July 31, 2005

BAD NEWS

By Richard A. Posner

THE conventional news media are embattled. Attacked by both left and right in book after book, rocked by scandals, challenged by upstart bloggers, they have become a focus of controversy and concern. Their audience is in decline, their credibility with the public in shreds. In a recent poll conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 65 percent of the respondents thought that most news organizations, if they discover they've made a mistake, try to ignore it or cover it up, and 79 percent opined that a media company would hesitate to carry negative stories about a corporation from which it received substantial advertising revenues.

The industry's critics agree that the function of the news is to inform people about social, political, cultural, ethical and economic issues so that they can vote and otherwise express themselves as responsible citizens. They agree on the related point that journalism is a profession rather than just a trade and therefore that journalists and their employers must not allow profit considerations to dominate, but must acknowledge an ethical duty to report the news accurately, soberly, without bias, reserving the expression of political preferences for the editorial page and its radio and television counterparts. The critics further agree, as they must, that 30 years ago news reporting was dominated by newspapers and by television network news and that the audiences for these media have declined with the rise of competing sources, notably cable television and the Web.

The audience decline is potentially fatal for newspapers. Not only has their daily readership dropped from 52.6 percent of adults in 1990 to 37.5 percent in 2000, but the drop is much steeper in the 20-to-49-year-old cohort, a generation that is, and as it ages will remain, much more comfortable with electronic media in general and the Web in particular than the current elderly are.

At this point the diagnosis splits along political lines. Liberals, including most journalists (because most journalists are liberals), believe that the decline of the formerly dominant ''mainstream'' media has caused a deterioration in quality. They attribute this decline to the rise of irresponsible journalism on the right, typified by the Fox News Channel (the most-watched cable television news channel), Rush Limbaugh's radio talk show and right-wing blogs by Matt Drudge and others. But they do not spare the mainstream media, which, they contend, provide in the name of balance an echo chamber for the right. To these critics, the deterioration of journalism is exemplified by the attack of the ''Swift boat'' Vietnam veterans on Senator John Kerry during the 2004 election campaign. The critics describe the attack as consisting of lies propagated by the new right-wing media and reported as news by mainstream media made supine by anxiety over their declining fortunes.

Critics on the right applaud the rise of the conservative media as a long-overdue corrective to the liberal bias of the mainstream media, which, according to Jim A. Kuypers, the author of ''Press Bias and Politics,'' are ''a partisan collective which both consciously and unconsciously attempts to persuade the public to accept its interpretation of the world as true.'' Fourteen percent of Americans describe themselves as liberals, and 26 percent as conservatives. The corresponding figures for journalists are 56 percent and 18 percent. This means that of all journalists who consider themselves either liberal or conservative, 76 percent consider themselves liberal, compared with only 35 percent of the public that has a stated political position.

So politically one-sided are the mainstream media, the right complains (while sliding over the fact that the owners and executives, as distinct from the working journalists, tend to be far less liberal), that not only do they slant the news in a liberal direction; they will stop at nothing to defeat conservative politicians and causes. The right points to the ''60 Minutes II'' broadcast in which Dan Rather paraded what were probably forged documents concerning George W. Bush's National Guard service, and to Newsweek's erroneous report, based on a single anonymous source, that an American interrogator had flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet (a physical impossibility, one would have thought).

Strip these critiques of their indignation, treat them as descriptions rather than as denunciations, and one sees that they are consistent with one another and basically correct. The mainstream media are predominantly liberal -- in fact, more liberal than they used to be. But not because the politics of journalists have changed. Rather, because the rise of new media, itself mainly an economic rather than a political phenomenon, has caused polarization, pushing the already liberal media farther left.

The news media have also become more sensational, more prone to scandal and possibly less accurate. But note the tension between sensationalism and polarization: the trial of Michael Jackson got tremendous coverage, displacing a lot of political coverage, but it had no political valence.

The interesting questions are, first, the why of these trends, and, second, so what?

The why is the vertiginous decline in the cost of electronic communication and the relaxation of regulatory barriers to entry, leading to the proliferation of consumer choices. Thirty years ago the average number of television channels that Americans could receive was seven; today, with the rise of cable and satellite television, it is 71. Thirty years ago there was no Internet, therefore no Web, hence no online newspapers and magazines, no blogs. The public's consumption of news and opinion used to be like sucking on a straw; now it's like being sprayed by a fire hose.

To see what difference the elimination of a communications bottleneck can make, consider a town that before the advent of television or even radio had just two newspapers because economies of scale made it impossible for a newspaper with a small circulation to break even. Each of the two, to increase its advertising revenues, would try to maximize circulation by pitching its news to the median reader, for that reader would not be attracted to a newspaper that flaunted extreme political views. There would be the same tendency to political convergence that is characteristic of two-party political systems, and for the same reason -- attracting the least committed is the key to obtaining a majority.

One of the two newspapers would probably be liberal and have a loyal readership of liberal readers, and the other conservative and have a loyal conservative readership. That would leave a middle range. To snag readers in that range, the liberal newspaper could not afford to be too liberal or the conservative one too conservative. The former would strive to be just liberal enough to hold its liberal readers, and the latter just conservative enough to hold its conservative readers. If either moved too close to its political extreme, it would lose readers in the middle without gaining readers from the extreme, since it had them already.

But suppose cost conditions change, enabling a newspaper to break even with many fewer readers than before. Now the liberal newspaper has to worry that any temporizing of its message in an effort to attract moderates may cause it to lose its most liberal readers to a new, more liberal newspaper; for with small-scale entry into the market now economical, the incumbents no longer have a secure base. So the liberal newspaper will tend to become even more liberal and, by the same process, the conservative newspaper more conservative. (If economies of scale increase, and as a result the number of newspapers grows, the opposite ideological change will be observed, as happened in the 19th century. The introduction of the ''penny press'' in the 1830's enabled newspapers to obtain large circulations and thus finance themselves by selling advertising; no longer did they have to depend on political patronage.)

The current tendency to political polarization in news reporting is thus a consequence of changes not in underlying political opinions but in costs, specifically the falling costs of new entrants. The rise of the conservative Fox News Channel caused CNN to shift to the left. CNN was going to lose many of its conservative viewers to Fox anyway, so it made sense to increase its appeal to its remaining viewers by catering more assiduously to their political preferences.

The tendency to greater sensationalism in reporting is a parallel phenomenon. The more news sources there are, the more intense the struggle for an audience. One tactic is to occupy an overlooked niche -- peeling away from the broad-based media a segment of the consuming public whose interests were not catered to previously. That is the tactic that produces polarization. Another is to ''shout louder'' than the competitors, where shouting takes the form of a sensational, attention-grabbing discovery, accusation, claim or photograph. According to James T. Hamilton in his valuable book ''All the News That's Fit to Sell,'' this even explains why the salaries paid news anchors have soared: the more competition there is for an audience, the more valuable is a celebrity newscaster.

The argument that competition increases polarization assumes that liberals want to read liberal newspapers and conservatives conservative ones. Natural as that assumption is, it conflicts with one of the points on which left and right agree -- that people consume news and opinion in order to become well informed about public issues. Were this true, liberals would read conservative newspapers, and conservatives liberal newspapers, just as scientists test their hypotheses by confronting them with data that may refute them. But that is not how ordinary people (or, for that matter, scientists) approach political and social issues. The issues are too numerous, uncertain and complex, and the benefit to an individual of becoming well informed about them too slight, to invite sustained, disinterested attention. Moreover, people don't like being in a state of doubt, so they look for information that will support rather than undermine their existing beliefs. They're also uncomfortable seeing their beliefs challenged on issues that are bound up with their economic welfare, physical safety or religious and moral views.

So why do people consume news and opinion? In part it is to learn of facts that bear directly and immediately on their lives -- hence the greater attention paid to local than to national and international news. They also want to be entertained, and they find scandals, violence, crime, the foibles of celebrities and the antics of the powerful all mightily entertaining. And they want to be confirmed in their beliefs by seeing them echoed and elaborated by more articulate, authoritative and prestigious voices. So they accept, and many relish, a partisan press. Forty-three percent of the respondents in the poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center thought it ''a good thing if some news organizations have a decidedly political point of view in their coverage of the news.''

Being profit-driven, the media respond to the actual demands of their audience rather than to the idealized ''thirst for knowledge'' demand posited by public intellectuals and deans of journalism schools. They serve up what the consumer wants, and the more intense the competitive pressure, the better they do it. We see this in the media's coverage of political campaigns. Relatively little attention is paid to issues. Fundamental questions, like the actual difference in policies that might result if one candidate rather than the other won, get little play. The focus instead is on who's ahead, viewed as a function of campaign tactics, which are meticulously reported. Candidates' statements are evaluated not for their truth but for their adroitness; it is assumed, without a hint of embarrassment, that a political candidate who levels with voters disqualifies himself from being taken seriously, like a racehorse that tries to hug the outside of the track. News coverage of a political campaign is oriented to a public that enjoys competitive sports, not to one that is civic-minded.

We saw this in the coverage of the selection of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's successor. It was played as an election campaign; one article even described the jockeying for the nomination by President Bush as the ''primary election'' and the fight to get the nominee confirmed by the Senate the ''general election'' campaign. With only a few exceptions, no attention was paid to the ability of the people being considered for the job or the actual consequences that the appointment was likely to have for the nation.

Does this mean that the news media were better before competition polarized them? Not at all. A market gives people what they want, whether they want the same thing or different things. Challenging areas of social consensus, however dumb or even vicious the consensus, is largely off limits for the media, because it wins no friends among the general public. The mainstream media do not kick sacred cows like religion and patriotism.

Not that the media lie about the news they report; in fact, they have strong incentives not to lie. Instead, there is selection, slanting, decisions as to how much or how little prominence to give a particular news item. Giving a liberal spin to equivocal economic data when conservatives are in power is, as the Harvard economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer point out, a matter of describing the glass as half empty when conservatives would describe it as half full.

Journalists are reluctant to confess to pandering to their customers' biases; it challenges their self-image as servants of the general interest, unsullied by commerce. They want to think they inform the public, rather than just satisfying a consumer demand no more elevated or consequential than the demand for cosmetic surgery in Brazil or bullfights in Spain. They believe in ''deliberative democracy'' -- democracy as the system in which the people determine policy through deliberation on the issues. In his preface to ''The Future of Media'' (a collection of articles edited by Robert W. McChesney, Russell Newman and Ben Scott), Bill Moyers writes that ''democracy can't exist without an informed public.'' If this is true, the United States is not a democracy (which may be Moyers's dyspeptic view). Only members of the intelligentsia, a tiny slice of the population, deliberate on public issues.

The public's interest in factual accuracy is less an interest in truth than a delight in the unmasking of the opposition's errors. Conservatives were unembarrassed by the errors of the Swift Boat veterans, while taking gleeful satisfaction in the exposure of the forgeries on which Dan Rather had apparently relied, and in his resulting fall from grace. They reveled in Newsweek's retracting its story about flushing the Koran down a toilet yet would prefer that American abuse of prisoners be concealed. Still, because there is a market demand for correcting the errors and ferreting out the misdeeds of one's enemies, the media exercise an important oversight function, creating accountability and deterring wrongdoing. That, rather than educating the public about the deep issues, is their great social mission. It shows how a market produces a social good as an unintended byproduct of self-interested behavior.

The limited consumer interest in the truth is the key to understanding why both left and right can plausibly denounce the same media for being biased in favor of the other. Journalists are writing to meet a consumer demand that is not a demand for uncomfortable truths. So a newspaper that appeals to liberal readers will avoid exposés of bad behavior by blacks or homosexuals, as William McGowan charges in ''Coloring the News''; similarly, Daniel Okrent, the first ombudsman of The New York Times, said that the news pages of The Times ''present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading.'' Not only would such exposés offend liberal readers who are not black or homosexual; many blacks and homosexuals are customers of liberal newspapers, and no business wants to offend a customer.

But the same liberal newspaper or television news channel will pull some of its punches when it comes to reporting on the activities of government, even in Republican administrations, thus giving credence to the left critique, as in Michael Massing's ''Now They Tell Us,'' about the reporting of the war in Iraq. A newspaper depends on access to officials for much of its information about what government is doing and planning, and is reluctant to bite too hard the hand that feeds it. Nevertheless, it is hyperbole for Eric Alterman to claim in ''What Liberal Media?'' that ''liberals are fighting a near-hopeless battle in which they are enormously outmatched by most measures'' by the conservative media, or for Bill Moyers to say that ''the marketplace of political ideas'' is dominated by a ''quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration.'' In a sample of 23 leading newspapers and newsmagazines, the liberal ones had twice the circulation of the conservative. The bias in some of the reporting in the liberal media, acknowledged by Okrent, is well documented by McGowan, as well as by Bernard Goldberg in ''Bias'' and L. Brent Bozell III in ''Weapons of Mass Distortion.''

Journalists minimize offense, preserve an aura of objectivity and cater to the popular taste for conflict and contests by -- in the name of ''balance'' -- reporting both sides of an issue, even when there aren't two sides. So ''intelligent design,'' formerly called by the oxymoron ''creation science,'' though it is religious dogma thinly disguised, gets almost equal billing with the theory of evolution. If journalists admitted that the economic imperatives of their industry overrode their political beliefs, they would weaken the right's critique of liberal media bias.

The latest, and perhaps gravest, challenge to the journalistic establishment is the blog. Journalists accuse bloggers of having lowered standards. But their real concern is less high-minded -- it is the threat that bloggers, who are mostly amateurs, pose to professional journalists and their principal employers, the conventional news media. A serious newspaper, like The Times, is a large, hierarchical commercial enterprise that interposes layers of review, revision and correction between the reporter and the published report and that to finance its large staff depends on advertising revenues and hence on the good will of advertisers and (because advertising revenues depend to a great extent on circulation) readers. These dependences constrain a newspaper in a variety of ways. But in addition, with its reputation heavily invested in accuracy, so that every serious error is a potential scandal, a newspaper not only has to delay publication of many stories to permit adequate checking but also has to institute rules for avoiding error -- like requiring more than a single source for a story or limiting its reporters' reliance on anonymous sources -- that cost it many scoops.

Blogs don't have these worries. Their only cost is the time of the blogger, and that cost may actually be negative if the blogger can use the publicity that he obtains from blogging to generate lecture fees and book royalties. Having no staff, the blogger is not expected to be accurate. Having no advertisers (though this is changing), he has no reason to pull his punches. And not needing a large circulation to cover costs, he can target a segment of the reading public much narrower than a newspaper or a television news channel could aim for. He may even be able to pry that segment away from the conventional media. Blogs pick off the mainstream media's customers one by one, as it were.

And bloggers thus can specialize in particular topics to an extent that few journalists employed by media companies can, since the more that journalists specialized, the more of them the company would have to hire in order to be able to cover all bases. A newspaper will not hire a journalist for his knowledge of old typewriters, but plenty of people in the blogosphere have that esoteric knowledge, and it was they who brought down Dan Rather. Similarly, not being commercially constrained, a blogger can stick with and dig into a story longer and deeper than the conventional media dare to, lest their readers become bored. It was the bloggers' dogged persistence in pursuing a story that the conventional media had tired of that forced Trent Lott to resign as Senate majority leader.

What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.

This means that corrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public. This is true not only of newspaper retractions -- usually printed inconspicuously and in any event rarely read, because readers have forgotten the article being corrected -- but also of network television news. It took CBS so long to acknowledge Dan Rather's mistake because there are so many people involved in the production and supervision of a program like ''60 Minutes II'' who have to be consulted.

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek's classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise -- not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It's as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.

How can the conventional news media hope to compete? Especially when the competition is not entirely fair. The bloggers are parasitical on the conventional media. They copy the news and opinion generated by the conventional media, often at considerable expense, without picking up any of the tab. The degree of parasitism is striking in the case of those blogs that provide their readers with links to newspaper articles. The links enable the audience to read the articles without buying the newspaper. The legitimate gripe of the conventional media is not that bloggers undermine the overall accuracy of news reporting, but that they are free riders who may in the long run undermine the ability of the conventional media to finance the very reporting on which bloggers depend.

Some critics worry that ''unfiltered'' media like blogs exacerbate social tensions by handing a powerful electronic platform to extremists at no charge. Bad people find one another in cyberspace and so gain confidence in their crazy ideas. The conventional media filter out extreme views to avoid offending readers, viewers and advertisers; most bloggers have no such inhibition.

The argument for filtering is an argument for censorship. (That it is made by liberals is evidence that everyone secretly favors censorship of the opinions he fears.) But probably there is little harm and some good in unfiltered media. They enable unorthodox views to get a hearing. They get 12 million people to write rather than just stare passively at a screen. In an age of specialization and professionalism, they give amateurs a platform. They allow people to blow off steam who might otherwise adopt more dangerous forms of self-expression. They even enable the authorities to keep tabs on potential troublemakers; intelligence and law enforcement agencies devote substantial resources to monitoring blogs and Internet chat rooms.

And most people are sensible enough to distrust communications in an unfiltered medium. They know that anyone can create a blog at essentially zero cost, that most bloggers are uncredentialed amateurs, that bloggers don't employ fact checkers and don't have editors and that a blogger can hide behind a pseudonym. They know, in short, that until a blogger's assertions are validated (as when the mainstream media acknowledge an error discovered by a blogger), there is no reason to repose confidence in what he says. The mainstream media, by contrast, assure their public that they make strenuous efforts to prevent errors from creeping into their articles and broadcasts. They ask the public to trust them, and that is why their serious errors are scandals.

A survey by the National Opinion Research Center finds that the public's confidence in the press declined from about 85 percent in 1973 to 59 percent in 2002, with most of the decline occurring since 1991. Over both the longer and the shorter period, there was little change in public confidence in other major institutions. So it seems there are special factors eroding trust in the news industry. One is that the blogs have exposed errors by the mainstream media that might otherwise have gone undiscovered or received less publicity. Another is that competition by the blogs, as well as by the other new media, has pushed the established media to get their stories out faster, which has placed pressure on them to cut corners. So while the blogosphere is a marvelous system for prompt error correction, it is not clear whether its net effect is to reduce the amount of error in the media as a whole.

But probably the biggest reason for declining trust in the media is polarization. As media companies are pushed closer to one end of the political spectrum or the other, the trust placed in them erodes. Their motives are assumed to be political. This may explain recent Pew Research Center poll data that show Republicans increasingly regarding the media as too critical of the government and Democrats increasingly regarding them as not critical enough.

Thus the increase in competition in the news market that has been brought about by lower costs of communication (in the broadest sense) has resulted in more variety, more polarization, more sensationalism, more healthy skepticism and, in sum, a better matching of supply to demand. But increased competition has not produced a public more oriented toward public issues, more motivated and competent to engage in genuine self-government, because these are not the goods that most people are seeking from the news media. They are seeking entertainment, confirmation, reinforcement, emotional satisfaction; and what consumers want, a competitive market supplies, no more, no less. Journalists express dismay that bottom-line pressures are reducing the quality of news coverage. What this actually means is that when competition is intense, providers of a service are forced to give the consumer what he or she wants, not what they, as proud professionals, think the consumer should want, or more bluntly, what they want.

Yet what of the sliver of the public that does have a serious interest in policy issues? Are these people less well served than in the old days? Another recent survey by the Pew Research Center finds that serious magazines have held their own and that serious broadcast outlets, including that bane of the right, National Public Radio, are attracting ever larger audiences. And for that sliver of a sliver that invites challenges to its biases by reading The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, that watches CNN and Fox, that reads Brent Bozell and Eric Alterman and everything in between, the increased polarization of the media provides a richer fare than ever before.

So when all the pluses and minuses of the impact of technological and economic change on the news media are toted up and compared, maybe there isn't much to fret about.

Books Discussed in This Essay

Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues, by Jim A. Kuypers. Praeger. Paper, $28.95.

All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information Into News, by James T. Hamilton. Princeton University. $37.95.

The Future of Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century, edited by Robert W. McChesney, Russell Newman and Ben Scott. Seven Stories. Paper, $19.95.

Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism, by William McGowan. Encounter. Paper, $16.95.

Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq, by Michael Massing. New York Review. Paper, $9.95.

What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News, by Eric Alterman. Basic Books. Paper, $15.

Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, by Bernard Goldberg. Perennial/ HarperCollins. Paper, $13.95.

Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media, by L. Brent Bozell III. Three Rivers. Paper, $13.95.

 

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history lesson
The Legend of the Scopes Trial
Science didn't really win.
By David Greenberg
Posted Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005, at 4:25 AM PT

This has been the summer of "intelligent design." In August, President Bush endorsed this revamped version of creationism, and this week a Pew Forum poll found that fewer than half of Americans accept Darwin's theory of evolution. This widespread rejection of seemingly established truths has shocked many observers. After all, didn't the Scopes trial resolve this 80 years ago?

The anniversary of the "Monkey Trial" provides an occasion to remember that it didn't really settle what we assume it settled. Popular memory of the trial, reinforced by the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, made it seem that evolution was triumphant and fundamentalism vanquished, but in fact the result was much more ambiguous. Anti-Darwinism didn't die in Dayton, Tenn., in July 1925—it just retreated temporarily from the national scene, to which it has now returned.

Like the 1960s, the 1920s witnessed a series of culture wars. After decades in which liberalism and science had gained popular acceptance, a backlash arrived in the '20s. A revived Ku Klux Klan swelled to 5 million members. Feminism, having secured women's suffrage, stalled. The 18^th Amendment, passed in 1919, prohibited the sale of alcohol. Congress restricted the immigration of peoples deemed undesirable.

Evolution marked another front in these fights. Although Darwin's theories had met fierce resistance when first proposed in 1859, in time they secured general approval. Even many Christian leaders, once hostile to evolution, endorsed the theory—one of several trends that split many Protestant denominations into modern (or liberal) and fundamentalist camps. "By the time of World War I," wrote the historian William Leuchtenberg, "an attack on Darwin seemed as unlikely as an attack on Copernicus."

But attack the fundamentalists did. Advocating a literal reading of the book of Genesis, they attained political power in many states, particularly in the rural South and Great Plains. In Tennessee, O klahoma, and Mississippi, they passed laws forbidding the teaching of evolution.

In Tennessee, the recently formed American Civil Liberties Union recruited teachers to challenge the so-called Butler Act, which banned teaching "any theory that denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the Bible." John T. Scopes, a slight, sandy-haired 24-year-old biology instructor at Central High School in Dayton, volunteered. Scopes, reported to the police by a friend for his transgression and promptly arrested, with the help of the ACLU retained a trio of eminent lawyers, including Clarence Darrow (whose recent defense of the brutal child-killers Leopold and Loeb hardly endeared him to pious Tennesseans). Aiding the prosecution was the thrice-failed Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, a leader in the anti-evolution movement, who promised a "duel to the death."

And so in July 1925 the Monkey Trial became a national obsession and a media circus. Partisans and reporters invaded Dayton. Horse-drawn carriages, mule-led wagons, and Model T Fords choked the small town's narrow streets. Owners of chimpanzees and monkeys hurried downtown for photo opportunities, while flappers sparked a short-lived fashion trend by donning simian stoles. Radio, rapidly spreading into American homes, brought the trial to people's firesides, and newsreels showed it to moviegoers.

In the courtroom, Scopes never stood a chance: He had broken the law. Instead, the ACLU hoped to send the case up to the U.S. Supreme Court to review the law's constitutionality. The real fight in Dayton was for public opinion.

The trial's turning point came when, in an unorthodox move, Scopes' lawyers got Bryan to take the stand. Darrow declared that he intended to "prevent bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the educational system of the United States." Darrow quizzed Bryan on his beliefs, humiliating the onetime hero. Bryan confessed that he believed in the literal truth of such biblical tales as Joshua making the sun stop in the sky, while also conceding, contradictorily, that scriptural passages could be interpreted as metaphorical. The crowd roared with laughter at his confused answers. (In a sad coda, Bryan fulfilled his promise of a duel to the death, succumbing to a fatal heart attack five days after the verdict.)

Bryan's faltering performance—along with the withering reportage of critics like H.L. Mencken, who mocked Dayton's "yokels" and "hookworm carriers"—caused the trial to be seen, simplistically, as a battle between enlightened science and backward religion. In this telling, Scopes technically lost but science and cosmopolitanism actually won. For although the case never reached the U.S. Supreme Court—the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict on a technicality—federal jurisprudence embraced the idea that evolution was fact, worthy of teaching in public schools, and creationism was religion, unfit for the science classroom.

Science certainly appeared victorious. After the trial, a slew of states rejected anti-evolution laws while only a couple dared pass them. Collective memory enshrined the episode, particularly Darrow's rout of Bryan, as a victory for free speech over censorship, of reason over faith, of the modern over the primitive. The 1955 play and 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, with their black-and-white depictions of the good guys and bad guys, further inscribed this interpretation of the trial.

In fact, fundamentalist disbelief in Darwin did not vanish, as Edward J. Larson has made clear in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Summer for the Gods. Many conservative Christians assumed they had prevailed at Dayton. While liberalism ascended in the public sphere, fundamentalism withdrew into local pockets and private subcultures where it thrived. Christian presses churned out anti-evolution books and pamphlets. Ministers warned their flocks of Darwin's folly. In Dayton, fundamentalists established Bryan College "based upon unequivocal acceptance of the inerrancy and authority of the Scriptures."

Indeed, large numbers of Americans continued to doubt Darwin and subscribe to literal readings of the Bible, some quite passionately. Anti-evolution sentiment was sufficiently strong in enough regions of the country to lead many biology-textbook writers to paint Darwin's teachings as less definitive than they are. Even George W. Hunter modified his Civic Biology—the book from which Scopes had feloniously taught—to make it palatable to scriptural literalists.

Yet for decades historians, national reporters, and educators failed to notice these subcultures or credit their numbers. Reviewing the film Inherit the Wind, the New Republic wrote, "The Monkey Trial is now a historical curiosity, and it can be made truly meaningful only by treating it as the farce that it was." "Today," echoed the historian Richard Hofstadter in his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964), "the evolution controversy seems as remote as the Homeric era to intellectuals of the East."

As Hofstadter was writing those words, however, fundamentalists began to end their voluntary exile from the national culture. Disturbed by relaxed sexual standards and social codes, and angered by Supreme Court rulings limiting the government's entanglement with religion—including Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), or "Scopes II," which finally ruled anti-evolution laws unconstitutional—they enlisted en masse in the burgeoning conservative movement.

By the 1970s, conservative Christian leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye had built powerful political armies that helped elect Ronald Reagan president and put evolution and creationism back on the political agenda. Reagan supported the teaching of creationism in public schools (as did Bush in his 2000 campaign). Like the recent Pew poll, a 1982 Gallup survey found the public "about evenly divided" between Darwinists and creationists. In 1983 Steven Jay Gould wrote that "sadly, any hope that the issues of the Scopes trial had been banished to the realm of nostalgic Americana have been swept aside by our current creationist resurgence."

Today, a debate is occurring about whether intelligent design represents a significant variation on the version of "creation science" that fundamentalists and other evangelical Christians began embracing in the 1960s (explained in the New Republic by University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne). To my mind, Coyne, Bob Wright in Slate, and others have persuasively shown that intelligent design contains no significant changes from "creation science" except its success at gaining a hearing in the mainstream media.

Either way, however, believers in science are now wondering how the rejection of Darwinian evolution, once presumed to be discredited, keeps returning to claim a place in high-school biology classrooms and in popular thinking. The answer is that we're in thrall to the powerful legend of the Scopes trial. For anti-Darwinist beliefs aren't returning; they've just never gone away.

David Greenberg writes the "History Lesson" column and teaches at Rutgers University. He is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.

 

chatterbox
Joe Allbaugh, Disaster Pimp
"I don't buy the 'revolving door' argument," said Bush's former FEMA chief.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 3:22 PM PT

Writing in the Sept. 1 Washington Post, Dan Balz noted that in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Joe Allbaugh, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), was in Louisiana "helping coordinate the private-sector response to the storm." Readers who don't know much about how Washington works probably took this to mean that an admirably selfless Allbaugh was giving generously of his time to help speed the rescue effort. There may, in fact, have been some of that. But Allbaugh is no mere dabbler in "the private-sector response" to government needs. He's a lobbyist and a consultant who's been cashing in on his close ties to President Bush since 2003. Allbaugh, in addition to being Bush's first FEMA chief (Allbaugh's college roommate Michael Brown succeeded him), was Bush's chief of staff when he was governor of Texas and campaign manager to Bush during the 2000 election. Now Allbaugh is the man to see if you want a contract in Iraq, or a piece of the action on homeland security, or, apparently, a shot at rebuilding New Orleans. "I don't buy the 'revolving door' argument," Allbaugh told the National Journal last year. "This is America. We all have a right to make a living."

As a former administration official, Allbaugh must follow certain rules meant to inhibit influence-peddling. These have never been terribly onerous, and the Bush administration last year made them less so. Federal law prohibits former government officials from ever attempting to influence the government on any matter in which they were directly involved while working for the government; it requires them to wait two years before they attempt to influence the government on any matter that was pending up to a year before their departure from government; and it requires senior personnel like Allbaugh to wait one year before they attempt to influence their former agency. No sweat! Allbaugh has been out of the government for two and a half years, and back when the one- and two-year restrictions still applied, the client always had the option to contact even FEMA through Allbaugh's wife and lobbying partner Diane. Diane Allbaugh had the entrepreneurial vision to set up a lobbying business in Washington shortly before her husband's boss was elected president—if you want to get technical, appointed president by the Rehnquist court—in 2000.

What, precisely, is the "private-sector response" that Allbaugh has been "coordinating" in New Orleans? Nobody seems to know. (Allbaugh hasn't returned my phone call yet, but I expect he will; he's famously accessible to reporters, which may help explain why his influence-peddling operation has received so little scrutiny.) Looking over the Allbaugh family client list, likely suspects include Kellog, Brown and Root (subsidiary to Halliburton), for whom both Allbaughs are lobbying to "[e]ducate the congressional and executive branch on defense, disaster relief [italics mine], and homeland security issues." KBR has already been hired to help repair three Navy facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina, under a contract that predates its relationship with Allbaugh. Shaw Group International is similarly employing Allbaugh to "educate" the government on disaster relief—we should start calling the former FEMA chief "professor"!—and therefore seems another likely beneficiary of Allbaugh's mission to Louisiana. But that's just guesswork. No doubt Allbaugh is scaring up new clients even as I write.

In his early days as FEMA administrator, Allbaugh worried that the agency's mission had "evolved into … an oversized entitlement program." Now it's Allbaugh himself who's suckling from FEMA's teat. Not to worry, though: It's all in the name of stimulating the private sector. And also—I almost forgot—rebuilding New Orleans.

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

 

explainer
Lying in State vs. Lying in Repose
What's the difference?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 3:17 PM PT

Visitors filed past the body of U.S. Chief Justice William Rehnquist in Washington this week. On Tuesday, both the president and the first lady viewed the casket, which sat atop the Lincoln catafalque in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court. Though some news organizations described Rehnquist as "lying in state," most called it "lying in repose." Is there a difference?

Only in Washington. Funeral directors throughout the country use the phrases interchangeably: A body that's put out for public viewing could be described as lying "in state" or "in repose." When Pope John Paul II passed away in April, the presentation of his body at St. Peter's Basilica was described both ways in the news media. But when you're talking about official U.S. government funerals, "lying in state" has a special meaning: You're only lying in state in the formal sense when your body is in the Rotunda of the Capitol Building in Washington.

The distinction between "repose" and "state" got its first widespread attention during the state funeral of Ronald Reagan last year. Reagan's body, like those of many presidents before him, was put out for viewing in multiple places. First, his remains spent two days on display at the Reagan Library in California. Then they were sent across the country to the Capitol Building. (Only 10 presidents have lain in state; many others have lain in repose at the White House.) Those involved with the ceremony made sure the media had the terms right: Reagan was "in repose" on the West Coast and "in state" in Washington.

As a general rule, you can only lie in state if you're due a state funeral. And you're only due a state funeral if you're the president, the president-elect, an ex-president, or someone specially designated by the president. Unless Bush had designated Rehnquist for this honor, the best he could have hoped for was an "official funeral"—which is similar to a state funeral but without the lying in state. Rehnquist's family turned down the official funeral, but they did allow his body to lie in repose at the Supreme Court, in accordance with long-standing tradition.

A third category emerged in 1998, when two Capitol police officers were killed defending Congress from a crazed gunman. The bodies of Jacob Chestnut and John Gibson were placed "in honor"—not in state—in the Capitol Rotunda. Due to the circumstances of their deaths, the order for the funeral came directly from Congress. The president hadn't designated them for a state funeral, so the lawmakers resolved to have them lie in honor instead. At the memorial service, Trent Lott may have confused things further with his speech: "We've had presidents lie in repose here," he said.

Next question?

Explainer thanks Robert Boetticher of Service Corporation International, Jon Deitloff of the Ohio Funeral Directors Association, and Betty Koed of the U.S. Senate Historical Office.

 

war stories
What's My Motivation?
The Department of Homeland Security is doomed to failure without a structural overhaul.
By Fred Kaplan
Updated Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 3:40 PM PT

A crucial question to be asked in the coming slew of investigations: Did the Department of Homeland Security do such a dreadful job on Hurricane Katrina because of incompetent officials and insufficient funds—or because of the organization and incentives of the DHS itself? Is it enough to make heads roll and budgets swell—or does the whole department need a structural overhaul?

Personnel and money were certainly among the problems. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff is by all accounts a superb prosecutor, but he's never run a large, multifaceted organization, and Katrina has raised questions about his attention span. He seems to have been oblivious to the reports of mayhem at the evacuation centers until hearing about them on the radio or television—and, even then, hours or days after the reports were first broadcast. Then again, Chertoff is a demigod compared with Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who's had no relevant experience whatsoever, and whose last private-sector job was as commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association (from which he was apparently fired).

Within FEMA, budgets were slashed two years running for the office that coordinates disaster-relief and preparedness with state and local agencies. The Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains floodgates, among other things, was also denied urgent requests for increases. One of the few high-level officials whom President George W. Bush has ever fired was Mike Parker, the assistant secretary of the Army for public works, after he testified before Congress in March 2002 about the disastrous effects of budget cuts on the Army Corps of Engineers' water projects.

There is also the matter of Hurricane Pam, a "tabletop exercise" conducted by FEMA in 2004, involving more than 250 federal, state, and local officials, simulating the aftermath of a hurricane and flood in New Orleans remarkably similar to what really took place after Katrina. The exercise uncovered problems with transportation, shelter, and—based on a telephone survey—the refusal by a large number of the city's poorer residents to evacuate. Yet nothing was done, no money was spent, to address these problems. A follow-up exercise was scheduled for the summer of 2005—but it had to be canceled due to lack of funds.

Still, it's too easy to blame the sluggish response entirely on a shortfall of money and talent—commodities that are scarce, after all, in governments everywhere. It's also necessary to look at the organization in which these people are working, particularly at the incentives—the set of rewards and punishments—that shape their behavior.

The Department of Homeland Security, it is worth recalling, was a political football and a bit of a sham from the outset. It was proposed in late 2001 by Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman as a way to show that the Republican White House wasn't alone in trying to tackle terrorism—that the Democratic Congress had a grander view of the problem and a grander solution to match. Initially, President Bush opposed the idea, saying it would just pile on another bureaucratic layer. Former White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer made the point at a news conference on March 19, 2002:

There are more than a dozen agencies ... which have components that deal with homeland security in one form or another. ... Even if you took half of them out and put them under a Cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security, the White House would still need ... an advisor on how to coordinate all that myriad of activities. ... So creating a Cabinet office doesn't solve the problem.

The president already had such a coordinator in the White House-based homeland security adviser. That would be good enough.

By June 2002, news began to break on the intelligence failures that led to 9/11, especially on the lack of coordination between the FBI and the CIA. At least in part to regain the initiative, President Bush endorsed the Department of Homeland Security and signed it into law in November of that year.

Still, Fleischer had a point back at that March news conference: How was a Cabinet official supposed to control or coordinate such far-flung activities? The politics that shaped the composition of the new department only intensified the challenge. Those who argued that better coordination might have prevented 9/11 made the claim only in regard to the intelligence communities. Yet none of the intelligence agencies were incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security. The FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, and so forth were powerful enough to stave off assimilation. (Similarly, an early draft of Bush's bill placed the Department of Energy's weapons labs inside DHS, but they, too, had enough powerful sponsors to retain their independence.)

A small shop like FEMA lacked the clout to resist the quicksand.

It made a certain sense to bundle Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Transportation Security Administration into a unified Directorate of Border and Transportation Security (one of five directorates in the DHS). However, it may not have made so much sense to bury FEMA, which dealt primarily with natural disasters, inside a subset (the Directorate of Emergency Preparedness and Response) of a department whose primary mission—whose entire reason for existence—was to prevent, reduce the vulnerability to, and recover from a terrorist attack.

This is where organizational incentives come in. You're an official at FEMA. Your director used to be a Cabinet officer who attended meetings of the National Security Council and had direct access to the president. Now the director is an undersecretary and the directorate's mission is explicitly a sideshow. When a warning goes out about the vulnerability to a hurricane, it's barely noticed—and there's no way to take your concerns to the top. You're also keenly aware of Mike Parker's fate: Raise too much of a stink about the administration's neglect, and you'll be fired. Where is the reward for enterprise, enthusiasm, or creativity? Where is the penalty for just muddling through a day's work?

The main point is this: There won't be big improvements until top management—which in this case must mean the White House—offers incentives to improve.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125815/

architecture
There's No Place Like Home
The historical problems with emergency housing.
By Witold Rybczynski
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 2:39 PM PT

With estimates of the time before evacuees can return to New Orleans ranging from months to years, there is an immediate need for housing for those who have been displaced. FEMA has announced that it will fill this need in a variety of ways, including renting cruise ships and hotel rooms, buying trailers, and using military bases. In his 1978 classic, Shelter After Disaster, British architect Ian Davis examines contemporary and historic experiences with providing shelter in the immediate aftermath of natural disasters. His observations are worth repeating in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Natural disasters invariably bring out architectural proposals for so-called emergency housing. The New York Times has already published Daniel Libeskind's proposed temporary modular shelters for tsunami victims in Sri Lanka and quotes the architect suggesting that something similar could work here. Architects in the past have proposed a variety of ingenious shelters, including prefabs, inflatables, geodesic dome kits, sprayed polyurethane igloos, and temporary housing made of cardboard tubes and plastic beer crates. As Davis points out, not only are these often untested "universal" solutions generally prohibitively expensive, their exotic forms are usually ill-suited to local conditions. That may be why such shelters, when they have been deployed, have frequently been rejected by users, and why historically the most common temporary shelter is the tent. Emergency housing sounds compelling, but it almost never works.

Even less popular than unusual forms of housing are communal shelters. In an emergency, people seek the support of the family. Since our idea of the family is inextricably linked to having a space of one's own, what people want is some kind of home. That is why FEMA wants to get evacuees out of the Astrodome and into the 50,000 campers and trailers they have reportedly ordered. Trailers are expensive, but at least they are mobile and could be moved to sites in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast at some point. Within months of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the city built 6,000 two-room temporary wooden huts. A year later, when people were ready to return home, they attached wheels to the huts and transported them to burned-out neighborhoods.

The wheeled cottages of San Francisco are frequently cited as a successful example of temporary housing, but the earthquake destroyed 250,000 homes, so in fact most people did not use them. They did what people always do after a disaster: Many left the city altogether, some stayed with family and friends nearby, some shared space in surviving buildings, others roughed it in makeshift quarters at the edge of the city. Davis is emphatic that "when offered the choice, people put temporary housing very low on the preference list." Disaster after disaster demonstrates that what people want is not a temporary roof, but to go home, to be among surviving family and friends, and to start rebuilding their lives.

The vast international experience of governmental and nongovernmental disaster relief agencies around the world suggests that the best strategy is to begin reconstruction as soon as possible. The reason for this is that, as Davis writes, the universal characteristic of post-disaster recovery is human improvisation and inventive resourcefulness. After the first shock, people invariably bounce back.

Relief is crucial—we have seen how crucial, in the last week. But in the longer term, as Davis describes it, relief can be the enemy of reconstruction. The more resources are poured into temporary arrangements—such as trailers and cruise ships—the less are available for reconstruction. In many cases, the longer that people are on relief, the later they start to live in their own houses on their own streets, and the later they begin their long road back to a normal life.

This needs to be borne in mind in the context of the current total evacuation of New Orleans. According to Davis, "all evidence from World War II onwards indicates the failure of [compulsory evacuation]." Certainly, the situation in New Orleans poses more immediate health and logistical challenges than most disaster areas do: The water must be drained, and critical infrastructure repaired before people can live there safely. But the bureaucratic impulse to keep all citizens out until this work is completed should be resisted. People must be let back into the city, or parts of it, as soon as possible; Mayor Ray Nagin is right about that. There is already anecdotal evidence being reported that some evacuees are considering settling down in Houston, or Dallas, or San Antonio, and not returning home.

What Davis' work also suggests is that most of the rebuilding of New Orleans will not be done by government but by the private sector, much of it by small contractors, do-it-yourselfers—and volunteers. Americans, more than most, are a nation of handymen. Their individual spirit of improvisation and inventiveness must be allowed to do its part.

Witold Rybczynski is Slate's architecture critic.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125816/

jurisprudence
The Mourning After
John Roberts grieves for his mentor.
By Cliff Sloan
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 2:32 PM PT

What's going in John Roberts' head right now, and what's in his heart? I don't mean what are his views on the constitutional right to privacy, or the scope of Congress' power under the Commerce Clause. I mean the distinctly personal reaction to the death of his mentor, the man who changed his life more than any other person in his professional life, the man he now is poised to succeed as one of the few people to hold the post of chief justice of the United States.

Looking at the photos and video of Roberts as he carries the casket and stands near the body, I am struck by his demeanor and his grief. He is truly bearing pall as he slowly mounts the steps of the Supreme Court with his hand gripping the coffin—the very steps he referred to the night he was first nominated by President Bush; the steps he says he never climbs without a lump in his throat.

There is no more moving a professional relationship than that between a law clerk and a Supreme Court justice. As a place to work, the court is unique in its intimacy and intensity. Most justices have only four clerks, but Rehnquist had three for a long time. There is no bureaucracy mediating the relationship between justice and clerk—no layers of posturing aides pulling up the ladder behind them. The power of the justice is final and absolute, or as absolute as one vote among nine can be. The internal proceedings are confidential, and only the clerks and justices are privy to them. The experience is limited in time, usually just one year, officially, just one term of the court, which makes it fleeting as the year unfolds. And the clerks generally are fairly young—in their 20s—and have been selected from reams of outstanding applicants by a justice for his or her own reasons; a selection that the clerk knows may well change his life, just as it changed the life of Roberts, a young law-school graduate from Indiana when Rehnquist chose him for the 1980 term.

Relationships between justices and their clerks vary, of course, depending on the particular justice and the particular clerk. But there always is, at a minimum, a powerful bond that is built in that momentous year they share. And, when a relationship between a justice and clerk is particularly close, as seems to have been the case with Roberts and Rehnquist, the bond is about as supercharged as any nonfamilial relationship can be.

All this and more, much more, must now be raging within Roberts. Only four previous Supreme Court justices have been law clerks at the court—Byron White, Rehnquist, John Paul Stevens, and Stephen Breyer. The influence on these former-clerk justices of the justices for whom they once worked is profound. Stevens speaks and writes reverentially of the little-known Wiley Rutledge more than five decades after his clerkship. Breyer fondly invokes the short-tenured Arthur Goldberg.

But, for Roberts, the experience is even more striking and intense. None of those four previous former-clerk justices actually took the seat of the justice for whom he clerked, as Roberts is now poised to do. And none of those former-clerk justices became a chief justice. One-hundred-and-eight people have served before Roberts as a justice on the Supreme Court. Only 16 have served as chief, and Rehnquist, of course, was one of those 16.

Look at the face of Roberts carrying that casket. It's not the face he deployed in the "murder boards" preparing him for the confirmation hearing that should have started this week. It's not the face he's used practicing in front of mirrors for Supreme Court arguments. In the midst of the preening and posturing, and ritualistic antics, of a Senate Supreme Court confirmation hearing process, it's the face of human grief, raw and unadorned.

Cliff Sloan is publisher of Slate. He is a former law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens and has argued five cases in the Supreme Court.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125848/

jurisprudence
The Real World
Why judicial philosophies matter.
By Risa Goluboff and Richard Schragger
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 1:53 PM PT

The devastation of New Orleans has rightly overshadowed the upcoming confirmation hearings for the next Supreme Court chief justice, and the nomination and confirmation of a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor. But Katrina, and the nation's response to it, has much to tell us about the future of the Supreme Court. The central debates of the nominations process mirror those concerning the government's response to Katrina: How much responsibility does the government, and in particular, the federal government, have in ensuring the safety and security of the inhabitants of this country?

To conservative jurists who take a parsimonious view of federal power, the answer to that question is: not much. Their philosophy of limited government, states' rights, and local control belittles the place of the federal government in our system. To the conservative jurist, the federal government is inevitably something to be feared; they assume that centralized power only leads to a loss of liberty. This crabbed and hostile view of the role of federal government has been in evidence throughout the Katrina debacle.

The two key constitutional commitments of those who would make government small enough to "drown in a bathtub"—as conservative Grover Norquist puts it—are the doctrines of federalism and individual property rights. Together, these two doctrines comprise what some conservatives call the "Constitution in Exile." The Constitution in Exile sees government as the enemy of individual rights. It insists that the preservation of such rights requires that government refrain from amassing power. And the individual rights it deems paramount are those of property and contract—rights that, if taken to the lengths the conservative jurists propose, would hobble government power as we now know it. The Constitution in Exile is, in many ways, the Constitution that existed before the New Deal.

Since at least the New Deal, and in some circumstances even earlier, federal officials, Supreme Court justices, and the American populace have replaced that limited vision with an alternative model of federal power. The modern constitutional vision remembers that the purpose of the Constitution is to provide for the general welfare. The general welfare in turn requires the government to affirmatively ensure the safety and security of the person, to maintain the minimal material conditions necessary to sustain one's civil and political life.

Under this vision, federal power is used to protect the weak and the vulnerable rather than harm them. Under this vision, individual rights require affirmative steps by the government, rather than passive restraint. Private power—and in the case of Katrina, the forces of nature—can pose greater threats to individual liberty than public power. It is, this New Deal vision holds, only government power that creates such liberty.

The events of Katrina, just like the crises of the Depression and World War II, have shown that state and local government simply cannot cope with large-scale social and economic catastrophes. Katrina displaced hundreds of thousands of people, many of them poor and without any resources to rebuild homes or start over. It destroyed one of the nation's most venerable cities, throwing into doubt the ability of millions more people to re-establish businesses, find employment, or continue their educations. It suspended oil and natural-gas production, affecting gasoline prices across the country. And it disrupted the commerce of the Mississippi River, crippling especially farm exports from the Midwest.

And the federal response to these cumulative disasters, late as it has come, will eventually entail the involvement of the Department of Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Energy, and numerous other federal agencies. Since that response has been until now inadequate, individual rights—to life most critically, as well as to liberty and property—have suffered. Make no mistake about it: This was a case in which more federal government would have made us freer.

Yet shrinking government even more than it's been trimmed already is precisely the goal of the Constitution in Exile. Such a Constitution is a figment. It invokes nostalgia for an agrarian society with individualistic values of self-reliance that may never have existed, and that certainly disappeared entirely more than a century ago. It is a world in which FEMA, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services—not to mention Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance—do not exist or are severely constrained.

The outrage Americans on both sides of the political spectrum have expressed toward the sluggish federal response to Katrina suggests just how divorced the Constitution in Exile, and those who reify it, is from the expectations of the great majority of the population. Those left stranded in New Orleans felt acutely the absence, the national government's abdication of responsibility, but they were hardly alone. Reporters, commentators, and politicians everywhere had no doubt that resolution of this crisis was a job for the national government—and that the national government had failed miserably. None of them could possibly support a Constitution in Exile. The very idea offends, when the need for government is so dire.

The most important lesson for political and constitutional scholars must be this: Were the Constitution in Exile to return to its allegedly rightful home in the Supreme Court, the national government would likely be prevented from taking on responsibility for any future Katrinas. After such a horrific display of what happens when the nation faces a disaster of national proportions and the national government falls short, it is clear that Judge Roberts, and Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement, should be asked if they endorse such a vision.

Judge Roberts should be asked whether he believes in a Constitution that permits and even demands that national resources be brought to bear to protect the safety and security of the person. He should be asked whether he believes that FEMA, or the Department of Homeland Security, for that matter, are constitutional. He should be asked whether the notion of civil rights includes the right to a minimally competent federal presence in the lives of the people, and an affirmative duty on the part of government to ensure basic necessities. And he should be asked whether the Constitution should be read as a document that has as one of its aims the promotion of the general welfare—as the Constitution's preamble states.

Judicial philosophies are not abstractions. They represent visions of a Constitution that are used to govern our very real world. Those who would reinstate the so-called Constitution In Exile would turn their backs on 75 years of federal commitment to protecting individuals. They would indeed have a federal government that they can "drown in a bathtub"; an unfortunate but telling metaphor after the events of the last week. No judge should be confirmed to the Supreme Court unless he or she repudiates that worldview. The consequences are no longer merely academic.

The authors are both associate professors at the University of Virginia Law School.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125817/

 

the big idea
An Imperfect Storm
How race shaped Bush's response to Katrina.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 12:59 PM PT

With the exception of Secretary of State Condi Rice, nearly every black person I've seen quoted in the press or on television—and most every white liberal—believes that African-Americans suffered disproportionately from government neglect in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Those being pulled from waist-deep corpse water sometimes put the case much more bluntly.

But what is the evidence that race itself—as opposed to such determinants as poverty, bad luck, geography, bureaucratic incompetence, and daunting logistics—deepened the misery of African-Americans in New Orleans? In that city, as in many others, blacks as a group were more prey to harm of many sorts because of the historic legacy of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. But those who, like me, think race was a factor in other ways as well ought to be able to give some account of how racial bias made the catastrophe worse.

At the heart of the matter is the racial pattern of American constituency politics. I don't think Kanye West can support his view that George W. Bush just doesn't care about black people. But it's a demonstrable matter of fact that Bush doesn't care much about black votes. And that, in the end, may amount to the same thing.

Blacks as a group have voted Democratic since the 1930s. The GOP has not courted them in any real way since the 1960s, focusing instead on attracting white constituencies hostile to civil rights and African-Americans in general. Even many conservatives now accept blame for this ugly, recent history. In July, Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, apologized to the NAACP for those in his party he said had been "looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization."

Yet the underlying racial dynamic of party politics hasn't changed at all under Mehlman's boss. Though he appointed the first and the second African-American secretaries of state, Bush seldom appears before black audiences. Beyond his interest in education, he has little to say about issues of social and urban policy. Bush has never articulated an approach, other than faith-based platitudes and tax cuts, to bettering the lives of African-Americans. And indeed, has not bettered them. The percentage of blacks living in poverty, which diminished from 33 percent to less than 23 percent during the Clinton years, has been rising again under Bush. In 2000, Bush got 8 percent of the black vote. In 2004, he got 11 percent. Because African-Americans constitute only 12 percent of the population, it's possible for Republicans to neglect them and still win elections. Indeed, as Mehlman indicated, neglecting them has often helped Republicans win.

Because they don't see blacks as a current or potential constituency, Bush and his fellow Republicans do not respond out of the instinct of self-interest when dealing with their concerns. Helping low-income blacks is a matter of charity to them, not necessity. The condescension in their attitude intensifies when it comes to New Orleans, which is 67 percent black and largely irrelevant to GOP political ambitions. Cities with large African-American population that happen to be in important swing states may command some of Karl Rove's respect as election time approaches. But Louisiana is small (9 electoral votes) and not much of a swinger these days. In 2004, Bush carried it by a 57-42 margin. If Bush and Rove didn't experience the spontaneous political reflex to help New Orleans, it may be because they don't think of New Orleans as a place that helps them.

Considered in this light, the actions and inactions now being picked apart are readily explicable. The president drastically reduced budget requests from the Army Corps of Engineers to strengthen the levees around New Orleans because there was no effective pressure on him to agree. When the levees broke on Tuesday, Aug. 30, no urge from the political gut overrode his natural instinct to spend another day vacationing at his ranch. When Bush finally got himself to the Gulf Coast three days later, he did his hugging in Biloxi, Miss., which is 71 percent white, with a mayor, governor, and two senators who are all Republicans. Bush's memorable comments were about rebuilding Sen. Trent Lott's porch and about how he used to enjoy getting hammered in New Orleans. Only when a firestorm of criticism and political damage broke out over the federal government's callousness did Bush open his eyes to black suffering.

Had the residents of New Orleans been white Republicans in a state that mattered politically, instead of poor blacks in city that didn't, Bush's response surely would have been different. Compare what happened when hurricanes Charley and Frances hit Florida in 2004. Though the damage from those storms was negligible in relation to Katrina's, the reaction from the White House was instinctive, rapid, and generous to the point of profligacy. Bush visited hurricane victims four times in six weeks and delivered relief checks personally. Michael Brown of FEMA, now widely regarded as an incompetent political hack, was so responsive that local officials praised the agency's performance.

The kind of constituency politics that results in a big life-preserver for whites in Florida and a tiny one for blacks in Louisiana may not be racist by design or intent. But the inevitable result is clear racial discrimination. It won't change when Republicans care more about blacks. It will change when they have more reason to care.

war stories
$41 Billion, and Not a Penny of Foresight
Why is the New Orleans recovery going so badly? Just look at the DHS budget.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, at 1:01 PM PT

As Tim Naftali wrote in Slate yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security just flunked its first test. The question now—to ensure that things go better next time—is: Why? Was it simply that the storm's magnitude would have overwhelmed even the best-laid plans? Or is there something about DHS—a conglomerate of 22 federal departments and agencies mushed together in the desperate wake of 9/11—that compounds the normal sluggishness of large bureaucracies?

To understand why DHS is underperforming on the Gulf Coast, and why it won't improve soon, the best place to start is how it spends its money. There is no clearer window on a bureaucracy's culture than its budget, so let's look inside the DHS's 100-page budget book for fiscal year 2006.

The first thing to note is that, contrary to official rhetoric, this is not a department infused with urgency. The budget proposed for next year is only a hair larger than the budget approved for this year. ($41.02 billion in FY 2005, $41.07 billion in FY 2006.)

As for addressing disasters, the budget's more than a hair smaller. The DHS agency in charge of liaison with local emergency-planning outfits—the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness—has had its budget cut by more than $600 million in the last two years (from $4.2 billion in FY 2004 to $4 billion in FY 2005 to a proposed $3.6 billion in FY 2006). This is one of just two DHS agencies that faces a budget cut, and it's the only one to be cut two years in a row.

Another line item that leaps off the page is the "pre-disaster mitigation fund and national flood mitigation fund." This is a "competitive grant program to assist states and communities to reach a higher level of risk management and risk reduction through planning and mitigation actions taken before disasters occur," and thus to "provide for a reduction to the risk to lives, to structures, and to critical infrastructure from natural hazards."

This program seems ready-made for a city like New Orleans. It gets a $58 million boost in next year's budget (from $120 million to $178 million)—but that merely restores the $49 million cut that it suffered in this year's.

Part of the problem is the consolidation of FEMA—an agency that deals with natural disasters—into a superagency set up primarily to deal with terrorist attacks. The head of FEMA used to be a Cabinet-level job and as such would sit in on meetings of the National Security Council and—at least theoretically—have a direct line to the president. When DHS was created in March 2003, all that was taken away; communiqués, bulletins, alerts, and so forth, from FEMA and 21 other federal departments and agencies, would henceforth be filtered through the secretary of homeland security.

If FEMA had still been an independent body in the days and weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck, would the NSC have been more fully warned of the disaster's potential scope? A FEMA study in early 2001 pegged a hurricane in New Orleans as one of the three biggest catastrophes that might strike the United States (the others were an earthquake in San Francisco and a terrorist attack in New York). Other specialists had warned that the levees might rupture—a possibility that neither the president nor his advisers apparently foresaw.

But there is a scarier question still to consider: How ready is DHS for the disaster that its officials have been focused on the last two and a half years? If New Orleans' levees had been broken not by a hurricane but by terrorists' bombs, the nightmares we see now—the lack of planning and therefore of food, water, transportation, shelter, and public order—would be no different. And yet the Department of Homeland Security had scant little to deal with it, either on hand or ready for quick mobilization, and nothing in the 2006 budget suggests it will be any readier next year, whether for a hurricane or another 9/11.

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Slate's Eric Umansky, in his "Today's Papers" column Friday, quotes the following from an AP story last year: "Officials have warned that if a major hurricane hits New Orleans, thousands of people could be killed and the city could be flooded for weeks as flood waters breach the levees ringing the city." [Italics added.]

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

 

dispatches
My Year of Hurricanes
I lost everything in Katrina.
By Blake Bailey
Posted Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, at 11:19 AM PT

Last year, my wife and I lived through four hurricanes. She was finishing grad school at the University of Florida, and even though we were pretty far inland (Gainesville), we lost power for a total of two weeks. I never really got used to it: the rotting groceries, the mosquitoes, the headache you get reading by candlelight, the general gloom. During Ivan, the last of the four, I had the good luck to be in Virginia—or so I thought. A few days later, Ivan caught up with me on the road to Washington, D.C., and blew me back to my motel in Williamsburg. It's hard not to take that sort of thing personally.

Two months ago we moved to New Orleans with our 1-year-old daughter, and a few days later, sure enough, Tropical Storm Cindy struck. Actually it was a good way to meet the neighbors. We'd bought a little art-deco-y home in Gentilly, near Lake Pontchartrain, a place of wistful gentility where people are proud of their lawns; the day after Cindy, everybody was outside, en famille, removing debris and sprucing up the grass. My moving company hadn't arrived yet—they took 27 days in all—and my neighbors loaned me rakes and so forth and stood around commiserating. Two days before, I told them, I'd accidentally backed my car over our cat's head; our move to New Orleans, everybody agreed, had gotten off to a rocky start. On the other hand our cat had survived, miraculously—there she was, nosing around the debris. Surely that was a good sign.

By the time Katrina arrived, everything was falling into place: Our furniture had been delivered (after we'd threatened legal action), a handyman had fixed our screens and replaced doorknobs and gotten all the appliances working, the baby was installed in a great Montessori day-care center. The night before evacuation—we didn't know that yet—we had a dinner party and our guests congratulated us on our cool house. It was true. For the past week or so, I could hardly get any work done because I kept turning around in my desk chair to survey my awesome new study: the rounded moldings over the doors, the glimmering parquet floors, everything. This was our reward for years and years of hard work.

The next day—Saturday, August 27—the front page of the Times-Picayune warned that Hurricane Katrina was coming right at us. A week before, the storm had been a dinky little depression somewhere in the Atlantic; then it was a Category 1 heading for the Florida panhandle; then, boom, it was a Category 3—a 4, a 5—headed right at us! Still, we didn't believe it.

"I went through this crap with Ivan," our neighbor Jean said. "Spent two days fighting traffic for nothing. When I came home, the coffee cup on my back porch was exactly where I left it."

But there was the baby to consider, and besides, we had friends in Oxford, Miss., who were happy to let us stay for a few days. So we packed a duffel bag with a few essentials—in my case, three shirts, two pairs of boxers, one pair of shorts, a toilet kit, and a laptop. Also, we took our dog but left the cat in our bathroom with plenty of food and water—she was a house cat, after all, who'd survived a car backing over her head.

Traffic was clogged on that first stretch of I-10—maybe five miles—but it was clear sailing once we got to the Pontchartrain Causeway. It was Saturday afternoon; evacuation was still "optional." We got to Oxford in time for a late dinner and watched the Weather Channel. The situation had darkened all right—there was the storm, bigger than ever, bearing down on our house—but still the announcers talked of a possible low-pressure system (or something) pushing it off to the east. So the next day I sipped bourbon and waited for the Weather Channel to bear glad tidings about that low-pressure system; instead it used words like "catastrophic" and "apocalyptic."

When the storm hit, Monday morning, it had diminished to a Category 4—thank God, thank God—and had pulled a little east of New Orleans. My wife and I were worried about wind damage, certainly, but scarcely considered the matter of flooding; we were in a "low-risk" flood zone, as our insurance company would have it, so we'd declined flood insurance.

That night I had a beautiful dream: Our house was not only intact, it was somehow better—bigger, spiffier—and there on the porch was a dry, immaculate coffee cup. Then my wife and I were awoken by the ringing of our cell phone (which continued to work because of our Florida area code). It was my father-in-law in Fayetteville, Ark.; the levee had been breached on the lake, he said.

"So we can't come home today?" my wife asked drowsily.

Hope dies hard. Even after we'd seen the video of the subaquatic Ninth Ward, and what looked like Gentilly, we thought maybe we'd been spared. A few of those cars on TV were submerged only up to their tires, and our house was raised three feet. So there was that. But finally, online, I saw a photograph of a street sign in our immediate neighborhood. It was just poking out of the swirling brown water. That was pretty definitive.

The boxers, T-shirts, and laptop I brought to Mississippi are pretty much my entire worldly possessions. We're lucky, though. Everyone has been so kind. Friends I haven't heard from in months, years, have gotten in touch offering support. A bevy of care packages are on the way. People speak to us gently, as if we might crack at any moment.

But it isn't so. Mornings are bad, to be sure: that first minute after you wake up, and you remember all over again that you're broke and everything is gone and your poor old cat is dead; but there, too, is your wife's warm haunch, right where you left it, and there's the gaping baby between you. And there on TV—in that weird, ragged, computerized footage that seems itself a sign of the Apocalypse—are the people left behind, raging and dying in the ruins. Thank God we're gone.

Blake Bailey is the author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. He's working on a biography of John Cheever.

 

jurisprudence
Humble Fie
Why does John Roberts hate courts so much?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, at 10:25 AM PT

Several commentators recently pointed out the differences between John Roberts and Sandra Day O'Connor: Gina Holland surveyed the differences between their substantive views on hot-button issues including police power, school prayer, and abortion. Jonathan Turley derided O'Connor for opinions that were "inconsistent, political and outcome-driven," adding that "Roberts, to his credit, is no Sandra O'Connor." And Craig Green wrote recently in the New Jersey Law Journal that O'Connor's fondness for real-world compromise stands in stark contrast to Roberts' inside-the-beltway ideological conservatism.

But it seems to me that the single biggest difference between the two jurists lies not in their respective ideologies, intellects, or job experience. The key difference is just this: O'Connor had a deep and abiding belief that government (and especially the court) could help people, while Roberts seemingly believes that no problem is too big for government (and especially the court) to ignore.

The most prevalent criticism of O'Connor—from writers across the political spectrum—was that she believed the court could and should intervene in every dispute, large or small. She may have been a minimalist or incrementalist in that she dealt with cases one at a time. But she sure was grandiose in her view of what the court should do with its powers. Jeffrey Rosen, in a New York Times Magazine profile—"A Majority of One"—famously charged her with being all-too-ready to place herself "not only at the center of the court but also at the center of American politics." O'Connor, in theory a strong backer of states' rights and the power of legislatures, was always prepared to second-guess them if she thought the court could cobble together a better fix.

A look at the writings of John Roberts suggests quite the opposite mind frame: Roberts' hostility toward activist judges and the courts is one of the enduring features of his career. Whatever you may think of the 108-page report on Roberts, released this week by the Alliance for Justice, one of the consistent themes is that he sees almost no role for courts as remedial institutions. Judges should limit themselves to interpreting the law, parsing statutes, and nothing more. Anything else, he feels, is overreaching.

So Roberts has made it his work to try to hobble the courts, be it by approving court-stripping legislation, cutting off access to courts for classes of plaintiffs, limiting the reach of federal statutes, or curbing the power of the courts to remedy injustices. The best courts, it seems, are bound, gagged, and left to huddle in a closet. One sort of wonders why the job of judge appeals to him in the first place.

Take Roberts' expansive views on the constitutionality of court-stripping legislation: In a memo from 1984, Roberts defended legislation that would have yanked busing cases from the hands of the courts—even when his superiors at the Justice Department thought the proposed bill went too far. Court-stripping legislation isn't merely an attack on the courts' prerogative to review the constitutionality of a law. It cuts off access to justice, telling wronged parties they deserve no remedy.

Roberts similarly sought to narrow the reach of 42 USC Section 1983, the federal law that allows us to sue the government when we are deprived of our federal rights. While working at the Solicitor General's office under George Bush I, Roberts authored an amicus brief in Wilder v. Virginia Hospital Association, a case in which the state of Virginia disputed whether it must reimburse hospitals for Medicaid claims at reasonable rates. The Supreme Court disagreed with Roberts' argument that the Medicaid Act created no enforceable rights. As the Alliance for Justice report notes, "Medicaid patients ... would have had little recourse for protecting their benefits if Judge Roberts' view had prevailed."

Roberts has also been a tireless warrior in the fight to limit access to the courts with respect to Title IX—the federal statute that attempts to remedy gender discrimination in education. Roberts has urged narrowing the interpretation of the statute so as to render it vastly less effective. He urged the Bush I administration not to get involved in a case brought by female prisoners saddled with disparate vocational programs. He also authored an amicus brief in Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools, contending that a student sexually abused by her high-school teacher was not entitled to compensatory damages under Title IX. The high court disagreed with him, concluding that Roberts' position would have left the girl with "no remedy at all."

"No remedy at all," in case after case. And all the while, Roberts has argued for narrowing the "standing" requirements—the rules about who gets to walk into a court with a controversy, most notably when they want to protest an environmental hazard or degradation.

Roberts has tried to cut courts off at the knees by limiting their ability to grant relief—including their power to impose consent decrees to improve conditions in prisons or schools. He has advocated that the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division shouldn't be entitled to grant back pay or offers of employment when settling disputes over schools with discriminatory practices. And Roberts has celebrated the Rehnquist Court's newfound love affair with the 11^th Amendment—a piece of truly bonkers constitutional doctrine that's being used to keep state employees from suing their own state governments and is a far broader application of the idea of sovereign immunity than the amendment itself contemplates.

Finally, as a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Roberts signed off on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, an opinion that told Guantanamo detainees named "enemy combatants," and thus subject to President Bush's new McGuilty Commissions, that they were plumb out of luck if they sought redress in the U.S. courts. This on the heels of the explicit 2004 Supreme Court ruling that such prisoners were entitled to file habeas petitions in federal court. The response of Roberts and his colleagues on the Hamdan panel? Go ahead, file your petitions, but no court can ever grant you relief.

What does it mean when a judge spends so much energy barring the courtroom door to citizens seeking relief? Is it proper when the courts are forced to say, "Sorry about your rape/discrimination/job/environmental hazard/crap schools/what-have-you, but there's just no relief to be had"? Are we comfortable with a judge so willing to dismiss civil rights, environmental, disability, voting, workers, and race complainants as undeserving, whiny masses?

At first blush, all this judicial deference and humility looks like a good thing—a correction for overzealous "activists" like Roberts' soon-to-be predecessor O'Connor. Certainly it's tempting to agree with Slate reader Steven Ehrbar, who feels that judges have plenty to do interpreting the law and don't need to be busying themselves fixing problems. But I'm still a bit partial to that old-fashioned, biblical view of judges as people who resolve disputes and remedy injustice. I still think there's a role for judges simply doing equity, making things fair, especially for the people who don't have the governor on speed dial.

From the day his nomination was announced, one word has been associated with John Roberts more than any other: "humility." While Sandra Day O'Connor has been called many things in her jurisprudential career, "humble" isn't one of them. But it seems to me that sometimes judges must be brave as well as humble. They must care when the world isn't fair. Judicial restraint isn't an end in itself. The end in itself should be doing justice, and sometimes that means listening to the whiny masses, one case at a time

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

 

architecture
The Jewel of the South
Can New Orleans recover its cultural richness?
By Witold Rybczynski
Posted Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, at 3:40 AM PT

New York 1835, Chicago 1871, Galveston 1900, San Francisco 1906. To this list of apocalyptic urban disaster must now be added, New Orleans 2005. As evidence slowly becomes available, it is clear that the effect of Katrina on the city is of epic proportions. In many ways, the case of New Orleans is even worse than its historic antecedents. Although the resources being marshaled in the rescue operation are greater—how did they manage before helicopters?—so is the problem; the city is much larger, and its infrastructure more complex and hence more difficult to replace.

Cities are man's greatest creation, at least measured in physical extent, so it is that much more awful to witness their destruction. And it is more than the loss of lives and property, it is also the eradication of a sense of community itself, which, however imperfect, is always a measure of human achievement. In the case of New Orleans, it is also the loss of a distinctive urban fabric. It is—was—a rare example of French city-building in the United States (Detroit, Mobile, and St. Louis are others, but New Orleans is the most fully realized and, until a few days ago, the best preserved). Founded by the French in 1722 and then taken over by the Spanish (who built all those wrought-iron balconies), New Orleans has a cultural and architectural richness that is unique among the bland, sliced-bread cities of the continent.

Many cities have historic buildings, but few have entire historic neighborhoods such as the Garden District and the Vieux Carré, which is one of the country's first legally protected historic districts, second only to Charleston. The narrow streets and alleys form an ensemble of great historical worth. The value of the French Quarter is not merely that it is old and exceptionally charming, with its cathedral and presbytery on Jackson Square, but that it has resisted gentrification and preserved a healthy vulgarity.

It's still too early to tell, but the effect of standing water on wooden buildings for a period of several weeks (or months?) will be calamitous. The loss of historical artifacts will be extensive. In many cases, irremediable. One can't imagine the fate of Metairie Cemetery, for example, or City Park. The unspoken question is, will New Orleans recover? Chicago and San Francisco did, after suffering calamitous fires. Leningrad in 1941 and Warsaw in 1944 underwent horrendous destruction during World War II—much worse than New Orleans—and both were reconstructed. Reconstructed, not merely built anew. Parts of both cities were painstakingly rebuilt over 50 years, rebuilt the way that a survivor's face might be rebuilt after a particularly awful car accident.

Perhaps the better question is whether New Orleans has the means to recover? It is not a rich city, as were Chicago and San Francisco after their great fires. In any case, American big cities are no longer paramount, and they were in the past. Like all cities today, and more than most, New Orleans has a large poor population. It is reliant on tourism, an unreliable industry that will surely be adversely affected by the destruction. If reconstruction is to take place it will require considerable outside resources. Business as usual—even disaster relief as usual—will not be enough.

Witold Rybczynski is Slate's architecture critic.

 

politics
Department of Homeland Screw-Up
What is the Bush administration doing?
By Tim Naftali
Posted Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005, at 4:22 PM PT

The Bush administration has been staggeringly ineffectual in its response to the rapidly deteriorating situation in New Orleans. Its failures are painful evidence of how far we have to go in developing the capability to respond rapidly to a mass-casualty disaster.

The president's statement this afternoon set the tone. Rather than direct the U.S. military to immediately assist the thousands of people without food or water in the city center, Bush assured the nation that expected gasoline shortages would be temporary and that his father and former President Clinton were ready to pass the tin can to ensure private-sector support for rebuilding New Orleans. As people began dying around the Convention Center, and Mayor Ray Nagin resorted to issuing a pathetic SOS over CNN, Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff spoke empathetically of the suffering of the people in New Orleans. But somehow he seemed proud that 72 hours after the hurricane hit, only 2,800 National Guardsmen had come to the city. The number is about to reach 12,000 by tomorrow. That is awfully late for the people stranded there. Yet Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who is commanding the military component of Washington's response, pleaded for patience from the people of New Orleans, promising that the U.S. Army was "building the capability" to help them.

Building the capability? How is it possible that with the fourth anniversary of 9/11 almost upon us, the federal government doesn't have in hand the capability to prepare for and then manage a large urban disaster, natural or man-made? In terms of the challenge to government, there is little difference between a terrorist attack that wounds many people and renders a significant portion of a city uninhabitable, and the fallout this week from the failure of one of New Orleans' major levees. Indeed, a terrorist could have chosen a levee for his target. Or a dirty-bomb attack in New Orleans could have caused the same sort of forced evacuation we are seeing and the widespread sickness that is likely to follow.

Chertoff's Department of Homeland Security demonstrated today that it could organize an impressive press conference in Washington, lining up every participating civilian or military service from the Coast Guard to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to promise its cooperation. But on the ground in Louisiana, where it counts, DHS is turning out to be the sum of its inefficient parts. The department looks like what its biggest critics predicted: a new level of bureaucracy grafted onto a collection of largely ineffectual under-agencies.

What has DHS been doing if not readying itself and its subcomponents for a likely disaster? The collapse of a New Orleans levee has long led a list of worst-case urban crisis scenarios. The dots had already been connected. Over the last century, New Orleans has sunk 3 feet deeper below sea level. With each inch, pressure grows along the levees. Meanwhile the loss of wetlands and the shrinking of the Gulf Coast's barrier islands have reduced the natural protection from hurricane winds. The weakness of the levees was underscored in a 2002 wide-ranging exploration of New Orleans' hurricane vulnerability by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, one of many grimly vindicated Cassandras. The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, which built the levees and continues to manage them, told the paper then that there was little threat of a levee's collapse. But the corps admitted that its estimates were 40 years old and that no one had bothered to update them.

The response to Katrina thus far indicates two flaws in the Bush administration's thinking about homeland security. The federal government hasn't learned how to plan for a tragedy that demands putting a city on sustained life-support, as opposed to a one-moment-in-time attack that requires recovering the dead and injured from debris and then quickly rebuilding. And DHS appears unwilling to plan for the early use of the U.S. military to cope with a civilian tragedy. Presidential administrations have perennially underestimated the difficulty of the latter task. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy's top aide, Kenneth O'Donnell, thought it would be easy to deploy troops rapidly to defend James Meredith when he was attacked by segregationists while trying to enroll as the University of Mississippi's first black student. "If the President of the United States calls up and says, 'Get your ass down there,' " O'Donnell said, "I would think they'd be on a fucking plane in about five minutes." Kennedy made that call. But then, in spite of O'Donnell's prediction, he watched in frustration as the army dithered for hours before deploying to Oxford, Miss.

The Kennedy administration thus learned that the army must be told in advance what to do. As a matter of law and preference, the military does little training for domestic missions. It balks and mutters about posse comitatus, the legal principle that prohibits the use of the army for law enforcement, and leaves the hard work for the National Guard and state and local authorities. This has made sense most of the time. But in an era when we are supposed to be better prepared for an urban disaster, the tradition of allowing local and state authorities to be overwhelmed before the federal government and military step in should have been rethought.

Located only three hours from New Orleans is Fort Polk, home of the 4^th Brigade of the 10^th Mountain Division, a light infantry unit with about 3,000 soldiers. Also at Fort Polk is the Joint Readiness Training Center, which prepares military units to respond rapidly to crises abroad. The 4^th Brigade has been training for duty in Afghanistan. Why was it also not ready to take on a local disaster scenario in hurricane season? Or at the least, once the National Hurricane Center predicted that the eye of Katrina would come close to New Orleans, couldn't DHS have deployed the military to help shore up the levees?

And in the event of a WMD attack, when there would likely be no warning at all, what is DHS's contingency plan for moving into position the army or the marines to restore order and sustain life? In the wake of Katrina and the breached levee, the answer seems to be not much of one. In the wake of 9/11, that is worse than incomprehensible. It is unforgivable.

Tim Naftali, the director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, is the author of Blind Spot: the Secret History of American Counterterrorism.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125494/

the middlebrow
Ray Bradbury
The pulp god lives.
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005, at 3:06 PM PT

Ray Bradbury has been dusted with so much glory lately that it's high time his reputation got a good sullying. A generous biography published in April prompted a round of tributes to Bradbury as a "literary icon" (the Los Angeles Times) and the sci-fi author of his generation "who could really write" (the New York Times). Last November, he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. His novel Fahrenheit 451 remains a staple of middle-school English classes. So now that Bradbury has officially been accepted into the halls of Literature, can we lesser life forms please have him back? To these eyes, many of Bradbury's most garishly "literary" achievements are his least impressive. When the McCarthyite gloom of Fahrenheit 451 fades, it's the pulpy, childlike terrors that stick. Bradbury nudging characters into his ingenious hells; Bradbury the fabulist of the Space Age (morals in 10 pages or less!); Bradbury the dinosaur nut who confessed an urge to "run and live" among giant reptiles. Cut the lights and cue the theremin. Ray Bradbury belongs to pulp.

Luckily, here comes a movie adaptation (by director Peter Hyams) of one of Bradbury's most ingenious parables, "A Sound of Thunder." The plot, much copied and parodied: Man hurtles back in a time machine, smooshes a butterfly, and sets off an evolutionary thunderstorm that turns the present into a police-state dystopia. Hyams' adaptation is mostly sodden, but anyone who re-reads "A Sound of Thunder" will find Bradbury at his hammy best, a pulp god at full power.

Writing nonstop since his Waukegan, Ill., boyhood, Bradbury plied his trade in the 1940s mostly at pulps like Weird Tales and Dime Detective. (He managed to place a story in The New Yorker in 1947—his only appearance in the magazine.) It wasn't until 1950, with his novel The Martian Chronicles, that Bradbury experienced the career-altering moment that genre writers yearn for—the moment when a literary eminence from one of the slicks declares, "This man is one of Us." For Harlan Ellison, the benediction came from Dorothy Parker. For Bradbury it came from Christopher Isherwood, the British gadfly whose years spent in Weimar Germany gave him a soft spot for extraterrestrial life. Bradbury bumped into Isherwood at a Santa Monica, Calif., bookshop and pressed a copy of The Martian Chronicles into his hands. Isherwood later praised the book for its "sheer lift and power of a truly original imagination." Of Bradbury's technical prowess, he noted, "His interest in machines seems to be limited to their symbolic and aesthetic aspects. I doubt if he could pilot a rocket ship, much less design one."

Thus goes the familiar rap on Bradbury: Writes great stuff. Doesn't know a lick about science. Indeed, "A Sound of Thunder" finds Bradbury at his most scientifically indifferent. A big-game hunter named Eckels arrives at an outfit called Time Safari, Inc. and discovers the safari involves a time machine that transports hunters back to the days of dinosaurs. With such a glorious premise, a writer like Arthur C. Clarke would have rifled through the technical journals and unleashed a blitz of pseudoscience—dazzling the reader into believing in the impossible. For Bradbury, the time machine is just a nifty plot device: "a snaking and humming of wires and steel boxes … an aurora that flickered now orange, now silver, now blue."

Eckels is hurtled back to a primeval jungle to bag the biggest of game, the Tyrannosaurus rex, with the added charge that he must not disturb any other part of the natural world, lest he upset the delicate time-space continuum. It's here, with dinosaur on the prowl, that Bradbury's pulp juices begin to flow. You can sense the extinct creature touching Bradbury in a way that humans or machines never will. Not only does his mood improve, but so does his writing:

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body, those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled.

Those hips, those thighs! None of Bradbury's humans were ever the recipients of a metaphor as delightful as "watchmaker's claws." All the business about time travel fades away and the slender purpose of Bradbury's story become clear: "Get me a dinosaur!" Given a similar imperative, Michael Crichton turned to prolix theories of bugs-in-amber and XX chromosomes; Bradbury got the same effect in a lean 10 pages. You can see why the literary establishment is tempted to claim Bradbury as one of its own. And yet that precise, almost tender evocation of a dinosaur could only have been written by a man-child—one raised on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Buck Rogers, one for whom creating a terrifying beast is a literary end in and of itself.

"A Sound of Thunder" derives its deeper effects from Bradbury's distinctive combination of boyish wonder and preoccupation with the violence of the adult world. Spooked by the Tyrannosaurus, Eckels panics and steps on a butterfly, setting off ripples in time. Returning to the present, he discovers that the presidential election has been won by a Teutonic militarist named Deutscher; Time Safari's signage has been rendered into phonetic Germano-English ("Wee taek yu thair"). Bradbury's fear of an American Reich is the product of a particularly paranoid historical moment, one Philip Roth returned to in The Plot Against America. So are Bradbury's gloomy warnings about technology, but they're worth pausing over for what they illuminate about Bradbury's unusual career.

It would be a profound understatement to call Bradbury a technophobe. He is a technocrank—eager to share his unhappiness about inventions new and old. For sci-fi adherents, this has made Bradbury into something of a strange apostle. In years past, Bradbury has fulminated against automobiles, telephones, and TV sets; more recent targets include ATMs, the Internet, and personal computers. ("A computer is a typewriter," he told Salon in 2001. "I have two typewriters, I don't need another one.") And yet, at the same instant, Bradbury is an exuberant fan of NASA and has proclaimed more than once that mankind should start colonizing Mars. There is a strange disconnect within a man who would live on the Red Planet but insist on in-person banking.

The critic Gary K. Wolfe suggests that Bradbury is a classic late-adapter: someone who fears technology but gives in when he sees it as a force for good. I think Bradbury's technophobia is slightly more complicated. It emerges from what you might call stunted futurism. Bradbury's worldview is unduly shaped by his Illinois boyhood—when he read Burroughs and Jules Verne and dreamed the dreams specific to 1930s sci-fi: missions to Mars, time machines, etc. When technology follows Burroughs and Buck Rogers, as with the space program, Bradbury rushes to embrace it. When technology veers off in an unforeseen direction, as with the Internet, he reverts to a defensive crouch—a Cold War worldview in which inventions can become, as he once put it, "paranoiacally dangerous devices." His is at once a boyish enthusiast and prophet of doom. "I don't try to predict the future," he has remarked, "I try to prevent it."

Bradbury has a similar ambivalence for his pulp roots, which he is happy to defend until they cost him literary prestige. In 1953, he published a ringing endorsement of science fiction in The Nation: "[T]here are few more exciting genres; there are none fresher or so full of continually renewed and renewable concepts." At the same moment, according to Sam Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles, he was pleading with his New York publisher to remove the words "science fiction" from the cover of his books, fearing it would cost him reviews in tony magazines.

Fahrenheit 451 is an exciting dystopian bible the first time you pick it up. But it seems to pale with each additional reading and nearly disappears altogether after you discover 1984 and Brave New World. It doesn't diminish Bradbury's "serious" novels to suggest that they weren't his best stuff. He thrived in creating compact terrors like "A Sound of Thunder"; or "The Veldt," in which children snare their parents in virtual reality; or "Zero Hour," in which the tykes facilitate an alien invasion, knowing the new world order will place them, not their parents, in charge. It's within the confines of the short story that Bradbury's mind best articulates the strange relationship between childhood yearnings and the violence around us. That Bradbury should set these parables in a dystopian future or on Mars is what makes him distinct. Earth to the literary establishment: The pulp god lives!

Bryan Curtis is a Slate staff writer. You can e-mail him at curtisb@slate.com.

 

surfergirl
Children of Beslan
The new documentary on HBO is brilliant, but bone-crushingly sad.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005, at 12:56 PM PT

There are a lot of things on television that can make you weep while watching them (in a pinch, any ER rerun will do), but it's rare to come across a program that leaves you sobbing in a ball on the couch for some time after it's over. That may seem like a strange sort of recommendation, but for all its bone-crushing sadness, I don't know that I've ever seen a made-for-TV documentary I'd recommend as highly as Children of Beslan, which premieres tonight at 8 p.m. ET on HBO. Co-directed by the British documentarians Ewa Ewart and Leslie Woodhead, the hourlong film revisits the terrorist siege that began one year ago today at an elementary school in the town of Beslan, about a thousand miles south of Moscow. For three days, Chechen extremists held nearly 1,300 people hostage in the school's gym, refusing them food and water and terrorizing them with homemade bombs strung from the ceiling on wires. On the third day, as the bombs began to go off, Russian forces stormed the school. In the end, the siege and its aftermath resulted in the deaths of 331 people, more than half of them children.

Given the extreme nature of the events it recounts, Children of Beslan is most remarkable for its unsentimental spareness. It consists entirely of interviews with children who survived those harrowing three days in the school gym: no adult talking heads, no voiceover narration (though occasionally an intertitle appears to clarify the chronology of the siege.) We don't even hear the offscreen voices of whoever's interviewing the children. There are some short clips of news footage of the event, and a few gruesome scraps of video shot by the terrorists themselves inside the gym. But the bulk of the film is nothing but close-ups of individual kids, recounting their memories with a thoughtfulness and gravity that makes you wish that more major news events were relayed to us by people under 10.

In Russia, Sept. 1 is the "Day of Knowledge," the traditional first day of the school year. The film opens on home-video footage shot by proud parents on that morning last year: Children decked out in their best clothes (black-and-white suits for the boys, huge pom-pom ponytail holders for the girls), smiling shyly at their teachers and chewing on the strings of their back-to-school balloons. Back in the present day, an intrepid kid named Alex leads the cameraman on a tour of the burned-out school, matter-of-factly recounting his memories of the events of that day. Like all the kids who are interviewed, Alex demonstrates an astonishing recall for detail. One girl remembers the dress she was wearing, which her mother eventually requisitioned to mop up a pool of blood on the floor: "It was beautiful and embroidered, and it cost 300 rubles." A boy describes the color of one masked terrorist's eyes: "They were black, like black glass."

The density of heartbreaking detail in the children's stories is such that it's hard to single out any one for special mention. A boy tells of how a woman who staved off thirst by drinking her own urine was pestered by onlookers to share it around. He concludes philosophically, "That's how it was. People even quarreled over their pee." Another recounts how he tried to use the five roubles he had in his pocket to bribe a terrorist into letting his mother go. Yet another recalls fantasizing that Harry Potter would come to save him: "I remembered that he had a cloak that made him invisible. And he would come and wrap me in it, and we'd be invisible, and we'd escape."

It's not until well into the documentary that we find out which of the children interviewed lost someone in the siege: a brother, a father, a mother, a school friend. When this information begins to come out, the children's composure seems all the more extraordinary. In the end, Children of Beslan becomes not only a documentary about an event too-little remembered outside of Russia (and all too germane in a climate of global terrorism), but a reflection on suffering, loss, and even theology. A girl named Lana recalls how she prayed to God to "save us all, please. ... He saved those he could manage to save, and the ones he couldn't, he kept with him. He kept the best. The most beautiful ones died."

The filmmakers' restraint and sobriety leave open the question of how traumatized these kids remain by the ordeal they endured. But the film leaves the impression that, however resilient these children may seem, the seeds of revenge have been planted for the next generation. One boy admits that, since the siege, he enjoys picking off terrorists in violent video games (though, God knows, so do plenty of kids who have never experienced terror firsthand.) Another child builds a schoolhouse out of Legos, making sure to equip it with rooftop missiles. And Alex, the little boy who coolly points out the classroom where his father was thrown out a window to his death, concludes his tour with the chillingly calm pronouncement: "My greatest desire is to go to Chechnya and kill all those terrorists. To avenge my dad."

If you're still keeping it together after those anecdotes, you might—might—be able to make it through Children of Beslan without losing it completely. But if you can, I'm not sure you're someone I'd want to know.

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

 

moneybox
The Katrina Premium
Why the hurricane may hurt the economy more than 9/11.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005, at 12:42 PM PT

Economically speaking, Katrina is no 9/11. It may be much worse. In the months after 9/11, stocks rallied. The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates, unleashing a wave of liquidity and paving the way for economy-boosting gimmicks like zero-percent financing. The airlines suffered a grievous blow. But prices didn't jump; there were no shortages of anything. Looking back, the catastrophe of 9/11 had a relatively minor impact on the broad economy.

And the consensus thus far seems to be that Katrina will be much the same. "As long as we find that the energy impact is only temporary, and there is no permanent damage to the infrastructure," Ben Bernanke, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said yesterday, "the effects in the overall economy will be fairly modest." Traders are already having the 9/11 reaction, bidding up stocks and buying long-term bonds.

But because of the nature of the damage, the industries it affected, the role the Gulf Coast plays in the national economy, and the place we're at in the business cycle, Katrina could prove to be inflationary. And as a result, the damage it causes could ripple far beyond the Mississippi Delta.

The 9/11 attacks struck at the heart of the New Economy. But the businesses affected—newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, investment banks, stock traders, insurance companies, accountants, and the New York Stock Exchange—were able swiftly to reorganize and get back on track in short order. The physical infrastructure they lost was not essential to their businesses—Merrill Lynch could trade stocks in midtown; the Wall Street Journal could publish from New Jersey. As a result, the businesses and consumers all over the country who relied on these services didn't face major dislocations.

But things are different with Katrina. The hurricane directly affected only a small chunk of the consumer economy. Louisiana and Mississippi have a combined population of 7.5 million and account for about 2 percent of the nation's economic activity. But it will indirectly affect all consumers and businesses, in the United States and abroad.

The problem is that New Orleans lies at the heavily trafficked intersection of the Old and New Economies. The region's economy is based on agriculture, water transport, and natural resources. But moving and selling goods requires an intricate web of supply chains, pipelines, and commercial arteries that connect producers to consumers. The networked economy isn't just about bytes and fiber-optic cable, it's about oil, grain, and sugar. And when the infrastructure of these networks gets damaged, it can't be replaced easily or cheaply.

If New Orleans were pure Old Economy—if, for example, it simply grew wheat—its devastation would not cost that much, because other wheat and grain growers would replace it. If it were pure New Economy, like Wall Street, it could bounce back instantly, because its real assets (information and people) would not be irretrievably lost. But because it's right in the middle, the damage will be enormous.

Katrina, for example, has already created havoc in the energy sector. Nine of the region's 14 refineries are shut, representing 12.5 percent of U.S. refining capacity, according to the Financial Times. This week, the United States also lost about 20 percent of its oil production and a big chunk of natural-gas production. As a result, the pipeline systems that originate in the Gulf Coast region and snake throughout the Southeast and Atlantic seaboard aren't functioning properly. The instantaneous result: higher costs for gas and heating oil in states far beyond Louisiana.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman may have announced the release of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But the bottlenecks in refining and distribution are causing price increases and panicked buying in Atlanta. Maintaining redundant trading floors and offices to be used in a crisis is relatively inexpensive, which is why Wall Street got back to work immediately after 9/11. But building and maintaining redundant oil refineries is prohibitively expensive.

Energy isn't the only valuable commodity that flows through New Orleans. As the Wall Street Journal notes, New Orleans ports "handle roughly half of the corn, wheat and soybeans exported from the U.S., much of which reaches the city on barges traveling on the Mississippi River." Katrina has already screwed up the vital supply chains that funnel goods from the Midwest to global markets and from global markets to the Midwest. Farmers have been floating grain to external markets on river barges since the 18^th century not because it offers speed, but because it is the most economically efficient means of doing so. As the Associated Press notes, "The Mississippi River is the cheapest route for shipping many crops and other commodities destined for overseas markets." So, farmers looking to get their goods to market will now have to rely on more expensive modes of transport. And importers will either have to eat higher costs or pass them along to consumers. Until yesterday, about 25 percent of Chiquita's banana imports arrived in the United States at the company's Gulfport, Miss., facility. No longer. The company, and many others, will have to scramble to find alternate (and likely, more expensive) arrangements.

Finally, consider the agricultural staples that are produced in huge volume in the Gulf Coast region and that are used in a wide range of products in the United States and overseas: oysters, chickens, cotton, and sugar, to name a few. Katrina will have the effect of making them more expensive and setting off a scramble among the companies that need steady supplies to find new sources. The shortages will drive up prices here and make our exports more expensive—and less competitive—abroad.

I have no doubt that markets and companies will respond to the disruptions—and respond more rapidly than we can imagine—just as they did after Sept. 11. But it will likely be a matter of months, rather than weeks, before things return to normal. Until then, the flood, which has deflated the hopes of so many, may act as an inflationary force.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

 

press box
Lost in the Flood
Why no mention of race or class in TV's Katrina coverage?
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005, at 4:22 PM PT

I can't say I saw everything that the TV newscasters pumped out about Katrina, but I viewed enough repeated segments to say with 90 percent confidence that broadcasters covering the New Orleans end of the disaster demurred from mentioning two topics that must have occurred to every sentient viewer: race and class.

Nearly every rescued person, temporary resident of the Superdome, looter, or loiterer on the high ground of the freeway I saw on TV was African-American. And from the look of it, they weren't wealthy residents of the Garden District. This storm appears to have hurt blacks more directly than whites, but the broadcasters scarcely mentioned that fact.

Now, don't get me wrong. Just because 67 percent of New Orleans residents are black, I don't expect CNN to rename the storm "Hurricane" Carter in honor of the black boxer. Just because Katrina's next stop after destroying coastal Mississippi was counties that are 25 percent to 86 percent African-American (according to this U.S. Census map), and 27.9 percent of New Orleans residents are below the poverty line, I don't expect the Rev. Jesse Jackson to call the news channels to give a comment. But in the their frenzy to beat freshness into the endless loops of disaster footage that have been running all day, broadcasters might have mentioned that nearly all the visible people left behind in New Orleans are of the black persuasion, and mostly poor.

To be sure, some reporters sidled up to the race and class issue. I heard them ask the storm's New Orleans victims why they hadn't left town when the evacuation call came. Many said they were broke—"I live from paycheck to paycheck," explained one woman. Others said they didn't own a car with which to escape and that they hadn't understood the importance of evacuation.

But I don't recall any reporter exploring the class issue directly by getting a paycheck-to-paycheck victim to explain that he couldn't risk leaving because if he lost his furniture and appliances, his pots and pans, his bedding and clothes, to Katrina or looters, he'd have no way to replace them. No insurance, no stable, large extended family that could lend him cash to get back on his feet, no middle-class job to return to after the storm.

What accounts for the broadcasters' timidity? I saw only a couple of black faces anchoring or co-anchoring but didn't see any black faces reporting from New Orleans. So, it's safe to assume that the reluctance to talk about race on the air was a mostly white thing. That would tend to imply that white people don't enjoy discussing the subject. But they do, as long as they get to call another white person racist.

My guess is that Caucasian broadcasters refrain from extemporizing about race on the air mostly because they fear having an Al Campanis moment. Campanis, you may recall, was the Los Angeles Dodgers vice president who brought his career to an end when he appeared on Nightline in 1987 and explained to Ted Koppel that blacks might not have "some of the necessities" it takes to manage a major league team or run it as a general manager for the same reason black people aren't "good swimmers." They lack "buoyancy," he said.

Not to excuse Campanis, but as racists go he was an underachiever. While playing in the minor leagues, he threw down his mitt and challenged another player who was bullying Jackie Robinson. As Dodger GM, he aggressively signed black and Latino players, treated them well, and earned their admiration. Although his Nightline statement was transparently racist, in the furor that followed, nobody could cite another racist remark he had ever made. His racism, which surely blocked blacks from potential front-office Dodger careers, was the racism of overwhelming ignorance—a trait he shared (shares?) with many other baseball executives.

This sort of latent racism (or something more potent) may lurk in the hearts of many white people who end up on TV, as it does in the hearts of many who watch. Or, even if they're completely clean of racism's taint, anchors and reporters fear that they'll suffer a career-stopping Campanis moment by blurting something poorly thought out or something that gets misconstrued. Better, most think, to avoid discussing race at all unless someone with impeccable race credentials appears to supervise—and indemnify—everybody from potentially damaging charges of racism.

Race remains largely untouchable for TV because broadcasters sense that they can't make an error without destroying careers. That's a true pity. If the subject were a little less taboo, one of last night's anchors could have asked a reporter, "Can you explain to our viewers, who by now have surely noticed, why 99 percent of the New Orleans evacuees we're seeing are African-American? I suppose our viewers have noticed, too, that the provocative looting footage we're airing and re-airing seems to depict mostly African-Americans."

If the reporter on the ground couldn't answer the questions, a researcher could have Nexised the New Orleans Times-Picayune five-parter from 2002, "Washing Away," which reported that the city's 100,000 residents without private transportation were likely to be stranded by a big storm. In other words, what's happening is what was expected to happen: The poor didn't get out in time.

To the question of looting, an informed reporter or anchor might have pointed out that anybody—even one of the 500 Nordic blondes working in broadcast news—would loot food from a shuttered shop if they found themselves trapped by a flood and had no idea when help would come. However sympathetic I might be to people liberating necessities during a disaster in order to survive, I can't muster the same tolerance for those caught on camera helping themselves in a leisurely fashion to dry goods at Wal-Mart. Those people weren't looting as much as they were shopping for good stuff to steal. MSNBC's anchor Rita Cosby, who blurted an outraged if inarticulate harrumph when she aired the Wal-Mart heist footage, deserves more respect than the broadcasters who gave the tape the sort of nonjudgmental commentary they might deliver if they were watching the perps vacuum the carpets at home.

When disaster strikes, Americans—especially journalists—like to pretend that no matter who gets hit, no matter what race, color, creed, or socioeconomic level they hail from, we're all in it together. This spirit informs the 1997 disaster flick Volcano, in which a "can't we all just get along" moment arrives at the film's end: Volcanic ash covers every face in the big crowd scene, and everybody realizes that we're all members of one united race.

But we aren't one united race, we aren't one united class, and Katrina didn't hit all folks equally. By failing to acknowledge upfront that black New Orleanians—and perhaps black Mississippians—suffered more from Katrina than whites, the TV talkers may escape potential accusations that they're racist. But by ignoring race and class, they boot the journalistic opportunity to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of a whole definable segment of the population. What I wouldn't pay to hear a Fox anchor ask, "Say, Bob, why are these African-Americans so poor to begin with?"

*******

Note to Al Campanis' departed soul: Al, if you had endowed a foundation to build a 50-meter pool in an urban neighborhood and hired some good coaches, I bet that pool would have spawned Olympic-caliber swimmers. Send your Katrina nuggets to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

 

 

surfergirl
Musical Blondes
Rita Cosby is the latest trophy in the cable-news game of anchor-poaching.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005, at 4:07 PM PT

One of the most puzzling recent hires in cable news has been MSNBC's poaching of the anchor Rita Cosby from Fox News (where she hosted two shows, The Big Story Weekend Edition and Fox News Live With Rita Cosby). This month, Cosby began hosting a nightly news show, Rita Cosby Live & Direct, which airs at 9 p.m. ET weeknights; its premiere on Aug. 8 bumped The Situation With Tucker Carlson into the 11 p.m. slot formerly occupied by a Hardball rerun.

MSNBC's anchor-napping of Cosby from Fox represents the third-place cable news network's attempt at landing what Variety recently called "the new ratings-grabber": "the crusading blonde on the crime-and-justice beat." Back in 2001, CNN stole Paula Zahn from Fox, resulting in a breach-of-employment-contract suit that was later dismissed, and a years-long vendetta between Zahn and Fox chief Roger Ailes, who told the New York Times that he "could have put a dead raccoon" in Zahn's time slot and gotten equally good ratings. In 2002, Greta von Susteren defected in the reverse direction, from CNN to Fox. Van Susteren's ratings have soared during her three-year tenure at Fox, especially this summer, when her obsessive fixation on the search for Natalee Holloway, the missing teenager in Aruba, has made her one of the highest-rated (and most ridiculed) personalities on cable news. (Van Susteren continues to defend her nonstop coverage of the case in terms that, perhaps unintentionally, only serve to impeach her own competence as a reporter: "For me, it's sort of an intellectual challenge.") Another much-hyped instance of inter-network blonde-poaching occurred this spring, when CNN Headline News landed Court TV's wild-eyed Cassandra of the justice system, Nancy Grace, for its prime-time 8 p.m. slot.

But the traffic in blondes seems to be acceding to an almost abstract plane with the acquisition of Rita Cosby by MSNBC. It's as if the new rules of the cable-network publicity machine demand that flaxen-haired anchorwomen must be routinely seduced away from other networks (and the resulting defections hyped in the press), regardless of their virtual indistinguishability from one another or their highly dubious contributions to the field of journalism at large. How many people actually watched Rita Cosby in her weekend ghetto on Fox? And if she does have a following (as the existence of a Rita Cosby fan club would seem to indicate), can those viewers be depended on to migrate to a prime-time nightly show on the least-watched cable news network? (This question brings up a corollary that's too sad to ponder for very long: What kind of person voluntarily spends their precious weeknight hours watching cable-news chat shows?)

Watching Live & Direct this week, it's been hard to get a sense of what Rita was hired to bring to MSNBC. The aftermath of a devastating hurricane is not really a Rita Cosby kind of story; for one thing, there's no one to blame for it. (I suppose you could rant bitterly against God, as if He were Robert Blake or Joran van der Sloot, but that might lose you a few viewers, especially from the Fox camp.) Cosby seems much more at home with stories like the disappearance of Olivia Newton-John's boyfriend, Patrick McDermott (I loved her attempt last week to pump some juice about this case out of a visibly nonchalant private investigator, who suggested, "I would say two words: Las Vegas, OK? Look in Las Vegas. He's probably hanging out there"), and of course, the Natalee Holloway story. This week, Cosby was supposed to be reporting live from Aruba, and she actually did broadcast the show from there, but God had thrown a wrench in MSNBC's plans to steal some of the Natalee Holloway fire away from Fox: Hurricane Katrina. There was something bitterly amusing in watching Cosby try to justify her presence in Aruba ("As you know, I just arrived here in Aruba, which was not hit by the storm, but is dealing with the fury of the Natalee Holloway investigation") before devoting the rest of the hour to long-distance coverage of the mega-disaster happening back in her own country.

MSNBC's promotional arm has made much of Cosby's status as an investigative journalist. The network's Web site promises that "Rita Cosby: Live and Direct will be a hard-hitting, no-nonsense news program that brings viewers stories they won't see anywhere else." But if the network's going to try to score points by bragging about Cosby's three Emmys for investigative reporting, or her historic "back-to-back interviews" with Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon, they should be all the more ashamed to feature her in such a low-rent grab for ratings. So far, interviews have included Victoria Gotti's former publicist (now there's a "get"!) and Martha Stewart, who appeared with Mark Burnett to promote her two new shows, Martha and The Apprentice: Martha Stewart. Cosby served up a few creampuff questions (Q: "Is the best ahead?" A: "The best is yet to come.") before musing about Stewart's personal growth in prison: "Maybe she's, you know, grown a bit. I mean, this experience has got to change someone. But she seems very genuine, I thought."

The 40-year-old Cosby is not entirely without appeal. She has a raw, husky voice and the coarsely people-pleasing manner of someone selling rayon pantsuits on the Shopping Channel. She's also a big woman, which is a nice change from the endless parade of female skeletons who man the newsdesks of cable TV. But if Cosby wants to be remembered as something more than the poor man's Greta van Susteren, she should rise above the cable-news battle of the blondes—and get the hell out of Aruba.

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

 

 

 sandbox
The New College Try
Helping low-income students write their application essays.
By Ann Hulbert
Posted Monday, Sept. 12, 2005, at 3:56 AM PT

"I don't want to write about obstacles and overcoming them," Assita announced with a toss of her head as she and the four other high-school seniors on "Writing Team Ann" settled into the classroom designated for my group. It was a muggy June weekend, and, like the kids, I had come from Washington, D.C., to Morgan State University, a historically black campus in Baltimore. The occasion was a four-day summer workshop, one of 30 held across the country by College Summit, a nonprofit organization founded 13 years ago to help low-income students tackle a competitive college admissions process that intimidates everybody these days. Assita was the first to speak up as we embarked on the especially agonizing ordeal I was there to oversee as a volunteer "writing coach": producing "the personal essay" for the Common Application used by a wide array of colleges.

The personal statement, a legacy of an old collegiate tradition of impressionistic character (and class) assessment, is back in the spotlight after decades in the shadow of the SAT. The total number of colleges that rate applicants' essays of "considerable importance" in admissions decisions rose from slightly more than 10 percent in 1993 to almost 25 percent in 2003. Nearly 40 percent of highly selective schools (where fewer than half of the applicants get in) say they now seriously weigh students' words as well as their scores. At the hypercompetitive top of the heap, personal statements just might turn out to be the decisive factor, college counselors tell kids: 250 to 500 words in which a student may prove he or she isn't "like many others," the dreaded verdict that consigns even qualified applications to the large reject pile. No wonder essay-crafting services and even summer camps, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, are catching on among an affluent clientele. Everyone's trying to come up with what College Summit calls the "bomb essay." But it just might be that this is one contest in which privileged students don't have the edge. If anyone stands to gain from the renewed emphasis on that qualitative je ne sais quoi in applicants, it may well be poor kids who come from understaffed schools but have real stories to tell.

Behind the new focus on personal testimony lies the unsettling fact that America's turn-of-the-millennium meritocracy seems to be functioning rather like an aristocracy. Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, sounded the alarm more than a year ago: Well-prepped kids from educated families are swamping elite colleges, while economically disadvantaged kids are losing out in the pursuit of degrees. (According to the Economist's recent survey of America, "a student from the top income quarter is six times more likely to get a BA than someone from the bottom quarter.") For admissions officers desperate both to winnow among the super-credentialed and to delve for underserved students, the personal essay is designed to elicit an applicant's distinctive voice and expose his or her particular passion or perspective. What the Common Application asks, in essence, is: Who or what (ideally dramatic something) has shaped you, and how?

Unfortunately, for high performers who have been busy grooming their résumés since grade school, the essay has a way of turning into yet another self-packaging exercise for attentive parents, or hired experts, to facilitate. (There's a reason students' SAT essays are available online for perusal by college admissions boards: so they can be compared with highly buffed application submissions.) It's at the other end of the spectrum that the personal statement has the potential to serve as a genuine epiphany—not just for admissions officers, but for the students who write them. At Morgan State, we were providing an essay-prep service, but I discovered it was the opposite of packaging: Unwrapping was more like it, in a laborious process well-suited to revealing signs of tenacity and teachability that might otherwise go unnoticed in low-achieving students.

Where cosseted kids (and their parents) pull strings and open wallets to arrange essay-worthy experiences, kids like Assita tend to need prodding to share dilemmas right there on their doorsteps. Mostly from fraying families as well as ill-equipped schools, they're afraid that their woes—having a father in prison or a mother on crack, or getting slashed at school—are evidence of weakness, which was the last thing anybody on my team wanted to betray. They're startled to find writing coaches hanging on their words—and then taken aback to see, when they finish, that they have a story that isn't just grist for what I overheard someone call a "pity party" but that actually shows their grit.

For just about all of these kids, the essay-writing process itself is an eye-opening challenge that, at least as College Summit conducts its workshops, reveals aptitudes that can otherwise be hard to discern. What colleges need to know about students who are emerging with low GPAs and test scores from unimpressive schools isn't just the state of their literacy skills. Schools also need indications that these are students who aren't easily daunted, much as admissions officers want to know whether privileged applicants reared on extracurricular opportunities have managed to cultivate some resilience and self-reliance along the way. But the College Summit cohort, most of whom are the first in their families to go to college, also need a chance to show precisely what advantaged kids wear on their sleeves: signs that they're open to adult influence. Morgan State offered a weekend for students to reveal themselves as tough kids who could nonetheless let down their defenses and muster the energy to make the most of an occasion (an all too rare one) when grown-ups are hovering, ready to help them.

Or rather, hound them. College Summit coaches are urged to push, and push, for concrete details that can make a real narrative—sentences that show, rather than tell. But the "ethical guidelines" prohibit us from polishing the prose. (It's OK to ask questions—Does that verb or tense sound quite right?—but the kids are supposed to do the fixing.) With only half a day remaining, I confess I was discouraged and almost wished my team seemed a little more worried. But just as our time was running out, even my most obstinate student, whose professed fatigue left her staring hour after hour at the blank page, finally squeezed out a vivid paragraph. I could tell from his giddy mood that Marc, a focused athlete who had buckled right down to write about memories of his felon father, had never expected to be so buoyed up at the end.

Team Ann gathered behind the podium at the closing banquet of the College Summit workshop, jittery at the prospect of me reading snippets of essays in which most of them had revealed more than they were sure they'd meant to. But we had the ideal introducer in brash Assita (who, after a frustrating false start, ended up writing about how yet another death in her family had made her feel resolute about a controversial decision). I took it as a good omen for the hard college road ahead of these students—80 percent of whom end up enrolling—when she flounced to the mike and made it sound as though our labors had been a breeze.

Ann Hulbert is the author of Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children.

 

Don't Refloat
The case against rebuilding the sunken city of New Orleans.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 12:19 PM PT

Nobody can deny New Orleans' cultural primacy or its historical importance. But before we refloat the sunken city, before we think of spending billions of dollars rebuilding levees that may not hold back the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of homes now disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let's investigate what sort of place Katrina destroyed.

The city's romance is not the reality for most who live there. It's a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it's a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. When you overlap this New York Times map, which illustrates how the hurricane's floodwaters inundated 80 percent of the city, with this demographic map from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which shows where the black population lives, and this one that shows where the poverty cases live, it's transparent whom Katrina hit the hardest.

New Orleans' public schools, which are 93 percent black, have failed their citizens. The state of Louisiana rates 47 percent of New Orleans schools as "Academically Unacceptable" and another 26 percent are under "Academic Warning." About 25 percent of adults have no high-school diploma.

The police inspire so little trust that witnesses often refuse to testify in court. University researchers enlisted the police in an experiment last year, having them fire 700 blank gun rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood one afternoon. Nobody picked up the phone to report the shootings. Little wonder the city's homicide rate stands at 10 times the national average.

This city counts 188,000 occupied dwellings, with about half occupied by renters and half by owners. The housing stock is much older than the national average, with 43 percent built in 1949 or earlier (compared with 22 percent for the United States) and only 11 percent of them built since 1980 (compared with 35 for the United States). As we've observed, many of the flooded homes are modest to Spartan to ramshackle and will have to be demolished if toxic mold or fire don't take them first.

New Orleans puts the "D" into dysfunctional. Only a sadist would insist on resurrecting this concentration of poverty, crime, and deplorable schools. Yet that's what New Orleans' cheerleaders—both natives and beignet-eating tourists—are advocating. They predict that once they drain the water and scrub the city clean, they'll restore New Orleans to its former "glory."

Only one politician, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, dared question the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans as it was, where it was. On Wednesday, Aug. 31, while meeting with the editorial board of the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill., he cited the geographical insanity of rebuilding New Orleans. "That doesn't make sense to me. … And it's a question that certainly we should ask."

"It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," Hastert added.

For his candor and wisdom, Hastert was shouted down. Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., and others interpreted his remarks as evidence of the Republican appetite for destruction when it comes to disaster victims. But if you read the entire interview—reproduced here courtesy of the Daily Herald—you might conclude that Hastert was speaking heresy, but he wasn't saying anything ugly or even Swiftian. Klaus Jacob seconded Hastert yesterday (Sept. 6) in a Washington Post op-ed. A geophysicist by training, he noted that Katrina wasn't even a worst-case scenario. Had the storm passed a little west of New Orleans rather than a little east, the "city would have flooded faster, and the loss of life would have been greater."

Nobody disputes the geographical and oceanographic odds against New Orleans: that the Gulf of Mexico is a perfect breeding ground for hurricanes; that re-engineering the Mississippi River to control flooding has made New Orleans more vulnerable by denying it the deposits of sediment it needs to keep its head above water; that the aggressive extraction of oil and gas from the area has undermined the stability of its land.

"New Orleans naturally wants to be a lake," St. Louis University professor of earth and atmospheric sciences Timothy Kusky told Time this week. "A city should never have been built there in the first place," he said to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Why was it? Settlers built the original city on a curve of high flood land that the Mississippi River had deposited over eons, hence the nickname "Crescent City." But starting in the late 1800s and continuing into the early 20^th century, developers began clearing and draining swamps behind the crescent, even dumping landfill into Lake Pontcha rtrain to extend the city.

To chart the aggressive reclamation, compare this map from 1798 with this one from 1908. Many of New Orleans' lower-lying neighborhoods, such as Navarre, the Lower Ninth Ward, Lake Terrace, and Pontchartrain Park, were rescued from the low-lying muck. The Lower Ninth Ward, clobbered by Katrina, started out as a cypress swamp, and by 1950 it was only half developed, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Even such "high" land as City Park suffered from flooding before the engineers intervened. By the historical standards of the 400-year-old city, many of the heavily flooded neighborhoods are fresh off the boat.

The call to rebuild New Orleans' levee system may be mooted if its evacuated residents decide not to return. The federal government, which runs the flood-insurance business, sold only 85,000 residential and commercial policies—this in a city of 188,000 occupied dwellings. Coverage is limited to $250,000 for building property and $100,000 for personal property. Because the insured can use the money elsewhere, there is no guarantee they'll choose to rebuild in New Orleans, which will remain extra-vulnerable until the levees are rebuilt.

Few uninsured landlords and poor home owners have the wherewithal to rebuild—or the desire. And how many of the city's well-off and wealthy workers—the folks who provide the city's tax base—will return? Will the doctors, lawyers, accountants, and professors have jobs to return to? According to the Wall Street Journal, many businesses are expected to relocate completely. Unless the federal government adopts New Orleans as its ward and pays all its bills for the next 20 years—an unlikely to absurd proposition—the place won't be rebuilt.

Barbara Bush will be denounced as being insensitive and condescending for saying yesterday that many of the evacuees she met in the Astrodome would prefer to stay in Texas. But she probably got it right. The destruction wrought by Katrina may turn out to be "creative destruction," to crib from Joseph Schumpeter, for many of New Orleans' displaced and dispossessed. Unless the government works mightily to reverse migration, a positive side-effect of the uprooting of thousands of lives will to be to deconcentrate one of the worst pockets of ghetto poverty in the United States.

Page One of today's New York Times illustrates better than I can how the economic calculations of individuals battered by Katrina may contribute to the city's ultimate doom:

In her 19 years, all spent living in downtown New Orleans, Chavon Allen had never ventured farther than her bus fare would allow, and that was one trip last year to Baton Rouge. But now that she has seen Houston, she is planning to stay.

"This is a whole new beginning, a whole new start. I mean, why pass up a good opportunity, to go back to something that you know has problems?" asked Ms. Allen, who had been earning $5.15 an hour serving chicken in a Popeyes restaurant.

New Orleans won't disappear overnight, of course. The French Quarter, the Garden District, West Riverside, Black Pearl, and other elevated parts of the city will survive until the ultimate storm takes them out—and maybe even thrive as tourist destinations and places to live the good life. But it would be a mistake to raise the American Atlantis. It's gone.

******

Apologies to Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, Ernie K-Doe, Allen Toussaint, Tipitina's, Dr. John, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Jelly Roll Morton, Jessie Hill, Lee Dorsey, the Meters, Robert Parker, Alvin Robinson, Joe "King" Oliver, Kid Stormy Weather, Huey "Piano" Smith, Aaron Neville and his brothers (falsetto is the highest expression of male emotion), Frankie Ford, Chris Kenner, Professor Longhair, Wynton Marsalis and family, Sidney Bechet, and Marshall Faulk. I await your hate mail at slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

 

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What Hastert Really Said

Excerpt from the Aug. 31 conversation between Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and the editorial board of the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill., a suburban Chicago paper. Reprinted by permission.

Speaker Hastert: "This is the largest disaster, natural disaster, we have ever had. I can just tell from what happened on 9-11 we spent nine weeks in my office working out all the problems so that we could solve these problems. I am sure the next 10 weeks or whatever in Washington (will be) consumed trying to get New Orleans back and Biloxi, Miss., that's been wiped of the map literally, and Pass Christian and on and on and down the line. This is a huge disaster. … When you talk about the oil issues you begin to see the tip of that iceberg. We don't know what else, the repercussions there are yet. "

Chris Bailey: Does it make sense to spend billions and billions and billions of dollars rebuilding a city-

Hastert: "That's seven feet under the sea level. I don't know. That doesn't make sense to me."

Bailey: Is that a question that anyone will ask or can we not even ask that?

Hastert: "I think it's a question that certainly we should ask. And, you know, it looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed."

Bailey: Awful.

Hastert: Yeah, it's just terrible. First of all, your heart goes out to the people, the loss of their homes. Anybody. But there is some real tough questions to ask. How do you go about rebuilding this city. What precautions do you take. When the electricity goes out and everything else goes out ... you don't have the pumps to pump it out either. Because it doesn't work either."

Patrick Waldron: Of course that's an unprecedented question by itself. What will it take to rebuild this city. Should we rebuild this city? Would you agree that will be part of the Congressional debate?

Hastert: I think it should be. Of course, the folks from New Orleans will have their own opinion on it—we are going to rebuild this city. We help replace, we help relieve disaster. That is certainly the decision the people of New Orleans are going to make. But I think federal insurance and everything goes along with it. We ought to take a second look at it. But you know we build Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake fissures and they rebuild, too. Stubbornness.

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

 

everyday economics
No Relief
Why we shouldn't aid Katrina's victims too much.
By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 11:52 AM PT

First came the hurricane, then came the torrent. We're awash in accusations that the government has done too little to help Katrina's victims. Is it impertinent to ask how much would be enough? What's the right amount of federal assistance for disaster victims?

The suffering that we see on our screens crowds out our instincts for coldblooded policy analysis. But coldblooded policy analysis is our best hope to relieve heartbreak and suffering in the future, so let's steel ourselves for the task. Let's also divorce the discussion from the particulars of Katrina. We're looking for general principles that will apply to a wide range of future disasters.

So, I'll use what economists call a model and humanists call a fable: a simple fiction that has enough in common with reality to focus our attention on some (but not all) of the key issues.

Here's my model: There are two cities; call them Gog and Magog. Gog is subject to violent earthquakes; Magog isn't. Otherwise, they're identical. Except, of course, that housing must be cheaper in Gog; otherwise, nobody would live there.

The people in this model have a choice: They can live cheaply in Gog, where they risk intermittent devastation, or they can pay higher rents in Magog, where they're relatively safe. Because different people have different risk tolerances, some prefer Gog and some prefer Magog.

Now, suppose the government adopts a policy of taxing Magogians to restore the losses of Gogians after any earthquake. The result? All disaster losses are shared equally. There's no longer any financial risk for living in Gog, and Magog absorbs the extra costs for Gog's safety. Gogian housing prices rise because of the government's promise to replace houses damaged by earthquake. Magogian prices drop, because a Magog address no longer insulates you from the financial consequences of future earthquakes. As housing price equalize, there's no longer any reason to prefer one city to the other. Instead of two cities appealing to different kinds of people, we have two cities that are interchangeable.

This is no clear improvement for anyone. Those who preferred to live cheaply and accept some risk are now forced to live more expensively; those who chose to live safely and pay for it are now forced to subsidize the risk-taking of others. That kind of homogenization is exactly what New Orleans has always stood against. It's good to have cities with different cultures, it's good to have cities with different musical heritages, and it's good to have cities with different risk characteristics. Without differences, how can we celebrate diversity?

There is no need to e-mail me with the observation that New Orleans and, say, St. Louis, differ in important ways from Gog and Magog. For one thing, the burden of the Gulf Coast tragedy is hardly being shared equally by the people of New Orleans and St. Louis. But the rest of us are taking on at least a part of the Gulf Coast's pain, and, in the process, making the country a little more homogeneous. For another thing, St. Louis and New Orleans are not identical like Magog and Gog. They differ in important ways that go beyond housing prices and the probability of floods. That's why New Orleans housing doesn't have to be cheaper than St. Louis housing, though it still has to be cheaper than it would be in a world without floods. The model is not 100 percent realistic; that's why it's a model. Models abstract from reality. Their offsetting advantage is that they clearly highlight important policy considerations that might otherwise be overlooked.

One important way this particular model fails to reflect reality is that it takes the locations of Gog and Magog as given. A better model would highlight the fact that a policy of federal disaster relief encourages cities—and the individuals who populate those cities—to locate in potentially disastrous regions.

Let me offer myself as a case in point. I travel to San Francisco once or twice a year, and every single time I visit, I resolve someday to move there. I think my resolve has been substantially weakened in the past several days. Having seen how ineffective disaster relief can be, I am suddenly disinclined to live someplace where I might need to rely on it. And that's a good thing. The horror being visited on New Orleans today has made it less likely that I (and others like me) will be victims of an equivalent horror in the future. Had the relief efforts been more comprehensive, I might still be a future earthquake victim.

So those are two reasons we might want to rethink the policy of giving federal assistance to disaster victims. It encourages people to live in dangerous places, and it denies people the opportunity to accept higher risks in exchange for lower housing costs. Those abstract principles might be partly offset by any number of real world considerations. But if we want to build a better world, no truth should be ignored.

Steven E. Landsburg is the author, most recently, of Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values, and the Meaning of Life. You can e-mail him at armchair@troi.cc.rochester.edu.

 

the dismal science
Pump It Up
Don't worry about price gouging now. Worry later.
By Austan Goolsbee
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 10:18 AM PT

Just before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the president told the country he would punish lawbreakers and singled out a trio of evildoers: looters, charity scammers, and price gougers. Maybe because they didn't do enough to stop the first two, state and federal governments have aggressively pursued the gougers. In doing so, they have embraced a radically expansive and unreasonable view of what gouging entails—when what they should focus on is what happens next, when prices ought to come down.

When Katrina hit, prices for gasoline rose dramatically throughout the country, in some places by more than a dollar a gallon in 48 hours. Scores of state attorneys general and governors launched investigations. The federal government's gouging-complaint line received 5,000 calls on the first day after the storm. States tend to make their anti-gouging laws purposely vague, forbidding "unconscionable profiteering" during a state of emergency or the like. But rising prices don't equal price gouging. Any reasonable definition of gouging must distinguish it from price increases that would exist in a competitive market.

Katrina contributed to driving up the price of crude oil to an all-time high of $70 per barrel, knocking out as much as 25 percent of U.S. oil production and 10 percent of its refining capacity. But increased demand as well as damage to the supply chain played a role. Consumers far from the disaster rushed to their local gas stations to fill their tanks before prices spiked more. Of course prices rose under those conditions. That would happen in any commodity market, anywhere.

What separates true gouging from other kinds of price increases is customer choice or the lack thereof—what economists term "monopoly power." Companies increase their monopoly power, and may start gouging, when the demand from their customers becomes more "inelastic." That means customers are less sensitive to price, usually because they have lost access to substitutes. This theory explains why popcorn is more expensive in movie theaters than in grocery stores—once you're inside the theater, you either pay the premium or you don't get to munch. Applied to hurricanes, the theory predicts that if desperate people will pay high prices for necessities, then a company without any competition will be able to take advantage of them. The idea behind anti-gouging laws is to help people who were stuck without alternatives, through no fault of their own.

This might explain a price-gouging investigation in Louisiana, where people buying gas were running for their lives. But it has nothing to do with most of the complaints in the rest of the country. Gas prices aren't rising in Los Angeles or New York because drivers are desperate to get somewhere with potable water. They are rising because supply has become extraordinarily tight and people want to keep driving as much as they were before.

If gas prices did not rise across the country now, in fact, the short-term impact would be disastrous. Demand would vastly exceed the current supply. As people continued to buy as much or possibly more gas, stations around the country would run out because wholesalers would refuse to supply them at the lower price. Families who'd driven off on Labor Day trips would still be stuck out on the highway, looking for a place to fill up.

Somehow, hunts for gas gougers always seem to start at the wrong time. A classic economic study of the gasoline market (by Severin Borenstein and Richard Gilbert of the University of California at Berkeley and A. Colin Cameron of the University of California at Davis) looked at the extent to which retail gas prices respond to changes in crude oil prices and wholesale gasoline prices. They found that the immediate retail price increases essentially reflected the increasing cost of oil and wholesale gas. There was little evidence of increased profits on the heels of increased wholesale prices, like the hike that followed Katrina. Instead, the study showed that gouging, if it occurs, typically begins when the stations' costs start to come down again. The stations in the study took about twice as long to cut prices when their costs decreased as they had to raise them on the way up. It was after a crisis ended that their profit margins shot up.

By that time, however, the federal gouging hotline has stopped ringing and government investigators have moved on. If the past is any guide, once the oil production and the refineries on the Gulf Coast ramp up again, only a few observers will notice if prices fall more slowly than they should, despite the studies that have consistently documented this pattern. In the meantime, economists will continue to cringe each time they hear an attorney general rant against "unconscionable" gas prices.

Austan Goolsbee is an economics professor at the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business, and a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation.

 

gaming
The Gaming Graybeards
Can two thirtysomethings survive on Xbox Live?
By Seth Stevenson and Chris Suellentrop
Updated Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 8:46 AM PT

Seth: Chris, I'm fresh off our initial foray into the Xbox Live universe, and I am feeling so many new feelings. Here are the moments I enjoyed most:

1) I liked how—just so we could log on and play the shoot'em-up game Halo 2—I had to spend 10 minutes downloading ancillary programs, including something called the "Killtacular Map Pack."

2) I liked how, when we finally started, I was killed within eight seconds. Then I came back to life in another part of the game … and was again killed within eight seconds. I don't think I ever survived longer than 20 seconds. At one point I accidentally detonated something (maybe a plasma grenade) right next to myself. In that instance, I committed suicide before other players had a chance to kill me.

3) I liked when I got in the driver's seat of the "Warthog" assault vehicle and one of our remote Xbox Live teammates quickly hopped onboard and manned the turret gun, as though he expected me to drive us somewhere useful. I instead drove off a cliff and killed us both. Boy, was he surprised!

How was it for you? Notice I've left out the part where we squared off in a head-to-head match. I'll let you describe that.

Chris: I believe I defeated you 7 to 0, meaning I killed you seven times and you killed me zero. That left me falsely confident when we entered our next team match, which we lost 50-11. We started with two other teammates, but they quit halfway through, presumably despondent over being paired with two aging, 30-year-old newbies.

Let me back up a bit, for the uninitiated. Xbox Live is the online gaming universe that's an extension of the Xbox console. Certain Xbox games are "Live enabled," which means you can log on and play against people from all over the world and/or download additional content. Players join the Live community by purchasing a kit that retails for about $70 and includes a free game or two, a 12-month subscription, and the "Xbox Live Communicator," a headset that allows you to hear the other players and talk to them. (That's right, when you play Xbox Live, you dress up like a telemarketer.)

Xbox Live has been around since late 2002, and at this point there isn't a decent multiplayer game—racing games, first-person shooters, fighting games, even Madden—that isn't Live enabled. Xbox Live reached 2 million members in July, just a year after Microsoft announced it had reached the 1-million subscriber benchmark faster than HBO, America Online, or TiVo.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I think Xbox Live is as culturally significant as all three. It's being adopted more quickly than critical darling TiVo, which started up in 1997 and only this year hit 3 million users. Xbox Live is changing the nature of console gaming in terms of game design, game play, and business model. We chose to play Halo 2 first because it's the most popular Live game and has become an obsession largely on the strength of the twitchy, adrenaline-filled chaos of its Live mode. According to Bungie, the game's developer, nearly 500,000 people play Halo 2 on Live every day.

Seth, I know I liked playing Halo 2 online more than you did. On Xbox Live, Halo 2 is usually played in short, 12-minute bursts as you run around a series of changing maps, picking up weapons (from pistols to swords to rocket launchers) and killing the other players with them. I'm terrible at it, but the brief nature of each minigame (each one ends with a stat-filled "Postgame Carnage Report") provides the optimist in me with an irresistible chance for redemption. For years, the trend in console gaming has been to create games with longer and more open-ended plots. On Live at least, Halo 2 upends that with short, repetitive minigames that are reminiscent of the quarter-plugging addictions of my youth.

But there are some things that trouble me about it. All the hand-wringing about the "Hot Coffee" mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is nonsense, but if I were a parent I would worry about letting my child play Xbox Live. Players are not sorted by age—typically we'd be grouped with a 9-year-old, a 16-year-old, some twentysomethings, and 30-year-olds like us. The chatter among players that came over my headset during gameplay and the Postgame Carnage Reports was usually vulgar, frequently homophobic, and sometimes racist.

I'm sounding like a much bigger prude than I am. But this anecdote illustrates one element of what makes me uncomfortable: I sent a "friend request" to a player who was particularly generous with advice. I immediately felt creepy upon realizing that I, a 30-year-old man, had just asked a 14-year-old boy to "be my friend." On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog. But it's also true that no one knows you're not a pedophile.

Seth: You're not a pedophile?

Yeah, I felt a little oogy when I was talking to a 9-year-old and I asked him, without thinking, where he lived. But mostly, I felt like I was the one who needed my innocence protected: All these little tweenie twerps, with their squeaky voices, kept calling me "dumb ass" as they were killing me. I'd chosen the screen name "sethdawg4000" because I thought it was archly funny in its utter screen-name-ness. After I got addressed as "homo-dawg" several times I came to regret the decision.

You're right that there's a lot of raunchy banter going on. I'm amazed Microsoft has not yet been called on this. If a few easily shocked parents sat in on a game of Halo 2, Congress would shortly be holding hearings.

Really, though, Xbox Live is just an online simulacrum of a middle-school cafeteria. The crudeness is coming from the kids, not being inflicted on them. If anything, the over-25s we met were an excellent influence. They tended to be polite and mellow and demonstrated good sportsmanship—like saying "good game" after they'd eviscerated me with various weapons.

For me, the two sociologically interesting things in this experience have been:

1) I'm right at the fulcrum point of gaming popularity. Almost everyone five years older than me doesn't really "get" video games and has little interest in playing them. Almost everyone five years younger than me can't imagine life without an Xbox (or PS2 or whatever).

As for me, I completely understand the appeal of these games—it's just that I suck at them and I'll never get any better. Having a job and/or girlfriend means not having the endless hours required to learn all the maps, determine which weapons work best in which situations, and so forth. There's also been some sort of evolutionary mutation that causes young people's thumbs to work better than mine. I simply cannot move my thumbs fast enough or accurately enough. I try to aim my plasma rifle and the thing is waving all over the place. Meanwhile, UrDeadHaHa147 has calmly sniped me 30 times from some hidden roost.

How are their thumbs so nimble and precise? It must be a genetic advance. In coming decades, I expect children will communicate complex thoughts using only thumb gestures. By the 22^nd century, we will elect a thumb president. This is the path we're on.

2) People used to be all concerned about kids playing video games, and how isolating that is, and shouldn't they be outside playing kickball and stuff. But here we see these kids from all over the world interacting with each other for hours on end (if only to call each other homo). Is there some sort of counter-Bowling Alone argument to be made in favor of Xbox Live? I see your Bowling Alone and raise you a Disemboweling Together.

Chris: For me, Xbox Live recreates the feel of the arcade, where you'd gather around to watch the best players do battle. While playing Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3 (in a cooperative mode against computer-controlled "Venezuelan terrorists" in Hawaiian shirts), I enjoyed the feature that put you in the eyes of the other players after you die. Watching through the eyes of a more experienced player, I started to figure out how to play the game. My 14-year-old "friend" (see above) told me that playing Rainbow Six in Live mode is a better way to learn than the in-game tutorial, because you have a guide who knows what he is doing. I started to think of that kid as our Virgil.

I almost typed "or she" in my mention of guides, but we didn't encounter a single woman (or young girl). At least one who turned on her headset.

Seth: Yup, Xbox Live is definitely lacking in feminine energy. Though I think I managed to bring a bit of womanliness to the battlefield.

Part of the problem was our selection of games. All shoot'em ups. I must admit that after awhile I get tired of shooting stuff. I was thinking it might be nice to play a fishing game or something, where we could just chat over our communicator headsets for a couple hours, interrupted by the occasional face-off with a trout. We'd be on couches miles apart, but it would feel like a day together on the lake. Toss me a Coors from the cooler!

I don't think I'll play Xbox Live too often, now that our touristic exploration is done. Mostly this is because I'm bad, and no one likes to lose all the time. Partly it's that I've yet to find any games I really enjoy. (I like the tennis game Top Spin, but I suck at that, too. When I played it on Xbox Live, my opponent hit every single serve for an ace and smacked every single one of my serves for a return winner.)

But partly it's because I feel like everyone else is cheating—"modding" their characters to be stronger and better-equipped. There was a lot of chatter about this when we were playing online. One kid said he'd seen a guy in Halo 2 who'd rigged his gun to somehow fire vehicles out of its barrel. You're in a firefight with him and he sends a truck hurtling toward you. (Conversely, it felt like someone had modded my character to be especially frail and had limited my weapons options to "butter knife.")

I know Microsoft tries hard to crack down on cheating, but it's a real issue. We were both convinced we'd encountered it several times. I believe you called one opponent the Rafael Palmeiro of Halo 2. (I pictured him shaking a robotic, metal finger during some sort of galactic parliamentary hearing.)

Will you be playing more Xbox Live now that we've gotten a taste? And will you cheat?

Chris: I have a confession to make. I've already been cheating on you. Late at night, after we stopped playing, I would sneak back to Xbox Live and spend the evenings with him. But don't worry; those encounters were brief and meaningless. It was nothing like when I was with you.

I think I will keep playing Xbox Live, though I already played a little before we started our adventures together. I won't cheat, and to be honest I didn't encounter as many cheaters as I expected. Just players who were much, much better than us. We're such bad players that it was hard for me to know whether an opponent got that rocket launcher right away because he cheated or because he has memorized the map. In this video, a player shows how his opponent modded his machine to make himself invincible. For all I know, I played against this guy and thought nothing of it. Bungie calls cheating a "growing epidemic," and both Bungie and Microsoft claim to take the problem seriously. But they also claim to take racist taunts seriously.

Part of the problem is Halo 2's pitiful feedback mechanism. Players have to tattle on their opponents, and then either Bungie or Xbox Live decides when there's enough complaining to ban someone temporarily or permanently. The two things that would improve the experience most for me are 1) instituting a more transparent, eBay-style ratings system that would give you some hint of which players are jerks and bullies; and 2) creating a "senior circuit" that lets graybeards like us match up against players our own age. Halo 2 uses an algorithm that tries to sort players by experience and ability, but some idiots go through the tedious exercise of "leveling down"—throwing a series of games in the style of the Chicago Black Sox—so they can get their jollies by annihilating lesser players. And even when it works, it's not quite what I'm looking for. It's not just that I want to play against players who are as bad as me. I want to talk to people who are like me, not preteens and high-schoolers.

The miserable social environment on Xbox Live is partly a product of that weird generational melting pot. And it's my fault, too. That 9-year-old kid you mentioned earlier complained to us, in his thick southern accent, that "a lot of people boot me"—that is, kick him out of their Rainbow Six games—"because I'm young and they make fun of my voice." I felt bad for him. Shortly thereafter, I started to find him annoyingly voluble and warned him to settle down. He turned off his mike. What was I saying about bullies?

Seth Stevenson is a frequent contributor to Slate.
Chris Suellentrop, now a freelance writer in Washington, D.C., was Slate's 2004 campaign correspondent.

 

 

 

explainer
What Happens to Flooded Houses?
Can their owners ever move back in?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005, at 3:12 PM PT

Eighty percent of New Orleans remains underwater today, and rescue teams continue to collect survivors from the tops of their submerged homes. What will happen to these flooded houses—will their owners ever move back in?

It depends on the severity of the flooding. For homes that are completely underwater or that are flooded to the upper floors, the cost of repair will probably exceed the cost of moving. At the very least, the interior finishes of a waterlogged house must be stripped and replaced. High water can also damage the wiring, gas lines, furnace, and septic system, as well as furniture and appliances.

Wind and water can cause a house's structural components—the struts, studs, and foundation—to shift or warp. Tilting walls or a shifted roof also suggest dangerous structural damage that could signal an imminent collapse. Flood victims should check the foundations of their homes for cracks before venturing inside.

Inside the house, ceilings may sag under the weight of trapped water or soggy drywall. Wet floorboards bend and buckle, and the roof may leak or break altogether. Flooding in the basement can be especially dangerous; if the water is removed too quickly, pressure from the soaked earth outside can push inward and crack the foundation walls.

Brick and masonry houses will suffer less exterior damage than those made of wood. In all types of housing, though, flooding will most likely destroy the interior walls. Soaked wallboard becomes so weak that it must be replaced, as do most kinds of wall insulation. (The higher the water gets, the more interior walls must be replaced.) Studs will eventually dry out and return to their original shape, but any plywood in the walls is likely to swell and peel apart. Water can also dissolve the mortar in a chimney, which creates leaks and thus a risk of carbon monoxide poisoning once the heat comes back on.

Structural hazards account for only one category of water damage. Floods often deposit dirt and microorganisms throughout the house. Silt and sediment can create short circuits in the electrical system as gunk collects in walls and in the spaces behind each switch box and outlet. Appliances, furnaces, and lighting fixtures also fill with mud, making them dangerous to use.

Anything that gets soaked through with water may contain sewage contaminants or provide a substrate for mold. A long-lasting flood provides more time for the mold to grow and requires more cleanup after the fact. Carpets have to be thrown away, along with mattresses, bedding, and most upholstered furniture. Kitchen items, clothes, washing machines, and dryers must be disinfected with bleach, and all surviving interior surfaces should be cleaned to prevent mold growth. Standing water in a house can also serve as a breeding ground for insects and other animals.

Bonus Explainer: What about flooded cars? A car that has been completely submerged will be considered "totaled" by most insurance companies. But that doesn't mean you can't fix it up. Floodwater must be drained from the engine, transmission, brakes, and fuel system, and bits of mud must be cleaned out. Problems will also arise if too much water mixes with the oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid, or antifreeze. The small electronic parts under the hood and in the dashboard are especially susceptible to water damage. Controls for door locks, windows, and interior climate tend to be difficult to clean.

 

 

sports nut
Raggedy Andy
How Roddick flamed out of the U.S. Open.
By Peter Dizikes
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005, at 2:13 PM PT

At Andy Roddick's first-round match at the U.S. Open Tuesday night, the fans around me entertained themselves by watching the radar gun. When Roddick finished off his first two services games with 139- and 146-miles-per-hour offerings, several fans repeated the readings out loud, as if involuntarily. Then everyone relaxed and settled in to watch Roddick do what he does best: overpower a low-ranked opponent.

No one suspected that he would be gone within two hours. As Gilles Muller crafted his startling straight-sets upset, the fans in my section developed a new preoccupation: riffing on the new, Dadaist American Express ads featuring Roddick—the ones revolving around the line, "Have you seen Andy's Mojo?" As Muller was about to win the first-set tiebreak, one fan drew stadium-wide laughs after yelling: "Hey, Andy: Bring out the mojo!" The guy directly behind me spent all of sets 2 and 3 informing his friends, "It's safe to say Andy hasn't found his mojo yet."

Tennis has had its share of odd advertising campaigns, but this is perhaps the first to highlight a star player's slump. At least someone at American Express knows tennis. Two years ago, Roddick rode his serve to the U.S. Open crown and the No. 1 ranking. His fans figured it would be the first of many major titles and the start of a long run atop the rankings. But Roddick has failed to win a major since then; he entered the U.S. Open as only the fourth seed.

Sure, Roddick has made the last two Wimbledon finals, and it would be unfair to expect him to win 14 grand slams like Pete Sampras. But why has he been coming up short so often? What happened to his supposedly sure-fire reign at the top of the sport?

The answer is that his serve is too good. Precisely because he can use it to overpower lesser foes, Roddick has always depended far too heavily on his service and failed to flesh out the rest of his game. The Muller match was a perfect compilation of Roddick's shortcomings. His trips to the net were infrequent and tentative—during the second-set tiebreak, a timid Roddick volley set up Muller for the backhand pass that put him up two sets to love. Muller often initiated his own trips to the net by approaching to Roddick's two-handed backhand, which lacked power and consistency. Even Roddick's forehand, his best groundstroke, is not uniformly strong; his inside-out forehand is one of the best on tour, but his running crosscourt shots often fly long. That Roddick could have his serve broken just once in three sets and still lose to the world's 68^th-ranked player shows how lacking the other parts of his game are.

Roddick is at least aware that he needs to improve. Earlier this month, he announced he was working on "my fitness a bunch. I'm working on my transition game. Obviously I'd love to keep improving on my return game." He also insisted, "I'm a better player than I was two years ago."

But as the Muller match showed, mere practice is not enough. Roddick has not spent enough time putting those supposed improvements to use during matches, where players make changes stick until they are habitual. It's not as if Roddick never has the opportunities to experiment: This U.S. Open aside, he routinely blitzes through his early round matches on hard courts and grass.

The more often Roddick shoots those 140-mph serves past overmatched foes, the less time he spends hitting his full range of shots. Over the two weeks of a major, Roddick's efforts to overpower everyone may even wear himself down. At Wimbledon this year, Roddick's fastest serves in his first two matches registered 141 and 145 miles per hour, while in the semifinal and final his fastest hit 135 every time.

It's against top-flight players—and, apparently, against Gilles Muller—that Roddick's flaws are most visible. He sports a 59-19 career match record in major tournaments but is just 1-6 lifetime against top 10 seeds in the majors. Roddick is 1-10 lifetime against Roger Federer, who has beaten him six straight times and won 14 of 15 sets in the process. Yes, Federer is a magical player, but Roddick is also just 2-6 in his career against Lleyton Hewitt; a win against Hewitt this month in Cincinnati marks the only time in 2005 that Roddick beat a player ranked in the top 10.

In contrast to Roddick, Federer seems to make a point of measuring his energy, testing all his shots against easier opponents, and ratcheting up his efforts as needed in hopes of peaking against the best players. At this year's French Open, Federer explained that as a grand slam moves along, "you're meeting people that are more difficult to play, and therefore, the level of your game has to go up." It takes tons of confidence to approach a tournament this way. In his easier matches this year, Federer has been experimenting with his drop shot, knowing he will need a better version of this daring play to win the French Open, the one major to elude him so far. This midmatch experimenting has made his game far more complete. Federer's topspin backhand, for instance, has improved noticeably in the last year, even after he put a chokehold on the No. 1 ranking.

Several hours before Roddick's loss on Tuesday, I watched Federer polish off an easy win. Late in the third set, Federer closed out a game with consecutive first serves of 94, 110, 95, and 118 miles hour. He then spent the next changeover watching the animated tennis-ball race on the stadium video screen. Roddick's fans probably would have been screaming for Federer's serving mojo. But Federer doesn't need service fireworks to win. And he's still playing at this year's U.S. Open.

Peter Dizikes is a writer living in Boston.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125353/

dispatches
Mourning My New Orleans
Our family has lived there for a century. Where will we go now?
By Josh Levin
Updated Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005, at 1:23 PM PT

I have to keep reminding myself that this is the same patch of land where I went to school and played baseball and had dinner with my grandparents every Friday night. Every time some new, awful report bubbles up—of prisoners rioting, of looters menacing Children's Hospital, of water so high there aren't roofs to wave a white flag from, of people lying on the interstate waiting for someone to tell them where to go and what to do—New Orleans seems more like a scene out of 28 Days Later than a place where people ever lived and worked and raised their families.

A little more than 48 hours after Katrina strafed the city, I'm starting to mourn a place that's not quite dead but seems too stricken to go on living. The promises early yesterday that breached levees would be patched with airlifted sandbags came to nothing. The exhausted-looking mayor reported last night that the sandbag-dropping helicopters didn't show up. So much for deus ex machina.

Local television stations, now streaming their broadcasts online, plead with people who aren't watching: You will be arrested if you're found on the street in Plaquemines Parish. Don't drink the water in St. Tammany until you've boiled it for a good long while. On the Times-Picayune's message boards, supplications stack up unanswered: "Looking for Gary," "Looking for Teldrich," "Carole & Monte DAVIS???" I search for the names of friends who stayed behind and don't find them. I'm sure they're riding it out somewhere, on a second floor without electricity or water to drink or in a shelter with thousands of others, but it's impossible to reach them. The cell phones are dead and all the circuits are busy anyway.

As the endlessly looping aerial footage shows little more than a giant lake with highway overpasses peeking out, I'm glad I wasn't there and terrified I never will be again. A friend from high school told me he took the scenic route out of town on Sunday morning so he could remember the places he needed to remember: Molly's at the Market, the Warehouse District, the Uptown JCC, the corner of St. Charles Avenue where he drank his first beer. I squint at the screen, searching for some kind of landmark to say goodbye to, but the only thing that's recognizable is the Superdome, which now looks like a potato with the skin peeled off to reveal the rotten insides.

As I watch my hometown slowly drown on CNN, it's hard to keep track of all the things to feel guilty about. I'm ashamed that my family has lived in New Orleans for 100 years yet I don't know the city well enough to figure out what they're showing on the helicopter flybys. There are so many canonical things—eating at Galatoire's, listening to traditional jazz at Preservation Hall, visiting the Cabildo—that I somehow never got around to doing. Even with the cracked levees threatening to spill Lake Pontchartrain over the entire East Bank of New Orleans, the French Quarter, the Garden District, and Uptown (where my parents live) will most likely survive because they're on relatively high ground. The poorest neighborhoods, though, are the lowest-lying ones. Places like Treme and the Lower Ninth Ward are full of people without the means to have gotten themselves out; the ones left behind had the least to lose but lost whatever they had.

I'm grateful that my parents and grandparents and aunt and uncles and cousins got out in time, but I'm worried about what they'll go back to once the water recedes and the fallen oaks get cleared. I'm more worried that they won't go back at all.

My father and his father and his father all grew up in New Orleans and went to medical school there and stayed in town to practice medicine. But for all its multigenerational families, New Orleans is—or maybe was—a place where a third of the people live below the poverty line and where the job market has been stagnant for decades. The gentrification of Marigny and Bywater in the last few years brought hope that the urban renewal that had come to so many other cities might not pass by New Orleans entirely. Those neighborhoods are now underwater. The city will get rebuilt no matter what, if only for the oil and gas industries. But who all is going to be there?

I don't remember much of what I did when I went down to visit my folks a few months ago: ate some fried seafood at some hole in the wall, went to my grandparents' house, probably walked under the canopy of oak trees in Audubon Park. Maybe it's a heartless thing to say when there are still people down there in the muck, but it's tragic to think of all those beautiful trees, in the park and on the Uptown streets that I drove through every day, toppled and on the ground, waiting to be chopped into bits and trucked away. There are friends' houses that will no doubt be so much flotsam, neighborhood restaurants that won't serve another oyster po' boy, bars where the jukebox won't ever play Allen Toussaint or Ernie K-Doe again.

With the water in the city still rising, there are rumors floating that they might have to dynamite the levees to get the water flowing back to Lake Pontchartrain. Maybe the only way to save it is to blow part of it up and start over. Next time, I'll make sure to remember everything.

Josh Levin is a Slate assistant editor. You can e-mail him at sportsnut@slate.com.

 

the book club
Bait and Switch
Barbara Ehrenreich shows how not to look for a job.
By Tyler Cowen and Alan Wolfe
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2005, at 3:33 AM PT

From: Tyler Cowen
To: Alan Wolfe
Subject: Barbara Ehrenreich Shows How Not To Look for a Job
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2005, at 3:33 AM PT

Dear Alan,

I did not expect to like Barbara Ehrenreich's new experiment, recounted in Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, but even so I am disappointed. The main thing I learned is how not to look for a job.

Ehrenreich gives up her identity and sends around a vita for media/public relations work. After a year of looking—with comic adventures along the way—she has no serious offer. She concludes that the white-collar world is one of "economic cruelty."

Our sleuth makes a mistake analogous to the one that marred Nickel and Dimed. In that earlier experiment, she entered life as a low-income worker, yet without many support systems. She had no church, no family, and no reliance on friends for financial or even moral aid. It is no wonder she found life so tough and capitalism so demoralizing. She lived an ordinary "lower class" life, yet with upper-middle-class, modern, academic morals and methods.

This time she cuts herself off from networks and personal contacts. She does recruit some friends to lie for her and back up her vita, should anyone call and ask about her past. But there is not a single voice to spread the word about her. Nor can she fall back on accumulated experience and contacts, for that would reveal her identity. So, she stalks the job world as a paper ghost. Alan, I wonder what would you—as a rational employer—make of a 60ish-year-old woman who appears out of nowhere and has no pre-existing contacts, offers, or networks? And what job is more a matter of personal contacts than public relations?

Ehrenreich is clueless when it comes to job searching. The book jacket describes her "series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and—again and again—rejected." The reader is never sure if she goes through all this to express her contempt for the participants in those enterprises, or if she truly believes this is the best way to look for a job. At one point she visits a Web site and pays $200 an hour for a weekly phone consultation; she is then told to fantasize about her ideal job. A worthy anecdote, yes, but should I assume this very smart woman was doing her best?

Nor was Ehrenreich a model interviewee. For one meeting she was late. She was asking for salaries of $60,000-$70,000, and at least once she asked for $100,000. Her (phony) résumé is stacked with a long succession of short-term contracts, none showing much commitment. One interviewer tells her she seems "angry."

This book could have, and should have, addressed two very real concerns. First, although the U.S. economic recovery appears robust, labor markets still show signs of slack. Larger-than-expected numbers of workers have stopped looking for work. Wages are flat even though measured unemployment is falling. Anecdotal evidence does not suggest a rush to hire labor. Something is plaguing labor markets, but we do not know what. Second, might there be bias against women in their 60s or perhaps against older workers more generally?

These are important questions, but Bait and Switch does not help us answer them. Ehrenreich tells us she met many workers in situations just like hers, but these other cases are not explored in any detail. We need a broader analysis of which white-collar workers—ones who are really looking for work and have real employment histories—are having problems and which are not.

On the topic of practical experience with a process, let me offer mine. Through my work in my university, I have been involved in interviewing, hiring, and working with a media and PR person. First, we knew people who knew the hire; personal recommendations were an important signal of quality. Second, had a candidate behaved as Ehrenreich did, she would not have made the first cut.

Alan, can you muster more enthusiasm for this book?
Tyler

Tyler Cowen is professor of economics at George Mason University and general director of the Mercatus Center and blogs at www.marginalrevolution.com. Alan Wolfe is professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. He is writing a book on whether American democracy still works.

 

jurisprudence
Double Trouble
Now what happens to the court?
By Emily Bazelon
Updated Monday, Sept. 5, 2005, at 7:52 AM PT

In some ways the timing is oddly fitting, if it's not too ghoulish to say so. Chief Justice William Rehnquist died with his former clerk and apparent ideological successor John Roberts poised to sail through his confirmation hearings and move on to the Supreme Court. This morning Bush chose Roberts to be Rehnquist's actual successor as well, by bumping him up to nominee for chief justice. With close to a month left until the court's new term begins, and with some scrambling, the White House still has time to usher Roberts through the confirmation process. The Senate Judiciary Committee might also squeeze in a nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, once Bush chooses someone for a second time to replace her (though O'Connor has said she'll stay on the court this fall if need be). With all this juggling, Rehnquist's death turns September, when all matters legal were about to be upstaged by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, into a national civics lesson about the court and its future. Twice the vacancies, more than twice the stakes. As the court's supreme supremacist, as Dahlia Lithwick puts it, one imagines that's how Rehnquist would have wanted it.

So, what happens now? President Bush has said he'll move quickly to name a second nominee. Which makes sense, because the president could use a distraction from New Orleans and because the administration spent a month this summer vetting candidates for the court after Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement. The White House must have figured out its No. 2. Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to slow things down. Roberts' confirmation hearings, which had been scheduled to begin tomorrow, will be postponed now that he's the choice for chief. But the administration will try to keep the delay short. Holding up a candidate who seemed likely to win 65 or 70-plus votes would only complicate his chances of easy confirmation.

One theory is that the next slot goes to Alberto Gonzales. That scenario plays out like this: Gonzales didn't get the nod the first time around because the administration couldn't get conservatives to line up behind him. Authoring memos that laid the groundwork for interrogation techniques that cross the line into torture—and helping Bush blithely sign off on 151 executions when he was governor of Texas—didn't help Gonzales because he hadn't also condemned abortion outright and expressed opposition to affirmative action. But now conservatives have Roberts in the bank. (The notion that he's the compromise candidate for whom liberals should be grateful makes sense only if it's really good for the Republican party—not just the Christian right—to people the court with nine Antonin Scalias and Clarence Thomases.) Bush stuck by Gonzales when the right was slashing his tires. The president likes to reward his most loyal henchmen. With the images still fresh on everyone's minds of destitute African-Americans abandoned for days in New Orleans, a nominee of color would have the right historic ring. It could give a short-term boost to Bush's popularity ratings and a long-term boost to the GOP's chances of winning the hearts—for generations—of Hispanic voters.

Another possibility, of course, is that Bush will choose someone much more like Rehnquist and Roberts or to the right of them, at least on the most salient social issues: abortion, gay rights, religion in the public sphere. There are plenty of candidates like that on the administration's summer shortlist: Judges Michael Luttig, Emilio Garza, and Michael McConnell are perhaps the top three. Any of those choices would mean that Bush's legacy would likely include decisively moving the Supreme Court to the right. But each could also draw the sort of concentrated, hard-to-shake opposition that has not really built against Roberts.

A third idea is that since Roberts is really Rehnquist's successor, Bush will choose a woman for this latest opening. Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, this morning resurrected the idea of enlisting O'Connor to stick around. In July, senators including Judiciary Committee Chair Arlen Specter called for Bush to woo O'Connor back to the court as chief justice. But O'Connor seemed wholly uninterested (not that she could have seemed otherwise as long as Rehnquist remained in his seat, but still). The idea that Bush would offer her the job now, and that she'd take it, seems like the wishful thinking of a group of sidelined Republican moderates and grasping-at-straws Democrats.

And for liberals, a different woman nominee could be Justice Medusa. There's the relatively palatable Judge Edith Clement of the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals, whose name was floated (great decoy!) as Bush's choice in the 24 hours before he went with Roberts. But her record is so sparse—at least based on what's currently known—that she could give the right as many or more fits than Gonzales. The other women whose names have come up: Judge Edith Jones, also of the 5^th Circuit, and Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown, who owe their seats on the 5^th and D.C. Circuits, respectively, to last spring's last-ditch deal to save the Senate from nuclear-option meltdown, are all dragon ladies. They've rarely met a civil-rights plaintiff for whom they didn't have scorn. Owen and Jones don't simply oppose abortion; they've expressed deep disgust for the procedure itself and the feminist principles it symbolizes. Brown isn't just skeptical about big government; she has called for rolling back the whole social compact of the New Deal.

Any jurist can surprise once he gets to the court. And as the new book Advice and Consent by political scientists Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal points out, a few justices amass records that make the presidents who picked them want to tear their hair out. Epstein and Segal include a nice chart that demonstrates what law students and court-watchers have long known: Earl Warren and William Brennan were far more liberal than the ideology of the president who nominated them (Dwight D. Eisenhower) would have predicted; David Souter, Harry Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens are somewhat more liberal than the presidents who picked them (George H.W. Bush, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford respectively), and Byron White, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer are somewhat more conservative than their nominators (John F. Kennedy for White and Bill Clinton for the other two). But with the possible-maybe-who-really-knows exception of Gonzales, the Bush administration Supreme Court shortlist—John Roberts included—is made up of mature and accomplished judges who have spent long careers helping to achieve conservative goals. There's no reason to think they'd stop once they got to the court. Roberts is the perfect successor for Rehnquist. The question now is whether Bush wants to double the chief's legacy, or on some fronts neutralize it.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

 

dispatches
Down on the Bayou
The lucky escape of one Louisiana town.
By Mike Pesca
Posted Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005, at 3:07 PM PT

The other day I drove south to Bayou Lafourche—a town as close to the Gulf of Mexico as you can get without a police escort or a boat—to see the effects of Katrina. While not the humanitarian tragedy that is New Orleans, Bayou Lafourche, which lies directly south of the city, was still hit hard and resources were taxed. As of Thursday, the power was out at all of the houses along the major road into town, but it wasn't out at all the homes. The boats docked in the bayou were all lit up, drawing juice from generators. If seen from the air at night, these lights would have traced the exact path of the waterway, which was once the Mississippi before the river changed course.

This piece of information was offered to me by my hosts of the evening, Mark Bourg and Ronnie Thibodaux. They also offered me cold water from the fridge (I accepted) and a place to spend the night (I politely declined). I'm not sure whose boat we were on—such was the communal feeling among the men and their families. The kids huddled under a blanket on the sofa while the grown ups watched CNN and drank beer. Thibodaux, bearded and stocky, spoke with an accent that made "hard " sound like "howed." He described a bayou lifestyle that included all the typical Cajun passions: hunting, fishing, and spiced crawfish. A growling purple and yellow tiger, the symbol of LSU's Bayou Bengals, stuck to the microwave.

Bourg, about 15 years younger than Thibodaux, could have been his offensive linemate. He talked wistfully about how he had been prevented from taking his son to the same places he'd gone with his father to hunt and fish, due to land loss that had reshaped the swamp. Thibodaux has been witnessing the effects of such erosion for years: Whenever he took out his bay boat, its GPS device (purchased in 2000) would tell him that the expanse of water in front of him was an island or some other land mass.

Thibodaux grabbed an old receipt from the desk drawer and began sketching New Orleans as a bowl nestled between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi. It was the low-tech but no less effective version of the computer model I had already seen a dozen times on CNN. Then Bourg noted that down on the bayou, they faced the same situation. They were surrounded by water on two sides. If not for locks and floodgates, the community would have been as underwater as New Orleans.

Bourg, who serves on the North Lafourche Levee District, told me that their monetary needs were smaller than those of New Orleans, but that over the years they obtained the money to fortify the locks and gates. As a result, the houses along the Bayou were still standing. So here I stood, on a safe house boat, in the company of men who were experts in flooding and storm preparedness. The most striking realization was that the only reason I was there at all—to bask in their prudence and drink their cold water—was random chance.

These men made the decision to leave the bayou before the storm hit; Bourg went to Baton Rouge and Thibodaux went to the town that bears his family's name. Only after the storm blew through did they return to their well-stocked houseboat. Bourg said that if the storm had changed course just a little, the citizens of Lafourche who failed to evacuate would be underwater right now. Bourg says his bayou's system is a model studied by other communities as the ideal, but still, they are not designed to hold up to any hurricane beyond a category 3. Here, on this houseboat, we could marvel at how nature could overcome even the best preparation. In New Orleans, they despaired at what nature could do to the worst.

Mike Pesca is the New York correspondent for NPR's Day to Day.

 

 

 

 science
The Katrina Science Test
Hint: The answer isn't global warming.
By Paul Recer
Posted Monday, Sept. 12, 2005, at 1:11 PM PT

It's easy to use the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina to call attention to human-caused global warming, as Nicholas Kristof did in his New York Times column on Sunday. But the scientific evidence currently is too thin to blame Katrina and other hurricanes on carbon dioxide emissions. And environmentalists may risk embarrassment if they exploit the theoretical link to promote their causes.

Virtually every objective climate scientist now accepts that humans are causing the Earth to baste like a meatball on a skewer with the help of CO₂ and a whole family of gases, which have been belching from auto exhaust pipes and drifting from industrial chimneys for the last 20 decades or so. The average Earth surface temperature has gone up about one degree in the past 100 years, and scientists expect a rise of between one and four more degrees over the next 50. That may not sound like much, but in the delicately balanced climate of the Earth it's enough to produce some big changes: a dramatic shrinkage of ice around the North and South poles, the retreat of mountain glaciers, slightly warmer oceans, and a rise in the global sea level of 4 to 8 inches.

Scientists also agree that in recent years, hurricanes have become more frequent and severe, at least in the Atlantic Ocean. After 24 years of relative quiet, more than 30 major hurricanes have churned in the Atlantic since 1995. Most researchers, however, think that increase has nothing to do with global warming. Those who study tropical cyclones say that Katrina was part of a natural cycle of angry storms that will batter North America for decades. "These changes in hurricane activity are viewed as resulting from long-period natural climate alterations that historical and paleo-climate records show to have occurred many times in the past," Philip Klotzbach and William Gray of the hurricane-forecast team at Colorado State University, which has been forecasting hurricane season activity since 1984, say in a statement released by the university in August.

There is one hurricane scientist who believes he has found a possible link between global warming and storm intensity. But it's an entirely theoretical one. In the Aug. 4 edition of Nature, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented math models that he said "show a substantial increase in potential intensity with anthropogenic global warming, leading to the prediction that actual storm intensity should increase with time." Emanuel concedes, however, that the observed storm intensities do not match what the models predict and that his study can only "suggest" that global warming "may" lead to more intense storms. In the New York Times last week, he agreed with Gray and Klotzbach that the increase in hurricane activity the last two years "is mostly the natural swing."

Until the science clarifies, environmental groups that use Katrina as a way to boost their campaign for tougher controls on greenhouse emissions risk provoking a backlash. Exploiting bad news and facile pseudoscience to seek support and fresh donations is a good way to lose credibility. Greenpeace, for instance, looked foolish when it denounced genetically modified foods as "Frankenfoods" that can potentially harm human health. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, a respected independent advisory group, concluded in 2004 that foods created by gene manipulation were no more dangerous than crops altered by traditional breeding methods. The animal-rights movement suffered a similar embarrassment when it argued against using laboratory animals for medical research by claiming that computer modeling could accomplish the same research goals as living animals. Donald Kennedy, executive editor in chief of the journal Science, called the claim "a remarkable piece of science fiction."

Environmentalists who want to leverage Katrina are on far more solid ground scientifically and economically in going after the state and federal rules that permit people to build in harm's way. Population growth along the U.S. coastline has exploded in recent years—13 million people now live in Florida's coastal counties alone compared to only about 200,000 a century ago. A USA Today study concluded that about 1,000 people move into U.S. coastal counties each day. The denser population makes the areas more difficult to evacuate: Officials told the Washington Post that it now takes twice as long to evacuate Biloxi and Gulfport, Miss., as it did 10 years ago.

All this is sure to increase the death toll in a major storm. Yet that risk is blithely ignored in many coastal developments, often with the support of elected officials. For instance, when an Army deputy assistant secretary tried to block applications to build a casino along a fragile marsh area in Mississippi in 1998, Republican Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi persuaded the Army to issue the permits; Lott had earlier attended a $100,000 casino-industry fund-raiser for the GOP. Now 20 of those Mississippi casinos have been smashed by Katrina.

The historic pattern has been that as soon as crises pass, more buildings go up and new people move in. As John Tierney, among others, pointed out last week, property owners don't have much financial incentive to respect the risks of living in a hurricane zone. The federal government's flood insurance stakes property owners to much of the cost of rebuilding on the site that's been inundated. Studies show that thousands of coastal dwellers have received federal insurance payments for the same site following at least two different floods. In rare instances, homes have been restored many more times than those with federally backed insurance: A Canton, Miss., property, currently worth about $49,300, has had 25 losses in 18 years at a restoration cost of $181,279.

The Flood Insurance Reform Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in June 2004, could change some of this. The new law is designed to discourage property owners from rebuilding in repeatedly flooded areas and would help homeowners to either elevate their homes or to build on high and dry sites. But the law on its own isn't enough. The president did not include funding for the Flood Insurance Reform Act in his 2005 or 2006 budgets. And given the powerful sentiment to rebuild New Orleans on its below-sea-level site, and the promise of Mississippi officials to restore that state's coastal area to its pre-storm glory, the historic pattern of rebuilding in flood zones is likely to be repeated. As estimates for the total recovery costs of Katrina edge toward $200 billion, environmentalists should ask what that money is getting us.

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Some CO₂ in the atmosphere is good. It allows heat from the sun to stay on and around the Earth instead of bouncing back into space. Without natural carbon dioxide and other gases to retain solar heat, the planet would be a lifeless snowball—all ice and no skiing. But the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that since the industrial age began, atmospheric CO₂ has increased 30 percent and the concentration of methane, another greenhouse gas, has more than doubled. Without new emission controls, some experts estimate that carbon dioxide concentrations will increase by up to 150 percent above today's level by 2100.

Paul Recer was a science writer for the Washington bureau of the Associated Press from 1987 to 2004.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125908/

 

chatterbox
Homeland Security's Lousy Morale
Only the Small Business Administration has unhappier employees.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2005, at 2:34 PM PT

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that monitors the federal workforce, has released a survey ranking government agencies according to employee satisfaction. Guess where the Department of Homeland Security ranks? It's number 29 out of 30. These are the people who are supposed to prevent the next 9/11 and who botched the New Orleans flood. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is folded into Homeland Security, and many people attribute its decline to that fact (though it's worth noting that in a similar survey conducted just before Homeland Security swallowed it up, FEMA ranked dead last). The only agency of the federal government with a more demoralized workforce than Homeland Security is the Small Business Administration, a notorious turkey farm that should have been abolished years ago.

Employee satisfaction isn't the be-all and end-all of excellence. If it were, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which nearly blew up the last space shuttle because of the same problem with insulating foam that blew up the previous one, wouldn't have placed sixth. But if not sufficient to guarantee excellence, decent morale would seem at least necessary as a precondition to success for any enterprise dependent on skilled labor. Yet Homeland Security isn't even as much fun to work for as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the government agency that insures your bank deposits up to $100,000.

Homeland Security ranked 29^th in the matching of employee skills to the agency mission, in "teamwork," and in "effective leadership." The only areas in which it did not rank 29^th were "training and development" (26^th) and "family-friendly culture and benefits" (28^th). It gets even more depressing when you look at the raw data for the survey, which was collected by the Office of Personnel Management (the federal government's "human resources" shop). Protecting citizens of the United States against acts of terrorism and natural disasters ought to make you feel pretty good about yourself, no? Yet only 20 percent of Homeland Security respondents strongly agreed with the statement, "My work gives me a feeling of personal accomplishment." That's against 29 percent at the Department of Energy, another federal agency with no particular reason for existing, and 27 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency, which routinely gets bossed around these days by political hacks in the White House.

"Overall, how good a job do you feel is being done by your immediate supervisor/team leader?" At Homeland Security, fully 6 percent ranked their bosses "very poor." Compare that to 4 percent at the General Services Administration, the most boring agency in the federal government (basically, it's the office-supplies and real estate shop).

"How would you rate the overall quality of work done by your workgroup?" At Homeland Security, 29 percent said "very good," compared to 39 percent at the Commerce department, where, to be honest, it doesn't much matter whether the overall quality of work is good or bad. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, perpetually one of the worst-managed federal agencies, 34 percent of all employees rate the quality of their workgroup "very good." Indeed, no agency of the federal government scored fewer "very goods" than Homeland Security on this question. Even the Small Business Administration scored a comparatively respectable 38 percent.

You want to know the most depressing thing of all? None of this is news! So many newspaper articles have been written about disorganization and incompetence at the Department of Homeland Security that a Washington Post story on the rankings (page A29) made the White House budget office, which placed first, the story's lead. Homeland Security wasn't mentioned until the story's penultimate paragraph. The people tasked with saving your life hate their jobs? Well, duh!

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

 

food
The Slurpee at 40
Has it grown up?
By David Amsden
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2005, at 10:47 AM PT

Lunchtime, Richard Montgomery High School, 1994. For those of us imprisoned in this suburban Maryland moonscape without cars or friends with cars, there were only two options when the bell rang: A) the cafeteria, a desolate fluorescent-lit echo chamber that pegged all ye who entered social contraband for the next four to 60 years; or B) 7-Eleven, the only "restaurant" within walking distance of the school. For obvious reasons, we always opted for the latter, typically indulging in some heroically seed-strewn marijuana on the way over. And so for a year of my life I subsisted almost exclusively on rubbery beef jerky, vaguely defrosted hamburgers, microwaved Big Bite hot dogs that made disconcerting crunching noises, and everything the devilish minds at Hostess ever invented. Each of these "meals" was, of course, washed down with a Slurpee about the size of an aboveground swimming pool—which left our brains perfectly "freezed" so we could get through the rest of the day.

These childhood memories seemed improbably significant the other day when I came across two news items: one informing me that the Slurpee has turned 40; the other that a 7-Eleven has opened in Manhattan, an island I migrated to eight years ago in order to pretend I was never the type of person who drank Slurpees every day. As much as I want to be thrilled, or at least ironically nostalgic, the pop sociologist in me can't help but raise an eyebrow. Here we have yet another instance of adults (in this case New Yorkers) co-opting the territory of teenagers (blended icy beverages) in such a way that the trashy and indulgent becomes hip and respectable. The Frappuccino, the Coolatta: At some point over the last few years, grown-ups developed an ability to order these things and take themselves seriously. Which makes me wonder: Is my beloved Slurpee looking to reinvent itself, Gatsby-like, as a pseudo-sophisticated drinkable dessert? How long until my editor asks me to grab a Slurpee so we can discuss my next piece?

The Slurpee, like so many great innovations and perfectly nice human beings, was an accident. In the late '50s, a Kansas Dairy Queen owner named Omar Knedlik found his soda machine was on the fritz. He tossed some bottles of pop in the freezer and discovered people went into conniptions for the slushy texture that resulted when the soda partially froze. Wheels turned. He invented a machine to slushify water, CO₂, and flavored syrup. In 1965, 7-Eleven bought the machines from Knedlik, hired an ad copywriter to coin an irresistible name, and the Slurpee was born. Back then it cost a dime. Four decades on there have been more than 200 flavors, ranging from the earnestly goofball of yesteryear (Blue Blunder Berry) to the quasi-classy of today (Mochaccino). Michael Jackson reportedly plunked down $75.62 to install a Slurpee machine at Neverland Ranch. Eleven million Slurpees are sold each month and hit the eager palate at a cryogenic 28 degrees. In total some 6 billion brains have been frozen since the dawn of the Slurpee. Here in the United States the drink is most beloved in Detroit, but, curiously, it's up in the Winnipeg tundra where the Slurpee is most popular—further evidence, at least to this patriotic-when-convenient mind, that Canadians really just want to be Americans.

But enough with the logistics. Explaining the appeal of the Slurpee is a bit like explaining the appeal of pure oxygen or terrific sex: Those who don't get it are simply not to be trusted. Slurpees are divine because of their unapologetic garishness, a giddy reminder that no amount of sugar is ever too much. That the expression "brainfreeze"—meaning the needling headache brought on by drinking something too cold too quickly—was trademarked in 1994 says it all: The point is masochistic, to find pleasure in pain, to embrace evil over good. (Sometimes this is taken too literally: Near my Maryland home, a teen was recently convicted of murdering another teen for trying to buy a girl a Slurpee.) My point here is to say that it's not (too) hyperbolic to equate drinking a Slurpee with surrendering to the greed and gluttony that is being a chronically shortsighted, diabolically unthinking American. In this, the Slurpee serves as a precursor to everything else 7-Eleven is about: namely, smoking cigarettes and drinking too much beer. (The franchise is the nation's No. 1 retailer of Budweiser.)

Or, wait, scratch that: The Slurpee represents everything 7-Eleven was about.

Celebrations of any sort—even those for drinkable sugar—are always somewhat preposterous, and in the strain to muster up excitement, something darker is often exposed: that whatever we're celebrating no longer exists in the form we're busy praising. 7-Eleven may be purporting to rejoice over the Slurpee, its neon-bright mascot, but in truth the Dallas-based franchise has spent the last year trying to distance itself from its identity as a haven for loitering teens looking to ignore their parents and husbands looking to pick up some beer and smokes before heading home to ignore their wives. A great deal of money was spent on an ad campaign lauding 7-Eleven's new line of designer food—turkey and zesty havarti on wheat-nut bread, a blue-corn wrap with turkey and tomatillo sauce, even a "chili-lime" hot dog to compete with the classic Big Bite. In a bygone era the glory of 7-Eleven was simple: Buy the food when you're 16 and it'll still be edible when you're in a nursing home 70 years later. Now they're proud to tell you that the sandwiches are made "fresh" daily. In other words, 7-Eleven is singing the praises of the Slurpee at the very moment when they're aggressively reaching out to an un-Slurpee demographic: self-consciously refined, ambitiously healthy yuppies.

Which brings us to 7-Eleven's glistening new Manhattan outpost. Apparently the location is doing well, having been dutifully covered in the New York Times and worshipped by burnished, carb-counting types looking to dupe themselves into thinking they're not burnished, carb-counting types. Slacker-hating sophisticates can now pretend to be slackers, projecting a false sense of value onto the very suburban childhoods that felt so valueless at the time. What's glimpsed here is a small piece of a much larger and much stranger social machinery: With misguided nostalgia comes a tendency to fetishize the mundane because the truth is either too earnest (I miss being young!) or just plain sad (When did I become this person?). As a result, people no longer simply wander inside and drink a Slurpee, but wander inside and "drink a Slurpee." I'd be concerned about this, worried that the point of the Slurpee will be missed, except years of experience have taught me that after three furious sips, the overly self-aware brain will be frozen, all meta-oriented cells will be annihilated, and, for a few painful seconds, we will all be bumbling freshman again. Truly.

David Amsden is a contributing writer at New York magazine and the author of the novel Important Things That Don't Matter. He is currently writing a personal and reportorial account of middle-class kids in their teens and early 20s.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126309/

sports nut
No Sweat
Does perspiration-fighting athletic gear really work?
By Nick Schulz
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2005, at 8:55 AM PT

There's no better testament to athletic effort than a sweat-soaked T-shirt. When a jock perspires, he's struggling and striving his way to glory. The guy who doesn't break a sweat? He's a bench-warmer, a goldbricker, a lazy bum.

At least that's how it used to be. Companies like Under Armour, which announced a few weeks ago that it's going public, now make a fortune by demonizing perspiration. Sweat-fighting athletic gear, known in the sportswear industry as "performance apparel," is now a multibillion-dollar business. The craze has even spread beyond sports: Haberdashers are now making perspiration-abating business suits.

Sweat cools your body when it evaporates from the surface of your skin. But sometimes the volume of sweat you produce is too great for it all to disperse. Instead, the watery excretion gets soaked up by your cotton T-shirt, which gets damp and gross as it slurps up the excess moisture. Performance apparel solves that problem by "wicking" sweat away from your body, just like the wick of a candle absorbs liquid and draws it upward. The sweat-removing shirts, with their polyester-blended fabrics and chemical treatments, pull perspiration away from the skin and push it through the clothing's surface, where it evaporates. The result: a comfortable, dry athlete.

Since I'm the sweatiest guy I know, I took some wicking gear for a test schvitz. In my unscientific opinion, the stuff works. Under Armour's Heat Gear Full T-Shirt (you can find one for about $25) stayed light and dry as sweat cascaded down my face during an hour-long run. The shirts I tried with "Dri-release microblend performance fabric"—a technology developed by former DuPont scientists and licensed to apparel producers—were even wickier. I wore an Anvil Dri-release short-sleeve T-shirt (about $10) while jogging in the August heat and an Anvil Dri-release sleeveless tee after getting out of the ocean without toweling off. Both shirts got bone dry in a frighteningly short period of time. Finally, I put on Brooks Sports' Pulse T (about $44), which comes with "moisture transfer polyester" and heat-release panels in the armpits and chest. The special panels "worked" a bit too well for my taste: Throughout my run I felt a cold tingling sensation in my chest and pits. Maybe a higher-performing athlete would enjoy the sensation. It just freaked me out.

My experience with the Pulse T made me wonder whether there was a darker side to this stuff. Is it possible that these shirts do their job too well? A small company called TR Gear thinks so. "Our extensive research shows that the high wicking fabrics currently used in the industry can actually increase the risk of injury, fatigue, overheating, and dehydration by not allowing sweat to affectively cool the body through evaporation against the skin," reads the company's Web site.

Mike Smoltz, the founder of TR Gear and the brother of Braves pitcher John Smoltz, told me that newfangled wicking shirts counteract the body's natural thermal regulation mechanism. By drawing sweat away from your skin as soon as it rises to the surface, he says, your body won't cool properly. That will make you sweat even more, which will lead in turn to dehydration and compromised muscle performance.

TR Gear claims that its proprietary fabric, called TR37, is superior to cotton and wicking shirts because it allows sweat to evaporate on your body without getting soaked itself. They insist that TR37 thus does a better job of regulating your core temperature and ensuring that you stay hydrated. Earlier this year, the technology was named "one of the top five innovative products" at a major industry trade show.

I tested TR Gear's form-fitting workout shorts, the same ones John Smoltz has worn under his uniform for the last four years. While they felt pleasant enough, it was impossible for me to tell what they were doing to my core temperature. For what it's worth, they were more comfortable than the form-fitting biking shorts I've worn. The shorts did get a little damp for my taste, though, far more damp than the better wicking shirts I tested. Mike Smoltz told me my thigh muscles might feel cool after my long run, but when I touched them they seemed as warm as the rest of my body.

The company says it has done "extensive research" on its products, but Mike Smoltz told me that no independent studies have been done on TR37. There has been at least one study on the effects of workout gear on core body temperature. East Carolina University's Dr. Tim Gavin evaluated the effects of working out in hot weather while wearing a Speedo (i.e., without clothes), cotton fabric, and wicking gear. Gavin's conclusion: Both performance apparel and cotton have little effect on core body temperature. Gavin told me it is theoretically possible that the Smoltzes are onto something. But in order to know for sure whether some clothes wick sweat too quickly, he'll have to expand his original experiment to include extreme weather conditions, such as when it's really humid and more difficult for the body to cool down.

Dr. David Pascoe, who tests workout gear for Auburn University's sports teams in his Thermal Lab, told me there's only so much influence a garment can have on an athlete's body temperature. He's also quick to say that boring old cotton is still a very good fabric for sportswear: It's lightweight, doesn't irritate the skin, breathes well, can take repeated washings without deteriorating, and is extremely cheap, especially compared to pricey performance apparel.

Cotton might not be the demon fabric that performance apparel manufacturers say it is, but I'm going to keep my Under Armour shirt. The wicking thing was nice, but more important, it held my excess midsection pounds in place like a shiny sports girdle. Who could go back to cotton after that?

Nick Schulz is editor of TechCentralStation.com and Transition Game, a blog focusing on the intersection of sports and technology.

 

architecture
When Architects Plagiarize
It's not always bad.
By Witold Rybczynski
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2005, at 3:14 AM PT

An architect has brought a lawsuit alleging plagiarism against David M. Childs and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, claiming that an early version of the Freedom Tower was copied from his project of six years ago. Whatever the merits of the claim, the suit raises a broader issue, one that is particularly relevant in an age in which "starchitect" buildings have become the norm: How important should artistic authorship be in the world of architecture?

For most of the last 500 years, imitation was the sincerest form of architectural flattery. The pattern was established during the Renaissance, whose architects were trying to re-create the buildings of ancient Rome. The fact that most of these buildings lay in ruins meant that designers had to do a lot of creative reconstruction, but that didn't alter the principle of learning from—and copying—the past. Invention was necessary, but it was not the most important factor.

Architecture was not a private preserve. Part of the glory of the period was the way that ideas bounced back and forth, gathering momentum in the process. The great Donato Bramante was probably responsible for the motif that later came to be known as the Palladian window. The motif is often attributed to Andrea Palladio because he used it in one of his most famous buildings, the Basilica in Vicenza, a design directly based on Jacopo Sansovino's St. Mark's Library in Venice. Yet no one would accuse Palladio—or Sansovino—of plagiarism.

Depending on precedents, and learning from the past, came to distinguish architecture from the other arts. Christopher Wren's dome of St. Paul's, for example, is inconceivable without Michelangelo's dome of St. Peter's in Rome. When Thomas Ustick Walter designed the Capitol dome in Washington, D.C., he modeled it on Wren's, not because he had no ideas of his own, but because he so admired the original.

The first generation of Modernists wanted to upset the apple cart and devise a new language of design, but they, too, took imitation for granted. How else to explain all those flat roofs, white plastered exteriors, and factory-sash windows? When pioneers such as Mies van der Rohe made discoveries, they belonged to everyone; it was a sign of esteem when other architects copied his steel and glass curtain walls. And once a discovery was made, architects stuck to it. "I don't want to be original," Mies is supposed to have said, "I want to be good." Design was too serious to be left to idiosyncratic imagination.

The idea that an architectural motif can be copyrighted—or plagiarized—reflects a very different idea of architecture, one in which originality is valued above all. This contemporary attitude distorts the creative process. Like fashion designers, whom they increasingly resemble, architects are expected to unveil new lines every season. When Frank Gehry takes the time to explore an idea over a series of buildings, he is accused of becoming stale. "Running out of ideas" is the harshest critique that can be leveled against an architect although, as Robert Venturi has pithily observed, "at least we'd had an idea."

A recent article in the New York Times seriously entertained the possibility that the form of a proposed skyscraper by Zaha Hadid might be influenced by the design of a screen in Kennedy Airport. The architectural auteur is expected to be self-contained, untainted, sui generis. It's OK to find inspiration in a common sponge, as Steven Holl is said to have done for a recent building, or in the shards of a broken teapot, as Daniel Libeskind confessed, but seeking inspiration from one's contemporaries, let alone from the past, is forbidden. Thus, instead of architectural conversations, we increasingly have self-absorbed mumblings or soapbox oratory. And lawsuits.

Witold Rybczynski is Slate's architecture critic.

 

 

 jurisprudence
Moments of Truth
What John Roberts really thinks.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Thursday, Sept. 15, 2005, at 1:33 PM PT

On a few rare occasions at this week's confirmation hearings, John Roberts answered a senator's real live question about a real live area of law. These glimpses hardly make up for all the demurrals. Still, they're striking on two counts. They line up Roberts with distinctly minority schools of thought, and they reveal him as a careful opportunist.

On Tuesday afternoon, Democratic Sen. Herbert Kohl of Wisconsin asked Roberts whether judges sometimes "break new ground" because they're acting "in the best interests of our country" (as opposed to because they're uppity troublemakers). Kohl pointed to the indisputably activist, universally hallowed Brown v. Board of Education. Roberts acknowledged that Brown's ban of school segregation was a "dramatic shift." But then he added: "If you look at the Brown decision, it is more consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment and the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment than Plessy v. Ferguson. And it's based on the conclusion that the separation of the races in the schools was itself a violation of equal protection. In other words, it's not a departure from the Fourteenth Amendment."

So, now it's Plessy's discredited notion of separate but equal—not Brown—that the 1868 ratifiers of the 14^th Amendment wouldn't have seen coming. All along, desegregation was supposed to follow from the end of slavery. Never mind Jim Crow.

The architect of this historical argument is Michael McConnell, a federal-appeals-court judge and respected conservative scholar. In a 1995 article in the Virginia Law Review called "Originalism and the Desegregation Decisions," McConnell argues that the writers of the 14^th Amendment understood segregation as a form of inequality. They meant to extend "equal protection under the law" to a broad array of civil rights, including education.

Embracing McConnell's argument helps Roberts on two fronts. It makes absolutely clear that Roberts is not a bigot. He understands the injustice of racial inequality so well that he thinks of Brown as a natural, restorative development in the law. At the same time, Roberts throws the originalists a bone and gets to signal that he's not so sure that judges need to break new ground after all. Sure, Brown broke with precedent by disavowing Plessy. But it did so by restoring the principles that the drafters of the 14^th Amendment had in mind. The decision is about originalism, not activism, at its best.

This is lovely, except that McConnell's historical evidence failed to convince virtually anyone who studies this stuff. "As a matter of history, the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood to ban segregation on the basis of race," Cass Sunstein says in his new book, Radicals in Robes (this is the book that Sen. Orrin Hatch keeps referring to when he talks about perfectionists and fundamentalists and whatever-else-ists). Sunstein relegates McConnell to a footnote because other scholars already have parted company with him. Does John Roberts really think McConnell is right and everyone else is wrong?

Roberts' other moment of self-revelation came thanks to a prompt from Sen. Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, about the proper role of foreign law in interpreting the U.S. Constitution. This is a live issue that will come before the Roberts Court. Taking a position on it doesn't involve saying how a judge would decide a particular case, but it says something significant about the judge's approach to reasoning. It's also a big fat political hot potato. This spring, in his majority opinion banning juvenile execution, Justice Anthony Kennedy referred to the court decisions and practices of other countries. He pointed out that nobody except the United States and Somalia was still killing people for crimes they'd committed as kids. The far-right ginned up the impeach Tony Kennedy movement in response.

If Roberts had been playing his usual don't-box-me-in game, he would have punted on Kyl's question. Instead he strongly stated his "concern" about the "use of foreign law as precedent." Roberts said, "If we're relying on a decision from a German judge about what our Constitution means, no president accountable to the people appointed that judge and no Senate accountable to the people confirmed that judge. And yet he's playing a role in shaping the law that binds the people in this country. The other part of it that would concern me is that, relying on foreign precedent doesn't confine judges. … Foreign law, you can find anything you want. If you don't find it in the decisions of France or Italy, it's in the decisions of Somalia or Japan or Indonesia or wherever."

This position is chiefly associated with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas; in the juvenile execution case, Chief Justice William Rehnquist signed on to it as well. The other six members of the court voiced strong support for using foreign decisions—not as commands by any means, but as sources of possible wisdom. Judges can cite anything they want. What's less democratic about giving a nod to a foreign judge than to William Shakespeare? As long as judges are clear about the limited weight they're giving to foreign law—as they've so far bent over backward to do—scanning the globe for a new idea, or empirical evidence to support an old one, seems pretty common-sensical.

That's the prevailing view in the academy, anyway (though the trend is rued by scholars including Judge Richard Posner). What to make of Roberts' firm stance against citing foreign decisions? It tells the Republicans who have been gnashing their teeth over America's threatened sovereignty that they can rest assured about Roberts on that score. And it does so at little cost, since the Democrats who keep asking about abortion and privacy won't much care or notice. Everyone is happy. Especially John Roberts.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

 

politics
Minority Retort
This is your moment, Democrats. Don't blow it.
By John Dickerson
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005, at 4:52 PM PT

Democrats were furious that President Bush didn't take responsibility for the Katrina relief catastrophe. Now they're furious that he did. President Bush's careful admission that he is responsible for the botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina "to the extent that the federal government didn't do its job right" is a familiar Washington gambit: "turning the page." Bush's acceptance of responsibility answers cable news' echo-room charge that someone needs to be held accountable. Now the president—having embraced his inner Truman—can move on and change the message.

Liberal pundits had already declared the end of his presidency, but with this rhetorical feint Bush muddies the discussion. He's giving away lots of federal goodies. He's making a prime time speech from Louisiana on Thursday night. Pretty soon, the media and the country might start letting Bush off the hook. Now any Democrat who carps on those federal failures can be brushed off as a hack merely playing politics. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), not immune to playing politics, warned Monday during John Roberts' nomination hearings that "Katrina victims should not be used to score political points."

Still, Democrats have been given their best chance in five years to win back the country. Are they going to blow it?

The first thing they need to do is remind themselves that they have to run on Katrina. The country and the party will be better for it. It's a little beneath Republicans who played politics so artfully with national security to now duck behind teacher's skirt. Democrats need to acknowledge that Karl Rove's justification for Republicans running on their response to 9/11 now applies to Katrina as well. Arguments about life and death issues shouldn't be dainty or avoided at the dinner table.

How do Democrats keep Katrina and the tragically late federal response front and center? By making Katrina part of a larger argument about leadership and national security. Despite the attempt at page turning, George Bush is at the lowest approval rating of his presidency, 42 percent, and his marks for leadership and for trust in a crisis—his strengths—are now down sharply to career lows. In their initial responses to the aftermath of the storm, Democrats used the issue to focus on their traditional strength: addressing the persistent problems of the underclass. "We have to come to terms with ugly truth that skin color, age, and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not," party chairman Howard Dean said in the wake of the disaster. Dean gins up the one-third of the electorate that represents the Democratic base but alienates independents and moderates who don't need thin partisan narration when they see the images of suffering.

Democrats don't need to rile up their base any more. They need suburban voters, and for suburban voters, Katrina isn't so much about race, it's about homeland security—about what would happen if someone bombs their mall. Some Democrats understand this already. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Clinton have both tried to pitch sensible reconstruction plans for the Gulf while also talking about the glaring problems exposed in the country's homeland security.*

If Democrats are going to seize their moment, though, they are going to have to settle the debate between those palsied by their hatred of Bush and the swing-vote-seeking centrists. The Clinton and Reid arguments have to silence or at least moderate the Dean ones. They have to show, as one Democratic strategist put it, "that we can be the daddy party."

*Correction, Wednesday, September 14, 2005: This article originally and incorrectly identified Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as Majority Leader of the Senate. He is the Minority Leader. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) is the Senate Majority Leader.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent.

 

press box
How the Court Imitates the World Series
John Roberts' winning baseball analogy.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005, at 3:44 PM PT

Into an opening statement that churned as slow as molasses, Judge John Roberts sneaked a revelatory comment. Wrapping up the first day of confirmation hearings yesterday (Sept. 12), he compared service on the Supreme Court to the ministrations of a baseball umpire.

"I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat," Roberts said.

The press hounds, whose snouts were turned up to 11 in hopes of sniffing out something of interest to report from the hearings, totally misinterpreted his allusion. Proving that they don't know baseball—and that they definitely don't know the art of umpiring—the press corps treated the balls and strikes quip as Roberts' vow to judge cases independently and fairly, and not use the power of the court to further his own agenda.

In today's hearings, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., rejected the strikes and balls analogy as specious. But I think Roberts' analogy holds up remarkably well, so well that he could extend it further: Both groups of lawgivers come to work in dark costumes; both hold insufferably high opinions of themselves; both inure themselves to a crowd's catcalls; both worship tradition and their own authority; and perhaps most important, both regard themselves as absolute dictators within their domains.

When Roberts said his job was "to call balls and strikes," he was asking the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask itself, What is a strike? Originalists in these matters might say that a strike is what its 1887 rulebook definition says it is, "a pitch that 'passes over home plate not lower than the batsman's knee, nor higher than his shoulders.' " Or they might accept some more recent official definition.

But a strike has never been what the rulebook says it is. This elementary unit from which a baseball game is constructed is whatever an umpire says it is. Ken Kaiser, who umpired in the American League from 1978 to 1999, stated this truth with philosophical precision in his memoir, Planet of the Umps.

"The strike zone as defined in the rule book … is a myth. It doesn't exist. It's a nonexistent imaginary box. It has always not existed," Kaiser writes.

According to Kaiser, no two umps see the same strike zone. They view the plate from different angles, react differently to pitches, and change their opinion of what a strike is from batter to batter. When umpires say they call balls and strikes the way they see them, they mean it literally. They are the strike zone.

Likewise, the law is whatever Supreme Court justices say the law is. Just as no two umps see the same pitch, no two justices view the same judicial strike zone. If they did, every decision would be 9-0. Oh, the justices are supposed to draw on the Constitution and consult binding precedents in their rulings, just as umpires are instructed to call games in accordance with the contents of the Major League Baseball rulebook. But established law and baseball rules are sufficiently complex to leave wiggle room for less than objective edicts from justices and umps. As Kaiser puts it, "The best way to stop an argument is to quote the specific rule that you used to make a call, even if you have to make up that rule."

Umps and justices are different than the amateurs who second-guess them in that they must labor to understand the balk rule and the Rooker-Feldman doctrine. But often their toughest task isn't being right, but selling the call. Justices must write blustering, confident, omniscient decisions, even though they may harbor doubts. When confronted with photo-finish ties at first base, umps must either call them "safe" or "out" with equal vehemence. On this score, umpires have it worse than justices: They must gird themselves for spittle-filled arguments from dirt-throwing managers who storm the field to protest close calls. Imagine what American jurisprudence might look like if we allowed Alan Dershowitz to rush the bench and bump chests with Antonin Scalia.

The toughest scrutiny that umpires and judges face comes during their stints in the minors and the lower circuits, where you're only as good as your worst decision: Botch a call there and you'll never get called up to the show. That's the bad news. The good news is once you reach the top, it's almost impossible to get fired. For example, many lawyers—even pro-choice lawyers—believe Roe v. Wade was a poor decision. Was anybody in that majority ever shown the door? No. At least once every three or four games, an ump suffers a Roe v. Wade moment. Such miscues didn't disturb Kaiser, who writes in his book, "When I blew a call I accepted responsibility for it and then forgot all about it. It wasn't a life-or-death issue with me. What were they going to do, kill me?"

The justices know that the less the public sees of them, the more magisterial and powerful they become, so they ban photos of and broadcasts from their court.* One imagines that if major league umpires had it to do all over again, they would have prohibited radio, television, and especially the instant replay, which destroys their claims to omniscience.

Other maxims collected by Kaiser that apply to both court and field: "The fewer calls you make the less chance you have to get in trouble," he writes in Planet of the Umps. Bemoaning the monotony of his profession, Kaiser confesses, "If all of life was like umpiring third base, the manufacturer of Prozac would be out of business."

If confirmed as chief justice, Roberts will find himself behind the plate, leading his crew through a grueling October-April season. We'll know he was serious about his baseball analogy if he arrives at his first oral arguments without Chief Justice William Rehnquist's gold-slashed robe and wears, instead, a chest protector, shin guards, and mask. He'll need them.

******

If the skills flexed on the Supreme Court don't serve you on the diamond, what is Justice John Paul Stevens doing at Wrigley Field on Wednesday night throwing out the first pitch of the Cub-Reds game? I'd like to thank the Troy Aikman Memorial Sports Library (Bryan Curtis, proprietor) for its guidance. Send your best umpire-justice stories to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Correction Sept. 14, 2005: The original version of this article mistakenly stated that the Supreme Court bans audio recordings of its procedings. The court itself has recorded oral arguments since 1955 but bans observers from recording. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126241/

 

  Wallace labeled Doctor Zhivago "a little commie"

On the September 18 broadcast of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace described Doctor Zhivago, one of two films named by chief justice nominee John G. Roberts Jr. as his favorites, as "a little commie." Weekly Standard editor William Kristol concurred, calling the film "a sappy, liberal movie." But the exchange mischaracterized both the film and the Boris Pasternak novel from which it was adapted, ignoring its anti-communist message and the persecution Pasternak suffered in the Soviet Union for expressing these beliefs.

Originally censored in the Soviet Union, Pasternak's novel, Doctor Zhivago, was published in Italy in 1957, and Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1958. Soviet authorities resisted the novel from the outset. Although Pasternak had smuggled a manuscript out of the Soviet Union to be published in Italy, The Guardian of London recently discovered that the Soviet government had forced him to send false telegrams rescinding his approval of the manuscript. Pasternak finally managed to send a genuine letter to his publisher, complaining of "moral pressure, repulsive in its duplicity." MSN's Encarta Encyclopedia reports that upon being awarded the Nobel Prize, Pasternak was forced to decline the award because the novel was anti-communist. According to the Academy of American Poets, the Soviet government took extreme measures to ensure he rejected the award as "all publication of his translations came to a halt and he was deprived of his livelihood."

Commentary on the novel suggests that it is not communist. The protagonist, Dr. Yuri Zhivago, is a doctor and poet himself persecuted for his rejection of Soviet dogmatism. After serving as a military doctor for the czarist regime in World War I, Zhivago returns to a local hospital where "his co-workers are suspicious of him. Influenced by Bolshevism, they dislike his use of intuition instead of logic," according to the New York University Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. Dr. Zhivago flees Moscow for the country but cannot escape Russia's political struggles. Eventually conscripted as a doctor by communist partisans, he spends the revolution caught up in a struggle he cannot understand. His loyalty is not to any political system, but to his art, as the NYU database notes:

For Dr. Zhivago, philosophy, literature, and medicine are all part of the same thing. They all are spaces in which he can express his love and respect for the beauty of life. In all these spheres, he is undogmatic, unrational, but wholly devoted to justice. He prizes sensory experience over dogmatism or logical argument.

Hardly "commie," the novel and film describe the struggles of an artist to express himself under a repressive regime.

From a panel discussion with Wallace, Kristol, Fox News host Brit Hume, National Public Radio (NPR) national political correspondent and Fox News political correspondent Mara Liasson and NPR senior correspondent and Fox News political contributor Juan Williams on the September 18 broadcast of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday:

[video clip]

SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER (D-NY): -- what kind of movies you like. You won't name one. Then I ask you if you like Casablanca, and you respond by saying lots of people like Casablanca.

ROBERTS: First, Doctor Zhivago and North by Northwest.

[end video clip]

WALLACE: That exchange during this week's confirmation hearings when democratic Senator Charles Schumer complained he couldn't get straight answers from Judge John Roberts. And we're back now with Brit, Mara, Bill, and Juan. All right. Let's review this week's Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Roberts, and let's start with the lead player. Bill Kristol, how did Roberts do, and should conservatives worry that perhaps this fellow is more moderate than they had expected?

KRISTOL: He did great. The only conservative worries I've heard are about Doctor Zhivago. Isn't that kind of a sappy, liberal movie, you know?

WALLACE: It's a little commie.

KRISTOL: Yeah, right. Anyway, no, he did great. Republicans, conservatives are happy. Democrats looked foolish. And now they've got a problem that they don't know what to do. Should they vote to confirm him or not? The New York Times says vote no. The Washington Post says vote yes. Huge dilemma for Democrats this week.

— S.G.

Posted to the web on Monday September 19, 2005 at 5:09 PM EST

 

war stories
The Worst-Laid Plans
Why was emergency planning so awful?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005, at 3:23 PM PT

When a new president of the United States takes office, one of his first tasks is to hear a briefing on the nuclear-war plan. Chances are nil that he'll ever have to carry out this plan. But if he did, his choice of action might be more fateful, and the consequences more catastrophic, than any event in human history. So, the briefing—or, as it's known, The Briefing—remains the first order of presidential business, the defining distinction of the job. A staff member on the National Security Council, if not the president himself, is routinely apprised of changes. The plan's logistical aspects are periodically rehearsed. A military officer carrying a briefcase that contains the nuclear-launch codes escorts the president constantly. The briefing, the officer, the plan, and the codes all remain the same, or gradually evolve, regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat has been elected. Nobody would think of appointing political hacks to run even the most trivial aspect of this well-oiled machine.

One lesson of Hurricane Katrina is that emergency-management planning ought to receive the same attention and professionalism as nuclear-war planning. Floods and hurricanes are less cataclysmic than nuclear war, but they're serious enough—and far more likely to happen.

This is a lesson for mayors and governors as well as presidents.

In 2000, Louisiana state officials produced a remarkably detailed "State Emergency Operations Plan," including an equally impressive "Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan." If this plan had been followed, Katrina probably would have wrought far less havoc. But it seems to have been laid in a drawer and forgotten. An April 2005 update, issued by the state's office of homeland security and emergency preparedness, includes a page headlined "Record of Changes to Plan," with columns labeled "Change Number," "Date," "Part Affected," "Date Posted," and "Name of Poster." The page is blank; the plan had not been altered in the previous five years—a fairly sure sign that it hadn't been read, either.

On the federal level, it's not clear whether there was a plan worthy of the name. In July 2004, the Homeland Security Council—chaired by a White House adviser and consisting of 70 officials from 18 federal departments and agencies—published a manual titled Planning Scenarios Created for Use in National, Federal, State, and Local Homeland Security Preparedness Activities. The document laid out 15 scenarios for various types of disasters involving nuclear, biological, chemical, radiological, and cyber attacks, as well as major earthquakes and hurricanes. Each scenario outlined the likely damage and what steps should be taken in preparation, relief, and rescue.

What's striking about this document—the result of so much effort, devoted to such a high-profile issue of public policy, and designed to be distributed to emergency-management offices nationwide—is how useless it is. Take the chapter on major hurricanes. Its forecast of effects: "Casualties: 1,000 fatalities, 5,000 hospitalizations … Infrastructure Damage: Buildings destroyed, large debris … Economic impact: Millions of dollars … Recovery timeline: Months." One's first reaction, upon reading this: Any grade-school kid with an encyclopedia could have written it.

The list of recommended actions is no more reassuring. For instance: "Care must include medical assistance; shelter and temporary housing assistance; emergency food, water, and ice provision; and sanitary facility provision." Not only is this head-slappingly obvious, but when Katrina whirred its way up the coast, the officials in charge didn't follow even these elementary guidelines. Worse still, the chapters on planning scenarios for various terrorist attacks are no more informative or specific.

One could argue that these sorts of generalized guidelines are necessary first steps in the creation of an emergency-response strategy. But this document was published a year and a half after the Department of Homeland Security began operating. There's no good reason why it couldn't have appeared a month and a half after.

The DHS published an updated version of Planning Scenarios this past April. However, only officials with proper clearances can obtain or download a copy. Are all relevant federal, state, and local emergency-management officials cleared to read it? And is the second edition any better than the first? If an independent body gets around to investigating the terrible planning for Hurricane Katrina and the implications for future disasters, man-made or otherwise, these should be two of the questions.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126271/

explainer
How Do You Handle an FBI Informant?
If you pay him, get a receipt.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005, at 3:18 PM PT

In the last few years, the FBI has repeatedly violated its own rules about informants, according to a report released by the Justice Department on Monday. The report found that agents broke the rules in almost 90 percent of the cases it reviewed. How are you supposed to handle an FBI informant?

With lots of paperwork. Any confidential source of information for the FBI, DEA, INS, or U.S. Marshals must be properly documented and registered throughout his government career. Before you can put a snitch to work, you first have to file a report on his qualifications and liabilities and then get written approval from a supervisor. Once your informant is on the government payroll, he faces annual reviews of his suitability and more extensive tests every six years.

To get started, you have to provide your informant with certain instructions. You can't lie to him, and he has to understand that his assistance is strictly voluntary. You'll try (without guarantees) to protect his identity, but you can't offer him immunity from prosecution without special permission from federal prosecutors.

Once he gets approved—and his photograph, true identity, criminal history, and other background material are filed away—you can start to pay your informant for evidence. Each time you hand over some money—whether it's a one-time payment or part of an annual salary—you need to get a signed, dated receipt. (He can sign with an agreed-upon pseudonym, if necessary.) You're also required to let him know that, in general, his payment is taxable income.

You'll need prior written approval if your informant is going to commit a crime, either to keep his cover or to get you more information. A law-enforcement agency can only authorize a crime—called an "Otherwise Illegal Activity" if it's approved—for a limited period of time, and if it's essential for the investigation. Under no circumstances can the informant engage in an act of violence or an obstruction of justice; the approval of more serious ("Tier 1") crimes requires a consultation with a prosecutor.

You can't spend too much time socializing with your informant, and you're not permitted to give him or receive from him "any thing of more than nominal value." If you have to "deactivate" an informant for cause, you can never talk to him again. Any deactivation must be documented in writing. You also have to tell the informant that he's been fired, though you can keep him in the dark for a little while if that's important for your investigation.

Bonus Explainer: How have the rules for treating informants changed over the years? Until the 1970s, the FBI followed its own internal rules. "Potential" informants were paid for information before they'd been approved by agency headquarters, and the only criteria for controlling their behavior were designed "to obtain maximum results and prevent any possible embarrassment to the Bureau." Attorney General Edward Levi* created the first official guidelines in 1976; Benjamin Civiletti updated them in 1980. Civiletti's rules gave the bureau formal permission to approve certain crimes, if necessary. A high-profile informant scandal in the late 1990s led to a major update in 2001, under Janet Reno. The 2001 rules limited fraternization among agents and informants and instituted a Confidential Informant Review Committee that included federal prosecutors.

Next question?

Correction, Sept. 13, 2005: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly spelled the name of former Attorney General Edward Levi. (Return to corrected sentence.)

Daniel Engber is a writer in New York City and a featured member of www.cryingwhileeating.com.

 

 

 

chatterbox
Auto Lobbyist Reformed?
It's long road to Damascus, pal.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005, at 1:18 PM PT

"Katrina Leads a Lobbyist To Re-evaluate His Priorities," read the headline on a Sept. 12 Washington Post story by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum. Birnbaum, with whom I once worked at the Wall Street Journal, is a gifted reporter who knows more about the lobbying world than just about anybody else, so I had high hopes.

The lobbyist in question is Frederick L. Webber, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and "a pillar of the association [i.e., lobbying] community," according to Donald A. Danner, executive vice president of the National Federation of Independent Business. Webber's epiphany occurred while he wrote a large check for Gulf Coast flood victims. "Political fundraising in this town has gotten out of control," he found himself thinking. Webber proceeded to preach this gospel at various lunches and phone conversations with other lobbyists over the course of the following week. "I couldn't justify making those $500 to $2,500 [campaign] contributions," Webber explained to Birnbaum. "It just didn't fit."

But if Webber wants to draw a line from the world of politics to the flooding of New Orleans, he ought to think more about causation. Political fund raising didn't cause Hurricane Katrina, and I doubt that it has impeded charitable fund raising to rebuild New Orleans and other flooded cities. I applaud Webber's disgust on its own terms—he's taking a step in a direction I've called for previously (see "We Are All Choctaw")—but I don't see how complaining about the never-ending pursuit of political contributions will help victims of this disaster or prevent future disasters.

I have another idea. It's quite possible that the Gulf Coast flooding was caused by global warming. Even if it wasn't, we must assume that in the future global warming will cause large-scale floods that are equally disastrous, or more so. Yet the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, like everybody else connected to the auto industry, opposes aggressive moves to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles, which account for one-third of the problem. They have resisted even modest efforts by the Bush administration, not known for its determination to impose regulatory burdens on industry, to raise fuel-economy standards. (See, for instance, this lobby disclosure form submitted last month, signed by Webber, which makes note of the alliance's lobbying against the Automobile Fuel Economy Act of 2005. That's a bill introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would require SUVs to match the fuel efficiency of other cars by 2011.) In the Sept. 19 New Republic, Gregg Easterbrook argues that Detroit's recalcitrance is bad not only for the environment, but, with oil prices rising, for the auto industry's own bottom line. The alliance's commitment to reducing global warming pretty much begins and ends with an endorsement of Bush's paltry climate-change program, which is entirely voluntary.

So, how about it, Mr. Webber? Do you really want to do something to prevent future Katrinas? Or, having been designated a Lobbyist Who Cares in the Washington Post, is your objective already achieved?

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2126242/

politics
Enter Slate's Presidential Speech Contest
Bush is going to New Orleans to give an address to the nation about Katrina. Guess where he delivers it.
By John Dickerson
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005, at 12:30 PM PT

On Thursday President Bush will return to Louisiana to deliver a prime-time address about Hurricane Katrina and the relief effort. Given the careful attention this White House pays to staging events, and given the ongoing political cleanup from the FEMA fiasco, the president will undoubtedly try to pick a venue that is loaded with meaning, signifying competence, compassion, and hope all at once.

The president could speak in front of an audience of hurricane survivors. That would go a small way toward replacing that aloof image of Bush flying over the flooded landscape on Air Force One. But introducing real people into a set piece would be a huge gamble for a Bush team terrified of serendipity. Speaking in a church shelter would be too overtly religious, the Superdome too much a symbol of government screw-ups. The deck of the relief ship Iwo Jima would signal competence and action but would also remind people of the president's cocksure "Mission Accomplished" speech on the carrier Abraham Lincoln after the Iraq invasion.

So, what is the right spot?

In the short period before the White House announces the venue, please write in with two suggestions:

1.        Where the president should give his address, and

2.        Where you think he actually will give it.

We'll post the best answers tomorrow.

Please send submissions to slatepolitics@gmail.com. All respondents agree to have their e-mails and names published unless they explicitly request otherwise.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent.

 

medical examiner
Don't Worry, Be Healthy
Fear is more likely to get you than the avian flu.
By Marc Siegel
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005, at 9:39 AM PT

This hardly seems the time to be arguing against apocalyptic public health warnings, as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina continues to unfold. But Katrina should not be a basis for heeding every dire prophecy. Given that we have limited resources to predict and protect ourselves, the hurricane instead is a reminder of the importance of distinguishing health warnings that are grounded in impending danger from warnings that are not.

Fear works best as a warning system when it is a response to dangers that directly threaten those who are afraid. In New Orleans, fear of the weak levees could have mobilized the public to put more pressure on the local and federal governments to fix them. But that didn't happen. One reason is that Americans tend to pour their fears into dangers that, however real, pose a relatively low risk for any individual—like terrorism, anthrax, smallpox, and now the avian flu.

The avian flu virus, or H5N1, has killed millions of birds in China and Russia, either directly or because they've been destroyed to prevent its spread. The virus has infected 112 humans, 57 of whom have died. Despite the small numbers, public health officials in Russia, Germany, and the United States—along with articles like this one and this one in Foreign Affairs—have loudly sounded the alarm: Avian influenza is about to transform into a massive human killer that could kill 50 million to 100 million people. In preparation, the Department of Health and Human Services has contracted for the production of 2 million doses of vaccine, with several million more on the way, as well as millions of doses of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu. This week, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called bird flu "a time bomb waiting to go off."

Yet the science behind all the worry is questionable. It rests on the unproven claim that the avian flu will develop exactly like the strain that caused the flu pandemic of 1918. A March 2004 article in Science showed that the 1918 flu—which infected close to a billion people and killed 50 million or more—made the jump from birds to humans through a slight change in the structure of its hemagglutinins, the molecules by which the virus attaches itself to body cells. This mutation allowed the virus to kill more World War I soldiers than weapons did, effectively ending the war when forces on both sides became too sick to fight.

The current bird flu, however, has a different molecular structure than the 1918 bug. And though it has infected millions of birds, there is no direct evidence that it is about to mutate into a form that would transmit from human to human. In isolated cases, food handlers in Asia have gotten sick, but that doesn't mean that a wildly lethal mutation is about to occur. As Wendy Orent points out in the New Republic, diseases that come from animals are often hard for humans to transmit. They lack the "essential characteristics" of virulent human infections—they're not durable, or waterborne, or carried by hospital workers, or transmitted sexually.

Even if the worst-case scenario does occur and the virus mutates, there is no current indication that it will spread the way the Spanish flu did in 1918. That disease incubated in the World War I trenches before it spread across the world, infecting soldiers who were exhausted, packed together in trenches, and lacked access to hygiene. These conditions were an essential breeding ground for the virus. Today, there is no way a huge number of people would be packed together in WWI-like conditions. Also, technology allows doctors to diagnose and isolate flu patients far more effectively.

Despite the lack of evidence about a huge avian flu pandemic, still we worry. That's a problem because fear causes stress, and stress is bad for your health. Numerous studies have shown the familiar link. The American Heart Association has emphasized a correlation between stress and overeating and stress and smoking, both of which lead to heart disease. A 2000 study in the journal Stroke of more than 2,000 men showed that those suffering from anxiety or depression were three times as likely to suffer a fatal stroke. A study in Psychosomatic Medicine showed that Israeli women with an expressed fear of terrorism had twice the level of an enzyme that correlates with heart disease.

The association between worry and physical disease means that doctors have a responsibility not to upset their patients unnecessarily. Yet many doctors increase worry by ordering tests with little explanation or deploying their assistants to relay a patient's test result as an impersonal statistic. In the same way that public health officials alarm the public about unlikely health threats, some doctors dispense information in a way that alarms their patients about diseases they don't have.

I recall one patient who was filled with fear about West Nile virus, SARS, mad cow disease, bird flu—everything that came down the media pike. He extended this worry to every test a doctor ordered for him. When I took over his care, it took me a long time to learn how to inform him without scaring him. Gaining his trust meant being careful not to sound false alarms.

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The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 25 million people in six months and eventually killed between 50 million and 100 million. An estimated 17 million died in India alone; in the Indian army, almost 22 percent of troops who caught the disease died of it. The death rate was also high among indigenous peoples. The populations of some entire villages perished in Alaska and southern Africa.

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The fear center of the brain, the amygdala, causes the body to release the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol, which speed up the heart, clamp down blood vessels, and prepare us to take action.

Marc Siegel is an internist and associate professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine. His new book is False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear.

 

urfergirl
Them Dry Bones
Fox's new forensics drama is CSI with older corpses.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005, at 7:52 AM PT

Like most promotional material from Fox, the preview screener for the new forensics drama Bones (premiering tonight at 8 p.m. ET) arrived wrapped in gimmicky packaging: in this case, a sealed plastic envelope stamped with fake warnings: "Evidence. Keep Sealed. Do Not Tamper." If only I had listened.

Bones is Fox's version of CSI, but with more thoroughly dead people; unlike the gooey corpses on the CBS franchise, this show's skeletal remains are dry as dust. Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan (played by Emily Deschanel, older sister of the saucer-eyed actress Zooey) is a brilliant yet gorgeous yet perennially cranky forensic anthropologist who's the author of several bestselling novels about her trade. (The character is based on real-life novelist and anthropologist Kathy Reichs.) Temperance works for the Medico-Legal Anthropology Unit at D.C.'s "Jeffersonian Institution"—a shady-sounding name if I ever heard one.

As the pilot opens, Temperance is just flying in from investigating a mass murder in Guatemala. The chain of custody at the Jeffersonian Institution is apparently somewhat less strict than that of the Fox publicity department, since Temperance totes around a decomposing skull, unwrapped, in her carry-on duffel bag.

Temperance is aided by a gang of techie nerds who enjoy slinging forensics jargon (drowned people are "soakers"; those burned to death are "crispy critters") and bonding over their substandard social skills. This kind of geeked-out backup team has become a staple in TV crime shows: 24 boasts one, as does Numb3rs. Bones' version consists of Temperance's brainy grad-student assistant Zack (Eric Millegan); a bug expert and conspiracy theorist named Jack (T.J. Thyne); and Angela (Michaela Conlin), a lusty computer whiz who's also Temperance's best friend. Angela is responsible for designing the single goofiest piece of faux-scientific technology I've seen on TV: a 3D hologram program that projects not only the revolving image of a reconstructed victim, but the likely scenarios of the killing, onto an ultra-groovy light table in the soaringly modern digs of the Jeffersonian Institution. Why these renderings can't be done on a regular computer screen, or sketched on a cocktail napkin, is never clear, but they look cool as hell.

The driven, brittle Temperance hates to be psychologized, as we're reminded four different times during the pilot. She feels more at home with the dead than the living, as we hear at least twice. "You're a heart person; I'm a brain person," she reminds FBI special agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz, from Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer). When a young woman's body shows up in Arlington National Cemetery—not buried, but dumped in a pond—only Temperance is able to identify the skeleton as that of a senatorial intern who disappeared two summers ago, Chandra Levy-style. She plunges clumsily into the case by hurling accusations pell-mell, bursting onto premises without search warrants, and generally offending everyone in sight.

The cerebral "squints," as Seeley calls Temperance and her team, may be knee-deep in advanced degrees and bafflingly pointless gizmos, but they lack the street smarts and people skills to solve a crime the old-fashioned way: by knocking on doors, asking tough questions, and figuring out who's lying and why. Temperance and Seeley have a lot of heated exchanges about this while violating each other's personal space in a way that reminds us that they're also the single heterosexual leads in a crime-solving drama and thus must be struggling with Unresolved Sexual Tension. But whatever Temperance's Ph.D. is in, it isn't chemistry—Deschanel and Boreanaz seem about as keen on mating as imported pandas.

Memo to network execs planning an all-forensics programming slate for fall: Watching attractive people poke at skull fragments is not inherently interesting. The peculiar casting magic and grisly sensibility that made the original CSI such a success (one that has never quite been repeated even in the other two versions of that show) can't be invoked just by gathering a bunch of actors around an autopsy table—even one equipped with a neato revolving hologram.

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

 

book blitz
Dear Booker Committee
Is Zadie Smith really ready to receive your esteemed prize?
By Stephen Metcalf
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005, at 7:11 AM PT

The still confoundingly young novelist Zadie Smith is talented, famous, and—if the publicity stills are any indication—very beautiful. As a 30-year-old with nothing much left to prove, Smith has permitted herself a final luxury, of being ambivalent about her own good fortune. She has complained to interviewers about all the attention that accompanied White Teeth, her first novel and a raging succès fou, and in 2003 went one extraordinary step further and indicated that all the hoopla had been, by the standards of genuine literary distinction, undeserved. "I don't have the physical and mental will to be a great [novelist], which is a shame," she told the Boston Phoenix. "I know what I'm not going to be now. There's a sadness connected with that, and then there's also a sense of, what am I going to do?" Cue strings, woe is her: Smith has come out with her third novel, and it has already been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. (Would that eminence stalked us all so pitilessly.) Idle chatter about sadness and greatness might seem to mark Smith as a coy diva, but she does appear committed to an older ideal, by which you tune out the cozening of the Event Fiction machine, get back to your desk, and do Keatsian battle for posterity's reward. Taking her at her word, I'm responding with something that's less a book review than an open letter on her behalf. Dear Booker Committee: I wholeheartedly recommend that you deprive Zadie Smith's new novel, On Beauty, of your esteemed award.

I recommend this not because Smith isn't richly, almost absurdly, talented—which she is—and not because On Beauty isn't a good book, because it is. I offer my recommendation because Smith, being so young, is too content to write well only in auroral bursts; too ready to concede a character to stereotype; and, in the presence of serious ideas, too quick to be woolly-headed and imprecise. Fair enough, these are hallmarks of the not-great. But Smith has picked an odd way to settle into her not-greatness, as On Beauty is, from its opening sentence on, a contemporary reworking of E.M. Forster's Howards End. (It is also a racial comedy of manners and a fairly straightforward university procedural, all rolled into one.) Virginia Woolf rightly saw Howards End as Forster's masterpiece and rightly also understood that Forster still couldn't fully shake his own worst tendency, which was to repeatedly tap his reader on the shoulder. Forster's problem was this: "How to connect the actual thing," as Woolf wrote in "The Novels of E.M. Forster," "with the meaning of the thing and to carry the reader's mind across the chasm which divides the two without spilling a single drop of its belief."

In Zadie Smith's On Beauty, here is the actual thing: a marriage, between Kiki Simmonds and Howard Belsey. Kiki is an American black woman who has become, over time, a walking Ansel Adams—all mountainous body, with an ancient, beautiful face. For 30 years, she has been married to Howard Belsey, a white Englishman and an itinerant academic. Here Smith is carving intricately. Where Forster had been able to assign the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes, and the Basts a definite and perspicuous position within the social hierarchy of Edwardian England, Smith understands that class functions far more subtly, if no less insidiously, in modern America. And so her Kiki works as a hospital administrator, a low-status but still white-collar job; her Howard is a humanities professor unable to secure tenure, even at the age of 57, hooked on at a decent college in the Boston area, a kind of fictional Wellesley. Howard's professional life lends him and Kiki the trappings of respectability—Ivy-ish surroundings, prestige friends, well-schooled children. Kiki, meanwhile, has given them something more critical: a house. Surveying photographs on her wall, Kiki notices:

After the children come four generations of the Simmondses' maternal line. These are placed in triumphant, deliberate sequence: Kiki's great-great-grandmother, a house-slave; great-grandmother, a maid; and then her grandmother, a nurse. It was nurse Lilly who inherited this whole house from a benevolent white doctor with whom she had worked closely for twenty years, back in Florida. An inheritance on this scale changes everything for a poor family in America; it makes them middle class.

So far, so very good. The actual thing: a man, a woman, a house. The meaning of the thing: love, regret, status insecurity. And not a drop of belief has spilled from the reader's mind. Here the book takes on larger ambitions. For, as it turns out, Howard is a kind of genial monster, a man at once too precious and awkward to fully accommodate himself to modern life—he can't negotiate a cell phone or a microwave—and yet brutally unsentimental, thanks to what he believes is his prow-forward positioning on the academic vanguard. He is, in short, an anti-aesthete, someone who despises Mozart and representational painting, and who stands before a crowd of credulous undergraduates spouting Foucauldian bromides 10 years out of date. Smith nails him perfectly: "Seventeen years earlier, when Lennon died, Kiki had dragged Howard down Central Park and wept while the crowd sang 'All You Need Is Love' and Howard ranted bitterly about Milgram and mass psychosis." So far, still pretty good: Noam Chomsky on the TV, a kid named after Primo Levi, willfully inhuman art on the walls. This is the modern drawing room, the open-plan kitchen of the shabby-genteel academic.

Here the reader's mind may begin to hesitate and tip, spilling drops of precious belief. The Belsey's oldest son, Jerome, is an apostate, which in the Belsey family means he is a believer: a Christian. Having accepted a fellowship in England, he lives for a while with the Kipps family, headed by Monty Kipps, a Trinidadian academic-pundit who has turned himself into a blimpish English Tory. Jerome sleeps with Kipps' daughter, and, because he is naive and fails to understand that he has been seduced for her sport, reports back to his parents that he will be getting married. Chaos ensues, then settles, then reignites when the Kipps family relocates to the Belsey's suburb upon Monty's appointment as a visiting scholar at Howard's university. Here belief has sprung a leak: Both Howard and Monty are writing books on Rembrandt. To make matters worse, Smith portrays all academics as sniffy rhetors, as stiff-backed and weirdly sprung as Monty Kipps' Edwardian furniture. "Even given the extreme poverty of the arguments offered, the whole would of course be a great deal more compelling … " begins a blah blah letter-to-the-editor Kipps writes, demolishing Belsey.

Now, the surprising thing about humanities professors is how smart the smart ones are, and how not smart the not-smart ones are. The not-smart ones in On Beauty are fun, as Smith has an ear for club-witted faculty banter. But Smith's smart ones aren't, well, smart enough. Kipps, supposedly the eminent black iconoclast reactionary of his generation, palms off this can of yesterday's wisdom on Kiki: "Liberals never believe that conservatives are motivated by moral convictions as profoundly held as those you liberals profess yourselves to hold. You choose to believe that conservatives are motivated by a deep self-hatred, by some form of … psychological flaw." Uh, OK—expand, dear professor? "Monty's Rembrandt book was, in Howard's opinion, retrogressive, perverse, infuriatingly essentialist … " Well, he would, wouldn't he? Claire Malcolm, the grim pseudo-eminence known as the university poet, tells an administrator, "My class rewards talent. I'm not teaching molecular biology, Jack. I'm trying to refine and polish … a sensibility." The meaning of the thing has started to overwhelm the thing itself.

But this was unnecessary, and on two counts. The first is simply that the question animating the novel—what happens to a university, or a soul, when it abjures aesthetic pleasure?—is real, and painful, and still painfully unresolved. Dusk, vespers, and the first bite of sweater weather in the air—a campus novel is one place to ask whether one can indulge all the reveries of academia without also succumbing to a nostalgia for an ancient, class-bound hierarchy. But Howard is passive and humorless, tripping his way into and out of two damaging affairs. At the twilight of a career that has hardly begun, he seems to hold no idea passionately—that is to say, dialectically, and in the face of a passionate doubt. What if Smith had portrayed him clinging to his rhetoric of disenchantment as if it were a religion? What if he believed, passionately, that social justice were not possible in a world that fetishized aesthetic beauty? That disinterested modes of appreciation actually mask highly interested habits of social disesteem? (Howard's father, after all, was a butcher.) And better yet, what if he then harbored a skepticism religious in its depth and sincerity, in his darkest moments suspecting that a Mozart sonata or a "Mont Blanc" could be uniquely ennobling?

The second reason On Beauty might have rescued itself from its own tendency to topical banality is simply this: It is written by an exquisite writer, who has mistaken her admirable pooh-poohing of a lot of foolish publicity for a free pass to get by as an overcelebrated mediocrity. Therefore, Dear Committee, I plead with you to assist in removing the cameras and quote-mongers from Zadie Smith's life and help prevent her from blowing up into an even larger global literary darling, prone to even more gratuitous Hamlet-like maunderings, and let the woman who could write the following develop into her appointed greatness:

"Always off somewhere, yes," said Howard genially, but it did not seem to him he traveled so very much, though when he did it was more and further than he wished. He thought of his own father again—compared to him, Howard was Phineas Fogg. Travel had seemed the key to the kingdom, back then. One dreamed of a life that would enable travel. Howard looked through his window at a lamp-post buried to its waist in snow supporting two chained-up, frozen bikes, identifiable only by the tips of their handlebars. He imagined waking up this morning and digging his bike out of the snow and riding to a proper job, the kind Belseys had had for generations, and found he couldn't imagine it. This interested Howard, for a moment: the idea that he could no longer gauge the luxuries of his own life.

Stephen Metcalf is a Slate critic and lives in Brooklyn.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2126224/

human nature
Over Our Heads
The bioethics council gets a lesson in limits.
By William Saletan
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005, at 4:13 AM PT

The President's Council on Bioethics wraps up its second term in a ballroom at an upscale Washington hotel. On the agenda: the council's future. The chairman, Leon Kass, is stepping down. Council members wonder what issue to discuss next. I wonder what I'm doing here. The rest of the country is consumed by the death and destruction in New Orleans. The idea of discussing medicine or duty in any other context feels absurd.

The people in this ballroom look nothing like those stranded in New Orleans. Three elegantly dressed women and 10 men in suits sit at the council table. Two of the 38 people in the room are black. The hurricane gets mentioned only with envy, as the sort of emergency we spend money on while neglecting long-term challenges like the one the council is discussing today: caring for an aging population.

To be fair, emergency management isn't the council's job. Its first responsibility, by executive order, is "fundamental inquiry into the human and moral significance of developments in biomedical and behavioral science and technology." But inquiry can become so fundamental that it loses its human significance. Like the president who appointed them, the council members are big-picture people. Unlike him, they're intellectuals. It's a dangerous combination. One member says the council's four years have been "like going to graduate school again. It's been wonderful." Her colleagues throw around words like "deep," "rich," and serious," often congratulating themselves or belittling less-thoughtful people. Meanwhile, in New Orleans, corpses are floating in the only deep thing anyone cares about.

The council's detachment worries some members. One frets that bioethicists spend too much time on "fun" cutting-edge issues like genetic engineering and not enough on everyday medical struggles. Another worries that the council's language is unfashionable. Another complains that some of its best work has been "neglected, unremarked." The youngest, philosopher Diana Schaub, urges her colleagues to do more public speaking instead of letting the council's reports gather dust. The lone Asian-American, Francis Fukuyama, points out that the council's emphasis on human moral uniqueness is a non-starter in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Shintoist countries leading the biotechnology revolution.

Nobody at the table meets Schaub's suggestion with even a smile. They're tired. Two council members shrug that professors should do what they're good at—think, talk, and write—and let others worry about reaching the public. Kass bemoans journalists who read only the last page of the council's reports. He fails to stifle a grin as a colleague points out the difficulty of educating a country of creationists. Despite his pleas, members resume old feuds. One gloats that the council has proved that liberal bioethicists such as Art Caplan are "washed up." Never mind what's washing up in New Orleans.

The debate over today's topic, aging, breaks down along similar lines. The younger, more liberal faction wants to talk about allocation of resources. We spend too much money on sickness and not enough on prevention, they argue. Too much on keeping old Americans alive for two more months, and not enough on protecting African babies from AIDS. Too much on doctors, and not enough on safe air and water.

The older, more conservative faction wants to get beyond questions of allocation. Even if we can afford to extend life spans, should we? Where does it end? What's the point of living once you've had your education, raised your kids, and finished your labors? What if you can't think straight, recognize your family, or remember who you were? How many of your parts can we replace before your body no longer feels like it's yours? Maybe life should be finite even if doesn't have to be. Life is "not an absolute good," the council's gentlest speaker, Alfonso Gomez-Lobo, advises his colleagues. "There are moments in which we just have to open ourselves to the fact that we have to let go."

The conservatives worry that extended life will become pointless and empty—an escalator to nowhere, as council member Bill Hurlbut puts it. They fear the loss of limits. Life-extending procedures "are going to become easier to do and relatively less burdensome," says Kass. If "there's no such thing as enough," the obligation to prolong life will become "limitless," defying the principle of "the life cycle, the accepting of limits."

It's a poignant anxiety. But it answers itself. If limits give our choices meaning, we should start our moral deliberations where the limits are: in allocation. Otherwise, bioethical debates meander into empty space without bearings, like the old age conservatives fear. This becomes clear as Hurlbut explains his concerns:

We're using biotechnology to short-circuit that which we've always wanted to have in terms of immediate pleasures, sense of personal ideals of appearance and performance and so forth. That creates ... the danger of desire magnifying our powers to get what we want, putting a preoccupation in our minds of what naturally is a positive desire but, unrestrained with biotechnology, becomes a preoccupation or vanity and even a selfishness. And with 30,000 kids dying on average every day in the world, it seems to me that we could use biotechnology to ... enhance our own vanity rather than increasing our goodness in the world.

Hurlbut is a brilliant synthesist. But nobody can figure out what the hell he's talking about until he gets to the part about the 30,000 kids. Nobody cares whether everyone in the AARP gets three face lifts, unless it costs us the money to vaccinate children or keep floodwater out of their homes. First things first.

Ben Carson, the council's only black member, challenges the group to broaden its focus from labs and hospitals to pollution. We spend more and more money on cancer research, he points out, yet cancer rates are increasing. Maybe we should look at the air and water. Mary Ann Glendon, one of the three women at the table, asks her colleagues to turn their attention from old people, who have lots of political clout, to kids, who have none. Others agree. Kass, while resisting liberal language, comes around to the idea of studying what "a good community" owes "its members who are unable ... to provide for themselves." The waters of depth are receding. Soon the council will touch the ground.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

 

jurisprudence
Confirmation Report
And you though the Supreme Court was out of touch with reality?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, Sept. 12, 2005, at 5:20 PM PT

From: Dahlia Lithwick
Subject: Echo Chamber
Posted Monday, Sept. 12, 2005, at 5:20 PM PT

The Senate Judiciary Committee has complaints about judges. For one thing, Republicans on the committee appear to think that "activist judges" are more dangerous to America than terrorism, hurricanes, and chemical weapons. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., vigorously condemns the "post-modern philosophy" of judicial activism, excoriating the "activist Supreme Court judges" who interpret the Constitution in light of "evolving standards of decency." (He offers no better constitutional test for interpreting the Eighth Amendment because, um, there isn’t one). Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, hurls contempt upon the "Internet Age," including those of us with the ability to download "thousands of documents" and read them—according to him—in "an inaccurate way." Damn readers. And John Cornyn, R-Texas, expresses serious doubt about the judgments of "nine judges isolated behind a monumental marble edifice, far removed from the life experienced daily by average Americans." So, just to recap, the Senate thinks judges are capricious, activist, postmodernists who are dangerously out of touch with the average American.

Thank goodness we have a Senate, then, to speak clearly, think lucidly, and act with selfless devotion to sort out the real-world issues that matter most to you and to me.

The whole scene today, on the first day of John Roberts' confirmation hearing for the chief justice's seat, is a shock, particularly after five years of covering the dank, cavernous underworld that is the Supreme Court. Starting with the blinding light—the stark white walls of the Caucus Room at the Russell Building; the bright lights of C-SPAN; the fluttering Venetian-blinds sound of a hundred photographers taking the same picture. Reporters everywhere—on their computers, on their cell phones, on their BlackBerrys: a far cry from the court security guards who'll body-slam a reporter carrying anything higher-tech than a No. 2 pencil. It occurs to me right off the bat that this show is being carried live across the country. I'll have to stop making things up. Crap.

You would never know, if you sat through today's proceedings, that there's a war on. You would never know, if you were here, that the country is barely beginning to heal from the national wound that is Katrina. If you were a visiting alien, covering the Roberts confirmation, you could not be faulted for believing that the single biggest burning constitutional issue facing the federal judiciary is whether Ruth Bader Ginsburg answered substantive questions at her own hearings. More airtime goes to Ginsburg—she who "refused to answer nearly 60 questions," according to Orrin Hatch, R-Utah—than to the extraordinary grant of executive-branch wartime powers in the 2005 opinion Roberts joined in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. In fact, I count exactly one senator (Dick Durbin, D-Ill.) who devotes more than a single sentence to the issue.

That's because today's hearings are not about the candidate. They are about the majesty and superiority of the Senate. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., describes these proceedings as a "job interview with the American people." But in what solar system would a four-day job interview include a solid day in which the interviewer talks about himself?

The level of self-congratulation here today leaves the room airless: Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., can't stop telling us how remarkably good his committee is about keeping to time limits. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., congratulates himself on the compromise agreement between the so-called Gang of 14—that "kept the Senate from blowing itself up." He shakes his head. "It was chaos. … We were at each other's throats. … We're doing better." Oh, huzzah. And Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., credits himself thusly: "I began to argue that a nominee's judicial ideology was crucial four years ago. Then, I was almost alone. Today, there is a growing and gathering consensus on the left and on the right that these questions are legitimate, important, and often crucial."

For those of you keeping score at home, I offer the following index of what worries the 18 senators of the Judiciary Committee most about Roberts, the judiciary, and the constitutional process:

Senators acknowledging that Roberts is really, really smart: 18

Republicans ranting about judicial activists: 7

Republican senators exhorting Roberts not to answer any questions more complicated than Roberts' choice of hair-care products: 6

Senators referring to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and whether she did or did not answer questions: I stopped counting at 6

Senators referring to God and/or angels: 5 (Three of them Democrats)

Senators offering grim estimates of John Roberts' extraordinary life expectancy: 4 (ranging from 25 to 40 years)

Senators fretting about the constitutionality of microscopic tags that can be implanted in a person's body to track his every movement: 1 (Joe Biden, D-Del.)

Senators referring to court decisions that limit congressional powers: 4

Senators referring to pregnancy, abortion, or choice: 5

Senators referring to the failure of federalism and Katrina: 2 (Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.)

Senators who cry: 1 (Tom Coburn, R-Okla.)

Senators referring to Roberts' expansive views of executive authority during wartime: 1 (Dick Durbin, D-Ill.)

Arlen Specter opened the proceedings with the grim warning that the committee faced "perhaps the biggest challenge of the decade." Really? Stuart Taylor wrote this week that questions regarding the detention of enemy combatants, the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the war on terror, and the scope of the president's power in wartime will be some of the most important questions faced by the Supreme Court in the coming years. Apparently not. We first need to get to the bottom of whether the judicial canons of ethics prohibit the nominee from opining on past cases.

One of the reasons Americans are not very exercised about the Roberts hearings is because they are genuinely worried about bigger things, like whether the federal government is equipped to help them through the next disaster and whether the Bush administration dragged the country into war on a pretext. But today it seems the senators are the ones hopping around isolated behind that marble edifice. You'd think this country were actually at war with a bunch of renegade activist judges who perform abortions on the side, while citing Ruth Bader Ginsburg and pleading the Fifth.

The Senate accuses the high court of being checked out. But the high court grapples with hard questions about the reach of Congress' power and the rights of enemy soldiers, while these senators rattle off canned speeches about overreaching judges. If this is the Senate tackling the tough questions, I'll stick with the court parsing the Commerce Clause any day …

******

If you can't beat 'em, bet 'em. We herein present Slate's confirmation betting pool. Write in to livingcons@hotmail.com with your numeric prediction for how many times John Roberts will say he can't answer a question because it would create an appearance that he had prejudged the matter before him. Winner gets a piece of Slate paraphernalia (to be determined as soon as I clean out the bottom of my office closet).

(Legal Bit: By entering this betting pool you allow Slate to publish your name.)

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

 

 

 

jurisprudence
Tennis and Top Buttons
Remembering William H. Rehnquist.
By Richard W. Garnett
Posted Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005, at 12:25 PM PT

I wrote a book report in high school on The Brethren, the Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong "behind the scenes" takedown (or send-up) of the early Burger Court. The justices struck me, I have to admit, as a dysfunctional and petty bunch, but I remember thinking that one of them seemed pretty "cool." The youngest justice, Bill Rehnquist, apparently went in for practical jokes, ping-pong in the basement, swashbuckling dissents, and shaggy hair. I am embarrassed to admit that the thought actually occurred to me, "It would be fun to be one of these 'law clerks' for him."

About 10 years later, I showed up at the court for my clerkship interview with the chief, sweating horribly from the combined effects of Washington, D.C.'s June humidity and my one wool lawyer suit. I can only imagine how obviously disheveled, in both appearance and mind, I seemed to his assistants, Janet and Laverne, as I waited. Right on time, the chief came into the waiting room, in casual clothes, shook my hand, and said, "Hi, I'm Bill Rehnquist."

He showed me around his chambers and the court's conference room. We had a friendly conversation about obscure Arizona mining towns, our respective hitchhiking experiences, the death penalty, and my childhood in Anchorage, Alaska. Thinking back to The Brethren, I asked him about pranks he'd played on Chief Justice Burger. When he asked me if I had any questions, I said—thinking it would be my only chance—that I would appreciate seeing the justices' basketball court, "the Highest Court in the Land." At the end of the interview, when the chief remarked that he'd never had a clerk from Alaska before, I started to get my hopes up.

During my clerkship year, the chief, my co-clerks, and I played tennis together weekly at a public, outdoor court near Capitol Hill. (We played on the same day that the week's "cert memos," analyzing petitions filed by those seeking review of their cases, were due, so—more than a few times—clerks played without having slept.) We took turns driving and buying a new can of balls. I was the chief's doubles partner that year, and I several times beaned him with my hopelessly chaotic serves. One day, I am ashamed to admit, after yet another double-fault, I slammed my racket to the ground and yelled an extremely unattractive expletive. My co-clerks looked across the net at me in horror. The chief, though, didn't turn around. He just slowly bent over, put his hands on his knees, and started laughing.

For me, maybe the best part of the job was the daily 9:30 a.m. meeting. We'd drink our coffee, talk a bit about football, movies, and weather, and check up on pending cases and opinions. Sometimes he'd wonder aloud why one colleague or another still hadn't circulated a draft. (He was always, though, unfailingly fair and genial about and toward his colleagues; he would never have tolerated from any clerk a snide remark about a justice.)

In keeping with his days as a sideburn-and-psychedelic-tie-wearing junior justice (though not with his expectations of lawyers who appeared before the court!), the chief didn't impose on his clerks the standard law-firm-ready attire rules. He did, however, have a problem with T-shirts showing under our shirts. So, whenever my co-clerks and I had a meeting, we'd quickly button up our top buttons. I sometimes forgot to hide the offending undergarment, though, and one day, in the middle of a conversation about a pending case, he looked at me, sighed, and wondered why even his "extremely lax" dress code was proving such a burden.

We had cheeseburgers and beer ("Miller's Lite," he called it) together regularly, and he allowed himself one cigarette with lunch. He invited us to his home for dinner and charades; I don't think I'll ever forget watching the chief act out Saving Private Ryan, crawling around under his coffee table, pointing his fingers like a gun, and mouthing "pow, pow!"

Chief Justice Rehnquist liked to put together friendly brackets and pools for the NCAA tournament, the Kentucky Derby, and the bowl games. One day, just after the 1996 election, he passed down to me a note from the bench. I assumed he wanted a law book or a memo, but instead he asked me to find out what was happening in one of the not-yet-called House races that was integral to our inter-chambers contest.

The chief's chambers ran like clockwork. We had a routine, and it worked well. He knew his job, and he knew he was good at it. He knew a staggering amount of law and was scarily quick at seeing and getting to the heart of any question. To prepare for oral arguments, the chief preferred not to read long, heavily footnoted memos, opting instead for talking through problems with his clerks, while walking around the block outside the Supreme Court building—sometimes twice, for a particularly tricky case. It was surprising, and always funny, that so few of the gawking tourists around the court recognized the chief justice as he ambled around Capitol Hill, doing his work. (He didn't mind at all).

A few years ago, lured by the promise of great seats for the Michigan game (the Fighting Irish won, though the chief thought they "won ugly"), the chief justice visited Notre Dame and—after a game of doubles with me and two colleagues—spent an hour with my First Amendment class. The conversation quickly turned to advice about life and lawyering, balancing work and family, being a good parent, making a difference, and contributing to our communities. It meant a lot, to me and to my students, that he clearly cared more about helping these students find happiness in the law than about selling them on his legal opinions.

The chief was a lawyer's lawyer. He taught and inspired me, and all of his clerks, to read carefully, to write clearly, and to think hard. He will, quite appropriately, be remembered as one of the few great chief justices. For me, though, William Rehnquist is more than a historic figure and a former boss. Today, thanks in no small part to him, I have a great job: I get paid to think, research, and write about things that matter and to teach friendly and engaged students about the law. I will always be grateful. And I hope that the deluge of political spin to come will not drown out what Americans should remember about the chief: He was a dedicated public servant, committed to the rule of law and to the court. He regarded himself as the bearer of a great trust and of a heavy obligation of stewardship. In my judgment, he was faithful to that trust, and he fulfilled that obligation.

Richard W. Garnett is a Lilly Endowment associate professor of law at the University of Notre Dame. He clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist in 1996-97.

 

jurisprudence
History's Justice
What Rehnquist didn't do.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005, at 11:54 AM PT

William H. Rehnquist died last night after a yearlong struggle with thyroid cancer. And he went out exactly as I imagine he'd have wanted to—as chief justice of the United States. Despite his age (80), the seriousness of his illness, and unspoken pressure to retire so as to ease the White House's confirmation woes, Rehnquist stubbornly refused to step down all summer. My own guess is that all those forces probably conspired to keep him at his post even longer: Rehnquist was not a man to succumb to pressures—political, social, or otherwise.

You'll read a good deal today about what Rehnquist did: He led the court's rightward zag away from the feel-good zig of the Warren Court and back to doctrinal rigor. He morphed from the bitter and caustic "Lone Ranger" to the triumphant sherpa of the federalism revolution. He breathed new life into the 10^th and 11^th Amendments and elevated the primacy of states' rights to a holy grail. He used his administrative position at the court to enforce new rules that elevated efficiency and mutual respect over egos and debate. He put eight gold bars on the sleeves of his judicial robes. And he died with his political views largely unchanged since college.

But what you may not hear much about today is what Rehnquist didn't do. And it seems to me that with a man like Rehnquist, that's a useful place to start.

Rehnquist was appointed by Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court as an associate justice in 1971 and elevated to chief justice by Ronald Reagan in 1986. Those hearings were marked by accusations that the young Rehnquist had authored a memo, while clerking for Justice Robert Jackson in 1952, advocating for the constitutionality of segregation. He was similarly charged with having intimidated black voters at polling places in Arizona in the 1960s. What Rehnquist didn't do in response to those charges was what Clarence Thomas did: He didn't become bitter, or reclusive, or vengeful. Rehnquist denied them, then moved on, and—for the most part—the public did too.

Rehnquist's early writings could have melted paint. In 1973, when he and Byron White were the only dissenters in Roe v. Wade, his language was uncompromising: "To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment." But as Rehnquist rose to chief and saw his pet causes—including federalism, strict adherence to the views of the framers, and judicial restraint—shift from marginal theory to the court's polestars, he didn't do what Antonin Scalia has done: He didn't keep using his writing as a showcase for his own brilliant, persuasive ideas. Indeed his opinions became increasingly anorexic—thinner and pale. He had no need to shame his colleagues or flaunt his genius. He saw that he had won his wars and moved on.

Then there were the conservative votes Rehnquist never cast: He didn't vote with the other conservatives to get rid of the Miranda warning in 1999—even though the 1966 holding that ushered in the warning was the sort of Warren Court overreaching that would have sent him into orbit as a younger man. He didn't vote with the conservative bloc in Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs—the 2003 case reasserting Congress' power to apply the Family Medical Leave Act to state governments—even though he was the charter member of the so-called Federalism Five (the group of justices who did away with Congress' Gun Free School Zones Act and the Violence Against Women Act because they violated his core doctrine of states rights). The Hibbs vote was largely seen as tactical—most court watchers agreed that Rehnquist switched his vote (he'd have been on the losing side of a 5-4 decision anyhow) so he could author the opinion himself and thus narrow it to create a precedent he could live with.

The Miranda decision was in part about public expectations and the appearance of stability on the court: As he wrote: "Miranda has become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture." But even more centrally, his decision about Miranda was about the primacy of the court over Congress: "We hold that Miranda, being a constitutional decision of this Court, may not be in effect overruled by an Act of Congress, and we decline to overrule Miranda ourselves."

No one will ever accuse Rehnquist of having been a liberal, or even a moderate. But, as Walter Dellinger points out today, time and again, in cases that implicated the supremacy of the judicial branch—cases that suggested that states or Congress might have the last word—Rehnquist was willing to part with his ideological buddies to promote a higher value than intellectual purity: the court itself.

Something else Rehnquist was not: He was not an Earl Warren. He did not expect or demand that the changes he sought would come with sudden, dramatic moves. He was the gentlest of constitutional chiropractors and—with the exception of Bush v. Gore—you rarely heard a crack or a snap over his tenure. Rehnquist didn't cajole his colleagues into unanimity and rarely used his assignment powers as strategically as his predecessors had. Indeed, he was notoriously fair about assigning cases. Rehnquist also refused to let the work of the court continue to grow exponentially. Where the Burger Court used to hear argument in 160 or so cases each year, the Rehnquist Court heard closer to 80. Rehnquist's style was to nudge the law back to the right slowly and inexorably, on issues ranging from civil rights to habeas corpus, from school busing to religion in public life. But he didn't throw constitutional bombs, and as a result his Supreme Court, as "activist" as the Warren Court by every possible measure, was not reviled and feared so much as respected and ignored.

What Rehnquist also refused to do was to jump on the judge-bashing bandwagon, even when he might have agreed with the tenor of the criticisms. Unlike his former law clerk John Roberts, with whom his views are otherwise remarkably congruent, Rehnquist did not tolerate expressions of contempt for the judiciary, or approve of measures to limit its powers. He used his Annual Report on the Judiciary, usually something of a snooze-fest, to castigate the Republican-led Senate for blocking Clinton’s judicial appointments and, more recently, to defend judges from attacks by right-wing demagogues. As he warned this year: "Although arguments over the federal Judiciary have always been with us, criticism of judges, including charges of activism, have in the eyes of some taken a new turn in recent years. ... Congress's authority to impeach and remove judges should not extend to decisions from the bench. That principle was established nearly 200 years ago in 1805. ... Any other rule would destroy judicial independence."

And something else that Rehnquist would not do was to change. He refused to hire minority clerks, just for appearances' sake, even when he was excoriated for it. He refused to stop leading the Christmas carols at the court's annual holiday party, even though many questioned the appropriateness of it. He refused to relax his bordering-on-the-absurd dress code for the court's public argument sessions. He once skipped a State of the Union address to attend an art class. And facing tremendous pressure, from nosy reporters like myself, to reveal either his prognosis or his plans, he remained defiantly private about his illness until the very end. The abiding Rehnquist legacy, both doctrinal and personal, is one of boundless confidence. He was certain of his duties as chief—restoring power to the states, cutting back perceived civil rights excesses, and upholding the dignity and the prestige of the court—and believed they gave him license to be authoritarian and even at times (I'm thinking of those gold bars now) grandiose.

Much will be made in the coming days of Rehnquist's so-called failures, most notably his failure to roll back the Warren Court's most sweeping rulings. Abortion, affirmative action, and gay sodomy are all legal in Rehnquist's America. But my guess is that Rehnquist, unlike Scalia, Thomas, or the court-bashers on the far right, was pragmatic enough to recognize that those were just side battles. He had won the war. A keen observer of history, Rehnquist always knew that he was making history and not merely law. With a potent blend of minimalism and control, he built a court that was, like himself, supreme, in terms of raw, cumulative power, national prestige, and public acceptance.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125684/

press box
News You Can Lose
What I hate about cable TV journalism.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005, at 11:48 AM PT

When al-Qaida attacks, the United States invades, or mother nature strikes, I increase my newspaper, Web, and TV diet to stay on top of events. So it's during times like these, as I surf from CNN to Fox to MSNBC and back again, that I comprehend how truly, deeply, madly I hate TV news.

Not to take anything away from the reporters and producers slaving away on Katrina and the corporate owners who've spared no expense to capture the story, but the medium's conceptual blinders and stupid conventions keep it from projecting the story in a coherent way.

In no particular order I …

… hate it when the news networks pair music with montages of newsworthy footage. The broadcasters usually avail themselves of this gimmick when they're wrapping up a day or half-day's worth of coverage. If I want emotional cues that music provides, I'll hire a therapist to coach me on when to sniffle and cry.

… hate the use of undated footage, especially when it's two or three days old, that runs as "video wallpaper" as the anchors talk about looting, the breached levee, death, destruction, or what have you. It's TV news if it's live or happened recently or is placed in context. But if I have to look at that shirtless guy with the extravagant butt-crack trying to shatter the store door one more time, I'm going to fly down to New Orleans and arrest him myself. Likewise the footage of the rescue helicopter blowing roof shingles into the air.

I offer this easy remedy: If the talking heads need a visual backdrop, let them run the footage as they gab. But all footage that's not live or taped "today" should be date- and time-stamped conspicuously.

Why won't the networks do this? My friend Mark Feldstein, a recovering broadcaster who now teaches journalism at George Washington University, explains that this video ambiguity is deliberate.

"Labeling the video as a few days old draws attention to just how stale the most dramatic shots are and thus makes it harder to hype for ratings," he writes in e-mail. While undated footage often confuses viewers about the who-what-when-where-why basics, it helps the news networks by concealing how much of their "coverage" consists of cheaply produced talking heads in New York studios speculating on what's happening, rather than more expensive in-the-field reporting, he continues.

… hate the conspicuous lack of maps illustrating where the camera and reporters are in New Orleans, Biloxi, Baton Rouge, Mobile, or elsewhere. Not being New Orleans-savvy, I've had to rely on newspaper maps to orient myself as the action moves from the Superdome to the Convention Center to the French Quarter. Not even Slate's New Orleans-born and -bred Josh Levin could figure out which neighborhoods the heli-cams were observing.

Every reporter and aerial camera should be equipped with a GPS unit that reports to a visible map of the region that the producers routinely inset at the bottom of the screen. Knock out the running ticker at the bottom, if need be, to make room for good maps. (While we're on the subject of the ticker, the producers should delete it whenever they go to split-screen.)

Feldstein says my yearning for geographical grounding reflects my shortcomings, not the news networks'.

"You're looking for information rather than emotion. Graphics are often considered 'bad TV' that can't compete with the gripping spectacle of flattened homes, tearful families, and the horrific if sneakily satisfying melodrama of others in life doing worse than you are," he writes.

… hate the fundamental dishonesty of 24/7 coverage. Because it's in their economic interests to keep you watching as long as possible, the networks never allow the possibility that the story has zenithed and that you can stay informed if you check back in a couple of hours. Instead, every new fire and helicopter mission—anything that looks "disastery"—is treated with the same urgency as the first news of the levee giving way. Today, Sunday, Sept. 4, the networks are panning the empty streets with the same intensity as they did the crowds of victims lined up outside the Convention Center a couple of days ago.

… hate the opportunism of Fox News Channel's Geraldo Rivera, who grandstanded at the Convention Center on the Friday night Hannity & Colmes show with babies he borrowed from trapped New Orleanian mothers. Rivera, who said he'd been in Louisiana for less than a day, wore his best sob face for the camera as he paraphrased Exodus:

There's the freeway here. I tell you what I would have done –what I would still do. I would say, let them walk out of here. Let them walk away from the filth. Let them walk away from the devastation. Let them walk away from the dead bodies in here.

(Speaking of Fox, the ordinarily cocky Shepard Smith experienced some sort of journalistic metamorphosis on Friday's Hannity & Colmes and The O'Reilly Factor. Numb from the days and days of horrors he'd viewed on the I-10 overpass, Smith delivered his report of death, murder, and rape with a stunning combination of deadpan and passion. I predict that when he returns to his regular gig on The Fox Report, he'll have a hard time reading the flip stories stuffed inside the "G Block.") (Watch the video.)

… hate the completely un-newsworthy "Fox News Alert" Chyrons that routinely run on the bottom of the Fox News Channel screen. I forget the original wording, but "Bush to Return to Louisiana Tomorrow" and "Troops Conduct New Chopper Rescue" give the flavor.

… hate the absence of context and continuity. Where are we in the story? What came before? What's next? More than once while watching reports, I've felt as disconnected from the narrative as that guy in Memento, who can only remember the last 20 minutes of what happened to him before his memory purges itself.

I appreciate the difficulty of covering this story, but if the news networks can't bring coherence to it, they can at least offer the disclaimer that circumstances will render their breaking-news accounts fragmented and flawed, and that they promise to sort things out in a 9 p.m. or 11 p.m. broadcast. With so much air to fill, why haven't they produced a 15-minute segment on the engineering of the levees or an animated 3-D representation of how the storm surged into New Orleans and broke upon the coast?

"Continuity, context, and historical perspective are areas where print almost always trumps broadcasting," writes Feldstein. "Continuity, context and perspective inevitably reduce that drama—and with it, ratings and profits, the holy grail that trumps all."

… hate the lack of input from knowledgeable outsiders. Yes, let's interview the mayor, senators, governors, police, the Red Cross, the gang from FEMA, and the Army Corps of Engineers. But what about Tulane professors, the mayor's political foes, local journalists, business people, clergy, and Master P? (NBC's use of the inarticulate Harry Connick Jr. is not what I have in mind.)

… hate the absence of self-criticism. The networks have no trouble finding fault with the government relief strategy, but you'd never know from watching that they've gotten anything wrong.

Allow Feldstein to explain it all to you:

"TV is notoriously weak on self-criticism—no ombudsmen, no letters-to-the-editor, no columns for running corrections or clarifications. At best, some little-watched weekend cable shows will address media coverage of Katrina, but that will predictably focus on how tough a story it is to cover for journalists (with lots of shots of reporters roughing it) not the sins you mention."

******

What do you hate about the TV coverage? Send e-mail to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. All e-mails will be on the record. (Addendum: The readers answered promptly, and I posted their comments in a follow-up piece. You can still send comments, but I probably won't post them.)

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

 

obit
In Memoriam
William H. Rehnquist, the man who devised the natural law of federalism.
By Walter Dellinger
Posted Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005, at 9:08 AM PT

The Rehnquist Court belongs to history. William H. Rehnquist will likely be seen as one of the three most influential chief justices in history, surpassed perhaps only by John Marshall and Earl Warren. Whether that influence was, on balance, benign will be one of history's great debates.

There will be little dispute that Rehnquist was a great leader and effective administrator of the Supreme Court and the national judiciary. He ran a tight ship in the great marble temple that houses the court. Every justice with whom I have spoken in recent years has noted that the court was functioning well under his leadership. Because of the power of his intellect—many law clerks thought him the smartest justice on a generally smart court—he quickly grasped the key issues in each of the complex and numerous cases that came before the court. As a consequence, he was able to lead the court's discussions in conference with efficiency and dispatch. Some colleagues thought he presided over these confidential sessions with too much efficiency, sometimes unduly limiting discussion. But all seemed to prefer his strong hand to the wandering, confused leadership of his predecessor Warren Burger. The effect of installing a new chief will be more profound than we can easily grasp. The new chief—if he or she comes from outside the court—will face a daunting task of leading such a powerful and experienced group.

Rehnquist could be gracious in social settings. Although I was of the "other party," he was warm and welcoming when I became acting solicitor general, inviting me over for tea and discussing how he thought the office could best be conducted. More recently, at a dinner at our home the night before I interviewed him publicly at Duke University Law School, he was relaxed and witty, discussing movies and popular culture with sparkle and, almost, verve. On the bench, he was another story—a most fearsome and incisive inquisitor. His questioning was sharp, and usually fair, but at times unnecessarily abusive to inexperienced advocates. He did not suffer fools gladly.

What is most important, however, is Rehnquist's jurisprudential legacy. In no small measure by the sheer power of his intellect, he made state sovereignty once again a central principle of American constitutional law. When serving as the court's most junior justice, he boldly authored a dramatic dissenting opinion in an otherwise routine case called Fry v. United States, a dissent joined by no other member of the court. In his first articulation of his theory of state sovereignty, he frankly stated that his position rested on "no explicit constitutional source" but rather on a "right inherent in [Ohio's] capacity as a State." As my Duke colleague Jefferson Powell noted in 1982, Rehnquist was "neither a strict constructionist nor a practitioner of judicial restraint." He sought, in Fry, to create a natural law of federalism, and over his lifetime, he essentially succeeded. The lonely position he took in 1973 had, by the end of his chief justiceship, become the law of the land.

History may judge favorably Rehnquist's success in asserting state's rights and the corresponding limits on national power. But on the Sunday morning of a week in which we have experienced profound embarrassment at our failure to rescue of tens of thousands of Americans in New Orleans, states' rights and limited national power seem particularly and starkly outmoded concepts.

The most profound and important aspect of Rehnquist's state sovereignty jurisprudence was his successful effort to minimize the power granted to the national government by the Civil War amendments. The 14^th Amendment was designed to enable future Congresses to guarantee rights of Americans everywhere against their own state governments. I believe that Rehnquist's state-sovereignty jurisprudence unduly diminished the nationalist triumph at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention and unjustifiably marginalized the impact of the great Civil War amendments. But few, if any, in our history have been as effective in this ongoing debate as was he.

Chief Justice Rehnquist's most significant jurisprudential contribution will not ultimately be states' rights, however, but the steps his court took firmly to entrench the supremacy of the judicial branch over the president, the Congress, and the states. The Rehnquist Court has not hesitated to place judicial limits on the executive branch's treatment of detainees, even in time of war, and robustly to defend freedom of speech. This court has been quick to set aside acts of Congress because it disagrees with the social judgments of the officials who had been elected by the people of the United States. Nor did the court hesitate to step in ahead of Congress to decide a disputed presidential election.

The potential impact of the court's repeated and confident assertions of judicial supremacy have been underappreciated, largely because the exercise of that authority by the Rehnquist Court has been controlled by the two justices close to the moderate center of American political life—Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor. If the court were to move sharply to the political left or right, that foundation of judicial supremacy and disregard for the judgment of other branches of government could lead to truly profound consequences.

Will William Rehnquist's exaltation of the judicial role turn out to be good for America and its people? As I noted here at the end of the chief’s final term, it is too early to tell. Way too early.

Over more than a decade with no changes in composition, the Rehnquist Court became like a family. Most striking is how much the other justices—even those who often profoundly disagreed with him on the most critical issues to come before the court—seemed genuinely to like their friend Bill Rehnquist. There has been little public comment about his extraordinary physical struggles to finish the past term. The other justices, and all those who work at the court, were deeply moved at what they consider to be his truly heroic performance of duty. It was Rehnquist at his best.

Walter Dellinger is a professor of law at Duke University and a partner in the law firm of O'Melveny & Myers.

 

human nature
The Thin Line Blew
How a hurricane turned citizens into criminals.
By William Saletan
Posted Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005, at 1:36 AM PT

Here's what your government said this week while people in New Orleans were stealing from and shooting at each other. The secretary of homeland security dismissed the problem as "isolated incidents of criminality." The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency called the security situation "pretty darn good" and expressed surprise at the lawlessness. The governor of Louisiana said she was mystified by the violence. "Disasters tend to bring out the best in everybody, and that's what we expected to see," she asserted. When President Bush finally addressed the chaos, he prescribed "personal responsibility."

When the history of our disgraceful preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina is written, logistical failures—evacuation, flood planning, aid delivery, communication—will be only half the story. The other half will be our government's incomprehension of the human part of the disaster. I'm not talking about the victims. I'm talking about the perpetrators, most of them ordinary people. The crime in New Orleans was not isolated. The lawlessness should not have been surprising. Disasters do not tend to bring out the best in people. And if you want to stop them from bringing out the worst, preaching is a lot less effective than weapons and aid.

Politicians have blamed the violence in New Orleans on "thugs" and "hoodlums." That's true in some places, notably at the convention center. But the role of criminals, and of malice generally, has been inflated. Initial reports of rapes at the Superdome were uncorroborated. Putative witnesses later said they had inferred the rapes from noises in the dark. The mayor blames a lot of the post-hurricane crime on junkies who freaked out because they were cut off from their fixes. And while a lot of people have looted non-necessities such as liquor, jewelry, and television sets, it isn't clear how much of this was taken with barter or desperation in mind.

What's striking about most of the crime is how ordinary the perpetrators and their motives are. They steal food and clothing. They say it's for their kids or neighbors. They argue—and some store managers agree—that that the flood would have ruined the goods anyway. Interviewed by reporters, they come off as decent citizens. Some are uniformed officers. You can imagine yourself, in dire circumstances, doing the same thing.

Unfortunately, the moral descent doesn't stop there. It isn't just the property crimes that were perpetrated for understandable reasons. It's the violent crimes, too. Carjackers were looking for cars to get out. Pirates were looking for boats. One guy described how men with knives demanded his generator. Without excusing them, it's easy to see how frightened people, perhaps with makeshift weapons, might start looking for things like generators. Pretty soon, you're an armed robber.

Or maybe you start confronting rescue personnel. Three or four days into your ordeal, if they brush past you because you're not on their agenda, maybe you push them, or worse. Look at the reports of stranded, hungry people accosting supply trucks, shooting at rescue planes and helicopters, or wrestling with Coast Guard swimmers who have come to help others. The rescuers flee, don't come back, or suspend operations while they try to figure out how to return safely. Next thing you know, one of every seven New Orleans cops is refusing to police the city. They can control ordinary criminals. What they can't control is a city full of ordinary-people-turned-criminals.

It's clear from the comments of the president, the governor, the FEMA director, and the secretary of homeland security that they never planned for this. I don't mean that they failed to anticipate the magnitude of the flooding; we knew that already. I mean that they have no idea how easily a natural disaster can turn human beings into a second-wave destructive force. They don't understand that disasters often bring out the worst in us, that the human dynamics are collective, and that "responsibility" is quickly swamped. If you don't understand these dynamics, you can't plan for them. You end up pleading for "personal responsibility" when what you needed was air drops and the National Guard.

It's not like this hasn't happened before. The 1977 New York City blackout led to an epidemic of stealing. The mayor of Charleston, S.C., during Hurricane Hugo says FEMA was clueless about law and order during that 1989 crisis. He thinks we need a military unit to take charge of these situations. That may be going a bit far, but we certainly need to think more systematically about the human dynamics of natural disasters. We run computer models of hurricanes, levee breaches, and flooding. What about isolation, desperation, looting, fighting, and shooting? It took the mayor of New Orleans three days to tell his cops to switch from rescue operations to controlling post-hurricane crime. Why? Because crime wasn't in the model.

When I see federal officials bragging that they were well-prepared for Katrina because they've been organizing for terrorist attacks, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. In a terrorist attack, the human dynamics will be far worse. That's why they call it "terrorism." The terrorists won't have to inflict most of the deaths directly. They'll just hit us with a dirty bomb to start the panic. We'll do the rest.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

 

chatterbox
Summer-House Lit, Part 1
On not owning a vacation home.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005, at 1:28 PM PT

I do not own a summer house. The summer house I don't own has not been in the family for three generations. It's a simple, shingled affair, weathered and dear, with fishnets not hanging from the ceiling, duck decoys not arrayed on the shelves, and a large, yellowing map of the area, festooned with incomprehensible nautical markings, not stuck to the wall with pushpins not manufactured in 1954. I love the scent it doesn't give off of mothballs mingled with mold.

We've been not coming here every August for as long as I can remember. The chief activities we don't engage in are swimming, sailing, and canoeing. At night we don't sit around sipping gin and tonics and playing Scrabble or Crazy Eights, or we don't read the old Life magazines piled up behind the davenport that go back to 1947, or we don't dip into the oddball collection of broken-spined books by long-forgotten authors like Irvin S. Cobb and James Gould Cozzens. At the moment I'm not working my way through John Gunther's Inside Asia, published in 1939. You'd be surprised how little has changed!

We don't worry, of course, that the character of the place is not starting to change, what with all the new money not buying up tiny parcels not carved from former dairy farms and not building gaudy new air-conditioned vacation homes that don't extend all the way to the property line. Imagine—air-conditioning here! Open a window, for God's sake! We finally didn't put in window units a few years ago, but only because of the kids. They're also the reason we didn't break down a few years ago and put in a small pool. Though I must admit I've come to prefer not taking my morning laps there to not walking out every morning to the shore and not diving into that bracing cold water.

The nouveau riche new arrivals don't show up every afternoon in the cove or on the lake (I can't decide whether my nonexistent summer house is at the shore or in the mountains) in their loud Lycra wet suits and their god-awful noisy jet skis, and they don't spoil the serenity for everybody else. And the shops not popping up in the town to not cater to the new crowd's needs—overpriced sportswear, sushi, plasma TVs—I don't find myself wandering down that way less and less. I have a good mind to not write a letter to the editor of The Beachcomber. Don't give me good old Doc Brinkman's Five and Dime any day (though he's not starting to hint that he may sell the place). He still makes the best strawberry ice cream I've never tasted.

Now Labor Day's coming. I'll not shut the house up for winter, and not drain and cover up the pool, and not remind the caretaker to not keep an eye on the place until June, when we don't start returning on weekends. What a lovely, languid ritual it is that I don't engage in. I can't understand why everyone doesn't not have a summer place. Just like the one I don't have.

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

 

chatterbox
Summer-House Lit, Part 2
Why can't journalists resist the trap?
By Timothy Noah
Updated Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, at 4:37 PM PT

My previous column ("Summer-House, Lit, Part 1") may have led some readers to believe that I harbor resentment against people who own summer houses. Nothing could be further from the truth. Some of my best friends own summer houses, and every summer I sponge off them as often as I decently can. There is nothing inherently wrong with owning a vacation home by the sea or on a lake. Indeed, the world could use more such people, if only to provide more summer-homeless people like me more pastoral settings in which to be guests.

The offense against which I rail is not owning a summer house, but being clod enough to write about said summer house for a broad reading public that, in most instances, summers at the same address where it winters, springs, and falls. In the dog days of summer, as the thermometer climbs above 95 degrees Fahrenheit, most people who do not dwell in summer houses would rather not hear about the bliss of those who do. You'd think this would be self-evident, but apparently it isn't.

Well-mannered journalists who would rather die than write about how much money they've accumulated in the stock market never hesitate to bore readers silly about the glories of their vacation hideaways. A common misconception is that one's summer house provides an escape from the relentless materialism of urban life (as if they were giving away houses on Block Island free of charge). Any egalitarian sentiments a summer-er may harbor are channeled into class resentment against a whole group of other summer-ers who represent the true elite. The squire who inherits his summer home feel morally superior to the arriviste who buys one because, well, it's not as though he's this rich person who slapped down a fat wad of cash. Meanwhile, the arriviste who buys his summer home feels morally superior to the squire who inherits one because, well, it's not as though he's some pampered aristocrat. He earned the money that bought this sylvan retreat!

Summer-house literature has many mansions. I will attempt to catalog a few, starting with misdemeanors and working my way up to felonies.

The casual mention. Slate's David Edelstein, reviewing Skeleton Key and The 40 Year-Old Virgin, datelined his Aug. 25 blog dispatch, "Truro, Mass.," by way of explaining that he saw the two films under review in one of the country's last surviving drive-ins. (Have I ever visited the Wellfleet Drive-In Theater? None of your goddamned business!) Similarly, Joseph Nocera, in his Saturday business column in the New York Times, informed us Aug. 27 that every summer he spends "a month or more" at a house on a lake in Quebec's Laurentian mountains by way of explaining why his column is all about Canada. To mitigate their sins, both writers make vague gestures of democratic self-effacement. Edelstein discourages envy by pointing out that the popcorn is soggy and artificial-tasting; Nocera states forthrightly what he knows you're going to think, i.e., "I'm a lucky guy." I count both writers as friends and enormously gifted journalists. Still, I must cry foul. Edelstein and Nocera could easily have written their columns without letting slip where they were written from.

The faux parody. How can I be called elitist when I'm making fun of the pampered denizens of my summer community, including myself? For years Russell Baker assumed this stance in his New York Times humor column, and the Washington Post's Art Buchwald continues to assume it in his. (Yes, Buchwald still writes his column. No, it hasn't been funny for some time.) The satire, of course, falls well short of savage, and usually involves a fair amount of name-dropping. In a Sept. 1999 column, for instance, Baker had a little fun with the fact that New York had just named the playwright John Guare a "living human treasure." Guare happened to be a friend of his, he explained; they met "in a cheese-shop door in Nantucket." In an April 12 column, Buchwald cackled about a statue of a female dancer that he bought years ago, dubbed "Our Lady of [Jane] Fonda," and installed in his backyard in Martha's Vineyard. He did this to rib his late wife, who led a bunch of older women in an exercise class there. One of the women in the class was Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers). Eppie later wrote about it in her column, but Jane Fonda didn't mention it in her recent autobiography. The statue is still there. There was no point to this column.

The summer home as refuge from racism. In Finding Martha's Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island, a portrait of the black summer community in Oak Bluffs, Jill Nelson says she cherished her childhood on the Vineyard because

There was no need to be the exemplary Negro here, or to show white people that we were as good or better than they were, to conduct ourselves as ambassadors for integration and racial harmony. For the months of summer the weight of being race representative—and all the political, emotional, and psychic burdens that come with demanding that an individual represent a nonexistent monolith—was lifted….Here, it was enough that you simply be yourself.

This is not privilege. This is something that is owed every African American! But of course, if every African American had a house in Oak Bluffs, the Flying Horses Carousel would probably collapse under the weight of all those children. Consequently, admittance is limited to those who can afford to pay.

The summer home as crucible of WASP dysfunction. In The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, George Howe Colt reveals the family secrets tucked under the gables. I don't know the specifics, because I can't bring myself to read this book.

The summer community as "the real America." Here we begin to enter the realm of outright delusion. Every summer David Broder assesses the national mood from his summer place on Beaver Island, Mich., in part, I suspect, to demonstrate that even when he's on vacation he's admirably incapable of enjoying himself. Since not much happens on Beaver Island—that's pretty much the point of Beaver Island—these "microcosm" columns are always mind-bendingly dull. (Writing in Washington's City Paper, my Slate colleague Jack Shafer once characterized Broder's Beaver Island dispatches as merging "the cosmic and common in a stupefying slop of prose.") This year Broder carped about a fence put up near the ferry in the name of homeland security, and went on in a tone that I think was intended to be wry and curmudgeonly about how this related, or didn't relate, to a recent mishap with a drawbridge. At least I think that's what Broder was writing about. Every time I try to read this column to the end my eyeballs lose their focus.

The summer home as reason to write hack freelance pieces about the summer home—somebody's gotta pay the mortgage on this baby! I refer you to "Nantucket On My Mind" by David Halberstam in the July 1999 Town and Country. He probably figured nobody whose opinion mattered to him would ever see it. But in the age of Nexis, you can never hide.

The summer community as city on a hill. If there's a hell for people who write about their summer houses, I'd like to enroll Ellen Goodman. Goodman used her sleepy Maine retreat this Aug. 14 to lecture the benighted souls who live life at too fast a pace:

I arrive at the island post office carrying an artifact from another age. It's a square envelope, handwritten, with a return address that can be found on a map….

We suffer from the illusion, says [former Microsoft techie Linda] Stone, that we can expand our personal bandwidth, connecting to more and more. Instead, we end up overstimulated, overwhelmed and, she adds, unfulfilled. Continuous partial attention inevitably feels like a lack of full attention….

It is not just my trip to the mailbox that has brought this to mind. I come here each summer to stop hurrying. My island is no Brigadoon: WiFi is on the way, and some people roam the island with their cell phones looking for a hot spot. But I exchange the Internet for the country road.

If only those silly welfare moms and Army soldiers in Iraq and flood victims waiting to be rescued atop their houses in New Orleans would buy themselves some little dacha on the coast of Maine, they'd be much, much happier. But they'll never learn, will they?

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

 

assessment
Ray Nagin
Mayor on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
By Josh Levin
Posted Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, at 4:14 PM PT

On Monday night, right after Katrina hit, Mayor Ray Nagin went on television to tell his battered constituents that "the city of New Orleans is in a state of devastation." Speaking softly, and often directly into the camera, Nagin said the only good news he had was that "at some point in time, the federal government will be coming in here en masse." Days passed, looting started, the feds didn't come, and Nagin cracked. In a radio interview Thursday night, he ranted passionately for 14 minutes that the feds had done little to stop thousands of deaths: "Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here! They're not here! It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and let's do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country!" Nagin didn't stop until he broke down in tears.

This is the story of Nagin's term: ambitious plans derailed by the dismal reality of his often-ungovernable city. In the days prior to Hurricane Katrina's landfall, the 49-year-old mayor ordered New Orleans' first-ever mandatory evacuation. He told those in the most flood-prone areas to leave early, and he set up shuttles to get the 100,000 or so residents without cars to shelters. He announced that the potentially catastrophic hurricane represented "an opportunity for us to come together in a way we've never done before." Instead, Katrina's aftermath turned into a typical—if unimaginably and hellaciously tragic—scene from New Orleans politics, with the requisite allegations that the rudderless, incompetent city government can't deal with the city's intrinsic geographic, economic, and racial problems.

Nagin swept into office in 2002 as a businessman and political outsider who promised to reform New Orleans government's notorious corruption and opacity. A graduate of the New Orleans public school system and the son of a sometime City Hall custodian, Nagin rose to become a top executive at Cox Communications. Before his 2002 mayoral run, Nagin's greatest local claim to fame was as the co-host of a long-running television show in which Cox's cable subscribers called in to gripe about the channel lineup.

Just as he talked down angry cable customers with his smooth baritone, Nagin charmed New Orleans voters with his plain-spokenness and wit. During one mayoral debate, he suggested that one way to solve the city's budget woes would be to divest Louis Armstrong International Airport—or, as he put it, "Man, I think we need to sell that sucker." (He also won over voters with his physical charms. Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose reported that Rose's female acquaintances called the chrome-domed mayor a "hottie" and "the beautiful man.")

Nagin, the reformer, defeated the law-and-order candidate, former New Orleans Police Chief Richard Pennington. He quickly got to the reforming. Two months after he took office, 84 warrants were issued in an attempt to snuff out bribes in the city's taxicab licensing and vehicle inspection systems. Among the arrested taxi drivers was the mayor's cousin. Nagin's clean sweep got glowing mentions in the national press, and the Times-Picayune called it "the biggest crackdown on municipal corruption in the modern history of the city." His approval rating shot up to 80 percent.

The newsmaking purges soon tailed off, though, and the already completed corruption-snuffing started to look a lot less impressive. The bribery investigation netted mostly small fish, what the Los Angeles Times described as "a motley collection of cabbies, vehicle inspection agents and low-level bureaucrats." The district attorney declined to prosecute 53 cabbies due to lack of evidence. The highest-ranking official arrested, the city's utilities director, got off when a judge ruled that her crimes were on the level of waiving a taxi-registration fee for an amputee.

In the black community, the fizzling of these early successes did less to hurt Nagin's reputation than the perception that he was disloyal—to the cousin he had arrested, to the administration of his popular predecessor Marc Morial (which he frequently insinuated, perhaps appropriately, was complicit in City Hall corruption), and to the city's African-American population as a whole. After Morial's brother's house was raided as part of a corruption probe, a leading black preacher called Nagin a "white man in black skin." It didn't matter that, according to the Times-Picayune, he had done a demonstrably better job than Morial in giving government contracts to minority-owned businesses.

Nagin lacked the communication skills to promote his legitimate accomplishments. He also oversold his blue-sky ideas. During his first term, Nagin has pledged at various times to build a new City Hall, take over the city's failing public schools, streamline government by merging agencies, reduce the number of mayoral appointees, and sell the city's airport to private investors. None of these proposals has come to fruition. Meanwhile, the city's major structural problems—poverty, unemployment, crime—have only gotten worse.

On Tuesday night, as the city started to lose all hope, Nagin lamented that water from Lake Pontchartrain continued to flow into the city because promised attempts to repair the busted 17^th Street Canal with giant sandbags never materialized. He should've known that stopping the flood wouldn't work. That plan was like so many that came before it: an innovative but impossible solution to an intractable problem.

Josh Levin is a Slate assistant editor. You can e-mail him at sportsnut@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125587/

explainer
Homeless
How do you pay for a house that no longer exists?
By Avi Zenilman
Posted Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, at 3:51 PM PT

Preliminary reports indicate that many New Orleans homeowners don't have financial protection in case of flooding, which isn't covered by most home insurance providers. If insurance can't pick up the slack, do you still have to pay a mortgage on a house that no longer exists? And if so, how?

Most mortgages must be paid back in full—whether you pay out of pocket or an insurance agency covers you. Bankrupt individuals, however, are exempt from payment.

More commonly, aid is sought from the Federal Emergency Management Administration. The first step to receiving FEMA assistance is to register your personal information with the agency via telephone or this Web site. Applicants must provide their Social Security number, insurance status, and family income, and FEMA asks that individuals provide as much contact information as possible, such as mailing address and phone number.

FEMA directs most homeowners and renters to the Small Business Administration, which gives out low-interest loans to people in declared federal disaster areas. Once a mailing address is established, the SBA sends a loan application form, along with this guide to disaster relief. The disaster recovery loans, which are capped at $200,000 for a house and $40,000 for other personal property, pay for repairs and mortgage refinancing for people without enough homeowner's or flood insurance. This interactive SBA map shows how many people took out disaster loans last year.

If the SBA determines that an applicant cannot afford a loan, FEMA can step in and pay for repairs and construction. Both programs require applicants to prove that their insurance would not cover the damage.

The process of obtaining an SBA loan or FEMA assistance often takes a while. Victims of 2004's Hurricane Ivan, for example, have until Sept. 12 to file for damages. This is because insurers and the SBA need ample time to process and verify the enormous number of damage claims before they can begin reimbursement.

Those who can't get insurance coverage or federal help in time to pay their mortgage are personally liable for their homes and are possibly vulnerable to foreclosure. Some banks have already begun to assuage these fears by granting borrowers at least a 90-day extension for their payments.

Explainer thanks Greg Bodin of the Baton Rouge Bar Association, Bank of America, and the Small Business Administration.

Avi Zenilman is a former Slate intern.

explainer
How Do They Estimate Hurricane Damage?
Why do the Katrina numbers vary all the way from $25 billion to $100 billion?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, at 3:23 PM PT

Hurricane Katrina could cost more than $100 billion, according to the latest estimate from Risk Management Solutions. On Tuesday, risk-modeling firms placed the potential costs at up to $25 billion. Where do these numbers come from, and why do they vary so much?

Teams of mathematicians, statisticians, meteorologists, and structural engineers compile the figures. Risk-modeling companies predict damage by comparing weather forecasts with detailed information about what lies in a storm's path. Using data from the National Hurricane Center, they estimate the wind speeds generated by the storm at various locations. The damage analysis typically addresses entire neighborhoods at a time; for each ZIP code, the modelers know the total value of buildings in the area, what percentage of them are residential, how many of those are wood-frame houses, and so on.

Once the modelers make a guess as to which buildings will be affected, and by what wind intensity, they can start to project the damage—and assign dollar amounts. For this they use "vulnerability functions," which derive from historical data about previous hurricanes. If a residential neighborhood in New Orleans were likely to be hit by Katrina's 100-mph winds, the damage estimates might come from the insurance claims made after 100-mph winds hit a similar neighborhood during Hurricane Charley or Hurricane Andrew.

Historical comparisons don't work for unique or unusual structures in harm's way. When the insurance companies saw Hurricane Floyd approaching Florida in 1999, the potential damage to the space shuttle couldn't be determined from past experience. Since shuttle damage could contribute a significant amount to the total cost of the storm, the modelers assessed the risk informally.

In general, information about previous storms comprises claims for all sorts of losses, like structural damage, destroyed equipment, and even interrupted business. The standard vulnerability functions incorporate all these factors into the final estimate. Overall projections can refer either to the insured damages or to the total costs of the storm. A $9 billion estimate reported in the news on Tuesday referred to insured and uninsured damages from the wind alone; the new $100 billion estimate applies to the total cost including flood damage. These numbers reflect damage to the local economy and infrastructure, but they don't account for global effects—like the dramatic increase in gas prices.

What good are these numbers? Insurance companies hire risk-modeling companies to help them prepare for the aftermath. They want to know how much money they'll need to settle claims, and how many agents they should send into the field. They don't care so much about the overall numbers—for the most part, those are computed for the risk-modeling company's press releases. Instead, the insurance companies use the same data and vulnerability functions to create estimates about their own specific liabilities.

Next question?

Explainer thanks Rick Clinton of EQECAT and Shannon McKay of Risk Management Solutions.

 

history lesson
When Chicago Baked
Unheeded lessons from another great urban catastrophe.
By Eric Klinenberg
Posted Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, at 2:34 PM PT

Sept. 11 was an epochal event in American culture, so it's no surprise that it's everyone's favorite comparison to the destruction of New Orleans. But the more instructive analogy is another great urban catastrophe in recent American history: The 1995 Chicago heat wave, when a blend of extreme weather, political mismanagement, and abandonment of vulnerable city residents resulted in the loss of water, widespread power outages, thousands of hospitalizations, and 739 deaths in a devastating week.

This summer is the heat wave's 10^th anniversary. Yet the event has been largely forgotten as government agencies charged with protecting Americans from disasters have ignored the lessons it offered—and people are dying on the Gulf Coast as a result.

Long before 1995, American public-health officials warned of the dangers of extreme summer weather. Heat waves in a typical year kill more Americans than all other extreme weather events combined (between 400 and 1,500). After cities including Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago itself experienced heat disasters in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began prodding government agencies to develop plans for preventing heat-related casualties. But few cities took this advice seriously. Chicago's Health Department shelved its heat-emergency plan in the office's back regions.

A strong emergency response might have compensated for the poor advance planning. As with Katrina, meteorologists identified the treacherous weather system at least a week before it hit Chicago and advised the city to prepare for the worst. Instead, Mayor Richard M. Daley and many of his Cabinet members set off on summer vacations, returning to Chicago only after dead bodies began piling up at the morgue. In the absence of its leaders, the city failed to pull its forgotten heat-emergency plan from the shelf. Local emergency managers refused to call in additional resources to help with the unfolding health crisis, even though paramedics and ambulances were readily available.

Affluent and middle-class Chicagoans had little trouble getting out of harm's way. They either turned on their air conditioners or fled for cooler destinations. Thousands of poor, old, isolated, and sick people, especially those concentrated in the city's segregated African-American ghettos, on the other hand, were effectively trapped in lethal conditions. Neither federal nor local agencies did much to assist them. Instead, city patrols cracked down on young people who opened fire hydrants.

Images of the "water war" between the teens and the city workers featured prominently in the local media, as did long sound bites from political officials who insisted that no one had foreseen the danger of heat waves and that they had done everything they could to respond. The commissioner of human services said that people died because they neglected to take care of themselves. The mayor blamed families for refusing to protect their kin. Outraged representatives of Chicago's African-American neighborhoods argued the obvious: Everyone knew which people and places were going to be most affected by the heat. The victims' vulnerability was predictable, and so was the city's neglect. Yet their complaints got little attention, and the story of what happened to their communities remains largely unknown.

Katrina is in some ways a different species of trouble. The hurricane has destroyed New Orleans and damaged smaller cities in addition to killing people. Yet the parallels are striking. Federal officials ignored several urgent pleas—from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, members of Congress, Gulf Coast politicians, and scores of disaster experts—for major infrastructure improvements to prevent catastrophic flooding on the Gulf Coast. Paul Krugman reports in the New York Times that FEMA rated this crisis one of the top three threats to American security. Yet the White House denied requests to shore up levees or build larger drainage systems for the lower Mississippi River.

Emergency preparations during the week before the storm were also weak. As in Chicago, top political officials—this time President Bush and his Cabinet members—refused to interrupt their vacation schedules until the death toll spiked. As in Chicago, city leaders neglected poor African-American neighborhoods where residents were certain to be vulnerable, failing to send evacuation buses there or to the hospitals and homes where the frail, elderly, and sick are clustered.

In contrast to Chicago, however, New Orleans officials have clamored for more assistance from Washington. The New York Times reported that Col. Terry Ebbert, director of Homeland Security for New Orleans, said the disaster response has been "carried on the backs of the little guys for four goddamn days. … It's criminal within the confines of the United States that within one hour of the hurricane they weren't force-feeding us. It's like FEMA has never been to a hurricane."

In part because of such open condemnation, the media coverage of Katrina has been more critical than the coverage of the Chicago heat wave. Yet little of the most valuable coverage, local radio broadcasting, is available inside New Orleans. Without TV, Internet access, newspapers, and telephones, people are depending on radios—battery-powered, in automobiles, or hand-crank—for emergency information. But as of Thursday evening, only one station, Entercom's WWL-AM 870, had its own reporters on the air. Clear Channel Communications, which owns roughly 1,200 stations nationwide (about six times more than any other company) owns six stations in New Orleans. The company has been criticized for failing to provide emergency information or expansive coverage during other local disasters in recent years. During the first days of the disaster, none of the Clear Channel stations provided their own reporting on the crisis. One, KHEV, retransmitted audio from WWL-TV. On Friday, the Web sites for Clear Channel's New Orleans stations announced that they had joined other broadcasters in setting up "United Radio for New Orleans" and removed the promos for syndicated programs and paid advertisements that had been visible on the site over the previous days.

It's important to keep asking questions about all the things that have gone wrong in New Orleans. Let it not be another Chicago disaster story, in which wasted lessons compound the catastrophe of wasted lives.

Eric Klinenberg is associate professor of sociology at New York University and the author of Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125572/

explainer
What Is Martial Law?
And is New Orleans under it?
By Keelin McDonell
Posted Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, at 2:04 PM PT

On Tuesday reports began circulating that New Orleans officials had put the flood-ravaged city under martial law. The attorney general's office of Louisiana quickly issued a denial. Confusion persisted, however, after White House press secretary Scott McClellan told a group of journalists on Wednesday that "martial law has been declared in Mississippi and Louisiana." Yesterday National Guard Lt. Gen H. Steven Blum sought to set the record straight, saying, "This is not, as it has been erroneously reported, martial law." What is martial law? And who can declare it?

Martial law occurs when the military assumes police powers because local authorities and courts aren't functioning. Although the president usually imposes martial law, federal regulation allows for a "local commander" to do so "on the spot, if the circumstances demand immediate action." Federal armed forces are expected to relinquish these powers as soon as the local government is once again operable. During martial law, the military may arrest and try civilians, seize private property, and institute curfews, among other emergency powers.

In practice, however, martial law has been all but barred since the late 19^th century. During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and set up military courts in several states in the South and Midwest. Many at the time felt that Lincoln had superseded his authority, and in 1878 Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the military from performing civilian law enforcement without congressional approval.

The Posse Comitatus Act effectively limited the president's power to declare martial law, but it did not entirely end it. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the governor of Hawaii called for martial law. President Roosevelt approved the motion, and the islands remained under military authority until October of 1944.

Additionally, governors can still request that the president immediately dispatch federal troops to assist police during emergencies. This happened during two notable instances of rioting in recent history—at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and after the verdict was handed down in the Rodney King trial in Los Angeles in 1992. Neither instance constituted martial law (or violated Posse Comitatus) since federal troops were supporting and not supplanting local leaders.

During the 1987 Iran-Contra scandal, it was revealed that Oliver North had helped FEMA draft plans to overrule Posse Comitatus and impose martial rule if a major instance of civil unrest occurred. More recently, civil libertarians have worried that the military may become the de facto enforcer of law if the United States is attacked.

The Katrina relief effort includes military assistance, but it is not martial law. National Guard units are acting under the direction of governors, and federal troops are providing humanitarian relief. Neither of these violates Posse Comitatus. While martial law has not been imposed, a state of emergency has been declared in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, signaling that some civil liberties, such as the right to congregate, may be limited because of extreme conditions.

Next question?

Explainer thanks Ken Pence of Vanderbilt University, Harry Scheiber of the Berkeley School of Law, and Scott Sillman of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke Law School.

Keelin McDonell is a reporter-researcher at the New Republic.

 

 

 chatterbox
The Truth About Cats and Dogs
That New Orleans policeman was right to confiscate Snowball.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, Sept. 12, 2005, at 2:01 PM PT

The Bush administration got a lot of things horribly wrong in its disaster response to the New Orleans flood, and it deserves almost all of the bitter recriminations hurled its way. But there's one thing the Bushies and the state of Louisiana got dead right: People matter more than animals.

This may seem an obvious point, but the reluctance of rescue workers to allow refugees from the city to bring their animals with them received thunderous condemnation. Much of the fury arose after Mary Foster of the Associated Press reported the plight of a little boy waiting to board a bus for Houston:

Pets were not allowed on the bus, and when a police officer confiscated a little boy's dog, the child cried until he vomited. "Snowball, snowball," he cried.

Who were these barbarians who would put a child in such distress? "Federal and nonprofit agencies need to acknowledge that animals are considered by many people to be members of the family," fulminated Rue McClanahan, honorary director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in an op-ed published by various Knight-Ridder and Tribune Co. newspapers.

People who share their homes with animals should never, ever, leave animals behind—you never know when you'll be able to return to your home, or if or when humane agencies will be allowed to rescue your animals, on the odd chance they survive the storm.

Karen Dawn, proprietor of an animal advocacy Web site, argued in the Washington Post, "The pets pulled from people's arms would not have taken seats meant for humans."

There is no reasonable explanation for abandoning them. They were the last vestiges of sweetness, in some cases the only living family, of those who had nothing left. But the police officers were just following orders—orders that reflect an official policy inconsistent with how people feel about their animals.

Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, complained on Canadian television that "some shelters don't take [pets], and that is really a major problem."

But a much greater problem would have arisen had evacuees been encouraged to bring their pets onto rescue boats and buses and into shelters. Knight-Ridder reporters Jack Douglas and Natalie Pompilio reported Sept. 8 that when one New Orleans couple insisted on bringing "our only baby"—a 125-pound potbellied pig named Rooty—the rescue boat nearly sank. Animal-lovers tend to be geniuses at not noticing the calamity animals can bring to a situation already fraught with chaos, but anybody who's ever seen a live-action Disney film whose plot turns on a dog and cat being housed under the same roof gets the idea. Simply walking my dog Sabrina around the block, I've noticed, creates a mild social disturbance. Although Sabrina is very sweet-natured, she strains at the leash to bark at other dogs, and she tries to leap up onto strangers who, in their body language and facial expressions, often communicate very strongly how little they like dogs, which of course is their right.

Multiply Sabrina by five, 12, or 100 dogs (and cats and hamsters and snakes and God knows what else), and you have excrement and earsplitting barking and biting and all sorts of other activity that is unhelpful at best and dangerous at worst when you're trying to solve a human crisis. True, some people apparently refused to be evacuated because they couldn't bring their pets, and it's likely at least a few of these people died as a result. But tragic though their fates obviously were, it would have been more tragic, and certainly more unfair, to allow these people to impose further chaos on the appallingly slow and ineffective process by which large numbers of people received aid.

Now that the flight of refugees has largely receded, animal-protection groups are mounting various animal-rescue operations, and that's laudable. For many of the animals, it's too late, and that's sad. Their owners should have evacuated them—and themselves—before the storm hit, when pets could be accommodated more easily. But according to USA Today, Snowball, at least, has been found and will be reunited with ….

Hmm. What is that little boy's name? Nobody seems to know. It's entirely consistent with the warped priorities of this sob story that in its telling, the human being's identity is judged less salient than the pooch's.

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

 

fighting words
George Galloway Is Gruesome, Not Gorgeous
Now, watch me debate him.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Sept. 12, 2005, at 11:53 AM PT

My old friend and frequent critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft once tried to define a moment of perfect contentment and came up with the idea of opening a vintage wine while settling down to read an undiscovered work by P.G. Wodehouse. Another comrade identified bliss with writing or reading very hard in the afternoon, knowing that someone really, really nice was coming to dinner. I, too, have a taste for the simpler pleasures. Can I convey the deep sense of delight that stole over me when I learned that George Galloway and Jane Fonda were to go on an "anti-war" tour together and that the idea of this perfect partnership had come from Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues?

The pure silliness and risibility of the thing would have been quite beyond one's power of invention. And, oh, just to be present when they finally meet. Jane can shyly tell George, who yells daily about the rape of Jerusalem by Zionism, of the brave days in 1982 when she and Tom Hayden went to entertain Gen. Sharon's invading troops in Lebanon. He can huskily and modestly discuss (he says he's a great admirer of her role in Barefoot in the Park) his long record as one of Britain's leading pro-life politicians, and his more recent outrage at the judicial "murder" of Terri Schiavo.

Jane Fonda, who the last I heard was in the throes of a post-orgasmic spiritual transfiguration, was a byword for ditziness even on the left when I was young, and she now issues apologies for her past politics almost as rapidly as Barbarella changed positions. Galloway, however, is nothing if not grimly consistent. Here, just for an example, is what he said as recently as July, after speaking at the Al-Assad Library in the Syrian capital of Damascus, about the host after whose foul dynasty that library is named:

We covered the whole world in 60 minutes. I was very impressed by his knowledge, by his sharpness, by his flexible mind. I was very, very impressed. … Syria is lucky to have Bashar al-Assad as her President.

Not that the Syrian people had any say in their good fortune, in being passed from the rule of a megalomaniac father to a feeble son. And not that anyone in Syria is permitted to disagree when Galloway comes to give one of his speeches. More serious still, it had been on the preceding Feb. 14 that Rafik Hariri, a former elected prime minister of Lebanon, was murdered by a bomb of military-grade force. The U.N. investigator of this odious crime, Detlev Mehlis, has since caused the arrests of four senior pro-Syrian Lebanese officers. This week, he travels to Damascus to pursue his inquiries to the source. Bashar Assad, who had been planning to fly to address the United Nations, has decided not to show his weak, slobbering face in New York after all. All or most of this was known or at the least seriously suspected when Galloway went for his asshole dialogue with Assad in July, and also delivered an asshole monologue of his own. Indeed, the outrage in Lebanon had already led to a Syrian "withdrawal," even though Syria still does not recognize the existence of Lebanon as a state. Galloway publicly deplored this withdrawal, saying that Syria's presence in Lebanon was "legal," which it was not after the Taif Accords of more than a decade ago, and adding that "the beneficiary from the absence of Syria is the US and Israel."

Fawning on dictators, posing and posturing for a state-controlled press in front of a coerced audience, managing to overlook the existence of death squads and torturers, and praising the invasion and occupation of neighboring states—this is the same George Galloway who in 1994 flew to Baghdad and addressed Saddam Hussein in the following terms, commiserating with him on his failure to annex the Arab and Muslim state of Kuwait:

Your Excellency, Mr. President, I greet you in the name of the many thousands of people in Britain who stood against the tide and opposed the war and aggression against Iraq. … I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.

Now, you can be a flatterer of dictators and murderers and still—just about—be a pacifist, or "anti-war." But here is what Galloway said about the car bombers and beheaders and suicide fanatics of Iraq, again this July 30 at the Al-Assad Library, as broadcast by Syrian state TV and by Al Jazeera the following day. He informed the Arab world:

Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners—Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. Some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters …

As for the jihadist and Baathist resisters: They "are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars, with 145 military operations every day."

Change only the name, and this is flat-out Bin-Ladenist hysteria. (It also fails to mention the fact that even Saddam Hussein's constitution recognized that Iraq was a state of Arabs and Kurds. There are at least 1 million Kurds in Baghdad alone, and I doubt that the ancestral Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Russians, and Druse of Jerusalem consider themselves members of "the Arab nation.") As for the "operations," they may not amount to 145 per day, but they have included the demolition of the U.N. and Red Cross offices in Baghdad, the deliberate murder of schoolchildren, the video-slaughter of journalists and aid workers, the leveling of Shiite mosques, and the assassination recently of Sheikh Omar Ibrahim al Duleimi, a Sunni cleric who opposes the coalition presence but who urged his followers to vote in the upcoming elections. I might add that the "operations" have also included the killing of hundreds of American soldiers, including Spc. Casey Sheehan, who died in the successful attempt to bring order and water to Sadr City, and over whose graves Galloway invites us to shed the tears of the crocodile—and then to capitulate to the killers. No shame. No shame at all.

Thus, and thanks in part to Eve and Jane, the "anti-war" movement has as its new star a man who is openly pro-war, but openly on the other side. A man who supported the previous oppressors of the region—the Soviet army in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq—who supports its current oppressors—Bashar Assad and his Lebanese proxies—and who still has time to endorse its potential future tyrants in the shape of the jihadists in Iraq and elsewhere. Galloway began his political life as a fifth-rate apologist for the Soviet Union, but he has now diversified into being an apologist for Stalinism, for fascism, and for jihadism all at once! All this, and Jane, too. One's cup runs over.

There has been a real question as to whether or not Galloway does all these favors to despots for free. A shallow and superficial press has allowed itself to be used as his megaphone and has allowed him to change the subject by means of tirades of abuse that are considered brilliantly apt and witty. At www.hitchensweb.com, you will find a compilation of the hard evidence that he has very good reason to try and change this dangerous subject; you will also find a great deal more chapter and verse about the record and the true opinions of this disgusting figure.

Galloway's preferred style is that of vulgar ad hominem insult, usually uttered while a rather gaunt crew of minders stands around him. I have a thick skin and a broad back and no bodyguards. He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a "popinjay" (true enough, since its original Webster's definition means a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest). In a recent interview he made opprobrious remarks about the state of my midriff, which I will confess has—as P.G. Wodehouse himself once phrased it—"slipped down to the mezzanine floor." In reply I do not wish to stoop. Those of us who revere the vagina are committed to defend it against the very idea that it is a mouth or has teeth. Study the photographs of Galloway from Syrian state television, however, and you will see how unwise and incautious it is for such a hideous person to resort to personal remarks. Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs.

I shall be debating him in public in New York on Wednesday Sept. 14, this time on a fair field with no favor. The event will be widely accessible via television and radio, and I do urge you all to tune in and watch the fun.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126121/

 

dispatches
Dispatch From New Orleans
The holes in the house I grew up in.
By Josh Levin
Posted Monday, Sept. 12, 2005, at 10:43 AM PT

Since I've been in New Orleans, I've spent half my time reporting and half worrying about my family. My parents and grandparents left town a few days before Katrina came through. They're safe in Houston now but have no idea what happened to their houses. Hours spent decoding before-and-after satellite images reassure us that the family homesteads are still standing, but the grainy photos don't tell us if they took on any water or got battered by falling oak trees.

My parents live in Uptown New Orleans, a few blocks east of the terminus of the Carrolton Ave. streetcar line. On my first day in town, I tried to drive home by going north on Carrolton but had to turn around when the water started rising five blocks south of our house. A day later, my dad drove from Houston to meet me at the place my uncle just rented in Baton Rouge. We set out for New Orleans the next morning with two pairs of wading boots in the back of the car.

While I'm focused on making my way to the house I grew up in, my dad's most concerned about getting into his office to find a patient's medical charts and the credentialing documents he'll need to secure temporary work as a surgeon out of state. Some New Orleanians returning to the city have bypassed the mandatory evacuation by paying off-duty cops to escort them across the parish line. My dad, though, can get in because doctors are a special caste; the cops and National Guardsmen who man the checkpoints on I-10 and at the parish line wave through anyone wearing scrubs. In the middle of the drive, my dad tells me it feels good to get up at dawn and put on his scrub shirt and scrub pants—that for the first time in a while it feels like the day has a purpose. He hasn't gone this long without working for 25 years.

There's no flooding around Touro Infirmary, and we make our way to the hospital without any problem. The gate at the parking attendant's station is nothing but a splintered nub—someone probably smashed right through it, just like in the movies. The garage's third level, where patients were airlifted out by helicopter in the days after the storm, is a freeze frame of harried evacuation. Rolling beds, IV stands, and moldy hospital food lie haphazardly between the parked cars. Choppers still use the parking garage roof for takeoffs and landings; the sound of rotors spinning fills the spaces where people should be.

The office is hot and musty but completely intact. My dad lifts his diplomas off the wall and dumps them in a garbage bag; I grab family photos out of their frames and make a pile on his desk. On the way out the door, he stops and takes a white coat from the hall closet. In the dark, airless stairwell, we run into a doctor with what looks like a miner's headlamp strapped to his forehead.

With the hospital checked off our list, we drive down St. Charles Avenue toward the house. My dad is heartened by the condition of Uptown. It's obvious that a hurricane's been through here, but the streets are getting cleared, and the houses look OK. And after a few weeks of hard work, he says, Touro could probably be up and running again—the problem is that there won't be any patients. Later that afternoon, he stops by East Jefferson General Hospital. Doctors have been told to report to work here; four surgeons pace the halls, waiting for something to do.

We turn toward the lake on Carrolton and look in on friends' and relatives' houses, all pretty much fine except for gutter and fence damage from severed tree limbs. The brick church where my mother holds her pre-school reading program looks unaffected, too—her sign is still screwed to the fence, but we can't go inside because the door has been barricaded by a giant pile of branches.

At the spot where rising water stopped me a few days earlier, the ground is dirty but dry. The pumps must be working. In two days, the water has receded 10 or 12 blocks. My dad asks if I'm getting nervous, because he sure is. Guys in Humvees pick up the big branches blocking the middle of our street; we drive down the path that's been cleared for us.

The house looks pretty much how I remember it, except for the boards and branches piled on the brick walk. The green shutter door opens with the same creak. On the ground below the mail slot, there are 15 new registrations for my mom's now-canceled program. The downstairs looks immaculate. We don't dare open the refrigerator to ruin the illusion that everything looks—and smells—exactly the same.

My dad goes upstairs later in the afternoon and finds a broken window in my sister's old room. The ceiling is also falling down. The storm blew bunches of tiles off our slate roof, allowing water to fall into the house unimpeded and collect on the attic floor. There's water damage on the ceiling of my old bedroom, too.

Early the next morning, we drive back from Baton Rouge to do what we can about the roof. Somehow, the water has gone up since the day before. Carrolton and Claiborne Avenue, a corner that had been dry, has once again become part of the municipal pool. We can still get to the house, though, if only by driving on the wrong side of the street.

We scour the garage for tools and come up with a staple gun with no staples, a battery-powered screwdriver with no bits, some hammers and nails, and a box of garbage bags. Sunlight squeezes into the attic from toaster-sized holes in the roof. Since we don't have a ladder big enough to get us on top of the house, we nail the garbage bags to the attic's interior support beams. After a few minutes, we give up and just lay the bags on the spots where natural light touches the floor.

We carry out boxes of photos, my sister's letters, my dad's CD cases, everyone's birth certificates. My dad slings three winter coats over his arm, just in case they're still not back home when the weather gets cold.

Next stop: my grandparents' house, the house my dad grew up in. Actual next stop: standing water. There's no way to drive to their place on S. Jeff Davis Parkway, and there's no way to wade there either. The water's still too high in every direction, and there are no dinghies or choppers around to commandeer.

On the way out of town, we scoot unimpeded through the streets we used to take to work, to school, to the airport. On Claiborne, a bored soldier plays golf in the middle of the street with a club fashioned from a stray piece of wood. We make it all the way back to Houston for an exiles' dinner at my grandparents' temporary apartment. There's brisket in the oven, and the LSU football game's on TV. My grandmother's black-and-white photos, the giant plush turtle I used to sit on, and everything else they own are still in a dark, empty house. Maybe it's all wet and maybe it's not, but everything feels far away.

Josh Levin is a Slate assistant editor. You can e-mail him at sportsnut@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126123/

the hollywood economist
The Indie Game
The secret to success is a Hollywood star.
By Edward Jay Epstein
Posted Monday, Sept. 12, 2005, at 10:24 AM PT

The genius of the indie film business lies in its use of Hollywood stars. The same actors and actresses who quote Hollywood studios $20 million per movie will work on indie films for a small fraction of that fee. Often they accept "scale," as the Screen Actors Guild's minimum wage of $788 a day is called, or "near scale" of about $10,000 a week plus overtime. Instead of requiring private jets, luxury suites, and multimillion-dollar perk packages as they do in studio films, the stars will fly on commercial flights, stay in inexpensive condos, and get the same per diem as the rest of the cast. Instead of receiving a sizable chunk of the gross receipts as they do on studio films, for indie films stars will accept "net points" (even though they—or their agents—are no doubt familiar with David Mamet's famous observation that in Hollywood, "There is no net."). "The total cost of a star can be less than that of running the office Xerox," explained one knowledgeable producer. The willingness of top stars—including Keanu Reeves, Mel Gibson, Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, Drew Barrymore, Al Pacino, Angelina Jolie, Pierce Brosnan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Charlize Theron, Tobey Maguire, Demi Moore, Sean Penn, and Julia Roberts—to work for near scale in the parallel universe of indie films allows indie producers to take advantage of a star's cachet to finance the movies.

Ironically, in the era of the moguls, the Hollywood studios gained a similar advantage over stars by locking all their actors and actresses into long-term contracts in which they were paid a specified weekly salary regardless of the success of their movies. Since the stars could not work for any other studio, the studios who employed them could create PR images and reap all the benefits of a star's cachet for themselves. After the studio system collapsed in the late 1940s, the stars, represented by powerful talent agencies, quickly turned the tables on the studios. Now, no longer under studio contract, the stars auctioned off their services to the highest bidder from film to film. The studios still paid for their films' publicity, but the stars now reaped the benefits of their cachet via product endorsement, licensing their images for games and toys, and a raft of other celebritized enterprises. So, for example, while Warner Bros., Sony, Fox, and Universal collectively invested more than a half-billion dollars to hammer the superhero image of Arnold Schwarzenegger into the public's mind in a dozen different action movies, Schwarzenegger himself got the rewards of his cachet, which included a record-breaking $29.25 million fee for Terminator 3, a personal-licensing empire, and the governorship of California.

Despite the lure of enormous compensation from studios—which now includes perk packages and cuts of the gross receipts that can easily exceed $30 million a film—stars find occasional satisfaction in working for coolie wages in indie productions, making a distinction between, as one top CAA agent put it, "commerce and art." Some stars may find that roles in studio amusement-park movies (that they share with live stuntmen and digital doubles) do not provide the acting opportunities, award possibilities, prestige, camaraderie, or even aura of coolness of indie productions. Others may want to work with a particular director, such as Woody Allen, Robert Altman, or David Mamet, or burnish their fading image as an actor. They might also need to fill a hole in their schedule—since, PR hype aside, there is not an endless cornucopia of $20 million parts in Hollywood. Also, when stars do "artistic" films practically pro bono, they do not lower their $20 million quote.

Whatever the star's motives, the indie producers get, if not a free ride, a means of financing their movies through a three-step process called "presales." Here is how it works:

Step 1: Since indie producers, unlike studio producers, typically cannot get a distribution deal in America before they finish the movie, they raise money by making "presales" abroad. In such an arrangement, the indie producer turns over all rights to exhibit the movie—as well as sell it on DVD and to television—in a particular country in return for a minimum guarantee of money once the film is completed and delivered. The Catch-22 here is that a foreign distributor often will not commit to a presale contract if there is no American distributor or unless the film has a recognizable star (with a star he has at least a chance of selling the DVD and TV rights). So, indie producers must persuade or seduce a star into joining the movie—and here is where the genius comes in—for practically no money. With a star in tow, he can often make enough presales to cover most, if not all, of the budget.

Step 2: Since presales are no more than promissory notes, the indie producer must borrow against them from banks to pay for the movie. Before he can do that, he needs to guarantee the banks that the movie, once begun, will get finished and delivered to foreign distributors. So, he needs a completion bond, which guarantees the banks that it will pay all cost overruns necessary to finish the movie, and if the production is abandoned it will pay all the money lost on the venture, which means that one way or another the bank will get back its money. Two companies, Film Finances Inc. and International Film Guarantors, provide almost all the completion bonds for independent productions. (Studios that finance their own movies internally do not need completion bonds.) Before either company will sell a producer a completion bond, he has to meet its requisites, which include buying full insurance for the star (so if she is injured or quits, the completion bond coverer gets all the money back from the insurer) and turning over to the completion bond company the ultimate control of the budget (including the right, if anything goes wrong, to take over the production and bring in its own director to complete it). The producer also has to pay the company about 2 percent of the budget.

Step 3. With the completion bond in hand, and the presales contracts as collateral, the producer then borrows the money from a bank or other financier. Since the completion-bond companies are themselves backed by giant insurers, such as Lloyd's of London and Fireman's Fund, the banks take only a very limited risk in making such loans. John W. Miller, the head of JPMorgan Securities' movie financing unit, which last year had $7.5 billion in movie loans outstanding, told me that he does not even "read the scripts" of the indie films he finances. "My bet is on the solvency of the distributors." When these presales contracts are with established international distributors, such as Sony Pictures, United International Pictures, Canal Plus, Tojo Films, or Buena Vista International, that risk is, he said, "negligible."

Even after scaling all these hurdles, securing the money, and making the movie, the indie producer faces one further challenge: getting the movie into American multiplexes. Unlike the studios, which have their own distribution arms and often set a tentative opening date even before filming is complete, indie producers typically cannot arrange American distribution until after they have shot and edited the movie. For many indie producers, finding a distributor requires going from film festival to film festival, an odyssey that often proves unfruitful. More than 2,000 indie films were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival last year, for example, of which about 1 percent were accepted. But if an indie movie has a Hollywood star it can improve its chances, especially in those festivals, such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, and Toronto, that depend on celebrity stars for publicity. The presence of a star not only often fast-tracks the film into these festivals, but even more important, as one highly successful indie producer explains, "It gives the acquisition executives there more of an incentive to give the film a chance with distribution, because they figure that even if the film is a hard sell, they can always promote the star. Selling the film ultimately is what it's all about." So, the Hollywood star as homo ludens, or at least seeking some kind of non-monetary gratification, winds up as the crucial element in a business model that now sustains a large part of independent films—and, for that, we can all be grateful.

Edward Jay Epstein is the author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood. (To read the first chapter, click here.)

 

gizmos
Resolution Revolution
It's finally time to buy an HDTV.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, Sept. 23, 2005, at 12:17 PM PT

This is the third time in as many years that I've asked the pressing question: Is it time to buy a high-definition television set? It's the first time I can answer, without many caveats: Yes, go for it.

Picture quality has gone way up, and prices have gone way down. True, this has been the unabated trend for the past three years. But I think we have now reached a point where the better sets are so good, and their prices are so low (relative to where they were), that further improvements will take place more slowly, and less dramatically, than those not just of the past year but of the past few months.

Earlier this month, I went to the annual press-and-industry expo of the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association. This is where the major HDTV and home-theater manufacturers show off their new wares for the fall season. Using my Slate buying guide from last December as a template, here is a report of what I saw.

Plasmas: Those bright, wide, flat screens are still the coolest-looking rectangles in the history of consumer electronics. Last December I wrote, "Any plasma worth owning will set you back at least $5,000 retail—a really good one will cost you double that." This year, there were good plasmas for $3,000 retail—and really, really good ones for well under $5,000.

Like last year, I was particularly impressed with the plasmas made by Pioneer and Panasonic. Many plasmas don't distinguish dark colors very well (blacks, blues, greens, and shadows tend to look alike). But these companies' screens stand out in detail, color, contrast, and the ability to make black objects look black. Last year, a 43-inch Pioneer plasma cost $10,500. This year, the improved follow-up, the Pioneer PRO-930HD, retails for $5,000. Likewise, Panasonic's 42-incher retailed for $5,500 last year. Its successor, the TH-42PX50U, costs $3,000—and a much-improved set, the TH-42PX500U, retails for $3,500.

LCD panels: Last year, I waved off plasma's flat-screen competitor, the liquid-crystal-display panel. For all of plasma's problems, flat LCDs are prone to worse maladies. Black looks light gray, fast-moving objects seem blurry and jumpy, and all images are prone to the "screen-door effect"—you can sometimes see the gridlines that separate each pixel. That's still the case with most of this year's crop, but not nearly to the same degree.

Sony—the star of this year's expo (see more below)—introduced its Bravia series, LCD flat panels that cost $3,500 for a 40-inch screen, $2,700 for a 32-inch, and $2,000 for a 26-inch. Unlike earlier models, you can watch the Bravias from way off to the side with no distortion or loss of light. Again, the picture isn't as black, bright, or smooth as that of the better plasmas, but it's definitely watchable, even pleasurable.

In January Sony previewed its Qualia 005, an LCD flat panel that used a different kind of technology for backlighting. Now the 005 is on the market. It looks amazing. I don't think I've seen more vivid colors on any television. The problem: It costs $15,000 ($3,000 more than originally estimated), a bit much for a 46-inch screen.

Rear-projection TVs and the beginning of true high-definition: First, let us review what "high-definition TV" means. Images on old-fashioned, analog televisions have 480 horizontal lines; first, the even-numbered lines get scanned, then the odd-numbered lines. This is called "interlaced scanning," so the resolution of these TVs is 480i. Digital televisions scan all the lines at once—a process known as "progressive scanning"—so their resolution is 480p. High-definition televisions either have 1,080 lines with interlaced scanning (1080i) or 720 lines with progressive scanning (720p). More lines mean a more solid, detailed, color-saturated picture; progressive scanning means a picture that moves more smoothly.

The big news at this year's CEDIA was the introduction of several televisions and projectors that scan images not at 1080i or 720p but at 1080p. The result, all other things equal, is richer detail and smoother action scenes—a picture that's livelier, more immediate, more real.

Again, Sony was particularly impressive. Last year, I raved about the $10,000 70-inch Qualia 006 rear-projection monitor, which used a new technology called SXRD. (For more on SXRD and other rear-projection tech, click here.) This year, Sony displayed two new 1080p SXRD monitors, the 60-inch Grand WEGA KDS-R60XBR1 for $5,000 and the 50-inch Grand WEGA KDS-R50XBR1 for $4,000. (That's 70 percent of the Qualia's size for 40 percent of the price!)

I found myself wandering back into the Sony booth several times a day to get another look at that R50, wondering if the price—amazingly low for what it is—might tumble a bit more by the holidays. (Given the plunging prices everywhere, I have a feeling it might.) The colors, contrasts, and level of detail beat every other TV at the show, except perhaps the Qualia 005. In fact, Sony's 50-inch and 60-inch models are better than the 70-inch original; you can watch them from way off to the side with very little harm to the picture. (However, as with all rear-projection TVs, the light diminishes greatly from below; if you like to watch television while lying on the floor, plasma—or the conventional cathode-ray tube—is the way to go.)

Nearly as fine were JVC's 1080p D-ILA televisions—a 56-inch model for $4,000, a 61-inch for $4,500, and a 70-inch for $6,000. These are $500 to $1,000 cheaper than last year's comparably sized 720p models!

One thing to note: Rear-projection televisions are not flat. Their light comes from a projector implanted in the back of the TV, which of course requires space. These sets range from 12 to 18 inches deep, though this bulk protrudes only from the rear center. They have streamlined designs, so from straight-on as well as from well to the sides, the sets look flat. Unless you want to hang your television on the wall, don't dismiss rear projection. (They also weigh a lot less than plasmas and are nearly indestructible; replace the projector lamp every few years, and they last forever, at least in theory.)

Front projectors: If you want a big, big picture and have a bank account to match, consider a projector that can beam a bright light on a screen 8 to 12 feet wide. 1080p has entered this realm as well. Last year, Sony introduced a $40,000 SXRD front projector. This year, they stunned everybody with the almost-as-good 1080p VPL-VW100 for $10,000.

Yamaha went one better with the $12,500 DPX-1300 DLP projector, which uses a Silicon Optix chip that greatly enhances picture quality. Unless you're willing to spend $30,000 or higher—at which point DVDs and HDTV start to look very much like cinema—you needn't look elsewhere.

Remnants of the past: Last year, I noted that if you didn't need a screen larger than 34 inches, there was no better set than Sony's $2,200 XBR910, a high-definition TV utilizing a cathode-ray tube (aka "picture tube"). I saw no CRT televisions at this year's expo—the first time that's been the case. It's nonetheless worth noting that Sony has upgraded the 910 to the XBR960. I've seen it on the Internet for as little as $1,600, and the picture is still terrific. It's HDTV's best bargain.

The future: The week after the CEDIA expo, Toshiba and Canon showed off a 50-inch monitor utilizing a new technology called SED—surface-conduction electron-emitter display. The screen's as flat as plasma and the picture has the colors and contrasts of CRT. By all accounts, it looks amazing—better than any plasma or rear-projection TV at CEDIA. According to industry insiders, SED TVs will hit the market sometime next year. Initially, they'll cost a few thousand dollars more than comparably sized plasmas, but by 2007 or 2008 the price will plummet.

And so, there is still solace for the late adopter. If you won't buy a new television till the tube on your 20-year-old Trinitron burns out, impress your high-tech friends by telling them that you're waiting for SED.

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The newest rear-projection TVs use one of three technologies: liquid-crystal display, Texas Instruments' digital-light processing, or some form of LCoS (liquid-crystal-on-silicon). Sony's SXRD (silicon crystal reflective display) and JVC's D-ILA (direct-drive image-light amplification) are two types of LCoS.

DLP uses millions of tiny mirrors to reflect light onto a microchip. The chip then processes these millions of reflections into a coherent image. Single-chip DLPs sometimes produce a rainbow effect, in which colors blur together (some viewers are bothered by this; others barely notice it). This happens because the single chip has to switch the primary color from red to blue to green very rapidly. Three-chip DLPs solve the problem, but they're still very new and very expensive. Just recently, Texas Instruments developed a 1080p DLP chip, which the company has licensed to Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Samsung, and several others.

Fred Kaplan, the War Stories columnist for Slate, also writes for The Perfect Vision, a high-end home-theater magazine.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2126799/

 

surfergirl
Excruci-fiction
HBO's Sunday night cringe-comedy lineup.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Sept. 23, 2005, at 12:14 PM PT

It must be said: Extras, the new half-hour comedy co-written by and starring Ricky Gervais that premieres this Sunday at 10:30 p.m. ET on HBO, is not as brilliant as his previous venture, the BBC series The Office. But that's roughly analogous to saying that Pierre, Herman Melville's first novel post-Moby Dick, was not as great as the one that preceded it. First of all, the man had just written Moby freaking Dick—give him a break. And second, Pierre is a fascinating oddball of a novel in its own right. Just so, even if Extras never accedes to The Office's heights of comic sublimity, it's still a rare find on American TV: a series that combines the ascendant genre of cringe comedy with Gervais' rich comic gifts, and his trademark humanism.

Gervais' character, Andy Millman, is a pudgy, fortysomething Everyman who's given up an unnamed but well-paying day job to become a film actor. Alas, his career is going nowhere, thanks to his fantastically inept agent (played by Stephen Merchant, the co-writer and creator of the series). As an extra (or, to use his preferred term, "background artist"), Andy's life consists of hanging around movie sets in absurd costumes (a Nazi soldier, a Regency footman), trying to wedge himself into the corner of a shot or sweet-talk his way into a single spoken line. Andy's only friend, Maggie (Ashley Jensen) also works as a movie extra; she's a good-natured ditz on a perpetual and fruitless search for a husband.

Together, Andy and Maggie get themselves into one humiliating scrape after another as they kill time on the periphery of the industry. In the first episode, Andy, an avowed atheist, pretends to be a devout Catholic to impress a woman he meets on-set. The next thing he knows, he's at a prayer meeting, launching into a long, disclaimer-laden monologue in front of an increasingly bemused priest: "That makes me sick, people saying that priests are pedophiles and kiddie fiddlers … I mean, they probably are … but there's no higher percentage of perverts … uh, there are nancies everywhere … uh … oh, condoms? Do we need 'em? I don't think so. Let the free seed of love gush forth, I say."

Andy Millman is a departure from the character of David Brent, the lovably loathsome boss at the center of The Office, though the two share a propensity to bury themselves in social shame. Andy is perhaps more like the real-life Gervais himself—intelligent and self-aware, yet constitutionally unable to keep himself from cramming his foot into his mouth at every opportunity. Where David Brent was blissfully convinced that he was the funniest, hippest, most happening boss in town, Andy Millman shares in the burden of embarrassment that we, the viewers, bear as we witness his daily excruciations. Extras also features guest stars like Ben Stiller and Kate Winslet, who play themselves in brutally self-incriminating cameos. We knew Stiller was funny already, but Winslet is unexpectedly so as a filthy-mouthed careerist who freely cops to doing a film about the Holocaust purely as a means to an end: "Schindler's bloody List, The Pianist … they've got Oscars coming out their arse."

Extras is perfectly paired with its lead-in on Sunday nights, the cringe-comedy pioneer Curb Your Enthusiasm, which begins its fifth season this Sunday at 10 p.m. ET with a return to classic form after last season's ill-begotten closer, in which the show's star and creator Larry David starred in a revival of The Producers. In Sunday's premiere, Larry's back to what he does best: not singing and dancing, but bullying, whining, and kvetching. When a whitefish-and-cream-cheese sandwich is named after him at the neighborhood deli, Larry attempts to trade sandwiches with his fellow celebrity sandwich-namesake Ted Danson, explaining, "I'm not a fish guy. You like fish." He hectors his hospitalized father (Shelly Berman) to come out and admit that Larry is adopted (as it turns out, he isn't, but wishes he were). And in a single half-hour episode, Larry manages, through various missteps, to alienate both the black community of Hollywood and its lesbian mafia (hilariously envisioned as a single-minded voting bloc headed up by Rosie O'Donnell).

Whether as The Office's David Brent or Extras' Andy Millman, the rotund, pie-faced Ricky Gervais has a sweetness and pathos that somehow makes you root for him despite everything. Larry David, bonier and more abrasive, fulfills a different role in the theater of cringe—he not only wallows in shame but glories in it. He's the liberated id that allows the worst part of all of us free rein. HBO has captured this quality in the show's new tag line: "Deep inside, you know you're him." It struck me, watching the season premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm, that one of the most restrained, socially correct people I know—a shy middle-aged woman who would never leave the house without full makeup and a primly conventional outfit—thinks Larry David is the funniest person alive and reserves a special high-pitched giggle for his show alone. It must be because he says everything she would like to say but can't.

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

 

 

jurisprudence
Take That, Nino
Breyer dukes it out with Scalia.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Monday, Sept. 12, 2005, at 3:54 AM PT

Last month, Slate readers valiantly rushed into the breach to defend the notion of an evolving, living constitution. The volunteers queued up after Dahlia Lithwick pointed out that "originalism"—the interpretive theory that promotes a literalist reading of the Constitution based on the understanding of its framers—looks ascendant, based on all its good press. Lithwick and her respondents aren't the only ones who think so. Justice Stephen Breyer also seems to have noticed that the originalists, led by his dear colleague Justice Antonin Scalia, have had the field virtually to themselves. Breyer fights back in a new book: Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution.

Calling Breyer's missive a book is a bit of an oversell. It's really a well-packaged presentation of three lectures he gave in 2004 at Harvard, in 135 large-pocket-sized pages. Breyer's theory is well timed for the upcoming addition of two new members of the Supreme Court. And it offers comfort to liberals who want their side to have a fighter in the ring with Scalia—to a point. Breyer is sensible and scholarly and often persuasive, if you buy the premise that the Constitution wasn't set in stone in 1787. What he's not is passionate and inspiring. However cogently argued, his book is a reminder that most American liberal judges have little to offer these days on that score.

Active Liberty takes its title from a distinction made by political philosopher Benjamin Constant between "the liberty of the moderns" and "the liberty of the ancients." Modern liberty is the sort traditionally associated with the Bill of Rights—freedom from government telling you what to say and how to live. Ancient liberty (which becomes active liberty in Breyer's formulation) is the citizenry's sharing of decision-making power with its sovereign. When citizens vote on questions like war or peace, Constant promises, they enlarge their minds and ennoble their thoughts.

Which suggests that the answer to America's problems, intellectual as well as political, is to turn the nation into California by instituting governance by federal referendum. Breyer, naturally, doesn't propose anything so radical. Instead he proffers an "interpretive aid" to the Constitution. Breyer wants to show judges the way toward giving more weight to the practical consequences of their rulings and to "the Constitution's democratic nature," the structural elements of American government that favor participatory democracy. These twin pillars, Breyer hopes, would move the Supreme Court back to emphasizing the values enshrined in the 1960s and '70s by the Warren Court, thus ensuring full equality, a goal from which he thinks the Rehnquist Court has backed away.

Readers be warned: When the 67-year-old Clinton appointee turns to actually applying his interpretive approach to recent Supreme Court cases, his dry-minded administrative lawyer side takes over. You may want to skip the snoozer examples and get the gist from his relatively vivid chapter on affirmative action. In the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court had to decide whether the University of Michigan law school could give a leg up to applicants of color, on a case-by-case basis, to promote the goal of a diverse student body. Four justices—Scalia, Clarence Thomas, William H. Rehnquist, and Anthony Kennedy—said no. They thought the 14^th Amendment instructs the government (including state-funded schools) to be as colorblind as possible. The other five justices took a "purposive" approach, as Breyer characterizes it. The majority gave weight to actual consequences, in particular the stated needs of American businesses for a diverse workforce. And it cited the importance of "effective participation by members of all racial and ethnics groups in the civic life of our Nation." Bingo for Breyer: "What are these arguments but an appeal to principles of solidarity, to principles of fraternity, to principles of active liberty?" the justice asks, in a rare indulgence in italics.

Breyer would like his approach to change the direction the court has taken in recent cases, like the decisions that champion states' rights at the expense of federal power. His main goal, though, is to come back at the originalists with a method of constitutional interpretation that's anchored in consistent application of legal principles. Scalia has made intellectual headway by arguing that unless judges stick to the Constitution's text, they risk making up the law as they go. Some liberals respond with, essentially: "So what?"—because they think part of a judge's job is to channel contemporary values—or "I know you are but what am I?"—because they think originalism is a means to a far-right end. But not Breyer. He is a leader of the recent liberal embrace of judicial modesty and restraint—which means he gets antsy when courts edge toward deciding cases based on what they think is right. Breyer chides the originalists for "placing weight upon eighteenth-century details to the point at which it becomes difficult for a twenty-first-century court to apply the document's underlying values." But he doesn't want the law to become unmoored any more than they do. By consistently giving weight to practical consequences and participatory democracy, Breyer says he has forged a tool that uses the constitution's "relevant values" to "limit interpretive possibilities." Take that, Nino.

Except that Scalia is unlikely to register all of this as a knock-out blow. Why elevate the Constitution's nods to participatory democracy when it also makes anti-majoritarian moves, an originalist would surely argue. And consequences in the eye of what beholder? Fair enough. For those who prefer a living Constitution to a dead one, however, the chief shortcoming of Breyer's book isn't theoretical imperfection. It's perfect abstraction. Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, the liberal lions of a bygone era, make one appearance between them in Active Liberty, in a muted footnote. And Breyer does not roar in their stead.

Brennan and Marshall's torch-bearers today mostly sit on courts in Canada and South Africa and Israel and Europe. Those places don't have centuries-old constitutions, and as a result, judges there tend not to care about originalism. They talk and write unapologetically about dignity, equality, and the human spirit. And many of them don't think judicial restraint is a paramount virtue or worry that they're imposing their values from on high. "A judge should also be part of his people," Israeli Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak said in a speech five years ago. "I sit on a bench located in the world."

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

 

dispatches
Dispatch From New Orleans
What the rescue workers find.
By Josh Levin
Posted Saturday, Sept. 10, 2005, at 4:35 PM PT

As the rubber rescue boat launches, I ask our team leader for the name of the street we're heading down. He looks down at his map of the New Orleans lakefront and says we're going south on West End Blvd., a major artery that connects I-10 to the neighborhoods just south of Lake Pontchartrain. It's also part of the route I took to school most mornings. If there weren't blue street signs poking out of the water, you might have convinced me this was underwater Nebraska. It has been tough this week to stare down at battered and sunken landmarks, but that I can no longer recognize a street I've driven down hundreds of times is something else entirely.

This afternoon, I'm riding along with a four-man search-and-rescue squad from the Army's 82^nd Airborne Division. The boat I'm on is covering a seven-block-by-four-block patch of residential area in Lakeview. None of the houses we drive past has a visible front door, but a few have second floors or attics that didn't sink into the murky depths. When we spot a house that's at least partially unsubmerged, the crew bangs on the roof and windows with fists and oars and shouts loud enough to wake a deep sleeper—"Anybody home?!", "Food and water! We're here to help!", and (once), "Hot dogs and beer!" When there's no response, someone sprays a hot pink X on the side wall along with the date and unit designation.

In New Orleans, some neighborhoods flood every time it rains, but Lakeview wasn't like that. Elderly people and middle-class families bought homes here knowing that the area has stayed dry through countless thunderstorms and a hurricane or two. Then the levee was breached, the water rose, and trapped people chopped through their roofs with axes to escape the surge. On every other block, there's a house with a makeshift escape hatch; one still has an ice chest perched beside it.

By now, everyone who's going to be fished out of Lakeview probably has been. Everything's still until the boat stirs the empty houses with its wake. In some places, the furniture bobs up and down next to the last Coke bottle someone drank from or the last paperback they flipped through. Each street looks like someone dumped a messy play room into an aquarium. There's a Big Wheel, a small plastic slide, chairs, a Jacuzzi, a Pepsi machine, and a dozen inflatable plastic balls.

All the debris makes the searching and rescuing tedious and exhausting, even for the lazy reporters who sit there doing nothing while the soldiers sweat buckets. The motor chews up a giant garbage bag, and we—by we, I mean they—spend 30 minutes cutting it out piece by piece. We nearly beach ourselves on the roof of a car that's just below the surface. We get stuck in a tree. The black rubber boat absorbs the direct sunlight and boils our drinking water. In three hours, none of the rescue boats has spotted a holdout or a person trapped in an attic, just a frail-looking cat in a second-story window that runs and hides when a soldier jumps on the roof.

Since there are no signs of life, I study the surface of the water. It smells a lot worse when you're sitting in it than when you're looking down at it. The stench of gasoline is so strong that my head throbs. Still, I can't help but gaze into it. The water isn't as static and opaque as it looked from 20 feet above. Smoky black wisps dissolve and re-form every few seconds as we glide by. The scary thing is that there aren't any mosquitoes flitting about—if they're afraid of this stuff, we humans have got to be seriously screwed.

Sitting in the middle of 12-foot-high floodwater for an afternoon makes me understand what it must be like for those gloomy psychics who see destruction around every corner. An hour into the cruise, I realize that everything I look at will get bulldozed—you can't renovate a place that's more liquid than solid. Every time the motor revs and we lurch forward, I see another two-story home crumbling to the ground. By the end of the day, I've condemned the entire neighborhood—houses where friends used to live, a vet's office, an elementary school.

After three hours of sloshing around, there's an inch of flood water in the boat, and it saturates my socks and sneakers. When we make landfall across the street from a Walgreens, I'm ordered to sit on the grass and take off my shoes. Soldiers line up to pour out their canteens over my tainted feet—"this is all biblical and shit," one says—and an Army medic tosses in half an IV bag's worth of saline solution. After I rub down with an antiseptic gel, my feet are officially clean. My gray New Balance sneakers, though, have to be retired. To keep my shoeless feet from touching the ground, a paramedic swaddles them in the first thing he sees: bright red plastic biohazard bags. I ride back to Baton Rouge with the bags crinkling around my feet and my shoes in plastic bags. The next morning, I toss them in a wind-blown garbage can and drape the red biohazard bags neatly on top.

Josh Levin is a Slate assistant editor. You can e-mail him at sportsnut@slate.com.

 

politics
The Aristobureaucrats
A dirty joke inside the government.
By John Dickerson
Posted Friday, Sept. 9, 2005, at 4:14 PM PT

When disaster strikes, ordinary people blame the government. And people in government blame … the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy blinded government officials to al-Qaida plots before 9/11 and now it is being blamed for the botched response to Hurricane Katrina. "Bureaucracy is not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people," said President Bush earlier this week. Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, told CBS's The Early Show, "Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area."

But who is responsible for the bureaucracy that failed? The CEO President came in with a promise to cut red tape and streamline government. His White House would be crisp, efficient, and everyone would be home by dinnertime. No more late-night bull sessions. It was a valiant effort, but most of Washington—the pundits, lobbyists, and congressional aides who see administrations come and go—knew that the team from Austin would face the same friction as all administrations, Democratic and Republican, that come in with such rhetoric.

But the Bush team got a shot their recent predecessors didn't: the Department of Homeland Security. They built an enormous agency from scratch, vowing to create the kind of shiny, swiftly clicking apparatus they envisioned for the government as a whole. Judging by the DHS response to Katrina, we can breathe a sigh of relief that they didn't expand their bureaucracy vendetta further.

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card presided over the creation of the DHS. He cooked up the second-largest department in the history of government in secret. "I knew that if word leaked out, the bureaucracies would defend themselves," he told me in an interview shortly after Bush announced the department's formation in June 2002. Card had presented the president with an inch-and-a-half-thick binder of options in the cabin of Air Force One just days before. One option the president picked was to integrate FEMA into the new department. Another option Bush might now wish he'd checked off was to bring in the National Guard, too.

Card described the process of creation with delight: He leaned off the sofa and grinned as he spoke, giddy at having been able to pedal so quickly past the usual government roadblocks. The defenders of the bureaucracy were so virulent, he had to put together a small team and they took their blueprints and drafting tools into the secure bunker underneath the White House. He had tried meeting with the heads of the government agencies but made no progress. "It turned into: 'My bureaucracy is the best bureaucracy in government,' " Card said in another interview last year. "And all we need is more money and another would say my bureaucracy is the best bureaucracy and it has been around for 100 years and we don't even need money and well, if you're going to pass out money my bureaucracy could do a great job."

Tom Ridge, the first director of Homeland Security, attended those early meetings, Card remembered, "and he said: 'what are the solutions.' And almost without exception, to an agency, the solution was them. Just give us more money. I am the solution. Give us more money. No one said: I want to be part of the solution and abolish me."

Because Card saw the status quo plus more money as no solution, he put together the task force with Ridge and OMB director Mitch Daniels to find another way. "A smart group of people were put together [and] were told not to bring any bias into meeting to look at the problem and the solution," Card said. "It was a way to make sure that bureaucratic bias didn't preclude a solution. Then, bingo, out popped a solution in the dark of night, and it was the only way that the solution could have been presented."

We now know the solution has failed. In the coming months we'll have a chance to learn just how, and in how many different ways, that bureaucracy-free, executive-authority-channeling machine sprang its wires, and whether the architects share the blame with the operators.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126028/

this just in
The Spirit of New Orleans
What hasn't washed away.
By Nancy Lemann
Posted Friday, Sept. 9, 2005, at 4:09 PM PT

A remoteness both geographical and psychic isolates New Orleans and accounts partly for its exotic strangeness. It is unusual, and that is its mark of distinction. In that atmosphere of isolation, a lot of things have time to develop. A lot of personality, a lot of talent. Some desperation. The climate is enervating. There is a certain amount of suffering involved. Most people know that it is a city of sharp divisions. There is a downtrodden population that was stricken long before the hurricane. That is a scandal that has always been around the South, after all, having originated there. It is a feature of New Orleans as defining as its climate.

People ask me about the city and its culture. What I have just described is its culture. There is a small strata of society possessed of privilege and dynamism. There is that vast downtrodden population. In some respects, the latter historically propped up the former. The heart and soul of New Orleans was always the black people. There is an elegance on that side of the coin equal to anything on the other.

Being swept away by a cataclysm has left total chaos. Everyone's life is changed by the shock, even from a distance. We can't yet discern the magnitude of the impact for all. So far, it appears that the core historic architecture of New Orleans is standing. The owners in these neighborhoods are dispersed to various other cities of the South, with an overwhelming majority in Baton Rouge and Houston, where many local businesses have set up offices. They must remain there for an as-yet indeterminate amount of months. They didn't go to the Superdome. They did not have to endure that total loss of everything you could possess except your spirit. But being swept away by a cataclysm is a unique experience they all share. They all had to leave, sooner or later, and for some it was later rather than sooner.

My people in New Orleans had hurricane fatigue (as the New York Times so accurately called it). They were burned last time by going along with the evacuation order and had vowed never to do it again: two days in gridlocked traffic with family members and pets crammed into one car and then crammed into one motel room in Mississippi somewhere—and then nothing happened. Or what usually happens happened: The air turns green, the leaves swirl around in the wind, then everything becomes very still, the golf course looks like a ballroom, there is a sensation of nameless excitement, and then at the last minute the hurricane diverts and goes somewhere else, usually to Biloxi.

But this was not like that. My father and stepmother battened down the hatches and at first they were all right. My father, being a bit of a mad genius type, had a huge generator on a strategically built platform mathematically rigged to surmount rising flood tides according to various water levels. They had power. They survived the storm itself without flooding in their neighborhood. A friend, also an elderly gent, walked over with his dog to stay with them as his anxious children somehow directed him to do from afar. They had dinner. They had air conditioning in three rooms. My father smoked cigars. My stepmother displayed her nerves of steel and my father retained his stoicism. But then the levees broke and the water kept rising. A ghostly voice appeared on the radio telling everyone to evacuate, yet we could only think: How?

After two days of anxiety from afar—and nerves of steel within—cooler minds than mine helped galvanize them and plan their escape on the one operable route out of town. My dynamic stepsisters contacted an ex-Green Beret down the street who organized a small convoy and other details. He cleared downed trees in the way and established the route out. He was meant to accompany them, but at the last minute, after getting them ready, stayed behind to help others. They made their way down Tchoupitoulas to the bridge over the river that was then still open, but is now closed, and made their way to Houston.

By the time they left there was no other traffic on the road. When they got to Houston they could finally crack. I was filled with ecstatic relief for six hours at their safe removal. Then I crashed.

My father focused on getting cigars and going back to work, and that was reassuring. If you're ever swept away by a cataclysm, bring your cigars; that helps. We are fixing to celebrate his 80^th birthday. I have always admired devotion to the city like his. Another thing about New Orleans is that people tend to stay there through many generations. That also fosters a distinct personality. This is not the first crisis people there have been through. These are stalwart souls. Some may now relocate—we really don't know yet. I did that long ago. In which case you're like any exile: You still have a memory and a dream, a knowledge and understanding, and that can still be a huge part of your life.

Black and white alike, there are a lot of people in New Orleans who have never flown in a plane before, or even left town. It is curious, but even among the sophisticated you will find in New Orleans the type of person who has been out of town once in his life, for two weeks. And yet this type of person can be more worldly than the Ancient Mariner. And then there's the type who has been everywhere and who seeks to travel far, but has never had another home, and could not imagine one.

Sometimes it is more daring to stay home. In the case of New Orleans, where conditions are adverse and isolated, I always considered it more daring to stay than to go. I'd say you have to be fairly madcap. But most are waiting only to return. And I hardly need add that your basic New Orleans person is fairly madcap. To relocate is not an option that most who have options would consider. The attachment is too deep. They are staunch and stoic people, despite their famed gaiety. A spirit can travel—it has traveled with me—and that is something you can take with you. But there will still be a place. They would not give it up.

Nancy Lemann is the author of Lives of the Saints, The Ritz of the Bayou, and Sportsman's Paradise.

 

press box
Rehnquist's Drug Habit
The man in full.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, Sept. 9, 2005, at 2:28 PM PT

As we usher the 16^th chief justice of the United States to his celestial reward, let us remember him in full. He labored successfully to return power to the states, treated colleagues with warmth and respect, was said to be a gregarious boss, and, inspired by a judge's costume he saw in the performance of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, added four silly gold stripes to each sleeve of his judicial robe.

And for the nine years between 1972 and the end of 1981, William Rehnquist consumed great quantities of the potent sedative-hypnotic Placidyl. So great was Rehnquist's Placidyl habit, dependency, or addiction—depending on how you regard long-term drug use—that by the last quarter of 1981 he began slurring his speech in public, became tongue-tied while pronouncing long words, and sometimes had trouble finishing his thoughts.

The parade of news stories and TV segments that followed Rehnquist's death made little mention of his affair with Placidyl. New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse offered more than any reporter, but still just 57 words near the end of a 6,100-word story. The Boston Globe made a two-sentence mention. The Washington Post story about his death ignored this chapter of his life, as did the Los Angeles Times.

(Slate can't brag on this score. David Plotz's 1998 "Assessment" and last week's Rehnquist retrospective-obituaries by Dahlia Lithwick, Walter Dellinger, and Richard W. Garnett avoided the topic.)

Obviously the lede of the chief's obituary should not have read, "William H. Rehnquist, a man with a jones for Placidyl, died yesterday. He also served as chief justice of the United States for 19 years." But the reluctance to explore this part of Rehnquist's life at any length illustrates a general rule of journalism: Most obituarists prefer the airbrush to the sharpened pen when it comes to the famous and powerful. In Rehnquist's case, reporters can't make the "I was on deadline" excuse. The chief justice gave generous advance notice of his impending death for months, and novella-length pieces like the Greenhouse obit were hardly banged out over Labor Day weekend.

Recounting Rehnquist's Placidyl story isn't just a bit of journalistic blood sport at the expense of a dead man. His unorthodox drug consumption first made headlines in 1982, when the Washington Post (owned by the same corporation that owns Slate) broke the story, when he entered the hospital to get off the stuff. The Placidyl episode was also news in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan upgraded Rehnquist from associate justice by nominating him as chief. A confidential report on Rehnquist's medical history prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee, which contained more details about his habit, was leaked to the press.

The Rehnquist story deserves a third airing today if only to illustrate the ugly double standards that excuse extreme drug use by the powerful, especially if their connection is a prescribing doctor, and condemns to draconian prison terms the guy who purchases his drugs on the street. Reviewing Rehnquist's tale one more time also demonstrates the reluctance of the Senate—and some members of the press—to grade the mental competency of judges and judicial nominees.

The 1986 medical report on Rehnquist described him as seriously "dependent" on Placidyl from 1977 to 1981. He often consumed three month's worth of the drug in one month before requesting more from Dr. Freeman H. Cary, the attending physician to Congress, who prescribed it. Anonymous sources told the Post that Cary first prescribed Placidyl to Rehnquist in 1971 to help him sleep through his severe back pains, but "Cary reportedly told the FBI that Rehnquist had taken it before."

What is Placidyl? Some news clips, such as the Boston Globe obit, call it a painkiller. Yes, it's a painkiller—in the sense that a fistfull of Ambien is a pain killer. You take it and it knocks you out. Placidyl is a "sedative-hypnotic" developed to help insomniacs sleep. See this period advertisement for Placidyl and this one, too. The abuse potential of Placidyl has always been rated as high: An associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University told the Post in 1986 that it was "a strong drug I would use only under very exceptional circumstance" and that he wouldn't give it to people for more than one or two weeks. He added that it shouldn't be given to patients who suffered both pain and insomnia.

The standard dose for adults is 500 milligrams, taken at bedtime. Rehnquist initially took 200 milligrams daily but by 1981 was taking 1,500 milligrams a day. Increasing dosage indicates drug dependency, the Johns Hopkins professor explained. For more about Placidyl's potency, see this "product information" from 1971 distributed by the Abbott Laboratories, the manufacturer in the early 1970s, and reprinted in Licit and Illicit Drugs by Edward M. Brecher.

After the Post broke the story about Rehnquist's drug habit, other news organizations reported that his "health problem" had been apparent to Supreme Court observers for three months before he was hospitalized on Dec. 27, 1981, (UPI) and that "reporters and lawyers at the Court" had notice Rehnquist's speaking problem "in recent months" (New York Times).

According to a Jan. 4, 1982, New York Times account, Rehnquist sought help with the drug in December 1981 because it no longer relieved his pain. He entered George Washington University Hospital on Dec. 27. According to the physician spokesman for the hospital he suffered "disturbances in mental clarity, characterized by distorted perceptions," as doctors weaned him off the drug. The spokesman added that after his Placidyl was cut off, Rehnquist began ''hearing things and seeing things that other people did not hear and see.'' The doctors took his dose back up before re-weaning him. By mid-January, Rehnquist returned to the bench.

When Rehnquist's drug problem became an issue during the 1986 confirmation hearings, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, defended Rehnquist in a Post story, saying he got into trouble with Placidyl because he was "a very compliant patient" who "followed the advice" of his doctors. Ah, yes, one of the most brilliant jurists of his time was the victim of his rotten doctors for almost a decade! Are we to believe that one of the court's sharpest minds never availed himself of a Physicians' Desk Reference for independent medical information, or in any way tried to educate himself about the drug he was taking in larger and larger quantities? The Senate Judiciary Committee asked Rehnquist no questions about his drug use, and he was, of course, confirmed as chief justice. The debate over whether Rehnquist's drug use might be relevant to his fitness to serve as chief never got started.

The Rehnquist narrative presented here owes much to legal scholar David J. Garrow's "Mental Decrepitude on the U.S. Supreme Court: The Historical Case for a 28^th Amendment," a 50,000-word article in the fall 2000 issue of the University of Chicago Law Review. Garrow believes a constitutional amendment should be passed forcing judges to retire at 75, and he inquires about the mental competency of a number of Supreme Court justices, including Rehnquist and Thurgood Marshall. Most court observers now concede that Marshall had lost much of his hearing and half his bag of marbles by his final years of service on the court. Garrow blames the Supreme Court press corps for not aggressively covering either such mental slippage or Rehnquist's "publicly visible struggle with deleterious overmedication."

One fascinating aspect of Rehnquist's drug habit is that nobody has ever demonstrated that his performance ever flagged during his decade-long binge. USA Today Supreme Court correspondent Joan Biskupic didn't cover the court during Rehnquist's drug days, but in examining the papers of justices Brennan, Powell, Marshall, and Blackmun, she says, "There's no sign that [Rehnquist] wasn't keeping up with his work" over the period he was taking Placidyl.

Tony Mauro, who covers the court for American Lawyer Media's Legal Times, says Rehnquist's speech problem manifested itself just as he joined the beat. "I do remember him speaking oddly," he says, but he didn't give it much thought. "In retrospect, I should have. A lot of us [reporters] felt that way."

A defense can be made for not including the Placidyl saga in Rehnquist's obituaries. As the Washington Post Supreme Court correspondent Charles Lane points out, his story was not intended to be "a complete biography." Lane has written about Rehnquist's drug use in the context of his thyroid cancer.

But am I unfair to link the reluctance of journalists to zoom in for a close-up on a dead person's warts to a general deference to authority or, in the case of Rehnquist, a class bias that predisposes them to look past his drug habit as purely a medical problem? I think not. This was a watershed event in Rehnquist's life. Did the experience—being dazed on drugs, humiliated in the press, getting off Placidyl—contribute to his jurisprudence? How could it not have? Supreme Court correspondents, start your word processors.

******

Before you send e-mail, don't even think of accusing me of being a Rehnquist hata: If you were to Venn-diagram my judicial philosophy (such as it is) against that of Rehnquist's and Justice Ruth Ginsburg's, I'd overlap with Rehnquist. That e-mail is slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

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Placidyl Information Distributed by Abbot Laboratories to Physicians, Circa 1971:

Patients who are taking PLACIDYL or other [central nervous system]-acting drugs should be cautioned about the possible combined exaggerated effects with alcohol, barbiturates, tranquilizers or other central nervous system depressants [that] might result in blurring of vision, paralysis of accommodation and profound hypnosis.

Patients also should be cautioned concerning driving a motor vehicle, operating machinery, or other hazardous operations requiring alertness shortly after taking PLACIDYL.

PLACIDYL should be administered with caution [to] patients with suicidal tendencies and large quantities of the drug should not be prescribed.

Psychological and Physical Dependence: PLACIDYL, LIKE OTHER SEDATIVE-HYPNOTIC DRUGS, HAS THE POTENTIAL. … FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHYSICAL DEPENDENCE. INSTANCES OF SEVERE WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOMS, INCLUDING CONVULSIONS AND [DELIRIUM] CLINICALLY SIMILAR TO THOSE SEEN WITH BARBITURATES, HAVE BEEN REPORTED IN PATIENTS TAKING REGULAR DOSES AS LOW AS 1000 MG. PER DAY OVER A PERIOD OF TIME WHEN THE DRUG WAS SUDDENLY DISCONTINUED. [Capitals in original.]

In view of the potential of PLACIDYL (ethchlorvynol) for inducing dependence, prolonged administration of the drug is not recommended.

Patients, particularly those known to be addiction-prone, or those who are likely to increase dosage Of PLACIDYL on their own initiative, should be observed for evidence of signs or symptoms which may indicate possible early withdrawal or abstinence symptoms. Signs and symptoms associated with withdrawal and abstinence include unusual anxiety, tremor, ataxia [muscular incoordination], slurring of speech, memory loss, perceptual distortions, irritability, agitation and delirium. Other less well defined signs and symptoms, not necessarily due to withdrawal and abstinence [,] may include anorexia, nausea, or vomiting, weakness, dizziness, sweating, muscle twitching and weight loss. Abrupt discontinuance Of PLACIDYL following prolonged overdosage may result in convulsions and [delirium].

Treatment of a patient who manifests withdrawal symptoms from PLACIDYL abuse involves readministration of the drug to approximate the same level of chronic intoxication which existed before the abrupt discontinuance. … A gradual, stepwise reduction of dosage may then be made over a period of days or weeks. The patient must be hospitalized or closely observed and gives general supportive care as indicated.

PRECAUTIONS: … Patients who respond unpredictably to barbiturates or alcohol, or who exhibit excitement and release of inhibitions in association with such agents may also react in this way to PLACIDYL.

Rarely, patients may exhibit symptoms suggestive of an unusual susceptibility to the drug: prolonged hypnosis, profound muscular weakness, excitement, hysteria, or syncope [fainting] without marked hypotension.

In occasional patients the drug appears to be absorbed very rapidly and may produce transient giddiness or ataxia. Should this occur, a glass of milk or other food should be given with subsequent doses of the drug, or the drug discontinued.

ADVERSE REACTIONS: Hypotension [low blood pressure], nausea or vomiting, gastric upset, aftertaste, blurring of vision, dizziness, facial numbness, and allergic reaction typified by urticaria [hives] have been reported following PLACIDYL (ethchlorvynol) administration. Mild "hangover" and symptoms of mild excitation have occurred in some patients. …

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

 

culturebox
Star Gazing
Unearthing the underworld of celebrity photography.
By Brett Sokol
Posted Friday, Sept. 9, 2005, at 11:55 AM PT

Click here to read an accompanying slide-show essay about the anatomy of a tabloid photo.

"This is the five minutes I love the most, when it's just me and my scooter," Seth Browarnik yells back to me over the whine of his Vespa's accelerating engine. "Right now is the only time that's really peaceful," he adds with a laugh, as I nervously grip his waist. Peaceful is the last word I'd use. Browarnik ignores my protests and continues answering calls and scanning the incoming stream of text messages on his cell phone, pausing only to maneuver his speeding scooter between a large puddle and an even larger SUV.

Nearly half of greater Miami is without electricity on this late Friday night—the result of Hurricane Katrina's initial landfall. But here on South Beach, the MTV Video Music Awards are hardly interrupted. After a round of rescheduled flights, young Hollywood and much of the music industry have finally converged on the area, which means it is time for the 27-year-old Browarnik, one of Miami's best-known celebrity photographers, to go to work.

As we pull up in front of Privé, an exclusive Miami nightclub, Browarnik looks particularly focused: Starlets Jessica Simpson and Pamela Anderson have been sighted. A half-dozen other photographers have already staked out the site, but Browarnik dismisses them as mere "paparazzi"—stalkers with zoom lenses who remain stranded on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, he pulls out his own digital camera from under his scooter's seat and wades into the scrimmage. After being spotted by the club's guards, Browarnik is waved past the velvet rope.

Privé, like many of South Beach's tonier nightspots, keeps Browarnik on an exclusive retainer, hoping that when his celebrity pics are featured in tabloids, the club's name will appear in the caption. Occasionally, Browarnik has to remind his clients of the benefits of their relationship: "One of [them] started complaining, 'You're making all this money [from the tabloids] off photos from our club, and we're paying you on top of that. How does this benefit us?' Are you kidding me? I'm getting your name in Us Weekly every week and you're still not happy?"The celebs themselves, at least those with films or fragrances to promote, are happy to play along with this business arrangement—as long as they're being photographed by someone like Browarnik, whose self-described goal is "to make people look even better than they do in real life." Indeed, according to Browarnik, it was one of Anderson's companions who texted him the group's exact itinerary. After all, Anderson does have a new book to plug, and with Browarnik there's no need to worry about "gotcha" shots. Browarnik is comfortable with this implicit role as a part of the army of handlers that carefully manages a celebrity's persona. By staying on the inside, he distinguishes himself from the paparazzi. In fact, Browarnik often spends as much time worrying about hidden photographers as the celebrities themselves, lest he catch the blame for an unflattering image that makes the tabloids.

Inside Privé, we head to the VIP section. Browarnik confers with a hostess and then grimaces, visibly crestfallen. Jessica Simpson has already left. His only consolation is a shot of a woozy Anderson kissing the towering drag queen Elaine Lancaster, a colorful personality in her own right, but ultimately too little-known beyond Miami to excite editors in New York. And for Browarnik, wowing the editors at Us Weekly and People is what this weekend is all about. The money he makes from tabloid sales—averaging from several hundred to several thousand dollars for a hotly desired exclusive picture—is important. But so is building a reputation—Browarnik ultimately hopes to join the rarified ranks of celebrity photographers David LaChapelle and Patrick McMullan.

He's on his way: What began as a hobby after he dropped out of Florida International University six years ago has become a lucrative career—and an implicit rebuke to the photography professor there who told him he lacked the discipline to go pro. On most nights, Browarnik races among the high-end lounges, restaurants, and hotel bars that have come to define South Beach as an adult playground. MTV's decision to stage its awards show in Miami has merely sent his typically frenzied weekend into overdrive.

By 3 a.m. Sunday we find ourselves inside the Setai hotel's sumptuous penthouse, where the vibe is promising. Rap beats boom and the air reeks of marijuana. Yahoo! foots the bill for the evening: The company has corralled hip-hop producer Pharrell into hosting a fete for its new downloadable music service, and Browarnik's been hired to document the shindig. He couldn't be happier—there in the middle of it all sits the A-lister he has been hunting, Jessica Simpson, flanked by her husband Nick Lachey and the actress Carmen Electra.

He immediately launches into a playful banter, putting the three at ease and asking for permission before even raising his camera. Electra tests a sultry pout, and actor Jeremy Piven leans in, egging her on: "Own it! Own it!"

Electra, a South Beach nightlife veteran, is familiar with Browarnik, so little ice-breaking is necessary. But for those meeting him for the first time, it's often the hulking security crews who smooth the way. Earlier that day, Browarnik had backed off of a skittish Hilary Duff. Not 15 minutes later, he found himself pulled into her hotel room. Her new bodyguard had previously worked for Diddy, and since he vouched that Browarnik had photographed his old boss's Miami visits for years, Browarnik was deemed safe.

After a rapid-fire series of pictures, Browarnik bounds from Electra to an adjoining couch, perching at the feet of Paris Hilton and hip-hop producer Scott Storch. Next to them, Nicky Hilton parks herself across the lap of her current boyfriend, Entourage actor Kevin Connolly. Within moments, they too offer up their best come-hither looks.

Browarnik makes his way back to me, beaming. I nudge him in the direction of a striking blonde attempting to swallow the tongue of a well-known star—who is most definitely not her "official" paramour. Browarnik takes a sidelong glance and simply shrugs, keeping his camera at his side. It's a moment tailor-made for the gossip pages, yet Browarnik doesn't appear titillated. "You're not going to take that picture?" I ask.

He rolls his eyes: "My whole career is based on trust. If I took a shot like that, my reputation would be tarnished. Over!"

"What if you saw a shot the tabloids would pay a million dollars for? You could be set for life in five minutes."

"I'd rather make that million dollars the right way, by becoming friends with the celebrities, getting them comfortable, taking the picture whenever they're ready. I've worked too long to throw it all away for one shot."

"You've never even been tempted?"

Browarnik has just enough time to stare back incredulously before running off again. Gwen Stefani has arrived.

Brett Sokol is a columnist for the Miami New Times, where he covers pop culture and politics.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125481/

food
A Confederacy of Lunches
New Orleans' best meals, and how to make them.
By Sara Dickerman
Posted Friday, Sept. 9, 2005, at 11:50 AM PT

New Orleans was, of course, and will be again, a great city to eat in. One hundred years before the Cajun-food craze hit its apogee in the 1980s, outsiders were already curious about the distinctive food of New Orleans, the unusual city that wasn't quite French, nor Spanish, nor American. By 1900, several Creole cookbooks had been published in English, and the city's grandest restaurants were already catering to rich tourists. Some of these establishments remained in operation until New Orleans was flooded last week. Until the city reopens for business, we could do worse than conjure the region by cooking its signature dishes. To that end, Slate offers a basic (and necessarily incomplete) primer on the greatest foods of Southern Louisiana—and how to cook them.

First, a clarification. Many people conflate Creole and Cajun cooking, which is understandable, because today they are served in the same restaurants. But the two cuisines are distinct. As its name suggests, the city of New Orleans was founded by the French in 1718 and then passed into Spanish hands for a few decades until Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803. Being a port as well as a swamp prone to population-depleting disease, the area was generally welcoming to European immigrants of many stripes; it also became home to many black Africans and Caribbeans who didn't have much say in the matter. Along the way, Louisiana cuisine retained its French backbone but adopted other ingredients and techniques: the deep frying, okra, hot peppers, and sweet potatoes of African and Afro-Caribbean cooking; the rice, sherry, and garlic of the Spanish; and the smoky sausages made by German newcomers.

Creole cooking was an urban cuisine, produced for New Orleanians of French and Spanish descent, who had been dubbed criollos by the Spaniards. Their French-speaking black cooks learned to prepare refined dishes based on the earthy ingredients that were plentiful in the nearby lakes, swamps, and the Gulf of Mexico. Crawfish bisque, for example, is made with lowly mudbugs, but the soup is puréed and strained, then served over a bed of rice and garnished with crayfish bodies, themselves filled with a tail-meat-and-rice stuffing. Cajun food, on the other hand, is country fare, cooked by the descendents of the Acadians, French Catholics who were squeezed out of Canada and eventually settled in the bayous near New Orleans in the second half of the 18^th century. The Cajuns, so renamed by the Native Americans they encountered along the way, specialized in one-pot feasts that included everything they could find in the water, the air, and the forest. Because the Cajuns are stellar woodsmen and -women, that list was long: Raccoon, possum, squirrel, crab, turtle, catfish, alligator, and doves have all been set forth on Cajun tables. Despite their differences, Cajun and Creole cooking share a French foundation, and both bear the indelible mark of Louisiana's immigrant culture.

In the rest of the country, Cajun food began to attract interest in 1971, when a tippling, patois-speaking cook named Justin Wilson started making it on television. But the Cajun craze really took hold in the late '70s and early '80s, when a Cajun chef named Paul Prudhomme caused a national sensation with his huge, jolly stature and his blackened redfish—the product of a not particularly traditional high-heat cooking technique he developed. Since Prudhomme had been the chef at Commander's Palace, one of New Orleans' grandest old Creole restaurants, the difference between Cajun and Creole cooking, already muddied, became almost totally obscured. But elements of both cuisines caught on, as chefs became infatuated with the lusty flavors and the homegrown but exotic ingredients (redfish! crawfish! andouille!) and developed an exaggerated perception of how much hot pepper Louisianans use in their cooking. After too many scorched gumbos cooked by carpetbagging chefs, the fad has subsided. But the real food of Southern Louisiana remains a revelation in its layering of flavors, and its constant reinvention of a few key flavoring agents.

Gumbo is one of the great Cajun catchall dishes, as the all-inclusive recipe I've linked to suggests. It's a hearty soup, almost always seasoned with the Cajun-Creole trinity of aromatics—onions, bell pepper, and celery—plus some, but not necessarily a lot of, hot red pepper. Gumbo can contain nearly any meat, because it is the seasoning and the thickeners that make gumbo gumbo. Two common thickeners are slithery okra, which makes broth viscous when it is cooked, and gumbo filé, the powdered sassafras leaves that Cajuns picked up from the Choctaw Indians. But it is a fundamentally French soup thickener—the roux—that defines Cajun gumbo. While there are Cajun and Creole uses for pale and medium brown roux, to make a true gumbo the roux must be stirred and watched and cooked until it is molasses brown—nigh black, but not burnt. For no matter how rustic the cuisine it is, it is not careless: A burned roux, every Cajun cookbook admonishes, must be thrown away.

Gumbo z'herbes, on the other hand, is a classic Creole dish, one thickened with neither roux nor okra nor gumbo filé. Traditionally served on Good Friday, gumbo z'herbes is a ragout of mixed bitter greens—turnip tops, mustard greens, kale—together with herbs and some country ham and hot red pepper for flavor. After weeks of winter and Lenten fasting, the greens were at once a celebration of spring and a restorative tonic. Best of all, for every kind of green that goes into green gumbo, eaters are supposed to make a new friend in the coming year.

Étouffée, classically made with the buggy-looking crawfish, is basically a low-liquid gumbo, flavored with celery, onion, scallions, red pepper, and hot pepper and served over rice. Whether to use a roux and/or tomato in étouffée is a subject of much debate. What is not debated is the essential enrichening presence of crawfish fat, which is scraped from the thorax of cooked crawfish, or better yet gathered from live crawfish torn in half before cooking. If you overlook it, your étouffée will never be more than second rate. (Those of us without crawfish on hand might consider making a crabmeat version of the dish.)

Red beans and rice is one of many rice-and-beans dishes that can be found across the Caribbean and the American South, but the Creole staple sets itself apart not just by the color of its beans, but by the use of French aromatic pot seasonings like carrots, onions, parsley, and celery. Add in smokey Creole sausages with their hint of the Alsace, and a subtle but essential hit of red pepper, and the dish is as distinctly New Orleans as Louis Armstrong, who signed his letters "Red beans and ricely yours."

Jambalaya is the ultimate Louisiana rice dish, likely a variant of paella and a relic of the city's Spanish rule. Since jambalayas often include heavily smoked tasso ham, the name may come from the Spanish jamon or the French jambon, but it has also been linked to the Provençal rice dish jambalaia. Like gumbo, jambalaya welcomes all creatures. "The secret of a good jambalaya," wrote the late Justin Wilson, "is that every grain of rice is supposed to taste like the meat that's cooked with it." Like roux, jambalaya gets its flavor from patient browning—in this case, of meat and aromatics at the beginning of cooking.

Turtle soup—although you can't get much swampier than turtles—as it is famously served at Commander's Palace, is less Cajun than Creole, with its blond roux, and the complex fragrances of sherry and Worcestershire. It is also a reminder that New Orleans serves as a kind of museum of fine dining: Turtle soup used to be de rigueur in grand 19^th-century restaurants, and now Commander's and Galatoire's are among the few places where it survives.

Creole cooking is particularly gifted when it comes to the Gulf's plentiful oysters. This is the land of oysters Rockefeller (oysters broiled in herb butter); oysters en brochette (skewered oysters with caper sauce); and oysters Bienville (oysters with shrimp topping), but not all oyster dishes are so elegant. The oyster loaf is rough and ready fare: a baguette filled with fried oysters and dressed with tartar sauce, pickled okra, lettuce, and tomato. It is good for drinking, and for its aftereffects: Oyster loaf is also known as La Médiatrice, once offered by husbands as peace offerings to their wives after another late night on the town.

Of course, what New Orleans and the Gulf Coast need most is financial help. But while you are giving (and you may want to consider this fund for restaurant workers), it is also a graceful gesture to fill your kitchen with the very Louisiana fragrance of onion, pepper, celery, and nearly, but not quite, burned flour.

Sara Dickerman is a cook and freelance food writer in Seattle.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125824/

 

 

dispatches
Dispatch From New Orleans
What it smells like.
By Josh Levin
Updated Monday, Sept. 12, 2005, at 9:02 AM PT

New Orleans is a small town, and it's even smaller when 99 percent of the town goes away. On Broadway near the Tulane campus, I run into a family friend who's just been salvaging some computers from his law office. A minute later we see Dr. Lance Hill, who gained local fame for organizing the grassroots campaign against David Duke in the early '90s. Hill, who's wearing an orange hat with "RELIEF WORKER" written on it in black magic marker, says his elderly neighbors won't leave their homes because they're afraid they'll be seen, rounded up, and forced to leave town. Hill sets out food, water, and mosquito repellant under an overturned above-ground pool nearby and then blows a whistle that he wears around his neck. "It's like feeding feral cats," he says. When some cops tried to get him to leave town by telling him he'd have to go to Houston to get a tetanus shot, Hill stood his ground. "I'd rather get lockjaw than live in Houston," he says.

My day began in St. Gabriel, the tiny town just south of Baton Rouge where FEMA has set up a crew of morticians, funeral-home directors, forensic dentists, and the like to run tests on the bodies that come in. Fifty-nine bodies have passed through the converted town hall so far; the makeshift lab is equipped to process 130 a day. FEMA keeps us all behind barricades a good distance from the site, but this place feels like death no matter how far away you stand. The only people I see working are digging a giant hole in the ground. It's not what it looks like, a cop tells me—they're looking for a busted water main.

In New Orleans a few hours later, I see my first dead body. Well, at least the Army guys I run into tell me it's a dead body—all I can tell is that it's a big black garbage bag with something pretty big inside. The bagged body on the shoulder of the I-10 East overpass bothers me a lot less, though, than what's beneath it. Below the elevated highway, there's standing water for miles in every direction. The water must be at least waist high—sometimes it's top-of-the-stop-sign high and halfway-up-the-house high—and it's mostly a drab gray or olive green, like people have been using it to wash paint from their hands. There are oil slicks floating on the surface. Lots of people have been asking me if the city smells bad. Yesterday, when I stuck to high ground, everything smelled like New Orleans: bad, but the kind of bad you get to know and love. But this stuff is vile and sulfurous, the sort of stench that sends carpets to the Dumpster and cars to the junkyard.

Death is following me around today—when I stop the car right before the Orleans Ave./Vieux Carre sign on I-10 East, the first thing I see on the right side of the overpass is St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. The graveyard, which opened for business in 1789, is the oldest cemetery in New Orleans. Water passes through the front gates with no resistance and licks the bottom of the ancient-looking aboveground tombs. It looks like the ruins of a lost civilization.

The water rises as I head east, nearly reaching the roofs of the squattest houses. The only bright colors in this drab, fetid sea come from the roof of Ernie K-Doe's Mother-In-Law Lounge. The building looks waterlogged, but the K-Doe-as-Indian-chief mural still pops even from hundreds of yards away. I spent one of my favorite New Orleans nights here five years ago, listening to the now-deceased New Orleans music legend sing about his tip jar while his wife Antoinette yelled at him from the PA system she kept behind the bar. At the end of the show, he led the crowd in a rousing rendition of "White Boy/Black Boy," the song he pledged would unite the races.

A few exits up, I catch up with a company from the 82^nd Airborne Division. Lt. Col. Troy Stephenson tells me they spotted an abandoned van a few days ago with "KILL THE WHITE BITCHES" painted on the side. "You can kind of gather there was some ethnic tension," he says. Stephenson says his men have had much more success in fishing people out of these poor, black neighborhoods than the New Orleans police. Stephenson says the local police often take fire from holdouts when they send rescue crews in, but his men haven't been shot at once. Maybe that's because the relationship between the NOPD and the black community is so fraught. But maybe it's just because the Army guys have gigantic automatic weapons.

The beret-wearing soldiers sit in their Humvees and spit chewing tobacco into the floodwaters as they wait for three boat crews to come back from a rescue mission. The access ramp they've been launching boats from is covered with water bottles, pudding cups, and military meals ready to eat—the remnants of a supply drop made for those who sought shelter on the elevated highway. After being assured that MREs have a "shelf life of a billion years," I crack open a package of wheat bread that's probably been sitting on the ground for a few days. It's not terrible—something like undercooked pizza dough.

The inflatable, black boats come back empty—the crews spotted a dog, but he ran up a tree and onto a roof before they could grab him. A few minutes later, though, the Coast Guard drops off a delirious-looking, shirtless man named Ben they found somewhere in the high water. The 82^nd Airborne scoops him up and takes him along as we drive over by Lake Pontchartrain to meet up with some other rescue teams. The lake is beautiful, bright blue and calm, and I remember how water is supposed to look. The convoy stops and we step outside into the sweet-smelling air. Ben starts shouting—he doesn't like it here. "Colonel, I want to go," he yells. "Take me back to where you got me."

Josh Levin is a Slate assistant editor. You can e-mail him at sportsnut@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125926/

 

dispatches
Dispatch From New Orleans
The people who won't evacuate.
By Josh Levin
Posted Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005, at 10:08 AM PT

As I drive into New Orleans on the West Bank Expressway, the bruised-looking Superdome is on my left, and an abandoned, 10-foot boat sits on the shoulder to my right. Straight ahead is a phalanx of guys in fatigues. They're pointing the kinds of guns that could put a Dodge Stratus-sized hole in my Dodge Stratus. I hold up the plastic card that says I'm a writer, and they let me go. Seconds later, I'm driving over the Mississippi River on the Crescent City Connection Bridge and headed into the city.

In the two days I've been in Louisiana, I've heard enough Katrina horror stories that I'm afraid to look at water. A friend from high school waited for a week for the levels to recede enough so he could open his door and find a neighbor with a working cell phone. A seventysomething relative of a friend swam in the murky water thinking he was about to drown only to cling to a tree and eventually climb to his roof. That all happened in wet New Orleans: the Lakefront, Mid-City, and pretty much everywhere else that isn't within spitting distance of the high ground near the river. On my first day in the city, I start in the small, sheltered enclave of dry New Orleans, the arid streets between the river and St. Charles Avenue.

Cruising up and down St. Charles—the wide, mansion-filled avenue where the streetcar runs—has always been a good way to get myself reoriented to the city after being away. It's still a good place to start—as I drive toward Uptown, the damage isn't as severe as it could be, but there's enough flotsam around to steel me for the waterlogged areas. On St. Charles, sagging power lines arc just eight feet off the ground, and downed tree limbs clog the sidewalks. The road is dry as a bone, if a bit crunchy. When I get out and walk, the tiny twigs that cover the ground crack under my feet like potato chips. The weirdest sight, though, is all the Mardi Gras beads lying in the middle of the road, shaken loose from the branches that once caught and held wayward throws 50 feet off the ground.

Reports of fires in the Garden District have been all over the news, but on my abbreviated tour of the area's fancy houses I don't see any with significant structural damage. Many of the three-story private homes do carry distress signals, though. Among the hastily painted warnings on fences, walls, and gates: "GO IN AND DIE," "LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT," or the more curt "LOOTERS SHOT."

Looting may have been rampant a few days ago, but I've never felt safer in New Orleans than I do driving around today. Such are the benefits of an occupying force. High-riding military vehicles and gun-toting troops blanket every block. Every so often, someone asks me to roll down the window and show ID before waving me on, but the soldiers mostly look like they're killing time. Sitting on milk crates and folding chairs in the middle of the road. Sitting on the steps in front of Bultman Funeral Home. On Carrolton Avenue, a forklift sticks out from the front of a drugstore where a group of enterprising scofflaws used it to peel back the steel security door. For the soldiers standing guard, the novelty has long since worn off. I ask one of them what they talk about to make the days go faster. "Each other's mothers, mostly," he says.

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the authorities in New Orleans have started telling the city's few remaining residents—even those who live on dry streets and have enough gas to run their generators for months—to evacuate or else. I don't see any conversations like that, but all the folks I run into on the street (primarily white homeowners, one or two a block in the most populated areas) tell me they're not getting off their land, no way, no how. (OK, not everyone. One ponytailed guy in bedroom slippers tells me he has to skip town immediately because the city has completely run out of weed.)

A few blocks off St. Charles in the Garden District, a woman named Suzie Lyons leads a petting-zoo-sized convoy of small animals up Seventh Street. Lyons says she's broken into at least 30 houses at the owners' behest—kicking down doors, breaking glass, finding hide-a-keys—to feed and rescue dogs and cats that owners left behind in their rush to evacuate. "Can you imagine if they die in their houses—how that would smell?" she asks.

Mixed in with the people who won't leave are a few who sneaked back in, mandatory evacuation be damned. When I see a guy wearing scrubs, I roll down my window to ask what hospital he works at. Turns out he's not a doctor—a dentist friend of his gave him scrubs so he could sneak past the security detail.

On Napoleon a few blocks north of the bar Tipitina's, I find a normal New Orleans scene: five guys, several shirtless, drinking cold beers on the porch. In the shade next to the neighbor's house, there are enough bottles of liquor and mixers—Maker's Mark, Crown Royal, pineapple juice, Dr. Pepper—to keep the party going for at least a few more days.

Kirby Gee, who owns the house, works as a bartender at Miss Mae's down the street. He says the bar did pretty good business even through last Wednesday—the cops kept them in shotgun shells as long as they kept pouring drinks. Gee says the police taught everyone around here how to loot. They were the first to bust into the grocery store down the street and the Wal-Mart a mile or so up the road. He also says they took to breaking into car lots in the days after the storm and driving off with brand-new Escalades. I'm not sure whether to believe him, until a cop car drives buy towing what looks like a mint-condition Corvette Stingray. "And these are the people telling us to evacuate," says one of the porch dwellers. Every time a Humvee rolls by, a few of the guys make sure to flash the peace sign.

Driving toward the river on Magazine Street, I see Audubon Park on my left and pull into the parking lot. A guy driving a motorized cart and smoking a pipe passes by, and I ask him if I can hop on and ride around with him. Don Meinert, who works maintaining the park's small golf course, says he's been living in the maintenance shed since his house got deluged by floodwater. The golf course looks like you could play on it tomorrow—in fact, Meinert says a couple of National Guard guys have played a few holes in the last couple of days.

The park is completely dry but there's lots of tree damage, mostly to younger, smaller trees. When we see one felled giant oak, Meinert stops the cart. "That was a good tree," he says. "I miss it, but it's gone, ain't nothing I can do about it." As we're winding back to the Magazine Street side, Meinert stops the cart again. "Don't tell me they did that," he says, looking toward a group of soldiers who've set up camp 100 yards away. He says it again, more loudly: "Don't tell me they did that." I'm assuming they chopped down a tree or something—there are a couple of big ones down in our field of vision. "They're flying the Texas flag," he says. "Ain't gonna let no other flag fly over this state."

Josh Levin is a Slate assistant editor. You can e-mail him at sportsnut@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125820/

dispatches
My Year of Hurricanes
Going back to work after losing everything.
By Blake Bailey
Posted Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005, at 9:34 AM PT

Blake Bailey and his wife lost their home and their possessions to Hurricane Katrina. Two months before, they had moved to New Orleans with their 1-year-old daughter; both had spent much of their adult lives in the city, and they'd returned so that Bailey's wife could complete her doctoral internship (clinical psychology) at Tulane. Bailey, meanwhile, had resumed work on his biography of John Cheever. Because the impact of the disaster looks like it will be a long-term ordeal for many families, Slate has asked Bailey to write a weekly dispatch chronicling his family's efforts to put their lives together again. Last week, he wrote about the immediate aftermath of the hurricane here.

Last week my wife and I rode out Hurricane Katrina at a friend's house in Oxford, Miss., watching the Weather Channel and checking online until we were pretty sure our home in New Orleans—where we'd lived all of two months—was a total loss. Then it was back to work.

At such times, I find work is the only anodyne. On the morning of 9/11, for example, we watched TV long enough to see the south tower fall and maybe 15 replays of the plane hitting it. Then I went upstairs and worked until dinner, writing almost five finished pages—twice my usual output. While I was working, I felt fine; afterward, though, I checked e-mail and learned that Nostradamus had predicted 9/11 ("Two brothers torn apart by Chaos ... ") and that World War III was imminent.

In Oxford, I began multitasking as soon as I saw, online, the placid Atlantis that used to be my neighborhood. While our baby daughter rolled around the carpet with a dachshund named Bud, I called Travelocity to cancel a Labor Day flight from New Orleans to Cleveland; then, while Travelocity kept me on hold, I used my cell phone to call our insurance company in New Orleans. It was odd to hear the pleasant recorded message asking whether I wanted to report a claim.

"Yes, I do," I said. "Our house is really, really flooded—that is, I think it's flooded—certainly looks that way—and we don't have flood insurance per se. I'm pretty sure we're covered for wind-damage, though I don't have the papers right in front of me." (This was true: My insurance policy and all other vital documents were left behind.) "Anyway my name is—"

Then the Travelocity person came back on the other line and I told my insurance company (its voice mail rather) that I'd call back. Travelocity informed me that Continental Airlines had yet to cancel my flight; since it was a nonrefundable ticket I'd either have to reschedule or accept a penalty worth almost the entire price of the ticket. I remonstrated: The flight left in four days, I pointed out, from New Orleans; in all likelihood swamp boats would be trolling the tarmacs. Travelocity advised me to take it up with the airline. I hung up—bitterly—and called my insurance company, whereupon I was told that the voice-mail box was now full.

The next day I went to a nice coffee shop on the Oxford town square and tried to get some work done on my book, a biography of John Cheever. I was editing (labeling, pruning, cutting, and pasting) the bits I'd transcribed from Cheever's 1956 journal. I noted, as always, the incongruity between Cheever's outer and inner lives: He'd just finished The Wapshot Chronicle, sold a story to the movies, and was about to take his family to Italy for a year. Meanwhile, he was miserable as ever—alcoholic, lonely, furtively bisexual. Now and then I'd look up from my laptop and stare out at the sun-dappled square; unlike Cheever in 1956, I mused, my own life (outer) had gone absolutely to shit. Yet—at that moment anyway—I didn't feel half-bad.

In the midst of this reverie I saw a familiar face: a former student of mine named Della, whom I knew from my previous life in New Orleans as a bachelor eighth-grade English teacher. Della had evacuated with her mother, a proudly bohemian woman who'd supported herself as a freelance set-designer for local movie productions. In the past couple of years the Industry had come to New Orleans in a big way, and Della's mother had prospered modestly. She'd just finished a 10-year renovation on her funky home in Mid City, near Bayou St. John.

"So much for that," she said tipsily. "I guess I can always go back to bartending, though I imagine things will be pretty medieval in New Orleans. Come see me sometime and I'll give you a cup of mead."

We talked about the looting, which had seemed rather larky and sensible at the outset—groceries, diapers, that sort of thing—but had turned ugly amid a dawning sense of futility. The gun department at a Wal-Mart supercenter had been ransacked. Gangs of armed thugs were roaming the city, taking potshots at helicopters. We imagined a sort of Escape From New York scenario whereby President Bush (if he ever got around to visiting) crash-landed somewhere in the Ninth Ward. Given that most American militia were deployed elsewhere in the world, they'd have to send in Snake Plissken to retrieve the nuclear codes.

Even though it was boiling hot, I decided to walk back from the square—about two miles. For the past few days I'd done little more than sit in a car, watch TV, and drink bourbon. I could use the exercise. At about the halfway point I passed a historical marker directing me to Faulkner's grave some 20 paces to the east. I walked over, my book bag chafing against my sweat-soaked back. "I believe that man will not merely endure," I said, in a folksy Southern drawl; "he will prevail." I'd memorized that part of the writer's Nobel speech for an oral presentation in college. As far as I was concerned, it was the weakest thing he ever wrote (with the arguable exception of Fable).

The next day it was time to move on. Our friends in Oxford were wonderful folks, but they hadn't counted on lodging, indefinitely, a homeless family. ("Are you doing any good?" my host would ask, with a kind of irritable solicitude, while I hogged his computer for hours at a time.) The six-hour drive to Fayetteville, Ark.—where my father-in-law lives—was a nightmare. Gas had jumped to three bucks a gallon, and I pictured the dregs of our bank account leaking away while the tank filled. Then the car's AC cut out as we drove west into the sun: The baby screamed; the dog sighed; I got dizzy and sick and gave up the wheel to my wife.

On arrival I went right to bed, but not to sleep: Rather I lay there wondering whether we'd have health insurance now that my wife's internship was in limbo, and what would become of our house, our mortgage, and were we eligible for FEMA assistance, and was our poor old cat still fighting for life in the bathroom (and what must she think of us?) ... on and on, my teeth chattering. There would be a lot of work to do in the morning.

Blake Bailey is the author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. He's working on a biography of John Cheever.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125896/

 

 

dispatches
Beyond the Astrodome
Helping the evacuees in Houston.
By Karen Olsson
Posted Friday, Sept. 16, 2005, at 10:15 AM PT

HOUSTON—As of today, the Astrodome is empty again. Over the last week the city has been quickly phasing evacuees out and into temporary housing; on Wednesday and Thursday, the last 2,000 or so hurricane evacuees in the stadium and in the newer Reliant Center next door packed up their things and were transferred to another building in the Reliant Park stadium complex, the Reliant Arena, which is sometimes used for livestock shows.

I arrived last Saturday, to help out, when the place was mobbed by volunteers and about 5,000 evacuees were still living in what officials referred to as "Astrodome City" and "Reliant Center City"—down from 24,000 in the Reliant Park complex on Sept. 4. (Thousands more were originally housed at the downtown convention center, aka "George R. Brown City," in smaller shelters, and in hotels around Houston.) The Astros played their last game in the Astrodome in 1999, and the facility is seldom used these days; next to the clean, glassy Reliant Stadium, the older park's concrete exterior and huge cooling apparatus give it the look of an industrial relic. Inside, the turf had been removed, exposing the concrete floor, and the surrounding tiers of cushioned orange seats were clean but dingy-looking under the glare of the daytime floodlights. With a couple thousand cots set up, covered by coarse gray blankets and people's belongings, the place felt like a giant, gloomy bedroom.

The hurricane survivors, most of whom had arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs, acquired what they could from the distributions of donated goods and—once the Red Cross began distributing cash cards—from Ross Dress for Less, Target, and other stores in the area. (At least once, the nearby Sally Beauty Supply had to close in the middle of the day so that employees could restock the shelves.) Some residents had become hoarders: Walking across the dome floor, I saw stashes of stuffed animals, butter pats, orange soda, small bags of potato chips, Christian inspirational books, and bottles of hand sanitizer. During the day most of the kids went to nurseries or school, and many of the adults left to try to find housing or jobs or to get temporary Texas ID cards, but there were always people left inside, sitting on their cots or in chairs, reading Bibles, doing hair, gabbing, or staring into space.

A lot of what you did at Reliant Park, whether you were a resident or a volunteer or a staff person or a cop, was wait around. That was a symptom of the shelter's necessarily impromptu nature: Spontaneity was both its strength and weakness. For instance, the phone company hadn't waited for permission before installing free telephones. Video-game stations had been connected to monitors in the Reliant Center corridor, where people sat playing Mortal Kombat, and the monitors on the Astrodome concourse were wired for cable.

There were certain problems of logistics and organization that good will alone couldn't solve. On my second day of volunteering, I found myself helping transport children back from the crowded day-care center where they'd been deposited that morning, in a ramshackle house miles away from the stadium complex. This was at a time of volunteer shortage: Six of us and two staffers from the day-care center rode with 24 very young kids on a city bus that had been requisitioned for shelter use. Like most of the adults, I held a baby, a tiny girl in a yellow dress with enormous eyes whose name I would never learn; and as we cruised down the highway I tried not to think about accidents. Four of the 2- and 3-year-olds had been belted into strollers and deposited in the handicapped section of the bus.

"Is this legal?" said the volunteer sitting next to me with a kid in her lap. I had my doubts. Later, I heard that the woman in charge had been reprimanded; evidently parents were supposed to accompany the kids on the bus both to and from day care, but no one had known that.

Celebrities made their appearances: Clinton, Oprah, Cosby, Joel Osteen, Macy Gray. Not to mention Barbara Bush. Some were less well-known but still appreciated: A young man in the Reliant Center told me he'd recognized one of the volunteers as an actor from television—"it was that guy from Two Guys and a Girl," he reported with enthusiasm, though he didn't know the actor's name, and I had to confess I'd never even heard of the show. There were rumors that Sean Penn had booked a $1,000/night hotel suite to come volunteer. I missed most of the famous people, though I saw a guy who looked like Joaquin Phoenix and caught a contingent of Houston Texans cheerleaders, who rustled their mini red pompoms at kids in strollers. Then there was the man billed over the PA system as part of a "championship yo-yo team."

Wednesday morning I was sent with a group of volunteers to the Reliant Arena, where 400 or 500 people were waiting restlessly in chairs. One woman explained that they were waiting to be assigned housing, but that the city didn't have enough units ready. Quite a few police officers and Homeland Security agents were on hand. A man from the Harris County Housing Authority, short and round with a moustache and glasses, greeted us, and then had us gather around a schematic sketch of the room. He stood over it wielding a big marker, like a coach or a commander. "These people are frustrated," he told us. "They've been waiting 10 days for housing."

He indicated the four seating areas, and then the place where we were standing, and explained our strategy as one of containment: People were not to cross from the seating zone into our zone. To that end, he would post pairs of volunteers in front of the seating areas. "People are going to try to engage you with a lot of questions. You don't know the answers," he warned, urging us to ask someone official for an answer, rather than make one up.

I wound up handing out lunch. "Are the sandwiches frozen again?" I was asked. I didn't know the answer. "Is there any mayonnaise?" I didn't know that either. I asked someone and was told there was very little mayonnaise. Later on a woman accused me of having lied, since I'd said there wasn't any mayonnaise and it turned out there was a box of it someplace else. I said I was sorry.

While all these people waited for lodging in Houston, a gray-haired, kind-looking man with an earring held up a piece of paper that said "Washington State Housing." He told me that he and some other private citizens in Washington had arranged to provide houses and job assistance to hurricane survivors but that he hadn't found any takers at Reliant Park. A very beefy Houston cop turned to him and shook his head and said, "They want to stay close to the south. They think they can go back. But they won't ever rebuild that Ninth Ward. The city of New Orleans has been wanting to get rid of them for a long time."

The man from the Housing Authority marched by with a bullhorn, telling people to keep the aisles clear. A woman would later tell me that she'd waited eight hours at the arena, and at the end had been rewarded with a wristband that would give her priority in line the next day. But some elderly people, at least, were granted apartments. One of them, a handsome mumbler named Mr. Ramsey, got cold feet at the last minute, worrying that his new place would be shoddy. It took a pair of young female medical workers to coax him into gathering his belongings and boarding the shuttle.

That afternoon, I was assigned to the Red Cross "information desk," though I was far less informed about what was going on than the evacuees who'd been living there for two weeks. The idea was that a representative from the Red Cross would answer questions while I served as a runner, taking messages to the announcer or to other shelter personnel. But after a bit, the Red Cross person—a frenetic redheaded lady from California with the unfortunate habit of answering questions before she had listened to them—bolted off to look for somebody's lost purse. When she came back she admitted that she was usually the runner and didn't know much either, and we were helpless answering most questions: How, a couple asked, could they look for housing in Baton Rouge? Where had the people with the bus passes gone? Which agency was paying for 14 days in a hotel? Often we would suggest that people try another desk or office; often they had already been there and had been sent to us. After several different people told us they'd heard there was a furniture-store representative in the building who would help them get free furniture, I finally called the store and learned there was no such representative. In fact, they were offering a 10 percent discount to Katrina survivors.

I did know the answer to one question: A lady had heard about some people giving out $200 checks? Yes, I said, those would be the Taiwanese Buddhists at the other end of the building. (At a table near the entrance, four representatives of the Tzu Chi foundation in matching navy polo shirts and white caps were offering $200 to every family.)

The residents I spoke with seemed neither overly eager nor particularly disinclined to tell the stories of how they'd left New Orleans. Everyone had a story, whether it was of being rescued off a roof, or waiting terrified in the Superdome, or climbing up onto the interstate on foot and spending the night there. But people were much quicker to talk about how grateful they were to Houston and to the volunteers and to me personally. Given what they'd just been through, being thanked for handing out bottles of water was embarrassing; somehow I wanted to thank them, though I don't know for what.

It was hard for even a generally stoic person to spend any length of time in the Astrodome and not get teary sooner or later. One ripe occasion was the Wednesday afternoon wedding of Rebecca Warren and Joseph Smothers, an older couple who'd planned to get married this week. A long aisle had been fashioned out of police tape and traffic cones, leading to a makeshift circular chapel in the middle of the stadium. At 3 p.m. people clustered around it, waiting for the ceremony to start.

Then Evander Holyfield arrived. He marched down the aisle, in the company of the Harris County judge and the actor Tommy Ford, and walked around outside the chapel area, shaking hands. All the reporters who'd been let in for the wedding now gravitated toward the boxer, and I began to worry that Rebecca and Joseph wouldn't regain the limelight. But after a bit, Holyfield, who'd arrived by coincidence just as the wedding was about to start, was dispatched to escort the bride down the aisle. Chamber music played from a boom box; a Pentecostal preacher presided over a brief ceremony; Rebecca cried the whole time. The married couple posed for pictures for hours afterward, and the message "Congratulations Joseph and Rebecca Smothers" was posted on an electronic scoreboard for the rest of the afternoon.

Toward the end of the day I spotted Mr. Ramsey again, outside the Astrodome. I worried that his place had fallen through. Then he pulled a set of keys out of his pocket and jingled them. "The place is not bad," he said. He'd come back to let his friends know where he'd be living, he said. He jingled his keys again as he walked away.

Karen Olsson lives in Austin, Texas. Her novel, Waterloo, will be published in October.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126465/

dispatches
My Year of Hurricanes
Three weeks after Katrina: missing cats, Wal-Mart, and a search for day care.
By Blake Bailey
Posted Friday, Sept. 16, 2005, at 9:29 AM PT

Blake Bailey and his wife lost their home and their possessions to Hurricane Katrina. Two months before, they had moved to New Orleans with their 1-year-old daughter; both had spent much of their adult lives in the city, and they'd returned so that Bailey's wife could complete her doctoral internship (clinical psychology) at Tulane. Bailey, meanwhile, had resumed work on his biography of John Cheever. Because the impact of the disaster looks like it will be a long-term ordeal for many, Slate has asked Bailey to write a weekly dispatch chronicling his family's efforts to put their lives together again. Click here and here for Blake Bailey's first two dispatches.

In our former lives, my wife and I liked to lie on the couch, sip our drinks, and read books after a long day: The pleasant ritual was our reward for working hard on things that mattered to us. Now we watch TV—whether with friends in Oxford, Miss., where we first fled from the storm, or in Fayetteville, Ark., where we stayed a few days with my father-in-law, or in Norman, Okla., where we now live with my mother. Our concentration is shot after hours of inconclusive phone calls, e-mails, and frantic errands that usually entail at least one trip to Wal-Mart or a Wal-Mart equivalent; and then of course we wonder, compulsively, about the home we left behind. Over the last 15 days or so, images of New Orleans have been recycled so often they've achieved a kind of permanent iconography: the flayed Superdome, looking like something out of Planet of the Apes; the old people stoically mopping their faces; the mothers sobbing over their dehydrated, heat-stunned babies; the blanketed corpses.

My wife worries about her therapy cases. "Oh my God, what about those kids at Tulane Med?" she said, when we heard that doctors were siphoning gas to keep generators running. As a psychology intern at Tulane, she had worked with seriously ill children and the biological parents of children in foster care; the latter were poor people, mostly, whose bad mental health and substance abuse had impaired their performance as parents. Many of them had no way to get out of the city and were perhaps in the Astrodome wondering if their children were safe. Probably my wife would never see any of these people again. She worried about one patient in particular, a child on advanced life-support who would almost certainly have died if the power failed.

The world, to be sure, was too much with us. For several days my wife had tried contacting her program director—what would become of her internship, our health insurance, this month's paycheck?—to no avail. All Tulane e-mail was down and nobody's cell phone (but ours) worked. Finally the director set up a Hotmail account and replied: He was in Houston, he reported, enrolling his children in school; the program would resume at some point and meanwhile he'd keep everybody posted. This seemed a trifle optimistic, given that New Orleans resembled a Hieronymus Bosch painting, so my wife was glad to hear from her training director at the University of Florida (where her doctoral program was based). They'd managed to scrape some money together and create a new position for her; it appeared we'd be going back to Gainesville.

That posed the problem of day care for our baby daughter. It seemed only yesterday that we'd been languishing on the wait-list of every semirespectable facility in New Orleans—thrilled to be told of a last-minute opening at our first choice, a Montessori place in the suburban town of Metairie, where our baby had adored her teacher and fallen into a benevolent routine. All that was shot to hell now. Hours in a hot car, a farrago of faces and scenery, her parents' palpable malaise—all had conspired to make our daughter, let us say, unpredictable. So, my wife was relieved to find, at length, a place of good repute in Gainesville that seemed willing to make room for a hurricane refugee.

"And how long has she been walking?" a staff person asked during a phone interview.

"She doesn't," my wife replied. "Walk. Yet. But she's about to! Any day now! "

"Oh dear," the woman sighed, and explained with genuine regret that their program was available only to children who'd been walking a few months. The physical activities and so on. She named a few other places my wife could try.

Meanwhile, we're haunted by the cat we left behind—left behind, that is to say, because of her horror of cars, the cat-hating dachshund at our saviors' house in Oxford, as well as the fact that we fully expected to return in a few days. We'd saved her, as a kitten, from meth heads who lived down the road from us in rural Waldo, Fla., and it's hard not to picture her waiting for our return with that bemused scowl of hers. The day after the hurricane, my wife checked postings on Nola.com for pet-rescue operations; she called the LSU Veterinary School and e-mailed "Noah's Wish." And of course we both tried calling the Humane Society at 1-800-HUMANE-1. For more than a week the line rang and rang, followed by a curious, resigned, silence. But finally I got through. There was a babble of ambient voices, like when you call a telethon; my own contact sounded as though she'd just woken up. She kept asking what color or breed my dog was. I kept repeating that the animal in question was a cat.

"And what's his condition?"

"Her. Not very good, I imagine, unless she's been rescued already. We tried—"

"I'll just put 'unknown' ... "

And finally the day ends. I sit in my mother's office and scroll through hundreds of photographs of rescued cats. That one there, in a shelter in Gonzales, La., has the right markings, but her head is averted (pettishly?) and I can't see the telltale scowl. In any case, I e-mail the shelter, then go home to another bleary night of TV. One hopes, at least, to find the baby in decent fettle. Tomorrow her hectic journey continues, as she and my wife fly to North Carolina to visit my mother-in-law (a fellow evacuee) and her family, then back to Gainesville, where a kind friend has offered us the use of her apartment through November. As for me, I'll stay here in Norman for the next couple of weeks, alone—working on my book, pursuing insurance claims, going to Wal-Mart, and pausing to gaze now and then at a photograph of my baby daughter in our old home, sitting in a nursery that no longer exists.

Blake Bailey is the author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. He's working on a biography of John Cheever.

 

politics
Bush's Second Second Inaugural Address
The president tries to start this term all over again in New Orleans.
By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, Sept. 15, 2005, at 8:41 PM PT

We've become accustomed to these fraught addresses from President Bush: the cadences of loss and resolve, the biblical echoes, and the strain of a voice trying to whip up hope. We heard them over and over after 9/11 and before the Iraq war. But tonight was different. President Bush has never spoken from a position of such weakness. The country is as uncertain about his leadership as it has ever been. He created the very Department of Homeland Security that failed to prepare itself or citizens for Hurricane Katrina or manage its aftermath. Bush has spoken at length about compassion for the least among us, and yet their condition has not improved.

Second terms usually start on the steps of the Capitol. George Bush hopes that his starts in Jackson Square. Before the storm, his second four years had been defined by impotency. The war he started in Iraq became even bloodier and looked more hopeless. Cindy Sheehan appeared to be working harder than he was. Gas prices jumped, and he admitted there was little he could do to help. He had to install John Bolton in the United Nations after the senators who wouldn't confirm him had gone home for the summer. His plan for revamping Social Security fell flat in the turf almost right out of the gate.

Katrina is his disaster, but also his chance. The president announced his plan for "Gulf Opportunity Zones" tonight. No one has a better Gulf Opportunity Zone than he does. Thanks to Katrina, at least now he can act. Bush can shuttle to the newly uplifted: visiting homeowners in their gleaming kitchens, or small-business owners turning profits in the reviving Gulf. Iraq will never offer up such made-for-television opportunities.

Katrina allows the president to cut away from all the other miserable news and do one of the things he does best: spend money. Bush may talk like a fiscal conservative, but he spends like a liberal. He binges for his priorities. Tonight he made a lot of promises. The federal government will pay to rebuild infrastructure, pay rent for the displaced, pick up state expenses, and deliver mobile homes. If you have any favorite federal programs you'd like enacted, please bring them to the front of the room. The costs to rebuild the Gulf will skyrocket, but Republican leaders are also going to have to pay hush money outside the region: funding projects from politically key areas. Lawmakers will find ways to tie their requests to Katrina.

As a political matter, tonight's immediate goals were limited. By standing alone and detailing his plan, Bush hoped to court disaffected Republicans with an image of leadership that will conjure memories of his post-9/11 performance.

The larger goal is harder: to restore the image of Republican competency with the broader voting public. That's important for Bush's legacy and Republicans up for election in 2006 campaigning on safety and leadership. Polls show Americans now view Bush's leadership abilities at their modest pre-9/11 levels, and only half the country trusts his ability to handle terrorism, his former strong suit. On the question of homeland security he seemed to invite more doubt. "I consider detailed emergency planning to be a national security priority," he said tonight. Yikes. It wasn't before?

The president has hitched his second term to the Gulf reconstruction, and that may require a surprising amount of political courage. Congress has been willing to spend like crazy in the past few weeks, but that profligacy will end. Fiscal conservatives in his party are furious at the new government spending. Conservative Democrats and independents in key districts outside of the affected area are also already balking: Why is the president pandering to the Gulf? Why doesn't he show as much effort helping me get a job or lowering my gas prices?

Bush will be rebuilding his presidency along with New Orleans. He has the money to spend—as he did after 9/11, as he did in Iraq. The question is what it always is with the president. His resolve and certainty are not in doubt; his competence is. Is his administration capable enough not to waste those billions but to turn them into a genuine Gulf recovery?

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

Curious Guy: Chuck Klosterman

By Bill Simmons
Page 2

Welcome to a new feature called "Curious Guy," in which I e-mail questions to somebody who is successful -- whether it's the GM of a baseball team, an author, a creator of a TV show, another writer or whomever -- and we just start trading e-mails for the rest of the week. In case you missed the last edition, we featured Josh Schwartz, the guy who created "The OC."

This week's exchange was with Chuck Klosterman, the best-selling author and pop culture guru who released his third book, "Killing Yourself To Live", earlier this summer. Chuck also writes monthly columns for Spin, Esquire and Honcho. All right, I made that last one up ... but he really does have columns in the other two. Somehow he found the time to exchange e-mails with me. Actually, who am I kidding? He's always online, just like me. Here's what transpired:

Simmons: All right, you're a much bigger sports fan than some people realize ... and yet you grew up in North Dakota. How does somebody fall in love with pro sports while living in a state without teams? Do you have a favorite team in every sport? How did you end up deciding on each one? Were you one of those kids who jumped on the bandwagon of every championship team when you were like, 7 years old? Please tell me you weren't one of those kids. I hate those kids.

Klosterman: This is one issue you and I will never agree upon. I absolutely do not understand why you believe geography should have any significance on which teams you are somehow "obligated" to support. That will always strike me as the most irrational reason for liking anything. There is no inherent regional quality to pro sports, beyond the imaginary relationship created by fans. I remember when I lived in Akron, Ohio, during the late 1990s, and it was suddenly announced that the Browns were returning to Cleveland. People in Northeast Ohio immediately began insisting that the Browns were their favorite team; this was before the expansion draft. People were buying Browns' jerseys before they had acquired any players. They didn't even have a coach or a GM. It was a wholly theoretical franchise. So -- essentially -- these people were rooting for (a) an incorporated municipality with a shared tax base, and (b) a color best-described as "burnt orange." These things have nothing to do with football, and you should never like any specific team more than you like the sport itself.

When people ask me who my favorite NFL team is, I always say, "The 1978 Dallas Cowboys." I still have some interest in that particular franchise, but I don't feel any loyalty to the organization; I mean, it's not like I'm a stockholder. Nobody asked me about firing Tom Landry. Nobody consulted with me about the acquisition of Drew Bledsoe. I have always liked the Packers (especially during that brief James Lofton-J.J. Jefferson era), but mostly because I grew up surrounded by hordes of Viking fans, virtually all of whom I despise. No Packer victory has ever made me as happy as the Vikings' loss to the Falcons in the 1999 NFC championship game; that was among the greatest days of my life. I generally have a modicum of interest in the Broncos, which (I think) was spawned by my affinity for a 1979 Rick Upchurch football card that recognized him as the NFL's all-time leading punt returner. The photo was of Upchurch adjusting his face mask; it was relentlessly cool. But I was also 7.

Certainly, I was a Celtic fan during the 1980s. I had a lot of interest in the pre-Jordan Bulls (I really liked Artis Gilmore, for some reason), but that waned when they became dominant. I liked the Bucks from the '80s and the '90s Pacers, particularly when Bird coached them. I have always been interested in the Minnesota Twins, as they have consistently been the most likable franchise in baseball. My favorite college football team varies, but it's usually somebody who still runs the option (Nebraska used to be my default university, but now they suddenly think fullbacks are supposed to run pass patterns). In NCAA basketball, I support all the schools coached by the former players and assistants of Bobby Knight, although I have very mixed feelings about Texas Tech.

Basically, I am an intense fan of sports, but I am able to detach from the insane tendency of just rooting for any given team out of habit. And I'll never understand why so many smart people refuse to think critically about sports.

Simmons: Very interesting answer. But here's the problem: You grew up in freaking North Dakota! Of course you don't understand the insane tendency of rooting for a team out of habit -- you were never brainwashed as a little kid into supporting every local team, so you have the ability to examine sports objectively. If you grew up in Boston, you would be wearing a lime-green Varitek jersey right now, getting into Brady-vs.-Manning arguments and worrying if Schilling can possibly hold up over the next four weeks. I mean, you rooted for your high school teams, right? What's the difference? Or were you the kid who sat in the opposing team's section like Ronald Miller and his friends in "Can't Buy Me Love?"

See, you're carrying the sports fan gene, but it was never properly dragged out of you -- so you're a detached observer and enjoy teams based on whether they grab your interest at that particular moment. In a way, you're like the main character from your new book -- instead of being in love with one person, you're in love with three, and all of them provide you with different things you like, only you can't actually settle on one of them. You're right, we fundamentally disagree on this. You approach sports like you approach music -- you can like more than a few bands at once, and every band (or team) means something different to you.

I don't think this is a bad thing or a good thing. At the same time, there's something honorable about loving a franchise through thick and thin. It prepares you for real life in a weird way -- sometimes your teams disappoint you, something they enthrall you, but they're always there, and you learn to support them whether they're good or bad (unless they're the Bruins and they simply stop spending money, then they're out). My favorite thing about a sports team is how if affects everyone in the community and becomes a common love that everyone shares -- that's the single biggest thing I miss about living in Boston. You should go there during the playoffs some time, the city's mood sways depending on how the Sox did the night before. I'm not kidding. Here in Los Angeles, there isn't a single team that everyone agrees on, and nobody cares that much to begin with (because it's 80 degrees every day) ... so the place always feels a little soulless. I think it's a little sad, actually.

Klosterman: I don't see why it would be "honorable" to support anything unconditionally. That kind of thinking has been the source of almost every significant problem in the entire world, except for maybe the hurricanes.

Simmons: See, now you made it seem like I inadvertently defended the Bush presidency. You're a devious man, Klosterman.

All right, next question ... your book (which was excellent, by the way) is semi-autobiographical, stemming from a trip you initially made for Spin Magazine in which you traveled to different spots where famous musicians had died, then tried to find some common link. First, how the hell did you come up with that idea? What kind of drugs were involved, and where can I get them? Second, the title says it's "85 percent of a true story." Please elaborate and discuss what it's like to put so much personal stuff in print (even if you did change some of the names). And third, now that the book is out, would you do anything differently? Did you feel like you shared too much in certain spots, or do you wish you had shared even more than you did?

Klosterman: My book is basically a synthesis of three things: (1) thinking about rock music, (2) thinking about women from my past, and (3) thinking about dying. Now -- obviously -- I'm not the first person who's ever saw a relationship between art, love, and death. But "Killing Yourself" ... is just my specific version of that experience, which happened to involve a lot of driving and smoking pot and listening to Black Sabbath and Fleetwood Mac. It's supposed to be funny, but I have no idea if it actually is. There's some decent information about mastodons and "Derek and the Dominos" in there.

The reason it's only 85 percent true is because I changed a few of the character's names and I made some minor adjustments to the chronology of the narrative. However, the main reason I gave myself a 15 percent window for error is because there are several elements of dialogue I actively recreated from memory (some of which happened in 1996). As such, I assume there are certain plot elements that were unconsciously manipulated by the passage of time and my own personal interpretations of what certain conversations meant (and/or how they were expressed at the time). Most of this book is how I remember things (as opposed to what really happened), which I concede is probably 15 percent flawed.

There are many things I regret about "Killing Yourself to Live." I would like to completely rewrite almost all of it; I feel that way about everything I've ever written. But here's the main thing I regret: When I first wrote this story, it was merely a 4,500-word magazine article for Spin. It was just journalism, and it was only about dead rock stars. When I expanded it into a 75,000-word book, I decided to add a bunch of information about my personal life (which is what most of the book ultimately is). Now, I fully understood that this was a self-indulgent, solipsistic decision. I was completely aware of that. So I thought, "Hey, I will just make it very clear to the reader that this is a self-indulgent, solipsistic story, and that I am using my own personal life as a literary device to talk about culture." And I stupidly thought that if I did this, people would understand the parameters for the story and consume it under those established conditions. However, it ended up having the opposite effect: By mentioning that I was totally self-aware of the book's narcissistic qualities, that became the ONLY thing certain people noticed. So it's almost like I actively went out of my way to remind people about why they should potentially hate this book.

I don't know ... it's just a predictably polarizing book, I suppose. Some people truly loathe it, but the people who love it seem to love it with an intensity I could have never possibly anticipated. In that sense, I'm hoping that "Killing Yourself to Live" will end up being my version of Weezer's "Pinkerton" album. But who knows? It will probably end up being my version of "Be Here Now" by Oasis. Either way, it was really, really fun to write.

Simmons: OK, a couple of reactions here. First, because your second book ("Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs") was successful, there was a certain group of people who were going to pick your next book apart no matter what it was. I liked that you went in a different direction, that's what you had to do -- Springsteen did it with "Tunnel of Love," Nirvana did it with "En Utero," DiCaprio did it with "The Beach," Dave Chappelle did it by moving to South Africa and becoming a crazy person. Not to compare you to those people, but you know what I mean. The point is, if you're screwed either way, why not pick a project that you like? What were you supposed to do, spend a year writing another collection of pop culture columns?

On the other hand, I can see where those same people are coming from -- for instance, when Pearl Jam released "Vitalogy," I was absolutely furious and felt betrayed by them because they included so many crap songs. Years later, I see what they were trying to do -- there's no way they could have topped their first two albums, so they went in another direction, enjoyed themselves and probably said, "Screw it, let's make this our third one." I listened to it a few times and chose not to like it. Other PJ fans love it; in fact, when I made fun of "Spin the Black Circle" once, the PJ fans went ballistic. So it depends on the person, I guess. And I think your third book was like that. As soon as you were doing your homage to Micheal Ray Richardson in Rhode Island, you had me. I didn't care what happened after that, I just wanted to find out as soon as possible.

That reminds me, as a self-proclaimed Celtics fan in the '80s, how could you ever snort lines after what happened to Tony Montana and Lenny Bias? The Bias debacle alone put the fear of God into me with coke for life. I mean, he single-handedly toppled the Celtics dynasty! If he doesn't blow those lines, Bird's back never goes, McHale doesn't have to play 20 playoff games on a broken foot, the Big Three wouldn't have logged all those minutes in '87 and '88, Magic's sky hook never would have happened, and the '87 team would have won between 70 and 75 games. Seriously, imagine the Lakers in the '80s if you just removed Worthy from the equation in 1982. Do they win another title?

Klosterman: This is a curious question to respond to, particularly since "Vitalogy" is almost irrefutably the best Pearl Jam album, its only major problems being (a) it had an oversized, environmentally conscious jewel case, which makes it impossible to file, and (b) that it was titled "Vitalogy," which sounds like the name of a riboflavin supplement.

Philip K. Dick wrote a novel in 1962 called "The Man in the High Castle" which speculated about what the United States would have been like if the Nazis had won WWII. You should write a similar book about what would have happened if Len Bias had lived; you could call it "The Man in the High Post." I sometimes wonder how good Bias would have been, though. I mean, he certainly seemed like the best player available that year and he destroyed the ACC, but there were a bushel of guys in that 1986 draft (Kenny Walker, Walter Berry, John Williams) who ended up having terrible careers. That had to be the highest class in NBA history -- Chris Washburn came out that year, Scott Skiles, Roy Tarpley, etc. It was like David Stern tried to simultaneously employ every member of The Eagles. Also, was Bias doing lines of coke? I thought he was supposedly freebasing. Freebasing is for crazy people.

Personally, it's hard for me to visualize what the Celtics would have looked like if Bias had been on the floor. I still can't see it. But it was still very disappointing, because it seemed like the Lakers would constantly just get new guys out of the ether. It seemed like they were constantly acquiring people like Worthy and Bob McAdoo and Mychal Thompson, and those guys were always the difference-makers. The only person the Celtics ever added was Bill Walton (who really only contributed for one season), and they barely even needed him, because L.A. didn't make the Finals that year. To me, that's almost more depressing than Bias' dying. The Lakers were defeated by the Rockets in the playoffs that season (on some ridiculous Ralph Sampson turnaround off an in-bounds play), which is a game I'm still convinced the Lakers lost on purpose. Because if the Lakers had met Boston that June, LA would have been crushed in five games. That would have been profoundly satisfying.

Two questions for you ...

1.) Why doesn't anyone care about college baseball?
2.) Why aren't you asking me about Gary Hogeboom being a contestant on "Survivor"?

Simmons: Hold on, I can't let the Rockets thing go. While I agree that the '86 Lakers would have gotten killed in the Finals, you underestimate that Rockets team. They had Young Hakeem (an absolute force of nature at the time) playing with Sampson (who was a top-15 player back then -- on basketballreference.com, if you look up Sampson's career, through 1986, he's closest statistically to Patrick Ewing at the same age), as well as some quality vets (Robert Reid, Rodney McCray, even Lewis Lloyd). Along with the '93 Suns, '87 Pistons, '98 Pacers and '82 Celtics, that Rockets team was one of the most dangerous teams that didn't actually win a title. Don't forget, they lost Game 1 against LA and swept the next four. Plus, half the team ended up being on drugs -- they nearly broke the record of the 1979 Atlanta Hawks. They just brought a ton of stuff to the table. Any team that could have two guys spring for 20 points and 20 rebounds in the same series has to be taken seriously.

On your questions: Nobody cares about college baseball because there are too many games and it's too hard to follow. With hoops, most people watch March Madness and that's it. With college football, you only have to follow one day a week. Also, the baseball uniforms always have too much yellow, orange and lime-green, making the sport a little USFL-y. And the aluminum bats are the equivalent of the smaller ball in the WNBA -- they inadvertently hurt the credibility of the sport. Aluminum bats are for Little Leaguers and potbellied softball players.

Hey, while we're here, I was wondering, what did you think of Gary Hogeboom's Carl Spackler-like performance on "Survivor"? Do you think Jeff Probst should yank him for Danny White six episodes into the season, just so Hogeboom will have Nam-like flashbacks about Tom Landry and kill everyone on the island?

Klosterman: OK ... as I'm writing this, I've only seen the first episode of the new "Survivor" season, but here are my initial thoughts:

A. I honestly fear that CBS is now programming their network *directly at me.* First they make a reality program about a critically maligned rock band from the 1980s with a dead singer; now they're taking a reality show and adding a journeyman quarterback who nobody cares about except for me, you, Michael Weinreb and seven dudes who still get drunk at Gilley's and complain about the anachronisms in "Urban Cowboy." If this trend continues, CBS will soon debut a sitcom where Val Kilmer and Bijou Phillips portray alcoholic roadies for a Thin Lizzy tribute band who fight a futuristic war against tigers, robots and the Loch Ness Monster.

B. If Hogeboom gets voted off of the island, I hope Probst accidentally calls him "Danny Hogeboom," which is what Landry did when he benched White in 1984 and announced Hogeboom would be the starter, which confused the hell out of everybody (and for multiple reasons). That was really the beginning of the end for the Cowboys.

C. I like that -- almost immediately -- Hogeboom was perceived as the leader of his tribe. This seems to indicate that there is an inherent "field general" quality to playing quarterback, and this intangible sensation is even palpable to bozos who think the easiest way to make a million dollars is to eat rats.

D. Isn't one of the other contestants on this year's "Survivor" a female sports-talk radio host from Kansas City? Will she be embarrassed if she never figures out she is on an island with a former pro football player? Do you think she would recognize Christian Okoye?

(Ed. Note: In episode No. 2, she did recognize Hogeboom and "out" him, although both Klosterman and Simmons are convinced that CBS fed her the information to make the game more interesting. Back to the exchange.)

Simmons: I think if she spends the whole season without recognizing Hogeboom, she should give up her show and work for Oxygen. By the way, we're drifting away from the main topic, which is supposed to be you. Who were your biggest influences as a writer? When did you know you wanted to do this for a living? Describe how you felt the first time you walked into a bookstore and saw your book on a shelf. And do you like being called a "pop culture guru," or do you think it sounds like something Joy Behar or Elisabeth Hasselbeck would say as they were introducing you on "The View?"

Klosterman: I'm not sure who my influences are; I'd prefer to have none at all, but I suppose that's impossible. When I was in eighth grade, I remember going through this very intense "black literature" phase, when I was suddenly obsessed with reading "Black Boy" and "Native Son" and "Black Like Me" and "Invisible Man" and whatnot. But -- at the exact same time this was happening -- I was constantly listening to Motley Crue and watching David Letterman and Monty Python's "Flying Circus." So I suppose I am ultimately the kind of writer who was equally influenced by Richard Wright, Nikki Sixx and people who tell jokes without punchlines. I really liked George Orwell during high school, and P.J. O' Rourke. In college I read a lot of the books that everyone seemed to be reading at the time -- "American Psycho," "Generation X," "Bright Lights Big City," that sort of thing. I probably ripped off those guys a lot. But it always seemed impossible to be influenced by people like Kafka or Calvino or Salinger. That seemed completely beyond by ability. I feel the same way about David Foster Wallace and Malcolm Gladwell -- I wish I could write with that kind of intellect or that kind of clarity, but I'm just not sharp enough.

I'm also not sure how I ended up doing this for a living; it just kind of worked out that way. I mean, five years ago I was a complete nobody, and now I'm suddenly answering questions on a Web site that 9 million people are going to read. It's insane. And so is seeing your own book in a bookstore (and not just the first time, but *every* time). It's almost confusing. I often feeling like I am watching someone else's life. As far as that "cultural guru" thing -- that seems ridiculous. It's not like I give people cultural advisement. I don't live in Tibet and wait for weary travelers to ask me questions about Audioslave. In many ways, I think Americans have become confused by the term "pop culture." They seem to think "pop culture" only refers to "shallow trivia." When anybody writes about things in the modern world that are familiar to people, they are writing about culture that is popular. It's pretty straightforward, really; it's not like I'm working on the Jarvik 7.

Stay tuned for Part II, on Wednesday.

Bill Simmons is a columnist for Page 2 and ESPN The Magazine and his Sports Guy's World site is updated every day Monday through Friday. His new book "Now I Can Die In Peace" hits bookstores on Oct. 1 and is available right now on Amazon.com.

 

Welcome back to "Curious Guy" with author Chuck Klosterman. In case you missed it Tuesday, here's Part I.

Simmons: My friends and I spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about movies, sports and TV ... so what's wrong with writing about this stuff? For instance, at a friend's house watching football last Sunday, my friend Dave Dameshek and I were trying to figure out the most ridiculous scene from "Face Off." Our friend Ace has a theory that they came up with the title before anyone wrote the script, like some movie exec told two writers, "Okay, the movie is called 'Face Off,' we start filming in two weeks, and Travolta and Cage are signed on ... I need a script by Monday." That really might have been what happened, so it's not like we're arguing about "The Godfather" here. But when you consider that it featured two huge stars (at the time), and it did pretty well at the box office, it's one of the most astounding cable movies to watch after the fact. Although 'Shek makes an excellent point: You can't argue about how ludicrous the premise is, only because we accept the premise simply by watching the movie. We knew going in that Travolta and Cage would eventually switch faces, we accepted it and that was that.

With that said, I thought the most ridiculous scene was when Cage's character wakes up from a coma with his face missing, so he uses the hospital phone to call one of his buddies to help him get Travolta's face. I just don't think it's possible to make a phone call if there's no skin on your face and you don't have lips. Call me crazy. 'Shek argued that the most ridiculous scene was the ending, when Travolta foils Cage and nearly gets shot to death, and he goes into the hospital and they save him, and they give him his old face back, and then the movie ends with him heading home to see his wife ... and she's on the computer and seems totally surprised that he's home. As though she's like, "Oh, wait, THIS was the day you were coming home from the hospital with your new face after you saved the world? I thought it was tomorrow!" (It's much funnier when 'Shek does it with his Pittsburgh accent, but whatever.) And you know what? He might be right.

The point is, people DO discuss this stuff in real life, which is why it should be OK to write about it. Like you said, it's not mindless trivia, it's a goofy way that people from our generation relate to one another. For instance, 'Shek just moved into a new house, and I just had a baby, and I guarantee we spent more time talking about "Con Air" then either of those other two things. Why is that? I have no idea. But that's our generation. Which brings me to my next question: We had Generation X, and then the Internet generation ... how do you think the next generation will be defined, and how do you think your writing will change (if at all) to reflect that evolution? Along those same lines, where do you see your focus shifting over the next few years? Do you think you'll ever shift to scripted stuff, or do you like writing conventional stuff too much?

Klosterman: I am not sure if I necessarily agree with the scope of your generational analysis. What will be interesting about the coming generation of people (at least if you're a writer) is that they will have a twisted concept of what the word "media" is supposed to mean. A term you hear people use a lot these days is "New Media," which really just means, "Electronic Media, Minus the Actual Reporting." This is what the Internet is, mostly. I constantly see all these media blogs that just link to conventional "Old Media" articles and pretend to comment upon them, but they add no information and no ideas. They just write, "Oh, look at this terribly archaic New York Times story. Isn't it pathetic?" But that sentiment is being expressed by someone who's never done an interview and has no tangible relationship to journalism. It all seems kind of uncreative. My favorite blog was always chaunceybillups.blogspot.com, but I think the dude who wrote it went on some kind of sabbatical.

New Media will never replace Old Media, because New Media couldn't exist without Old Media; they would have nothing to link to. But the net result is that all people are starting to assume that the media is inherently useless and that there is absolutely no difference between news and entertainment. This will make the coming generation even more cynical than the current one, which is mostly bad (but not necessarily tragic). I think this is why so many teenagers are obsessed with things like myspace.com: They have lost interest in the world at large, so they've decided to just build an interior culture where they are the sole focus. The can live without the world.

My writing will change as I get older, but it won't have anything to do with how audiences evolve. It's impossible to anticipate that sort of thing in any meaningful way; it would be like when Skid Row suddenly tried to sound like Soundgarden. I have a few ideas for movies and television shows, but I'll probably never pursue them. It would be satisfying to create an especially good TV show (like the original BBC version of "The Office" or "Freaks and Geeks" or "The Wire" or "Twin Peaks"), but I would be nervous about turning over so much control to the producers and the actors and the network. When TV is bad, nothing is worse. And that stuff gets even more complicated when it comes to film, because -- if you want a movie to be remotely decent -- you pretty much have to allow the director to do whatever he or she wants. I would really have to trust the people I was working with. That is one advantage I've had in book publishing: My editor at Scribner (Brant Rumble) appears to be the last honest man in all of New York.

Simmons: I liked your point about New Media. Everyone keeps talking about the Blog Revolution, but what does that even mean? If you were in film school and wanted to make movies for a living, would you create a movie from scratch, or would you just make documentaries about other filmmakers and how much they stunk? You'd make the movie from scratch, right? Well, what's the point of writing about people who write about sports/movies/politics/music if you're not backing up your words with your own columns or features? How do you have credibility then? I could write for a living, I just choose to rip everyone else. What? How does that make sense? What's the ultimate goal there? Why not come up with your own material, angles and thoughts? Wouldn't that be more rewarding? How do you get better? That's what I don't understand.

I'm not killing all blogs here -- some of them are useful because they find me stories that I couldn't find on my own, and some of their comments or features make me laugh and think. When the goal is to keep everyone on their toes, have some fun, provide an alternate take on things and remain at least somewhat objective, that's great. If you're using a blog to constantly ream everyone else, that's depressing. Also, how can we have so many libels/slander laws in place for newspapers, and yet the Internet is like the Wild West? People can steal material, slander people, rip them to shreds, make up news ... I mean, you can get away with anything now. Do you know how many times an NBA Web site reported having sources that confirmed some trade that ended up never happening? It was embarrassing. I could go on about this forever.

Switching gears, you argue about music almost like your opinions are fact -- like your comment that "'Vitalogy' is almost irrefutably the best Pearl Jam album" -- which is one of the reasons I like your material so much, because you're so sure about your opinions on these things, and you will argue them to the bitter end. But can you really argue about music to the level that you can argue sports? Isn't music more subjective? For instance, we could argue about the '86 Rockets and Lakers, I could probably find stats that would show how Kareem had stopped rebounding that season, how that Lakers team wasn't big enough to handle a Sampson-Hakeem combo, and so on. But there are no stats to prove that "Vitalogy" was better than "Ten" or "Vs," just like there's no way to prove that "Jungleland" was Springsteen's defining song (although I will always believe that it is).

Klosterman: Certainly, music is WAY more subjective. These two subjects are not even comparable. For example, I could insist that the greatest band in the world is actually four unsigned guys from Oregon who have never made a record and are just bouncing around the Portland club scene, and that this band is like what would have happened if Lennon & McCartney had formed a quartet with Keith Richards and Charlie Watts, and that these people write the best songs since The Smiths and they play louder than Blue Cheer. I could argue that this group is cooler than The Arcade Fire or the White Stripes, because I could insist they are more "authentic" or "incendiary" or "visceral." I could create reasons that explain this hypothetical band's greatness, and a few crazy people would find my theory interesting and potentially valid. However, I could never claim that the best quarterback in the country is actually some 28-year-old dude working in a car wash in downtown Detroit, and that this person is substantially better than Peyton Manning. That would immediately seem idiotic to everyone. This is why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is such a failure; there are no quantifiable qualities for the inductees. There is no way to *prove* that a musician is good. And this is not an issue in sports. There's no risk that Greg Maddux won't make the Baseball Hall of Fame simply because certain sportswriters don't think he's hip enough, or because they feel his pitching style is derivative.

I think you somewhat misread my rock writing, though; I don't think I ever imply that my opinions are some kind of universal truth. When I say "Vitalogy" is "irrefutably" the best Pearl Jam album, I'm really just saying that fact is irrefutable *to me.* But I am only speaking about my own reality. If I say a band is good, it only means that *I* think they're good; if I say a band is bad, it only means that *I* think they're bad. All my criticism is autobiography. I have no interest in persuading (or dissuading) readers from liking anything.

 

Simmons: I'm not arguing against that, but you have a way of condoning certain bands, albums and songs while putting down other bands, albums and songs, even if you're rarely blatant about it. Just from reading the Billy Joel chapter in "Cocoa Puffs," I know you respect "Glass Houses," that you think the finest Led Zep songs are the obscure ones, that you don't like Moody Blues or the Knack, that you think "Born to Run" and "Born in the USA" are overrated, and so on. By weighing in on these things, you don't think you're clandestinely persuading/dissuading readers a little? For instance, you shredded Coldplay in "Cocoa Puffs," and I thought their first album was good, their second album was OK (but pretentious), and their third album sounded like a high-tech version of Bread. When you shredded them, I felt dumb for liking their first album. Then I thought, "Hey, screw you, Klosterman! I liked that song from the Kieran Culkin movie where he played the screwed-up rich kid, you're not swaying me on that one!" You have to admit, your opinions about music -- no matter how you formulate them, and no matter what your intent is -- end up affecting the opinions of your readers in some way.

And while we're here, you love sports and you love music. Which one is more fun to argue about?

Klosterman: I'm sure some people's opinions are affected by the things I write, but that doesn't have anything to do with my motivations for writing those sentences. Ozzy Osbourne wrote a song titled "Suicide Solution," and some of the kids who listened to it decided to shoot themselves in the face. Now, that particular song was actually about Bon Scott's alcoholism. And the fact that a few confused kids killed themselves after hearing it does not change the original intent of the song. Obviously, I'll concede that calling the song "Suicide Solution" was probably a little misleading, especially since most kids are stupid. But my point is that causality doesn't change intent. If someone who read "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs" now hates Coldplay, they sort of missed the crux of that essay. That essay was supposed to be about how modern people use culture as a crutch to understand the elements of their lives that they can't control. I mean, Coldplay does stink, and they are boring, and they (probably) aren't as good as Bread. But my reasons for feeling this way are very personal and highly specific. I certainly don't feel a desire to convince anyone else that I'm right about this.

In response to your second question: It's more fun to argue about sports, but it's more interesting to argue about music. When someone argues about music, you can usually get a remarkably clear portrait of their personality -- you can get an idea of how they view authority, or if they have an adversarial relationship with mainstream culture, or if they are extremely worried about being cool. You can deduce which subcultures they experienced in high school, and you can figure out how much they are engaged with modernity. Of course, the downside is that people who always want to talk about music tend to be profoundly annoying (and often unshaven). Which is probably why it's more fun to talk about sports.

Arguing about sports is the ultimate cultural equalizer: I can't think of any subject that so many people know so much about. I feel like I personally know at least 100 guys who have a "near expert" understanding of the NFL. If you watch the games each week (and especially if you grew up watching the games each week), you can easily have a 90-minute conversation about pro football with a total stranger in any airport bar (assuming said stranger has had a similar experience). There is a shared knowledge of sports in America that is unlike our shared knowledge of anything else. Whenever I have to hang out with someone I've never met before, I always find myself secretly thinking, "I hope this dude knows about sports. I hope this dude knows about sports. I hope this dude knows about sports." Because if he does, I know the rest of the conversation will be easy.

Also ... the best Bruce Springsteen song is either "State Trooper" or "Thunder Road." And I never said the '86 Rockets were bad -- I just said that the Celtics' beating Houston had less symbolic value than if the Celtics had thumped the Lakers that year (regardless of how good the teams were).

Simmons: You argued earlier that the Lakers threw that series! Anyway, we should write an NBA book together where we just argue about dumb things like this for 400 pages -- it could be like that Red Sox book that Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan whipped out, only lazier (if that's possible). I would love to argue about stuff like "Gheorghe Muresan vs. Manute Bol, who was more underrated both from a talent standpoint and from a freak standpoint?" and "Realistically, can the Clippers ever become a competitive franchise, or do they have too much baggage -- is it like Tara Reid bouncing back and suddenly becoming an award-winning actress? Should they just change cities and change their name?"

Klosterman: I don't know if either Manute or Muresan could possibly be underrated within the "freak" idiom. Manute supposedly iced a lion in the Sudan, so he always gets free pancakes at my house. I think the most underrated sports freak would have be former San Francisco 49er cornerback Merton Hanks, who (almost certainly) had the longest neck in NFL history. He was like an emu. The only guy who came remotely close was Brad Johnson, a player my friend Jon Blixt's wife regularly referred to as, "That ex-Viking quarterback who has the second-longest neck in the league." I am not kidding about any of this.

Simmons: Wow, I haven't thought about Merton Hanks in years. If he was like an emu, then Drew Bledsoe is definitely turning into a wildebeest -- the ones that freeze when they see a lion approaching. This could make for a cool column that I'm sure ESPN would never run.

OK, time for some shorter questions before we shatter Tolstoy's record for words ...

1. I loved the piece you wrote about spending time with Bono in Ireland and trying to figure out if he was full of crap or not. Who is the most interesting celeb you ever spent time with and why?

2. Seth reading "Cocoa Puffs" on "The OC" last year -- where does that rank on your top 200 list of career achievements? Can you put this on a résumé? Have you gotten laid more or less since? What show would you have preferred over "The OC?" Personally, my dream would be either (A) William Peterson reading me during a "CSI" episode right before somebody said, "Hey, we got that semen sample back from the lab," (B) Johnny Drama carrying my book around on "Entourage" and Turtle making some sort of derisive Red Sox comment while Adrian Grenier tried to fake-laugh in the background, or (C) somebody reading me in the waiting room as they waited for a hooker in HBO's "Bunny Ranch" show. That's my Pantheon. What was yours?

3. Please elaborate on your theory that Shaq is secretly planning a run for President.

Klosterman: In order ...

1. It's hard to pick which celebrity I've interviewed as the most interesting, primarily because celebrities are almost never interesting. Bono would certainly be one of the better ones, because he actually enjoys the interview process; he kind of treats it like psychoanalysis. Marilyn Manson is consistently the best subject for a Q & A, because he actively tries to be entertaining. Radiohead was the smartest band I've ever met, but Donald Fagen of Steely Dan and Robert Plant were probably the smartest individual people (at least among rock musicians). Jeff Tweedy was the most likable. Barry Manilow was really funny (I interviewed him in 1997, and we mostly talked about Trent Reznor).

2. The "OC" thing really isn't an "achievement," per se, but it was probably the single weirdest thing that has ever happened to me. I was sitting in this diner eating dinner, and I suddenly get a phone call from my associate Alex. Alex says, "You were just on 'The OC'" Now, within this particular context, that kind of information makes no sense, so I said, "What does that mean, exactly?" So Alex explains what happened, and we have this five minute conversation where I say things like, "That's weird," and Alex says things like, "Yeah, that's strange," and I respond by saying, "This is curious," and Alex would counter with, "This is indeed perplexing." Eventually, we ran out of synonyms. I went back to eating my perogies. But then I looked down at my cell phone, and I noticed I had received a few voice mails during this dialogue with Alex. About 13 people had called me simultaneously. So -- if nothing else -- I now have an exceedingly accurate understanding of how many of my friends watch "The OC."

I guess I've never considered what TV show I would most enjoy being mentioned on. Perhaps I could get a recurring role on "Reba."

3. Here is my thing with Shaq: Remember when he decided to take care of George Mikan's family after Mikan died, and he kept saying what a great guy Mikan was? I found myself thinking, "That's really nice of him, I suppose, but it almost seems ... political." It's like he was rebranding himself as some kind of historical humanitarian philanthropist. And then I started thinking about how Shaq always talks about wanting to become a cop, and how he constantly goes on those VH1 shows and does romantic things for his wife and how he is always trying to deliver stuffed giraffes to sick children (or whatever). That's when I realized that Shaq is not-so-secretly gearing up for a presidential bid. That is his true goal. Shaq will become the first post-Jeb Democratic governor of Florida, and he'll run for the presidency in 2020. However, he will lose to the Republican nominee, which will probably be Will Smith.

Simmons: I just hope Will Smith runs with Martin Lawrence. Couldn't you see a "Bad Boys: 2020!" campaign? Last question: On a scale of 1 to 10, how badly do you think we'll be skewered on message boards and snarky blogs for what just transpired over the past 7,300 words?

Klosterman: I'd probably say about 8.4, unless there happens to be a preponderance of Merton Hanks message boards that I am currently unaware of. In that case I'd go with 8.9, most of whom will be failed graduate students suggesting we're estranged lovers (and will therefore make references to that upcoming cowboy movie starring Donnie Darko). Also, on Oct. 15 Notre Dame will defeat USC. Believe.

 

First, an update on my book: Even though it wasn't supposed to be released until Oct. 1, apparently Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble online have it in stock as we speak. Not sure about bookstores yet -- I think it depends on the store -- so if you want to flip through it before you decide on buying it, just call your local bookstore and ask whether they have it in stock. It's fun to harass bookstore employees, anyway.

From what I can gather, if you preordered the book, you should be getting it any day (or you might have received it already), and if you were waiting to order the book until it came out, then you can order it right now and have it within a few days. And no, I'm not putting the link at the end of this paragraph, because that would be shameless. Just know that, if this book doesn't sell, I'm going to pull a Ricky Williams and end up traveling around Australia in some 24-hour-a-day marijuana fog with a Grizzly Adams beard, stinky clothes and like $3 in my pocket. Not only would that be terrible, not only would my column disappear, not only would my family suffer as a result, not only would ESPN sue me for breaching my contract ... but it would be all your fault. So buy the book. Here are some early reviews:

"I loved it! I'm very proud of you!"
-- My dad

"This is the best book you have ever written!"
-- My mom

"I bought 10 copies already!"
-- My stepmother

"Great [expletive] book man, its gonna be huge!"
-- My buddy J-Bug

"Looks fantastic! Can't wait to read it!"
-- Jimmy Kimmel

As you can see, the early feedback has been tremendous.

Also, later this month, I'm embarking on a 10-day book tour starting Sept. 27 (New York City), then going to Stamford (Sept. 28), West Hartford (Sept. 29), Holy Cross (Sept. 29), Boston (Sept. 30 and Oct. 1), Washington (Oct. 4) and Chicago (Oct. 5). That schedule hasn't been finalized yet, but those will be the dates. So if you want an autographed copy that will bump the eBay value of the book from $5 to $7 ten years from now, here's your big chance to get the book signed and have an awkward 10-second conversation with me. And yes, if you insist, I will sign your breasts.

While I'm spending your money, if you haven't given to the Red Cross yet, here's the link. Make sure you click on the "Hurricane Katrina" choice so the money goes directly to relief effort in New Orleans. It's tax-deductible.

One more random note: Gabe Kapler's tearing his Achilles tendon while scoring on someone else's home run, reacting like he tweaked his ankle, finally crumbling to the ground, then insisting he wanted to run out the last two bases ... I mean, this has been one of the weirdest Red Sox seasons ever, and that pretty much crushed every weird thing that ever happened, especially because Dale Sveum was frantically waving him home even as Kapler writhed on the ground. All right, I made that last part up. But that was nuts. Sad moment though because he was one of the truly likable guys on the team. And while we're here, can anyone think of a single reason why a team would pitch to Big Papi in the last two innings of a close game anymore? Why isn't he getting the Bonds treatment here?

(Actually, disregard those last two sentences ... um, I think he's about to cool off. It's only a matter of time. Teams should take their chances with him, he can't possibly keep this up.)

Anyway, here are some follow-up e-mails, corrections and other goodies playing off things I wrote over the past week or so:

I had to write in to debunk the "Jerry Maguire" time lapse that was brought up in yesterday's mailbag. The game was on Christmas day, meaning that it probably started earlier at, say, 4:30 p.m. Phoenix time. This is a stretch but, if Maguire talks to Tidwell at 8:30, that puts him at the airport at 8:45. Southwest flies to LAX just about every hour, even this Christmas (I looked it up). So, pre-9/11, he's on the 9:15 flight because there is no way that flight is full on Christmas night. Now, because Arizona doesn't observe daylight savings, in the winter there is a time difference between LA and Phoenix. So, he actually SAVES an hour while in the air, putting him in to LAX at 9:15. Using SG's best case, "Mr. Black People" is in his car at 9:25, home by 9:45, just in time to save his marriage and catch the late SportsCenter.
-- Chris C., Scottsdale, Ariz.

(Note from SG: I don't remember the Christmas day part, but if that's true, the game would have started at the earliest for an 8 p.m. East Coast start, which means 6 p.m. Arizona time. He wouldn't have made the airport before 10:15/10:30 at the earliest, which means he wouldn't have gotten home before 11:15/11:30 at the earliest. More important, why would Renee Zellweger's sister have an "Angry Women Who Hate Men" support group meeting on Christmas night?)

Regarding reader Doug Cantor ruining "Jerry Maguire" for us, unless I'm missing a shot to a clock in that womens' group scene that states it's only 8:30, I think it's plausible that such a desperate group of women were still up at 2 a.m. when Jerry truly arrived. "With all the constant chocolate-eating" as the one girl says, perhaps there were still bon-bon's left to be eaten. It's sad that I felt compelled to save this movie for everyone.

 sports nut
The Last Weekend
The Red Sox and Yankees fight to the death, again.
By Charles P. Pierce
Posted Friday, Sept. 30, 2005, at 8:42 AM PT

If it is all right with David Ortiz, whose blessing we in Boston now seek in all things, it will be incumbent upon every unaffiliated baseball fan in America this holiday season to send a fruitcake to Eric Wedge and his glorious Cleveland Indians. This is not simply because the Indians have been the best story in the game for nearly three months now, what with their marvelously irrepressible rookies and the sudden emergence of C.C. Sabathia as the walking ghost of Bob Lemon. The Indians have done more than simply scare the daylights out of the Chicago White Sox. They also have helped to rescue the rest of baseball from revolving exclusively once again around the overly dramatic pole stars of the Yankees and the Red Sox.

As baseball rounds into a final weekend that may be spectacularly chaotic enough to make everyone forget briefly the embarrassing presence of the San Diego Padres in this year's playoffs, it is the Indians that pried open at least the possibility that either Boston or New York will miss the postseason entirely. The presence of a third team in the playoff hunt means that the master narrative of the climactic series at Fenway Park will at the very least have to acknowledge that baseball does occur west of Buffalo. In turn, this will spare us a revival of all the Athens-Sparta nonsense that was laid to rest during last year's American League Championship Series. On second thought, probably not.

It had all been laid to rest until the past month, when the threadbare Boston bullpen finally caught up with its equally tattered rotation and Yankee fans rejoiced in the tiny miracles wrought by Shawn Chacon and Aaron Small. In this same space earlier this season, when the Yankees were floundering around close to .500, I argued that New York would spend the year as an interesting team but not necessarily as a contender. Since then, of course, Chacon and Small anchored the pitching staff until Randy Johnson was able to round back into his aging form. New York is 9-3 in games that Chacon has started, and his brilliant six-plus innings against Baltimore on Wednesday night may turn out to be the most signifying victory of all. That's when the Red Sox were getting pummeled 7-2 at home against Toronto and the Yankees were thereby able to break out into the vast, clear daylight of a full one-game lead.

That lead would be two games, of course, if not for the ludicrously excessive heroics of Ortiz and the Red Sox on Thursday night. Down 4-1 to Toronto, and with the Yankees preparing to hand Mariano Rivera a six-run lead, Boston first got an opposite field two-run homer from Manny Ramirez. And then Ortiz tied the game, also with a home run the other way, this one into the seats atop the left-field wall. Ortiz then won the game in the ninth inning with a solid single that (again) went to left field. Ortiz now has 47 home runs—more than any other Boston player besides Jimmie Foxx—and 20 of them have either tied a game or put the Red Sox into a lead. If he's not the American League MVP, then I'm Michael Kay.

It was Ortiz who kept this weekend's face-off a two-out-of-three proposition, but this round of Sox-Yankees will be a series of supporting players. In a series of small-ball deals that brought Chacon and outfielder Matt Lawton to the Bronx, New York general manager Brian Cashman showed himself capable of subtle moves not entirely dependent upon the fact that he does his job within the biggest vault in professional sports. Meanwhile, in Boston, GM Theo Epstein pretty clearly spent the year trying to buy time in 2005 without peddling 2008-2012 out of town. Epstein reasoned—correctly, I believe—that the trading deadline this year was a tour of the Petrified Forest. So, rather than scramble after some left-handed orthopedic case, Epstein hung on to young pitchers Manny Delcarmen, Craig Hansen, and, especially, Jonathan Papelbon, who together make up the strongest group of young Red Sox pitchers since the Oil Can Boyd-Bruce Hurst-Roger Clemens class of the mid-1980s. Epstein took a gamble that the Red Sox had just enough to squeak back into the playoffs again. But that was before the Indians broke up the wild-card picture by storming through the second half of the season.

So, the teams have reversed roles. The Yankees look solid and contenderish. The Red Sox have drained every last drop from what was never a big gas tank to begin with. Some of the dismantling of the 2004 world champions still seems curious. If it was at all possible, there should have been a more serious attempt to re-sign Pedro Martinez, especially since Derek Lowe ran off to Los Angeles in order to run off with TV reporters, and since it was obvious almost from the moment the champagne dried that Curt Schilling was damaged goods. And the unseemly haste with which Series hero and exquisite defensive shortstop Orlando Cabrera was shuffled out of town in favor of Edgar Renteria and his 30 (oy!) errors is still a mystery. (Cabrera fit in splendidly with his teammates, many of whom have spent an awful lot of time this season admonishing the various talk-radio lycanthropes to go easy on the iron-gloved Renteria.) And some of the changes were pure individual self-destruction; in terms of personal unpopularity along the banks of the Charles, former closer Keith Foulke is closing fast on former Cardinal Bernard Law.

(Perhaps the season's most surreal moment came when Foulke expressed anger that his performance was being criticized by "Johnny from Burger King." Given that Foulke's been dead meat on the mound for most of the season, this particular Johnny struck most Sox fans as a perfectly appropriate judge of the pitcher's abilities.)

Absent Epstein's trading for solid starting pitching that wasn't on the market anyway, the Red Sox face the series with Tim Wakefield as the team's best starter and Mike Timlin tremulously hanging on as the closer.

Moreover, in the closing days of the race, Curt Schilling has determined that it's time to start driving nails into his own palms again. Last week, an anonymous Red Sox player wondered to a Boston Herald columnist why Schilling, who spent the offseason rehabilitating his famous stigmatine ankle, still gets cheered "like he's the Pope" even though he hasn't produced on the field. Schilling responded by laying out a long, lachrymose self-drama in the Boston Globe.

Sides were chosen. Suspected moles were run to ground. Villains were fashioned and heroes defended, and the Internet sites dedicated to the Red Sox degenerated—albeit not very far—into what looked like high-school slam books written by Bill James. Of course, for drama's sake, if the two teams split the first two games of the series, it will be Schilling who gets the ball on Sunday to pitch for the pennant against Mike Mussina—two famous brand names who have spent a good part of the season on the remainders table.

So, despite the best efforts of the Cleveland Indians, who sought to spare us all, your defending world champions enter the final weekend against the Yankees with the past around them like a shroud. Of course, this time, it's only their most immediate past, so things are looking up, God and Papi willing. But, of course, I repeat myself.

Charles P. Pierce writes for the Boston Globe Magazine and Esquire. He also appears regularly on National Public Radio.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127169/

 

 

-- Pat S, Cleveland, Ohio

About the "Jerry Maguire" questions: You're obviously forgetting that the various collection of divorced, well-over-35, single moms (non-moms after 35 would support my theory even better) would be up well past 2 a.m. bad-mouthing all the various men of their collective pasts. You figure they each have 3-4 terrible men in their pasts if they're 30-40. That means each one would talk for an hour minimum on average throughout the night. I don't have a true count, but I'm guessing there were 6-8 women in the room when Jerry walks in. That means if they started eating their pot-luck at 6 or 7, they'd all still be there at 2 a.m. Also, by midnight, they would have sucked down a gallon of coffee each -- essentially getting themselves wired on caffeine, furthering the yap-fest. And, of course, just as women compete to out-do each other with their clothes, jewelry, etc., they would probably embellish their horrible men stories to one-up each other, making the girl talk continue indefinitely. Therefore, I find the ending of "Jerry Maguire" incredibly plausible.
-- J.P., San Francisco

"Jerry Maguire" is one of my favorite movies, and as a result I've seen it about 3,459 times. The MNF game is flawed in terms of when it ends, but so how 'bout some of the other flaws. Rod Tidwell picks up an excessive celebration penalty with only 1:30 or so left in the game. This sets Dallas up for one last drive with a short field, but no one seems to care. Or how about earlier in the movie when they're discussing Rod's stats from the previous season. Go back and listen to them. They're ridiculous! But somehow no one at the draft even knows who Rod Tidwell is? Any football person should know who a receiver is that amassed something like 1,500 yards. Am I the only one bothered by this?
-- Mike W., Ann Arbor, Mich.

One more Forrest Gump moment for Al Michaels that you forgot: He announced the "Rod Tidwell Game" in "Jerry Maguire" that put the Cardinals into the playoffs and eventually led to Cuba Gooding Jr. starring in "Boat Trip."
-- Ethan, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Doug Cantor pointed out the horrendous timing problem in "Jerry Maguire." However, the worst example of this is in the "Blues Brothers." At the end of the movie they play the sold-out concert to raise the money to save the orphanage. The Blues Brothers play two songs before sneaking out to avoid the police. Even granting that they were late to the concert, considering that the entire audience is still in attendance it can't be much past 11 p.m. when they leave. There is then the classic line "It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses." The Blues Brothers then lead a massive police chase driving roughly 100 miles per hour. The 106 mile trip, therefore, should not have taken much more than an hour, putting them in Chicago at midnight. Yet somehow they arrive in Chicago around 10 a.m.! The fact that a federal building is open and operating is a sure sign that it is at least mid-morning. So what were they doing? What happened? That is a minimum of 9-10 hours that simply disappeared without a trace.
-- Eric H, Phoenix, Ariz.

Your columns are great ... but one thing, in your mailbag today you say Valerie Malone bought a 'Vette ... not true, she bought a Acura NSX with her money from Jonesy. Only one person can handle the 'Vette: Sanders. Rock and roll.
-- Peter, Salem, Mass.

I hate myself for knowing what I'm about to type, but I've got some more info for you on Valerie's finances. First, she bought an Acura NSX, not a Corvette. Second, Dylan lost $8 million, which he was splitting 50-50 with Jonesy for $4 mil each. Jonesy made a big deal about splitting things fairly with Val, which makes me think he split his half with her 50-50 since she was the one getting the money back. But even if he figured she only earned 1/3 of his $4 million, that leaves her with over a million bucks to blow on the After Dark and the Bel Age. Seems reasonable to me.
-- Kevin Quinn, Philadelphia

(Note from SG: I don't remember Dylan and Jonesy splitting the $8 million ... are we sure that happened?)

For "best slow clap," I feel somewhat betrayed by the fact that a self-confessed "Can't Buy Me Love" fan would neglect to mention Big John's inspired slow clap following Ronnie Miller's passionate lunchtime speech to Quint. I imagine I feel somewhat like Kenneth did after he caught Ronnie in the net on Halloween. I'm going to the arcade now to play a motorbike racing game.
-- Mike, Chicago

In your banter with Josh Schwartz, you claim that you want to see a TV character with a drinking problem have no repercussions. All you need to do is look to Homer Simpson! Now, I realize he isn't real, but still ... the man gets away with everything! Granted he's had a few rough mornings, but who doesn't? He gives the rest of us reason to believe that all in all, you CAN get away with drinking too much and live a fully functional life. Personally, I'm still waiting for the day I get to float around in a space shuttle munching on a bag of Lays that has popped open in no gravity.
-- Greg, Washington, D.C.

You missed a big moment in your discussion of the slow-clap. There was an entire SNL skit built on it -- it was a fake soap opera called "The Sarcastic Clapping Family of Southhampton." Here's the link to the transcript.
-- John M., St. Louis

Your recent mini-mailbag mentioned the sarcastic "I love you in ... " routine (congratulating big-time stars about earlier roles that they would rather forget). I think Tom Hanks was mentioned along with a few others. Here's a true story along the same lines: About five or six years ago, I was in Beverly Hills with a friend when we ran into Michael Richards, aka Kramer from "Seinfeld." My buddy walks right up to him and deadpans, "I really enjoyed your role in UHF." He was LIVID ... I don't think he enjoyed being praised for his uplifting portrayal of a jedi-esque janitor who becomes a children's variety show star overnight.
-- Eric, Redondo Beach, Calif.

When I was in LA, I was at a bar watching the early morning Sunday games (West Coast people drinking beers at 9 a.m. waiting for football. Really good) and Leo DiCaprio was there. We went over to him and told him he was "Phenomenal in Growing Pains." The look of death was priceless. Even better by the next line. I said to my buddy "I can't believe we're meeting Kirk Cameron!"
-- Crash, New York

The winner for the "I loved you in ... " game lies in the cast of "The Harvest". Check out who played the Lip-Synching Transvestite.
--Tim, Chicago, IL

(Other recommendations that came in for this category: Kevin Costner in "Night Shift"; Demi Moore in "Blame it on Rio"; Jennifer Connelly in "Hot Spot"; Vince Vaughn in "Rudy"; Courteney Cox in the "Dancing in the Dark" video; Chazz Palminteri AND William H. Macy in "The Last Dragon"; Nic Cage (billed as Nicolas Coppola) in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High"; Laurence Fishburne in "Pee-Wee's Playhouse"; Jennifer Garner in "Dude Where's My Car?"; Jeff Bridges in "Tron"; and my personal favorite, Tim Robbins in "Top Gun.")

In your response to the guy questioning if Forrest Gump had HIV, you said that he ran for 18 months. He actually ran much longer than that -- 3 years, 2 months, 14 days, and 16 hours. I had a pair of Nike Cortez shoes in high school, just like Forrest, and let me tell you, if he ran more than five miles in those things, he would have knee and ankle problems that would last forever. Like I do.
-- Todd L, Canton, S.D.

In the mailbag, you took a little jab at Jon Stewart, saying someone could embarass him by mentioning his role in "Half Baked," since he takes himself so seriously now. As a "Daily Show" fan, I thought I'd let you know that Stewart mentions his "Half Baked" cameo on the show quite often, as recently as last week, as an example of why he sticks to his TV anchor role rather than pursue acting. His lack of embarrassment regarding the role is probably due to his audience, characterized by Bill O'Reilly as "stoned slackers" being far more forgiving toward the cameo than the average movie goer.
-- Conor L., San Diego

In a recent mailbag column, you mentioned Jon Stewart as someone you'd like to take down a peg by mentioning "Half Baked" in the context of "Hey, I loved you in ...." because he takes himself so seriously now. I call Shenanigans on you, sir. Stewart actually makes fun of his own acting (particularly in "Half Baked") on a pretty regular basis. I say that if you really want to get him, you should mention the emotional climax of "Big Daddy" or his role as an alien teacher who goes by the name of the actor from "Terminator 2" in "The Faculty." There, I said it.
-- Dominic M., Brooklyn, N.Y.

I thought that you would be proud to know that Bess, the most commonly used Internet filtering program for high schools, including my own, has all of your cowbell ramblings under the "global block list." Congrats. You officially corrupt the minds of the youth in our nation. Keep up the good work.
-- Brad Inman, Toledo

Watching parts of the U.S. Open match between Hewitt and Federer, I realized there was something that needed your input: Should there be some kind of special achievement award presented to Mary Carillo for being the first and only female sports broadcaster to not be incredibly obnoxious and really overbearing in seemingly trying way too hard to sound like they "fit in" in the men's sports world, and even BRINGING things to the table? We could even have Jack Morris present the award to her.
-- Alexander S., Twin Cities, Minn.

How can you rattle off a list of good assistants/crappy head coaches and leave out Ray Handley? You say you didn't have room? Fine, he still deserved to make it. Ray Rhodes at least made the playoffs. I think I speak for all Giants fans when I say that our Ray was [worse] by a factor of at least 7. I mean, one of my first memories of the NFL was performing the "Ray Must Go" chant with my dad. You must have known some big Giants fans at the time, so you must be familiar with the utter disgust we all had with him as a coach. I'm not going to bring up his benching of Phil Simms in favor of Hoss and his porn 'stache. I'm not going to mention a 13-3 championship team going a combined 14-18 over the next two years. I'm going to tell you a story and then let you go. I'm sitting with my dad and my grandfather watching a game. The G-men have the ball on the 1-yard line and it is fourth down. Pro-Bowler Rodney Hampton is not in the game for some reason, leaving Ray with two running backs: 175 pound scatback Dave Meggett and 250 pound Jarrod Bunch. Ray, of course, decides on a draw play for Meggett, who proceeds to get hit behind the line of scrimmage by approximately 58 defensive linemen. So, to sum up this unnecessarily lengthy e-mail, Ray Handley is not only responsible for the collapse of the post-Parcells Giants, he also managed to get me to, in a roundabout way, defend Jarrod Bunch. The horror.
-- Nick C., Storrs, Conn.

From yesterday's mailbag: How in the world could that girl that tried to seduce three roommates be called "Secretariat"? If that's not screaming for the name "Seattle Slew," I don't know what is.
-- Matt Boutwell, Maine

While sitting in the Montreal airport after a three-day bachelor party (which after reading your recent column about New Orleans I will champion as an underrated bachelor party spot, where I believe my soul and dignity completely wasted away into a pile of dust), I spotted the following poster in full page color in the NY Times Fall Movie Preview. Read the cast list very carefully. I believe this could signal the end of life as we know it on Earth. It has to be a misprint of some sort. I'm going to buy a generator and as many canned foods as I can fit into my trunk.
-- Nick, Lansdale, Pa.

I was shocked to learn in your last mailbag that in America, "pulling the goalie" means trying for a baby. In Canada, the birthplace of the phrase, you would instead be describing a sexual encounter that involves only one person (male). If you said that to a Canadian, he'd think you were just getting "assistance" from your wife, and be really really jealous. Just so you know.
-- Steve S, Calgary, AB

As a Pats fan, petecarroll.com is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. He had no clue while with the Pats and now he is one of the best coaches in college football. I remember going to a game when he was coaching the Pats -- they were playing a crappy team and won. Not spectacularly, but they won. After the game he came sprinting through the tunnel, pumping his fists like they beat the '85 Bears by 30. He looked like a complete moron. He probably still looks like a complete moron, but at least he wins.
-- Archie, Fall River, Mass.

In your Sept. 14th mailbag you were asked how you handle comments about your daughter from friends with sons. I have two daughters and with each employed what I call the "now and later" defense. The now part consists of telling your friend with sons that if you hear that comment ever again, you are telling his wife about X. The later part consists of having your daughter beat up and basically emasculate your friends' sons every time you get together with them. No parent will allow their sons to get physical with a little girl (this works best with wives around), but girls are always considered to be just trying to play like a boy if they get a little rough. Guaranteed that your buddy's sons won't ever want anything to do with your daughter down the line.
-- Dan, Indianapolis

Not sure if you've come across this, yet, but if you are still fast-forwarding (with TiVo) through commercials (or, like me, through the interminable amount of time it takes for Mike Martz to call in a play), let me introduce you a little friend I like to call "the thirty second skip." Armed with that and the eight-second rewind button, you can jump through any length commercial break in two seconds.
-- Mike S., St Louis

Bad news for you, pal. "24" doesn't return until January. That way they can run the whole season without the gaps that plagued "Lost." It [stinks] now, but wait until they run four episodes in two days after the Super Bowl. Best show on TV.
-- Kyle, Marion, Iowa

As an avid Sports Guy fan for many years, I cannot explain to you how excited I am that you have finally caught on to "24". I've been watching for all four seasons. Just so you know, at the beginning of the season last year, Jack and Chloe, the geeky assistant, were the only two characters that were ever on the show before. Season Four was going along just fine, but the whole time, all the longtime fans were asking "Where are the superstars?" The episode where Tony makes his return, I knew during commercial it was going to be him, as Jack said "there is only one person I can trust." You knew it was going to be Tony and you could not be happier. Kind of like late '90s WWF, when a title match was going on, everybody was getting beat up, you hadn't seen Stone Cold make an appearance, and the camera zooms away and looks at the ring with the entrance ramp above it and the glass shatters. Very similar. Go Sox!
-- Hank, Providence, R.I.

I see you're on the "24" bandwagon now and want to ask if you know of any other TV/Movie character who had a worse day than Audrey Raines in Season 4? She was kidnapped along with her father ... they tried to commit a double suicide and were saved at the last minute ... she nearly watched her father take a bullet to the head before they were both saved ... also, her brother was somewhat responsible for the kidnapping, and if that wasn't bad enough, he came out of the closet by confessing about his threesome with two terrorists that ended up starting the whole thing ... her estranged husband came back into her life only for her to suspect him of being a terrorist, see him tortured by her new boyfriend, start to fall for him again, see him survive a surgery, then watch him die in another surgery because your new boyfriend needed the doctor to save someone else's life ... five hours later, she watched her new boyfriend die. Now try to complain about your day again.
-- Micky, Brooklyn, N.Y.

I'd like to nominate Clancy Pendergast (Arizona Cardinals D-Coordinator) for first-ballot induction to the Reggie Cleveland Hall of Fame.
-- Joe Carney

I rarely ever feel this way, but as the self-proclaimed king of "Seinfeld" enthusiasts, I have to take umbridge at your recent mailbag reference to Jason Alexander as George. First, Alexander was signed up to headline the show because of his name recognition from Broadway (he won a Tony the year before getting the "Seinfeld" gig). The first few episodes, he is obviously channeling Woody Allen until he realized that his character is Larry David, and began, admittedly, parodying him for the next few years until George finally took on a character of his own. The reader e-mail pointed out that we have seen nothing of Alexander since the show, which is true for most of your audience who focuses on TV and film. Jason Alexander has done quite well for himself on Broadway, which is the only place he ever wanted to have a career. Granted, I'm not saying theatre should be on the same scale as TV or movies, I've never been to Broadway and don't plan to go anytime soon, but they do tend to have quality actors, Jason Alexander among them. Perhaps the only downside of the new "Seinfeld" on DVD collection is that we fans get indisputable proof that Jason Alexander has nothing in common with George Costanza. Jason Alexander is basically the pretentious theatre geek we all hated (or were) in high school, he just happens to be very good at it.
-- Ryan Scott

I read your buddy Gus' review on "Madden '06" and I thought it was great. But he forgot the single best addition to this year's game. Being able to flip into the end zone. It's the little things.
-- Brian M., New York

A few facts to refute a pro-WNBA e-mail trying to claim that it took decades for the NFL and MLB to establish themselves, so you should give the WNBA more than just 9 years before you write them off: Well, the first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was founded in 1869. It went on a nationwide tour and became an immediate hit, resulting in the formation of a new professional league, the National Association, in 1871. That league, it is true, folded after five seasons, but (1) the causes were largely the prevalence of gambling and the depression of 1873 and (2) it was immediately replaced by the National League. The NL also had some rocky moments, but by 1880 it was firmly established and starting to thrive, and within two more seasons (1882) the league was successful enough to spawn a full-fledged rival.

So, maybe it did take just a little longer for baseball to settle in than the current life span of the WNBA ... but baseball had to invent professional team sports in America in the process, and do so in the face of a depression and the aftermath of Civil War, with no mass media, playing exclusively on weekday and Saturday afternoons. I'd like to see the WNBA try that.
-- The Baseball Crank, New York

Until tomorrow.

 

posted: Sep. 13, 2005  |  Feedback

With rookie Jon Papelbon standing on the mound during a tie Red Sox game Monday night, I called my buddy Hench just to tell him, "This is the single biggest moment of the season."

Strange prediction, since they were playing the Blue Jays, but here was my logic: Boston's bullpen, as presently constituted, cannot win three straight playoff series. It's impossible. You know how they always use the saying "lights-out" for an effective reliever? Well, Boston's bullpen has been lights-on for five months and counting.

Historically, no team in the modern baseball era has captured a World Series with a group of relievers this statistically inept. As it stands right now, the Red Sox have one decent reliever (Mike Timlin) who's not even that good ... and he's the closer. Former closer Keith Foulke pushed his body too far last October and hasn't been remotely the same since -- I wish people would remember this when they decide to rip him, but that's a whole other story. Last year's lefty stopper (Alan Embree) pitches for the Yankees, where he's helped the Red Sox more in the past month than he did in the previous four. Nobody else really matters. In October, "Brandon" (that's what announcers have been calling him) Arroyo moves to the pen as a set-up guy, giving the Sox another decent arm (although he's the ultimate hit-or-miss guy).

Here's what was missing: A young stud who could come in, throw some heat and make batters swing and miss. And the only guy who fit the bill was Papelbon. Long considered one of the organization's top prospects, he came up in July and pitched a couple of decent starts (Varitek went out of his way to rave about him), went back to the minors, returned to throw a beauty in Anaheim (6.2 shutout innings), then moved to the bullpen (where he pitched in college). And the makeup is there -- Papelbon throws between 93 and 95 with a kick (his fastball hops up), and he struck out the side against the Devil Rays two weeks ago. He also carries himself like Seagal in "Under Siege" -- quiet, confident, doesn't seem fazed by anything. So you knew we were reaching the "All right, this kid is either going to be a factor or not" point with him.

Monday night? It happened. Arroyo self-destructed in the seventh, blowing a five-run lead with help from Foulke (downright sad to watch) and Francona's goofy, Jamesian decision to bring in Timlin (who promptly gave up a game-tying bomb). After Timlin threw 24 pitches through the eighth, Francona didn't have a choice -- we had to find out about Papelbon once and for all. So the kid comes out for the ninth, throws two hitless innings, gets the obligatory go-ahead homer from Big Papi in the top of the 11th -- seriously, this is getting ridiculous, he's like the Dominican Roy Hobbs at this point -- then effortlessly retires the side in the bottom of the 11th for the win. Forty-five pitches, no hits, one baserunner, one strikeout.

And here's what we found out: In October, when everything slows down, when the tension mounts, when weaker players fold and stronger players thrive, only a handful of relievers can handle the shift in pressure. We didn't know if Papelbon was one of them; now we know that he has it in him. There's also a precedent here, because Calvin Schiraldi came out of nowhere during the '86 season and helped propel that team in the playoffs (everyone forgets this now because of what happened in October, but he was superb in the regular season before the Schiraldi Face made its debut in the Angels series). And as recently as 2002, the Angels wouldn't have won the World Series without K-Rod giving them a boost in September.

Can it happen with Papelbon? After watching Monday's game, I say yes.

And as strange as this sounds, the 2005 Red Sox can't win the World Series without him.

One more baseball note: I was reading Peter Gammons' column Monday when he casually mentioned that St. Louis' Chris Carpenter was the best starter in baseball right now. Thinking it was a typo, I checked out his stats ... I mean, he's on pace for an $11 million whatifsports.com season right now! Who knew? Then I looked at his career stats and noticed two things. First, he's 30. Second, he's never even come close to approaching this. Other than Mike Scott's ungodly 1986 season, has there ever been another situation like this before?

So I e-mailed Holy Cross grad Dan McLaughlin, who used to write the "Baseball Crank" column for my old Web site and continues to write for baseballcrank.com. Here was Dan's response (and please note that it took him over an hour, he's clearly slipping in his old age):

"Well, Scott is the obvious parallel. There's a bunch of examples of less dramatic turnarounds by guys who were inconsistent or injury-prone in their 20s (Mike McCormick, Kevin Brown, Curt Schilling, Mike Cuellar, Bob Tewksbury), were previously relievers (Wilbur Wood, Hank Aguirre), pitched OK and got huge run support (Steve Stone) or just didn't get a shot in the majors until they were past 30 (Dazzy Vance, Spud Chandler, Sal Maglie). Carpenter's just 30 and was 15-5 last year with a 121 ERA+ [3.46 actual ERA] and 7.52 K/9, so he did build up to this a bit, although I don't think anyone predicted this after he broke down (yet again) at the end of last year (me, I've been arguing for years that he should be converted to a closer due to his fragility). But there are a few other, similar examples besides Scott (I could be forgetting someone -- I didn't exactly do a systematic study -- but I don't think so):

1. If you look at the top 10 most similar pitchers to Carpenter entering 2005 on baseball-reference.com, you'd find Jason Schmidt at No. 9. Schmidt's career-bests through age 29 were 13 wins, a 3.45 ERA and 196 K, all set or matched at age 29 (his age-29 season is quite similar to Carpenter's). At 30, Schmidt went 17-5, 2.34 ERA, 208 K, pitching comparably to Carpenter, if winning a few less games and throwing a few less innings. Other than Scott, he's probably the most similar one.

2. Bucky Walters, through age 29, had career bests of 15 wins (at age 29) and a 4.17 ERA. At 30, he went 27-11 with a 2.29 ERA and won the MVP Award for the '39 Reds; other than Scott, he's probably the most similar case.

3. John Tudor's career bests were 13 wins and a 3.27 ERA, until at age 31 he posted the 1.93 ERA in 275 innings and won 21 games for the '85 Cards. Getting out of Fenway and getting Ozzie behind him had a lot to do with that.

4. Dave Stewart's career high in wins through age 29 was 10, and he'd never tossed 200 innings before. Stewart at 30 started the string of four consecutive 20-win seasons, although he didn't instantly dominate the league."

So there you go. In case you didn't realize it before, I am very, very, very, very secretly a baseball stat dork but have successfully weaned 98 percent of that habit out of my body. The other two percent is still fascinated by this stuff. Anyway, thanks to the Crank.

One note from Monday night's Eagles-Falcons game: How could it take John Madden until the final drive of the fourth quarter to wonder if that hellacious hit on Donovan McNabb in the first quarter was still affecting him? Jeez, you think so? What tipped you off, the 10-12 passes that were way off the mark, the fumble, the interception and horrendous screen pass that became a backwards lateral fumble, the fact that he didn't scramble the entire game, or the fact that he looked like he had just eaten some bad seafood for three straight hours?

Look, I think Madden is the best football announcer of all-time, and unlike some other aging announcers who mangle names and don't do their homework anymore -- yes, I'm dying to drop one person's name here, but they won't let me (although I left a clue earlier in this posting) -- Madden isn't guilty of either of those things. But how can you not comment on something that basic? And where was Michaels on this? McNabb is banged up to the point that Michaels said one of the most horrifying sentences in gambling history ("Koy Detmer is warming up for the Eagles") and comes back into the game at the last minute ... and the whole sequence is never mentioned again until the Eagles' final drive, despite mounting evidence that McNabb was off his game?

(Note: In the playoff game against the Falcons last year, McNabb scrambled 10 times for 32 yards. Last night? One scramble, no yards. Nobody mentioned this, either.)

Finally, today's sports book recommendation...

A few weeks ago, you may remember how I poked fun at the "Best American Sports Writing" series and its increasingly sappy direction. Here's what I wrote:

"It's like how the Oscars nominates the same types of dramas every year and ignores anything else that's successful. That used to be a fantastic book -- not only did I look forward to it every year, I own every version since the late-1970s -- and now reading that thing is like attending a film festival where they show a Holocaust movie, followed by a Depression movie, followed by a civil-rights movie, and so on. Many of the stories don't even have anything to do with the major sports anymore; for instance, if you're a blind, club-footed, diabetic, hemophiliac long-distance runner in Cambodia, and somebody did a piece on you in a major magazine, and you didn't end up in this book, you really need to reevaluate things. But that's a whole other story."

The next day, editor Glenn Stout was nice enough to e-mail me, and we had a lively exchange about what I wrote (to his credit, Glenn didn't take it personally). According to Glenn, he narrows the field down to 75-80 potential picks every year, then sends those pieces to the guest editor, who ends up making the final choices on what ends up in the book. Fair enough. Glenn also sent me an advance copy of the 2005 book by guest editor Mike Lupica, who chose 29 pieces in all. And you would think these pieces would offer some common reflection over the sports year as a whole, right?

Of course not. The first three choices are weighty pieces about an embattled Mexican high school track team, an embattled Compton football team and Ken Caminiti's death. So we're off to a happy start. As it turns out, probably two-thirds of the book is ultra-serious and depressing (rape, steroids, Pat Tillman, you name it), with some other bizarre choices that speak for themselves (including four fishing pieces and two about Howard Cosell). Astoundingly, nothing from ESPN.com or ESPN The Magazine made the book -- I'm glad future generations will think the ESPN empire took the year off from publishing a single worthwhile piece -- although Sports Illustrated was represented five times. Even more astoundingly, Chris Jones' jaw-dropping Ricky Williams profile in Esquire -- which was the most entertaining piece I read last year, hands down, with nothing else coming close -- didn't even make honorable mention. How is that possible?

(Note: You would think somebody had to have written a worthy piece at some point during the Red Sox-Yankees series, which finished with one of the most memorable four-day stretches in the history of sports, right? Nothing made the cut. For instance, I made honorable mention for my piece about Game 5 of the ALCS, which was nice of them ... but if that piece was the best thing anyone wrote about the ALCS, it should have made the book. If somebody else topped it, he should have made the book. Seriously, how can you not have one piece about the ALCS in a book about the best sportswriting in 2004? Lupica even spends a page in his introduction remembering the Dave Roberts game, which he calls "the biggest comeback story in the history of sports" and adds, "Columnists live for a moment like that." I agree. So you're telling me that there wasn't a single writer in the country who wrote anything memorable about that game or the next three?)

Not every choice was bad, obviously -- I was happy to see Tom Verducci's excellent SI piece about Red Sox fans make the cut, as well as Jon Wertheim's well-reported feature about Roscoe Tanner's scummy life (count me among the growing number of Wertheim fans, his tennis stuff is truly superb, and I don't even like tennis), and I even enjoyed the piece about Mexican runners (if only because Gary Smith wrote it). Even David Shields' Cosell piece was excellent (and far superior to the other Cosell piece that was inexplicably chosen for the book). This stuff is subjective to a degree, so you might like some of these choices more than I did. But overall? It's the sappiest "BASW" yet. In fact, I think that's how they should promote these books: "If you thought last year's book was sappy, think again -- this is the sappiest 'BASW' book yet!"

Do I recommend it? Yes. I always recommend "BASW" for anyone who cares about sportswriting, no matter how inexplicable the choices are, and it's certainly the only book of its kind. There will always be five or six pieces worth your time. If there's a flaw in the system that Glenn currently uses, it's that he gives the guest editor waaaaaaaaaay too much power (after all, everyone likes different things) and opens the door to some obvious conflicts of interest (just about every guest editor manages to include pieces from some of their friends and/or favorite colleagues, which demeans the process). I also think they should pick the top 10 sports stories of each year and run the best column or feature about each of them, just so there's some cohesive perspective on the year that just passed.

Anyway, if you want to buy the 2005 book, go ahead. But for this week's "best sports book" recommendation, I'm selecting the 1994 edition of the "BASW," which was edited by Thomas Boswell and features a murderer's row of pieces, including five transcendent ones that rank among the most memorable of the last 25 years: Bruce Bushel's hatchet job of Lenny Dykstra playing at a baccarat table in Vegas; Gary Smith's unforgettable piece on a dying Jim Valvano; John Ed Bradley's piece on Buster Douglas' post-Tyson fall; Davis Miller's essay about meeting Muhammad Ali (which was so good, he was able to extend it into a book); and Charlie Pierce's profile of Magic Johnson, post-AIDS (my favorite Pierce piece ever, and he's written some good ones). All five of those pieces are twice as good as anything in this year's book, and they're about sports figures that people actually know. At least 8-10 other pieces are worth your time, including Susan Orlean's 25-page profile of schoolboy hotshot Felipe Lopez (much funnier to read now that we know how his career turned out). It's a true reflection of that sports year in every sense.

Sadly, there are only a few copies available online, although I'm sure every relevant used bookstore or library carries them. But the book is worth your time if you can find it.

Until tomorrow.

 

posted: Sep. 12, 2005  |  Feedback

Some people and companies to thank on a Monday:

• Thanks to Fox and MLB for not showing Saturday's Yankees-Red Sox game in California, courtesy of the inexplicable "Every Saturday baseball telecast with a 1 p.m. East Coast start is blacked out on the West Coast" rule. I pay something like $159 a year to allegedly get "every Red Sox game," and yet I have missed at least six or seven Saturday games this season (and counting). Really? They couldn't bump a "90210" rerun on FX and simulcast these games there so the people on the West Coast can watch them? They couldn't make them available to anyone who subscribes to the Extra Innings package? My goal of the week is to find out (a) why this rule exists, (b) if they're even aware of how many Red Sox and Yankees fans live on the West Coast and get furious every time one of these games are bumped, and (c) if they even care.

• Thanks to Curt Schilling, who pitched maybe the biggest game of the season on Saturday when the Yankees were getting ideas of a possible sweep at the Stadium. I'd say more, but they didn't show the game on TV out here. Have I mentioned that yet?

• Thanks to Dale Sveum, who is officially "The Worst Person In America At His Job" now that FEMA chief Michael Brown has been reassigned. As Ontario reader Andrew Steed wrote over the weekend, "I'm nearly beyond help now. Why does Sveum have a job? Waving in Varitek [in Friday's game] was possibly the worst decision by a paid coach that I have ever seen. That includes Bowie-Jordan. That includes trading half of the GDP for Herschel. I live in Ottawa and there are few people who understand just how calamitous this is. You did a column talking about the waiting period after a championship, but then you went on to say that they've clearly abandoned the 'let's keep everyone together premise.' How is Sveum still there? Getting Dusty Baker's kid to replace Sveum would be an upgrade comparable to the Lakers going from Kurt Rambis to Phil Jackson."

(I have nothing to add -- this was a problem last season, it's been an ongoing problem this season, and nobody seems to care. I don't get it.)

• Thanks to Andre Agassi, who had me interested in tennis for the first time in years last week under the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Memorial "If you hang around long enough, people will eventually like you when you're competing at an advanced age and seem like a relative underdog" Corollary. Hard to believe this was the same contrived guy with ridiculous hair that everyone despised in the early '90s. Seems like just yesterday.

• Thanks to Steffi Graf for 20 years of "Wait, is she cute or not cute?" battles. I bet I have had that conversation 50 times in my life with somebody. And yes, I think she's cute. Great pegs on her.

• Thanks to USA, CBS and DirecTV for cutting away from the Agassi-Blake match in the fifth set -- moving it from USA to CBS -- so anyone who lives on the West Coast didn't see how the last 32 minutes of the match finished (because we're three hours behind here, so they were showing CBS's and USA's prime-time lineups). That was fantastic. I TiVo'ed the match because I was writing my NFL column at the time, then went to watch it on Friday morning and nearly ended up killing everyone in a three-mile radius. And I don't even like tennis anymore.

• Thanks in advance to everyone who's sending me an "It's your own damned fault, you never should have moved to the West Coast, you idiot!" e-mail.

• Thanks to three readers who pointed out that the Cooper Manning joke in Friday's column could be perceived to be in bad taste. I was going for the easy "brother who wasn't as good as the other brothers" joke and totally forgot that he battled spinal stenosis in the early 90s (prematurely ending his playing career). My apologies if anyone took it the wrong way.

• Thanks to my local cable providers, who decided to run a five-minute Emergency Test broadcasting message -- you know, when the screen turns black and they run an annoying noise that makes dogs crazy -- during the final telecast of A&E's "24" marathon last week. The Sports Gal and I plowed through the first 23 episodes, we're immersed in the season finale, and at the 15-minute mark, right when they're about to hunt down the last missile, BOOM! This is a test of the emergency broadcasting system. By the time they returned to the show, the missile was being blown up. Fantastic.

That reminds me, I thought Season Four was the best season yet. Ten belated comments …

1. Did you ever think, at any point in his career, that you would be saying the words, "All right, it's not even an argument any more -- Kiefer Sutherland is the best law enforcement character of all time." I know he's not an actual cop, but he's taking down bad guys every episode, so I think it's fair to compare him to Sonny Crockett, Starsky and Hutch, Andy Sipowicz, Vic from "The Shield," the guy from CSI and everyone else. And he's the best. If you needed to take down a group of bad guys, and you could pick one TV character from any show, who wouldn't take Jack Bauer?

2. William Devane hasn't been that good since he was chanting "Let Them Play" at the Astrodome.

3. Couldn't stand the actress who played Devane's daughter and Jack's girlfriend -- she wasn't a good actress, she wasn't that cute and her character stunk. Other than that, I thought she was great.

4. A new addition to the That Guy Hall of Fame: That Guy from the Sopranos who also played Edgar in "24." What a resume -- he's becoming this generation's Robert Costanzo. And speaking of That Guys, how 'bout Trey from "The OC" pulling double-duty as Devane's gay son in "24"?

5. How could CTU end up with so many moles? How is this possible? You'd figure like one mole every 10 years would be a big deal -- this place has them every six months.

6. Have no idea if this is true or not, but I'm guessing that they started Season 4 with a bunch of new characters, only everyone missed the old ones, so they figured out convoluted ways to bring back Tony Almeida, Michele Dessler and President Palmer just to appease the diehards. Which is fine with me -- I like all three of them. I'd even throw Tony Almeida in to the TV Sidekick Pantheon along with Ricardo Tubbs, Bosley, Huggy Bear, the Skipper, Boner Stabone, Screech Powers, Paulie Walnuts, Steve Sanders, Johnny Drama and everyone else.

And by the way, Dennis Haysbert should be the president in real life. I'm not even kidding. I would vote for either him or Jeff Bridges, and if they were on the same ticket, all the better. After watching the country survive (barely) despite the Martz-like performances of our last three presidents, it's clear that the position is overrated -- so why can't we just hire guys who seem like they would be good presidents? At least their speeches and public appearances would be good, right?

7. Speaking of presidents, bookies in Vegas have just removed the odds of my dropping a "President Logan Face" joke in an upcoming column.

8. I loved the ending of the last show, as Jack was walking aimlessly down the street with the knapsack over his shoulder … but why couldn't they have gone with the piano music from the endings of "The Incredible Hulk?" Remember when Dr. David Banner would be walking down the street in a torn pair of jeans, and they would play that sad, "Too bad, his new life didn't work out again because the Hulk came out" music as the closing credits rolled? That used to destroy me as a little kid; I couldn't handle it. Jack needed that music to push the final scene over the top.

9. Idea for the next "24" season: Jack has 24 hours to prevent a season-long strike for the 2006 NFL season. They need to mix things up.

10. Did you ever watch too many "24" episodes in too short of a span, to the point that it starts affecting your innate reactions to people in your everyday life? For instance, there's an Arab (really nice guy) who runs the newstand near my house, and I was walking there last week and thinking about something else when I saw him on his cell phone, so my brain was still in "24" mode, and I thought for like 0.2 seconds, "Oh my God, he's calling Marwan, HE KNOWS WHERE THE NUCLEAR FOOTBALL IS!" Then I realized it was real life and the moment passed. All right, I think I shared too much here.

• Just so you know, I'm saving all my NFL thoughts for Friday's column this season. But after watching what happened Sunday, it's clear that (a) the NFC South is the best division in football, and (b) Tampa Bay is better than anyone thought except for the guys at Football Outsiders (although even they admitted that they couldn't figure out why their stat engine liked Tampa so much and that the same thing happened last year when they stunk). Well, somebody has to stink in that division, right? Watch out for a potential Falcons stinkbomb tonight -- they could be the team.

• For everyone who keeps e-mailing me about my "complaints" that the Pats didn't have good enough Super Bowl odds -- for much of July and August, they were at 8-1 and Indy was at 6-1. Right now, on every gambling-related Web site I can find, the Pats are 6-1 and Indy is 4-1. My argument was and is that Indy shouldn't have better odds to win the Super Bowl than New England until (a) the Belichick-and-Brady combination loses a playoff game, or (b) Indy beats them in the regular season. Neither of these things has happened yet. Not sure why this is so tough to understand.

• If you haven't given to the Red Cross yet, here's the link. Make sure you click on the "Hurricane Katrina" choice so the money goes directly to the relief effort in New Orleans. And yes, it's tax deductible.

More tomorrow.

 

posted: Sep. 9, 2005  |  Feedback

I have few rules in life, but this is one of them: Any time one of my buddies plays a "Madden" season in franchise mode through the year 2022, and he has a wife and two kids to boot, he gets to critique the next year's game on the Sports Guy's site. So here's my buddy Gus' critique of "Madden 2006."

• Short of bringing back Pat Summerall and the ambulance driving on the field, the NFL Films Music component is the best thing they ever could have done. Nothing beats kicking field goals in training camp on the All-Madden level with Sam Spence doing his thing in the background as the clock winds down.

• Love the cutaways to the coordinators in the booth during game play, as well as how the stands clear out if you're blowing out a team on the road in the fourth quarter.

• Not since Summerall uttered the word "Ah-Waaaay-Zah-kay" have I enjoyed an announcer saying a name as much as the way Michaels says "Putzier." The word "Houshmandzadeh" is also entertaining.

• NFL Superstar mode is a nice diversion. Fun to create yourself. But as a wideout who got drafted by the Browns, it was a bit of a bummer to try and improve in practice with Trent Dilfer as my QB. Fun to get all tattooed up, call out your coach and demand trades. I ended up in Tennessee and Drew Bennett and I make for a unique receiving duo (just call us "Vanilla Thunder"). And since there is a Ramsey in the NFL now, Al Michaels actually says my last name when I make a play. Once the season starts, I play the games with the accelerated clock on, and it's a fun half hour.

• Now, for the most controversial video game development that doesn't include subliminal pornography. I like the passing cone, but at the All-Madden level it's ridiculously hard. My hands haven't flailed about that haplessly since my junior prom. On All-Pro level it's better -- I imagine teenagers can handle it, but for a 30-something, carpel tunnel-impaired person, it's really hard at All-Madden level. The cone combined with precision passing makes completing the tough pass easier if you do it right, but the penalty for doing it wrong is often a pick. I asked six people at work if they play with the cone on or off and they all said "off." I can't imagine that anyone competing in this year's Madden Challenge would say, "Hey, do you mind if we turn the cone off?" So I'm keeping it on.

• I actually like that you can overthrow guys now, makes the game seem more realistic. I also like the random spin move as the runner bounces off tackles that is in the game this year. The return of the helmet flying off is also nice.

• You can still line up to block a punt and then audible to punt return formation to give yourself a chance at the punt return.

• The Broncos' playbook is loaded with play-action passing and is pretty fun to run. One good thing is that many of their receiver routes have two guys in the same line of vision, which makes using the cone a little easier. It's also fun to do running plays out of a formation in the first half thinking that the computer will bite on the run in the third quarter when I go to the play-action from the same formation.

• Dislikes: The elimination of the pregame weather report, which I always enjoyed; the drive-summary graphic after a score almost always has the wrong total yardage (details are important, dammit); they still haven't bagged the cameos for memory space and used actual cheerleader footage at halftime; sometimes when you try to throw a low precision pass the QB fades back and the throw is inaccurate; no Jimmy Kimmel and Tim McGraw at halftime. I like it, I love it.

• My ultimate goal is to get to 2030 with this game. In last year's version I made it to 2024 and Wade Phillips retired in 2022! I can't believe he made it that long without being fired -- that had to be the upset of the century.

Final grade: B-plus.

posted: Sep. 7, 2005  |  Feedback

Couple of quick notes:

1. In Tuesday's " Cowbell" posting, I wrote a section about "Kanye West's spectacular ad-lib from Friday night's charity telethon." Just to clear that up, I used the word "spectacular" because it was such a crazy TV moment, not because I was endorsing what he had said. I thought that was clear given what followed in the section, but some readers were confused. So there you go.

(Translation: No, I do not believe that the president hates all black people. Sorry to disappoint you.)

2. Along those same lines, a few readers made a fantastic connection between the Kanye/Mike Myers TV moment and a classic SNL skit from 1994. I'm legitimately bummed that I didn't remember this myself, but I'll let reader Josh from New Hampshire explain:

"If you think Mike Myers' reaction was hilarious during the Kanye West rant during the Hurricane Katrina telecast solely based on the reaction itself, then you have NO idea how funny it is for those of us who have seen the old SNL 'Pasta maker infomercial' skit where he plays a salesman opposite host Heather Locklear. For no reason at all, during the selling of this pasta maker, she starts insulting every ethnicity she can think of. Stuff along the lines of, 'This machine is so easy, even a drunk Indian could use it.'

"The board of callers behind them would light up every time she made one of these insulting remarks, but the best part was watching Myers trying to distance himself from her, hiding behind the counter, trying to say how he didn't agree with what she was saying before she would interrupt -- the expression on his face during the whole thing was the best part. You MUST not have seen this skit because I find it impossible that you would not bring it up when mentioning the Kanye West debacle. It just adds a whole new level of hilarity to his discomfort."

3. Not only did I receive a press release for the "White Shadow: Season One" DVD -- coming out Nov. 8 -- but they were kind enough to send me the advance discs yesterday. (OK, OK, I threatened everyone's life at the PR company doing the release until they sent it to me.) The DVD includes all 15 episodes from Season One and episodes with director's commentaries (including Ken Howard and Tim Van Patten doing a commentary on the show where Salami was boxing underground). You are going to buy this DVD when it comes out if I have to hold a gun to your head -- it's the greatest sports show of all time, it has never been even approached before or since, and the shows still hold up to this day. You have to believe me. Anyway, mark that day on your calendar: Nov. 8.

4. Random Boston note: Only now is the local media starting the "Is David Ortiz the greatest clutch hitter in Red Sox history?" conversation? What's next -- "Is Bill Belichick the greatest Patriots coach ever?"

5. Speaking of the Pats, here's my favorite Web site of 2005, courtesy of Big Vito in Manhattan: petecarroll.com. If you're a Patriots fan who remembers the days when Pete was such a joke that I actually spent two years on my old Web site calling him "Coach Fredo," make sure you close the door into your office, turn up the volume on your computer and watch the intro. Then prepare for the coming apocalypse.

6. If you haven't given to the Red Cross yet, here's the link. Back with more tomorrow.

 

posted: Sep. 6, 2005  |  Feedback

Hope everyone enjoyed the three-day weekend as much as you can enjoy a weekend when there's a national catastrophe going on. If you haven't given to the Red Cross yet, here's the link. Make sure you click on the "Hurricane Katrina" choice so the money goes directly to the relief effort in New Orleans. And yes, it's tax-deductible.

Along those same lines ...

1. I thought Bill Maher's HBO show, "Real Time," on Friday night was the highlight of his career. He made all the right jokes and raised all the right questions, and the panel segment was particularly good -- it was just a superb show from start to finish. Like many others, I'm carrying a significant amount of anger about how the government (both federal and local) handled this entire thing last week, and the Maher show tapped into all of it. I remember watching "Cinderella Man" this summer, seeing the Depression scenes and thinking, "Wow, I can't believe that happened in America!" Never thought I would be saying that about something that happened here in the 21st century.

2. They didn't show Kanye West's spectacular ad-lib from Friday night's charity telethon on the West Coast, but we did find it on the Web (The Intern has the link) and Mike Myers' stunned reaction immediately joined the Pantheon of Faces -- along with the Tom Cruise "I'm trying to cry" Face in "Top Gun," the Derek Lowe Face, the Stan Humphries "I've just been concussed again" Face and everything else. I kept expecting him to turn into Wayne from Wayne's World and say, "No ... way!" Just an unbelievable TV moment. Frankly, it could alter Myers' career -- will you ever be able to look at him without thinking of him glancing at Kanye West in sheer disbelief?

• As you may have guessed, I received a good chunk of WNBA-related e-mails last week, although I was surprised that nine out of 10 e-mailers liked the column and agreed with it. Thought the number would be closer to 70/30 or 60/40. One e-mail stood out though, from a reader named Andrea in New York City:

"As a woman who is also a big sports fan, I was slightly shocked but mostly impressed with your WNBA article. I think it is sad to say that someone who speaks their mind is brave, but that's the only word I can come up with right now. In this overly PC world we live in, it's nice to read an article where someone speaks from their heart, giving facts to back up their claim, and isn't afraid that they might be offending a few people. That's the great thing about this country -- we don't all have to agree, but we do have to respect each others views. You may receive a lot of nasty letters from certain fans, parents and sports writers alike, but YOUR fans respect you because you talk like we talk. It's great that women who are talented basketball players can fulfill their dreams of becoming professionals in the U.S., but it doesn't mean the entire U.S. has to watch it. As a woman, the fact that I feel this way doesn't mean I'm betraying my sisters, and men who feel this way are not being sexist -- we're just being honest. Thank you for your honesty."

Here's what scared me about that e-mail: Our society has become so politically correct and so uptight that, after I chose to write a thought-out, factually driven, cheapshot-free opinion column about a sports-related subject (and you have to admit, I avoided every possible easy joke in that column) somebody actually felt the need to congratulate me for having the "courage" to speak my mind. Does that creep anyone else out? Is that really where we are as a country? Whatever happened to freedom of speech, or every American having the constitutional right to express his opinion in a nonconfrontational way? Have those rights been thrown out the window and nobody told me?

Anyway, here are two pages worth of WNBA-related e-mails -- they're pretty entertaining and I appreciate everyone taking the time to write in, whether you agreed with the column or not. I did my best to include all kinds of e-mails that reflected the various perspectives on both sides:

1. E-mails supporting the column
2. E-mails disappointed by the column

• Finally, I don't have my weekly recommendation for a sports book because I didn't have time to reread any of the classics this weekend -- I spent way too much time watching the New Orleans coverage, and then A&E started its "24: Season 4" marathon on Sunday morning and I was done for the weekend (the Sports Gal and I have plowed through the first 16 hours already). But since they stuck the banner for my upcoming book on the "Sports Guy's World" page today (coming out on Oct. 1), I thought I would provide a brief explanation of "Now I Can Die In Peace" without spoiling the book if you actually want to read it.

In February, I went through every Red Sox-related column I ever wrote -- dating back to 1997 on my old "Boston Sports Guy" site -- picked out 50 or 60 that stood out, then tried to figure out the best way to patch together a collection of my Red Sox columns and make the collection different enough that it would be worth it for A) longtime readers to buy the book, and B) non-Boston fans to buy the book. I also wanted to figure out a way to include as many columns as possible, which was difficult because absolutely nobody wants to read a 700-page book. And I wanted to curse, tell inappropriate stories and make fun of TV announcers when warranted -- that was an absolute necessity for me.

So I made four decisions:

1. Since I didn't want the book to be perceived as your typical "quickie about the 2004 season," I decided to gear the book around my life as a Red Sox fan, which meant I would have to write a meaty prologue about everything that happened before the Pedro Era, as well as a childhood spent growing up in New England and getting slowly sucked into rooting for a tortured team. Then I split the book into four sections from 1998 to 2005 and wrote new material leading off each section, with the actual columns providing the heart of the book. I like collections (if they're done correctly) for two reasons. First, if you don't like a certain column, you can skip to the next one. Second, each column is a snapshot of how many people felt at the time, which gave certain columns a different feel reading them after the fact (especially the Nomar and Pedro stuff).

2. Since I needed to hone down those 50-60 columns down as much as possible so they complemented one another, I decided to treat them like first drafts in a journal, almost like nobody had ever read them before. And honestly? Those columns were like first drafts. My biggest flaw as a writer is how I procrastinate until the last possible minute before writing anything, so most times, I'm handing in stuff that could have and should have been better. So I looked at this book as a chance to tackle some of those columns again and make them better -- not by changing what I wrote, but simply by trimming the fat in each column (especially in some of the older columns, when I really didn't know what I was doing as a writer) and tinkering with the structure of some of them. (This is all explained in the book.) If the original columns were like a movie, then this book is like a director's cut of that same movie.

3. I absolutely hate when writers release a collection of columns and pretty much say, "Here they are!" Drives me crazy. So I wanted to do something different that would make the book stand out. Ultimately, I decided to write footnotes for each column -- almost like a director's commentary on a DVD. Some of the footnotes make fun of what I wrote, others expand on what I wrote, others have goofy stories and comparisons, ramblings, statistical evidence and everything else you can imagine.

As it turned out, I had so much fun writing the footnotes that I got a little carried away -- suddenly there were like 800 footnotes for the 50 columns and the footnote gimmick was threatening to overpower the book. I narrowed them down to about 500 for the final edition, which we're running on the sides of every page instead of the bottom (so they're easier to read). We'll see if it works.

4. The ultimate goal: Fifty cohesive Red Sox columns that complemented one another, didn't waste a word and remained coherent enough that anyone could enjoy them. And I think I did that. Again, we'll see.

Just so you know, I thought long and hard about whether a Red Sox book should be my first book, ultimately deciding that it doesn't matter what you write about, as long as it's entertaining. For instance, one of my favorite books (as I mentioned a few weeks ago) is "Wait Till Next Year," which concentrates on one year in New York sports (1988). Well, I hate New York sports -- I could care less about any of their teams from that year. But the book was entertaining and well-written, and it holds up to this day, whether you like New York teams or not.

So I rolled the dice and wrote my Red Sox book, and hopefully, you'll read it and feel like you didn't waste your time. Just so you know, I spent an impossible amount of time working on this thing -- every word has been examined, considered and reconsidered about 10 times over -- and it's the absolute best I can do. That's all I can promise you.

 

 the hollywood economist
The War for the Couch Potato
It's cable vs. satellite.
By Edward Jay Epstein
Posted Monday, Sept. 26, 2005, at 8:02 AM PT

Like the joke in which a suitor for a woman asks his rival, "What are we fighting about if we both want the same thing?" Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. and Brian Roberts of Comcast both want the same thing: Roberts' 23 million cable subscribers.

When Roberts and his family built Comcast, the cable business was a series of local monopolies. Once a cable operator bought a franchise (or, in some cases, the politicians with the power to grant it), he did not have to compete in that area with other cable companies. He merely had to wire up the homes of subscribers who couldn't get good reception of broadcast television or were otherwise willing to pay a monthly charge for the sports, movies, and semiporn that cable providers offered. After all the homes in an area were wired up, the only practical way for entrepreneurs to expand was to acquire other cable operators. AT&T, which bought out cable king John Malone, was the largest operator, with 21.5 million subscribers. In 2002, Roberts bought AT&T's cable operation for $72 billion and then paid another $8.7 billion to divvy up the 3 million subscribers of Adelphia Cable (after its chairman, John Rigas*, was sent to prison) with Time Warner Cable. These deals made Comcast the world's largest cable operator. Thanks to the ingenuity of Rupert Murdoch, however, Comcast's 23.2 million subscribers, for which Roberts paid in excess of $80 billion, are no longer locked up safely in local monopolies.

Back in the 1980s when cable entrepreneurs in America were wiring up homes, Murdoch was putting an armada of satellites in outer space. They were positioned 22,300 miles above the earth in the Clarke Ring, where they would serve as geosynchronously fixed broadcasting platforms capable of beaming digitized programming into the home. By 2003, he had established satellites over Europe, Asia, Australia, and Latin America—even though the capital costs nearly bankrupted him. That same year, he bought control of DirecTV which, with 12 million subscribers, was by far America's largest provider of satellite television. (The only other satellite service was EchoStar.) Murdoch immediately ordered additional satellites that would expand service to include 500 channels of high-definition programs. His game plan, according to Chase Carey, the charismatic ex-rugby star with a Harvard MBA whom Murdoch put in charge of the operation, is to "double the DirecTV subscription base, making it the number-two distributor of programming after Comcast, and then number one. It's that simple."

Where does Murdoch get the additional 12 million or so subscribers he needs to be No. 1? Carey answers: "Cable users." With his usual brutal candor, Murdoch told BusinessWeek, "We don't want to take over the world. We just want a piece of it."

What concerns Roberts is the size of the "piece" that Murdoch wants to take out of Comcast. Unlike cable franchises, which are limited to local bailiwicks, Murdoch's satellites reach about 90 percent of the American population. Everyone (including Roberts' cable subscribers) in this vast footprint can receive Murdoch's 500 channels with a small 31-inch dish and digital receiver. Murdoch could give away this hardware, as well as free installation, and recover the cost from monthly subscription fees in a year. So, Murdoch is in a position to get—at virtually no cost—many of the subscribers for which Comcast paid more than $3,000 apiece to acquire. To stop Murdoch from luring away millions of Comcast customers, Roberts needs to offer them something that Murdoch cannot. His answer: video on demand. VOD permits customers not only to choose when they watch a program, but, like a DVD player, it lets them pause, rewind, etc. As Roberts explained in a speech at Wharton Business School: "You can't do any of that on satellite." Digital cable both sends and receives signals from cable boxes, whereas satellites broadcast only a one-way signal. Roberts believes that VOD programs and movies will keep viewers so enamored of their cable service that they won't defect to satellite.

For starters, Roberts is now in talks with Disney, which owns, among other things, the ABC network. He is offering Disney a deal to put ABC's hit series on Comcast VOD 24 hours after they air on the network, and he is willing to pay a huge sum. Comcast subscribers could then watch these shows whenever they choose without commercials (though not without the product placement embedded in the programs). For Disney, the deal would provide a short-term windfall and a long-term risk of upsetting network advertisers. Roberts is also seeking VOD content from other quarters of Hollywood, reportedly Viacom and Sony (with whom he partnered on the acquisition of MGM's film library). His ultimate VOD goal is to release new movies at the same time as they are released on DVD. So far, all the studios turned him down because of their concern, according to Roberts, that new films on VOD would "tick off" Wal-Mart.

Murdoch, meanwhile, is not without recourse. While his satellites are not technically able to provide the same VOD service as cable, he can achieve much the same effect by providing his American subscribers with TiVo-like digital video recorders, as he did in Britain in the early 1990s. With digital video recorders, his satellites can download six to eight hours of programs in the middle of the night onto an encoded section of subscribers' hard disks (without their having to do anything or even be aware of it). Then, to rent the program, the subscribers need only click on their remote control (which will charge their account via their telephone line). Even though this system cannot match the huge quantity of programs and movies that cable VOD can provide, it can offer enough to satisfy most viewers. The battle of the titans will be decided by who can offer the most attractive content. Murdoch can draw from his own empire, including the Fox movie studio and library, Fox News, and Fox networks with 19 regional sports channels. To beat him, Roberts needs to buy content, no matter what the price, to protect his $80 billion investment in subscribers. The outcome can only benefit couch potatoes.

Correction, Sept. 27, 2005: This article originally and incorrectly identified the chairman of Adelphia Cable as John Riga. His name is John Rigas. (Return to corrected sentence.)

Edward Jay Epstein is the author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood. (To read the first chapter, click here.)

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126860/

 

 the middlebrow
Seinfeld
Master of Madison Avenue's domain.
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Friday, Sept. 9, 2005, at 10:55 AM PT

Download the MP3 audio version of this story here, or sign up to get all of Slate's free daily podcasts.

When the creators of Seinfeld took a stand against the saccharine rituals of the sitcom—"no hugging, no learning"—one hoped the warranty would extend to reunion specials. So far, so good. Other than a meeting on Oprah last November, the Seinfeld gang has admirably resisted the urge to gather 'round the teleprompter and reminisce about "old times." But if you watch TV commercials, you could be forgiven for thinking we're in the middle of a Seinfeld tribute show. In a host of recent ads, Madison Avenue has exhumed Seinfeld's catchphrases and characters and put them to work selling product. Seinfeld is back, as shill rather than sitcom, lending its imprimatur to everything from luxury cars to light beer. It is the victim of what one of the show's former writers calls "sincere bastardization."

In a new Chrysler commercial, Jason Alexander (who played George Costanza) saunters up to a crusty CEO-type and squirms—invoking Costanza's obsequious relationship to New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Only instead of Steinbrenner, the commercial's CEO turns out to be … Lee Iacocca! Iacocca then disgorges one of Seinfeld's signature catchphrases: "yada, yada, yada." Another commercial, from the American Association of Retired Persons, has Ping Wu, a beloved bit player on Seinfeld, cloning himself a dozen times so he can better minister to the aged.

Coors Light, whose previous commercials focused on bikinied twins, has lately borrowed from Seinfeld's high-tone comedy. On a recent commercial, a woman says of her beer bottles, "They're plastic and they're spectacular." Seinfeld completists will recognize this as a twist on the coda of a 1993 episode called "The Implant." There, Teri Hatcher, playing Jerry's love interest, was questioned about the provenance of her shelfware. "They're real and they're spectacular," she huffed, before leaving Jerry to ponder his own domain.

Coors Light and Chrysler—not exactly the hallmarks of Seinfeld's Upper West Side milieu. Seinfeld writers haven't seen a dime in the way of royalties, and Peter Mehlman, who wrote "The Implant" and "The Yada Yada" episodes, is irked by the casual deployment of his best lines. "Coors Light, their commercials to me are like the lowest ebb," says Mehlman. "The way they use [the spectacular line] is so disgusting." He continues, "It makes you wonder about just how incredibly lazy ad writers have gotten. 'Use a Seinfeld thing! Let them write it!' That's 13 years ago that I wrote that episode."

Nor is 80-year-old Iacocca Mehlman's idea of Shecky Greene. "Lee Iacocca sounds like he has absolutely no clue as to what he's saying," Mehlman says. "You used to hear the rumor that the group Abba didn't know any English and was just fed the lines. That's how he sounds. 'What am I saying here, yada, yada, yada?' It's sad."

Seinfeld's transition from Jerry Seinfeld's "garage band" to Madison Avenue staple was in some ways inevitable. Syndication and Curb Your Enthusiasm have encouraged Seinfeld worship to continue, burning one-liners into the brains of viewers—and one presumes the same thing goes for ad writers. To cite Seinfeld in a TV ad is to make common cause with the show's not-quite-middle-aged worldview; its childishly finicky tastes (Jerry and Co. did nothing if not scrutinize consumer goods); and, perhaps most important, some of the choicest demographics in television. Toward the end of its nine-year run, Seinfeld dominated among young urban professionals aged 24 to 54, the cherished group that advertisers claim to so desperately crave. And since Seinfeld's writers minted so many catchphrases (Peter Mehlman claims "sponge-worthy," "shrinkage," and "double-dip" as his own), one might also argue that, as with Shakespeare, a Seinfeld citation or two is unavoidable.

There's dormant cultural capital in Seinfeld, too. Robert Thompson, a Syracuse television historian, notes that the show's best lines still sizzle a decade later—they're "worth something" in monetary terms, but the show is "all dressed up with no place to go." Where it goes, then, is into TV commercials. Regurgitating a Seinfeld line has become one of the easiest ways to flatter the intelligence and good taste of the TV viewer. This is true even when the Seinfeld reference comes alongside a mismatched product, like a Chrysler—Seinfeld serves to elevate the product's hipness, as Led Zeppelin music did for Cadillac commercials. Mehlman says, "It both points up how prominent Seinfeld was on the cultural landscape, and how no show in the last seven years has occupied any space on the cultural landscape."

Seinfeld in its day was rife with product placement: Snapple, Häagen-Dazs, Bosco, Entenmann's, and Junior Mints—all of them held up for the cast's ironic inspection. ("It's chocolate. It's peppermint. It's delicious!") Indeed, the meta-scrutiny of Seinfeld is well-suited to TV commercials. Seinfeld styled itself as a show about nothing. TV commercials are also about nothing. The last 20 years have seen the rise of the "non-ad ad," says St. Lawrence University sociologist Stephen Papson. Where ads once extolled the virtues of their product (20 percent more absorbent!), they are now more likely to praise lightly, with ironic distance, or never get around to praising at all. The Coors Light ad, which neglects to mention why you should buy the beer, is a good example. "Commercials had become so boring, so formulaic, so predictable, that people would leave unless you addressed those that are more literate," says Papson. It is a fair distillation of why one would want to allude to Seinfeld in a TV ad, not to mention how Seinfeld itself approached the situation comedy.

Finally, there is a subliminal element in Seinfeld ads. Those that merely cite a catchphrase are getting a kind of gratis celebrity endorsement. Those that use both catchphrase and actor, like Chrysler, are making an overt appeal to nostalgia. Seinfeld was one of the few sitcoms to exit to more or less universal acclaim. Holding out hope that Jerry and Co. will one day reunite is the favorite daydream of the Seinfeld addict (and the subject of nightly bedside prayers from NBC's Jeff Zucker). Note, ye faithful, the words of Larry David in the book Sein Off: "I also wanted to leave open the possibility that they could come back, that they could emerge from somewhere. Not that they would come back and do the series, but just to perhaps give people some hope." Won't happen. Shouldn't happen. But hope springs with every last yada, even when it's delivered by Lee Iacocca.

Bryan Curtis is a Slate staff writer. You can e-mail him at curtisb@slate.com.

 

 

foreigners
Storm Warning
How the flood compromises U.S. foreign policy.
By Richard N. Haass
Posted Friday, Sept. 9, 2005, at 8:56 AM PT

It has long been a tenet of American foreign policy that politics stop at the water's edge. The tradition is that too much is at stake to allow partisan interests to take precedence over the national interest. Sometimes this principle is honored, sometimes not, but either way, the water in question is the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

What happens when water floods an important American city, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless, is something else again. It will be no easier to cordon off U.S. foreign policy from the effects of Hurricane Katrina than it has been to protect New Orleans from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.

That a purely domestic event should have profound consequences for American foreign policy is not in and of itself new. U.S. prestige suffered a blow in 1992 when the Los Angeles riots were broadcast around the world. By contrast, Ronald Reagan's firm handling of the air-traffic controllers strike a decade before communicated resolve and firmness.

The initial federal and local reactions to Hurricane Katrina, however, have sent the opposite message. The images seen around the world communicated a lack of competence and considerable chaos and suffering. The dominant overseas reaction has been sympathy mixed with shock and horror at what was seen by many as evidence of racism and a reminder of the extreme poverty in which many Americans live. America's enemies indulged in schadenfreude. Hugo Chávez could not resist the chance to taunt President Bush; North Korea radio linked the U.S. "defeat" in Iraq with its "defeat" by Katrina; jihadists celebrated what had happened and the possibility the price of oil would soar even higher. The world's only remaining superpower appeared to be anything but. In an era of 24-hour satellite television and the Internet, public diplomacy is about who Americans are and what they do, not just what they say. Unlike Las Vegas, what happens here does not stay here.

The global impact goes beyond impressions. A priority of this administration's foreign policy is to promote democracy around the world. But the attractiveness of the American model, and the ability of the United States to be an effective advocate for more democratic, capitalist societies, which had already been weakened by the disarray in Iraq, is now weaker still as a result of the disarray at home. It will be more difficult to make the case for free markets and more open societies if the results of such reforms come to be associated with the disorder seen in New Orleans.

Katrina will also have an impact on how citizens of the United States view foreign policy. The enormous problems and costs associated with the hurricane will raise additional questions about the ability of the United States to "stay the course" in Iraq. The aftermath of the catastrophe will inevitably increase political pressure on President Bush to begin to reduce the U.S. involvement in Iraq and refocus U.S. resources at home, be it on the expensive reconstruction of flood-ravaged areas or on improving the country's capacity to deal with future disasters of this magnitude.

A similar debate can be expected about the military. The National Guard is being used in unforeseen ways in Iraq, and it is clearly needed in foreseeable ways at home. The National Guard will not be able to do it all. Homeland security requirements, be they derived from hurricanes or terrorists, are and will be extensive. This reality highlights the fact that the Guard will not forever be available for overseas duty on anything like the current scale. The need clearly exists to expand the active duty Army, now too small to carry out its assigned tasks of fighting traditional wars and dealing with difficult aftermaths such as we are witnessing in Iraq.

U.S. energy policy or, to be coldly honest, the lack of one, is another reality that Katrina exposes. This time it was a storm in the vicinity of important refineries, but next time it could be instability in any one of the major oil-producing countries or simply the cumulative result of the growth in world demand for oil outstripping the growth in world supply. Americans cannot drill or diversify or substitute their way out of this shortage. The United States must act to cut its consumption of oil, something that can be accomplished most efficiently with new regulations mandating substantially higher fuel economy for all vehicles sold in the country. Unfortunately, this is precisely what the legislation recently passed by Congress failed to do.

The United States emerged from the Cold War as first among unequals, with an extraordinary opportunity to shape the world. This opportunity rested on many factors, but above all on a foundation of the country's strength. U.S. power—military, economic, diplomatic, cultural—is great by any yardstick and gives the United States the ability to get things done in the world at the same time it works to discourage other powers from challenging it.

Hurricane Katrina has delivered a painful but important warning. In ways similar to the 9/11 attacks four years ago, it demonstrates that U.S. power, however great, is not to be confused with invulnerability. In addition, U.S. power, however great, is still limited. And U.S. power, however great, cannot be taken for granted. In the end, American power is a reflection of the strength of the American economy and the cohesion of American society. Any country must balance what it allocates for guns and what for butter; the United States is no exception. Although we are wealthy enough to fund both, we are not wealthy enough to fund both to the extent we are now doing and to keep taxes as low as they are. Something will have to give.

Richard N. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was director of the State Department policy planning staff from 2001 to 2003. His most recent book is The Opportunity: America's Moment to Alter History's Course.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125994/

 

explainer
Why Do People in New Orleans Talk That Way?
The origins of the accent.
By Jesse Sheidlower
Posted Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005, at 3:48 PM PT

If you've been listening to coverage of Katrina's devastation on the radio, you've no doubt heard the distinctive New Orleans accents of victims, officials, and rescue workers alike. Some of them speak with a familiar, Southern drawl; others sound almost like they're from Brooklyn. Why do people in New Orleans talk that way?

New Orleans has long been one of the most diverse cities in the country, and it has a correspondingly rich level of linguistic diversity. Founded by the French in the early 18^th century, the city was ruled by Spain from 1763 to 1803; in the 1760s, the Acadians, or Cajuns, arrived from Canada speaking a variety of French quite unlike Parisian French. In 1803, English-speaking settlers began to arrive in significant numbers, and throughout the 19^th century the city saw heavy immigration from Germany, Ireland, and Italy. As the major port city in the South, New Orleans was also a gateway for the slave states, which brought in speakers of a variety of African languages. The slave trade also brought New Orleanians into contact with speakers of Plantation Southern English from the East Coast. And Midland English reached the city through river traffic headed down the Ohio and into the Mississippi River.

The language of New Orleans reflects this hodgepodge. There is substantial borrowing from French in banquette for "sidewalk" (now old-fashioned) and gallery for "porch," not to mention a large number of food terms including beignet, étouffée, jambalaya, praline, and filé. French-derived idioms include make the groceries for "to buy groceries; to shop for food" and make ménage for "to clean the house," both from the French faire; for, meaning "at (a specified time)" ("the parade's for 7:00"), is from French pour. A lagniappe, "a small gratuity or gift; an extra" is from Louisiana French but borrowed from Spanish, which itself took it from Quechua, an Indian language of South America. Similarly, bayou is from French but ultimately from Choctaw, and pirogue, a dug-out canoe or open boat used in the bayous, went from the Caribbean-Indian language Carib to Spanish to French to English. Gumbo is from French but ultimately from a West African language. New Orleanians also use many Northernisms, including chiggers for the biting mites that nearby Southerners usually call red bugs, and wishbone for the chicken part more usually known as the pully-bone in the South.

Despite the intrinsic interest of New Orleans speech, the city has not been extensively studied by professional linguists. Locals, however, are self-conscious about the language and take a fierce pride in it, making careful distinctions about the speeches of different neighborhoods and ethnic groups. (John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is regarded as particularly accurate.) One of the better-known varieties is spoken by the "Yats," lower- and middle-class white New Orleanians. (The name derives from "Where y'at?" a local greeting.) The Yats have a strong Irish heritage, and several features of their speech recall stereotypical Brooklynese—"dese," "dem," "doze" for "these," "them," "those"; "berl," "earl," and "ersters" for "boil," "oil," and "oysters"; and "mudder" for "mother."

Uptown whites, and blacks, use different pronunciations. Some of these are characteristically Southern, such as the diphthongization of vowels in all and task (sounding something like "owl" and "tyask," respectively). But in other cases, New Orleans English does not reflect usual Southern forms—it retains the "i" diphthong in words like hide and my (usually pronounced "hahd" and "mah" in the South), and maintains a distinction between the vowels in pen and pin or ten and tin (usually pronounced like the second item in each pair). There are also a number of unusual pronunciations with unclear origins, including the first-syllable stress on adult, cement, insurance, and umbrella, and the fact that when you rinse your hands, you "wrench" them in the "zink."

Next question?

Explainer thanks Bill Kretzschmar of the Linguistic Atlas of America, native New Orleanian Connie Eble of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Joan Hall of the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Jesse Sheidlower is editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary.

 

moneybox
It's So Fine To Be a Refiner
Who you should really hate when you fill your tank.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005, at 2:44 PM PT

When gasoline prices spike, the public and politicians tend to vent their anger at the two most obvious sources: 1) local gas stations, where people have to pay $60 to fill up their SUVs, and 2) the companies and countries sitting on giant pools of crude oil, like ExxonMobil and Saudi Arabia.

But those who are making the biggest profits in the oil business post-Katrina aren't facing public wrath at all. In fact, they've been receiving sympathy and various forms of government aid, even though they're doing better than anyone. For the refiners, long the overlooked middle child of the oil business, good times just got better.

Huge integrated oil companies such as ExxonMobil have refining operations. But the independent refiners like Valero and Tesoro are relatively anonymous. Since they occupy a spot in the middle of the supply chain, they don't have well-known consumer brands, and they don't make news by hitting big strikes of crude. Instead, they're involved in a tough, low-margin, and capital-intensive processing enterprise—turning crude oil into gasoline or heating oil. And it can be a difficult business. It takes a lot of money to build and operate a refinery, and communities don't exactly welcome them with open arms. According to this fact sheet from the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association, no new refineries have been built in the United States since the 1970s.

But that doesn't make it a bad business—especially in the past year. While giant industries like autos and airlines struggle with excess capacity and ruinous competition, refiners have been running full out. As this chart from the Department of Energy shows, refineries in May were running at 94 percent of capacity—which is good for profits. And since there are no new refineries being built, they face no domestic price-lowering competitors.

This summer, refiners' profit margins began to expand. For much of the past year, the so-called "cracking spread"—the difference between what refiners pay per barrel of crude and what they charge per barrel of refined product—stood at around $10, higher than the recent historical average. As a result, refining stocks suddenly became hot. The Financial Times "Lex" column noted that the stock of Valero, the largest independent refiner, was up 226 percent in the past year, outpacing Google's 186 percent rise. (Here's a one-year chart of the two stocks.)

When Katrina plowed ashore, it looked like bad news for the refining industry. A bunch of Gulf Coast refineries—representing about 10 percent of the nation's refining capacity—were knocked out of service and damaged. But this bad news for a few has outweighed by good news for the many.

The hurricane curtailed oil production along with refining capacity, but demand for gas didn't contract. The result: The price of gasoline at the pump shot up rapidly, driven by distribution problems, panic buying, and perhaps some price gouging. The Department of Energy reported that as of Sept. 5, the average weekly retail gasoline price increased to $3.07—up 45.9 cents, or 18 percent, from the previous week. But in the same week, the price of crude actually fell. The spot-market price of a barrel of West Texas crude actually fell from $67.20 on Aug. 29 to $64.37 per barrel on Sept. 6, according to the Department of Energy.

In a matter of days, then, the spread between the cost of crude and the finished product expanded rapidly. And as a result, refiners' margins have grown dramatically. In his column (subscription required) last week, Barron's editor Alan Abelson posted a chart that showed the cracking spread spiking from about $10 per barrel in late August to above $40 per barrel in Katrina's wake.

Which explains why the mood among refining executives at the Lehman Brothers Energy conference this week was one of quiet giddiness. "We expect we will have a long period of very good refining margins," said William Klesse, chief operating officer of Valero, the nation's largest refiner. (His remarks can be heard on a webcast here.) Citigroup analyst Doug Leggate on Tuesday urged clients to buy refiners Sunoco, Tesoro, and Valero, raising his price targets by about 50 percent on all three.

Meanwhile, the refining capacity knocked out last week is coming back on line. The Energy Department said yesterday that three downed refineries will be operating by the end of this week.

Even better, the refiners have benefited from the government's belated response to the disaster. With gulf oil production hampered, President Bush ordered the release of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That helped knock down the market price of crude (a plus for refiners) and ensured they'd have a supply of product to run through their machinery (another plus). At the same time, there's been no sign of any sort of dramatic government action—a call for widespread conservation, a recommendation for greater fuel efficiency—that would bring down the retail price of gasoline.

Refiners are even getting a break on regulations and governmental oversight. The Financial Times reported today (subscription required), "The White House has told US refiners to postpone all scheduled maintenance in a drive to maximise petrol and diesel production."

The refiners are enjoying the good times, but they know they have to stay out of the limelight. The worst thing that could happen to them is the public realizing just how much money they are making off the hurricane.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125900/

jurisprudence
Diversity Jurisdiction
Do we really need a woman or minority to fill O'Connor's shoes?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005, at 1:50 PM PT

Rumors are flying that George W. Bush really wants to pick a woman or minority to fill Sandra Day O'Connor's Reeboks. Evidently, his sagging poll numbers and the mishandling of Katrina are making him worry less about his base and more about appearances. Now that it seems he's a rich white guy who only cares about rich white guys, putting another rich white guy on the highest court in the land looks a little dubious. The hasty decision to switch John Roberts to his nominee for chief justice, rather than an associate, starkly re-opens the question of whether the court needs another minority more than it needs another Scalia. Roberts was a slam-dunk for O'Connor's seat. But now, with that seat open again, the pressure is back on to find someone who looks like O'Connor. Or, to quote the always-entertaining Manuel Miranda, "Roberts has soaked up the white male seat."

The early money was on Janice Rogers Brown; she who won't be happy until courts are once more adjudicating witch trials and drive-by tar-and-featherings. But on Tuesday, Bush made it clear in his inimitable Bush: joking-or-stupid? fashion that Alberto Gonzales is still up at the top of his dance card. It's clear that Laura Bush and Sandra Day O'Connor are hoping for a girl-justice, and it seems the rest of the country agrees. Most of us should have figured out long ago that Priscilla Owen will be no "better" for women than Clarence Thomas has been for African-Americans. So, why is this still an issue?

A CBS poll reported on July 15 found that nearly six out of every 10 Americans thought it important to name another woman to replace O'Connor. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll from the same time saw 80 percent of those polled saying they liked the idea of a woman replacement for O'Connor. Thirteen percent thought it was "essential." Do we really believe that people who look like us actually believe what we do? Or is that just the best proxy we have? Is the court so removed from the public life of this country that nothing matters beyond the appearances of the justices? Or are we gunning for breaking through these race and gender barriers, regardless of fitness, in the hopes that once we claim a woman's or minority seat, it will stay that way forever?

The most commonly voiced argument for giving O'Connor's seat to a diversity candidate is appearances, pure and simple. As this editorial puts it: "[W]e believe it's important for the American people to see themselves reflected in the Supreme Court as much as possible." Given that the American people see the members of the Supreme Court maybe once every 10 years, this is a little tough to accept. Still, having a court that looks like America confers some sort of public legitimacy on the institution, at least in theory.

But of course, the Supreme Court looks nothing like America. For a long time it's been composed of six old white guys, two old white ladies, and one middle-aged black guy. The only America that mirrors is an upscale nursing home. There is nobody with a disability on the court, nobody young on the court, no single parents on the court, and nobody poor on the court. So, it's not really true that we're desperate to see ourselves in the folks who sit on the bench; it's that we're desperate to see members of the groups about which we are most anxious.

Walter Dellinger has argued that the notion of diversity on the court is a slippery one: For instance, there used to be terrific concern about geographic diversity on the court—a New York seat, or certain southern seats. There was also once great urgency for religious diversity on the court. But almost nobody noticed the glut of southwestern jurists on the bench during Rehnquist's reign. And no one seems bothered that where there was once a begrudging Jewish seat, there are now two. As regional and religious identity became less important in the country, the need for them to be proportionally reflected on the court was diminished. As race and gender have come to define us, that's what we need on the court.

So, what we want on the court isn't exactly diversity. It's diversity reflecting those issues about which we are most anxious right now. It suggests that just because we are worried about race and gender, minority and women judges will worry, too. We don't care if the Pacific Northwest is unrepresented on the high court, but we freak out when we "lose" a woman's seat.

All this is predicated on the tricky assumption that one's gender or race matters even more than one's ideology. It leads to the outrageously unattractive spectacle of minority groups bickering amongst themselves over whether a minority candidate is enough of a minority to represent them. See, e.g., the failed confirmation battle over Miguel Estrada for the worst of the worst versions of that fight.

Perhaps the perfect metaphor for the sinkhole that comes from these kinds of identity politics is the sidebar debate that has raged for several years now over whether Bush can truly appoint the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice or whether that distinction has already gone to Benjamin Nathan Cardozo—the descendent of Portuguese Jews. Those groups and writers who've been brave enough to take up the Great Cardozo Question have found themselves consumed by such minutiae as whether Cardozo considered himself Hispanic; whether Jews can ever truly be Hispanic; whether Cardozo was good for the Latinos; and who gets to decide.

I don't cite this to belittle the fact that it's long past time we had a Latino on the court. I just really think it's worth waiting for the right Latino. And this goes a long way toward explaining why having a court that looks like America is an impossible project. We've already established that looking like a woman doesn't make you responsive to women's concerns (see Edith Jones just for starters). We've established that two women on the court don't vote as a monolithic women's bloc. What we're left with is the faint hope that being of a minority group might make one slightly more likely to worry about the welfare of that group and the outrage that comes when they do not.

I'm not sure what anyone can do to hasten the day when the woman's seat or the Hispanic seat is as much of an anachronism as the New York seat or the Catholic seat. But it seems to me that we won't get there until gender and race are the beginning of the conversation rather than the end of it.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125898/

music box
Hip-Hop's Hamlet
The fascinating contradictions of Kanye West.
By Hua Hsu
Posted Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005, at 12:04 PM PT

While making good beats may net you some fancy jewelry, it rarely lands you on the cover of Time. But Chicago rapper Kanye West's quick ascent has been littered with such improbabilities. He's gone from the minor distinction of being Jay-Z's favored producer to releasing two of the most inspired records of the past decade, last year's College Dropout and the new follow-up, Late Registration. As a lyricist, West has lingered masterfully in the gray area of contradiction. He pokes fun at his (and everyone else's) materialism while celebrating his riches. He writes brash club hits about Jesus. He acts like a rap star and then rhymes about his insecurities. His appeal is slightly mystifying: He's found a large and loyal audience despite a comfortable background short on hip-hop's roughneck signifiers. What, exactly, is propelling his success?

Besides his musical gifts, West skillfully exploits the vantage point provided by his middle-class upbringing. Consider the wardrobe he chose for the Time cover shoot: a turtleneck and sports coat. Always careful about self-presentation, West uses his appearance as a reminder that he's anything but a thug; he's a man of refinement—a dandy, even. In 1957, the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier published the seminal Black Bourgeoisie, a harsh but enduring profile of this emerging community. His conclusion? The black middle class inhabited a world of "make-believe," where "glitter and gaiety" obscured the ennui of their lives. In their pursuit of material comfort, they had cut their ties with the more authentic working-class experience of most African-Americans. West doesn't exactly fit the profile of a black bourgeoisie—his mother is an English professor; his dad a former Black Panther—but he, unlike some of the rappers he's made beats for, appeals to the values of that world. The finely dressed, churchgoing West exudes an air of clean-cut conformity. He corrects his own grammar during interviews and details his by-the-bootstraps journey toward superstardom.

Most important, West seems safe. After all, one of last year's biggest hits was West's "Jesus Walks," a gospel-tinged, feel-good uplift anthem that was, at core, about a very middle-class subject: self-help. Jay-Z might possess more street clout, and there are plenty of rappers with more interesting flows or story lines. But West is the one who gets invited to mime alongside movie stars for a live NBC hurricane telethon. As he proved last Friday night, when he strayed off-script to blast the federal government's slow-footed response to the swells of black suffering, West isn't as polite as his image would suggest. "George Bush doesn't care about black people," he quivered, ending an impromptu ramble that teased the censors and shocked the executives. Anybody familiar with the Kanye canon, though, shouldn't have been surprised. Underneath it all—and often at odds with his cool and occasionally arrogant demeanor—West has always been a vulnerable and eternally overwhelmed person fascinated by ugly questions.

Because of his background, West sidestepped hip-hop's ready-made, rags-to-riches narratives. His debut, College Dropout, was distinguished by the breadth of its critique. While hip-hop's default mode is to assume a healthy disdain for the powers that be, it rarely turns that righteousness against the self. A true narcissist, West spent every song either broadcasting his own excellence or beating himself up for his shortcomings. "Always said if I rapped I'd say somethin' significant," he shrugged on "Breathe In Breathe Out," "but now I'm rappin' about money, hos and rims again." These self-conflicts fascinated him. "All Falls Down" encodes a Frazier-esque concern with patterns of consumption ("We shine because they hate us/ Floss because they degrade us/ We tryin' to buy back our forty acres") inside a gorgeous, radio-friendly twirl. Having been seduced by hip-hop's twin functions as righteous, conscious uplift (the wage-labor anthem "Spaceship") and anything-goes materialist apologia ("We Don't Care" and its drug-dealing-as-protest subtext), West split the difference. He made an album obsessed with contradictions.

His follow-up, Late Registration, works over the same thematic ground as his debut, only with much less humility. In the overblown "alt="Play Media" v:shapes="_x0000_i1040">Diamonds From Sierra Leone," West scrutinizes the around-the-world consequences of his own taste for diamonds. It's a classic West-ian marriage of material hunger and moral confusion: "Over here it's the drug trade—we die from drugs/ Over there they die from what we buy from drugs," he spits after bullying a jeweler about conflict diamonds. As is West's wont, he can't broker a way out of this conflict between the shiny and the righteous. It may be "in a black person's soul to rock that gold," but it doesn't feel so good after you see the pictures of the kids with no arms.

What makes these moral soliloquies all the more provoking is that Late Registration is one of the best-sounding records of the year, thanks largely to the help of the producer Jon Brion. Better-known for his quirky, pop-baroque soundtracks (I Heart Huckabees, Punch-Drunk Love) and his collaborations with Aimee Mann and Fiona Apple, Brion adds his melancholy touch to the gracefully lilting "alt="Play Media" v:shapes="_x0000_i1041">Heard 'Em Say" and the spaced-out orchestration of "Celebration." Beats are not enough, of course. Few rappers or producers have West's ear for detail; even fewer could get away with peddling his college-educated C.V. over and over. The festive "alt="Play Media" v:shapes="_x0000_i1042">Touch the Sky" samples the ultimate striver's anthem—Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up"—as West once again recounts his past: packing a U-Haul and setting forth for the big city, pinching pennies and splitting buffets, and verging toward tears after mounting rejections. The precious "Bring Me Down" and "Addiction" shade these story lines in a bit more, while the hospital-room drama of "Roses" and "Hey Mama" purport to trade all his success away for the comfort of family. Like College Dropout, Late Registration is an amazingly intimate album, at once funny and sad and self-obsessive.

Still, a slight change in West's attitude is detectable. First, West was the middle-class beat-maker who made his name working with Jay-Z and the tough guys; now, he's the one-in-a-million rap superstar telling everyone they can do it, too, no matter where they start. "He got ambition baby, look in his eyes/ This week he mopping floors, next week it's the fries," he raps on "Gold Digger," describing an Everyman scrimping and saving his way to the top. West's expansive empathy and pendulumlike swing between arrogance and insecurity have made him into something more than a rapper. He's become a pop star, in the fullest sense of that term: He's someone whom people use as a guiding light, with whom they identify, and whose experiences and ambitions seem universal.

With his could vs. should monologues, West has shown he can be all things to all people, from the nouveau riche who shares his thirst for diamonds to the janitor earnestly working his way up. He possesses a pathological need to ask the impossible, important questions, even if he is the first to confess that he hasn't a clue about the answers. This has worked for two albums, but one wonders if the novelty will dissipate—if his routine of rhetorical posturing, eternal contradiction, campus humor, and middle-class self-doubt will grow tiresome. At some point, he will either have to figure out a way to answer his own questions, or just restart with some completely different ones. For now, though, West's presence restores something that pop music has lacked for far too long: a conscience.

Hua Hsu is a writer and student living in Cambridge, Mass.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125296/

 

surfergirl
Same Time, Next Year
Fox's Reunion brings high-concept plotting to the teen soap.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005, at 10:31 AM PT

You've got to give Fox's new teen drama Reunion props for so earnestly trying to get in on the ground floor with this high-concept thing. Like Lost, it's an intricately plotted, flashback-laden mystery that ends each episode with a cliffhanger, and like 24, it rocks the time-trickery angle; each episode, instead of representing one hour in a day, represents one year in the life of the six main characters.

This group of old friends (as we know from St. Elmo's Fire and Friends, groups of old friends tend to come in heterosexual, gender-balanced sets of six) graduates from high school in 1986, tossing their mortarboards in the air to the sound of Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget About Me)." (Somewhere, Judd Nelson is pumping his fist with pride.) The hapless teens then proceed to curse the rest of their lives by celebrating with the toast, "May everything always stay just as perfect as it is right now." Flash-forward to 20 years later; one of the six has been brutally murdered, and another is being questioned by a homicide detective (Six Feet Under's Mathew St. Patrick.) To parse the events leading up to who might have killed whom and why, you'll just have to tune in, oh, 20 more times to get back up to the present day.

If Reunion lasts that long. Given its brutally competitive time slot (Thursday nights at 9 p.m. ET, up against NBC's popular The Apprentice and CBS's top-ranked CSI), this show would have to really catch fire in the popular imagination to stay on the air. And despite a bold premise and an appealing young cast, that seems unlikely to happen. Reunion doesn't seem to get how important character is to carrying a show. Its characters are types (the devil-may-care golden boy, the shy tomboy, the troubled slut), whereas the quirky denizens of, say, The O.C. are individuals, however absurdly overplotted their predicaments may be. The generic replaceability of Reunion's cast was underscored by the show's writer, Jon Harmon Feldman, at a press conference last month, when he told reporters that if the show survives the season, "the goal would be to use one of our characters to transition to a new group of friends and tell their story over 20 years." And we should care about this new group of people … why?

In the pilot episode's main story, Craig (Sean Faris), the aforementioned golden boy, crashes his Porsche on graduation night with his best friend Will (Will Estes) in the passenger seat. Because Craig was drunk and Will wasn't, they decide to tell the cops Will was driving, thus turning a potential DUI incident into a harmless mistake. But when the driver of the other car dies unexpectedly, Will finds himself charged with vehicular manslaughter—and taking the rap for his buddy to the tune of a year behind bars.

The car-crash story, predictable though it is, has it all over the show's wimpy pregnancy subplot, in which yet another knocked-up TV teen (Alexa Davalos) decides that, darn it, she just can't go through with the mysteriously unnamed procedure that she briefly stooped to considering, so she hops off the examination table at the last minute to meet her maternal destiny. The word "abortion" is never spoken in this episode; instead, there are discreet, ladylike references to "an appointment." Whatever your position on the issue, the fact remains that women in this country occasionally terminate their pregnancies, and not all of them go mad or kill themselves afterward; when is a mainstream TV series going to have the simple courage to represent that fact? (And don't talk to me about Maude. Maude's abortion was 33 years ago. In the decades since, I've seen one too many dewy adolescents save entire networks from controversy with a convenient miscarriage or an 11^th-hour change of heart.)

Even if, as I suspect, it's destined for the ash-heap of midseason cancellation, Reunion does offer up a field of young actors ripe for the picking for future shows. Carla (Chyler Leigh) is the "plain girl" of the group by TV standards, that is to say, gorgeous in a brunette and slightly tomboyish way. Despite Carla's overt mooning, Aaron (Dave Annable) can't seem to take the hint that they belong together, so he continues to pine over the blond party girl Jenna (Amanda Righetti.) Leigh is the standout of the cast, capable of investing ho-hum dialogue with hidden layers of vulnerability and wit. As the gang's amoral alpha male, Sean Faris is a Tom Cruise double, complete with the lupine eyebrows and rows of subway-tile teeth. He seems destined to play Cruise in the inevitable television movie chronicling the actor's sudden descent into insanity.

In the meantime, the most interesting thing about Reunion is the question of how it will handle its ambitious, if cumbersome, time-lapse premise. "Could things get any more complicated?" pouts one character at the end of the first episode of Reunion. Honey, you don't know from complicated. See you next week, in 1987.

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2125911/

 

moneybox
Das Flat Tax
The conservative economic proposal flopped with American voters. Now Germans are learning to hate it, too.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, Sept. 16, 2005, at 12:12 PM PT

DÜSSELDORF, Germany—Will the flat tax do for Angela Merkel's campaign for German chancellor what it did for Steve Forbes' ill-fated presidential campaigns in 1996 and 2000?

Until recently, Merkel, the leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union party, enjoyed a healthy lead over incumbent Gerhard Schröder, whose Social Democrats are listing after eight years in office and a growing national malaise.

American conservatives hope that Merkel will turn out to be a Teutonic Margaret Thatcher: an up-from-the-bootstraps woman from a right-of-center party, an economic conservative who favors structural reforms of a bureaucratic welfare state. On everything from the war in Iraq to the potential accession of Turkey to the European Union, American conservatives had hoped that by electing Merkel, the German electorate would effectively abandon some of the policies that had recently put it at odds with the United States.

Merkel's lead has narrowed significantly as Sunday's election nears, a function of two dynamics familiar to people who follow U.S. political campaigns. First, Schröder has turned in effective performances in televised debates. And second, a flat-tax proposal has become a millstone around Merkel's neck.

The first clue that the flat tax is an unwelcome import: The Germans, who have a word for everything, don't have one for the flat tax. They call it the "flat tax."

As a childless professional woman from the East, Merkel is an anomaly in German politics. And she has conducted the campaign in an anomalous way. One of the radical things she did—a move that would strike U.S. voters as perfectly normal—was to look beyond political professionals for advice. In Germany, former CEOs and even academics rarely figure in campaigns or in governments. But Merkel brought on former Siemens CEO Heinrich von Pierer as an adviser. And in August, Paul Kirchhof, a former judge and professor at the University of Heidelberg, was enlisted as shadow finance minister. His task: to come up with a plan to kick-start Germany's large and lumbering economy into higher gear.

The result has been a disaster. Kirchhof had long recommended a serious reform of Germany's progressive and deduction-riddled income-tax system, which has a top rate of 42 percent. His preferred plan is to rip up the tax code, institute a flat 25 percent income-tax rate, and make up for lost revenue by boosting the value-added tax. An analyst for Hypovereinsbank dubbed Kirchhof "the miracle worker."

The plan to reduce taxes on income and effectively boost taxes on consumption is unpopular in Germany for much the same reason it is in the United States—only more so. Germans tend to see progressive income-tax rates as part and parcel of a democracy. The notion that a secretary would pay the same proportion of her income in taxes as a CEO doesn't strike Germans as egalitarian, it strikes them as unjust. What's more, the trade-off of taxing consumption rather than income seems counterproductive in a nation where the lack of domestic demand is a continual problem. Germans need more incentives to consume, not fewer.

The other problem is the source. In the United States, the involvement of professional economists, Wall Street executives, and CEOs in political campaigns and the formulation of economic and tax policies is not only accepted, it's preferred by both parties. Not so in Germany. Although Germany has more than its share of world-beating, world-class companies—Siemens, DaimlerChrysler, SAP, and BMW, to name a few—its CEOs possess little juice. At a moment where there is a wide perception that the political system can't adequately address Germany's economic problems, there is still no room in Germany's political life for a Ross Perot, a Robert Rubin, a Paul O'Neill, or a Larry Lindsey. No wonder German executives are perpetually gloomy.

In the United States, anti-intellectualism generally flows from right to left, with conservative populists ridiculing liberal pointy-heads. In Germany this fall, it's flowing in the opposite direction. Schröder has dubbed Kirchhof the "professor from Heidelberg." Even Merkel's own CDU has hardly embraced Kirchhof's proposal. Its platform calls for a more modest move on taxes, bringing the top rate down from 42 to 39. The candidate herself is now sprinting away from her adviser's proposal. "Our program says nothing about a flat tax," she said yesterday. Now that's exactly how an American politician would behave: floating the idea of a flat tax, then running away when voters actually realize what it would mean.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net), who writes Slate's Moneybox column, is in Germany on a trip sponsored by the Atlantik-Brucke Foundation. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

 

 

BRAIN CANDY by MALCOLM GLADWELL Is pop culture dumbing us down or smartening us up? Issue of 2005-05-16 Posted 2005-05-09

Twenty years ago, a political philosopher named James Flynn uncovered a curious fact. Americans—at least, as measured by I.Q. tests—were getting smarter. This fact had been obscured for years, because the people who give I.Q. tests continually recalibrate the scoring system to keep the average at 100. But if you took out the recalibration, Flynn found, I.Q. scores showed a steady upward trajectory, rising by about three points per decade, which means that a person whose I.Q. placed him in the top ten per cent of the American population in 1920 would today fall in the bottom third. Some of that effect, no doubt, is a simple by-product of economic progress: in the surge of prosperity during the middle part of the last century, people in the West became better fed, better educated, and more familiar with things like I.Q. tests. But, even as that wave of change has subsided, test scores have continued to rise—not just in America but all over the developed world. What’s more, the increases have not been confined to children who go to enriched day-care centers and private schools. The middle part of the curve—the people who have supposedly been suffering from a deteriorating public-school system and a steady diet of lowest-common-denominator television and mindless pop music—has increased just as much. What on earth is happening? In the wonderfully entertaining “Everything Bad Is Good for You” (Riverhead; $23.95), Steven Johnson proposes that what is making us smarter is precisely what we thought was making us dumber: popular culture.

Johnson is the former editor of the online magazine Feed and the author of a number of books on science and technology. There is a pleasing eclecticism to his thinking. He is as happy analyzing “Finding Nemo” as he is dissecting the intricacies of a piece of software, and he’s perfectly capable of using Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence to discuss the new creative rules of television shows. Johnson wants to understand popular culture—not in the postmodern, academic sense of wondering what “The Dukes of Hazzard” tells us about Southern male alienation but in the very practical sense of wondering what watching something like “The Dukes of Hazzard” does to the way our minds work.

As Johnson points out, television is very different now from what it was thirty years ago. It’s harder. A typical episode of “Starsky and Hutch,” in the nineteen-seventies, followed an essentially linear path: two characters, engaged in a single story line, moving toward a decisive conclusion. To watch an episode of “Dallas” today is to be stunned by its glacial pace—by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships, by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of “The Sopranos,” by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot. Modern television also requires the viewer to do a lot of what Johnson calls “filling in,” as in a “Seinfeld” episode that subtly parodies the Kennedy assassination conspiracists, or a typical “Simpsons” episode, which may contain numerous allusions to politics or cinema or pop culture. The extraordinary amount of money now being made in the television aftermarket—DVD sales and syndication—means that the creators of television shows now have an incentive to make programming that can sustain two or three or four viewings. Even reality shows like “Survivor,” Johnson argues, engage the viewer in a way that television rarely has in the past:

When we watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around us—the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation and gesture and facial expression—scrutinizes the action on the screen, looking for clues. . . . The phrase “Monday-morning quarterbacking” was coined to describe the engaged feeling spectators have in relation to games as opposed to stories. We absorb stories, but we second-guess games. Reality programming has brought that second-guessing to prime time, only the game in question revolves around social dexterity rather than the physical kind.

How can the greater cognitive demands that television makes on us now, he wonders, not matter?

Johnson develops the same argument about video games. Most of the people who denounce video games, he says, haven’t actually played them—at least, not recently. Twenty years ago, games like Tetris or Pac-Man were simple exercises in motor coördination and pattern recognition. Today’s games belong to another realm. Johnson points out that one of the “walk-throughs” for “Grand Theft Auto III”—that is, the informal guides that break down the games and help players navigate their complexities—is fifty-three thousand words long, about the length of his book. The contemporary video game involves a fully realized imaginary world, dense with detail and levels of complexity.

Indeed, video games are not games in the sense of those pastimes—like Monopoly or gin rummy or chess—which most of us grew up with. They don’t have a set of unambiguous rules that have to be learned and then followed during the course of play. This is why many of us find modern video games baffling: we’re not used to being in a situation where we have to figure out what to do. We think we only have to learn how to press the buttons faster. But these games withhold critical information from the player. Players have to explore and sort through hypotheses in order to make sense of the game’s environment, which is why a modern video game can take forty hours to complete. Far from being engines of instant gratification, as they are often described, video games are actually, Johnson writes, “all about delayed gratification—sometimes so long delayed that you wonder if the gratification is ever going to show.”

At the same time, players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The game presents the player with a series of puzzles, and you can’t succeed at the game simply by solving the puzzles one at a time. You have to craft a longer-term strategy, in order to juggle and coördinate competing interests. In denigrating the video game, Johnson argues, we have confused it with other phenomena in teen-age life, like multitasking—simultaneously e-mailing and listening to music and talking on the telephone and surfing the Internet. Playing a video game is, in fact, an exercise in “constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence,” he writes. “It’s about finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that order.”

It doesn’t seem right, of course, that watching “24” or playing a video game could be as important cognitively as reading a book. Isn’t the extraordinary success of the “Harry Potter” novels better news for the culture than the equivalent success of “Grand Theft Auto III”? Johnson’s response is to imagine what cultural critics might have said had video games been invented hundreds of years ago, and only recently had something called the book been marketed aggressively to children:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. . . .
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. . . .
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. . . . This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.

He’s joking, of course, but only in part. The point is that books and video games represent two very different kinds of learning. When you read a biology textbook, the content of what you read is what matters. Reading is a form of explicit learning. When you play a video game, the value is in how it makes you think. Video games are an example of collateral learning, which is no less important.

Being “smart” involves facility in both kinds of thinking—the kind of fluid problem solving that matters in things like video games and I.Q. tests, but also the kind of crystallized knowledge that comes from explicit learning. If Johnson’s book has a flaw, it is that he sometimes speaks of our culture being “smarter” when he’s really referring just to that fluid problem-solving facility. When it comes to the other kind of intelligence, it is not clear at all what kind of progress we are making, as anyone who has read, say, the Gettysburg Address alongside any Presidential speech from the past twenty years can attest. The real question is what the right balance of these two forms of intelligence might look like. “Everything Bad Is Good for You” doesn’t answer that question. But Johnson does something nearly as important, which is to remind us that we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that explicit learning is the only kind of learning that matters.

In recent years, for example, a number of elementary schools have phased out or reduced recess and replaced it with extra math or English instruction. This is the triumph of the explicit over the collateral. After all, recess is “play” for a ten-year-old in precisely the sense that Johnson describes video games as play for an adolescent: an unstructured environment that requires the child actively to intervene, to look for the hidden logic, to find order and meaning in chaos.

One of the ongoing debates in the educational community, similarly, is over the value of homework. Meta-analysis of hundreds of studies done on the effects of homework shows that the evidence supporting the practice is, at best, modest. Homework seems to be most useful in high school and for subjects like math. At the elementary-school level, homework seems to be of marginal or no academic value. Its effect on discipline and personal responsibility is unproved. And the causal relation between high-school homework and achievement is unclear: it hasn’t been firmly established whether spending more time on homework in high school makes you a better student or whether better students, finding homework more pleasurable, spend more time doing it. So why, as a society, are we so enamored of homework? Perhaps because we have so little faith in the value of the things that children would otherwise be doing with their time. They could go out for a walk, and get some exercise; they could spend time with their peers, and reap the rewards of friendship. Or, Johnson suggests, they could be playing a video game, and giving their minds a rigorous workout.

 

 explainer
Why Do Airlines Go Bankrupt?
Delta can't keep up with JetBlue.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Thursday, Sept. 15, 2005, at 3:44 PM PT

Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines declared bankruptcy on Wednesday. United and US Airways are already in Chapter 11, as are the smaller companies Aloha and ATA. Continental went bankrupt in 1983 and again in 1990, and TWA filed three times before disappearing for good. In all, more than 100 airlines have filed for protection against their debtors since the late 1970s. Why do airlines go bankrupt?

They can't compete with younger rivals. Airlines almost never went bankrupt in the old days, when a federal board controlled every aspect of the industry, including ticket prices and routes. The board would also step in when an airline was about to go under. That kind of government oversight ended with the United States Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, which opened the runways to upstart competitors. Though many of these new airlines went out of business, they had—and continue to have—several advantages over the "legacy carriers" from the pre-1978 era.

The free market pushes business toward the airlines that have the lowest operating costs and thus can afford to have the lowest ticket prices. The legacy airlines—United, Northwest, Delta, Continental, American, and US Airways—pay more to fly their planes than less venerable companies like JetBlue and Southwest. They tend to have an older workforce, with more veteran employees who earn higher salaries and more retirees who get pension benefits. Their union contracts, which are based on a long history of labor-management negotiation, often include more restrictions on how much each pilot or mechanic can be asked to work. Given these higher costs, the legacy carriers have more difficulty competing on ticket prices.

Though some of the big airlines (like Delta and United) have created low-cost subsidiaries, they can't always cut costs enough to be competitive. Rising fuel prices add to their problems; a history of credit troubles makes it more difficult for legacy carriers to guard against oil price hikes by locking in guaranteed contracts.

Airlines seem to go bankrupt more often than any other business, but companies in other deregulated industries, like telecommunications, have followed a similar pattern in recent years. Bankruptcies are also common in commodity industries, where customers are most likely to buy at the best price—steel is steel, no matter who's selling. In the deregulated aviation industry, airline tickets are like a commodity—since multiple carriers serve the same routes, customers will go with whoever's the cheapest.

Why do airlines declare bankruptcy? By filing for Chapter 11 protections, a company gets time to devise a new business plan to pay off its creditors. A bankruptcy judge can impose a new contract—and new wage cuts—on a union, approve the transfer of pension obligations to the federal government, and agree to eliminate some debts altogether.

That said, businesses do what they can to avoid the high costs of bankruptcy. The debtor must pay for its own legal advisers as well as for those of its creditors; the total price of an airline bankruptcy can be hundreds of millions of dollars. If the company can't find enough cash to pay back loans and cover legal fees, it gets liquidated.

Next question?

Explainer thanks William Rochelle of Fulbright & Jaworski, Deborah Thorne of Barnes & Thornburg, and John Weiss of Katten Muchin Rosenman.

sports nut
Golf vs. Tennis
How one country club sport defeated the other.
By Field Maloney
Posted Thursday, Sept. 15, 2005, at 9:01 AM PT

On Sunday evening, there was a palpable sense of relief in the TV commentators' voices as the sun went down over the U.S. Open championships. It had been a thrilling, hard-fought final. The matchup had storybook dimensions: tennis's most dominant player, Roger Federer, squaring off against its charismatic elder spokesman, Andre Agassi. Still, John McEnroe, Mary Carillo, and Dick Enberg, the CBS announcers, had reason to be nervous. Last year's finals drew the lowest television ratings in Open history. And this year, despite all the drama and unexpected excitement, there were still reminders that tennis is stuck in a decades-long slump, with the audience for the professional game and the number of Americans playing recreationally both shrinking.

The biggest slight was directed at Robby Ginepri, a doleful-eyed journeyman from Georgia, who suffered the indignity of having his fourth-round match against Richard Gasquet cut off in the middle of the third set so that USA Network could air Law & Order: SVU. For much of the last two weeks, until the epic Agassi-Blake quarterfinal last Thursday, Arthur Ashe Stadium rarely appeared more than two-thirds full. Agassi's comments after his match against Blake—"I wasn't the winner, tennis was"—hinted at how U.S. players feel the burden of keeping tennis alive. Would Allen Iverson ever proclaim in a postgame interview that the real victor that night was the game of basketball?

I spent some time this summer on the men's U.S. pro circuit, where a sense of bitterness about the state of tennis hangs over players' lounges and practice courts. You hear it from the coaches, administrators, and hangers-on, and it gets directed at different targets, but the basic substance is the same: What can make Americans pay attention to tennis? I remember one grizzled coach, a Polish émigré, spinning elaborate courtside conspiracy theories involving various tennis governing bodies and the TV networks, whom he considered nearly as bad as the Communist government he'd defected from. Justin Gimelstob, a smart, outspoken, 28-year-old tour veteran, calls the game—somewhat ruefully—"a niche sport."

Meanwhile, golf has exploded in popularity. This is a sore point in the American tennis community. "Golf is horrible for America," Gimelstob told me. "There are enough overweight out-of-shape people as it is, and you get guys spending five hours on the few days they have off away from their families playing golf, and then going out to eat and drink afterward. It's horrible." There's a Cain-and-Abel element at play here. Golf and tennis are essentially sibling rivals, both raised in white polo shirts, one wielding a 9-iron, the other a wooden racquet, who, during the leisure boom after World War II, left their stuffy country club to seek fame and fortune on a larger scale.

Golf's popularity originally surged in the late 1950s and '60s. You had a golf-nut president, Dwight Eisenhower, and a charismatic regular-guy star, Arnold Palmer, the son of a course superintendent. Public links were going up all over the country. As golf expanded, its core constituency shifted from the old-money WASP establishment to the new technocratic elite. Golf became the pastime of the American business class. Firmly rooted in the culture of the deal, golf found a bigger stage in the '80s and reached an apogee of media attention in the '90s with the arrival of Tiger Woods.

Yet, during the '70s and into the early '80s, tennis appeared poised to grab the limelight. Golf seemed too fusty and stiff for prime time, too male, too redolent of Republicans and retirees, less prepared to shed its exclusive aura. Tennis courts could be found in neighborhoods rich and poor, and the sport already had its Tiger Woods figure: Arthur Ashe, black, from a blue-collar background, tremendously eloquent, poised, and statesmanlike. But tennis's popularity, in terms of people playing, peaked in 1978 and has been dropping ever since. These days, the professional game has some clout abroad, but, in the States, tennis is on the cultural sidelines. The guy with the 9-iron has become an American everyman.

How did this come to pass? Every year brings a new crop of tennis-is-dying articles, with a familiar list of theories. Changes in racquet technology have made for a faster, duller game. Too few colorful personalities at the top of the game, and too few Americans. Poor TV coverage. These are more reductive than helpful. The rise of golf and the decline of tennis can be explained by the changing popular perceptions of the games. In the '50s and early '60s, tennis and golf were aspirational sports, part of the American upper-middle-class package: If you wanted to join, you played. Tennis, as it outgrew its country-club demographic in the late '60s and '70s, gradually became more of a sport than a lifestyle. Most tennis was no longer part of a day at the club and all the upturned-collar conversation that entailed. It was simply a couple of hours of hitting a green ball back and forth over a net.

The irony is that golf has thrived and tennis withered precisely because tennis has worked so hard to expand into a wider demographic. In the '70s and '80s, more public courts were built, more outreach programs were started, and racquets got cheaper and easier to use. Andre Agassi, in his younger, wilder years, played in black denim and lime-green Lycra in order to, as he said last week, "bring something to the game that would maybe impact those that don't normally watch it, maybe to draw interest to the game."

Golf has shed its clubby trappings much more slowly. Tiger Woods never plays tournaments in shorts, let alone black denim and Lycra. Two out of the three American majors this year were held at private clubs.* For better or worse, golf has remained an aspirational sport in the American consciousness, an emblem of the road to success and prosperity. Golf's tent got bigger—and more meritocratic (even Tony Soprano plays golf)—but never lost its peaked shape. Tennis, by becoming a mere sport, plunged into an identity crisis, and was left out of the bounties of American aspiration.

The final insult is how, despite tennis's efforts to woo the people, the sport has never shaken its vestigial associations to the old WASP aristocracy. For evidence of this, you need go no further than the ever chameleonlike and opportunistic Bush clan, whose deep roots in both games co-exist with a knack for political self-presentation. So, while George H. W. Bush is a dedicated tennis fan and player and his eldest son was an avid player well into his 30s—part of W. and Laura's courtship was spent at a Texas tennis ranch—the president now seems to make a point of never being seen with a racquet. Tennis has become a political liability: effete, preppy, what high-schoolers call a "wussy sport." Whereas golf, no matter how fey the links attire or how pricey the greens fees, has become so solidly red-blooded and all-American that even our folksy president can embrace it.

Correction, Sept. 16: The article originally and incorrectly stated that all three American
golf majors were held at private clubs. The U.S. Open was held at Pinehurst, which, while being very expensive, is not a private club. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Field Maloney is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126314/

 

the gist
Where To Hide From Mother Nature
Wyoming? Nope. West Virginia? Think again.
By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Thursday, Sept. 15, 2005, at 3:20 AM PT

Human beings are self-absorbed creatures, so the response to Hurricane Katrina has naturally included some hand-wringing over the question: "Could this happen to my hometown?" Depending on the worrywart's location, the theoretical catastrophe could be a flash flood, a wildfire, or an earthquake rather than a hurricane; no corner of the United States is immune to lethal natural disasters.

Still, some corners are safer than others. If an American wants to minimize his chances of dying at Mother Nature's hands, where should he set up house? Slate crunched the numbers—and did some educated guesswork—to find the U.S. city where the odds of perishing in a natural disaster are closest to nil.

We started by taking a look at every presidential disaster declaration from 1965 through 2004. As this color-coded map reveals, the Eastern half of the nation has had the most officially declared disasters, although North Dakota, Washington, and California have endured more than their share of woe. Going by presidential decrees alone, then, Western states such as Nevada or Wyoming appear safest.

But the data are skewed by the fact that disasters are more likely to be declared in populated areas. As this FEMA primer makes clear, disasters are declared in order to make funds available to people and businesses affected by a catastrophe. So, a severe storm in the Milwaukee suburbs is a lot likelier to be declared a federal disaster than a severe storm in an unpopulated expanse of southwestern Wyoming.

The declared disasters list was useful, however, in helping to eliminate the obvious noncontenders. Like, say, California. The state's massive population gives it a low per-capita fatality rate for natural disasters, but no one would consider it a safe haven from nature's worst: It's susceptible to earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, torrential rains, rip currents, and even volcanoes. Unsurprisingly, then, California has had more declared disasters than any other state but Texas, which is frequently hammered by tornadoes, thunderstorms, and floods.

For simplicity's sake—Slate still lacks a supercomputer to handle massive number-crunching assignments—we automatically eliminated the 30 states with the most declared disasters. Most were no-brainers, such as the hurricane-prone states of the Gulf Coast and the heartland states that lie in Tornado Alley. Sparsely populated North Dakota has regular problems with severe flooding, as do Virginia, Tennessee, and New York. (Flooding, tornadoes, and tropical storms/hurricanes have been the most prolific killers in recent years, although heat waves often take significant tolls.) Illinois and Pennsylvania didn't make the grade because their cities can get lethally hot. Also disqualified were some notably frigid members of the union, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota; blizzards and icy conditions are frequently deadly, especially for motorists. And seemingly placid West Virginia? It has some issues with landslides, particularly in the counties that border Ohio.

That left 20 states, two of which we knocked out immediately on common-sense grounds: Hawaii, since islands are inherently at the ocean's mercy (plus there's a slew of volcanoes), and Alaska, where severe winter storms are the norm. For the remaining 18 states, then, we looked at year-by-year fatalities resulting from severe weather, dating back to 1995, as recorded by the National Weather Service. The NWS statistics cover 27 different types of weather events, including such relative rarities as deaths due to volcanic ash, fog, dust devils, and "miscellaneous." (Since California had been eliminated at this stage, we ignored earthquake fatalities, which the NWS does not track.) We then used the total number of fatalities from each state to arrive at a deaths-per-thousand figure, based on population numbers taken from the 2000 Census.

Of the 18 states, only three had a fatality rate lower than 0.01 per thousand for the last decade: Connecticut (0.00587 per thousand), Massachusetts (0.00299), and Rhode Island (0.00286). These figures are somewhat surprising, given that all three of these New England states have ample coastlines and are thus susceptible to fierce storms. But they are also more immune to hurricanes than their southerly counterparts, virtually free of tornadoes, and blessed with relatively cool summers and winters that, although cold, aren't quite North Dakota cold. They're also affluent—all three boast family median incomes above the national average—and, as Hurricane Katrina reminded us, socioeconomics matter when it comes to preserving life during natural disasters.

For the three finalists, we looked at the county-by-county breakdowns of presidential-disaster declarations since 1995. Rhode Island only had one, during the Blizzard of '96. Connecticut was hit by that storm, too, as well as by Tropical Storm Floyd in 1999, which affected Litchfield, Hartford, and Fairfield counties. Massachusetts, meanwhile, had five major declared disasters, mostly associated with heavy rains and flooding in its seven easternmost counties.

Based solely on the numbers, then, Rhode Island would seem to be the winner. But the tiny state's cities are clustered around bays and rivers, which means a major hurricane could cause flooding. During the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, for example, a violent storm surge hit Providence.

Eastern Massachusetts is dicey because its long coastline is exposed to the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean. The rural west has proven statistically safer, but winter in the Berkshires can be snowy and harsh.

That leaves Connecticut, whose coastline faces the Long Island Sound rather than the open ocean. Still, living near the water is not recommended for the truly tense; a safer bet is somewhere inland, away from rivers and lakes, but not too deep in the boonies. The state's winters aren't tropical, but they tend to be not quite as snowbound as those in western Massachusetts.

After much debate, then, we settled on Slate's "America's Best Place to Avoid Death Due to Natural Disaster": the area in and around Storrs, Conn., home to the University of Connecticut. It lies in Tolland County, which was not part of the 1999 federal disaster declaration for Tropical Storm Floyd. It's a safe 50 miles from the sound and not close to any rivers. It also has relatively easy access to a major city (Hartford) in the event an evacuation or hospitalization becomes necessary.*

This conclusion is by no means scientific, nor can safety ever be completely guaranteed; as moviegoers and Rick Moody fans are already aware, Connecticut does have its share of dangerous ice storms. And we're open to suggestions about other candidates for the title. If you want to make a case for your hometown, please drop us a line. In the meantime, the parents of UConn students can sleep a little easier tonight.

(E-mail may be quoted unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

*Correction, September 15, 2005: This piece originally asserted that the University of Connecticut Health Center is in Storrs, Conn. It's actually in Farmington.

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a fellow at the New America Foundation.

 

frame game
Evasion of Privacy
The phony humility of John Roberts.
By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2005, at 9:24 PM PT

Some of you have asked me to comment on John Roberts' confirmation hearings. I'm sorry, but I can't. In my capacity as a journalist, Roberts might come before me as chief justice, and he's entitled to know that I'll consider his arguments with an open mind.

Just kidding! I knew you'd never fall for that one. I've been watching Roberts, just like he's been watching the Supreme Court. I've got opinions about him, just like he's got opinions about the court. The difference is, I'm going to level with you.

First of all, I like this guy. You can tell from those Reagan-era memos that he's got a deliciously caustic edge. Second, the "humility" he's projecting to disguise that edge is either self-deception or fraud. Third, in practice, he's no more committed to a right to privacy than Robert Bork was.

On Monday, Roberts told the Senate Judiciary Committee, "Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent."

On Tuesday, Roberts demonstrated how a clever judge, veiled in humility, can operate within a system of precedent to overturn precedents.

Roberts was asked about Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 opinion that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade based on precedence. He called Casey "one of the precedents of the court, entitled to respect like any other precedent." Five times he repeated the phrase "like any other precedent."

Why couch the point this way? Because if Casey deserves no more respect than any other precedent, all you need to overturn it is a contrary precedent. That's what happened to some of the court's other landmark opinions, according to Roberts: The court decided that "intervening precedents had eroded the authority of those cases." So, the recipe for overturning Casey, and ultimately Roe, is to create intervening precedents, starting this fall with Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood.

On Monday, Roberts told the committee, "Judges are not politicians."

On Tuesday, Roberts refused to comment on Roe and Casey, saying he had to keep an "open mind" on issues he might adjudicate. Yet he commented freely on other cases, notably Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the right of married couples to use contraception. Why the distinction? Issues involving the former cases "are likely to come before the court," he explained, whereas the latter "are not, in my view, likely to come before the court."

Roberts was right: Legislatures are likely to restrict abortion but wildly unlikely to ban contraception. But that's the calculation of a politician, not a judge. That's why Roberts, unlike Bork, said he'd strike down anti-contraception laws both men knew they'd never face. The cases "unlikely to come before the court"—the ones no sane legislature would challenge—are the ones so politically settled that it's safer for a judicial nominee to affirm them than to stay neutral. If Roberts were using the "unlikely to come before the court" standard for judicial rather than political reasons, he'd be able to name at least one settled case with which he disagrees. Maybe somebody will ask him that question tomorrow.

On Monday, Roberts told the committee, "President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights. We do."

On Tuesday, Roberts demonstrated how our own judiciary can purport to grant rights while leaving them nearly empty.

Roberts was asked to locate the right to privacy in the Constitution. He quoted parts of the Bill of Rights pertaining to military occupations and invasions of citizens' homes. Does the right to privacy extend beyond those contexts? Roberts offered one addition: "I agree with the Griswold court's conclusion that marital privacy extends to contraception." Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., pressed him about the extension of contraceptive rights to unmarried people. "I don't have any quarrel with that conclusion," he allowed. What about Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case that interpreted Griswold to bar prosecution of private sex between consenting adults? Roberts ducked the question, citing "the difference between the issue that was presented in Griswold and its ramifications." In other words, any claim of privacy beyond the specific "issue" in Griswold—the right to marital contraception—is a "ramification" Roberts might reconsider.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., asked Roberts whether the right to abortion "is so embedded that it's become a part of our national culture." Roberts demurred, explaining, "That gets to the application of the principles in a particular case." Feinstein asked Roberts whether the "right of privacy applies to the beginning of life and the end of life." Roberts begged off again, arguing, "The exact scope of it, with respect to the beginning of life and the end of life—those are issues that are coming before the court." Feinstein asked Roberts about his pro-privacy remarks to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. Roberts affirmed the "right to be left alone" as "a general statement of the principle." But he cautioned, "With regard to particular restrictions [Wyden] was talking about ... I don't think it's appropriate to comment on."

You get the picture. Privacy is a principle so general that its assertion against any "particular restriction" unspecified in the Constitution, aside from a ban on married people using birth control, is a mere "ramification" or "application" open to review. By refusing to define privacy's "scope," Roberts eviscerates it.

On Wednesday, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., asked Roberts, "Do you think the Constitution encompasses a fundamental right for my father to conclude that ... he does not want to continue on a life support system?" Roberts replied, "I cannot answer that question in the abstract." Six sentences later, Roberts said he couldn't comment because "those are issues that come before the court." It's too abstract ... it's too concrete ... whatever.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told Roberts, "I assume that you disagree with Justice Thomas' view that there is no general right to privacy, as he stated in Lawrence." Roberts replied, "That question depends, obviously, on the modifier and what you mean by 'general.' " Schumer tried again: "You would disagree that there is no general right to privacy in the Constitution?" Roberts answered, "I wouldn't use the phrase 'general,' because I don't know what that means. I don't know if, by saying 'general,' they're trying to describe the particular scope to the right to privacy or not." Twice more, Schumer asked about a right to privacy. Twice more, Roberts said he didn't know what "general" meant.

That's the privacy Roberts is offering: No scope, no modifiers. Not particular, not general. Bork had the same view. "Privacy to do what, Senator?" he asked one of his inquisitors in 1987. Bork presented this view, honestly and fatally, as a critique of privacy rather than an affirmation of it. Roberts has learned.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

 

explainer
Dead Man's Float
Why are bodies in the water always facedown?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2005, at 3:44 PM PT

On Tuesday, the governor of Louisiana accused FEMA officials of taking too long to recover dead bodies. Last week, the agency asked photojournalists not to take pictures of floating corpses. (The policy was reversed on Saturday.) Most images that have been released show corpses floating on their stomachs. Do bodies always float facedown?

As a general rule, yes. A cadaver in the water starts to sink as soon as the air in its lungs is replaced with water. Once submerged, the body stays underwater until the bacteria in the gut and chest cavity produce enough gas—methane, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon dioxide—to float it to the surface like a balloon. (The buildup of methane, hydrogen sulfide, and other gases can take days or weeks, depending on a number of factors.) At first, not all parts of the body inflate the same amount: The torso, which contains the most bacteria, bloats more than the head and limbs. The most buoyant body parts rise first, leaving the head and limbs to drag behind the chest and abdomen. Since arms, legs, and the head can only drape forward from the body, corpses tend to rotate such that the torso floats facedown, with arms and legs hanging beneath it.

Most dead bodies float this way, but there are exceptions. The smaller the limbs, the more likely a corpse will float facing up—short arms and legs create less drag. Also, if a body stays on the surface of the water for a long time it will release the built-up gas and sink once again. Decomposition continues underwater—more gas accumulates—and the body may become what rescue workers sometimes call a "refloat." Since refloats are at a more advanced state of decay, they may be more evenly bloated and thus more likely to float faceup.

Bodies that are dead before they reach the water could have different floating patterns. A corpse that falls in face-first might remain on the surface, since there would be no way for the air inside the lungs to escape. (A faceup corpse would fill with water and sink in the normal fashion.)

Editorial control over photographs also contributes to a facedown bias. Most photo editors won't publish pictures of a body that could be identified by a friend or family member. Since facedown corpses are likely to be anonymous, they're more suitable for newspapers and television.

Next question?

Explainer thanks Greg Garneau of the National Press Photographers Association, John Sanders of the National Underwater Rescue-Recovery Institute, Daniel Schultz of the District Six Medical Examiner's Office in Florida, and reader Sara Stewart for asking the question.

 

shopping
Booster Shot
How well do those energy drinks work?
By Sam Eifling
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2005, at 2:54 AM PT

In spring of last year, some dudes in the park began passing out samples of Red Bull, the omnipresent energy drink, while I was playing football. I chugged a can. Immediately, I felt giddy and off-kilter. I started running around. Some guy with John Elway's arm and Kordell Stewart's aim passed the ball my way. I turned, reached for it, and felt my pinky dislocate at the middle joint. My finger did its impression of a clock face at 2:30 until an ER doctor wrangled it back into place. It took six weeks of physical therapy before I could make a proper fist.

I've had about two-thirds of a Red Bull since. That is, until about half an hour ago, when I cracked open a can. My feet have begun wiggling, unbidden. The TV seems too loud. But, whoa, do my fingers scamper along this keyboard! Red Bull, like most of its energy-drink ilk, claims to perk you up and keep you there—"gives you wings," its ads intone. It must provide something: The company reports that people worldwide consumed almost 2 billion cans of Red Bull in 2004.

Red Bull claims nearly half of the swiftly expanding U.S. energy-drink racket—the industry grew 74 percent last year. John Sicher, editor and publisher of Beverage Digest, attributes the drinks' tremendous growth to "consumers' growing interest in functional foods." A can of Coke keeps you awake, gives that sugar rush, rots your teeth, weakens your bones, softens your love handles. Black coffee has so little measurable nutritional value that the FDA doesn't require it to carry a label.

Most energy drinks, on the other hand, provide some combination of B vitamins (which help convert sugar to energy and help regulate red blood cells, which deliver oxygen), amino acids (e.g., taurine), antioxidants (milk thistle, vitamin C), and stimulants, ranging from the reliable (caffeine, guarana) to the alleged (horny goat weed). Unfortunately, they also deliver rafts of sugar in the form of maltodextrin, fructose, and glucose. And the citric acid that pervades the drinks isn't a friend of your teeth. Taste is hit or miss (it ranges from fruity to mediciney)—yet hardly critical. You almost want it to taste crappy, because that could mean it's good for you.

But can these energy drinks live up to their pronouncements? Do they improve "performance" and "reaction speed"? To determine this, I bought a slew and evaluated them over several weeks on three factors. First, do they taste like something a person would want to consume, or like chewable aspirin? Second, how do they affect my mental state, including focus, alertness, mood, and ability to play an electronic version of the board game Boggle? Third, how do they affect the way my body feels, both in terms of physical harmony and strenuous activities such as swimming, running, pickup basketball, push-ups, and coin-op arcade basketball? In other words, are these truly "performance" drinks?

The cashier at Food Store gasped when I approached the counter with three separate armloads of cans. "Goddamn," she said. "Can't you buy those cheaper at the grocery store?" Not really, unless you buy in bulk, and after imbibing about four gallons of energy drinks over the last month, I declare that prospect unlikely. But I was pleased to find that not all fizzy, fortified syrups are lousy. Herewith, the results, from worst to first.

Mountain Dew Amp Energy Drink

8.4 oz./120 calories
Touts: Vitamins B-6 and B-12, ginseng, taurine, guarana, caffeine.
Warns: "Not recommended for children."
Tastes: Like orangey Mountain Dew with a bitter, toned-down edge.
Effects: I drink a can to keep from nodding off while reading a novel. Immediately I perk up, start tapping my fingers on the book cover, bouncing my foot. No jitters, but a slight headache develops above my left ear. It's hard to focus. Boggle's not much better: In the final game, I find only three words on the board. Twenty minutes later, I'm physically and mentally wrung-out, and my stomach aches as though I might vomit unless I eat or drink something. A later sampling does not produce such a nasty reaction, but the flavor does not improve.

Verdict: The warning should be abbreviated to, "Not recommended." Definitely the worst of the lot.

Full Throttle Energy Drink by Coca-Cola

16 oz./220 calories
Touts: Vitamins B-3, B-6, and B-12, taurine, ginseng, carnitine, guarana, caffeine.
Warns: Of nothing.
Tastes: Tart and vaguely fruity. Like Alka-Seltzer in Kool-Aid.
Effects: I guzzle a can on the way to take an 8-year-old boy to play in the park. I quickly realize that 16 ounces of anything fizzy is a lot to ask a moving stomach to digest. Other than bloat, I discern no effect, as I'm run ragged in no time. I do play Hoop Fever at the nearest arcade and score a ridiculous 74 points, besting the day's previous mark by 29 points.

Verdict: My concentration and shooting groove were great. As for energy, well, there wasn't much. Sicher predicts that in a few years, only drinks from the larger beverage companies (Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Red Bull, Hansen's) will emerge from the current glut. It'll be a shame if that's the case, considering the mediocre offerings from Pepsi and Coke.

Red Bull

8.3 oz./110 calories
Touts: Vitamins B-3, B-5, B-6, and B-12, taurine.
Claims: The farm. "Improves performance, especially during times of increased stress or strain, increases concentration and improves reaction time, stimulates the metabolism."
Warns: "Avoid while playing potentially harmful contact sports." No, I made that up.
Tastes: Sweet, fizzy, acrid. "Like corn syrup that burns" is one friend's accurate assessment.
Effects: Endows me with some verve that, per usual, dissipates when I start the push-ups. There's no endurance in these cans. To test the claim of "increased stress" I play Boggle while watching Family Guy and emerge with wildly varying scores. My stomach feels sour and a headache brews.

Verdict: Beats a trip to the emergency room, but I'm surprised this little can holds half the domestic market, considering how blah it is. The taste, while distinct, isn't exactly pleasant, and the energy it provides is fleeting.

Monster

16 oz./200 calories
Touts: Vitamins B-3, B-6, B-12, and C, taurine, ginseng, inositol, caffeine, L-carnitine.
Warns: "Consume responsibly—limit 3 cans per day. Not recommended for children, pregnant women or people sensitive to caffeine."
Tastes: Like subdued Mountain Dew, with a now-familiar vitaminy edge.
Effects: I see this everywhere, so I assume it's popular—but it has almost no noticeable effect on me. When I do push-ups, my body protests early, as when it's asked to run on too much sugar. In playing pickup basketball, I melt quickly. The thought hits me that perhaps I've acquired a resistance to vitamins and sugar water. On the other hand, the Boggle scores are among the best of any drink tested.

Verdict: A moderate disappointment, considering the bitchin' claw marks on the can. I can't figure out why I seem immune to this, and two other drinks called Energy Pro and Hansen's—all the spawn of Hansen's, the second-largest U.S. energy-drink manufacturer. I recently met an Iraq war veteran (who knows from stimulants) who buys this stuff by the case. Me, I can't see it, although a fair flavor and a lack of ill effects make it a borderline drink.

SoBe No Fear

16 oz./260 calories
Touts: Vitamins B-6, B-12, and C, folic acid, selenium, zinc, taurine, inositol, ginseng, guarana, creatine, grape seed extract, L-carnitine, L-arginine, caffeine.
Claims: "Super energy supplement."
Warns: "Not recommended for children, pregnant women or people sensitive to caffeine."
Tastes: Sweet, mildly fizzy, with a hint of grapefruit.
Effects: It does offer some extra kick first thing in the morning: My arms move faster even when drying myself off after a shower. When I type, my fingers move quickly and with precision. My heart seems to pound too hard during push-ups. I feel alert but distractible. Boggle scores are high; Hoop Fever scores disappointingly mediocre.

Verdict: What I'd reach for if falling asleep at the wheel. Not ideal if you need focus or fine motor skills.

Arizona Tea Caution Energy

8.3 oz./130 calories
Touts: Vitamins B-5, B-6, and B-12, taurine, caffeine, D-ribose, L-carnitine, ginseng, inositol, milk thistle, guarana.
Warns: "Not recommended for children, pregnant women or persons sensitive to caffeine."
Tastes: Like sweet tea with a dash of cough syrup. The only drink aside from Rock Star Cola that isn't completely overwhelmed with the strong citric acid.
Effects: No ill effects. I have strong Boggle scores and two bang-up games of Hoop Fever on this bad baby, scoring 63 and 64 points. Importantly, when I drink a can on an empty stomach, I get neither a headache nor tummy ache.

Verdict: Decent flavor, and the small dose kept me from feeling like I had the attention span of a terrier. One of the better finds. What I'd recommend for people who dislike energy drinks.

Everlast Nutrition Citrus Blast Energy Drink

8.3 oz./140 calories
Touts: Vitamins A, B-3, B-5, B-6, and B-12, caffeine, inositol, taurine.
Claims: "Improves performance, increases concentration, improves reaction speed, increases metabolism."
Warns: "One serving contains about as much caffeine as a cup of coffee. Not intended for young children and persons sensitive to stimulants such as caffeine, or for use with products that may contain stimulants such as medications for allergy, asthma, cough/cold, decongestants, or certain pain relief products. Do not use if pregnant or lactating."
Tastes: Like fizzy, sweet grapefruit juice. Pleasant.
Effects: Boggle scores are mediocre, and after a few minutes, I notice my handwriting deteriorate. But it does sit well when called into duty: I drink it just before playing basketball but after I've imbibed a pint of beer and a happy-hour whiskey. My stomach feels hot with the drink as soon as I start running, and I experience a moment of wooziness. But I recover and hit clutch shots in a game of three-on-three, with enough stamina to hustle on defense at the end.

Verdict: A nice flavor, and it earns plaudits for its slim size; 16 ounces of anything carbonated is too much before a run. Given the apparent boost it gave me in basketball, this drink is what I'd reach for if feeling sluggish before a jog.

Rockstar Energy Cola

16 oz./240 calories
Touts: Vitamins B-2, B-3, B-5, B-6, B-12, and C, caffeine, taurine, guarana, inositol, milk thistle.
Claims: "Party like a rockstar."
Warns: "Not recommended for children or those sensitive to caffeine."
Tastes: Pleasantly metallic. Like a cross between Coke and pennies.
Effects: I drink a can while on deadline. I'm keenly focused, and I'm typing sentences almost too quickly, spitting them out before I finish evaluating them in my head. Meanwhile, my foot bounces on the floor. With a little more verve than usual, I drop to the floor and pound out 15 push-ups in the time usually required to do five. The Boggle scores are on the low side, but no vitamin or caffeine headache accompany this beverage. In fact, it's kind of fun.

Verdict: Better for you than a can of Coke, and it doesn't leave that squeaky residue on your teeth. Out of the dozens of cans I mowed through, Rockstar Cola is the only drink that offers that feeling of physical exuberance you expect from an energy drink. And it's the only one I'd actually want to consume again anytime soon. To me, coffee remains king for a pick-me-up, but among this group, Rockstar rolls.

Sam Eifling writes for New Times, the alt-weekly in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126591/

explainer
The Reason for the Season
Why do television shows premiere in September?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Monday, Sept. 19, 2005, at 3:39 PM PT

The new television season begins today, with premiere episodes appearing on almost all of the broadcast networks. Each network has already run a premiere or two during the last few weeks—Fox even trotted out its new show Prison Break at the end of August. So, what's the significance of the first day of the fall season?

Starting today, each night's Nielsen numbers will be factored into the networks' yearly ratings. Each network tries to court advertisers by averaging the highest numbers over the course of the nine-month season, which runs from September to May. That said, television execs can run season premieres whenever they want. Many debut episodes get held until after Jan. 1—the so-called second season. A network might also push a show's premiere to October so it can run more fresh episodes later in the year while competitors are in reruns. Starting a show early—in the late summer, for example—shields it from the fierce competition of September.

Television shows have come out on a seasonal schedule for almost as long as there have been televisions. The original networks copied the radio industry, where shows typically aired from September until the following spring, then took the summer off. Both television and radio used a 39-week season and filled in the remaining 13 weeks with replacement shows. (By the 1970s, most summer replacement shows had been replaced with reruns.)

Debuting new content in the fall made sense—and continues to make sense—because fewer people tend to watch TV during the summer. (They could be on vacation or busy watching summer Hollywood blockbusters.) By starting their seasons all at once, the networks also get free publicity; newspapers and magazines generate buzz for new shows with ubiquitous "Fall TV previews."

The way the networks sell advertising also contributes to the seasonal cycle. Next year's schedules are announced at the close of the previous season so advertisers can purchase packages months in advance. This "upfront" system began in the 1960s and persists to this day. (Many consider the upfront an outdated mode of doing business and argue that it should be replaced with a system of continuous sales.)

Though most network shows still premiere at the start of the season, there have been many breaks with tradition in recent years. Cable channels often ignore the "seasons" altogether, premiering their shows over the summer when the networks are in reruns. After successful summer debuts for shows like Big Brother and American Idol, networks have started rolling out many reality shows in the offseason, along with some traditional fare.

Who sets the official dates for the TV season? Nielsen, with the agreement of the major networks. In general, the networks agree to start up on the second or third Monday of September, unless a big event (like 9/11 or the Writers Guild strike of 1988) gets in the way. Before Nielsen took over this role in the 1990s, a reporter at the trade magazine Variety got to make the call.

Next question?

Explainer thanks Gil Schwartz of CBS and Robert Thompson of Syracuse University.

Daniel Engber is a writer in New York City and a featured member of www.cryingwhileeating.com.

 

ad report card
Paul McCartney? Is That You?
What he's doing in that Fidelity ad.
By Seth Stevenson
Posted Monday, Sept. 19, 2005, at 1:23 PM PT

The Spot: It kicks off with a photo of a very familiar face. "This is Paul," says the announcer. Cut to other snapshots of Paul McCartney's iconic mug through the decades—along with some home-movie footage—as the announcer tells us that Paul has been a "Quarryman, Beatle, Wing, poet, father, frontman, producer, business mogul, painter, and—if that weren't enough—a knight. The key is: Never stop doing what you love." Eventually, we find out what's being advertised here. "Call us today. We'll help you plan for the next part of your life. Fidelity Investments. Smart move."

This ad debuted during the NFL's season opener a couple of weeks ago. Immediately, the British press was all over McCartney (even though the spot has not run in the U.K.). The Brit tabloids roasted "Macca" for tainting his legacy with vile commerce. Several stories trotted out a 2002 statement in which McCartney claimed, "We're not in the business of singing jingles. We do not peddle sneakers, pantyhose, or anything else." The headlines ranged from "Rubber Sold" to "I Am the Ad Man, Goo Goo G'joob." American papers were a tad more restrained, but the Miami Herald titled its piece "Sir Paul Sells Out."

I'm not sure that the concept of selling out has much traction anymore. The battle is over, and the sellouts have won. At this point, about 97 percent of Who songs have been used in automobile ads. The Rolling Stones appear in ads for Ameriquest, a mortgage-services company. Bob Dylan made a cameo in a spot for Victoria's Secret underwear.

Those are all geezers, you protest—not fierce and uncorrupted young bucks. But when I talk to younger people, the sellout label seems not to exist anymore. They expect TV ads to introduce great new music. They don't care when Oscar-winning actors turn up in spots for Diet Coke. To them, endorsement deals just seem like a natural byproduct of fame, and nothing to get worked up over.

I'm not quite post-integrity, yet. Part of me continues to wince when artistic heroes get sucked into the marketing machine. It makes me wonder what their work really means to them. It makes me contemplate the force of greed. Bottom line, it's just sort of a bummer.

Paul McCartney seems to recognize this. It's not like the Fidelity ad shows him talking into the camera about how terrific his IRA is, or about the great returns he got on some municipal bonds. The ad doesn't even bother to say that McCartney's a Fidelity client (and Fidelity will not disclose whether he is or isn't).

Paul doesn't speak at all here, or appear in any new footage shot for the purposes of the ad. The home-movie clips do serve to make the spot more intimate, and more compelling and watchable. (My favorite scene is of bearded Paul a-gallop on a horse. Also, I love any moment where he makes that patented "O" with his mouth and then breaks into laughter.) But they also serve to distance Sir Paul from the pitch. The grainy clips are over and the screen has gone black before the word "Fidelity" is mentioned for the first and only time.

The question lingers: Why would he do it? When Dylan popped up in a bizarre lingerie ad, it seemed to be in large part just an impish provocation, in tune with Dylan's well-known penchant for mischief. But there's nothing impish about index funds.

No doubt Paul is pleased to be paid for his endorsement. While Fidelity won't release any figures, they surely offered millions for the ad. Still, Paul has a net worth of $1.5 billion; can money really have been his core motivation? Yes, Fidelity is also sponsoring his tour, but I'm willing to bet he'd sell out every show if he publicized them with flyers tacked to telephone poles.

I think Paul's driving desire is for relevance. This is a way for Paul to say: Remember that bloke in the home-movie clips? The guy you loved so much? I'm still here. I've got a fresh new album. I hope you'll actually listen to it. (McCartney plays all the instruments on several tracks of this latest release, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, suggesting the work might be especially close to his heart.) It's odd that one of the most famous figures of the 20^th century is doing mutual-fund ads just to stay in the public eye. But that's showbiz.

Besides, I think the ploy has worked. The first half of the Fidelity spot employs a tune called "Follow Me" from Paul's new disc (the second half of the ad uses the Wings hit "Band on the Run"), and I'm intrigued enough by the sound that I may have to buy Chaos and Creation. Can we really consider it selling out when what you crave above all else is to put your new art in front of your audience?

As for Fidelity, it's a no-brainer to associate yourself with Paul McCartney. Baby boomers retiring means lots of business for financial-planning firms. McCartney is the ultimate boomer icon. And I can't think of any celebrities out there who are more loved or less controversial.

Grade: B. It's pretty hard to distinguish among the massive financial-services firms, and this ad does help set Fidelity apart. But there's a gaping disconnect here. How did we go from marveling at the life of a billionaire genius … to setting up a retirement account? Fidelity advises that "the key" is to "never stop doing what you love." That sounds like an awesome retirement strategy. I will never stop playing squash on weekday afternoons, taking lazy beach vacations, and watching baseball on high-definition television. Now can I spend my golden years in security and comfort?

Seth Stevenson is a frequent contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126568/

 

sports nut
Lamecocks
Steve Spurrier—just another coach who can't revive South Carolina football.
By Andrew Rice
Posted Monday, Sept. 19, 2005, at 12:28 PM PT

If you happened to tune in to a South Carolina football game this year, you might get the impression that the sport is less a competition between helmet-wearing giants than a traveling exhibition of facial contortions. During the Gamecocks' first three games—all nationally broadcast, for the first time in living memory—the producers cut to the sidelines after nearly every play to see what Carolina's ruddy, 60-year-old coach Steve Spurrier would do next. Fumble: Spurrier grimaces. Touchdown: Spurrier pumps his fist. Incompletion: Spurrier claps wanly.

With Saturday's 37-14 loss to Alabama, Spurrier's record is a not-very-Lombardiesque 1-2. The enfant terrible of college coaches isn't such an enfant anymore: It's been nearly a decade since his national championship with the University of Florida. And after two terrible seasons in the NFL with the Washington Redskins, his genius credentials are in need of a little burnishing. Enter the Gamecocks. Spurrier hopes to make South Carolina his Elba, the beachhead from which he'll once again conquer the college rankings. If history is any guide, though, it's more likely to be his Devil's Island. Coaches go to South Carolina, but they never come back.

Columbia, S.C., the city where I was born and raised, is a pleasant town most notable for being the second-most-notable city to be burned during the Civil War. Perhaps the Union army sowed our football fields with salt so that no decent team would ever grow again. Despite an ample supply of local talent, Gamecocks football has almost always been lousy, a ne'er-do-well cousin to regional powers like Georgia and Florida State. I could quote many statistics to illustrate the team's futility, but one really sums it up: Since World War II, no South Carolina head coach has gone on to another head coaching job after leaving the school. Ever. Anywhere.

For decades, the team lost every bowl game it played, and fans muttered about a "Chicken Curse" that guaranteed any fleeting Gamecocks success would be followed by calamity. In 1984, a squad coached by former New York Giants fullback Joe Morrison—imagine Johnny Cash with a clipboard—started the season with nine straight victories, rising to No. 2 in the rankings. They were then upset by Navy—Navy!—and stumbled to a miserable loss in the Gator Bowl. This nonetheless ranks as the greatest year in school history. Four mediocre seasons later, amid a steroids scandal that led to the indictment of four of his assistant coaches, Morrison dropped dead of a heart attack after a game of racquetball. In a recent online poll conducted by the local newspaper, fans voted him the team's best-ever coach. (Spurrier, before coaching a single game, was running second.)

Other coaches got off easier than Morrison—South Carolina only killed their reputations. Lou Holtz brought the team a pair of midlevel bowl wins but nothing close to dominance. By the end fans had soured on his uninspired offensive schemes and the players' thuggish behavior. Holtz's final game before retirement, against upstate archrival Clemson, was ended by the referees after a wild, helmet-tossing brawl. If that note wasn't sour enough, the team is also now on NCAA probation for three years due to some Holtz-era rule-bending.

You'd think we'd learn not to get our hopes up. But South Carolinians have long been adept at denying the unpleasant aspects of our past—in high school, a guest speaker told my history class that the Civil War wasn't really about slavery. And, disappointments be damned, we love our football. Since Spurrier came to town, South Carolina fans have genuflected to the coach whose strutting, pass-happy style at Florida always had a way of infuriating his opponents. The Gamecocks had been the victim of some of those routs—Spurrier had, in fact, been one of the most hated men in town. But Columbians decided to forget all that past unpleasantness.

When I went home to visit my family before the first game of the year, one of the first things I saw was an airport billboard that boasted, "We got Spurrier!" In the week leading up to his debut, the newspaper ran a series of front-page articles that examined everything from his quarterbacking drills to his habit of tossing his trademark visor when frustrated. (A good Spurrier throw, one article explained, can go "Frisbee-style from the out-of-bounds stripe on the sideline to the team bench.") The Sunday paper included a 104-page insert fronted by a gauzy Spurrier portrait and a single-word headline: "BELIEVE."

The opening game, against Central Florida, was moved to Thursday night for television. By mid-afternoon on the appointed day, all business in Columbia had shut down as thousands of fans skipped work to slug beers, grill piquant mustard barbeque, and talk like contenders. Never mind the analysts' predictions, the tough competition in the Southeastern Conference, or the fact that several players—Holtz's recruits—had been suspended during the offseason for offenses ranging from larceny to drug use. The tailgaters I hung out with bandied about predictions of a bowl game; my sister's boyfriend passed around victory cigars before the season's first snap.

Central Florida, which went winless in 2004, didn't figure to be a tough opponent. On the fifth play of the game, sophomore quarterback Blake Mitchell threw a 49-yard touchdown pass. On the team's second possession, Mitchell drove down the field using the no-huddle offense for a second score. A guy in front of me shouted, "When he was at Florida, I hated him." His friend hollered back, "Now we love 'im!"

In the second half, the Gamecocks offense came to a dead stop. Central Florida scored a touchdown after a couple of South Carolina fumbles. Then a field goal. On the subsequent kickoff, South Carolina fumbled again. The fan in front of me buried his head in his wife's shoulder. It was all happening again. But the Gamecocks stopped the Golden Knights on fourth-and-goal and eventually escaped with a 24-15 victory. The next day's newspaper devoted its entire front page to a huge Spurrier picture. (And it wasn't a slow news day—a headline on Page 3 read, "Anarchy rules in New Orleans.")

Genius or not, Spurrier can't win games all by himself. Against Georgia in Week 2, the Gamecocks nearly pulled off a big upset before losing by two. We savored the familiar taste of a moral victory. Then came Saturday's home-field debacle in which the defense couldn't stop the Alabama running game and the vaunted Spurrier offense didn't do a thing. "It was sad to watch," the coach conceded afterwards. It certainly was torture, at least for those who stuck around. By the fourth quarter, the team was playing in front of thousands of empty seats. So much for belief.

Andrew Rice is writing a book about Uganda.

 

fighting words
The Inalienable Right To Screw Up Your Country
And the joy of finding a leader who can help bring it back together again.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Sept. 19, 2005, at 10:54 AM PT

More than half the exchanges I have about Iraq are concerned with the sheer fact of how messed up it is. Unprevented looting in the early days, water and power all on a knife edge, religious fanaticism, corruption … you know how it goes. Even as I grit my teeth and whisper, "Tell me something I don't know, sweetie," I try politely to point out that this is a non sequitur. The messed-up-ness of the country is part of the original justification for taking action, as I attempted to say before April 2003. Unless perhaps you think that we should have intervened in some other country that was not near terminally ruined and not on the verge of civil war and of intervention from outside neighbors. A Somalia on the Tigris. A Rwanda astride the sea lanes of the Gulf. A Bosnia in Mesopotamia. Every picture of today's chaos and violence serves to remind me of how much worse things would have been had Iraq been left to rot and crash.

It was quite amazing to meet President Jalal Talabani, the country's first elected president, last week. His patience and good humor are extraordinary. What he likes about the new constitution, for example, is that nobody very much likes it—proof that no faction or section, including his own native Kurdistan, is in a position to crow about victory. Talabani is much more than a regional politician: He's an old lion in his 70s who was well-known in Arab and nationalist and intellectual circles when Gamal Abdel Nasser was still alive. He recalls some of his disagreements with former Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul Bremer and grins when he says that Bremer would always exclaim, "That's your Marxist background coming out again." What odds would you have given, four years ago, that Iraq would move from being privately owned by a kleptocratic sadist to having a brave, tough, democratic socialist as an elected president? One should be on his side, up or down and win or lose, and one must have the moral fiber to say that the authors of the chaos and misery are not the coalition but the jihadist and Baathist saboteurs who gleefully make war on civilians and on the very concept of society.

A similar principle holds, at least with me, when it comes to Palestine. The Palestinian Arabs, whether Muslim, Christian, or secular, have an innate right to self-determination in the land of their birth. This right, as I never tire of saying, is not Israel's gift and is not a reward for good behavior. Suppose someone were to come to me, after reading the papers last week, and say—Look: No sooner did Israeli troops leave Gaza than mobs began to loot and destroy even the greenhouses that had been left there as part of their agricultural infrastructure. The police of the Palestinian Authority, who had ample warning of the deadline, managed to post a total of 70 policemen at these valuable sites, who could do no more than stand by as people scavenged and stole. The synagogues left behind by the settlers, which the Israelis were too squeamish to destroy, could perhaps have been preserved for a day or so until a decision was made about what to do with them (a museum, perhaps, or even a school—religious buildings have no special sacredness for me), but they were simply and viciously torched. Gangs of ruffians and blackmailers roam Gaza unchecked, and even tolerated, and prey upon their fellows. Clerical extremist parties flourish their banners and mouth fearsome oaths and slogans. The promise to respect the border with Egypt is void, and smugglers and mobsters laugh at the authorities. So, now how do you like your Palestinian state?

My reply would be that this doesn't alter the case. It breaks my heart, but it doesn't alter the case. The right of the Palestinians to a homeland and flag and passport of their own is in the first place inalienable, and in the second place enshrined in many U.N. resolutions as well as in the pledges (moral and monetary) made by European and American statesmen. The fact that this cause was represented for so long in the person of a thief and dictator and fantasist (and admirer of Saddam Hussein), a man well-described by Edward Said as "the Papa Doc of Palestine," doesn't change this essential point, even though everybody should read David Samuels' absolutely arresting profile of the late Yasser Arafat in the September 2005 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Still, when one considers how many lives have been pointlessly lost in the last decade of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, and how many billions upon billions of international donations have been poured down a rathole and used for the greasing of the nastiest palms, a certain feeling of depression is inevitable. But have I heard anybody say that the whole thing's obviously a waste of time and resources, and the Palestinians should therefore be abandoned to their own devices? No. And the obvious difference in my comparison—the presence of U.S. troops—may not be as weighty as it first appears. Does anyone believe that another breakdown of Palestinian and Israeli relations would not end up costing American lives? Meanwhile, we should hope that, as they begin to recover more of their territory and autonomy and self-respect, the Palestinians find a leader as good as President Talabani.

*****

Galloway update: Thanks to all who wrote to take my side after the debate last Wednesday. I wasn't actually on very good form and was feeling a bit hot and, after awhile, a bit sick. For example, when told I was a butterfly who had metamorphosed back into a slug, I ought to have been able to summon lepidopteral correctness and reply that butterflies pupate from sturdy, furry caterpillars. But others did notice this for me—and a man who can't tell a slug from a caterpillar is liable to miss the difference between an Iraqi dictatorship and an Iraqi democracy.

I don't know how Galloway felt, but he failed to show up two nights later when we were billed to appear on Canadian television, and he has since had Jane Fonda cancel her two promised appearances with him in Madison and Chicago this week. She claims to be recovering from hip surgery, and I hope she feels better soon, but I know she didn't have hip surgery between the time the debate was transmitted and the time she bailed.

On Galloway's oil-for-food arrangements, I shall be offering updates on www.hitchensweb.com.

There was some question of security in the hall on Wednesday, with the audience being subjected to metal detectors, but my advance complaint to the organizers was about someone who was already safely inside the premises. George Galloway has a press officer named Ron McKay, who is just about as fastidious as his boss. Here is what he said, as transmitted by the BBC current affairs program Newsnight, when another of Galloway's business ventures was being investigated by a reporter named Richard Watson. Watson received the following telephone call, broadcast to BBC viewers on June 25, 1998:

McKay: "Turn on your tape-recorder because he's having a hard time from ***** like you and, really, enough is enough. I'll come and see you after you do your *****"

Watson: "What do you mean by that?"

McKay: "I think you know what I mean."

Watson: "Well, what do you mean?"

McKay: "I'll fill you in."

Watson: "Come off it.

McKay: "Oh no. I'm serious. Absolutely serious. Check my record, check my record."

In British slang, to "fill you in" means to give you a hard beating. McKay, in any case, was obviously not offering to fill gaps in Watson's knowledge. And yes, I have checked McKay's record, and I quite see what he must have meant. It's not only in Iraq and Syria that Galloway gravitates to the company of thugs.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent books include Love, Poverty, and War and Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126585/

the hollywood economist
Hollywood's Biggest Blunders
Inexplicable decisions of the new moguls.
By Edward Jay Epstein
Posted Monday, Sept. 19, 2005, at 10:49 AM PT

While it is a decidedly minority view, the proposition that inner Hollywood is a pretty rational place run by intelligent people is one that I am dedicated to. They fully grasp the new reality (even if the outside world doesn't get it) that what used to be a business focused on movie theaters is now one centered around television sets and DVD players in the home. Even so, I have to admit that some decisions made by the new moguls seem to defy this logic—or any explanation other than personal pique or ego gratification.

Consider, for example, the near-suicidal decision of Blockbuster Entertainment in 1998 to turn down Warner Bros.' offer to entrench a DVD rental window. Warren Lieberfarb, who headed Warner Bros.' home video division, which, along with Sony, then provided the vast majority of DVD titles, offered Blockbuster CEO John Antioco a deal to insulate the rental business from retail competition by delaying putting DVDs on sale for a few weeks after their release. Warner Bros. (and presumably the other studios) would provide rental copies of new titles on DVD to the 10,000 Blockbuster stores and, in return, receive 40 percent of the rental revenues that Blockbuster earned from them.

At the time, Blockbuster was a powerhouse, accounting for nearly 50 percent of the studios' video revenue. Indeed, Sumner Redstone, the CEO of Viacom (which owned Blockbuster), had told Lieberfarb, "The studios can't live without a video rental business—we are your profit." Yet, even though Lieberfarb was only asking that the 40 percent revenue-sharing arrangement that Redstone himself had pioneered for video be extended to DVD, Antioco turned him down. Warner Bros.' response was to offer DVDs as a traffic-builder to Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and other mass retailers. As it turned out, the studios could not only live without a video rental business, they could thrive. By 2004, the studios were raking in $20.7 billion a year from DVDs while Blockbuster Entertainment, its rental business decimated, was hemorrhaging losses. Why did Antioco turn down Lieberfarb's offer? According to an insider privy to the Warner Bros.-Blockbuster negotiations, Antioco's decision proceeded not from any financial analysis of the offer's merits but from his "massive ego," which made it difficult for him to accept Lieberfarb as an equal in the negotiations.

Or, consider Paramount and Universal's inexplicable decision this summer to effectively kill their jointly owned United International Pictures, even though it was the dominant international film distributor. UIP dates back to 1970, when Lew Wasserman found that his Universal Studios lacked the clout overseas to profitably book movies into foreign theaters. With the help of lawyer Sidney Korshak, another consummate Hollywood insider, he combined Universal's foreign distribution operation with that of Paramount and MGM, the other two weak sisters of international distribution. The muscle that three studios could bring to bear provided enormous leverage overseas, where U.S. antitrust law did not prevent the consortium from block-booking whole slates of their movies into chains. UIP indeed became so dominant in getting bookings in the key European markets that the European Union has attempted (unsuccessfully) over the last decade to force it to disband.

In 2000, after MGM dropped out of the consortium (and was subsequently acquired by Sony), the two remaining partners, Paramount and Universal, changed the overhead cost-sharing split from one based on "intensity of use" to a simpler 50/50 split of the operating costs. When Universal attempted to further renegotiate the overhead-splitting formula this spring, Paramount's new regime, led by MTV founder Tom Freston and former TV producer Brad Grey, dug in their heels. According to one executive, they became so exasperated with Universal's nitpicking refinements to the formula that they told Universal, "Let's just split it up," and the consortium Wasserman had so carefully engineered disappeared in a fit of new-mogul pique.

Although Paramount executives justify the move on the grounds that it will now have its own overseas arm instead of having, as one Paramount executive put it, "half a studio," the immediate consequence is that Paramount will go from being the dominant international theatrical distributor, with all the rewards that entails in getting play dates, to an also-ran at the bottom of the pack. Nor will Paramount save any money since its new international operation will cost an additional $35 million a year. Why would Paramount and Universal accept this outcome? "It is stupid, stupid, stupid on every possible level," answered an insider who had been involved with UIP. "The great thing about the UIP deal is that when it's your movie's turn in distribution, UIP is essentially 100 percent your leverage. Paramount didn't get half the leverage, it got 100 percent—and when it was Universal's turn, it got 100 percent." So, without much ado or analysis, a win-win game became a lose-lose game for two studios.

These decisions, as baffling as they may seem, pale in comparison to what may be the most inexplicable decision in the annals of modern Hollywood: Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s decision, in 1999, to trade most of Universal's television assets, including the USA cable channel, to Barry Diller's company, renamed USA Networks, in return for $1.2 billion in cash and a minority interest of 56.7 million shares in Diller's company. While the transfer of Universal's television interest no doubt reflected Bronfman Jr.'s high esteem for Diller's business acumen, it also deprived Universal of the properties that are the bread-and-butter profits for a movie studio. So, when Bronfman Jr. sold Universal to the French conglomerate Vivendi in 2000, it had to buy back these television assets from Diller for $10.3 billion, and then, to completely reverse Bronfman Jr.'s deal, Diller also got back the 56.7 million shares and an additional $2 billion. So, while this deal fully demonstrated Diller's brilliance in deal-making, it resulted in a loss for Universal and Vivendi of over $10 billion (part of the larger $40.6 billion write-off taken by Vivendi-Universal).

To be sure, such inexplicable blunders are relatively rare in Hollywood—especially if one does not count mere financial contretemps such as Time Warner's $99.7 billion write-off from its AOL fiasco, or Murdoch's News Corp.'s $7.2 billion write-off from its Gemstar fiasco, or Sony's $2.7 billion write-off from its initial employment of Jon Peters and Peter Guber when it took over the Columbia-TriStar studio. But if Slate readers have further candidates, I will happily add them to the list.

Edward Jay Epstein is the author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood. (To read the first chapter, click here.)

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126576/

recycled
Soft News and Hard Candy
Has the Wall Street Journal gone too far?
Posted Monday, Sept. 19, 2005, at 8:04 AM PT

On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal debuted its much-hyped Weekend Edition. In plunging into the weekend space with a breaking news and news-you-can-use package, the Journal hopes to draw the sort of readers and advertisers who helped make its "Personal Journal" such a success. "Personal Journal," the fourth section, added to the paper in 2002, focuses on cars, books, entertainment, wine, food, travel, personal finance, and other aspects of the "good life." In this Press Box, Jack Shafer examined the Journal's history and argued that "Personal Journal" was an attempt to sweeten and lighten the paper. "In the Journal's half-century-plus migration from Wall Street to Main Street to Rodeo Drive," Shafer writes, "it may have finally strayed too far from its 'core mission'—as business types put it—with 'Personal Journal.' "

 

 

heavy petting
Why I Killed My Cat
There are so many reasons. First, he kept peeing in my daughter's bed. …
By Emily Yoffe
Posted Monday, Sept. 19, 2005, at 3:32 AM PT

We put down our cat, Goldie. Why? Because there was one bedtime too many when my 9-year old daughter laid her head on her pillow and remarked, "Mom, my pillow is wet." Because Goldie kept us all awake as he howled through the night. Because he decided that instead of using the litter box in our new house, he preferred to relieve himself in our only bathtub.

I have spent 25 years caring for two successive sets of cats and have always thought of myself as having an ancient Egyptian's admiration for their grace, beauty, and mystery. When my beloved cat Shlomo was dying of cancer at age 16, I kept her alive weeks longer than I should have. Every time I called my veterinarian to make her final appointment, I'd break down sobbing and have to hang up. Yet here I am, minus one healthy cat, and not sorry about it.

Believe me, we tried with Goldie. During the four years we had him, we spent hundreds of dollars on medical tests to get to the cause of Goldie's refusal to use the litter box. There was no physical problem, so we progressed to psychology. We tried Prozac (though the package insert says nothing about it being a cure for a compulsion to urinate on pillows), and a product called Feliway, a pheromone that is supposed to reduce a cat's anxiety. Our anxiety increased as the treatments failed. We moved on to home décor, spending thousands of dollars to replace carpets so soaked with urine that they created their own microclimate. Goldie turned his attention to bedding and area rugs.

Following the advice of cat behavior experts also didn't solve the problem, but it did make me feel less alone. After I wrote about my findings, I got an e-mail from one reader who said her cat had taken to peeing into the toaster (I'm not going to brunch at her house). Another had a cat so committed to wetting her bed that she made herself a quilt of black plastic garbage bags fastened together with duct tape.

My veterinarian, who was pessimistic I would ever solve Goldie's problem, suggested I consider moving. Recently we did, although it had more to do with the school system than the fact that our house had reached the saturation point. As we prepared for the move my husband, normally a kind and forgiving man, started sounding like Pat Robertson faced with a feline Hugo Chávez. "We're not taking piss-cat with us," he would declare while stroking Goldie, who, when he wasn't peeing or screaming, could be an appealing, fluffy fellow. I couldn't bring myself to actually agree to putting down Goldie, but I dreaded the thought of decorating my new home with a plastic-bag-and-duct-tape theme. I told him I didn't want to know, but that if Goldie wasn't around when we made the trip, he didn't need to explain.

On the day of the move we loaded the car with our daughter, our frozen food, our cleaning supplies, and crates containing our beagle, Sasha, and the cats, littermates Goldie and Biscuit. As we made our Beverly Hillbillies-like drive across town, Goldie howling, my husband admitted he couldn't do it.

For two of our three animals the move went great. Sasha is happy anywhere she finds a full food bowl, and Biscuit is a flexible and delightful cat who immediately inaugurated the new litter boxes and then eagerly explored our packing boxes as if he were in Disneyland. Goldie became, as we feared, unhinged. On the third night in our new home, to get some relief from the howling, we confined him to a basement bathroom, with bedding, bowls of food and water, and a litter box. From two floors away our stomachs churned as we listened for hours to the desperate Goldie throwing himself against the door. When I went down in the morning to let him out, I discovered that, Houdini-like, he was gone. It turned out he had levitated himself into a hole in the ceiling cut by a plumber repairing leaking pipes.

The hole was scheduled to be closed that day, but no amount of coaxing with food, or attempts at yanking, could budge Goldie. Finally, a county animal-control officer arrived and spent an hour wrestling poor Goldie out. We were now forced to put Goldie outside in our fenced yard, where he hid most of the day, then screamed most of the night. It was oppressively hot and thunderstorms were forecast. We couldn't keep him in the house, and we couldn't keep him exposed outside. My husband said Goldie's time had come. He was going to take our cat to the Humane Society shelter to be euthanized. Our daughter was away at the beach with a friend, but we had discussed with her that Goldie might not be there when she got back. "I understand Mom," she said. "He's just so unhappy all the time."

Please don't tell me you would have taken in Goldie. You wouldn't have, and he wouldn't have wanted you to. There are three things he couldn't bear: change, other animals, and confinement. We never considered just dropping him off at a shelter. According to the American Humane Association, only about 25 percent of relinquished cats are ever adopted. We weren't going to lie about Goldie's problems to make him sound more appealing, because that would mean his unwitting new owners would quickly return him. And we weren't going to find some no-kill shelter and dump him there to spend forever locked in a cage in torment.

And spare me the argument that Goldie was a member of the family and nothing could justify my actions. I feel love for my animals, but I maintain there is a distinction between people and pets. Goldie was a pet, but he had ceased to be an acceptable one. He was miserable and so were we. I believe my obligation was to give him a quick, painless death.

It is awful that an estimated 10 million healthy cats and dogs are put to death in shelters each year. But I am clinging to a study from the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, which distinguishes between owners who give their animals to shelters and owners who bring in animals specifically to be euthanized. This study found the latter to be committed pet owners who had painfully concluded they had reached the end. For the most part the animals were old and sick, but a significant portion were brought in because desperate owners couldn't live with them anymore. The usual cause was aggression from dogs and soiling from cats. The authors of the study acknowledge such animals are unlikely ever to find another home.

I regret I couldn't make Goldie happy, but since he's been gone the feeling of dread I lived with for years has been lifted. My other animals are a joy. I'd even say since Goldie's demise they've been on their very best behavior.

Emily Yoffe is the author of What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner. You can reach her at emilyyoffe@hotmail.com or www.whatthedogdid.com.

 

chatterbox
Lindsey Graham's Smear
No, Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not advocate pederasty.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Sept. 16, 2005, at 4:00 PM PT

What is Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., smoking? On the fourth day of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on John Roberts, President Bush's nominee for chief justice of the Supreme Court, Graham accused Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of advocating that the age of sexual consent be reduced to 12. Let's go to the transcript:

Well, there are all kind of hearts. There are bleeding hearts and there are hard hearts. And if I wanted to judge Justice Ginsburg on her heart, I might take a hard-hearted view of her and say she's a bleeding heart. She represents the ACLU. She wants the age of consent to be 12. She believes there's a constitutional right to prostitution. What kind of heart is that?

Graham's bizarre smear, deployed to warn Democrats not to come down on Roberts' "value system," was omitted from nearly all news accounts, presumably because no one knew what on earth he could possibly be talking about. An exception was Fox News, which ran the clip without commenting on whether the accusation was true. (Shame on Fox, and on reporter Jim Angle, who introduced the clip.) Graham's press secretary posted the smear on Graham's Web site but didn't cite any source.

So what was Graham's source? According to Graham spokesman Kevin Bishop, it was Sex Bias in the U.S. Code, a booklet co-authored by Ginsburg and published by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1977. The booklet's existence has been a hot topic among conservative homophobes for some time; see, for instance, here, here, and here. I haven't got the booklet itself—we'll get to its specific language, as related (no doubt accurately) by Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law School, in a moment—but Edward Whelan, president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, has posted a 1974 paper coauthored by Ginsburg (under the aegis of the Columbia Law School Equal Rights Advocacy Project) titled "The Legal Status of Women Under Federal Law." This paper was an earlier version of Sex Bias in the U.S. Code. In an item about the 1974 paper posted last year on National Review Online, Whelan put the pro-pederasty accusation at the bottom of a list of other ridiculously distorted examples of Ginsburg's "extremist views" at the time—a tip-off that he knew he was on shaky ground. (Whelan didn't mention the age-of-consent point at all in a more recent rundown of the paper's most supposedly damning bits.) Here is Whelan's throwaway line in his National Review Online post:

Other nuggets abound. For example, Ginsburg recommended that the age of consent for purposes of statutory rape be lowered from 16 to 12. [See pages 69-71 and the specific recommendation regarding 18 U.S.C. § 2032 on page 76.]*

When we go to these pages, we find nothing of the sort.

"The Legal Status of Women Under Federal Law" is a paper advocating that federal statutes be rewritten so that, wherever possible, gender-specific references be replaced with gender-neutral references. That's the entire point of the paper, and, apparently, it's the entire point of Sex Bias in the U.S. Code as well. The paper's discussion of statutory rape objects to the fact that the relevant federal laws define the victim as female and the offender as male. Ginsburg and her coauthor argue that the law should be rewritten to outlaw sexual abuse of any minor, male or female, by any person who is significantly older, male or female (thereby obviating the absurd possibility that a 13-year-old boy would be prosecuted for seducing a 15-year-old girl). I would be very surprised if Sen. Graham disagreed with a word of this.

In the course of making this point, Ginsburg's 1974 paper praises and then quotes a draft Senate bill that never became law. The proposed law has, she writes, "a definition of rape that, in substance, conforms to the equality principle." She then quotes the bill's language:

"A person is guilty of an offense if he engages in a sexual act with another person, not his spouse, and: (1) compels the other person to participate: (A) by force; or (B) by threatening or placing the other person in fear that any person will imminently be subjected to death, serious bodily injury, or kidnapping; (2) has substantially impaired the other person's power to appraise or control the conduct by administering or employing a drug or intoxicant without the knowledge or against the will of such other person, or by other means; or (3) the other person is, in fact, less than twelve years old."

Yes, the language Ginsburg quotes with approval puts the age of consent at 12, which does seem awfully young. But she isn't addressing herself to the age issue; she's addressing herself to the gender issue. Is her praise meant to constitute an endorsement of the entire bill? Of course not. Ginsburg makes this explicit in a footnote in which she complains that even this language "retains use of the masculine pronoun to cover individuals of both sexes," which at the very least is confusing if it's intended to outlaw statutory (and other) rape by women, too. I would further guess that neither Ginsburg nor her feminist cohorts at the Columbia Law School Equal Rights Advocacy Project were particularly crazy about the quoted language's get-out-of-jail-free card for married men who raped their wives.

With this in mind, let's proceed to the language in Sex Bias in the U.S. Code, as described by the eminently reliable (though in this instance, I believe, analytically faulty) Eugene Volokh. Once again, Ginsburg objects to the fact that the law, as written, makes gender distinctions that she doesn't consider legitimate: "[T]he immaturity and vul[n]erability of young people of both sexes could be protected through appropriately drawn, sex-neutral proscriptions." According to Volokh, on page 102 Ginsburg makes the following "suggestion":

18 U.S.C. §2032 — Eliminate the phrase "carnal knowledge of any female, not his wife who has not attained the age of sixteen years" and substitute a Federal, sex-neutral definition of the offense patterned after S. 1400 §1633: A person is guilty of an offense if he engages in a sexual act with another person, not his spouse, and (1) compels the other person to participate: (A) by force or (B) by threatening or placing the other person in fear that any person will imminently be subjected to death, serious bodily injury, or kidnapping; (2) has substantially impaired the other person's power to appraise or control the conduct by administering or employing a drug or intoxicant without the knowledge or against the will of such other person, or by other means; or (3) the other person is, in fact, less than 12 years old.

From this, Volokh concludes that Ginsburg does indeed favor lowering the age of consent to 12. Exasperatingly, though, Volokh leaves out precisely how Ginsburg has worded her "suggestion." Since the topic, once again, is sex bias rather than age bias, I think that's important to know. Even if Ginsburg's "suggestion" is unqualified, it ought to be clear that, even in the swingin' 1970s, nobody would have proposed lowering the age of consent to 12 without offering up some sort of argument as to why this should be done. Yet Volokh does not cite any language elaborating on the point. From this I conclude that none exists. At the very worst, Ginsburg would seem to be guilty of a sloppy cut-and-paste job that muddied her meaning. Here's how she frames her recommendation in the 1974 paper (page 76):

A sex neutral definition of rape, such as the one set forth in S. 1400, §1631, should be added to Title 18 or Title 10 and referred to throughout for the definition of the offense.

What, then, is Ruth Bader Ginsburg's true crime? In discussing how to rewrite the federal law addressing statutory rape, Ginsburg failed to state an opinion about what the age of consent should be. Perhaps she didn't address the issue, even parenthetically, because she really didn't have an answer. (Maybe she thought it should be higher than 16!) More likely, though, Ginsburg didn't address the age-of-consent issue because it wasn't relevant to her topic. Say it with me: She wasn't writing about age; she was writing about gender!

This indifference may seem monstrous to some. But one should remember that the sexual abuse of children didn't really become a high-profile issue until the 1980s, when the "recovered memory" phenomenon brought many more cases to light, some of them involving real abuse and putting real criminals behind bars, others merely creating hysteria and destroying the lives of innocent people. Were Ginsburg writing that paper today, she would no doubt raise at least a parenthetical eyebrow at making 12 the age of consent, if only to fend off accusations that she was herself pulling little boys into alleys. But in the 1970s, this particular variety of political quicksand had not yet evolved.

One final puzzle: Even though Volokh finds the defendant (Ginsburg) guilty, he's uncovered one bit of evidence that seriously undermines his argument. What follows is a quote from Volokh, not Ginsburg:

S. 1400 §1633 provided (at least in the version that I could find), that "sexual abuse of a minor" (essentially statutory rape) be limited to victims who are under 16, and who are "at least five years younger than" the defendant.

Whaa? S. 1400 kept the age of consent at 16? Then why did Ginsburg write in the 1974 paper that it lowered the age of consent to 12? Wait a minute! Could all this Sturm und Drang be over…a typo? A typo that, mysteriously, was transposed from Ginsburg's 1974 paper to the 1977 booklet? That would be too rich.

[Update, Sept. 18: Graham's Ginsburg smear at the Roberts hearing was no mere slip of the lip. He said the same thing on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes the day before. Tim Funk of the Charlotte Observer and Michael McAuliff of the New York Daily News both passed along Graham's smear to their readers without bothering to point out that it was hooey. But kudos to Nina Totenberg of NPR for not letting Graham get away with it. She explained to her listeners that it wasn't true.]

Correction, Sept. 19, 2005: In an earlier version of this column, the phrase, "the specific recommendation regarding 18 U.S.C. § 2032 on page" was inadvertently omitted. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

 

dvd extras
The Best Thai Transvestite Kickboxing Film Ever
Plus, a defense of the mainstream message movie.
By Charles Taylor
Posted Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005, at 10:27 AM PT

It would be tempting to call Beautiful Boxer, the true story of the transvestite Thai kickboxer Nong Toom (Asanee Suwan), the Driving Miss Daisy of transgender films. By that I mean it's a well-made, emotionally involving mainstream movie that draws audiences into a subject they might otherwise avoid. It's become fashionable to deride Bruce Beresford's film; Morgan Freeman must have had an inkling of that sentiment when, just before the Driving Miss Daisy was released, he was asked if it was demeaning for a black actor to play a chauffeur and he answered, "God save us from well-meaning white liberals." And black ones, he might have added. The movie's detractors looked at Freeman's Hoke, saw that he wasn't Stokely Carmichael, and concluded he must be Uncle Tom. Had Driving Miss Daisy indulged in Stanley Kramer-style fantasy, had it shown the civil rights movement transforming the South into a bastion of tolerance overnight, or Hoke making fiery speeches demanding an end to segregation, or Jessica Tandy's Miss Daisy suddenly made sensitive to the sufferings of blacks because of the prejudice she endures as a Jew, had it, in short, violated the reality of the era and the psychological reality of the characters, well, then the movie would have been "progressive."

The movie's detractors missed its shrewdness: Hoke and Miss Daisy transcend the limitations of their roles without renouncing them—for both of them, that would be like renouncing themselves. The detractors missed the larger picture, too. It's easy to spurn mainstream movies that take on prejudice because they often seem tepid and conservative. What goes unacknowledged is that it takes less courage for filmmakers working outside the mainstream to risk controversy—non-mainstream audiences expect nothing less—than it does for filmmakers whose work will be marketed to a wide audience. Obviously, that approach can be used as a rationale for praising all manner of dreck from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner to Philadelphia. But the movies I have in mind don't preach. They present characters, not case studies. Had American audiences gone to The Sum of Us, as Australian audiences did, they would have seen a carefully rendered story of the closeness between father-and-son roommates, one straight (the father, Jack Thompson) and one gay (the son, a pre-stardom Russell Crowe). Significantly, the son's gayness figures into the plot only when outsiders make it an issue. For the father, it's just a fact about his son, like the color of his eyes or hair.

How do you get mainstream audiences to see a movie about a country boy who dreams of being a woman? In the case of Beautiful Boxer, a success in its native Thailand, the story of Nong Toom had what the American studios call—God help us—"pre-awareness" in its own country. Lured in by the promise of learning the "true life story" of a celebrity they knew, Thai audiences got a movie that, without falling back on speeches or—pardon the expression—gender theory, challenged rigid definitions of what it means to be masculine or feminine.

Good directors can suggest the movie they're going to make in the first five minutes, sometimes in the first shot. In the opening shot of Beautiful Boxer—which shows oil being massaged into a fighter's torso as he prepares for a match—the first-time director Ekachai Uekrongtham brings out what sports movies nearly always try to hide: the sexual appeal of the bodies they offer up as the objects of heroic admiration. We're watching an image of power and machismo—a fighter's sculpted chest—in a position traditionally associated with the female: recumbent, passive, an object for adoration. Nong Toom disliked the violence of Muay Thai (though he was so good at it, he managed to defeat most of his opponents with one swift kick) and fought mostly to earn money to support his parents. His trainer Pi Chart (pronounced pee-sha and played by Sorapong Chatree) sees a chance to make Toom stand out as a fighter by encouraging him to wear make-up in the ring. The press treats him as if he's the Thai Gorgeous George. They think it's a publicity stunt but don't know that Toom's transvestitism is a panacea, and an increasingly inadequate one, for his real desire to be a woman.

Throughout the movie, Ekachai plays up the tension between the violence of kickboxing and Toom's gentleness. The movie shows us that the more make-up he wore into the ring, the more enraged (and, thus, sloppier) his opponents became. In one scene, Toom walks over to an opponent he has just defeated and kisses him on the cheek. "They don't know that I kiss to say I'm sorry," he says.

In movie terms, transgendered characters are what gay characters used to be: tortured souls just ripe for all manner of melodramatic suffering. Asanee Suwan, himself a professional kickboxer, plays Nong Toom as a sunny character, which is a relief. His appeal is that he's fey and somewhat coquettish, with a sweet, shy grin. In one scene, his buddies at the kickboxing camp decide to treat him to a hooker to relieve him of his virginity. The woman takes off her top and says to Toom, "You've seen mine, now let's see yours." The great joke of the scene is that he's as enraptured with her breasts as any other young man would be, but for entirely different reasons. Admiringly he tells her, "I don't have them yet."

Part of what's so refreshing about a movie like Beautiful Boxer (or Driving Miss Daisy or The Sum of Us) is that even with their built-in tolerance lessons, they're generous enough to allow that people are capable of change, or at least decency. Toom's friends at the training camp go from making nasty cracks about the trannies they see on TV to feeling real camaraderie for him. Sure, they cover up and act like swooning ditzes when he enters the communal shower, but that's the joshing that makes him part of the gang. One of the movie's best moments comes when Toom is completing the paperwork for his sex-change operation. The only obstacle left is the consent of his father (Nukkid Boonthong), who's never been able to hide his shame over his son's effeminacy. Just as the father is about to sign the authorization form, he stops and announces he can't agree to the operation. Looking hard at the doctor, he tells the man he can't agree until he's assured his son will be safe.

The ambition of Beautiful Boxer is contained in that moment, in the implicit faith that, like Toom's father, the audience will take the opportunity to go beyond themselves and show compassion for something experience hasn't prepared them for.

Charles Taylor is a columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger.

 

culturebox
Fairy Tales in the Age of Terror
What Terry Gilliam helps to remind us about an ancient genre.
By Maria Tatar
Posted Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005, at 4:18 AM PT

In The Brothers Grimm, Terry Gilliam invites us into the woods to witness the murder of Little Red Riding Hood in a setting of such breathtaking allure that we experience a double jolt—one administered by the girl's terrifying death and the other by the magnificent landscape in which she perishes. The dark blend of horror and fantasy on-screen is enough to make adults wonder anew just what were, and are, the "uses of enchantment," as Bruno Bettelheim called his book about why children need fairy tales. In an age when beauty has been separated from art, when horror has migrated into lowbrow entertainment, when cynicism has driven out wonder, and when the grand narrative style has given way to postmodern pastiche, we still hunger, especially in times of social and cultural crisis, for the primal and unforgiving emotional experience delivered by narratives like the ones told by our ancestors. There is transformative power in terror, as life has lately taught us, and we count on stories to keep us from forgetting that—a kind of story that has become harder, not easier, to find.

A film about fairy tales and about the two men who collected the traditional German tales that migrated across the Atlantic to become part of our folklore, The Brothers Grimm delivers a startling reminder that the narratives started out as adult entertainment—violent, bawdy, melodramatic improvisations that emerged in the evening hours, when ordinary chores engaged the labor of hands, leaving minds free to wander and wonder. Fairy tales, John Updike has proposed, were the television and pornography of an earlier age—part of a fund of popular culture (including jokes, gossip, news, advice, and folklore) that were told to the rhythms of spinning, weaving, repairing tools, and mending clothes. The hearth, where all generations were present, including children, became the site at which miniature myths were stitched together, tales that took up in symbolic terms anxieties about death, loss, and the perils of daily life but also staged the triumph of the underdog. There Jack could slay the giant and escape with his treasured hen, Rapunzel could use her tears to restore the sight of the man who fathered her children, and Puss in Boots could outwit an ogrelike monarch to advance the fortunes of his humble master. Beneath the horror was always the promise of revenge and restitution, the exquisite reassurance of a happily-ever-after.

Beauty, horror, wonders, violence, and magic have always tumbled thick and fast through fairy tales. Folk raconteurs gave their audiences what they wanted, indulging the desire for audacious eroticism, hyperbolic fantasies, and casual cruelty. For those gathered around the hearth, Little Red Riding Hood was not necessarily an innocent who strays from the forest path. In tales that formed part of an adult storytelling culture in premodern France, she unwittingly feasts on the flesh and blood of her grandmother, performs an elaborate striptease for the wolf, and manages to escape by telling the predatory beast that she needs to go outdoors to relieve herself. Firmly rooted in the familiar, she introduces us to the great existential mysteries, in a miniature and manageable form. Her irreverent behavior, effortless mobility, willingness to take detours, and daring resourcefulness modeled possibilities for those lingering at the fireside.

In the great migration of fairy tales from the fireside to the nursery that was finally accomplished in the course of the 19^th century, "Little Red Riding Hood" was twisted, pretzellike, into a cautionary tale, warning small children not only about the dangers of straying from the path but also about their own unruly desires. Charles Perrault's version of 1697 shows us a Little Red Cap who never emerges from the belly of the wolf, and her story becomes a platform for teaching children many lessons, among them the fact that "tame wolves / Are the most dangerous of all."

Framing fairy tales with platitudes about obedience (those efforts continue today in the anthologies of children's literature produced by William J. Bennett) and settling them in the nursery could not strip them entirely of their power to shock and enthrall. If the Grimms took pains to eliminate raunchy folk humor from the narratives, they insisted on keeping the violence, in some cases intensifying it and surrounding its effects with an intoxicating verbal shimmer. J.R.R Tolkien was fascinated by the "Juniper Tree," one of the more ghoulish tales in the collection, and referred to the scene in which a stepmother decapitates her stepson as "exquisite and tragic." He was not alone; P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, found the story "beautiful," even though what follows the scene of decapitation is a description of how the boy is chopped into small pieces and served up to his father in a stew. Disavowing the notion of fairy-tale whimsy, Tolkien and Travers are stirred by childhood memories of how the violence in the stories can tear us apart but also restore us to life through the knowledge, wisdom, and experience they impart.

Fairy tales once elicited what Richard Wright has described as a "total emotional response." In Black Boy, an autobiography of growing up in the Jim Crow South, Wright evokes the memory of having "Bluebeard and His Seven Wives" (a fairy tale whose implied audience is clearly adults) read to him by a schoolteacher named Ella: "My imagination blazed. The sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me. … I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me." Like so many young fairy-tale protagonists, Wright found himself experiencing a shudder of pleasure and fear, standing "at the gateway to a forbidden and enchanting land." And it was literally forbidden: Ella, who was boarding at his house, sneaked the story in, but this was long before Bettelheim had enlightened Americans about the therapeutic power of fairy tales to strengthen young superegos. For Wright, the maturational effect was a sound beating (Wright's grandmother denounced the tale as "devil's work") and a lifelong engagement with stories, whose power to change us—not least by frightening us into imagining alternate realities—had once overwhelmed him. Wright's experience gives us pause about our endless efforts to invent child-friendly fairy tales. Were our ancestors on to something when they included children in their communal storytelling practices?

Fairy tales have not vanished from the world of adults, but today they often take the form of cultural debris, fragments of once powerful narratives that find their way into our language to produce colorful turns of phrase. In the media, we read about a Goldilocks economy, about the Emperor's new clothes, and about Sleeping Beauty stocks. In popular sendups of the classic plots, the purpose is usually to mock the values found in the earlier variants, whether it is the virtue of selfless industry or a lack of vanity. Julia Roberts plays a latter-day Cinderella who moves from rags to Rodeo-Drive riches in Pretty Woman. Anne Sexton gives us a Snow White who is described as both "dumb bunny" and "lovely virgin" as she falls into her comatose state. Not surprisingly, a parodic idea of wonder also gets enlisted to promote consumerist fantasies. Kim Cattrall makes her way through the cobblestone streets of Prague, wearing a red dress, red hooded cape, and red heels in search of a man with the good taste to drink Pepsi. This modern "use" of fairy tales depends on undercutting precisely their original power to give us a bite of reality, to confront us with monsters that seize us, and sink their teeth into our most vulnerable parts. In The Brothers Grimm, Gilliam gets us back to the raw emotional power of the originals, with his mirror queen, whose beautiful face shatters into pieces before our eyes, and with his gingerbread man, a gob of primal muck that emerges from a well to revel in chthonic glory as he swallows a child.

In a scene from To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf captures the elusive hold that fairy tales have on modern sensibilities. When Mrs. Ramsey reads the Grimms' "Fisherman and His Wife" to her son, the tales of old are likened to "the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up unexpectedly into the melody." The plots are still there, tugging on us as reminders of the hard-won wisdom that enabled our ancestors to cope with their collective anxieties and fantasies. They continue to haunt us, yet we never quite embrace them or abandon them completely.

Too anxious about the trackless future to trust in the clarifying energy of wandering in "once upon a time," we are in danger of losing our willingness to resurrect wondrous narratives that first transfix us with the terror they arouse, then engage our intellectual powers, provoking forms of curiosity that lead us to consider possibilities—what could be, what might be, what should be. These tales reveal the double face of wonder, restoring the pleasures of fascination, yet at the same time inciting us to reflect on the dark fears and desires embedded in that fascination. In returning us to the gnarled roots of the Grimms' tales, Terry Gilliam opens a gateway that takes us back to the enchantments of a long time ago but also leads us forward into the mysteries of the here and now, this time with an ancient road map in our hands.

Maria Tatar, dean for the humanities at Harvard and the John L. Loeb professor of Germanic languages and literatures, is the author of The Annotated Brothers Grimm.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2126727/

everyday economics
Hurricane Relief? Or a $200,000 Check?
I'd take the check, and so would most of Katrina's victims.
By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005, at 4:17 AM PT

Before we spend $200 billion on New Orleans disaster relief, can we just pause for about three seconds, please? That should be long enough to divide one number by another. The numbers I have in mind are, on the one hand, $200 billion, and, on the other hand, 1 million people—the prestorm population of the New Orleans area, broadly defined.

Two-hundred billion divided by 1 million is 200,000. For the cost of reconstructing New Orleans, the government could simply give $200,000 to every resident of the region—that's $800,000 for a family of four. Given a choice, which do you think the people down there would prefer?

I'm guessing most of them would take the cash. I can't prove that, but I think I can make it plausible: If your city were demolished, would you prefer to have it rebuilt—with someone else making all the decisions about how it gets rebuilt—or would you prefer to collect $800,000 in cash and move your family elsewhere? I've asked a lot of people this question during the last week, and, according to my informal unscientific survey, pretty much everyone would take the money and run.

One reason my survey is unscientific is that most of the people I've asked are middle-class. I'm guessing that for the very poor, a big cash handout would be even more tempting.

Even after paying out all that cash, there would still be some tidying up to do, like rebuilding the interstates—but that accounts for a small fraction of the projected $200 billion. A lot of the other funds are earmarked for rebuilding infrastructure that's local to New Orleans. But if you hand out big buckets of cash, most of that rebuilding is no longer necessary—some families will leave the area, and the ones that remain can, if they wish, tax themselves to re-create urban amenities—just as people do anywhere else.

It's expensive to rebuild the levees. If enough newly enriched people choose to remain, there's enough of a tax base to do the job—and if too few remain, then rebuilding the levees would be a bad investment anyway. Yes, New Orleans is a critical port, and yes, there has to be a local population to maintain that port. But it doesn't follow that there has to be an urban area of 1 million people.

At any rate, it's not clear that any form of disaster relief is such a great deal for the people who live in places like New Orleans. I explained why in this space a couple of weeks ago: The prospect of relief from future disasters raises housing prices in disaster-prone areas. That's bad for people who prefer more risk in exchange for cheaper housing.

Many readers wrote to ask: "What about the poor, who have no choice about where to live?" Apparently none of these readers has noticed that the images we've seen on television for the last two weeks are mostly of poor people. It is precisely the poor who benefit most from the opportunity to live cheaply in high-risk areas. Even within New Orleans, it was mostly the rich who opted for the high ground and the poor who lived below sea level. Why? Because it's cheaper below sea level. But not as cheap as it would be in a world without federal disaster assistance.

If your concern is that people shouldn't be so poor in the first place, my response is that you don't have to wait for a flood to raise that issue. The specific flood-related policy question is this: Given the population of poor people, do we make them, on net, better or worse off when we give them disaster relief (which is good) and simultaneously raise their housing costs (which is bad)? The refusal to engage that question is, it seems to me, nothing short of a declaration of indifference to what actually benefits the poor.

You might say that what we really owe the poor is disaster assistance and affordable housing. You might as well say that we owe them all magical pink unicorns that produce an unlimited supply of milk. It is quite simply impossible to guarantee assistance to people living on a flood plain without affecting their housing costs. And it is quite simply unserious to declare your commitment to poor people without pausing to ask whether your pet program does poor people more harm than good.

We probably shouldn't spend this kind of money on New Orleans. But given that we will, it at least makes sense to target it in a way that does the most good for the most afflicted—and that, I suspect, is to hand out cash. The current policy seems to be more along the lines of "Ready! Fire! Aim!"

Steven E. Landsburg is the author, most recently, of Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values, and the Meaning of Life. You can e-mail him at armchair@troi.cc.rochester.edu.

 

hatterbox
Customer Service Heaven
An occasional series ferreting out hard-to-find phone numbers.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2005, at 3:40 PM PT

As I have explained before (here and here), my bid for immortality is that, two years ago, I found and published the customer service phone number for Amazon.com, which Amazon was not much interested in sharing with its, ahem, customers. That number is

1-800-201-7575.

More recently, responding to a distress call from my sister Patsy, I tried and failed to ferret out a customer service number for iTunes. Like the Fountain of Youth, the perpetual-motion machine, and The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, the iTunes customer service number (which, in fairness, iTunes never claimed to possess) is something that exists only as a cruel hoax. I searched and searched and searched, and finally had to conclude that the real thing didn't exist. I felt dejected. I grew a three-day stubble and knocked back shots of Jack Daniel's at the corner bar while my children ran barefoot in rags through the streets. I grabbed the lapels of strangers, drew their faces a little too near my foul-smelling breath, and shouted, I used to be somebody! The Nobel committee was considering me for the Peace Prize! Beautiful Hollywood ingénues gave me their cell phone numbers! Don't look away!

In short, I felt let down.

Today, though, a friend and former colleague bucked up my spirits by passing along the URL for a Web site with the delightful name, "Find-A-Human." It lists banks, cell phone companies, manufacturers of personal computers, stores, airlines, etc., alongside phone numbers and instructions to get a real person on the phone immediately! For example, if you want to talk to a human being at US Airways and you don't want to go through a series of automated menu options to get there, you dial 800-428-4322, then hit 4 after the initial greeting, then hit 1.

Except … I tried that and it didn't work. "Our menu options have changed," said the recorded voice, with just the faintest hint of malice. I couldn't get through using the instructions for American Express, either. Or for Gateway. Maybe you can find some that work. For me, it's back to the bottle.

[Update, Sept. 22: I'm told the instructions for Bell South work like a charm. Apologies, incidentally, to reader Marc Naimark, who apparently flagged "Fine-A-Human" to me a week before my friend did.]

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

 

jurisprudence
Rethinking Originalism
Original intent for liberals (and for conservatives and moderates, too).
By Akhil Reed Amar
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2005, at 9:36 AM PT

Should constitutional interpreters embrace the document's original intent or evade it? Several leading liberal scholars are urging Americans to choose Door No. 2, because the original-intent game is doomed to reach intolerably conservative—indeed, reactionary—results.

But is it? And once we reject that game, what are the proper legal rules to play by?

The present moment is a perfect time to ponder such foundational questions: The Rehnquist Court is now officially history, two new justices will soon be in place, and the Roberts hearings have introduced a new generation of channel-surfers to detailed debates about constitutional philosophy. Closer to home (i.e., the home page of this Web site), several recent Slate postings by Jack Balkin, Dahlia Lithwick, and Emily Bazelon have made interesting contributions to the original-intent debate.

In late August, Balkin—my Yale colleague and sometime co-author—correctly pointed out that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, while proclaiming themselves faithful followers of original intent, do not always practice what they preach. For example, these two justices have consistently voted against affirmative action but have never explained how their votes can be squared with historical evidence that the Reconstruction Congress itself engaged in affirmative action.

But without more, this is merely an argument that Scalia and Thomas should be more consistent and less hypocritical: They should respect original intent across the board—at least in the absence of some compelling legal counterargument, such as justifiable reliance on past practice or precedent.

Balkin himself has reached a wholly different conclusion: Modern constitutional interpreters, says he, should simply stop trying to heed the original intent of the men and women who ratified and amended the document. In his opinion, interpreters should focus on the text, not the original intent.

As I see it, text without context is empty. Constitutional interpretation heedless of enactment history becomes a pun-game: The right to "bear arms" could mean no more than an entitlement to possess the stuffed forelimbs of grizzlies and Kodiaks. (And if history no longer constrains, why should spelling? Maybe the Second Amendment is about the right to "bare arms" and other body parts—e.g., nude dancing.)

How about Balkin's argument that originalism generally leads to outrageously conservative results? Another leading liberal light, Cass Sunstein, has said much the same thing of late. I disagree. The framers themselves were, after all, revolutionaries who risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to replace an Old World monarchy with a New World Order unprecedented in its commitment to popular self-government. Later generations of reformers repeatedly amended the Constitution so as to extend its liberal foundations, dramatically expanding liberty and equality. The history of these liberal reform movements—19^th-century abolitionists, Progressive-era crusaders for women's suffrage, 1960s activists who democratized the document still further—is a history that liberals should celebrate, not sidestep.

Consider, for example, the landmark 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education. Both Sunstein and Balkin say that Brown broke with the history underlying the Civil War amendments, which, they claim, plainly permitted racial segregation. But the 14^th Amendment, ratified in 1868, undeniably demanded that government treat blacks and whites with equal respect, equal dignity, and equal protection. All Americans—black and white alike—were proclaimed equal citizens by that amendment. True, some framers of this amendment did say that some segregation laws might be permissible. But in saying this, many of them were envisioning a postwar world in which both races in general might prefer separate spaces (as most men and women today probably prefer sex-segregated bathrooms in public places). In such a world, they believed, segregation would not always be unequal.

But the Reconstructionists never said that segregation would always and automatically be constitutional. The Constitution's text does not say that all citizens are equal "except for segregation laws." Rather, it uncompromisingly demands equality of civil rights—no ifs, ands, or buts. In fact, most Reconstructionists understood that a law whose statutory preamble explicitly proclaimed whites superior to blacks would be plainly unconstitutional. The question in both Plessy v. Ferguson (in 1896) and Brown v. Board (in 1954) was thus a simple one, and simpler than these constitutional scholars might suggest: Was Jim Crow in fact equal? Or was it instead a law whose obvious purpose, effect, and social meaning proclaimed white supremacy in deed rather than in word? For any honest observer in either 1896 or 1954, the question answered itself: Jim Crow was plainly designed to demean the equal citizenship of blacks—to keep them down and out—and thus violated the core meaning of the 14^th Amendment. So, Brown is in fact an easy case for those who take text and history seriously. (Note, by the way, that this basic view of Brown—embraced by a wide range of scholars from Robert Bork on the right to Charles Black on the left—is somewhat different than the more controversial originalist theory championed by the towering judge/scholar Michael McConnell, whose ideas Emily Bazelon has recently explored.)

Another key originalist point that is often overlooked derives from the 15^th Amendment, which was ratified two years after the 14^th and reflected a far more robust vision of black rights, including equal-suffrage rules. This amendment was intrinsically integrationist, envisioning a world in which blacks and whites would work side by side at the ballot box, in the jury box, and in legislatures across the country. As the first Justice Harlan understood in Plessy (though many modern scholars seemed to have missed the point altogether), the enactment history of the 15^th Amendment thus powerfully reinforced various 14^th Amendment arguments against Jim Crow.

Yes, it's true that on today's court the two leading originalists are both conservative, but perhaps the court's most influential originalist in history was the great Hugo Black—a liberal lion and indeed the driving force behind the Warren Court. (For more on Black's role in leading the Warren Court to apply the Bill of Rights against states, protect the rights of criminal defendants—especially the indigent—champion the rights of political dissenters, and enforce racial and voting equality principles, click here.) It's also worth remembering that the most towering originalist scholar of the 1970s was also a professed liberal, John Hart Ely.

In short, there are many reasons to question the idea that modern liberals should abandon constitutional history rather than claim it as their own. This short posting is not the place to present all the historical evidence that some modern anti-originalists are overlooking—I've tried to do that elsewhere (in an article in the Harvard Law Review published in 2000, and, more comprehensively, in my new book being published this month). But I hope I've said enough here to convince thoughtful anti-originalists to take a second look at the Constitution's first principles.

Akhil Reed Amar teaches law and political science at Yale and is the author of several books, including, most recently, America's Constitution: A Biography.

 

human nature
Ass Backwards
The media's silence about rampant anal sex.
By William Saletan
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2005, at 8:23 PM PT

"Oral Sex Prevalent Among Teens," announced Friday's Washington Post. "A federal survey finds more than half of 15- to 19-year-olds have had oral sex," said the subhead in the Los Angeles Times. "Sex Survey Shocker; Concern as most American teens have had oral sex," cried the Boston Herald.

Across the United States—and beyond it—any newspaper that didn't focus on lesbianism in the sex survey (released last week by the National Center for Health Statistics) declared a crisis of oral sex among teens. Experts and journalists, unwilling to express plain old moral dismay at the idea of their kids doing the deed, cited its health risks. "Oral sex has been associated in clinical studies with several infections, including gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes and the human papillomavirus," observed the Post. Teens "have not been given a strong enough message about the health risks of oral sex," an expert warned the Times. "We need to provide them with information about the public-health consequences," another expert told Time.

If only it were that simple. Talking to your kids about oral sex is the easy part. If you're going to be frank about the most dangerous widespread activity revealed in the survey, you're looking at the wrong end of the digestive tract.

There's no delicate way to put this, so I'll just quote the survey report: "For males, the proportion who have had anal sex with a female increases from 4.6 percent at age 15 to 34 percent at ages 22–24; for females, the proportion who have had anal sex with a male increases from 2.4 percent at age 15 to 32 percent at age 22–24." One in three women admits to having had anal sex by age 24. By ages 25 to 44, the percentages rise to 40 for men and 35 for women. And that's not counting the 3.7 percent of men aged 15 to 44 who've had anal sex with other men.

The last time major national surveys asked about this practice, in the early 1990s, only 20 percent of men aged 20 to 39 said they'd had anal sex with a woman in the preceding 10 years. Only 26 percent of men aged 18 to 59 said they'd ever done so. In the first survey, the 10-year limit excluded half the sexual career of half the sample, but that isn't enough to explain a doubling in the percentage saying yes. In the second survey, according to the current report, the inclusion of men aged 46 to 59 might have diluted the sample with "cohorts that were less likely to have had anal sex." But that's the point: Newer cohorts are more likely to have tried it.

Why does this matter? Because anal sex is far more dangerous than oral sex. According to data released earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control, the probability of HIV acquisition by the receptive partner in unprotected oral sex with an HIV carrier is one per 10,000 acts. In vaginal sex, it's 10 per 10,000 acts. In anal sex, it's 50 per 10,000 acts. Do the math. Oral sex is 10 times safer than vaginal sex. Anal sex is five times more dangerous than vaginal sex and 50 times more dangerous than oral sex. Presumably, oral sex is far more frequent than anal sex. But are you confident it's 50 times more frequent?

A CDC fact sheet explains the risks of anal sex. First, "the lining of the rectum is thin and may allow the [HIV] virus to enter the body." Second, "condoms are more likely to break during anal sex than during vaginal sex." These risks don't just apply to HIV. According to the new survey report, the risk of transmission of other sexually transmitted diseases is likewise "higher for anal than for oral sex," and the risk "from oral sex is also believed to be lower than for vaginal intercourse."

If you live in Bergen County, N.J., congratulations. You get the only newspaper in the world that mentioned heterosexual anal sex, albeit briefly, in its write-up of the survey. Two other papers buried it in lines of statistics below their articles; the rest completely ignored it. Evidently anal sex is too icky to mention in print. But not too icky to have been tried by 35 percent of young women and 40 to 44 percent of young men—or to have killed some of them.

Not that there's anything wrong with it, as Jerry Seinfeld might say. But if your moral standard for judging sex acts is the risk of disease, anal is worse than oral. The spin that activists, scholars, and journalists have put on the survey—that abstinence-only sex education is driving teenagers to an epidemic of oral sex—doesn't hold up. As the survey report notes, data "suggest that there was little or no change (accounting for sampling error) in the proportion of males 15-19 who had ever had heterosexual oral or anal sex between 1995 and 2002." The more interesting numbers are in the next age bracket up—and the next orifice down.

I understand why we fixate on the oral sex numbers. Even liberals can digest sexual revolutions only one taboo at a time. We think oral sex is the new frontier. We think talking about it in print and sex education classes makes us hip and candid. It doesn't.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2126643/

politics
Pity the Poor Fiscal Conservative
Because no one else cares if the government busts the budget for Katrina relief.
By John Dickerson
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2005, at 4:49 PM PT

Fiscal conservatives are angry. Of course, they're always angry. They're like social conservatives that way. (The fiscal conservatives who are social conservatives, like Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., are so angry they can barely finish the crossword.) Instead of getting exercised about the radical homosexual agenda and prayer in school, the fiscal conservatives fume about stuff that bores the majority of the Fox News producers: balanced budgets and emergency supplemental funding. The other big difference is that current Republican leaders don't listen as attentively to fiscal conservatives. Terri Schiavo—she's worth a special session of Congress. No one beats it back to Washington on Air Force One to sign stricter spending legislation. Still, the fiscal conservatives soldier on. "We spend a lot of time in groups of 12 hoping for a tipping point," says one of their tribe, "another Tsongas or Ross Perot."

Their latest just cause for frustration is the Katrina cleanup. The $62 billion already appropriated is just the first installment of a tab that might reach $200 billion. Where is the money going to come from to pay for it, they ask?

The green eyeshade crowd has a number of reasons to hate the red ink. Deficit spending funds ineffective programs, expands the deficit, and drives up interest rates. The Katrina cleanup, in which money is just getting dumped into the Gulf (they may be using $100 bills to patch levees, for all they are spending), is particularly troubling for them. If government just throws money like that and fudges the books, how can it be trusted to clean up the mess effectively?

The President has dived into the details of Katrina recovery, announcing 1-800 numbers and speaking at length about debris removal. But when it comes to how he's going to pay for the new spending, he is more vague. He has promised that he won't touch tax cuts. He says he wants spending cuts but has not said which ones.

Bush officials and advisers say they're going to balance out the costs, but they've said that before. Privately they seem to have a less rigorous view of the perils of blowing the bank. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil says that when he tried to resist tax cuts, Vice President Cheney replied: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." During last year's presidential campaign, a senior administration official put their worldview more bluntly: "Name me one person who has lost an election because of the deficit."

White House aides also don't think all the carping about nickels and dimes and billions is genuine. Members rail against a budget that's out of balance but then lunge to protect their pet projects when they're under the knife. (Karl Rove can reportedly do a spot-on imitation of a congressman who cycles from budget-cutting bravado to sniveling pleas for hometown pork.)

But Bush aides say this time is different. They may actually heed the fiscal nitpickers. They recognize that they've been putting off this constituency for too long—ever since the December 2003 prescription-drug entitlement, which handed out hundreds of billions to seniors and drug companies. In his weakened political state, Bush has to pay attention to even the neglected members of his wavering base. Small-business owners who have supported Republicans care about righteous fiscal behavior. It's also a game of chicken between Congress and the White House. Republican leaders are worried that the White House is trying to make them go first, naming unpopular cuts for which they'll be tagged in their elections in 2006. They believe that if the president wants to make up for his slow response to Katrina with big spending, he should say where the cuts are coming from.

The small and unhappy band of fiscal conservatives are doing what they can to make their leaders squirm. Mike Pence, R-Ind., has suggested holding off on implementation of the prescription-drug bill. Others have suggested tinkering with the $286 billion transportation bill. Those are two juicy targets with big price tags, but they're also two pieces of legislation shepherded by House Speaker Denny Hastert.

They're also two big accomplishments Republicans are going to run on. Plans are already in place for an extended campaign rollout of the prescription-drug program. Members will return to their district and hold events to introduce seniors to the new benefit, which starts in January 2006. The transaction is easy: I give you your prescription-drug card; you give me your vote.

The problem that always bedevils the fiscal conservatives is that they are directly targeting the horse-trading that makes government go. Start pulling out earmarks and you unravel support for the whole bill. Deny seniors their prescription-drug bill and you anger a bloc of voters far larger and more influential than those watching the pennies. When social conservatives balk, they represent massive organized blocs of voters who have shown their willingness to stay home. When fiscal conservatives balk, only a few thousand ornery Republicans in New Hampshire and Arizona abandon the party.

Can the Democrats grab this angry constituency? Not likely. The Democratic Party hasn't shown bristling accounting leadership recently. "After the Democrats' obstructionist approach to Social Security reform, it is more difficult for them to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility," says Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Budget. John Kerry and John Edwards both gave speeches Tuesday calling for a new era of leadership to address the challenges posed by the hurricane and the poverty that it exposed, but neither called for sacrifice or any painful tradeoffs.

After days of weighty speeches on the topics of race and poverty in America, lawmakers from both parties have reverted to the familiar evasions. The bucks are passing, the deficit will keep growing, and the fiscal conservatives will stay very, very angry.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

explainer
What's So Great About Ice?
Why they bought 200 million pounds of it for Katrina victims.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2005, at 3:04 PM PT

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ordered more than 200 million pounds of ice following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina. Now the Federal Emergency Management Agency says they have more ice than they need, and truckers hired by the agency have been carting excess bags around the country. Is ice really that important for the victims of a hurricane?

Yes. According to emergency-response agencies, it's more important to deliver ice than it is to distribute food in the aftermath of a catastrophe. Hurricane victims can use ice to refrigerate food, preserve medicine, and cool off in the summer heat. When the ice eventually melts, they can use it for water.

Dehydration poses a more immediate risk than starvation, so aid workers start by trying to deliver water. Cold water gets absorbed more quickly into the gut than warm water, so a few ice cubes could help those who are at the greatest risk. Ice water might also help stave off heat-related illness.

Families in disaster areas without electricity can use ice to refrigerate food. Frozen items kept in a closed freezer can last for three days or more without power; adding a few bags of ice can significantly extend this period. It's also more efficient to supply ice to hurricane victims—which allows them to preserve their own food—than it is to dole out nonperishable food, like military MREs.

Ice is also used to preserve certain medical supplies. In particular, aid workers try to get ice to anyone who requires regular doses of insulin. (Diabetes affects about 6 percent of the U.S. population, with a higher rate among African-Americans.) Drug manufacturers say insulin should be stored between 35 and 46 degrees, although it can last for up to 28 days if left in the heat. Prepared baby formula can also be preserved with ice.

If ice is so important, why are truckloads of it being tossed in storage? It's not clear what happened. The Army Corps of Engineers says mass evacuations from the disaster area reduced the need for ice. A FEMA official told NBC news that the agency simply made a mistake. It could be that the victims of Katrina didn't have any food to keep cool.

Next question?

Daniel Engber is a writer in New York City and a featured member of www.cryingwhileeating.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2126644/

jurisprudence
Who's Next?
Supreme Court scuttlebutt.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2005, at 2:31 PM PT

Making one perfect Supreme Court pick is hard enough. Making a second one may be impossible, as the Bush administration is learning. John Roberts' cakewalk through the Senate has changed the calculus. The Democrats swear they won't be slow on the trigger for the next nominee. Republican women are anxious. The far right is determined to gain rather than lose ground on the court. And that's just the beginning. Here's what is being whispered, screamed, or hissed into the ears of the decision-makers:

1. It's Girl Time. Whether or not the gender of the next nominee should matter, it does to Republican women lawyers. When Sandra Day O'Connor and Laura Bush expressed enthusiasm for a female justice, these women took hope. Priscilla Owen of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reportedly flew to Washington for a meeting with Bush recently. But many of the Republican women who want to see one of their own chosen aren't satisfied with Owen. And they also aren't wild about the other women mentioned most often as candidates, federal judges Janice Rogers Brown, Edith Jones, and Edith Clement. The women on the shortlist are crazy or lightweights or both, the naysayers complain. In their most despairing moments, they worry that the administration has deliberately cut down the pool of women candidates by refusing to seriously consider anyone who isn't a federal appeals court judge (with the exception of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson). According to the rumor mills, no prosecutors or politicians or law firm partners are under consideration. "They haven't done that well appointing women to the courts of appeal, so now they're going to say, 'Well gee, there isn't anyone qualified?' " one law professor sputtered. "They need a really smart woman and maybe in their universe she doesn't exist, but she does in mine!"

None of the women whose names are being bandied about this week are known intellectual stars like Roberts, which makes it seem harder than it is for Bush both to satisfy his female base and appoint another world-class legal mind.

2. John Roberts, The Sequel. If Bush really wants to put his mark on the law, he'll pick someone with the intellectual weight to lead the court and the personality to persuade his colleagues to follow him (or to think he's following them). Who is another Roberts? The clearest choice is Michael McConnell, the former University of Chicago law professor who had the support of fellow academics across the ideological spectrum when he was chosen to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10^th Circuit in 2002. McConnell is the kind of guy deft enough to give a warm eulogy for William Brennan, the justice for whom he clerked, without departing from his own far-right stances. The idea of a Roberts-McConnell one-two punch on the court thrills conservative academics. Judge Michael Luttig also plays well in the heavyweight field, but he's not universally known as a nice guy. He's got detractors who say he has John Bolton tendencies.

It may be that the female John Roberts is out there. Like Roberts, Maureen Mahoney is a leading Supreme Court litigator; she's been arguing before the court since 1988. Like Roberts, she's from the Midwest (born in South Bend, Ind.). Like Roberts, she clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Like Roberts, she was one of Kenneth Starr's deputies when he was solicitor general for Bush I. Mahoney's problem: She has argued in favor of affirmative action—on the winning side for the University of Michigan Law School in the 2003 Supreme Court case Grutter v. Bollinger. But that shouldn't disqualify her if defending development restrictions around Lake Tahoe—a bad loss for the property-rights movement—didn't disqualify Roberts. Also, Mahoney isn't a judge. In 1992, George H.W. Bush nominated her for a federal trial bench seat in Virginia, but Bill Clinton became president before confirmation. So, she's still a lawyer at the Washington, D.C., firm Latham & Watkins. At first blush, it would seem odd for the administration to single out a plain old lawyer for the nation's highest court. At second blush, why not? Mahoney is smart and she knows the court.

3. Someone Bush Trusts. Mahoney lacks what another late-surging female candidate has—a longtime spot in the president's inner circle. White House Counsel Harriet Miers has been vetter-in-chief of the Supreme Court candidates. What if Bush selects her over them, in the Dick Cheney tradition? Before she got her current job, Miers was assistant to the president and his staff secretary. She was the person who knew where all the paper in the White House was coming and going. She never talked to reporters. She came with Bush from Texas, where she was chair of the state lottery commission and the first woman president of the Texas State Bar. But Miers isn't a skilled Supreme Court advocate. She has no reputation outside the insular Bush circle. Firepower-wise, she looks like a big gamble.

Is that also true of Alberto Gonzales? He's not known in Washington for his great intellect. On the other hand, the opinions he wrote as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court are solid, consistent, and well-reasoned. Gonzales, of course, gives the religious right fits. But he's still the candidate to beat if you believe the chatter at the Department of Justice, which dismisses the recent Owen sightings as a decoy.

Inevitably, Roe. If narrowing or eliminating the right to abortion is the administration's priority, then Gonzales is out. Owen and Jones are the surest bets. McConnell looks good, too: As a private citizen, he signed a 1996 statement supporting a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, and he has testified before Congress in opposition to a bill designed to limit the access of protesters to abortion clinics.

Of course, a reliable stance against abortion also means a fight. All those Democratic senators who seemed unable to ask Roberts a coherent question would have a bull's-eye they couldn't miss. And there are good long-term political reasons for the Republican leadership to prefer chipping away at Roe to scrapping it and to care more about other issues before the court, like protecting business interests and curtailing environmental protections.

So many agendas, so hard to choose.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

 

 

 fashion
Kate Moss
The ironies of her downfall.
By Amanda Fortini
Posted Friday, Sept. 23, 2005, at 12:36 PM PT

If rumors that a model has a coke habit no longer raise an eyebrow, photos of her mid-binge apparently do. Last Thursday, the U.K.'s Daily Mirror published grainy camera-phone stills of supermodel Kate Moss perched on a leather couch in a London recording studio, allegedly chopping and snorting multiple lines of cocaine with the quick sureness of a practiced user. (According to most reports, Moss used a £5 note to vacuum up five lines in 40 minutes.) The Swedish clothing giant H&M, whose upcoming ad campaign for its new Stella McCartney line was to feature Moss, stated late last week that they would give the model a "second chance." She had signed, like a contrite schoolgirl, a written statement promising to remain "healthy, wholesome, and sound." But then H&M reversed its position on Tuesday, announcing that the campaign would be ditched altogether. The next day, Burberry and Chanel, two retailers in Moss' robust portfolio of contracts, followed suit: The former dismissed the model from its fall ad campaign, and the latter stated, cryptically, that it had "no plans" to use her after her contract ends.

The response to H&M's action (and the subsequent domino effect) has been twofold. In one camp are the irate customers and furious bloggers who maintain that the Swedish retailer, a company that markets its inexpensive clothing to teenagers and young adults, had a duty to denounce such behavior publicly. "After the feedback from customers and other papers," an H&M spokesperson told the New York Times, "we decided we should distance ourselves from any kind of drug abuse." Not on principle, mind you, but because feedback indicated that the company's pardon would harm business. This leads to the second contingent, which calls the company out on its hypocrisy. Drug use among fashion models, this group contends, is rampant, a problem H&M was surely aware of. Moss has thus been unfairly singled out by a company hoping to save itself, as well as by a corrupt industry in need of a sacrificial cleansing. While there is some truth to this—Moss is not the only model who is reported to indulge, she was just unlucky enough to be caught with her nose in the apparent powder—it does not take into account the fact that, as the face of several multinational brands, Moss has a public image and a responsibility to protect it. And she has not exactly been assiduous about doing so.

There's no question that H&M's action was hypocritical. It's an open secret that models dabble in drugs, particularly cocaine. ("Shock; horror—models do drugs? Oh my God, the world is going to stop," Michael Gross, author of Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, said in response to the incident.) It's even sort of understandable: How else to stay as thin as a prepubescent boy? Though we are regaled with stories of fast metabolisms, of Gisele's miraculous ability to inhale ice cream and yet fit into Victoria's Secret's smallest panties, most of us know that it is a rare woman who can consume an adequate amount of food and remain a good 20 pounds underweight. Many models subsist on a diet that includes generous quantities of cigarettes, caffeine, and cocaine, which doesn't exactly make for a person who is healthy, wholesome, and sound. Moss has, in the past, admitted to trying drugs because she was worried about getting fat. And at 31, post-pregnancy, she looks not all that different than she did at 14, when her gawky body defined the term "waif." This emaciated look is what the fashion industry demands of its models, so the policy toward methods of weight-loss has generally been don't-ask-don't-tell. If there weren't pictures to substantiate the drug allegations, it is unlikely a word would have been uttered.

Hypocritical though H&M may be, the fact is that any celebrity in Moss' position would have met with a similar fate. And indeed they have: Lavazza Coffee dropped Ingrid Parewijck, a Belgian model, after she was caught at JFK airport with several grams of cocaine. McDonald's and Nutella decided not to renew their endorsement deals with Kobe Bryant after allegations of his possible sexual misconduct surfaced. The reason for the dismissals is obvious: Featuring a celebrity in an ad campaign associates the celebrity with the product (and brand) being pushed; if that celebrity gets into trouble or falls out of favor, it reflects poorly on the brand. Arguably the world's most famous supermodel (her sloe-eyed visage is on almost every other page of fashion magazines), and a frequent tabloid presence (she's been involved with Johnny Depp, Evan Dando, Leonardo DiCaprio), Moss is a genuine celebrity. She is not paid just to be a pretty clotheshorse, but also to bestow on a product her glamorous aura. Her lucrative contracts—totaling approximately $9 million a year, by most accounts—surely hinge on the maintenance of the commodity of her celebrity, on staying out of legal trouble and at least nominally above reproach.

For years, Moss has managed to dodge any real trouble. But there have long been chinks in her image. In 1998, she checked herself into a rehab clinic for "exhaustion." In a rare interview, she admitted that she modeled drunk throughout much of the '90s. She is almost always photographed with a cigarette in one hand—she is said to have an 80-a-day habit—and a cocktail in the other. Earlier this year, she won libel damages from the Sunday Mirror for false claims that she had collapsed into a cocaine-induced coma in Barcelona. And, over the last nine months, she has fueled rumors by dating Babyshambles frontman Pete Doherty, the music world's current Sid Vicious: Doherty has been jailed for burglary and last month was arrested in Oslo for possession of heroin and crack. As a spokeswoman for designer Robert Cavalli hinted to the Times (of London): "She is not going to be going out with Pete Doherty and having milk and cheesecake every night, is she?"

The irony is that the rumors of bad behavior, the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, have always been part of Moss' allure. For years, the fashion world has courted, and profited from, her edgy, bad-girl image and her gaunt, post-hangover looks. It was Moss, in fact, who ushered in the controversial "heroin chic" look when she graced the cover of The Face in 1990. But whereas a gangly body is a natural state for an adolescent, for a woman, it is much harder to maintain it. And perhaps H&M, understanding this, waited to take the measure of the public's pulse before acting. An anonymous marketing executive linked to H&M told the Independent, "There has been a period of a few days where people have waited to see which way the wind is blowing on this." As it happened, the appearance of drugged-out chic was acceptable; the reality was not.

But the peculiar logic of the fashion world may rehabilitate her yet. A weird sort of awe ran through much of the writing on the incident; writers marveled at how amazing Moss looked, dressed in hot pants and Nancy Sinatra boots, even while allegedly getting high in the wee hours of the morning. Others wondered how she treats her body with such disregard and still remains "miraculous and miraculously unimpaired": What's her secret? Not surprisingly, in the fashion industry, image is everything. Moss knows this as well as anyone: Like Garbo, she rarely grants interviews, and she never leaves her house in sweatpants but only in some artfully unstudied, impossibly chic ensemble. Last week, after the news broke, she emerged from the Mercer hotel as stylish and as silent as ever. Perhaps, after 17 years, she knows to battle the industry on its own terms and that, sadly, if she can come through with her looks intact, that may be enough.

Amanda Fortini is a Slate contributor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2126381/

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2126840/

moneybox
What FEMA Could Learn From Wal-Mart
Less than you think.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, Sept. 23, 2005, at 11:58 AM PT

"Government broke down. Business stepped up," blares Fortune's cover story. Wal-Mart relief trucks reached stricken Gulf Coast areas before the Federal Emergency Management Administration did. Federal Express continued to deliver when the National Guard couldn't. As Kenner, La., Mayor Philip Capitano put it: "The Red Cross and FEMA need to take a master class in logistics and mobilization from Wal-Mart."

With Rita bearing down, it's a good time to ask if the public should really plan to rely on the private sector rather than the government for disaster-relief. Federal Express and Wal-Mart have something to teach us all—FEMA included—about logistics and mobilization. But Wal-Mart and the private sector in general are getting way too much credit for their intermittently impressive relief efforts. In fact, the economic and management trends that Wal-Mart and FedEx typify may have been responsible for some of the post-Katrina suffering.

Wal-Mart responded well to Katrina. The giant retailer donated $3 million in supplies and $17 million in cash to emergency efforts—$20 million in total, or about the amount of sales it does in about 38 minutes. Wal-Mart and Federal Express were indeed way more organized than FEMA. FEMA was a dumping ground for political hacks. Wal-Mart and Federal Express are highly profitable logistics companies run by seasoned, well-compensated pros. They have made enormous investments in the personnel, technology, and infrastructure necessary to respond to changes in demand and market conditions, and to get goods where they need to go quickly. "That's what we do," Rollin Ford, Wal-Mart's executive vice president of logistics and supply chain, told Fortune. "We move mass volume very efficiently."

Wal-Mart and FedEx are the platonic exemplars of the Just-in-Time economy, which prescribes keeping inventories low, maintaining the precise amount of capacity needed, and building and exploiting hyperefficient supply chains. This set of management practices, which started in manufacturing, has spread to every sector of the economy. Whether you're a bookstore, an auto-parts maker, an oil refiner or a grocer, having more inventory or capacity than you absolutely need ties up capital and imposes storage and handling costs. In the Just-in-Time economy, redundancy is the enemy of efficiency. That's one of the reasons delivery companies like FedEx have grown so much over the years—they're constantly restocking everybody's shelves. The nation's most efficient retailer and its most efficient delivery service were uniquely designed to be able to respond and function in a post-Katrina environment.

But for every Wal-Mart or FedEx—efficient machines doing good in a time of need—there was a major-league screw-up by a large company that didn't have sufficient backup capacity in place. At Tenet Health Care's Memorial Hospital in New Orleans, the backup electric generating system failed. Several patients died.

Katrina also exposed the downside of the Just-in-Time economy. The crucial networks that are the lifeblood of Wal-Mart and FedEx are more virtual than real—trucking and air routes, logistics systems, and software—and survived the hurricane just fine. But companies whose networks were composed of pipes, fiber, and transformers didn't prove as resilient. Several weeks after Katrina, Entergy, the large utility company, is still struggling to restore electric service. BellSouth, the phone company, saw its systems utterly swamped: On Sept. 2, more than half of Louisiana's access lines and about 40 percent of Mississippi's were out of service. It may be October until phone service is restored. Yes, the companies had to cope with unprecedented damage. But these networked Just-in-Time companies didn't have the backup or emergency planning in place to weather the storm and respond with sufficient speed.

Then there's the massive oil and gas business—the ultimate Just-in-Time business. Refiners don't keep weeks' worth of crude on hand in the event supply is disrupted—that would needlessly tie up capital. Refiners like Valero don't maintain standby refineries ready to kick into gear in case of a disaster. Too expensive. As previously noted in this space, U.S. refineries this spring were running at 94 percent of capacity. Once crude is refined, petroleum courses through pipelines and into delivery trucks. Gas stations take delivery daily, or a few times a week, depending on their volume. The Kwik-E-Mart won't build and fill giant storage tanks to ensure it'll always have a week's worth of supply. Environmentally conscious neighbors wouldn't like it.

In normal times, this efficient energy delivery system keeps our costs down and our tanks full. But it doesn't take all that much to screw things up. In a neat illustration of chaos theory, high winds in the Gulf of Mexico can cause consumers in Chicago to panic-buy gasoline a few days later, and a giant corporation in Minneapolis to file for bankruptcy two weeks later. When Katrina knocked out a healthy chunk of the nation's Just-in-Time refining and oil production capacity, there was no excess capacity available. Almost immediately, the supply of petrol was disrupted on the Atlantic seaboard. Throughout the country, the price of gasoline at the pump shot up rapidly. And the spike in fuel prices may have hastened the bankruptcy filings of giant airlines Northwest Airlines and Delta Airlines.

Oddly, the market price of crude oil fell after Katrina, even though production of crude in the Gulf of Mexico was interrupted. Why? It turns out there was a party that, acting in an economically inefficient manner, had spent billions of dollars to amass a standby supply of a crucial material that could be used on a rainy day. When the crisis came, it acted with a Wal-Martian efficiency. After Katrina, the federal government began to release crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And it came just in time. The move helped lower the price of crude, keep refineries humming, and calm panicky consumers.

There's no doubt the government could learn a great deal from the private sector about how to prepare for and respond to a natural disaster. But the private sector may have something to learn from the government, too.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2126832/

 

dispatches
Escape From Houston
How I fled Rita.
By Mimi Swartz
Posted Friday, Sept. 23, 2005, at 11:13 AM PT

I have just two pieces of advice for anyone who has to flee a large metropolitan area in the face of a Category 5 hurricane: Be sure you have a Magellan RoadMate and a Japanese car. Let me explain.

My 14-year-old son, Sam, and I left Houston at 10:30 Thursday morning with our golden retriever, headed for my parents' condo in San Antonio. This is normally a three-hour drive. My neighbor, offering to share his hotel room at the Hilton downtown, warned me not to go—"It's anarchy out there," he said—but by then I was packed and was being drawn out of town by progressively more anxious calls from my parents and my boss. My husband, a newspaperman, had to stay. He kissed us goodbye like someone forced to stay in Atlanta as Sherman approached.

I was not particularly worried about Rita. I grew up with hurricanes, starting with Carla in 1962, and spent Alicia, in the early '80s, calmly babysitting my friend's cats while the wind howled around us. In anticipation, I stocked the house with canned goods, flashlights, and batteries; got cash from the ATM; and filled up the car day before yesterday—go or stay, I was as ready as a Girl Scout trying to win her preparedness patch. I thought I even had a good alternate route out of town: I was going to go south and then head west on 90A, a back road I'd taken a few times before to San Antonio. If the phrase "going south" strikes you as somewhat ominous, please note that I have been living in Hurricane Central for the last few weeks, and was gripped by serious denial.

And so, Sam, Chuy, and I drove toward the coast, out Main Street and on to 90A, where there was, indeed, no traffic. At all. Somewhat further on we sped past a beat-up scarlet Nissan with the words "Rita, go away bitch" spray-painted on the back window. Fifteen minutes later, we hit gridlock. To the right of me was a family that had three kids and a bright cockatoo flittering out of its cage. Behind me was an Asian couple who took no solace from the smiling, happy Buddha on the dashboard of their pickup. In front of me, as far as the eye could see, were cars, bumper to bumper. "I think there's a wreck up there," a driver with binoculars told me hopefully. Meanwhile, the radio DJs kept using the word "catastrophic" and talking about "the cone of uncertainty"—that area where the storm might or might not hit, which included the exact point at which we were stuck. I had the air conditioner on—at the lowest setting, mixed with outdoor air, which by then was already 100 degrees. My son and I were both the color of tomatoes, and the dog's panting was starting to sound like coronary disease.

We sat there for two hours, during which time we moved exactly three-tenths of a mile by my speedometer's reckoning. I kept checking the gauges on my 9-year-old Honda Accord's dashboard—so far, all was well. I had about three-quarters of a tank of gas—I'd run a few errands on Wednesday, but the car wasn't overheating. I figured I needed only a half-tank to get home to San Antonio, and we had about 48 hours until Rita came ashore. Still, at the rate we were moving, the odds weren't good. I turned off 90A the first chance I got.

We were somewhere near the suburb of Missouri City in what was most definitely a mandatory evacuation area. We spent the next hour or so heading north again, past oversized tract homes that, if past experience was any indication, might not be there when we returned. Every gas station we passed either had long lines in front of it or bright yellow plastic ribbons tied over the tank handles, indicating they were out.

I remained calm, and couldn't figure out why, since it's not my normal state. Then I realized I wasn't calm—that this quiet focus was what it felt like to be terrified. I had visions of riding out the storm in Southwest Houston—a part of town I avoid on the best days—while the water rose up around the Accord, the dog whimpering as Sam and I huddled together, waiting for the end in a Ross Dress for Less parking lot. I thought about turning back home, too, but I kept worrying about the pine tree in our backyard crashing through the roof. I wondered, briefly, how long our neighbors would realistically let us stay at the Hilton, and how long the Hilton would realistically let us all stay. (During Alicia, the hotels pushed everyone out once the power went off.) Then I thought of my parents' condo, with computers, clean beds, and air conditioning. I pushed on, toward I-10, despite increasingly alarming reports on the radio about people running out of gas and further blocking the highway, where many drivers had already been stranded since the night before. "Better start rationing those Doritos," I told Sam, who had already gone through one bag and three Capri Suns with electrolytes, while the dog had already drunk two bottles of Ozarka.

It took about three hours heading dead west on side-streets before I reached the approach to I-10. It was utterly jammed. Then I remembered my husband's Christmas present to me last year—a GPS device called the Magellan RoadMate. That may not sound like the most romantic gift, but I spend a lot of time in the car, and a lot of that time on strange roads on the verge of being very, very lost. "Turn on the RoadMate," I said to my son.

The RoadMate displays a map so detailed that even the most directionally challenged can find their way to their destination. I decided to skip the freeway and let the RoadMate guide me. At 1:23 the radio brought news that the first rain bands had reached the coast.

By then we were on a series of farm roads, driving about 50 mph toward San Antonio, tacking first west, then northwest, then west again, according to the computer on my dash. I knew most of the towns, with their wonderful German and Central European names—Waelder, Wiemer, Schulenberg, New Ulm—but had forgotten how pretty and pastoral they are, racing around Texas on the interstates as I do. While the radio was predicting Armageddon, we drove past gnarled live oaks and sable herds of cattle, crossed the Brazos near Columbus, and veered past turn-of-the-century homes that were still waiting for gays and yuppies from the city to take them over. We pulled into a general store called "Po Boys Gas." It, too, was out of gas, and mobbed by desperate Houstonians in search of homemade sandwiches (there were none) and bottled water (supplies were dwindling). "Oh, I forgot to tell you," Sam said, when we were further down the road, "The lady back there told me I-10 is open on both sides now."

We used the navigator to tack south—past a house inexplicably decorated with four knights in shining armor out front—and got to the interstate, where, indeed, traffic was now moving at 60 mph on four lanes, all of them headed west. There were families picnicking at underpasses, and cars broken down along the road—clearly out of gas—but the traffic moved, so we stayed on until my boss called to tell me that I should get off the highway because it was going to bottleneck in Seguin, where the four lanes went down to two again. We had lost the radio by then, and so were blissfully free of horrifying news.

A few miles later we turned off the AC—I was down to a quarter of a tank, probably enough to get to San Antonio but I wasn't taking chances. We rolled down all the windows, and soon, the car filled up with glistening gold hairs floating in the air—my dog shedding in the breeze.

We cut south. It was close to 6 p.m., the sun was starting to set, a bright orange ball with the kind of rays you see in children's paintings, filtered through the beginnings of the fluffy cumulus clouds that signal storms on the way. Even this far west, people had boarded up windows of their homes—no one here needs a DJ to tell them hurricanes can change direction overnight. We finally pulled into a gas station that had lines but also gasoline, filled the tank, and, air cooled again, tacked northwest for the 30 or so miles toward my parents' place. We had been on the road for nine hours. Near Seguin I passed a high school jammed with people and bright yellow buses and assumed it was a shelter. Then I looked again: Crowds had collected on small bleachers, and there were kids in pads and uniforms on the field. I had forgotten: This was Texas. They were just playing football.

Mimi Swartz is an executive editor at Texas Monthly and the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failure, the Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron.

 

movies
Art for Arteries' Sake
The bloody fatalism of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence.
By David Edelstein
Posted Friday, Sept. 23, 2005, at 4:41 AM PT

Violence is the dominant cuisine of world cinema, so any movie that seems to critique it while serving up a scrum-dilly-icious platter of blood and shattered cartilage is bound to get some critics hollering, "Masterpiece!" That's what you might be hearing about David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (New Line)—and it is an absolutely sensational piece of filmmaking. It's staged and shot and acted and scored like nothing else this year, and it has images that will lodge themselves in your brain, rather like an ice pick. I have nothing bad to say about it—except that it shouldn't for a second be taken too seriously.

The movie belongs to a hallowed but problematic genre: guilty pulp. Here, you have your cake but choke on it, too. The modern apex is the vigilante Western Unforgiven, in which a return to bloodshed costs the hero his soul—but the higher price (for him and at the box office) would have been leaving his buddy unavenged. A closer comparison is the tony The Road to Perdition, based on a graphic novel (the comic book's highbrow cousin): a Charles Bronson picture in Oscar-bait clothes, complete with a handy anti-violence message that's delivered with perfect timing, after the bad guys have been blown away.

Another graphic-novel adaptation (by Josh Olson, from A Small Town Killing by John Wagner and Vince Locke), A History of Violence is better by miles than that pretentious perdition-bricked Road, but it's steeped in the same kind of fatalism. It opens with a single, lengthy take: The camera travels along the flat exterior of a cheap motel, in front of which two low-life homicidal scumbags make banal small talk before killing an entire family, including a little girl. This happens off-screen, thank God, but nothing that follows does. When the child is shot, there's a cut from the gun blast to another little girl as she wakes from a nightmare, screaming. Her daddy, Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), tells her it's OK, there are no monsters—when, of course, we know there are.

The setting is a picture-perfect Midwest town, and Tom and his pretty ex-cheerleader, now-lawyer wife, Edie (Maria Bello), have a picture-perfect homestead. Tom is picture-perfect, too, with his sky-blue eyes and rangy diffidence. He owns a luncheonette on the main street (Main Street?) and serves up pie and coffee while chatting about the weather, and he would seem to be the very image of Norman Rockwell wholesomeness if not for those killers from the opening sequence passing through town in need of fast cash and—

Well, I'm not going to spoil anything, no sir. But it's fair to say A History of Violence revolves around a momentous secret. Either Tom is not what he appears to be or a bad case of mistaken identity is going to force him to become something other than what he is. By and by, three more bad men—dark-suited gangsters—saunter into the luncheonette. Their leader, Fogarty (Ed Harris), has a mottled, milky, dead eye, which nonetheless fastens on Tom. Fogarty repeatedly calls him "Joey," as in "Good coffee, Joey," to which Tom responds with polite incomprehension.

It's a fascinating exchange, pitting Mortenson's tense easiness against Harris' easy tension. Whether he's Joey or not, the heroic act of violence that puts Tom in the public eye will beget violence and more violence. And Cronenberg gives it a super-kinetic charge, along with the explosive compression of great comic book (sorry, graphic novel) frames. The sudden bloody discharges are lightning-fast and deliciously satisfying—orgasmic, even. But they also leave you sickened, because Cronenberg cuts briefly—in an extra frame, like a comic book's (sorry, graphic novel's)—to men with heads shattered and faces beaten, literally, to bloody pulps.

But here's the thing: Those extra frames don't sicken us morally. Even though A History of Violence is suffused with loss—it's in every bar of Howard Shore's gorgeous, elegiac score, his plangent Americana darkened with Bartok-like "night-music" dissonances—the right people are always on the right end of the (righteous) violence. There's never a second in which the hero's killings suggest that he has truly lost his soul. And he's so virtuosic in the way he delivers death that the subsequent messes seem like moral ass-savings—like Cronenberg saying, "This is more than a Steven Seagal movie." It's the same with the picture's parallel subplot, in which Tom's shrinking, slightly effeminate son (Ashton Holmes, in an impressive debut that evokes Bruce Davison's Willard) stands up to a bully with the improbable technique of a practiced fighter. To paraphrase Clint, "An adolescent who wants to be a man's gotta do what an adolescent who wants to be a man's gotta do."

A History of Violence does have dissonances beyond Shore's music. The Midwest landscape, as photographed by Peter Suschitzky, is a stablizing force, yet it isn't pastoral or idealized. It's also a place in which to hide. When a police chief warns the gangsters that the town "protects its own," he's both reassuring and unnerving. After all, it might protect them from people like us as well.

Two remarkable sex scenes add even more wrinkles. The first is a piece of nostalgic play-acting, for which Edie dons her cheerleader outfit and Tom lovingly services her. The second is its opposite, a rape that is scarily unresolved—a thrill that remains a violation. In these and other scenes, Bello gives the film an emotional core, and Mortensen's transitions are so subtle that you almost buy his barely credible character. (If an ex-gangster, he is too corn-fed; if a corn-fed Midwesterner, his instincts are too Seagal-like.) Harris and, later, William Hurt give bravura performances—laugh-out-loud over-the-top but with shockingly vicious underbellies.

That's how I think of A History of Violence—as laughably over-the-top and shockingly vicious. But what strikes some critics as complexity feels to me like shame—the shame of Cronenberg, an uncompromising director whose bloodshed has always been genuinely horrifying. As a gun for hire, he will surely have his biggest hit since The Fly by delivering simpleminded pulp violence—and, like his hero, delivering it a little too triumphantly... 4:42 a.m. P.T.

David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at slatemovies@slate.com.

 

ispatches
My Year of Hurricanes
The dramatic rescue of our lost cat from New Orleans.
By Blake Bailey
Updated Friday, Sept. 23, 2005, at 3:17 AM PT

Blake Bailey and his wife lost their home and their possessions to Hurricane Katrina. Two months before, they had moved to New Orleans with their 1-year-old daughter; both had spent much of their adult lives in the city, and they'd returned so that Bailey's wife could complete her doctoral internship (clinical psychology) at Tulane. Bailey, meanwhile, had resumed work on his biography of John Cheever. Because the impact of the disaster looks like it will be a long-term ordeal for many, Slate has asked Bailey to write a weekly dispatch chronicling his family's efforts to put their lives together again. Click here, here, and here for Blake Bailey's first three dispatches.

For the last week, my wife and child have been in North Carolina, visiting the maternal side of my wife's family. My mother-in-law, Chris, is a fellow evacuee. One of the nice things about moving to New Orleans this summer was the sweetness of her company: She and my wife would go to the farmer's market every Saturday, a beloved routine, and Chris was great about caring for her granddaughter, whose life she'd looked forward to sharing for a long time to come. But none of us will be returning to New Orleans anytime soon: My wife and I are moving back to Gainesville, Fla., and Chris isn't sure what she'll do. Before, she was a teacher in the New Orleans public schools, a system that barely functioned under the best of circumstances and now is pretty much defunct. This is a loss for Chris' students—she insisted on teaching only the lowest achievers—and as for Chris herself, she's had to apply for food stamps.

Here in Norman, Okla. (where I'm staying with my mother and various friends), I try to avoid morbid thoughts—a matter complicated somewhat by the fact that I'm working on a biography of John Cheever, one of the saddest men who ever lived. I'm fond of Cheever—as a biographer it's important to like your subjects, I think—but he can be pretty gloomy company day in and day out. "I remember standing on the terrace of your old house," he wrote his friend John Weaver, whom he visited during a dreary trip to Hollywood in 1960. "The door was open and I heard Harriet [Weaver's wife] flush a toilet and open and close a drawer. The sensation of my aloneness was stupendous." I know how he feels. I'm also thrown on the hospitality of others, and can scarcely hear some homely bit of domestic business—a flushing toilet, a friend kissing his wife—without thinking that my own wife and daughter are far away, my mother-in-law is destitute, and none of us can go home again.

One is succored by the kindness of strangers. When I first arrived in Norman, I took my car to a repair shop to have the AC fixed; after considering the matter for two or three hours, the manager told me that the AC was broken in every conceivable way that AC can break and that to repair it would cost roughly the blue-book value of my car (a 1998 Suzuki Esteem). I decided to cut my losses. The woman who wrote up the invoice for all that expensive labor—a dead ringer for the woman in American Gothic—noticed my Louisiana license plate and wondered if I was from New Orleans. I said I was and added something to the effect that I had miles to go before I sleep, albeit in a very warm car, ha ha. The woman stopped writing and gave me a rock-faced look—deploring my stupid joke, I thought, but not at all: "No charge," she said, and firmly shook her head when I fumbled for my wallet. The next day I got a haircut and the same thing happened. It's almost worth losing your house to be reminded, again and again, that people are really nice when given half a chance.

Consider the guy who rescued my cat this weekend—Chris Cole, the neighbor of an old friend in Oklahoma City. I'd met him a week ago in my friend's pool. (Like Neddy Merrill in Cheever's "The Swimmer," I spend a lot of time in other people's pools, drinking their liquor and trying to forget.) And now, my friend told me, Chris was in New Orleans on a press pass. So, I gave him a call: Amid the gulps and gaps of a bad cell-phone connection, I explained that my cat, if alive, was enduring Day 20 without food or potable water (that I knew of); could he possibly retrieve her, I asked, as well as my wife's laptop (on top of the fridge), a box full of Cheever photos (on a stack of other boxes stashed, idiotically, in a rackety old wardrobe cabinet), and all our vital documents? He was glad to do so.

Chris' cell phone cut out every 15 seconds or so—calling from New Orleans these days is like calling from Gdansk—such that his progress was reported in one- or two-sentence increments: "OK, I'm driving along Elysian Fields now, and I think the next ... You say the hide-a-key is where? Sorry, but I—oh wait ... OK, inside now. Looking for ... paw prints in your living room, but no cat. Mold all over the place. The floor's ... You there? OK, your floor's a mess. The waterline was about 18 inches, I guess, and the boards are buckled. The door to that last room won't ... cat. Listen, I'm just gonna look for the cat, OK, and I'll call you back when ..."

I fielded these calls while driving around the countryside north of Oklahoma City—what used to be the countryside, I should say, when I lived here as a child; now it is mile after mile of generic subdivisions with names like "Whispering Acres" and "Rambling Estates." Every time I return to Oklahoma there are more and more of these places, sprouting like mushrooms in dung. Perhaps the rebuilt New Orleans will resemble Oklahoma City someday.

Chris called me back. "I have good news and bad news. The good ... Sorry. You there? Hello? OK, the good ... found your cat. But ..."

But. Oh, God—I thought, waiting for my cell phone to ring again—the poor old cat is dead: She'd survived a car backing over her head, a hurricane, a flood, the receding of the flood, and finally had padded into our empty, moldy living room and despaired. After five or six more calls, though, Chris had established the following: He'd found our cat, alive, under a waterlogged couch; at first he'd tried enticing her with a can of tuna—no dice, in spades—and finally he'd pulled the sofa away from the wall, whereupon our cat had bolted into the kitchen and, Chris thought, out the door. Well, I sighed, at least now she'd have a fighting chance to forage among the ruins. In any case it was getting dark; Chris said he'd put food and water both outside and in and resume his search in the morning.

The next day I worked on an endless Disaster Home Loan Application from the U.S. Small Business Administration—this courtesy of FEMA. I had to keep calling my wife to ask her, say, for her father's address in Fayetteville, Ark. ("CLOSEST RELATIVE NOT LIVING WITH JOINT APPLICANT"), or the balance owed on her Sallie Mae loans. At one point I got a call from my friend Alfred, a New Orleans lawyer who was back in the city, with the mayor's blessing, to retrieve files and clean out his fridge ("solid maggots"). He offered to check on my house, and I told him to go ahead, the more the merrier, etc., and returned to my SBA application. ("Unsure," I wrote, in reply to the prompt "Year Mortgage Pays Off." "Vital papers lost in hurricane and Chase website currently unavailable. Chase will provide info on request.") Every now and then either Alfred or Chris would call: The cat was in the house! She'd eaten the food! And finally the best news of all:

"Got her!" said Chris. "Alfred blocked ... under the crib. Put her in the big Tupperware ... holes in the top, don't worry. Anyway I'll ...OK, I'm driving tonight ... city ... straight through. Call me in the morn— ..."

About 20 hours later, I was reunited with my cat. Her wet fur stood out in jagged spikes—she'd upset the water bowl in her storage bin—and she gave me a sort of baleful, Queen Victoria look. Otherwise she seemed OK. I let her out of the bin and her head bobbed at the faint smell of wood smoke, the first whiff of autumn. She wandered outside and took a long, pensive piss; then, with a shudder, she trotted back and threw herself against my ankles. She wanted to go home, wherever that was.

Blake Bailey is the author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. He's working on a biography of John Cheever.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2126756/

mixing desk
Michael Jackson to the Rescue!
Pop music responds to the hurricane.
By Hua Hsu
Posted Friday, Sept. 23, 2005, at 3:15 AM PT

First came the wind, then came the floods, and then came the songs. Pop musicians are, to some extent, the ambulance chasers of the public-tragedy game. While these moments have inspired timeless material, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Ohio" or John Coltrane's "Alabama," the bulk of these hastily issued songs arrive with expiration dates. The intertwined bandannas of the West Coast Rap All-Stars' "We're All in the Same Gang" and Tom Petty's "Peace in L.A.," for example, may have felt like powerful statements at the time, but neither track has survived. New Orleans seems to be a special case, however, and the musical response has been far from rote. As Kinks singer Ray Davies observed, "If New Orleans is allowed to die, a crucial part of the world's musical heritage will disappear." That's a particularly noteworthy sentiment, given that Davies had been mugged and then shot in the city the year before.

Twenty years after co-writing "We Are the World," Michael Jackson is "moving full speed ahead" on a Katrina benefit song bearing the tentative, and less communal-sounding, title of "From the Bottom of My Heart." While the go-to section of Jackson's Rolodex has likely thinned in recent years, R. Kelly, Jay-Z, and Mariah Carey are among the artists who have been invited to participate. Hopefully, this effort won't follow the same path as "What More Can I Give," Jackson's 9/11-themed attempt at a charity single that was never released.

One of Jackson's former rivals, Prince, was also moved to act, albeit with far less deliberation. Dashed off after a night spent overdosing on Sade's "Sweetest Taboo," the quirky and upbeat track for "S.S.T." belies the stern, words-versus-deeds lyrics: "Did you have open arms for each and everybody you met/ Or did you let them die in the rain?" More maudlin is Coldplay's Internet-only benefit Fix You EP. "Fix You" was one of the more melodramatic moments on the band's latest album, a languid ballad detailing singer Chris Martin's attempts to inspire, or "fix," a lover who feels let down. But the song's passion-soaked lines about "feel(ing) so tired you can't sleep" or "los(ing) something you can't replace" could just as easily describe the present situation—such is the wonderful elasticity of the pop song. The same applies to "Napoleon's Hat," a gorgeous, rambling Bright Eyes track about fear, loathing, and the fractures of modern living that coincides with the cynicism of the moment, even if it was probably written months before everyone learned what FEMA stood for.

Many performers recorded new tracks merely to let off steam. Take rapper Mos Def's freestyle, "Dollar Day for New Orleans (Katrina Klap)." Borrowing the beat from New Orleans rapper Juvenile's 2004 hit "Nolia Clap," the righteous Mos draws a very clear line between Them (the government and, uh, Bono) and Us (the poor and oppressed). While his didacticism is timely, Mos' verses lack any of his distinctive subtlety or cleverness. Perhaps he should have tried some humor: In the wake of disaster, laughter can be the most cutting and comforting response. "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" by the Houston hip-hop duo the Legendary K-O, also known as K-Otix, has been an e-mail favorite. Using the beat to Kanye West's current hit "Gold Digger"—and borrowing its title and chorus from West's recent anti-Bush ad lib on TV—the song is both a chilling first-person account of tragedy and a witty smack at the government's lead-footed response. "Five days in this motherfucking attic/ Can't use the cell phone I keep getting static," Micah complains before swimming to a deserted corner store, while Damien pokes fun at the president's vacation itinerary.

Taking a subtler route is TV on the Radio, a New York quintet that specializes in an abrasive, intoxicating marriage of barbershop harmonies and tense guitars. "Dry Drunk Emperor" is a jingle-jangle march that slowly unfolds into an anti-Bush screed—where else could the free-association jumble of "Gold cross jock skull and bones/ Mocking smile" point but to the top? By song's end, the assembled voices of TVOTR, now backed by swarming clouds of noise, rally on the lawn of the White House for some true fife-and-drum regime change.

While many of these tracks certainly indulge in the dreaded blame game, savvy bloggers uncovered something on the FEMA Web site that is as inexcusably bad as it is musically bizarre. Tucked away on the "FEMA for Kidz" portal of the site is something titled "FEMA for Kidz Rap," an old-school-flavored 50-second primer on the agency's role delivered in that newfangled rapping style the kidz seem to luv. "Disaster prep is your responsibility/ And mitigation is important to our agency," rapper and producer Scott J. Wolfson explains, before concluding, "We're ready all the time, 'cause disasters don't rest." This, too, was probably written before everyone knew what FEMA stood for.

Hua Hsu is a writer and student living in Cambridge, Mass.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2126748/

 

the big idea
The Conservative War on Poverty
Bring it on.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005, at 4:03 PM PT

Since Hurricane Katrina exposed the ghetto poor of New Orleans to national view, stirring a national conscience that has been asleep for many years, the federal government has begun to re-engage with the problem of urban poverty. George W. Bush has made a strong rhetorical and financial commitment to rebuild the city in a way that does not re-create what was there before. The president mentioned a few specific anti-poverty ideas in his speech from Jackson Square: vouchers for job training and education, tax-abated Opportunity Zones, and a Homestead Act intended to help poor people own their own houses.

The reaction from liberals to Bush's proposed War on Bayou Poverty has been outrage that Republicans would take advantage of the tragedy to advance their ideological agenda. Democratic leaders are upset about the suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act, sacred to unions, which requires the federal government to pay prevailing wages to workers. They've also denounced Bush's proposal to provide school vouchers to students displaced by the storm and the suggestion that Karl Rove might run the rebuilding show.

This is precisely the wrong response. Liberals, who have failed to muster any kind of social consensus for a major federal assault on poverty since LBJ's day, should welcome conservatives as converts to the cause. They should hold back on their specific objections—some of which are valid, some of which are not—and let Bush have his way with the reconstruction. Making New Orleans a test site for conservative social policy ideas could shake out any number of ways politically. But all of us have a stake in an experiment that tells us whether conservative anti-poverty ideas, uh, work. If the conservative war on poverty succeeds, even in partial fashion, we will all be better for its success. And if it fails, we will have learned something important about how not to fight poverty.

Not everyone on the right is so keen about a new federal attack on poverty (for a quick taxonomy of conservative views on the issue, click here). But the activist Republicans who have been ascendant since the disaster are ready for action. What are the radical proposals they want to implement in New Orleans? The first place I looked for them was on Newt Gingrich's Web site, Newt.org. No luck. (Though at the top of the home page, you will find a 20-slide Powerpoint presentation that provides additional evidence—were any needed—of the former speaker's clinical megalomania.) Nor does "I-care-about-poor-people" conservative Jack Kemp have much to offer beyond inspiration and admonitions not to sweat the deficit spending.

There's more detail in a new position paper from the Heritage Foundation, which recommends a slew of policies including a zero capital gains rate for investment in the disaster zone, suspension of EPA regulations, rental vouchers in place of government-provided housing, emergency health care accounts instead of expanded Medicaid, and $5,000-per-pupil school vouchers for private, public, or charter schools. The Department of Education has since suggested that the vouchers it wants to offer displaced students could be worth as much as $7,500—which would address a major flaw in Bush's previous versions of school choice, namely that the vouchers wouldn't have been worth enough to cover the tuition anywhere other than parochial schools.

Not mentioned in the Heritage paper, but clearly applicable, is the stalled GOP proposal for second-round welfare reform: a requirement that recipients work 40 hours a week to qualify for benefits. Let's try that in New Orleans, too. Let Congress go ahead and suspend affirmative action requirements for contractors and environmental regulations for builders. Let Republicans bar victims from suing volunteers for damages, and give them a flat tax. In the category of Onion headlines that aren't a joke, Sens. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., want to suspend the estate tax for people killed in Hurricane Katrina. The only problem: They can't find a corpse—that is, any victim whose estate would owe any tax. But let Republicans go ahead and kill the death tax there if it makes them feel better. Heck, let them privatize Social Security for poor blacks in New Orleans (who Bush says get a raw deal under the current system).

Unfortunately, the conservative war on poverty in New Orleans probably won't take place in any concerted way, because Republicans and Democrats are equally terrified about what might happen. Conservatives don't necessarily want their panaceas tried out, for fear their utopia might not be so dreamy after all. Liberals don't want conservative ideas tested for a different reason. They're afraid that some of them might actually work.

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One of the less-examined divisions among conservatives concerns the government's role in fighting poverty. Libertarians, anti-federalists, and some neoconservatives believe, essentially, that the poor shall always be with ye. National crusades against poverty, they think, are doomed to frustration. On the other side of the fence are compassionate, national greatness, empowerment, and opportunity-type conservatives. They contend that poverty can be ameliorated but that liberal solutions don't work.

Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.

 

explainer
How Do You Dump Fuel From a Plane?
Just turn on your fuel dumping system.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005, at 3:38 PM PT

A plane operated by JetBlue made an emergency landing in Los Angeles Wednesday night, after air-traffic controllers noticed that its landing gear was twisted to the side. The pilots first circled for three hours, to burn off fuel and lighten the aircraft. If they'd been flying a different kind of plane, they might have been able to dump the fuel instead. How do planes dump fuel?

It's as easy as flipping a switch. Many commercial airplanes (and almost all military aircraft) have a built-in fuel-dumping system that uses pumps and valves to release fuel from the wings and sometimes the tail. These systems, controlled from the cockpit, typically allow a plane to eject several thousand pounds of fuel per minute; a standard fuel-dumping operation could take around 10 minutes to complete.

Why would you need to dump fuel? A plane that lands too heavy risks structural damage (particularly to its landing gear), so manufacturers assign each model a maximum landing weight based on the sturdiness of its parts. Since planes burn fuel and get lighter as they fly, most are designed to carry much less weight at landing than take-off. A 747 that's fully gassed up for a long trip might burn through hundreds of thousands of pounds of jet fuel before it landed.

If the 747 were forced to land well ahead of schedule, it would be far too heavy for a safe touchdown. An overweight plane probably won't break apart when it hits the ground, but it may become unsafe for future flights. Airline mechanics would have to give it a thorough inspection, perhaps even dismantling parts of the plane, before allowing it to fly again. These hassles can be avoided, though, if the pilot just flips on the dumping system.

Dumped fuel flows out behind the plane like a contrail, and then most of it evaporates before it reaches the ground. Exactly how much of the fuel plume evaporates depends on several factors, including altitude, air temperature, and dumping pressure. In general, at least half of the fuel—and sometimes more than 99 percent of it—will dissipate. Fuel dumped from a high altitude in warm weather disperses best.

The Federal Aviation Administration's dumping policy prescribes a minimum altitude for dumping, and a five-mile separation from other aircraft. Air traffic controllers try to direct dumping planes away from populated areas and toward large bodies of water. (Experts guess that more than 15 million pounds of jettisoned fuel rained down into the oceans from civilian and military aircraft during the 1990s.)

Next question?

Explainer thanks Al Dickinson of the University of Southern California and Cass Howell of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

 

 

moneybox
Frist's Real HCA Scandal
It's how he and his party have helped ruin the family business.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005, at 1:32 PM PT

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's 2008 presidential campaign has gotten off to a rocky start, what with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a U.S. attorney investigating whether Frist ordered the sale of his shares in HCA, the hospital company his family founded, because he knew the stock was about to plummet.

Frist welcomes the investigation, and he's probably correct that he will be cleared of wrongdoing. Sure, his blind (or perhaps seeing-eye) trust sold shares in the company ahead of a disappointing earnings report in July. But a shrewd investor (or broker) didn't need a personal tip from a company official to dump HCA in May and June. You could just look at sales by HCA executives—widely available to the public through SEC filings and on free services like Yahoo! finance—to see how company insiders were trying to get out before a crash.

The real story about Frist and HCA is just how little he has done to help his family company. As Senate leader, he has done nothing to address the health-insurance problems that have caused HCA's stock to plummet. Republican policies have been troublesome for many health-care businesses, but they have been particularly devastating to HCA.

Here's why. HCA and other large hospital companies face a serious problem. They can't refuse to serve customers who show up at emergency rooms, even those who lack insurance. As a result, they wind up giving away or writing off a significant chunk of the services they provide. In the disappointing second quarter, between charity care, bad debts, and special discounts extended to the uninsured, HCA essentially gave away $1 billion in services, about 15 percent of its revenues.

Even with several consecutive years of economic and job growth, uninsured patients—or underinsured patients who prove unable to pay their bills—have continued to flood into HCA's hospitals. Between 2000 and 2004, the company's provision for doubtful accounts more than doubled, rising from $1.255 billion, or 7.5 percent of revenues, to $2.7 billion, or 11.4 percent or revenues in 2004. This year is looking no better. In the first quarter of 2005, uninsured emergency-room admissions were up more than 15 percent. In the second quarter of 2005, provisions for doubtful accounts ate up an even higher proportion of revenues than they did in 2004: 11.6 percent. Meanwhile, in the second quarter of 2005, the company provided $275 million in charity care, up 18.5 percent from the second quarter of 2004.

How is it that, in the midst of the purported Bush Boom, HCA each quarter has to write off a huge—and growing—chunk of its potential revenues? Long-standing macro politico-economic trends, including the increasing divorce of work and health benefits and the government's disinterest in the problem, are to blame. Four years of economic growth—the brief recession ended in the fall of 2001—simply haven't made a meaningful dent in the number of the uninsured. According to the Census Bureau, the number of Americans without health insurance rose from 45 million in 2003 to 45.8 million in 2004, holding steady at 15.7 percent of the population. Plenty of jobs may have been created in 2004. But increasingly, American jobs don't come with health-care benefits. The percentage of Americans whose health care was covered by employers fell from 60.4 percent in 2004 to 59.8 percent. (Thanks, Wal-Mart!)

These national trends have disproportionately affected HCA because of its Southern strategy. Founded and based in Tennessee, HCA has sought growth by expanding into rapidly developing, union-hostile, business-friendly (and poor) Southern states. The company's fact sheet says it has 190 hospitals and 91 outpatient centers in 23 states, England, and Switzerland. But check out the facility location map (here's an interactive one). It looks like something you'd find on Karl Rove's laptop. Operations are concentrated in Florida, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, Virginia, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Colorado. The only outpost in the northeast is in New Hampshire. By my count, only 15 of HCA's 281 facilities are in states that voted for John Kerry in 2004.

HCA is drawn to states in the old Confederacy and Sun Belt, such as Texas and Florida, for the same reasons that Republicans have focused so much attention on them. Employment and population are growing more rapidly there than in the congested, competitive Northeast and Rust Belt. And in theory, states in which Republicans predominate should be good for business—lower taxes, less regulation, and so on. This is true—except if you're in the business of providing health care. The regions and states in which HCA has chosen to set up shop are noteworthy for their lack of businesses that provide health care to workers. As Figure 5 in the Census report shows, the regional uninsured rates break down as follows: South, 18.3 percent; West, 17.4 percent; Midwest, 11.9 percent; and Northeast, 13.2 percent. As this Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report shows (see Figure 5 on Page 10), of the six states with the worst record on insuring the employed—Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Montana, and Oklahoma—four are big HCA states.

If Bill Frist were really interested in his portfolio and the long-term fortunes of HCA, he wouldn't be messing around with blind trusts. Instead, he might propose a national debate on what companies and the government can do to increase the proportion of the population that has insurance. Or he might start to echo the thinly veiled call for some form of national health care that HCA CEO Jack Bovender has been making in recent years. Or, as Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman has been doing, Frist might raise questions about his beloved institution's Southern strategy.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126984/

 

the dismal science
The Grip of Gas
Why you'll pay through the nose to keep driving.
By Austan Goolsbee
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005, at 9:54 AM PT

President Bush called on Americans to drive less yesterday in response to the "disruption" caused by the Gulf of Mexico hurricanes. Will they? High fuel prices make the question a natural one. Conservation advocates, along with policy-makers and the press, have been grasping for evidence that the answer is yes. Here's what they've collected so far: Toyota's announcement that Hurricane Katrina boosted demand for hybrids, the D.C. Metro's strong ridership last month, and a report of large SUVs sitting unsold on a car lot in Texas. Unfortunately, the economics suggests a pretty clear answer to what this adds up to: not much.

In repeated studies of consumer purchases over the years in the developed world, drivers in the United States consistently rank as the least sensitive to changes in gas prices. Even when gas gets expensive, we just keep on truckin'. The latest estimates, based on a comprehensive study released in 2002, predict that if prices rose from $3 per gallon to $4 per gallon and stayed there for a year (far greater and longer than the impact of Katrina), purchases of gasoline in the United States would fall only about 5 percent.

Why don't we ratchet down more when fuel prices go up? The rule of thumb in economics is that people react to price increases only when they can turn to substitutes. Raise the price of Ford trucks and sales go way down because you can buy your truck from Chrysler or GM or Toyota instead. Raise the price of gasoline and what are the alternatives? As a New York Times article pointed out on Sunday, people can't change the type of fuel they put in their cars, and they can't stop going to work. They might take one less driving vacation or check their tire pressure more often when they fill up. But that hardly makes a dent in the total numbers.

Gasoline purchases are, in fact, the kind of buying affected least by price changes because they are so closely tied up with other things we already own. When you buy a $1,000 digital camcorder that uses a specific brand of tape, you lock yourself in. If the cartridges get expensive, you have to eat the increased cost until you buy a new camcorder. Gasoline follows the same pattern. In the last two decades when gasoline was cheap, Americans switched from cars to minivans and SUVs, seriously reducing their gas mileage. Also, many moved farther from their places of work­, to suburbs and then ex-urbs. In the 1990s, the average commute time rose about 15 percent, and the share of people commuting alone rose dramatically to more than three out of every four American workers, according to the 2000 census. As jobs moved out of central cities and into suburbs, car-pooling became more difficult and public transportation often unavailable. Less than 5 percent of the population regularly uses public transportation to get to work now (and even that number includes people taking taxis). In Europe and Japan, people drive less when the cost of gas goes up because they still can. On average, they live closer to their jobs. About 20 percent of Europeans walk or ride their bike to work (more than five times the share in the United States).

Practically speaking, the only hope of changing America's driving habits is a hefty price increase that lasts. For, oh, five years. The data show that after that long, even the response of American drivers to higher prices can be pretty sizable. Five years gives people the time to come up with substitutes. Higher commuting costs over that many years could induce you to buy a smaller car, move closer to work, find a car pool for your kids. Of course, that's why Hurricane Katrina is not likely to have a lasting impact on gasoline use. It's a big blip, but only a transitory one. Which means it's exactly what consumers don't change their behavior for.

Think about the choice between the hybrid and gasoline versions of the Toyota Highlander SUV. At the moment, the hybrid costs about $9,000 more. Optimistically it could double your gas mileage from 17 to 34 miles per gallon (if you only drove in the city, say). A family driving the average of 12,000 miles per year would use about 29 fewer gallons per month with the hybrid. Even if the hurricane drove the price of gas to $5 a gallon for three months, the hybrid would only save them about $441 total over that time. The savings just don't add up in the short or medium run. For the average family to justify the hybrid at its current price based on fuel savings, gas prices would have to stay at $5 per gallon for several years. Or, if prices stay where they are, the savings would eventually add up if you kept driving your hybrid for a few decades.

With time horizons like this, it's no wonder that few people change their behavior when gas prices spike temporarily. Even the oil crisis of 1979, the biggest ever, did not have much lasting impact on America's intensive use of energy. Within five years, prices had fallen dramatically and people took off their Jimmy Carter cardigans and went back to their energy-happy ways. One of the oldest lessons economists have for thinking about what changes consumer demand is that moral exhortation doesn't change people's behavior. Prices do. Except that for a commodity like gasoline, even prices don't do an impressive job.

Austan Goolsbee is an economics professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126981/

surfergirl
Smell the History
ABC's Commander in Chief is cheesy good fun.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005, at 9:50 AM PT

Commander in Chief (premiering tonight at 9 p.m. ET on ABC) is The West Wing with extra cheese. Rather than a hardheaded, ripped-from-the-headlines political drama, it's a political fantasy that takes place in a Beltway Neverland, where bipartisanship becomes tripartisanship and the fate of the free world is decided by an ill-placed sexist jibe. It's less a vision of what a real female presidency might be like than an extended allegory about gender politics in the workplace. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Geena Davis is Mackenzie "Mac" Allen, an Independent vice president on a Republican ticket (my internal logic meter is going berserk already) who's forced to step up to the plate when the president, Teddy Roosevelt Bridges, suffers a fatal brain aneurysm. Everyone, including the dying president himself, encourages Mac to resign, insisting that her place on the ticket was purely symbolic in the first place and that the country needs a leader who can carry out the incumbent's conservative mandate.

The show's real casting coup was landing Donald Sutherland for the role of Nathan Templeton, the right-wing speaker of the House who's dead set against Allen's presidency, not least because the chain of command would put him next in line for the office. Mac's resignation speech is already written when a heated tête-à-tête with Templeton changes her mind. "People who don't want power have no idea how to use it," he sneers before questioning her seriousness as a potential leader: "You know your vice-presidency was never, ever intended to be a presidency. It was a stunt, pure theater." Sutherland is magnificently reptilian, and his too-few moments onscreen with Davis crackle and hiss with potential energy. When he whispers, "I'm right behind you" in Davis' ear after her first speech to Congress as president, it comes out as equal parts reassurance and threat.

Much domestic comedy is wrung from the emasculation of Mac's husband Rod Calloway (Kyle Secor), who served as her chief of staff in her Veep days but has now been demoted to "first lady" status (there's not even any discussion of how to adjust the nomenclature for a male occupant of the office). His officious social secretary shows him into his new, very pink office and introduces him to the White House chef, all the while getting in digs at Hillary Clinton ("Mrs. Clinton had a staff of 20," she clucks. "That didn't go over very well"). It's unclear where the satire is being aimed—at Hillary's outsized ambition or at the traditional concept of first ladydom that she ignored at her peril. This ambivalence (like President Allen's Independent Party affiliation) keeps the political investment of Commander in Chief nicely off-balance. However feminist the show may be, it's no amicus brief filed on Hillary's behalf.

Mac's decision to assume office is also complicated by the demands of her three children: Her youngest daughter, Amy (Jasmine Anthony), spills cranberry juice on her mother's blouse on the way to Mac's first big speech as president. The other two are teenage twins: Becca (Caitlin Wachs), a budding Republican who'd rather see Pat Buchanan in office than her mother, and Horace (Jack Lanter), a jock who annoys his sister by supporting his mother's decision. "You be John-John," she tells him condescendingly. "I'll be Patti Davis."

In addition to mollifying the former president's loyal chief of staff (Harry Lennix) and attempting to hold together his disgruntled Cabinet, President Allen is also given a studiedly benign international human-rights crisis to solve: a Nigerian woman, set to be executed for adultery, is saved in a last-minute helicopter rescue (hmmm … innocent women being stoned to death while holding their babies? Personally, I'm against it).

But the show takes plenty of time out for apolitical gal talk, including a dish session between Mac and the former first lady: "If Moses had been a woman leading the Jews in the desert," opines the president's widow, "She'd have stopped and asked for directions. They'd have been in Israel in a week." As Allen's idealistic chief of staff exults to her slightly more skeptical speechwriter, "A female president. Can't you smell the history?"

I can, and it smells kind of cheesy. Another helping, please.

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126991/

recycled
Demi and Ashton Marry
What will it do for their careers?
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005, at 9:25 AM PT

Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher married last Saturday, in a private Kabbalah ceremony at their Beverly Hills home. The happy news may chagrin the cynics who thought their romance was a media stunt from the get-go, but ought the newlyweds worry that their honeymoon will mark the end of all the great publicity? In 2003, Demi-Ashton skeptic David Plotz weighed in on their then-rumored relationship with a short history of celebrity dating and a how-to guide for the career-focused Hollywood player. He advised against taking vows: "It is generally considered a bad career move to allow celebrity dating to progress to marriage. When a sexy actor marries, it dims his hot image. When a sexy actress marries, it's even worse. The story gets boring for the public."

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126989/

 

medical examiner
Drug Secrets
What the FDA isn't telling.
By Jeanne Lenzer
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005, at 3:38 AM PT

Traci Johnson's body was discovered on Feb. 7, 2004, hanging by a scarf from a shower rod in an Indianapolis laboratory run by the drug company Eli Lilly. The 19-year-old college student had been serving as a test subject in a clinical trial of the experimental antidepressant duloxetine. Investigators from the Food and Drug Administration rushed to Indianapolis to determine whether the experimental drug was related to her death. The probe was inconclusive.

This left researchers in a quandary: Was the drug safe or not? Could duloxetine trigger suicide, as some experts suggested? Or was Johnson's death an "isolated tragedy," as Eli Lilly claimed? When drug manufacturers fail to publish negative study results, as studies show is often the case, the best source of information about these questions is the FDA. The agency—which was rocked last week by the sudden resignation of Commissioner Lester Crawford—requires companies seeking approval for a drug to provide data from randomized controlled trials, studies in which some patients are given the drug and others are given a placebo. But when researchers and the press started asking about duloxetine, the FDA didn't scour its database and go public. It kept quiet.

The FDA gave a legal rationale for its silence: Some clinical trial data are considered "trade secrets," or commercially protected information, and thus are exempted from release under the Freedom of Information Act. Since the FDA doesn't routinely perform comprehensive reviews of drugs once they are on the market, when uncommon but deadly side effects tend to be picked up, independent researchers are often the only hope of catching such flaws. But the trade-secrets rule can leave researchers in the dark about the most worrisome data—negative results that support a failed application to market a drug.

The argument for secrecy is that failed efforts at drug development need protection lest entrepreneurs suffer a competitive disadvantage when other companies aren't forced to expend the same time and money exploring dead ends. And at first blush, there would appear to be little need for clinical data on a drug that isn't in use. The problem is that many drugs have multiple uses. Duloxetine, for example, is marketed under the brand name Cymbalta to treat depression. Traci Johnson committed suicide while taking duloxetine during tests for selling the drug to treat stress urinary incontence, under the brand name Yentreve. If a drug is on the market for one use and studies about another use suggest disquieting risks—as the death of Traci Johnson may—do the benefits of keeping the study data secret outweigh the costs?

The FDA approved Cymbalta to treat depression in August 2004. By the end of that year, Cymbalta sales topped $61.3 million. At some point—the date is undisclosed—Eli Lilly began testing Yentreve. In January 2005, as Cymbalta sales climbed to $106.8 million for the first quarter, Lilly announced that it was withdrawing its application for Yentreve. Then it cited the trade-secret rule in refusing to disclose why the drug did not win approval. Perhaps the rationale was harmless—the drug didn't work for incontinence. But duloxetine has been approved as a treatment for incontinence in Europe since August 2004.

Over four months beginning in January, I filed several Freedom of Information Act requests on behalf of the Independent on Sunday, a British newspaper, for all safety data related to Cymbalta and Yentreve. I received a database that included 41 deaths and 13 suicides among patients taking Cymbalta. Missing from the database was any record of Johnson, or at least four other volunteers known to have committed suicide while taking Cymbalta for depression.

When I asked the about the missing results, FDA officials cited a federal regulation that they said prohibited the agency from releasing study data—or acknowledging the existence of an application—for a drug that fails to win FDA approval. Since the FDA never approved Yentreve, all the data about it were off limits. The agency may have used a similar rationale in failing to release safety data about the pain reliever Bextra, which Pfizer, its manufacturer, withdrew from the market in April for fear of links to an increased rate of heart attack.

In its Web-site database, Eli Lilly initially listed no suicides and two deaths among patients enrolled in seven clinical trials of Cymbalta for depression. (Lilly's database won the company praise in a May New York Times article for being "the company that has gone furthest in disclosing results.") Today the Web site lists 10 clinical trials of Cymbalta and five of Yentreve, with one suicide and five deaths combined. Based on the dates of the trials and the circumstances of the deaths, it's clear that the Web-site numbers do not include any of the five suicides missing from the FDA database. Lilly admits that it has never made public at least two of those deaths. Lilly spokesman David Shaffer said that data was unavailable because some of the studies were still in progress. He also said that two of the suicides "took place in depression studies run by another company," and that "the decision about how and when to disclose such information rests with that company." Shaffer was referring to the Japanese firm Shionogi & Co., which partners with Lilly to market duloxetine in Japan.

Meanwhile, my sources (sorry, they're gun-shy and anonymous) were telling me that duloxetine caused suicidal tendencies in patients who took the drug for incontinence—and who were not depressed. That news was potentially explosive. In the face of questions about a link between antidepressants and suicide, industry experts have long insisted that it's depression, not the drugs used to treat it, that causes patients to kill themselves. Johnson's death appeared to call that claim into question. She entered the clinical trial as a healthy, nondepressed volunteer in order to help pay her college tuition. And she was only approved for the study after undergoing thorough medical testing to screen out depression or suicidal tendencies.

Because one patient's reaction can't prove anything one way or the other, it was critical for researchers to analyze the results of all the patients in Lilly's duloxetine studies. Instead, the FDA's interpretation of the trade-secrets rule left only the positive data from the Cymbalta trials available for review.

In June, after the Independent article, the FDA (without issuing a press release) noted on its Web site that one suicide "was reported in a Cymbalta clinical pharmacology study in a healthy female volunteer." The agency added that new data from stress urinary incontinence trials showed that middle-aged women taking duloxetine had a suicide attempt rate of 400 per 100,000 person-years, more than double the rate of about 160 per 100,000 person-years among other women of a similar age. These findings had been withheld from the public, and the researchers asking for them, for five months after the FDA had reviewed data showing the increased risk.

The FDA claims it has no choice but to resist releasing information about drugs it doesn't approve. "My hands are tied," said Dr. Robert Temple, FDA's director of medical policy. "This is something only Congress can change." That may be as much a matter of the FDA's interpretation as it is of the law, however. Experts disagree about whether congressional action or a federal court ruling is needed to make data like Johnson's death available, or whether the FDA could choose to disclose more itself.

The voluntary guidelines promoted by the drug industry, however, are not a solution. These guidelines encourage companies to list every clinical trial they initiate. Registration would be helpful. But it would not compel companies to release the data from, or even the outcomes of, their trials, as long as they companies can argue that this information is "commercially protected."

The use of trade-secret laws to conceal deaths and serious side effects linked to drugs has the obvious flaw of putting profits before public health. It also subverts the covenant between researchers and study volunteers. Subjects like Traci Johnson are told that even if they do not personally benefit from a new drug, the scientific knowledge gained from the study in which they've participated will benefit others. The volunteers should be told instead that scientists will learn about their experience only if it's good news for the drug they're helping to test.

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Stress urinary incontinence is a condition in which women leak urine with they laugh or sneeze.

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In the wake of revelations that the COX-2 inhibitor Vioxx caused a dramatic increase in heart attacks, doctors began switching patients to the pain reliever Bextra, believing it was safer. Bextra sales rose 57 percent after Vioxx was withdrawn from the market in September 2004. Dr. Peter Jüni, a senior research fellow in clinical epidemiology at the University of Berne, filed a FOIA request with the FDA for its safety data on Bextra. The FDA released a clinical trial report so heavily censored that it looks like a top-secret document. The stamp on the report reads: "28 page(s) are redacted because it [sic] contains trade secret and/or confidential information that is not disclosable."

Acting on a tip, Dr. Curt Furberg, an FDA advisory panelist, obtained unpublished safety data on Bextra from its manufacturer, Pfizer. His analysis showed that Bextra was no safer than Vioxx. After Furberg told the New York Times last November that Bextra was unsafe, the FDA removed him from its advisory panel. Furberg's study was published in the journal Circulation. In February 2005 the FDA asked Pfizer to withdraw Bextra from the market. Pfizer did so in April.

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Total known FDA database Lilly clinical trials Web site

Deaths 46 41 5

Suicides 16 11 1

Jeanne Lenzer is a freelancer whose work appears regularly in the medical journal BMJ. Her e-mail address is jeanne.lenzer@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126918/

 

dispatches
How Gotti Jr. Beat the Rap
An unbelievable courtroom upset.
By David Segal
Posted Monday, Sept. 26, 2005, at 2:10 PM PT

In the next day or two, John A. Gotti will leave the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Manhattan, utter a few words to a horde of reporters, and drive to his house in Oyster Bay, Long Island, where his mother has promised a welcome-home feast. It's a spectacle sure to gall the federal prosecutors who spent more than a year trying to convict the one-time head of the Gambino crime family of a Whitman's Sampler of felonies, including extortion, stock fraud, and the kidnapping of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.

Gotti just barely beat the rap. Last week, a jury acquitted the 41-year-old son of John "the Dapper Don" Gotti of stock fraud and hung on the remaining three counts. Only one juror stood between Gotti and guilt on racketeering conspiracy, and there was an 11-1 split on the charge that he plotted to extort construction workers. He nearly went away—or, technically, he nearly stayed away, since he's been in prison since pleading guilty to racketeering in 1999—for a very long time. The U.S. Attorney's office says it will refile the charges.

How did this happen? Even though Gotti was already locked up, we're talking about a marquee mobster here, whom the government wanted to nail. They fielded a varsity bench of turncoats, all of them eager to rat out their former capo. This was supposed to be a rout. Even Gotti's lawyers appeared stunned by the result. One of them, Jeffrey Lichtman, wept when the judge announced, the day before the verdict, that the jury said it was deadlocked.

For the government, the trouble started with those defectors. Naturally, they were a bunch of highly colorful sociopaths. One of them, the Gambino associate Andrew DiDonato, coolly recounted the bullet he fired into the head of a neighbor who had the nerve to sell his wife a car. ("I didn't want my wife taking favors from other men," he explained.) This, of course, isn't the first time that the government has relied on the testimony of miscreants to put away gangsters. As prosecutor Michael McGovern noted in his summation, people like Gotti don't plot and scheme with pillars of the community.

Unfortunately for McGovern, the defectors in this case didn't just come across as thugs—they came across as liars. As Lichtman and his partner for the trial, Marc Fernich, both noted, all of the government's witnesses were facing lengthy prison terms and had strong incentives to make up incriminating tales. The more dirt they dished, the more likely they would receive light sentences for their own crimes. On the stand, nearly all the informants admitted that they hoped to follow in the footsteps of their former colleague Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, whose testimony put Gotti the elder behind bars. In return for his candor, Gravano joined the Witness Protection Program, despite confessing to some 19 murders.

Throughout August, these "Sons of Sammy," as the defense tagged them, grudgingly acknowledged that they were bargaining for their freedom. "You want a pass on all your murders now, don't you?" Lichtman asked Frank Fappiano, who had turned out to be a fairly prolific murderer. "I would like to get that," Fappiano murmured. Several confessed that in previous cases they had lied under oath. Others admitted they had lied every day of their lives.

Worse, these guys told stories that didn't jibe with each other, especially when it came to the 1992 kidnapping of Sliwa. A former Gambino captain named Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo swore that Gotti plotted the crime with him at the Carousel Diner in Queens. Meanwhile, an ex-soldier named Joseph D'Angelo claimed that he and Gotti drafted the details in a basement in Brooklyn, at a meeting that DiLeonardo didn't attend. One of these guys lied, and the jurors noticed. The first testimony "read back" they requested were these irreconcilable accounts of Sliwa's abduction.

To further muddy the situation, Sliwa's own version of the crime couldn't be squared with that of D'Angelo, even though the government claimed D'Angelo drove the car that day. Both men agreed on the basics: that Sliwa was targeted for ranting against Gotti senior on his WABC talk radio show; that he was picked up in a taxi rigged so the doors would bolt shut; that someone wearing a mask popped up from under the front passenger seat and shot Sliwa, and that Sliwa escaped by lunging out a window. But Sliwa claimed the assailant shouted, "Take that, you son of a bitch." D'Angelo claimed the line was something like, "Give me your wallet." And that was just the beginning. There were differences about the number of shots, the angle of the shots, and on and on.

It didn't help that under cross-examination, Sliwa trimmed and hedged about matters he didn't need to trim and hedge about, like the size of his speaking fees. For months on his radio show he had billed his appearance at the Gotti trial as a showdown between Loudmouth Good and Lunkhead Evil, which are the roles these characters play in New York's tabloid arena. But what Sliwa called on the stand his gift for "theater of the mind"—all the acts and comments that generate publicity—came across as something less whimsical during his long day of testimony. When Sliwa finally wobbled out of the witness box, he seemed nuts.

Gotti's defense, by contrast, was a model of coherence. He claimed—through his lawyers, since he declined at the last minute to testify—that he'd quit the mob after his guilty plea in '99, and that he yearned for nothing more than the minivan life of a suburban dad. Yes, Gotti had done some horrible things during his tenure as a made man and boss, his lawyers said, but that was when he craved the approval of his louche and violent poppa. "Changing was not easy for John," Lichtman said of his client in his opening statement. "He would have to disappoint the only role model he ever had—his father."

The prosecution scoffed at this withdrawal argument and played pre-1999 videos in court of Gotti the younger visiting Gotti the elder in prison. Big mistake. The Dapper Don was heard demonically browbeating Junior, adding plausibility to the daddy-made-me defense. This miscue was typical of the government's strategy: They over-lawyered this case. Their rendering of Gotti would have been twice as plausible with a fraction of the evidence and half as many witnesses. And it hurt that some of those witnesses sounded more dangerous than the man on trial—altogether, they have confessed to planning or committing about 30 murders, a crime that Gotti has never been accused of.

Not that Gotti's legal troubles are behind him. He could again face trial on those hung charges, or new informants might someday bring to light now-unknown crimes. But give the man some credit. He's trying to forge a new path out of the mob—by convincing a jury he isn't a threat to society and convincing his former paisans that he isn't a threat to them. So far, weirdly enough, it's sort of working.

David Segal, a writer based in New York City, writes for the Style section of the Washington Post.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126945/

 

medical examiner
Paging Dr. Welby
The medical sins of Grey's Anatomy.
By Ingrid Katz and Alexi Wright
Posted Monday, Sept. 26, 2005, at 11:09 AM PT

Last night, on the season's first episode of Grey's Anatomy, surgical intern Meredith Grey was drafted to help a pediatric surgeon, who happens to be her boyfriend's wife, operate on a pregnant woman, who happens to have lost her husband to an affair. Genius. As doctors, though, we haven't been dreading the show's reappearance because of its silly plot twists. We have a professional beef with Grey's Anatomy: Along with House, the other hospital show on the air at the moment, it is medically far-fetched and misleading. Most of all, we dislike the show because it loses sight of the point of any medical enterprise—the patients.

It hasn't always been so. The TV medical dramas of the 1960s brought viewers to patients' bedsides and kept them there. Shows like Ben Casey and Marcus Welby, M.D., were structured around patients in part because doctors had a surprising degree of control over their TV image. However self-servingly, they nudged producers to paint a clearer, better picture of medicine than today's shows.

The American Medical Association started campaigning in the early 20^th century to redefine doctors as scientists and healers, rather than quacks and leech-bearing butchers. When the first medical dramas hit the airwaves in 1951 with the debut of City Hospital, the AMA demanded from television producers the right to revise scripts in the name of medical accuracy. The association struck deals with NBC and ABC that gave it veto rights in exchange for an AMA seal of approval to be aired at the end of each vetted show. Often the AMA wasted its time carping about decorum. On Ben Casey, male doctors were not allowed to be seen sitting on female patients' beds, driving fancy cars, or discussing dying patients casually over coffee. Nor, usually, were they allowed to make mistakes. AMA representatives were hawks for medical accuracy, ensuring that surgeons held scalpels properly. They were also careful to protect their own interests, editing out story lines that focused on medical malpractice, according to Dr. Joseph Turow, professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication and author of Playing Doctor: Television, Storytelling, and Medical Power.

The AMA also pushed to keep the focus away from physicians' personal lives. Throughout the '50s and '60s, shows like Ben Casey; Dr. Kildare; and Marcus Welby, M.D. instead spotlighted patient dilemmas that stood in for larger societal problems. On one episode in which Dr. Casey took care of a young girl beaten by her father, his show explored the ramifications of child abuse. In another, Dr. Kildare became responsible for a mentally disabled man who was the brother of a patient who had died. Patients' struggles drove the story lines. They were the complex characters while the physicians were typecast as one-dimensional superheroes, always available, ever altruistic and humble, without any problems of their own.

The AMA's reign began to crumble in the mid-'60s with the rise of a new show, The Nurses. Its producer, Herbert Brodkin, refused to hire AMA vetters, instead employing a nurse to ensure medical accuracy. The Nurses flopped. But it put an end to the AMA's hegemony. Then, in the 1970s, the new hit series M*A*S*H further altered the formula by treating doctors with utter irreverence. Set on the front lines of the Korean War, the show critiqued authority in general along with the U.S. military presence in Vietnam. Drs. "Hawkeye" Pierce and "Trapper John" McIntyre (played by Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers) were as dedicated to chasing nurses and drinking homemade hooch as they were to performing surgeries.

Over the next few decades, medical dramas continued to write scripts around physicians. Advertisers ate up shows that encouraged young professionals to watch characters they could identify with. St. Elsewhere and ER get credit for portraying decaying urban hospitals and taking on controversial story lines—St. Elsewhere was the first prime-time drama to feature an AIDS patient; ER was the first to show a lesbian doctor. But the shows filtered every experience through the eyes of a doctor or nurse. Unlike their godlike predecessors, the physicians on these series were pathetically human, battling drug addictions, health problems, and bad relationships.

Grey's Anatomy is an extreme of this genre. In last season's premiere, blond and attractive Meredith Grey oversleeps on the first day of her surgical residency after a one-night stand with a stranger—who later turns out to be her boss. As the show unfolds throughout the season, the two struggle to stay apart, soap-opera style. Meanwhile, Grey and her fellow interns suffer through the humiliations of residency, from an abusive chief nicknamed "the Nazi" to a hospital-wide syphilis epidemic started by a surgical intern.

Many moments would make the old-time AMA vetters cringe. Instead of asexual father figures, the doctors on cast are hyper-hormonal. Attendings sleep with residents. Interns bed nurses. Even patients are fair game. On one episode, Grey kisses an injured biker brought in to the hospital after an accident involving spokes sticking out of his abdomen. Normally, any of these infractions would be grounds for dismissal. At Grey's hospital, they're all in a day's work.

These breaches, however, are minor. What matters are the glaring inaccuracies in complicated and delicate areas of medicine. In one egregious episode, the character played by Sandra Oh, Cristina Yang, asks a woman to donate her husband's organs after he dies unexpectedly. Yang botches the job, dispassionately asking for the husband's eyes and skin as if they were no more than items on a grocery list. Then she runs out of the room as the wife begins to cry.

The scene is rife with errors that could damage public perception of organ donation, starting with the premise: Yang is angling for the husband's organs because another patient (who also happens to be a close friend of the chief of surgery) is dying from liver failure and will be saved if the wife agrees. In real life, hospitals go to great lengths to prevent exactly these types of conflicts of interest, barring doctors from approaching patients directly and designating statewide organizations instead of individual hospitals to distribute organs. Maybe we're just two overeducated doctors who take television too seriously, but we worry that this plot line could have done real harm by discouraging people from donating.

In another episode, two of the characters experiment on a patient, performing an illegal autopsy against a family's wishes. On the show, the characters are forgiven, instead of arrested, because they discover the patient had a rare genetic disease (which Oh blithely mispronounces). But as doctors, we could not forgive the producers for their superficial all's-well ending. Since the Tuskegee tragedy, doctors have instilled institutional checks to ensure that clinical research is ethical. Still, many patients avoid doctors because they are afraid of being experimented on. The autopsy on Grey's Anatomy's casually corroborated their worst fears.

Watching these episodes makes us long, in spite of ourselves, for the days when the AMA had television producers on a tight leash. Don't get us wrong: We don't miss Dr. Welby's starched white coat. But we are afraid that TV's worst inaccuracies may compromise what trust remains between doctors and patients.

A few months ago, one of our patients left the hospital emergency room before getting treated because he did not want to miss a Grey's Anatomy episode. As he signed out against his doctors' advice, he reminded us that medical shows are sometimes better than patient realities. Maybe so. But the patients are what real doctoring is all about.

Ingrid Katz and Alexi Wright are medical residents at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and clinical fellows in medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126916/

 webhead
How To Monkey With the Web
The software that lets you rewrite your favorite sites.
By Paul Boutin
Posted Monday, Sept. 26, 2005, at 10:05 AM PT

I can't go a day without checking Boing Boing, the quirky blog that throws vintage art, live posts from hurricane zones, and Japanese robots onto the same page. The problem is that I work in an open office where everyone can see my screen, and Boing Boing's home page is festooned with scantily clad T-shirt models and ads for soft-core porn sites. Wouldn't it be great if I could turn those ads off at the office?

Thanks to a piece of software called Greasemonkey, I can do that and lots more. Greasemonkey, a plug-in for the Firefox browser, allows you to run "user scripts"—Javascript programs that tweak other people's Web pages after you've loaded them. (In theory you could pull this same stunt with Internet Explorer, but no one's offered the software yet.) Most commercial sites already have Javascript programs nested inside that turn menus on and off or respond when you press a button. Google Maps is a great example—it's more program than page.

Greasemonkey lets you play Web designer. Instead of settling for a site's out-of-the-box appearance and functionality, you can stuff in your own Javascript apps. User scripts can rearrange or remove images, add links and buttons, even mix content from multiple Web sites onto the same page. Greasemonkey doesn't mess with the entire Internet. The software waits until a page is downloaded to your local machine, then modifies it on your screen only—when I hide Boing Boing's cheesecake, the girlie pics are still there for every other Web surfer.

Don't worry, you don't have to write the scripts yourself. Gung-ho Greasemonkey acolytes have already written a few thousand mini-applications that, for example, add competitors' prices to Amazon's book pages, install extra buttons on Google, and increase the security of Yahoo! Mail sessions. All of this is a shocking reminder that Web pages aren't static. Talk of the spread of "remix culture" has become standard fare—we TiVo past commercials, burn mix CDs, and make Bush and Blair lip-sync to "Endless Love." But site designers have somehow convinced us that their pages are as immutable as a glossy brochure. Greasemonkey resurrects the Web's original spec: Page layouts are just suggestions, people. Everything is remixable.

When I wrote about Greasemonkey for Wired recently, I argued that this simple program had the potential to mess with the business models of e-commerce sites. Many user scripts undo copyright protection, remove ads and sponsored links, or end-run registration pages. The experts I interviewed predicted a cops-and-robbers battle between site owners and script hackers. Greasemonkey might make the Net a better-designed place; it might just rob online vendors of their revenue.

(You might've heard that Greasemonkey will also make the net a less secure place. Reports that the software has a massive security hole are out of date, though. That bug, which was never exploited, got patched within days back in July. That's not a 100-percent security guarantee, but be aware that Firefox has yet to see the kind of real attacks that barraged Internet Explorer last year.)

Readers e-mailed to say all of this would be really interesting—if only they could get the damn thing to work on their computer. Indeed, Greasemonkey's makers stunted its superpowers with a standard geek blunder: There aren't any installation instructions.

That's easy to fix. It takes five minutes to get Greasemonkey up and running, and you won't have to close this page to do it. To see my step-by-step instructions, click here.

Once you have Greasemonkey installed, you're ready to take a tour of the Web as customized by its users. The best place to start is Userscripts.org, a repository of 1,800 mini-applications that address a laundry list of gripes. Install the BoingBoing Butler, and—voilà!—Boing Boing's ad-laden sidebars appear briefly, then wink out of existence. The middle strip of stories widens to fill the empty space.

Userscripts.org also includes applications that let you fix CNN's buggy video links and eBay's feedback pages, which (until now) didn't let you hide all the positive posts and show just the complaints. You can add Internet Movie Database ratings to Netflix movie pages, or Blockbuster links to IMDb. Ad-remover scripts are popular, but the cooler ones clean up awkward sites or add obvious features that the designer left out. There are dozens of scripts just for Google. One Gmail widget puts a Delete button right where Sergey and Larry left it out. Another adds a history of your recent searches whenever you revisit the site.

After spending a weekend looking for the most striking example of Greasemonkey's power, I gave top honors to two scripts. (And an honorable mention to this goofy but eye-opening script that turns Boing Boing into an interactive quiz by replacing the author bylines with multiple-choice popup menus.)

Magic Line crawls every page you visit and creates a searchable history of links and RSS feeds you might have missed. Hold down Ctrl-Shift-L and a semitransparent search pane appears atop your browser window. I typed "New Orleans" and found a blog entry from the storm zone that I'd overlooked while speed-surfing.

The other winning script overhauls the Library of Congress' American Memory photo collection, a valuable archive hobbled by HTML pages straight out of 1995. Install the American Memory Fixer and the exhibit gets a makeover: tidy white pages with new fonts, a smarter layout, and large photos rather than thumbnails. It's more than a modification—it's a renovation.

These demos inspired me to write my own user script to streamline the site I've been working for into a lightweight search page. After an hour of fruitless keyboard-pounding, I realized the guys who wrote Magic Line and American Memory Fixer spend a lot more time on this than I do.

That's the limitation that threatens Greasemonkey's potential: Unless you're a natural programmer, you'll just have to hope some hacker shares your annoyance with, say, Slate's front page. So far the distribution of scripts is twofold—they're either for superpopular sites like CNN or programmer's hangouts like Slashdot, with a few niche favorites thrown in. (I haven't found a single script for Slate yet.) You also better hope the guy who programmed your script knows what he's doing. Buyer beware, because not all Greasemonkey scripts work flawlessly: My editor installed one that promised to trim the ads on IMDb, but it erased his whole page instead. (A script that doesn't work as advertised is annoying but won't cause any permanent damage—it's easy enough just to turn it off).

Greasemonkey recalls the giddy fun of when browsers first came out a dozen years ago. It also suffers from the same problem that hamstrung the Web before the arrival of easy-to-use site-building tools. Only a tech-savvy elite knows enough to play with it. The rest of us are still consumers. What we need is a Greasemonkey Remix Tool, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor that lets us redesign other people's Web pages on-screen, then spits out a script to make it happen. Something this powerful is too good to let the hackers have all to themselves.

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Greasemonkey Installation Instructions

First, download and install Firefox. When you're done, launch Firefox and open the Greasemonkey download page. Click on "Install Greasemonkey 0.5.3," or whatever the latest version happens to be. A bar will appear at the top of the page: "To protect your computer, Firefox prevented this site (greasemonkey.mozdev.org) from installing software on your computer." This is where it gets confusing, but hang in there. Click "Edit Options …" and when a dialogue box pops up, click "Allow" and then "OK." Now click the link to "Install Greasemonkey 0.5.3" one more time. If nothing happens, click it again. Eventually you'll get a pop-up dialogue box. Click "Install Now."

Once Greasemonkey is installed, quit Firefox and start it again. You should see a smiling Paul Frank-like monkey face on the lower right corner of the browser. Congratulations, you've got Greasemonkey!

Now, go to userscripts.org and search for scripts associated with your favorite sites. Start with the script I described at the top of this piece: BoingBoing Butler. In the upper right corner of the page, you'll see an "Install this Script" link. Click on it—you should see a page of source code gibberish. Now, go to Firefox's Tools menu and select "Install This User Script." Click OK, and you're done. Now go to Boing Boing and see the fantastic results for yourself.

To disable a particular script, go back to Firefox's Tools menu and click "Manage User Scripts." To turn off Greasemonkey completely, click on the monkey icon. He'll turn grey and put on a frowny face until you click him again.

Paul Boutin is a Silicon Valley writer who spent 15 years as a software engineer and manager.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126908/

 

 

culturebox
Joss Whedon
Why he should stick to television.
By Seth Stevenson
Posted Friday, Sept. 30, 2005, at 8:23 AM PT

My girlfriend was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer addict. Later, she was an Angel addict. As these weird, one-hour vampire dramas packed our TiVo and filled our TV screen, I had little choice but to watch them. And slowly, to my own surprise, I began to see that their creator, Joss Whedon, had a geeky sort of auteur charm. I wasn't headed to Comic-Con in a "Joss Whedon Is My Master Now" T-shirt. But when Whedon launched a new TV series called Firefly, in 2002, I tuned in from the start. I was genuinely disappointed when it was canceled after half a season.

Now Whedon has written and directed Serenity, a feature-length film that revisits the Firefly world (and opens in theaters tonight). At an advance screening earlier this week, I found myself surrounded by "Browncoats" (that's what Firefly junkies call themselves—don't ask) who'd waited hours in line for another glimpse of their gone-too-soon Firefly friends. When, toward the end of the film, one of these beloved characters died in a sudden and violent manner, the crowd gasped loudly. This character had about four lines in the movie. But still you could feel the stunned sense of loss permeating the room.

At this point I realized: Joss Whedon should stick to television.

Whedon, who got his TV start writing for Roseanne in the late 1980s, has long said that his true ambition is to make films. But nightmarish experiences with his scripts for the original 1992 Buffy movie and for Alien Resurrection (both were butchered by inept directors) sent him trudging back to the small screen, licking his wounds. In 1997, he recreated Buffy for TV—where, despite being about vampires and dorky high-school kids, it became both a critical and popular success.

Now—with Serenity out and a version of Wonder Woman in the works—Whedon seems poised to make the leap back into features. But it's an odd move for a man who once said, "Why are the best writers in TV? Because they can control their product. They're given something resembling respect. …" (I'm quoting here from the evenhanded biography Joss Whedon: The Genius Behind Buffy.) Perhaps Whedon figures he now has the clout to control a movie set. But I think his skills—imagining every nook and cranny of an intricate fictional universe; conjuring an ensemble of nuanced characters with complex, long-running relationships—are actually far better suited to television. When he's got a TV show humming, Joss Whedon, bless his pasty, dough-faced soul, is the most gifted serial storyteller alive.

Whedon has some sort of preternatural feel for TV-making. When you listen to his DVD commentaries, you hear him effortlessly cataloging the narrative devices at work, the shortcut gimmicks that establish character and advance a plot, the genealogy of the jokes. He explains that a kindly, pure-hearted character can serve as the audience's guidepost—whenever she speaks up, we know she's speaking truths. Want to make a villain scary? Show the toughest character getting a little freaked out. It's like these rules are in Whedon's DNA. And they may well be: As his IMDb biography notes, Whedon is perhaps "the world's first third-generation television writer." His father wrote for Alice and Benson, while his grandfather wrote for Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show.

Of course, a tried-and-true TV-making toolbox by no means ensures a quality show (quite the opposite, much of the time). But Whedon is so efficient with his plotting that each new twist develops the drama and the characters. When Buffy loses her virginity to her boyfriend Angel, he loses his soul and turns evil. Many have noted that this is a clever metaphor for teenage sex. But it also sidesteps a classic narrative pitfall: the Sam-and-Diane problem, wherein the romantic leads finally get together … and the show loses all its tension. Whedon skips this slack phase by immediately transforming Angel into an archenemy who must be killed. At the same time, Buffy's character matures, a new villain is introduced, the saga churns on, and the audience is rapt. In a later season, when Buffy's mom dies, the most poignant moments come as Anya—an ex-demon from another dimension—attempts to make sense of human grief. The point, of course, is that humans on the show can't make sense of it either. The melodramatic sci-fi plots serve to lend the characters greater depth (as opposed to a show like Lost, in which the characters exist to advance the plot). And remember: He's doing this with demons!

Whedon has killed off his shows' major characters, then resurrected them—repeatedly. He turned Buffy's friend Willow gay, then made her into a murderous hellion, then turned her sweet and good again. But even as Buffy's plots whirligigged around, the characters remained self-aware, and the banter remained off-handed and cute. For me Buffy's greatest appeal always lay in its use of language. The show created its own slangy patois—or at least did a stellar job of instantly adapting new teen lingo. (There is in fact an entire academic treatise on Buffy-speak.) Strange constructions were invented. Parts of speech popped up in novel contexts. "[Quirky adjective] much?"; "Don't get all [infrequently used noun]-y on me, Mr. [run-on sentence describing recent actions of the person being addressed]"; "It's a [blank]-a-palooza!" Besides being funny, the dialogue made the characters seem authentic: They feel like a real group of pals who've crafted their own, organic dialect. And you feel you're watching a reasonable approximation of what might happen were your own friends to fight vampires.

Of course, you can fit stunning plot twists and brilliant dialogue within the confines of a 100-minute movie. But it's not the same. Take that character who dies in Serenity. Had Firefly lived on as a TV series, Whedon would have invested the character with foibles and hidden strengths. Our bond with the character would have had ample time to develop as we watched countless informal, telling moments. Then the character might have been killed in Season 3—only after this loss would be certain to stomp the heart of any die-hard viewer. Later, Whedon might bring the character back to life. Then make the character gay.

It all adds up to a richer relationship than can be had with even the most carefully drawn movie protagonists. The way characters can accrue definition over time, the opportunity to draw on a long back story of events—this is TV's powerful and innate advantage. It's the advantage of all serial narratives. Ask comic book fans (Whedon's one of them). Ask Charles Dickens.

Or, ask the new generation of TV auteurs that's been exploding the medium's limits and lending it some long-missing gravitas. Shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, and the Sorkin-era West Wing have elevated the form. Perhaps Whedon, steeped in TV all his life, takes it for granted. There's no doubt that film has traditionally been considered the higher art. But the line is blurring fast. Whedon is bailing out just as TV finally gets the respect it deserves.

I'm sure when Whedon makes the Wonder Woman movie he'll do a fine job. He's a gifted guy, he throws all his talents into everything he does, and his script-doctoring work on Speed and Toy Story proves he has excellent screenwriting chops. Still, I'd much rather he pitch some new show to HBO. Don't get all silver-screen-y on me, Mr. I've Got a Fetish for Teenage Girls Who Know Karate. I eagerly await your return to my living room.

Seth Stevenson is a frequent contributor to Slate.

 

politics
Free-Falling?
How much trouble is the GOP really in?
By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005, at 3:41 PM PT

With Tom DeLay's indictment, conventional wisdom has coalesced around the notion that the Republican Party is deeply damaged. This is, no doubt, a gloomy moment to be a member of the GOP. As one veteran Republican strategist outside Washington asked me, "Is this what it feels like to be in free-fall?" Perhaps. The plunge may continue—but a parachute may open. Here's how both sides see it …

The Good News (if you worry about the polar ice cap melting, support Planned Parenthood, or have a Hillary 2008 bumper sticker on your car):

The Republican Party is a national disgrace. Sure, off-year elections tend to be about local candidates and issues, but sometimes they aren't. Remember the 1994 election? Democrats certainly hope you do. Only 32 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction. Only 29 percent approve of the job the Republican-controlled Congress is doing, its lowest approval rating in eight years, and 40 percent approve of the Republican president. Democrats will try to run against that broad dissatisfaction with the majority, twining charges of incompetence with corruption and arrogance of power. News of DeLay's indictment and investigations into Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist fall nicely into this line of attack. The perception of GOP vulnerability makes it easier for Democrats to raise money and recruit candidates.

Sir, the prosecutor is on line two. Open-ended investigations give Democrats ammunition for their narrative and offer little resolution. Tom DeLay needs his trial to start as soon as possible. He says the charges against him are trumped up, but unless and until a jury agrees or a judge pitches them, the public will be suspicious of him. Bill Frist will also have to suffer the drip, drip, drip of scandal without the possibility of definitive exoneration. The investigation into indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff has already ensnared the head of Bush's office of procurement, David Safavian, and seems likely to contaminate more in the party, if not the administration itself.

The big question of the fall is how will the investigation into the leaking of an undercover CIA agent be resolved? What has prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald been up to? He interviewed the president and vice president and helped put a journalist in jail. Such bold moves suggest he's not going to come up empty-handed—which is bad news for President Bush and the Republicans. Maybe nothing criminal was done, but when the report does come out, George Bush is going to have to reckon with his adviser Karl Rove's role. Rove said he wasn't involved. He was. Will the president hold Rove to the exacting ethical standards he set when campaigning for the office or set a new standard?

I keep turning the wheel but nothing happens. Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction and there's not much Republicans can do about it. The president has admitted this when it comes to lowering gas prices. Bush's latest gambit was to hint at conservation, but no one seems ready to do that, especially without an ounce of sacrifice from Bush himself. Iraq and government spending are essentially out of control.

I am proud to nominate … Bush elided the basic split in his party with the nomination of John Roberts, but that trick will be hard to pull off twice. If President Bush nominates a fiery conservative to fill Sandra Day O'Connor's slot on the Supreme Court, he could cement the impression that the far right controls the GOP. Moderate Republicans could bolt, and Republicans would lose the country for being too ideological and ineffective. Or, if he picks a moderate like Alberto Gonzalez, the right may revolt, staying at home for the off-year election.

The Good News (if you use the term "death tax," support embryo adoption, or think Bill Frist is just dreamy):

I thought we just had an election. It's 13 months until the midterm elections. That's an eternity in politics. Eleven months ago the Republicans, now considered shot-with-rot, were judged to be unstoppable. People aren't paying attention enough yet to buy what Democrats are trying to sell. Plus, the press loves the twists and windy narratives of campaign season. It's not much of a horse race without a challenger, and so journalists will seek out signs of a Republican comeback. Meanwhile, the troubles and fears of disaster may have given the GOP focus both in Washington and out in the country. "Everyone has broken out of their deer-in-the-headlights, self- and/or Bush flagellation mode," says one top Republican strategist. "They are sick of being on defense and want to get back on offense … getting past the hand-wringing paralysis is important."

Name the four things Democrats stand for. Go! Just because people are dissatisfied with Republicans doesn't mean that they're rushing into the warm arms of Democratic candidates. Yes, Democrats are seeing visions of 1994, but Newt Gingrich did more than just tear the face off of Democrats in leadership, he nurtured a farm team and presented a set of ideas that dovetailed with his political instinct for the jugular. Democrats have no Contract with America and have to find a Gingrich or some central figure to pitch their message.

I hate them all, but I like my guy. Incumbents win. There are not very many competitive districts. For Democrats to take control of the House, they'll have to protect their dozen or more vulnerable seats while carrying about the same amount of Republican open seats. The task in the Senate is just as daunting.

I am proud to nominate … If President Bush picks a figure who stirs the base and the Democrats overplay their hand, Republicans will get the best of both worlds. Bush will be able to take the high road, tsk-tsking Democrats who play politics, while the conservative activists who are so important to his presidency and to the party's chances in 2006 will get exercised and active. The base is already paying close attention, but a tough fight will remind them why it's important to have officials in Washington who share their values.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

jurisprudence
Pick a Chick
Why we need more women on the Supreme Court.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005, at 2:18 PM PT

A few weeks ago I suggested that race and gender should not be the only—or even the primary—filter through which we consider Supreme Court nominees. I rejected the arguments that minority candidates serve as proxies for minority views (whatever those might be), or that they create the appearance of a court that "looks like America." I was wrong. We need another woman on the Supreme Court. And while we're at it we need a few more women on the Senate judiciary committee.

Yesterday, in a speech at Wake Forest University, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined her colleague Sandra Day O'Connor and first lady Laura Bush in calling for a second woman on the high court. And while she qualified her words, her message was clear: "I would not like to be the only woman on the court," said Ginsburg. "First and foremost should be the quality of the nominee, both as a judge and as a human." But she added: "Yes, it would be nice to have another woman on the court, but not any woman." This is not the first time Ginsburg has made this point in recent days. She made similar comments last week in New York. She also offered to share her shortlist of qualified women with the president. It's rather extraordinary for a sitting justice to publicly lobby for a woman colleague. Imagine Antonin Scalia demanding that the president appoint more Catholics.

Ginsburg also included in her remarks a story about her former colleague—William H. Rehnquist—that was less than flattering. According to the Winston-Salem Journal: "When [Ginsburg] argued a case before the Supreme Court in 1978 to include women in jury duty, even Rehnquist made an off-color joke about women . … While Ginsburg was arguing about women having equal rights with men, Rehnquist asked her, 'So you can't settle for Susan B. Anthony's face on the silver dollar?' "

If I've learned anything from the Roberts hearings, it's that we feminists totally can't take a joke. Still, I wonder why both Ginsburg and O'Connor—who differ on virtually everything—feel so strongly that there should be two women on the Supreme Court that they'd use their offices to publicly urge the president to appoint one.

And I can't help but wonder if it has anything to do with the ways in which gender politics are starting to infect our discourse about the courts. Consider this commentary by Bruce Fein this week in the Washington Times: Fein lines up Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then levels potshots at them as believers in Supreme Court justices as "apostles over the law" because of their concern for John Roberts' positions on women's and civil rights. Oddly enough, Patrick Leahy, Joseph Biden, Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy, and the other male Senate Democrats who called for Roberts' views in this area are never mentioned.

Mark Steyn is positively bilious about this feminization of the Democrats in the Washington Times on Monday. Again Feinstein (and only Feinstein) is blistered for wanting to hear Roberts "talking to me as a son, a husband and a father." For which Steyn's prescription is that she "get off the Judiciary Committee and go audition for 'Return To Bridges Of Madison County,' or 'What Women Want 2' ('Mel Gibson is nominated to the Supreme Court but, despite being sensitive and a good listener, is accused of being a conservative theocrat')."

And here's George Will this week, also taking his nasty stick to Sen. Feinstein: "Dianne Feinstein's thoughts on the nomination of John G. Roberts as chief justice of the United States should be read with a soulful violin solo playing, or perhaps accompanied by the theme song of 'The Oprah Winfrey Show.' Those thoughts are about pinning one's heart on one's sleeve, sharing one's feelings and letting one's inner Oprah come out for a stroll." Will's contempt for Senate efforts to know something about the next chief justice's "temperament and values"—to understand his heart—is absolutely laser focused on the senator from California. Odd. Never a mention of Biden, Schumer, Mike DeWine, and Dick Durbin—each of whom similarly deployed the language of hearts and feelings in their questioning of Roberts.

Now, I am not come today to praise Sen. Feinstein. Her performance during those hearings probably set the women's movement back a decade. From her ingenuous "Now, I'm not a lawyer …" questions to her tendency to turn even declarative sentences into halting questions, she hardly projected the air of mastery and confidence I've seen in her in the past. I'm not sure I can sign off on her self-appointed task of representing all 145 million American women at the hearings. I can't even get behind her efforts to force a clearly private man into vomiting up mawkish personal revelations onto the hearing-room floor.

But I do wonder why it became so very easy to blast only the woman who wanted to cut through Roberts' repeated claims to be a lean, mean law-making machine. I wonder why the woman who worried about his aloofness and disconnection from poverty or suffering was singled out for derision. Is it because the stereotype of the pathetic, whiny, "but how do you feel" nag fits so much better if the asker is wearing curlers and a housecoat? Is it a cynical effort to paint all women as hysterics or merely all Democrats as women? Or is it, in the end, the consequence of having only one woman on the committee?

I'm sure it's just an accident that Fein, Steyn (weird name-coincidence or conspiracy?), and George Will each singled out only Feinstein as their judiciary committee poster-person for the strange quest-for-feeling that characterized the Roberts hearings. But it certainly evokes something Ginsburg mentioned in her remarks yesterday at Wake Forest. According to the report, she noted that "she started in law school in the 1950s—a time when law students and law practitioners were predominantly male. She said she felt pressure to excel, to break the stereotypes about women. … 'You felt like all eyes were on you. If you gave a poor answer in class, you felt like it would be viewed as indicative of all female students.' "

Imagine being judged and ridiculed as a lightweight, when—as sole representative of your gender—you feel you must defend the achievement of all women. The solution for both Ginsburg's problem and Feinstein's is simple: Give the critics more targets. Load up the courts and Congress with enough women, and then maybe blaming them for being women in the first place will stop sounding like a legitimate critique.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127103/

movies
The Truman Show
Philip Seymour Hoffman's brilliant Capote.
By David Edelstein
Posted Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005, at 2:18 PM PT

Janet Malcolm's brilliant The Journalist and the Murderer opens with the provocative and, I think, madly overheated assertion that, "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he does is morally indefensible." This idea of the journalist's inevitable betrayal of his or her subject is at the heart of the new film Capote (Sony Pictures Classics), which tells the story-behind-the-story of the writing of In Cold Blood. As directed by Bennett Miller and written by Dan Futterman (who cites Malcolm's work in interviews), the grim story of Truman Capote and his seminal nonfiction masterpiece becomes a tale of duplicity and self-loathing—of the loss of a writer's soul and the beginning of the end of his artistry.

The title character, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is the droll dandy that many of us recall from Capote's TV appearances in the '60s and '70s: a pudgy Southerner with a voice that suggests both suckling and conniving, the voice of a baby mad scientist. A master manipulator, Hoffman's Capote speaks so slowly that his listeners have to stop and hang on his every self-consciously dazzling word. With his books The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany's, his New Yorker articles, and his screenplays, Capote has a cult following in the boho salons of Manhattan and Brooklyn. But how will his effete preening play in Kansas?

That's where Capote heads in 1959—along with his doting friend, the future To Kill a Mockingbird novelist Harper Lee (a drabbed-down Catherine Keener)—when he reads of the inexplicable slaughter of an entire family, the Clutters, in their remote farmhouse. Capote cuts a bizarro figure in the American heartland—the look by Chris Cooper, as Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent Alvin Dewey, is a deadpan howl. But the writer uses his celebrity and the aura surrounding his magazine to open both official doors and jail cells. It's in the latter that he develops an intimacy with one of the Clutters' killers, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.). In gentle, understanding tones, he probes Smith's memories, shares his own, and nudges the killer toward the big prize: a moment-by-moment account of what actually happened in the farmhouse on that hideous night.

In a key scene, Smith speaks hopefully of the effect Capote's account of their inadequate legal representation will have on the appeal of the convicted killers' death sentences; and Capote explains that he hasn't started writing and doesn't even have a title. He has and does, of course. He just doesn't plan to finish In Cold Blood until Smith and his cohort, Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino), have been hanged. The execution is going to be the book's big finale. And while Capote cares for Smith, maybe even has a whopping crush on him, he becomes desperate to see him executed so he can finish the damn thing. Over the years it takes for the killers to exhaust their appeals, Capote's inner conflict, between his empathy and his opportunism, eats him alive. He begins the heavy drinking that we're told, in an end-title, will kill him.

Capote is dark and slow and gets darker and slower as it crawls to its emotional climax, in which Capote finally extracts from Smith the story of the murders—a climax presented as a triumphant piece of vampirism. It's a fascinating idea—powerful and eerie on many levels (even if, in his book, Capote places Dewey in the room).

But I think something's missing: that Capote transcended that vampirism, so that In Cold Blood fostered more understanding of why people kill than any book I know. The prose might be showy, but the depth of the author's humanity is in every page. I admit I don't know how Futterman and Bennett could have conveyed this split between life and literature, but a film about the writing of a book that ignores the alchemy of creation isn't telling the full story. Although New Yorker editor William Shawn (a subdued and surprisingly lifeless Bob Balaban) speaks of Capote changing the face of journalism (he did), Capote views its subject's achievement in the context of his celebrity and Malcolmesque exploitation. There isn't a hint that in the end Capote memorialized Smith's (and Hickock's) pain.

The distorted mirror image that Capote told friends he saw in Smith is more talked about than dramatized, but the actors fill in some of the holes. As Smith, Collins finds the perfect mixture of neediness and cunning. And Hoffman: Talk about alchemy! When I heard he was cast, I was skeptical, because he's so much bigger than Capote. But somehow he's framed to look short. (Did other actors stand on platforms? Did Hoffman stand in a hole?) And while you're aware of the nightclub impersonation aspect of the performance in the first few minutes, you quickly forget. Hoffman reportedly listened to many tapes of Capote (courtesy of his biographer, Gerald Clarke), and sometimes when gifted and porous actors faithfully duplicate the stammers and pauses and delicate rhythms of their subjects, they get inside those subjects' heads—they become possessed.

That's what obviously happened here: Hoffman goes beyond the surface mannerisms and diction. He disappears into Capote. There's an extraordinary scene that features a good young actress named Allie Mickelson in which Capote seduces the girl (a close friend of the Clutters' teenage daughter) by confessing to his own embarrassment at being different. It's devious but true. Hoffman lays bare this whiny, wheedling, self-absorbed little man who nonetheless could see more deeply than almost anyone alive. If only Capote did more than hint at the transformative genius behind what he saw.

David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at slatemovies@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127120/

culturebox
All Too Conceivable
The reality behind NBC's new fertility clinic soap opera.
By Liza Mundy
Posted Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005, at 1:53 PM PT

Last summer, when I was in England, birthplace of Louise Brown and the ever-expanding field of in vitro fertilization, the British tabloids were full of the latest lurid tale involving a convoluted surrogacy situation. This one, as I recall, had to do with a mother who carried her own daughter's baby but gave birth in India, where she lived, as opposed to England, where the daughter/genetic mother lived, raising the question of what the heck country the child was automatically a citizen of. That same week, a longstanding IVF controversy made front-page news in mainstream papers: Should the agency that regulates British fertility clinics permit the creation of "savior siblings," babies conceived as tissue-match donors for existing children suffering from genetic diseases?

This robust public discussion of IVF ethics seemed remarkable to me, even though at that point I had spent a year researching American fertility medicine. In the United States, we do not have much in the way of public discussions of reproductive technology, in part because we do not seriously regulate it. For better and worse, in England and much of Europe there are laws and/or bureaucrats determining which procedures can be offered and to whom. The decisions that get handed down invariably lead to public disputes, which lead to ongoing, anguished attempts to hammer out a collective moral consensus. Here—where the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does little more than track patient loads and outcome rates for clinics that choose to be monitored—moral "consensus" often means doctors sitting around a table, or e-mailing bioethicists, or deciding on their own. Rarely do these discussions bubble over into the public. For that, we can now turn to the new NBC drama Inconceivable, which tries to bring the issues of modern-day conception into the American living room.

NBC's decision to set an overdetermined, soap-operatic, pretty seamy, never-quite-funny drama in a fertility clinic is itself a barometer of the national mood on the subject. Just as the network gay shows signaled the arrival of the cultural moment when everybody either knew a gay person, knew someone who was related to a gay person, or was gay, so now we seem to have arrived at a point where every adult has either undergone fertility treatment or has a friend who has. According to the CDC, between 1996 and 2002, the number of rounds, or "cycles," of IVF performed at U.S. clinics rose by 78 percent, from 65,000 rounds to more than 115,000. Fertility-related medical visits now number in the millions each year. Truly, fertility medicine is the perfect vehicle for Hollywood drama: ordinary enough now to feel universal, but still emotionally charged and, often, genuinely dramatic. I found myself watching the pilot episodes (the series airs Fridays at 10 p.m.) with revulsion and fascination. The scenarios were often far-fetched, and there was lots of fudging with science and with normal lab procedure. Still, what rang true was the sight of clinic staffers deciding, on their own, whether to accede to the desires of, for example, a soldier who wants to conceive a child using eggs frozen by his soldier-wife before she shipped out to, and died in, Iraq. What rang true were decisions quietly made based on bottom-line profit-making; fear of lawsuits; the desire for publicity; scientific principles; committed medical professionalism; fundamental decency; what's known in science as the "yuck" factor; and real delight in giving somebody a baby.

Inconceivable is set in a fictional Beverly Hills fertility clinic, Family Options. It was a good geographical choice, given that if the show were set anywhere else, the staff might have to—for purposes of verisimilitude—occasionally decide not to go ahead with something. There is a real difference between the culture of East Coast fertility medicine, which is more hidebound in clinging, at least nominally, to the notion of "medical necessity," and the West Coast, especially Los Angeles, where a more consumer-minded approach to patient care prevails. In the Washington, D.C., area, where I live, many clinics still will not work with gay males, justifying this on the grounds that technically IVF is a medical treatment for infertile people. Many of these same clinics, however, will provide sperm donation services for lesbians, partnered or single, and other unmarried women whose infertility amounts to "no male partner." In Los Angeles—by way of contrast—there are doctors who specialize in gay couples. In L.A., land of 48-year-old actresses-turned-first-time-mothers, the trade in donor eggs is so active and so normalized that the college-age daughter of a friend of mine, sitting at a cafe in Santa Monica, was approached by an unknown couple who asked if she would be their donor. Surrogacy laws are friendly in California. Fertility treatment is cheaper in California. In Los Angeles—I think this is fair to say—doctors may debate ethics, but chances are the end of the debate will be: Yes. Which means that in the case of Family Options, almost every patient can be an unfolding storyline.

Certainly that's what happens in the first two episodes. Some of the minidramas are dispensed with rapidly, and some you can see are going to last way longer than you want them to. Among its many faults, the drama is dizzyingly front-loaded. Family Options seems to attract a relentless stream of unusually tortured situations. Many are simply implausible: an extreme makeover type who wants to secretly use an egg donor so her husband won't know she carries ugly genes and was once herself an ugly woman; a staffer who, after being dumped by the unctuous main doctor, Malcolm Bowers, steals his sperm and switches it with the semen sample of a patient. Others are plain confusing: Why are they offering cytoplasm transfer, a fringe treatment once offered to women with old eggs, to a couple whose problem seems to be male infertility?

And there is way, way more surrogacy in this practice than there is in the real world, where surrogacy accounts for about 1 percent of IVF cases. There are more counselors and coordinators, too: a whole troupe of women whose job is to find donors and surrogates but also to help couples sort through ethical issues. The truth is, many clinics have only one, or at most a few, overburdened nurse/egg-donor coordinators, as well as a counselor to whom some patients are outsourced.

And yet, I kept asking myself, are these scenarios really so far-fetched? The series was created by two gay men who themselves have families with the help of surrogates, which makes it odd that among the most unappealing characters is a gay man who spies on his surrogate to make sure she doesn't eat pork rinds or drink alcohol. But it's true: People who hire surrogates can overstress about fast-food habits. I once watched a roomful of real and potential gay fathers debate how fat is too fat in a surrogate. And many real-life scenarios are every bit as melodramatic as those the creators have come up with here. I once spent the day with a clinic psychologist who had received a request from a bereaved mother who wanted to use her dead son's frozen sperm, and a surrogate, to create an IVF grandchild. The psychologist had herself lost a parent young, and had a horror of "creating orphans," as she put it. So her clinic said no to cryo-grandma, even though a competing clinic had already agreed to take her on. One counselor mentioned that a patient on her egg-donor waiting list had been waiting a while because she specifically wanted a donor who was blonde and good-looking, better-looking, in fact, than she was. Other doctors regularly struggle with whether to help patients who are really sick: women with autoimmune diseases, for example, or who are dangerously diabetic, whose bodies may be endangered by pregnancy. Another doctor I interviewed was approached by an infertile man who, wanting a baby as close to "his," genetically, as possible, asked to use his own father as sperm donor. Since there is no rule book here, the doctor called her father, a minister, to ask him what God would think of this. Her father told her he thought that God would think it was OK. Technically, it was something close to incest. The family, according to the doctor, is incredibly happy. Many scenarios doctors face really are unprecedented, and in truth, it's hard to see how government regulation could determine the outcome of them all.

The central drama of the opening episodes has to do with baby-switching, which remains one of the fundamental horrors of the field. The series opens with the birth of a black baby to a surrogate who contracted with a white couple (of course it's a black baby; does no one ever consider having a white baby born to horrified black people?), and then of course there is the sperm-switching. In this country, patients are still haunted by two high-profile cases of genetic deception: that of Ricardo Asch, who in the '90s was indicted for stealing embryos and eggs from patients in his highly respected clinic at UC-Irvine and secretly giving them to other women or using them for research; and Cecil Jacobson, the Virginia fertility doctor who was secretly the sperm donor for scores of his patients. (Jacobson, in part, was the impetus for the regulation we currently have.) Doubtless, even now mistakes or deceptions happen. But the clinics I've spent time with are obsessively concerned with the proper care and handling of sperm, egg, and embryo. Before the series started, I happened to be meeting with Robert Stillman, a doctor at Shady Grove Fertility, one of the largest practices in the country, who in response to Inconceivable had drawn up a detailed description of the clinic's lab practices, anticipating that patients would be unduly worried. "It's every patient's worst fear," he said to me, the text, or subtext, of so many initial consultations: If I go through with this, will I really be raising my own child? Or somebody else's?

Which is ironic when you think about it. Shady Grove, like most clinics in this country, does a brisk and growing business in egg donation. Studies have shown that even now, more than half of patients who conceive via egg donation do not tell their child the truth about how they were conceived. So while some IVF patients may fret about the remote possibility of unknowingly raising a child who is not genetically related to them, the far more prosaic reality of fertility medicine is the other way around: The parent is fully aware of the fact of genetic unrelatedness, and it's the child who doesn't know. It's a complicated world, full of compromise and contradiction. At least somebody is paying attention.

Liza Mundy, a staff writer for the Washington Post, is writing a book about assisted reproduction.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127108/

war stories
Karen Hughes, Stay Home!
What on earth is she doing in the Middle East?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005, at 1:27 PM PT

Could someone please explain to me what Karen Hughes is doing. Her maiden voyage to the Middle East has turned into a fiasco. She assures a room of Saudi women that they, too, will someday drive cars; they tell her they're actually happy right now, thank you. She meets with a group of Turkish women—hand-picked by an outfit that supports women running for political office—who brusquely tell her she has no credibility as long as U.S. troops occupy Iraq.

In a sense, this is par for the course when American officials meet with unofficial audiences abroad. But here's the puzzler: Why is it Karen Hughes who's taking these meetings? It was strange enough when her longtime friend President George W. Bush named her as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. It's absolutely mind-numbing to discover that she considers it one of her mandates to be the public diplomat.

The main task of this posting is to improve America's image in the Muslim world. Let us stipulate for a moment that Hughes is ideally suited for the job—that she can figure out how to spin sheiks, imams, and "the Arab street" as agilely as she spun the White House press corps in her days as Bush's communications director.

Even if that were so, why would anybody assume that she is the one to do the face-to-face spinning? Wouldn't it be better to find someone who—oh, I don't know—speaks the language, knows the culture, lived there for a while, was maybe born there?

Put the shoe on the other foot. Let's say some Muslim leader wanted to improve Americans' image of Islam. It's doubtful that he would send as his emissary a woman in a black chador who had spent no time in the United States, possessed no knowledge of our history or movies or pop music, and spoke no English beyond a heavily accented "Good morning." Yet this would be the clueless counterpart to Karen Hughes, with her lame attempts at bonding ("I'm a working mom") and her tin-eared assurances that President Bush is a man of God (you can almost hear the Muslim women thinking, "Yes, we know, that's why he's relaunched the Crusades").

Hughes is the third person that President Bush has appointed to this admittedly daunting position since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And she's the third piece of living evidence that he has no idea what "public diplomacy" requires.

His first pick was Charlotte Beers, a brilliant advertising executive—a reflection of the notion that all we needed to do was come up with a better slogan. Beers was driven out of town on a rail after preview audiences howled and jeered at a propaganda film she'd produced. Next up was Margaret Tutwiler, the hard-driving press spokeswoman for James Baker when he was secretary of state under Bush's father. She, too, came up zeros.

And now here is Hughes, once again a strong woman with no substantive experience on the subject, who was named to the job last March but put off coming to work so she could spend quality time with her son before he went off to college—a laudable priority for Hughes personally, but this indulgence by the president of the United States casts doubt on how urgently he regards the job's mission.

Back in the days of the Cold War, the U.S. Information Agency ran a vast, independent public-diplomacy program in embassies all over the world—libraries, speakers' bureaus, concert tours by famous jazz musicians, and broadcasts of news and music on the Voice of America. Together, they conveyed an appealing image of a free, even boisterous, America in the face of an implacable, totalitarian Communist foe.

It's hard to say what kinds of programs—which cultural messengers or emblems of freedom—might effectively counter the hatred and suspicions of today's foes. But Karen Hughes would be spending her time more wisely trying to come up with some.

Perhaps the most effective personification of public diplomacy in recent times was Vladimir Posner, a Soviet newsman who in the early 1980s appeared frequently on Ted Koppel's Nightline to defend the invasion of Afghanistan. Posner was sophisticated, dapper, and spoke perfect, idiomatic, accent-free English. It turned out that he had been born and raised in the United States. His father was a Communist who immigrated to Moscow—taking along his family, including his teenage son—after being blacklisted during the McCarthy era. In short, Posner was the perfect man for the job.

So, that's another thing Karen Hughes should be doing—looking for the Muslim equivalent of our own Vladimir Posner.

But even smart public diplomacy can only go so far. When the Afghan invasion turned disastrous, Posner could not save it—or the Soviet Union. (By the way, he managed to rehabilitate himself nicely, emerging as a pro-reform TV game-show host in the Yeltsin era.) Similarly, when the Vietnam War came to dominate nearly everything about the world's perception of America, the USIA's cleverest image-molders could do nothing to stave off the damage.

To the extent that public diplomacy has worked at all, it has done so as a garnish. The main course—a nation's ultimate image—is fashioned not by how it talks but by what it does.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127102/

moneybox
The J.P. Morgan of Silicon Valley
Is Larry Ellison the software industry's savior?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005, at 1:17 PM PT

September has been a big month for Larry Ellison, the chief executive of software company Oracle Corp. Vanity Fair has a big feature on him and his 454-foot yacht, Rising Sun. (For Ellison, size matters.) On Sept. 12, Oracle announced the $5.85 billion acquisition of Siebel Systems. The same day, Ellison agreed to settle a lawsuit accusing him of dumping Oracle stock ahead of a bad earnings announcement by donating $100 million to charity. (This is small change for Ellison, who is the fifth-richest American, according to Forbes.)

Ellison founded Oracle in 1977, and he has been the enfant terrible of Silicon Valley ever since: brash, in-your-face, and daring—in the boardroom and on the sea. (His exploits in the fatal 1998 Sydney-Hobart boat race were chronicled in G. Bruce Knecht's The Proving Ground.) But Ellison is enfant no longer, and he is somewhat less terrible as well. In the last few years, he has emerged as a slightly grizzled survivor, the rational, cool-thinking consolidator who arrives after the storm to buy out the victims. Ellison is becoming the J.P. Morgan of Silicon Valley.

Morgan helped rationalize the chaos of early 20^th-century capitalism. At the beginning of the last century, the United States emerged from a boom-and-bust cycle. Urbanization, the rise of immigration, and the advent of new technologies spurred businesses to create a great deal of excess capacity: in railroads, telegraphs, steel, cars, shoes, you name it. The result was a slew of bankruptcies and profit-killing competition. Morgan used his capital to merge competitors into giant unitary entities like AT&T and U.S. Steel. Less ruinous competition, more profits.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, Ellison is performing a similar function for the highly fragmented software industry. Fueled by venture capital, public investors, and insatiable demand for information technology, thousands of software companies rushed into the market in the 1990s. Then came the meltdown, and the enterprise software business—applications like databases and inventory-management software that help companies run their businesses more effectively—shifted into lower gear. Hundreds of companies, many of them well-capitalized, were left to fight bitterly over a market that was smaller than anticipated.

Oracle enjoyed the information-technology boom in the 1990s. And while its stock fell massively in 2001 and 2002—here's the painful five-year chart—the company remained on an even keel, thanks to its balance sheet and its roster of big customers. Ellison saw more clearly than other CEOs that software wasn't so different from railroads or automobiles before it. Software may have seemed the ultimate New Economy business—clean, with low distribution and manufacturing costs, and infinitely scalable—but it behaved like an Old Economy one. As Ellison said in the fall of 2003:

No industry remains in this fragmented form. The railroad industry didn't, the automobile industry didn't, nor will the computer industry. There'll be far fewer companies. For example, there aren't that many auto companies in the world. There doesn't need to be, nor will there be thousands of software companies.

To Ellison, the solution was obvious. Make like Morgan. Remove or eliminate some of the competition by consolidating. After all, it's tough to win customers away from rivals, because companies despise switching software. So, why not just buy the competition? Oracle, with its cash hoard and relatively strong stock, was a natural consolidator. The other likely giant, Microsoft, aroused too much suspicion in Silicon Valley and in Washington to start snapping up smaller competitors.

Like Morgan, Ellison has had run-ins with the antitrust cops. First he made a hostile bid for PeopleSoft, the big human-resources software company, in the summer of 2003. Ellison was undeterred by resistance from PeopleSoft's management—who knew that Ellison would swing a heavy ax at the acquired company—and by the antitrust division of the Justice Department, which filed a lawsuit to block the merger. He won the lawsuit, and last December, Oracle finally amassed enough shares to assume control of PeopleSoft. The following month, Oracle said it planned to cut 5,000 jobs, about 10 percent of the total of the combined companies.

But as Ellison told the San Francisco Chronicle last May, that was just the beginning: "The industry is maturing. It is going to consolidate." In recent months, he's been collecting software companies. In May, Oracle agreed to buy Retek, which makes software for the retail industry, for about $630 million, gazumping a bid by German rival SAP. Then came data-management software company TimesTen (June), ProfitLogic, which makes software for the retail industry (July), and a minority stake in Indian banking software company i-Flex (August). And now the big Siebel purchase in September, which simultaneously enriches and delivers comeuppance to company founder Thomas Siebel, who had left Oracle in 1990.

Like Morgan, Ellison clearly has an obsession with size. Ellison uses the Rising Sun, the world's largest private yacht, to impress fellow billionaires. J.P. Morgan used his massive yacht, the Corsair, to the same effect. Also like Morgan, Ellison seems intentionally to cultivate a prickly public persona. Ellison may give his boats Japan-inspired names, and his compound in California may be modeled after a Japanese village. But one of his role models is a distinctly less placid consolidator from the Far East: Genghis Khan.

Oracle isn't the biggest company in the technology universe—yet. Its market capitalization is about $62 billion, less than that of Cisco ($112 billion), Intel ($146 billion), Google ($86 billion), IBM ($126 billion), and Microsoft ($273 billion). But hundreds of enterprise software companies are still out there waiting to be bought, and Oracle has a healthy stock and a growing pile of cash.

Like Morgan, Ellison is in the business of delivering an unpleasant truth to CEOs of smaller companies: You won't be able to make it on your own. Others may see his hostile bids as imperious and rapacious. But for the 61-year-old Ellison, who in 2003 married thirtysomething novelist Melanie Craft, it's just a matter of finally acting like a grown-up. As he told biographer Matthew Symonds in Vanity Fair: "It's very difficult for Silicon Valley to adjust to the notion that they won't be forever young."

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127104/

 

low concept
Giant Squid
Don't mess with them.
By Grady Hendrix
Posted Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005, at 11:09 AM PT

Is there any doubt that the scariest animal in the world is the giant squid? Just its name paralyzes my heart with fear in a way that "killer whale" or "jumbo shrimp" do not. Most of us first caught a glimpse of this denizen of the deep trying to kill Kirk Douglas in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and we all had the same question: How angry do you have to be to try to kill the recipient of an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement? The answer was instantly branded onto all of our brains: as angry as a giant squid.

The giant squid is an "eat the crew, ask questions later" kind of cephalopod, and motion pictures have rightly depicted it as a very angry animal that's not given to conversation. To see a giant squid is to be attacked by a giant squid, the saying goes. But, like Tom Cruise between movies, the giant squid is camera-shy. And, just like the diminutive actor, Architeuthis dux spends long periods lurking out of sight, surely up to no good, before bursting forth, tentacles flailing, and exercising its alternate belief system. In Mr. Cruise's case, the alternate belief system is Scientology. In the giant squid's case, the alternate belief system is a desire to wrap you in its horrible tentacles and poke you to death with its poisonous beak. There are similarities.

Usually we only see giant squid in artist's conceptions fighting sperm whales (very scary) or washed up dead on beaches (not very scary at all). But now the Japanese have ruined it for everyone. With the aid of a very long string and a bag of mashed shrimp, Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori have taken 500 pictures of the giant squid at home. Stripping all the mystery and dignity from this great beast, they got the not-very-coordinated, 26-foot-long monster to snag itself on their bait bag. No one said the giant squid was very bright, but the fact that it tried to free its tentacle for more than four hours before giving up and tearing the thing off doesn't do much for its reputation. Even the researchers' statement that the giant squid seems "much more active … than previously suspected" comes across as a little condescending.

Kubodera and his crew have taken great pains to emphasize that losing a tentacle hasn't harmed the squid, but if they knew anything about giant squid they'd cut the press conferences short and run home to protect their families from this now-livid cephalopod that almost surely wants revenge. The giant squid hates everything: It hates Kirk Douglas, it hates the crew of the Pequod, and it especially hates scientists who make it look stupid.

If man is to live in harmony with nature we must respect nature's needs, and the needs of the giant squid are simple:

a) three (3) metric tons of small fish per week, or one (1) sperm whale;

b) if giant squid is to make more than two appearances in one day, giant squid must be supplied with a rest area equipped with Bose sound system and six large, clean towels;

c) no flash photography.

We have violated our contract with the giant squid. Will any of us ever feel safe in the water again?

Grady Hendrix, a New York writer, runs the New York Asian Film Festival.

 

human nature
Grow Some Testables
Intelligent design ducks the rigors of science.
By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005, at 4:30 AM PT

Four months ago, when evolution and "intelligent design" (ID) squared off in Kansas, I defended ID as a more evolved version of creationism. ID posits that complex systems in nature must have been designed by an intelligent agent. The crucial step forward is ID's concession that "observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building"—not scriptural authority—define science. Having acknowledged that standard, advocates of ID must now demonstrate how hypotheses based on it can be tested by experiment or observation. Otherwise, ID isn't science.

This week, ID is on trial again in Pennsylvania. And so far, its proponents aren't taking the experimental test they accepted in Kansas. They're ducking it.

The Pennsylvania case involves a policy, adopted by the board of the Dover Area School District, that requires ninth-grade biology teachers to tell students about ID. According to the policy, "A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations." So far, so good.

Under the policy, "Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin's Theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, Intelligent Design." Notice the "of" before "other theories." The policy doesn't tell teachers to discuss gaps and problems in ID. It tells them to discuss gaps and problems in Darwinism—and then to discuss ID as an alternative "theory." The board's brief makes clear that the policy's aim is "informing students about the existing scientific controversy surrounding Darwin's Theory of Evolution, including the fact that there are alternative scientific theories."

The first half makes sense: Students should be made aware of gaps and problems in Darwinism. But what's with the second half? Once you've outlined the limits of Darwinism, what more does ID offer? What does it say? What does it explain?

So far, nothing.

The board names two scientists who advocate ID "as a scientific theory": Michael Behe of Lehigh University and Scott Minnich of Iowa State. Minnich's expert testimony in the Dover case refers to Behe's work. Behe's testimony refers to a 2001 article in which he claims to have shown "that intelligent design theory is falsifiable." A longer version of the article explains,

In fact, intelligent design is open to direct experimental rebuttal. Here is a thought experiment that makes the point clear. In Darwin's Black Box (Behe 1996) I claimed that the bacterial flagellum was irreducibly complex and so required deliberate intelligent design. The flip side of this claim is that the flagellum can't be produced by natural selection acting on random mutation, or any other unintelligent process. To falsify such a claim, a scientist could go into the laboratory, place a bacterial species lacking a flagellum under some selective pressure (for mobility, say), grow it for ten thousand generations, and see if a flagellum—or any equally complex system—was produced. If that happened, my claims would be neatly disproven.

Behe is right that such an experiment, by showing that random mutation and natural selection can produce the flagellum, would disprove the claim that they can't. He calls the latter claim—that Darwinism fails to produce the flagellum—the "flip side" of his claim that the flagellum required intelligent design. But the Darwinism-fails claim isn't just the "flip side" of the design-is-necessary claim. It's the whole thing. The theory that's being tested in the experiment is Darwinism. If Darwinism succeeds, ID would be disproved, but only to the extent that ID consists of saying Darwinism would fail. And to that extent, ID isn't an explanatory theory in its own right. It's just a restatement of the first half of the Dover School Board's policy: a discussion of gaps in Darwinism.

Behe's article makes clear that ID is purely negative, with no explanatory mechanisms of its own.

The claim of intelligent design is that "No unintelligent process could produce this system." The claim of Darwinism is that "Some unintelligent process could produce this system." To falsify the first claim, one need only show that at least one unintelligent process could produce the system. To falsify the second claim, one would have to show the system could not have been formed by any of a potentially infinite number of possible unintelligent processes, which is effectively impossible to do.

The complaint that Darwinism can resort to an "infinite number" of processes misses the key word: processes. What makes Darwinism finite and falsifiable is its commitment to explain processes of evolution. Debunk one process, and Darwinists are forced to propose and test another. (For an excellent review of Darwinism's performance under empirical challenge, see Rick Weiss and David Brown's article in Monday's Washington Post.) What makes ID infinite and unfalsifiable is its refusal to explain intelligent design. You send your kids to biology class to learn by what processes living things evolve. ID doesn't even try to answer that question.

Don't take it from me. Take it from Behe. "By 'intelligent design' I mean to imply design beyond the laws of nature," he writes. Or take it from the Dover School Board, whose brief flatly denies "that Intelligent Design Theory sets forth a thesis concerning the nature of the intelligence responsible for the apparent design in nature." In his testimony, Behe even asserts that "the necessity for a 'scientific' theory to be falsifiable is disputed."

So here's what ID proponents are offering to teach your kids: They won't say how ID works. They won't say how it can be tested, apart from testing Darwinism and inferring that the alternative is ID. They won't concede it has to be falsifiable. All they'll say is that Darwinism hasn't explained some things. But that's what the first half of the Dover policy says already. So there's no need for the second half—the part that mentions ID.

The Dover School Board thinks it's getting a bum rap. All it asked its teachers to do was to mention ID. It never ordered them to teach it. "The theory of Intelligent Design shall not be taught to the students," says the board. Of course not. There's nothing to teach.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

 

books
Simon Blackburn
The British philosopher's take on truth.
By Stephen Metcalf
Posted Thursday, Sept. 29, 2005, at 3:25 AM PT

This is the first part of a two-part article.

Its loftier aspirations aside, philosophy wouldn't be philosophy if it didn't occupy itself with problems that no normal person, in the course of his or her daily life, ever experienced to be problems. My favorite example comes from a letter of Bertrand Russell's, where the great English logician remarks on a certain mooncalf who has been pestering him after lectures. "My German engineer, I think, is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable—I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn't." The young German engineer's name was Ludwig Wittgenstein. Like Russell, Wittgenstein started out a logician, but surpassed his teacher to become the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century, in part because he was willing to entertain the possible presence of rhinoceroses. Modern philosophy may submit itself to stringent canons of proof-seeking, but to move the multitudes (or at least the stray avid sophomore) it must also carry with it some leftover power of credo quia absurdum—I believe because it is absurd. And so, after reading Hume, perhaps the most sensible man who ever lived, one is not entirely sure that a billiard ball striking another billiard ball actually causes the second billiard ball to roll.

Simon Blackburn's new book, Truth: A Guide is an attempt to alarm us into believing in something he calls "the Truth Wars." For Blackburn, the credo has become too credulous, while standards of evidence have been allowed to erode. The label Blackburn applies to the trend is "relativism," and this covers a pretty vast catalog of deplorable items. Working up a typical lather, he writes:

Today's relativists, persuading themselves that all opinions enjoy the same standing in the light of reason, take it as a green light to believe what they like with as much conviction and force as they like. So while ancient skepticism was the sworn opponent of dogmatism, today dogmatisms feed and flourish on the desecrated corpse of reason. Astrology, prophecy, homeopathy, Feng shui, conspiracy theories, flying saucers, voodoo, crystal balls, miracle-working, angel visits, alien abductions, management nostrums, and a thousand other cults dominate people's minds, often with official backing. Faith education is encouraged by the British Prime Minister, while Biblical fundamentalism, creationism and astrology alike stalk the White House.

Clever vitriol aside, Truth purports to tell both sides of a contentious story. On one side are the relativists, who believe truth is inevitably partial and objectivity impossible, and who doubt that science affords us a uniquely accurate access to reality. On the other side are absolutists, or realists, who believe that some mix of common sense and the scientific method allows for correct judgments, or accurate descriptions of the world as it is in itself.

Truth is basically a recasting of the culture wars with the great philosophers enlisted as protagonists. Blackburn starts the book with a discussion of William James, later goes back as far as Locke and Bishop Berkeley and Kant, and has generously long sections on recent analytic philosophers, some of whom he admires, like Quine, and some he deplores, such as Sellars. Blackburn is himself a philosophy professor at Cambridge University, best-known in professional circles for a doctrine he pioneered called "quasi-realism." Blackburn the quasi-realist is widely recognized as a lucid, careful, and generous philosopher. His two heroes are Hume and Wittgenstein; keying off them, he has pointed to a middle way, whereby we might reject a strictly realist account of knowledge, but without lapsing into the flabbiness of relativism, or emotivism, or what philosophers sometimes call noncognitivism.

As he has grown older and his audiences larger (Truth is only his latest attempt at the pop intellectual limelight), Blackburn has grown considerably less patient. The prevailing tone of Truth is an incredulous disdain. Here, the absolutist is never a creationist, a eugenicist, or the thundering Republican water-carrier of Fox News, but a reasonable consulter of maps and timetables, the scientist calmly plying his honest trade. (That the history of science could be equally one of advancement and disinterest and falsification and overreach is never seriously entertained.) The relativist, meanwhile, is unfailingly a ninny. Blackburn mentions as examples of relativist excess Mayan birth cultists and bad-boy darlings of the English art world, though mostly he wants us to be thinking of the tenured radical, or that trendy humanities professor who believes in "the dark forces of language, culture, power, gender, class, economic status, ideology and desire."

Even a sympathetic reader—someone who already agrees that intellectual onanism has overtaken the liberal arts—might occasionally find herself in need of clearer bearings. "The science wars arose," Blackburn tells us, "when scientists found sociologists and historians of science apparently rubbing a lot of the bloom from the scientific enterprise itself. In good relativistic fashion the sociologists and historians and cultural critics bracketed science's claims to objectivity and truth, and regarded the enterprise purely in an anthropological spirit."

This may be true, or it may be tendentious and broadly drawn—either way, we're given no names, no titles, no citations to back it up. An entire chapter is devoted to Nietzsche on the premise that, "It is an axiom of many academic schools and programmes that [Nietzsche] has something supremely important to tell us about truth." But no school or program is specified, and the assertion is left to the dubious authority of It is an axiom. (Nietzsche in general gives Blackburn fits: A few paragraphs further, Nietzsche is described as "most famous as a culture critic," then barely a page later we're told Nietzsche is "most famous" for his "highly general doctrines" such as "the will to power.") Should a book titled Truth so frequently revert to lore? "There are amusing episodes," writes Blackburn, "of radical postmodernists who suddenly forgot all about the death of the author and the indefinite plasticity of meaning when it came to fighting about copyright and the accuracy of translations of their own works." In lieu of names, dates, titles, and places, Blackburn frequently recurs to his own parables, about mapmaking, bus schedules, and tide tables. "Tide tables have their prestige," he informs us. "Good sailors make a point of carrying them. This is not because of social and political machinations, or dark cultural or psychological forces like the grip of myth or superstition, but because they are reliable, and in turn that enables you to do things with them."

True, tide tables allow you to do things with them. But has Blackburn done too much? After all, many different kinds of statements aspire to be considered true. "7+5=12," "All bachelors are unmarried men," "Gravity is the warping of space by matter," "The 5:15 leaves in 10 minutes," "The Beatles are better than the Stones," "A specter is haunting Europe"—do they all refer equally to a mind-independent reality, or submit equally to the scientific method? In running together different types of knowing, Blackburn helps himself to an enormous, and unearned, rhetorical advantage, as this is how he imputes to his relativist an almost impossible lack of common sense. Reject the authority of science, he implies, and forget about catching the 5:15, or acknowledging (another Blackburn favorite) "Cambridge is north of London." On the opposite ledger, science is promoted as the one inexorable method for apprehending reality. "Science and common sense offer their own explanation of why we do well using them," Blackburn writes emphatically. "Science explains the success of science."

As easily as it can make him sound like a paragon of reason, a boundless confidence in the prestige of science can make an author appear curiously literal-minded. "There are no specifically Hindu or Taoist designs for mobile phones, faxes or televisions," goes one typically jeering aside, by which the reader supposes he means that the sheer utility of technology renders it the supreme form of human knowledge. (To which one is tempted to reply, "And no mobile phone has yet to give me Satori.") In a later aside, he writes, "Why is it right, we might ask the poetry lover, to be gripped by the thought that, 'Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.'? And back comes the reply that it is because this is what life does." But such Donnish confidence is strangely misplaced. The poet he quotes was a devoted neo-Platonist, filled with quasi-mystical ideas about the relationship of poems to reality; and the line of poetry he cites, in case he hadn't noticed, is a metaphor, and a fairly outlandish one at that.

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In his earlier work, Blackburn had asked: Could a person start with a nonrepresentational idea of ethics, and yet end up believing what a realist believes? (In other words, could you accept that no external nonhuman authority prohibits murder or incest, and yet still proclaim them absolutely wrong?) Later, he carried the idea beyond ethics and into epistemology itself. "The figure of the 'quasi-realist' [is] a person who, starting from a recognizable anti-realist position, finds himself progressively able to mimic the intellectual practices supposedly definitive of realism."

Stephen Metcalf is a Slate critic and lives in Brooklyn.

 

 

politics
Justice DeLayed
Why neither side wants the House majority leader gone.
By John Dickerson
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2005, at 4:56 PM PT

Democrats seemed delighted today when Tom DeLay had to step down as majority leader after the announcement of his indictment on a charge of conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws. The Texan and his GOP colleagues had anticipated today's indictment, and last November they tweaked the House ethics rules so that when the grand jury spoke, DeLay would still be able to keep his leadership post. But after a public outcry, Republicans were shamed into reversing that clubby rule change. So today, DeLay was forced to take his medicine and step down. Score one for the minority!

Except that Democrats would have to be nuts to root for DeLay's scalp, something many of them admit in private. He's the best villain they'll ever have. DeLay's got troubles hanging from him like charm bracelets. Not only does he have the Texas mess, but he's been knocked three times by the House ethics committee for misusing his post, and he's been closely linked to indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. At the level of personality, he positively oozes meanness, making him a perfect foil for Democrats. His poll numbers have been tanking. And now he's under indictment. DeLay makes an even more potent symbol bookended by Senate Majoriy Leader Bill Frist, who is having his own ethical inquiries into his stock sales.

The one hope for Democrats is that DeLay is unlikely go quietly into the steam room for a sulk. It's not in his nature. After his last round of troubles in the spring, he came out swinging. "This is exactly the kind of issue that's going on in America, that attacks against the conservative moment, against me and against many others," he told an audience at the Family Research Council.

Today, when he was indicted, DeLay did not disappoint. "I have done nothing wrong," he said at a Capitol Hill news conference, "I am innocent." He then went on to lambaste the Texas prosecutor, Ronnie Earle, repeatedly. He called him an "unabashed partisan zealot" and "fanatic," and in a flourish that proves he was a former exterminator and not a lawyer, described the charges as "one of the weakest and most baseless indictments in American history."

When DeLay goes zany like this, you'd expect Republicans to move toward the exits. I mean, isn't a man that brash and full of scandal a liability? Not for Republicans. The party supported DeLay as it has time and again. "Everyone up here is rallying big time," said one senior House staffer. "Congressman DeLay is a good ally, a leader who we have worked closely with to get things done for the American people," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. "I think the president's view is that we need to let the legal process work."

Why do they stick with him? Because they think he'll be back, and he has a long memory. Tom DeLay is revered by both Republicans and Democrats as the best inside player in the House of Representatives. He knows who has helped him and who has not. He also knows how to make you pay if you're in the latter category.

The president himself once used the Texas congressman as a far-right foil during the 2000 campaign. He argued that a DeLay-backed provision that would have deferred payment of the Earned Income Tax Credit to low-income workers was an attempt to "balance their budget on the backs of the poor." Before coming to Washington, Bush knew that DeLay might become such an unwieldy problem that he would have to apply pressure to keep him from acting out. He reportedly boasted that he could do so because he knew "all the money-raisers in his district." Now the president recognizes DeLay as a powerful ally when it comes to getting things done on the Hill. The administration has a notoriously low view of members of Congress. DeLay is the one person who can get results from the collection of fuzzy-headed and self-absorbed.

DeLay is also a folk hero on the stump. He raises gobs of money for GOP candidates, and conservatives love that he defies the elites and carries the air of having just kneed a partisan enemy in the groin.

The two-cheers-for-Tom parade was so well orchestrated it appeared precooked, which it was. With advance word of the indictment, Republican leaders met last night to arrange plans for a "Continuity of Operations" plan, or COOP, as they call it in the military. DeLay would step down and into his place would effortlessly slide David Dreier, the silky-smooth California congressman who now chairs the House Rules committee. "It's an inspired pick," said GOP pollster David Winston earlier in the day, before the plan fell apart. Though Dreier was not in the direct line of succession, he was perfect for Hastert's purposes. He wasn't aggressively angling for the top job, like No. 3 Roy Blunt, Mo., the House whip. And Dreier has far better TV skills than anyone in the Republican caucus, something that would be necessary to warm up the party's image outside of its base.

But the best-laid plans fell clattering apart. Though Dreier's pick had been wired last night by House leadership, and was agreed to by members this morning, by the end of the day he was out, replaced by Blunt. It was a quick and bloody business.

Social conservatives who dislike Dreier's position in favor of stem-cell research started calling House leaders and members to lobby against him. "We do not find David Dreier representative of the values of conservatives," said Jessica Echard, executive director of the pro-family group the Eagle Forum, which contacted members of the Republican caucus. The House "Values Action Team," a group of GOP members tasked with pushing pro-life/pro-family issues within the caucus, blasted an e-mail to their colleagues alerting them that Dreier was to be tapped as a replacement and underlining his voting record supporting stem-cell research and against the marriage protection amendment.

Several Republican sources speculate that the ambitious Blunt put his allies in the socially conservative groups on the phone-calling campaign, and now that he has the job, won't want to give it back if DeLay is cleared. Now, those are tactics Tom DeLay would approve of.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126987/

explainer
Giant Squid, Where Are You?
If they're so big, why can't we find them?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2005, at 4:04 PM PT

This week, a British journal published the first-ever pictures of a giant squid alive in its natural habitat. A pair of Japanese researchers set up an apparatus that photographed the creature as it wrapped its tentacles around some bait attached to a deep-sea camera. How did the giant squid remain elusive for so long?

The difficulty of underwater exploration. The giant squid may be no harder to find than any other animal that lives at the bottom of the ocean. Submersibles that travel thousands of feet underwater have provided scientists with only a limited view of deep-sea life. Cameras can see only what's within range of an artificial light, and light can scare off some dark-adapted critters. Plenty of deep-sea animals other than giant squid have shown up in fishing nets without having been captured on film in their natural environment.

The giant squid seems especially mysterious for a couple of reasons. First of all, its incredible size—giant squids can be 40 feet long or more—makes it hard to believe that it can't be seen alive. Second, dead giant squids surface with surprising regularity. In the last few years, there's been a dramatic increase in the number of giant squid carcasses that have been discovered. So, why is it so hard to find a living giant squid when the dead ones are a dime a dozen?

For one, we don't really know where and how giant squid live. Specimens have been found all over the world, but it's not clear if they have regular migration patterns. We know sperm whales eat giant squid—remains have been found in the whales' stomachs—so some researchers have tracked the predators to find the prey. The Japanese researchers looked for the giant squid where sperm whales were known to congregate. Their camera-on-a-rope technique wasn't particularly innovative. (More adventuresome researchers have attached cameras to the sperm whales, for example.) Giant squid experts think they just got lucky.

Bonus Explainer: What's with all the giant squid carcasses? Dead giant squids may be more buoyant than the carcasses of other deep-sea creatures because they have an unusually high concentration of ammonium ions. Since the ammonium is lighter than seawater, the carcasses tend to float, making them easy to spot. (Giant squids use the ammonium to keep from sinking while they're alive, too.) It's less clear why so many have turned up in the last few years. One theory suggests that an increase in deep-sea fishing—of orange roughy in particular—has disturbed the giant-squid habitat. Others say that the squid deaths have been caused by underwater seismic surveys using air guns. Or it could be global warming.

Bonus Bonus Explainer: What's the difference between squid and giant squid? The giant squid isn't just a big ol' version of a regular squid—it has its own genus, called Architeuthis. (There may be several species of giant squid, but no one knows for sure.) The lesser-known "colossal squid," of the genus Mesonychoteuthis, may be even bigger and nastier than the giant squid. It has a larger beak than the giant squid and has hooks on its tentacles. While a few specimens of colossal squids have been discovered, no one has yet seen one in its natural habitat.

Next question?

Explainer thanks Martin Collins of the British Antarctic Survey and Neil Landman of the American Museum of Natural History.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

 

chatterbox
I Am Goldberg
Years ago, the Times turned me down because I was white. So what?
By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2005, at 3:17 PM PT

I hereby declare solidarity with Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker. I am Spartacus! I'm a Pepper! I am … Goldberg!

My colleague Jack Shafer did a fine job yesterday describing the absurd ruckus Goldberg caused at the Washington Post merely by asserting to Harry Jaffe in Washingtonian magazine that, some years ago, an editor at the Post told him he'd been turned down for a job because the slot was reserved for a Hispanic. Goldberg did not gripe about this outcome; he is now the New Yorker's bureau chief in Washington, so it would be most unattractive for him to do so. But Goldberg's observation was misread as griping by David Nakamura, a Post staffer, and then by the two top editors at the Post, who rushed to denounce Goldberg before they read the Washingtonian piece. They mostly backed off when the facts of the case were presented to them, but Executive Editor Len Downie continued to insist, "We do not designate slots for minorities."

Well, I don't know what they do at the Washington Post. But I had almost exactly the same experience Goldberg described in the late 1980s when I applied for a job at the New York Times. Like Goldberg, I'd worked at the Times before, and was therefore a known quantity. Like Goldberg, I was told that I wouldn't get a job—not right away, anyway—because the paper was bent on hiring some minority candidates before it hired the next white male. Like Goldberg, I am not inclined to gripe about this, because I ended up following another route and today enjoy success in my chosen field. And, like Goldberg, I have no reason to believe that the newspaper that chose not to hire me ended up sacrificing quality on the altar of racial balance. For all I know, the minority reporter the Times hired in my stead (if they did hire a minority) was infinitely more gifted than I. (A low bar, many of my readers will surely rush to observe in the Fray.)

I suppose it's conceivable that a white male who'd approached the Times without my Harvard College degree, or with less talent, or less confidence, or a less-privileged background in general, would have been more inclined to take this rejection to heart and become a coal miner instead. But life doesn't usually work that way. Our fortunes tend not to hinge on one single failure; they hinge on a series of tests, many requiring luck, many requiring cunning, and some actually requiring merit. We may not get the fate we deserve, but who's to say? This can be misread as an argument against affirmative action itself, of course. If the damage is so slight for a white male, isn't it slight for a black male who faces the more traditional style of job discrimination? Well, no. The difference is that white males swim in a fishbowl where success is a more reasonable expectation for white males than it is for black males. It's easier to discourage somebody who sees evidence all around that the odds are heavily against him—as remains the case today. Racial bias isn't as severe as it used to be, but only a fool would declare it extinct.

Len Downie says, "We do not designate slots for minorities." I don't believe him. Maybe he has some extremely subtle and ultimately meaningless distinction in mind between reserving "slots for minorities" and being aggressive in hiring minorities. Another possible explanation is that he's been advised that if the Post admits to anything that might be construed as racial quotas the paper might be vulnerable to reverse-discrimination lawsuits. Or perhaps he fears that any acknowledgment that quotas existed (or perhaps still exist) would signal to minority employees that they're underqualified, and to conservatives that the Post is the Bolshie rag they've always claimed it to be. Neither conclusion would be fair or true.

An alternative interpretation of Goldberg's experience, and mine, is that our prospective bosses didn't want to hire us, but they also didn't want to hurt our feelings, so they fibbed. To be told you've been turned down for a job because you're white is to be told it isn't really your fault. I wouldn't recommend it as a dodge, because it's always a bad idea to bring race into sensitive matters when race isn't really relevant. But maybe the dodge was employed nonetheless.

What I do know is that the Times, unlike the Post, is on record saying it had racial quotas during the very period when I applied for a job there. Three or four years after the Times turned me down, the New Yorker's Ken Auletta quoted Max Frankel, then the Times executive editor, as saying that when he assumed that position in 1986, "one of the first things I did was stop the hiring of non-blacks and set up an unofficial little quota system." When I read these words, I was impressed by Frankel's candor. I felt no resentment. I had a good job at the Wall Street Journal, and I believed—and still believe—that workplace diversity benefits everybody. I just wish we could all feel freer to discuss how it's achieved.

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127051/

low concept
Mind the Gaps
Intelligent design as an answer to all life's great conundrums.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2005, at 2:15 PM PT

The good people of Dover, Penn., are in court this week fighting for their right to tell high-school students that evolution is an elective, not a requirement. Intelligent design isn't just your great-grandpa's creationism, they contend. Instead, it fills in the myriad "gaps" and "problems" in Darwin's theory of evolution with an unnamed, omnipotent "designer." (Hint: His name rhymes with "Todd.") For this exceedingly pluralistic and tolerant worldview, Dover School Board members have gotten themselves into a world of trouble with parents, the ACLU, and pundits across the land.

But the critics are missing the beauty of this new theory. Because the really great thing about intelligent design is that it takes all the awkward uncertainty out of science. It says, "You know those damn theoretical gaps and conundrums that send microbiology graduate students into dank basement laboratories at 3 a.m.? They don't need to be resolved at all. Go back to bed, sleepy little grad students. God fills those gaps."

Let's face it: The problem with science has always been that each new discovery unleashes thousands of new questions and ambiguities. So really, the more we discover new stuff, the stupider we get. Clearly, that isn't working. ID says we shouldn't bother ourselves with resolving scientific inconsistencies or untangling puzzles. We should recognize that what God really wants is for us just to stop learning.

Think of the applications. Science is, after all, teeming with unresolved conundrums. What if we just recognized, for instance, that we can't make the Standard Model of particle physics work? This theory, which purports to describe all known matter—including subatomic particles, such as quarks and leptons, as well as the forces by which they interact—is plagued by scientists' failure to observe something called "proton decay." Now, if we apply the ID principle to particle physics, no one ever needs to put on a lab coat again. Quarks and leptons? They're made of God.

And so are quartz and leprechauns.

There are many thorny medical mysteries doctors can't explain: How can pluripotent stem cells give rise to any type of cell in the body? Why is the genetic marker for Huntington's disease characterized by an excess of trinucleotide repeats? What accounts for the phenomenon of spontaneous remission in some cancers? With intelligent design, we don't ever need to find out. Years from now, we'll all lie in our hospital beds while ID-trained doctors hold our hands and assure us that we are merely dying of God.

We'll all be able to huddle around our radios and listen to Car Talk as a family. After the question is posed, we can all yell out in unison with Click and Clack that the mysterious drut-drut-drut coming from that lady in Vermont's carburetor is … "God!!"

And Law & Order: Special Victim's Unit will be vastly improved when Mariska Hargitay can look ruefully over at Chris Meloni, shake her head over the dead victim's limp frame, and shrug: "Heck if I know what happened. It's a real mystery. I guess we'll have to get a warrant for God." Sigh. "Again." Cut to closing credits.

Replacing every single gap in human knowledge with a theory of divine agency would save us billions of dollars in wasteful public education. In fact, while we're at it, replacing every single Gap store with a God store would save us billions of dollars on flat-front chinos.

My modest proposal would be that, instead of using intelligent design merely to fill in the gaps and inconsistencies of our most intractable scientific puzzles, we roll back what we've already learned about science and plug God into the equation at the outset. Kind of cut out those annoying scientific middlemen. That apple didn't fall onto Sir Isaac Newton's head because of gravity. It was God. God didn't want Newton to study science, and he doesn't want us to, either. And I, for one, am relieved. As Galileo famously said, and Teen Talk Barbie famously paraphrased: "Science is hard."

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

 

food
Down With Gloves
Why chefs shouldn't have to wear them.
By Sara Dickerman
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2005, at 11:47 AM PT

Most cooks I know—including me—hate wearing gloves in the kitchen. That's probably why you can find so many of us ignoring health-department regulations that prohibit touching food with bare hands. Gloves are no fun. They make your hands clammy; they make you clumsy; they don't do well with heat. When you use a mandoline, little slivers of glove always seem to land in the food. And, yes, as with sex, the sensual pleasure of cooking is dulled when there's latex in the way.

Cooks are supposed to wear gloves to prevent the spread of foodborne illness, which is a major problem in this country. According to the CDC, food-borne diseases cause about 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year. It's likely that the last "stomach flu" you contracted had something to do with something you ate. Disease-causing bacteria and viruses—Norwalk virus, E. coli, shigella, hepatitis A, and Staphylococcus aureus, among others—can be transmitted by dirty hands, and most localities now prohibit (or at least discourage) cooks from touching "ready-to-eat food." Tongs, spoons, and deli paper are also acceptable barriers, but for a line cook doing detail work—say, twirling a little festoon of microgreens and balancing it atop a quenelle of tuna tartare—the only viable option is gloves. For the most part, I follow the rules. But I'm not convinced that gloves are the best way to keep eaters safe.

Workers in food-processing plants and cafeterias have been wearing gloves for decades. But gloves didn't become common in restaurant kitchens until the '90s, when a few high-profile E. coli outbreaks made food safety a major public concern. Corporate restaurant chains, terrified of lawsuits, committed themselves more seriously to formal food safety programs. And during the same period, the federal government issued its first health-code guidelines since 1976. The 1993 uniform Food Code, a set of recommendations that states could choose to adopt, homed in on critical ways to improve food safety. The code, which has been revised five times since its '93 debut, lays out proper cooking and storage temperatures, cleaning procedures, and ways to document the origins of potentially contaminated food like shellfish. It also instructs food retailers on three things food employees must do: wash their hands properly; stay home if they're sick; and avoid bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat foods. As of March of 2005, 48 of 56 states and territories had adopted some version of it.

As a cook in the trenches, though, I'm not convinced that rampant glove use has made cooking more sanitary. There are times when gloves work well. "We love them when we're eviscerating squab," said one chef in Washington, D.C. They're also effective when a cook has injured a hand—gloves keep vinegar out of the cut and blood off the plate—or when a worker can stick to one job for a while, like making sausage or assembling sandwiches. The real problems arise for multitasking line cooks, who often use gloves poorly. Ideally, a line cook would change gloves with each new task and wash her hands every time she put on a new pair. But this takes time, and in real kitchens, it rarely happens. There are too many tasks, too many tickets, and too many unconscious behaviors: I've seen gloved hands scratch heads and noses and butts.

One chef I spoke to said that cooks treat gloves like a bulletproof vest—once you're wearing them, you can become careless about other food-safety measures. And that can be dangerous. If you leave a pair of gloves on between, say, handling raw meat and slicing cooked meat for a plate, the glove can pass on nasty bacteria. And if you put gloves on unclean hands, they can become infected inside and out. An emphasis on glove use can overshadow the importance of washing your hands, and washing them well, which is probably the most crucial step cooks can take to prevent the spread of disease. Personally, I think a cook is more likely to wash her hands frequently if she feels something on them, be that the guts she handled when cleaning a fish, the flour and egg she used to bread it, or the parsley and sea salt she sprinkled on top.

If gloves aren't foolproof, then why are they so widespread? Easy: You can see whether a cook has gloves on. You can't see whether his hands are clean. Gloves are visible to kitchen managers, government inspectors, and the busy practitioners of dirty-restaurant journalism (who follow not the money, but the mouse poop). Perhaps most important, customers can see them: One study conducted by the glove industry showed that 85 percent of customers who observe gloved workers say they "believe [the] operation is trying very hard to be sanitary and cares about me." Because hand-washing is a process, and one that must be repeated again and again throughout the day, it is harder to confirm that it's being done properly. (Not for long, though. One company has devised a Big Brother-esque sink that can, using an employee ID card, track how often and thoroughly workers wash up in a given day.)

Given the problems with gloves, it's not surprising that the National Restaurant Association has lobbied the FDA to loosen up the food code's language on bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat foods. And they've had some success. The brand new 2005 food code, which was released on Friday, allows restaurants to apply for permission to allow bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat foods if they pass a gamut of hygiene tests. How such language will trickle down to states and localities remains to be seen.

But not all restaurants bother to ask for permission. Even in certain cities and counties where the practice is a violation, cooks continue to serve food with bare hands, particularly in higher-end restaurants. There is, in fact, a kind of latex class barrier in the restaurant world: Every Subway sandwich I've ever eaten has been made with gloved hands, but whenever I eat sushi, my raw fish, ginger, and wasabi have all been handled by bare fingers. Frank Bruni, the New York Times restaurant critic, noted this phenomenon in his rapt review of Masa, Manhattan's obscenely expensive sushi mecca: "From just inches away, you watch this ritual, which culminates in the chef's placing the sushi in front of you with a bare hand." Never mind that in New York, bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat food is a critical violation on a health-inspector's report. I have yet to sign a waiver at a restaurant door, but if that's what it takes to get a perfect piece of nigiri assembled by a bare-handed sushi master, just show me the dotted line. Because in the end, it's not gloves, but engaged cooks—those who care about the outcome of their work—that make for good food, and safer food. The trick is expanding that mindset to all restaurants: from high-end kitchens to greasy spoons.

Sara Dickerman is a cook and freelance food writer in Seattle.

 

press box
"Doomed by Diversity"
New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg gets the pillory for something he didn't say.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005, at 4:38 PM PT

A great man once wrote—well, actually, I once wrote—that to discuss any aspect of race in this country is to invite an "Al Campanis Moment." For the uninitiated, a Campanis Moment arrives when, by the slip of a tongue or somebody's misinterpretation, a discussion of race ends with the speaker being tossed onto the pillory.

New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Goldberg is getting this treatment from some for having told Washingtonian magazine how newsroom diversity kept him from getting a permanent job at the Washington Post in 1989, after he worked there one year as a reporter. A Post reporter has weighed in against him in Romenesko Letters, and the Post's executive editor and managing editor have castigated Goldberg somewhat unfairly—while defending the paper's diversity program—on an internal message board.

If you follow Romenesko, you already know the back story: In a Friday afternoon dispatch on Sept. 23, Washingtonian national editor Harry Jaffe described the Post as The New Yorker's "farm team" because a growing numbers of former Posties are now working for the magazine. In the piece's middle, Jaffe writes this about Postie turned New Yorker Goldberg:

Jeff Goldberg's career at the Post was doomed by diversity. He came as a Post intern in 1986 and covered the police beat. "It was the center of the journalistic universe," he says. "I rode around covering murders. I had old-fashioned editors yelling, 'How old is that dead body?' "

Goldberg was up for a full-time job, he says, when an editor took him aside and said, "We would like to hire you, but we have to hire a Hispanic for that slot." He went on to report from the Middle East, but when he returned, editor Milton Coleman said the Post had no jobs. Metro editor Jo-Ann Armao told him to send some clips. He got his clips working for the New York Times Magazine for several years before joining Remnick at the New Yorker in 2000.

About two hours after the Washingtonian piece posted, Post reporter David Nakamura unloaded on Goldberg in the Romenesko Letters section with his scathing "open letter." He writes, "I was terribly sorry to read in the Washingtonian that your career at the Washington Post was doomed by diversity and that, in your words, an editor told you your spot here had to go to 'a Hispanic.' "

Goldberg returned fire on Romenesko a couple hours later, noting that the words "doomed by diversity" weren't his, and insulted Nakamura back.

By yesterday, the row had spilled over into a Post internal message board. There, executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and managing editor Philip Bennett responded to a posting by a staffer who had ripped Goldberg for feeling "his career at the Post was 'doomed by diversity' or so it said in the article" and wanted to hear from management on the topic.

Downie went first:

I have not yet seen the Washingtonian piece cited by Phong Ly, but I want to make clear that improving diversity in the newsroom and in our coverage has never been in conflict with hiring the best journalists and producing the best journalism. Quite the opposite. We have been fortunate to attract to our newsroom many outstanding journalists of color who have greatly improved our journalism throughout the newspaper, as can be be (sic) seen, for example, in our hurricane coverage. I'm pleased, as I will detail at Monday's staff meeting, that we have signficantly (sic) increased the diversity of our staff and its leadership this year, which has also increased our capacity to produce great journalism. I'm sorry that someone who long ago failed to make the grade here would attack our diversity efforts.

A minute later, Bennett posted this:

The Goldberg comment is appalling, offensive, idiotic. His own search for a diversity-free workplace may have succeeded. That's not where we live, or want to live, or intend to live. Diversity is a cardinal value of The Post and the communities we cover. Period.

Bennett says his internal post was a response to the staffer who characterized what Goldberg said. "The idea that white males' careers at the Washington Post would be 'doomed by diversity' is absurd," he says.

But the "doomed by diversity" line that Nakamura picked up on and Downie and Bennett alluded to was Jaffe's invention, not Goldberg's. Jaffe calls it a "lame attempt at alliteration" to describe what he thought happened to Goldberg at the paper.

"Goldberg never used that line," Jaffe says. "He never implied it."

Bennett says if that doomed diversity wasn't Goldberg's notion, then he doesn't have a beef with The New Yorker writer.

In an e-mail and phone interview, Downie acknowledges that Goldberg didn't "attack" the paper's diversity efforts, and that "blamed" is what he thought he wrote on the paper's internal site. But he still dismisses Goldberg's account of how the paper passed him over. Downie writes via e-mail:

We do not designate slots for minorities, although we seek diversity in candidates for all of our openings. In Goldberg's case, I was part of the decision-making. We decided that we did not want to hire him, period. We had enough openings on the Metro staff (as we often do because of its size) that his candidacy was not affected by the hiring of anyone else, minority or otherwise.

Goldberg recalls that the paper's city editor*, Mary Jo Meisner, told him explicitly that she wanted to hire him but had to give the slot to a Hispanic. Meisner, now at the Boston Foundation, remembers Goldberg as a "great, scrappy, young reporter," but of the Hispanic comment she adds, "I do not remember this."

In 1989, Downie was managing editor to Ben Bradlee's executive editor. According to Goldberg, Downie told him, "We'd love to have you back" after he was passed over. Goldberg took this to mean he should reapply for a job in the future after acquiring more experience.

The he-said, she-said quality to this rumble makes determining what happened at the Washington Post 16 years ago impossible. But the story is worth musing over because it reveals the inner tensions at work in businesses, schools, and branches of government that take pride in increasing diversity, as the Post does. In 1991, when Downie became executive editor, 17.1 percent of the paper's newsroom staff was nonwhite. According to a summer 2005 study, the percentage of nonwhites in the newsroom at the Post had risen to 21.4, better than the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today.

At the risk of falling victim to my own Al Campanis Moment, let me think out loud about diversity. Without a doubt, diversity can improve the newspaper quality by putting ears, eyes, and brains inside the newsroom that understand the world outside. So, how do you increase diversity? You recruit for it and you train for it. But that effort isn't always painless. It's predictable that when a minority is hired or promoted that someone on staff will suspect that a diversity calculator in the backroom made the personnel decision, not a human being who considered only merit.

Goldberg isn't the first journalist I've heard say he was passed over at the Post for a minority. In 20 years of Post watching, I've heard a dozen anecdotes from folks who claimed that an editor said they were being passed over for a promotion or hired because the slot had to serve diversity. Others say they were told to read between the lines for the reason they didn't get the job.

Whether the claims are true or not, when diversity plays a significant role in hiring it makes race the prism through which folks start viewing their jobs. (It's telling that both Bennett and Downie reacted so strongly against Goldberg before reading the allegedly offensive article.) Which is to say: Jeffrey Goldberg's comments to the Washingtonian didn't start the debate at the Post over the unintended effects of promoting diversity, it just brought them back into the open.

******

Interests declared: Goldberg is a friend; the Post and Slate are owned by the same company; and my wife, a Post employee, is on maternity leave. Send e-mail to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Correction, Sept. 28, 2005: The original version of this article mistakenly described Mary Jo Meisner as a Post Metro editor. She was city editor. Click here to return to the corrected sentence.

sidebar

Return to article

Re: Sept. 23 Ginsberg, Sugawara, Brack
Posted By: Phuong Ly
Date: 9/23/05 5:03:10 p.m. EDT

Re: the New Yorker story on Washingtonian. I found it offensive that Jeff Goldberg felt his career at the Post was "doomed by diversity" or so it said in the article.

Even more offensive was that an editor told him that they couldn't hire him b/c the slot had to go to a Hispanic. I hope this isn't happening here anymore. I don't think anything has made my blood boil recently as much as reading that comment. There are plenty of slots here at the Post and plenty of reasons why a person isn't hired (a hiring editor just simply making an idiotic decision could be one of them). If minorities were getting all the advantages, this paper would have looked a lot different a long time ago. There's a lot more I can say on this subject, of course, but my main hope is that the Post management addresses the comment in the Washingtonian article.

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126982/

chatterbox
Santorum's Mighty Wind, Part 2
If you can't lick 'em, spoof 'em.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005, at 3:00 PM PT

When last we checked in on AccuWeather, it had persuaded Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who is ostensibly a proponent of the free market, to sponsor a bill that would give special protection to AccuWeather and a handful of other private weather services. The bill would achieve this by forcing the National Weather Service to withhold its forecasts from the general public. AccuWeather is located in Santorum's home state, and its employees have shoveled at least $7,000 in Santorum's general direction, according to Maeve Reston in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Santorum is such a hack that he was even willing to accuse the National Weather Service of botching its forecasts for Hurricane Katrina when in fact the NWS was strikingly prescient.

Now AccuWeather has apparently decided that if you can't lick 'em, hijack their Web traffic. If you entered "nationalweatherservice.org" into your computer, you might reasonably assume you'd be taken to the NWS site. But you would be wrong. It will actually take you to AccuWeather. The NWS (whose real URL, incidentally, is www.nws.noaa.gov) has complained about this sleazy deception in the past, and it's even gotten AccuWeather to apologize and desist. Apparently, though, you can't keep a good spoofer down.

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

 

explainer
Can I Cut Off My Electronic Monitoring Bracelet?
You bet I can!
By Daniel Engber
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005, at 2:46 PM PT

Last Friday, Puerto Rican nationalist leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios died after a shootout with FBI agents. In 1990, while awaiting trial for stealing millions from an armored-truck company, Ojeda snipped off his electronic monitoring bracelet and went on the lam. How easy is it to cut off one of those bracelets?

All you need is a pair of scissors. Electronic monitoring bracelets aren't designed to stay on at all costs. A device that can't be removed without special tools would pose a serious health risk to its wearer. A bracelet might get caught in heavy machinery, for example, or paramedics might need to remove it to provide emergency medical care. Most of the monitoring bracelets on the market can be easily cut in two, or even ripped off if enough pressure is applied. The SCRAM bracelet—that's Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitoring System—comes with a labeled line that tells you where to cut in case of emergency.

If you slice through your bracelet, you'll probably set off an alarm. A radio transmitter embedded in the bracelet is programmed to send a distress signal as soon as it's tampered with. Bracelet manufacturers won't discuss the specifics of tamper-proofing, but many pieces of monitoring jewelry use a wire that runs the length of the band. Cutting the wire breaks a circuit and sends an alert to the authorities. Some bracelets also use internal light sensors to catch anyone who manages to pry open the transmitter's housing.

Anyone can cut off a bracelet and go into hiding, but it's very difficult to take one off and put it back on later. Parole officers or other supervisors are supposed to examine the bracelets on a regular basis. If they see any signs of tampering—like cut marks or twisted plastic—the offender is considered to have violated the terms of the monitoring program. The fact that most bracelets are worn on the ankle makes them very difficult to remove intact. (Someone wearing a device on his wrist might be able to slide it over a greased-up hand.)

When a criminal has served his time, removing the bracelet is as simple as cutting it off. Just before Martha Stewart was allowed to remove her monitoring bracelet, New York's chief federal probation officer said that former prisoners were allowed to chop off their anklets at 12:01 a.m. on the day of their release. The actor Robert Blake wasted no time in removing a monitoring bracelet at the close of his murder trial. He asked the crowd outside the courthouse for a cutting implement moments after the verdict.

Next question?

Explainer thanks Steve Chapin of Pro Tech, Joe Russo of the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center, and Tom Wharton of iSECUREtrac.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

 

 

 

 

 Inhaled insulin: No more shots?

State of the Science: As all science-minded schoolchildren should know, in 1921 the Canadian scientists Frederick Banting, Charles Best, J.J.R. MacLeod, and J.B. Collip developed insulin, the first treatment for diabetes. Insulin was a miracle drug, capable of transforming an almost uniformly fatal disease into a survivable illness with good quality of life. But as any diabetic will tell you, its failing is that it must be injected. Other methods of giving insulin—oral administration, nasal sprays, others—have been tried, but none have worked.

Now, for the first time, an insulin inhaler (which carries the drug into the body via the lungs) is close to FDA approval. Exubera, as the product will be called, is the first of five similar products in development. The manufacturer, Pfizer, submitted data to the FDA that suggests that the insulin inhaled through Exubera is approximately comparable in performance to injected insulin (though not better). A majority of the FDA advisory panel that examined the data recommended approval, and such recommendations are usually accepted.

Ancient History: It is not easy to deliver a medication to the place in the body where it is needed. In the olden days (but, alas, in my memory) there were basically three ways to administer one. If you wanted topical effects, you could apply creams or ointments to the skin. If you wanted to administer a medication to the entire body, you could take a drug orally or by injection. Medicines taken either way are usually absorbed rapidly and eliminated by the kidneys or liver equally rapidly. A few tricks were available to slow down the absorption. Injection could be packaged in a slowly dissolving goo and the whole mess deposited as a glob in a muscle, from which the active ingredient would be released slowly over a period of time. In a hospital, intravenous medications could be set to gush or to drip slowly. Oral medications could be placed in the center of many small beads, each covered with coatings that dissolve at different rates (remember those "tiny time pills"?).

Modern History: The first big improvement in drug delivery was the introduction of inhaled drugs for lung diseases like asthma. Once perfected, this method allowed high concentrations of active medications to be delivered deep in the lung. The next stride forward was the tiny portable pump. It permitted the long, slow injection of medications, which proved to be of enormous benefit to many diabetic patients, as well as sufferers from other diseases. Next came patches held to the skin by adhesives. These dispense drugs that pass through the skin slowly. They're used for everything from motion sickness treatments to contraceptives.

Other new technologies are stunningly clever. Concerta, a medication used to treat attention deficit disorder, consists of a capsule with a tiny laser-drilled hole in one end. The drilled end is packed with the active drug, which passes out into the intestine through the hole. The other end of the capsule holds a material that swells as it absorbs water. As the material swells, it pushes the active ingredient out through the tiny hole. So, Concerta capsules are really tiny pumps that release their active ingredient at a precisely controlled rate over a very long period of time.

Caveat: Exubera is a tremendously attractive product, both for diabetics and for Pfizer stockholders. It's important, though, to point out that not all the members of the FDA panel (the vote was 7 to 2) agreed that it was the right time to release inhaled insulin for general use. The dissenting panelists raised significant, if theoretical, safety concerns about this medication. They were concerned about possible long-term side effects from extended chronic use. For example, in some tissues insulin acts as a kind of growth hormone, stimulating cells to proliferate. What if this effect were to take place in the lungs? These organs need to be mostly hollow to function and excess cell proliferation might fill them up—with ill consequences.

Inhaling insulin could also produce antibodies that could either inactivate the inhaled drug, or cause serious allergy and inflammation in the lungs—as asthma does. For some reason, this method of giving insulin stimulates considerably more antibody production than the old-fashioned method of injection. Still, so far we have not seen any of the predicted negative effects. The two dissenters on the FDA panel to release the medication point out, however, that the product has only been in testing for four years, perhaps not long enough for serious side effects to emerge.

Insulin is the hormone that controls the entrance of blood sugar, the most fundamental source of nutrition and energy, into most cells of the body. Without insulin, blood sugar (glucose) remains in the blood, where its concentration keeps increasing. This concentration damages blood-vessel walls and leads to other kinds of serious and permanent damage, for example to nerves. Meanwhile, the body loses the source of energy that cells need to function.

Insulin is normally made by specialized cells in the pancreas called beta cells. In type 1 diabetes, the body's immune defenses turn against, and destroy, beta cells. In type 2 diabetes, insulin is present but for a number of reasons can't do its job effectively.

politics
Inside Inside the Bubble
The film about John Kerry's campaign won't tell you why he lost.
By John Dickerson
Posted Friday, Sept. 30, 2005, at 4:27 PM PT

Inside the Bubble, a documentary that promises to reveal how the Kerry campaign lost the 2004 election, has restored a bit of campaign-season buzz to Washington. The Drudge Report called the film a "devastating behind-the-scenes look." Lloyd Grove promised despair among Kerry loyalists and snickering from Hillary's followers as the doc revealed the Massachusetts senator, who still hopes to run in 2008, as boobish and flailing. Democrats e-mailed preview clips and weighed how much exposing the underbelly of a Democratic campaign would hurt the party. Defensive quotes from Kerry staffers about the film suggested they had something to hide.

Titillating possibilities flitted through my head: grainy footage of John Kerry flip-flopping late at night in his hotel room. Strategist Bob Shrum controlling the candidate's every move from behind a glowing orb. Modern campaigns are so freeze-dried and antiseptic that one longs for unscripted moments, even after the fact. Plus, the film arrives as Democrats are still mulling the lessons of their loss. Should leaders of the party be cautious and calibrated to appeal to moderates and independents—or should they roar and stomp in an attempt to rally the base and captivate voters with authenticity?

Unfortunately, Inside the Bubble, which premiered at the New York Television Festival Thursday, doesn't do much to answer those questions. The movie overpromises the way sham politicians do. There are some amusing and entertaining moments, but there is little in it to explain why Kerry lost—no inside scoop from his senior advisers or much insight into the man himself. The strategists who may have botched the effort are either not seen or pass through in a blink. Instead, we spend a lot of time with secondary and tertiary players.

Vanity Fair media critic Michael Wolff is called in to add some structure and sometimes to slash and burn. "Stephanie is a horror show," he says of the campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. He makes sweeping statements about the campaign that may or may not be true, but the footage doesn't back him up. And he contradicts himself. Wolff claims that Bob Shrum kept Kerry too safe and controlled but then spanks the campaign for not controlling the candidate's image in a photo shoot as ruthlessly as the Hollywood actors do. Oh, the Vanity Fair cover he could have had!

As for the candidate himself, we don't see much of him that we haven't seen already. But there are a few surprises. Kerry the candidate seems tantalizingly less stiff than we remember. As he waits in a locker room for a satellite interview, he pretends to interview himself. It's a goofy, amusing moment. I've watched presidential candidates in this familiar, tense setting and seen them anxious that time's wasting, irritated by a local anchor's gooey snap, bark at their staffs, or even, in one case, bolt from a Marriot ballroom. Off-camera, Kerry is surprisingly at ease. "I don't know who exercised in this locker room last," he jokes with his aides, "but they left a lot of themselves here." Alas, when the interview starts, he snaps back into that familiar wooden image.

In the most talked-about scene, Kerry pulls aside his press spokeswoman and pushes her to correct two reporters who have mischaracterized the number of bills he has sponsored in the Senate. You'll remember Kerry remarkably glossed over his many years in that body in his convention speech. So it's amusing to see him here in his barn jacket fixating on the point. Others might chuckle because the accomplishments he's boasting are so minor. Though if you catch the reference to the bills he's talking about, they have a certain belated bite: flood protection, coastal zone protection …

Why is the candidate picking these nits when he's got bigger fish to fry? You could draw the conclusion that Kerry was a hopeless micromanager, but the truth is that they all do this: Candidates focus on the little stuff because it helps them feel in control. George Bush did this kind of thing a lot in 2000 and 2004. If there were scores of such clips, or if it were part of the larger narrative, perhaps we could draw conclusions about Kerry's controlling nature. But as a single incident it doesn't tell the uninitiated viewer much. Washington insiders may also note that the two reporters Kerry charges with distorting his record both once worked for the Boston Globe. Kerry's relationship with (some would say fixation on) his hometown newspaper is deep and complicated, which makes this an interesting moment for political obsessives, but not necessarily a revealing one.

If you're not a campaign-bus alum, the movie is most revealing as a window into what happens to staffers who live on the road for months at a time, their metabolisms in a blender as they chug coffee all day, drink too much at night, and fold and unfold themselves into plane, bus, and auditorium seats in the hours in-between. It's like a campaign version of Super Size Me.

If the movie has a star, it's Jim Loftus, the Kerry press wrangler who made sure the photographers stayed behind the rope lines and that the press got on the buses and into their seats without getting too close to the candidate or delaying his schedule.

He's manic and insane. Loftus rails at the New York Times for an unflattering picture of Kerry and rags on the campaign's own press spokesperson for her bad relations with the media. At one point, he tries as a birthday prank to get a pony into the room of Marvin Nicholson, Kerry's personal aide and the other star of the film. "Get the fucking pony and put it in the hotel room … if you can't get a pony get a goat but I want it in women's lingerie … and in that case you do have to stay with the goat or the goat will fucking eat the lingerie and the joke will be ruined."

Some might be tempted to shake their heads. You mean this is what Kerry's senior people were up to? Stow the sanctimony. This is what people like Loftus do. They are asked to ruin their bodies, spoil their minds, and shorten their life spans handling the logistics of campaign life. They blow off steam by playing jokes on each other. Later, when Loftus breaks down talking about how he'd give up his long-hoped-for Red Sox World Series victory if Kerry won the presidency, it makes you wonder if the Kerry campaign couldn't have used a few more such lunatics.

Because the Steve Rosenbaum wasn't given much access to the real strategists, he tries to make the subjects he gets sound more important than they are. When not doing that, the film tries to suggest that the confusion you're watching represents the chaos afflicting the Kerry campaign. It doesn't. It's garden-variety chaos that hits all campaigns.

The same endless series of switchbacks bedeviled the Bush campaign, which I spent most of my time covering at Time. Once when the president visited his campaign headquarters to buck up the troops, he and his entourage got lost in the warren of desks. The president blew up: "Is this how you want to be spending the president's time?" he snapped. "Lost and meandering within his campaign headquarters," reporters could have all written, if they'd seen the Bush campaign as undisciplined and disorganized at the time instead of hearing harrowing tales later. If Democrats are going to learn anything from this film or their loss in 2004, they will have to separate what was the normal confusion of a campaign from the confusion of this particular campaign.

It's not that the lower-level staffers don't have the potential to be interesting. Marvin Nicholson is no strategist, but he was Kerry's body guy and during the campaign was with him more than his wife. But alas, the film doesn't get much from him on Kerry the man. The other person physically closest to Kerry was John Sasso, his lifelong friend and confidant. Sasso is on-screen so briefly that if you glance away at the wrong moment to unstick your Milk Duds, you may miss him.

After the swirl of the campaign is over, Loftus is interviewed and offered as a sage to pinpoint the Kerry team's one great weakness. "What was the overarching point of the campaign?" he asks. "I don't know what the hell it was … I don't know now. I lived it for 11 months, admittedly intoxicated and exhausted and strung out from cigarettes and arguing with the press and sappers and the whole thing. I don't know. That's a problem." That is a problem, even when the guy saying it isn't your tactician or strategist. But the filmmakers shouldn't expect Loftus to play analyst—especially after lampooning him.

This genre has delivered before. The War Room let us into Clinton's scrappy 1992 campaign, and Journeys With George showed us the goofy, some would say frightening, side of the current president during his 2000 run. This movie can't achieve the grand goal it sets for itself, in part because the campaign seems to have known enough to keep the cameras out of the rooms where the important bad decisions were being made. But if you aren't going to allow the cameras inside, letting them hang around the outskirts of a campaign only courts misinterpretation. If the 2008 documentarians get any more distanced from the action, we'll be watching shaky footage of volunteers painting placards before rallies.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127242/

press box
The Biggest Loser
It's not Judith Miller. It's the Times editorial board.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, Sept. 30, 2005, at 4:07 PM PT

The biggest loser in Judith Miller's capitulation yesterday to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald isn't freedom of the press. And it isn't Miller, the New York Times reporter whose reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had previously sullied her reputation.

It's the Times editorial page.

Ever since Miller refused to testify before a grand jury in the Valerie Plame case and a federal judge issued her a contempt citation and the jail sentence that goes with it, the Times editorial page has aligned itself with her absolutist stance that she should never, ever be forced to talk. On Oct. 16, 2004, the editorial page stated:

The specter of reporters' being imprisoned merely for doing their jobs is something that should worry everyone who cherishes the First Amendment and the essential role of a free press in a democracy.

The page reiterated support of Miller with multiple editorials (Oct. 16, 2004; Dec. 5, 2004; Dec. 20, 2004; Feb. 17, 2005; June 28, 2005) and one on July 7, 2005, as she entered the Alexandria Detention Center. Nor did the page abandon Miller once she was behind bars, stridently calling for her release on July 19, 2005; Aug. 15, 2005; Aug. 29, 2005; and Sept. 19, 2005, drawing unintentional laughs by heralding the European petition for Miller's behalf signed by "writers, journalists and thinkers including" Günter Grass, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Pedro Almodovar. You can almost hear Fitzgerald say, "If Gunter, Bernard-Henri, and Pedro want me to spring Judy, well, okay!"

The page's Aug. 29, 2005, editorial universalized her plight: "If Judith Miller loses this fight, we all lose."

We lose? I'm sorry, but the only losers I count today are Miller and the Times editorial page, which she left holding the soiled bag of her absolutism. As today's news accounts (Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times) report, Miller has accepted a waiver to testify from confidential source I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, and the get-out-of-jail card that comes with it.

Don't get me wrong about Miller and Fitzgerald's investigation. I opposed the investigation even before there was an investigation, writing that it's highly unlikely that anybody broke the law (the Intelligence Identities Protection Act) that has been invoked. I've written reams denouncing Fitzgerald's misguided investigation, standing up for reporters' privilege. I've given unsolicited legal advice to Miller and Matthew Cooper, the Time reporter who eventually answered subpoenas in the case, telling them to dump lawyer Floyd Abrams and hire my former paladin, Bruce Sanford. I even threw a kiss to that impossible minx, Miller, when she promised not to talk.

But there is no way for Miller—and by extension the Times editorial page, which staked so much on her stance—to deny that they have lost hugely. From the get-go, Miller refused to accept waivers from sources releasing them to talk. In particular, she and the Times editorial page disdained the "general waivers" that prosecutor Fitzgerald had obtained from White House officials and presented to journalists under subpoena. On July 19, 2005, the editorial page stated, "In fact, these documents were extracted by coercion, so they are meaningless. Employees who are told they are required to sign waivers to keep their jobs are not sincerely freeing reporters from promises to keep their identities secret."

The Times was not alone on this score. As the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reported on July 13, 2005, "Post reporters who answered prosecutors' questions also declined to rely on the paper waivers."

Miller held similar disdain for "specific waivers," personal waivers sources sign freeing specific reporters to talk to the grand jury. Times Executive Editor Bill Keller outlined Miller's waivers views in the same Post story:

The simple fact is that Judy made a promise to a source that she would protect his anonymity. That source has not granted her any kind of a waiver from that promise, at least one that she finds persuasive or believes was freely given, and she feels bound by that pledge. And more than that, she feels that, if she breaks that pledge, she will compromise her ability to do her job in the future.

The spin that the Miller camp appears to be putting on her belated acceptance of a Libby waiver is that something changed between the time she was jailed and yesterday. Times publisher and Miller friend Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told his own news pages today that she "has finally received a direct and uncoerced waiver, both by phone and in writing, releasing her from any claim of confidentiality and enabling her to testify." [Emphasis added.]

Said Keller in a statement reported in the Post, "Judy refused to testify in this case because she gave her professional word that she would keep her interview with her source confidential. In recent days, several important things have changed that convinced Judy that she was released from her obligation." [Emphasis added.]

What changed? On one level, nothing: Libby attorney Joseph Tate told the Post that he had informed Miller attorney Floyd Abrams a year ago, explaining that Libby's waiver was voluntary and that Miller was free to testify. On another level, everything: At some point this year, Miller replaced Abrams with Bob Bennett. Tate was astonished to learn several weeks ago when Bennett contacted him that Miller did not regard his earlier communication as license to talk.

"We are surprised to learn we had anything to do with her incarceration," Tate told the Post.

How could Miller have misunderstood? It's well known that her fellow First Amendment martyr, Cooper, who narrowly avoided becoming Miller's cellmate when Karl Rove gave him a waiver, previously got one from Libby and gave limited testimony in August 2004. Cooper wrote up the account in Time magazine (July 25, 2005, issue) and recounted it on the July 17, 2005, edition of Meet the Press. Can we really believe 1) that Miller misunderstood the original deal Tate conveyed to Abrams; or 2) that she and her lawyer missed the Time and Meet the Press revelations that Libby was willing to talk?

What's more likely is that Miller was tiring of jail after her 12-week stay—and who wouldn't be?— and that she conveniently "rediscovered" Libby's offer once Fitzgerald threatened her anew with criminal contempt charges, obstruction of justice, and extension of the grand jury, which could have given her 18 months more to stew in her cell. One clue that I might be right: Miller's former attorney Abrams, a charming man who returns phone calls, did not return the Post's. He also declined to discuss the question of the year-old waiver with reporters covering the story for the New York Times, his sometime employer.

If Abrams isn't talking, there's much, much more to say, and I think we can say it for him. Judith Miller surrendered her ballyhooed principles yesterday and called it victory. The real winner for anybody with eyes to read a newspaper is Patrick Fitzgerald.

One last point: The Times editorial page deserves a big loss in its column if for no other reason than they called this mess down on Miller, Cooper, Novak, Pincus, Russert, Kessler, the Times, et al. with a self-contradictory Oct. 2, 2003, editorial. The editorial both fretted that Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department and the White House weren't investigating the case aggressively and fretted that a thorough investigation would ensnare the press, too.

"The Justice Department should focus its attention on the White House, not on journalists," stated the editorial.

But you can't investigate a crime that consists of leaking to the press without getting the press to talk. Maybe the paper's publisher and editorial board have figured that out now. They should have grasped it then, before requesting the epic collision of first principles from which Judith Miller has just slunk away.

******

What will Judith Miller do next? Send your speculations to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127240/

books
Simon Blackburn
The British philosopher's "Truth Wars."
By Stephen Metcalf
Posted Friday, Sept. 30, 2005, at 2:37 PM PT

This is the second part of a two-part article. Click here to read Part 1.

The English philosopher Simon Blackburn would like us to believe in something he calls "the Truth Wars," a kind of shadow version or echo of what was once known in the 1980s and '90s as "the culture wars." In the Truth Wars, respect for the truth has been degraded by a band of careless and pseudo-sophisticated philosophes, and this degradation carries with it a broad set of cultural consequences. (Loss of public esteem for the natural sciences most worries Blackburn, though he paints a world broadly lacking in proper respect for any authority or expertise.) To this end, Blackburn has set up a contrast between what he labels "absolutists," or right-thinking scientists and philosophers whose respect for truth remains intact; and "relativists," or the wrongheaded, overindulged critical theorists who believe only in self-interest and power. While Blackburn generously names his allies—the philosophers Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, and Hilary Putnam—details about his enemies are left sketchy. In Truth, the hostility to the unnamed relativist so overflows at points as to make her sound more like a solipsist, a nihilist, or even a willful and demented child. I spent a number of years in and around English departments and certainly met plenty of nudniks and witnessed my share of bizarre seminar discussions. But never once did I meet the shameless knave that Blackburn describes.

Why would someone so ostensibly smart as Simon Blackburn spend so much time attacking a papier-mâché doll of his own making? Anyone currently in academia in any capacity knows that the prestige of hard and semihard disciplines (notably economics) has never been higher, while the prestige of soft disciplines—those aided over the previous 25 years by the allure of "theory," such as English, Comp Lit, Art History—has never been lower. Over the period in the history of the Anglo-American university Blackburn identifies as coinciding with the broader societal decline he decries, philosophy departments were ruled by analytic philosophers, direct descendants of the logical positivists he professes to adore, and the avowed enemies of the hermeneuticists he clearly detests. Meanwhile, the idea I read about constantly in the mainstream press or catch whiffs of from the stray Charlie Rose isn't post-colonialism or queer theory; it's sociobiology, or any of the various offshoots of Darwinian determinism that have left a cadre of English and American philosopher-scientists the most accredited, respected, and glamorously feted public intellectuals of their day.

Blackburn's Truth Wars would pit right-brain adepts of the math and sciences against the left-brain adepts of the humanities, but this is a tendentious morality play meant to fret the public imagination without taking into account the actual intellectual or institutional history of the American university. Blackburn doesn't ever let on, but the unacknowledged conflict at the heart of Truth is between two opposing camps within the humanities over what the humanities should look like given the unchallenged pre-eminence of the natural sciences. Here a little history might be in order. The contemporary American philosophy department is heir to a group of European intellectuals, known as the Vienna Circle, who came to the United States in the '30s to flee the Nazis. (Some were also from a related group called the Berlin Circle.) The contemporary American English department is the heir to a group of European intellectuals, known as the Frankfurt School, who came to the United States in the '30s, also to flee the Nazis. The Vienna Circle was made up of philosophers—chief among them Carnap, Feigl, and Reichenbach—who knew personally the prominent scientists of the day and were proficient, to say the least, in math. They wanted to establish a firm basis for all knowledge as logical and empirical—that is, as mathematical and scientific. For their part, the Frankfurt sociologists—chief among them Horkhemer, Adorno, and Marcuse—were interested in understanding modes of social control, especially in light of the political psychosis they had only just fled. Their work did not presuppose or aspire to a style of thinking that refined away historical contingency or the vicissitudes of political conflict; but they firmly believed, under the direction Horkheimer, that Marxism was a science.

Within the humanities, there's no denying it, the prestige attaching to the heirs to the Frankfurt School has outstripped the prestige attaching to the heirs to the Vienna Circle. The reason, I think, is simple: In the battle for non-scientific hearts and minds in a university, the less-scientific sounding people are bound to win out. One philosopher above all has chronicled the decline in prestige of analytic philosophy and the corresponding rise in interest in literary theory; and not coincidentally, this is the one enemy Blackburn troubles to identify by name. This is a review-essay, and any attempt to justify the American philosopher Richard Rorty's conclusion, that truth is human-centered and consensual and not alien and extrinsically imposed, would require at least a book. But it is possible to identify, merely by quoting Rorty, the wound to the ego that seems to have motivated Blackburn to write a screed in response to him. As Rorty has written:

The principal vice of the community of analytic philosophers is that its members do not read much outside of analytic philosophy. Graduate study in philosophy in most American philosophy departments is largely a matter of going over the publications of the last ten or twenty years in order to get the background necessary for throwing oneself into the "hot topics" of the last one or two years—the topics currently being discussed on the pre-print circuit. … Yet they have little sense of what the ancient discipline was. … Nor do they have much sense of what is going on in the history, political science, literature, or sociology departments of the universities in which they teach. This is why they are baffled and annoyed when they find that contemporary French and German philosophers are being admired, discussed, and taught in these departments.

Being told that you are ill-read, or better yet, a "time-serving bore," as Rorty has dubbed analytic philosophers, would fuel anyone's bafflement and annoyance, and these are the twin engines behind Truth. As a helpless rejoinder to Rorty that only serves to prove his case, the book would be harmless if it didn't also take energy from a trend darkening the culture at large. A few years back, Blackburn, the defender of the total explanatory advantage of science, confided to an interviewer that he didn't believe in global warming:

I think the scientific evidence is that the phenomenon is either very slight or doesn't exist. There is no good measurement of global warming. There are bad measurements of it using land-based, widely-scattered, sporadic, rather primitive instruments called "Stevenson Boxes," often sited near airports and in cities which do indeed show warming, but the globe is much bigger and the best measurements of the atmosphere's temperature are given by satellites and by meteorological balloons. And if you go to the websites for those, they show more or less flat graphs.

At this, as one might imagine, the interviewer expressed some amazement. "Yes, I shared that belief until six months ago," Blackburn replied. "I then went to New Zealand, where a man called Denis Dutton directed me to some of the skeptical literature on this and to the websites I've been talking about." Now, I have met Denis Dutton, and he is a nice enough man, an American philosophy professor who lives and teaches in New Zealand. Dutton is well-known for two things: his dislike of the academic left, which he lampoons with his Annual Bad Writing Contest; and a phobic dislike of environmentalism, which he berates tiresomely through his otherwise very fine Web site, Arts & Letters Daily. Dutton is a gadfly, not an authority (on anything, so far as one can tell), and on the most basic facts regarding global warming, both he and Blackburn are simply wrong. The evidence for global warming comes from a variety of sources, and it is convergent: In addition to ground-based temperature readings, there are satellite measurements, space measurements of Earth's heat budget, borehole readings, computer models, and several mutually reinforcing lines of historical evidence. Nonetheless, how satisfying, if global warming were a canard! How vast the bad faith, and the hoodoo powers of left-wing conspiracy! To which one can only reply: Physician, heal thyself. As in his beef with Rorty, Blackburn has let a personal distaste overwhelm a basic respect for the facts. To have been lectured to at length by this man, on just this score, and in a book so clumsily soldered together, lies beyond even poor taste; it is perverse. It requires reminding, then, that "Philosopher" isn't a job description, but an honorific. And in this instance, it might better be revoked.

Stephen Metcalf is a Slate critic and lives in Brooklyn.

 

explainer
What's a Runaway Grand Jury?
Is that what sank Tom DeLay?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Friday, Sept. 30, 2005, at 2:07 PM PT

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is scheduled to appear in a Texas courtroom three weeks from today to face a charge of conspiracy. DeLay's allies have ridiculed the charge, calling it the handiwork of a partisan prosecutor. DeLay claims that the prosecutor first told him he wasn't a target of the investigation and then dodged responsibility for the indictment by blaming it on a "runaway grand jury" that didn't follow his instructions. What's a runaway grand jury?

One that ignores the prosecutor's instructions. Grand juries are supposed to be independent, investigative bodies with the power to call their own witnesses, subpoena documents, and decide on the specifics of an indictment. In practice, they have very little opportunity to take initiative. The prosecutor decides which evidence will be presented, then tells the jury whom to indict on what charges. All the jury does is vote yes or no. In rare cases, a grand jury rejects the prosecutor's direction, makes its own investigation, and draws its own conclusions. Lawyers call this a "runaway."

These days, grand juries tend to serve as rubber stamps. In 1985, Judge Sol Wachtler famously said that grand juries are so compliant, a district attorney could get one to "indict a ham sandwich." (Republican lawmakers likened DeLay to a ham sandwich here and here.) The modern criminal-court system makes it very difficult for a grand jury to exercise any independent authority. Subpoenas for witnesses or documents go through the prosecutor's office, and testimony typically unfolds under her direction in the absence of a judge or defense attorneys. Critics of the system argue that even though grand juries are supposed to protect defendants from frivolous charges, they almost never do. Instead, prosecutors use grand juries to strengthen their cases—by obtaining evidence without having to parry defense objections, for example.

Runaway grand juries were far more common before the 20^th century. Feisty jurors in New York took on government prosecutors when they chose to investigate Boss Tweed in 1872. Thirty years later, a grand jury in Minneapolis hired private detectives to help indict the mayor.

There have been a few runaway juries in recent years. In 1991, a federal prosecutor lost control of a jury investigating environmental crimes at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. The government worked out a plea bargain with the company that owned the plant, but jurors wanted to indict the company along with five of its employees and three officials from the Department of Energy. A member of the grand jury who happened to be an attorney led the dissent.

Could Tom DeLay have been indicted by a runaway grand jury? Yes, because the jury didn't have to run very far. It's almost impossible for a jury to completely ignore a prosecutor's wishes and conduct their own investigation. But in the Texas case, two of DeLay's close associates were also being charged. Given the evidence, the jury might have decided on its own to extend the indictment to DeLay. It's not clear if this happened—grand jury proceedings are typically kept secret—but these comments from the jury foreman suggest that the case proceeded in the usual manner.

Even if the jury did conjure the DeLay indictment on its own, the prosecutor could still try to make it go away. He could ask a judge to dismiss the charge for lack of evidence, for example.

Next question?

Explainer thanks Lori Shaw of the University of Dayton.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

 

 

 supreme court dispatches
They're Dying in Oregon
Should the Supreme Court save them?
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005, at 2:51 PM PT

Some Supreme Court cases have odd or long-winded names that have nothing to do with what they're remembered for. The case heard this morning, however, is satisfyingly direct. It's called Gonzales v. Oregon, and it pits a state's power to let doctors help terminally ill patients die against the attorney general's power to stop them. It's all life and death—no fun, no games—in the first major case for the term and for Chief Justice John Roberts.

In 1994 and then again in 1997, Oregon voters passed the Death With Dignity Act, which allows doctors to prescribe lethal doses of legal but regulated drugs to dying Oregonians who ask for them. John Ashcroft, who was then a senator, asked Janet Reno, who was then Clinton's attorney general, to stop the Oregon doctors. Reno declined. In 1998 and 1999, Ashcroft introduced two bills in Congress that would have explicitly scuttled Death With Dignity. Both bills failed.

Then Ashcroft became President Bush's attorney general. In 2001, he announced that the federal Controlled Substances Act—passed by Congress in 1970 to "conquer drug abuse" and control the trafficking of legal and illegal drugs—gave him the power to revoke the licenses of doctors who assisted suicide with a prescription drug. The doctors could also be criminally prosecuted. When Ashcroft made his move, Oregon squawked its way to court. (That's why the name of today's case could be improved on a bit—it should really be called Ashcroft v. Oregon.)

At oral argument this morning, the justices start off nervous about this abundance of AG power. What about "some very different attorney general who had a very different view of the death penalty" and decided to prosecute a doctor who prescribed a lethal injection at a state or federal execution, Sandra Day O'Connor asks. What would stop him? Solicitor General Paul Clement tries to reassure her that Congress ratified the use of lethal injections for execution in 1994. But O'Connor can't be appeased. "But isn't the reasoning the same?" she presses. David Souter and later Stephen Breyer join in. The full-court press backs Clement into a mistake. He says that doctors aren't directly involved with lethal injections.

It's the first of several such off-balance moments for Clement—not because he's not his brilliant self, but because he's got a tough set of facts and precedents to negotiate. A minute or two later, Ginsburg reminds him of the Justice Department's position in Washington v. Glucksberg, the 1997 case in which the court found in the Constitution no right to die. "The government said then," Ginsburg points out, that there is "every reason to believe that the state legislatures will address this issue in a fair and legitimate way." It sounds like she is directly quoting. "You are rejecting that position," she concludes, taking pains not to sound triumphant.

Clement has to disagree. The problem is where that takes him. A breath after standing by Glucksberg, he seems to be saying that doctors in Oregon can zap all the patients they want to as long as they don't do it with federally regulated drugs. His poster boy is none other than Jack Kevorkian. Doctor Death "had no federal substances license for six years before his conviction," Clements notes cheerfully.

Has the Bush administration really just invoked Dr. Kevorkian as a model of medical practice?

Clement reaches for a lifeboat. Even if the drugs that non-Kevorkian doctors can prescribe to assist suicide (barbiturates classified as Schedule II under the Controlled Substances Act) are the most effective means to that end, he continues, that wouldn't make them OK. After all, if a state wanted to allow doctors to prescribe illegal drugs (Schedule I drugs like cocaine), it wouldn't be able to. Clement is paddling toward Ashcroft v. Raich. In that case last term, the court ruled that the federal government could prosecute sick Californians who were smoking pot with the blessing of their state's medical marijuana law.

Then Ginsburg snatches the lifeboat away. "But Congress said when it made a drug Schedule I, 'No. Never,' " she says. "With Schedule II, it's OK with a doctor's prescription." Marijuana is definitely Schedule I. If Clement loses, this exchange will probably be why. The drugs that doctors prescribe to assist suicide are legal. Marijuana is illegal. The attorney general who is trying to nab Oregon doctors with a law that says nothing about assisted suicide is one executive appointee. Congress that passed a law explicitly criminalizing pot is the whole elected legislature.

But when Oregon's lawyer, Robert Atkinson, takes his turn, he gets addled, too. What if a state wanted to, say, let doctors prescribe morphine for recreational use, Stephen Breyer asks. The attorney general would be able to do something about that, wouldn't he?

The correct answer is clearly yes. Atkinson says no. The federal government should trust the states to regulate drugs responsibly and leave them alone, he argues. This is too much for Breyer, and for the rest of his team, too. "Far be it from me to suggest an argument," Breyer says after Atkinson fails repeatedly to bail himself out. Breyer and Souter team up to propose that it's one thing for a state to "gut" the Controlled Substances Act—by letting doctors be drug pushers—and another for that state to make provisions for physician-assisted suicide, a scenario that Congress didn't envision when it passed the CSA.

"I don't have any argument with that," Atkinson says, relieved.

"Yes you do!" Scalia interrupts. Atkinson's case, Scalia assures him, hinges on the argument that the boundaries of accepted medical practice are determined state by state. Atkinson agrees—falling into a trap that Scalia laid earlier. Congress chooses to regulate gambling and to set a national drinking age. These things "are none of the federal government's business either," Scalia says. But no one's questioning Congress' authority to take on gambling or drinking—or, generally, speaking, the prescription of drugs. And if that's the case, and the Controlled Substances Act gives the attorney general broad power—as Scalia thinks it does—why shouldn't Ashcroft and Gonzales string up any doctor they want?

Maybe this is federalism—the debate over how to balance federal and state power—come full circle. Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and John Paul Stevens often advocate for accommodating federal authority. But they're with Oregon in this case, because they're far more comfortable expanding Congressional power than they are enhancing the power of the attorney general. Scalia, revealed as federalism's fair-weather friend last year when he joined the pro-Congress majority in Raich, is on the federal government's side again. More power for the attorney general appears to be fine with him. John Roberts seems unhappy about the prospect of Oregon letting doctors dole out morphine to make patients happy. Anthony Kennedy seems unhappy generally. O'Connor, the court's staunchest states' rights advocate (William Rehnquist RIP), appears to be firmly on the side of Oregon. But her vote only counts if she's still on the court when the ruling is handed down.

Count heads, and you figure out that this case could come down to O'Connor. And since the court is unlikely to decide any cases with O'Connor as the deciding vote, Clement and Atkinson may be back for a second round—with a new ninth justice. This, then, is what all the fuss over Harriet Miers' confirmation is about.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127561/

surfergirl
A Horse Walks Into a Bar ...
I Am Not an Animal is a cheerfully sicko social satire from the BBC.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005, at 2:50 PM PT

A long philosophical tradition attempts to distinguish between man and animal on the grounds that humans alone possess the gift of language, and thus deserve their self-imposed status as the masters of the animal world. Of course, there are various objections to this argument: that speech is not the key difference between man and animal, that language in and of itself confers no particular moral status, or even that animals do possess a kind of language of their own, incomprehensible to us. But what if a horse could walk right into a bar and order a drink? The six-part animated BBC series I Am Not an Animal, which premieres tonight at 11 p.m. ET on the Sundance Channel, takes on this absurd question as an ethical challenge.

The show's terrific premise: In a lab ominously known as "Vivi-Sec UK," unscrupulous scientists are engaged in "Project S," a top-secret experiment to develop talking animals. So far, they've successfully created only a handful, including a pseudo-intellectual horse named Philip (voiced by Steve Coogan); Hugh (Kevin Eldon), a horny Scottish monkey; and Winona (Amelia Bullmore), a celebrity-obsessed bulldog who remains convinced that, if she could just meet Tim Robbins, she could easily steal him away from Susan Sarandon, his "very, very old, fly-eyed wife."

These freaks of nature live in artificial upper-middle class comfort in the secluded lab, sipping chianti and discussing the latest "sub-Altmanesque" cinema under the heavy surveillance of Mike, a guilt-ridden lab tech with his finger poised above a button reading "Kill Them All." Just outside the lab lurks a mopey animal-rights activist named Julian, who's so depressed by the mistreatment of God's creatures that he can only be saved from suicide when a fellow activist reminds him that he himself is, technically speaking, an animal. ("Oh my God!" he gasps, removing the gun barrel from his mouth. "I almost killed an animal!")

In tonight's pilot episode, "London Calling," Julian and his terrorist cohorts storm the lab, freeing seven of its coddled denizens into a world where they're suddenly expected to behave like, well, animals. Forced to remain mute and forage for their own food, they wander through the outskirts of London, trying to make sense of the gulf that suddenly separates them from the civilized world. (Philip's description of his first glimpse of a pasture full of cows is a wonderful glimpse of the lab animals' radical alienation from nature: "This weird giant nightclub with its uneven green dance floor, which the overweight, naked clientele insist on eating.")

All these beasts and men are rendered in appealingly flat stop-frame collage animation, mixed with some digital effects. The low-tech aesthetic of I Am Not An Animal looks like a clip-art children's book come to life, but the show is decidedly not for kids; while not overtly dirty, it contains plenty of off-color references and some disturbing imagery, including a scene in which the head of Kieron the cat, severed in a lab experiment, continues to smoke a cigarette as smoke pours out from his bloody stump of a neck.

The show's overall effect falls somewhere between dystopic science fiction and the cheerfully sicko sensibility of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup. But unlike, say, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, I Am Not an Animal styles itself as social satire. In part, it's a brief for the ethical treatment of other species (though less explicitly and heartbreakingly so than Creature Comforts, the Oscar-winning anti-zoo short film by Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park). But it also skewers PETA-style animal-rights activism, rampant consumerism, and the pretensions of the educated class. Explaining why animals outside the lab seem incapable of making articulate sounds, Philip the horse whispers, sotto voce, to his companions, "Many people below a certain level of breeding just point at each other and fight." Mark, a sparrow with dreams of a singing career ("My stage name is Glenn Belt"), refuses to travel without his Italian shoes, complete with shoe trees. Served a plate of sugar cubes by his human host, Philip mutters, "This generally comes with a pot of Darjeeling."

A cult hit in Britain last year, I Am Not an Animal also caused some controversy there, both from animal-rights advocates and from those who claimed that the vivisection-lab setting was no place to joke about (the show's creator, Peter Baynham, answered his critics in this moving piece in the Guardian). Though Baynham's show can be appreciated for its deliberately wonky animation technique, its sly voice characterizations, and its sheer anarchic silliness, it also echoes, however indirectly, a point made by the 18^th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant: "If [a man] is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men."

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127584/

the book club
The Accidental Masterpiece
What do people want from art?
By Michael Kimmelman and Stephen Metcalf
Updated Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005, at 2:26 PM PT

From: Stephen Metcalf
To: Michael Kimmelman
Subject: On the Art of Being an Art Critic
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2005, at 5:02 AM PT

Every now and then, Slate varies our standard Book Club format (in which two critics discuss a new book) by asking one of our critics to interrogate the author of the book in question and allowing the author to respond. This week, Stephen Metcalf will correspond with Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for the New York Times, and the author of the recent The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa.

Michael,

For a very brief while, I was a political speechwriter. At the beginning of every political speech is a brief panegyric known in the trade as "the suck-up." Ours is an odd format, with one of us (er, me) addressing a set of public letters to a writer (er, you) about his newly published book, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, and if nothing else it requires a suck-up. You've made my job blessedly unawkward, though, by writing a terrific book—really and truly, a thoughtful, unpretentious, funny, pop (in the best sense of the word) monograph (in the best sense, etc.) about the delightfully vexatious relationship between art and life. I have to admit, I cringed a little at the subtitle (the title I unreservedly like) as it reminded me of all the grim and condescending middlebrow vade mecums recently published, touting the Oprah-esque therapies available in the Great Works. But this book is both so immediately companionable and so nuanced that my fears were quickly banished, and what followed was a pleasure from beginning to end.

Before I plunge in with observations and queries, let me lay out my qualifications for writing about art: none. I think I like Cézanne and Degas and something called Fauvism, but if the authorities were to tell me otherwise, I would cease immediately. On the other hand, this makes me (I hope) your ideal reader—moderately ignorant, suspicious of the art world, but ripe for conversion experiences.

Probably the best way to start is to summarize the book, which is divided into 10 essays. Each essay introduces a broad theme—collecting, pilgrimages, "the sublime"—that is then worked through by mixing personal history, art history, anecdote, lore, and reportage. Some essays focus most intently on a single person or artist; so, the essay on collecting has at its center Dr. Hicks, who amassed a collection of 75,000 light bulbs, many of them rare specimens; the essay on nudes is almost exclusively a profile of the painter Philip Pearlstein. Many essays, however, are driven more by theme. And several artists—and non-artists—are discussed. A guiding theme overarches the entire book and is laid out in the introduction:

The idea behind The Accidental Masterpiece, the one that popped into my head at some point, is pretty simple. It is not that I should write a book of art history or criticism, exactly, or dwell on the accomplishments of the greatest or my favorite painters, sculptors, and photographers. Nor is it that all art is salutary. A day of looking at bad art can be long and dark. Instead, it is that—whether the example is the life of an artist as lofty as Bonnard or the passion of the lightbulb enthusiast Dr. Hicks—art provides us with clues about how to live our own life more fully. Put differently, this book is, in part, about how creating, collecting, and even just appreciating art can make living a daily masterpiece.

Along the way, you treat a wide variety of artists, from Bonnard, in his own time the démodé impressionist, to Matthew Barney, now an à la mode multimedia superstar. But you seem (correct me if I'm wrong) most attuned to that artist whose life is an intense and often self-consciously unworldly devotion to his or her own tightly circumscribed routine; so that when the signature of that artist finally emerges, it doesn't appear as something sudden, cheap, and public, as the commanding gesture of naughty self-branding that many people now associate with modern and postmodern art, but as something worthy of a similarly intense devotion on our part. Unschooled as I am, we seem to share a taste for: Bonnard, Charlotte Salomon, and Ray Johnson. Not coincidentally, these were my favorite chapters in the book. The essay on Bonnard is simply narcotic, as it lovingly describes Bonnard's marriage to Marthe as the tender prisonhouse that became his universe. I won't spoil it for the reader, but that last sentence, and that last image, are—well, what is the word when pathos is completely earned?

Let me round this out with some questions. Am I right in thinking that the subtext for the book is an open question of your own about how to assume the proper attitude toward art as a critic? Those dangers being: humorlessness, pedantry, in-group preciousness? When someone like me looks at art, he also sees implied behind the canvas or installation a complex economy of competing egos and interests, and sometimes decides to check out of the whole affair. To put it bluntly, as the chief critic for the New York Times, aren't these your Scylla and Charybdis: a philistine majority culture that "knows what it likes"—i.e., Thomas Kinkade—and a hyper-refined minority culture, made up of absurdly fastidious palates? How do you find room to turn people on to the Good, when you have provincial distrust on one hand, and cosmopolitan ego-jockeying on the other? Was this book an answer to that dilemma at all? As I read it, in The Accidental Masterpiece you were saying our own lives, as we actually live them, help arbitrate our tastes and keep them from becoming either too vulgar or too precious. And to conclude: I liked hearing the voice of my own distrust, especially directed at someone as gigantic in egoistical proportion as Donald Judd, echoed by none other than Clement Greenberg, who claimed Judd trafficked in little more than "aimless surprise." Isn't that an apt description of everything bad about the art world these days?

Steve

From: Michael Kimmelman
To: Stephen Metcalf
Subject: Art After Marcel Duchamp, and Other Woes
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2005, at 10:34 AM PT

Steve,

I like this political speechwriting format that you've clearly perfected. I could really get used to the suck-up.

Thanks for the kind words. You do need a sense of humor to survive the current art scene, which I suspect is not really so different from the literary scene. Definitely the pitfalls of art criticism are pedantry, humorlessness, and insider arrogance. People outside the art world now simply presume that art writing is not for them. I'm reminded of the scene in a Marx Brothers' movie (I suddenly forget which one) where Chico (or is it Harpo?) untethers a raft with an orchestra on it, and the musicians keep playing, oblivious that they're drifting out to sea.

You've also nailed the Scylla and Charybdis of art writing (pandering either to "a philistine majority culture that 'knows what it likes' " or "a hyper-refined minority culture"), except that I'm more optimistic than you that the world is not divided so strictly between philistines and snobs.

Art, like Washington and Wall Street and old I Love Lucy reruns, has increasingly become the province of wonky specialists and private interest groups. There are many good writers who love art, but it used to be that great writers wrote often about it: Proust, Diderot, Baudelaire, Zola, Balzac, Tolstoy. They wrote in the spirit of the amateur—that is, for the love of it, because art, like other rich social and cultural topics, provided them with the necessary tools: good stories, characters, dramas, philosophy. If surveys are right, more people today visit art museums than go to ballgames, so millions are clearly looking for something from art. But so much art criticism feels exclusive or condescending.

I suppose (forgive me for this bit of pedantry) the problem is a spillover from Marcel Duchamp's urinal. It was a short step from his urinal to the bottle of Paris air that Duchamp called a sculpture, after which Yves Klein invited Parisians to the opening of an exhibition at which there was nothing to see. If there was no difference between Duchamp's urinal and an ordinary urinal (plumbing aside) and an art show could consist of nothing, then art no longer necessarily resided in the thing itself but in those who interpreted the thing. Meaning it resided in what you aptly call the in-group. This by definition created an out-group, a majority, whose alienation greases the exclusionary system. The art market depends on this—the spectacle of rich people paying obscene amounts for somebody else's underpants or similar objects of dubious art providing compensatory dollops of black comedy.

Even so, I've found that good art is, by its nature, generous. It's about opening our eyes—about encouraging people to look more closely at what's around them (this was Klein's point). Art is too important and interesting to be left to the art world. This is why I am frequently attracted, as you are, to serious obsessives, often of a more private temperament, who, if not always divorced from cheap fame and passing fads, are at least legally separated from them. They throw themselves into their work, for its own sake, and are willing to fail. Their routines can speak to us, even if we don't, or can't, do what they do.

You mention, for example, Dr. Hicks, the Baltimore dentist who collected 75,000 light bulbs and opened the erstwhile Museum of Incandescent Lighting in his basement. In that same chapter I recall my late friend Alex. He was an aspiring novelist who lined his tiny, roach-infested studio apartment (in one of those vanilla brick buildings near the United Nations) with bookshelves stuffed to capacity, so that whenever he bought a new book he had to dispose of one of equivalent width. Most of us just make piles. Precarious ones are even now threatening to topple over onto my laptop.

By tending methodically to his books, Alex, I came to realize, was devising a kind of evolving self-portrait, a shifting, surrogate literary identity. He turned something utterly mundane and routine into an artful act. I hadn't thought anybody else noticed what he was up to. Then after he died, I visited his father in London, and as I was leaving his house I spotted Alex's whole dog-eared collection, including his cheap pine bookshelves. His father had shipped everything across the Atlantic and recreated the library as a kind of memorial and a homespun work of installation art.

So, yes, to answer another of your questions, in terms of critical attitude I imagine my job is to find ways to explain what it is that we're all looking for when we go to museums, myself included. I guess I think that means going beyond a thumbs-up, thumbs-down verdict, or delivering a potted art history lesson. Down off my soapbox I can try to seek out old-fashioned stories, even adventures, that, in turn, permit a degree of constructive ambivalence. You say you're glad I express skepticism about Donald Judd and similar macho, misanthropic egomaniacs who built their own Xanadus in the middle of nowhere for millions of other people's dollars. I felt skeptical about them in the beginning. But I came to regard their obsessiveness and egomania as useful counterbalances in an equivocal and cautious cultural age. Acknowledging my own doubt was part of telling the whole story.

Now let me ask you: What do you look for when you go to a museum or a gallery? Is it beauty and cultural instruction, or good air-conditioning and an amusing crowd?

Michael

From: Stephen Metcalf
To: Michael Kimmelman
Subject: The In-Group Mentality of Contemporary Art
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005, at 5:02 AM PT

Michael,

Yours is such a good question, I'm temporarily stumped. I once found myself wandering through an art museum in Moscow. A nerveless traveler to begin with—I get disoriented leaving my kitchen to go to my living room—in Moscow I felt beyond stranded: alien, mute, stupid, and marked for petty crime. Killing time in this museum, I wandered through an assembly of old-master oils, none of which I could distinguish from any other. And then a face was looking out at me, so strange and yet so recognizably human in all its weariness, I suddenly felt less alien and stupid (though no less marked for petty crime). I leaned forward to see that the painting was, indeed, a Rembrandt.

A second, related anecdote: A friend of mine is a talented up-and-coming artist (you've probably run across his stuff—Benjamin Edwards) whose work I genuinely admire. Every few weeks or so, he comes to New York to trawl the various Chelsea galleries, and every now and then I tag along. At the end of a typically dispiriting circuit, in which the usual exhibitionistic tropes were on display, we stood lingering on a street corner. An older man, who, if I had to guess, was not homeless but a remnant of the old SRO days of Chelsea, walked up to us and said, "Disneyland for rich people. It's just Disneyland for rich people."

I can't deny the power of either one of these experiences. If I still go to museums or galleries, it's to be reminded that life is a series of unhappenings, and that this is the good news. If I avoid galleries and museums, it's because the cunning of bad art only redoubles our own boredom with ourselves back on ourselves, while making us feel excluded. No amount of air-conditioning and people-watching can make up for that.

Now back to your superb book. (And I write that last in reviewer mode, not speechwriter mode.) I was intrigued to see you date a certain tendency in art back to Duchamp, who famously signed the urinal "R. Mutt," converting it into Fountain, or a work of art. In your book, you write, "[Duchamp] challenged the prestige of the handmade." But he also inaugurated the total prestige of the gesture, the signature, as you very effectively argue. (Does this mean that Fountain is the very opposite of an accidental masterpiece?) If I follow you, you trace to Duchamp's founding gesture the origin of the in-group mentality, which implies the philistinism of the majority, the out-group. The basis of this mentality is, "I get it, because I get that everyone else will be getting it too." It acts like any pricing mechanism—you calibrate your own estimation of a thing based on the value you anticipate others will assign it. (The literary critic René Girard calls this "mediated desire.") I don't think what I felt when I saw the Rembrandt was "mediated desire." What I felt when I saw the signature was: "Huh, this whole art thing—maybe it's not such a fraud." To an even greater extent, your friend Alex's book collection so lacked a signature that its dignity as a private memorial act was total. When you discovered that Alex's father had preserved it, the discovery didn't enter you into a market relation with Alex's father, or with the memory of Alex; no "value" was assigned, no desire excited or extinguished; it was something closer to a communion, if I hear you right.

Which is why I like your book so much. Is this maybe the dialectic of the "accidental masterpiece"? Without something like a self-conscious gesture to heighten it, life recedes back into its old banal self. The bland surface of things (Updike) closes back upon itself; the ax never strikes the frozen sea within (Kafka). (Pick your own high literary cliché, though I still find both of these quite moving.) Heighten the gesture too much, though, and what do you get? A circle-jerk of the wealthy and hyper-educated. Where you draw the line is "taste," about which only the most provisional consensus is ever possible. So "good taste" is an open argument, not a laundry list of acceptable items. (A friend has already e-mailed to excoriate me for my idiotic dismissal of Donald Judd.)

I wonder, can we take this a step further? Has pride in despising philistinism itself become a mass luxury item, like the BMW 5 Series and the Sub-Zero fridge? So many people now know that Van Gogh died unvalued, and that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was mistaken for rebarbative junk, that the need to push frontiers has itself become habitual? The bourgeoisie can't get enough of placing its own thumb in its eye. No limit can be placed on the tendency; in fact, it constantly needs to refresh itself with new outrages. Thus an art district can indeed become a Disneyland for rich people. To employ life itself to chasten this tendency—to bring life to bear on our experience of sculptures and paintings, or poems and novels and plays—isn't philistinism; it's the opposite of philistinism.

Of the many great excerpts and quotes you include in The Accidental Masterpiece, maybe my favorite comes from Heinrich Heine: "Ach! I can't write any more. How can I write when there's no longer any censorship? How should a man who has always lived with censorship suddenly be able to write without it? All style will cease, the whole grammar, the good habits!"

Many thanks, Michael, for a delightful book, and a delightful exchange. I look forward to hearing from you this afternoon!

Steve

From: Michael Kimmelman
To: Stephen Metcalf
Subject: Most New Art Is Unoriginal and Unexciting
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005, at 2:25 PM PT

Steve,

I'm beginning to worry that I have a case of the Stockholm syndrome. I've been around the art world so long now that I may embrace my own oppression. Or maybe I'm just less easily dispirited by the inevitable disappointments of the Chelsea crawl. Obviously, Chelsea is like Disneyland because, unlike SoHo, it never was a neighborhood for artists that spawned consonant galleries. It began as an out-of-the-way real estate venture by rich dealers and is now a mall.

Meanwhile, as Iwan Wirth, the British dealer, recently told the Financial Times, contemporary art has "become a lifestyle" for the rich and overeducated. The bubble market sustains more and more galleries, which now must overfarm the land. Most new art is unoriginal and unexciting.

But then, so are most new television shows, most new restaurants, most new plays and movies and books. Good art is, by definition, distinguished by its exceptional condition, otherwise it would be ordinary art. So I don't expect to find it often—but I try to be open to it when it's out there.

Does that make me cynical or Pollyannaish?

It's risky to confuse the spectacle of the art world with art and miss the real point, which is to have an encounter, as you put it, beyond "value." I think you beautifully describe what we're looking for—what most people want from art—when you talk about a self-conscious gesture that neither reiterates "the bland surface of things" nor stoops to cheap posturing. These gestures reside in the realm of "taste," which remains "an open argument, not a laundry list of acceptable items." I couldn't agree more. A few years ago, when I visited Judd's compound in Marfa, Texas, which he turned into a kind of Lourdes of minimalism and is now a tumbleweed-tossed resort for the Gulfstream V crowd, I found books in his library by Ortega y Gasset, who lamented how an aversion to pathos and dependence on irony "imparts to modern art a monotony that must exasperate patience itself." This speaks, I think, to your experience with Rembrandt and to my point about Alex—and to why in the book I like to dwell on artists like Bonnard and Chardin as well as on amateur snapshots, Dr. Hicks' light bulbs, and Charlotte Salomon, an utter nonentity by all accounts who, on the eve of her death at Auschwitz, poured her whole life into making a work of art with no reasonable prospect that anybody would ever notice it.

Your encounter in Moscow also reminds me of the time I stumbled into a show of amateur snapshots at Ubu Gallery. In that case, unselfconscious pictures, the photographs naturally lacked all pretense. Their honesty left me dumbstruck. Not that they were Bonnards or Cartier-Bressons, but somehow, art had sneaked into them. They were ham-fisted flukes of double exposure and other miracles of dumb luck that sent me fishing through my own shoebox of family pictures, where I came across a fading Polaroid of myself, as it happened, in a museum in Russia. As a little boy I was planted by my parents before Picasso's Absinthe Drinker at the Hermitage. The picture of me is not bad enough to be good (my mother must have been fumbling with the camera), but I mention it anyway to illustrate your point, which the insular art world sometimes neglects, that "to bring life to bear on our experience of sculptures and paintings, or poems and novels and plays—isn't philistinism; it's the opposite of philistinism."

I love the story about Degas that I mention in the introduction: that as an old man in 1911 every day he visited a show of his hero, Ingres, at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. Degas was blind. He went just to run his hands over the pictures. I'm guessing that, as most of us hope to do when we look at art, he wanted to touch something that he cherished and deemed larger and longer-lasting than himself.

It's the difference between life and lifestyle. You're more of a pessimist—or is it a realist?—than I am. I wonder which one of them you think will win out in the end?

Great talking with you, Steve.

Michael

Michael Kimmelman is the art critic for the New York Times. He is the author of The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa.
Stephen Metcalf is a Slate critic and lives in Brooklyn.

 

history lesson
Supreme Court Cronyism
Bush restarts a long and troubled tradition.
By David Greenberg
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005, at 12:17 PM PT

With cries of cronyism greeting the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the White House is appealing to history—saying, in effect, that there's a long and distinguished tradition of cronyism in Supreme Court appointments. And they're right: From Andrew Jackson to Lyndon Johnson, many presidents have put their confidantes on the bench. But the White House claim omits a key fact. The practice of naming presidential pals began to wane decades ago, and, as John Roberts might say, the wisdom of avoiding cronyism is now a settled matter. The question is whether the Miers choice represents a one-time relapse or a harbinger of things to come.

Dismay about cronyism in America dates back to the 1830s, when government by the elite gave way to a more inclusive and contentious democracy. With democratization and party politics came the spoils system—a name derived from New York Sen. William L. Marcy's gloating remark, "To the victor go the spoils"—under which the party that wins an election doles out the rewards, including jobs, to its supporters. If such raw patronage strikes us today as unseemly, it appealed to populists like Andrew Jackson as a democratic reform—a blow against the aristocratic strains of the early republic. Of course, not everyone agreed.

In distributing offices to friends, Jackson deemed the Supreme Court fair game. In his two terms he appointed six justices, many of whom had helped him politically in some fashion. Most controversial was his choice of Roger Taney, who had been a crucial ally in shutting down the Bank of the United States. After an angry Senate refused to confirm Taney as treasury secretary, Jackson vowed to strike back, and when a high court vacancy opened in 1835, he did. Although the Senate rebuffed Taney's nomination at first, Jackson got the last laugh, nominating his friend again later that year when Chief Justice John Marshall died. Taney served as chief justice for 28 years.

In time, Jackson's habit of naming friends to the bench became fairly routine. In 1862 Abraham Lincoln appointed David Davis, a brilliant Illinois judge who had pushed Lincoln's Senate candidacy in 1858 and served as his campaign manager in 1860. Rutherford B. Hayes nominated two men who had worked to secure his dubious election, John Harlan and Stanley Matthews. Chester Arthur—who after a hacklike career surprised everyone as president by championing clean government—chose two meritorious justices, yet stumbled by naming his longtime sponsor, the former New York senator and political boss Roscoe Conkling, to a Supreme Court vacancy in 1882. (Though the Senate confirmed Conkling, he amazingly had the good sense to refuse to serve.)

In these years, no one presumed an iron wall should exist between the Supreme Court and party politics. Experience in elective politics or in other branches of government regularly preceded—and often coexisted with—judicial service. In the 20^th century, however, Progressive ideas about good government, which relied on disinterested, professional expertise, helped to give partisanship a bad name and to redefine law as a sphere separate from, rather than adjacent to, politics. Although justices still counseled presidents on a range of matters, and presidents still placed their friends on the court, they now did so with less frequency and more difficulty.

In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt caught little flak for picking William O. Douglas, his SEC chairman and sometime speechwriter. But nine years later Harry S. Truman was given hell—accused of rank favoritism—when he nominated to the high court his attorney general, Tom C. Clark (father of Ramsey), a political ally in several key fights. The next year Truman drew brickbats again for choosing former Sen. Sherman Minton, a close friend from his Senate days. Both nominations passed the Senate, though with an unusual amount of opposition for a time when deference to presidential prerogative reigned. Neither man went on to become an accomplished justice.

Although many recent justices have had loose ties to the presidents that nominated them, and both William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor cut their teeth as Barry Goldwater acolytes, the last justice who can fairly be called a crony—albeit a distinguished crony—was Abe Fortas. A former Yale Law School professor, a founding partner of the prestigious Washington firm Arnold, Fortas, and Porter, and an advocate before the high court, Fortas nonetheless owed his selection to his friendship with Lyndon Johnson, who in turn owed his 1948 Senate primary victory largely to Fortas' assistance.

Interestingly, no one cried cronyism when Johnson made Fortas an associate justice in 1965. Only three years later, when he tried to elevate the justice to chief, did the mostly conservative critics of the Warren Court and its liberal jurisprudence seize on Fortas' continuing contacts with the president as a reason to filibuster his nomination, which they did successfully. The prohibition against advising presidents on policy was a new stricture, which dozens of justices in the past had violated; the sudden outrage about it was mostly a smoke screen for conservatives. They didn't want to be seen as taking ideological aim at an institution the public saw as above the fray of partisan politics.

The Fortas filibuster, in retrospect, was a death knell for cronyism in high-court appointments, at least until this week. For several reasons, presidents since the 1960s found it imprudent to turn to close advisers.

First, since that contentious time, the Supreme Court has adjudicated many of our culture wars, and much of the public has come to care deeply about how the body will rule on all those sensitive issues we hear about with each nomination fight. Moreover, since the Fortas filibuster, the Senate has grown emboldened about challenging the president's choices. In the first two-thirds of the 20^th century, only one nominee failed to reach the bench, but now it happens often. As Fortas showed, undue closeness to the president hands ideological opponents an easy claim on which to ground their opposition.

Also, as a consequence of the new strife in the confirmation process, presidents have sought to immunize nominees from charges of unfitness by choosing candidates with impeccable credentials—a strategy Bush followed with Roberts. Presidents (until Bush) turned to the American Bar Association to bless candidates as "highly qualified," suggesting that merit was purely a professional quality, independent of ideology, that other professionals could best assess. Whereas Supreme Court justices once ran for president (as Charles Evans Hughes did in 1916) or freely dispensed partisan political advice (as, for example, William Howard Taft did for Calvin Coolidge), now the court was deemed to be wholly separate from party politics.

Finally, too many recent presidents ran into trouble by picking mediocrities. Most famously, Richard Nixon, when he unsuccessfully nominated the egregiously pedestrian G. Harrold Carswell, whose record Sen. Roman Hruska comically defended by stating, "So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters and stuff like that there." With this debacle, the political calculus had shifted: Appellate judges and distinguished law professors were in, and political pals were out.

Although it's obviously too soon to situate the Bush administration in history, it's possible, as I've suggested before, that it may be leading us into a period where politics is defined according to the old spoils system rather than the technocratic assumptions ushered in by the Progressive Era. This administration has, after all, disdained independent nonpartisan expertise—for example, in belittling the arguments of environmental science and in endorsing the teaching of religious accounts of human origins. It has politicized agencies once prized as nonpolitical, such as the CIA and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It has been unabashed about nepotism and cronyism. In the legal arena, the banishment of the ABA from the judicial selection process represents only the most obvious way that this White House has placed partisan loyalty over disinterested professional authority.

Cumulatively, all of this may well herald cronyism's return to the Supreme Court appointment process. Especially if Harriet Miers is confirmed.

******

For this piece, and for other research I've done on Supreme Court nominations, I've consulted dozens of books and articles. I would like especially to credit Henry J. Abraham's book Justices, Presidents and Senators, an indispensable source for much of this material.

David Greenberg writes the "History Lesson" column and teaches at Rutgers University. He is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127493/

 

music box
Seize the Time
Gang of Four and the eternal returns of retro rock.
By Simon Reynolds
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005, at 4:50 AM PT

In an early Ian McEwan short story, a novelist struggles with the follow-up to her acclaimed best seller. The tale has a grotesque psychological twist when the writer's lover discovers that the manuscript the writer has been working on is actually a painstakingly composed, word-for-word repeat of the debut. This isn't precisely what post-punk legend Gang of Four has done on Return the Gift, the first release by the group's original lineup since 1981, but it's not far off. Instead of recording an album of new material like most reformed bands do, they've rerecorded 14 Gang of Four classics cherry-picked from albums such as Entertainment!, Solid Gold, and Songs of the Free.

It's hard to think of a precedent in rock history for Return—essentially, a band recording its own tribute album. The decision has bemused many Gang of Four fans, who wonder why the band didn't just put out a compilation of the definitive versions. Some see Return as proof that the group's reformation was purely opportunistic, an attempt to reap the rewards of post-punk's ultrahip status these last couple of years. The renaissance has involved a swarm of new bands—from the Rapture and Radio Four to Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand—drawing heavily on the Gang's jagged and minimalist punk-funk. Surely, the argument goes, if the group really felt it had a relevant contribution to make beyond being a nostalgia act, it would write an album of new material.

But there are other ways of looking at Return the Gift. The title itself hints that the whole project might be an oblique commentary on retro culture's "eternal returns." That kind of meta-rock gesture was always Gang of Four's signature. When the band formed in 1977, singer Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill were enrolled in the University of Leeds' fine art department, then a hotbed of conceptualism and leftist critiques of institutionalized art. Absorbing this sensibility and bolstering it with extracurricular immersion in Marxist theorists like Gramsci, Gang of Four approached every aspect of their "intervention" in pop culture—songwriting, album packaging, interviews, internal band relations—in the spirit of demystification.

Return the Gift places in plain, unavoidable sight the redundancy and reconsumption involved in rock's nostalgia market. When fans buy new albums by reformed favorites of their youth, at heart they're hoping for a magical erasure of time itself. They're not really interested in what the band might have to say now, or where the band members' separate musical journeys have taken them in subsequent decades; they want the band to create "new" songs in their vintage style. Such consumer bad faith is precisely the kind of phenomenon that the old Gang of Four enjoyed skewering. Could it be that Return is saying, "You want a Gang of Four resurrection? Here you are, then, exactly what you secretly, deep-down crave: the old songs, again."

Yet the motivation for Gang of Four rerecording their songs also has a mundane, pragmatic aspect. "Covering" their own songs is a canny way of honoring and reactivating their legacy while ensuring that any benefits accrue to them. A straightforward repackaging of the old recordings, such as a compilation or box set, would only serve to enrich EMI, their original record company in the United Kingdom. And that's something Gang of Four didn't want to happen. "We have never made any money at all from record sales with EMI and still have unrecouped advances," King wrote in an e-mail. "So we didn't want them to benefit as they did nothing to support us." As for their original American record company, Warner Bros., King claims that they deleted Entertainment!—easily one of the 50 most powerful and influential rock albums of all time—in 1993 and only rereleased it in 2005 in response to Gang of Four's having become a fashionable reference point. Rerecording the songs—something that contracts typically allow artists to do after 20 years—puts Gang of Four in a strong bargaining position for negotiating a new deal with superior royalty rates. "It is our way of reasserting ownership of our own material," says King.

This hardheaded approach may seem "un-rock 'n' roll," but it's perfectly in accord with Gang of Four's commitment to stripping away the mystique from everything. The famous cover of Entertainment! depicts a Native American shaking hands with a cowboy. "The Indian smiles, he thinks that the cowboy is his friend," runs the caption. "The cowboy smiles, he is glad the Indian is fooled. Now he can exploit him." If demystification involves the refusal to be fooled, then such a sober, unsentimental mind-set lends itself to business, where seeing all the angles is paramount. Despite their Maoism-referencing moniker, Gang of Four were never card-carrying Communists (although early on they did operate as a collective, paying their roadies the same wage as the musicians). But it's precisely their Marxist worldview, with its structural understanding of exploitation and the power play of economic interests, that's made the Gang vigilant and astute in their dealings with the record industry.

As it happens, like those Soviet commissars reborn as industrial barons in the '90s, most of Gang of Four "crossed over into enterprise" (as their post-punk fellow traveler John Lydon once sang it) after the group disintegrated and have thrived in the business world. Bassist Dave Allen's long résumé includes stints at Emusic.com, Intel's Consumer Digital Audio Services Operation, and the Overland Entertainment Division. Drummer Hugo Burnham plunged into the corporate heart of the music industry, working for EMI Music Publishing, Warner Bros., and Island before starting his own management company, Huge & Jolly. Until recently, King was the CEO of World Television, a webcasting/corporate TV/news production/event-management company. On the face of it, it's disconcerting that King, author of the savagely mordant lyrics to songs like "Capital (It Fails Us Now)," should have become a sharp operator in the realm of shareholder meetings and venture financing. (At one point, the first part of his e-mail address was "investorrelations"!) Then again, what were they supposed to do during the '90s, this bunch of smart, university-educated guys? Likewise, with Return, why shouldn't Gang of Four exploit their own legend and literally capitalize on their moment in the retro sun?

"Comrades, let us seize the time" is the tongue-in-cheek chorus of "Capital," and Gang of Four have done exactly that. But what does it feel like to listen to Return? The rerenditions are oddly faithful, with only subtle deviations from the blueprints. The fundamental structures of songs like "At Home He Feels Like a Tourist" and "Why Theory?" have been left intact. The main difference between Return and its sources relates to recording ambience, reflecting both advances in studio engineering techniques and the accumulated know-how of the band over the decades. The rerecordings of the Entertainment! songs especially sound glossier and have a modern big-drum sound. Then again, the stark, emaciated production of Entertainment!, a result of its being recorded "dry" (engineer lingo for no reverb), was part of the record's aesthetic statement. Reverb creates the illusion of a band playing together in the same acoustic space. More live-sounding, the Return versions are stronger in a certain sense but are also more conventional and naturalistic. And they lack, of course, the aura of historicity itself.

For this die-hard fan, Return is a curious listening experience, with something of the eeriness of that Ian McEwan story about the blocked writer. You can't help wondering what it must have felt like for the band members, laboring away at remaking songs they'd laid down definitively long ago. On the new version of "Love Like Anthrax," Gill adds some self-reflexive lines about the project to his original spoken-word critique of pop's fixation on love songs. He describes Return as an "an exercise in archaeology," an attempt to find out where their heads were at in those heady post-punk days. When quizzed about the project, both King and Allen refer to the original recordings as "Dead Sea Scrolls" that they could call upon when memory failed. Aged 7, I wanted to be an archaeologist because I thought it was all about stumbling on Mayan temples in the jungle. Then I lost interest when I went to a dig and saw how tedious sifting for pottery shards actually was. Return isn't dreary (it could hardly be, given that the songs are among the most dynamic and structurally inventive rock songs of the last 30 years), but it never quite ignites because of the contradictions that brought the record into existence. These new versions seem to exist neither in 1979 nor 2005, but in a peculiar limbo of nontime, the undefined space of "retro" itself.

Simon Reynolds is the author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127526/

 

explainer
How Do They Harvest Caviar?
They suck it through a straw.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2005, at 3:07 PM PT

As of last Friday, the United States no longer permits the importation of fancy beluga caviar from the Caspian Sea. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced the ban as part of an effort to protect endangered sturgeon near Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan. Do sturgeon die when fishermen take their eggs?

Yep. Almost all caviar is harvested from dead fish. Fishermen on the Caspian wait until the mature female sturgeon (which are at least 10 years old) are ready to migrate upstream and lay their eggs. Once caught, the sturgeon will be transferred to a large boat, where workers slit her open and remove her eggs. The caviar is cleaned to prevent spoilage and then packed up; the rest of the fish is sold for flesh.

Why can't the fishermen postpone the harvest until the sturgeon lays her eggs? First of all, the eggs would be almost impossible to gather. A female that's ready to spawn might be swollen with pounds of black caviar clumped together on her ovaries. Once she releases these eggs into the water, they're much harder to collect, clean, and package.

Second, there's no market for ovulated or fertilized fish eggs. When the female begins to spawn, the exterior of her eggs deteriorates to allow for the penetration of sperm. Even if fishermen were able to sweep up those ovulated eggs, they wouldn't be able to sell them: An egg with a broken-down lining will eventually leak and turn to mush. (The quality of caviar depends on its firmness, taste, color, and size.)

Fish farmers who raise sturgeon for caviar sometimes use a surgical procedure to remove eggs from a female without killing her. To foster reproduction in captivity, aquaculturists will induce ovulation in a female with hormone injections and then make a small incision in her abdomen. Eggs that have already detached from the ovaries can be scooped out with a plastic spoon or squeezed out into a bowl.

Most farmers use this technique only to obtain eggs for insemination, but some Russians do live-harvest eggs for food. In some cases, a farmer might perform a Caesarean on a fish that hadn't ovulated. He could cut out some but not all of her eggs before sewing up the fish and putting her back in the water. A farmer might also induce ovulation, squeeze out the loose eggs, and then use a novel process to restore the integrity of their outer coverings.

Caviar producers who harvest from dead animals can still use surgical techniques to improve their yield. Some fisheries will test the eggs of a mature female before killing her. First, an incision is made in her abdomen and then a small tube is inserted. The farmer then puts his mouth on the tube and sucks out a small quantity of eggs for examination. If they're the right color and consistency, he'll kill the animal and harvest the caviar. If they're too "ripe"—if the fish has begun to break them down for reabsorption—he'll put her back in the water and wait until her next reproductive cycle.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Peter Struffenegger of Sterling Caviar, Frank Chapman of the University of Florida, and Mark Zaslavsky of Sturgeon AquaFarms.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

 

war stories
The Dumbing-Down of the U.S. Army
And some modest proposals for countering the trend.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2005, at 1:41 PM PT

Further evidence that the war in Iraq is wrecking the U.S. Army: Recruiters, having failed to meet their enlistment targets, are now being authorized to pursue high-school dropouts and (not to mince words) stupid people.

This year the Army set a goal of recruiting 80,000 active-duty soldiers, but it wound up with just 73,000—almost 10 percent short. As a result, the Army Times reported this week, the Pentagon has decided to make up the difference by expanding the pool—by letting up to 10 percent of new recruits be young men and women who have neither graduated high school nor earned a General Equivalency Diploma.

More than that, the Los Angeles Times reports today that 4 percent of recruits will be allowed to score as low as in the 16^th to 30^th percentile—a grouping known as "Category IV"—on the U.S. Armed Forces' mental-aptitude exam.

As of 2003 (the last year for which official data are available), just 6 percent of active-duty Army soldiers lacked a high-school diploma or a GED. Just 1 percent scored in Category IV on the aptitude test.

Not since the mid-1980s—when the military brass first decided to reject low-scoring applicants—have the all-volunteer Army's standards been allowed to dip so steeply.

Several career officers are dismayed by this new policy—not least because it reverses the progress that has been made these past two decades in the buildup of a professional army.

In the mid- to late-1970s—in the wake of the Vietnam War, the height of popular disenchantment with the military, and the start of the all-volunteer armed forces—as many as half of U.S. soldiers hadn't finished high school, and as many as one-third were Category IV.

The new policy will leave the Army's ranks in far better shape than they were back then. But officers, analysts, and many recruiters are disturbed by the trend, the lowering of a barrier, the reversal of an accomplishment.

Should they be disturbed? Is it important that nearly all our soldiers have a diploma or score better than abysmally on an aptitude test? Yes and yes, for at least two reasons.

The first reason is sociopolitical. Not many nations have an all-volunteer army, and the concept could not be sustained if the burden of service fell entirely on the lowest classes—on those who joined the military because they couldn't find jobs elsewhere. The inequity would be intensified—rendered impossible to ignore—if the face of this lower-class army were disproportionately black. This was precisely the kind of military we had in the early days of the all-volunteer force: overwhelmingly poor, uneducated, and African-American. But this is no longer the case. The racial mix, reading levels, and aptitude scores of today's Army are not much different from those of 18-to-24-year-olds in American society as a whole.

But the point of an army is to fight wars, not to promote social equality. So, the more critical reason to lament the Army's declining standards is their likely impact on military skills. This is a high-tech army, where even tank crews and artillery spotters deal with digital displays and computerized commands. Low-tech missions, too—foot soldiers on patrol in the sorts of "stability operations" they're conducting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia—require a degree of alertness, sensitivity, initiative, even rudimentary foreign-language skills, that goes beyond a rote ability to follow orders and shoot straight.

Under the new rules, recruits without a diploma will be required to take and pass a GED exam, and the Army will pay for a preparation course, so at least the total dregs will be kept out. But something crucial will still be lost. Young men and women who graduate from high school, or who set out to earn a GED, demonstrate a degree of focus and ambition. It doesn't take much to sit through a GED prep course and then pass the exam; it does take a certain vitality to bother going through the process on your own. This is what the Army risks whittling away.

What to do about it? Some have proposed bringing back the draft. This would fill the ranks, but it wouldn't solve the problem of quality—and, for a variety of reasons, Congress isn't likely to approve a draft anyway, short of a genuine national emergency that requires the amassing of millions of American troops.

Some suggest bigger bonuses and salaries for those who sign up and re-enlist. The Army is already doing this to some extent, and it has probably kept the ranks from declining more dramatically—but it hasn't filled them to the level that its military missions require.

Another approach is to take a closer look at those military missions—and at the policies that generate and support them. It's a fair guess that fewer people are joining the Army (and fewer still are joining the Reserves and National Guard) for a simple reason: They don't want to get killed.

So, here are some modest proposals for this or any other administration:

First, if you do go to war, protect your soldiers as much as you can. There's no excuse for shortages of armor platings—especially in a war that was planned for over a year ahead of time.

Second, if you do go to war, plan it better. The evidence is now overwhelming that the Pentagon conducted no planning for "postwar" stabilization operations. Other government departments did, but their plans were ignored. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld & Co. persuaded themselves that their favored Iraqi exiles would quickly form a new government and that most American troops would be home by late summer 2003—hence no need for long-term planning. It's appalling enough to be wrong (everybody is sometimes); it's disgraceful and irresponsible to dismiss the notion that you might be and that you should devise a backup plan accordingly.

Third, if you're thinking about going to war, think again. Do you really have to? What might happen if you don't? If you think the war will be easy, what will you do if it's not? How much death and destruction are you willing to inflict—and absorb—in its cause? This last question can be addressed, if you prefer, not so much as a moral issue but as a hard-boiled matter of national security: If the Army comes unraveled in the fighting of a protracted war whose victory seems elusive and whose goals were never clear, the nation will be less able—and perhaps less willing—to fight a more justified war down the road. Most comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam are shallow, but here's one that isn't: The Vietnam War ravaged the American military for a generation; it looks like the Iraq War might be about to do the same.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127487/

 

foreigners
All Oligarchs Are Not Created Equal
Russia's latest energy power play.
By Kim Iskyan
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2005, at 10:36 AM PT

The purchase last week by Gazprom, Russia's state gas monopoly, of a 73 percent stake in Sibneft, the country's fifth-largest oil company, marked the latest stage in the Russian government's ambitions to reclaim a spot in the club of global superpowers—this time on the back of its energy assets rather than its nuclear arsenal. The acquisition, corporate Russia's largest ever, also vividly demonstrated that if you're a big Russian oligarch, it pays—in this case, to the tune of a cool $13.1 billion—to stay friends with the folks in power.

The biggest beneficiary of the Kremlin's latest effort to recapture some of its lost glory by tightening its control over Russia's energy assets is Sibneft's majority owner Roman Abramovich. More widely recognized in some circles as the owner of England's Chelsea Football Club (and, in other, colder, circles as the governor of the remote northeastern Russian region of Chukotka), Abramovich and his well-connected buddies paid $100 million for Sibneft—which now produces the equivalent of around 3 percent of total U.S. daily oil consumption—in 1996, during Russia's privatization fire sales. The sale of Sibneft to Gazprom puts the finishing touches on the obituary of Russia's privatization process: State sells off asset on the cheap; businessman restructures asset and lets the market establish a price; state buys it back—yielding a 19,900 percent profit (including dividends) to businessman and cronies.

If Abramovich needs any reminder of what might have been, he need only look to his erstwhile oligarch cohort, former Yukos Oil Co. head Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is sitting in a Moscow jail cell awaiting a transfer to a prison colony in the depths of Russia. (For the background on Khodorkovsky, click here.)

Khodorkovsky was hardly the only big businessman in the fast-and-loose Russia of the 1990s to apply a very liberal interpretation to the letter of the law—particularly among the oligarchs who made billions of dollars by grabbing Mother Russia's crown jewels for kopeks on the ruble. But he was alone in two significant respects, which were central to his downfall: He began to exhibit an unhealthy interest in politics, which the Kremlin may have perceived as a potential and highly unwelcome threat; and he indicated that he might sell Yukos to a foreign oil producer, if the price was right.

Even before energy became the touchstone of global geopolitics, auctioning off a large chunk of Mother Russia's natural-resource wealth (even though it was privately owned) to a foreign entity was viscerally abhorrent to the economic nationalists who populate Putin's inner circle. (Worsening matters for Yukos was that it was in talks to acquire none other than Sibneft; Abramovich scuppered the deal in November 2003, even though the transaction was legally complete and cash had changed hands.) By going after Yukos, in one masterstroke the Kremlin eliminated a potential rival and ensured that more of Russia's assets didn't fall into the hands of evil foreign entities like ExxonMobil, Chevron, or Total, a big French oil producer. (ConocoPhillips and BP have significant stakes in Russian oil companies, but neither is a majority partner and both ventures have been carefully stage-managed from the Russian side.)

The cost to the Kremlin of bankrupting Yukos was a public-relations disaster of Siberian proportions, though, as the Putin government came under intense global criticism for its heavy-handed treatment of Khodorkovsky and Yukos. The Kremlin weathered the political uproar, however, and investors—never noted for their long memories—have similarly forgiven and forgotten, pushing up Russian stocks by 60 percent since the end of the Yukos affair in May, when Khodorkovsky was convicted. Now the Russian government faces the challenge of explaining to the Russian electorate why the Kremlin is making ridiculously wealthy oligarchs even richer at the expense of the state—instead of, say, spending more on health care, infrastructure, or education.

Abramovich avoided Khodorkovsky's fate in part by sticking to his knitting (his governorship may be little more than a politically savvy charity effort, a socially acceptable way for him to sprinkle some of his vast wealth in one of the most desperately poor parts of Russia) and knowing which side of his bread was buttered. Critically, he is accepting a lower price for Sibneft than the company likely would have fetched if foreign oil companies had been allowed to bid. But a guaranteed paycheck of $13.1 billion (and being able to spend it while not wearing striped institutional clothing) should help assuage the pain of money left on the table. (Gazprom attempted but failed to gain control over the assets of Yukos; the victor was Rosneft, a Russian government oil company.)

With the acquisition of Sibneft, the Kremlin is serving notice—for anyone who's been under a rock for the last few years—that it intends to leverage its control over a good chunk of the world's energy reserves to shimmy back up the league tables of geopolitical power. Russia's nuclear arsenal is rusting away, the country needs a booster chair plus a few phone books to sit at the economic table with the rest of the G8, and its regional sphere of influence has contracted to the point of invisibility. So, by marshaling Russia's energy assets, the Kremlin wants to rebuild a bit of the global respect it used to enjoy.

Indeed, with 9.27 million barrels of oil production per day in 2004 (compared with total U.S. oil production of 8.69 million barrels and top dog Saudi Arabia's 10.37 million barrels), Russia is the world's second-largest oil producer and exporter. As the largest oil producer that is not part of oil cartel OPEC, Russia is potentially a swing oil producer, which means that the incremental oil it pumps (which can make the difference between global demand being met and not being met, depending on market conditions) can play an outsized role in determining the global price of the commodity. With the acquisition of Sibneft, the Russian government boosted its total ownership stake in the Russian oil output to around 30 percent (close to 60 percent of the energy sector overall). Through gas giant Gazprom—the proud new papa of Sibneft—the Russian government controls around one-third of the world's natural-gas reserves (twice the level of No. 2 Iran). Energy from Russia accounts for more than one-third of Germany's total consumption, and recent and ongoing pipeline projects will only increase Western Europe's reliance on Russian energy.

The Russian government isn't alone in its pursuit of oil assets. China and India, to name two of the more aggressive suitors, have intensified the global race to secure energy assets by bidding for far-flung oil producers. Both countries are significant importers of oil, and both are anxious to secure energy supplies to fuel continued economic growth. But, unlike most other participants in the energy scramble, Russia is sitting pretty as the second-largest net oil exporter after Saudi Arabia. The Russian government merely aims to tighten its grip on its domestic oil industry—and is trying to consolidate its position domestically—rather than scramble to find reserves internationally. Russia may aim to follow in the footsteps of Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Mexico, where state-owned companies pump the black gold from the ground. But the Kremlin will have to pay up for the privilege, as illustrated by its recent purchase.

Meanwhile, Russia's remaining private oil companies—apparently wanting to remain so—go to great pains to display their loyalty to the Kremlin. The backbreaking tariffs that rob them of much of the potential profit windfall of high oil prices prompt hardly any protest. The country's oil companies recently announced a voluntary domestic price freeze on gasoline prices through the end of the year, which will help soften public discord over the rising cost of fuel.

Efforts by the Russian government to increase its control over energy assets are likely only the first step. The endgame of the Kremlin's acquisitiveness for energy assets, and what it will mean for the geopolitical balance of power, is anyone's guess.

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To briefly recap the Mikhail Khodorkovsky saga: Just a few years ago, Yukos was Russia's largest and most successful private company, with a market capitalization of more than $30 billion and annual revenues of around $15 billion. The beginning of the end for Yukos was the jailing of Khodorkovsky in July 2003 on charges of fraud relating to a 1994 privatization. Later that year, the Russian government seized a stake in Yukos. Multiple back-tax claims eventually forced the company into bankruptcy and its management into exile or jail. Conveniently, a state-controlled oil company emerged to acquire the assets of Yukos. Khodorkovsky, once worth upward of $8 billion, faces the next eight years behind bars.

Kim Iskyan has written extensively on the former Soviet Union and is head of research at MDM Bank in Moscow.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127488/

shopping
The Old College Try
Which reference guides will help you find the right school?
By Jay Mathews
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2005, at 8:38 AM PT

A college search is like shopping for clothes. The entire experience varies radically depending on the tastes of the buyer. In the last 14 years, for instance, I have been through three college searches with my children. The first was easy: He had one school in mind, applied early, and got in—that quick, no-fuss shopping typical of teenage boys. The second child was more difficult. He is a golfer and a biker and announced that no matter how distinguished the institution, he would not apply to any schools where a flake of snow marred the landscape. Unfortunately, no college guides could help narrow his search—weather reports and listings of local green fees were more important to him than statistics and rankings.

We finally found college guides helpful when my third child began her search. She considered two dozen schools and visited 13 of them in the East, the Midwest, and the West. We consulted at least six guides during that marathon selection process. I can still see those books on the top shelf of her bedroom bookcase.

I liked many of those guides, but they were all large and pricey and have only become more so since. A cheat sheet of their virtues could have saved me some time and money, so to help streamline your college search, I've devised a rating system to evaluate which books in today's market offer the most insightful counsel.

Methodology

I selected only guides featuring more than 100 schools. There was no way—short of a long stretch in prison—that I could read all 14,293 pages of these books, which made a 2-foot-high stack on my dining-room table. Instead, I sampled each using four criteria.

Depth of Information: Does the guide offer more than the basic statistics about average SAT scores and tuition costs—providing information about which departments have the best professors, or whether undergraduates can do original research? Verve: Is the guide interesting to read? Are the descriptions vivid? Detail: Is it up-to-date? Does it give leading majors and financial-aid info, as well as the football schedule? Student Perspective: Are opinions of undergraduates presented in write-ups? Does it address students' rather than parents' concerns? I awarded up to 25 points for performance in each criteria, for a possible total of 100.

I pored over each of the guides, and to give my sampling some consistency, I read everything in each of about 10 different but worthy colleges with which I'm familiar. Four are public (Alcorn State University; the Citadel; St. Mary's College of Maryland; and the University of California, San Diego) and six are private (Elon University, Harvard University, North Central College, Pomona College, University of Chicago, and Ursinus College). I subtract detail points for any guides that miss some of these schools, but if you are looking for books that feature more selective colleges, disregard that part of my assessment.

The results, from worst to best:

The Insider's Guide to the Colleges 2006 by the Staff of the Yale Daily News, 1,017 pages, $18.99

The Yale Daily guide is the smallest and lightest of these books. It also has some of the best student quotes. A student at UC-San Diego says, "I feel like I need a megaphone and binoculars to participate in class sometimes." A Johns Hopkins University undergraduate says the dining halls are "like eating at a five-star restaurant, except the opposite." But it is also the least informative. It rarely offers more than basic data and offers little insight into details such as which schools are affordable, which schools help you survive the trauma of freshman year, or which schools have the kind of extracurricular activities you crave. It reports on just four schools in my sample and is probably useful only to applicants considering the most selective colleges. In this era, getting into schools like Yale is akin to winning the lottery. Take a look at the bigger books—you might find something you like.

Depth:16 (out of 25)
Verve: 21 (out of 25)
Detail: 15 (out of 25)
Student Perspective: 24 (out of 25)
Total: 76 (out of 100)

Peterson's Four-Year Colleges 2006 by Thomson Peterson's, 3,087 pages, $32

I have not used Peterson's before and am surprised by its structure. The front of the book has standard short descriptions with the usual data on each college, such as average SAT scores, major departments, sports, and activities. But the back of the book lists advertorials "written by admissions deans" in place of independent assessments. Perhaps these are helpful to some readers, but personally I feel duped buying a $32 book that seems to rely so heavily on subjective write-ups written by the universities themselves.

I found nothing inaccurate in the Peterson's advertorials, but I prefer to rely on more objective perspectives from outside observers.

Depth: 20
Verve: 19
Detail: 21
Student Perspective: 17
Total: 77

The College Board College Handbook 2006, 2,069 pages, $28.95

The College Board book gets major depth points for being the only guide to take community colleges seriously. It has data on more than 1,600 two-year schools, a great boon since nearly half of all U.S. undergraduates attend such colleges. Its four-year college outlines are fine, with lots of good data, but it misses some important details. Elon University, for instance, is unusual because it scores very high on the National Survey of Student Engagement—an increasingly influential measurement of which colleges teach best. But this guide does not address that. Like U.S. News and Barron's, The College Board contains all the standard numbers. But because it does not discuss details like which departments are strongest, or the differences in student interests and living styles, it's not easy to determine which school might be best for you or your child.

Depth: 24
Verve: 15
Detail: 23
Student Perspective: 18
Total: 80

U.S. News & World Report Ultimate College Guide 2005, 1,763 pages, $26.95

Blessed with remarkable data from its "America's Best Colleges" surveys, the U.S. News guide helpfully ranks schools in different categories, such as the priciest private schools, the cheapest public universities, and the best values. The guide also addresses the important issue of how well colleges retain their freshmen, with a list that ranks schools accordingly.

The individual college descriptions, however, are a bit thin. The basic data on academic and financial aid are there, but U.S. News doesn't address issues that don't fit the standard categories. For instance, the guide does not mention Ursinus College's Common Intellectual Experience course, one of the few freshman courses in the country that every student is required to take. Elon's high marks on the National Survey of Student Engagement are also ignored.

Depth: 20
Verve: 20
Detail: 22
Student Perspective: 19
Total: 81

Barron's Profiles of American Colleges 2005, 1,669 pages, $26.95

Like the U.S. News, College Board, and Peterson's guides, Barron's provides a thick clump of useful data on each college, including composition of the student body, housing options, financial aid, special programs, sports, and transfer rules, but it does not present it in an entertaining or vivid manner. I give it some perspective points for student-friendly data: It gives the exact requirements for completing a major, and it also presents a helpful list of which colleges have which majors. But it misses unusual but potentially important details, such as the progress Alcorn State has made in providing extra tutoring and other support for freshmen so that more of them are able to return for their sophomore year.

Depth: 21
Verve: 21
Detail: 23
Student Perspective: 18
Total: 83

Choosing the Right College 2005: The Whole Truth About America's Top Schools, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 972 pages, $28

Choosing the Right College differentiates itself from the other guides in ways both good and bad. Its ideological leanings will offend many readers. It concludes that Brown "was little but a left-wing echo chamber" until some right-of-center groups were formed. And it has narrow coverage—only 125 schools, and just four (University of Chicago, Harvard, Pomona, and UC-San Diego) of the 10 on my sampling list.

But its school profiles offer many interesting details the others lack. For example, none of the other guides names specific professors who make their campuses great. The Davidson College profile identifies nine top professors in seven departments loved by students. While other guides have a generic feel, with general statements and few recent examples, Choosing the Right College is often as fresh as the latest headlines. For instance, other guides address Pomona's smog problem—an old story—but this guide covers the school's reaction to an alleged hate crime that occurred on campus in 2004.

Depth: 24
Verve: 24
Detail: 15
Student Perspective: 23
Total: 86

Fiske Guide to Colleges 2006 by Edward B. Fiske with Robert Logue, 774 pages, $22.95

The Fiske Guide is popular: Fans say the amount of information strikes the right balance—there's enough so it's useful but not unwieldy. Personally, I find the book strong on student perspective but lacking in verve and details. For instance, it says many Harvard students find "the most rewarding form of instruction is the sophomore and junior tutorial, a small-group directed study in a student's field of concentration." I have heard frequent complaints from Harvard undergraduates about these often poorly organized bull sessions.

The summaries of each profile aptly pinpoint what students may want to know about a particular school. In a profile of the University of Maryland, College Park, Fiske speaks directly to the needs of students seeking more challenging academic environs by highlighting the College Park Scholar program's classes for high-achieving admittees. It also points out that Vanderbilt's strengths in business and engineering are rare among Southern schools, which applicants may want to consider.

Depth: 22
Verve: 22
Detail: 19
Student Perspective: 23
Total: 86

The Unofficial, Biased Guide to the 331 Most Interesting Colleges 2005 by the staff of Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, 720 pages, $19

Since the title mentions bias, this is a good time to point out that Kaplan is part of the Washington Post Co. So is Slate magazine. So am I—I've been a Washington Post reporter for 34 years. But I have tried to be objective, and the Unofficial, Biased Guide deserves high marks. It helpfully exposes students' real feelings about issues. For instance, some Dickinson College students find the campus "a little too close for comfort, and grow tired of seeing the same people, day in and day out." A junior at Providence College says, "Homework is not necessary for a solid grade in my classes."

Kaplan admissions experts Trent Anderson and Seppy Basili used to brighten the volume with wry judgments of each school. An "Experts Say" box has replaced their insight, but the editors have preserved some of their best lines. On Ithaca College: "Get ready to spend four years tripping over Cornell students."

Depth: 23
Verve: 23
Detail: 20
Student Perspective: 23
Total: 89

The Best 361 Colleges 2006 by the Princeton Review, 810 pages, $21.95

The Best 361 Colleges takes a refreshingly playful approach—a good read for someone who knows little about colleges. I like the mischief-making rankings, based on student surveys of which college are most likely to have "Dorms Like Dungeons" or "Students Most Nostalgic for Bill Clinton." The profiles are also lively and full of student quotes—one freshman at Kenyon remarks, "It is odd for me, as a 4.0-plus high-school student, to hope for a C in my science classes"; a West Point cadet comments that students "get graded on how well they beat up their classmates." It offers "The Inside Word," too, a quick and helpful summary of what makes each school unique. Students also get the all-important sense of whether they have a chance at acceptance.

By providing the most complete and colorful feel for each school, The Best 361 Colleges comes closer than any other guide to putting you on each campus. And when it's not always possible to visit each and every school in person, what more can you ask for?

Depth: 23
Verve: 24
Detail: 20
Student Perspective: 23
Total: 90

Jay Mathews is an education reporter and online columnist for the Washington Post, as well as the author of Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League to the College That is Best for You.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127455/

medical examiner
Living Memento
Is happiness worth losing your memory?
By Jay Michaelson
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2005, at 7:45 AM PT

There was a time when I didn't have a memory. It was the spring of 2001, after I suffered a Grade 3 concussion when a tow truck hit a taxi in which I was riding. For six months, I forgot conversations as soon as they were over, lost track of names and addresses, and often found myself on the street, or the subway, without any idea where I was headed or why.

Of course, everyone forgets things: We've all had the experience of walking into the kitchen and then losing track of why we came, or fumbling for the name of someone we've met a dozen times. But this was different. This was a complete erasure of linear time. Every moment was new, without history, and grounded in the past only by the detailed notes I kept for myself.

After about six months, the symptoms eventually lifted and my short-term memory returned. I had suffered no retrograde amnesia and should have been back to my "old self." Except that my old self was no longer there. In the six-month space of my memory loss, I had quit my job at the software company I'd founded, unable to keep track of the many meetings, tasks, and personnel of which I was in charge. My longtime girlfriend had left me, prompting me to come to terms with my sexuality and come out to myself and my friends. And fundamentally, something about me had shifted—I had been skeptical, uptight, nervous. But now I was performing poetry at slams, dancing at bonfires in the desert, and traveling to new countries on a whim. At the time, it felt like a rebirth.

For three decades, Jonathan Cott was a successful music and cultural critic. A contributing editor to Rolling Stone since its inception, he wrote 15 books, including classic portraits of Lou Reed and John Lennon. In 1999, however, Cott underwent Electroconvulsive Therapy, or ECT—shock therapy, as it's popularly known—to treat chronic depression. The ECT helped alleviate his symptoms. But as a result of it, Cott, like me, lost his short-term memory. He also suffered retrograde amnesia and effectively forgot 15 years of his life. According to his new book, On the Sea of Memory: A Journey From Forgetting to Remembering, Cott is unable to recall anything that happened to him between 1985 and 2000. When his friends tell stories of his "lost years," he writes, "I listen to their stories with incredulity, amazement, shock, bewilderment, regret, and often with great amusement and acute embarrassment about the things that the I I am now who was the me I don't remember apparently did."

According to studies published by the American Psychiatric Association, about 120,000 Americans receive shock therapy every year. The numbers may seem surprising, given the treatment's notorious past. Yet for people suffering from serious depression, ECT is often the only therapy that works. The APA and other professional organizations endorse it. And ECT has come a long way since the days of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, when shock therapy was used as a catchall "cure" for phobias, "hysteria," ulcers, psoriasis, and even homosexuality. Today it's performed under general anesthesia, with paralyzing agents administered to prevent seizures, as a therapy of last resort after an affective disorder, usually depression, has been definitively diagnosed and medication has failed to alleviate it.

Nevertheless, ECT is radical—it's basically the intentional infliction of brain damage. No one knows exactly why it works. Its link with memory loss is proven. For Cott, the effects were catastrophic. "What do I not remember?" he asks at the beginning of On the Sea of Memory. "The world as it was (the end of the Cold War, the Oslo peace accords, the abolition of apartheid, the massacre at Srebrenica). Who was born and who died … the films I saw or the contents of my favorite books read during the 1980s and 90's … the six books and the magazine articles I worked on as well as the fourteen books I edited … meetings, encounters, and relationships with friends and acquaintances both at home and in various parts of the world."

For Cott, as for me, the loss of memory was really a loss of identity. ECT can heal seriously depressed people who might otherwise have no hope of leading a normal, happy life. But is happiness worth losing your memory? Your sense of self?

Being without memory is more than mere forgetfulness: It is being set adrift on an eternal present, without trajectory or history. Cott's book is subtitled "A Journey From Forgetting to Remembering," but it's not nearly so linear. The book is an odd combination of memoir, reflection, and interviews with philosophers, neurologists, and spiritual teachers. As Cott says many times, he cannot remember a paragraph once he has written it—and these lapses reveal themselves in Cott's rambling style and his penchant, in the interviews that make up the heart of the book, for consulting his notes rather than engaging in dialogue with his subjects. It's heartbreaking to see a once-gifted writer and interviewer so deserted by his craft.

At the same time, living without past or future has a transformative aspect. Living in the "eternal present" is, in many religious and philosophical schools of thought, a form of freedom. It's what the spiritual guru Ram Dass means by "being here now": Every moment is new.

I experienced this sensation during my season of forgetting. Since I knew that I was unlikely to remember the meal, or conversation, or film that I was enjoying, I grew to enjoy these pleasures more and then let them go. Without memory, I glided from moment to moment. Like the amnesiac protagonist of the film Memento, I kept copious notes and detailed to-do lists that enabled me to pretend to other people that I had an idea what was going on. Actually, though, I was quite lost. Each moment was a surprise. I had no choice but to trust, trust, trust. It became, almost, relaxing.

Like Cott, I lost my sense of self when I lost my memory—but that self wasn't working anyway. I have no doubt that I am much happier now than I was five years ago.

By the end of On the Sea of Memory, however, it is clear that Cott would rather be depressed and himself than happy and unrecognizable. The Jonathan Cott of 1985 is lost forever; to him, it doesn't matter that if he hadn't undergone ECT, he might have been lost forever anyway. Cott worries about a time when, as in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, unpleasant memories will be simply washed away. (In fact, as one of Cott's subjects observes, doctors are already doing this for victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. Beta blockers are used to block the action of stress hormones and thus lessen the intensity of traumatic memories.) Above all, Cott is a humanist: He craves the memories, flavors, and formative experiences that make up his identity and tells us how, with the help of friends, he has tried to reconstruct what he has done, whom he has known. For him, forgetfulness is a form of extinction.

Mystics from around the world report "peak experiences," in which a temporary suspension of memory, and of thought, allows experience to unfold in all its variety. Yet in every wisdom tradition of which I am aware, there is also a return. The Zen monk comes back to the marketplace; Moses descends from the mountain; Christ emerges from the wilderness. It is that moment of integration that is so ruthlessly denied to victims of memory loss. Like William Blake before him, Cott is right that the innocence of amnesia is only half of the truth. Without memory, there may be beauty, but there is no coherence; episodes, but no narrative. Pure "moments of being," in Virginia Woolf's memorable phrase, may be the closest we come to enlightenment. But then, as Cott well knows, there is the telling of the story.

Jay Michaelson is the chief editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127351/

 

 

  

chatterbox
Susan Lucci in Judicial Robes
A brief history of Edith Jones, eternal Supreme Court also-ran.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2005, at 4:40 PM PT

And once again, the Supreme Court nominee is … not Edith Jones.

Edith Jones, a judge for the Fifth U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans, is to the Supreme Court as Susan Lucci is to the daytime Emmys and Philip Roth is to the Nobel Prize. Well, not precisely. Lucci finally won an Emmy in 1999, after 18 previous nominations. And Roth's chances of finally winning the Nobel are currently thought to be on an upswing. Jones, on the other hand, is starting to look like damaged goods.

Presidents have been not choosing Jones since 1987, when Ronald Reagan, now deceased, was trying to figure out who to nominate for the Supreme Court after the Senate rejected Robert Bork. Jones' name turned up on a list of possible nominees reported by United Press International in late October 1987; she was a particular favorite, reported the New York Times, of Sen Orrin Hatch, R.-Utah. But Reagan nominated Douglas Ginsburg instead. Then Ginsburg admitted that he'd smoked marijuana in the 1960s and 1970s, and he had to withdraw his nomination. Once again, Jones was reported to be under consideration. But the nod went to Anthony Kennedy.

Jones' name got mentioned even when there weren't any vacancies. In December 1989, the "Washington Whispers" column in U.S. News & World Report, noting that the Supreme Court included three octogenarians, said there was bound to be a retirement soon and mentioned Jones among the leading candidates. Six months later, Ethan Bronner of the Boston Globe reported speculation that Sandra Day O'Connor, who had recently been treated for breast cancer, would step down and be replaced by one of three women. One was Edith Jones. A couple of weeks after that, U.S. News once again said that Jones was a logical choice for the court. One obvious advantage Jones enjoyed was that she had once been a law partner of Bush's secretary of state and close friend, Jim Baker.

Not long after, in late July 1990, one of the octogenarians finally retired. William Brennan called it a day, and once again the list of possible candidates included Edith Jones, now a favorite of the anti-abortion movement, though she had never ruled in an abortion case. But some newspaper accounts described her as "moderate." Hatch was still touting Jones. The nomination went to David Souter. According to the Washington Post, Jones was "the runner-up."

A year passed. Richard Thornburgh resigned as attorney general so he could run for the Senate from Pennsylvania. (He lost.) U.S. News floated Jones as a possible replacement. I forget who got the job instead. (Wait, it's coming...William Barr.) Then a second octogenarian, Thurgood Marshall, retired. Jones was widely mentioned as a possible nominee. But the nomination went to Clarence Thomas. At a press conference, President George H.W. Bush was asked why he hadn't chosen Jones, who had so narrowly missed being nominated for Brennan's seat. "Well, she's a very able justice, judge," Bush said.

She was given consideration then and now, and I just felt that Judge Thomas with his seasoning now is best prepared to serve. It was that. It was not a demeaning or putting down of anybody else, because there were some very good names brought to my attention.

And I might say, you know, this just happened last week, and some will be saying, "Well, was the screening process thorough?" And the point I want to make is that I have met several times since Judge Souter's sending to the bench to discuss what would happen if a Supreme Court Justice stepped down, with no one particularly in mind, but just to be ready. So, consideration was given to a wide array of candidates, but we'd already done a lot of homework.

But you ask about Edith—Edith, who comes from my hometown. And I have nothing but high regard and high esteem for her. But I decided, on the advice of people that I trust, that this is the way to go.

By now, Bronner at the Globe was calling Jones "the eternal bridesmaid." And it was only 1991!

What the hell was the matter with this woman, anyway? According to the National Law Journal, Jones was now a "far-right ideologue." The Bush administration worried that she'd be another Robert Bork—a magnet for liberal criticism who would go down in flames.

Then Bill Clinton got elected and everybody stopped talking about Edith Jones' chances of getting onto the Supreme Court.

But you can't keep a good woman down. During the 2000 election, Jan Crawford Greenburg mused in the Chicago Tribune that if George W. Bush got himself elected president, among the candidates for his first Supreme Court nomination would likely be you-know-who. Angie Cannon said the same thing two months later in U.S. News. In November 2002, Stuart Taylor called Jones a "brainy, conservative woman" whom Bush might nominate to the court when a vacancy emerged. Two years later, there was still no vacancy, and Edith Jones rejected an attempt by Norma McCorvey,* the "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade (who had since changed her views on abortion), to reopen the case. But Jones also wrote a separate, concurring opinion, calling Roe "an exercise of raw judicial power" that made a mockery of the court's consideration of "dozens of death penalty cases each year."

"What about Edith Jones?" Larry Kudlow asked Pat Buchanan on MSNBC in November 2004 (when there was still no vacancy on the Supreme Court).

"She's terrific," Buchanan answered.

Late in 2004, Chief Justice William Rehnquist became severely ill. Jones' name was bandied about. John Fund wrote in The American Spectator that Jones had "strong champions within the conservative Federalist Society." But Rehnquist, stubborn old codger that he was, wouldn't die! Finally, in July of this year, Sandra Day O'Connor announced that she would retire. On CNN, Kyra Phillips reported that "when talking about the replacements and the shortlist, if you will, one name, one female name is out there, Edith Jones." On Fox News Sunday, Charles Krauthammer said Jones "was considered 15 years ago by, you know, Bush's father when he nominated Souter. So it would be a kind of a poetic justice of nominating her. ..." The nomination went to John Roberts.

Finally, Rehnquist died. Bush decided to make Roberts his nominee for chief justice, which meant he had to find someone else to replace Sandra Day O'Connor. O'Connor was the first woman on the Supreme Court. How could her replacement not be a woman? But by now (O cruel fate!) Edith Jones was frequently being referred to as "the other Edith," because Edith Clement, also a judge on the Fifth U.S. Court of Appeals, was thought to have the inside track.

Once Edith Jones had been the runner-up to the president's choice for the Supreme Court. Now she was merely the runner-up to the president's choice for women named Edith on the Fifth Circuit for the Supreme Court.

Hurricane Katrina came. New Orleans flooded. A nation wept for the Big Easy. Surely one of the waterlogged Ediths would be compensated with a nomination to the Supreme Court. Back in 1987, when Jones had been 38, there'd been some worry that she might be too young to go on the court. Now Robert Novak was writing that, at 56, Jones was "near the outer age limit."

The nomination went to White House Counsel Harriet Miers (who, incidentally, is four years older than Jones). William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, pronounced himself "disappointed, depressed and demoralized." He continued, "I'm disappointed because I expected President Bush to nominate someone with a visible and distinguished constitutionalist track record." He then listed five female candidates he would have found preferable. Third down the list was … well, you don't really need me to tell you, do you?

Since Edith Jones was first considered for the Supreme Court, the Soviet Union has fallen, the World Wide Web has been invented, and the long-playing vinyl record has been rendered obsolete. If I were Jones, I'd be starting to suspect it isn't going to happen.

Correction, Oct. 5, 2005: An earlier version of this column misstated Jane Roe's real name as "Norma Corvey." (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127376/

politics
Harriet the Sly
Why does James Dobson like Miers so much?
By John Dickerson
Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2005, at 4:09 PM PT

When John Roberts appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, senators treated him like a legal god, Solomon crossed with John Marshall, with a touch of Hammurabi. They trembled just to be in the room with him. Even the Democrats who voted against him moaned, "We are not worthy."

This won't be the problem, to put it mildly, with Harriet Miers. As we struggle to learn what, if anything, she believes, we're all going to become experts in the unfamiliar positions she held—from staff secretary in the White House to lottery commissioner in Texas. Was she the one spinning the wheel on the Pick Five? Whatever we learn, the initial judgment will stick: fine lawyer, no legal giant.

On the surface, this is good news for the senators on the committee. It's no fun to feel intimidated. Now they can go back to demonstrating how smart they are without the fear of being shown up by a nominee who knows better. But showboating senators who might want to derail the president's nominee should tread very carefully. The caricature of Miers that is emerging is so pathetic, her inadequacies so exaggerated, her inarticulateness so certain, that by the time she speaks in the committee room, she's almost certain to seem appealing.

Managing expectations has become a key strategy of this White House. The president has benefited for most of his career from being seen as the middling boy from Midland, and he got elected in 2000 by seeming more competent than his bumbling image. But we've become accustomed to his favorite act. So now it's Miers' turn to try it. Miers is an unknown, and the initial grim assessments are lowering the bar into the basement. Democrats have called her a crony and a cipher. "She was Bush's fixer," said one Democratic strategist, pointing to her role in his 1998 gubernatorial re-election campaign checking reports that Bush shirked his National Guard duty. Conservatives have been even more ruthless. Key elite pundits like William Kristol and Pat Buchanan were dejected that Bush caved to the forces of moderation, wasting his crucial pick when he could have cemented the court's conservative course for the next 20 to 30 years. Even Rush was grumpy until the vice president settled him down. The biggest fear is that she is a Souter in St. John knits: a justice insufficiently conservative who will only become more liberal once she gets on the bench.

Even the moderate Republicans were making jokes. "Crony or wing nut? Crony or wing nut?" asked one strategist. "Okay, this time we'll go with the crony."

When the president's nominee finally appears before the cameras, all she has to do is offer cogent answers and she'll come off like a worthy O'Connor successor. Miers has a few things going for her that suggest this might happen. Her slightly nervous presentation today in the Oval Office suggests that she's not too comfortable in the spotlight. Such lack of polish will serve her well when she has to spend hours at the witness table. She may actually be humble as opposed to just telling us she's humble, as Roberts did with each click of the minute hand.

She's also very diligent and methodical. She may be a personal friend of the president's, but that doesn't mean she loafed around until she was 40 and then got cracking. She has had a careful upward career. Her White House colleagues describe her as thorough, forceful, and straightforward. It was her job to prepare Roberts for his testimony, so she's had practice at not answering questions.

Also, she's a woman. Arlen Specter is still living down his pushy questioning of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Women have come a long way, but Americans still cringe when they see a woman get browbeaten by a man in pinstripes. It will be a particularly thorny matter for Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, who is noodling a run for the White House.

On the right, if Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kans., is really thinking about running for president, he might be tempted to put on a show for the social conservatives who are nervous about Miers. But it is more likely that he won't want to risk alienating women voters. The White House clearly understands the political power of picking a woman: They scheduled the president's announcement for smack in the middle of Good Morning America and Today—and their female-skewed demographics.

Those who know Bush well say that the biggest reason Miers will be a better pick than the pundits realize is that this president is obsessed with his father's mistakes. The Souter appointment was worse for George H.W. Bush than breaking his no-new-taxes pledge. The son would never duplicate that mistake. Already there are signs that the social conservatives may be more enthusiastic than the reaction of professional inside-the-Beltway conservatives would lead you to expect. James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, has already moved to support Miers, a faster nod than he gave to Roberts. The evangelical community murmurs that Dobson based his endorsement on those who have known Miers for 25 years at the Valley View Christian Church in Dallas. Her fellow parishioners bore witness to her evangelical faith. Marvin Olasky, a key influence in shaping Bush's faith-based initiatives, reported a similar review of her personal devotion on his blog. The emerging message seems to be: She's one of us and she's with us on abortion. Now if she can just avoid saying that to the Senate and speak in complete sentences, she will be on the court in no time.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127364/

books
Wilmerding Shrugged
The political ambitions of Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision.
By Michael Agger
Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2005, at 3:07 PM PT

I had trouble deciding whether or not to read Indecision. Sure, it received one of those weird, apparently positive reviews from Michiko Kakutani where she attempts to write in the voice of a literary character, in this case Holden Caulfield. Next, there was Jay McInerney, Mr. Eighties himself, lauding the book on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Yet the whole idea of a generation-defining novel seemed passé. Who could believe in something like that anymore, in our hip-hop, globalized, multiethnic, broadbrand-ready world?

When I did read the book, I discovered that the author, Benjamin Kunkel, doesn't really believe in generation-defining novels, either. But he's written what might once have been called one. More specifically, he's written a book that speaks to college-educated males of a certain questing persuasion. I felt a slight embarrassment reading the book in public. It was as if I were rushing a fraternity for sensitive guys, or sending out some lame signal: "Look, he's trying to figure himself out." Eventually, I took off the dust jacket.

My squeamishness derived from my motives. Mostly I read for pleasure, but, when I am honest with myself, I realize that I am often looking for direction, a philosophy of life. In high school, I fell under the influence of Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Ford, and, forgive me, Ayn Rand. In college, I absorbed an idea that undid my previous easily gathered belief. Namely, that texts, religions, notions of success and the good life were all cultural constructions, the changeable and shaky foundations of our current historical moment. This had a corrosive effect: The constructed nature of everything made it hard to believe in anything.

To put it another way, I once had a straight-laced friend who started listening to the Grateful Dead. When was the moment that he ceased to be "my friend who was into the Dead" and became an actual Deadhead? I couldn't understand how he plunged through the silly arbitrariness of lifestyle choice to actually change his life.

In Indecision, the novel's 28-year-old protagonist, Dwight Wilmerding, expresses a more succinct version of the same thought process:

It wasn't very unusual for me to lie awake at night feeling like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But to know the clichés are clichés doesn't help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it.

This passage comes early in the book, and it sets the stage for what follows: a novel that is not so much interested in the dramatic irony of being self-aware but in the reconstruction of belief that comes after it.

Irony has become one of those thoroughly annoying words, but let's return to 1991 when the concept in its contemporary, tonal incarnation was fairly fresh. Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X and Richard Linklater's movie Slacker distilled a mostly white, college-educated, upper-middle-class North American sensibility. It was partly a politicized worldview shared by the children of baby boomers who were disgusted with capitalism (the Iran-Contra scandal, El Salvador, Reaganism, Wall Street) but who also saw that the alternatives—communism and socialism—had flopped. The I-word came to represent an attitude of passive engagement at a recession-era moment, typified by the motto of Linklater's movie: "Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy." An ironic stance toward America and its culture provided a space for novelty and pleasure, and, potentially, a sense of purpose.

Reading Indecision provided more than a touch of confusing déjà vu. Here we find a protagonist who is filled with the same types of beliefs that Coupland's characters had started out with, but who was young enough to have graduated during the boom of the '90s. It would seem that today, a group of (again, privileged, college-educated) people afloat on a sea of meritocratic possibility and dazed by 9/11 are finding a similar difficulty engaging with America. Dwight Wilmerding wants to be in earnest. He's searching for genuine gravity in his life, just like Coupland's characters. The plot device that drives the first half of the book is Dwight's decision to fly to Ecuador to see a girl he had a crush on in prep school, and to start taking an experimental drug called Abulinix that will cure his indecisiveness. When he arrives in Ecuador, the girl he came to see turns out to have an extremely attractive Belgian roommate named Brigid. Circumstance throws Dwight and Brigid together on a jungle tour, and, during these chapters, the book's mix of sexual tension and gratuitous philosophical dialogue is less Coupland than, well, Ayn Rand.

What Kunkel nails is the malleable mindset of the college-educated liberal arts major: "In my experience, when a person doesn't know what to do with himself, he will check his e-mail." He also circumvents the most annoying trait of indecisive characters—if your life is such a muddle, then how are you writing this book?—by making the composition of a memoir part of Dwight's drug-assisted decision-making spree. But the most ambitious element of Indecision is the way the novel does not withdraw in disgust, but rather embraces a social justice argument in its final chapters. Completely high on some Ecuadorian drug, Brigid tells Dwight about an imaginary fruit:

When you eat from this fruit then whenever you put your hand on a product, a commodity, an article, then, at the moment of your touch, how this commodity came into your hands becomes plainly evident to you. Now there is no more mystification of labor, no more of a world in which the object arrives by magic—scrubbed, clean, no past, all of its history washed away.

By the end of Indecision, Dwight has declared himself a "democratic socialist" and lives in Bolivia, writing press releases on behalf of exploited workers. I like that Kunkel has written a novel about belief, and it's exciting to see someone in my peer group wrestling with such questions. But let's take a closer look at what, exactly, that belief constitutes.

For starters, it's striking that Dwight's conversion to socialism takes place in South America. Latin America is a place where socialism has had a long, tangled history and, pace Venezuela, the talk that circulates about the regions these days tends more toward free-trade agreements than Maoist rebels. Kunkel has Dwight nod toward socialism's complications, but he never makes the embrace seem more than a nostalgic pose. It's a moral pleasure to be a socialist (especially if you're living in a capitalist economy): The hard part is to engage socialism as a rigorous, powerful, and fraught ideology. Dwight seems committed to his ethic of anti-consumerism, but what's less clear is how his passion for his cause translates into a viable intellectual framework for improving on the economic policies of our globalized world.

Granted, it's much more difficult to write a novel about a character embracing a belief system than a novel in which they cast beliefs aside. One of the people who successfully pulled it off, actually, is Ayn Rand, whose 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, launched the philosophy of objectivism, complete with campus objectivist clubs. Even so, Rand is hardly a subtle writer; her books are more like effective vessels for ideas. Kunkel is a much more nimble and perceptive novelist than Rand—less didactically monolithic—but beneath all the wit, Indecision suffers, in its second half, from the kind of speechifying one might find in a Rand novel, and I wonder if their writerly aspirations are all that far apart. There are plenty of hints in Indecision that Kunkel believes that a novel can spark a revolution. And, as a writer, he's just at the beginning of his career and influence. Explaining socialism to the postironic, ambivalent, hopeful, generous twentysomethings of 2005, I suppose, is what sequels are for.

Michael Agger is a Slate associate editor. He can be reached at michael.agger@gmail.com.

 

moneybox
The October Surprise
It's your home heating bill, 70 percent higher than last year's.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2005, at 1:58 PM PT

So far, rising gasoline prices have caused only marginal damage to the vast U.S. economy. Lower-end retailers, like Wal-Mart and Family Dollar, complain that high gas prices are cutting into their sales. American Airlines has canceled several flights, and the White House has issued a halfhearted plea for conservation. But while drivers may groan about the high price of gas, they haven't changed their consuming habits drastically—and if my Slate colleague Austan Goolsbee is right, they won't unless the high prices persist for five years.

But high prices for another form of energy are about to brutalize Americans. October signals the beginning of the winter heating season. The high price of heating fuel—a problem that has been hibernating in the spring and summer—is about to become an enormous issue in the northern half of the country.

The price of natural gas, the most popular fuel for heating homes, is rocketing upward, driven by rising demand, relatively stagnant North American supplies, and the disruptions imposed by the recent hurricanes. According to the Energy Information Administration's most recent daily production update, up to 76 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's natural gas production remains off-line. As this chart shows, the price of a contract for November delivery of natural gas has risen 50 percent in the last six weeks, from about $9 per million British thermal units in mid-August to $14 today. Natural gas is vulnerable to such spikes. Because crude oil can be moved around the globe with relative ease, the hurricanes didn't massively disrupt the market for oil. That's not the case with natural gas. Natural gas from the Middle East would have to be cooled to -256 Fahrenheit, liquefied, transported in special ships, and then re-gasified in the United States. The necessary infrastructure is lacking. And there is no strategic natural-gas reserve the government can draw down in times of need.

The cost of heating oil, the price of which is largely a function of the price of crude oil, has been rising as well, up about 10 percent in the past month, according to EIA's weekly report. EIA projects significant further price hikes for both heating oil and natural gas next year, too. The government does have a Northeastern heating-oil reserve that President Bush is thinking about tapping.

As a result, assuming a typical winter and a "Medium Recovery case," EIA estimates that heating costs are going to explode. For the 2005-06 heating season, "residential per-household expenditures" will rise by 71 percent for natural gas in the Midwest, 31 percent for heating oil in the Northeast, and 40 percent for propane in the Midwest. For all of 2005, EIA projects Americans will spend $1.08 trillion on energy, up 24 percent from 2004. That amounts to 8.7 percent of gross domestic product, the largest percentage since 1985.

Heating-fuel prices hikes will have a different psychological and economic impact than rising gasoline prices. For most consumers, rising gas prices are manageable, since people tend to buy gas in $40 or $50 portions. And the price increase has generally been orderly and steady, which gives people time to adjust.

Not so for heating-related fuels. Many people haven't paid heating bills since last winter, and level-paying arrangements (which spread payments out over several months) frequently take a hiatus in the summer. Consumers also purchase heating fuel in larger quantities than they do gasoline. They take delivery of several hundred gallons of heating oil at a time, not 20. Monthly bills run well into triple digits.

For many who live in cold-weather climes, the bite will be more painful than rising gas prices. Many consumers (Moneybox included) already spend more on heating fuels than they do on gas. For urban dwellers, for the carless, and for suburbanites who commute primarily by train, higher gasoline prices haven't been a big deal. But because everybody needs to heat their home in winter, the tax imposed by higher heating-fuel prices will be more far-reaching. Poor people in the Bronx who don't drive will find themselves spending much more on energy than they did last year.

Heating bills are, at least, somewhat progressive. The bigger your house, the bigger your heating bill. This winter, all those people living in 6,000-square-foot McMansions with double-height entryways and steam showers will be shelling out several thousand dollars extra in heating costs. The yuppies and the executive class will get squeezed along with the poor and rural dwellers.

One economic downside of the heating-fuel spike is that it will afflict many of the highest-earning parts of the country, which account for a disproportionate share of consumer spending. This winter, many northerners who shop at Costco and Saks will find that thousands of dollars that would ordinarily be spent on clothes, food, and electronics will instead go to the utility or to the gas company. And the first big bills will be arriving in mailboxes across the Northeast just when retailers are preparing the circulars for Christmas sales. In mid-September, the National Retail Federation issued its first Christmas shopping season forecast, which was somewhat pessimistic. If energy prices remain high, this is the year the Christmas shopping grinches could finally be right.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127384/

jurisprudence
Let-Down Lady
Harriet Miers isn't just no John Roberts. She's no Sandra Day O'Connor.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2005, at 1:35 PM PT

Commentators on the right as well as the left—anyone, really, who thinks a Supreme Court justice should possess a record of world-class distinction—are groaning over Harriet Miers' nomination. She may turn out to have a great legal mind. She may be a thoughtful, incisive Supreme Court justice. But there's no reason to think so now. The problem isn't that Miers hasn't been a federal judge or a Supreme Court lawyer. It's that she isn't those things and she also doesn't bring with her the breadth of experience that the other justices lack. Can anyone really imagine that she'd be the nominee if she weren't a woman and the president's friend and loyal adviser? Cronyism and affirmative action: It's a nasty mix.

Comparing Miers to the woman she would replace—Sandra Day O'Connor—underscores why you don't have to be snooty to think she's a let-down. O'Connor graduated from Stanford University with high honors and, in 1952, at the top of her class at Stanford Law School. Miers got her undergraduate and law degrees from Southern Methodist University, finishing law school in 1970. O'Connor moved to Arizona with her husband and concentrated on having kids and raising them. She went back to work in 1965, part-time, for the Arizona attorney general's office. According to this Washington Post profile, Miers was the first woman hired by the Dallas firm Locke Purnell Boren Laney & Neely. Her clients included Microsoft and the Walt Disney Co. So far, so good—Miers is winning, though O'Connor should probably start with handicap points since she was coming up in an earlier, more sexist era.

But O'Connor's next move was to the Arizona Senate, to which she was appointed in 1969 and then ran for re-election. Miers, by contrast, stuck to the more comfortable private sector, becoming president of her 400-lawyer firm (Locke, Liddell and Sapp in Texas). In 1973, O'Connor became the first woman to serve as the majority leader of a state Senate—not just in Arizona, but anywhere. In 1992, Miers became the first woman to be elected Texas State Bar president. O'Connor ran again for election and won, this time for a county trial-judge seat. Miers' friendship with Bush got her an appointment as head of the state lottery commission. O'Connor was tapped across party lines, by Democratic Gov. Bruce Babbitt, for the state court of appeals. Miers got a ride with Bush to the White House.

O'Connor didn't have a national reputation when President Reagan chose her for the Supreme Court in 1981. She was a Westerner who'd stayed West. But she had demonstrated accomplishment, acumen, and moxie in the public arena. She is the justice you counted on to tell the other ones what it is like to write a law and pass it. Miers, by contrast, has advanced by impressing clients and other lawyers. She has one brief stint in public office: She served on the Dallas City Council for one term in the late 1980s. But her interest was short-term and limited. (When the council seats changed from citywide representation to single district, she decided not to run for re-election.) Her record includes nothing like O'Connor's accomplishment of winning the support of voters statewide and then her fellow legislators (of whom 28 of 31 were men).

The words Miers' supporters most often use to describe her are "discreet," "dedicated," "capable," and, of course, "loyal." Her critics today dejectedly compared those attributes to the praise heaped on John Roberts for his intellectual firepower and deep knowledge of constitutional law. The O'Connor model, however, demonstrates that the Supreme Court bar and the federal appeals courts aren't the only place to look for highly qualified nominees. There's Congress, state government, state courts, universities. Miers doesn't come from any of those places either. She doesn't even have Clarence Thomas' track record of running a government agency (the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission).

For the Democrats who promised to charge hard at Bush's second nominee after giving Roberts an easy ride, the problem will be going after Miers without sounding like a snob or a hypocrite. To question Miers' qualifications could open up for attack the whole idea that it's important to appoint a woman to the court, or a broader commitment to affirmative action. Sen. Edward Kennedy started trying to pick his way through this minefield this morning. He called Miers' public record of writings and speeches "insufficient to assess" her qualifications as a nominee, and demanded that the White House release documents relating to her service for Bush during his presidency and Texas governorship. But Kennedy also said that Miers' résumé "lists impressive qualifications as a practicing attorney." That's hardly the route to complaining about all the things she hasn't done.

Instead, it is the intellectual right that's on that case today (in the happy company of Bruce Reed). The National Review, which touted Roberts as a heavyweight with "stellar professional qualifications," says that Miers comes up short by comparison. David Frum and others are tearing their hair out that Bush didn't pick judges Michael McConnell or Michael Luttig, conservatives with renowned reputations as scholars and legal thinkers.

The real fear on the right, of course, is that Miers will turn out to be another Justice David Souter, a respecter of precedent who lets her colleagues pull her to the center and then to the left. Doubtful. On the surface, Miers has Souter-like qualities: She isn't married, she mentioned her mother in her remarks this morning, and here's a glimmer of evidence that she hasn't always toed the conservative line. But if Miers isn't a solid vote on the court in the Rehnquist-Scalia-Thomas model, why is Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law & Justice, who has made it his mission to push for a nominee willing to overturn Roe v. Wade, crowing today?

The more plausible complaint about Miers, from the point of view of conservatives, is that she won't have the intellectual prowess to pick the court up and move it, to persuade other justices with the power of her ideas. For moderates and liberals, the complaint is that Bush had plenty of opportunity to pick a woman without picking the one whose best qualification is that she's his friend. Here's a love letter I sent to my pick for female John Roberts, Maureen Mahoney. Here are three lesser-known women judges the Bush administration recently has been considering. Diversity doesn't have to be this way.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

 

supreme court dispatches
The New Kid
John Roberts' first day at school.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2005, at 12:31 PM PT

Since you're dying to know: John Roberts is not wearing the gold stripes that William H. Rehnquist added to his black robe several years ago. If we wanted proof of the new chief justice's infamous humility, this would seem to serve. At Harriet Miers' press conference this morning, Bush's new nominee for associate justice, like Roberts, also claimed to be humble.

Unlike Roberts, she's truly earned that right.

In a delicious double-Cheney, the woman assigned the task of selecting the next associate justice of the Supreme Court ultimately determined that there was no one so qualified as herself. Never mind that probably 49 other women have also served as the first woman president of their state bar associations. Never mind that the credentials Miers brings to the table might have justified labeling her a "pioneer" for women's rights 25 years ago. And never mind that the best thing Bush could manage to say for her this morning was that her mom is proud. The soft bigotry of low expectations …

The president has caved to the twin pressures of identity politics and confirmation politics: He's ignored the extremely well-qualified women for an unqualified one, and the well-qualified candidates for a confirmable one.

There's a sweet moment on the steps of the Supreme Court this morning in which young Jack Roberts, wearing his Christopher Robin short pantsuit and bow tie, leaps to his father's grasp with his arms outspread like an airplane. The disconnect between this tableau from a bygone era—this 1960s father-and-son moment—and the clumsy affirmative action choice of Miers is striking. We are clearly at a historic moment in which we can't comfortably move backward to the days of white privileged male power, or forward to an era of truly equal women.

Justice John Paul Stevens opens this morning's oral argument with a tribute to William H. Rehnquist. He was, he says, truly "first among equals," and then he quotes from Thomas Gray: "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air." He concludes by welcoming Roberts, who, he notes, "argued 39 times before this court." He smiles and adds: "Which exceeds the combined experience of the rest of us."

Roberts makes no speeches. He closes the 2004 term and opens the 2005 term, swears in the new Supreme Court Bar members, and announces oral argument in IBP Inc v. Alvarez and Tum v. Barber Foods Inc. The first case is not exactly a blockbuster—the issue in these consolidated appeals is whether the Fair Labor Standards Act requires that employees (in this case in the meat-processing industry) be compensated for the time they spend doffing and donning protective clothing and walking to their workstations. It's a case in which dry statutory construction bumps up against dry conflicting case law. Sizzling exchanges include lines like this one, from oral advocate Carter Phillips: "But let's not forget 79.7(g) footnote 49!"

Or this one, also from Phillips: "But this will have effects for res judicata and collateral estoppel."

So, how does Roberts look in the chief justice's chair? As though he were born to it, quite frankly. He is clearly prepared for argument. He listens intently to his colleagues' questions and watches them while they speak. His first exchange with Phillips shores up his credentials as a strict constructionist: "So, your approach introduces a third concept … and that's nowhere in the statute." He goes back and forth several times in this first colloquy and is quickly confident enough to retort: "That's my question." He juggles counsels' names, time limits, and a stack of briefs as though he's been doing it all his life. The fact that Roberts' umbilical cord was being cut when most of his colleagues were already practicing law is irrelevant. He is absolutely ready to lead them.

To his left sits Sandra Day O'Connor, who may vote and count, vote and not count, or not vote and not count in this case—depending on when Miers is confirmed. How she feels, knowing that her own résumé was more impressive 24 years ago than Miers' is today, is not evident from her questions. She must be wondering, as are the rest of us, whether young Jack Roberts might not have been a better pick to replace her.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

 

  technology
Me Against My Students
How I use the Internet to combat plagiarists, fabulists, and cheaters.
By Adam L. Penenberg
Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2005, at 10:36 AM PT

Like any journalism professor, the last thing I want is for one of my students to end up on Romenesko for all the wrong reasons. I don't know whether there are more plagiarists and fabricators today than in years past, but I have no doubt more are getting caught.

The reason: technology. And I'm not talking about high-tech, cutting-edge, predator plagiarism drones that circle the sky and are programmed to fire missiles at the ethically challenged (although that might not be such a bad idea). No, I'm simply referring to Google and Lexis-Nexis.

Before this great digital interconnectedness, in which you can find just about any article from any news source by plugging keywords into a search engine, publications functioned as separate fiefdoms. Since content wasn't instantly searchable, reporters and students could reprint words from a publication on the opposite coast with little chance of getting busted.

In the graduate journalism courses I teach at New York University, I'm always on the lookout for the subtle plagiarist who lifts quotes, facts, and well-turned phrases and descriptions, and the student who stitches together someone else's ideas without offering credit. More rare, although it does happen, is the student who copies and pastes an entire article he finds online into a Microsoft Word document and slaps his byline at the top.

I don't want you to get the wrong idea. In my experience, plagiarism and other ethical lapses are not all that common at NYU, especially for such a large university. (The journalism program alone has about 700 undergraduates and 130 graduates.) But there is a cheating epidemic in colleges around the country, and NYU is not unaffected.

So, at the start of each semester I lecture my classes on journalism ethics, warning them about what happens to plagiarists and fabulists in the real world of journalism (they get fired) and what would happen to a student who tried it (he would probably be expelled and his career would be over before it started). It's not that I assume all students are liars, cheats, and word frauds. I just want to spare NYU the type of public humiliation the University of Pennsylvania suffered because of Stephen Glass and the University of Maryland endured on account of Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley.

What some students forget is that if they can find an article to steal from, I can probably find it, too. When I edit assignments, I plug random quotes, clauses, and full sentences into search engines to check for similar word patterns. I look closely at poetic turns of phrase or quotes that seem too good to be true and verify the names of all sources and affiliations. If I can't confirm the existence of a source used in a story—say, she isn't on Google, Lexis-Nexis, 411.com, or Zabasearch—I tell the student to provide contact information, and I then call or e-mail that person.

There are, of course, certain transgressions that search engines, article archives, and Web-based directories simply can't prevent. It is very difficult to stamp out idea theft—the kind of plagiarism that occurs when someone keeps another writer's syntax and ideas but changes the words—or to stop anonymous source abusers, who concoct quotes and people out of whole cloth. It is also hard to unmask students who pay hired guns to write their papers. And I suppose it would be possible for a dishonest student to crib notes from a dusty old library book or academic journal that hasn't been scanned into any digital archives.

By insisting on proper attribution, I make it difficult for students to pass off someone else's ideas as their own and handle the anonymous source problem by simply refusing to accept them. As for unauthorized ghost writers, by the end of the semester I get to know my students' work better than they know it themselves. If I spot a change in style or a much-improved command of the English language from one week to the next, I call the student in for a meeting.

More than anything, I trust my instincts. Whatever his level, each student writer has a style. I'm bound to parse a phrase that sticks out because it doesn't flow like the rest of the passage (or because it's the best-written part). And there are some common signs that something is probably amiss: dry descriptions of products or services gleaned from company press releases; highly technical language that's used to explain how something works; quotes from someone who works for a company that has never before been cited in a news article; and fascinating facts that the writer neglects to attribute and anecdotes that sound too good to be true.

Naturally, all this fact checking is time-consuming and only a small portion of the feedback I offer. I still have to provide extensive line edits, suggestions to improve the lede and solidify the nut graf, and structural tips. As a result, I tend to pull back over the course of the semester, once I'm satisfied the student understands, and subscribes to, high ethical standards. Even then, I spot-check whenever possible.

Professors take it personally when a student tries to put one over them. Which may explain the popularity of Turnitin, an automated plagiarism-detection service the company claims has been licensed by 2,500 institutions, including Georgetown, West Point, and "all colleges and universities in the United Kingdom." Professors send in their students' papers, which are then compared to the 4.5 billion pages in the company's archives. When Central Michigan University tried out Turnitin last year, the program caught two students plagiarizing. (They claimed they were just making sure the software worked properly. Uh huh.)

At NYU, we have considered deploying an automated plagiarism prevention system like Turnitin but wonder if it is too blunt an instrument that could result in false positives. In the meantime, professors like me will continue efforts to combat word fraud with our own ad hoc techniques. They may not be cutting edge, but they do seem to work.

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

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127365/

the hollywood economist
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
Why Pixar can't leave Disney.
By Edward Jay Epstein
Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2005, at 8:48 AM PT

Hollywood's El Dorado is a concept or character that can be spun into sequels—or, as in the case of Star Wars, prequels—and serve as an expanding platform for DVDs, television, games, and other licensing rights. Although successful franchises, such as MGM/UA's James Bond, Sony's Spider-Man, Warner Bros.' Harry Potter, Paramount's Star Trek, New Line's Lord of the Rings, DreamWorks' Shrek, and Universal's Jurassic Park, are few and far between, Steve Jobs, as head of Pixar Animation Studios, has handed Disney four of the potentially richest mother lodes in the history of filmdom. Namely, the sequel rights to Toy Story; Finding Nemo; Monsters, Inc.; and The Incredibles. These franchises are particularly lucrative because they have no stars, directors, or other gross players entitled to a share of the take. Disney also has the exclusive rights to use all of the Pixar characters in its theme parks.

How did Disney wind up with four Pixar-created franchises? After Steve Jobs bought George Lucas' computer-animation division in 1986, he needed the muscle of a Hollywood studio to get this new form of 3-D animation into theaters worldwide. Disney, with its Disney Channel, theme parks, and family-friendly Walt Disney brand, was a natural ally. So, in 1991, Jobs entered into a deal with Michael Eisner to co-produce its first animated feature, Toy Story. Disney agreed to finance the movie completely, while Pixar's creative guru John Lasseter would develop and direct. Disney would then get the lion's share of the proceeds—87 percent, including its distributing fee. Though it took almost three years to complete, Toy Story proved to be not only an immense box office success but the most lucrative toy-licensing platform in Disney's history.

Jobs negotiated a better deal in 1997 with Eisner for five more animated features. Pixar again assumed full creative control of the movies while Disney was in charge of the distribution, marketing, exploitation, and licensing. In this deal, Pixar paid half the cost of developing and producing the movies and shared 50-50 the money that flowed in from all sources, after Disney deducted its advertising, print, and out-of-pocket expenses and took its 12.5 percent distribution fee. The only revenue Pixar was not entitled to was that which was earned from Disney's theme parks. When it came to the sequels, Eisner insisted that Disney have the rights to make an unlimited number of sequels with the characters and computerized algorithms from the originals. Pixar had the option to buy into the sequels by putting up half the financing, but it would get only 35 percent of the proceeds that remained after Disney repaid itself its expenses and took its 12.5 percent fee. Since this was a deal-breaker, Jobs handed over the sequel rights, but he was not happy about it.

After fruitlessly attempting to renegotiate the sequel option with Eisner in 2003, Jobs announced in January 2004 that after Pixar completed its contract by delivering its fifth and final movie, Cars, it would terminate its arrangement with Disney and not participate in any of the sequels, leaving Disney with four franchises. All that Pixar would get would be a small royalty (3.5 percent of the proceeds until each movie reaches cash break-even and 7.5 percent afterward).

Even with Pixar's incredible track record, Jobs has found that getting a new partner is easier said than done. Since Universal and Paramount have decided to disband their international distribution arm, UIP, Jobs has only three choices if he wants a distributor with the global clout that comes close to Disney's—Sony Pictures, 20^th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. But in the 20 months that have elapsed since he fired his parting shot at Eisner, Jobs has not been able to make a suitable deal with any of these studios. The reason is not that the studios lack appreciation for the creative genius of Pixar and its pioneering work in computer graphics, but that any new Pixar films would face a potentially awesome competitor: Pixar sequels. For example, a new Pixar film might find itself competing for summer play dates with The Incredibles 2, backed by a Disney juggernaut of merchandising tie-ins with fast-food restaurants, toy licenses, informational shows on the Disney Channel and overseas channels, and its proven Pied Piper effectiveness in recruiting children's audiences.

Simply put, it would be Pixar vs. Pixar. Ironically, the only studio that can release a Pixar movie without the threat of such competition is Disney. Just as second chances with happy endings are a formula for success in children's movies, Jobs may prudently decide, especially now that Eisner is gone, that breaking up with Disney is not worth the effort.

Edward Jay Epstein is the author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood. (To read the first chapter, click here.)

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2127348/

fighting words
Why Ask Why?
Terrorist attacks aren't caused by any policy except that of the bombers themselves.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2005, at 8:00 AM PT

The return of murderous nihilism to Bali is highly instructive. It shows, first, that the fanatics of Islamism don't know how to stop. And it also shows that they never learn. How can Jemaah Islamiyah, which almost ruined Indonesia's economy by its filthy attack three years ago, possibly have tried to repeat the same crime in the same place? If we look for answers to this question, we shall find answers that completely discredit the current half-baked apologies for terrorism.

I remember going to Bali from Jakarta in the summer of 2003. I had already toured the wreckage of the Marriott Hotel in the capital city, which was blown up by a suicide team just as I arrived, slaying several Muslim cab drivers who were waiting in line outside. The rage of the local population was something to be seen: The widows of the dead men were calling for the perpetrators to be tortured before they were executed. In Bali, which is a more mild and temperate place, a huge candlelit march had followed the bombings that had devastated the tourist hangouts in Kuta. I made a point of going to Legian Street, which had been the "ground zero" of this fiery atrocity, and of attending the opening of Paddy's Bar Reloaded, where so many genial Australians had been foully incinerated. The prevailing view was that JI had isolated itself and that the trial of the perpetrators would expose them to popular contempt—which indeed it did.

But if JI were rational, it wouldn't have attacked the bars and clubs and beaches of Kuta and Jimbaran in the first place. Indonesia is a mainly Muslim society, whose government takes a stern line against the war in Iraq and even Afghanistan. Its people, who are astonishingly hospitable to all foreigners, depend in millions of cases on tourism to make the difference between indigence and the minimum wage. Its elections feature Muslim political parties, many of them quite austere in their propaganda. Why on earth, then, would a fundamentalist group wish to bring discredit upon itself and ruin upon its neighbors by resorting to random slaughter?

Never make the mistake of asking for rationality here. And never underestimate the power of theocratic propaganda. The fanatics look at the population of Bali and its foreign visitors and they see a load of Hindus selling drinks—often involving the presence of unchaperoned girls—to a load of Christians. That in itself is excuse enough for mayhem. They also see local Muslims following syncretic and tolerant forms of Islam, and they yearn to redeem them from this heresy and persuade them of the pure, desert-based truths of Salafism and Wahhabism. (One of the men on trial in Bali had been in trouble before, in his home village, for desecrating local Muslim shrines that he regarded as idolatrous.) And then, of course, Australians must die. Why would that be? Well, is it not the case that Australia sent troops to help safeguard the independence of East Timor and the elections that followed it? A neighboring country that assists the self-determination of an Indonesian Christian minority must expect to have the lives of its holidaymakers taken.

Do not forget that on Aug. 19, 2003, a gigantic explosion leveled the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, which then served as the Iraq headquarters of the United Nations. The materials used to do this were of a high military grade not available to any random "insurgent" and certainly came from the arsenals of the fallen regime. The main target—and principal victim—was Sergio Vieira de Mello, the dashing Brazilian who had been sent by Kofi Annan to reanimate the U.N. presence in Iraq. De Mello had been the most devoted and humane of the world body's civil servants and had won himself golden opinions in Cambodia, Lebanon, Sudan, and the Balkans. But it was his role as U.N. supervisor of the transition in East Timor that marked him for death. A communiqué from al-Qaida gloated over the end of "the personal representative of America's criminal slave, Kofi Annan, the diseased Sergio de Mello, criminal Bush's friend." It went on to ask, "Why cry over a heretic? Sergio Vieira de Mello is the one who tried to embellish the image of America, the crusaders and the Jews in Lebanon and Kosovo, and now in Iraq. He is America's first man where he was nominated by Bush to be in charge of the UN after Kofi Annan, the criminal and slave of America, and he is the crusader that extracted a part of the Islamic land [East Timor]."

Consider this, look again at the awful carnage in Bali, and shudder if you ever said, or thought, that the bombs in London in July, or the bombs in Baghdad every day, or the bombs in Bali last Friday, are caused by any "policy" but that of the bombers themselves. Note the following:

1) East Timor was for many years, and quite rightly, a signature cause of the Noam Chomsky "left." The near-genocide of its people is an eternal stain on Indonesia and on the Western states that were complicit or silent. Yet Bin Ladenism wants not less of this killing and repression but more. Its demand to re-establish the caliphate is a pro-imperialist demand, not an anti-imperialist one.

2) Random bombings are not a protest against poverty and unemployment. They are a cause of poverty and unemployment and of wider economic dislocation.

3) Hinduism is considered by Bin Ladenists to be a worse heresy even than Christianity or Judaism or Shiism, and its adherents, whether in Bali or Kashmir, are fit only for the edge of the sword. So, it is absurd to think of jihadism—which murders the poor and the brown without compunction—as a movement against the rich and the "white."

So, what did Indonesia do to deserve this, or bring it on itself? How will the slaughter in Bali improve the lot of the Palestinians? Those who look for the connection will be doomed to ask increasingly stupid questions and to be content with increasingly wicked answers.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent books include Love, Poverty, and War and Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.

 

 explainer
How Does Assisted Suicide Work?
A guide to "Death With Dignity" in Oregon.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005, at 3:20 PM PT

The U.S. Supreme Court took up the issue of assisted suicide on Wednesday as it heard arguments in the case of Gonzales v. Oregon. The Bush administration has challenged an Oregon law that lets physicians prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients. How does assisted suicide work?

The patient has to ask for it three times. According to Oregon's "Death With Dignity" law, only certain people can ask for lethal medication from their doctors. You must be at least 18 years old, an Oregon resident, and the victim of a terminal disease that will kill you within the next six months. You also have to be able to make and communicate a clearheaded decision to your doctor.

The first step is to make a "formal oral request." Advocacy groups that work with terminal patients suggest something like, "Doctor, will you assist me in using Oregon's Death With Dignity law?" At least 15 days later, you need to make another oral request. The doctor still won't be able to prescribe lethal drugs until you file a written request form signed by two witnesses.

Many people who are considering assisted suicide contact a patient-advocacy group for help with the procedure and paperwork. Such a group can help to screen out people who are ineligible for assisted suicide, but a doctor makes the final decisions. If she thinks the patient may have a psychiatric or psychological disorder, she can refer him for evaluation and treatment. The doctor also must tell him about alternatives like hospice care, advise him to confer with his family or next of kin, and remind him that it's OK to change his mind at any time. By law, a second physician must review the case and sign off on the first doctor's diagnosis.

A doctor can prescribe lethal drugs two days after receiving a written request, but under no circumstances can she administer them herself. That would be euthanasia, which is illegal in Oregon. The state's assisted-suicide laws mandate that the patient take the drugs himself. Almost all assisted suicides take place in the home, with at least one health-care worker present. The patient takes one of two kinds of barbiturates. Seconal costs about $125 for a lethal 10 gram dose, which comes in the form of 100 individual caplets that must be broken apart to produce about three tablespoons of powder. Nembutal comes in a more convenient liquid form. It costs more than $1,000 for a dose, though, and insurance almost never covers lethal drugs.

If the patient is using Seconal, it's either mixed in water to create a bitter drink or stirred into pudding or applesauce to hide the taste. The patient will slip into a coma about five minutes after taking the drug, with death coming within about half an hour. If you're in pretty good shape, or if you're especially fat, death can be delayed for up to 48 hours. In most cases, the time of death is determined by a health-care provider who checks your pulse every few minutes until you pass away.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks George Eighmey of Compassion in Dying of Oregon.

 

reel time
No Soap, Television
The Case for George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. Plus, The Squid and the Whale.
By David Edelstein
Updated Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005, at 2:52 PM PT

Elsewhere in this magazine, Jack Shafer has brought such fine, principled skepticism to bear on the historical foundation of George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck (Warner Independent Pictures) that my case for it will no doubt seem lightweight. Here goes: It's a damn good movie!

There is no contesting that it's a self-congratulatory hagiography of Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and that Clooney and his co-screenwriter, Grant Heslov, are highly selective in how they portray Murrow's fight to broadcast a damning assessment of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his overweening anti-Communist crusade on the timorous CBS network. But it's also a passionate and rousing piece of filmmaking—a civics lesson with the punch of a good melodrama.

Although most of Good Night, and Good Luck is set in the CBS studios, it's anything but static. Clooney and his cinematographer, Robert Elswit, use high-contrast black-and-white to evoke both the era in TV and the starkness of the forces in play. The movie never settles into one of those loitering period pictorials. It feels electrified; it has the chain-smoking jitteriness of its protagonist. Cigarettes, by the way, are everywhere, and the way the white smoke curls against the deep blacks is both beautiful and ominous: You don't need to be told that Murrow perished from lung cancer.

Jack is obviously correct that Murrow did not lead the charge against McCarthy. But since when does TV news ever lead charges? With the exception of such programs as Frontline (and, at the opposite extreme, administration mouthpieces like Fox News), the medium generally lags behind print in afflicting the powerful, constricted as it is by the interests of its sponsors (Murrow's principal underwriter, Alcoa, looms large in this movie) and the celebrity status of its anchor people. (They are fat targets, indeed: See "Rather, Dan." A weighty subplot here revolves around the disintegrating psyche of Ray Wise's local anchor Don Hollenbeck, who finds himself regularly pilloried as a pinko by a powerful tabloid columnist.)

More important, the larger battle for Murrow and Friendly in Good Night, and Good Luck is with the network itself. CBS employees have been ordered—on pain of termination—to sign loyalty oaths to the United States; and a gutless midlevel executive (Jeff Daniels, here fatted by complacency) all but begs Murrow to choose another target—preferably, heh-heh, Joe Kennedy. He threatens Murrow with the worst fate imaginable for a journalist with pretensions: more puffy celebrity interviews. (The one shown here, from Murrow's Face to Face, is with a coyly closeted Liberace.) In a big oaken office reeking of power, chairman William Paley (a wittily grave Frank Langella) argues that McCarthy's going to self-destruct anyway and hints that such a broadcast could imperil the network's standing and the careers of its employees. (See "Rather, Dan.")

Not all of Good Night, and Good Luck clicks. I found the moody interludes between acts—smoky jazz numbers, often ironic in context, sung by Diana Reeves—a mite self-conscious. The subplot featuring Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson as secretly married CBS employees (such alliances were against the network's rules) seems shoehorned in. As much as I like Strathairn's crisply understated performance, saints don't do much for me. And I could have done with at least the suggestion that some rational people at the time believed Soviet Communism was a threat and that there might have been spies in the State Department.

But Clooney's (and Murrow's) straightforward message—the movie's raison d'etre—that "we should not confuse dissent with disloyalty" feels especially vital. It wasn't too long ago that Andrew Sullivan was labeling writers who raised questions about the evidence for an invasion of Iraq "fifth columnists" for the enemy. (Although Sullivan has furiously backpedaled on the war, he has not, to my knowledge, recanted that characterization.) Bill O'Reilly declared such critics "Enemies of the State." (The words appeared in bold letters on the screen.) And Ann Coulter topped the best-seller lists with her assertion that most Democrats are guilty of "treason"—which, the last I heard, is punishable by death. (The unhinged Coulter wished actual fiery destruction on staffers at the New York Times—odd timing, given that the faux First Amendment martyr Judith Miller was well into her neocon campaign of disinformation.)

None of those writers or TV personalities has the power to imprison, thank heaven. But, like McCarthy, they are happy to resort to the ultimate smear, the political "smart-bomb." That's why the stand of such a middle-of-the-road figure as Murrow mattered then and, in Good Night, and Good Luck, matters now. ... 2:51 p.m. PT

The best reason to see Noah Baumbach's blistering autobiographical divorce drama The Squid and the Whale (The Samuel Goldwyn Company) is Jeff Daniels as the teenage protagonist's father, Bernard Berkman, a novelist and a titan of self-absorption whose ego envelops his son like a squid. Or is he the whale? I think he's the whale and the mother is the squid: Whales are blowhards while squids have vagina-dentata-like … Never mind. I don't really understand the metaphor anyway, although it makes for a stunning visual climax when the boy, exhausted from all the psychodrama, trudges into New York's Museum of Natural History and contemplates the ancient origins of life. The image obviously resonates in Baumbach, and so this domestic tug-of-war taps into something deeper than the specifics of his Park Slope, Brooklyn, upbringing.

Anyway, the part of the father, closely based on the novelist Jonathan Baumbach, is a classic portrait of wounded vanity, and Daniels—a fine, self-effacing actor who rarely gets a chance to dominate a movie—rises to the occasion and then some. He wears a bushy, salt-and-pepper beard that takes the focus off his cute little cleft chin and puts it on his eyes, which blaze with indignation at the lack of attention being paid him. After early success, Berkman no longer attracts much notice from critics, while his wife, Joan (Laura Linney, in a part based on Baumbach's mother, the former film critic Georgia Brown), enjoys increasing success. Bernard paternalistically suggests changes in her prose, she nods and doesn't take them, and so the balance of power shifts—fatally. It isn't long before Bernard leaves their gorgeous brownstone for a crumbling house in a less desirable neighborhood.

The older son, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), shares his father's anger at his mother's ascension, while the younger Frank (Owen Kline), is more of a mommy's boy. (I don't mean that pejoratively.) Baumbach's riskiest strategy is to turn his alter ego, Walt, into a snotty little creep, echoing his dad's imperial dismissals of books like A Tale of Two Cities ("minor Dickens") without actually having read them. Hypercritical, he laments the abundance of freckles on the face of his lovely quasi-girlfriend (Halley Feiffer), but his greatest victim is himself: When he's caught trying to pass off a song he sings at a school assembly as his own, it's clear that he's judging himself by standards too high ever to begin to create anything. You can look at The Squid and the Whale as the truest kind of artistic coming-of-age story: a cathartic piece of self-criticism.

The movie isn't "minor Baumbach," but it feels more like a good, tight short story than a novel. Its scheme is a little tidy: Under the sway of his dad, Walt is furious at his mom (he even calls her a whore); then it hits him that his dad is a monumental egotist who doesn't completely see him. So maybe he was too hard on his mom … What makes the film feel unfinished is that Joan remains elusive and un-filled-in: Her soothing pet names for her sons become more and more irritating, her easy mockery belies her warmth, and her sexuality is a source of unease. (She had a long-term affair with a neighbor, the father of one of Walt's friends, and, shortly after Bernard is banished, takes up with her tennis instructor, played by William Baldwin.) The hole in the film isn't a reflection on Linney's performance. It's as if Baumbach, his hands full of oily whale blubber, didn't want to deal with an exploding sac of squid ink. And who can blame him, really?

The irresolution and anxiety is right there in Baumbach's filmmaking—in how he still can't shake his angry, competitive father from the frame. What keeps this from being an "I hate Dad" orgy is how alive Baumbach is to Bernard's pain—and to Daniels' performance, which has an aura of bewilderment and incomprehension, like a dethroned king who looks around and finds only a single courtier—his son. Driving around Park Slope, Bernard is outraged when an on-street parking space he occupied a few hours earlier is gone: Everywhere he looks he sees signs of his diminished potency. What kills our sympathy, finally, is that he can't help using what little power he has left to best his son. When they both eye a nubile student of Bernard's and classmate of Walt's (a radiant Anna Paquin), there's little doubt who'll end up sleeping with her. (Movie trivia buffs will have reason to feel even more righteous anger: Paquin played Daniels' daughter in the wholesome Fly Away Home.)

The Squid and the Whale ends up reinforcing the thesis of Elizabeth Marquardt's new book (full disclosure: edited by my wife) Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. Marquardt's contention—which will be embraced by knee-jerk social conservatives but is worth considering anyway—is that while many divorces are justified (and, in the long term, healthy) there's no such thing as a "good" one. Traveling between parents, children must do what they aren't equipped to do: take sides, keep secrets, weigh opposing lifestyles, and reconcile their parents' different worlds in a way they wouldn't ordinarily need to—even in a home riddled with conflict. Marquardt says this emotional labor "restructures childhood itself." And while I haven't examined her data (and am not a child of divorce), I can think of few pieces of evidence more compelling than the image of a young boy staring hopelessly at a giant squid and whale. ... 10:35 a.m. PT

David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at slatemovies@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127502/

war stories
Say What?
Bush's speech was a sad, demoralizing spectacle.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005, at 2:23 PM PT

President Bush's speech this morning, billed as a major statement about Iraq and the war on terror, was a sad spectacle—so ripe with lofty principles, so bereft of ideas on what to do with them. He approached the podium amid growing disapproval of his performance as a war president, ratcheting chaos and violence in Iraq, continuing terrorist attacks worldwide—and pleaded for nothing more than staying the course, with no turns or shifts, for a long, long time to come.

He crisply outlined the stakes of the larger struggle against Islamofascism: fear vs. freedom, oppression vs. tolerance, the dark ages vs. modern civilization. "The defense of freedom," he declared, "is worth our sacrifice." And he's right. Which is why his failure to articulate a strategy—his evasion of the difficulties and dilemmas that his own aides and commanders are grappling with—is so distressing.

Early on in the speech, he observed that this new terrorism is "not centrally directed," that it's "more like a loose network with many branches than an army under a single command." This is a crucial, though long-obvious, insight; it implies that this war cannot be fought—and progress cannot be measured—in traditional ways. Maybe, I thought at this point in the address, Bush would finally lay out a new strategy for this new kind of conflict.

Alas, no. He instantly retreated to the same old, irrelevant formulas. He likened the struggle against terrorism to the Cold War struggle against Communism—ignoring that Communism's strength derived less from its ideology than from its embodiment in the massive, heavily armed, centrally controlled Soviet state. He boasted that we had killed or captured "nearly all" of those responsible for the 9/11 attacks—not just finessing his failure to find Osama Bin Laden, the man most responsible, but also ignoring that such head counts might not matter in fighting a "loose network."

President Bush chided those who despair over the state of affairs in Iraq. Pessimism, he said, "is not justified. With every random bombing and with every funeral of a child, it becomes more clear that the extremists are not patriots or resistance fighters. They are murderers at war with the Iraqi people themselves."

Maybe so, but what about the Iraqis killed by American bullets or bombs? I am not asserting the slightest "moral equivalence" between U.S. soldiers and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's suicide bombers. However, Bush's own top military advisers have ruefully acknowledged that the dynamics of escalation work both ways.

It was almost exactly two years ago, on Oct. 16, 2003, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent his aides a searching memo (soon after leaked to USA Today), in which he noted:

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

The shocking thing is not so much that it took two years, following 9/11, for Rumsfeld to formulate the right question; it's that two more years have passed, and the administration is only now seeking an answer. Military analyst William Arkin reports in his Washington Post blog, Early Warning, that just last month the Defense Department issued a solicitation for outside contractors to devise "a system of metrics to accurately assess US progress in the War on Terrorism, identify critical issues hindering progress, and develop and track action plans to resolve the issues identified."

I suspect this is why support for the war is waning on the home front—not because Americans doubt that the stakes are high, but because they wonder if the commander in chief knows what he's doing. We were supposed to be in and out of there in a matter of months; Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz all said so. Now it's stretching out for years, with no end in sight—and dubious prospects of meaningful victory.

In this regard, Bush's speech—which was clearly meant to revive support for the war—could not have been reassuring. "This war," he said, "will require more sacrifice, more time, more resolve." (One clear inference from this speech: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. commanders in Iraq, and several Republican politicians may be planning for major troop withdrawals to begin next year, but the president seems to have no such intentions.)

It was an uncharacteristically defensive speech, Bush reciting, then rebutting, the arguments of his critics. But his counterblows were usually unpersuasive. For instance:

Some have argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September 11, 2001, and al-Qaida attacked us anyway.

This is mere playing with words. Notice: First, he cites the claim that the U.S. occupation has "strengthened" the extremists; then he dismisses some straw man's contention that our presence has "caused or triggered" the radicals' rage. The fact that 9/11 preceded the invasion of Iraq is irrelevant to the point that he started to counter—that the occupation "strengthened" the insurgency. This point is incontestable. (On the most basic level, before the invasion, there was no insurgency and no al-Qaida presence in Iraq, except for a training camp run by Zarqawi—and that was in the Kurdish-controlled northern enclave, which Bush could have bombed, and was encouraged by the Joint Chiefs to bomb, at any time.) More important, to evade the point is to misunderstand this phase of the war—and, therefore, to misjudge how to win it.

Near the start of the speech, Bush declared, "We will never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory." What he has to do now—because, after all this time, he still hasn't—is to explain what he means by "victory" and how he plans to get there.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

 

moneybox
The New Lords of the Ring Tone
Why Americans are hanging up on the Baby Bells.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005, at 1:42 PM PT

In the 1990s, tech gurus like George "Infinite Bandwidth" Gilder rhapsodized that with the roll-out of fiber-optic cable, the price of making phone calls and sending e-mails would fall inexorably to zero. The investment thesis: Go long the New Economy start-ups like Global Crossing and short the incumbent Baby Bells. After all, Verizon, BellSouth, and their sad siblings were under assault from all directions. Portable wireless phones were going to displace land lines. Juggernauts like Worldcom/MCI would eat the Baby Bells' lunch in long-distance. Cable companies would use their fat pipes to deliver high-speed voice and data to the home. And these legacy companies, with their large bureaucracies and unionized workforces, wouldn't be able to respond.

Gilder's promise of infinite bandwidth was more like infinite jest. Companies like PSINet, Global Crossing, and 360 Networks piled on debt to build out telecom infrastructure and lay millions of miles of fiber-optic cable. But in a cycle reminiscent of the boom and busts that surrounded the telegraph and railroad, we got a glut of cable and vicious price competition. By late 2001, just 5 percent of the U.S. fiber-optic capacity was in use. Bankruptcy and consolidation quickly followed.

While the Baby Bells have suffered, as this five-year chart of the stocks of Verizon, SBC, BellSouth, and Qwest shows, they survived the meltdown. Consumers and businesses continued to pay their phone bills, and the companies (Qwest excepted) continued to pay their dividends. And they've been leading the consolidation. So far this year, as Forbes notes, SBC has agreed to buy AT&T, and Verizon bought MCI. And all the Baby Bells are furiously marketing DSL high-speed Internet connections. Collectively, the four companies are worth close to $190 billion.

But just as it was too soon to declare the Baby Bells dead in the 1990s, it may be too soon to declare them the victors in this decade. The price of making phone calls or accessing the Internet may not be going to zero. But a slew of developments in recent weeks suggests that it will be getting closer to zero than the erstwhile Baby Bells would like. And if current trends escalate, it won't be too long before kids regard telephone jacks the way us thirtysomethings used to look at the giant console radios in our grandparents' basements.

The one telecom sector Baby Bells dominate is the land-line business—the phone in your home. But despite spotty service and dead zones, cell phones may slowly be displacing land lines. Today's twentysomethings have come of age talking on portable wireless handsets. Why bother with the expense and hassle of a Verizon installation if you're going to move in a year? The Wall Street Journal yesterday noted that a Manhattan landlord who owns a few dozen buildings didn't even bother to install standard phone jacks when he renovated many of his apartments.

For a growing number of people, the personal computer is becoming the telephone. Until a few weeks ago, 3-year-old Skype was another one of those quirky Scandinavian tech stories and a great example of a viral marketing. Some 54 million people had downloaded the software that allows users to speak to one another free of charge via the Internet. But in September, when eBay, another valuable business built on the wreckage of the 1990s fiber-optic infrastructure boom, decided to cough up $2.6 billion in cash and stock for Skype, the company became a serious player. If just a fraction of eBay buyers and sellers start using Skype instead of their local phone company, it would be a huge blow to the Baby Bells.

Last month, Vonage, the venture-capital-fueled Voice Over Internet Protocol company that, like Skype, is turning fiber-optics into a cheap telephone network, announced it had added its millionth line. That's rapid growth, considering it had just 400,000 subscribers in January. And there's likely more to come. In August, the Daily Deal and others reported that Vonage was preparing an initial public offering of between $400 million and $600 million. Oh, and big cable companies like Time Warner and Cablevision have made slower (but still notable) headway at signing up customers for VoIP telephone service.

Taken together, the numbers of VoIP phone customers aren't huge. But this is a zero-sum game. Every customer added by Time Warner, Skype, or Vonage is one lost by Verizon or SBC. And although none of these services is close to free—even with Skype, you have to pay for services that allow you to make calls out of the network—these services don't have to be free to hurt the Baby Bells badly. The start-ups can undercut them on price because they don't have the same infrastructure costs—pensions and buildings, wires and switching stations.

The Baby Bells have tried to combat potential shrinkage of the land-line business by diversifying into wireless, DSL, and Internet service. But these areas are problematic, too. Cable modems are significantly more popular than DSL service. And the emerging area of wireless Internet access isn't shaping up as a growth area for the Baby Bells either. Building citywide wi-fi networks is a capital-intensive business, and the returns are uncertain. So, the Baby Bells haven't exactly been rushing to build wi-fi networks on spec. Which means they've left a vacuum for others. And here again, the new entrants are driving the price down. Earlier this week, Philadelphia hired Earthlink to build its wi-fi network, which should be completed late next year. The service won't be free: Poor people will pay $10 per month and others will pay $20 per month. And the news flow just keeps getting worse. Last week, it was reported that Google is interested in building a free wi-fi network that would cover all of San Francisco. With a cash hoard of $7.1 billion (and rising), Google has the ability to build free wi-fi networks wherever it wishes.

The rampant innovation and investment in cheap and potentially free voice and data services have left the Baby Bells on the defensive. They're left lobbying state legislatures to forbid the construction of municipal wi-fi networks, as SBC did in Texas (the effort failed), and pushing yesterday's technologies at ever-lower prices.

When eBay announced its acquisition of Skype, many analysts wondered how it could be that a company with 2004 revenues of only $7 million could be worth $2.6 billion. More analysts should wonder how Verizon can be worth $86 billion.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127617/

 

surfergirl
Ovary-Acting
Two new Sex and the City ripoffs prove that estrogen is not enough.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005, at 11:56 AM PT

O Sex and the City, what hast thou wrought? Ever since the HBO series went off the air last year, network programmers have clung blindly to the hope that any program featuring four neurotic, man-hungry women, preferably set in the 212 area code, will have viewers salivating like Pavlov's dogs. Even offscreen, the show's legacy lives on: I honestly believe that the success of Sex and the City statistically increased the number of unbearable women in New York (and perhaps elsewhere as well). Its sympathetic portrait of a quartet of entitled hotties with expensive wardrobes and significant real-estate footprints has enabled a whole generation to overspend on shoes, spill overpriced cocktails on innocent bystanders at bars, and yammer on their sparkly cell phones in the middle of the sidewalk. Despite the predictable plotlines and the painful puns in Carrie's voiceover, there was still something irresistible about the life-loving heroines of Sex and the City. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of that show's army of fictional and real-life fembot clones.

Two new series, ABC's Hot Properties and the WB's Related, stick closely to the S&TC formula, placing four attractive females in a hothouse Manhattan environment and waiting for the laughs to roll in. Both shows even boast some parentage with Sex and the City: Related is co-created by Liz Tucillo, a former S&TC writer, and Hot Properties features Evan Handler (who played Charlotte's devoted husband, the hairless Harry) in a supporting role. But as it turns out, four sets of ovaries pumping out estrogen are not an automatic recipe for TV magic.

Related, a one-hour drama that premiered last Wednesday at 9 p.m. on the WB, follows the travails of the four Sorelli sisters. The eldest, Ginnie (Jennifer Esposito), is a successful lawyer who's just learned she's pregnant but can't find a way to tell her Peter Pan husband Bob (Callum Blue). Ann (Kiele Sanchez), a counselor who specializes in treating transvestites, is having trouble with her distant restaurateur boyfriend Danny (Dan Futterman). Marjee (Lizzy Caplan) is a frazzled party planner who's just received an eviction notice. And the youngest, 19-year-old college student Rose (Laura Breckenridge), has just switched majors from pre-med to experimental theater.

Related has some strengths, particularly the understated performance of Kiele Sanchez, who was called in as an 11^th-hour replacement for Laura San Giacomo when an early screening of the pilot bombed. (What was wrong with San Giacomo's performance, I wonder? Her down-to-earth sarcasm was the only thing that made Just Shoot Me watchable.) But this show's downfall is that it hews too religiously to its own sororal typology. Ginnie is the bossy type-A control freak, organizing "phone chains" to alert the sisters to every new family development. Ann is the buttoned-down, analytical one. Marjee is the supposedly lovable drama-queen kook (who, like many such people in real life, comes off instead as a pathological narcissist). And Rose is the unadventurous nice girl, who must be reminded of this trait in every conversation (ensuring, of course, that she will engage in all sorts of tongue-piercing, hair-dyeing mischief by episode's end.) Related airs in the same time slot as Lost, on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET—given that juggernaut show's second-season ratings so far, the WB might as well have saved its money by airing a color-bar test pattern during that time.

As for Hot Properties, it's been handed the none-too-enviable slot between Hope & Faith and 20/20, on Friday nights at 9:30 p.m. ET. Given the shut-in demographic likely to be tuned in at this hour, this sitcom's rampant raunchiness seems oddly out of place (though it could become a minor cult hit among the Golden Girls/Designing Women fan base, where geriatric overlaps with gay camp). Set in an all-female real-estate office in—say it with me—Manhattan, Hot Properties also lays out a strictly delineated foursome of types. Ava (Gail O'Grady) is the Kim Cattrall character, a lusty blonde in her 40s married to a much younger man. Chloe (Nicole Sullivan) is the classic man-hunting sad sack, toting around a copy of He's Just Not That Into You as she laments her latest unenviable date. Lola (Sofia Vergara) is a spicy Latina with a huge rack who's constantly affirming her spicy Latina-tude with lines like, "You had me at hola." And cute, preppy Emerson (Christina Moore) is a virgin who joins the agency as an office assistant after she learns that her fiance—ostensibly also a virgin—has in fact two-timed her with not one but two of the sexy realtors.

Hot enough for you? Well, not really. Despite an abundance of painfully suggestive one-liners (the voluptuous Lola assures one client that she knows a lot about carpentry, having spent her life "surrounded by men with wood"), Hot Properties feels tepid and static. What's worse for a show designed to appeal to female audiences, it feels misogynistic. The insights of how-to dating guides like He's Just Not That Into You or The Rules could have been treated as fodder for a wicked parody of contemporary gender politics; instead, they're respected as holy writ. When women are told for the katrillionth time that all we want is a husband, a baby, and the perfect pair of shoes, it starts to sound less like gal talk and more like marching orders. Sex and the City could be glitzy and occasionally inane, but at least it aspired to be a portrait of the pleasures of female friendship, not just a checklist of gags about biological clocks, boob jobs, and the quest for a diamond engagement ring.

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127639/

sports nut
Days of Braves and Padres
Tough times for fans of the National League.
By Neal Pollack
Posted Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005, at 11:47 AM PT

I'm an old-fashioned National League purist. I stand firmly against the designated hitter and believe that NL games are more sophisticated and interesting. Even during the prime juice years of McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds, there was still a pitcher hitting ninth; baseball isn't baseball without the double switch. I've never even lived in an American League city except for Chicago, but I rented on the North Side and rode my bike to Wrigley on game day. Why, then, do I find myself captivated by the American League playoffs year after year while the National League has me flipping to Comedy Central?

As I write this, six playoff games are in the books. In the AL, the Yankees and Angels played two taut games full of good pitching and clutch hitting. The White Sox unloaded massively and melodramatically on Boston in the first game then rallied in a Game 2 thriller. The National League has had two uninspiring slogs. Reggie Sanders put the severely overmatched Padres away with a fifth-inning grand slam in St. Louis. San Diego's 11^th-hour "comeback," basically a barrage of too-little, too-late singles, looked like something out of split-squad spring training. The annual Houston-Atlanta snore pretended to be close until the seventh, when the Braves trotted out their minor-league bullpen and the Astros hunted and pecked their way to a foregone conclusion. The American League message: October baseball is a thrilling spectacle. The National League? Um, do you remember the Big Red Machine?

It's not fair to generalize from six games, but it is fair to generalize from 10 years. The balance of power, or at least the balance of intrigue, has been this way since Division Series play started in 1995. That year's Mariners-Yankees series was one of the best of all time, with New York losing at the wire to a historically inferior team. In the AL's other matchup, the long-suffering Indians swept Boston. The National League featured a four-game victory by the already-perennial Braves over the Rockies, and a three-game Reds sweep over an uninspired, bickering Dodgers team. I'll be hard-pressed to forget Griffey's jubilant slide into home to beat the Yanks. I remembered the not-so-dramatic pitcher's duel between Greg Maddux and Kevin Ritz because I looked it up.

The NL has had some good individual series. In 2003, the Marlins tagged out a runner at home to beat the Giants in four games then kneecapped the Cubs in a legendary seven-game, curse-extending duel. But there's where the problem lies. It was the Marlins doing the vanquishing.

The National League predates the American League, the "junior circuit," by 25 years. But the august NL seems to have misplaced its historical identity. In the AL, every team gets caught up in the sweep of dueling empires. Cleveland and New York, Oakland and Boston: Every recent combination except for Baltimore and Seattle has felt like operatic drama. Sure, the Red Sox-Yankees thing is getting old. But there's always the fun of rooting against either or both of them.

The NL doesn't have teams anyone loves to hate. It's the disposable Braves and any three other teams out of a hat except the Pirates and Brewers. The league's rivalries (Dodgers and Giants, Cardinals and Cubs) have withered because traditional foils never manage to make the playoffs in the same year. Even the Mets-Braves contretemps, which burned brightly in the glow of John Rocker's cornpone racism at the end of the last century, have faded to embers. I'd take the Cubs against the Brewers at this point. But those are long odds.

Since 1995, three NL franchises have won World Series. In the first year of the three-division era, a wormhole opened and spat the trophy toward Atlanta. Since then, it's been Florida, Arizona, and Florida again. Both Marlins were worthy champions, and so were the Diamondbacks. But the way in which they won, by flinging money out of deep pockets, struck me as very American League. The most unexpected recent AL title winner, the 2002 Angels, actually had an air of respectability. They weren't money-flingers and were loaded with cred because they mercifully ended the Yankees' run of four straight World Series appearances.

The quality of National League playoff games is so inconsistent because the stakes feel lower. A Cardinals-Padres game has a high bar to scale to achieve historical importance. A 20-inning duel punctuated by a game-winning home run by the backup catcher might fit the bill. Otherwise, that series, which features the worst team ever to qualify for a big-league playoff series, sends a chill down no one's spine but Jerry Coleman's. Astros-Braves seems like a better matchup. But any playoff game involving Atlanta must be taken with a grain of bullpen dirt.

The early stages of this year's NL playoffs can be summed up thusly: In the bottom of the ninth of Wednesday's Braves-Astros game, Atlanta scored a run and had men on second and third when the final out was recorded. Rick Sutcliffe, an analyst who could have made Game 1 of the 1988 World Series sound boring, droned on about how the Braves had won a small victory because the Astros' closer had to start warming up in the bullpen. Atlanta's "comeback" brought them to within 10-5. That is National League playoff baseball.

Neal Pollack's memoir, Alternadad, will be published in the fall of 2006. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127628/

dvd extras
The Guilty Pleasure
An intellectual justification for your 17^th viewing of Cruel Intentions.
By Matt Feeney
Posted Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005, at 10:22 AM PT

Now that "the big screen" refers to a $5,000 television hanging in the family room, there's something elegiac about the multiplex experience, a sense of doom pervading the empty rows. When I want to escape from this moribund atmosphere and still have a popcorn-munching good time, I turn to a roster of DVDs that I call—with a flagrant lack of originality—my Guilty Pleasures. They are studio movies that, though patently contrived, have stood the test of time (i.e., five or six years). Because these pleasures are guilty, I've gone to tiresome lengths not just to justify them to myself, but to define them as well.

First, a guilty pleasure should induce guilt. It must be neither overtly satirical nor so bad that it can be enjoyed ironically. Satire is its own alibi for a movie's trashy subject matter, and irony, on the other hand, is the viewer's. So, neither Heathers (satire) nor Showgirls (so bad it's good) qualifies as a guilty pleasure. Guilty pleasures tend to operate on the low end of high concept. They usually feature at least one narrative gimmick or ludicrous plot twist, and, at some point, they ditch narrative coherence for the sake of titillation.

Secondly, a guilty pleasure must be a pleasure. I enjoy them as much as I enjoy my favorite "serious" films. And because of their hyper-vivid production values, I can get pleasure from guilty pleasures in circumstances—fatigue, distraction, inebriation—where I can't really give Renoir or Buñuel chin-in-hand attention. This essay, in other words, is a qualified defense of studio filmmaking. Lush sets, beautiful people, exotic locations expensively shot … studio films offer the heightened reality that people have always sought in their trips to the movie house. Or so I tell myself.

When I saw first Double Jeopardy, I figured Ashley Judd for a future Hollywood colossus. With her girlish radiance, virtuosic sobbing, feral grace, and that fantastic purr-snarl of a voice, she seemed like an impossible hybrid of Julia Roberts, Vanessa Redgrave, Kathleen Turner, and Vin Diesel. The movie did huge business, and I'm surprised we haven't seen more of its subgenre: the gorgeous, ass-kicking soccer-mom flick. If your intelligence is overly sensitive, however, Double Jeopardy's plot will insult it. Indeed, the movie rests on a premise so moronic that your mind actively rejects it. Judd plays Libby Parsons, who goes to prison for murdering her dashing husband, Nick, only to find out once she's inside that he staged his own death and framed her for his murder. But one of her prison pals is a tough ex-lawyer who tells her that, thanks to the Fifth Amendment's double jeopardy clause, she can't be tried a second time for the same crime. When she gets out, she can just kill him for real this time, "and nobody can do a thing about it." Now, the problems with this legal advice are … oh, never mind. Once Libby starts her prison fitness regimen, which consists of leg presses and angry jogging in the rain, you more or less forget about the whys. She and the movie have acquired a motive force.

Unlike Double Jeopardy, the plot of Devil's Advocate is at first merely audacious. It becomes ludicrous only at the very end. Young Florida lawyer Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) is recruited by a New York firm whose senior partner, John Milton (Al Pacino), may or may not be the devil. When Kevin gets to the big city, things get weird and sexy. Kevin's devout Baptist mother warns that the city itself is evil, a portal of sorts to the underworld, and director Taylor Hackford does his best to make this warning resonate. He turns the city's beauty against it with a series of nightmare flourishes—nightfall over Central Park in spooky time-lapse, the old financial district in jagged aerial sweeps, the glass canyon of Sixth Avenue in broad daylight, emptied of everything but windblown litter. The main attraction is Al Pacino as Milton/Lucifer. The movie waits awhile before confirming that Pacino's Milton is in fact Satan, but come on. With that demonic hairline and the lizard thing he does with his tongue, who else could he be? Pacino had been playing the same basic character with varying degrees of dissonance and unintentional comedy since Scent of a Woman. Devil's Advocate is its apotheosis, where Pacino finally becomes who he is. It's heaven to watch.

One of the advantages of trashy genre movies is that they are free to re-create the more outsized histrionics of traditional theater—the conventional plotting, the overt choreography in staging, the explicit portrayal of villainy and innocence—in a way that serious film usually avoids. In Cruel Intentions, a prep-school version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Roger Kumble revels in this sort of artifice. The centerpiece of the story is the cynical jousting between the cad Valmont (Ryan Philippe) and his scheming stepsister Katherine (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who bets him that he can't bed a celebrity virgin (Reese Witherspoon). Kumble stages these encounters as acerbic little chamber dramas, each with a dancerly use of exquisite Upper East Side spaces. Indeed, of all these movies, Cruel Intentions is the closest to being not so much a guilty pleasure as a plain old excellent film, except that it cranks up the raunch with gratuitous girl-kissing and rampant teenage sex. One scene culminates with Gellar delivering what may be the filthiest come-on in the history of teen movies. Also, its "tragic" ending is a bit of a clunker.

If Cruel Intentions is the most pleasurable of my guilty pleasures, Wild Things is the guiltiest. There's a long tracking shot at the beginning of Wild Things that helps illustrate its appeal. It's a sly, atmospheric shot that follows school counselor Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) as he enters a high-school auditorium buzzing with excited chatter. As he reaches the stage the camera veers away from him and turns back to light upon popular senior Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards) sitting imperiously in the front row. It's hard to express the effect of this shot without getting all technical, so I'll put it this way: Denise Richards is the hottest woman I've ever seen in a movie. This alone does not make a good movie, or even a guilty pleasure, but it's a bracing start.

It sounds strange (or maybe just self-justifying) to say, but the outré titillation of Wild Things is organic to its style—which combines soapy suspense and droll comedy without ever drifting into camp. The suspense comes from a wildly elaborate plot about an infinite regress of scams (first a scam, and then some scammers scamming other scammers, and so on). The comedy comes from a brief but indelible appearance by Bill Murray. The soapiness comes from the Florida setting lovingly conjured by director John McNaughton—the fictional city of Blue Bay (love that name) that is half wealthy oceanfront enclave, half swamp town. One thing these guilty pleasures share is a saturated sense of place, and Wild Things, for its part, is delightfully swampy.

What is most memorable about these films, the reason I can dip into them time and again, is not so much their sex or scandal as their settings. And this, alas, represents a persistent advantage of large cynical studio films over small serious independent films. Small films can convey setting accurately and even evocatively. But the sense of place in these big movies is not just accurate or evocative. It's erotic. That still makes me feel a little guilty.

Matt Feeney is a freelance writer in Oakland, Calif. He can be reached at mattfeen@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127619/

 

heavy petting
Do Dogs Think?
Owners assume their pet's brain works like their own. That's a big mistake.
By Jon Katz
Posted Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005, at 7:48 AM PT

Blue, Heather's normally affectionate and obedient Rottweiler, began tearing up the house shortly after Heather went back to work as an accountant after several years at home. The contents of the trash cans were strewn all over the house. A favorite comforter was destroyed. Then Blue began peeing all over Heather's expensive new living room carpet and systematically ripped through cables and electrical wires.

"I know exactly what's going on," Heather told her vet when she called seeking help. "Blue is angry with me for leaving her alone. She's punishing me. She always looks guilty when I come home, so she knows she's been bad. She knows she shouldn't be doing those things."

Heather's assessment was typical of many dog owners' diagnoses of behavioral problems. And her vet agreed, suggesting "separation anxiety" and prescribing anti-anxiety medication for Blue. Heather also hired a trainer, who confirmed the diagnosis.

Blue, they concluded, was resentful at her owner's absence and was misbehaving to regain the attention that she'd once monopolized. After all, Blue didn't transgress like this when Heather went out shopping or took in a movie with friends. It must be punitive. Heather's mother even recalled Heather, as a child, throwing tantrums when she went off to work. Heather and Blue had become so close, she joked, that they were acting alike.

So Heather shut Blue in the kitchen with a toddler gate, removing countertop food and garbage. Things calmed down. Heather began to relax and gave Blue the run of the house again.

Heather, a friend of a friend, had called me for counsel as well. But since she, her vet, her trainer, and her mother had all reached the same conclusion, and since the rampaging had stopped, I didn't give the situation much thought.

A month later, though, Heather was back on the phone: Blue had relapsed. She yowled piteously when confined to the kitchen or basement. Worse, she was showing signs of aggression with people and other dogs and refusing to obey even simple commands that were once routine. On one late-night walk, Blue attacked a terrier walking nearby, opening wounds that needed stitches.

Blue's problems had grown so serious that kennels wouldn't board the dog and the vet wouldn't examine her without a muzzle. Heather was thinking of finding her another home, turning her over to a rescue group, possibly even euthanizing her.

"She's out of control," Heather complained, exhausted, angry, and frightened. She sounded betrayed—a dog she'd loved and cared for was turning on her because she went to work. "I caused this by leaving her," Heather confessed, guiltily. But was she supposed to quit her job to stay home with her dog?

This time, Heather got my full attention. I took notes, asked questions, then called a canine behaviorist at Cornell and explained the problem in as much detail as I could.

"Everybody says the dog was reacting to her going back to work," I suggested.

"Everybody is probably wrong," was his blunt comeback. "It's 'theory of mind.' This is what often happens when humans assume that dogs think the way we do."

His analysis: "Being angry at the human and behaving punitively—that's not a thought sequence even remotely possible, given a dog's brain. The likely scenario is that the dog is simply frightened." When Heather was home, she was there to explain and enforce the rules. With her gone, the dog literally didn't know how to behave. The dog should have been acclimated to a crate or room and confined more, not less, until she got used to her new independence.

Lots of dogs get nervous when they don't know what's expected of them, and when they get anxious, they can also grow restless. Blue hadn't had to occupy time alone before. Dogs can get unnerved by this. They bark, chew, scratch, destroy. Getting yelled at and punished later doesn't help: The dog probably knows it's doing something wrong, but it has no idea what. Since there's nobody around to correct behaviors when the dog is alone, how could the dog know which behavior is the problem? Which action was wrong?

He made sense to me. Dogs are not aware of time, even as a concept, so Blue couldn't know whether she was being left for five minutes or five hours, or how that compared to being left for a movie two weeks earlier. Since she had no conscious notion that Heather's work life had changed, how could she get angry, let alone plot vengeance? The dog was alone more and had more time to fill. The damage was increasing, most likely, because Blue had more time to get into mischief and more opportunities to react to stimulus without correction—not because she was responding to different emotions.

I was familiar with the "theory of mind" notion the behaviorist was referring to. Psychologist David Premack of the University of Pennsylvania talks about it; it's also discussed in Stanley Coren's How Dogs Think.

The phrase refers to a belief each of us has about the way others think. Simply, it says that since we are aware and self-conscious, we think others—humans and animals—are, too. There is, of course, enormous difference of opinion about whether this is true.

When I used to leave my border collie Orson alone in the house, uncrated, he learned to open the refrigerator with his nose, remove certain food items, open the plastic container, and consume its contents. Then he'd squirrel away the empty packages. Everyone I told this story made the same assumptions: Orson was a wily devil taunting me for leaving him alone. We actually installed a child lock on the refrigerator door. But what changed his behavior was that I began to crate him when I went out. He has not raided the fridge since. Yet he could easily sneak in and do that while he's uncrated and I'm occupied outdoors or elsewhere in the house. Is he no longer wily? Or is he simply less anxious?

There's no convincing evidence I'm aware of, from any reputable behaviorist or psychologist, that suggests dogs can replicate human thought processes: use language, think in narrative and sequential terms, understand human minds, or share humans' range of emotions.

Yet that remains a powerful, pervasive view of dogs, the reason Heather's vet, trainer, and mother all agreed on Blue's motivations. It's almost impossible not to lapse into theory-of-mind reasoning when it comes to our dogs. After all, most of us have no other way in which to grasp another creature's behavior. How can one even begin to imagine what's going on inside a dog's head?

Most of the time, I don't know why my dogs do what they do. They seem aware that I have a way of doing things. They've learned that we don't walk in the street, that I don't distribute food from my plate, that there will be a bone or treat after dinner. But they are creatures of habit and instinct, especially when it comes to food, work, and attention. I often think of them as stuff-pots wedded to ritual, resistant and nervous about change.

I don't believe that dogs act out of spite or that they can plot retribution, though countless dog owners swear otherwise. To punish or deceive requires the perpetrator to understand that his victim or object has a particular point of view and to consciously work to manipulate or thwart it. That requires mental processes dogs don't have.

The more I've moved away from interpreting my dogs' behavior as nearly human, the easier it is to train them, and the less guilt and anxiety I feel.

To attribute complex thoughts and plots to their actions unravels the training process. Training and living with a dog requires a different theory: that these are primal, predatory animals driven by instinct. Rather than seeking animal clues to her dog's behavior, Heather imagined herself as the dog. She reasoned that if she, Heather, were suddenly left alone for long periods, abandoned by someone she loved and used to spend a lot of time with, she would feel angry and hurt and might try to get even, not only to punish her companion but to try to persuade him or her to return.

That's attributing a lot of intellectual activity to an animal that can recognize a few dozen words but has none of its own, that reads human emotions but doesn't experience the same ones. Since the Cornell behavorist made sense to me, I conveyed his analysis: The dog didn't know how to behave with Heather gone. Crating Blue would reduce her anxiety and give her less chance to act up. I persuaded Heather—by now distraught—to buy a large crate. For weeks, she fed the dog in the crate, leaving the door open. Between meals, she left treats and bones inside.

The first time Heather closed the crate door, Blue threw herself against the metal, whining and howling. The same thing happened the second, third, fifth, and dozenth times. But Heather, cautioned that training and retraining often takes weeks and months, persisted. Sometimes she left the treat-filled crate open; other times she closed it.

After several weeks, Blue began to go into the crate willingly and remained there quietly for short, then lengthening periods. Heather walked Blue two or three times daily; when she was gone for more than three or four hours, she hired a dog walker to take her out an additional time and throw a ball. But whenever Heather left the house, she put Blue in the crate and left a nearby radio tuned to a talk network.

This time, Heather got it right, treating Blue as a dog, not a rebellious teenager. Blue improved dramatically, and the improvement continues. Her aggression diminished, then seemed to vanish, although Heather no longer lets her near dogs or children unleashed. It seemed the dog had comprehensible rules to follow, and felt safer.

Blue was liberated from the confusion, anxiety, and responsibility of figuring out what to do with her unsupervised and sudden freedom. Once again there was little tension between the two of them. Heather's house wasn't getting chewed up, and homecomings weren't tense and angry experiences. Yet here was a case, I thought, where seeing canine behavior in human terms nearly cost an animal its life.

Sometimes it does. Harry, a social worker in Los Angeles, wrote me that he had a great rescue dog named Rocket and was happy enough with the experience to adopt a second. Rocket attacked the new dog while Harry was feeding them, then bit a neighborhood kid. "He never forgave me for getting the new dog," Harry explained. "He was so angry with me. I couldn't trust him not to take out his rage on others, so I had him put to sleep."

We will never know, of course, what Rocket could or could not forgive. Rocket probably didn't attack the new dog out of anger at Harry. He was more likely protecting his food or pack position. The creature in the household with the most to lose from a new arrival, he probably simply fought for what he had. Then, once aroused, he was more dangerous. As trainers know, dogs under pressure have two options: fight or flight. Rocket decided to fight and paid for it with his life. Had his owner known more about dogs' true nature, he might have introduced the new dog more gradually, or not at all. And there might be one less bitten child. But this is all a guess. We will never know.

When I face such training problems—and I do, we all do—I try to adopt a Sherlock Holmesian strategy, using logic and determination. We have all sorts of tools at our disposal that dogs don't have. We control every aspect of their lives, from food to shelter to play, so we ought to be able to figure out what's driving the dog and come up with an individually tailored approach that works—and if it doesn't, come up with another one.

Why will Clementine come instantly if she's looking at me, but not if she's sniffing deer droppings? Is it because she's being stubborn or, as many people tell me, going through "adolescence"? Or because, when following her keen predatory instincts, she simply doesn't hear me? Should my response be to tug at her leash or yell? Maybe I should be sure we've established eye contact before I give her a command, or better yet, offer a liver treat as an alternative to whatever's distracting her. But how do I establish eye contact when her nose is buried? Can I cluck or bark? Use a whistle or hoot like an owl?

I've found that coughing, of all things, fascinates her, catches her attention, and makes her head swivel, after which she responds. If you walk with us, you will hear me clearing my throat repeatedly. What can I say? It works. She looks at me, comes to me, gets rewarded.

The reality is, we don't know that much about what dogs think, because they can't tell us. Behaviorists tend to believe that dogs "think" in their own way—in sensory images involving their finely honed instincts. They're not capable of deviousness or spite. They love routine: Nothing seems to make them more comfortable than doing the same thing at the same time in the familiar way, day after day: We snack here, we poop there, we play over here. I am astonished at how little it takes to please them, how simple their lives can be if we don't complicate them.

Jon Katz is the author of The Dogs of Bedlam Farm: An adventure with three dogs, sixteen sheep, two donkeys and me. He can be e-mailed at jdkat3@aol.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127419/

 

foreigners
No U.S. Visa for You! But How About a Nice Trip to Iraq?
Why America loves Poland's soldiers but not her tourists.
By Scott MacMillan
Posted Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005, at 3:46 AM PT

You have to hand it to the Poles: There is something positively endearing about their loyalty to America. The war in Iraq is unpopular there, but Poland has nonetheless given a sweeping majority to a center-right government that will reconsider the departing coalition's decision to pull Polish troops out of Iraq.

But don't let anybody tell you the Polish election was a ringing endorsement of President Bush's Iraq policy, because there's a catch: If it acts on one of its campaign pledges, the new government is likely to ask for a "new contract" with America in exchange for its help. Poland, it appears, is disappointed with the lack of any perceivable payoff for its Iraq deployment. Rewards might have included contracts for Polish companies in Iraqi reconstruction projects and increased U.S. investment in Poland, but for the average Pole, it seems there is one American concession that matters more than any other: visa-free travel to the United States.

Unlike most citizens of the European Union, Poles can't just hop on a plane and fly to New York for a few days. Tourists need to apply for a visa, which generally entails sitting down for an interview with a U.S. consular officer. This officer will reject the application if she or he suspects the applicant might secretly harbor a desire to "overstay" and take an American job. (The decision often appears quite arbitrary.) The same rules apply for nearly all of post-communist Europe (minus Slovenia), but Poland is notable mainly due to the size of its population (38 million) and its diaspora: Nine million people identify themselves as Polish-Americans, and according to the last census, over 667,000 U.S. residents speak Polish at home as their first language.

Not being able to see the Grand Canyon or visit relatives in Chicago without a bureaucratic hassle may sound a bit petty to American ears, but it's downright denigrating for Poles and others in the former Soviet Bloc who view themselves as deserving of at least the same treatment as Western Europeans. To use a mawkish metaphor offered to the Los Angeles Times by one Polish legislator, Poland is the faithful, forbearing wife, and America is the husband that won't (or can't) stop sleeping around. When outgoing President Aleksander Kwasniewski visited Bush in January 2004, their joint press conference ended with Kwasniewski's emphatic plea to Bush for a "no-visa" policy for Poland. A spokesman for Civic Platform, the junior partner in Warsaw's new coalition government, said a relaxation of visa rules will be among the concessions demanded of America by the new government. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation says U.S. visa policy fosters resentment of America in Poland.

Poland's shift to the right is the result of a dual election—one for parliament, already complete, and another, on Oct. 9, for president. A candidate from one of the two winning parties in the parliamentary race is almost certain to win the presidential vote as well. Both parties have campaigned on a theme of house-cleaning: a bid to purge the state of crooked politicians who have mismanaged the economy. Foreign policy has played a minor role, overshadowed by the country's 18 percent unemployment rate and the stench of corruption that has tainted the outgoing government. Differences over Iraq notwithstanding, few Poles would question the country's alliance with the United States.

The winners, Law and Justice and Civic Platform, differ mainly over economic policy: Law and Justice, which came out on top with 27 percent, favors a traditionally European social-welfare state, while Civic Platform advocates deregulation and a freer market. What unites them is fierce anti-communism—both sprang from the dissident Solidarity movement of the 1980s, while the discredited ruling party rose from the Soviet-backed regime of the old Polish Worker's Party—and a vow to bring some integrity back into Poland's scandal-plagued politics. Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski (not to be confused with his identical twin brother Lech Kaczynski, who is running in the presidential election) promises a "moral revolution"; in short, the coalition won by pledging to be honest.

It is this spirit of honesty—and with it, assertiveness—that Warsaw is likely to bring to future dealings with Washington, including any renegotiation of the Iraq "contract." To follow the marriage metaphor, this is one scorned lover that's about to set a few things straight with her wayward mate. And one thing that's bound to get brought up is that humiliating visa requirement.

If the solution sounds a bit too easy—get rid of the red tape for Poles visiting America, and the Poles will love us again, this time with renewed ardor—that's because it is. Of the 100,000 or so Poles who apply for American tourist visas each year, roughly 30 percent are rejected because consular officers suspect they're going to try to work in the States, adding to the estimated 70,000 already working in the country on expired visas. The rejection threshold to qualify for the U.S. Visa Waiver Program (which allows citizens of selected countries, including most of Western Europe, to visit America visa-free) is 3 percent. So either U.S. immigration policy needs a complete overhaul—and let's save that argument for another night—or the Poles have a long way to go.

Steps short of eliminating the visa requirement entirely could probably help. Washington could announce a commitment-free timetable to introduce Poland (and other post-communist states) to the Visa Waiver Program, or at least soften the policy—if not immediately, then within, say, five years. The Heritage Foundation recommends something akin to this approach.

Since Poland's military help in Iraq is largely symbolic (there are 1,500 troops there now), Washington may take a hard line on the visa question, fearing, like the French, an influx of Polish plumbers. But Washington ignores the mood of Poland, and the visa issue in particular, at its peril. Along with Britain, Poland is America's most loyal ally in Europe; the Polish people are famously—almost notoriously—pro-American. Some say Poles actually sweat McDonald's hamburger juice, and it is rumored that if you poke one, he will bleed special sauce. That is why the Poles are integral to preserving American influence in the enlarged European Union. The old quip about a "new Europe" more allied with U.S. interests—already misleading in so many ways—would mean little were it not for Poland, by far the largest and most pro-American of the new EU states. The rhetoric of Poland's next government signals that Warsaw's loyalty cannot be taken for granted. In the long term, Washington is in a pickle if it starts to lose Poland.

Scott MacMillan is a freelance journalist who lived in the Czech Republic for nine years covering business and politics in post-Communist Europe.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127576/

 

politics
Gods vs. Geeks
GOP evangelicals fight intellectuals over Harriet Miers.
By John Dickerson
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005, at 4:49 PM PT

The debate within the Republican Party over Harriet Miers has quickly devolved into a simple question: Is the nominee qualified because of her religious faith, or unqualified by her lack of intellectual heft? On the one side, James Dobson, Miers' fellow parishioners at Valley View Christian Church, and President Bush speak for her heart. On the other, George Will and William Kristol and others who swooned for John Roberts decry her unimpressive legal mind.

In this battle, the White House has clearly sided with the churchgoing masses against the Republican Party's own whiny Beltway intellectuals. The Bushies have always mistrusted their own bow-tied secularists, but the rift has never before been so public. "This is classic elitism," says a senior administration official of the GOP opposition to the Miers nomination. "We often blame the left for it, but we have it in our own ranks. Just because she wasn't on a shortlist of conservatives who prepared their whole life for this moment doesn't make her any less conservative … and just because she hasn't penned op-eds for the Wall Street Journal doesn't mean she hasn't formed a judicial philosophy."

Left-wing bloggers may see the Bush administration and its allies as a uniform mass, but like all successful political teams, it's actually a coalition. At the heart of the coalition is an uncomfortable mix between, on the one hand, right-wing intellectuals, including the neoconservatives whose backing for the Iraq invasion has been so important, and, on the other, the evangelicals who turned out in such numbers to vote for a man who boasted that he was one of them. The Bible-thumbing armies may carry the elections, but they sometimes make the elites in the Republican Party as uncomfortable as they make Maureen Dowd and Michael Moore. In return, the mega-church attendees are mistrustful of the party's often secular, often not-Christian pundits and wizards.

For the Ivy League conservatives who edit magazines and read the New York Times, Miers' lack of judicial prowess makes her incapable of fending off the inevitable leftward pull of all of that marble. Bush evangelicals, on the other hand, believe that her faith will be a more powerful guard against the forces of secularism than any school-book learning. "If she is really centered on Christ, then that's even more important than not caring what Ivy League law schools think about her," says Marvin Olasky, editor of the Christian conservative World magazine. "It means she has a moral compass not tuned to Washington glory." One group wants a member of the judicial monastery, the other wants a woman who could live in one. Bush pledged to appoint a Scalia, say those that weigh her intellectual heft, and she's no Scalia. But those who find Scalia's belief in God more important than his belief in original intent don't see the difference.

We've seen a lot of Bush's neocon side during the war years, as he appropriated arguments from Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Kristol for democratizing the Middle East to provide ballast for his Iraq invasion. But the Miers pick is more reminiscent of the candidate who in 1999 was asked who his favorite philosopher was. "Christ," Bush famously replied, "because he changed my heart. ... When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the Savior, it changes your heart and changes your life."

The elites howled at the time. The evangelicals smiled. They understood. The president was trying to tap into that understanding yesterday in the Rose Garden, when he said he knows Miers' heart. The case Bush is making is that in fact, she is the anti-Souter. Before the confirmation hunt, George H.W. Bush wouldn't have known Souter had he been riding on the president's shoulders. But Bush knows Miers.

It's usually time to duck with Bush when he starts playing clairvoyant cardiologist. He said he knew Putin's heart, too, before Putin turned out to be more like Stalin than Jefferson. But he knows Miers not just because they've worked together for 10 years, but because she's walked the same walk. Bush became a committed evangelical Christian at around age 40. She was 34. In that faith, knowing her heart is code for: She's one of us. James Dobson didn't announce his support for Miers so quickly because he heard she was a whiz in the corporate boardroom.

Beyond the religious ties, there's nothing that will make Bush fight harder for his nominee than an attack by the intellectuals—even if they are from his own party. Those who put others down as second-rate minds with weak credentials get relegated to that class of snobs he first learned to hate at Yale, when he walked through their Vietnam protests in his leather bomber jacket. Those who lack skill in what Will called "constitutional reasoning" are already pressing the president's anti-intellectual buttons. Bush loves the idea, say aides, that Miers strikes a blow for real-world simplicity.

Wednesday morning, administration envoys Ed Gillespie, the former head of the RNC, and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society appeared before anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist's weekly off-the-record gathering of conservative leaders to discuss the Miers nomination. According to my sources, there was yelling. Sparks flew. Miers was not qualified; her pick was a capitulation to the left; Bush is not a true conservative. The White House listens to these outraged voices but considers them more a nuisance than genuine problem. Norquist would not talk about the meeting but did describe the sweaty feeling among disenchanted conservatives. "This is a hard time for the right," he says. "There's the frustration that comes from impotence, because there's nothing they can do. She's going to get confirmed. And they don't know what she'll do when she is. If you're the president, all you can say is 'trust me,' but 'trust me' me is borderline insulting."

The administration says that those with the loudest voices don't have a vote in the Senate, and they're right. That the conservative Eagle Forum is planning to shift and openly oppose Miers isn't a fatal blow, but it may make it easier for conservative lawmakers to defect. Today Sen. Lott crossed his arms and acted doubtful. Still, Miers is likely to be confirmed. But by taking one side so clearly in the internal debate in his party, Bush is making a bet that he can heal the fissure after a short-term win, and that the current fracas among Republicans will dissolve back into one between Republicans versus Democrats.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127492/

press box
Edward R. Movie
Good Night, and Good Luck and bad history.
By Jack Shafer
Updated Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005, at 4:29 PM PT

If Jesus Christ no longer satisfies your desire to worship a man as god, I suggest you buy a ticket for Good Night, and Good Luck, the new movie about legendary CBS News broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. Good Night, and Good Luck's Murrow burns cigarettes like altar incense. He speaks in a resonant, godly rumble. And he plods through the greatest story ever told about the hunting of communist hunter Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy like a man carrying all the world's sins.

Of course, Murrow was no god. Point of fact, he shouldn't be regarded as the patron saint of broadcast news his fans, among them Good Night, and Good Luck director George Clooney, make him out to be. But the passage of time, the self-serving testimonials from the broadcasters he recruited to CBS ("Murrow's Boys"), and the usual nostalgia for newsrooms choking on their own cigarette smoke have puffed the considerable accomplishments of a mortal and flawed newsman into modern miracles. Good Night, and Good Luck, a docudrama that pits Murrow against McCarthy, escalates the veneration to heavenly levels.

A terrific movie about the Murrow-McCarthy duel could be made, mind you, but Clooney and company ignore the material that might argue against their simple-minded thesis about Murrow, the era, and the press to produce an after-school special. It's a shame, too, because Good Night, and Good Luck's unbeatable production values and sharp performances constitute key ingredients of a great historical drama. Plus, Clooney is an able director, artfully meshing the original documentary film footage from Murrow's weekly CBS series, See It Now, with recreations of the studio end of the broadcasts.

But it all goes wrong with the naive screenplay, written by Clooney and his collaborator, fellow actor/producer Grant Heslov. Plowing through the Murrow and McCarthy literature after viewing the film, I was impressed at how deeply Clooney and Heslov researched the topic yet dismayed at how they cherry-picked material to compose their sermon.

The film covers the five-month period from late 1953 to early 1954 during which Murrow combated the McCarthy-inspired hysteria over communist subversives with a quartet of programs on his weekly CBS series See It Now. The Venona transcripts have shown definitively that American communists and Soviet sympathizers, such as Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, did gather information for Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet for all his thuggery and congressional hearing grandstanding, hounding a suspected red dentist who got an Army promotion or a Pentagon clerk suspected of Communist Party membership, McCarthy bagged not a single commie spy.

Good Night, and Good Luck never comes out and credits Murrow with single-handedly slaying McCarthy on March 9, 1954, with his famous See It Now program, "A Report on Joseph R. McCarthy." But if you want to form that impression, the moviemakers won't mind. David Strathairn plays Murrow as if he's Gary Cooper in High Noon, an unblinking stoic facing down and defeating evil with solitary courage.

In reality, McCarthy's takedown was much more complex. As the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson wrote in 1996, "McCarthy had been hanging himself quite efficiently in the several months before Murrow offered him more rope." Ferguson continues:

By the time the [March 9, 1954] show aired, a mutiny was underway on his own subcommittee to relieve McCarthy as chairman. Prominent Republicans had joined Democrats in publicly denouncing him, even, gingerly, his former comrade Vice President Richard Nixon. In the mainstream press, anti-McCarthy feeling was endemic. Among those routinely critical were Time magazine and Col. Robert McCormick's Chicago Tribune. If Col. McCormick and Henry Luce were denouncing a right-wing icon, you could feel pretty safe in firing away.

But don't take Ferguson's word for it. The McCarthy program "came very late in the day," said one of Murrow's brightest "boys," Eric Sevareid, in a January 1978 broadcast. "The youngsters read back and they think only one person in broadcasting and the press stood up to McCarthy," Sevareid said, "and this has made a lot of people feel very upset, including me, because that program came awfully late." Sevareid named Elmer Davis and Martin Agronsky as two broadcasters who had taken on McCarthy long before Murrow.

But don't take Sevareid's word for it, either. Listen to Murrow. Jack Gould, the New York Times television columnist whose Murrow praise is read aloud in the movie, took lunch with Murrow shortly after the McCarthy program. Murrow confessed his tardiness in taking on McCarthy, according to an interview Gould gave to Edwin R. Bayley for his 1981 book, Joe McCarthy and the Press. "My God," he recalls Murrow saying. "I didn't do anything. [Times columnist] Scotty Reston and lot of guys have been writing like this, saying the same things, for months, for years. We're bringing up the rear."

Gould had his own ideas about "who killed McCarthy," and it wasn't Murrow. "It was ABC's decision to put the [Army-McCarthy] hearings on. That was the exposure that did it," Gould told Sally Bedell Smith in her biography of CBS chief William Paley, In All His Glory. The Army-McCarthy Senate hearings, commencing the month after the Murrow broadcast, ended up sinking McCarthy. The struggling ABC network carried the Army-McCarthy hearings live for 36 days; Murrow's CBS declined to air the complete hearings because they'd interfere with its lucrative daytime soap operas.

Other evidence of Murrow's less-than-crucial role in toppling McCarthy can be found in histories and scholarly works about the period. The well-regarded mainstream history of McCarthyism, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joseph McCarthy by David M. Oshinsky, burns only four of its 597 pages on Murrow's role, regarding him as more cog than wheel in the flattening of McCarthy. Thomas Doherty's Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture, offers the revisionist view of Murrow as "a glory hog who played it safe, more puffery than paladin, an elite opinion-maker smart enough to strike at the heart of the beast already hobbled by braver hearts." Doherty cites Washington Post cartoonist Herblock and muckraker Drew Pearson as members of a "lengthy lineup" of Fourth Estaters who ridiculed and attacked McCarthy.

Good Night, and Good Luck briefly acknowledges that Murrow wasn't standing alone when it recreates his See It Now program about McCarthy. The Murrow character cites the mainstream newspaper editorials criticizing the senator: the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Evening Star, the Washington Times-Herald, the Milwaukee Journal, the New York World Telegram & Sun, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Good Night, and Good Luck viewers not fluent in McCarthyese might ask how Murrow could be knock-kneed about the Wisconsin mad dog when the newspapers obviously weren't. We can pardon Clooney for not slowing to explore the topic, but Murrow's trepidations were more institutional than personal. Newspapers had complete First Amendment rights to criticize whoever they wanted to in government without worrying that federal agents would shut down their presses. Broadcasters, on the other hand, lacked First Amendment parity with their print cousins (they still don't enjoy parity, but things are much better now). They existed at the sufferance of the federal government, by virtue of the Communications Act of 1934, which required them to air news and public affairs. Irritating the government could prompt a congressional investigation or worse yet, a dressing down by the Federal Communications Commission and revocation of a network's radio and television licenses.

Such a shutdown could have been deadly in the early years of television, with networks struggling for a foothold. You could argue Murrow only risked his livelihood with his McCarthy broadcasts, but CBS chief William Paley (played by Frank Langella) risked his broadcast empire. (Though Paley didn't really have that much to fear. An Eastern moderate Republican, he'd befriended Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II. The broadcast executive and the president golfed and played bridge together, according to In All His Glory, and in Washington, presidents always trump lone-nut senators who go on rampages.)

Because the essence of drama is conflict, it's odd that Clooney ignores the turmoil the McCarthy program caused Murrow. Biographer A.M. Sperber (Murrow: His Life and Times) writes that Murrow "was always uneasy about" the McCarthy attack, "almost anxious at times to disown it." When See It Now published its greatest hits as a hardcover book in 1955, Sperber writes, it did not include "A Report on Joseph R. McCarthy."

Why did Murrow feel so queasy about his takedown of McCarthy? See Part 2 to continue.

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127595/

 

moneybox
Don't Look Now ...
Here comes inflation.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005, at 3:37 PM PT

While U.S. consumers have been forced to pay more for gasoline, they have generally been insulated from the ravages of inflation. The Consumer Price Index, which measures inflation experienced by individuals, rose 3.6 percent in the 12 months ended in August 2005, a period in which the price of energy rose 20.2 percent. But that doesn't mean that inflation isn't extracting an economic cost. The Producer Price Index measures inflation experienced by companies and businesses. And in the 12 months ended August 2005, as this release shows, the cost of finished goods rose 5.1 percent, while the cost of crude goods rose 11.3 percent.

How does an 11.3 percent rise in the cost of crude goods paid by businesses get translated into a 3.6 percent increase in the cost of goods and services paid by consumers? We've got some pretty powerful inflation shock absorbers—companies and industries that manage to keep consumer prices down while experiencing higher costs themselves.

In the '90s, information-technology companies such as Cisco, Intel, Dell, and GE acted as inflation absorbers. Their technology cut costs and improved productivity throughout the economy, holding down prices. But such easy gains are gone, and other parts of the economy need to absorb the massive rise in energy and raw-materials costs caused by world events and the growth of China and Japan.

That's where Wal-Mart comes in. With domestic sales of about $229 billion in 2004, Wal-Mart accounted for about 8.66 percent of the nation's retail sales (not including cars and car parts). Wal-Mart's obsession with low prices forces all its competitors to keep their prices low, too, even when the prices of the inputs needed to make products—gas, plastics, steel, and construction materials—are rising. Wal-Mart absorbs inflation shocks by adhering to three disciplines. First, it buys aggressively from low-cost China—to the tune of $18 billion last year. Second, it continually beats up its 61,000 U.S. suppliers (with which it spent $150 billion in 2004) to produce at lower costs and accept lower profit margins. Third, it accepts low margins for itself. Wal-Mart's operating income is generally about 6 percent of sales. Shoppers may like it. But shareholders haven't been thrilled. Indeed, the company's stock recently slumped to a five-year low.

The companies that make shock absorbers have also proved to be major inflation shock absorbers. The biggest single sector of the U.S. retail market is motor vehicle and parts dealers, with a whopping $882 billion in sales in 2004. For the last several years, U.S. automakers have spared no expense or effort to keep their products affordable, even as the cost of steel rose sharply. First came zero-percent financings, then heavy promotional rebates, and, most recently, the extension of employee discounts to all buyers. Stockholders of General Motors, Ford, and Daimler Chrysler have surely absorbed some of the pain associated with keeping prices low in an inflationary environment. But the impact has fallen heaviest on auto-parts suppliers.

Time was, the Big Three used to make many of their own parts. But they ultimately spun off their parts units as more or less independent entities. That way, the auto companies would free themselves of obligations to the parts units' aging workforces and be in a better position to extract favorable prices. GM spun off Delphi in 1999, and Ford spun off Visteon in 2000.

In the last few years, companies like Visteon and Delphi have been caught in a vise. Auto parts are generally made out of steel and plastics like polypropylene, whose price is correlated with the price of oil. While the parts makers have to buy raw materials at the market price, they're tied into long-term contracts (some with their former parent companies) that don't provide significant relief from commodity spikes.

And so 2005 has proved to be an annus horribilis for U.S. car-parts makers, caught between higher raw-material costs and heartless heavyweight customers. Tower Automotive filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Collins & Aikman, the second-largest auto-parts company in the United States and a big supplier to DaimlerChrysler, filed for bankruptcy protection in May. Danny Hakim of the New York Times reported today that Delphi could file for bankruptcy this week. And Ford recently offered to relieve Visteon's pain by taking back a chunk of its operations. Ford and General Motors may be struggling to keep their heads above water, but they're doing it by standing on the shoulders of their submerged auto-parts suppliers.

The problem is that the ability of companies like Wal-Mart and Visteon to buffer consumers from inflation may have reached its capacity. And that may be one reason why inflation is finally filtering into the consumer economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in September that the Consumer Price Index had risen at a rapid 4.2 percent annual rate in the previous three months. And there's probably more where that came from. Today's Institute for Supply Management report showed that the prices paid by all companies—manufacturers and nonmanufacturers—rose rapidly in August. With the shock absorbers having grown thin, we may all be in for an inflation jolt.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127565/

 

supreme court dispatches
They're Dying in Oregon
Should the Supreme Court save them?
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2005, at 2:51 PM PT

Some Supreme Court cases have odd or long-winded names that have nothing to do with what they're remembered for. The case heard this morning, however, is satisfyingly direct. It's called Gonzales v. Oregon, and it pits a state's power to let doctors help terminally ill patients die against the attorney general's power to stop them. It's all life and death—no fun, no games—in the first major case for the term and for Chief Justice John Roberts.

In 1994 and then again in 1997, Oregon voters passed the Death With Dignity Act, which allows doctors to prescribe lethal doses of legal but regulated drugs to dying Oregonians who ask for them. John Ashcroft, who was then a senator, asked Janet Reno, who was then Clinton's attorney general, to stop the Oregon doctors. Reno declined. In 1998 and 1999, Ashcroft introduced two bills in Congress that would have explicitly scuttled Death With Dignity. Both bills failed.

Then Ashcroft became President Bush's attorney general. In 2001, he announced that the federal Controlled Substances Act—passed by Congress in 1970 to "conquer drug abuse" and control the trafficking of legal and illegal drugs—gave him the power to revoke the licenses of doctors who assisted suicide with a prescription drug. The doctors could also be criminally prosecuted. When Ashcroft made his move, Oregon squawked its way to court. (That's why the name of today's case could be improved on a bit—it should really be called Ashcroft v. Oregon.)

At oral argument this morning, the justices start off nervous about this abundance of AG power. What about "some very different attorney general who had a very different view of the death penalty" and decided to prosecute a doctor who prescribed a lethal injection at a state or federal execution, Sandra Day O'Connor asks. What would stop him? Solicitor General Paul Clement tries to reassure her that Congress ratified the use of lethal injections for execution in 1994. But O'Connor can't be appeased. "But isn't the reasoning the same?" she presses. David Souter and later Stephen Breyer join in. The full-court press backs Clement into a mistake. He says that doctors aren't directly involved with lethal injections.

It's the first of several such off-balance moments for Clement—not because he's not his brilliant self, but because he's got a tough set of facts and precedents to negotiate. A minute or two later, Ginsburg reminds him of the Justice Department's position in Washington v. Glucksberg, the 1997 case in which the court found in the Constitution no right to die. "The government said then," Ginsburg points out, that there is "every reason to believe that the state legislatures will address this issue in a fair and legitimate way." It sounds like she is directly quoting. "You are rejecting that position," she concludes, taking pains not to sound triumphant.

Clement has to disagree. The problem is where that takes him. A breath after standing by Glucksberg, he seems to be saying that doctors in Oregon can zap all the patients they want to as long as they don't do it with federally regulated drugs. His poster boy is none other than Jack Kevorkian. Doctor Death "had no federal substances license for six years before his conviction," Clements notes cheerfully.

Has the Bush administration really just invoked Dr. Kevorkian as a model of medical practice?

Clement reaches for a lifeboat. Even if the drugs that non-Kevorkian doctors can prescribe to assist suicide (barbiturates classified as Schedule II under the Controlled Substances Act) are the most effective means to that end, he continues, that wouldn't make them OK. After all, if a state wanted to allow doctors to prescribe illegal drugs (Schedule I drugs like marijuana*), it wouldn't be able to. Clement is paddling toward Ashcroft v. Raich. In that case last term, the court ruled that the federal government could prosecute sick Californians who were smoking pot with the blessing of their state's medical marijuana law.

Then Ginsburg snatches the lifeboat away. "But Congress said when it made a drug Schedule I, 'No. Never,' " she says. "With Schedule II, it's OK with a doctor's prescription." Marijuana is definitely Schedule I. If Clement loses, this exchange will probably be why. The drugs that doctors prescribe to assist suicide are legal. Marijuana is illegal. The attorney general who is trying to nab Oregon doctors with a law that says nothing about assisted suicide is one executive appointee. Congress that passed a law explicitly criminalizing pot is the whole elected legislature.

But when Oregon's lawyer, Robert Atkinson, takes his turn, he gets addled, too. What if a state wanted to, say, let doctors prescribe morphine for recreational use, Stephen Breyer asks. The attorney general would be able to do something about that, wouldn't he?

The correct answer is clearly yes. Atkinson says no. The federal government should trust the states to regulate drugs responsibly and leave them alone, he argues. This is too much for Breyer, and for the rest of his team, too. "Far be it from me to suggest an argument," Breyer says after Atkinson fails repeatedly to bail himself out. Breyer and Souter team up to propose that it's one thing for a state to "gut" the Controlled Substances Act—by letting doctors be drug pushers—and another for that state to make provisions for physician-assisted suicide, a scenario that Congress didn't envision when it passed the CSA.

"I don't have any argument with that," Atkinson says, relieved.

"Yes you do!" Scalia interrupts. Atkinson's case, Scalia assures him, hinges on the argument that the boundaries of accepted medical practice are determined state by state. Atkinson agrees—falling into a trap that Scalia laid earlier. Congress chooses to regulate gambling and to set a national drinking age. These things "are none of the federal government's business either," Scalia says. But no one's questioning Congress' authority to take on gambling or drinking—or, generally, speaking, the prescription of drugs. And if that's the case, and the Controlled Substances Act gives the attorney general broad power—as Scalia thinks it does—why shouldn't Ashcroft and Gonzales string up any doctor they want?

Maybe this is federalism—the debate over how to balance federal and state power—come full circle. Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and John Paul Stevens often advocate for accommodating federal authority. But they're with Oregon in this case, because they're far more comfortable expanding Congressional power than they are enhancing the power of the attorney general. Scalia, revealed as federalism's fair-weather friend last year when he joined the pro-Congress majority in Raich, is on the federal government's side again. More power for the attorney general appears to be fine with him. John Roberts seems unhappy about the prospect of Oregon letting doctors dole out morphine to make patients happy. Anthony Kennedy seems unhappy generally. O'Connor, the court's staunchest states' rights advocate (William Rehnquist RIP), appears to be firmly on the side of Oregon. But her vote only counts if she's still on the court when the ruling is handed down.

Count heads, and you figure out that this case could come down to O'Connor. And since the court is unlikely to decide any cases with O'Connor as the deciding vote, Clement and Atkinson may be back for a second round—with a new ninth justice. This, then, is what all the fuss over Harriet Miers' confirmation is about.

*Correction, Oct. 6, 2005: The article originally gave cocaine as an example of a Schedule I drug because that was the example used during the oral argument. In fact, cocaine is a Schedule II drug because it has an accepted medical use as a topical anesthetic and so can be prescribed by a doctor. Click here to return to the corrected sentence.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2127561/

 

jurisprudence
The Many Faces of Harriet
Miers supports, opposes, and is neutral on Roe, all within 24 hours!
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005, at 1:49 PM PT

There is a huge problem with the White House strategy shift on Harriet Miers this week. The idea was to shift the focus from her heart and her eternal soul and her unfaltering fealty to all things Bush (read: her views on abortion) and back toward her substantive legal qualifications. But the only substantive legal qualification anyone cares about right now is Harriet Miers' views on abortion. Having jettisoned the John Roberts playbook, in which the nominee and the White House say nothing whatsoever about Roe, the Bush team has put itself in the unenviable position of having to keep talking and un-talking and re-talking about abortion. They set the terms of this debate—even if they did so in code—as a set of promises about Harriet Miers and abortion, and now it's all anyone wants to talk about.

We can talk about Roe in religious code ("Shhhh. Miers is a member of a fundamentalist church.") or we can talk about it in constitutional code ("Shhhhh. Miers supports the right to privacy.") It hardly matters. Miers and the White House just can't seem to stop talking.

First, Miers was for reversing Roe: On Oct. 3, Karl Rove apparently hooked up James Dobson and other members of a coalition of evangelical groups with two Texas judges including Nathan Hecht—for weeks the White House's sole expert witness on All Things Harriet. As reported in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Hecht and Judge Ed Kinkeade assured the Christian right that Miers would "absolutely" vote to overturn Roe. So, now the lot of them face the prospect of being subpoenaed to testify before the Judiciary Committee, where they will assuredly say that they cannot recall anyone promising them that Miers would do what she would have needed to do in order to win their support in the first place.

Then Miers was for privacy: After meeting with her yesterday, Sen. Arlen Specter came away happily reporting that Miers agreed with Griswold v. Connecticut—the 1965 case establishing that married people had the right to use contraception, by way of privacy rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. John Roberts had testified, in the one interesting nanosecond of his confirmation hearings, that he had no problem with Griswold. So, Specter's report seemed par for the course. But no! Suddenly Harriet has a problem with Griswold. Obviously the good senator from Pennsylvania misunderstood her, as he announced last night. She had in fact offered no opinion to him on Griswold. She must have been talking about Grisburn v. Massachusetts—a little-known tax case from 1987.

Nor, she told Sen. Charles Schumer of New York in no uncertain terms, does anyone know "my views on Roe v. Wade." But today it seems that a whole lot of pro-lifers not only know her views on the subject but were assured of her support in reversing it. Affixed to the mostly innocuous responses to the Judiciary Committee questionnaire she turned in this morning was another questionnaire, from 1989, which she filled out at the behest of Texans United for Life while running for Dallas City Council. In this document, the eager-to-please candidate pledged her willingness to actively support ratification of a constitutional amendment to ban all abortion, unless it was necessary to save the life of the mother. She promised to oppose the use of city money to "promote, encourage or provide referrals for abortions." She pledged to vote against the appointment of "pro-abortion persons" to any city boards or committees that dealt with health issues. (Here she appended this lawyerly qualification: "to the extent pro-life views are relevant.") She also promised to use her influence as a pro-life official to "promote the pro-life cause."

Well that doesn't sound like someone who's given no thought to Roe v. Wade. Or like someone whose opinions on the subject are a big secret.

Now, it's hard to overstate how utterly stupid these questionnaires are: Only last week social conservatives were wigging out over Miers' replies to another 1989 questionnaire—this one from the Lesbian/Gay Political Coalition of Dallas—also filled out while she was running for City Council. In that document she acknowledged that gays and lesbians deserve the same civil rights as everyone else. Still, despite the absurdity of a system in which empty promises are swapped for political endorsements, these documents reveal volumes, even if it's only that candidate Miers would promise whatever she had to in order to be elected.

The White House was quickly out of the gate this morning, again reassuring us that Miers didn't mean what she had said in 1989: "A candidate taking a political position in the course of a campaign is different from the role of a judge making a ruling in the judicial process," said a White house spokesman this morning. But no one is asking her to make a ruling: We just want to know if she opposes Roe.

Maybe Miers should explain that when she says she hasn't formed an opinion of Roe v. Wade, she means she doesn't have an opinion at this exact instant. Because it's clear that she can't satisfy the far right until and unless she goes on Rush Limbaugh and promises on a stack of state-sanctioned bibles to overturn Roe—whether or not it's on the docket this year. It's equally clear that, despite John Yoo's generous invitation that she do so, Miers is just not going to make that promise. Although I for one would have renewed respect for her if she did.

So I am begging now. This is embarrassing. End it. Karl Rove: Either plant the 500 pounds of cocaine you keep for such occasions in Miers' car, or trot out some actress to play her bitter, gay ex-lover. You have the power to end this. So do whatever it is you do. But end the unnecessary pain and suffering now, before someone really gets hurt.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

 

the big idea
Illiberal Prosecution
Why Democrats should take no comfort in the Plame case.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005, at 11:39 AM PT

As Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald mulls possible charges in the Valerie Plame investigation, the gloating in liberal enclaves like Manhattan, Oberlin, and Arianna's dining room has swelled to a roar. Opponents of the Bush administration are anticipating vindication on various fronts—justice for their nemesis Karl Rove, repudiation of George W. Bush's dishonest case for the Iraq war, a comeuppance for Chalabi-loving reporter Judith Miller of the New York Times, and even some payback for the excesses of independent counsels during the Clinton years.

Hold the schadenfreude, blue-staters. Rooting for Rove's indictment in this case isn't just unseemly, it's unthinking and ultimately self-destructive. Anyone who cares about civil liberties, freedom of information, or even just fair play should have been skeptical about Fitzgerald's investigation from the start. Claiming a few conservative scalps might be satisfying, but they'll come at a cost to principles liberals hold dear: the press's right to find out, the government's ability to disclose, and the public's right to know.

At the heart of this misbegotten investigation is a flawed piece of legislation called the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. As Jack Shafer has written, this 1982 law is almost impossible to break because it requires that a government official unmask covert agents knowingly and with the intent of causing harm. The law was written narrowly to avoid infringing free speech or becoming an equivalent of Britain's Official Secrets Act. Under the First Amendment, we have a right to debate what is done in our name, even by secret agents. It may be impossible to criminalize malicious disclosure without hampering essential public debate.

No one disputes that Bush officials negligently and stupidly revealed Valerie Plame's undercover status. But after two years of digging, no evidence has emerged that anyone who worked for Bush and talked to reporters about Plame—namely Rove or Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff—knew she was undercover. And as nasty as they might be, it's not really thinkable that they would have known. You need a pretty low opinion of people in the White House to imagine they would knowingly foster the possible assassination of CIA assets in other countries for the sake of retaliation against someone who wrote an op-ed they didn't like in the New York Times.

But in the hands of a relentless and ambitious prosecutor like Fitzgerald, the absence of evidence that you've broken a law just becomes an invitation to develop a case based on other possible crimes, especially those committed in the course of defending yourself, like obstruction of justice and making false statements. Call witnesses back enough times and you can usually come up with something. Special prosecutors never give up, because saying no crime was committed, after investing years and tens of millions of public dollars, counts as abject failure. And if gleanings from the grand jury room are to be believed, Fitzgerald may go beyond the Ken Starr-style foolishness to bring more creative crap charges of his own devising. Fitzgerald's questions to Judith Miller suggest the possibility of indictments under the much broader and seldom used espionage law or Section 641 of the U.S. Code, which deals with the theft of government property. The Justice Department has used 641 in at least one case, to prosecute a Drug Enforcement Agency analyst who leaked a name from an agency file to the British press.

Already, Fitzgerald's investigation has proved a disaster for freedom of the press and freedom of information. Reporters, editors, and publishers have been put on notice about the legal risk of using blind sources, which most consider an essential tool of news-gathering. Any ambiguity about a press privilege under federal law has been resolved, not in favor of the media. According to some anecdotal accounts, journalists' failure to fully protect their sources in the Plame case has already chilled official leaks to reporters. Should Fitzgerald win convictions under the espionage law or Section 641, any conversations between officials and journalists touching on classified information could come become prosecutable offenses. That would turn the current chill into permafrost.

The publisher of the New York Times and its editorial page deserve more blame than they've gotten for demanding that former Attorney General John Ashcroft name a special prosecutor in the Plame case. In leading that charge, they failed to think through the logical consequence of the policy they were advocating, namely subpoenaing reporters who were the recipients and only witnesses to leaks from the White House. The New York Times won the great modern battle for freedom of information in the Pentagon Papers case. With the Plame case, it has provoked a no-win showdown that is likely to constrain public disclosure for years to come.

Why did the Times make this mistake, especially after criticizing the out-of-control independent counsels who went after Henry Cisneros, Bruce Babbitt, and Bill Clinton? I think that, like a lot of liberals, the Times editors imagined the Bush team to be so ruthless as to be capable of anything—even taking down a critic by wrecking his wife's career and endangering the lives of American spies abroad.

Losing a sense of proportion, and of reality, is an occupational hazard when arguing about politics. But Joseph Wilson's accusation that administration officials outed his wife to punish him for speaking up was never really credible. And by now, a small mountain of evidence points toward a more plausible, nondiabolical motivation for the accidental blowing of Plame's cover. In her first-person account in the Times, Judith Miller indicates that Libby's motive in talking to her about Wilson and his wife was the fight between the White House and CIA over whose fault it was that Bush had included faulty intelligence about Saddam's pursuit of African uranium in his 2003 State of the Union address. That blame game was morphing into a larger public dispute about the administration's claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Bush officials were in the middle of an argument in which they were largely wrong, and which they lost, but in which they thought they were right and were trying to win.

In that context, Libby's comments don't look anything like retaliation against Joe Wilson—especially now that we know that Libby first mentioned Wilson and his wife to Judith Miller three weeks before Wilson went public with his op-ed piece. As for Rove, so far as we know, he spoke to only a single journalist—Matthew Cooper of Time. According to Cooper, Rove didn't even know Plame's name. If that's a White House smear campaign, Rove's skills are getting pretty rusty.

Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128301/

surfergirl
The Colbert Factor
The Daily Show's senior bloviator gets a desk of his own.
By Dana Stevens
Updated Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005, at 12:12 PM PT

Daily Show fans watched last night's premiere of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central (Monday through Thursday nights, 11:30 p.m. ET) with their hearts in their throats. It was impossible not to feel nervous for Stephen Colbert, who, after eight years as a fake-news correspondent on The Daily Show, has finally landed his own platform, a parody of "personality journalism" chat shows a la The O'Reilly Factor. On the one hand, Colbert can't lose: He's benefiting from basic cable's most golden time slot, with a built-in audience of Daily Show fans looking for somewhere to go (after giving the new Adam Carolla debacle a few chances, I had just started switching over to the last half of Iron Chef on the Food Network.)

On the other hand, the bar has been raised really high for Colbert. The Daily Show is at the height of its powers, coming off a great year in which it became an indispensable part of the political conversation during the 2004 campaign, spawned a best seller (America: The Book) and won two Emmys. It wasn't enough just for Colbert to get a few laughs last night; he had to be as topical, intelligent, and innovative as Jon Stewart, without ever appearing to rip off his progenitor.

Watching Colbert stretch his Daily Show character into a half-hour format sparked an impromptu reflection on the work Colbert has cut out for him. Jon Stewart may laugh at everything and everybody, including himself, but for the most part, we don't laugh at him. On the contrary: Stewart is, quite literally, our anchor, the one fixed point of sanity who watches, bemused, as the utter insanity of the day's news (and of his correspondents, who seem to take it all seriously) swirls around him. Stewart is the guy scanning the headlines and pausing to ask, "What the hell is this? What's really going on?" The whole joke of Colbert's persona is that he deliberately avoids asking those questions, or indeed, any questions at all. Stephen Colbert (or "Stephen Colbert," the character he plays) is proudly ignorant, aggressively obtuse—qualities that make him perfectly suited for parodying the new breed of cable-news bloviators. But by its very nature, the position Colbert occupies—the butt of his own show's joke—seems more difficult to sustain than Stewart's role as the eternal observer.

Last night's show opened with a funny, if slightly overlong, segment called "The Word"—an obvious spoof of Bill O'Reilly's nightly "Talking Points," in which bulleted summaries of Colbertian wisdom appeared down the right-hand side of the screen as the fake anchor enjoined his audience to stop thinking so darn much. "Check gut," read one directive, as Colbert raged against not only the "word police over at Webster's," but against knowledge-gathering in general: "I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart." Colbert concluded this segment with a kind of mission statement for the show to come: "Anyone can read the news to you—I promise to feel the news at you."

A gag in which Colbert chewed out a behind-the-scenes staffer fell flat, and a satire of cable-news alarmism called "the Threat-Down" sounded like it had spent too long in a writers' meeting. But the show's centerpiece—an interview with NBC anchor Stone Phillips, and the subsequent "gravitas-off" in which the two men took turns reading nonsensical fragments of news copy—worked brilliantly. The gravitas-off in particular was a beautifully orchestrated spiral of ascending absurdity: "If you have ever sat naked on a hotel bedspread, we have a chilling report you won't want to miss," intoned a deadpan Phillips, only to be topped by an even sterner-sounding Colbert: "Thankfully, alert gauchos were able to save the llama before it was swept into the blades of the turbine." This segment was the show's first real flight into pure verbal fancy, and the moment in which it seemed to break free of opening-night nerves and really take off.

The interview will be a tough segment to pull off on an ongoing basis; it's neither a sincere one-on-one conversation, as on The Daily Show, nor an Ali G-style stunt in which the interviewee has no idea he's being mocked. Where will Colbert's bookers go to find interesting and willing guests? Celebrities looking to promote a new book, record, or film may fear being made fools of, and even the most oblivious of self-loving blowhards (the real-life versions of the character Colbert himself plays) will get that the show's aim is satirical, and likely refuse to appear. Tonight's guest, Lesley Stahl, will presumably be as game to ridicule her own profession as Phillips was. But once The Colbert Report has cycled through the roster of self-deprecating news anchors, where will it go from there?

Jon Stewart's guest tonight will be none other than Bill O'Reilly himself, providing a perfect lead-in for the second installment of The Colbert Report. I hope Stewart asks his guest about today's very Colbert-esque profile in Newsday, in which an outraged O'Reilly, butter steadfastly refusing to melt in his mouth, pleads with his critics to "stop the viciousness."

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

 

  

medical examiner
The Disappointment Gene
Why genetics is so far a boondoggle.
By Arthur Allen
Updated Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005, at 10:05 AM PT

Celebrating the sequencing of the human genome five years ago, President Bill Clinton declared the decipherment of its 3 billion base pairs "the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by mankind." Enthusiasts promised that the genome project heralded an era of personalized medicine. By 2010, predicted Art Caplan, the University of Pennsylvania bioethicist, the "age of one-size-fits-all drugs" would be replaced by an era of "designer drugs" targeted to different biological groups. Soon we would all have records of our own DNA, enabling physicians and counselors to program what we ought to eat, where we should go to school, what kind of life insurance we should buy, and what antidepressants we might use.

In five years, the genome has indeed transformed biological research. Thanks to vast quantities of new genetic information, scientists are revealing unimagined complexity in the molecular workings of the body. Precisely because of this complexity, though, much of the data have little immediately useful meaning, and the research has produced only a trickle of medicine. The drug industry submitted 50 percent fewer applications to the Food and Drug Administration in 2002 and 2003 than in 1997 and 1998, despite the fact that biotech research investment doubled between the two periods.

But where the angels of established medical science fear to tread, a new industry has arisen. Several companies now offer genetic scans, some available at a supermarket near you, that claim to provide all you need to "take the guesswork" out of living. So, let's get started: In the words of Sciona, a leading "nutrigenetics" company, "It's time to discover The Science of You!"

The Web site of Great Smokies Laboratory of Asheville, N.C., which sells its Genovation "profiles" through alternative practitioners, promises that "seeing the results of your Genovations test is like seeing the cards you've been dealt by Nature." Sciona, a British company that recently moved to the alternative-lifestyles mecca of Boulder, Colo., sells "nutrigenetics" kits, with information on heart, immune system, bone health, endocrinal, and "detoxification" genes. After sending in a cheek-swab sample of DNA, you receive a booklet describing several of your gene variations and their meanings. What can be divined from these double-helixed tea leaves? A 97-page mock-up of a model profile that Sciona showed me (cost: about $500) provided the following advice to "John Doe" based on Sciona's readouts of 34 DNA variants: Eat your vegetables, get exercise, take some vitamins, and lose a few pounds. This your mom also can tell you; Sciona co-founder Rosalynn Gill-Garrison admits as much. The difference, she says, is the magical aura surrounding genetic information, the sense of finality that comes with that knowledge—however partial and even distorted.

Some of the offerings are more tailored, though certainly not more credible. GeneLink, of Margate, N.J., will do your "nutragenic and dermatagenic profile" and direct you to particular skin-care products. Another outfit, Imagene, founded by former University of Texas pharmacologist Kenneth Blum, offers DNA testing for children with "disruptive and addictive personalities." Once the $275 test kit has confirmed that your child has "dopaminergic related Reward Deficiency Syndrome," you can buy a month's supply of pills for $60, along with a $30 oral spray that provides up to two hours of relief from unspecified "cravings."

As snake oil goes, these offerings are mild compared with the product that some biotech companies were putting out to investors a few years back. For a precautionary tale of genetic hype, it's hard to beat the story of Human Genome Sciences, created in the 1990s by William A. Haseltine, a Harvard AIDS researcher. Haseltine had a partnership for several years with Craig Venter, an erstwhile computer brainiac at the National Institutes of Health, to begin sequencing and submitting patents on thousands of pieces of DNA. To listen to Haseltine was to believe that he had discovered a gold mine. His work, he said in 2000, "speeds up biological discovery a hundredfold, easily. Easily." He talked of finding in genes "the fountain of youth" in the form of "cellular replacement" therapies. Investors rewarded Haseltine with more than $1 billion in 2000. The drugs bombed out early in clinical trials, the stock plummeted, and Haseltine decamped with his millions to become a philanthropist. Three other big genomics companies—Incyte, Celera, and Millenium Pharmaceuticals—also failed to spin genetic discoveries into drugs.

To be fair, all four are still trying, and drug development takes time. But the failed promise thus far points to the hubris of a simplified view of genetics. Certain powerful genes cause disorders like cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sach's disease. But one-gene diseases are rare, as you may remember from high-school biology; in our primitive past, most humans who carried them died before child-rearing age. (Click here for an explanation of why some of these genes persist.)

Assiduous readers of newspaper science columns will remember the stream of announcements in the 1990s of the discovery of genes "for" everything from impulsive behavior to schizophrenia to heart disease and cancer. (Not to mention the so-called gay gene.) In the fine print, the authors of those studies made clear that they thought the genes they'd located made only small contributions to the condition in question. But even those limited effects failed to hold up in most cases. A recent literature review by Joel Hirschhorn, a geneticist at the Broad Institute in Boston, found that only six of the 166 initially reported associations of genes with a disease or trait had been replicated consistently. It may turn out that many inherited diseases aren't connected to genes at all. The genome project itself showed why this is so. Some geneticists guessed, based on the number of RNA transcripts discovered by the late 1990s, that there were as many as 150,000 genes in the human genome. Genomic companies like Incyte patented many of those transcripts. But the number of genes has proved to be closer to 20,000. A lot of the RNA transcripts, it turns out, play other roles in the cell that are only partially understood. Genes, per se, don't provide the whole biological, and therefore medical, story of inheritance.

New gene-hunting methods involve searching for DNA variations over the entire genome. Within a year or two, for example, scientists will have a catalog of 10 million single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, which are variations in DNA base pairs at particular stretches of the genome. The hope is that by mapping out these variations, scientists will find similar patterns in people who have predispositions to certain diseases. These variations will lead the way to more genes that make subtle contributions to disease.

Few doubt that SNPs and other collections of biomarkers will help find some meaningful genetic links to illness. But their value for the utopian future of personalized medicine is far from clear. If genetic "errors" occur in common parts of DNA across the human species, then SNP collection will help us find those errors. But if each subgroup of humans—from Pima Indians to Mongolian shepherds to Icelanders—has a unique way, say, of becoming vulnerable to Alzheimer's, then no matter how many SNPs we collect, it will be difficult to find key genetic variants that we can test for—or treat. The optimistic view is that SNPs and other data collections will locate common genes that contribute to common sources of suffering. But it will be years, if ever, before a comprehensive genetic screen could tell you how specifically to stave off a particular condition. For the foreseeable future, environmental effects will swamp the visible genetic ones. That is, no matter what your genotype is, the best health advice is to eat well and not overmuch, get exercise, and stop smoking. And in general make love, not war.

For this you should pay $500?

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One-gene diseases often persist because they have dual roles. The gene variant causing iron-overload disease, or hemochromatosis, for example, allowed our ancestors to thrive on low-meat diets, while certain blood disorders like sickle cell were protective against malaria. The genetic variations causing cystic fibrosis may have protected against cholera.

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You may also remember from high-school biology that a gene is transcribed from DNA onto RNA. The RNA is thus a transcript of the DNA that in turn is translated into a protein—in other words, one gene = one protein.

Arthur Allen is writing a history of vaccination. His e-mail address is artnews@earthlink.net.

 

sports nut
Matt Leinart's Big Score
He beat Notre Dame, but will the USC QB make it in the pros?
By Josh Levin
Posted Monday, Oct. 17, 2005, at 4:24 PM PT

As Stephen Rodrick argued in Slate, college football games are too often "decided by the physical incompetence and downright chokery of their players." While there was plenty of that this weekend—see, for example, the blocked punt at the end of the Minnesota-Wisconsin game—most of Saturday's matchups were decided by legitimate skillfulness and dexterity. In what might have been college football's best day ever, Michigan and Boston College won on last-gasp touchdown passes, Alabama took out Ole Miss on a final-play field goal, and West Virginia and UCLA came from way back to win overtime slugfests.

Those were all topped, of course, by the already-immortal USC-Notre Dame game, in which Trojans running back Reggie Bush proved he's the next best thing to Barry Sanders. Like Sanders—who often led the NFL in carries for negative yardage—Bush understands that if you're more elusive than everyone else on the field, it's perfectly logical to risk a 10-yard loss for a chance to make a big play. Bush's most important runs of the afternoon, though, were his most straightforward. With under a minute remaining and USC on the Notre Dame 13-yard line, he slithered between the tackles for 6 and 5 yards on consecutive handoffs, putting the Trojans in position to win the game on Matt Leinart's quarterback sneak. Or, if you'd prefer, Reggie Bush's quarterback shove.

When Leinart came back for his senior season after throttling Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl, it seemed like a conscious emulation of Peyton Manning, the college star who stayed in school for four years, got picked No. 1 in the draft, and made bushels of cash while setting records in the NFL. Heck, Leinart was a new, improved Peyton Manning—the former University of Tennessee QB never won the national title or the Heisman Trophy. Now, six months after deciding to finish up at USC, Leinart looks more like Jason White or Danny Wuerffel—a gutsy Heisman winner who doesn't have the physical ability to succeed when the guys on defense get bigger and faster.

USC's offense clicks because the Trojans' dominant offensive line gives the accurate Leinart more than enough time to spot open receivers. But against Notre Dame, Leinart proved fallible when faced with a stifling, aggressive defense. With Fighting Irish defenders in the backfield all day, the short timing routes that the Trojans thrive on become ineffectual. Leinart's savvy and toughness—as seen on his clutch, last-minute, fourth-down throw to Dwayne Jarrett—are unimpeachable. But he's not shifty enough in the pocket to avoid taking big hits, and his arm is too weak to throw the ball over the top when he's pressured. On Saturday, the Trojans' most effective passing play was the screen pass to Reggie Bush. It doesn't take a pro quarterback to dump the ball off.

By passing up certain riches in the pros, Leinart has crafted himself into the kind of winning, wholesome Joe College figure who will be asked to appear in Campbell's soup commercials. He's also been able to enjoy the perks of SoCal celebrity—the magazine covers, the posh birthday parties, the hobnobbing with Nick Lachey—while earning the priceless appellation "winner."

Everybody knows that Leinart isn't any more of a college student than Tom Brady is. As has been widely reported, the only credits he's getting this term are for a ballroom dancing class. In an interview with NBC's Pat Haden, Leinart admitted, "I'm not on campus too often. I'm on campus to watch film, to work out. … I don't find myself walking around too much because it kinda gets hectic around here sometimes." Man, just imagine how hectic it would be if he had to go to class.

So, why did Leinart stay in school? Well, there's that these-are-the-best-years-of-my-life malarkey. But the USC quarterback also told Haden that he came back because he needed time to recover from off-season elbow surgery and a lingering sports hernia. "I felt like I could go to the NFL, probably do OK, maybe get drafted high, but who knows," he said. "I just wanted to be sure."

When commentators talk about the risks of staying in school, they mostly mention the risk of career-ending injury. Leinart's got a multimillion dollar insurance policy to cover that. But there's another possible consequence that's nearly as damning—that NFL scouts will figure out you're not as good as they thought you were. Sure, Leinart will make millions upon millions in endorsements. But in a few years, the accountants will be lining up outside Reggie Bush's door.

Josh Levin is a Slate assistant editor. You can e-mail him at sportsnut@slate.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128209/

foreigners
A Whisper Instead of a Scream
HBO's loose-nukes docudrama is much too subtle.
By Peter Savodnik
Posted Monday, Oct. 17, 2005, at 3:47 PM PT

Just in case 9/11 and The Sum of All Fears hadn't jolted Americans into paying attention to the nightmare of nuclear terrorism, HBO has weighed in with Last Best Chance, which debuts tonight at 8 p.m. ET.

The poorly titled and very poorly acted hour-long warning-slash-docudrama about the free world on the brink of vaporization stars former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., as (presumably) the last president of the United States. Three terrorist cells steal a nuclear warhead or the ingredients needed to make a nuclear warhead. Government officials from Washington to Moscow learn of the impending attacks, but, in the end, they are unable to prevent the terrorists from entering the United States and Britain, where (apparently) Armageddon lurks.

Alas, Last Best Chance is, one hopes, neither our last nor our best chance of alerting the public to the possibility of mass death at the hands of atom-bomb-toting terrorists.

It's not that the movie is off the mark. It's right on target. As former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., who took part in a panel after an advance screening last week at Washington's Four Seasons Hotel, pointed out, it's only a matter of time before something truly unthinkable happens in New York, London, or Paris.

The problem is that stirring the American public from its slumber requires bloodshed. It requires violence. Recall that it took Schindler's List—with its ghoulish depiction of little Jewish girls and boys being led to the crematoria—to spawn a mini-movement of Holocaust studies. Similarly, had it not been for the first 40 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, there probably wouldn't be a World War II memorial on the Washington Mall today.

Last Best Chance, by contrast, is a tad too literary. Consider the final frame: An SUV—framed by deciduous trees and an American flag, bathed in a lovely, upstate New York kind of chiaroscuro—pulls away from a guard post at the U.S.-Canadian border. Inside the SUV are two white people who look nothing like the people who usually blow up embassies and skyscrapers. Sitting in the back seat is a bomb in an unmarked crate destined for Manhattan … And then? Then nothing: We never get to see what happens when the bomb goes off. We only get to imagine it.

And therein lies the crux of the problem. Americans have lost their taste for imagination. Television, movies, the Internet—mass culture—doesn't allow for much imagination nowadays. The height of hip is revelation: To show everything (sex, death, various species of self-degradation) is to be bold, ahead of one's time, even "courageous."

Senior policy wonks, think-tank analysts, and Homeland Security higher-ups may prefer John Le Carré to Robert Ludlum, but the public demands Kalashnikovs, roadside bombs, and flying limbs.

True, there's that gun battle toward the beginning of the movie at the top-secret facility in the Belarusian hinterlands. But only one hapless guard gets killed. And he was just an extra; no one will shed any tears for him. Most of the pivotal scenes in Last Best Chance take place in the Oval Office and involve telephone conversations between Thompson's President Ross and the Russian president who always seems to be in his pajamas. Viewers of The West Wing may find this compelling; the other 280 million people in the United States will wonder when the action starts.

This movie is not about action. It's not about what you see. It's about what goes unseen. It's about the quiet evil of invisible, protean forces slithering through porous ports and borders. It's about nuance.

That could be a problem. Nuance is hardly the matchstick of mass movements.

And boy do we need a mass movement. Geopolitics may mitigate dangers on the horizon: The Kremlin may overcome its ancient suspicions of the West, and finally, belatedly, muster a united front with Washington and London against uranium traffickers in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Caucasus.

The dominos may tumble in the Middle East, with proto-republics sprouting in the Persian Gulf and Egypt. The North Koreans may stop dealing arms. Afghan drug lords may stop siphoning funds to radical Islamists.

But this is unlikely.

As Sergei Markov, a professor of political theory at Moscow State University and an informal adviser to Vladimir Putin, put it: The Russians, among others, don't trust Washington. "The main problem is the selfishness of the Americans," Markov said after the panel at the Four Seasons concluded, the subtext being that if we all get blown up because we failed to forge an alliance, it will be the fault of an imperialist and ruthlessly Realpolitik United States.

Nor is this simply a matter of a Texan cowboy-president antagonizing would-be allies. "Clinton and Bush, there is no difference," Markov said, adding that Washington rhetoric about "democracy" and "freedom" doesn't jibe with U.S. "meddling" in the recent Ukrainian and Georgian democratic uprisings. (Apparently, Russian meddling isn't meddling—it's assistance.)

So, something must be done. And if Washington won't do it, someone should make some noise. A multimedia campaign is called for.

If that campaign is to succeed, if governments are to be prodded into action before millions die and constitutional democracy is subverted, it will require something gorier than Last Best Chance. People must be horrified—by mass death and by the stupidity and intransigence of partisans inside the Beltway who would rather eat their own than lead.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that democracies are particularly slow to dive headlong into war but, once wrested from their sleep, will fight relentlessly for the freedom they cherish.

We have yet to be wrested from our sleep. Perhaps someone in Hollywood will make a movie about terrorists detonating a nuclear bomb in Times Square. Hopefully this movie will be filled with gratuitous violence and totally devoid of character development, figurative language, and shades of gray. That would be a real blockbuster. That would be a great service to the nation.

Peter Savodnik is the political editor of the Hill in Washington, D.C.

 

culturebox
The Nobel Fool
Harold Pinter's strident politics.
By Rachel Shteir
Posted Monday, Oct. 17, 2005, at 3:26 PM PT

Finally, the Nobel Committee for Literature got something right: Harold Pinter.

But for all the wrong reasons. The Nobel citation applauds Pinter, who was named a laureate last Thursday, for "forc[ing] entry in oppression's closed rooms," as though he were the author of a journalistic exposé about Abu Ghraib. The Los Angeles Times quoted Edward Albee as saying, "He's a splendid writer and a good political activist." The same article quoted David Hare, who suggested that the award vindicated Pinter for his "bold and brave political stand against the policies of the British and American governments."

The truth is that about five or six of Pinter's plays are works of great genius, but the leftist politics that he has embraced over the last two decades has nothing to do with them.

Many scholars have attempted to claim Pinter as a political writer ever since the 1980s, and those voices will likely become even more insistent now. But Pinter's best work is important for other reasons. It's difficult to even talk about his contribution to theater today, because the style of his early plays—with their mannered pauses and silences—is so much a part of the zeitgeist that it is more often a subject of parody than reverence. But from the Birthday Party in 1958 to Betrayal in 1978, Pinter's plays, like those of Eugene Ionesco and Pinter's mentor Samuel Beckett, changed the way we expect the theater to work. For one thing, there is setting: Pinter brought Beckett's apocalyptic optimism into working-class English interiors—seedy boarding houses and abandoned tenements and dark, damp backrooms. But for all of this, he is no kitchen sink realist. His language is both elliptical and strange. Like Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, Pinter's dialogue rarely does anything as pedestrian as telling a story or revealing a detail about a character's inner life. Instead, it spatters all over the other characters. It is representative language that often belies its subject—as in The Birthday Party (1958) when McCann and Goldberg do a kind of music hall duet, which is both about helping Stanley and about their intent to torture him. You practically expect them to break into soft-shoe.

Most significant is that Pinter never really made a distinction on stage between the real and the unreal, the good and the bad, the moral and the immoral. He charged his plays with a bleak sense of modernity and modern relationships, with disaffected and sometimes demented characters scrambling toward humanity. (He once said he was interested in writing about "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.") In a Pinteresque world, the characters may arrive at a feeble revelation, but just as often, they lurch blindly into apocalypse, never knowing how they arrived there. Sometimes, as in The Room, Pinter's first play, his characters are literally blind as well as figuratively so.

Those praising Pinter's plays have long characterized his work as "menacing," and centered on how they use language to "miscommunicate." But what is shattering in a Pinter play is subtler and more mysterious: It is the way he maneuvers his characters, little by little, into psychological endgames. In The Homecoming (1965), Teddy, the aloof professor—a figure who turns up a lot in Pinter—arrives with his wife, Ruth, at the London house where his sullen and antic working-class family looms. Ruth seduces the family—or, really, stuns them with the force of her femininity—and suddenly, midway through the play, the characters take on new identities, as if they are playing a game of musical chairs. There is a sense that, as in a macabre fairy tale, Ruth has awakened these four trolls from a slumber—or has put a curse on them so they will now fall asleep. In the hands of a lesser playwright, these character shifts would resolve themselves in a literal-minded ending; in Pinter's hands they expose the charade that is our public persona, while showing how tenaciously we cling to such charades.

Even in the most formally conventional phase of his career, Pinter remained interested in individual self-delusion, although he traded his violent style in for deft playfulness and his working-class settings for those of tony literary Londoners. His most commercial work, the stylish Betrayal (1978), turns on the unraveling of an affair. Last week the media repeated that Betrayal "moves backwards," as though it were a Hollywood film. But actually, Betrayal is more interesting: It swings both backward and forward to give the short and long view of how an affair both wrecks and salvages the lives of its characters.

But by the mid-1980s, Pinter seemed to become less interested in limning "mere" personal oppression for an interest in the connection between totalitarianism and personal oppression.

In the past Pinter has made plays of politically themed material, because he wants us to see how social catastrophes haunt us as much as transform us. Consider The Birthday Party: The action takes place on the night of a young British punk's birthday in a boarding house he lives in. Two men come to visit, wreak havoc, and eventually beat him up and take him away. But this play is not a protest against the brutality of torture. It is best thought of as a farce, a commedia dell'arte about the confusion between self-delusion and truth. That is what hurls it out of the world of domestic realism.

Pinter's politics today lack this complexity. They rail against Bush, the Iraq War, and Tony Blair. Most of his work over the last two decades reflects this didacticism. (One exception is Ashes to Ashes.) Only 20 minutes long, Mountain Language (1988), is set in a nameless prison and deals with prisoners and torturers. There is no ambiguity in either the language or the situation. There is certainly no comedy. When an old woman tells her son, a prisoner of war, "the baby is waiting for you," she means exactly (and only) that. Similarly, a recent poem reads: "The bombs go off / The legs go off / The heads go off/ The arms go off/ The feet go off/ The light goes out/ The heads go off/ The legs go off/ The lust is up/ The dead are dirt/ The lights go out/ The dead are dust/ A man bows down before another man/ And sucks his lust."

Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise, then, that last spring Pinter announced he was going to stop writing plays. His most enduring and ambitious work, with its mood of disturbing clarity and terror, is well behind him.

Would the Nobel committee have recognized Pinter's genius if he hadn't traded his career for sermonizing? The committee has a history of giving the Nobel Prize for Literature to writers—particularly playwrights—who are also political activists, as if it were compensating for the irrelevance of literature with the force of politics. Political writing offers playwrights—especially at a time when the theater is so marginalized—a consoling sense of immediacy. But it rarely produces great theater; not, at any rate, the kind that Pinter created almost half a century ago, in the days when he told students, "I do happen to have strong political views but they simply do not come into my work, as far as I can see."

Rachel Shteir is the author of Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show. She is working on a book about kleptomania.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128206/

moneybox
21^st-Century Bank Run
Watching a $4 billion company fall apart in a week.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, Oct. 17, 2005, at 2:52 PM PT

If you want to know what a modern bank run looks like, consider the case of the giant commodity trading firm Refco. It went public in mid-August, but in the course of the past week it has gone from $4 billion stock-market darling to carcass. The proximate cause of the meltdown was the surprise disclosure on Monday, Oct. 10, that an entity controlled by CEO Phillip Bennett had owed $430 million to the company. A week later, trading of the stock has been halted and vultures are picking over Refco the way hyenas gnaw on the remains of wildebeest.

Refco was no boiler-room operation. It's been around and successful for a long time. (Scandal connoisseurs will recall that Refco was Hillary Clinton's commodities broker.) And it had been getting more and more respectable. First, Thomas H. Lee, the highly respected private equity investor, agreed to take a big stake in Refco in the summer of 2004. Then gold-plated underwriters Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse First Boston brought it public two months ago.

Refco was a model 21^st-century business—a highly digitized, high-tech services company that traded complicated financial instruments on behalf of customers all over the globe. But its meltdown shows that its real assets were not its New Economy algorithms and brainpower. Rather, this extremely modern company depended ultimately on the kind of assets that built American capitalism in the 19^th century: trust, integrity, and the personal reputation of executives.

Nothing material changed in Refco's financial situation when it announced that Bennett had secretly owed money to the company, or when it provided more details the next day about how Bennett had hid the debt. If anything, the company's situation improved, since Bennett paid the money back and quit the same day. The company also took further proactive action, hiring Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to help clean things up. Refco was solvent. It had tons of cash on hand. Nobody was worried that it wouldn't be able to pay its rent, salaries, or utility bills.

But it was already too late. Refco was in the business of facilitating trades that are conducted essentially through a digital handshake. The actual exchange of cash—the settlement—takes place within a few hours or a few days. Any company operating in this environment relies on liquidity—the ability to access vast stores of credit instantaneously and cheaply—and on the willingness of other institutions to act as counterparties, to wait a day or two before receiving payment.

Once the trouble was announced, Refco's customers wondered whether it was wise to do business with a company whose internal controls were so weak that it didn't know its own CEO was hiding a nine-figure debt. So, the demise was swift. (Here's the nasty five-day chart.) Within two days of the announcement of the discovered debt, Refco had to shut its nonregulated capital-markets subsidiary because it lost liquidity. In other words, people no longer trusted Refco to make good on trades. Customers began to yank funds, clients started to steer business elsewhere, and employees began furiously to look around for new gigs.

In abandoning Refco so rapidly, the market proved that creditworthiness is not an absolute attribute that can be proved by showing you have a certain amount of cash on hand, or that your equity-to-debt ratio is above a certain level. Rather, it's relative. Companies may boast excellent credit ratings from agencies like Standard & Poor's. But ultimately, creditworthiness is in the eye of the beholder. It's something that people say you have, based on personal experience, reputation, and marketplace behavior.

And that's how Refco found itself transported back 150 years. Dun & Bradstreet has been in the business of providing credit ratings since the 19^th century. Its predecessor companies, including R.G. Dun & Co., employed correspondents in every major city and town who would send word to headquarters about the reliability of various businesspeople. Much of it was gossip, which is part of what makes Harvard's collection of R.G. Dun & Co.'s massive leather ledgers such great reading. The correspondents may not have had access to merchants' balance sheets, but they did know whether, say, a dry goods merchant in Albany, N.Y., had stiffed a supplier on a $10 bill, or which glass manufacturer in Brooklyn could be trusted for $1,000 of credit.

But Refco's downfall isn't simply an occasion for a history lesson, or an object lesson for people who make their living in the commodity pits. The entire global economy runs on the lubricant of easy credit extended among companies. And much of that credit depends on trust and reputation. An auto-parts company that gives its customers 30 days to pay it and has 30 days to pay its suppliers can function quite well. But if a few suppliers become worried that the company might have difficulty paying its bills, and demand to be paid in 10 days, that company could go bankrupt in a matter of days. These days, you don't have to be a bank—or even a liquidity-dependent finance firm—to suffer a run on the bank.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

 

 technology
The Death of Television
Will the Internet replace the boob tube?
By Adam L. Penenberg
Posted Monday, Oct. 17, 2005, at 1:48 PM PT

The television of the future will provide entertainment on demand; whatever, whenever, and wherever you want. It will be far superior to TiVo, which only lets you record the programming that your cable or satellite company offers. It will outshine Apple's new video iPod—who's going to watch an hour-long drama on a 2.5-inch screen, anyway? And it will be far more grandiose than even that Qwest ad from the late 1990s, where a motel clerk tells a traveler that he can watch "every movie ever made, in every language, any time, day or night" from the comfort of his room.

You'll not only be able to watch every film, but also every TV program, news show, documentary, music video, and video blog, and all of it will be playable wherever you go. Great, you think: Thousands of channels, millions of choices, and still nothing worth watching. Nevertheless, "nonlinear TV"—watching the tube on our schedule, not the broadcasters'—is our destiny. The revolution will not be televised, however, until the companies that funnel the content into our homes figure out how to control it. The best advice for now: Study the music industry and do the exact opposite.

When Hollywood and cable executives look at the record companies, they see an industry in decline. What they should see is a business that failed for too long to offer its customers what they want: portability, searchability, and the chance to buy the two songs you like without the 10 you don't. Music companies, fearful of piracy, dragged their heels on offering digital downloads, so their customers made it happen themselves via Napster, Kazaa, and the like. Rather than create a legal and lucrative alternative, the record industry has launched a flurry of lawsuits against its own customers and continued to blame piracy for falling CD sales. Meanwhile, Apple's iTunes Music Store has sold half a billion songs since April 2003. When users can download only the songs they want at 99 cents a pop, the industry's traditional business model—charging a high price for a heavily promoted, shrink-wrapped product—gets obsolete pretty fast.

The reason Hollywood and the television biz haven't yet read from the same script is bandwidth. While a typical music file takes a minute or two to download on a fast connection, a full-length movie can take hours. Hence there was little demand for downloads of Shrek, especially with the advent of TiVo and the various digital recording schemes that cable companies offer. But this has started to change with the emergence of a peer-to-peer distribution system called BitTorrent.

Once you've downloaded the BitTorrent software, you can grab files from users who already have the stuff you want on their computers. With peer-to-peer music swapping services, downloading is a lot faster than uploading, which creates digital traffic jams when users swap the same file. While it doesn't make much of a difference when users trade music, it does when swapping extremely large files like movies and TV shows. BitTorrent gets around this built-in bottleneck by letting you take small pieces of the file from different users. The more popular the episode, the more people save it to their hard drives, and the faster the download.

Of course, this isn't legal now. It isn't exactly illegal either, since BitTorrent does have legitimate purposes—you can swap any file using the BitTorrent protocol, not just copyrighted movies. The Motion Picture Association of America and the TV networks would probably have a hard time suing it into the ground like the music industry did with Napster. What they should do is co-opt it: Follow Steve Jobs' lead and charge $1.99 per episode, using BitTorrent as a distribution pipeline.

Even if Bram Cohen, BitTorrent's creator, won't stand for this, media conglomerates could set up a network of servers that holds all of their programming and use BitTorrent to distribute the content to consumers—for a price. What's Cohen going to do? Sue them for copyright infringement?

Although it's impossible to stamp out piracy, Apple has shown that consumers will pay for music if it's available. All Hollywood has to do is make it an easy, fun, satisfying experience. Many networks have started to experiment with putting their shows online. Before ABC cut that deal with Apple to sell episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives, MTV (which is owned by Viacom) had already put 8,000 music videos on the Web. MTV Overdrive also includes highlights from Total Request Live and online-only outtakes and commentary for shows like Laguna Beach. The channel's recent acquisition of Internet video service iFilm likely means it will add more content in the months to come. And it's all free, paid for by advertisers like Toyota and Procter & Gamble. (The appeal is stifled somewhat, though, since unlike with real television you can't channel-surf away from the ads.)

The audience for MTV Overdrive isn't huge yet—according to an MTV spokesperson, about 73 million total viewers have tuned in to the TV version of Laguna Beach as compared to 6.3 million who've watched the online programming. I'd bet that a good amount of people who've tried Overdrive haven't become repeat visitors. The biggest problem is quality. Streaming video, with its lag times, skips, and disconnections, is just not ready for prime time. Until it can offer the reliability of analog and digital cable, it won't look like anything but a weak sister.

The networks don't have to distribute programming via streaming video, however. Television viewers don't watch most content in real time. They see it well after it has been shot and edited. West Coasters also typically watch Desperate Housewives three hours later than East Coasters. The only content that necessarily has to be seen in real time is breaking news and sports. People will tolerate iffy quality if the news is important enough. For all the rest, Hollywood and TV should forget about streaming video and provide digital downloads of movies and TV shows. Otherwise, consumers will figure out a way to get them without paying for it—and they'll be sorry.

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

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128201/

 

fighting words
Tribal Ignorance
What you think you know about Iraq's factions is all wrong.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 17, 2005, at 9:03 AM PT

Ever wonder how to piss off an Iraqi? It's relatively simple. Just ask one, no sooner than you have been introduced: "So you're an Iraqi? How absolutely fascinating. Do tell: Are you a Kurd or a Sunni or a Shiite?" This will work every time, just as it's always so polite and so useful to ask a brown-skinned American if he or she is Chicano or, you know … Latina.

If you fall into conversation with an Iraqi, you will soon enough find out what you want to know. Kurds are not shy about mentioning their nationhood, and followers of the Shiite confession are not inclined to make a secret of the fact. So don't force the question. But you will have to know a lot of Iraqis before you meet one who cannot introduce you, usually with pride, to his or her Sunni cousin, or Kurdish auntie, or Shiite brother-in-law, as the case may be. And as for ethnicity and religion beyond our customary categories, you had better be prepared to meet Turkish and Assyrian Iraqis, as well as to bear in mind that in 1947 there were more Jews in Baghdad than in Jerusalem (many of the former of whom had been there longer), that many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are Christian from more than one denomination—Islamic fanatics murdered the head of their Anglican congregation just the other day—and that the spiritual leader of the Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Sistani, is an ethnic Persian.

When it comes to Iraq, one of the most boring and philistine habits of our media is the insistence on using partitionist and segregationist language that most journalists would (I hope) scorn to employ if they were discussing a society they actually knew. It is the same mistake that disfigured the coverage of the Bosnian war, where every consumer of news was made to understand that there was fighting between Serbs, Croats, and "Muslims." There are two apples and one orange in that basket, as any fool should be able to see. Serbian and Croatian are national differences, which track very closely with the distinction between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic beliefs. Many Muslims are Bosnian, but not all Bosnians are Muslim. And in fact, the Bosnian forces in the late war were those which most repudiated any confessional definition. (And when did you ever hear the media saying that, "Today the Orthodox shelled Sarajevo," or, "Yesterday the Catholics bombarded Mostar"?)

In Iraq there are also two apples and one orange in the media-coverage basket (as well as many important fruits that, as I mentioned above, are never specified). To be a Sunni or a Shiite is to follow one or another Muslim obedience, but to be a Kurd is to be a member of a large non-Arab ethnicity as well as to be, in the vast majority of cases, a Sunni. Thus, by any measure of accuracy, the "Sunni" turnout in the weekend's referendum on the constitution was impressively large, very well-organized, and quite strongly in favor of a "yes" vote. Is that the way you remember it being reported? I thought not. Well, then, learn to think for yourself.

This same tribal habit of mind—tribal on our part, I mean, not on the part of the Iraqis—allows some people to make the lazy assumption that the liberation of Iraq has created these differences, or intensified them, rather than sought to compose and heal them. The Saddam Hussein regime was based on a minority of a minority—a Mafia clique based in and around the city of Tikrit—and it stayed in power not by being "secular" or multiethnic but by being sectarian and by playing the card of divide and rule. It treated all the inhabitants of the country as its personal property, and it made lifelong enemies among all communities and all confessional groups. The differences between these groups are now specified in a constitution, perhaps a bit more than I would like, but are at least specified in order that no group is to be left out, or classified as second-class.

Since Iraq has no choice but to be a plural and various country, these diversities can be handled in only one of three ways: by a fascistic dictatorship of one faction over all others, by civil war leading to partition, or by federal democracy. The first option has now, I think, been demolished for all time. The second two options need not be mutually exclusive or incompatible, since one is still possible and the other is still hard, and since a great deal of damage was done to intercommunal relations (to phrase it mildly) during the decades of the fascistic expedient, and since there are neighboring countries that have an interest in supporting their own religious or ethnic clienteles within Iraq. But these are long-standing material realities, and not in any way the product of the intervention. It would make as much sense to say that the murderous terrorism of the religious sectarians is the product of the intervention.

Ah, but that is exactly what the moral cretins do say about Zarqawi and his death squads. There may be an argument about the authenticity of the newly released Zawahiri/Zarqawi correspondence, and I myself make no pronouncement. But as it happens, we know from many open sources that there is a debate among the jihadists as to the wisdom and even the propriety of killing civilians without discrimination, or of slaughtering the Shiites as if they were all heretics or apostates. One of Zarqawi's mentors has even weighed in, on a Muslim Web site, questioning the excessive zeal of his disciple. So even the most stone-cold killers and dogmatists have to wonder, and to worry, about the balance of forces in Iraq. I take this as a sign of encouragement. Perhaps, since they, too, are human, they will have to worry about the enormous casualties they are taking, as well as inflicting.

There will soon be a comparative experiment to run. The Syrian Baathist dictatorship of Bashar Assad, which is also based on a tiny confessional minority—the Alawites—is currently entering its moribund stage. Its despotism and corruption to one side, it has made the vast additional mistake of supporting death squads in Lebanon as well as in Iraq. When Syrian Baathism implodes, and when the many Arab and Kurdish Muslims it has oppressed take revenge, and when its killers prowl the streets of Beirut as well as Damascus and Aleppo in the hope of saving what they can, will we hear again that this chaos and misery would never have happened if it were not for American imperialism?

Actually, we are already hearing rehearsals of this stupidity. Discussing the possibility of cross-border tussles to deal with Syria's wretched, spiteful sabotage of the new Iraq, the New York Times kept tight hold of its only historical analogy and announced—in a news story, not a sidebar—that this was Cambodia all over again. And so it might just possibly be, if we were fighting the Vietcong in Iraq and if Assad were the cynical but neutralist Prince Sihanouk. As it is, our foes in Iraq are much more like the Khmer Rouge, and Assad's regime is more like the aggressive and corrupt minority rulers of South Vietnam, so the analogy is at the expense of those who repeat it parrot-fashion, and who mostly cannot tell Sunni from Shinola.

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

 

 

 politics
Miers 2.0
The White House plans for a do-over.
By John Dickerson
Posted Monday, Oct. 17, 2005, at 7:44 AM PT

This week, we get a whole new Harriet. President Bush and his team, on their heels for the last two weeks, are mobilizing for a big repackaging of the nominee. One report suggests an administration team of 20 has been assembled for the effort. Forget for a moment the evangelical workaholic who wrote those fawning notes and instead think about Harriet the keen, lean legal mind. "We're going to talk about not the church she goes to," says one official involved in the effort, "but her record and qualifications."

The White House now faces the same problem Democrats did with John Roberts. "Whoever defines the nominee in the first 48 hours wins," said Democratic strategist Jim Jordan after it became clear that the initial applause for Roberts' nomination was hardening into a lock on confirmation. Miers has already been defined, and the administration will have to overcome what has solidified into conventional wisdom in order to redefine her more positively. You could see the frustration on Friday as spokesman Scott McClellan exchanged elbows with reporters he accused of focusing on side issues rather than Miers' record.

But wasn't the original pitch about her heart and her church necessary because there weren't a lot of specifics to throw at critics? Not true, say White House aides who admit to being clumsy in the hopes of resisting a more dangerous truth: that they went looking for qualifications but couldn't find many. This time, they'll emphasize qualifications, even at the risk of exaggerating some paltry-sounding ones. We'll be introduced to supporters from Texas, including former members of the Texas Supreme Court (other than Nathan Hecht) and others who have known and worked with Miers on the Dallas City Council and the lottery commission. White House officials would prefer to spend next week trumpeting the successful and relatively violence-free referendum on the Iraqi Constitution, but they have little choice if they're going to salvage their nomination

The president's most vocal critics are not going to be swayed, of course, but the gambit is not designed for them. Republican senators just need some ammunition to justify their yea votes. The White House has to help senators who have been watching the nominee flop around the deck come up with something positive to say to their own dubious conservative constituents.

Miers' allies will continue to portray her opponents as snobs. The new witnesses coming forward know her, Bush aides will argue, unlike the armchair quarterbacks who manufacture opinion on radio talk shows and in conservative magazines. We might even start hearing a little more militancy, too. "That's the president's pick: a woman who is smart and who could get confirmed," said a top administration aide, "if you want to complain about that, then fine. That's who he is." It's unclear whether he is also someone who might help Miers by offering an actual illustration of her alleged competency. Bush has known her for 10 years. Can't he give those who would like to support Miers something a little more specific on which to hang their votes?

The White House has some quiet allies in this fight, but they're not the sort it wants. A number of Democrats I've talked to say that their own criticism of Miers has been muted, not just because they don't want to interrupt a budding GOP civil war, but because they'd prefer a potentially moderate woman with soft qualifications to another committed, persuasive conservative. "Reid is mindful that if she goes down to defeat, something far uglier for us might come down the pike," said a senior Senate Democratic staffer of the Senate minority leader.

The quieter liberals are, of course, the more suspicious conservatives become. So, in the stage management planned for the next weeks, the White House might want to address this issue. In addition to tutoring the public on what Harriet knows, they might want to do something to make Ted Kennedy really mad.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128165/

jurisprudence
Leggo My Ego
GooglePrint and the other culture war.
By Tim Wu
Posted Monday, Oct. 17, 2005, at 3:59 AM PT

Did you know you can search television? That you can type in "yada yada yada," and find the exact frames where George Costanza's girlfriend Marcy said it first? Weird as it may seem, you can do it with one of Google's little-known products, "Google Video." It's part of Google's not-quite-secret master plan—to make as much of the "offline world" searchable online as humanly possible.

Google is the company that wants to be loved, and it is invariably shocked when people object to what they are doing. That, recently, has amounted to a lot of shock. Earlier this month, the New York-based Author's Guild filed charges against Google, calling the company both "brazen" and a "massive copyright infringer." The lawsuit capped a year in which Google has been called "arrogant," "greedy," "stretched," and even, by the French, "un ogre."

Tough going for a company whose motto is "Don't be evil."

What's going on? Google has become the new ground zero for the "other" culture war. Not the one between Ralph Reed and Timothy Leary, but the war between Silicon Valley and Hollywood; California's cultural civil war. At stake are two different visions of what might best promote authorship in this country. One side trumpets the culture of authorial exposure, the other urges the culture of authorial control. The relevant questions, respectively, are: Do we think the law should help authors maximize their control over their work? Or are authors best served by exposure—making it easier to find their work? Authors and their advocates have long favored maximal control—but we undergoing a sea-change in our understanding of the author's interests in both exposure and control. Unlike, perhaps, the other culture war, this war has real win-win potential, and I hope that years from now we will be shocked to remember that Google's offline searches were once considered controversial.

What I've called the "exposure culture" reflects the philosophy of the Web, in which getting noticed is everything. Web authors link to each other, quote liberally, and sometimes annotate entire articles. E-mailing links to favorite articles and jokes has become as much a part of American work culture as the water cooler. The big sin in exposure culture is not copying, but instead, failure to properly attribute authorship. And at the center of this exposure culture is the almighty search engine. If your site is easy to find on Google, you don't sue—you celebrate.

It is this dramatic shift—to a culture of exposure—that Google and others want to export to the worlds of books, video, and other large stores of offline information. Consider Google's widely misunderstood "print" product, which is at the heart of the litigation with the Author's Guild. Designed to be similar to Google's Web search, Googleprint searches the full text of Google's library of scanned books. (This page shows the results of a search for "Harriet Miers.")

There's a key difference between Google "print" and the regular Google "Web." On the Web search, if you find something, you can then just click through to the Web page. But using Googleprint is different—you only get the results. To get the "full" result, you actually have to buy the book. This is a common misunderstanding about Googleprint—it is a way to search books, not a way to get books for free. It is not, in short, Napster for books.

Where does Google get the books in its search? Most, so far, are sent in by publishers who want to be noticed. But Google last year also began slowly adding to its database scans of some of the largest university libraries in the world (here is an example). That's the main controversy and also the main attraction. There is a lot of really great and valuable stuff in college libraries, but it is hard and time-consuming to find. Professors are not usually excitable creatures, but I have personally heard squeals at the prospect of full-text searching our libraries. That book searches are great for users and researchers is a no-brainer.

The big question is whether they are good for authors. Many of my friends who are authors are, to be sure, initially very suspicious. "It's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied" says Nick Taylor, president of the Author's Guild. Taylor isn't suggesting that book search engines are necessarily bad for authors. His objection is that Googleprint has deprived authors of their control—their right to decide whether to be in a book search in the first place. The author knows best, the argument goes, and she should be the one who makes all the decisions. If exposure serves the authors' interest, she can agree to be on Google—otherwise, forget it.

The idea that there is no tradeoff between authorial control and exposure is attractive. But it is also wrong. Individually, more control may always seem appealing—who wouldn't want more control? But collectively, it can be a disaster. Consider what it would mean, by analogy, if map-makers needed the permission of landowners to create maps. As a property owner, your point would be clear: How can you put my property on your map without my permission? Map-makers, we might say, are clearly exploiting property owners, for profit, when they publish an atlas. And as an individual property owner, you might want more control over how your property appears on a map, and whether it appears at all, as well as the right to demand payment.

But the law would be stupid to give property owners that right. Imagine how terrible maps would be if you had to negotiate with every landowner in the United States to publish the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Maps might still exist, but they'd be expensive and incomplete. Property owners might think they'd individually benefit, but collectively they would lose out—a classic collective action problem. There just wouldn't really be maps in the sense we think of today.

The critical point is this: Just as maps do not compete with or replace property, neither do book searches replace books. Both are just tools for finding what is otherwise hard to find. And if we really want to have true, comprehensive book searches, we cannot require that every author's permission be individually sought out. The book search engines that emerge would be a shadow of the real thing, just as a negotiated map would be a lousy one. Studies suggest that millions of out-of-print books are of unclear copyright status, and Google estimates that relying solely on books provided by publishers and authors will yield only 20% of the books in existence. Not only might it be difficult to get permission. (At least with real property we know who the owners are.) But there are just too many books with owners who are hard or impossible to find—"orphan works."

Each of those is a hole in the "map," and a shame.

What's at stake in a comprehensive book search? In a word, authorial welfare. It is true that once authors are famous and successful, control becomes more important than exposure. But authors don't know in advance that fame is going to happen. If we imagined a hypothetical bargain between all the nation's potential and future authors, I think they'd agree to put exposure first—and make book searches permissible. From that original position, a system making it easier to find your work is preferable to the system we have now, namely reviews, word of mouth, and marketing campaigns. And while searches will never displace these means entirely, we have seen that searches can help make eccentric bloggers as popular as newspaper columnists.

While I've stressed the tension between exposure and control, it's not if the ideal is no authorial control. What we want is the right balance. The Google Print booksearch, for example, gives copyright owners an "opt-out." As on the web, if you don't want to be searchable, you don't have to be. If you're really embarrassed about your first novel, you can tell Google, and make it unfindable. That's not enough for some, like the Author's Guild, who demand that the owner give permission before Google acts, not vice-versa. But with devices with opt-outs—which may be critical to Google's fate in court—we can respect authorial wishes without making everyone's work hard to find.

We must remember, looking to the future, that books, as a medium, face competition. If books are too hard to find relative to other media, all authors of books lose out, and authors of searchable media like the Web, win. And that's too bad for those who love books—those who still like a slow read better than the blustery urgency of blogs.

I believe that everyone who considers themselves an author or an author's advocate should take a deep breath and, at least this time, praise Google Print. In the end, it is just a search, not a replacement product. We readers need help finding what exists, and we authors also need help being found. There is here, as anywhere, such a thing as too much control. It may be time for the offline media to learn something from online media—namely, the virtues of letting go.

Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School. He teaches copyright, trade, and telecommunications and is co-author of Who Controls the Internet?

 

press box
Paper-Thin Excuses
If a publisher moans about rising newsprint costs, slap him.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, Oct. 14, 2005, at 4:20 PM PT

To serve as a newspaper publisher, one must be able to whine and blubber at a moment's notice about how the rising cost of newsprint is preventing the paper from achieving greater profitability.

This week, Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. took its turn blowing its nose to cite increased newsprint costs as one of the reasons it's downsizing the paper from grande to tall. By 2007, the Journal will have lopped off 3 inches from the width of each page, an act the company claims will save it $18 million annually.

Here's the sympathetic press the Journal got after blaming its move on newsprint costs:

Given the widespread concern over the price of newsprint, which has soared 40 percent in the last three years, more broadsheets could shrink even further, to tabloid size, over the next few years and convert to lighter paper stock.

—New York Times, Oct. 12

The Journal is the most recent paper to combat higher newsprint prices by reducing its paper consumption. …

Newsprint prices have risen steadily since bottoming out at $435 per metric ton in 2002. On Oct. 1, they jumped $35 per ton to $625 per ton—their highest historical price.

—Washington Post, Oct. 12

Many other newspapers have also reduced their size in recent years, responding to higher newsprint costs and research finding that many readers prefer smaller newspapers.

—Associated Press, Oct. 11

But the problem with the excuse is that when newsprint prices are corrected for inflation, the commodity costs no more than it did in June 1997. And the current price is only 68 percent of its 20-year high, which came in early 1988, as the accompanying chart indicates. Far from being victims of high newsprint costs, newspapers have been coasting on cheap newsprint for much of the past two decades.

Dow Jones isn't the only publisher scapegoating "pricey" newsprint. This week, Knight Ridder, Media General, and the Tribune newspaper chains all sobbed about how increased newsprint costs are contributing to declining profits. Tribune, the New York Times Co., and Knight Ridder are using newsprint costs, along with falling circulation and advertising, as justifications for recent newsroom layoffs.

The last time nominal prices spiked, which was in the mid-1990s, Philip Meyer of the University of North Carolina debunked the publisher bellyaching by charting the real cost of newsprint for the Columbia Journalism Review (July/August 1995). His finding: Real prices were down from historical highs.

Seeing as I pinched the idea for this piece from Meyer's CJR article, I might as well help myself to his conclusion, as the newspaper business hasn't changed much. Meyer notes that the nominal price for newsprint "has a way to go to reach its expected peak … and prices are still moving higher. Publishers using newsprint prices as an excuse for slashing newsroom budgets will find plenty of new ammunition."

******

Seen another press criticism classic I can steal and update? Please send your suggestions via e-mail to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

 

 

explainer
What Happens When a City Goes Bankrupt?
You stay solvent, San Diego.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Friday, Oct. 14, 2005, at 3:33 PM PT

Federal corruption investigations, bottomed-out bond ratings, and a history of poor fiscal management have brought San Diego to the brink of financial ruin. Two mayoral candidates have said the city might have to file for bankruptcy in the face of its $1.4 billion pension deficit. How does a city go bankrupt?

It asks a judge's permission. Under Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code, a municipality (i.e., a city, county, town, or public authority) can file for protection from its creditors if it meets certain eligibility criteria. First, it must get approval from the state legislature. (About half the states have laws on the books that allow their cities to go bankrupt. The others would have to give permission on a case-by-case basis.) Second, it must be demonstrably insolvent—the city needs to prove that it can't make future debt payments or that it has already missed debt payments for lack of funds. Third, the city must want to get out of financial trouble, and it must have made a good-faith effort to negotiate with its creditors before filing for bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy for cities didn't exist until the 1930s. As tax revenues fell during the Great Depression, thousands of municipalities failed to make their debt payments. In 1934, Congress drafted emergency legislation to give cities a way out. In its early years, the new law ran afoul of the Supreme Court, since the 10^th Amendment prohibits the federal government from meddling too much in state affairs.

As a result, modern Chapter 9 fillings don't work quite like other bankruptcies. When a city goes bankrupt, the judge's primary job is to make sure that it's eligible to file and to approve its plan for paying off the debt. But federal bankruptcy judges have less control over cities than they do over other kinds of debtors. In particular, the judge can't order a city to liquidate its assets to pay off creditors. (As one Chapter 9 lawyer said when Miami faced bankruptcy in 1996, "They can't come pick up the fire engine.") In addition, the city can borrow money without the oversight of the judge or her appointed trustee. (In conventional bankruptcies, a debtor would need approval from the judge for certain financial transactions.)

Since the 1930s, fewer than 500 municipalities have gone through bankruptcy. Cash-strapped cities that would benefit from Chapter 9 might be reluctant to file because the recovery process often involves unpopular service cuts and tax hikes; the political fallout also tends to be grave.

New York City came close to filing during its mid-1970s financial crisis. At the time it was almost impossible for a large metropolis to meet Chapter 9's eligibility requirements. For one, New York would have had considerable trouble negotiating with all of its many creditors before filing.

Congress changed the bankruptcy law in the late 1970s to make it easier for big cities to file. The new rules allowed for Orange County's huge municipal bankruptcy in 1994. A local official had put the county's money in high-risk investments that ended up losing almost $2 billion. After a year and a half, the O.C. emerged from bankruptcy and paid off $900 million of its debt with new financing.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Alex Laughlin of Wiley Rein & Fielding LLP.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128062/

faith-based
The View at Valley View
What kind of Christian is Harriet Miers' church?
By Lauren Winner
Posted Friday, Oct. 14, 2005, at 3:25 PM PT

In their efforts to reassure conservatives about Harriet Miers, the Bush administration has led with her conversion to evangelical Protestantism. Miers was baptized in 1979 at Valley View Christian Church in Dallas, Texas. She quickly became a humble servant at the church, teaching Sunday school and bringing doughnuts for coffee hour. What kind of Christianity do Valley View and its members practice—and what does worshipping there reveal about Miers?

Valley View is part of the "restorationist" movement that is one strand in the larger web of American evangelicalism. Broadly speaking, evangelicals have three characteristics: They believe that Scripture is infallible and view it as their sole authority; they emphasize their personal relationships with Jesus Christ; and, often, they can tell you the day, even hour, at which they accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior. (The dramatic, datable conversion experience has a venerable pedigree—think of the Apostle Paul's light on the road to Damascus.) Specifically, Valley View's roots lie with the 19^th-century Campbellites, who sought to recover the simple form of Christianity practiced when the New Testament was written. The Campbellite movement gave birth to three different church communities. One of them is the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ fellowship, whose umbrella organization has 6,500 member churches, one of which is Valley View. Restorationism was in part about doing away with denominations, so the fellowship offers no formal oversight—Valley View is technically independent.

Evangelicals withdrew from society in the early 20^th century, threatened by the rise of liberal Protestantism. They didn't run for office, or watch network TV, or hang out at the local honky-tonk. Even the architecture of evangelical institutions of the era reflects a defensive mind-set—the buildings look like fortresses. The Rev. Billy Graham led the way to a tentative reacquaintance with American culture in the 1950s, making ecumenical overtures to Catholics and liberal Protestants. At the time, Graham was roundly criticized by fundamentalists like Bob Jones, the founder of Bob Jones University. (Fundamentalists are more unbending than evangelicals—an old joke says they're evangelicals who are angry.) The subsequent fissures are still part of the American religious landscape: Evangelicals are more likely to participate in ecumenical dialogue and less likely to read the first chapter of Genesis as a textbook.

By the mid-1970s, evangelicals were not only engaging the larger culture—they were trying to remake and transform it. (It's telling that when Joel Belz* founded his evangelical magazine in 1986, he chose a word that an earlier generation of evangelicals would have considered an epithet: World.) Evangelicals were energized about politics, of course, in part by Roe v. Wade, which they understood not only as a sinful taking of innocent life, but also as a broad sexual license that was eroding the fabric of American society. Eventually, some fundamentalists signed on for the fight. (And in this way, the distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists is blurry.)

It's no surprise, then, that Valley View is staunchly anti-abortion. When I asked Valley View's pastor, Barry McCarty, whether he was pro-life, he quickly denounced abortion and euthanasia, but he didn't mention war or capital punishment. Many Catholics—and, to be sure, some evangelicals, like Ron Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action—advocate the "consistent life ethic," which seeks to end nuclear proliferation, war, poverty, and the death penalty along with abortion. McCarty's narrower pro-life agenda is more representative of evangelical churches, which have devoted vastly more money and more pulpit time to denouncing abortion than to denouncing, say, militarism.

Though most American evangelicals are pro-life, not all evangelicals are Republicans. (I myself am an evangelical Christian and a yellow-dog Democrat.) According to a 2001 Barna Poll, 38 percent of American Democrats self-identify as born-again Christians. ("Born-again" is an elastic term that refers to the moment of dramatic conversion.) McCarty told me that while most of his congregants probably vote Republican most of the time, "there are a number of people here who are very strong Democrats."

And, like most evangelical churches, Valley View's good works are not limited to counseling pregnant women against abortion. Church members also give time and money to the sorts of projects typically associated with liberal Presbyterians or even Unitarians. Last year, Valley View partnered with other evangelical Dallas churches, including Potter's House, the congregation led by T.D. Jakes, a leading black evangelical pastor who is sometimes touted as the next generation's Billy Graham. For "90 Days of Blessing," church members worked in soup kitchens and homeless shelters and built houses with Habitat for Humanity. Valley View also has a strong relationship with H.I.S. BridgeBuilders, a 10-year-old Dallas organization devoted to transforming "cities for Jesus Christ through the revival of its people, the reconciliation of communities, the renewal of neighborhoods." With BridgeBuilders, Valley View offers GED classes and eye-care clinics for low-income residents of south Dallas. If Valley View is an index of Miers' convictions, we should assume not only that she's anti-abortion (as her supporters have said), but that she also cares about America's urban poor.

Valley View is representative of American evangelicalism in another way. It's undergoing a ritual exercise in Protestant church life: It's splitting.

In March 2004, Barry McCarty was named Valley View's "preaching minister." Under his leadership, the church began to shake things up a bit, in part to attract new younger members. Likely a church in your neighborhood has done the same thing in recent years, trading its organ for a guitar, tossing out some of the 18^th- and 19^th-century tunes and opting for what is euphemistically known as "praise music."

At Valley View, these stylistic changes didn't sit well with all of the congregants. This summer, 100 people left the church, led by Ron Key, who had been a pastor there for 30 years. Among the walkers was Nathan Hecht, Miers' frequent defender. Hecht recently resigned from his position of elder at Valley View (though you can still find his elder page online). Key's group—which reportedly voted Sunday to be called Cornerstone Christian Church—is meeting at a Doubletree Hotel in north Dallas. Last Sunday, with Hecht at the piano, the Cornerstoners got to sing their old favorites, like the staple "What A Friend We Have in Jesus."

It's not clear where Miers will cast her ecclesial chips. Last Sunday she went to the Doubletree for worship, but she has not said she plans to leave Valley View. Whether she stays at Valley View or goes with the breakaway group won't reveal much about Miers' political views, though. Cornerstone will likely prove to be, like Valley View, a representative evangelical church: Republican-leaning but not entirely so; concerned about abortion but also about poverty; and perhaps more exercised about prosaic matters like hymn selection than about national politics.

Correction, Oct. 17, 2005: This article originally inaccurately identified Marvin Olasky as the founder of World. Return to the corrected sentence.

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Fundamentalists get their name from a series of pamphlets published between 1910 and 1915, which laid out theological tenets that were "fundamental" to Christian belief, including the virgin birth of Christ and the inerrancy of Scripture.

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The term "born-again" comes from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus says, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."

Lauren F. Winner is the author of Girl Meets God and Real Sex.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128077/

 moneybox
Green Is Good
Corporations finally learn that energy conservation is great for profits.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005, at 2:03 PM PT

Wal-Mart has a nasty habit of stepping on its own good news. Yesterday, CEO Leo Scott gave a visionary speech. He said Wal-Mart would become a better citizen. He said it would offer more accessible health care to its employees. He urged Congress to boost the minimum wage. Then today, the New York Times unearthed a memo in which an executive suggested ways to reduce employee benefit costs, in part by avoiding hiring workers who might get sick.

But the most surprising stuff in Scott's speech had to do with environmental issues. Scott pledged that Wal-Mart would reduce energy use in stores, increase the fuel efficiency of Wal-Mart's vast truck fleet, and generally figure out ways for the big boxes to make a smaller environmental impact.

It's tempting to dismiss such a corporate pledge as a cynical public relations effort, like BP's feel-good-but-misleading Beyond Petroleum campaign, or as a savvy exercise to appeal to the upscale customers Wal-Mart covets. But what it really showed is how supremely out of it Scott and his Wal-Mart colleagues have been for the last few years and how they've strayed from founder Sam Walton's legendary cheapness.

For all that we are buying Priuses and installing extra layers of home insulation, it is giant corporations like Wal-Mart that have the most to gain by being more energy-efficient. That's the case today, when energy prices are high. But it's also been the case for the last 30 years. The intensity of energy use may differ across industries. Chemical manufacturers use much more energy than software companies. But energy is a huge chunk of operating costs for all businesses, from airlines to department stores to pencil factories to restaurants. Worse, when energy prices fluctuate beyond the control of management, they can wreak havoc with the bottom line. Just ask the CEOs of the airlines, all of which have been deeply hurt by sudden spikes in fuel prices.

That's why smart managers at all kinds of companies have been thinking about how to reduce energy use for decades. Manufacturers have led the way, in part to comply with regulations that required lower emissions, but largely to improve their profitability in relentlessly competitive markets. The giant chemical company DuPont claims that in the 1990s it not only reduced greenhouse gas emissions by half (a move that won management points with environmentalists) but it "also held energy consumption flat, despite a 36 percent increase in production volume." That saved millions of dollars and won management points with a far more important constituency: shareholders.

It's nice when companies pledge to buy renewable energy. But what really makes the economy more energy-efficient over time are the boring process improvements and small-scale innovations that allow corporate America to produce more stuff with the same amount of energy. Thanks to these kinds of efforts—and to the general shift from energy-intensive manufacturing to less-energy-intensive services—the U.S. economy has become significantly more energy efficient. As this Excel file from the Energy Information Agency shows, between 1980 and 2003 the energy consumption (measured in BTUs) per dollar of gross domestic product fell 37 percent, from 15,174 to 9,521. Because the U.S. economy is less energy-intensive than it used to be, the sharp recent increases in energy prices haven't pushed us into recession—as such spikes often did in the past. All of which makes the derogatory comments Dick Cheney made about energy conservation seem all the more stupid.

Now energy-efficiency is migrating from manufacturing to service companies. Hilton Hotels has installed an efficient lighting program in rooms and asks customers if they'd like to forgo having their sheets washed daily, a move that saves water—and the energy used to power washing machines. The Loews Hotels chain is installing heat sensors to reduce heating and cooling costs. Building owners are looking into green roofs. The Solaire, an apartment building in New York City, comes with all sorts of eco-friendly bells and whistles. Toyota's marketing division in Southern California saves money by generating 20 percent of its own electricity with a gigantic array of solar panels. Federal Express is developing its own hybrid vehicles.

PR moves? Absolutely. But all these image-enhancing schemes either reduce—or have the potential to reduce—operating costs. And given a choice of two companies with similar businesses and business models, wouldn't you rather invest in the one that is making extra efforts to reduce one of its major costs?

What's amazing is that Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, and a company that invests gazillions in logistics and technology, didn't pick up on this sooner. Lee Scott yesterday proclaimed that "being a good steward of the environment and in our communities, and being an efficient and profitable business, are not mutually exclusive. In fact they are one in the same."

In a business of small margins and huge volumes, even marginal changes can have a significant impact on the bottom line. Think about how much electricity Wal-Mart uses throughout its 5,500 stores every day. Reducing the amount used by even a few percentage points would yield significant returns. Wal-Mart's truck fleet gets about 6.5 miles per gallon. "At today's prices, if we improve our fleet fuel mileage by just one mile per gallon, we can save over $52 million a year," Scott noted. That's why the company is also working on a futuristic truck. He also pointed to a prototype green store in McKinney, Texas, that is simultaneously attracting customers and using 10 percent less energy than a nearby Super Center.

Wal-Mart's stock hasn't budged an inch so far this decade, in part because investors have lost faith in the ability of the post-Sam Walton regime to continue to squeeze greater profits out of highly efficient operations. So far, Scott and his team have sought efficiency largely by clamping down on labor and benefit costs and by ordering more and more goods from China. But those efforts have stirred up a backlash. If Scott & Co. start devoting their considerable brains and resources to clamping down on energy costs, it would finally make yuppie Wal-Mart skeptics happy. More important, it might have the same effect on long-suffering shareholders.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

 

reel time
Cold, With a Chance of Angst
In The Weather Man, Nicolas Cage delivers a bleak forecast.
By David Edelstein
Posted Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005, at 3:35 PM PT

Nicolas Cage couldn't have found a more natural fit than David Spritz, the title character of The Weather Man (Paramount). Cage is a very entertaining actor, but he's not much of an inter-actor. A showboater who lovingly cultivates his own idiosyncracies (I once called him a "role stylist"), he gravitates to solipsists—men who are emotionally at sea and find themselves, at a crucial juncture in their lives, reaching out forlornly through the fog. That's certainly the case with Spritz, who changed his name from "Spritzel" at his TV station's request (a lot of weathermen adopt cute meteorological names like "Storm") and feels shallow and ridiculous in his new persona—especially when passers-by repeat his stupid catchphrases or inexplicably bombard him with Slurpees or Big Gulps.

Spritz is having one of the most naked existential crises I've seen in a movie—and, folks, I've seen 'em all. In his state of chaos, he can't get anywhere near the wavelength of his heavy daughter (Gemmenne de la Pena) or pothead son (Nicholas Hoult), both of whom are rapidly approaching their own crisis points. He wants desperately to get back with his ex-wife, Noreen (Hope Davis), but she's fed up with his self-centered spaciness: She doesn't trust him to take care of her—rightly. And his father, Robert Spritzel (Michael Caine), a famous novelist, has just been diagnosed with lymphoma, and uses the occasion to remind his son, again and again, that it's time to become a responsible adult.

Steven Conrad's script is—with the exception of one subplot—superb. He makes David's narration wry and extremely funny without mitigating the film's essential bleakness, and the squirm scenes aren't reflexive, the way they are (this year, especially) in Curb Your Enthusiasm. The embarrassments come from David's wildly imperfect stabs at expressing his true feelings—his behavior in stark contrast to the gravity of his father, a miracle of self-discipline and centeredness. (Despite a spotty American accent—Why do English actors playing Yanks have to hit those "r's" so harrrd?—Caine does it again: His gravity and self-containment are perfect.)

The one grace note in this symphony of despair is that Cage's Spritz is terrific on television. True, he's not a meteorologist, but we can see (on omnipresent monitors) that he's a master at engaging the viewer's eye: It makes sense that he's a finalist for a gig on a national morning show. But reading the weather comes easily to David; it doesn't stretch him. He knows his talent is minor and disposable—he even likens it to fast food. (A fast-food motif runs through the film, with key scenes taking place around Arby's, Wendy's, and Starbucks.) He can't chuck his dreams of becoming a novelist like his dad—or of doing something, anything, more meaningful. The movie builds to an unusually double-edged epiphany, a downbeat variation on "accept who you are." It's finally about chucking your dreams, if for no other reason than to help you make peace with the real world—and maybe (although this isn't spelled out) to be a good father and husband.

The Weather Man is a fine movie, beautifully acted, but it isn't easy to love—or to watch. It's a parade of miseries, made even more miserable by Gore Verbinski's direction. Best known for Pirates of the Caribbean and The Ring, Verbinski is a skilled and thoughtful filmmaker, but he tends to come up with one big visual idea and stick to it. The movie takes place in a snowy Chicago, and there isn't a smidge of red or green in sight. The palette of the cinematographer Phedon Papamichael is all white and gray and ice blue, with droning ambient music (by Hans Zimmer). And apart from Spritz's slouch, the screen is full of hard lines—bare straight trees, faceless skyscrapers, metal desks, and glass partitions.

The film is so perfectly worked out that it's suffocating. When David became obsessed with archery, my Metaphor Meter began to click: Archery makes physical the idea that David is trying to find his focus, to straighten himself out in a universe of swirling winds and unpredictible currents. And Cage is a little suffocating, too: Good as he is at lurching around with his eyes shocked open and arms spread beseechingly, he's too familiar a spectacle. As always, the Cage stands alone.

Now for that unfortunate subplot that I mentioned above—which is probably a spoiler: When David's teenage son is wooed and then accosted by a creepy pedophile drug counselor (Gil Bellows), the way this absent father proves himself is by beating the guy up.

Let me be clear: I have no moral problem with beating up pedophiles. I would like to beat up one myself. In fact, life would be simpler if we could all prove our worth and devotion to our loved ones by finding predatory pedophiles to beat up. Thank heaven there aren't enough of them to go around—except in movies, where they slither in on cue to demonstrate how righteous violence has a way of cutting cleanly through spiritual and interpersonal tangles. The beat-up-the-pedophile bit belongs in a different kind of film, in which the characters aren't so black-and-white and the resolutions so tidy. Which means it will probably be the multiplex audience's favorite scene… 3:33 p.m. PT

David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at slatemovies@slate.com.

 

politics
What Will They Do Without Karl?
If Bush's Brain is removed, it's gonna hurt.
By John Dickerson
Posted Friday, Oct. 14, 2005, at 3:11 PM PT

What's going to happen to Karl? That question was being asked in the White House and throughout Washington today as the president's top political adviser appeared for a fourth time before the grand jury in the CIA leak probe. That he answered questions for four and a half hours only increased speculation that Rove might be the target of an indictment when Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald wraps up his work later this month. If he is indicted, it is almost certain that the man sometimes called Bush's Brain will have to resign. White House officials will not talk about the case but do not challenge the logical notion that Chief of Staff Andy Card is already thinking through how to fill Rove's shoes. Card can shuffle around his duties into different organizational boxes, but it won't do much good. Rove can't be replaced. His departure would create a "black hole," says one official who works with Rove closely. "He's irreplaceable." Here are the five ways a Rove departure would hurt the Bush White House most:

1. Repairing the Right. George Bush must heal his breach with conservatives over his nomination of Harriet Miers. If anyone knows the road back to reconciliation, it's Rove, who is Bush's primary ambassador to them. Rove wasn't able to hypnotize the president's base into supporting the president's pick, but given how opaque Miers is, that was a near impossibility. However, Rove does know what Miers can say that will send soothing signals to that constituency. That might relieve the political pressure enough to allow GOP senators to rally around her. After Miers is confirmed or rejected, Rove could call on his lifetime of experience working with the leaders of various GOP factions to develop a program that might placate them. His many years in direct-mail advertising also taught Rove how to appeal directly to the conservative base—something no one else around Bush understands as deeply.

2. Afternoons With Turd Blossom. President Bush has relied on Karl for 25 years. They've won two gubernatorial races and two presidential contests together. The elections are over, but the contests aren't: Bush trusts Karl more than any other adviser about what political tactics are necessary to pass legislation and push whatever is left of his second-term agenda. Rove knows the pulse of the country and the political pulse in Washington among politicians and interest groups and lobbyists. Other advisers make the same study, but Bush doesn't have the same instinctive trust in their judgments. Rove also thinks for his boss, anticipating what the president will want before Bush has even opened his briefing book. Remove Rove as filter and there are likely to be many more instances when Bush sternly asks aides: "Is this something you want to be wasting the president's time with?" And Bush will no doubt miss his whipping boy. For all his power, Rove is often the target of Bush's ire, which is how he earned the Bush nickname "Turd Blossom." The president chews him out because he knows Rove will snap into action and "get after it," as Bush likes to put it.

3. Whack by Proxy. When a senator or Cabinet official gets a call from Karl Rove, he makes time to take it. Only Dick Cheney has more throw-weight as a stand-in for the president. Rove also knows that Washington shiatsu requires finesse as well as power. He knows where the political pressure points are found: what member needs what program in his district; what staffer can undermine the efforts of a recalcitrant Cabinet official, and which lobbyist needs to be invited to the Christmas party.

4. BlackBerry Boy. Though Rove has been distracted, a few of his colleagues wouldn't mind if he were a little more so. He still sends BlackBerry messages at a thumb-spraining pace. Rove is in the middle of every important West Wing decision: where the president goes, what he says, and how he says it. In addition to his official meetings and duties, he darts off schedule to put out little fires. Yesterday Rove was zipping out e-mails prompting aides to respond more quickly and forcefully after Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid attacked the White House on its failures in Iraq. And he beat back chatter that Bush might withdraw the Miers nomination by chatting with conservative blogger Hugh Hewitt.

5. 2006. George Bush and Karl Rove came to Washington in 2000 to launch not only a presidency but a Republican revolution that would keep the GOP in power for a generation. During the off-year election in 2002, the two gambled by sending Bush to campaign in close races. It worked: They picked up congressional seats, reversing the historical trend that the party in control of the White House loses seats in its first midterm election. Now the Bush-Rove dream is in big trouble. The president's approval ratings are at their lowest level, and a recent poll showed that by 48 percent to 38 percent of Americans would prefer that Democrats control Congress.

Now, Republicans don't need Rove to do everything. A lot of the infrastructure of campaigning is already being handled by his acolytes and disciples. But late in the cycle, when a fingertip feel for which races could use more of the president's face time or scarce GOP money, Rove's experience and intuition would be crucial. Depending on what Patrick Fitzgerald is thinking right now, they may or not be available.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

moneybox
Greenspan's Successor
Who will fill the Fed chairman's shoes?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, Oct. 14, 2005, at 1:00 PM PT

As Alan Greenspan's 18-year tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board enters its final months, speculation is growing as to whom President Bush will nominate to succeed him. The crowds at Intrade are betting on Ben Bernanke, current chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Asked to rank potential nominees, economists polled by the Wall Street Journal gave the highest marks to Bernanke and longtime Greenspan understudy Donald Kohn, a member of the Fed's Board of Governors (the Economist also believes Kohn is "the best choice"). Harvard eminence Martin Feldstein and Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson followed close behind in the Journal poll. Glenn Hubbard, the former Bush economic adviser who is now the dean at Columbia University's business school, is also in the mix.

All the above have great credentials. And while it's impossible to say how global capital markets would react to any appointment, it's a safe bet that they could easily digest any of these individuals. Unlike so many other important federal appointments that affect economics—to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Supreme Court, the Treasury Department—there aren't fundamental disagreements about the nature of this job. There's a broad consensus among the elite, policy-minded economists that the chairman must fight inflation.

But there's no such consensus about fiscal policy. And ironically, Bush may be more focused on his nominee's attitudes toward fiscal policy than on the nominee's monetary policy. In the next few years, as Washington faces some truly monumental and uncomfortable choices about taxes, spending, and deficits, the Federal Reserve chairman could play a crucial role.

In theory, there's a neat division of labor at the federal level between fiscal policy (taxing and spending decisions) and monetary policy (decisions about short-term interest rates). The executive branch and legislative branch are responsible for fiscal policy, and the Fed is responsible for monetary policy. But that doesn't stop one group from trying to influence the other. The administration of Bush the Elder publicly complained that interest rates were too high in the early 1990s. And Greenspan emerged as an important voice in fiscal policy, convincing Robert Rubin and other Clintonites of the necessity to reduce deficits, for example. In recent years, Greenspan squandered a big chunk of his fiscal credibility by unambiguously supporting the Bush tax cuts even as deficits skyrocketed. Nonetheless, when he goes before Congress, Greenspan gets pressed by Republicans to come out in favor of tax cuts, and Democrats get on him to warn about the danger of deficits. And the markets listen to what he says. As a result, both sides want—and need—the Fed's imprimatur on their preferred policies.

The Fed chairmanship carries a four-year term. So, whoever fills Greenspan's well-worn chair in January 2006 will be running the show at least through the end of 2009. As such, the next Fed head will remain in that role for years after Bush has retired to Crawford. More important, the candidate Bush names now will be in charge when the Republican fiscal policy of the past five years starts to unwind. Remember, virtually all the tax cuts passed in recent years were designed to be temporary. The dividend and capital-gains tax cuts expire in 2008. The marginal-income-tax rate reductions expire at the end of 2010. At the same time, Bush and Congress have expanded government massively—a new prescription-drug entitlement in Medicare, pork-laden transportation bills, hundreds of billions of dollars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan—while doing nothing to deal with approaching debacles in Medicare and Social Security. Meanwhile, the Alternative Minimum Tax ensnares increasingly larger numbers of Americans each year.

As Democrats and Republicans in Congress seek to sort out these messes, they'll look to the Federal Reserve chairman for succor. So, the biggest danger for Bush is not that the next Fed chairman will be lax when it comes to fighting inflation. It's that he will use his Congressional testimony or his public speeches to speak honestly about the implications of the fiscal policy, to note that the pledges to reduce deficits and make tax cuts permanent are mutually exclusive, or to argue that the stock market can't magically cure Social Security's long-term imbalance.

Thus considered, it behooves Bush to choose the candidate least likely to speak out. Someone who, when push comes to shove, will go with partisan instincts over academic leanings and whose willingness to speak truth to power goes only so far. From this perspective, many of the potential appointees are problematic, given Bush's Manichean worldview. Ferguson was appointed by Clinton. Kohn is reportedly a Democrat. Bernanke doesn't have much of a public record when it comes to deficits, and he's a latecomer to the Bush White House. Feldstein? He's been a big supporter of Bush policies in recent years, as his writings show. But he wrote in the Financial Times in 2003 that "persistent budget deficits crowd out investment and thus reduce long-term growth." What's more, he has a troubling history of being willing to criticize his fellow Republicans over deficits, as he did in the 1980s. And none of these guys has any professional skin in the game—they were all spectators to the fiscal train wreck.

If you're Bush, you need someone who has a first-rate economic mind but the soul of a political hack. You need someone who was intimately involved in the selling of the fiscal policy in the first place and who will go to great lengths to defend it. You need someone who can argue in a textbook that deficits influence interest rates and then argue as a White House adviser that they don't—and still maintain an academic reputation. You need someone who campaigned hard for you in 2004. In other words, you need the guy Chris Suellentrop dubbed a "first-rate economist, tax-cut champion, presidential Yes Man." President Bush, you need Glenn Hubbard.

Bush recently pledged that his Fed appointee would rise above politics. "It's this independence of the Fed that gives people—not only here in America but the world—confidence," said Bush. But the Supreme Court is supposed to be an independent branch of government. And Bush didn't think twice about putting his personal lawyer there to protect his policies and look after his legacy. Bush and Hubbard aren't particularly close. There are no anecdotes of Hubbard clearing brush in Crawford or writing mash notes. But if the guy who did Bush's taxes in the 1980s wasn't available for the Fed, Glenn Hubbard may be the next best choice.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

 

 

 October 23, 2005

The Way We Live Now

Beyond Human

By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

Many of the fans milling into this year's postseason baseball games have been wearing authentic major league uniforms, with GUERRERO, say, or OSWALT, stitched on the back. True, society has traditionally encouraged kids to fantasize about what they'll be as adults. But most of the people I've seen in $200 regulation shirts are adults. What they're fantasizing about is an alternative adult identity for themselves.

Why do they do this? The literary critic Paul Fussell once speculated that wearers of "legible clothing" like T-shirts were merely losers trying to associate themselves with a success, whether it be a product (Valvoline) or an institution (The New York Review of Books). A conservative view held that dressing like a child meant shirking the responsibilities of adulthood. It was a subset of dressing like a slob. But these explanations do not cover the ballpark people or (to take a similar phenomenon) those weekend bicyclists in their expensive pretend-racer costumes, with European team logos and company trademarks. The message in their clothing is aimed not at others but at themselves. It is a do-it-yourself virtual reality.

Abandoning your own world for a made-up one is an ever larger part of adult life. For the futurist Ray Kurzweil, this is only the beginning. According to his new book "The Singularity Is Near," we are approaching the age of "full-immersion virtual-reality." Thanks to innovations in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics, you'll be able to design your own mental habitat. You'll be able to sleep with your favorite movie star - in your head. (It is not lost on Kurzweil that you can already do that, but he insists it will be really, really realistic.) Those same technologies will help us "overcome our genetic heritage," live longer and become smarter. We'll learn how brains operate and devise computers that function like them. Then the barrier between our minds and our computers will disappear. The part of our memory that is literally downloaded will grow until "the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate."

But this raises questions: What will then be the point of unenhanced human beings? And what will become of our relations to one another? A willingness to run head-on at these moral-technological issues has made the French novelist Michel Houellebecq one of Europe's best-selling writers and arguably its most important. His "Elementary Particles" (2000), set in the year 2079, recounts the near-total extinction of ordinary human beings. His new novel, "The Possibility of an Island," due out in the United States next spring, describes the triumph of a cult that believes man was created by nondivine extraterrestrials and sees genetic engineering as a path to "immortality."

The novel cuts between a sex-obsessed comedian, Daniel1, and two of his enhanced clones, Daniel24 and Daniel25. It would not surprise Houellebecq that Kurzweil, like other technological optimists, should use sex to sell his utopia. For Houellebecq, the important line the cult crosses is not a scientific but an anthropological one. By making credible promises of longevity and sex, it manages to elevate materialism (more specifically, consumerism) into a religion. Daniel1's girlfriend, the editor of a magazine called Lolita, explains, "What we're trying to create is an artificial humanity, a frivolous one, that will never again be capable of seriousness or humor, that will spend its life in an ever more desperate quest for fun and sex - a generation of absolute kids."

But something gets left out of sex when it is idealized, marketed, venerated or souped up: other people. Regardless of whether your girlfriend can handle your sleeping (virtually) with Angelina Jolie, it is very likely you'll find the hard work of maintaining a relationship less rewarding when so many starlets beckon. Americans may be surprised that Houellebecq attributes the bon mot about masturbation being sex with someone you love not to Woody Allen but to either Keith Richards or Jacques Lacan. But whatever its source, the narrator Daniel25 views it as one of the more profound insights of our time.

Human interactions of all kinds, especially those that involve caring for others, appear less and less worth the trouble. Houellebecq is fascinated by young couples who have pets instead of children, and by the French heat wave of 2003, which killed thousands of senior citizens who were forgotten by their vacationing children and abandoned by their vacationing doctors. Daniel1 mocks the newspaper headline "Scenes Unworthy of a Modern Country." In his view, those scenes were proof that France was a modern country. "Only an authentically modern country," he insists, "was capable of treating old people like outright garbage."

If we treat our fellow humans this way, why should we expect posthumans to care for us any better? We shouldn't. In the novel, when an acolyte witnesses a murder that, if revealed, could derail the cult's DNA experiments, the chief geneticist orders her thrown from a cliff. He feels no shame, nor does the narrator see any reason why he should. "What he was trying to do," Daniel1 writes, "was to create a new species, and this species wouldn't have any more moral obligation toward humans than humans have toward lizards."

In his recent book, "Radical Evolution," Joel Garreau suggests a "Shakespeare test" to determine whether Prozac or cloning or full-immersion virtual reality robs us of our humanity: would the user of these innovations be recognizable to Shakespeare? Houellebecq suggests that the answer is tipping toward No. "Nothing was left now," Daniel25 notes, "of those literary and artistic works that humanity had been so proud of; the themes that gave rise to them had lost all relevance, their emotional power had evaporated."

Many Westerners looking to the future think they're about to attain the prize of a fantasy-filled high-tech life that lasts until a ripe old age. Houellebecq warns that second prize may be a fantasy-filled high-tech life that lasts forever.

Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about Turkey.

Parents Fret That Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up

By MIREYA NAVARRO

KATHERINE KELIHER, 9, of Lakeville, Minn., could sleep an extra hour every weekday morning if she wanted to. But she would rather get up early, sit down at her computer and spend that time trading instant messages with her best friends, five girls she will soon see at school.

"We just talk about, like, 'What are you going to do today?' and stuff like that," Katherine said.

Her mother, Judy Keliher, says she isn't looking to deprive Katherine of her messaging access. "For fourth graders this is critical," she said, understanding that video games, cellphones, iPods and other high-tech gear are just part of growing up in a digital world. But Ms. Keliher is concerned about the amount of time her children, including a son, Matthew, 14, spend there.

So she is asserting some control. She says she will allow only one computer in the house and limits Matthew's and Katherine's screen time each night. "I don't like them to be home and be lazy, not at the expense of doing other things that need to get done," said Ms. Keliher, 43, who is divorced and works full time as the manager of a hardware store. "I just put it into the whole scope of a healthy lifestyle."

In interviews and surveys many parents say that their children spend too much time in front of computers and on cellphones. Some parents worry that long, sedentary hours spent at a computer may lead to weight gain, or that an excess of instant and text messaging comes at the expense of learning face-to-face social skills. Some complain of having to compete for their childrens' attention more than ever.

A report on teenagers and technology released this summer by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that teenagers' use of computers has increased significantly. More than half of teenage Internet users go online daily, up from 42 percent in 2000, the report said; 81 percent of those users play video games, up from 52 percent.

Instant messaging has become "the digital communication backbone of teens' daily lives," used by 75 percent of online teenagers, according to the Pew report. "Parents are really struggling with this," said David Walsh, the president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, a nonprofit educational organization in Minneapolis that began a program this year to help families reduce screen time and increase physical activity. "As the gadgets keep evolving, they keep consuming more and more of our kids' time. Our kids need a balanced diet of activity, and the problem is that it's getting out of balance. I don't think as a society we're dealing with it yet."

Technological advances have produced generational conflicts before, of course, whether the gadget was a rabbit-ear television set, a transistor radio or a personal computer. The young would find the latest thing exciting and freeing. Parents would worry that it was distracting and cramping academic and social development. So it goes today. Only now it is not a single high-tech wonder that concerns parents but a seemingly constant and ever-more-sophisticated tide of them.

As new technological devices beckon - Apple recently rolled out an iPod that can play video - young people are not necessarily shedding old media. A survey of 8- to 18-year-olds by the Kaiser Family Foundation this year found that the total amount of media content young people are exposed to each day has gone up by more than one hour over the past five years, to eight and a half hours.

But because they are multitasking, young people are packing that content into an average of six and a half hours a day, including three hours watching television, nearly two hours listening to music, more than an hour on the computer outside of homework (more than double the average of 27 minutes in 1999) and just under an hour playing video games.

Neither the Kaiser nor the Pew report found evidence of impending doom in all that exposure. The Pew report noted, for example, that despite their great affection for technology, teenagers still spent somewhat more time socializing with friends in person than on the telephone or through e-mail or instant and text messaging. And as teenagers get older, the report found, they tend to be less interested in diversions like online games and more inclined to use the Web for information.

"It's not something I think is a crisis," said Elizabeth Hartigan, the managing editor of L.A. Youth, a newspaper and Web site for high school students in Los Angeles. "Teen pregnancy is a crisis."

For a great number of young people, Ms. Hartigan said, high-tech gear was not an issue because their families can't afford much beyond a television set. Others are just not that interested. "Some kids get really into it, but some kids are obsessed with fashions or boyfriends or cars," she said.

Ariel Edwards-Levy, 16, a staff writer with L.A. Youth, agreed that computer use is "a sedentary activity, and if you let yourself be obsessive, it's an issue."

"But some parents don't understand that it's a different medium," she said. "It's mostly just a tool, and it can be used very well. The resources online are amazing. You can meet people and reconnect with people."

Many parents say they are limiting screen time, checking their children's Web-surfing histories and using filters to block objectionable material. Another strategy is to keep only one computer in the house and to place it in a common area, like the family room, better to monitor children's online habits.

Paula Hagan Bennett, a lawyer from the San Francisco Bay area, says she uses a variety of methods to manage how and when her four boys - ages 16, 14, 12 and 5 - are connected. For the two older boys that means controlling the use of their cellphones. "It's not for them to be chattering," said Ms. Bennett, 48, who insists that calls are for contacting parents, not friends, and should last no longer than three minutes.

For the 12-year-old it means limiting computer screen time and disabling the instant messaging function. He was unhappy about it, she said, and had no trouble reinstalling it when she wasn't looking. (Ms. Bennett prevailed.) But she said she views instant messaging as she does most cellphone conversations among young people.

"It's a waste of time," she said, "because most of the time they're talking about nothing." As for her 5-year-old, technology is not yet an issue, but Ms. Bennett said that in affluent Marin County, where she lives, she has seen young children watching "Barney and Friends" on portable DVD players in the backs of cars.

Linda Folsom, a media producer for the Walt Disney Company theme parks, decided to stick to a "motherly nag mode" rather than impose restrictions on her 14-year-old daughter, Alana, who "tends to be constantly on the I.M.," Ms. Folsom said.

While doing homework Alana will write a paragraph, respond to an instant message, then go back to her schoolwork, her mother said. "She says the I.M. is related to the project she's working on," Ms. Folsom said. "But if I hear giggling, I put in a comment: 'It doesn't sound like homework to me.' "

But Ms. Folsom, 46, and her husband, Scott, 57, a PTA leader in Los Angeles, said they had no reason to crack down on Alana because she earned good grades and behaved well. But they have insisted that she eat dinner with them and that she practice her clarinet and play soccer.

Alana sees her instant chatting as harmless. "It's just rambling," she said. And it is fun to be able to have a five-way chat with friends, she said. But she said she knows when it's time to type the message: "I'm doing homework. Leave me alone."

"If it starts controlling you rather than you controlling it, that's when you stop," Alana said.

Ms. Folsom said she felt that the technology was robbing her of her daughter's company more and more. There was a time, she said, when father, mother and child would listen to the same music in the car. "Now she plays the iPod, and she's in her own music world," Ms. Folsom said.

David Levy, a University of Washington professor who studies high-tech communications and quality of life, acknowledges that the young have become adept at managing multiple sources of information at once, but he questions whether the ability to multitask has curbed their "ability to focus on a single thing, the ability to be silent and still inside, basically the ability to be unplugged and content."

"That's true for the whole culture," he said. "Most adults have a hard time doing that, too. What we're losing is the contemplative dimension of life. For our sanity, we need to cultivate that."

Some parents seem to be getting that message. When the National Institute on Media and the Family went looking for a few hundred families in Minnesota and Iowa to participate in a research project this year that calls for reducing the amount of time third to fifth graders spend in front of a computer or television screen, 1,300 families signed up.

Ms. Keliher, a Lakeville school board member, is one of the participants. She thought the project would help 9-year-old Katherine "acknowledge the amount of time she spends on the screen."

But as parents try to monitor their children's habits, some said there is also a need to be realistic. "We as parents tend to overreact a little bit to this," Mr. Folsom said. "This is the virtual playground. It's part of growing up."

October 21, 2005

Scientists Build Tiny Vehicles for Molecular Passengers

By BARNABY J. FEDER

Scientists at Rice University have built molecular vehicles so small that more than 20,000 of them could sit side-by-side on a human hair.

The fleet consists of nanocars, nanotrucks capable of carrying small-molecule payloads, and trimers that pivot on their three axes. All of them roll on buckyballs, which are 60-atom, soccer-ball-shaped spheres of pure carbon. Each axis pivots up and down independently to allow the vehicles to negotiation atomic potholes and mounds.

The work, which was first described earlier this month in the online version of the journal Nano Letters, is the fruit of more than eight years of research led by Prof. James M. Tour into systems that could be used to build structures molecule-by-molecule.

"This is it, you can't make anything smaller to transport atoms around," Professor Tour said.

The vision of the Rice researchers, like many other specialists working in nanotechnology, is of a world where new materials can be fashioned by armies of tiny machines working in organized ranks. This so-called "bottoms up" version of manufacturing is patterned after biology and, in the view of many researchers, it could be far more efficient than current manufacturing systems.

Skeptics have said such molecular manufacturing will prove to be impractical in most cases and may pose unexpected environmental risks. But scientists working in the field almost universally dismiss visions of nanomachines proliferating into a deadly world-choking "gray goo" as popularized in Michael Crichton's novel "Prey."

Nanotechnology derives its name from the nanometer, or billionth of a meter. Nanoscale objects are tens to thousands of molecules in size. While they consist of familiar materials, the scale is so small that atomic forces affect their behavior and strange, potentially valuable traits emerge. The nanocars are immune to friction, for example, because the buckyball wheels are a single molecule that cannot be easily pulled apart into its 60 carbon atoms.

Professor Tour said the research marked the first time anyone had demonstrated nanoscale structures that roll rather than slide across a surface. The current generation of vehicles can be set in motion by heating the gold surface on which they sit to about 200 degrees Celsius. Absent any outside force, it is unpredictable whether they will move forward or backward, but once they start they will continue in that direction as long as heat is applied.

But Rice's researchers have shown that they can control the direction by applying an electrical field. They have also built a tiny light-powered motor for the devices consisting of 30 carbon atoms and a handful of sulfur atoms, Mr. Tour said. But that motor does not capture enough energy to move the devices over the gold surface because the gold molecules absorb most of the light.

The nanocars are 95 percent carbon by weight, with a smattering of hydrogen and oxygen atoms to keep them soluble during manufacturing. They are manufactured in a 20-step process similar to the way many drugs are synthesized from small molecules in closed reactors. They are then suspended in toluene gas and spun cast onto the gold surface.

Professor Tour said that he had not sought any patents on the work because he believed it would take at least a generation to overcome the many hurdles to molecular manufacturing using the technology Rice has developed.

"The patents would have expired long before you could have build a useful business," Professor Tour said.

Professor Tour has five graduate students working on the research. He said that the scanning electron microscope imaging necessary to capture the data is managed by his co-author on the Nano Letters paper, Kevin F. Kelly, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and two other graduate students.

The original research was financed by Zyvex, a nanotechnology company based in Richardson, Tex., the Welch Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Professor Tour has recently received an additional research grand from Honda of Japan.

October 23, 2005

For Some College Graduates, a Fanciful Detour (or Two) Before Their Careers Begin

By ALAN FINDER

Laurie Heckman worked as a whitewater rafting guide in Colorado. Steve Wiener has been crisscrossing the country in a large van, taking international tourists to see major cities and national parks.

Zach Carson bought a small bus, converted the engine to run on recycled vegetable oil and is touring the country promoting alternative fuels.

All are recent college graduates who intend to go on to graduate school, but not yet. Like a growing number of graduates, they are taking time away from school and the vigorous pursuit of a career. Some are looking for new experiences; others want to test potential careers or devote themselves to public service for a while; still others simply want to have a good time after the rigors of high school and college.

Career development professionals call the break the timeout or gap years, and the directors of career offices at a dozen major colleges and universities said more students are taking it than ever before. In response, the career offices have begun changing how they function.

"At some point, I'd like to do graduate school," said Mr. Carson, who graduated in May from the University of Vermont with a major in environmental studies and since then has driven 10,000 miles through 25 states in his converted bus, preaching the virtues of its vegetable-oil engine.

"But I've just finished 16 grades of school and I haven't lived yet," he said. "I think the important thing is to always be learning. And when I get to the point that I need credentials, I'll go back to school."

Career counselors at the University of Vermont first noticed about two years ago a significant increase in the number of seniors eager to take a break after graduation, saying they were not ready to commit to graduate school or a career.

"Students are saying, 'You know what, I've been working hard and I've been doing what people have told me to do for a long time,' " said Pamela K. Gardner, director of career services at Vermont. " 'What if I just play for a time?' They want to find an adventure and have a good time, but they are also thoughtfully trying to find their place in the world."

"We've always seen students do this," Ms. Gardner said, "but it's become a more common occurrence, and it's more socially acceptable now."

At Lafayette College, in Easton, Pa., many more seniors have applied for community service programs like the Peace Corps and Teach for America in the last two years. At Washington University in St. Louis; Harvard; the University of California, Los Angeles; Dartmouth; and the University of Colorado, counselors said that over the last five years or more, they have seen a larger proportion of seniors looking to take time off from the serious pursuit of their future. Most of these students work after graduation, but not at jobs that they see as part of their long-term careers.

"I tell students there is no rush here," said Linda N. Arra, the director of career services at Lafayette. "Career interests typically don't solidify until about the age of 25. All the research shows that. And yet we are asking students to think about careers pretty early in life."

Students who take a timeout are still a minority of all graduates, career counselors said, and not every counselor said the number was expanding. At Ohio State, the proportion of graduates who opt for nontraditional alternatives is small and has remained fairly steady, said Martha M. Garland, the dean of undergraduate studies.

If students choose to do something different after college, graduate and professional schools usually do not hold it against them. "Most graduate and professional schools today would prefer that a student take the time to go away, have different experiences and then come back refocused," said Bill Wright-Swadel, director of career services at Harvard College.

There are three primary reasons students seek out alternatives to traditional career-building after college, said Mark Smith, assistant vice chancellor and director of the career center at Washington University. One is simply fatigue.

"I see our students immensely involved as undergraduates," Mr. Smith said. "They are taking overloads of classes, double majors, and then they are very involved in extracurricular life. A lot of them are coming out and they are just kind of worn out."

Other students, he said, are motivated by idealism to seek out community service programs. Kathy L. Sims, director of U.C.L.A's career center, said that every year about 60 new graduates of the university go to Japan to teach English for a year.

The third motivation is to test a possible career by working in a field for few years before committing to graduate or professional school. Someone contemplating law school might work for a while in a legal office or in government.

"These are not necessarily unfocused people who are putting off launching," Mr. Wright-Swadel of Harvard said. "Often they have a plan and they have three or four things in mind that they want to experiment with."

Cultural patterns have changed, too, with fewer people getting married immediately after college and fewer taking jobs with companies at which they expect to work for their entire careers, said Lisa Severy, director of career services at the University of Colorado.

The mind-set for many students is "you get your degree and then you think about what you might want to do," she said.

Experience Inc., a Boston-based company that provides information about jobs and employers to students at 3,800 universities through an Internet service, recently prepared a questionnaire for subscribers on their choices after graduation. More than 2,000 seniors and recent graduates filled out the questionnaire online over four days in mid-September, and the results appeared to bolster what career counselors have been observing.

Most of those who responded said they were considering taking a year off after graduating or were actually doing so. Only a small portion said they wanted to do community service, with most saying that they either wanted time to decide on a career or wanted to pursue new experiences to build their résumés.

These shifts in attitudes have prompted many college career centers to reconsider how they interact with students. At Vermont, the career services office is trying to change its image. "We're not going to be the place where you come in with a tie and talk to some corporation," said Ms. Gardner, the director.

The office organized a new event for seniors last year in the student center, where tables offering spin art and massages were interspersed with those that had advice on how to write a résumé. Vermont has also added a counselor who specializes in nonprofit organizations.

Many university career officials also said they are working much more often with alumni. Some institutions provide free guidance to alumni, while others charge a fee.

Ms. Heckman, who worked as a whitewater rafting guide after graduating from Vermont last spring, said she expects to seek help eventually from the university's career office. But first she plans to spend a year or more in Colorado.

After rafting season ended in August, she moved to Durango, where she works as a hostess and buses tables at a brewery and volunteers at a nature center. Having majored in environmental studies and economics, she hopes to find a job "that's more environmentally oriented," so she can gain experience before applying to graduate school.

"I think of this year as just kind of gaining experience," Ms. Heckman, 22, said. "Obviously, I don't want to bus tables forever. It's kind of nice having a year off, having fun. I hope to do a lot of skiing this winter."

Mr. Wiener, who has been leading tour groups through the United States and Canada since June, has had a variety of experiences since graduating from U.C.L.A. in 2002 with a major in political science. He worked for a few months in Dublin and then spent two years as a corporate recruiter in Oakland and San Francisco, where he learned, he said, that the business world was not for him.

He took the touring job to see the country and to have an adventure. Mr. Wiener, who is 25, recently completed a three-week tour of the Southwest. It will probably be his last.

"I decided I did this, I had my fun," he said. "It's time for public policy graduate school."

October 21, 2005

Former Powell Aide Says Bush Policy Is Run by 'Cabal'

By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff has offered a remarkably blunt criticism of the administration he served, saying that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.

The comments came in a speech Wednesday by Lawrence Wilkerson, who worked for Mr. Powell at the State Department from 2001 to early 2005. Speaking to the New America Foundation, an independent public-policy institute in Washington, Mr. Wilkerson suggested that secrecy, arrogance and internal feuding had taken a heavy toll in the Bush administration, skewing its policies and undercutting its ability to handle crises.

"I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita - and I could go on back," he said. "We haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time."

Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that "if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush's first term "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations" and "perturbations."

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues," he said.

The former aide referred to Mr. Bush as someone who "is not versed in international relations, and not too much interested in them, either." He was far more admiring of the president's father, whom he called "one of the finest presidents we've ever had."

Mr. Wilkerson has long been considered a close confidant of Mr. Powell, but their relationship has apparently grown strained at times - including over the question of unconventional weapons in Iraq - and the former colonel said Mr. Powell did not approve of his latest public criticisms.

October 23, 2005

Colleges Protest Call to Upgrade Online Systems

By SAM DILLON and STEPHEN LABATON

The federal government, vastly extending the reach of an 11-year-old law, is requiring hundreds of universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications.

The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers. Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues.

The order, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in August and first published in the Federal Register last week, extends the provisions of a 1994 wiretap law not only to universities, but also to libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial Internet access providers.

It also applies to municipalities that provide Internet access to residents, be they rural towns or cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco, which have plans to build their own Net access networks.

So far, however, universities have been most vocal in their opposition.

The 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, requires telephone carriers to engineer their switching systems at their own cost so that federal agents can obtain easy surveillance access.

Recognizing the growth of Internet-based telephone and other communications, the order requires that organizations like universities providing Internet access also comply with the law by spring 2007.

The Justice Department requested the order last year, saying that new technologies like telephone service over the Internet were endangering law enforcement's ability to conduct wiretaps "in their fight against criminals, terrorists and spies."

Justice Department officials, who declined to comment for this article, said in their written comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission that the new requirements were necessary to keep the 1994 law "viable in the face of the monumental shift of the telecommunications industry" and to enable law enforcement to "accomplish its mission in the face of rapidly advancing technology."

The F.C.C. says it is considering whether to exempt educational institutions from some of the law's provisions, but it has not granted an extension for compliance.

Lawyers for the American Council on Education, the nation's largest association of universities and colleges, are preparing to appeal the order before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Terry W. Hartle, a senior vice president of the council, said Friday.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties group, has enlisted plaintiffs for a separate legal challenge, focusing on objections to government control over how organizations, including hundreds of private technology companies, design Internet systems, James X. Dempsey, the center's executive director, said Friday.

The universities do not question the government's right to use wiretaps to monitor terrorism or criminal suspects on college campuses, Mr. Hartle said, only the order's rapid timetable for compliance and extraordinary cost.

Technology experts retained by the schools estimated that it could cost universities at least $7 billion just to buy the Internet switches and routers necessary for compliance. That figure does not include installation or the costs of hiring and training staff to oversee the sophisticated circuitry around the clock, as the law requires, the experts said.

"This is the mother of all unfunded mandates," Mr. Hartle said.

Even the lowest estimates of compliance costs would, on average, increase annual tuition at most American universities by some $450, at a time when rising education costs are already a sore point with parents and members of Congress, Mr. Hartle said.

At New York University, for instance, the order would require the installation of thousands of new devices in more than 100 buildings around Manhattan, be they small switches in a wiring closet or large aggregation routers that pull data together from many sites and send it over the Internet, said Doug Carlson, the university's executive director of communications and computing services.

"Back of the envelope, this would cost us many millions of dollars," Mr. Carlson said.

F.C.C. officials declined to comment publicly, citing their continuing review of possible exemptions to the order.

Some government officials said they did not view compliance as overly costly for colleges because the order did not require surveillance of networks that permit students and faculty to communicate only among themselves, like intranet services. They also said the schools would be required to make their networks accessible to law enforcement only at the point where those networks connect to the outside world.

Educause, a nonprofit association of universities and other groups that has hired lawyers to prepare its own legal challenge, informed its members of the order in a Sept. 29 letter signed by Mark A. Luker, an Educause vice president.

Mr. Luker advised universities to begin planning how to comply with the order, which university officials described as an extraordinary technological challenge.

Unlike telephone service, which sends a steady electronic voice stream over a wire, the transmission of e-mail and other information on the Internet sends out data packets that are disassembled on one end of a conversation and reassembled on the other.

Universities provide hundreds of potential Internet access sites, including lounges and other areas that offer wireless service and Internet jacks in libraries, dorms, classrooms and laboratories, often dispersed through scores of buildings.

If law enforcement officials obtain a court order to monitor the Internet communications of someone at a university, the current approach is to work quietly with campus officials to single out specific sites and install the equipment needed to carry out the surveillance. This low-tech approach has worked well in the past, officials at several campuses said.

But the federal law would apply a high-tech approach, enabling law enforcement to monitor communications at campuses from remote locations at the turn of a switch.

It would require universities to re-engineer their networks so that every Net access point would send all communications not directly onto the Internet, but first to a network operations center where the data packets could be stitched together into a single package for delivery to law enforcement, university officials said.

Albert Gidari Jr., a Seattle lawyer at the firm Perkins Coie who is representing Educause, said he and other representatives of universities had been negotiating with lawyers and technology officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies since the spring about issues including what technical requirements universities would need to meet to comply with the law.

"This is a fight over whether a Buick is good enough, or do you need a Lexus?" Mr. Gidari said. "The F.B.I. is the lead agency, and they are insisting on the Lexus."

Law enforcement has only infrequently requested to monitor Internet communications anywhere, much less on university campuses or libraries, according to the Center for Democracy and Technology. In 2003, only 12 of the 1,442 state and federal wiretap orders were issued for computer communications, and the F.B.I. never argued that it had difficulty executing any of those 12 wiretaps, the center said.

"We keep asking the F.B.I., What is the problem you're trying to solve?" Mr. Dempsey said. "And they have never showed any problem with any university or any for-profit Internet access provider. The F.B.I. must demonstrate precisely why it wants to impose such an enormously disruptive and expensive burden."

Larry D. Conrad, the chief information officer at Florida State University, where more than 140 buildings are equipped for Internet access, said there were easy ways to set up Internet wiretaps.

"But the wild-eyed fear I have," Mr. Conrad said, "is that the government will rule that this all has to be automatic, anytime, which would mean I'd have to re-architect our entire campus network."

He continued, "It seems like overkill to make all these institutions spend this huge amount of money for a just-in-case kind of scenario."

The University of Illinois says it is worried about the order because it is in the second year of a $20 million upgrade of its campus network. Peter Siegel, the university's chief information officer, estimated that the new rules would require the university to buy 2,100 new devices, at a cost of an additional $13 million, to replace equipment that is brand new.

"It's like you buy a new car, and then the E.P.A. says you have to buy a new car again," Mr. Siegel said. "You'd say, 'Gee, could I just buy a new muffler?' "

October 23, 2005

What's He Really Worth?

By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN

For decades, Donald Trump, America's most effervescent rich guy, has made his wealth a matter of public discourse. But sometimes his riches are hard to find. This article was adapted from "TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald," by Timothy L. O'Brien, a reporter for The New York Times. The book, to be published on Wednesday by Warner Books, looks inside Mr. Trump's wallet.

BY 1993, with his casinos in hock, most of his real estate holdings either forfeited or stagnant and his father slipping into the fog of Alzheimer's disease, Donald Trump, at the age of 47, had run out of money. There were no funds left to keep him aloft, and as the bare-bones operation he maintained in Manhattan started to grind to a halt, he ordered Nick Ribis, the Trump Organization's president, to call his siblings and ask for a handout from their trusts. Donald needed about $10 million for his living and office expenses, but he had no collateral to provide his brother and sisters, all three of whom wanted a guarantee that he would repay them.

The Trump children's anticipated share of their father's fortune amounted to about $35 million each, and Donald's siblings demanded that he sign a promissory note pledging future distributions from his trust fund against the $10 million he wanted to borrow.

Donald got his loan, but about a year later he was almost broke again. When he went to the trough the second time, he asked his siblings for $20 million more. His brother Robert Trump, who briefly oversaw Donald's casinos before fleeing the pressure of working for him to take over their father's real estate operation, balked. Desperate to scrape some money together, Donald tasked Alan Marcus, one of his advisers, to contact his brother-in-law John Barry and see if he could intervene with Robert and his other siblings.

"John and I spoke about it a few times," Mr. Marcus told me. "In fact, we spoke about it in the conference room in Trump Tower. John then went around and addressed it with the family."

Mr. Marcus said that Mr. Barry successfully lobbied other members of the Trump clan and that another handout was arranged, with Donald agreeing again that whatever he failed to pay back would be taken out of his share of their father's estate.

"We would have literally closed down," said another former member of the Trump Organization familiar with Donald's efforts to keep the company afloat. "The key would have been in the door and there would have been no more Donald Trump. The family saved him."

Donald disagreed with this version of events. "I had zero borrowings from the estate," he told me. "I give you my word." Donald's brother, Robert, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Mr. Barry is deceased. His widow, Maryanne Trump Barry, a federal judge, said that she could not recollect any efforts to offer her brother financial help. Donald's other sister, Elizabeth, was unavailable for comment.

But Mr. Marcus and two other executives who worked closely with Donald all said the family's financial lifeline gave the developer the support he needed to get through the rough waters separating his early years of overblown, overhyped acquisitions and the later years of small, sedate deals preceding his resurrection on "The Apprentice." Both of Donald's parents died during that time, he parried with Ivana Trump in a bitter divorce battle that hinged on properly valuing his dwindling assets, he remarried and divorced again, and then he did what anyone else in his situation would do when confronted with limited options: he ran for president of the United States.

Before Donald could get to Phase 2 of his career, he had to muscle his way through the dismantling of his business empire and a thorny financial restructuring with his bankers and bond holders that left him on the precipice of personal and corporate bankruptcy. As bankers who once fell over one another to throw money at him now lined up for their share of what was left over, Donald scrambled to hang on to whatever he could while maintaining his facade as America's most savvy entrepreneur. And in terms of maintaining his popular mojo, Donald proved remarkably resilient.

"When I was in trouble in the early 90's, I went around and - you know, a lot of people couldn't believe I did this because they think I have an ego - I went around and openly told people I was worth minus $900 million," Donald recalled. "And then I was able to make a deal with the banks."

To survive a process as tortuous and unpredictable as a debt workout, however, requires a large dose of gumption. Donald had gumption in spades.

"You're out there alone. I mean, it's not fun," he advised me. "I went from being a boy wonder, boy genius, to this [expletive] guy who has nothing but problems."

Although Donald's brush with bankruptcy separated him from some of his showiest assets and from the banks whose loans had first puffed him up, his penchant for claiming billionairedom remains. To this day, he closely monitors his ranking on Forbes magazine's annual list of America's wealthiest individuals, the Forbes 400, and his ability to float above the wreckage of his financial miscues and to magically add zeroes to his bank account has ensured that he remains an object of fascination. But how much is Donald Trump really worth?

IN September 1982, with Trump Tower a year away from completion, Forbes published the Forbes 400 for the first time. (In 1918, Forbes produced a list of America's 30 richest people, but that was a one-time event.) Chock-full of anecdotes about how the rich became rich and what they did with their richly deserved riches, the Forbes 400 was financial pornography of the most voyeuristic and delicious sort.

While there was a refreshing inclusiveness about the list (Mafia treasurer Meyer Lansky made the inaugural tally, for example), some on the roster held rank upon the loosest of foundations. For those whose wealth was based on a stake in a publicly traded company, calculating their Forbes worthiness was relatively straightforward: put a value on their stock. But for those with privately held money who weren't a Rockefeller, Mellon, du Pont or Kennedy, the process of ascertaining fortunes was trickier. Forbes relied on those people to willingly fork over an honest and somewhat exact self-appraisal of their wealth.

It also turned out that some big buckaroos, understandably averse to receiving an avalanche of phone calls from charities or scamsters that would follow such publicity, loathed being on the list. Nonetheless, the Forbes 400 drew scads of attention from the moment it was published. The list became capitalism's Rosetta stone, a decoding device for divining the American Way. Even prominent economists parsed it for social truths.

"At a trivial level, it is almost impossible not to be interested in Forbes magazine's annual list of the 400 wealthiest individuals, minimum net worth $150 million, and 82 wealthiest families, minimum net worth $200 million," wrote Lester Thurow, an M.I.T. economist, in 1984. "Subconsciously, we read their biographies hoping to find the elixir that will add us to the list. While the elixir - a rich father - is to be found (all of the 82 families and 241 of the 400 wealthiest individuals inherited all or a major part of their fortunes), it doesn't help most of us to point this out to our fathers."

Professor Thurow added: "Great wealth is accumulated to acquire economic power. Wealth makes you an economic mover and shaker. Projects will happen, or not happen, depending upon your decisions. It allows you to influence the political process - elect yourself or others - and remold society in accordance with your views. It makes you an important person, courted by people inside and outside your family. Perhaps this explains why some people try to persuade Forbes that they are wealthy enough to merit inclusion."

This, then, was the dividing line: Those who were secure enough not to reveal their wealth abhorred the Forbes 400, or at least tried to avoid it; those who were less secure, needed to keep score and had their identities wrapped up in the concept of billionairedom turned the list into a white-collar fetish. For the latter group, to be off the Forbes 400 represented emotional and social exile.

Donald, paradoxically, was a loner who did not want to live in exile. He was obsessed with the Forbes list. And his propensity for inflation, matched with Forbes's aversion to hiring the sizable staff it might need to assess accurately the wealth of each of its designated 400, got Donald on the magazine's inaugural list in 1982. Forbes gave him an undefined share of a family fortune that the magazine estimated at $200 million - at a time when all Donald owned personally was a half-interest in the Grand Hyatt hotel and a share of the yet-to-be-completed Trump Tower.

Donald and the Forbes 400 were mutually reinforcing. The more Donald's verbal fortune rose, the more often he received prominent mentions in Forbes. The more often Forbes mentioned him, the more credible Donald's claim to vast wealth became. The more credible his claim to vast wealth became, the easier it was for him to get on the Forbes 400 - which became the standard that others in the news media, and apparently some of the country's biggest banks, used when judging Donald's riches.

IN some years, Donald insisted on impossibly high figures for his net worth and then, in a faux fit of complaining, settled for an estimate that Forbes convinced itself was conservative - even though it was often wildly high anyway. The one gap in this mating dance was 1990 to 1995, when Donald didn't appear on the list at all. Forbes was apparently so chastened by the $2.6 billion difference in its estimate of Donald's wealth between 1989 and 1990 that the magazine needed a six-year hiatus before it had the confidence to begin helping him inflate his verbal fortune again.

Forbes's odes to Donald and his father, Fred Trump, went like this over the years:

1982 Wealth: Share of Fred's estimated $200 million fortune. Forbes explains: "Consummate self-promoter. Building Trump Tower next to Tiffany's. Angling for Atlantic City casino." Forbes quotes Donald: " 'Man is the most vicious of animals and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.' " While Forbes estimates that the family's fortune was over $200 million, it says that "Donald claims $500 million."

1983 Wealth: Share of Fred's estimated $400 million fortune. (Author note: Observe that although 1982 to 1983 was a particularly brutal recession year, the Trump family's real estate fortune doubles.)

1984 Wealth: Fred has $200 million; Donald has $400 million.

1985 Rank: 51; Wealth: $600 million. (Donald becomes a solo Forbes 400 act; Fred disappears from the list.)

1986 Rank: 50; $700 million.

1987 Rank: 63; $850 million.

1988 Rank: 44; $1 billion.

1989 Rank: 26; $1.7 billion. (Observe that Donald's wealth has grown by $1.1 billion during a four-year period when he was borrowing huge sums to buy money-losing properties.)

1990 Dropped from the list! Forbes explains: "In 1990 the rich have been getting poorer. Trump is the most noteworthy loser. Once a billionaire, Trump's net worth may actually have dropped to zero." (That makes things clearer. Was he ever a billionaire? Maybe his net worth just stayed the same? Maybe it always had been zero?)

1991 AWOL.

1992 AWOL.

1993 AWOL. (These are the times that try men's souls. Hang in there, Donald.)

1994 AWOL.

1995 AWOL.

1996 He's back. Rank: 373; $450 million. Forbes explains: "Trump, polite but unhappy, phoning from his plane: 'You're putting me on at $450 million? I've got that much in stock market assets alone. There's 100 percent of Trump Tower, 100 percent of the new Nike store - they're paying $10 million a year in rent!' Add it all up, said Trump, and his net worth is 'in the $2 billion range, probably over $2 billion.' " (Don't worry, Donald. One year from now Forbes will help you find another easy $1 billion.)

1997 Rank: 105; $1.4 billion. Forbes explains: "Net worth was negative $900 million in 1990, but the Donald now claims to have $500 million in cash alone. Disputes our estimate. 'The real number,' he insists, 'is $3.7 billion.' "

1998 Rank: 121; $1.5 billion. Forbes explains: "Unstoppable salesman, master of hyperbole. Net worth was negative $900 million in 1990, now claims our estimate is low by a factor of three: 'The number is closer to $5 billion.' "

1999 Rank: 145; $1.6 billion. Forbes explains: "We love Donald. He returns our calls. He usually pays for lunch. He even estimates his own net worth ($4.5 billion). But no matter how hard we try, we just can't prove it."

2000 Rank: 167; $1.7 billion. Forbes explains: "In the Donald's world, worth more than $5 billion. Back on earth, worth considerably less."

2001 Rank: 110; $1.8 billion.

2002 Rank: 92; $1.9 billion.

2003 Rank: 71; $2.5 billion.

2004 Rank: 189; $2.6 billion. Forbes explains: "America's love affair with the Donald reaching impossibly new highs; his reality show, 'The Apprentice,' was prime-time television's highest-rated series last year ... After nearly defaulting on its debt obligations, Trump's gaming properties to reorganize ... No matter. For Donald, real estate is where his real wealth lies. Over 18 million square feet of prime Manhattan space."

Forbes, if not entirely skeptical of Donald, had, of course, grown accustomed to his intense lobbying. "There are a couple of guys who call and say you're low on other guys," said Peter Newcomb, a veteran editor of Forbes's rich list, "but Trump is one of the most glaring examples of someone who constantly calls about himself and says we're not only low, but low by a multiple." Mr. Newcomb said that Forbes works hard to ensure the accuracy of its data but that it also relies on information provided by those whom it surveys.

The Forbes 400, of course, has always loomed large in Donald's imagination.

"When you think of it, I've been on that list for a long time. I think they work very hard at the list," he told me. "It seems to be that they're the barometer of individual wealth. It doesn't really matter. It matters much less to me today than it mattered in the past. In the past, it probably mattered more."

Donald's verbal billions were always a topic of conversation whenever we visited. In my first conversation with him, in 1996, he brought up his billions. When Donald and I spent time together one weekend in Palm Beach, Fla., earlier this year, the subject inevitably came up. Donald had gamely and openly fielded a diverse range of questions all day, so I was curious to see where he would go when we got to money. When I popped the wealth question, he paused momentarily and scrunched his eyebrows. We had reached a crossroads. Out it came. He pursed his lips a little bit. Out it came. He blinked. Out it came, rising up from deep within him.

"I would say six [billion]. Five to six. Five to six," he said.

Hmm. The previous August he told me that his net worth was $4 billion to $5 billion. Then, later that same day that August, he said his casino holdings represented 2 percent of his wealth, which at the time gave him a net worth of about $1.7 billion. In the same day, Donald's own estimates of his wealth differed by as much as $3.3 billion. How could that happen? Was Donald living in his own private zone of wildly escalating daily inflation, a Trump Bolivia? And his $1.7 billion figure in August was well below the $2.6 billion that Forbes would credit him when it published its rich list just a couple of months later.

Now Donald was saying he was worth $5 billion to $6 billion.

"Five to six. Five to six."

And on the nightstand in my bedroom at Donald's Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago, was a glossy brochure that said he was worth $9.5 billion.

WHEN I sat down in a Trump Tower conference room one afternoon earlier this year with Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's chief financial officer, he claimed that Donald was worth about $6 billion. But the list of assets that Mr. Weisselberg quoted, all of which were valued in very inflated and optimistic terms and some of which Donald didn't own, totaled only about $5 billion. Where might the rest have been? "I'm going to go to my office and find that other billion," Mr. Weisselberg assured me.

Did he ever return? No, he never returned. His assessment of Donald's wealth is outlined in the accompanying chart.

But Mr. Weisselberg's analysis left me confused. So I asked around for guidance.

Three people with direct knowledge of Donald's finances, people who had worked closely with him for years, told me that they thought his net worth was somewhere between $150 million and $250 million. (Donald's casino holdings have recently rebounded in value, perhaps adding as much as $135 million to these estimates.) By anyone's standards, this still qualified Donald as comfortably wealthy, but none of these people thought that he was remotely close to being a billionaire.

Donald dismissed this as naysaying.

"You can go ahead and speak to guys who have 400-pound wives at home who are jealous of me, but the guys who really know me know I'm a great builder," he told me.

However illusory, it was Donald's fixation on billionaire bragging rights and real estate prowess - in addition to the financial lifeline his siblings tossed to him - that kept his mojo rising during his brush with financial extinction in the early to mid-1990's. But the Donald who emerged on the other side of his business meltdown was a financial shadow of his earlier, acquisitive, debt-laden self, and would remain so right up to the debut of "The Apprentice."

Financial turmoil, of course, didn't stop Donald from spouting. The all-time howler award for a publication taking his verbal billions at face value belonged to Playboy. In early 1990, just a month before the Taj Mahal opened in Atlantic City and began a financial slide that would take Donald's empire down with it, the magazine profiled the developer and said he had amassed "a fortune his father never dreamed possible," including "a cash hoard of $900 million" and a "geyser of $50 million a week from his hotel-casinos."

In the real world, New Jersey casino auditors estimated in public reports that as of September 1990, Donald was worth about $206 million - almost all of which was tied up in hotels, an airline, casinos and other properties that were devaluing rapidly or about to be taken away from him. Donald's cash on hand was only $17 million, and that was dissolving quickly as well.

Regulators projected Donald's 1991 income from trusts and rentals at $1.7 million, offset by $9.7 million in debt payments, $6 million in personal business expenses and $4.5 million to maintain his Trump Tower triplex and estates in Greenwich, Conn., and Palm Beach for the year - meaning that he would be about $18.5 million in the hole at the end of 1991. Regulators projected Donald's income for 1992 to sink to $748,000 and his 1993 income to drop even further, to $296,000 - with all of his debt payments and personal expenses continuing to pile up. At the end of 1993, his personal cash shortfall would amount to about $39 million and there would still be $900 million in personally guaranteed loans hanging over his head.

In the midst of all of this, Donald reached a property settlement with Ivana Trump after their divorce. According to a 1991 New Jersey regulatory report, the settlement called for Ms. Trump to get a $10 million payment, the couple's Greenwich estate, $350,000 in annual alimony, $300,000 in annual child support, a $4 million housing allowance, use of some Trump properties and a $350,000 salary for running the Plaza Hotel. Donald didn't have the $10 million to pay his ex-wife; he ended up using part of the $65 million that banks had loaned his business the prior year to pay her, according to regulators who said in their report that the payment to Ms. Trump "depleted most of Mr. Trump's personal cash."

Throughout early 1991 and into the summer, Donald helped his banks begin to dismantle his holdings so he could pay off $3.4 billion in business debt and release himself from the $900 million in personal arrears attached to that pile. Absent an overhaul, Donald would be wiped out.

The little ray of sunshine in all of this for Donald was that the real estate collapse sweeping the country in the early 1990's left banks with wads of bad loans in their coffers. They could choose to put their borrowers out of business and be left owning companies they didn't want to run, or force debtors into messy bankruptcy proceedings that would involve paying whopping legal fees and suffering through years of delays. Neither alternative appealed to the banks.

"That was sort of the bottom of the heap. Deep trouble. They could have really done a big number. There was a personal guarantee on the loan," Donald told me. "My father was a pro. My father knew, like I knew, you don't personally guarantee. So I wrote a book called 'The Art of the Deal,' which as you know is the biggest of all time. In the book, I say, 'Never personally guarantee.' "

But, Donald added, "I've told people I didn't follow my own advice."

Donald's enthusiasm for the Forbes 400 also waned during his flirtation with bankruptcy. In his sequel to "The Art of the Deal," a book called "Trump: Surviving at the Top," he offered a new take on his view of a rich list to which he no longer belonged.

"It always amazed me that people pay so much attention to Forbes magazine," wrote Donald, who always paid a lot of attention to Forbes magazine. "Every year the Forbes 400 comes out, and people talk about it as if it were a rigorously researched compilation of America's wealthiest people, instead of what it really is: a sloppy, highly arbitrary estimate of certain people's net worth."

DONALD managed to weather the slings and arrows of doubters during these lean years and hunkered down with his bankers and with his debts. As the negotiations progressed, Donald's bankers looked for every alternative they could find to bankruptcy, because none of the banks wanted to contend with the mess that would ensue if the talks collapsed. And the Trumpster kept singing a happy tune. "He was always upbeat," recalled Harvey Miller, a lawyer representing Citibank. "One thing I'll say about Donald, he was never depressed."

Unbeknownst to his creditors, Donald was just as worried about a bankruptcy as they were. He later told me that he wanted to avoid bankruptcy at all costs because he felt that it would permanently taint him as a failure or a quitter.

Sanford Morhouse, a lawyer representing Chase Manhattan bank in the Trump negotiations, said: "I did a lot of workouts in those days on behalf of Chase, with a lot of real estate developers who had similar problems, and big ones. Almost all of them, at one point or another in that era, filed for bankruptcy protection. And Donald, to his credit, did not."

Donald whittled down his mammoth personal debts by forfeiting most of what he owned. Chase Manhattan, which lent Donald the money he needed to buy the West Side yards, his biggest Manhattan parcel, forced a sale of the prized tract to Asian developers. Though Donald would claim after the yards were sold that he remained a principal owner of the site, property records did not list him as such.

According to former members of the Trump Organization, Donald did not retain any ownership of the site's real estate - the owners merely promised to give him about 30 percent of the profits once the site was completely developed or sold. Until that time, the owners kept Donald on to do what he did best: build. They gave him a modest construction fee and a management fee to oversee the development. They also allowed him to slap his name on the buildings that eventually rose on the yards because his well-known moniker allowed them to charge a premium for their condos.

Retained for his building expertise and his marquee value, Donald was a glorified landlord on the site; he no longer controlled it. (Earlier this year, the owners negotiated to sell the site without consulting Donald; terms of the prospective sale are in dispute.)

EVEN as the national real estate bubble was bursting, fresh funds began rushing onto Wall Street, fueling a historic run-up in both the stock market and initial public offerings of often barely viable companies. If you had a good story and a prominent name, it suddenly became quite easy to sell stock. And it turned out, against all odds, that investors were willing to gamble on Donald's name - even though they were getting a chief executive whose sense of his responsibilities as the steward of a publicly traded company and the guardian of other people's money was somewhat ill defined.

"Something gnawed at me, and I knew what it was - the whole head-of-a-public-company routine," Donald wrote in "Surviving," relating his previous experience as a manager of Resorts International. "Although I certainly agreed with the theory of stockholder-owned corporations and was absolutely committed to fulfilling my fiduciary duties, I personally didn't like answering to a board of directors."

In a tribute to the sucker-born-every-minute theorem, Donald managed to take two of the Trump casinos public in 1995 and 1996, at a time when he was unable to make his bank payments and was heading toward personal bankruptcy. The stock sales allowed Donald to buy the casinos back from the banks and to unload huge amounts of debt. The offering also yanked Donald out of the financial graveyard and left him with a 25 percent stake in a company he once owned entirely. Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts traded at $14 a share initially and, along with a fresh bond offering, the new company raised about $295 million.

Exactly what investors thought they might get for their Trump Hotels investment wasn't entirely clear. Donald had already demonstrated that casinos weren't his forte, and investors were buying stock in a company that was immediately larded with debts that made it difficult, if not impossible, to upgrade the operations. Even so, Trump Hotels' shares rose to about $36 in 1996, giving Donald a stake worth about $290 million. With little real estate left to speak of in Manhattan, Donald's wealth was centered on his casinos.

But in subsequent years Trump Hotels' stock price tanked. Had Donald tried to pare down some $1.8 billion in debt smothering the casino company and spruced up the operation, he might have ridden a reignited gambling boom and grown his newly seeded fortune. Instead, Trump Hotels, which never earned a profit in any year between 1995 and 2005, became Donald's private stockpile of ready cash. In 1996 alone, Trump Hotels' shares fell to $12 from $35.50. About a decade later, the New York Stock Exchange delisted the shares entirely and any kid with a quarter could buy the stock. (Trump Hotels recently reorganized as Trump Entertainment Resorts; it now carries $1.2 billion in debt, and Donald's stake in the company is worth about $135 million.)

When I interviewed Donald in 1996, he was effusive about his casinos and somehow seemed to forget that he owned relatively little Manhattan property at the time.

"Donald Trump is in two businesses," he told me. "I have this huge company that's real estate. I also have this huge company that's gambling. So I have two huge companies."

Donald continued to carve out a niche for himself in New York real estate as the manager of other people's properties. In 1994, General Electric was looking for someone to refurbish the old Gulf & Western building on Columbus Circle in Manhattan, and retained Donald. Presto, the renovated skyscraper was christened Trump International Hotel and Tower. Even though Donald didn't own the building, it later flashed across the opening credits of "The Apprentice" as if he did.

And Donald did scramble back to gain control of some other Manhattan buildings, including 40 Wall Street, which he spent about $35 million to buy and refurbish in 1996. The building has about $145 million in debt attached to it, and New York City tax assessors currently value the property at about $90 million. Donald values it at $400 million.

Donald's recent golf course ventures have produced some sterling new properties, but the values he assigns those deals appear to be hyper-inflated. Donald's Palm Beach course, for example, has about 285 members who paid $250,000 for memberships, for a total of $71.25 million. Donald borrowed about $47 million to build the course and a new clubhouse. So he banked about $24 million on the deal, before other costs. He leases the land beneath the course from Palm Beach County; he doesn't own it. But Donald carries the course on his books as an asset worth $200 million.

Forbes, in bestowing a $2.6 billion fortune on Donald in its 2004 rich list, credited him with owning 18 million square feet of Manhattan property, which certainly is an impossibility. On one occasion, Donald told me that the West Side yards, which he doesn't own, would have 10 million square feet of salable space when the site, now known as Riverside South, was completed. (Mr. Weisselberg told me, alternatively, that the site would have about five million square feet of salable space.) However measured, the yards were by far the biggest property in Donald's former Manhattan real estate portfolio - but he no longer owned the tract.

Between 2000 and 2004, Forbes allowed Donald's verbal billions to grow by $1 billion. The jump came during a period when the stock market bubble burst, Donald's stake in his casinos - one of his most valuable assets until "The Apprentice" came along - had fallen in value to $7 million and, despite Manhattan's red-hot real estate market, he owned much less real estate there than he let on.

Donald said his casinos' myriad problems - no profits, suffocating debt, disappearing cash - did not mean that he had failed in Atlantic City. Instead, he described his management of the casinos as an "entrepreneurial" success, defining "entrepreneurial" as his ability to take cash out of the casino company and use it for other things.

"Entrepreneurially, not as a person who drives up stock, but as a private person, it's been a very good deal," he told me. "If I would have worked Atlantic City the way I worked real estate, I would probably be the biggest casino company in the world rather than just a nice company, et cetera, et cetera."

Two weeks ago, Forbes published its 2005 list of America's wealthiest people. Donald held 83rd place with what Forbes described as a $2.7 billion fortune. "My net worth has tripled," Donald told the magazine.

 October 23, 2005

Being a Patient

When Health Insurance Is Not a Safeguard

By JOHN LELAND

CAMBY, Ind. - Until the fourth trip to the hospital in 1998, Zachery Dorsett's parents thought their son was an average child who was having trouble getting over a passing illness. He was 7 months old, and it was his second case of pneumonia.

The Dorsetts, Sharon and Arnold, were concerned about Zachery's health, but they were not worried about the financial consequences. They were a young, middle-income couple, with health insurance that covered 90 percent of doctors' bills and most of the costs of prescription drugs.

Then the bills started coming in. After a week in the hospital, the couple's share came to $1,100 - not catastrophic, but more than their small savings. They enrolled in a 90-day payment plan with the hospital and struggled to make the monthly installments of nearly $400, hoping that they did not hit any other expenses.

But Zachery, who was eventually found to have an immune system disorder, kept getting sick, and the expense of his treatment - fees for tests, hospitalizations, medicine - kept mounting, eventually costing the family $12,000 to $20,000 a year. Earlier this year, the Dorsetts stopped making mortgage payments on their ranch house, in a subdivision outside Indianapolis, because they could not afford them. In March, they filed for bankruptcy.

"Zach was really mad at us when we told him we were going to lose the house," Mrs. Dorsett said. "We told him we had to make a choice: whether to pay for medical bills or the house."

She added: "I didn't want the kids to hate their father for working all the time, but I also didn't want them to think we were irresponsible. I was worried about Zach feeling guilty or his sister blaming him that she has to leave her friends. But whatever we gave up is a small price to pay for his health."

Never have patients had so many medical options to extend, enrich or alter their lives. But these new options are expensive, and with them has come a change for which many Americans - even those with health insurance - are financially ill prepared.

After decades in which private and government insurance covered a progressively larger share of medical expenses, insurance companies are now shifting more costs to consumers, in the form of much higher deductibles, co-payments or premiums. At the same time, Americans are saving less and carrying higher levels of household debt, and even insured families are exposed to medical expenses that did not exist a decade ago. Many, like the Dorsetts, do not realize how vulnerable they are until the bills arrive.

Lawyers and accountants say that for the more than 1.5 million American families who filed for bankruptcy protection last year, the most common causes were job loss and medical expenses. New bankruptcy legislation, which went into effect Oct. 17, requires middle-income debtors to repay a greater share of their debt.

The Fight for Solvency

The Dorsetts' filing came after years of accumulating relatively modest bills, often just co-payments on doctor visits or prescriptions. Almost since Zachery's birth, they had finished each year with more credit card debt than they had the year before. Even when they took out a second mortgage to pay off their credit cards, by the end of the year they were in debt again, with higher mortgage payments. And each year, their projected expenses were greater.

On a late summer morning, Mrs. Dorsett, now 32, sat with her son in Room 4013 at St. Vincent Children's Hospital in Indianapolis as a colorless infusion of immune globulin, a treatment made from blood plasma, dripped slowly into his left arm, supplying the antibodies that his immune system does not produce.

The monthly infusion, which has become a regular part of his childhood along with soccer practice and family camping trips, costs $54,000 a year, of which the Dorsetts will pay more than $5,000.

"My friends don't understand it," Mrs. Dorsett said, looking back at the family's relentless, inevitable process of insolvency. "They think, How could it get so bad so quick? Unless you have a sick kid, you don't know what it's like."

For the Dorsetts, this is what the end looked like, according to the family's bankruptcy filing: They had $1,431 in their checking and savings accounts; they owed $29,146 on various credit cards; and after refinancing their house to pay down their credit cards, they could no longer afford the payments on their house or car.

Mr. Dorsett, who works on commercial heating and air conditioning systems, sometimes stitching together 90-hour weeks, earns $68,000 a year. It is more money than his father ever made, but not enough to cover the bills, especially with the monthly infusions starting.

Mrs. Dorsett recounts the impact their medical expenses have had on the family: They buy their clothing at yard sales, and skip vacations and restaurant meals. Mr. and Mrs. Dorsett argue, like many couples, mainly about money. Mr. Dorsett has had to work nights and weekends, with little contact with his wife and children; Mrs. Dorsett has tried to create a home for the children.

"We don't live a frivolous life, but I need to make my kids' life normal," she said. "They still need bikes. My husband says, 'Kids in the third world don't have those things.' I say, 'We don't live in a third world country.' "

As the bills mounted, it was Mrs. Dorsett who forced her husband to acknowledge that he could not simply work more hours. "I showed him, even if I went back to work, we'd still be in debt in 10 years," Mrs. Dorsett said. "Our kids could not go to college."

In a study of 1,771 people who filed for bankruptcy, reported this year by four researchers at Harvard and Ohio University, 28 percent said the cause was illness or injury. Most were middle class, educated and had health insurance at the start of the treatment. Many lost phone service, went without meals or skipped medications to save money. Although the study relied largely on people's own accounts of their finances, the figure suggests that as many as 400,000 American families file for bankruptcy each year because of medical expenses.

"Not only are the bills higher, but the way we pay for care has changed," said Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School and one of the study's authors. "My mother always carried a bill with the doctor, but every dollar she paid went to principal.

"Today, the doctor takes a credit card, and a family might be paying that off at extraordinary interest rates. So people may recover physically from major medical injury, but may not recover financially."

A Shift in Burden

Though health care costs have been rising for decades, changes in insurance starting around 2001 have put more pressure on consumers, especially those who need the most treatment, said Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan research group financed primarily by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The families driven into bankruptcy by these costs include those dealing with both rare and common medical conditions, and others who simply saved too little or owed too much in the false confidence that there would not be unforeseen medical problems, or that their insurance would protect them.

In Pfafftown, N.C., Glenda and Robert Lee Gantt filed for bankruptcy protection after Mrs. Gantt's rheumatoid arthritis forced her to give up working as a security guard. In Houston, Roy and Patsy McKanna filed for bankruptcy after helping their adult daughter pay for breast cancer treatment.

"We were just trying to keep them from sinking until things got better," said Mrs. McKanna, 71. "They took bankruptcy a little more than a year before we did. We managed our budget for 52 years. You never know what life's going to throw at you."

In the 1990's, as medical expenses rose faster than inflation, insurance companies limited costs of coverage by limiting patients' treatment options through the system known as managed care. Even as hospitals and drug companies introduced expensive new treatments, out-of-pocket costs for patients actually fell during the decade.

But as consumers have objected to the limits imposed by managed care, insisting on more choice, the trade-off has been higher insurance premiums and higher out-of-pocket costs, said Arnold Milstein, medical director of the Pacific Business Group on Health.

Dr. Milstein said companies had two rationales for shifting expenses to consumers: to "share the pain" that came with higher overall costs and to encourage patients to seek care judiciously.

"But what if you're unlucky enough to get sick?" he said. "Now you pay a lot more out of pocket. One of the unintended consequences of cost-shifting is that sicker people - the ones who most need insurance - are the ones who end up paying more of their bills."

From 2000 to 2005, employees in the most common type of insurance plan, known as preferred provider organizations, saw their premiums for individual coverage rise 76 percent, to $603 from $342, while their deductibles - the amount they pay out of pocket before insurance kicks in - rose almost 85 percent, to $323 from $175, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. By 2003, a survey by the Center for Studying Health System Change estimated, 20 million American families had trouble paying their medical bills. Two-thirds of these had health insurance.

Twists of Fate

Mr. and Mrs. Dorsett never expected to be part of this group. They met more than a decade ago at a gas station where she worked part time while studying to be a nurse.

Mr. Dorsett liked to talk on his way home from work. Both wanted to have a big family. They married with plans to have six children. Mrs. Dorsett hoped to finish her studies and work as a nurse; Mr. Dorsett thought she should stay at home with the children.

But shortly after Zachery was born, they knew something was not right. He got the same illnesses or infections as other children, but while others got better, he would get worse. A cold would turn into bronchitis; a sinus infection would require 45 days of antibiotics, and often turn into pneumonia. He needed follow-up doctor visits, refills on prescriptions, X-rays, CAT scans - each time ringing up co-payments of $10, $15, $30 or more.

On a blazing summer evening, the Dorsetts sat at their kitchen table. Their one extravagance, a large-screen television, occupied the children: Zachery, 8; Dakota, 5; and Jessica, 4. Mrs. Dorsett bought the television with her mother as a present for her husband, from money she had earned baby-sitting. Mr. Dorsett, she recalled, had complained about the expense.

At 40, Mr. Dorsett has a ruddy complexion, buzzed blond hair and a light beard. As he nursed a can of supermarket-brand cream soda, he seemed to wish he could turn back the calendar, find some alternative to bankruptcy court. It is a source of recurring friction between them: Mr. Dorsett never wanted to file; Mrs. Dorsett convinced him that there was no alternative.

"I make good money, and I work hard for it," Mr. Dorsett said. "When we filed for bankruptcy, I felt I failed."

He said one of his hardest moments was telling his father about the bankruptcy. His father had worked two or three jobs during hard times, but always managed to pay his debts. Arnold Dorsett made more money than his father ever had, he said, but what good did it do him?

"At work," he said, "the single guys say our insurance is good. Well, it's good for them, because they don't have kids, or don't get sick. When you have a kid who's chronically sick, it's totally different."

On his long days, Mr. Dorsett usually skips lunch rather than spend $6 or $7 at a fast food restaurant. He wishes he could take the family to the Grand Canyon, or afford a house where the girls could have their own bedrooms. But when asked about his sacrifices, he said the luxury he missed most was time, not money. "Zach and I had no relationship until two years ago," he said. "Dakota hardly ever talked to me. I was putting in 80, 90 hours a week, not having a relationship with my children."

While Mr. Dorsett works, Mrs. Dorsett juggles child care with the seemingly endless wrangling with insurance companies and, until the bankruptcy filing, with creditors.

Managing a Medical Mystery

On an August morning at home, Mrs. Dorsett prepared a lunch of corn dogs and macaroni and cheese while Zachery got ready for soccer camp. By all appearances, he is a healthy-looking boy with a somber disposition. Though he has missed as many as 42 days in a school year because of illness, he has friends and keeps up with his classes, his mother said. His worst problem at school, she said, is pushing himself too hard.

Until earlier this year, no one knew what was wrong with him. His immune disorder, known as common variable immune deficiency, can be detected through a simple blood test, but as Mrs. Dorsett took him from doctor to doctor, usually with small problems that would not go away, the doctors looked elsewhere. Some treated only the immediate symptoms; others made Mrs. Dorsett feel she was overtreating her child.

"I felt there was something wrong," she said. "But you can't walk into a doctor's office and say you think you know what it is because you saw it online. They're the ones with the prescription pads, and I didn't want to make them mad."

As the family went from one doctor to the next, without a diagnosis of the root problem, the insurance company often questioned the expenses. Why did Zachery need four doctor visits or five rounds of antibiotics for an ailment that most children shook off in a couple of days? Mrs. Dorsett spent days on the phone, often in voice-mail loops, and often long-distance, pleading her case.

"Like when they refused to pay for antibiotics when he had pneumonia" last year, she said. "The antibiotics cost $373, and we didn't have it. But we couldn't just not give it to him. I knew the review board would come around eventually, but he needed the medicine right away. Finally the doctor gave us samples."

She managed the expenses, like many people, by constantly applying for new credit cards, rolling the debt from the old cards into the new ones, which usually came with low introductory interest rates. In a good year, they would have the rolling charges on their credit cards down to $5,000 or $6,000, but the charges always went up again.

Gradually the debts started to catch up with her. When she fell behind on one of her heavily used cards, the company raised the 2.9 percent interest rate to 14 percent. Suddenly, she could not find a card with a low interest rate or a line of credit of more than $5,000, when the family balance exceeded $13,000. She tried playing dumb with the company, saying she was sure she had sent the check. "But they weren't buying it," she said.

With Mr. Dorsett's insurance, Zachery's bills were not astronomical, but they were just beyond what the Dorsetts could afford. Finally, Mrs. Dorsett asked one of the hospitals for assistance. "They said all I could do was go to churches," she said. "Which is worse, filing for bankruptcy or - I'm going to say it - begging at churches?"

Now, Uncertainty

Since the couple filed for bankruptcy protection in March, the creditors have stopped calling for money. The Dorsetts filed for, and were granted, protection under Chapter 7, which means that a trustee will liquidate their nonexempt assets to pay their creditors. But as in most Chapter 7 cases, there are no assets to liquidate.

In the meantime, since they are resigned to losing their house, they are putting aside the money that would have gone to the mortgage for the next round of big expenses. For the first time since Zachery's birth they are saving money.

Even now, credit card companies still offer them cards, which they have turned down. But because of the bankruptcy, they know they will not be able to secure a mortgage on their next home. Many of their friends, and especially the mothers in Mrs. Dorsett's preschool group, do not know about the bankruptcy.

Even with their debts cleared for the moment, there are no guarantees that the Dorsetts will be able to stay above water. The immune globulin may keep Zachery out of the emergency room this winter, but it may not. They have no credit to buffer unforeseen expenses - a sudden car repair, a slowdown at work, braces.

Mrs. Dorsett tried to put the best spin on the contingencies that loom over their lives: "If we get another house for under $800 a month, if nothing else happens, if the treatments work, we'll make it."

And if things do not work out, they will face that another day, and for many days after that.

STEVE LOPEZ / POINTS WEST

Now Comes the Heavy Lifting

Steve Lopez
Points West

October 23, 2005

"I am going to take on the challenge."

That's Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa talking about skid row.

He went there twice last week and walked the streets, eyes wide open. So he knows he's understating things when he calls it a challenge.

As a five-part Times series documented — and the mayor saw for himself — there's a human catastrophe unfolding a few blocks from City Hall, in a city of unfathomable wealth.

"It's the worst situation in America," says Police Chief William J. Bratton, a veteran of urban nightmares in Boston and New York City. "And we should be ashamed."

City Council members Jan Perry and Bill Rosendahl spoke up too on Friday, putting out a "call for action" on homelessness across the city, from Venice to North Hollywood.

It's nice to hear that these folks are on the case, because it's going to take all of their best efforts — and more — to make a difference. We've all heard lots of promises over the years, and if there had been results, I wouldn't have spent the week on skid row, where I watched a junkie take her last breaths a few steps from where drug peddlers count stacks of cash.

And the mayor didn't get a sanitized version. I watched as a man injected heroin and another smoked crack in his honor's presence.

Skid row, in fact, is described by some as a bigger mess than ever. Like Villaraigosa, I'd been there before on many occasions, but I'd never gotten to know it the way I have this year, and it all began with a chance encounter.

The person who opened my eyes to the calamity was Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a onetime aspiring musician whose mental illness has robbed him of pretty much everything but his soul and his love of music.

Once you're invested in someone, particularly someone crippled by a devastating disease, you can't accept that a civil society has no qualms about leaving him out there with the rats. Nathaniel and too many others just like him.

No official count is available, but it's safe to say thousands sleep on skid row. Some readers have challenged my reference to 10,000 street dwellers, but we know that roughly 3,000 are in shelters, with another several thousand in and out of single-room occupancy hotels and flophouses. Councilwoman Perry says she's certain that 5,000 to 8,000 more are camped between 1st and 9th, Broadway and Alameda, with additional hordes living on the periphery.

It's time to get past the paralysis and do something, the mayor said in volunteering to lead the way.

It's going to take some real leadership. I've come around to the conclusion that laws intended to protect the rights of Nathaniel and other mentally ill people are well-intended but inhumane.

Nathaniel is too sick to know he's sick, so he resists treatment that might give him a shot at a better life, and I now understand the frustration of hundreds of families that have told me in agonizing detail of similar dilemmas.

On that one, the mayor says he's on board. He told me he plans to campaign for the legal authority to involuntarily commit people in obvious need of help.

It's a treacherous political and legal minefield, and the mayor's appointment of a fellow ACLU member to his commission on homelessness last week appears to put him in conflict with his vow. But he insists the pendulum has swung too far toward a hands-off approach. Let's be humane and respectful of civil liberties, he says, but "we need to commit people who are obviously sick."

Another priority, he says, is to ensure that money available beginning in January from Proposition 63 — the 1% surcharge on taxable income of more than $1 million to fund programs for the mentally ill — goes into the most creative kinds of outreach and housing programs. Prop. 63 is a chance for Los Angeles and all of California to make amends for the travesty in which mental hospitals were shut down without enough new community clinics, thereby sentencing helpless patients to the squalor of the streets.

Of course you can't change skid row without addressing all the feeder problems. Thousands of people earn rock-bottom wages in a region where real estate is obscenely priced and low-income housing is scarce.

Thousands have no health insurance, and their children go to schools with high dropout rates.

If you've got money and become addicted or mentally ill, you've got a chance at quality care. But if you're scraping to get by and become addicted or mentally ill, it can be a ticket to skid row.

"The real issue is that people don't have enough money," says Paul Tepper of skid row's Weingart Center. "It would be cheaper to help someone as they're falling off the edge rather than wait until they've plummeted onto skid row."

If we're going to start waving magic wands, I'd like to shake one at the disastrous clustering of so many services in one place, as has happened on skid row. It's created a human corral. Anyone who wants help has to go through hell to get it.

To give you an example, Nathaniel has no addiction problem and in fact is disgusted by the drug trade. But to get to Lamp, an agency for the mentally ill homeless, he has to walk the street one prostitute called " 'Escape From New York,' without Kurt Russell."

At one end is a set of Porta Pottis used as a brothel. As he makes his way down the street, Nathaniel passes the drug-ravaged masses, some of whom you have to look at twice to see if they're breathing. Fights break out, dealers talk business.

At the other corner are fleets of wheelchairs carrying the victims of forgotten wars, and just across that block are the paramedics who picked up the dying junkie.

Chief Bratton assures me the police are on the case. I hope so, because although they can't solve the social problems that created that scene, they can at least make sure a city street one block from a police station isn't turned into a brazen, lawless caldron of drug dealing and prostitution.

Come on, a guy shot up in front of the mayor, for god's sake. It's entirely out of control, and a threat to the children who get dragged onto these streets.

As for the mental illness aspect of the problem, when new services become available under Prop. 63, they need to be scattered precisely where you and the guy down the street don't want them to be.

In your neighborhood.

This would alleviate the kind of massive encampments you see now on skid row — where people get seduced by the very demons they go there to escape.

Sometimes I wonder how Nathaniel has survived as long as he has, though I know it's partly because of the good-hearted people who do brave work on skid row watching out for the likes of him.

If despite such efforts Nathaniel doesn't get out and find a better life, I'd like to think it's possible for him to one day at least have a safer and more humane environment.

"I mean, that almost looked like Bombay or something, except with more violence," Villaraigosa says of his two trips to skid row last week.

"There is no place [in the city] where the chaos and the degradation are as pronounced. You see a complete breakdown of society."

Yes, and it's utterly unacceptable.

Now fix it.

 

Sealing a money leak

We've been wasting our energy. New air-duct rules fix that, but there's a price.

By Dinah Eng
Special to The Times

October 23, 2005

WHEN Larry and Donna-Marie Acker bought their 25-year-old home in Newport Beach last year, they knew it needed work. What they didn't anticipate was having to spend $15,000 to replace the duct system.

"Just by looking at the house, we could see there were a lot of things the developer didn't do," Larry Acker said.

Near the top of their to-do list was the heating and air-conditioning system, which the environmentally conscious Ackers decided to check for leakage.

Tests showed that the system was leaking nearly half the air that was supposed to circulate through it. The vents were too small, and ducts were not properly sealed or located, so the system had to be replaced.

Leaky ducts have been such a prevalent energy waster that on Oct. 1 a California building standard was imposed requiring most inland homeowners to have systems checked before the installation or replacement of a central air conditioner or heater. Ducts found to leak 15% or more in existing homes or 6% or more in new construction must be sealed.

For consumers, it's spend now, save later. The California Energy Commission estimates that testing and sealing should cost about $660, depending on the condition of the ductwork. With the average home duct system leaking about 30%, according to Bill Pennington, manager of the commission's buildings and appliances office, cutting that in half would save about $16 a month on a $200 heating bill and $28 a month on a $200 cooling bill. The rise in heating costs this winter will shorten the time span to recoup the initial expense.

After repairs have been made, a third party, known as a Home Energy Rating System verifier, will test again to make sure the duct sealing is up to code, or the homeowner can opt to be placed in a random testing group where one in seven duct systems repaired by the contractor is checked.

Exempt from the new law are homes in specified coastal zones where people use less air conditioning and heating and energy savings would be minimal. To see if your city falls in an exempt zone, visit http://www.energy.ca.gov/maps/climate_zone_map.html . Cities in climate zones 2 and 9-16 are exempt.

Also exempt are houses with less than 40 feet of ductwork; ducts constructed, insulated or sealed with asbestos; and a few extremely energy-efficient heating and cooling systems.

Some contractors secured as many building permits as they could before the law went into effect Oct. 1 to save their customers the cost of duct testing and sealing. In most local jurisdictions, a permit is required to replace or install furnaces and air conditioners.

"Under the old rules, if you did a change-out of a furnace and put new ductwork in the attic of an 1,800-square-foot house, the homeowner would probably pay about $5,200 to $5,800," said Craig Iascone, owner of CMI Heating & Air Conditioning in Thousand Oaks. He figures that duct testing and repair will cost consumers more than twice the California Energy Commission estimate.

"If I were to bid that job today, I'd have to add on $650 for the rater's services to test before and after installation," Iascone said, plus an additional $800 for sealing. "So, it'd cost about $1,450 more for that job."

Iascone, who has been in business for 18 years, said he believes conserving power and replacing old ductwork make sense.

However, he added, "if people don't want to pay for duct testing, they'll shop around and find a contractor who will do the work without getting a permit."

There will always be contractors who work without permits, noted Lyman Lockwood, president of George Haney & Son Inc. in Glendale.

Lockwood also pointed out that, because systems with higher energy efficiency exempt a homeowner from duct testing, decisions about equipment have become more complex.

"For example, you can buy a 92% efficient or higher furnace and a 14 SEER [Seasonal Energy-Efficiency Rating] and 12 EER [Energy Efficiency Ratio] air-conditioning system and be exempt from duct-performance testing," Lockwood said. "But be cautious if the contractor says you should just buy the highest-efficiency equipment and avoid the testing, because that may not be the most cost-effective or energy-efficient solution."

If you install energy-efficient equipment but have duct leakage, the overall system will be less efficient than it should be, he said.

Not only does leakage cost consumers, but Pennington noted that improper airflow can also cause health problems. For example, if the leak is in the attic, garage or crawl space underneath the house, pollutants from those areas can be sucked into the home.

Utility companies in California are working on rebate and incentive programs to encourage compliance with the new law, which carries penalties if not followed.

Real estate law also requires a seller to disclose whether a permit was obtained, when necessary, for work done on a house.

"Disclosure wouldn't stop a sale as long as the buyer knows what they're getting into," said June Barlow, vice president and general counsel for the California Assn. of Realtors. "You should always get permits when required. If a homeowner has work done without a permit, it'll become a negotiation point if it's of concern to the buyer."

The duct-sealing law has also resulted in a stampede among contractors and companies eager to make more money by becoming certified as raters. Contractors and homeowners can find raters through two provider websites: http://www.cheers.org and http://www.calcerts.com .

"We're inventing this business right now," said Mike Bachand, owner of CalCERTS, based in Folsom, Calif. "Like any other inspection process, there's a certain amount of integrity involved.

"Bottom line is, those guys who are going to be part of the underground market aren't going to play by the rules anyway. The contractors who do pull permits know their licenses are at risk, so they will follow the rules."

Can homeowners tackle duct repairs themselves?

"It's possible that a contractor or rater might work with an extremely handy do-it-yourselfer who has done a lot of research to learn about duct sealing, but this would be extremely unusual," Pennington said. "It would take a lot of the contractor or rater's time, and they would probably want to be compensated for that."

 

Sure, it kills birds, but it won't kill you

By Wendy Orent
Wendy Orent is the author of "Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease."

October 23, 2005

IT MUST SEEM like the sky is falling — that it's about to rain chaos and death as the dreaded H5N1 avian flu appears to close in.

Last spring, bird flu broke out in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. It spread to western China, Siberia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia in the summer. How did it travel half a continent?

Though maps of the outbreaks show the flu following roads, railway lines and national borders, many flu experts insist that migratory birds spread the virus across Asia. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that some of the birds might fly to Alaska, then down into the United States, bringing the bird flu with them. That hasn't happened, but the virus appears to be in Europe. Last week, ducks and chickens were found dead in Romania, Turkey and Greece.

News reports make the threat even more ominous. In resurrecting the 1918 pandemic virus, the deadliest flu strain of all time, researchers recently learned that this strain was far deadlier than any other human virus — it killed mice, while normal human flu won't even ruffle a mouse's fur. They also found out that all of its genes came, directly or indirectly, from birds. Unlike the pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 version didn't arise from a combination of bird and mammal genes. Instead, the bird genes evolved into a human virus that killed as many as 50 million people.

This means, say breathless news reports, that what happened in 1918 could happen again, this time with H5N1.

But Peter Palese doesn't think so. He is lab director at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where the technique that re-created the 1918 genes — known as reverse genetic engineering — was developed. He and associate Adolfo Garcia-Sastre contend that what the resurrected virus really shows is how supremely adapted it is — how well its parts fit together, how perfectly it works. The sublime malignance of the 1918 virus doesn't lie in one part but rather in how the genes function together. Evolution shaped this virus to be a sleek, effective killing machine.

We don't know what bird the genes came from originally. It wasn't a domestic duck, chicken or goose, because their flu strains are quite different. According to Jeffery Taubenberger, the senior researcher at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the 1918 flu originated in an unknown bird reservoir, one equally distant from American and Eurasian birds. "To me, it's from an unknown host, evolutionarily isolated from other birds," Taubenberger said last year.

But all wild-bird viruses are mild. They have to be: Sick birds don't fly far, and dead birds don't fly at all. Although H5N1, which evolved among domestic poultry in the crowded conditions of Asian farms and markets, has demonstrated the ability to kill wild birds in the hundreds, it cannot continue to be so deadly and still spread among them.

In nature, flu viruses in birds are intestinal diseases. Through feces, flu particles are deposited in water, where another duck or goose picks them up, gets infected and sheds the virus in turn. Wild-bird flu depends on mobile hosts to spread. If flu strains kill their hosts in the wild, the lethal versions will vanish. This is why evolution pushes wild-bird strains toward mildness.

To think that the 1918 flu started out as a harmless intestinal bird virus that jumped directly from its wild host into human beings and immediately turned into an explosive respiratory killer is to believe that hippos fly. Evolution doesn't work that way. The flu's genes came from birds, but it's what they did when they got into humans that matters.

Somehow, somewhere, the mysterious gene collection that made up the 1918 killer influenza acquired its adaptive and lethal abilities in people. Most influenza viruses are respiratory and require mobile human hosts, who become viral distribution machines. You might be miserable with the flu, but you're still able to walk around, shake hands, sneeze on your keyboard and talk to colleagues with a halo of virus around you.

But the 1918 pandemic strain was different. According to evolutionary biologist Paul W. Ewald of the University of Louisville, its lethality evolved in the trenches, the trucks, the trains and the hospitals of World War I. Infected soldiers were packed shoulder to shoulder with the healthy, and even the deadliest virus can jump from one host to another. The Western Front was a disease factory, and it manufactured the 1918 flu. The packed chicken farms of Asia are a close parallel. H5N1 evolved the same way as the 1918 flu did in the trenches.

We don't know what will happen to H5N1 as it moves through Europe. It is certain, though, that the longer it lives in wild birds, the more likely it will become mild, at least for its wild-bird hosts. This is what happened to the 1918 flu after soldiers abandoned the Western Front. In just over a year, the virus lost its virulence and wandered the planet as an ordinary flu.

The lesson here is that the flu virus, like all of life, is subject to evolution. Lethal diseases don't fall out of the sky. They evolve in the context of a host and that host's conditions of life. There is no sign, so far, that H5N1 is turning into a human disease — effectively spreading from person to person. Even if it does, it needs a Western Front to become more than ordinary.

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-reality23oct23,0,3661157.story

Plot line: Drink Pepsi!

By John Furia Jr.
John Furia Jr. is a former president of the Writers Guild of America West, a professor and founding chairman of the division of writing in the School of Cinema-Television at USC, and a TV writer.

October 23, 2005

TELEVISION, particularly reality TV, is erasing the line between content and advertising by clumsily grafting sponsors' car brands, soft drinks and other products into story lines.

American television has always been a commercial medium. Advertisers pay the bills. Early shows, following radio's lead, often jumped through hoops to promote sponsors — beginning with the launch of Texaco Star Theater in the 1940s. But this commercialization never penetrated the artistic product. Classic shows, from "Bonanza" to "Seinfeld," managed not to sell out to sponsors.

That's changed. On "The Apprentice," for instance, contestants now compete in what are essentially hourlong commercials to market brand names, including Burger King. In the episode sponsored by the burger chain, the contestants ran around like goofballs trying to come up with catchy taglines for its latest product. They then donned Burger King's blue and yellow uniforms and struggled to perform jobs easily mastered by high school dropouts. Why? The fast-food chain paid upward of $2 million to have its newest hamburger flipped by Donald Trump's would-be minions. Never mind selling real estate — on "The Apprentice," contestants win challenges by shilling for major advertisers.

This "product integration" pads the profits of the TV networks while turning viewers' favorite shows into infomercials. When advertising agencies usurp control from writers, directors and editors, they are seeking to manipulate the emotional connection that viewers forge with stories and characters.

This corruption of the story is hardly limited to reality TV. CBS Chairman Les Moonves has predicted that up to 75% of all scripted prime-time network shows will soon feature products paid for by advertisers and integrated into plot lines. One advertising executive recently predicted that content and advertising will be fully integrated and, "in the end, corporate clients will be happy, and the writers and actors won't be able to tell an Emmy from a Clio."

Children's programming has often been financed by sugary cereals, for example. But what happens to kids subjected to hidden ads?

The morphing of selling and storytelling is also infiltrating the movie business. Mark Schmuger, vice chairman of Universal Studios, told an audience at an entertainment marketing conference that "studios need to work with [corporate] brands so that we're not force-feeding them our already baked product. Can we co-create?" He suggests that corporate advertisers allot a portion of their budgets to script development.

What role will film and television play in our culture when advertisers determine the story and characters by testing how suitable they are to sell product? Imagine if Pope Julius II, when giving Michelangelo the commission to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, had approved the artist's design of the Lord stretching out a hand to Adam, but only if in that hand he painted a bar of Dove soap or a Big Mac.

CBS' Moonves told Advertising Age's editor, Scott Donaton, that the key to expanding product integration will be "breaking down the resistance of writers, directors and actors."

The Hollywood talent guilds should wholeheartedly promote this resistance. They should insist that writers, not advertising executives, be trusted to do what is best for the story. They should defend actors' right to portray compelling characters and explore intriguing ideas rather than shill for Home Depot or Pepsi. Together, the Hollywood talent guilds should step forward to protect the public from the blight of hidden advertising by insisting in contract negotiations that the media giants address these issues. If corporations won't, the guilds should take these issues to the Federal Communications Commission.

The Communications Act already bans stealth advertising, requiring that all such transactions be disclosed to the viewing public. Obviously, these rules have not been strictly enforced. The agency should force broadcasters to clearly disclose who has paid for advertising. It should require networks and advertisers to run a notice at the bottom of the screen when an advertising pitch is being made during the content portion of a television program. It should ban outright hidden advertising in children's programming.

Unfettered product integration is in no one's best interest. The American viewing public deserves to have some rules established to regulate the crass commercialization of their favorite programs.

Advertising executives and production companies eager to cash in on product integration deals will not regulate themselves. People have a right to know whether they're watching a program or product propaganda, and the guilds have a vested interest in helping the public to protect itself.

 

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-magazine23oct23,0,4455638.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Hey, stupid, this is not an ad

By Michael Levine
MICHAEL LEVINE is the head of an L.A.-based public relations and marketing firm and the author of numerous books, including "Guerrilla PR," "A Branded World" and his latest, "Broken Windows, Broken Bu

October 23, 2005

APPARENTLY, the American Society of Magazine Editors has a considerably lower opinion of magazine readers (and, for that matter, magazine editors) than one might expect.

The organization's latest guidelines, issued last week, are intended, in part, to dissuade magazines from printing advertising that could be confused with editorial content. It seems that too many Americans are dazzled by glossy ads and coerced into believing that they are, in fact, magazine copy.

Can an industry's faith in its own clientele be any shakier? Do magazine editors truly believe that if we see page after page of slick magazine stock with images of the Target stores logo but not the word "advertisement" on the top, we'll think that the staff of the New Yorker has suddenly decided they have a journalistic duty to inform us that Target is better than Wal-Mart?

At issue are the placement of ads too close to articles that might be pertinent to the advertiser's business, and the use of "advertorials," or features commissioned by advertisers that include factual information in addition to a sales pitch. The ASME guidelines don't discourage advertorial use, but they do require that a clear disclaimer (now the word "promotion") be printed on each page of a special advertising section, lest the gullible public be duped into thinking Newsweek might have suddenly lost its business (not to mention journalistic) sense and decided to independently endorse one brand of vodka over another.

The ASME acted after the Aug. 22 issue of the New Yorker included only ads for Target, with myriad artworks featuring the company's logo throughout the magazine. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the "ASME found the New Yorker was in technical violation of its guidelines" and required "that an issue sponsored by a single advertiser include a note from the publisher or editor saying as much."

If readers of the erudite New Yorker can't be counted on to recognize advertising when they see it, what hope is there for readers of Us Weekly, the National Enquirer or — Lord help us! — Teen People?

Even more puzzling than the idea that readers don't know ads from reportage is the implied notion that magazine journalism has deteriorated to the point that editors can't make feature articles clearly distinguishable from advertising. Does the ASME truly believe its own membership is incapable of producing journalism that doesn't look like a pitch for a Saab?

When, in a recent ad campaign, Lee Iacocca spent his summer cavorting with Jason Alexander, Snoop Dogg and a girl who was at least pretending to be his granddaughter, all in support of Chrysler's current vehicle line, Americans didn't think they were watching the evening news. And even when Iacocca, in one of those commercials, turned on his morning news show to hear glowing reports about how "the Chrysler group has done it again" in the business report, the Federal Communications Commission did not require that the word "advertisement" be flashed on the screen to remind people they weren't really watching CNN.

Yes, Madison Avenue will try to find ways to blur the line and get a reader to look at an ad and believe for a moment that he is reading an objective piece of reporting. Advertisers may even try to persuade an editor to slip a product into a story.

So it's not unreasonable to police the border between advertising and journalism. And there's no harm in labeling an advertorial section "promotion."

Still, the ASME's implications about the the American public and the publications it reads are disturbing. The organization has no faith in the intelligence of readers or editorial boards.

 

Defending The Indefensible

By George F. Will
Sunday, October 23, 2005; B07

Such is the perfect perversity of the nomination of Harriet Miers that it discredits, and even degrades, all who toil at justifying it. Many of their justifications cannot be dignified as arguments. Of those that can be, some reveal a deficit of constitutional understanding commensurate with that which it is, unfortunately, reasonable to impute to Miers. Other arguments betray a gross misunderstanding of conservatism on the part of persons masquerading as its defenders.

Miers's advocates, sensing the poverty of other possibilities, began by cynically calling her critics sexist snobs who disdain women with less than Ivy League degrees. Her advocates certainly know that her critics revere Margaret Thatcher almost as much as they revere the memory of the president who was educated at Eureka College.

Next, Miers's advocates managed, remarkably, to organize injurious testimonials. Sensible people cringed when one of the former Texas Supreme Court justices summoned to the White House offered this reason for putting her on the nation's highest tribunal: "I can vouch for her ability to analyze and to strategize." Another said: "When we were on the lottery commission together, a lot of the problems that we had there were legal in nature. And she was just very, very insistent that we always get all the facts together."

Miers's advocates tried the incense defense: Miers is pious. But that is irrelevant to her aptitude for constitutional reasoning. The crude people who crudely invoked it probably were sending a crude signal to conservatives who, the invokers evidently believe, are so crudely obsessed with abortion that they have an anti-constitutional willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade with an unreasoned act of judicial willfulness as raw as the 1973 decision itself.

In their unseemly eagerness to assure Miers's conservative detractors that she will reach the "right" results, her advocates betray complete incomprehension of this: Thoughtful conservatives' highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution's meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path that the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result.

As Miers's confirmation hearings draw near, her advocates will make an argument that is always false but that they, especially, must make, considering the unusual nature of their nominee. The argument is that it is somehow inappropriate for senators to ask a nominee -- a nominee for a lifetime position making unappealable decisions of enormous social impact -- searching questions about specific Supreme Court decisions and the principles of constitutional law that these decisions have propelled into America's present and future.

To that argument, the obvious and sufficient refutation is: Why, then, have hearings? What, then, remains of the Senate's constitutional role in consenting to nominees?

It is not merely permissible, it is imperative that senators give Miers ample opportunity to refute skeptics by demonstrating her analytic powers and jurisprudential inclinations by discussing recent cases concerning, for example, the scope of federal power under the commerce clause, the compatibility of the First Amendment with campaign regulations and privacy -- including Roe v. Wade .

Can Miers's confirmation be blocked? It is easy to get a senatorial majority to take a stand in defense of this or that concrete interest, but it is surpassingly difficult to get a majority anywhere to rise in defense of mere excellence.

Still, Miers must begin with 22 Democratic votes against her. Surely no Democrat can retain a shred of self-respect if, having voted against John Roberts, he or she then declares Miers fit for the court. All Democrats who so declare will forfeit a right and an issue -- their right to criticize the administration's cronyism.

And Democrats, with their zest for gender politics, need this reminder: To give a woman a seat on a crowded bus because she is a woman is gallantry. To give a woman a seat on the Supreme Court because she is a woman is a dereliction of senatorial duty. It also is an affront to mature feminism, which may bridle at gallantry but should recoil from condescension.

As for Republicans, any who vote for Miers will thereafter be ineligible to argue that it is important to elect Republicans because they are conscientious conservers of the judicial branch's invaluable dignity. Finally, any Republican senator who supinely acquiesces in President Bush's reckless abuse of presidential discretion -- or who does not recognize the Miers nomination as such -- can never be considered presidential material.

georgewill@washpost.com

Young Democrats Sharpen Tactics Against Old Rivals
New Breed on Hill Works Aggressively To Snap GOP Grip

By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 23, 2005; A04

With the Capitol all but deserted last Monday night, the Democratic "30-Something Working Group" seized the House floor and took aim at their Republican adversaries.

As C-SPAN cameras beamed their performance around the country, Rep. Timothy J. Ryan, 32, of Ohio and Rep. Kendrick Meek, 39, of Florida recited a litany of GOP misdeeds -- mismanaging Hurricane Katrina and neglecting education and health care, for example -- and offered the Democrats' alternatives.

Their conversation even veered to religion, a subject many Democrats are afraid to touch. Ryan described the problems of the poor as a moral obligation and asked of Meek: "Where is the Christian Coalition when you are cutting poverty programs? They are fighting over Supreme Court justices."

The two newcomers -- who have served a combined six years in the House -- are part of a new generation of Democrats who are working to try to topple the GOP. Their fresh ideas, modern media skills and aggressive political tactics have inspired a party that has drifted for much of the past decade -- wedded to old notions and seemingly incapable of capitalizing on White House and congressional Republican miscues.

As part of the new approach, House and Senate Democrats are devising an alternative agenda of key policies. Ryan is pushing proposals aimed at drastically reducing the number of abortions over the coming decade by offering support and services to pregnant women. Others are crafting a plan for reducing U.S. dependence on imported oil by using more domestic agricultural products, an approach that would have significant appeal to Midwestern voters.

"We can't be Dr. No to everything Republicans do," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). "We have to provide our own positive ideas."

The rise of the new breed, including Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Barack Obama (Ill.), the Senate's only African American and the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, marks a generational divide in a party long dominated by Northeastern liberals and Southern conservatives.

Unlike some of their forbears, the newcomers are pragmatists who view the past decade of GOP rule not as an aberration but as a sea change in political campaigning, fundraising and lobbying to which Democrats must adjust. They arrived in Washington as challengers and are comfortable questioning the establishment -- because they have not been part of it.

"Everyone recognizes the bottom line: We've got to win the House," said Van Hollen, who is in his second term. "So people are looking for creative alternatives, and they're much more willing to experiment now."

Many Democrats concede that, as a group, they were bullied into submission by President Bush during his first four years, when his popularity was high. They went along with his tax cuts, backed the war in Iraq and helped adopt a controversial Medicare prescription drug program. This year, however, the Democrats began pushing back more, even before the uproar over the administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina. By standing united, they helped to block Bush's plan to create private accounts in the Social Security system.

But in light of the Democrats' meager political successes in recent years, it is far from certain they can score major gains in next year's elections, even with Bush's popularity falling and widespread displeasure over the war and gasoline prices, according to lawmakers and political experts.

"It's not as easy as it looks," said former representative Robert S. Walker (Pa.). Walker sees plenty of parallels between his crowd of 1994 GOP House revolutionaries and the young Democrats, but he notes that the Republicans started laying the groundwork for their takeover in the early 1980s, at least a decade before their electoral coup. "I can understand why people say an opportunity is presenting itself," Walker said. "But it does take more than a couple of election cycles to change things."

While change within the party has not always gone smoothly, the top leaders recognize the importance of giving newer members running room. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has passed over more senior lawmakers to give newcomers key committee assignments and speaking roles during high-profile floor debates. For instance, she placed Meek on the Homeland Security and Armed Services panels, to enable him to earn national security credentials. And she gave Rep. Stephanie Herseth (S.D.) a prominent role in fighting a GOP plan to reduce Medicaid spending.

She also put junior lawmakers in charge of the 2006 campaign effort. "They are the future," Pelosi said. "And they are starting to set the pace for where things go."

Perhaps no other newcomer has moved up as quickly as Emanuel, an adviser in the Clinton White House who took command of the Democrats' campaign committee after a single House term.

Emanuel has assembled a 2006 candidate slate that includes a former National Football League player, several veterans of the Iraq war, and many senior state officials, the latest being New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid, who signed on last week to challenge Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R). Madrid was recruited by Rep. Hilda L. Solis (D-Calif.), who is in her third term.

Another standout on Emanuel's recruitment team is Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, 39, who arrived in Washington 11 months ago after a dozen years in the rough-and-tumble Florida legislature. She lined up former Florida state senator Ron Klein (D) to run for the seat next door to hers, now occupied by Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R), a veteran legislator.

When Shaw heard the news, he confronted Wasserman Schultz on the floor and told her that the tradition among members of the Florida delegation is to refrain from working against one another. Wasserman Schultz reminded Shaw that several Florida Republicans had worked against Rep. Karen L. Thurman (D-Fla.), who was defeated in 2002.

"I was really polite and said the pact didn't seem to have held very solidly," Wasserman Schultz recalled. "I guess he thought he was speaking to someone who had just begun their political career that day."

Emanuel says of his newcomer colleagues, "They're willing to dust it up, and that's what it's going to take."

They have run into their share of friction. Pelosi has gone back and forth with Ryan over his abortion proposal, worried that certain provisions could dilute the traditional Democratic position backing abortion rights. And Emanuel got into a spat with senior Hispanic House Democrats over the hiring of a campaign committee aide they were pushing.

In the Senate, newer faces must vie with Democratic presidential aspirants for media attention. Two who are breaking through are Obama, 44, and Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), 42, one of 22 Senate Democrats who supported John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice of the United States. Yesterday, Pryor gave the Democratic response to Bush's radio address.

"One of the advantages of having a lot of new blood in the Senate is that we don't necessarily come to the chamber with a lot of baggage from past battles," Pryor said. "A lot of my senior colleagues vividly remember the Bork nomination. I don't care about Robert Bork. That's in the past, and I don't think we ought to dwell on that."

Obama, a former Illinois legislator, voted against Roberts but defended Pryor and other Democratic supporters on the Daily Kos blog. Like many new-generation Democrats, he is impatient with the rigidity expressed by some of the party's old-line liberal interest groups, believing the public takes a more nuanced view of issues such as abortion and affirmative action.

"When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive 'checklist,' then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems," Obama wrote.

Pelosi says House and Senate leaders will soon lay out a slate of new ideas, similar to the "Contract With America" that the GOP used to attract voters in 1994, when it took back control of Congress.

One group that Democrats want to tap is veterans and active military members, who have seen their benefits cut or frozen as part of an ongoing budget squeeze. Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.), a second-term House member, believes Republicans could pay heavily at the polls throughout the South for overlooking this crucial voting group.

"When I see white male Alabamians shaking their heads, that tells me there are opportunities for Democrats to make major inroads," Davis said.

politics
Who Is Scooter Libby?
The secretive Cheney aide at the heart of the CIA leak case.
By John Dickerson
Posted Friday, Oct. 21, 2005, at 3:57 PM PT

Who is I. Lewis Libby? The not-Karl-Rove character at the center of the CIA leak investigation is so mysterious he hides his first name. Rove we know: He's Bush's political id—a self-taught master of political hardball, a brash Texan who has plotted the president's advance for 25 years.

The adviser universally known as "Scooter" represents the other side of the Bush administration: the secret undisclosed side. Like the vice president he works for, Libby prefers to work on policy in the shadows and leave the politics to others. Unlike Rove, or even fellow neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, Libby rarely speaks on the record; he almost never gives public speeches. Unlike the Texas gang, he doesn't boast at being an anti-intellectual and is in fact proud of his intellectual credentials. "Lewis Libby is a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University School of Law," reads the blurb under his picture on the back flap of his book, a historical novel about Japan at the turn of the 20^th century.

If these two men are so different, why are Rove's and Libby's names now spending so much time in the same sentence? Both are under investigation by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald for telling reporters that Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA after Wilson challenged the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein sought to buy enriched uranium from Niger. Though there is still much we do not know about their actions, one thing we can say is that the two were almost certainly leaking for different reasons. Rove's principal instinct would have been to knock back a threat to Bush's political standing. Libby's natural urge would have been to push back against the CIA with whom he and his boss had been waging an ongoing war over the intelligence that led to the war itself, a war for which he was a key proponent, and in which he continues to deeply believe.

According to one report, Libby became so obsessed with knocking back Wilson's claims, White House advisers had to step in. Arguing the point would only keep the charges alive and harm the president politically.

"Everything you know about Cheney you know about Scooter," says one who worked with him closely. That means that Libby is discreet, big-thinking, detail-oriented, and addicted to action over show. Libby is not only chief of staff but the vice president's top foreign-policy adviser. In the rare photos of Bush's war counsel, Libby can be seen in the background. He particularly shares his boss' fixation on external nuclear and bioterrorism threats. When Cheney was tasked with preparing a homeland security plan before the 9/11 attacks, it was Libby who handled it. He was minutes away from a meeting on the final report when the planes hit the World Trade Center.

Libby is a neocon's neocon. He studied political science at Yale under former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and began working with his former teacher under Cheney at the Defense Department during the George H.W. Bush administration, thinking about grand national security strategy in the post-Cold War era. When a document outlining their thinking leaked to the New York Times, the foreign policy establishment, including many of the more moderate voices in the first Bush administration, howled at its call for pre-emptive action against nations developing weapons of mass destruction. After 9/11, what was once considered loony became the Bush Doctrine.

Libby is not political in the glad-handing way—he looks as lost as Cheney at Republican Lincoln Day dinners. But he plays internal politics with force and lack of emotion. If the State Department under Colin Powell hated Dick Cheney, it hated Scooter almost as much, viewing him accurately as a pre-eminent member of the cabal hellbent for war with Iraq. It was Libby who sat with Powell in the final session before Powell's U.N. speech, eyeing every detail to make sure that the Secretary of State didn't water down the case. When Libby talked privately to friends about his rivals at State during the Powell era, it often sounded like the head of one political party speaking about the other, ascribing the worst motives and rarely giving Powell's team the benefit of the doubt.

Now no one is giving Libby the benefit of the doubt, at least in interpreting his mysterious jailhouse note to Judy Miller. That letter ended with a personal passage that seemed to cry out for accompaniment by moody background music: "You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover—Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers. With admiration, Scooter Libby."

Was this a hint to Miller about staying on the same page—either with her journalistic colleagues who seem to have backed Libby's story to the grand jury, or with her fellow former believer in Saddam's WMD stockpiles? Patrick Fitzgerald certainly wanted to know if Libby was trying to coach the reluctant witness to bolster his own case. Libby helpfully pointed out earlier in the letter that "every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me, or knew about her before our call."

Or, Scooter may have been playing with coded meanings that most of us are too dull to see. This suspicion arises naturally because of Libby's connection with Straussianism. Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish political philosopher, is seen by many as one of the intellectual fathers of neconservatism. Wolfowitz, Libby's teacher at Yale, was a graduate student at the University of Chicago during Strauss' ascendancy, and Libby won membership into that conservative club via Wolfowitz. Part of Strauss' teaching is that ancient philosophers wrote on two levels: for the mumbling masses, but also, and often in contradiction of the literal message, on an "esoteric" level that only initiates could make out. Some Straussians have adopted this code themselves. So, where Homer Simpson would interpret Libby's note as ham-handed fawning over Judy, a Straussian close reader might discern something more devious: a literary file in the cake for both of them.

It's surprising, in any case, to find Libby is at the center of a press scandal. The daily communications operation is not something he cares much about. Rove, by contrast, spends a portion of every day running his own press operation. He sends BlackBerry messages, forwards polling data, and argues his case to influential journalists. Libby flies at a higher altitude, talking mostly to marquee columnists and preferring longer and more in-depth conversations to the rat-a-tat-tat required by reporters on deadline.

Libby does enjoy the intellectual cat-and-mouse game of longer form interviews, those who have worked with him say. He challenges basic assumptions and presses on a reporter's sloppy definitions. In my experience interviewing him, if a line of reasoning was in any way harmful to the administration or the vice president, it was sometimes impossible to get past the gorilla dust. His shimmy and shake sometimes got so bad, I wondered if he would even admit to working for the vice president. "It's very lawyerly kind of amusement," says a former aide.

When the Cheneys hosted a party in February 2002 for the paperback publication of Libby's book, the guest list was not filled with workaday journalists, but with the elite from New York and Washington: Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee, Leon Wieseltier and Maureen Dowd. In those early days after 9/11, it seemed like the relationship between the press and the media elite might turn out to be a fairly cozy one. The Bushies hated "old Washington," but as Libby and the vice president spoke from the landing at the bottom of the stairs, it seemed as if their half of the administration understood the quiet commerce between the ruling elite and the more permanent Washington establishment. Maureen Dowd, who was invited to that party, ended that fantasy.

Libby is fussy and precise with reporters, which is why friends and colleagues find it so hard to believe that he would have been involved in leaking Plame's identity, obstructing justice, or committing perjury. Libby was an exacting source for anyone who talked to him. After using a Libby quote, it was not unusual for reporters to receive a call from the vice president's press shop. Mr. Libby wanted to know why only a portion of his comment was used. "He would prefer that if a reporter was going to quote him that it be an unedited transcript," says one who worked closely with him. Other reporters were scolded if a Libby quote hidden under the attribution of "senior administration official" was placed near sentences that he thought might identify him, even if no reasonable reader could come to such a conclusion. In other words, he's as careful as they come in Washington.

Those who know him say that if you're going to be stuck in an undisclosed location with somebody, Scooter Libby isn't a bad choice. He can do tequila shots on the saddle-shaped seats of the Wyoming bar near the vice president's vacation house and deconstruct poetry afterward. He is also athletic. He skis, plays ultimate Frisbee, and rode a mountain bike so hard one time at an AEI retreat, he fell and broke his collar bone. Once, at one of the undisclosed locations, he helped the Cheney grandchildren play pretend-Halloween, answering the door to the tricksters and handing out candy as if they were in their own neighborhood.

A man who likes to stay out of the limelight knows something about disguises. But I. Lewis Libby appears to be on the verge of losing the option of a low profile for good. If Fitzgerald announces his indictment, "Irving" will soon become a household name.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128530/

 interrogation
Sarah Silverman
The comedian discusses her religion, Zoloft, and a plan for an unusual softball league.
By Pamela Paul
Posted Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005, at 12:06 PM ET

Sarah Silverman is a comedian whose one-woman show will be released on Friday as a feature-length film, Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic. Silverman appeared most recently in The Aristocrats, where her contribution led to a threatened lawsuit from Joe Franklin. (Silverman's version of the joke revolved around her "recollection" of a childhood rape by the longtime TV host.) Silverman made her comedy debut as a writer and performer on Saturday Night Live when she was 19 and has since been a frequent guest on programs ranging from Seinfeld to Mr. Show With Bob and David. We met in the bar of the Regency Hotel in New York, where Silverman curled up on a worn sofa in the corner.

Slate: You're often compared to Lenny Bruce and Sandra Bernhard, and you're on the cover of Heeb magazine this month. Do you think of yourself as a Jewish comedian?

Silverman: I just think of myself as a comedian, really. I mean, I talk about being Jewish a lot. It's funny because I do think of myself as Jewish ethnically, but I'm not religious at all. I have no religion.

Slate: Have you ever been pressured to pull a Winona Ryder (aka Winona Horowitz) and change your last name?

Silverman: I haven't. I'm thinking of changing my name to Horowitz though.

Slate: How did three of the Silverman sisters end up getting into show business and one is a rabbi?

Silverman: Ach, it's the same thing.

Slate: Your sister wrote a book, Jewish Family & Life: Traditions, Holidays, and Values for Today's Parents and Children. Are you going to follow her advice?

Silverman: Only when I'm visiting her. I just had Sabbath dinner at her house. And it's so great. It warms my heart because it's the whole family together and seeing the kids. I do love the idea of ritual. I'm a very ritualistic person. I have to wash my face twice, and on the second wash before I rinse, I brush my teeth, then I rinse, then I floss, then I put on moisturizer. I'm ritualistic. Jewishness is very ritualistic.

Slate: Do you have any rituals with Jimmy [Kimmel, her boyfriend]?

Silverman: When we have a night alone, like a Saturday night with no kids, we'll go to this restaurant we really like and sit at the bar and play Scrabble on our phones. We have two games going, so we can go back and forth. There's constant action.

Slate: You don't get confused between the two games?

Silverman: There's never any confusion about who's winning.

Slate: So, who wins more?

Silverman: I really want to say me, but he wins more. The motherfucker.

Slate: Do you go out with his kids, too?

Silverman: I'm not "going out" with his kids. We're not dating. When we go out with the kids, we play games. We play 20 Questions, which is one of my favorites. It transcends all ages. But you have to make sure it's somebody everyone knows. Like people in the family or people they love from TV or movies.

Slate: Have they seen your new movie?

Silverman: No. They're not allowed. I'd let them because I have no boundaries. But Jimmy's a good dad.

Slate: Do you and Jimmy test out material on each other? Did he have any hand in your movie?

Silverman: Oh yeah. Definitely. He's on ABC, so he'll come up with jokes that he couldn't possibly use. And if it's something I think I can use, I will absolutely take it. I don't feel like it's going to give me some kind of identity crisis.

Slate: So, what did you pilfer in the film?

Silverman: You know what's his? Lemon-AIDS. ["When someone gives you AIDS, make lemon-AIDS."]

Slate: You've been open about your own depression. Are you still on Zoloft?

Silverman: Yes. Yeah! I never went off it. I really lucked out because I see people always trying a million different antidepressants. Whatever chemical imbalance I have, Zoloft fit perfectly because I take a half-pill every night before I go to bed. I don't feel like I don't have highs or lows, but what's missing is that complete downward spiral into despair about nothing.

Slate: When did you feel that despair so acutely that you went on Zoloft?

Silverman: I went through it from 13 to 16. Then, when I was 22, it hit again really hard. So when I was 23 or 24, my mom and her sister, who's a psychologist, talked to me about it.

Slate: You're never tempted to go off it?

Silverman: I'm very good. I go to this psychiatrist every six months, like you're supposed to, to make sure you're on the right track. I've mentioned to him, like "I feel great, I feel so stable. After all these years, I wonder what it would be like to be free of it, this medicine." And he's like, "Why? If someone has diabetes, they don't say, OK, let's see what it's like to not take insulin."

Slate: What do you think of humor that makes fun of depression or psychopharmacology?

Silverman: I haven't heard anything. It must be out there! It seems like an easy target. Maybe I should—good idea. I just don't know how to talk about it because it works for me. I have a friend who wants to start a softball league, where the people on Zoloft will play the people on Paxil, and Wellbutrin will play Effexor. Or there should be a team of people not on antidepressants but you believe should totally be on antidepressants.

Slate: Why do you think people find what you say in your act somehow more offensive than what Chris Rock says?

Silverman: Technically he has more license to talk about black people. I mean, he does totally racist jokes about black people. That's why on The Chris Rock Show, he had the most racist writers. They're the best writers for Chris. I think he's brilliant. Traditionally, I have no right to talk about race. I'm white; I didn't grow up in an all-black neighborhood. But the license I see for myself is I'm a member of the world.

Slate: Do you self-Google?

Silverman: Yeah, of course. I bet you self-Google. Everyone self-Googles. And, I have, of course, the Google alert. But I don't have the time lately to read it. I'm actually losing interest in Googling myself. I'm so sick of myself after these past couple of months.

Slate: How often do you write?

Silverman: I don't have a routine. If I have a deadline, I'm really good. I've always been someone who got my homework assignment done immediately, before I even got home from school. I'd find every pocket of time. But when I don't have a deadline, I'm lazy like every writer.

Slate: There was a bit in The New Yorker about your having notes around your house, and one that said "stubbed my vagina."

Silverman: I feel so awful because [the writer] looked around my place and wrote that down and of all the things in the world, I didn't write that! It's hilarious, but please write this—the guys I wrote this pilot with for Comedy Central—one of them, Dan Harmon, wrote that. It's a line in the pilot.

Slate: What's the premise of the pilot?

Silverman: It's a one-camera sitcom. I play the version of myself that's in the movie [Jesus Is Magic].

Slate: The "version of yourself" that's in the movie?

Silverman: Yeah. I actually think of it as a character. I mean, I don't have a weird voice or always have to be angry. I'm completely myself on stage. I talk the way I talk and I move the way I move, but inside, I think she's—She! That's so obnoxious! I—I'm more ignorant, yet arrogant.

Slate: What's your biggest insecurity?

Silverman: This is so … totally … not unique. My thighs. Isn't that the most un-unique thing you've ever heard a woman say? My fucking thighs! They're not what they were when I was 19. They look all right, but you should see them in person. They're, like, covered in some sort of cottage cheese oatmeal-type stuff.

Slate: One of the criticisms that's leveled at your work is that it hasn't changed much over the past few years, that with a few small exceptions, you've been recycling the same material.

Silverman: I've been doing this show, Jesus Is Magic, and honing it. It has new material and I throw away older stuff. But it's a show and this is the movie of it. I'm doing like 10 20-minute spots in town now. I write new material and then sandwich it in old material that works. When the new stuff gets strong enough, I shed the old material. That's the way stand-up is. I may not be as prolific as Margaret Cho, with a new concert movie every year, but that's OK with me. If it's OK with you, that's good, but if it's not, whatever.

Pamela Paul is a contributor to Time and the author of Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families and The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129955/

culturebox
Irony Maiden
How Sarah Silverman is raping American comedy.
By Sam Anderson
Posted Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005, at 12:04 PM ET

It's fitting that the comedian Sarah Silverman's impending cultural moment—high-profile film, ongoing miniscandal, TV series in the making—is going to coincide with serious public moralizing about the sexual orientation of penguins. Silverman's work is a natural byproduct of the high-stakes game of contemporary American identity politics—the emotionally volatile generalizing about our moral right to generalize. But she's not just a critic of PC culture: She's a connoisseur. She handles the complex algorithms of taboo—who's allowed to joke about what, to whom, using what terminology—with instant precision: "Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ, and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'm one of the few people that believe it was the blacks." (The joke exposes not the ancient perfidy of any particular race but the absurdity of blaming entire races for anything.) Her best jokes are thought experiments in the internal logic of political correctness: "I want to get an abortion, but my boyfriend and I are having trouble conceiving." A Playboy interviewer, probing for something salacious, once asked Silverman if she had a nickname for her vagina. She answered "Faggot"—a throwaway joke that manages to kink sexual identity into such an ingenious pretzel it could fuel a doctoral dissertation.

Silverman began her career as an immediately discarded Saturday Night Live writer, fired after a year or so for her controversial jokes ("Quite frankly, I think it's a good law," she wrote about a mandatory 24-hour waiting period for abortions. "I was going to get an abortion the other day. I totally wanted an abortion—and it turns out I was just thirsty.") Since then, she's been elusively everywhere, starring in either forgettable shows (Greg the Bunny) or forgettable roles: Cameron Diaz's friend in There's Something About Mary, Kramer's girlfriend on Seinfeld, the painfully unfunny girlfriend of a painfully unfunny minor character in Jack Black's School of Rock.

Through her stand-up, however, Silverman has become an important member of a guerrilla vanguard in the culture wars that we might call the "meta-bigots"—other members include the South Park kids, Sacha Baron Cohen's "Ali G", and the now-AWOL Dave Chappelle. The meta-bigots work at social problems indirectly; instead of discussing race, rape, abortion, incest, or mass starvation, they parody our discussions of them. They manipulate stereotypes about stereotypes. It's a dangerous game: If you're humorless, distracted, or even just inordinately history-conscious, meta-bigotry can look suspiciously like actual bigotry.

Silverman is particularly vulnerable to such confusion because, unlike other meta-bigots, she doesn't insulate herself with fictional characters: Her persona—an incestuous, genital-obsessed, racist narcissist—looks and sounds exactly like Silverman herself. She delivers even the most taboo punch lines with almost pathological sincerity. It looks like her face isn't in on her own jokes: Her nostrils flare, her mouth cocks meaningfully to one side, her teeth (of which there seem to be a few extra) hide and reveal themselves in strategically earnest formations. It's like a Juilliard exercise; you'd need stop-motion film to track all of her expressions. Deadpan is nothing new, of course, but Silverman's deadpan is extra dead: She stretches the distance between delivery and message almost as far as it will go. While she neutralizes mass death with self-help wordplay ("When God gives you AIDS, make lemon-AIDS!") or relinks the historically unfunny tandem of sexual assault and anti-Semitism ("I was raped by a doctor, which is a bittersweet experience for a Jewish girl"), her body language suggests she's just a concerned citizen talking about property taxes at a city council meeting.

"I don't care if you think I'm racist," Silverman says in her act. "I just want you to think I'm thin." The request has largely been granted. She's pretty in a way that baits journalists into bodice-rippingly Harlequin descriptions: Variety has called her "rail-thin yet full-bosomed," and the New York Times (the description of record) "babelicious"; The New Yorker recently described her as "coltish, with shiny black hair and a china-doll complexion" (and added, in a weirdly zoological flourish, that she "moves like a vervet monkey"). She's been on Maxim's "Hot 100" list (after Jennifer Love Hewitt, before Norah Jones) and is currently the cover girl for the Jewish magazine Heeb, for which she has also written porn reviews. In light of all this, a cynic might read Silverman's mysterious long-term relationship with the stumpy late-night host Jimmy Kimmel as her ultimate ironic performance, a complex parable of sexual disorientation (as she said at a recent roast: "Jimmy Kimmel everyone, he's fat and has no charisma!"). Though Silverman uses her beauty as a prop for her sexual humor, her act stands up without it: I first ran into her as a disembodied voice issuing from Hadassah Guberman, a hilarious but not particularly attractive puppet on the (attractive but not particularly hilarious) show Crank Yankers.

Silverman has a gift for inspiring absurdly instructive public controversy. Her most notorious fiasco occurred in 2001, when she told a joke on Late Night With Conan O'Brien that unapologetically hinged on the word "chink." This summer, she got into trouble in a venue that was supposed to be trouble-proof: The Aristocrats, a documentary that challenged 100 comedians to offend its audience as ingeniously as possible. While most of the comics went straight for the "piss-shit-suck-fuck" paradigm, which very quickly became about as offensive as a newborn koala, Silverman turned the old-school joke against an iconic old-schooler. She implied, via an emotionally supercharged soliloquy full of loaded pauses, that she had been sexually abused by the 79-year-old show-business institution Joe Franklin. At the end, she looked straight into the camera and said, dead seriously, "Joe Franklin raped me"—an anti-punch line that completely paralyzed the theater I was at. Instead of laughing, we were all stuck trying to decide whether this was some new species of joke or just plain old slander. When Franklin threatened to sue soon after the movie was released ("I didn't like the nature of that wisecrack"), it made the joke strangely better. Silverman was the only comic in the film who met the challenge of the joke: She pushed it too far.

Silverman is a prototypical ironist—someone who says things she doesn't mean and (through more-or-less subtle contextual winks) expects us to intuit an unstated, smarter message underneath. But what is that message? Does she, like Socrates, play dumb in order to make us smart? Or just to experience the cheap thrill of public racism? Every ironic statement should, in theory, be translatable out of the joke world and into the world of civic-minded sincerity (the classic example: Swift's "eat Irish babies" equals "stop oppressing my country"). But Silverman's ultimate point is hard to find, partly because it's hidden behind such a blank expression. This may be one reason why such a consistently funny voice has had such a peripheral career.

All of Silverman's controversies are essentially large-scale pieces of PC performance art—but instead of settling anything about race and humor in America, they just expose the incoherence of the debate. If her humor does have a larger purpose, it is that it maps the outer limits of our tolerance; it exposes ambiguities in the discussion that we don't like to acknowledge; it taps into our giant unspoken mass of assumptions, tensions, fears, and hatreds—not to resolve them, but to remind us that they're there. (She told the Believer recently that she likes the idea of "saying things that force people to have opinions.") By reducing all of this toxic material into a logical game, she creates a kind of public catharsis. The point of Silverman's humor—the final translation of all that irony—might simply be that, no matter how much we pretend, we're not ready for her humor. These are life-and-death problems, and our laughter has terror in it.

But it may be that all of our white-knuckled hand-wringing gives Silverman too much credit. She has said that a comedian's "only job is funny thoughts"; most likely, she's just following her joke-instincts and leaving the implications to social critics. America has a famously vexed relationship with its irony: Though our pop culture exports about 90 percent of the world's supply, the puritanical, isolationist, log-cabin region of the nation's oversoul prays nightly for its death. But in a world as complicatedly social as ours, it's not expendable—irony is social chess, the playful manipulation of lazy expectations. It's at least as important as love or sadness. Only total extermination of the species would kill it.

Sam Anderson is a writer living in New York.

 

sports nut
Ozzie Guillén, Man of Letters
The White Sox manager's overlooked literary career.
By Mike DeBonis
Posted Friday, Oct. 21, 2005, at 3:51 PM PT

Ozzie Guillén may be the most misunderstood guy in professional sports. The White Sox manager has made enough verbal faux pas—telling a former player that "he better shut the [bleep] up," playfully calling a friend a "child molester"—that sportswriters have had an easy time portraying the fiery Venezuelan as a loose cannon. It doesn't help that he sounds a bit like Al Pacino's Tony Montana. When Guillén talks about "small ball," you can't help imagining him uttering, "Say hay-lo to my lee-tle friend."

But there's more to Guillén than the gruff, obscenity-laden exterior. The Sox skipper may be the most accomplished baseball-star-turned-writer since Jose Canseco, if not Jim Bouton. Since Guillén started managing last year, he's penned a regular column in El Universal, a Spanish-language daily out of Caracas, Venezuela.

Amalia Llorca, the newspaper's sports editor, says that El Universal solicited various Venezuelan sporting figures to write a regular column, but only Guillén had the discipline to keep it up. The manager's column appears on Page 2 of the sports section each Saturday. Lllorca says Guillén requires very little editing, and for his efforts he's paid a "symbolic" sum. "It's little, very little," she says. "It's like a thank you."

Writing under the byline Oswaldo Guillén, the manager is equal parts baseball savant, media critic, family man, and loyal patriot. Most of the columns are topped by a simple but profound headline: "Chance," "In the End," "The Fans," "To Win and to Lose," "Podsednik." At the bottom, readers find his e-mail address: ozzieguillen13@hotmail.com. (Guillén has complained more than once that his e-mail account crashes due to the volume of reader mail he receives.)

For the most part, Guillén's columns chart the day-to-day doings of the White Sox. However, as befits a national hero, much of his writing concerns his homeland. When Chico Carrasquel—a fellow Venezuelan and a fellow longtime White Sox shortstop—died in June, Guillen eulogized him: "He will be in another lineup, above, next to the other glories of baseball that have gone away before him."

Guillén also uses the column to set the record straight. After his well-publicized spat with former Sox slugger Magglio Ordonez—tape recorders caught him calling Ordonez "another Venezuelan piece of shit," among other epithets—he attempted to quell the fury with his pen. Sort of. "As for Magglio," he wrote, "I hope that he's dedicated to playing ball, to enjoying his money, and that, when possible, he has me at the edge of his declarations. If he thinks I'm his enemy, that's his problem."

Read on for more choice excerpts from the Guillén canon. (With special thanks to Rebecca Corvino for assistance in translating from the original Spanish.)

Ozzie explains the Cubs-White Sox rivalry: "And so that the Venezuelans understand what this series means, imagine a Caracas-Magallanes game, and multiply the emotion by three." —"Rivalries," May 21, 2005

Ozzie the psychic: "I insist, if we continue playing like this and luck helps us out, we're going to give a little surprise to all of the analysts who've predicted third place for the White Sox in the central division. We'll see." —"To Third," April 16, 2005

Ozzie on the state of nail hygiene in Chicago: "Eleven victories in 12 games have been decided by a single run. ... Chicago's manicuristas don't have any work, because the fans are biting their nails following our games." —"Eleven and One," May 8, 2004

Ozzie on his facility with the English language: "And when they asked me yesterday who was finally going to be the team's closer, my answer was: The closer will be the one who closes! Not even Yogi Berra would have responded better." —"Closer," April 4, 2004

Ozzie on courting Omar Vizquel—to a point: "And, of course, our No. 1 priority, after finishing the meeting that we had this week in Las Vegas, is to sign Omar Vizquel to be our shortstop in 2005. … I've already told him that if he comes here, it better not even occur to him to fix me up with a watch so that I'll give him the No. 13 uniform that we've both been using for a long time. … At the least, he's going to have to give me a Mercedes Benz." —"Venezuelans," Nov. 6, 2004

Ozzie on failing to court Vizquel: "I trusted that we'd obtain the services of Omar Vizquel, but it was San Francisco who signed him. It did surprise me that his agent didn't even communicate with us at all, not even to give me the chance to up my bid." —"Pure Passion," Dec. 4, 2004

Ozzie on current events, the relevance of: "After the worst storm and the worst hurricanes, the sun always comes out. This is true. It's also true that many thought that the unity that reigns in our clubhouse, the feeling that we're a family and all that happy atmosphere that they've envied us so much for, would collapse as soon as we fell into a losing streak. It was not like that." — "It Is the Truth," Oct. 1, 2005

Ozzie on witchcraft and the American League Championship Series: "It's true that we've been lucky, but the ingredients are there, on the field and on the bench, and even in the stands with the support of the fans. As for the rest, what we have to achieve is to keep it all together until October. From then on, it'll be my turn to make witchcraft!" —"Luck," June 11, 2005

Ozzie on philanthropy: [Detroit Tigers catcher] Iván Rodríguez … has an exceptional human quality. … [L]ess than a year ago [he] was in Venezuela participating in the Home Run Derby organized by Pepsi and in the autograph signing carried out by the Oswaldo Guillén Foundation to collect funds for its charity activities." —"Embarrassment," July 16, 2005

Ozzie on his critics: "No sport lends itself more to criticism than baseball. … Who plays each position, what turn at the bat you're going to give him, what pitch you're going to request, what play you're going to make. Should the team play inside or outside? And the outfielders? Do you touch the ball, or do you prefer to hit and run? Do you give the pitcher one more batter, or do you bring in the lefty who's warming up? Devils! So many options. And the worst thing is that, whatever you do, there's always going to be someone criticizing your decision, even when the play goes well and you win the game. That's how baseball is." —"Critics," June 18, 2005

Mike DeBonis is senior editor of the Washington City Paper.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128531/

 

faith-based
History of the World, Part 2
Jewish conspiracy theory: the satire.
By Joshua Neuman
Posted Friday, Oct. 21, 2005, at 9:16 AM PT

"If the Jews control the media, why don't we give ourselves better press?" Jon Stewart quipped recently on The Daily Show. If Jewish conspiracy theory is central to modern anti-Semitism, jokes about Jewish power are increasingly a staple of Jewish irreverence. The latest example is Marc Levin's documentary Protocols of Zion, produced by HBO and opening today in New York, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities. (The film will also air on HBO in the spring.) A Swiftian satire, the documentary takes as its modest proposal the premise that Jews conspired to bring about 9/11.

Jews who think that humor and anti-Semitism are as unkosher a mix as milk and meat need not fear: Protocols of Zion is no Life Is Beautiful. Unlike director Roberto Benigni, Levin carefully sets his story in a historical context rather than in a land of make-believe. He links the resurgence of anti-Semitism after 9/11 to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forgery purporting to be the Jewish master plan to rule the world that the Russian secret police composed 100 years ago. Long ago exposed as a fake, The Protocols has been translated into countless languages. Along with Mein Kampf, it's the acme of Western anti-Semitic literature. Levin uses excerpts of The Protocols to make sense of an improbable journey that takes him, as narrator, to West Palm Beach, Fla., where senior citizens struggle with voting machines and lament voting for Pat Buchanan for president in 2000, and to a tête-à-tête with Larry David, who manages to steal the scene through the other end of a telephone without being heard.

For all its shtick, Protocols isn't slapstick. Among its more trenchant moments is a meeting with Walid Rabah, publisher of the Arab Voice Newsletter of Patterson, N.J., who after 9/11 cut and pasted (with a glue stick) excerpts of The Protocols into his publication to suggest that the Jews were somehow responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center. Levin also interviews Pastor Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who calls Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ "the Michelangelo portrait of this generation." And he visits neo-Nazi leader Shaun Walker, who shows off SS bolted boots that he pulls out of a box labeled "Aryan Wear: the Sole of Our People."

None of this is revelatory—most of us know that subcultures like these are out there. But typically, Jews try to erase smears rather than air them. Recently, for example, the Anti-Defamation League got The Protocols removed from Wal Mart's online catalogue, and the Jewish Web log jewschool.com successfully campaigned to remove the anti-Semitic Web site jewwatch.com from Google's search engine.

Yet as Lenny Bruce teaches (along with First Amendment scholars), ideas and speech gain strength when they're driven underground. Mockery, on the other hand, zaps them. Think of Bruce's routine about finding a note in his basement that takes full responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ—"Signed, Morty." Sure, Levin is handing a mike to a racist skinhead when he puts Shaun Walker on camera. But in prompting Walker to describe his preference for tan boots instead of the traditional black, he is also pricking the bigot's balloon.

Levin has company among Jewish satirists in going after conspiracy theorists at the moment. In literature, music, film, and television, examples abound that would make Lenny Bruce plotz. Check out this Jewish apparel Web site, jewishfashionconspiracy.com, which puts the "racy" back into "conspiracy," by selling "Jews for Jeter" and "Happy Madonnakah" T-shirts. I'm part of the movement: Co-author and conspirator David Deutsch and I recently published The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies. In the book, we posed as historians purporting to divulge the secret history of the world, toured the greatest hits of Jew hatred—Jesus-killing, blood libel, well-poisoning—and fetched up at a meeting with the contemporary Elders of Zion. Their names are Alan Dershowitz, Noam Chomsky, and Soupy Sales, and they can't decide whether to start a "Museum of Conspiratorial Intolerance" or a reality TV show called When Anti-Semites Attack!

The new wave of satire coincides with the general resurgence of global anti-Semitism, which includes the myth that 4,000 Jews employed at the World Trade Center somehow knew to stay home from work on 9/11. So, are the satirists making the classic Jewish move of striking a blow against intolerance by playing disaster for laughs? I don't think so. At the release party for my book, Jewish waitresses served Bloody Libels ("a Bloody Mary with more screaming"), DJs played klezmer break beats, and a German television crew chased after the queen of Jewish conspiracy theory herself, Monica Lewinsky. Satire seemed to be about revelry, not politics.

Or maybe Levin's film is less about saving Jews from the Mel Gibsons of the world than about spinning out a fantasy—the fantasy that today's American Jewish community could ever act in accordance with one master plan. Back in the day, Jews spoke Yiddish, married within the tribe, and lived close together. And still the old joke was: Two Jews, three opinions. Nowadays, with intermarriage rates rising and synagogue affiliation falling, Jewish conspiracy satire gives us the illusion of a shared cosmic mission. Imagine 4,000 Jews acting in unison to do anything! To do so—even in the most darkly ironic way—is to hearken back to a world in which we were still outsiders together.

A toast, then: Let's lift a bloody libel—not "to life," but "to Morty."

sidebar

Return to article

Where to go if you're looking for more satire of Jewish conspiracy:

The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies

, by David Deutsch and Joshua Neuman.

·  Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by Will Eisner and Umberto Eco

·  "Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ … I'm one of the few people that believe it was the blacks." Jesus is Magic, Sarah Silverman (2005)

·  "Throw the Jew Down the Well" performed by Borat on Da Ali G Show (2004)

·  The Jewish Justice League in The Hebrew Hammer, Jon Kesselman (2003)

·  John Zorn, Protocols (Tzaddik Records, 2005)

·  Henry Sapoznik, Youngers of Zion (Henry Sapoznik, 2005)

·  www.jewishfashionconspiracy.com

·  www.internationaljewishconspiracy.comJoshua Neuman is the editor and publisher of Heeb magazine and co-author of The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128525/

culturebox
Mother Superior
Cameron Crowe puts his Mom in all his movies. That may be a bad thing.
By Sarah Hepola
Posted Friday, Oct. 21, 2005, at 8:27 AM PT

On the commentary track for the director's cut of Cameron Crowe's autobiographical film Almost Famous, Crowe is joined by an unusual guest—his mother. Over the course of two and a half hours, she reminisces about their life in San Diego, gushes about her son's talent, and, occasionally, scolds him. At one point, when Crowe starts rhapsodizing about a scene in which Kate Hudson lets one aching tear slip down her cheek, his mother interrupts him. "Let's just let it stand, Cameron, without comment." Like a dutiful son, he does.

Mothers have always served as cinematic fodder—from Hitchcock's Psycho, a film literally screaming with mommy issues, to Almodóvar's rose-tinted paean All About My Mother. But few American filmmakers have paid tribute to their mother so often, or so baldly, as Cameron Crowe. Alice Marie Crowe more or less co-chairs the Almost Famous director's commentary, and she also has cameos in each of her son's six films.

This, in itself, isn't strange: The Zucker Brothers slip their mother, Charlotte, into most of their films, and Rob Reiner's mother delivered the classic When Harry Met Sally one-liner that followed Meg Ryan's fake orgasm: "I'll have what she's having." Alice Marie's appearances have been less remarkable. A tall, dark-haired older woman with a twinkling smile, she has appeared as a teacher (twice), a plastic-surgeon's assistant, and as a member of the divorced-women's group in Jerry Maguire. That's where she speaks her most memorable line: "So, I finally got in touch with my anger!"

But Alice Marie's imprimatur on her son's career doesn't end with cameos. A strong-willed widow who raised Cameron and his older sister, Cindy, Alice Marie has influenced Crowe's most memorable female characters—from the deflated single mom Constance, played by Joan Cusack in Say Anything, to the plucky widow Dorothy Boyd, played by Renée Zellweger, in Jerry Maguire. And then, of course, there was Alice Marie's fictional counterpart in Almost Famous, Elaine Miller, played by the divine Frances McDormand as a no-nonsense mama bear. (A lifelong teacher, Alice Marie can't resist scolding McDormand, either. "I don't go barefoot!" she laments in the commentary. "Oh, Frances, please.")

Crowe's latest film is Elizabethtown, a romantic comedy about an entrepreneur (Orlando Bloom) who returns to small-town Kentucky after his father's sudden death and the biggest flop of his career. His mother, Holly Baylor, is played by Susan Sarandon, and regardless of what details Alice Marie might nitpick here, it can't be the casting. She has been played by some of Hollywood's most talented actresses. But despite Sarandon's charm, Holly is easily the weakest of the characters Alice Marie has inspired. There is a moment when we catch a glimpse of the baffling pain a widow must face. "I kept waiting for life to start," she says in a daze, "and now it's … over?" But soon after this delicate aside, the character morphs into a scattered self-help nightmare. "I want to learn to cook!" she says to her grieving daughter. "I want to learn to laugh! And I want to learn to tap dance!" At her husband's memorial, she does just that—tap dancing to "Moon River" and launching into a raucous stand-up routine about a randy neighbor. In that audience is Alice Marie herself, playing a minor role as an aunt, guffawing along with everyone else. For those of us watching the movie, the sequence induces sighs and embarrassment. That's not Alice Marie's fault—she's just here for the ride, and who can blame her? But I wonder if Crowe might have a little more perspective on the women in his films if he weren't so reverent toward those women in real life.

It seems unjust to complain about a filmmaker who, in his best work (Jerry Maguire, Say Anything), shows a refreshing optimism about womanhood, even an unabashed sentimentalism, tempered by cutting dialogue and unforgettable characterization. Consider Jerry Maguire's Dorothy Boyd, a young, beautiful widow without a shred of self-pity. She was a scrappy Gal Friday with a modern twist, in the form of her precocious son. As played by Zellweger, Dorothy also had a dippy self-deprecation that made her incredibly likable and all too human. But that hasn't been the case with later Crowe heroines, who often seem more like magical beings sent to earth to save our aching hero, armed with fistfuls of quirk, humor, and (usually) blond highlights. While the male protagonists wallow in confusion, tripping in the hallway and scrambling around for a rudder, the women (Almost Famous' Hudson, Vanilla Sky's Penélope Cruz, Elizabethtown's Kirsten Dunst) glow with warmth and humor.

As for the mothers, they're fierce, unstoppable survivors. "A single mother, that's a sacred thing," says Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) in Jerry Maguire—and you get the sense Crowe couldn't agree more. But by treating these women as sacred, he also makes them less than human. At least Elaine Miller had a few moments of frailty, alone and frightened about her son on the road. Holly Baylor doesn't even grieve; it's as if her husband's death is the most fabulous thing that has ever happened to her.

Now, to what extent all this idealization derives from Crowe's relationship with his mother (or his sister, or his wife, Heart's Nancy Wilson) is for the armchair therapists to decide. It's certainly no surprise that Crowe—a filmmaker with such generosity of spirit that he made cranked-up rock critic Lester Bangs seem like a softie—would want to pay tribute to the woman who raised him. And it's no surprise that a kid who famously left home at 13 to tour the country with the Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin might have a little guilt to burn. But this reverence is turning his female characters, mothers and love interests alike, into movie-land clichés. That's a shame for a director who has created such breathlessly frail and human moments on screen.

At the beginning of the Almost Famous DVD, Crowe announces, after introducing his mother, "We're gonna go for the embarrassingly personal approach. Because that was the thing about the music I loved, and the movies I loved." But as a confessionalist, he's too protective, always willing to embarrass himself while lionizing everyone else, whether it be a rock band, a mentor, or his mother. The thing about personal art is that it can't just be embarrassing to you. Sometimes it has to be embarrassing to everybody—even, as hard as it may seem, to your mother.

Sarah Hepola is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128519/

 

readme
After Judy
The New York Times' next First Amendment embarrassment.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005, at 9:01 PM PT

Here in mediaworld, we're all quite cross at the New York Times and its former star reporter, Judith Miller. She is widely believed to have sought her martyrdom as a career move. And then she gave up after a mere couple of months in jail. What a wuss! And the Times: This great institution let a mere reporter lead it around by its nose, with predictable results. What a super-wuss!! But this latest blow to the reputation of the MSM (mainstream media) cannot be pinned on Miller or the Times. It is the result of a sentimental and self-indulgent view of journalism that is widely shared in mediaworld—including by many of the journalists and media institutions now distancing themselves from Miller and the Times.

At the New York Times and beyond, the cult of the anonymous source continues strong. The Times has conceded that in theory a journalist's right to protect the identity of a source is not absolute, but the paper has not said what the limits are. Judging from the Times' feverish defense of Miller, it is hard to imagine what circumstances would exceed those limits. An exemption for journalists from the basic citizen's duty to cooperate with law enforcement is supposed to encourage troublemakers who want to tell truth to power. But Miller was being used by people in power in a secret campaign to undermine a troublemaker. The conversations Miller wanted to protect are not merely evidence of a possible crime—they are the alleged crime (outing an undercover CIA agent) itself. If the reporter is immune from testifying, the law in question might as well not be on the books. The Times asserts this right to foil the justice system not just for itself as an institution but for each of its reporters individually. And it even claims the right to ignore all judicial rulings, up to and including the Supreme Court, if these bodies happen to disagree.

In order to give journalists special privileges like this, you have to define who is and who is not a journalist. That is harder to do in the age of the Internet. One reason for the explosion of hostility against Miller and the Times is the resentment of the blogosphere. Blogging is, if anything, more like the kind of pamphleteering the framers had in mind when they guaranteed "freedom of the press" than is the New York Times or Washington Post. But if everyone with a blog or an e-mail listserve is a journalist, who isn't?

Another opportunity is coming up for the New York Times to lead the mainstream media off a First Amendment cliff. The first day under its new management, the Supreme Court agreed to decide several cases about campaign spending and the Constitution. The most important is a challenge to a Vermont state law limiting how much a candidate can spend running for governor. The law was explicitly intended to goad the Supreme Court into reconsidering its current doctrine on campaign finance, which holds that (with various complications) the government may put limits on campaign contributions, but campaign spending is an exercise of free speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment.

The court's equation of money with speech is the despair of bien-pensants everywhere, but especially at the New York Times. A Times editorial called the state of Vermont "laudable" (an adjective that exists only in newspaper editorials) and declared that "the absence of [spending] limits gives an unfair advantage to wealthy candidates, who can spend vast amounts of their own money."

That last point is obviously true. Unfortunately, it should be equally obvious that limits on spending for speech are limits on speech, both in intent and in effect. You can't use money to buy votes directly in this country, for the most part. Having more money is an unfair advantage only to the extent that it is spent on sending a louder or more persuasive message. The government can and should do many things to help make the softer voices louder. But when it tries to make the louder voices softer, it is reducing speech, which is unconstitutional.

One interesting revelation in that 6,000-word deconstruction of the Judith Miller affair in the Times last Sunday was the different ways the whole culture of anonymous sources leads to suppression of information. The identity of sources is just the beginning. Yet the Times believes that its First Amendment right to speak includes a right (for journalists only) not to speak when subpoenaed in a criminal investigation. Meanwhile, it cannot see how a right to speak includes the right to spend money on speech.

As many have pointed out over the years, the Times might feel differently about a law that limited how much any one person or organization could spend putting out a newspaper, although that too would reduce the "unfair advantage" of some players over others. As a matter of fact, various legislative attempts to limit campaign spending invariably include an exemption for the news media, just to avoid that whole thicket. But this would be an excellent moment for the Times (and the Post and the other MSM) to reconsider all their various pleas for special treatment.

Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.

 

 sports nut
Eight Games a Week
Turning my living room into a sports bar with DirecTV's SuperFan package.
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005, at 3:44 PM PT

When I was growing up, my family started every New Year with two rituals: going to Catholic Mass and perching a second television atop the larger TV in the basement so we could watch more than one college football bowl game at the same time. The arrival of a new big-screen television with picture-in-picture technology in the 1990s did not end this holiday practice. Instead, it empowered us to watch an unprecedented three games at once.

This year, DirecTV has bestowed upon me a technology that surpasses even my dad's invention (sadly unpatented) of picture-atop-a-picture-within-a-picture. The "SuperFan" package, which costs $99 on top of the $239 yearly fee for the NFL Sunday Ticket (that's the cost for new subscribers—renewals get a discount), allows you to watch two "Game Mix" channels that show up to eight games on the same screen. Slate threw down the $99 for me this past weekend. Now, I can watch half the league without changing the channel.

Several of my friends provide complicated accounting justifications to their wives for the expense of Sunday Ticket, noting how much they would spend on average at a sports bar over the course of 16 games. SuperFan complicates the calculus by bringing a better bar, with more TV screens, into your living room. (Next year, DirecTV promises digital taps, waitresses, and an annoying guy in a Donovan McNabb jersey.) The question the DirecTV subscriber must ask: Is the package worth an additional $5.82 per Sunday over a 17-week season? Let's assume you'll miss three or four games because your favorite team has a bye or a night game, or because you visit your retrograde Sunday Ticketless family for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Now, you're up to $7.60 a game. Would I have paid $7.60 for SuperFan this past Sunday? Probably not.

You really shouldn't bother with SuperFan unless you have a large-screen HDTV paired with the right kind of DirecTV receiver. Part of the package's appeal is that, in addition to the Game Mix channels, you get more than 100 games in HD. No such luck for me—I've got an old-fashioned, non-HD tube. And since I don't have the special "D10" interactive receiver, I'm also missing some crucial labor-saving features, such as instantaneous scrolling among audio feeds.

Most important, size matters. Sure, I get eight pictures on my 32-inch box—they're arranged in two rows of four games apiece—but thanks to the large DirecTV graphics surrounding them, each game measures only about six inches from corner to corner—it's like watching eight video iPods. I tried to sit close to the set, but at close range each miniscreen is so pixilated as to be almost unwatchable. Game Mix tries to make up for the small pictures with some functional graphics—scoreboards that turn red when a team has a ball inside the opponent's 20-yard line and turn green when someone scores. There's also a little arrow that shows you approximately where the ball is. I would have gladly jettisoned the bells and whistles for eight slightly bigger screens.

If you bore in on a tiny sector of the screen, you can figure out if somebody caught a pass or made an interception, but it's impossible to make out who missed a tackle or made a block. It's also disappointing when you realize you've missed a game-changing interception in the lower-left corner because you were zoning in on the upper right. Not surprisingly, watching eight games at once turns out to be impossible. It would be better if you could select the four games you want and double them in size, or at least dump the blowouts that aren't worth following. Of course, missing exciting plays from around the league happens all the time when you're watching a single full-screen game. But with Game Mix, the whole point is to catch all the action.

The other major problem is redundancy. Ever get annoyed when James Brown pops up every five seconds for another one of Fox's "Game Breaks"? On Game Mix, you get to watch each in-game highlight package four or five times as it cascades across the mini-screens. There's also an irritating scroll at the bottom of the screen that gives you the score of any games that don't fit on your eight-screen cornucopia, as well as who's playing in the late games. Why do I need a scroll? I've already got eight scrolls.

For all my carping, there were times when Game Mix was a godsend. Cowboys-Giants and Steelers-Jags went into overtime simultaneously, just as New Orleans drove in the fourth quarter to tie its game with Atlanta. Thankfully, I didn't have to choose. Take that, Barry Schwartz!

SuperFan provides subscribers with a few more perks. At midnight each Monday, you can start watching "Short Cuts"—games in 30 minutes or less. That's every snap, every play, every flag—including occasional replays of turnovers, touchdowns, and key injuries—in half an hour. Finally, someone has figured out how to turn football into basketball: free-flowing action and a running clock, plus the players get to wear pads and tackle each other. There's also a "Red Zone Channel" on game days that's supposed to cut to the best plays as they happen. Like CBS during March Madness, the execution isn't very good. RZC took me to the Falcons-Saints game just in time to see a defensive holding call. I don't see the point. With Game Mix, I can make my own lackluster decisions about what game to jump to next.

Now that my Chiefs are playing on Friday night because of Hurricane Wilma, I'm considering TiVo-ing Game Mix this weekend while I watch Chargers-Eagles. That way, I'll have all seven 1 p.m. ET games on tape—at least in miniature—if I want to click over and rewind to watch a key play or drive from another game. The real test will come when there's not one game that I'm really interested in. I can see myself watching Game Mix for a while after kickoff and before the final gun, when several games are competing for my attention.

If that becomes a habit, SuperFan will have achieved a remarkable feat: persuading me to watch live television again. For two NFL seasons, I've started watching my game of choice about a half hour after it actually starts. That way, I can fast forward through all the ads and the halftime show and catch up in time to watch the last few minutes live. With SuperFan, however, I watched three and a half hours of live TV, with barely a pause or a fast forward.

As a consequence, I saw more TV ads on Sunday than I have in a year and a half. What did I get for $99? More Simpsons promos! More Bridgestone tire ads! More pitches for the Batman Begins DVD! For this turn of events, Fox and CBS should be paying me.

Chris Suellentrop, a writer in Washington, D.C., is a former Slate staffer.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128444/

explainer
Stop That Ship!
How do you make an arrest at sea?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005, at 3:26 PM PT

A five-day boat chase through the North Atlantic ended Wednesday when a Russian trawler accused of illegal fishing escaped the pursuit of the Norwegian coast guard. Patrol boats tried to escort the rogue ship to port, but it turned around and made a beeline for Russian waters. At one point, its captain even threatened to ram the Norwegians to avoid arrest. How do you make an arrest at sea?

Board the ship and put everyone in handcuffs. U.S. Coast Guard cutters first try to pull over a mischievous ship by making radio contact with its crew. (P.A. systems can be used if no one responds to the radio call.) They ask how many people and weapons are on board and tell them to assemble in one area—the crew's mess, for example. Boarding teams deploy either from small boats or helicopters; they search the ship and take any lawbreakers they find into custody. If they have to bring prisoners back to the cutter, the team will leave several members behind to pilot the criminal vessel to a nearby port, where U.S. Marshals may seize the boat as evidence. In some cases, the Coast Guard may leave a crew in control of its ship and escort them to a nearby port.

Some nautical outlaws—like the Russian trawler—try to flee the scene of a crime. Patrol boats may fire warning shots across their bow (i.e., into the water in front of them). They may also attempt to disable the ship's engines. For smaller vessels, this may be as easy as firing a copper slug into an outboard engine. Police can drown the engine of a bigger ship by firing a water cannon into its exhaust stacks. (Sometimes helicopters spray water down the stacks with fire hoses.)

Another approach is to immobilize the ship by "fouling its propeller." Patrol boats and helicopters sometimes entangle fugitive vessels by firing a netlike device into the water in front of it. (The USCG is now lobbying to install free-floating "running gear entanglement systems" to protect ports from terrorist attacks.) In the future, maritime law enforcement may send out remote-controlled "RoboSkis" armed with these net launchers.

Bonus Explainer: How do local cops on patrol boats make arrests? They turn on their lights and sirens and pull over the offender. If they have to take someone into custody—for driving a boat while intoxicated, for example—they'll turn over control to another passenger. (If no one else on board can drive, the officer will tug the boat to a pier or radio a local towing company.) In the rare event when someone tries to escape, police boats will pursue as far as possible. Since bullets can ricochet off the water's surface and pose a risk to nearby civilians, water patrol officers almost never fire warning shots.

Bonus Bonus Explainer: It's also possible to arrest a boat, as opposed to its crew. According to maritime law, a boat can be held responsible for unpaid bills or wages or any damages it causes in accidents. If someone makes a claim against a boat, local authorities can "arrest" it and force its owner to pay up.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Sgt. Ralph Bledsoe of the Missouri State Water Patrol and Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Carter of the United States Coast Guard.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128445/

 

 

politics
A Friend in Need
Is it cruel for Bush to support Miers at all costs?
By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005, at 1:13 PM PT

Friends and allies of the White House are now saying the Harriet Miers nomination has come to the same pass that the president's plan for overhauling Social Security reached last spring. The nomination is no longer viable; all that remains is for Bush to accept this.

Careful observers of Bush's tenure chuckle at such apocalyptic judgments. Bush has consistently ignored the rules of Washington and overcome dire predictions. No one thought Bush would pass two tax cuts. He passed four. Medicare reform was never supposed to pass. It did. When policy failures call for a sacrificial firing, Bush almost always resists. Smart people said he would have to sack Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld after the abuses at Abu Ghraib to get re-elected. He didn't. There's a predictable pattern: The chattering class revolts, Bush holds his position, and the storm passes. "Someone said, 'It's a steep hill to climb, Mr. President,' " Bush recalled about opposition to Social Security reform last spring. "Well, my attitude is, the steeper the better, because when you get up top, you realize you have left a significant contribution behind." In the past, the fight has been worth it. Bush almost always gets his way and usually enhances his standing in the process.

But it's one thing to push a program against the will of the system. It's another thing to push a person. A person bleeds. At some point, Bush's refusal to scuttle Miers' nomination may turn into an act of cruelty. Forcing Miers to go forward increases the chances that her admirable career as a private lawyer, trusted friend, and able public servant will be eclipsed by the repeated calamities associated with trying to ram through her nomination. There is a reason Michael Jordan stopped playing baseball: He wanted to be remembered for succeeding at what he was good at, not failing promiscuously at something he wasn't cut out for.

We may not be at that moment yet, but Washington is experiencing something like tissue rejection over Miers. The marks against the nomination mount with each passing day, and the resistance does not seem to bend in response to Bush's determination and force of will. White House attempts to resuscitate Miers' prospects this week with a showy sales campaign were almost immediately scuttled. She crossed signals with Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter over the right to privacy, which is code for you-know-what. He thought she'd endorsed precedent that found such a right in the Constitution. Her handlers said she didn't, and Specter had to mumble that he must have misunderstood. Her meetings with other senators have also been underwhelming. In the latest wrong turn in this sad tale, Specter and his Democratic counterpart Pat Leahy found her answers to the committee's questionnaire so lacking that they asked she try again, and to take the assignment seriously this time. Legal scholars are preparing to pick apart what she has written, arguing that her answers were not only thin but wrong. All of the individual problems with her nomination feed into the larger narrative that she's just not up for the task.

The White House must realize by now that the Washington establishment can't be blown off as readily as before. The lobbyists, strategists, and pundits turned out to be right about the slow death of Bush's Social Security fix. They may be right about Miers, too.

Some have speculated that Bush's determination is a product of the boom-and-bust cycle of the oil business. He had a patchy business history in that trade but kept the optimism and determination that you need to persevere in a world where you could face a long patch of dry wells. Bush never did find a gusher, but he had the mentality you need to keep looking.

There's also another famous tale from Bush's Texas years about knowing when to cut your losses. It was the 1970s, and the oil business in Midland was going belly up. Tom Dickey, a young geologist at Bush's company, walked into his boss's office hoping to be told there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Bush had been telling his employees that times were tough but they'd ride 'em out. When Dickey arrived, Bush was ready to face up to reality. "Dickey," he said, with his cowboy boots propped up on his desk, "You need to get out of here. You need to go where there's some action."

Perhaps sheer resolve will allow the "fog to clear" around the nomination, as one administration aide put it to me recently. But if the weather on the Judiciary Committee doesn't change soon, the president will owe his old friend Harriet Miers the same candor and compassion he showed Tom Dickey.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

medical examiner
Where's My Avian Flu Shot?
How to ramp up vaccine production.
By David Dobbs
Posted Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005, at 10:52 AM PT

If the bird flu that last week flew from Asia to Europe mutates into a form that moves easily from human to human, historians will say of the 21^st century's first pandemic: They knew what was coming. Public-health officials have known for four years that the avian virus—H5N1—is a nasty one that might jump to human-to-human transmission. Alas, forewarned doesn't mean forearmed. Clinical testing under way suggests we'll soon have a viable vaccine. But neither governments nor private vaccine-makers have a way to produce vaccines fast enough to prevent or contain an outbreak.

It's possible that bird flu may never jump to human-to-human transmission, or that it will jump but become less virulent, turning into the equivalent of an ordinary seasonal flu. But given that the virus has killed about half the 120 people known to have picked it up from birds, and that it bears disturbing genetic and clinical likenesses to the mass-killer Spanish flu virus of 1918, pumping up vaccine production makes sense. If there's a slim chance that tens or hundreds of millions of people will be killed, it's worth preparing for.

In a pandemic scenario, a vaccine acts as both fire extinguisher and firewall. Having several hundred million doses of vaccine on hand globally, and the capacity to make more quickly, is the only realistic way to encircle and contain an initial local outbreak of bird flu—or, should containment fail, to keep infection and death rates from skyrocketing. This spring, health agencies around the world, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health, contracted with drug makers to develop and test bird-flu vaccines. The biggest trial under way so far, conducted by the NIH and the drug maker Sanofi-Pasteur, found that Sanofi-Pasteur's vaccine safely produces immunity in healthy adults. The NIH is now testing it on the elderly and children. Other drug makers, including Chiron, GlaxoSmithKline, and Medimmune, are running early trials of other formulations.

These efforts suggest that vaccine makers will be able to develop a seed supply of a reasonably effective vaccine within six months to a year. Producing mass quantities would take another six to nine months. (Click here for a Slate Explainer on how bird-flu vaccine is made.) In the best-case scenario, then, it will take at least a year—and more likely closer to two years—to produce a significant stockpile of vaccines, or 60 million to 90 million doses for the United States. (The goal shouldn't be to make billions of doses, because the virus might mutate radically before many of those shots could be given.)

What are our chances of pulling this off? A decade from now, they'll be quite good, as the planned expansion of industrial facilities and new, faster vaccine-development techniques ramp up production. But the shorter term is far dicier.

Currently, the drug industry can produce annually about 900 million doses of ordinary seasonal flu vaccine. But the bird-flu vaccines tested so far seem to require more raw antigen than do common flu vaccines (90 micrograms per dose instead of 15). That means current methods can produce only about 150 million doses of bird-flu vaccine a year. Since effective vaccination requires two doses six weeks apart, those doses would vaccinate only 75 million people. That falls well short of the need.

Drug companies might be able to stretch the supply, however, by using an adjuvant—a chemical that magnifies a vaccine's effect. Several companies, including Sanofi-Pasteur, Chiron, GlaxoSmithKline, Medimmune, and Herispherx Biopharma, recently signed agreements with the United States and other countries to develop and test adjuvant-assisted vaccines. They hope to have these ready for approval by the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization within a year or two. GlaxoSmithKline says its version will be powerful enough to stretch the current production capacity of 150 million shots of bird-flu vaccine to 7 billion shots—enough to vaccinate 3.5 billion people.

But a pandemic could still outpace the drug companies. That's one reason it also makes sense to prepare to cope in other ways—by coming up with a plan for maintaining essential infrastructure and services should a pandemic occur (we don't have one) and a way to quickly allocate, distribute, and administer antiviral drugs (we don't have that either). At the same time, the Bush administration and world health authorities need to keep pushing for and funding speedy vaccine development and manufacturing. Can the powers that be sustain that sort of interest? Their track record isn't encouraging. But the race is on.

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Flu-vaccine production might be sped up by ditching the egg method in favor of methods that use cell-culture or plasmid DNA. Cell-culture methods, used for most non-flu vaccines, involve growing key antigen components in human, monkey, insect, or other animal cells in enclosed vats. For bird-flu vaccine, cell-culture would cut at least a month off the current six-to-nine month manufacturing process. It would also double or triple capacity. Several vaccine makers are moving in this direction, but it will probably take them two to five years to work out the kinks.

In five to 10 years (or possibly sooner, if the NIH puts them on a fast track), plasmid DNA methods for making flu vaccine will probably be approved. Plasmid DNA vaccines inject a person not with grown antigen, but rather with DNA that encodes the desired antigen, causing the body to build its own antigens. Test cases in animals have shown this method to be effective, quick, and remarkably safe. (In 2003, a plasmid DNA vaccination program successfully inoculated the remaining 200 California condors from West Nile Virus.) Unlike present methods, plasmid DNA vaccines offer tight matches of antigen to the target virus and at the same time can produce immunity against several viruses at once. And they can be made in large quantities in as little as a month. The main barrier to their adoption is that some problems remain in predictably translating animal test vaccines into human vaccines.

David Dobbs, author of Reef Madness, writes on science, medicine, and culture.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2128432/

moneybox
Miers and Her Money
A psycho-financial analysis of the Supreme Court nominee.
By Henry Blodget
Updated Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005, at 9:31 AM PT

What does Harriet Miers' money tell us about her? The Supreme Court nominee has filed financial disclosure forms for the last five years as a requirement for her White House job. The most remarkable fact that emerges from her filings is this: She managed to work for nearly 30 years as an attorney in private practice without getting rich. Chief Justice John Roberts—whose psycho-financial biography you can read here—amassed a fortune worth at least $3 million and probably much more; Miers finds herself at age 60 with a net worth of about $675,000, which unfortunately does not make her wealthy.

Miers, like many of her fellow Americans, has not saved enough for retirement. According to her latest financial filing, submitted last week, Miers' IRA contains about $207,000, a sum that would fund comfortable golden years for a cocker spaniel, perhaps, but not an average American, even a single one (at a typical 5-percent-per-year withdrawal rate, Miers could spend only about $10,000 annually, pre-tax). Her investing strategy also shows her to be excessively cautious. She has invested her nest egg mainly in cash and Treasuries and is therefore in grave danger from inflation. In today's environment, Miers' IRA probably generates a paltry real return of about 1 percent a year.

Like many Americans, in other words, Miers will depend on her Social Security benefits and/or will need to keep working well past the national retirement age. Also like many Americans, she appears to have raided her retirement funds to cover current expenses.

When Miers left Dallas law firm Locke Liddell in 1999—and the $624,000 salary she earned as a managing partner—her IRA (then a firm profit-sharing account) contained between $500,000 and $1 million. Every year since, however, this account balance has mysteriously declined, so much so that it now totals the aforementioned $207,000. It is possible that, in typical American fashion, Miers has mortgaged her future to maintain the lifestyle she enjoyed when she was earning $624,000, instead of the one she should be restricted to now that she gets a government salary of $161,000. But such profligacy seems unlikely, based on the rest of Miers' disclosures.

She's certainly not wasting the IRA money on housing. Miers owns a house in Dallas valued at $688,000 and a condo in Virginia valued at $295,000. It might be easy to mistake $1 million of property as evidence of a taste for extravagance, but with the ballooning real-estate prices of recent years, it isn't. Assuming Miers is reporting her property values at today's prices (instead of at cost), her housing investment is modest. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal reports that her Virginia pad encompasses all of 964 square feet. (She also owns a "vacant lot" in Dallas, estimated to be worth $7,500.)

In typical American fashion, Miers has financed her two residences with mortgages, taking advantage of low interest rates and the mortgage tax deduction. Sensibly and conservatively, she does not appear to have succumbed to the current fad for negative-amortization or adjustable-rate interest-only loans, debt bombs that could blow the personal finances of many homeowners to smithereens. Miers' mortgages amount to a reasonable 53 percent of the equity value in her properties, providing a cushion if rates spike and real-estate values tank. Dumping one of her houses would improve Miers' retirement picture, but it wouldn't save the day.

Nor is Miers extravagant in other ways. The Journal reports that she drives an "older-model Mercedes," and her disclosure form values her cars and other personal property at a grand total of $35,000. No Monets, sloops, or cavernous wine cellars here.

So, where has all that retirement money been going? Perhaps to another expense category depressingly familiar to most Americans: health-care costs. According to the Journal and AP, Miers is the primary caretaker for her 91-year-old mother, who has required in-home and nursing-home care since the mid-1990s. That a decade of her mom's health care could consume several hundred thousand dollars set aside for Miers' own retirement won't come as a surprise to anyone who has had (or paid for) a long-term illness in recent years.

Judging from her financial statements, the difference between Miers' brand of conservatism and the kind exemplified by many of the ex-private-sector moguls who employ her is that it seems truly compassionate, in the sense that Miers seems to be sacrificing some of her own lifestyle and financial security for the benefit of others. If Miers sits on the Supreme Court until she's 75—or trades her newfound fame for a humongous salary somewhere else—her retirement will be plush, irrespective of her currently depleted IRA. A Supreme Court pension and speaking engagements will guarantee it. This said, Miers' financial situation does reveal an interesting irony: Without the late-career, Hail Mary to the court, she would have to work well into her 70s. She has no husband or children to care for her. Absent the Supreme Court boost, the retirement of this well-educated, hardworking, self-reliant, and frugal American would be funded primarily by a liberal government program that some of her conservative colleagues would love to abolish: Social Security.

Henry Blodget, a former securities analyst, lives in New York City.

 

music box
Southern Rock
Even with an electric guitar, the past is never past.
By Ethan Hauser
Posted Friday, Oct. 28, 2005, at 11:42 AM PT

The Louisville band My Morning Jacket has a wildly allusive cameo in Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown. They appear as Ruckus, a Southern-rock group covering "Freebird." It's a curious choice: an actual band from the South portraying a fictional band from the South playing one of the most iconic Southern-rock songs ever written. It's even more puzzling because My Morning Jacket has often railed against being identified as a Southern-rock band. As they told an interviewer, "Ever since day one, we've tried to do lots of different things on all our EPs and records and stuff like that, and feel like the image is mostly conveyed because we're hairy and we're from Kentucky and we play in bare feet sometimes."

Like all labels, "Southern Rock" can be ghettoizing and silly—there's no such thing as "Northern Rock" or "Midwestern Rock." Yet, like most labels, it's an efficient shorthand, in this case for an unadorned guitar-based rock with a little bluesy swagger, written and played by Southerners. Dormant through much of the '80s and '90s, the genre has been freshened lately, courtesy of acts such as Kings of Leon, Bobby Bare Jr., Drive-By Truckers, and My Morning Jacket. In the media, each of these groups has been tagged as channeling progenitors: Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, Charlie Daniels. They're also often depicted as small-town guys who play homespun music, drink too much, regret too much, and complain too much about their jobs at the factory.

No band in this genre was so nakedly foisted upon us as throwback Southerners than Nashville's Kings of Leon, who have a marketer's dream of a bio (rural roots, sibling band members, an evangelist father). Too bad they're a very generic rock band, a Southern version of the Strokes: all hair, image, and carefully chosen vintage T-shirts. Their success has overshadowed a more talented old-fashioned Southern-rock band: the Drive-By Truckers. Hailing from Muscle Shoals, Ala., the Drive-By Truckers sing about officially sanctioned Southern themes like Wal-Mart and bar fights, complemented by accessible and unaffected guitar leads and basic rhythms. "We can't afford no insurance," frontman Patterson Hood complains in the song "Puttin People on the Moon," adding, "I been 10 years unemployed." Just in case you missed it from the album title (The Dirty South) or the "I been" locution, the way Hood drawls "insurance" ("inshur-nce") reveals his Southern pride. If this all sounds a little self-regarding, it is. But the band redeems their kitsch with solid musicianship. Hood has a alt="Play Media">muddy, emotive growl, an instrument so distinctive that it can overwhelm the guitar play underneath.

While Drive-By Truckers seem unconflicted about their heritage, My Morning Jacket's resistance to trumpeting their own roots stems from an idealistic hope that music need not be compartmentalized. Their ambivalence also likely derives from the fact that the word "Southern" (and by extension, "Southern rock") has often been used synonymously with "racist," "redneck," and "stupid." In 1977, on his album Decade, Neil Young famously admonished, "Southern man better keep your head/ Don't forget what your good book said/ Southern change gonna come at last." Which earned a rebuke from unreconstructed Southerners Lynyrd Skyrnyrd, in "Sweet Home Alabama": "Well I heard Mister Young sing about her/ Well, I heard ole Neil put her down/ Well, I hope Neil Young will remember/ A southern man don't need him around anyhow."

My Morning Jacket, aside from chafing at their categorization, has remained above this fray. They don't grapple with the taint of racism that accompanies their drawl; they express neither sympathy nor condemnation toward neighbors who might still fly the Confederate flag. Lyrically, their songs are about the universal themes (love, loss, and hope) that are the purview of no single part of the country. Instead, their ancestry bleeds through in the way that their songs are assembled. Through four albums, the band has been lacing traditional rock compositions with bits of country, folk, and psychedelia. Jim James, My Morning Jacket's singer and songwriter, is obsessed with space. He attempts to widen the contours of a conventional rock song, cutting the fences circumscribed by hummable, melodic guitars and foot-tapping drums and bass—all the while still preserving a classic enough sound so that a listener never feels alienated or lost.

On the band's first two albums, the intensely personal At Dawn and The Tennessee Fire, this spatial experimentation was accomplished through soaking the songs in reverb. James's voice is alt="Play Media">haunting even when it's unfiltered; tunneled through so much echo, it becomes heartbreaking. My Morning Jacket's 2003 album, It Still Moves, saw the band ambling toward a more standard rock sound. The churning guitars, always out front during the furious live shows, dominate tracks like " alt="Play Media">One Big Holiday" and "Mahgeetah." The songs reveal their influences, but they are not typical of Southern rock. Instead of grounding his songs with bluesy pain and an Elvis-esque strut, James turns to sources like the aforementioned scolding Mr. Young; he shares with the Canadian a voice that can transfix a listener with alt="Play Media">lamentation, along with the ability to shift quickly between rough-hewn and fragile. It's a good bet that James has also listened to a fair share of Led Zeppelin. The most aggressive songs are underpinned with the kind of searing, shattering riffs found on "Black Dog." Finally, there's a healthy dose of Cheap Trick, whose looser guitars, driving and bright, show up here as well.

On their latest album, Z, My Morning Jacket has ventured even further afield, toying with reggae ("Off the Record"). Not all of the experiments work, but when the band sticks closer to home, as on the album's strongest cut, "Gideon," the results are moving. The song starts off slow and calm, with James asking, "Gideon, what have you told us at all?" Then, in the space of a minute and a half, it has built into a towering stream of alt="Play Media">glorious, melodic noise, with James howling at the end, "Animal, come on."

It's a song that encapsulates My Morning Jacket, as much as any one song can: soft and loud, tiny and epic. For all of the band's protests at being called Southerners, they are engaged in the same sort of boundary-stretching as two of their brethren, albeit in very different fields: William Faulkner and Samuel Mockbee. Faulkner's sprawling sentences never devolved into mush because they were anchored by precise logic, a structure that let them veer and return; they too were about space, about carving new space and verging on the out of control. And the architect Mockbee, whose Rural Studio erected churches and homes out of cast-off tires, carpet tiles, and other detritus, worked within an inherited vernacular as well. That both of these men, and My Morning Jacket, were products of a region of the country so rich in charm and conflict has to be something more than coincidence.

Ethan Hauser is a writer in New York. His short stories have been published in Esquire, Playboy, and the anthology New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2005.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128928/

politics
Scooter Who?
How Bush will deal with the Libby indictment.
By John Dickerson
Posted Friday, Oct. 28, 2005, at 11:34 AM PT

Scooter who? You may remember how George Bush's friendship with Enron chairman Ken Lay evaporated when the energy company came under investigation. That looks likely to happen with Scooter Libby. Libby has resigned. Vice President Cheney has vouched for his patriotism and talents. And now the White House will attempt to change the subject.

Will that strategy work? White House aides saw how badly it went for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, last week when she referred to the kind of indictments that have now been handed down as a "perjury technicality" and got slammed as a hypocrite. They don't want to repeat that. What may be slightly more effective is taking a page from the Clinton playbook by looking as busy as possible in the midst of scandal. Bush will keep "doing the people's business," visiting hurricane-damaged areas and talking about the war on terror. Already, officials are trying to make the case that the scandal is a minor political incident. "Is it going to matter in a year?" asks a Bush adviser. "Not likely. What is going to matter in the midterms? Iraq and spending and immigration. This does not affect that."

But as Bush plays down the scandal, he may be undermined by the kind of conservatives who recently pulled down Harriet Miers, and who may try to lead a more assertive political response. Karl Rove would prefer they stay quiet. He'd like it to become accepted wisdom that since Fitzgerald didn't indict him today, he's in the clear. Rove and his allies would like Patrick Fitzgerald's 22-month investigation to become known as the Scooter Libby affair. Cheney, whose natural instinct would be to lash out at the prosecutor, is extremely unlikely to do so, given that the criminal investigation centered around his office is ongoing.

But will conservatives who revere the vice president and the hawkish worldview Libby was promoting go along? Many are instinctively inclined to rally around Libby the way they did around Oliver North during the Iran-Contra affair. Instead of seeing the evidence of Libby's perjury, obstruction of justice, and false statements as efforts to protect his own skin, they'll decry the "criminalization of politics," and frame his actions in a patriotic narrative: Whatever lines Libby may have crossed, he was acting in the service of two noble goals. He was protecting his boss and defending the case for the war against Saddam Hussein. Supporters regard Libby's obsession with refuting Joe Wilson as proper. They see him as merely fighting back against a partisan Democrat who lied about his mission and his findings.

Whether this line will play with the public the way North's good-solider act did remains to be seen. Scooter is no Ollie. He's shy and evidently sane and doesn't wear a uniform. He also won't have the public stage of congressional hearings that North did to make his case. But conservatives may cast him in that role anyway. The Miers pick was a symbol of what much of the "base" sees as a general flabbiness at the White House. They think Bush shrank from a fight by nominating a tepid nominee who could pass liberal muster. They'll be watching to see if he shrinks again by shirking Libby.

And even if Republicans decide not to embrace Scooter as a martyr, Democrats are hardly going to ignore the issue. They're intent on using the indictments as a way to relitigate the case against an increasingly disastrous and unpopular war.

It would have been better for the White House in some ways if Patrick Fitzgerald had indicted Rove but not extended the grand jury. After 22 months of having to say "no comment," they were looking forward to being able to start spinning and managing the crisis. Now they have the stabbing political pain of an indictment plus the long-term ache of an ongoing investigation.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

surfergirl
Extreme Television
I Shouldn't Be Alive recounts real-life survival stories with harrowing precision.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Oct. 28, 2005, at 9:54 AM PT

The new Discovery Science Channel series with the impressively grabby title I Shouldn't Be Alive (premiering tonight at 9 p.m. ET) was co-created by John Smithson, who also produced the 2003 feature film Touching the Void. For anyone who's seen Touching the Void, that alone should be reason enough to give the show a chance. That movie turned the true story of a disastrous two-person mountain climbing expedition in the Andes into an almost sickeningly suspenseful saga of loyalty, betrayal, guilt, and the human instinct to survive.

I Shouldn't Be Alive uses the same storytelling technique as Touching the Void: present-day interviews with the survivors of each ordeal are intercut with minimalist re-enactments of the events. The actors playing the survivor's younger (and usually stupider) selves basically function as posable action figures, their choices and motivations understood through the voice-over rather than through dialogue. In tonight's premiere episode, "Shark Survivor," the five-person crew of a yacht sailing from Maine to Florida undergoes an unbelievable ordeal after their boat sinks in a storm at sea.

First, their fully equipped survival raft, stocked with flares, food, and fresh water, is ripped from the skipper's hands and carried away by the waves, leaving only an inflatable rubber dinghy with no supplies at all. As two of the five tread water alongside the dinghy, one of them snarls to the other, "Stop kicking me." "I'm not kicking you," responds the first, and in a double take that's both grisly and funny, both of them realize that they're being bumped by the noses of circling sharks. They scramble into the dinghy pronto, beginning a five-day ordeal of floating aimlessly, without food, water, or any means of signaling to passing ships, as one woman's bone-deep wounds, sustained when the rigging of the sinking ship lashed her legs, begin to fester.

In a scene straight out of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," two of the men make the desperate choice to drink seawater, only to succumb to a dehydration-induced psychosis that has them hallucinating and spouting gibberish. Slowly the viewer begins to realize that, gee, only two of the five real-life crew members have appeared onscreen to share their memories. As we learn, one by one, the miserable fate of the other three, the sense of loneliness and despair becomes almost unbearable.

This show has taken some critical heat for its low production values and the over-the-top acting in the re-enactment segments, but it seems to me that these complaints miss the point. Sure, the re-enactment technique is cheesy by its very nature, but at the heart of this show is the ancient art of storytelling. The verbal accounts of the survivors are so vibrant, their evocation of extreme experience so precise, that the viewer huddles before the TV like a child listening to ghost stories around a campfire, undistracted even by the indignity of commercial interruptions.

The producers did make one terrible aesthetic choice: the occasional CSI-style animated shots in which the camera zooms into the human body to illustrate the changes taking place in the survivors' physiology. There's Adrenaline-cam! Trenchfoot-cam! Gangrene-cam! And in one particularly regrettable moment, Interior-of-Shark-Nose-cam! We don't need a tour of the nubbinlike olfactory sensors in a shark's snout to know that, if you're stranded at sea with several dozen of them and an open gash in your leg, you have significant reason for concern. I Shouldn't Be Alive doesn't need to borrow techniques from pop forensics shows to drive home the terror of the life-and-death situations it recounts. These stories already benefit from the scariest special effect of all: They're true.

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

 

 

science
Swimming for Cancer
The tadpole test.
By Paul Boutin
Posted Friday, Oct. 28, 2005, at 8:50 AM PT

When I step into the Molecular Sciences Institute in downtown Berkeley, I find a bunch of mixed-breed postdocs—math, physics, engineering, computers—in street duds. The genomics research lab looks like a high-school classroom. There are benches covered with pipette stands, a few laptops, thousands of pinky-sized plastic test tubes, a few Bunsen burners, and a deep freezer for cellular cultures. The biologist in the room turns out to be the guy who looks like (and is) a motorcycle mechanic, casually whipping up a batch of custom DNA in what looks like (and is) a green plastic ice bucket. The bucket holds what could become an early-warning blood test for cancer.

MSI's research seeks to discover and model the molecular processes inside living cells. The nonprofit lab has about 25 researchers—and at least $20 million in funding. But instead of using clean rooms and supercomputers, the MSI team creates custom life forms with buckets and outdated Macs. Welcome to the new biotech—part IT project, part cooking class.

The only mind-bending piece of equipment in sight is a DNA synthesizer, a yellowing plastic appliance (you can buy a used one for $2,500 on eBay) that spits out strands of DNA from computer-generated sequences. It's like an inkjet printer for genes. You plug in bottles of the four basic nucleotides—A, G, C, T—as if they were toner cartridges, send a DNA sequence from your computer, and out comes the components of a custom double helix. (If that's too much work, even, you can order your custom DNA online and FedEx will deliver it two days later.)

MSI was founded in 1996 by acclaimed molecular biologist and future Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner, who believed in recruiting researchers from outside the field of biology. A few years back, one of Brenner's hires, a physicist by training, goaded his biologist labmates over their crude measuring tools. Why can't you guys identify any molecule as reliably as you can a DNA sequence? he asked. The question spurred the development of MSI's "tadpoles." These custom molecular widgets can detect trace molecular counts of substances—proteins, poisons, or inorganic stuff like lead—in concentrations too low for other current measurements to register.

A tadpole (technically known as a protein-DNA chimera) is a hybrid of two molecules. Its head is a protein designed to bind to one specific type of molecule. Its tail is a strip of DNA that serves as a chemical bar code. Despite its name, the tadpole isn't alive. It's a chemical sticky. Mix some tadpoles into a blood sample and their heads will stick to, say, the specific kind of protein that breaks loose into your blood as a prostate tumor develops—months before your doctor would notice anything funny down there. In the past, biologists would have struggled to find and count the protein heads. But the tadpoles' DNA tails stand out like price tags. "No other biological molecule can be quantified as easily, or with as much sensitivity, as DNA," Ian Burbulis, the biker biologist, explained to me.

Burbulis showed me how he makes the tadpoles. The easy part is printing out their tails on the DNA synthesizer. Burbulis grows the protein heads by genetically reprogramming bacteria. Doping a test tube full of them with another custom DNA sequence forces the bacteria to make the protein heads inside their single-cell bodies. Burbulis fills a few test tubes with a broth of modified bacteria and nutrients and lets them fatten up for a day or so. Then he slaughters the herd, zapping them with a titanium probe that emits ultrasound waves. The probe ruptures the bacteria's cell walls. The dying bacteria spew protein heads into the test tube. Burbulis quickly gathers the heads and stores them on ice in the bucket. "It's just like cooking," he says. "The ingredients will spoil and you want the product to be fresh." When he's collected enough heads, he mixes them with the tails and then bakes the mix gently at 30 degrees Celsius for 12 to 16 hours. If he gets it right, the result is a nice warm batch of tadpoles.

To test your blood for cancer, a medical lab would mix the tadpoles with a single drop of your blood. A minute or two later the tester would wash away any tadpoles that hadn't bound to a target. To measure the remaining tadpoles—the ones that have latched onto cancer indicators, the tester would place the tadpole-bearing blood sample into a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) machine, a sort of incubator that replicates short DNA strands.

This is the genius part. Even if there were only a dozen tadpoles in your blood sample, the PCR would multiply their tails until there were enough (say a thousand or so) to be detected by standard lab gear. By dividing what he or she had just multiplied, the tester would know roughly how many tadpole tails—and hence how many cancer-indicating molecules—were in your blood sample. The whole process takes an afternoon at most. MSI refused to let me quote a number until rigorous trials are done, but I'd wager that tadpoles could be at least 10 times more sensitive than current lab tests at spotting cancer.

The challenges to bringing MSI's cancer test to market include mass-producing tadpoles on the cheap and surviving federal testing and approval. If the lab makes it past those hurdles, then its tadpoles could one day help doctors diagnose gastric, testicular, ovarian, breast, colon, rectal, lung, pancreatic, or other cancers much sooner. They could find trace-level warnings of other health problems, too, all as part of a standard blood test. Not bad for starting out in a green plastic bucket.

Paul Boutin is a Silicon Valley writer who spent 15 years as a software engineer and manager.

 

readme
Niger-Scooter-Plame-Gate
The bewildering scandal of the moment.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, Oct. 28, 2005, at 12:39 AM PT

Confused? Sure. Who isn't? One entertaining aspect of the story that reaches some sort of climax today is the struggle of the media to summarize or label it (hence, "the story that reaches some sort of climax today"). Once upon a time, someone went to Niger, which is not Nigeria, and off we go in time and space. Even Fox News has been driven to compound sentences.

All the glam elements are there: a secret agent, international intrigue, sex (if you know where to look), blogs, moral dilemmas, movie-of-the-week dialogue at the White House. (Aide: "Mr. President, somebody has inserted a lie into your State of the Union address!" The President: "This is clearly the work of al-Qaida. We must invade Iraq immediately. Or is it Iran?") But somehow all these elements don't cohere. Alfred Hitchcock coined the term "McGuffin" to describe the gimmick that keeps the plot moving. He said you need one. The trouble here is not the lack of a McGuffin but too many.

You can't knock the names, though. Above all, there is the wonderfully Pynchonesque Valerie Plame. Plame: headline writers and copy editors seeking a short label for this saga were drawn like moths to this mysterious beauty, a one-syllable word of only five letters. And yet the eponymous heroine of the Plame Affair or Plame Controversy has actually been off-stage the entire time. Except for a brief appearance in Vanity Fair, posed rakishly with her husband in a sports car, it's been Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.

The husband's name is forgettably bland. Joe Wilson? John Roberts? Something like that. Then there is the aide to the vice president who answers to the call of "Snooker." Or is it Smoky? Or maybe Sunshine? In the typical movie about Washington, a character labeled as an aide to the vice president might just as well carry a sign saying, "I get killed off in the first five minutes." And yet Snotty, or Skipper, or Snappy starts out as an obscure minor character and floats up steadily to the point where he is the central figure of the entire drama.

Anyway, let's recap. Two and a half years ago, Robert Novak published the name of an undercover CIA agent in his column. He then joined Plame off-stage, where he has mysteriously remained ever since. Since he has known the answer all along, he may have been murdered to assure his silence. Although there is no evidence for this, it makes as much sense as any other explanation for his disappearance from the story line.

Enter the liberal media establishment, led by the New York Times. First seen charging up a hill, demanding the appointment of a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of this outrage, it soon was charging back down the hill, complaining that the special prosecutor was asking journalists to finger the leaker. Who else would you ask?

Judith Miller of the Times was the only reporter who declined any deal, at least at first, and went to jail rather than testify. An expert on germ warfare (the subject of her most recent book), she said that revealing her source would inevitably lead to a pandemic that would wipe out all of humankind. Or something like that. My notes are a bit hard to interpret.

Everyone assumed that Miller's source was Snapper. Him and/or Karl Rove (another great name, especially for the official bad guy: a double rifle shot with the "K" in Karl lending a Teutonic flourish). He said he didn't mind if she testified. She apparently didn't hear this, so a couple months later he said it louder and she said OK. Then she testified that she couldn't remember who told her that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent, but it wasn't Skippy. And she conceded that much of what she reported in the run-up to the Iraq war, relying on administration leaks, was wrong. So, she went to jail to protect a "source" who didn't give her the crucial fact at issue for a story she didn't write, but did give her inaccurate information for other stories. Huh?

The New York Times has started quietly, nervously backing away from Miller, like hikers trying to escape a rattlesnake. The rest of the media are fleeing without restraint. She's not a good poster child for the cause. But the cause itself remains somewhat bewildering. Why should you go to jail to protect the identity of a source who has used anonymity systematically and successfully to deceive you and your readers? Why should Scooter Libby go to jail—involuntarily—for having a conversation with you that you think the Constitution should protect and even encourage? Either this whole prosecution is nuts, or the mainstream media's view of reporters' rights is nuts. Which is it?

The Republicans have their own plotline they'd like to impose on this confusing blur of events. It's actually a dusted-off plotline from the Reagan Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s: all about an "overzealous prosecutor" and "bitter partisans" on the other side who want to "politicize policy differences." But two intervening developments have overroasted these chestnuts: Bill Clinton and Yahoo! When Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison pre-emptively mocked perjury as what prosecutors charge you with if they can't find a real crime, it was the work of minutes for bloggers to find and post her comments from the Clinton impeachment about the transcendent seriousness of a perjury rap.

But despair not. Many of these contradictions and ambiguities will surely be resolved in Act 2. Please take your seats. The performance is about to begin.

Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128916/

dispatches
My Year of Hurricanes
Calculating the good things that came out of Katrina.
By Blake Bailey
Posted Friday, Oct. 28, 2005, at 12:38 AM PT

This article is part of an ongoing series by Blake Bailey, a New Orleans resident who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina. Click here to read more of his dispatches.

After living through a certain number of hurricanes, one begins to feel like a hapless cartoon character with a stylized thundercloud over his head. Last Monday, for instance, I fully expected Hurricane Wilma to pay us a visit here in Gainesville, Fla., though she would have had to go well north of her projected path. Instead, after a bit of blustery rain that morning, the sun came out and we had our first day of cool, glistening autumn. Life can be beautiful, as they say, and so in this column I thought I'd dwell on some of the nicer things that have happened since Katrina rendered us homeless.

When my wife and daughter returned to Gainesville a few weeks ago (while I stayed in Norman, Okla., working on Cheever in my mother's real-estate office), the day-care situation was bleak. My wife had found an opening at one of the better places, but it proved an awful letdown after our beloved Kinderhaus Montessori in New Orleans. The elderly minder at the new place seemed a little weary of small children, though she didn't positively abhor them. "OK," she'd sigh, "stop crying." After three days of the phase-in process, it was my wife who was in tears.

"They mean well," she sobbed to her friend Heidi, with whom she was staying at the time, "but it's just so—so awful …"

Heidi suggested she call some of the other day-care places, if only to get on their waiting lists. "At least you'll feel better," she said.

So, my wife called. "This is amazing," said the first person she spoke to. "Because we do have a place in your daughter's age group, and that almost never happens. We just got an opening, and I've been calling everybody on the wait list, but nobody's called back yet. If you want it, you can have it."

My wife took it. She figured the place would have to be pretty Dickensian to be worse than our present arrangement. Instead, it surpassed our fondest expectations, such that even Kinderhaus seems something of a mauvaise époque. Nowadays, not only does our toddler refrain from tears when we drop her off in the morning, she often shrieks with dismay when we come to pick her up (or at least when I do). "Amelia had a great day exploring and looking at books!" her lively young caretakers write in her daily report, along with a sober tally of her bowel movements. It's remarkable what a blithe business life can be—however difficult in other respects—when your child is happy. The other day my wife bought Amelia a cow costume for the Halloween parade at her day-care center, and it was the giddiest I'd seen either of them since we became refugees.

"Someone must be looking out for you!" We hear that a lot. Also (re our sudden removal from New Orleans): "God must have had different plans for you!" Yes, one is tempted to reply, and He must have had radically different plans for those poor sods in the Ninth Ward …

But one doesn't say that. People mean well, after all, and in our case they have a point: Since losing our home and other possessions, things have turned out rather well. Consider the fact that—unlike most of our friends in New Orleans—our livelihoods weren't affected a whit. As a writer, I spend my days exactly as before (albeit in the starker milieu of Windmeadows Apartments)—that is, I dribble at my laptop in a desultory way, drink too much coffee, and compulsively check my e-mail. As for my wife, she's resumed her doctoral internship at the University of Florida, where her old friends were glad to have her back and vice versa. Nor, on bad days, is she inclined to let self-pity get out of hand, seeing as how she works with seriously ill children and their grieving families.

In fact, our whole Weltanschauung has improved as a result of this ordeal. Before, I took the Hobbesian view that life tended to be nasty, brutish, and short, if you weren't careful. But now I have moments when I'm a regular Pangloss. "Things have a way of turning out for the best," I find myself saying, and, "Really, people are so kind." Almost two months after the hurricane, hardly a day goes by that we don't receive some further remembrance from friends or family: a gift card, a check, a parcel of baby toys, books, clothes, small appliances, and so on. My friend Christian—a sort of Bertie Wooster with a social conscience—recently sold his house in the Hamptons and gave us the furniture, just like that. After the delivery truck left (he paid for that, too), our little one-bedroom unit reminded me of the butler Hobson's hospital room in the movie Arthur, what with the transplanted mahogany amid the dreary beige of it all.

Even car salesmen go out of their way to be nice to us. One may recall that we fled the hurricane in my wife's car, a 1998 Suzuki Esteem, and left my poor old Saturn to a terrible fate. So, we needed another car, the cheaper the better. When we said as much to the salesman at Wade Raulerson Pontiac, he winced and sort of twiddled his cigarette in a way that struck me as dismissive, if not downright sinister. Then we mentioned the hurricane, etc. The next thing we knew we were shaking hands with the man's boss, who, it shortly transpired, was the friend of a friend (one begins to feel karmic inklings!) who made it his personal business to see that, by God, we got a good car cheap. The snazzy green Subaru Outback we eventually drove off the lot had been thoroughly checked by a third-party mechanic, repaired as needed, and sold to us for thousands below blue book value. "You don't like it, you bring it right back," said the gruff but kindly dealer as we sealed the deal with a final handshake, and a couple days later he sent us a $219 gift card to Home Depot.

Happy, too, are our dog and cat, who now live with my mother in rural Oklahoma. I worried a little about the cat, who'd survived almost three weeks in a flooded house. The 12 cats at my mother's place would be disinclined, I thought, to respect her solitary nature. As it happens, they seem to sense that she once subsisted on rats and toxic water and give her wide berth. As for our dog, Gracie, she seems to suspect that she died at some point (perhaps in a boiling hot Suzuki) and went to doggy heaven. There are no leashes at my mother's place, no dog pens, and plenty of fresh cat turds to gobble up in the morning. Nor does my mother mind—as we did—sharing her couch with a dog. "Talk to Gracie!" my mother commands when I call her on the phone, and so I pour my love into the dog's taut, lifted ear. Gracie listens with a wary frown: God forbid we should come to reclaim her.

Blake Bailey is the author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. He's working on a biography of John Cheever.

 

 

 explainer
To Cull a Mockingbird
How they kill birds infected with avian flu.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005, at 3:15 PM PT

British government officials are planning to slaughter millions of hens, chickens, and turkeys if there's an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu on the island. In recent weeks, Romania has culled more than 50,000 domestic birds, and in 2004 the Canadian government destroyed more than 16 million chickens, turkeys, and ducks. How do these mass killings work?

In two stages: First you have to kill the birds, then you have to dispose of them. When the United Kingdom decided to kill off about 6 million cattle, sheep, and pigs to control an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, the military officer in charge of the operation described it as being more complicated than the Gulf War.

The World Health Organization has said that mass culls might be the best option for controlling the spread of bird flu, especially where vaccines are not available. To prevent the spread of the disease, authorities might order the destruction of every bird within a few miles of an infected bird. If there are multiple infections, culls can take place over large territories and include huge numbers of animals. (Governments usually reimburse bird owners for their losses.)

The World Organization for Animal Health says that culls of any kind should be performed under the direction of a veterinarian. The "cullers" themselves should wear coveralls or surgical gowns, an apron, rubber work gloves and boots, respirator masks, and goggles. They're also supposed to wash their hands frequently with soap and water.

The killing should take place away from public view, and the birds should be handled as little as possible. In general, infected birds should be killed first, followed by those birds that were closest to the infected birds, and then finishing up with the healthy birds. Whenever possible, younger birds should be killed before older ones, to preserve them from unnecessary stress.

Any of a number of methods can be used to cull a flock. Authorities in Canada used carbon dioxide, which kills birds by increasing the acidity of their cerebrospinal fluid. (Long-necked birds, like ducks, require more gas than the relatively short-necked chickens.) Cullers sealed up poultry houses with foam and duct tape and then pumped in the gas until they thought all the birds were unconscious or dead.

Birds can be killed with other kinds of gas, such as nitrogen or hydrogen cyanide, but CO₂ tends to be the most common because it's cheap and easy to get. Another common technique hangs birds upside-down and then submerges their heads in an electrified water bath. For smaller operations, cullers might fire air guns into the skulls of the animals. Cullers can also wring birds' necks by hand or with a pair of burdizzo tongs. (OIE caveat: This technique may result in "operator fatigue.") Cullers may also decapitate birds with a guillotine or give them a lethal injection. Small birds can be killed by "maceration," which means they get tossed in something like a wood chipper. Newspaper reports say the culling operations in Asia (and a few other places, like Albania) have resorted to burying the birds alive after tossing them in plastic bags.

No matter how the birds are killed, their carcasses must be either buried, burned, composted, or rendered. Since bird flu can be transmitted from animal droppings, the culling teams are supposed to compost any feces or feces-contaminated soil they find as well.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

 

jurisprudence
Hear Me, Hear Me
The case of the year that the Supreme Court may duck.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005, at 11:19 AM PT

The Supreme Court faces an unappealing question this week: What to do about a lower-court decision that gives the president unfettered authority to chuck the Constitution, military law, and the Geneva Conventions in trying foreign detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay? It's a question that's only been complicated further by Harriet Miers' withdrawal today as Bush's nominee and the uncertainty that creates for the court's composition.

For weeks, the justices have been avoiding one of the term's most far-reaching and explosive cases, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The case seemed made for review by the court. In two contentious opinions that came down in June 2004, the justices left open crucial questions about the scope of the rights of the foreign suspects whom the Bush administration is holding at Guantanamo Bay. Hamdan is an obvious vehicle for beginning to provide answers. The lower-court opinion in the case, by a panel of three judges on the D.C. Circuit in July, was breathtakingly broad. It allowed the administration to try Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the former bodyguard and driver of Osama Bin Laden, before a special military commission for crimes including murder and terrorism. Because it sets itself no limits, the opinion in theory would also allow the president to set up the same sort of commission—one that doesn't provide for basic rights afforded both in civilian court and in a military court martial—for any offense committed by any offender anywhere, including by an American on American soil. "No decision, by any court, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks has gone this far," Hamdan's lawyers argue. They're right.

Yet twice in the last few weeks the Supreme Court has considered whether to hear Hamdan this winter or spring, and twice the justices have declined to say they will do so. Tomorrow, they may discuss the case for a third time. Four-hundred-and-fifty law professors issued a statement on Wednesday urging it to grant review. They think the military commission set up to try Hamdan should be ruled out of bounds for three reasons. First, the commission violates traditional separation-of-powers principles—the president created it, defined who and what offenses it may try, set all its rules, and controls the appointment of its members. One branch of government isn't supposed to act both as prosecutor and judge. Second, the commission is out of step with constitutional and international standards of due process. Its rules allow for unsworn statements as testimony and for evidence that may have been gathered using coercive tactics that amount to torture. The presumption of innocence can be dispensed with at any time. Hamdan also has no right to be present at his trial.

Perhaps most significant, in approving the commission, the D.C. Circuit appears to have stripped the basic protections of the Geneva Convention from all the Guantanamo detainees. In other words, no Geneva for the fight between the United States and a terrorist group like al-Qaida. This is a long-sought goal of the Bush administration—it's the position taken by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his Justice Department that led to the 2002 torture memo.

The D.C. Circuit threw Geneva overboard with a reading of the convention's Common Article Three that is plausible but unconvincing, as Georgetown law professor David Luban explains in this helpful post. Common Article Three protects detainees from being sentenced or punished without minimal rights and protections. It prohibits torture and "humiliating and degrading treatment." Its text states that it applies to armed conflicts that are "not of an international character." The question is what that phrase means. Two judges on the D.C. Circuit panel—one of whom was John Roberts, before he became the Supreme Court's chief justice—read "not … international" to mean "internal," as in a civil war. Wars between states are covered elsewhere in Geneva, so this cramped reading of Common Article Three doesn't remove the significant protections for prisoners of war and civilians in conflicts that pit one state against another. But detainees captured in conflicts that are neither civil nor state-against-state are out of luck. The third judge on the panel, Stephen Williams, argued that "not international" really means "not between nation states"—in which case Common Article Three would apply to the United States' fight against al-Qaida. Luban points out that Williams' reading is standard among international lawyers. If the D.C. Circuit majority's contrary interpretation is left to stand nonetheless, then Common Article Three is no longer common—it doesn't apply to everyone anymore.

The Bush administration, of course, is happy with the blank check it got from the D.C. Circuit and is urging the Supreme Court not to meddle. Certainly don't grant review now, Solicitor General Paul Clement argues in his brief—Hamdan hasn't even been tried yet. The problem with this argument is that the government is using the D.C. Circuit's ruling in Hamdan as a big weapon in another set of Guantanamo cases.

Hamdan is one of only a handful of the hundreds of Guantanamo detainees—the precise count is unknown—who actually faces charges. The rest are being held indefinitely, many since 2001, with recourse only to tribunals that review simply whether they are "combatants," and that have many of the same un-defendant-friendly features as Hamdan's special commission. The detainees are challenging these tribunals before another panel of D.C. Circuit judges in a set of consolidated cases known as Al Odah. That panel is bound by the circuit's decision in Hamdan as long as it hasn't been overruled. And the government argues that Hamdan gives it a free pass in Al Odah. The D.C. Circuit's opinion cuts off the detainees' claim in those cases that Common Article Three gives them procedural protections that they're currently not getting, and undermines their claim to constitutional rights as well. So Hamdan matters now, to a great many people.

What's the Supreme Court thinking about Hamdan? Here are the possibilities. It takes four justices to grant review in a case, but five to win it. So if only four think the D.C. Circuit was wrong, they may decide to hold their noses and agree not to hear the case in order to prevent it becoming nationally settled law.

John Roberts' ascension to the court adds another wrinkle. Presumably he has decided to remove himself from the matter, since Hamdan is a case that he helped decide and judges generally aren't supposed to review their own decisions. That call, however, is entirely his to make, and at this stage it's not public.

If the court were to decide to hear Hamdan and Roberts didn't take part, then the justices could split 4-4—in which case the lower court opinion would stand. Up to now, review by eight justices hasn't seemed likely. Since O'Connor thought she was about to step off the court, the justices may well have agreed not to hand down any decision in which her vote would be decisive. But Miers' withdrawal could scramble that calculus. If O'Connor keeps her promise to Bush to stay on until the Senate confirms her replacement, she won't be going anywhere for a while. In a different case last spring, which also happened to involve tricky questions of international law, O'Connor wrote, "It seems to me unsound to avoid questions of national importance when they are bound to recur." She could have been talking about Hamdan.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

 

 

jurisprudence
Code Blue
What the Miers withdrawal means for abortion code-speak.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005, at 10:52 AM PT

The epitaph for Harriet Miers' failed bid to be an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court should go like this:

Here lies the nomination of Harriet Miers
Oct. 3, 2005 - Oct. 27 2005
With her died the ability to speak about Roe in code

The Miers nomination went off the rails about seven seconds after it was announced, in large part because President Bush tried to mollify his base in code. The nominee had no background or record as a movement conservative and no written promises to be the kind of right-wing activist who would spearhead a Supreme Court counterrevolution. What she had—according to the president—was a "good heart." She was a religious person and she was loyal to him. That, Bush thought, would suffice to assure everyone that she had it in for Roe v. Wade.

But it didn't suffice, because movement conservatives weren't willing to settle for a coded message anymore. They have built up a strong and capable stable of thinkers and jurists who are not speaking in half-promises or symbols. And they wanted a nominee with the brains and brawn to overturn Roe because it's bad law rather than just because it's "a sin." The code also didn't suffice because the right had heard the same coded promises about Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter—and had dejectedly watched them go on to uphold Roe. Sick and tired of ambiguous messages and middle-of-the-road nominees, they would not be placated by anyone who wasn't willing to say, as are Janice Rodgers Brown or Priscilla Owen or Edith Jones, that Roe must die now.

John Roberts was the last wink, or coded nominee, the far right will ever accept. Not because he won't prove to be as conservative as they hope. But because they held their fire on Roberts as a quid pro quo; they were assured that an Owen or a Michael Luttig would be their payback for that acquiescence. Bush's base never loved Roberts. They worried about his moderation and his caution and they worried about his possible softness on gay rights after it became clear that he'd been on the wrong side of Romer v. Evans—the 1996 gay-rights case out of Colorado. The outrage you saw over Miers was the outrage of a promise broken.

The vociferous demands by both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to see Miers' work product from her time as White House Counsel reveal that coded messages are not doing it for either side anymore. The same GOP senators who would have fought to the death to keep John Roberts' work product secret were clamoring louder than anyone to see Miers'. Both sides needed to see tangible evidence of what she would do in the future because the currency of the wink died with Roberts.

It's going to be easy to panic and argue—as all the interest groups are already doing—that the Miers nomination represents a capitulation by the embattled Bush administration to the far right. But that's an overreading. Certainly pundits and activists from Bush's base lit the first fires under this nomination. But over the intervening weeks, Miers did herself in. She gave nobody a reason to support her. Instead of offering something for everyone, Miers offered nothing to anyone.

It will be a shame if Bush's capitulation to basic common sense is spun merely as a capitulation to his base. The real story is not necessarily that the far right is driving the bus. It's that movement conservatives won't ever again accept anyone who hasn't promised outright and on paper that they support the base's political agenda. That may prove a big win for the base; but only if Bush is content to be perceived as their water boy for the next three years. In either case, it's a big win for honesty, and that may be, in the end, a good thing.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

 

politics
Answered Prayers
How Bush lost the Miers fight.
By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005, at 9:28 AM PT

When Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination, religion was once again at the heart of the drama. "Thank God," said one senior Republican Hill staffer in an e-mail. "Amen," a top Bush adviser wrote. Another top GOP staffer reported receiving a string of BlackBerry messages forwarding news alerts followed simply by short prayers of thanksgiving.

For weeks it felt like the Washington system that sometimes operates independently of the most powerful man in the world was waiting for a reason to end the Miers nomination drama. Last week, the narrative had gotten so bad that friends of the White House were predicting (correctly, it turns out) that Miers was doomed and that only the president had yet to realize it.

The White House had stood firm. Forget the pundits, the Senate vote count is all we care about, insiders said. "The people yelling the loudest don't have a vote in the room," a top White House official told me at the time. But as the pundits squawked, Republican senators communicated their doubts in public with increasing fervor. Yesterday, the White House legislative shop dialed around to senators asking where they stood on the nomination. The count didn't go well. "Did we have the votes yesterday? Yes," said a senior administration official. "Did we know where it was going? Yes."

The fight over documents related to Miers' work in the White House was the last straw. According to administration officials, Sens. Sam Brownback, R-Kans., and Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., were adamant that they would need documents—something, anything—to make up for her thin record and middling performance since her nomination. Miers' questionnaire had been paltry. Her visits with senators had not gone well. At his Cabinet meeting Monday, Bush told his staff the documents represented a "red line" that he would not cross, setting the stage for the showdown.

Of course the White House should have known this fight was coming. This president was never going to let anyone peek into his private conversations with Miers. But Bush and his advisers never thought they'd have to. They assumed that Bush's backing Miers' résumé (including her religious credentials) and her gender would allow the president to push her though.

In the end, the documents issue provided the face-saving cover that columnist Charles Krauthammer suggested they would. Each side played to type: Sen. Brownback took to the cameras to lament the impasse over the documents. The White House framed Miers' withdrawal as a principled stand to protect a prerogative of the office. After a long intraparty fight, everyone embraced the illusion as the first act of reconciliation.

This morning, officials described Bush as angry and disappointed. He's had to watch his friend get chewed up by the system and has been given another illustration of his diminished power. He no longer has the political capital of which he has so often boasted.

Is there any good news in this for the White House? Inside the West Wing, the fever might break: Aides have suffered day after day as Miers' chances diminished; now they can fight for a new, presumably more defensible, pick. Also, a replacement nomination—which officials say may be announced as soon as tomorrow—gives Bush an opportunity to change the story line of conflict inside the GOP. A new choice the right applauds may bring the fractured party back into line. "If he chooses a solid conservative, this is the opportunity he needs to shore up the base on the one issue that unites all," says a senior Republican strategist. "It won't just shore them up—they will be excited because they will think, rightly, they got it done."

Bush's next nominee is almost certain to kick off a fight with Democrats, which will further animate the GOP base. In their wildest dreams, Bush advisers hope that a big messy Supreme Court fight not only invigorates the right again but distracts the country from the indictments everyone supposes are coming tomorrow from Patrick Fitzgerald. Think of it as encouraging conflict to downplay disaster.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

chatterbox
Cheney Dodges a Bullet
How Cheney's week could have gotten even more miserable.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005, at 8:18 AM PT

Harriet Miers has withdrawn her Supreme Court nomination. The special prosecutor is expected to indict at least one, and perhaps two, White House officials, and it's not inconceivable that he'll name Dick Cheney as an unindicted co-conspirator. Could Dick Cheney's week get any worse? Incredibly, it might have. Just minutes ago, Paul Volcker's commission looking into the U.N. oil-for-food scandal released a report documenting evidence that roughly half the companies that participated in that program paid bribes to Saddam Hussein. If Halliburton, the company of which Cheney was chairman until the summer of 2000, had been on that list, the Bush White House would have had yet another embarrassment on its hands. But Cheney dodged the bullet. Halliburton isn't even mentioned in the report. Whew! To see who is, click here. (George Galloway, call your lawyer. Again.)

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128898/

miers-o-meter
Zero!!!
Harriet Miers goes down (and so do we).
By Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005, at 8:17 AM PT

Today's Chance of Confirmation: Zero

The fight over the White House documents was the excuse. The looming possibility of indictments of top White House officials was the subtext. The 1993 speeches in which Harriet Miers sounds (gotcha!) like a heartfelt liberal may have been the trigger.

In her letter to the president this morning announcing her decision to withdraw, Miers took Charles Krauthammer's advice and blamed the impasse over whether the Senate needs to review documents relating to her work as the president's lawyer. "As you know, members of the Senate have indicated their intention to seek documents about my service in the White House in order to judge whether to support me," she wrote. "I have been informed repeatedly that in lieu of records, I would be expected to testify about my service in the White House to demonstrate my experience and judicial philosophy." President Bush said that he "reluctantly accepted" her decision and agreed with her rationale. "It is clear that Senators would not be satisfied until they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at the White House—disclosures that would undermine a president's ability to receive candid counsel," he said in a statement.

What really went wrong? Miers was failing to win over senators in her meetings with them. She was reportedly doing badly on her murder boards as she prepared for her confirmation hearings. And it's no accident she went down the day after she gave Democrats a reason to support her—in a speech from 1993 in which she appeared wary of government regulation of "the individual women's right to decide for herself whether she will have an abortion," as she put it. The speech also expressed deep concern about racial and economic inequity and floated the idea of a state income tax in Texas to pay for public schools. "The radical right wing of the Republican Party killed the Harriet Miers nomination," Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid said. After weeks of backing away from Miers, he went back to reminding us that he'd recommended her to the president. Miers proved once and for all her toxicity to Republicans, which means that it's time for the Democrats to start lighting candles for her.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.
John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

 

sports nut
The Umpire and His Discontents
Another way to think about the men in blue.
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005, at 4:06 PM PT

Lasting image from this year's baseball play-offs: Doug Eddings, the plate umpire for Game 2 of the American League Championship Series, blows a third-strike call with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. More than that, he blows the third-strike hand signal, stranding it somewhere between "strike" and "out." The next batter, who probably should have never seen the plate, smashes a game-winning double. In the clubhouse, Eddings faces reporters. The scene quickly achieves the semantic genius of a White House press conference. "My interpretation is that's my Strike 3 mechanic. … I did not say 'no catch.' … I don't see how you guys can say it's clearly a caught ball. …"

If the old occupational hazard of umpiring was bodily harm—Ty Cobb once met an umpire under the bleachers and gave him the worst of it—it is now death by sportswriting. Nearly every baseball columnist in America has since inveighed against Eddings' boner. This fits nicely with the prevailing sociology of umpires, which you might call the Lonely Man theory. Thomas Boswell's essay "Lives of Noisy Desperation" paints the umpire as a tragic creature, moving noiselessly among 35,000 fans and a few dozen ballplayers. He walks undetected until he makes a mistake, at which point everyone finally notices him. Why would anyone subject themselves to such masochism? "Almost without exception," Boswell writes, "they are men who dreamed about athletic heroism as children; becoming umpires was their compromise with their own lack of talent."

In the face of baseball's dismal officiating—Eddings' screw-up seemed to trigger a half-dozen others, including one in last night's World Series game—here is another way to think about umpiring. Call it the Union Man Theory. Umpires are proud unionists, blue-collar in every sense of the word. As with baseball's players, the success or failure of their labor disputes tends to dictate how we think about them.

Major-league umpires have been organized since 1963; their union has since been reconfigured, rather grandly, as the "World Umpires Association." An umpire's education might consist of little more than a high-school diploma and a trip through umpire's school. After an apprenticeship in the minors, a few umpires are picked to jump to the bigs. There he becomes a member of a protected and feisty class. Those who remember baseball's various labor stoppages may not recall that umpires have gone on strike three times since 1978. The first major action came in 1979, when a strike won them "no-cut" contracts, a two-week vacation, and salaries of up to $55,000. In 1988, major-league umpires were earning up to $117,000, according to the New York Times, plus expenses, for baseball's six-month season.

With the union at its peak, umpiring in the 1980s became rather decadent. A trove of ump memoirs of the period—Planet of the Umps; The Umpire Strikes Back; Working the Plate—reveals umpires exulting in their newfound job security. Clownish umps like Ken Kaiser, who made an entertaining show of arguing with managers, flourished. Umpires hung on well past physical decay: The National League's John McSherry, whose weight had ballooned to more than 400 pounds, collapsed on the field and died in 1996. Moreover, umpires frequently tangled with players, as exemplified by Terry Cooney's quick ejection of Roger Clemens in the 1990 play-offs. When questioned about the excesses, umpires often fell back on their "unique" arbitrative skills. Summing up the public discontent with the umps, the Boston Globe reported in 1990, "They now provoke, they now antagonize, they now start arguments and, most of all, they prolong confrontations. Long gone are the days of the impartial arbiters."

Two events brought about the end of the umpire's free reign. First was the 1997 National League Championship Series,* where Eric Gregg, a behemoth plate umpire, enforced a strike zone wide enough to accommodate a midsize automobile. Gregg's performance crystallized a fan complaint: that umpires had become too mercurial and big games were often dictated by their tics rather than the rulebook. Two years later, the umpire's union finally overreached. Telling the New York Times he was performing "God's work," union chief Richie Phillips convinced more than 50 major-league umpires to submit their resignations—a bold move, he hoped, that would force commissioner Bud Selig to award them a new contract. Selig shocked the umpires by happily accepting the resignations and hiring replacements. (A few of the umpires were able to reclaim their jobs.) The era of the self-aggrandizing umpire was over.

With the union reeling, baseball re-asserted control. Standardization and accountability became the buzzwords. The American and National Leagues merged their pools of umpires in 2000, eliminating the discrepancies between the two (for years, American Leaguers rarely called low strikes). In 2001, baseball issued an edict that umpires should enforce the codified strike zone—a threat backed up by QuesTec video cameras mounted in the ballparks. In response to McSherry's death and a rash of umpireal obesity, the league began more seriously enforcing weight limits. The result has been that, with a few exceptions, umpires are much more difficult to tell apart, less prone to elicit a fan's ire. They are smaller targets, literally and figuratively.

Thus, the roasting of this year's wayward umps has been different than that of earlier eras. After Don Denkinger's 1985 World Series boner—which, admittedly, was in a different league than Eddings' goof—St. Louis radio stations provided his home telephone number to aggrieved Cardinals fans. This season, by comparison, the writers' calls have been not for the umpires' heads but for the establishment of instant replay. Baseball's umpire reform has had its desired effect—it ingrained the notion that umpires are no longer innately incompetent, and that even an elite crew will face balls that stray outside the range of perception. The chief emotion for Eddings and company is sympathy rather than sadism. We no longer want to kill the umpire. We want to help him.

Correction, Oct. 27, 2005: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly stated that umpire Eric Gregg worked the 1997 World Series. He worked the National League Championship Series of that year. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

 

 

 

 war stories
First, Fire All the Lawyers
It's time to put a manager in charge of the Department of Homeland Security.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005, at 1:14 PM PT

Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security, said last week that he has a plan to fix FEMA and the other tangled branches of his colossal, jerry-strung bureaucracy. But a large part of the department's problem is Chertoff himself—not the man personally, but his professional background, the way he's been accustomed to dealing with problems, and his tendency to surround himself with like-minded friends.

The Department of Homeland Security was cobbled together—amid the panicked demands to "do something" in the wake of 9/11—from 22 federal agencies holding a combined budget of $40 billion and a payroll of 183,000 employees. To be in charge of such a labyrinth may be an inherently hapless chore, but whoever gets the assignment should be, at minimum, a competent and creative manager—preferably someone with experience at running mergers and acquisitions, since the department is, in essence, one big, unwieldy M&A.

Yet before Chertoff took the job last January, he had spent most of his career as a federal prosecutor—a good one, by most accounts, but it was never clear how that qualified him to manage the massive effort of protecting the nation from terrorism and Mother Nature.

During the 2004 campaign, President George W. Bush often ridiculed the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, for believing that terrorists could be fought by lawyers. The criticism distorted Kerry's views. But the baffling irony is that, a mere two months after the election, Bush entrusted the war on terror's home front to … a lawyer.

Once at the post, Chertoff proceeded to appoint other lawyers—some of them associates or underlings from his days at the Justice Department—to key advisory positions:

• His chief of staff, John Wood, was a counselor to the attorney general.
• His assistant secretary for policy, Stewart Baker, was a lawyer whose only substantive experience has been to serve on a commission that endorsed ballistic-missile defense, the one aspect of homeland security in which DHS plays no role at all.
• His nominee for director of immigration and customs enforcement, Julie Myers, was Chertoff's chief of staff at the Justice Department, and she recently married John Wood (see above), who is Chertoff's current chief of staff. She is utterly, and somewhat notoriously, inexperienced for the job. (If confirmed, she will succeed Michael Garcia, who worked for two years with Chertoff in the assistant U.S. attorney's office in New York.)

There are talented, experienced, qualified civil servants toiling in the cubbyholes of DHS. But the top managers—Chertoff's entourage of fellow lawyers and cronies—are the gatekeepers, the ones who assess and filter the information flowing up the chain of command and who issue the orders back down.

As a result, those talented civil servants are getting fed up; many are leaving. According to a widely reported survey of morale at 30 large federal agencies, the Department of Homeland Security ranks 29^th. (Morale is lower still only at the Small Business Administration.)

One high-ranking official, who two years ago eagerly transferred to DHS from another department, told me, "There's not a lot of inspired leadership here. Things aren't getting done, policy's not going anywhere. I go home at night, I feel like I haven't accomplished anything. Just about everyone I know here feels the same way."

A problem, according to this official (and to some of the department's overseers on Capitol Hill), is that Chertoff and his entourage are too caught up in procedure; they possess no vision, take no risks, and tolerate no bold ideas. In short, they act like who they are—federal lawyers.

Chertoff recently said, in response to criticism over his handling of Hurricane Katrina, "I'm not a hurricane expert." He's right, and nobody should expect him to be. But he was wrong in thinking that all he had to do, as a result, was to leave the task to the director of FEMA, Michael Brown. Had Chertoff been a good manager—in other words, had he been a good match for his job—he would have delegated to Brown, but he also would have leaned over Brown's shoulder, asked questions, made sure that the answers made sense and that the orders were being followed. Long before Katrina happened, he would have hired assistant secretaries and chiefs of staff who knew what the right questions were—who knew at least the rudiments of the department's mission and operations.

Last January, after Bernard Kerik—Bush's initial and utterly mind-blowing pick for homeland security secretary—self-destructed in blazes, I wrote a column asking Slate readers to pick a proper successor. Their favorite, by an overwhelming plurality: Jack Welch, the retired CEO of General Electric.

It was an inspired choice. Welch had transformed a quaint $12 billion company into a $300 billion global growth machine. In his 20 years of running GE, it acquired more than 600 companies with a workforce of 276,000, and he molded nearly all of them into sector leaders. His management style was disciplined but also decentralized, nonhierarchical, and results-oriented. His key concept was the "boundary-less" sharing of ideas across all divisions of the empire. Isn't this just what DHS needed—a manager who sets firm standards, lets his experts do their job, coordinates their resources, integrates their functions, and eliminates redundancies and deadwood?

I called Welch at the time to ask whether he'd take the job if it were offered to him. He good-naturedly hemmed and hawed, but he didn't say "No." More intriguing still, just last month, in the aftermath of Katrina, Welch wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal titled "The Five Stages of Crisis Management," in which he spelled out how business principles can be applied to homeland security. Could it be? Does he want the job? Would George W. Bush dare ask him?

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

 

the highbrow
Theories of the Erotic
Male traditionalists wring their hands at the "grim" lives of young women.
By Meghan O'Rourke
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005, at 12:14 PM PT

Last week, Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield told students that the sexual revolution may not have served the best interests of young women. Instead, it had merely "lower[ed]" us to the crass level of men, who pursue sex thoughtlessly and without hopes of marriage. In a talk titled "Feminism and the Autonomy of Women," he suggested that men who grow used to "free samples" in the bedroom are going to leave women high-and-dry when it comes to committed relationships. And then he revealed his insights into the erotic: "[Today's] women play the men's game, which they are bound to lose. Without modesty, there is no romance—it isn't so attractive or so erotic," said the professor. The solution to the problem, clearly, was for women to start saying no a little more often.

The need to tell young women how to behave often comes over middle-aged men—it's an itch right up there with buying a flashy new car. And Mansfield's case for modesty is merely a new version of, say, Leon Kass' argument in "The End of Courtship," a 1997 article currently posted on the Public Interest Web site, which I happened to stumble across after reading Mansfield's remarks. One similarity between them is particularly worth note. Mansfield and Kass don't suggest that female sexual activity is immoral or wrong. They suggest that it makes women unhappy: "Young women strike me as sad, lonely, and confused," Kass writes, voicing an avuncular worry about our "grim" lives. Like Mansfield, he goes on to express concern that contemporary sexuality isn't morally but erotically bankrupt. The best sex, he argues, is stimulated by reading poets like Shelley, and, "if properly sublimated, is transformable into genuine and lofty longings—not only for love and romance but for all the other higher human yearnings." Reading these two pieces back to back, one finds oneself envisioning conservative elders gathered over brunch with teary-eyed twentysomethings, Sex and the City-style, nodding and patting hands: I feel your pain, honey, they soothe. And I'll tell you how to really get your groove on. First, go get a ring.

Forty years after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the terms of the debate over sexuality have irrevocably changed, and it is curious to watch middle-aged male traditionalists trying to keep up. If they have not quite absorbed the notion that women need to have a voice in shaping their own sexual identity, they acknowledge that it is no longer permissible, or at any rate very popular, simply to pronounce that premarital sex is wrong. Thus they cast the sexual revolution as something that makes women unhappy, couching their critique in the fuzzy language of gratification and personal gain that we Oprah-raised kids can relate to. Beneath Kass' pronouncements on what is erotic is a struggle not to come off as a prude; beneath Mansfield's, a quest to establish his credentials as not anti-sex. By adopting a soft stance of empathy, they conveniently skirt the need to supply any facts and figures about just what is going on in the hearts and bedrooms of America's youth.

In a way, this shift in rhetoric (from morality to gratification) makes it look like the argument about the criteria Americans should use to shape our ideas about relationships and marriage has already been settled. But it's more complicated than this. There's something slippery about the "sex will make you unhappy" position. It relies on a retrograde notion of female vulnerability while pretending to take women's side. It's offered in the name of an open-mindedness that is something of a pretense: Professor Mansfield does not exactly wish that sexual freedom had panned out for us—or recognize the extent to which it has. He presumes, for example, that all women have similar experiences and want the same things: love and marriage, the baby in the baby carriage, and so forth. Finally, this position holds women responsible for the supposed unwillingness of American young people to get with the marriage program and settle down. But what evidence is there that women are deeply unhappy in their sexual relationships with men? And if women really are, why is it up to them to "fix" what's broken by insisting on early marriage rather than on, say, serial monogamy followed by marriage later? If things are so bad, how do we explain the fact that social indicators are, for the most part, on an uptick over the past decade?

In fact, the evidence is thin that a woman should be concerned that giving out a "sample" will make a man less prone to marriage—or a future husband less likely to want to stay with her. First of all, according to the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, "only 36% of single men agree that 'single men have better sex lives than married men.' " And only 22 percent of unmarried men report feeling that marriage is "personally" not for them, even if they're not interested in marriage in their immediate future. Second, engaging in premarital sex with the partner you eventually marry apparently does not make you more likely to get a divorce, according to a 2003 study cited by the National Marriage Project. Kass complains that "the elite, those who in previous generations would have defined the conventions in these matters, lack a cultural script whose denouement is marriage." But is this the case? The majority of "elites" still get married, according to recent reports. And if they get married a little older—as Kass complains they do—this only seems to make their marriages more stable. The National Marriage Project reports that getting married after the age of 25 reduces the chance of divorce.

Fears of sexual anarchy and uncurbed licentiousness afflict every age. But the supposed sexual anarchy we live in is not as nihilistic and free of "family values" as these sorts of pieces make it out to be (just as the golden age of 1950s marriage wasn't as golden as it is retrospectively made out to be). A 1992 study (conducted before Kass wrote his piece) found that 79 percent of Americans between 25 and 29 had had zero or one sexual partners over the past year, and the same was true for a significant (often larger) majority of Americans of all ages. It also found that the majority of marriages are characterized by fidelity and do not end in divorce. Another study found that this is especially the case among white Americans who are educated and get married over the age of 25 (a category the majority of Mansfield's Harvard students fall into). A recent study of teen behavior actually found that intercourse was down and oral sex was slightly up—which suggests, in fact, that students are listening to sex ed messages that advocate postponing full intercourse.

Of course, there remains important stock-taking to do, and Mansfield and Kass assume with good reason that the results of the sexual revolution are imperfect. But if the men who assume they have their pulse on the female experience were really paying attention, they might realize they could entrust some of this work to women themselves. Mansfield is making his gallant argument at a moment when there are plenty of women raising concerns that he might well appreciate, among them Ariel Levy in her recent book Female Chauvinist Pigs. Levy argues that we do live in a culture that celebrates—in its magazines, TV, and movies—an unbridled sexuality that hasn't served women well. And she claims that the proliferation of pornography has posed some intractable problems. But her proposed solutions don't presume that experience follows a tidy script of wanting to get a ring on our finger right away. She takes into account lesbians (who mostly can't get married) and women who aren't looking for long-term commitment. Her willingness to rethink ingrained liberal assumptions—and to make women attentive to the consequences of promiscuous Girls Gone Wild-style behavior—is appealingly unpredictable.

The irony is that we seem only to have grown more demanding about what constitutes a happy marriage. And while marriage is undeniably less stable than it once was, it hardly seems on the verge of collapse. Recent studies show only a slight decline—5 and 8.5 percent respectively for men and women—in the reported happiness levels of married couples since the early 1970s, and we don't know what, exactly, accounts for this shift. Meanwhile, it remains unclear what role Mansfield and Kass think modesty actually plays in stable romantic relationships. Is Mansfield so sure everyone—not to mention today's 20-year-olds—finds it erotic? Take, for instance, the activist Havelock Ellis, an advocate of "trial" marriages, who in the 1920s—he was then in his 60s—was saying things about women that sound eerily familiar: "Modesty may almost be regarded as the chief secondary sexual character of women on the psychical side," he observed. But he went on to suggest that women would have to overcome this attribute before a happy sexual marriage—of precisely the type that Kass is advocating—could exist.

Meghan O'Rourke is Slate's culture editor.

 

politics
Water From a Stone
In which Scott McClellan actually admits something!
By John Dickerson
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005, at 8:32 AM PT

Observers of the White House press briefing—you masochists, you!—may wonder why reporters ask the same question again and again, knowing that White House spokesman Scott McClellan won't answer. Well, sometimes if you pound your head against a stone enough times you get a little water. That appears to have happened yesterday.

For the last several months, McClellan has dodged all questions about the CIA leak investigation. "I'm not going to comment because it's relating to an ongoing investigation," is his typical answer. He has been particularly stout in handling questions about Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. For good reason: McClellan bravely defended those two administration officials in October 2003 by saying they had nothing to do with the affair. In fact, he did more than that: To prove that he wasn't issuing meaningless, blanket denials, he told reporters at the time that he'd double-checked with the two men. They had assured him they were not involved. "I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved," he said at the time. "I had no doubt of that in the beginning, but I like to check my information to make sure it's accurate before I report back to you, and that's exactly what I did."

We now know that both men were in fact involved. Both talked to reporters about Joe Wilson's wife. So, someone wasn't telling the straight story two years ago. Over the last several months, reporters have asked McClellan: Was he misleading reporters, or had Rove and Libby misled him? McClellan refused to answer, citing an ongoing investigation.

Yesterday, though, he did something a little different. Asked again about his blanket denials of two years ago as a part of a broader question about whether he could be trusted, he responded:

… you know that our relationship is built on trust, and I have earned that trust with you all. As you pointed out, you pointed back to some past comments that I gave and I talked to you about the assurances that I received on that. [emphasis added]

What does this mean in plain English? After months of refusing to revisit his 2003 comments, McClellan suddenly did. More important, he went out of his way to make this distinction, which reporters have been repeatedly asking him to make. He reminded us that two years ago, Rove and Libby gave assurances to him that they were not involved. In other words, McClellan wasn't the agent of the lie. He was merely the good-faith conduit. After taking months of battering on behalf of his colleagues, did the onset of indictments make McClellan finally stand up for his honor, or did he merely make a slip of the tongue? Whatever the motivation, at least that one tiny question has been answered.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128820/

sports nut
The Astros Get Crunk
Some World Series hip hop, plus other sports rap classics.
By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005, at 8:26 AM PT

After last night's 14-inning heartbreaker, the Houston Astros are basically toast; no team has ever overcome a three-game deficit in a World Series, and Roger Clemens' gimpy hamstring bodes ill for their comeback chances. But Astros fans can take heart in knowing their team has emerged victorious in one crucial off-the-field competition. Houston has, hands down, the better unofficial theme songs.

Chicago White Sox fans are still listening to the archaic, 1950s-era ditty " alt="Play Media">Let's Go Go Go White Sox!" By contrast, Houston's airwaves have been saturated with " alt="Play Media">Turn It Up (Astros Version)," a hip-hop nugget by native son Chamillionaire and "They Don't Know (World Series Version)" by fellow Houstonian Paul Wall. "Turn It Up (Astros Version)" and "They Don't Know (World Series Version)" are some of the finest examples of sports-fan rap—a genre of hits inspired by athletic success.

Houston may have the upper hand now, but Chicago does have a proud sports rap history. One of the first fan-authored hip-hop hits, "The Cubbies Are Rockin'," was released by Hollywood composer Barry Goldberg ("DJ Barry") and former P-Funk backup singer Gary Moody ("MC Gary") in honor of the Chicago Cubs' 1989 division title. (A lyrical excerpt: "The Cubbies are rockin', all over town/ There's a new sensation and it's really comin' down.") And though fan rap shouldn't be confused with jock-penned rap, the Chicago Bears recorded the granddaddy of that genre, the 1985 novelty tune "Super Bowl Shuffle."

Sports-fan rappers rarely possess pedigrees as impressive as those of the chart-topping Paul Wall, Chamillionaire (aka Houston's "Mixtape Messiah"), or MC Gary. Rather, the genre is dominated by minor artists looking for a way to kick-start their careers or make a quick buck. As a result, sports-fan rap often flourishes in cities that are beneath the record industry's radar, where capitalizing on the local team's playoff run may be the only way to snag some attention. How else to explain that three tributes to the up-and-coming Cincinnati Bengals are now in circulation: " alt="Play Media">J.U.N.G.L.E. (Bengals 2005)" by Brandon "Blayze" Floyd, "Shake N' Quake" by Leslie Isaiah Gaines, and Clinton Crawford's "Who Dey Think Gonna Beat Dem Bengals." (Floyd and Gaines live in Cincinnati, while Crawford is a Dayton native now living in Atlanta.)

Of the Bengals-loving rappers, Blayze has the most promise, based on such slick rhymes as, "Defense step it up, bring the heat/ We're tasting a win while they smell defeat." However, unlike the best sports-fan rappers, he doesn't name-check specific players. That might be a good business strategy, as it adds a certain timelessness to the music, but it's a creative decision that leads to more humdrum lyrics.

Drive-time radio listeners afflicted with playoff fever don't demand top-notch production values and lyrical brilliance. As long as their heroes merit a mention and the opposition gets lyrically humiliated, they can't get enough (at least until the season is over). Both Houston rappers have simply reworked their hit singles. Chamillionaire subs lines like "They gonna show you how to hit a home run/ Competition don't really want none" for "I'm a show 'em how to get the club crunk/ Give 'em something that's goin' rattle that trunk." Paul Wall goes to the trouble of mentioning every Astros player by name—"What you know about Brad Ausmus and what you know about Jason Lane?/ What you know about Andy Pettite, up on the mound, bringing pain?" Krazy's 2003 Tampa Bay Buccaneers anthem " alt="Play Media">Welcome to Raymond James" takes a similar tack, replacing the lyrics of Jermaine Dupri's "Welcome to Atlanta" with obscure references that are sure to fire up Tampa natives: "Buccaneers back, breaking teams like dishes/ What you know about Stecker and Jurevicius?

Time is of the essence when celebrating a team's playoff run; songs can get written, produced, and distributed in a matter of days. Brad "Big Hit Buda" Turner's " alt="Play Media">Tha Illini," written in honor of the 2005 University of Illinois basketball team, was recorded two days before the national semifinals. The song aired on a local radio station the following afternoon. A few days after that it poured out of the public-address system at the Final Four, where fans thrilled to such witticisms as "We ain't goin' nowhere/ Like Gene Keady's hair," and "The nets in St. Louis, we gonna cut 'em/ Even the minister will tell you, prayin' won't do nuttin'."

The trouble with rapping about a team is that your career is tied to its success—if they wash out, you're stuck with crates of unsold CDs. When Melvin Blakely co-wrote "Bad Like the Braves" in 1993, the Atlanta Braves were battling the Giants for the division crown. The record received steady airplay, and CNN even interviewed Blakely about the phenomenon. But when the Braves lost to the Phillies in the National League Championship Series, Blakely's career petered out. DC the Brain Supreme is another Atlantan sports rapper who enjoyed fleeting success. His "Dirty Bird Groove," a 1998 single inspired by the Atlanta Falcons' improbable Super Bowl run, got heavy radio play until the Falcons got walloped in Super Bowl XXXIII. In subsequent weeks, the $6.99 maxi-singles became as popular as Sen. Orrin Hatch's Put Your Arms Around the World. DC the Brain Supreme was one of the lucky ones, though; as one half of Tag Team, he had his royalties from "Whoomp! (There It Is)" to fall back on.

A very lucky few have actually built a semblance of a sports-fan rap career. The trio Cheeseheads With Attitude (C.W.A.) released an entire album (Straight Outta Wisconsin) of Packers-themed raps during the team's 1996-97 Super Bowl season. Rather than fade away once Green Bay won the Lombardi Trophy, C.W.A. released two more full lengths in the next two years and a 2003 greatest-hits package. The pro-Packers shtick has garnered the group decent sales—50,000 units, by their label's count. The members still lament the fact, though, that they have yet to meet Brett Favre.

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a fellow at the New America Foundation.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128747/

low concept
Speaking to Me: Terms and Conditions
Please retain for your records.
By Tom Peyer
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005, at 3:58 AM PT

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4. Tom Peyer may be spoken to solely for noncommercial purposes. Your speech may not transmit to Tom Peyer any message for commercial purposes or any message that contains advertising.

5. Tom Peyer is not intended for use as a sounding board for creative works. Tom Peyer shall have no responsibility for any similarities between any screenplays, novels, jokes, short stories, comic strips, short humor pieces, or other creative works described to him in violation of his Terms and Conditions, and any works subsequently sold by Tom Peyer as any such similarity shall be purely coincidental. By telling Tom Peyer any ideas for screenplays, novels, jokes, short stories, comic strips, short humor pieces, or other creative works, you waive any claims for credit or consideration of any kind as a result of Tom Peyer's sale of any similar material in any medium.

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Tom Peyer is a co-editor of O Holy Cow: The Selected Verses of Phil Rizzuto.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128421/

architecture
Let's Do the Twist
Is Ground Zero's architectural superstar all he's cracked up to be?
By Witold Rybczynski
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005, at 3:57 AM PT

Most visitors to Malmö, Sweden, catch their first glimpse of Santiago Calatrava's Turning Torso as they cross the magnificent Oresund Bridge, which links Sweden to Denmark. You can hardly miss the 54-story high-rise since it stands in a flat landscape with no other tall building in sight. The apartment tower consists of nine cubes that are torqued, or twisted, through 90 degrees from top to bottom. It's a vertical exclamation point to the bridge's monumental five-mile length.

Calatrava is having a very good year. The American Institute of Architects has awarded him its Gold Medal for 2005; a show of his buildings and sculptures has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum; and work has commenced on his kinetic World Trade Center Transit Hub, which promises to be the best—and for a long time perhaps the only—building at Ground Zero. The hub is vintage Calatrava, the kind of poetic long-span structure for which he first became famous. But in the last five years he has greatly broadened his repertoire, completing a number of striking cultural buildings: the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, an expansion to the Milwaukee Art Museum, and an opera house in the Canary Islands. And now in Malmö, his first skyscraper is nearing completion.

Approaching the tower, I was reminded of another tall building, Norman Foster's Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters. The two share a matte monochrome coloring (in Calatrava's case taupe, rather than Foster's battleship gray), and purposeful, bridgelike struts that crisscross the facade. But where Foster's bank headquarters is all business, Calatrava's apartment building is more fanciful. The torqued design is an enlargement of his 1991 steel and marble sculpture, Twisting Torso. An exposed structural "spine" on one side of the building reinforces the anthropomorphic analogy.

Turning Torso stands in a new residential district in Malmö's Western Harbor, surrounded by five- and six-story apartment buildings. From a distance, the tower interestingly changes shape as one moves around it, sometimes appearing bowed, sometimes skewed, sometimes alarmingly top-heavy. Unlike the great Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, whose inspired structures were always grounded in rational construction, Calatrava can play fast and loose with engineering. The 630-foot tower doesn't taper as it rises, which is consistent with his ongoing interest in challenging gravity, but the contortionist shape appears even more massive than it actually is, producing from certain angles an uncomfortable sense of Escher-like instability.

Close-up, Turning Torso is a disappointment. It's as if, having made his big architectural move—the twist—Calatrava wasn't sure what to do. The steel and glass curtain walls are banal. The twisting produces trapezoidal-shaped windows that are distinctly odd (and must be weirder still on the interior). An interminable line of circular windows—portholes?—looks like a fugitive from an art deco night club. As for the structural spine, it appears pinned to the building and is much too flimsy, coming across as a sort of orthopedic back brace.

The unsatisfactory design of Turning Torso raises questions about the future direction of Calatrava's career. He has been widely praised for his lyrical structures, which has given him the confidence to tackle more complicated buildings. Yet theatrical structures can only carry an architect so far. A bridge or a stadium roof is required to perform a single dramatic task; a tall apartment building, on the other hand, must fulfill a host of functions, large and small: landmark, urban neighbor, home. If Calatrava is to expand his oeuvre successfully, he will have to deepen his range as a designer considerably. God, as Mies van der Rohe famously said, is in the details.

Witold Rybczynski is Slate's architecture critic.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128757/

 

obit
Rosa Parks
The story behind her sitting down.
By Diane McWhorter
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2005, at 4:48 PM PT

My favorite image of Rosa Parks, who died Monday at the age of 92, is of the confrontation between her and a policeman on that auspicious afternoon of Dec. 1, 1955, when she refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala. After the officer had instructed her to "make it light on yourself" and give up her seat to a standing white man, she later said, she asked him, "Why do you push us around?" And he had given an honest answer: "I don't know." But then he explained that he had to arrest her anyway (even though she was not in technical violation of the city's segregation laws, but that's a whole other tangent of this rich saga). And so did history turn. In support of Parks' defiance, the black citizens of Montgomery boycotted the city buses until segregated seating was abolished, one whole year later. And so was born what is still known as the modern civil rights movement.

What's so great about that exchange between Parks and the policeman is the way they both seem to helicopter momentarily above the affray and acknowledge a truth of history: We all act upon, and are acted upon by, forces we don't understand. And then suddenly those forces crystallize in an event or person that "de-randomizes" all that has come before. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., who as a green young minister reluctantly agreed to head the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks "had been tracked down by the zeitgeist—the spirit of the time."

It took a while for the general public—and perhaps even Parks herself—to catch onto the historic logic of her action. For years, she was seen as a woman without a context, a poor-but-proud broken-down seamstress who had refused to move simply because she was "tired," clueless of the implications. In fact, her life (and she was only 42) encompassed the preceding two decades of black liberation. She had met her husband, Raymond Parks, in the early 1930s when he was raising money for the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight train, who had become an international cause célèbre thanks to the legal and propaganda efforts of the American Communist Party. (Virtually alone in that era, the Communist Party advocated full equality for African-Americans, and even the term "civil rights" was considered left-wing jargon.) With her high-school diploma—a credential that required resourcefulness and commitment for a black female of her time—Parks had served for years as the secretary in the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She and her NAACP boss, E.D. Nixon, had already been discussing a way to protest that most demeaning daily feature of black life: the segregated bus ride to work and home under the watch of the city's famously abusive bus drivers. Nixon's day job was as a sleeping-car porter; his civil rights hero was A. Philip Randolph, the socialist intellectual who had turned the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters into the first significant black labor union.

Nixon bailed Parks out of jail that December evening. Along with him were two white aristocratic Alabama renegades, Clifford and Virginia Durr, who had been prominent New Dealers (Cliff was an early Federal Communications Commission member*) and were among the seamstress's private clients. Cliff, a skilled constitutional lawyer, became a behind-the-scenes adviser to Fred Gray, the inexperienced young black attorney who handled the class-action suit that pressed the legal brief against bus segregation at the same time the boycotters protested with their feet. In one of the ironies of the boycott story, Parks (Gray's constant lunch companion) was not in fact a named plaintiff in the constitutional test case she had inspired. And yet it was that case, on which the Supreme Court ruled in November 1956, that ended up desegregating the buses.

So why is Parks' obituary on the front page of the New York Times? Why did the Montgomery bus boycott turn out to be such a big deal when it was the courts that got the job done? Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's chief, doubted the boycott's significance himself when he said, "All that walking for nothing!"

In fact, the boycott represented a quantum shift in black emancipation. It was the passing of the torch from the mandarins of the NAACP, whose lawyers had tried to dismantle segregation statute by statute, to the ordinary bus riders, the "little people" now taking charge of their own destinies. By moving the struggle out of the courtroom and into the street, the droves of "walkers" (Virginia Durr likened them to a daily black tide) presented a vivid moral witness that piqued the country's imagination. And the boycott anointed Martin Luther King as the man of the very long ensuing hour, transforming the civil rights movement from a strategic offensive directed from New York to a spiritual uprising out of the black church. Rosa Parks not only launched this new paradigm but incorporated all those that preceded it: Old Leftism, New Deal liberalism, unionism, NAACP legalism and gradualism. She was an embodiment of the civil rights movement to that moment, even if the impression persists that she was a simple old lady with aching feet.

Despite what the eulogies might suggest, Parks did not ride off into the sunset on the front of that bus. The boycotters' organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association, split bitterly between Martin Luther King's faction, with its bourgeois gloss and razzle-dazzle access to the national media, and the earthier locals like E.D. Nixon, who complained that King treated him "as a child." Nixon would remain vocally bitter about being overlooked as the father of the boycott, regretting that he had tapped King to be the protest's leader ("and, with that bad guess," he would write, "we got Moses"). Nixon's ally, Rosa Parks, would quietly suffer her removal from the action, taking a job at Virginia's Hampton Institute (the Upper South version of Tuskegee Institute) within months of the boycott's end, since her notoriety prevented her from finding work in Montgomery. Birmingham's firebrand civil rights leader, Fred Shuttlesworth, chewed out the MIA leadership for not recognizing her symbolic importance to the struggle and finding a way to support her.

And so Parks would spend most of her life far away from the city she put on the map. She ended up in Detroit, resuming her sewing before Rep. John Conyers put her on his staff in 1965. But she showed her pioneering stuff in the foundation she began, the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, to help ordinary black kids achieve the blessings of society. She recognized that it was not the exceptional children who most needed grant money and attention but the contemporary version of the striving, struggling bus riders. In her final years, Parks suffered from dementia, which may explain her misguided and unsuccessful lawsuit against OutKast for appropriating her name as the title of a song. I can't help but feel that Parks was fortunate to fade when she did, in the wake of Katrina's images of black poverty and hopelessness. In just a few weeks, the 50^th anniversary commemorations of her heroism will make us reckon with how far we still are from the goals her civil rights movement had seemed to put within grasp.

Correction, Oct. 26, 2005: This piece originally and incorrectly stated that Clifford Durr was on the first Federal Communications Commission. He was not one of the original commissioners, though he joined in 1941. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Diane McWhorter is the author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama—The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution and a young-adult history of the movement, A Dream of Freedom.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128752/

explainer
X Marks the Baseball Team
Why the White Sox aren't the White Socks.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2005, at 4:11 PM PT

If the Chicago White Sox beat the Astros tonight, they'll be just one victory away from their first World Series title since 1917. Last season, the Boston Red Sox won their first championship since 1918. Why are these teams "Sox" rather than "Socks"?

They followed the fashion of the times. Many early baseball teams were named after their uniform colors. In the 19^th century, there were clubs called the Red Stockings, Brown Stockings, and Blue Stockings. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune often shortened these nicknames to "Sox." When Charlie Comiskey founded the American League's Chicago White Stockings in 1901, the Tribune wasted no time in dubbing them the White Sox. Boston's AL franchise seems not to have had an official name during its first few years. Reporters called them different names on different days, including the Americans (to distinguish them from Boston's National League team), the Bostons, the Plymouth Rocks, and the Beaneaters. In late 1907, the club's owner settled on Red Sox.

Why the love affair with the letter "x"? The formation of the modern baseball leagues coincides, more or less, with a broad movement to simplify English spelling. The father of the movement, Noah Webster, had pushed to create a "national language" a century earlier. Webster wanted to distinguish American English from British English by correcting irregular spellings and eliminating silent letters. Some of Webster's suggestions took—"jail" for "gaol"—while others haven't caught on—"groop" for "group."

Near the turn of the century, advocacy groups like the Spelling Simplification Board pushed for spelling reform with renewed vigor; they argued that millions of dollars were wasted on printing useless letters. The editor of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill, supported the idea. Medill stripped final "e"s from words like "favorite" in the pages of his newspaper and even suggested more wholesale changes that would have made written English look something like e-mail spam. In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt ordered the government printer to adopt some simplified spellings—such as replacing the suffix "-ed" with "-t" at the end of many words—for official correspondence. Congress responded by passing a bill in support of standard orthography later that year.

By the first decade of the 1900s, "sox" was already a common way to shorten "socks." The "x" version of the word frequently appeared in advertisements for hosiery, for example. And in his 1921 tome The American Language, H.L. Mencken described "sox" as a "vigorous newcomer." "The White Sox are known to all Americans; the White Socks would seem strange," he wrote.

The spelling reform movement weakened over the course of the 20^th century. But by the time "sox" fell out of fashion, the baseball nicknames were already entrenched in the sports pages and in the hearts of the teams' fans.

Bonus Explainer: The White Sox and Red Sox weren't the only early-20^th century teams not to have a steady nickname. Interchangeable nicknames were common in old-time baseball. Before becoming universally known as the Yankees, New York's American League team was also known as the Highlanders, the Invaders, and the Porchclimbers in the early 1900s.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Jill Lepore of Harvard University and Ben Zimmer of Rutgers University.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

 

moneybox
What's in Bernanke's Wallet?
A psycho-financial analysis of Fed chair nominee Ben Bernanke.
By Henry Blodget
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2005, at 1:36 PM PT

What can we learn about the likely policies of prospective Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke from the way he manages his own money? Plenty!

In his previous job as a Fed governor, Bernanke filed disclosure statements detailing his assets and income. The latest of these, filed in 2004 and covering 2003, is available here and serves as the basis for the discussion below. Bernanke will presumably file more up-to-date info as his confirmation proceeds.

Like most of the current Fed governors—and unlike Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers—Bernanke is rich. Not as rich as Alan Greenspan, who is worth $4 million to $9 million, but rich, with total financial assets of $1.1 million to $5.6 million. Bernanke and his wife have socked away enough of his former $295,000 salary as head of the Princeton economics department, his six-figure textbook royalties, and her salary from Princeton Day School to amass a retirement account worth $1 million to $5 million (by far their biggest asset). Regardless of how the confirmation hearings go, the Bernankes will not eat cat food during their retirement (unless his Fed policies lead to skyrocketing inflation).

Bernanke's other financial assets consist of custodial accounts for his kids, cash-management accounts, a couple of exotic securities, a single stock, and a bunch of mutual funds. The exotic securities include Canadian bonds and U.S. Treasury STRIPS, which are bonds sliced in half so the interest and principal payments can be owned separately. Bernanke's single stock is Altria, the old Philip Morris. This stock has performed well, beating the S&P 500 for many years. Why Bernanke owns a cigarette stock and what it means, however, are mysteries.

The bulk of Bernanke's holdings outside the TIAA-CREF retirement account are plain vanilla mutual funds. Yes, there are fancy ones here and there (a Greater China fund for his son, Joel, for example), but most are the type familiar to many Americans: Merrill Lynch Large Cap Core Fund, Merrill Lynch Balanced Capital Fund, etc. What's interesting about Bernanke's fund choices is that most are actively managed instead of passively managed, meaning that Bernanke is choosing to pay portfolio managers to try to beat the market, instead of picking low-cost, passive index funds.

This is interesting because Bernanke is an academic economist, and most academics believe that the market is so efficient that stock-picking is usually a waste of time and money. (The average active fund costs its investors 1 to 2 percentage points of performance every year.) Fifty years worth of academic research supports this conclusion, and almost every analysis of mutual funds over the last 30 years has concluded that the vast majority of active funds do worse than passive benchmarks.

So, why would a financial rocket scientist pursue a dumb investment strategy? Here are four possible interpretations, in order of least to most likely:

1) Bernanke possesses less intellectual rigor than is commonly thought. Perhaps, despite decades in academia, Bernanke hasn't evaluated the active vs. passive evidence and, therefore, still accepts the common "wisdom" espoused by brokerage firms, fund companies, and CNBC. If so, this would be seriously problematic for his tenure at the Fed. One shudders at the thought that a Fed chairman might make policy decisions by flicking on the boob tube and listening to, say, Jim Cramer. Fortunately, this interpretation seems unlikely, especially given the proximity of Bernanke to Princeton colleague Burton Malkiel, who wrote A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

2) Bernanke has the brainpower necessary to find the truth but lacks the willpower and decision-making discipline necessary to put it into practice. (Also known as the difference between the ivory tower and the real world.) In this scenario, Bernanke believes that active management is a crock but won't act on this belief. Why? Perhaps Bernanke's charming financial consultant has opined that the efficient market stuff is a load of hooey: "It's the pursuit of mediocrity, Ben. Who wants to strive to be average? Certainly not you. I mean, it's downright un-American." Perhaps Bernanke finds this convincing or lacks the energy to argue. This, too, would spell disaster at the Fed.

3) Bernanke, like most people, is overconfident about his own abilities, even as he recognizes the limitations of others (i.e., even though most folks can't pick funds that beat the market, he can). The good news here would be that, if anyone has earned the right to be overconfident about his financial prowess, it's Bernanke. The bad news is that overconfidence is perhaps the most common psychological infirmity that dooms most of us to crappy performance. (Analyzing whether Bernanke's funds have beaten their benchmarks would be a waste of time because we don't know how long he has owned them, and because less than a multidecade holding period might tempt us to mistake luck for skill. As an example, Bernanke's large-cap core fund charges a mammoth fee of nearly 2 percent a year but has managed to outperform the S&P 500 by 3 percent annually over the last five years.) The implications of this overconfidence might be that Fed Chairman Bernanke would assume that he, like Maestro Greenspan, possesses the rare talent, touch, and je ne sais quoi necessary to actively steer the economy between the Scylla of slow growth and the Charybdis of inflation. Will he actually be able to do this? Hang on to your hat (and diversify your assets).

4) Bernanke is an easygoing optimist who views life as too short to worry about 1 or 2 percentage points lost to active management and full-service brokerage fees. This is a typical attitude for folks who have enough money that 1 or 2 percentage points don't matter. It is also typical for people who like and trust their financial advisers and don't stress about how much they pay them and/or whether they generate the highest possible return; as long as the money grows, everything's cool. This "Don't worry, be happy" attitude would have implications for Bernanke at the Fed. Specifically, it supports the idea that he would be less concerned about inflation than economic growth: "Hey, what's a few points of inflation when the economy's roaring along?" If nothing else, this attitude would keep him popular with the president who appointed him.

Henry Blodget, a former securities analyst, lives in New York City.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128743/

fighting words
Calling Galloway's Bluff
The Senate uncovers a smoking gun.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2005, at 12:59 PM PT

Just before my last exchange with George Galloway, which occurred on the set of Bill Maher's show in Los Angeles in mid-September, I was approached by a representative of the program and asked if I planned to repeat my challenge to Galloway on air. That challenge—would he sign an affidavit saying that he had never discussed Oil-for-Food monies with Tariq Aziz?—I had already made on a public stage in New York. Maher's producers had been asked, obviously by a nervous Galloway, to find out whether I had brought such an affidavit along with me. I replied that this was not necessary, since his public denial to me was on the record and had been broadcast, and since it further confirmed the apparent perjury that he had committed in front of the U.S. Senate on May 17, 2005. I added that I wanted no further contact with Galloway until I could have the opportunity of reviewing his prison diaries.

That day has now been brought measurably closer by the publication of the report of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. This report, which comes with a vast archive of supporting material, was embargoed until 10 p.m. Monday and contains the "smoking gun" evidence that Galloway, along with his wife and his chief business associate, were consistent profiteers from Saddam Hussein's regime and its criminal exploitation of the "Oil for Food" program. In particular:

1) Between 1999 and 2003, Galloway personally solicited and received eight oil "allocations" totaling 23 million barrels, which went either to him or to a politicized "charity" of his named the Mariam Appeal.

2) In connection with just one of these allocations, Galloway's wife, Amineh Abu-Zayyad, received about $150,000 directly.

3) A minimum of $446,000 was directed to the Mariam Appeal, which campaigned against the very sanctions from which it was secretly benefiting.

4) Through the connections established by the Galloway and "Mariam" allocations, the Saddam Hussein regime was enabled to reap $1,642,000 in kickbacks or "surcharge" payments.

(For a highly readable explanation of how the Oil-for-Food racket actually worked, see the Adobe Acrobat file on the site www.hitchensweb.com prepared by my brilliant comrade Michael Weiss and distributed as a leaflet outside the debate in New York.)

These and other findings by the subcommittee, which appear to demonstrate beyond doubt that Galloway lied under oath, are supported by one witness in particular whose name will cause pain in the Galloway camp. This is Tariq Aziz, longtime henchman of Saddam Hussein and at different times the foreign minister and deputy prime minister of the Baathist dictatorship. Galloway has often referred in moist terms to his friend Aziz, and now this is his reward. I do not think—in case anyone tries such an innuendo—that there is the smallest possibility that Aziz's testimony was coerced. For one thing, he was confronted by Senate investigators who already knew a great deal of the story and who possessed authenticated documents from Iraqi ministries. For another, he continues, through his lawyers, to deny what is also certainly true, namely that he personally offered a $2 million bribe to Rolf Ekeus, then the head of the U.N. weapons inspectors.

The critical person in Galloway's fetid relationship with Saddam's regime was a Jordanian "businessman" named Fawaz Zureikat, who was involved in a vast range of middleman activities in Baghdad and is the chairman of Middle East Advanced Semiconductor Inc. It was never believable, as Galloway used to claim, that he could have been so uninformed about Zureikat's activities in breaching the U.N. oil embargo. This most probably means that what we now know is a fraction of what there is to be known. But what has been established is breathtaking enough. A member of the British Parliament was in receipt of serious money originating from a homicidal dictatorship. That money was supposed to have been used to ameliorate the suffering of Iraqis living under sanctions. It was instead diverted to the purposes of enriching Saddam's toadies and of helping them propagandize in favor of the regime whose crimes and aggressions had necessitated the sanctions and created the suffering in the first place. This is something more than mere "corruption." It is the cynical theft of food and medicine from the desperate to pay for the palaces of a psychopath.

Taken together with the scandal surrounding Benon Sevan, the U.N. official responsible for "running" the program, and with the recent arrest of Ambassador Jean-Bernard Mérimée (France's former U.N. envoy) in Paris, and with other evidence about pointing to big bribes paid to French and Russian politicians like Charles Pasqua and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, what we are looking at is a well-organized Baathist attempt to buy or influence the member states of the U.N. Security Council. One wonders how high this investigation will reach and how much it will eventually explain.

For George Galloway, however, the war would seem to be over. The evidence presented suggests that he lied in court when he sued the Daily Telegraph in London over similar allegations (and collected money for that, too). It suggests that he lied to the Senate under oath. And it suggests that he made a deceptive statement in the register of interests held by members of the British House of Commons. All in all, a bad week for him, especially coming as it does on the heels of the U.N. report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, which appears to pin the convict's badge on senior members of the Assad despotism in Damascus, Galloway's default patron after he lost his main ally in Baghdad.

Yet this is the man who received wall-to-wall good press for insulting the Senate subcommittee in May, and who was later the subject of a fawning puff piece in the New York Times, and who was lionized by the anti-war movement when he came on a mendacious and demagogic tour of the country last month. I wonder if any of those who furnished him a platform will now have the grace to admit that they were hosting a man who is not just a pimp for fascism but one of its prostitutes as well.

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

 

jurisprudence
Vote for Harriet!!!!
The dubious professional distinctions of Harriet Miers.
By Mark Obbie
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2005, at 12:31 PM PT

Throughout the public evisceration of Harriet Miers, even her critics have tended to concede one of President Bush's main claims: Miers couldn't have been a complete loser to rise to the top of the bar and of her law firm.

Wrong.

Well, to be fair, a complete loser would have had to stretch to win election as president of her local and state bar associations. And loser perhaps isn't the word for the typical law firm managing partner back in Miers' era.

Mediocrity—that's a better word for it.

The point non-lawyers may miss here is that these accomplishments don't necessarily signal astonishing professional achievement. Implicit in the president's loving assessment of Miers' résumé are these assumptions: that lawyers choose their leaders based on merit, and that leading a bar association or a law firm is a position of great respect and honor. So, let's explore each notion, in the context of Texas in the late 1980s and early '90s, a time and place in which truly outstanding lawyers pawned off their "leadership" duties on those who wouldn't be much missed from the billable-hours assembly line.

First, take the bar associations. They come in two flavors: voluntary and mandatory. The Dallas Bar Association and American Bar Association are voluntary. Lawyers are not required to join, and in fact many do not. Those who pay their dues get various goodies in return: dreadful magazines, decent educational seminars, schlocky trade shows, and any number of excuses to get out of the house and tip a few. It's like that crew of thirsty Knights of Columbus on Saturday Night Live, except in pinstripes and with slightly better haircuts. Mandatory bar associations—like the State Bar of Texas—are pretty much the same deal, but in these states, lawyers have no choice about joining. They're mandatory because they serve a dual role: licensing lawyers for the state while keeping the draft beer and Scotch flowing at lawyer parties.

Guess who seeks election to such groups. Not the busiest, in-demand lions of the bar. Instead, it's usually the second stringers, the runners-up in the lawyer game. Real lawyers, for the most part, snicker about "bar weenies"—much as they did about the goofs in high school who ran for class president. Does David Boies spend his $800-an-hour time going to committee meetings and wrangling over the ABA's next convention schedule? Hardly. He might deign to give a speech at a bar gathering if he can fit it into his busy trial schedule. But bar weenies—their slightly kinder name is bar junkies—are the ones holding the Town Car door open for Boies when he arrives at the hotel. And when they're not doing that, they're jabbering endlessly about legal-regulatory policy questions that even most lawyers find stupefying.

In fairness, it was still considered revolutionary for a woman to climb this career ladder when Miers did it in Texas. But other than that distinction, she slipped right into the customary role of the bland leading the bland. What occupied the Dallas bar's time in those days? Not much worth remembering, except for the nativism on display in the local bar's horrified reaction to the arrival of a big, national law firm, Jones Day, during Miers' reign at the bar. Dallas law firms, always far smaller in size and national prominence than Houston firms, reacted with a mix of resentment and disdain to some good old competition. The bar's steady diet of seminars back in those days might as well have been renamed "Jones Day??!! Oh, crap."

The State Bar of Texas back then had similar aspirations to great consequence. Recall how Miers' presidential pronouncements in the Texas Bar Journal caused recent hand-wringing about her skills as a thinker? Well, she was only doing what little was expected of her in that role—bad writing included. The rest of the nation's legal establishment at that time was alarmed that the state of Texas was rushing convicts to execution without providing them with counsel in the latter stages of appeals. So, how did the State Bar of Texas respond? By relying on out-of-state volunteer lawyers—and grudgingly at that—to pick up the slack Texas lawyers had left by averting their eyes. Rather than impose pro bono time requirements on Texas lawyers, the state bar endlessly debated mandatory reporting of pro bono hours—in other words, we don't care how much you volunteer, but we do want you to fill out a form telling us what you haven't done. And if that nice Mr. Boies comes to town to save the life of a death-row inmate, please meet his Town Car at DFW Airport!

If this brand of public service is easy to ridicule, it's even easier to diss the business savvy of a 1990s-era law-firm manager. By the 1990s, when Miers' partners put her in charge, law firms had reluctantly concluded that they were in fact a business. Now that they were thinking outside the box, they had to figure out how to run themselves like businesses. Mostly they failed. Often it didn't matter anyhow. As recession-proof money machines, most firms could wait for clients to seek them out. "Managing" such an enterprise meant divvying up too much money among partners, paying overworked associates just enough to keep them chained to their desks, and deciding whom to admit to the partnership—mostly those who could turn a profit and not those destined to be bar weenies.

Law partnerships, at least then, weren't so much managed as they were administered. Certainly there were exceptions with strong leaders—typically firms still led by a founder who brought in all the business, held much of the equity, and made all the key decisions. But your average corporate firm, like Miers', was like a university faculty—democracy run amok. The ostensible leader had a pretty short list of duties: calling meetings at which he or she could be informed of his or her failings, and making speeches.

Among the big debates of that era in law-firm management: Word vs. WordPerfect (endlessly amusing as dinner-party banter and sure to become a Harvard Business School case study). Another biggie was whether to shorten firms' names from way too many unpronounceable surnames (e.g., Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom) to punchy brands like the giggle-inducing MoFo (for Morrison & Foerster).

The jig was up for this blissfully ignorant oasis in the market economy when cracks first appeared in firms exactly like Miers'—midsized, regional, full-service, ill-defined blobs that couldn't sell themselves as distinct from other midsized, regional, full-service blobs. Because they couldn't make as much money as their more elite, premium-billing brethren, the smarter among them saw the logical ending to this story—a death spiral.

Lacking the ability to manage their way out of a crisis, victims of this midsized crunch started mating—with each other, or with legal conglomerates that could buy local talent on the cheap. Miers' firm chose the former strategy, merging with an identical firm five hours away on I-45 in Houston. The result? A somewhat larger full-service regional blob. This, then, is what passes in Miers' former professional circles for the vision thing.

Law firms these days, as a whole, are much better managed. The exceptions can be found in traditional midsized enclaves, for which the day of reckoning has been extended, not eliminated. Bar associations since Miers' day have changed little, except even fewer younger lawyers today consider them cool. To the bar's jocks and cheerleaders, the bar weenies are Pedro in the film Napoleon Dynamite, the misfit with the flat vocal inflections running for student-council president. Napoleon Dynamite's contribution as Pedro's campaign manager is the archetypal bar-association slogan, "Vote for Pedro. He will make your wildest dreams come true."

For bar weenies, seeing one of their own elevated to the coolest enclave in law has to be, like, their wildest dream come true. For Miers, it all depends now on a simple question: Is there a Napoleon lurking among her White House handlers?

Mark Obbie was editor and publisher of Texas Lawyer newspaper when Harriet Miers led the State Bar of Texas. Obbie teaches journalism and media law at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and is the former executive editor of The American Lawyer.

 

explainer
How Do You Fire a New York Times reporter?
Could Judy Miller get the ax?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Monday, Oct. 24, 2005, at 5:32 PM PT

New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd and Byron Calame lashed out at their colleague Judith Miller over the weekend. Some have even called for her dismissal from the newspaper on account of her role in the Valerie Plame affair. How does the Times go about firing someone?

For the most part, they don't. Most Times staffers enjoy the protection of their union contract, which makes dismissal a complicated, drawn-out process. Last year, deposed Executive Editor Howell Raines claimed that "would-be staff members get tenure for life" as a result of the procedures mandated by the union contract. (Raines was himself fired in 2003; as a member of management he didn't qualify for union membership.)

What Raines calls "tenure" doesn't kick in until an employee has passed a probationary period. New reporters spend 26 weeks on probation, during which time they can be fired for any reason (except for something like racial discrimination). After that, the contract says any firing must be "for good and sufficient cause." That doesn't mean the paper can't lay people off—the union recognizes economic necessity as a sufficient reason for letting an employee go. But it does mean that editors who want to fire an employee for incompetence or ethical lapses must be able to justify their decision to the union.

According to the Newspaper Guild of New York, management should first notify the reporter that there's a problem. If he doesn't shape up, they must provide him with a formal, written warning and meet with him to discuss their concerns. Then the reporter would have to receive another formal warning before he could be suspended or dismissed.

At any point in this process, the union can step in and file a complaint on behalf of the staffer, which may result in a "grievance hearing." If the guild thinks a reporter has been fired unfairly, they can take the dispute to binding arbitration, where management must prove there were sufficient grounds for dismissal.

The Times almost never fires its permanent staff employees. (Freelancers and contract writers get the ax more often.) Two staffers got canned earlier this year, though. Former Baghdad Bureau Chief Susan Sachs was let go when she allegedly told the wives of two foreign correspondents their husbands were having affairs. Photographer Nancy Siesel got fired for what her termination letter called a "repeated failure to comply with warnings and directives concerning [her] job performance." Both Sachs and Siesel denied the charges against them, and both are awaiting arbitration.

What about the reporters who got canned in 2003? Technically, they all resigned. Jayson Blair and Lynette Holloway quit at the urging of their bosses. Rick Bragg's job wasn't covered by the union contract when he was caught allegedly misusing a stringer. (Some senior reporters and photographers get bigger salaries at the expense of union benefits, while some low-level editors are in the union.) The newspaper suspended him for two weeks, but he left of his own accord. "I am not enjoying the atmosphere and I am not enjoying the tension," he said.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

war stories
Now They Tell Us
Why didn't Bush's foreign-policy critics speak out a year ago?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, Oct. 24, 2005, at 3:10 PM PT

Two erstwhile loyalists have come out roaring against President George W. Bush this past week, attacking not just his conduct of the war in Iraq but the foundations of his foreign policy generally.

The critics are retired Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, a longtime friend and former national security adviser of Bush's father, who attacks his targets in a profile by Jeffrey Goldberg in the latest issue of The New Yorker, and retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, another admirer of Bush Sr. and Colin Powell's former chief of staff, who launched his artillery in an Oct. 19 speech at the New America Foundation.

Scowcroft, besides voicing dismay over the invasion of Baghdad, slashes the administration—especially his old friend Dick Cheney and his own former underling Condoleezza Rice—for their "evangelical" notion that they can export democracy at the point of a gun.

Wilkerson goes further, charging Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with running foreign policy like a "cabal"—worse still, an "incompetent" cabal that has "courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran." He says they've gotten away with it because the president is "not versed in international relations and not much interested in them either."

There's nothing novel about the substance of these critiques; many analysts have made similar points for quite a while. The startling thing here is the critics—consummate insiders, veteran military officers, who as a rule don't reveal secrets or attack presidents, especially those named Bush.

One question comes to mind, though: What took them so long? Why didn't they come out and tell us these things, oh, say, a year ago, when their words might have made a difference?

Scowcroft is somewhat exempt from this complaint. He did write an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal in August 2002, just as the president was gearing up for war, titled "Don't Attack Saddam," in which he argued that Iraq posed no immediate threat and that an invasion would detract from the more urgent war on terrorism. Given his relationship with the Bush family, it was a brave piece to write—and it had consequences. As The New Yorker piece points out, Bush did not renew Scowcroft's appointment as chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board when his term expired in 2004; and his old friends in high office—Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and so forth—stopped speaking to him. Though he didn't speak out much against the war as it progressed—or against Bush's fantasy-ridden foreign-policy rhetoric as it took off—at least he'd tried once.

But what's Wilkerson's excuse? Where's he been? During the question-and-answer period at the New America Foundation, he was asked where someone in his position should draw the line between loyalty and disclosure. He replied, "I feel like, as a citizen and as a person very concerned with the military … I need to speak out. … I think when you feel like what you might say has even a remote opportunity to affect some change for the good."

Sorry, colonel. You had far more than a merely "remote opportunity" to "affect some change" last November. As Bush put it shortly before his second-term inauguration, "We have an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election." That was Wilkerson's "accountability moment," too, and he skipped it.

Which leads to a larger question: Why do so few U.S. government officials do what Wilkerson might now wish he had done—resign in protest and announce their reasons publicly? Dozens of officials and probably hundreds of military officers will speak privately, to their families and friends, about their fundamental disagreements with this administration's foreign and military policy. But none has spoken publicly.

One who came close was Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, who, shortly before the war, testified before a congressional committee that a few hundred thousand troops might be needed to occupy Iraq—only to be upbraided, humiliated, and essentially dismissed from office a year before his term was up.

This problem with renegade truth-tellers isn't an exclusive feature of the George W. Bush administration. Cyrus Vance resigned from his position as Jimmy Carter's secretary of state in protest over the raid to rescue the hostages in Iran. Vance turned out to be right; the raid was a botch. But no one in government ever hired or openly consulted with Vance again.

Colin Powell might have had Vance in mind when he stayed in office, despite repeated defeats and humiliations in his four years as Bush's secretary of state. (Perhaps he calmed his conscience by leaking damaging stories to his old friend Bob Woodward.) And since Powell stayed, it would have been doubly—or quadruply—hard for his chief of staff, Wilkerson, to resign, if he'd ever contemplated that course.

Edward Weisband and Thomas M. Franck wrote a breezily insightful book 30 years ago called Resignation in Protest: Political and Ethical Choices Between Loyalty to Team and Loyalty to Conscience in American Public Life. They observed that resignations in protest are common in Britain, where Cabinet ministers tended also to hold parliamentary seats; they could therefore leave the government and still retain power and a constituency. In the American system, officials who quit the president in protest are left with nothing. Not even the opposition party wants them because they're seen as loose cannons; if they squealed on their current boss, they might squeal on a future boss too.

Conscience-torn military officers confront another barrier—their oaths of loyalty to their civilian commander in chief. Breaking with the president would not only mark the end of their career, their entire way of life; it would violate a key tenet of that life.

And yet when the U.S. Army Command and Staff College issued a reading list for officers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the books included—with an asterisk indicating it should be among those read first—was H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. McMaster, a West Point graduate, concluded—from extensive research of declassified documents—that the Joint Chiefs had told President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that the Vietnam War could not be won without a level of force that no one wanted to commit. Their civilian commanders ignored the Chiefs' advice, lied about the facts—and the Chiefs went along. McMaster's point was that through this collusion the Chiefs abrogated their professional responsibility and so had committed a "dereliction of duty."

How many officers read McMaster's book, as the Command and Staff College (rather astonishingly) recommended? Why haven't any of them taken his thesis to heart?

Maybe that's what Colonel Wilkerson—who is about to start teaching at George Washington University—has finally, if very belatedly, done. And maybe Scowcroft—who has long been extremely secure as the president of his own consulting firm—is doing a bit of that as well.

At one point in his speech, Wilkerson became almost apocalyptic in his warnings about the crew in power:

If something comes along that is truly serious … like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city or … a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. … Read in there what they say about the necessity of the people to throw off tyranny or to throw off ineptitude. … You're talking about the potential for, I think, real dangerous times if we don't get our act together.

There is another critic lurking in the background of The New Yorker article, and if he were ever to step into the light, it would be one of the most sensational protests in history. That third man is the sitting president's father, George H.W. Bush himself.

Bush père answered Goldberg's queries via e-mail. Read carefully what he says about the ostensible subject of the profile, Scowcroft:

He has a great propensity for friendship. By that, I mean someone I can depend on to tell me what I need to know and not just what I want to hear. … [He] was very good about making sure that we did not solely consider the "best case," but instead considered what it would mean if things went our way, and also if they did not.

Isn't the patriarch talking, implicitly, about the son? Isn't he saying that W. is in deep trouble because he's surrounded himself with people who tell him only what he wants to hear and paint only rosy pictures of best-case scenarios? Isn't he telling his boy to get some real friends?

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128629/

  

moneybox
Big Ben
Bernanke's a great choice for Fed chairman, but is he tough enough on inflation?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, Oct. 24, 2005, at 3:05 PM PT

At last, President Bush has found somebody in the White House who is truly qualified for a senior non-White House appointment. Today, he named Ben Bernanke*, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, to replace Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Economists, usually a back-biting bunch, are nearly universal in their praise for Bernanke. The stock market is pleased, as the key indices are up on the day. The Senate, which has to confirm Bernanke, is enthusiastic as well, with Democratic (Paul Sarbanes) and Republican (Robert Bennett) members of the Senate Banking Committee appearing on CNBC to support the nomination. The punters at Intrade, who had Bernanke as the odds-on favorite, are also surely satisfied: Hey, the guy's middle name is "peace." Literally. Bernanke is an excellent economist with excellent credentials. He's a highly respected scholar who also writes books that are accessible to laypeople. (See his Essays on the Great Depression.) And he's also been blessed with excellent timing. After all, the last few years have not been kind to Republican-leaning academic economists interested in government service. Working in the Bush administration meant selling a set of dishonest fiscal policies, crafting public policies that were anathema to their beliefs (from steel tariffs to the Medicare prescription-drug plan), and occasionally having to disavow their own writings.

Bernanke was lucky enough (or smart enough) to spend the first term of the Bush administration in the cloisters of Princeton, and then in the economists' equivalent of a monastery—the Federal Reserve, where he was appointed a governor in the fall of 2003 (one of Greenspan's dwarves). At the Fed, Bernanke was responsible for the one bit of weirdness on his résumé: He helped popularize the savings-glut meme, which argues that Europe and Asia are saving too much and profligate consumer and government spending in the United States are saving the global economy.

In June 2005*, Bernanke left the Fed and entered the White House as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Again, good timing. When he arrived, the bitter fiscal-policy battles were at a lull and the economy was creating jobs. Bush's disastrously unpopular Social Security plan had essentially been called off, and the short-term budget picture was improving. Between Iraq, Katrina, and the Miers appointment, the news has been dominated by noneconomic issues. And so Bernanke was not called upon to become a salesman for horrid policies, as predecessors Glenn Hubbard and N. Gregory Mankiw were forced to.

So, what's not to like? The suspicion about Bernanke isn't that he's a blinkered ideologue (Greenspan, in fact, was a blinkered ideologue, and he turned out to be a pretty good Federal Reserve chairman), or that he's a political hack. No. The one question about Bernanke is how seriously he takes the threat of inflation and how far he'll be willing to go to stamp it out.

President Bush in his speech today listed several job functions of a Fed chief, many of which may seem opaque to the public: "overseeing the integrity of our banking system ... containing the risk that can arise in financial markets ... ensuring a functioning payment system." But really, what the markets, politicians, and consumers most want from the Federal Reserve is vigilance against inflation.

Some suspect Bernanke of being a little soft on inflation. After all, Bernanke was an instrumental figure in the incipient deflation scare of 2002 and 2003, which gave Greenspan the intellectual justification to push interest rates to record lows and to leave them there. If he was so worried about falling prices, Bernanke might be insufficiently concerned about rising ones.

Now, calling a Fed nominee soft on inflation in 2005 is a little like calling a State Department nominee soft on communism in the 1950s. But how the Federal Reserve deals with the very real threat of inflation is the question Bernanke will face upon assuming office.

Inflation in this economy is real, and not just in food and energy. And some of it may be the Fed's own creation. When Greenspan relentlessly slashed interest rates to emergency lows in 2003, and left them there well into 2004 (with Bernanke's support), it unleashed a tidal wave of liquidity into the economy. Much of that easy money went into commodities, houses, energy, and food—and various other things that are becoming more expensive. As James Grant argues in the current Forbes: "To preserve the nation from an imagined deflation, the Fed instigated a real estate and mortgage inflation."

And so for the past year, Greenspan and the Federal Reserve have been playing catch up. The Fed has raised interest rates 11 straight times, taking the Federal Funds rate from 1 percent in 2004 to 3.75 percent today. There are two more meetings before Greenspan retires, which means Bernanke could enter office in January 2006 with the Federal Funds rate higher than it has been at any time since April 2001. In his first months on the job, Bernanke will likely face some tough questions about how far the Federal Reserve should go in raising rates to fight off inflation, or whether it has already done enough and should just stand pat. And that is the most difficult call a Federal Reserve chairman can make.

*Corrections, Oct. 25, 2005: Gross originally misstated Bernanke's first name. It is Ben, not Benjamin. Gross also erred about the date Bernanke became chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. He became chairman of the CEA in June 2005, not June 2004. Click here and here to return to the corrected sentences.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128630/

technology
The Fight Over Wireless
Will we get Internet access from big government or big business?
By Adam L. Penenberg
Posted Monday, Oct. 24, 2005, at 2:20 PM PT

Wireless Internet access means more than being able to check your e-mail at Starbucks. Imagine if the town you live in transformed into one gigantic wireless hot spot overnight. You could feed parking meters with your MasterCard instead of hunting for quarters. Utility companies might read meters in real time and pass the savings on to customers. The next time you saw a pothole, you could instantly e-mail a camera phone photo to city hall.

Municipal wireless wouldn't just make life easier for citizens—it has the potential to save lives. Firefighters would be able to turn traffic lights green as they race to put out a blaze. Police could tap into a bank's surveillance cameras to get a head start on cracking a heist. And emergency responders would be able to communicate during a natural disaster or terrorist attack, a need that became obvious in the aftermath of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

This wireless fantasy land, where wireless is as much a public utility as water and electricity, has become irresistible to hundreds of cities. Earlier this month, Philadelphia chose EarthLink to build and manage a wireless network spanning the entire city. Cost to taxpayers? $0. The deal requires EarthLink to put together the network on its own dime—an estimated $10 million to $15 million—and share future revenues with the city. To recoup its investment, EarthLink will charge users $20 a month (half that to low-income households). Chicago; Miami Beach; Milwaukee, Wisc.; and Portland, Ore., are also exploring muni wireless. Recently, Google offered to make all of San Francisco wireless for free, reaping revenue by targeting ads to users.

According to a recent study, the United States has dropped to 16^th in the percentage of citizens with access to broadband, trailing South Korea, Canada, Israel, and Japan, among others. There is consensus across the political spectrum that we need to go wireless—and fast. The disagreement is about who will cover the country with hot spots: big government or big business.

Public-private partnerships like the one in Philadelphia probably won't be the model for the rest of the country. After Philly announced its intention to provide citywide wireless last year, Verizon spent more than $3 million to lobby the state government to pass a bill preventing cities and townships in Pennsylvania from offering broadband or wireless services unless the phone company has refused to do so. More than a dozen states have similar statutes on the books that make it difficult for government to get into the wireless broadband business. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed a law in June that prevents municipalities from offering broadband if there are competing private services. Nevada bans most cities and counties from offering telecommunications services. Texas flatly prohibits it.

Companies like Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and SBC don't want citywide wireless broadband because they'd much prefer the wireless market to look like the cell-phone market. Instead of wireless becoming something akin to a public utility, the telecom companies envision a pastiche of providers divvying up the market much the way cell-phone providers have carved up the United States. If you want wireless broadband, you may have to subscribe to a local phone service or accept a slew of services you don't want. And even if the country is blanketed with wireless, you might have to pay roaming charges to access competitors' networks. In the end, you'll probably end up paying more than with muni broadband, not to mention that emergency responders crossing from one network to another won't be able to communicate as efficiently.

Verizon lobbyists helped draft Pennsylvania's anti-wireless statute in 2004. That law, in essence, gave Verizon veto power. After the legislation passed, Philadelphia officials were forced to negotiate with Verizon so they could proceed with their wireless plan. After much public outcry, the company agreed to a settlement.

It's not just state politicians who are promoting the interests of the telecommunications industry. Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, a former SBC executive, introduced a bill in the House of Representatives earlier this year that would prohibit state and local governments from offering telecommunications services unless the area wasn't being served by a private company. According to Sessions' House financial disclosure forms from 2003 (the most recent year they were available), he has between $500,000 and $1 million in SBC stock options.

In July, Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., a member of the Republican High Tech Task Force, introduced the Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act. If passed, the bill would severely hamper cities' ability to build and manage wireless networks. Ensign and his ilk believe that private industry and not government is the cure for what ails us. Of course, they also believe that states should be able to govern themselves without interference from Washington. Is it a coincidence that Ensign has received more than $125,000 in political action committee donations from AT&T, Verizon, SBC, Sprint/Nextel, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, Qualcomm, Qwest, Comcast, and Cingular?

In response to Ensign's bill, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., have introduced legislation that gives municipalities free rein to offer broadband. Who will win is anybody's guess. But with all this money carpeting the halls of Congress and state legislatures, don't expect municipal wireless to take root without a big fight.

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

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128632/

recycled
What Does the Federal Reserve Do, Anyway?
Interest rates, explained.
Posted Monday, Oct. 24, 2005, at 1:00 PM PT

Today, President Bush nominated Ben S. Bernanke to succeed Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who's stepping down in January. Bernanke, the current chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, was the odds-on favorite for the job. Daniel Gross wrote back in May 2004 that Greenspan had worn out his welcome. So, what exactly does the Fed do? In 2001, Emily Yoffe explained the basics—how the Fed raises or lowers the interest rate at which banks lend money to one another—as well as the effects of monetary policy on the everyday economy: "So, why should some technical transaction between banks affect average Americans? Because the target that the Fed sets … is the rate on which most other rates of credit are based. When the Fed acts, banks immediately adjust their prime lending rate, which affects mortgage rates, credit card rates, car loan rates, etc."

 

 

the hollywood economist
Will Mark Cuban (Finally) Revolutionize Hollywood?
His plan to break the video window.
By Edward Jay Epstein
Posted Monday, Oct. 24, 2005, at 10:12 AM PT

I recently demonstrated my high-definition projector by showing scenes from the beautifully shot Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. First, I played an HD recording made by the TiVo-style digital recorder that Time Warner Cable provides. Next, I played the same scenes from a DVD. The HD recording was so clearly visually superior to the DVD that one guest asked: "Why would anyone ever rent a DVD if they could record it in HD?"

He had a point. Not only is an HD recording sharper—it has about five times the information as the DVD format (which has a slightly better picture quality than conventional TV)—it is much more convenient. There's no trip to the video store, no credit card hassle, no concern about late fees, no scratched disc, no labyrinth of setup menus. Why would anyone choose to make two trips to the store or, as with Netflix, to the mailbox? The studios are aware of this. That's why they have created an artificial barrier called the video window, which prevents cable operators and TV stations from showing movies at the same time as their release on DVD. In the case of pay-per-view, the window is 45 days; with subscription cable such as HBO, it is at least four months. If someone wants to see a new movie when it arrives in video stores, he does not have the option of recording it with a TiVo or similar device. Because most people rent movies the week of their release—indeed, more than 80 percent of rental earnings in 2004 came within the first two weeks of release—most would-be renters have already seen a new release by the time the 45-day window has elapsed. If that barrier were removed, a large part, if not all, of the DVD rental business would disappear.

The reasons for maintaining this barrier may be more political than economic. If the studios did not give DVDs a 45-day head start and a large number of DVD renters switched to pay-per-view to get the same movies, the studios would make much more money. Electronic delivery not only would eliminate the manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, sales, and return cost of DVDs—which averaged about $6 per title in 2004—but it would cut out the video stores, which at present get about 40 percent of the rental money. It might also greatly expand the audience for renting movies so that, depending on how electronic delivery is priced, the lost sales of purchased DVDs would be offset.

What has prevented the studios from closing the video window is simple: Wal-Mart. The company, which is the single biggest seller of DVDs, has made it clear that it does not want to compete with home delivery. Wal-Mart executives told Viacom's home entertainment division in no uncertain terms that if any studio does away with the 45-day video window for a single title, they would risk losing access to Wal-Mart's shelf space for all of its titles. Wal-Mart provided studios with more than one-third of their U.S. DVD revenue in 2004. In the face of Wal-Mart's retail power, the studios have not dared (yet) to do away with the protective video window.

Enter Mark Cuban. Along with his longtime business partner Todd Wagner, Cuban became a multibillionaire selling his Internet company, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. Cuban and Wagner then created an entertainment conglomerate that includes controlling interests in a movie production company (HDNet Films), a distributor (Magnolia Pictures), an art-house chain (Landmark Theatres), a television and video library (Rysher Entertainment), and a high-definition television network (HDNet). Cuban believes that Hollywood's distribution system requires radical change. He wants to do away with artificial windows so that consumers can buy a movie, as he notes in his blog, "How they want it, when they want it, where they want it." He argues that movies should be made available simultaneously on cable television, DVD, and in movie theaters, letting consumers decide whether they prefer to see it at home (even if it means paying a premium for a new release) or in the theater.

This is not mere theory. As Cuban writes, he's using HDNet to lead "the charge in collapsing windows all the way to Day and Date releases of Movies in theaters, on TV (HDNet Movies), and soon, on video." His company released The War Within on Sept. 30 simultaneously in theaters and on HDNet TV channels. Cuban plans to make this option available to other movie producers. The Hollywood studios can hardly ignore Cuban's experiment. The movie audience has a finite amount of time, or "clock," to spend on movies. If more and more independent film companies follow Cuban's lead, the studio system of artificial delay could cost Hollywood a significant part of both its movie and its DVD rental audience.

To be sure, Hollywood has a long history of resisting new forms of delivery. When television first came on the scene in the 1940s, the studios attempted to kill this infant medium by refusing to let the networks show films from their libraries or use their facilities to produce programs. When the VCR was introduced, the studios attempted to strangle it with eight years of litigation. Even when Sony and Warner Bros. launched the DVD, the other major studios did not join them for a year or so. By now, the top studio executives recognize that the electronic delivery of digital movies is inevitable—it is only a question of who will defy Wal-Mart and when.

Edward Jay Epstein is the author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood. (To read the first chapter, click here.)

 

human guinea pig
Caution: Student Driver
Can I learn how to drive a stick shift?
By Emily Yoffe
Updated Monday, Oct. 24, 2005, at 8:49 AM PT

The large sign on the back of my white Chevy Cavalier read, "Student Driver." I discovered that, perversely, this was as alluring as a shiny set of whips and chains to the many sadomasochists on the road. Drivers loved to get right behind my bumper as if we were in a funeral cortege then honk maniacally when I stalled—which I did an average of four times per intersection.

Yes, I know how to drive. I've been driving for 30 years, and I have an impeccable driving record. This is not because I'm a good driver, but because I'm such a lousy driver that I try to drive as little as possible. I would rather read a book titled The Collected Letters of Harriet Miers than merge onto a highway. But what I don't know how to do is drive a stick shift, so I went out on the road with my instructor, Bill Barnes, to learn. And it turned out that this was my first Human Guinea Pig in which dying, not just humiliating myself, was a possibility.

Mastering a stick shift has joined the list of disappearing milestones that once marked every young person's march to adulthood, like learning the foxtrot, or getting your first set of monogrammed handkerchiefs. Even if you want to learn to drive a stick shift these days, it's not easy to do. I called about a dozen local driving schools and only two offered courses on manual transmission. Why should they? About 90 percent of vehicles sold in the United States are automatics.

At our first meeting, Barnes placed me behind the wheel and offered this cheery introduction: "Last year a driving instructor and two students were killed. Don't think the risk factor is zero." Then he assured me that in only a few hours I would not only master manual transmission, I would find driving it fun.

Barnes quickly introduced me to the manual transmission: how to use the clutch, the third pedal that's to the left of the brake; and how to move the stick shift. He sat in the passenger seat, which was equipped with its own set of brake pedals and a rearview mirror. He had me press down my left foot on the clutch pedal, then he told me to put my right foot on the brake. I did.

"That's the gas," he said.

We sat there while I tried to reacquaint myself with the brake and memorize the hand and foot maneuvers I now had to do. It was starting to remind me of piano lessons, tennis instruction, horseback riding—all the activities at which I had failed because they required that body parts move in coordination. Barnes said I needed to stop thinking and start driving, so he told me to get going. The car lurched and stalled. I had let the clutch up too fast with my left foot and was too timid on the gas with my right. I started again and managed to get moving.

My neighborhood is a spaghetti bowl of twisting streets and hills, and as I ascended the first one, a 25 percent incline, I became worried about rolling backward and stalled.

"What if I'm entering the Beltway and I stall?" I asked Barnes as I started grinding gears.

"You're dead," he replied. At least a theme was emerging.

I got the car started again and began staggering around the streets. I was slowly starting to get the feel of things, and even shifted from first to second gear, when I realized I had driven us irrevocably (because I hadn't learned how to use "reverse") onto a major thoroughfare, East/West Highway. I stopped at the light and cars started lining up behind me. When the light turned green I was so agitated by my responsibility to the drivers in back of me that my mind stalled along with the car. The light cycled back to red as the other drivers palmed their horns.

"Don't be concerned by others around you; it breaks your concentration," said Barnes, as he flipped my rearview mirror out of my line of sight. He was right that I couldn't stand having other drivers around me. I realized over the course of three two-hour lessons that the only way I could learn to drive a stick shift was if I were the sole survivor of an avian flu pandemic.

Although Barnes tried to remain calm, by our second lesson he was increasingly taking over the pedals as I consistently stalled at every intersection. I also had seen Bullitt too many times and had a tendency to yank the gears around, often missing the mark, like the time I was trying to shift into third but ended up taking us with a screech into fifth. Barnes seemed to lose it the time I was halfway across an intersection with an SUV heading my way, when I neglected to press hard enough on the gas and the car stopped dead.

We arrived back at my house shortly afterward. Two lessons were enough for both of us. As we parted, he encouraged me to continue to develop my skills by asking a "friend" with a manual transmission to go out driving with me. I hoped that once I made this new friend, after we went for a few drives, she would ask if I minded housesitting at her villa on the Amalfi coast.

Although I still couldn't drive a stick shift, I did learn something important: I discovered that the source of America's obesity epidemic wasn't portion size, or lack of exercise, or the decline in smoking. It was the invention of the automatic transmission. Here I was, the typical, atrophied American, barely able to press the clutch without my slack muscles begging for relief. Automatic transmissions became widely available in the 1940s. Over the decades, as Americans have increasingly embraced them, they've increasingly increased. Since you need both hands to drive a stick shift, there's no way you can also be sucking down Slurpees and shoving in Big Macs. It's because of automatic transmissions that we're becoming blob people who will soon have to be hoisted into our behemoth vehicles.

Compare us with Europeans, who still generally have firm left legs and discernable waists. About 85 percent of cars sold in Europe have manual transmission. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that European weights are creeping up in tandem with upward sales of automatics. (Idea for a best seller: French Stick-Shift Drivers Don't Get Fat.)

I had to give the manual transmission one more shot, so I called the other place that offered instruction, the Arrive Alive Driving School. I hoped I would not cause them to change their name to the Arrive Alive—With One Exception—Driving School. This time my instructor, Trevor Farrell, appeared at my house in a Nissan GXE Sentra with an extra-scary sign on the back: "Student Driver/ Stick Shift." Farrell, a native of Trinidad and Tobago, was charming and serene as he gave me the lecture on the pedals and stick shift in his soothing island accent.

Off we went, stalling and lurching. Learning to drive was bringing out the misanthrope in me. At one point, while I was restarting the car, behind me an elderly woman in a Lexus began honking.

"So sorry, you old bat, am I making you late for your polyp removal?" I wanted to scream.

We took a turn that brought me to a major intersection. The light turned green, and again I was too fast off the clutch and too slow on the gas and stalled out. It only took me three more tries before I was able to jack-rabbit across the intersection, much to the amusement of a couple of pubescent boys on the sidewalk who laughed at the spectacle.

"Laugh, you pimple-pussed pishers. I can't wait to watch your first driving lesson!"

Farrell remained calm as he gave me directions, sending me ever further into traffic. At one point I found myself in the left-turn lane in downtown Silver Spring, Md., when the light changed. This time the car didn't stall, and I was so excited by this accomplishment that I drove forward into oncoming traffic. Farrell dove across me and turned the wheel just in time. I wanted to ask him if he'd ever been in an accident with a student, but forming the words seemed tantamount to calling down the evil eye.

I kept following his directions, and before I knew it I was on an unfamiliar expressway, Old Columbia Pike. Semis were whizzing by and my stomach felt as if I'd just swallowed a vial of Helicobacter pylori. At one point, while attempting to get into fifth gear, I accidentally shifted the car into neutral. Another time, trying to go from second to third, I mistakenly put the car in first and it did a cartoonlike shimmy. But the only time Farrell lost his sang-froid was when he told me to make the light on a left turn off the highway. I choked and stopped on yellow. The woman behind us screeched to a halt, inches from my Student Driver sign, and started honking and gesticulating. Farrell waved pleasantly to her and explained to me that he had seen that she had been about to rear-end us and asked if I would please do what he said.

We were now worrisomely far from my house, but he said we were picking up his next student, who would drive us back. We pulled up at a high-school parking lot, and the student, with a ponytail and braces, climbed into the front seat while I got into the back. Her name was Vanessa and she was 16.

"She doesn't have any fears," Farrell informed me as Vanessa smiled confidently. For that I envied her, though it didn't make me want to drive with her. Vanessa pulled onto the street and Farrell gave her a running stream of suggestions, "Look far ahead." "Slow down." "Merge. Merge. Merge!" Then Farrell told her to take a right; it turned out Vanessa did have fears.

"But Mr. Farrell, that's the ramp to the Beltway!" she cried.

"Yes. Take a right," he replied.

"Not the Beltway, Mr. Farrell, please not the Beltway!" she said as she made weeping sounds. To most of the country the Beltway is the place inside of which rapacious lobbyists rob and pillage. To me it is a 64-mile asphalt loop of dread. As Vanessa took her first on-ramp onto the Beltway, I thought there was a strong possibility I would be squashed in this tin can with a 16-year old at the wheel. I also thought, "Hooray, I'm not driving!" and happily closed my eyes. She gained confidence as we sped along and, taking the exit nearest my house, and with only a few bouncy shudders of the car, deposited me at my front door.

When my husband and I went to Italy on our honeymoon, he had to do all the driving because we could only rent a stick shift. I was hoping that I could learn to drive one, so I could relieve him if we went back on a second honeymoon. But neither Italian-American relations, our marriage, nor we would survive my driving a stick shift on the autostrada.

Emily Yoffe is the author of What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner. You can reach her at emilyyoffe@hotmail.com or www.whatthedogdid.com.

 

October 30, 2005

What's a Modern Girl to Do?

By MAUREEN DOWD

When I entered college in 1969, women were bursting out of their 50's chrysalis, shedding girdles, padded bras and conventions. The Jazz Age spirit flared in the Age of Aquarius. Women were once again imitating men and acting all independent: smoking, drinking, wanting to earn money and thinking they had the right to be sexual, this time protected by the pill. I didn't fit in with the brazen new world of hard-charging feminists. I was more of a fun-loving (if chaste) type who would decades later come to life in Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw. I hated the grubby, unisex jeans and no-makeup look and drugs that zoned you out, and I couldn't understand the appeal of dances that didn't involve touching your partner. In the universe of Eros, I longed for style and wit. I loved the Art Deco glamour of 30's movies. I wanted to dance the Continental like Fred and Ginger in white hotel suites; drink martinis like Myrna Loy and William Powell; live the life of a screwball heroine like Katharine Hepburn, wearing a gold lamé gown cut on the bias, cavorting with Cary Grant, strolling along Fifth Avenue with my pet leopard.

My mom would just shake her head and tell me that my idea of the 30's was wildly romanticized. "We were poor," she'd say. "We didn't dance around in white hotel suites." I took the idealism and passion of the 60's for granted, simply assuming we were sailing toward perfect equality with men, a utopian world at home and at work. I didn't listen to her when she cautioned me about the chimera of equality.

On my 31st birthday, she sent me a bankbook with a modest nest egg she had saved for me. "I always felt that the girls in a family should get a little more than the boys even though all are equally loved," she wrote in a letter. "They need a little cushion to fall back on. Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries."

I thought she was just being Old World, like my favorite jade, Dorothy Parker, when she wrote:

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

I thought the struggle for egalitarianism was a cinch, so I could leave it to my earnest sisters in black turtlenecks and Birkenstocks. I figured there was plenty of time for me to get serious later, that America would always be full of passionate and full-throated debate about the big stuff - social issues, sexual equality, civil rights. Little did I realize that the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century.

Maybe we should have known that the story of women's progress would be more of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years.

Despite the best efforts of philosophers, politicians, historians, novelists, screenwriters, linguists, therapists, anthropologists and facilitators, men and women are still in a muddle in the boardroom, the bedroom and the Situation Room.

Courtship

My mom gave me three essential books on the subject of men. The first, when I was 13, was "On Becoming a Woman." The second, when I was 21, was "365 Ways to Cook Hamburger." The third, when I was 25, was "How to Catch and Hold a Man," by Yvonne Antelle. ("Keep thinking of yourself as a soft, mysterious cat.. . .Men are fascinated by bright, shiny objects, by lots of curls, lots of hair on the head . . . by bows, ribbons, ruffles and bright colors.. . .Sarcasm is dangerous. Avoid it altogether.")

Because I received "How to Catch and Hold a Man" at a time when we were entering the Age of Equality, I put it aside as an anachronism. After all, sometime in the 1960's flirting went out of fashion, as did ironing boards, makeup and the idea that men needed to be "trapped" or "landed." The way to approach men, we reasoned, was forthrightly and without games, artifice or frills. Unfortunately, history has shown this to be a misguided notion.

I knew it even before the 1995 publication of "The Rules," a dating bible that encouraged women to return to prefeminist mind games by playing hard to get. ("Don't stay on the phone for more than 10 minutes.. . .Even if you are the head of your own company. . .when you're with a man you like, be quiet and mysterious, act ladylike, cross your legs and smile.. . .Wear black sheer pantyhose and hike up your skirt to entice the opposite sex!")

I knew this before fashion magazines became crowded with crinolines, bows, ruffles, leopard-skin scarves, 50's party dresses and other sartorial equivalents of flirting and with articles like "The Return of Hard to Get." ("I think it behooves us to stop offering each other these pearls of feminism, to stop saying, 'So, why don't you call him?"' a writer lectured in Mademoiselle. "Some men must have the thrill of the chase.")

I knew things were changing because a succession of my single girlfriends had called, sounding sheepish, to ask if they could borrow my out-of-print copy of "How to Catch and Hold a Man."

Decades after the feminist movement promised equality with men, it was becoming increasingly apparent that many women would have to brush up on the venerable tricks of the trade: an absurdly charming little laugh, a pert toss of the head, an air of saucy triumph, dewy eyes and a full knowledge of music, drawing, elegant note writing and geography. It would once more be considered captivating to lie on a chaise longue, pass a lacy handkerchief across the eyelids and complain of a case of springtime giddiness.

Today, women have gone back to hunting their quarry - in person and in cyberspace - with elaborate schemes designed to allow the deluded creatures to think they are the hunters. "Men like hunting, and we shouldn't deprive them of their chance to do their hunting and mating rituals," my 26-year-old friend Julie Bosman, a New York Times reporter, says. "As my mom says, Men don't like to be chased." Or as the Marvelettes sang, "The hunter gets captured by the game."

These days the key to staying cool in the courtship rituals is B. & I., girls say - Busy and Important. "As much as you're waiting for that little envelope to appear on your screen," says Carrie Foster, a 29-year-old publicist in Washington, "you happen to have a lot of stuff to do anyway." If a guy rejects you or turns out to be the essence of evil, you can ratchet up from B. & I. to C.B.B., Can't Be Bothered. In the T.M.I. - Too Much Information - digital age, there can be infinite technological foreplay.

Helen Fisher, a Rutgers anthropologist, concurs with Julie: "What our grandmothers told us about playing hard to get is true. The whole point of the game is to impress and capture. It's not about honesty. Many men and women, when they're playing the courtship game, deceive so they can win. Novelty, excitement and danger drive up dopamine in the brain. And both sexes brag."

Women might dye their hair, apply makeup and spend hours finding a hip-slimming dress, she said, while men may drive a nice car or wear a fancy suit that makes them seem richer than they are. In this retro world, a woman must play hard to get but stay soft as a kitten. And avoid sarcasm. Altogether.

Money

In those faraway, long-ago days of feminism, there was talk about equal pay for equal work. Now there's talk about "girl money."

A friend of mine in her 30's says it is a term she hears bandied about the New York dating scene. She also notes a shift in the type of gifts given at wedding showers around town, a reversion to 50's-style offerings: soup ladles and those frilly little aprons from Anthropologie and vintage stores are being unwrapped along with see-through nighties and push-up bras.

"What I find most disturbing about the 1950's-ification and retrogression of women's lives is that it has seeped into the corporate and social culture, where it can do real damage," she complains. "Otherwise intelligent men, who know women still earn less than men as a rule, say things like: 'I'll get the check. You only have girl money."'

Throughout the long, dark ages of undisputed patriarchy, women connived to trade beauty and sex for affluence and status. In the first flush of feminism, women offered to pay half the check with "woman money" as a way to show that these crass calculations - that a woman's worth in society was determined by her looks, that she was an ornament up for sale to the highest bidder - no longer applied.

Now dating etiquette has reverted. Young women no longer care about using the check to assert their equality. They care about using it to assess their sexuality. Going Dutch is an archaic feminist relic. Young women talk about it with disbelief and disdain. "It's a scuzzy 70's thing, like platform shoes on men," one told me.

"Feminists in the 70's went overboard," Anne Schroeder, a 26-year-old magazine editor in Washington, agrees. "Paying is like opening a car door. It's nice. I appreciate it. But he doesn't have to."

Unless he wants another date.

Women in their 20's think old-school feminists looked for equality in all the wrong places, that instead of fighting battles about whether women should pay for dinner or wear padded bras they should have focused only on big economic issues.

After Googling and Bikramming to get ready for a first dinner date, a modern girl will end the evening with the Offering, an insincere bid to help pay the check. "They make like they are heading into their bag after a meal, but it is a dodge," Marc Santora, a 30-year-old Metro reporter for The Times, says. "They know you will stop them before a credit card can be drawn. If you don't, they hold it against you."

One of my girlfriends, a TV producer in New York, told me much the same thing: "If you offer, and they accept, then it's over."

Jurassic feminists shudder at the retro implication of a quid profiterole. But it doesn't matter if the woman is making as much money as the man, or more, she expects him to pay, both to prove her desirability and as a way of signaling romance - something that's more confusing in a dating culture rife with casual hookups and group activities. (Once beyond the initial testing phase and settled in a relationship, of course, she can pony up more.)

"There are plenty of ways for me to find out if he's going to see me as an equal without disturbing the dating ritual," one young woman says. "Disturbing the dating ritual leads to chaos. Everybody knows that."

When I asked a young man at my gym how he and his lawyer girlfriend were going to divide the costs on a California vacation, he looked askance. "She never offers," he replied. "And I like paying for her." It is, as one guy said, "one of the few remaining ways we can demonstrate our manhood."

Power Dynamics

At a party for the Broadway opening of "Sweet Smell of Success," a top New York producer gave me a lecture on the price of female success that was anything but sweet. He confessed that he had wanted to ask me out on a date when he was between marriages but nixed the idea because my job as a Times columnist made me too intimidating. Men, he explained, prefer women who seem malleable and awed. He predicted that I would never find a mate because if there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical faculties. Will she be critical of absolutely everything, even his manhood?

He had hit on a primal fear of single successful women: that the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men. It took women a few decades to realize that everything they were doing to advance themselves in the boardroom could be sabotaging their chances in the bedroom, that evolution was lagging behind equality.

A few years ago at a White House correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful and successful actress. Within minutes, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."

I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with young women whose job it was was to care for them and nurture them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.

John Schwartz of The New York Times made the trend official in 2004 when he reported: "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame." A study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggested that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors. Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them. There it is, right in the DNA: women get penalized by insecure men for being too independent.

"The hypothesis," Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, theorized, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference between their attraction to men who might work above them and their attraction to men who might work below them.

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? Do women get less desirable as they get more successful?

After I first wrote on this subject, a Times reader named Ray Lewis e-mailed me. While we had assumed that making ourselves more professionally accomplished would make us more fascinating, it turned out, as Lewis put it, that smart women were "draining at times."

Or as Bill Maher more crudely but usefully summed it up to Craig Ferguson on the "Late Late Show" on CBS: "Women get in relationships because they want somebody to talk to. Men want women to shut up."

Women moving up still strive to marry up. Men moving up still tend to marry down. The two sexes' going in opposite directions has led to an epidemic of professional women missing out on husbands and kids.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the author of "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," a book published in 2002, conducted a survey and found that 55 percent of 35-year-old career women were childless. And among corporate executives who earn $100,000 or more, she said, 49 percent of the women did not have children, compared with only 19 percent of the men.

Hewlett quantified, yet again, that men have an unfair advantage. "Nowadays," she said, "the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child. For men, the reverse is true."

A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to marry, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.

On a "60 Minutes" report on the Hewlett book, Lesley Stahl talked to two young women who went to Harvard Business School. They agreed that while they were the perfect age to start families, they didn't find it easy to meet the right mates.

Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women. The girls said they hid the fact that they went to Harvard from guys they met because it was the kiss of death. "The H-bomb," they dubbed it. "As soon as you say Harvard Business School . . . that's the end of the conversation," Ani Vartanian said. "As soon as the guys say, 'Oh, I go to Harvard Business School,' all the girls start falling into them."

Hewlett thinks that the 2005 American workplace is more macho than ever. "It's actually much more difficult now than 10 years ago to have a career and raise a family," she told me. "The trend lines continue that highly educated women in many countries are increasingly dealing with this creeping nonchoice and end up on this path of delaying finding a mate and delaying childbearing. Whether you're looking at Italy, Russia or the U.S., all of that is true." Many women continue to fear that the more they accomplish, the more they may have to sacrifice. They worry that men still veer away from "challenging" women because of a male atavistic desire to be the superior force in a relationship.

"With men and women, it's always all about control issues, isn't it?" says a guy I know, talking about his bitter divorce.

Or, as Craig Bierko, a musical comedy star and actor who played one of Carrie's boyfriends on "Sex and the City," told me, "Deep down, beneath the bluster and machismo, men are simply afraid to say that what they're truly looking for in a woman is an intelligent, confident and dependable partner in life whom they can devote themselves to unconditionally until she's 40."

Ms. Versus Mrs.

"Ms." was supposed to neutralize the stature of women, so they weren't publicly defined by their marital status. When The Times finally agreed to switch to Ms. in its news pages in 1986, after much hectoring by feminists, Gloria Steinem sent flowers to the executive editor, Abe Rosenthal. But nowadays most young brides want to take their husbands' names and brag on the moniker Mrs., a brand that proclaims you belong to him. T-shirts with "MRS." emblazoned in sequins or sparkly beads are popular wedding-shower gifts.

A Harvard economics professor, Claudia Goldin, did a study last year that found that 44 percent of women in the Harvard class of 1980 who married within 10 years of graduation kept their birth names, while in the class of '90 it was down to 32 percent. In 1990, 23 percent of college-educated women kept their own names after marriage, while a decade later the number had fallen to 17 percent.

Time magazine reported that an informal poll in the spring of 2005 by the Knot, a wedding Web site, showed similar results: 81 percent of respondents took their spouse's last name, an increase from 71 percent in 2000. The number of women with hyphenated surnames fell from 21 percent to 8 percent.

"It's a return to romance, a desire to make marriage work," Goldin told one interviewer, adding that young women might feel that by keeping their own names they were aligning themselves with tedious old-fashioned feminists, and this might be a turnoff to them.

The professor, who married in 1979 and kept her name, undertook the study after her niece, a lawyer, changed hers. "She felt that her generation of women didn't have to do the same things mine did, because of what we had already achieved," Goldin told Time.

Many women now do not think of domestic life as a "comfortable concentration camp," as Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," where they are losing their identities and turning into "anonymous biological robots in a docile mass." Now they want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological Robot in a Docile Mass. They dream of being rescued - to flirt, to shop, to stay home and be taken care of. They shop for "Stepford Fashions" - matching shoes and ladylike bags and the 50's-style satin, lace and chiffon party dresses featured in InStyle layouts - and spend their days at the gym trying for Wisteria Lane waistlines.

The Times recently ran a front-page article about young women attending Ivy League colleges, women who are being groomed to take their places in the professional and political elite, who are planning to reject careers in favor of playing traditional roles, staying home and raising children.

"My mother always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time," the brainy, accomplished Cynthia Liu told Louise Story, explaining why she hoped to be a stay-at-home mom a few years after she goes to law school. "You always have to choose one over the other."

Kate White, the editor of Cosmopolitan, told me that she sees a distinct shift in what her readers want these days. "Women now don't want to be in the grind," she said. "The baby boomers made the grind seem unappealing."

Cynthia Russett, a professor of American history at Yale, told Story that women today are simply more "realistic," having seen the dashed utopia of those who assumed it wouldn't be so hard to combine full-time work and child rearing.

To the extent that young women are rejecting the old idea of copying men and reshaping the world around their desires, it's exhilarating progress. But to the extent that a pampered class of females is walking away from the problem and just planning to marry rich enough to cosset themselves in a narrow world of dependence on men, it's an irritating setback. If the new ethos is "a woman needs a career like a fish needs a bicycle," it won't be healthy.

Movies

In all those Tracy-Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. You still see it onscreen occasionally - the incendiary chemistry of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie playing married assassins aiming for mutually assured orgasms and destruction in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Interestingly, that movie was described as retro because of its salty battle of wits between two peppery lovers. Moviemakers these days are more interested in exploring what Steve Martin, in his novel "Shopgirl," calls the "calm cushion" of romances between unequals.

In James Brooks's movie "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, playing a sensitive Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid, just as in "Maid in Manhattan," Ralph Fiennes, playing a sensitive New York pol, falls for the hot Latino maid at his hotel, played by Jennifer Lopez. Sandler's maid, who cleans up for him without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman, in looks and character. His wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm and fears she has lost her identity.

In 2003, we had "Girl With a Pearl Earring," in which Colin Firth's Vermeer erotically paints Scarlett Johansson's Dutch maid, and Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," about the attraction of unequals. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson, the sister of the prime minister, falls for his sultry secretary. A novelist played by Colin Firth falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.

Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection rather than of affection.

It's funny. I come from a family of Irish domestics - statuesque, 6-foot-tall women who cooked, kept house and acted as nannies for some of America's first families. I was always so proud of achieving more - succeeding in a high-powered career that would have been closed to my great-aunts. How odd, then, to find out now that being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men.

An upstairs maid, of course.

Women's Magazines

Cosmo is still the best-selling magazine on college campuses, as it was when I was in college, and the best-selling monthly magazine on the newsstand. The June 2005 issue, with Jessica Simpson on the cover, her cleavage spilling out of an orange crocheted halter dress, could have been June 1970. The headlines are familiar: "How to turn him on in 10 words or less," "Do You Make Men M-E-L-T? Take our quiz," "Bridal Special," Cosmo's stud search and "Cosmo's Most Famous Sex Tips; the Legendary Tricks That Have Brought Countless Guys to Their Knees." (Sex Trick 4: "Place a glazed doughnut around your man's member, then gently nibble the pastry and lick the icing . . . as well as his manhood." Another favorite Cosmo trick is to yell out during sex which of your girlfriends thinks your man is hot.)

At any newsstand, you'll see the original Cosmo girl's man-crazy, sex-obsessed image endlessly, tiresomely replicated, even for the teen set. On the cover of Elle Girl: "267 Ways to Look Hot."

"There has been lots of copying - look at Glamour," Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo's founding editor told me and sighed. "I used to have all the sex to myself."

Before it curdled into a collection of stereotypes, feminism had fleetingly held out a promise that there would be some precincts of womanly life that were not all about men. But it never quite materialized.

It took only a few decades to create a brazen new world where the highest ideal is to acknowledge your inner slut. I am woman; see me strip. Instead of peaceful havens of girl things and boy things, we have a society where women of all ages are striving to become self-actualized sex kittens. Hollywood actresses now work out by taking pole-dancing classes.

Female sexuality has been a confusing corkscrew path, not a serene progressive arc. We had decades of Victorian prudery, when women were not supposed to like sex. Then we had the pill and zipless encounters, when women were supposed to have the same animalistic drive as men. Then it was discovered - shock, horror! - that men and women are not alike in their desires. But zipless morphed into hookups, and the more one-night stands the girls on "Sex and the City" had, the grumpier they got.

Oddly enough, Felix Dennis, who created the top-selling Maxim, said he stole his "us against the world" lad-magazine attitude from women's magazines like Cosmo. Just as women didn't mind losing Cosmo's prestigious fiction as the magazine got raunchier, plenty of guys were happy to lose the literary pretensions of venerable men's magazines and embrace simple-minded gender stereotypes, like the Maxim manifesto instructing women, "If we see you in the morning and night, why call us at work?"

Jessica Simpson and Eva Longoria move seamlessly from showing their curves on the covers of Cosmo and Glamour to Maxim, which dubbed Simpson "America's favorite ball and chain!" In the summer of 2005, both British GQ and FHM featured Pamela Anderson busting out of their covers. ("I think of my breasts as props," she told FHM.)

A lot of women now want to be Maxim babes as much as men want Maxim babes. So women have moved from fighting objectification to seeking it. "I have been surprised," Maxim's editor, Ed Needham, confessed to me, "to find that a lot of women would want to be somehow validated as a Maxim girl type, that they'd like to be thought of as hot and would like their boyfriends to take pictures of them or make comments about them that mirror the Maxim representation of a woman, the Pamela Anderson sort of brand. That, to me, is kind of extraordinary."

The luscious babes on the cover of Maxim were supposed to be men's fantasy guilty pleasures, after all, not their real life-affirming girlfriends.

Beauty

While I never related to the unstyled look of the early feminists and I tangled with boyfriends who did not want me to wear makeup and heels, I always assumed that one positive result of the feminist movement would be a more flexible and capacious notion of female beauty, a release from the tyranny of the girdled, primped ideal of the 50's.

I was wrong. Forty years after the dawn of feminism, the ideal of feminine beauty is more rigid and unnatural than ever.

When Gloria Steinem wrote that "all women are Bunnies," she did not mean it as a compliment; it was a feminist call to arms. Decades later, it's just an aesthetic fact, as more and more women embrace Botox and implants and stretch and protrude to extreme proportions to satisfy male desires. Now that technology is biology, all women can look like inflatable dolls. It's clear that American narcissism has trumped American feminism.

It was naïve and misguided for the early feminists to tendentiously demonize Barbie and Cosmo girl, to disdain such female proclivities as shopping, applying makeup and hunting for sexy shoes and cute boyfriends and to prognosticate a world where men and women dressed alike and worked alike in navy suits and were equal in every way.

But it is equally naïve and misguided for young women now to fritter away all their time shopping for boudoirish clothes and text-messaging about guys while they disdainfully ignore gender politics and the seismic shifts on the Supreme Court that will affect women's rights for a generation.

What I didn't like at the start of the feminist movement was that young women were dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. They were supposed to be liberated, but it just seemed like stifling conformity.

What I don't like now is that the young women rejecting the feminist movement are dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. The plumage is more colorful, the shapes are more curvy, the look is more plastic, the message is diametrically opposite - before it was don't be a sex object; now it's be a sex object - but the conformity is just as stifling.

And the Future . . .

Having boomeranged once, will women do it again in a couple of decades? If we flash forward to 2030, will we see all those young women who thought trying to Have It All was a pointless slog, now middle-aged and stranded in suburbia, popping Ativan, struggling with rebellious teenagers, deserted by husbands for younger babes, unable to get back into a work force they never tried to be part of?

It's easy to picture a surreally familiar scene when women realize they bought into a raw deal and old trap. With no power or money or independence, they'll be mere domestic robots, lasering their legs and waxing their floors - or vice versa - and desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan.

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times. This essay is adapted from "Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide," to be published next month by G.P. Putnam's Sons.

 

October 30, 2005

The End of Pensions

By ROGER LOWENSTEIN

I. THE LATEST FINANCIAL DEBACLE

When I caught up with Robert S. Miller, the chief executive of Delphi Corporation, last summer, he was still pitching the fantasy that his company, a huge auto-parts maker, would be able to cut a deal with its workers and avoid filing for bankruptcy protection. But he acknowledged that Delphi faced one perhaps insuperable hurdle - not the current conditions in the auto business so much as the legacy of the pension promises that Delphi committed to many decades ago, when it was part of General Motors. This was the same fear that had obsessed Alfred P. Sloan Jr., the storied president of G.M., who warned way back in the 1940's that pensions and like benefits would be "extravagant beyond reason." But under pressure from the United Auto Workers union, he granted them. And as future auto executives would discover, pension obligations are - outside of bankruptcy, anyway - virtually impossible to unload. Unlike wages or health benefits, pension benefits cannot be cut. Unlike other contracts, which might be renegotiated as business conditions change, pension commitments are forever. And given the exigencies of the labor market, they tend to be steadily improved upon, at least when times are good.

For the U.A.W., Miller noted forlornly, "30 and Out" - 30 years to retirement - became a rallying cry. Eventually, the union got what it wanted, and workers who started on the assembly line after high school found they could retire by their early 50's. "These pensions were created when we all used to work until age 70 and then poop out at 72," Miller told me. "Now if you live past 80, a not-uncommon demographic, you're going to be taking benefits for longer than you are working. That social contract is under severe pressure."

Earlier this month, Miller and Delphi gave in to the pressure and sought protection under the bankruptcy code - the largest such filing ever in the auto industry. It followed by a few weeks the Chapter 11 filings of Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines, whose pension promises to workers exceeded the assets in their pension funds by an estimated $16 billion.

The three filings have blown the lid off America's latest, if long-simmering, financial debacle. It is not hedge funds or the real-estate bubble - it is the pension system, both public and private. And it is broken.

II. THE MORAL HAZARD OF INSURANCE

The amount of underfunding in corporate pension plans totals a staggering $450 billion. Part of that liability is attributable to otherwise healthy corporations that will most likely, in time, make good on their obligations. But the plans of the companies that fail will become the responsibility of the government's pension insurer, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. The P.B.G.C., which collects premiums from corporations and, in theory, is supposed to be self-financing, is deeply in the hole, prompting comparisons to the savings-and-loan fiasco of the 1980's. Just as S. & L.'s of that era took foolish risks in part because their deposits were insured, the P.B.G.C.'s guarantee encouraged managements and unions to raise benefits ever higher.

In such situations, individuals are tempted to take more risk than is healthy for the group; economists, in a glum appraisal of human nature, call it "moral hazard." In effect, America's pension system has been a laboratory demonstration of moral hazard in which the insurance may end up bankrupting the system it was intended to save. Given that pension promises do not come due for years, it is hardly surprising that corporate executives and state legislators have found it easier to pay off unions with benefits tomorrow rather than with wages today. Since the benefits were insured, union leaders did not much care if the obligations proved excessive. During the previous decade especially, when it seemed that every pension promise could be fulfilled by a rising stock market, employers either recklessly overpromised or recklessly underprovided - or both - for the commitments they made.

The P.B.G.C. is now $23 billion in the red - a deficit that is expected to grow, significantly, as more companies go under. The balance sheet for the end of September will very likely show a deficit of more than $30 billion. If nothing is done to fix the system, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts, the deficit will mushroom to more than $100 billion within two decades. This liability will almost certainly fall back on the taxpayers, since the alternative to a bailout - letting the pension agency fail - would force aging former auto workers and other retirees onto the street.

As bad as that sounds, the problem of state and local government pensions is even worse. Public pensions, which are paid by taxpayers and thus enjoy an implicit form of insurance, are underfunded by a total of at least $300 billion and arguably much more. While governments have been winking at these deficits for years, they are now becoming intolerable burdens for taxpayers. In San Diego, pension abuse has effectively bankrupted the city. Thanks to a history of granting sweeter and sweeter pension deals that it has neglected to fund, the city has been forced to allocate $160 million, or 8 percent of the municipal budget, to the San Diego City Employees Retirement System this year, with similar allocations expected for years to come. San Diego has tabled plans for a downtown library, cut back the hours on swimming pools, gutted the parks and recreation budget, canceled needed water and sewer projects and fallen behind on potholes.

State or local governments in New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia and elsewhere face similar budget strains aggravated by runaway pension promises. According to Carl DeMaio, director of the Performance Institute, which advocates better government accountability, "There is a San Diego brewing in every community."

Not only are taxpayers certain to suffer, but senior citizens in the future may also have to settle for less secure retirements anchored only by Social Security and whatever they've managed to put away into their 401(k) accounts. A backlash already has begun in state capitals, where the political forces that have been lobbying for Social Security reform have been rallying lawmakers to get out of the pension business altogether. Alaska's Legislature recently passed a shotgun bill to deny pensions to future employees. This mimics a trend in the private sector, in which corporations have been leaving the system, either by paying off their workers and terminating their pension plans or by "freezing" their plans, a step recently taken by Hewlett Packard, so that many current employees will no longer accrue benefits and new employees will not participate at all.

If the pension system continues to wither, it is not hard to envision a darker future in which - as was true until early in the 20th Century, before the advent of pensions - many of the elderly would be forced to keep working to stave off poverty.

III. THE SHRINKING PENSION SYSTEM

Congress has been debating legislation to fix the private system, but it has been unable to resolve a basic tension: anything it does to ease the burden on failing or failed pension plans lessens the penalty for failure and enhances moral hazard. By making it easier for, say, a Delta or a Delphi to offer benefits, it raises the possible cost of a future bailout.

The tough medicine favored by the Bush administration, which would eliminate loopholes in the system as well as much of the subsidy that now exists in the insurance system, would lead to more companies freezing their plans or leaving the system outright. The number of pension plans would continue to shrink and in time all but disappear. This would strip the elderly of the future of what is still the most secure form of retirement income.

The fear of runaway pension costs plainly echoes the Social Security debate, and many suspect that the Bush administration would not much mind if pensions did disappear. "I don't think the administration is very interested in creating a future for traditional pensions," says Julia Coronado, a senior research associate at Watson Wyatt, a human-resources consulting firm. "It doesn't fit very well with their vision of the ownership society."

Bradley Belt, executive director of the P.B.G.C., shrugs off the charge. "The last thing we want to do is chase people out of the system," he says. Besides, the government doesn't need to chase. As Belt points out, the number of workers covered by pensions is shrinking without government help. In 1980, about 40 percent of the jobs in the private sector offered pensions; now only 20 percent do. The trend is probably irreversible, because it feeds on itself. Hewlett Packard, for instance, must compete with younger companies like Dell Computer that do not offer traditional pensions. Freezing its plan, which was a legacy of the company's famously employee-oriented founders, was an embarrassing step for H.P.'s present managers - but freeze it they did.

This may have made economic sense, but federal law has long recognized a social purpose to pensions as well. By allowing companies to deduct from taxes the money they contribute into their pension funds, the government encourages employers to provide a safety net for their workers. This remains a legitimate function, and if pensions were allowed to die, we would need something to take their place.

IV. WHY PENSIONS MATTER

To understand why pensions are still important, you have to understand the awkward beast that benefits professionals refer to as the U.S. retirement system. It is not really one "system" but three, which complement each other in the crudest of fashions. The lowest tier is Social Security, which provides most Americans with a bare-bones living (the average payment is about $12,000 a year). The highest tier, available to the rich, is private savings. In between, for people who do not have a hedge-fund account and yet want to retire on more than mere subsistence, there are pensions and 401(k)'s. Currently, more than half of all families have at least one member who has qualified for a pension at some point in his or her career and thus will be eligible for a benefit. And among current retirees, pensions are the second-biggest source of income, trailing only Social Security.

During most of the 90's the decline in pension coverage was barely lamented. It was not that big companies were folding up their plans (for the most part, they were not) but that newer, smaller companies weren't offering them. As the small companies grew into big ones (think Dell, or Starbucks, or Home Depot), traditional pensions covered less of the private-sector landscape. This did not seem like a very big deal. Younger workers envisioned mobile careers for themselves and many did not want pension strings tying them to a single employer. And most were able to put money aside in 401(k)'s, often matched by an employer contribution.

It happened that 401(k)'s, which were authorized by a change in the tax code in 1978 and which began to blossom in the early 1980's, coincided with a great upswing in the stock market. It is possible that they helped to cause the upswing. In any case, Americans' experience with 401(k)'s in the first two decades of their existence was sufficiently rosy that few people shed tears over the slow demise of pension plans or were even aware of how significantly pensions and 401(k)'s differed. But 401(k)'s were intended to be a supplement to pensions, not a substitute.

From the beneficiary's standpoint, pensions mean unique security. The worker gets a guaranteed income, determined by the number of years of service and by his or her salary at retirement. And pensions don't run dry; workers (or their spouses) get them as long as they live. Because the employer is committed to paying a certain level of benefits, pensions are known as "defined benefit" plans. Since an individual's benefit rises with each year of service, the employer is supposed to sock money away, into a fund that it manages for all of its beneficiaries, every year. The point is that workers don't (or shouldn't) have to worry about how the benefit will get there; that's the employer's responsibility. Of course, the open-ended nature of the guarantee - the very feature that makes pensions so attractive to the individual - is precisely what has caused employers to rue the day they said yes. No profit-making enterprise can truly gauge its ability to meet such promises decades later.

A 401(k), on the other hand, promises nothing. It's merely a license to defer taxes - an individual savings plan. The employer might contribute some money, which is why 401(k)'s are known as "defined contribution" plans. Or it might not. Even if the company does contribute, it offers no assurance that the money will be enough to retire on, nor does it get involved with managing the account; that's up to the worker. These disadvantages were, in the 90's, somehow perceived (with the help of exuberant marketing pitches by mutual-fund firms) to be advantages: 401(k)'s let workers manage their own assets; they were a road map to economic freedom.

Post-bubble, the picture looks different. Various people have studied how investors perform in their 401(k)'s. According to Alicia Munnell, a pension expert at Boston College and previously a White House economist, pension funds over the long haul earn slightly more than the average 401(k) holder. Among the latter, those who do worse than average, of course, have no protection. Moreover, pensions typically annuitize - that is, they convert a worker's retirement assets into an annual stipend. They impose a budget, based on actuarial probabilities. This might seem a trivial service (some pensioners might not even realize that it is a service). But if you asked a 65-year-old man who lacked a pension but did have, say, $100,000 in savings, how much he could live on, he likely would not have the vaguest idea. The answer is $654 a month: this is the annuity that $100,000 would purchase in the private market. It is the amount (after deducting the annuity provider's costs and profit) that the average person could live on so as to exhaust his savings at the very moment that he draws his final breath.

So the question arises: what if he lives longer than average? This is the beauty of a pension or of any collectivized savings pool. The pension plan can afford to support people who live to 90, because some of its members will expire at 66. It subsidizes its more robust members from the resources of those who die young. This is why a 401(k) is not a true substitute. Jeffrey Brown, an associate finance professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a staff member of the president's Social Security commission, notes that as baby boomers who have nest eggs in place of pensions begin to retire, they will be faced with a daunting question: "How do I make this last a lifetime?"

V. FROM MANAGEMENT TOOL TO EMPLOYEE BENEFIT

The country's first large-scale pension plan was introduced after the Civil War, when the federal government gave pensions to disabled Union Army veterans and war widows. Congress passed an act in 1890 that extended pensions to all veterans 65 and over. This converted pensions into a form of social welfare. Over the next 20 years, states and cities added pensions for police officers and firefighters. By World War I, most teachers had been granted pensions as well. Governments couldn't offer big paychecks for workers - teachers, the police, firefighters - so it offered stability and pensions instead.

In the private sector, the first pension was offered by American Express, a stagecoach delivery service, in 1875. Railroads followed suit. Employees were required to work for 30 years before they qualified for benefits, and thus pensions helped companies retain employees as well as ease older workers into retirement. These employers thought of pensions as management tools, not as employee "benefits." But in the first half of the 20th century, as the historian James Wooten put it, government policies turned pensions into a tool of social policy. First came the tax deduction. This feature was abused, as companies used pensions to shelter payments to their executives. The rules were gradually tightened, however, forcing plans to include the rank and file. World War II gave more incentives to create pensions: punitive tax rates made the pension shelter enormously attractive and a government freeze on wages meant that pensions were the only avenue for increasing compensation.

The effect of these policies was to encourage unions to bargain for pensions and to pressure employers to grant them. After the war, John L. Lewis, the legendary labor leader, staged a strike to win pensions for miners. Ford Motor capitulated to the U.A.W. in 1949. G.M., headed by the reluctant Sloan, followed in 1950. This led to a so-called pension stampede; by 1960, 40 percent of private-sector workers were covered. Meanwhile, in the auto industry, the seeds of the problem were already visible.

Companies might establish plans, but many were derelict when it came to funding them. When companies failed, the workers lost much of their promised benefit. The U.A.W. was acutely aware of the problem, because of the failing condition of several smaller car manufacturers, like Packard. The union didn't have the muscle to force full funding, and even if it did, it reckoned that if the weaker manufacturers were obliged to put more money into their pension funds, they would retaliate by cutting wages.

Thus in 1959, Studebaker, a manufacturer fallen on hard times, agreed to increase benefits - its third such increase in six years. In return, the U.A.W. let Studebaker stretch out its pension funding schedule. This bargain preserved the union's wages, as well as management's hopes for a profit, though it required each to pretend that Studebaker could afford a pension plan that was clearly beyond its means. Four years later, the company collapsed.

The Studebaker failure was a watershed. Thousands of employees, including some who had worked 40 years on the line, lost the bulk of their pensions. Stunned by the loss, which totaled $15 million, the U.A.W. changed its tactics and began to lobby in earnest for federal pension insurance. A union pension expert tellingly explained to Walter Reuther, the U.A.W. chief, that insurance would reconfigure the "incentives" of both labor and management. Though business was skeptical of the idea, a decade later, in 1974, Congress finally passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or Erisa, which, among other protections, established the P.B.G.C. to insure private pensions. Erisa, according to Wooten, who wrote a history of the act, completed the transition of pensions into a part of the social safety net. It was also the birth of moral hazard.

VI. THE SURPRISINGLY PLIABLE SYSTEM OF PENSION ACCOUNTING

Erisa, which would be amended several times, was supposed to ensure that corporate sponsors kept their plans funded. The act includes a Byzantine set of regulations that seemingly require companies to make timely contributions. As recently as 2000, most corporate plans were adequately funded, or at least appeared to be. Their assets took a serious hit, however, when the stock market tumbled. (In retrospect, they had been cavalier in assuming the bull market would continue.) And they were burned again when interest rates fell.

Since pension liabilities are, for the most part, future liabilities, companies calculate their present obligation by applying a discount rate to what they will owe in the future. As interest rates move lower, they have to set more money aside because it is assumed that their assets will grow more slowly. The principle is familiar to any individual saver: you need to save more if you expect, say, a 5 percent return on your investment instead of a 10 percent return. What is much in dispute is just which rate is proper for pension accounting.

Corporations have been gaming the system by using the highest rates allowable, which shrinks their reported liabilities, and thus their funding requirements. The P.B.G.C., when calculating the system's deficit, uses what is in effect a market rate; whatever it would cost to buy annuities for everyone covered in a pension plan is, it argues, the plan's true "liability." The difference between these measures can be extreme. Depending on whom you talk to, General Motors' mammoth pension fund is either fully funded or, as the P.B.G.C. maintains, it is $31 billion in the hole.

What is not in dispute is that when interest rates fell, the present value of pension liabilities (by whatever measure) soared. The confluence of falling stock prices, plunging interest rates and a recession in the beginning of this decade was the pension world's equivalent of the perfect storm. An unprecedented wave of pension sponsors failed and then dumped their obligations on the P.B.G.C. (To do so, a sponsor generally must prove that it could not re-emerge as a viable enterprise without shedding its pension plan.) By far the most costly failures were in airlines and steel, although the list ranges from Kemper Insurance and Kaiser Aluminum to Murray, a lawn-mower manufacturer.

As the P.B.G.C. assumed responsibility for more and more pensioners, it became clear that the premium it charged was way too cheap. Mispriced insurance, like mispriced anything, sends the market a distorted signal. Belt, the P.B.G.C. director, who served as counsel to the Senate Banking Committee in the late 1980's during the savings-and-loan crisis, says that cheap pension insurance gave rise to flawed incentives: namely it kept companies in the pension business who didn't deserve to be there. He also argues, rather convincingly, that lax rules allowed pension sponsors to get away with inadequate funding.

For example, United Airlines did not make contributions to any of its four employee plans between 2000 and 2002, when it was heading into Chapter 11, and made minimal contributions in 2003. Even more surprisingly, in 2002, after two of its jets had been turned into weapons in the Sept. 11 disaster, and when the airline industry was pleading for emergency relief from Congress, United granted a 40 percent increase in pension benefits for its 23,000 ground employees.

Bethlehem Steel similarly enjoyed a three-year funding holiday as it was going through hard times, letting its liabilities swell in advance of turning them over to the government. Meanwhile, in order to gain its unions' approval for plant shutdowns, it agreed to costly benefit enhancements. In 2001 Bethlehem filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It was guided through its bankruptcy by none other than Miller, now the Delphi C.E.O. Miller disputes the notion that capital-scarce companies like Bethlehem intentionally game the system by shirking funding. "Companies don't like falling behind," he says. "When you have a hard choice between starving the capital base to feed the pension plan, or making capital investments to become more productive, to the extent there is permission that's what you do." The point is, they had permission.

Neither Bethlehem nor United broke any laws. Both companies made the full contributions required under Erisa. When the P.B.G.C. seized their plans, however, Bethlehem was only 45 percent funded, and United was only 42 percent funded. For companies that terminate their pension plans, such gross underfunding has become the norm. Either assets suddenly vanish when the P.B.G.C. walks in the door, or, evidently, the system for measuring "full" funding is broken. As Belt testified to the Senate Committee on Finance in June, "United, US Airways, Bethlehem Steel, LTV and National Steel would not have presented claims in excess of $1 billion each - and with funded ratios of less than 50 percent - if the rules worked."

Even leaving aside the debate over which rate to use in calculating pension liabilities, there is no doubt that Erisa permits companies to use some doubtful arithmetic. For instance, the law lets corporations "smooth" changes in their asset values. If the stocks and bonds in their pension funds take a hit (as happened to just about every fund recently), they don't have to fully report the impact. Nor do they have to ante up fresh funds to compensate for the loss for five years. A similar smoothing is permitted on the liability side. And though, in theory, Erisa discourages underfunding by requiring offenders to pay higher premiums, its various loopholes render the sanction toothless. Thanks to another loophole, companies that contribute more than the required amount get to skip future contributions even if they later become underfunded. These companies are awarded so-called "credit balances," which remain in place even if the actual balance is showing red.

Incredibly, when United's plans were terminated, earlier this year, even though they were groaning under $17 billion in pension liabilities and a mere $7 billion in assets, they still had credit "balances" according to Erisa. (By law, the P.B.G.C. will be on the hook for most, but not all, of United's shortfall. The agency guarantees pensions up to $45,000 a year; employees, mostly pilots, who were owed richer pensions are uninsured above the cap.)

Their dubious funding history notwithstanding, corporations - airlines in particular - have been lobbying for greater permissiveness for several years. And they have gotten it. Congress has twice relaxed the rules, permitting pension sponsors to use a higher rate to calculate their liabilities.

VII. WHAT BUSH WOULD DO?

Enter the Bush administration: it has essentially declared the era of permissiveness over. Among other changes, it wants the funding rules tightened. To tackle moral hazard, it wants to stop companies with poor credit ratings from granting benefit hikes, or from doling out unfunded pension benefits to unions who agree to plant shutdowns. It even wants to prevent workers at some companies whose bonds are given a "junk" rating from accruing more years of service. This would be painful to employees at many industrial companies, possibly including G.M.

Indeed, one reading of the administration proposal is that, having seen the steel and airline industries raid the P.B.G.C., it is drawing the line at the auto industry - whose initial distress, of course, prompted the agency's founding. Asked about that before Delphi went bust, Belt admitted: "Eight auto-parts suppliers have come under Chapter 11 so far this year. No question our single largest source of exposure is the auto sector."

Since G.M.'s stock was downgraded to junk status earlier this year, the possibility that it would file for bankruptcy has been the subject of on-again, off-again debate on Wall Street. G.M.'s pension plan totals an astronomical $90 billion; a bankruptcy filing would be the P.B.G.C.'s biggest nightmare. G.M. says the notion is far-fetched. The company seems to have plenty of liquidity and, just two weeks ago, with retiree costs a major concern, it reached an agreement with the U.A.W. to trim health benefits. G.M. and other industrial companies, along with their unions, have harshly attacked the Bush pension proposal, which would force many old-economy-type corporations to put more money into their pension funds just when their basic businesses are hurting.

Alan Reuther, Walter's nephew and the U.A.W.'s legislative director, says the provisions to restrict benefits would be "totally devastating for workers and retirees." He makes no apologies for "30 and out" - a fair reward, he maintains, for hard service on the assembly line - and he wonders at the post-modern notion that blue-collar workers should be responsible for their own retirements because giant corporations can't handle it. Also, a typical G.M. pension for someone with 30 years on the job is about $18,000 a year. That is hardly to be compared with an airline pilot's. "The P.B.G.C. is focused on protecting themselves from claims and not on protecting the claims of workers," he says. "They forget why they were created." Social safety nets have their price - in this case, a little moral hazard - and that is really what the debate is about.

What has emerged from the Beltway skirmishing thus far are bills on either side of Congress that would in some ways tighten funding but give a special break to airlines. Premiums to the P.B.G.C. would rise from $19 per plan participant to $30, and variable premiums on distressed companies would be enforced. The bills would chip away (but not eliminate) gimmicks like "smoothing."

The Senate is still divided, however, on how to treat corporations with junk credit ratings - the ones most likely to wind up in the P.B.G.C.'s lap. Hard-liners like Senator Chuck Grassley insist they should be forced to strengthen their pension plans in a hurry; Senators Mike DeWine and Barbara Mikulski (both from states with blue-collar constituencies) want to give such companies lenience. So after months of lobbying, politicking and deal making, moral hazard is still alive.

VIII. PENSION VS. POTHOLES

The P.B.G.C. does not protect government pensions, but dynamics similar to those in the private sector have also wrecked the solvency of public plans. Even in states where budget restraint is gospel, public-service employees have found it relatively easy to get benefit hikes for the simple reason that no one else pays much attention to them. In the corporate world, stockholders, at least in theory, exert some pressure on managers to show restraint. But who are the public sector "stockholders"? The average voter doesn't take notice when the legislature debates the benefits levels of firemen, teachers and the like. On the other hand, public-employee unions exhibit a very keen interest, and legislators know it. So benefits keep rising.

As a matter of practice, those benefits are as good as insured. Because public pension benefits are legally inviolable, default is not an option. Sooner or later, taxpayers will be required to put up the money (or governments will be forced to borrow the money and tax a later generation to pay the interest). Thus, unions can bargain for virtually any level of benefits without regard to the state's ability, or its willingness, to fund them. This creates moral hazard indeed. At least in the private sphere, there are rules - ineffectual rules maybe, but rules - that require companies to fund. In the public sector, legislatures wary of raising taxes to pay for the benefits that they legislate can simply pass the buck to the future. This explains how the West Virginia Teachers Retirement System has, embarrassingly, only 22 percent of the assets needed to meet its expected liabilities. It also explains how Illinois, a low-tax state, is underfunded by some $38 billion, or $3,000 per every man, woman and child in the state.

California is a good example of the political forces that have driven benefits higher. In the 90's, Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat who was strongly supported by public-employee unions, pushed through numerous bills to increase benefits. One raised the pension of state troopers retiring at age 50 to 3 percent of final salary times the number of years served. (Previously, the formula was 2 percent at age 50, more if you were older.) Thus, a cop hired at age 20 could retire at 50, find another job and get a pension equal to 90 percent of his final salary.

The higher benefits trickled down to the local level, as counties that feared losing police officers to the state felt forced to copy the formula. Counterintuitively, as benefits were going up, the California Public Employees Retirement System (Calpers), which was boasting high returns in the stock market, allowed state agencies and local governments to reduce their contributions.

Contra Costa County, which adopted the "3 percent at 50" formula for its Police Department, got by with contributing only $55 million to retirement costs in 1999, near the market peak. When the market tanked, the county found itself with lower assets and greater obligations. Six years later, the county's retirement bill had more than tripled to $180 million. Bill Pollacek, the county treasurer-tax collector, says the excess earnings from the bull market were spent, among other things, on higher benefits; "the losses were left for the taxpayers."

This example was repeated with various twists across the country. In New Jersey, for example, Christine Whitman, the Republican governor in the 90's, ultimately relied on buoyant stock-market predictions to finance hefty tax cuts, which were the centerpiece of her administration. In 1997, New Jersey borrowed $2.8 billion, at an interest rate of 7.64 percent. The money was advanced to its pension system, on the convenient theory that its pension managers would make more in the market than the state paid out in interest. For a while, they did. The state even raised benefits.

Meanwhile, Trenton achieved a sort of transitory budget balance by contributing less to its pension system. New Jersey's contribution to the Police and Firemen's Retirement System was zero in 2001 through 2003. But during the dot-com debacle, its investments plunged. And the state came under intense budget pressure because of the recession, and so gave itself a few years more to start paying down its pension liability (which further widened the gap). This year, the last easy-funding year, New Jersey will contribute $220 million to its pension system; by 2010, the annual bill will be an impossible-seeming $2.5 billion.

I spoke to Jon Corzine and Doug Forrester, the candidates in next Tuesday's gubernatorial election, and while each expressed the proper horror with regard to past mismanagement, neither had much to say about how they would replenish New Jersey's pension system. State pension officials say that if New Jersey were a private corporation, its system would be nearly bankrupt. "In the real world this is a P.B.G.C. takeover," Fred Beaver, the head of the pension division, told me. Raising taxes is politically forbidden (Forrester has been campaigning to cut property-tax rates).

And the state's reported pension underfunding, officially $25 billion, is undoubtedly optimistic. It assumes that New Jersey's pension assets will earn 8.25 percent, a number collectively determined - some say pulled from thin air - by the state's pension council. Even Orin Kramer, a private hedge-fund manager who also is also chairman of the council, says that any assumption higher than 7.5 percent is unrealistic. "The published numbers are divorced from economic reality," Kramer says. "No one even does the math for what will happen if you only do 7 percent because it's too serious. You start firing cops and teachers."

According to Barclay's Global Investors, if you use realistic assumptions, the total underfunding in all public plans is on the order of $460 billion. If this figure is even close to true, future taxpayers will be hopelessly in hock to the police, firefighters and teachers of the past.

Cutting pensions (unlike health benefits) is simply not an option. State constitutions forbid public entities, even prospectively, from reducing the rate at which employees accrue benefits. They can tinker with, or abolish, benefits for future employees, as Alaska did, but for a worker already on the payroll, benefits - even benefits that might not be earned for many decades hence - are sacrosanct. These benefits are like headless nails; once driven in they can never be removed. This year, New York's Legislature approved 46 new bills - more headless nails - to increase pension benefits, according to E.J. McMahon, an analyst at the Manhattan Institute. New York's benefits already rank among the most generous in the country, and the new bills would expand categories of workers who can retire early, or who can qualify for higher rates. Such bracket creep is pervasive.

One of the biggest pension offenders is San Diego, where six members of the pension board, including the head of the local firefighters' union and two other union officials, have been charged with violating the state's conflict-of-interest code, a felony. What is interesting about San Diego is that, juicy details aside, its pension mess actually looks rather commonplace. The six board members are accused of making a deal to let City Hall underfund the pension system in return for agreeing to higher benefits - including special benefits for themselves. Explicitly or otherwise, this is what unions and legislators have been doing all over the country. A senior adviser on pensions to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told me he fears that ever higher benefits are inescapable, given the fact that legislators control the benefits of people whose support is vital in elections.

Calpers, the country's biggest state-employee retirement system, responds that the pension system has worked well. And for Calpers's 1.4 million members, it has. The average benefit for retirees is $21,000 a year, more than most at General Motors. But at some point, the interest of the public and the interests of public employees diverge.

Earlier this year, Schwarzenegger tried to move California to a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan (for new employees), but the Legislature refused to go along. Schwarzenegger has vowed to revisit the issue in 2006. This battle is being fought from statehouse to statehouse. Michigan (mimicking Alaska) has closed its pension plan to some new employees, and various states, including Florida, Colorado, South Carolina, Arizona, Ohio and Montana, are taking a partial step of letting employees choose between defined contribution plans and traditional pensions. This compromise does not really change much. Most employees who are given the choice opt, quite naturally, to keep their pensions.

Partly for that reason, the Citizens Budget Commission, a politically neutral watchdog, concluded that only by ending pensions outright (for new employees) could New York avert a future fiscal calamity. "Changes in pension benefits for future workers would yield fiscal gains only slowly," the commission noted in a position paper, "but the service to the future fiscal health of the City and State would be enormous."

Most legislatures are not about to do that anytime soon. There is a legitimate argument for preserving public pensions, however, if only they could be put on a sound fiscal basis. Critics like Grover Norquist, the tax-cut crusader, lampoons pensions as remnants of a stodgy, Old World economy. The desire to collect a pension, he argues, keeps workers from moving to better opportunities and shackles employers to workers who are just marking time.

But while mobility is generally considered a virtue in the modern economy, it isn't appropriate everywhere. It may be desirable for a software engineer to move from job to job, notes Robert Walton, a Calpers assistant executive; "for teachers, firefighters, nurses, engineers, that isn't the type of work force you want." Stability is a virtue. The trick is to force legislatures to commit to funding with the same zeal with which they commit to benefits.

De Maio, the San Diego watchdog, is lobbying for a federal law that would impose Erisa-type rules on public plans. Another solution might be found in the Texas Municipal Retirement System, which represents 800 cities and towns in the state. It has a blended system of automatic employer and employee contributions that are managed by the system and turned into an annuity upon retirement. These sorts of remedies could avert plenty of future San Diegos. In principle they are quite simple. It is only the politics that are difficult.

IX. HOW DO YOU MAKE SAVINGS LAST A LIFETIME?

On the private side, benefits professionals have been touting so-called cash-balance plans, a hybrid that in some ways looks like a 401(k), as the best hope for saving the pension industry. With a traditional pension, employees accrue benefits very slowly during their first 20 years and very rapidly during their next 10 (this is why pension plans act as retention tools; you pay a penalty for leaving early). Thus, an employee who stays at a company for 30 years gets a much bigger pension than one who works at three companies for 10 years each. Cash-balance plans were devised to appeal to younger workers, most of whom do not envision retiring at the firm that hired them out of college. In these plans, employees accrue benefits steadily, one decade to the next. There is no penalty for leaving, and workers who change jobs simply roll their accrued benefits into their next plan, as with a 401(k). Many firms converted to cash-balance plans in the 90's to attract younger and more mobile workers.

But the downside of giving more to junior employees is that senior employees get less. When I.B.M. converted, it reduced the rate at which some employees of long standing would accrue benefits, touching off a firestorm. The company was sued, I.B.M. lost and the legal status of similar plans remains in doubt. The pension industry has been lobbying Congress to clarify the status of existing cash-balance plans, but neither the administration nor anyone on Capitol Hill has done so.

To some people, this is further evidence that the Bush administration would just as soon be done with pension plans altogether. I put that recently to Elaine Chao, the secretary of labor, and while her answer was diplomatic, she made no bones about the fact that, in the administration's view, traditional pensions are losing their relevance. "Defined benefit plans have their advantages," she told me, "but in an increasingly mobile 21st-century work force, the lack of flexibility of D.B. plans is yielding to greater usage of defined contributions plans."

It's hard to argue with her, if you look at the numbers. Although 44 million people are covered by private-sector plans, half are people who have already retired and are collecting benefits or whose plans have been frozen or terminated. In other words, on-the-job employees accruing benefits - once the backbone of the system - constitute only half. At that rate, even without legislation, the private-sector pension community will mostly die off in a generation.

And pension sponsors are likely to get another jolt soon. Under current accounting standards, companies can "smooth" their earnings reports, so that each quarter's net income reflects the average assumed performance of the company's pension assets, whether up or down, but not the actual performance. (Discrepancies from the average are sifted back into the earnings stream over time.) This means that reported earnings are often wildly misleading. Robert Herz, chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, has criticized this practice as "a Rube Goldberg device." If FASB follows up and disallows it, corporate pension sponsors would have to cope with a lot more volatility in their earnings. Managers hate volatility, and such a change would prompt many of them to fold their plans.

If defined benefits are on their last legs, then it would make sense to try to incorporate their best features into 401(k)'s. The drawback to 401(k)'s, remember, is that people are imperfect savers. They don't save enough, they don't invest wisely what they do save and they don't know what to do with their money once they are free to withdraw it. Quite often, they spend it.

Here there is much the government could do. For instance, it could require that a portion of 401(k) accounts be set aside in a lifelong annuity, with all the security of a pension. Behavioral economists like Richard Thaler have demonstrated that you can change people's behavior even without mandatory rules. For instance, by making a high contribution rate the "default option" for employees, they would tend to deduct (and save) more from their paychecks. If you make an annuity a prominent choice, more people will convert their accounts into annuities.

Otherwise, it's not hard to predict that as octogenarians and nonagenarians become commonplace in society, many are going to outlive their savings, which is even more scary than outliving the savings of the P.B.G.C. Promoting an annuity culture is probably the single best way to make up for the demise of pensions. Yet most companies that provide 401(k)'s don't even give the option of purchasing an annuity when people cash in their accounts. As Brown, the Illinois professor, notes, "There is no box to check that says 'annuities."' That is a minor scandal. "I wish someone in Washington were thinking bigger thoughts about what the optimal retirement package should look like," says Watson Wyatt's Coronado.

What are Secretary Chao's thoughts? She bounced the question to the Treasury Department. Mark Warshawsky, the Treasury's top economist, has written about the need for annuities, and in an interview he allowed that as 401(k)'s become the primary, or the only, source of retirement income for more people, "I think it is a concern that annuities are not being offered in those plans." When I asked what the Treasury was doing about encouraging annuities, Warshawsky merely said that it was under study. Anything that smacks of regulation (like rules to make sure employees get a particular menu of choices, whether for annuities or for their portfolios) gives the administration shivers. This is what you would expect, given the administration's strong free-market tendencies.

But the government is already deeply involved, since it shelters retirement savings - pensions, yes, but also 401(k)'s, which are similarly permitted to grow tax-free. When it passed Erisa, Congress agreed that corporations that invested tax-sheltered retirement funds - pensions - should have to live by certain rules. But in the defined contribution world - the world of 401(k)'s - there are no rules. Employers can contribute or not. Employees can diversify or blow it all on the company stock (even if it is Enron). If nothing else, the century-long experiment with pensions has proved that in the absence of the right rules, the money will not always be there. The purpose of pension reform should be not merely to avoid a fiscal disaster but to find a fiscally sound way to preserve the likelihood of secure retirements. If people are going to retire on 401(k)'s, those should be subject to rules, and guidance, as well.

It would be nice to think that reform would include a future for pensions, but on the private side at least, it is doubtful. As Delphi's Miller put it simply: "A pension plan makes no sense in today's world. It's not wise for a company to make financial promises 40 or 50 years down the road." Most American executives would agree. Miller says he has not decided what to do at Delphi. If workers grant wage concessions, he has said, the pension plan, which is $4.5 billion shy of what it needs, might even survive. This has the sound of a bargaining ploy. Knowing that the P.B.G.C.'s guarantee is in place, the unions will probably insist on keeping their wages as close to intact as they can, and Miller will probably end up handing the pension plan over to the agency, just as he did at Bethlehem. Then, Miller and other executives will get stock and dandy bonuses in a new Delphi that is happily stripped of pension obligations, and some 45,000 employees and retirees will, in time, happily collect their pensions - courtesy of the U.S. Government. Moral hazard at work.

Roger Lowenstein, a contributing writer, has written about Social Security and health care reform for the magazine.

 October 31, 2005

Editorial Observer

Why Race Isn't as 'Black' and 'White' as We Think

By BRENT STAPLES

People have occasionally asked me how a black person came by a "white" name like Brent Staples. One letter writer ridiculed it as "an anchorman's name" and accused me of making it up. For the record, it's a British name - and the one my parents gave me. "Staples" probably arrived in my family's ancestral home in Virginia four centuries ago with the British settlers.

The earliest person with that name we've found - Richard Staples - was hacked to death by Powhatan Indians not far from Jamestown in 1622. The name moved into the 18th century with Virginians like John Staples, a white surveyor who worked in Thomas Jefferson's home county, Albemarle, not far from the area where my family was enslaved.

The black John Staples who married my paternal great-great-grandmother just after Emancipation - and became the stepfather of her children - could easily have been a Staples family slave. The transplanted Britons who had owned both sides of my family had given us more than a preference for British names. They had also given us their DNA. In what was an almost everyday occurrence at the time, my great-great-grandmothers on both sides gave birth to children fathered by white slave masters.

I've known all this for a long time, and was not surprised by the results of a genetic screening performed by DNAPrint Genomics, a company that traces ancestral origins to far-flung parts of the globe. A little more than half of my genetic material came from sub-Saharan Africa - common for people who regard themselves as black - with slightly more than a quarter from Europe.

The result that knocked me off my chair showed that one-fifth of my ancestry is Asian. Poring over the charts and statistics, I said out loud, "This has got to be a mistake."

That's a common response among people who are tested. Ostensibly white people who always thought of themselves as 100 percent European find they have substantial African ancestry. People who regard themselves as black sometimes discover that the African ancestry is a minority portion of their DNA.

These results are forcing people to re-examine the arbitrary calculations our culture uses to decide who is "white" and who is "black."

As with many things racial, this story begins in the slave-era South, where sex among slaves, masters and mistresses got started as soon as the first slave ship sailed into Jamestown Harbor in 1619. By the time of the American Revolution, there was a visible class of light-skinned black people who no longer looked or sounded African. Free mulattos, emancipated by guilt-ridden fathers, may have accounted for up to three-quarters of the tiny free-black population before the Revolution.

By the eve of the Civil War, the swarming numbers of mixed-race slaves on Southern plantations had become a source of constant anguish to planters' wives, who knew quite well where those racially ambiguous children were coming from.

Faced with widespread fear that racial distinctions were losing significance, the South decided to define the problem away. People with any ascertainable black ancestry at all were defined as black under the law and stripped of basic rights. The "one drop" laws defined as black even people who were blond and blue-eyed and appeared white.

Black people snickered among themselves and worked to subvert segregation at every turn. Thanks to white ancestry spread throughout the black community, nearly every family knew of someone born black who successfully passed as white to get access to jobs, housing and public accommodations that were reserved for white people only. Black people who were not quite light enough to slip undetected into white society billed themselves as Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, South Asian, Native American - you name it. These defectors often married into ostensibly white families at a time when interracial marriage was either illegal or socially stigmatized.

Those of us who grew up in the 1950's and 60's read black-owned magazines and newspapers that praised the racial defectors as pioneers while mocking white society for failing to detect them. A comic newspaper column by the poet Langston Hughes - titled "Why Not Fool Our White Folks?" - typified the black community's sense of smugness about knowing the real racial score. In keeping with this history, many black people I know find it funny when supposedly white Americans profess shock at the emergence of blackness in the family tree. But genetic testing holds plenty of surprises for black folks, too.

Which brings me back to my Asian ancestry. It comes as a surprise, given that my family's oral histories contain not a single person who is described as Asian. More testing on other family members should clarify the issue, but for now, I can only guess. This ancestry could well have come through a 19th-century ancestor who was incorrectly described as Indian, often a catchall category at the time.

The test results underscore what anthropologists have said for eons: racial distinctions as applied in this country are social categories and not scientific concepts. In addition, those categories draw hard, sharp distinctions among groups of people who are more alike than they are different. The ultimate point is that none of us really know who we are, ancestrally speaking. All we ever really know is what our parents and grandparents have told us.

October 30, 2005

Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too

By SAUL HANSELL

Mountain View, Calif.

IN many ways, Larry Page and Sergey Brin seem an unlikely pair to lead an advertising revolution. As Stanford graduate students sketching out the idea that became Google, the two software engineers sniffed in an academic paper that "advertising-funded search engines will inherently be biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."

They softened that line a bit by the time they got around to pitching their business to venture capitalists, allowing that selling ads would be a handy safety net if their other, less distasteful ideas for generating revenue didn't pan out.

Google soared in popularity in its first years but had no meaningful revenue until the founders reluctantly fell on that safety net and started selling ads. Even then, they approached advertising with the mind-set of engineers: Ads would look more like fortune cookies than anything Madison Avenue would come up with.

As it turned out, the safety net was a trampoline. Those little ads - 12 word snippets of text, linked to topics that users are actually interested in - have turned Google into one of the biggest advertising vehicles the world has ever seen. This year, Google will sell $6.1 billion in ads, nearly double what it sold last year, according to Anthony Noto, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network. By next year, Mr. Noto said, he expects Google to have advertising revenue of $9.5 billion. That would place it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales after Viacom, the News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, but ahead of giants including NBC Universal and Time Warner.

Not content to just suck advertising dollars from Web search, Google is using its windfall to pay for an eclectic range of ambitious projects that have the potential to radically disrupt other industries. Among other things, it is offering to build a free wireless Internet network in San Francisco, plans to scan nearly every book published and is testing a free classified advertising system it calls Google Base.

More quietly, Google is also preparing to disrupt the advertising business itself, by replacing creative salesmanship with cold number-crunching. Its premise so far is that advertising is most effective when seen only by people who are interested in what's for sale, based on what they are searching for or reading about on the Web. Because Google's ad-buying clients pay for ads only when users click on them, they can precisely measure their effectiveness - and are willing to pay more for ads that really sell their products.

HIDDEN behind its simple white pages, Google has already created what it says is one of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems ever built. In a fraction of a second, it can evaluate millions of variables about its users and advertisers, correlate them with its potential database of billions of ads and deliver the message to which each user is most likely to respond.

Because of this technology, users click ads 50 percent to 100 percent more often on Google than they do on Yahoo, Mr. Noto estimates, and that is a powerful driver of Google's growth and profits. "Because the ads are more relevant," he said, "they create a better return for advertisers, which causes them to spend more money, which gives Google better margins." (Yahoo is working on its own technology to narrow that gap.)

Google already sells its text ads for many other sites on the Internet (including nytimes.com), and is also moving tentatively to sell the picture-based interactive advertising preferred by marketers who want to promote brands rather than immediately sell products. Now it is preparing to extend its technology to nearly every other medium, most significantly television. It is looking toward a world of digital cable boxes and Internet-delivered television that will allow it to show commercials tailored for each viewer, as it does now for each Web page it displays.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, explains the company's astounding success in advertising - and reconciles it with the founders' distrust of hucksterism - by suggesting that advertising should be interesting, relevant and useful to users. "Improving ad quality improves Google's revenue," he said in an interview at the company's headquarters, known as the Googleplex. "If we target the right ad to the right person at the right time and they click it, we win."

This proposition, he continued, is applicable to other media. "If we can figure out a way to improve the quality of ads on television with ads that have real value for end-users, we should do it," he said. While he is watching television, for example, "Why do I see women's clothing ads?" he said. "Why don't I see just men's clothing ads?"

The media and advertising industries certainly see a future in which television ads are aimed at individual viewers. But few outside of the engineering Ph.D.'s at Google think that television ads should simply be utilitarian, rather than entertaining, provocative or annoyingly repetitive - the models that have worked so far. And some media industry executives wonder whether Google, which has already become the most powerful force in Internet advertising, should also become the clearinghouse for ads of all types - a kind of advertising Nasdaq.

"For all of us to throw all our eggs in the Google basket is dangerous, because no one should have that much power," said Jeff Jarvis, a veteran magazine editor who publishes BuzzMachine, a blog about the media, and is a consultant for About.com, a division of The New York Times Company. He added that if Google were to expand its ad sales to other media outlets, prices would fall. "Google commoditizes everything," he said.

There is no better example of that than Google Base, a service that allows users to post all sorts of information free, including classified ads, he said. Newspapers, which increasingly use Google to sell ads on their own Web pages, will see Google Base as a "frontal assault" on their lucrative classified-ad business, and they will say, "I can't trust Google," Mr. Jarvis said.

Mr. Brin said that preliminary versions of Google Base leaked onto the Internet and that the company's partners should not fear it. "Google Base is as much about classified as it is about zoology," he said.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were exceedingly ambitious from the day they started Google, but the job of finding some source of revenue fell to Omid Kordestani, an amiable former Netscape sales executive who was brought to the company in 1999 by K. Ram Shriram, another Netscape alumnus and an early Google investor. Mr. Kordestani explored a range of ideas, including charging users for searches as well as selling Google's technology to corporations or to other Web sites - notably Yahoo - that were less shy about selling ads.

Eventually, in 2000, Google started to sell ads on its own site, but they were only a few lines of text placed above the search results. There were no graphics and no banners. At first, these ads - and later, a second form of text advertisement that ran down the right side of the page - were sold at fixed prices. But such an approach would not last long.

In early 2002, a Google employee, Salar Kamangar, now 28, convinced Mr. Schmidt and the founders to switch to an auction-based system like the one set up by Bill Gross, the head of IdeaLab. Mr. Gross had created Goto.com, a search engine made up entirely of ads, where advertisers paid only if their ad was clicked on, and the advertiser who bid the most per click was listed first. (Goto was later renamed Overture Services and then bought by Yahoo, an early Google backer that has become its fiercest rival.)

Mr. Kamangar, though, had an important improvement on the model. Rather than giving priority to the advertisers that bid the most per click, as Goto did, he realized that it was better to save the front of the line for ads that brought in the most money - a combination of the bid and the number of clicks on the ad. This was not only more profitable, but it also linked readers to ads that were more relevant to them. He also figured out that the system should use what is called a Vickrey auction - that is, to charge the winner only one cent more than the second-highest bidder. That gives advertisers an incentive to bid high, knowing that they will not be penalized if they are far higher than the rest of the market.

Mr. Page and Mr. Brin were suspicious of any system that put high-bidding advertisers at the top, Mr. Kamangar said. "They thought if someone was willing to pay more it was a negative," he recalled. But he was able to convince them that the site could be improved by incorporating how often users clicked on an ad.

Mr. Schmidt, who was still new as chief executive, was worried more that moving to an entirely auction-based system - amid a recession in online advertising - could be financially disastrous. "I said to Salar, 'Promise me the revenue won't go down,' " Mr. Schmidt said. "I was afraid people would realize these ads were worthless." In fact, revenue quickly increased tenfold.

As Google's audience took off, advertisers came running - many thousands of smaller ones at first, but soon large companies as well. Among Google's largest advertisers is eBay, which has long bought keywords for nearly every sort of merchandise it sells.

"The smartest thing that Google did was getting smaller advertisers to buy in," said Ellen Siminoff, the chief executive of Efficient Frontier, an agency that helps advertisers manage their campaigns on search engines. She estimates that Google has two to three times as many advertisers as Yahoo does, largely because Yahoo has a 10-cent minimum bid. This lets Google earn money on more obscure search terms for which rivals have no ads.

This growing advertising business gave Google the confidence to expand its audience. Most significantly, in 2002, America Online brought in Google to replace Overture, which provided both search and search ads; that deal enshrined Google as the premier search engine and ad network. Google won the deal by guaranteeing AOL a substantial sum, which it would not disclose. Google was willing to make that bid only because of its confidence in its advertising sales prowess. "If we were wrong," Mr. Kordestani said, "there were some scenarios that would bankrupt the company."

But by that point, Google had figured out that the same sort of computing and engineering skill that it used to find Web pages could also be used to improve the quality and, ultimately, the profitability of advertising. "Initially, we didn't understand how fundamental the computer science was in advertising," Mr. Schmidt said. "We didn't have enough staffing or focus on this area. I managed to fix that."

GOOGLE introduced its current system for determining which ad to show on which page late last year. It is a wonder of technology that rivals its search engine in complexity. For every page that Google shows, more than 100 computers evaluate more than a million variables to choose the advertisements in its database to display - and they do it in milliseconds. The computers look at the amount bid and the budget of the advertiser, but they also consider the user - such as his or her location, which they try to infer by analyzing the user's Internet connections - as well as the time of day and myriad other factors Google has tracked and analyzed from its experience with advertisements.

"If someone is coming from a particular location, a certain ad may be more popular there," explained Jeff Huber, Google's vice president for engineering. "The system can use all the signals available, and the system itself learns the correlations between them."

This technology is both amazing and potentially frightening. Google already collects and keeps vast amount of data about what Web pages and advertisements each of its users click on, and it can evaluate that history - and compare it with that of hundreds of millions of other users - to select the ad shown on each page. For now, Google says it identifies users only by a number in a cookie it places on each computer that uses Google. It says it has not connected the vast dossier of interests and behavior to specific users by name. But that could change as Google offers more personal services - like e-mail messages and social networking - and works more tightly with partners who already have such personal information.

Lauren Weinstein, the founder of the Privacy Forum, said the data that Google collects creates troubling privacy issues, especially because it declines to say what data it keeps or for how long. "If you start to target people based on a corpus of data, it can be abused in various ways internally and externally by organizations and government agencies," he said. Government investigators and lawyers in civil suits regularly get court orders to force Internet companies to reveal e-mail messages and other personal information about users.

Google recently rewrote its privacy policy to make it easier to understand what data it collects, but it did not scale back its data retention. Nor did it, as Mr. Weinstein and others have demanded, give users the right to see the data collected about them and their computers.

For now, the only personal information Google says it considers is the user's location, which allows it to display ads for local merchants. It is starting to encourage other Web sites to send it the ZIP codes of their registered users so Google can display ads relevant to their location.

Mr. Brin said he was not sure what other information about users might prove useful, but he said Google would not use the data inappropriately. "I don't think it's a big deal to show opera glasses to someone searching for binoculars that you somehow infer is a woman," he said. "But you don't want to pop up ads for H.I.V. drugs on someone's page, because you inferred they have H.I.V., when their boss is standing there looking at their computer."

To be sure, other Web sites are far more aggressive in using personal information. Yahoo will let marketers display ads to users based on demographic information the users provide as well as the users' surfing and searching history. Microsoft's new system for MSN explicitly allows advertisers to bid different prices for clicks from users of different ages, sexes and locations.

In addition to selling ads on its own site and on other sites that use its search technology, Google also places text ads on all manner of sites published both by professional media companies and by amateurs. Mr. Brin created this program in early 2003 after he became worried that the Internet crash would keep people from creating interesting Web pages for Google to index. This technology, called AdSense for Content, has made advertising on Google more attractive and provided the economic foundation for the rise of blogs.

"God bless Google," said Mr. Jarvis, the BuzzMachine blogger. "They took the cooties off citizen media." Until Google's program came along, advertisers shied away from placing ads on individual user's pages. But AdSense analyzed each page and tried - not always successfully - to find ads related to the page's content.

Now Google is looking to expand its advertising into even more places. It is testing a plan to buy pages in magazines on which to place text ads. And it also shows ads as users browse its new book search service. "A lot of the world's content is not accessible today and thus it is not easily monetizable today," Mr. Kordestani said. "We will figure out how to get more and more content and find the right way to put ads on it."

Advertisers, meanwhile, have had to scramble to adapt to this completely different approach to buying ads. They needed to find ways to keep track of bids on thousands of keywords, and to measure which ads, tied to which keywords, produced which sales - and then to figure out if they had bid the right amount for the ad.

Many advertisers and their agencies have a powerful love-hate relationship with Google. They find it a meaningful source of leads and sales, and the effectiveness of Google's ads is much easier to measure than that of traditional media. But Google has sometimes been hard to deal with. There is a growing sense that a significant number of clicks that advertisers pay for are fraudulent - made by competitors trying to deplete advertising budgets or by Web sites trying to bolster the revenue they get for displaying the ads. Google says it has technology to minimize what is called click fraud, but many people in the Internet business are skeptical that the incidence of fraud is as low as Google contends.

Here, as in other places, many advertisers criticize Google for being like a black box, because the company gives them less specific information and control than they would like. Until recently, for example, advertisers could not specify where their ads ran, though they were convinced that some Web sites in Google's network were much more likely than others to send them customers. Google responded with what it calls "smart pricing" technology that discounts certain ads if Google's analysis shows that they are seen on sites it determines are less likely to produce paying customers. But Google discloses little about how this works, and advertisers find it frustrating.

"Google is very opaque and bizarre to deal with," said Joshua Stylman, a managing partner at Reprise Media, a search advertising agency, but he added that Google had become somewhat more responsive in recent months.

Mr. Schmidt addresses those complaints by saying that advertisers are missing the point of Google's new model. It shouldn't matter what Google does with their ads, he argues, so long as the received value, which advertisers can measure, is higher than the price they pay. The entire discipline of media planning, which has long been important on Madison Avenue, may be rendered obsolete - just as Google's fully automated news Web site threatens the livelihoods of human news editors.

In any case, there is little doubt that Mr. Schmidt believes that science will replace much of the art of marketing. "I have this fantasy that goes like this," he said at one point. "You are the C.E.O. of a large company, and I come to you and say, 'Give me $1 million and give me your Web site, and we will guarantee you will get $100 million in sales.' Which C.E.O. would turn that down?"

Google isn't quite pursuing that sort of deal, but it is trying to have big retailers link their inventory systems directly to its advertising auction. That way, a toy store chain, for example, could respond to a search for dolls with an ad for either Barbies or Bratz, depending on which were overstocked in the store near the user's home. "Most retailers only advertise 5 percent of their products," said Tim Armstrong, Google's vice president for ad sales. "We can let them advertise all of them."

ON the other end of the spectrum, Google is also trying to focus on what the Internet market calls branding advertising - the sort that dominates television and magazines and creates awareness of a product, but doesn't directly call on viewers to buy right away. Yahoo, AOL and MSN have all evolved the simple rectangular banner ad into much more elaborate units with animation, interactivity and sometimes video formats that have been embraced by national advertisers.

Google has been able to convince some companies that its text ads can help build awareness of their products, even if people don't click on them to buy something. But top executives are also meeting weekly to develop a broader strategy for branding advertisements. Google has already allowed its so-called publisher network - those non-Google sites for which it sells ads - to accept advertising with limited graphics. At first, these were simple images, perhaps with a little animation. It is now moving to accept ads that use the popular Flash technology that allows for more interactivity. So far, these nontext ads have been only a tiny part of Google's business.

Indeed, such ads shine a spotlight on the mental compromise that Mr. Brin and Mr. Page made when they overcame their initial objections to advertising on their service. Text ads, they argued, were not the normal fluff of Madison Avenue, but actual information that was useful to searchers.

"Advertising was not a business built by logic, and we don't work by algorithm," said Wenda Harris Millard, Yahoo's chief sales officer. "Yes, we need to be more accountable, but that doesn't mean you sacrifice art and creativity."

Mr. Schmidt acknowledges that as Google explores moving into television, it may well face a conflict between its core belief that advertising must be useful and the typical television commercial that is "based on feeling and emotion."

"Our model is likely to affect television last," he said, while expressing optimism that a formula for useful, targeted commercials could be found. For now, he quickly added, the market for various forms of direct marketing is three times larger than that for television ads. "I was shocked by this," he said. "All of us are so conditioned to television as the height of advertising.

"We are in the really boring part of the business," Mr. Schmidt concluded, "the boring big business."

October 31, 2005

The Journalist

TV Newsman Is His Own News in the Leak Case

By TODD S. PURDUM

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 - On any given Sunday, the cream of Washington officialdom presents itself for confession before Tim Russert, a big, bluff lawyer-turned-journalist who may be the capital's most intimidating interlocutor outside a courtroom or Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney, not a chatty guy, has been his guest no fewer than 10 times since taking office.

But on this particular Sunday, the news compelled Mr. Russert to turn his trademark attention to an atypical topic: himself.

"Inside the C.I.A. leak indictments, including the role of journalists, including yours truly," Mr. Russert intoned in no-nonsense staccato before a commercial break halfway through "Meet the Press," NBC News's top-rated Sunday morning interview program.

Mr. Russert has moderated it for nearly 14 years, and with it he now wields as much influence as any single working journalist in Washington.

For Mr. Russert, who is also NBC's Washington bureau chief, turns out to be a pivotal ear-witness to the only crime so far charged in the inquiry into the disclosure of a C.I.A. agent's classified identity that has consumed the intersecting circles of news organizations and politics in which he has been a prominent player for years.

It was Mr. Russert's 20 minutes of sworn testimony to the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, in a Washington law office on a summer Saturday in 2004 that helped undermine the account of Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr.: that Mr. Russert first told him that Valerie Wilson, the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador and a sharp critic of the Bush administration's rationale for war with Iraq, worked at the C.I.A.

The five-count grand jury indictment against Mr. Libby charges that he called Mr. Russert "on or about July 10, 2003" (four days before Ms. Wilson's identity became public in a column by Robert D. Novak) "to complain about press coverage of Libby by an MSNBC reporter" (by all evidence, Chris Matthews of "Hardball") and "did not discuss Wilson's wife with Russert" at all.

In a telephone interview on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Russert acknowledged some discomfort with his unusual role in the case, in which Matthew Cooper of Time magazine and Judith Miller of The New York Times have also contradicted Mr. Libby's account under subpoena. "We hate being in the middle of what we're reporting on," he said. "But it is what it is."

Mr. Fitzgerald is clearly counting on the credibility of the 55-year-old Mr. Russert, a popular figure who cut his teeth in Washington more than 25 years ago as an aide to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, as a crucial witness against Mr. Libby at any trial. But he would be far from the only one.

According to the indictment, Mr. Libby talked about Ms. Wilson's identity with at least six other people in the government, including Mr. Cheney, before talking with Mr. Russert, who says he learned about Ms. Wilson's name by reading Mr. Novak's column (and, good newshound that he is, he said he was irked not to have known it before). All those people have also told their stories and could be called to the stand.

If the charges in the indictment are true, it is by no means clear why Mr. Libby would have told investigators and the grand jury in March of last year that Mr. Russert was his source, except that he might have believed that Mr. Russert and the other journalists involved would not testify.

Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph A. Tate, has said that "Mr. Libby testified to the best of his honest recollection on all occasions" and cited the passage of time as a possible explanation for contradictory accounts. After getting waivers from Mr. Libby, all of the other journalists eventually testified, though Mr. Russert managed to avoid the protracted legal battles over the terms of such testimony that brought far more attention to Mr. Cooper and to Ms. Miller, who served 85 days in jail.

Mr. Russert declined to discuss the circumstances of his testimony in much detail beyond the official statements he and NBC issued at the time, and he largely confined himself to repeating those statements on the air on Sunday. But there is evidence he may have faced a somewhat easier decision than Mr. Cooper and Ms. Miller, because Mr. Libby was calling him not as a confidential source but as an angry viewer, upset about one or more MSNBC cable programs a day or two before his call.

On "Hardball" on July 8, 2003, for example, Mr. Matthews blamed Mr. Libby and others in the White House for failing to warn President Bush that a reference in his State of the Union speech that winter about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger was wrong. Mr. Wilson, a former ambassador to Gabon, had just published an Op-Ed article in The New York Times in which he said he had been sent to Niger by the C.I.A. the previous year to investigate an intelligence report about a possible uranium sale, and concluded that it was "highly doubtful."

Mr. Matthews said on the air, "Somebody's to blame here, and it's a very high level."

Mr. Libby testified to the grand jury about his conversation with Mr. Russert on March 5 and March 24 last year, and Mr. Russert was subpoenaed in May. NBC issued a statement at the time saying, "Russert was not the recipient of the leak," and vowed to fight the subpoena in federal court because of what it said was the potential chilling effect on its ability to cover the news. On July 20, 2004, the court rejected the network's arguments (although it did not make the decision public until Aug. 9) and on Aug. 7 Mr. Russert answered "limited questions" posed by Mr. Fitzgerald, an NBC statement said at the time.

Under an agreement with the prosecutor, NBC said, Mr. Russert did not go before the grand jury, and was not asked questions that would have required him to disclose information provided in confidence.

Steve Capus, the acting president of NBC News, said in a telephone interview Sunday that he was quite confident of Mr. Russert's ability to analyze the case on the air, despite his unusual role as a part of it. Mr. Cooper and Ms. Miller have each written first-person accounts of their own involvement.

"I feel that what we've done to date is a model of how we're going to handle this," Mr. Capus said. "We have tried to be as open as possible." He added: "I'm very comfortable with how Tim has handled himself."

As anyone who has ever watched his program during football season knows, Mr. Russert was born in Buffalo, and also worked as an adviser to former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York early in his tenure in Albany. It seems clear that some of his sharp-eyed instincts for covering the political world were honed while he worked in it, though he himself gives equal credit to "four years of Latin and going to law school."

Mr. Russert's wife, Maureen Orth, is a writer for Vanity Fair. Their son, Luke, is a student at Boston College.

Mr. Russert moves easily in the worlds of official and social Washington, in which politicians and reporters sometimes find themselves on the same playing field.

But Mr. Russert never goes out on Saturday nights, preferring to attend the 4 p.m. Catholic Mass at Georgetown University Hospital's chapel before preparing for his program.

Mr. Russert was appearing live on MSNBC with the anchor Brian Williams shortly before 1 p.m. Friday when NBC's legal correspondent, Pete Williams, who was Mr. Cheney's press secretary at the Pentagon more than a decade ago, began reading aloud from the indictment and mentioned Mr. Russert's name.

"Tim, this will be an interesting conversation," Brian Williams said. It was then that Mr. Russert first acknowledged that Mr. Libby had been calling not to explain but complain.

In the telephone interview, Mr. Russert said he had not had any particular prior relationship with Mr. Libby, and that there were "other people in the vice president's office I talk to much more regularly." He said important guests like Mr. Cheney and President Bush, who appeared during the election campaign last year, came on "Meet the Press" because "we have a significant audience."

Some of Mr. Russert's colleagues have reacted sharply to the charges about Mr. Libby's actions. On "Hardball" Friday night, Tom Brokaw, the retired NBC anchor, said of Mr. Libby: "In all the years I've been covering Washington scandals, this is the clumsiest case of lying I've ever been witness to," and said Mr. Libby "concocted this scheme, beginning by trying to set up Tim Russert."

But Mr. Russert said that he had been careful not to go beyond the facts, using the reprinted written quotations and snippets of video that are part of his patented technique. "What I did this morning is went through, very carefully, what's in the allegations, what I said, what the other reporters said," he said. "I'm not going to be judgmental."

 

October 30, 2005

The Comic-Strip Revolution Will Be Televised

By LOLA OGUNNAIKE

Los Angeles

FANS fearing that "The Boondocks," the wildly scathing, racially charged comic strip, will lose its bite when it appears on television next week need not worry. Within the first 10 seconds of the new show of the same name, viewers will be offered the following Molotov cocktail of social criticism: "Jesus is black, Ronald Reagan is the devil and the government is lying about 9/11."

Since its national debut six years ago, the strip, about two black children living in white suburbia, has slaughtered its share of sacred cows, eviscerating everyone from Condoleezza Rice and Strom Thurmond to 50 Cent and Ralph Nader. President Bush has been a frequent target. As a result, the strip has been suspended, banished to editorial pages and dropped from some newspapers (it currently appears in more than 300).

Trying to translate that incendiary spirit into great television will be a challenge, an expensive challenge at that. Cartoon Network pays Sony Pictures Television, producer of the series, an estimated license fee of $400,000 per episode. Add to that the millions the network has spent on marketing, including many billboards in New York and Los Angeles trumpeting the show's premiere on Nov. 6 in the late-night "Adult Swim" block, and "The Boondocks" becomes the most expensive show the network has made.

"We don't have a lot of money, so we decided that for this year, we're going to put every dime we have into 'Boondocks,' " said Mike Lazzo, senior vice president of programming and production at Cartoon Network.

It remains to be seen if the anime series will become a phenomenon like Dave Chappelle's "Chappelle's Show" or sputter and die like "The PJs," Eddie Murphy's animated series about life in the projects. (Both shows satirized African-American culture and the culture at large.) "I figure it will either be a big hit or a massive flop; there is no room for in between," Aaron McGruder, creator of "The Boondocks," said one recent afternoon in the windowless warehouse space that serves as his studio here. "I work presuming horrendous failure and I do my best to prevent that."

Like the strip, the series follows the adventures of Huey Freeman, a 10-year-old militant with the soul of a Black Panther, and his baby brother, Riley, a cornrow-sporting potty mouth who idolizes gangsta rappers. The boys live in the suburbs with their stern but loving grandfather. Played by John Witherspoon (best known for his role as a sartorially challenged father in the 1992 romantic comedy "Boomerang"), Granddad is partial to corporal punishment and exercising in the nude. The actress Regina King ("Jerry Maguire") gives voice to both Riley and Huey. (The singer Alicia Keys was originally cast as Huey but dropped out citing scheduling conflicts.) Unlike the strip, Mr. McGruder said, the series will not be topical. "We cannot make a show that's going to be dated," he explained. "It has to survive into syndication and be watchable in 10 years."

Still, it would not be an Aaron McGruder production if it were not controversial and "The Boondocks" is sure to inspire heated conversation. One episode imagines the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. emerging from a coma, only to find that his pacifism doesn't play well in the post-Sept. 11 world. No longer a beloved national hero, he lands on the cover of Time magazine as a traitor. Even worse, a film about him, directed by Oliver Stone and starring Cuba Gooding Jr., tanks. Another episode has a self-loathing black man praying to get into white heaven. In "Guess Hoe's Coming to Dinner," Granddad dates a young gold digger who turns out to be a prostitute. And an episode poking fun at the R&B singer R. Kelly, who is facing child pornography charges, ends with Huey declaring, "We all know the nigga can sing, but what happened to standards?"

Mr. McGruder is unapologetic about the use of the N-word in his series - it appears more than 20 times in one episode, even. "I use it," he said. "A lot of young black people use it and a lot of old black people use it. At a certain point it starts to feel fake if you're not using it."

The furor over the word "speaks to how juvenile racial discourse is in this country," Mr. McGruder said.

Mr. Lazzo said he was not bothered by the provocative content of "The Boondocks." "I'm 47 and I grew up with 'All in the Family' and I remember that show made people laugh and think and that's what good television does," he said.

Still, Mr. McGruder is willing to make certain concessions to more delicate sensibilities. When Sony executives asked that he heavily edit an episode that featured Oprah Winfrey being kidnapped by two thugs, he did not protest. "They were scared of Oprah, which is O.K.," he said. "We should all have a healthy fear of Oprah."

"Oprah has the power to lay waste to entire industries with a mere utterance," Mr. McGruder said, quoting one his show's characters. "That's a power that you have to respect. And ultimately I respect it."

That doesn't mean he's gotten softer, though; he views the very suggestion as a kind of trap. "The same people that question me about getting soft to get me to say something crazy about Oprah will turn around and be like, 'Look at what this crazy fool just said about Oprah!'"

Standing just over 5 feet 7, Mr. McGruder is a slight, handsome man with small features and slim hands. Dressed in jeans, a Stevie Wonder T-shirt and horn-rimmed glasses, the cartoonist could easily pass for a bookish high school sophomore. Unlike his alter ego, Huey, whose face is all furrowed brow and self-righteous scowl, Mr. McGruder is quick to smile. One afternoon this month, he was brimming with opinions. Mr. McGruder on Senator Barack Obama's chances of ever sitting in the Oval Office: "He's not even going to be able to smell the White House unless he's a member of Skull and Bones or any of those close-knit secret societies that really aren't so secret anymore." Regarding the rapper Kanye West's recent remark that Mr. Bush doesn't care about black people: "If you're black and you don't know that by now, you're in trouble. I think it's time that poor whites start realizing that George Bush doesn't care about them either and he will let them die too."

Those who work with Mr. McGruder say that his passion for politics is infectious. "Since meeting Aaron," Ms. King said, "I've started listening to NPR. He inspires you to want to go out and learn more."

Born on the South Side of Chicago and raised in the middle-class suburb of Columbia, Md., an area that bears more than a passing resemblance to the bucolic Boondocks, Mr. McGruder began drawing as a child. In high school he listened intently to the black nationalist-inspired rhymes of rap groups like Public Enemy, X-Clan and Poor Righteous Teachers. During his years as an African-American studies major at the University of Maryland, Mr. McGruder said, he flirted with the idea of becoming "a spokesman for the people." The life expectancy of that gig, however, proved an insurmountable deterrent. "Usually if you're doing that job well, you're dead by 34, which is not in my plans," he said.

Instead, he set out to create a spokesman who could not be assassinated: an adorable, opinionated, elementary school kid with not-so-elementary insights about race, class and culture. The first person to put "The Boondocks" in print was a college student named Jayson Blair, who was then editor of The Diamondback, the campus paper at the University of Maryland. Mr. McGruder proudly recalled persuading Mr. Blair to pay him $30 per strip, $17 more than his fellow cartoonists were receiving at the time. Years later, Mr. Blair, hired by this paper and then resigned after fabricating stories, would be lampooned in the strip he help put on the map. "You can actually look at Jayson Blair and say, 'Wow, you set black people back,' " Mr. McGruder said, shaking his head. "A lot of people are accused of that, but he actually did it."

"The Boondocks" went national in 1999 and its creator quickly became a personality. Books of his cartoons, like "Birth of a Nation" and "A Right to Be Hostile," soon followed.

This is not the first time Mr. McGruder has tried to turn his strip into a television show. From the fall of 2003 to the summer of 2004, he worked on a six-minute pilot for Fox. He described the process in a word: "hellish." "It was an incredibly difficult time for me," he said. "I was worked half to death all the time. I was a zombie. I was mean. I was miserable."

Mr. McGruder said he had seriously contemplated walking away from his strip. Or getting himself fired: "I didn't want to quit, but if they threw me out then I'm a martyr," he reasoned. As it turned out, however, the angrier and more frustrated he grew, the better his work got. "Going as far as I can with my own creative instincts has generally only paid off," he said with a rueful shrug.

When Fox passed on the show, Mr. Lazzo contacted the cartoonist and asked to look at the pilot. "It felt networky," Mr. Lazzo recalled. "Aaron's voice felt watered down." Because cable is less restrictive, he said, "we were able to say, 'Make the show you want to make, Aaron.' "

These days it is not uncommon for Mr. McGruder and his illustrator, Carl Jones, to write a week's worth of comic strips in one day. "We're juggling so many things," Mr. Jones said. "You have no idea how crazy it can get." Already Cartoon Network has asked Mr. McGruder for another season of scripts. When not working on the strip or the series, Mr. McGruder is fiddling with a movie script about black fighter pilots in World War II.

Friends and family rarely see him. "Sometimes he works so hard, he gets sick," Ms. King said. "Like a big sister, I'm always asking Aaron if he's getting any sleep." The answer, he said, is not yet. "I made the decision early on that I was going to work myself to death now, so that I don't have to wait until 65 to enjoy my life," Mr. McGruder said. "I'm trying to live well, and there is no freedom in America if you're economically bound to the system."

October 31, 2005

Editorial

The House's Abuse of Patriotism

In the national anguish after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress rushed to enact a formidable antiterrorism law - the Patriot Act - that significantly crimped civil liberties by expanding law enforcement's power to use wiretaps, search warrants and other surveillance techniques, often under the cloak of secrecy. There was virtually no public debate before these major changes to the nation's legal system were put into effect.

Now, with some of the act's most sweeping powers set to expire at the end of the year, the two houses of Congress face crucial negotiations, which will also take place out of public view, on their differences over how to extend and amend the law. That's controversy enough. But the increasingly out-of-control House of Representatives has made the threat to our system of justice even greater by inserting a raft of provisions to enlarge the scope of the federal death penalty.

In a breathtaking afterthought at the close of debate, the House voted to triple the number of terrorism-related crimes carrying the death penalty. The House also voted to allow judges to reduce the size of juries that decide on executions, and even to permit prosecutors to try repeatedly for a death sentence when a hung jury fails to vote for death.

The radical amendment was slapped through by the Republican leadership without serious debate. The Justice Department has endorsed the House measure, and Representative James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Judiciary Committee chairman, who is ever on the side of more government power over the individual, is promising to fight hard for the death penalty provisions.

There are now 20 terrorism-related crimes eligible for capital punishment, and the House measure would add 41 more. These would make it easier for prosecutors to win a death sentence in cases where a defendant had no intent to kill - for example, if a defendant gave financial support to an umbrella organization without realizing that some of its adherents might eventually commit violence.

Any move to weaken the American jury system in the name of fighting terrorism is particularly egregious. But the House voted to allow a federal trial to have fewer than 12 jurors if the judge finds "good cause" to do so, even if the defense objects. Under current law, a life sentence is automatically ordered when juries become hung on deciding the capital punishment question. But the House would have a prosecutor try again - a license for jury-shopping for death - even though federal juries already exclude opponents of capital punishment.

The House's simplistic vote for another "crackdown" gesture can only further sully the notion of patriotism in a renewed Patriot Act.

 October 25, 2005

Op-Ed Contributor

The Lap of Luxury

By ELISABETH EAVES

Paris

IT'S happened again. Another innocent man who just wanted a few lap dances claims to have been victimized by an exclusive New York strip club, Scores.

This time it's an executive from Missouri named Robert McCormick, who, treating himself and friends, ran up a $241,000 bill at Scores on his corporate American Express card two years ago. American Express is now suing him for refusing to pay up. Several other unhappy customers have also sued Scores over large bills.

These don't seem to be cases of bill padding. American Express sought signed receipts from the club before bringing its suit against Mr. McCormick. In the most recent suit against Scores, meanwhile, the plaintiff's justification is simply that he was drunk when he signed his bills.

Nevertheless, the Manhattan district attorney's office is investigating allegations of overcharging at Scores. To which I say, as someone who has worked in strip clubs, you've got to be kidding - there's no such thing as "overcharging" in this industry.

Does Christian Dior "overcharge" when it sells a handbag for $13,000? That depends on how you look at it. If you see the handbag as a few pieces of stitched leather, the price is grossly inflated. If you see it as a source of heady self-worth - a passport to an exclusive club - then it's hard to say what price would be too high.

This is the economic logic relied on by purveyors of luxury goods. It's not about the utility of the product. It's about making the customer feel as if he has arrived.

Strip clubs, particularly high-end ones like Scores, provide a luxury service. That $3,000 price tag on a bottle of Champagne isn't just for the beverage; it's part of the price of the experience. Mr. McCormick probably didn't go to Scores strictly to see topless women, or even for the physical contact and potential sexual gratification of a lap dance. Both experiences can be had in simpler, cheaper ways.

Rather, he and his colleagues probably went because being surrounded by fawning, semi-naked, Champagne-flute-wielding women was for them a symbol of success. It's like hiring a chauffeured limousine: a taxi would get you there, but without the aesthetic experience.

When I worked in a Seattle peep show, I had a customer who told me his name was Excalibur and quietly slipped me his poetry. Part of my job, in that moment, was to make him feel like a Knight of the Round Table. This required only a show of curiosity and respect. He must have found those things hard to come by in the real world, though, because he paid me well to help spin the illusion.

With many customers, fawning is key. What a stripper sells is not her ability to dance or take off her clothes, but her ability to suspend the customer's disbelief.

If she is doing her job right, his bald spot and his mortgage cease to exist, and he enters an adolescent fantasy of sexual prowess, temporarily transformed into James Bond, Han Solo and Hugh Hefner all rolled into one. The dancers keep cooing and flattering until the money runs out. It's not duplicitous; it's what the patron signs up for.

I have little sympathy for these carping customers. Their complaints are the height of boorishness. It's acceptable to indulge your James Bond fantasies, but it's not acceptable, when the bill comes due, to remain convinced that you're James Bond. The dancers weren't in it for kicks.

Among strippers I worked with, the most dreaded customers were not the obese or the lame. Rather, we feared customers who thought they were exceptions to the rule. They were just handsome enough, or successful enough, to foolishly think that their own sex appeal was tip enough.

It's just this kind of guy who would backpedal on a strip club bill and go crying to the courts that he was hustled. Well, sure, the dancers hustled Mr. McCormick, but no more so than the occasional Mercedes dealer. Buyer's remorse is not an occasion to stiff the seller.

So, gentlemen, pay the bill. A reasonably priced lap dance is not a right.

Elisabeth Eaves is the author of "Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping."

October 16, 2005

As Young Adults Drink to Win, Marketers Join In

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

PHILADELPHIA - The bar is packed, the floor is wet, and dozens of glassy-eyed young people are squeezed around tables trying to lob Ping-Pong balls into cups of beer.

It is the final round of a beer pong championship, sponsored by a maker of portable beer pong tables, and all across the bar, as one team scores points, the other happily guzzles beer.

"It's awesome," said Chris Shannon, 22, a senior at Drexel University here. "If you win, you win. If you lose, you drink. There's no negative."

Drinking games have been around since Dionysus. But a whole new industry has taken off around them, making the games more popular, more intense and more dangerous, according to college administrators who say the games are just thin cover for binge drinking.

Some colleges have tried to ban the games on campus, but that has just driven them elsewhere. Many bars now hold beer pong tournaments like the one in Philadelphia, and some even have leagues and keep baseball-like statistics.

Urban Outfitters stocks a popular beer pong kit called Bombed and boxed sets of rules for other games. In January, thousands of players are expected at the first World Series of Beer Pong, sponsored by a beer pong accessories company and held on the outskirts of - where else? - Las Vegas.

This past summer, Anheuser-Busch unveiled a game it calls Bud Pong. The company, which makes Budweiser, is promoting Bud Pong tournaments and providing Bud Pong tables, balls and glasses to distributors in 47 markets, including college towns like Oswego, N.Y., and Clemson, S.C.

Bud Pong may soon expand into more markets, said Francine Katz, a spokeswoman for Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc.

"It's catching on like wildfire," Ms. Katz said. "We created it as an icebreaker for young adults to meet each other."

Beer companies like Anheuser-Busch have made promoting "responsible drinking" a matter of corporate philosophy, partly as an answer to criticism that they market to youth.

But Ms. Katz said Bud Pong was not intended for underage drinkers because promotions were held in bars, not on campuses. And it does not promote binge drinking, she said, because official rules call for water to be used, not beer. The hope is that those on the sidelines enjoy a Bud.

On the ground, though, it may be a different story. At the Esso Club near Clemson University, Jessica Twilley, a bartender, said she had worked at several Bud Pong events and had "never seen anyone playing with water."

"It's always beer," Ms. Twilley said. "It's just like any other beer pong."

When told about the Esso Club, Ms. Katz responded that her information was that the club used water, and that distributors were instructed to "conduct retail promotions responsibly."

Budweiser is not the only brand using games to sell alcohol. One recent Miller campaign featured spin the bottle, and its distributors have promoted beer pong tournaments as well, although the company says it has no corporate strategy to market the game.

Henry Wechsler, director of the College Alcohol Study at the Harvard School of Public Health, said he was "aghast that companies who posture themselves as promoting responsible drinking promote drinking games, which by their nature involve heavy drinking."

As for the Bud Pong water defense, Dr. Wechsler said: "Why would alcohol companies promote games that involve drinking water? It's preposterous."

Drinking games seem to be most popular among college students, and according to four recent academic studies that surveyed more than 6,000 students nationwide, 50 percent to 80 percent play them.

Some games are based on luck and revolve around cards and dice. A few are simply organized binges, like "Edward 40-Hands," in which players tape 40-ounce malt liquor bottles to their hands. Others, like flippy cup and beer pong, take a little skill.

In beer pong, each team stands at the end of a table in front of a triangle of cups partially filled with beer. Players pitch the ball into the other team's cups. When a player sinks the ball, the other team must chug the beer and remove the cup from the table. When a side runs out of cups, it loses.

Students say they enjoy the games because they are a fun way to compete, socialize and drink, and often the only consequence of playing is a hangover. But alcohol prevention experts say the games do sometimes lead to alcohol poisoning and drunken-driving crashes and may increase the chance of a woman being sexually assaulted.

Thomas J. Johnson, a psychologist at Indiana State University, has published seven articles on student alcohol use in peer-reviewed journals since 1998 and has studied thousands of students who play drinking games. He found that 44 percent of men who played said that they did so to sexually manipulate other players. Twenty percent said they had done things after playing a drinking game that could be defined as sexual assault.

In many games, the more you lose, the more you drink, which leads to losing more and drinking more, a cycle that can spiral out of control.

"When you play drinking games, you're not really in charge of how much you drink," said Brian Borsari, a psychologist at the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown University. "Your drinking is at the whim of other players, which can be very dangerous, especially if you're trying to fit in."

Charles R. Pollock, vice president for student affairs at Bucknell University, said many students were taking their cues from increasingly outrageous Web sites. Drinking game sites feature rules, merchandise and pictures of wild parties, with some students naked and others hugging the toilet.

"It's a race to be the most extreme," Mr. Pollock said.

Four years ago, Bucknell banned drinking games on campus. But last year, the university changed its approach and dropped the ban as part of an effort to encourage students to take more personal responsibility for their behavior.

Kenyon College in Ohio did the same. "It became apparent the ban wasn't going to work," said Shawn Presley, Kenyon's director of public affairs. "And we didn't want to drive the games underground."

But more and more colleges, including the University of Pennsylvania, Fairfield University in Connecticut and Georgetown, are sticking to strict policies that punish students for playing.

"We didn't want to be silent on an issue that really bothers us," said Todd A. Olson, Georgetown's dean of students.

Illinois has tried to prohibit drinking games in bars, and this August, the Jersey Shore town of Belmar banned drinking games outdoors after residents complained.

Still, drinking games have become a staple of many young people's social lives, essentially the warm-up, or preparty, to a long night.

On a recent Friday evening at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Kyle Field, 22, and his friends were watching television in an off-campus house when the clock struck 8:30.

"Beer thirty!" someone yelled. "Let's drink!"

The quiet gathering suddenly morphed into a symphony of beer-swilling action: one student pulled out a table, another pumped the keg, another filled cups.

The group split into two teams of five, including some women, and started playing flippy cup, a relay race in which players gulp down an inch of beer in a cup and then try to flip the cup over so it sticks upside down.

Mr. Field warned a struggling teammate, "Don't be the weak link!"

After he won his game and drifted off to the bars, Mr. Field confided, "The point of drinking games is to get as lit as possible."

But, he added, friends make sure no one drinks too much or chugs alone.

The description of this scene distressed the university's chancellor, Walter V. Wendler. "If someone could show me one positive benefit of these games, I'd host one tonight," Dr. Wendler said. "But there isn't. It's a way to abuse alcohol. Period."

Beer pong seems to be the drinking game du jour.Legend has it that the game, which can be played with paddles and is also known for some reason as Beirut, started years ago at a Dartmouth College fraternity party. Now bars hold matches every week, often working with beer distributors who help advertise the events and supply the prizes.

While the Miller Brewing Company has no companywide campaign for beer pong, its distributors are getting in on the action. Aimar McQueeney, a sales representative for a Miller distributor in Smyrna, Ga., said Miller supplied her with prizes and "Miller girl" models for a four-day beer pong tournament in Atlanta in May, which drew hundreds of people.

"It's the perfect demographic," Ms. McQueeney said. "It's mostly college kids pounding pitchers of beer."

Coors Brewing Company says it frowns on beer pong. "The game is generally associated with overconsumption," said Kabira Hatland, a spokeswoman, though she acknowledges Coors distributors might be promoting the game, too.

The recent tournament in Philadelphia was sponsored by Bing Bong, a company that sells portable beer pong tables for $150. In the past year, Bing Bong has sold more than 2,000.

"It was something a lot of people needed," said Tom Schmidt, the 27-year-old chief executive. He added that he wanted to turn the game into a socially acceptable barroom sport, like darts.

"I realize that beer pong was born out of binge drinking," Mr. Schmidt said. "But I want to make sure it's not synonymous anymore with binge drinking. Without the proper rules and regulations, we could get banned."

Stop the Campaigning
The Bush White House Is in Trouble Because of Its Disdain for Governing

By Lewis L. Gould
Sunday, October 30, 2005; B01

AUSTIN

There is an old theatrical adage that tragedy is easy, comedy is hard. For politicians, that could be reformulated as: Campaigning is easy, governing is hard. The Bush administration, long disdainful of governance as an exercise for wimps and Democrats, now finds its political and legal troubles mounting while its time-tested campaign mode falters. The divide between campaigning and governing has existed for all administrations, of course, and was particularly and painfully evident during the darker moments of Bill Clinton's second term. But under the rule of George W. Bush and his outriders -- Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Andrew Card -- the disconnect between the pleasures of campaigning and the imperatives of governing has become acute.

Continuous campaigning, dating back to Richard Nixon and perfected in succeeding decades, has evolved into the approach of choice. Stage-managed events, orchestrated by masters of spin, provide the appearance of a chief executive in charge of the nation's destiny. Some presidents -- Ronald Reagan, Clinton and the younger Bush -- were or are masters of the art. Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were less adept on the hustings and more at home with policies, diplomacy and personnel choices. Their performances varied but their impulse was toward making the government run, not creating the illusion of an executive in perpetual motion.

The Bush team brought its campaign skills from the 2000 presidential contest into the White House and never stopped its reliance on these methods. Along with that style went the assumptions rooted in the Republican DNA of the president and those around him: The Democratic Party is not a worthy partner in the political process; repealing key elements of the New Deal is but a prelude to overturning the accomplishments of the Progressive Era; and negotiations with a partisan opponent are not opportunities to be embraced but traps to be avoided.

The other part of the recipe for Bush's success was an unstated but evident identification of the president himself with the nation at large. Accompanied by a willing array of incense swingers in the White House, Bush attained (particularly in the minds of his base) a status that embraced both the imperial and in some cases the quasi-deified. Why then become involved in the details of running a government from the Oval Office? Appoint the right Republicans to key posts, and the federal government would run itself while providing an unending source of patronage for supporters, contracts for friendly businesses and the sinews of perpetual political dominance. It seemed to cross no one's mind that the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- a post where dealing with extraordinary crises is all in a day's work -- might need to be super-competent rather than just a superintendent.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq insulated the president from questioning whether his government was operating effectively. In the first term, criticism and contrary advice could be (and often was) labeled as mere partisan sniping, as happened with such figures as former National Security Council counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and, more notably, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

During a campaign, attacking the opponent's motives is part of the cut and thrust of politics, and so the substance of charges can be finessed with the claim that their author had worked for the opposition or had some other hidden agenda. In the case of Wilson, the attack on him fit with the principle of rapid retaliation so characteristic of a campaign. Less thought was apparently devoted to whether revealing the identity of his wife, a CIA employee, served the interests of wise and prudent governance. Whatever the outcome of the charges filed Friday against Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the apparent blurring of the line between campaigning and governing is evident in the indictment returned by the federal grand jury.

Meanwhile, many in the administration -- and in the media -- simply turned their minds away from engaging a dissent from a Bush policy on its merits if the critic wasn't a Republican. That a critic might be a Democrat and correct -- or a Republican outsider offering a useful counterpoint -- seemed to be a contradiction in terms for people around Bush.

This strategy worked well during the first term and culminated in a larger margin of victory last November. Once the president was no longer a candidate for office, he turned to the issue of a mandate for change with his seemingly abundant political capital. Remaking the Social Security system loomed as the big domestic goal of the second term. Hammering out an actual proposal ("Negotiating with ourselves" in the president's parlance) was not to the taste of inveterate campaigners. Campaign first, program last seemed the slogan to be followed. So the president made numerous speeches before captive audiences touting the virtues of change in Social Security as a platonic ideal, but refused to provide a specific plan. Since popular enthusiasm for an alteration in retirement policy failed to materialize, the president was left with a campaign in search of a governing objective.

Hurricane Katrina, and the political and atmospheric storms that followed, underscored the deficiencies of continuous campaigning as a response to real-life crises. Getting assistance to storm victims is a matter of logistics, competent administrators and coordinated planning. A presidential visit to express sympathy for those who have lost homes, jobs and loved ones is a one-day nostrum that leaves the basic situation unchanged, no matter how many times the chief executive jets in with concern. When the government does not work, it does not matter how many officials are told they have done "a heck of a job." Citizens see for themselves that their government is absent and help is not on the way.

The Bush presidency will end in three years, but the larger problems revealed by his faltering second term will remain to plague the nation. There is as yet no meaningful evidence that the president, Congress and the media are prepared to abandon their infatuation with continuous campaigning as an alternative to actual operation of the federal government. Imagine an occupant of the White House who thought about issues, anticipated crises and sacked officials who didn't measure up to the demands of an urgent problem. If that worthy person failed to fly Air Force One around the country and feed the appetite of the media for attractive visual moments, there would soon be cries that the president was out of touch, aloof and in political danger.

But government, while it has elements of a show and entertainment, is not at bottom about pleasing today's cable TV audiences. The president needs to take the long view about the national interest beyond the demands of a political campaign or the continuous electioneering so common to the modern White House. The dilemma is that paying attention to those considerations guarantees a short tenure in office. George W. Bush may have a presidency now that is moving from embattled to dysfunctional. The problems that his administration represents go deeper than the perils of a special prosecutor, a restive political base or an invigorated opposition. If in 2008 the United States simply chooses a practitioner of continuous campaigning who shares Bush's disdain for governing, the process will repeat itself and another chief executive will encounter problems retaining the trust and confidence of the electorate.

Somehow, the political system needs to restore governing to its proper place in the conduct of American government. Whether this means more one-term presidencies, a more rigorous screening process for national candidates, a more involved citizenry and a more aggressive press -- or at least a press less influenced by artifice -- cannot be discerned at this moment of potential disaster for the Bush administration.

But it's important to realize that the underlying issues are systemic, not to be cured by different incumbents of either party. George W. Bush's current troubles offer perhaps a final chance to mature as a nation and to understand we must ask more of our leaders than a television screen filled with reassuring images while the hard work of actual governing lapses into disuse and decay.

Author's e-mail: lgould@austin.rr.com

Lewis Gould is the author of books on the presidency, politics and Congress. His latest, "The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate" (Basic Books), will be published next week.

The Realist Who Got It Wrong

By Charles Krauthammer
Sunday, October 30, 2005; B07

Now that Cindy Sheehan turns out to be a disaster for the antiwar movement -- most Americans are not about to follow a left-wing radical who insists that we are in Iraq for reasons of theft, oppression and empire -- a new spokesman is needed. If I were in the opposition camp, I would want a deeply patriotic, highly intelligent, distinguished establishment figure. I would want Brent Scowcroft.

Scowcroft has been obliging. In the Oct. 31 New Yorker he came out strongly against the war and the neocon sorcerers who magically foisted it upon what must have been a hypnotized president and vice president.

Of course, Scowcroft's opposition to toppling Saddam Hussein is neither surprising nor new. Indeed, we are now seeing its third iteration. He had two cracks at Hussein in 1991 and urged his President Bush to pass them both up -- first, after Hussein's defeat in the Persian Gulf War, when the road to Baghdad was open, and then, days later, during a massive U.S.-encouraged uprising of Kurds and Shiites, when America stood by and allowed Hussein to massacre his opponents by the tens of thousands. One of the reasons for Iraqi wariness during the U.S. liberation 12 years later was the memory of our past betrayal and suspicions about our current intentions in light of that betrayal.

This coldbloodedness is a trademark of this nation's most doctrinaire foreign policy "realist." Realism is the billiard ball theory of foreign policy: The only thing that counts is how countries interact, not what's happening inside. You care not a whit about who is running a country. Whether it is Mother Teresa or the Assad family gangsters in Syria, you care only about their external actions, not how they treat their own people.

Realists prize stability above all, and there is nothing more stable than a ruthlessly efficient dictatorship. Which is why Scowcroft is the man who six months after Tiananmen Square toasted those who ordered the massacre; who, as the world celebrates the Beirut Spring that evicted the Syrian occupation from Lebanon, sees not liberation but possible instability; who can barely conceal a preference for Syria's stabilizing iron rule.

Even today Scowcroft says, "I didn't think that calling the Soviet Union the 'evil empire' got anybody anywhere." Tell that to Natan Sharansky and other Soviet dissidents for whom that declaration of moral -- beyond geopolitical -- purpose was electrifying and helped galvanize the movements that ultimately brought down the Soviet empire.

It was not brought down by diplomacy and arms control, the preferred realist means for dealing with the Soviet Union. It was brought down by indigenous revolutionaries, encouraged and supported by Ronald Reagan, a president unabashedly dedicated not to detente with evil but to its destruction -- i.e., regime change.

For realists such as Scowcroft, regime change is the ultimate taboo. Too risky, too dangerous, too unpredictable. "I'm a realist in the sense that I'm a cynic about human nature," he admits. Hence, writes Jeffrey Goldberg, his New Yorker chronicler, Scowcroft remains "unmoved by the stirrings of democracy movements in the Middle East."

Particularly in Iraq. The difficulties there are indeed great. But those difficulties came about not because, as Scowcroft tells us, "some people don't really want to be free" and don't value freedom as we do. The insurgency in Iraq is not proof of an escape-from-freedom human nature that has little use for liberty and prefers other things. The insurgency is, on the contrary, evidence of a determined Sunni minority desperate to maintain not only its own freedom but its previous dominion over the other 80 percent of the population now struggling for theirs.

These others -- the overwhelming majority of Iraq's people -- have repeatedly given every indication of valuing their newfound freedom: voting in two elections at the risk of their lives, preparing for a third, writing and ratifying a constitution granting more freedoms than exist in any country in the entire Arab Middle East. "The secret is out," says Fouad Ajami. "There is something decent unfolding in Iraq. It's unfolding in the shadow of a terrible insurgency, but a society is finding its way to constitutional politics."

Ajami is no fool, no naif, no reckless idealist, as Scowcroft likes to caricature the neoconservatives he reviles. A renowned scholar on the Middle East, Ajami is a Shiite, fluent in Arabic, who has unsentimentally educated the world about the Arab predicament and Arab dream palaces. Yet. having returned from two visits to Iraq this year, he sports none of Scowcroft's easy, ostentatious cynicism about human nature, and Iraqi human nature in particular. Instead, Ajami celebrates the coming of decency in a place where decency was outlawed 30 years ago.

It is not surprising that Scowcroft, who helped give indecency a 12-year extension in Iraq, should disdain decency's return. But we should not.

Office Stereotyping and How It Stifles

By Amy Joyce
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 30, 2005; F01

A few weeks ago, Neil French, a well-known advertising executive, told 300 people that women "don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to." He elaborated, saying that women are apt to "wimp out and go suckle something."

Just about the same time, a new survey announced that gender stereotypes still exist in the workplace.

Well, duh.

Of course they do. But when comments such as French's become public, it's easy to still be surprised and to think: "Is this really 2005?"

It is, and gender stereotypers is who we are. Men and women both.

According to a study released this month by the women's research and advocacy organization Catalyst, men consider women to be less adept at problem-solving. That sort of skill is, of course, pretty necessary to be an effective leader. And since men continue to sit in most chief executive spots throughout the country, any "male-held" stereotype will only continue to be in place, the study points out.

Stereotyping is a major reason "behind the gender gap in leadership," said Ilene H. Lang, president of Catalyst. The data, she said, "points a finger directly at problem-solving, which is a key leadership behavior. Senior men perceive that women are not as good problem-solvers as men."

Which is, for women and those men who care to see women in top positions, a problem.

Catalyst's study asked senior-level executives to rate the effectiveness of women and then men leaders on 10 key leadership behaviors.

The study found that both men and women viewed women as better at stereotypically feminine caretaking skills, such as supporting and rewarding. And both genders said men excel at more conventionally masculine taking-charge skills, such as influencing superiors and delegating responsibility.

In other words, men run the organization and women support them. That's just the way most of us still think, right?

But why, after all this time, and after all these years of listening to the facts and figures about the lack of women in top positions, are we still putting women in their stereotypical places?

"I think the laws have been won. Legally, we almost have it all," said Alison Stein, project director of the Younger Women's Task Force at the National Council of Women's Organizations.

But, she said, those laws don't change the subtle discrimination that women face in the workplace.

That could be partly because women are shown falling into these stereotypes in life outside the office, too.

If a woman and man have a child, the school still often asks for the mother's name as caretaker. Check out any commercial for cleaning supplies: It's the woman doing the vacuuming. (Sorry, Mom, but that's not the case in my house.)

A commercial for child's cough medicine? It's the mom tending to the child, bedside, in the middle of the night.

But in reality, it's increasingly both parents who do the day-care picking up, the cooking and the cleaning. Generation X fathers are asking to leave work early to hit their children's soccer games, and an increasing number of married women are the sole breadwinners. (Even one of the main characters on the popular television show "Desperate Housewives" went off to work this season as her husband decided to stay at home with the kids.)

In recent years, a notable number of Gen X women (who have been told by their mother's generation they can have it all) opted out of the workforce to raise a child. But considering the fact that gender stereotypes are still so prevalent in the workplace, researchers and women's advocates question the reasons some (of course not all) of the working women decide to stay home full time.

"You have to ask yourself, if that many women are choosing to do that, is it really a choice?" Stein said.

One has to wonder, indeed.

The fact is, women hold 50.3 percent of all management and professional positions. But only 7.9 percent of Fortune 500 top earners and 1.4 percent of Fortune 500 chief executives are women.

Is that because women aren't ambitious or willing and eager to take over the top spots? Or is it because they aren't groomed for positions beyond middle management or human resources or other "typically female" jobs because they are the caregivers of the office, not the leaders?

During the data-collecting process of the Catalyst study, the head researcher discussed the report with a few chief executives. One told the researcher that he thought the idea of diversity or inclusion was to bring someone different to the team or table. So, he proudly told the researcher, he liked to hire women because they are better at team-building and supporting.

The researcher pointed out that was exactly the kind of stereotyping that stops female advancement, even though that was not his intent. "Diversity and inclusion are important, but don't presuppose what they are going to bring," she told him. "Bring them in because of them, not because of assumptions about what they might be good at."

Or not good at, as far as people such as French (who has since resigned from his job at WPP Group) are concerned.

"I think he is a walking example of the kind of stereotyping we're talking about," Lang said. "He's saying because women are mothers, they can't be good leaders. And we know from all our research, that's just not the case. Women are ambitious, just as ambitious as men."

Forget the research. Just ask the woman sitting next to you what she expects out of her work life. It might be a little enlightening for all of us.

 

the good word
The Word We Love To Hate
Literally.
By Jesse Sheidlower
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 6:56 AM ET

When I introduce myself as a dictionary editor to a stranger, I can usually count on a few things. The stranger will say, "Oh, I'll have to watch how I talk in front of you." The stranger will ask me about why some word like bling was put into The Dictionary (as though there's only one). And then the stranger will complain about a pet usage peeve, some error perpetrated by members of a disliked group—sportscasters, say, or teenagers, or Americans.

Recently, strangers I meet seem particularly peeved by people who use literally to mean figuratively (the ones who say things like "he literally exploded with rage"). Even strangers I don't meet are fixated—two of them run a reasonably informed blog devoted to "tracking abuse of the word 'literally.' "

As is often the case, though, such "abuses" have a long and esteemed history in English. The ground was not especially sticky in Little Women when Louisa May Alcott wrote that "the land literally flowed with milk and honey," nor was Tom Sawyer turning somersaults on piles of money when Twain described him as "literally rolling in wealth," nor was Jay Gatsby shining when Fitzgerald wrote that "he literally glowed," nor were Bach and Beethoven squeezed into a fedora when Joyce wrote in Ulysses that a Mozart piece was "the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat." Such examples are easily come by, even in the works of the authors we are often told to emulate.

How did literally come to mean the opposite of what it originally meant? The earliest uses of literally were "in a literal manner; word for word" ("translated literally from Greek") and "in a literal sense; exactly" ("He didn't mean that literally").

By the late 17^th century, though, literally was being used as an intensifier for true statements; the Oxford English Dictionary cites Dryden and Pope for this sense. Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Autobiography, "I did not think that I should ever literally stand before Kings, which however has since happened." Jane Austen, in Sandition, wrote of a stormy night that, "We had been literally rocked in our bed." In these examples, literally is used for the sake of emphasis alone.

Eventually, though, literally began to be used to intensify statements that were themselves figurative or metaphorical. The earliest examples I know of are from the late 18^th century, and though there are examples throughout the 19^th century—often in prominent works; to my earlier examples could be added choice quotations from James Fenimore Cooper, Thackeray, Dickens, and Thoreau, among many others—no one seems to have objected to the usage until the early 20^th century. In 1909, Ambrose Bierce included the term in Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, offering the following sentence—"His eloquence literally swept the audience from its feet."—as suspect. "It is bad enough to exaggerate," he wrote, "but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable." Revered usage writer H.W. Fowler complained in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage that, "We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that ... we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate." The examples usually stigmatized are the ones in which literally modifies a cliché or a metaphoric use that is already highly figurative.

Why, though, did this usage of literally suddenly come under such fire? It is not the first, nor will it be the last, instance of a word that is used in a seemingly contradictory way. There are many such words, and they arise through various means. Called "Janus words," "contranyms," or "auto-antonyms," they include cleave ("to stick to" and "to split apart"), dust ("to remove dust from" and "to sprinkle dust upon"), moot ("able to be discussed; arguable" and "purely theoretical") and peruse and scan (each meaning both "to read closely" and "to glance at hastily; skim"). Usage writers often criticize such words as potentially confusing and usually single out one of the meanings as "wrong," the "right" meaning being the older one, or the one closer to the word's etymological meaning, or the one more frequent when 18^th-century grammarians began to examine language systematically. It's not always possible to predict when something will be condemned: While the "skim" sense of peruse is often criticized, the "skim" sense of scan—the main current sense—is rarely noticed, even though it's a recent development, quite different from the meaning the word had for centuries.

In the case of literally, the "right" meaning is said to be "exactly as described; in a literal way," because that's what the base word literal is supposed to mean. In fact, the literal meaning of literal would be something like "according to the letter," but it's almost never used this way. "He copied the manuscript literally" would be one possible example. So when we use literally to refer to something other than individual letters—to whole words, or to thoughts in general—we are already walking down the figurative path, and if we end up with people eating curry so hot that their mouths are "literally on fire," how surprised can we be?

The trouble with usage criticism of the sort leveled at literally is that it's typically uneven: Parallel uses are frequent and usually pass unnoticed. For every peruse there's a scan (see my essays on these terms here and here); for every hopefully there's a clearly; and for every literally there's a really: Or did you expect people to complain when really is used to emphasize things that are not "real"? When Meg, in Little Women, moaned that "It's been such a dismal day I'm really dying for some amusement," she wasn't the one dying.

The one sensible criticism that can be made about the intensive use of literally is that it can often lead to confusing or silly-sounding results. In this case, the answer is simple: Don't write silly-soundingly. Some usage books even bother to make this point about literally. Then again, most usage advice could be reduced to one simple instruction: "Be clear." But that would be the end of a publishing category.

Jesse Sheidlower is editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary.

 

frame game
Why Catholics?
The political advantages of Catholic justices.
By William Saletan
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 1:46 AM ET

Three hours after President Bush nominated Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, a conservative "Catholic-based advocacy organization" fired a warning shot at liberals. "Given the likelihood of a vigorous debate, we remain steadfast in our insistence upon a fair and dignified process free of any attack on Judge Alito's Catholic faith and personal beliefs," said the group's president. "Early attacks by left wing interest groups are particularly worrisome."

As evidence of the early attacks on Alito's faith, the group pointed to ... nothing. The only basis for alleging an anti-Catholic inquisition was the uproar over Alito's defense of abortion restrictions. This is the GOP's new victim shtick: Nominate pro-lifers to the courts; brag that they're simply upholding abortion laws favored by a majority of voters; and when liberals complain, accuse them of attacking a religious minority.

A decade ago, when Bill Clinton was president, Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition pioneered this shtick. "Anti-Christian bigotry," they cried at every run-in of church and state. I can't proselytize my employees? Anti-Christian bigotry. I can't pray over the school public-address system? Anti-Christian bigotry. But the shtick rang hollow, because 80 percent of the country was Christian. Bigotry against a powerful majority made little sense. As conservatives captured power—Congress in 1994, the White House in 2000—the victim pose grew less and less plausible.

Not to worry. Two years ago, Republicans found a new way to play victim. They were trying to get Bill Pryor, the attorney general of Alabama, confirmed to the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals. Pryor had called Roe v. Wade an "abomination" that had led to "slaughter." Such rhetoric, according to Democrats, suggested that Pryor was incapable of subordinating his moral convictions to constitutional law. A well-connected conservative lobby, the Committee for Justice, fired back with ads depicting a warning on a courthouse door: "Catholics need not apply." The ads accused senators of attacking Pryor's " 'deeply held' Catholic beliefs."

In truth, no opposing senator had mentioned Pryor's Catholicism. The inference was drawn purely from questions about his sharp moral rhetoric. Republican senators took the campaign further, suggesting that criticism of judges who supported abortion restrictions was inherently anti-Catholic. Unlike the old charge of anti-Christian bigotry, anti-Catholic bigotry sounded plausible. For one thing, less than one-fourth of the U.S. adult population was Catholic. For another, Catholics have historically been excluded from high office in this country. Of the first 54 U.S. Supreme Court justices, only one was Catholic. Not until the 1890s did others arrive, and not until 1960 did we elect the first Catholic president. Twenty years ago, only one justice was Catholic. The rest were Protestants.

In 1986, all that began to change. President Reagan appointed Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy to the court. The first President Bush appointed Clarence Thomas along with David Souter, an Episcopalian. President Clinton appointed two Jews: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. The second President Bush appointed John Roberts and nominated Alito. If Alito is confirmed, Catholics will hold five of the court's seats, and the Protestant contingent will have dwindled from eight to two. The notion that bigotry is keeping Catholics off the court is becoming numerically preposterous. Politically, that's no accident. Catholic voters have become the top target of Republican courtship.

At the same time, the Catholic justices appointed in the last two decades (I'm excluding William Brennan, who was appointed nearly 40 years ago) have become the court's most reliable votes for abortion restrictions. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health (1990), Hodgson v. Minnesota (1990), and Rust v. Sullivan (1991), Scalia and Kennedy upheld the restrictions in question. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Scalia and Thomas voted to overturn Roe. Kennedy thwarted them, but this was the only major case in which any of the three justices disappointed pro-lifers. In Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), all three voted in vain to uphold a ban on "partial-birth" abortions. In the next year or two, when that ban (now in federal form) returns, it will probably be considered by five Catholic justices instead of three. And judging from the records of Roberts and Alito, it will probably be upheld.

I'm not suggesting all Catholics vote a certain way, any more than all Jews or Protestants do. You can factor out a lot of the discrepancy based on sponsorship: Since 1960, all four Jews appointed to the court have been nominated by Democrats, while all five Catholics have been nominated by Republicans. But even among the Republican-nominated appointees, there's an acute Catholic-Protestant gap. Since the Nixon years, Republicans have appointed seven Protestants (Warren Berger, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, and Souter) and five Catholics (Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito). Six of the seven Protestants have defied pro-lifers. Only one of the five Catholics has done so, and in only one of six major cases.

Of course, neither Roberts nor Alito has voted on abortion in the Supreme Court. But each has made his position clear as an appellate judge or advocate. If you're a pro-lifer, it's hard to escape the feeling that among the potential nominees in a Republican administration, Catholics are more reliable. Maybe it's the frank language of moral revulsion in abortion-related opinions by Thomas and Scalia. Or maybe it's the fact that Roberts' wife worked with Feminists for Life. Or maybe it's the fact that Alito's mother tells reporters, "Of course he's against abortion."

Whatever it is, Catholics are clearly in vogue as reliable choices of this White House. Among the eight names circulated on Supreme Court shortlists this year, I count three known Catholics. One got the first open seat; another is getting the second. If you're pro-life, the fact that these nominees are Catholic doesn't mean they'll vote the way you want. But it does make it easier to label anyone who challenges their abortion writings a bigot—and to cash in that label at election time.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129120/

surfergirl
Geraldo at Large
The ageless reporter's new syndicated tabloid show.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, at 8:19 PM ET

There's some scary programming lined up for this week: NBC's triple back-to-back reruns of Medium, AMC's 200-hour Monsterfest marathon, or the special one-hour edition of A&E's goth-magician show, Criss Angel Mindfreak. But no Halloween lineup could be spookier than this afternoon's premiere of Geraldo at Large. This new syndicated half-hour tabloid show (check the Web site for times and stations in your area) will run live daily in the time slot previously occupied by the recently canceled A Current Affair.

Why is Geraldo scary? Not because he represents, as he once did, the vanishing point of sleaze for television news. Au contraire: After four decades of bombastic, pathos-laden, aggressive reporting, Rivera has become, as he puts it in this affable interview, the "rock and roll graybeard" of newscasting. His influence has trickled down enough to be detectible even in well-regarded journalists like Anderson Cooper (whose personal asides and abrasive interactions with officials in his coverage of Katrina and the South Asian tsunami bear a distinctly Geraldian stamp). No, Geraldo is scary because he doesn't age, either as a human being or as a brand. Like Oscar Wilde's eternally youthful Dorian Gray, the now 62-year-old Rivera is eerily identical to his mid-'80s incarnation as a pulp reporter and talk-show host. The television news landscape has changed around him, crumbling and rebuilding itself again and again, but Geraldo abides, immutable and changeless as a vampire, his bottle-brush moustache firmly in place (his vow to shave it if Michael Jackson was convicted was never put to the test). In the opening frames of Geraldo at Large, posed in front of a house blown to splinters by Hurricane Katrina, Rivera might as well still be standing in Al Capone's vault in 1986, next to two empty gin bottles and a pile of dirt.

From the first day out, Geraldo at Large doesn't bother with a mission statement, just gets right in the thick of things with a report on "Katrina Predators"—the 2,000 convicted sex offenders who fled their parole officers in the aftermath of the storm. "Where are they hiding?" asks Geraldo. "Should you be worried?" Silly question, that: As Rivera goes on to gravely inform us, "this peril, ladies and gentlemen, is not just theoretical." Not much is theoretical on At Large—the show traffics in the most primitive affects of news reporting: outrage, pathos, and above all, fear. Chopper crash in Atlanta. Stalled roller coaster in Tampa. All are noted in passing, in the glancing style of a pre-commercial bumper from a cable news show, but after the initial tease, never mentioned again.

As with the half-hour daily entertainment magazines (Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight), Geraldo at Large manages to manufacture a vague atmosphere of news-ness that sweeps you pleasantly along, as Rivera questions New Orleans cops about the perverts-on-the-lam story ("Does it make you angry, Sarge?"), or encourages a legal analyst to speculate on the Pamela Vitale murder case ("Was there a Satanic carving in this woman's back? Is there anything about the occult or cults that's going on here?"). As a closing sign-off, Geraldo kisses two fingers, then holds them up in a "V for Victory" sign—is this his traditional gesture of farewell? A search for the phrase "Geraldo finger kiss"—possibly the kinkiest phrase I've ever Googled—yielded nothing.

In another recent interview (Geraldo may have his limits as an interviewer, but he's a fantastic interview subject), Rivera had this to say about the critical bias against him: "Bill Moyers could urinate on a tree and the writers would say, 'Oh, how elegant.' ... I could get an interview with Jesus, and they'd say, 'He was too hard on him, too soft on him, look at the way he was chummy with him.' " Maybe so, but if PBS had Bill Moyers peeing on a tree up against Fox's Geraldo/Christ exclusive, I know where I'd tune in. In fact, with November sweeps just under way, Fox might want to give that some thought.

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129169/

explainer
How Many Ways Can You Say "Lie"?
The difference between perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, at 6:19 PM ET

On Oct. 28, a special prosecutor indicted now-former vice-presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for deceiving federal investigators and a grand jury. Among the charges against him: two counts of perjury, two counts of making false statements, and one count of obstruction of justice. What's the difference between these crimes?

In this particular case, very little. The perjury counts allege that Libby "knowingly made a false declaration" to the grand jury when asked about conversations he'd had with Tim Russert, Matthew Cooper, and other reporters. The false-statements counts say he "did knowingly and willfully" make "materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent" statements to FBI agents about conversations with Russert and Cooper. And the obstruction count alleges that Libby made "materially false and intentionally misleading statements" to the grand jury about conversations he'd had with Russert, Cooper, and Judith Miller.

How is perjury different from making false statements? To commit perjury, you have to be under oath, and you have to knowingly fib about something that's relevant to the case at hand. (Your statement must also be literally false—lies of omission don't count.) In contrast, you can break the false-statements law by lying about an issue that's "within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government," even if you're not under oath. The false-statements law is worded so broadly that it can apply to almost any interaction a private citizen has with the government; in practice, it's typically used against people who lie to federal investigators or who file false documents with government agencies.

It gets more complicated. In Libby's indictment, prosecutors used the term "perjury" in a colloquial sense. In fact, he is charged with breaking 18 U.S.C. § 1623—or, the "false declarations" law—rather than 18 U.S.C. § 1621, aka the perjury law. The two are very similar, but false declarations tend to be easier to prove. For one thing, perjury convictions must be based on evidence from at least two witnesses; false declarations can be proved without any witnesses. Prosecutors can show that Libby made "false declarations" simply by showing that his statements to the grand jury were inconsistent. (As with perjury, false declarations must be knowingly made and about an important issue.)

What about obstruction of justice? You're guilty of obstruction if you do anything that hampers an ongoing case—destroying documents, intimidating witnesses, or lying under oath, for example. (Some courts have ruled that lying under oath is not sufficient for conviction on its own, though.) As with the other charges, prosecutors must show that an act of obstruction has significant bearing on the proceeding. According to the Supreme Court, it must have the "natural and probable effect" of interfering with the case.

When a witness lies under oath about an important topic, it almost always interferes with a prosecutor's case. That's why charges of perjury (or false declarations) often come with charges of obstruction. In the Libby indictment, the obstruction count refers to the same conduct as the perjury counts, with one or two extra examples thrown in—like the fact the he allegedly lied about Miller, too. The added material might represent an attempt on the prosecutor's part to show that Scooter worked out a broad scheme to deceive the grand jury.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Sara Sun Beale of Duke University and Stuart Green of Louisiana State University.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129115/

moneybox
Tax 'em Till They Turn Red
The Bush tax panel's plan to screw Democrats.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, at 5:02 PM ET

The president's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform will present its proposals tomorrow, and the bipartisan commission seems to have reached the following conclusion about how to improve revenue collection: Screw the blue states.

In the name of simplification and fairness, the panel is proposing to do away with the dreaded Alternative Minimum Tax, a pernicious levy that effectively increases taxes on millions of people each year by robbing them of some deductions for property taxes and state and local income taxes. According to the Treasury Department, some 4 million Americans will pay the tax in 2005. If Congress doesn't extend a law that limits the reach of the AMT, it could hit 21 million people next year. Abolishing the AMT would seem to be good news for blue-staters, since it falls largely on people who live in Democrat-dominated areas.

But to do away with the AMT, the reformers must replace the expected $1.2 trillion in revenue it would throw off over 10 years. And, as David Rosenbaum reported in an Oct. 19 New York Times article (which you now have to pay to read online), the panel came up with two simplification plans. Both would severely limit the size of the home mortgage deduction. Now the deduction applies to up to the first $1 million of a mortgage. The panel's plans would cut it down so that it would only apply to loans that are the "maximum that the Federal Housing Administration will insure." The sum varies by market, but the maximum is $312,895 and the national average is $244,000. Both plans would eliminate deductions for interest on home-equity loans or mortgages for vacation homes. And both would eliminate the deduction for state and local taxes paid, including property taxes.

On the one hand, gutting the mortgage-interest deduction seems progressive, because the deduction now favors the well-off: The mortgage deduction gets more generous the more expensive the home you buy, and the more income you have. And property taxes are generally a function of home size and value. On the other hand, regional variations in home prices and state and local taxes would heavily skew the burden of these tax changes onto blue-staters. Who has the most to lose if the mortgage deduction is capped at $313,000, and if you can no longer deduct local taxes from your taxable federal income? People who live in places where (a) real estate is expensive; (b) states and/or cities tax income; and (c) property taxes are high, to support local schools and services. In other words, people who live in California, Seattle, the entire Atlantic seaboard from Maryland up to Maine, and well-off suburbs of Chicago. If you live in a $300,000 McMansion in a state with no income tax, like, say, Texas or Wyoming, these changes aren't likely to affect you at all. But if you just bought a $700,000 house in Takoma Park, Md., you're screwed three ways.

Many of the people writing and talking about these issues suffer from one of two kinds of myopia. There's blue-state myopia. Classic sufferers: Moneybox, Moneybox's editors, many of Moneybox's readers. These are people who think you have to pay seven figures to get a nice house with a nice yard in a nice suburb, or who think its normal to borrow $800,000 to buy a two-bedroom condo in a dicey neighborhood.

Then there's red-state myopia. Connie Mack, the Republican ex-senator who is co-chairman of the tax advisory panel, is a classic sufferer. When asked by the New York Times Magazine whether limiting the deduction could "hurt the middle class and discourage people from buying, say, a $500,000 house?" he responded: "It depends on how you define middle class. I don't think that there would be a large percentage of middle-income families that would have a $500,000 house." Mack has obviously never spent much time in Staten Island, N.Y., where Vito Fossella, one of the few remaining Republican members of Congress in the Northeast, has already come out against the panel's ideas. In the high-population, high-income states—the states that, by the way, produce a disproportionate share of federal income taxes—plenty of middle-class people live in $500,000 homes.

In both instances, the myopia can be cured by a simple exercise. Go to Realtor.com, punch in your ZIP code and a price point, then punch in another ZIP code in a different part of the country and the same price point, and check out the astonishing difference in what you get.

To a degree, the AMT payers have only themselves to blame. People choose to live in places that have high property values and higher taxes, and for some pretty rational reasons. They like the beach. Schools tend to be better in places where property taxes are high. There may be a wider variety of high-paying jobs available. What's more, they've generally chosen to back the wrong horses over the last several years. Bush didn't seriously compete on the Atlantic seaboard or on the West Coast in 2000 or in 2004. And the Republicans who remain—feeble moderates like Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island and Rep. Chris Shays in Connecticut—aren't part of the in crowd. Is it any surprise that the changes recommended by a commission appointed by the president would probably have the worst effects on Democratic areas?

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

 

the hollywood economist
The World According to Hollywood
Pushing the reality envelope.
By Edward Jay Epstein
Updated Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, at 3:29 PM ET

On Sept. 4, 2005, the New York Times printed the following intriguing correction:

An article last Sunday about film piracy included incorrect revenue data supplied by the Motion Picture Association of America. Hollywood's global revenue in 2004 was $44.8 billion, not $84 billion. Of the total, $21 billion, not $55.6 billion, came from sales of DVDs and Videos.

The correction was the result of a Times reporter, Timothy L. O'Brien, asking the Motion Picture Association of America to furnish the combined global take of the major studios in 2004. The six major studios submit their revenue reports to the MPAA, which, in turn, compiles the total revenue received from theatrical distribution, video sales (now mainly DVD), and television licensing. These data are then circulated among top executives in the All Media Revenue Report. (Click here to read the actual report.)

Instead of supplying the New York Times with the actual numbers, the MPAA sent bogus figures. Hollywood's DVD revenue alone was inflated by more than $33 billion, possibly to make the MPAA's war against unauthorized copying appear more urgent. Of course, the reporter had no way of knowing these impressive-sounding numbers were inaccurate and published them in an otherwise accurate story on film piracy. Such are the perils of Hollywood reporting. Since Hollywood is an industry dedicated to perpetrating illusion, its leaders often assume they have license to take liberties with the factual elements that support the movies they make. This practice is euphemistically described by marketing executives as "pushing the reality envelope."

The way in which Hollywood crosses the boundary between the make-believe and the real world takes myriad forms. Consider, for example, 20^th Century Fox's creation of an "Extraterrestrial Highway" in Nevada. In 1996, in preparation for a publicity campaign for the movie Independence Day, Fox executives persuaded Nevada Gov. Bob Miller to officially dedicate Nevada's Highway 375 as a safe haven for extraterrestrials who landed their spaceships on it. Fox then placed a beacon on the highway near the town of Rachel, Nev., pointing to "Area 51"—which it described in a news release as the place where the U.S. military operates "a top secret alien study project." To make sure that the story received wider circulation than just Fox News, the studio arranged for busloads of reporters to see the putative periphery of "Area 51." Even though there is no such military base or "Area 51," the "Extraterrestrial Highway" resulted in hundreds of news stories about alien visitors. Not only did this help publicize Independence Day, but it fed into the long-standing paranoid fantasy about government machination to conceal space invaders from the public. (A fantasy that Steven Spielberg, for one, has brilliantly mined in such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, Men in Black, and the miniseries Taken.)

Hollywood has pushed the reality envelope in other creative fashions, ranging from a studio creating a fake corporate Web site, as Paramount did with the Manchurian Global Corporation for its remake of The Manchurian Candidate, to counterfeiting a film critic, as Sony Pictures did with the nonexistent "David Manning." It's a given that studios will alter the off-screen lives of stars, as in the case of the unmarried actor Raymond Burr, whose official biography included two imaginary dead wives and a dead child. There's also the common practice of scripting fake anecdotes for stars to recite on talk shows, as, for example, Lucy Liu's vivid description of her co-actress Drew Barrymore clinging to the hood of a speeding car going about 35 miles an hour without a safety cord during the making of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.

Nor is it surprising that the culture of deception is so deeply entrenched in Hollywood. The industry, after all, derives much of its wealth and power from its ability to get audiences to suspend disbelief in movies and television programs—even so-called reality shows. Further, to realize full profitability, these illusions must be convincing enough to be sustained in other products—such as videos, theme-park rides, games, and toys—for years, if not decades. So, pushing the reality envelope is simply seen by the entertainment press and the players themselves as just part of show biz.

Edward Jay Epstein is the author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood. (To read the first chapter, click here.)

 

jurisprudence
Trick and Treat
Sammy Alito is the whole bag of goodies.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, at 2:26 PM ET

Well, boo.

It's magic. Almost as if the whole Harriet Miers debacle never happened, President Bush has rapidly retreated from his judicial preferences of last month. The urgency of filling Sandra Day O'Connor's seat with another woman has been erased; the importance of balancing the too-scholarly court with a practicing attorney has evaporated; and the need to put an outsider onto the court is long forgotten. Suddenly George Bush's vision for what the high court most needs maps perfectly with that of the movement conservatives who sank the Miers nomination. Never has a pander felt so good.

In the true spirit of Halloween, a month of vicious attacks from the right has been papered over, and this nomination is dressed up as if the last one never occurred.

So rededicated is President Bush to keeping his promise to elevate a Clarence Thomas or an Antonin Scalia to the high court, that he picked the guy in the Scalia costume. Alito offers no surprises to anyone. If explicit promises to reverse Roe v. Wade are in fact the only qualification now needed to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, Alito has offered that pledge in spades: In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey—which later became the case that reaffirmed Roe, Alito dissented when his 3^rd Circuit colleagues struck down Pennsylvania's most restrictive abortion regulations. Alito felt that none of the provisions proved an undue burden, including a requirement that women notify their spouses of their intent to have an abortion, absent narrow exceptions. Alito wrote: "The Pennsylvania legislature could have rationally believed that some married women are initially inclined to obtain an abortion without their husbands' knowledge because of perceived problems—such as economic constraints, future plans, or the husbands' previously expressed opposition—that may be obviated by discussion prior to the abortion."

Sandra Day O'Connor rejected that analysis, and Casey reaffirmed the central holding of Roe. Then Chief Justice Rehnquist quoted Alito's dissent in his own.

You'll hear a lot about some of Alito's other decisions in the coming days, including his vote to limit Congress' power to ban even machine-gun possession, and his ruling that broadened police search powers to include the right to strip-search a drug dealer's wife and 10-year-old daughter—although they were not mentioned in the search warrant. He upheld a Christmas display against an Establishment Clause challenge. His prior rulings show that he would raise the barriers for victims of sex discrimination to seek redress in the courts. He would change the standard for analyzing race discrimination claims to such an extent that his colleagues on the court of appeals fretted that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, would be "eviscerated" under his view of the law. He sought to narrow the Family and Medical Leave Act such that states would be immune from suit—a position the Supreme Court later rejected. In an antitrust case involving the Scotch tape giant 3M, he took a position described by a colleague as likely to weaken a provision of the Sherman Antitrust Act to "the point of impotence."

And there's a whole lot more where that came from.

Best of all for Bush's base, Alito is the kind of "restrained" jurist who isn't above striking down acts of Congress whenever they offend him. Bush noted this morning: "He has a deep understanding of the proper role of judges in our society. He understands that judges are to interpret the laws, not to impose their preferences or priorities on the people."

Except, of course, that Alito doesn't think Congress has the power to regulate machine-gun possession, or to broadly enforce the Family and Medical Leave Act, or to enact race or gender discrimination laws that might be effective in remedying race and gender discrimination, or to tackle monopolists. Alito thus neatly joins the ranks of right-wing activists in the battle to limit the power of Congress and diminish the efficacy of the judiciary. In that sense Bush has pulled off the perfect Halloween maneuver: He's managed the trick of getting his sticky scandals off the front pages, and the treat of a right-wing activist dressed up as a constitutional minimalist.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129106/

books
Beam Me Up, Godly Being
Is alien abduction real—or a creation of Hollywood?
By Karen Olsson
Posted Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, at 2:07 PM ET

A few years ago, Harvard University could claim not one but two sets of researchers studying, of all things, alien abduction. Naturally—this being academia—a sharp divide separated the two camps. As chronicled by the New York Times Magazine and Psychology Today, members of the psychology department alleged that people's memories of extraterrestrial transport and unsavory probing could be explained by normal science—i.e., that controlled experiments were able to come up with a list of terrestrial factors that added up to an "abduction experience." Over at Harvard Medical School, meanwhile, maverick psychiatrist John Mack had interviewed abductees and concluded that their experiences belonged to a mystical realm that science couldn't explain. Abductees' stories had convinced him that a "universal intelligence" resides in the cosmos, as he wrote in his 1994 best seller Abduction. The dispute at Harvard was a reflection, however baroque, of a long-standing divide within psychology, one dating back at least to the days of another Harvard professor interested in the supernatural, William James. On the one side you had the experimentalists who designed tests to support their claims about mind and memory; on the other, a clinical researcher primarily interested in interpreting subjects' narratives rather than the results of lab experiments.

It seems the aliens have since left the campus: Mack died last year, while Susan Clancy, the psychology department researcher who originally interviewed and tested abductees, accepted a fellowship in Nicaragua. Now, though, Clancy has published a short, popular account of her research, Abducted: How People Come To Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens. The funny thing about Clancy's book is that it begins by trumpeting the virtues of science over superstition but ends up veering into Mack territory. Not that she thinks her subjects were truly nabbed by diminutive intergalactic sex researchers—far from it. But in trying to make sense of their experiences, she ultimately relies on their personal narratives more than on the results of her laboratory tests, and she credits those narratives as meaningful, even if not literally true. Finally, she wants to say something general about the nature of belief. Abduction memories reflect peoples' desire to find the purpose of life: "Being abducted may be a baptism in the new religion of this millennium." E.T., meet Rick Warren.

Is there any consensus about the psychology of alien abduction? Prior research has yielded a few insights, some of which are hardly surprising: People who believe they've been abducted tend to be fantasy-prone and eccentric, for one. On the other hand, they don't tend to be crazy. Most abductees are regular Joes, with decent jobs; though they have varying levels of education, they are predominantly white and middle class. In addition to an appetite for fantasy, researchers have identified several mental phenomena that often accompany a person's belief that she's been abducted: One is sleep paralysis, a relatively common experience during which the brain and the body desynchronize briefly before waking up. The body remains paralyzed (as it is during REM sleep) while the mind enters a state between sleeping and waking, in which some people hallucinate. The theory goes that a subset of the hallucinators, primed by popular culture to believe in visits from otherworldly kidnappers, interpret their experiences as abductions.

The second contributing factor is the mind's capacity to create false memories, particularly under hypnosis—which is how many abduction "memories" have been retrieved. In fact, it was the study of false memory and trauma that led Clancy to the aliens. She started graduate school in the mid-'90s, as psychologists were duking it out over the validity of "recovered" memories, and signed on to assist two professors with a study of sexual-abuse victims. The professors gave subjects lists of words to memorize—"sugar," "candy," "sour," "bitter"—that were all related to another word, "sweet," that was not on the list. People who had allegedly recovered memories of sexual abuse while in therapy, it turned out, were more likely than a control group to remember "sweet" as having been on the list—that is, to produce false memories in the lab.

Of course, this did nothing to prove whether the women's abuse memories were themselves false, and Clancy and her colleagues were roundly attacked by victims' advocates and other scientists. So, the researchers went looking for another set of subjects—people whose memories were assumed by most people to be false—and they wound up with alien abductees. Again, their work revealed that abductees were also more likely to misremember words than a control group. Alas, they were attacked on the same grounds: How dare you question the veracity of other people's firsthand experiences?

It's impossible to disprove these experiences. But what's interesting is how many seem to have been largely shaped by popular culture. Speculation about extraterrestrial beings is ancient, but "alien abduction" as we know it originated in the 1960s, after a New Hampshire couple named Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have been kidnapped by extraterrestrials. Betty was a fan of movies like Invaders From Mars. Her story inspired a best-selling book, a TV movie, and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Many more people began to report abductions, which in turn led to more books and movies, which led to more people claiming to have been abducted—in a sense, it was Hollywood that had abducted them.

In a chapter of The Varieties of Religious Experience called "The Reality of the Unseen," William James attested to the existence of a "sense of reality" distinct from the other senses, in which "the person affected will feel a 'presence' in the room, definitely localized, facing in one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone; and yet neither seen, heard, touched, nor cognized in any of the usual 'sensible' ways." As evidence, James produces several firsthand accounts from people who were visited by "presences" late at night. These have a familiar ring: They sound just like stories from alien abductees, minus the aliens. Objects of belief, James says, may be "quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended."

Clancy doesn't quite grant reality status to aliens, but on the other hand, Abducted devotes much more space to abductees' stories than to her lab results. That's probably at least in part because the stories—both those that the abductees tell and the ones she tells about her research—are much more entertaining than research protocols; this is a book aimed at a general audience. But it's also because narrative is a better vehicle for understanding why people believe what they do than a set of lab results is. When it comes to the ambitious project of explaining the why and wherefore of "weird beliefs," Clancy's book doesn't tell us too much more than James did: People believe in this stuff because it seems real to them, more real than any reasoning about sleep paralysis or the unreliability of memories produced during hypnosis.

But Clancy goes on to assert, muddily, that people conjure up aliens to satisfy religious desires (unlike James, who did not grant religion status to perception of "presences"). People's imagined contacts with aliens, she speculates, arise from "ordinary emotional needs and desires. ... We want to believe there's something bigger and better than us out there. And we want to believe that whatever it is cares about us, or at least is paying attention to us. ... Being abducted by aliens is a culturally shaped manifestation of a universal human need." To conclude that alien abduction is a religious experience seems a stretch. (Admittedly, I have not yet been contacted.) And it also seems a cop-out, since Clancy is not religious and didn't study the religious tendencies of her subjects. Instead, her research hints at—but does not ultimately tell us much about—the way in which pop culture permeates even our subconscious minds. However you want to categorize alien abduction, the fact that pop culture schlock fills our dreams may be the eeriest part of all.

Karen Olsson lives in Austin, Texas. Her novel, Waterloo, has just been published.

 

jurisprudence
Alito v. O'Connor
How the nominee tried to restrict Roe.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, at 1:11 PM ET

In 1991, when Judge Samuel Alito became a mini-hero of the far right in the abortion battles, the fate of Roe v. Wade was far less settled than it is now (or, at least, than it has been until now). Alito's role wasn't to pen a manifesto—his partial dissent in the 1991 abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey is appropriately legalistic. Still, Alito's opinion in that case would have limited the right to abortion more severely than Sandra Day O'Connor, whom he will replace if confirmed, has ever been willing to do. And Alito's split with O'Connor involves not only abortion but also marriage. She worried about wives who might be victims of domestic violence. He put first the rights of husbands to know what their wives are doing.

Casey challenged a Pennsylvania law that required a woman to receive extensive information about the fetus and the abortion procedure, to wait 24 hours, to sign a statement of informed consent, and—most controversially—to tell her husband about her intention to have an abortion. A panel of three appeals judges on the Third Circuit upheld all the regulations except for the spousal notification. Alito, who was on the panel, dissented from the part of the ruling that struck down the requirement that women tell their husbands before obtaining an abortion.

Alito agreed with the other two judges on the Casey panel that the test for the constitutionality of Pennsylvania's law was whether it imposed an "undue burden" on a woman's abortion decision. O'Connor had introduced the undue burden test in a series of earlier opinions. To figure out whether the Pennsylvania law fell on the safe or foul side of her line, Alito emphasized examples from earlier O'Connor opinions that expressed greater disapproval of abortion. He pointed out that she had once written that an undue burden "has been found for the most part in situations involving absolute obstacles or severe limitations on the abortion decision." O'Connor had also noted that other laws found to be unconstitutional had "criminalized all abortions except those necessary to save the life of the mother," he continued. Alito played down O'Connor's rejection of a Minnesota law that required girls to tell both their parents before having an abortion, without providing for a "judicial bypass" that would allow the girls to go instead before a judge to explain why they didn't want to tell their parents. Alito pointed out that O'Connor said two-parent notification was OK, as long as the judicial bypass came with it.

"Taken together," Alito wrote, "O'Connor's opinions allow for abortion regulations unless they prohibit abortion, give someone veto power over the mother's decision, or have 'the practical effect of imposing 'severe limitations.' " Requiring women to tell their husbands before having an abortion would do none of those things, Alito concluded. Then he explained why, in his view, Pennsylvania had a legitimate interest in requiring women to tell their husbands: "The Pennsylvania legislature could have rationally believed that some married women are initially inclined to obtain an abortion without their husbands' knowledge because of perceived problems—such as economic constraints, future plans, or the husbands' previously expressed opposition—that may be obviated by discussion prior to the abortion," Alito wrote.

When Casey reached the Supreme Court, the case became famous for upholding the core of Roe v. Wade. It's the decision in which O'Connor, David Souter, and Anthony Kennedy acted as a keep-the-peace triumvirate and voted with John Paul Stevens and Harry Blackmun, Roe's original author, to preserve it in the name of stability and respect for precedent. At the same time, Casey tossed the Roe "trimester framework" that allowed for more intrusive regulation of abortion as a pregnancy progressed. In its place, the court substituted O'Connor's undue burden test, much as the Third Circuit panel in Casey had anticipated. Along, the way, the court also upheld Pennsylvania's 24-hour waiting period, its informed-consent requirement, and its rule that women had to hear all about the growth and development of their fetuses.

But the court rejected Alito's narrow reading of what sort of regulation constitutes an undue burden. O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter wrote: "A finding of an undue burden is a shorthand for the conclusion that a state regulation has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus." The definition of an undue burden on the right to abortion as a "substantial obstacle" wasn't exactly what the pro-choice crowd wanted to hear. But it was a lot better than the "severe limitation" prohibition, or veto, that Alito had proposed—definitions that would have allowed much more extreme restrictions.

The triumvirate also parted company with Alito entirely over his vision of the rights of husbands. The Constitution did not permit states to require wives to tell their husbands before getting an abortion, the Supreme Court majority found. The O'Connor-Souter-Kennedy opinion cited a lot of trial testimony about the prevalence and danger of domestic violence. Pennsylvania's law exempted wives who'd been raped by their husbands, but not those who'd been coerced into "sexual behavior other than penetration," the three justices noted. They continued:

In well-functioning marriages, spouses discuss important intimate decisions such as whether to bear a child. But there are millions of women in this country who are the victims of regular physical and psychological abuse at the hands of their husbands. Should these women become pregnant, they may have very good reasons for not wishing to inform their husbands of their decision to obtain an abortion. Many may have justifiable fears of physical abuse, but may be no less fearful of the consequences of reporting prior abuse to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Many may have a reasonable fear that notifying their husbands will provoke further instances of child abuse; these women are not exempt from [Pennsylvania's] notification requirement. Many may fear devastating forms of psychological abuse from their husbands, including verbal harassment, threats of future violence, the destruction of possessions, physical confinement to the home, the withdrawal of financial support, or the disclosure of the abortion to family and friends.

The dissenters, by contrast, adopted Alito's sunnier, husband-centered version of marriage. Then Chief Justice William Rehnquist (joined by Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Byron White), emphasized "a husband's interests in procreation within marriage and in the potential life of his unborn child." Rehnquist paid Alito the high compliment of directly quoting his words about the good that could come from requiring women to talk to their husbands. "This participation might in some cases result in a decision to proceed with the pregnancy," Rehnquist concluded.

That's Alito's star turn on the abortion stage thus far. It is direct evidence that Casey would have come out far differently if he, rather than O'Connor, had been on the court 13 years ago.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129096/

politics
Ready To Rumble
The Supreme Court battle we've all been waiting for.
By John Dickerson
Posted Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, at 12:24 PM ET

Finally, the battle everyone has been waiting for. Since summer, Washington has been preparing for a Supreme Court brawl, a chest-beating showdown filled with sweeping displays of pettiness, small-minded political bickering, and explosive camera-luring rhetoric. John Roberts turned out to be too qualified for that. Harriet Miers wasn't qualified enough. Now, with the nomination of Samuel Alito, both parties can revert to type.

The White House has picked a candidate the conservatives in the green room love. Right-wingers in the real world will like Alito, too. And only the pickiest of pundits will note that Bush has zigzagged wildly in his selection criteria. Gone are the bows to affirmative action and judicial diversity that were central to the Miers pick. Gone are the testimonies to the nominee's religious faith. The president did not mention that Alito is a Catholic or opine about the role of religion in his life, as he did with Miers. Alito's religious affiliation was not even mentioned in the official biographical materials the White House released this morning.

Bush also dropped his stated preference for someone from outside the judicial monastery. "He's one of the most accomplished and best judges in America," the president said today in the second sentence of his announcement. And never mind anti-elitism. The president noted that this son of immigrants had attended both Princeton and Yale.

Conservatives like political expediency when it's their interests that are being tended to. They may be needy these days, but they already seem to have forgiven Bush for wandering into the Miers cul-de-sac. The blast of e-mails supporting Alito as a strict constructionist was filling my inbox before breakfast. When Miers was nominated, approving testimonials started as a trickle and then stopped altogether. This time the e-mails have lots of chewy talking points, such as Alito's unanimous approval for the U.S. Court of Appeals by a Democrat-controlled judiciary committee and Senate in 1990.

The left is jumping on the case just as quickly. People for the American Way is boasting that it "will mobilize its 750,000 members and activists to wage a massive national effort to defeat Alito's nomination." It will "work closely with its coalition partners to educate Americans about the threats posed by this nomination." Those war rooms everybody readied during the summer look like they'll get some use after all.

Abortion-rights advocates on the left are focusing on Alito's vote to uphold the legal requirement that an adult woman must notify her husband prior to getting an abortion. His writings on church-state separation and gender-discrimination issues will provide secondary fodder for many liberals. Hostile voices are making regular use of Alito's nickname "Scalito," bestowed (not by President Bush) because of his supposed affinity to fellow Italian-American Catholic conservative Antonin Scalia.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid clearly had his Halloween script prepared. His press release challenging the Alito pick was issued before Bush had officially named him. "The nomination of Judge Alito requires an especially long hard look by the Senate because of what happened last week to Harriet Miers," Reid noted. "Conservative activists forced Miers to withdraw from consideration for this same Supreme Court seat because she was not radical enough for them. Now the Senate needs to find out if the man replacing Miers is too radical for the American people." By 10 a.m., Reid had sent reporters the phone number and access code to grab a sound bite of him saying that, "President Bush would leave the Supreme Court looking less like America and more like an old boys club."

With Roberts and Miers, Reid told his colleagues to restrain their partisan impulses. They needed to show that Democrats could evaluate a nominee soberly and thoughtfully. Wait and challenge Bush's nominee in the committee, Reid counseled his colleagues. This time, they're going to try to not let Alito in the door.

Though Reid whined that Bush didn't consult him after Miers withdrew, the Nevada senator has had his chance to make his views known. On Sunday, Reid was telling CNN that he had argued specifically against Alito in previous discussions with the White House. ''That is not one of the names that I've suggested to the president," he said. ''In fact, I've done the opposite. I think it would create a lot of problems."

While the Democrats erect obstacles, the White House is all frantic acceleration. Last night, aides moved up by a day Bush's visit to the Capitol to pay tribute to Rosa Parks. The president went before dinner so he could start his week with a bang, announcing Alito at 8 a.m. Tomorrow Bush will give a major speech on his plans to combat a possible outbreak of the avian flu. The White House is anxious to show the president in command and taking charge of an agenda and administration out of control. After spending the last several weeks on defense, Bush will have at least two days where he gets to decide what goes on the front page.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129101/

politics
Liar or Fool?
What's left of Scooter Libby's reputation.
By John Dickerson
Posted Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, at 11:02 AM ET

When Democratic wise man Clark Clifford was accused of acting as a front for the corrupt Pakistani bank BCCI, he admitted, "I have a choice of either seeming stupid or venal." Clifford had become famously invaluable to presidents by using his sharp mind to help them navigate the waters of Washington. That reputation for shrewdness made it hard for anyone to imagine him dumb enough to be duped.

Scooter Libby is in the same fix: His reputation is now a witness against him. Libby is known for his precision and intellect. I, like many of the reporters who now must cover his trial, remember the micrometer he used to measure our questions and assumptions. So it's hard to buy his lawyer's suggestion that Libby's misstatements to the FBI and grand jury were due to a shaky memory made shakier by "the hectic rush of issues and events at a busy time for our government." Yes, he worked 14-hour days handling tricky and disparate issues. But this isn't a matter of forgetting what you had for lunch. How Libby learned Plame's identity was a central question of a 22-month investigation. He had time to think this through.

Before Libby gets a chance to defend himself in court, he must suffer through speculation about the seemingly more plausible rationale for his actions: that he knew he should not have spoken about Plame and that to cover up having done so, he fashioned a fictitious narrative.

Two witnesses against him may be his former colleagues Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer. Based on what can be gleaned from the indictment and elsewhere, these two aides treated news of Plame's employment as if it were radioactive before it ever became a public issue. Their caution suggests that at the upper levels of the administration not only was Wilson's wife's identity known, but that it was also known that it was not for public distribution.

Karl Rove talked to only two reporters back in July 2003. That doesn't mean Patrick Fitzgerald can't still indict him for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or obstructing his investigation. But it does mean that whatever Rove was up to, he was being careful with that information. Rove could have reached scores of influential journalists with whom he has close relations. Yet he talked to only two reporters. And those reporters called him; he didn't dial around looking for a receptive stenographer.

More astonishingly, we learn from the Fitzgerald indictment that Ari Fleischer knew about Plame and didn't tell anyone at all. He walked reporters, including me, up to the fact, suggesting they look into who sent Wilson, but never used her name or talked about her position. Why not? It certainly would have been helpful for him at the time. His colleagues were savaging him at the time for bungling the response to Wilson's July 6 New York Times opinion piece. They blamed him for not sufficiently refuting the article. By leaking the Plame information, Fleischer could have discredited Wilson, muddied the story, and won back the affection of his complaining colleagues.

Fleischer and Rove each discussed Plame with Scooter. A tantalizing fact still hidden in Fitzgerald's briefcase is whether Libby in those conversations with Fleischer and Rove discussed disclosing Plame's identity.

Even Libby seems to have been using potholders when he talked about Plame in 2003. He didn't mention her to some of the reporters to whom he talked about Wilson and even in the cases where he did, he was vague. According to Judy Miller's account of her testimony, Libby said he thought Wilson's wife might work at the CIA. He offhandedly half-confirmed it to my former Time colleague Matthew Cooper only when Cooper brought it up. "Yeah, I've heard that too." he said.

Why was this fact important enough for Libby to risk discussing it at all? For the same reason administration critics zeroed in on FEMA Director Michael Brown's friendship with his predecessor Joe Allbaugh. When it was reported (incorrectly) that the two had been roommates in college, critics had a handy explanation of how someone as unqualified as Brown had nevertheless been promoted to head the disaster agency. Nepotism provided a quick way to hollow out Wilson's claims. It also fit with Libby's depiction of the CIA as an agency playing its own games rather than pursuing the facts in a cleareyed way.

The way Patrick Fitzgerald tells it, in the spring and summer of 2003, Scooter Libby was marinating in information about Joe Wilson's wife. He was also discussing her status with reporters. The subject of her CIA status shows up so many times in Scooter's world, Fitzgerald argues, that it became an indelible fact, impossible to forget, particularly for someone repeatedly asked to think hard about it under penalty of law.

To defend himself Libby will have to zero in on the various meetings in which he supposedly discussed Plame's identity with other officials. He'll either have to say he forgot what he was told, or he'll have to challenge his colleague's recollections of what was said. Or he'll have to say that Plame's name did come up but her status as a CIA agent, open or undercover, was unclear—and that only when he talked to reporters did he really learn where she worked for sure. Even if he beats the rap like, in the end, Clark Clifford did, one of those two halves of Libby's reputation is going to have to fall. He can have his meticulousness or his integrity—but he can't keep a reputation for both.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

faith-based
Hands Across Catholic America
Should churchgoers hold hands during Mass?
By Andrew Santella
Posted Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, at 6:29 AM ET

Not long ago, I heard a Catholic churchgoer complaining about a wave of inappropriate touching that had spread across so many American parishes. He wasn't talking about pederast priests and the sex-abuse scandal. What he had in mind was the way many Catholics have taken to holding hands in church while they recite the Lord's Prayer.

Hand-holding is the sort of thing that wouldn't draw a bit of notice in, say, an evangelical service. But we Catholics have a long history of arguing about the right ways to worship (Latin Mass or guitar Mass?). Certainly there are weightier issues facing Catholics: how to respond to the institutional failures revealed by the abuse scandal; who should be allowed to enter the priesthood. But nothing illuminates the divide between old-school Catholics and their more touchy-feely brethren quite like the postures and practices on display in church each week.

The official liturgical documents of the church neither condone nor condemn hand-holding; they don't speak to the topic at all. Nevertheless, the practice has spread, driven by the people in the pews and their parish priests. In many churches it has become standard practice for churchgoers to hold hands with their neighbors as they pray the Our Father, sometimes reaching across aisles and over pew-backs to do so. Hand-holders say the practice is all about community and fellowship and unity. (It's called the Our Father, they like to say, not the My Father.) But to some old-school Catholics, hand-holding detracts from the solemnity of the Mass and the sober mysteries of Catholic tradition. It's a step toward a more homogenized, less identifiably Catholic service—one that would fit in any suburban megachurch.

Old-schoolers and touchy-feelies clash over a whole range of questions that might be lumped together under the heading of worship etiquette: Is it all right to applaud church musicians during Mass? Should we stand or kneel after receiving Communion? And what's with these kids showing up for Mass in their soccer uniforms? The divide over worship etiquette is clear enough that Catholics have their own version of the red state/blue state meme: They talk about whether the Mass should be a vertical or horizontal experience. Touchy-feelies go horizontal, making the Mass increasingly about community and fellowship within the congregation. They hold hands, then they shake hands, and often take time out at the start of Mass to introduce themselves to the person in the pew next to them. Old-schoolers want to restore the Mass's vertical orientation—the focus on the transcendent and divine. They chant in Latin and pray solo over rosaries.

Hand-holding has established itself in many parishes. But the old-schoolers are striking back. The Catholic society Adoremus, for example, defends old-style notions of Catholic piety and aims to restore a more sober vibe to the Mass. The traditionalists are heartened by the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI, an acknowledged fan of Gregorian chant and other traditions mostly lost in the shuffle after Vatican II. One of Adoremus' founders, Joseph Fessio, once studied under then-Professor Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) at the University of Regensburg in Germany and has been called by Garry Wills Benedict XVI's "man in America."

Of course, most Catholics are neither vehemently touch-feely nor vehemently traditional. I'm not a big fan of hand-holding and have even complained about it in print. To me, it smacks of enforced good cheer and saccharine singalongs. But the trouble with being against hand-holding is that it puts you in league with the church's most ultra-orthodox flat-Earthers. It's a dilemma: Hold hands and give up a bit of the traditional Catholic solemnity, or forsake your neighbor's hand for a rosary and take refuge in the practices of the past. It's a choice between retrenchment and assimilation.

That's pretty much the choice facing Catholics on the weightier questions about the church's future as well. Questions like whether priests can someday marry will be settled by the church's hierarchy. But so far, the call on whether or not to hold hands has been left to the people in the pews. The choices we make about holding hands and other points of worship etiquette may not be as binding as a papal bull. But they help articulate the faithful's vision of the church.

Andrew Santella writes from Illinois. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Commonweal, and GQ.

 

culturebox
America's Waistline
The politics of fat.
By Laura Kipnis
Posted Friday, Oct. 28, 2005, at 5:28 PM ET

In the war on fat, fat isn't just winning, it's crushing the opposition. A new study reports that in the course of a lifetime, 9 out of 10 men and 7 out of 10 women are going to become overweight. The CDC says that a third of the country is currently obese. This puts a large portion of the nation's population in an unenviable predicament, since antipathy toward the fat, it's frequently remarked, is the last sanctioned form of bigotry. But bigotry is traditionally the plight of minorities, and the fat are fast becoming a majority. So, is America's spreading waistline at least a plus for anti-fat-discrimination efforts?

Perhaps. What is clear is that not all fat citizens are obediently jumping on the diet bandwagon: A growing number are organizing to demand that society transform its bodily ideals, instead of agreeing that they should try to transform their bodies. The best-known of the fat activist groups is the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), but there are dozens of others, from the Fat Underground, which devotes itself to disrupting Weight Watchers meetings with pro-fat guerrilla theater, to rabble-rousing zines like Fat!So?, "for people who don't apologize for their size." Read though these Web sites and manifestos and you encounter a political movement in the making, one that a lot of us overfed Americans may soon be thinking about joining.

As in any rights movement, the rhetoric is a mixture of self-empowerment credos and anger. The latter is directed at the diet industry for exploiting the fat (to the tune of $46 billion a year), at society for its ongoing cruelty to the fat, and at the medical establishment for providing condescending substandard care to the fat. A particularly incendiary topic is weight-loss surgery (stomach stapling or more radical measures like rerouting the intestine). Activists regard such procedures as a human rights abuse akin to female genital mutilation. They also frequently cite contrarian strands of medical research, some suggesting that fat really isn't a health hazard, others disputing conventionally accepted disease and mortality statistics.

Contesting the usual origin story about fat—excess calories, individual blame—is high on the activist agenda. The preferred account is that fat is genetic and/or glandular, thus not anyone's fault. Alternatively, fat is caused by the diet industry: "We're getting fatter because of dieting," as one activist puts it. "The way to fatten an animal is to starve it and then re-feed it. Your metabolism slows down when you're eating less. People on diets are predisposing their body to gain more weight."

The origin question is important in the politics of fat because it shapes the approach to policy and advocacy issues. For instance, should the primary battle now be to ensure that obesity is included under the Americans with Disabilities Act? Some argue that this is a misguided strategy, since it turns fat into a disease instead of a rights issue—though if it were a recognized disability, suing over workplace discrimination and access issues would be a lot easier. Access and mobility hurdles provide material for a lot of wrenching chat-room discussions: Sufferers trade coping strategies for an endless variety of daily humiliations or share the longing for less impeded lives—like just being able to get an airplane seatbelt around your waist without a humiliating extension. Such admissions can also prompt heated responses from the more defiantly fat and proud: Doesn't wanting to lose weight mean giving into self-hatred? (Or, as the militant put it: Should blacks desire to be white and thus give into racism?) The psychological strain of trying to have dignity while lugging a fat body around is all too palpable, despite the pride rhetoric.

Not surprisingly, given such strains, this movement is rife with political contradictions. For instance, one topic you rarely find discussed in activist venues is food. Overeaters Anonymous, a 12-step program modeled on AA, does promote size rights while also linking obesity to overconsumption. But critics worry that treating fat on the model of alcoholism or compulsive gambling means pathologizing it. Such worries produce certain political blind spots: While the diet industry comes under attack, the $900 billion food industry does not. But as Marion Nestle points out in her convincing treatise, Food Politics (2002), the food industry now produces 3,800 calories a day for every person in the United States (2,200 to 2,500 would be adequate). That's a 500 calorie-a-day increase since 1970. And, as Nestle notes, the American weight spike in the late 1970s exactly corresponded with the invention of supersizing in fast-food marketing.

Unfortunately, focusing on the food industry would put the preferred activist fat origin stories into question—unless the one-third of Americans who are now obese all developed glandular or genetic problems simultaneously in the '70s. Nestle's is a different version of fat politics: Hers spotlights how overconsumption is socially and politically organized, from agribusiness subsidies and price supports to a pattern of hiring lobbyists and corporate execs to run "oversight" agencies like the USDA and the FDA that—go figure—function like industry tools instead. But the real bottom line is that processed food—which generally means higher-calorie food—is more profitable than raw food. Flavor is eliminated, then artificially added (usually meaning fat or sugars); nutrients are lost, then artificially added. The more additives, the higher the price. And we all know where this money trail leads: to our stomachs and hips.

The irony is that while overconsumption may be encouraged, all bodily evidence of it is stigmatized, especially in the romantic sphere. Activist organizations are now stepping in to rectify the problem. NAAFA doubles as a dating site, and Dimensions, a magazine and Web site that celebrates "the fat-positive lifestyle," gears itself to fat admirers (FAs)—those who buck social trends by preferring fat partners. One of the most surprising elements you come across in these venues are the erotic fantasies of "feeders," who like to imagine a fat lover gaining even more weight. Arguments rage about whether such fantasies are harmless fictions, or whether love-struck objects of FA desire might be dangerously manipulated into complying to keep someone's sexual attention. (Though one wonders how different this is from its "normal" counterpart: dieting to attract that special someone.) Clearly our bodies are being reshaped by the food industry's avarice—are our erotic fantasies being reshaped by it, too? Interestingly enough, Dimensions began publishing in 1984, as supersizing was sweeping the country, with the nation itself providing a captive population to corporate overfeeders.

Despite the fact that most of us now apparently face a roly-poly future, a visceral revulsion toward fat persists. It's an interesting form of social hypocrisy, hatred for fatness coupled with a free ride toward the industries that exploit the susceptible. But wait: Is that the sound of corporate responsibility kicking into gear? Yes, in its ever public-spirited way, McDonald's has just announced it will start printing calorie information on its food wrappers. Once you've paid for your Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, you will learn that you're about to put away 730 calories*. Whatever threat fat poses to the contemporary psyche—especially at the murkiest psychosexual levels where disgust is conjured—the fat themselves end up bearing a stigma that could be redirected to bona fide gluttons—the profiteers. Until that day, the bloating of the population continues apace.

*Correction, Oct. 21, 2005: This article originally and incorrectly stated that the Big Mac With Cheese contains 730 calories. In fact, McDonald's offers no sandwich by that name. The Big Mac contains 560 calories. The Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese has 730.

Laura Kipnis is a professor of media studies at Northwestern. Her last book was Against Love: A Polemic.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2128999/

surfergirl
And Now, the Prosecutor
Fitz makes his grand TV debut in the post-indictment press conference.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Friday, Oct. 28, 2005, at 4:35 PM ET

Patrick Fitzgerald's press conference this afternoon, officially announcing the indictment of Scooter Libby on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to a grand jury, had the long-awaited quality of a true television event. By keeping an unprecedentedly low profile during the two years of the investigation, stonewalling every press inquiry with a stern, "No comment," Fitzgerald has cultivated an image of almost monastic austerity, naturally arousing public curiosity about what manner of man he really is. During the endless pregame show leading up to the statement, MSNBC's Chris Matthews speculated about Fitzgerald's personality to the Washington Post's Dana Milbank: "We'll know whether he's Alexander Scourby or Don Knotts, I guess, in a couple minutes." Alexander Scourby or Don Knotts?

As it turned out, the Fitzgerald who made himself known in the hourlong press conference belonged nowhere on the Scourby/Knotts continuum. Neither stentorian nor buffoonish, he came off as the kind of dedicated civil servant rarely seen in an administration marked by showboating and cronyism: a colorless, earnest-looking, hardworking bureaucrat (an impression corroborated by this Los Angeles Times profile.) In appearance, Fitzgerald looks not unlike John Dean in his Watergate days: a wide, boyish face with a receding hairline and eager, guileless eyes just begging to be magnified by a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

Fitzgerald began by providing an exhaustive, almost professorial overview of the Plame case, ending in a carefully circumscribed summary of the indictment charges: not that Libby had knowingly outed a CIA agent (an allegation the indictment never makes), but simply that Libby had discussed Plame's status as a CIA agent on at least four occasions with various reporters and members of the administration (including Dick Cheney) before the date on which he claimed to have learned about it for the first time—in fact, Libby claimed, only days after the last of these conversations, not to know that Wilson even had a wife. Scooter had already scooted by the time the press conference began, tendering his resignation to Cheney just hours after the indictments came down, so Fitzgerald's painstaking explanation of the myriad and intersecting ways in which Libby's pants were, indeed, on fire had an after-the-fact, finger-wagging quality: "Mr. Libby, the indictment alleges, was telling Mr. Fleischer something on Monday that he claimed to have learned on Thursday." Naughty Scooter!

But in general, Fitzgerald tended to stay close to the cool, dispassionate language of the law, refusing to step outside what he repeatedly referred to as "the four corners of the indictment." In the extended question-and-answer session afterward, Fitzgerald deflected question after question with the prissy insistence that "we can't talk about people not mentioned in the indictment." Queries about Rove, Cheney, Miller, Cooper were all batted away. In answer to a reporter's inquiry about the extensive reach of the investigation, Fitzgerald resorted to a baseball analogy: If a pitcher hit a batter in the head with a pitch, you would want to know all the context to figure out why: What was going on before the game? Was there tension in the dugout?

When another reporter asked him to respond to Republican characterizations of the perjury charges as "technicalities," the mild-mannered Fitzgerald came as close as he ever did to a firebrand Tom Cruise speech from A Few Good Men. "That talking point won't fly," he replied, the eagle embroidered on a blue curtain behind him seeming to swell in size and flutter in the wind as he continued, "The truth is the engine of our judicial system. If you compromise the truth, the whole process is lost … if we were to walk away from this, we might as well hand in our jobs." But Fitzgerald's last words before opening the conference up to questions retreated once more to the impersonal language of civil service: "Let's take a deep breath," he concluded, "and let justice process the system."

******

The reader who writes in with the best interpretation of Chris Matthews' inscrutable Scourby/Knotts analogy will be rewarded with a random piece of Slate swag.

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

 

 sandbox
Take Back the Prom
How, and why, one school called it all off—and you can, too.
By Ann Hulbert
Posted Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005, at 1:20 PM ET

In the early 1970s at my unconventional private school in Brooklyn, a prom was unthinkable—a bourgeois and sexist ritual of the traditionalist '50s that our parents might have enjoyed but we, long-haired and liberated, disdained. It wasn't just urban sophisticates like us who sneered. I double-checked with friends who went to a big suburban high school on Long Island—my idea then of the quintessential American teen educational experience—and they didn't go to any proms, either. That is right in line with what Amy Best reports in her slim social history, Prom Night: Youth, Schools, and Popular Culture: During the late 1960s and early '70s, she says, "many 'irreverent' youths brought them to a halt" all across the country. In other words, countless baby boomer parents of today's prom-age teenagers never experienced the iconic coming-of-age ritual. Perhaps, then, we should not be surprised by the current prom mess: The erstwhile school dance and celebration of an impending diploma has morphed into a bacchanal sponsored by staggering parental largesse (some estimates put the cost at $800 per couple). A generation of adults, as therapists would say, are working out prom issues.

At one Long Island high school, the drama has boiled over early this year. In September, the president and principal of Kellenberg Memorial High School, a Catholic school in Uniondale, sent a letter to a parent who complained after noticing the absence of a prom on the school calendar. The letter was circulated to all the parents and surfaced last week on the Chicago Tribune op-ed page. "You are correct," Father Philip K. Eichner and Brother Kenneth M. Hoagland peremptorily begin. "The school calendar does not indicate the date for a senior prom. KMHS is no longer sponsoring a senior prom. As your own letter suggests, if parents and/or seniors want a senior prom, they will have a prom, no matter what the administration says or does. In fact, that is precisely the reason why we are no longer sponsoring a senior prom—it is so much beyond our control that it is mere tokenism to put our name on it."

The memo is notable for its anti-parent animus—it boldly deploys a Dr. Phil-style rhetoric—but even more for its anti-materialist message. "It is not primarily the sex/booze/drugs that surround this event, as problematic as they might be," that inspired the prom's cancellation, Eichner and Hoagland explain. "It is rather the flaunting of affluence, assuming exaggerated expenses, a pursuit of vanity for vanity's sake—in a word, financial decadence." Surprisingly, KMHS parents and students haven't kicked up much of a fuss. Maybe that's because they recognize the diatribe has useful lessons for cowed parents eager to regain the moral high ground with their debauched adolescents. And perhaps those coddled kids might like to rebel for real rather than barf in limos on the way to beach houses supplied by parents for after-prom fun.

Once upon a time, back in the 1930s, the prom emerged as a rite of passage designed to signal the assumption of adult status and appurtenances—hence the tuxes and gowns and scripted displays of what Parents magazine in 1935 called "gracious manners and good taste." These days, the prom signals, if anything, a regression to an immature mean. It is an orgy of consumption that entails abandoning the pretense to policing sex/booze/drugs, sustained over four previous years by parents, kids, and school administrators. High school—at least in middle-class places—occasions no end of hand-wringing by boomer parents and educators about that trifecta of perils (which boomers themselves of course sought out as teens and survived). Given their own wild pasts, parents find themselves trapped in the pose of earnest worriers, shying away from the hypocritical role of scourges. And so they lay down the law by citing the medical (not the moral) dangers of drink, etc., and their kids roll their eyes and break the rules. Come prom time, however, the compact is out the window. Then—to cite Eichner and Hoagland—"fathers [sign] the contract for Captain Jim's booze-cruise out of Huntington for an after-prom adventure," while mothers make motel reservations. And kids eagerly buy into the whole business. They rush out to spend their parents' money on clothes hyped at events like Macy's 1999 "It's Not Your Mother's Prom" fashion show. On prom night itself, they overindulge in drink, drugs, and sex, a first only in the sense that heretofore they've done so with the thrill of illicitness. Now they're partaking with parental approval.

Surely even subscribers to Your Prom and Teen Prom (two magazines that market the event as a "pre-wedding") would sheepishly agree that things have gone too far. Every year, as Eichner and Hoagland note, schools devise new gimmicks in an effort to fend off the after-prom scene—a car raffle at 6 a.m., say, to keep the kids from ducking out to go crazy. But in vain. Amy Best calls for a "pedagogy of proms" and urges lots of discussion by students, teachers, "cultural workers," and school officials about the night's role in "the formation of student identities"—just one more way to waste senior year obsessing about the event. While their fierce letter surely came as a shock, Eichner and Hoagland cut right to the chase. They put parents in the foreground where they belong, and they fulminate against consumerist "vanity" in a way that just might resonate with boomers who were, after all, former prom scoffers themselves. Before they go overboard, making up for their own missed proms in the past, parents of today's prom-goers might stop and reflect that here is the rare occasion where they can lecture their kids with a clear conscience: Do as I did.

It takes Catholic moralists, not therapists, to put parents back in touch with their anti-materialist and nonconformist adolescent impulses, that old Puritan streak that ran through their otherwise hedonist youth. If they can't fight their teens' dissipation with fervor, they've got better ground to stand on in denouncing precocious conspicuous consumption. And if high-rolling parents can't pull it off, a screed from bold school administrators can give kids a defiant model to follow. Amy Best salutes youths for such subversive gestures as wearing Doc Martens with their tuxes or sticking radishes in their lapels ("using irony as a rhetorical tactic to disrupt, expose and resist the adult meaning systems through which the prom is defined"). But if kids are looking for a truly radical way to assert their power and signal that they've finally grown up, they can tell their parents to take their lavish prom-night clothing allowances, liquor-stocked limos, and condos, and go to hell.

Ann Hulbert is the author of Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children.

 

human nature
Right to Wife
Why does Judge Alito treat women like girls?
By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005, at 7:55 AM ET

Judge Alito, it's a pleasure to have you before our committee this morning. You're obviously an accomplished jurist, and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle speak very highly of you. I really have only one question for you, and it's my hope that you'll be able to put my mind, and the public's mind, at ease about it. What I'd like to know is, why do you think it's constitutional to treat a pregnant woman like a child?

I'm referring, of course, to your dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey 14 years ago. As you know, that case involved a Pennsylvania statute that required women to notify their husbands before having abortions, on pain of criminal sanctions. You voted to uphold the statute.

First of all, Judge, I notice that in your concluding footnote to that case, you mentioned that the plaintiffs had asked your court to hold the statute unconstitutional because it "violates the rights to marital and informational privacy and equal protection." You wrote that you wouldn't address those arguments because your colleagues had relied on a different argument, the right to abortion. Since you rejected the abortion argument and didn't bother addressing the other arguments, I guess we can infer that they wouldn't have changed your vote. So, you don't think privacy or equality entitles a woman, constitutionally, to make the decision without consulting her husband.

Now, about the abortion argument. The trial record in Casey, as you recall, included testimony that mandatory spousal notification might inhibit some women from having abortions because they'd be afraid to tell their husbands for fear of physical abuse or other kinds of retaliation. You concluded that this inhibition effect, to the extent it was substantiated in the record, did not rise to the level of an "undue burden" as defined by Justice O'Connor and was therefore not severe enough to make the statute unconstitutional. And to prove that this fear and inhibition didn't meet the undue burden standard, you cited two previous Supreme Court decisions: Hodgson v. Minnesota and H.L. v. Matheson. With regard to Hodgson, you wrote,

Justice O'Connor found that no undue burden was imposed by a law requiring notice to both parents or judicial authorization before a minor could obtain an abortion. Justice O'Connor reached this conclusion despite statistics adduced by Justice Marshall to show that mandatory parental notice may inhibit a significant percentage of minors from obtaining abortions … and despite the district court's finding, noted in Justice Marshall's dissent, that the judicial bypass option "so daunted" some minors that they felt compelled to carry to term.

Then you went on to say that Justice O'Connor didn't think the statute in Matheson presented an undue burden, even though Justice Marshall, in that case, wrote that a girl who's required to tell her parents about an abortion "may confront physical or emotional abuse, withdrawal of financial support or actual obstruction of the abortion decision."

Now, in your opinion in Casey, right after that quote from Justice Marshall, you write this: "These harms are almost identical to those that the majority in this case attributes to Section 3209." Section 3209 is Pennsylvania's spousal-notice provision. Then you conclude, "Justice O'Connor's opinions disclose that the practical effect of a law will not amount to an undue burden unless the effect is greater than the burden imposed on minors seeking abortions in Hodgson or Matheson." And you uphold the spousal notice law because its burden doesn't exceed the burdens in those other cases.

Now, here's my question, Judge. Do you really think an undue burden for a grown woman is the same as an undue burden for a teenager? Do you think a woman deserves no more deference than a girl?

That seems to be the gist of your opinion here. Let me quote from your explanation—well, actually, this is the entirety of your explanation for what you call the rational basis of the spousal notice provision:

The Pennsylvania legislature could have rationally believed that some married women are initially inclined to obtain an abortion without their husbands' knowledge because of perceived problems—such as economic constraints, future plans, or the husbands' previously expressed opposition—that may be obviated by discussion prior to the abortion. In addition, the legislature could have reasonably concluded that Section 3209 would lead to such discussion and thereby properly further a husband's interests in the fetus in a sufficient percentage of the affected cases to justify enactment of this measure.

Now, I'm seeing two arguments there. One is that the woman has some kind of misperception about her marriage or her situation, and her husband can set her straight. And the other argument is that the husband has such a profound interest in keeping the fetus alive—and his wife has such a small interest in controlling what happens to her body—that the government can force her to consult him even if she's so afraid of him, or so certain she can't have this baby, that she won't talk to him unless we threaten her with criminal charges. And you implied that Justice O'Connor, the justice you're planning to replace on this court, would agree with you.

In point of fact, you were wrong about that, weren't you, Judge? I mean, we have the actual answer to that question, because Justice O'Connor, along with Justices Kennedy and Souter, wrote the Supreme Court's controlling opinion in Casey a year after you issued your dissent. And she pretty flatly rebuked you, didn't she? She says the spousal notice provision "is an undue burden, and therefore invalid." Couldn't be any plainer. And in the very next sentence, she addresses those parental notification cases you cited, and here's what she says:

Those enactments, and our judgment that they are constitutional, are based on the quite reasonable assumption that minors will benefit from consultation with their parents and that children will often not realize that their parents have their best interests at heart. We cannot adopt a parallel assumption about adult women.

And here she is a bit later, talking specifically about the provision you voted to uphold:

The husband's interest in the life of the child his wife is carrying does not permit the State to empower him with this troubling degree of authority over his wife. … A husband has no enforceable right to require a wife to advise him before she exercises her personal choices. … A State may not give to a man the kind of dominion over his wife that parents exercise over their children.

That's kind of a slap there, isn't it, Judge? All that stuff you wrote about the woman not being sufficiently informed to make the decision without her husband's help—not being competent, evidently, to decide whether consulting him was a good idea—Justice O'Connor pretty much whacked that one out of the park, didn't she? And the same for your point about the husband's interest in the fetus—"Does not permit the State to empower him with this troubling degree of authority," she says. That's pretty clear, isn't it?

Now, Judge, I'm sure you're going to tell me the same thing Chief Justice Roberts told us when he was here, about respecting precedent and all that. And now that we have Justice O'Connor's verdict on this provision, which came a year after you wrote your opinion on this, you're not going to mess with it, and women don't need to worry that you're going to take us back to the 19^th century. And I'd like to believe that. But I can't. And the reason I can't is that you already did mess with the precedents set by this court, and by Justice O'Connor specifically.

When you wrote your dissent in Casey, that was a year after Hodgson. And of course you cited Hodgson in your opinion, so obviously you read it carefully. And as you'll recall, Hodgson concerned a Minnesota law that required a minor to notify two parents, not just one, if she was planning to get an abortion. So, even if she told the mom, the mom would have to tell the dad, or the girl would have to tell the dad. The mom wasn't enough. And Justice O'Connor concurred with all but two parts of the main opinion by Justice Stevens, which held that the central part of this law was unconstitutional. And the part she concurred with says this:

In the ideal family setting, of course, notice to either parent would normally constitute notice to both. A statute requiring two-parent notification would not further any state interest in those instances. In many families, however, the parent notified by the child would not notify the other parent. In those cases, the State has no legitimate interest in questioning one parent's judgment that notice to the other parent would not assist the minor or in presuming that the parent who has assumed parental duties is incompetent to make decisions regarding the health and welfare of the child.

And in a footnote, they add: "What the State may not do is legislate on the generalized assumptions that a parent in an intact family will not act in his or her child's best interests and will fail to involve the other parent in the child's upbringing when that involvement is appropriate."

So that's what Hodgson says. The state has no legitimate interest in second-guessing the mom about whether to tell the dad. The mom's decision is good enough, because she's not a kid, she's an adult. And you know what the funny thing is, Judge? Your colleagues on the appeals court, the ones you disagreed with in Casey, took their logic and a lot of their language straight out of that part of Hodgson. They figured, if the Supreme Court says you can't second-guess a woman about her daughter's abortion, you can't second-guess her about her own abortion, either.

But not you, Judge. You didn't go along with what Justice O'Connor said, even when your colleagues flagged it in neon orange for you. You looked the other way. You went on a cherry-picking expedition through her opinions, taking just the parts you wanted and ignoring the parts you didn't, to the point where she had to step in a year later and set you straight. And then, having bent over backward to interpret a woman's abortion right as narrowly as possible, you bent as far as you could the other way to give men the widest possible right to interfere. Do you mind if I read from one more paragraph of your opinion? Here's what it says: "The Supreme Court has held that a man has a fundamental interest in preserving his ability to father a child." Next sentence: "The Court's opinions also seem to establish that a husband who is willing to participate in raising a child has a fundamental interest in the child's welfare." Then you conclude: "It follows that a husband has a 'legitimate' interest in the welfare of a fetus he has conceived with his wife." And you use that to justify the spousal notification law.

Now, Judge, you and I both know that the cases you cited with regard to previous Supreme Court holdings, one was about sterilizing felons, and the other was about establishing the paternity of an already-born child. How you get from there to giving a man a state-guaranteed say in a woman's abortion decision—well, I don't know what to call it, but it sure as hell isn't judicial restraint. Why does the man get all the breaks in your legal reasoning, Judge? Why does only the woman get treated like a child?

I see the chairman motioning for me to wrap this up, so I'll end with a question. Actually, I'll let Justice O'Connor ask the question. Here's what she wrote 13 years ago, replying to your opinion in Casey:

If a husband's interest in the potential life of the child outweighs a wife's liberty, the State could require a married woman to notify her husband before she uses a post-fertilization contraceptive. Perhaps next in line would be a statute requiring pregnant married women to notify their husbands before engaging in conduct causing risks to the fetus. After all, if the husband's interest in the fetus' safety is a sufficient predicate for state regulation, the State could reasonably conclude that pregnant wives should notify their husbands before drinking alcohol or smoking. Perhaps married women should notify their husbands before using contraceptives or before undergoing any type of surgery that may have complications affecting the husband's interest in his wife's reproductive organs.

What do you think, Judge? Is she right? If we put you on this court, would you strike down any of those laws she's talking about? Or is it open season on pregnant women?

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

 

moneybox
Sam Alito, Financial Whiz
Why his great investment strategy suggests he'll be a good justice.
By Henry Blodget
Posted Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005, at 6:26 AM ET

Thanks to fast work by the Associated Press, we already know that Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's family is worth between $600,000 and $1,600,000 (excluding the value of a house in New Jersey). But what AP didn't tell us is what his investment decisions say about him.

Does he possess a wild, romantic streak like John Roberts, who takes fliers on long-shots like XM Satellite Radio? Is he so compassionate that he raids his retirement fund each year to support an ailing parent, as Harriet Miers appears to do? Does he, like Fed chairman nominee Ben Bernanke, fail to act on half-a-century's worth of evidence suggesting that stock-picking subtracts rather than adds value—and turn his money over to expensive fund managers and brokers anyway?

The good news: In Alito, America finally has a nominee whose analytical powers appear to extend to the personal-finance realm. According to his 2003 and 2004 financial-disclosure statements, Alito is well-diversified, holding primarily cash and bond and stock funds. He doesn't trade much, so he apparently understands what many investors don't: In most cases, relative to a static benchmark, the more you trade the more you lose. Alito keeps most of his money at Vanguard, a low-cost fund provider, which suggests that he also understands that costs matter. (In the financial world, unlike the clothing world, Wal-Mart prices do not mean Wal-Mart-quality merchandise; rather, Wal-Mart prices often mean Saks-quality merchandise, and vice versa.) Alito even apparently understands that taxes matter: Several of his funds are tax-exempt. Many brokers, fund managers, small investors, and financial writers (stupidly) ignore taxes and focus on sexy pretax returns.

To appreciate what these decisions suggest about Alito—as well as about how he might function as a judge—it makes sense to pause here for a moment. It is not that Alito has discovered some deep, dark secret about investing: The evidence that high costs, frequent trading, and tax-blind strategies reduce expected returns is in plain view, and there is a ton of it. This evidence, however, is often obscured or ignored by a vast and cacophonous brokerage industrial complex (brokers, fund companies, amateur Buffetts, and personal-finance media) which, unlike the average investor, benefits from trading, fees, viewers, listeners, etc. The brokerage industrial complex is so good at telling us what we want to hear (If we listen to this analyst/strategist/pundit, we can beat the market! If we hire this fund manager/broker, we'll make a mint! Index funds are boring and un-American, the pursuit of mediocrity! Higher prices mean better products—you get what you pay for!) that its strategies have been accepted as conventional wisdom.

To make his investment choices, therefore, Alito has had to ignore what most people around him believe, doubt the spellbinding stories he is being told by supposed experts, and, instead, focus on the facts. This, most of us would agree, is an extremely desirable quality in a judge. (Of course, Alito may have just hired a talented financial adviser, but even this implies an above-average ability to reject perception and act on empirical reality.) Alito also resists the excitement of trading and the violent, emotional swerves of the herd, suggesting he is conservative in a traditional way: He resists change and doesn't make it for the sake of change.

Alas, Alito's choices also suggest that his fact-based reasoning extends only so far. Yes, he owns many Vanguard funds, but within this category, he's also chosen many actively managed Vanguard funds rather than cheaper index funds. This suggests a human eagerness to try to do better than "average," as well as a typical overconfidence. (Most people can't pick funds that beat the market, but I can!)

Lastly, Alito does own a few individual stocks: Bristol-Myers, McDonald's, Disney, Intel, and ExxonMobil. Some pundits will suggest these holdings create conflicts of interest, but the idea that a judge's judgment would be warped by a small stake in one of the companies whose conduct he or she is evaluating is, in most cases, ludicrous, especially when such holdings are in plain sight and the judge's reputation is at stake. (A few years ago, Alito was criticized for not recusing himself from a case involving Vanguard.) The more interesting point is that Alito's individual stocks do not seem to fit with the rest of his investment program, perhaps because several were received as gifts. It will be instructive, therefore, to see what he does with them.

Will Alito cling emotionally to his stocks—because they were gifts, have been in the family for a long time, have done well, are "good companies," or any of the other common but illogical reasons that investors offer for exceptions to wise investment policy? Or will he maintain his investment discipline, selling the stocks and investing the proceeds in better-diversified funds? If he does the latter, the newest Supreme Court nominee will demonstrate not only above-average ability to separate facts from stories but also above-average self discipline—another positive quality in a judge.

Henry Blodget, a former securities analyst, lives in New York City.

 

politics
Superiority Complex
Why is the vice president deciding how the U.S. treats foreign detainees?
By Tim Naftali
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, at 7:03 PM ET

Today's revelations in the New York Times about the Bush administration's internal debate over how to treat foreign detainees highlight the unprecedented role that Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff are playing in setting national security policy. In the Constitution, the vice president is the nation's understudy. He is not supposed to be in the chain of command. Cheney knows this better than most: In 1989, when he was George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney slapped down Vice President Dan Quayle for calling a meeting of the National Security Council about a coup attempt in the Philippines while the president was out of the country.

Yet now the Office of the Vice President is dictating the rules by which the U.S. military interrogates and detains terrorist suspects. This is being done subtly. All the Office of the Vice President has to do is informally convey its opposition to complying with international law in this area, and any such effort is thwarted.

This is what happened to an attempt by some officials in the Department of Defense, along with the lawyers of all the armed services, to write a new directive on the treatment of detainees. Since the Bush administration began sending foreigners captured abroad to Guantanamo Bay in winter 2001, its refusal to afford them all the protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions has been, to say the least, internationally contentious. Now the military and some Pentagon officials are increasingly aware that this refusal is making American troops vulnerable abroad by potentially provoking other countries to respond in kind. The current policy has also created confusion in the armed services among interrogators who were originally trained to follow Geneva and now don't know which standard to apply. The goal of the drafters of the new directive was to set clear standards that are consistent with international law and with the military's rules since 1949.

The draft directive drew upon the language from Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, implying that the United States recognized the role of international law in governing how it treated detainees. Not everyone in the Pentagon was happy with this. Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence policy, and William J. Haynes, DOD's general counsel, apparently let the vice president's office know what was happening. In September, David S. Addington, who was then Cheney's general counsel, and former Cheney aide I. Lewis Libby did their best to veto the initiative.

Cheney and Addington (and Libby) believe that there should be no limit on the president's right to authorize interrogations of terrorist suspects. The Office of the Vice President is contemptuous of the British and our other European allies, who have been reluctant to turn over suspects to the United States because of what they see as Washington's lawless approach.

What does the Oval Office think about adopting a Geneva-friendly detainee policy? So far, there is no evidence that President George W. Bush has weighed in directly since February 2002 on applying Geneva's protections to the detainees. At that point, he said that al-Qaida and Taliban fighters would not have prisoner-of-war status but would nonetheless be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles" of the Geneva Conventions. The ambiguity of Bush's 2002 statement—was he saying that the Geneva Conventions did not trump military necessity?—has encouraged advocates of a Geneva-based policy to argue that he intended to set a floor rather than a ceiling for the treatment of detainees.

And what about Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who is in the military chain of command? The reporting is still vague thus far on his opinion about the standards for detainees. Matthew Waxman, Rumsfeld's deputy assistant secretary of defense, was a champion of incorporating Common Article Three into the new interrogation directive. But Rumsfeld himself reportedly said nothing, even after the vice president's office shot down the draft directive. Rumsfeld and Cheney go way back; Cheney worked for Rumsfeld in the Nixon administration. Whatever else Rumsfeld's silence means, by ceding this area to Cheney, the defense secretary signals to the armed services that he doesn't much care that their lawyers want to bring U.S. policy in line with the Geneva Conventions.

The military cares about Geneva's protections because of the correlation that American intelligence officers increasingly see between Muslim anger at the United States for human rights abuses in Guantanamo and elsewhere and the virulence of the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. In its secret brief in a case involving the ACLU's request for the disclosure of additional photographs of the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib, the government acknowledged as much.

Ordinarily presidents assign their vice presidents some projects, usually with consultation, of course. Yet once Cheney focuses on a policy, he dominates it.

So long as his views prevail in how the Bush administration treats foreign detainees, the military's push to safeguard American troops by respecting Geneva will be stymied.

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Here is the text of Geneva's Common Article Three:

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, at a minimum, the following provisions:

1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) Taking of hostages;

(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;

(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

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The government's brief said that that it had linked "disclosure of images depicting alleged abuse of detainees to insurgent attacks" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tim Naftali, the director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, is the author of Blind Spot: the Secret History of American Counterterrorism.

 

explainer
The XXI Club
What's the history of closed sessions in the Senate?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, at 6:24 PM ET

At the request of Minority Leader Harry Reid, the Senate conducted a two-hour secret session on Tuesday. According to news reports, "the public was ordered out of the chamber, the lights were dimmed, and the doors were closed." What's the history of closed sessions in the Senate?

Rule XXI, which allows any senator to ask for a closed-door session, has been around since 1795. Before then, all Senate debates were held in secret. (House proceedings have always been open to the public.) During the 19^th century, the press and visitors could attend general sessions of the Senate but not the "executive sessions" at which lawmakers discussed matters like nominations and treaties. Information from these meetings often leaked out to the press anyway. After one such episode in 1929, the senators resolved to make closed sessions much less common.

There have been more than 50 secret sessions since then, with more happening in the 1970s and 1980s than any other decades. (Not all were convened under Rule XXI. Executive sessions can be made secret under Rule XXIX.) In general, senators put guards at the doors when they're discussing confidential issues relating to national security. During World War II, for example, senators held closed sessions to brief their colleagues on inspections of overseas military bases.

Many closed sessions have involved fights over military spending. In 1963, Strom Thurmond called for a secret session to argue for investments in the Nike Zeus anti-missile battery. In the 1970s, lawmakers feuded in private over how much money should be invested in Trident nuclear submarines and whether $20 million should be spent to develop a "neutron bomb."

Most other closed sessions have dealt with treaties, military campaigns, or impeachment. Impeachment deliberations are usually held in secret, while testimony and votes are public. In 1999, the Senate held half a dozen closed sessions to discuss the impeachment of President Clinton.

Harry Reid's two-hour closed session wasn't particularly drawn out; many of these debates last twice as long. A 1983 session to discuss the nomination of a former New York Times reporter to be an assistant secretary of state took only 90 minutes, though, and a half-hour of that was spent searching for electronic listening devices. (Lawmakers decided against sending in bug-sniffing dogs on Tuesday.)

The secret discussions are typically recorded and then kept under seal for at least 20 years. (Congress can choose to extend the seal to 50 years.) In some cases, transcripts of the sessions are made public right away, like those of a 1975 debate over whether to release a report on CIA assassinations. Though the topic was sensitive enough to merit a closed-door debate, lawmakers ended up spending more time bickering than talking about classified information.

Bonus Explainer: Why did they dim the lights when the doors were closed on Tuesday? To save energy, not to make the meeting super-duper secret. In open sessions, the Senate chamber is illuminated with bright lights so everything looks good on C-SPAN. Since the cameras are switched off for closed sessions, they can turn off the extra lights.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Betty Koed of the U.S. Senate Historical Office.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

 

the big idea
Karl Rove's Dying Dream
So much for the permanent Republican majority.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, at 5:18 PM ET

Karl Rove's dream is dying. This is happening for reasons that have nothing to do with Valerie Plame.

Rove's dream was to reshape American politics by creating a durable Republican majority. In the old days, Rove told anyone who would listen that his role model in this project was the legendary political boss Mark Hanna.

Hanna was the brain behind William McKinley's political career in much the same way that Rove ("the architect") is the brain behind Bush's. McKinley was an affable, none-too-bright former congressman when Hanna helped elect him governor of Ohio. In 1896, Hanna raised an unprecedented amount of money and ran a sophisticated, hardball campaign that got McKinley to the White House. One could go on with the analogy: McKinley governed negligently in the interests of big business and went to war on flimsy evidence that Spain had blown up the USS Maine.

The key to McKinley's political success was the alliance Hanna forged between industrialists like himself, who provided the cash, and workers, who provided the votes. In Rove's alliance, the rich provide the cash, and religious conservatives provide the votes. Refuting the conventional wisdom that successful presidential candidates must lay claim to the political center, Bush has governed from the right and won re-election in 2004 with a "base-in," rather than a "center-out," strategy.

When Bush was re-elected, everyone hailed Rove's strategy as a masterstroke. But would Rove's protégé have eked out victories in 2000 and 2004 absent special circumstances, lame opponents, and good luck? Less than a year into Bush's second term, the president's approval rating is down around 40 percent. Many things have gone wrong for Bush, but the underlying problem is his relationship to the constituency that elected him. Bush's debt to his big donors and to religious conservatives has boxed him in and pitted him against the national consensus on various issues. His extremism is undermining Rove's realignment.

The problem has become clear with Bush's difficulties in filling Sandra Day O'Connor's slot on the Supreme Court. The Harriet Miers nomination was an attempt to satisfy both the militant conservative base and the eternally moderate American electorate. With the Alito nomination, Bush has acknowledged that splitting this difference is impossible. Faced with a choice, he has chosen, once again, to dance with the ones who brought him. But by appointing a superconservative, Bush risks propelling his increasingly beleaguered administration even further toward the right-hand margin—a place where his party cannot win future national elections.

Bush aims to be the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan. But he has never understood the genius of Reagan's method, which was to placate the religious right without giving in where it mattered. Reagan could proclaim his undying support for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion without doing anything to endanger Roe v. Wade. (He was the one who nominated O'Connor, remember?) In the same way, Bill Clinton managed to keep liberal interest groups onboard without advancing their politically untenable wish list. But whether because he is less adroit or because he truly believes, Bush seems able to appease his base only by surrendering to its wishes. He has caved to conservatives on Terri Schiavo, on stem-cell research, on Social Security privatization, and on "intelligent design." Now, most important, he is caving by at least creating the appearance that he is trying to get enough votes on the Supreme Court to reverse Roe.

Bush's failure at base-pacification is not entirely his fault. The evangelicals, who were pragmatically willing to settle for half a loaf during the Reagan and Bush 41 years, now feel empowered, emboldened, and owed. James Dobson and Pat Robertson don't understand that they would do their cause the most good by keeping their mouths shut and not scaring everyone witless. Conservatives of all kinds are in a militant mood heightened by their success in muscling Bush on Miers. They do not realize how their militancy alienates not just the left, but the swingers in the center whom Republicans need to win.

Rove is actually the second Republican realigner to stumble in this way in recent years. After the 1994 election, Newt Gingrich had his own visions of political sugarplums. Gingrich's unsuccessful revolution was more libertarian and less moralistic. He thought the new Republican majority would coalesce around shrinking government (a theme Bush has soft-pedaled, preferring to undermine government through neglect and incompetence). Gingrich was also, frankly, a little nuts. But he failed because he made the same basic mistake that Rove did. Gingrich thought he'd won a mandate for radical change and enshrined a new governing majority. He forgot about the country's nonideological majority, which likes Medicare, Social Security, national parks, and student loans. Republicans have retained control of Congress since Gingrich's downfall, but only by reversing his austerity program and spending like a bunch of drunks.

Of course, the failure of Rove's realignment doesn't mean a new progressive era is at hand. After winning the White House back in 1896, Republicans held on to it until 1912, years after McKinley had succumbed to an assassin's bullet and Hanna had died of typhoid fever. But Republicans retained the presidency on a basis that Hanna never anticipated. Theodore Roosevelt, a man Hanna feared and tried unsuccessfully to keep off the GOP ticket in 1900, was sworn in when McKinley died in 1901. Roosevelt emerged as a reformer and a trustbuster, taking on the corporate interests that had underwritten his predecessor's career. The GOP retained power, but only by reversing the pro-business direction Hanna had set.

Like McKinley, Bush has a potential successor who would like to change his party's direction. John McCain spouts reform and idolizes Teddy Roosevelt. And oh yes—he and Karl Rove loathe each other.

Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129292/

moneybox
Repo Men
Debt collectors don't send thugs with baseball bats anymore. Now they sic lawyers on you.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, at 4:31 PM ET

It's a great time to cash in on the misery of others. As Americans acquire bigger and bigger mortgages and credit card bills, more and more of their debt is going bad—which is an economic opportunity for you. Loan sharks can't do IPOs, but there are legitimate, above-board businesses that are making millions from uncollected debts.

In Barron's last Sunday, Alan Abelson flagged the recommendation of Stephanie Pomboy of Macromavens to buy what she redubbed three "Repo-Men" stocks: Encore Capital, Portfolio Recovery Associates, and Asta Funding. The companies are small—they have a collective market capitalization of $1.2 billion—but thanks to easy money policies, low wage growth, and the impact of the new bankruptcy law, this is an exploding industry.

The investment thesis: With rates rising and consumers under economic stress, it follows that there's likely to be more bad debt out there. And that means banks, credit card companies, utilities—all sorts of people who extend credit to customers—will find themselves with growing piles of uncollectible debt on their balance sheets. Consumer-oriented companies don't like to be in the gritty business of collecting because it's cost-intensive and using hardball tactics can bring negative press or regulatory attention. Instead, they do to collections what corporate America does with every other unpleasant task: They outsource it, selling the bad debt for a tiny fraction of face value.

And here's where the repo companies come in. The terms "repo man" and "collection agent" may bring to mind the Emilio Estevez movie or Sylvester Stallone in the first Rocky. But this business has moved far beyond leg-breaking sleazeballs. These are fundamentally financial-services companies that buy up receivables at gigantic discounts and then hire collection agents or law firms to collect. To do so, they use a mix of persuasion and threats. They send letters to borrowers asking for—or demanding—payment. Collection agents spend time on the phone with their new customers—the debts are officially transferred to the collection companies—and persuade them to set up payment programs. Where appropriate and legal, lawyers can threaten to file liens. At root, however, collecting these debts is a matter of negotiation. The goal is not necessarily to get the debtor to make full payment but rather to pay enough to cover the company's costs and allow it to turn a profit.

The largest publicly held repo company, by market capitalization, is Portfolio Recovery Associates. Founded in 1996, the Norfolk, Va.-based company went public in 2002. Its third-quarter results showed very good earnings growth. In the quarter, the self-described "benevolent" debt collector bought $445 million of face-value debt for only $16.5 million. PRA's 10-Q filing provides interesting reading, including cool tables on the productivity of collection agents (Page 26) and another showing how much it's able to collect on the receivables it buys. So far this year, it has collected $3.24 for every $1 it spent buying debt, meaning that $16.5 million could yield more than $50 million—only a fraction of its nominal value, but better than a sharp poke in the eye.

Encore Capital, based in San Diego and originally backed by buyout artists Peter May and Nelson Peltz, is the stylish innovator. Other companies may focus mainly on credit card debt. But Encore is also interested in bad debt from telecommunications, utility companies, and even health clubs, as an investor presentation from this spring notes. And it sees a big opportunity in health care. In September Encore entered the health-care market by buying "$274 million in face value of self-pay debt from a major healthcare provider for $4.27 million." It turns out that the misery of hospital companies like HCA, which are unable to collect from the growing ranks of uninsured patients, could prove to be a boon to Encore. Encore President Brandon Black enthused that, "according to industry estimates, there are approximately $15-20 billion in annual charge-offs of self-pay receivables in the healthcare industry, which represents a huge opportunity for us."

Asta Funding, based in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., takes a New Economy approach to debt collection. It outsources the outsourcing. The company buys up bad debt and then, as a corporate fact sheet notes, hires collection agencies and law firms to gather the cash. In the first nine months, it spent $93.5 million to buy $2.3 billion face value of debt. It reported record results in its most recent quarter.

As this chart shows, PRA and Asta have healthily outperformed the S&P 500 in the past year. And all three are bullish on the future—and rightly so. Why? Overall credit quality is deteriorating. The American Bankers Association found in September that credit card delinquencies are at a record high. Meanwhile, the new bankruptcy bill has made it harder for individuals to walk away from obligations to credit card issuers and other lenders—which is good for business. As Eric Dash reported in the New York Times, "more than 500,000 Americans filed for bankruptcy protection in the 10 days before the law took effect on Oct. 17." That figure is equal to nearly one-third of total bankruptcies in all of 2004. The surge has led credit card companies to take steps to write off huge chunks of credit card debt sooner rather than later. This week, for example, Morgan Stanley's Discover Card said it would take an extra pretax charge of $200 million to $250 million due to higher bankruptcy filings. And while it may theoretically be easier for banks to collect on loans with the new law, they still don't want to deal with the hassle. Because they get to keep what they collect, the repo men may wind up benefiting from the stiffer bankruptcy requirements.

Many people find it unseemly to profit from the downfall of others. But the repo companies are in fact performing a vital service for the U.S. economy. By removing the dead weight of bad debt from big companies, they're helping corporate America clean up its balance sheet and freeing them to engage in risk-taking, growth-fueling activities—such as extending more credit.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129294/

jurisprudence
The Best Defense
Prosecutors are from Neptune, defense attorneys are from Pluto.
By Rod Smolla
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, at 3:05 PM ET

In Virginia's neck-and-neck race for governor—which culminates next week—the Republican candidate, Jerry Kilgore, has attacked the Democratic candidate, Tim Kaine, for opposing the death penalty and representing death-row prisoners. Virginia ranks second only to Texas in its pace of executions, and polls show that Americans favor capital punishment for murder. Kilgore, a solid conservative lawyer, former prosecutor, and state attorney general, would seem to have found a good niche issue to give bite to his otherwise stock "my opponent is a liberal soft on crime" mantra. So, in a Kilgore television spot, a victims-rights advocate, Stanley Rosenbluth, emotionally lambastes Kaine for assisting in the death-row appeals of the man who murdered Rosenbluth's son—although the killer was eventually executed for his crime. The Kilgore ad claims that Kaine would have spared even Hitler from the death penalty.

More interesting than either Hitler or Kilgore's attack ads, however, is what this controversy illuminates about American attitudes toward criminal prosecutors and defense lawyers. Are—as these ads suggest—prosecutors and defense attorneys really from Venus and Mars? I am beginning to believe they are.

As a law school professor and dean, I have taught and befriended many students who have gone on to successful and satisfying careers as prosecutors and defense attorneys, and while stereotypes are always perilous, I have come to the conclusion that on the whole prosecutors and defense lawyers are so different, they almost don't recognize the moral imperatives of the other. It starts early, and I'd hazard that it's in the genes. As students, they dream different dreams. Students who dream of being prosecutors have little in common with those fantasizing about being defense lawyers. Some fundamental yin/yang, left-brain/right-brain, red-state/blue-state genetic coding is at work. These students are united by passion but divided by where their passions have taken them.

Those with the prosecution genes think the system is broken because too many of the guilty are acquitted; those with the defense genes think the system is broken because too many of the innocent are convicted. I have noticed that the students with the prosecutor genes tend to be the students who most abhor chaos. A fundamental premise of criminal law is that punishment exists to deter crime and that, for the deterrent effect to operate, the would-be criminal must believe that there is a risk he or she will be caught, and if caught, prosecuted, and if prosecuted, convicted. As the Bob Dylan line goes, "If you can't do the time don't do the crime." For the students with the prosecutor genes—the future Jerry Kilgores—this becomes more than polite sentiment, it becomes deep dogma.

I find the psychology of students with the defense genes more complex. Vigorous defense lawyers also deter crime—the crime of corrupt prosecution. But truly corrupt prosecutions are rare, and defense lawyers, who generally toil amid a culture of scorn, are often perceived as amoral gunslingers who thrive on the thrill of beating the system and defending the guilty. I have found this caricature entirely inaccurate.

So, let us tackle the harder questions put by the Kilgore attack on Tim Kaine: Is there really a vast difference between the two candidates because one is willing to defend killers? Should we think less of a candidate for governor because that candidate, as a lawyer, voluntarily undertook to prevent a convicted murderer's execution? For reasons that go to the heart of our constitutional democracy, I believe the principled answer is "no." Vote against a candidate because of the candidate's position on the death penalty if you wish. But do not vote against a candidate merely because, as a lawyer, he or she volunteered to defend persons accused or convicted of heinous crimes.

To accept this proposition one must first understand the ethics of defense advocacy in a system of constitutional rights. Personal ethics and professional ethics are not always in parallel. My personal ethics derive from many influences in my life, including values I have absorbed through religion, family, community, friendships, and personal reflection. When I became a lawyer I volunteered for a profession I knew would from time to time demand, as an essential element of the profession's ethical norms, that I subordinate my private ethical or moral code to the larger code of the profession. To mock or deride this as immoral or amoral is to misunderstand entirely the role of lawyers in constitutional democracies. Anyone who thinks that lawyers routinely act as immoral or amoral agents does not know the profession. I encounter lawyers in all strata of the bar who act as admirable moral agents every day of their professional lives. They do this not by holding themselves out as holier than thou self-appointed ethical elites, but as common-sense, hardworking advocates who owe their first and primary allegiance to their clients.

In legal lore, perhaps the most famous statement of this loyalty was that of an English lawyer, Lord Brougham, in his 19^th-century defense of Queen Caroline. Caroline's husband, King George IV, was trying to divorce her by charging her with adultery. Lord Brougham was one tough divorce lawyer, and he made it clear that in defending the queen he planned to prove that the king was a philanderer and had even gone so far as to marry a Catholic secretly—a fact that would have jeopardized his entitlement to the throne. Brougham was roundly criticized for these hardball tactics. But in a famous speech to the House of Lords, Brougham stated that:

an advocate, in the discharge of his duty, knows but one person in all the world, and that person is his client. To save that client by all means and expedients, and at all hazards and costs to other persons. And in performing this duty he must not regard the alarm, the torments, the destruction which he may bring upon others. Separating the duty of a patriot from that of an advocate, he must go on reckless of consequences, though it should be his unhappy fate to involve his country in confusion.

In America, this zealotry has been absorbed into the very fabric of our constitutional law. And Justice Byron White (no knee-jerk liberal), concurring in part in United States v. Wade (1967), said this about the role of the defense lawyer:

But defense counsel has no comparable obligation to ascertain or present the truth. If he can confuse a witness, even a truthful one, or make him appear at a disadvantage, unsure or indecisive, that will be his normal course. More often than not, defense counsel will cross-examine a prosecution witness, and impeach him if he can, even if he thinks the witness is telling the truth, just as he will attempt to destroy a witness who he thinks is lying. As part of the duty imposed on the most honorable defense counsel, we countenance or require conduct which in many instances has little, if any, relation to the search for truth.

To paraphrase White, then, defense lawyers appear to work against the system. But in doing so they also make the system work.

It is not the job of a defense lawyer to be popular. As it happens, of course, being popular is the job of a candidate for governor—or popular enough, at least, to get elected. As a lawyer and legal educator I hope that when voters form their judgments on citizens Kilgore and Kaine they think beyond the Hitler card. This is a bipartisan hope—one that cuts both ways. The jobs of criminal prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer are equally noble and altruistic. Vote as you will on judgments of content and character. But do not hold it for or against either lawyer-candidate that they chose one side of the courtroom over the other. After all, it was in the genes.

Rod Smolla is dean of the University of Richmond School of Law.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129219/

fashion
Power Suit
A younger, hipper St. John.
By Mimi Swartz
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, at 2:58 PM ET

A few years ago, I found myself at a fashion-show luncheon sponsored by Neiman Marcus in a Houston hotel ballroom. This isn't the kind of thing I do often, but in this case it was just an hour at midday, a favor for a friend, and so I went. The models were the usual post-pubescent sylphs, and the clothes were appropriate to their age: whiskered jeans and leather pants adorned with chain-link belts; tight, opulent faux-fur jackets over tight blouses that left little to the imagination. The spectacle had the earmarks of Tom Ford, but it was, strangely, a fashion show for St. John knits. Most of the women in the audience were of a certain age, coiffed, powdered, and encased in those venerable boxy, jewel-toned suits with the faceted, braided, beaded, queen-of-someplace buttons. As the models flounced down the catwalk in increasingly challenging outfits, the crowd picked at their poached chicken and looked, in equal parts, appalled and dismayed. It wasn't hard to understand why: If St. John went the way of Gucci, what the hell were they going to wear for the rest of their lives?

The only person who didn't seem worried was a tall, toned, beaming blonde in the back of the room: Kelly Gray, the middle-aged CEO of St. John, who was then trying to update the company's look and image. She was someone who could convincingly assert that 50 was the new 40 and that her clientele didn't have to cover themselves in the sturdy, stuffy Chanel homages her mother and father, Robert and Marie Gray, had been turning out since 1962. Gray was also starring in company ads that appeared in all the best magazines; in these, she was surrounded by panting Lotharios in various stages of undress. "This isn't my father's St. John," Gray seemed to be promising. As Gray dusted off the family business, she seemed to be on the verge of dusting off middle age itself.

Alas, Gray was only partially successful. Manhattan-based Vestar Capital Partners Inc. bought St. John six years ago, and Gray left the company earlier this year. Her attempts to remake St. John with a flashier update of her parents' look—one-shouldered evening gowns, knit jackets with fox collars—must not have met with the approval of Vestar, who last year replaced her with a significantly younger model, Gisele Bundchen, and set to work not just incrementally revamping but completely overhauling the clothes. So far, Gisele has been appearing in what seems to be an intermediate upgrade: somewhat conservative suits that look even less conservative on one of today's sexiest models. But in September 2006, even Gisele will be replaced; the new model will be Angelina Jolie—"mother, actress, and a philanthropist," to quote St. John's CEO, Richard Cohen.

The idea, obviously, is that St. John hopes to build itself into an international luxury brand, like Gucci, Burberry, and, of course, Chanel. As the Wall Street Journal's Teri Agins pointed out in September, this is risky for St. John, because it is an extremely successful company going into its makeover. In an age when the retail business has foundered, its sales were up 7 percent as of October 2004, to $395.6 million, and its customers are loyal. The question is: Can St. John keep its classic customer base—average age 55—and continue to thrive while it skews younger and hipper? And might St. John actually offer the compromise I have lately been looking for: clothing for the middle-aged that is sexy and stylish but age-appropriate—no belly-button or upper-arm exposure—and priced somewhat less than the gross national product of a Third World country?

If your age hovers anywhere between 40 and 60 and you have tried to take care of yourself, you understand the dilemma of which I speak. The pickings for middle-aged women are, well, slim. For mall rats—that is, women who can't get to or can't afford boutiques in Manhattan or Los Angeles—they range from the shapeless, Earth Mother shrouds of J. Jill to the boldly hued shrouds of Chico's. In other words, American retailers think my sartorial role models should be either Mia Farrow or Phyllis Diller. (The Gap has entered this market with Forth & Towne but so far has not seen fit to establish a beachhead in Texas, even in fashion-obsessed Dallas.) There was a brief, halcyon period in the 1980s when Donna Karan made clothes that fit and even enhanced women's curves, but those days are gone.

And so, St. John. At the store in my local luxury mall, I surveyed the racks with a sinking feeling. There they were, the same old knits I remembered, though jazzed up with last year's faux-fur necklines and lots of zippers and beads. The jackets also seemed to be designed with the word "forgiving" in mind—cut a distance from the body, stretchy but not tight. And in colors and prints that evoke either the Fourth of July or Kenyan safaris. (Who really wears animal prints, besides African tour guides and septuagenarian movie stars?) There has always been something patently American about St. John: the unsubtle palette, the democratic cut. It's true that almost any woman can wear these clothes, but, as I considered my own aging issues and sense of style, I had to ask: Gisele or Angelina aside, did I want to?

The now customary upscale immigrant saleswoman—mine was from "Persia"—presented me with some ensembles appropriate for political conventions, while I searched for the stuff Gisele wore in the ads. Finally, I found a short-sleeved knit top with a nice cowl neck and a long black matching skirt. I put it on, studied myself in the dressing-room mirror, and tried to figure out what was wrong. Then it hit me: Though both pieces were my usual size—8 on top and 10 on bottom—they were too big. Clever, those folks at St. John: downsizing, so to speak, to shore up the sagging self-images of the rapidly aging. By the time I got through experimenting, I was a 4, something that has not happened since I was, well, 4.

Feeling newly svelte, I tried on another outfit—a sable-colored wrap sweater and matching skirt with an asymmetrical hem. It looked … OK. But I soon fled. If the clothes at Banana Republic and J. Crew don't fit the over-40 set because they are cut too severely, the clothes at St. John are cut far too generously. If you're going to forgo second helpings and put yourself through boot camp at the gym, you want the world to know. St. John concealed what I needed to conceal—but also much more, thus adding years to my rear. No, thanks.

What about all those glittery evening clothes that looked so glam in the fall catalog? The satiny tuxedo pants and skirts, the sequined sheaths? Where were they? "We don't stock many of those," the saleswoman told me apologetically when I returned the next day.

Confused by the disconnect between the clothes in the ads, the clothes in the catalog, and the clothes in my local store, I put in a call to St. John to discuss. Several calls, in fact. "No one will talk to you," a confoundingly unhelpful publicist named Pearl told me, after failing to return calls for about 10 days. Apparently, the only person allowed to speak on behalf of St. John is the company's CEO, Richard Cohen, and he wasn't talking. Pearl finally agreed to send me shots of the latest runway show, which premiered recently at Los Angeles' fashion week.

If hope springs eternal, even among middle-aged women, St. John's latest collection may explain why. Cohen, formerly head of Ermenegildo Zegna in the United States, brought in Tim Gardner, the recently departed creative director of Calvin Klein, to consult on the designs. The changes are profound: a subtle palette of grays, browns, and blues; sharp, high-collared raincoats; cropped jackets and pants; and a sexy, knit chemise with that sleek boat neck Klein used to revive every few seasons. The updated lines of the suits make them elegant instead of dowdy. And, as the LA Times pointed out, there wasn't "a gold button or cardinal red stitch in sight."

This is what shapely, sophisticated middle-aged women want to wear, I thought. But can they? All will be revealed when the clothes hit the stores this spring. The new line, though gorgeous, looks less forgiving, and so begs more than a few questions: Will the traditional St. John customer—the one who loved the jewel tones and boxy knits—buy these clothes? Or is St. John throwing them over for younger women, who would rather evoke Calvin Klein than Kelly Gray? How big a gamble is the company taking? Pearl still hasn't gotten back to me on that.

Mimi Swartz is an executive editor at Texas Monthly and the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failure, the Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129284/

 

readme
Truth, Justice, and the American Way
Is Scooter Libby innocent until proven guilty?
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, at 12:31 PM ET

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald quite properly emphasized in his press conference on Friday that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is, in the eyes of the law, "innocent until proven guilty." Fitzgerald, who has the gift of making extreme fastidiousness seem macho, also refused to comment in any way on Karl Rove or any other suspect—and isn't even filing a final report—because he believes that the only thing the law should say is "guilty"—if it's got the goods. If it can't say guilty, it should say nothing at all.

This posture is admirable and darned charming in a federal prosecutor. But it is silly, sneaky, and wrong when adopted by politicians to avoid saying anything substantive, as many have done in the past few days.

Scooter Libby is not innocent until proven guilty. This is true in several senses, but let's start with the one that many observers believe is undervalued in our hurly-burly world of today. It's called reality. Libby may be innocent, or he may be guilty. We will try to reach a conclusion about that in a trial, which of necessity lies in the future. But the events that his innocence or guilt turn on are all in the past.

Either he fed the FBI and the grand jury a phony story in order to impede the investigation of a security leak, or he didn't. Even the states of mind that the law requires for various crimes—knowledge of this or that, intent to do this or that—occurred or did not occur in the past, however imperfect our future efforts to fathom them might be.

The presumption of innocence is a conceit of the judicial system. That doesn't make it a bad thing. In fact it is a good thing—one of the ornaments of free and democratic society. The law, and especially the criminal law, is full of conceits that serve justice, although they require participants to make believe various things. The rules of evidence, for example. Anyone who has watched a TV courtroom drama, from Perry Mason to Law & Order, has heard a judge declare that "the jury will disregard" something no one seeking the truth would disregard. That's because the judicial process has other goals besides seeking the truth.

One of those other goals is protecting the innocent. The law bends over backward to avoid a wrongful conviction. That's why it excludes certain kinds of evidence, and that's why the standard for conviction is guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." In a civil lawsuit, the standard is generally "more probable than not." Whatever probably happened, as best as the judge or jury can determine, is taken to have happened. But in a criminal trial there is a whole range of probability that is off limits: It probably happened, but not beyond a reasonable doubt.

The judge and the jury who try Scooter Libby must start with a presumption of innocence and must consider only the facts as presented at trial—which may or may not include all the relevant facts. If the truth is that he's probably guilty, but not beyond a reasonable doubt, they must declare him innocent. Superman fights for "truth, justice, and the American way," but the American way sometimes pits truth against justice. In the courtroom, justice counts for more than truth. But outside the courtroom, truth has its claims as well.

In refusing to discuss any aspect of the CIA-leak mess, the White House is exploiting an American mania for judicial process that President Bush has so often criticized. Meanwhile, in the Supreme Court mess, Democrats have been misusing this same mania against the president. Trying to milk every last drop out of the botched nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, the opposition party faced a challenge: How can you knock Bush without endorsing Miers? Solution: You complain that she was denied her fair opportunity to a hearing and an up-or-down Senate vote. And that is the official Democratic sound bite. But it is ridiculous. Hearings are about the Senate's right to approve of the president's choice, not a nominee's right to be approved. There is no such right, and no right to a hearing, either.

As for the CIA-leak investigation, there are more than enough facts, unchallenged or beyond reasonable dispute, to raise questions that President Bush and others should have to answer. These questions do not depend on a final judicial resolution about one person's guilt or innocence, and they shouldn't have to wait for it. The most important of these questions involve the legitimacy of the war in Iraq. To avoid this topic, the administration and its defenders cling to Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald's declaration that the war and the Libby prosecution have nothing to do with each other. It's fine, and appropriate to his job, that he thinks so. But about this, at least, he's quite wrong.

Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129264/

recycled
Charles and Camilla Do America
All we are saying is give them a chance.
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, at 12:14 PM ET

On Tuesday, Britain's Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, kicked off a weeklong tour of the United States that will include stops in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and New Orleans. This is the first official visit for the pair since Charles wed Camilla in a decidedly low-key ceremony in April. According to officials, the couple's mission is to highlight the ties that bind the United States and Great Britain and to promote the prince's environmental work; however, some are speculating that it is a palace ploy to get America to finally warm up to the un-Diana-like Camilla. In April, June Thomas applauded the prince for "making an honest woman of his age-appropriate partner, a woman with whom he is well-matched in looks, habits, and hobbies, whom he has known and loved for more than 30 years." According to Thomas, Charles' real mistake was getting his "weddings out of order: He married his first wife second and his trophy wife first."

 

 jurisprudence
Alito or Scalito?
If you're a liberal, you'd prefer Scalia.
By Robert Gordon
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 6:24 PM ET

In the great Alito-Scalito debate, everyone makes one mistake: They seem to assume that if Samuel Alito is as conservative as Antonin Scalia, that's about as conservative as a judge can be. Not so. In important ways, Samuel Alito could prove more conservative than Antonin Scalia. And the record suggests he will.

Yes, Alito shares Justice Antonin Scalia's ambivalence toward judicial activism. Both men tout their own restraint in deferring to majorities that step on individual rights (including a woman's decision whether to bear a child). Both men also act aggressively to override majorities that touch states' rights like sovereign immunity from lawsuits. And neither Scalia nor Alito has really explained how to reconcile the criticism of activism on one front with the embrace of activism on the other.

In 2000, Alito concluded that Congress had improperly allowed workers to sue states for violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act. That conclusion anticipated a dissent by Justice Scalia three years later, when Chief Justice Rehnquist rather shockingly upheld the leave law in Nevada v. Hibbs. Both Alito and Scalia's views of sovereign immunity trumped their deference to democratic decision-making.

But that is just part of the story. Scalia has actually proved to be less adventuresome than Alito in curtailing congressional power. Alito wrote a dissenting opinion in 1998 arguing that Congress couldn't bar possession of a machine gun, because merely having a machine gun isn't connected closely enough to the thing Congress can constitutionally regulate—interstate commerce. Alito relied on a 1995 Supreme Court case saying Congress couldn't constitutionally regulate the possession of a handgun near a school. Every court of appeals, save one, that reached this question rejected Alito's position. Courts distinguished the 1995 case and concluded, in the words of Dennis Jacobs, a 2^nd Circuit judge appointed by George H.W. Bush, that the machine-gun law was "integral to a larger federal scheme for the regulation of trafficking in firearms—an economic activity with strong interstate effects." In other words, if Congress can stop gun trafficking, which is clearly commerce, Congress can also stop people from having machine guns in order to choke off trafficking.

Justice Scalia himself adopted this common-sense logic last year—not in addressing gun possession, but in agreeing with the court's liberals that Congress could stop local production of marijuana as a way to get at interstate drug dealing. Scalia wrote that the "regulation of an intrastate activity may be essential to a comprehensive regulation of interstate commerce even though the intra­state activity does not itself 'substantially affect' inter­state commerce." Following that decision, the Supreme Court vacated the single appellate ruling to agree with Alito's view. If Alito's position on family leave once proved too much for Rehnquist, his position on the Commerce Clause seems likely to prove too much for Scalia.

While Alito goes to conservative places Scalia won't, the more telling point is that Scalia goes to liberal places Alito won't. Scalia has a libertarian streak that can yield surprising results. In a 5-4 decision, Scalia found that the government could not, without a warrant, use a sophisticated thermal imaging device to figure out what you are doing in your home—whether growing marijuana or making whoopee. And Scalia dissented from a decision upholding mandatory drug testing for Customs employees, charging that it is a "kind of immolation of privacy and human dignity in symbolic opposition to drug use." When his libertarianism combines with his (sometime) commitment to "original intent," Scalia offers other surprises: Last year he wrote an eloquent opinion concluding that the president lacked power to detain enemy combatants. Only the court's most liberal member, John Paul Stevens, joined that position; Stephen Breyer, another liberal, provided the key vote for a controlling view friendlier to the president. And unlike other conservative colleagues, Scalia has endorsed sharp limits on the power of judges to lengthen sentences for defendants, the power of prosecutors to use hearsay evidence, and the power of police officers to detain defendants before arraignment.

The Alito record holds few such surprises. In the Washington Post, Cass Sunstein examined Alito's dissents and found them "almost uniformly conservative." That's nearly true for criminal matters—just forget the "almost." In 15 years on the bench, Alito has filed more than a dozen dissents in criminal cases or cases involving the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. Not one of those dissents urges a position more protective of individual rights than the majority.

A broader survey is even more striking. Consider all those criminal and Fourth Amendment cases in which Alito sat on a three-judge panel and one judge disagreed with the majority. In some, Alito wrote a majority opinion and a colleague dissented; in some, Alito silently joined a majority opinion; and in some Alito dissented. At least in my research, Lexis/Nexis revealed exactly one case in which Alito protected individual rights more vigorously than colleagues. That wasn't really an individual-rights case at all; it was the states' rights case in which Alito would have vacated the conviction for owning a machine gun.

So, for example, Alito sat on a dozen panels in which judges disagreed regarding a citizen's Fourth Amendment rights. In each of those cases, Alito adopted the view most supportive of the government's position. Alito would have upheld the strip searches of an innocent 10-year-old girl, dissenting from the opinion by the well-known civil libertarian Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Alito crossed swords with two Reagan appointees in arguing that a jury shouldn't decide whether a police officer lawfully allowed his men to push to the ground, handcuff, and hold at gunpoint another innocent family. That case was echoed three years later when Alito, this time writing for a majority, found that in the course of an eviction, marshals could reasonably pump a sawed-off shotgun at a family sitting around its living room.

Of course, caveats apply. All of the cases are more complicated than short summaries can capture. In any given case, Alito's position often seems reasonable; it is the accumulation of consistent results that surprises. Alito has also written or joined unanimous opinions ruling for defendants or citizens pushed around by police. And in en banc reviews where the entire 3^rd Circuit sits, and where his vote has not been decisive, he has joined a few decisions not fixed on the right side of the court. None of this changes the basic point: Scalia's rulings on police power push back against conservative colleagues. Alito's don't.

Alito would also look more moderate if he sat on the very conservative 4^th or 5^th circuits. But recent news reports have vastly overstated the liberalism of the 3^rd. In late 1996, the 3^rd Circuit's active judges numbered 10 Republicans and two Democrats, and today the court is evenly divided on partisan lines. Alito regularly finds himself to the right of quite conservative colleagues.

There's also an interesting question about freedom of speech. Neither Scalia nor Alito is a free-speech absolutist. Both have protected businesses' right to advertise, but not prisoners' right to read, for example. In an early battle in the war over political correctness, Scalia struck down a Minneapolis law barring bias-motivated speech; Alito recently echoed that decision in his own ruling against a campus anti-harassment policy. Yet in the only free-speech case many Americans know about, Scalia evoked the right's fury by casting the fifth vote to strike down a law barring flag burning. There's no evidence Alito would take on the right the same way.

Alito does appear more sensitive to the claims of religious minorities. Scalia famously rejected the claim of two members of a Native American church that they should be exempted from anti-peyote laws; Alito distinguished that case to rule in favor of Muslim police officers who felt religiously obligated to wear their beards. And Alito seems to be on the better side of that argument. But today, when leaders of the religious right have made so much of their own victimization, his position is hardly a mark of ideological heterodoxy. These conservatives celebrate Judge Michael McConnell for his critique of Scalia's view.

If you are the sort of person who believes conservatives are always right, Alito's consistency in many matters will cheer you. Maybe it will even send you into the same earthly rapture that America's right has experienced since Monday morning. But if you are the sort of person who believes that conservatives and liberals both tell some of the truth and neither tells all of it, you may prefer the sort of conservative judge who ventures out of camp more often. Most Americans probably feel that way, which is why most Americans probably should think carefully about Samuel Alito's confirmation.

When Antonin Scalia starts looking good, you know you're in trouble.

Robert Gordon is senior vice president of the Center for American Progress. He was a law clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129107/

explainer
How Do Church Trials Work?
Do pastors get jury duty?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 6:21 PM ET

The highest court of the United Methodist Church defrocked a lesbian minister on Monday, ending a legal battle that lasted more than a year. Rev. Irene Elizabeth Stroud had been found guilty of practicing homosexuality last December, but an appeals committee overturned the verdict in April. How do church trials work?

Every denomination has its own system, but most resemble standard American legal proceedings. To punish someone for breaking a law that's in the United Methodist Church's Book of Discipline, a case must be argued before a "trial court" of 13 jurors and two alternates. Both the "complainant" and the "respondent" have counsels who argue before a judge, called the "presiding officer." To secure a conviction, the complainant's side must sway nine jurors; sentencing decisions require a simple majority.

Members of the jury are selected from a group of at least 35 local pastors who get summoned through the mail. Counsels can reject potential jurors through a classic voir dire process; each side gets four peremptory challenges and unlimited challenges for cause.

The first Stroud trial took place in the rec hall of a church camp in Pennsylvania. Both sides made opening statements and called witnesses to the stand. Jurors had occasional prayer breaks. After a regional appeals committee ruled that the first court ignored key issues relating to the United Methodist Church constitution, Stroud's case went to the denomination's highest court—the Judicial Council. When the council hears a case, judges review 30 minutes of oral arguments from each side, as well as written briefs. Once they make a ruling, it stands as precedent.

Not all church legal systems rely on precedent. Catholic judges, for example, decide cases on the basis of codified church law. (The legal systems in some countries also rely on a "civil code" instead of legal precedent.) If the Catholic Church decides to hold a trial, each side hires a "canonical advocate" who has at least a three-year degree in canon law and the proper certification. The advocates argue the case in front of a judge or a panel of judges. The judges themselves decide the outcome of the case behind closed doors. Appeals are adjudicated at a regular meeting of cardinals.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Arthur Espelage of the Canon Law Society of America and Robyn Murphy of Soulforce.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129229/

politics
Dirty Harry
The Senate Minority Leader throws a roundhouse.
By John Dickerson
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 6:13 PM ET

Harry Reid speaks so quietly that reporters who interview the Senate minority leader in a breeze have to hold their tape recorders to his chin, as though they were giving him a shave. Some liberals find him too soft-spoken. They didn't like his caution during Roberts' nomination and his quasi-support for Miers'. Yesterday, all he could do was gripe that President Bush hadn't called before announcing his new Supreme Court nominee. According to the Constitution, he explained Monday to a group of reporters, senators are supposed to offer "advice and consent" on nominees. All he got was a 10-second phone call from Chief of Staff Andy Card when news of Samuel Alito's nomination was already all over the airwaves. (Andy: "I guess you've heard." Reid: "Yup." Click.)

Late this afternoon, Sen. Reid did more than complain about White House railroading. He shut down the Senate over it. In a rare secret session, he called for the entire body to convene behind closed doors to talk about the intelligence that led to the Iraq war. Reid invoked Senate Rule 21 allowing closed secret sessions necessary to discuss classified information. The C-SPAN cameras were switched off and the lights lowered.

Reid was trying to thwart White House efforts to move past the Scooter Libby indictment. Yesterday, Bush had everyone talking about Alito. Today he unveiled a big program to prepare for a possible outbreak of avian flu. Reid wants to change the subject back. "The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really about," he said on the floor of the Senate today in regular session, "how the administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions."

Reid's tantrum was entirely symbolic because while he could force the secret session he can't force a full investigation, but it's just the kind of plate-throwing that liberals in his party have been crying out for. They'll no doubt be delighted by the outrage in the GOP. Republicans complained Reid's move violated the Senate's tradition of courtesy and consent. Recent closed sessions called to discuss chemical weapons and Bill Clinton's impeachment were agreed to by the leaders of both parties beforehand. But there was nothing in Senate rules that allowed them to stop him.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee said the chamber was "hijacked" by Democrats. "Once again, it shows the Democrats use scare tactics," he complained, sounding as impotent and frustrated as Reid had the day before. "They have no conviction. They have no principles. They have no ideas. But this is the ultimate. Since I've been majority leader, I'll have to say, not with the previous Democratic leader or the current Democratic leader have ever I been slapped in the face with such an affront to the leadership of this grand institution."

I should have seen Reid winding up for this punch yesterday. When I asked him to assess President Bush's political fortunes at a lunch with reporters, Reid started what sounded like a folksy anecdote. "When I was in eighth grade in Searchlight, Nev., some new kid moved into town and I picked a fight with him," he said, explaining that he thought delivering one drubbing would be sufficient. "That was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. People can always come back. You can knock them down and they can still come back to cause you a lot of trouble."

Bush was the annoying pest in his analogy, but Sen. Reid could have been talking about himself.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129275/

chatterbox
Gap in Alito Paper Trail!
Plus, the only even vaguely colorful Alito anecdote.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 6:11 PM ET

In nominating Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, President Bush is in effect saying, "You want a paper trail? I'll give you a paper trail!" Alito's been an appellate judge for a decade and a half. He trails opinions requiring that a woman notify her husband* before having an abortion; striking down a ban on machine guns; disallowing a school hate-speech code; etc., etc. The Senate Judiciary Committee won't lack for bedtime reading.

Or will it? The undergraduate newspaper for Alito's alma mater, the Daily Princetonian, reports that Alito's senior thesis on the Italian Constitutional Court is "missing from the University archives." Missing, eh? Just what does that senior thesis say? Get me a subpoena! Get me a special counsel investigation! The cover-up is always worse than the crime! What we have here is the appearance of impropriety! Politics ain't beanbag! It's not the heat, it's the humidity! Feed a cold and starve a fever!

Sorry. I seem to have whipped myself up into cant-spouting frenzy. I'm better now.

The other reason to peruse Christian Burset's story in the Daily Princetonian is that it contains the closest thing we have to a colorful anecdote about Alito. Ready? Here it goes:

David Grais '72, who roomed with Alito for three years at Princeton, said they were both "too studious for [their] good." But he, too, experienced his roommate's lighter side.

"One of our other roommates pulled some practical joke on Sam, which I do not remember," Grais said in an email. "The other guy drank scotch-on-the-rocks every night. Sam retaliated by putting salt in the water used to make ice cubes in the refrigerator in our room. The other guy went through a full bottle of terrible-tasting scotch before realizing that his ice cubes had been sabotaged."

To-ga! To-ga! To-ga!

Correction, Nov. 2, 2005: An earlier version of this column stated, incorrectly, that Alito's decision required that a woman secure consent from the father. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129232/

webhead
TV You'll Want To Pay For
How $2 downloads can revive network television.
By Ivan Askwith
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 5:02 PM ET

It has now been 20 days since Apple announced it would sell selected ABC-Disney television programs via iTunes. As of Monday, iTunes customers had bought more than than 1 million videos. At first glance, these sales figures seem like another nail in the coffin of broadcast television. If we can get television content online, on demand, whenever we want it, how will networks convince us to tune in on their schedules? For that matter, how can they be certain we'll tune in at all?

The iTunes distribution model does give the networks a huge opportunity to reinvent themselves, though. By allowing viewers to purchase individual episodes, broadcast-television executives could free themselves from the yoke of advertising revenue. That could potentially usher in a new age of television, one where fans have the power to keep their favorite series in production and producers have the opportunity to create more elaborate, controversial, and innovative programs.

Until now, broadcast television has followed a predictable pattern. If a show does not attract enough viewers, it goes off the air. Sometimes this system functions perfectly (e.g., Who Wants To Marry My Dad?), but it often fails in spectacular fashion. Many of the most innovative shows of the last two decades—shows that generated critical acclaim and cult followings—have been early casualties of the ratings wars.

When such shows get canceled, there are generally two explanations: Either the network didn't know how to market or schedule the show, or the series grew too complex and unwelcoming for casual viewers and latecomers. (Joss Whedon's Firefly is an example of the former, while David Lynch's Twin Peaks exemplifies the latter.) Both scenarios are symptoms of the same problem. There's still an assumption that if a show is good enough, a sizable audience will be sitting in front of the television when it airs. In an age of DVD boxed sets and TiVo, such a belief is fatally flawed.

As iTunes and its inevitable competitors offer more broadcast-television content, producers won't have to depend on couch potatoes as their only audience. They also won't have to compromise their programs to meet broadcast requirements. Episode lengths can vary as needed, content can be darker, more topical, and more explicit. If the networks are clever, these changes can supplement broadcast programming rather than replace it. Audiences already expect director's cuts and deleted scenes on DVDs. It's not hard to imagine that the networks might one day air a "broadcast cut" of an episode, then encourage viewers to download the longer, racier director's cut the next afternoon.

Nor will episodic programs have to be self-contained to remain accessible to new viewers. While DVDs now give viewers the chance to catch up between seasons, on-demand television will allow anyone to catch up at any time, quickly and legally. Producers will no longer have to choose between alienating new viewers with a complex storyline or alienating the established audience by rehashing details from previous episodes. (This would be especially critical for plot-intensive shows like Alias, which has been forced to "reboot" its plot several times to make it accessible to new viewers.) If they're smart, the networks will realize this is not only feasible but extremely profitable. Rather than recapping relevant details from previous episodes ("Previously on Alias ..."), we may soon be encouraged to buy our way up to speed ("Before watching tonight's Alias, download Episodes 4, 5, and 6.")

The most enticing possibility, though, is that on-demand television will allow audiences to take an active role in programming the networks. We've seen several examples of fans banding together to save their favorite programs in the past few years. Fox put Family Guy back into production on the strength of high DVD sales, NBC released Freaks and Geeks on DVD after getting bombarded with petitions, and a fan-organized campaign to resurrect Firefly resulted in last month's big-screen release of Serenity.

Direct downloads will give fans of endangered shows the chance to vote with their wallets while a show is still on the air. And when a program does go off the air, direct payments from fans might provide enough revenue to keep it in production as an online-only venture. If we assume that the average hour-long drama costs $1.5 million per episode and downloads will cost around $2 per viewer, shows would only need a few million viewers to turn a small profit. Would a few million viewers pay $2 a week to download an hour of television? It's certainly not impossible. In the past month, viewers have shelled out more than $30 million for two hours of Serenity. And even if viewers aren't prepared to pay $2 per show, there's nothing to stop the networks from offering free downloads with embedded advertising (which could be far better targeted than the ads networks currently show).

MIT's Henry Jenkins, for one, has already written extensively on potential business models for online, on-demand television. Jenkins outlines a subscription model where viewers pay in advance for an entire season of downloadable episodes, providing the startup capital needed to fund production. Episodes would also be available at a higher cost on a per-episode basis, providing a steady stream of additional funds. Downloadable television also would provide access to a global audience, which would presumably include many viewers who would be thrilled to buy episodes rather than wait for shows to arrive in their country. (The BBC is already well ahead of us on this.)

If iTunes shows us anything, it's that audiences are willing to purchase their media when it is simple, affordable, and convenient. With Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft set to join Apple in the television wars, it's a safe bet that we'll see more major-network content for sale in the near future. For those of us who use peer-to-peer software like BitTorrent to download the shows we miss, there's no rush. For everyone else, I just hope Veronica Mars and Arrested Development will be available for download before the networks give up on them.

Ivan Askwith, a media analyst with MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium, writes frequently on the intersection of technology, entertainment, and culture.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129003/

jurisprudence
Rock and Roe
Alito's unequivocal abortion decisions.
By Richard Schragger
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 4:08 PM ET

Supporters of Judge Samuel Alito are out in full force today, arguing that he is conservative but not extreme; principled but not overzealous. The example being widely touted: He may have voted against a broad right to abortion in one case, but he struck down an abortion regulation in another. In one article after another it is suggested that Alito has taken a middle-of-the-road position in abortion cases. Now, let's be very clear: Judge Alito might be ambivalent about many things, but he is not ambivalent about abortion. Seeking to cloud this issue by pointing out that Alito authored opinions on both sides of the issue is nonsense. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In 1991, Alito was very clear. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey—the very case the Supreme Court later used to affirm Roe v. Wade—Alito joined the majority in holding that it is not an undue burden on a woman's right to choose to require women to wait 24 hours for an abortion, to require minors to obtain parental consent, or to require that abortion providers give women information about alternatives to abortion and comply with certain disclosure and public-reporting requirements. But Alito went even further than the majority in that case. Though he joined the other two judges in upholding most of Pennsylvania's law, he disagreed with them that the spousal notification portion of the statute was unconstitutional. Alito would have upheld the entire statute, including the spousal notification provision, on the grounds that it did not constitute an undue burden. It was this part of the statute the Supreme Court struck down in Casey.

Nine years later, in 2000, in Planned Parenthood v. Farmer, Alito faced a Pennsylvania statute banning the so-called partial-birth abortion procedure. But this time he did not get a chance to rule. The Supreme Court had granted review on an almost identical Nebraska statute, and the 3^rd Circuit postponed handing down its own decision until it could hear from the Supreme Court. Alas, the Supreme Court struck down the Nebraska statute in Stenberg v. Carhart. Therefore the Pennsylvania statute had to fall as well. Alito had no choice: To do otherwise would have been to ignore a direct command of the Supreme Court.

What is interesting, however, is that Alito did not join the majority opinion in Farmer. He wrote separately. Why? Here's a very good guess: The majority opinion in Farmer had been drafted before the Supreme Court had issued its decision in Carhart; indeed, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, who wrote it, expressly noted as much. Instead of rewriting the draft opinion, Barry simply tacked on the Carhart precedent to the beginning of her existing decision, observing that her opinion was essentially in agreement with the Supreme Court's. Had Alito originally agreed with Barry, it is a good guess he would have gone along with this shortcut, since the outcome was exactly the same. But I suspect that he didn't agree with the majority and certainly did not want some reasoning lurking out there that might have been even marginally broader than the Supreme Court's. So, Alito went out of his way to distance himself from Barry's opinion, which, he observed in concurrence, "was never necessary and is now obsolete."

Alito's snub of the Barry majority opinion echoes his logic in Casey, in which he rejected the majority's application of the undue burden test to Pennsylvania's spousal notification provision. That provision required a married woman to notify her spouse if she was planning to have an abortion unless she swore that her spouse was not the father of the child, her husband could not be located after diligent effort, the pregnancy was a result of a sexual assault that had been reported to the authorities, or she had reason to believe that notification would likely result in infliction of bodily injury.

The 3^rd Circuit majority in Casey accepted expert testimony that this provision—even with its exceptions—would impose an undue burden on a woman's right to choose to undergo an abortion. The majority observed that most married women would voluntarily tell their husbands of their plans, but that in circumstances where they would not, requiring notification could result in spousal coercion. The exception for bodily harm, reasoned the majority, did not take into account the myriad forms of psychological coercion a husband could apply to a wife, including withdrawal of financial support or threats to dissolve the marriage. Moreover, the exception for spousal sexual abuse required that women report their abuser to the police, an action experts testified was likely to lead to further abuse and one a battered woman was unlikely to take. The majority of the Casey judges, taking account of the "real world consequences of forced notification," concluded that "because of the nature of the marriage relationship and the emotional character of the human response to pregnancy and abortion, the number of different situations in which women may reasonably fear dire consequences from notifying their husbands is potentially limitless."

But Alito rejected this "real world" approach, arguing that the plaintiffs had not sustained their burden of proving that the spousal notification provision would result in spousal coercion. Alito's interpretation of "undue burden" is noticeably crabbed: It is not enough, he argued, to show "that a law will have a heavy impact on a few women." Rather, those challenging the law must prove a "broader inhibiting effect." Alito thus demanded that the plaintiffs provide the court with a rough number of how many women would be inhibited from obtaining an abortion by the requirement of spousal notice. The majority's common-sense reasoning was not enough; the "undue burden" test required the plaintiffs to provide actual evidence that coerced spousal notification would inhibit some actual number of women's decision-making.

Of course, that kind of evidence is almost impossible to obtain. How would one begin to figure out just how many women would have sought an abortion but did not because they were required to notify their spouse? The plaintiffs provided expert evidence that women are often coerced physically and emotionally by abusive husbands; that the abortion decision presents them with a terrifying choice in those circumstances; and that required notification adds to the burden of an already difficult decision by holding out the threat of spousal reprisal. For Alito, this was not enough, and so he dissented.

That Alito was on the wrong side of the 3^rd Circuit majority and the Supreme Court should be enough for those who are full-throated supporters of a woman's right to choose. But this fact is also important for anyone who finds themselves in the middle on this issue: Note that the judges who joined the 3^rd Circuit opinion in Casey—Judges Walter Stapleton and Collins Seitz—were not radical, bra-burning feminists of any sort. Stapleton—who wrote Casey—was appointed by Ronald Reagan, and Seitz was a Johnson appointee; one can only characterize their jurisprudence as emphatically moderate and mainstream. And remember that the swing justices who upheld Casey and reaffirmed Roe—Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor—were also appointed by Republicans and are also moderate and well within the mainstream of judicial attitudes.

If Alito replaces O'Connor, both of his crucial abortion opinions in the 3^rd Circuit indicate that he will not take her centrist path. But this time, there will be no moderate Supreme Court above him to put on the brakes.

Richard Schragger is an associate professor at the University of Virginia Law School.

 

dvd extras
Star Wars: Episodes I-VI
The greatest postmodern art film ever.
By Aidan Wasley
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 3:21 PM ET

With the release of Episode III Revenge of the Sith on DVD today, George Lucas' audience can finally see all six Star Wars films back-to-back, as a single text. This is how Lucas himself regards the series, often joking that, including his 1973 hit American Graffiti, he has made only three movies in his career. One of the surprises in store after a marathon viewing is how much of the young Lucas, the self-conscious avant-gardist of THX1138, is actually visible onscreen, peeking out from behind the endless sequences of digitally enhanced space battles and ritualized light-saber duels. Looking at these familiar films with fresh eyes, unfiltered by the lens of nostalgia and sentiment—and it was, admittedly, a resonant moment this summer to watch the final episode with my father, who had taken me to see the original film in 1977 when I was 8—we start to see just how deeply weird they really are. Three decades on, the kids who grew up playing with Luke Skywalker action figures and carrying Princess Leia lunchboxes may be startled to discover that Star Wars is really just one big elephantine postmodern art film.

Star Wars, at its secret, spiky intellectual heart, has more in common with films like Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books or even Matthew Barney's The Cremaster Cycle than with the countless cartoon blockbusters it spawned. Greenaway and Barney take the construction of their own work as a principal artistic subject, and Lucas does, too. "This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level," one of John Ashbery's works begins. Star Wars, we might say, is concerned with plot on a very plain level. Everything about the films, from the opening text crawls to the out-of-order production of the two trilogies, foregrounds the question of plot. As an audience, we grapple with not just the intricate clockwork of a complex and interwoven narrative, but, in postmodern fashion, with the fundamental mechanics of storytelling itself.

As Star Wars works to make us aware of its own narrative structure, other odd things about the films start to come into focus. Most significantly, we start to notice that the films are an elaborate meditation on the dialectic between chance and order. They all depend upon absurd coincidence to propel the story forward. Just what are the odds, in just one of near-infinite examples, that of all the planets in that galaxy far, far away, the droids should end up back on Tatooine, in the home of the son of the sweet (if annoying) boy who had built C-3PO decades before? Throughout all six films there are scenes of crucial serendipity. Such dependence on unlikely coincidence isn't unique to Star Wars. As literary critics have long pointed out, the arbitrary yoking together of events in the service of storytelling is one of the fundamental characteristics of all narrative. R2-D2 needs to hook up with Luke on Tatooine, just as Prospero's enemies need to wash up on the shores of his island, and Elizabeth Bennet needs to marry Mr. Darcy, for the narrative requirements of those stories to be fulfilled. The audience's willing surrender to narrative coincidence is demanded by the story's need to conclude itself.

But Lucas takes this self-consciousness about narrative artifice a step further: He makes explicit his theoretical interest in the mechanics of plot. As viewers, we take pleasure in the implausible events that must happen for the narrative contraption to snap shut in a satisfying way. But the characters come to understand that there is another agent, external to themselves, that is dictating the action. Within the films' fiction, that force is called … er, "the Force." It's the Force that makes Anakin win the pod race so that he can get off Tatooine and become a Jedi and set all the other events in all of the other films in motion. We learn that Anakin's birth, fall, redemption, and death are required to "bring balance to the Force" and, not coincidentally, to give the story its dramatic shape. The Force is, in other words, a metaphor for, or figuration of, the demands of narrative. The Force is the power of plot.

If the Force is Plot, then what is the difference between the Light and Dark Sides of the Force? As Qui-Gon tells the young Obi-Wan, "Feel, don't think. Trust your instincts." Obi-Wan instructs Luke that the Force "binds the Galaxy together," and Yoda teaches him that the Force manifests its power most strongly "when you are calm, at peace, passive." Luke puts this doctrine of existential surrender most famously into practice when he turns off his targeting computer and "uses the Force" to blow away the Death Star. The Light Side of Plot, then, seems to involve the willing submission to chance, to imagination, to inspiration—a formula familiar from epic narrative, where poets like Homer announce their surrender to the possession of "the Muse" in the service of a story beyond themselves.

The Dark Side, on the other hand, is all about conscious control, structure, order, and design. Emperor Palpatine, the embodiment of the Dark Side, taunts the despairing Luke in Return of the Jedi, "Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design," and we are led to understand in Sith that it was Palpatine himself who set the entire plot in motion by manipulating the Force toward Anakin's virgin birth. Palpatine is the emblem of the artist as clockmaker or puppet master, the omniscient manipulator of his hapless characters for the purposes of a satisfying narrative payoff. At the end of Jedi, in a scene out of Pirandello or one of Ashbery's own plays, the characters assert their autonomy and kill their author.

Every text depends on the balance between inspiration and authorial control, and Lucas makes that tension the principal subject of his film. Lucas, like every author, is Luke to his own Palpatine—both the surrenderer to chance (as in Harrison Ford's memorably ad-libbed "I know" in response to the scripted "I love you" from Leia), and the rigorous, arranging schemer (as epitomized in the films' elaborate special effects). Anakin is the tension-filled creative midpoint between the two: "the balance of the Force." And if we want to critique Lucas' own text, we might do so using the theoretical terms he himself has set up and suggest that the parts that are least successful are the moments when the artistic balance tips too far toward either the Light or the Dark Sides. For instance, the much-deplored dependence on computer animation in the prequels, which opened up spectacular vistas at the expense of feeling and characterization, can be seen as Lucas tilting dangerously toward the Dark Side. There's no place for serendipity in a pixilated galaxy, since every digital detail must be planned and plotted and programmed. And similarly, Jar Jar Binks, the films' most notorious misstep and an explicit signifier of bumbling whimsy, looks like an error of unbearable Lightness.

Characteristic of these films' dizzying self-reflexivity, Lucas even seems to acknowledge these stumbles toward excess within the structure of the films themselves. It's Jar Jar's chance collision with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan in the jungles of Naboo that inflicts his continued presence on the screen for the rest of The Phantom Menace. But by Clones, his role is reduced to that of a deferential stooge of the nefarious Palpatine, and in Sith he gets only a single line of dialogue, suggesting a certain balancing out of Jar Jar's irritating disturbance in the Force. More important, we are made to see how Jar Jar's apparently coincidental meeting with the Jedi needed to happen, since it is his misguided vote that allows Palpatine to take control of the Senate, leading to the death of the Republic. The clown becomes the villain, and balance is restored.

Likewise, in Clones there's a fascinating instance of cinematic self-consciousness that speaks to Lucas' awareness of the imaginative costs of all-digital filmmaking. Amid a riotous and panoramic battle-scene on a desert planet, the film frame suddenly starts to shudder as it zooms in on a close-up of a clone-filled combat vehicle. As viewers, we recognize the jerky camera movement as that of a hand-held camera, familiar to us from news footage and war movies, and the shot gives a kinetic, you-are-there edge to the chaotic scene. Until, that is, we realize that the entire scene exists only in a computer hard-drive, that there is no hand-held camera, and that Lucas is using a computer program to mimic the authentic touch of the unsteady human hand. It's a startling moment, where the film calls our attention to its own technological artifice. Lucas is firmly committed to digital cinema, but in this single shot we see him acknowledge, perhaps a little sheepishly, his technology's erasure of a fortuitous or exciting human accident.

Lucas now says that he's finished with popular filmmaking and wants to return to the experimentalism of his early career: "I love doing Star Wars, and it's a fun adventure for me, but I'm ready to explore some of the things I was interested in exploring when I was in my late 20s." As Obi-Wan would tell him, the Master's nostalgia for his artsy youth is misplaced. That Force has been with him, always.

Aidan Wasley teaches at the University of Georgia, in Athens, Ga.

 

technology
Privacy for Sale
How to buy online anonymity.
By Adam L. Penenberg
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2005, at 1:34 PM ET

When you surf the Internet, you leave footprints everywhere you go. Google conceivably knows every term you've searched for and every e-mail you've sent and received. Cookies greet you when you return to a site and track your movements when you stay within its pages or visit affiliated sites. Your ISP knows who you are and where you live or work whenever you get online.

This tracking continues far from your computer. The hundreds of publicly and privately owned surveillance cameras within a 10-block radius of my office capture my image when I buy a falafel or read a book in Washington Square Park. If you talk on a cell phone or send text messages from your PDA, your provider knows where you are. The same goes for when you pay for socks with a credit card or get cash from an ATM.

As the battle to provide ads better-targeted to online consumers intensifies, our information becomes more valuable to online marketers and publishers. Web surfers also fear that identity thieves are on the prowl for their personal data. The government is a potential bogeyman, too: As fears over terrorism intensify, the feds may find your personal data irresistible. In 2003, Congress scuttled the Total Information Awareness program, which would have enabled the Pentagon to mine millions of public and private records to search for indications of terrorist activity. But that doesn't mean the effort to combine databases has stalled—it's just been redirected.

So, how can we protect ourselves? We're going to have to pay for it. In the same way we fork over a few extra bucks a month for caller ID block and an unlisted phone number, we'll pay for anonymity in other areas. Privacy has become a commodity. The more our personal information gets out there, and the more valuable it becomes, the more incentive there will be for companies to shield it on our behalf.

There's a good chance you already have a personal firewall or a spyware remover installed on your machine. But there are loads of other products that can do everything from masking your IP address—kind of like driving in a car with a fake license plate—to scrambling your data so that anyone trying to intercept it will encounter gibberish, to services that claim to expunge your personal information from a whole range of databases and search engines. Some do what they say they can do. Others don't.

For $29.99, Acronis Privacy Expert Suite will wipe your hard drive of all traces of Web surfing. Anonymizer.com offers an array of products that do everything from masking your identity by routing your Web traffic through secure servers to encrypting your wireless connection. GhostSurf, a competing product, provides "an anonymous, encrypted Internet connection" that erases any trace of your surfing "to Department of Defense standards." Encryption schemes like PGP will let you send e-mail securely so that even if hackers intercept it upstream, they won't be able to read it. A program called SafeHouse will fully encrypt your hard drive to ensure that if your laptop is stolen, your data won't be.

Not everything that comes at a price can do the job. A new service called DeleteNow vows to expunge your personal information from search engines, databases, and directories for $2.99 a month. The company says it uses searchbots and a "deletion module" to search for and destroy information in databases and on the Web that its client doesn't want dispersed in the ether. But DeleteNow's claims are a bit exaggerated. It can't simply delete information from third-party Web sites—all it does is automate the process by which any user can ask that a page gets removed from a particular search engine. Believe me: If Google didn't remove its CEO Eric Schmidt's personal information from search results after the company raised a stink with CNET, it's not going to remove yours.

Not all privacy enhancers cost money. Some free Web-based services help those who simply want to control their information because they don't want "The Man" to have it—marketers, the government, whoever. Bugmenot offers communal logins and passwords—the password "liberalmedia" for the New York Times and the e-mail nypostisfuckingretartedforrquiringregistration@suckme.com to access the New York Post, for example—that allow users to avoid providing personal information at sites that require free (but annoying) registration. But the model that Hushmail, which offers snoop-proof e-mail, has adopted will probably hold sway in the future. The company gets you in the door by offering free e-mail accounts but then offers a number of different services that cost money.

Of course, it's possible that these services go too far. Do most of us really need to encrypt our hard drives so that pictures of our kids don't fall into enemy hands? The most important question, though, is whether it's right that individuals have to bear the economic burden of protecting their anonymity online. Shouldn't our own personal default settings be set on privacy?

Perhaps, but consider that the free flow of information online lowers the cost of doing business. It makes it easier and more cost-effective for marketers to find us and for publications to target ads based on our interests, which lowers prices for everyone. Those who opt out of receiving cookies, for example, are altering what has become the natural state of the Internet. Just like you don't assume you'll be anonymous when you walk down the street, you shouldn't assume you will be in cyberspace. No one would expect to get a funny-looking hat and a pair of dark sunglasses for free. You shouldn't expect to get the digital equivalent without paying for it, either.

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

 

explainer
Does That F-16 Come With a Warranty?
What happens if the U.S. government sells you a lemon.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Friday, Nov. 4, 2005, at 6:09 PM ET

An argument about a 20-year-old military contract with Venezuela erupted this week after President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday he might turn some U.S.-made F-16 fighter planes over to Cuba or China. Chavez says the Pentagon won't sell spare parts or provide maintenance for 22 jets Venezuela purchased in the early 1980s. When you buy weapons from the United States, do you get a service contract?

In most cases, yes. The sale of fighter jets can be negotiated in one of two ways: Either the buyer country works out a deal with a U.S. contractor (with State Department and Pentagon approval), or it goes through the Pentagon's Foreign Military Sales program. Contractors provide warranties and technical support as they would for any sale. The Pentagon also offers service agreements: According to a U.S. military guide for handling FMS transactions, "a newly purchased weapon system without follow-on logistics support rapidly takes on all of the characteristics of a museum piece—impressive, but inert, impotent, and immobile."

To make sure their F-16s don't end up in a museum, buyer countries typically get several years' worth of spare parts with their purchase. (Subsequent spare-parts contracts are negotiated as needed.) They can also buy into long-term maintenance contracts, which include "repair and return" programs for any equipment that wears out. The standard contract provided by the Pentagon promises to "repair or replace at no extra cost" any items that are initially damaged or defective, but it does not ensure their continued function—long-term warranties for specific weapons cost extra.

An FMS contract often includes surcharges for packing, shipping, and handling that can amount to around 20 percent of the purchase price. If you go through the FMS system, you'll also have to pay a 2.5 percent administrative surcharge to the government. The Pentagon accepts payment—in U.S. dollars only—via check or wire transfer. Checks should be made out to the "U.S. Treasury" with an identifying note: "Payment from Government of [country] for [FMS code]."

Almost every U.S. military sales contract also includes a prohibition on "third country transfers": You're not allowed to give the equipment you buy—or any classified information—to anyone else without special permission. Venezuela has now threatened to violate this provision on the grounds that the United States refused to work out a deal for more spare parts. Meanwhile, U.S. military officials say they're not selling spare parts because Chavez won't let them inspect his F-16s. (Many contracts give the Pentagon the right to check up on military equipment, to make sure the buyer hasn't resold it without permission.)

This isn't the first time the United States has stopped selling spare parts for military aircraft to a lapsed ally. After the 1979 revolution in Iran, the Pentagon cut off maintenance for a fleet of F-14s it had sold to the shah.

Bonus Explainer: Why did we sell F-16s to Venezuela in the first place? The Reagan administration offered the fleet to Venezuela in 1981—for $615 million, including spare parts, training, and technical help—after then-President Luis Herrera Campins showed support for the right-wing Duarte regime in El Salvador.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks William Hartung of the Arms Trade Resource Center and Rachel Stohl of the Center for Defense Information.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129390/

 press box
The Should-and-Must Rap Sheet, Vol. 1
Which editorial pages broke Rosenthal's Law this week?
By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, Nov. 4, 2005, at 5:45 PM ET

Back when Jack Rosenthal ran the New York Times editorial page (1986-1992), he barred his editorialists from using the words "should" and "must." As he explained to George magazine's Timothy Noah in 1999, the two imperial directives tended to produce weak editorials that argued by assertion, and he preferred persuasive editorials supported by logic.

Besides, Rosenthal told Noah, should-and-must editorials made it sound as if the Times' message to readers was, "You must, by God, because we said so, and we're the fucking New York Times."

Howell Raines abandoned Rosenthal's dictum when he assumed command of the Times editorial page, and today it's a rare week that the Times doesn't issue several should-and-must proclamations. But the Times isn't the only offender. A data dump from this week reveals egregious should-and-musting on the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and Chicago Tribune editorial pages.

(Relatively innocent of the journalistic crime this week is the Wall Street Journal editorial page, where they must tattoo Rosenthal's Law on editorialists' foreheads.)

The worst sort of should-and-musting is the generic and modular kind, such as in this foreign-aid lecture by the New York Times insisting that the United States, "as the richest country on earth, must lead" and "must do more to breathe some life into" an aid program. An editorialist who follows the generic and modular path can save himself countless hours of reporting and research by inserting arguments about U.S. wealth into any editorial. A variation of the, "Yes, we should spend more money" appears in this New York Times editorial: "The federal government must increase both state and federal unemployment benefits to a level that's closer to the national average, and increase their duration, which is now 26 weeks."

Whenever belaboring the obvious, editorialists reach for the language of decree. Mulling over the tax code this week, the shining lights at the Washington Post conclude that "lawmakers should know the long-term price tag before proceeding." Responding to the scandal at American University, the Washington Post bravely declares in one paragraph that the school's audit efforts "must be improved," and its board-selection practices "should be changed." Over at the Los Angeles Times, the page announces that the "United States should continue to preach the merits of free trade and the rule of law." Opining on Alito, the New York Times believes that the nominee "should be given a serious hearing" and that "we should pay attention" to his radicalism.

The most craven expenditure of the forbidden words comes when an editorialist places one in the last sentence of an editorial. The New York Times did this twice in one day (Oct. 31) last week in its energy policy and Michael Brown editorials. It must kill poor old Rosenthal to read the page these days.

Some editorial pages spend their shoulds-and-musts as if they purchase them in bulk. A 445-word Boston Globe editorial from yesterday contains four: "Employers of these people should pay a special assessment … everyone in the state should be required to buy health insurance … there should be no free riders in the system … The Legislature should improve it, not bury it." Another Boston Globe editorial burns through three shoulds and one must. The Chicago Tribune's anti-torture editorial states, "McCain's amendment should be adopted, and the administration should drop its rear-guard action to gut the measure. … torture should not be in the toolbox of the military or CIA. … When it comes to torture, the Bush administration should listen carefully to a man [Sen. John McCain] who carries the weight of experience." Los Angeles Times editorialists similarly splurge by dictating that "Bush should apologize to Plame"; "Cheney should spend the bulk of his time at undisclosed locations and funerals for foreign dignitaries"; "and Bush should continue to express respect for Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's inquiry."

This Washington Post editorial page takes the award for the tightest packing of shoulds last week: "We oppose capital punishment, but even its supporters should agree that a sentence so severe and irreversible should be meted out only when the arguments for it are overpowering. When a qualified juror is not persuaded, prosecutors should not get another chance." And the paper wins the week's should-and-must overkill award for its Oct. 31 editorial "A Deal on Social Security," in which five shoulds and two musts command the president, Democrats, and the Bush team to take action.

You should read it. No, really. You must.

jurisprudence
The Dangling Conversation
The one-sided "debate" about judges.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Friday, Nov. 4, 2005, at 2:12 PM ET

Of all the criticisms of Harriet Miers, the one I found most perplexing was that some Senators felt she spoke too quietly. Her murder boards were going badly, in part because she was a whisperer. Forgive me, but what the hell? She wasn't auditioning for the lead in Annie. She was applying for a job largely composed of reading and writing. I have heard a total of 30 words emanate from the mouth of Clarence Thomas in six years covering the court.

It occurred to me only in hindsight that there was a reason Miers' tiny voice was such an issue: Conservatives wanted to use these confirmation hearings as infomercials for their views on the proper role of judges in America. The soft-spoken Miers wouldn't have moved any product. The John Roberts hearing was, and the Sam Alito hearing will be, Justice Sunday III—the church service/call-to-arms staged by demagogues on the far right. Except these hearings are carried live on C-SPAN, broadcast nationwide, and blessed by the Senate.

You think I am overstating matters? You're not reading the right op-eds. Here is Ned Rice at the National Review Online, scorning Miers as a nominee: "Let's name someone to the Supreme Court whose nomination is guaranteed to trigger a national conversation on the proper role of the judiciary—it can only help the conservative cause. Let's demand that Judge Bork be allowed to take his case against judicial activism directly to the American people."

And here is George Will: "This is the debate the country has needed for several generations: Should the Constitution be treated as so plastic, so changeable that it enables justices to reach whatever social outcomes—'results'—they, like the result-oriented senators who confirm them, consider desirable?" Here is Joe Mariani: "Taking a Mulligan—a golf term for 'undoing' a poor shot—on Harriet Miers gives President Bush an opportunity to launch a public relations offensive with his base solidly behind him. … [I]f the President nominates a strong originalist like Sam Alito, Janice Rogers Brown, Michael Luttig or Edith Hollan Jones, we can finally have that national conversation about judicial activism and tyranny the Left has been dreading for decades."

The italics are mine. But there is, it would seem, a national conversation going on, though it is a conversation in which most of us are not participating. The same devoted right-wingers who torpedoed the Miers nomination are frothing at the mouth to explain painstakingly to the nation—yet again—their theory of judging. Liberals believe that the object of these hearings is to find out what a nominee stands for. But conservatives have long understood that the real point is a mass public-relations effort to drive home their lasting, unitary view of all liberal or even moderate judges as reckless and overreaching.

The net effect of the John Roberts hearings was a national four-day "civics lesson" in which the populace heard, again and again, that any approach to judging other than "modesty" and "minimalism" would result in judges making things up as they go along. That's a page from the far right's talking points. No competing vision emerged from the left, as far as I could tell. I won't credit the efforts of the Democrats on the judiciary committee to see into John Roberts' heart, or probe whether his kids play soccer with poor immigrant children, as efforts to put forth a competing jurisprudence. Those questions were clumsy proxies for the clumsy theory that judges should just fix life for sad people. I am calling for something else. It's time for Senate Democrats to recognize that a) there is a national conversation about the role of judges now taking place; and that b) thanks to their weak efforts, it's not a conversation—it's a monologue.

Partisans on both sides are eagerly setting one another's hair on fire, deconstructing every word of every opinion Sam Alito ever penned. Trust me—my hate mail is staggering. But the substance of Alito's writings is a distraction from the main event. In truth, conservatives cannot wait for Round 2 of this next civics lesson, a lesson that will star Sam Alito—a charming, articulate, card-carrying conservative jurist with an evolved and plausible-sounding legal theory. It will, unless Democrats get it together, become yet another Jerry Lewis telethon, raising national awareness about the dangers of "judicial activism" and the plague of "the reckless overreaching of out-of-touch liberal elitist judges." Democrats in the Senate either will not or cannot put the lie to these trite formulations. They need to shout it from the rooftops: that blithely striking down acts of Congress is activism; that the right's hero Clarence Thomas may be the most activist judge on the current court; that reversing or eroding long-settled precedent is also activism; and that "legislating from the bench" happens as frequently from the right as the left.

Part of this woeful unpreparedness is the result of something we've discussed before—the sinking fear on the part of some progressives that the right's criticisms are somehow legitimate. Maybe Roe was judicial overreaching; maybe there is no principled theory for what liberal jurists do. Part of the left's program is that any principled theory for what liberal jurists do is complicated. There's no cheap sound bite for Justice Stephen Breyer's notion of "active liberty" or for Cass Sunstein's program of judicial "minimalism" or Jack Balkin's principled "centrism." Or perhaps there is a cheap sound bite embedded in those ideas—it simply hasn't been excavated yet.

The main attraction of the right wing's relentless attack on the judiciary is that its oversimplified theory of judicial restraint solves its oversimplified problem of unconstrained judges. You have to drill down a lot deeper to see that unconstrained judges are making mischief at either end of the political spectrum, and more urgently, that hogtying judges is not an end in itself. It's a means to an end—with the end, I suppose, being the packing of the courts with judges who say they believe in restraint even as they gleefully dismantle decades' worth of legislative and judicial progress.

The point here is not that Democrats must—between today and the start of the Alito hearings—pull together a well-worked-out global vision of constitutional interpretation. They do, however, need to enter into this "national conversation" about the role of judges with a more evolved doctrine than: "Judge Alito, would you cry if your puppy died?"

In his wonderful book, Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America, Cass Sunstein lays out four alternative theories of constitutional interpretation and concludes that judicial minimalism is the surest and most principled path. Senate Democrats should commit to memory the parade of horribles Sunstein lists as following from the fundamentalist project (he means fundamentalism not in the religious sense but in terms of rigid adherence to original intent). If the Scalias, Thomases, Alitos, and Borks of the world had their way, he says, there would be no meaningful gun control. States could have official churches. Hard-fought federal worker, environmental, and civil rights protections would disintegrate. What you currently think of as the right to privacy would disappear. These are the questions Senate Democrats need to ask of Sam Alito: Should property rights trump individual rights? Should the right to privacy be interpreted as narrowly as the framers might have intended? Do you believe that a return to the morals and mores of two centuries ago is in the best interest of this nation?

It doesn't matter what he answers, indeed the answers are irrelevant. By posing these questions to the American people, the senators will give them some understanding of the America that stands to be dismantled. What matters now is injecting an alternative voice into this conversation. To start talking, before the conversation passes us by altogether.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

 

jurisprudence
Hard Read
Sam Alito, Mystery Man.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Friday, Nov. 4, 2005, at 12:14 PM ET

It should be easy to suss out what sort of Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito will be. The man has written hundreds of opinions as an appeals court judge. As the printers whir in senators' offices and newsrooms, he may already be responsible for the death of forests, whatever he eventually rules about national environmental law. The left began sifting through the pile of paper and quickly accused Alito of being a "liberal nightmare," to the right of Scalia in important areas, and "an out of the mainstream opponent of fundamental legal rights and protections for all Americans."

Maybe so. I've read about a dozen of Alito's opinions carefully so far and scanned a dozen more. And I'm ready to sign on to the proposition that Alito would be to the right of Sandra Day O'Connor, whose seat he's taking. But exactly what kind of conservative is he? Will he push the court dramatically to the right in the most currently contested areas of law? Because of his approach to appellate judging, I feel like I need to read a lot more to know.

Federal appeals judges are middle managers. Their boss is the Supreme Court; their underlings are the federal trial courts and—on questions of federal law—the state courts. Inevitably, they spend a fair amount of time reviewing routine legal claims and plowing through tedious trial records. When they get to wield real authority by deciding a question the Supreme Court hasn't, appellate judges have a choice. They can try to push the law in the direction in which they think the Supreme Court should go. Or, based on their bosses' past decisions, they can try to predict how the case would come out if they were to decide to hear it themselves.

Alito is a predictor. His partial dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey—which would have upheld a Pennsylvania law that required wives to tell their husbands if they planned to have an abortion—turned on his reading of which way O'Connor would jump when she faced the question. Alito guessed wrong—but most court-watchers probably did, too, at that time. In 2000, he wrote a cursory opinion ruling that Congress lacked the power to impose the Family Medical Leave Act on state employers. The case seemed easy because at the time few judges thought the Supreme Court would halt its march toward state sovereign immunity for the FMLA. No judge likes to be overturned on appeal; predictors are especially keen on being upheld. Alito's efforts to divine the justices' likely views don't explain away the conservative results he often reaches. But it makes it harder to be sure that he'd reach the same result if he no longer had a boss to answer to.

More telling, perhaps, is Alito's predilection for qualifying his conclusions. Unlike O'Connor, he doesn't frame his opinions so they only apply to a single set of facts. Still, he is a narrow-caster. As the lone dissenter in a 1996 decision in which his court (the 3^rd Circuit) set an important standard for the evidence a plaintiff must put on to prove race discrimination, Alito said the majority's rule was "usually" right—just "not always." In a 2001 opinion dismissing a challenge to a town's Christmas display on the ground that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, he invited them back "to challenge any future display that plaintiffs believe violates constitutional principles." In United States v. Rybar, Alito parted company with the other two judges on the panel, as well as with most of the other appeals courts, to be a standard-bearer for the Supreme Court's effort to cut back on Congress' power to pass laws based on its powers to regulate commerce between the states. But then he offered Congress two straightforward ways to save the law he wanted to knock down (a statute prohibiting the transfer or possession of a machine gun). "These steps are not too much to demand to protect our system of constitutional federalism," he intoned.

In a thoughtful piece in the New Republic this week (sorry, subscription only), Andrew Siegel argues that Alito's polite, reasonable approach is his biggest weapon. Unlike the flamethrowing Antonin Scalia, he would be a justice "with the skill to craft opinions that make radical results appear inevitable." The nightmare scenario for the left is this: Alito doesn't help overturn the big Warren Court precedents that are household names—Roe, Brown, Miranda. Instead, he and Chief Justice John Roberts merrily and cleverly chip away at those precedents, eroding them beyond recognition without provoking a backlash against Republican electoral candidates. Meanwhile, they take a series of small steps to the right in areas of law that remain relatively open. After a decade or two—which they will presumably have—it would become extremely difficult to walk the court back. Rybar is especially troubling in this regard, because it signals that Alito would be game to rein in Congress in ways the Supreme Court hasn't yet attempted—for example, by scuttling the Endangered Species Act so developers can bulldoze the habitats of small furry and scaly animals.

That scenario is entirely plausible. And for liberals deciding how vigorously to oppose Alito, plausible may be enough. Still, I'm going to read more of Alito's opinions. I'll try to be systematic and go through them one area of law at a time. I'll report back when the judge and I have killed some more trees together.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

 

readme
How Conservative Is "Too Conservative"?
Rules for the Alito Games.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, Nov. 4, 2005, at 5:15 AM ET

The Democrats have declared war on President Bush's latest Supreme Court candidate, Samuel Alito, without much in the way of weapons. Only two, really: the filibuster and the power of persuasion. And the filibuster—because it seems (and is) unfair and anti-democratic—will backfire unless people are persuaded that it is saving them from something really bad.

And to make the challenge even more daunting, most of the usual tools of persuasion aren't available this time. Alito seems like a fine fellow, personally. His credentials and qualifications are beyond dispute. Unlike Robert Bork, he is not scary-looking. And another Anita Hill is too much to hope for. Those are the cheap shortcuts. All that's left is a serious argument: Alito is simply too conservative.

The Republican counterargument will be fourfold: A) He is not very conservative; B) no one knows how conservative he is, and no one is going to find out, because discussing his views in any detail would involve "prejudging" future issues before the court; C) it doesn't matter whether he is conservative—even raising the question "politicizes" what ought to be a nonpartisan search for judicial excellence; and D) sure he's conservative. Very conservative. Who won the election?

Actually D), the most valid argument, is one you will never hear, although the Harriet Miers detour showed what happens if Republican activists suspect that a nominee really might not be onboard the ideological train.

The other Republican arguments are laughable. Of course Alito is very conservative. That's why he got nominated. The process of choosing justices is no more political in the Senate than it is in the White House. Alito has been a judge for 15 years and has written opinions on hundreds of subjects. If that is not "prejudging," answering questions at a confirmation hearing certainly is not.

So, how conservative is "too conservative"? Democrats like the phrase "outside the mainstream." They also like to emphasize that the next justice will be replacing Sandra Day O'Connor, an icon of swing-vote moderation. The notion is that presidents of all stripes are under some kind of vague, floating obligation to keep the court in ideological balance. This, unfortunately, is a party-out-of-power fantasy. There is no requirement of moderation in the abstract. President Bush needn't nominate a compromise candidate just to show he's a good sport.

"Too conservative" may just mean anti-abortion. Maybe this is all about Roe v. Wade and nothing more. But if you're really looking for a standard to judge whether someone is too conservative to sit on the Supreme Court, you need to distinguish between three different kinds of judicial conservatism.

First, conservatism can mean a deep respect for precedent and a reluctance to reverse established doctrines. All judges are supposed to be bound by precedent, and it's a bit of a mystery when and why they feel empowered to change course. But this meaning of conservatism is mainly advanced by liberals, who like the idea that conservatism itself will stay the hand of conservative judges in reversing great liberal precedents.

Of course each of these liberal precedents—school desegregation, Miranda warnings, abortion choice, and so on—was a precedent-buster in its day, making the argument a bit hypocritical. But recent Supreme Court nominees have found that asserting a deep respect for precedent is a great way to reassure senators that they won't overturn Roe, whatever they might think of it on the merits, and whatever they actually intend.

Second, a conservative can mean someone who reads the Constitution narrowly and is reluctant to overrule the elected branches of government. Republicans have been waving this flag for decades, reverencing "strict constructionism" and the framers' "original intent" while condemning "activist" judges who are "legislating from the bench." It's not just that the conservative theory of constitutional interpretation is better than the liberal theory. It's that conservative judges have a theory, while liberal judges are just on an unprincipled power grab. This conceit is what allows President Bush to insist that he does not impose any ideological litmus test on judges, as long as they agree with him.

The truth is that Republicans do not have a simple machine that turns the framers' words into instructions for judges, and Democrats are not entirely bereft of judicial philosophy either. It is probably true that if you rated all constitutional rulings on a scale of literal-mindedness, it would show that, on average, Democratic appointees are more inclined than Republican appointees to take metaphorical leaps from the framers' exact words. It may even be true that judges picked by Republicans are on average less likely to tell the elected branches what they may and may not do.

But only on average. On some hot issues—such as affirmative action, or property rights, or gun control—it is Republicans calling for judges to interfere and Democrats who want them to keep their hands off.

The third meaning of conservative as applied to judges is a conservative judicial activist: someone who uses the power of the courts to impose conservative policies, with or without the benefit of a guiding philosophy. A judge who preaches judicial restraint but practices activism would be a good example of how to be "too conservative." But so is a judge whose philosophy of restraint leaves injustices unrectified. Restraint isn't always good, and activism isn't always bad.

Judicial power is like government spending: People hate it in the abstract but love it in the particular. That makes an honest debate hard to have, and harder to win. Nevertheless, it would be nice to have one.

Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.

 

politics
Scooter's First Day in Court
On the scene at Libby's not-guilty plea.
By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005, at 6:14 PM ET

To find Scooter Libby in White House photos you usually have to search behind the famous people for his mild-mannered face. Libby has succeeded in Washington by working invisibly behind the scenes. At his arraignment this morning, Libby was in the center of the camera lens. Photographers backpedaled and jostled to capture him walking into the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse. He entered a side door, but the vice president's former chief of staff, who spent so much time with Cheney ducking into undisclosed locations—rode the public elevator like everyone else. He exchanged pleasantries with a reporter also going to the sixth-floor courtroom.

Libby milled by the witness table, in the nervous way defendants do, before the judge arrived. Everyone was watching him: the reporters who had been trading rumors as they waited in the hallway, law students interning in other courtrooms, and even lawyers trying cases a floor below. Who wouldn't feel intimidated with judges from the past, in oil paintings stacked three rows high, looking down from the vast walls? They included one familiar face: Watergate Judge John Sirica, who forced Nixon to hand over his secret tape recordings.

Today's U.S. district judge, Reggie Walton, waited for Libby, who recently injured his foot, to hobble to the microphone before reading the charges against him. Libby's wife sat behind the legal team. Her long black coat and gray scarf added a slight funereal air. Her husband leaned his aluminum crutches against the podium and listened as the judge read the charges of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements. When asked how he would plead, Libby responded while seeming to button his coat: "With respect, your honor, I plead not guilty."

It was probably the first time many of the reporters packing the six rows behind Libby had ever heard him speak. The clerk pronounced his name "Lie-by," proving he has not yet become a household name.

The lawyers spoke to the judge briefly and efficiently about the timetable for the case. Libby's team will have to get security clearances. Fitzgerald has built a case out of highly classified materials. That vetting might take a month. Fitzgerald said it would take him two weeks to put on his case. Libby's lawyer suggested there might be some First Amendment challenges that would delay the case, presumably from reporters who are likely to be called as witnesses.

Libby's friends and colleagues in the administration said they were encouraged that he has finally upgraded his legal team. For months, Libby was represented by a lawyer who didn't specialize in criminal defense. Now he has two well-known criminal trial lawyers, Ted Wells and William Jeffress. Wells won acquittals for former Agriculture Secretary Michael Espy and former Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan. (Donovan famously asked after his acquittal: "Where do I go to get my reputation back?") Jeffress is from the firm Baker Botts, where Bush family friend and former Secretary of State James A. Baker is a senior partner. Jeffress has won acquittals for public officials accused of extortion, perjury, money laundering, and vote-buying.

The lawyers are two quite different characters. Wells, an African-American, smiled and draped his hand on Libby's shoulder as they talked. Later he greeted court workers with the same drapes and handshakes, as if they'd been college roommates. Jeffress was reserved. When reporters surrounded him later, he looked like he'd eaten a lemon. One crank harangued him about government lies until Jeffress turned to a U.S. marshal. "Could you get these people out of here?" he said, referring to us. "We're waiting for our client." We were moved outside.

Libby didn't speak to reporters either. But he did notice CNN's John King standing at the rail of the spectator's section as he made his way to the marshals' office "for processing." As he leaned on his crutches, Libby gave King a wink.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129420/

press box
The Royal Scam
The Washington Post bows and curtsies to Charles and Camilla.
By Jack Shafer
Updated Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005, at 5:54 PM ET

In 10 pieces totaling 11,500 words published during the last week, the Washington Post captures with precision the nonexcitement generated by the Washington stopover of newly legal Charles Mountbatten-Windsor and Camilla Rosemary Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly Parker Bowles, née Shand).

Half of that cataract of words courses like cold gravy through today's Style section, where five pieces don't even bother to pretend to have discovered any news in the dinner thrown last night at the White House for the "royals." This is the sort of journalism that leaves you less intelligent about a subject than when you started reading: What the "royal" couple wore, what the president and his wife wore, what the guests ate and swilled, the designer of Condoleezza Rice's outfit, what a sad thing it was that Diana Mountbatten-Windsor couldn't make the trip this time, the name of Nancy Reagan's walker, and the names of those who didn't attend (Scooter Libby, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Harriet Miers—yuk, yuk). Us Weekly puts more enterprise and wit into the coverage of the lives of Hollywood's celebrities than the Post did in any of its pieces about the parasites who answer to the titles prince and duchess.

The first serving of regal gravy came a week ago (Oct. 27), with a Style preview of the couple's seven-day trip to New York, Washington, and San Francisco by Post London correspondent Mary Jordan. We learn—not for the first or last time—that Camilla is not Diana; Charles is a New Age doofus and devoted fund-raiser; Charles is happy now that he's married to his true love, Camilla; she isn't a Rottweiler but she is tough. I consider Jordan a friend and a great talent, and I'm certain that she, too, regards her clip job supplemented with quotes as the journalistic equivalent of taking out the trash. Somebody in the family has got to do it.

But having taken out the trash once, why do it twice? Three days after Jordan's piece, the Post ran a second piece (Oct. 30) at twice the length about the forthcoming trip by Jordan's husband, Kevin Sullivan, another Post London correspondent. In it we learn—not for the first or last time—that Camilla is not Diana; Charles is a New Age doofus and devoted fund-raiser; Charles is happy now that he's married to his true love, Camilla; she isn't a Rottweiler but she is tough. I consider Sullivan a friend and a great talent, and I'm certain that he, too, regards his clip job supplemented with quotes as the journalistic equivalent of taking out the trash. If only he'd resisted the editor's call to recycle his wife's garbage.

Post reporter Paul Schwartzman took the handoff from Sullivan on Nov. 2, with "A Crash Course in Pomp and Protocol" in the Metro section, which I interpret as a plan to ensure that readers of every section of the Post got the non-news about the nonevent. The story's subject—will the locals curtsy or fart when introduced to the "royals"?—is such a perennial that Schwartzman could have written it with his eyes closed. In a piece the same day from New York chronicling the arrival of the "royals" and their genuflection before the Ground Zero memorial, Robin Givhan, the Post's delightfully offensive fashion writer, disarmed her stinger. The only sharp remark came in the headline to her piece: "They Came, They Saw, They Nodded; The Royals' Sedate Day in New York."

The Post saved the worst for last, when the "royals" finally arrived in Washington and devoted themselves to making as little news as possible. Charles speaks, Camilla smiles, introductions and toasts are made, protesters are spotted on the periphery of the scenes, the British press corps mills about, the locals curtsy but don't fart, and dinner is served to 130 guests. By comparison, Jordan's and Sullivan's London dispatches soar.

It's a modern editorial miracle that the Post prepared a 10-course meal from a barrel of tripe. Forgive Post reporters for sleepwalking through their stories because, 1) none can possibly give a damn about the subject and, 2) obviously nobody instructed them to report and write the story with the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen"* blasting from their headphones. (Where is that vixen Lisa de Moraes when you need her?)

The one Post contributor undeserving of forgiveness is professional Brit Tina Brown, who writes a weekly column for Style. Brown approaches her "royal" subjects with supine kindness, making her piece look like beat sweetener for her forthcoming Diana book. Brown puts points on the scoreboard for the "royals" by noting that Camilla has "very good legs," is "smaller, prettier, more delicate" than you might think, and isn't the "horseface" she appears to be in press shots. These testimonials don't convince me that had she found Camilla a total barker she would have written so. At times, Brown's subservience causes her to write in a kind of code I found impossible to crack. "[Camilla's] easy responses come in a sexy basso that makes you want to pull up a chair and sit down," Brown writes. Do you suppose that "pull up a chair and sit down"—like "shag"—is Brit-speak for having sexual intercourse?'

After flattering Camilla, Brown keeps her eye on the book project by sympathizing with poor, poor pedantic Charles, a man she describes as born out of time and "essentially raised by his grandmother," who "did his midlife crisis backward." Brown's suck-up paid off even before she filed her column, as Charles turned to confide in her at a New York event at MoMA. Brown writes:

"Now everyone can see how wonderful she is," the prince told me quietly as his wife plunged through the sea of sharp elbows of the museum's drafty atrium."

The Windsors are versatile in the art of autodestruction, and their adventures would make a good novel, and maybe even a good column, if we weren't so familiar with their creepy stories. But Charles takes the prize when it comes to sustained, lifelong loserdom. He's had neither the courage to abandon his ceremonial obligations nor to embrace them, and his bottomless self-pity has made him an international laughingstock. Brown almost redeems herself when she quotes from a recent 60 Minutes episode in which Charles talks about his detractors and his accomplishments.

"I only hope that when I'm dead and gone, they might appreciate it a little bit more," he said.

If Charles promises to hasten the day, I'll be happy to grant him his graveyard wish.

Addendum, Nov. 4: On the long shot that you haven't had enough on the "royals," the Post returns today with three more stories about the clothes Camilla wore, the riff-raff who eyeballed Chuck and Cam, and one about—oh, hell, you figure it out.

******

Disclosure: The Washington Post Co., which owns both the Washington Post and Slate, is controlled by the royal Graham Family. Send your favorite Windsor story to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Correction: Nov. 4, 2005: The original version of this article gave the incorrect title to the Sex Pistols song about Elizabeth II. The copy has been changed.

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

 

November 6, 2005

Just Googling It Is Striking Fear Into Companies

By STEVE LOHR

Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, often intimidates its competitors and suppliers. Makers of goods from diapers to DVD's must cater to its whims. But there is one company that even Wal-Mart eyes warily these days: Google, a seven-year-old business in a seemingly distant industry.

"We watch Google very closely at Wal-Mart," said Jim Breyer, a member of Wal-Mart's board.

In Google, Wal-Mart sees both a technology pioneer and the seed of a threat, said Mr. Breyer, who is also a partner in a venture capital firm. The worry is that by making information available everywhere, Google might soon be able to tell Wal-Mart shoppers if better bargains are available nearby.

Wal-Mart is scarcely alone in its concern. As Google increasingly becomes the starting point for finding information and buying products and services, companies that even a year ago did not see themselves as competing with Google are beginning to view the company with some angst - mixed with admiration.

Google's recent moves have stirred concern in industries from book publishing to telecommunications. Businesses already feeling the Google effect include advertising, software and the news media. Apart from retailing, Google's disruptive presence may soon be felt in real estate and auto sales.

Google, the reigning giant of Web search, could extend its economic reach in the next few years as more people get high-speed Internet service and cellphones become full-fledged search tools, according to analysts. And ever-smarter software, they say, will cull and organize larger and larger digital storehouses of news, images, real estate listings and traffic reports, delivering results that are more like the advice of a trusted human expert.

Such advances, predicts Esther Dyson, a technology consultant, will bring "a huge reduction in inefficiency everywhere." That, in turn, would be an unsettling force for all sorts of industries and workers. But it would also reward consumers with lower prices and open up opportunities for new companies.

Google, then, may turn out to have a more far-reaching impact than earlier Web winners like Amazon and eBay. "Google is the realization of everything that we thought the Internet was going to be about but really wasn't until Google," said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Google, to be sure, is but one company at the forefront of the continuing spread of Internet technology. It has many competitors, and it could stumble. In the search market alone, Google faces formidable rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo.

Microsoft, in particular, is pushing hard to catch Google in Internet search. "This is hyper-competition, make no mistake," said Bill Gates, Microsoft's chief executive. "The magic moment will come when our search is demonstrably better than Google's," he said, suggesting that this could happen in a year or so.

Still, apart from its front-runner status, Google is also remarkable for its pace of innovation and for how broadly it seems to interpret its mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The company's current lineup of offerings includes: software for searching personal computer files; an e-mail service; maps; satellite images; instant messaging; blogging tools; a service for posting and sharing digital photos; and specialized searches for news, video, shopping and local information. Google's most controversial venture, Google Print, is a project to copy and catalog millions of books; it faces lawsuits by some publishers and authors who say it violates copyright law.

Google, which tends to keep its plans secret, certainly has the wealth to fund ambitious ventures. Its revenues are growing by nearly 100 percent a year, and its profits are rising even faster. Its executives speak of the company's outlook only in broad strokes, but they suggest all but unlimited horizons. "We believe that search networks as industries remain in their nascent stages of growth with great forward potential," Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, told analysts last month.

Among the many projects being developed and debated inside Google is a real estate service, according to a person who has attended meetings on the proposal. The concept, the person said, would be to improve the capabilities of its satellite imaging, maps and local search and combine them with property listings.

The service, this person said, could make house hunting far more efficient, requiring potential buyers to visit fewer real estate agents and houses. If successful, it would be another magnet for the text ads that appear next to search results, the source of most of Google's revenue.

In telecommunications, the company has made a number of moves that have grabbed the attention of industry executives. It has been buying fiber-optic cable capacity in the United States and has invested in a company delivering high-speed Internet access over power lines. And it is participating in an experiment to provide free wireless Internet access in San Francisco.

That has led to speculation that the company wants to build a national free GoogleNet, paid for mostly by advertising. And Google executives seem to delight in dropping tantalizing, if vague, hints. "We focus on access to the information as much as the search itself because you need both," Mr. Schmidt said in an analysts' conference call last month.

Telecommunications executives are skeptical that Google could seriously eat into their business anytime soon. For one thing, they say, it will be difficult and expensive to build a national network. Still, they monitor Google's every move. "Google is certainly a potential competitor," said Bill Smith, the chief technology officer of BellSouth, the Atlanta-based regional phone company.

The No. 1 rival to phone companies in the Internet access business, Mr. Smith noted, is the cable television operators. "But do I discount Google? Absolutely not," he said. "You'd be a fool to do that these days."

In retailing, Google has no interest in stocking and selling merchandise. Its potential impact is more subtle, yet still significant. Every store is a collection of goods, some items more profitable than others. But the less-profitable items may bring people into stores, where they also buy the high-margin offerings - one shelf, in effect, subsidizes another.

Search engines, combined with other technologies, have the potential to drive comparison shopping down to the shelf-by-shelf level. Cellphone makers, for example, are looking at the concept of a "shopping phone" with a camera that can read product bar codes. The phone could connect to databases and search services and, aided by satellite technology, reveal that the flat-screen TV model in front of you is $200 cheaper at a store five miles away.

"We see this huge power moving to the edge - to consumers - in this Google environment," said Lou Steinberg, chief technology officer of Symbol Technologies, which supplies bar-code scanners to retailers.

Such services could lead to lower prices for consumers, but also relentless competition that threatens to break up existing businesses.

A newspaper or a magazine can be seen as a media store - a collection of news, entertainment and advertising delivered in a package. A tool like Google News allows a reader or an advertiser to pick and choose, breaking up the package by splitting the articles from the ads. And Google's ads, tucked to the side of its search-engine results, are often a more efficient sales generator than print ads.

"Google represents a challenge to newspapers, to be sure," said Gary B. Pruitt, chief executive of the McClatchy Company, a chain of 12 newspapers including The Star Tribune in Minneapolis and The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. "Google is attacking the advertising base of newspapers."

At the same time, Google and search technology are becoming crucial to the health of newspapers as more readers migrate to the Web. As one path to the future, Mr. Pruitt speaks of his newspapers prospering by tailoring search for local businesses, but also partnering with search engines to attract readers.

Within industries, the influence of Internet search is often uneven. For example, search engines are being embraced by car companies, yet they pose a challenge to car dealers.

George E. Murphy, senior vice president of global marketing for Chrysler, said Chrysler buys ads on 3,000 keywords a day on the big search sites: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN and AOL, whose search is supplied by Google. If a person types in one of those keywords, the search results are accompanied by a sponsored link to a Chrysler site.

Chrysler refines its approach based on what search words attract clicks, and studies its site traffic for clues on converting browsers to buyers. "We've got Ph.D.'s working on this," Mr. Murphy said. "The great thing about search is that you can do the math and follow the trail."

After following a link to a Chrysler Web site, a prospective buyer can configure a model, find a dealer and get a preliminary price. Only dealers can make final price quotes. Yet with more information on the Web, the direction of things is clear, in Mr. Murphy's view. "It will fundamentally change what the dealer does, because telling people about the vehicle won't add value for the customer anymore," he said. "If dealers don't change, they'll be dinosaurs."

Mr. Breyer, the Wal-Mart board member, watches Google closely in his job as managing partner of Accel Partners, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. These days, he advises startups to avoid a "collision course" with Google, just as he has long counseled fledgling companies to steer clear of Microsoft's stronghold in desktop software.

Internet search, like personal computing in its heyday, is a disruptive technology, he said, threatening traditional industries and opening the door to new ones. "We think there is plenty of opportunity for innovation in the Google economy," Mr. Breyer said.

November 7, 2005

Another Choice for Elderly: Charity or Medicare?

By STEPHANIE SAUL

The pharmaceutical industry's version of a campaign bus, the "Help Is Here Express," has toured 25 states this year to spread the word about charity prescription programs sponsored by drug companies.

But even as the bright orange bus travels from state to state enrolling patients in the programs, the assistance may be coming to a halt for thousands of elderly people.

One of them is Walter Bach of Glendale, Queens.

Mr. Bach, 65, who is blind, received worrisome news last month from Bristol-Myers Squibb. The free Plavix he gets from the company's charitable foundation will stop if he enrolls in the new Medicare prescription program that begins in January.

Mr. Bach says that his free Plavix, a $125-a-month blood thinner that reduces the risk of heart attacks and strokes, is more valuable than the immediate benefits he would receive from signing up for the Medicare program, even taking into account the three inexpensive generic drugs he also takes.

The letter telling Mr. Bach that he must choose between Bristol-Myers's program and the new Medicare drug benefit speaks to an unintended effect that the new Medicare plan is having on the pharmaceutical industry's charity drug programs. Some companies are simply eliminating their charity programs for older people, taking the position that the recipients are now eligible for Medicare drug coverage.

But even in programs like Bristol's that will remain in place for the low-income elderly, the us-or-them ultimatum throws one more tricky variable into retirees' assessment of the Medicare plan. The drug companies, which distributed free drugs with a retail value of $4.1 billion last year to an estimated three million to four million Americans, will continue their charity programs in some cases, focusing on other patients with financial needs who don't qualify for the Medicare prescription drug program.

But the companies also complain that the Medicare law means that a patient cannot get drug subsidies from them and also participate in the program.

Dr. Mark McClellan, administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said during an interview late last week that nothing prevented the industry programs from continuing, as long as the free or subsidized drugs the patients received were not counted toward their Medicare co-payments or deductibles.

Several drug companies have sent proposals to the Health and Human Services department, asking for guidance, and its Office of Inspector General is reviewing their legality.

The Medicare Rights Center, an organization that helps Medicare recipients understand the system (and where Mr. Bach works part-time), is monitoring the changes in the charity programs. Those programs are generally aimed at people whose incomes fall near the poverty level - but who make too much to qualify for Medicaid, the federal health care program for the poor.

"It's an important issue to see what the drug companies will do with these plans," said Robert M. Hayes, president of the center. "It's yet one more blow to the algorithm of informed decision-making."

The decision by Bristol-Myers is similar to the stance of Merck, which said it would be notifying the affected patients.

But Eli Lilly is notifying 235,000 older people that its charitable program for the elderly, Lilly Answers, will end next May. The program distributed $140 million in subsidized medications last year, charging a $12 co-payment. Edward G. Sagebiel, a spokesman for Lilly, said the company viewed that program simply as a bridge until Medicare drug benefits kicked in. Mr. Sagebiel said it was possible that some over-65 people could receive assistance through other Lilly programs.

Johnson & Johnson, meanwhile, is notifying doctors that their patients must first be turned down for extra help under provisions of the new Medicare plan before they can apply to Johnson & Johnson's program.

The cutbacks in charity drug assistance for the elderly are coming only six months after the industry began a campaign to publicize the programs widely. Last April, the drug industry's trade group introduced the Partnership for Prescription Assistance as a centerpiece of the industry's efforts to improve its image.

In a news release last week, the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said that an additional 5,000 people had been signing up each day as a result of the industry's new toll-free call center and a publicity campaign that includes the bus, an enrollment center on wheels.

Ken Johnson, a spokesman for the trade group, acknowledged that the new Medicare program could cause a decline in the programs' overall enrollment, possibly as much as 40 percent. But he said that the industry sign-up effort would continue.

"It's possible that there will be drop-off, but at the same time, we're going to be very aggressive in reaching out to the millions of other Americans who are below the age of 65," Mr. Johnson said. He said the industry was doubling its advertising budget and sending out a second bus, and had signed the television host Montel Williams as a spokesman beginning in January.

"There are millions of people in America who could qualify for one of these programs but are not receiving assistance," Mr. Johnson said. "We're on the road to try to find them, state by state, city by city."

The pharmaceutical industry complains that one reason the programs are being cut back for older people is that federal laws prohibit health care companies from giving something of value to Medicaid and Medicare participants. While the statutes are aimed at reducing opportunities for fraud rather than curbing charity to individuals, they do call into question any kind of financial relationship between drug providers and recipients.

The solution, suggested by legal guidance from the federal department of Health and Human Services, might be a pooled charity fund set up by all drug companies. That may be hard to sell to the companies, though, who may fear that they will end up subsidizing a competitor's drug.

"A lot of companies want to help, but they've run into a legal roadblock," said Mr. Johnson, the spokesman for the drug industry trade group.

But Dr. McClellan of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Studies said that the companies "can continue their current programs, they can make contributions to private foundations that are planning to fill in gaps, or they can collaborate," said Dr. McClellan. "There are lots of options, none of which are precluded by the Medicare drug benefit."

Benefits under the Medicare drug plan depend on income. Among low-income people, a single person with a monthly income between $1,076 and $1,197 - defined as 135 to 150 percent of the poverty level - pays a sliding scale premium for coverage, a $50 deductible and 15 percent coinsurance until drug expenses reach $3,600 a year, according to figures from Dr. McClellan's office. At that point, the individual is eligible to receive generic drugs for a $2 co-payment and brand-name drugs for a $5 co-payment.

Some officials have expressed concern that the pharmaceutical companies might assist Medicare recipients until the $3,600 level, locking them into an expensive brand-name drug that they would continue using after crossing the threshold. Ultimately, under that scenario, the charity programs could increase costs to the program.

Mr. Hayes of the Medicare Rights Center, who refers to the charity programs as "10 percent help and 90 percent hype," says the drug industry has a history of operating programs with red tape that limits the actual number of charity recipients.

"They placed hurdles that kept demand for these programs down," Mr. Hayes said. "Whether or not they were purposeful obstacles or not, we got very little receptivity to the easy measures we recommended to make them easier. Patient-assistance programs may not be something the companies are promoting with 100 percent enthusiasm."

But Mr. Johnson said recent outreach efforts by the industry were aimed at streamlining the application process and reducing red tape. And he added that industry surveys revealed that customer satisfaction with the programs was increasing.

Mr. Bach said late last week that he had analyzed his situation and decided he would not sign up for the Medicare drug program for now. His reliance on industry assistance is simply too great.

"I have no alternative," Mr. Bach said. "I need it."

November 7, 2005

Every State Left Behind

By DIANE RAVITCH

WHILE in office, Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton both called for national academic standards and national tests in the public schools. In both cases, the proposals were rejected by a Congress dominated by the opposing party. The current President Bush, with a friendly Congress in hand, did not pursue that goal because it is contrary to the Republican Party philosophy of localism. Instead he adopted a strategy of "50 states, 50 standards, 50 tests" - and the evidence is growing that this approach has not improved student achievement. Americans must recognize that we need national standards, national tests and a national curriculum.

The release last month of test results by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is part of the Department of Education, vividly demonstrated why varying state standards and tests are inadequate. Almost all states report that, based on their own tests, incredibly large proportions of their students meet high standards. Yet the scores on the federal test (which was given to a representative sample of fourth and eighth graders) were far lower. Basically, the states have embraced low standards and grade inflation.

Idaho claims that 90 percent of its fourth-grade students are proficient in mathematics, but on the federal test only 41 percent reached the Education Department's standard of proficiency. Similarly, New York reports that nearly 85 percent of its fourth graders meet state standards in mathematics, yet only 36 percent tested as proficient on the national assessment. North Carolina boasts an impressive 92 percent pass rate on the state test, but only 40 percent meet the federal standard.

In fourth-grade reading, the gaps between state and national reports are equally large. Georgia claims that 87 percent of its pupils are proficient in reading, but only 26 percent reached that level on the national exam. Alabama says that 83 percent of its students are proficient, but only 22 percent meet the federal standard.

The same discrepancies are found in the scores for eighth-grade reading, where Texas reports that 83 percent met the state standard, but the federal test finds that only 26 percent are proficient. Tennessee and North Carolina both claim that 88 percent are proficient readers, whereas 26 percent and 27 percent, respectively, met that mark on the federal test.

Why the discrepancies? The states function in a political environment. Educational leaders and elected officials want to assure the public that the schools are doing their jobs and making progress. The federal testing program, administered for the past 15 years by an independent, bipartisan governing board, has never been cowed by the demands of parents, school officials and taxpayers for good news.

In the No Child Left Behind law of 2001, Congress left it to each state to develop its own standards and tests, but added that the tests given by National Assessment of Educational Progress should serve as an external gauge of national and state-level achievement. The federal tests are considered the gold standard for good reason: they are the product of a long-term federal investment in research and development. Unlike the state tests, the federal program tries to align its performance standards with international education standards. Many states model their testing on the national program, but still cling to lower standards for fear of alienating the public and embarrassing public officials responsible for education.

The price of this local watering-down is clear. Our fourth-grade students generally do well when compared with their peers in other nations, but eighth-grade students are only average globally, and 12th graders score near the bottom in comparison with students in many European and Asian nations. Even our students who have taken advanced courses in mathematics and physics perform poorly relative to their peers on international tests.

Last month, the National Academy of Sciences released a report warning that our nation's "strategic and economic security," as well as our leadership in the development of new technologies, is at risk unless we invest heavily in our human capital; that is, the education of our people. The academy report made clear that many young Americans do not know enough about science, technology or mathematics to understand or contribute to the evolving knowledge-based society. The best way to compete in the global economy, the report maintained, is to ensure that American workers are "the best educated, the hardest-working, best trained, and most productive in the world."

It is fair to say that we will not reach that goal if we accept mediocre performance and label it "proficient." Nor will we reach that goal if we pretend that mathematics taught in Alaska or Iowa is profoundly different from the mathematics taught in Maine or Florida, or for that matter, in Japan and Hungary.

Unfortunately, the political calculations that resulted in the No Child Left Behind law adopting a strategy of letting the states choose their own standards and tests remain the reality. In general, Republicans are wary of national standards and a national curriculum, while Democrats are wary of testing in general. Both parties must come to understand that the states are not competing with each other to ratchet up student achievement. Instead, they are maintaining standards that meet the public's comfort level.

America will not begin to meet the challenge of developing the potential of our students until we have accurate reporting about their educational progress. We will not have accurate reporting until that function is removed from the constraints of state and local politics. We will be stuck with piecemeal and ineffective reforms until we agree as a nation that education - not only in reading and mathematics, but also science, history, literature, foreign languages and the arts - must be our highest domestic priority.

Diane Ravitch, a research professor at New York University and fellow at the Brookings Institution, was on the governing board of the National Assessment of Educational Progress from 1997 to 2004.

 November 1, 2005

Preventing Cancer

But Will It Stop Cancer?

By GINA KOLATA

Bernyce Edwards's daughter was 42 in 1997 when she died of breast cancer. It was just 69 days from diagnosis to death. And through her shock and grief, Ms. Edwards had a terrible worry: what if she got breast cancer, too?

"That's my biggest fear," she said.

So, to protect herself, she has taken up exercise.

And not just any exercise. This 73-year-old woman has turned into an exercise zealot.

She walks, she runs, she leaves her house in Bellingham, Wash., as early as 5 a.m. and spends an hour every day, rain or shine, putting in the miles on the trails and around a lake.

But will her efforts help? Medical researchers agree that, at the very least, regular exercise can make people feel better and feel better about themselves.

There is less agreement on whether it can also prevent cancer. But for two types, the evidence is promising: breast cancer and cancer of the colon. Other cancers have not been studied, or the studies that have been done have yielded little evidence that exercise can help.

Even for breast and colon cancer, further confirmation is needed.

Researchers who are enthusiastic about a cancer-exercise connection also caution against too much enthusiasm.

Exercise is like a seat belt, says Dr. Anne McTiernan of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, a co-author of "Breast Fitness: An Optimal Exercise and Health Plan for Reducing Your Risk of Breast Cancer."

"It's not a guarantee, but it can reduce your risk," Dr. McTiernan said. "The negative side is when a person says, 'The reason I got cancer is that I didn't exercise.' That's the problem."

Dr. Brian Henderson, dean of the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, knows just where the idea that exercise might prevent breast cancer came from. It was an extrapolation from an observation, and from the start it was filled with untested assumptions. He knows this, Dr. Henderson said, because it included work that originated with his research group.

He began with the observation that exercise could affect when girls started to menstruate. For menstruation to begin, girls must be eating more calories than they burn, Dr. Henderson said. Adolescent girls who exercise strenuously often do not eat enough to make up for the extra calories they are using, and as a result, they may start menstruating later than more sedentary girls.

Researchers also knew that the older a girl was when she started to menstruate, the lower her risk of eventually developing breast cancer, Dr. Henderson said, and "that's where the idea came from that exercise might affect risk for breast cancer."

The question was whether they could document it. Dr. Henderson knew the problems with such studies.

"It's hard to measure exercise," he said.

Researchers can ask people to recall how much they exercised, but their answers may not be accurate.

And it is almost impossible to account for incidental activities, like walking up a flight of stairs, that can cause one person to get more total daily exercise than another.

"We all go around in circles: isn't there a better way to measure this?" Dr. Henderson said.

Another problem for researchers is the timing of exercise. Is it important throughout life? Only in young adulthood? Or is it as effective to start to exercise in middle age, when breast cancer risk rises?

The best test of the exercise hypothesis would be to assign thousands of people randomly either to exercise or not exercise and then follow them for years, keeping track of cancer diagnoses as they occur.

But, researchers say, not only would such a study be expensive - the exercise groups would need constant support, and researchers would have to monitor how much they were exercising - but volunteers would be unlikely to comply with their assigned regimens. Telling someone to exercise or to remain sedentary for years is not like telling her to take a pill.

The alternative is to look at populations of people who did or did not exercise and try to correct for factors that might be linked to exercise and to cancer. Exercisers might be thinner, for example, and if they had a lower incidence of breast cancer it might be body weight, not exercise, that was responsible.

Study after study was conducted: some found small protective effects of exercise on breast cancer; others found none.

Now, in Dr. Henderson's opinion, there is no point in continuing to ask the same question in the same ways.

"We've pretty much settled the issue that there is a small effect," he said. The effect, Dr. Henderson added, is so small, that even if it is real, it makes little difference to an individual woman. In one of his studies, the effect of exercise was so small that if he took into account alcohol consumption - which has been associated with a slightly increased breast cancer risk - the exercise effect went away.

"If you are going to exercise, there are other good reasons," Dr. Henderson says. "But protection from breast cancer is not one of them."

Dr. McTiernan has a different view. Instead of continuing to ask if there is a correlation between exercise and breast cancer, she said, she has been asking, "What are the biochemical changes that occur with exercise and could they affect a woman's risk?"

In Dr. McTiernan's studies, she randomly assigned overweight postmenopausal women to exercise for an hour a day, six days a week, or not to exercise. And she kept track of the levels of sex hormones - estrogens and androgens - in their blood.

After menopause, women's estrogens and androgens are mostly synthesized by an enzyme in body fat. The more fat a woman has, the more hormones she makes. Exercise can reduce fat levels, and so it may reduce hormone levels and thereby lower breast cancer risk.

The results of the study were as Dr. McTiernan might have predicted: women who lost fat had lower hormone levels and those who did not lose fat did not.

On average, the exercisers lost about three pounds of fat over the yearlong study; the more fat they lost, the more their hormone levels dropped. Nearly a third lost at least 2 percent of their fat - about 4 pounds for a typical woman in the study, who weighed 180 pounds at the start and whose body was 47 percent fat.

That modest loss in fat was accompanied by a 10 percent drop in estrogen levels, nearly twice what would have been expected if they had lost the same amount of weight with diet alone, Dr. McTiernan said. That is enough of a hormone drop to be associated with a decreased breast cancer risk, she added.

Such studies, of course, do not prove that exercise prevents breast cancer. But, Dr. McTiernan said, finding biochemical changes that are consistent with a protective effect at least gives some plausibility to the findings from the population studies.

"It makes us more confident that exercise is working," she said.

While the link between breast cancer and exercise sprang from observation, the notion that exercise and colon cancer might be related came out of the blue. And epidemiologists and statisticians laughed when they first heard it.

The idea originated about 20 years ago when Dr. David Garabrant, now a professor of occupational medicine and epidemiology at the University of Michigan, was a young assistant professor at U.S.C.

Dr. Garabrant was interested in cancer epidemiology and, in particular, a cancer registry that Dr. Henderson had started and that kept track of all the cases of cancer in Los Angeles County.

"Our statisticians used to do computer runs, looking at cancer by age and ethnicity, and we used to look through these big computer printouts asking, 'Do we see anything interesting?' " Dr. Garabrant recalled.

"One day we were looking through the cancer risks for various occupations and we noticed that all the jobs where people sat around had higher rates," he said. "I said, 'Gee, that's interesting.' So we came up with a rating scheme and we grouped occupations according to how active they were - sedentary, moderately active or an active job."

Then, Dr. Garabrant said, he examined the colon cancer data. Sure enough, there was a direct relationship between exercise and illness. The more active the job, the less likely its holder was to have colon cancer.

"I presented it at a department meeting and they laughed at me; they hooted," Dr. Garabrant said.

He added: "This was a department made up of epidemiologists and statisticians. They just razzed me. 'Come on!' "

But it turned out that he was right. Now, Dr. Garabrant says, he knows of at least 50 studies, all of them showing the same relationship between exercise and colon cancer. "Everyone who has data that allows them to look for it finds it," he said.

Others researchers agree. In fact, said Dr. John Baron, an epidemiologist at Dartmouth Medical School, there have now been so many studies of colon cancer and exercise that the issue is no longer whether there is a correlation. There is.

Now, Dr. Baron said, the main issue is what does the correlation mean and why is it occurring.

He and others worry that the interpretation of such studies can be confounded, because people who exercise are often different from people who do not exercise in many other ways, as well.

"Who has very active jobs? Probably poor people who aren't making a lot of money. Who joins health clubs?" Dr. Baron said. "Well, these other characteristics may be important."

Researchers take into account every factor like this that they can think of. But, Dr. Baron said, "The problem is the things we're not smart enough to know about, the things we haven't even thought of."

He said he remembered studies of colon cancer and dietary fiber. Some studies of populations found that the more fiber a person ate, the lower the risk for colon cancer. But two large studies that randomly assigned people to eat lots of fiber or stay away from it found no protective effect.

On the other hand, noted Dr. Robert Sandler, a gastroenterologist at the University of North Carolina, the finding that people who took aspirin on a regular basis had less colon cancer, also from population studies, was supported by a large study that he directed. In it, people were randomly assigned to take aspirin or not take aspirin. So is exercise like fiber or is it like aspirin? Medical researchers may never know.

There are animal studies, but it is hard to know what they mean. With cancer, Dr. Baron said, "sometimes animal studies are right on the money and sometimes they're not."

The problem, he added, "is that you don't know which is which."

Still, Dr. Baron said, with the possible exception of over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin, nothing has been so strongly associated with reduced risk of colon cancer as exercise. And he said he thinks it makes sense to counsel patients who are at risk of colon cancer to exercise.

There, is, however, one problem: Doctors say that it is so hard to persuade most patients to exercise that many do not even try.

Dr. Sandler said he sees patients right after they have had a colonoscopy, a screening test for cancer that looks for small growths, polyps, in the colon. Although most polyps are not cancerous, most colon cancer starts with a polyp, and so patients with polyps are at increased risk.

Doctors cut polyps out in a colonoscopy but more can grow back. So patients with polyps are often frightened, and they ask what could have caused the polyps and how they can protect themselves from colon cancer. Dr. Sandler suggests aspirin and he suggests exercise.

"I'm pretty confident it will work," Dr. Sandler said of the exercise prescription. But, he adds, most patients dismiss that advice.

"They kind of blow me off," he said.

Dr. John Min, an internist in private practice in Burlington, N. C., loves exercise - he runs in marathons - and he believes it can improve health and possibly protect people from colon and breast cancer. But he does not even mention it to his patients as a way to protect against those cancers.

"Unfortunately, trying to get patients, even those who are very interested, to start exercising is very difficult," he says.

He said he has tried, and patients have left his office seeming excited about turning their life around. But they soon return to their sedentary ways.

"This is unfortunately what I have realized," Dr. Min said. "The ability for someone to significantly change their lifestyle, which they've lived with for years, is extremely difficult unless it is personally important to them. I can't make it personally important to them in the time of an office visit."

Once in a while, though, someone who never thought they wanted to exercise takes it up out of fear of cancer and discovers that they love it. That happened with Ms. Edwards, who worries about breast cancer but says her life is so much better now that she is active.

John Knudson, a 58-year-old mathematics instructor at Seattle Central Community College had a similar experience. Mr. Knudson had never really been a regular exerciser. He would sometimes play soccer on the weekends, he said, but "I would play one day and hurt for four days."

Then, about five years ago, Mr. Knudson had a colonoscopy. Mr. Knudson had polyps, lots of them.

"I remember my gastroenterologist, when he was doing it, said, 'Well, you're a regular polyp farm,' " Mr. Knudson said.

Soon afterward, he got a letter from his gastroenterologist asking him to be in another of Dr. McTiernan's studies - a one-year study at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center that would randomly assign people like him, with lots of polyps and so a high risk for colon cancer, to exercise vigorously for a year or to remain sedentary.

As in the breast cancer study, the idea in this research was to track biochemical changes with exercise to see if they were related to cancer. In the case of colon cancer, the researchers were looking for prostaglandins, insulin and insulin-like growth factor, all proteins that have been associated with colon cancer risk. And they were looking for small molecules that have been associated with cell growth, reasoning that excessive growth might indicate cancer risk.

Mr. Knudson agreed to participate in the study. He was assigned to the exercise group, and he discovered he loved running.

Dr. McTiernan says she and her colleagues are still analyzing their data from the study and so it is not clear yet whether there is a biochemical explanation for the colon cancer connection.

But Mr. Knudson has gone beyond his original reason for exercising. Running has become his passion. Years after the study ended, Mr. Knudson is now running in half marathons. His polyp problem has gone away, although, he says, he has no idea if it was the exercise or whether his doctor just cut out all the polyps the first time and they have not had a chance to grow back.

In any event, he said, "The polyp farm is kind of dormant."

Some of the other study participants had trouble with the exercise program, he noted. "It was a big commitment."

But not for him.

"I like the freedom I get running," he said. "I like the feeling that I can pick up and run somewhere. It's kind of exhilarating."

Rage of French Youth Is a Fight for Recognition
Spreading Rampage in Country's Slums Is Rooted in Alienation and Abiding Government Neglect

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 6, 2005; A01

LE BLANC-MESNIL, France, Nov. 5 -- Mohammed Rezzoug, caretaker of the municipal gymnasium and soccer field, knows far more about the youths hurling firebombs and torching cars on the streets of this Paris suburb than do the police officers and French intelligence agents struggling to nail the culprits.

He can identify most of the perpetrators. So can almost everyone else in the neighborhoods that have been attacked.

"They're my kids," said Rezzoug, a garrulous 45-year-old with thinning black hair and skin the color of a walnut.

While French politicians say the violence now circling and even entering the capital of France and spreading to towns across the country is the work of organized criminal gangs, the residents of Le Blanc-Mesnil know better. Many of the rioters grew up playing soccer on Rezzoug's field. They are the children of baggage handlers at nearby Charles de Gaulle International Airport and cleaners at the local schools.

"It's not a political revolution or a Muslim revolution," said Rezzoug. "There's a lot of rage. Through this burning, they're saying, 'I exist, I'm here.' "

Such a dramatic demand for recognition underscores the chasm between the fastest growing segment of France's population and the staid political hierarchy that has been inept at responding to societal shifts. The youths rampaging through France's poorest neighborhoods are the French-born children of African and Arab immigrants, the most neglected of the country's citizens. A large percentage are members of the Muslim community that accounts for about 10 percent of France's 60 million people.

One of Rezzoug's "kids" -- the countless youths who use the sports facilities he oversees -- is a husky, French-born 18-year-old whose parents moved here from Ivory Coast. At 3 p.m. on Saturday, he'd just awakened and ventured back onto the streets after a night of setting cars ablaze.

"We want to change the government," he said, a black baseball cap pulled low over large, chocolate-brown eyes and an ebony face. "There's no way of getting their attention. The only way to communicate is by burning."

Like other youths interviewed about their involvement in the violence of the last 10 days, he spoke on the condition he not be identified for fear the police would arrest him.

But he and others described the nightly rampages without fear, surrounded by groups of younger boys who listened with rapt attention. A few yards away, older residents of the neighborhood, many with gray hair, passed out notices appealing for an end to the violence.

A man with wire-rimmed glasses handed one of the sheets to the black-capped youth. He accepted the paper, glanced at it and smiled respectfully at his elder. The boy then carefully folded it in half and continued the conversation about how the nightly targets are selected.

"We don't plan anything," he said. "We just hit whatever we find at the moment."

In Le Blanc-Mesnil, halfway between the northern edge of Paris's city limits and the country's largest airport, youths have burned a gym, a youth center and scores of cars and trucks. Residents here say the violence that began in these northern suburbs on Oct. 27 is the worst ever in these low-income neighborhoods and the most widespread social unrest in France since student riots nearly four decades ago.

Rezzoug said about 18 youths between the ages of 15 and 25 are responsible for most of the fires and attacks on police in Le Blanc-Mesnil, though he said some young men from neighboring towns have joined in the mayhem. The youths said they dodge the authorities by splitting into small groups, using their cellular telephones and text messaging to alert each other to the location of police and firefighters.

For the young men of Le Blanc-Mesnil and hundreds in other impoverished suburbs, one man represents all they find abhorrent in the French government: Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been considered the country's leading contender in the 2007 presidential elections. Last month, he recommended waging a "war without mercy" against criminals and other troublemakers in the poor areas.

A week later, two Muslim teenagers from the northern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois were electrocuted in a power substation where they were hiding from police who they believed were chasing them. French officials have said police were not pursuing the youths. Their deaths triggered the violence that quickly spread, particularly when Sarkozy called the perpetrators of the violence "scum" and "thugs."

"I'm a citizen of France, but I don't count," said an athletic 28-year-old who identified himself only as Abdel. With his trim black beard and short hair gelled into shiny black wavelets, Abdel hovered on the edge of the circle surrounding the youths who admitted to their involvement in the violence.

"They call us maggots," added a thin teenager hunched inside a thin polyester windbreaker that offered little protection from the damp chill of a gray fall afternoon.

Beyond their hatred of Sarkozy, the youths involved in the rampages and their companions offer a disparate list of grievances against the government.

Abdel, echoing the anger of many of the youths, said he resented the French government's efforts to thrust Muslim leaders into the role of mediators between the police and the violent demonstrators.

"This has nothing to do with religion," he said. "But non-Muslims are afraid of people like me with a beard. I look suspicious to them. Discrimination is all around us. We live it every day. It's become a habit. It's in the air."

He continued: "I grew up in France, yet I speak of God and religion. I have a double culture. I belong to both. We should stop the labeling."

Rezzoug, the caretaker, said he has seen local youths struggle with deep personal conflicts caused by their dual cultures. "They go to the mosque and pray," he said. "But this is France, so they also drink and party."

"They also are out to prove to their parents and brothers and uncles they can't take it any more," he said. "They're burning the places where they play, where they sit -- they're burning their own playpens."

Le Blanc-Mesnil is not a community where youths aspire to spend their lives. There is none of the glamour that most of the world associates with Paris, just a 25-minute drive or train ride away. It is an industrial city of boxy apartment complexes and strip malls. In a nation where unemployment has hovered at 10 percent this year, the rates are here four to five times as high among people under 25.

"We feel rejected, compared to the kids who live in better neighborhoods," said Nasim, a chunky 16-year-old with braces and acne. "Everything here is broken down and abandoned. There's no place for the little kids to go."

As on most Saturday afternoons, there was little for Nasim or his friends to do. They sauntered among the older youths who spent the late afternoon hanging out on street corners or the sidewalks in front of coffee shops.

Several of the older youths fingered pockets bulging with plastic packets of hashish for sale or trade. As they read local newspaper accounts of their previous night's exploits, they began discussing Saturday night's plans with more of an air of boredom than a commitment to a cause.

"We don't have the American dream here," said Rezzoug, as he surveyed the clusters of young men. "We don't even have the French dream here."

Passport to Health Care At Lower Cost to Patient
California HMOs Send Some Enrollees to Mexico

By Sonya Geis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 6, 2005; A03

TIJUANA, Mexico -- There are world-class hospitals in San Diego, not far from where Luis Gonzales lives. But when he or a member of his family needs a doctor, they drive 50 miles south to a clinic in Tijuana.

The Gonzaleses are members of a Blue Shield of California HMO that provides all of the family's nonemergency care in Mexico. They are among 20,000 California workers and their dependents in health plans that cost 40 to 50 percent less than comparable care in the United States because the doctor's visits are outsourced south of the border.

With health care costs in the United States continuing to rise, many employers in Southern California are turning to insurance plans that send their workers to Mexico for routine care, plans that are growing by nearly 3,000 people a year. And Gonzales, for his part, is happy about it.

"They have everything I need," Gonzales said. "They're clean. You don't see a difference between a doctor over here and over there."

Despite Gonzales's satisfaction with the quality of his family's care, the new trend has some medical professionals in the United States worried that care is being sacrificed to low prices.

"There are quality standards that we are developing and implementing in America that are not going to be implemented there for a long time," said Jack Lewin, chief executive of the California Medical Association. "In terms of specialized care, it's critically important that we look beyond just cost savings."

Five years ago, California became the only state to regulate insurance programs that require border crossing for basic health care. Since then, more than 700 non-agricultural businesses have offered plans requiring treatment in Mexico. Hundreds of farms offer similar coverage for about 120,000 migrant laborers.

In Texas, legislators explored the possibility of allowing health maintenance organizations to operate on both sides of the border. But physicians in South Texas lobbied against the changes, arguing that local doctors could not compete with the lower costs in Mexico.

Lower-priced labor, malpractice insurance and overhead in Mexico mean both basic and sophisticated medical procedures can be performed at a small fraction of the cost. A hysterectomy that averages $2,025 in the United States costs $810 in Mexico, said Mary Eadson, director of legal compliance for the Western Growers Association, an agricultural organization that provides health insurance for California workers in Mexico.

The movement of U.S. health care across the border has sparked a boom in hospital construction in Tijuana, with clinics and pharmacies opening a short walk from the border.

Francisco Carrillo owns and operates a Mexican HMO plan for California workers called SIMNSA, and he owns the Centro Medico clinic, where large windows face the border bridge many of his patients cross on their way to the waiting room.

On a recent weekday, half the cars in the parking lot bore California license plates. On two of the clinic's six floors, a new surgical center and a dentist's office are under construction. The clinic's other floors were crowded with patients.

"Things are moving very fast," Carrillo said. "We're growing."

David Castillejos Rios has performed laser eye surgery on both sides of the border. At a small hospital in Tijuana, he charges one-third as much as he does in San Diego.

"The medicine is the same, and to me, whether I do it here or there, it's the same," Castillejos Rios said. "Only the price changes."

The difference can translate into the kind of affordable monthly premiums most American businesses have not seen in a decade. At Health Net, the cost of insuring a family of four whose treatment was covered in the states is $631 a month. Using physicians in Mexico, the same family would pay $306 a month, company officials said.

At the Santaluz golf resort in San Diego, where Gonzales supervises golf course maintenance, workers can sign up for a Blue Shield of California plan called Access Baja. Their doctor visits are covered in the United States or Mexico, while their families are covered only in Mexico. Dale Standfast, the resort's controller, said several workers whose dependents were not covered switched plans to cover their families.

Offering Access Baja saves the resort about $1,000 per month in premiums, he said. This year the club used the savings to offer vision coverage to all employees for the first time, Standfast said.

Representatives of Blue Shield of California and Health Net, both of which offer cross-border HMO plans in California, said the quality of care is comparable in both countries. Their doctors are credentialed in Mexico, and the HMO operations are subject to California oversight. The insurance companies audit Mexican clinics themselves, and then report to the California Department of Managed Health Care.

Company officials emphasize the warmth of the Mexican medical culture.

"Mainly, the patients that come here are searching for more attention," said Juan Carlos Helu Vazquez, a gastroenterologist in Tijuana who sees Mexican and American patients. "They want the doctor to talk to them, be warm to them. There are a lot of patients who like the old-time medicine. They like the doctor asking about your family, your work."

Gonzales said he had better care in Mexico than in the San Diego region.

"I went to the doctor over here and he never cured the problem, he never gave me a good medicine, never sent me to a specialist. He never cared about my health," Gonzales said. "When I went over there, the first doctor I saw, he sent me to a specialist. He wasn't just going to say, 'Take this and go home.' "

Administrators at cross-border HMOs expect their plans to grow because the cost of health insurance in the United States is out of reach for an increasing number of working families.

That is what worries Lewin of the California Medical Association.

"It's understandable that lower-income workers are trying to seek health care they can afford," he said. "But these people are largely paying taxes and contributing some of their own financial resources to this country. It's high time we provided good care for these people through enlightened public policy."

 

explainer
I Want My Oil Yesterday!
Why it takes so long to drill in Alaska.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005, at 6:23 PM ET

Republicans in the House dropped their support for a measure to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The death of the proposal in the House comes just a week after the Senate voted to approve it. Even if Congress passed the legislation, experts say that no oil would be produced at ANWR until 2015. What's the holdup?

Permafrost. Unless the oil companies take special precautions, their heavy trucks and oil rigs would sink into and damage the Alaskan tundra. This isn't as much of a concern in the winter months, when the ground freezes over and hardens. In the initial stages of oil exploration, companies can work only four months out of the year. Later, they could set up permanent drilling pads and roads that rest on a few feet of gravel.

Getting the pads and other equipment in place could also take a while. Most of the heavy stuff—feeder pipelines, for example—gets produced in the mainland United States and then sent up to Alaska. The shipping barges can navigate to the oil-rich North Slope only during the summer months, when there's no ice in the waterways.

There are also plenty of bureaucratic issues to deal with before drilling could start at ANWR. The Bureau of Land Management must work out a leasing program by soliciting proposals from the oil companies and asking for public comments. The government would also take time to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. After a company secures a lease to work in a particular area, it sends in a team to do seismic surveys—which can themselves take several months or a year.

It takes a long time to extract oil under any conditions. First, oilers must drill one or more exploratory wells on the basis of their seismic data. Even if a rig is staffed at all hours, that doesn't mean the drill is in continuous operation. The bit might turn for half of each day or less, depending on the hardness of the rock. Workers have to stop the drill periodically to run pipe down the hole. Every once in a while, a drill bit will wear out; replacing a bit can take more than a day.

A typical 10,000-to-20,000-foot oil well takes between one month and three months to excavate. Exploratory wells take even longer because petroleum engineers stop the drilling every once in a while to take a core sample for analysis. It might take eight months (more than two winters) to drill an exploratory well in ANWR and another couple of years to plan and build the infrastructure for more substantial drilling.

It's hard to say how long it would take to get oil out of ANWR. Some experts say 10 years, but others suggest it might be done in half that time. It all depends on how the oil company decides to approach the site. They can start slow, with extensive surveys and exploration, or they can jump in at the most promising spot and hope it all works out for the best.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Philip Budzik of the Energy Information Administration and Hand Juvkam-Wold of Texas A&M University.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130022/

jurisprudence
No Smoke, No Fire
Alito, the hard-ass.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005, at 5:04 PM ET

If I had direct evidence that I'd been denied a promotion because my boss preferred a guy because he was a guy, I might be content to have Judge Samuel Alito review my case on appeal after I'd brought suit. He'd read the record closely. He might even dust off a worthwhile claim that the trial judge had impatiently tossed out below.

The problem is, I probably wouldn't have any direct evidence. In an employment suit, a smoking gun is rare enough to be a collector's item. Discrimination is often subtle or goes unspoken, and companies have gotten better at training supervisors not to say obviously illegal things ("I'd hire her if her name was Emil"). And without that sort of hard-to-come-by but easy-to-grasp evidence, I'd want to keep Judge Alito far away.

It's not that Alito is a judge who always thinks the employer wins. I read 14 opinions of his in suits alleging discrimination at work because of race, gender, age, or religion. In nine majority opinions and five dissents, Alito found for the employee four times, each time reversing a lower-court verdict in favor of the other side. But in close cases in which the evidence of discrimination was present but subtle, Alito downplayed potentially powerful facts. These cases ought to turn on how the people who heard all the testimony—in other words, the jury—evaluated its credibility. Yet Alito has freely substituted his own dismissive reading of the evidence for a jury's verdict.

Consider Barbara Sheridan, once one of five head captains at a restaurant in a hotel owned by DuPont. Sheridan sued for sex discrimination after she was denied a promotion to manage the hotel's multiple restaurants. Up to that point, she'd received a series of steady promotions, strong evaluations, and raises, and after 10 years on the job she'd become a supervisor. In 1991, DuPont decided to create a new post of manager for the hotel's multiple restaurants. The company didn't advertise the job, considered only five male employees, and refused to consider Sheridan. One of the men was hired, and Sheridan complained of sex discrimination. She was subsequently demoted and then left the hotel.

At trial, DuPont claimed that Sheridan was demoted because her performance went downhill after she was passed over for the manager's job. In 1992, her bosses investigated her for comping—giving away food and drinks for free—and then started keeping daily records of her activities. But at trial, Sheridan argued that the accusations and recordkeeping were in retaliation. She poked big holes in DuPont's proof that she'd been comping (she had been out on jury duty on three of the dates that the supervisor recorded her doing it). And she testified that when she tried to talk to a key supervisor in the company of male employees, he ignored her and spoke only to them.

Sheridan won her suit before the jury. But the judge overseeing the trial overturned the judgment, as judges can do when they don't think the evidence presented at trial meets the legal standard for liability. Sheridan appealed. Her case was eventually heard by all the judges of the 3^rd Circuit. Judge Dolores Sloviter wrote the majority opinion for herself and 11 other judges. She rejected the trial judge's ruling and said that Sheridan had presented sufficient evidence to support the jury's verdict. And she used the case to decide a tricky question: whether employees suing for discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act necessarily win once they've made a "prima facie" case of discrimination and then shown that their employer's stated reason for firing or demoting or otherwise dinging them wasn't the real reason. Sloviter—along with five other appeals courts—said that yes, employees do win if they make that showing.

Alito responded in a lone dissent. He wanted a different result, and also a different rule: proof not only that an employer's explanation was false, but also "that intentional discrimination on the ground alleged by the plaintiff was a determinative cause of the challenged employment action." In other words, he wanted Barbara Sheridan to catch her supervisors in the act of going after her for gender-related reasons. He wanted a smoking gun. And because Barbara Sheridan didn't necessarily have one, he didn't care that the jury had believed her. He saw in the record "great friction" between Sheridan and DuPont, but no evidence that "the reason for the animosity between the plaintiff and her supervisors was gender rather than sheer personal animosity." No discrimination—just a pissed-off woman who couldn't get along with her male bosses.

In a 2000 case, Reeves v. Sanderson, the Supreme Court rejected both Sloviter's rule (employee always wins if she shows her employer's rationale wasn't the real one) and Alito's higher standard (employee only wins if she shows her employers were motivated by discrimination). As Yale law professor Vicki Schultz said when I asked her about the case, Alito's analysis wasn't a bad reading of the higher court's precedent at the time (in particular the 1993 case St. Mary's Honor Center v. Hicks). But Alito would have decided the case on purely technical grounds. And his approach would have led to a less fair result than Sloviter's rule.

More bothersome was Alito's dismissive treatment of the indirect evidence Sheridan amassed. Schultz pointed out that Alito failed to take into account the possibility of sex stereotyping at DuPont—the idea that Sheridan's problems stemmed from her refusal to stay in the role that her male supervisors were comfortable with. Sandra Day O'Connor, who wrote the majority opinion in Reeves, understands the problem of sex stereotyping and has used it to craft fair evidentiary rules in other cases. Maybe when Alito sits in her seat, some of that understanding will rub off on him. Somehow, I doubt it.

sidebar

Return to article

To establish a prima facie case in a Title VII suit, a plaintiff has to show that she is a member of the class that Congress protected from discrimination (on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, national origin); that she was qualified for the position she seeks; that she didn't get it; and that the position went to someone who isn't in the class. Here's a primer on federal job discrimination law.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

 

hey, wait a minute
End the Mortgage-Interest Deduction!
Why the left should embrace the Bush tax commission's most radical proposal.
By Jason Furman
Posted Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005, at 12:13 PM ET

Last week, President Bush's critics interrupted their feeding frenzy about wars, floods, hurricanes, torture, and indictments to briefly savage his tax reform commission, particularly its proposal to scrap the mortgage-interest deduction.

The commission targeted the mortgage-interest deduction for several reasons. They say it is an unwarranted subsidy for housing that diverts capital from more productive uses in the business sector. The commission was also trying to find a way to limit the Alternative Minimum Tax from encroaching on middle-class families without raising income tax rates.

Outside economics departments, these arguments have been less than persuasive. The proposal has been savaged by critics who insist that scrapping the deduction would raise their taxes, lead to plunging house prices, and in the worst case, send the economy spiraling into recession. Some progressives even suggest that having failed to take away their Social Security benefits, the Bush administration is now trying to evict them from their homes.

Although the commission's two comprehensive tax-reform proposals should be rejected because they are costly and regressive, progressives should rush to embrace many of commission's specific ideas, particularly the mortgage proposal. That's because the plan will increase tax breaks for homeownership for the plurality of American families, likely increasing homeownership and making the tax system more fair.

One of the goals of our tax system is to encourage homeownership, based on the theory that homeownership has benefits that go beyond individual homeowners, making people into better citizens and better neighbors, reducing crime, and keeping neighborhoods cleaner. Whatever the merits of this view (and the evidence for important "externalities" for homeownership is uneven), our current tax system actually does an extremely bad job of encouraging homeownership.

This year the federal government is providing $200 billion in subsidies for housing, including $150 billion of tax breaks. The mortgage-interest deduction alone is $69 billion of that, making it one of our biggest government programs. Families get to take an itemized tax deduction on the interest from home mortgages of up to $1 million. The richer you are, the better the deal. For every $1,000 in deductions, a family in the 35-percent bracket would see its taxes go down by $350, while a family in the 15-percent bracket would see its taxes go down by only $150. And families taking the standard deduction wouldn't get any tax break at all.

As Gene Steuerle and his co-authors at the Urban Institute have documented, more than 80 percent of the major tax incentives for housing go to the top 20 percent of Americans (they get an average annual tax break exceeding $2,000) while less than 5 percent go to the bottom 60 percent (who get an average annual tax break of less than $50). Nearly half of all families with mortgages do not get any housing tax benefit at all.

This fact alone should be enough to give progressives pause when they tout the mortgage-interest deduction as a great boon to the average American. But it's worse: Only a small portion of this housing-tax break could conceivably be construed as supporting the goal of helping American families own their own homes. Since the mortgage cutoff is so much higher than the cost of buying a basic home, the bulk of the subsidies end up encouraging families who would have bought a home anyway to buy a larger house and/or to borrow more against it.

The commission proposes to scrap the mortgage-interest deduction and replace it with a "Home Credit" that allows families to reduce their taxes by 15 percent of mortgage interest on borrowing up to $227,000 to $412,000 (the limit is set at 125 percent of the median sales price for each county). Any family with $1,000 of mortgage interest would see its taxes go down by the same $150, regardless of their tax bracket. And the credit would be extended to nonitemizers who currently get no benefit.

Extending the mortgage-interest credit to all taxpayers would extend the tax benefits to all but 12 percent of families with mortgages, according to estimates by the commission. The fraction of typical families (those making $40,000 to $50,000) getting a tax break for their mortgage interest would jump from less than 50 percent under current law to more than 99 percent under the commission proposal. More than 20 million families would get a tax cut from the plan.

Despite these large benefits, the media coverage has focused almost exclusively on a smaller number of families that would see their taxes go up under the commission's plan. The commission estimates that 85 percent to 90 percent of new mortgages in 2004 would have been unaffected by the lower mortgage limit (an even larger fraction of existing mortgages would be unaffected). That's fewer than 5 million people with mortgages large enough to be affected by the proposed cap. Some additional high-tax-bracket families would see their existing deduction curbed by the conversion to a credit.

Some more affluent families would lose not just because of their reduced tax breaks but also because it would likely drive down the value of their homes. One of the reasons there is so much scaremongering is that elites in places like New York and Washington, D.C., are disproportionately represented in this 5 million. Many of these elites would probably be surprised to learn that the median value of owner-occupied houses was only $140,000 in 2003, the most recent year for which data are available.

Admittedly, the tax breaks curbed by the proposal are larger than the new tax breaks. This is how it will add tax revenue and perhaps help fund an AMT fix. To the degree that the savings are plowed back into other tax cuts, some of the families losing their mortgage breaks might even see their taxes go down.

Extending tax benefits to so many people would, if anything, increase homeownership, albeit modestly. Curbing tax breaks at the top would not hurt homeownership either: The more affluent would just buy slightly smaller homes and borrow less against them. The effects on house prices are ambiguous and are unlikely to be very large. It is likely to drive up the median house price as more families could enter the housing market, while it would drive down prices at the top end of the market as richer homeowners lose their subsidy.

More important, the mortgage tax credit would end a tax system that discriminates between different homeowners and would make the overall burden of taxes more progressive. In effect, it would pay for a working-family tax cut by raising taxes on some high-income families. I can see why President Bush isn't rushing to embrace his commission's housing proposal, but progressives certainly should.

Jason Furman is senior fellow, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and visiting scholar, New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Administration.

 

 moneybox
The Big Money
What's wrong with $100 billion mutual funds.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005, at 10:57 AM ET

When it comes to investing, size matters. More is often better if you invest in mutual funds and also if you manage mutual funds. After all, management fees are calculated as a percentage of total assets.

But size also kills. When mutual funds grow too big, they become unwieldy—a point illustrated by last week's resignation of Robert Stansky, the longtime manager of the once-mighty Fidelity Magellan Fund.

The law of large numbers dictates that it's difficult to sustain performance and growth when you're really big. The Magellan Fund, the largest mutual fund for most of the last 25 years, is a case in point. Running Magellan is probably the highest-profile and most difficult job in money management. It's like managing the Yankees. You've got to follow in the footsteps of some hall-of-famers, and your every move is closely scrutinized. (This piece from Investors Business Daily shows the impressive performance of the 42-year-old fund under managers like Fidelity founder Edward Johnson and Peter Lynch.)

The last two Magellan managers have struggled. Jeffrey Vinik's tenure was cut short after four years, thanks to an ill-timed bet on bonds. His successor Stansky didn't have much better luck over the long term. Although Magellan closed to new investors in 1997, its assets continued to grow, topping out at near $110 billion in August 2000. Since then, the fund's assets have shrunk, thanks to losses and investors yanking out cash. (Here's a chart of the fund's performance.) Today, Magellan is about half of its peak size.

Stansky and other managers of giant mutual funds operate under several handicaps. When you have to buy as much as they do, it's difficult to open and close positions quietly. Hedge funds and other quick-fire traders are constantly trying to suss out which stocks the big dogs are buying and selling and how they can profit by jumping in and out ahead of them. And unless you want to buy hundreds upon hundreds of positions—in which case you're essentially mimicking the broader market—a huge mutual-fund manager has to confine himself to huge stocks. (To see Magellan's holdings, go here and click on "Prospectus & Reports.") Magellan has 207 positions, and its top 10 holdings are the same giant stocks that everybody owns: General Electric, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, AIG, Home Depot, Citigroup, etc.

Of course, performance is only one reason funds get big and remain big. People also invest based on brands, past performance—although they are constantly warned not to—tips, momentum, and fads. When investors believe that individual stock-pickers can beat the market they'll invest with them, and those pickers' funds will swell—even after they stop outperforming. That's what happened with Magellan in the 1990s, when it kept expanding despite mediocre long-term performance. Post-bust, investors became more interested in indexing. And so in April 2000, the Vanguard 500 Index fund became the biggest mutual fund, a title it held through the bear market, as the S&P 500 fell and then recovered. (Here's a 10-year chart of the Vanguard 500 fund.) But now many investors are finding that investing in index funds when the index is moving sideways is unsatisfying.

So, there is a new trend in large funds: the mutual fund that tries to imitate hedge funds. Of course, most investors don't qualify to invest in hedge funds, but they admire hedge funds' adventurous tactics and look for mutual funds that have some of that moxie. One fund that has benefited is American Funds' $117 billion Growth Fund of America, which this year replaced the Vanguard 500 as the largest fund. The fund's assets have tripled during the last four years, thanks to its market-beating performance. And it now has 3.6 million shareholder accounts. This was a list of its holdings as of June 30, 2005.

The secret to its success? Parent company American Funds managed to stay out of trouble and put up a lot of good numbers in a period when rival companies like Janus were covering themselves in ignominy. The fact that Growth Fund of America has crushed the S&P 500 during the last two years has also helped. And while Growth Fund of America isn't a hedge fund by any stretch of the imagination, it mimics them in some ways. Unlike Magellan, which is managed by a single emperor, Growth Funds' assets are divided into several portfolios managed by individual managers, each with his or her own team of analysts. They take a more catholic approach to investing than Magellan did, with more foreign stocks and corporate bonds, for example.

There's one crucial place at which Growth Fund of America parts company with hedge funds. While hedge-fund managers have a lot of self-confidence—managing the money of really rich people requires abnormally high levels of self-confidence—they know that to try aggressively to manage $10 billion or $20 billion is to tempt the market gods. As a result, many hedge funds close funds or simply return cash to investors when they get too big. Mutual-fund companies like Fidelity and American Funds know, intuitively, that size is a barrier to performance. But because they covet market share and management fees, they have plenty of incentives to keep the funds open even as they surpass the $100 billion mark.

The managers of Growth Fund of America have beaten the market while amassing the largest pile of assets in the mutual-fund universe. But if history is any guide, they won't be able to continue to do both for long.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129920/

fashion
The Secret Language of Jeans
Why some people are willing to shell out for designer denim.
By Louisa Thomas
Posted Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005, at 10:56 AM ET

"Is it bad that I make snap judgments about girls based on what jeans they wear?" a male friend asked recently in an e-mail. "When I see a girl in Sevens, I dismiss her. If she's wearing Citizens, I'm skeptical, especially in recent months. If she's in Diesels, that's legit, as that's an enduring brand. But right now, I'm looking for girls in Hudsons." A girl in regular jeans was, apparently, off the map.

My friend was kidding, but there are those who would take him seriously. For the past five years, the premium denim market—that is, jeans costing at least $100, with some priced at more than $1,000—has exercised a kind of tyranny over a small but visible segment of the population: upwardly mobile, status-conscious young women (and the celebrities who provide the cues for them). Brand names are always tribal markings of a sort, indicating the identity (real or aspirational) of the wearer, but when it comes to jeans, these signals have become increasingly coded and, for those who wear designer jeans, imperative. While it would seem that blue jeans should suggest a kind of populist casualness—they're worn by everyone from toddlers to electricians to computer programmers, everywhere from barbecues to offices to cocktail parties—to those who can read the language of the back pocket, jeans are anything but democratic. Jeans have become fashion's equivalent of a secret handshake.

Jeans are, of course, an unlikely status symbol. Denim, made of twilled cotton fabric, is not exactly a luxury material; it does not require the harvest of thousands of silkworms' secretions or the careful shearing of a Kashmir goat. And jeans do not obviously signify wealth: The average price of a pair of blue jeans—say, a pair of Lee Jeans from Sears—is around 25 dollars, and a typical American owns, on average, seven pairs.

The pants also have humble origins. The industry dates to 1873, when a dry-goods storeowner named Levi Strauss and a tailor named Jacob Davis were granted a patent for pants with rivets reinforcing the seams. But despite the efforts of Levi Strauss & Co. to expand its clientele—in 1935, the company took out an ad in Vogue, claiming that Levi's were "worn by the knowing, not merely on dude ranches, but at the more exclusive resorts, beaches, and camps, throughout the country"—blue jeans would remain working-class garb for several more decades. Their association with manual labor made them too déclassé for a society that equated status with leisure, even as dress codes were relaxing.

Yet that association would also eventually make jeans the perfect badge of nonconformity. In the 1950s, denim became synonymous with a sexy rebelliousness when Marlon Brando and James Dean wore jeans in The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause. A decade later, hippies donned jeans in their protest against the establishment, as an easy way of publicly identifying with the underprivileged and dispossessed. But as society loosened up, progressive values became more mainstream—and so, too, did jeans.

It wasn't until the end of the 1970s, when jeans had become widespread enough to be socially acceptable yet were still subversive enough to be cool, that the first crop of designer jeans sprang up. Gloria Vanderbilt slapped her name across the back pocket of skintight jeans, and in advertisements a sultry (and 15-year-old) Brooke Shields purred, "You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." During the next two decades, the occasional pair of jeans appeared on the red carpet, and the denim market continued to expand—there were Chic, Jordache, Guess, among others—but designer jeans weren't commonplace, even among the fashion vanguard.

Then, in 2000, the brand Seven for All Mankind ("Seven") appeared on the scene, and everything changed. These jeans' long, lean cut and vintage wash gave them a sexy, laid-back vibe, and they cost enough to seem special. Suddenly everyone from socialites and celebrities to college students, receptionists, and starving artists were convinced that $130 (and up) was an acceptable price to pay for a pair of jeans. Within five years, the premium denim market went from a blip to a billion-dollar business. ("We say thank you every day to Seven for All Mankind for creating basically the category," the CFO of True Religion reportedly gushed at an industry conference this summer.) Department stores started hiring "denim specialists" to help shoppers find jeans with perfect pocket placement. Gwyneth Paltrow was spotted in a pair of Blue Cult jeans in 2002, and demand for the cargo-pocket style she wore became so great that the company christened the jeans "the Gwyneth" and hired a PR director to deal with requests. (The company now also carries "the Angelina," which somehow signifies "boot leg"; "the Cameron," which is "straight leg"; and the flare-leg "Kate," which the PR director told me stands for "all the celebrity Kates.")

Still, celebrity sanction is only part of the attraction. So is fit: Blue Cult also sells a style called "Butt Lifter," and it's true that designer jeans tend to be more flattering than their cheaper cousins. They're generally made with finely woven denim, cut in a way that elongates the leg, and with pockets perfectly positioned to flatter the bum. But the real appeal of designer jeans may be that they are at once egalitarian and exclusive, lowbrow and high-end. They transform their wearer into a social chameleon of sorts, allowing her to look like any other American while signaling her status-consciousness to those in the know. Celebrities can thus wear $675 Dolce & Gabbana jeans and project a down-to-earth image. College freshmen can emulate celebrities without seeming like they're trying—and without worry about fitting in, since everybody's wearing the same thing. Indeed, jeans have become the staple item, acceptable almost anywhere, day and night. This is true in part because dress has generally become less formal, but also because the thinking seems to be: If jeans cost as much as a Vera Wang dress, shouldn't they be good enough for a movie premiere? And anyone who pays this much for jeans can trust that the price won't go unnoticed. Like a Mercedes medallion or the print of a Louis Vuitton bag, the symbol on the back pocket sends a signal to those versed in identifying labels. This is consumption conspicuous only to those whom conspicuous consumption doesn't offend.

So what, exactly, are these labels saying? Each designer projects a slightly different, if necessarily ephemeral, image. Seven is still the Titanic of jeans, but like all blockbusters, the brand has become so mainstream it's no longer hip. Citizens of Humanity, from the designer of Seven, are the new Sevens—a safe, wildly popular choice that flatters many body types. The LA-based Hudson jeans put a Union Jack on the pocket to evoke a venerable "tradition" of hand craftsmanship—though since Angelina Jolie showed off her back tattoo and, inadvertently, her Union Jack-emblazoned pockets on national television, the brand's London chic is more Sex Pistols than Princess Di. There are dozens of other premium brands (True Religion, Rock & Republic, Earnest Sewn, to name a few). The scramble to become the new "It" jean is almost impossible to sort out, as brands cycle in and out of favor and fashion with dizzying speed. Regardless of the particular designer, though, the message of the back pocket is clear: The wearer is someone with disposable capital, who cares about her image, and who knows that other women will be surreptitiously checking out her butt.

When it comes to fashion trends, it's difficult to say what is fleeting and what will endure. There are already signs that the premium jeans market has peaked. With too many cognoscenti, too many who speak the language of the back pocket, it is bound to lose its appeal. Perhaps we'll even see a return to a conspicuous consumption of a more conspicuous nature. I recently saw a Seven for All Mankind cropped jean cuffed with real rabbit fur, for $295.

Louisa Thomas is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129956/

human nature
Isn't That Spousal
Alito, abortion, sexism, and the polls.
By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, Nov. 10, 2005, at 8:12 AM ET

Fourteen years ago, Judge Samuel Alito voted to uphold a Pennsylvania law that required married women to certify, prior to an abortion, that they had told their husbands they were having the procedure. A year later, the Supreme Court struck down the law. "A husband has no enforceable right to require a wife to advise him before she exercises her personal choices," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and her colleagues wrote in the court's controlling opinion. They concluded, "A State may not give to a man the kind of dominion over his wife that parents exercise over their children."

Who represents the mainstream on this issue? Alito or O'Connor?

Alito's defenders have good evidence on their side. In a 2003 Gallup poll, 72 percent of Americans endorsed a spousal notice requirement. Last week, the Washington Post and ABC News released a survey indicating that Alito's opinion made as many Americans more likely to support him (27 percent) as to oppose him (26). What do other polls show? Do most Americans support spousal notice laws? Do women? If so, why? Is it about men's rights, women's untrustworthiness, or abortion's gravity?

Since 1989, when abortion polling exploded, the lowest level of support for mandatory spousal notice has been 63; the high is 73 to 76, depending on which polls you trust. The only two national polls taken since 1992—both by Gallup—show more than 70 percent supporting the idea.

Is the trend heading upward? I doubt it. Look at the wording of the questions. Gallup gets the industry's highest support levels for spousal notice—73, 71, and 72 percent in its last three surveys—by telling respondents that a notice law requires the woman to inform her husband "if she decides" to have an abortion. This language emphasizes that the decision is up to the woman, and it seems to leave open the possibility that she could tell him after the abortion rather than before it.

Only once was Gallup forced to change its wording, in a 1992 poll for Life magazine. The Life questionnaire said a notice law required the woman to tell her husband "before she is allowed" to have the abortion. That language took power away from the woman and emphasized that notification had to come first. With those changes, support dipped to 67. Likewise, the University of Michigan's 1992 questionnaire told respondents that a notice law required the woman to tell her husband "before she can have" the abortion. In that poll, support fell to 63 percent.

In short, some people who support spousal notice seem uneasy about taking power away from the woman. Last week's Post/ABC survey, which indicated that the issue was a wash for Alito, framed spousal notice in the most palatable way: requiring the woman to tell her husband "if she decides" to have the abortion. I'd like to see how Alito fares if the public is told that he upheld mandatory notification by the woman "before she can have" the abortion.

Do men and women differ about this? Yes. In a March 1992 Post survey, 70 percent of men agreed that "a pregnant married woman should be required by law to obtain the permission of her husband before she could obtain a legal abortion." Only 58 percent of women agreed. In a 1992 New Jersey poll, 73 percent of men favored a spousal-notice law; only 67 percent of women did. In a 1989 Pennsylvania poll, 78 percent of men supported mandatory notification; only 53 percent of women did. In each case, the difference between men and women on spousal consultation dwarfed their differences on other restrictions.

Is spousal notice just an outgrowth of paternalism or opposition to abortion? No. It routinely scores lower in polls than informed consent and 24-hour waiting periods do. That means some folks who think women don't initially know enough to make an abortion decision—or won't think it through diligently without a waiting period—aren't sure a husband is the right person to supply the diligence or knowledge. On the other hand, opponents of Roe consistently account for less than half the pool of respondents supporting spousal notice. The rest, evidently, are people who don't oppose Roe but still think women should at least have to talk to their husbands.

Do supporters of spousal notice think women need guidance from their husbands in the same way teenage girls need guidance from their parents? The simplest way to answer that question is to compare support levels for mandatory spousal involvement with support levels for mandatory parental involvement. Parental consent scores consistently in the 70-to-75 percent range. Parental notice scores around 80. Spousal notice scores in the low 60s to low 70s.

I've tracked down five surveys that asked about both parental and spousal notice. Parental notice scored higher in every case, but not by much. In a 1992 Parade magazine poll, the gap was four points. In a 1992 Wirthlin poll (for the National Right to Life Committee), it was six. In two 1989 polls by Gordon Black, it was 14 and 12. In a 1992 New Jersey survey, it was eight. The average gap in this group of surveys was eight to nine points. It's easy to conclude that fewer than 10 percent of Americans think (or thought, since these polls are old) women deserve more autonomy than girls do.

But the more telling comparison is between the girl-woman gap on mandatory notice and the girl-woman gap on mandatory consent. I found only two surveys that asked about both spousal and parental consent. Both were taken in Florida: one (statewide) for the Miami Herald in 1989, the other (regionally) for the St. Petersburg Times in 1992. The Times poll found a 30- to 34-point gap between spousal and parental consent, with parental scoring higher. The Herald poll found a 14-point gap between spousal consent and two-parent consent. Since one-parent consent tends to score 18 to 20 points higher than two-parent consent, the second poll lends support to the first poll's gap of at least 30 points between spousal consent and one-parent consent.

In other words, the Florida polls suggest (contrary to the 1992 Post poll, which allowed no such comparison) that when veto power rather than mere notification is at stake, the percentage of people who would grant women more autonomy than girls triples. If that's true, any blurring of the line between spousal notice and consent—like, say, the blurring in O'Connor's reply to Alito 13 years ago—could put him, not her, on the wrong side of public opinion.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

 

explainer
How Do Legal Teams Work?
Have my lawyer call my lawyer.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2005, at 6:22 PM ET

A legal defense fund has been set up to help former White House staffer I. Lewis Libby battle his recent federal indictment. Donations will go toward paying for a high-priced legal team that includes, among others, star attorneys Theodore Wells and William Jeffress. How does a legal team work?

A team leader delegates responsibility. If a criminal defendant has enough money, he can hire special lawyers for each element of a case. (Government prosecutors work in teams as well.) One lawyer might be particularly good at working a jury, so he'd do much of the talking in court. Others might have expertise with certain kinds of evidence: A case involving wiretaps would call for an attorney who knows the ins and outs of the laws that cover eavesdropping. If the prosecutors have an incriminating document, the defense team could bring in a lawyer who has worked with handwriting specialists. A third attorney could be in charge of poring over FBI interviews. And so on.

Though each lawyer typically has her own area of expertise, the whole team meets to discuss overall strategy. A "lead counsel" makes the final decisions, sometimes with the assistance of a "second chair"—his top lieutenant. Lead counsels are also the ones who build the team by recruiting people for each aspect of the case. At least one member has to be a local lawyer—and he'll have to ask the judge to admit (pro hac vice) any colleagues who come in from another state.

Each attorney on the team might bring in associates from his or her law firm. These guys do the grunt work, like obtaining documents, researching legal briefs, and sifting through grand jury testimony. A high-powered team will also hire a staff of non-lawyers to serve as jury consultants, private investigators, and expert witnesses.

Large teams can split up to handle different phases of the case. The 30 or so attorneys who worked together to defend Timothy McVeigh against capital murder charges broke into two squads: One worked to get him acquitted, while the other prepared for his sentencing. (When a defendant in a capital case can't afford his own lawyers, the federal judge must appoint two lawyers instead of one to ensure he gets at least a tiny legal team.) The team can also hedge against a guilty verdict even before the trial begins. A specialist in appellate law might keep careful notes in case anything arises that could be brought up in a subsequent trial.

Can too many cooks spoil the broth? Not really. A large defense team has more expertise than a small one, and it gets things done more quickly. The lawyers on O.J. Simpson's "Dream Team" pushed for a quick trial because they knew the prosecution didn't have the manpower to assemble their case as quickly. One concern the lead counsel might have is that their team will seem like a bunch of bullies: Too many lawyers around the courtroom could intimidate a jury.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Jack King of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Jeralyn Merritt, and John Orsini of Friedman Kaplan Seiler & Adelman.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129922/

supreme court dispatches
Ramps in the Big House
The Supreme Court contemplates disability rights for prisoners.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2005, at 6:19 PM ET

It's far too early to call your bookies on this one. But if today's oral argument was a canary in the coal mine of the big "states rights" revolution under Chief Justice John Roberts, I'd guess that the so-called "dignity" of states might finally be less compelling to the justices than the "dignity" of a real-live human being forced to sit for hours in his own excrement.

At issue in United States v. Georgia and Goodman v. Georgia is whether Title II of the Americans With Disabilities Act allows disabled prisoners in state prisons to sue for damages when their rights under the ADA have been violated. Title II provides that "no qualified individual with a disability shall … be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of the services, programs, or activities of a public entity." Briefly, then, this case pits the doctrine of state sovereign immunity from suit, against Congress' right to override that immunity. Congress can invoke that override to correct for violations of the Fourteenth Amendment. I know, I know, you heard on NPR that this case is about Georgia inmate Tony Goodman—a paraplegic confined to a 12-by-3-foot cell, who claims he was often denied the most basic hygiene and was confined to his jail cell 23 hours or more each day. But by the time a case like Goodman's makes it to the Supreme Court, no one wants to talk about the bones he's broken or the showers he was denied. Instead, the nine justices wrestle with problems of statutory construction, congressional intent, and standards of review. These and other arcane questions surrounding the constitutionality of the ADA are the bread and butter of constitutional law. Still wanna go to law school?

Goodman is a paraplegic, as a result of spinal injuries sustained in a car accident. He was convicted in 1995 of aggravated assault and gun and cocaine possession and assigned to the high/maximum-security section of Georgia State Prison, a facility not equipped for prisoners in wheelchairs. Facing the conditions described above, he sought injunctive and monetary relief under the ADA but lost on summary judgment in the district court and then again in the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals. He sought Supreme Court review, arguing that his case follows logically from the court's decision in Tennessee v. Lane—the 2004 case finding that Congress could override state immunity from suit under the ADA when disabled plaintiffs can't physically access courthouses that are not handicapped-equipped. The holding in Lane, a 5-4 case with O'Connor in the majority, dealt with Title II of the ADA but very narrowly limited itself to the violations at issue in the case—rights of access to the judicial process. Whether other rights—such as the rights of state prisoners to sue for damages against the states—were implicated, was expressly reserved for another day. Today.

The Bush administration is in this case on the side of Goodman, and Solicitor General Paul Clement argues that this flows naturally from the court's prior holding in Lane. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor quickly asks whether decisions about prison regulations are not granted great discretion by courts, and Clement replies that the regulations must still be "reasonable."

Justice Anthony Kennedy inquires, for the first of several times, why prisoners should be entitled to money damages as opposed to mere injunctions to assure the conduct is stopped. He worries about attorney fees being "levied against state treasuries." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observes that the solicitor general's brief emphasizes that the federal government has complied with these accommodations in federal prisons under a different federal statute—the Rehabilitation Act of 1973—and found it "wasn't inordinately expensive."

Samuel R. Bagenstos has 15 minutes representing Goodman, but he speaks so fast it's like he had at least 22. He cites the record of constitutional violations of prisoners "on a nationwide basis." When Justice Antonin Scalia observes that there is no record of extensive violations in Georgia, Bagenstos replies that the national record is sufficient. "But the money is not coming from the nation. It's coming from Georgia," retorts Scalia. Justice Stephen Breyer then cites "one of the cases in the solicitor general's brief," having to do with mentally ill juveniles in Georgia—who were shackled, put in restraint chairs for hours, then sprayed with pepper spray.

Chief Justice John Roberts says he is unpersuaded by the argument that the ADA requires nothing significantly different than the existing laws. "I always read the ADA as a significant change to the rights of the disabled." O'Connor suggests that the difference between disabled prisoners here and the plaintiffs who successfully sued under the ADA in Lane is that "prisons exert control over all aspects of a prisoner's life … which [control] can be quite extensive." Of course Goodman argues that is exactly why prisoners deserve even more accommodation for their disabilities. Or as Roberts will put it later this morning, "Prisoners don't have a lot of choice as to which accommodations they select."

Bagenstos hastens to point out that "reasonableness" is a pretty reasonable standard; that there's a big difference between "a prisoner's ability to go to the bathroom safely" and his ability to "attend an arts and crafts class." Again, Kennedy says he doesn't understand why money damages are a necessary component of curing these violations. Bagenstos says damages have a real deterrent effect when other federal statutes fail to protect prisoners.

Gregory Castanias, representing Georgia, could take the position, as prison officials have done, that Goodman is not really as disabled as he claims. (They say he wasn't too injured to get out of his wheelchair and beat on his girlfriend, for one thing.) But he doesn't argue that. Nor does he acknowledge that the record contains horrifying instances of nationwide prisoner mistreatment about which the state is duly concerned. Instead, he argues that Title II of the ADA "gets disabled prisoners trials for whether they have access to televisions."

When Ginsburg asks whether courts have in fact granted disabled prisoners relief on the basis of access to television, he says that two district courts have done so. He again complains that these "TV cases" keep coming up, with petitioners seeking "reasonable access to the television and the burden shifts to the prisons to show why such access is unreasonable." Then Scalia stymies Castanias by asking what is to be done when some of the acts complained of by the plaintiff really do amount to constitutional violations. Castanias responds that they can file an action under the existing federal civil rights law—Section 1983.

"But they wouldn't get damages," replies Scalia. Castanias says they could win damages against state officers. "But state officers don't have any money," retorts Scalia. Then he repeats: "To the extent it only includes constitutional violations, why isn't this lawsuit OK?"

Castanias is speechless for a moment. He thought Scalia was on his side. He replies that the ADA affords disabled inmates rights that are not limited to solely constitutional violations. Just as Castanias is regaining composure, Breyer jumps in to say he never heard of First Amendment rights of disabled reporters to courtrooms until Lane. And when Breyer refers again to First Amendment rights, and the newspaper reporters at issue in Lane, it becomes clear that he has made a mistake: The disabled reporter in Lane was a court reporter—not a journalist. But no one—certainly not Castanias—corrects Breyer. If you were in Castanias' place, would you? Castanias tries to change the subject. Problem: If Miss Manners, or our own bewitching Prudie, have published on the etiquette of correcting Supreme Court justices at oral argument, I can't find it online. Perhaps a tasteful engraved note?

When Scalia again suggests that although Congress perhaps went "too far" in enacting the ADA, "to the extent it covers a constitutional violation, it's OK." Ginsburg nudges him along this path by pointing out that the "core concerns" in Goodman—"prisoner sanitation, mobility, and protection from injury—sound like the 8^th Amendment heartland."

Gene Schaerr has 10 minutes to represent Georgia's side. He argues against granting Congress broad police powers to micromanage prisons. And again he exhaustively details the absurdity of the nefarious TV cases—citing to cases in the record where prisoners complained about TV lounges that were not wheelchair-accessible. Kennedy cuts him off. Georgia's efforts to reduce this case to the trivial television complaints don't seem to be selling anyone. In his rebuttal, Clement is careful to reassure Roberts that the "specter of TV access cases" can be "weeded out" under the existing legal tests.

For years now, court-watchers have been reading the tea leaves of the Federalism Revolution—trying to see how far the five most conservative justices on the court would take their passion for states rights and how many acts of Congress they could strike down without looking like they wanted to dismantle the whole New Deal or the civil rights advances that most of us have become rather fond of. Different justices have bailed out on the revolution for different reasons in recent years—Scalia couldn't bring himself to gut federal drug laws in the name of Californians' sovereign right to smoke weed, and the late Rehnquist blinked when he looked deep into the eyes of the Family and Medical Leave Act. The question today is whether there will be five solid votes to render Title II of the ADA toothless when it comes to state prisoners.

Maybe if Georgia's flippant claims that only handicapped access to TV lounges and prison quilting bees are at stake were accurate, these five votes would be certain, assuming O'Connor's vote will count at all once she's replaced by Sam Alito. But as the many disturbing briefs in this case make plain, sometimes the law asks for more than just a punch line.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

 

politics
Don't Fire Karl
Five reasons Bush should keep Rove.
By John Dickerson
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2005, at 6:36 PM ET

For weeks, the city's permanent class has speculated about whether Patrick Fitzgerald would indict Karl Rove. If he does, then Rove will resign as Scooter Libby did. But as each day passes with no action from the special prosecutor, Rove is looking safer and safer. So, the lunchtime conversation has shifted. The question now is: What should President Bush do if his top political adviser is not indicted? Fifty-nine percent of Americans think Rove should resign from the White House. (The most amazing aspect of this: that 59 percent of Americans know who Rove is.) Only 36 percent of Americans "now believe that Bush has lived up to his campaign pledge to restore integrity to the White House."

So, will Bush fire Rove to try to improve public perceptions about his administration? Or will he continue to rely on Rove's advice and ignore his critics?

Administration officials who work intimately with Rove are making their own guesses. "It's never been clear how long Karl would stay," said one White House aide last week in an offhanded attempt to make it seem like Rove was mulling a 2005 departure long before things got so sticky. Others talk about how he really misses Texas. Another top aide joked that security guards will be dragging a BlackBerrying Rove out of the White House gates on Inauguration Day 2009. The gossip is high, but the truth is, no one knows what's going to happen. "We just assumed he'd be indicted because you all were writing it," admitted one senior administration official.

President Bush—the only person who will decide Rove's future—seems to be holding off until Fitzgerald makes up his mind. But just because he's waiting doesn't mean we should. Here are five reasons Bush should keep Rove if he's not indicted:

1. You'll only encourage us. The nay-saying Washington establishment can never get enough. If Bush fires Rove, the journalists and wise men who have been calling for his head won't be satisfied. They'll be emboldened. There will be calls for more acts of dubious self-flagellation: a broader staff shakeup, a public session of mistake-admitting by Bush, a timetable for troop withdrawals from Iraq, and perhaps even makeup sessions with the French. "They'll bank it and then want more," says a senior administration official of those who want a Rove firing.

2. The tumult will pass. The limbo period after the Libby indictment has contributed to the ethical stink surrounding the White House. The press asks the president or his spokesman about Rove every day, and the White House can only stonewall. That drives the president's poll numbers down. But once Fitzgerald closes shop without another indictment, the scandal will start to fade away. Sure, Rove's continued employment will be measured against Bush's previous righteous statements on government ethics. Clintonites will be rightfully smug. Democrats won't let the Rove case go, but they were going to attack him whether Bush fired him or not. If the nonpartisans in the country ever cared about Rove at all, most will go back to caring about the war in Iraq and gas and home-heating-oil prices. Those aren't issues that work well for Bush, but they're also ones that won't be improved by a Rove firing.

3. Bush needs him. Legislation doesn't pass itself. Rove is in charge of plotting strategy and policy on Bush's guest-worker program, a key element of his second-term agenda. He is also central to planning the State of the Union and the 2006 policy initiatives that will be launched there. If Bush is going to "hit the reset button"—the cliché White House officials now use to explain the effort to get past Katrina, Libby's indictment, and the Miers cul-de-sac—he needs Karl to help implement whatever plan they concoct.

The 2006 elections are looking ever gloomier for Republicans as voters tell pollsters that they prefer the Democratic Party. All of Rove's talents will be needed to support Republican candidates. Democrats are going to turn every local election into a referendum on Bush's performance. GOP candidates who try to distance themselves will find the president hard to shake. Since Bush will be dragged into the election anyway, he might as well take control of his destiny. Even if swing voters don't like Bush anymore, Rove knows where and how to use the president to inspire the Republican base that will be so important to the off-year election. If Bush can beat expectations, he has a chance to resuscitate his political standing. That's also something Karl is good at: managing expectations. Even a middling performance by GOP candidates will be spun as a triumph.

4. The base loves Karl. Karl Rove is a GOP folk hero. Conservatives have never winced at the accusation that Rove was leaking to smear Joe Wilson. Partly this is because they despise Wilson so much. Partly it's that they revere Rove. If Rove is not indicted and Bush gets rid of him anyway, conservatives will likely view it as a capitulation to the liberal media. Yes, Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., has suggested Rove should go no matter what Fitzgerald decides. He's no member of the liberal elite, but the former majority leader is enjoying whatever the Mississippi term for schadenfreude is and may not be representative of any widespread GOP sentiment. (Lott believes Karl helped push him out of his leadership post after Lott's public praise of former segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond became a national controversy. He is repaying the kindness.) The professional members of the GOP in Washington, who have been telling reporters on background that Rove has to go, will be sending him hasty love notes about how he beat the rap if Fitzgerald does not indict.

5. He's chastened. Rove can be difficult to work with. He is notoriously demanding and encroaches onto other people's turf—"not staying in his lane," as they say in the White House. He is still popular in the West Wing, but colleagues who occasionally grouse about his "always proving he is the smartest person in the room" hope that his brush with indictment could mellow him. If nothing else, Bush, who occasionally bristles at what he considers Rove's showboating, can look forward to reminding his star performer just how much grief his phone conversations about Joe Wilson's wife have caused the administration.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

sports nut
The Lords of Discipline
Coaches and broadcasters peddle an easy solution to every problem in football.
By Felix Gillette
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2005, at 5:10 PM ET

This past Sunday morning, New York's CBS affiliate ran a feature on the woes of the New York Jets. Players from Vinny Testaverde to Curtis Martin recited the team's problems: turnovers, mistakes early in the game, players missing practice. What will it take to revive the season? "You have to be disciplined," said coach Herman Edwards. "It's called discipline."

Sound like a familiar solution? It should. In today's NFL, bemoaning a "lack of discipline" isn't simply a part of the perfunctory hand-wringing after a string of losses. It's the diagnosis for anything and everything that goes wrong on and off the field.

Why did Eagles coach Andy Reid have to suspend Terrell Owens? According to ESPN's Steve Young, "he has to have some discipline." Why are the Baltimore Ravens struggling this season? The AP says: "Childish Ravens lack discipline—and victories." Why was former starting safety Michael Hawthorne cut recently by St. Louis? Rams coaches say he contributed to the team's lack of discipline in the secondary. How did Vikings executives crack down on the team's alleged romping on stripper-bedecked yachts? "Lack of discipline will no longer be tolerated at any level," said owner Zygi Wilf. And why has Green Bay come up short in the playoffs recently? Bob McGinn of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel attributes the losses, in part, to Brett Favre's "undisciplined approach."

If you can tag Favre—a guy who hasn't missed a start since 1992—as undisciplined, then you can get away with attaching the label to anything. Pre-snap penalties. Turnovers. Fourth-quarter collapses. First-quarter collapses. Buck-naked lake cruises. Ejections. It seems like everywhere you look in football, there's a problem that could be cured if somebody had a bit more self-control.

So, what's with football's discipline fetish? As countless observers have noted, the rhetoric of football borrows heavily from the rhetoric of warfare. It's no surprise, then, that the tendency to blame football mishaps on players' lack of discipline has a parallel in the military. Like their NFL counterparts, U.S. military leaders aren't afraid to play the "discipline" card. Just look at 2004's Jones-Fay report, in which Army poo-bahs attributed the malfeasance at Abu Ghraib prison to a "lack of discipline" on the part of soldiers and leaders, a "breakdown in discipline," and "the actions of a few undisciplined soldiers."

But while military observers can turn to the likes of Seymour Hersh for deeper explanations of armed-forces fiascos, football fans are stuck with the likes of Joe Buck. Today's crop of sideline reporters and booth jockeys spend more time nattering about fantasy stats than analyzing X's and O's.

Botched plays in basketball and baseball lend themselves to immediate diagnosis—mistakes tend to involve one or two players and happen right at the focal point of the action. Football's more confusing. On each play, 22 players swarm around, each carrying out duties that are largely unknown to both fans and the guys in the press box. Unlike the rest of us, play-by-play announcers and color commentators don't have the luxury of admitting their befuddlement. When a play gets fouled up for some unknown reason, it's safe to blame the screw-up on a lack of discipline. That analysis might be wrong, but at least it's irrefutable.

The evocation of discipline extends beyond the media to players and coaches. When asked by the New Orleans Times-Picayune about their frequent penalties this year, both Saints coach Jim Haslett and guard Kendyl Jacox fingered a lack of discipline as the culprit. In reality, penalties and turnovers happen for a vast number of reasons, many of which are beyond the control of the guys on the field. Refs make crappy calls. Ray Lewis causes fumbles. Wind knocks down passes. Cleats get caught in turf. Blind hands grab facemasks unseen.

When you think about it, the possible reasons for penalties and turnovers seem infinite. That's why coaches and players buy into the discipline myth. Whereas bad weather, bad calls, and bad luck are completely uncoachable, a lack of discipline can be solved. At least in theory. In practice, the term is so vague that improving a team's discipline would look like … what, exactly? Perhaps combo drills focusing on A) the finer points of a cover-two zone and B) the finer points of life without water-borne exotic dancers.

During that time of hopeful rejuvenation known as the offseason, coaches trot out their team's newly shored up discipline like a talisman to ward off the coming storms. "My discipline isn't loud," Jets coach Herman Edwards said before the start of the season. "My discipline is like the nun's discipline. It's matter-of-fact. You don't have to hit anybody in the head with a hammer. If you're not a disciplined player, you're not going to be here." As it turns out, football coaches are like nuns in another way—they put their faith in unempirical abstractions.

Felix Gillette is a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review's CJR Daily.

 

architecture
Suburban Despair
Is urban sprawl really an American menace?
By Witold Rybczynski
Posted Monday, Nov. 7, 2005, at 6:42 PM ET

We hate sprawl. It's responsible for everything that we don't like about modern American life: strip malls, McMansions, big-box stores, the loss of favorite countryside, the decline of downtowns, traffic congestion, SUVs, high gas consumption, dependence on foreign oil, the Iraq war. No doubt about it, sprawl is bad, American bad. Like expanding waistlines, it's touted around the world as yet another symptom of our profligacy and wastefulness as a nation. Or, as Robert Bruegmann puts it in his new book, "cities that sprawl and, by implication, the citizens living in them, are self indulgent and undisciplined."

Or not. In Sprawl, cheekily subtitled "A Compact History," Bruegmann, a professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the assumptions that underpin most people's strongly held convictions about sprawl. His conclusions are unexpected. To begin with, he finds that urban sprawl is not a recent phenomenon: It has been a feature of city life since the earliest times. The urban rich have always sought the pleasures of living in low-density residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities. As long ago as the Ming dynasty in the 14^th century, the Chinese gentry sang the praises of the exurban life, and the rustic villa suburbana was a common feature of ancient Rome. Pliny's maritime villa was 17 miles from the city, and many fashionable Roman villa districts such as Tusculum—where Cicero had a summer house—were much closer. Bruegmann also observes that medieval suburbs—those urbanized areas outside cities' protective walls—had a variety of uses. Manufacturing processes that were too dirty to be located inside the city (such as brick kilns, tanneries, slaughterhouses) were in the suburbs; so were the homes of those who could not afford to reside within the city proper. This pattern continued during the Renaissance. Those compact little cities bounded by bucolic landscapes, portrayed in innumerable idealized paintings, were surrounded by extensive suburbs.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "sprawl" first appeared in print in this context in 1955, in an article in the London Times that contained a disapproving reference to "great sprawl" at the city's periphery. But, as Bruegmann shows, by then London had been spreading into the surrounding countryside for hundreds of years. During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, while the poor moved increasingly eastward, affluent Londoners built suburban estates in the westerly direction of Westminster and Whitehall, commuting to town by carriage. These areas are today the Central West End; one generation's suburb is the next generation's urban neighborhood. As Bruegmann notes, "Clearly, from the beginning of modern urban history, and contrary to much accepted wisdom, suburban development was very diverse and catered to all kinds of people and activities."

When inexpensive public transportation opened up South London for development in the 19^th century, London sprawl took a different form: streets and streets of small brick-terrace houses. For middle-class families, this dispersal was a godsend, since it allowed them to exchange a cramped flat for a house with a garden. The outward movement continued in the boom years between the First and Second World Wars, causing the built-up area of London to double, although the population increased by only about 10 percent—which sounds a lot like Atlanta today.

It was not only by sprawling at the edges that cities reduced their densities. Preindustrial cities began life by exhibiting what planners call a steep "density gradient," that is, the population density was extremely high in the center and dropped off rapidly at the edges. Over time, with growing prosperity—and the availability of increasingly far-reaching mass transportation (omnibuses, streetcars, trains, subways, cars)—this gradient flattened out. Density at the center reduced while density in the (expanding) suburbs increased. The single most important variable in this common pattern was, as Bruegmann observes, not geography or culture, but the point at which the city reached economic maturity. In the case of London, the city's population density peaked in the early 19^th century; in Paris it happened in the 1850s; and in New York City in the early 1900s. While the common perception is that sprawl is America's contribution to urban culture, Bruegmann shows that it appeared in Europe first.

Yet haven't high rates of automobile ownership, easy availability of land, and a lack of central planning made sprawl much worse in the United States? Most American tourists spend their time visiting historic city centers, so they may be unaware that suburbs now constitute the bulk of European metropolitan areas, just as they do in America. We marvel at the efficiency of European mass transit, but since 1950, transit ridership has remained flat, while the use of private automobiles has skyrocketed. Just as in America. "As cities across Europe have become more affluent in the last decades of the twentieth century," Bruegmann writes, "they have witnessed a continuing decline in population densities in the historic core, a quickening of the pace of suburban and exurban development, a sharp rise in automobile ownership and use, and the proliferation of subdivisions of single-family houses and suburban shopping centers." Despite some of the most stringent anti-sprawl regulations in the world and high gas prices, the population of the City of Paris has declined by almost a third since 1921, while its suburbs have grown. Over the last 15 years, the city of Milan has lost about 600,000 people to its metropolitan fringes, while Barcelona, considered by many a model compact city, has developed extensive suburbs and has experienced the largest population loss of any European city in the last 25 years. Greater London, too, continues to sprawl, resulting in a population density of 12,000 persons per square mile, about half that of New York City.

The point is not that London, any more than Barcelona or Paris, is a city in decline (although the demographics of European city centers have changed and are now home to wealthier and older inhabitants, just like some American cities). Central urban densities are dropping because household sizes are smaller and affluent people occupy more space. Like Americans, Europeans have opted for decentralization. To a great extent, this dispersal is driven by a desire for home-ownership. "Polls consistently confirm that most Europeans, like most Americans, and indeed most people worldwide, would prefer to live in single-family houses on their own piece of land rather than in apartment buildings," Bruegmann writes. So strong is this preference that certain European countries such as Ireland and the United Kingdom now have higher single-family house occupancy rates than the United States, while others, such as Holland, Belgium, and Norway, are comparable. Half of all French households now live in houses.

It appears that all cities—at least all cities in the industrialized Western world—have experienced a dispersal of population from the center to a lower-density periphery. In other words, sprawl is universal. Why is this significant? "Most American anti-sprawl reformers today believe that sprawl is a recent and peculiarly American phenomenon caused by specific technological innovations like the automobile and by government policies like single-use zoning or the mortgage-interest deduction on the federal income tax," Bruegmann writes. "It is important for them to believe this because if sprawl turned out to be a long-standing feature of urban development worldwide, it would suggest that stopping it involves something much more fundamental than correcting some poor American land-use policy."

What this iconoclastic little book demonstrates is that sprawl is not the anomalous result of American zoning laws, or mortgage interest tax deduction, or cheap gas, or subsidized highway construction, or cultural antipathy toward cities. Nor is it an aberration. Bruegmann shows that asking whether sprawl is "good" or "bad" is the wrong question. Sprawl is and always has been inherent to urbanization. It is driven less by the regulations of legislators, the actions of developers, and the theories of city planners, than by the decisions of millions of individuals—Adam Smith's "invisible hand." This makes altering it very complicated, indeed. There are scores of books offering "solutions" to sprawl. Their authors would do well to read this book. To find solutions—or, rather, better ways to manage sprawl, which is not the same thing—it helps to get the problem right.

Witold Rybczynski is Slate's architecture critic.

 

war stories
President Cheney
His office really does run national security.
By Daniel Benjamin
Posted Monday, Nov. 7, 2005, at 5:06 PM ET

It has become a cliché to say that Dick Cheney is the most powerful vice president in American history. Nonetheless, here is a prediction: When the historians really get digging into the paper entrails of the Bush administration—or possibly when Scooter Libby goes on trial—those who have intoned that phrase will still be astonished at the extent to which the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney was the center of power inside the White House—and at the grip it had on foreign and defense policy.

With a national security staff that numbered 14 last year (Al Gore usually had four or five), Cheney's office has a finger in every pie. Several of the State Department's top diplomats, including Eric Edelman, now undersecretary of defense for policy, and Victoria Nuland, now ambassador to NATO, are alums of Cheney's office. According to David L. Phillips' Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, the dominant figure in some of the key interagency deliberations on postwar Iraq was not the State Department official who chaired them but Samantha Ravich, a Cheney aide who left the government and has since returned to OVP*. In addition, Cheney has remarkable influence over his onetime boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Writing in Slate, Tim Naftali was surprised by the news in the New York Times that Cheney's office was calling the tune on how the United States treats terrorist detainees. At least as interesting was the mention in the same story that the Office of the Vice President (or OVP) had hammered out the compromise in last year's intelligence reform bill that "made clear that the new national intelligence director could not interfere in the military chain of command." Eighty percent of the nation's intelligence budget is spent within the Pentagon. So, that compromise leaves a large question mark over whether John Negroponte or his successors will have anything like the power the 9/11 commission had anticipated when it proposed sweeping intelligence reform.

Cheney's connection with intelligence and, particularly, Pentagon intelligence is not exactly new. The transmission lines for many of the bogus claims in 2002 and 2003 about the purported ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida ran from the civilian Office of the Secretary of Defense through Cheney's office. Although the Libby indictment might lead some to believe that OVP was running an apolitical enforcement operation, it was doing much more than that. Cheney's team was producing the basic justification for going to war.

News accounts have placed the origin of much of the bad intelligence in the Office of Special Plans, which was run by Abram Shulsky, a graduate-school pal of former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. In fact, the bad intel came largely out of something called the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which reported to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. This group consisted of just two people: Michael Maloof, a controversial former aide to Richard Perle whose security clearances were eventually suspended, and David Wurmser, a longtime neoconservative advocate of toppling Saddam Hussein. (Since late 2003, Wurmser has worked in OVP.)

The information CTEG put together was treated differently than other intelligence. Unlike other reports, CTEG's conclusions about Iraq's training of jihadists in the use of explosives and weapons of mass destruction were never distributed to the many different agencies in the intelligence community. Although CTEG analysts met once with Director George Tenet and other CIA officials, they changed no minds at the agency on the issue of Saddam and al-Qaida, and their work was never "coordinated" or cleared by the various agencies that weigh in on intelligence publications. Top officers in military intelligence who saw the report refused to concur with it.

Nonetheless, CTEG's findings were the basis for briefings in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Some of CTEG's material was leaked to the Weekly Standard, where it was published. In that form, the Feith "annex" achieved some renown as a classic in the genre of cherry-picked intelligence.

Dick Cheney was CTEG's patron. He had the group present its material at OVP and the National Security Council. He made frequent public remarks, drawing on CTEG conclusions, alleging an al-Qaida/Saddam connection. (Even after the 9/11 commission delivered its verdict that there was no collaborative relationship between the two sides, Cheney announced that the evidence of the Bin Laden-Baghdad ties was "overwhelming.") John Hannah, a Cheney aide who became the vice president's national security adviser after Libby's resignation, recycled some of the material into a draft of the speech Secretary of State Colin Powell was to give at the United Nations in February 2003—a draft that Powell threw out, calling it "bullshit."

The wide airing of CTEG material clearly irked George Tenet, who declared at one point when pressed by congressmen in 2003 that he would "talk to" Cheney about some of the claims he was making. Whatever passed between them, Cheney was not deterred. In January 2004, he told a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News that the Standard article was the "best source of information" on Saddam's ties to al-Qaida. In June 2004, Cheney was still claiming that 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta met an Iraqi agent in Prague.

Much is still to be learned about how intelligence was used and abused in CTEG and OVP. But one story gives a hint of what the historians may find: When I interviewed him several months ago, Powell's former chief of staff Larry Wilkerson recounted the story of a meeting in the White House situation room during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq when policymakers met with top intelligence officials from a number of agencies. After the intelligence officials made their presentations, Douglas Feith "leapt to his feet, pointed to a certain National Intelligence Officer and declared 'You people don't know what you're talking about.' "

Feith had worked for Cheney—together with Scooter Libby—when he was secretary of defense in the administration of George H.W. Bush and, according to former administration sources, was even closer to Rumsfeld than Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was. After that outburst, Feith held up a piece of paper and read aloud an account of al-Qaida's ties with Iraq in the early 1990s. Then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, a man well-known and well-liked in Washington for his gentlemanly manners, looked on, aghast at the scene. Wilkerson told me that after the end of the meeting, he got a copy of the paper and determined it was a newspaper clipping that had been retyped in the vice president's office to be presented as "intelligence."

Browbeating intelligence officials, disregard for the National Security Council's traditional leadership of the interagency process—this kind of behavior, plenty of Bush administration officials privately attest, was typical as the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis that took the country to war. "Who knows," Larry Wilkerson wondered to me, "how many other people they intimidated."

Correction, Nov. 8, 2005: The original version of this article failed to mention that Samantha Ravich had returned to work in OVP. Return to the corrected sentence.

Daniel Benjamin is co-author, with Steven Simon, of The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right. He served on the National Security Council staff 1994-1999.

 

moneybox
Avoiding Las Vegas
Is the hottest destination in America cooling off?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, Nov. 7, 2005, at 3:42 PM ET

MGM Mirage, the nation's second-largest casino company (its trophy properties include the Bellagio and MGM Grand), reported disappointing results in late October, and the stock was hammered. MGM Mirage was hamstrung by the loss of properties in the Gulf Coast, which was no surprise. But the company also warned that things aren't quite as hot as was thought in its core market of Las Vegas.

The key financial metric for hotel/casino companies is REVPAR—revenue per available room—or how many dollars per night you can squeeze out of a guest's spending on mini-bars, spa services, room service, and blackjack. For the fourth quarter of 2005, MGM Mirage expects REVPAR will rise 6 percent at its Vegas Strip properties—down from 13 percent growth in the fourth quarter of 2004. For casinos, as MGM Mirage's Web site notes, it's all about momentum. And so the soggy forecast had investors rushing for the exits like a bunch of hipsters trapped in a Céline Dion show.

MGM Mirage and other giant gambling companies like Harrah's face two problems. The first currently bedevils all companies that depend on consumers to blow discretionary income on their products and services: the lethal cocktail of inflation, rising interest rates, and weak income. Few people need to gamble or to buy the food, booze, and baubles on offer in Vegas. And Las Vegas caters to the middle- to upper-income consumer who may just be starting to feel the pinch. (This neat 2004 survey by Harrah's suggests that American gamblers are a little more professional, educated, upscale, and more likely to vote Democratic than the American public at large.)

The second problem is more industry-specific. In theory, with the economy growing and Katrina having knocked out a good-sized chunk of the nation's gambling capacity, Las Vegas should be doing well. After all, Americans have shown a seemingly limitless capacity to lose money and engage in games where the odds are against them. But while Las Vegas and its environs boast massive population growth and new construction everywhere, the deck may be stacked against the operators of huge hotel/casinos. The ultimate boom town may be maturing as a city and as a destination for tourists.

Thanks to the stunning growth of new gambling dens like Foxwoods in Connecticut, new investments in Atlantic City, N.J., and the proliferation of Indian casinos all over the country, gamblers no longer have to trek to the desert to piss away their hard-earned money. As the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority notes, there "are more than 440 high-stakes casinos in the United States, and further expansion is expected over the next 5-10 years." Meanwhile, Indian casinos, which accounted for about 40 percent of nationwide casino revenues in 2003, are expanding in the gigantic market adjacent to Las Vegas: California.

For the hotels and casinos, the key is to get bodies from out of town into hermetically sealed environments where they're captive spenders. According to the LVCVA, Vegas is having a lot of success convincing business customers to check in, as shown by the impressive growth of trade shows. But look at the overall numbers. In 2004, LVCVA said 37.4 million people visited. This year, it expects 38.2 million visitors, up just 2.1 percent. And expectations for the near future are muted. LVCVA has a goal of attracting 43 million visitors in 2009. That represents a 12.5 percent increase in four years, or about 3 percent a year.

That's not bad. But it's hardly booming. And while there are more people coming to Vegas—through August, these statistics show visitor volume is up 3.1 percent—the challenge for MGM Mirage and its rivals is that the visitors have more hotels to choose from. Through August 2005, room inventory grew more rapidly than the number of visitors, by 3.7 percent, and now stands at 133,000 rooms. As a result, hotel occupancy levels are down fractionally. Another key: Through August 2005, tourism room nights occupied (that is, the number of tourists multiplied by the number of nights they stayed) fell 2.3 percent.

When tourism was booming, it was easy for companies to rake in big bucks just by putting up glitzy new hotels and rolling out the red carpet. (Here's a nice roundup of new openings in Vegas in recent decades.) But when growth shifts into a lower gear, consolidation becomes the order of the day. Companies can save money by cutting overlapping business functions. More important, it takes some of the cutthroat competition out of the market. And in the past year, there's been plenty of consolidation, with MGM Mirage buying Mandalay Bay Resorts and Harrah's buying Caesars.

In theory, more casinos in the hands of fewer owners should be good news for room rates—there's less competition among companies. But there's more capacity in the works. And every time a splashy new resort like the Wynn Las Vegas opens, incumbents have to increase marketing—i.e., cut prices.

The new environment also has hotel/casino managers talking less like slick showmen and more like management consultants. "We're aware that in recent weeks concern about Las Vegas room rates have made some observers skittish," Harrah's CEO Gary Loveman said in the Financial Times this week. "Even in a changing economic climate, however, our sophisticated revenue management systems are our best ammunition against room rate fluctuation and retail pressure."

So, competition is increasing as growth is slowing. The American gambler is getting pinched like other consumers. And with more gambling closer to home, fewer tourists feel the urge to splurge in Nevada. That doesn't mean Las Vegas is over. It just means the city could finally be graduating from its state of perpetual rowdy adolescence into a calmer adulthood.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129653/

jurisprudence
Fire Sale
How the gun industry bought itself immunity from the rule of law.
By David Kairys
Posted Monday, Nov. 7, 2005, at 3:36 PM ET

We're used to spotting lawlessness and corruption around the world and at home: in Iraq, or Saudi Arabia, or large no-bid contracts to Halliburton out of Washington. The cure for such ills is usually some version of the rule of law and probably its most basic principle—that the rules apply to everyone, including the richest, the most powerful, and the most connected.

But corruption and lawlessness are not limited to human rights violations or greedy hands in large tills. In the past two weeks, Congress and the president have exempted one industry from the most basic legal rules that apply to all other industries and individuals: They have enacted unprecedented legislation giving the gun industry immunity from lawsuits based on federal or state laws to which everyone else is subject. In so doing, Congress and the president have violated the most fundamental tenets of constitutional separation of powers, in which government fashions rules of general application, avoids singling out powerful friends to be above the law, and leaves the outcome of pending lawsuits to the courts.

If a manufacturer or dealer in another industry—or if you or I—create, for example, a public nuisance that interferes with public health or safety, we're subject to a lawsuit by local authorities to stop that nuisance and recover the costs of cleaning it up. The law recognizes the obvious when it imposes liability for spreading a dangerous substance or device in a way that knowingly places it in the hands of people who will use it to harm others. You, I, and manufacturers and dealers in other industries cannot do that without subjecting ourselves to civil lawsuits. But from now on, gun manufacturers and dealers may do it with impunity. Even if, as alleged in pending lawsuits targeted for retroactive dismissal by the immunity act, they knowingly facilitate the notoriously easy access criminals and youths have to new, inexpensive handguns.

Long-standing law in most every state, for instance, holds a bar liable for harm caused by a drunk patron in some circumstances, depending on the knowledge and conduct of the bar. The harm can include the drunk patron criminally causing a car crash, or urinating on the lawn of a neighbor. The liability turns on the conduct of the bar's owner or agents, even though the ultimate vehicle of the harm is the drunk patron.

If this new gun legislation withstands review in the courts, the gun industry is no longer subject to such traditional legal principles. In other words, Congress and the president have given the gun industry—and only the gun industry—immunity from the rule of law.

To see this clearly, one has to see through a few gun-industry smokescreens that tend to hide the true meaning and enormity of the immunity act. This legislation is not, as the industry depicts it, about tort reform or insurance law or manufacturer liability, and it does not generally address liability involving the conduct of others. Nor is it about frivolous lawsuits, which are in any event quickly dismissed and, if they are sufficiently baseless, can result in the payment of the opposing side's costs and counsel fees by the party filing frivolously.

One industry has simply been exempted from rules that apply to everybody else.

Is there some basis for treating only one industry completely differently? The reasons offered for singling out those who produce and distribute a product designed to kill don't hold much buckshot either. These lawsuits don't affect in any way the right to own a gun, and thus do not implicate the Second Amendment. They deal only with whether the manufacturers and dealers in this industry can be held liable like any other industry or individual.

The industry also pleads poverty: Gun makers say they don't have the deep pockets of the tobacco industry. No one does. But that's not the point. If they cause harm in circumstances other industries or individuals would have to pay for, there's no reason they should be immunized simply because they cannot afford to pay. More urgently, the legislation means victims of gun-industry misconduct—unlike victims of misconduct by any other industry or individual—have to bear the full brunt of their injuries or deaths themselves. The victim of the D.C. snipers who recently recovered $2 million from a dealer whose negligence allowed 17-year-old Lee Malvo to obtain an assault rifle would be out of luck.

Leading backers of the immunity legislation in the House and Senate irresponsibly claimed that the very narrow exceptions in the sweeping immunity legislation—which do not include simple negligence or public nuisance—might have nevertheless allowed this suit. Yet they ultimately refused to adopt specific amendments that would have clearly kept this kind of case out of the broad immunity granted the industry.

The unspoken context for this legislation—unspoken mostly because Democrats are afraid of the issue—is a sizable liability the industry was about to face. The gun-industry immunity act was a direct response to lawsuits filed in the last several years by more than 30 cities—including all the major cities in the country—one state attorney general (Eliot Spitzer of New York), and individuals harmed by gun violence connected, like the Malvo assault rifle case, to misconduct by gun makers, distributors, or dealers. These lawsuits are based, unlike previous litigation the industry faced, on conduct that facilitates easy access by criminals and youths to new handguns. The suits primarily used a traditional public-nuisance approach based on the theory that some (not all) within the industry are knowingly supplying and marketing handguns through distribution outlets—such as particular distributors and dealers and gun shows—that provide youths and criminals that easy access. A recent comprehensive study by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms concluded that 57 percent of guns used in crimes were sold by only 1 percent of the dealers.

If the cities and individual plaintiffs had been afforded the opportunity to prove these allegations in court, the industry would have been in trouble—as well it should be for such reckless conduct. On average, 50 people are killed by handguns each day, and three or four times that number are seriously injured daily. These lawsuits claim—and the testimony of high-level industry insiders confirms—that the industry has been knowingly supplying handguns through distribution channels that feed the criminal and youth market.

The largest share of the handgun market, by far, is purchases by law-abiding people for self-defense, so it's worth wondering why the manufacturers would knowingly feed the crime and youth market when it amounts to a small share of their business. The depths to which people sink for personal gain, and the rationalizations sometimes offered, never cease to amaze, but more is at stake here than immediately meets the eye. The large self-defense market is driven by fear. Anything that increases fear—the school shootings at Columbine, the 2000 millennium computer scare, 9/11—increases the demand for handguns. The steady source for the fear that drives the handgun market is crime, particularly crimes committed with guns.

About half of the city suits not prohibited by state statutes (before the national legislation was signed, the industry had already gotten many state legislatures to exempt them from the usual state rules) have already surmounted motions to dismiss because they're not frivolous. The city gun suits, and some of the suits by individuals harmed, have fared much better than the state tobacco suits. New York City's suit would have gone to trial in late November.

The congressional sponsors of the legislation, the gun industry and the NRA, acknowledge that the immunity legislation was simply a reaction to these pending suits, and the immunity act specifically provides for dismissal of all of them. In other words, they went and asked a favor from Congress: Enact a law to make these troubling lawsuits go away. And Congress obliged.

All of this raises a constitutional issue that vitally concerned the framers. Before the Constitution was adopted, legislatures regularly intervened in pending lawsuits—indeed parties to lawsuits regularly raced right to the state assemblies to get legislation resolving pending or anticipated lawsuits in their favor.

Thomas Jefferson complained that this practice was becoming "habitual." James Madison rightly called it "legislative usurpation ... [that] must lead to tyranny." The Federalist Papers railed against it. And partly in response, the Constitution establishes separation of powers: Legislatures make laws of general application, executives enforce the laws, and courts decide cases between parties based on the law.

So, here we have a suspension of the rule of law for one industry, enacted by Congress and signed by the president to federally limit traditionally state-determined rules of tort liability: a law that intervenes in and decides the outcome of pending lawsuits. Other industries will surely recognize the utility of such legislation and will seek similar treatment when they are sued. Doubtless they will make some steep campaign donations to get it. And why not, since the rule of law appears to be suddenly up for sale?

David Kairys is James E. Beasley Professor of Law at Temple University. He has helped some cities and individuals in their litigation against gun manufacturers and dealers.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129649/

the hollywood economist
Games That Moguls Play
Sumner Redstone's next move.
By Edward Jay Epstein
Posted Monday, Nov. 7, 2005, at 2:28 PM ET

Sumner Redstone, who built Viacom into one of the world's largest media conglomerates through spectacular leveraged buyouts, is now going to divide it through a stock split into two separate, publicly traded companies. The company that is retaining the name Viacom Inc. will be comprised of the Paramount movie studio (stripped of its television production) and the MTV, VH1, and Nickelodeon cable networks. The second company, which will return to the name CBS, will get both broadcast networks (CBS and UPN), all the owned and operated television stations, the King World TV production arm, the Infinity radio and outdoor advertising unit (for which Viacom took a $20 million write-off this year), and the Simon & Schuster publishing house.

Redstone hopes that this maneuver will dazzle Wall Street into increasing the share price of both parts of his divided empire. In fact, both sides will be managed exactly as they are now: Tom Freston will continue to head the Viacom side, and Leslie Moonves will continue to head the CBS side. More important, control will continue to be in the hands of Redstone, since his personal investment vehicle, National Amusements Inc., owns the majority of the special class of voting stock in both new companies. The split, aside from allowing Redstone's top executives to cash in their out-of-the-money stock options (which automatically get vested when there is a change in corporate ownership), may involve little more than the proverbial rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Meanwhile, Redstone is moving into the video-gaming business, which he describes in Business Week as "the hottest part of the entertainment industry." After turning down a proposal for Viacom to buy Electronic Arts, the world's largest publisher of video games, Redstone himself has bought control of Midway Games through National Amusements Inc.—he also made his daughter Shari Redstone the vice chairman and installed his own board. Even though Midway currently loses a great deal of money, part of the company's appeal comes from the potential for video games to be platforms for paid "product placement" or unlabeled advertising inserted into the game itself.

The logic goes like this: Since Rupert Murdoch's DirecTV, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast are now equipping their subscribers with TiVo-type digital recorders, it is only a matter of time before a significant portion of television viewers will routinely be able to TiVo-out TV ads. Advertisers will need to find new ways to reach their audience's eyeballs, and video games present just such an opportunity. "Unlike television," Shari Redstone points out, "you know they're glued to their screen." To this end, Midway Games has signed licensing deals with Viacom's arch rival, Time Warner, to develop games based on Warner Bros. animation such as Happy Feet and Ant Bully.

Midway's development into an alternative advertising platform raises a possible conflict of interest for Redstone. The CBS part of Redstone's empire is the largest harvester of conventional television, radio, and billboard advertising in America. How will Redstone fit Midway into his twin empire? The speculation inside Viacom is that first he will take Midway private by buying up the rest of the shares (indeed, a wire story today reports that Redstone has increased his holdings to 89 percent), and then he will resell it to Viacom at a hefty price (his rapacious buying of the stock has driven up its price nearly fourfold, even though Midway itself continues to lose money). To keep the purchase from appearing to be incestuous self-dealing, Redstone will no doubt delegate the job of determining the purchase price to a committee of independent Viacom directors.

Surprisingly, the real concern among Viacom executives is not that Viacom may wind up paying an inflated price for a money-losing game company but rather that Redstone's dabbling with Midway may help fuel an intra-empire competition for advertising dollars. "Moonves can't wait to launch CBS cable channels that will compete with MTV," one Viacom insider suggested. "No one knows, Sumner least of all, how it will play out." Game-playing often has unanticipated consequences—even for moguls.

Edward Jay Epstein is the author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood. (To read the first chapter, click here.)

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2129643/

 

  November 12, 2005

Op-Ed Contributor

Our Faith in Science

By TENZIN GYATSO

Washington

SCIENCE has always fascinated me. As a child in Tibet, I was keenly curious about how things worked. When I got a toy I would play with it a bit, then take it apart to see how it was put together. As I became older, I applied the same scrutiny to a movie projector and an antique automobile.

At one point I became particularly intrigued by an old telescope, with which I would study the heavens. One night while looking at the moon I realized that there were shadows on its surface. I corralled my two main tutors to show them, because this was contrary to the ancient version of cosmology I had been taught, which held that the moon was a heavenly body that emitted its own light.

But through my telescope the moon was clearly just a barren rock, pocked with craters. If the author of that fourth-century treatise were writing today, I'm sure he would write the chapter on cosmology differently.

If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.

For many years now, on my own and through the Mind and Life Institute, which I helped found, I have had the opportunity to meet with scientists to discuss their work. World-class scientists have generously coached me in subatomic physics, cosmology, psychology, biology.

It is our discussions of neuroscience, however, that have proved particularly important. From these exchanges a vigorous research initiative has emerged, a collaboration between monks and neuroscientists, to explore how meditation might alter brain function.

The goal here is not to prove Buddhism right or wrong - or even to bring people to Buddhism - but rather to take these methods out of the traditional context, study their potential benefits, and share the findings with anyone who might find them helpful.

After all, if practices from my own tradition can be brought together with scientific methods, then we may be able to take another small step toward alleviating human suffering.

Already this collaboration has borne fruit. Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has published results from brain imaging studies of lamas meditating. He found that during meditation the regions of the brain thought to be related to happiness increase in activity. He also found that the longer a person has been a meditator, the greater the activity increase will be.

Other studies are under way. At Princeton University, Dr. Jonathan Cohen, a neuroscientist, is studying the effects of meditation on attention. At the University of California Medical School at San Francisco, Dr. Margaret Kemeny has been studying how meditation helps develop empathy in school teachers.

Whatever the results of this work, I am encouraged that it is taking place. You see, many people still consider science and religion to be in opposition. While I agree that certain religious concepts conflict with scientific facts and principles, I also feel that people from both worlds can have an intelligent discussion, one that has the power ultimately to generate a deeper understanding of challenges we face together in our interconnected world.

One of my first teachers of science was the German physicist Carl von Weizsäcker, who had been an apprentice to the quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg. Dr. Weizsäcker was kind enough to give me some formal tutorials on scientific topics. (I confess that while listening to him I would feel I could grasp the intricacies of the full argument, but when the sessions were over there was often not a great deal of his explanation left behind.)

What impressed me most deeply was how Dr. Weizsäcker worried about both the philosophical implications of quantum physics and the ethical consequences of science generally. He felt that science could benefit from exploring issues usually left to the humanities.

I believe that we must find a way to bring ethical considerations to bear upon the direction of scientific development, especially in the life sciences. By invoking fundamental ethical principles, I am not advocating a fusion of religious ethics and scientific inquiry.

Rather, I am speaking of what I call "secular ethics," which embrace the principles we share as human beings: compassion, tolerance, consideration of others, the responsible use of knowledge and power. These principles transcend the barriers between religious believers and non-believers; they belong not to one faith, but to all faiths.

Today, our knowledge of the human brain and body at the cellular and genetic level has reached a new level of sophistication. Advances in genetic manipulation, for example, mean scientists can create new genetic entities - like hybrid animal and plant species - whose long-term consequences are unknown.

Sometimes when scientists concentrate on their own narrow fields, their keen focus obscures the larger effect their work might have. In my conversations with scientists I try to remind them of the larger goal behind what they do in their daily work.

This is more important than ever. It is all too evident that our moral thinking simply has not been able to keep pace with the speed of scientific advancement. Yet the ramifications of this progress are such that it is no longer adequate to say that the choice of what to do with this knowledge should be left in the hands of individuals.

This is a point I intend to make when I speak at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience today in Washington. I will suggest that how science relates to wider humanity is no longer of academic interest alone. This question must assume a sense of urgency for all those who are concerned about the fate of human existence.

A deeper dialogue between neuroscience and society - indeed between all scientific fields and society - could help deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and our responsibilities for the natural world we share with other sentient beings.

Just as the world of business has been paying renewed attention to ethics, the world of science would benefit from more deeply considering the implications of its own work. Scientists should be more than merely technically adept; they should be mindful of their own motivation and the larger goal of what they do: the betterment of humanity.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, is the author of "The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality."

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-carter14nov14,0,3117329.story?track=mostemailedlink

This isn't the real America

By Jimmy Carter
JIMMY CARTER was the 39th president of the United States. His newest book is "Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis," published this month by Simon & Schuster.

November 14, 2005

IN RECENT YEARS, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.

These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.

Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.

At the same time, our political leaders have declared independence from the restraints of international organizations and have disavowed long-standing global agreements — including agreements on nuclear arms, control of biological weapons and the international system of justice.

Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.

Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.

These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained. Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of "You are either with us or against us!" has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.

Another disturbing realization is that, unlike during other times of national crisis, the burden of conflict is now concentrated exclusively on the few heroic men and women sent back repeatedly to fight in the quagmire of Iraq. The rest of our nation has not been asked to make any sacrifice, and every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties.

Instead of cherishing our role as the great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act.

Of even greater concern is that the U.S. has repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, and secretly through proxy regimes elsewhere with the so-called extraordinary rendition program. It is embarrassing to see the president and vice president insisting that the CIA should be free to perpetrate "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment" on people in U.S. custody.

Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right (and that of others) to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years. We have now become a prime culprit in global nuclear proliferation. America also has abandoned the prohibition of "first use" of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and is contemplating the previously condemned deployment of weapons in space.

Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups. The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation's global environmental policies.

Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).

I am extremely concerned by a fundamentalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.

As the world's only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights. Our country should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to people in need.

It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within our country to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have espoused during the last 230 years.

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-prager13nov13,0,1142056.story?track=mostemailedlink

FAITH FRONT

Five questions non-Muslims would like answered

By Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager's nationally syndicated radio show is heard daily in Los Angeles on KRLA-AM (870). He may be contacted through his website: www.dennisprager.com.

November 13, 2005

THE RIOTING IN France by primarily Muslim youths and the hotel bombings in Jordan are the latest events to prompt sincere questions that law-abiding Muslims need to answer for Islam's sake, as well as for the sake of worried non-Muslims.

Here are five of them:

(1) Why are you so quiet?

Since the first Israelis were targeted for death by Muslim terrorists blowing themselves up in the name of your religion and Palestinian nationalism, I have been praying to see Muslim demonstrations against these atrocities. Last week's protests in Jordan against the bombings, while welcome, were a rarity. What I have seen more often is mainstream Muslim spokesmen implicitly defending this terror on the grounds that Israel occupies Palestinian lands. We see torture and murder in the name of Allah, but we see no anti-torture and anti-murder demonstrations in the name of Allah.

There are a billion Muslims in the world. How is it possible that essentially none have demonstrated against evils perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam? This is true even of the millions of Muslims living in free Western societies. What are non-Muslims of goodwill supposed to conclude? When the Israeli government did not stop a Lebanese massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982, great crowds of Israeli Jews gathered to protest their country's moral failing. Why has there been no comparable public demonstration by Palestinians or other Muslims to morally condemn Palestinian or other Muslim-committed terror?

(2) Why are none of the Palestinian terrorists Christian?

If Israeli occupation is the reason for Muslim terror in Israel, why do no Christian Palestinians engage in terror? They are just as nationalistic and just as occupied as Muslim Palestinians.

(3) Why is only one of the 47 Muslim-majority countries a free country?

According to Freedom House, a Washington-based group that promotes democracy, of the world's 47 Muslim countries, only Mali is free. Sixty percent are not free, and 38% are partly free. Muslim-majority states account for a majority of the world's "not free" states. And of the 10 "worst of the worst," seven are Islamic states. Why is this?

(4) Why are so many atrocities committed and threatened by Muslims in the name of Islam?

Young girls in Indonesia were recently beheaded by Muslim murderers. Last year, Muslims — in the name of Islam — murdered hundreds of schoolchildren in Russia. While reciting Muslim prayers, Islamic terrorists take foreigners working to make Iraq free and slaughter them. Muslim daughters are murdered by their own families in the thousands in "honor killings." And the Muslim government in Iran has publicly called for the extermination of Israel.

(5) Why do countries governed by religious Muslims persecute other religions?

No church or synagogue is allowed in Saudi Arabia. The Taliban destroyed some of the greatest sculptures of the ancient world because they were Buddhist. Sudan's Islamic regime has murdered great numbers of Christians.

Instead of confronting these problems, too many of you deny them. Muslims call my radio show to tell me that even speaking of Muslim or Islamic terrorists is wrong. After all, they argue, Timothy McVeigh is never labeled a "Christian terrorist." As if McVeigh committed his terror as a churchgoing Christian and in the name of Christ, and as if there were Christian-based terror groups around the world.

As a member of the media for nearly 25 years, I have a long record of reaching out to Muslims. Muslim leaders have invited me to speak at major mosques. In addition, I have studied Arabic and Islam, have visited most Arab and many other Muslim countries and conducted interfaith dialogues with Muslims in the United Arab Emirates as well as in the U.S. Politically, I have supported creation of a Palestinian state and supported (mistakenly, I now believe) the Oslo accords.

Hundreds of millions of non-Muslims want honest answers to these questions, even if the only answer you offer is, "Yes, we have real problems in Islam." Such an acknowledgment is infinitely better — for you and for the world — than dismissing us as anti-Muslim.

We await your response.

 

November 10, 2005

Got 2 Extra Hours for Your E-Mail?

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

Correction Appended

EVEN in his sleep, Stever Robbins, an executive adviser, could not escape his e-mail. "I was buried under a pile of e-mail," Mr. Robbins, 41, said. "I can't remember ever having a nightmare. For my first nightmare to be about e-mail, that was pathetic."

In his waking life, at the consulting company where he worked, Mr. Robbins sometimes had to troll through 120 e-mail messages a day, many of them from his boss. "By the time I got done triaging the e-mail, I didn't have energy to do the rest of the work," Mr. Robbins said.

So Mr. Robbins sent his boss and colleagues a series of recommendations about changing their e-mail ways. When the suggestions were ignored, Mr. Robbins quit his job and went into business for himself, helping executives improve their job performance. High on his list of priorities was helping them wrestle down their e-mail.

"I quit my job because of the stress, and it had almost everything to do with e-mail," he said.

It was not so long ago that e-mail dashed around the world with abundant good cheer, prompting people to race to the keyboard with anticipation, punctuate their sign-offs with smiley faces or TTYL (talk to you later) and express general wonderment at how life was ever lived before the in-box was invented.

But now that it has become an essential form of communication — with traffic exploding from 5.1 billion messages a day in 2000 to 135.6 billion messages daily in 2005, according to the Radicati Group, a technology and market research firm in Palo Alto, Calif. — e-mail is causing as much distress as delight. And it's driving an increasing number of employers, bosses and workers to find ways to control or curtail the load.

"You have to be smart about how you use e-mail," said David Strom, editor in chief of Tom's Hardware Guide, a technology review Web site. "Otherwise you let it ruin your life."

There is no doubt that e-mail has become a fast, efficient and almost indispensable workplace tool. But it has also bred its own varieties of stress, from the panic that ensues after sending a compromising message to the wrong person to the unease that festers when a message goes unacknowledged.

The rampant office practice of "cc-ing" colleagues and bosses (carbon copying, to use the term of the ancients) has also heightened anxieties by forcing an ever-widening circle of people to respond immediately. Even vacation is no longer an automatic escape valve, not with the lure of laptops and Internet cafes.

The popularity of wireless connections and hand-held devices like BlackBerries has only deepened the e-mail deluge. And then there is the scourge of spam, which still manages to stay one step ahead of the most aggressive filters.

Perhaps e-mail's biggest source of stress, though, is the overstuffed in-box. Many employees, both bosses and subordinates, commonly receive 150 e-mail messages a day, consultants say, and some high-powered clients can be peppered with 50 an hour.

"You plow through e-mail and feel accomplished, and then you log on the next time and see the little number on the left side of the screen that tells you you have 200 e-mails in your box," said Anna Marta Sala, 40, who is president and owner of AMS Artists, which provides management and services for musicians.

And because e-mail is the quickest form of communication, it's often perceived as demanding a quick response. "My shoulders are up around my ears with the pressure to respond immediately," Ms. Sala said.

It's a complaint that Julie Morgenstern, a time management expert and best-selling author whose latest book is "Never Check E-Mail in the Morning," said she hears frequently.

"We are all addicted to it on some level," she said of e-mail. "There is a fear that if you don't check e-mail, you are missing something major. If you don't answer it right away, you look incompetent; you are not competing properly. Your client, your customer, your boss will move on to the next person. That is stressful."

Dealing with e-mail - filing it, cataloging it, prioritizing it - has added hours of extra work a week, much of it done by people in the late evening and early morning. In a recent survey by America Online and Opinion Research Corporation, 41 percent of the respondents said they checked their e-mail in the morning before going to work. More than 25 percent said they had never gone more than a few days without checking e-mail, with 60 percent saying they check it on vacation. Four percent looked at e-mail in the bathroom.

The onslaught has given rise to a cottage industry of consultants who advise companies - including Microsoft, which helped create e-mail - on how to juggle their e-mail messages and focus on being more proactive than reactive, a difficulty in today's e-mail-intense corporate world.

"The influx of e-mail never stops, particularly in a global economy," Ms. Mogenstern said. "You could always check e-mail. And people are still programmed to wait for things to calm down in order to do proactive stuff. 'When it quiets down, when I get through this flood, this batch, these to-dos, I will get proactive.' But there never is a quiet time."

"People have to be able to pull away from the reactiveness, close the door, get quiet. You have to develop those muscles again."

Michelle LaBrosse, the chief executive of Cheetah Learning, a management training company, was so determined to cut back her e-mail load - 100 on a slow day - that she told her 100 employees that she planned to collect $5 from anyone who sent her an unnecessary electronic message. The plan backfired: people stopped sending her e-mail altogether. Instead, she chose to talk to the worst offenders and asked them for a little restraint. Now she has honed a tough love approach to e-mail: Don't respond. "If they figure out that this is a way they can't communicate, they stop sending it," she said.

Her policy runs against the grain of a workplace culture of pervasive carbon copying, a practice that can produce its own strain of e-mail anxiety. Someone carbons a message to a boss and then to eight other people, which in the power-play world of the office forces everyone to respond to the message right away, no matter how unnecessary, lest they be seen as negligent. When memos and letters were copied on paper, there was less pressure to jump in unnecessarily because of the time and effort it took to type up a reply and get it to the right person.

Writing an e-mail message, for all its supposed informality, can also quietly ratchet up stress levels as people strive, in much less time than before, for the correct tone, the appropriate grammar and pitch-perfect brevity. People "don't take the time to think things through," Ms. Morgenstern said. "A lot of mistakes are made."

Jeff Jaenicke, a supervisor at a financial institution, said e-mail can breed a touch of paranoia. When he sends an e-mail, he said, he finds himself scouring the message for goofs, or to see if the tone is right. If someone doesn't respond quickly enough, he said, insecurity kicks in. He chalks up one lost friendship to a political joke he sent to a friend, a Republican, during the Republican National Convention last year. "I tend to make jokes when I talk," he said. "I think I'm funny. But you look at e-mail - I'm not a writer - and it's completely different."

Even more cause for work-force anxiety is the increasingly commonplace and entirely legal practice of corporate snooping. Companies are now routinely monitoring computer use and e-mail to protect proprietary information, like corporate strategies and research; to increase productivity; and to inoculate themselves against prosecutors. Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, has made a career out of collecting e-mail messages to root out wrongdoing at financial institutions.

A survey of 850 professionals this year by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute, a consulting firm, found that 55 percent of the companies said they "retain and review" their workers' e-mail; that a quarter of the companies had fired employees for violating e-mail policies; and that 20 percent had their e-mail subpoenaed by courts and regulators at some point. The list of companies and employees who have suffered from a click of the send button is long. One glaring example is Henry Blodget, the former Merrill Lynch stock analyst who was barred from Wall Street in 2003 after his e-mail messages revealed that he had been systematically inflating research on Internet companies to win investment banking deals. Large companies now readily use software to monitor, organize and archive e-mail. Financial institutions are legally required to save e-mail for at least six years.

Some companies preserve e-mail on tapes, CD's and DVD's. To protect themselves and their employees, most companies have adopted an e-mail protocol: no salty language, for example; no discriminatory, derogatory or defamatory remarks; no transfer of company information.

Still, e-mail indiscretion can be a tough habit to break. Earlier this year, Harry C. Stonecipher, the former chief executive of Boeing, was fired after it was discovered that he was having an extramarital affair with an employee. A saucy e-mail was his undoing. And last week, the reputation of Michael D. Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, took another hit when lighthearted e-mail messages he exchanged with a subordinate in the wake of Hurricane Katrina ("I am a fashion god," he wrote) were made public.

Janis Fisher Chan, who holds business writing seminars and who wrote a book this year titled "E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide," cautions clients about the risks of e-mail. "It's like taking a megaphone and shouting it out from the top of the building," she said. "E-mail lingers."

An article in Thursday Styles yesterday about the stress many e-mail users experience because of the flood of messages they receive misstated the volume of e-mail traffic measured by a research firm, the Radicati Group. From 2000 to 2005, the group says, messages have exploded to 135.6 billion daily from 5.1 billion. (The figures are not in the millions.)

 

The Ginsburg Fallacy

By Ruth Marcus
Tuesday, November 15, 2005; A21

To hear some Republicans tell it, letting Ruth Bader Ginsburg onto the Supreme Court was a tough pill to swallow. She was an ACLU-loving, bra-burning feminazi, but they supported her anyway, dutifully respecting the president's right to put his own stamp on the high court. Therefore, Democrats now owe President Bush the same deference when weighing his choice of Samuel Alito.

Ginsburg had "supported taxpayer funding for abortion, constitutional right to prostitution and polygamy," Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) said at the confirmation hearings for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. "And she opposed Mother's and Father's Days as discriminatory occasions. But nevertheless, Republicans . . . put that aside and supported her nomination because she had terrific credentials, and because President Clinton was entitled to nominate someone to the Supreme Court of his choosing."

Ginsburg, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), "said the age of consent for sexual activity for women should be 12. In her writings she said we need co-ed prisons because separate prisons are discriminatory against women. . . . Where I come from in South Carolina, that's about as far out of the mainstream as you can get, but it wasn't about whether or not . . . the Republicans agreed with her philosophy."

Strong argument -- if only it had happened that way. Either those peddling this conveniently muddled version of events don't remember it correctly or they are betting that others won't. Listeners beware: Those who don't remember history are condemned to be spun by it.

In fact, then-Judge Ginsburg was a consensus choice, pushed by Republicans and accepted by the president in large part because he didn't want to take on a big fight. Far from being a crazed radical, Ginsburg had staked out a centrist role on a closely divided appeals court. Don't take it from me -- take it from Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). In his autobiography, the Utah Republican describes how he suggested Ginsburg -- along with Clinton's second pick, Stephen G. Breyer -- to the president. "From my perspective, they were far better than the other likely candidates from a liberal Democratic administration," Hatch writes.

Was he conned by a polygamy-loving leftist? On the count of being associated with the American Civil Liberties Union, Ginsburg is guilty as charged: She helped shape the law on sex discrimination as head of the group's Women's Rights Project. Yet if her views were as far out as critics suggest, how did she manage to win five of the six cases she brought to the Supreme Court?

The nuttier positions were all mined from a 1974 report she co-authored: "The Legal Status of Women Under Federal Law." Did Ginsburg really think the age of consent should be lowered to 12? Conservative UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has concluded that Ginsburg probably "was the victim of a drafting error." As to the rest, it's fair to say that Ginsburg flirted with such views in the report; the document said, for example, that "prostitution, as a consensual act between adults, is arguably within the zone of privacy protected by recent constitutional decisions" and recommended repealing federal prostitution laws.

But even if Ginsburg took that position, it doesn't tell you all that much -- which is no doubt why she got just one question about the report during her confirmation hearings. She hadn't made getting rid of Mother's Day her life's work. And in any event, she had a much more recent body of work -- her dozen years as an appeals court judge -- that belied any notion that she was a raging lefty.

According to a Legal Times study of voting patterns on the appeals court in 1987, for instance, Ginsburg sided more often with Republican-appointed judges than with those chosen by Democrats. In cases that divided the court, she joined most often with then-Judge Kenneth W. Starr and Reagan appointee Laurence H. Silberman; in split cases, she agreed 85 percent of the time with then-Judge Robert H. Bork -- compared with just 38 percent of the time with her fellow Carter appointee, Patricia M. Wald.

By contrast, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein found that Alito, in the overwhelming majority of cases in which he dissented, took a more conservative stance than his colleagues. In short, if this were an SAT analogy, Ginsburg would not be to liberal as Alito is to conservative. Nor could her tenure on the high court be called "Ginsburg Gone Wild."

Not that conservatives aren't trying to make it look that way. On the night of the Alito nomination, for instance, Fox News's Sean Hannity pushed this argument. "You knew the very extreme positions of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but you gave the benefit of the doubt to President Clinton," he prompted Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

None of this, of course, answers the hard questions posed by the Alito nomination: Is his judicial philosophy within the ideological goalposts? Do those goalposts shift depending on the balance of the court, or the ideology of the departing justice? In grappling with those questions, though, no one should be taken in by the Ginsburg fallacy. It's what the justice herself might call a straw person.

Ivy-Covered Court

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 15, 2005; A21

William F. Buckley, a founder of contemporary conservatism, once said he "would rather live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone directory than in one governed by the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty." Since he said that, conservatism has gone from a fringe movement to the dominant ideology of American political life. It now controls two branches of the federal government and is about to add the third -- the Supreme Court. Alas for Buckley, Harvard still rules.

With the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor (Stanford and Stanford Law), the Supreme Court will have six justices, including the new chief, John Roberts, who have attended Harvard College or Harvard Law School. If Yale and Princeton are thrown in for good measure -- along with Harvard, the favorite schools of the old East Coast Protestant establishment -- then the figure goes to eight out of nine, assuming Samuel Alito Jr. is confirmed. John Paul Stevens, he of the University of Chicago and Northwestern School of Law, will be the last non-Ivy League holdout.

You might think that the lock the Ivy League has on the Supreme Court is long-standing. Not so. This is a rather new phenomenon and is a direct result of the movement in these schools to admit students on the basis of merit -- however that is defined. At one time merit was defined as the possession of certain leadership qualities that matched those of the old WASP elite and were largely designed, in the words of Harvard's early 20th-century president, A. Lawrence Lowell, to "prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews." Harvard lost that battle -- but won the war.

The Lowell quote is from Jerome Karabel's fascinating new book, "The Chosen." It details the efforts made by the Ivies -- in particular Harvard, Yale and Princeton -- to keep out Jews. The admissions department, with its demands for interviews and references, questions about your mother's maiden name (now we know why) and other attempts to filter out the undesirable Hebrews, was originally introduced to avoid the sort of school Yale was becoming in 1929 when its admissions chairman, Robert Corwin, likened the list of newly admitted students to "a recent roll call at the Wailing Wall." Yalies always could frame a quote.

The paradox is that the dismantling of the old-boy network and the introduction of merit has produced a greater concentration of power in the Ivy League. This is particularly the case in law, where Ivies are disproportionally represented on the elite law firms, law school faculties and, most important, the Supreme Court.

Karabel, whose book contains 116 pages of notes, astoundingly has data in his computer that he did not include in the book. Among those he fetched out for me is the fact that of the 53 justices who served on the Supreme Court in the 20th century, only 11 went to Harvard Law (the current court already has five), four went to Yale (two on the current court) and four to Columbia (one at the moment). The rest went all over the place -- including to no law school at all. For instance, Robert Jackson -- U.S. attorney general, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and an FDR appointee to the Supreme Court -- went to no college and attended the Albany School of Law. He will, you can be assured, be the last to have done so.

With the recent nomination of Alito, much was made of the fact that if he is confirmed, Roman Catholics will make up a majority of the court. What this means no one can quite say, since Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy are both Catholics but hardly see eye to eye on constitutional matters. The same could be said about the way the Ivies, particularly Harvard, dominate the court. What does it mean?

Well, at a minimum, it means that the court's membership is not as variegated as it once was. Sure, Clarence Thomas (Yale) and Scalia (Harvard) hardly come from the old WASP establishment, but in some immeasurable sense they were formed or affected by Ivy League institutions. Gone, for one thing, are politicians like Earl Warren (Berkeley) or civil rights lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall (Howard), whose life experiences informed their decisions.

What we now have is an intellectual elite, smart as hell, no doubt, but a bit short on political or even executive experience. It governs -- once from the left, soon from the right but more and more from the same place: the banks of the Charles.

Review of 'Plan B' Pill Is Faulted
Report Calls FDA Actions 'Unusual'

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 15, 2005; A01

Senior Food and Drug Administration officials were told that the application to sell the "morning-after pill" without prescription was going to be rejected before the staff completed its scientific review and months before the decision was made public, government investigators reported yesterday.

A report by the independent Government Accountability Office also said senior FDA officials, including then-Commissioner Mark B. McClellan, were actively involved in the politically sensitive decision -- one of four aspects of the agency's actions that the investigators called "unusual."

The GAO report, requested by Congress more than 16 months ago, said the agency did not follow its normal procedures in making the scientific assessment of the Plan B proposal and in having a top official sign off on the eventual decision after lower-ranking scientists refused.

Critics of the FDA's handling of the issue said the report confirmed their view that the agency had allowed politics to trump science. The application was strongly opposed by some social and religious conservatives, including 49 members of Congress who wrote a letter to President Bush asking that the application be rejected.

The FDA, in a statement responding to the report, said: "We question the integrity of the investigative process that results in such partial conclusions by the GAO. The report mischaracterizes facts and does not appear to take into consideration the input provided by the FDA."

But Susan F. Wood, a former FDA assistant commissioner for women's health who left her job to protest the agency's actions, said: "This report is a sad reminder of why I felt compelled to resign. Instead of improving and advancing women's health, the FDA leadership is ignoring its process and not relying on science and medical evidence."

The GAO report said then-Commissioner McClellan raised numerous objections to the proposal for over-the-counter sales of Plan B in a staff meeting three months before it was rejected.

The report also said that McClellan, who left the FDA two months before the rejection was announced to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, did not respond to written questions from the GAO except to say that he left before the decision was made and that his actions had been "consistent with his usual practices."

In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) said the GAO was unable to fully assess McClellan's role because he would not speak with investigators and because the agency provided no documents reflecting his communications with other officials. The FDA told the investigators that e-mails to and from McClellan had been deleted and that written memos were routinely destroyed.

Raising the possibility that this practice was a violation of federal record-keeping law, the congressmen wrote that "as the Plan B decision makes clear, retaining the documents of the agency head is essential for the transparent operation of government."

Plan B, manufactured by Barr Laboratories, is an emergency contraceptive that can prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex. The drug was approved by the FDA in 1999 as a prescription medication, but advocates say the time needed to get a doctor's appointment and prescription often makes emergency contraception far less effective.

Critics of the Plan B decision have charged that the decision was made in the White House, which was under pressure from conservative activists who believe over-the-counter availability of Plan B would promote teenage promiscuity. Some also believe Plan B causes abortions, although the FDA considers it to be a contraceptive.

GAO investigator Marcia Crosse said the GAO did not look into White House involvement. The investigation "specifically did not look at interactions outside of the FDA -- with the White House or HHS," she said. "That is not part of what we agreed to review."

The GAO report also found significant discrepancies in what lower- and higher-ranking FDA officials recalled about the process.

The report said, for instance, that the leaders of some FDA science divisions and offices recalled that top officials, including Steven Galson and Deputy Commissioner for Operations Janet Woodcock, told them months before the rejection that the application would not be approved. Woodcock and Galson, then acting director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, recalled that they only discussed the possibility of a rejection and what might be missing from the application. It was Galson who signed the Plan B rejection in May 2004 after the lower-ranking officials who would normally have signed off refused.

In a formal response to the report, Woodcock said the agency followed normal procedures for a controversial drug application.

The report led some lawmakers, including Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-N.Y.), to call for hearings. "This report is the 'smoking gun' which clearly demonstrates that the FDA based its decision on politics, and not science," she said.

But Wendy Wright, executive vice president of Concerned Women for America, said the GAO report showed that the FDA had made the correct decision. "Making Plan B over the counter would needlessly expose adolescents to risks and reduce access to health care to those in need of it," she said.

A subsequent application to make Plan B available over the counter only to women older than 17 was also indefinitely postponed by the FDA in August. At the time, then-Commissioner Lester M. Crawford said it was unclear whether the agency had the legal authority to make a drug available without prescription only to older women.

Crawford was reported earlier to have declined to speak to the GAO investigators. The GAO report said that although he did not respond before leaving his job in September, his attorney subsequently sent a written statement saying that Crawford played no role in the first Plan B review.

 

The Google Story: An Excerpt
Chapter 26: Googling Your Genes

Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, November 14, 2005; 6:00 AM

Not since Gutenberg invented the modern printing press more than 500 years ago, making books and scientific tomes affordable and widely available to the masses, has any new invention empowered individuals or transformed access to information as profoundly as Google. I first became aware of this while covering Google as a beat reporter for The Washington Post. What galvanized my deep interest in the company was its unconventional initial public offering in August 2004 when the firm thumbed its nose at Wall Street by doing the first and only multi-billion dollar IPO using computers, rather than Wall Street bankers, to allocate its hot shares of stock.

A few months later, in the fall of 2004, I decided to write the first biography of Google, tracing its short history from the time founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met at Stanford in 1995 until the present. In my view, this is the hottest business, media and technology success of our time, with a stock market value of $110 billion, more than the combined value of Disney, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com, Ford and General Motors.

The Google Story goes on sale in the United States on Tuesday, Nov. 15, and the extraordinary reach of the search engine has made the book of global interest. The book is also being published in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, China, Taiwan, Russia, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Czech Republic, Holland, South Africa, Turkey, New Zealand and Indonesia.

-- David A. Vise

Chapter 26 -- Googling Your Genes

Sergey Brin and Larry Page have ambitious long-term plans for Google's expansion into the fields of biology and genetics through the fusion of science, medicine, and technology. Their goal -- through Google, its charitable foundation, and an evolving entity called Google.org -- is to empower millions of individuals and scientists with information that will lead to healthier and smarter living through the prevention and cure of a wide range of diseases. Some of this work, done in partnership with others, is already under way, making use of Google's array of small teams of gifted employees and its unwavering emphasis on innovation, unmatched search capacity, and vast computational resources.

"Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world," Brin says. "We can store an incredible amount of data very cheaply."

He and Larry want to make it easier for users to find the right information faster, and the company is pouring the bulk of its resources into enhancing the breadth and quality of search. This involves wholly different methods of searching that may eventually make today's Google seem primitive. As these evolve, the search mechanisms of the future will produce better answers to queries, just as Google is superior to the early search engines that preceded it.

"The ultimate search engine," says Page, "would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want."

The critical path inside the Googleplex includes experimentation with artificial intelligence techniques and new methods of language translation. Brin and Page are hopeful that these efforts will eventually make it possible for people to have access to better information and knowledge without the limitations and barriers imposed by differences in language, location, Internet access, and the availability of electrical power.

To assist in this effort, Larry and Sergey have recruited a diverse group of people to work at the Googleplex, including a collection of former CEOs, hundreds of Ph.D.'s, U.S. and world puzzle champions, former Olympians, an award-winning independent filmmaker, and a coterie of university professors.

Brin and Page foresee Google users having universal access to vast repositories of fresh information, some of it public and some private, which is not currently available on the Internet. This encompasses motion pictures, television, and radio programs; still images and text; phone calls and other voice communications; educational materials; and data from space. The pair is also involved in the hunt for clean, renewable energy sources to power Google and broaden economic growth. "These guys have a big, compelling vision for what the company is going to do," said Stanford president John Hennessy. "They think very hard about the long term."

One of the most exciting Google projects involves biological and genetic research that could foster important medical and scientific breakthroughs. Through this effort, Google may help accelerate the era of personalized medicine, in which understanding an individual's precise genetic makeup can contribute to the ability of physicians and counselors to tailor health care treatment, rather than dispensing medications or recommending treatments based on statistics or averages. New insights, new medicines, and the use or avoidance of certain foods and pharmaceuticals for people with specific genetic traits are among the possible outcomes.

"Just think of the application of Google to genomics," said Hennessy. "There are large databases, lots of information, and the need for search." With the addition of specialized data, he said, Google's index could aid in new discoveries in genetics. "You want to be able to use a search system that is content-dependent, with the genome and structure of DNA already built in. It is one of many potential areas where you can see this so-called 'intelligent search' making a big difference. We are going to see more and more of it."

Dr. Alan E. Guttmacher, deputy director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, said Google's involvement in genetics is particularly meaningful because of its capacity to search and find specific genes and genetic abnormalities that cause diseases. He also said that its massive computing power can be used to analyze vast quantities of data with billions of parts-quantities that scientists in laboratories do not have the capacity to process. The old model of a scientist working in a lab, he said, is being replaced by the new paradigm of a researcher working at a computer, connected to databases through the Internet, and doing simulations in cyberspace. "Until recently, the challenge has been gathering data," Guttmacher said. "Now, the bigger challenge is organizing and assessing it. Google-like approaches are the key to doing that. It completely accelerates and changes the way science is done. We are beginning to have incredible tools to understand the biology of human diseases in ways we never have before, and to come up with novel ways to prevent and treat them."

--

Over dinner and plenty of wine in February 2005, Sergey Brin discussed the prospects for genetics and Google with the maverick biologist Dr. Craig Venter. Venter, who had decoded the human genome, was in the midst of gathering oceanic samples from around the world and sending them back to the U.S. for analysis of nature's DNA. Despite millions of dollars in funding and thousands of hours of computing time from the federal Department of Energy, Venter needed more help to unlock the molecular myster- ies of life. It seemed to him that Google's mathematicians, scientists, technologists, and computing power had the potential to vault his research forward. He pressed Brin hard to get Google involved.

Also at the table was Ryan Phelan, chief executive officer of DNA Direct, one of the foremost Internet companies providing individuals with genetic testing and counseling. DNA Direct gets nearly all of its patients through ads it buys on Google. The ads appear to the right of the free search results when users type in "blood clotting," "breast cancer," "cystic fibrosis" or certain other diseases. Brin, Venter, and Phelan were among those who had been invited to a dinner of the wealthy and wise at Cibo, a trendy Italian bistro in Monterey, California. Brin had brought along his friend Anne Wojcicki, a health care investor whose sister is a senior executive at Google. Seated nearby was early Google investor Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.

"What [Venter] was talking about with Sergey was, 'How can you use Google to really help access everything at the genetic level?' " Phelan recalled. "What Craig was after was pure raw science. What I was hearing was, 'What if Google was the repository for the distribution of this information?' Sergey is so intellectually engaging. He was trying to pull out from Craig how you could use Google and how it could make a difference."

Google is not averse to contributing to the scientific efforts of others. It teamed up with Stanford several years ago to provide computing power for a scientific project that focused on unfolding proteins. The process of protein folding is one of the keys to understanding biology, yet very little is known about how it works. It is believed by some that when proteins fold incorrectly, it can lead to serious diseases, ranging from Alzheimer's to Parkinson's to many types of cancer. The Stanford project utilized idle computer time from the PCs of individual volunteers and organizations like Google that agreed to apply excess computational power to the gargantuan effort to simulate the protein-folding process in 3-D. Google also made it easy for individuals who downloaded its search toolbar to sign up for the Stanford program, so that while they were away or asleep their computers could be utilized in the cause of science. The extra computing power accelerated the simulation and analysis of protein folding. "Modeling even the simplest of proteins can be computationally very, very challenging," Brin said.

Not long after the dinner in California, Brin and Page teamed up with Venter. The biologist gained access to Google's immense computing power and personnel. He said this would accelerate analysis of molecular data and significantly increase the likelihood of advances in both applied health care and basic scientific research.

"We need to use the largest computers in the world," Venter said. "Larry and Sergey have been excited about our work and about giving us access to their computers and their algorithm guys and scientists to improve the process of analyzing data. It shows the broadness of their thinking. Genetic information is going to be the leading edge of information that is going to change the world. Working with Google, we are trying to generate a gene catalogue to characterize all the genes on the planet and understand their evolutionary development. Geneticists have wanted to do this for generations."

Over time, Venter said, Google will build up a genetic database, analyze it, and find meaningful correlations for individuals and populations. It is utilizing the 30,000 genes discovered by Venter and scientists from the National Institutes of Health when they were racing to beat one another to map the human genome. On June 26, 2000, federal researchers and those from the private sector came together at the White House to announce that their race to map the human genome had ended in a tie. Shortly thereafter, Venter and scientists from NIH made the genetic information they had gathered publicly available on the Internet, a stark contrast to the days when scientists hoarded data. Google went on to post a double helix doodle on its Web site to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA, the material inside cells that carries genetic information.

Google's data-mining techniques appear well-suited to the formidable challenges posed by analyzing the genetic sequence. It has begun work on this project, but has not been required to disclose any information about it publicly since the work has no impact on its current revenue and profits.

Brin, who has long had a serious interest in molecular biology, is deeply engaged by the role that Google can play in enhancing "the ability for cellular biologists and other kinds of medical researchers to be able to start to use data clusters like we have at Google, and certainly like the ones we're going to have in a decade or two decades' time, and be able to do completely new things that we weren't able to dream of before." The implications could be significant for individuals. While genetics does not necessarily provide yes-or-no answers to various medical and other questions, it does offer probabilities and statistics that can guide decisionmaking.

"People will be able to log on to a Google site using search capacities and have the ability to understand things about themselves as they change in real time," Venter said. "What does it mean to have this variation in genes? What else is known? And instead of having a few elitist scientists doing this and dictating to the world what it means, with Google it would be creating several million scientists.

"Google has empowered individuals to do searches and get information and have things in seconds at their fingertips," he went on. "Where is that more important than understanding our own biology and its connection to disease and behavior? With Google, you will be able to get an understanding of your own genes. Google has the capacity to do all of this, and it is one of the discussions I have had with Larry and Sergey. They are the right people to undertake this." Stewart Brand, a technologist and futurist who was also at the dinner where Brin and Venter discussed Google and genetics, described the alliance of these mavericks as "a match made in heaven."

Venter may have discussed matters with Brin first, but he bonded with Larry Page too. In April of 2005, Page invited Venter to join him as a member of the board of directors of a foundation encouraging a private space race. The X Prize Foundation is fashioned after the Orteig Prize won by Charles Lindbergh in 1927 for his New York-to-Paris flight. Its stated mission is to promote competitions to foster breakthroughs in space travel and related technologies. The foundation shares something in common with Google: innovation through small, highly motivated groups of bright people who are given access to immense resources.

A few weeks after Google went public in the summer of 2004, Mojave Aerospace Ventures Team, led by Burt Rutan and funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, flew the world's first private spacecraft to the edge of space and won the $10 million Ansari X Prize, cementing the foundation's model for innovation through competition. Upon joining the board in January 2005, Page said he was "excited to be working with the foundation to foster additional breakthroughs." Venter said he was honored and pleased when Page asked him to join the distinguished group.

"They're trying to foster competition to get people into space," Page explained. "I have a good friend who really wants to go to Mars, and so he decided he should build a rocket company. He has been pretty successful about it. I just sent him an email, and I asked him for some stats. 'So what is the theoretical cost of getting a pound of something into space?' It's basically the fuel that powers the rocket into orbit. The Space Shuttle costs about $10,000 to $20,000 per pound that it carries up. What do you think the theoretical lower limit is? It's actually about $10 to $20 per pound to move something into orbit. For you or your body, that's probably the cost of an expensive airplane ticket, right? Do you think someday we might figure out how to get close to that? I think we could. That would change things a lot and might get us to Mars."

Back on earth, Page also foresees greater involvement for himself and Google in causes that work to relieve hunger and poverty through entrepreneurship, self-reliance, and philanthropy. He has taken a particular interest in programs that provide small bank loans to people in developing nations. "Mohammed Yunus in Bangladesh has given out over $2 billion now, $160 at a time, to poor people and been very successful," he said. "The money gets returned and it is a functioning business." He added, "I believe eliminating poverty is something we could do. Bono is actually more eloquent than I am on this, so I'll read you a quote from him: 'Africa is not a cause. It is an emergency.'"

--

Among the other innovations that Sergey Brin and Larry Page would like to see Google and other firms achieve in the future is the production of affordable, clean-burning fuel that does not harm the environment. The source for this power is likely to be the sun. This area of research is important to Page, who for years has focused on the enormous quantities of electricity needed to power Google's network of hundreds of thousands of computers.

While it is possible that some of Venter's biological research may lead to discovery of alternative fuels, Brin, Larry Page, and his brother, Carl Page Jr., are investors in Nanosolar, Inc., a privately held California company that is developing solar cells for commercial, residential, and utility use. Nanosolar specializes in "thinfilm solar cells"; the advantage of these cells is that they can be printed on plastic sheets that can be integrated into roofs, walls, and other surfaces transparently, eliminating the typical solar cell eyesore. The company has a $10.5 million grant from the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which provided funding for the creation of the Internet.

Given that one of Google's potential limitations on growth is the availability and cost of electricity, the involvement of Brin and Page in Nanosolar and in other energy-related experiments and investments is a logical extension of their future plans for Google and Google.org. The pair also plan to fund wireless Web access in various locations around the world. CEO Eric Schmidt sees his company's reach ultimately extending to every place on Earth. "When you look at the Amazon and you say, 'Why aren't there any Internet users?' it's because there is no power," he explains. "And people are working on this. So we'll get them all, even the people in the trees. It's just a matter of getting them power and some kind of a device."

--

While Brin, Page, and Google search for new sources of energy, the U.S. Department of Energy is investing heavily in genetics and biotechnology. The DOE is backing Craig Venter and related scientific research at an $80 million annual rate to support its own foray into genomics. The department's career employees are keenly aware of the role Google may play in contributing to solutions to some of the earth's biggest and most complex challenges.

Ari Patrinos, the point man for these DOE efforts, is a big fan and heavy user of Google. He turns to it an estimated 50 to 100 times daily, and fully appreciates its potential as a force and a partner in the search for answers to the world's dearth of clean, renewable sources of power. Both DOE and Google, each in its own way, are supporting biological research by Venter and others aimed at solving serious long-term problems.

"Google is getting into the biology business as they have gotten into other fields. I don't think the government has tried to do anything comparable to Google," Patrinos said. "We have been stressing the importance of advanced scientific computing research and information research that Google is helping to enable. It was an alien concept for most biologists until recently. The genome revolution has exploded in the production of vast amounts of data we need to analyze, process, and use. Search engines are extremely important for the biological data we have collected. It is the only way we will be able to exploit this treasure trove. The search engines have become sophisticated enough to identify functional elements of individual genes and proteins. These are not blind searches. There are pieces of this software that are almost like artificial intelligence."

Patrinos happens to live in Rockville, Maryland, next to Dr. Francis Collins, the director of NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute. He also maintains a close working relationship with Venter, and is trusted by all of the various parties. If NIH's primary focus is human health, the emphasis for Patrinos is analyzing the DNA of animals and plants to find fresh ways for bioremediation, the cleaning up of toxic sites, and the development of clean-burning fuels. It was Patrinos, in his basement over beer and pizza, who negotiated the compromise in 2000 that led to the joint announcement at the White House about the mapping of the human genome. Born in Athens, Greece, he earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and the astronomical sciences at Northwestern University and holds the formal title of director of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research at the DOE. He is passionate about the fusing of technology and biological research to provide new age answers through Google.

Patrinos says Google has the capacity to provide insights into the function of genes; given the enormous complexity, it is essential to have sufficient computing power to model all of the different operations within the cell. "The wizardry of search engines is that they can race through databases and show relationships and bring to light answers. This is information that can be used by enterprising technology firms or this growing field of industrial and environmental biotechnology. Google is working on their version of it."

And then there are the personal experiences that have made Patrinos a major Google enthusiast. "I have found colleagues I hadn't seen in 40 years through Google. One guy is in Nigeria, one guy is in France and another guy is in Australia. I wouldn't have found them any other way."

Google has other friends in Washington too, and it will need them as it grows larger and branches out. Power and size breed mistrust, so inevitably there are calls from competitors and others for regulation and restrictions. Google has already encountered hostile opposition from some who fear it is trampling on their rights. After publishers raised legal objections, it chose to put a temporary moratorium on its scanning of copyrighted library books. Moreover, given the company's emphasis on gathering information it saves about millions of searchers, as well as its forays into genetics and biology, these far-flung interests will raise concerns about ethics and privacy that have strong political overtones. Sharon Terry, president of the Washington-based Genetic Alliance, is someone Google is likely to have on its side as it does battle in the political trenches.

Terry's journey into genetics began as a parent, when in 1994 her two children were diagnosed with a rare condition that leads to premature aging. She was seeking both authoritative information and other parents who were in the same situation. When Google came online, she used it to mine newsgroups and online bulletin boards. "It exploded how we could connect with other people," she said, adding that her kids are now 16 and 17 years old.

Terry, who holds an advanced degree in religious studies but has no training as a scientist, relies on Google daily to stay abreast of news and information about the disease and related genetic research. Has a group in Hungary posted a new paper on the disease? If so, she finds it and reads it immediately, thanks to Google. "I can get specialized information quickly by using Google," Terry says. "It allows the layperson to come up to speed on specific topics and get into the discussion in ways that I wouldn't otherwise be able to."

In her professional life leading the Genetic Alliance, Terry's goal is to make it the leading clearinghouse for people seeking information about genetics. She is deliberately nonpolitical, positioning the organization in a way that enables her to converse with researchers, policymakers, and private-sector pharmaceutical firms. The Alliance receives frequent questions from individuals looking for information, and Terry and her staff use Google and Google Scholar throughout the workday to help find answers. She remembers how much harder it was a decade ago, when search engines lacked Google's comprehensiveness and ability to rank search results by relevance.

"Nothing else meets the depth of Google to hone in on exactly the right information," Terry said. "Our work is connecting the dots, and Google connects the dots wonderfully. We may meet someone who says 'I have a concern about a certain condition,' and often we do a Google search first. I remember ten years ago when sites didn't have good indexes, and you had to wade through crap to get to the nut you needed. We have grown our organization and ability to do what we need to do exponentially, in a way that is attributable to the Internet and good search engines like Google. I can't imagine Google not existing."

Brin and Page want to make it even easier for Terry to find the information she needs. Their ambitions and at times seemingly crazy ideas go far beyond Google alone. People around the world may see Google and the Internet as one these days, but Brin and Page foresee the potential for human beings and the search engine to grow ever closer.

"Why not improve the brain?" Brin asked. "You would want a lot of compute power. Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain. We'll have to develop stylish versions, but then you'd have all of the world's knowledge immediately available, which is pretty exciting."

From the book: THE GOOGLE STORY by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed

politics
Tough Love
Why the GOP wants us to be harder on the Iraqis.
By John Dickerson
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 7:01 PM ET

President Bush rarely misses a chance to champion "the commitment and sacrifice that the people are making" in Iraq. Maimed by Saddam, they hobble on crutches to vote. Suicide bombers blow up police recruits and young men continue to sign up. When Iraqi politicians have bickered and disagreed, Bush has forgiven their uncertain progress. Even America's founders were sluggish, he has reminded us.

The narrative of the noble Iraqi has been necessary to remind Americans of the moral cause for which soldiers continue to die. But that ideal may be fading, if today's Senate votes mean anything. This afternoon, the Senate voted to 79-19 to demand progress reports from the White House and pressure Iraqis to speed up their process of taking over the security of their own country. The Senate had originally considered a measure that would have set a schedule for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, but that failed after Republican lawmakers argued a timetable amounted to cutting and running. Sen. John Warner, who authored the Senate resolution, told the New York Times today that the underlying message to Iraqis was, "[W]e really mean business, Iraqis, get on with it." The time for paying tribute to Iraqis' George Washington-like qualities is over. The subtext of the Senate action: Iraqis must work harder and take control of their country, so that American troops can leave.

The White House has seen this coming for months. As Americans become less sure that fighting in Iraq makes them safer, they're less willing to sacrifice U.S. soldiers for the Iraqi people. Freedom and democracy are nice, but let the Iraqis figure them out on their own time. "It's hard to get [Americans] to care about what's happening in [Iraqis'] lives," said a senior administration official recently. That remark is typical of a complaint I've heard from inside the administration for months.

Perhaps Americans should embrace their dwindling affection for the Iraqi people. In fact, saving face as the United States draws down troops requires it. We must not say that U.S. soldiers are leaving because the situation has become untenable or because the politics of the 2006 elections demand pictures of troops coming home for good. Rather we must insist that U.S. soldiers will leave as an act of tough love. By setting the timeline, the United States will shock Iraqis into embracing their new freedom in earnest.

Republican senators are impatient with what's happening in Iraq. With today's provision, they were careful not to blame the White House or the American fighting men and women. They were less nervous about blaming the Iraqis.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

explainer
All the Presidents' Papers
How do presidential libraries decide which records to release?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 6:51 PM ET

In a memo from 1985 that was released on Monday, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito declared that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." That memo was part of a haul of almost 200 pages of records from the Ronald Reagan and George Bush presidential libraries. How did the archivists at the presidential libraries decide which documents to release?

They asked the presidents (and their appointed representatives). First, researchers submitted written requests for information about Alito. The archivists searched through their collections for relevant material; any documents they turned up had to be sent out for review before they could be made public. According to George W. Bush's protocol for presidential record-keeping, both the current and former president must sign off for documents to be released. Either one could have claimed executive privilege and forced the archivists to withhold the pages. (In Reagan's case, a family-appointed representative could have claimed executive privilege on his behalf.)

Until 1978, the rules for releasing records varied from president to president. Former chief executives were expected to donate their papers to the National Archives, but they had no obligation to do so. (In practice, only Nixon refused.) Since gifts to the archives aren't covered by the Freedom of Information Act, the rules for releasing records from these collections were negotiated in the terms of the donation. In most cases, former presidents chose to make everything public except documents that would be exempt from FOIA requests anyway.

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 made White House papers public property. Each president's papers now go to the National Archives at the end of his term. They remain sealed for up to five years while librarians sort them out. Under the terms of the act, former presidents can choose to seal documents relating to security, personal matters, trade secrets, federal appointments, or confidential communications for another seven years. After this initial 12-year period, archivists handle all pages in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act, which has its own similar special exemptions.

So, what happens when you ask a presidential library for documents? It's possible that they've already been released—about a quarter of the 50 million pages at the Reagan library are already open to the public. But if you want pages that haven't been "processed," you'll need to submit a FOIA request. Archivists scour the collection for relevant pages, then conduct three separate reviews to see if they might be covered by a special exemption. Questionable pages are sent to the White House and to the former president or his representative for review. For high-profile documents—like those relating to a Supreme Court nominee—the archivists send every page to the White House.

The former and incumbent presidents get 90 days to look over the documents, but the White House can ask for unlimited extensions (during which time the library must keep the records sealed). If you don't like how your document request was handled, you can either file an administrative appeal with the National Archives, or you can try to argue your case before a judge.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Michael Duggan of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130445/

press box
The New Power Generation
How you'll know when the boomers have lost control of the media.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 6:09 PM ET

Glenn Garvin recalls his first hint that the baby boomers were about to take over the media. While lounging at home on a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1977, he received a call from his co-worker Terry Jackson, a 25-year-old news editor at the Austin American-Statesman.

Because Sundays are days of minimal adult supervision at most papers, Jackson had been put in charge of picking A-1 stories for the Monday edition and laying them out. Austin had endured an unusually hot and dry spring, and Jackson had just the hed for his drought story. He called fellow boomer Garvin at home to confirm the lyrics to the Temptations' 1967 hit, "I Wish It Would Rain."

When Jackson arrived for work the next day, at least two big bosses chewed him out for placing on Page One the hed "Sunshine, Blue Skies, Please Go Away." No American-Statesman reader would understand the headline, they said, and they damned him for polluting the newspaper with rock 'n' roll lyrics.

"This was Austin, the home of UT and the youngest, hippest city in Texas," says Garvin. "If it had happened in Dallas or Houston, I'm sure Jackson would have been shipped straight to death row in Huntsville."

Had they sent Jackson to Huntsville, the boomers would have soon freed him. That generation, born between 1946 and 1964, was taking positions of authority and control throughout the media, injecting their ethos into newspapers, magazines, television, book publishing, and advertising. By 1979, you were as likely to hear the tune "Good Vibrations" in a Sunkist TV commercial as on the radio.

By sheer force of numbers, boomers quickly toppled the martini-drinking, WW II generation and substituted their cultural references. In recent years they've repelled the next generations—let's call them the post-boomers for lack of a satisfying rubric that encompasses Gens X, Y, and Z—from taking cultural control.

That's not to say boomers have locked out the post-boomer sensibility. Quite to the contrary—they've co-opted post-boomer references to maintain their position. For instance, Madison Avenue boomers happily mashed up the generations that came before and after them with that Lee Iacocca-Snoop Dogg Chrysler commercial, which alerted everybody in the nation to izzle-speak. But the cultural frame of reference—the odd couple of the duffer meets the ghetto-slangster—remains distinctly boomer.

Demographics should dictate how long boomer cultural hegemony will hold on. While still the largest single generation, the boomers are steadily dying off—or at least going to pasture. They peaked as a percentage of the population in 1980 at 35 percent and currently stand at about 27 percent, or 77 million self-absorbed individuals. But sooner or later, the post-boomers will give them the necessary nudge, push, and shove to sweep their rotting culture from the scene, and references to Beatles tracks will become as irrelevant as references to Mills Brothers songs.

But what post-boomer reference in a mass-media headline or TV commercial will signal the cultural coup? I polled a panel of post-boomers for markers, ruling out all Seinfield, Saturday Night Live, and R.E.M. references as too cross-generational. I sought references outside enough to exclude the majority of boomers, but inside enough to elicit recognition from post-boomers. I awarded extra points to slightly transgressive suggestions on the theory that the ruder the headline, the more obvious that a new generation had taken charge.

The provisional findings of my under-40 panel:

The Simpsons should produce a heap of references in headlines, movies, music, and ads, predicts Chris Suellentrop. While cross-generational, the show's most devoted adherents are post-boomers. Suellentrop suggest such Simpsonia as the words "cromulent" and "embiggen" and variations on the phrase, "I for one welcome our new overlords."

Daniel Radosh finds the mother lode in his generation's favorite movies, particularly The Breakfast Club. "If we were running things the headline, 'Just Answer the Question, Blair,' would appear over every third London dispatch," he writes. "Come to think of it, most high school movies have headline-ready quotes that would be instantly familiar to post-boomers, from Heathers to Dazed and Confused to Napoleon Dynamite." (Ditto Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, Risky Business, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and War Games.) Radosh finds evidence of post-boomer influence in a Scarface reference gleaned from a recent video game review headline: "Say Halo 2 My Little Friend."

Seth Stevenson points to two post-boomer developments that boomers don't get and don't particularly care to get—namely video games and rap music—as a rich source of future heds. Such references will be a slap at all boomers, who will grab their walkers and storm out en masse for a Don McLean concert. Stevenson was too lazy to provide any examples, though, but the industrious Jeremy Derfner sees a news story on the horizon about boomers who won't slow down despite their advanced age headlined "By the Power of Grayskull." Josh Levin offers the "cheat code" from popular Nintendo game Contra, "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start," as the starting place for a million heds, movie titles, and commercial gag lines. Think, also, of the tunes from "Tetris" or dialogue from "Grand Theft Auto."

Old-school rap (Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC) and gangsta rap (N.W.A., everybody on Death Row records except Snoop) have aged sufficiently so that lyrics from these artists wouldn't appear out of place in a 2006 headline. Other exploitable subgenres: If "Lust for Life," Iggy Pop's heroin song, can be used to sell Carnival Cruise Lines, what's to keep the codeine cough-syrup raps by the late DJ Screw from selling Mrs. Butterworth's? Because many white post-boomers consider the Beastie Boys the Beatles of their generation, which daily newspaper will be the first to title a story about a Hollywood star's entourage "Posse in Effect"? Amanda Watson-Boles wonders how long it will take Kraft Foods to create an ad campaign based on the Beasties' song "She's Crafty." She writes, "I mean my God, Kraft just ruined one of my favorite anthems from high school, 'Unbelievable' by EMF, making the word 'Crumbelievable' to advertise a new type of crumbling cheese. Does Kraft's CEO know what EMF stands for?" Rounding out the musical recommendations for headlines, Jeremy Derfner writes, "I don't know how they're going to fit it in, but how about 'My Name Is Luka, and I Live on the Second Floor' "? Guilty references to Britney Spears songs and not so guilty references to Eminem are sure bets, too, says Avi Zenilman.

Wes Miller foresees acronyms from chat rooms, IM, and cell phone messages beyond the well-known "LOL" and "ASAP" as potential building blocks for future headlines. "LMAO@U" or "NFW GL" or "MOSS" or "LTR" could all do service. He also put in a plug for anything composed in L337. Wes Kosova consulted slang dictionaries to compose these 2006 headlines: "Housing Market Proves Chewy for First Time Buyers"; "President No Longer Kickin' It With Crashy Defense Secretary"; "Fed Chief Assures Friends Dat Economy Is Crunk." Josh Levin crosses the decency line by calling my attention to the "shocker," the hand gesture young people use in the presence of their elders to 1) disrespect them and 2) show how clueless the old fogies (read: boomers) are. When the shocker appears in a New York Times headline, we'll know the boomers have been vanquished.

Matt Labash pisses all over the concept of this column in response to my invitation to contribute. He writes:

It's such an icky boomer-like exercise, obsessing over your own demise. It's understandable I suppose. By now, your health is failing and your prostate has grown to the size of a tangelo—especially considering how you abuse yours. But we don't think that way. Not because we're younger. But because we know the Rapture is coming soon. Plus, unlike the boomers, the post-boomers aren't so generation-centric. Not since Douglas Coupland died.

Thank you, Matt. I validate you. You complete me. Or something like that.

Meanwhile, if Labash or anybody else thinks I've raised this vital topic only to move on to comment on the next media maelstrom, sorry. If you have a good idea of a cultural marker in a headline that will illustrate that the boomers have been bounced, please send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com for the sequel I intend to write. No anonymous contributions will be considered, and all e-mail on this topic will be subject to quotation and attribution.

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130429/

 

jurisprudence
Let My People Roe
Slate readers poll on discussions of Roe v. Wade.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 3:45 PM ET

Several weeks back, in response to Harriet Miers' claim that "nobody knows my views on Roe v. Wade," we asked Slate readers—and particularly attorneys—to write in to indicate whether they, too, could claim that nobody knew their views of the landmark abortion case. Hundreds of readers responded (including a rather staggering number of former American Parliamentary Debating Association members). It all seemed to be sort of old news when the Miers nomination was withdrawn. Yet here we have Judge Sam Alito, whose mother, former adviser, and now 20-years-ago-self, all suggest that he has voiced some rather strong objections to Roe. And again, he doubtlessly will tell the Senate that neither his mother, his college professor, nor the Sam Alito who filled in a job application in 1985 ever actually heard his views of the case because he has none. Raising yet again the thorny questions: Why does everyone lie and say they haven't discussed the case? Or do some people really go through life never discussing it?

Well, here is what you had to say.

I divided respondents into lawyers (including law students) and nonlawyers, simply to test my original hypothesis that nobody who had ever set foot in a law school could avoid debating Roe.

LAWYERS/LAW STUDENTS

YES
Of the 357 lawyers and law students who responded to the poll, 281 (78.7 percent) said that of course they had discussed Roe. Typical of this was a message from lawyer Bill Altreuter: "I would venture to say that everyone I went to law school with could tell you my opinion on Roe. I'm not so sure I could do the same for everyone in my class, but I could probably guess about 75%." Writes law student John Cannavino: "As a second year law student at the University of San Francisco, I am in a Constitutional Law class of roughly 100 other law students. Out of those 100 other law students, I have heard 100 opinions on Roe. And we haven't even gotten to the case in the case book yet."

Same goes for most lawyers. Reader Matt Stubbs explains: "I'm a partner at a midsize, midwest firm that handles very few constitutional issues. Even so, Roe v. Wade, and the right to privacy in general, is to trial lawyers what The Aristocrats is to comedians. Discussing it is a secret handshake, a sign of respect, and test of wit." Reader Tracy Hresko went one better and broke it down numerically: "... Thus, I would estimate (conservatively) that approximately 200 people have heard me express my views on Roe v. Wade. Here's the math: 65 people in my first-year constitutional law class (law school); 50 people in my second-year advanced constitutional law class (law school); 30 people in my Moral and Ethical Issues of Public Policy class (college); 15 people in my constitutional law seminar (college) and 40 friends, classmates and family members that I have discussed the decision with over the past few years."

There was a judgment embedded in lots of these replies, insisting that any nominee who hadn't discussed it wasn't fit to be considered for the high court. Wrote Robert R. Ambler Jr.: "In my experience as a law student from 1986-1989 and a practicing lawyer since, the vast majority of law students and lawyers have never expressed an opinion on Roe v. Wade. That same vast majority is largely unqualified to sit on the United States Supreme Court." Asked reader Kevin Carboni, "Would we appoint a Surgeon-General who had claimed not to have an opinion on human cloning (or stem-cell research, or IVF, or medical marijuana use, or end-of-life decisionmaking)? Would we elect a President who professed no opinion on using armed force to subdue terrorists?"

Most readers simply couldn't believe that anyone who'd attended law school hadn't discussed the case, including Bradley Parr, who wrote: "It would be one thing to say you've never talked about some obscure zoning case from Wyoming. But Roe? Come on."

NO
Of lawyers and law students, 76 (21.2 percent) said they had flat-out never discussed this case. One longtime attorney married to an attorney writes: "As far as I can remember, I have never discussed the merits of Roe v. Wade with anyone, including my husband." Adds reader Terrence Kessler, "I don't recall ever expressing a view, then or since. My confidence in my response stems from my inability to crystalize a 'view' even now."

Many readers contend that most real attorneys are too busy or bogged down in their own areas of law to hazard opinions on Roe. Writes reader Philip Miller: "I have been a practicing lawyer for 11 years and have never discussed Roe v. Wade. The fact is, unless an attorney is a social or political activist there simply is no reason to discuss the case." Adds another attorney, who asked not to be named: "Most attorneys are more interested in whatever branch of law they choose to pursue. It doesn't take long as a lawyer to know that other areas of law can be so convoluted that expressing a meaningful opinion on them is impossible without long association in that area. Why not ask what percentage of lawyers have had any specialization in constitutional law since first year law school? If you do you'll likely find the percentage is quite small."

Other readers who voted no argued that anyone who, like Miers, had attended law school before Roe was handed down may have more credibility in asserting they had never discussed the case.

Several readers point out that there is a difference between saying no one knows your views on Roe and no one knows your views on abortion. Notes reader Jonathon Groubert: "If you asked 'Have I ever expressed my opinion on abortion?' you would get quite a different answer. That's a question, the answer to which I have discussed with others." Several suggest that if you are a lawyer and also pro-life you would be mad to discuss Roe. And some question whether an opinion on Roe held in the past is even relevant: Writes second-year law student Joel Flaxman, "Just because I've stated an opinion doesn't mean that my views have not evolved or that the view I stated was not my own, just one that I was trying out."

Of the lawyers and law students who have never discussed the case, there was a vocal subset who claim that Roe wasn't even taught at their law schools. Reader Andrew Tenzer wrote: "I think it is fair to assume that most law students, like me, go through law school having never read Roe." Others suggest that the case is so fraught that it's taught with no class discussion. Dan [last name withheld] from New York writes: "An interesting side note: that con law professor generally cold called people, but the day before we started on Roe he said that, because of the controversy surrounding the case, he would only ask questions of volunteers, and no one should feel pressured to say anything." Writes lawyer Robert Spaugh, "Just for the record, Roe was not discussed during my three years of law school. Liberals who run our law schools think the issue has been decided so there is nothing to discuss. Freedom of speech does not extend to conservatives!"

Finally, some readers wrote to suggest that most law students are too lazy/bored/distracted to have opinions on Roe. Says David Noll, a law student: "Law students are more interested in professor's foibles and their colleagues' sex lives than Roe."

NONLAWYERS

YES
Of the 144 nonlawyers who answered, 130 (90.3 percent) said that of course people know their views on Roe. One anonymous respondent writes: "I'm a librarian in a law firm and lawyers are forever in my library tossing opinions back and forth. They wouldn't be lawyers if they didn't have an opinion about everything." Adds Kim Sekel, a teacher, "Now, I am a middle school English teacher, and my 12 and 13 year old students are already interested in discussing abortion. They have written speeches both for and against the procedure, and even understand that Roe is the court ruling that protects abortion rights. If these kids, none of whom study law as yet, are into the discussion, how is it possible that Miers has never considered the question?"

NO
Of the 144 responding nonlawyers, 14 (9.7 percent) said no one on the planet can claim to know their views. My favorite response came from reader Olivier Duchamp, who writes: "I can honestly say that while I've discussed it before with friends and teachers alike, I've never let anyone know my opinion on Roe v. Wade. Oh well, being a fifteen-year old, my opinions are ignored a lot anyway."

The most interesting conclusions from this limited, skewed, unscientific, and generally very sarcastic poll: That in general liberals are generally far more comfortable discussing Roe than conservatives; that some lawyers really do keep their private views private; and that the way Roe is taught in law schools deserves an article of its own. Stay tuned ...

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130443/

 

college week
Akbar at Yale
From Kabul to the Ivy League.
By Said Hyder Akbar
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 12:52 PM ET

From: Said Hyder Akbar
Subject: From Kabul to the Ivy League
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 12:52 PM ET

Here's a story from my first semester at Yale. In one of my classes, Introduction to the Middle East, my professor was talking about the modern history of Iran. During his lecture, he paused to ask a question in an attempt to engage the class. The question was this: "For you future Third-World dictators out there, where would you turn to for money and support?" Nobody answered. I didn't feel comfortable raising my hand, but in my mind I thought, America, of course. The professor, giving up in the face of our studious silence, finally said, "America, of course." I felt pleased at my insight. Then he said, "All right, again, if there are any future Third-World dictators in this room, who would you not want to mess with if you are in power?" Again, nobody answered, and I did not feel comfortable raising my hand, but in my mind, I thought, the religious establishment, duh. The professor answered, "The religious establishment." It was a little disconcerting to know that thinking like a Third-World dictator came so easily to me. My expertise did not come from the books I read or some previous class on "Third-World dictators": It came from experience.

Since high school, I've been a student in three very different environments—Afghanistan, where I've been spending my summers; Diablo Valley College, a community college in Pleasant Hill, Calif., about 20 minutes from my home in Concord, Calif. (where I spent most of my life); and Yale, where I transferred this semester as a junior majoring in economics. So, when the professor asked who you shouldn't mess with, I immediately thought of something I saw in the summer of 2002. It was at the loya jirga, or grand assembly, in Kabul, that first elected President Karzai as the leader of the country. A man came up to the stage to propose that the word "Islamic" didn't need to be in the official title of the new government. Before he could even offer his rationale, people started to crisscross their arms—a traditional sign of rejection in Afghanistan—and the crowd began shouting for him to get off the stage. My lesson for the day? That the country, still recovering from the war against the Soviets in which millions died and fought for their beliefs, is not ready for religious discourse yet.

During that same summer, my father was President Karzai's spokesman, which meant I had a chance to spend months in the presidential palace. It was there that I learned firsthand some of the difficulties of governing a Third-World country reduced to rubble. When I had a chance to ask the president what he felt was the greatest obstacle facing him, he responded almost immediately, "The lack of resources." Afghanistan was in dire need of international assistance as it tried to rebuild, and it looked toward America the most for assistance. So, that is how I knew the answers to my professor's questions. In fact, I was even tempted to add to his lecture a quick postscript: Don't depend on America too much, either.

The other day, as I checked out the books at Sterling Memorial Library, I was thinking about history. The hook Americans use to get people interested in history is usually something along the lines of, "Well, if you want to know where you're going, you need to know where you came from." It's almost seen as a chore. But for me, it's very different. When I read history books or political science books or philosophical work, I don't see where I came from but where I am right now. The feeling is surreal and exciting—sometimes I feel like I'm living in Afghanistan's history. A friend of mine, Sudipta, invited me to a debate for Yale's conservative party last week. He told me how he, along with some of the others in the party, felt that human nature hadn't changed much since the time some of these classics had been written. What he said made sense, of course. But I didn't need to defend studying the classics by trying to draw parallels between that world and the world we live in today, or by studiously figuring out how they apply to each other. In Afghanistan, I couldn't help but notice that it was some of these books—The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes—that best helped explain the situation.

It used to be that my summers in Afghanistan seemed like a break from my real life; it now seems to me that Afghanistan is where my real life is. When people talk about enjoying "college life," I just don't get it. Some of my peers here at Yale don't want it to end; I, on the other hand, can't wait to get out of here. To me, it feels like I'm in stuck in a bubble while forces outside are transforming the world. In this regard, Diablo Valley College was a boon. A community college is much less of a bubble. You aren't completely submerged in residential college life; you commute to school from your home. Sometimes, that separation can really help.

Even in a place as international and resource-rich as Yale, one encounters strange bits of parochialism. Last August, during one of the orientations for transfer students, someone from Career Services spoke to us about summer opportunities and employment after Yale. I was excited to utilize Yale's connections to find something interesting to do this summer in Afghanistan. But when I walked up to the speaker after the meeting and asked about Afghanistan, I think he took it as a joke. When he realized I was serious, he told me there was no way that Yale could help me with anything I wanted to do in Afghanistan. The security situation wasn't ideal, and there were State Department warnings about the place. So much for taking advantage of Yale, I thought.

There's another irony about life at Yale. These days, when I get back to my room from a day of class and problem sets, I'm exhausted. So disconnected have I become from the real world that the flow of the nightly conversation between my older brother and me has changed: I used to be the one giving him updates about the world, but now by the time I'm done with my work, I've missed all of the day's headlines.

Hyder Akbar, 20, is the author of Come Back to Afghanistan and a junior at Yale.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130424/

medical examiner
Katrina Cough
The health problems of 9/11 are back.
By Amanda Schaffer
Updated Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 12:54 PM ET

People returning to New Orleans and other flood-ravaged areas have recently come down with a constellation of symptoms—coughs, sore throats, runny noses, and respiratory trouble—that has earned itself a name. The ailment is called Katrina cough, and local doctors say it is widespread. They attribute it mainly to the mold and contaminated dust left behind by the floodwaters that have been stirred up by cleanup and demolition work.

Shortly after Katrina hit, doctors worried aloud about the potential for a devastating outbreak—of cholera, say, or typhoid fever. When these worst-case scenarios didn't come to pass, public health officials breathed a sigh of relief and moved on to other priorities. Katrina cough isn't necessarily dramatic, and some experts have dismissed it as minor. But it can be serious for people with asthma, respiratory illness, or compromised immune systems. As we should have learned from the aftermath of 9/11, early symptoms like coughs can auger chronic health problems among people who aren't protected from ongoing hazards. If Katrina cough follows the 9/11 pattern, more people are likely to become sick months or years from now—unless we start doing more to protect them.

Following 9/11, the EPA and OSHA failed to safeguard nearby residents and workers at Ground Zero from unnecessary exposures to asbestos, lead, glass fibers, concrete dust, and other toxins. The damage was caused not by a few days of rescue work, but by weeks and months of cleaning up the site or living nearby. The EPA offered assurances that the air outside of Ground Zero was safe to breathe—even though, as the agency's inspector general found in 2003, the agency "did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement." The EPA also caved to pressure from the White House Council on Environmental Quality "to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones" from its public announcements about the disaster. And in overseeing work at Ground Zero, OSHA decided not to enforce workplace health rules as it regularly would have, but instead acted primarily as an "adviser" to employers. As a result, the agency did not ensure that workers wore proper protective gear, especially respirators, though the equipment was widely available on the site. (For more on respirators and Ground Zero click here.)

The aftermath of Katrina differs from 9/11 in the specific toxins that have been unleashed. But so far, the failure of governmental agencies to protect people against long-term health risks is eerily reminiscent. Once again, activists contend, the EPA is downplaying risks faced by returning residents—this time from petroleum products, arsenic, lead, mercury, bacteria, and rampant mold. The agency has distributed flyers and made public service announcements about the potential hazards of mold, asbestos, lead, carbon monoxide, and other toxins. But virtually everyone I spoke with said that these materials either are not reaching people or are not helpful. Wilma Subra, a Louisiana chemist and environmental consultant who is a former MacArthur fellow, says that the agency has dodged the key question: who should return to areas touched by the hurricane and when. More than 16 percent of New Orleans children suffered from asthma, for example, according to the American Lung Association. They are at particularly high risk in mold-infested houses. But the EPA has declined to tell these children's parents to keep them away until the cleanup has significantly progressed. Meanwhile, just as it did at Ground Zero, OSHA has decided to advise contractors and other employers rather than to enforce standards. (An OSHA spokesman said that enforcement would begin at a particular site if there was a fatality or a specific complaint there.)

Meanwhile, people fixing their own homes may find it difficult to follow the safety directives that the government has in fact issued, because they can't find protective equipment like respirators. Web sites like this one from the CDC note that anyone working inside of a building that's been soaked in floodwater should wear a respirator. But in the New Orleans area and possibly elsewhere, stores like Home Depot have mostly run out of the needed model, called an N95, which filters about 95 percent of particulate matter and costs about $18 for a box of 20. So says Johanna Congleton, the Louisiana director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, who adds that the doctors in her group have seen people cleaning their homes while wearing painter's masks—which can actually trap particulate matter and make breathing problems worse.

Also troubling is the lack of protection for recovery workers hired by contractors. Subra says the workers she has seen have no respiratory gear. Contractors are reportedly hiring the workers, many of them Latino immigrants, in nearby cities like Houston. "I know men who have gotten so sick with diarrhea, skin inflammations and breathing problems they can't work. … The contractors just hire more," said Juan Alvarez, director of the Latin American Organization for Immigrant Rights in Houston, in a letter sent to Congress by the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health and other groups.

It's not too late for the federal government to do better. If the EPA made a push for respirators, stores like Home Depot and Wal-Mart would probably restock N95s because they'd know people would buy them. OSHA could use its enormous influence over manufacturers. And OSHA needs to establish some means of enforcement to make employers take responsibility for the health of their workers; the ad hoc advisory playbook that the agency adopted after 9/11 is not a good model.

At the moment, however, the government is poised to take steps in the wrong direction. Bills pending in the Senate would relieve governmental contractors of liability for damage to property or people (including in cases of negligence), or would allow for temporary suspension of environmental rules against polluting air and water. And the EPA has approved a proposal by the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality that would allow for the burning of construction debris in four New Orleans parishes. The incineration is supposed to use smoke-reducing technology, but environmental advocates are still worried about the release of toxins into the air.

Four years after 9/11, the high costs of loosening public health rules after a disaster are evident. Thousands of people who worked at Ground Zero or lived in lower Manhattan are still sick with respiratory problems and other illnesses because of the contaminants they were exposed to. Some do not respond to standard medications and can't work. And the total price exacted by the toxins is still unknown: It won't be clear for many years whether cancer rates are higher for the 9/11 and Katrina coughers.

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Ensuring respiratory protection at Ground Zero was a big challenge. Most employees at the site worked 12-hour shifts, making it hard for them consistently to use nonpowered respirators. Those respirators increase the physical effort required for breathing and are hard to wear for long periods of time, especially during physical labor. OSHA could have asked for shorter shifts or insisted on more expensive battery-powered respirators. It didn't.

Amanda Schaffer is a frequent contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130421/

 

college week
College Makeover
In praise of great books.
By Andrew Delbanco
Updated Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 8:26 AM ET

What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of this debate. Click here to read more from our symposium on reinventing college, and here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

For me, the best way to think about Stanley Katz's idea of a "magic wand" is to imagine what kind of effect we would want it to produce if we waved it. By effect, I don't mean what would happen to the curriculum ("Great Books" vs. "Distribution" or "Modes of Thought") or to pedagogical technique (discussion vs. lecture), but what would change in the lives of students. Helping students achieve competence in a certain discipline is the business of the various academic departments. Liberal education ought to be the collective effort of all departments to help students achieve two objectives in their lives: personal happiness and civic responsibility.

When these objectives converge more than conflict in the life of a mature person, we call that person a "citizen" in the normative sense of the word. It seems to me that underlying all schemes of liberal education, no matter how they differ in their instrumental details, is the idea that an educated citizen is someone who recognizes that personal happiness depends, at least in part, on making some contribution to what our Constitution calls "the general welfare."

Here, of course, is where the moral, political, and pedagogical arguments begin rather than end—which is why students need to be equipped to debate with others and with themselves what are the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and what, exactly, the general welfare might be.

At Harvard, where I went to college about 20 years after Katz did, such debates were pretty much left to the ad hoc mixing of students in the residential houses. Sometimes they happened. Sometimes they didn't. At Columbia, where I teach, we have something called the "Core Curriculum"—an attempt to foster the debate more formally. The Core consists of two yearlong required courses (a "Great Books" course called Literature Humanities, and a "Key Ideas" course called Contemporary Civilization), along with semester-long courses in music, art, and, recently added, a new course called "Frontiers of Science." There is also a distribution requirement designed to insure that students get some exposure to non-Western cultures.

I like this curriculum. I enjoy teaching in it when I can find time (these courses require approximately twice as much work as any other course—and, as Katz points out, all the incentives are to avoid them). And I like the effects of the Core on the students who enroll in my more specialized (not necessarily more "advanced") courses on this or that aspect of American culture. One effect is that all students bring to the table some familiarity with a common group of challenging books and therefore have something to talk about with one another. Another effect is that the random assignment of students to Core classes, which are taught in small groups, tends to work against the impulse to congregate exclusively with others of similar inclination, interest, or background.

I'm not sure how feasible such a core curriculum would be at other institutions. At ours it works pretty well. The students who choose to attend Columbia generally know what they're getting into, and Core courses furnish good memories for many of our alumni. In fact, I believe we should push the Core to live up to its original conception. The full name of the centerpiece course, "Introduction to Contemporary Civilization" emphasizes its introductory nature and its historical emphasis on classic European texts. But "CC," as one of its faculty founders put it in the wake of World War I, was always intended to engage students with "the insistent problems of today"—toward the goal of ensuring that each generation "should be brought to some appreciation of its responsibility" as its steps out of college into the future.

For this reason, my colleagues and I in American Studies (we are a program, not a department) are trying to shape a curriculum in which junior and senior undergraduates, after completing their Core requirements, continue to engage the problems they encounter there, but to do so more concretely in the context of contemporary society—such problems as rights versus responsibilities; causes and effects of wealth and poverty; the relation between individual and group identity, and so on.

This means offering seminars (sometimes team-taught) on subjects that have both a long history and a current urgency—subjects such as constitutional debates over the limits of free speech, war and American values, or the ethics of triage in modern health care. As Katz points out, formidable obstacles can obstruct the development of a rich undergraduate curriculum. But I sense a growing appetite among students to think seriously about such issues, and a growing willingness, especially among younger faculty, to help them do so.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130330/

college week
College Makeover
Learn statistics. Go abroad.
By K. Anthony Appiah
Updated Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 8:21 AM ET

What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of this debate. Click here to read more from our symposium on reinventing college, and here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

Nobody's ever going to put me in charge of designing the general education requirements of a major university, with or without a magic wand. Thank God. I've been on committees at a couple of great universities charged with the task and, putting aside the political difficulties (which I guess you can do, if you have a magic wand) you come to see it's one of those problems you can't solve, only manage. Here's the basic dilemma: If you say that a general education should teach you all the stuff worth knowing, there's far too much to fit around a major in a four-year education. If you say, on the other hand, that it should teach you only the essentials, there's too little. You can live a perfectly decent life with what you have to know just to get out of high school; indeed, many people do.

In any case, whatever you think is good for them, some students will resist it, and others will find their way to a great education without a requirement in sight. So my general attitude to college education, I'm afraid, is let a hundred flowers bloom. Let people try core programs of different sorts and distribution requirements with categories as exotic as they like. Heck, let them try allowing students to put together a general education out of any courses they like. But since we've been offered a magic wand, there are two things that I'd want to urge most colleges to think about as ways of strengthening the liberal part of liberal education: the part, that is, that's supposed to prepare you for life as a free person.

I start with two problems. One is most evident with humanities majors: Many of them don't know how to evaluate mathematical models or statistical arguments. And I think that makes you incompetent to participate in many discussions of public policy. So I favor making sure that someone teaches a bunch of really exciting courses, aimed at non-majors in the natural and social sciences, which display how mathematical modeling and statistical techniques can be used and abused in science and in discussions of public policy. If there are enough of them and they're good enough, one or two required courses in this area won't seem like a chore to students. And even those who grouse will probably be grateful later. Learn Bayes' Theorem, it won't kill you.

The second problem is one that you can find in almost every major, though it's less common among those doing foreign-language majors or area studies. It is an astonishing parochialism. (This is, for obvious reasons, less common among students from abroad.) Too many of our students haven't the faintest idea what life is like anywhere outside the class and the community—let alone the country—they grew up in. Language requirements—that you should leave college with one more language than you entered with, say—can help here. And so, no doubt, can courses on other places, peoples, and times.

But parochialism isn't a matter of not knowing a bunch of cultural snippets about peoples everywhere. It's an attitude. And the fellow from Des Moines or San Francisco who spends a semester at Tallinn or Johannesburg or Berlin or even Canberra at least acquires the basic Another Country insight: They do things differently there. (The University of Tallinn will be a bit of a stretch for most students, true: They teach mostly in Estonian or Russian and use Finnish, Russian, and English textbooks. Try the Tallinn Institute of Technology, whose Web site claims that it "is the only public university in Estonia which offeres degree programs fully in English language." One thing they do differently there, it appears, is English.) So why not just reinvigorate an old tradition—the Junior Year Abroad—which, at too many campuses, has fallen into desuetude. We could take a leaf from the EU's strikingly successful Erasmus program, which makes it easy for college students to spend a semester or two at an accredited university in another country. If you want to improve the general education you're offering, in short, encourage your students to try somebody else's.

K. Anthony Appiah taught a variety of subjects at the University of Ghana, Cambridge, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard before settling in at Princeton, where he now teaches philosophy. His most recent book is The Ethics of Identity. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers will be out next January.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130328/

college week
College Makeover
Un-American activities.
By Mark Lilla
Updated Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 8:17 AM ET

What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of this debate. Click here to read more from our symposium on reinventing college, and here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

1. American higher education is mass education. And it is not clear that mass education can, or even should, be liberal education. American universities are vast machines devoted primarily to vocational training, professional preparation, middle-class socialization, and research. Liberal education is the main aim of some smaller colleges, but not of our universities. That is why, in those institutions, it is crucial to establish small programs, majors, or residential settings where liberal education can be cultivated for those who really want it. Reforms of curriculum requirements for all university students contribute little to this end since they must cope with students who have little inclination for a liberal education.

2. American higher education is civic education. While we Americans may disagree about the nature of our values, most of us see our schools as vehicles for inculcating them. No one in the culture wars thinks of himself as working for a foreign power. But the aim of any liberal education worthy of the name is to transport students out of the world they live in, making them less certain about what is valuable in life. It does not seek to overcome alienation, it tries to induce it. Genuine liberal education is, of necessity, an un-American activity.

Inducing alienation in American students is not easy, though. They are a self-satisfied bunch—optimistic, pious, indifferent, and egalitarian. They need to be shocked, and nothing is more shocking to them than the alternatives to what they know: tragedy, impiety, commitment, and hierarchy. World history and literature are full of examples, which is why the study of foreign languages and basic history must be the foundation of their education. Anything can be built on those stones.

Footnote: The study of things foreign cannot guarantee alienation. As anyone in a university knows, it is possible to teach foreign cultures from a flat, multicultural perspective that sees the whole world through democratic American eyes. And the study of certain things American, taught from the right perspective, can be deeply alienating, too. Cf., Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, the Civil War. Just steer clear of anything polluted by Emerson.

3. The best reason to rely on the "great books" in liberal education is that they are almost impervious to bad teaching. A great teacher can shake his or her students up with a mediocre book, but even a dull teacher will have trouble ruining Moby Dick. Most attacks and defenses of "great books" curricula miss the point. There is nothing sacred about these works; they do not teach moral uplift, good values, civic inclusion, toleration, or proper hygiene. They are open, radically so, to interpretation and questioning. Their effect depends less on teachers than on a chance spark falling from them onto a young mind ready for combustion. And that's a good thing.

4. Combustion usually takes place outside the classroom, in private study, which should be encouraged. A core program in the first two years is a necessity in this country, given the failure of our high schools to provide a foundation. But, after that, students need to be free to connect the themes of the great books to some deep question that is meaningful to them individually. A system of tutorials, culminating in some sort of exam on a few books and/or a senior thesis, seems best suited to this end. I am involved in one such program at the University of Chicago, and it has taught me that genuine liberal education is possible in America. For my students and, in teaching them, for me.

Mark Lilla is Professor at the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130326/

college week
College Makeover
When ideas kill.
By Alan Wolfe
Updated Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 8:17 AM ET

What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of this debate. Click here to read more from our symposium on reinventing college, and here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

If consensus has disappeared over what, if anything, should be taught to all students who attend college, it has been lost most dramatically where morality is concerned. Colleges once required a senior capstone course, often taught by the college president, focusing on morality, usually from a Christian perspective. These days colleges are afraid of teaching any perspective at all for fear that someone will be excluded.

I would make morality central to any plan to revitalize general education. Students would be exposed to the great ethical thinkers who pondered the meaning of life and death, defined the difference between right and wrong, and tried to figure out what was good and what was evil. By its very nature, such a course would include religious figures, Christian ones along with others; Jesus, St. Paul, and Augustine come immediately to mind. But it would also include moral philosophers with hard-to-define religious views (Kant, Hume), as well as the resolutely secular (Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins).

It is easy to say that such a course could avoid the problem of taking sides by not taking them. But I wonder whether such resolute nonjudgmentalism would best serve the needs of contemporary students. Although I teach at a Catholic university, I find students reluctant to proclaim any one thing better than any other thing, including their own faith. Catholicism cannot, they believe, be the one true faith, which is another way of saying that any faith, even no faith, can be true. Their pluralism is admirable. Their inability to choose is lamentable.

Religion and morality are either serious subjects or they are not. If they are not, by all means let college reinforce the conviction of its students that there are no real convictions. But if they are serious subjects, part of teaching them involves preaching them. Let the best case be made for why Christianity offers a superior morality to Islam (or, for that matter, the other way around). And then let the students argue against whatever case is being made.

If religion should be taught with its sharp edges intact, so should the Enlightenment. My students are the products, if long removed, of a revolution in thought that took place in the 18^th century; had it not occurred, they would not be in college. They need to know why it was so important for modern science to break through the orthodoxies imposed by faith, one reason why they also need to know what those orthodoxies were in the first place.

We live at a time when ideas kill. Even in the United States, where killing over ideas is less likely to happen compared to the places we send our troops, people devote their lives, sacrifice potential income, and even break the law on behalf of conceptions of the world they hold to be true. For my students, by contrast, ideas are things found in books meant to be transcribed into blue books. My students are intelligent enough to know which ideas are important and which are not. But they lack the passion to choose between which ones are worth fighting for and which ones are not.

The "liberal" in liberal education is generally understood to mean openness of mind: a suspicion toward dogma and a willingness to allow truth to emerge from the clash of different viewpoints. Liberalism, however, also means the cultivation of dispassion, the capacity to evaluate ideas from behind what the American philosopher John Rawls called a "veil of ignorance." The most just social arrangements, Rawls famously insisted, are the ones we would choose if we were forbidden to know whether or not we would benefit from them. In a similar way, students must learn that an idea is not necessarily true because it just feels true or accords with a moral sensibility that, however strongly held, is not well grounded in reason.

In today's attack-and-defend style of politics, the very possibility of dispassion is denied; a typical cable television program features someone from the left and someone from the right, as if ideas were nothing more than the ideological categories imposed on them. Along similar lines, we are frequently told that each person's religious convictions are sacrosanct and that someone outside one tradition has no right telling another inside one what to believe. My aim for liberal education is to make students passionate about dispassion. I want them both to have strongly held views and to be able to stand outside their own views and judge them as if they were wrong or self-serving. Making morality central to the reform of general education is a way of recognizing that human minds have come up with radically different answers to the great questions of moral obligation, but that human practices have also found ways for people with different answers to live together short of war and chaos—at least most of the time.

Alan Wolfe, professor and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, is the author most recently of Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs To Do To Recover It.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130323/

 

war stories
I Was Wrong, but So Were You
Parsing Bush's new mantra.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, Nov. 14, 2005, at 6:39 PM ET

President George W. Bush has suddenly shifted rhetoric on the war in Iraq. Until recently, the administration's line was basically, "Everything we are saying and doing is right." It was a line that held him in good stead, especially with his base, which admired his constancy above all else. Now, though, as his policies are failing and even his base has begun to abandon him, a new line is being trotted out: "Yes, we were wrong about some things, but everybody else was wrong, too, so get over it."

Quite apart from the political motives behind the move, does Bush have a point? Did everybody believe, in the run-up to the war, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction? And are Bush's Democratic critics, therefore, hypocritically rewriting history when they now protest that the president misled them—and the rest of us—into war by manipulating intelligence data?

President Bush made this claim—and thus inaugurated the new line of counterattack—at a Veterans Day speech last Friday before a guaranteed-to-cheer crowd at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania, one of the few American military bases that no sitting president had ever visited. (The White House transcript of the 50-minute speech notes a breathtaking 47 interruptions for applause.)

As with many of the president's carefully worded speeches on the subject, this one contains fragments of truth—for instance, nearly everyone, including the war's opponents, did think back in the fall of 2002 that Saddam had WMDs—but they serve only to disguise the larger falsehoods and deceptions.

Let's go to the transcript:

Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

This is not true. Two bipartisan panels have examined the question of how the intelligence on Iraq's WMDs turned out so wrong. Both deliberately skirted the issue of why. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence deferred the second part of its probe—dealing with whether officials oversimplified or distorted the conclusions reached by the various intelligence agencies—until after the 2004 election, and its Republican chairman has done little to revive the issue since. Judge Laurence Silberman, who chaired a presidential commission on WMDs, said, when he released the 601-page report last March, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

There's something misleading about Bush's wording on this point, as well: The investigation "found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments." The controversy concerns pressure from the White House and the secretary of defense to form the judgments—that is, to make sure the agencies reached specific judgments—not to change them afterward.

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein.

This is an intriguingly ambiguous statement. What does he mean by "our assessment of Saddam Hussein"? Of the man—his motives, intentions, wishes, fantasies? In which case, he's right. Most of the world's intelligence agencies figured Saddam Hussein would like to have weapons of mass destruction. If he means an assessment of Saddam Hussein's capabilities, though, he's wrong: Several countries' spy agencies never bought the notion that Saddam had such weapons or the means to produce them in the near future.

They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing the development and possession of weapons of mass destruction.

This, too, is misleading. These resolutions called on Saddam to declare the state of his WMD arsenal and, if he claimed there was no such thing, to produce records documenting its destruction. The resolutions never claimed—or had the intention of claiming—that he had such weapons.

Saddam did demonstrably have chemical-weapons facilities when the U.N. Security Council started drafting these resolutions. But, as noted by former weapons inspector David Kay (but unnoted in President Bush's speech), President Bill Clinton's 1998 airstrikes destroyed the last of these facilities.

[M]any of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security."

Bush's opponent, Sen. John Kerry, did utter these words, possibly to his later regret. Still the key phrase is "to use force if necessary." Kerry has since said—as have many other Democrats who voted as he did—that they assumed the president wouldn't use force unless it really was necessary to do so, or unless the intelligence he cited was unambiguous and the threat he envisioned was fairly imminent. This, Bush never did.

That's why more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate—who had access to the same intelligence—voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.

This is the crucial point: these Democrats did not have "access to the same intelligence." The White House did send Congress a classified National Intelligence Estimate, at nearly 100 pages long, as well as a much shorter executive summary. It could have been (and no doubt was) predicted that very few lawmakers would take the time to read the whole document. The executive summary painted the findings in overly stark terms. And even the NIE did not cite the many dissenting views within the intelligence community. The most thorough legislators, for instance, were not aware until much later of the Energy Department's doubts that Iraq's aluminum tubes were designed for atomic centrifuges—or of the dissent about "mobile biological weapons labs" from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Intelligence estimates are unwieldy documents, often studded with dissenting footnotes. Legislators and analysts with limited security clearances have often thought they had "access to intelligence," but unless they could see the footnotes, they didn't.

For instance, in the late 1950s, many senators thought President Dwight Eisenhower was either a knave or a fool for denying the existence of a "missile gap." U.S. Air Force Intelligence estimates—leaked to the press and supplied to the Air Force's allies on Capitol Hill—indicated that the Soviet Union would have at least 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1962, far more than the U.S. arsenal. What the "missile gap" hawks didn't know—and Eisenhower did—was that the Central Intelligence Agency had recently acquired new evidence indicating that the Soviets couldn't possibly have more than 50 ICBMs by then—fewer than we would. (As it turned out, photoreconnaissance satellites, which were secretly launched in 1960, revealed that even that number was too high; the Soviets had only a couple of dozen ICBMs.)

So, yes, nearly everyone thought Saddam was building WMDs, just as everyone back in the late '50s thought Nikita Khrushchev was building hundreds of ICBMs. In Saddam's case, many of us outsiders (I include myself among them) figured he'd had biological and chemical weapons before; producing such weapons isn't rocket science; U.N. inspectors had been booted out of Iraq a few years earlier; why wouldn't he have them now?

What we didn't know—and what the Democrats in Congress didn't know either—was that many insiders did have reasons to conclude otherwise. There is also now much reason to believe that top officials—especially Vice President Dick Cheney and the undersecretaries surrounding Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon—worked hard to keep those conclusions trapped inside.

President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said today that the arguments over how and why the war began are irrelevant. "We need to put this debate behind us," he said. But the truth is, no debate could be more relevant now. As the war in Iraq enters yet another crucial phase—with elections scheduled next month and Congress finally taking up the issue of whether to send more troops or start pulling them out—we need to know whether the people running the executive branch can be trusted, and the sad truth is that they cannot be.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130295/

 jurisprudence
Three-Quarter Truths
The sloppy mischaracterizations of Alito's abortion decisions.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, Nov. 14, 2005, at 6:17 PM ET

This morning's Washington Times story about Sam Alito's views on abortion is interesting for any number of reasons, not the least of which is his assertion, in a 1985 job application, that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."

Stop the presses. Alito's conservative!

That abortion statement is being thoroughly chewed over today. It's part of the de rigueur constitutional doublespeak, in which most almost everyone privately agrees that: (i) Roe probably represented judicial overreaching; but (ii) Americans believe in a constitutional right to privacy; such that (iii) to be confirmed, conservative Supreme Court nominees must be privately opposed to indefensible Roe and publicly in favor of indefensible Roe. This abortion mambo is exhausting, but it does help keep the pounds off.

Perhaps most noteworthy about the Washington Times article, however, is the attempt to undercut the impact of Alito's ominous words with the ubiquitous claim that the judge "sided with abortion proponents in three of four rulings during his 15 years as a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, usually based on existing law and technical legal issues rather than the right to abortion itself."

The notion that Alito took the pro-choice side in 75 percent of the abortion cases before him as a court of appeals judge has become so pervasive that even left-wingers now doubtfully tout it in hopes of his future moderation on abortion cases. But a closer look at the cases suggests that the claim that he's pro-choice most of the time is a stretch, for either side.

The one Alito opinion almost everyone agrees upon is his dissent as a 3^rd Circuit judge in Planned Parenthood v. Casey—the case that grew up to become Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court's major decision upholding the right to abortion. In Alito's dissent, he argued that it was not an "undue burden" for a wife to have to notify her husband prior to obtaining an abortion. The Supreme Court eventually disagreed. I suspect everyone can log Casey as a "pro-life" decision, although there is debate at the margins over whether it represented pro-life activism or a temperate prediction of where Alito thought the Supreme Court was headed.

The other case that clearly implicated the right to choose was Planned Parenthood v. Farmer—the 2000 case in which Alito agreed with two other judges that New Jersey's partial-birth abortion law was unconstitutional. But as Richard Schragger has argued, it's a stretch to read Farmer as a big victory for the pro-choice camp, except insofar as Alito declined to openly violate the law and ignore clear Supreme Court precedent. Yes, he agreed the ban on the procedure was unconstitutional*. He had to: The Supreme Court had only just struck down a nearly identical law in Nebraska, in Stenberg v. Carhart. If anything, Alito's position in Farmer emphasizes his go-through-the-motions unease with that precedent: As Schragger has pointed out, and as some pro-life groups emphasize, rather than signing on to the majority opinion, Alito elected instead to write his own narrow concurrence—in effect, to say that his hands were tied by the Supreme Court.

As he wrote sparely: "Our responsibility as a lower court is to follow and apply controlling Supreme Court precedent." Alito then simply applied the facts of the New Jersey statute to the Supreme Court's holding in Stenberg and noted that the New Jersey statute failed because it was virtually indistinguishable from the Nebraska law that had just fallen. Perhaps this concurrence was simple judicial minimalism; Alito felt that the court should decide no more than it needed to, and in light of Stenberg, the case was closed. Or perhaps, as Schragger suggests, he was deliberately taking a shot at the 3^rd Circuit majority—which had gone much further and analyzed the New Jersey statute for its own constitutional flaws. Either way, Alito's concurrence was no more a "win" for the pro-choice camp than any other instance of a judge following settled law is a "win." It was a win for stare decisis, yes. But not for choice.

Then there are the two cases that actually have very little to do with abortion: In the 1995 case, Elizabeth Blackwell Health Center for Women v. Knoll, Alito agreed to invalidate a Pennsylvania law requiring women who wanted Medicaid to pay for an abortion in cases of incest or rape to "personally report the crime to the appropriate law enforcement agency together with the name of the offender." The majority held that if the secretary of Health and Human Services reasonably found these requirements to be in conflict with federal law, as she had in this case, based on her reading of the Hyde Amendment, then the secretary's reading of the law would trump. State Medicaid programs are voluntary, and any state receiving Medicaid funds must comply with the federal requirements, so the secretary is generally accorded broad deference in interpreting agency rules. Knoll is not an abortion case merely because the underlying statute was about Medicaid-funded abortions. Knoll was a dispute about the level of deference granted a federal agency in implementing its own rules.

Which brings us to Alexander v. Whitman, the 1997 case in which Alito decided that for purposes of a wrongful-death claim brought by parents of a stillborn child, fetuses are not "persons" as defined by the Constitution. This case also has nothing to do with abortion, save for the fact that some pro-life groups would urge constitutional protection for the unborn. The parents in Alexander were trying to argue that fetuses were "persons" and thus protected under the 14^th Amendment. All three judges on the panel in Alexander rejected that argument, finding, under Roe, that "the word 'person,' as used in the Fourteenth Amendment does not include the unborn." And drawing an important distinction both sides in the abortion wars may sometimes forget, the panel noted:

Our inquiry is not a factual one. It is a legal one. The question is not whether a stillborn child is a human being from the moment of conception, but whether that unborn "human being" is included within the meaning of "person" contained in the Fourteenth Amendment. That legal question was resolved over twenty-four years ago when the Supreme Court decided Roe.

It's worth noting that in Alexander, as in Farmer, Alito wrote a separate concurrence. He said that while he was "in almost complete agreement with the court's opinion," he had two small quibbles. He balked at the majority's suggestion that "there could be 'human beings' who are not 'constitutional persons,' " warning that the reference was "capable of misuse." He also wrote to emphasize that "substantive due process inquiry must be informed by history" and, consequently, that "at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment and for many years thereafter, the right to recover for injury to a stillborn child was not recognized."

Perhaps the single most interesting aspect of all the decision-parsing on Alito is this: Every one of these data points can be spun either for him or against him. For instance, while some pro-choicers find Alito's narrow concurrence in Farmer a pointed slap at the majority, some pro-lifers are incensed that he "didn't even try to distinguish the N.J. case from Stenberg. He made no attempt to find a way to uphold the N.J. partial birth abortion law."

There are two mistakes underpinning this analysis. The first is the assumption that any judge who rejects Roe v. Wade will necessarily disregard its precedential value whenever he or she rules in any future abortion cases. Alito has shown—and even said explicitly—that he rejects Roe but still has been willing to adhere to its dictates.

The second mistake is to assume that any case that touches upon the right to choose necessarily becomes a referendum on Roe. Alito's four so-called abortion cases tell us more about his views on stare decisis, statutory deference to federal agencies, and his unwillingness to invent new federal constitutional rights than they tell us about what he thinks about the legality of abortion. Just as you can't search for every case in which Alito mentions "trains" for some global stance for or against trains, you cannot legitimately claim that these four abortion cases signal a global position on the right to life. Which is why the three-out-of-four statistic is silly.

It's almost impossible to predict what a judge will do with cases that present fact patterns that do not yet exist; and it's hard to tell what an appellate court judge might do once he's seated on the high court. Certainly we should scrutinize Alito's 1985 job application for hidden motives, just as we should scan his opinions for judicial theory. But randomly classing together disparate abortion cases will tell us very little about Alito—save for the fact that he's not so reflexively pro-life or pro-choice that the rest of constitutional law is just wallpaper for him. That should give both sides in this discussion some measure of comfort going forward.

I'm guessing it won't.

Clarification: The article originally stated the procedure was unconstitutional. What was in fact unconstitutional was the state ban. Return to the sentence.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130296/

 

technology
Digital Rights Mismanagement
How Apple, Microsoft, and Sony cash in on piracy prevention.
By Adam L. Penenberg
Posted Monday, Nov. 14, 2005, at 5:47 PM ET

A couple of weeks ago, a motley crew of New York University students collected in front of the Virgin Megastore in Union Square for a digital rights rally. Protesters from the NYU chapter of the Free Culture Society brandished signs and snuck inside the store to stick leaflets into racks of CDs. Shades of the student movements of 1968—except that instead of protesting war or agitating for social justice, these college kids took to the streets because corporations are messing with their music.

Back in the days of Napster, MP3 trading was something of a free love movement, with music-adoring scofflaws swapping files under the noses of the record companies. As digital music has become a mass-market, big-money phenomenon, the corporations have succeeded in making digital music a lot less free. By now, thanks in large part to Apple, most people have gotten used to paying for music online. But the other half of the not-free-anymore equation is trickier: Not many music lovers have warmed to the idea that they don't retain all the rights to the music they buy.

The crux of the debate is this: When you buy a song, an album, or a movie, are you buying the content only in the form it comes in? If you purchase a song from Apple's iTunes store, should you be able to play it on any hardware you want? Not according to Apple, which bundles each download with a "digital rights management" scheme called FairPlay. When you pay 99 cents for the latest Sheryl Crow hit, it's stored on your hard drive as an encrypted file. Every time you play it on your computer with iTunes or on your iPod, it is unlocked with a random encryption key supplied by Apple. FairPlay allows you to load a song on up to five computers and an unlimited number of iPods and burn as many CDs as you please. But you can't e-mail a song to a friend, you can't distribute it over the Web, and you can't play it on anything but iTunes or an iPod.

Companies like Apple claim that digital rights management—"digital restrictions management" to critics—is a tool to dampen the threat of piracy, which the record industry claims has cost it billions in revenues. But DRM also locks consumers into using their technologies over those of competitors. The term "FairPlay" is a classic example of technological doublespeak. Since Apple sells about 80 percent of legal music downloads in the United States, FairPlay effectively stunts competition and consumer choice.

Last year, when RealNetworks came up with a product that let users load music from its stores onto iPods, Apple denounced Real's "hacker tactics" and updated its software to block songs from the Real store. A class-action suit that's now winding its way through the courts accuses Apple of effectively forcing consumers to purchase iPods over less-expensive digital music players by unlawfully bundling the iPod and the iTunes Music Store. The stakes for Apple couldn't be greater, since iPod sales now represent a third of the company's revenue—and sales are growing at more than 200 percent a quarter.

Besides Apple's FairPlay, there are two other prominent digital-rights-management technologies on the market. On the software side, Microsoft has licensed Windows Media Audio, which comes equipped with a proprietary copy protection scheme, to Apple rivals like Samsung, the most popular digital music player in Asia. On the compact disc side is Sony's "XCP" anti-piracy technology, which quickly earned a reputation as the most draconian system of them all. When you play an XCP-encoded compact disc on your computer, it covertly installs a "root kit" on your hard drive. The root kit software gives Sony complete access to your computer, as if it were the owner or system administrator.

A day after security firms announced that hackers had started using the Sony root kit to hide malicious programs on users' PCs, Sony announced it would halt production of CDs with XCP. Sony claims it only wanted to limit the number of copies a user could make of a particular CD. What it really did is confirm what many digital music lovers already believe about record execs—that they will do everything they can to wring every last penny from us, even if it means messing with our hard drives.

For decades, piracy has been an irritating song record executives can't get out of their heads. In the late 1970s, LP manufacturers instituted a "spoiler signal" to stop people from copying records onto cassette tape. A spoiler-encoded vinyl record couldn't be taped without an irritating squeal getting copied as well. By sabotaging home tapers, the record companies only alienated consumers and artists, so the spoiler signal was soon abandoned. More to the point: Home taping didn't kill the record industry. Just like the VCR didn't kill television.

While Apple stands alone and Sony self-destructs, Microsoft is practically giving away its digital-rights-management tool in an effort to pick up market share against Apple (so far with little success). We may even see a replay of the Apple-Microsoft battle over the desktop, which ended with Apple holding on to a tiny sliver of the computer market. There is, however, a big difference between then and now. Steve Jobs has a hefty market share and a massive content library made up of millions of songs at a price that people like. As long as the record companies license their content to Apple and consumers flock to the iPod, Apple is in a powerful—some might say Gatesian—position.

What's hardest for the consumer to swallow, then, is that anti-piracy schemes like DRM look like the subtle tactic of the monopolist. Neither Apple nor Microsoft is hurt by music piracy. Instead, they use it as a marketing ploy to force people to use their products. It doesn't have to be this way. The companies could agree on one standard that allows people to play the music they lawfully purchase on whichever player they choose. The music industry is supposed to sell music, not the medium it comes in, right?

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

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130300/

moneybox
Dark Knight
Why would anyone want to buy Knight Ridder?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, Nov. 14, 2005, at 5:33 PM ET

Knight Ridder, the nation's second-biggest newspaper company, today said it would seek "a possible sale of the company." In doing so, Knight Ridder was responding to pressure from Private Capital Management, the company's largest shareholder, which sees an auction or sale as a way to perk up Knight Ridder's chronically underperforming shares. (Here's a five-year chart.)

Usually shareholders agitate for a sale because they believe selfish or incompetent managers have been blocking one. But this may be one case in which a shareholder activist seeking to take on entrenched management is making a mistake. After all, who on earth would want to buy a big newspaper company?

A strategic buyer—one of the other more or less pure-play newspaper companies such as New York Times Co., Gannett, which gets about 85 percent of its revenues from newspapers, and Tribune—might be interested in Knight Ridder, a profitable company whose properties include the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Jose Mercury News. But there are no obvious gains for a strategic buyer. When you purchase a newspaper in a different part of the country, few synergies are readily apparent—you can't simply shut down the San Jose operation and run it from Chicago. The last blockbuster newspaper merger, the acquisition of Times-Mirror by Tribune, hasn't panned out well, either for shareholders or for journalists, as Ken Auletta wrote in The New Yorker earlier this fall. (Auletta's piece isn't available online, so here's a link to a story discussing it.)

Besides, the potential strategic buyers are themselves under enormous pressure. Companies like Knight Ridder, the Times, and Gannett are consistently profitable and pay small dividends. But forward-looking investors aren't particularly interested in their stocks because they fear the future will bring slow and steady—if profitable—erosion. Newspapers make decent money today. But they might not tomorrow as audiences decline and advertising shifts elsewhere. And as a result, newspaper stocks are weak—here's a chart showing the performance of the Times, Gannett, Tribune, and Knight Ridder against the S&P 500 over the past three years. No industry player has a strong stock to use as a currency. And in any case, the recent trend is for companies with large newspaper holdings to diversify away from newsprint, with the New York Times Co.'s acquisition of About.com and Dow Jones' purchase of Marketwatch. The Washington Post Co., which bought Slate earlier this year, is already well-diversified, especially with its rapidly growing Kaplan education division. In the most recent quarter, newspapers accounted for only 27 percent of the Post Co.'s overall revenues.

Another class of potential buyers is missing from the field, too: media conglomerates. In the past, the empire-builders at Time Warner, Viacom, and News Corp. could be relied upon to put in bids for media businesses with putatively synergistic properties. No longer. Viacom and Time Warner are looking to downsize, not bulk up. And Rupert Murdoch, though he still loves his legacy newspapers, has his wizened eyes firmly focused on the Internet.

How about new media companies with soaring stocks that might like to be bigger players in the content industry? Yahoo! and Google could easily digest a comparative minnow like Knight Ridder. At $4.25 billion, Knight Ridder's present market value represents less than 8 percent of Yahoo!'s and less than 4 percent of Google's. But, again, what would be the point? Companies with explosive growth and massive margins would simply be wasting cash to buy into slower-growth, lower-margin businesses.

Financial buyers—leveraged buyout and private equity firms that are less concerned with synergies and more concerned with balance sheets—likewise wouldn't seem to have much interest in Knight Ridder. The notion behind an LBO is that you take on lots of debt, buy a company that has reliable cash flow at an attractive valuation, use cash flow to pay off debt, and then sell it several years later. And here, newspaper companies present two problems. The cash flow of newspapers is not reliable and may decline over time. Second, in order for the original investors to cash out, financial buyers have to sell the company to someone else down the road. Assuming trends continue, who would want to pay a premium for a bunch of newspapers in five years' time?

It's sad to say, because I derive a chunk of my livelihood writing for newspapers and because my day would be incomplete without the three dailies that arrive on my lawn each morning, but newspapers are just not a very good business. The '90s-era warnings that newspapers were dead were premature. But having peaked in 1984, daily newspaper circulation in the United States is slowly falling. As the New York Times reported last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulation found that "newspaper circulation fell 2.6 percent in the six-month period that ended in September, more than in any comparable six-month period since 1991." The circulation of Sunday papers fell 3.1 percent.

Meanwhile, advertisers continue to shift dollars to television and new media. As a result, even the newspapers with the best reputations and the richest readers can lose money. Dow Jones' print operations, mostly the Wall Street Journal, lost money in the third quarter. The Financial Times is hoping to break even. And of course there have been self-inflicted wounds, such as the revelations that the Chicago Sun-Times and Newsday were inflating their circulation numbers.

So, why is Private Capital Management putting so much pressure on Knight Ridder? Perhaps it has something to do with the pocketbook of Bruce Sherman, Private Capital's CEO. Seth Sutel of the Associated Press reported earlier this month that in addition to owning nearly 20 percent of Knight Ridder, PCM owns "an average position of nearly 10 percent in nine leading newspaper companies, according to a recent research report by Morgan Stanley analyst Doug Arthur." Yikes! By pressing for a sale of Knight Ridder, Sherman is seeking an exit strategy for one big holding—and perhaps trying to light a fire under a sector in which he seems to be stuck.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130299/

history lesson
Rough Draft
Scholars grapple with Bill Clinton's legacy.
By David Greenberg
Posted Monday, Nov. 14, 2005, at 4:16 PM ET

Since 1982, when Hofstra University hosted a conference on the achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the school has regularly corralled scores of scholars, journalists, activists, and ex-government officials to evaluate the reigns of successive presidents. Last week it was Bill Clinton's turn. Three hundred participants and hundreds more spectators trekked out to Hempstead, Long Island, for a three-day confab titled "William Jefferson Clinton: The 'New Democrat' From Hope." The event served as both scholarly inquest and class reunion—with both the insiders (administration "alumni") and the outsiders (the rest of us) taking a first crack at assessing the 42^nd president's legacy.

With 30-odd Clinton administration officials in attendance, plus keynote speeches from a half-dozen former Cabinet secretaries and an hour-long stemwinder in the basketball arena by Clinton himself, fears of a nostalgic love-in ran high. But although the dual purpose of the conference at times worked against serious inquiry—the most popular question from the audience of regular citizens was, "Which Democrat should (or will) run in 2008?"—the tension between insiders and outsiders also led to some stimulating intellectual firefights.

Clinton has been gone five years, and we're just now reaching the point where the authority of the insiders, having had their say through memoirs and media-spinning, is giving way to that of the outsiders. For this conference, at least, administration alumni still dominated the discussion of Clinton's legacy. They received self-abasing deference from some moderators and drew the lion's share of the audiences' questions. But outsiders were nonetheless well enough represented that a clear distinction could emerge—between those who thought they could explain the Clinton presidency because they were there and those who thought they could do so because they weren't.

Having witnessed policy-making up close, the alumni tend to distrust the analyses of scholars and journalists, who might gather documents, memoirs, and interviews but who, at the end of the day, simply weren't in the room when history was being made. Scholars and journalists rebut that any individual participant—however much he thinks he has a unique purchase on the president's motives, goals, or ideas—sees but one facet. Moreover, the participant will unwittingly overrate any meetings he attended and downplay those he missed or never knew about. For Clinton, this poses a special problem, since he notoriously let every Oval Office visitor leave feeling that his position had been endorsed. Only the disinterested observer, scholars and journalists claim, can gather and make sense of these competing viewpoints.

Many times, an alumni perspective did enrich the debate, as when Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg suggested—against a clever (perhaps too clever) paper arguing that Clinton's success stemmed from his skill at reinvention—that in fact it was his authenticity, his undeniable connection to ordinary people, that accounted for his recurring successes over nine years, even through tough times like the impeachment ordeal.

On the other hand, one erstwhile Clinton underling who egregiously exhibited the solipsism of the blind man feeling the elephant was Al From, the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council. He was on my panel, "Redefining Liberalism," which sought to locate Clintonism philosophically. After the sociologist Amitai Etzioni (via a research assistant sent to deliver his paper) argued for the importance of communitarianism to Clinton's worldview, I argued that Clinton melded several diverse strands of thought, including but hardly limited to the DLC's social conservatism. In response, From claimed that he alone knew "the facts" because he had been present at the creation. From, who by the end of his remarks was referring to the former president of the United States as "we," certainly knew better than most of us the details of Clinton's dealings with the DLC. But he seemed oddly unaware of—and thus unwilling to credit—the equally great influence upon Clinton of such competing ideas as Robert Reich's neoliberalism and, indeed, old-fashioned FDR-style economic populism.

Earlier, I heard some whispering around the Mack Student Center that many Hofstra faculty members, rebelling against the profusion of Clintonites on the program, had demanded additional papers critical of the president. My panel was joined at the last minute by professor David M. Green, a Hofstra political scientist, for what he said was "ideological balance." Green proceeded to deliver an eloquent and stinging—though to my mind completely misguided—broadside against Clinton for having sold out liberalism in favor of his own self-aggrandizement.

Even without these homegrown latecomers, though, most of the panels I heard contained plenty of Clinton-bashing. Papers challenged the alleged "myth" of Rubinomics, tallied the costs of NAFTA's passage, cast a cold eye on welfare reform, faulted Clinton's Iraq policy, and lamented his reflexive deference to the military. The academic left's view of Clintonism as "Republicanism lite" was amply ventilated. What was surprising was that most of the criticism came from the left, not the right. It was as if the central fights of the 1990s had occurred not between liberals and conservatives but between Clintonites and Naderites.

But if the ideological battles sometimes seemed a bit intramural, the conference still worked. Not that it rendered any definitive verdict on Clinton's "legacy." As the historian John Robert Greene of Cazenovia College told one audience, we all would get asked umpteen times in the days ahead to judge Clinton's presidency historically, and the only accurate answer was that it's too early to tell.

Wise words. And yet the conference succeeded, paradoxically, because of the evident effort of most participants—insiders and outsiders—to try: to submit their theories about Clinton to their peers and thereby to strive haltingly toward a better grasp of his achievement. To hear Paul Begala or David Gergen struggle to explain why more Democrats aren't emulating Clinton, or his speechwriters discuss why our most eloquent of presidents left surprisingly few Bartlett's-worthy quotes, or a panel of defense experts wonder what Clinton would have done about Iraq in 2002, is to see personal experience pass into something resembling objective analysis. That's what it looks like to see history being made.

David Greenberg writes the "History Lesson" column and teaches at Rutgers University. He is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130298/

the hollywood economist
Movies for Adults
Why Hollywood won't make them anytime soon.
By Edward Jay Epstein
Posted Monday, Nov. 14, 2005, at 4:15 PM ET

After four months of reporting declining attendance at the American box office, the New York Times made the case in August that Hollywood had lost touch with its adult audience by producing too many cartoonlike amusement-park movies for teenagers. "Hollywood's box office slump has hardened into a reality," the article grimly concluded, raising the prospect that, in order to improve ticket sales, Hollywood would produce more movies that appeal to adults.

Before shouting hallelujah, it's worth looking more closely at the "reality" behind the story: the 2005 box-office numbers. While it's true that overall box office receipts are down so far in 2005—theaters took in 8 percent less money in the first nine months of 2005 than they did in the same period in 2004—the box-office revenues for the major Hollywood studios—Fox, Sony, Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, and Universal—are up. So is their share of the box office, and so is their revenue.

From January 2005 to September 2005, the movies of the six Hollywood studios earned $4.7 billion compared to $4.5 billion in the same period in 2004. Their share of the American box office rose from 68 percent in 2004 to 75 percent in 2005. (Click here for all the studio numbers for the past nine months.) The big losers were independent studios who specialize in more adult movies, such as Lions Gate and Newmarket Films, and the so-called "studioless" studios, DreamWorks and MGM, which suffered 40 percent box-office declines. (Studioless studios are verging on extinction as MGM is in the process of selling itself to Sony and DreamWorks is desperately attempting to sell itself to Universal or Paramount.)

Moreover, the reason that some studios did not do as well in 2005 is that they had too few, not too many, amusement-park films for juveniles. Sony, for example, had no Spider-Man 3 to match the $373 million U.S. box-office gross it had from Spider-Man 2 in 2004 (Spider-Man 3 is scheduled for 2007). DreamWorks had no Shrek 3 in 2005 to match the $476 million U.S. box-office gross it garnered from Shrek 2. On the other hand, the studios that scored the biggest box-office gains in 2005, Fox and Warner Bros., generated them through amusement-park movies such as Star Wars—Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Fox) and Batman Begins (Warner Bros.).

With the overall audience for movies in decline, the lesson of 2005 is that the studios need youth-oriented franchises supported by massive advertising budgets to fill theaters. As a top Sony executive explained, "Franchises are the name of the game." He added that one reason Sony bought MGM was to get its James Bond franchise. Once established, a franchise that appeals to youth enables studios to acquire merchandising tie-ins from fast-food chains and licensing commitments from toy and game manufacturers—all of which help promote the film. The huge advertising budgets that merchandising partners contribute, which can exceed $100 million for a single movie, are especially important in an era of declining audiences.

The drop in the audience in 2005 is hardly a new phenomenon. Since the advent of television in 1948, the movie audience has declined in most years. Annual ticket sales have fallen from 4.6 billion tickets in 1948 to 1.6 billion last year, even though the U.S. population has doubled. The studios, recognizing that most of the former habitual moviegoing audience is at home watching television—and soon their iPods—create audiences for each of their movies through advertising on television, an enormously expensive—and risky—enterprise. To make it work, the studios look for a group of people that both regularly tune into TV programs on which the studios can afford to buy commercials and who can be motivated by a 30-second ad to leave the comfort of their houses to go to the multiplexes. And for better or worse, that means teenagers.

Edward Jay Epstein is the author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood. (To read the first chapter, click here.)

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130294/

 

human nature
Pat Robertson vs. the Pope
Is the intelligent designer loving or vindictive?
By William Saletan
Posted Monday, Nov. 14, 2005, at 7:53 AM ET

The intelligent design movement has a new problem. The designer, it seems, is unpredictable.

Last Tuesday, voters in Dover, Pa., ousted advocates of intelligent design from their school board. Since then, two religious leaders who purport to know the designer have come forward, ostensibly on his behalf.

In Rome, Pope Benedict XVI chided people who, "fooled by atheism, believe and try to demonstrate that it's scientific to think that everything is free of direction and order." The pope recalled that in the Bible, "The Lord awakens the reason that sleeps and tells us: In the beginning, there was the creative word. In the beginning, the creative word—this word that created everything and created this intelligent project that is the cosmos—is also love."

Meanwhile, in Virginia, Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson warned residents of Dover, "If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected Him from your city. And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help, because he might not be there." Later, Robertson issued a statement explaining that "our spiritual actions have consequences. ... God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever."

Which is it? Does the designer operate by love or punishment?

A core principle of modern science is that theories have to make predictions. A belief that doesn't make testable predictions isn't a theory and can't be taught in science classes.

Proponents of ID claim that complex systems found in nature—the cell, the bacterial flagellum, the immune system—are evidence of "intelligent activity" by a designer. But what kind of intelligence? Is the designer brutal or loving, jealous or forgiving? Look at the ancient crocodilelike predator we just dug up. Its mouth is a perfect killing machine. Does the same intelligence that designed us design our murderers?

Is the designer love, as the pope suggests? Or does the designer turn on you if you stick a finger in his eye? Robertson says our spiritual actions have consequences, but he can't tell us whether problems will arise in Dover as a result of the school board ouster: "I'm not saying they will," he shrugs. Nor can he tell us what the designer will do if such problems arise: "He might not be there," says the televangelist. And even if Robertson eventually figures out what he thinks, how can we decide which version of the designer—Robertson's or the pope's—to teach in biology class?

"If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them," Robertson joked the other day. Since the immediate problem in Dover is figuring out which theories are scientific, that's not bad advice. At least Darwin is predictable.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130282/

 

press box
Press Secretary Sulzberger
The Times publisher does his skeeziest Scott McClellan on The Charlie Rose Show.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Friday, Nov. 11, 2005, at 6:47 PM ET

Notables who ordinarily shun television talk shows make an exception when the Charlie Rose invitation arrives because he offers them such a big, safe, dark room in which to chat. The show's blackened set, the late hour in which it airs, and Rose's protective style suggest a father lulling a child back to sleep after an early night fright.

Rose conducts the show's business as if the interviews belong to the subjects—not to the host—and that they're free to confide as little as they wish without risking his reprimand as long as they allow him to ask his tortured, show-off, preening questions. Yet last night, as New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. consumed the entire hour with bob-and-weave evasions about Judith Miller, even the accommodating Rose had to rebel.

In the show's opening teaser clip, drawn from the final minutes of the interview, Rose throws his hands up, spreads his fingers, and waves his arms as if the two are playing one-on-one wheelchair basketball and he's attempting to block Sulzberger's shot.

"I'm not satisfied here that I've gotten—that you have been as completely open as I want you to be. Now, that's a decision for you to make, with respect to what this meant for the New York Times, how you saw this," says Rose, voice straining.

"This," of course, is the saga of the ignominious Judith Miller: The journalistic malpractice she committed on the weapons of mass destruction beat; her relentless grandstanding; her petulant insubordination at the paper; the treacherous and devious way she dealt not only with Times colleagues but with her bosses.

Instead of responding to Rose's unusually persistent questions, Sulzberger wheels away from them like a White House flack and attempts to smother the inquiry with words that make it seem as if they've been resolved:

"Our job is to recognize when we make a mistake, learn from the experience, and move on."

"It's been hard on all of us. And—and I think we're now past it."

"The coverage appeared in the New York Times. Flawed, own it, moved on. We made changes."

"What's critical to remember here is that we made errors in our coverage of the weapons of mass destruction. We made them at the reporting level and at the editing level. We owned those errors in a very long and very detailed editors' note, and that was then over."

"That's over now. [Miller is] now a retired employee of the New York Times. And the New York Times will move forward. And that's what's important here."

"Move on." "Past it." "Moved on." "Over." "That's over now." "Move forward." Sulzberger's jabber differs not one whit from the standard bullshit—"Move along folks, there's nothing here to see"—issued by every politician and corporate leader who finds himself trapped in the media's cross hairs. When a news subject relies on such transparent talking points as "it's time to move on," reporters know the story is only beginning.

As for the "very long and very detailed editors' note" acknowledging the Times errors to which Sulzberger refers (actually titled "From the Editors"), it measures a meager 1,150 words, about the same length as the column you're reading.

When Sulzberger tells Rose, "Miller was one of the reporters at the center of it, but not alone, and The New York Times is a—is an institution that runs—is run by editors, not by reporters. And we didn't bring the degree of editorial skepticism we should have brought to that story," he's dead on. Miller can't operate the Times printing presses. But nine of the 11 flawed stories highlighted in the "From the Editors" note are by Miller or co-bylined by her, evidence that the "institution," i.e., the editors, received generous help from one reporter in botching WMD coverage.

The first Times figure to assign blame to the editors was former Times Executive Editor Howell Raines, who did so a year and a half ago. Raines, who ran the paper from September 2001 until he was ousted in March 2003, is largely considered the boss who unleashed Miller. In a May 27, 2004, Los Angeles Times news story, he criticized the paper's mea culpa, saying Jill Abramson—now the paper's managing editor—edited the Miller stories, and she deserved the blame.

Sulzberger, who denies that Miller "was running amok" at the paper, never disparages Miller in the whole hour. He alludes to how she lost the "trust" of Times editors and says, "Miller was one of the reporters at the center of [the flawed WMD reporting], but not alone." And when he calls her a "highly politicized journalist" he quickly adds that it's "not all her fault."

It's no exaggeration to say Sulzberger believes that Miller is a victim. Explaining why she couldn't come back to the paper, he tells Rose:

Judy is seen now, rightly or wrongly, through a highly political prism. And if Judy came back to the—to the newsroom of the Times to write restaurant reviews, Charlie, I'm convinced that the first time she gave a laudatory review of a restaurant, somebody would declare there's a political reason behind that.

As if Miller needed any encouragement to think of herself as victim. It's a role Miss Run Amok has been playing ever since her critics first drew a bead on her. Last night on Larry King Live, Miller once again blamed "faulty intelligence" for her "handful" of flawed stories, neglecting to explain that real investigative reporters aren't passive conduits for intelligence but skeptical analysts of it.

Those who know him call Sulzberger a force for good in journalism, but he'll have to work on his public persona to convince me. His creepy caginess on the Miller subject and his refusal to answer Rose's nonthreatening questions in a satisfying, air-clearing manner indicate that he has agreed not to criticize her as part of her official "retirement." Instead of answering the questions, Sulzberger salutes Miller's talents by bringing up (twice) the team Pulitzer she won. He talks about the team Emmy she received. He cites her "four books." And with no sense of irony he proclaims her an "expert on terrorism."

If only Rose had thought to ask if he is legally free to speak his mind. It's a good question for the press hounds to ask Sulzberger the next time he plays press secretary in public.

******

Disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co., which had a decades-long business affair with the New York Times Co. in Paris and shared custody of the Post Co.'s International Herald Tribune until 2002, when the Sulzbergers ousted the Grahams somewhat unamicably and took full control of the IHT. Send your favorite "Judith Miller as victim" anecdotes to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

 

politics
Take the Blame, Mr. President
McCain's excellent advice for Bush.
By John Dickerson
Updated Friday, Nov. 11, 2005, at 6:08 PM ET

Sen. John McCain has advice for how President Bush can rebuild support for the Iraq war. Try candor.

McCain regularly spars with the administration—he's currently fighting Bush to end mistreatment of war prisoners—but he's as hawkish as they are when it comes to Iraq. That's why, in a speech Thursday outlining a new approach, he counseled frankness: The administration should avoid "rosy aspirations for near-term improvements in Iraq's political or security situation, and more accurately portray events on the ground, even if they're negative."

Candor, of course, is always McCain's solution. He has used bluntness as spin better than any other politician. He'll tell you about his shortcomings before you can learn about them. Some pols hate being put on the couch. He campaigns with one. It's efficient and effective and it wards off further probing. It's also why he and his aides joke that the press is his political base. When McCain was asked after his remarks who was to blame for the dire situation in Iraq, he played to type: "I think everybody is to blame, including me. I didn't anticipate the depth and the difficulty of the challenge we faced in postwar Iraq. … I could spend a half an hour pointing out the failings. I could also point out the failings and mistakes that are made in every war we've ever been in. … Mistakes are made in every conflict. The key is to fix them." Bush, by McCain's reckoning, should say much the same thing.

White House officials laugh. It's all well and good for McCain to admit mistakes. He's one of 100 senators. His reputation isn't on the line. He is not responsible for the morale of soldiers in Iraq. The White House apparently believes that once Bush admitted a mistake the persecution would never stop. Democrats and the press would pounce, insisting on more hand-wringing and self-abnegation.

The refusal to admit error is a reasonable position for the president to take. It just isn't working. According to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, just 33 percent of the country now gives Mr. Bush high marks for being "honest and straightforward," down from 50 percent in January. The White House blames the press.

But the media can't be blamed for everything. The news from Iraq is largely bad. The public is smart enough to distrust the nightly news producers. They're also smart enough to know when they're not getting straight talk. A little candor might break through that skepticism. Bush and McCain are both desperate to convince Americans that the war is still worth fighting and that the penalties for wavering are indeed severe. It's just that McCain is the only one who will admit "[t]here is an undeniable sense that things are slipping in Iraq."

Today the president fought back against Democrats who charge he distorted prewar intelligence. "It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," he scolded his critics. It's the start of a concerted campaign by the president and his aides to call out Democrats who voted for the war but now seek to benefit politically from its unpopularity. This partisan fight also offers a chance to talk about those broader goals that led to the war. But Bush starts at a disadvantage. Fifty-seven percent of the country says he "deliberately misled" the nation about the case for war in Iraq. Maybe he can change those numbers by merely pointing at the other party.

But the president is fighting an old battle—prewar intelligence—rather than the current one—Iraq's decay. He has got to face the present, and if he wants to make his case persuasive, he's going to have to point the finger at himself, too.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130132/

 

moneybox
Obscure Economic Indicator: The Price of Copper
The metal tells us almost everything we need to know about the global economy.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, Nov. 11, 2005, at 5:25 PM ET

For the nervous among us, looking at the headlines of the Financial Times can be a form of torture, what with high oil prices, global instability, trade imbalances, and the murky threat of China. But optimists should take cheer from the price of copper, a vital and frequently overlooked metal. It costs less per pound than coffee or hamburger meat. But as an investment, in the last few years it's been pure gold.

Gold, which is trading today for about $467 per ounce, is the glamour metal—as an investment, as a bauble, and as a contrary economic indicator. Gold rises when people fear instability and inflation. But workaday copper, which trades for about 12 cents per ounce, is another story. After iron and aluminum, it's the "world's third most widely used metal," as the New York Mercantile Exchange notes. (It wins the bronze medal for the most used metal.) And it's a great coincident indicator. As copper's fortunes go, so goes the world economy.

Copper is a cheap, plentiful metal with lots of useful properties: It resists corrosion and is an excellent conductor of heat. As a result, it can be found in the intestines of a good chunk of the world's industrial economy. Plumbing, radiators, electrical wiring, and air conditioners all require copper. And copper has been benefiting from some pretty significant trends. First, there's the global housing and construction boom. According to the Copper Development Association, almost half of the copper in the United States goes for building construction. (The pattern of copper use in the United States is roughly analogous to the global pattern of use.) China, which is currently undergoing a building boom, is also playing a major role. About 20 percent of copper goes into electrical and electronic products—telephones, televisions, connectors, earphones. As Chinese consumers acquire the taste for telephones, stereos, air conditioners, and plumbing, they are stimulating growing demand. Other heavy users are the transportation sector—Andrew Kireta, the chief executive officer of CDA, notes that every car contains close to 50 pounds of copper—and industrial machinery. And, of course, all major U.S. coins contain some copper.

So consumption and production of copper have been rising. This chart shows global copper consumption between 1993 and 2002. And the CDA notes in this data-packed report that global copper production rose 20 percent between 2002 and 2004. That's been very good news for Chile, which supplies about a third of the world's copper, and for companies like Phelps Dodge, the U.S.-based copper giant. Phelps Dodge just reported an impressive quarter, and its stock has quadrupled in the last three years.

The rising demand has also been good news for copper traders. This monthly chart plots copper's rise over the last several years, and this vertigo-inspiring chart illustrates how the price of copper has doubled in the last year.

The copper charts may look like the charts of Internet stocks circa early 2000, which heralded bad news for the economy and investors. But the copper price hikes don't necessarily signify rampant speculation that is bound to end with a crash. The price of copper generally represents a pretty accurate barometer of the demand for it in the real world, rather than an irrational bet on its future value. Why? As Howard Simons, a strategist for Chicago-based Bianco Research, notes, copper is cheap, heavy, and plentiful. "So you don't stockpile it, you use it as needed." Nobody bothers to hoard it. (You'd need a massive warehouse to store any meaningful amount of copper.) And while some hedge funds are doubtlessly speculating on copper, "nobody goes out and takes a flyer on it, the way you would with more expensive metals like gold and silver," says Simons.

When commodities vault into highly speculative mode, or when there's a short-term mismatch in supply and demand, the price for delivery this month (the spot price) can get way ahead of the price for delivery in future months (the futures price). That tends not to happen with copper. If the price for near-term delivery gets way ahead of the future price, then companies that are sitting on some inventory will sell it.

So the charts and the data from CDA tell a story of steadily rising demand, steadily rising production, and steadily rising prices. Like reasonably efficient markets, the copper market responds nicely to trends in supply and demand. So, as long as the price of copper remains high, it means that companies the world over are buying plenty of copper to turn into wiring, plumbing, and coils. When the price tapers off, it means that some core sectors are probably cooling. Right now, copper is sending a message that is being transmitted by plenty of other data, but that many analysts find difficult to digest: Despite all the tensions, despite the huge imbalances in trade and capital flows, despite all the world's apparent economic troubles, the global economy continues to grow at a steady and impressive pace.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130034/

 

jurisprudence
Who They Are
The double standard that underlies our torture policies.
By David Cole
Posted Friday, Nov. 11, 2005, at 12:32 PM ET

"It's not about who they are. It's about who we are."

So said Sen. John McCain, in defending his amendment to a defense appropriations bill that would bar U.S. officials from inflicting "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" on detainees in the war on terror. But while Sen. McCain is surely right that how we treat those in our custody ultimately reflects back on us, this debate is also very much about who "they" are. That's because the Bush administration's justification for employing "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" against certain individuals expressly turns on the fact that these individuals are foreign nationals held abroad. The coercive-interrogation policy is predicated on a double standard: According to the administration, we can do it to "them" because "they" are different from "us."

On this theory, what would indisputably be illegal if done on U.S. soil, or if done to a U.S. citizen anywhere in the world, becomes lawful when inflicted on foreign nationals held abroad. It is this theory that drove the administration to warehouse hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under our control but technically beyond our borders. It is this theory that drove the administration to open a network of CIA-controlled secret prisons—dubbed "black sites"—in undisclosed locations around the world. Application of the theory has already resulted in multiple homicides in the course of interrogations, one of which is recounted in gruesome detail by Jane Mayer in the Nov. 14 issue of The New Yorker.

And just when Congress appeared to be on the verge of doing something about it, Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the principal co-sponsors of the McCain Amendment, convinced the Senate to undercut the amendment by making it unenforceable—at least for the hundreds of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On Thursday night, the Senate approved Graham's proposal, which would selectively suspend the writ of habeas corpus for foreign nationals held at Guantanamo, denying them any access to a court for violations of constitutional or international law—even if they are being subjected to precisely the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment that the McCain Amendment prohibits. Graham's amendment is predicated on the same double standard as the Bush administration's interpretation of the Torture Convention—namely, that it is somehow permissible to do to foreign nationals what would be patently unacceptable if done to citizens.

This double standard is deeply flawed. Legal protections for fundamental rights of those we have locked up should not vary depending on the passport they hold. And this flaw raises a serious question not only about administration policy in the war on terror, but also about American constitutional doctrine.

The administration's justification for treating foreign nationals held abroad in the war on terror differently from those held here first surfaced with respect to the prisoners held at Guantanamo. When lawyers challenged the legality of those detentions, the administration responded that the Constitution does not extend to foreign nationals outside our borders, and that therefore the Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional rights. That issue is now being litigated in the courts—although not for long, if Graham's amendment becomes law.

Then, during Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' confirmation hearings, the administration disclosed that, in its view, not only does the Constitution not apply to foreigners held abroad, but a key part of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment doesn't either. That treaty, signed by virtually every country in the world, and signed and ratified by the United States in 1994, absolutely prohibits such conduct, without exception, even in a state of war.

After 9/11, however, the Bush administration took the view that the prohibition on "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" simply does not apply to foreign detainees held outside the United States. It pointed to the fact that when Congress ratified the treaty, it stated its understanding that "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" comprised conduct that would violate the United States Constitution—whose Fifth Amendment prohibits any coercion that "shocks the conscience" in interrogations. Claiming that the U.S. Constitution does not extend to foreigners overseas, the administration reasoned that the treaty prohibition on "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" is similarly limited.

This legal sleight of hand allows the president to insist repeatedly that he does not condone torture and acts only in accordance with the law, while simultaneously dispatching the vice president to Congress to preserve the loophole that allows the infliction of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment on foreign suspects abroad. That loophole is the legal underpinning of the CIA's reported practice of "disappearing" foreign suspects into secret "black sites" and then using interrogation tactics against them that would unquestionably be forbidden if employed at the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters. The CIA's approved tactics have reportedly included water-boarding—in which the suspect is made to think he is drowning to convince him to talk—mock burials, and threats to send individuals to countries with a known track record for even more brutal forms of torture.

The administration's treaty interpretation makes no sense. The Torture Convention is predicated on the principle that the conduct it prohibits is fundamentally incompatible with human dignity—and all human beings have equal dignity, regardless of their nationality, and regardless of where they are held. There is no evidence that Congress sought to limit the Torture Convention prohibition to conduct within our borders. Abraham Sofaer, who submitted the treaty to Congress on behalf of the first Bush administration, has written to Congress stating that the current administration's position is inconsistent with the original understanding of the convention and improperly turns an effort by Congress to give substantive definition to the terms "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" into a geographical loophole that frees U.S. officials to commit actions just short of torture when acting abroad.

Sen. Graham's proposal to cut off judicial review for foreign nationals held at Guantanamo exploits a similar double standard. By its terms, it applies only to foreign nationals—denying them habeas review that is preserved for citizens. There is no basis for selectively denying judicial review to foreign nationals—if anything, they need such protection even more than citizens, since, unlike citizens, they are unlikely to find any protection through the political process.

These efforts to exploit the vulnerabilities of foreign nationals raise even more fundamental questions about the proper scope of our constitutional obligations. If a particular tactic—say, water-boarding—is unconstitutional because it shocks the conscience when used against a citizen within the United States, why should the result be any different when U.S. officials employ the same tactic against a foreign national overseas?

Distinctions based on nationality and location have historical roots, but those roots are of doubtful validity today. For example, the Supreme Court's failure to treat freed slaves as "citizens" was the basis for its infamous 1857 ruling against Dred Scott. But Congress rejected the rationale of the Dred Scott case in the constitutional amendments adopted after the Civil War, guaranteeing equal protection and due process to all "persons."

When the Constitution was initially adopted, there were also strong distinctions between domestic and international law and jurisdiction—so much so that there was a question whether even U.S. citizens would be protected by the Constitution overseas. Indeed, in 1891, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field wrote that "the Constitution can have no operation in another country."

But while such territorial distinctions might have made some sense in the 18^th century, they make little sense today and have for the most part been abandoned. We routinely extend our laws abroad, prosecuting individuals for conduct overseas if it has any effect on U.S. citizens or property. Since the 1950s, the Supreme Court has held that the Bill of Rights is not limited by our borders and protects U.S. citizens from their own government wherever in the world they may be. Shouldn't the same principle apply to foreign nationals—at least in cases where U.S. officials have exercised coercive authority over them? The rights not to be locked up arbitrarily or to be protected from treatment that shocks the conscience are human rights, not privileges of citizenship. We should honor these rights wherever we are acting and on whomever we are acting.

Hermann Cohen, a 19^th-century Jewish philosopher, once wrote, in an exegesis on the Bible, "The alien was to be protected not because he was a member of one's family, clan, or religious community, but because he was a human being. In the alien, therefore, man discovered the idea of humanity." We are in danger of losing that idea.

David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130028/

 

readme
A Tale of Two Constitutions
Britain, land of freedom.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, Nov. 11, 2005, at 11:42 AM ET

Two countries. One has a constitution with a bill of rights. These documents limit the power of the elected branches. They cannot be repealed or easily amended. Although neither one says so explicitly, there is a rock-hard tradition that the courts, and not the legislature or the executive, have the final say over their interpretation. No elected official would claim more authority than the Supreme Court in interpreting the constitution. (The only important national institution that claims a right to disregard Supreme Court rulings is the New York Times.) Put it all together, and an individual citizen can feel pretty secure against the tyranny of the majority or a runaway government. Or so we suppose.

The other country has what it calls a constitution, but it is a metaphysical conceit—an ill-defined set of ideas and values floating in the ether, not an actual document. Courts do refer to it in deciding cases, but there is no certainty about what the words are, let alone what they mean. There is no established principle that the courts may declare acts of the legislature unconstitutional. The legislature, meanwhile, is sovereign and can trump this constitution by passing an ordinary law. In effect, the individual has no legal protection against the tyranny of the majority.

Or at least he or she didn't until recently. The first country is the United States. The second is Great Britain. In recent decades, Britain has ceded some of its sovereignty to what has evolved into the European Union. This includes some Europe-wide human rights, enforceable by courts even to the point of overturning acts of Parliament. But it's all pretty new. And all these constitutional arrangements, including ours in the United States, require what they call in the theater a "willing suspension of disbelief." They work because we all have agreed that they should work. As Stalin allegedly said about the pope, how many divisions has the Supreme Court?

So, in which country are individual rights more secure? Legally, the clear answer is the United States. But there's something else, something hard to describe because it's essentially a "love of freedom," but it's earthier than that, which I think is more deeply rooted in the older country than the newer one, which broke itself off from the old one over precisely this issue of human freedom. Maybe it's because they don't have the crutch of a real bill of rights. Or maybe it's because their freedom was seriously at risk in the memory of many who are still alive (i.e., in World War II). Or maybe it's tied in with the landscape and the national character in a way that Orwell was able to describe but I cannot.

Anyway, the contrast between the two countries was on display this week. On Wednesday, the British Parliament humiliated the prime minister, Tony Blair, by solidly rejecting his proposal to let police keep someone in custody for up to 90 days without bringing charges. Although the political interest was in how many members of Blair's own Labor Party deserted him, it was the overwhelming opposition by Conservatives that killed the thing. To an American, it takes a bit of effort to wrap your head around this: The prime minister, who leads the rough equivalent of the Democratic Party, said that the sacrifice of freedom was necessary to the war on terror. But the rough equivalent of the Republican Party said that individual rights are more important.

We need not leap to the assumption that this was entirely a matter of glorious principle. No doubt opportunism and the yin/yang of politics played a role: Blair became a ferocious supporter of George W. Bush's war in part to show that a party of the left could be hard-nosed about this sort of thing. And once the war became the dominant issue of British politics, it became only natural that the Tory opposition would find reasons to oppose it. But even if opportunism is what led Conservatives to oppose 90-day detention, there was a language and a set of values available to them to make the case seem at least principled and sincere. It has to do with the traditional conservative suspicion of government and respect for the individual—even the individual accused of terrorism.

Meanwhile, the United States, which once held these truths to be self-evident, is running prison camps in Eastern Europe and telling nobody about them until the Washington Post finds out. President Bush says that we don't and never would practice torture, but he is against outlawing it, for reasons he is unable to articulate but must add up to "just in case." And Vice President Cheney lobbies to exempt the CIA. So, it's good to know that the Department of Transportation will not be torturing people. And perhaps the CIA could get people to wear seat belts. (If Bush and Cheney get their way, the agency will certainly have ways of making you buckle up.)

It could be that all these developments are constitutional. Maybe you can't enforce the U.S. Constitution in Poland. But the Constitution is not supposed to be just an obstacle course for officials who are trying to get around it. It ought to inspire policy even when it doesn't impose policy. Ditto the Geneva Conventions. Why would you even want to be clever about reasons it might not apply here or there? Nor is the Constitution supposed to be divvied up like patronage, with the First Amendment for liberals, the Second Amendment for conservatives, and so on.

Laws, including constitutions, are supposed to have sharp edges. Even without the help of clever lawyers, they define what is permissible in the process of defining what is impermissible, and they send a strong message that if it's not impermissible, it's OK. By contrast, a bone-deep desire to be left alone, a tolerance for eccentricity, a quick resentment of bullies—these are qualities that Britain has more than America, I think. And they may be more important.

Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130035/

reel time
Silver Showers
Sarah Silverman's great geysers of filth.
By David Edelstein
Posted Friday, Nov. 11, 2005, at 11:17 AM ET

She is a nerd's wet dream: a darkly pretty Jewish princess with a potty mouth, reveling in the JAP stereotype while propelling it into the nether-reaches of absurdity—and obscenity. Your Jewish grandmother would meet her and say, "Thank you for bringing home a nice Jewish girl!"—and then, bam! The old woman would hear, "I was raped by a doctor… which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.'" And yet… Grandma might still approve. She'd ask, "Was it a Jewish doctor?"

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (Roadside Attractions), directed by Liam Lynch, is a glorious piece of showmanship—easily the best stand-up film by a Jewish comedian (let's jettison "comedienne," shall we?) I've ever seen. It's not a cultural milestone like Richard Pryor Live in Concert, but it has its own explosively twisted originality. It's a geyser of exhilarating tastelessness.

Silverman's onstage persona might be limited, but it's endlessly resonant. Staring down from behind a large pair of nostrils, she impersonates the over-entitled, solipsistic, materialistic, prejudiced, and insensitive American upper-middle-class female—or, rather, her uncensored doppelganger. She exuberantly free-associates—she's a pipeline to the id. Sexually voracious and unashamed to the point of arrogance, she compliments a black man she's dating by telling him that he would make "a really expensive slave." His indignation doesn't faze her: "I don't care if you think I'm a racist, I just want you to think I'm thin."

I have a list of 50 jokes that are instant classics—but giving away more would be an act of criminal selfishness. What I can promise is that the ratio of splendors to stinkers (there's one involving the World Trade Center) is about five to one—a winning ratio by any measure. When you get on Silverman's wavelength, you brace yourself for the joke—and then it swims up from behind, like the shark in Jaws, or it Jackie Chans you with some pretzel contortion you didn't think a human being (let alone a complacent princess) could execute.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic has some hugely entertaining song and dance numbers (Yes, she sings, too. Can she cook?) and a moderately amusing (maybe too facetious) framing device. Off-stage, she excoriates her manager (the criminally underused Bob Odenkirk) for allowing the wrong kind of mineral water into her dressing room. But that's not the genius part: It's the detail with which she describes the taste of the offending water. Her jokes don't have much sting. Their beauty is that they're mindbenders. "You're a star," she whispers to her reflection in her dressing-room mirror. "And I'm a star-fucker."
… 8:20 a.m. PT

David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at slatemovies@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130130/

 

 

 politics
Cheney's Rules of Evidence
How the vice president argues by deception.
By John Dickerson
Posted Friday, Nov. 18, 2005, at 6:12 PM ET

Dick Cheney likes to play the heavy—or, as a top aide once put it, "sit in a loincloth with a knife in his mouth." After keeping silent for a couple of weeks following the indictment of his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, Cheney donned the loincloth this week and went back on the attack. He criticized administration opponents, saying that they have lost the "basic measure of truthfulness and good faith in the conduct of political debate." Their claim that the president "purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence," said Cheney, "is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city."

Welcome back, Mr. Vice President—you're always good for the headlines. What was striking about Cheney's assault was that while denying critics' charges of manipulation and dishonesty involving prewar intelligence, he resorted to exactly the tactics that inspired the criticism. As he did with the prewar intelligence, Cheney told no outright lies, but he exaggerated the case, picked only evidence he liked, and ignored the caveats. Here's how he did it:

Cheney said: "Some of the most irresponsible comments have, of course, come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorizing force against Saddam Hussein."

By talking about "irresponsible comments," Cheney makes it seem that critics are welcoming insurgent bombs or inviting Saddam Hussein for dinner. But how outlandish, in fact, are these "irresponsible" claims by those who voted to authorize force? The most incendiary quote the administration and GOP committees can offer comes from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid: "[T]he administration engaged in a pattern of manipulation of the facts … as it made its case for attacking, for invading Iraq." Reid's charge is debatable, but it's hardly the combustible, irresponsible speech Cheney suggests it is. Cheney is setting the bar for irresponsibility so low that any questions about prewar intelligence can be dismissed.

Cheney: "These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence, and were free to draw their own conclusions."

Cheney talks only about a narrow question: Did the administration fudge evidence it gave to Congress in advance of the vote to authorize the use of force? That's the most solid ground he can stand on, but even it's still shaky. Cheney does not repeat Bush's claim that members of Congress had access to the same intelligence, because they didn't. But he plays up their unprecedented access to the National Intelligence Estimate before they cast their vote—though Cheney knows that some important caveats were left out of that report. Congress had access to intelligence before bombs started dropping, but the administration decided, in the end, how much and what kind of intelligence that was.

And what the vice president doesn't talk about is all the other ways he, the president, and other members of the war council manipulated evidence in hundreds of speeches and interviews leading up to the war. Cheney, for example, insisted there might be a link between Iraq and the attacks on 9/11 after the administration's official position was that there was no such link. He presented the direst view of Iraq's nuclear program without discussing dissent within the administration about those claims. This was not intelligence data, but these claims were critical to shaping public opinion and putting pressure on Congress to vote for war. He could make a case about why the administration had to be aggressive, but he doesn't.

Cheney: "The saddest part is that our people in uniform have been subjected to these cynical and pernicious falsehoods day in and day out."

Cheney has branded administration opponents as hypocrites and wimps. His last blow is the fiercest: They are unpatriotic. The president and Cheney invoke "the troops" to shut down discussion. But the troops demand this kind of debate. Soldiers aren't in a position to be critical and shouldn't be, so their elected officials need to ask questions and argue on their behalf. American soldiers are smart and tough enough to weather the public debate. They can handle whatever Harry Reid has to say. Plus, Dick Cheney believes in his position and has plenty of backbone, so why won't he fight the opposition on the merits?

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

explainer
What's a Senior Administration Official?
Does the president's personal aide count?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Friday, Nov. 18, 2005, at 6:07 PM ET

Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, who testified on Monday in the CIA leak investigation regarding Valerie Plame, says he first learned her identity from a "senior administration official." That official wasn't Vice President Dick Cheney, according to another unnamed source. It might have been National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley—who neither confirmed nor denied the charge at a press conference on Friday. Which members of the administration count as "senior officials?"

It's mostly up to the reporter. A source who wishes to remain anonymous can ask a reporter for a specific attribution, like "Bush aide" or "source close to the White House." It's up to the reporter to decide whether the suggested title is too general or misleading. If a midlevel member of the White House staff—a deputy assistant to the president, for example—asked a reporter for a highfalutin title like "senior administration official," she might refuse. A source might also ask for a title that's not highfalutin enough: Judith Miller of the New York Times has been criticized for agreeing to refer to Scooter Libby as a "former Hill staffer" rather than a "senior administration official."

Since there are no hard and fast rules on attribution, reporters can punch up their stories by ascribing "senior" status to just about anyone. The only people who can't be senior administration officials, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank told the Explainer, are the interns.

Several Washington reporters said that "senior" officials in the White House must at the very least have "commissioned status." Commissioned staffers include those from the top three ranks of the White House hierarchy. In descending order of importance, these are: assistants to the president, deputy assistants to the president, and special assistants to the president. The 80 or so commissioned staffers in the White House get special dining-room and parking privileges. In general, they also get higher salaries.

In practice, reporters rarely use the term "senior" for anyone below assistant level. (Special Assistant Blake Gottesman, who sits right next to the Oval Office and serves as the president's personal aide, isn't likely to get the title.) There are almost 20 assistants to the president, including familiar figures like Stephen Hadley, senior adviser Karl Rove, Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and press secretary Scott McClellan. The vice president is, of course, also a senior administration official. The most senior official of all—the president—rarely speaks on background. Bill Clinton's press secretary tried (and failed) to work out a suitable attribution for presidential background briefings. Reporters deemed phrases like "someone close to the president" too misleading.

Senior administration officials don't have to come from the White House. Cabinet secretaries are undoubtedly senior, and some reporters extend the title to their deputies and undersecretaries. Even a few officials at the assistant secretary level might merit "senior" designation. Given these possibilities, the population of senior officials in the administration could number well over 100.

In many cases, the rank ascribed to a source depends on the context of a story. A reporter might call Tony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a "senior administration official" in a story about avian influenza. But Fauci would never get that title—in fact, he'd never be quoted—in a story on education.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Andy Alexander of Cox Newspapers, John Burke of the University of Vermont, Deborah Mathis of the Medill School of Journalism, and Mike McCurry of Public Strategies Washington.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130669/

 

college week
The Rules of Distraction
Hey, you—with the laptop! Ignore your professor and read this instead.
By Avi Zenilman
Posted Friday, Nov. 18, 2005, at 4:19 PM ET

My professor right now is talking about something important and world-historical, but instead of listening, I am writing this article. I just e-mailed my editor telling her I'd finish a draft by tomorrow, but before that I was clicking through old New Yorkers and checking NBA box scores. Normally I'd IM with a friend about how boring the lecture is, but I can see that today she brought a pen and paper and is idly staring into space. Lame.

There are about 100 students in the Columbia University lecture I'm currently attending, and about 10 have laptops. (The lecture consists mostly of grad students in their late 20s, so the ratio is a bit low.) I can see four screens from here; only one person is actually taking notes. Another is looking at the registrar's Web site. The other two keep checking their e-mail.

In sum, a relatively well-behaved class. In my other lectures, nearly half of the students spend time pecking away at laptops, and most of us aren't just fact-checking the professor. This is the classroom of the future: Students use class time to read the Drudge Report, send e-mail, play Legend of Zelda, or update our profiles on Facebook.com. Last year, during a guest lecture by the estimable K. Anthony Appiah on W.E.B. DuBois and cosmopolitanism, I edited three articles for a campus magazine. But the distraction epidemic is really nothing new. Replace laptops with crumpled notes, and the classroom of the future looks a lot like the classroom of the past.

Almost 10 years ago, a couple of researchers from the University of the Kentucky prophesied the coming of an educational utopia in which professors would "replace conventional blackboards and chalk with a collaborative, networked, portable computing environment." For years, tech enthusiasts (and tech companies, natch) have been bullish on putting all sorts of information and technology at students' fingertips. This enthusiasm seemed to hit its irrationally exuberant peak in 2003, when Boeing gave Washington State University $99,000 to create something actually called "the classroom of the future"—which, it turns out, resembles the Star Trek Enterprise done over by Ikea.

But now that 42 percent of American college classrooms have wireless access—and more and more students are using Wi-Fi-enabled laptops each year—administrators and professors are having second thoughts. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal noted that administrators at UVa, UCLA, Stanford, the University of Houston, and others have considered "devices to block wireless access in the classroom after faculty complaints of out-of-control Web surfing." An October news feature in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution sympathized with college instructors across Georgia who "are trying to figure out how to get students to log off their computers long enough to listen."

The Internet is, of course, a distraction. There are some ground rules: I always try to position myself so my screen isn't in the line of sight of the professor or one of the teaching assistants. And after a bad pop-up ad experience, I always press the mute button. Still, even when a lecture engages me, it can be hard to pay attention when the little AIM man starts bobbing up and down at the bottom of my screen.

But are these distractions worse than the old-fashioned ones—doodling, dozing, reading, playing footsie, passing notes? Those of us mucking around on IMDB today are probably the same kids who in middle school, before the wireless age, either skipped class or wrote painfully bad rap lyrics on the inside of their notebooks. (Avi Zvi in the place to be/ Kick all ya'll again and you'll never pee … .) The students in front assiduously typing are probably the ones who spent eighth grade taking painstaking notes by hand.

And it's not at all clear that wireless classrooms cause any decline in the quality of student work. One of the most telling anecdotes in the Journal story is that of Jonathan Clarke, a finance professor at Georgia Tech whose classrooms were outfitted with wireless in 1999. He said he didn't realize people in his class were Webbing it up until two years ago, "when the presence of a guest lecturer gave him a chance to sit among the students." What's remarkable here is not Clarke's distracted students, but the fact that for four years his students had been ignoring him, and he found out not when test scores plunged, but when he walked down the aisles.

It could even be that distractions make for better students. Last year, a high-achieving friend of mine—fellowship finalist, budding academic, campus leader—brought the classic video game Quake to class one day, and afterward he claimed that the distraction enhanced his educational experience:

The part of my brain that handles spatial relationships and tactical thinking is clearly distinct from the part that reads, writes, and analyzes historically. I ended up both winning the game with a well-placed rocket and learning everything [the Prof] said.

This observation may be total hooey. But when Cornell University researchers outfitted classrooms with wireless Internet and monitored students' browsing habits, they concluded, "Longer browsing sessions during class tend to lead to lower grades, but there's a hint that a greater number of browsing sessions during class may actually lead to higher grades." It seems a bit of a stretch to impute a causal relationship, but it's certainly possible that the kind of brain that can handle multiple channels of information is also the kind of brain that earns A's.

In any event, even when multitaskers can't keep track of the professor, it probably doesn't matter much. In lectures at large universities, especially in the humanities and social sciences, class time is usually taken up by the broad outlines of the subject. The real learning occurs when we bear down and pore over the hundreds of pages assigned every week—the lecture I'm currently tuning out assigns about 3,000 pages of reading over the span of the semester—and when we attend small discussion sections with graduate students who go over what we've read. Any good grade-grubber knows that the trick to doing well on exams is knowing the reading, not what the professor said last week.

Perhaps the real problem with laptops in lectures isn't the laptops, but professors' over-reliance on the lecture as a learning tool. Earlier this week in Slate, M. Stanley Katz contended that "the most effective learning is active learning … teaching must involve presenting students with problems to solve rather than merely lecturing about those problems." Amen, professor. You try listening to rambling, jargon-filled disquisitions for 15 hours a week without reading blogs. At least Gawker solicits our contributions.

Judging by the Journal article, one professor at the University of Houston seems to be cottoning on. He "now peppers his lectures with enough questions to reduce students' Web surfing. When he is discussing a particularly complex subject, he says, he tells students to close their laptops." Now, this could be a problem: If I start actually learning in class, how will I find time to do anything else?

Avi Zenilman is a former Slate intern.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130600/

 

readme
What Abortion Debate?
Why there is no honesty about Roe.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, Nov. 18, 2005, at 6:09 AM ET

In a 1986 case called Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court ruled that state laws against homosexual sodomy do not violate the U.S. Constitution. In a 2003 case called Lawrence v. Texas, the court ruled that on second thought, anti-gay-sodomy laws do violate the Constitution. Liberal politicians cheered this rare and unexpected admission of error by the court. They did not express any alarm about the danger of overturning precedents. Plessy v. Ferguson, upholding racial segregation, was a major precedent when the court overturned it and ended formal racial segregation with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Liberals did not complain.

These days, the vital importance of respecting past Supreme Court rulings is an urgent talking point for Democratic operatives, liberal talk-show hosts, and senators feeling their way toward a reason to oppose Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Olympia Snowe, a Republican liberal from Maine, said Wednesday that Alito's respect for precedents will be "the major question" in her decision whether to support him.

The major question for Snowe and other liberal senators actually is not respect for judicial precedents. The major question is abortion. They want to know whether Alito would vote to overturn Roe. But by the absurd unwritten rules of these increasingly stylized episodes, they are not allowed to ask him and he is not allowed to answer. So the nominee does a fan dance, tantalizing the audience by revealing little bits of his thinking but denying us a complete view. And senators pretend, maybe even to themselves, that they really care about precedents and privacy in the abstract.

The artifice can get quite elaborate. Sen. Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, makes a half-serious distinction among precedents, super-precedents, and super-duper precedents. Others emphasize that social policies can start with a Supreme Court ruling and develop into deeply rooted national values. That happened with Roe and abortion, they would say, while the opposite happened with Bowers and laws against homosexuality. Of course if a policy has really become a deeply rooted national value, then the once-controversial Supreme Court ruling is superfluous, because democracy will protect such a value. The fear that motivates Roe panic is that the rights at stake are not deeply rooted. Or not deeply rooted enough.

While Roe defenders play this double game, ostensible Roe opponents, especially those in the White House, may be playing a triple game. Their public position is A) Roe is a terrible decision, responsible for a vast slaughter of innocents; B) legal abortion is deeply immoral; C) we ignore all this in choosing Supreme Court justices, and you (Roe defenders) should, too. It doesn't make sense, and it's not believable. The natural assumption is that Bush is trying to con abortion-rights supporters. Only an idiot would squander the opportunity to rid the nation of Roe because of some fatuous nonsense about picking judges without finding out the one thing you most urgently want to know.

But Machiavellians of my acquaintance believe that it is the anti-abortion folks who are getting conned. The last thing in the world that Republican strategists want is the repeal of Roe. If abortion becomes a legislative issue again, all those pro-choice women and men who have been voting Republican because abortion was safe would have to reconsider, and many would bolt. Meanwhile, the reversal of Roe would energize the left the way Roe itself energized the right. Who needs that?

Abortion is the most important issue in American politics. It shouldn't be. Others have as big an impact on the lives of individuals and a far bigger cumulative effect on society. No other nation obsesses about abortion the way we do. But many Americans believe that legalized abortion is government-sanctioned murder or something close to it. And many others (including me) believe that forcing a woman to go through an unwanted pregnancy and childbirth is the most extreme unjustified government intrusion on personal freedom short of sanctioning murder. For many in these groups, abortion is almost by definition an issue that overwhelms all others, or comes close, when they are deciding how (and whether) to vote. It is also, on both sides, a reliable issue for opening wallets.

Yet there is no abortion debate. Or at least the debate is unconnected to the reasons people on both sides feel so strongly about it. What passes for an abortion debate is a jewel of the political hack's art: a big issue that is exploited without being discussed. In the Virginia governor's race this year, both candidates said they were personally morally opposed to abortion, and both accused the other candidate of falsely accusing him of intending to act on this moral belief, which both of them denied. And both of them, in this last particular, were probably telling the truth.

Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130607/

moneybox
Housing Bubble Insurance
Can you protect the value of your home when the housing market drops?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, Nov. 18, 2005, at 6:08 AM ET

Thanks to rising prices, homeowners increasingly view their houses as investments. At the end of 2004, U.S. residential real estate was worth $18.6 trillion—more than the entire stock market. The National Association of Realtors reported that 23 percent of homes bought in 2004 were investment properties. It's no surprise that there's now a company, Condoflip.com, which aims to let people trade homes the way they trade stocks.

More people have more riding on their homes—and second homes—as investments than ever before. And yet there's no good way to insure those investments. Homeowners policies only cover the infrastructure from physical damage. But if your home falls in value from $1 million to $750,000 thanks to market dynamics, you can't call Allstate. So far, the only methods of hedging against the value of your home are crude and inefficient. You can short the stocks of publicly held home-building companies, like Toll Brothers or Pulte, or buy and sell options on them. But when you do so, you're betting on management and all sorts of other factors. There's no guarantee Toll will fall when the value of your house drops.

Next spring, however, investors might finally have a better hedging product. Just in time for the apparent top of the housing market, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is introducing futures and options on housing prices in 10 cities for the second quarter of 2006. (Here's an overview of the products, and CME's White Paper on the topic.)

These derivatives are largely the brainchild of one of the leading apostles of investing caution: Robert Shiller. Author of the prescient best seller Irrational Exuberance, the Yale economist has a fecund academic and entrepreneurial mind. Along with economist Karl Case, Shiller in the early 1990s developed a method of tracking home prices and devised indexes to chart the rise or fall in home values. The company he helped form in 1991, Case Shiller Weiss, was acquired by Fiserv in 2002 and compiles Case-Shiller Indexes for 10 markets, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, New York, and San Francisco. In 2004, Shiller and CME announced they would work together to create options based on the indexes.

When they debut next spring, the options will be pitched to big-time real estate owners, builders, mortgage lenders, and hedge funds. A builder putting up a $100 million subdivision outside Chicago ready for sale in 2008 could buy puts on the Chicago housing index that expire in the summer of 2008. If the housing market plummeted and the company took a bath on the McMansions, it would recoup a chunk of the losses on the rising value of the puts. But it's unlikely that the people who could most benefit from hedging—individuals—will be big users. Why? These options will cover large markets—it will be tough to hedge the value of your own house, which depends so much on your particular neighborhood. The Case-Shiller New York Commuter Index covers single-family residential homes from the Jersey Shore to New Haven, Conn., a remarkably heterodox stretch that contains markets and submarkets and sub-submarkets.

There's also a psychological barrier. Individuals have shown a great propensity not to buy insurance on financial assets, even when such insurance is readily available. Most individual investors don't hedge their large stock holdings: Did you buy puts on the Nasdaq-100 Trust to guard against the drop in your tech stock portfolio? What's more, recent history shows that investors tend to assume that unsustainable gains will continue, investing more money into overheated sectors rather than hedging them. Before the market crash in 2000, investors weren't grasping for advance copies of Shiller's Irrational Exuberance; they were gobbling up Dow 36,000, an uncautionary book written by different shillers.

In his most recent book, The New Financial Order, Shiller proposes another way homeowners might be able to hedge against the value of their home—a way that wouldn't require options. What if you could take out insurance policies on your home equity? You would buy insurance guaranteeing that if you sold your house, you would get at least the, say, $200,000 in equity you have today. Financial services companies would do the complicated risk analysis to figure out what that should cost, given the direction of the housing market, etc. "With the vast electronic data sets of home prices now available, it is possible to devise indices for many small geographic areas, even for individual neighborhoods within a city," Shiller writes. This isn't idle academic speculation. Shiller and several Yale colleagues have started the Home Equity Protection Project, which has been offering residents of Syracuse a way to hedge their home investments since 2002.

The CME's housing options exemplify 21^st-century financial innovation. But the overwhelming majority of home investors will likely find the options too scary and complicated. So, it may be that those seeking to protect their housing equity may resort instead to a 19^th-century financial innovation: home insurance.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130596/

movies
Scary Harry
A more sinister Potter.
By David Edelstein
Posted Friday, Nov. 18, 2005, at 6:06 AM ET

Having grumbled about the twinkly, inexpressive, family-movie ambiance of the first (Chris Columbus-helmed) Harry Potter adaptation, I can only give thanks that each subsequent installment has been darker and creepier; that the last, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, seemed organically rendered—from the inside out—instead of storyboarded from on high by neutered elves; and that the newest, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Warner Bros.), is a ghoulish PG-13 horror picture from its first scene—one of those caretaker-investigating-a-strange-light-in-an-old-dark-house numbers. No, I couldn't be more pleased with what the screenwriter, Steven Kloves, and the director, Mike Newell, have wrought this time. That said, I stood my ground and left my 7-year-old (who devoured the book) at home. Weak-willed parents of similarly aged children should prepare for night sweats and bed-wetting. It's scary, kids.

Goblet of Fire has little in the way of niceties: no blithe schoolboy (or -girl) mischief-making, no wisecracking portraits, no bizarre but lovable pets, and barely a frame of Quidditch. (A murderous army of Death Eaters interrupts the World Cup festivities.) More terrifying, puberty has finished its work and dating is now neck-and-neck with Voldemort as Harry's most soul-wrenching preoccupation. At this point in J.K. Rowling's series, it's clear that he and Hermione are not destined to fall into each other's arms. While Hermione and Ron resort to traditional British bickering in the face of their undeclared attraction, Harry stews over a fetching classmate named Cho Chang (Katie Leung), who turns out to have a Scottish brogue—how adorable—and no personality.

Daniel Radcliffe's Harry is aging to look like Elijah Wood's dour, pinched brother—but I've never minded his lack of color. Too much acting might interfere with our ability to project ourselves into his head and vicariously experience the fruits of his celebrity. Radcliffe does need all the help he can get from Rupert Grint's Ron, his red hair in a Beatles shag, and Emma Watson's Hermione, who continues to demonstrate that humorless know-it-all valedictorian grinds can be madly attractive provided you have the right casting director.

Speaking of casting, it's always a treat to see what big-studio-franchise cash can produce in the way of top-flight British (and Irish) actors. The islands have been swept for great thespians; this movie must have closed the theaters for months. Along with the peerlessly bitchy Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane (smitten with a visiting giantess who looks like an elongated Judith Miller—only nicer), and Michael Gambon (who has found his Dumbledore, injecting a dose of irony into his lines), we get more Gary Oldman (albeit only as a smoke-and-ash face in a fireplace), more Timothy Spall (vermin with a pedigree), and, best of all, more of the delicious Shirley Henderson as Moaning Myrtle (now sneaking peeks at Harry's privates). There are three additions: Miranda Richardson—regrettably one-note—as a journalist who has made up her mind about Harry well in advance of their interview (i.e., the normal-sized Judith Miller); the amusing glowerer Brendan Gleeson as the latest Defense Against the Dark Arts professor; and Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort.

Fiennes rises from a cauldron of what looks like primordial slime—and proves worthy of it. The Dark Wizard's frame is all there, but his features aren't filled in: He's like a statue sculpted from pus, a raging infection on legs. The scariest thing is Fiennes' voice. While Voldemort moves jerkily, not quite at home in his body, his diction is supple and edged with cold steel. All form and sterling elocution, he is every inch the English public-school-bred bogeyman.

David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at slatemovies@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130629/

 

press box
Bob Ain't Judy
But the similarities don't flatter Woodward.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 10:11 PM ET

It's so obvious that the Associated Press ran with it this morning, comparing Bob Woodward's career with Judith Miller's.

Woodward's reputation took a beating yesterday when his newspaper, the Washington Post, revealed that he had just informed his bosses that in mid-June 2003 he learned from an anonymous source that Joseph C. Wilson IV's wife was CIA employee Valerie Plame. Miller, the recently "retired" New York Times reporter, similarly neglected to inform her editors of her first meeting in June 2003 with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in which she discussed Wilson, until special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald reminded her of it.

The similarities continue: Miller called herself Miss Run Amok because she did whatever she wanted at the Times; Woodward's colleagues at the Washington Post call him a bigfoot because he does whatever he wants.

Miller didn't write about Plamegate after discussing Wilson with Libby, nor does she appear to have helped her paper pursue the story. Likewise, Woodward didn't write about the subject and doesn't appear to have helped his colleagues. Miller writes books. So does Woodward. Both rely heavily on anonymous sources, appear on Larry King Live frequently, are accused of carrying the administration's water, have produced Pulitzer-winning journalism, and will be subpoenaed for the Scooter Libby trial.

After that, the parallels grow crooked until they skew: While both are being shamed for not telling their bosses what their sources said, only Miller is being shunned for reporting the b.s. she heard from various other sources. And while Woodward ultimately apologized to his editors for keeping them out of the loop, Miller is still waiting for the first below-zero day in hell to make amends.

The most significant difference between the two journalists is that Woodward has gotten it right—spectacularly right on many occasions—more often than any other working reporter. The Miller record, especially on the WMD front, isn't even in the same solar system.

Setting Woodward's Watergate accomplishments aside, he deserves lasting respect for the way he revolutionized the Supreme Court beat with 1979's The Brethren, which he wrote with Scott Armstrong. The institution was—and remains—more leak-proof than the CIA, and The Brethren was the first book to put a human face on a living Supreme Court and its decision-making ways. Veil (1987) captured the out-of-control cowboy that was spook-master William Casey. With nary an anonymous source, Woodward chronicled the life and death of John Belushi in Wired (1984). Although they flow as slowly as an ice-clogged river, The Commanders (1991), The Agenda (1994), Bush at War (2002), and Plan of Attack (2004) boast a thoroughness that you have to admire. Has anybody ever gotten as far inside a working presidential administration as Woodward?

But at what cost? Did getting too close to Casey cause Woodward to miss the Iran-contra scandal? Also, Woodward's critics damn him as a stenographer to power. But if that's the case, you've got to admit that he takes fantastic shorthand. Although his versions of presidential events are subject to debate and interpretation, the underlying truths of his accounts stand. Yes, some of Woodward's reporting may seem incredibly one-sided. But isn't one side of the story today preferable to both sides of the story 40 years hence when the archivists unseal the presidential papers? If nothing else, does not Woodward's "slow journalism and fast history" (as investigative reporter Steve Weinberg once put it) encourage the unheard side to speak out once Woodward's take is printed?

The dismissals of Woodward's books as dictation can change with the political weather. Rutgers University history and media-studies professor David Greenberg (also a former Woodward assistant) notes that Bush at War earned Woodward the stenographer kiss-off from "the chattering classes" when it appeared. But in 2004, when the liberal tide had risen against the Iraq war, the same people who had denounced the book as limp mined it for anti-Bush material.

When Woodward makes mistakes, you won't hear him blaming anybody else, least of all his sources. Compare that with Miller, who told her own newspaper that, yes, she got WMD "totally wrong," but only because the "analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them—we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong." She is, of course, wrong about this. Not everybody got it wrong, as Michael Massing has persuasively written.

Even if Woodward is on the up-and-up, he still has much squirrelly behavior to account for. For instance, his justification for not helping his paper pursue the big Plame story is no more plausible, on its face, than Miller's. He claims to have tipped off fellow Post reporter Walter Pincus about Wilson's wife, but Pincus says it didn't happen. Miller claimed most recently in an e-mail to Times Public Editor Byron Calame that she suggested to Jill Abramson—then Washington bureau chief and now Times managing editor—that the bureau check out Wilson and Plame. Abramson tells me, "That is not so." I believe her.

Woodward shares other DNA with Miller, something he might not like to admit, considering the circumstances. Both are practitioners of "access journalism," ever seeking to cultivate sources higher and higher up the power pyramid. Miller gave this kind of reporting its ugliest face when she said in a 2004 radio interview:

My job was not to collect information and analyze it independently as an intelligence agency; my job was to tell readers of the New York Times as best as I could figure out, what people inside the governments who had very high security clearances, who were not supposed to talk to me, were saying to one another about what they thought Iraq had and did not have in the area of weapons of mass destruction.

Access journalists can also become incredibly controlling and possessive. While hunting WMD in Iraq with the MET Alpha team, Miller "intimidated" U.S. Army soldiers with the names of the powerful and famous back in Washington, namely Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his undersecretary, Douglas Feith. As the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reported, she battled with the Times Baghdad bureau chief over access to Ahmed Chalabi, whom she considered her chattel.

I can't cite any similar highhandness on Woodward's part, nor is he the sort to sluice the words of authorities directly into his journalism. But I wonder if he gets too chummy with his best and most powerful sources, as the recent controversy indicates. Slate columnist Fred Kaplan remembers Woodward emerging from the spectators' section to greet Colin Powell at Powell's 1989 confirmation hearings as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kaplan, who was covering the story for the Boston Globe from the press table, says Powell hallooed Woodward as if he were a long-lost frat brother. Woodward kept his standard reserve, but his wide grin telegraphed their mutual admiration.

What troubles me about Woodward's conduct in the Plame affair is his Miller-esque self-centeredness. Absolute vigilance in protecting the confidentiality of sources is wonderful, but not when it comes at the expense of finding a way to report the news.

Even though Woodward has publicly apologized to Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. for caching the Plame nugget rather than sharing it with the Post, I'm not convinced he feels that he's done anything wrong. To sit on such incendiary information for so long, especially while other reporters are being threatened with jail, is beneath the standards to which I thought Woodward subscribed. I can see him waffling for two months, six months, or nine months. But 29? If he owes Post editors an apology, surely he owes his readers one, too, and reassurances about what kind of reporter he'll be in the future.

******

Am I the only one who's noticed how pleased Downie seems to be at Woodward's trip to the doghouse? Downie wasn't gloating last night discussing the furor on Chris Matthews' Hardball, but he wasn't suffering, either. Pleased or gloating? Let me know what you think at slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

 

explainer
How To Start Your Own Town
Can you name it after yourself?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 6:21 PM ET

Download the MP3 audio version of this story here. The Explainer now has its own free daily podcast; click here to learn more.

The town of Clark, Texas, agreed to change its name to "DISH" on Tuesday, after the town council worked out a corporate deal that will give every resident free satellite TV. The founder of the town, L.E. Clark, was disappointed by the change. "I worked my butt off a little over a year getting it incorporated," he told the Associated Press. How do you found a town?

Get to know the neighbors. Though each state has its own rules on "municipal incorporation," in general you'll need to get 51 percent of the eligible voters in the area to go along with you. (It's easiest to start a town from scratch, as opposed to by secession; most upstarts begin as "unincorporated communities" within a larger county.) In 2000, Clark hired a surveyor to draw up boundaries for a town that would be a little bigger than a square mile and would include 254 people—of whom only 65 were registered to vote. To found Clark, Texas, he had to convince only a few dozen neighbors it was a good idea.

To incorporate a town, you'll need a lawyer who can handle the paperwork. Once you've decided on where to put your town, the first step toward You-ville is to get a petition signed by some of the people who live there. In Texas, you'll need 10 percent of the voters. In Arkansas, you need to get 75 signatures, no matter how big your town is going to be.

An application for forming a town includes the signed petition, a proposed name, and—in some cases—a proposed form of government. There are four basic town governments to choose from—mayor-council, council-manager, commission, or representative town meeting—but some states' laws limit your options depending on the size of your community. Once you complete your application, all you typically need is a "yes" vote from your neighbors and the approval of a county judge or state official. In some places, though, a town charter must be granted by vote of the state legislature.

Depending on where you live, you may face certain restrictions on your right to incorporate. Your proposed town may need to have a minimum number of people, for example, or it may need to be a minimum distance from other towns and cities. The description of where it is should be very specific—for an example, take a look at the charter-specified boundaries of Danbury, Conn. And some states will expect your town to have a unique name, so think again if you wanted to use "Fairview" or "Midway."

An unincorporated community gets its services from the county without paying municipal taxes, so frivolous town-founding can be a bad idea. Why might you want to incorporate? First, you could be heading off annexation by a nearby city. The residents of what is now DISH, Texas were afraid of being annexed by Fort Worth. If their land had become part of the city, they'd have faced the high property taxes used to cover social services in less affluent areas. Second, unincorporated communities have very little control over what gets built in the area. But towns can control their own zoning—and thereby protect their property values.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Cy Behroozi of the National League of Cities and Gary Miller of Washington University.

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Commencing at the point formed by the intersection of the boundary lines between the City and Town of Danbury, the Town of New Fairfield, and the State of New York, thence proceeding as follows: North 74 degrees East a distance of 12,750 feet more or less to a point; thence North 73 degrees 30 minutes East a distance of 18,400 feet more or less to a point, which is the common bound between the said Danbury, the said Town of New Fairfield, and the Town of Brookfield; thence South 14 degrees 30 minutes East a distance of 12, 407 feet more or less to a point on the North side of Federal Road; thence South 75 degrees 45 minutes East a distance of 2,570 feet more or less to a point marking the common bound between the said Danbury, the said Town of Brookfield, and the Town of Bethel; thence South 4 degrees East a distance of 4,878 feet more or less to the intersection of Interstate Route #84 with Payne Road; thence generally in a southerly direction along the said Payne Road a distance of 5,100 feet more or less to a point; thence due West a distance of 750 feet more or less to East Swamp Brook; thence in a southerly direction along said East Swamp Brook a distance of 2,200 feet more or less to its intersection with East Swamp Road; thence South 38 degrees 45 minutes West a distance of 6,800 feet more or less to a point, said point lying on the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad line of tracks; thence generally in a westerly direction a distance of 2,800 feet more or less to Coalpit Hill Road; thence 2,200 feet more or less in a southwesterly direction to a point; thence South 12 degrees 45 minutes East a distance of 13,700 feet more or less to a point, said point marking the common bound between the said Danbury, the said Town of Bethel, and the Town of Redding; thence South 75 degrees 30 minutes West a distance of 12,500 feet more or less to a point, marking the common bound between the said Danbury, the said Town of Redding, and the Town of Ridgefield; thence North 23 degrees 45 minutes West a distance of 11,825 feet more or less to a point; thence North 68 degrees 15 degrees West a distance of 4,757 feet more or less to a point adjacent to Pine Mountain Road; thence North 15 degrees West a distance of 5,736 feet more or less to a point; thence South 85 degrees 30 minutes West a distance of 9,800 feet more or less to a point, marking the common bound between said Danbury, the Town of Ridgefield, and the State of New York; thence in a northerly direction a distance of 23,700 feet more or less along the boundary marking the State of New York to the point of beginning.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

 

jurisprudence
Bring It On
Why are conservatives chickening out of their big national conversation on judges?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 2:46 PM ET

This week's revelation that Judge Samuel Alito is on record, as early as 1985, insisting that he "personally believes very strongly" that there is no constitutional right to abortion should have conservative pundits and thinkers jigging for joy. After all, they claim that they're dying to have this big, defining, national conversation about the role of judges; about the need to repair the damage wrought by renegade liberal activists who've been trampling all over the Constitution for decades. So, here is Sam Alito, unequivocally opening the door to that national conversation with his personal assertion that Roe is bad law.

And what are Alito's supporters, and Alito himself, doing? Backpedaling so fast, all you can see is the blur of their lost integrity.

Listen to Fox News' Brit Hume, who says: "[T]these were not personal views he was discussing, in all fairness, though were they? ... No, he has said these were the legal arguments that he made as a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department."

Listen to Todd F. Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, who says, "Alito was saying, 'You might want to know my political bona fides.' In no way does he say his political views dictate his judicial philosophy." Or listen to Alito himself, who told Dianne Feinstein: "First of all, it was different then. ... I was an advocate seeking a job. It was a political job. And that was 1985. I'm now a judge, you know. I've been on the circuit court for 15 years. And it's very different. I'm not an advocate. I don't give heed to my personal views. What I do is interpret the law." Listen to the Alito who told Ted Kennedy, D.-Mass., "that he's an older person, that he's learned more, that he thinks he's a wiser person and he has a better grasp and understanding about constitutional rights and liberties."

So, here we have a lawyer putting forth a legal opinion on a constitutional matter, and now he and his supporters seek to reduce it to the functional doctrinal equivalent of, "You simply must tell me what's in this artichoke dip."

Or listen instead to the near-deafening silence from the columnists, advocates, and politicians who only weeks ago begged the president to ditch Harriet Miers for a candidate who would boldly and lucidly articulate the arguments against liberal judicial activism, "legislating from the bench," and the results-oriented judging that brought us decisions like Roe. There is a smattering of exceptions, conservatives who have stepped forward touting the courage of their convictions. Bruce Fein is brave enough to opine that Alito couldn't and shouldn't parrot John Roberts' claim that he was merely mouthing GOP platitudes. "This idea that all the folks in the Reagan administration were all apparatchiks who didn't believe what they were saying and writing is surreal," he said. "In Alito's memos, it's clear that he wasn't writing these things because he was forced to do so. He wrote them because he believed them."

Similarly, Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, has said that "Judge Alito's statement in 1985 reflects a legal view that has been widely held among judges, lawyers, and legal scholars from across the political spectrum, who have widely divergent views on the proper abortion policy." Well, good for you, Bruce and Wendy. But, um, where are the rest of you?

Might it be that your calls for this big old national bull session over activist judging are as cynical and results-based as the holding in Roe that you so revile? Could it be that the national polls—which indicate robust support for Roe and strong opposition to justices who'd reverse it—have rendered this conversation too dangerous? Or is it the prospect of the national backlash that would follow from actually reversing Roe that has rendered you speechless? Aren't you eager, finally, to defend the GOP platform, which overtly promises that the president will appoint judges who will defend the "sanctity of life" and overturn Roe? Or are your notions of scrupulous judicial purity less compelling in the cold light of political reality?

If you aren't brave enough to openly discuss the merits of Roe, can we at least chat about the role of precedent? We can limit the questioning to Judge Alito's views on stare decisis—if he is brave enough to stand by his denouncement of Roe at his hearings. That, too, is a discussion that would be welcome. But it would require candor and openness; more than a retreat to vague half assurances about "privacy" and the irreducible brilliance of the Griswold decision.

Conservatives have argued that there is a double standard at work here, that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed despite her "radical" espousal of abortion, polygamy, and other mad notions. But of course, besides the fact that so many of the claims made about Ginsburg's views are false or distorted, Ginsburg was willing to discuss her views of abortion and women's rights quite openly. Also, her views were in line with the law. What part of her confirmation hearing makes it acceptable to retreat to smoke signals when the nominee opposes Roe?

A few weeks back, I optimistically suggested that the death of the Harriet Miers nomination also spelled the death of coded speech about abortion. I asserted that the GOP base that had scuttled her confirmation would no longer accept coded messages about Roe. But here's the flip side: Movement conservatives will no longer accept coded messages about nominees and Roe, but they are not brave enough to send clear ones when it matters the most.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130599/

college week
College Radio
What's changed—and what hasn't.
By Douglas Wolk
Posted Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 2:38 PM ET

College radio has always been an unslick, spit-and-baling-wire affair, surviving on the strength of its volunteers' and listeners' enthusiasm. At my old station, we were pretty sure the studio's control panel had been welded together from archaic dishwasher parts, but the staff happily argued for hours over the merits of records pressed in editions of 500 copies, and we'd stay on the air for nine hours straight if the DJs scheduled after us had overslept.

Most of American radio has changed drastically in the decade and a half since I left college—it's been taken over by a few huge conglomerates, fiercely battling each other for market share. College radio, though, is almost exactly the same as it's always been—run on a shoestring and fueled by earnest devotion—because there's no money in it: Most college stations have noncommercial licenses. What has changed in the last 15 years is the cultural impact of college radio. Back then, having your song broadcast after a scratched-up Sex Pistols LP played backward by a 20-year-old DJ cramming for her midterms was a step on the way to the big time: If you got played enough on college stations, it was a pretty sure thing that you'd eventually graduate to commercial radio and much wider exposure. That's not true any more.

In the '80s and early '90s, college radio was an incubator for bands aiming for success in the commercial format that was first called "modern rock," a name that gradually gave way to "alternative rock." College-radio play was perceived as a necessary proving ground on the way to the big time. Before commercial stations would touch them, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden, the Clash, the Smiths, and dozens of other bands started out as favorites at college stations, which generally preferred new sounds to old formulas. All of them eventually became staples of commercial-alternative radio, although some had to wait longer than others—Costello, for instance, appeared on the cover of the first issue of the college-radio magazine CMJ in 1979 but didn't hit the Billboard Top 20 for another decade.

Then, in 1991 and 1992, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" altered the landscape. The major labels, eager to replicate the mainstream success of Nirvana, spent a fortune signing up anybody with a pulse and a distortion pedal and hyping them to college stations. (A tiny fraction of that money trickled down to the stations themselves, but then again, it doesn't take a lot to buy a college student—some undergrad music directors would roll over for a pair of tickets to a concert and a couple of Rolling Rocks.) The early '90s alternative-rock bubble eventually burst, as a lot of the crappier post-grunge bands that majors had signed up began to be ignored by both college and commercial radio. Anybody remember Radish, the subject of a way-too-enthusiastic New Yorker profile in 1996?

Eventually, major labels became a lot more selective about what "underground" rock bands they'd sign. That caution lingers to this day. While there's still a bidding war every few years over a band like the Strokes, most big labels have figured out that they're likely to get more return on their investment from hip-hop, tween-friendly pop, and older listeners' favorites like Santana and Sheryl Crow.

The majors never abandoned college radio altogether, but their partial retreat has been a boon to independent labels. Indie-rock bands had found a home on college stations since the early '80s, but they took awhile to make it to the top of the college charts—the first independently released college No. 1 was the Spinanes' Manos (Sub Pop), in late 1993. In the mid-'90s, though, the indies took over in a big way—only six of the current top 20 albums on college radio are on major labels, according to CMJ New Music Report, and No. 1 is the self-titled album by Broken Social Scene, on the small Canadian label Arts and Crafts.

It's odd, then—at least on the surface—that a lot of the bands that have done exceptionally well on college radio over the last decade are still absent from the airwaves outside campuses. Sleater-Kinney, Stephen Malkmus, Bright Eyes, the Decemberists, the New Pornographers, Tortoise, and Sufjan Stevens are all major stars on college radio and solidly popular as touring artists—but you'll almost never hear them on a Z100. There's a reason for that, and it doesn't have a lot to do with what they sound like.

Case in point: Death Cab for Cutie. The Seattle emo band has made the jump from college to commercial-alternative stations in the last few months—their "Soul Meets Body" is currently a Top 10 hit on Billboard's modern-rock chart. Why them and not the Decemberists, say? The answer is depressingly simple: After years on the indie Barsuk imprint, Death Cab moved to Atlantic Records for their new album Plans. The cost of promoting records to commercial-rock radio stations is so high that effectively only major labels can afford it, so it's nearly impossible for a band to cross over without major-label support. It's also true that college radio's swing toward music released on indies has diminished its cultural power: The cult heroes it creates still might become stars eventually, but there's no guarantee of that anymore.

But the great thing about college radio is that it doesn't need to care about being "important" or popular—which is why its fans are still drawn to it. Kingmaking power or no, it's pretty much the only kind of terrestrial radio that still operates according to its music directors and even its DJs' personal aesthetics. College radio is local and individual, and the digital audio revolution has barely slowed it down. You can download songs from a dorm-mate or someone halfway across the world (or, all right, an actual online music store), but that only works if you already know what you want to hear. The point of college radio is that you get to hear things you didn't already know about. And that means it's one of the last few parts of American media that still has the power to surprise.

Douglas Wolk, a frequent contributor to Slate, was the managing editor of CMJ New Music Monthly from 1993 to 1997.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130587/

faith-based
The Sin Box
Why have Catholics stopped lining up at the confessional?
By Andrew Santella
Posted Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 2:13 PM ET

A Catholic friend of mine recently went to confession at her parish church for the first time in years. She had personal reasons for wanting to seek absolution, but there was this, too: She said she'd long felt a little sorry for the priests sitting alone in their confessional boxes, waiting for sinners to arrive.

A generation ago, you'd see a lot of us lined up inside Catholic churches on Saturday afternoons, waiting to take our turn in one of the confessionals. We'd recite the familiar phrases ("Bless me Father, for I have sinned"), list our transgressions and the number of times we'd committed them, maybe endure a priestly lecture, and emerge to recite a few Hail Marys as an act of penance. In some parishes, the machinery of forgiveness was so well-oiled you could see the line move. Confession was essential to Catholic faith and a badge of Catholic identity. It also carried with it the promise of personal renewal. Yet in most parishes, the lines for the confessionals have pretty much disappeared. Confession—or the sacrament of reconciliation, as it's officially known—has become the one sacrament casual Catholics feel free to skip. We'll get married in church, we'll be buried from church, and we'll take Communion at Mass. But regularly confessing one's sins to God and the parish priest seems to be a part of fewer and fewer Catholic lives. Where have all the sinners gone?

On the surface, the drop-off in confessors might seem like no surprise.

To congregations scarred by the recent sex-abuse scandal, the thought of turning to a priest for forgiveness might not hold the attraction that it once did. And regular penance is not the only Catholic sacrament that has declined in practice recently: The scant number of young Catholic men training for the sacrament of holy orders, or ordination, for example, has left the church with a serious shortage of priests.

But it's strange that so many lay Catholics should have abandoned the confessional even while secular culture is increasingly awash in confession, apology, and acts of contrition of every sort. Parents own up to pedophilia on Jerry Springer. Authors reveal their fetishes and infidelities in self-lacerating memoirs. On Web sites like Daily Confession and Not Proud, the anonymous poster can unburden his conscience electronically. The confessions on these sites are displayed in categories borrowed from Sunday school lessons: the Ten Commandments or the seven deadly sins. At least one posting I read was framed in the language of the Catholic confessional. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned," it began before going on to catalog a series of mostly mundane misdeeds. (Others are simply odd: "I eat ants but only the little red ones. They're sweet as hell and I just can't get enough.")

All this public confessing testifies to the impulse to share our deepest shame. So, why isn't that impulse manifesting itself in Catholics practicing the ritual that was created expressly for that purpose? Of course, Catholic penance—whether it's done in a confessional booth or in a face-to-face meeting with a priest, an innovation introduced in 1973—is supposed to be private and confidential. It may be that in an age of media-fueled exhibitionism, some people want more attention for our misdeeds than can be had from whispering a list of sins in a box in a church. But those Internet confessions won't count toward absolution in the eyes of the church any time soon. "There are no sacraments on the Internet," declared the Pontifical Council for Social Communication unequivocally in 2002.

The Catholic tradition of listing the number and kinds of one's sins in regular, private confessions became standard practice after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Penance took root in Catholic ritual and established itself as, in the words of religion writer Peter Steinfels, "the linchpin of the Catholic sacramental economy." The Eucharist and the other sacraments, Steinfels points out, provided access to God's grace. But expressing contrition in confession could mean the difference between going to heaven or hell: Dying with unconfessed mortal sin on your soul meant eternal torment. Early 20^th-century Catholics might have taken Communion only once a year—some referred to it as their Easter duty—but they generally confessed their sins far more regularly. As recently as 40 years ago, many Catholics would not have thought of accepting the Eucharist until after they'd cleansed their souls.

Today the situation is almost exactly the reverse: Entire congregations receive Communion, while the confessionals remain mostly empty. Between 1965 and 1975, according to the National Opinion Research Council, the proportion of Catholics who confessed monthly fell from 38 percent to 17 percent. A University of Notre Dame study in the 1980s showed the decline continuing. In a 1997 poll by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut, only 10 percent of Catholics surveyed said that they confessed at least once a month; another 10 percent said they never went to confession at all.

Like most of the recent changes in the church, the shift occurred in the wake of the Vatican II reforms. The program of renewal for the church that emerged from the Vatican II council said almost nothing about penance and reconciliation. The church's emphasis after Vatican II seemed to be less on guilt and damnation and more on love and forgiveness. The sacrament was given its current kinder, gentler name—reconciliation. Which seemed to reduce the stakes: If priests rarely talked about going to hell anymore, why bother confessing to them? To the extent that confession seemed necessary, the church's post-Vatican II efforts to empower the people in the pews left some Catholics figuring that they could confess their sins directly to God in prayer. At the same time, baby boomers who had been educated in the arcane legalisms of Catholic transgression—is eating meat on Friday a mortal or venial sin?—found themselves as adults thinking less about whether they were breaking the rules and more about their attitudes, intentions, and ideas about how to live a Christian life.

Last but surely not least, there was the growing gap between church teachings and the daily practices of American Catholics, especially when it came to sex and contraception. If you practiced birth control or had sex outside marriage, and you were scrupulous about confession, you might end up spending a lot of time in the confessional sharing every detail of your personal life with the (celibate and male) parish priest. That prospect is particularly bothersome to some Catholic women. I know one who says she'll go back to confession when she can confide in a female priest.

The biggest barrier between Catholics and the confessional, however, may be the real effort it requires. Unloading your transgressions on the Internet takes a few computer clicks—you can do it on your coffee break. But done right, Catholic confession demands a rigorous examination of conscience and real contrition, to say nothing of the prayers you may be assigned for penance and the thinking a priest may ask you to do about the ways you've let yourself and God down. No wonder we are more comfortable with the Eucharist service, which demands only that we line up like consumers and accept something for free. Dorothy Day wrote of having to "rack your brain for even the beginnings of sin." That's work.

Andrew Santella writes from Illinois. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Commonweal, and GQ.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130589/

college week
The Hottest Professor on Campus
What happens when students rate their teachers online.
By Michael Agger
Posted Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 1:59 PM ET

Click here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

Dear Professors, the college students of America are silently judging you. While you are nattering on in lecture, they are clicking over to RateMyProfessors.com—remember, more than 42 percent of college classrooms now have wireless—and assessing your performance. As of yesterday, the site had 4.5 million ratings of 676,416 professors. They've been grading you on "easiness," "helpfulness," and "clarity." And if they think you're hot, they award you a red chili pepper, which appears next to your name. It also adds one point to your "Hotness Total." Perhaps you've already looked at the site and checked out your rating. If you haven't, let me save you some time. All across this great collegiate land, students want pretty much the same things.

Don't play favorites, yet don't deny students extra credit or a second chance on a paper or test. Don't "get sidetracked by boring crap." Don't refer to yourself in the third person. Don't ever call on students. Don't be "mean," "hateful," or "ambiguous." Don't take attendance. Don't be "high on Viagra and full of yourself." Don't be "distractingly spastic." Very important: Don't talk about stuff in class and then put other stuff on the test. Most important: Don't give low grades. Do show slides. Do offer easy assignments. Do crack jokes and "provide a fun teaching atmosphere." Do show up at your office hours. Do give A's on all group projects. Do walk your dog around campus. Do resemble a celebrity of some sort. Finally, try your best to be "awesome."

The uncomfortable truth for the non-hot is that hotness is important. A hot professor can have a powerful effect on a student. Here is but one example of a potential intellectual awakening inspired by hotness: "I never had her class, but supposedly she is a hot 50 year old . . . what could be bad." Students write about hot professors who are "the only reason to get out of bed in the morning." They also express desires to take classes with certain hot professors "forever." A hot professor can leave a student weak, unable even to hit the shift key: "so hot. so so hot." Even if you occasionally wander off topic—say, to discuss a conversation you had with Woody Allen that inspired a scene in Manhattan (yes, we're talking about you, Renata Adler, at Boston University)—well, hotness can make up for that.

Not that you asked, but language departments appear to have the hottest professors. They also have the best dancers. Professors at the big state universities and community colleges garner the most ratings. Some famous professors—John McPhee at Princeton, Henry Louis Gates at Harvard—don't turn up in the ratings at all. (Although you do uncover a cult figure here and there.)

The overall top-rated professors can be found at Full Sail Real World Education in Winter Park, Fla. This is not a sailing school; it caters to computer animation and video-game jockeys. The most academically elite college in the top 10 is Amherst College, where students rave about professors whose voice "touched me to the quick" and who are also "damn smart." At the bottom currently lies Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., a Catholic liberal arts institution, where one teacher is described as a "dictator" prepared to "destroy you." The lower-ranked schools tend to be in cold places, while the upper reaches are flush with California schools. Never underestimate the educational power of a healthy tan.

Distressed by your ratings? Remember—as demonstrated by your fellow marketing professors—people who are compelled to rate things online have usually had a strong emotional response, i.e., they either hated you or loved you. For every student complaining that "this is the most boring class ive ever taken ... she is too much of a hippie and needs to occasionally wear a bra," there is another who will write, "Clone her as the model of a Perfect Prof!" And, if it makes you feel any better, a casual read through the ratings turns up a lot of suspect data. I doubt, for example, that a professor named "Homer Saxshual" really teaches art history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. I also doubt that the student who took Joyce Carol Oates' writing seminar at Princeton was being truthful when he or she wrote, "Brooke Shields told me this was a great blow off class."

RateMyProfessors.com probably isn't all that useful to most students, who will continue picking classes the way they've always done: by listening to friends, by avoiding 9 a.m. lectures, and, yes, by satisfying their intellectual curiosity. But student evaluations have a place in academia—a RateMyProfessors exercise of a more considered sort just took place at Harvard, where the students made it clear in a curricular review that their star professors were too removed; they asked for more seminars and "small class settings." No one wants to reduce college education to a consumer experience, but the Harvard study suggests, professors, that perhaps you need to pay more attention to the product you're peddling.

And, while the student comments on RateMyProfessors.com may be akin to scrawlings in the library stacks, that doesn't mean students don't have anything useful to say or that you should take your cues from Stanley Fish, the dean at the University of Illinois in Chicago, who writes about throwing his student evaluations, unopened, into the trash. The take-away impression of RateMyProfessors.com is that students want you to be organized, fair, accessible, and reasonably interesting. When you think about it, that's kind of hot.

Michael Agger is a Slate associate editor. He can be reached at michael.agger@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130586/

college week
The Death of Literary Theory
Is it really a good thing?
By Stephen Metcalf
Posted Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 1:47 PM ET

Click here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

Hugh Blair was the very first English professor. His official title was the regius professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh, and when he was appointed in 1762, almost no one in the world did what he did: formally teach literary works written in English. A few years earlier, Blair had been shown a manuscript of some ancient Gaelic verse, a fragment of an epic by a third-century poet named Ossian. The fragment—translated into modern English—was called "The Death of Oscar," and it recounted a heroic past in which the Scots had defended the British Isles against foreign invasion. "The Death of Oscar" thrilled Blair, and in 1760 he helped finance a trip into the northern Highlands to recover more of what he was now calling "our epic." Blair didn't know that, even as he was bankrolling its painstaking restoration, "our epic" was being composed in the apartment directly below his. The Ossian fragments were a fake, a miscellany of oral ballads and Irish saga cycles and Viking lore that had been cleverly patched together to flatter the tastes and expectations of—well, Hugh Blair, whose enthusiasm helped make them an international sensation. (Napoleon carried a translation in his vest pocket; Goethe incorporated sections into The Sorrows of Young Werther.) The first professor of English was, in other words, a sucker. Why should he have been the last?

For most of the 240-odd years since Hugh Blair, English professors have been suckers, and for the same reason Blair made such a glorious one: No one knows what an English professor does. In waking up each day only to rejustify their entire existence—to jealous colleagues, to class-shopping undergraduates, to the administrative purse strings—professors of literature invoke the literary past in whatever way will most advance their own institutional self-interest. Blair's was simply the most aggravated instance of the case. As the first English professor, he needed a work of literature in English, sufficiently venerable to justify teaching it instead of the Greek and Latin classics, but not a work of English literature, which would only confirm to him and his students their second-class status as Scottish provincials. In Ossian, he wish-fulfilled into existence an entire Scottish epic past.

At each subsequent stage in the history of the modern university, English professors have repurposed literary history to suit expedient needs. When English classes were one way of carrying forward the religious mood of schools once devoted to educating a ministry, literature was made an occasion for conversion or homily. "I escaped from the gall of bitterness and the bond of my philistine iniquity, into the kingdom of light," is how William Phelps, the man who pioneered the modern English class at Yale, colorfully described his discovery of Tennyson. Meanwhile, Irving Babbitt, the great Harvard professor of the '20s and '30s, cleansed the great books of their incest and gore in a font of anodyne moralism. "[Babbitt] almost succeeded in giving Sophocles and Plato the aspect of pious English dons," said Edmund Wilson, an avowed nonprofessor. "[He] has turned Sophocles into something even worse and even more alien to his true nature; he has turned him into a Harvard Humanist."

For all its pretense to being a grand irruption, the great age of literary theory was not so different. It started with New Criticism in the '30s and '40s, which, if you think about it, was less a literary movement than one of the great public works projects launched in the wake of World War II, by which the teaching of literature was democratized to fit the needs of a rapidly expanding university system. New Criticism is always described as a method of close reading (mostly of poems) that assumes no historical or biographical facts about the author. But its great virtue was as a mass-scalable method of teaching, as it assumed no biographical or historical knowledge on the part of the student. It was, in short, a reading technique that could be taught to any bright learner, whatever his or her cultural background. By flattering students for their aptitude and not their moral or aesthetic sensitivity, New Criticism allowed the English department to grow alongside a newly meritocratic and increasingly professionalized university.

With New Criticism, literary history was still being customized to fit the professor's expedient needs. In were the Augustans and the Metaphysicals and T.S. Eliot, whose poems supposedly reward close reading; out were the slovenly Romantics, whose poems supposedly don't. But something had started to change. The English professor himself was slowly evolving. The key to that evolution was what is sometimes called "the linguistic turn." Language is of course the necessary medium for all advanced learning; but after Wittgenstein, the default position of the tenured philosophe has been that only within language can we order and experience human reality. If the English professor is the expert in charge of understanding how we use language—how metaphors shape history, how history shapes our metaphors, etc., etc.—he holds a position of enormous intellectual authority on a college campus. For a brief period, climaxing with the reign of terror of the Yale Deconstructionists, the English professor appeared to have arrogated, not only all of literary history, but all possible knowledge to his own powers of interpretation. The English professor had completed the transition. He was no longer a sucker. He was now a con man extraordinaire.

The end of the era of the English professor as con man, and his return to sucker status (at least in the public imagination), can be dated with some precision. In 1996, a physics professor at NYU named Alan Sokal submitted an article to the then cutting-edge journal Social Text in which he argued that the idea of an external world obedient to invariable physical laws was an Enlightenment fiction. Sokal went to great lengths to make the editors of Social Text appear as inane as possible: In support of an outrageous thesis he offered only banal recitations of trendy Post-Modernist dogma, and a lot of what he asserted in the name of science was either absurd or demonstrably false. Sokal had designed his bogus arguments to flatter the editors of Social Text in much the same way another trickster, 250 years earlier, had designed Ossian to flatter Hugh Blair. The con man's game is always the same: sensing what the gull most wants to be true. Sokal knew that a respected physicist admitting that the scientific method is itself a social construct—subject to the same protocols of interpretation as King Lear or Lamia—would complete the English department's grab for intellectual pre-eminence. The same day the issue of Social Text appeared, Sokal announced in the magazine Lingua Franca that his article had been a prank. Fustian know-nothings have been celebrating ever since.

I started graduate school a few years before the Sokal hoax, when what was still transgressive and sexy about literary theory was fighting it out with the sheer ay, caramba factor of such pronouncements as "E=MC² is a sexed equation." By the time I exited grad school, the feeling of an era being over—however meretricious in some of its particulars the era might have been—was unmistakable. These days, no think tank pundit would bother to denounce literary theory; its biggest stars, by way of generating some final headlines, have publicly disowned it; and no fresh cohort of terrifying intellectual charismatics has crossed the Atlantic to revive it.

Great critics continue to write brilliantly about novels and poems, both within the academy and without. But something was lost when the English department relinquished its status as the all-purpose intellectual nerve center on the American college campus. In its weakness lay its great strength: For not knowing exactly what an English professor does, the English department, though vulnerable to charlatanism and dupery, was also the last great repository for the nonutilitarian hopes of the university. These Cardinal Newman had in mind when he wrote in The Idea of a University that "intellectual self-possession and repose" should be the ideal of a humanist education, and that these lie prior to any specific vocational end. Newman railed against the insistence that higher education must "at once make this man a lawyer, that an engineer, and that a surgeon." Though intellectual repose was hardly what the editors of Social Text had in mind, it's worth remembering that it wasn't Sokal who came out best in his eponymous hoax, but an English professor. As Stanley Fish gently explained to professor Sokal in an op-ed to the New York Times,

What sociologists of science say is that of course the world is real and independent of our observations but that accounts of the world are produced by observers and are therefore relative to their capacities, education, training, etc. It is not the world or its properties but the vocabularies in whose terms we know them that are socially constructed—fashioned by human beings—which is why our understanding of those properties is continually changing.

Distinguishing fact from fiction is surely the business of science, but the means of doing so are not perspicuous in nature—for if they were, there would be no work to be done. Consequently, the history of science is a record of controversies about what counts as evidence and how facts are to be established.

Those who concern themselves with this history neither dispute the accomplishments of science nor deny the existence or power of scientific procedure. They just maintain and demonstrate that the nature of scientific procedure is a question continually debated in its own precincts.

Did Post-Modernism—in this instance, some twilit mélange of Gadamer and Lyotard and Habermas and Kuhn and Latour, many of whose original beachhead in America had been the credulous English department—overreach in taking on science? Maybe. But on its way to producing a new generation of lawyers and engineers and surgeons (and risk arbitrageurs and pharma lobbyists), was it so wrong for a university to indulge one department whose time was spent agonizing over the entire mission of knowledge production itself? By never firmly establishing what it itself was for, the English department cultivated habits of withering self-reflection and so became one mechanism by which the university could stay in touch with its nonutilitarian self and subject its own practices to ongoing critique. Did the theory era produce bullshit by the mountain-load? Of course it did. But by allowing "literary theory" to turn into a pundit's byword, signifying the pompous, the outmoded, the shallow, the faddish, we may have quietly resolved the argument over what a university is for in favor of no self-reflection whatsoever.

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It was eventually published as Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland.

Stephen Metcalf is a Slate critic and lives in Brooklyn.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130583/

college week
Carolina Blue
Working hard on not writing my thesis.
By Laurel Wamsley
Updated Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 12:24 PM ET

From: Laurel Wamsley
Subject: A Day in the Life of a Tar Heel
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 11:17 AM ET

Chapel Hill, N.C.—This morning Chapel Hill turned cold. My mom is sending my winter coat; until then, I'm layering sweatshirts for the five-minute bike ride to campus from my little house. This is my first semester not in the dorms, and I'm far enough away that I can no longer let my fear of hitting pedestrians stop me from riding a bike. I haven't run down any yet, but there have been some close calls.

Mondays are rough because the weekend is never as productive as it was supposed to be. Especially when you're a senior writing a history thesis—in my case on the political activism of poets Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell. My only classes today are International Relations in World Politics—which is required for my other major, in political science—and then the co-requisite section with a graduate student. The lecture is in a hall with 225 of my fellow Tar Heels, making it the only class I can get away with skipping. But for the most part, I go: Professor Oatley is engaging and funny—you get the feeling that he's telling it to you straight. Lecture courses have a bad reputation, especially among proponents of small liberal arts schools, but I've had some excellent lecture classes during my time at UNC. There's something satisfying about just learning for an hour, three days a week: It's like storytelling that makes you smarter. Even if the story is about free-trade agreements and the global economy.

Between classes, life revolves around the Pit: a large cement depression bordered by the dining hall, student union, undergraduate library, and bookstore. The moniker is apt, but it doesn't convey the energy that's there at midday: a capella groups beat-boxing, step shows by the black fraternities, never-ending "awareness weeks," and a ring of tables with student groups looking for new members. When you want to find people you know, just stand in the Pit for 30 seconds. The space inspires a certain state-school pride in me: We don't need a Yard—we'll take our cement and two trees.

But I won't wax nostalgic just yet, even though it becomes more tempting with every day pulling me closer to the post-college unknown. Fewer faces are familiar to me this year, as the class ahead has graduated and the class behind is mostly studying abroad. The ones I do recognize ask me questions I can't answer, namely, "What are you doing next year?" It's November and I'm a liberal arts student, so this question is unfair. No, I'm not going to law school. No, I'm not interviewing for jobs yet. I give vague answers about heading to either New York or South America. My acquaintances think I'm being evasive, but that's all I've got at this point.

Other seniors have started figuring things out, which only increases my anxiety. A lot of my business-minded friends have gotten jobs in New York working as investment bankers. I made it my mission during my sophomore and junior years to talk friends out of being business majors, out of concern for their souls. Most of them ignored me. Three years later, their souls are intact and they have actual jobs. I still prefer my shifty schemes to the idea of working for an investment firm, but these future executives will probably make more money next year than I'll be making when I'm 40.

I do some work in the library as the sun drops behind the brick classroom buildings, then I have a meeting with the Student Advisory Committee to the Chancellor. We meet with Chancellor Moeser once a month to bring him student concerns: frustrations about class registration, poor lighting in the far reaches of campus, and the proposed inclusion of "gender identity" in the school's nondiscrimination policy (which would require measures such as unisex bathrooms that could be used by transsexuals and others who don't identify as either male or female). In turn, he explains the administration's position on tuition increases, athletics fees, and labor regulations for housekeepers—all controversial topics recently. Today's meeting is just students, formulating stances and proposals for when we meet with the chancellor again. I promise to do some research on how the university determines the number of course sections to be offered in a given semester. Then I head back to the library to do some reading on Robert Lowell so I can show my thesis adviser that I am making some small progress. When I bike home at 1 a.m., the streets are empty and my roommate Katy has been asleep for hours.

From: Laurel Wamsley
Subject: Is College as Debauched as Tom Wolfe Thinks?
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 6:51 AM ET

This morning I had aerobic dance class at 8 a.m. It's the first 8:00 class I've had in college, and I brought it on myself. I had delusions that it would bring discipline to my daily routine—that I would wake up early and get lots of work done before my American Foreign Policy class at 2 p.m. Instead, I've slept through it three times already, and my grade will drop if I miss any more. UNC requires two semesters of physical education and the passing of a swim test; the latter is archaic and is being phased out. I'm in the last class of Carolina students who will gather in the final days of senior year to swim two laps and tread water for a few minutes.

After class, I grab a bagel and head to the library to finish reading about the second Bush administration's policy for preventive war for my American Foreign Policy class. Professor McKeown is an ideal political science professor: He's incisive and ruthless on classroom topics of political decision-making but dodgy about his own politics. The most effective professors I've had are the ones who can play devil's advocate on any side of an issue. It's easier for me to believe we're discussing a topic objectively if the professor isn't making periodic digs at the president—something that actually happens more often in the "less political" academic departments like English than in poli sci.

UNC-Chapel Hill is one of the most liberal campuses in the South, a source of perpetual heartache to the very vocal College Republicans here. A few of the conservative students on campus have an affinity for suing the university. Each summer, incoming freshmen read the same book and participate in discussion groups the day before classes start; two years ago, the Republican "Committee for a Better Carolina" challenged UNC's selection of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed as our summer reading book. The conservative students were backed by the John William Pope Foundation, which paid for a full-page ad in the Raleigh News and Observer calling the book a "classic Marxist rant" and a work of "intellectual pornography with no redeeming characteristics." The committee suggested that in the interest of balance, students should be required to read Sam Walton's biography as well. That didn't happen, but the next year the summer reading book was Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point.

I worked on my friend Seth's campaign for student body president last year, and I ended up attending a College Republicans meeting for a candidates' forum. The meeting began with a prayer led by a student in cowboy boots and a huge belt buckle. A young woman in pearls made disdainful wisecracks about The Vagina Monologues, and the club president grilled the candidates about whether conservative organizations could get an entire office suite in the student union.

In both student parties, it's easy to spot the kids who have a shot at being the next Elizabeth Dole or John Edwards: They are unnervingly smooth, confident, and eager to shake your hand. They're part of why I don't buy the debauched and materialistic version of college life that Tom Wolfe sells in I Am Charlotte Simmons; there are simply too many varieties of people here, who are ambitious for very different things. We heard rumors that Mr. Wolfe did his research here and down the road at Duke, but it seems he must have hobnobbed with a pretty narrow crowd: Only 17 percent of Carolina students are in fraternities and sororities. I briefly considered rushing my freshman year, but once I got to campus I realized it wasn't my scene. Most of my friends didn't go Greek, either, though I have some friends in Chi Psi, which at UNC is known as "the smart frat" (among other things). Freshman year, I went to a frat-house cocktail party once. I was the only girl not in a black dress, but I got a lot of compliments.

Frat boys and sorority girls get a lot of flak for dressing alike, but the look is just Southern prep: the boys in khakis, pink Polo shirts, New Balance sneakers, and Croakies to secure their sunglasses. The girls wear essentially the same thing, matched with Citizens jeans, tote bags, and themed mixer T-shirts. Non-Greeks tend to dress like their friends as well, whether they are tight-pants hipsters or Croc-clad hippies. Black fraternities and sororities have their own styles and status symbols: white Nike Air Force Ones and monogrammed jackets. UNC always makes the list of the most black-friendly universities in the country, but still the most common complaint on campus is the prevalence of self-segregation.

After foreign policy was my fiction-writing workshop. It's the senior honors class, and we have to produce 50 pages of new work this semester. So far I'm at 15 pages, which means many late nights ahead. Hopefully I won't have to resort to writing disguised events from my own life; a lot of us in the class are friends, and they can tell when I'm writing about myself. Camaraderie doesn't take the edge off critiques, which can be brutal. (My own unforgiving comments have been dubbed "Wam-bombs.") Our professor (who is wise) said my last story was "ironic to the point of being incomprehensible." Thank goodness second semester is dedicated to revision.

I spend at least as much time on creative writing as I do on any of my other classes, and it's not even my major. By senior year it seems that majors are mostly irrelevant, anyway. You've realized that all those required classes still don't add up to a very coherent base of knowledge—instead you've become well-versed in the jargon of your field and know some impressive trivia. If you aren't sure what you want to do with your life, or if your aspirations are something vague like "being a writer," then a major is mostly a best guess at 10 classes that might be enjoyable or useful. I have chronic Major Envy, which causes me to cast a jealous eye at American studies and anthropology majors as I contemplate what might have been.

This evening I was late to meet some friends, so I pedaled fast through the darkness. When I'm in a hurry (and I usually am), I ride my bike more aggressively than is appropriate, given my novice biker status, and my reluctance to wear a helmet (vanity). My friend Adam has advised me that bikes don't have to obey traffic laws, as our civic reward for not using gas, so I cut across a corner; I saw an oncoming car slow down and assumed it saw me. It didn't. I rode right into it. I managed not to die or even fall off, but I was still surprised when the driver just kept going without stopping to see if I was OK. I was moved to be more careful, but incidents like this always have the stupid effect of making me think I'm immortal. My friends don't buy it; they've suggested I might need to overcome my vanity and wear a helmet after all.

From: Laurel Wamsley
Subject: Working Hard on Not Writing My Thesis
Posted Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 12:24 PM ET

I made it to aerobic dance today at 8 a.m., and on time for once. Alas, I was awake at that hour only because I had set my alarm for 6 a.m., hoping to get some layout work done for the campus literary magazine, but I couldn't pull myself out of bed until 7:30. It doesn't take long in the day for me to feel behind.

Last night I was doing schoolwork at the Undergraduate Library until 3 a.m. The UL is the smaller, more social library that's open all night, avoided by the study snobs who sequester themselves on the eighth floor of Davis, the main library. The presence of other people at the UL helps keep me awake, though occasionally I can be found asleep in a carrel, drooling onto my international economics book. During the day, homeless people come to the UL and use the Internet, but at midnight the library closes to the public and a cop comes around to check our university IDs. As the crowd thins out after 2 a.m. to just us hard-core nerds and procrastinators, the library gets more depressing, but at least there are fewer people stage-whispering into their cell phones: "Hey, I can't talk, I'm in the library. … Yes, the library. … No, I'm not always here, you just always call when I'm here. … But I can't really talk. … I'll call you back. … Yeah. … OK, bye." The talker gets a glare from everyone else, but they never notice.

The same crowd is always up late, beating the path from the UL to Alpine Bagel in the student union, the one eatery on this part of campus that's open late. After a few weeks of this, you form a community with the other night owls, after being introduced to friends of friends while refilling library-approved coffee cups and bitching about the work you still have to do. Last night, Alpine ran out of coffee around midnight and we just stared in disbelief. Decaf was left, but it always strikes me as a pointless beverage. I'm trying not to drink coffee because it gives me stomachaches, but sometimes the fatigue is so overwhelming that I drink it anyway, knowing full well that I'll feel ill within the hour.

I mentioned to my roommate that I've been exhausted lately, and she suggested that maybe I've got mono. Having mono would actually be convenient: a medical justification for nodding off in class. But I know that the fault is all mine—and due to a simple lack of sleep. Five hours a night really isn't enough, but one of my night-owl friends has convinced me that you can train your body to get used to it, so I guess you could say I'm practicing.

Today I have only one class so I'm working on my history thesis. I also have a story due soon for creative writing, so I keep another Word document open in case I have a brilliant idea for a short story. The muse has been aloof lately, though, so I'll settle for a brilliant idea for a sentence. This morning I met with my thesis adviser, who is kind to me even though I'm behind on my project. He seems to know most things that have ever happened in America, and he has read the biographies of nearly everyone: It's his beach reading. I love the research aspect of working on my thesis—sifting through old issues of magazines, printing articles off microfilm, reading letters between Allen Ginsberg and his father—but it's hard to find the time to sit down and, you know, write it.

A friend who still lives on campus cooked dinner for me tonight; he's the student-body vice president, which means he gets a staff and an office but less time to hang out with his friends. I'm impressed with the angel-hair pasta with artichoke hearts he makes in the dorm kitchenette because I never eat home-cooked meals; I live on sandwiches and quesadillas. We talk about his law-school applications and what I might do next year and reminisce a little about freshman year. Then I tell him my policy of "no nostalgia until the spring," and he agrees. His roommate just won a Marshall scholarship, so we pledge to hang out again this weekend to celebrate. Their room is famous for wine-and-cheese parties.

I rush back to the library to get in a few hours of work, because at 11 p.m., my cell phone will start vibrating: the official start of the weekend. A lot of seniors go out on Tuesdays, but I can't manage that. Thursday nights, then, are my big reward. I meet friends for a few drinks at Top of the Hill, a bar and microbrewery that's classier than I really need. But it has a great view over Franklin Street, the main drag through town, and I can count on most of my crowd being there on any given Thursday or Saturday. (Fridays are usually quieter—homework and maybe a house party.) By Saturday evening the guilt of looming homework will creep into any revelry, so Thursday night is the highlight of my week. The lights come on at 2 a.m., and the bouncers urge everyone toward the door. We gripe that the time has gone too fast, but starting earlier is never suggested: No one goes out until 11. College may seem like a free-for-all, but there are certain rules we uphold.

Laurel Wamsley is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

 

human nature
Technical Knockout
The overconfidence of stem-cell liberals.
By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 7:57 AM ET

Last week, I went to a lunch and forum with two prominent thinkers on stem-cell research. It didn't break any news, but the debate got pretty hot, and it illuminated a lot of what's going on with this issue, morally and politically. I thought I'd tell you about it.

The lunch and the forum were hosted by the Genetics and Public Policy Center. I've heard people on both sides criticize GPPC as too moderate, but I've always regarded that criticism as a compliment. The chief combatants were Bill Hurlbut, a conservative member of the President's Council on Bioethics, and Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University. I've talked to Hurlbut a lot. I'd never met Zoloth, but I'd been told to look her up, as a representative of Jewish thought, by a priest at a Catholic-sponsored stem-cell forum in Rome.

I've always liked Jews and liberals because they tend to prefer questions to answers. But maybe this is why I sometimes find myself leaning the other way on stem cells. On this issue, it's the liberals who act as though they have the answers, possibly because they have the upper hand. To begin with, they have business on their side, and they swing that ax with all the shame of a clear-cutter. "Oh, my goodness! We can't have some pharmaceutical company making money. Alas!" the fast-talking Zoloth moaned over lunch in mockery of lefty biotech critics. Zoloth has the polls on her side, too. Her hostess, GPPC director Kathy Hudson, noted that the public not only supports destructive stem-cell research using leftover IVF embryos by a 2-to-1 margin but also is evenly divided on creating embryos for such research.

Hurlbut, quiet and somber, warned the lunch group that research wouldn't go forward politically until people agreed on a way to get stem cells without destroying embryos, such as his altered nuclear transfer (ANT) proposal. Zoloth immediately shot him down. A lot is going forward, she said: California, Massachusetts, Illinois, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and others are shelling out. She called this an "extraordinary consensus" manifested by a "new federalism" of states funding the research. That's not consensus, Hurlbut protested. It's consensus enough for me, said Zoloth. Then we're going to have to get consensus about what kind of consensus we need, Hurlbut demanded.

I spent a lot of time covering politics before I got into science, and one thing I learned is that anybody who starts pleading for consensus is losing. Also, anybody who invokes the United Nations is losing at the level of real state power. So, when Hurlbut cited a U.N. resolution against cloning, I knew he was in trouble. Zoloth shrugged, in the manner of President Bush blowing off the Security Council, that the U.N. vote wouldn't mean much in terms of stopping research. I asked Hurlbut what bad things would happen if California and other states plowed ahead before getting consensus instead of after getting it. He spoke of bitterness. He cited a "scathing e-mail" he'd received. But bitterness and scathing e-mails are the weapons of minorities.

Feeling besieged, Hurlbut unraveled. When Zoloth described ANT as a plan to create a "disabled embryo," he called her language "rude." Now, I agree that the phrase "disabled embryo" is an inaccurate and politically shrewd way of sabotaging ANT. But a basic rule of politics, not to mention etiquette, is that the first person who calls the other "rude" is the one who looks—and is—rude. Like a TV pro, Zoloth let the insult bounce off her. She explained that in making her argument, she was being historical. "Historical? You're being hysterical," Hurlbut snapped. He seemed unconcerned that six of the nine people in the room were women, and that he wasn't one of them.

Before anyone could fire back, Zoloth, in a gesture of sublime non-hysteria, stepped in to soothe and vouch for him. "I like Bill," she told them. "I don't care if you like me or not," he scoffed. By this point, Matt Lauer would have pulled the plug. But in this room, there was no plug to pull, nothing to hold Hurlbut back, least of all himself. "You're misrepresenting Judaism," he told Zoloth, Christian to Jew, when she quoted Jewish theologians. I winced, but Zoloth turned the other cheek. "We're Jews," she quipped. "There's always going to be disagreement."

After lunch, we walked across the street to the public forum, where the unraveling continued. Hurlbut pleaded for consensus, accused Zoloth of not listening to him, and complained that she wasn't letting him finish his answers. She smiled back with the serenity of the saved. In TV terms, she was killing him, or at least he was killing himself. I've seen Hurlbut do this before, at meetings of the bioethics council and at a congressional hearing. And yet there's something about him that makes me want to step in on his side. Part of it is that in all the wrong ways, he raises all the right questions. And part of it is that Zoloth and other liberal evangelists for stem-cell research mirror the certainty of the Christian right just a little too well.

There's something a bit too polished about the way Zoloth deflects unwelcome queries. There are only three interesting moral questions, she announced at the forum, and the moral status of the embryo isn't one of them. Again, I've spent a lot of time covering politics, and this is what political consultants tell candidates to do: If your opponent raises something you don't want to talk about, brush it off. But it isn't the way you talk in a humble search for wisdom. Dismissing ANT and other non-destructive ideas for getting stem cells, Zoloth joked that they had the Harriet Miers problem: They were good, but not good enough. The audience laughed. It was a great line. But that's all it was.

I watched Zoloth, the putative anti-authoritarian, slam door after door with authority. Nobody intends to transfer leftover IVF embryos to a womb; therefore, moral concepts from the abortion debate don't apply. Science can't answer religious questions; therefore, science can't help us solve moral problems. We don't agree with you that the embryo is inviolable; therefore, you have to agree with us that you won't impose your values. Many people who object to embryo-destructive research are religious; therefore, objections to such research shouldn't influence public policy. Embryo-destructive research should be funded; alternative schemes for getting stem cells shouldn't. Be pluralistic. Do it my way.

Between the lunch and the forum, Zoloth engaged me in a lovely chat. She explained the moral issues she wants to put on table, which are very different from the ones Bush and Hurlbut want to discuss. She's an egalitarian. Two of the diseases targeted by embryonic stem-cell research—diabetes and spinal cord injuries—are particularly hard on poor people because insulin, wheelchairs, and ventilators are expensive. That's one reason why she and other liberals have counterattacked critics of the research so fiercely. The other reason, she said, is that freedom of thought means freedom to research.

I'd like to believe that. I'd like to trust Zoloth's air of authority, just as I'd like to trust the Bible's or the pope's. We all want answers. But then you ask a question, and the authority fails you. At lunch, Zoloth said the idea behind ANT—knocking out a gene called Cdx2 to prevent development of an implantable embryo—wouldn't reliably succeed because gene knockouts produce a range of outcomes. I asked for her evidence that a range of implantation outcomes would occur with Cdx2 deletion. That's how it works, she assured me. But as I write this, I'm looking at the published report on the ANT experiment. It says "none of the Cdx2[-deleted] nuclear transfer blastocysts formed visible implantation sites (0 out of 40)." There goes my faith.

It's not that Zoloth deceived me; I'm sure she didn't. She just thought she knew more than she did. We all do that sometimes. It's part of being human. That's why I like to put my faith in questions rather than authority, even when my liberal friends don't.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130493/

 

college week
Reforming College
What professors don't tell you.
By Astrida Orle Tantillo
Updated Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 6:49 AM ET

What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of this debate. Click here to read more from our symposium on reinventing college, and here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

Before one can make decisions about the specific courses that comprise a liberal education, it is important to examine the foundations underlying it. Liberal education is an elitist enterprise. It is so on at least two fronts: Professors must be willing to teach, and the goal is not success in a job or profession, but rather obtaining critical distance from one's preconceptions and enriching oneself intellectually and culturally through a wide array of courses across the curriculum. Those unfamiliar with the debates in higher education may see little that is controversial in these statements, yet they would be attacked from the left and (at least implicitly) the right.

The assault on liberal education from the left presumes that pedagogy must be "student-centered," with professors no longer "teaching" but "facilitating" or serving as "architects of interaction" who "enable" students to teach one another. The assumptions underlying this methodology are democratic and, as such, inimical to a type of education that prizes the difficult or esoteric. For example, the "communicative approach" is the most popular one in foreign-language classes across the country. Beginning students interact with one another more than with the instructor. Instructors are further discouraged from correcting mistakes for fear of inhibiting self-expression. This model emphasizes oral communication (and students do speak with greater ease), but at the cost of precision, knowledge of grammar, and ability to read serious texts. No longer is the primary goal to teach students to examine their own lives and cultures through the lens of great literary texts, but rather to encourage them to become global tourists and consumers: Their language abilities enable them to order food and navigate a strange town. One could draw similar parallels to other courses, including English composition, where many instructors do not teach or correct grammar. As the National Council of Teachers of English would have it, students have the "right" to their own language. Paradoxically, this approach is more insidiously hierarchical than the old teacher-centered one: Teachers consciously withhold their knowledge and high-culture experiences, thereby limiting the students' educational opportunities.

The assault on liberal education from the Republican right (from Reagan's "A Nation at Risk" to Bush's No Child Left Behind mission) stems from its desire to prepare students for the workforce (only) and to make schools and universities run more like businesses. The consequences are twofold. First, any nonpractical fields—those at the very core of liberal education—are denigrated because one cannot directly show their usefulness in the world of commerce. Government grants gravitate toward those endeavors that might eventually make money or solve medical problems. (The federal government funds approximately $34 billion for science and health research versus only $162 million for the humanities.) Second, newspapers are filled with controversies surrounding standardized testing in primary schools, yet universities are facing similar pressures. The Bush administration has been considering measures analogous to those of NCLB for higher education. Moreover, accrediting bodies, which ultimately answer to the Department of Education, are increasingly demanding "accountability," i.e., data on the "success" of liberal education courses. Yet the very heart of these courses is to teach students things that a standardized test could never measure, including love of learning and the ability to question one's beliefs and challenge those of others. As a consequence of these pressures, many administrators are more concerned with how a course can be assessed rather than what it is about.

The ultimate problem with the left and the right is that they encourage ever-narrowing educational possibilities. The irony, of course, is that, in the end, neither side gets what it wants: A lack of elitism impairs students from eventually becoming their own teachers in the broadest sense, and teaching students testable skills discourages the kind of creative thinking that is the necessary condition for success in the world.

Astrida Orle Tantillo, associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and associate professor of history and Germanic studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is overseeing the revision of the general education program at her university.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130327/

college week
College Makeover
Give majors an overhaul.
By W. Robert Connor
Updated Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 6:48 AM ET

What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of this debate. Click here to read more from our symposium on reinventing college, and here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

If I could wave a magic wand, I'd abolish all talk of "general education" and get back to the liberal arts. Harvard's 1945 Red Book, General Education in a Free Society, gave the term general education wide currency and implicitly defined the issue in undergraduate education as a battle between general and specialized knowledge. That was a mistake, and so was the idea that "general education" was the same as "liberal education." The artes liberales are not some sample of great ideas of the (Western) world. These artes are crafts, skills, cognitive capacities. Historically they have included forms of quantitative reasoning, systematic ways of thinking about truth and values, and the means to express ideas clearly and persuasively. That's why they were sometimes equated with the medieval quadrivium and trivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, grammar, logic or dialectic, and rhetoric.

Such lists sound quaint and culture-bound, but behind them is the lasting and cross-cultural need to teach people to analyze, evaluate, and persuade. Those cognitive capacities are immensely valuable but not swiftly acquired. They take systematic development from day one, through every course and project, up to and including departmental requirements, research projects, senior theses, capstone courses, and comprehensive exams.

And that's where the old general education went most seriously astray. It let advanced courses and, especially, the undergraduate major, off the hook. Faculty teaching these courses didn't have to think about liberal education or about its goals. General education took care of all that. They could get on with cloning the next generation of specialists.

It is time to step back, think again, and restructure. To develop the cognitive skills that constitute a true liberal education takes a coherent system, with broad introductory courses playing a part but specialized, disciplinary work making its contribution, too. The starting point has to be something that too rarely happens: faculty sitting down to argue about how these perennially needed cognitive capacities—the skills to analyze, evaluate, and persuade—are to be realized on their campus.

Under the pattern I am advocating, a student majoring in English would find her departmental courses less likely to be designed as preparation for graduate school and more directly concerned with developing her abilities in one or more of the competencies of the liberal arts. The subject matter might still be Shakespeare or the Gothic novel, but from the outset each course would be explicit about the skills it aimed to develop and fully intentional about the way it went about developing them. It might, for example, set as a goal developing the ability to write clearly about the values implicit in the texts being studied. That can be a revealing way of approaching a work of literature, but it can also develop a "transferable skill," important in settings far removed from academia. In such a course, our English major would be more likely to find herself sitting next to students majoring in other fields and to engage with them about the big questions that underlie all important literary texts. And she herself might be more willing to enroll in a course in population biology if she knew it would be taught in a way that helped majors and nonmajors alike develop their abilities to use quantitative analysis to understand otherwise puzzling behavior.

That means, however, that courses must be redesigned and advising improved so that a genuinely coherent system results. Every stage of instruction must ask what it can do best and make that goal explicit for both teachers and students. That's not so hard to do once one frees oneself from the false rhetoric of the old general education.

W. Robert Connor, a classicist, is president of the Teagle Foundation, a New York philanthropy devoted to strengthening liberal education.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130324/

college week
College Makeover
Morality-based learning.
By S. Georgia Nugent
Updated Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 6:47 AM ET

What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of this debate. Click here to read more from our symposium on reinventing college, and here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

What is the knowledge most worth having? In the Western tradition, sages have asked this question since the era of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, about 2000 B.C. One Egyptian magistrate declares, "It is to writings that you must set your mind. … There is nothing that surpasses writings! They are a boat upon the water. … I shall make you love books more than your mother." A thousand years later, a second Egyptian scribe provides a succinct curriculum: "Write with your hand, recite with your mouth, and converse with those more knowledgeable than you."

The answers offered by Western thinkers from Socrates to Benjamin Franklin have been remarkably consistent over the years: The aim of education is to teach reading (analytical interpretation), writing (clear and persuasive communication), and the moral development of character. As Franklin put it, "The Idea of what is true Merit should also be often presented to Youth … as consisting in an Inclination join'd with an Ability to serve Mankind … which Ability … should indeed be the great Aim and End of all Learning."

This clarity, however, does not at first glance characterize the history of the American college curriculum. When America's great universities were founded in the 18^th century, the privileged young men who attended them marched through a common curriculum. Often, the undergraduate career culminated in a "capstone" course in metaphysics, taught by the college's president.

Today, a small liberal arts college like Kenyon—of which I am president—offers study in more than 30 academic departments and 10 interdisciplinary programs, mounting almost 400 courses each semester. Other sectors of higher education offer courses ranging from "turf management" to "the behavior of consumers." This proliferation of courses mirrors the explosion of knowledge in our era, which has generated professions and entire fields of thought (nanosciences, financial derivatives, videography) that simply didn't exist in past decades.

Does the expansion of the curriculum mean that the fundamentals have been lost sight of? I suspect not. Last year, a national survey found that 99 percent of faculty said "the ability to think critically" was crucial to a college education; 90 percent said "the ability to write effectively."

But what of the emphasis on moral development? On the same national survey of faculty, only 69 percent identified "developing moral character" as the most important aspect of a college education, and only 39 percent chose "enhancing spiritual development." When I have asked my faculty colleagues their views, they say they are too "modest" to assert the ability to develop moral character and too wary, in today's political climate, to meddle in students' spiritual development. Perhaps it's time for me and my fellow presidents to draft the syllabus for that capstone course in metaphysics with which the presidents used to send their graduates off into the world.

What would be the syllabus for such a course? My response—not at all flippant—would be: It doesn't matter. What I'm talking about is not a required reading list; rather it is an experience of understanding and growth that might take a myriad of forms. The goal is not mastery of a subject but maturity as an adult—attaining a degree of self-understanding, an appreciation for the limits of the human condition, empathy for others, and a sense of responsibility for civil society. For me, as a classicist, the syllabus would probably focus on the Homeric epics and Greek tragedy. These texts have, to my mind, almost unparalleled power to anchor us in the world and confront us with both our wrenching limitations and our soaring possibilities as human beings. But for another colleague, the entire syllabus would be Melville's Moby Dick; for another, such a course would consist of teaching his students to construct a scientific instrument by hand; for a fourth, the course might be organic chemistry taught inductively through group discussion. What matters is not the subject but the sensibility. In fact, each of these hypothetical courses is one I have known a fine faculty member to teach, in a way that offered not information "to pass the exam" but the wisdom of a life-changing experience.

Re-introducing the ethical dimension into American higher education is not, I believe, a matter of specifying certain readings (à la E.D. Hirsch or William Bennett). Nor is it, finally, something to be left to "capstone" courses taught by college presidents. Rather, a recommitment to the moral dimension of higher education requires all of us who are teachers to re-focus our sights on the Big Questions: Why am I here? What is asked of me? What is the good? In another national survey taken last year, a substantial majority of undergraduate students said that what they expect from college is guidance in defining their life's values. In this, it seems to me, today's students join that long line of sages who have understood that the education that most matters must touch the soul.

S. Georgia Nugent is the president of Kenyon College.

 

explainer
What Are Army Field Manuals?
How-to guides for interrogation, laser injury prevention, and other useful skills.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 6:39 PM ET

Download the MP3 audio version of this story here. The Explainer now has its own free daily podcast; click here to learn more.

The Pentagon has delayed the release of a newly revised Army Field Manual on interrogations, a day after Tuesday's Senate vote to amend a torture ban to a defense bill. Earlier this month, Sen. John McCain succeeded in adding a provision that established the Army Field Manual as the source for interrogation procedures for all branches of government. What's an Army Field Manual?

A how-to book for soldiers. There are field manuals—or FMs—for just about everything a member of the Army might need to do, from handling nuclear material to cooking dinner. As of a few years ago, there were over 650 different manuals. Some cover broad topics (for instance, FM 1 "The Army," and FM 3-0 "Operations") while others focus on more specific issues—like FM 8-50, "Prevention and Medical Management of Laser Injuries." The standard field manual is written at a sixth-grade level and broken into chapters, and adorned with charts, tables, and hand-drawn illustrations. Some of the books come with appendices of examples or real-life vignettes. Many—but not all—of them are available to the public on Web sites like this one.

A battalion typically has a library of 40 or 50 field manuals at headquarters. These would include some FMs on general topics, as well as a selection of more specific guides that vary from office to office. (A library might store multiple copies of a particularly useful guide.) Most field manuals look like college textbooks with the covers ripped off—they're about an inch thick, with a flimsy spine. Some have holes punched in the margin so they can be kept in three-ring binders. They're also available in HTML or PDF form, and some can even be downloaded to a Palm device.

Some FMs are used in the field. FM 7-8, for example, covers the basic tactics and operations for small infantry units. All platoons would have at least one copy of the "seven-dash-eight" around; the platoon leader might keep it in his humvee. Since it's so common, the FM 7-8 comes in a handy pocket-size version that's about the size of a small paperback book and bound at the top with staples. (At more than 400 pages, the little 7-8 is still pretty thick. True Army nerds can get their copies laminated for protection from the elements.) Other FMs that deal with very specific topics—like a specific weapon system—might be kept near the equipment for which they provide instructions.

All Army interrogators have access to the field manual on "Intelligence Interrogation" (FM 34-52), but it's unlikely that any carry it around. The book contains chapters on the role of the interrogator and various procedures for obtaining information. (Slate contributor Phillip Carter outlined a few of the FM 34-52 techniques here.) Chances are they'd only consult it when something unusual came up.

The Army distributes several other kinds of publications to its troops. Technical manuals (TMs) are a lot like owner's guides—most pieces of equipment come with one. Pamphlets give information on a topic or program, more to educate the soldier than to explain how to do something. Army regulations (ARs) lay out basic rules, like how to wear your uniform.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Operation Truth and the United States Army.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130494/

college week
Confessions of a College Journalist
Why aspiring writers should be allowed to fail in private.
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 6:36 PM ET

Click here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

In the dozen or so hours a day I spend on Jim Romenesko's media news Web site, I have read a lot about college newspapers. Collegiate editors run amok. Editorialists making sloppy pronouncements. ("I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport," wrote one columnist—an international studies major.) Plagiarists, con artists, and hacks: the kind of journalistic malefactors that Romenesko specializes in smoking out for public inspection. The difference, of course, is that the collegians are usually between 18 and 22 years old. And if they're anything like I was during that interregnum, they don't have a clue about where to place a comma—let alone how to craft their public personae for their future colleagues. College newspapers have gone digital, and with that we've lost something vital about college journalism: the privilege to write wretchedly, irresponsibly, and incoherently in relative privacy. "When you screw up now, it's Google-able," says Christopher Buckley, the editor of Forbes FYI and a veteran of the Yale Daily News. "In the old days, you just had to wait three days and no one would remember."

It comes as a great relief that my own college career predates Romenesko. I was the third of the three-man editorial board of the Daily Texan, the achingly earnest conscience of the University of Texas at Austin. I wrote three editorial columns per week, each of which, in a rather grand gesture, carried a reproduction of my signature at the bottom. I often rummage through my old clips when I need to feel rotten, and they never fail to do the trick. For one thing, I seemed to have had a peculiar preoccupation with personal freedoms—and the university's attempts to run afoul of them—that did not rear its head during, say, the passage of the Patriot Act. As for metaphors, I preferred tortured ones. An out-of-control student committee operated "like a water sprinkler"; spring break was a "runaway train"; fall registration an "April shower." I once began a column with a quote from the historian Frederick Jackson Turner—the only mystery being how many seconds elapsed between my hearing the quote in political science class and committing it to the printed page. It was one of my many acts of heroic transcription; the ethos of the college journalist being that if one is required to appear in class, then one should at least be able to get a column out it.

Whether at the Texan or the more august halls of the Harvard Crimson, working at the college newspaper tends to instill in its writers a particular set of values. More than being liberal or conservative, they reflect a touchingly undergraduate concern for the human condition. Up with unionized cafeteria workers! Down with date rape! We must have more 24-hour study spaces, more parking spaces, more "safe" spaces. Fraternities and secret societies ought to be frog-marched off campus—unless, of course, they ask us to join. Can we talk about race for a minute—I mean, really sit down and talk about it? And the daily outrages! Beloved local businesses bulldozed by university expansion! Binge drinking! Lazy professors! Impractical majors! And—a favorite of finals week—are we all getting enough sleep?!

Such burning issues are examined with a certain brand of undergraduate prose. "Pompous and oracular," says Robert Gordon, former editorial chairman of the Harvard Crimson and now a professor at Yale. Gordon recalls that he and his colleagues fancied themselves the intellectual descendants of George Orwell and Edmund Wilson, with bits of Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse thrown in for levity's sake. (Note: This is also how many older journalists view themselves.) Jacob Weisberg, Slate's editor and a former Yale Daily News staffer, says, "Harvard is the place where people make more aggressively oracular pronouncements. At Yale, it was more like covering the anti-apartheid rally as if it were the invasion of Grenada."

At the college newspaper, much like the real newspaper, there is a deep cultural divide between the news and editorial operations. Each tends to regard the other with maximum suspicion. Part of this enmity emerges from the rampant careerism of student newspapers (the paper is often only as important as the summer internships that it produces). Another part is the result of a genuine social rift, like that between the social fraternities and academic ones. "The news board tended to talk like and dress like streetwise investigative reporters," says former Crimson editorialist Gordon. "They always had cigarettes dangling out of their mouths. They were laconic, straight-talking. They dressed down."

Both sides, however, make common cause when it comes to the university administration. The newspaper is the scourge of the college president, his most relentless observer and his most vocal critic. On a respectable college newspaper, writing about the administration with anything other than lightly concealed disgust is tantamount to treason. With other subjects, there is room for a lighter touch. Buckley, who co-edited the magazine of the Yale Daily News with John Tierney, now a columnist with the Times, recalls running "the most unscientific drug study that has ever been conducted." Leaflets were passed out in the dining halls with questions along the lines of, "Have you ever made money selling drugs?" Students who had so much as peddled a joint to a roommate were encouraged to answer in the affirmative. Buckley and Tierney went to press with a "special report" that stated that about 14 percent of Yalies were aspiring drug dealers. The Associated Press picked up the figure, and broadcast it to the world. Buckley says he went into hiding. Tierney does not remember that part but says, "The alumni gift solicitation people were not proud of it."

The Internet makes such puckishness fairly implausible. And, in the end, a little digital scrutiny may be the best defense against aspiring fabulists (c.f., Jayson Blair, editor, the University of Maryland's Diamondback). But, please, allow college students to compose their articles and columns in peace. The fear is not just humiliation in front of their future colleagues. The fear is that with the attention of big media, ambitious collegians may be tempted to skip ahead. They will put aside the date-rape and cafeteria stories and move too quickly into the dreariness of the "adult" world: COLA adjustments, forged National Guard documents, and so forth. The cherished intimacy of college journalism will give way to the partisan stew of the rest of it. As Frederick Jackson Turner might say, "The wilderness masters the colonist."

Bryan Curtis is a Slate staff writer. You can e-mail him at curtisb@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130495/

press box
Bob Woodward's Timetable
It's not a cover-up, but what the hell is it?
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 5:35 PM ET

What did Bob Woodward know, and when did he know it?

That's the first question that came to my mind as today's (Nov. 16) Page One story in the Washington Post, "Woodward Was Told of Plame More Than Two Years Ago," knocked me off my seat, spilling steaming hot coffee all down my Slate insignia bib.

For the last two years, every reader and reporter in America has been adjusting his Valerie Plame timetable, trying to figure out who in the government leaked her name to whom and in what order. Meanwhile, Woodward was sitting mum in the catbird seat, the scoop trapped in his bill. The information would still be there if Woodward's source—unnamed in the Post account and unnamed by Woodward in his "statement"—hadn't told Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald about the conversation on Nov. 3. Fitzgerald deposed Woodward for more than two hours yesterday.

That Woodward learned Plame's name and employer—but not that she was covert—in mid-June 2003 changes the arc of the story by making Woodward one of the earliest, if not the earliest, recipients of a Bush administration tidbit about Plame, and by extension, about Joseph C. Wilson IV. (Robert Novak didn't out Plame until July 14, 2003.) The timing of Woodward's conversation with the official also casts fresh doubt on the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby indictment.

But first a digression: What sort of journalist publishes a "statement" in his paper as opposed to writing a story? What sort of journalist refuses to talk to his own newspaper when making such a revelation, as Woodward did? Today's story reads, "Woodward declined to elaborate on the statement he released to the Post late yesterday afternoon and publicly last night. He would not answer any questions, including those not governed by his confidentiality agreement with source."

But wait, I have additional digressions! What sort of journalist, even one writing a book—Woodward is always working on a book—withholds blockbuster information about a major investigation, prosecution, and First Amendment battle from his editors until the 11^th hour, as Woodward did? According to the Post story, he only told them last month. What sort of journalist doesn't use the information he's had since mid-June 2003 to break bigger news about the subject? Was he worried about the legal exposure his bosses might suffer? Or was he holding on to it—and his access to top officials in an unfolding story—for his book? End of digression. (Or maybe I should refashion my digression into a "statement" and have Slate publish it.)

My digressions don't compare with Woodward's. After sleeping on it, Woodward finally talked to the Post's Howard Kurtz, who published a story on the paper's Web site today at 1:18 p.m. In it, Woodward apologizes to Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. for not informing him of the leak earlier. Woodward says he "was trying to protect" his sources and himself. "I didn't want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed," he elaborates.

As long as Woodward is coming clean, he should revisit his appearance on the Oct. 27, 2005, Larry King Live, in which he responded to a question from Newsweek's Michael Isikoff about a scoop he was allegedly preparing for the Washington Post. Woodward said:

I wish I did have a bombshell. I don't even have a firecracker. I'm sorry. In fact, I mean this tells you something about the atmosphere here. I got a call from somebody in the CIA saying he got a call from the best New York Times reporter on this saying exactly that I supposedly had a bombshell.

Woodward, like most manly men, is being too modest about what he packs. It wasn't a firecracker or a bombshell. It was an atomic bomb.

Journalist (and journalism professor) Mark Feldstein points me to another troubling wrinkle in the Woodward episode. The Post reports that Woodward's "confidentiality agreement" with the official who was his Plame source allowed him to talk to the prosecutor about their discussion, but not publicly reveal the source's identity or crucial details about his testimony.

Agreeing to such tortured pacts with sources contradicts the views Woodward expressed on Page 204 of his 2005 book, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat. There, Woodward debates whether he should approach Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat, with a sworn affidavit to release him—Woodward—from the vow to keep Felt's identity secret. Woodward's lawyer, Robert Barnett, suggests that given Felt's wobbly mental state, he should also collect the signatures of Throat's doctor, Throat's lawyer, and a Throat family member to ensure a complete release. On Page 205, Woodward says to hell with releases. He writes:

I had never signed an agreement with any source before, during or after I received information. Why start now? Would it set a precedent? Paper agreements exist when there is an absence of trust. Well, that pretty much defined the situation. But Barnett's standard—voluntarily, absolutely and competently—was impossible in this case. The "competently" was unattainable for sure. And what would "voluntarily" and "absolutely" mean in these circumstances? I abandoned the idea of a signed affidavit.

Has Woodward set a precedent with his recent confidentiality agreement? And is the source Vice President Dick Cheney? (Woodward always encourages journalists to go straight to the top for sources when reporting a story.)

I don't expect immediate answers to my questions, but I do expect Woodward to review his utterances on candor and openness in his July 17, 2005, appearance on Kurtz's CNN show, Reliable Sources, before he declines to speak. Said Woodward then:

Be careful what you say, particularly early in an inquiry, and what's the main lesson of Watergate in these sort of scandals? You know better than anyone, get the full story out completely at the start so they don't have to drag it out of you. And that's what we're in. We're in the dragging out phase.

******

As long as I've got Mark Feldstein contributing to my column for zero remuneration, allow me to publish his other volunteered gem: He salutes Woodward's superior reportorial tradecraft, noting that he appears not to have left an identifying fingerprint for Fitzgerald to discover as Judith Miller did when she signed the visitor log on June 23, 2003, at the Old Executive Office Building for her Libby session. Fitzgerald, as the Post reported, only learned of Woodward's conversation with the source because the source … burned Woodward. Send your flaming e-mails to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

 

war stories
We Still Don't Have a Plan
What has everybody been doing for three years?
By Fred Kaplan
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 4:51 PM ET

It is becoming increasingly clear that President George W. Bush and his top advisers lack not only a strategy for fighting the war in Iraq but—more disturbing—any idea of how to devise one.

The latest, most jaw-dropping evidence comes from a front-page article by Greg Jaffe in the Nov. 15 Wall Street Journal. Jaffe tells the story of David (last name withheld for obvious reasons), a 37-year-old U.S. Army foreign-affairs officer stationed undercover in northwestern Iraq. David wears civilian clothes, packs only a pistol, and is so fluent in Arabic that the locals think he's one of them. As a result, he's been able to trace how jihadist fighters have moved into Iraq across the Syrian border—what routes they use, what markings they follow—and he's passed on the information to American military commanders. He's also advised these commanders and other officials on how to deal with their Iraqi counterparts, he's fired incompetent interpreters who'd been hired by officials who didn't know the language, and he's staved off at least one big conflict with Turkey.

You read the first few paragraphs surprised and pleased that the Army has such officers. The chief of staff to Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez is quoted as saying, "We ought to have one of these guys assigned to every commander in Iraq."

Then Jaffe drops the bombshell: The military is pulling David out of Iraq later this month, along with seven other officers who form his unit. The U.S. Embassy and military headquarters in Baghdad have apparently decided that they are duplicating the work of others.

Jaffe's sources—on-the-ground officers and commanders, speaking on the record—sternly disagree. (Clearly, they let Jaffe talk with David as a way of rallying opposition to the move.) Col. John D'Agostino, who oversees the unit, is quoted as saying, "When David leaves, the U.S. Embassy's regional office in Mosul won't have a single Arabic speaker or Middle Eastern expert on its staff."

This—all of this—is simply staggering. What has the military brass been doing the last three years—what has the diplomatic corps been doing the last three decades—to leave the United States in such a lurch that the regional office in Mosul, one of the most critical and turbulent cities in northern Iraq, has nobody versed in Arabic or even in Middle Eastern studies? (The office, Jaffe writes, is staffed with Asia and South America specialists.)

The Pentagon has issued high-level reports calling for more training in foreign languages and cultures. Officials acknowledge a particularly acute need in Iraq. Yet here's David and his seven culturally astute colleagues doing invaluable, irreplaceable work on the battlefield, at the negotiating tables, in the embassy briefing rooms—and Baghdad headquarters is yanking them out of the country.

Whatever President Bush plans to do with Iraq next year—pull troops out, put more troops in, or just muddle through—this move is scandalously mindless.

Meanwhile, David Ignatius recently reported in the Washington Post that the "hot book" among top Iraq strategists this season is Lewis Sorley's A Better War, which argues that we were on the verge of winning the Vietnam War just as political pressures forced Richard Nixon to pull out. The war started to go our way in 1972, Sorley contends, when Gen. William Westmoreland retired as U.S. commander, and his successor, Gen. Creighton Abrams, abandoned the "search and destroy" strategy in favor of "clear and hold." Westmoreland had focused on attrition and body counts; Abrams started clearing insurgents out of villages, one by one, then holding each area securely.

The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, was seen reading the book in September. It's on the bookshelves of many senior officers in Baghdad. It also caught the eye of State Department counselor Philip Zelikow. Most pertinent of all, Ignatius notes that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice practically quoted from it in her Oct. 19 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "Our politico-military strategy has to be clear, hold and build—to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and to build durable, national Iraqi institutions."

The idea—which is similar to the counterinsurgency strategy that Andrew Krepinevich Jr. recently laid out in Foreign Affairs—is appealing in theory. The problem—in Vietnam then and in Iraq now—is the "hold" part. American troops could, and can, "clear" an area of insurgents. But the South Vietnamese army couldn't "hold" it securely—couldn't keep the North Vietnamese army from coming back and retaking it. And neither the American nor the Iraqi army can keep the insurgents from coming back to cities like Fallujah. The Americans lack the numbers, and the Iraqis as yet lack the wherewithal or the training. Until that situation is changed, "clear and hold" is a daydream.

So, why are the country's leaders conducting this war so cavalierly? William Kristol, one of the leading neocons who advocated this war, blames Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "I don't think he ever really had his heart in it," Kristol is quoted as saying in last Sunday's Washington Post Magazine. At every stage of the war, Rumsfeld pushed for doing less—fewer troops, skimpier supplies, shorter training time, and so forth.

This theory doesn't wash. By most accounts, Rumsfeld was bent on war with Iraq from the first moments after 9/11. His push for a small invasion force—which he demanded, and micromanaged, in the face of fierce resistance by the Army establishment—stemmed not from tepidity but from deep enthusiasm for "military transformation," a theory that touts light, lithe, high-tech forces. It was a theory that seemed redeemed by the unconventional invasion of Afghanistan. And, as things turned out, it was further vindicated by the first month of the war in Iraq—the battlefield phase of the war.

Which leads us to the ultimate source of the problem: Rumsfeld and most of the others who planned the war thought the battlefield phase would be the only phase; contrary to advice from the CIA and the State Department's regional specialists (whom the White House and Pentagon brusquely ignored), they truly believed that the aftermath wouldn't be a problem. Saddam would be ousted, freedom would be rung, flowers and candies would be flung, Ahmad Chalabi and his militia would ascend to power, and our troops would be home by Christmas, if not by the Fourth of July.

The civilian hawks and neocons weren't alone in this shortsightedness. Military leaders were culpable as well. In 2002, the Army and Air Force conducted war games that simulated an invasion of a country resembling Iraq. In both cases, victory was declared with the toppling of the enemy's leader—not with the accomplishment of the larger strategic goals. As the real war began in the spring of 2003, there was no Army field manual on what used to be called "war termination"—i.e., how to end a war and what to do afterward.

By summer, it was clear to many that capturing Baghdad wasn't synonymous with victory. But the mantra within Bush's inner circle, on all matters of high policy, was firm: Never admit mistakes, never alter course. All hell broke loose in Iraq, and our leaders let it. By the time their attitude changed, and they realized the need for concessions to reality, it was in many ways too late. They never forged a coherent new policy, so even their adjustments were fitful and ad hoc.

Hence the bizarre attempt to seek a formula for victory from the grim playbooks of Vietnam. Hence the thoughtless order to shoo the genuinely productive David from the deadly deserts of northwestern Iraq.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

 

college week
Akbar at Yale
Will Econ help me protect Afghanistan from warlords?
By Said Hyder Akbar
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 3:25 PM ET

From: Said Hyder Akbar
Subject: From Kabul to the Ivy League
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 12:52 PM ET

Here's a story from my first semester at Yale. In one of my classes, Introduction to the Middle East, my professor was talking about the modern history of Iran. During his lecture, he paused to ask a question in an attempt to engage the class. The question was this: "For you future Third-World dictators out there, where would you turn to for money and support?" Nobody answered. I didn't feel comfortable raising my hand, but in my mind I thought, America, of course. The professor, giving up in the face of our studious silence, finally said, "America, of course." I felt pleased at my insight. Then he said, "All right, again, if there are any future Third-World dictators in this room, who would you not want to mess with if you are in power?" Again, nobody answered, and I did not feel comfortable raising my hand, but in my mind, I thought, the religious establishment, duh. The professor answered, "The religious establishment." It was a little disconcerting to know that thinking like a Third-World dictator came so easily to me. My expertise did not come from the books I read or some previous class on "Third-World dictators": It came from experience.

Since high school, I've been a student in three very different environments—Afghanistan, where I've been spending my summers; Diablo Valley College, a community college in Pleasant Hill, Calif., about 20 minutes from my home in Concord, Calif. (where I spent most of my life); and Yale, where I transferred this semester as a junior majoring in economics. So, when the professor asked who you shouldn't mess with, I immediately thought of something I saw in the summer of 2002. It was at the loya jirga, or grand assembly, in Kabul, that first elected President Karzai as the leader of the country. A man came up to the stage to propose that the word "Islamic" didn't need to be in the official title of the new government. Before he could even offer his rationale, people started to crisscross their arms—a traditional sign of rejection in Afghanistan—and the crowd began shouting for him to get off the stage. My lesson for the day? That the country, still recovering from the war against the Soviets in which millions died and fought for their beliefs, is not ready for religious discourse yet.

During that same summer, my father was President Karzai's spokesman, which meant I had a chance to spend months in the presidential palace. It was there that I learned firsthand some of the difficulties of governing a Third-World country reduced to rubble. When I had a chance to ask the president what he felt was the greatest obstacle facing him, he responded almost immediately, "The lack of resources." Afghanistan was in dire need of international assistance as it tried to rebuild, and it looked toward America the most for assistance. So, that is how I knew the answers to my professor's questions. In fact, I was even tempted to add to his lecture a quick postscript: Don't depend on America too much, either.

The other day, as I checked out the books at Sterling Memorial Library, I was thinking about history. The hook Americans use to get people interested in history is usually something along the lines of, "Well, if you want to know where you're going, you need to know where you came from." It's almost seen as a chore. But for me, it's very different. When I read history books or political science books or philosophical work, I don't see where I came from but where I am right now. The feeling is surreal and exciting—sometimes I feel like I'm living in Afghanistan's history. A friend of mine, Sudipta, invited me to a debate for Yale's conservative party last week. He told me how he, along with some of the others in the party, felt that human nature hadn't changed much since the time some of these classics had been written. What he said made sense, of course. But I didn't need to defend studying the classics by trying to draw parallels between that world and the world we live in today, or by studiously figuring out how they apply to each other. In Afghanistan, I couldn't help but notice that it was some of these books—The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes—that best helped explain the situation.

It used to be that my summers in Afghanistan seemed like a break from my real life; it now seems to me that Afghanistan is where my real life is. When people talk about enjoying "college life," I just don't get it. Some of my peers here at Yale don't want it to end; I, on the other hand, can't wait to get out of here. To me, it feels like I'm in stuck in a bubble while forces outside are transforming the world. In this regard, Diablo Valley College was a boon. A community college is much less of a bubble. You aren't completely submerged in residential college life; you commute to school from your home. Sometimes, that separation can really help.

Even in a place as international and resource-rich as Yale, one encounters strange bits of parochialism. Last August, during one of the orientations for transfer students, someone from Career Services spoke to us about summer opportunities and employment after Yale. I was excited to utilize Yale's connections to find something interesting to do this summer in Afghanistan. But when I walked up to the speaker after the meeting and asked about Afghanistan, I think he took it as a joke. When he realized I was serious, he told me there was no way that Yale could help me with anything I wanted to do in Afghanistan. The security situation wasn't ideal, and there were State Department warnings about the place. So much for taking advantage of Yale, I thought.

There's another irony about life at Yale. These days, when I get back to my room from a day of class and problem sets, I'm exhausted. So disconnected have I become from the real world that the flow of the nightly conversation between my older brother and me has changed: I used to be the one giving him updates about the world, but now by the time I'm done with my work, I've missed all of the day's headlines.

From: Said Hyder Akbar
Subject: Will Econ Help Me Protect Afghanistan From Warlords?
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 3:25 PM ET

Here at Yale, most students turn to teachers and friends for advice in figuring out what they really want from college. But for me, the person who really helped me understand what I wanted was a guy writing to his wife in 1780. John Adams, in a letter to Abigail Adams, wrote, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." The quote, which I first read at the library while researching for a paper, really resonated.

When my native country, Afghanistan, was turned upside down in the fall of 2001—my senior year in high school—I became involved with a place I had never seen before. (I call it "native" because I was born a refugee in Pakistan, and my parents lived in Afghanistan for most of their lives.) After college, my plans are to go to Afghanistan to help with the rebuilding efforts in whatever capacity I best can. It's a pretty bizarre feeling to be attached to a country that has fallen so far behind—even though I'm 20, it might be possible that I am of the generation that only brings enough bare order to Afghanistan that the next generation can study mathematics and philosophy.

Which makes my time at Yale a little strange, since my goal is to use the opportunities here to train myself, like the young Bruce Wayne, for the challenges of Afghanistan. Obviously, choosing a major is key, and it's what I've been wrestling with recently. For a long time I wanted to be an Econ major. But the other day I was sitting in one of my core economics classes at Yale—a huge class filled with overachievers sitting in the front row furiously jotting down notes and jocks huddled up in the back making obnoxious sounds, laughing at their own jokes (and in case you're curious, I sit somewhere in the middle)—going over the von Neumann-Morgenstein utility function, when a thought popped up: When am I ever going to need this? Sure, plenty of college students wonder this during a dull lecture. But in this case I was studying Econ: Knowing this stuff was actually pretty useful—if you planned on going into investment banking in New York. For Afghanistan, this seemed to be a little ways away. The classes over in Poli Sci look a little more essential to me: Violence and Civil Strife, the U.N. and International Security. That's what I'm now wondering if I should set my cap at.

Part of my new dislike for Econ has to do with the difference between Yale and community college. At Diablo Valley College, my economics professor was a World Bank official who had experience everywhere from Yemen to India, and plenty of time—and the interest—to sit with me and discuss economic development in Afghanistan. Before I left, somebody warned me that the professors at "big-name" universities would not be the same.

That's proven to be the case, to some degree. Plenty of professors are great in the classroom. For others—especially some of the bigger names—teaching seems to be the last thing on their mind. One of my professors walks into class and starts copying down on the board exactly what he has given to us as notes, downloadable online from our class server—most of my friends don't see the point in coming to that class (and usually don't).

So, a few weeks ago, I dropped that economics class and decided to reassess my situation. It might be expecting too much from Yale to help me learn how to deal with people like Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a notorious—even by Afghan standards—warlord who is said to have crushed some of his own people with tanks and killed his enemies by suffocating them in containers by the hundreds. What I do know is that utility functions will not do much against these types of people.

Hyder Akbar, 20, is the author of Come Back to Afghanistan and a junior at Yale.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130424/

college week
The Profit Chase
For-profit colleges have lots of champions—and lots of problems.
By Anya Kamenetz
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 3:18 PM ET

You've seen this ad before, on the subway or at a bus shelter: An attractive young ethnic type beams in three-quarter profile, against a background of blue sky and clouds, looking off at … his future. At the bottom appears an aspirational word like Apex or Phoenix or Capella. Despite appearances, the product is not a psychopharmaceutical; it's one of the nation's 2,000-odd for-profit colleges.

So-called proprietary schools, which rely on tuition to both cover their operating costs and turn a profit, enroll about 1.6 million of the 20 million students at all accredited colleges nationwide; they run 28 percent of all two-year colleges. Their enrollment is growing four times faster than the sector as a whole, about 8 percent a year. The largest is the Apollo Group, which operates the well-known University of Phoenix and three other colleges. In all, Apollo has 176 locations, plus many online programs, with a total enrollment of 307,400 students in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Canada, up there with the largest state university systems.

Conservatives have hailed the robust for-profit college phenomenon as a welcome infusion of free-market forces into an otherwise bloated higher-education sector. The top official at the Department of Education making decisions about higher education, Bush appointee Sally Stroup, was previously a lobbyist for the Apollo Group. A vigorous champion of proprietary schools, Richard Vedder of AEI was recently named to a blue-ribbon Department of Education commission on the future of higher education that aims to tackle, among other things, the issue of soaring costs. Proprietary schools, among the largest donors to higher-education committee members, not surprisingly also have many loyal Republican supporters in Congress.

But before we herald these institutions as the smarter, leaner future of higher education, it is worth scrutinizing their practices and their shady past. There is no question that they are adept at turning a profit. Yet commercial colleges' long history of ethical lapses and the highly uneven quality of their offerings make them a poor model for a higher-education field in crisis.

American "career colleges" date back to the 1850s, when H.B. Stratton and P.R. Bryant founded a chain of 50 schools starting in Buffalo, N.Y., to teach shorthand, bookkeeping, and the use of the newfangled mechanical typewriter primarily to women, who were not welcome at most traditional colleges. They occupied cheap rental space in downtown office buildings rather than spending money on leafy campuses. The industry also grew through correspondence courses, which acquired a checkered reputation over the years. For every reputable accounting program, there were hucksters like the bogus art schools that took out the famous "can you draw this?" matchbook ads.

As the liberal arts curriculum evolved (or devolved) from the classics, to the humanities, to today's critical-thinking courses and ethnic-studies departments, the need for vocational education remained, and commercial institutions were there to fill it. They attracted underserved students, especially low-income and working adults, by offering accelerated courses with flexible schedules and focusing their pitch on job placement. These schools commonly report placement rates of a credulity-straining 80 percent or 90 percent, no matter what the program; the Department of Education does not track or verify these numbers. Tuition is set far above the rates charged by public community colleges, for-profits' main competitors, yet below those at private nonprofits.

Today, according to the biggest for-profit lobbying group, these schools graduate about half of the "technically trained workers"—a fuzzy category—in the United States. Proprietary schools are the likeliest place to turn if you're interested in becoming a Microsoft Certified ™ Systems Administrator, or a clerk processing the paperwork for an HMO. Many of these colleges do offer bona fide degrees, including advanced degrees, in established subjects like business or computer science. But the volume business is in non-degree programs, which are shorter and cheaper to produce; they can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars yet terminate in a certificate of dubious value. Some of the offerings are pure wish fulfillment, like video-game design, film directing, or fashion merchandising; others are so limited they barely deserve to be called postsecondary. At the University of Phoenix, for example, you can earn a master of arts in education or an MBA with a specialty in e-commerce. At the other end of the spectrum, an outfit called Allied Schools offers a home-study course in "medical report writing" that involves "basic keyboarding skills, with an emphasis on medical terminology." There is no US News & World Report ranking or other objective measure to guide prospective students, who must make do with marketing claims.

Proprietary schools have been eligible for federal student aid under Title IV of the Higher Education Act since 1972. Taxpayer money, $4.3 billion in 2004, in the form of guaranteed student loans and Pell Grants, remains the primary source of revenue for these schools. This makes it emphatically the public's business how good a job they're doing. Unfortunately, the enticement of unlimited federal cash led proprietary schools into their darkest era in the 1980s. With little federal oversight, unscrupulous recruiters haunted welfare offices to sign up unqualified and even homeless students, collected their aid money, and offered useless courses in return. Student loan defaults peaked in 1992 at 22 percent, and proprietary schools accounted for nearly half of all defaulters, although they were the source of just a fifth of all loans. Angry student advocates nearly succeeded in casting these schools out of the federal aid program altogether. Instead, 1,500 of the nation's then 4,000 trade schools were disaccredited, and the 1992 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act added complicated funding rules to try to control fraud.

Since the mid-1990s, the industry has spruced up its public image. After a round of buy-ups and mergers, publicly traded companies now enroll nearly half of for-profit students. These companies are Wall Street darlings—the highest-earning stocks of any industry between 2000 and 2003. But the very characteristic that makes them so attractive to investors, the ability to enroll ever-increasing numbers of students, has been the continuing source of trouble. A rash of investigations and complaints has called into question both these schools' business practices and their educational results.

A Department of Education inspector testified in May 2005 that during the previous six years, 74 percent of the agency's institutional-fraud cases have involved proprietary schools. In the last few years, the SEC has probed or investigated three of the 10 biggest higher-education companies, ITT, Career Education Corporation, and Corinthian Colleges, for discrepancies in their financial reporting. In September 2004, the University of Phoenix received the largest fine ever levied by the Department of Education, $9.8 million, for linking enrollment to recruiters' financial incentives, a violation of agency rules. In January of 2005, 60 Minutes aired an exposé on the Career Education Corporation, which has been sued by students who borrowed up to $80,000 for courses and were stuck working in retail. Frustrated students are increasingly turning to class-action lawsuits to make good on what they say are the colleges' false claims about job placement; such suits have been filed against Corinthian and ITT, among others.

All this bad publicity has hurt stock prices for the companies involved, but it hasn't diminished the industry's political capital. In the last year, Congress has moved toward relaxing all the restrictions of the '92 crackdown. Most important, the version of the Higher Education Act currently before the House would include proprietary schools in a single definition of "an institution of higher education." Right now, they are eligible for student aid but not other kinds of subsidies available to nonprofit colleges; the change would potentially allow them to compete for millions more in infrastructure and program-related grants.

Conservatives like Vedder embrace for-profit colleges precisely because they are businesses. They see them as more focused on cutting costs and raising productivity than state-supported universities, with their tenured professors and their money-losing philosophy departments. They have a point there. The cost of public higher education has been rising steeply for decades. Colleges are a common budget-balancer for states facing fiscal crises; institutions in turn raise tuition, with much of the bill ultimately going back to the federal government in the form of student aid. The prevailing sentiment in Washington is that it's time to turn off the spigot and force colleges to control their spending. The current budget-reconciliation bill, in fact, includes the largest cuts to student aid in the 40-year history of the program.

It's true that proprietary institutions have taken the lead in money-saving innovations like accelerated courses, distance learning, and the deprofessionalization of teaching (hiring only instructors); nonprofit schools, for better and for worse, are already following these examples. Yet pointing to proprietary schools as models of probity is wishful thinking. Experts like Vedder, praising the "highly profitable" for-profit schools, willfully ignore the reality that the big higher-education companies were built to suck up federal handouts, which provide the majority of their income; these schools grab a share of federal aid higher than their share of enrollment, while public community colleges receive less than their share. Even worse, the prevalence of fraud, waste, and abuse in these schools from their origins down to the present day is a clear signal that turning a profit, not serving students, is their top priority. When students equal revenue, the pressure is on to pack them in and charge them as much as the market will bear. When colleges have shareholders, decisions are going to be made with short-term profitability in mind, and the shiny images in those subway ads will displace honest assessments of performance. Or as a University of Phoenix enrollment director told recruiters, as quoted in a 2003 Department of Education report, "It's all about the numbers. It will always be about the numbers. But we need to show the Department of Education what they want to see."

Anya Kamenetz is a freelance writer and a columnist for the Village Voice. Her first book, Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time To Be Young, will be published in February 2006.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130516/

college week
College Makeover
Wrestling with Greco-Roman ideas.
By Anthony Grafton
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 6:57 AM ET

What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of this debate. Click here to read more from our symposium on reinventing college, and here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

What would I like to offer American students by way of general education? Pretty much what several colleagues and I offer 30 to 35 Princeton freshmen every year: a magical mystery tour through the Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Christian worlds. We have them read the best books we know from the ancient, medieval, and—in the spring term—modern world, in the best translations we can find: Homer, Plato, large parts of the Old and New Testaments, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, down to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. The course staff—a classicist, a medievalist, a Renaissance literature specialist, and two historians—and some friends who make guest appearances offer three lectures a week. We apply our different methods to the course material, giving the kids examples of literary, historical, and philosophical approaches that they can apply when they write their papers. We also play off and make fun of one another, a game in which the swift-footed young far outscore grizzled veterans like me. Our students meet in groups of 15 for three hours a week of discussion and write six short papers and one long one per semester.

All students who make it through the year—a few vote themselves off the island after Christmas—seem to work pretty hard. Classroom discussions are intense, funny, mostly on-topic. It's a lot to digest. Some of the readings are alien, subversive, even wicked, from the standpoint of modern American society and culture—Plato, for example, and the Synoptic Gospels. Thucydides and Cicero reveal what it felt like to live in republics whose leaders gave long, coherent speeches to large, attentive audiences. Seneca shows them that they're not the first people to face the task of constructing an acceptable adult self; Ovid makes reading itself an act of wild and complex delight.

Both our choice of texts and the questions we put to them reflect a loosely shared conviction that something like a Western tradition exists and that some of its creations are pretty wonderful. But you won't hear us making propaganda for—or against—the "West" of current political discourse. Mainly we try to get our students excited about old books; to teach them to read and argue more precisely; and to give them a home for the year, a place where they can argue about big questions, passionately and articulately, without worrying that they might have broken the current social rules, which seem to hold that guys don't do humanities and girls who want a social life shouldn't talk in class. Graduates of the course have gone in every imaginable direction: to classics, to anthropology, to making documentary films. All of them tell us that the experience was formative for them as students and thinkers. It's certainly great for the teachers. We have to drop the shield of specialized knowledge and confront, week by week, books that shock and stimulate and amuse after 2,500 years.

This course is expensive, and we pay for it partly with the help of a gift from an alumni family that loves the humanities. To make a course like it work, moreover, you need more than money: You need teachers who have time and space to commit themselves to an enterprise that won't immediately advance their careers, small classes, and students with time to do a lot of reading. That's a lot to ask for in most contemporary universities. Why?

Anthony Grafton teaches European history and serves as chair of the Council for the Humanities at Princeton. His books include Defenders of the Text, The Footnote: A Curious History, and Bring Out Your Dead.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130333/

college week
College Makeover
Disability studies.
By Michael Bérubé
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 6:56 AM ET

What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of this debate. Click here to read more from our symposium on reinventing college, and here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

I used to think that postmodernists and multiculturalists got a bad rap when it came to general education. Amid the confused alarms of the 1990s culture wars, very few people realized that some of the most determined opponents of general education courses in the Western tradition were quite far afield—over in the finance, physics, and engineering wings of the campus, where neither professors nor students could be persuaded to see the point of getting acquainted with the Western literary and philosophical tradition from Plato to Nietzsche (or Homer to DeLillo).

Though I understood those professors' desires to train students in the dense technical aspects of their fields, I believed that A) students of finance, physics, and engineering will, upon graduation, have to live in an advanced society partly of their own making; B) anyone who hopes to reflect seriously on his place in that society has a positive obligation to verse him- or herself in the history of human thought; and C) at this time, in this country, Plato-to-the-present courses in "Western thought" are as good a place as any (and better than most) to start.

I still believe that courses in Western thought are essential to a liberal arts education; but I'm more circumspect about how many wings of your average research university aren't interested in the ideals of liberal arts education. In the course of serving on this committee and that, I've discovered that the people who oppose rigorous gen-ed requirements don't always come from finance, physics, and engineering; sometimes they come from psychology, art and design, or law and criminal justice. Every department finds ingenious ways of keeping its majors to itself: I'm most familiar with literature departments that require 30 or 36 credits for the major, but I know that many programs, from music to metallurgy, demand 50, 60, even 70-something credits from their students. This strikes me as a powerful form of academic territorialism, one that is unlikely to be overcome by well-meaning appeals to critical cosmopolitanism. And if, as I suspect, it is driven by departmental budgets (that is, by the need to put bodies in seats and keep them there), then general education requirements at research universities will remain nothing more than window dressing.

But I can dream, and when I do, I dream that American colleges and universities will acquaint students not only with the richest literary and philosophical works in the Western tradition but also with the history of the ways in which we humans have thought about and dealt with the fact of disability.

Disability? you wonder. It's not enough that the pomos and multicultis have insisted on race and gender and sexuality and what-have-you? Now students have to think about marginal subjects like disability?

Well, yes, it would be nice—if only to prevent people from thinking about disability as a marginal subject. From genomics to prenatal testing to special education to employment discrimination to mental illness to advance directives to Alzheimer's, disability is integral to how humans define the parameters of the human. It's central to every idea of autonomous personhood and every conception of citizenship.

It wouldn't take all that much to get students to see why disability matters; once you see why it matters, you begin to see how ubiquitous it is, and you don't need constant reminders. A course that included Henri-Jacques Stiker's A History of Disability, Alasdair Macintyre's Dependent Rational Animals, and Eva Kittay's Love's Labor would make a powerful case for the centrality of disability in Western thought, and a syllabus that included Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky's The New Disability History: American Perspectives would demonstrate that disability is as critical to ideas of American identity as are race and immigration (and the history of race and immigration in the United States has everything to do with theories about the cognitive abilities and disabilities of the peoples of the world).

As it happens, your average campus contains hundreds of scholars and students circling the elephant—in colleges of law, education, arts and humanities, medicine—none of whom call the elephant by name. And I think it's no accident that so few people in public life understand disability issues or disability politics—unless they happen to know someone with a disability, someone whose life makes disability visible as disability.

If we can remedy that—if we can acquaint college students with varieties of human mindedness and human embodiment so that they develop the capacity to think about disability not as an affliction blighting individual bodies but as a phenomenon that colors our conceptions of freedom, justice, and the good life—then we'll have made all that tedious gen-ed committee work worthwhile. And we'll have done our students—and our fellow citizens, able-bodied and disabled, a positive service.

Michael Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Penn State University and the co-director, with Janet Lyon, of Penn State's disability studies program.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130329/

college week
College Makeover
The matrix, revisited.
By Steven Pinker
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 6:55 AM ET

What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of this debate. Click here to read more from our symposium on reinventing college, and here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

General science education, often an afterthought, needs to be reconsidered, because scientific literacy is more important than ever. It's not just essential to being a competent citizen who can understand, for example, why hydrogen fuel cannot solve energy shortages, or that a child who swallows a pencil lead will not get lead poisoning. Science is also critical because it is blending with the other realms of human knowledge.

One example is deep history— the study of the peopling of the earth, the diversification of languages and cultures, and the transition from foraging to farming and civilization. Deep history, popularized by Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, is unifying the timeline of biological evolution with the timeline of human history and culture. Another example is the sciences of human nature, such as cognitive neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary psychology. They are illuminating the mental processes that go into creating and appreciating art and that drive the social contracts underlying economic and political systems.

More generally, the discoveries of science have cascading effects, many unforeseeable, on how we view ourselves—for example, that we are a species of primate that has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth, and that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified.

Conventional introductory courses will not impart the necessary appreciation. Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world. Science courses should thus be organized around content rather than discipline: the physical universe, rather than physics or astronomy or chemistry; living things, rather than biology; the human mind, rather than psychology or neuroscience.

Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist. Science has to be taught in a way that knowledge is organized, one hopes permanently, in the minds of students.

One possibility is to use time as a matrix. The big bang marks the origin of the subject matter of physics; chemistry came into being with the cooling of the young universe and condensation of elements; the formation of the solar system and earth inaugurated geology; the emergence of the first life brought forth evolution and molecular biology; the successive appearance of complex cells, multicellular organisms, social organisms, primates, and our species each provided an excuse for a new branch of biology. And with the advent of deep history, a chronologically organized science curriculum could naturally segue into an updated "Western Civ" sequence on world history, civilizations, and ideas, potentially unifying an entire general education curriculum.

Another major discovery of cognitive psychology with implications for general education is that the untutored mind is prone to systematic fallacies and biases. Most physicians, for example, make whoppingly inaccurate estimates of the probability that a person has a disease given a positive test result and the disease's base rate. The mind seems to have trouble grasping basic statistical facts such as that a person with the typical signs of a rare condition probably does not have the condition, that exceptional cases will regress to the mean, or that relaxing the standards for reporting an uncertain event will increase both hits and false alarms.

I would like to see required courses on the major analytic tools of logic, probability, and critical thinking, particularly those that serve as prosthetics for the limitations of everyday human cognition. The pedagogical challenge is to prepare students to apply these tools, since other research suggests that people often don't generalize abstract rules to new domains.

In sum, general education in science should stimulate a worldview grounded in our best understanding of reality, provide a complement to knowledge in other fields, and equip students with factual analytic resources to enhance their effectiveness as individuals and citizens. The best way to attain these goals, I think, is to develop synoptic courses that are organized around content rather than discipline, and ones that explicitly target the limitations of human cognition.

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard and author of The Blank Slate, How the Mind Works, and The Language Instinct.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130334/

 

college week
College Makeover
Let them solve problems.
By Alison Gopnik
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 6:55 AM ET

What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of this debate. Click here to read more from our symposium on reinventing college, and here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

I'm a cognitive scientist who is also a university professor. There is a staggering contrast between what I know about learning from the lab and the way I teach in the classroom. I know that human beings are designed to learn as part of their deepest evolutionary inheritance. I know that children, and even adults, learn about the everyday world around them in much the way that scientists learn. I even know something about the procedures that allow children and scientists to learn so much. They include close observation of real phenomena, active experimental investigation, and a process of guided apprenticeship. Children, and novice scientists, carefully try to imitate their mentors, and their mentors carefully watch and correct them.

Almost none of this happens in the average university classroom, including mine. In lecture classes, the teacher talks and the students write down what the teacher says. In seminars, the students write down what other students say. This is, literally, a medieval form of learning, and it's no coincidence that modern science only began to take off when it abandoned it—at first divorcing itself from universities in the process.

This is particularly ironic because modern universities have become the home of science and scholarship. And yet, notoriously, research is divorced from teaching. Faculty immersed in research think teaching is a distracting chore, and students are increasingly taught by academic lumpenproletariat adjuncts who don't do research. Students only get to do real research themselves in graduate school. What would French cooking be like if aspiring chefs never cracked an egg till after they had listened to four years of lectures about egg-cracking?

Why not make all teaching like graduate teaching (or, for that matter, the best preschool teaching)? Let freshmen students select five different areas of study—with no disciplines overlapping. Tell them about the unsolved problems that the professor is actively working on—analyzing that Jane Austen text, deciphering that Assyrian inscription, working out the economics of slavery in that small town, discovering a particular virus genome. Post the layman's abstract in the professor's latest grant proposal in the catalog. Let students choose a problem to work on.

All but the most technical areas of research can be translated into terms that a student can understand. Nowadays almost every professor has had the experience of explaining what they do to a lay audience—and if they haven't they should learn how. Give students articles about the problem to read as background—there are a plethora of popular science journals that deliberately appeal to broad audiences—instead of making them plow through a homogenized textbook with a sentence per study. Instead of zoning out in lecture halls, make them sit in on lab meetings, run the simple bits of experiments, find documents in the archives, hang out with the graduate students in the bar.

In subsequent years let them specialize more and take a more active hand in research. They might not help too much at first—everyone who has taught someone else to cook knows that— but the extra hours would be more productive for everyone than the ones we spend now translating professorial PowerPoint into student notes. At the end of the four years students wouldn't know everything that science and scholarship can teach, but they would know the most important thing. They would know how science and scholarship work.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology at Berkeley and the co-author of The Scientist in the Crib and Words, Thoughts and Theories.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130331/

college week
Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs
When academics post online, do they risk their jobs?
By Robert S. Boynton
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 6:52 AM ET

Click here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

"Here goes nothing. I shouldn't be doing this. I'll be going up for tenure soon," reads the first post of the blog that University of Chicago political scientist Daniel Drezner started in September 2002. Sure enough, this past October, Drezner was denied tenure. And although his department claimed that blogging hadn't been a factor in the decision, junior academics across the blogosphere were traumatized. Drezner had seemed a top candidate. He has impeccable credentials (two masters degrees and a Ph.D. from Stanford); his essays appear in the top journals of his profession; and his next book will be published by Princeton University Press.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of academics keep blogs these days, posting everything from family pictures to scholarly works-in-progress. While few are counting on their Web publications to improve their chances at tenure, many have begun to fear that their blogs might actually harm their prospects. Last July, "Bloggers Need Not Apply," an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education about an anonymous Midwestern college's attempt to fill a position, laid out the perils for academic job-seekers who blog. "Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know 'the real them'—better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn't want to know more," wrote the pseudonymous columnist.

But academics aren't just concerned about the public display of an applicant's personal eccentricities. Many perceive blogs as evidence of a scholar's lack of seriousness. Shouldn't he be putting more time into scholarship, they wonder, and less into his blog? And if a blogger does have something serious to say, why is he presenting it in a superficial medium, rather than a peer-reviewed journal?

At the same time, it is hardly a secret that lots of peer-reviewed material and articles in prestigious academic reviews are neither very good nor widely read, while some of what appears on academic blogs is of high quality and has a large readership (some of it, obviously, isn't and doesn't). So, it's worth taking a closer look at the question: How can a system that ostensibly cares only about the quality of one's arguments and research automatically include the former and exclude the latter?

In many respects, Drezner's predicament was merely a cyber-version of an age-old dilemma. Whether online or off, the kind of accessible and widely read work that brings an academic public recognition is likely to draw the scorn and suspicion of his colleagues. Furthermore, so-called public-intellectual work won't count for much when it comes time to decide whether one gets tenure. In most disciplines at large research universities, tenure is directly related to the number of peer-reviewed books and articles one publishes. Teaching and community service are factored in but are usually far less important than one's publishing record. "For the time being," says John Holbo, an assistant professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore and the founder of a group blog called The Valve, the most academic bloggers will receive is "a bit of 'service' credit, for raising the department's profile."

On the one hand, some resistance to the proliferation of blogs is understandable. The value of academic culture is that it stands apart from the ephemeral marketplace. Universities are by their very nature culturally conservative and slow to change. The odd situation would actually have been if universities had automatically embraced blogging. Holbo suggests that from one perspective, blogging is an affront to the traditional idea of the university. "You want to graft this onto the last living medieval guild system?" he imagines a senior scholar protesting.

But in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"—an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. Drezner's blog, for example, is hardly of the "This is what I did today …" variety. Rather, he usually writes about globalization and political economy—the very subjects on which he publishes in prestigious, peer-reviewed presses and journals. If his prose style in the blog is more engaging than that of the typical academic's, the thinking behind it is no less rigorous or intelligent.

To take only one other example, John Hawks, an assistant anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, posts three to five essays a week on subjects like evolutionary theory. He writes about science with the breadth of the late Stephen Jay Gould and doesn't see a big difference between most of his online and offline output. "Much of what I write online is scholarly. When I review an issue in human evolution, it is a genuine review. If I criticize something, I back it up," he says. Indeed, his essays are festooned with citations.

So, might blogging be subversive precisely because it makes real the very vision of intellectual life that the university has never managed to achieve?

The academic purist's response is a resounding "no." He represents one extreme of the spectrum, in which the only writing that "counts" in academic life (in the category of "publications," at least) is peer-reviewed in the traditional manner. The shrinking number of books published by university presses has put this position in jeopardy. Moving across the spectrum, the fact that a large number of books by academics (tenured and not) are published by non-peer-reviewed commercial presses (Routledge, for one) further diminishes the purist's position. But should blogging, certainly at the other extreme of the spectrum, be included in a professor's publication record?

The current antipathy toward blogging may have something to do with the fact that universities have no tools for judging blogs. And most people agree that blogs would need to be evaluated through some kind of peer-review mechanism if they are to be taken into account. "It is utterly absurd to propose giving someone credit for activity with no barriers to entry," Holbo says.

Peer review, however, is not a static practice. Some disciplines in the sciences, physics in particular, have had great success bypassing the cumbersome apparatus of traditional peer review (in which a large corporation owns a journal, which has a standard board of editors and is published regularly, and sold at a very high price) in favor of self-policed Web sites on which scientists (often the same ones who edit the expensive journals) post and critique their research papers. Rather than waiting months for publication, and then months more for reaction, they receive immediate editorial scrutiny from the very set of peers they most want to hear from.

Perhaps the most significant challenge to the traditional peer-review practices comes from open-source projects like the Public Library of Science, which, though their journals are peer-reviewed, are available to all readers. Michael B. Eisen, an assistant biology professor at Berkeley and one of the co-founders (with Harold Varmus) of PloS, believes that academic bloggers face similar challenges to those of scientists who publish in open-source journals like his.

"One of the main issues we face in trying to convince junior academics to publish in PLoS instead of more established journals is their concern about how such publications will look at tenure time. I keep trying to convince people that, in an ideal world, tenure decisions should be made on the quality of one's work, not the venue of its publication. And there's no reason this shouldn't apply to things like blogs as well," he says.

So, how might a blog be peer-reviewed? The market provides a number of viable models. eBay, for one, has established an efficient rating system for buyers and sellers, based on the number and quality of transactions they execute. In a noncommercial medium, Slashdot uses a "Moderation and Meta Moderation System," in which moderators are awarded higher or lower "karma" according to how well they police the discussions on the site. (The "Meta Moderation System" judges the moderators' moderators.)

How would these apply to blogs? One can imagine a rating system in which visitors to a blog evaluate what they read and leave feedback—the significance of which is weighted according to what kind of reputation and background they have. A physicist's views would carry more heft on a physicist's blog than on a sociologist's (and vice versa). Someone who has a reputation for leaving serious, informative comments will be ranked higher than the Web surfer who just glances at a few lines before jetting off to the next site.

The objection that the above proposals are relative, open to manipulation, and depend too much on individual judgment makes sense only if one has never been involved in the vicissitudes of the peer-review system. In the end, peer review is just that: review by one's peers. Any particular system should be judged by its efficiency and efficacy, and not by the perceived prestige of the publication in which the work appears.

If anything, blog-influenced practices like these might reclaim for intellectuals the true spirit of peer review, which, as Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters has argued, has been all but outsourced to prestigious university presses and journals. Experimenting with open-source methods of judgment—whether of straight scholarship or academic blogs—might actually revitalize academic writing.

As for Daniel Drezner, you needn't worry about him. After being turned down by Chicago, he received a number of inquiries and this fall will be a tenured associate professor of international politics at Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He heard from a number of other schools, too. How did Tufts learn he was available? They read it in his blog.

Robert S. Boynton is the author of The New New Journalism. He teaches magazine journalism at New York University, where he is up for tenure. He does not have a blog.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130466/

science
The Birth of Soft Torture
CIA interrogation techniques—a history.
By Rebecca Lemov
Updated Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005, at 5:07 PM ET

In 1949, Cardinal Jószef Mindszenty appeared before the world's cameras to mumble his confession to treasonous crimes against the Hungarian church and state. For resisting communism, the World War II hero had been subjected for 39 days to sleep deprivation and humiliation, alternating with long hours of interrogation, by Russian-trained Hungarian police. His staged confession riveted the Central Intelligence Agency, which theorized in a security memorandum that Soviet-trained experts were controlling Mindszenty by "some unknown force." If the Communists had interrogation weapons that were evidently more subtle and effective than brute physical torture, the CIA decided, then it needed such weapons, too.

Months later, the agency began a program to explore "avenues to the control of human behavior." During the next decade and a half, CIA experts honed the use of "chemical and biological materials capable of producing human behavioral and physiological changes" according to a retrospective CIA catalog written in 1963. And thus soft torture in the United States was born.

In short order, CIA experts attempted to induce Mindszenty-like effects. An interrogation team consisting of a psychiatrist, a lie-detector expert, and a hypnotist went to work using combinations of the depressant Sodium Amytal and certain stimulants. Tests on four suspected double agents in Tokyo in July 1950 and on 25 North Korean prisoners of war three months later yielded more noteworthy results. (Relevant CIA documents do not specify exactly what, but reports later claimed that the special interrogation teams could hold a subject in a "controlled state" for a long period.) Meanwhile, the CIA opened the door to pre-emptive psychosurgery: In a doctor's office in Washington, D.C., one unfortunate man, his name deleted from documents, was lobotomized against his will during an interrogation. By the mid-to-late 1950s, experiments using "black techniques," as the agency called them, moved to prisons, hospitals, and other field-testing sites with funding and encouragement from the CIA's Science and Technology Directorate*.

One of the most extreme 1950s experiments that the CIA sponsored was conducted at a McGill University hospital, where the world-renowned psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron had been pioneering a technique he called "psychic driving." Dr. Cameron was widely considered the most able psychiatrist in Canada—his honors included the presidency of the World Psychiatric Association—and his patients were referred to him from all over. A disaffected housewife, a rebellious youth, a struggling starlet, and the wife of a Canadian member of Parliament were a few of the more than 100 patients who became uninformed, nonconsenting experimental subjects. Many were diagnosed as schizophrenic (a diagnosis since contested in many of the cases).

Cameron's goal was to wipe out the stable "self," eliminating deep-seated psychological problems in order to rebuild it. He grandiosely hoped to transform human existence by opening a new gateway to the understanding of consciousness. The CIA wanted to know what his experiments suggested about interrogating people with the help of sensory deprivation, environmental manipulation, and psychic disorientation.

Cameron's technique was to expose a patient to tape-recorded messages or sounds that were played back or repeated for long periods. The goal was a condition Cameron dubbed "penetration": The patient experienced an escalating state of distress that often caused him or her to reveal long-buried past experiences or disturbing events. At that point, the doctor would offer "healing" suggestions. Frequently, his patients didn't want to listen and would attack their analyst or try to leave the room. In the 1956 American Journal of Psychiatry, Cameron explained that he broke down their resistance by continually repeating his message using "pillow and ceiling microphones" and different voices; by imposing periods of prolonged sleep; and by giving patients drugs like Sodium Amytal, Desoxyn, and LSD-25, which "disorganized" thought patterns.

To further disorganize his patients, Cameron isolated them in a sensory deprivation chamber. In a dark room, a patient would sit in silence with his eyes covered with goggles, prevented "from touching his body—thus interfering with his self image." Finally "attempts were made to cut down on his expressive output"—he was restrained or bandaged so he could not scream. Cameron combined these tactics with extended periods of forced listening to taped messages for up to 20 hours per day, for 10 or 15 days at a stretch.

In 1958 and 1959, Cameron went further. With new CIA money behind him, he tried to completely "depattern" 53 patients by combining psychic driving with electroshock therapy and a long-term, drug-induced coma. At the most intensive stage of the treatment, many subjects were no longer able to perform even basic functions. They needed training to eat, use the toilet, or speak. Once the doctor allowed the drugs to wear off and ceased shock treatments, patients slowly relearned how to take care of themselves—and their pretreatment symptoms were said to have disappeared.

So had much of their personalities. Patients emerged from Cameron's ward walking differently, talking differently, acting differently. Wives were more docile, daughters less inclined to histrionics, sons better-behaved. Most had no memory of their treatment or of their previous lives. Sometimes, they forgot they had children. At first, they were grateful to their doctor for his help. Several Cameron patients, however, later said they had severe recurrences of their pretreatment problems and traumatic memories of the treatment itself and together sued the doctor as well as the U.S. and Canadian governments. Their case was quietly settled out of court.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, CIA experts thought they understood the techniques necessary for "breaking" a person. Under a strict regime of behavioral conditioning, "the possibility of resistance over a very long period may be vanishingly small," several researchers concluded in an analysis used in the CIA's 1963 manual Counterintelligence Interrogation. At the agency, pressure increased to field-test coercive interrogation tools. The task, as CIA second-in-command Richard Helms urged, was to test the agency's techniques on "normal" people. At times, this imperative made the agency reckless. As part of the now notorious MK-ULTRA program—"one of the seamiest episodes in American intelligence," according to journalist Seymour Hersh—the CIA set up a safe house in San Francisco where its agents could observe the effects of various drug combinations on human behavior. They were in search of a "truth serum" and thought LSD might be it. Prostitutes were hired to bring unwitting johns back to the house, where the women slipped acid and other strong psychoactive substances into the men's drinks. From behind a one-way mirror, investigators watched, notebooks and martinis in hand. Sometimes the men took the drugs and managed to carry on. Sometimes they babbled or cried. An internal CIA review condemned these high jinks in 1963, but Congress didn't investigate them until 1977, after a post-Watergate crisis of confidence in the agency.

At least officially, the CIA ended its behavioral science program in the mid-1960s, before scientists and operatives achieved total control over a subject. "All experiments beyond a certain point always failed," an operative veteran of the program said, "because the subject jerked himself back for some reason or the subject got amnesiac or catatonic." In other words, you could create a vegetable or a zombie, but not a robot who would obey you against his will. Still, the CIA had gained reliable information about how to derange and disorient a person who was reluctant to cooperate. An enemy could quickly be made into a confused and desperate human being.

Since 9/11, as government documents and news reports have made clear, the CIA's experimental approach to coercive interrogation has been revived. Last week, as the Washington Post revealed the existence of secret CIA-run prisons—"black sites"—in Eastern Europe, Vice President Dick Cheney continued to campaign to ensure that the agency will not be prevented from using "cruel, inhumane, and degrading" methods to elicit intelligence from detainees. The operatives of the 1940s would approve.

Correction, Nov. 18, 2005: The article originally referred to the CIA's Technology and Science Directorate. The correct title is the Science and Technology Directorate. Return to the corrected sentence.

Rebecca Lemov, a recent Woodrow Wilson fellow, is the author of World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes and Men, to be published next month.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130301/

 

politics
Tough Love
Why the GOP wants us to be harder on the Iraqis.
By John Dickerson
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 7:01 PM ET

President Bush rarely misses a chance to champion "the commitment and sacrifice that the people are making" in Iraq. Maimed by Saddam, they hobble on crutches to vote. Suicide bombers blow up police recruits and young men continue to sign up. When Iraqi politicians have bickered and disagreed, Bush has forgiven their uncertain progress. Even America's founders were sluggish, he has reminded us.

The narrative of the noble Iraqi has been necessary to remind Americans of the moral cause for which soldiers continue to die. But that ideal may be fading, if today's Senate votes mean anything. This afternoon, the Senate voted to 79-19 to demand progress reports from the White House and pressure Iraqis to speed up their process of taking over the security of their own country. The Senate had originally considered a measure that would have set a schedule for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, but that failed after Republican lawmakers argued a timetable amounted to cutting and running. Sen. John Warner, who authored the Senate resolution, told the New York Times today that the underlying message to Iraqis was, "[W]e really mean business, Iraqis, get on with it." The time for paying tribute to Iraqis' George Washington-like qualities is over. The subtext of the Senate action: Iraqis must work harder and take control of their country, so that American troops can leave.

The White House has seen this coming for months. As Americans become less sure that fighting in Iraq makes them safer, they're less willing to sacrifice U.S. soldiers for the Iraqi people. Freedom and democracy are nice, but let the Iraqis figure them out on their own time. "It's hard to get [Americans] to care about what's happening in [Iraqis'] lives," said a senior administration official recently. That remark is typical of a complaint I've heard from inside the administration for months.

Perhaps Americans should embrace their dwindling affection for the Iraqi people. In fact, saving face as the United States draws down troops requires it. We must not say that U.S. soldiers are leaving because the situation has become untenable or because the politics of the 2006 elections demand pictures of troops coming home for good. Rather we must insist that U.S. soldiers will leave as an act of tough love. By setting the timeline, the United States will shock Iraqis into embracing their new freedom in earnest.

Republican senators are impatient with what's happening in Iraq. With today's provision, they were careful not to blame the White House or the American fighting men and women. They were less nervous about blaming the Iraqis.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130441/
college week
My First Literary Crush
The books famous people loved in college.
Updated Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2005, at 8:29 AM ET

Click here to read more from Slate's "College Week."

In celebration of College Week, Slate asked journalists, cable-news personalities, novelists, Hollywood types, and other great thinkers a question: What's the most influential book you read in college? What made you slam down your café au lait and set out to conquer the world? The answers are below.

Eric Alterman, media columnist, The Nation
I'd like to say Thucydides or Wittgenstein, or something fancy like that, but I guess it'd have to be Ronald Steel's biography of Walter Lippmann, not only because it taught me a great deal about how power worked in American politics, but also—and more important—because it gave me a model of what I might do with my life.

Judd Apatow, writer-director, The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Having only gone to college for a year and a half, I didn't read enough books to remember an impactful one. The books I read while I was a dropout that inspired me are A Death in the Family, by James Agee, and A Fan's Notes, by Frederick Exley.

Nicholson Baker, author, Checkpoint
During a junior year in Paris, I was supposed to be reading Samuel Beckett's l'Innommable for a lit class, but I couldn't face it. Dark, dark, dark. I took the subway to the Centre Pompidou library, where, browsing through a low shelf of philosophy books, I discovered Personal Knowledge, by chemist-epistemologist Michael Polanyi. What a fine, thought-twirling dufflebag of a book, full of odd anecdotes from the history of science and engineering—more helpful, it seemed to me, than Thomas Kuhn's windswept paradigm shifts or even Karl Popper's falsifiability. Polanyi's gist was that we know more than we know we know, and that without this connoisseurial, "unsayable" knowledge, science and society can't function. But the entertainment, as I remember it, was in the examples.

Harold Bloom, professor, Yale
It would have to be Shakespeare, and if one play only, Henry IV, Part I, because in Falstaff I found myself more truly and more strange.

Mark Bowden, national correspondent, the Atlantic
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which was not part of any course; in fact, I no longer recall how or why I picked it up, but to me it was incendiary. I was an English major, so I was reading a lot, but this was something entirely new and different. Here was a writer clearly having fun … no, the time of his life, with words, ideas, observation, storytelling. I was already interested in writing, but Wolfe made me crazy about writing.

David Brooks, columnist, the New York Times
This is going to sound awfully pompous (but hey, I went to the University of Chicago), but the two most important books I read in college were Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Hobbes' Leviathan. I loathed both books at first reading, but they both explained how little we can rationally know about the world around us and how much we have to rely on habits, traditions, and intuition. I've been exemplifying our ignorance on a daily basis ever since.

Mark Cuban, owner, Dallas Mavericks
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. It was incredibly motivating to me. It encouraged me to think as an individual, take risks to reach my goals, and responsibility for my successes and failures. I loved it. I don't know how many times I have read it, but it got to the point where I had to stop because I would get too fired up.

Anne Fadiman, Francis writer-in-residence, Yale
The most influential textbook was Criticism: The Major Texts, an anthology in which pre-theoretical literary criticism wheezed its last heroic gasp. I read it during the first term of my freshman year in a class taught by its editor, Walter Jackson Bate, and it made me start thinking about the question, "What is literature for?" I'm still thinking about that question. The most influential extracurricular work was John McPhee's Encounters With the Archdruid, which I read in installments in The New Yorker. I'd previously thought fiction was a higher calling than nonfiction, but midway through the first installment I said to myself, "This is what I want to do." I knew I'd never be as good as McPhee, but he was the lodestar that set my course.

James Fallows, national correspondent, the Atlantic
There are only a few books I can remember actually reading in college. The high-toned one was American Renaissance, by F.O. Matthiesen, which in retrospect was useful for understanding 19^th-century literary America (Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, et al.) but at the time seemed to tie me down for most evenings through an entire year. But the ones that made the biggest difference to me were these three: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans; Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, whose most famous section described a murder in my hometown; and Nixon Agonistes, by Garry Wills. I am cheating a little on Agonistes, which came out while I was in graduate school. But I still remember reading each of them and thinking: There are some interesting possibilities in journalism.

Christopher Hitchens, columnist, Vanity Fair
He who hesitates is lost. If I gave myself any time to reflect, I might come up with Peter Sedgwick's edition of Victor Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary. But to answer the question about "most influential" is really to choose the indelible, and the book I most remember reading between 1967 and 1970 is The Mill on the Floss, borrowed well away from Oxford in a "youth" camp in Cuba. Only Shakespeare and Proust are superior to George Eliot in guessing at the real springs of human motive and in describing the mammalian underlay of social forces. At the time, I may have believed that literature was of less importance than politics, but when I shook off this fatuous illusion I went straight to the Eliot shelf and didn't stop until I had read it all, which I suppose will serve as a paltry definition of influence.

Gish Jen, author, The Love Wife
Robert Fitzgerald's translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey changed my life—as did, I should say, Fitzgerald himself, my favorite professor. I couldn't believe how different his Homer was from Lattimore's—so much more lithe and live. Could translation really make that much difference? And did Homer really come to us through normal humans who played tennis and cracked jokes and wore berets? Suddenly literature was much less remote; suddenly it was something that involved, in one way or another, writers. What an idea!

Sam Lipsyte, author, Home Land
Simulations by Jean Baudrillard. It was the mid-1980s and this book could get you laid. Plus, reading about hyperreality was a great hangover cure.

Chris Matthews, host, Hardball
A Thousand Days by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Kennedy was assassinated in November of my freshman year at Holy Cross. I watched Walter Cronkite declare him dead on a dormitory television. I rarely read a book in those years that I didn't have to. I studied most of the time. I would read the Schlesinger book at evening's end. He is a beautiful, sweeping, and grand writer of the William Manchester sort.

Peter Mehlman, writer, Seinfeld
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong blew me away. Yes, it was well-written, funny, and very instructive about the lives of wealthy people. But the observations on sex kept me from reading the books I was assigned. With absolutely no attribution to Ms. Jong, I quoted lines to girls and sounded so evolved. One of those lines gave me a collegiate philosophy (paraphrase): A little phony feminism can get any man laid.

Daphne Merkin, author, Enchantment
The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. I read it for a class taught by Catherine Stimpson in my senior year at Barnard, and if I were grateful to her for nothing else, I would be grateful to her for introducing me to that novel. I was immediately riveted by its casual yet urgent style, as though there were a secret message running through the book that you would be able to detect only if you paid careful attention to what appeared to be its many inconclusive scenes and exchanges of throwaway dialogue. It remains for me an unutterably prescient book about so many things: the impact of celebrity on earthlings; the yearning for some kind of transcendental meaning in the midst of a secularly ordained universe; the possibility of romantic love even for the inveterately cynical (Binx); the limitations of romantic love, even for the nuttily hopeful (his cousin Kate); the temptations and arrogance of outsiderism; the pathos of emotional illness (Kate) and physical illness (Lonnie, Binx's half-brother).

Daniel Okrent, author, Great Fortune
I didn't read many books of lasting influence in college—I was in college from 1965 until 1969, so I actually thought Cleaver and Mao were philosophers. But Jim Bouton's Ball Four got me interested in baseball again (I had moved away from it so I could fight the revolution), and you could certainly do worse than that.

Charles P. Pierce, writer, Boston Globe Magazine
The first problem I had with the book is that I was sitting in a great lost place called the Avalanche Bar on Wells Street in Milwaukee and it was 10:30 in the morning and I was laughing out loud to myself. It was not unusual at any hour in the 'Lanche to find someone engaged in a long, involved dialogue with the apparently empty air. But undifferentiated guffaws from deep in the cracked vinyl of the booth seemed to set my fellow patrons somewhat on edge. It was my first time through At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien, and the novel had wound its way into the mad scene in which an author's characters put him on trial before the bar—and I do mean bar. In the place of gavels, the judges wield imperial pints—and when one of them accuses the author of forcing him to act "at all times contrary to the best instincts of a gentleman," I pretty much lost it, my laughter drowning out Dylan's "Gates Of Eden" which, for some reason, was one of the more popular tunes on the old Seeburg that sat under the 'Lanche's front window. Mysteries unfathomable danced all around in the smoky air, like the snow off the big lake.

Neal Pollack, author, Never Mind the Pollacks
I probably should have been into Bukowski in college, or Burroughs, or either of the Thompsons, Jim or Hunter S. All the fashionable lowlifes at Northwestern read them. But my favorite book in those days was Middlemarch. George Eliot didn't speak to me in any particular way. It's just a great novel.

Jonathan Raban, author, My Holy War
My first summer vacation from the University of Hull in England, I had a job as a bus conductor on an unbusy country run between Bournemouth and Southampton. When I wasn't issuing tickets, I was reading William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity with a sort of jaw-dropping, Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus sense of being granted revelation. The book taught me how to read. Thereafter, every essay I wrote was an attempt to answer the question, "What would Empson say about this?" and I'm still proud to call myself a devout Empsonian. Just read the section early in the book where he discusses the covert meanings in Shakespeare's "bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang ..." It's as near to pure magic as lit crit has ever come.

George Saunders, author, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
The book I was obsessed with in college was You Can't Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe, a six-foot-five raving romantic of a writer, who supposedly wrote the book on the top of his refrigerator, and would just toss the pages on to the floor, dozens of pages a night, to be gathered up by the cleaning lady next day. But that's not why I liked him. I liked him because he was epic and broken-hearted and sloppy and emotional and in love with the world and wrote sentence after sentence beginning with the word "O," as in "O Brooklyn, harbinger of cruel autumn," or "O mourned and never-to-be-regained Time" (though I'm pretty sure I just now made those two up). I loved his big-heartedness and the way, apparently, he had just taken his life and made a huge book out of it. But damn, his life was so much bigger and romantic than mine! He felt things so much more deeply, knew so many more Tragic Figures! So, soon I had developed the habit of pacing tragically around and phrasing my life in his terms: "O bitter Seven-Eleven of broken love, which, mourning, how many times have I paced by you, mad visions trumpeting my ravening brain, because of the lovely (FILL IN NAME OF GIRL) lost, no more to be Regained?" Finally I realized that my life didn't GO in that voice, and left the book behind, but sadly, with an affection I still feel. O Wolfe!

Bill Simmons, columnist, ESPN.com
During the summer after my freshman year in college, I bought a collection of Raymond Carver's short stories—Where I'm Calling From—that ended up impacting me more than anything I ever read. At that point in my life, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to attend law school or become a writer, and that book literally made the decision for me. I can't even tell you how many times I read it—in fact, I have the exact same copy from college, only it looks like somebody pounded it with a bloody baseball bat or something. I don't know what's holding it together. Aside from the obvious classics ("Cathedral," "A Small Good Thing"), my favorite Carver story was "The Calm"—structurally perfect, layers to everything, quirky as hell—which had one of those classic Carver endings that made you just shake your head and think, "I will never be as good of a writer as that guy." Not only did he inspire the hell out of me in college, he completely discouraged me in every way. Now that is an influential book.

Sam Tanenhaus, editor, New York Times Book Review
When I was a sophomore in college I decided to read Bellow. I had dragged myself through Seize the Day, an assignment in high school AP English, but hadn't liked it much. The story was so dreary, and the hero so pathetic and doomed. But all the culture signals were beaming Bellow, Bellow, so I tried again. I started with Herzog, which, frankly, I didn't get. The letters interspersed with the narrative confused me. Also, Bellow manipulates time—back and forth, past and present—quite as complexly as Proust, and if you're not ready for it, you can easily get thrown. Still, I stuck with it. I admired individual scenes, and the prose appealed to me, its intelligence and erudition, plus the wit and contemporaneity. To paraphrase Dylan, I knew something was happening, but I didn't know what it was. Then I read Mr. Sammler's Planet and was simply overwhelmed—the philosophical depth and brilliance on every page, the way the streets and living rooms of New York were so pulsatingly alive. I liked a lot of contemporary fiction—Mailer, Roth, Updike, in particular—but Bellow was the first contemporary who made me realize the age I was living in could be evoked with the same rich dense saturation of Balzac's Paris, Tolstoy's St. Petersburg, or Joyce's Dublin. Also, I was very big on the romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Keats, and it was clear Bellow descended from them in some way. At any rate, I was blown away and reported all this in babbling ecstasy to my English professors, who plainly thought I was out of my mind. To them, I think, Bellow was a kind of freak—not a literary writer at all.

Ricky Van Veen, editor, collegehumor.com
High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess by Charles Fleming. This glimpse into the ridiculous world of Hollywood pushed me in the "entertainment-career-after-college" direction more than any guidance counselor or computerized survey ever could. I'd find myself stopping every few pages and reading passages aloud to my roommate. "Wait, he paid a hooker just to watch TV with him?" "Yeah, dude."

Andrew Wylie, literary agent
The most influential book I read in college was The Odyssey, which I was taught to sing in the original by the legendary professor Albert Lord, author of The Singer of Tales. Lord's presentation of the text, the extraordinary beauty of the verses intoned, the logic and history of the oral tradition—all pushed the dirt of a good education under my nails.

 

DECODING SAMUEL ALITO JR.

Answer Key
by Jeffrey Rosen

For those who believe in bipartisan judicial restraint, Samuel Alito Jr. poses a dilemma. On the one hand, his vote to strike down a federal ban on machine gun possession in 1996 suggests that he might be a conservative activist who is determined to resurrect limits on congressional authority that have been dormant since the New Deal. On the other hand, many of his other opinions support the judgment of those who know him: that he is a fair-minded conservative incrementalist, closer to Chief Justice John Roberts than to a radical conservative like Justice Clarence Thomas. 

How can those (like me) who remain unsure about how restrained a Justice Alito would be make up our minds? The question shouldn't be whether he would cast himself as a swing vote in the style of Sandra Day O'Connor, the justice he would replace, since the last thing the country needs is another O'Connor to short-circuit all of our most contested political debates. By splitting every difference, she aggrandized her own power at the expense of Congress and the states. Instead, the relevant question is whether Alito generally believes in judicial deference to Congress, the states, and previous Supreme Court precedents, or whether he has an agenda to turn back the constitutional clock to the pre-New Deal era. That is a question that his hearings can answer; and the very different confirmation performances of Thomas and Roberts provide clues for the Senate about how to distinguish reassuring testimonies from troubling ones. 

 

The case that suggests Alito might be a conservative activist (see "How to Judge," November 29, 2004) was his dissent nearly a decade ago from his colleagues' decision to uphold the constitutionality of a federal law prohibiting the possession or transfer of machine guns. Six federal circuit courts had upheld the ban on machine gun possession. Showing an unsettling lack of deference to Congress, the president, and the judgment of other appeals courts, Alito dissented on the grounds that Congress and the president had not produced empirical evidence that there was a substantial connection between gun possession and interstate commerce. Last June, by a six-to-three vote, the Supreme Court implicitly rejected Alito's reasoning. In upholding Congress's power to regulate the local possession of marijuana, the Court emphasized that it had never required Congress to make specific empirical findings in order to legislate and that Congress's power to regulate purely local activities should be upheld as long as a rational person might believe that they affected interstate commerce. Only O'Connor, Thomas, and then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist dissented, suggesting that Alito might be among the most high-octane enthusiasts for federalism on the Court. 

Almost as troubling for those who oppose conservative judicial activism was Alito's 2000 opinion holding that Congress had no power to authorize suits against state employers who violate the sick leave provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act. Repeating his habit of flyspecking Congress's legislative authority, Alito's majority opinion objected that Congress had the power only to ban intentional sex discrimination and that it had failed to make specific findings that employers who violated sick leave policies might contribute to discrimination against women. Three years later, in another six-to-three decision, the Supreme Court said that Congress did have the power to authorize these suits, on the grounds that Congress had considered "significant evidence of a long and extensive history of sex discrimination with respect to the administration of leave benefits by the States." Although the Court didn't explicitly reject Alito's analysis, his two leading opinions on federalism suggest an unsettling lack of deference to Congress. 

So the case for Alito as a conservative activist focuses on his cramped view of congressional power. By contrast, his abortion opinions--which have been hyperbolically attacked by liberal interest groups--are impressively nuanced and restrained. In his most controversial opinion, Alito dissented from his colleagues' decision in 1991 to uphold a Pennsylvania law that required women to notify their husbands before seeking an abortion. The following year, reaffirming Roe v. Wade in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court, by a five-to-four vote, repudiated Alito's analysis. A section of the opinion written by O'Connor rejected Alito's conclusion that the spousal notification law would affect very few women, emphasizing that the small group most likely to be affected was also the one with the best reasons to be afraid of notifying husbands. But Alito, who tried in good faith to apply O'Connor's confusing "undue burden" test, shouldn't be blamed for failing to predict O'Connor's vote; and, in the end, he erred on the side of deferring to the state legislature, which is the most neutral definition of judicial restraint. 

Three of Alito's other encounters with abortion disputes are similarly scrupulous. He voted without fuss to apply the Supreme Court's 2000 decision striking down bans on partial-birth abortion. In a wrongful death case in 1997, he emphasized that a fetus is not a "person" entitled to constitutional protection under the Fourteenth Amendment-- a pivotal opinion that could have broad implications for future battles over assisted reproductive technologies. Some conservative scholars assert unconvincingly that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment meant to protect fetuses; by rejecting that historically implausible claim, Alito signaled his willingness to allow future battles over reproductive technology to be decided in legislatures, where they belong. Finally, ten years ago, Alito cast a decisive vote in a two-to-one opinion, holding that the federal government's limits on the use of public funds for abortions prevented Pennsylvania from adopting even more severe abortion restrictions. 

Liberals also worry about Alito's apparent lack of concern for unchecked police and executive authority, especially since O'Connor was more willing to second-guess the president and the police. But, if Alito's deference to the police is part of a general tendency to defer to politically accountable officials, it may suggest that his federalism decisions are an anomaly. As Adam Liptak and Jonathan D. Glater of The New York Times noted in a review of Alito's 67 dissenting opinions, "He generally deferred to what he called the good faith judgments of other participants in the justice system, including police officers, prosecutors, prison wardens, trial judges and juries." Nevertheless, privacy advocates haven't given up hope on Alito who, as a Princeton senior in 1971, helped to write an expansive report on the boundaries of privacy in American society that called for congressional regulation of computer surveillance and other high-tech searches as well as the repeal of anti-sodomy laws. Only the Senate can determine whether Alito's youthful concerns about privacy might be resurrected on the high court. 

The most reassuring evidence that Alito might be a conservative incrementalist comes from those who have worked with him in the past. "Sam is cautious, he is deliberative, he had a judicial temperament even when he wasn't a judge," says Joshua Schwartz, a colleague of mine at George Washington University Law School who worked with Alito in the Solicitor General's Office during the Reagan era. "He was an enormous believer in hearing both sides in every case; he was patient and careful--and reasonably content to decide cases one by one, applying existing precedents rather than writing sweeping critiques of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence." And Schwartz recalls that, when Alito was tapped to supervise cases involving the Reagan administration's efforts to overturn affirmative action, he resisted some of the more extreme arguments advanced by Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds. 

Next: "The contrast in the answers given by Thomas and Roberts suggest clues for senators to look for as they try to decode Alito's responses."

Here, then, is the dilemma posed by Judge Alito: His federalism opinions suggest that he might be a conservative activist like Thomas with an agenda to restrict congressional power; many of his other opinions suggest that he might be a cautious incrementalist, as Roberts is likely to be, nudging the law in a more conservative direction rather than rewriting it from the ground up. Given the conflicting evidence, how can senators decide what kind of justice Alito would be? The questions to ask Alito are obvious enough. They're many of the same ones that have been asked in Supreme Court confirmation hearings for nearly two decades, and they involve the nominee's attitudes toward congressional power, previous judicial precedents, and the original understanding of the Constitution. 

The contrast in the answers given by Thomas and Roberts suggest clues for senators to look for as they try to decode Alito's responses. If Alito is evasive, as Thomas was, about a) how often the Court should strike down federal laws; b) how much weight it should give precedents that have been repeatedly reaffirmed; or c) how rigidly it should follow the original understanding of the Constitution, run for the hills. If he answers those questions precisely and candidly, as Roberts did, breathe a sigh of relief. 

Thomas's testimony, in particular, reminds us that it's easy for nominees to mislead the Senate in confirmation hearings. But, by pressing nominees to give specific and detailed answers--as Roberts did--the Senate is more likely to get an accurate sense of how those nominees would perform on the Court. (We haven't yet seen many opinions from Roberts, of course, but the precision of his answers makes a surprise less likely.) First, consider federalism. Both Thomas and Roberts were asked whether they thought the Commerce Clause imposed limits on congressional power. Thomas answered in platitudes, telling Senator Arlen Specter, "I don't know whether we know what the limits are." After assuring Specter that "I don't question the current development of the Commerce Clause," Thomas wrote a judicial opinion only four years later declaring that the entire development of the Commerce Clause since the 1930s was legally misguided and should be reversed. Roberts, on the other hand, was much more specific in making clear that he thought the Court should strike down acts of Congress only on rare occasions. He quoted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's observation that striking down federal laws is the "gravest and most delicate duty that the Court performs." And he stressed that "the reason is obvious: All judges are acutely aware of the fact that millions and millions of people have voted for you, and not one has voted for any of us." It's not clear whether Alito shares Roberts's concerns about judicial modesty when reviewing acts of Congress; the specific reasons he gives when talking about the importance of judicial restraint should cast light on whether he does. 

Next, consider a nominee's willingness to overrule precedents. During his confirmation hearings, Thomas refused to say how much deference he would give to previous decisions that he thought were wrong. But he earnestly told Senator Patrick Leahy, "You cannot, simply because you have the votes, begin to change rules, to change a precedent. ... On a personal level as a judge, I, at the end of the day, if I made a decision in a case that way--that willfully--I could not say to myself in the mirror that I have acted consistent with my oath." Contrast these protestations with his record on the Court, where, according to his colleague Justice Antonin Scalia, Thomas will vote to overturn any precedent that he thinks is wrong. Roberts, on the other hand, spoke in specific terms about the weight the Court should give to various factors in deciding whether to overturn an incorrect decision. He told Specter, "If an overruling of a prior precedent is a jolt to the legal system, it is inconsistent with principles of stability." 

In his own courtesy visit with Specter, Alito declined to embrace the idea that certain decisions that have been accepted by different presidents, Congresses, and courts over time might qualify as a kind of "super-stare decisis" (or super-precedent). But Alito endorsed the idea of a "sliding scale," according to Specter, and suggested, "The longer a decision was in effect and the more times that it had been reaffirmed by different courts, different justices appointed by different presidents, it had extra-precedential value." By pressing him to give specific examples of precedents that deserve special weight, senators could flesh out whether his stated views about stability are sincere or fig leaves. 

Finally, there is the question of a nominee's judicial philosophy. During his hearings, Thomas insisted to Senator Joseph Biden that his interest in natural law-based constitutional theories, such as those of Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago, had been "purely in the context of political theory." Only four years later, however, in U.S. v. Lopez, Thomas proceeded to try to write Epstein's theories into law. Moreover--although Thomas emphasized in his hearings that "the important point is, What did the Framers think they were doing? What were their views?"--he stressed that "the world didn't stop with the Framers. ... You then look at the rest of the history and tradition of our country." On the bench, however, Thomas has distinguished himself for insisting that the world did stop with the Framers and any law inconsistent with their original vision should be overturned. Roberts, by contrast, refused to embrace a jurisprudence of original understanding or natural rights. "I do not have an overarching judicial philosophy that I bring to every case," he said, "I tend to look at the cases from the bottom up rather than the top down." 

As for Alito, his views about constitutional originalism remain opaque. Some of his supporters have insisted that he is a reliable originalist, but his opinions rarely invoke constitutional history in a systematic way. By pressing Alito to give specific examples of when and how he thinks the original understanding of the Constitution should bind judges, and when it shouldn't, senators will have a better idea of whether Alito is a bottom-up judge like Roberts or a top-down judge like Thomas. 

Trying to make an informed judgment about whether Alito will be a conservative activist, in the model of Thomas or O'Connor, or a principled judge devoted to bipartisan restraint may be one of the harder challenges facing the Senate since the confirmation process went haywire after the defeat of Robert Bork in 1987. But the contrast between the responses of Thomas and Roberts demonstrates that nominees reveal more of themselves under the klieg lights than senators appreciate at the time. If Alito is precise, detailed, and specific about his devotion to restraint, senators can vote their hopes; if he is evasive and abstract, they should vote their fears.

Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor at TNR.

 

 

November 20, 2005

The Prodigy Puzzle

By ANN HULBERT

'So you're the geniuses," Senator Carl Levin said, looking pleased as he peered over his glasses. He was addressing the flaxen-haired Heidi Kaloustian, a 17-year-old freshman at the University of Michigan, and John Zhou, a superfriendly 17-year-old senior at Detroit Country Day School, unusual visitors to Room 269 of the Russell Office Building on Capitol Hill. Michigan had distinguished itself, Levin had been informed: the state boasted two Davidson Fellows, and he had clearly been told these teenagers came trailing brainy superlatives. "Genius loves company," announced the September press release about the students who had won scholarships awarded annually since 2001 by the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a foundation that supports "profoundly intelligent" youths, a more recent term for off-the-charts children. "Seventeen prodigies," the press release went on, were "to be honored at the Library of Congress for contributions to society" in the fields of science, math, technology, music and literature.

Even among these superstars, the young Michiganders stood out. All the accolades and attention added up to a thrilling but evidently also somewhat disorienting experience, at least for one of them. "I'm generally pretty shy, hesitant to show my work," Heidi told me over the summer - a reticence that had only partly been drummed out of her by joining her high school's poetry-slam team at a teacher's insistence. Sitting on the couch awaiting the senator, she looked slightly dazed at being in the limelight: Heidi was one of the four Davidson "fellow laureates" this year - recipients of the top $50,000 scholarship awards for projects they had submitted. She was also the first laureate ever in literature, with a writing portfolio she titled "The Roots of All Things." John, a scientist whose 2005 accomplishments also included semifinalist standing in the national math, physics and biology olympiads, was taking his $25,000 award in stride. He was one of five winners at that level. The remaining eight Fellows received $10,000 each - money to be disbursed for approved educational purposes for up to 10 years.

Apparently feeling his visitors deserved more than the usual small talk, Senator Levin forged on with "Where are your souls?"

"You mean what are our projects?" John responded, ready with the title of his: "A Study of Possible Interactions Among Rev1, Rev3 and Rev7 Proteins From Saccharomyces Cerevisiae." John laughed along with everyone else when Levin remarked, "I understood the word 'protein,' " and with the confident charm of a youth who has spent lots of time with adults, he told the senator he really enjoyed seeing him at a recent AIDS walk in Michigan (for which John had organized a school team). Turning to Heidi, who explained that she wrote both poetry and prose, Levin was prompted to joke, "So writers are worth twice as much as scientists these days?" It was a short step to reminiscences about college-tuition bills for his own daughters. The Senate photographer then sprang into action, arranging a classic portrait of future promise: professorial senator in the middle, flanked on one side by a bright-eyed youth and on the other by a mother wearing a grin her child might later tell her looks goofy.

For the Davidson Fellows who came to Washington in late September for a gathering that culminated in an evening reception at the Library of Congress, the visit to Capitol Hill was more than a photo op. It was an effort to help promote the vision of their patrons, the founders of the Reno-based Davidson Institute, Bob and Jan Davidson. Drawing on a fortune earned in the educational-software business, the Davidsons established themselves as a well-endowed new presence on the gifted-education scene in 1999. Their goal is not just to support extraordinary youthful achievements, though their contributions to the cause of enriching precocious childhoods have been wide-ranging. The institute's enterprises include, in addition to the fellowships, a free consulting service now assisting 750 "Young Scholars" between the ages of 4 and 18 who qualify with top test scores (99.9th percentile, I.Q.'s of at least 145) or, for those without a battery of assessments, portfolio submissions. The Davidsons have also begun the Think Summer Institute, offering college courses for 12- to 15-year-olds. Next fall the Davidson Academy, a public middle and high school for the profoundly gifted, will open on the Reno campus of the University of Nevada. How much pleasure the Davidsons, in their early 60's, take in celebrating the accomplishments of the fellows was obvious at the reception: Bob, strong-jawed and a jokester, and the elfin Jan glowed like godparents as they beckoned the multicultural array of prize-winners up to the dais to speak about their projects - "prodigious work," a term the Institute favors, ranging from the adorable 6-year-old Marc Yu's piano performance to the 17-year-old Kadir Annamalai's work on the "growth of germanium nanowires," useful in thermoelectric devices.

It is the Davidsons' other, related aim that calls forth a different kind of fervor. Authors (with Laura Vanderkam) of a book called "Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Minds" (2004), they are on a mission to remedy what they are convinced is a widespread neglect of exceptionally talented children. That means challenging the American myth that they are weirdos or Wunderkinder best left to their own devices or made to march with the crowd. "By denying our most intelligent students an education appropriate to their abilities," Jan Davidson warns a nation in the midst of a No Child Left Behind crusade, "we may also be denying civilization a giant leap forward." Precocious children are not only avid learners eager for more than ordinary schools often provide, the Davidsons emphasize; they are also a precious - and imperiled - resource for the future. The Davidsons, joined by many other advocates of the gifted, maintain that it is these precocious children who, if handled right, will be the creative adults propelling the nation ahead in an ever more competitive world. As things stand, the argument goes, the highly gifted child is an endangered species in need of outspoken champions like the Davidsons, who are role models for the "supportive, advocating parent" they endorse.

The youths have their chance to engage in advocacy, too, and the Davidsons had selected very personable prodigies to visit Washington to publicize the don't-hold-children-back message. (Video presentations are part of the fellowship application process.) "Rounded like an egg" is the simile John Zhou used in the SAT-prep classes he taught (though he himself, a perfect scorer, didn't take any), where he recommends blending a well-honed talent with other interests to "erase the image of the nerd or the geek" - a balanced profile the Davidsons would surely endorse. Their fellows fitted it and proved ideal ambassadors of well-tended youthful brilliance. Admirably poised, they were getting precocious practice for the future eminence that, they were told more than once that day, awaits them.

The Davidsons are not the first Americans dedicated to cultivating early promise and dismantling the popular image of highly gifted children as misfits, an affront to a nation founded on egalitarian principles. More than three-quarters of a century ago, the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, armed with his newly minted I.Q. test, set out to challenge the myth that unusually intelligent and talented children are "puny, overspecialized in their abilities and interests, emotionally unstable, socially unadaptable, psychotic and morally undependable." His longitudinal "Genetic Studies of Genius" aimed to prove the opposite: highly gifted youths tended not only to enjoy more wholesome childhoods than ordinary kids but also to become extraordinary adults. His labors have since helped spawn a rich field of research and outreach devoted to exceptionally gifted children - though you might not guess it from the embattled rhetoric employed by gifted-child advocates in general, not just the Davidson Institute.

The lament uttered half a century ago that in philistine America "there are no little leagues of the mind" could not be made in our turn-of-the-millennium meritocracy. Thanks precisely to programs like those run by the Davidson Institute, there is what you might call a farm system devoted to finding talent and developing it, and though the process isn't streamlined, it has become ever more extensive. You merely have to look at the résumés of the Davidson Fellows, which list a stunning array of distinctions - from music and Intel competitions to math and science olympiads to participation in highly selective summer programs. Even as they sound the alarm, prominent advocates themselves celebrate the widening span of resources. Consider, for example, "A Nation Deceived," the Templeton National Report on Acceleration issued last year and subtitled, "How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students." In its brief for more grade skipping and subject acceleration, it indicts an educational system that indeed gives talented students short shrift. (Federal money for the "gifted and talented" is minuscule compared with the quarter billion in this year's No Child Left Behind budget, and state and local efforts, though often better, are uneven.) Yet in the course of promoting the benefits of leaping ahead, "A Nation Deceived" also extols "a whole host of outside-of-school opportunities, including award ceremonies, summer programs, after-school or Saturday programs, distance-learning programs and weekend workshops and seminars," to which the talent search serves as a "gateway" for the topmost students, who also have a variety of early college options to consider, like California State University at Los Angeles's lively early-entrance program. Julian Stanley, a Johns Hopkins psychology professor and a pioneer of the gifted-child movement, marveled not long before he died last summer at age 87 at how a dearth of opportunities had given way to a "wealth of facilitative options."

Perhaps the time has come to examine a rather different myth, embraced by gifted-child advocates themselves: that children of unusual intelligence and accomplishments remain a misunderstood, marginalized resource in a culture obsessed with equity and prone to conformity. In fact, youthful prodigiousness is the leading edge of a wider cultural preoccupation with early high performance in our meritocratic era. Among the educated elite, the superchild has become the model child, and the model parent is an informed advocate with an eye trained on his or her child's future prospects. The unusual fate of the precocious child - to become adultified early and yet to remain hovered over for longer - is echoed in the situation of the privileged child, ushered along a highly scheduled path of credentialed performance from cradle onward, with college and career ever in mind.

In short, thanks not least to the gifted-child movement itself, the mission of discovering and molding precocious talent has been mainstreamed more successfully than anyone expected. Once in a while, the more mundane variety of Ivy League-aspiring kids and their ambitious parents pause to ask themselves whether the ethos entails too much early pressure to compete. For truly extraordinary kids, a different version of the question arises, but it is considered less often: could it be that in the quest to pinpoint and promote exceptional youthful promise, testers and contests and advocates may have unwittingly introduced early pressure to conform, not to the crowd but to an assiduously monitored, preprofessionalized and future-oriented trajectory? If the mold-breaking creativity and innovation that advocates invoke are what society wants more of, perhaps it is worth asking whether anointing the ranks of talent-search stars with a sense of foreordained distinction and steering them onto a prize- and degree-laden fast track, the earlier the better, may have its costs. Of course, it is every parent's hope to help satisfy highly gifted children's zeal for mastery and give them fulfilling childhoods, and programs like those the Davidson Institute runs help make that easier. But a look back over a century suggests it may be hubris if the goal of the guidance is to shape truly exceptional destinies in adulthood. Well-intentioned efforts to smooth the path and hone expertise in a hurry might even - who knows? - be a hindrance in the mysterious process by which mature originality ultimately expresses itself.

ong before 20th-century psychology turned its attention to young geniuses, children with extraordinary powers were enshrined in myth as figures to be at once feared and revered. Baby Hercules had occasion to display his prowess in strangling serpents because jealous Juno, angered that Jupiter had sired a son with a mere mortal, dispatched snakes to his cradle. Twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple after Passover, "sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions," invites not only astonishment "at his understanding and answers," but also rebukes from his bewildered parents; they're unsettled by his insistence that he "must be about my Father's business," well aware that he isn't referring to Joseph. In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, perhaps the first early Christian attempt to fill in Jesus' life before that temple story, awe is mixed with terror. Jesus is an alarming little boy who doesn't merely make real birds out of clay and work other miracles but causes the death of those who scold him for not resting on the Sabbath and shames masters who try to instruct him in his letters. From the divine/demonic child of antiquity to the Romantic era's idealization of the innocent imaginative genius was perhaps not as big a leap as it seems: the prodigy was the very emblem of prophecy, in touch with mystical truth and powers outside of human time. In his different guises, the phenomenal young emissary came bearing an implicit message: adults beware.

Lewis Terman, however, was not a man readily daunted, and his endeavor embodied the ambitions and the confusions - and the elusive predictions - that have marked gifted research and development ever since. Five years after he revised Alfred Binet's intelligence test, creating what became known as the Stanford-Binet I.Q. test, he put it to use in a pioneering survey of a little-understood population. When Terman began seeking gifted California schoolchildren to participate in his "Genetic Studies of Genius" in 1921, he was undertaking the first youthful talent search, eager not just to explore the nature of gifted children but ultimately to predict and improve their chances of future greatness. Convinced that intellectual capacity was innate, he was a eugenicist eager to see the brightest selected out and trained up to guide society. But he was also aware that no one knew when or how, much less which, buds of brilliance might ultimately produce glorious flowers. Terman became determined to see to it that the proverb "early ripe, early rotten" wouldn't describe their fate. He would do his best to boost, not just stand back and trace, the trajectories of subjects, whose well-rounded giftedness augured such promise.

If that interfered with the purity of his findings and predictions, so, too, did Terman's methods for choosing his subjects. His approach made it less than surprising that the Termites, as the study participants were nicknamed, proved exemplary schoolchildren, not lopsided or eccentric at all. Terman's tool, the I.Q. test, was devised in and for an academic context, focusing on verbal and quantitative reasoning and memory skills, which meant scores at the high end correlated closely with classroom success. He was in search of the overall high performers, and his fieldwork further ensured a sample low on idiosyncratic characters. Since Terman didn't have the resources to comprehensively test the more than a quarter-million students in the California school districts he was looking at, he enlisted teachers to help make the first cut. They supplied him with the kids they considered the best, a group unlikely to include "some nerdy person in the corner mumbling to himself," points out Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in the scientific study of historical genius. Testing this cohort - as well as other batches of bright children he rounded up earlier - Terman emerged with an overwhelmingly white and middle-class sample of roughly 1,500 students whose average age was 11 and whose I.Q.'s ranged between 135 and 200, about the top 1 percent. (The mean I.Q. in this group was 151, and 77 subjects tested at 170 or higher.) It is worth noting that his methods selected for a conscientious breed of parents as well, given that lengthy questionnaires about their children were part of the drill.

The data reviewed in the first volume of findings, in 1925, demolished "the widespread opinion that typically the intellectually precocious child is weak, undersized or nervously unstable." Terman's inventories - of physical and personality traits, books read, intellectual and recreational interests, family background - revealed children physically superior as well as more trustworthy and honest, and much better at school (where about 85 percent of them had skipped grades) than a nongifted group used for a rough comparison. On the East Coast, a fellow psychologist, Leta Hollingworth of Columbia University Teachers College - a forerunner whom the Davidsons salute - chimed in with similar positive findings about the gifted students she studied in two public schools. For the rare specimens with I.Q.'s of 180 or higher, the record was somewhat more mixed on the question of social adjustment (more recent studies on "psychological well-being" continue to conflict); Hollingworth drew particular attention to the problem of disengagement at school. But home life in their samples' comparatively well-off and small families seemed enviable. "Fortunately," Hollingworth wrote, "the majority of gifted children fall by heredity into the hands of superior parents, who are themselves of fine character and worthy to 'set example.' "

With this portrait, the pioneers confronted a tension that exists to this day in the quest to rally support for the select cohort. Such a positive account of gifted children was good for their image, but less so for the message that, as Terman proclaimed at the close of the first volume, "the great problems of genius" require urgent attention. The young geniuses seemed to be doing nicely - perhaps all too competently, in fact. In the 1930 follow-up volume to "Genetic Studies of Genius," the Terman team betrayed a hint of defensiveness that reappeared in the 25-year and 35-year follow-ups. Anticipating later critics, they cautioned against undue expectations. "The title is not meant to imply that the thousand or more subjects who have entered into the investigations described are all potential geniuses in the more common meaning of that term. A few of the group may ultimately achieve that degree of distinction, but not more than a few."

The urge to forecast, then as now, drives research on childhood giftedness - yet as Malcolm Gladwell noted in a recent talk, precocity in general doesn't turn out to be a very reliable predictor of truly exceptional mature performance. When a colleague of Terman's, Catharine Cox, undertook the curious exercise of retrospectively computing the youthful I.Q.'s of 300 adult geniuses in the past (drawing on facts from their biographies), she found they were high - but far from the whole story. She also discovered the importance of other qualities, especially persistence and confidence. And she presciently warned that tests "cannot measure spontaneity of intellectual activity; perhaps, too, they do not sufficiently differentiate between high ability and unique ability, between the able individual and the extraordinary genius." Cox concluded that "the extraordinary genius who achieves the highest eminence is also the gifted individual whom intelligence tests may discover in childhood," with the crucial caveat that "the converse of this proposition is yet to be proved."

Focusing on a small cohort of children with I.Q.'s above 180, Hollingworth's case studies couldn't supply clear-cut evidence that a high-testing childhood was a precursor of later extraordinariness. The few she followed into early maturity excelled in their early 20's at academic and intellectual work, and won honors. But she wasn't sure what to conclude about creativity and originality, plainly disappointed that her sample didn't display more. She speculated that this was partly because of nurture: "so harnessed to the organized pursuit of degrees," in one child's case, and subjected to an "education so scrupulously supervised and so sedulously recorded that he had little time for original projects" in another. "The gifted group at midlife," as the Termites were called in the 35-year follow-up study, were highly educated for the time, professionally very successful and well adjusted. But the Terman team tried not to sound too let down that "a majority of gifted women prefer housewifery to more intellectual pursuits," right in step with postwar America.

In 1956, the year Terman died, a Nobel Prize was awarded to William Shockley, who as a California schoolboy didn't make the cut for the Termites but went on to help invent the transistor (and was later hailed as a catalyst in the creation of Silicon Valley, and also pilloried as a racist eugenicist). In 1968, another reject, Luis Alvarez, won the prize for his work in elementary particle physics. No Termite ever became a Nobel laureate, though some became well-published scientists and multiple patent holders. Alumni include journalists, poets and movie directors as well as professors, among whom psychologists have been particularly distinguished, perhaps not surprisingly. Terman, after all, pulled Stanford strings and did everything he could to help his protégés, who had been selected for what are often now called "schoolhouse gifts" and had grown up as a self-identified group imbued, not least by him, with expectations of academically approved achievement.

The fact that "the group has produced no great musical composer," as the study's authors wistfully noted, "and no great creative artist" perhaps wasn't so surprising, either. In part, of course, that is because such figures don't surface very often. In part, it was because "special abilities" weren't what they were testing for - the I.Q.'s appeal was its assessment of general cognitive ability, and the "globally gifted" child was the figure the Terman group fixed on. But in part it was also because when special talents were spotted in their high I.Q. mix, they resisted systematic analysis. Fewer than half of the kids who had shown distinctive artistic abilities stuck with those interests, though musicians were more likely to. (Even in music, the field best known for spawning prodigies, the yield of distinguished mature artists is low. Out of an unusually large concentration of 70 young musical marvels in the San Francisco area in the 1920's and 30's, only 6 went on to notable adult careers: Leon Fleisher, Ruth Slenczynska and Hephzibah Menuhin on the piano, and Isaac Stern, Ruggiero Ricci and Yehudi Menuhin on the violin.)

Terman and his colleagues focused on a batch of precocious literary girls. The researchers set out to compare their work with the juvenilia of eminent writers of the past. But quality and development tended to be highly uneven. That was obvious, for example, in a sampling of the 100 poems produced between ages 6 and 8 by the prolific Betty Ford, an engaging girl with an I.Q. of 188 who was said to skip and dance as she dictated her poetry, if she wasn't feverishly typing it out by herself. Nor did the juvenilia of the great provide a steady standard. In fact, a panel of judges rated poems by the young Longfellow and Shelley below those of Betty and other nobodys. As Terman's team concluded: "One would hardly be justified in attempting to devise methods for the prediction of adult literary accomplishment. Too many factors other than natural ability go to determine the amount and merit of achievement." The 8-year-old Betty herself suggested as much in "Blackbirds," which the judges rated among the poorest of her poems: "But to tell what I have in mind,/Is harder by far, than to guess/What the twitter of those birds mean,/As they spatter their words about."

The Stanford-Binet I.Q. test reached middle age along with the Termites, looking disappointingly staid itself. At least it did from the vantage of those increasingly convinced that youthful giftedness could not be reduced to a fixed and innate general intellectual ability or potential. In postwar America, the terms "gifted" and "talented" crowded out "genius," which sounded suspiciously elitist, and a quest was under way for a wider, democratic conception of human excellence. Psychologists pushed toward a more multifaceted understanding of giftedness, turning their attention to "divergent thinking" and creative capacities - fluency, originality, flexibility - as well as to a wider range of less distinctively intellectual abilities, like "task commitment." It was time, too, to take a more interactive, social view of the emergence and growth of talent, whose very existence in childhood, after all, depended on adult recognition. Youthful giftedness could not be fully appreciated, or cultivated, without viewing it as a social construct, a capacity that flourishes thanks to a confluence of forces: a domain of knowledge with clearly demarcated rules a child can master, adult models and mentors ready to assist and a receptive cultural context. All of these factors help explain why highly structured, permanently valued fields like music and math prove especially hospitable to prodigies. It's also why precocious mental calculators and map makers, for example, were once a sought-after variety of prodigy and no longer are.

Some 50 years after Terman, giftedness was a social construct in flux and in the spotlight. The first federal definition of "children capable of high performance," announced in the Office of Education's Marland Report of 1972, which led to legislation on education for the gifted, was a symptomatic catch-all. The formulation covered students "with demonstrated achievement and/or ability in any of the following areas, singly or in combination: general intellectual ability, specific academic aptitude, creative or productive thinking, leadership ability, visual- or performing-arts aptitude, psychomotor ability." The lineup still led off with what Ellen Winner, professor of psychology at Boston College and the author of "Gifted Children: Myths and Realities" (1996), describes as "the smooth and even image of the globally gifted child." Yet narrower talents - and perhaps quirkier and more uneven ones - now received independent billing, for the old faith had been shaken that I.Q. and creativity were so closely correlated after all. The problem was, there were no good tools for tracking skills like "creative or productive thinking," and in any case, what could that really mean in childhood, a period dedicated to mastering, not generating, knowledge? Looking back to the 1980's, David Henry Feldman, who teaches child development at Tufts University and is the author, with Lynn T. Goldsmith, of "Nature's Gambit: Child Prodigies and the Development of Human Potential" (1986), recalls a sense of frustration with psychometricians and with "creativity as measured by creativity tests, as in how many ways can you use or describe a brick" - but also a sense of ferment. He was busy examining the uncanny extremes that Terman's study had skirted - Feldman's book probes six specialized prodigies and their hothouselike homes - and he found himself sharing ideas with an eclectic array of psychologists tackling the development of creativity from different angles. Among them were Howard Gardner, who was soon to begin work on his theory of "multiple intelligences," and Howard Gruber and Dean Keith Simonton, both busy looking at the history of creative eminence.

But the impulse to "recharge" the prodigy notion with some of its "original power and mystery," as Feldman put it in his book, failed to gather scientific momentum, he now ruefully admits. (He awaits further brain research.) In the meantime, a less global assessment method than the I.Q. exam had proved itself ideal for identifying the most familiar item on that Marland Report list of special capacities, "specific academic aptitude." There is nothing like a ready tool, and a numerical measure, to cut a phenomenon down to more accessible - and usable - size in America.

The test was the SAT, which Julian Stanley, who established Johns Hopkins as a center of gifted education and research, went ahead and administered in 1969 to an 8th-grade math whiz he had heard was not only excelling in a summer computer course at Hopkins but also helping graduate students. Joe aced the math portion. It emerged that among children under 13 who scored in the very highest percentiles on grade-level standardized tests, there were some who could match or outperform the average high-school senior SAT-taker, particularly on the math section, but also on the verbal section and sometimes on both. The SAT could thus be used as a device for winnowing the top and tiptop performers in specific areas very early. With the help of colleagues, Stanley inaugurated the Johns Hopkins talent search and began gathering subjects for the second-most-famous longitudinal gifted study: the continuing Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which includes a superselect cohort of students who scored 700 or above on the math or the verbal section before turning 13 (a feat performed by 1 in 10,000 children, those the Davidsons and others label "profoundly gifted"). Intervention was Stanley's real goal, and acceleration - not mere enrichment - became his mission, which meant packing the earliest SMPY phenoms off to college very young. Soon Johns Hopkins had started intensive summer programs where students could devour whole-year math courses, and before long literature classes too, in mere weeks. The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth model caught on. Stanley helped start centers at Duke and Northwestern, and there are now programs as well at the University of Denver, the University of Iowa and Vanderbilt University.

"The idea that we should try to make a universal man out of one person isn't appealing to me somehow," Stanley once said, not sharing Terman's interest in the omnibus genius. Instead he and his team emphasized a more specialized vision: to spot children's narrower talent as linguistic or numerical "symbol analyzers" and, by supporting it early and intensively, help spur them on to excel in that field as adults. It is an endeavor, they have pointed out, right in step with the spirit of the information age that was dawning as the SMPY unfolded. What began as a regional talent search has become national, annually testing nearly a quarter-million students. Last year the Hopkins Center for Talented Youth alone recognized about 400 students who scored above 700 on either or both sections - which suggests the net is quite successful in catching the top kids.

In the SMPY's most select group of high scorers - the 1 in 10,000 cohort - almost all have enjoyed some form of academic acceleration, and Stanley's hope of orchestrating self-fulfilling prophecies so far seems mostly to have panned out. Early adolescent math or verbal trajectories are borne out in about two-thirds of the cases, with the notable exception that high verbal males are as likely to pursue an undergraduate degree in the sciences as in the humanities and arts. Advanced degrees are far more common in this SMPY group than in the general population. Participants also more often receive tenure and take out patents, cited as evidence that the SAT measures "much more than book-learning potential." As SMPY researchers await the analysis of data on the cohort at age 50, it is worth noting their scaled-down accomplishment. They have created what amounts to effective early career-profiling - an instrumental goal rather different from the inspirational visions of their predecessors. Where Hollingworth sought cultural "originations" from her highest I.Q. cohort (not just cultural "conservation"), the new mission is to answer the need for "human-capital specialization" by fine-tuning and facilitating particular expertise earlier and faster.

It is hard to say what might have become of these already high-scoring middle schoolers had they never sat for the SAT and enjoyed summer courses and been anointed as extra-special. Stanley and his associates have not aspired to conduct a rigorously controlled experiment. They do like to claim, though, that if they had been in charge, the future Nobel laureates Shockley and Alvarez would have made the cut. What they neglect to note is that the two of them didn't need finding. It is interesting, though, to wonder what difference, if any, it might have made to Shockley's career had his alternately domineering and indulgent mother received guidance in rearing her brilliant but obnoxious son. And who knows what might have happened had Shockley received an early (nonmaternal) imprimatur of promise and a chance to mingle with brilliant peers - rather than the insult, which reportedly rankled him all his life, of scoring too low (129) to qualify for the Terman study. Might he have avoided his late-life notoriety? Or is it conceivable that he might not have helped invent the transistor at all?

There is no predicting the fate of the fellows anointed by the Davidson Institute over the past five years, and of course the award itself is just one identity-marking moment for them. But the emergence of this junior MacArthur grant at the turn of the millennium points up the persistent tensions in talent development. On the one hand, it is worth wondering whether the inflated rhetoric of adult approval might prove a burden of sorts for children who are already much lauded. Leta Hollingworth advised long ago against placing highly gifted children "in a position which will be a constant stimulus to live up to the role of child prodigy" and warned against overusing "genius," a term generally understood to imply domain-altering powers no child can possibly yet have. Confidence is a crucial ingredient of success in carving out a distinctive path, but too many early plaudits can undermine risk-taking and drive. Outsize external expectations can also be daunting for precocious learners and performers as they make the maturational leap from the work of mastering rules and skills to the challenge of asserting more self-conscious control of their gifts.

On the other hand, the Davidsons' revival of the reverent terminology is a reminder that precocious accomplishments are wondrous in themselves: the monumental efforts and results children are capable of can be amazing, never mind what those children may (or may not) go on to become. These are awards for hard-earned achievement, not for test-taking ability or abstract potential, Jan Davidson emphasizes as she explains why she feels it is appropriate for the fellows to speak to the press and be saluted by senators and congressmen. By the same token, she doesn't want to see public attention drawn to the other lucky beneficiaries of the Institute's help, the 750 Young Scholars, who are selected merely "for being smart, a God-given gift." The arduous fellowship application (which asks about the labors and mentors involved, and the social significance envisaged) is wisely geared to older adolescents: despite the talk of "prodigies," only 3 of this year's 17 are younger than 16. In Washington, effusions over the fellows' precocious promise and polish are offset by an emphasis on their persistence and their initiative in seeking out guidance - surely a better identity than "genius" for kids with, let's hope, lots of exploratory stumbling ahead of them.

At the evening reception in the Library of Congress, John Zhou and the other dark-suited teenage scientists seemed to be in their element, chatting over the hors d'oeuvres as if they were veterans of public events like this - which the handsome Lucas Moller, who was clearly practiced at answering lay inquiries, gave every sign of being. Moller, a 17-year-old from Moscow, Idaho, has been researching Mars dust ever since fifth grade, when at the suggestion of his scientist father he submitted an entry to a NASA-sponsored school contest and won. It was the beginning of a relationship with a NASA mentor, which has led him on to other related projects and assorted conferences. The basic pattern proved to be common. Entering competitions and finding internships or connections, governmental or academic: from Stephanie Hon (working on Alzheimer's) to Milana Zaurova (studying malignant brain cancer), nearly every science/technology fellow had a similar tale of closely mentored opportunity to tell in the morning discussions that the Davidsons videotaped for clips to quote from when they lecture. It was not quite grist for the "genius denied" paradigm: if schools couldn't offer direct help, no fellow said schools actively stood in the way.

In fact, with all the enabling institutions, it was sometimes hard to tell exactly where and how the young scientists' drives originated. Over lunch, John Zhou's mother - whose husband left China after Tiananmen Square, with her following later - confessed that she had despaired that her bored sixth grader's energy was disappearing into computer games, only to be reassured when she succeeded in redirecting it into Web design, and he became a whirlwind of accomplishment (even setting up a site for a branch of his city's library). "I don't know if I was going to fall through the cracks, like my mother said," John said with a laugh. He was more inclined to credit the example of other purposeful kids as the real catalyst for his many endeavors. As a group, the scientific fellows are definitely not lacking in passion, the galvanic trait everyone invokes these days, including the Davidsons and the fellows themselves. Bob and Jan astutely pressed the kids to also discuss their frustrations - a darker side of intense commitment that too often gets left out, notes Felice Kaufmann, a psychologist who has been following up on a similar group, called the Presidential Scholars. The young scientists obliged. Stephanie Hon, for example, was crushed to think six weeks of research had been in vain, only to discover that a computer glitch accounted for her nonresults - "the best of both worlds," as she put it, "taste the failure but still have the success." No one could say these fellows lack tenacity. What they wouldn't be confused with, though, is that figure of lab lore, the unkempt obsessive pursuing the experiment everybody says is fruitless, or the kid outdoors absorbed for hours watching insects. These are well-connected youths with timely projects - security devices and computer innovations, as well as urgent diseases - who have kept very busy excelling at a well-tailored array of other interests as well, from the saxophone to ballroom dancing and the Boy Scouts.

The musician fellows did not blend in quite so effortlessly that evening, since two of the four of them looked rather young to be mingling at a reception in such an elegant setting: Marc Yu, who plays the cello in addition to the piano, and the 12-year-old Karsten Gimre, also a pianist (as well as a sophomore at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore., majoring in math and physics). When it comes to "true" prodigies, preadolescents with spectacular abilities, the Davidson Institute follows the historical pattern of finding them mainly in the realm of music. In publicly touting the very young performers as prodigies, the Institute steps into an ongoing debate. For at least a quarter century now, there has been "a benevolent conspiracy" among influential musical figures to fend off burnout by trying to foster "a more humanistic, nonexploitative approach to the development of talent," as the writer Marie Winn put it in a New York Times Magazine article in 1979. What a researcher named Jeanne Bamberger has termed a "midlife" crisis seems to occur for prodigious young musicians: a transitional period of cognitive and emotional maturation during which only some performers manage to move beyond intuitive imitation to a more reflective sense of direction. Parents must carve out space for precocious players to "have a childhood. . .an adolescence," according to influential figures like Itzhak Perlman; resist the pressure, they urge, to "get management" and a packed schedule of practice and performance.

Yet pressure also unavoidably goes with the terrain of musical promise. After all, even if most musicians with phenomenal early talent won't emerge as great

mature artists, the stars of the future will surely have been young phenomenons. Marc's mother is well aware of that - and knows that constructive practice at Marc's age requires an adult at his side. So does Marc, who appreciates how much work his idols Yo-Yo Ma and Lang Lang devoted to honing the technique that no virtuoso can do without. The message for kids that Marc passed on in his session with the Davidsons will no doubt be their most used quotation. "You should play Game Boy less," he said in his slightly lisping cadence, "and you should practice more." Marc's cello teacher understandably worries about all the attention (he has been on "The Tonight Show" and "Oprah"), yet this bubbly boy who can bear down on his music with undaunted intensity seems proof of the pleasure - never mind future fame - this kind of driven focus can bring.

Karsten, who by age 6 had already placed first in the International Young Artists Concert at the Kennedy Center, couldn't help casting more of a shadow with his listlessness in his morning session with the Davidsons. To their opening question about how he got started on the piano, he quietly replied: "Actually, I didn't want to do it. My mother wanted me to have something to do when I was older. And then I liked it." Asked at the end about what lay ahead, he said, "I really don't know what I'm doing," adding with a sigh that he would "just graduate in math and physics." By then it had become clear that Karsten, even before facing any subtle maturational challenges of adolescence, had run into a physical obstacle: elbow tendonitis had forced a hiatus in his playing, he said, and now his wrist hurt. Though he is feeling better, it was the kind of setback that could well leave a phenomenal performer sounding temporarily adrift.

As the Library of Congress reception was breaking up, the literary laureate was standing off to the side, feeling "very weird," she commented. Heidi Kaloustian, the only fellow in literature, hastened to say she had "great respect for science," but the evening had brought home to her just what a different place she was in from the young researchers. A professional path seemed to open out before them, with scientific papers already in the works for some, patent possibilities in view for others, further lab options surely ahead for all. Almost as if in sisterly solidarity, Maia Cabeza, the lone girl musician, came up to ask Heidi eagerly whether her portfolio - which, along with her poetry, contains a striking trio of fictional portraits of female coming-of-age ordeals in other cultures - was going to be published. Trying not to sound too appalled, Heidi answered: "I wouldn't dream of trying. I have so much more to learn." Heidi confided that the fellowship, though hugely welcome, has also been daunting. "I have to top something when I'm not even sure how I did it." It is not that she lacked teachers; she felt indebted to one in particular, and had a fabulous summer with other artistic kids at the Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan. Her spirited mother, an avid reader and nurse, who, instead of whisking her daughters to a round of activities, made sure they had lots of time with books, clearly has inspired confidence in her daughter. Still, to have an imagination like Heidi's is to be aware of how mysterious the future twists and turns may be (and how rarely $50,000 drops down on struggling writers).

Unexpectedly, given that nonverbal brilliance is popularly associated with an aura of weirdness, it is the Davidson Fellows outside the realms of math, science and technology who look quirky by comparison, kids who have embarked on sometimes unwieldy projects that propel them they are not quite sure where. With criteria far less clear-cut in the nonquantitative fields, the institute's judges (who are anonymous) are evidently eager to reward reach and a degree of intellectual nonconformity, and on one occasion extreme youth: a 10-year-old named Alexandra Morris received a fellowship for her literary work. (There is even an "outside the box" category, though so far no winners.) The first year of the fellowships, 2001, 15-year-old Daniel Ohrenstein was awarded for tackling "The Endeavor of Seeing the Essential Nature of Existence," a series of rather woolly philosophical lectures that Ohrenstein, now an engineering major, says he shies from rereading since he has become a convert to "clear thinking" and "vowed never to use the words 'everything' and 'nothing' again." That same year, 16-year-old Rachel Emery says she was rescued by the Davidson award she won for an existential-fantasy novella written in what her mother calls the depths of depression. An eclectic energy has fueled her subsequent course through Simon's Rock, an experimental college designed for high-school-age students, and on to Wellesley, where she continues to work on several novels and to be, as she puts it, "constitutionally incapable of attempting anything on a reasonable scale."

For caution about forecasting and scripting the futures of the highly gifted, there is no better place to look than the past. History has plenty of humbling examples, one of them cited by the psychologist Howard Gruber, who observed that "any fellowship-awards committee comparing young [Thomas] Huxley's plans when setting out on the voyage of the Rattlesnake with young Darwin's plans when setting out on the voyage of the Beagle - both wrote them down in a page or so - would have given first place to Huxley and put Darwin on the waiting list." It was precisely Huxley's impressive "hard-edged analytic objectivism," Gruber speculated, that may have proved a handicap, where Darwin's vaguer, receptive cast of mind was crucial. "When someone asked Albert Einstein, 'What is your key to success?' " Dean Keith Simonton says, his answer was "I'm just curious." Simonton went on: "How do you cultivate that? It's a hard thing to do." He notes that Einstein himself "couldn't be mentored, refused to listen to his teachers, went his own way."

Nobody, of course, expects to handpick the next Einstein. Still, it is worth remembering that the solicitously individualized "scaffolding" for the highly gifted that experts currently recommend, and the pre-professional alacrity that programs like the Hopkins Center for Talented Youth and the Davidson Fellowships often reward, are themselves experiments in progress. Look at eminences in the past, and what stands out in their childhoods is an animus toward school, a tolerance for solitude and families with lots of books. What also stands out is families with "wobble" - which means stress and, often, risk-taking parents with strong opinions - rather than bastions of supportiveness where a child's giftedness is ever in self-conscious focus. Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics and himself a prodigy who went to Tufts at 11 and Harvard at 15, wrote that prodigious children need to develop a "reasonably thick skin" - to feel they aren't demonized and will find a niche, but not to expect the world to supply a spotlight. Simonton speaks of the importance of being able to be "on the failure track for a while, take time off, take a real risk." Creativity and innovation, he says he is convinced, depend on "exposure to the unusual, to the diverse, to heterogeneity," which inspires a "recognition that there are a lot of different ways of looking at different things." There are also all kinds of ways that this "awareness that there's more than one possible world" can dawn. (The fact that it is built into the immigrant experience is one reason, on top of an ethos of incredibly hard work, that Simonton says he believes kids of recently arrived families so often dominate the ranks of the spectacularly talented.)

No one would recommend throwing more obstacles in highly gifted children's way. But as experts sound the alarm about the brilliant minds that aren't being found or are being frustrated, it is some solace to think that the real geniuses aren't necessarily being denied. They are biding their time and will take us by surprise.

Ann Hulbert, a contributing writer, is the author of "Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children."

 

November 20, 2005

The Problem With an Almost-Perfect Genetic World

By AMY HARMON

MIA PETERSON is not a fan of tests. Because she has Down syndrome, she says, she cannot always think as fast as she would like to and tests end up making her feel judged. A recent driving test, for instance, ended in frustration.

Ms. Peterson, 31, the chief of self-advocacy for the National Down Syndrome Society, prefers public speaking and travel. And her test aversion extends to the latest one designed to detect Down in a fetus. "I don't want to think like we're being judged against," Ms. Peterson said. "Not meeting their expectations."

Heralded in the Nov. 10 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, the new prenatal test provides earlier, more reliable results for all women than the current test, which is routinely offered to only older women who are at higher risk. But for people with Down syndrome and the cluster of other conditions subject to prenatal screening, the new test comes with a certain chill.

Because such tests often lead to abortions, people with conditions from mental disability to cystic fibrosis may find their numbers dwindling. As a result, some fear, their lives may become harder just as they are winning the fight for greater inclusion.

"We're trying to make a place for ourselves in society at a time when science is trying to remove at least some of us," said Andrew Imparato, president of the American Association of People With Disabilities, who suffers from bipolar disorder. "For me, it's very scary."

Some bioethicists envision a dystopia where parents who choose to forgo genetic testing are shunned, or their children are denied insurance. Parents and people with disabilities fear they may simply be more lonely. And less money may be devoted to cures and education.

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, for instance, does not endorse prenatal testing, which the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends offering during pregnancy.

"If you can terminate pregnancies with a condition, who is going to put research dollars into it?" said Nancy Press, a professor of medical anthropology at Oregon Health and Science University.

Indeed, the $15 million spent on the new test for Down by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development might have gone instead toward much-needed research on the biochemistry of people living with the condition, said Michael Bérubé, co-director of the disabilities studies program at Pennsylvania State University.

Mr. Bérubé, whose 14-year-old son has Down syndrome, worries that if fewer children are born with the condition, hard-won advances like including them in mainstream schools may lose support. "The more people who think the condition is grounds for termination of a pregnancy, the more likely it will be that you'll wind up with a society that doesn't welcome those people once they're here," he said. "It turns into a vicious cycle."

Anthony Shriver, founder of Best Buddies, a nonprofit organization that helps people with intellectual disabilities form friendships, said smaller numbers will mean even greater social isolation for the people his group serves.

"Loneliness is one of the most significant challenges they face," Mr. Shriver said. "And it would only become more acute as they became a smaller segment of the population."

Beyond the impact on the disabled, disabilities activists say, the implications of prenatal testing for diversity and democracy require more attention than they have so far received.

Lisa Hedley, whose 10-year-old daughter has dwarfism, said the condition is usually not detected prenatally. It is so rare that it has traditionally not been considered worth the expense of the genetic test. Soon, though, pregnant women may be offered a gene-chip technology that can perform hundreds of tests at once for a few hundred dollars.

"It's so complicated," said Ms. Hedley, president of the Children of Difference Foundation. "Would I choose to have my child have a disability? Oh my goodness, no. It's difficult for her. It's difficult for everyone. But difference is what makes the world go round."

Supporters of abortion are especially wary of wading into a discussion over the ethics of prenatal testing, lest they be seen as playing into the opposing side in the fraught national debate over abortion rights. But advocates for people with disabilities are troubled by how much faster the science of prenatal testing is advancing than the public discussion of how it ought to be used.

If no child is ever born again with the fatal childhood disease Tay-Sachs, many might see that as a medical triumph. But what about other conditions, including deafness, which some do not consider to be a disability, and Huntington's Disease, an adult-onset neurological disorder?

Among the difficult choices facing prospective parents in coming years, genetics researchers say, will be the ability to predict the degree of severity in chromosomal abnormalities like Down syndrome, which can cause mild to moderate retardation.

"Where do you draw the line?" said Mark A. Rothstein, director of the Bioethics Institute at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. "On the one hand we have to view this as a positive in terms of preventing disability and illness. But at what point are we engaging in eugenics and not accepting the normal diversity within a population?"

Abortion, Mr. Rothstein and others fear, could become a kind of "poor man's gene therapy," if cost-conscious health insurance companies see it as less expensive than treating a disabled child. Others argue that prenatal testing will be limited to those who can afford it, leaving the poor to grapple with genetic disability and disease.

Of course, as more conditions are diagnosed in utero, many parents may simply decline testing, or use the information to prepare themselves. But studies have shown that women are considerably more likely to terminate their pregnancies if they know of fetal anomalies.

One study of 53,000 women's choices, published in Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2002, found that the termination rate ranged from about 1 percent for conditions that were classified as having no impact on the quality of life, to 50 percent for those considered to have a serious impact.

Women were far more likely to choose abortions for disabilities that have a high probability of affecting cognitive functioning. For conditions that have little or no impact on the quality of life but might require medical or surgical therapy, the abortion rate was 16 percent, but doubled for those likely to cause mental dysfunction.

As for Down syndrome, doctors estimate that about 80 percent of women who get positive test results choose abortion.

Still, some who work with Down syndrome children don't believe the future is that grim. Allen C. Crocker, director of the Down syndrome program at Children's Hospital Boston, believes that number of women who choose to continue their pregnancies will go up in the coming years.

Even as genetic tests appear to have lowered the number of Down syndrome births, he said, social conditions for people with the conditions have improved markedly.

"We're in the midst of a gentle social revolution," said Dr. Crocker, and, he believes, it may just outpace the scientific one.

November 21, 2005

E-Commerce Report

Where Is Wal-Mart's Fancy Stuff? Try Online

By BOB TEDESCHI

Sometime soon, somewhere in the country, an aspiring groom will go down on bended knee, present a ribboned blue box to his sweetheart and watch as she beholds the yellow diamond ring on which he spent $10,000.

And unless his fiancée has a highly refined sense of irony, somewhere in that gentleman's mind he'll be hoping she doesn't ask where he got it.

Walmart.com has broken through its own glass ceiling, selling high-priced platinum and diamond jewelry, cashmere sweaters and other goods designed to appeal more to the Tiffany crowd than to the bargain hunters who browse the company's terrestrial stores.

The question is why, and the answer is straightforward: Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, with 1.3 million workers and nearly $300 billion in annual revenue, is reaching out to more affluent shoppers. With disappointing sales of late and its stock price lagging, it has begun displaying more fashionable clothes and more upscale home furnishings in its stores.

Over the last few weeks, it has added luxury items to its Web site as a test. The online store still caters overwhelmingly to buyers' appetite for low-cost deals, from $18 six-packs of boxer shorts to $15 roller-skate kits, just as its stores do. But now, if you look hard, you can also find a Hyundai 60-inch plasma TV with a built-in digital tuner for $7,688, a gift basket of 1,000 fine chocolates for $248 and 100 percent cashmere scarves for $98.88.

And, sure enough, right there along with the $520 Keepsake Majestic 7/8-carat diamond ring ("was $600"); the $229 Keepsake Tapestry ¼-carat diamond, 14-karat yellow-gold ring; and the $13.12 sterling silver cubic zirconia ring ("was $17.97") you can find the 1¾-carat, fancy-yellow-grade diamond, 18-karat white gold ring ("IGI Certified") for $9,988. Wal-Mart will not say how many of those beauties it has sold.

"This is us being very aggressive in trying to understand if someone is willing to buy from us at that price point," said Raul Vazquez, vice president of marketing at Walmart.com, referring to the 1¾-carat diamond ring.

Analysts said that Wal-Mart was also grappling with a familiar predicament for online merchants: The cost of selling cheap goods. "A lot of retailers have found that they're not so sure they want all those mainstream customers on their site," said Carrie Johnson, a retail analyst with Forrester Research. "They buy fewer items, they need more help with orders and they're harder to satisfy." In contrast, Ms. Johnson said, "the wealthy, time-strapped consumers are looking pretty good right now."

Wal-Mart's dot-com division has sold upscale merchandise in the past and has long been a testing ground for items the company might like to carry in its stores. But that role has assumed more prominence in recent months as Wal-Mart has expanded its assortment of upscale items in an attempt to win back upper-middle-class consumers it has lost to Target, among others.

Walmart.com is an ideal place to test such items, Mr. Vazquez said. "We've been able to prove some assortments in areas like holiday décor, fitness equipment and toys would sell," he said. "Some are just categories the stores haven't tried because of limited shelf space, so not all of them are higher price points."

Higher-priced goods, though, have often been the place where Walmart.com's corporate buyers have migrated. The company has a policy of carrying a different assortment of goods online than offline, so the Web site will not divert sales from Wal-Mart stores.

And although Walmart.com is steadfastly focused on selling all the pricey items it carries - as opposed to letting them collect dust in the name of corporate experimentation - Mr. Vazquez admits the 1¾-carat diamond ring may represent a little hucksterism as well. "We want to change the perception that customers have about Wal-Mart," he said. "At times you have to do something dramatic to get customers' attention. That's what the ring is meant to do."

Walmart.com certainly does not lack for attention. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, an Internet research firm, more than 16 million people visited Walmart.com last month, or nearly 11 percent of the active Internet audience in the United States. The average visitor spent nearly 14 minutes on the site during each visit. By contrast, 130 million customers visit Wal-Mart stores each week in the United States.

Some e-commerce executives say they believe sites are often too shy about selling high-priced goods. "I think it's a terrible mistake not to have one or two 'money is no object' products on a site," said Bill Schubart, the chief executive of Resolution Inc., which, among other things, helps media companies (including The New York Times Company) sell videos and other goods online.

Mr. Schubart said one of his clients, which he would not identify, "on a whim wrapped together all of their classic foreign films and charged $5,000 for them, with the goal of selling five."

"In a short period of time, they sold 54," he said.

He added: "Consumers use this to say, 'I bought this gift for you because I'm so rich that money is no object to me and I care about you a great deal, so here's this British telephone booth.' It doesn't work for everybody, but it works for a large number of people."

Companies can only misfire by selling items that are not related to their overall brand message, Mr. Schubart said. In that context, Walmart.com should be fine as long as it convinces customers that a $10,000 ring is a bargain. (Indeed, late last week, the ring was sold out, although Walmart.com did not say how many were offered.)

Wal-Mart's policy of testing goods on its Web site for placement in stores, meanwhile, is not an approach embraced by all retailers. Some merchants contend that the Web site experience is far different from that of the stores, so it makes little sense to apply intelligence from one area to the other.

Take Federated Department Stores. The company, which owns Macy's and Bloomingdale's, among others, stocks each store differently, depending on the attributes of the local customers. It does not use company Web sites to test goods.

"Customers behave a little differently online than in the stores," Jim Sluzewski, a Federated spokesman, said. "Shopping in stores is a full sensory experience. So if you're testing something for stores, you'd want to test it in the in-store environment."

 

November 21, 2005

Eminent Domain Project at Standstill Despite Ruling

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

NEW LONDON, Conn. - They have still not moved out. Not Susette Kelo. Not the Derys. Not Byron Athenian or Bill Von Winkle or the others.

Five months after the United States Supreme Court set off a national debate by ruling that the City of New London could seize their property through eminent domain to make way for new private development, no one has been forced to leave.

No bulldozers have arrived to level the last houses still standing, and none are expected soon.

Even though the holdouts lost their case, and the development that would displace them finally seems free to go forward, construction has not begun, and some elements of the project have been effectively paralyzed since the court ruling prompted a political outcry.

"I felt relaxed enough to get my checkbook out and put the new roof on," said Mr. Von Winkle, who owns three buildings with a total of 12 occupied apartments in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood by the Thames River, where the city was sued for claiming 15 properties through eminent domain.

Ms. Kelo, also among the handful of holdouts, said, "We still have hope that we'll get to keep our homes."

It is not that Ms. Kelo and the others have chained themselves to their property in a final dramatic defiance of the law.

Instead, wary of public disapproval and challenges from groups like the Institute for Justice, the law firm that represented the holdouts in court, the state and the city have halted plans to evict the remaining residents. Investors are concerned about building on land that some people consider a symbol of property rights. At the same time, contract disputes and financial uncertainty have delayed construction even in areas that have been cleared.

With so many complications, some people are unsure whether the city's initial vision for the property - a mix of housing, hotel and office space intended to transform part of its riverfront and bolster a declining tax base - is even realistic anymore.

"Winning took so long," said Mayor Jane L. Glover, "that the plan may not be as viable in 2005 or 2006 or 2007."

New London, founded in the 17th century as a port city in southeastern Connecticut, has a high unemployment rate and fewer residents today than it had in 1920. Its court battle over eminent domain started five years ago, when it claimed the property of six Fort Trumbull homeowners, a two-block area within 90 acres set for development. Homeowners challenged the move, and the matter eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled 5 to 4 in June that the city had the right to take the land to improve its financial health, even though doing so would eventually transfer the property to a private developer.

But in a dissent that echoed what property rights activists were saying, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote: "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall or any farm with a factory."

Congress and state legislatures across the country have reacted by revisiting eminent domain laws. Over the summer, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the court decision. This month, the House voted overwhelmingly to deny federal economic development money for two years to local governments that seize private property for private development.

In September, Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut demanded that the New London Development Corporation, the city's development agency, rescind eviction orders delivered to tenants in rental units that belong to homeowners who have refused to give up their property.

The Connecticut General Assembly has asked cities to delay using eminent domain while it considers revising state law. Some city and state officials cite the difficulty in finding a balance between using eminent domain to rebuild blighted areas and preventing the potential for abuse that concerned Justice O'Connor.

"We're not writing a law to solve the New London problem," said State Representative Michael P. Lawlor, a Democrat who is co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee. "We're writing a law to fix the Sandra Day O'Connor problem."

Amid all the debate, the Fort Trumbull project has stalled.

"This lawsuit put a chill on the development of the whole 90 acres, no doubt in my mind," said Thomas J. Londregan, the city's director of law. "Any developer knew that whatever they did would most likely be appealed to the courts."

Contentiousness led to stalemate and stumbles. At one point the city severed ties with the New London Development Corporation, only to reverse itself days later under pressure from the state. A key corporation executive was forced out.

Pressure to go forward is considerable, even if momentum is not. The state has already invested $73 million on environmental cleanup and sewer and road improvements. Elegant street lamps, intended to illuminate a gentrified new riverfront, instead shine over empty lots where buildings have been leveled but not replaced.

In recent weeks the city, the state and the developer, Boston-based Corcoran Jennison, have begun discussing ways to jump-start construction in empty areas. Details are not firm.

"We are currently working our way toward what I believe will be something fruitful," said Michael Joplin, president of the New London Development Corporation.

One point of contention: Corcoran Jennison is resisting pressure from the city to build a waterfront hotel first, as was initially planned, out of concern that there is no market for one.

Corcoran Jennison says that Pfizer, which built a major research center next to the site in the late 1990's and pushed for the Fort Trumbull development, backed away from a commitment to help pay for the hotel as the lawsuit dragged on. And the prospects for a Coast Guard museum, which under one plan could be built on the holdouts' land, are also unclear.

Still, Ron Angelo, deputy commissioner of the state's Department of Economic and Community Development, insists that the project, at least in some form, will get under way soon. "I think for the first time in a number of months, if not years, we have come close to beginning with the project," he said.

If any construction begins soon, it will happen away from the area where the holdouts remain, said Marty Jones, president of Corcoran Jennison, which has been under contract on the project since 1999.

"We need to have some positive things happening so that every lender and investor I go to doesn't say, 'I want to be 100 miles away from here,' " Ms. Jones said. "Eminent domain in Fort Trumbull has been on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and it has not put New London in the most positive light."

Despite losing in court, the holdouts have gained political leverage, largely through the public relations effort led by the Institute for Justice, Mr. Joplin said.

Scott G. Bullock, a lawyer for the Institute for Justice who argued for the resistant property owners before the Supreme Court, said, "We might have lost the battle, but the overall war is really going in our favor."

"What developer is going to want to build on land that was received through probably the most universally despised Supreme Court decision in decades?" Mr. Bullock asked.

Governor Rell has hired a mediator to meet with the holdouts. The goal is to see what, if any, financial terms, beyond the outdated appraised value they have been offered, might persuade them to leave.

"I'm on the road to search for the proverbial win-win," said the mediator, Robert R. Albright. "It's an extraordinarily complex situation. It's not a two-party situation by any means. I'm not sure I can honestly give you an option set or even fully describe the obstacles."

The property owners have their critics in New London. They have been accused of delaying the city's resurgence, and even of taking payoffs from property rights advocates in order to keep up the fight. But at least a few, after seeing most of their neighborhood leveled, say they will consider coming to terms with Mr. Albright if the money is right. Others, however, have not ruled out new lawsuits.

Meanwhile, some renters are moving in, not out. Michelle Cerrato arrived from Pennsylvania in September and found her two-bedroom apartment on Walbach Street through a newspaper ad. Unaware of the fuss over eminent domain, Ms. Cerrato, a 30-year-old casino hostess with three children, soon figured out why neighbors have signs in their windows that say, "Not for Sale."

Confused and concerned that she would be evicted, she called her landlord, Sue Dery, one of the holdouts.

"She said it's not going to happen," Ms. Cerrato said. "It's been going on for eight years."

November 17, 2005

The Unwasteful Home

I Vant to Drink Your Vatts

By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON — Households across the land are infested with vampires. That's what energy experts call those gizmos with two sharp teeth that dig into a wall socket and suck juice all night long. All day long, too, and all year long.

Most people assume that when they turn off the television set it stops drawing power.

But that's not how most TV's (and VCR's and other electronic devices) work. They remain ever in standby mode, silently sipping energy to the tune of 1,000 kilowatt hours a year per household, awaiting the signal to roar into action.

"As a country we pay $1 billion a year to power our TV's and VCR's while they're turned off," said Maria T. Vargas, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program, which sets voluntary standards for energy use, and grants its ratings to the most efficient products.

There are billions of vampires in the United States, drawing more than enough current in the typical house to light a 100-watt light bulb 24/7, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, a research arm of the Energy Department.

These silent energy users include the chargers for devices that run on batteries, like cellphones, iPods and personal digital assistants, and all the devices around the house that have adapters because they run on direct current, like answering machines. Some have both batteries and steady power use, like cordless phones. Experts call all those adapters "wall warts." Many deliver in direct current only half as much energy as they suck out of the wall; the rest is wasted.

Vampires and wall warts are only part of the problem. DSL or cable modems, among other things, are increasingly likely to be left on around the clock. A computer left on continuously can draw nearly as much power as an efficient refrigerator - 70 to 250 watts, depending on the model and how it is used.

It's not that hard to engineer a more energy-aware computer: Dell introduced one in 2004 that drew 1.4 watts in "sleep" mode and just under one watt when "off." But energy-efficient design is not necessarily rewarded in the marketplace, where people who are shopping for the latest shiny electronic device are unlikely to put its energy consumption rate while "off" topmost on a list of considerations.

Energy efficiency experts say the answer lies instead in industry-wide standards, which would require manufacturers to build appliances with low consumption when in standby.

Just about everyone supports such a move. President Bush early on announced that electric devices purchased by the federal government would need to meet a standby consumption standard. Congress is pushing forward, too. This summer it passed a bill to set testing protocols for measuring energy use, clearing the way for nationwide consumption standards. The Energy Department held a meeting this week to discuss developing the standards. California has already adopted its own, to take effect in 2006.

Among the worst vampires are big-screen televisions, mainly because of satellite and cable boxes, which can draw up to 30 watts when turned off, experts say.

Indeed, the words "off" and "on" no longer seem to apply; a better word might be "idling."

"They won't even say 'off' now; they'll say 'power,' " noted Alan K. Meier, a senior energy analyst at the International Energy Agency, a consortium based in Paris. "My washing machine draws five watts even when there's no sign of intelligent life."

One culprit is the microchip, whose presence is revealed by a "soft button" instead of a switch. Microchips are generally an improvement over mechanical controls because they are more durable and sophisticated. They also help reduce the size and weight of consumer products. But they require a continuous trickle of electricity. Energy experts say it would be simple to cut that trickle in half - not by running around the house unplugging everything in sight, which would require much resetting of clocks, but by engineering products differently.

It doesn't cost much to make a more efficient device: sometimes just 50 cents a unit, they say. But consumers don't consider invisible energy use - "there's no labeling of power use in 'standby,' " Mr. Meier said, and "no way for people to recognize what a low-standby device is" - making government-imposed energy efficiency the best hope, he said.

The Energy Department would be in charge of setting standby mode standards that would apply to all consumer products sold in the United States. "Things may be a small step for each individual consumer," said Douglas Faulkner, the acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, "but they can add up across the country."

The Energy Star program, whose labels on electronics help consumers comparison shop, has announced that it will not rate a product that fails its standby mode requirements (consumers in the market for VCR's, among other things, can see how they rate at energystar.gov).

"Consumers are buying more electronics, and there are more consumers," Mr. Faulkner said. "So the amount used by these devices is going up."

All the more reason to make each item as energy efficient as possible.

November 16, 2005

Op-Ed Contributor

Can I Get a Little Privacy?

By DAN SAVAGE

WILL Estelle Griswold ever be able to rest in peace? Although she died in 1981, the poor woman gets kicked up and down the block whenever someone is nominated to a seat on the United States Supreme Court. But few people remember who Griswold was or what she did.

In 1961, Griswold, the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, opened a birth-control clinic in New Haven. She was promptly arrested for dispensing contraceptives to a married couple and was eventually convicted and fined $100. She appealed, and when her case reached the Supreme Court in 1965, seven of nine justices voted to overturn the conviction, striking down Connecticut's law against selling birth control (effectively overturning similar laws in other states). Americans, the court ruled, had a fundamental right to privacy.

Much of American jurisprudence since then flows from Griswold - including Roe v. Wade, which found that women had a right to abortion, and Lawrence v. Texas of 2003, which found that the right to privacy prevents the government from banning sodomy, gay and straight.

Problematically, however, a right to privacy is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. The majority in Griswold held that it was among the unenumerated rights implied by the Constitution's "penumbras" (which sound like something a sodomy law might keep you away from). The Griswold case didn't settle the matter, and the right to privacy quickly became the Tinkerbell of constitutional rights: clap your hands if you believe.

Liberals clap. We love the right to privacy because we believe adults should have access to birth control, abortion services and pornography as well as the right to engage in gay sex. Social conservatives hate the right to privacy for the very same reason, as they seek to regulate private behaviors from access to birth control to masturbation. (Think I'm kidding about masturbation? In Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, he wrote that the majority's decision called into question the legality of state laws against "masturbation, adultery, fornication.")

And now, with three Supreme Court nominees in three months, the issue is again on the front burner. In the 1980's, Chief Justice John Roberts was a Reagan administration aide who wrote a memo questioning the "so-called" right to privacy. During his confirmation hearings the press-release brigade at People for the American Way warned that these documents suggested that he believed that the Constitution did not guarantee a right to privacy.

In his hearings, when asked if he could a locate a right to privacy in the Constitution, Judge Roberts said that he could - but he was vague about what it actually covered. Heterosexual married couples have a right to use birth control, he conceded, but that was about as far as he was willing to go.

During her brief but thoroughly entertaining tenure as a Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers bumbled into a "he said, she said" dispute with the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Arlen Specter. According to Senator Specter, Ms. Miers told him in a private meeting that the Griswold case was "rightly decided." The White House, however, denied that Ms. Miers had said any such thing, and later she said that Senator Specter had misunderstood her.

Now it is Samuel Alito's turn. Senator Specter says he believes the nominee accepts the idea of a constitutional right to privacy. But we can still count on Judge Alito to be grilled about Griswold during his confirmation hearings next month. Does he believe in a right to privacy or not? Can he locate it in the Constitution or not?

Well, if the right to privacy is so difficult for some people to locate in the Constitution, why don't we just stick it in there? Wouldn't that make it easier to find?

If the Republicans can propose a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, why can't the Democrats propose a right to privacy amendment? Making this implicit right explicit would forever end the debate about whether there is a right to privacy. And the debate over the bill would force Republicans who opposed it to explain why they don't think Americans deserve a right to privacy - which would alienate not only moderates, but also those libertarian, small-government conservatives who survive only in isolated pockets on the Eastern Seaboard and the American West.

Of course, passing a right to privacy amendment wouldn't end the debate over abortion - that argument would shift to the question of whether abortion fell under the amendment. But given the precedent of Roe, abortion rights would be on firmer ground than they are now.

So, come on, Democrats, go on the offensive - start working on a bill. Not only would enshrining the right to privacy in the Constitution secure a right that most Americans rightly believe they are already entitled to, it would also allow Estelle Griswold to finally rest in peace.

Dan Savage is the editor of The Stranger, a Seattle newsweekly.

Middle Schools In Md. Find Advanced Math Is Right Formula
More Students Taking Courses and Succeeding

By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 21, 2005; B01

Yasmin Dagne is in the eighth grade at Newport Mill Middle School in Kensington, but she and most of her friends are taking 10th-grade math.

More than one-third of Maryland students take at least one high school math course before they leave middle school. Changing philosophies dictate that students should learn math concepts as soon as they are ready, not when the lesson plan says they should.

"There's a class of about 25 kids, and we've all taken algebra together," Yasmin said. At her school, one of the most racially diverse in Montgomery County, algebra participation quadrupled in two years after more students were invited to take the course. "It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be," Yasmin said.

The rise of advanced math in middle schools goes hand in hand with the dramatic increase in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate coursework in high school, each trend feeding the other. School systems are expanding access to courses that typically have been restricted to the academic elite, gambling that students with weaker academic credentials can succeed in the most difficult classes.

The gamble has paid off. Of the 23,979 Maryland middle school students who took the state High School Assessment in algebra last spring, 90 percent passed, according to an analysis of data from the Maryland State Department of Education. Thirty-seven middle schools had a 100 percent pass rate. The overall pass rate on the exam, which is a graduation requirement starting with the Class of 2009, was 54 percent.

It's a striking success story for middle schools, which, in the Washington area and nationwide, have shown anemic progress on some state and national exams in recent years.

At MacArthur Middle School at Fort Meade, in Anne Arundel County, the number of students taking high school algebra has more than doubled since 2003. Participation in the Maryland School Assessment in geometry, which requires knowledge of 10th-grade math, has gone from zero to 46 students. Nearly half of the students taking algebra and geometry at the school are black.

"Geometry is kind of easy. It's mostly thinking," said Wayne Harding, 13, an eighth-grader at MacArthur who wants to become a fighter pilot.

When Eric J. Smith became superintendent of Anne Arundel schools in 2002, students were allowed to take high school math in middle school only if they scored in the 90th percentile or better on a math aptitude test.

Smith relaxed entry rules so that three times as many students -- those scoring in the 70th, 80th or 90th percentiles, as well as some in the 60th percentile -- could take Algebra I in middle school. Less than 5 percent of students who took the state algebra test this spring failed.

In Anne Arundel middle schools, participation in the statewide geometry exam has grown from 45 students in 2002 to 714 this year, a figure surpassed only by much-larger Montgomery. Anne Arundel is home to Severna Park Middle School, which had more students take the state algebra test, 326, than any other middle school last year.

But the pace of math acceleration is uneven and varies from school to school and county to county. In Prince George's County public schools, participation in the state geometry test has declined in the past three years, and less than 15 percent of students take high school algebra in middle school.

In Maryland, the number of students who passed the state geometry exam in middle school, meaning that they had completed two years of high school math, reached 4,246 this year, up from 2,436 in 2002. The analysis does not include a handful of schools that include middle school grades but are not labeled middle schools in the state's database.

In Virginia, the number of seventh- and eighth-graders taking the Standards of Learning exam in geometry rose from 2,928 in the 2000-01 academic year to 4,130 in 2004-05.

What's driving the trend, math educators say, is the same push toward advanced academics that is swelling enrollment in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses in high schools.

"One factor is the recognition that algebra is the gatekeeper for more advanced math, as well as for science courses," said Mark Johnston, assistant superintendent of the Arlington school system, where the share of students taking Algebra I in middle school rose from 27 percent in the 1999-2000 school year to 48 percent in 2004-05.

Teachers also cite new statewide standards for what students should know at each grade level that introduce algebraic concepts at an earlier age. In Frederick County, for example, the concept of variables is now introduced before the fifth grade.

"Each generation is becoming more and more ready for higher-level thought when they arrive at the middle school level," said Lois Roney, a math specialist at New Market Middle School in Frederick County.

Cathy L. Seeley, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, said middle schools have made tremendous progress in math instruction since the 1970s, when middle school math "was a review of all the arithmetic that students were supposed to have learned in K through six."

She cites one drawback to accelerated math instruction: a possibility that advanced students could run out of math courses to take in high school.

At MacArthur Middle School, Scott Rassatt, 13, took Algebra I as a sixth-grader, geometry in seventh grade and, this year, Algebra II. He probably will take pre-calculus as a freshman and calculus as a sophomore -- the highest-level math course offered at many schools.

Next year, because of Scott and students like him, the Anne Arundel school system will offer a course in its high schools called Calculus III for students who have taken ordinary calculus and need a fresh challenge.

Staff writer Nick Anderson contributed to this report.

College Learning Secrets Revealed

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 15, 2005; 12:24 PM

One of the most interesting, useful and mysterious ratings of U.S. colleges is the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). In the last five years, nearly 900,000 undergraduates at about 1,000 different colleges and universities have provided to the Indiana University-based organization the kind of data completely missing from the best-known college guides and lists.

NSSE (pronounced Nessie) asks freshmen and seniors if they have ever discussed ideas from their readings with professors outside of class, if they have received prompt feedback from their instructors, if they have had serious conversations with students different than they are, if they have done an independent study, and scores of other questions that illuminate which schools are providing the best environment for learning.

Unfortunately, most of the colleges that participate in this survey keep their results a secret. They have their reasons. Colleges compete for students, and the NSSE data could be used to show that writing instruction at Beerblast State University is not as good as it is at the Egghead Institute on the other side of town. The staff of U.S. News & World Report's America's Best Colleges have wisely begun to print the results of some NSSE questions from the few colleges willing to give them out. Many colleges do not want that much public scrutiny of their students' learning experiences, particularly if the news is not good.

And yet what is the purpose of college but to learn? And why should colleges be allowed to keep this information to themselves?

NSSE officials had to promise colleges that they could keep their data secret and use it only for their own internal assessments in exchange for being allowed to survey their students. It is the kind of bargain that social scientists often have to make.

But now NSSE has a new sibling, the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, CCSSE (pronounced Sessie), which has broken out of the polite little world of academic anonymity and begun to publish the results from all the colleges it surveys. Go to their Web site, www.ccsse.org, click on Survey Results at the top, and then click on College Profiles. There you see a list of all 257 colleges (click on State List if you want them organized by state) that participated in the 2005 CCSSE survey of 133,281 community college students. With a few more clicks you can see how each one measured up on a national yardstick of factors such as academic challenge or student-faculty interaction.

Kay McClenney, who directs CCSSE from the campus of the University of Texas-Austin, said that unlike the vast majority of four-year school leaders, the community college officials on her advisory board said that since theirs were public institutions, they felt obligated to reveal to the public what CCSSE had discovered about the quality of learning on their campuses.

I sense an additional, more practical motive for their endorsement of a system that requires all participants to agree to have their results published. The two-year community colleges educate 46 percent of all U.S. undergraduates and do wonderful work providing inexpensive higher education to students whose needs are not met by the four-year colleges. But they remain the Rodney Dangerfields of the college world, never getting much respect, and are thus willing to reveal themselves in exchange for some attention.

I asked McClenney if CCSSE's insistence on publishing all results kept participation low when it started to do the surveys in 2002. "It may have been the first year," she said, "but nobody has died yet." The fact that the initial CCSSE participants suffered no serious harm has led more to sign up, she said.

Those of you interested in checking out the results from your local community colleges should stop reading and go explore the Web site. The summary results page for each school has a bar chart that shows where the school scored on five factors -- active and collaborative learning, student effort, academic challenge, student-faculty interaction and support for learners. When you click on the bar of the factor that interests you, you get a detailed breakdown of the questions asked and the average response from that school.

For instance, Scottsdale Community College in Scottsdale, Ariz., had a benchmark score of 46.5 on active and collaborative learning, on a scale where the average is 50. When I clicked on that bar, I learned that 917 students had been asked how often that school year they had asked questions in class or contributed to class discussions, also a question on the NSSE survey. The choices were 1 point for never, 2 for sometimes, 3 for often and 4 for very often. The Scottsdale student responses averaged out to 2.88, the highest mean score on any of the seven questions. The lowest was 1.24, the average response of students asked if they had participated in a community-based project as part of a regular course.

The CCSSE list includes results back to when the survey began. On that class participation question for instance, students at Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield, Ill., had an average score of 2.75 in 2002, and inched up to 2.83 in 2005. The school on the list closest to where I am sitting, Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Va., had an average score of 2.81 on that question in 2005.

As the CCSSE list grows longer, and researchers have more time to analyze the results, I expect we will learn much about what works and what doesn't in community colleges. One intriguing preliminary finding in CCSSE's own analysis of the data is that students who are the first in their families to go to college, are academically underprepared or have other factors that might hurt them in college are more engaged in their college experience that better prepared students. Despite, or maybe because of, their disadvantages, they are less likely to come to class unprepared and they interact more frequently with instructors outside the classroom, the survey found.

Wouldn't it be nice to have such a rich source of data on four-year colleges and use it to make good decisions on which school was best for you? I will not be holding my breath waiting for Harvard and Stanford to let their students participate in such a venture, but CCSSE is a sign of progress. Someday our most famous colleges may even be following in the footsteps of our least famous, and letting us know how well their students are being taught inside their ancient, expensively restored buildings.

 moneybox
My Cartel Is Bigger Than Your Cartel
How we can screw OPEC.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005, at 5:02 PM ET

What if there were a simple way to unite the world's democracies and China in a common cause, cut the trade deficit, shrink the federal budget deficit, and extend the temporary tax cuts—all while sticking it to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Hugo Chávez? It may sound like the fondest fantasy of neocon foreign-policy fantasists like Michael Ledeen. But Jayanta Sen, a University of Chicago-trained economist who teaches at Nevada State College, thinks he's hit on a way to make it happen. In a recent paper, he urges the great oil-consuming nations of the world to unite and form a buyers' cartel. To defeat the market power of a malevolent force like OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) we need a countervailing force for good: OPIC (the Organization of Petroleum Importing Countries).

In today's global oil markets, the large producers—OPEC—essentially collude to limit supply, thereby influencing the price. OPEC (including Iraq) produces enough oil to sate only about 40 percent of global demand, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. (Here's a great chart on global supply and demand.) But because its members speak with one voice, and because the cartel loosely enforces production quotas, OPEC has an enormous influence on the global price of oil. Needless to say, OPEC's members include the national oil companies of some of our least favorite regimes, including the Islamic Republic of Iran and Venezuela.

High demand—OPEC's members today say they get about $50 per barrel for their oil—constitutes a huge windfall for oil producers. When the market for crude is hot, the rents—the difference between the cost of production and what producers are able to sell it for—accrue solely to the producers. Each day, the United States and other oil-importing countries transfer massive amounts of wealth to the Saudi ruling family and other unsavory OPEC regimes. Sen estimates that between 1998 and 2005, with crude rising from $12 to $54 barrel, the United States' collective annual bill for imported oil rose from $40 billion to about $185 billion.

But what if big oil buyers did to cartel members what they have been doing to us for decades: use their concentrated market power to influence prices? Sen notes that the world's 10 largest oil importers—the United States, Japan, China, Germany, South Korea, France, Italy, Spain, India, and Taiwan—imported about 32.6 million barrels per day in 2004, almost exactly what OPEC produces. Oil prices are high precisely because of the growth in these importing countries. And the more we grow, the more oil we'll need, and the more cash we'll ship to OPEC.

The cartel would purchase 32 million barrels a day at a price it names and deems to be fair—the producers' cost of production plus some profit. We can't expect the Saudis to give it away at cost, after all. But ultimately, the market would still set the price of oil, as refiners, companies, governments, and traders compete to buy crude. OPIC could offer to buy OPEC oil at $20 per barrel, and then these other entities would buy it competitively from the cartel. Let's say that market price settles at about $50 per barrel. Instead of flowing into coffers on the Arabian Peninsula, that $30-per-barrel rent would be split among OPIC member governments proportionally according to consumption. Domestic OPIC producers would continue to produce oil as they wished and sell it into the larger market.

Wouldn't such a buyers' cartel discourage exploration? Perhaps. Oil producers within the buyers' cartel, such as Gulf of Mexico drillers, wouldn't be subject to the same restrictions. They could sell their crude where they wanted, but might make less than they make now. And OPEC's oil prospectors might explore less, knowing their returns on an oil strike would be lower.

The more important problem: The Saudis and their friends would respond by shutting down the global economy, making the oil shock of the '70s look mild by comparison. Sen thinks that the demands for price reductions could be phased in. "You can't go to Saudi Arabia and say: Today you're getting $50, tomorrow you'll get $20." Sen suggests that even at these lower prices, OPEC countries would be making out like bandits. Back in 2000, Saudi Prince Faisal bin Turki said that "our cost of production is currently 1 dollar and 50 cents per barrel compared to the global average of about 5 dollars per barrel." The rise of OPIC might also destabilize governments in places like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and embolden anti-Western Islamists there.

One thing OPIC wouldn't do is cut the price of gasoline at the pump. But it could help strapped consumers indirectly. Sen estimates that the U.S. government could collect $150 billion per year in the OPIC regime. With that cash, it could cut the federal gas tax, provide tax rebates, or extend temporary rate cuts, and still have cash left over to shore up Social Security or spend on prescription drugs. Oh, and it would relieve pressure on the dollar by cutting the trade deficit by 40 percent.

It sounds too good to be true, and of course it is. OPIC is both admirably simple and hopelessly complex. And it doesn't have a prayer of working. But as we gripe about our collective incompetence as consumers to do anything about the price of oil, it's nice to think about.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131024/

 

politics
Muffing Murtha
How Bush's rapid response went wrong.
By John Dickerson
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005, at 4:35 PM ET

Let's be clear: Members of the Bush administration think Jack Murtha is a jolly good fellow. On Nov. 20, the president went out of his way to praise the Pennsylvania congressman as "a good man who served our country with honor and distinction as a Marine in Vietnam and as a United States congressman." The next day, Vice President Cheney did the same. He praised Murtha as a "good man, a Marine, a patriot."

There is almost no higher praise in Bushworld. To be called a good man means you are loyal, honest, and on America's side. The week before, administration officials and GOP leaders had strongly suggested just the opposite in responding to Murtha's call for a rapid redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq. That Bush and Cheney are now complimenting him so conspicuously is a sign of how badly their original attack backfired.

This is what happens when a party goes into campaign mode without a single opponent. With no specific person to target, the Bush administration ends up taking on all members of the opposition at once. The White House plugged Murtha into an indiscriminate and undifferentiated rapid-response machine and it didn't work. Finally, Democrats have reason to be happy that they have no clear leader.

When Murtha first made his proposal, the White House press secretary pounced. Scott McClellan issued a statement directly targeting Murtha for "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party." In calmer times, McClellan would have made the point in his regular daily briefing. But White House aides are in rapid-response mode, so they didn't wait. They rebutted Murtha's proposal immediately, the way they would have during the week before an election, and their disproportionate response itself became the issue.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert wrote on his blog (yes, Denny too!) that when Murtha announced his proposal, it was "the biggest show I've seen on television in a long time. And I don't think it was an accident that it was done while the President was out of the country. Our President was on foreign soil and the Democrats were up there criticizing him on the War!" Murtha's stunt, he said, was an example of how Democrats "seem to have made an agenda out of misrepresentations."

Republican Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, the newest member of the House, followed her leaders in the day's now most notorious misstep. Speaking of Murtha's ideas on the floor of the House, she quoted a colonel as saying, "Cowards cut and run, Marines never do." Schmidt has been saying she's sorry ever since: She immediately withdrew her remarks from the record and wrote Murtha an apology note. Tuesday, she apologized again, this time in public. (The colonel, an Ohio state representative, denies the remarks.) If this keeps up, Murtha can expect a large holiday fruit basket.

How did the Republicans screw this up so badly? Two weeks ago, the White House decided to go back into full campaign mode. A war room was formed. No charge would go unanswered. Staffers began issuing press releases rebutting claims by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Sen. Edward Kennedy.

The first indication of trouble was the president's effort to make John Kerry the face of the opposition. "Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election," said Bush in his Veteran's Day speech. The gambit was obvious: to portray all those who are against the administration's policies in Iraq as politically motivated and hypocrites like that famous flip-flopper from Massachusetts. But the effort to re-fight a campaign he won last year made Bush look a bit petty and desperate.

The effort ran further aground when administration aides had the bright idea of linking Murtha to Michael Moore. Comparing any opponent to the toxic filmmaker would only work after months of softening up his reputation. Murtha's history probably makes even that impossible. In his 37 years in the military, Murtha won two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star with a Combat "V," and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry.

The bungled Murtha response gave him more energy, validity, and acclaim than he probably would have gotten otherwise. It has made the withdrawal option in Iraq a far more serious topic of conversation than it would be otherwise. No one is signing on to Murtha's quick timetable for withdrawal, but the idea can no longer be dismissed by merely mentioning the name of the person who offered it. Murtha's next proposal will arrive with far more credibility because of this episode. People will pay attention to what he has to say. After all, he's a good man. Just ask the president.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131022/

jurisprudence
Public Enemy No. 43,527
The government throws back another small fish.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005, at 4:21 PM ET

Poor Jose Padilla. When the Defense Department decided to release America's last Public Enemy No. 1—Yaser Esam Hamdi—from nearly three years of bondage in a military dungeon without charges, he was shipped off to Saudi Arabia, with a firm handshake and commemorative U.S. Navy mug. The terrorist too dangerous to be tried in open court was sent home to his parents for a seriously enforced new bedtime. But Padilla—perhaps because he grew up in America, or maybe because his name could be readily stapled onto another conspiracy case—faces criminal charges and a lifetime in prison.

Padilla is not, nor was he ever, a central figure in the war on terror. The Brooklyn-born former gang member who converted to Islam has sequentially been demoted from the "Dirty Bomber" to the "Apartment Bomber" to "Random Bad Fella." And thus he joins Hamdi, Zacarias Moussaoui, John Walker Lindh, and most of the other big terror suspects we've convicted, or incarcerated without charges, as walk-ons repurposed to be special guest villains in the legal war on terror.

Padilla was detained at Chicago's O'Hare airport on May 8, 2002, and held as a "material witness" in New York. Facing a legal deadline to defend its decision to hold him as a material witness indefinitely, the government hastily labeled Padilla an enemy combatant and hustled him off to a military brig in Charleston, S.C. Authorities determined that he had no legal rights—no right to counsel or to be charged with a crime. And then the speechifying began:

"This guy, Padilla, is a bad guy," President Bush announced at the time. "And he is where he needs to be—detained." Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft bragged: "We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or 'dirty bomb,' in the United States." In the face of this evil, the Bush administration triumphantly threw away the key. Until it was faced with another deadline in the winter of 2004, when Padilla's lawyers were about to challenge his detention at the Supreme Court, and suddenly his overdue right to a lawyer materialized. Then in June 2004, as the court considered the case, the government released a document detailing the alleged plan in which Padilla was involved—a plan to blow up American apartment buildings. Big downgrade from dirty bombing. But still scary.

The Supreme Court refused to rule on the merits of Padilla's claims in 2004, throwing his case back to the lower courts on a technical matter. But the court did rule in Hamdi's case, voting 8-1 that American "enemy combatants" captured in the war on terror are entitled to challenge indefinite detentions in federal court. As Lyle Denniston has explained, while normal sentient humans might have read this ruling as something of a loss for the Bush administration, the government continued to hold Padilla, claiming it had prevailed in Hamdi and the other terrorist suspect cases and giving no ground on its position that the Guantanamo detainees have no rights in federal court. This week, the government faced another deadline: In response to Padilla's second appeal to the Supreme Court, the Bush administration would have had to advance its losing argument in favor of unfettered executive power. And magically Padilla is transferred—doubtless blinking gratefully—into the bright hopeful light of a protracted criminal trial.

The Bush administration can pretend this timing is mere serendipity and that the "real" charges against Padilla—the dirty, rotten apartment-bombing charges—are not in the indictment for national security reasons. But the truth is that the government oversold Padilla the same way it oversold Hamdi, Moussaoui, Lindh, and the Detroit and Lackawanna "terrorists." The government caught street hooligans and passed them off as gang lords.

Nobody disputes that small-fry terrorists must be caught and punished. After all, most of the Sept. 11 murderers were small fish with no real grasp of the big plan. Nor does anyone dispute that these terrorists should be questioned by the state if they can help foil big terrorist plots. But most Americans now dispute—and some have long disputed—that all this needs to be done outside the existing legal stratosphere. More than three years after the government began holding citizens in jails without charges, there is no proof that anyone in this country is safer for it. Nor is there any proof that ordinary criminal trials for Padilla, Hamdi, and the other terrorists we've tagged would have exposed vital intelligence information or resulted in acquittals. Yet with Hamdi sent home, and Padilla shuffled to the criminal courts, there may be no testing the addled theory that President Bush has boundless wartime powers, even after the Supreme Court has told him he doesn't.

Had Padilla been charged and tried back in the summer of 2002, rather than touted as some Bond villain—the Prince of Radiological Dispersion—his case would have stood for a simple legal proposition: that if you are a terrorist, a supporter of terrorism, or a would-be terrorist, the government will hunt you down and punish you. Had the government waited, tested its facts, kept expectations low, then delivered a series of convictions of even small-time al-Qaida foot soldiers, we in this country would feel safer and we would doubtless be safer. Instead Padilla, like Hamdi, was used as fodder for big speeches. They became the justification for Bush's position that some people are so evil that the law does not deter them, that new legal systems must be invented—new systems that bear a striking resemblance to those discredited around the time of Torquemada.

The facts of the Hamdi, Padilla, Lindh, Moussaoui, and other terror cases have never mapped onto the propaganda used to sell them. The trouble, yet again, is those bedeviled facts. The problem the Bush administration keeps having with the legal system is that no matter how long you stall, speechify, and deny, in the end it all comes down to facts—facts that become increasingly inconvenient with every passing day.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131020/

 surfergirl
Say Good Night, Nightline
Ted Koppel's philosophical farewell.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005, at 2:50 PM ET

With characteristic modesty, Ted Koppel, in his final broadcast as the host of Nightline, chose to short-circuit the usual nostalgic montage of clips from his 25-year tenure on the show. Instead, the 65-year-old Koppel shifted the focus to a much older dude saying a much sadder goodbye: Last night's show revisited clips from Koppel's 1995 series of interviews with Morrie Schwartz, the sociology professor dying of Lou Gehrig's disease who would later become the subject of Mitch Albom's best-selling book Tuesdays With Morrie. In a newly taped interview, Albom himself told Koppel that he first decided to write the book after catching a glimpse of Schwartz, his former teacher, on Nightline. Schwartz is a gentle and lovely man who reflects on his own impending death at a philosophical remove. The final clip has him reflecting on his personal insignificance in the greater scheme of things: "I'm not a wave, I'm a part of the ocean of all humanity."

The choice to re-air the Schwartz footage as a valediction seemed an odd punt for Koppel, an interviewer known for his unsentimental professionalism. But in the program's final minute, Koppel's tone sharpened a bit as he delivered a direct address to his audience, taped only hours before the show broadcast at 11:30 p.m. (According to one account, Koppel sat down and wrote his farewell speech on Tuesday afternoon after pounding a double mocha.) In his own version of Morrie Schwartz's image of the wave, Koppel stressed his place in an ever-ebbing and flowing ocean of news anchors: "Cronkite begat Rather, Chancellor begat Brokaw, Reynolds begat Jennings. And each of them did a pretty fair job in his own right." He described a test he often gives to new Nightline interns, asking them to identify names like Eric Sevareid, Chet Huntley, or John Chancellor, only to be met with "blank stares." Koppel then reminds the young whippersnappers that, in their day, each of these men were once so famous that "everybody in the country knew their names. Everybody."

Amid all the portentous pronouncements these days about the Death of the News Anchor, there was something refreshingly humble about Koppel's perspective: In his Biblical metaphor, the endless procession of household-name newsmen were like so many dust motes swirling in the winds of history. Though some might have heard disrespect in Koppel's characterization of his just-retired colleagues Rather and Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings as "pretty fair," it seemed to me like a deliberate case of ironic understatement, masking his admiration for them. And Koppel ruefully acknowledged that he hadn't given his usual quiz to "this last batch" of incoming interns, because numbering himself among the ranks of the soon-to-be-forgotten hit a little too close to home.

Beginning on Monday, Nightline will be broadcast live from a snazzy new studio, anchored by a three-person team: Terry Moran, Cynthia McFadden, and Martin Bashir (who's probably sick of having his name linked with his tawdry 2003 documentary Living With Michael Jackson, but you know, you make your bed …). In the last sentence of his sign-off, Koppel entreated viewers to "give this new anchor team at Nightline a fair break. If you don't, the network will just put another comedy in this time slot, and then you'll be sorry." The comedy reference was an obvious dig at Late Show With David Letterman*, which nearly replaced Nightline in 2002 when ABC tried unsuccessfully (and in secret) to lure the late-night host away from CBS, understandably provoking Koppel's ire. It may also have been a poke at Jon Stewart, whom Koppel chided in an interview on the floor of last year's Republican National Convention for his overly flip take on the future of TV journalism. The new Nightline may not be a comedy show, but given the ever-dwindling audience for broadcast news and the resulting trend toward tabloid-style stories, it may still turn out to be an unintentional joke.

*Correction, November 23, 2005: An earlier version of this piece misstated the title of David Letterman's CBS show as Late Night; it is Late Show. Click here to return to the corrected sentence.

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131025/

jurisprudence
Don't Tell, Ask
Bob Woodward had no duty to disclose anything.
By David Feige
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005, at 2:31 PM ET

As the investigation into claims that the Bush administration leaked the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame in an attempt to discredit her husband expands to include criminal charges, the Washington Post's star reporter Bob Woodward has taken center stage as the scandal's latest villain. The revelation that Woodward learned Plame's name several months before anyone else has led to angry challenges to his prolonged silence and even calls for his resignation. But Bob Woodward owes no apology. His silence hasn't betrayed the nation, the Washington Post readership, or anyone else. Legally speaking, all Woodward's discretion did was force Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to do his job. The real discussion here shouldn't be about why Woodward didn't come forward; it should be about why Fitzgerald didn't call.

In maintaining his silence, Woodward, more than anyone else in the Plamegate scandal, has upheld the highest standards of journalistic integrity and discretion. Perhaps this is because, more than anyone else, Woodward understands the tenuous and often strained relationship between a powerful government and its citizens. (Whether Woodward—who has made his career as a journalistic watchdog, attentively patrolling executive power run amok—had some special obligation to his editor is a different question.) Woodward's critics are essentially arguing that he should have volunteered information (whether directly to the prosecutor or functionally to the prosecutor via publication) before being asked—that is, he should have become an informant.

We have laws in this country that designate precisely when citizens are required to rat on other people. The laws, for instance, require doctors who witness injuries consistent with child sex abuse to call authorities; and social workers are obligated to snitch if they confront someone clearly about to physically harm another. Certain other professionals are also deemed by law to be "mandatory reporters." But outside these narrow confines, there is no law in our country imposing an obligation to begin or to assist in a criminal prosecution—not in drug cases, not in mob cases, not even in murder cases.

And rightly so. America has been through McCarthyism before, and we have seen what a culture of informants can produce.

In America, it is the prosecutor's job to get information, not the citizen's to volunteer it—and this is for good reason. Many of our other important values—such as journalistic integrity, the right to privacy, or the right to be free from unwarranted searches and seizures—compete directly with an obligation to volunteer information. The value of our freedom from governmental authority is invariably tested during troubled times and generally faces its greatest challenges in the context of highly charged issues. But although it is chic to be patriotic, particularly in wartime, a vogue for cooperation with prosecutors shouldn't be confused with good policy. It is true that we prize honesty and integrity in America, and certainly we expect those summoned before a tribunal to testify completely and truthfully, but this is only required when someone is questioned by federal agents or compelled to testify. We may be a nation of Honest Abes, but we are not a nation of snitches.

It is precisely because we so long ago made the determination that people needn't (absent some very good reason) cooperate with the government against their fellow citizens that prosecutors are given a corresponding weapon of almost staggering power: the subpoena. By simply writing someone's name on a slip of paper, a U.S. attorney can haul a person into court and ask questions about anything he or she deems remotely relevant to an investigation. A prosecutor can paw through your library records, credit card receipts, and phone records; seize computer data; depose your secretaries and functionaries; procure driving records; and generally root through the most intimate details of your life in picayune detail. In exchange for this, we, as citizens, are relieved of the obligation to tattle to others indiscriminately.

All prosecutors have this power, and prosecutors leading wide and nebulous grand-jury investigations have even more of it. They are allowed to obtain documents and compel testimony with minimal oversight and with almost no limitation. Like any ordinary citizen, Bob Woodward was wise to fear that power. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, had, after all, already used it widely—demanding testimony from dozens of government officials and journalists, leading to the Matthew Cooper crisis and including the incarceration of Judith Miller. By acting as he did, Woodward implicitly took the position that confidentiality, journalistic integrity, and privacy trump the need to make a prosecutor's job easier.

Sadly, in the current political climate, those values aren't getting the respect they deserve. Woodward had sources to protect and every reason to avoid being subpoenaed. Moreover, he had no legal reason to step forward, when Fitzgerald could readily have called him and demanded truthful answers. As Woodward correctly divined, his only option was to lay low and to remain completely discreet. The fact that Woodward did just that, and did it successfully for so long, should be a beacon of hope, not a cause for condemnation.

Given the administration's outrageous conduct in leaking Plame's name, and allowing for Woodward's special place in the pantheon of modern journalism, it is easy to feel betrayed both by his silence and by his seemingly unnecessary public pronouncements. But make no mistake about it: Patrick Fitzgerald is a tenacious prosecutor. He found Judith Miller despite the fact that she (unlike Matthew Cooper) hadn't gone public with what she'd been leaked; he found creative ways to pressure potential targets and witnesses into signing confidentiality waivers, and when that didn't work, he showed no compunction about jailing journalists, all in the pursuit of the information he wanted. Fitzgerald had all the power here. The failure was his—not Woodward's.

For Woodward, publishing what he knew was likely to buy him a one-way ticket to a jail cell. Whether or not we might have wanted him to bite that bullet, go public, and languish in jail, it is crucial to remember that without stronger laws in place to protect sources and with no legal authority compelling him to come forward, for Woodward as for most everyone, discretion really was the better part of valor.

David Feige has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. Indefensible, his book about the criminal justice system, will be published in June. He can be reached at www.DavidFeige.com.

 

sports nut
No Passing Fancy
Should we care that Falcons QB Michael Vick isn't a pocket passer?
By Robert Weintraub
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005, at 2:18 PM ET

Michael Vick has had enough constructive criticism. After a decent, if hardly Marino-esque, game against the lackluster Dolphins, Vick scolded the media throng. "They say I can't throw the ball from the pocket and my passing efficiency isn't that good, so I had to show everybody," he said. "From here on out, I don't want hear that question again, if I can throw the ball from the pocket and if I can make plays from the pocket. I feel like I answered them." Vick and his Atlanta Falcons are 0-2 since he put his foot down; perhaps he'll allow the odd swipe at his arm, so long as the team returns to winning.

Vick will get his chance tomorrow as part of the annual excuse for ignoring your cousins known as Thanksgiving football. While beating the Detroit Lions likely won't earn Vick much street cred, it should make for some tasty premeal viewing. That is, if a national television audience can stomach his style of play.

Vick's credentials hardly need enumerating here—he's probably the most exciting player in all of pro sports. What separates him from even the best running backs is his acceleration when he sees a fissure in the defense. Watch when he eludes the rush and decides to take off—there is a split second of hesitation, as Vick computes pursuit angles, then whoooossshhhhh, and defenders are pawing helplessly at his jet wash.

Yet after the requisite nod to his athletic ability, most talk about Vick centers on what he can't do: throw the ball around like Marino and Montana. What he can do is win games like Marino and Montana. Since Vick became the Falcons' starter in 2002, his winning percentage is up there with those of Super Bowl QBs Tom Brady and Donovan McNabb.

The elephant in the room, of course, is race. Trent Dilfer leads his team to the Super Bowl by "managing the game" (code for not screwing up worse than his opponent). Vick wins by playing "PlayStation football" (code for coasting on his natural athletic ability) and gets derided for not being Peyton Manning.

Manning works hard to foster the image that he works hard. Good luck finding a story that doesn't mention Peyton's love affair with game film. No one is better versed in defensive wrinkles, no one exploits matchups with such aplomb, no one sees the field so clearly. At the line of scrimmage, Manning looks like a man with Tourette's syndrome—arms akimbo, patting his guards on the keister, pointing at every defender, bouncing around to every teammate to make sure they are on the same page. He's essentially the first Hall of Fame dork.

Manning reminds me of that old Jon Lovitz character from Saturday Night Live, the Master Thespian ("Acting!!"). Manning spends a lot of time Quarterbacking!! He wants you to forget that his path to the Pro Bowl was greatly eased by natural athletic ability (check out the gene pool he swims in). It's the same 99^th-percentile athleticism that Vick possesses, just expressed in a different way. Manning makes it seem like every quarterback could throw the perfect deep ball if they only studied harder and gesticulated more wildly.

Even up-and-coming stars, similarly gifted, have bought into the charade. The tale of Carson Palmer and Chad Johnson driving to Indy to study the master at work is now embossed legend. Many an NFL player would make a pilgrimage to see Vick play, but not to study at his feet. They go because Vick is so compelling to watch. Where Manning is homework, Vick is recess. Apparently, Vick's critics think the position of quarterback is too important not to be taken more seriously.

Imagine that the Kansas Board of Education ran the NFL, and offenses never evolved past the single wing. Quarterbacks still took direct snaps and ran the ball on virtually every play. In this alternate universe, Vick would be the state-of-the-art QB, Manning the one dissected at length for his unusual approach to winning. Or, let's just dispense with allegory, like Falcons coach Jim Mora recently did: "When are we going to start talking about when Peyton Manning is going to start doing what Mike Vick does?"

Robert Weintraub, a freelance TV producer/writer based in Atlanta, writes about sports media for Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131027/

explainer
Laptops at the Airport, Part 2
Do you have to take out your computer at foreign airports?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005, at 2:06 PM ET

In yesterday's column, the Explainer asked readers about their experiences with airport security outside the United States. So, do you have to take out your laptop when you're in another country?

Not very often. Quite a few readers report being castigated for taking out their computers unnecessarily. (One quoted an airport guard in the U.K.: "That's the easiest way to spot an American.") Here's a summary of the results, based on the first few hundred responses.

North America: Laptop screening is routine throughout Canada, where security personnel often swab computers for traces of explosives. (In some cases, you don't have to take out your laptop until after your bag goes through the X-ray machine.) Passengers at Canadian airports are sometimes asked to turn on their computers.

Europe: Very few countries in the EU require special screening for laptops. In general, you're more likely to be asked to take out your computer for trips to the U.S. than for trips within Europe. Readers report that checkpoints in Ireland tend to be very scrupulous, however, as are those in Belgium. Travelers report being asked to remove their computers from time to time in Austria, the Netherlands, Greece, and England. (Among the London airports, Heathrow tends to be stricter than Gatwick.) In the late 1990s, says one reader, German security asked to weigh his laptop to see if it matched manufacturer standards.

Asia: The Explainer's reader survey indicates that checkpoints in Japan seem to ask fewer than half of all passengers to remove and power up laptops. Other Asian countries are much more lax, and almost never give special attention to computers. Even Indonesia, which has been hit by a rash of terrorist bombings in the past few years, seems not to inspect laptops. According to one reader, India requires four separate security screenings for domestic flights to Kashmir, and that guards confiscate the batteries for all electronic devices for the duration of the flight.

Australia and New Zealand: Australia requires the removal of laptops in most cases. (A few years ago, you had to take out your batteries, too.) Airports in New Zealand sometimes ask passengers to turn on their computers and load up "Microsoft Word or something similar."

Middle East: Airports in the Middle East rarely ask travelers to take out their computers. Readers gave mixed accounts of the procedures in Israel: About half said they sailed right through the checkpoints with their laptops securely in their carry-on baggage.

Readers report no special screening for laptops in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks everyone who wrote in with their travel experiences.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131028/

 

science
Theory of Anything?
Physicist Lawrence Krauss turns on his own.
By Paul Boutin
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005, at 11:44 AM ET

Lawrence Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, has a reputation for shooting down pseudoscience. He opposed the teaching of intelligent design on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. He penned an essay for the New York Times that dissed President Bush's proposal for a manned Mars mission. Yet in his latest book, Hiding in the Mirror, Krauss turns on his own—by taking on string theory, the leading edge of theoretical physics. Krauss is probably right that string theory is a threat to science, but his book proves he's too late to stop it.

String theory, which stretches back to the late 1960s, has become in the last 20 years the field of choice for up-and-coming physics researchers. Many of them hope it will deliver a "Theory of Everything"—the key to a few elegant equations that explain the workings of the entire universe, from quarks to galaxies.

Elegance is a term theorists apply to formulas, like E=mc², which are simple and symmetrical yet have great scope and power. The concept has become so associated with string theory that Nova's three-hour 2003 series on the topic was titled The Elegant Universe (you can watch the whole thing online for free here).

Yet a demonstration of string theory's mathematical elegance was conspicuously absent from Nova's special effects and on-location shoots. No one explained any of the math onscreen. That's because compared to E=mc², string theory equations look like spaghetti. And unfortunately for the aspirations of its proponents, the ideas are just as hard to explain in words. Let's give it a shot anyway, by retracing the 20^th century's three big breakthroughs in understanding the universe.

Step 1: Relativity (1905-1915). Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity says matter and energy (E and m in the famous equation) are equivalent. His General Theory of Relativity says gravity is caused by the warping of space due to the presence of matter. In 1905, this seemed like opium-smoking nonsense. But Einstein's complex math (E=mc² is the easy part) accurately predicted oddball behaviors in stars and galaxies that were later observed and confirmed by astronomers.

Step 2: Quantum mechanics (1900-1927). Relativistic math works wonderfully for predicting events at the galactic scale, but physicists found that subatomic particles don't obey the rules. Their behavior follows complex probability formulas rather than graceful high-school geometry. The results of particle physics experiments can't be determined exactly—you can only calculate the likeliness of each possible outcome.

Quantum's elegant equation is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It says the position (x) and momentum (p) of any one particle are never completely knowable at the same time. The closest you can get is a function related to Planck's constant (h), the theoretical minimum unit to which the universe can be quantized.

Einstein dismissed this probabilistic model of the universe with his famous quip, "God does not play dice." But just as Einstein's own theories were vindicated by real-world tests, he had to adjust his worldview when experimental results matched quantum's crazy predictions over and over again.

These two breakthroughs left scientists with one major problem. If relativity and quantum mechanics are both correct, they should work in agreement to model the Big Bang, the point 14 billion years ago at which the universe was at the same time supermassive (where relativity works) and supersmall (where quantum math holds). Instead, the math breaks down. Einstein spent his last three decades unsuccessfully seeking a formula to reconcile it all—a Theory of Everything.

Step 3: String theory (1969-present). String theory proposes a solution that reconciles relativity and quantum mechanics. To get there, it requires two radical changes in our view of the universe. The first is easy: What we've presumed are subatomic particles are actually tiny vibrating strings of energy, each 100 billion billion times smaller than the protons at the nucleus of an atom.

That's easy to accept. But for the math to work, there also must be more physical dimensions to reality than the three of space and one of time that we can perceive. The most popular string models require 10 or 11 dimensions. What we perceive as solid matter is mathematically explainable as the three-dimensional manifestation of "strings" of elementary particles vibrating and dancing through multiple dimensions of reality, like shadows on a wall. In theory, these extra dimensions surround us and contain myriad parallel universes. Nova's "The Elegant Universe" used Matrix-like computer animation to convincingly visualize these hidden dimensions.

Sounds neat, huh—almost too neat? Krauss' book is subtitled The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions as a polite way of saying String Theory Is for Suckers. String theory, he explains, has a catch: Unlike relativity and quantum mechanics, it can't be tested. That is, no one has been able to devise a feasible experiment for which string theory predicts measurable results any different from what the current wisdom already says would happen. Scientific Method 101 says that if you can't run a test that might disprove your theory, you can't claim it as fact. When I asked physicists like Nobel Prize-winner Frank Wilczek and string theory superstar Edward Witten for ideas about how to prove string theory, they typically began with scenarios like, "Let's say we had a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way …" Wilczek said strings aren't a theory, but rather a search for a theory. Witten bluntly added, "We don't yet understand the core idea."

If stringers admit that they're only theorizing about a theory, why is Krauss going after them? He dances around the topic until the final page of his book, when he finally admits, "Perhaps I am oversensitive on this subject … " Then he slips into passive-voice scientist-speak. But here's what he's trying to say: No matter how elegant a theory is, it's a baloney sandwich until it survives real-world testing.

Krauss should know. He spent the 1980s proposing formulas that worked on a chalkboard but not in the lab. He finally made his name in the '90s when astronomers' observations confirmed his seemingly outlandish theory that most of the energy in the universe resides in empty space. Now Krauss' field of theoretical physics is overrun with theorists freed from the shackles of experimental proof. The string theorists blithely create mathematical models positing that the universe we observe is just one of an infinite number of possible universes that coexist in dimensions we can't perceive. And there's no way to prove them wrong in our lifetime. That's not a Theory of Everything, it's a Theory of Anything, sold with whizzy PBS special effects.

It's not just scientists like Krauss who stands to lose from this; it's all of us. Einstein's theories paved the way for nuclear power. Quantum mechanics spawned the transistor and the computer chip. What if 21^st-century physicists refuse to deliver anything solid without a galaxy-sized accelerator? "String theory is textbook post-modernism fueled by irresponsible expenditures of money," Nobel Prize-winner Robert Laughlin griped to the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year.

Krauss' book won't turn that tide. Hiding in the Mirror does a much better job of explaining string theory than discrediting it. Krauss knows he's right, but every time he comes close to the kill he stops to make nice with his colleagues. Last year, Krauss told a New York Times reporter that string theory was "a colossal failure." Now he writes that the Times quoted him "out of context." In spite of himself, he has internalized the postmodern jargon. Goodbye, Department of Physics. Hello, String Studies.

Paul Boutin is a Silicon Valley writer who spent 15 years as a software engineer and manager.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131014/

 

the big idea
The Misleaders
Who is Dick Cheney kidding?
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, at 7:05 PM ET

Dick Cheney calls it "dishonest," "reprehensible" and "not legitimate" to claim that the administration misled the public about prewar intelligence. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Nov. 21, the vice president added for good measure that "any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false."

Most Democrats in Congress think that prewar intelligence was indeed distorted and hyped—though not "fabricated," which, like the accusation that they have accused Bush of "lying," is a straw man of Cheney's. Democrats believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and others misrepresented what our government knew about Saddam Hussein's WMD capacity and his links to terrorists in order to make a stronger case for invading Iraq.

So, who's right? Did Bush officials mislead us, or didn't they?

Because the Republicans who control Congress have prevented any investigation into the administration's use of prewar intelligence (as opposed to the gathering and formulation of that intelligence), there's a lot we still don't know. Officials haven't yet had to answer questions about what they knew or did not know when they advanced various spurious claims. And even the kind of investigation that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is demanding could prove frustratingly inconclusive, because proof of deception requires knowing someone else's state of mind. In the president's case, it may be possible to show that he should have known enough to avoid some inaccurate assertions, including the notorious "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam seeking to buy significant quantities of uranium from Africa. But as with Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush's combination of self-delusion, disengagement, and sheer mush-headedness nearly precludes the possibility of willful deception.

Here's what we do know already, without a congressional inquiry: Members of the Bush Administration were dishonest with the public and with Congress about prewar intelligence. We've known this for some time—see, for example, the comprehensive and damning story Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus wrote in the Washington Post in August 2003 ("Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence"). Over the past two years, several incidents of executive-branch dishonesty in the run-up to the war have turned into subscandals of their own: the aluminum tubes that Iraq used for missiles and not gas centrifuges, the yellowcake uranium that Saddam didn't try to buy from Niger, the mobile biological warfare laboratories that turned out to be hydrogen generators for balloons, the al-Qaida chemical warfare training that was based on a false confession, the meeting with Mohamed Atta that didn't happen in Prague.

If you examine these and other pillars of the administration's case for invading Iraq, a clear pattern emerges. Bush officials first put clear pressure on the intelligence community to support their assumptions that Saddam was developing WMD and cooperating with al-Qaida. Nonetheless, significant contrary evidence emerged. Bush hawks then overlooked, suppressed, or willfully ignored whatever cut against their views. In public, they depicted unsettled questions as dead certainties. Then, when they were caught out and proven wrong, they resisted the obvious and refused to correct the record. Finally, when their positions became utterly untenable, they claimed that they were misinformed or not told. Call this behavior what you will, but you can't describe it as either "honest" or "truthful."

Many of the White House's most serious misrepresentations involve the case that Saddam was trying to build nuclear weapons, which he had in fact stopped trying to do in 1991. "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," Cheney said in August 2002, in one of his conclusive comments on the subject. This position was echoed by Bush and Rice, who both conjured the specter of a mushroom cloud, as well as by Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, who went into more detail about aluminum tubes and uranium. If you were on the inside and read even the now notorious National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, you at least knew that such statements were at the very least overdrawn. Analysts at the departments of Energy and State weren't buying the aluminum tubes and yellowcake theory that formed the basis of the nuclear case.

Or consider another component of that case that has gotten less attention, the description of fresh "activity" at Saddam's known nuclear sites. A draft paper produced by Andrew Card's White House working group on Iraq, and cited in the 2003 Post article, was characteristically distorted. The document inaccurately attributed to U.N. arms inspectors the claim that satellite photographs showed signs of reconstruction and acceleration of Iraq's nuclear program. It went on to quote something chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix told Time: "You can see hundreds of new roofs in these photos." But the White House paper left out the second half of Blix's quote: "[B]ut you don't know what's under them." In February 2003, American inspectors visited those sites as part of U.N. teams and saw that nuclear bombs weren't being made at them. But Bush officials acted as if such counterevidence didn't exist.

In retrospect, Cheney casts himself and his colleagues as uncritical consumers of what the CIA and DIA spoon-fed them. Bad intel, he gives us to understand, is like lousy weather—a shame, but nothing policymakers can do anything about. In fact, the Bush hawks were anything but victims of the intelligence community. They challenged any evidence that cut against their assumptions about Saddam, going so far as to set up their own unit within the Pentagon to reanalyze raw data and draw harsher conclusions. And remember that the trigger for the Valerie Plame scandal was the vice president's mistrust of the CIA.

Another giveaway is the administration's lack of outrage over the bad intelligence they now claim to have been victimized by. Only Colin Powell, before his U.N. speech, seems to have pushed back with any skepticism about charges he was being asked to retail. And only Powell has expressed any outrage after it became evident that his U.N. speech had been a case of garbage in, garbage out.

Powell's old colleagues now defend themselves by saying they didn't know their claims about Iraq weren't true. But the truth is most of them didn't care whether their assertions were true or not, and they still don't.

Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130884/

explainer
What Makes Laptops So Dangerous?
Why they get special attention at the airport.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, at 6:43 PM ET

Download the MP3 audio version of this story here. The Explainer now has its own free daily podcast; click here to learn more.

Almost 22 million people are expected to travel on U.S. airlines during the Thanksgiving holiday period, and wait times at the airport may increase as a result. As usual, airlines are telling passengers they can save time if they remove laptop computers from their carry-on baggage before they get to security checkpoints. Why do computers get so much attention?

In theory, a laptop might contain a bomb or hide a weapon. The Transportation Security Administration requires that all laptops be taken out of carry-on bags and passed through scanners on their own. The rule allows screeners to get an unimpeded look at each computer, which might help them discern whether it contains hidden explosives. And removing a laptop also makes it easier for screeners to see whatever else is in the bag. Computers can be large and dense enough to conceal parts of a suitcase in an X-ray image. (A knife, for example, might slip through a scanner if it were tucked underneath a heavy laptop.)

No one worried too much about electronic devices in carry-on baggage until the 1989 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The device that destroyed that plane—and killed 270 people—turned out to have been hidden inside a boom box.

After this incident, Congress briefly considered banning electronic devices in the cabin. Instead, the FAA asked airlines and airports to exercise more scrutiny over cell phones, radios, alarm clocks, computers, and other electronics. As a result, many travelers were asked to turn on their laptop computers at screening checkpoints, to prove that they functioned normally. (Some airports made powering up a computer mandatory; others required it only for travelers who were afraid to send their computers through the X-ray machine.) Laptops with dead batteries were sometimes taken to a special room and plugged in. By 1993, the process had become enough of a hassle that one company released a program called "Airport Shut Down"; it put your computer to sleep—rather than turning it off completely—in advance of the screening.

Security experts argued that these procedures were a waste of time, since you could easily hide a bomb inside a functioning computer. (Explosives could be packed into disk drives or internal cavities for additional hardware.) By the late '90s the practice had mostly disappeared, but the exact rules for screening laptops—and whether they needed to be taken out of the carry-on baggage—seemed to vary from place to place up until 9/11.

Since the end of 2001, the removal of laptops from carry-on baggage has been standard practice at U.S. airports. Initially, this practice led to a dramatic increase in reports of lost property, as passengers forgot their computers at security checkpoints. (In early 2002, Denver officials resorted to posting "Got laptop?" signs around the airport.)

Help the Explainer: Do you have to take your laptop out at airports in other countries? The Explainer couldn't get a consistent answer to this question from American security experts or international aviation organizations. What's your experience? Write down where you were and whether you had to remove your laptop from your carry-on luggage—and send it to ask_the_explainer@yahoo.com.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Doug Laird of Laird & Associates, Doug Lavin of the International Air Transport Association, and Billie Vincent of Aersospace Services International. Thanks also to reader Justin Drake for sending in the question.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130910/

 

medical examiner
The Last Big Virus
SARS—a fire drill for the avian flu?
By Arthur Allen
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, at 4:37 PM ET

The recent death of a girl from avian flu in a Chinese village, along with this week's report of the eighth confirmed human death from the virus in Indonesia, underscore the reasons to fear a human avian-flu pandemic. But it isn't all bad news on the scary virus front. Remember SARS? Chances are it is gone forever.

Exactly three years ago, a village Communist Party chief in Guangdong province went to bed with a bad cough after chowing down on delicacies such as civet cat and snake. A few days later he was admitted to a hospital, where he spread the disease to his nurses. Within weeks, many cities in Guangdong were full of people gasping and dying of mystery pneumonia. The Chinese government didn't inform the world about the outbreak until March 2003, around the time that a sick businessman at a Hong Kong hotel coughed on fellow travelers from Singapore, Vietnam, Germany, and Canada. SARS ("severe acute respiratory syndrome") swept through parts of Hong Kong, Taipei, Toronto, and other cities, killing 10 percent of the 8,000 people it sickened and setting off a panic that cost the Asian and Canadian economies $40 billion. No one seemed to have a clue about how to stop this crazy killer cough, though public health officials did their best to isolate patients while doctors treated symptoms of infection and toxic shock. And then in July 2003, after a few months in the headlines, SARS disappeared.

A tidal wave of medical literature—3,000 journal articles—has been published on SARS. All this study allows scientists to make a good case that, barring lab error or bioterrorism, SARS is unlikely to return. And if the disease does reappear, the world will be well-prepared. We'll know what to expect and how to react.

SARS seems a feeble monster indeed compared to H5N1, the avian flu virus, which when it crosses to humans seems to kill as many as half of them. Still, the SARS fight was a wake-up call, an alarm drill, whatever you want to call it—a case study for thinking about pandemic flu.

The good news about SARS, if one can call it that, started coming in late 2003, when a recurrence of the disease infected four Guangdoners who had frequented "wet markets" where live game animals were sold. By this time, Chinese scientists had discovered that some of the Himalayan palm civet cats sold as food items in these markets carried a coronavirus that is 99.8 percent identical to the causative agent of SARS. It seemed likely that both waves of SARS patients had contracted the virus from the civet or other market animals. But unlike the first group of SARS victims, the four new patients had a different strain that produced mild cases and didn't spread the virus further. Studies of antibodies in the population of Guangdong confirmed this finding. The evidence suggested that strains of a SARS-like virus had probably jumped from animals to humans at least a dozen times. But in only one of these transfers—the cause of the world epidemic—had the virus adapted well enough to kill and spread. That strain died out after the first four-month epidemic.

A second piece of good news came last September, when two groups of scientists reported that they had discovered the reservoir for the SARS-like virus. Horseshoe bats, another animal sold in wet markets, carried the virus in the wild but did not appear to be sickened by it. And it turned out that though the palm civet could be infected with SARS in wet markets, their wild civet cousins did not carry the disease. From these two pieces of evidence scientists were able to reconstruct the beginnings of the SARS epidemic, which likely began when droppings from a caged bat fell into a civet's cage. As the virus mutated successfully to accommodate itself to the civet, it also acquired the capacity to infect people. But not very well. Although civets or other animals could infect people with a SARS-like virus again, a virulent, deadly attack was probably a chance, one-off event—especially since China has since banned wet markets.

Canada, which had sunk $1.2 million into developing a SARS vaccine, has apparently ditched its efforts, convinced the disease is no longer a threat. The NIH still has a portfolio of about $98 million in contracts, grants, and internal research aimed at developing therapies and a vaccine that would at least be ready for experimental use if SARS returned. But officials at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease think things are pretty well under control. "It's not as unlikely as lightning striking twice, but there's a good chance that SARS as we knew it—a deadly contagious virus—will not appear again," says Stan Perlman, a virologist at the University of Iowa.

So, how much good does the apparent demise of SARS augur for the fight against flu? Some, though not much, unfortunately. In scientific terms, SARS was easier to stop and thus required less global communication and coordination than will be necessary to control a pandemic of H5N1. If the initial host country for the pandemic flu waits as long as China did to report SARS, we're probably done for. Flu, once it gets going, is a fast-traveling bug.

While only a few of the SARS patients seem to have been so-called "super-spreaders"—capable of coughing up bubbles of virus that remained floating in the air for a couple hours—the influenza virus often floats. And it infects cells better than SARS did. (Click here for more about how the viruses spread.) In addition, SARS patients were only contagious after they got quite sick, while flu patients can be contagious for a few days before symptoms start. Eventually, isolation and tight quarantine kept SARS from spreading. Flu would be harder to quarantine, and in any case enforced quarantine is an alien concept in the United States. Rather than tossing around the idea of a military occupation here in the case of a pandemic, as President Bush has done, it would make sense for the United States to invest more scientific time and money in hospital labs and surveillance teams in Asia. In the event of a definitive human-to-human crossover, tight control efforts would then have a better shot at preventing H5N1 from breaking out around the globe.

SARS showed the continued importance of the World Health Organization, a relatively small agency that opened avenues of communication and data-sharing among the world's virus hunters and public health officials. If pandemic flu breaks out, there probably won't be enough effective vaccines or drugs to fight the disease on a global scale, if at all. The key prescription for fighting emerging diseases, SARS has shown, is detection, communication, and good science.

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Four mutations in the gene encoding the protein that enables the coronavirus to penetrate animal cells were apparently the key difference between a virus that caused a SARS epidemic and one that caused a cold or no symptoms at all. Flu fighters suspect that a change of roughly the same size could make it far easier for flu to infect people. At present, it may be that 120 or so people infected with H5N1—most of them farmers or others in proximity to live fowl—got it by handling birds and then rubbing their eyes, which have higher numbers of the type of receptors that line the gastrointestinal tracts of birds, rendering them easily infected by the virus. Once in the body, flu can adapt to the receptors in our lungs, which is why it is crucial to immediately isolate anyone who has been infected with H5N1 and could theoretically be brewing a more deadly form of the virus.

Arthur Allen is writing a history of vaccination. His e-mail address is artnews@earthlink.net.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130908/

 

hey, wait a minute
Too Many Choices
Why seniors won't sign up for the Medicare prescription drug plans.
By Barry Schwartz
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, at 2:32 PM ET

The new Medicare prescription drug plan will save senior citizens billions of dollars, so why are so many of them afraid to sign up for it? You wouldn't think such a beneficent program would have to put a metaphorical gun to people's heads (in the form of a 1 percent per month premium penalty) to get them to enroll now. Yet that is what seems to be happening. Senior citizens are confused. The government has turned the insurance companies loose, with the result that in some states there are more than 50 plans to choose from—all of them complicated—and nowhere is there a simple metric that people can use to determine which plan is best for them.

Befuddled seniors are clutching their heads and asking someone, anyone (their pharmacists, their kids, AARP) for help. Some of them will end up avoiding the plans entirely—and missing out on big drug savings—because they can't figure out which plan to pick.

This reaction to the drug plan was completely predictable based on modern research in the psychology of decision-making, sometimes called "behavioral economics." There is now ample evidence that when you increase choice by offering more and more options, a point is reached at which paralysis rather than "freedom" is the result. This is true of trivial consumer choices, such as which flavor of jam to buy, and of extremely consequential choices, such as which 401(k) funds to put your retirement money in.

Indeed, the 401(k) story is remarkably analogous to the new prescription drug plan. Columbia University social scientists Sheena Iyengar and Wei Jiang found that as companies did their employees a "favor" by offering more and more mutual-fund options for their 401(k) contributions, fewer and fewer people elected to participate. Participation dropped 2 percent for every 10 options offered. And, analogous to the Medicare drug plan, by not participating, employees were giving up "free money" in the form of an employer match. It was so hard to decide which funds that employees chose "none of the above." Employees were so worried they would make a bad choice that they made the worst choice—opting out. And even among those employees who realized that it was foolish to opt out, Iyengar and Jiang found another interesting result: As the number of mutual-fund options increased, the percentage of employees choosing ultraconservative money-market funds rather than equity funds also increased. Any investment adviser will tell you that this is the worst choice you can make for your retirement plan, unless you are old enough to be nearing retirement. So, as the number of options increases, fewer people opt in at all, and more who opt in make poor decisions.

We can expect both of these things to happen with the prescription drug plan. Many people who would be well-served to sign up for some plan—any plan—won't. And many of those who do sign up will choose poorly. To simplify a hopelessly complex task, people may choose solely on the basis of price (take the cheapest) or on the basis of brand (choose a plan offered by a company you've heard of).

The pity in all this is that the prescription drug plan is being unveiled at precisely the time when the financial-services industry, having learned what choice overload does to people's ability to make good decisions, is changing how it does business, so people can manage the options they are offered. As documented by Carla Fried in the Nov. 13 New York Times, more and more employers are embracing automatic employee enrollment and offering what are called "lifestyle funds" that put a mix of stocks and bonds into a single package so employees don't have to choose. Both of these moves are driving up employee participation and driving down anguish. Fidelity, the huge mutual-fund company, was a bit ahead of the curve when it introduced such lifestyle funds a few years ago. The modus operandi of these funds is, "Trust us. Give us your money and we'll keep your portfolio balanced, manage risk, and shift to less and less risky holdings as you get older." In a stroke of sheer brilliance, Fidelity called these funds, in which participants have no choice, "Freedom Funds." Freedom from choice, not freedom of choice.

It is possible that over time, the drug plans now offered by insurance companies will shake out, choice will be reduced, plans will get simplified, and "trust us" plans like the Freedom Funds will appear and even come to dominate the market because of their attractiveness to Medicare recipients. The pity is that the Medicare prescription drug plan could have been designed this way from the start. Rather than letting insurance companies compete with plans, the government could have simply extended Medicare, offering perhaps a few choices and a simple metric for comparing options. The choices could have been designed to cater to the prescription drug needs of the overwhelming majority of citizens, with "safety features" that prevented people from catastrophic mistakes. Under these conditions, the government could have used its leverage to control drug prices, instead of relying on the insurance companies to do so. And since Medicare is more efficient than any of its private alternatives, there is no reason to think that people would have given anything up (except waste and complexity) if the drug plan had been a government plan. If the government had moved in this sensible direction, it would not now have to cajole and strong-arm people into signing up. Senior citizens would enroll in droves.

Why didn't it happen this way? The cynic in me imagines that the Bush administration regarded complexity as its friend, since it would reduce enrollment (and costs) and make the drug plan less of a budget-buster. But one needn't be so Machiavellian. Many conservatives are skeptical that government can do anything right, and they feared that a government-run benefit would bully drug companies and kill the incentives to create new drugs. Beyond this, if you believe that individuals are the best judges of their own welfare, giving them choices does more to enhance collective welfare than any universally imposed government program could, even one that permitted a limited number of options. Competing plans ought to free individuals to pursue their welfare as they see fit.

We now know, unequivocally I think, that this simple belief is far off the mark as a description of the real behavior of real people. While a life without any freedom of choice would not be worth living, it appears not to be true that more choice inevitably leads to more freedom and greater well-being. Indeed, there may be a point when choice tyrannizes people more than it liberates them. The implication of this, both for individuals and for government officials, is that sound social policy cannot consist solely of throwing an ever-greater menu of options at the American people. For the Medicare drug plans, less would be more.

Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

foreigners
Ariel Sharon's Flight of Fantasy
His new party could revolutionize Israel's political culture.
By Shmuel Rosner
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, at 1:01 PM ET

In 1975, Ariel Sharon was an adviser to the then-inexperienced prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. The episode lasted only eight months; Sharon quickly realized that the position provided him with little opportunity to influence policy, and, after battling some other operatives, he quit. When he left, one of the few achievements he could point to was a report he submitted to Rabin recommending vast changes to Israel's system of government: moving toward the separate, direct election of the prime minister and forming a smaller and more reliable government, a government that would be more obedient, since it would be nominated personally by the prime minister, like the relationship between the U.S. president and his Cabinet.

Years passed before Sharon got to see some elements of his plan materialize, and many proved to be harmful. After voting for the prime minister they thought most suitable, Israeli citizens felt free to elect to parliament the party that catered to their exact needs—as trivial or bizarre as they might be—polarizing the political arena even further. So, after three direct elections for prime minister, the system was changed again, but the basic agonizing reality of the Israeli prime minister did not improve. The current Israeli system puts power in the hands of individual members of the Knesset, enabling marginal groups of political activists to influence policy in ways contrary to the public's desires. Almost all Israeli leaders of recent years have lived under the constant badgering of "rebel" ministers or party members. Now Sharon is suffering at the hands of the rebels, but 10 years ago he was a rebel himself, making life miserable for then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Israeli politics is like a drunken eagle, looking for a rock to land on. This is, for the most part, the reason Israel is now heading toward its third election cycle in five years. Sharon is a popular leader who was unable to control his own party. He got to be a centrist and disengage from the Gaza Strip, but the hard-core Likud activists stayed on the right.

The real issue at stake now might be the system, not the substance. In forming a new party—some call it a dream team, others a party of last resort—like the government he envisioned in 1975, Sharon has created a completely new arena for speculation and maneuvering. A new field for fantasy.

Sharon will celebrate his 80^th birthday in less than two years, and he will probably not run again, so his new party is in danger of being dismantled after only one stint in government (as has happened to many Israeli centrist parties before). But it also presents a rare opportunity: changing Israel's political culture, getting rid of the old habit of too many parties and too many election cycles, and creating an atmosphere in which two of the three big parties—Labor on the left, Likud on the right, and the new one in the middle—will form governments for years to come. Stabilizing Israeli politics is an achievement worth exploring, whether you're a pro-disengagement voter or a right-wing hack.

And the outcome of the election is also of some importance. If the polls are to be trusted, a Sharon-Labor coalition is the most likely outcome, enabling the next government to dismantle more settlements but carrying the seeds of a future rift between centrist Sharon and left-winger Amir Peretz, the new Labor leader. Sharon does not trust the Arabs and will pursue unilateral steps; Peretz is an "Oslo Accords" disciple who aims for multilateral agreements with the Palestinian Authority.

And, as has happened before, much of the outcome of the Israeli elections depends on events in its backyard. The Palestinian parliamentary elections, slated a mere six weeks before Israel's, might influence Israeli voters more than it is customary to acknowledge. Terror attacks, or the Palestinian Authority's inability to act against terror groups, might convince them to turn right, once again proving the polls to be inaccurate—as happened to Shimon Peres in 1996, when he lost to Benjamin Netanyahu after a series of suicide-bomb attacks.

The American political operative and philanthropist Bernard Baruch once said that people should vote "for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing." The candidate who promises least to the Israeli voter is Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. Whatever he makes of his promises, Abbas will have a great impact on whether this upcoming Israeli election is decided on substance or system.

Shmuel Rosner, chief U.S. correspondent for the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, writes daily at Rosner's Domain.

 

 

 press box
The Great Google Wipeout
Chronicle of a corporate death foretold.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Monday, Nov. 21, 2005, at 7:35 PM ET

It wasn't like it had never happened before in the tech world. At the beginning of the 1980s, an Apple computer was the only box a self-respecting user would own. Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, IBM PCs, CompuServe, Nintendo, Netscape, AltaVista, AOL, Dell, the iPod, and Microsoft all held, at one time, what seemed like impregnable positions in their markets. In late 2005, as the price of a share of Google broke $400 and every software, advertising, print, broadband, and entertainment CEO in the country cowered in his executive bathroom sobbing about what the creative destruction crew from Google was doing to his business, the popular search engine seemed invincible.

Oh, some commentators, such as Adam L. Penenberg in Slate, had gone out on a ledge to speculate that the company had peaked. But they were dismissed as deadline johnnies who had to write something contrarian to satisfy their editors. But it wasn't until Knight Ridder Inc.'s largest stockholder, Private Capital Management LP, called for the newspaper chain's breakup that the creative destruction of market forces turned on Google and began its rout. The young company that arrogantly thought it owned the Internet soon learned that its only assets were tens of thousands of computers, terabytes of hard-disk storage, a terrific page-rank algorithm that coughed up pretty accurate searches, billions in the bank, and a dandy logo.

Private Capital's proposal didn't kill Google, but it signaled the newspaper industry's vulnerability, which in turn set off a chain reaction that did slay the firm. By forcing a sale of the Knight Ridder 32-newspaper chain (Philadelphia Inquirer, San Jose Mercury News, Miami Herald, Kansas City Star, et al.), just as Google had slithered in with Google Base, Private Capital created a panic. Classified ads were a $15-billion-a-year business for daily newspapers, and the conventional wisdom held that the newspaper industry had no way to fight back against Google, let alone earlier interlopers eBay and craigslist.

But then the recently re-Webified Rupert Murdoch of News Corp.—a media revolutionary always a step ahead of his peers—arrived to buy Knight Ridder and the newspaper properties of the stagnating Tribune Company (Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, et al.) and built the national classified database to end all national classified databases. He allowed customers to have classified ads their way: They could get them free or paid and sell the goods or services at set prices or by auction; they could have them displayed in a News Corp. paper, on the News Corp. Web site, on cell phones, and in podcasts, or any combination of the above. He could also send data from his DirecTV platform in space or by using slivers of his conventional TV stations on earth. Pricing was determined by who the customer was, what they were selling, how much they were willing to pay for placement, and whether they wanted to upload a video of the thing they were selling. Google Base stumbled, and eBay acquired the rest of craigslist in a fluster to catch up.

Next, Rupe fused MySpace.com, another savvy acquisition, into the network to expand its reach to the young people who refuse to read the newspaper. Then he rescued the Washington Post, New York Times, Boston Globe, and the Gannett and Hearst chains by inviting their classified pages to join his combine—for free. He hadn't turned altruist in his old age but was acting on the theory that the larger his network, the more valuable the individual pieces. (Murdoch could always come back and buy out the demoralized and starving Grahams, Sulzbergers, and Hearsts with his fabulous profits. He had time. He was a young 77.) He took his classified network international by integrating his London Timeses and his U.K. tabloids as well as his BSkyB satellite TV system, adding his Australian media properties and continental newspapers, too.

Like the Apple iTunes operation only bigger, RupeWeb was a sort of "Club Web." Its content was for members only and invisible to the Web spiders of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. (Some people call this kind of Web the "invisible" or "deep" Web.) Many RupeWeb users started helping themselves to the new search engine he had purchased in his acquisition of Lycos. Capitalizing on plummeting hard-disk prices, faster processors, growing bandwidth, and sleek new algorithms, the RupeGrab search engine ran loops around Google. People didn't even seem to mind that RupeGrab billed its search results as "Fair and Balanced."

RupeWeb immediately put a bite into Google's billions-of-dollars-a-quarter AdSense and AdWords advertising platforms. So did Microsoft and Yahoo! search, which had reached parity with Google. Google had also lost its "don't be evil" cachet ever since founders Sergey and Larry had purchased a Boeing 767-200 and crashed it into Coit Tower while doing barrel rolls over the San Francisco Bay. They survived, but their reputations and that of their company did not.

Then Amazon threw Google a curve it couldn't hit. Google had alienated the entire book-publishing business with its universal book-scanning project, one that paid the publishers in lip service rather than cash. Amazon leveraged this alienation to convince the major New York publishers—including Murdoch's HarperCollins, of course—to make nearly every book in print available via its "Search Inside" feature, which could already be searched in tandem with Amazon's A9 search engine. Giving publishers a cut of the book sales and book rentals obtained through search was an essential part of the deal. The book feature of the A9 search engine made it another Club Web, almost as useful as Murdoch's. Amazon added music lyrics, composers, titles, and artists and extended its IMDb.com database of film and TV artists and film dialogue. It became the dominant online seller of CDs, DVDs, books, and downloadable music, movies, and TV. Information didn't want to be free, Amazon figured out. It just wanted to be sold at a variety of price points, just like feature films were—at the theater, on pay-per-view, on DVD, or free thanks to the largesse of advertisers. The only ones who mourned the passing of iTunes were the deranged iPod people.

Having plunged into too many businesses at once, Google had become distracted. Regulators throttled its local Wi-Fi initiative. Its plan to build out ad-supported computer services—word processors, spreadsheets, databases—for end users had died when Microsoft jumped in first with a superior polished suite. Google, as users of its desktop search had learned, wasn't good at writing client applications. Microsoft, now run by Scott Moore, who had defected back to the company from Yahoo!, continued to trump Google on the desktop and used its know-how and market muscle to write lingua franca search and communications software for all the smart devices, services, and nano-gizmos that people were plugging into the Web: phones, media players, medical monitors, life recorders, cars, houses, ships at sea, personal satellites, and USB-ready newborns as well as the Club Webs belonging to individuals and institutions.

The wheels really came off Google not when it got thrown out of China for accidentally offending the regime, and not when it purchased Time Warner and then sold it for a huge loss, and not when Google TV and Google Phone flamed out. The problem wasn't that the Web wasn't growing. It was growing like a hothouse fungus! Google just couldn't keep up with the zigzagging beast. The final reckoning came when a Wall Street calamity of the highest order struck: Google failed to deliver increased quarterly earnings for the first time in memory. The stock buckled and the firm retreated into Chapter 11.

Meanwhile in China, a couple of 22-year-old computer scientists had an idea for a company based on the new economy in which a terabyte costs a penny, processors are too fast to measure, and bandwidth is too plentiful to charge for …

*******

I should acknowledge my debt to Chip Bayers, whose similarly titled Wired feature from almost a decade ago inspired this one. John Ellis started my fever-dream with his weekend piece from the Wall Street Journal. Also, I own Microsoft stock, most of which cost me more than today's closing price. Google me or send me e-mail via Google's soon-to-fold e-mail service: slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130795/

politics
Cheney's Dreadful Lack of Ambition
We'd be better off if the vice president were running in 2008.
By John Dickerson
Posted Monday, Nov. 21, 2005, at 7:11 PM ET

Today, Dick Cheney was dispatched to the friendly confines of the American Enterprise Institute to try to reverse the momentum for troop pullouts from Iraq. "A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be a victory for the terrorists, an invitation to further violence against free nations, and a terrible blow to the future security of the United States of America." The vice president argued against "self-defeating" pessimism in America and pushed back against the president's critics who say Bush manipulated prewar intelligence. Cheney's message was the one he has delivered often in the last five years: The White House isn't budging.

In a traditional political marriage, the vice president would be too nervous about his political future to give such a full-throated endorsement of unpopular policies and kiss-offs to politicians in both parties. Only 37 percent of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing, and 54 percent say the Iraq war was a mistake. Normally, a vice president would want to distance himself from those growing problems. The people who raise money for his coming presidential campaign would be on the phone demanding it. We need checks from moderates too, they'd say, and women are not writing checks at all. A wealthy industrialist somewhere would accuse the vice president of hurting the party. GOP politicians would also be quietly telling him to distance himself from Bush. If the vice president wanted their future political support, they would hint, he should praise their effort to quicken troop withdrawals.

Dick Cheney doesn't have to worry about any of that. That's the great thing about Dick Cheney. That's why he could give such a strong speech today. He has no political ambitions. Bush aides have been bragging about that since he was asked to leave Halliburton to come back to Washington. "He speaks with the authority of the president," his former top aide Mary Matalin told me in 2001, "because everyone understands the vice president has no personal agenda." Cheney thinks this way about himself, too. He immediately framed his job as an exercise in selfless devotion when I interviewed him the day after Bush picked him. "He's got a very important trait for a leader," he said describing Bush, "the ability to convince people to set their personal desires aside for the greater good."

The theory in 2000 was this: With no political ambition, Cheney could dive into the details of policy and do the right thing without having to worry about how it might hurt him for his next campaign. He would never have to separate himself from the president and therefore could be a trusted adviser. (Cheney's loyalty was a crucial selling point for George W. Bush, who had watched selfish aides undermine his father's presidency.)

Five years later, it looks a little different. Just because Cheney lacks a personal political ambition doesn't mean he's lacked a personal ideological agenda. He has been able to pursue that agenda without compromise. He followed his determined ideas for strengthening the executive branch and America's place in the world with no fear of political damage. Since he didn't need Congress or the press as much as he might have if he were a potential candidate, Cheney dismissed them almost the minute he came back to Washington. His energy task force operated in secret and told no one about its operations. Congress and outside groups sued to gain access and lost. When it came time for war, he stepped up his calls for executive authority, endorsing detention and interrogation policies that became the focus of international condemnation. His overly dire predictions about Saddam Hussein's weapons and optimistic ones about the progress of the Iraq war undermined his credibility. His approval rating now stands at 36 percent.

Disillusioned former Cheney friends describe the Veep as if the total political freedom brought on madness. "I consider Cheney a good friend," former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft told The New Yorker. "I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described to author Ron Suskind seeking guidance from the vice president about how to improve debate within the White House. He got grumbles, and then it hit him. "I realized why Dick just nodded along when I said all of this, over and over, and nothing ever changed," O'Neill said. "This is the way Dick likes it."

Cheney didn't have to stay on message. He suggested Iraq might have had links to the attacks on 9/11 even though President Bush denied such ties. When asked if the insurgency would be a problem after the war, he declared that it would not because American soldiers would be greeted as liberators. More recently, he suggested that the insurgency was in its "last throes." Not true, said military advisers. If Cheney had to worry about his political future he would have realized that future voters hearing about explosions every night on the news would have found such an assertion absurd on its face. But he didn't have to worry about having his rosy assessment thrown back at him in a future presidential debate.

Despite his lowered standing, Bush knows he can keep using Cheney for unpopular assignments because in theory, his approval ratings can drop to zero and Cheney won't balk. So, Cheney has taken up opposition to John McCain's amendment that would restrict "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of American military prisoners. The president can't argue the case directly, and he certainly can't argue it in public, so he lets Cheney do his dirty work for him. Internally, says Colin Powell's former chief of staff Larry Wilkerson, Cheney's political freedom allowed him to sway the rest of the administration. "There's no question in my mind where the philosophical guidance and the flexibility in order to [torture] originated—in the vice president of the United States' office," Wilkerson told CNN's Late Edition yesterday.

Cheney has been so extreme in various ways, usually at his president's behest, that he has marginalized himself from being able to reach out to nonbelievers in a useful way. In the end, Dick Cheney's lack of political ambition may have been no better for the administration than if he had spent the past five years trying to position himself to run against Hillary Clinton.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130793/

explainer
What's in the Congressional Record?
Anything your congressman wants.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Monday, Nov. 21, 2005, at 6:12 PM ET

Download the MP3 audio version of this story here. The Explainer now has its own free daily podcast; click here to learn more.

Michael Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, was indicted on Friday for bribing a member of Congress with "a stream of things of value." In return, the congressman agreed to perform "a series of official acts," including the placement of comments in the Congressional Record. How does a member of Congress put something in the Congressional Record?

He writes it down, signs his name, and hands the paper to a clerk. Anything a member of Congress says on the floor gets printed, more or less verbatim, in that day's Record. (Members do have the right to edit their words before publication.) But a congressman can also get material in the Record without saying it out loud. A senator can insert a document into the Record with unanimous consent, which is almost always granted. Members of the House don't even have to ask permission (though they sometimes do): They can choose instead to submit a signed copy of their comments directly to the House clerks.

Anything submitted to the clerks gets appended to the day's Congressional Record in the "Extensions of Remarks" section. (There are typically between a few dozen and a few hundred of these remarks in the Record every day.) The statements, once published, cannot exceed two pages in the document's small type—that's about five single-spaced, letter-sized pages. If a representative wants to publish a longer piece, she must ask permission on the floor of the House.

What kind of material goes in the extended remarks? Just about anything, as long as it begins with the phrase "Mr. Speaker." Members can insert personal apologies for missing votes or gripes with a law that just passed. They can honor institutions or individuals, like a high-school volleyball team that won the state finals. Remarks for the Congressional Record sometimes include long quotations—or even the full text—from a magazine or newspaper article.

The clerks and the printing office tend to publish material without question, though obscene material merits a call to the submitting member for confirmation. In 1989, Rep. Bill Dannemeyer of California inserted a graphic passage on the dangers of homosexuality. (To read an excerpt from the congressman's detailed disquisition, click here.) Dannemeyer's colleagues tried without success to remove his comments from the Record. (A precedent for expurgation had been set in 1921, after a lawmaker from Texas was found to have inserted "grossly indecent and obscene language, unworthy of a member of the House of Representatives.")

Why might Scanlon have bribed someone to insert a statement into the Congressional Record? Very few people read the Record, and nothing that's inserted in the extended remarks carries legislative authority. But an official statement in Congress could still be influential. Scanlon allegedly persuaded Rep. Bob Ney to insert criticism of the owner of SunCruz, a line of gambling boats. Scanlon's partner, the indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, was trying to buy SunCruz. He may have used Ney's official comments to drive down the price or to show the extent of his influence in Washington.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Larry Noble of the Center for Responsive Politics and Trudi Terry of the House of Representatives.

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"Other activities peculiar to homosexuality include: Rimming, or one man using his tongue to lick the rectum of another man; golden showers, having one man or men urinate on another man or men; fisting or handballing, which has one man insert his hand and/or part of his arm into another man's rectum; and using what are euphemistically termed 'toys' such as one man inserting dildoes, certain vegetables, or lightbulbs up another man's rectum."

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

 

moneybox
GM's Other Victim
For years, the Big Three staved off catastrophe by crushing auto parts manufacturers. Not anymore.
By Daniel Gross
Updated Monday, Nov. 21, 2005, at 5:02 PM ET

Today, General Motors announced a far-reaching restructuring plan to close nine plants and three service and parts facilities, cut 30,000 jobs, and reduce North American production capacity by 1 million vehicles a year. Last month GM cut a deal with the United Auto Workers to reduce health benefits, while the Wall Street Journal reported last Friday that Ford plans to cut about 4,000 salaried positions in the first quarter of 2006.

What's with the sudden sense of urgency? For years, GM and Ford hewed to a basic strategy: If they could just sell enough cars, all their structural problems would be solved. If they only regained lost market share, they could keep factories humming and provide their profitable financing arms with more business. But in recent weeks, there's been a change in direction. In GM's case, it could be that ancient and impatient activist investor Kirk Kerkorian, who owns about 10 percent of the company, is putting pressure on management.

But here's an alternative explanation. GM and the other U.S. auto manufacturers can no longer push their problems onto their suppliers. The Oct. 8 bankruptcy filing of Delphi, GM's main supplier, and the failure this year of several other parts makers, have put their biggest customers on notice.

The auto industry was once one of the great examples of vertical integration. Henry Ford's River Rouge plant, where raw materials were turned into autos with stunning efficiency, was the apotheosis of integration. Of course, different industrial eras call for different strategies. And in recent years, auto manufacturers have seen the wisdom of outsourcing the production of parts. Doing so allows companies to shop around for deals. So in 1999, GM spun off its parts unit as Delphi. Ford followed suit by spinning off Visteon in 2000. DaimlerChrysler likewise spun off portions of its parts-making capabilities.

These spin-offs started life with some advantages—they had solid relationships with giant car companies. But they also came into the world burdened by some handicaps. They inherited their former parent companies' legacy issues: excess capacity, pension commitments, and expensive unionized workforces. And even though the new companies were independent, they were somewhat captive. At Delphi, GM accounted for about 47 percent of revenues in the most recent quarter. In 2004, GM accounted for $15.4 billion of Delphi's $28.6 billion in revenues. And the bill from Delphi, which provides only a portion of GM's parts, ate up about 10 percent of GM's auto revenues for the year. In Visteon's most recent quarter, 64 percent of its sales went to Ford. Collins & Aikman* did about one-third of its business with DaimlerChrysler and about three-quarters of it with the Big Three.

For the last several years, GM, Ford, and, to a lesser degree, DaimlerChrysler have been able to delay their day of reckoning by shifting their problems down the line to suppliers. They continually cajoled suppliers to deliver parts for less money—or else face the prospect of losing the business. In the early part of this decade, when a global slowdown led to sharp declines in commodity prices, the parts makers could deal with the pressure. But when prices for steel and oil—the main input for plastic—started to rise a few years ago, instead of compensating suppliers for higher costs, the automakers continued to demand lower prices. As the Detroit News notes, GM in 2003 kicked off a program to get suppliers to cut prices by 20 percent by 2005. For suppliers, raw materials can account for half of total costs. And when the price of oil, steel, and other metals like copper began to rise, the suppliers were out of luck.

When the parts makers appealed for help, the automakers generally told suppliers to stuff it, or threatened to move business elsewhere. After all, GM and Ford had their own problems. Since the fall of 2001, the Big Three were able to careen from discount gimmick to discount gimmick without destroying themselves—zero-percent financing, big rebates, extending employee discounts, and now free gas—only because the suppliers were choking on the cost of higher raw materials.

In August, Bo Andersson, GM's global supply chief, told Automotive News, "I see much more emotion in our supply base ... in the last two years than I've seen in my whole career." No wonder. Many of the biggest suppliers were dying. In February, Tower Automotive filed for bankruptcy. Collins & Aikman was next to go in May. Then the largest parts maker, Delphi, went bust in October.

Why is this bad news for the Big Three? If the parts makers can't make it as independent businesses, then the Big Three must help fund their upkeep, one way or another. Companies in bankruptcy can reject existing contracts and ask the courts for relief. In July, Collins & Aikman got a customer financing agreement in which the end users (i.e., the Big Three plus Toyota, Honda, and Nissan) agreed to pay more for parts. On Oct. 1, Ford took back a big chunk of Visteon's operations onto its own books, including 23 facilities and 18,000 workers—a pre-emptive bailout. And Delphi, which continues to lose money, will certainly be asking GM and all its customers for help.

In a way, the long-overdue job-cutting efforts by Ford and GM are just another sign of indirect ravages of inflation, which we are routinely assured is under control. By cramming down their suppliers, the Big Three, and especially GM, spared themselves—and consumers—from dealing with higher costs for a few years. With nobody left to stiff, and with commodity costs still high, the big automakers must increasingly look inward. The only companies they can cram down now are their own.

Correction, Nov. 22, 2005: The piece originally misidentified Collins & Aikman as the second-largest auto parts maker. In fact, it was the 12^th-largest parts maker in North America last year. Return to the corrected sentence.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2130797/

 

readme
Corrupt Intentions
What Cunningham's misdeeds illustrate about conservative Washington.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, Dec. 2, 2005, at 7:08 AM ET

It used to be said that the moral arc of a Washington career could be divided into four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition, and corruption. You arrive with a passion for a cause, determined to challenge the system. Then you learn to work for your cause within the system. Then rising in the system becomes your cause. Then finally you exploit the system—your connections in it, and your understanding of it—for personal profit.

And it remains true, sort of, but faster. Even the appalling Jack Abramoff had ideals at one point. But he took a shortcut straight to corruption. On the other hand, you can now trace the traditional moral arc in the life of conservative-dominated Washington itself, which began with Ronald Reagan's inauguration and marks its 25^th anniversary in January. Reagan and company arrived to tear down the government and make Washington irrelevant. Now the airport and a giant warehouse of bureaucrats are named after him.

By the 20^th anniversary of their arrival, when an intellectually corrupt Supreme Court ruling gave them complete control of the government at last, the conservatives had lost any stomach for tearing down the government. George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was more like an apology than an ideology. Meanwhile Tom DeLay—the real boss in Congress—openly warned K Street that unless all the choice lobbying jobs went to Republicans, lobbyists could not expect to have any influence with the Republican Congress. This warning would be meaningless, of course, unless the opposite was also true: If you hire Republican lobbyists, you and they will have influence over Congress. And darned if DeLay didn't turn out to be exactly right about this!

No prominent Republican upbraided DeLay for his open invitation to bribery. And bribery is what it is: not just campaign contributions, but the promise of personal enrichment for politicians and political aides who play ball for a few years before cashing in.

When Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham pleaded guilty this week to accepting a comic cornucopia of baubles, plus some cash, from defense contractors, the vast right-wing conspiracy acted with impressive speed and forcefulness to expel one of its most doggedly loyal loudmouths and pack him off to a long jail term. Even President Bush, who possesses the admirable quality of an affable capacity for understanding and forgiveness on the personal level, seized an unnecessary opportunity to wish the blackguard ill. There was no talk of "sadness"—the usual formula for expressing sympathy without excusing guilt.

This astringent response would be more impressive if the basic facts about Cunningham's corruption hadn't been widely known for months. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported last June that a company seeking business from the Pentagon had bought Cunningham's southern California house from him, held it unoccupied briefly, and sold it—in the hottest real estate market in human history—for a $700,000 loss. You didn't need to know that Duke's haul included two antique commodes to smell the stench. Yet all the Republican voices now saying that Cunningham deserves his punishment were silent until he clearly and unavoidably was going to get it.

Like medieval scholastics counting the angels on the head of a pin, Justice Department lawyers are struggling with the question of when favors to and from a member of Congress or a congressional aide take on the metaphysical quality of a corrupt bribe. The brazenness of the DeLay-Abramoff circle has caused prosecutors to look past traditional distinctions, such as that between campaign contributions and cash or other favors to a politician purposely. Or the distinction between doing what a lobbyist wants after he has taken you to Scotland to play golf, and promising to do what he wants before he takes you to Scotland to play golf.

These distinctions don't really touch on what's corrupt here, which is simply the ability of money to give some people more influence than others over the course of a democracy where, civically if not economically, we are all supposed to be equal. So, where do you draw the line between harmless favors and corrupt bribery?

It's not an easy question, if you're talking about sending people to prison. But it's a very easy question if you're just talking: The answer is that it's all corrupt bribery. People and companies hire lobbyists because it works. Lobbyists get the big bucks because their efforts earn or save clients even bigger bucks in their dealings with the government. Members of Congress are among the world's greatest bargains: What are a couple of commodes compared with $163 million of Pentagon contracts?

Perhaps conceding more than he intended, former Democratic Sen. John Breaux, now on K Street, told the New York Times that a member of Congress will be swayed more by 2,000 letters from constituents on some issue than by anything a lobbyist can offer. I guess if it's a lobbyist versus 1,900 constituents, it's too bad for the constituents. That seems fair.

Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.

 

politics
Kerry Swift-Boats Bush
The president isn't as clueless as his rival makes him out to be.
By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005, at 6:37 PM ET

Responding to the president's Wednesday speech on the war, Sen. John Kerry charged that George Bush didn't understand a fundamental reality on the ground in Iraq: that the presence of U.S. troops itself fuels the insurgency. Even Bush's top officer overseeing operations, Army Gen. George W. Casey, has testified to this and yet, Kerry charges, the president is oblivious. "The president's not dealing with a certain kind of reality that's important to the lives of our troops," says Kerry.

The criticism cleverly paints Bush as hopelessly clueless. It aligns Kerry with the fighting man: He's not cutting and running when he calls for a speed-up of troop withdrawal, he's just listening to Gen. Casey, unlike Bush himself. Kerry is leveraging Bush's reputation for stubbornness and lack of candor and turning it into a deadly flaw.

Like most clever feints in Washington, it's also not entirely honest. True: Bush doesn't admit that the presence of large numbers of U.S. soldiers inspires insurgents. He probably never will. But that's a lack of candor, not a hole in the military strategy. Kerry wants to make what Bush doesn't say proof of what Bush doesn't know.

Lord knows that Bush should be more candid. But Kerry is being less than candid himself when he suggests that the strategy Bush is following—as flawed as it may be—does not accommodate a realistic understanding of the insurgency. Why? Because Gen. Casey, whom the senator has been quoting to criticize Bush, is the author of the counterinsurgency strategy that Bush unveiled publicly Wednesday.

As Kerry asserts, Casey did tell the Senate armed services committee on Sept. 29, 2005, that "our presence in Iraq" was "one of the elements that fuels the insurgency." Furthermore: "Increased coalition presence speeds the notion of occupation. It extends the amount of time that it will take for Iraqi security forces to become self-reliant, and it exposes more coalition forces to attacks at a time when Iraqi security forces are increasingly available and increasingly capable."

That's the part that Kerry has been referring to. But he glosses over Casey's next point: The military has a strategy for dealing with this problem. What is that strategy? Train Iraqi forces and remove U.S. troops once the Iraqi army is ready. This is how Casey puts it: "[R]educing the visibility and ultimately the presence of coalition forces as we transition to Iraqi security self-reliance remains a key element of our overall counterinsurgency strategy." This is how Bush has been putting it since late June: "As they stand up, we stand down."

There are reasonable grounds for criticizing the Bush/Casey strategy for dealing with the insurgency as flawed. It may be too little too late, or it may be based on rosy assumptions. But Kerry doesn't challenge it on any substantive basis. He can't, because to do so would acknowledge that Bush is offering a solution to the problem of U.S. troops inspiring insurgents. Kerry's spin is that Bush is so clueless he doesn't even know the problem exists; whereas he, Kerry, has his eye on what is so "important to the lives of our troops."

It must be pleasurable for the president's former rival—whose positions were so distorted during the presidential campaign—to do a little twisting himself. But it's a little too clever to both scold Bush for playing rhetorical tricks and then steal the dishonest technique. Of course, had Kerry gotten the hang of this a little sooner, he might have won.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

fighting words
Sticking Up for Saddam
Ramsey Clark admits that his client is guilty.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005, at 5:51 PM ET

All must agree that Saddam Hussein is entitled to the best legal defense team, and that it is a very special responsibility of the Coalition authorities to provide cast-iron protection to those who undertake the task. (This remains true even if, as is strongly implied in a Nov. 29 article by John Burns in the New York Times, Saddam and his lawyers have been caught hinting at involuntary changes in the composition of the prosecution team.)

But the phrase "best defense" and the name "Ramsey Clark" do not have the same apposition as, say, peaches and cream. Clark used to be Lyndon Johnson's attorney general and in that capacity tried to send Dr. Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, and others to jail for their advocacy of resistance to the war in Vietnam. (In a bizarre 2002 interview in the Washington Post, he took the view that he was still right to have attempted this, even though the defendants were acquitted.) From bullying prosecutor he mutated into vagrant and floating defense counsel, offering himself to the génocideurs of Rwanda and to Slobodan Milosevic, and using up the spare time in apologetics for North Korea. He acts as front-man for the Workers World Party, an especially venomous little Communist sect, which originated in a defense of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

I was wondering when Clark would pop up in Baghdad, and there he was last Monday, presenting his credentials to the judge in the Saddam Hussein case and being accepted at his face value as a defense spokesman. He lost no time in showing what he is made of.

The first charge being brought against Saddam Hussein is that in 1982, after his motorcade came under fire near the mainly Shiite town of Dujail, he ordered the torture and murder of 148 men and boys. It's a relatively minor item in the catalog, but there it is. The first prosecution witness in the case, Wadah al-Sheikh, has actually testified that he knows of no direct link between Saddam and the killings. The defense team has to hope that it can prove the same, or perhaps suggest that no such massacre occurred. Not so Ramsey Clark. In a recent BBC interview, he offered the excuse that Iraq was then fighting the Shiite nation of Iran:

He (Saddam) had this huge war going on, and you have to act firmly when you have an assassination attempt.

Just go back and read that again. Ramsey Clark believes that A) the massacre and torture did occur and B) that it was ordered by his client and C) that he was justified in ordering it and carrying it out. That is quite sufficiently breathtaking. It is no less breathtaking when one recalls why Saddam "had this huge war going on." He had, after all, ordered a full-scale invasion of the oil-bearing Iranian region of Khuzestan and attempted to redraw the frontiers in Iraq's favor. Most experts accept a figure of about a million and a half as the number of young Iranians and Iraqis who lost their lives in consequence of this aggression (which incidentally enjoyed the approval of that Nobel Peace laureate Jimmy Carter). And Ramsey Clark says that the aggression is an additional reason to justify the massacre at Dujail.

Rather than say what substance I think Ramsey Clark is made of, I shall quote from Jeffrey Blankfort. There are various Web sites devoted to undermining the war effort in Iraq, one or two of which are also devoted to attacks on my own moral turpitude. I can't read them all but I do usually look at the e-mail I get from Blankfort. He is a very serious guy with whom I have had a few exchanges. He is one of the few to have noticed what Ramsey Clark said, and here is his comment:

The problem is … that Clark is one of the most well-known representatives of the anti-war movement and represents the ANSWER coalition and in my mind this is more than the conflict of interest that it unquestionably is. Thus, the message that it sends to the Iraqi people is that the anti-war movement doesn't really care about any Iraqis other than those who have been killed by US and UK forces, that it, in fact, does not condemn Saddam for his long history of human rights violations and for his launching a bloody war against Iran that took well over a million lives.

That is to say the least of it. He adds:

It is long past time for the anti-war movement to drop its double standards. It can begin by saying Ramsey Clark does not speak for us. He certainly does not speak for me.

This is a nice twist on the self-regarding "Not In Our Name" slogan under which the anti-war movement filled the streets to hear speeches from Saddam sympathizers, Fidel and Kim groupies, and Islamic fundamentalists. Not really anti-war at all, but pro-war on the other side. It was more like a single standard if you ask me, but let's put this to the test.

So, how about it, Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore and Tim Robbins and all the rest of you? Do you need any prompting to say what you think? Or is the only crime scene to be found in the Downing Street memo and the identifying of a CIA bureaucrat? We know what Clark is made of: What about you? I meanwhile shall recline, happy in the knowledge that Saddam Hussein has engaged the services of an attorney who proclaims him to be guilty as charged.

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

 

dvd extras
The "Left Behind" Movies
How to end the world on a budget.
By Grady Hendrix
Posted Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005, at 12:51 PM ET

Last month, Christians everywhere were supposedly locked up in their churches watching the most recent apocalyptic movie, Left Behind: World at War. The three "Left Behind" movies, based on the best-selling "Left Behind" books, were produced and written by the Lalonde brothers, two Canadians who have built their careers on faith-based thrillers. The movies have either been released straight to video or, as in the case of Left Behind: World at War, DVDs were mailed to churches, which were encouraged to hold public screenings. The new "Left Behind" movie disturbs me—not because thousands of people are watching a movie that proclaims non-Christians will burn in hell for all eternity—but rather because thousands of people are watching a movie where Toronto stands in for New York, Chicago, and Israel. Also, Washington, D.C. And Egypt. London, too.

The "apocalypse on a shoestring" aesthetic has become the hallmark of the "Left Behind" series. It tells the story of the End Times, the events that, according to fundamentalist Christianity, precede the end of the world. Like all enormous bummers, they're tightly scheduled. First comes the Rapture, when Christians are sucked up to heaven, leaving the unsaved behind. Then the Tribulation begins—the seven years when the United Nations, led by the Antichrist and the Whore of Babylon, take over the planet. The movies star Kirk Cameron of Growing Pains as a member of a resistance movement known as the Tribulation Force. In a nice touch, Cameron's wife, Chelsea Noble, has been cast as the Whore of Babylon. The Antichrist is played by Canadian Gordon Currie.

The first film, Left Behind: The Movie, introduced us to Cameron's character, Buck Williams, an anchorman for GNN news who broadcasts around the world live from an off-the-shelf consumer-model video camera. Melrose Place vet Brad Johnson plays a pilot whose Christian wife ascends into heaven during the Rapture, leaving him with their teenage daughter, Chloe (who, in one of the queasier elements of the series, falls in love with Buck). Things get rocking once the Rapture hits, the Christians go to heaven, and chaos ensues. Planes crash, cars burst into flames, heavy machinery goes unoperated, little old ladies take to the bottle, and everyone freaks out and leaves garbage everywhere.

The Lalonde brothers admit that the first "Left Behind" movie was a major flop, but it sold well on video and so we got a sequel, Left Behind 2: Tribulation Force, which was a pathetic attempt at filmmaking even by the standards of straight-to-video movies. For the third film, Sony Entertainment got involved and signed the checks. While each installment's budget is estimated to be around $17.4 million, I think that number might be off by $16 million or so. In Left Behind 2: Tribulation Force, for example, Kirk Cameron has to take Ben Judah, a respected rabbi, to the Wailing Wall so that he can tell Jews everywhere that Jesus Christ is Lord. Israel is represented by a few stone walls obviously made of plywood, some Christmas-tree lights, and 500 volunteer extras wearing leftover costumes from a Nativity pageant. The Wailing Wall is patrolled by soldiers dressed in World War II army uniforms. The producers have also dubbed in the sound of goats during scenes set in downtown Jerusalem, which leads to the unusual notion that modern-day Israel is populated by WWII re-enactors, nervous-looking people in bathrobes, and goats.

In low-budget movies there are just some things that you can't portray convincingly. The end of the world is one of them, and the spinning wheels of geopolitics is another. In Left Behind: World at War, the world is never depicted at war, but we do get a brief snowmobile battle. Worse, the Lalonde brothers have reduced international diplomacy to its most ham-handed elements. The first thing that the evil Nicolae (aka the Antichrist) does is seize control of the United Nations by executing his opponents on the floor of the General Assembly, gangster style. Then he proclaims, "While nations deal with the chaos within their own borders, the U.N. has taken a leadership role in stabilizing the world." The United Nations can't even take a leadership role in getting rid of its parking tickets, but in the "Left Behind" universe, the U.N. wants nothing more than to disarm the world's armies, eliminate famine, and bring about a global peace. This, confusingly, makes them the bad guys.

Thanks to Sony's money, the third installment is slightly more upscale—it's even got Louis Gossett Jr. as the pistol-packing president of the United States—yet the series still can't shake its low-budget mindset. The president slips out of the White House in the trunk of a hatchback, invades a chemical weapons lab (the nefarious Nicolae has been poisoning Bibles, causing Christians to become sick), takes out the bad guys by surfing down a flight of stairs on their faces, and then sneaks back in to the White House undetected. Once there, he orders the "SS" to launch an attack. I think he means the Secret Service, but I'm not sure whom the president is trying to scare, as we've already seen his Secret Service detail and there are only two guys on it. At the end of the movie, the Christians discover that communion wine can stop the plague, and the president finds God and almost immediately sacrifices himself in a missile strike on Nicolae. A fine effort, but Nicolae emerges from the rubble without even a smudge on his European menswear. Roll credits, start planning sequel.

There's much more to ponder in Left Behind: World at War, not the least of which is: Did Kirk Cameron actually think that sporting 5-o'clock shadow would make him more viable as an action hero? Did the Lalonde brothers really think no one would notice that they've replaced Clarence Gilyard, a black actor who played a resistance minister in both previous movies, with a totally different black actor? Do they think that all black actors look alike? The Lalondes have said that they are not going to report the box office numbers for Left Behind: World at War in terms of money made but in terms of souls saved. Yet watching this movie's nonstop barrage of bargain-basement digital effects, computer displays of missile attacks that look like screen savers, and scenes of a world at war that feature the same sets used over and over, the only thing I could see being saved was money.

Grady Hendrix, a New York writer, runs the New York Asian Film Festival.

 

supreme court dispatches
Nibbling Away at Roe v. Wade
For the Supreme Court, Ayotte is an hors d'oeuvre.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at 7:15 PM ET

There is an awkward bit of bride's-side/ groom's-side stage business to navigate this morning, in bypassing protesters outside the Supreme Court. For some reason, the NOW protesters are blocking the whole right side of the sidewalk, while the anti-abortion demonstrators, mouths sealed with red tape, occupy the left. Nobody seems to want to get too close to the building itself—which has seen some freaky Amityville Horror action of late, including blasted light bulbs at oral argument and the spontaneous hurling of marble chunks onto the plaza.

Once inside, there is no big woolly policy discussion of the competing rights at issue in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood—the right of a young woman to obtain an abortion versus the right of her parents to know that she is doing so. Instead, the discussion focuses on a flaw—and virtually everyone today concedes it's a flaw—in New Hampshire's parental notification law. The statute requires a doctor to notify parents before performing an abortion on a minor, and contains an exception for cases in which the life of the teen is in peril. But it offers no exception when only her health is at risk. There is an option to bypass the parents via a judge, but that's not completely helpful in medical crises. Prior Supreme Court cases—notably Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Stenberg v. Carhart—have required such a health exception for similar statutes. The question before the court today is a lawyer's question: What to do about New Hampshire's flaw?

There's a second, technical issue in the case. Until now, when the court found that an abortion regulation imposed an "undue burden" on the mother—by requiring, for example, that she notify a spouse before obtaining an abortion—it held the statute unconstitutional "on its face." That meant the court struck down the law altogether—a broad remedy that's been rejected in most other contexts. Most of the time, a law can't be junked altogether unless a plaintiff who has been harmed by it can show that there is "no set of circumstances" in which it could be validly applied. The normal rule is known as the Salerno standard (from the 1987 case United States v. Salerno). If Salerno became the rule in abortion cases—a step the high court has refused to take thus far—then restrictions on abortion would have to be challenged after they'd gone into effect, by plaintiffs facing actual harm. It's clear today that several justices wouldn't object to such a switch. Chief Justice John Roberts, for one, plainly rejects the notion of striking down a whole statute because of a few unconstitutional applications. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor sounds almost like she agrees.

Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire attorney general, defends her state's parental notification statute. In her opening sentence, Ayotte characterizes a minor who might seek an abortion as a "child." Just so you know where her head is at.

Justice David Souter immediately challenges Ayotte on something he's found in her brief. He waits for her to find the place in the document and read along as he questions her assertion that in the unlikely event a doctor couldn't obtain parental consent and performed an abortion to protect the health of a minor, that doctor would not be subject to liability because his conduct is "constitutionally protected and independently justified." Souter asks how the doctor's conduct would be constitutionally protected. Ayotte doesn't have an answer. "Doesn't that mean there's a constitutional health exception?" asks Souter. His point: How can the doctor be constitutionally protected unless there is a constitutional right to protect? Ayotte replies that the doctor would be protected from liability under a "competing harms doctrine." Also, her office would be "prepared to issue an opinion" in such cases on the doctor's behalf. Perhaps a note like the one pinned to Paddington Bear: "Please exempt this doctor from liability."

Justice Stephen Breyer wants to talk real-life horror stories (click here to listen), like when a pregnant 15-year-old with high blood pressure walks into an emergency room at 2 a.m. on a Saturday. She's not about to die, but absent an abortion right now she will not bear more children. She refuses to tell her folks. The doctor who sees the girl "doesn't want to risk prosecution," says Breyer. "And he happens to have his lawyer with him." So, what does his lawyer advise? Ayotte cites the competing harms defense. Says Breyer: "But how do you know that's actually the law? Lots of people say this isn't a competing harm. Many say in good faith that the life of the fetus is more important than the possibility of the mother having more children."

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg adds that for a doctor whose license is on the line, the prospect of a possible "defense" is pretty cold comfort. The doctor doesn't want an opinion from the attorney general. He needs to know in advance that he's not violating the law. Justice Antonin Scalia needs to change the subject fast and he does, advising Ayotte to make her other argument—the one about why courts shouldn't find entire statutes invalid based on a few unconstitutional applications. This leads Roberts to ask, for the first of many times this morning, whether Ayotte would accept a "pre-enforcement as-applied challenge" to the statute, brought by doctors facing prosecution.

I am sure that "pre-enforcement as-applied challenge" means something. Perhaps that the doctors facing potential prosecution could come forward to challenge the statute as applied to all of them before the cops actually knock on their doors. What I can't quite figure out is how Roberts' characterization truly differs from the position of the plaintiffs here. Ginsburg makes this point better than I can (she is talking to Ayotte because she can't just ask Roberts, at least not until they get behind closed doors): "You characterize this as an 'as applied' challenge. But how is it 'as applied' if the doctor doesn't have to wait for an emergency?" Justice John Paul Stevens adds, "Do you have to wait until the doctor has an actual patient in his office?" The nice thing about finding a whole statute unconstitutional up front, as the district court and the 1^st Circuit Court of Appeals did in this case, is that doctors needn't wait for some woman to be bleeding on a gurney before finding out what they are and aren't allowed to do.

Solicitor General Paul Clement gets 10 minutes to argue on New Hampshire's side. He says the statute shouldn't be gutted based on hypothetical health emergencies—which he characterizes as "literally one case in a thousand." He and Breyer then step all over each other for a while, with Clement curiously refusing to give ground. When Scalia suggests the court should defer to the New Hampshire legislature, Souter notes that what the legislature wanted was clear: It wanted no health exception because that is seen as a big fat loophole. Souter points out that the court should hardly graft it back onto their statute.

Jennifer Dalven has half an hour to argue for Planned Parenthood, and she is in the unenviable position of defending the court's decision in Casey against attacks from the justices who signed the majority opinion in that case. When she suggests that delays in performing abortions might lead to liver and kidney damage or strokes or infertility, Justice Anthony Kennedy (one-third of the trio that saved the core of Roe v. Wade in Casey) cuts her off to ask whether the time taken by a doctor's mere "telephone call to a judge" would really lead to all these awful results. Dalven replies that "every minute is critical."

Dalven says there is no way to reach a judge in Breyer's hypothetical Saturday morning situation. Kennedy seems unmoved. He says, signaling clearly where he is going in this case, "The judicial bypass provision can go a long way toward saving the statute." Adds Scalia (click here to listen): "Assume New Hampshire sets up a special office, 24 hours a day, any time anywhere, with an 'abortion judge'." Would that solve for these health emergencies? If there's no time to put in such a call, he quips, the doctor wouldn't have time to put on his surgical gloves, either.

Dalven wonders what purpose there is in requiring a perfunctory phone call to a judge in which there is no time to ask or answer questions. "The purpose," answers Kennedy, "is saving the statute."

"Saving a statute is not worth putting a teenager's health at risk," retorts Dalven, raising questions about what hippie-dippy kum-ba-ya law school she attended. What good is a statute, the New Hampshire legislature might ask, that doesn't panic teenagers and abortion doctors every single day?

The justices keep asking Dalven to "focus" today, as though she were herself some addled teen on Ritalin. O'Connor wants to see New Hampshire's statute narrowed to include a health exception but not struck down altogether. For some reason, she thinks this is Dalven's responsibility, asking her to narrow the statute to resolve the health problem. (Click here to listen.) Dalven can't bring herself to say that the law is invalid on its face because O'Connor took that position in Casey. So Ginsburg does it for her: "Why is it not OK to say the whole statute is unconstitutional when it fails to accommodate immediate threats to the mother's health?" she asks.

O'Connor and Kennedy aren't satisfied. Dalven's best response is that the court shouldn't let states write patently unconstitutional laws, then figure out ways to rewrite them constitutionally. "You would eliminate any incentive for legislatures to write constitutional laws," she says. For years the courts have required health exceptions; why should New Hampshire be allowed to ignore that and leave it for women and doctors to go to court? Stevens asked why New Hampshire never tried to fix their law when it was invalidated in the lower courts. Sighs Dalven: "They could have just enacted a law with a health exception and we could have all gone home."

Just to be clear about what's happening today: No one is talking about reversing Roe v. Wade. But I can't count five people willing to apply the holding in Casey to these facts either. Instead most of the court is doing constitutional loop-the-loops to try to save the New Hampshire law, even though they are almost all bothered by the lack of a health exception. Mostly they try to graft a health exception back on, whether or not the New Hampshire legislators wished to have one. The larger point is that New Hampshire nipped and tucked the so-called right to an abortion when it passed this law, and most of the court thinks that is just fine.

This morning we learned that soon-to-be Justice Samuel Alito embraced this nip-tuck strategy years ago. No need to wait for Roe to be overturned. Just eat away at it, one small nibble at a time.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131263/

 

explainer
How Does a Governor Grant Clemency?
With a signed note.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at 6:08 PM ET

Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia granted clemency to a death-row inmate on Tuesday. The execution—which was supposed to take place today—would have been the thousandth since 1976, when the Supreme Court brought back the death penalty. How does a governor grant clemency?

Any way he wants. Every state has its own rules for handling clemency requests, but many leave the final act in the governor's hands. A state's constitution might have a provision like that found in Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which grants the executive a broad power to pardon criminals and commute sentences. A governor with this kind of power doesn't have to follow every one of the state's procedures—just as the president isn't bound by the "official" rules for presidential pardons. (A few states, like Georgia, let a review board make the final decision.)

In most cases, a governor will grant clemency by signing an executive order (sometimes called a "warrant of pardon" or "warrant of commutation") in response to a formal petition from an inmate. When governors intercede for multiple inmates, they often sign orders for each one. Gov. Richard Celeste of Ohio, for example, signed separate warrants for all eight inmates to whom he granted clemency in 1991. So did Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, who offered pardons and commutations to around 160 death-row inmates in early 2003. (For an Explainer on the difference between clemency, pardons, and commutations, click here.)

Death-penalty proponents (unsuccessfully) challenged Ryan's orders in court on the grounds that only 140 of the inmates had asked for clemency. Each state has its own procedure for requesting a pardon or commutation. In Virginia, an inmate must write a letter to the governor that details his crime and incarceration, his prior criminal record, and the reasons why he thinks he's a deserving candidate. A convict in Illinois has to send a typewritten petition, in the form of "a narrative or essay that is written in complete sentences." He also needs to sign his request and get it notarized, and he needs to prove that he sent a copy to the state prosecutor and sentencing judge. In other states, an inmate must fill out a clemency petition form or give someone else written permission to fill it out on his behalf.

Letters and forms often get passed on to a parole board, which screens out unrealistic applications and investigates others. The board may consult prosecutors and judges and hold a public hearing, before passing on its recommendation to the governor via his counsel—who typically adds his own advice. In general, convicts can file for clemency as many times as they want, but they have to wait a year or two between applications.

Sometimes an inmate must formally accept a pardon or commutation before it goes into effect. In Virginia, Gov. Warner announced his decision to grant clemency before he actually signed the executive order; the convicted killer had to sign it first. In some places, a governor can pardon a prisoner against his will.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Jane Bohman of the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Kevin Hall of the Virginia Governor's Office, and Daniel Kobil of Capital University Law School.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

 

 dvd extras
What Did He Say?
A Cockney gangster film becomes a DVD phenomenon.
By Matt Feeney
Posted Thursday, Dec. 8, 2005, at 6:48 AM ET

The British gangster film Layer Cake (starring Daniel Craig, the new James Bond) recently concluded a surprisingly lucrative three-month run on the DVD rental charts. Most major releases take in a little less as a DVD rental than they did in theaters. Some do a little more. Occasionally, a well-reviewed art-house film will double its theatrical box office in DVD rentals. But no recent film has so outperformed its theatrical box office as Layer Cake. No other film has even come close. The $20 million in American DVD rentals that the film earned is about nine times its theatrical box office in this country. What happened?

Layer Cake is a phenomenon that we're likely to see more of in the future, the word-of-mouth DVD hit. As such, it raises interesting questions about the future of movies in a business increasingly dominated by the home-video market—not just whether movies can perform markedly better in home video than in theaters, but what kind of movies are likely to do so. Layer Cake is a good test case in part because it's a wildly complicated and morally ambiguous film. It also has the usual problem with Cockney crime films: On first pass, the American viewer understands approximately one-third of the dialogue. Its popularity on DVD suggests that viewers are willing to abide this type of difficulty when the "pause" and "rewind" buttons are only a thumb's-length away.

Layer Cake was directed by Matthew Vaughn, who produced Guy Ritchie's first two films, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Similar to them, it's a convoluted caper movie that pits likable criminals against much-less-likable criminals. It begins with a narration by a suave and levelheaded cocaine dealer (Craig) whose character, never named, is identified in the credits as "XXXX." He lays out the "few golden rules" that help him avoid the trouble that most hoodlums get into—always work in a small team, avoid loud gangster-wannabes "in it for the glory," and avoid all contact with the street-level user. Unfortunately, just as he's planning to retire and disappear, his boss, Jimmy (Kenneth Cranham) strong-arms him into an operation in which every one of his cherished rules will be grossly violated. Not only does he end up dealing with moronic cokeheads, these cokeheads get him in trouble with a Serbian named Dragan. That's about all you can say about the plot without spoiling something important. The twists start early and keep coming.

Vaughn forgoes the technical gimmickry and manic pacing that gave Ritchie's films their novelty. With the exception of some snazzy splicing of parallel story lines and one Tarantino-esque flashback, Vaughn tells his story in a straight, one-damn-thing-after-another fashion. The effect of this, oddly, is to make the narrative convolutions seem that much more random. In the Ritchie films, things were not so much crazy as "crazy." He always let you know he was master of the chaos. Vaughn's more literal approach, by contrast, makes XXXX's sudden tumble down the rabbit hole feel like it's happening to a person rather than to a movie. (The one departure from this admirable clarity is the film's climactic double-cross, which is glib and jokey in a way that nearly undercuts everything else.)

This randomness afflicts people as much as the plot. Events force us to reassess each main character not just once, but several times. XXXX comes on as a kind of sexy supercriminal, completely in charge of his milieu. So, when things turn bad, we're supposed to learn—per supercriminal convention—that he's an ex-special forces guy with deep expertise in small arms, explosives, and nonlethal chokeholds. (He is, after all, known as XXXX. That's like Vin Diesel's XXX, but with one more X, innit?) But he's really just a good-looking guy with some nice clothes. Sometimes he gets things right, tactically speaking, but he's usually outflanked by events, and sometimes he's a bit of a doofus.

David Edelstein has commented on the Zelig-like versatility Craig has shown over his career. He shows the same uncanny changeability within the 100 minutes of Layer Cake. When XXXX is gliding through his fashionable haunts, he looks smart and rakish, but when he's been threatened or beaten up, his whole facial structure seems to collapse—it's that striking. (Maybe, when its time for him to become James Bond, he'll just morph into Sean Connery.) And XXXX's relationships with his criminal buddies swing wildly depending on how well he's faring. One minute he's the recognized alpha-bloke, the next minute his security man, Morty (George Harris), is threatening to kill him if he doesn't get his act together. (These shifting relationships highlight Layer Cake's marvelous cast—especially Colm Meaney, Jamie Foreman, and an embalmed-looking Michael Gambon.)

But the one thing that should trip up American audiences and make Layer Cake a liability in the American market is language. We Americans are extremely particular about consonants. We chew the hell out of our Rs and hack out our Ks like we're trying to dislodge a windpipe obstruction. The Cockney and semi-Cockney characters in Layer Cake pronounce most of their consonants like, well, vowels. They all sound like they've just come from the dentist. The easiest guy to understand is the Serb. (When you see one of these Cockney crime films in a theaters, audience chatter tends to consist entirely of "What'd he say?") But people watching on DVD can just rewind and listen again. Granted, half the time, listening again doesn't really help, but often it does, and just having the option makes you feel that this recondite mix of class and language—so crucial for these films' verisimilitude but so bloody confusing—is not totally beyond your control.

I don't expect we're going to see a DVD-driven resurgence of the Cockney crime thriller, or even greater popularity for difficult films. But Layer Cake does suggest something that has not been discussed much in all the talk about the rise of home video—that this new reality might have a hidden bias for certain types of movie content. It's easy to assume that this will be just another bias for garbage. But if Layer Cake's success is any indication, there's reason for small hope. Maybe, on the margins, in the shadows of the burgeoning dimwit and kiddie markets, we'll see a greater tolerance for complexity, confusion, and edifying weirdness.

Matt Feeney is a freelance writer in Oakland, Calif. He can be reached at mattfeen@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131838/

 

music box
It's All Too Much
Is there anything left to say about the Beatles?
By David Yaffe
Posted Thursday, Dec. 8, 2005, at 6:46 AM ET

Years ago, George Harrison had a one-line cameo on The Simpsons. The cartoon George pulled up in a limo, saw Homer and an ensemble called the B Sharps performing on the rooftop of Moe's, and, recalling the finale of Let It Be, quipped, "It's been done before." Now that Little, Brown has unloaded Bob Spitz's 983-page book The Beatles: The Biography, I'm tempted to say the same thing.

Eight years in the making, Spitz's book is chock-full of interviews with hangers-on, siblings, groupies, Apple employees, and any other random bloke or bird who happened to be in Liverpool or Savile Row at the right moment. In an apparently earnest quest to separate the truth from the mythology, he interviewed 650 subjects. What did he come up with? The biggest scoop he scored is a lass named Dot who divulges her tale of getting impregnated by a young and callow McCartney on the eve of Beatlemania, only to miscarry. For most of this hardbound doorstop, though, the interview subjects recycle familiar stories and facts, and Spitz, certainly diligent and professional, presents the standard line. John met Paul and met George. They fired Pete and hired Ringo. Girls screamed, acid was dropped, John said accurately that they were bigger than Jesus, they all lived in a Yellow Submarine, then Paul couldn't get along with Yoko and Ringo was eventually cast as a small conductor in Shining Time Station. We've seen that road before.

Full disclosure: As a substitute for a happy childhood, I had the Beatles. I devoured Philip Norman's Shout!, Nicholas Schaffner's The Beatles Forever, Peter Brown and Steven Gaines' The Love You Make, and so on. Mark Lewisohn's comprehensive book on Beatles recording sessions surfaced a little later, and the three-volume biography he is currently writing will dwarf Spitz's in scope and ambition. Spitz took eight years? Lewisohn says he will take 12. (John, Paul, George, and Ringo, incidentally, spent about eight years being Beatles.) It's clear, however, that Spitz thinks he's written the Definitive Study. Presenting himself as a Joycean stylist, he begins and ends the book with the word "water" and conveys an aura of being above the fray. But what's he doing up there?

Pick your favorite Beatle gossip and see Spitz weigh the evidence and bat away the competition. One of many examples: John Lennon and Brian Epstein may or may not have engaged in some rough trade on a 1963 trip to Spain. There was an entire movie, The Hours and Times, speculating about that vacation. Lennon's Liverpool chum Pete Shotton wrote an opportunistic memoir where he recalled John telling him, "I let Brian toss me off." Brown and Gaines, much to Spitz's disapproval, construct a Lennon-Epstein dialogue in their book. Spitz plays it responsibly, quoting from his predecessors before assessing, "He may have been experimenting, nothing more—or just in an extremely vulnerable state. Away from home, in a beautiful resort with a man—certainly a father figure—who was devoted to taking care of him, John was relaxed and open enough to let it happen unconditionally." Noted. Which of the 650 interview subjects sourced him on that?

While Little, Brown is making a media event out of these recycled tales, Sir Paul has just released a CD that not only holds up to repeated listenings, but actually adds a new chapter to the story Spitz is rehashing. McCartney has been the bête noire for many a rock critic, especially after he was characterized as the bad guy in the Beatles breakup and, as he put it in a meta-song lashing back at all those Rolling Stone pans, the author of so many "silly love songs."

His new album, Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard, has a few silly love songs, but they are all cast in a melancholy dye. After McCartney initially greeted the news of John Lennon's murder with "It's a bit of a drag," Lennon's ghost has hovered over many of Paul's most inspired moments. For this recording, McCartney, expressed his desire for someone with the courage to say "no" to him, just as John used to. Radiohead and Beck producer Nigel Godrich somehow summoned up the nerve to do just that.

The McCartney in the later pages of Spitz's biography is the egomaniac who wanted his in-laws to manage the Beatles and who sent George Harrison storming off in a huff after showing him how to play a guitar part. The bossy Beatle plays every instrument on Chaos and Creation, except that Linda is no longer around to give him a harmony and distract him from his breakup with John. He also gets to play the way he told George to play—even on the same Epiphone electric with which he usurped George's solo on "Taxman"—but now George isn't around to badger anymore. McCartney said that the feeling of George came over him when he was writing "Friends to Go," and Harrison's droll quips on the way to the grave (in a late song, "P2 Vatican Blues," Harrison sang of getting dressed in his "concrete tuxedo") feel like they've been channeled here, particularly when McCartney's own words fail him. As McCartney sang, melodiously but clunkily, "I've been sliding down a slippy slope," I cringed, but when he followed it up with "I've been climbing up a slowly burning rope," it could have even inspired a grin from the Quiet Beatle himself.

Godrich managed the quality control, essential for any McCartney product, and McCartney was pushed to write darker, more dissonant chords, providing the right chill just as certain lyrics threatened to become Hallmark couplets. "How Kind of You" opens with the wince-inducing line, "How kind of you to think of me, when I was out of sorts/ It really meant a lot to be in someone else's thoughts." But don't change the track yet. The key turns minor, and the alt="Play Media">musical interlude is so haunting you want to forgive Paul his schmaltz.

Unexpected chords turn up on nearly every track, just as the lyrics begin to turn soppy. " alt="Play Media">At the Mercy" modulates its way to dissonant harmonies, beginning with a traffic jam and ending with an apocalyptic image of watching "the universe explode." On " alt="Play Media">Riding to Vanity Fair," McCartney can be heard having a bitchy argument with someone who needs to be told "the definition of friendship" from a knight worth $1.5 billion. He says the song wasn't directed to anyone specific, but who else could get his goat like John? Godrich hurt Sir Paul's feelings when he initially told him the song was "crap," but Sir Paul slowed down the tempo and let the vitriol burn. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do/ I'll try to take my mind off you/ And now that you don't need my help/ I'll take the time to think about myself." McCartney, his voice more or less intact, can whine in his upper register, but he can also dig into the deeper notes with an ennui that could only come with age.

These are emotions that couldn't have ever come from the wunderkind who saw the Beatles disintegrate when he was all of 27. McCartney is communing with the dead on Chaos and Creation, but unlike Spitz's book, he actually has something new to say. On " alt="Play Media">This Never Happened Before," a song whose opening piano chords might owe a few quid to "You Never Give Me Your Money," McCartney is singing the song's title to Heather Mills, but really, hasn't he already written scads of silly love songs for Jane Asher, Linda, even his sheep dog Martha? What has really never happened before is that McCartney, in mourning for his fellow Beatles, is finally able to channel the dead in a new way, admitting that Lennon was his "soul mate." This is part of getting older—a year away from "When I'm 64"—and maybe it's not too late to do something new. For a man who at the age of 23 wrote his most lucrative hook with "I believe in yesterday," McCartney at 63 assures us that it really hasn't been done before after all.

David Yaffe is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University and the author of the forthcoming Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131584/

 

press box
Lip-Service Journalism
If protecting sources is paramount, why don't more reporters go to jail?
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2005, at 9:53 PM ET

The Washington press corps—yours truly included—shook their defiant keyboards at special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as he served us a buffet of subpoenas in the Valerie Plame investigation. But the truth is, he broke us. Fitzgerald cut early deals with some; beat back Supreme Court appeals by the two reporters who defied him, Matthew Cooper and Judith Miller; and, finally, made 11^th- and 12^th-hour arrangements with Cooper and Miller after their confidential sources freed them to testify. Even Bob Woodward got a waiver from his source.

Now, I'm not about to cast aspersions upon those who swung early—or late—deals with the prosecutor to avoid jail. But the compromises reporters and publications made in the Plame investigation—and the lack of criticism directed at them by their peers—indicate that in 2005, very few Washington journalists really believe that protecting sources is a paramount and holy duty.

How did we get to this hypocritical juncture where journalistic bluster doesn't match performance? Stephen Bates provides an essential history lesson in his April 2000 monograph, "The Reporter's Privilege, Then and Now."

American reporters have been going to jail to protect their sources since at least 1848, he writes, when Congress jailed John Nugent of the New York Herald for contempt because he wouldn't say who gave him a copy of the draft of a secret treaty with Mexico. The subpoenas journalists faced between 1848 and about 1960 were considered a "sporadic annoyance," as Bates writes, rather than a menace to the press. This came, in part, from the fact that many reporters were largely sympathetic to government interests. Some resisted government demands, but others willingly "provided information to police, prosecutors, and grand juries, often informally and without a subpoena."

Bates quotes former Los Angeles Times media reporter David Shaw, who believed that police reporters were already "half cop," and that "their interests and instincts lay with the police." This overlap wasn't limited to reporters on the police beat. Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, at least 22 American news organizations provided cover for CIA operatives overseas, according to John M. Crewdson and Joseph Treaster's landmark December 1977 New York Times series. The organizations included ABC News, CBS News, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press.

Changing times and professionalization seasoned the relationship between press and state with much-needed antagonism. The college graduates arriving in newsrooms were more skeptical about authority, and more willing to challenge it. The revolutionary political movements of the 1960s, the riots and the demonstrations, were easier for reporters to penetrate in many cases than police, Bates reports. Prosecutors, lusting for the evidence contained in tape-recorded interviews, newsreel footage, and notebooks, hoped to harvest material with subpoenas, but many new-breed reporters resisted.

"In the first 20 months of the Nixon administration, CBS and NBC were served with more than 120 subpoenas, nearly half of them issued by attorneys for the government," Bates writes. Reporters viewed the storm of subpoenas as part of a conscious Nixon administration plot to neuter the fourth estate. Alarms rang at the Columbia Journalism Review, which alerted its readers in the early 1970s that a "subpoena epidemic" threatened to turn the press into a "de facto arm of the Attorney General's office."

In 1970, the Department of Justice responded to critics by establishing guidelines (updated here) that made it difficult but by no means impossible for federal prosecutors to subpoena reporters. The ultimate decision whether to subpoena or not rests in the hands of the attorney general, making the guidelines only as good as the AG who oversaw them.

The legal issue of whether reporters enjoyed a legal privilege to bat subpoenas down was settled by the Supreme Court's 1972 decision in Branzburg v. Hayes, which ruled against such a privilege. But, as Bates writes, lower courts found wiggle room in the "ambiguities" presented by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.'s "unorthodox concurring opinion." The press exploited this, and the Supreme Court ignored the mess it had made, neglecting to correct lower courts that invoked Powell to find "qualified privilege" for journalists who wanted to quash subpoenas. Since Branzburg, no Supreme Court has revisited the issue at all; the court declined to hear Cooper and Miller's appeals.

Since Branzburg, a press-state stalemate has ensued. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press counted only 17 journalists who landed in jail for refusing to testify between 1984 and 1998, Bates writes, but none of the reporters spent more than a month. Nine spent less than a day. The greatest deterrent against reporter subpoenas was, as Bates quotes former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh as saying, that most prosecutors "don't want to get the media mad. …"

This "détente," as my friend David Corn of The Nation describes it, collapses whenever a special prosecutor like Fitzgerald is appointed to a politically charged case. He gets attorney general-like powers to determine whether reporter subpoenas are warranted, and this puts him in a tight spot. In the Plame example, if Fitzgerald fails to subpoena journalists to build his case, he looks like he's thrown the Bush White House a political favor. If he subpoenas journalists and tosses the rebellious ones in jail, he looks like Torquemada.

Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr subpoenaed five or six national news organizations for outtakes or notes during his pursuit of President Bill Clinton, First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams told the American Journalism Review in 1998. He adds that the subpoenas were never made public. The implication here is that the organizations surrendered to Starr in secret rather than fight and lose face in public. It also bolsters the argument that the Washington press corps thinks that protecting confidential sources is essential to doing its job—except when jail time is a possible consequence of doing that job.

My point isn't that we Washington journalists are spineless aquatic creatures who will surrender our sources whenever threatened with jail. But even the 85-day prisoner-of-conscience performance Judith Miller turned in at the Alexandria Detention Center showed only half the pluck of one Vanessa Leggett, the Texas freelance writer who spent 168 days in jail for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury for testimony. (How many celebrities visited her?) Leggett won release only because the grand jury expired: Should a new grand jury serve her with another subpoena, she could earn a return trip to jail and maybe even face years on criminal contempt charges. From the sounds of it, she's ready to go to jail again if pressed.

Likewise, academic Rik Scarce spent more than five months in jail rather than answer prosecutor queries about his Ph.D. research on a radical environmental group. Compared with the courage of these two outlanders, we in the D.C. press corps pay only lip service to the supposed sanctity of the reporter's right to protect his sources.

******

If this doesn't get me excommunicated from the Washington press corps, what will? Send your heretical suggestions to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131829/

the big idea
Beyond Spin
The propaganda presidency of George W. Bush.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2005, at 7:13 PM ET

A frequent complaint about the Clinton administration was that it tried too hard to "spin" everything in its own favor. Clinton's spin doctors had a variety of individual styles but shared a grating habit of relentlessly coloring the news to support their side in any argument. George Stephanopoulos, with whom the technique was closely identified, once defined spin as "a hope dressed up as an observation." In practice, Clinton-era spinning meant that officials seldom conceded the obvious or acknowledged losing, failing, or being wrong about anything.

George W. Bush arrived in Washington avowing an end to all that. He promised he would never parse, shade, or play nice with the truth the way that Clinton had. But if Bush has shunned spinning, it has been in favor of something far more insidious. If the Clintonites were inveterate spinners, the Bushies have proved themselves to be thoroughgoing propagandists.

Though propaganda and spin exist on a continuum, they are different in essence. To spin is to offer a contention, usually specious, in response to a critical argument or a negative news story. It does not necessarily involve lying or misleading anyone about factual matters. Habitual spin is irksome, especially to the journalists upon whom it is practiced, but it does not threaten democracy. Propaganda is far more malignant. A calculated and systematic effort to manage public opinion, it transcends mere lying and routine political dishonesty. When the Bush administration manufactures fake "news," suppresses real news, disguises the former as the latter, and challenges the legitimacy of the independent press, it corrodes trust in leaders, institutions, and, to the rest of the world, the United States as a whole.

Propaganda is the only word for the Pentagon's recently exposed secret efforts to plant positive stories in the Iraqi press. There is, to be sure, precedent for the U.S. funding democratically-minded foreign journalists, both clandestinely through the CIA and openly through agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID. Covert funding is both ethically indefensible and, in most cases, practically counterproductive. In the Cold War context, however, such efforts were often aboveboard and directed toward supporting courageous independent media and opposition voices in repressive countries.

In the Iraq cash-for-flacks scheme, on the other hand, the Pentagon did something simply stupid and wrong by hiring a propaganda-making firm called the Lincoln Group to cultivate an impression of grass-roots support for the American occupation. In this greenhouse, the gardeners did not just water and fertilize the seedlings; they handed out plastic flowers and hoped no one would notice they weren't real. American operatives paid Iraqi journalistic mercenaries to publish a farrago of puffery and outright misrepresentation. Here's my favorite quote from the Nov. 30 Los Angeles Times piece that exposed this operation: "Zaki [an Iraqi newspaper editor] said that if his cash-strapped paper had known that these stories were from the U.S. government, he would have 'charged much, much more' to publish them."

As with the torture and rendition scandals, Bush administration officials are sorry about this only because they got caught doing it. Look at Donald Rumsfeld's Dec. 5 response: The only blame he assigns is to the international news media, which has "pounded" the revelations. With one wave of the hand, Rummy excuses the government's ham-fisted propaganda effort and expresses his dripping contempt for genuine journalists, who in his mind are eternally spreading negativity, undermining support for the war on terror, and compromising military security. Like his colleagues in Bush's war council, Rummy indicates with every gesture that he simply does not accept the legitimate role of a free press.

According to a recent report in the British press, Bush last year proposed bombing Al Jazeera's headquarters to Tony Blair. This may or may not have been a joke, but given our military's record of accidental assaults on journalists in Iraq, it's not impossible to imagine that the president thinks smart-bombing would be a good way to respond to hostile coverage. At home, it's more a matter of freezing out and anathematizing organs, such as the New York Times, that are deemed unfriendly, while promulgating his own, dubious version of reality. The familiar litany of the administration's domestic disinformation efforts includes the Department of Education paying Armstrong Williams to defend the No Child Left Behind Act, HHS hiring Maggie Gallagher to promote its "marriage initiative," and both agencies sending local TV stations prepackaged pseudo-news videos advocating administration policies. Any of these incidents might be excused as an episode of poor judgment by an underling. In combination and accompanied by various presidential comments about not reading the newspaper, preferring to get his news from aides, and so on, they suggest a propaganda ethic.

For the Bush team, rolling-your-own news has the further advantage of supporting the revolving-door conservative welfare state that has flourished in five years of expanding, undivided government. The administration's need to outsource its propaganda work—for reasons of deniability, not efficiency—has promoted the emergence of a new kind of PR-industrial complex in the nation's capital. Outfits like the Ketchum's Washington Group, the shadowy Lincoln Group, and the even more flourishing, even more shadowy Rendon Group are the parasitic fruit not just of unchecked self-puffery but of a lucrative new patronage network.

In a way, what's most troubling about the Bush's administration's information war is not its cynicism but its naiveté. At phony town hall meetings, Bush's audiences are hand-picked to prevent any possibility of spontaneous challenge. At fake forums, invited guests ask the president to pursue his previously announced policies. New initiatives are unveiled on platforms festooned with meaningless slogans, mindlessly repeated ("Plan for Victory"). Anyone on the inside who doubts the party line is shown the door. In this environment, where the truth is not spoken privately or publicly, the suspicion grows that Bush, in his righteous cocoon, has committed the final, fatal sin of the propagandist. He is not just spreading BS but has come to believe it himself.

Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131768/

 

 

 jurisprudence
Tortured Rationale
Does Congress really want to fight the war on terror with false confessions?
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2005, at 6:52 PM ET

On Nov. 22, the Bush administration announced that it would not charge Jose Padilla in a plot to plant a radioactive bomb in an American city. Never mind that he'd been paraded about as a major terrorist and held for three and a half years as an enemy combatant in a military brig—in the end, Padilla was indicted on lesser charges that have nothing to do with a dirty bomb. According to a Nov. 24 New York Times article, the administration changed course because it "was unwilling to allow testimony from two senior members of Al Qaeda who had been subjected to harsh questioning."

Those al-Qaida members are Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, who are being held in secret prisons by the CIA. A 2004 review by the CIA's inspector general found that Mohammed has been subjected to near-drowning while in custody (the term of art is "waterboarding"). He and Zubaydah "could almost certainly not be used as witnesses, because that could expose classified information and could open up charges from defense lawyers that their earlier statements were a result of torture," unnamed government officials told the Times.

Funny how that works. Because on Nov. 8, the government charged someone else in the dirty-bomb plot. What's the difference between the new bad guy, Binyam Mohammed, and Jose Padilla? Padilla is an American citizen who was picked up stateside, and the Bush administration had decided not to push its luck by insisting on trying him before a special military commission that can dispense with basic constitutional due process. Binyam Mohammed, on the other hand, is a Yemen native and a British resident being held in Guantanamo Bay. So, the administration plans to try him before a military commission. And while evidence obtained through torture doesn't fly in federal court (or at a regular military court-martial), a military commission may choose to hear it. And apparently will so choose: The dirty-bomb case against Binyam Mohammed relies heavily on tainted evidence. As the Times reported, without the questionable statements of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Zubaydah, "it would be nearly impossible for the United States to prove the charges" relating to the dirty bomb.

All of this is bad news for Binyam Mohammed, of course, who says (through his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith) that he falsely confessed to participating in the dirty-bomb plot after being repeatedly beaten and cut on the genitals while in American custody for 18 months in Morocco. But what's worse is that the bipartisan bill pending before Congress concerning the rights of the Guantanamo detainees—the Graham-Levin-Kyl Amendment—makes it harder rather than easier to block the use of tainted evidence by a military commission. As currently written, the bill would allow a detainee to be convicted and sentenced to death by a commission without recourse to federal court to challenge either the conviction or the sentence. If that sounds medieval, that's because it is. Self-respecting courts don't admit torture testimony because it's untrustworthy. Whether they're waterboarded, beaten, or pulled apart on a rack, suspects who have been tortured don't speak the truth. They speak the words their tormentors want to hear.

The Graham-Levin-Kyl Amendment promises that a combatant status review tribunal or administrative review noard "may not consider statements derived from persons that … were obtained with undue coercion." So far, so good. But the CSRTs and the review boards aren't the military commissions. They're for determining whether continued detention of an "enemy combatant," as designated by the Bush administration, is proper—not for deciding whether the detainee is guilty for a war crime and should be punished for it. The military commissions are nowhere to be found in the part of the bill that bars the admission of coerced testimony.

Elsewhere, the amendment provides that the D.C. Circuit (one of the federal courts of appeal) can review the decisions of a military commission. But the court's scope of review is limited. The D.C. Circuit can decide whether the final decision of a commission is "consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States." That language sounds promising. Tortured testimony, after all, is clearly unconstitutional. Except that according to the D.C. Circuit—unlike other federal appeals courts—the constitution doesn't apply to non-Americans like the Guantanamo detainees. If you're an alien who has no "voluntary connection" to the United States—in other words, if you came here because you were snatched, as opposed to extradited—then you don't get the constitutional protections of due process in the D.C. Circuit. You get nothing.

What about the rules governing the military commissions themselves? According to the latest set of regulations put out by the Department of Defense, the commissions are supposed to provide for "a full and fair trial." That sounds promising, too. But the regulations also include a huge loophole. They state that they do "not create any right, benefit, or privilege, substantive or procedural, enforceable by any party, against the United States." And also that nothing in them "shall be construed to be a requirement of the United States Constitution." In other words, the rules mean what the Pentagon, not the Constitution, says they mean. Also, they can change at any time. Reassuring, no?

In theory, if Graham-Levin-Kyl becomes law the Supreme Court could still come through for a detainee convicted by a military commission. It could reject the D.C. Circuit's stingy approach to the constitutional rights of snatched aliens, for one thing. And it could decide that the military commissions are unconstitutional on other grounds. But under the terms of Graham-Levin-Kyl, a detainee has to get a final order from a military commission, then a ruling from a military appellate board, then a review by the president, and then a decision from the D.C. Circuit before his case can reach the Supreme Court. There are no timetables or deadlines for the military process or for presidential review. So Binyam Mohammed or any other unlucky soul could rot in Guantanamo for many more years before the justices weigh in on his fate.

Graham-Levin-Kyl is supposed to be the compromise that both Democrats and Republicans can embrace. Admittedly, it's better than the original version of the bill, which Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., sponsored on his own and which the Senate passed with little debate. But the compromise that Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., are co-sponsoring is a hastily conceived and deficient response. Yesterday, Sen. Graham argued in the Washington Post that in combination with the bill Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has proposed to prohibit the torture of foreign detainees, the Graham-Kyl-Levin amendment strikes "a balance between protecting our nation's interests and ensuring that we adhere to the values for which we are fighting." It's hard to see how a death sentence that's based on torture testimony adheres to American values.

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131782/

moneybox
Buy What You Hate
Which is the better stock: the company with a good reputation or the one with a bad one?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2005, at 6:48 PM ET

In corporate America, a good name can be golden. CEOs and advertising executives love to speak of the company's image as an asset every bit as valuable as its factories and distribution systems. But does a company's reputation actually help investors? Perhaps, but not in the way you think.

Harris Interactive and the Reputation Institute just released their annual reputation poll results. The two groups ask 7,000 people to name two companies with the best reputation and two companies with the worst. They then compile a roster of 60 companies and ask another group of people to evaluate the individual companies on attributes such as the quality of their products and services, financial performance, and social responsibility. The result is a Reputation Quotient (RQ).

You'd think that, generally speaking, it's better to invest in a company that has a great reputation than in a company that finishes last in reputation surveys. But—at least in the relatively short-term—the market tends to agree with noted securities analyst Joan Jett, who famously proclaimed, "I don't give a damn 'bout my bad reputation." After all, many of the goody-goody companies that top the reputation survey have been stock market laggards in recent years, while many of the delinquents have outperformed.

Charles Fombrun, the founder of the Reputation Institute, notes that his surveys have uncovered anti-capitalist feelings in a large chunk of the population: "When we do detailed analysis of public perception, we find that a significant portion of the ranking is negatively affected when companies do too well." Companies that appear to profit at the expense of others do especially poorly. That might explain why Exxon Mobil, which in October reported the best quarter—ever—checks in at 53^rd of 60. And why it is joined near the bottom by Royal Dutch/Shell (54), Halliburton (57), and Chevron Texaco (47).

There's another factor that weighs against Exxon Mobil. While stock investors are focused intently on the future, reputation rankers seem to be focused on the past. The 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster still casts a pall over Exxon Mobil's public image. The three companies at the bottom of this year's list—MCI, Enron, and Adelphia—don't even really exist as independent entities anymore, but they are still hated. Being associated with criminal activity or a scandal is enough to keep a company's reputation low, even if it primarily involved a company executive—and not the company's operations. As evidence, check out the low rankings of Tyco (55) and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (52).

Also, Fombrun notes, some companies just have a difficult time building positive images because of the nature of their business. "Airlines can't do very much to make the world like them, except Southwest," said Fombrun. "And the banks always have a hard time getting up there. They tend to be associated with gouging or taking advantage of the consumer."

This state of affairs—a frustration for a CEO and a disaster for public relations officials—creates opportunity for investors. For the best-loved companies don't always make good investments. Look at the companies topping the reputation chart. The top 10 are Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Google, UPS, 3M, Sony, Microsoft, General Mills, FedEx, and Intel. Of those, only Google, Federal Express, and Intel have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past three years. In the past year, only Google, Intel, and Johnson & Johnson have outperformed the S&P 500. Now look at the bottom of the reputation list. Of the six publicly traded companies in the last 11—Altria, Martha Stewart, Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, Tyco, and Halliburton—five have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past three years, and four have outperformed the index over the past year.

In the past, Fombrun and his colleagues have looked at the stock performance of the companies in the year following the rating. And he concludes that the companies with the best reputation tend to behave like growth stocks: "If the stock market was growing, those with high reputations tended to do better than companies with lower reputations." But if the broader market was falling, the high-reputation stocks fell harder and faster.

Intuitively, it makes sense that highly respected companies are overvalued in hot markets. Value investors school themselves to look for stocks that are hated by the market and to avoid stocks that are loved too much by the market. When everybody owns a stock and all the analysts rate it a buy, a stock's value tends to rise—and there's frequently nowhere for it to go but down. Conversely, when analysts rate a stock as sell and many fewer people own it, the stock may be on the verge of failure—or it may be on the brink of a turnaround. And therein lies the opportunity. Sears Holdings, which owns the much-hated brands Sears and Kmart, has long suffered from a poor reputation. Shoppers and investors alike avoided both chains. But the widespread shunning of the company allowed hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert to gain control of Sears and Kmart on the cheap and to engineer a surprising turnaround. The stock has soared in recent months and has performed better than that of the better-regarded retailers on the list such as Costco (18), Target (25), and Wal-Mart (29).

The lesson in these choppy days may be: Find a company you really hate, and buy.

Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131777/

 

war stories
Bush's Rosy Spin on Iraq's Economy
And the pesky facts that undercut it.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2005, at 6:33 PM ET

As President George W. Bush gave the second of four speeches on his "strategy for victory in Iraq" this morning, the delicacy of his underlying strategy—for political victory at home—became clear. On the one hand, he has to convince an increasingly wary nation that we are making real progress in Iraq. On the other hand, he has to concede we haven't made that much progress. The upshot of the two lines, taken together, is that we can't get out of Iraq now—just as the light's beginning (but only beginning) to shine at the end of the tunnel.

It's a clever tack: If critics take up the debate on Bush's terms and argue that he's exaggerating the progress (as he is), the White House could say this only proves we must stay longer, to advance the progress further. The president also acknowledged mistakes (though he never mentioned the M word, talking instead of "fits and starts" and "adjustments of approach"). The implication was that we shouldn't extrapolate from past trends; there's a new strategy in place, and we should wipe the scorecard clean in appraising its success.

Yet the president's speech this morning—delivered not before the usual applauding crowd of American cadets, midshipmen, or officers, but to the staid pinstripers of Washington's Council on Foreign Relations—only reinforces the common suspicion that things aren't going so well in Iraq, that on a basic level something's wrong with the entire enterprise.

Bush's theme this time out was how we're improving Iraq's economy (last week, at the U.S. Naval Academy, it was how we're training Iraq's armed forces). He recited good-news statistics ($21 million in loans to 30,000 new small businesses, 3,000 renovated schools, some new sewage lines and power substations). None of these figures are to be sniffed at; some are genuinely impressive; but they pale before the larger trends, none of which bode well.

Take the most recent edition of the U.S. State Department's "Iraq Weekly Status Report," dated Nov. 30. This long-invaluable, continuously updated document is no longer an entirely apolitical compendium of facts and figures. For example, its contents are now organized along the "eight pillars" of the president's strategy for victory. Still, facts are stubborn things (as another president once tried to say), and the rah-rah tone can't disguise them.

Most critically, Iraq's electrical power grid appears as dim as ever, or dimmer. Average daily supply—about 80,000 megawatts—falls 55,000 megawatts short of daily demand. It's 30,000 megawatts below the target that planners tried to hit last summer. And it's 15,000 megawatts below the average pre-war level. (A new power plant turbine in Kirkuk, which is about to fire up, will add just 260 megawatts to this total, according to the report. Two new substations, which Bush heralded in his speech, will service a mere 2,500—out of roughly 1 million—homes in Baghdad.)

Baghdad, a capital city of roughly 6 million people, has only 6.1 hours of electrical power a day; nationwide, the average is 11.9 hours a day. The situation is, if anything, worsening; in the previous week's report, the respective figures were 8.7 and 12.6 hours.

Crude oil output—which Paul Wolfowitz once told us would pay for the war within months of Saddam's toppling—is stagnant, at 2 million barrels a day, well below the official goal of 2.5 million.

In today's speech, President Bush pointed to Najaf and Mosul as model cities—sites of intense, chaotic violence not long ago, now bastions of relative calm with Iraqi security forces in charge. Progress has been remarkable in both places, but it's not at all clear that they reflect Bush's picture of an ideal future. Many, if not most, security forces in Najaf are avowed members of Muqtada Sadr's militia. In recent days, the city saw former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's campaign office attacked by rocket-propelled grenades, the province's ex-governor kidnapped, and the provincial council threaten to break ties with Americans after reports that a U.S. soldier stabbed a young man during a house raid.

President Bush said the progress in Najaf and Mosul "is being replicated across much of Iraq." Yet examples are hard to come by. (He didn't cite any.) He said that Iraqi people are beginning to see the fruits of freedom and democracy and that each new glimmer of this connection deals a blow to the Saddamists and terrorists who seek only destruction. And yet the attacks continue to soar, as do the resulting casualties. As Bush prepared his speech, gunmen raided a prison and killed three policemen while freeing a man who'd been arrested for plotting to kill a judge. Two suicide bombers killed 43 people inside Baghdad's police academy. Two Americans were killed in a rocket and mortar attack on the U.S. military base in Mosul—yes, even Mosul.

Again, Bush might argue, in the face of all this, that the strategy needs more time; improvements will build on improvements, successes will generate popular support, which will yield more successes. Missing from this assurance, though, is any recognition of the dynamics set in motion by America's occupation—that the large-scale presence of U.S. troops bolsters security and stability, but it also foments resentment and hatred and swells the ranks of the insurgency, which wreaks further fear and chaos. Simply keeping the troops there longer won't necessarily improve the situation. The president still hasn't painted a complete picture; he still hasn't spelled out a strategy.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131769/

surfergirl
After Birth
Heidi Klum's postpartum strut at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2005, at 6:21 PM ET

As any discriminating consumer of undies knows, Victoria's real secret is that her lingerie sucks. It's itchy, bunchy, and cheaply constructed, deliberately designed to obsolesce after one season so you (or more likely, your boyfriend) have to buy another drawerful next year. But the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show (CBS, Tuesday) had very little to do with showcasing this year's innovations in panty-related design. Rather, it was a chance to ogle some blue-chip T & A, not to mention a good once-a-year opportunity to glimpse the national libido in its rawest, most barbaric form.

But for this viewer, currently 10 weeks away from delivering her first child, the perverse highlight of last night's show was watching the supermodel Heidi Klum parade down the catwalk half-naked, showing off the body that, through some combination of starvation, genetic luck and Alberto-Gonzales-approved methods of torture, she hammered into runway-ready condition only eight weeks after giving birth to her son, Henry Guenther Ademola Dashtu Samuel. The speed with which women can "get their bodies back" after delivery has become one of the many arenas of gladiatorial competition among new mothers, but Klum took the cult of postpartum fitness to new heights with last night's appearance; she wasn't just rocking a carefully cut Oscar gown on the red carpet, she was rocking an electrified thong. On the runway.

In an interview with USA Today, Klum explains that whipping herself into Bundchen-grade shape for the fashion show was nothing, really: She "naturally" lost a pound a day for the first five weeks after the birth, turning to her trainer for a whirlwind exercise campaign only during the last three weeks before filming the show. The obvious question, of course, is why? Klum is one working mother who can afford an extended maternity leave, and even if she wanted to host the event (perhaps to promote the new season of her reality series, Project Runway, which premieres tonight on Bravo at 10 p.m. ET), she could have chosen not to strip down to her be-sequined skivvies. The only explanation I can imagine for the brutal speed of Klum's slim-down is that she wanted to show the world she could do it. She wanted to raise the bar for expectant supermodels, snipping the umbilical cord with one hand while pumping her delts with the other.

The fact of her recent parturition was never alluded to, not even by Klum herself in the series of backstage vignettes that framed the runway show. I'd been expecting a sentimental background segment in which young Henry was paraded before the cameras by Klum and her husband, the British singer Seal. That's a surefire crowd-pleaser, right? A cute newborn baby? (Er … perhaps we should shorten that to just: a newborn baby.) But there was nary a mention of the squalling 3-month-old result of Klum's world-class sex appeal. Seal did appear from within a giant mirrored disco ball to sing "Crazy" while Heidi strolled by onstage, her chest and groin aglow in a bikini trimmed with light bulbs. Seal testified to the cameras that, in his eyes, his wife's reproductive organs really are perpetually luminous: "Whenever I get to see her, on the runway or in our apartment, it makes my heart flutter." He must have to be hooked up to a defibrillator when he watches her change diapers.

It's as if the female body were divided into two completely separate, compartmentalized functions: being sexy (or rather, providing the ready-made answer to the Victoria's Secret marketing slogan, "What is sexy?") and propagating the human species. Any cause-effect relationship between these functions was neatly severed on last night's show. Presumably, glimpsing Klum with her son even for a moment would have killed the audience's lightly pornographic buzz more quickly than watching her scrub Seal's toilet.

Last night's VS fashion show also marked Tyra Banks' retirement from the runway, as she kicks off her new talk show. "One thing I really admire about Victoria's Secret," Banks told the camera, "is that they've never told me to lose weight, ever." That's VS all over—so accepting of different body types, even poor, pudgy Tyra's. A fellow model, Karolina Kurkova, had some advice for the retiring Banks: "Take your time, have fun, have some kids, don't go to the gym." Yeah, that's right, Tyra. If and when you do decide to gift the world with your genetic legacy, give yourself eight whole weeks off before you offer yourself up to the world's scrutiny in your underwear.

Dana Stevens is Slate's television critic. Write her at surfergirl@thehighsign.net.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131781/

 

politics
Marathon of Mirth
Had enough Christmas parties yet? Bush has to host 26 of them.
By John Dickerson
Updated Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005, at 7:57 PM ET

No matter how much you may enjoy your office holiday party, there's always someone you'd like to avoid running into at the punch bowl: Bob from the seventh floor who won't shut up about his Big Bertha Fusion golf club, or Felicia in accounting who wants to know where your expense reports are.

Imagine hosting a party for only the people you've always wanted to avoid. The president and the first lady will hold two such events next Thursday as they welcome the press corps into their home. They are less the hosts of these parties than their victims. The first couple will not sip at eggnog or nibble on tiny lamb chops in the state dining room. They will stand in one spot in the Blue Room, next to a Christmas tree, as hundreds of correspondents, sound people, and photographers line up to have individual photographs taken with the first couple.

During the holidays, the president is a virtual prisoner in the White House. He and his wife will perform this grueling act of cheer at 26 holiday parties between Dec. 4 and Dec. 20. There's one for the diplomatic corps, members of Congress, the Secret Service, and top military brass. Invites also go out to political donors and allies across the country. The last evening is reserved for the White House staff—the plumbers, electricians, cooks, and butlers who hang the president's towels when he leaves them on the bed and polish his floor. For most of that period, the Bushes will have "two-a-days," hosting one party from 4 to 6 p.m. and a second from 7 to 9.

This year's theme (because Jackie Kennedy insisted there must be one) sounds secular—"All Things Bright and Beautiful"—but it comes from a religious hymn. The Bush White House isn't hiding the baby Jesus. There He is among the wise men and barnyard creatures in the 18^th-century Italian crèche. Mrs. Bush calls the 18-and-a-half-foot Fraser fir from Laurel Springs, N.C., a Christmas, not a "holiday," tree.

It takes three days to fill the public rooms with decorations. The White House florist directs a team of volunteers to drape the fireplaces with boxwood garlands, stand topiaries of lemon leaves and tangerines in the state dining room, and arrange dozens of paperwhite narcissus, amaryllis, and wreaths of pears. Few tabletops are left alone. On one sits a gingerbread White House, a tradition started by Richard Nixon, and on another squat topiaries of the White House pets, a tradition that one hopes will begin and end with Bush. The press release promoting the decor reads like Southern Living: "The color schemes of tangerine, lime green and hot pink boldly accent the traditional touches of the holiday decorations."

The 9,500 guests will consume roughly the same menu of ham, turkey, lamb, cheeses, and gnocchi from an enormous candlelit table in the State Dining Room. The first lady's office reports that when the last guest collects his coat, 30,000 Christmas cookies, 10,000 petit fours, 1,100 truffles, and 2,100 pounds of sweet potatoes will have disappeared. At the Hanukkah party tonight for Jewish religious and community leaders and Jewish members of the staff, there were also the traditional latkes, or potato pancakes, and a kosher buffet. The spiked eggnog is the only thing available for anyone who needs a bracer before standing in line.

The parties run with the precision and efficiency of a military parade, while making an effort to have you feel like you're the only guest invited for the night. Smiling, uniformed military personnel appear at every turn, directing you to the coat check or staircase or bend in the hallway. They're glowing and you almost forget that they'd pin you like a bug if you tried to scramble upstairs to the residence.

White House staffers moan about having to attend so many of these events every year, but both Republicans and Democrats start to sound like children when they look back on the party season. Bruce Reed, who served as Bill Clinton's domestic policy adviser before rising to become a blogger on Slate, describes it this way: "With the giant, over-decorated tree in the Blue Room, the pastry chef's marzipan model of the White House in the dining room, the boughs and lights twinkling in the East Room, and a Marine band playing Christmas songs on the grand piano in the foyer, visiting the White House is as magical as climbing aboard the Polar Express."

Reagan's speechwriter Peggy Noonan describes her first impression with the same misty nostalgia: "I was new at the White House. I walked over from the EOB, entered the White House and thought it was like walking into Santa's playhouse—trees, garlands, sparkling stars. Everything shined and there were red velvet bows. It was a wonderland. It had everything but elves and then I saw the NSC staff in their little beards."

Click here to find out who gets invited—and who doesn't.

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.

 

explainer
How To Replace Tom DeLay
A guide to congressional leadership elections.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005, at 6:42 PM ET

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay may face a criminal trial within the next few months, after only one of the three charges against him was dismissed on Monday. Some House Republicans now say they'd like to vote on a new, permanent majority leader in January. How do you get elected party leader?

By secret ballot. Party organizations in the House and Senate typically elect their leaders every two years, not long after the public votes in the new Congress. Four sets of leaders must be chosen since each party has a leadership structure in each chamber. (The groups are the Senate Republican Conference, the House Republican Conference, the Senate Democratic Conference, and the House Democratic Caucus.) Though each organization has its own election rules, the procedures are fairly standard. For each elected position, one or more members are nominated and seconded in a closed-door meeting. Short speeches are made on their behalf, and then all the members vote in secret. A majority of votes determines the winner, with the lowest vote-getter being taken off the ballot if no one gets more than half.

House Republicans elect members for several positions, including majority leader, whip, chair, vice chair, and secretary. (They also nominate a speaker, who then gets elected by majority vote in the full House.) In order to vote, members—i.e., every House Republican—must attend a conference meeting, which usually takes place at the Capitol. The chair can convene a meeting with the consultation of the speaker, or a group of 50 members can call for one by written request. No one is allowed at the meeting except the congressmen themselves and maybe a few members of the leadership staff.

Nominees for leadership positions don't get to make a speech before the vote. (Under House Republican Conference rules, nominators get three minutes to speak on behalf of their candidate, while seconders have only a minute.) As a result, candidates for leadership positions must conduct their campaigns for office before the meeting is held.

House leadership campaigns tend to be larger in scale than those of the Senate. A candidate for House majority leader might organize an informal election committee of his most trusted supporters, who would in turn make phone calls and hold meetings to gather up the necessary votes. Staff members and a few lobbyists might be involved in the process. A Senate candidate would be more likely to work the phones himself, since he'd need to wrangle votes from only a few dozen lawmakers.

Why would you want to be House majority leader? First, you'd have more power and responsibilities than other lawmakers. Winning would also put you in an excellent position to run for speaker of the House somewhere down the line. As majority leader, you'd get a special office and an extra-large staff. Finally, you'd get a pay raise—in 2005, majority leaders earned $180,100, as opposed to the $162,100 paid to the rest of the herd.

Bonus Explainer: We didn't always have official majority leaders. Though each party had de facto leaders in the 19^th century, the formal title wasn't bestowed on anyone in the House until 1899. The Senate followed suit in the years following the 1912 elections. The authority of the party leaders grew over the next few decades and in the period following World War II.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Barbara Sinclair of UCLA and Steven S. Smith of George Washington University.

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131649/

supreme court dispatches
Law Schools Against Free Speech
The Supreme Court considers military recruitment on campus.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005, at 6:07 PM ET

Anyone who has attended law school will attest to the lunacy of interview season, wherein law students trade in jeans and sweatshirts for rumpled navy suits and heroically endure an uneasy session with an uneasy recruiter in an airless room. Imagine how much worse it might be when that recruiter hails from the U.S. Army, the student is met by jeers and catcalls, and the law school has posted a sign outside the interview reading: "Welcome to Satan's Lair."

Well, that, my friends, is the future of military recruitment on campus.

Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights pits against each other two visions of higher education. On the one hand, you have the federal government, which sees colleges, and specifically law schools, as fertile ground for Judge Advocate General recruitment and resents any intrusion as pointy-headed anti-Army hostility. On the other hand, you have the military's nasty little "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gay soldiers—a policy that undermines many law schools' commitment to nondiscrimination. And in the middle of it all, you have the 1994 Solomon Amendment (named for its sponsor, Rep. Gerald Solomon), which withholds Defense Department funds from any university that denies military recruiters access to campus. The amendment's co-sponsor, Rep. Richard Pombo of California, urged his colleagues to vote to "send a message over the wall of the ivory tower of higher education" and warned that "starry-eyed idealism comes with a price."

I liked this speech better when Jack Nicholson delivered it in A Few Good Men: "You can't handle the truth!"

In its later iterations, the Solomon Amendment expanded to include university funding from more federal agencies, and Congress made clear that a whole university could be on the hook for a law school's decision to host military interviews in janitorial closets. FAIR, a coalition of law schools, brought a suit challenging the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment, claiming it violates the schools' rights to free speech and association, notably, the right to exclude groups that discriminate based on sexual orientation. The schools stand to lose federal funding to the tune of $35 billion. FAIR struck out in the district court but won before a divided panel of the 3^rd Circuit Court of Appeals. It seems the Supreme Court granted review principally to mock the 3^rd Circuit in a very public fashion.

Solicitor General Paul Clement represents the government today, as usual, and he just seems to get better and better. (It certainly helps when, going into the argument, the bet is whether you'll win 8-1 or 9-0.) Clement briefly runs afoul of some of the justices when he claims that the military seeks only to be treated "like every other employer." Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy quickly point out that "every other employer" that discriminates against gay candidates is barred from campus.

Justice Stephen Breyer cites one of the amicus briefs in the case that suggests that the law schools have not discriminated against military recruiters, but rather have adopted an evenhanded policy from which the military seeks an exemption. For a few moments several justices are in the thrall of the amicus brief, until Scalia reminds Clement that the Constitution grants Congress the power "to raise and support armies." Scalia wonders why that isn't the end of this case.

Clement says that other acts of Congress, including anti-discrimination laws such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, also encroach on "associational interests." If you extend FAIR's logic, he points out, schools could refuse to hire veterans and justify it as a war protest. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says such an action would be "far fetched," given that the schools' policy "is to teach equality." Clement's rejoinder is that it hardly teaches equality to include homosexuals but exclude the military. He reminds the court that "NYU for three years had a policy of excluding recruiters from the state of Colorado" because of its anti-gay amendments. NYU wanted to exclude seal clubbers, too, but they all applied to Harvard.

Justice David Souter, who seems to take FAIR's arguments more seriously than most of his colleagues, tells Clement that he is "still left with a speech problem. You are forcing [the schools] to underwrite your speech and forcing them to change their message." Clement says there is no speech claim here, characterizing recruitment not as "speech activity, but commercial activity." At which point Scalia interjects that this commercial activity also "happens to be specifically authorized by the Constitution."

Souter again attempts to characterize the Solomon Amendment as having an "expressive objective"—that is, barring law schools from expressing their support for equal rights. Scalia wonders whether you can "convert any law into a law attacking the First Amendment by saying the reason you are disobeying it is to protest the war." O'Connor signals why she'll be voting for the military by asking: "Does the Solomon Amendment pose any restriction on the extent to which a law school can distance themselves from the military discrimination, with signs at every recruitment office saying 'our law school doesn't agree with any discrimination against gays?' " Or "Welcome to Satan's Lair," in the room where the military is interviewing. Clement says law schools can protest in any way that falls short of a denial of access.

Stevens tries to probe whether telling a military recruiter that he has do his interviewing at the campus of a college, as opposed to a law school, is a denial of equal access to the military. He asks whether the law school could offer recruiters a facility that was "equally effective" but perhaps not as good. Scalia promptly quips: "Separate but equal?"

Ginsburg—repeating O'Connor's question—asks what the law faculty might do to protest a visit by a military recruiter. Clement, flashing his counterculture creds, suggests they could "put up signs on bulletin boards, give speeches, organize a student protest."

He briefly loses Kennedy. "The school can organize a protest where everyone jeers at the recruiters and the applicant? That's equal access?" the justice fumes. Clement stands firm. Yes. Cue Scalia the wiseacre: "You are not going to be a military recruiter are you?" Scalia and Kennedy don't want to allow student jeering. But Clement would permit it. "This statute gives a right to equal access," he says. After that, recruiters are on their own.

Joshua Rosenkranz represents FAIR, and he argues that the Solomon Amendment is part of a long tradition of congressional attacks on universities in response to war protests. "Congress had a law," he says. They passed a new law designed "to squelch even the most symbolic element of the law schools' resistance to the military policy."

Chief Justice John Roberts instantly shuts him down, saying the Solomon Amendment "doesn't insist that you do anything. … It says that if you want our money, you have to let our recruiters on campus." Moreover, for Roberts, this is not about speech. "This is conduct." Rosenkranz disagrees. "This is a refusal to send e-mail. This is conduct only in that they are moving molecules. … This is speech."

Kennedy repeats that you cannot "infuse anything with speech claims," adding that under FAIR's analysis "schools could exclude anyone in uniform from the cafeteria." A moment later he explodes that the law-school policy would mean "you can't get anyone from medical school for the armed forces … you can't get any chaplains … all for expressive reasons."

And O'Connor repeats her earlier argument: "The government says the law school is entirely free to tell its message, too." Rosenkranz replies that students who thought the school had an anti-discrimination policy would see the military recruiters on campus and say to the schools, "we don't believe you."

"We don't believe you because you are willing to take the government's money!" snaps Roberts, who will state several times that if the piper takes your money, he'd better play your tune. Breyer telegraphs his vote when he says that the remedy to bad speech "is not less speech. It's more speech." Breyer adds, "I can't find anywhere in the record where a student believes this speech is the school's. I can't even find a recruiter who told a student they can't join the military if they're gay."

Scalia dings Rosenkranz with a question about where there is "actual" compelled speech in this case. "Posting bulletins?" he asks. "That's symbolic!" "Words, words!" he demands. Then Breyer and Ginsburg and Stevens offer hypotheticals in which they extend FAIR's logic to extreme, hard-to-defend positions and Rosenkranz, inexplicably, adopts each extreme position in turn. Stevens asks what's objectionable about the military message here—which is "Join the Army." Souter needs to remind him that the objectionable message is not "Join the Army," but rather "Join the Army, but not if you're gay."

Suddenly one can't help but notice that all the conservative justices have gotten quiet while the liberals are taking turns beating on counsel. That can't be a good sign. Says Breyer: "Speech is on their side. They are trying to recruit!"

Clement's rebuttal is a beautiful thing. He quickly explains that no student can confuse a military recruiter's speech with the law school's. Also that any protest can be re-characterized as free speech or free association, opening the door to allowing law schools, if they so choose, to disregard bedrock federal anti-discrimination laws. It's a clever approach—painting the Solomon Amendment as an anti-discrimination law, as opposed to an aggressive counter-punch at anti-discrimination diehards. A series of culture clashes underlies this case: The Army versus the Ivies; brawn versus brain; raw politics versus political correctness. But none of that really matters. You want the truth? You can't handle the truth. The law schools have no case.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131643/

gaming
Sit Down, John
Blitz: The League summons the mojo of pre-Madden sports games.
By Chris Suellentrop
Updated Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005, at 5:04 PM ET

It's blasphemous to say so out loud, but Tecmo Bowl ruined video-game football. It hurts to say such a thing about a seminal video-game title: The 1989 Nintendo game was the first console title that included the names of actual NFL players. Tecmo Bowl is so beloved that there are still Internet leagues devoted to it. Bo Jackson has said that he "can't go a week" without someone rhapsodizing about the greatness of his Tecmo Bowl character, dubbed "Video Bo" by ESPN.com's Bill Simmons.

The problem today isn't that there are no longer any games like Tecmo Bowl. It's that there are only games like Tecmo Bowl. By today's standards, the game was extremely limited: only 12 teams and four plays to choose from. (The 1991 sequel, Tecmo Super Bowl, included every NFL team and a mind-boggling eight plays). But back then, it was a revelation. During the Atari 2600 years, my brother and I would watch NFL games, joysticks in hand, and pretend to control the teams. (Yes, I know it's sad.) Tecmo Bowl was the first game that gave you the feeling that you were manipulating real players. It's what put us on the road to having sports broadcasts that look like video games, rather than the other way around.

But by following the successful Tecmo Bowl template, game developers have abandoned an entire genre. Before Tecmo Bowl, the best sports games weren't licensed by sports leagues and didn't include authentic team or player names. Some games, such as Konami's Double Dribble, featured teams that were obvious imitations of their real-world counterparts. Then there were games such as SNK's Baseball Stars, which included the Lovely Ladies, the Ghoulish Monsters, and the aptly named Ninja Blacksox, whose roster featured nothing but ninjas. Once Tecmo Bowl came along, these unlicensed games seemed exceedingly lame. Who wants to play with a team full of girls when you can make Bo Jackson rip off 80-yard runs?

In retrospect, there was greater variety in the sports-game universe in the days before gamers turned up their noses at ninja ballplayers. After Tecmo Bowl, every sports game was licensed by an actual entity—the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NHL, the NCAA. As a result, every game aspired to just one thing: to be the best possible simulation of an actual sports league. By the age of the PlayStation 2, sports titles were characterized by a depressing sameness, prompted in part by developers' ambitions and in part by the censorship and content regulation that comes when you sign a licensing deal with a giant corporation. In 2002, for instance, Paul Tagliabue brought some of his No Fun League ethos to the NFL's licensed simulations by asking Midway to eliminate some of NFL Blitz's groin kicking and body slamming.

The release of Blitz: The League, Midway's new unlicensed football game, heralds a return to variety in sports games. Blitz: The League—a sequel of sorts to NFL Blitz, its licensed predecessor—is unlicensed out of necessity. In 2004, the NFL and the NFL Players Association signed an exclusive five-year deal with EA Sports, the makers of the Madden franchise. Midway's response: Create a game that takes place in a mythical football league, featuring teams like the "Washington Redhawks."

Despite that team name, Blitz isn't a pale imitation of the NFL. It's more like a pale imitation of the XFL. Players and coaches curse, you can dress up your cheerleaders in leather, and you can send "escorts" to the other team's hotel before the game to reduce their stamina. When one of your guys gets hurt, you can treat the injury with traditional medicine or "juice" him to get him back quickly while risking even greater injury. (If you want your players to pass a drug test, you can buy them a "Pissinator.") There's a wide receiver named "TO Moss," an Arizona receiver named "Tidwell," and a quarterback named "Mexico." You can name your team whatever you like, and you can design your own uniforms. I chose a pinup girl riding a rocket ship for my helmet logo, though I was tempted by the cross, the beer bottle, the samurai, and the fist with knuckle jewelry that says "BLING."

Blitz: The League's weakness is that it often seems more interested in shock value than entertainment. The campaign mode opens with New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor—er, "Quentin Sands" of the "New York Nightmare"—breaking a quarterback's arm. Cheerleaders dance, crawl along the ground, and bend over in front of you while you're trying to select a play. The most sensational content is presented during cinematics—in-game movies that you watch passively rather than participate in. When my rookie quarterback went back to a "VIP room" with a cheerleader for what I'll call a "voluntary workout," the scene seemed designed to titillate without giving me any choices. The introduction of morality-based consequences—such as in Knights of the Old Republic—would have made the game more complex, or at least more replayable.

If an NFL simulation is what you're looking for, Madden is still the standard-bearer. Even when it featured actual NFL teams, Blitz's cartoonish eight-on-eight gameplay was both faster-paced and less faithful to reality than Madden's 11-on-11 action. But as Madden has gotten more realistic, it has come to resemble the real NFL: conservative and unadventurous.

With most video games, the trend has been to give players more and more freedom, as with the open-ended Grand Theft Auto titles. But EA Sports has been taking choices away from Madden players for years. For one thing, Madden eliminated the opportunity to hit opponents after the play. A creative game developer might have built in a penalty for repeated late hits, such as a suspension or a fine; instead, EA just took them out entirely. John Madden himself insisted that fourth-down conversions be made more difficult, so Madden conversions would succeed at the same rate as those in the actual NFL. But perhaps NFL coaches would succeed on fourth down more frequently if they tried the tactic with the carefree abandon of Madden players. (There's research to support this hypothesis.)

Blitz: The League is important, then, as a reminder that sports video games don't have to be constrained by authenticity. Gamers feared that last year's proliferation of exclusive deals (EA Sports also controls the licenses for NASCAR and NCAA football, while Take-Two Interactive has the Major League Baseball Players Association license) would limit competition. But rather than "curbing creativity," as one game company complained would happen, the deal has fostered it. The NFL's contract with EA Sports has given Midway a mandate to distinguish itself with an inventive, if flawed, new game, rather than reprise its second-tier NFL simulation.

The removal of the NFL's content controls means that gamers will be able to choose among a diversity of football games, rather than multiple variations on a single theme. Blitz: The League isn't the revelation that Tecmo Bowl was. But it is an omen: The fact that EA has a monopoly on the NFL may, at long last, loosen EA's monopoly on video football.

Chris Suellentrop, a writer in Washington, D.C., is a former Slate staffer.

 

explainer
Are Sonograms Dangerous?
Mr. Cruise, get your hands off that ultrasound machine!
By Daniel Engber
Posted Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, at 6:56 PM ET

Last Tuesday, Tom Cruise revealed that he had purchased an ultrasound machine to glimpse inside the womb of his pregnant fiancee, Katie Holmes. Doctors voiced concern at the news that Cruise and Holmes would be performing sonograms at home; a representative from the American College of Radiology said that "if it is not medically necessary, the use of ultrasound raises unnecessary physical risk to the fetus." Are sonograms really dangerous?

They can be. An ultrasound machine works by sending vibrations into the body and then waiting for them to bounce back. The machine can use information from the echoes to produce a moving image of a fetus. But not all of the energy that goes into the body comes back out—some gets absorbed in the tissues. This can cause cells to heat up, or it can make trapped gas bubble up. Studies of ultrasound in lab animals have shown that heat and bubble formation (or "cavitation") can damage internal organs.

Few studies of ultrasound have been conducted on the human fetus (for ethical and logistical reasons), and there's no smoking gun to suggest that the machines are causing harm. We've known for a long time that ultrasound heats up human tissue—that's the rationale for its application in physical therapy. Several experiments conducted overseas have shown an increase in left-handedness (or at least a reduction in right-handedness) among those exposed to prenatal ultrasound, which suggests that the test could have neurological effects.

Even if ultrasound is relatively safe for developing babies, doctors try to limit the number, duration, and intensity of imaging sessions. Doctors sometimes use ultrasound in the first trimester to confirm the baby's heartbeat, screen for genetic defects, find the source of pain or bleeding, or for other reasons. Most pregnant women get one at about the 20-week mark, to make sure that the fetus is healthy and growing at a normal rate. More sonograms might be taken later with a specific medical rationale.*

To help mitigate the risk of heat and cavitation, doctors check for two numbers displayed on the screen of a modern ultrasound device—the "thermal index" and the "mechanical index." These indices give a sense of how much the vibrations might affect the body, so doctors try to keep them below a certain threshold whenever possible.

Is Tom Cruise putting his baby—or his fiancee—at risk? It depends on what kind of machine he's using, and whether he's got a trained sonographer to help him out. He may have a machine that doesn't have the more dangerous high-power settings. Doctors tend to use those settings when a regular ultrasound won't penetrate an especially thick layer of fat. (It's hard to imagine that you'd need to turn up the machine for Katie Holmes.) Cruise isn't necessarily putting his baby at greater risk by looking at it multiple times—unlike X-rays, ultrasound seems not to cause cumulative damage across sessions. But without medical supervision, each individual sonogram could be harmful.

In view of the possible risks posed by ultrasound, the FDA regulates its use. If Cruise is operating the machine himself, he may be breaking the law. Companies that offer parents a nonmedical, "keepsake" sonogram may also be breaking the law. So far, the government hasn't spent too much time enforcing its ban on the use of ultrasound "for entertainment purposes." FDA officials have bigger fish to fry.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Dr. Joshua Copel of Yale University and Dr. Carol Rumack of the American College of Radiology.

Correction, Dec. 6, 2005: This piece originally stated that pregnant women rarely get sonograms during the first trimester. The practice is not uncommon. The piece also implied that most women receive only one sonogram during their pregnancies. In many cases, a fetus will be imaged multiple times. (Return to corrected paragraph.)

Daniel Engber is a regular contributor to Slate.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131574/

today's blogs
The CIA's New Black Eye
By David Wallace-Wells
Posted Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, at 6:09 PM ET

Bloggers are generally dismayed by a case of CIA mistaken identity. They also discuss yesterday's pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong and a new book that questions the authority of so-called "experts."

The CIA's new black eye: German citizen Khaled Masri was wrongfully imprisoned by the CIA in 2004, the victim of mistaken identity in the agency's vigorous pursuit of terrorist suspects. "The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls 'erroneous renditions,' " the Washington Post reports.

"It is becoming obvious that 911 did change everything, for the worse," writes retired engineer Ron Beasley at Middle Earth Journal. "The United States was once the beacon for freedom and justice but no more." At OneGoodMove, Norm Jenson suggests the imprisonment amounts to a mark on the American permanent record. "You can't take back torture," he says.

"It's really scarey when you have an organization as powerful as the C.I.A is running amok playing 'Spy vs. Spy,' " remarks Houston Conservative Will Malven, nevertheless optimistic. "Hopefully the ongoing shake-up within the C.I.A. will remedy such abuses," he writes. Conservative Tom Maguire of JustOneMinute, pointing to an excerpt in which a covert agent is described but not named, thinks the story itself demonstrates agency dysfunction, a personal turf war cannibalizing the front pages. "Quick, subpoena Dana Priest of the WaPo - someone with a political axe to grind has leaked to her the name of a covert CIA officer!" he cries in mock outrage.

Others say such treatment of suspected terrorists impedes the war on terror. "Listen, in the long run, it's about winning the hearts and minds of the world," writes contributor Justin Gardner at Joe Gandelman's The Moderate Voice. "And do any of you think that's going to happen when we're kidnapping innocent people because of so-called 'actionable intelligence' we got from torturing other detainees?"

At Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy, a professor of ethical philosophy, believes the lesson is equally clear. "This is why we have a legal system: because even with the best intentions, government officials make mistakes. People who are kidnapped and sent off … to some secret CIA prison … have no recourse at all."

Read more about the report.

Chinese democracy?: Thousands of pro-democracy protesters rallied in Hong Kong Sunday, calling for the first general elections in the region since its return to Chinese rule in 1997. The march was widely considered to hold significance beyond Hong Kong in mainland China.

"The march today was somber, determined, and serious," reports Yan Sham-Shackleton, a Hong Kong artist and activist, at Glutter. "It did not have the joyous atmosphere of some of the protests past, I kept feeling that everyone there had the same kind of feeling which is that we are in this for the long haul." Of particular concern, she believes, was the underestimation of the crowd by police, who reported the turnout as 63,000. "I had my doubts that the march was going to be that large," admits protester and American expatriot Tom Legg at The Eleven. "But if that march was only 63,000, then I'm a monkey's uncle."

"I am less interested in numbers, and more interested in meaning," confides Sam Crane, an American professor of Asian studies, at Useless Tree. "We often hear that democracy is fragile in Chinese cultural contexts because of the lack of deep historical experience with electoral rotation of political leadership. Apologists for authoritarianism in Beijing and Hong Kong and Singapore will argue that not only is democracy culturally alien, but it is simply not necessary or wanted by Chinese people. … Hong Kong is at a point in its history where, I would bet, a majority of people would vote for direct elections. "

Plenty of others agree the city is, presently, uniquely able to popularly demand popular government. "Hong Kong is like no other place on earth," writes Publius Pundit Robert Mayer, a longstanding supporter of democratic movements worldwide. "It is an outpost of Western ideas on the flank of communism. … This march, and others like it, will serve as an example for activists in Beijing and elsewhere who are preparing — even now — to challenge the government and take their rights back."

Read more about the rally.

The meaning of expert: In his new book, Expert Political Judgment, Berkeley psychologist Philip Tetlock examines the reliability of analyses and predictions made by specialists and experts. His finding? "The accuracy of an expert's predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge," summarizes critic Louis Menand in a New Yorker review. "People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote."

"The problem as I see it is that the market for punditry has skewed incentives," opines Jane Galt at Asymmetrical Information. "There is no reward for being boring and right, nor any punishment for being novel and wrong. But there are big rewards, in the form of book contracts and lecture fees, for being novel and right. Pundits are thus tempted to act like executives with fat option packages."

"This is one of the (few) must-read social science books of 2005," declares economist Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, adding this caveat: "Each new forecast or new theory is an example of individual hubris and in expected value terms it is stupid. But the body of experts as a whole, over time, absorbs what is correct. A large number of predictions creates a Hayekian discovery process with increasing returns to scale. Social knowledge still comes out ahead, and in part because of the self-deceiving vanities put forward every day. You can find that point in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels."

Read more about the book, and more about the New Yorker review.

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

David Wallace-Wells is a writer living in New York.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131626/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131573/