Slate eBook Club
December 2002
The Best of Slate Edition

Culture:
Sex and the Single Superhero Chris Suellentrop
Winona Scissorhands Dahlia Lithwick
Letter Bomb Sarah Van Boven
"Tribute in Light" Explained Gustavo Bonevardi
Wasps in August Andrew Hudgins
Rhymes for a Watertower Christian Wiman
Out With the Monarch, the Vole, and the Toad Patricia Clark
Assessment—Nevada Chris Suellentrop
Score Sara Mosle
Eek, Mickey Mouse! Michael Lewis

Sports:
Fight! Fight! Choke! Choke! Stephen Rodrick
The Orlando Predators Are Down 10! Hugo Lindgren
The Anaheim Angels Chris Suellentrop
Flag on the Field Anne Applebaum
Choking at the Bowl Bryan Curtis

TV, Movies, and Music:
Pumping Iron: The Return Virginia Heffernan
Death Takes a Quaalude David Edelstein
Blame Runner David Edelstein
The Secret Vice of Power Women Michael Kinsley
Sweet Emotion Virginia Heffernan
No More Moby! Ted Widmer
A Long, Staid Trip Marc Weingarten
Rockumentary Redux James Surowiecki
The Poet Laureate of 9/11 A.O.Scott

Shopping, Food, and Wine:
Abs-Surdity Eric Umansky
To Sleep: Perchance To Take Lots of Pills Seth Stevenson
The Great Whitening Way Seth Stevenson
Battle of the Middlebrow Chains Sara Dickerman
The Ever-Expanding American Restaurant Tip Sara Dickerman
Cold Shower Michael Steinberger
Alcohol Testing Randall Lane
What Happens to Recalled Meat? Brendan I. Koerner
Wok the Dog William Saletan

Diary:
Zac Unger Zac Unger
Michael Brus Michael Brus

Science and Technology:
Donor White Meets His Daughter David Plotz
The Romance of the Monorail Brendan I. Koerner
How Do You Stop a Lava Flow? Brendan I. Koerner
Dead Heat Eric Klinenberg
Death by Spam Kevin Werbach
Sex and Death Jim Holt
The Nigerian Nightmare Brendan I. Koerner
Dot-Columnist Clive Thompson
Hormonal Imbalances Emily Yoffe
Unintelligible Redesign William Saletan
Strep Threat Emily Yoffe

Money:
Short Changed Steven E. Landsburg
Andersen, Meet Aetna Daniel Gross
Ad Report Card: Bill Ford in the Driver's Seat Rob Walker
Citi of Fear Tim Carvell
The "529" Rip-Off Austan Goolsbee

Politics:
Tenet to Mitchell to Chance William Saletan
The Pledge of Allegiance David Greenberg
Deliver Us From Evil Michael Kinsley
Newspaper War Jack Shafer
Thong of the South Dahlia Lithwick
Does Your Spit Have Fifth Amendment Rights? Chris Suellentrop
9/11 and the Law Dahlia Lithwick
Two Concepts of Anti-Terrorism William Saletan
Tom Daschle, Mosquito William Saletan

Sex and the Single Superhero
Spider-Man's vow of celibacy.
By Chris Suellentrop
Updated Tuesday, June 4, 2002, at 8:26 AM PT

Spoiler alert: This article gives away plot points of Spider-Man and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

"This story, like any story worth telling, is about a girl," Peter Parker intones in the opening line of the summer's blockbuster hit Spider-Man. Except it's not about a girl. At the film's end, Spider-Man wins the girl, as we've come to expect of our movie heroes, but instead of embracing her, he spurns her love. Spider-Man turns out to be a coming-of-age story about a boy who decides that his moral responsibility to the world at large is too great to allow himself the selfish, singular attachment of romance.

Which sounds a lot like what Roman Catholic priests do. Or are supposed to do, anyway. Many critics have pointed out that Spider-Man unfortunately reminds viewers of the World Trade Center disaster. But the movie also speaks, quite eloquently, to the debate over celibacy in the Catholic Church. By the end of the movie, viewers learn that Spider-Man is celibate, and his superherodom is a calling, a voluntary priesthood.

The vow of celibacy in Spider-Man isn't overt. The movie implies that Parker/Spider-Man's decision to rebuff M.J. is made out of a concern for her safety, because Spider-Man's enemies will seek to harm those whom Spider-Man loves. But Parker never considers the alternative: He could  abandon being Spider-Man and live a life of normalcy with M.J. No one would be the wiser, and as an added bonus, Parker's roommate, Harry Osborn, wouldn't have to deliver on his vow to avenge his father's death—because Spider-Man would have mysteriously disappeared. (This decision would of course ruin the potential for sequels.) Instead, Parker/Spider-Man tells M.J. that friendship "is all I have to give." Because "with great power comes great responsibility," Spider-Man must be wedded to the world. He can't walk away from the moral obligations his powers impose on him.

And it's not just Spider-Man. Hardly any movie superheroes get laid, for similar reasons. In the summer's other big movie so far, Attack of the Clones, we learn that Jedi (the superheroes for young boys born in the past 30 years or so) are bound by formal vows of celibacy. Anakin Skywalker's decision to break his vow and get busy with Padmé Amidala is one of the acts that leads to the downfall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire and Darth Vader. And in Superman II, Clark Kent/Superman initially makes the same decision that Spidey rejected: He explicitly renounces his superhero powers in order to settle down to an ordinary life with Lois Lane. But by the end of the movie he's realized that the obligations of Superman are too important. He reclaims his powers, defeats General Zod and company, and returns to his lonely, solitary superhero existence.

Who'da thunk it? Hollywood takes celibacy more seriously than most members of the elite Eastern media, whose by-and-large reaction to the church's pedophilia scandal has been to opportunistically attack a celibacy doctrine they see as outdated and nonsensical. It's startling to see putatively liberal moviemakers portray celibacy as a noble, selfless, even rational endeavor. Of course, it's possible that the Hollywood message is more subversive and underhanded than that: Only superheroes are fit for lives of celibacy, and as we've learned, not all priests are superheroes.


Winona Scissorhands
Why were her accessories the biggest issue?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Friday, November 8, 2002, at 2:12 PM PT

No wonder the girl steals things.

This week, a jury convicted Winona Ryder of felony theft for having ... self-discounted more than $5,500 worth of clothing and accessories at Saks Fifth Avenue last December. As a rule, for every paragraph the media have devoted to the legal developments in the trial, two were devoted to what she was wearing and how she wore her hair.

This wasn't a person on trial, it was Felony Barbie.

Serious legal commentators discussed her wardrobe and makeup on television with serious legal faces. CNN's legal analyst questioned a reporter about her wardrobe, urging that "Winona's wardrobe" was "a big part of the case." The New York Post carefully described her as "heavily made up and demurely dressed in a virginal, cream-colored suit with a matching pleated skirt." The Los Angeles Times (and virtually everyone else) reported that Ryder received the verdict while "wearing a plum-colored dress."

The media were by no means the only offender when it came to putting Winona's clothes on trial. In one of the oddest tactics in an altogether perplexing defense strategy, Ryder's attorney, Mark Geragos, deployed the "this old thing?" defense throughout the trial. At one point Geragos actually waved an ugly stolen hair clippie over Ryder's head as he defied the jury to imagine her—her, icon and arbiter of taste—accessorizing so clumsily. "Can you see her wearing this thing?" he asked, with all the disgust of Cindy Crawford on MTV's House of Style.

Trust me, Johnnie Cochran is furious he didn't think of this defense first: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, can you really imagine my client, O.J. Simpson, wearing anything as hopelessly last year as these Bruno Maglis? And this shapeless—and, might I add, bloody—glove? Please. The defense rests."

Geragos' other defense tactic was to argue that while regular mortals might tolerate clothing torn by ripped-out security tags, Ryder was far too glamorous to be seen in public wearing frocks with holes. Why would she be ripping up clothes? he argued. She was Winona Ryder, for heaven's sake.

There is a wonderful symmetry here: Both the crime and the trial were about looking like a celebrity. The movie star had already dropped $3,000 that day on clothing and accessories, yet still shoplifted a $140 hair band and a $750 thermal shirt (because God knows, she couldn't go pay $16 for them at Target). So her attorney trotted out the people-who-look-like-her-don't-take-stuff defense, alternating it with the people-who-don't-look-like-her-persecute-people-who-look-like-her-because-they're-jealous defense.

Geragos, so blinded by Ryder's celebrity, never managed to make this trial about anything other than Ryder's celebrity. She was either too famous to have done this or she was being framed for being famous. Either way, her only defense was her celebrity. Meanwhile, the columnists and reporters and TV commentators—tastefully decked out in designer suits (not quite the Marc Jacobs, both worn and apparently stolen by Ryder this year)—also fell into the celebrity trap. For most of us watching at home, the whole trial might as well have been about the spring collection.

But there is nothing more real than a courtroom, even in Los Angeles. A thousand glamorous headshots melt into dust when you're at a defense table with a judge, a gavel and some bailiffs. In the eyes of the jury, the larger-than-life defense probably came too late for Winona Ryder. By simply walking into a courtroom, she'd already proved that she was life-size to the only people who really counted: the jury.


Letter Bomb
Breaking up is hard to do right. Especially on paper.
By Sarah Van Boven
Updated Wednesday, November 13, 2002, at 7:31 AM PT

What makes a great breakup letter? As is the case with so many hypothetical questions you never thought about before, there is a new book that thinks it has the answer. In Hell Hath No Fury: Women's Letters From the End of the Affair, editor Anna Holmes presents a compendium of eight centuries' worth of breakup missives by both historical figures (Anne Boleyn, Mary Wollstonecraft, Edith Wharton) and everyday women (plus the requisite number of Sex and the City writers). The book is a godsend—but probably not for the reasons Holmes originally intended.

As literary anthologies go, Hell Hath No Fury is pretty heavy sledding. In too many of the thematic chapters—the Tell Off, the Unsent Letter, the Goodbye, and so on—readers slog through boring or tangential historical documents, followed by excruciatingly banal modern-day writing. (Take Kim, 27: "I realize that I didn't do a good job of giving you space this week. I was so bewildered by your not calling. … You seemed so sincere when you were telling me all about your childhood and the issues around your father's death." This after two dates with a man she met on match.com.) But as a how-to—or rather, how-not-to—manual, the book is downright indispensable. After all, there's nothing like watching Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir fail to write truly great breakup letters to convince you not to try in the first place. Here's why:

1. The odds of succeeding are bleak. Reading Hell Hath No Fury, it quickly becomes clear that there are an almost unlimited number of ways a breakup letter can fail. Self-pity, stridency, pettiness, arrogance, appalling grammar—the beach is littered with all sorts of sharp rocks that can puncture a letter before it even pushes off. In contrast, the epistles that still leap off the page and grab you by the throat (even decades or centuries later) share just one common attribute: There is a little kernel of something in each great letter— be it eloquence or dignity or grief or humor—that you can imagine made the recipient think, "I've made a terrible mistake." (Typing these words, I can almost hear a chorus of women's voices chanting, "I didn't write it for him, I wrote it for meeeee," but the fact remains that not one of the letters included in Hell Hath No Fury begins "Dear Self.") Now for the bad news: Of the 149 letters included in this collection, by my estimation there were only nine that unequivocally contained that kernel of greatness. Nine. That's a failure rate of 94 percent.

2. You can't rewrite history, not even with the backspace key at your disposal. What a nice idea to think you could somehow shift the balance of power in a relationship with one last letter; what a shame that this is apparently impossible. Too many of the modern-day Clarissas in Hell Hath No Fury got themselves into demeaning relationships with jerks, then composed breakup letters as futile, last-ditch attempts to get their swains' reprehensible behavior on the record. Take the missive by comedian/writer Lynn Harris that insists "… not calling me when I went home to my parents to PUT MY DOG TO SLEEP? … By the way, I broke up with you that weekend, the dog weekend. By myself. I just didn't get around to telling you until you, you know, had a moment." This is a pretty squirm-inducing read even with the self-deprecation; the book's more pleading passages, like this one written by Australian artist Stella Bowen to Ford Madox Ford in 1928, are downright mortifying:

I think public opinion—for what it is worth—would be softened if we announce that our relations remain cordial, and if I might continue to know what you are writing, etc., and be able to give people some news of your career. … If it ever becomes known that we separated on account of R. I should like it also to be known that you wanted not to break with me outwardly, and that it was I who wished to end it all.

3. If you feel a pressing need to reach for the good stationery, you probably shouldn't. In one of life's annoying little ironies, like starlets being able to borrow Harry Winston jewelry, the best breakup letters are penned by the women who least need to write them. In other words, those who have already moved on. Unlike the frantic revisionism above, the most affecting writing is all anchored by a certain dignified inevitability. When TV producer Cindy Chupack clarifies her unreciprocated feelings for a friend, she's clearly given up on winning his heart:

So … if you do just want to be friends, let's just be friends and not do date-like stuff, because then I end up wanting to kiss you, and then you don't, and then I just feel stupid, which is not helping me … meet other people who might actually want to kiss me and date me, which is something I rather enjoy.


Even Zelda's letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald in which she writes "I love you anyway—even if there isn't any me or any love or even any life—I love you" is devastating because of its naked acceptance that the good times are all gone. The best "it's over" letters all have but one message—"it's over." Or, as novelist Kate Christensen puts it in the signoff to her elegant letter, "There's so much more to say but I can't say any more. Writing this letter about ending it with you is just another way to keep it all going, when what I need to do is sign off, and get out."

4. Do you really want to give him an excuse? Sometimes dignity is no object—and there are definitely letters in Hell Hath No Fury that are memorable for their sheer, unadulterated vituperation. That doesn't necessarily mean you want to write one. In what is probably the book's funniest entry, pseudonymous writer "Lola Fondue" delivers a 51-item list to an ex, beginning "1. You have B.O. even after you shower" and only getting meaner from there. Should her boyfriend "Ira" ever become a serial killer, this letter will no doubt be introduced in the insanity defense as Exhibit A. Reading Agnes von Kurowsky's letter to Ernest Hemingway ("I know that I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart"), all of his subsequent womanizing and misogyny suddenly seems more understandable, if not justified. The cruelest of all the letters in the anthology are the "Dear John" letters sent to servicemen—the literary equivalent of grenades. ("Honey if you ever intended to marry me I wished you could have done so before you left. … You see Harry darling I'm afraid it's too late now—as I am already married.") No wonder one GI mentioned in the book remembered another soldier standing up during a firefight and allowing himself to be shot after opening one of those. Even if the best your ex can manage in peacetime is stepping in front of a taxi, is that really the outcome you were looking for?

5. Once it's out of your hands, a breakup letter has a life of its own. In case there's anyone out there who still needs reminding: That e-mail in which you blame yourself for the "trouble" you two had in bed can be forwarded on to a thousand bond traders—or your parents. The letter detailing exactly how you'd like to mutilate his new girlfriend could resurface in the natural sequel to this anthology, 'Then She Just Wigged Out on Me, Man': Letters Received From Women at the End of the Affair. Or, worst of all, pouring out your heart could result in the most chilling scenario of all—hinted at only once in Hell Hath No Fury, in this fictional breakup letter scene from Nabokov's Mary:

[He] tore up each portion and threw the scraps to the wind. Gleaming, the paper snowflakes flew into the sunlit abyss. One fragment fluttered onto the windowsill, and on it Ganin read a few mangled lines

ourse, I can forg
ove, I only pra
hat you be hap

He flicked it off the windowsill into the yard smelling of coal and spring and wide-open spaces. Shrugging with relief, he started to tidy his room.


"Tribute in Light" Explained
A designer of the WTC memorial says it's too early for a permanent one.
By Gustavo Bonevardi
Posted Monday, March 11, 2002, at 3:44 PM PT

The day of Sept. 11 thrust me back into childhood. I don't mean that it brought back a flood of memories. (Though it did: I grew up in the meat-packing district, just north of Lower Manhattan, and still live and work in what had been my father's studio. The construction of the towers was the backdrop to my childhood.) Rather, I mean that I was seeing the world again as a child. The events were so big as to be beyond my comprehension. My grown-up frame of reference was useless to me, and the work and life that I have created for myself were eclipsed. I relate this because my first reaction was juvenile: I wanted everything to be OK, I wanted the Twin Towers back, and I wanted it all, now. That day, after watching the buildings crumble, I aimlessly biked around the city. The skyline I saw was all wrong, but it was also strangely familiar. I took some pictures.

It's hard to backtrack and remember exactly how we had the idea to build something out of light. My partner, John Bennett, and I were not the only ones who had it; as the project moved forward, we worked with collaborators, Richard Nash Gould, Julian LaVerdiere, and Paul Myoda, who had nearly the same idea at almost the same time. I think it's because we had all been staring at the towers for so many hours that day. The after-image was practically burned in our retinas. So the idea of trying to evoke what was lost was almost self-evident. In our minds' eye, the image was as clear as the towers themselves had been the day before.

The day after the towers fell, I discussed the initial idea with John, and together we developed it into a realizable concept and made a digital rendering. Though thousands had died, we rejected the idea of creating a memorial. At that time, we still believed the rescue workers would miraculously free survivors. We could not yet acknowledge the deaths.

We set out to "repair" and "rebuild" the skyline—but not in a way that would attempt to undo or disguise the damage. Those buildings are gone now, and they will never be rebuilt. Instead we would create a link between ourselves and what was lost. In so doing, we believed, we could also repair, in part, our city's identity and ourselves.

All the same we saw the work as part of the physical and spiritual reconstruction efforts. Not wanting to interfere with the city's recovery, we proposed that the lights be installed in any of a number of sights in the immediate vicinity of Ground Zero, but not where the towers had actually stood (one idea was to situate them on barges in the harbor). The reconstruction of the skyline did not have to be literal. Besides, we wanted our proposal to be a realistic, viable project, not a fantastical one. We felt an incredible urgency. We wanted the light to inspire the rescue workers and the city at large and to show the world that New York was still New York. The international aspect was key: It was the World Trade Center, after all, and people of many nationalities had perished there. We even proposed that, in solidarity, similar light towers be erected in cities around the world: London, Paris, Buenos Aires. The original towers were destroyed. Now virtual ones would sprout up all over the world.

Architecturally speaking, more than buildings were lost that day. Part of the identity of our city was lost, too. The development of New York, of all cities, is a dialogue between architects, developers, ideas, and self-interests. Each new addition is created for, or in reaction to, a specific context. This is not to say that the work is contextual; the best work often refutes, challenges, or intentionally ignores its context. Still, the play between one building and the next is what gives the skyline its coherence, its interest. This is very much the case with the buildings constructed around the World Trade Center, particularly those in front along the harbor. They were designed in relation to and were visually dependent on the towers. Together they created a larger composition and a defining image of our city. This composition has now been fractured. Our temporary monument had to address the void in the New York skyline and symbolize the spirits of the thousands caught in the towers' tragic collapse.

It didn't seem to matter what deranged persons were responsible. Seeing those huge monoliths, as seemingly timeless as the pyramids, vanish taught us something about our buildings, our institutions, and ourselves. We learned how ephemeral life really is. Light is ephemeral, but it is also universal—that's what we wanted this project to be. We simultaneously wanted the towers of light to express humanity's brighter side and to offer renewal through a celebration of creativity, ingenuity, and technology.

Even though six months have passed since Sept. 11, we think it's still too soon to build a permanent monument. Some time has passed, and now our project does memorialize those who lost their lives—it's a tribute to rescue workers, among other things, and we hope it helps bode a spring full of hope and renewal for New York City. But nobody has yet achieved the perspective necessary for a more lasting commemoration. Permanent memorials need time—passion has to be framed by a cool, sharp, historically mature understanding of what is being memorialized. The Vietnam Memorial in Washington is a good example. It could not have been built right at the end of that war. Philip Johnson recently remarked that even the Washington Monument wasn't started until nearly 50 years after the president's death.

The project being erected tonight is remarkably true to our original inspiration. We're not reconstructing the towers in their original size, but the distance between the two squares of light is the same as the distance between the actual towers. So in effect, we're not rebuilding the towers themselves, but the void between them.


Wasps in August
By Andrew Hudgins
Posted Tuesday, August 6, 2002, at 12:33 PM PT

With the death craze on them, wasps in August
rage near their paper nests,
defending them from raccoons, jays,
and other ravening guests

that hunger for the feast, and risk
the death-watch wrath of wasps.
They'll swarm on anything to save
the spit-and-tissue wisps,

their soft spawn pulsing as they swell.
In their united need
to gorge the hardening larvae in the nest,
they stand and bleakly feed

on broken apples in my yard.
They don't pause, don't buzz, don't
fly up in fear and light again.
They simply stand and eat

then ferry nectar to the nest.
Death calls, and they're replying,
The nest, the nest, the nest, the nest.
The easy job is dying.


Rhymes for a Watertower
By Christian Wiman
Posted Tuesday, June 11, 2002, at 1:05 PM PT

A town so flat a grave's a hill,
      A dusk the color of beer.
A row of schooldesks shadows fill,
      A row of houses near.

A courthouse spreading to its lawn,
      A bank clock's lingering heat.
A gleam of storefronts not quite gone,
      A courthouse in the street.

A different element, almost,
      A dry creek brimming black.
A light to lure the darkness close,
      A light to keep it back.

A time so still a heart's a sound,
      A moon the color of skin.
A pumpjack bowing to the ground,
      Again, again, again.


Out With the Monarch, the Vole, and the Toad
By Patricia Clark
Posted Tuesday, July 9, 2002, at 1:31 PM PT

To live as they do, vulnerably, in the air,
the wing-assaulting wind, to breathe
the wind, the cool September air, and watch
the Sweet Autumn clematis twine and climb.
To live with the scuff and smatter of leaves
at the burrow hole, the dying fall of the pink
geranium petal, the tomato stalk blackening from last
night's chill. To live with the thought, the weight—the dead
branch pitching down to shatter in the yard,
the hawk's shadow, the days ahead
without sun. A full moon spills its cream
over Dean Lake and boys at midnight
putter on their scow. An exhalation from the lake
rises to surround them, safe with a light,
though far from shore. To live with water's depth
and dark, some force that wants to pull things
in and down. To live hidden, hurrying, hurt.
The toad finds the upturned pot and crouches there,
but the snake crawls across the flagstones' warmth
and surprises it. To live the death, the thrash
in red, the awful struggle, to let breath go.
To hunker down and yet be lifted up, skin tingling,
synapses firing, the heart a-beat, awash, eyes
wide, nose lifted to what is perceptibly near.


Assessment—Nevada
America's Yucca Mountain of vice.
By Chris Suellentrop
Updated Friday, July 19, 2002, at 7:34 AM PT

In the novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a future America in which a vast swath of the country has been transformed into a repository for the nation's pollution. Giant fans are erected along the border to blow the waste away from the rest of the now-pristine nation. In this future, Americans call this place "The Concavity." In the present, we call it Nevada.

Americans have long thought of Nevada as the place to store our filth, our refuse, our somewhat embarrassing excess. The Senate confirmed this instinct last week when it voted to ship tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, near Mercury, Nev. But the phenomenon is cultural as well as physical: Nevada has always been fenced off from the rest of the country as the landfill for our vice, our cultural pollution. It's the place to store the things we want, even need, but must confine: prostitution, mobsters, secret government areas for military testing, and God knows what else. Things we hate to love have been stored there for easy recall: boxing, gambling, Sammy Davis Jr. "The government has always regarded Nevada as a place unlike others, fit for tests, experiments, and ventures it would sometimes rather not talk about," David Thomson writes in In Nevada: The Land, the People, God, and Chance.

But it's not just the government or the outsiders that think of Nevada as an experiment. Nevadans themselves think of their state that way, too. If states are the laboratories of democracy, Nevada is the one we've handed over to the mad scientists.

Perhaps it's in their blood. The first Americans to settle in Nevada were themselves unwanted exports, exiles—Mormons shipped west by an uncaring public. The Utah Territory established for Mormon settlers by Congress in 1850 included nearly all of present-day Nevada. Las Vegas, before it was a glorious Technicolor play-land, was a Mormon colony (unsurprisingly, a failed one). These Mormons were Nevada's first of many encounters with the national policy of YINBY—Yes, In Nevada's Backyard.

This sense of Nevada as a dumping ground for the country's castoffs continued into the 20^th century. The nation nodded approvingly as organized crime flocked to Nevada during the three decades after the state legalized gambling in 1931 (or rather, re-legalized it after a two-decade prohibition). Mormons and mobsters don't have a lot in common, but the thought process was the same: Good riddance. At least they're not here.

And in what other state would Harry Truman have cordoned off a chunk of land the size of Connecticut for nuclear tests and top-secret government research? To this day, the federal government owns 85 percent of the land in Nevada. It's partly because of this (because Nevada is the storehouse of our nation's secrets) that it's easy for some to believe that an alien spaceship landed in Roswell, N.M., and was shipped to Nevada's mysterious Area 51. Nevada would be the obvious choice for something the government wanted to dispose of: Just stick it in the attic and hope everyone forgets about it.

The famous Nevadan distaste for government stems in part from this kind of federal meddling, real and imagined. Nevada's state government itself arrived as an imposition from Uncle Sam. The state came into existence because Lincoln wanted an extra state, to get votes both for his re-election and for the 13^th Amendment, outlawing slavery. The fact that Nevada didn't contain enough people to qualify for statehood was conveniently overlooked. That dubious admission to the Union has fostered a still-prevalent local myth in Nevada that Lincoln and the Republicans needed the state's mineral deposits to finance the Civil War.

While Nevada disdains the outsiders who view it as a moral wasteland, it also encourages the perception. The state's economy is fueled by Nevada's special role—it's the place you go to get what you can't get at home. So, when Nevada's vice seeps back out into the rest of the country, Nevada suffers. That's what happened to Reno, which made its name in the 1920s as the divorce capital of the nation. Other states made divorce onerous, but Nevada made it easy. Just live there for six months and you could chuck your spouse overboard. Famous and wealthy men and women flocked to the state. "Divorce ranches" popped up to care for them during their stay. But as the moral stigma of divorce faded, other parts of the country started loosening their requirements, too. Nevada engaged in a race to the bottom, lowering its residency requirement to three months, then six weeks. By the 1960s, Americans didn't need to go to Nevada for divorce. They could get it at home.

Now, something similar may be happening with gambling. Who needs Nevada when you can gamble in Boonville, Mo.; in Sioux City, Iowa; in Peoria, Ill.? Perhaps that fear is behind Nevada's newest experiment, one that hasn't yet passed: the legalization of the possession of up to 3 ounces of marijuana. Nearly 75,000 Nevadans signed a petition supporting a change in the law, which would need voter approval in November and again in November 2004 to become law. Under the proposal, Nevada would tax marijuana and sell it in state-licensed shops. The vices change, but Nevada remains the same.

If the proposal passes, many will condemn Nevada for its hedonism, for its willy-nilly disregard for the consequences of its actions. But Nevada knows exactly what it's doing. And so do we. After all, look who's behind the marijuana initiative: the Marijuana Policy Project, an advocacy group based in—where else?—Washington, D.C.


Score
The new (and improved) theology of the SAT.
By Sara Mosle
Posted Friday, June 21, 2002, at 9:51 AM PT

There was always a Calvinist streak to the old SAT. A descendant of IQ tests from the 1920s, the test now known as SAT I is supposed to measure something innate and immutable—aptitude—and be impervious to coaching or studying. Good works in school avail you nothing. Brains are bestowed at birth, and results are predestined. On judgment day, the class clown or goof-off may be raised up, his chosen status revealed by a perfect score of 1600, and the class nerd cast down, his stellar transcript unmasked as the product of grade inflation. (Only the "saved" have a prayer of being admitted to Harvard, or the kingdom of heaven.) If you do badly on the test, it's hard to know what to do about it—except make your contribution to the $100 million test-prep industry, the educational equivalent of buying indulgences.

In truth, of the 1.7 million students who take the test each year, scores will only be a determining factor of admissions for a tiny fraction—50,000 maybe—who attend one of a handful of selective colleges. But as a result, the SAT I is at the center of most debates about affirmative action and educational opportunity. It's less a test than an entire belief system, governing American notions of merit, opportunity, and fairness.

That theology, however, is about to change. On June 27, the College Board is expected to approve a series of revisions to the test—among other things, introducing a separate writing exam, eliminating the analogies in the verbal section, and adding more reading and advanced math questions tied directly to high-school curriculums. The move is an implicit response to the criticisms of Richard C. Atkinson, the president of the University of California. A former professor of cognitive psychology at Stanford University and testing expert (who in his 70s was considered on the verge of retirement), he stunned the educational establishment a year ago by announcing that the state university system—the College Board's biggest client—was considering replacing the SAT I with subject-based, achievement-style tests such as the ACT or the SAT II. Conservatives promptly denounced Atkinson's plan as a cynical ploy to get around Proposition 209, the state's ban on affirmative action. In their view, the College Board's subsequent decision to revise the test is a capitulation to the forces of political correctness. Progressive educators were only slightly less unhappy. Most would like to see high-stakes, standardized tests eliminated altogether. They thought Atkinson didn't go far enough.

Defenders of the SAT I argue that the test is necessary because it provides a common yardstick against which to gauge the scholastic ability of students who have attended widely varying schools. The test has what statisticians call a higher "predictive value"—a measure of how well a student will do during his or her first year of college—than grades or teacher recommendations. But according to a University of California study released last fall, when combined with the high-school grade point average, the SAT II has a higher predictive validity than the SAT I. And not only is the SAT II a better yardstick, it has all sorts of other ancillary benefits as well.

Atkinson's real beef with the old-style SAT is that it's an aptitude test, designed to measure some vague notion of innate intelligence. But by divorcing aptitude from actual achievement, he argues, the test sends precisely the wrong message to high schools and students: that what kids learn in class doesn't matter, because it all comes down to what they're born with anyway. Uncertain of how to prepare kids for a test that is not about anything in particular, teachers and parents either throw up their hands or push students into test-prep courses that have no real educational value. This sense of fatalism is the most pernicious aspect of the test. It's one thing to tell a poor black parent that his or her child hasn't achieved. It's another thing altogether to say that a child's aptitude, or capacity to learn, is fixed in the firmament and unalterable. Yet that is essentially what the SAT I says.

The College Board is not revamping the test entirely, but Atkinson has succeeded in pushing it in the direction of achievement tests—no small accomplishment. By adding a writing test, for example, the College Board will almost certainly encourage more writing in the nation's high schools. Similarly, replacing the analogies section—which has spawned some of the more mindless test-prep—with reading questions tied to high-school curricula might actually inspire the reading of real books. That's not to say that such reforms will get rid of test-prep altogether or eliminate the class advantage of kids who can afford private tutors. But the College Board is at least nudging test-prep toward the study of real subject matter, such as math, English, and science. This will help all students, whether they are applying to a selective college or not.

Opposition to Atkinson's ideas comes from both left and right. But conservatives' criticisms are harder to fathom. Aren't they the ones who are always saying schools should concentrate more on content? Their objection is that aptitude tests do a better job than achievement tests of uncovering what affirmative-action critics Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom call "diamonds in the rough—students who come from lousy schools and haven't learned much but who are nonetheless extremely promising academically." The Thernstroms never quite explain how kids who haven't learned anything could still be "extremely promising academically." But they seem to fear that poor, bright kids would suffer if asked to perform on an achievement test that actually requires them to know something specific. (Imagine the scorn they'd heap on a liberal who made the same argument.) But according to the University of California study, there is actually less correlation between students' scores and their socioeconomic background on the SAT II than on the SAT I. In other words, slightly more disadvantaged kids—the kind who attend those "lousy schools" the Thernstroms are so worried about—are admitted to the University of California using achievement tests.

What conservatives are really worried about is Atkinson's calls for a more "holistic" admissions process, by which he means simply looking at more than grades and test scores when assessing applicants—a practice, it's worth pointing out, that fairly describes the way every Ivy League school has long approached admissions. But "holistic" is the kind of word that sets conservatives' teeth on edge. They worry it's a cover for lowering standards to ensure that more minority students get in than would otherwise. And in their pursuit of this obsession, the virtues of achievement tests often get lost. Whatever one thinks of holistic assessment, the real issue is whether achievement tests are better than aptitude tests. And by any measure—from predictive validity to the incentives they create for high schools—they are.

Progressive educators have their own hobbyhorse to ride, arguing that any form of standardized test stifles creativity and encourages teachers to concentrate on rote exercises. (This is also the complaint of wealthier suburban parents at places like Scarsdale High School.) But a child who has already blossomed into a minor novelist shouldn't have any trouble writing a coherent essay with a thesis and a few supporting paragraphs. If kids have already graduated to "higher thinking skills," the nirvana of progressive educators, they can handle a few lower order tasks, too.

As originally conceived by the Educational Testing Service, the Scholastic Aptitude Test was supposed to create a "natural meritocracy" by helping poor and middle-class students win admission to elite colleges that had previously been reserved for the sons of the East Coast establishment. But as the test has evolved, it has ended up replacing one accident of birth (class) with another, in its way equally dubious one (innate intelligence). The idea of merit, in the sense of actual achievement, has been lost. The College Board's recent changes to the test are a small step toward resuscitating that idea. It's the right move.


Eek, Mickey Mouse!
A low-rent cartoon character drives six hours to scare the crap out of my daughter.
By Michael Lewis
Updated Monday, July 29, 2002, at 2:38 PM PT

I once went to visit Roald Dahl at his home in the English countryside. The author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and other macabre tales for children had just publicly denounced The Satanic Verses as an irresponsible piece of self-promotion. He didn't exactly endorse the fatwa that had just been issued against Salman Rushdie, but he came close, and I used this as an excuse to go and talk to him. He wasn't well—he was more or less confined to an upholstered chair and wasn't long for this world—but he could not have been better company. I remember next to nothing of what he said about Rushdie. What I recall was lunch. Several Dahls gathered, and a plate of ham cold cuts arrived at the table. Dahl said something about how closely the cold cuts resembled human flesh, and how he once thought of writing a story about children who are served cold cuts from the corpse of a missing friend. I expected someone at the table to complain but instead his daughter giggled and told a story about how she had witnessed, first hand, a butcher slice off his palm while running a shank of ham over a meat slicer. She went on to describe, to the delight of the entire family, how the slice of butcher's flesh fit perfectly on top of the stack of ham. Exactly like the ham we were about to eat! Sixty seconds into the meal the Dahls were vying to out-gross each other with tales of severed limbs and pulsing pink flesh, while happily munching ham sandwiches. With the possible exception of Mrs. Dahl, the entire family had preserved into adulthood a childlike delight in the grotesque.

Once you have a small child you can see the full appeal of the Dahlian imagination. To a small child the adult world is grotesque. For a start, it's all ridiculously out of proportion: To a child every grown-up is a monster. Then there are all these events that occur in the grown-up world that a child, in trying to get her mind around them, distorts wildly. I went out of town on business last week. "Are you going on an airplane?" Tallulah asked, before I left. "Yes," I said. "Are you going to an airport?" she asked. "Yes," I said. "Are they going to put chickens on your luggage?" she asked. I had to think about that one. Then it struck me: check-in luggage/chickens on the luggage. How strange the adult world must seem when filtered through the child's vocabulary. Even those aspects of the adult world designed explicitly to give innocent pleasure to a child are often, to a child, either weird or downright horrifying. Which brings me to Mickey Mouse.

I had taken Tallulah to a birthday party around the corner from our house in Berkeley. The highlight of the birthday party was to be the appearance of Mickey Mouse. Mickey was meant to be kept a secret. The children would gather and play for a bit and then Mickey Mouse would burst through the doors and surprise everyone. But it's hard to keep a secret, especially a good one, from Tallulah, as it is so tempting to use any prospective treat as a bribe. To coax her into her car seat I had told her that if she ceased to struggle she would get to meet Mickey Mouse. In the flesh. She seemed pleased by the idea.

We arrived at the birthday party. Tallulah overcame the shyness she always experiences when she enters a crowded room and was soon playing with the other children. But there is no such thing as equilibrium in a room full of toddlers; something bad is always about to happen; and what happened was that the father of the birthday girl came over to say there was a problem with Mickey. The company that farmed out Mickey to children's birthday parties had just phoned: Mickey was ill. The company had called around looking for a substitute. They had found one, but he lived six hours away. He was on his way, but he'd be late.

You had to admire the commitment. In six hours you can get from our house in Berkeley to Reno, Nev. Some poor guy who lived, in effect, in Reno had tossed his Mickey Mouse costume in the trunk of his car in the wee hours of that morning and was now hauling ass across the country to humor a room full of 3-year-olds. And he wasn't even the real Mickey Mouse. He was an understudy.

An hour or so later Tallulah was off on one side of a large deck playing with a doll house. The other kids and adults mingled on the other side. I was munching a raw carrot and glancing across the deck every four seconds to ensure Tallulah hadn't fallen off. Suddenly, onto the deck, between Tallulah and everyone else, burst Mickey Mouse. He wore all the official gear. But still there was something off about him. In the first place, he wasn't alone. Trailing him was a ghoulish assistant, clutching balloons and sweating so profusely that one of the children turned to his mother and said, "Mommy, the man went swimming!" Together the two of them looked as if they had jogged, not driven, from Reno.

But the real problem was Mickey himself. He wasn't the cute little Mickey you think of when you think of Mickey Mouse. He was a large man, stuffed into a small costume that didn't quite fit. His giant mouse head tilted this way then that, as if partially severed. His white gloves failed to disguise the thick black hair on the backs of his hands. Even his black mouse slacks looked to be loaners; bending over hurriedly to greet the first child he saw, he flashed a rear vertical smile. The first child he saw was Tallulah.

I tried to imagine this scene from Tallulah's point of view. The fact is that while she had pretended to be delighted that she was going to meet Mickey Mouse, she had never actually heard of the creature. God knows what she thought she was getting into, but it wasn't a 6-foot rodent with a greaseball sidekick. Instantly—so quickly that Mickey didn't have a chance to lay his hairy mitts on her—her face dissolved in terror and she began to scream. Not a playful scream, a Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho scream. I raced across the deck, clutched her in my arms, and spent the next five minutes consoling her. When she'd calmed down she squirmed away from me and ran into the house.

"Where are you going?" I hollered after her.

"To find Mickey Mouse!" she said.

For the next hour or so she enjoyed Mickey Mouse in a way that was new to me and I assume also to Mickey. Mickey Mouse, to Tallulah, was not an endearing character. He was a serial killer. This was Disney with a twist of lime. She'd sneak right up to him and then, when he noticed her, dash away screaming bloody murder. It was strange to see. Her mother and father can't bear scary movies, and I'll bet money that when she grows up she won't like them either. But in her current state of mind she likes nothing more than the toddler equivalent of a horror flick. If she weren't so much like every other small child, she'd be considered insane.


Fight! Fight! Choke! Choke!
College football and the culture of failure.
By Stephen Rodrick
Posted Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 1:55 PM PT

There are many reasons why I hate college football. The 4-hour games drone on longer than Steve Lyons during the American League playoffs. The ever-expanding season threatens to creep into early July. Boise, Idaho, hosts a bowl game. And it's played on blue artificial turf. Then there's the NCAA's absurd overtime gimmick: Each team gets the ball at their opponent's 25-yard-line, the moral equivalent of asking NBA hoopsters to start OT possessions at half court.

All that's true, but the main reason college football blows is, well, it's just not very well played. More than any other major sport, professional or amateur, college football games are decided by the physical incompetence and downright chokery of their players.

On Saturday, millions wasted a perfectly good fall afternoon watching Miami and Florida State struggle for football-factory supremacy. In the end, the game wasn't decided by a brilliant run or catch, but by Seminole kicker Xavier Beitia hooking a 43-yard field goal in perfect conditions. No one was surprised, particularly since Florida State's earlier loss to Louisville was predicated on quarterback Chris Rix's dying quail interception in overtime. After Saturday's Oklahoma-Texas game in Dallas, few were talking about the Sooners' defensive prowess. Instead, sports radio was packed with Longhorn fans bemoaning that Heisman-hyped Chris Simms has never ever thrown a touchdown pass against a Top-10 team. He threw three interceptions against OU, only to be outdone by Sooner quarterback Nate Hybl, who threw four.

Things were hopping at the other end of the food chain, too. Temple, a team so woeful that if it was a horse it would be shot and its remains deemed unsafe for dogs or glue-eating kids, scored a 17-16 victory over Syracuse when the Orangemen's kicker missed an extra point in the final minutes. The conversion, a mere formality in the NFL, has plagued America's top amateurs all year. Last week, USC lost to Washington State after missing an extra point, and two weeks ago, Texas A&M fell to Texas Tech after their kicker botched two extra points, one in regulation and one in overtime. Both losing teams were ranked in the Top 25.

The University of Michigan squeaked by a Penn State team Saturday that missed an extra point, too. In fact, the Champions of the West have benefited the most from this year's college football high comedy. In their opener, the winning kick—yes, one that was actually made, but only after the Wolverines' marksmen had blown three earlier attempts—was set up when the Washington Huskies were penalized for having 12 men on the field. What makes this amusing is that the dirty dozen appeared on the field after a Husky timeout. The next week, Michigan traveled to South Bend where they scored a TD against a Notre Dame defense featuring 10 men on the field. The crack Irish staff didn't notice the deficiency until moments before Michigan snapped the ball for the subsequent two-point conversion. They had to take a timeout to determine whether they wanted a cornerback on the play.

The ineptitude isn't new. Hell, Florida State has been missing field goals against Miami for 11 years. Who can forget modern classics like Arkansas' Clint Stoerner needing only to run out the clock to upset top-rated Tennessee in 1998? Alas, Stoerner stumbled coming out of the snap, tried to use the ball as a cane, and fumbled. Pre-Simms, there's Vinnie Testaverde in the 1987 Fiesta Bowl throwing five interceptions against Penn State. And speaking of the Nittany Lions, has anyone ever seen them run a 4-minute offense, much less the 2-minute version? Is spiking the ball and getting out of bounds an unteachable skill? The increasingly poor execution is baffling as college football coaching staffs are now like small bureaucracies with a 7-1 teacher-student ratio that would be the envy of Princeton.

Yes, there are brain cramps and bouts of inadvertent slapstick in other sports. But they are relatively rare. That's why Merkle's Boner is called a boner. Chris Webber's no-timeout timeout in the Final Four would quickly be forgotten in the wash of college football. In pro football, Bills' kicker Scott Norwood is remembered as the ultimate chokester for missing one 47-yarder in the Super Bowl. Yet if Xavier Beitia makes his 43-yarder everyone wets their pants, and Xavier is on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

In college football, fans wallow in a culture of failure. Unless you root for Miami, you sadly wait for disaster to strike your team in a manner not seen outside of Fenway Park. Let's go back to Saturday in Boone, N.C. With seven seconds to go, Furman, ranked No. 5 in Division 1-AA, scores to go ahead of No. 4 Appalachian State, 16-15. Furman decides to go for two to give them a three-point cushion. (How Appalachian State was going to get in position to kick a field goal in seven seconds is a question Paladins coach Bobby Lamb will be answering for the rest of his life.) Furman fans knew what was going to happen next. QB Billy Napier throws an interception on the conversion try. It is returned over 90 yards, and Furman loses the game 17-16. As often happens in college football, the Paladins found the only way they could spit the bit and did it with bells on. Mountaineers fans tear down the goal posts, exit the stadium, and throw them in a nearby duck pond.

And no one is surprised.


The Orlando Predators Are Down 10!
The agony of owning stock in an arena football team.
By Hugo Lindgren
Posted Friday, August 9, 2002, at 1:36 PM PT

Flipping channels the other day, I came across an Arena Football League playoff game. Most normal people would have kept on flipping. I, however, had what you could call a "chocolate in my peanut butter" moment. Two great forms of non-porn but otherwise male-oriented television entertainment—sports and the stock market—collided and the result was, well, I'm embarrassed to say it, but it was riveting.

The game, you see, involved the Orlando Predators, and for reasons that are hard to explain with a straight face, I own a couple of thousand dollars worth of Predators stock (it trades under the symbol PRED on the Nasdaq). OK, the precise figure, at the moment I came upon the game, was $1,700, or $1.70 a share. Betting that the NFL would exercise an option it held to purchase half the league, I bought in a year ago at $2 a share. But the NFL shucked the option, and the stock took a dive. So I was down 15 percent.

Though I had never before sat down and watched a game, I had always admired arena football as a perfect Reagan-era invention, a textbook "supply-side" concoction. The guy who dreamed it up noticed two phenomena—arenas sitting empty in the summer that could be rented for cheap and thousands of semiskilled football players who would play for cheap—and realized that he could create a new cheap form of entertainment by combining them. This was his chocolate-and-peanut-butter moment. To make things even more hairy, he shortened the field to 50 yards, erected padded walls around it, and put big nets at the end zones that keep passes and kicks in play. Early on, the sport proudly (and aptly) billed itself as "human pinball."

The game I came across was a first-round playoff between the Predators and the Buffalo Destroyers, and I quickly realized that my financial future was tied up in the outcome—in the sense that if Orlando advanced, it might supercharge my PRED stock. If the team went all the way to the championship, I might even make it all the way back to break even. How glorious!

Fortunately, I had tuned in during the second half, so it didn't have to kill my entire afternoon. Arena ball is rigged to make scoring easy—it's not unusual for teams to rack up 60, 70 points apiece. To not score, you have to drop passes and miss wide-open receivers and otherwise demonstrate all the reasons why the NFL is not interested in you. And that's exactly what I saw unfold. Buffalo fumbled four times and gave up seven sacks. In the fourth quarter, the game ground to a halt. It actually became a defensive struggle, a rare and dispiriting spectacle in arena football. The Predators eked out a win, 32-27.

Most witnesses would have sworn off arena football for life. I, however, was hooked. I waited with great anticipation for the markets to open on Monday to see just how much value my hour of hard rooting would translate into. Nothing, it turned out. My penny stock had plunged 20 cents.

Like a young initiate into a cult, however, I took this failure to be a sign that ever greater and more glorious rewards lay ahead. So naturally, I tuned into the Predators' next game the following Saturday, the playoff quarterfinals against the New Jersey Gladiators. It took place on a gorgeous afternoon, in front of a crowd at the Continental Airlines Arena that barely outnumbered the players. There may have been even fewer TV viewers. The game felt as if it were being beamed directly into the void, playing only to unseeing eyes in nursing homes and bus terminals.

The game got off to a bouncy start. The Predators surprised the Gladiators with an onside kick. I was elated by the ballsy coaching move. The Gladiators, in turn, surprised the Predators by returning said kick 7 yards for a touchdown. I was disgusted by the dumb-ass coaching move.

I spent the entire game like this, pinballing between elation and disgust—emotions heightened by the realization that these dumb-asses could be costing me money. Orlando quarterback Jay Gruden—who is somehow already a member of the Arena League Hall of Fame—played smartly, piling up yardage with apparent ease. The defense, however, was appalling. Both teams made a habit of tackling high and with their arms—maybe that's because they're being sensibly cautious and avoiding injury (nothing could be sadder than crippling yourself for the sake of arena football), but it sure makes for low-quality entertainment. Tapes of this should be shown to young players as anti-instructional videos, a kind of Scared Straight series for the young gridder: Tackle like this, and you, too, will one day be forced to play human pinball for the Grand Rapids Rampage.

Orlando scraped out another victory, aided by a couple critical non-calls by the officials, and I was once again jazzed about what this might mean for my PRED stock. So I've been checking it every day, and I'm happy to report that this week it has crept back to $1.699 a share. Two weeks of arena football fandom have set me back one-tenth of a penny. In today's market, that's practically a profit.

So I consider myself a full and total convert. In fact, I think every Arena League team should post itself on the Nasdaq. They could be the first sports league to sell itself this way. Geography, when you think about it, is an increasingly flimsy foundation for sports fans. Rooting doesn't really mean anything until you buy in. This Saturday, the Predators travel to the land of busted stocks, Silicon Valley, to play the San Jose SaberCats. There, I am convinced, something as real and incorruptible as a win, even in arena football, will really be worth something.


The Anaheim Angels
The worst team you've never heard of.
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Friday, October 18, 2002, at 6:53 AM PT

The Anaheim Angels aren't the worst franchise in baseball history, but they are the most pathetic. If you're a Boston Red Sox or Chicago Cubs fan, you can take pride in your team's futility, or you can be tortured by it. You can brag about it, or you can bemoan it. But you don't have to go around explaining it to everyone.

That's the fate to which Angels fans are doomed. Historically, the Angels have been doubly cursed: Since the franchise's birth in 1961, it's been the most frustrating, most agonizing, most heartbreaking team to watch in baseball. And it's not even famous for it.

Locally, of course, the team's plight is well-known. Here's how the Los Angeles Times' Mike Penner described this year's World Series squad, the first in the franchise's 42 seasons to win a playoff series: "The best thing you can say about this team is that it has failed, utterly and completely, in upholding the Angel Way to Play Baseball. Fundamental chapters—How to Fall Apart After a Questionable Managerial Decision, How to Fail to Get the Final Out, How to Choke—are being blithely ignored." To drive the point home, the Los Angeles Times launched its game coverage of the Angels' playoff series-clinching victory over the Minnesota Twins by citing the franchise's "four decades of humiliation," crowing that "At 5:04 p.m. Sunday, the Angels cast aside their image as bumblers and stumblers and losers."

But nationally, the Angels don't have that image. The situation is actually somewhat worse: They're not known for anything. The Cubs are bumblers. The Red Sox are stumblers. The Montreal Expos are losers. But the Angels? They have no reputation at all.

The Angels deserve to be famous. Since they entered the American League in 1961 as the first expansion team of the modern era (along with the Washington Senators, now the Texas Rangers), they have watched team after team after team beat them to the Fall Classic. Seven of the 12 teams created after 1961 made it to the World Series before the Angels, including two—the Florida Marlins and the Arizona Diamondbacks—that were born in the 1990s. Four younger expansion teams (the New York Mets, Kansas City Royals, San Diego Padres, and Toronto Blue Jays) have been to the World Series more than once, and the Mets and Blue Jays both have two championship flags waving over their stadiums.

But the Angels' curse is defined by more than simple futility. After all, the Senators/Rangers, created the same year, haven't been in a World Series. (The Rangers, however, are one up on the Angels in another category.) Nor have the Expos or the Houston Astros, both created in the 1960s. Not to mention the much younger Seattle Mariners, Colorado Rockies, or Tampa Bay Devil Rays. But none of those clubs shares the Angels' sad history of personal tragedies and late-season collapses.

First, the collapses. The Angels' autumn flops equal the Boston Red Sox's, who are much more renowned for them. In 1982, the Angels became the first team to blow a 2-0 lead in a five-game League Championship Series, dropping the next three to the Milwaukee Brewers, who advanced to the World Series. Four years later, the Angels went up 3-1 on the Red Sox in a seven-game playoff and entered the ninth inning of Game 5 leading 5-2. But with two outs and a 2-2 count—one strike away from the World Series—Angels closer Donnie Moore surrendered a home run that put the BoSox up 6-5. The Angels lost 7-6 in 11 innings, then lost the next two games, blowing the entire series.

The Angels accomplished something truly special: In two playoff series, the Angels had six chances to win a game to advance to the World Series. They lost all six. The 1986 team's feat in particular should rank among baseball's all-time collapses. But the Red Sox, the Angels' rivals in futility, did them one better and blew the World Series that year in a more famous fashion, beginning with that grounder through Bill Buckner's legs. As a result, baseball historians dismiss the Angels' claims to cursedness. "The Angels are not the Red Sox or the Cubs," one expert sniffed to the New York Times earlier this month. Even the Angels' hard-luck movie, Angels in the Outfield, isn't as well-known as Major League, starring the more famously hard-luck Cleveland Indians.

It's not just the playoffs that haunt the Angels. For their fans, September has been the cruelest month. Of all the team's late-season collapses (and there are many), the most bitter took place in 1995, when the Angels led the Seattle Mariners by 11 games on Aug. 3. Over two months they frittered that lead away, ultimately losing a one-game playoff and the division title. As September 2002 began, the Orange County Register noted that since the Angels' creation, the team has played at a .492 clip before September; after Sept. 1, the team's winning percentage dropped to .455. Over that period, only the Cubs took a bigger nose dive during the season's final month.

The Angels also have suffered a bizarre array of personal tragedies. Here's a sampling, not a complete list by any means: In 1965, a rookie pitcher died from a brain tumor. In 1968, a reliever was paralyzed in a car accident—his wife and two of their three children were killed. In 1972, a car accident killed an Angels infielder. In 1974, yet another car crash killed another reliever. In 1977, a shortstop died in a wreck. The next year, in a case of mistaken identity, an outfielder was shot to death. In 1992, the team bus crashed on the New Jersey Turnpike, nearly killing the manager. And three years earlier in 1989, Donnie Moore, reputedly tortured by that 1986 home run, shot and wounded his wife before killing himself.

What's going on here? Local legend has it that the Angels' ballpark—formerly Anaheim Stadium, now christened Edison Field—was built on an Indian burial ground. (What is this, Poltergeist?) Earlier this month, the Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., reported straightforwardly, "City of Anaheim historians have said there is no evidence to indicate that it's true but nothing to prove it isn't, either." The paper added that, "convinced that their ancestors rest underneath the property," members of a local tribe "blessed the ballpark themselves before this season began." Maybe that lifted the Angels' curse. Or perhaps the totemic Rally Monkey has warded it off.

Either way, the other half of the curse has stuck. The feel-good stories in this year's postseason were the Twins (those loveable Contraction Kids) and the St. Louis Cardinals, who received sympathy for the deaths of a starting pitcher, Darryl Kile, and their longtime broadcaster, Jack Buck. But the Twins' and Cards' adversity goes back only a season. The Angels have suffered for four decades. If they win the World Series, all that changes. Or rather, half of it does. The franchise will still be cursed because hardly anyone will realize what's happened. Once again, Angels fans will have to explain it to them.

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For most of the Angels' history, the team's roster has had a reputation as a retirement community for aging stars. As a result, the team has had an extraordinary seven Hall of Famers play for it—Reggie Jackson, Rod Carew, Frank Robinson, Hoyt Wilhelm, Don Sutton, Nolan Ryan, and Dave Winfield—but none of them were inducted as an Angel. (An eighth, Eddie Murray, will likely be added to the list in 2003.)

Ryan, the best player in the team's history, had great numbers for the Angels. He pitched four no-hitters, hurled a major-league record 383 strikeouts in 1973, and one season won 22 games for a last-place team that went 68-94, notching nearly a third of the team's wins. In another season, he tossed two no-hitters and nine shutouts. During his eight seasons with the Angels, Ryan went 138-121, a .533 winning percentage. As a team, the Angels were .481.

But he pitched only 291 of his 777 games as an Angel. The team, unwilling to pay him a then-record $1 million salary, let him go as a free agent after the 1979 season, when he went 16-14. The Angels' general manager suggested that Ryan could be replaced with "two 8-7 pitchers."

But Ryan achieved more as an ex-Angel than he had as an Angel. After winning 138 games in Anaheim, he won 157 with his next two teams (the Astros and the Rangers), and he threw three more no-hitters. As an Angel, he struck out 2,416 batters, but he struck out 2,805 after he left. In 1999, Ryan entered Cooperstown as a Texas Ranger. To add insult to the Angels' injury, his Hall of Fame plaque concludes, "A Texas legend whose widespread popularity extended far beyond his native state."


Flag on the Field
Soccer, the last acceptable form of nationalism.
By Anne Applebaum
Posted Tuesday, June 18, 2002, at 9:37 AM PT

Once, and only once, have I attended a world class—not quite World Cup—soccer game: England was playing Germany in London in the semifinals of the European championships. I'd previously been to a Super Bowl and one or two Redskins' games, but nothing really prepared me for the decibel level of Wembley Stadium. Over and over again, the fans sang "Football's Coming Home," a weirdly catchy tune, with lyrics predicated on the mystical notion that football (soccer), a game the English invented, was finally "coming home"—and that the chronically weak English team would once again become great. They also chanted. The night I watched England play, they mostly chanted, "Here we go, here we go, here we go," but sometimes the chants are more original. During the England-Argentina World Cup match last week, for example, they chanted, "Where is your navy? At the bottom of the sea"—a not terribly subtle reference to the Falklands War. About once a year, a British anthropologist is trotted out to analyze the chants as a vestigial form of primitive cult religions.

Outside the stadium that day, soccer mania had gripped the nation—and it is a mistake to imagine that only the hooligans temporarily turn into chauvinistic nationalists on the day of an England match. Otherwise well-behaved friends of mine were genuinely outraged that I, a mere foreigner, had received a press ticket. Germany jokes, usually involving the Nazis, were all the rage. One was attributed to Mrs. Thatcher, who upon being told that Germany had defeated England (which they did, of course) had allegedly replied, "They may have beat us at our national game, but we beat them twice at their national game in the 20^th century."

And everyone laughed. In the context of soccer, flag-waving nationalism—even chauvinistic, anti-foreigner, flag-waving nationalism—is acceptable in Britain. Which is odd, given that it isn't acceptable in other contexts, not in Britain and not anywhere in Western Europe, where most countries' political elites, at least, are ideologically dedicated to diluting their national identities into the broader European Union—as quickly as possible.

In Britain, even what Americans would consider to be ordinary patriotism is often suspect. When Tony Blair first entered the prime minister's residence in Downing Street, in 1997, he staged a little parade of well-wishers, all of whom were waving the British flag, the Union Jack. The British chattering classes howled their disapproval of this unsightly show of nationalism—one friend told me that the Union Jack always made him think of right-wing extremists—just as they had earlier howled their disapproval of the Blair campaign's brief (and quickly withdrawn) use of the traditional British bulldog. This summer's Jubilee, the 50^th anniversary celebration of the queen's reign, has been accompanied by some flag-waving—but some opposition, too. One Independent columnist wrote that her friends are "studiously ignoring the event," since national symbols such as the queen and the flag "bear uncomfortable overtones of racism and colonialism." Patriotism, she went on, is seen as "profoundly down-market, like doilies and bad diets."

The attitudes vary in other countries—unlike the Union Jack, the French tricolor flies from just about every public building in France—but the general rule of thumb holds true. Certainly there isn't anywhere in Germany you can go to shout, "Deutschland! Deutschland!" except a soccer stadium, for example. Perhaps as a result, feelings run so high in Germany following a soccer match that no incumbent German chancellor has ever lost an election in the wake of a major German victory. The re-election of Helmut Kohl in 1990 was widely attributed to Germany's victory in that year's World Cup. Perhaps it was all a coincidence, but the current German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is taking no chances. He has made a point of halting all his current, tight election campaigning for 90 minutes every time Germany plays a World Cup match.

In part, reverse snobbery explains this strange phenomenon. Soccer is the man-on-the-street's game in Europe, and the politicians, academics, and high-end journalists who would normally shun exhibitionist patriotism support their national teams as a means of proving they are really men-in-the street themselves. But it may also be that high national emotions are permissible when a soccer team is playing precisely because they are impermissible at most other times. There aren't, simply, many other places where you can sing your national anthem until you lose your voice without causing a riot.

And the implications are broad-ranging. The somewhat strange fact that the British have four international teams (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) instead of one, for example, may well have contributed to the recent revival of Scottish and Welsh separatism. If the England team really did become successful, it might even create some serious English separatism, a previously unknown phenomenon. Certainly the rise in middle-class support for the England team has contributed to the revival of the English flag—a red cross on a white field—which now flies from fans' cars on the days of big matches, and sometimes gets painted on their faces.

But the significance of the American team's weakness has always been underrated, too. Particularly now that the Olympics have been spoiled by total American dominance, it is nice for everybody else that the United States always loses at the only game the rest of the world really cares about. Now that the United States has started to do a bit better, the future looks darker. Hearing the score of this morning's Mexico game—and the rumors that riots might start in Mexico City—I immediately worried: If the United States started to dominate soccer the way it dominates basketball, then anti-Americanism might really start to get ugly.

As it stands, the relationship between the United States and soccer is perfect. Americans—citizens of a modern state—have plenty of opportunities to show their patriotism, on inaugurations and at school assemblies and on the Fourth of July. They don't need to do it in soccer stadiums as well. Europeans, on the other hand—citizens of postmodern states—have fewer and fewer, and need those soccer highs badly as a result. Cheer for the American soccer players if you will—but keep your fingers crossed, and hope the U.S. team doesn't upset the balance by winning too many more matches.


Choking at the Bowl
Why do men have trouble urinating at ballparks?
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Monday, May 13, 2002, at 1:11 PM PT

A Slate employee—we'll call him "Thad"—asks the sports department to solve a problem that has been vexing him: Why does he have trouble urinating at ballparks? His testimony, worded as delicately as possible, goes like this: At a Seattle Mariners game, Thad slugged down several ballpark beverages. Later, he shuffled into the restroom, angled toward the urinals, unzipped his trousers, and then … nothing. Not a drop. Embarrassed and in acute pain, he waddled back to his seat, where he spent the remaining innings swaying like Stevie Wonder in front of a piano.

After polling some of the country's pre-eminent urologists, we discovered that, surprise, Thad isn't alone. Men experience stage fright at ballpark urinals all the time. In fact, the problem is so common that urologists have a reassuring, pat-on-the-butt-sounding name for it: choking at the bowl.

There are three reasons why ballparks cause men to choke—two physical, one psychological. First, some men spend their time at the ballpark slugging down a beer every half-inning. Alcohol causes the prostate gland to swell, which impedes the flow of urine from the bladder to the urinal channel. Thus, when the man reaches the urinal, nothing happens. Dr. Rodney Appell, a urologist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, says the problem occurs most frequently with older men who have enlarged prostates to begin with.

Other times men choke at the bowl because they guzzle too many beverages, alcoholic or not, and overstretch their bladders. A normal-sized bladder will contract when full, allowing urine to flow out of the body. But an overstretched bladder—distended by four or five souvenir-cup sodas—is slow to contract, and sometimes urination stalls.

But most of the men who choke at the bowl suffer from an anxiety disorder called paruresis, or Shy Bladder Syndrome. These men, quite simply, are embarrassed to bare all in the presence of strangers. Steve Soifer, a professor of social work who founded the International Paruresis Association, estimates that 17 million Americans suffer from some form of Shy Bladder Syndrome, about 7 percent of the population.

When a man with a shy bladder enters the ballpark restroom, the crowds, long lines, and stadium noise make him sweat. So does the ballpark restroom's infamous trough urinal, a knee-high, stainless steel gutter that forces men to urinate while standing elbow-to-elbow. (Some stadiums built before the Trough Era have gutters carved directly into the floor.) If the shy bladder even makes it to the trough—some flee the restroom at this point—his nervousness causes him clamp down on his sphincter muscle, which prevents his bladder from contracting.

Soifer, a recovering paruretic himself, offers a three-day workshop for shy bladders, held monthly in cities in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. It costs $300 to attend. The first day is a group counseling session. During the second day, attendees gorge themselves on water and then, in pairs, practice voiding in their hotel bathrooms. In this exercise, one man stands at the toilet while his partner stands a comfortable distance behind him. As the first man begins to urinate, his partner inches closer, eventually standing directly behind the man, sometimes touching or razzing him as he urinates, to re-create the feel of a busy public restroom. The closing event of the workshop, which Soifer calls the "graduation ceremony," is held in a bathroom at a train station, airport, or, occasionally, a ballpark.

Even with therapy, will a shy bladder ever feel at ease at the ballpark trough? "I've suffered from paruresis for 30 years," Soifer says, "and I've been in recovery for the last six. I'm not cured. It's a lot like alcoholism. You can recover close to 100 percent, but it can get set off again in certain situations. That's why I don't talk about a cure."


Pumping Iron: The Return
It wants to pump you up all over again.
By Virginia Heffernan
Updated Thursday, November 14, 2002, at 1:50 PM PT

Bodybuilding is a form of competitive modeling in which contestants are judged on the symmetry, proportion, size, and clarity of their muscles. The world's greatest bodybuilder—Mr. Olympia—is currently Ronnie Coleman, a 38-year-old Louisianan who looks, to the untrained eye, perfectly clear, symmetrical, and gigantic. One look at Coleman and you'd think no man could ever be bigger. But some had already had that thought when they first beheld the preternaturally vascular Lee Haney, who held the Olympia title from 1984-1991. And certainly many, many fans thought that man had reached his apotheosis years earlier, in the form of Mr. Olympia 1970-1975: the Austrian Oak, the King, the King of Kings—Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger.

In 1977, two filmmakers, George Butler and Charles Gaines, released the no-budget documentary Pumping Iron, in which Schwarzenegger is shown winning the 1975 Olympia title, and other bulky hopefuls—most notably Lou ("The Incredible Hulk") Ferrigno—are shown losing it. To commemorate the 25^th anniversary of the film, Cinemax has remastered and digitally enhanced the weird movie, encircling both Pumping Iron and the demimonde practice of bodybuilding in a brand-new aura of legitimacy, reminding viewers that the film opened at Cannes, and claiming that it "led to a redefinition of the image of leading men in films." Along with some new material about the movie, the cleaned up Pumping Iron airs on Friday, Nov. 15 at 8 p.m. ET.

No true fan of Pumping Iron has ever needed to be apprised that the movie was intended as a vérité art project, in the academic school of Frederick Wiseman or the Maysles brothers. But what most people who have seen Pumping Iron like to remember, and can't forget, are the horrible-wonderful scenes of mental conflict between the swaggering, comically vain Schwarzenegger—"I was always dreaming about very powerful people, dictators, people like Jesus, being remembered for thousands of years"—and the guileless Ferrigno, a hearing-impaired former sheet-metal worker under the thumb of his carping dad Matty. Ferrigno comes off as a simpleton giant, seemingly built to be outfoxed.

Schwarzenegger, fresh from a year of training at Gold's Gym in Venice Beach, is just the man to do the outfoxing. Far from home—and his own father, whose funeral Arnold skipped so that he could keep training—the reigning Mr. Olympia at the time of Pumping Iron is an unscrupulous bully with a mighty mind for head games. Having resolved to trick Ferrigno into thinking he's lost the 1975 Olympia title (in Pretoria, South Africa) before they've even posed off, he joins the Ferrigno family for breakfast on the morning of the competition. Lou's mother gamely offers that the event should come earlier in their stay in Pretoria, so all the competitors would have time to enjoy the sights. Then, as the family looks dumbly on, Schwarzenegger fires back:

Are you kidding? They should have it in a month for him! He's not even in shape yet! He didn't get the timing right, I'm telling you. A month from now would have been perfect. But then I get bigger too again. And if you retire this year, you just never had the Olympia … what the hell. Can you imagine the feeling I have? Six times Mr. Olympia. I called my mother yesterday already and said, "I won," and she said, "Congratulations, Arnold!"

Stunned, Lou seems confused. Has he already lost? But the competition's not till—later—isn't it? He enters the pre-judging dejected—and ultimately comes in third place. Schwarzenegger, as predicted, is six times Mr. Olympia. Can you imagine the feeling he has? It may be that no movie has ever treated the joys and horrors of male preening so well as Pumping Iron.

The film offers many scenes of wonderment before the final showdown. Schwarzenegger's gym-rat acolytes are nervous oddballs packed into the muscles of Hercules. When they flex their muscles for each other, their biceps contract into cantaloupe-sized balls that seem to qualify as new appendages. The Brooklynite Matty Ferrigno can't take his eyes off his son and praises him with the verve of an Italian tenor: "What symmetry you've got, Louie! You look like something Michelangelo cut out!"

The '70s were the golden age of steroids—and rampant telltale acne is visible on the oiled skin of many of the bodybuilders. (In Sam Fussell's excellent 1991 book Muscle, about his own adventures in bodybuilding, he reveals that some '80s steroid-takers got acne everywhere, including the soles of their feet.) Schwarzenegger, who has spent 25 years being cagey about his past drug use, is never seen ingesting more than water and eggs. By contrast, the filmmakers caught Lou Ferrigno in his bedroom, unabashedly glugging down handfuls of pills and supplements.

The other characters in Pumping Iron—in particular, Franco Columbu, a short Sardinian who comes in second to Schwarzenegger, and Mike Katz, a sweet sad sack who seems destined to lose—help demonstrate that it takes a strange kind of guy to want cantaloupe biceps, but the drama of the film focuses, wisely, on Schwarzenegger and Matty and Lou Ferrigno. Matty plays the Burgess Meredith role with aplomb, shouting at his son: "They're all looking at you, Louie! … You look at your arms like you're admiring, and then you go, boom! Like 'Take a look at this hunk of man.' OK, Louie? Atta boy! Remember your arms are bigger than Arnold's!"

Now, writing this out, I realize that the dialogue and drama in Pumping Iron either seems eccentric and endearing or eccentric and sick. I see it the first way; watching men go through their poses and try to please their dads and try to look stronger than one another (without actually being stronger) made my heart swell with sentimental sympathy. As the warm-blooded Italian-American faces off with the icy Austrian, I can't help but root for Ferrigno, while at the same time being pleased that he doesn't win the unsavory competition. Lou—something Michelangelo cut out—might now rise above the sleaziness and be a good, loving giant and protector.

Cinemax has produced a preface film and a making-of documentary to go with the 86-minute remastered film. In these, you learn that Ferrigno looks great these days—and he seems to be hearing better (cochlear implants?). Schwarzenegger looks strained—he's smaller, and his face, which had a nice sensuousness in his youth, appears unnaturally tightened. Both men now laugh off the competition of the mid-'70s. Ferrigno simply seems like his life has come together, and, though he resented his dopey image at the time, he's not sweating the old days. Schwarzenegger, however, takes pains to point out how much he was acting the part of the villain. "I played the kind of Germanic machine," he says now. "I tried anything and everything to look like this evil guy."

If so—if Arnold was gaming the filmmakers—then Pumping Iron ought to be considered less an insider's look at a gruesome American subculture and more a staged battle of exaggerated archetypes. I'm happy to witness that big clash again, and to concentrate on the lyrics to the movie's hilariously trashy synth theme song—with its irresistible Oedipal triumph:

Everybody wants to be respected. Everybody wants to be protected. Every man wants to be bigger than dad. … Pumping up! Really feels like flying! Coming up, just like a lion. Pumping up, now! Working out, now! Everybody wants to be remembered, everybody wants to have a friend. Gonna be ready and able, if my friend wants to turn the table. Pumping Iron. Nobody's gonna be bigger than I am.


Death Takes a Quaalude
Moonlight Mile is the worst film of the year; Igby Goes Down is the best.
By David Edelstein
Posted Friday, September 27, 2002, at 8:46 AM PT

Narcissistic coming-of-age stories are not exactly uncommon in movies, but I've rarely sat through one as eerie as Brad Silberling's Moonlight Mile (Touchstone), an early entry in this year's Terms of Endearment (1983) heart-tugger sweepstakes. Silberling is reportedly a warm guy, but as a writer and director he's gruesomely insensitive. I'm at a loss to account for how off this film is—how a movie can seem so conscientiously earnest yet so creepily exploitive. It's like a Christmas stocking over a crematory.

The tone goes kerflooey in the first sequence, in which Jake Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, and Susan Sarandon prepare for a funeral amid ringing phones, which Hoffman dutifully answers—accepting condolences, relaying the time of the service—while Sarandon quietly fumes at her husband's amiability. Over time, we learn that the rites are for their only daughter, that Gyllenhaal was her fiance, and that she was murdered in a local diner by a crazy man bent on exacting vengeance on his own wife. Before we've even gotten our bearings, Silberling goes for little laughs at the parents' expense; and during the service, the dead girl's best friend rubs the fiance's shoulders in a way that's unnervingly intimate.

We're meant to identify with the squirmy young man, Joe, who feels self-conscious and out of place, having now been adopted by this weird couple he doesn't know in a town that isn't his home. A few scenes later, he goes to retrieve the unsent wedding invitations and has a meet-cute scene with Bertie, a zany postal clerk (Ellen Pompeo)—and suddenly it's clear that Moonlight Mile will be about their kooky coming-together while he's living under the roof of his murdered fiancee's parents and preparing to testify at the trial of her killer.

Will Joe have the strength of character to admit (on the witness stand, if necessary) that the relationship with his fiancee was troubled before she died? Will he declare his love for this other girl before she gets away? How will Joe choose between the new love of his life and his in-laws manqués?

My reaction to the above is easily stated: Yuck. It's not the touches of comedy in a story framed by grief. It's the combination of the maudlin and the arch. Joe is like a Woody Allen character amid the Gentiles, and in this context his eye-rolling higher consciousness is repellent. And when Silberling turns him into a fount of truth, his candor inspiring the parents to face up to their past and move on, the movie becomes an affront to the living and the dead.

Moonlight Mile is like In the Bedroom (2001) made sweet and uplifting. It's even more vomitous than what Silberling did to Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1988), which he remade as City of Angels (1998) with Nicolas Cage as an angel who becomes fully human only when the woman he loves (Meg Ryan) celebrates their impending nuptials by bicycling into a truck. Silberling has said that this movie was partly inspired by his relationship with the parents of his girlfriend, Rebecca Schaeffer, the young actress murdered by a stalker—which makes Moonlight Mile more than an aesthetic crime. Dear In-Laws-That-Might-Have-Been: It wouldn't have worked anyway.

To understand some of what's missing, you need only check out another current Susan Sarandon movie, Igby Goes Down (MGM), which opens with a scene of breathtaking—near mythic—tastelessness. Two sons, the teenage Jason "Igby" Slocumb Jr. (Kieran Culkin) and his college-age brother Oliver (Ryan Phillippe), sit by the bedside of their mother (Sarandon) waiting for her to die from poison. When she persists in breathing, they hasten her death with a plastic bag. We don't know whether they have just murdered their mother or assisted her in some sort of suicide pact. But the scene is played for grim laughs—her snoring, the lack of tears, the sons' impatience. Yet it isn't exploitive: By the end of the movie—a long flashback—we know why that scene happened as it did, and why it will haunt Igby for the rest of his life.

Igby (the name is from his childish mispronunciation of a Digby bear) is the biggest jerk in movies right now—and also the most vulnerable. He might even be the most likable, although maybe not if you actually met him and he called you an idiot. The movie isn't a flip black comedy in which loss has no sting. It's a wrenching, tumultuous, emotionally chaotic comedy—a comedy in which grief is expressed in rage. The first-time writer-director, Burr Steers, has given us a teenage hero who knows only what he hates.

He hates his rich and narcissistic mother, and it gives him pleasure to frustrate her monumental will: He flunks out of school after school, he runs away and hides with Manhattan bohemians. He seems to blame her for the insanity of his absent dad (Bill Pullman), who shows up in his dreams like a wreck out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He hates his unctuous preppie brother, an honors student at Columbia, who seems almost incestuously in league with his mother. He hates his vastly wealthy godfather D.H. (Jeff Goldblum), a cold snob who takes a strange interest in his upbringing. At a cocktail party at D.H.'s beach house in the Hamptons, Igby meets a young woman he might actually like, a cool misfit named Sookie (Claire Danes—all grown up and alluringly self-contained). But he'll come close to hating her, too, when she can't resist his brother's moves.

There's a long line of movies about dysfunctional kids and their heartless mothers—the modern template is Ordinary People (1980). But unlike them, Igby Goes Down doesn't feel like the product of psychoanalysis. Its hero's despair hasn't been diagrammed or his rebelliousness turned into a metaphor. The movie hasn't been designed to make his callow narcissism seem a state of grace, as it is in Wes Anderson's Rushmore (1998). Igby's journey is haphazard and messy; the movie is built on one emotional dissonance after another. Culkin's face is a mask of sneering sophistication, but we can see that it's a mask; we can glimpse on occasion the face of the squalling, needy infant underneath.

Igby has grown up with people who don't know how to express their love, and so this smart-mouth provokes them in lieu of asking for what he really needs. He gets hit, too. He gets slugged a couple of times by a therapist, which shocks him—and us. He gets cuffed by a beautiful and damaged young artist (Amanda Peet), at whose loft he's been hiding. He gets beaten up by his godfather, who finds out Igby's been sleeping with his mistress. And those are just the physical blows—the other ones, from his mom and his sometime girlfriend, draw even more blood. And still he goads them, needing only a response—the way this movie goads us, with its scenes that sometimes go on too long, its sudden cruelties, its great actors who hit unpleasant notes they've never hit on screen before.

Igby Goes Down got a reaction from me: I think it's the movie of the year. I squirmed, I laughed a lot, I thought about how cursed this boy was by his enraged sense of entitlement. Some heroes can demonstrate their vulnerability more vividly through anger than through sweetness. Jerks have to work harder than nice guys. They have more miles to go before they sleep.


Blame Runner
Minority Report is a fabulous, witty totalitarian nightmare.
By David Edelstein
Updated Friday, June 21, 2002, at 10:14 AM PT

For slightly under two hours, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (DreamWorks/20^th Century Fox) is even greater than the sum of its parts—a roller coaster in which the loop-the-loops are philosophical as well as visceral. It's one of the drollest projections of the future ever put on film. The movie is adapted from an early short story by Philip K. Dick; and while it strays from Dick's narrative, it nails the basic premise and some quintessential Dickian motifs. The year is 2054, and in and around Washington, D.C., murder has been eliminated by a private corporation with governmentlike powers of detention. The company, Precrime, has developed technology to tap into the minds of "Pre-Cogs," psychic humans who float in a sort of sacred amniotic pool, their synapses wired to video terminals. What they visualize, and what shows up on screens in the company's control room, are not "thought crimes" but crimes that definitely will be committed.

Sounds invasive, no? Shrewdly, the screenplay (by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen) adds a cliffhanger aspect to engage our sympathies. With crimes of passion, the Pre-Cogs' vision can come mere minutes before a murder is destined to occur, which means a race to discern the location and stop the killing. While his hovercraft SWAT team waits to swoop down on the perpetrator-to-be, the unit chief, John Anderton (Tom Cruise), reviews the Pre-Cogs' tapes on a giant glass screen like some sort of forensic Leonard Bernstein, commanding the computer to shift the grid, try different angles, and zoom in for close-ups. Anderton also has a direct video link to a pair of judges, who by rote give their legal blessing to go forth and apprehend.

I must admit that I find elements of this future attractive—and so, according to Minority Report, does the populace of 2054. A political advertisement for Precrime is stunningly effective: It shows people who would have been murder victims expressing gratitude for their lives. As the movie begins, Precrime is on the verge of a referendum that would make its policies the law of the United States, and a smirky Justice Department honcho called Witwer (Colin Farrell) has arrived to scrutinize the company's inner workings—to ensure that the data that sends would-be culprits into suspended animation for the rest of their lives is reliable. The movie presents us with a classic totalitarian trade-off, upgraded by technology and the paranormal: Would you surrender a slew of civil liberties for a world without crime? Assuming that the right people were always jailed for the right reasons, I'd think about it long and hard.

The hero, Anderton, doesn't have to think too hard. He has a vigilante's worldview and a fanatical loyalty to Precrime director Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow). A drug user and fantasist, Anderton spends most of his spare time with his holographic home movies, reliving the life he once led with his wife and young son, the latter abducted and (presumably) killed a mere six months before Precrime came into existence. Six months earlier and he'd still have a family! Nothing can come between Anderton and his Precrime religion—nothing, that is, until the Pre-Cogs have a vision of him killing a man he has never heard of, until the entire apparatus of the company is turned toward apprehending the former apprehender.

The idea that an individual could have a hidden life that even he doesn't know about is pure Dick, and it gives the suspense an extra kink. Unlike the heroes of most blockbuster thrillers, Anderton isn't simply running away from special effects; he's running toward his future. He's trying to learn the identity of the man he's fated to murder—to prove that he won't commit the crime, that with knowledge he can change the future, that even in a universe with Pre-Cogs, no one's actions are predestined. The search leads him back to the Pre-Cogs he regarded as both holy and subhuman: They're like floating star-children, hairless, in a druggy state of suspension. The one he abducts, Agatha (Samantha Morton), has never lived in the present, only the twilit world of other people's futures. Morton comes with her own lyrically disconnected aura. She can't move too fast, but a Pre-Cog proves a handy thing to have in a chase. You know what's going to trip you up a minute or so down the road.

It has been a long time since a Spielberg film felt so nimble, so unfettered, so free of self-cannibalizing. When he sheds his pandering mannerisms, he really is one of the most wittily dexterous filmmakers alive, and he gets a fine, focused performance from Cruise, who's better when you can't spot him acting. Spielberg was gun-for-hire on Minority Report (Cruise's company developed the project), but nothing feels impersonal. Having publicly taken issue with his old friend George Lucas' paeans to digital video, Spielberg makes a passionate case for celluloid. Janusz Kaminski's palette is cool, desaturated, blue-washed, with a grainy texture suggesting the unstable molecules of reality.

Digital video is the instrument of the state, of Precrime, of the corporation: It's a world in which marketers identify you with a retinal scan and tailor billboards to your purchases (an extension of Amazon's technique of greeting you "personally" with a list of recommendations based on books you've bought before). Precrime tracks with retinal scans, too. There's an amazing sequence—a showstopper—in which a team in search of Anderton dispatches a horde of mechanical spiders into a fleabag hotel, the robot insects skittering from room to room, crawling under doors, lasering the eyeballs of the building's inhabitants.

This script is so smart and the editing (by Michael Kahn) so crackerjack that every freaky black-comic element works like gangbusters. Take the squirmily funny scene in which an underground surgeon (Peter Stormare)—a druggie sadist—gives Anderton a new set of eyeballs, but not before taunting him with his defenselessness: It's a Saturday Night Live sketch in hell. As the reclusive Dr. Iris Hineman, the inventor of the Precrime technology, Lois Smith manages to be forward and evasive in the same instant—a hilariously discomfiting combination. It is Hineman who lets slip the existence of "minority reports"—alternate Pre-Cog visions of the future that are swiftly suppressed, for fear of undercutting the cases against people who as yet haven't actually done anything.

This thread of Minority Report has prompted lively commentary, from Dahlia Lithwick's deft comparison to the Jose Padilla case to Jeremy Lott's provocative assertion that the movie will be to the Bush administration what Wag the Dog was to the Clinton team—a crystalline metaphor for political expediency. But neither Lithwick nor Lott has seen the film, and I'm sorry to report that, unlike Dick's story, it doesn't stick with that idea and develop it. In fact, the minority report becomes the casualty of the last 20 minutes, which play more like a third-rate episode of Murder, She Wrote than anything by Philip K. Dick. I can't believe that the same screenwriters who fashioned the first two hours had anything to do with the scene between von Sydow and Anderton's estranged wife, played by Kathryn Morris, who emerges from nowhere to save the day. Whose idea was it to turn Minority Report into a mushy declaration of humanism? It ends up as less of a warning about an Orwellian police state than a protest that Pre-Cogs are people, too. It's Dick-less.


The Secret Vice of Power Women
By Michael Kinsley
Updated Thursday, November 14, 2002, at 10:45 AM PT

(Note: In the marital relations system, the people are represented by two separate but equally important groups: the wives who watch Law & Order obsessively, and the husbands who don't. This is their story. Ka-chunk.)

Recently I got married, fairly late in life for that sort of thing, and have made astonishing discoveries. Most of these revelations turn out to be common knowledge. But one, I believe, has not been widely aired.

People's Exhibit A (my wife), Your Honor, is a formidable, intelligent woman with an important and challenging job and a full private life. (Also undeniable loveliness and charm, which are not strictly relevant to the present case.) She doesn't squander her time. And yet she spends many hours a week watching reruns of Law & Order—often back-to-back (the shows, that is).

It would be misleading to call her a fan. Law & Order, the long-running crime drama, is not just one of her favorite TV shows, or even her very favorite. Other than reruns of Law & Order, she has almost no interest in television at all. Specifically, she has no interest in any of the (to me) barely distinguishable Law & Order spinoffs and rip-offs (such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Double-Entry Bookkeeping, CSI, CSI: Miami, Mayberry R.F.D. and so on.) She's not even interested in new episodes of Law & Order itself. She couldn't tell you what night it's on and has no view about what this country is coming to when a man like Fred Thompson can be plucked from the obscurity of the United States Senate and entrusted with the responsibility of running the prosecutor's office on Law & Order.

Nor does she care—or even, possibly, notice—whether it is Michael Moriarty or Sam Waterston who is being unvarnished in any episode she may be watching. Don't ask her whether the female assistant district attorney is the blonde or one of the brunettes. Don't attempt to amuse her by predicting what demographic category the judge will be from. ("They've had four black women in a row, so I'm thinking white man. No, I know, that's ridiculous, so I'll go with white woman—but in a wheelchair. Whaddya think, Honey? Honey?? Ouch, that hurt. OK, never mind.")

Exhibit A and I assumed that this was our little secret. Perhaps it had to do with our weather here in Seattle, which affects some people oddly. Or too much coffee. But then we had a visitor from the East Coast who announced that his wife was about to become the TV critic of a major newspaper. "And the amazing thing," he added, "is that she never watches TV except for reruns of Law & Order."

Good grief. I began making discreet inquiries. My closest chum in Washington is a political columnist and TV pundit. I thought I knew her pretty well. Turns out that for years, on all those evenings when I assumed she was at parties to which I wasn't invited, she was at home watching reruns of Law & Order. The dean of a major business school poured out a similar confession, as did a senior editor at a newsmagazine. The girlfriend of one of my Slate colleagues. Half the women at the University of Texas (according to another Slate colleague, who may be exaggerating). Another Washingtonian, this one a teacher, though her husband says she is "drifting back to C-SPAN." Always women. Always high-powered. Always Law & Order. Always reruns. What on earth is going on?

It is not a cult, because a cult is communal. Sex and the City has a cult following: Women, especially, watch it together and/or discuss it the next day at work. New episodes are considered, on balance, a good thing. The obsession with Law & Order is something different. Far from discussing it with one another, women seem to watch it alone and may be unaware that anyone else shares the habit.

Exhibit A may be an extreme case. In a rare glimpse into this secret world, Molly Haskell wrote an essay last April for a local section of the New York Times in which she frankly and courageously labeled herself a Law & Order addict. But she claimed to discuss the show freely with other addicts. She also described her addiction as an essentially New York phenomenon, which suggests that even Haskell does not appreciate the full extent of the situation.

This would all be merely curious except for one ominous recent development. Law & Order reruns used to be scattered across the cable schedule like wildflowers. (Or weeds.) To catch them all, you needed to be able to play the remote control like Paderewski. More important, you had to control the remote control. Under these circumstances, only the smarter and more high-powered women were able to indulge this temptation. Now, though, TNT cable has exclusive rights to Law & Order reruns and, near as I can tell, runs them more or less all the time. That means Law & Order addiction is now available to all women with access to even basic cable.

This presumably is just the kind of chic new social problem the Democrats are being advised to rebuild their party around, now that George W. Bush has solved all the old ones. The new Democratic leader in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, is just the kind of dynamic, smart, take-charge person who can …

Uh-oh. Do you suppose …?


Sweet Emotion
The continuing appeal of Aerosmith's aging, derivative, eyeliner-wearing hams.
By Virginia Heffernan
Posted Monday, April 29, 2002, at 2:28 PM PT

Twenty years ago, with my bio textbook and a $5 bill in my knapsack, I stopped at a school-supplies store near my junior high, bought a piece of cotton paper and a green felt-tip calligraphy pen, and went home to transcribe the lyrics to Aerosmith's song "Dream On." Tacking the sheet to the bulletin board beside my bed, I imagined that one night a guy might come into my room, read "Dream On," and see me as a tough and tender small-town girl who knew about laughter and tears—and who was ready to sing with him, for the years.

Aerosmith—Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Joey Kramer, Brad Whitford, and Tom Hamilton—were sexy, bluesy guys from my home state of New Hampshire. They seemed sad, rowdy, and courteous at the same time. Now I'm 32, and the past has gone—it went by like dusk to dawn—but Aerosmith is still here. The other night, MTV premiered mtvICON: Aerosmith, the channel's tribute concert to the jokers who tried and failed to be the American Rolling Stones—or, no, the country's one funky, blues-rock garage band with stamina—or, no, the pioneers, with Run-DMC, of the rap-rock industrial complex—or, let's face it, the aging derivative jerks in eyeliner who ride the nostalgia train and consent to appear on MTV as "icons."

Of course, you can't underestimate the music industry's swelling capacity for gaudy self-congratulation. Through the device of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, the music business, with MTV still firmly at its center, has canonized more saints than John Paul II. It's also democratized rock fame. The assumptions behind Behind the Music (VH1), Cribs (MTV), Becoming (MTV), Being (VH1), Driven (VH1), Before They Were Rock Stars (VH1), VH1 TV Moments (VH1), and dozens of shows beyond MTV Networks are evidence of the widespread belief that anyone who has had even a run-in with rock fame has a story worth telling. And maybe it's true. Rock stardom may be like the Congo: If you've been there, no matter what happened, we want to hear about it.

As mtvICON has it, Aerosmith's story goes like this. The band formed in Sunapee, N.H. (about a 40 minutes' drive from my town's school-supplies store); went to Boston to become guitar gods; lived on a malign but common street drug that MTV won't call by name; had hits; split up; endured some barren Spinal Tap years; shot a video with Run-DMC in a Rick Rubin feat that sent up both bands but also invigorated their careers; rallied; got sober; reunited; reclaimed children they had fathered; had new hits; built a fan base of people like me who had listened to them as children; and finally became Icons.

Aerosmith, while commercial, seem to be set on proving that rockers can age like bluesmen, becoming wise, just-playing-music types who are mellow and give props to the kids. They've been humiliated, snubbed, and nearly died many times over, and now they are smug, rangy, and amused. Their interviews about the trashy years are of course the most compelling. After describing the band's stupendous bingeing, Tyler says what we're all thinking: "It's hard to talk about drugs after 15 years of sobriety, but they had to do some good." More than musical innovation, miscellaneous experience, especially with drugs, is Aerosmith's high card. And while that's true of other old second-tier rock bands, Aerosmith is peculiarly good-natured about it—and they make growing old look like fun. They are the biggest hams in elderrock.

The band's biopic comes in intervals, between performances by young musicians, who by turns praise and cover the masters. Conspicuously absent from MTV's festivities were any of Aerosmith's contemporaries: no Jagger, Richards, McCartney, Clapton, Don Henley. No one from Journey, Boston, Asia. The covers—by Train ("Dream On"), Papa Roach ("Sweet Emotion"), Kid Rock ("Last Child"), Shakira ("Dude Looks Like a Lady"), Pink ("Janie's Got a Gun"), Nelly and Ja Rule ("Walk This Way")—are uneven. But they make you think not only about the debt of the young to the old, but also the debt the old can have to the young.

The brief Run-DMC/Aerosmith collaboration—for years hailed as a noble political act akin to school desegration—is nothing compared to the youth/age collaboration of a show like this, in which the old men get credibility from the bands that cover them, and vice versa. Because the young bands are so self-conscious—this isn't their crowd, after all, and the auteurs are in the house—their inhibitions become an accidental part of their performances. Am I doing this right? No, it's so not rock 'n 'roll to think about "right." I should just try to rock. That paradox—how to be deferential without being uncool—infuses every moment of television's current rock nostalgia. And it backs some of the young rockers into a corner: How can they cover this boomer music without turning into has-beens themselves? How can they manifest the defiance of youth and the chops of age? On mtvICON, that challenge actually makes the performances interesting.

I was happy to hear the songs again. As the under-30 musicians played on, I also savored the cutaways to Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, who, with the rest of the band, were watching from the balcony. In their youth, the frontmen of Aerosmith looked sensuous like Keith and Mick, but they didn't look decadent; they've always looked like musicians who liked to practice. Today, Perry is an easy, lovely looking man who, against the odds, retains his New Hampshire accent. And whatever other poisons linger in Tyler's system, his freedom from Botox makes his face sinuous and vivacious—lined with swirls far more elegant than my preteen calligrapy. So, while the show made much of the redemption of rehab, let's just say it: The lean, cool look of these guys can lead one to suspect that a bout with drugs, if survived, can enhance late-life handsomeness. These guys have none of the jowls and belly of executives or politicians; instead they've got a jagged, vampiric look that can be even sexier than youth.

As the young bands covered his band's hits, Tyler gamely rocked along in his chair. He looked like an enthusiastic parent at a school play—in the second act he and Perry both had children in their laps. And if Perry was gracious, Tyler was openly effusive, nodding vigorously as he picked up the new bands' choices—and praising even Train's stiff, awkward rendition of "Dream On."

Of course the show had its cringe-inducing moments. David Spade roasted the band in a nasty, uninformed way, and he looked like he hated doing it. And I found it especially unnerving when members of Metallica claimed that Aerosmith were their saviors. These former screamers thanked Aerosmith for returning a cell phone ("Steven called the number marked mom, and she found me") and improving the life of a sick friend. Has recovery cost Metallica all of its metal ferocity? The band has none of Aerosmith's weathered grace or old-man's savoir vivre; instead they have the unsteady, one-day-at-a-time look of new Christians or halfway-house dwellers.

As a remarried band, Aerosmith represents an enviable triumph of hope over experience. Perry and Tyler split in the 1980s, but they soon found out that they missed each other. Now—drug-free, clean-shaven, and rich—they sit easily together. True, they rarely look at each other, but they seem to know that they're bound to work together like a pair of draft horses in a cross harness. Perry confesses that Tyler's outbursts and self-centeredness still bug him. "How much of that is ego, family things? But he's got really good intuition. And I gotta admit it a lot of the time he's right." The line was delivered lightly; this sounds like a good marriage to me.

Fundamentally, Aerosmith makes sexy music for good girls—"dirty" music, as Janet Jackson, who was last year's Icon, put it. I was not surprised that the chief sponsor of MTVIcon: Aerosmith was Lady Venus; at every commercial break, the same noxious ad appeared for a women's razor designed to "reveal the goddess in you." The campaign is dreadful, but Lady Venus is on to something: When Aerosmith's around, women—just for being women—feel a little bit holy. And sluttiness seems next to godliness. I don't know any men who don't have mixed feelings about Aerosmith. At most they admit that they're tight and have some good licks—and that Tyler's a decent performer. But these guys don't run home and put on "Jaded" like some women I know. Christina Applegate got this gist when she said onstage: "[Aerosmith's] is a music for coming of age, for spreading your … wings."

Aerosmith sounds the way a guy does when he's trying to get you to leave your bio homework to go get drunk and make out. Even if you're no longer using a fake ID and worrying about hickeys, hearing Aerosmith can bring you back to the days when you did. For four years, I kept the "Dream On" lyrics on my bulletin board. The rocker guy never showed up, and finally I put the manuscript away in a box, under my childhood bed. On the subway this morning, I dipped into Health, a magazine for women in their 40s concerned with stress and savings. To my amazement, Steven Tyler was on the back cover, shrieking, his upper lip lined with milk. "Makes your bones rock hard," reads the copy. "Ya think soda can do that? Dream on."


No More Moby!
Why on earth is he so popular?
By Ted Widmer
Updated Tuesday, July 9, 2002, at 1:48 PM PT

Not long after the release of his latest record, 18, the megastar DJ Moby posted this journal entry on his Web site:

#1 In The World
5/21/2002—Cologne, Germany
i've just been told that '18' is the # 1 selling album in the world.
whoo-boy, that's just nuts.
i'm a little bald guy from the lower east side of manhattan and i make records in my spare bedroom. how have i ended up with the #1 selling album in the world?
thanks everybody. and thanks to christ.
very strange, huh.
–moby

Actually, according to Billboard magazine, 18 never got above fourth place on the Top 200 Albums chart. But it did become the No. 1 electronic record, the No. 1 record sold on the Web, and, for what it's worth, the No. 1 album in Canada. The press also seized the bait in a big way, with the usual effluvia in the music rags and a flattering cover piece in the New York Times Magazine. Which raises the question: How can it be that at this pivotal moment in our history, when the entire world is looking to America for leadership, our most robust music-maker is a 36-year-old hermit who can barely play a guitar?

Admittedly, Moby-hating is too easy a pose to strike. Eminem has that base covered, and he's welcome to it. In fact, I have nothing against Moby and even owe him a small favor: At some point in the mid-'90s, he mentioned to the press that he liked a band I was in, the Upper Crust. So, thanks, Moby. But even so, I find it utterly baffling why so many people are bewitched by Mobymania. His music is pretty and ambient, but so is wallpaper. Everything about 18—the goofy spaceman photographs, the bad computer art, the aimless liner notes about life's rich diversity, and, of course, the music—comes off as a well-executed high-school science project, conceived by a nice loner who could use a few more friends. Could someone please invite this guy to a keg party?

Take "We Are All Made of Stars," the album's opening track and first single. The Times Magazine piece tells us that Professor Moby is obsessed with the occult science of hit-making. If we extrapolate from this track, Moby's alchemy of the hit can be defined as follows: Take some mechanical drumming, add a farty synthesized bass, inject some noodly guitar, and then sing cryptically about the unlimited potential of the human spirit. Either that, or about extraterrestrials—I can't quite tell.

The second track, "In This World," is more promising. It includes a lovely fragment of singing by a female guest vocalist, and it reveals an interest in gospel that sprouted on Play and is now in full bloom. Quite a few tracks on 18 radiate an evangelical quality. But to my ears, there is something mildly sinister about using the Lord's music this way. It's fine to use gospel inflections to do the devil's bidding and sing about carnal urges, as Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin did way back when, but to just snip out a piece of gospel and repeat it on an endless loop seems worse than Satanic—it's like a Microsoft engineer is in charge. Moby's cousin Herman Melville said it best: Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall.

(But it's not just Moby's distortion of gospel that strikes a hollow note. His long, lugubrious instrumentals are not exactly rocking either. "Fireworks" is inaccurately named, to put it mildly, and the title track sounds like something 101 Strings would have recorded in 1969 for the skating-rink market.)

One of Moby's distinguishing features is that he doesn't sing much on his records. Is it because his voice sucks? I don't think it's that bad, though he doesn't have the biggest pipes in the world. Rather, it seems to be part of a North Korean strategy of raising his profile by seeming everywhere and nowhere at the same time. 18 features 10 different guest vocalists—which may be a big part of the appeal for people who find different voices titillating in some anti-rock-star way. Many great bands—Sly Stone, the Staples—have spread their music among different voices. But this has nothing to do with a band. It's all about Moby, who seems to loom up larger the fewer songs he sings. There's something a little sinister about the messianic words of the first track ("growing in numbers … no one can stop us now"), and the album's Trojan horse gift: Inside my copy were 20 cards with pictures of Moby and instructions for assembling them into a Moby Shrine. Hilariously, these cards are "limited edition"—thank God I got my order in when I did!

The music sends out the same cultish vibe song after song, Moby finds a riff, then repeats it, repeats it, repeats it. (This bit from "In My Heart" gives you the idea.) It might work in a club, at deafening volume (what doesn't?), but it's boring at best and totalitarian at worst when you're listening at home. What's missing is the organic feeling of real people bouncing real musical ideas off each other and living in the moment—the basic performance honesty that true gospel never strays from, which is why the best gospel is always heard live under the tent or in church. There are beautiful bits and orts of music, but after rote repetition, they lose their appeal and you start to hear them as interchangeable pieces of a rock-by-numbers kit. You never escape the feeling that a computer keypad is generating the beat. Indignant Moby fans should consult the song "Moby Dick" by Led Zeppelin to hear what animal skins are capable of when struck by a live human being.

Give Moby his due: He seems well-intentioned and certainly works hard for the money. Day after day, he enters his quotidian thoughts into his Web journal, and even if it begins to seem like The Truman Show, you've got to admire his industry. He's got a knack for assembling techno collages, and he's done pleasant, ambient work for movie soundtracks ("God Moving Over the Face of the Water" in the Al Pacino flick Heat, for instance). He's a decent composer. But he's just not a performer. He is a talented collector, a lepidopterist of sounds, a builder of ant farms, but he is definitely not a rocker. Which is why it's weird to keep hearing about his ambitions to change rock itself and about his barely restrained punk sensibilities. Punk? On the scale of rockingness, Moby ranks only slightly above N*Sync and well below Britney Spears. While listening to 18, I kept thinking back to another recent album by a lonely musical genius—Joey Ramone's achingly beautiful swan song, Don't Worry About Me; maybe because its title echoes Moby's "I'm Not Worried at All." To my ears, there's no comparison. Even from the great beyond, Joey plumbs deeper below the surface than Moby will ever know. Rock'n' roll is just too important to be left to the Vegan-People.


A Long, Staid Trip
How Deadheads ruined the Grateful Dead.
By Marc Weingarten
Posted Friday, August 30, 2002, at 7:53 AM PT

"There is nothing like a Grateful Dead Concert," the old bumper stickers read. After attending my first 10 Dead shows, I soon realized this wasn't true: Every Dead concert is pretty much is like every other Dead concert. Not in terms of the set lists, which famously varied, or the particular architecture of band leader Jerry Garcia's frequently transcendent guitar work. No, it was that ineffable Dead "vibe" that always struck me as rote—it felt more habitual than blissful. What bugged me was the a priori assumption among Deadheads that Dead shows were always magic and that the magic could be routinely summoned on a nightly basis. It couldn't, not by a long shot. And that's coming from a fan.

A Long Strange Trip—the exhaustive authorized Dead bio written by Dennis McNally, a Ph.D. in American history and the band's publicist for the past 18 years—debunks the few remaining preconceived notions about the band's hippie benevolence that Deadheads have carried around. Even if one assumes that McNally has airbrushed some of the uglier episodes out of this official story (and other Dead bios might lead us to believe he has), he couldn't leave it all out. Despite the book's "Great Men" breathlessness, this is a sad, sorry tragedy—the chronicle of a personality cult so toxic it destroyed the very thing it venerated. Blame it on the Deadheads.

The band's idea in the beginning was to bridge the gap between performer and audience. According to McNally, the Dead's career was forged in a mid-'60s San Francisco culture where showbiz notions of hero worship were unwelcome. "The Grateful Dead certainly sought to entertain and move its audience," McNally writes, "but the root basis of their relationship was that of a partnership of equals, of companions in an odyssey."

From 1965 to roughly 1975, the Dead fed off of this symbiosis brilliantly, moving through Live/Dead's lysergic-stoked free rock to the space-cowboy country of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty on to the baroque prog-jams of Wake of the Flood. Their venturesome efforts were rewarded with a fan base of Deadheads that had swelled to a mega-movement by the end of the '70s. Intensely loyal to the band, Deadhead-dom became its own sideshow, a traveling community of freaks and later, frat-boy geeks.

The Deadheads gave the Grateful Dead a steady revenue stream and a safe harbor. At first, it felt like a rear guard action—fighting for community in a socially fragmented era. But it curdled into the last refuge for musical conservatism and complacency, and it seemed to destroy the band's work ethic. McNally glancingly makes reference to this dark side of the Deadhead phenomenon: "Like all fans … they could become tediously obsessed with the object of their joy," he writes.

It wasn't just the fanatics; every fan (myself included) bought into the "satori through space jam" myths, wore the same tie-dye, danced the same wiggle dance. What had begun as an inclusive rallying point for outcasts became a provincial closed society. Deadheads were supposed to represent enlightened musical inquiry, but instead, as McNally points out, they ignored adventurous opening acts and lifted lyrics out of context. In the early '90s, according to McNally, Jerry Garcia became annoyed with the fact that the line "when it seems like the night will last forever" from his bleak ballad "Black Muddy River" invariably was greeted with lusty cheering.

Thematic content hardly mattered to the loyalists any more; the band's canon instead became a series of dramatic gestures, well-timed downshifts, and dance cues. Safe within the fuzzy bubble of Deadhead-land, the band coasted for years on end, but no matter how negligent or desultory the performance, they always had the Deadheads to fall back on. Of course the Dead loved the support—they never had to work hard to earn it.

With nothing to strive for and no musical goals to attain, the band lapsed into a creative torpor for the last 15 or so years of its career, even resurrecting itself this summer for another go-round without Garcia. If McNally's book teaches us anything, it's that, for a band with a prodigious drug and alcohol habit, the Deadheads' unquestioning faith was perhaps its most dangerous narcotic.


Rockumentary Redux
Everyone's wrong about the new Wilco movie.
By James Surowiecki
Posted Monday, August 19, 2002, at 7:30 AM PT

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart—the new movie about the making of the Wilco record Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—is one of those rare documentaries that actually documents something the filmmaker didn't anticipate. When first-time director Sam Jones asked Wilco if he could follow the band as it noodled around in the studio, he was planning to "chronicle their artistic road to success." Instead, he got an inside look at the torturous relationship between art and commerce in today's record industry.

The story the film tells is by now well-known: Wilco hands Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to Reprise Records, its longtime label; Reprise demands changes to make the album more marketable; Jeff Tweedy, Wilco's singer-songwriter, refuses. They eventually part ways, and Wilco sells the record to Nonesuch, which releases it to considerable success on the charts. The point of the story seems clear enough: In today's world, it's all about marketing, not music. Record labels are too interested in the next Britney Spears to pay attention to the Wilcos of the world. If you don't have the potential to sell a million copies of your record, the philistine suits want nothing to do with you. This was a well-worn theme in the reviews of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and it's made explicit in I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, where one critic describes Reprise's rejection of Yankee Hotel as "a measure of what corporations that own record companies are willing to put up with." There's an inherent conflict, we're told, between the time it takes to understand and appreciate a great album and the bottom-line mentality that demands success on a quarter-by-quarter basis.

There's only one problem with this story: Both Nonesuch and Reprise are owned by AOL Time Warner. In other words, the same suits who supposedly found Wilco's approach too artistic to tolerate when the band was working for one part of the company apparently found it commercially viable when the band was working for another part. In the movie, this comes across as simply an ironic twist of fate. But it's more than that. In fact, Nonesuch's move makes the whole "victim of multinational capitalism" narrative look rather suspect. After all, if Reprise's axing of Wilco was really the inevitable result of a corporate ethos that privileges commercial appeal over artistic integrity, then Nonesuch's decision makes no sense. If Wilco wasn't going to be profitable enough for AOL Time Warner when it was at Reprise, it wasn't going to be any more profitable for AOL Time Warner at Nonesuch.

What I Am Trying to Break Your Heart makes clear, however inadvertently, is that what happened to Wilco was not the result of interference by the green-shaded money men but rather something specific to the internal politics at Reprise. Howie Klein, who had run Reprise for as long as Wilco was there, retired right around the time the band handed in Yankee Hotel. And in the movie, he explains that if he had still been at Reprise, the label would never have dumped the band. In other words, it wasn't some systemic flaw that killed Wilco's relationship with Reprise. Instead, the wrong guy—in this case, someone named David Kahne—was now in charge, and he didn't have the taste to see how good Yankee Hotel was and didn't want to release a record he didn't like and didn't think would sell. His decision to drop Wilco was boneheaded, but it's not a metaphor for what multinational corporations will or won't put up with. (In fact, soon after dumping Wilco, Kahne, who was only an interim head of Reprise, was himself replaced.)

The really telling thing about what happened to Wilco is not that the band was dropped by AOL Time Warner but rather that it was re-signed, because that suggests that there is no overarching vision at the company, no real idea of what does or doesn't make economic sense for a record label today. And this fits well with the current state of the music business, as floundering labels try to deal with falling sales, shrinking profits, and record buyers who now have their choice of 30,000 new releases every year. In the end, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart doesn't really show us that record labels are more mercenary than they once were. It shows us instead that they're just much more confused.


The Poet Laureate of 9/11
Apocalypse and salvation on Springsteen's new album.
By A.O.Scott
Posted Tuesday, August 6, 2002, at 3:00 PM PT

Very few recent albums have been anticipated with as much hunger or greeted with as much rapture as The Rising, Bruce Springsteen's new one. It is not only the Boss' first studio album with the E Street Band since Born in the USA back in 1984, but also his first rock 'n' roll record in a decade, and the first rock 'n' roll record in a very long time whose release has seemed like a cultural event. Rock 'n' roll, while not exactly dead, is decidedly middle-aged—no longer the dominant, organizing principle of youth-driven popular music. In a music industry given over to the various permutations of metal, hip-hop, neo-bubblegum, and the folk revival revival,  rock 'n' roll survives mainly in cut-price CD back stock and in the drearily repetitive playlists of "classic rock" radio stations. Chuck Berry, Springsteen's great precursor, promised that the music would "deliver us from the days of old," but more often these days it transports us back to them.

Though his best-known songs are staples of the not-quite oldies format, Springsteen, now 52, has remained a stubborn, if sometimes melancholy romantic, indifferent to both fashion and nostalgia. "The church door's/ thrown open/ I can hear the organ's song/ but the congregation's gone" Springsteen sings in "My City of Ruins," the last song on The Rising. His own congregation, of course, has remained remarkably steadfast in its faith. At his Madison Square Garden concerts with the newly reunited E Street Band two summers ago, Springsteen, midway through his medley of "Good Golly Miss Molly," "Devil With a Blue Dress," and other chestnuts, shouted and gesticulated like a fire-breathing Pentecostal preacher, invoking a "rock 'n' roll baptism." (Nothing if not ecumenical, he also called it a "rock 'n' roll bar mitzvah.") Since Born To Run, the album in which he first discovered his prophetic vocation, Springsteen's lyrics have often given a religious inflection to the durable rock 'n' roll themes of desire, frustration, and the longing for liberation, fusing Berry's vocabulary of cars, guitars, and pretty girls with the language of apocalypse and salvation, purgation and redemption. And these are more than just themes: The dialectic of despair and triumph is built into the musical structure and aural texture of the songs themselves, which enact, and induce in their listeners, the very emotions their words describe.

The songs, indeed, may be the only concrete manifestations of the abstractions—faith, freedom, "Born To Run" 's everlasting kiss—they summon up. Consider, among many possible examples, "The Promised Land," from Darkness on the Edge of Town. Its lyrics begin, after a low-key, harmonica-tinged introduction, with a particular character in a specific place—a "rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert." In the second verse, the character's malaise builds into thwarted rage and then, at the end, into a climactic vision of purifying destruction, "a twister to blow/ everything down/ that ain't got the faith/ to stand its ground."

At this point, the song leaves the ground of realist narrative and ascends into metaphor: The storm is not an actual event in the narrator's life, but the figuration of his anger and his hope. And what delivers the metaphor—what makes its grandiose, utopian imagery so powerful and vivid—is the music, with its thickly layered middle register (two guitars, two keyboards) carrying the voice through its litany of agony and defiance.

This is not Springsteen's only mode, of course. It evolved out of the shaggy-dog hipster surrealism of his first two records and has always coexisted with the more hedonistic and contemplative sides of his personality. For most of the past 15 years, the oracular strain of Springsteen's voice, at least in the recording studio, was all but silent. After Born in the USA, he preferred to bear witness—to his own romantic wounds (on Tunnel of Love) and to the travails of the forgotten and the dispossessed (on The Ghost of Tom Joad). He refashioned himself as the heir to Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, lonely avatar of a faded tradition of social conscience and left-wing populism.

And then there was Sept. 11, the overt or implicit subject of most of the songs on The Rising and one of the reasons its arrival has stirred up so much emotion. If any American artist could summon up an adequate, inclusive response to the events of that day, it would have to be Springsteen. This is not only because he has roots in the same Northeastern Catholic working-class soil from which so many of the local heroes of 9/11 sprouted, but because his songwriting idiom is almost uncannily attuned to the tangle of feelings—horror, grief, and rage, but also resolve, resilience, and solidarity—that that day left in its wake and is perhaps uniquely capable of clarifying them.

In the past, Springsteen has approached the disasters of history—Vietnam, de-industrialization, Third World poverty—obliquely and piecemeal, through the lens of individual first- and third-person narratives. While some of the songs on the new album adopt fictional personas—a lost fireman's widow ("Into the Fire"), a rescue worker suffering from post-traumatic depression ("Nothing Man"), even a suicide bomber ("Paradise")—the details of their lives have been almost entirely stripped away. There are no proper names and no place names (aside from generic markers like "Al's Barbecue" and "Mary's place"); instead, the language is spare and elemental, with the same simple nouns recurring again and again: blood, fire, rain, sky; strength, hope, faith, love.

This is only fitting. Unlike the unemployed dockworkers and immigrant farmers of Ghost of Tom Joad, we already know the names and the stories of many of the individual victims of 9/11. And in the face of a terrible and tremendous experience, too much eloquence is suspect, and we fall back on commonplaces. It takes more than mere sincerity to turn these utterances into poetry, but Springsteen, through the understated conviction of his voice and the precision of producer Brendan O'Brien's arrangement, manages something close on "Into the Fire," whose chorus expresses something every New Yorker has felt walking past the local firehouse since last fall.

May your strength give us strength
May your hope give us hope
May your faith give us faith
May your love give us love.

Similar words turn up in "Countin' on a Miracle" and "My City of Ruins" (a song written before Sept. 11 to lament the decay of Springsteen's beloved Asbury Park, N.J.). Repetition, psychologists say, is part of the work of grief, and over the course of the 15 songs on The Rising the reiteration of key words and phrases—now sung in agony, now in resignation, now in hope—has a cathartic effect. In the weeks and months after 9/11, people told and retold their stories almost compulsively and plunged again and again into their terror and confusion in a paradoxical effort to move beyond the experience and to keep it close. The Rising, listened to repeatedly—the only way true Springsteen fans know how—has a similar effect. It neither assuages the horror with false hope nor allows it to slip into nihilistic despair.

But rock 'n' roll is not all about grief and terror, and the song that has lodged most firmly in my head is "Mary's Place," an effusion of joy that comes two-thirds of the way through The Rising. Here, Clarence Clemons' saxophone, overshadowed on much of the album by Soozie Tyrell's violin, at last cuts loose, and the way the band stops short before plunging into the chorus is an E Street moment of pure (though highly disciplined) release the likes of which have not been heard on record for 20 years. "Meet me at Mary's place." I'll be there, Boss.


Abs-Surdity
Can the ab-enhancing devices hawked on late-night TV give me a stomach of steel?
By Eric Umansky
Posted Tuesday, May 14, 2002, at 2:00 PM PT

My job requires me to stay up late at night. And in the wee hours of the morning, I occasionally—OK, habitually—procrastinate and flip on the television. Unless I'm watching HBO, I'm inevitably greeted by a bunch of hard-bodies in Lycra outfits cheerfully and effortlessly using some device to give themselves tight tummies.

They always have perfect abs.

As somebody whose belt bears a few now-abandoned notches, I wondered whether these things could help me—especially those now-ubiquitous electric belts, which one commercial extolled as "like 1,000 sit-ups in 3 minutes."

It wasn't so much the promise of potential improvement that caught my eye; it was the assurance that I could do it without breaking a sweat. (Plus, I have a tender back, and nasty things like sit-ups tend to aggravate it.)

Sure, I knew these things were shticky—and that the ads' claims were dubious, perhaps even illegal. But what did I have to lose? These things promised me I wouldn't have to do much work.

Methodology.

My plan was to try three kinds of devices: those ab belts and two other ab tools that have been heavily promoted. I used each for about three weeks, with a week off in-between to return to my original zaftig shape. The tricky part was figuring out a way to rate my progress. To help with that, I drafted the most knowledgeable gym-rat I know: my girlfriend. (Let's call her Anna.) After a Sunday morning brainstorming meeting, we had a plan: the Pinch 'n' Poke.

For the pinching part, I'd use calipers to judge whether I had lost any fat. (I bought a digital version, the AccuMeasure FatTrack, for $41.95.) I also needed a non-back-threatening way to test the strength of my soon-to-be-rippling stomach muscles. For that, Anna, and her poking fingers, would be the arbiter. She'd rate firmness on an increasing scale, from one-pack to six-pack.

My starting numbers: The calipers told me I had a 28- to 30-millimeter roll of stomach fat. By also taking measurements of my chest and thighs, the caliper judged that I had about a 19 percent body-fat rating. According to the instructions, that put me, barely, in the "good" category.

Meanwhile, I started out with a one-pack strength rating.


Electric Ab Belts

Cost: AbTronic: $89.85; AbSonic: $21.95.
What is it? The beltlike devices first came to the public's attention during the 1970s when rumor spread that they were the secret weapons of Soviet Olympians. Today, there are bags full of these things, though perhaps not for long. In order to see if there were any differences, I bought two belts: the Ferrari of the genre, the AbTronic (a telesalesman at AsSeenOnTV.com called them the "gold standard"); and the Yugo of the bunch, the AbSonic. ("Two for just $20!")

The belts looked suspiciously similar; both had the same chintzy padding and similar cheap-looking switches. In fact, the biggest difference I could see was that the more expensive AbTronic didn't come with instructions.

The warning labels on the two belts were also nearly identical. Both, for example, admonished users to "apply a generous amount of a waterbased gel or lotion." (Underline in both originals.) Presumably, this is meant to keep the electricity flowing between the device and your body. I scrounged through both shipping boxes. No gel. So I tried the AbSonic without any liquid, but only felt a slight uncomfortable buzzing. Finally, I rummaged around my medicine cabinet and pulled out what I figured was the most appropriate lotion: Astroglide.

I got back on the couch, slathered on the Glide, strapped on the AbSonic, and set the mode to "Karate Chop." (Other settings offered: "Fat Blaster," "Crunch Craze," "Iron Man," etc.) Immediately a jolt of electricity shot through my stomach. It hurt—a lot. Remember the buzzing you got when you were a kid and put a 9-volt battery on your tongue? Triple that. It felt like a localized epileptic seizure.

I smacked the "off" button, ripped off the belt, and set it aside. For a month.

Then my editor called to check on my progress.

Hesitantly, I strapped myself back in. I figured getting the maximum potential out of the belts would require dedication on my part. The instructions suggest using the belts daily for a maximum of 30 minutes at a time. So I committed to being gently electrocuted for one full episode of The Simpsons per day.

After I lowered the setting from "high" to "medium," it was easy going. About the only trouble I had is that the belts automatically turn off after about 10 minutes. Wanting to give myself a little cross-training, I'd use this as an opportunity to change the belt's setting.

Besides their vaunted "no-sweat" factor, the ab-belt shillers also shout that the things can "go anywhere!" I chose the subway. I hopped into the most crowded train I could see and began to repeatedly lift my shirt and change my settings. I was, of course, completely ignored. The only problem I had was that when I arrived at my destination, my shirt was sullied with Astroglide.

Did they do any good? No. They were painful, humiliating, and useless.

Pinch 'n' Poke results. The fat caliper reading didn't budge: I still had about a 28-millimeter spare tire. Anna wasn't impressed either. She gave me a one-pack.

What do the experts say? An ab-belt study by the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, concluded that test subjects using the belts "experienced no significant changes in weight, boy-fat percentage, strength or overall experience." The researchers added, "Not only was electric muscle stimulation ineffective, but it was also painful."

Still, these types of devices (though presumably ones of higher quality) have been used successfully for rehabilitation. How is it that they can work for that, but not give me taut abs?

Jim Brown, editor of the Georgia Tech Sports Medicine and Performance Newsletter and a health education Ph.D., explains that electric stimulation can "help you make the kind of tiny improvements that matter when your muscle, because of some injury, is so weak that you'd have to start out with baby steps." But, he says, "If there's nothing wrong with you—other than that you're lazy—in order get a real benefit, you'd have to put so much current through your body that you'd get fried."


Ab Mouse
Cost: $28.95.

What is it? First of all, I admit it, I bought this thing solely based on its name. The Ab Mouse looks like a Big Wheel without the steering part. It's a wing-shaped piece of plastic with little office-chair wheels on the bottom. The idea is that you kneel on the ground (resting your knees on an oversized, well, mouse pad that's included) and put your hands in front of you holding onto the Ab Mouse and roll it back and forth.

As I took the Ab Mouse out of the box, I noticed an impressively thick instruction booklet. Alas, it consists mostly of a 43-page "Suggested Menu Guide." ("Lunch: 1 oz. turkey breast. Fat-free mayonnaise. 2 slices whole-wheat bread. 1 apple.") That night, my girlfriend and I cooked rib-eye steak and horseradish mashed potatoes. Delicious.

Did it do any good? No. Besides suggesting that in order to get rock-hard abs I'd have to give up sausage, the Ab Mouse had another drawback: I couldn't use it on my hardwood floors. The wheels just slid around. I constantly felt like the thing was about to fly out from under me.

In an attempt to give it a fairer shot, I brought the Ab Mouse out into the carpeted hallway of my apartment building. It worked just fine there. But this wasn't a long-term proposition. After about a week of furtively working out in the hallways, I decided that I enjoyed my dignity and took the Ab Mouse out of the running.

Pinch 'n' Poke results. The calipers still read about 30 millimeters. And I still got a one-pack rating.

What do the experts say? "This is what I would call a borderline product," says Conrad Earnest, an exercise physiologist at the Cooper Institute, a health research foundation. "If you do it correctly, you may get some benefit. But if you don't, you won't get any benefit at all."


Abflex II
Cost: $39.95.

What is it? Advertised as giving you "a perfect six-pack in just three minutes a day without straining your back," the Abflex II looks like a cheap plastic crossbow.

The thing requires assembly, but instead of paper instructions it has a video. The narrator, a very enthusiastic and buff woman, had a much easier time of this than I did. Once I'd snapped all the parts into place, I watched as the video woman explained how to do an Abflex workout: You pull down on the attached side handles, which stretch a rubber cord that in turn pushes the base of the Abflex, known as the Six Pack, into your stomach. (Click here to see a picture of it in action.) The "exercise" forces you to tense your stomach muscles to keep the Six Pack from socking you in the gut.

In contrast to the ab belts, the exercises on the Abflex video—as promised—lasted for only three minutes, presumably a benefit of the fact that you actually have to gently exert yourself. I thought that was absurdly short, so I started putting in a few extra minutes, eventually settling on a comfortable time frame: one couple's matchup on the show Blind Date from introductions until the good-night kiss (about eight minutes).

Did it do any good? Sorta. The Abflex isn't the most classy-looking thing, but it did have some key advantages. In order of importance: 1) I could do it on the couch; and 2) it worked—just not on my stomach.

A few weeks after I started using the Abflex, I felt like my abs had become marginally tighter. The fat caliper reading, though, didn't budge. Still, I felt kind of ripped. If it wasn't my stomach, maybe it was my arms. All that pulling on a thick rubber cord could have made them a bit stronger.

Quickly, I brought the potential development to Anna's attention. I flexed, making various Mr. Universe poses. Tentatively, she felt around my biceps, pushing and prodding. Finally, she exclaimed, "Huh. They are a bit better."

Yes!!!

Pinch 'n' Poke results. No changes, except for the arms.

What do the experts say? "I just don't buy it," says Earnest, the exercise physiologist. "It might work in a limited way, but it doesn't sound like you're doing enough work to make a difference."


Conclusion. The ab belts don't work. And the while the other ab-improvement products can help you a bit, they certainly don't deliver you to the six-pack holy land.

"If you really want to have developed abdominal muscles," Earnest explains, "you'll need weight training, stability exercises, and a good eating plan. If you don't lose the fat, all you have is toned muscles under a flabby exterior. Same old song and dance, I'm afraid."

Then he thinks for a moment. "There is one thing that really works," he says. "It's called the Physioball. They're just big rubber balls. While you exercise on them, you also have to keep balance. So, you have to contract your muscles that help you keep stability. Anybody who uses one of those in a training routine will have a greater strength and stability in their abs and back muscles." Mine is already on its way.


sidebar

"Lose 4 Inches in 30 Days Guaranteed!"—Infomercial for the AbTronic electric exercise belt.

Aren't those absurd ab-belt claims illegal? And if so, isn't the government doing anything about it?

Probably. And yes.

Just last week, the Federal Trade Commission, the agency charged with ensuring that ads aren't spouting outright lies, filed suit against various belt-makers for airing "false and deceptive" claims. The FTC isn't saying that the products are useless; it's just arguing that they don't deliver on their absurd promises.

The FDA, meanwhile, says that the belts are "medical devices," and thus must be judged as "safe and effective" by the agency before they can be sold. So far, one belt, the Slendertone Flex, has applied for and received the FDA's stamp of approval. (The makers of the Slendertone don't claim that it'll give you rock-hard abs. They only say that it "strengthens and tones your muscles.") As for the other belts, an FDA spokeswoman says they "are illegal, and under investigation."


sidebar

A note on accuracy: It was hard to get consistent readings from the calipers. For example, short of tattooing an X mark onto my abs, I wasn't sure how to always pinch the same place as my previous reading. If you want an exact reading of your body-fat percentage, it's probably best to have a professional help you out.


To Sleep: Perchance To Take Lots of Pills
Testing over-the-counter sleep aids, herbal and non.
By Seth Stevenson
Posted Tuesday, March 5, 2002, at 12:23 PM PT

In my role as a Slate shopper, I have made many curious purchases. I've grown accustomed to questioning looks as the checkout guy rings up 30 toothpastes, or 28 toothbrushes, or 15 cases of beer ... OK, the beer wasn't for a story. Still, I was bracing for the most questioning checkout look of all as I approached a drugstore counter holding seven boxes of sleeping pills. I thought the kid at the register might refuse the sale, or refer me to a psych ward, or at least call over the manager. As it was, he never even blinked. Which is good, because now I can tell you all about over-the-counter sleep aids.

When it comes to OTC pills, you're basically looking at two options: 1) antihistamines; or 2) herbal remedies. Antihistamines use either diphenhydramine hydrochloride (brands include: Sominex, Compoz, Tylenol PM, and Unisom SleepGels) or doxylamine succinate (Unisom tablets, Equate). The two ingredients are pretty interchangeable. Each inhibits the same neurotransmitter to depress your central nervous system. These antihistamines are the same stuff you might take for allergies, which is why allergy medications make you so drowsy.

On the herbal side, there's valerian root, chamomile, passionflower, humulus lupulus, melatonin, and so on. Nobody seems to know how these work for sure. I've used melatonin once before (or, more accurately, misused it), and it gave me horrid dreams about metal hooks, so I'll never go back. But I was eager to try out some other crunchy solutions.

As for prescription sleep aids, I didn't go there. The most common are benzodiazepines (Xanax, Halcion), which work by boosting a neurotransmitter called GABA (didn't they do "Neurotransmitter Dancing Queen"?). Again, this slows down your central nervous system. A similar set of drugs includes Ambien and Sonata, which are not benzodiazepines but work in much the same way. You take these pills at night, just before you want to sleep, same as with the antihistamines and herbals. Some claim the benzodiazepines and, even more so, Ambien and Sonata, get out of your system quicker than antihistamines—meaning less "hangover effect" the next morning. But the prescription drugs can be more habit forming. And I wanted to stick with stuff I could buy right around the corner—to battle sudden bouts of sleeplessness—rather than set up a doctor's appointment as one would for chronic insomnia. I ended up trying out OTC pills in several different scenarios.

1. Jet Lag
Can sleep aids beat it? On a recent trip to Japan, I arrived in Tokyo in the afternoon, then needed to get a good night's sleep (despite a 14-hour time difference) and wake up for a 9 a.m. meeting. Basically, an impossible task. I took a Unisom Maximum Strength SleepGel (50 mg of diphenhydramine hydrochloride) in Tokyo at 11 p.m., when it felt like midafternoon for me, and it actually worked OK. I managed to stay asleep until 6:30 a.m., which was better than I'd hoped for, and I made it through the day. Thanks, Unisom!

The next night, still wickedly lagged, I took two Simply Sleep caplets (together, another 50 mg of diphenhydramine hydrochloride—same as the Unisom), but only managed to sleep until 5:45 a.m. I blame it on the sheer momentum of jet lag, not the pills.

On the third night, as a control, I took no pills and woke up at 4:30 a.m. Unacceptable. So I took two Simply Sleep caplets and managed to sleep until 9:30 a.m. Perfect. Except I should have taken one caplet—I might have avoided the severe grog that plagued me all day and made interaction with Japanese people an even greater effort.

Conclusion: These pills are not a bad way to deal with jet lag, in an emergency. Also, there's no chemical difference between Unisom Maximum Strength SleepGels and Simply Sleep, yet there are two important distinctions. 1) Unisom's "gel" is much nicer going down—the Simply Sleep actually caught in my throat half-dissolved and tasted so bad that I gagged. 2) You can't split Unisom Maximum Strength's dose—it's one gel that can't be cut in half—while Simply Sleep's two caplets give you more flexibility for a half-dose (25 mg) if you're scared of feeling out-of-it when you wake up.

2. Sacking Out
Sometimes you need to hibernate. I did not wish to be awake for any part of the 13-hour plane ride back from Japan—not even when they were showing America's Sweethearts. Could OTC pills do the trick? This time, I went herbal.

Calms Forté is a homeopathic sleep aid containing passionflower, humulus lupulus, chamomile, and a whole buttload of other ingredients. At least one Slatester swears by this remedy, and it's a well-known alternative treatment for insomnia (it also claims to treat attention deficit disorder and general nervousness). I took two Calms Forté caplets (recommended dosage: one to three) right after getting on the plane in Tokyo and promptly slept for the next 12 hours continuously. I woke up just before landing in New York, feeling quite rested and refreshed. The only way to fly! Of course, you need a solid 12 hours with nothing to do for this to work.

While on Calms Forté, I had a very long, very trippy dream. In this dream, I had memory lapses, Memento-style, and was freaked by revelations of things I'd done but then forgotten. This was, in fact, an appropriate sleeping pill dream, as sleep aids often cause disorientation. In the course of researching this story, I got a bit wigged out by moments of confusion while under the pills' effects. But that strange dream on the plane was so cool it made me want to take Calms Forté again.

3. Insomnia
I'm not a chronic insomniac. Like many folks, I am prone to occasional nights of bad sleeplessness—maybe once a month. These are awful. Nothing is worse than lying awake in bed for six hours, mind racing, all the while knowing you'll be useless the next day. I've long wondered if there was something I could do about it. It's not worth it to get a prescription drug like Ambien, as the recommended course of treatment with these is to take them at night for a week or so and then stop, hoping they've brought you back onto a normal sleep schedule. I wanted a quicker fix to use every once in a while.

So on a night when I found myself having insomnia, I took Compoz (50 mg of diphenhydramine hydrochloride) at 2:15 a.m. I was asleep by 3 a.m., which is better than my usual habit of being awake until 4:30 or later. But the drug kept me asleep the next morning until noon, and even then I had to drag myself out of bed. It's always hard for me to get up, but this was a whole new level. I was shaking off the effects of the drug until evening.

I immediately realized that this stuff is basically worthless for occasional insomnia. By the time you realize you're not falling asleep, it's too late to take a sleeping pill and still function the next day. The half-life is way too long. If you do want to experiment with this, I strongly suggest you take a half-dose or you may not even be able to safely drive to work in the morning. Further experiments with Unisom and with Equate (which uses doxylamine succinate) confirmed my suspicions, as I consistently got bad pill hangovers. All afternoon on the following days I was drifting in and out of conversations.

As I didn't have time to wait for lots of separate insomnia bouts, I cheated twice by drinking coffee (which usually keeps me up all night) and pitting it head-to-head against pills. This was not a good idea. The first time, I washed down two Calms Forté caplets with a huge mug of java at 10:30 p.m. Within 45 minutes, I was tired and ready for sleep. Score one for the pills! But as I lay in bed, a terrible thing happened. My body felt exhausted, barely able to move, yet my mind continued to race the way it does on coffee. This was like being paralyzed and was really horrifying. (I also had another trippy dream on Calms Forté: It involved an intriguing new strategy for darts, and let's just say the distinction between "dartboard" and "sternum" became somewhat meaningless.) When I tried the coffee battle again with Unisom, it took longer to fall asleep (about two hours), but I didn't have the paralysis thing. Still, my girlfriend reports I tossed and turned in bed that night like a caged animal.

One intriguing technique might be using sleep aids as a precautionary measure. Let's say you've got a big day tomorrow and can't afford even the chance of insomnia. You could take a pill at 9 p.m., knowing the effects will mostly be gone by morning. I tried this a few times, and it sort of worked, but I was still pretty hungover, even with the extra lead time. Still, it's a bit silly to take a drug when you probably don't need it (unless it's a really fun drug).

The one pill that didn't work at all was Alluna, an herbal with valerian root and hops extracts. It didn't make me tired, but then again it also gave me no hangover, so I guess I can recommend it.

4. Just for Kicks
After getting a good night's sleep (without pills), I woke up one weekend morning and immediately took a half-dose of Sominex (25 mg diphenhydramine hydrochloride) just to see what would happen. I didn't fall back asleep, but man did it take the edge off. I've never been so calm and unexcitable in my life—and believe me, that's saying something. I might recommend the daytime half-dose technique for family reunions or any time you just want to kick back and let the river flow.

So How Do You Sleep at Night?
In the end, I was not a big fan of sleep aids. If you have chronic insomnia, they are not the answer—you need to see a doctor and change your lifestyle. If you get insomnia once in a while, like me, I think the best solution is to live with it. Taking a pill to combat it late at night will ruin you for the next day. And you can get "rebound insomnia" if you've been taking pills and then stop. So just grab a book, relax, and settle in for some sleeplessness—it builds character.

As for jet lag, sacking out on plane rides, and dulling the pain of a family get-together, you might want to try out Calms Forté. It's powerful enough to put you out for 12 hours straight, yet offers a flexible dosage. It gave me crazy dreams. And its natural ingredients—unlike the antihistamines—don't interact with alcohol and other medications. Score one for homeopathy!


The Great Whitening Way
Testing at-home teeth-whitening products.
By Seth Stevenson
Posted Monday, April 1, 2002, at 10:45 AM PT

Tooth whiteners are primed to be the next deodorant: a once-optional form of personal hygiene that's now simply an obligation. It's only a matter of time because the more of us who get whitened, the grungier your unwhitened teeth will appear in contrast. Man, look at those choppers! Nasty! Aren't you going to do something about that? There has lately been a boom in tooth-whitening techniques, both at home and in the dentist's office. I asked St. Louis-area dentist (and frequent Slate dental correspondent) Dr. William Hartel about the various options, then tried a few for myself. Below, my findings.

At the Dentist's Office
Dentists have been whitening teeth for years. You have two options here: 1) The dentist gives you special equipment, and you do it yourself at home, over a few weeks; or 2) the dentist does it entirely at his office, in a single day.

With Option 1, the dentist molds vinyl trays to fit your teeth. Then he gives you a prescribed gel to put in the trays. This gel will contain carbomide peroxide (which reacts with your saliva to become hydrogen peroxide) at a concentration somewhere between 10 percent and 25 percent. You go home, load the gel into the trays, wear the trays two to four hours per day for two to three weeks, and your teeth get whiter as the gel oxidizes their stains. This option has been available for more than a decade, and it works. You'll see a difference within two days. The whole thing costs about $200 to $400, and the effects won't wear off for several years.

Option 2 is actually the same thing but massively speeded up. The dentist puts the peroxide on your teeth and then uses a laser (or plasma arc lamp) to activate the oxidization and whiten your teeth much more quickly. You spend about an hour in the chair, and it costs between $400 and $1,000 (one Slatester paid $800 for this service). The results are the same as with Option 1, but it's clearly more convenient. Of course, it's more expensive, too, and you spend a full hour in the dentist's chair with your mouth open the entire time—which can be quite unpleasant.

At Home
First of all, let's crush the myth of "whitening toothpaste" for good. I've said it before; I'll say it again: Whitening toothpastes don't work. They don't do anything regular toothpastes can't do. They just cost a whole lot more (up to $7 for a tube of Rembrandt).

Toothpaste—any toothpaste—removes only surface stains. That yellowness that's bothering you is likely not on your surface enamel (which is transparent and can be polished with toothpaste), but rather in the dentin inside your teeth (where toothpaste can't reach). Your dentin gets yellower as you get older, even if you don't smoke tobacco or drink coffee. It's the yellow within this dentin that hydrogen peroxide can bleach away—when applied correctly and for an extended period.

So, can you whiten your teeth at home? Yes, but you need a hydrogen peroxide kit that mimics what the dentist does. I tried three such kits, then ranked them from worst to first.

Absolute worst: Natural White Pro Tooth Bleaching System.

I at first thought this would be the best product. It came in a fancy box with plastic dental trays, "pre-whitening toothpaste," an "oral rinse neutralizer," and a complicated set of steps to follow. But I soon realized this was all nonsense. The "oral rinse neutralizer" is plain old mouthwash; the "pre-whitening toothpaste" is just toothpaste. My dental expert calls this "mad scientist marketing," wherein they convince you you're accomplishing something by assigning lots of technical-seeming busy work. Really, all you need (or want) is the dental trays and the peroxide whitening gel.

The dental trays were a nightmare. Using the "warm and form" technique described in the instructions, I immersed the plastic trays in boiling water, then pressed them into place around my teeth. At this point, I had steaming water burning my tongue and melty plastic against my gums. Once the trays had set, I was left with mouth guards that sort of, kind of molded to my teeth. (In a dentist's office, they make trays that fit much better.)

Next, I was to fill the trays with whitening gel and bite down on them. Another nightmare. You're meant to wear the trays for 10-20 minutes at a time, but after 30 seconds, you begin drooling a gel-infused drool—either disgustingly down your chin or unappetizingly down your throat. You're asked to repeat this process twice a day for one week. No thanks. And don't think about trying to wear the trays at work or while talking on the phone. You're a drooling mute as long as they're in your mouth. What's more, the concentration of hydrogen peroxide in the gel is a measly 3 percent—nowhere near what the dentist can prescribe.

I wore these trays for three days before I couldn't take it anymore. I saw no results, despite the company's claim that I'd notice a difference after "just a few days." In the end, it was $24.99 utterly wasted.

Only slightly better than worst: Ultra Plus White Complete Teeth Whitening System.

This one came with a "pre-whitener rinse" (mouthwash), a tooth-whitening gel, and a "patented Soft Foam mouth tray." However, when I got home and opened up the box, there was no mouth tray. Interesting. So, after stealing a tray from the Natural White kit to use for a few days, I went back and bought a second Ultra Plus box which actually included the foam tray.

What was it like to use the Soft Foam mouth tray? Imagine, if you will, a small Nerf ball. Now, in your mind's eye, coat this Nerf ball with sticky gel. Put the sticky Nerf ball in your mouth, and bite down on it, and stay like this for five whole minutes. The Nerf ball is sponging up your spit and getting soppy. You're tasting Nerf. You're unhappy. You're meant to do this twice a day for a whole week. After each five-minute session of unhappiness, you run the Nerf ball under tap water and squeeze it dry ... so you can later put it back in your mouth. This is what it's like to use a Soft Foam mouth tray.

The Ultra Plus gel did taste a little less gaggy than the Natural White. I managed four days of treatment with it before I gave up in misery. And still no results. Like the Natural White gel, Ultra Plus White is only 3 percent hydrogen peroxide. The sole reason I rank it higher than Natural White is price: Ultra Plus costs only $14.89.

Best by far: Crest Whitestrips.

Please, I beg you—if you're going to buy one of these kits, buy the Whitestrips. At $43.99, you pay a premium, but it's well worth it.

Instead of using trays, the Whitestrips affix directly to your teeth, like little Band-Aids coated with peroxide gel. You wear each strip for a half-hour, then throw it away, and do this twice a day for two weeks. Crest says the results will last for "at least 6 months," whereupon you can repeat the treatment.

I actually noticed results after a couple of days. This is likely because the Whitestrips use 6 percent hydrogen peroxide, double that of the other two chumpish whiteners. What's more, I didn't mind using the Whitestrips at all. No drooling! And I could talk with them in my mouth, no problem. You could even wear Whitestrips around the office if you wanted. No one would notice unless you smiled, and anyway if you smile around the office, you should stop. It makes people suspicious.

After 10 days, I checked to see if the Whitestrips had bleached my teeth, using a "Professional Tooth Shade Guide" (thoughtfully included in the Natural White instruction booklet). On the tooth shade scale from 1 (piano key which is not a sharp or flat) to 16 (kernel of corn), I had been at about a 6 before starting the treatment. (You don't want to see what these sample teeth look like once you get past 11 or so. Just brutal.) After using Whitestrips, I'd say my teeth were at a 2 or a 3. I could actually see the difference. And I could easily compare these whitened upper teeth to my still-yellow bottom teeth, which had remained unchanged despite treatment with Natural White and Ultra Plus White.

Also, unfortunately, I could see how my upper front teeth differed from my upper back teeth. This was the only drawback I found with Whitestrips: They don't cover your teeth all the way around. They extended about one tooth past my eyetooth on either side. So now if I smile wide, you can see my unwhitened back teeth looking a bit buttery by comparison.

Still, Whitestrips are a fantastic product. Double the peroxide concentration, ingenious delivery system. Besides, if you use all the strips for your upper teeth and you still aren't satisfied, you can return the lower strips for your money back.

When I called the customer hot lines for the other two products, both said they would soon upgrade to the 6 percent peroxide level. But even after they catch Crest on that front, I'll be danged if I wear one of those dental trays ever again.

Conclusion
If you have a lot of money that you'd like to spend on your teeth, it may be worth it to go to the dentist for whitening. The effect will be more dramatic and will last much longer. But remember, the at-home dentist treatment still means wearing trays (albeit better-fitting trays), and the in-office treatment can cost up to $1,000. If you want to spend a lot less and still see some results, you'd be extremely well-advised (by me) to go with Crest Whitestrips.


Battle of the Middlebrow Chains
Our chef pits Cheesecake Factory against Outback Steakhouse against Olive Garden.
By Sara Dickerman
Posted Friday, September 6, 2002, at 10:12 AM PT

Seven years ago, I worked across street from the Brentwood, Calif., branch of the Cheesecake Factory. My co-workers and I would lovelessly dole out the occasional lunch hour to the brass 'n' fern holdover. Little did I know it, but as I jawed through monotonous salads and sipped passion fruit iced tea, I was tasting the future.

When a branch of the restaurant landed in downtown Seattle last year, I assumed it would draw the same glum business clientele. But the Factory has drawn lines of expectant diners that would impress Steve Rubell—not only in terms of how many people wait, but how dressed up they get for dinner at the restaurant. These diners aren't looking for a cheap pit stop: After all, a pasta dish can run $15.95, which is the same price you'd pay in any number of well-respected independent restaurants in Seattle.

And Seattle's not the only city to catch Cheesecake fever. According to the online Zagat guide, the chain ranks No. 9 in popularity in Los Angeles, No. 3 in Miami, and No. 1 in Orange County, Calif. (Where nine of the top 10 are chains.) This may say more about Zagat's populism than the quality of these restaurants, but it's still startling to see the Los Angeles Cheesecake Factories listed alongside such local culinary landmarks as Campanile and Matsuhisa.

These days, chains have more of a shot at competing with "real" restaurants than you might think. Freshness is the big buzzword. Waiters at Chevy's swear oaths of freshness before serving new diners (nothing from a can, salsas made every hour, hot tortillas every 53 seconds). Each Olive Garden makes soups and sauces from scratch every day. The menus are sophisticated: Cheesecake Factory offers a dish like Miso Salmon without explaining what miso is. P.F. Chang's boasts of its menu collaboration with Barbara Tropp, the late Chinese food scholar. Olive Garden sends its chefs and wine managers to Tuscany.

Clearly, these chains are defining fast food way upward. But is the food keeping pace with its ambition and the popularity? To find out, I gathered together my dinner companions (two to three per meal), unbuckled my belt, and set off on a tasting tour of the following restaurants:

Outback Steakhouse, North Seattle
Concept: Steak, Crocodile Dundee-style
Gimmick: Bloomin' Onion
Motto: No rules, just right
Prices: Strawberry 'Rita, $5.25; Bloomin' Onion, $5.99; Canberra Chicken, $13.99; Rockhampton Rib Eye Steak, $17.99; Pacific Rim Salmon, $17.49

A couple of Ned Kelly paintings and boomerangs hang on the wall, but Outback's Australian theme is mostly played out in the eye-rolling names on its party-hearty menu, starting with fried "Aussie-tizers." Outback does fry things well, from its massive, greasy whole fried onion to coconut-crusted shrimp. Unfortunately, it was at Outback that I developed my theory of anti-eponymy; in other words, don't order a dish if it's in the name of the restaurant. The rib eye steak seemed baked, not seared or grilled, and was devoid of the salty crust that makes steak so delicious. The "Pacific Rim" salmon, much recommended by our server, featured the first of many sweet, soy-flavored sauces served at the chains to exterminate any lingering flavor in their bland farmed salmon. It's a dismaying trend and, at $17.49, an expensive one.

Cheesecake Factory, Downtown Seattle
Concept: Something-for-everyone American
Gimmick: Enormous menu, enormous portions, plus cheesecake
Motto: No one goes home hungry from the Cheesecake Factory
Prices: Thai Lettuce Wraps, $9.50; Cajun Jambalaya Pasta, $15.95; Coffee Heath Bar Crunch Cheesecake, $6.25

Cheesecake Factory radiates Vegas grandeur: Faux-marble walls climb two stories up; spiral-bound menus run ads for diamonds and leather goods; huge plates are dressed up with colored sauces and toupees of fried noodles. With over 200 choices on the menu, CF serves as a repository for all other corporate-restaurant concepts. There's Americana (tiny hamburgers), Southeast Asian (Thai-style lettuce wraps), and absurd Sino-Latino fusion (Tex-Mex egg rolls). Everything was cooked competently, but way too many dishes were coated in syrupy sauces (including the Miso Salmon at $16.95—sweet salmon No. 2). The most scandalous thing about CF, and the clincher for the anti-eponymy theory, was the cheesecakes. In order to accommodate flavors from Coffee Heath Bar to Craig's Crazy Carrot Cake Cheesecake, all cheesiness has been removed from the cakes, leaving just sweet, bland fluff. Careful analysis revealed that the cheesecakes at Outback Steakhouse, the Olive Garden, and P.F. Chang's China Bistro were better.

P.F. Chang's China Bistro, Downtown Bellevue, Wash.
Concept: Contemporary Chinese
Gimmick: Tableside sauce mixing
Motto: Too classy for a motto
Prices: Mojito, $8; Northern Style Short Ribs, $6.25; Orange Peel Chicken, $10.95; Singapore Noodles, $8.95

P.F. Chang's is free of China kitsch: There are no gilded dragons or red lacquer. And there's a similar "classiness" in the extensive wine list and a menu that nods to China's regional cuisines. The Northern-style spare ribs, with their deep anise flavor, were the best bite of the night. In general, the food was oddly dour, as if the Chang's people were so worried about avoiding the clichés of bad Chinese food that they feared making things oily or spicy enough. The meal was also perilously short on vegetable matter: The steamed fish, Orange Peel Chicken, and Singapore Noodles were all drab and nearly green-free.

Wolfgang Puck Café, Downtown Seattle
Concept: Trickledown Spago
Gimmick: Wood-fired pizza
Motto: Live, love, eat!
Prices: Mini Salmon Pizzas, $9.95; Rosemary Chicken, $13.95; Pumpkin Ravioli, $12.95; Filet Mignon, $23.95

Wolfgang Puck is the celeb chef whose L.A. restaurants attract a constant stream of stars. (This is true: I worked there briefly and saw Tony Curtis several times.) Puck's fine-dining restaurants are supposed to serve as R & D for his capitalist … err, populist efforts, including canned soup, airport kiosks, and cafes. With bright lighting, primary-colored mosaics, and patchwork linoleum tables, Seattle's WPC reads more preschool than grown-up restaurant. All the merriment is in the décor and the menu combinations, not the stilted service. A steak was misfired and arrived 10 minutes after the other entrees. The smoked-salmon pizza for which Puck is justly famous (it comes with caviar in Beverly Hills) arrived cold and dried out—another disappointing signature dish. But the rest of the meal—the Pumpkin Ravioli, a crispy roast chicken, and the belated filet—were a notch above other chains. Most important, WPC avoided the sugar-sweet trap; if anything was overused at WPC, it was butter, and that's hard to complain about. The trio of crème brûlées, sent to us by way of apology for the steak, is a cliché these days in upscale restaurants, but not at the chains. It was a delicious break from cheesecake.

Chevy's Fresh Mex, Lynnwood, Wash.
The concept: Tex-Mex
Gimmick: El Machino tortilla machine (Note: La maquina is actually the Spanish word for machine.)
Motto: Hey! It doesn't get any fresher than this.
Prices: Fresh Watermelon Margarita, $4.95; Sampler appetizer plate, $11.99; Fish Tacos (add guacamole), $10.98; Sweet Jalapeno Steak Fajitas $12.99

Our servers at Chevy's were stars: modifying our tacos and quesadillas with aplomb, treating the 18-month-old at our table with speedy service and a free ice cream cone. The food was conventional but vibrant: The roasted-tomato salsa, guacamole, and the warm tortillas felt newly made, and the entrees came loaded with vegetables. Unfortunately, Chevy's is headed into dangerously sweet territory with items like the Napa Valley quesadilla with brie and apples, the glazed flank steak, and the candied salmon special (No. 3!). Portions are out of control, with fajitas arriving not on plates but 2-foot-wide consoles. Lest they look small in comparison, the yummy margaritas are massive, too.

Olive Garden, Lynnwood, Wash.
The concept: Italian
The gimmick: Heavy wine promotions, lots of grated cheese
The motto: When you're here, you're family
Prices: Glass G. Rocca Chianti Classico, $7.50; Bruschetta, $5.25; Spaghetti della Rocca, $8.95; Swordfish Piccata, $15.25; Lobster Spaghetti $17.95

The Tuscan boondoggle for Olive Garden's managers seems to pay off. The wine list is arranged by flavor intensity and features some tasty Chiantis and Pinot Grigios. Our waiter was comfortable talking about wine and brought out a couple of Chianti tasters for comparison. The Italian tradition of a carefully paced, multi-course meal is not in effect at OG, where abundance is a virtue. But at least two of my companions at the table cleaned their plates—a first. The pasta was cooked al dente; the fresh sauces were well-executed and tossed, Italian-style, throughout the pasta rather than simply being ladled on top. Even the Lobster Spaghetti that's been advertised on television all summer was decent. And the Swordfish Piccata was fresh and cooked right, even if the sauce was almost caper-free. (OG's owned by same company as Red Lobster; the mass buying power helps get some good seafood options on the menu.) Only the minestrone fell flat: If the salty soup didn't come straight from a can, the beans in it did.

So what did I learn on my odyssey? Middlebrow cuisine lets you know when a style of food has stopped being trendy and started being American: '80s Tex-Mex, early-'90s Tuscan, and later-'90s Asian fusion have achieved regular-stuff status. The freshness mantras and in-house preparations mimic the "market" menus and "house-made" ingredients served by high-end restaurants. The chains haven't quite hit their marks yet: The step away from frying and canned sauces is a tough one, and sugar has swept in as a new crutch. But even if this sort of cuisine is only a pale imitation of what's served in more high-end joints, its ambition is impressive.

I spent too much time in Berkeley to believe anything prepared en masse can compete with lovingly raised ingredients cooked to order. And I don't think the majority of diners visit corporate restaurants for the meal of a lifetime (even those who voted the Cheesecake Factory the No. 1 most popular restaurant in Orange County). Casual dining restaurants serve a very specific function in American dining. In general, you don't take a date to one, unless you are on the way to the prom. What chain restaurants do splendidly is feed awkward groups of people—extended families, business associates, high-school basketball teams, etc. With big tables, efficient service, splittable checks, and plenty of sharable appetizers and booze for camaraderie, corporate restaurants know how to serve the herds. Timid eaters can always find something plain, restless eaters will find something new, and unrepentant food snobs can always find potent, fruity drinks.


The Ever-Expanding American Restaurant Tip
By Sara Dickerman
Posted Tuesday, October 29, 2002, at 2:46 PM PT

It's no secret that waiters and cooks don't always get along—our mutual dependence leads to mutual resentment. Waiters always seem to be letting hot food languish in the pickup window, while cooks always growl when a customer has a special eating request. But the main reason for this animosity is that waiters get tips and cooks generally do not. Waiters seduce customers with our food, so there's nothing harder than mopping the floor at the end of the night and watching them count tens, twenties, and hundreds.

Part gift, part sales commission, and part salary, the tip is a peculiar artifact. The etymology of the word is in dispute, although the most oft-quoted story (and likely a spurious one) is that jars were conspicuously placed on the tables of 18^th-century British coffeehouses "To Insure Promptitude"—shades of the good-karma cups that have so inflated the cost of a cup of coffee in the past few years.

The tip and its symbolism are at the heart of Hey, Waitress! America From the Other Side of the Tray, Alison Owings' book of transcribed oral biographies of waitresses. She has interviewed a fascinating roster of waitresses: one who worked at the Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth's lunch counter during the 1960 sit-in; a union firebrand; and another who was the first woman to serve at La Côte Basque. Owings is a non-waitress herself, and there's a strange, admiring exoticism filtering though the work. Nonetheless, the interviews give a good sense of the complexities of the waiting life, particularly the fickle tip. In the words of Frances Donovan, an early-20^th-century sociologist quoted by Owings, tipping is "the gambling factor in the life of the waitress."

Gambling is the right reference. Every night in a restaurant is a turn at the craps table. You simply never know whether people will actually show; whether they'll spend money; and whether they'll have a good time (a surprising number of people who eat out seem to dislike food). And then there's the cash. Few legitimate businesses pay employees with so much cash. In the words of one interviewee, a former waitress with a Ph.D., "there are all kinds of perks and hidden exchanges of money. … I never felt as rich as I did as a waitress."

But here's where some of my tip jealousy is unfounded: The cash comes at a price, of course. "The last thing they want is a decent meal, you know," says one of her interviewees, of the customers who eat out as an exercise in being served. Many of the waitresses in Owings' book jokingly make the link between waiting tables and prostitution. Debra Ginsberg, whose memoir, Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress, captures the tart tone of the restaurant business even better than Owings' book, writes that "the server is, effectively, the customer's private dancer for the two hours he sits at her table."

Tips might come rolling into a waiter's pocket, but they are constantly leached out as well. All the other cogs in the restaurant machine expect a little trinkgeld, too. In the same voluntary-involuntary way a customer tips a waiter, a server might whittle away nightly profits by giving 15 percent to 20 percent to the busser, 5 percent to 10 percent to the host, 5 percent to 10 percent to the expediter, and buying drinks for the kitchen. (We are easily appeased.) Or tips might be pooled by management and redistributed equally among all the servers (a system that invariably pisses off the seasoned waiter who's expertly coaxed a table into ordering a $200 bottle of wine). Of course, the biggest drain of tip income comes from the IRS. Tipped employees are subject to a different minimum wage than everyone else in the country: It varies state to state, but the federal minimum is $2.13 per hour. While waiters are supposed to report all their tip income, the IRS double-checks their math based on the restaurant's sales. Once Social Security and Medicaid are withheld, waiters often get $0 pay stubs—even after two weeks of double shifts. Stiff a server and you're not denying her a perk, you're denying her regular income, and you're making her pay taxes for it, too.

For all the hand-wringing about how much to leave, tipping is less of an incentive for good service than we think. While big and tiny tips stand out, it's hard to tell exactly what a moderate tip, say 17 percent, is communicating. Plus, tipping after a meal is not the best way to guarantee good service during it. In theory, the promise of a tip works to the advantage of diners, who reward attentiveness and punish indifference.

But not according to Cornell Hotel School Associate Professor Mike Lynn. For one thing, he has determined that between 20 percent and 25 percent of the dining population are "flat tippers" who don't take the bill size into account when they add a gratuity. Furthermore, his meta-study of tipping studies shows that the correspondence between tips and consumer satisfaction with service is minimal. (A typical study, conducted at the Chili's chain, revealed that some customers who rated the service as poor to fair left 20 percent tips, while some satisfied customers left chintzy tips of 7 percent or 8 percent.) What a tip does seem to evaluate, however, is the diner, and how much she or he cares about what the server thinks.

Lynn has also performed a cross-cultural study of tipping and national personality traits. Americans tip more often than others because we're more likely to be extroverts and/or neurotics, he suggests. Extroverts tip because they like the attention, while neurotics tip to reduce their anxiety and guilt about being served.

This line of reasoning might explain why tips have gone up over the past couple of decades—the average is now somewhere around 18 percent in metropolitan areas. Perhaps some of the rise can be attributed to Americans' exploding interest in food and dining; maybe it's also because service has actually gotten better over the years. But Lynn surmises that if we tip for the approbation of the person who is serving us, and "an average tip doesn't get that approval or attention," over time the definition of a generous tip must grow.

There are rare exceptions to the tipping status quo. At Chez Panisse, where I once worked, the service fee is included in the tab, and the wait staff is paid a good wage, plus benefits. At the tapas restaurant where I currently cook, the waiters are also paid more than minimum wage, and tips are pooled (as are duties—cooks serve customers at the bar) and shared equally among everyone, even the dishwasher. Both restaurants display uncommon accord between the front and the back of the house. These experiences make me inclined to argue for a regime change in the restaurant world, shifting the onus of paying servers decently from the customer to the employer. A service charge would be added to the bill, making the tip unnecessary. This system has worked in Europe for years.

But the change won't happen anytime soon. Restaurant associations will continue to lobby to underpay employees, waiters will continue to want the cash, and customers would continue to tip above the service charge. According to Owings, tips "turn each of us from customer into employer, whether we want the job or not." In some way, I think we do want the job. Going out to eat in America is an escape because we momentarily try on certain undemocratic principles, including snobbery and classism. Part of the ritual pleasure of dining out is the potlatch effect—the show of power through giving (witness the end-of meal credit-card fight). It might be that we crave the tip as much as the crème brulée.


Cold Shower
How to spit with the wine pros.
By Michael Steinberger
Posted Tuesday, October 1, 2002, at 11:31 AM PT

Spit or swallow? For wine aficionados, the choice is usually dictated by circumstance: At meals you swallow, at tastings you spit (unless the wines being tasted are liquid gold; it would be criminal to cough up even a drop of the 1989 Haut-Brion, for instance). But as with so many other wine-related rituals, spitting is no simple matter. Proper technique and correct form count for a lot more than you might think in wine circles.

My method of spitting has always been more or less indistinguishable from my approach to vomiting—place my head above the bucket, open my mouth, and let gravity pretty much handle the rest. It took me a long time to realize the damage this artless splattering was doing to my credibility as a part-time wine journalist. I was certainly aware that there were world-class spitters: Shortly after catching the wine bug, I had come across a priceless photo of Len Evans, a popular Australian wine writer, vintner, and raconteur. In it, Evans is expectorating a laser beam of purple spittle while wearing a suit and tie (with a white shirt!). For weeks thereafter, I kept returning to the picture, gazing at it worshipfully.

Still, I saw no need to emulate Evans; I assumed that projectile spitting was simply a flourish. My opinion did not change even after I started regularly visiting wineries. Several years ago, I paid a call on a Burgundian estate of some renown. The proprietor took me to the cellar, where he poured and I tasted. Knowing that he was watching made me self-conscious, which only made my spitting worse. At one point, as I was dabbing my chin with a tissue while trying to rub the stains out of my khakis, I caught him with an arched eyebrow and an expression that seemed to say, Who sent you here?

Thereafter, I got into the habit of spending a few minutes practicing spitting before heading off to wine country; usually, this involved taking a glass of water, standing in the doorway of the shower, and attempting to blast a cohesive stream out of my mouth. I never succeeded, but that didn't bother me: I had confidence in my palate and figured that as long as I showed myself to be a competent taster, my disposal problem would be forgiven.

Turns out I was wrong. A few weeks ago, I was thumbing through the British wine writer Jancis Robinson's latest book, How To Taste, and discovered that she devotes an entire page and then some to the topic of spitting. One sentence in particular struck a nerve: " 'Spit with pride' might well be the wine taster's motto." It dawned on me that spitting was perhaps more important than I had imagined. I immediately placed a call to Daniel Johnnes, the wine director at Montrachet, who is widely considered the dean of New York sommeliers. He confirmed it: Spitting really is a big deal. I asked Johnnes if he would help spare me any more embarrassment and give me some tips. He graciously agreed and invited me to his office in Tribeca for a lesson.

Johnnes is affable, energetic, and a little cheeky—perfect sommelier material. Within minutes of my arrival, it became clear that this would be a mutually beneficial exercise: He would give me pointers, I would give him a good laugh. As Johnnes fetched a bucket and a bottle of red, the 1999 Chateau de Lascaux from the Languedoc region in France, he explained to me that "there are three types of spitters: droolers, dribblers, and beeline spitters. Dribbling usually becomes spray before it becomes a bead."

I asked him to name some of the more esteemed wine-hockers. "Jancis Robinson is excellent. Robert Parker is a great spitter. But the most famous is probably [New York wine writer] Alex Bespaloff. He has incredible accuracy and distance."

What is considered good distance? "Two feet is standard. Three feet—that's competition spit."

So, how competitive does this stuff get? "Very. When I'm tasting with other sommeliers, we all look out of the corner of the eye to check the other guy's spitting ability. It's noticed, and any sommelier who tells you otherwise is not telling the whole story."

By that point, Johnnes had uncorked the wine and put a generous pour in his glass. Perhaps feeling some performance anxiety himself, he advised me that he was a bit tired and might be off his game that day. With that, he took a swig of wine, held it in his mouth for a few seconds, and then rifled what looked to be a fairly compact effluence into the bucket.

"Better than I expected," he said. "But if you noticed, I lost my form at the end. The finish is the one flaw in my spitting; the pressure drops, and I get just a little dribble at the end. I'm working on it."

Now it was my turn. I gathered my thoughts, took a good sized sip, and let it fly. As I pulled my head away from the bucket, wiping my mouth with my fingers, Johnnes handed me a paper towel. "I think you just created a new category—cascade spitter," he said, chortling. "That was awful. You get a D. But I've seen worse, if it's any consolation."

It wasn't. As I set my glass down, Johnnes began a step-by-step explanation of how to spit like a pro. It is essential, he said, to put the right amount of wine in your mouth; he recommends between one-quarter and one-half ounce. Once you have tasted the wine and are ready to expel it, you pucker your lips, tighten your cheeks, and press your tongue up against your top teeth, broadening the tongue so that it extends past the molars on each side. This pools the wine between the top of your tongue and the roof of your mouth. The key, Johnnes says, is muscle control and force: You need to generate sufficient power to push the wine out while maintaining your form throughout the process.

With his instructions in my mind, I refilled my glass and gave it another try, struggling to keep all the parts in place. "Better," Johnnes reported. "A little spray, but tighter, better." Feeling emboldened, I poured some more wine and repeated the drill. Johnnes shook his head. "Bad. You're really going to have to practice. To be honest, the way you are spitting right now, I personally wouldn't want to go into too many cellars." I asked him if it was hopeless.

"You are never going to be great, but you are clearly willing to work on it, and that's half the battle."

I am working on it, every chance I get. Even spitting out mouthwash has become an opportunity to practice. If all this strikes you as a bit asinine and pathetic, you may have a point. After all, stylish spitting does not improve your ability to appraise wine; it only keeps your clothes clean and the floor dry. But the wine world is a clubby, often catty one, with its own rites of passage. If you want to be seen as legit by the Crips, it helps to have a drive-by shooting to your credit. If you want be seen as legit by wine geeks, you need to be able to shoot a mouthful of Chardonnay in a clean, straight line.

No doubt, spitting's importance is amplified by the fact that so much else about wine is subjective. One man's elegant Cabernet is another man's tannic beast. There is no accounting for taste, nor is there much sense in arguing over it. Among the few aspects of wine that can be assessed with some degree of objectivity is spitting. The wine is expunged either in a tidy package or a centrifugal mess—and the tablecloth never lies.


Alcohol Testing
Can a regular guy pass the sommelier SATs?
By Randall Lane
Posted Thursday, July 18, 2002, at 11:24 AM PT

Viewed from the outside, sommelierhood always seemed to me like a high-fenced country club—snobby, exclusive, and yet as hopelessly alluring as the Groucho Marx aphorism promised. I was a sometime food writer and full-time wine lover, and the studied rituals (the dainty stem pinch, the little swirl, the deep sniff) and the pretentious adjectives ("chewy," "herbaceous") seemed to me like Skull and Bones with a buzz.

So, late in 2000, I decided to try to gain admission. Formal wine training generally falls into three camps. First, the horny amateurs, who show up at functions thrown by the Wine Brats or Fun With Wine in search of Mr. or Ms. Right (or, after a few too many glasses, Mr. or Ms. Right Now). Then, the rich amateurs, who have more money than time, and take one of any number of intensive courses that convey just enough information to impress friends. Both accomplish their goals, but neither gets you into The Club.

The only route for me was professional certification. Technically, sommelier is a just job title, like welder or garbage hauler; anyone can call herself a sommelier and many do. But becoming a certified sommelier requires a class and a test. And the doors to the highest levels of sommelierdom are even more firmly gated: To become a Master of Wine or a Master Sommelier, you need to be invited just to take the famously rigorous curriculum and tests. But basic sommelier certification remains open to anyone with six months to kill and $800 or $900 to blow.

Two organizations certify sommeliers in the United States. The original group, the Sommelier Society of America (SSA), started as a union in 1954 when the wine captains at Manhattan's haughty 21 Club didn't feel they were treated as well as the waiters, and has evolved through the decades into a New-York-based education and accreditation body. Then, three years ago, came the Great Schism—a group of nationally ambitious renegades started the American Sommelier Association (ASA). Now these groups battle like two alphabet-soup boxing federations, each determined to prove that its belt-holder is indeed the true and worthy heavyweight champ.

The SSA boasts about its rotating lecturers, the ASA about its weekly quizzes, but as the limited anagram combos suggest, there's not much difference—each mixes lectures with tastings and lasts about 20 weeks, covering a different wine region each week. The competition keeps both vigilant about their certification parameters. The courses are thorough, with mandatory attendance and vast readings, and the tests are ridiculously hard. For both organizations, roughly one-third of those who take the class don't even bother taking the test, and then half of those who do fail it—a winnowing process that keeps the fraternity small and the accreditation valuable.

My choice was easy. The traditional SSA had an opening, and its course started almost immediately. That's how I found myself in the appropriately clubby saloon area of the classic Oyster Bar, tucked neatly in the basement of Grand Central Station, as eager as a 14-year-old on his first day in high school.

High school is a pretty apt description, except that here the teachers pour you booze instead of confiscating it. Gazing about at my 40 or so classmates, it didn't take long to see the cliques emerge. The trade professionals were the jocks—confident, pack-oriented (wholesalers, distributors, and others often send entire teams in for training), and full of the ease that comes with not personally paying or particularly wanting to be there. The waiters were the nerds—working stiffs diligently trying to move another notch up the restaurant industry ladder. Next came the foreigners—like the exchange students at your high school, they were a bit aloof, smoked in the hallway, and took exception whenever their country's reputation came up.

I was the odd duck, a journalist who fit into none of these categories. The class loner. Which was fine, because it was hard enough to drink wine at 9 a.m., much less kibbitz. The restaurant-friendly start time was supposedly a great hour to taste, since our tongues begin each day relatively uncorrupted. This is also how I learned to appreciate spitting. Previously, spitting had represented to me everything wrong with wine snobs. Tipsiness, after all, is part of drinking wine. But given that nothing kills a day quicker than a midmorning buzz, I began filling water glasses with my own version of rosé.

It was a shame because we tasted some beautiful wines. A $60 Napa cabernet. A $65 Bordeaux Sauternes. An $85 Burgundy Corton Grand Cru. Up to 10 per class, all donated by vintners or importers trying to wow these future beverage directors. The one day that spitting was not allowed was when Claudine Pepin, daughter of Jacques, drilled us in food and wine pairing, resulting in both the most social class of the year and the least productive Tuesday I've ever had.

Guest lecturers like Pepin were fairly common. Richard Dean, the Mark's master sommelier, taught German wines, his specialty. Jordan Ross, a noted barrel expert, lectured on "cooperage" day. Jeffrey Goldenstein, a former SSA student made good, who started New York's Rhone wine bar, came back to his enological alma mater to discuss that region.

By the end of the semester, however, even the best lecturers were struggling to keep the class engaged. Like in high school, everyone was focused on the impending test. For many, passing meant a new career. For me, it was all ego. Vouching that you attended some six-month wine course gets you laughed at by the wine fraternity; a certified sommelier degree gets you in.

So, I crammed my ass off. For a week, I cloistered myself in my apartment, distilling each region of the world into its most essential components. It wasn't enough. As with history, you could study wine forever and still not know everything. The test itself was a cruel exercise—for instance, the multiple-choice section allowed multiple answers and no partial credit.

Example: Which of the following wine label descriptions would likely indicate the presence of grenache? 1) Chateauneuf-du-Pape; 2) Pomerol; 3) Gevrey-Chambertin; 4) Mosel-Saar-Ruwer; 5) Somontano. Well, Chateauneuf-du-Pape hails from the southern Rhone, where grenache is a dominant grape, while Pomerol and Gevrey-Chambertin are areas in grenache-free Bordeaux and Burgundy, respectively. Mosel-Saar-Ruwer is a throwaway—not much grenache in Germany. But what to make of No. 5? It sounds ever so vaguely Spanish, and Spain has lots of garnacha, its version of grenache. But it also could be Italian. Either way, I've never heard of it. So, what to do? Take the safe 1 or roll the dice and go with 1 and 5.

The clock was ticking toward the two-hour limit, and I hadn't even gotten to the blind tasting, another gut-punch. Three wines sat there, demanding to be identified by dominant grape type and country. There are entire tournaments devoted to blind tastings, and sommeliers who emerge triumphant rightfully prance around like the biggest cock on the walk. But for us, the thought that we might (correctly) identify the asparagus hints of a New Zealand sauvignon blanc over American or Bordeaux versions bordered on the absurd.

After the test, the mood outside the Oyster Bar was glum. I was sure I failed. Then again, so was everyone in the class. Thus, it was to my great surprise that, a month later, a perfectly caligraphized diploma arrived at my door.

So, now I have the pedigree. Has my life changed? Maybe a bit. There are some benefits of being a sommelier. At bad restaurants, when a bungling waiter (and when it comes to wine, they're almost all bungling) brings the wrong bottle, I can confidently shoot down the invariable B.S. explanation. At good restaurants, the sommelier will cut to the chase: This is what you should order.

With a discerning eye, I now drink better without spending any more money. All my pals let me order the wine, and because I picked it, they think it's better than it probably is. And my family now has an easy time buying me gifts. Sometimes, I detect a sommelier-to-sommelier wink, as if we're two Swedish speakers coincidentally meeting up in the Andes. That said, I haven't been invited to any secret meetings, taught any new handshakes, or given any fabulous new friends. Maybe it's because I still act like an interloper. I'll never be able to utter the word "jammy" with a straight face. But now I know what it means.


What Happens to Recalled Meat?
By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Monday, October 14, 2002, at 2:50 PM PT

Wampler Foods, a division of poultry titan Pilgrim's Pride, is recalling 27.4 million pounds worth of cooked deli products, which may be contaminated with the potentially lethal bacteria Listeria monocytogenes. What's going to happen to all that recalled meat?

Once consumers have returned their suspect victuals to the supermarket, the processed turkey and chicken products will likely be shipped back to Wampler's Franconia, Penn., factory, which produced the shady meat between May 1 and Oct. 11. The packages will be sprayed with green dye to make clear that their contents should never be consumed. The meat will then either be carted off to landfills, tossed into incinerators, or set aside for rendering into nonhuman protein sources—i.e., dog and livestock food. Listeria, which is frequently present in animal placentas, can be destroyed by subjecting it to temperatures in excess of 160 degrees Fahrenheit, so a long spell of industrial-strength cooking can make the recalled turkey pastrami and chicken breasts safe for canine consumption. (However, due in large part to the furor over mad cow disease, there are growing concerns over the wisdom of feeding tainted meat to cattle, regardless of how well it's been heated.)

Some stores may elect to destroy the meat on premises instead of holding it for Wampler's trucks, but they'll need an OK from federal food safety inspectors, who will monitor the disposal process. Given the nastiness of listeriosis, which is often fatal to infants, the elderly, and others with weakened immune systems, those inspectors will be monitoring the recall very carefully.

Explainer thanks Professors Dennis Burson of the University of Nebraska and James Marsden of Kansas State University.


Wok the Dog
What's wrong with eating man's best friend?
By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, January 16, 2002, at 3:56 PM PT

Nine months ago, Frame Game grossed out its readers by tackling a mounting controversy in newspapers and state legislatures: the ethics of having sex with dogs. In that column, Frame Game asked "why, if it's wrong to rape animals, it's OK to kill them." Carnivores who ignored this question will now have to confront it. The biggest team sporting event on earth, soccer's World Cup, is coming to South Korea, where hot dogs and doggy bags are all too literal. Those of us who don't take our poodles with noodles will have to think about why, or whether, it's wrong to eat man's best friend.

In case you've been distracted by the war or the recession, here's where the dog fight stands. Dogs are eaten in parts of East and Southeast Asia. The South Korean dog meat industry reportedly involves about 1 million dogs, 6,000 restaurants, and 10 percent of the population. French actress-turned-activist Brigitte Bardot, backed by thousands of rabid European and American letter writers, has enlisted FIFA, the world soccer federation, to pressure South Korea to shut down the industry. South Korean lawmakers, angered by this pressure, are pushing to legalize the industry next month. The industry, armed with supportive research by a scholar known as "Dr. Dogmeat," plans to set up dog-meat stands near World Cup stadiums and advertise recipes on English-language Web sites.

On Jan. 14, animal rights activists muzzled the industry's PR campaign kickoff. On Jan. 19, Korean hackers plan to attack the Web sites of French and American media companies that have disparaged canine Seoul food. The controversy has even invaded New York, where lawmakers are considering whether to ban dog meat (which is legal in 44 states) amid reports that it's being sold there. Editorials have expressed disgust at the practice, and Korean-Americans are assuring the public that they, too, find it barbaric. Everybody wants to show that he's civilized by condemning the eating of dogs. There's only one problem: Nobody can explain why it's wrong. In fact, on closer examination, the arguments against dog-eating turn out to be creepier than dog-eating itself.

Let's start with the clearest complaint: the needlessly cruel methods—beating, strangling, boiling—by which many dogs are killed in Korea. To Frame Game, this is a no-brainer. These methods have to be stopped. At a minimum, they should be replaced with electrocution, which is far more humane. That's why South Korean lawmakers are proposing to legalize, license, and regulate the industry. But guess who's trying to stop them? The same attack-dog activists who complain about the cruelty of the old methods.

South Korea's Livestock Processing Act doesn't officially apply to dogs. The obvious solution is to classify dogs as livestock. But in 1999, legislators who tried to do that were thwarted by critics who warned that legalization would hurt the country's image. Now anti-dog-meat activists in Korea, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere are trying to block legalization again, arguing that "there is no recognized humane method of killing" dogs. As a spokesman for the Korea Animal Protection Society put it, "South Korean officials misunderstand the situation. They think it would be okay as long as dogs are not killed in a cruel manner." Given a choice between ending the cruelty and waging their all-out war till the last dog is hung, the activists choose the latter. FIFA, too, opposes legalization—at least until after the World Cup—and calls for a total end to dog-meat consumption.

To justify keeping the industry underground, unsafe, and inhumane, activists ought to have a pretty good reason why dog-eating—as opposed to the eating of other animals, which they tolerate—is too horrible to legalize. But what is that reason? Since dogs aren't smarter or more gentle than pigs, for example, anti-dog-meat activists argue that dogs are special because they're "pets" and "companion" animals. FIFA President Sepp Blatter calls them the "best friend of humankind." Dogs are "friends, not animals," Bardot told a Korean radio interviewer. "Cows are grown to be eaten, dogs are not. I accept that many people eat beef, but a cultured country does not allow its people to eat dogs."

Strip out Bardot's silly arrogance and her Korean colleagues' sentimentality, and their philosophy boils down to this: The value of an animal depends on how you treat it. If you befriend it, it's a friend. If you raise it for food, it's food. This relativism is more dangerous than the absolutism of vegetarians or even of thoughtful carnivores. You can abstain from meat because you believe that the mental capacity of animals is too close to that of humans. You can eat meat because you believe that it isn't. Either way, you're using a fixed standard. But if you refuse to eat only the meat of "companion" animals—chewing bacon, for example, while telling Koreans that they can't stew Dalmatians—you're saying that the morality of killing depends on habit or even whim.

The joke is on you because in Korea, until recently, dogs haven't been pets. Therefore, by the "companion" standard, it's OK to eat them. In fact, the "companion" standard is exactly what South Korean newspapers and government officials are using to justify an emerging system of dog Nazism. In the city, Koreans raise "pet dogs." In the country, they raise "meat dogs," also known as "junk dogs" and "lower-grade" dogs. But you don't become a "lower-grade" dog by flunking an IQ test. You're just born in the wrong place. Then you're slaughtered and fed to a man who thinks he's humane because he pampers a Golden Retriever that has half your brains. And Bardot, who says that cows can be butchered because they're "grown to be eaten," can't fault this arrangement.

If dog-eating isn't intrinsically wrong, why should South Koreans give it up? Because, Bardot told her radio interviewer, "Eating dog meat seriously hurts the image of your country." FIFA President Blatter likewise told South Korea that the practice was bad for its "international image." He urged the country "to show the world that it is sensitive to vociferous worldwide public opinion." But absent an underlying moral argument, appeals to "image" and "sensitivity" are as likely to disguise snobbery or evil as to promote good.

There's more than a whiff of cultural supremacy, if not racism, in French attacks on Korean dog-eating. When Bardot's radio interviewer told her that some Western visitors eat dog meat in Korea, she replied: "French people, German people, and Americans never eat dogs. If they did, it is most likely that South Koreans served them dog meat, saying it was either pork or beef." The French soccer team supports Bardot's campaign. A French state TV channel recently ridiculed Korean dog-eating in a piece full of distortions. Never mind that some Frenchmen eat horse meat or snails or that, according to a Seoul waitress, more than one staffer from the French Embassy has sated his canine tooth at her restaurant. Norwegians didn't stop eating reindeer during the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics. American restaurants didn't stop serving bull testicles during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. No one forced Spain to outlaw cat stew during the 1982 World Cup, and no one is hounding Japan, the co-host of this year's World Cup, to shut down its sushi bars.

Fourteen years ago, when Seoul hosted the Summer Olympics, the dog-meat critics had their day. The South Korean government threw them a bone, banning dog meat under a law prohibiting "foods deemed unsightly." That's the law FIFA now wants South Korea to invoke to sweep away dog-meat restaurants during the World Cup. But unsightliness, by definition, is in the eye of the beholder, and beholders are motivated by prejudice as often as by justice. The last time organizers of a global sporting event removed an "unsightly" presence from their city, that presence was the homeless people of Atlanta. If FIFA and other carnivorous arbiters of civilization want to tell Koreans what to eat, they'll have to come up with a better reason than that.



Diary: Zac Unger
Zac Unger is a firefighter in Oakland, Calif. His daughter was born three months premature and is in the neonatal ICU.

Subject: Entry 1
Posted Monday, October 28, 2002, at 10:25 AM PT

My daughter Percy was born two weeks ago yesterday. And because she showed up three months early, there are still about 11 weeks to go until the day she should have been born. My wife Shona and I had planned to use the last trimester to make the spare bedroom into a nursery, take some parenting classes, and go on one last just-the-two-of-us vacation to Hawaii. Instead, my precocious little girl arrived on her own schedule, and my wife and I have spent the last two weeks camped out next to an incubator in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Even if everything goes perfectly, Percy won't be ready to come home until at least her due date in mid-January.

I knew that becoming a father was going to change my life, but I wasn't expecting that it would be like this. The birthday of your first child should be exciting, jubilant, and full of high hopes and dreams for the future. I didn't have any hope that day, only terror. I didn't know if she'd live through those first hours, and I wasn't even sure that we were doing the right thing by fighting to keep her alive. On a day of celebration, the only thing I felt was sick to my stomach with dread.

When she was born she weighed 1 pound and 15 ounces. At weigh-in yesterday I saw that she's put on a little over 2 ounces since birth, but she's still almost indescribably small. Her entire hand is the size of a penny. Her toe is a grain of rice. My wedding ring fits up and over her knee. Her skin is so thin that you can see every blood vessel and almost make out the organs below. She's tiny, but she's perfect. All of her parts are completely formed: She's got eyebrows, fingernails, a minuscule tongue. Twenty-seven weeks of gestation is near the lower limits of fetal survivability. I've always been staunchly pro-choice, but when you see a baby this small you can't help but wonder when life really begins. When Percy was born she couldn't breathe, open her eyes, or control any of her muscles. Babies younger than this are often allowed to make a "compassionate exit," but at 27 weeks there are no longer any choices to be made, and the full assault of a modern medical campaign rolls into place.

At this point Percy's survival is more a feat of engineering than anything else. She doesn't have a single bodily system that works right, and she'd never make it on her own. A baby this small is like an astronaut on Mars. The outside environment is toxic to her, she can't find anything to eat, and she has to have a constant flow of pure oxygen to survive. Machines have total control over her life right now. She lives in a climate-controlled Plexiglas box that's shaped like a sneeze-guard. The nurses spin dials and calculate drug-infusion rates to try and replicate conditions in the womb. Alarms ring constantly whenever one of her vital signs swings above or below narrowly defined parameters.

Minutes after she was born the doctor dropped a tube into her throat and set the ventilator to breathe for her, regular and constant, hiss after hiss after hiss. Her arms are too small for a regular IV, so the nurse practitioner started two lines in her umbilicus and one in her head. The one on her scalp isn't like the regular IV an adult would have. Instead it's a long catheter that threads down the side of her head, through her internal jugular vein, and terminates just a few millimeters above her heart. She's lying naked under high-powered lights in order to jump-start her liver. Soon she'll need a blood transfusion; the few drops of blood that have been drawn for her labs are enough to deplete her supply to dangerously low levels. They hung a bottle of white fat on her IV tree for calories, along with a bag of something that's neon and yellow and is supposed to give her nutrients. They were so busy worrying about her lungs that they didn't feed her at all for the first few days. The first time she ate they threaded a tube directly into her stomach and gave her 1 cubic centimeter of milk. One cc. There are 355 cc's of liquid in a can of soda. She seems to be doing great, though, and I think she must be hungry because yesterday they increased her feedings to 11 cc's every three hours. She's been making fantastic poops ever since her first meal, and I haven't been this excited by bodily fluids since junior high.

A person this young shouldn't have to endure indignities like this. It's not fair. She should be drooling and burping and keeping us up all night, not suffering this endless poking and testing. They've given her steroids to mature her lungs, Dopamine to steady her blood pressure, Lasix to make her pee, caffeine to fire her up, and morphine to calm her down. When she gets wild they tuck her hands under the blankets so she can't hurt herself.

I feel as helpless as she does, and it's awful. I'm a big strong man. I fight fires and rescue people for a living. But there's nothing I can do to help my own daughter, no solution I can create out of muscle and determination and courage. I've got these thick, clumsy hands and I'm terrified that I'll break her, that I'll pull her legs out of their sockets like chicken wings when I'm changing her diapers. The only thing I can do is sit for hours next to the incubator, my hand barely touching her head, willing my love to flow into her. I can already tell that she's tough though, small and mighty like her mom. She pulled out her breathing tube twice and yesterday she made a fist and punched my thumb when I tried to take her temperature. I still get scared every single time I think about her, but now there's plenty of hope mixed in as well. She's my daughter, and I'm going to do everything I can to make her life better from here on out.

All in all she had a pretty good 14^th day. She slept a lot, had some milk, and I read her a story through the porthole in the incubator. All of the nurses tell us to enjoy these good days while they last. They tell us it's a roller coaster, and we're still only on the first incline. They tell us they've never seen a preemie this small that didn't suffer a few terrifying drops before going home. Even on the good days Shona and I are so on-edge that I can't imagine how we're going to cope with the setbacks. Percy is at risk for lung disease, bleeding in the brain, and catastrophic blood infections. Since the infection is the only thing that I can even pretend to have control over, I've rubbed my hands raw from the constant washing and disinfecting. I'm terrified to breathe on her. My daughter is 2 weeks old, and I've never even kissed her.


Subject: Entry 2
Updated Wednesday, October 30, 2002, at 11:04 AM PT

Percy had a rough day yesterday. I've barely gotten familiar with her personality, but as soon as I peeked into the incubator I could tell that she wasn't herself. She wouldn't open her eyes at the sound of my voice, and she barely fought when the nurse pushed a feeding tube into her stomach. She was listless, not making any of those little squeaks that I've gotten used to ever since they replaced her breathing tube with a less invasive nasal oxygen setup.

Her lab work makes it look like despite all my hand-washing, she's getting an infection. Also, she keeps forgetting to breathe, a condition that the nurses refer to as "apnea." I had a hand on her tiny foot when her alarms sounded. I watched her heart rate fall from where it should be—about 150 beats per minute—down to 90, 80, 70. It's paralyzing to watch, and it just keeps happening. When her oxygen-saturation falls, she starts to turn a little blue, and we have to rub her tiny chest with two fingers to get her heart going again. It's a struggle not to lose hope every time she crashes. The nurses say she'll outgrow it, so I try to trust them.

Even just getting to this scary, premature point of parenthood has been a struggle. The first miscarriage was easy. After you have one you learn that everyone else has had one too. You hear "my sister had one, and little Jenny's 6 now" and "Nicole Kidman had one, so at least you're in good company." Miscarriage No. 2 was disappointing, but still within the realm of random misfortune. No. 3 was sickening, but No. 4 was by the far the worst, the realization that it wasn't bad luck, that we were marked by something awful and mysterious that we wouldn't be able to overcome. Miscarriages Nos. 5 and 6 were sad, but not surprising, like incomplete Hail Mary passes from a backup quarterback.

A year ago we were at our most despondent, and we decided to try using a surrogate. We guessed that our embryos were good—we'd made it to the second trimester twice—but that there was something immunological or structural that made it impossible to carry a baby to term. I felt like we'd been thrown a lifeline when we finally found Jessaca, a strong, friendly, well-grounded woman who had two healthy deliveries to her credit. So, Shona's egg and my sperm did their thing in a Petri dish, the doctor implanted little 8-celled Percy into Jessaca's womb, and we were on our way.

After six months of surrogacy I felt like we were actually going to have our baby. But just when it seemed safe to let the guys at work in on my big secret, Jessaca came down with HELLP syndrome, a debilitating and unforeseeable form of pre-eclampsia. They call it "maternal-fetal incompatibility": My baby was very literally killing Jessaca. Her blood pressure skyrocketed, her liver shut down, her kidneys started to fail. Sick as she was, she struggled to hold on and give our baby every golden hour she possibly could. But finally, in order to save our surrogate's life, our baby had to come out three long months before she was due. Approximately 5 percent of pregnant women will get pre-eclampsia. Of those, 5 percent will progress to HELLP, and only a small percentage of those will deliver earlier than the relative safety point of 30 weeks gestation. I don't even know what the odds are of having six unexplained miscarriages, but it feels like we must be bumping along the bottom 1 percent of the bottom 1 percent of bad luck. When I learned that even our surrogate pregnancy was drifting toward disaster, I felt like we'd never see daylight again.

Within 48 hours of delivering Percy, Jessaca lost 30 pounds of water weight and her blood pressure stabilized. We had dinner with her the other day, and now she's as healthy as ever, home playing with her own little girl. Having a surrogate is an unavoidably strange experience. I got her pregnant, but she's not my wife. She carried Percy and felt her kick, but she's not her mom. What she is is the woman who saved Shona and me from the depths of despair, the woman who gave us our tiny, terrifying, beautiful premature daughter. Surrogacy didn't work out perfectly, but it's working.

From her very beginnings until today, Percy's entrance into the world has been a massive team effort. We've had support from so many unlikely places. Yesterday another mother in the NICU offered to share her breast milk with Percy, and that unexpected generosity from a stranger sent Shona and me into tears.

I'm hoping this current blood infection will pass through Percy quickly. I'd harbored a secret hope that she'd be in the 20 percent of preemies her age who don't get infections, but I should know better than to play the odds. The job is mostly up to her now. Everybody on her team has done their best to give her a good start, and now she has to take over and be strong for herself. She's lost her fight for a little while, but I'm confident she'll get it back. That's why we named her Percy. It's short for Perseverance.


Subject: Entry 3
Posted Wednesday, October 30, 2002, at 11:04 AM PT

I never thought I'd be the kind of guy who lives in a motel. We're from Berkeley, but our surrogate, Jessaca, lives in the Central Valley, which is two hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic away from our home. When Percy decided to come early, Jessaca went to the nearest hospital and our daughter has been here in Modesto ever since. Nobody said that having a preemie in the ICU was going to be convenient, so we're trying to figure out how to adjust our lives. We've been staying in the fabulous Vagabond Inn, which during the week is one step up from a typical hookers-and-smack kind of place. On weekends it takes that step right back down. Its main virtue is that it's across the street from the hospital, so on those nights when I can't sleep—which is most of them these days—I can be out of bed and at Percy's incubator within three minutes.

On that first terrible night in Modesto, as Jessaca was due to deliver in 12 hours and all we wanted to do was escape into sleep, a car alarm in the parking lot rang for three hours until the battery died. We thought about renting an apartment and I visited a few, but there was something about them all that seemed so sad and empty. At least at the Vag they change my towels and make my bed every day. We brought in a mini-fridge and we've made a laundry hamper into a filing cabinet. We're very classy people.

I woke up yesterday morning feeling guilty. My daughter was lying in the hospital with a nasty infection, and I was over at the hotel catching up on my sleep. I feel like I should be next to her 24 hours a day. The social workers keep telling us that the best thing we can do for Percy is take care of ourselves, get some rest, drink plenty of water. I know they're right, but I still feel like I ought to be doing something. But it's easy to overdo it with preemies. They don't like to be stroked, and being talked to and touched at the same time is overstimulating. I want to pet her constantly, and I have to hold myself back so she can relax and use her energy to grow.

The crisis mode is passing now, and Shona and I are settling in for the duration. We take shifts at the hospital so we won't go insane from all the sitting. We joined a local gym and Shona's working a fair amount, telecommuting back to the Bay Area. I started back to work a few days ago, and it's actually kind of relaxing to be at the firehouse instead of the hospital.

Living in a motel in Modesto has its advantages. We've created a little island for ourselves centered entirely on the baby. There's nothing for us to do here but be at her bedside, and I think that just by being nearby we're making big steps in bonding with her. I'm starting to know what kind of kid she is. She gets antsy 20 minutes before feeding time, and afterward she always has a period of quiet alertness, where she opens her eyes and checks out the scene. The nurses say babies this small can distinguish only between light and dark, but I think she can recognize me.

Percy's lab cultures came back yesterday. She's got gram positive infections in both her scalp line and on her arm where they poked her for an arterial blood gas. We had a new nurse who was unfamiliar with Percy and said, "Boy, she's a feisty one!" but the downward change from a few days ago is dramatic. It's like something has been dimmed inside her. I guess it's good news that she has an infection. This is something they expected and know how to treat. I was terrified that her cultures would come back normal and the doctor would give me one of those "we just don't know what the problem is" answers that I've come to hate so much over the last couple of years. I'm hoping that by tomorrow her antibiotics will have run their course and she'll be back to screaming and ripping out her lines.

Last night my parents came to visit and we went to dinner at Modesto's best restaurant (no comment), a little Italian place in the back corner of a strip mall. When the waiter told us that the special was a 16-ounce steak, I could see everyone thinking about the meat in comparison to Percy. What a triumph: My daughter's bigger than a steak! She's probably even a steak and a baked potato at this point. It's strange to be able to just leave and go to dinner like this. There's a whole team of doctors and nurses dedicated to taking care of my little girl. I don't have to worry about when to feed her, she doesn't wake me up crying. Last night we hung out with her until midnight, then went back to the Vag and caught the last hour of Top Gun on television. When we finally get her home I'm not going to know how to raise a baby without the assistance of vital-sign monitors and my own personal nurse practitioner.


Subject: Entry 4
Posted Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 10:09 AM PT

I spent most of the day yesterday on the phone with insurance companies. Every single thing about Percy is small, except for her medical bills, which are enormous. We've had trouble with our insurance ever since we started having miscarriages, and it's been getting worse. The fact that Percy was born via surrogacy only added to the confusion. Originally our insurer refused to pay for any of Percy's care; they claimed that our surrogate's coverage should be charged instead. Since Percy is 100 percent ours genetically, Jessaca's insurance company was understandably reluctant to assume the cost of her care.

After much prodding, my insurer agreed to pay for Percy's bills, but only after the first 30 days of her life. It would take me 10 years at my current job to pay for the cost of one month of hospitalization in the NICU. With the help of a very understanding cashier here at the hospital, I think we've finally gotten our point across and extracted from the insurance company an agreement to do what they're supposed to. Until I see all the paperwork (or until the bills come rolling directly to me) I have this unsettling feeling that our financial fate is dependent on the good graces of the insurance industry.

After the first 10 days of hospitalization, Percy had rung up charges of $380,000. And that doesn't include the cost for the doctors, who bill separately. On her first day Percy got three doses of artificial surfactant, the viscous goo that keeps the air sacs in our lungs inflated. It's a miracle drug, and Percy wouldn't be doing nearly so well if she hadn't gotten it, but each dose costs $3,500. When nobody you love is sick it's easy to be dispassionate about the outlandish price of medical care and to debate the costs and benefits to society of fighting to save difficult patients. But when it's your own daughter, you want all the big money spent. Similarly, yesterday I asked the doctor why, if most preemies get infections, shouldn't they all be given antibiotics prohphylactically? He gave me a perfectly reasonable answer about the risks of creating drug-resistant superbugs. I'd like to be concerned about hypothetical future babies, but all I really care about is the immediate health of my own sick girl.

Our current insurance crisis involves the fact that my plan has a lifetime per-person maximum of $2 million, and I think we're going to blow right past that over her projected three-month stay. I'd hate to make it through this ordeal only to leave Percy uninsured when she gets chickenpox in 10 years. I thought we could just switch Percy to an HMO with no maximum that my wife's employer offers. But the insurance industry has a rule that children of two-plan parents must be covered by the parent whose birthday falls earliest in the year. Unfortunately that's me. We considered ways for Percy to lose my coverage and get switched to Shona's, but all of them—quitting my job, getting a divorce, faking my death—seemed unworkable. The other option is to switch to a no-maximum plan at my job, but it carries a $600 per month co-pay. They say that when Percy's not in crisis anymore, when she's just a feeder and a grower, that her bills will come down dramatically, and we may not ever reach the 2 million mark. But I'm left trying to weigh my current budget against future costs that are both entirely unpredictable and utterly critical.

In our thoughts about switching carriers, Shona and I have offered up so many odd variations that we've thoroughly confused the benefits people at our jobs. It's also nearly impossible to get definitive answers out of the insurers themselves about what the various coverages will actually cover. Whichever course we choose will be essentially a guess, and we won't know how deeply we've miscalculated until we reach our next unforeseen medical crisis in the years to come.

The good news amid all the hassle is that Percy's feeling better. The Ceftazidime and Vancomycin have worked their (expensive) magic, and her infection levels are dropping. She's up to 144 cc's of milk a day, and when the nurses evacuate her stomach before every feeding, there's nothing in there, a good sign that she's learning to digest well. The nurse puts her in a little shirt for the first time, and it's so big it looks like a wizard's cape. She opens her eyes more and more, and she's got this incredible little toothless smile that she puts on after she stretches and rubs her eyes. She's seeming more and more like a real baby, and I can even start to imagine that one day she'll be able to come home with us like a normal kid.

We'll get this insurance stuff worked out somehow. I'm confident of that, though I'm not sure why. I just hate the fact that I have to spend a single ounce of my emotional energy worrying about this crap when I should be focusing exclusively on Percy. My lowest moments aren't when we're facing a new medical crisis, but when I'm on the phone with an idiot, or even with a well-intentioned lackey working under a bureaucratic mandate to value money over my daughter's life. In the end I take a fair amount of glee in the fact that no matter how many years' worth of premiums I pay, my family will always be a gigantic net loss for the insurance industry.


Subject: Entry 5
Posted Friday, November 1, 2002, at 11:02 AM PT

If there is one thing that neonatalogists can't agree on, it's "kangaroo care." A few studies show that premature babies who are held skin-to-skin by their parents tend to gain weight and get discharged earlier than babies who aren't held. We've been getting dramatically conflicting advice from all of the nurses and doctors, though. Some tell us that we should hold Percy as much as possible, and some say that we should just leave her alone and let her grow. I want definitive answers; I want to be told that holding her for four-and-a-half hours per day will make her 33 percent healthier. But babies are as unique as adults, and we're learning to read her own cues to find out what she wants. At one point Percy went through a wild stage and the nurses wanted to give her more morphine. But as soon as Shona held her she fell immediately to sleep and we spared her the drugs. On the other hand, when her infection was at its peak she stopped breathing every time I touched her.

I can't say for sure what good kangaroo care does for Percy, but as far as our mental health is concerned, it's absolutely amazing. Shona's a crier, but I've never seen her more emotional than that first time she laid Percy on her chest. With all of the tubes and wires it's easy to think of Percy as a medical obstacle to overcome rather than a tiny little human being that we love. Holding her cements the bond, makes it clear that our lives are interwoven. My skin keeps her warm, the rise of my chest reminds her to breathe and the sound of my voice stimulates her to interact. They have lots of children's books around, but I can't imagine that it's the content that matters. So, yesterday I read her an article about Hezbollah, and when that was over the only thing within reach was a book about preemies, so she got to learn about necrotizing enterocolitis and bronchopulmonary dysplasia.

Sometimes it's hard not to feel like the most unfortunate people in the NICU. Percy's so small and helpless, our story's been so long and tragic. When new parents come in looking frantic and dazed, wondering how their babies will do after only 35 weeks gestation, I think to myself: 35 weeks … any kid could grow up to win the Nobel Prize if he got to gestate for a whole 35 weeks. But yesterday I spoke with a friend of a friend whose baby was born at 25 weeks compared to Percy's 27.5, 1 pound, 5 ounces to Percy's 1 and 15. They also had a bunch of miscarriages and had a rougher go of it in the NICU than I hope we're going to have. The 25-weeker parents are jealous of the 27s. We 27s are jealous of the 32-week kids. And everybody is jealous of all those homeless 16-year-old girls who seem to have no trouble whatsoever popping out beautiful healthy babies.

We missed out on so many of the normal aspects of pregnancy. There was no miracle of life here, just a grinding march of technology and money from beginning to end. But now we've got something most people don't have: an extra three months to spend with our baby. We're able to watch the last trimester of pregnancy unfold in front of us, watch as Percy lays on fat, learns to use her muscles, and discovers the joys of sucking her thumb. And even though our surrogate was a fantastic woman, she wasn't us. Now Percy gets to spend one third of her womb time with us, people who are going to be next to her for the rest of our lives.

I'm getting to the point where being in the hospital doesn't seem strange anymore. This is just my life; she's just my baby. With each day that passes, with each little bit of strength that she gains I start to feel more and more like a real parent instead of a medical combatant. Her infection is gone now and she's back to her feisty self. Of course I'm still worried about all of the complications of prematurity, the potential for blindness, cerebral palsy, and a host of other nasties. But I need to make sure that I'm not constantly watching Percy for signs of deficit. I can't spend her whole life wondering—is what's happening today because she was premature? Being a parent of even the healthiest child has got to be terrifying. By letting yourself love somebody, you set yourself up for sadness. But I know that the everyday highs are so much higher than the imagined lows are low.

For so long I've felt like if I could just get a baby, everything would be fine, that life would be perfect. But really we're just getting started on all of the worries that normal parents face. When we take Percy home she'll only be a newborn, and a small one at that. But it feels like such liberation to worry about normal things, like whether my daughter will grow up to do ghastly things like date rock musicians or manage an insurance company. In fact, there's a giant 4-pound boy in the next incubator over who's been giving Percy the old sly wink. I think I'd better have a talk with him about respecting my baby girl.


Diary: Michael Brus
Michael Brus, a former Slate assistant editor, works at a homeless shelter in Seattle.

Subject: Entry 1
Posted Monday, June 17, 2002, at 11:54 AM PT

About nine months ago, I left a well-paid staff position at the magazine you are now reading and took an entry-level job at a chaotic, drug-infested homeless shelter in Seattle. I took the plunge for lots of reasons: because life is short, because I am young and without a family and value experience, because I had tired of politics and the media, and because I had met one too many people who, when asked if they enjoy their work, shrug and say, "Well, it pays the bills." But most of all, I entered social service because I received life-saving mental-health treatment in college and am interested in giving something back, either for several years or permanently.

I work for a non-profit called the Downtown Emergency Service Center. I became interested in DESC after reading this profile of its executive director, Bill Hobson, in the Seattle Weekly. He seemed like a dedicated, competent, no-bullshit advocate for the disadvantaged. About 20 years ago he abandoned a political-science professorship and began a $5-an-hour job at DESC, then just a nighttime shelter with a handful of employees. Under his leadership, DESC has grown into a $7.5 million organization. (Ten years ago its budget was just $2 million.) It consists of a 24-hour emergency shelter that serves 10,000 people a year, four apartment buildings that house nearly 500 formerly homeless people, and 200 employees, including clinical staff who provide mental-health and addiction-recovery services to about 650 people.

A year ago I called Bill Hobson, introduced myself, and told him I was a political journalist looking to enter social services. He talked to me for about 20 minutes and suggested I volunteer in the shelter, to get a taste. I did, and three months I later took a full-time position. My job title is "counselor," which is misleading. I'm not a therapist, or even a case manager (i.e., someone who monitors the basic needs of a caseload of clients). My job is to help run the minute-by-minute operations of the shelter during the daytime. This includes monitoring who enters the shelter (everyone has an ID card); enforcing rules against fighting, yelling, and drug use; signing people up for mats; passing out goodies like coffee, towels, toothbrushes, and tampons; and trying to figure out the needs of people who are often dirty, smelly, angry, hungry, crazy, high, scared, confused, and needy.

The shelter is on the second floor of a 1908, seven-story brick building called the Morrison Hotel. The Morrison Hotel used to be just that, a luxury hotel, and was even home to a society of entrepreneurs called the "Arctic Club." Today, the five floors above the shelter hold 200 closet-sized apartments for formerly homeless people. The street level features DESC's administrative offices, a nightclub, two eateries (one of which is a homeless charity), lots of drug dealing and loitering, and the occasional shooting. Across the street are the King County Courthouse and a small park. Within several blocks there are more convenience stores, check-cashing outlets, and bail-bonds agencies than you can shake a stick at. In a word, I work on Skid Row.

When I say "Skid Row," I mean that literally: The shelter is located next to Yesler Way, which in the late 19^th century became known as "Skid Road" when pioneers dragged logs down its steep incline to a waterfront mill. As Seattle's business district migrated north during the 20^th century, the area deteriorated, and from "Skid Road" came the term "Skid Row." The area, also known as Pioneer Square, was gentrified 20 to 30 years ago, but it is still home to most of the city's homeless as well as to the social-service agencies that serve them.

Many of those agencies are religious. DESC was founded, in 1979, as one of the first secular charities in Pioneer Square. Almost all its money comes from the government. The City of Seattle provides over 90 percent of the shelter's budget. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development contributes about three quarters of the housing program's expenses. (The rest comes from private sources, most prominently from an AIDS group.) The salaries of the mental-health staff come from both King County—as a pass through from Washington state—and Medicaid. It's worth noting that DESC, like most human-service charities, operates on a shoestring. Its highest-paid administrator, Hobson, makes $75,000 a year, and most of its employees make far less than do people with comparable experience and responsibility in the for-profit world (including at Slate).

I usually work Wednesday through Sunday. This week I altered my schedule to jibe with the "Diary"'s publishing schedule. I have today (Sunday) off. I return to work tomorrow at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m., when the bleary-eyed night shift takes its leave. I often dream of the shelter, and I'm never fully slept.


Subject: Entry 2
Updated Tuesday, June 18, 2002, at 10:54 AM PT

My first task each morning is to listen to the shelter's night-shift supervisor read the computerized log entries written by the previous two shifts (swing and night). This thrice-daily "brief" meeting is vital because it is the only direct communication between the shifts. Among the messages passed on this morning: An unidentified "client" (i.e., a person who uses the shelter, either during the day or the night), whom I had barred on Saturday for threatening staff, was later identified by another staff member; a barred client who makes a habit of illegally entering the shelter and then vanishing did it once again; one client accused another of "dumping urine on him" (staff didn't see any urine, but the accused client—a nearly blind, wheelchair-bound man with dementia—has a history of pissing on himself and others during the night); and a new client with a hip injury was given temporary access to the elevator entrance.

We shelter counselors rotate among different stations every hour. I spent my first hour today in the lobby office. When the lobby is busy—and it is for three-quarters of the day—it is an impossible job for one person to handle. I must simultaneously: 1) Answer the main shelter phone line. This includes not just transferring professional calls to staff voicemail and answering client questions, but also securing mats for clients at the request of case managers, hospital social workers, and probation officers. 2) Monitor entry to and exit from the elevator entrance through the use of security cameras, a barely audible intercom system, a less-than-legible elevator-approval list, and a half-dozen door-unlocking buttons that beep very loudly. 3) Answer in-person questions about mat assignments and agency policies from clients, many of whom cut in front of other clients and get angry quickly if we don't tell them what they want to hear. 4) Search our database for clients who have lost their shelter ID cards and print them new ones. 5) Ensure that all clients entering the shelter—several every minute—slide their ID cards through a laser scanner so that they register on our computer. (Client compliance rate without hectoring by staff: about 60 percent. Scanner compliance rate when a client does slide his card: less than 50 percent.) Because of this chaos, many clients slip through the door without detection.

At noon, a man arrived who several months ago was barred from the shelter for a year for threatening staff and getting into fights. Despite his bar, he likes to sashay up to the lobby, inform the person behind the desk (in this case, me) how much he hates the director of the shelter, Karyn Boerger, and how he plans to wreak vengeance on her and the staff who barred him (in this case, not me). "I'm going to show you the wrath of God," he told me, rather calmly. "People got to learn that they will reap what they sow." After socializing with some other clients in the lobby, he left. Had he entered, I would have followed the policy we use for clients who repeatedly won't follow staff instructions: Call the police. In the case of this client, I would have requested that the SPD not just escort him from the shelter but read him a criminal trespass warning, threatening him with arrest next time he enters.

When I am not serving my two to three hours a day in the lobby office, I am either handing out beverages and sanitary supplies at our coffee counter or "floating"—that is, enforcing rules and outreaching clients in need. During my first hour floating today, I did a bathroom sweep for drugs. (Clients can enter the shelter drunk or high, within limits, but they cannot smoke up, shoot up, or drink once inside.) Immediately I found a short Latino man, whom I did not recognize, working on a 40-ouncer of Natural Ice. Ninety percent of the time, I can ID a client either by sight, by confiscating their card, or by asking my colleagues for assistance. In this case, the man would not produce his card or tell me his name, and he did not speak English (or pretended not to). He left before I could consult a co-worker, and on his way out, I chided him in my pidgin Spanish for eluding identification: "No nombre, no tarjeta, amigo? Por qué está un hombre con nada?"

Not all client interactions are negative, of course. Today I ran into several clients who used to stay in the shelter but now have housing. One, a charming, stocky kid from the south side of Chicago, showed me his newly recovered arm flexibility. He fled his gang-ridden neighborhood two months ago and, once in Seattle, secured a job on an Alaskan fishing expedition set to depart in July. (Alaskan fishing is a popular, if arduous, way for unemployed and able working-class Seattleites to make money. You sign your life away for several months, and, if you can hack it, the company pays you handsomely. If you can't, you buy your own ticket home and don't get paid.) Last month he was jumped on the street and received severely bruised ribs, which restricted his arm mobility and threatened his employment. (I spent the better part of a morning convincing him to get treated at a hospital for the assault; he was writhing in pain but scared of encountering racist cops at the ER.) Luckily, his mom sent him just enough money for a short-term apartment and a YMCA membership. With some weight training, his arm is now good as new. Unfortunately, most of our regular clients do not have anything like the family ties or mental and physical health that this kid has. I'll talk about them tomorrow.


Subject: Entry 3
Updated Wednesday, June 19, 2002, at 10:08 AM PT

The first thing I'd like to address today is the "Dolemite Da Pimp" fake ID card featured next to yesterday's entry. I'd like to address it because DESC's executive director fears that it may offend some readers. He has a point. For those who have not heard of Dolemite, he's a fictional blaxploitation star from the 1970s. The actor who played him, Rudy Ray Moore, is a singer and stand-up comedian whom some credit with inventing rap music.

Here's the back-story: A co-worker of mine, Chuck, created the card several months ago as a joke. Chuck, who recently took another job, was the Hawkeye Pierce of DESC. For those who don't remember Robert Altman's film M*A*S*H*, Hawkeye is a brilliant front-line Korean War surgeon with a wickedly subversive sense of humor. He does not laugh to cause offense (though he does cause offense); he laughs so that he may not cry. After creating Dolemite's ID card—with some technical assistance from me—Chuck filled out paperwork to bar him from the shelter. Several days later the shelter's administrator, Karyn, unwittingly paged a "Mr. Dolemite" before a weekly meeting of barred clients. (Chuck swears he did not intend for this to happen.)

Yesterday I promised to discuss mental illness. I also want to talk about its murderous relative, suicide. (Remember the theme song to M*A*S*H*?) Several months ago, a relatively new client calmly smoked a butt, walked to a shelter window, opened it, and leaped to the sidewalk some 45 feet below. Day shift had ended, and I had just left. Chuck hadn't and was first on the scene. The scene he described to me—the client was conscious, gurgling blood through smashed teeth, with broken leg bones piercing the skin—is almost too gruesome to imagine. Chuck spent a good 20 minutes helping the medics load him into the ambulance, and he left covered in blood. Luckily for Chuck this client had no blood-borne diseases. (The most common among our clients are HIV and hepatitis. Hep C, which slowly attacks the liver, is incurable and is carried by about 70 percent of IV drug users.) The client is still living and making a recovery.

I should hasten to add that I think our staff acted empathetically and professionally toward this client. He had expressed suicidal thoughts to a night-shift counselor several days before. This counselor gave him emotional support and persuaded him to sign a no-harm contract. (A no-harm contract is a promise made by a suicidal person that he will seek help before killing himself. To an outsider it sounds almost hokey—Camus would certainly take issue with its existentialist implications—but to someone who is in extremis, it can serve as a tangible symbol that somebody cares about him. Studies have proven that it saves lives.) Of course, in any given week there are several clients who voice suicidal thoughts, and in any month there are several no-harm contracts signed. We take every threat seriously, but someone who is truly determined to attempt suicide will do it.

Most of the time, disabling mental illness is less melodramatic but no less tragic. For instance, there is a man in his early 20s who paces the shelter every day. He likes to kickbox the air, and when I say hello, he usually ignores me. When he does open up to me, as he did yesterday, he says things like this: "I am Arabian. That's 'cause I'm the sultan of Saudi Arabia. You have to be Arabian to make money in Saudi Arabia. My name is muy bien. That means money in Arabian … All the stars in space. That's the flag I carry around. I put it in the black hole in my neck. I have this metal plate in my head. I was an android working stuff."

In psych textbooks, this is known as grandiose delusion. If you pretend to understand what he's talking about, or pretend to agree with him, he will latch on and not let go. After listening to him for 10 minutes yesterday, I said goodbye and began to walk away. He followed me across the entire shelter, continuing his monologue.

Because this client is young and obviously psychotic, it is relatively easy to sympathize with him. This is less true for other mentally ill people. As I was leaving the shelter for lunch today, I ran into a Native-American client who stops by the shelter several times a month to seek out his case manager. He doesn't make appointments; he just drops in, with a menacing look on his face, and gets mad when his CM happens to be out. As I passed him in the stairwell, I told him that his CM was not in. "I feel like he's ignoring me," he protested. I tried to assure him that this wasn't the case, but before I could say much, he started to call several black clients on the sidewalk "nigger" and get in their faces. I yelled at him to walk away—for his own safety if nothing else—and luckily he did.


Subject: Entry 4
Updated Thursday, June 20, 2002, at 10:08 AM PT

About a dozen computer logs in the brief meeting this morning. Many are updates of ongoing sagas:

Log 1: Around midnight the shelter received an automated call from King County Jail. A barred client with a history of stalking the shelter's manager, Karyn, has been released. His restraining order prohibits him from being on the same block as the shelter. He went to jail about a month ago for—yes—violating the restraining order. His picture is posted in all staff offices.

Log 2: A long-term client, elderly and often surly, was sent to the hospital last night with a bleeding ulcer. He returned this morning. This client is a good example of a difficult type of homeless person whom I think the shelter deals with successfully. He is chronically insubordinate, partly due to dementia. He cuts in line during the evening meal, mouths off to staff and clients, and smokes wherever he feels like it. As a result, he receives one-day bars to the tune of one or two a week. We always let him back in, though, and he always comes back. In the context of the shelter, his behavior is merely a nuisance. We tolerate it partly so that when he develops serious medical problems, like bleeding ulcers, we can help him.

Log 3: A young female client is having her period again. We know this because she refuses to wear tampons or pads without coercion. Every month, she bleeds through her pants and leaves a putrid trail of menses behind her as she walks. When this happens, we make her take a shower and wear tampons, on penalty of a one-day bar. She usually complies.

Log 4: An obese, elderly client with asthma was sent to the hospital with breathing problems for the second time in one night. This is nothing new, because this client—who is a die-hard chain smoker—goes to the hospital once or twice every night. She smokes, becomes visibly short of breath, goes to the hospital, comes back, and smokes. She made over 30 trips to the ER last month, and she appears to be keeping pace this month. (My former colleague Chuck did a back-of-the-envelope calculation: Assuming, conservatively, that each ambulance trip costs the taxpayers $300, given her $500 a month in Social Security income, it would take this client several decades to pay off just one month of ambulance trips.) As a legal matter, we cannot refuse to call 911 when a client has an obvious medical need, even a chronically self-induced one. But as a matter of shelter policy, we bar her for one day if she makes more than one trip in a night. Of course, if we kicked her out on the street permanently (which we may do), she would still smoke, wheeze, and call 911 from pay phones. To provide a long-term solution, Karyn has been meeting with hospital officials (who are also fed up) to find a group home that will accept her.

Log 5: At 1 a.m. the Back Door Ultra Lounge, a nightclub on the ground floor of the Morrison Hotel, began blasting music loudly enough to be heard, and felt, throughout the shelter. A night-shift worker called the BDUL, which promised to turn the music down. Instead, it got louder. This ritual occurs nearly every night. Last year, when the Seattle Housing Authority owned the Morrison, it signed the BDUL to a multiyear lease, over DESC's protests. DESC bought the Morrison last October, but a fierce legal fight has yet to negate the lease. (On weekends, the pounding of the bass begins around 10 p.m.)

Log 6: At 2:30 a.m. shelter staff heard a single gunshot on the street. A half-hour later four squad cars were investigating. This is the third shooting in front of the shelter since I began working here. The first was an early-morning drive-by. Several people on the street were hit, and one of the Morrison's windows was shot out, but no one died. The second shooting occurred at 8 p.m. A man, perhaps fleeing a drug deal gone sour, took a bullet in the back but lived. (On my first day of work, nine months ago, a loaded pistol was found in the underground bus station on the corner.)

My day, as it turned out, was quiet, as far as the shelter goes. At 1 p.m. I found a forged-steel steak knife on the floor. It had probably been carried and concealed by one of our clients. For lack of a better place to put it—nobody was eager to claim it and take a weapons-possession bar—I walked back to our kitchen, sharpened it, and placed it in the knife drawer.


Subject: Entry 5
Posted Friday, June 21, 2002, at 10:41 AM PT

Two drug-related incidents in the shelter today. Around 10 a.m. a middle-aged client tried to pick up a chair, lost his balance, and fell hard to the ground. Staff came to his side and tried to talk to him, but he only mumbled incoherently. A woman sitting nearby reported that the fallen client had said he had suffered a seizure the day before. Perhaps. His incoherence did mimic a post-seizure haze. But we know this client too well to take this apparent explanation at face value, for he is perhaps the shelter's premier heroin addict. He never shoots up in the shelter, but he comes in high about three-quarters of the time. (His addiction has left him so malnourished he has scurvy rashes.) He has mastered the art of stumbling about the shelter in a state of semiconsciousness, like a sleepwalker who never wakes.

He usually doesn't fall down, however, and today he had another symptom: a slow rolling of the lips. This is a Parkinsonian symptom that often appears as a side effect of anti-psychotic medication. The client does take an anti-psychotic for schizophrenia, but he takes one of the newer generation—developed in the mid-'90s—which trigger those side effects at a much lower rate than the older generation. (They appear in 0.5 percent of patients per year, as opposed to 5 percent per year.) Our nurse examined him and decided to call an ambulance. Did this client have a seizure yesterday? Did a brief seizure trigger the fall this morning? It's possible, the nurse told me, but he's never been diagnosed with epilepsy. More likely, a heroin overdose or withdrawal triggered a seizure. Or maybe he just took too much smack and slipped briefly from semiconsciousness to unconsciousness. The medics propped him up in a stretcher and took him to the hospital for tests.

After lunch I did a routine bathroom sweep and found a client in front of a urinal slipping something to the guy next to him. They spied me, stuffed their paraphernalia into their pockets, and pretended to piss. I smelled crack smoke—for the uninitiated, it smells like an electrical fire—and ordered them to do a self-search, which turned up nothing. Without evidence, I couldn't bar them. I warned them to leave their habit outside and logged the incident on the shelter computer. To take a hit of crack you need to expose the lighter and pipe for only several seconds, so catching clients in the act is hard. What's sad, though, is the lengths clients go to for a fix. Several weeks ago I had a long conversation with a new client despairing over his crack addiction. He's a skilled worker, but he can't pay rent or hold a job because of his habit. His "girlfriend" provides him with crack but also sells herself to get it. We strategized ways to stay away from the girlfriend, and while we both knew the odds were against him, he thanked me, and I believed I had earned his trust. Several days later he begged me to let him use a locked bathroom so that he could piss. I let him. He was in and out in 15 seconds, and the bathroom smelled like an electrical fire.

I want to end this diary by talking about equality, as a matter of both policy and philosophy. An annual one-night count of Seattle's homeless found nearly 1,500 people on the streets last October. Some of these folks want to sleep outside, but most don't. The solution isn't just to throw more money at the problem, though that would certainly help. Research indicates homelessness persists partly because of a misallocation of resources. This occurs in two ways: 1) Most chronic homeless people are single men, yet most human-service charities target women and children. 2) Chronic homeless people do not receive enough mainstream social services, such as welfare, health care, and addiction treatment. As a result, they consume a disproportionate amount of emergency social services, such as shelter beds. This pushes many of the temporary homeless—who constitute the vast majority of the population—onto the street. (Welfare-reform wonks sometimes call the mentally ill and drug addicted the "hard cases," partly because they don't respond to monetary incentives as effectively as the more functional population. They are hard to treat but vital to the larger solution.)

The Morrison Hotel's history as a destination for the rich provides a daily study in wealth and the lack thereof. The shelter's walls are actually mahogany paneled with engraved cornices near the top. But decades of retrofitting have shrouded the building's turn-of-the-century opulence with a floor of cheap tile and a drop ceiling. Add to this the rows of cheap plastic chairs, the piles of ugly gray mats, and the constant stench of urine, B.O., and bleach, and you have a thoroughly decrepit space. (A DESC client-confidentiality policy prevented me from photographing it.) When I first entered the shelter, I was reminded of the scene in Dr. Zhivago when Zhivago comes home to find his mansion being commandeered by angry Red soldiers and stripped by hungry peasant squatters. "There was living space for 13 families in this one house!" one of the commissars barks. Zhivago replies, "Yes, this is a better arrangement, comrades. More just." His wife begins to titter, but Zhivago, that bleeding heart, protests: "Well, it is more just, Tonya. Why did it sound so funny?"


Donor White Meets His Daughter
Fifteen months ago, Slate helped a mother search for the Nobel Prize sperm bank's "Donor White"—the genetic father of her daughter. We just found him.
By David Plotz
Posted Wednesday, August 7, 2002, at 12:23 PM PT

In February 2001, Slate launched "Seed," a three-month series about the Repository for Germinal Choice, the "Nobel Prize" sperm bank that was started by California industrialist Robert Graham in 1980 and closed in 1999. Slate searched for the 200-odd children conceived through the "genius sperm bank," their parents, and the men who donated the sperm for them. (At the bottom of the page, you'll find links to the 13 other articles in the Seed series, including the introduction explaining the project.)

The article that generated by far the most reader response chronicled the hunt for Donor White. The piece, which you can read here, recounted the story of "Beth" and her now 11-year-old daughter, "Joy." Beth, whose husband had had a vasectomy, conceived Joy using sperm from the repository donor identified as "White # 6." According to the description in the repository catalog, Donor White was an accomplished scientist born in the 1930s who liked running and gardening. Employees at the repository told Beth that other mothers who used Donor White had "happy babies." That's what Beth got: a happy, blond infant, who has grown up into a happy, blond, ballet-dancing, Harry Potter-loving, horseback-riding little girl.

Beth wanted to thank the man who gave her this gift, so when Joy was 7 months old, Beth arranged to leave the baby at the repository's Escondido, Calif., office for a few hours. Beth, who then lived nearby, dropped Joy off with the office manager, Dora Vaux. Vaux immediately called Donor White, who also lived in Southern California. The donor and his wife rushed over to meet his baby daughter. They brought Joy a Fisher-Price doll. When the visit ended, he told Vaux he "would live on that moment for the rest of his life."

As Joy grew up, Beth sent photographs of her to the repository, always enclosing an extra copy for Donor White. In 1995, Donor White responded by writing Joy a birthday card, in care of the repository. The repository covered up his signature but forwarded the card to Beth. Soon Beth and Donor White were corresponding regularly through the repository. (Beth, understandably, didn't tell 5-year-old Joy about it.) Beth sent the donor a Father's Day card. He mailed back a poem he wrote about Joy, "A Figure of Red on a Field of White." He said that he hoped Joy would follow him into science since he and his wife had no children of their own. He and his wife signed their letters "your adoptive grandparents." In one Christmastime note, he told Beth that he hoped he might someday, somehow meet his daughter.

Then, in early 1997, the letters stopped. Dora Vaux had left the sperm bank. A new manager and the board of directors worried that the correspondence violated the repository's confidentiality rules. The repository wrote a note to Beth: "We simply cannot continue to share Joy with the donor."

Beth was devastated. She and Joy were alone in the world. She had divorced from Joy's "social" father, and she had no other children. In 2000, when Joy was 9, Beth finally told her about her genetic father. She read Joy one of Donor White's letters and gave her the Fisher-Price doll she had kept for all those years. Joy told Beth that she thought of Donor White "as being like Professor Dumbledore in the Harry Potter books." Joy said she wanted to meet him.

When Beth saw Seed, she called Slate. She knew that Donor White wanted to find her as much as she wanted to find him, and she thought Slate's articles—and our offer to be a conduit—were her only chance. "A Mother Searches for 'Donor White' " appeared on Feb. 27, 2001, inviting Donor White to contact me confidentially. Beth and I got our hopes up. Scores of readers wrote to sympathize with Beth and Joy. Dozens of offspring from other sperm banks e-mailed me to ask Slate to find their donor fathers. But not a word came from Donor White.

Three TV newsmagazines contacted Slate wanting to interview Beth and Joy. Beth, protective of her family's privacy and Joy's innocence, agonized about the offers and eventually refused. Beth and I kept corresponding. "I can't believe that he knows about us and is choosing not to contact Joy. You will see from the letter how warm and unguarded he was," she wrote. "I can imagine him, a 70-year-old man, with no children to call his own, looking at these pictures of Joy and just being overcome with all kinds of emotions. I wish he could see them."

Then, on June 12, 2002, a long e-mail appeared in my inbox. It began, "This is Donor White …"

Donor White, it seems, isn't much of an Internet user, and he had never heard of Slate. But on June 11, he had used a search engine for the first time. He typed "genius sperm bank" into alltheweb.com. It pulled up "A Mother Searches for 'Donor White.' " He was stunned.

In his initial e-mail, which you can read here, Donor White offered details to verify his identity. He described how he had been recruited into the repository in 1984, when he was working in a California high-tech company. He gave a careful account of the visit he had with Joy in 1991. He mentioned that he'd fathered 11 boys and eight girls through the repository. He described how Dora Vaux inadvertently let him learn the identities of two other children—a brother and sister—and that for years he ran by their house so he could watch them grow up. He ended the note like this:

"I cannot imagine that some of the donors contacted have said that they rarely think about their children, because I think of mine very often. Indeed, I expect that they will be included among my last conscious thoughts on this sweet earth."

Donor White asked me to forward the e-mail to Beth, but before I would, I needed to verify his identity. Every corroborating fact he gave about the repository could have been gathered from press reports. So I quizzed him about details of his family history that he revealed in his earlier letters to Beth, letters that she had passed on to me. (I asked him where his ancestors were from, how old his mother was, how one of his grandfathers died, and what Beth's and Joy's real first names were.) He nailed the answers.

The night I got Donor White's answers, I called Beth and forwarded his first e-mail to her. I included Donor White's e-mail address so she could write him directly. Beth was ecstatic and wrote back instantly. Donor White received her e-mail on Father's Day. They immediately struck up a giddy, loving correspondence. He traced his family tree for Beth, described his mother and father, told family stories, and sent a poem that his mother had written. Donor White charmed Beth with his straightforward warmth. "I am so emotional I am having a hard time concentrating," she wrote me in a late June e-mail.

Beth kept the news from Joy for three weeks. "I needed time to settle down, I was on an emotional high. … I just wanted to tell her in the best way possible." When Beth told Joy that she'd found Donor White, her daughter asked, "When can I meet him!!?"

On July Fourth, Joy wrote her first e-mail to Donor White. Since then, Joy and Donor White have been messaging each other two or three times a week. She writes to him about school, dance, track, her summer vacation. Joy advised him to see the Harry Potter movie before reading the book. Donor White talked about his pets and favorite books and passed on stories about their ancestors. Joy asked what she should call Donor White and his wife, and they decided to use first names. They sent each other photographs. Writes Donor White, "I was most highly pleased with Joy, and my photo was not so bad that it caused her to change her mind about a visit with us."

At the end of August, Beth and Joy will travel to California to spend a few days with Donor White and his wife. He is going to take them to a favorite garden, for a walk on the beach, and to see a museum that might interest Joy. "Mostly, though, I think that we will visit in our home, as I have a good many things to show Joy that I believe will be of interest to her, including photographs of several of her half-siblings."

And so there is a happy ending, or, rather, a happy beginning.

It is a beginning that could foreshadow many more. Approximately 30,000 children per year are born from anonymous sperm donations—probably half a million kids in the two decades the practice has flourished. But when Donor White and Joy see each other in a few weeks, it will be one of the first times in history that an anonymous sperm donor has met his child—and the only time a donor and child have met without the help of the sperm bank. (There has been one published case of a bank helping a child meet her donor. But sperm bank experts I contacted have not heard about any other encounters between a child and an anonymous donor. Some American sperm banks are experimenting with "identity-release" programs that will allow kids to meet donors after they turn 18. Read about them here.)

Was it wrong for Slate to break the confidentiality the repository required? Read a discussion about this.

America appears on the cusp of a revolution in the relationship between donors and offspring. In the last few decades, the United States has been astonished by the vigorous campaign of adoptees to break open adoption records. A similar movement among sperm bank children seems inevitable. This is an age of genetic determinism. People increasingly demand to know their genetic heritage. Sperm bank kids are missing half of their genetic history, and they want to know it. A California court recently ordered a sperm bank to reveal the identity of a donor to his offspring when it turned out the donor had failed to mention a rare gene-linked illness in his medical history.

The wall of secrecy around sperm banks is cracking. In the past, families always hid their use of donor sperm in order to protect fathers. But more and more sperm bank customers are single women and lesbians, who don't need to pretend.

The result of these changes: Sperm bank kids will soon be demanding names. The first large cohort of sperm bank kids is now in its late teens. Unlike donor offspring of the '50s and '60s, many of them know their parents used a bank. As they enter adulthood and start their own families—which is the time people get curious about their past—they may start insisting that sperm banks open their sealed records. (Seed suggests that the Web could be another mechanism for donors and children to find each other. The Single Mothers by Choice Web site, for example, has a "sibling registry" where sperm bank moms can look for other kids from their donor.) The sperm bank kids may not succeed in opening records: The law isn't on their side. But Americans changed their minds about the rights of adoptees, and adoption records are easier and easier to open. Will they change their mind again if thousands of donor offspring demand to know their origins?

What will happen if donors and children do start finding each other? In some respects, donor offspring are like adoptees: They have a genetic parental relationship that challenges a social parental relationship. Adoptees and their birth parents don't necessarily find happiness when they meet, and there's no reason to assume that donors and their children will have it easy. But unlike adoptees, donor offspring are unlikely to be troubled by feelings of abandonment.

Donor White and Joy seem likely to avoid many of the emotional conflicts that others might face. Donor White is too old to be Joy's father, so their relationship already resembles a grandparent-grandchild bond more than a parental one. Joy's social father, while not enthusiastic about the reunion, isn't trying to prevent it. Donor White has no children of his own, so he doesn't have to worry about hurting the feelings of his own kids when he pays attention to Joy. Still, who knows how it will turn out in reality? Slate will keep in touch with Donor White, Beth, and Joy to discover what happens in their new family.

The original idea of Seed was to see what became of the children born from the "Nobel Prize" sperm bank. We were happily surprised when it turned out that people were just as interested in lost families as in genius babies—and that Slate, purely by accident, had become a tool for helping donors and repository families find each other.

This is a task we welcome. I've heard from several other repository donors who would like to meet their children and from several other repository mothers who would like to meet their donors or have their children meet unknown siblings. (Slate has introduced two half-siblings from one donor and plans to introduce several others to each other in coming weeks.)

Beth and Donor White hope their story will inspire other Donor White families to seek them out. Beth would like siblings for Joy. Donor White would love to know more about his other, lost family.

To other parents who conceived children using Donor White's sperm: If you would like to be in touch with Donor White or with your child's half-sister, Joy, and Joy's mom, Beth, please e-mail me at plotz@slate.com or call me at (202) 261-1370. All contacts will be considered confidential.

If you are a parent, child, or donor who wants to find lost repository relatives, Slate wants to hear from you and to help you find them. Please e-mail me at plotz@slate.com or call me at (202) 261-1370. All contacts will be considered confidential.

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Dear Mr. Plotz:

This is Donor White and, even though some 15 months late, I hope that you will be so kind as to pass on this note and my e-mail address to Beth about whom you wrote in your article regarding the Repository of Germinal Choice (RGC).

I am sorry to be so late in responding, but some allowances should be made for lack of knowledge about the type of Internet search engines that finally led me to your article, considering that I was one of those who went to a college specializing in engineering in the days when students wore their foot-long slide rules dangling from their belts and tied to one leg like a gun fighter in the Old West. Later, when introduced to computers, I carried a foot-long tray of punched cards into a room about the size of a basketball court, all of which was required to hold a single computer. Those of my generation can never compete in cyberspace with younger people who grew up using modern computers.

So that you and Beth might know that I am who I claim to be, please allow me to tell you a little bit about how I became involved with the RGC. In about 1984, I received a call from the receptionist at the high-tech company where I worked telling me that I had two visitors. I assumed that they would be visiting scientists with whom I often dealt, but instead I found two older women unknown to me, one of whom was Dora Vaux mentioned in your article.

They received visitors badges and I escorted them to my office, but I soon excused myself long enough to close the open office door after being told of recommendations from two different persons saying that I might be a suitable candidate to be a donor at a sperm bank they represented. I listened, without saying much, mainly because of being virtually speechless. I would never have thought about such a thing in my entire lifetime and had no idea that I would wind up becoming involved. However, not wishing to be rude, I told them that I would need to think about this myself for some time and then speak to my wife before getting back to them in case there might be any chance of going forward.

In fact, I had already written this off as a strange experience and had no intention of any additional discussions. Over fully the next three months, almost every week, I received a copy of a letter from a grateful recipient, a copy of a magazine article, or a videotape about the RGC. None of this made much difference but might have worked subconsciously because then came the dream that changed everything.

I had also been doing some research on family history and had been thinking about my grandfather who was only 6 months old when his father left for the Civil War, never to return. My grandfather lost contact with his father's family and always regretting not knowing more about them.

The combinations of these things, perhaps, led to a dream in which I was sitting on the edge of an open field with my back against the trunk of a giant oak tree. It was a beautiful day and monarch butterflies were flitting about all around me, when some distance away the outline of a man could be seen coming out of the field toward me. There was a bright light at his back that blinded me until he came close enough to fall within the shade of the tree, at which time I immediately knew who he was before a single word was said. While no photograph of him existed, I knew that this poorly dressed man was my great-grandfather from the Civil War, because he looked exactly like a composite of my father and grandfather.

Without any introduction, he spoke to me as follows: Most of my friends volunteered at the first opportunity to enter the war. I was newly married and waited until there was danger of being conscripted before joining up. Because of that I had a son that I was never really able to know, which is the only reason that you and all of those known to you having my name ever had a chance at life. You now have that same opportunity.

I had never had a dream of such clarity, and there is no doubt that this caused me to agree to an evaluation, which I never expected to lead to anything because I had been told that even many of those with high sperm counts produced samples that did not freeze well. Well, there were a few more delays here and there, but if Joy has a desire to be a part of a large family she would be highly pleased if all of her half-siblings could be rounded up. At the last accounting that I had, there were 19, 11 boys and eight girls. I have seen very pleasing photographs of 11 of these and, in addition to the short visit with Joy of which mom Beth wrote, I have had the opportunity to watch two of the children grow into their teenage years.

As for my wonderful visit with Joy, she was being held by Dora when my wife and I walked up to them, and Joy immediately held out her arms to me to be taken. I held and admired her for perhaps 30 minutes during which time she was perfectly happy. Then she began to want to get down on the carpeted floor, where she quickly scooted over to a stroller that her mom had left and pulled herself up and began to try to step up over the side and get into the stroller seat. I lifted her up and sat her into the stroller, which caused the first hint of unhappiness that we had noticed. I then lifted her out and let her struggle until she was able to get into the stroller by herself, at 7 months of age.

I then turned to my wife and said to her: "We really have ourselves something special here." The smart one in my family, by a wide margin, has been my much younger sister. At a very early age she began to speak, not just in words but in complete sentences. She was so remarkable that almost every one who was around her said that she was the smartest child that they had ever seen. However, she could not tolerate being helped and wanted to do everything for herself. I could see that exact same behavior in baby Joy, and my guess is that this never changed. My sister lived up to her early potential, as several textbooks that she has written are used at colleges all across the country. The only reason for me to think that I might be even halfway suitable as a donor is because I had the same potential for inheritance at birth as did my sister.

We are not quite done with my Civil War ancestor yet. Beth has been extremely kind to show her appreciation in numerous ways, as she has said. After hearing of the story about my dream from Dora, Beth carried Joy to the re-enactment of a Civil War battle and found a man fully dressed in a fine soldier's uniform. I have no idea whether he was found at random or how this came about, but somehow a photograph came to be made with this Civil War soldier holding Joy (maybe 2 years old) in his lap. I do not exaggerate when I tell you that the hair stood up on the back of my neck and I felt a tingling all over as I saw how much that soldier looked like the man in my dream. Say what you will about this being a coincidence, but to me it was a sign that my great-grandfather would have been pleased that I had taken his advice given under the shade of that oak tree.

In regard to the two children that I have been able to watch grow up, the kindly Dora Vaux always gave me a bit more information on the White-6 children than the RGC management would have liked. She sent me a picture on one occasion of one of the earlier children, a little boy with his slightly unusual double given name written on the back. Then, about two years later, she told me the birth date of his sister. A few days later, by pure chance, I happened to notice a tiny item in our local newspaper about the announcement from proud parents of a new baby girl having that same birthday, with an anxiously awaiting brother at home with the same double name that I knew. There was no doubt in my mind that these were White-6 children.

I was able to learn from the phone book that their parents lived only about a mile and a half from my house, and over the years the end of their dead-end street has been a perfect place for me to turn around while doing my daily three-mile run. I always make it a point to go by on Christmas morning and on their birthdays, where the garage door is always decorated with happy birthday signs and a party is often in progress….

Not yours, but many articles have been written trying to paint Dr. Graham and my good friend Dora Vaux as villains of some kind, when they had only the best of intentions in their wish to help others. I attended the funeral of Dr. Graham and happened to sit next to an elderly gentleman who asked me if I had known Dr. Graham for long. After telling him that I had not, he told me that he had known him from the early days. He said that while he did not have to, Dr. Graham had given him (and several others who had worked with him on developing his patents for plastic eyeglass lens) a small part of his company and that this had allowed him to have a comfortable retirement. Despite his great success in scientific work and in business, it would be my guess that Dr. Graham would have considered his greatest legacy to have been his establishment of and work at the RGC.

In some respects, Dr. Graham was his own worst enemy, because he went on nationwide TV programs in which he knew that there would be an agenda to make him look bad. This was all done for the good of the work at the RGC. In regard to the repository, Dr. Graham knew one thing that was very important—any publicity, bad or good, benefited his work. After such an appearance in which he might have been asked if he would like to clone Adolph Hitler, or some such thing, there was a flood of mail from those wishing to be recipients, because even in the most adversarial of programs there was usually an occasion in which the camera panned over a wall covered with the most appealing of children. These pictures of the children trumped anything bad that was said. The bottleneck in RGC operations was always a shortage of donors, as there were more recipient applications than could be handled.

I would not wish to end this message before telling Joy how pleased and proud I was to read of her many accomplishments and activities, but I have known that this was likely to happen ever since that day when I saw her work so hard to get into her stroller without any help. I cannot imagine that some of the donors contacted have said that they rarely think about their children, because I think of mine very often. Indeed, I expect that they will be included among my last conscious thoughts on this sweet earth.

My thanks and best regards,
Donor White

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The description of Donor White No. 6 in the Repository for Germinal Choice's catalog is spare and clinical. He's described as a "scientist involved in sophisticated research. Many highly technical publications." His IQ is "Not tested—but very high." His hobbies are "running, gardening, reading history." He "excelled in basketball and track." He's reported to be brown-haired, blue-eyed, medium-complexioned. His blood type is 0+, and he's myopic. One line breaks the chill. Under personality, it reads: "Very engaging, warm, friendly."

The Repository for Germinal Choice styled itself the "Nobel Prize" sperm bank. But like all its successful donors, Donor White hasn't won the Nobel Prize. Now retired from science, he describes himself as having had a "solid, but not outstanding, career in technical work, with scores of publications and a good number of patents, some with military applications." He still doesn't know why repository founder Robert Graham recruited him. He suspects that a former colleague, who may have himself been a repository donor, tipped Graham to him, and he guesses Graham liked that he was both a successful scientist and a decent athlete.

When two repository staffers approached him in 1984, Donor White was noncommittal. He and his wife couldn't have their own children, but the sperm bank didn't really interest him. Three months of steady requests didn't change his mind. Then he had a vivid dream about his great-grandfather, a soldier who enlisted in the Confederate Army only after his son was born, and then died in battle. In the dream, his great-grandfather told him that he too had an opportunity to give others the chance at life.

That inspired Donor White to sign up, and he soon became a stalwart contributor to the bank. He was older than most donors—around 50 when he started giving—but age didn't weaken his fertility. He fathered 19 children, more than any other donor I've heard about. (This large number of offspring raises questions about the repository's practices.)

Donor White soon knew more about his "kids" than he was supposed to. Most repository donors either had children of their own or chose to not have them. They tend to be less interested in their bank offspring than Donor White, who wanted to have his own kids but couldn't. (This is one reason Beth trusted him.)

The repository guaranteed anonymity, so how did Donor White learn about his kids? He seems an exceptionally warm and friendly man, he lived near the repository's office, and repository employees, particularly Dora Vaux, were soon confiding in him. Vaux, who more or less ran the repository, was looser with her tongue than she should have been. (She divulged the full name of a donor to at least one mother—not something a confidential sperm bank should ever let slip.) Vaux told Donor White the birthdays of all his kids and gave him baby pictures of 11 of them. She allowed him to meet infant Joy and correspond with Beth. She also accidentally revealed the identity of two children, a brother and sister.

Donor White became an enthusiast for the repository. In 1991, he published an article in a local women's magazine praising the bank. ("And Now a Word from a [Sperm Bank] Father" appeared under the pseudonym "R. White.") In the late '90s, Donor White asked the repository to let him study its birth records. He hoped to learn if sperm banks confirmed the finding in nature that couples in which the biological father is much older than the mother tend to disproportionately have boys. The repository never responded.

Of all his repository children, Joy was dearest to Donor White. She was the only one he met, and Beth was the only mother Donor White corresponded with. (Beth, who heard from Dora Vaux about Donor White's Confederate dream, even sent him a photograph of Joy with a Confederate soldier at a Civil War re-enactment. "I felt a tingling all over as I saw how much that soldier looked like the man in my dream," says Donor White.)

When the repository stopped their letters, he was heartbroken. Donor White made his own desperate, fruitless search for Beth and Joy. He had figured out what state they lived in (one picture of Joy bore the address of a photography studio) and guessed at their last name based on a few clues in a letter. He wrote a cryptic note to the only person in the state with that name in hopes that she would reply. He guessed wrong. He longed to meet Joy again and assumed he never would.

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American doctors started using sperm donors regularly in the 1950s, and from the beginning, anonymity was the rule. For decades, doctors didn't even keep records about who gave what to whom. Parents didn't want to know, because almost every family pretended the "social" father was the biological father. The rise of sperm banks in the '80s created a market for donors, as banks sought the smartest, healthiest, sportiest, tallest men they could find, and eagerly advertised their talents. (Click here to read a story about how finding sperm donors has become like shopping for a car.) The sperm banks continued to insist on absolute donor anonymity.

But no law mandates anonymity, and about 20 years ago, the progressive Sperm Bank of California pioneered an "identity-release" program. When they gave sperm, donors could agree to be identified when their children turned 18, if the children were curious. The first "ID-release" kids turned 18 last fall, but so far none has contacted a donor. Other small sperm banks are experimenting with similar programs, but none has advanced as far as the Sperm Bank of California's. Sweden, New Zealand, and parts of Australia have passed laws allowing donors to be identified, though no children have reached adulthood since those laws passed.

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The repository, like all sperm banks, imposed double anonymity for legitimate reasons. It hid the identity of the donor so that parents didn't make financial or emotional demands on him. Many donors don't want to know their sperm bank offspring, and the bank has an obligation to protect their privacy. And the bank kept the identity of parents secret to protect the family. A couple might want to pretend the social father was the biological father, and the bank had no business interfering with that.

Slate wanted to tell the story of the repository, but without violating the privacy of families and donors. So we made it an all-volunteer series: Because the sperm bank was so private, we only wrote about people who wanted to tell their stories. And Slate would not violate the confidentiality of donors who don't want to be found. There are repository donors I have talked to who don't want to hear from offspring, and Slate won't help the families that want to get in touch with them. We did not impose on Beth or Donor White. They came to us on their own. If Donor White didn't want to be found, he didn't have to contact us. Donor White made a decision that the happiness he could receive from getting to know Joy and Beth outweighed the risks of ending his anonymity.

Beth's family is slightly trickier. Beth decided on behalf of her daughter that they should know the donor. Beth is a mother and has the parent's right to make decisions for her child. But the case of Joy's social father is more complicated. He did not have a say about whether to contact Donor White. According to Beth, Joy's social father was surprised but "not angry," that Beth made contact with the donor. He told Beth, "I have always been her father and always will be. Make sure she knows that."

Donor White and Beth decided that knowing each other was more important than the repository's confidentiality rules, and accepted that their decision could create turmoil for Joy's social father. Slate decided that these were not its secrets to keep.

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Like most sperm banks, the repository limited the number of children a donor could father. In theory, the repository sent a donor into retirement after 10 children, making exceptions only to allow a family to have a sibling using the same donor. But in practice, repository policy may have been a bit looser, since Robert Graham did not have an easy time recruiting star donors. Several donors seem to have fathered many more than 10 children in more than 10 families. Since many of the repository's customers lived in Southern California, there is a remote but real possibility that half-siblings could meet each other (and who knows what else) without knowing it.

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Beth writes: "I knew enough about the donor from Dora Vaux not to be threatened by him. I knew that he was happily married for many years, but had no children of his own, despite having wanted them. I … was disarmed by his warmth and openness. We received a letter from him in 1995 and he referred to himself and his wife as 'Honorary Grandparents' and he just felt like family. If the donor was a young unmarried college student or a man with children of his own, we might not have sought out contact, and I certainly would never have pursued him if I thought he wasn't willing to make contact. The circumstances in this particular case make contact a pleasant reality."


The Romance of the Monorail
The mass transit technology of Tomorrowland finally reaches today.
By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Friday, November 1, 2002, at 10:28 AM PT

There's an episode of The Simpsons in which a smooth-talking huckster named Lyle Lanley, patterned after Music Man charlatan Harold Hill, persuades Springfield's gullible townsfolk to build a $3 million monorail. The transit system debuts to tremendous fanfare—Star Trek icon Leonard Nimoy shows up for the christening—but the euphoria is short-lived. Minutes into the maiden voyage, a brake line snaps, and the cartoon passengers nearly suffer a violent fate. The show's core joke is easy to get: How could these rubes not have realized that "monorail" is synonymous with "boondoggle"? One-track trains, after all, are a relic of the same Tang-fueled, Jetsons-era futurism that predicted the rapid rise of hover cars and holographic spouses.

But a decade after "Marge vs. the Monorail" first aired, monorails are no longer mere punch lines. Las Vegas is spending $650 million on a seven-mile monorail designed to ferry gamblers from one end of the Strip to the other. On Election Day, Seattle voters will decide yea or nay on a proposed $1.7 billion, 14-mile expansion of that city's one-mile monorail, a leftover from the 1962 World's Fair. And in northern Delaware, transit planners are championing a 15-mile monorail as the best solution for alleviating the region's traffic jams and worsening air quality.

The fad may provoke laughter in those who chiefly associate monorails with Disney World, but the technology's history is longer and more distinguished than most people realize. A suspended version known as the "Swinging Railway" has been gliding through Wuppertal, Germany, since 1901, and monorails flourish in such metropolises as Tokyo, Osaka, Singapore, and Sydney. Just a quick I-5 jaunt from Seattle finds Vancouver's SkyTrain, originally built as a gimmick for the 1986 Expo but later expanded deep into the suburbs. The line now handles nearly 150,000 boardings each weekday.

Why, then, is America a virtual monorail abstainer, save for the occasional theme park or zoo? The nation's automotive fetish is an easy culprit, but Walt Disney deserves a fair share of the blame, too. In 1959, the "Happiest Place on Earth" unveiled a miniature monorail that snaked along the park's edge. Visitors dug the ride, but they also figured that such trains would never work outside Mickey's domain—if it was in Disneyland, well, then it must be a kiddie thing.

The monorail's image wasn't helped by two successive World's Fairs—Seattle in 1962 and New York in 1964—that featured monorails as futuristic centerpieces. The technology just couldn't shake the stereotype of being too fanciful for real-world straphangers. For the "Train of Tomorrow—Today!" tomorrow never seemed to come.

A few decades and massive gridlock later, folks are wising up to the monorail's many perks as they grope about for mass-transit alternatives. New underground subways have been dinosaured by dizzying construction costs, not to mention the legal and engineering headaches of digging through built-up cities. This is a lesson that Los Angeles learned the hard way with its superexpensive Metro Red Line, which hasn't helped a whit in lessening rush-hour congestion on the city's freeways.

Light-rail options are the current vogue, hailed as low-cost and easy to build. But laying trolley tracks on busy urban streets is more labor-intensive than it sounds. A separate lane must be created, electric wires must be hung to provide power, and streets often need to be widened to accommodate both trains and autos. There's also the issue of providing crossing points for pedestrians and vehicles. No matter how many safety precautions are put in place, sooner or later an unlucky driver or walker gets smooshed.

True, monorails cost more than light-rail systems: Estimates in Seattle range upward of $124 million per mile. At least for short-haul routes, however, that's where the disadvantages stop. Monorail tracks are prefabricated and can be erected relatively quickly: Simply dig a hole every 120 feet or so, plop down a column, and lift the track into place. Because the systems operate above traffic, collisions with errant motorists are never an issue. The trains are automated, saving millions in labor costs in the long run. And rubber wheels mean that Simpsons monorail salesman Lyle Lanley spoke the truth when he sang, "It glides as softly as a cloud."

This is not to suggest that Seattle's monorail plan is faultless or that any auto-jammed city need only go monorail to solve its every transit headache. They fit best in still-nascent cities where the columns won't disrupt bustling sidewalks and where commuters aren't too wedded to the freeways already.

A big knock on monorails, favored by opponents of the Seattle initiative, is that they're eyesores that cast shadows upon sidewalks and obscure views. That critique was valid during the monorail's World's Fair heyday 40 years ago, but today's tracks and columns are far less obtrusive. Some monorails get by with tracks just a shade over two feet wide. Support columns are thinner than ever and can be designed to blend into the surrounding environment. Besides, if you want a lovely view in a monorail town, simply fork over your fare and watch the scenery zip by at 50 miles per hour. It's a heck of a lot more entertaining than slogging through a city center via light rail.

As crazy as it may sound, that fun factor counts for something—a lot, in fact. The goal of mass transit is to convince people to abandon their cars, which feature such enticing accessories as CD players and elbow room. Light rails are too buslike to impress most commuters, too squished and close to the ground. Monorails, by contrast, strike a chord with travelers. There's something about the sleek designs, the pillowy rides, and the panoramic views that just enchants. Monorails have their own fan club, which claims more than 2,500 members who swap monorail toys and trinkets. Modern light rail can claim no such devoted fan base.

So, maybe the technology isn't quite as lampoon-worthy as The Simpsons would have us believe. Forget about Disneyland, the World's Fairs, and remember that snappy number from "Marge vs. the Monorail": "Is there a chance the track could bend?/ Not on your life, my Hindu friend."


How Do You Stop a Lava Flow?
By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Friday, November 1, 2002, at 12:49 PM PT

Sicily's Mount Etna has been spewing molten rock since last Sunday, when a series of earthquakes sparked the volcano's first major eruption since 1992. Some villagers in the nearby town of Linguaglossa, located just a few miles from the crater, are making evacuation plans. Is there any way to stop a lava flow?

Not dead in its tracks, per se, but there are some viable tricks to slowing down the deadly stream. The Italians' efforts to stymie Etna's lava date back to 1668, when a retaining wall was built on the mountainside. (It didn't work.) They've had more success in recent years, particularly 1983 and 1992, when hastily constructed earthen barriers managed to slow the flows, which typically sluice down Etna at a few dozen meters per hour. The lava eventually breached the barriers, but it was hindered enough that it atrophied before scorching inhabited land.

Some anti-lava folks put their stock in explosives. Back in 1935, a young George S. Patton Jr. (then a lieutenant colonel) led an aerial bombing strike against Hawaii's Mauna Loa, hoping to divert the lava away from the city of Hilo; it didn't work. But others have had success with dynamiting the narrow "lava tubes" through which the 1,800-degree rock travels. By widening the tubes, engineers force the lava to lose energy and dissipate higher up on the volcano. The Italians used this technique in 1992, too, with good results.

The most spectacular anti-lava effort in history occurred on the Icelandic island of Heimaey in 1973. Worried that the lava would flow into the harbor's mouth, forever closing the vital port to ships, Icelanders came up with an ingenious plan. They sprayed the flow with 6 million cubic meters of water, hoping to cool the lava enough—by about 50 degrees Celsius—so that it would solidify. It took five months of nearly constant spraying, through fire hoses and pumps, to atrophy the lava, but the scheme succeeded. But most volcano fighters do not have the luxury of such time.

When all else fails, there is always the ancient Hawaiian method: sending a holy figure to the lava flow's edge to make an appeal to Pele, the volcano goddess. Many Hawaiians credit the prayers of Princess Ruth Keelikolani with stopping an 1881 lava flow that threatened Hilo.


Dead Heat
Why don't Americans sweat over heat-wave deaths?
By Eric Klinenberg
Posted Tuesday, July 30, 2002, at 8:31 AM PT

It's not easy to picture a heat wave. We all carry stock mental photos of more camera-ready extreme weather, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods. These natural disasters are so visually spectacular that they make the front page or the TV news even when they occur in remote places. Extreme heat, on the other hand, is invisible.

But heat waves kill more people in the United States than all of the other so-called natural disasters combined. More than 400 Americans die from heat-related illnesses in a typical year. Annual mortality from tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods together is under 200. Since heat waves inflict damage on the nation's major cities, well within the range of most media organizations, the lack of visibility or panic is all the more mysterious.

Heat-wave deaths aren't the worst natural disasters only in quantitative terms, but also in qualitative ones because they're slow and preventable. There's no telling when an earthquake will strike. But dangerous heat always comes announced, and it's fairly easy to prevent human damage. Victims of heat tend to wilt gradually
In the past three decades, New York City (1972, 1984), St. Louis (1980), Philadelphia (1993), Dallas (1998), and Milwaukee (1995) have experienced massively deadly heat waves. But in recent years, Chicago has become the national epicenter of heat mortality. This summer, Chicago had recorded 27 heat-related deaths by July 22. That's small by current standards. In one week of July 1995, 739 Chicago residents—the majority of them home alone—died in one of the greatest and least-known American disasters in modern history.

To place the 1995 heat wave in context, think of the great Chicago fire of 1871. It killed less than half as many people. Other recent catastrophes, such as the Northridge, Calif. earthquake of 1994 or Hurricane Andrew of 1992, killed one-tenth and one-twentieth the number of people, respectively. Yet several lists of the most fatal American weather events of the 1990s fail to include the heat wave. In the words of the New England Journal of Medicine, the Chicago disaster "was forgotten as soon as the temperatures fell."

That's generous. From the moment the local medical examiner began to report heat-related mortality figures, political leaders, journalists, and in turn the Chicago public have actively denied the disaster's significance and questioned whether the deaths were—to use the popular local phrase—"really real." Although so many city residents died that the coroner had to call in nine refrigerated trucks to store the bodies, skepticism about the trauma continues today. In Chicago, people still debate whether the medical examiner exaggerated the numbers and wonder if the crisis was a "media event" that the press had "propped up somehow." The American Journal of Public Health definitively established that the medical examiner's numbers actually undercounted the mortality by about 250 since hundreds of bodies were buried before they could be autopsied. But how many people read the American Journal of Public Health? For now, the heat wave stands as a nonevent—perhaps a footnote—in the grand narrative of affluence and revitalization that dominates accounts of urban life in the 1990s.

One reason so many people die in heat waves is that more Americans seem to be living and dying alone than ever before. In San Francisco, for example, officials report that they discovered almost as many cases of people who died alone, with no one to claim their bodies and estates, during the first six months of 2000 as they had in the previous decade. In Chicago, one month after the 1995 heat wave, county officials buried 68 people, most of them heat-wave victims, in a 160-foot-long trench.

Could it happen again? It already did. In 1999, over 110 Chicagoans perished in a late-July and early-August heat spell despite an exemplary response from city government that undoubtedly saved lives. Clearly, industrious local officials can only do so much.

There are a few simple and relatively inexpensive measures that could prevent future heat deaths. Cities can implement the heat-warning system designed by Laurence Kalkstein at the University of Delaware, a system that distinguishes dangerous air masses from ordinary summer heat. We can expand the supportive housing and social-service programs available to the people most likely to die in heat waves. And Congress can provide the poor with energy subsidies for summer cooling, just as it does for winter heat. (Rep. Danny Davis is now mobilizing support for such a bill.) Although it is cheap and effective, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program remains a favorite target of budget-cutters. In most cities LIHEAP funds run out long before the need ends. Just one week after the heat wave of 1995, with dozens of victims still unclaimed in Chicago, the House overwhelmingly approved a proposal to reduce LIHEAP funds. But compared to the cleanup costs and refunds the federal government routinely doles out to homeowners and corporations who suffer property damage in other disasters, the costs of preventing heat deaths are low. It's just a question of whether we value the lives of poor city dwellers as much as the property of wealthy coastal developers.


Death by Spam
The e-mail you know and love is about to vanish.
By Kevin Werbach
Posted Monday, November 18, 2002, at 7:35 AM PT

One-third of the 30 billion e-mails sent worldwide each day are spam. That's 10 billion daily pitches for herbal Viagra, Nigerian scams, and genital-enlarging creams piling up in our inboxes. Neither legislation nor litigation against spammers has stemmed the tide, and they're not going to have much of an effect in the future, either. It's time to give up: Despite the best efforts of legislators, lawyers, and computer programmers, spam has won. Spam is killing e-mail.

Or at least it's about to destroy the e-mail we're used to: the tool that lets a stranger respond to something you posted on your Web site or that lets a potential client contact you after reading an article you wrote. E-mail is pervasive because it's simple to use, remarkably flexible, and it reaches everyone. The trouble is that e-mail is too good at that third task. Because e-mail inboxes are open to anyone, longtime Internet users now receive hundreds of spams per day, making e-mail virtually unusable without countermeasures.

The most common countermeasure, server-side filtering, has serious limitations. No automated system can identify spam as well as a human can. Internet service providers certainly try: They block known spammer addresses and use algorithms to identify spam based on an e-mail's contents, subject line, or other headers.  AOL and MSN both trumpet spam filtering systems like this in their latest software, and Yahoo! and Microsoft's Hotmail offer junk-mail filters for their Web-based e-mail services. But the filters are running out of gas. The spammers keep multiplying, and they keep finding clever ways to fool the systems designed to stop them. Promising newcomers such as CloudMark, which taps the collective power of e-mail recipients to identify spam, may improve things for a while. But there will always be a trade-off between catching all the spam and ensuring that every piece of legitimate e-mail gets through.

So, sophisticated Internet users are turning to a new approach. Instead of trying to block spam while allowing everything else, these users employ software that blocks everything except messages from already known, accepted senders. These systems, called "whitelists," change e-mail from an open system to a closed one.

Whitelist applications available today include MailFrontier, ChoiceMail from DigiPortal, Vanquish, and the freeware Tagged Message Delivery Agent. There's also a whitelist option built into Hotmail, known as the "exclusive" setting. Though it's hidden in the preferences menu (click "Options," then "Junk Mail Filter"), more than 10 percent of Hotmail users reportedly invoke it. Before long, expect all e-mail applications to offer this function.

Whitelists typically allow e-mail from everyone in a user's existing address book. Other, unknown senders receive an automated reply, asking them to take further action, such as explain who they are. Or senders may be asked to identify a partially obscured image of a word. A person can make out the word, but automated spammer software can't.

Whitelists are rare today, but they will become more common.  The relentless growth of spam guarantees it. A filter that catches 80 percent of spam sounds great, and it is great if you get 10 spams a day. But when you get 500 a day, that same filter leaves you sorting through 100 opportunities to Make Money Fast!!!!!

Like it or not, the only way to kill spam is for an element of e-mail to die as well. There's always been something charming and casual about e-mail. The informality comes through in the style people use to write messages, but also in where they send them. You've probably sent an e-mail to someone you'd never call on the phone, approach in person, or even write a letter to. Losing this aspect of e-mail is a shame, but it's inevitable. E-mail will become more like instant messaging, with its defined "buddy lists."

E-mail's openness is doomed when faced with massive traffic and a few bad actors. The next time you try to reach out and touch someone electronically, you may need to know who that person is. Otherwise, you might be reaching out to no one.


Sex and Death
The awful existential significance of cellular suicide.
By Jim Holt
Posted Tuesday, October 8, 2002, at 12:52 PM PT

Monday, three biologists won a Nobel Prize in medicine for their work on how healthy cells can deliberately kill themselves. Cellular suicide was first discovered in the early 1970s. Scientists dubbed it apoptosis (AP-o-TOE-sis), a Greek word meaning "falling away," as in petals from a flower or leaves from a tree. Most of us do not worry inordinately about apoptosis. A few brain cells self-destructing here, a few lung cells or muscle cells self-destructing there—what's the difference? We go on living just fine. But, though it may not be obvious from today's news stories about the Nobel Prize, cellular suicide has an awful existential significance. It is the link between sex and death.

For the first billion years after life appeared on Earth, death was a contingent thing. The single-celled organisms that existed back then were essentially immortal. They reproduced over and over again by fission. Given protection from predators and enough food, they never died.

Only when sex entered the picture did death become inescapable. Living things that reproduce sexually have two kinds of cells: germ cells, which are involved in reproduction, and somatic cells, which aren't. The cells in our muscles and brains and hearts and lungs and just about everywhere else are somatic. The DNA in them directs the cell's day-to-day functioning. Over time this somatic DNA accumulates errors in the form of mutations—errors which make it not just irrelevant, but harmful. That is why every somatic cell has embedded in it a self-destruct program—a "death gene." After a certain predetermined span, the cell stops dividing and commits suicide, chewing up its bad DNA in the process.

The DNA in germ cells, by contrast, is destined for the next generation. These cells, which make sperm and ova, have lots of DNA-repair enzymes that prevent the buildup of dangerous mutations. Once enough copies of the germ-cell DNA get out into the world through sex, the somatic cells—which form the structures that make intercourse possible—become just so much excess baggage.

The division of labor between somatic and germ cells is eminently reasonable from the DNA's point of view. From our point of view, it is terrible. Our gonads aside, we are agglomerations of somatic cells. Our brains—the seat of our consciousness, of our selves—are made up of components intent on committing suicide as they become genetic garbage. Even if we evade disease and accident, senescence is sure to set in as more and more of our cells undergo programmed self-extinction. When enough of them die in our critical organs, so do we. As one biologist has put it, "Sex can save our germ cells, but it cannot save us."

One of the three scientists who shared yesterday's Nobel Prize was honored for identifying a death gene that may control cellular suicide in humans. What if this gene could somehow be switched off? Mightn't that be a first step toward bodily immortality? In fact, this seems to be precisely how a certain rather creepy form of immortality was conferred on one Henrietta Lacks of Baltimore. In 1951, Lacks, a mother of four then just entering her 30s, was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital with cervical cancer. A piece of her tumor was removed and, as it happens, passed on by the pathologist to a researcher who was trying to grow human tissue in vitro.

The cells from Henrietta Lacks—labeled HeLa—were astonishing. Unlike other human cell lines, which would grow for a while and then peter out, HeLa proliferated nonstop and consumed food voraciously. They seemed to have no senescence clock, no suicide program. Since this made them perfect for studying human cell biology, they were distributed to researchers all over the world. They were even sent into orbit aboard the Discover 17 satellite.

Once introduced into a lab, HeLa cells were so vigorous that they crowded out the other human cell lines. In the mid-'60s, it was discovered, to the horror of medical researchers, that hundreds of published scientific papers supposedly describing how certain heart cells or liver cells behaved were actually about HeLa. Since then the exponential growth of HeLa cells has continued apace. Somehow—scientists are still not sure how—their "death genes" have been deactivated. The number of them around the world today (and in space!) defies comprehension. Each contains a genetic blueprint for constructing Henrietta Lacks—who died in the hospital back in 1951.

This is not the sort of deathlessness anyone desires. We want the immortality of a god, not of a tumor.

In 1929 James Thurber and E.B. White posed a deep question: Is sex necessary? Seven decades later, the answer remains shrouded in mystery. But thanks to the work of yesterday's Nobel laureates and others, we have gained some understanding of a related question: Is death necessary? The answer appears to be yes—because of sex.


The Nigerian Nightmare
Who's sending you all those scam e-mails?
By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Tuesday, October 22, 2002, at 7:13 AM PT

Perhaps you heard from Daniel A. Oluwa over the past few days. He's a member of Nigeria's Federal Audit Committee. He dropped you an e-mail, labeled "Strictly Confidential," stating that he's discovered a frozen account containing $42.5 million. Mr. Oluwa wants to snag the loot, but, for unfathomable reasons, he needs a foreign-based partner to act as an intermediary. Interested? Merely send along your "bank name, address, account number, swift code, ABA number (if any), beneficiary of account, telephone and fax numbers of bank." Thirty percent of the booty shall eventually be yours.

If you didn't receive Oluwa's electronic plea, maybe you were instead pitched by Dr. Chukwubu Eze, who's looking for a partner to help him spirit away $33.62 million in illicit oil money. Or Steve Okon, the purported son of a murdered Zimbabwean diplomat. He's got the skinny on about $10 million stashed away in an Amsterdam vault. Or any number of women named Mariam who claim to be the widows of either the late Nigerian strongman Sani Abacha or the deceased Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. They need help tapping into some Swiss bank accounts.

As you no doubt guessed, none of these supplicants were on the up-and-up. But you might be surprised to learn that they are, in fact, Nigerian. Odds are they're all Lagos-based con artists looking for American dupes greedy enough and dumb enough to spend thousands in pursuit of nonexistent fortunes. They aim to lure you to Nigeria or to a nearby nation where you'll be cajoled into ponying up endless fees to secure the "riches"—$30,000 for a "chemical solvent" to disguise the money or $50,000 for "customs duties." When you eventually wise up, faux police barge into your hotel and demand massive bribes in exchange for your freedom. Tapped out? Expect to be held for ransom or murdered.

This swindle is commonly known as "419 fraud," after the section of the Nigerian penal code covering cons. According to the anti-spam software vendor Brightmail, 419 come-ons are the Web's second-most common form of junk mail, ranking behind only those incessant "herbal Viagra" ads. Though most people merely laugh at the pleas' awful grammar and all-caps style ("I WILL LIKE YOU CONTACT MY LAWYER ..."), about 1 percent of recipients actually respond. Of that number, enough people fork over enough cash to sustain an industry that ranks in Nigeria's top five, right up there with palm oil and tin. The U.S. Secret Service has estimated—conservatively, by its own admission—that the scammers net $100 million per year.

The scam is experiencing a digitally aided heyday, but 419's roots stretch back to the Jazz Age. It's an Africanized version of "The Spanish Prisoner," a classic 1920s scheme in which suckers were convinced that a wealthy scion was rotting in a Barcelona jail. Front some cash to win his freedom, and you'd be amply rewarded for your troubles. Or not.

Nigerian updates on the Spanish Prisoner first appeared in the late 1970s, when photocopied pleas began arriving in American mailboxes. Organized gangs located potential victims by combing through the White Pages, and they paid for the postage with bogus stamps. The volume of letters picked up in the mid-1980s, when Nigeria's oil industry tanked. The widespread adoption of the fax machine gave the hucksters an additional means of contacting their prey, and corporate faxes churned out plenty of junk letters beginning, "PLEASE EXCUSE MY INTRUSION INTO YOU BUSINESS LIFE. …"

The scam's transition to e-mail began around 1996. At first, because of Nigeria's lackluster telecommunications infrastructure—household phones are a rarity, to say nothing of dial-up Internet access—only the old organized gangs could afford to participate. But in the past two to three years, cybercafes have sprung up all over Lagos and other major Nigerian cities.

Information technology has lowered the barriers to entry for Nigerians hoping for a share of the 419 haul, just as it's helped countless Americans indulge their fantasies of becoming self-taught electronic musicians, video auteurs, or MP3 swappers. Brains, not money, is the scam's only prerequisite now, thanks to the Internet's inherently democratic nature. Unfortunately for the gullible of the world, Lagos teems with bright, underemployed youths who grasp that concept. No longer the sole domain of professional criminals, 419 has become a cozy family business, Nigeria's version of the Greek diner or Irish pub.

For $1 per hour, a lone 419er can use a cybercafe terminal to send out duplicitous spam, eliminating the need for sizeable startup capital (even fake postage stamps cost something). Spam "bots," or automated programs, comb the Internet in search of e-mail addresses, replacing the need to spend hours upon hours thumbing through American or European phone books. E-mail accounts can be obtained for free via services like Hotmail or Yahoo!, and they're untraceable when registered with false information and used from a public terminal. Some 419ers with rudimentary HTML skills have even begun to set up fake Web pages to bolster their scams. A site for the fictitious "Dominion of Melchizedek" recently bilked thousands of Filipinos in a bogus-passport con.

Not surprisingly, the number of 419 letters received by Americans has soared. The Secret Service reported a 900 percent increase in the volume of Nigerian scam spam between 2000 and 2001. The U.S. government is so rankled by 419 spam that it's given the Nigerian government an ultimatum: Do something about the problem by November or face economic sanctions. Although last year only 16 Americans claimed financial losses, totaling $345,000, that's probably a fraction of the full amount. Most victims are too embarrassed by their own stupidity to ever come forward.

Heartless as it may sound, there's a silver lining to the digitization of 419. The proliferation of cybercafes in Nigeria can be linked directly to the demand supplied by 419ers, who form the establishments' core clientele. Walk into an Internet cafe in Lagos, and chances are that a good percentage of the terminals are occupied by men masquerading as Laurent Kabila's long-lost son or as a rogue official at the Central Bank of Nigeria. The wiring of Nigeria is being propelled by 419—much as America's appetite for porn helped shepherd the commercial Internet through its infancy. AOL made it through its lean, early years only because of adult chat rooms and spicy picture downloads (which kept the meter running during the era of per-hour access fees).

Someday 419 will abate, when young, educated Nigerians have better economic prospects and foreign Internet users get it through their thick skulls that, no, you're not going to rake in millions by flying to Nigeria and fronting some stranger your life savings. And when that day comes, there will be a thriving Internet culture for Nigerians to use for more legitimate purposes. If the Daniel A. Oluwas of the world have the technical chops to work a 419 scam, they can surely get an e-commerce site going.


Dot-Columnist
Online video games are the newest form of social comment.
By Clive Thompson
Posted Thursday, August 29, 2002, at 7:56 AM PT

Last week, I tried to keep the World Trade Center from collapsing.

A friend e-mailed me the link to an online video game called New York Defender. The game starts with a cartoon World Trade Center standing beneath an open, peaceful sky. Then planes begin zooming in, and you have to shoot them out of the air before they collide with the towers. But within barely a minute, the game becomes so difficult—and the planes so frequent—that you can't catch them all. They break through your defenses and smash huge smoky holes in the buildings. The towers collapse. Game over.

Unlike most shoot-'em-ups, New York Defender doesn't give players a sense of excitement or joy. Instead, it makes them feel powerless. It is, in essence, a grim message about the hopelessness of anti-terrorism: Try as you might to knock every enemy out of the sky, one will always slip past. "There are no ways to actually win," Jonathan Pitcher, one of the game's French designers, wrote when I e-mailed him. "The winner becomes the last one to lose." Pitcher says more than 1 million people have played New York Defender, making it an unusually popular statement about the war on terrorism.

The online video game has become the newest way to mouth off about current events. Last summer, the pass-around hit was a Lizzie Grubman game in which you mowed down hapless Hamptons townies using a grinning Lizzie in her SUV. These days, there's a parody version of the arcade hit Street Fighter—Downing Street Fighter, in which nine British politicians beat the crap out of each other in a quest to become prime minister, all the while yelling mangled Japanese-style Engrish taunts at their opponents. ("You are no match for my kung fu. Stop wasting my time!" William Hague snarls.) It's a jab at the whole concept of party politics—where supposedly principled debate frequently turns into a cartoonish smack-down and, quite literally, a game.

The war, in particular, has inspired scores of similar titles, and their makers span the political spectrum from peaceniks to hawks. One designer crafted War on Terrorism, a game that allows you to gun down the Taliban with AK-47s and sniper rifles, then pummel Osama Bin Laden with your fists. ("No better way to kill time ... er, Taliban," the creator notes on his Web page.) Another designer created Al Quaidamon, a sardonic riff on both Pokémon and human-rights concerns over how we treat prisoners of war. ("Your very own war prisoner! How will you treat him?" the game asks. "Be careful, or you might just grow to love him!") A grisly title called Kaboom! has you play as a Palestinian suicide bomber. ("I just think people who blow themselves up are stupid," the game's author writes.) Meanwhile, the French creators of New York Defender also produced a game called Enduring Freedom, in which you try to bomb Afghan military bases while avoiding peaceful settlements. But the cartoonish little bases look pretty much identical to the townships, and they all whip by so fast that you wind up indiscriminately wiping out innocents despite your best efforts. Call it Collateral Damage, the game.

This material would have been unheard of a few years back, when only corporations could afford to code video games. But online animation software like Flash has made the means of production easy to download. In an hour or so, angry young Webmasters can spin their political opinions into interactive editorials. Many of the games are hosted at Newgrounds.com, a portal where thousands of people post their creations; visitors vote for their favorites, and the best ones become part of the site's permanent collection. The site has received so many games devoted to Sept. 11 and the war in Afghanistan that it has a special section just for it.

Mind you, the social commentary in these games isn't terribly sophisticated. Most are made by disgruntled teenage boys and young men, so they're often riddled with bathroom humor, sophomoric sexual antics, and misogyny. But some merely push the line of taste in a creative way, like Aaron Chapman, a 21-year-old atheist living in Texas. Annoyed by what he sees as omnipresent Christianity in government and society, Chapman began making a series of anti-Jesus games—including Messiah Annihilator, in which you blast away at phalanxes of attacking Jesuses. In the final round—when, in accordance with the conventions of video games, you fight the mastermind Big Boss—the game forces you to battle an Ultra-Mega-Jesus-Bot. (To start playing, you hit a button called "Begin the blasphemy!") Like South Park, it's puerile but acidly funny.

As a game, however, it's pretty dull. Most of these political games are. You'd never find yourself pumping quarters addictively into them. They're low-tech, 2-D, cartoonish, and the game-play in most is so painfully simple that you can master them after one or two sessions at the keyboard. Yet this is, weirdly, part of the point. These games aren't trying to get you hooked or make your thumbs sore. They're trying to make you think.


Hormonal Imbalances
Why were all those women taking hormones in the first place?
By Emily Yoffe
Updated Thursday, July 11, 2002, at 3:14 PM PT

How could so many doctors get it so wrong for so long?

This week the Women's Health Initiative, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, suddenly pulled the plug three years early on part of its massive study seeking to determine whether hormone replacement therapy for healthy, older women could prevent major chronic illnesses. For years now, women have been told that staying on hormones for the entirety of their post-menopausal lives would keep them living as long as the biblical Sarah while looking as gorgeous as Gwyneth Paltrow. But five years after taking hormones, a small but statistically significant number of women in the study were getting breast cancer, making the researchers conclude it was unethical to continue. In addition, the study revealed that women on HRT, in contrast with those taking a placebo, had more blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks. All this outweighed a corresponding reduction among participants in fractures and colon cancer.

These findings contradicted almost all medical expectations and call into question literally stacks of previous studies. After all, the pharmaceutical manufacturer Wyeth hadn't provided its drug gratis in the hope that the results would sink its stock price. Most people believed the HRT question was essentially settled; this latest study would offer the final proof. But with an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association announcing "Do not use estrogen/progestin to prevent chronic disease," long-vilified hormone skeptics scored a big win this week.

None of these skeptics is more prominent, less surprised, or has been more attacked than Dr. Susan Love, a researcher, medical activist, and former breast cancer surgeon at Harvard and UCLA. In her 1997 best seller, Dr. Susan Love's Hormone Book, and in op-eds and speeches, Love has argued for years that routinely prescribing hormones for older women amounts to a conspiracy between Big Medicine and Big Pharmaceuticals to turn a natural process—menopause—into a disease. As she writes in her book, even the phrase "hormone replacement therapy" implies "that you've lost something you should get back." As a consequence, Love had been treated by much of the medical establishment as a dangerous New Age nut who'd forgotten to get out of the menstrual hut in time to take her own estrogen. On the side of the Bigs were seemingly persuasive studies showing that taking HRT was one of the best things older women could do to prevent their number one cause of death: heart disease.

But Love was unconvinced by the supposedly miraculous effect of HRT on the heart and more concerned about the possible devastating effect on the breast. For one thing, most of the studies that showed heart benefits also showed some degree of increase in breast cancer. The heart benefits of such studies were seen to trump the breast cancer risks because heart disease overall kills many more women (a fact Love got wrong in her book). But as she presciently wrote five years ago:

Is it possible that … we will put millions of women on HRT to prevent heart disease and then the Women's Health Initiative will show that it doesn't work or, even worse, that the resulting increase in breast cancer is higher than we thought? It certainly is possible and some such as myself think it is even likely.

Love turned out to be right, because she pointed out an essential flaw in the many studies that had found that HRT protects the heart. One of the best known was the Nurses' Health Study, a huge investigation done at Harvard. The study tracked women's behavior—did they or did they not decide to take hormones?—and correlated it with their likelihood of contracting subsequent disease. This observational study found that hormone users had about a 50 percent reduction in fatal heart disease (and an increased risk of breast cancer that was, as noted, deemed worth the heart benefits).

But it turns out—and Love called this—finding that taking HRT tends to result in women getting less heart disease is like finding that dating Donald Trump tends to result in women's hair turning blond. All that was really "proved" in this study was that generally healthy women chose to take hormones in the first place. If you were the type of woman who went to the doctor to get the hormones and faithfully took them, you were also likely to be the type of woman who ate nutritiously, exercised, watched your blood pressure and cholesterol. And it showed that healthy women generally stay healthier than unhealthy ones.

The recommendation to get on hormones and stay there for life was founded on similarly observational studies of voluntary behavior. The Women's Health Initiative is seen as definitive (and different) because as a clinical trial it took two large matching groups of women from the general population and assigned one group to take the hormones, the other to take a placebo, and watched to see what happened.

There were other ways the hormone-using women may have skewed the results of the earlier observational studies. One was, as Love points out, that because of conflicting data over the decades, until recently women at high risk for heart disease were often not prescribed HRT, just as women at high risk of breast cancer were discouraged from using it. This meant that it's likely that women at lower risk for these diseases ended up being put on hormones in the first place. That self-selected sampling may have helped overestimate the beneficial effect of hormones on the heart since those most likely to get heart disease weren't in the hormone-taking group, just as it may have underestimated the deleterious effect of hormones on the breast, because women at high risk of breast cancer were also excluded.

Dr. Deborah Grady, a researcher at the medical school at the University of California San Francisco, has become an estrogen apostate. In 1992 she co-wrote treatment guidelines encouraging widespread, long-term prescription of hormones for prevention of heart disease. This week she told the New York Times of those same hormones pills, "This is a dangerous drug," and encouraged women to get off HRT. What happened in between? She became co-leader of a large clinical trial, the Heart and Estrogen/Progestin Replacement Study, that was only recently completed. Like the Women's Health Initiative, Grady's study was designed to compare two groups of rigorously selected women, in this case to see if older women who already had heart disease did better with hormone treatment or a placebo.

Grady's expectation was that HERS would give definitive proof to the assumption behind hormone recommendation. But in the first 18 months of this study, 50 percent more of the women on the hormones had heart problems than the control group. So confounding were the results that the researchers had the pills tested to make sure they hadn't been mixed up, Grady told the Journal of the American Medical Association. At the end of the more than six-year study, there was no difference in the heart problems between the two groups. The women being "treated" were no healthier than the women receiving the placebo.Love says there was a question lurking in the stacks of all those observational studies: Did hormones make you healthy or did healthier women take hormones? Both HERS and the Women's Health Initiative study have shown the answer is the latter.

While one part of the Women's Health Initiative has been terminated, another part—the long-term health effects of estrogen alone on women who have had hysterectomies—will continue. (The hormone progestin is added to estrogen in HRT for women who have their uteruses in order to prevent cancer of the uterine lining.) To date, participants in that part of the study have not shown an increase in breast cancer. The hormone opponents say just wait. Research shows, says Love, that estrogen alone seems less damaging to the breast than the hormone combination. But she doesn't believe it's benign. Let this study run long enough, she says, and there will likely be more bad news for the advocates of hormones.


Unintelligible Redesign
This is the way creationism ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, February 13, 2002, at 10:48 AM PT

According to scientists, teachers, and civil libertarians, the Taliban has invaded Ohio. Creationists have devised a theory called "Intelligent Design" (ID) and are trying to get Ohio's Board of Education to make sure it's taught alongside Darwinism. Unlike creationism, ID accepts that the Earth is billions of years old and that species evolve through natural selection. It posits that life has been designed but doesn't specify by whom. Liberals call ID a menace that will sneak religion into public schools. They're exactly wrong. ID is a big nothing. It's non-living, non-breathing proof that religion has surrendered its war against science.

Creationism used to be assertive and powerful. Darwinism wasn't allowed in schools. As Darwin gained the upper hand, conservatives fought to preserve creationism alongside evolution. They lost the war on both fronts. Courts struck down the teaching of creationism on the grounds that it mixed church and state. Meanwhile, scientific evidence discredited the belief that the Earth was created in six days and was only 6,000 years old. Like the Taliban, creationists were washed up. Their only hope was to flee to the mountains, shave their beards, change their clothes, and come back as something else.

What they've come back as is the Intelligent Design movement. Gone are the falsifiable claims of a six-day creation and a 6,000-year-old Earth. Gone is the God of the Bible. In their place, ID enthusiasts speak of questions, mysteries, and possibilities. As to whether God, the Force, or ET created us, ID is agnostic. "We simply ask the question as to whether something can form naturally or if there must have been something more, a designer," Robert Lattimer, an ID proponent in Ohio, told the Columbus Dispatch. "Our main contention is that [evolution-focused curriculum] standards are purely naturalistic and leave no room for the possibility that part of nature can be designed."

This soft-headed agnosticism matches the soft-headed arguments for including it in the curriculum. They're the same arguments leftists have made for ebonics. According to ID proponents, the committee in charge of Ohio's science curriculum is too "homogenous" and lacks "diversity." It marginalizes alternative "points of view" to which students should be "exposed." A conservative state senator says some people "think differently, and all those ideas should be explored." A conservative member of the state education board says Ohioans deserve a science curriculum "they can all be comfortable with."

Behind these pleas for diversity is the kind of educational relativism conservatives normally despise. "Biological evolution, like creationism and design, cannot be proved to be either true or false," writes one ID enthusiast in Ohio. Since evolution is an "unproven theory," says another, "belief in it is just as much an act of faith as is belief in creationism or in the theory of intelligent design."

The response of liberals, teachers, and scientists has been hysterical. They accuse the ID movement of peddling "intolerance," fronting for the Christian right, and trying "to force a narrow religious ideology into our schools." If Ohio lets ID into its curriculum, they prophesy, the state will become an "international laughingstock," triggering a corporate exodus, a decline in property values, and the collapse of Ohio's standard of living. They refuse to acknowledge a difference between ID and creationism. "This is just a new paint job on the same old Edsel," says an Ohio University physiologist.

The analogy is inside out. Creationists haven't repainted their Edsel. They've taken out the engine and the transmission. Without distinctive, measurable claims such as the six-day creation, the 6,000-year-old Earth, and other literal interpretations of the Bible, creationism no longer materially contradicts evolution. The reason not to teach intelligent design isn't that it's full of lies or dogma. The reason is that it's empty.

Advocates of ID do offer interesting criticisms of Darwin's theory of evolution. They argue that natural selection doesn't account for the rise and fall of species, that many biological mechanisms wouldn't make organisms more fit to survive unless those mechanisms appeared all at once, and that the combinations necessary to create life are so complex that it would be statistically impossible to generate them by chance. My colleague Bob Wright answered these criticisms in Slate last year. I don't know whether they stand up to his rebuttal or not. But I do know this: They don't add up to a theory.

A theory isn't just a bunch of criticisms, even if they're valid. A theory ties things together. It explains and predicts. Intelligent design does neither. It doesn't explain why part of our history seems intelligently designed and part of it doesn't. Why are our feet and our back muscles poorly designed for walking? Why are we afflicted by lethal viruses? Why have so many females died in childbirth? ID doesn't explain these things. It just shrugs at them. "Design theory seeks to show, based on scientific evidence, that some features of living things may be designed by a mind or some form of intelligence," says one ID proponent. Some? May? Some? What kind of theory is that?

As Wright explains, Darwinian theory makes predictions that can be tested. It predicts that the average difference in size between males and females will correspond to the degree of polygamy in a species, and that in species in which females can reproduce more often than males, females will be more sexually assertive and less discriminating about their sex partners than males will be. These predictions turn out to be true. Darwin claimed that humans had descended from apes. If fossils unearthed since his death had exhibited no such connection, his theory would have been discredited. What empirical predictions does ID make that, if proven untrue, would discredit the theory?

John Calvert, the country's principal exponent of ID, answered that question in a treatise he presented to the Ohio board. Calvert described the "methods" by which scientists can "detect" design in nature.

In summary, if a highly improbable pattern of events or object exhibits purpose, structure or function and can not be reasonably and rationally explained by the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry or some other regularity or law, then it is reasonable to infer that the pattern was designed. — the product of a mind.

That, in a nutshell, is ID. It offers no predictions, scope modifiers, or experimental methods of its own. It's a default answer, a shrug, consisting entirely of problems in Darwinism. Those problems should be taught in school, but there's no reason to call them intelligent design. Intelligent design, as defined by its advocates, means nothing. This is the way creationism ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.


Strep Threat
Can a sore throat lead to Tourette's syndrome?
By Emily Yoffe
Posted Wednesday, February 27, 2002, at 12:22 PM PT

Last February a happy, confident 8-year-old girl went to bed and woke up the next morning having turned into someone else. She came to her mother with a series of shocking confessions. She said she had licked people's bottoms and drunk her own urine. She listed the people to whom she had shown her private parts. She asked if this made her a "bad person."

The mother was horrified and baffled. She calmed the girl down and sent her to school. When her mother picked her up, the girl said she had spread her feces around the school. The mother casually checked with a teacher about the girl's behavior and was told she was fine. This went on day after day. The girl said she had blinded her brother with a fork in his eye. She said she wanted to step in front of a bus. She said she had swear words stuck in her head. At first the mother suspected sexual abuse, but the daughter said no one had touched her, and the parents could find no evidence anyone had. The pediatrician said it sounded like a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition of unknown origin, and referred the family to a psychiatrist.

Surfing the Web, the mother discovered other cases just like her daughter's: normal kids who suddenly become consumed by horrible thoughts or, in some cases, begin twitching uncontrollably. Doctors at the National Institutes of Health had a startling suspect: strep throat, one of the most common illnesses of childhood. Two months before the girl's transformation, she had come down with strep throat four times.

Virtually all elementary-school-age children will get a sore throat, often many sore throats, caused by the Group A streptococcus bacterium, and the overwhelming majority will recover uneventfully. Many will get better without even seeing a doctor and getting antibiotics, the standard treatment. But there is growing evidence that a range of neurological disorders from temporary tics, such as eye-blinking and head-scratching, to full-blown OCD and Tourette's syndrome are linked to the bacteria. The scientists who connected these neurological maladies to strep throat named the condition pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections, or PANDAS. Some scientists even believe that strep throat might be a factor in some cases of anorexia nervosa.

It is estimated that about 2 percent of the population suffers from OCD and/or tics, which are diagnosed on the basis of behavior, making the conditions more common than schizophrenia and manic-depression. But many believe the incidence is likely far higher. No one knows the cause, and not even researchers in the field know to what degree strep might turn out to play a role in these cases.

That infections can trigger common mental illnesses is not a new idea. It is a very old one, discredited for most of the 20^th century. In the middle of that century the cause for such disorders as schizophrenia, manic-depression, Tourette's syndrome, and OCD was believed to be bad parents. One theory was that OCD was the result of punitive toilet training. Toward the end of the century, the blame shifted to bad genes. That idea, which is still the most widely held in the scientific community, is that the unfortunate few inherit a bad gene or genes that, in the case of schizophrenia, make people hear voices or, in the case of OCD, have obsessive thoughts. Yet, despite many seemingly promising leads, no one has been able to identify this blighted DNA.

But what if the problem isn't bad genes but bad germs? Researchers are making the connection between OCD and tics with evidence of an infectious assault to the brain. For example, brain scans of children with PANDAS show that they have an inflammation in the basal ganglia, a portion of the brain that acts as a sort of gatekeeper for behavior and movement. It is the same inflammation seen in a rare neurological condition that arises from rheumatic fever, a disease caused by strep.

Scientists at both Brown Medical School and Yale University School of Medicine have infused rats with the blood serum of patients with Tourette's and/or OCD. How it affected the rats' thoughts is unknown, but the infused rodents exhibited the tics and grunts stereotypical of Tourette's. And, as just reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center identified a small group of children when they first exhibited signs of OCD and tics and eliminated the symptoms with early antibiotic treatment.

The researchers themselves warn that these studies, while intriguing, don't prove the infection connection and that each step forward raises more questions. For instance, treatments that have been effective in the newly diagnosed have been failures in people with chronic cases. Is that because strep is responsible for only a small portion of these neurological illnesses? If so, what causes the rest? Or could chronic cases be linked to strep, but the available treatments are only effective when the brain is newly under assault?

Paul Ewald, a professor of biology at Amherst College, is a leading theorist of the germs-not-genes movement (read a full explanation of his theories here). But if bad genes aren't responsible, why do disorders such as OCD/Tourette's/tics run in families? Ewald says there is a place for genetics in the theory. He posits that genes determine how an individual's immune system reacts—or overreacts—to any given infection. So, if that's the case, in the end what's the difference? Either some of us inherit a gene that makes us crazy, or some of us inherit a gene that makes us crazy because we got a certain infection. One crucial difference is if the cause is infection, there's the possibility of prevention or cure (for now, genes can't be fixed). Ewald says, for example, that the discovery of penicillin is the "biggest success story in all of psychiatry" because it ended one of the most common mental illnesses, syphilitic insanity.

For germ-theory proponents, the case that strep throat can cause a variety of mental disorders otherwise believed to be either psychological or genetic in origin is tantalizing. And a model for how that might happen already exists.

In the early 1990s, Dr. Susan Swedo, a senior investigator at NIH, was hoping to better understand OCD by studying a rare and ancient malady when a chance remark by a patient's mother led to the description of PANDAS. Swedo was looking at Sydenham's chorea, known in the Middle Ages as St. Vitus' dance, a disorder that causes facial grimacing and flailing limbs. Sydenham's occurs as a result of rheumatic fever, an autoimmune reaction to untreated strep throat that can cause inflammation of the heart. It was once the major killer of young children in the United States. But since the use of penicillin to treat strep throat became widespread in the 1940s, rheumatic fever incidence has declined dramatically. What intrigued Swedo about Sydenham's is that before the onset of physical symptoms, the young victims often experience OCD.

About 25 years ago, researchers discovered the likely neurological basis of Sydenham's. When we contract strep, our immune system recognizes the invading proteins on the outside of the bacteria, the antigens, and creates antibodies that attach themselves to the invader. That sends a signal to our white blood cells to kill the trespasser. But in an unfortunate quirk of nature known as "molecular mimicry," proteins in the human heart closely resemble strep antigens. In vulnerable individuals, the immune system, instead of stopping when the strep is vanquished, continues on an autoimmune rampage against its own heart. In the case of Sydenham's, the molecular mimicry, and the damage, is found in the neurons of the basal ganglia of the brain.

Swedo was evaluating a boy thought to have Sydenham's. He didn't, but he did have OCD and tics, and because these things often run in families, Swedo was not surprised to find that his older brother had Tourette's syndrome. As Swedo was talking to the boys' mother, the woman mentioned that it had become a family joke that whenever her kids' tics got worse, it was time to take them in for a throat culture because an increase in tics inevitably meant a strep throat.

It clicked. Swedo theorized that Sydenham's could just be one manifestation of neurological damage due to strep. Perhaps there were children who never got rheumatic fever or Sydenham's but who got OCD or tics directly as a result of an unremarkable sore throat. If that was the case, it meant there might be something they could do to cure it. Antibiotics were not the answer for the patients Swedo saw. Because it was so long between the onset of symptoms and her patients' arrival at NIH, the initial strep infection had cleared up. What was needed was a way to stop the autoimmune damage occurring in the brain.

So Swedo and her colleagues used a procedure called plasma exchange or plasmapheresis. It's like a high-tech bloodletting. She performed a series of five on each patient—the patient's blood was removed, and the fluid part, the plasma, where the antibodies are found, was discarded and replaced.

Swedo's initial study was much too small to be considered definitive. In all, she has treated only about 30 children with the most devastating cases. But the results are striking. Last April, two months after the onset of her symptoms, the 8-year-old girl was admitted to NIH for a two-week course of plasma exchange. During her first three days in the hospital, she was unable to eat because of the extreme distress of seeing other sick people; she was convinced she had made all of them ill. By the third plasma exchange, the girl was less fraught with worry. By the fifth, she was almost herself again. Within a week of returning home she was completely better. Over the course of the plasma exchange study, 80 percent of the children receiving it maintained a remarkable improvement in their symptoms a year later.

Will there be other neurological disorders linked to strep infection? Dr. Mae Sokol, a specialist in eating disorders at Children's Hospital in Omaha, Neb., believes some of her patients with anorexia nervosa had strep-triggered onset. Like the PANDAS patients, they tend to be preteens, and their parents can usually pinpoint exactly when, even to the day, the obsession with food began, usually within a few weeks of a strep infection. One 10-year-old patient, after an inadequately treated strep infection, became consumed with the idea that she couldn't swallow solid food. As she began losing weight, she liked the result. Six months and 30 pounds after the onset of her symptoms, she was referred to Sokol. At that time, the girl had a sinus infection, and Sokol treated her with a high dose of antibiotics. The girl began eating two days later. Sokol says there is a possible physiological explanation for such cases: The part of the brain thought to be responsible for body image is close to the basal ganglia, which is inflamed in children with PANDAS.

Could other infections trigger PANDAS-like symptoms? Dr. Louise Kiessling, a professor at Brown Medical School, says there is some evidence Lyme disease can provoke similar behaviors. And once the immune system is primed to overreact, other invaders besides strep can set off the process. For example, says Kiessling, children with Sydenham's have had recurrences of writhing after infection with the chicken pox virus or bacteria called Haemophilus influenzae.

While the connection between strep and neurological disorders is intriguing, it is far from proved. Research to find out to what degree strep is responsible for what percentage of OCD and tic disorders is continuing on everything from the chemical level to the epidemiological one. Researchers are trying to find out if there is a molecule produced in the brain unique to PANDAS patients. They are also following large groups of children to see if they can better correlate strep throat and subsequent behavior disorders. And if the work on a strep vaccine is successful, widespread inoculation could result in a dramatic decline of OCD and tics. (The doctors involved in the research all warn against rampant use of antibiotics, which is more likely to cause dangerous antibiotic resistance than prevent PANDAS.)

For now, Swedo doesn't have much better advice than teaching children about washing their hands and not sharing drinking glasses, and for parents of children who have shown neurological symptoms following strep, even minor ones such as eye-blinking, to be vigilant about sore throats. As the mother of the 8-year-old says, "I can't let her get strep."


Short Changed
Why do tall people make more money?
By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Monday, March 25, 2002, at 1:21 PM PT

Economists have known for a long time that it pays to be tall. Multiple studies have found that an extra inch of height can be worth an extra $1,000 a year or so in wages, after controlling for education and experience. If you're 6 feet tall, you probably earn about $6,000 more than the equally qualified 5-foot-6-inch shrimp down the hall. (Previously in this column, I wrote about the connection between beauty and income and weight and income.)

That makes height as important as race or gender as a determinant of wages. And it works for women as well as men. Even among female identical twins (whose heights can differ more than you might expect), the taller sister earns, on average, substantially more than the shorter.

Height matters not just for wages but for ascension to leadership roles. When I served on the board of directors of a midsized corporation, I missed half the sights on the plant tours because I couldn't see over the heads of my colleagues—all of whom, unlike me, had considerable histories of success in the world of business.

Of 43 American presidents, only five have been more than a smidgeon below average height, and the last of those was Benjamin Harrison, elected in 1888. (Another three, most recently Jimmy Carter, were just a hair below average.) Most presidents have been several inches above the norm for their times, with the five tallest being Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, and Franklin Roosevelt—suggesting, incidentally, that height predicts not just electoral success but a propensity to subvert the Constitution. (This statistical anomaly works in the other direction as well; the shortest of American presidents was James Madison, who largely wrote the Constitution.)

So, what's the deal? Why do the tall tower over the short in more than just physical stature? Does height breed respect, so that tall people get showered with riches? Or does height breed self-esteem, so that tall people are more likely to assert themselves? In other words, do tall people succeed because of how others see them, or do tall people succeed because of how they see themselves? That sounds like the kind of question you could argue for years and never settle, but three clever economists have gone ahead and settled it. Their names are Nicola Persico, Andy Postlewaite, and Dan Silverman of the University of Pennsylvania, and they've uncovered a key bit of evidence: Tall men who were short in high school earn like short men, while short men who were tall in high school earn like tall men.

That pretty much rules out discrimination. It's hard to imagine how or why employers could discriminate in favor of past height. If tall adolescents—even those who stop growing prematurely—grow up to be highly paid workers, it's got to be because they've got some other trait that employers value. Persico, Postlewaite, and Silverman believe that trait is self-esteem. Tall high-school kids learn to think of themselves as leaders, and that habit of thought persists even when the kids stop growing.

If not self-esteem, what else could it be? Are tall kids better-nourished? Do they come from wealthier homes or have better-educated parents? Are they smarter? Do they mature early and therefore get more out of high school? One by one, the Penn economists considered and eliminated these hypotheses by examining relevant data. That leaves self-esteem—and very specifically, self-esteem in adolescence. Height at age 7 or 11 turns out to have no impact at all on future wages. But height at age 16 makes all the difference in the world.

Why should adolescent self-esteem be so significant? Partly, perhaps, because self-esteem, once learned, lasts a lifetime. But partly also because a kid with self-esteem is more likely to join the teams, clubs, and social groups where he learns to interact with people. And that participation is clearly valuable. The economists report that "after controlling for age, height, region and family background, participation in athletics is associated with an 11.4 percent increase in adult wages, and participation in every club other than athletics is associated with a 5.1 percent increase in wages." These effects account for part, but not all, of the wage premium for adolescent height.

Or the causality might go the other way: Maybe it's not self-esteem that gets you to go out for the chess club, but success in the chess club that breeds self-esteem. What we do know is that shorter kids tend to avoid extracurricular activities, and those activities are clearly associated with success in later life.

Did Lincoln free the slaves and Clinton lie to the grand jury because they learned in adolescence that they could dominate others through their height? Of course, it can't be quite that simple. But thanks to Persico, Postlewaite, and Silverman, we really do know a lot more than we used to about how and why the very tall are different from the rest of us.

sidebar

Lincoln stood 6 feet 4 inches; Johnson, 6 feet 3 inches; Clinton and Jefferson, 6 feet 2 and a half inches; Roosevelt, 6 feet 2 inches; and Chester Arthur, George Bush (the elder), and George Washington were all just a hair shorter than Roosevelt.


Andersen, Meet Aetna
What's the best way to prevent future accounting scandals? Audit insurance.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, November 12, 2002, at 12:57 PM PT

If the new accounting oversight board ever gets down to business—William Webster will apparently withdraw as chairman even before Wednesday's first meeting—it probably won't be bold enough to address the deepest problem in the accounting business: Companies pay for their own audits.

This principal-agent conflict has existed since New Deal-era securities laws first required "independent" audits of public companies. As long as an accounting firm was reasonably competent, it had every incentive to go easy on its clients—even if the public would benefit from more vigilance. Toughness would just encourage the client to replace the auditor with a more pliable firm. The conflict became truly intractable in recent decades, as the tax code grew more complex and accounting firms built massive consulting arms. With audit fees shrinking to a sliver of overall revenues, accountants had even less incentive to ride herd on their clients.

In theory, an auditor's concern for its own reputation should deter it from signing off on cooked books. But the experience of Arthur Andersen, which presided over a series of accounting debacles before Enron without major client defections, shows that deterrence doesn't happen in practice. Either companies were too lazy to change accountants, or they were simply oblivious to Andersen's failures, or they may have wanted the lax treatment for themselves.

So even if Rudolph Giuliani is named to head the accounting oversight board, the misalignment of carrots and sticks will remain in the structure of the industry. Certified public accountants, like lawyers, are licensed by the public to perform certain services. An old-fashioned guild, the accounting industry has a monopoly on the auditing business. Yet the profit motive dictates that CPAs' highest duty is owed to the paying client rather than to the non-paying investing public.

The key to real accounting reform is to remove the economic incentive for accountants to be halfhearted in their audits. One way would be to make the audit of public companies a federal function. That would guarantee independence, to be sure. But the government's inability to hire low-skilled airport screeners in a timely fashion doesn't exactly instill confidence that it could assemble a crack team of accountants. Besides, even if you've got an executive branch pushing for accounting strictness—and we certainly don't have that now—members of Congress have shown an alarming tendency to interfere with the federal agencies charged with setting accounting standards. You can be sure Congress would make life impossible for any federal audit service that went too hard on favored corporations.

But there is a way to use the power of the marketplace—which until now has conspired against good auditing and accounting—to bring corporations to heel. We should require publicly held companies to purchase accounting insurance. Joshua Ronen, a professor of accounting at New York University, floated this idea in a March New York Times op-ed. It makes even more sense today.

Here's how it would work. Public companies, as a condition of doing business, would be required to buy accounting insurance. Accounting insurance would cover all, or a portion, of damages suffered by investors because of accounting fraud or earnings misstatements, with a certain deductible and a cap.

In order to assess the risk of insuring a company's books, insurance companies would hire accountants and pay them to conduct annual audits. Since the auditors would be representing their new customers—insurers—not the audited companies, they would have both the freedom and the incentive to be tough and thorough. Meanwhile, accountants could continue to offer their consulting services to public companies, because the conflict of interest created when they both audited and consulted to the same company would disappear.

Signing off on faulty books would be devastating for an accounting firm. Insurance companies are nothing if not risk-averse; mitigating risk is their business. If an accounting firm were to botch one audit or help insiders cook the books, that firm would jeopardize the dozens or hundreds of auditing assignments it got from insurance companies.

The insurance companies would charge premiums based on the perceived risk. That risk would be dictated not simply by the audits but also by the past actions of the company and its executives—the way accident-prone drivers pay higher rates or smokers with a history of accidental fires shell out more for home insurance.

For companies with honest, clean, and transparent books, accounting insurance will be a relatively minor cost of doing business. A company run by Warren Buffett would pay a low premium. For companies or executives with a history of earnings exaggeration, insurance would be more expensive. A company headed by Jeff Skilling would find it very difficult to obtain accounting insurance. Premiums and ratings would be disclosed to investors in financial statements, so they could draw their own conclusions about the accounting risk inherent in a given company.

It would be a challenge for insurers to price the audit coverage at first, but insurers have shown an ability and eagerness to insure everything from the knees of college football players to priceless works of art. And this is a market with sufficient history and sufficient size to quickly develop an orderly pricing regime.

Accounting insurance would have other salutary effects. When honest companies are victimized by fraud—say by an internal bad apple or by a company that they acquire—the litigation and hangover can last for years. Insurance might provide a more rapid settlement and allow new management teams to revive the business faster.

Sure, requiring public companies to purchase accounting insurance would be a coercive government mandate. But we also require drivers to carry auto insurance, and mortgage companies require home buyers to purchase home insurance. These requirements certainly don't inhibit ownership or the ability to conduct transactions in either market.

The accounting insurance market would work much like the credit market. Companies' bonds and other debt instruments are rated by outside agencies. Those with lower ratings pay higher interest rates. Investors can make a conclusion about a company's prospects based on its credit rating and decide if they think the potential reward is worth the risk. This credit risk market is one of the great tools of American capitalism. Audit insurance could be a worthy supplement.


Ad Report Card: Bill Ford in the Driver's Seat
By Rob Walker
Posted Monday, March 11, 2002, at 9:23 AM PT

Ford, obviously, is one of the most famous names in business. Henry Ford is a near-mythic icon, and the company that bears his name remains one of the largest in the world. Lately, of course, the name has been synonymous with a troubled public image culminating in executive suite fireworks, as Bill Ford assumed full control of the company his great-grandfather founded. He's restructuring the car-maker, and he's trying to spruce up that image a bit—in part by appearing in a series of ads, including TV spots, which you can view by following these links, called "Family," "Legacy," "Discovery," and "Built Ford Tough." They fall into two categories, the first two being more or less pure image-builders while the second two try to build on the image-buffing to make a more direct pitch.

The image-builders: "Family," like other spots, opens with a tinted shot of Bill Ford and the words "Ford on Ford," which fade into a name-and-title caption. "The thing that is special about Ford is, we're not just another nameless, faceless company," he says. "We're a company that has a soul." We see clips of him talking interspersed with archival footage and various images of smiling workers, male and female, white and black. Plus a few product shots. Ford talks about employees whose families have worked for the company for generations. "It's so cool to me when I go out and talk to people and the stories are, 'My grandfather worked with your grandfather,' " he says. "To me, that really sets us apart from other major corporations. There is a sense of history here, we have a direct link to that history, and we're a company that's really going to preserve that feeling going into the future. To me, the litmus test of whether we've done a good job here really is going to be the stories the next generation's going to tell. I love this place, and I can't ever imagine doing anything else."

The second spot, "Legacy," is very similar, with  maybe more emphasis on archive film. Here Ford's speech includes these comments: "My great-grandfather Henry Ford really redefined what it meant to live in this country. 'No Boundaries' applied to everything he did, and that's the part of him that really inspires me. It's a wonderful legacy. At the same time, you can't emulate anybody. You have to have your own thoughts, your own ideas and leave your own legacy. … This company has always been about looking forward. … Ford has been part of me since the minute I was born, and I wouldn't have it any other way."

Test drive: These two spots are a reasonable attempt at leveraging Bill Ford's most obvious asset, which is in fact his link to the company's storied past. He's not exactly battle-tested as a CEO and is obviously subject to skepticism about whether he has any actual ability to lead a company, as opposed to a blood-tied right to lead it. The touchy-feely vibe is a stab at counteracting the cold reality that the current plan has for turning the auto-maker around, which includes shutting down several North American plants and eliminating 35,000 jobs. The ads amount to an attempted sugar-coating of the difficult decisions that Ford faces; it may or may not work, but there's probably no harm in trying.

The sales-pitch spots: While the remaining two ads look and feel much the same, with similar visuals and an identical tone, the underlying message is different. In "Discover," Ford says: "My two great-grandfathers, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, used to take these camping trips every year with Thomas Edison and whoever the president at the time was. They called themselves 'the Vagabonds.' They sort of invented SUVs." He goes on to say that he loves the outdoors himself and asserts that "SUVs are what people want, and we do them better than anybody else." The percentage of the ad devoted to product shots is higher than in the image ads. The same is true in "Built Ford Tough," a paean to the company's truck line. "Built Ford Tough isn't just a slogan; it's what we deliver," Ford declares.

Test drive: These ads are much weaker. The truck spot is a total throwaway, coming close to undercutting the spirit of the image ads by so blatantly rehashing their visual style in a warmed-over pitch we've already heard a million times.

But the "Discovery" commercial is even worse. Any feeling of "Gosh, that Bill Ford is a regular guy" pretty much evaporates with the story of Gramps camping with the president. That's, uh, not a Main Street memory, Bill. Now I remember the difference between you and your fourth-generation line workers: You're the scion of an incredibly wealthy and powerful family, and they're just praying that their jobs won't evaporate. Moreover, the leaps from that memory to Bill Ford's love of the great outdoors to the notion of a Ford SUV as some kind of link to a mythic-frontier past is laughable; and the mention of Firestone, which I guess is there to somehow suggest that Bill Ford is the real heir to that firm's pioneering past, instead serves as an unpleasant reminder of corporate bickering. This is the spot that reminds the viewer to ask, "OK, so Ford has a special history—so what?" The strength of the first two ads is that they sidestepped this so neatly. The weakness of the second two is that they make the question unavoidable and don't provide much of an answer.


Citi of Fear
What are Citigroup's weird ads really saying?
By Tim Carvell
Updated Wednesday, July 31, 2002, at 11:30 AM PT

Surely one of the most bizarre ad campaigns of recent years has been Citigroup's "Live Richly" series of billboard, TV, and print ads, all of which carry the implicit message, "Money isn't all that important"—a healthy worldview, perhaps, but not one that's necessarily reassuring coming from an institution whose sole job is to protect your money. In the wake of the recent allegations against Citigroup—that the bank assisted Enron in hiding some of its debts, and that its decision to underwrite a $12 billion bond offering for WorldCom may have been influenced by the closeness of one of its analysts to the company—the campaign has never seemed more worrisome. Indeed, it's difficult to walk past Citi ads these days and not engage in a mental conversation with them.

Dramatis personae: Me and Citigroup, the latter represented solely by its ad slogans.

ME: Um, hi. Look, I know this is an odd question to ask, but I've been reading some things in the papers about you guys lately, and I just want to make sure: Is my money OK?

CITIGROUP: People with fat wallets are not necessarily more jolly.

ME: What the hell is that supposed to mean? All I want to know is, you haven't gone and done anything irresponsible with my checking account, have you?

CITIGROUP: Holding shares shouldn't be your only form of affection.

ME: Oh, God. You have done something with my money, haven't you? Just tell me what you've done. I promise not to be mad.

CITIGROUP: He who dies with the most toys is still dead.

ME: You put it all into WorldCom, didn't you?

CITIGROUP: Funny how nobody ever calls it warm, soft cash.

ME: Uh-huh, uh-huh. Point taken. But just out of curiosity—you know, not that such things matter to me—exactly how much of my cash do you still have left?

CITIGROUP: Don't wait until someone says "Your money or your life" to remember that they are two different things.

ME: Oh, sweet Jesus. It's all gone, isn't it?

CITIGROUP: People make money. Not the other way around.

ME: That didn't even make any sense. Look: I sort of needed that money for little things like … rent.

CITIGROUP: Be independently happy.

ME: (Inarticulate whimpering.)

CITIGROUP: Human decency is up a point and kindness is making a rally.

ME: You'd better hope so.

CITIGROUP: Live richly!

ME: Go to hell.


The "529" Rip-Off
Those new college savings plans aren't so great.
By Austan Goolsbee
Posted Friday, August 23, 2002, at 2:16 PM PT

In the past year, parents have been pouring money into the new "529" state college savings plans. Since the 2001 Bush tax bill exempted qualified withdrawals from taxes, the 529 plans have become one of the fastest-growing personal financial products in history. About $25 billion is now invested in 529 plans, three times as much as two years ago, and investors are expected to add $40 billion more by 2006.

Financial advisers and even Consumer Reports have been touting 529s as a miraculous way to save money for your children's college. They seem flawless. Unlike other tax-advantaged savings plans, the 529s have extremely high contribution limits and no income cutoffs. All earnings are tax-exempt if they're spent on education. The 529 plans are supposed to be an enormous federal tax subsidy for education.

But serious flaws in the 529s are being overlooked. The long-run potential of the plans has been seriously compromised by excessive "management" fees that states have added to these plans. In addition, all but a few of the plans limit investors to a single financial firm that offers only two or three investment options. The reality of 529 plans is that much of the tax subsidy is merely going to pay these higher fees to states and financial companies. Under some plans, families would actually do worse investing in 529 plans than in traditional savings instruments.

Take one of the most egregious examples, Arizona's InvestEd plan, operated by Waddell and Reed. Investing in its class "A" shares with the highest equity option, an investor must pay 92 basis points (0.92 percent of assets) per year for fund expenses and then another 91 basis points of state management fees. When you cash out, you have to fork over another 5.75 percent of total assets as a "sales load." The class "B" shares don't take the 5.75 percent final cut, but the extra management fee is 162 basis points, meaning the state and Waddell and Reed grab a whopping 2.54 percent of your savings every year.

These fees are unbelievably high, vastly more than you'd pay for any normal investment. Over the life of the fund, the fees can kill the benefits of these plans completely. Consider two parents who want to save enough money to pay tuition and room and board at Harvard for their now-infant daughter. If Harvard's costs grow 5 percent annually, the parents will need $330,000 in 2021. Imagine the Arizona 529 plan were a low-expense S&P Index fund—the Vanguard fund that has expenses of 18 basis points, for example. With $50,000 in the account today and the historical rate of return of 11 percent, these parents would have $350,000 in 2021.

But woe to them if they opt for the actual Arizona plan. Assuming the same 11 percent return, after the extra fees and the sales load, the class "A" shares would yield $237,000 in 2021, the class "B" shares $217,000. Here, the excessive expenses have cost these two parents more than $110,000 dollars. This is hardly the boon to educational savings they might have hoped for. In fact, this family would do better to skip the 529 entirely. If they put the money in an index fund and then paid the capital gains taxes when they sold, they would still clear $290,000, much more than with the Arizona 529 plan.

The excessive fees aren't limited to Arizona. Of the 45 states that have established plans, 27 of them charge expenses of more than 1 percent per year, and 10 of those take additional sales loads. Even the best 529 plans, the ones run by states that chose low-expense investment companies—notably TIAA-CREF and Vanguard—are still charging more than they would for similar, non-529 investments. Tennessee, Minnesota, and Michigan, for example, use the same TIAA-CREF equity option (a mixture of the Growth and Income fund and the International Equity Index). Investing in these funds with a regular IRA would mean expenses of about 45 basis points. But the same investment with the Minnesota and Michigan 529s costs 65 basis points in expenses. In the Tennessee 529, it costs 95 basis points. Utah has by far the cheapest 529 plan, but even it adds 25 basis points of state fees to Vanguard's tiny 7 basis points of expenses.

These state fees make it easy to understand why every state either has a 529 plan or is developing one. The maintenance fees are a regular cash stream for them. The financial companies, too, are clamoring for the exclusive 529 franchises because they provide such huge fees. In Illinois, for example, where the exclusive provider is Salomon Smith Barney, the state treasurer has appeared in a series of statewide ads promoting the 529—paid for by Salomon Smith Barney.

The federal government will forgo billions of dollars in tax revenue to subsidize 529s. The goal of this subsidy was to encourage education, not to have the federal government provide a windfall to states and financial firms in the form of high fees. An easy way to fix the 529 problem would be to bestow the benefits of the 529s on other savings plans. Congress could raise the limit on contributions to Coverdell/Education IRAs or allow penalty-free withdrawals from 401(k) accounts for educational expenses. In these other accounts, people can choose any investment from any provider, without paying extra management fees. It would cost the federal government the same amount as the current 529 system, but the benefits would go to the parents, not the providers.


Tenet to Mitchell to Chance
The farcical Middle East peace process.
By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, April 3, 2002, at 3:26 PM PT

The Middle East is going to hell. Palestinians are blowing up Israelis. Israelis are shooting Palestinians. What is the United States doing about it? Belatedly sending U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell back to the region to create an impression of involvement, but otherwise not much. But don't worry, says Powell. Eventually, the Israelis will pull out of the West Bank, "and Tenet and Mitchell will be waiting for them."

If you don't know what Tenet and Mitchell are, you need a lesson in the three languages of the peace process: Hebrew, Arabic, and bureaucratic bullshit. Officially, Mitchell refers to an April 2001 list of recommendations for conducting peace talks, and Tenet refers to a June 2001 list of security measures each side must take to halt violence so that talks can proceed. Unofficially, Mitchell and Tenet, like Zinni, Oslo, and Madrid, are buzzwords designed to create an impression of progress where none exists.

The theory put forward by Powell, President Bush, the U.N. Security Council, and other peace process exponents is that Zinni will lead to Tenet, which will lead to Mitchell, which will lead to Oslo, which will lead to peace. But the history of the invention of these steps suggests the opposite. Mitchell was created because Oslo failed. Tenet was created because Mitchell failed. Zinni was created because Tenet failed. The peace process is growing ever more complicated not because each stage leads to the next but because it doesn't.

In principle, all Middle East peace agreements accomplish some good. They build momentum toward reconciliation. They get people in the habit of talking to each other. They put both sides on record endorsing compromise and self-restraint, thereby creating the prospect of embarrassment for whoever reneges. When carefully drafted, they create a structure for proceeding.

But if you read the agreements, you'll notice several troubling patterns. First, they tend to repeat each other. The Oslo Accords, for instance, declare that Israel and the Palestinian Authority will "abstain from incitement" against each other. The Mitchell report says the two governments "should resume their efforts to identify, condemn and discourage incitement." The Tenet plan says that "the PA will stop any Palestinian security officials from inciting, aiding, abetting, or conducting attacks against Israeli targets." Why must the pledge against incitement be repeated? Because the incitement persists.

Second, each agreement includes pledges to honor previous agreements. The Mitchell report says the parties should "reaffirm their commitment to signed agreements and mutual understandings." Specifically, the report says, "The parties should abide by the provisions of the Wye River Agreement prohibiting illegal weapons." The Tenet plan begins with a pledge by both sides to "reaffirm their commitment to the security agreements … embedded in the Mitchell Report." Why are the parties repeatedly asked to agree to honor past agreements? Because they repeatedly ignore them.

Third, the agreements are ambiguous. The important thing about the Mitchell report, according to Bush, is that by signing onto it, the Palestinians agreed that security cooperation must precede political talks. In fact, however, the report is ambiguous on that point. "We acknowledge the PA's position that security cooperation presents a political difficulty absent a suitable political context," says the report. "We believe that security cooperation cannot long be sustained if meaningful negotiations are unreasonably deferred." This ambiguity allowed Bush, at a recent joint press conference with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, to describe the security steps and political talks as a sequence while Mubarak described them as a package deal.

The result of these flaws is an almost comical proliferation of agreements. Oslo was supposed to provide the framework to resolve all issues, including borders, the powers of the Palestinian Authority, and the status of Jerusalem. But two years ago, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat rejected Israel's best offer on those issues, violence erupted, and everything went to hell. So the United States put together the Mitchell report. Mitchell didn't attempt to resolve the big issues; it just proposed to get the parties back to Oslo, which in turn would resolve those issues.

The Mitchell recommendations began with a call for security cooperation and a halt to the violence. But the violence didn't stop. So the United States put together the Tenet plan. Tenet didn't attempt to set up the political talks envisioned in Mitchell; it just proposed to establish security conditions to get the parties back to Mitchell, which would get them to Oslo.

The Tenet plan began with an "operational premise" that "the two sides are committed to a mutual, comprehensive cease-fire." The important thing about the plan, Bush explained in June 2001, was that both sides had "agreed" to it. But when the cease-fire failed to materialize, Bush began talking about a new push to "get the parties to agree to Tenet." That push became what Bush and Powell now call "the Zinni mission," referring to U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni. "We hope that the Zinni mission will help get to Tenet," Bush explained last month. That, in turn, "will then enable the Mitchell process to kick in."

Now the Zinni mission itself is in dispute. "The Israelis accepted General Zinni's ideas; The Palestinians did not," Powell reported Tuesday. According to U.S. officials, Arafat is trying to "lawyer" the terms of Zinni's proposal. In other words, Arafat is negotiating the Zinni agreement to implement the Tenet agreement to implement the Mitchell agreement to implement the Oslo agreement. Bush and his aides, who used to talk about Mitchell as the road to peace, now talk about the road to Mitchell.

One problem with this backward road-building is that it fosters what Bush has called, in the context of education, the soft bigotry of low expectations. It makes it easy to say we're getting somewhere when in fact we're getting almost nowhere. For the past week, reporters have asked Bush and his spokesman Ari Fleischer what the Tenet and Mitchell plans have accomplished. Bush and Fleischer keep brushing aside these questions by talking about how close the Zinni mission has brought us to "getting a chance to get into Tenet." Getting that far, according to Fleischer, would constitute "success."

Another unfortunate consequence is that Bush and Powell have begun to fetishize the Mitchell and Tenet plans. They imagine that Palestinian terrorists and American citizens not only understand these plans, which they don't, but orient their thinking and behavior around them. "This great nation wants us to get into Mitchell as quickly as possible," Bush asserted two months ago. This week, Powell added that the bombers who have struck Israel in recent days "are trying to destroy the Tenet work plan and the Mitchell process." What Bush and Powell can't accept is that Mitchell and Tenet are neither loved nor hated; they're simply irrelevant.

The option to add new steps to the front end of the peace process also makes the viability of the process unfalsifiable. In an old joke, an economist, presented with the problem of opening a can of food on a desert island, begins his solution by stating, "Assume a can opener." The peace process works the same way: When the parties refuse to create the conditions for one stage of the process, you simply tack on a previous stage in which they agree to create those conditions. The Tenet plan, for instance, stipulates that the Palestinian Authority will prevent weapons-smuggling and that Israel won't attack the PA's police buildings. Both sides are thoroughly trampling those commitments. Does that mean the Tenet plan is dead? Not at all, says Powell. Like the parrot in the famous Monty Python sketch, Tenet is just "waiting" to be revived by the Zinni plan.

The principal cost of adding stages to the current peace process is that it blocks out alternatives. Bush talks about Mitchell and Tenet not in conjunction with other steps, such as speaking to Arafat or detailing his proposal for a Palestinian state, but as a pre-emptive substitute for them. "The first step toward any political solution has got to be the Tenet plan," he says. Then, perhaps, the outline of a Palestinian state can be discussed, "if we ever get into the Mitchell process." Tenet and Mitchell, conceived as a means to peace, have become an obstacle to it.

Bush ran for office on a promise to focus on results. In the Middle East, he's lost that thread. "Our focus is to get the parties into a process that the world agrees is a good process," Bush said last month. That's a fine epitaph for Bill Clinton's Middle East policy. If Bush isn't careful, it'll be his as well.


The Pledge of Allegiance
Why we're not one nation "under God."
By David Greenberg
Updated Friday, June 28, 2002, at 1:39 PM PT

Poor Alfred Goodwin! So torrential was the flood of condemnation that followed his opinion—which held that it's unconstitutional for public schools to require students to recite "under God" as part of the Pledge of Allegiance—that the beleaguered appellate-court judge suspended his own ruling until the whole 9^th Circuit Court has a chance to review the case.

Not one major political figure summoned the courage to rebut the spurious claims that America's founders wished to make God a part of public life. It's an old shibboleth of those who want to inject religion into public life that they're honoring the spirit of the nation's founders. In fact, the founders opposed the institutionalization of religion. They kept the Constitution free of references to God. The document mentions religion only to guarantee that godly belief would never be used as a qualification for holding office—a departure from many existing state constitutions. That the founders made erecting a church-state wall their first priority when they added the Bill of Rights to the Constitution reveals the importance they placed on maintaining what Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore have called a "godless Constitution." When Benjamin Franklin proposed during the Constitutional Convention that the founders begin each day of their labors with a prayer to God for guidance, his suggestion was defeated.

Given this tradition, it's not surprising that the original Pledge of Allegiance—meant as an expression of patriotism, not religious faith—also made no mention of God. The pledge was written in 1892 by the socialist Francis Bellamy, a cousin of the famous radical writer Edward Bellamy. He devised it for the popular magazine Youth's Companion on the occasion of the nation's first celebration of Columbus Day. Its wording omitted reference not only to God but also, interestingly, to the United States:

"I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

The key words for Bellamy were "indivisible," which recalled the Civil War and the triumph of federal union over states' rights, and "liberty and justice for all," which was supposed to strike a balance between equality and individual freedom. By the 1920s, reciting the pledge had become a ritual in many public schools.

Since the founding, critics of America's secularism have repeatedly sought to break down the church-state wall. After the Civil War, for example, some clergymen argued that the war's carnage was divine retribution for the founders' refusal to declare the United States a Christian nation, and tried to amend the Constitution to do so.

The efforts to bring God into the state reached their peak during the so-called "religious revival" of the 1950s. It was a time when Norman Vincent Peale grafted religion onto the era's feel-good consumerism in his best-selling The Power of Positive Thinking; when Billy Graham rose to fame as a Red-baiter who warned that Americans would perish in a nuclear holocaust unless they embraced Jesus Christ; when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles believed that the United States should oppose communism not because the Soviet Union was a totalitarian regime but because its leaders were atheists.

Hand in hand with the Red Scare, to which it was inextricably linked, the new religiosity overran Washington. Politicians outbid one another to prove their piety. President Eisenhower inaugurated that Washington staple: the prayer breakfast. Congress created a prayer room in the Capitol. In 1955, with Ike's support, Congress added the words "In God We Trust" on all paper money. In 1956 it made the same four words the nation's official motto, replacing "E Pluribus Unum." Legislators introduced Constitutional amendments to state that Americans obeyed "the authority and law of Jesus Christ."

The campaign to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance was part of this movement. It's unclear precisely where the idea originated, but one driving force was the Catholic fraternal society the Knights of Columbus. In the early '50s the Knights themselves adopted the God-infused pledge for use in their own meetings, and members bombarded Congress with calls for the United States to do the same. Other fraternal, religious, and veterans clubs backed the idea. In April 1953, Rep. Louis Rabaut, D-Mich., formally proposed the alteration of the pledge in a bill he introduced to Congress.

The "under God" movement didn't take off, however, until the next year, when it was endorsed by the Rev. George M. Docherty, the pastor of the Presbyterian church in Washington that Eisenhower attended. In February 1954, Docherty gave a sermon—with the president in the pew before him—arguing that apart from "the United States of America," the pledge "could be the pledge of any country." He added, "I could hear little Moscovites [sic] repeat a similar pledge to their hammer-and-sickle flag with equal solemnity." Perhaps forgetting that "liberty and justice for all" was not the norm in Moscow, Docherty urged the inclusion of "under God" in the pledge to denote what he felt was special about the United States.

The ensuing congressional speechifying—debate would be a misnomer, given the near-unanimity of opinion—offered more proof that the point of the bill was to promote religion. The legislative history of the 1954 act stated that the hope was to "acknowledge the dependence of our people and our Government upon … the Creator … [and] deny the atheistic and materialistic concept of communism." In signing the bill on June 14, 1954, Flag Day, Eisenhower delighted in the fact that from then on, "millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every city and town … the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty." That the nation, constitutionally speaking, was in fact dedicated to the opposite proposition seemed to escape the president.

In recent times, controversies over the pledge have centered on the wisdom of enforcing patriotism more than on its corruption from a secular oath into a religious one. In the 1988 presidential race, as many readers will recall, George Bush bludgeoned Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for vetoing a mandatory-pledge bill when he was governor of Massachusetts, even though the state Supreme Court had ruled the bill unconstitutional. Surely one reason for the current cravenness of Democratic leaders is a fear of undergoing Dukakis' fate in 2002 or 2004 at the hands of another Bush.

The history of the pledge supports Goodwin's decision. The record of the 1954 act shows that, far from a "de minimis" reference or a mere "backdrop" devoid of meaning, the words "under God" were inserted in the pledge for the express purpose of endorsing religion—which the U.S. Supreme Court itself ruled in 1971 was unconstitutional. Also according to the Supreme Court's own rulings, it doesn't matter that students are allowed to refrain from saying the pledge; a 2000 high court opinion held that voluntary, student-led prayers at school football games are unconstitutionally "coercive," because they force students into an unacceptable position of either proclaiming religious beliefs they don't share or publicly protesting.

The appeals court decision came almost 40 years to the day after the Supreme Court decision in Engel v. Vitale. In that case, the court ruled it unconstitutional for public schools to allow prayer, even though the prayer was non-denominational and students were allowed abstain from the exercise. When asked about the unpopular decision, President John F. Kennedy replied coolly that he knew many people were angry, but that the decisions of the court had to be respected. He added that there was "a very easy remedy"—not a constitutional amendment but a renewed commitment by Americans to pray at home, in their churches, and with their families.

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In 1923, a group of self-declared flag enthusiasts, led by members of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, formed a body called the National Flag Conference and, afraid that the millions of new immigrants to the United States might construe the pledge as allowing them to remain loyal to their native lands, took it upon themselves to change the pledge's wording. "My flag" became "the flag of the United States." ("Of America" was added the next year.)


Deliver Us From Evil
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Thursday, September 19, 2002, at 1:20 PM PT

Of all the explanations for Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent alleged war on terrorism, the least illuminating is that it's all about evil. We didn't know or didn't appreciate that there is evil in the world. Now we do know, or ought to. In President Bush's "axis of evil" speech last January, the first item on his list of truths "we have come to know" after 9/11 is that, "Evil is real, and it must be opposed."

William J. Bennett—the Martha Stewart of morality—takes up the theme in a quickie book, Why We Fight, a Web site (www.avot.org, "avot" being "Americans for Victory Over Terrorism"), and in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece. "It took George W. Bush … to revive the language of good and evil," Bennett slobbers." Until a year ago, he avers, "terms like 'evil,' 'wrong,' and 'bad' " were not in "the lexicon." And even now, a fifth column of "pseudo-sophisticated intellectuals" is undermining America's war effort with nefarious suggestions that it might be more complicated than that. Bennett's evidence that the concept of evil is endangered is pretty thin. He scrounges up a couple of professors making moral-relativist noises about understanding terrorists as people and the possibility that America's own actions may have contributed to America's current dilemma. Neither of them is actually quoted dissing the word "evil." My own impression, for what it is worth, is that concepts like "bad" and "wrong" did pop up occasionally before 9/11 and that there has never in our entire history been a proposition from which fewer Americans dissent than "Osama Bin Laden is evil." Calling terrorists "evil" requires no courage and justifies no self-congratulatory puffing. It's just not a problem.

But it's also not a solution. There are many people, unfortunately, who would be happy to hijack four airplanes, fly them into crowded buildings, and kill 3,000 Americans. In terms of malign intent, they all are evil. But only one of them managed to actually do it. The concept of evil tells you nothing about why—among the many evils wished upon the United States—this one actually happened. Nor does "evil" help us to figure out how to stop evil from visiting itself upon us again.

If the great essential truth about terrorism is that some people just hate the United States, the obvious next question is, Why? But that is precisely the question that offends the All-About-Evil crowd, because it leads in two unacceptable directions. One is toward psychology, attempting to understand how a human mind could plot the deaths of so many innocents and/or gladly die in carrying it out. "Root causes" is what this kind of thinking is called in the context of domestic social issues like crime and welfare, and conservatives regard it as a major liberal disease, with symptoms that include coddling criminals and forgiving sloth.

If the subjective basis for terrorists hating America is off limits for consideration, that would seem to leave the objective basis: Is it something we did, or didn't do, to them or theirs? But this violates the ancient conservative taboo (c. 1984, styling by Jeane Kirkpatrick) against "blaming America first." So, check and mate: Terrorism is evil, evil, evil—gosh, it's evil—and there's nothing else to discuss.

This is an astonishingly philistine, know-nothing posture for a group of people (mostly neoconservative would-be muscular-intellectual types) who generally preen as the guardians of intellectual standards. They are so afraid of the fallacy of "tout comprendre c'est tout pardoner" that they fall right into it: In order to avoid the danger that understanding terrorism might lead to excusing terrorism, they put understanding itself beyond the pale. This is not just anti-intellectual, but actually a hindrance to the war on terrorism. Blocking any deeper understanding of the terrorist's mentality and motives cannot be good for the war effort. Using the word "evil" to resist any more complex understanding of terrorism is doubly philistine because of what the study of evolutionary psychology is learning about how much of human behavior is hard-wired into our brains. Ordinarily conservatives are quite thrilled by the idea of a genetic basis for nearly anything and eager to accuse liberals of refusing to face the truth. The whole subject appeals to their treasured sense of futility. In this case, though, it is conservatives who are hiding from science. Advances in our understanding of the brain do indeed pose a challenge to the moral concept of blame or fault or guilt or, yes, even evil. But the challenge is not necessarily insurmountable. (Robert Wright explores and explains all this in his wonderfully lucid book, The Moral Animal.) In any event, wrapping yourself in the flag and burying your head in the sand—please take a moment to imagine Bill Bennett in this condition—is not an appropriate way to deal with an unwelcome philosophical challenge. It may not be evil, but it isn't very nice.


Newspaper War
Why do our Iraq battle plans keep showing up in the New York Times?
By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, July 30, 2002, at 3:35 PM PT

Three times in the last month, the New York Times has excerpted secret Pentagon plans to invade Iraq and crush Saddam Hussein on Page One. All of these stories have given rise to charges of reckless reporting and treason from the conservative press and military analysts. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld himself fulminated against the leaks in a July 12 memorandum to the Pentagon's top brass, insisting that they stop blabbing.

"