Table of Contents
A confirmed sadist could find many things to enjoy in the pages of The Canterbury Tales. As Chaucer's pilgrims take turns telling stories to while away the hours on their long walk to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket, they shy away from no variety of physical violation or psychological torture. In "The Miller's Tale," a man is rectally impaled with a red-hot poker. In "The Clerk's Tale," a husband tests his wife's obedience by pretending to murder their two children. In "The Reeve's Tale," a pair of students rapes a man's wife and daughter in order to humiliate him.
Why is it, then, that the actual experience of reading The Canterbury Tales is not at all painful? Why has it struck six centuries of readers as, in fact, the humane masterpiece of English literature—the book that seems to embrace more of the world, and affirm more of human nature, than any other? The answer lies in the disjunction between the men and women who populate Chaucer's poem and the stories that they tell. In their tales, the pilgrims reflect the assumptions of a medieval world that manages to appear, at the same time, inhumane in its love of comic brutality and sanctimonious in the way it elevates piety, humility, and (especially female) chastity into the highest virtues. Who would want to live as austerely as Chaucer's Pardoner demands from the pulpit?
O gluttony, the height of wickedness!
O primal cause of mankind's utter fall!
O first and original sin that damned us all
Till Christ redeemed us with his own dear blood! ...
O stomach! O belly! O stinking bag of jelly,
Filled with dung, and reeking with corruption!
Yet by the time the reader reaches these lines from "The Pardoner's Tale"—as rendered, here, by Burton Raffel, in his new translation of Chaucer from Middle to Modern English—she has already learned not to trust a word this character says. For in real life, the Pardoner—or, as Raffel derisively calls him, the "Pardon-Peddler"—is himself a first-class glutton, not to mention a lecher and a con artist. "I want good money, good clothes and cheese and wheat/… I like to water my throat with wine,/ And have a frisky wench in every town," the Pardoner brags in the prologue that precedes his tale. He is so brazen that the reader has to laugh, especially when he reveals the trick that always gets people to pay for the privilege of genuflecting before his faked relics. He announces to the congregation that "Anyone in sitting in church, cozy and warm,/ Guilty of several sins so awful he/ Dares not, for shame, confess and pray for mercy," is strictly forbidden to make an offering. After that, of course, no one wants to be seen holding back.
"In real life," I wrote, the Pardoner is not what he seems in his tale—yet of course there is no "in real life" when it comes to the pilgrims, who are all Chaucer's inventions. Indeed, the pilgrims are far more Chaucer's inventions than the stories they tell, which are usually recycled from other medieval tale collections. Yet it is precisely by building this second level, this metafiction, into his fiction that Chaucer renders it so powerfully realistic. Because we see the pilgrims telling stories, they gain the trust we place in storytellers, who, by definition, are more real than their tales.
And it is in the gap between the tellers and the tales that Chaucer's humanity is able to flourish. The Clerk might offer up Griselda, the wife who is unswervingly loyal despite her husband's cruelty, as a model of Christian patience: "A woman having been incredibly patient/ To a mortal man, how very much more we ought/ To take in good part whatever God has sent us,/ For rightfully he tests what he has wrought. …" Yet at the end of that tale, Chaucer adds a song or "envoy," gleefully acknowledging that "Griselda is dead, and so too is her patience," so that husbands should not try to find her like: "They'd only be wasting their time, and deserve their penance."
More important, Chaucer creates the Wife of Bath, that irresistible emblem of female independence and appetite, to display "in real life" a charisma that the "fictional" Griselda could never match. Griselda is the kind of woman that only exists in stories written by "clerks," that is, clergymen, as the Wife complains:
There is no greater impossibility,
In truth, than clerics praising wives would be,
Unless the woman is a holy saint:
No other women deserve a word of praise.
Pictures of lion-killing show a living
Man. But what if a lion had painted the picture?
The Wife of Bath's fifth husband, she recounts, had a book full of misogynistic stories from sacred and pagan literature; tired of hearing them, she "yanked three pages out of the book/ And threw them onto the floor, and also hit him/ Right on the cheek, hard, with my balled-up fist." The secret of The Canterbury Tales is that it allows its characters to tear out its own pages, so to speak—to mock and complain about the rules they are supposed to live by. Because of this, the book has a holiday air, a tolerance for human appetites and frailties, that few modern works can rival. Our officially secular and hedonistic society seldom allows us to feel as free and happy as Chaucer's pilgrims seem to be.
All the passages I have quoted come from Burton Raffel's new translation, and they show its one big virtue: It is immediately comprehensible, allowing the reader to grasp (most of) Chaucer's meaning without footnotes. For those readers who are absolutely unwilling to puzzle out Middle English spelling, or spend time getting acquainted with Chaucer's versification and syntax, Raffel's edition will be a useful substitute.
But even Raffel, a poet who has translated everyone from Cervantes to Stendhal, seems a little curious why anyone would bother reading The Canterbury Tales in translation. "Native speakers of English, as recently as the first half of the twentieth century, were not particularly uncomfortable with Chaucer's difficulties," he writes in his introduction. Since the English language has not changed much in the last 50 years, he clearly believes that the problem lies with its speakers—that we have gotten lazier and more provincial.
No one who embarks on reading The Canterbury Tales, however, can be all that lazy, and any reader who compares the original with Raffel's version will surely agree that the extra effort is worthwhile. For Raffel's translation loses the original's music without finding a music of its own; he is wordy where the original is pithy and bare where the original is lush. Chaucer is in many ways the progenitor of English fiction—he is closer to Dickens than to Keats—but he is also a great master of English poetry; and since poetry is what is lost in translation, why not take the trouble to read the original and avoid the loss? Besides, as the Pardoner says, "lewed peple loven tales olde;/ Swiche thynges kan they wel reporte and holde."
"So I analyzed that and decided I didn't want to be the president during a depression greater than the Great Depression, or the beginning of a depression greater than the Great Depression."—Washington D.C., Dec. 18, 2008
Click here to see video of Bush's comments. The Bushism is at 19:09.
Got a Bushism? Send it to bushisms@slate.com. For more, see "The Complete Bushisms."
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"People say, well, do you ever hear any other voices other than, like, a few people? Of course I do."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 18, 2008
Click here to see video of Bush's comments. The Bushism is at 31:42.
Got a Bushism? Send it to bushisms@slate.com. For more, see "The Complete Bushisms."
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I am the most successful writer in the United States. Based on what, you ask? You'll just have to take my word for it. Not good enough, you say? Then why is it good enough when Amazon claims to be the most successful retailer in the United States?
The day after Christmas, Amazon put out a press release declaring the 2008 holiday season "its best ever, with over 6.3 million items ordered worldwide on the peak day, Dec. 15." The story was eagerly snapped up by the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and even the Web site for Business Week, which really ought to know better. Some, but not all, of these accounts went on to concede that Amazon would not provide revenue data for the entire shopping season, or even for its "peak day." Nor would Amazon confirm or deny that one or both of these revenue figures exceeded those for 2007. Without this information, we can't possibly know whether Amazon had a good year in comparison either to other retailers or to its own sales during the previous Christmas shopping season.
The same gullibility applies to coverage of the Kindle, Amazon's e-book reader. The New York Times reported on Dec. 23 that "the e-book has started to take hold." We "know" this "in part because of the popularity of Amazon.com's Kindle device," which is "out of stock and unavailable until February." The Post fronted essentially the same story in its business section on Dec. 27. But these newspapers were unable to report how many Kindles Amazon sold, much less how much revenue these sales generated, because Amazon won't release that information. We don't even know whether Amazon sold more Kindles this year than last. Amazon is famously stingy with financial numbers generally. This Christmas season, that's proving to be a winning strategy in dealing with a business press that, between layoffs and the usual holiday vacations, appears short-staffed to the point of utter witlessness.
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 24 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and June Thomas by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss Tom Cruise's screen adventures as a one-eyed German soldier, Bruce Springsteen's decision to sell his new best-of collection exclusively at Wal-Mart, and the 2008 year in culture.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:
The Valkyrie Web site.
Stephen's Slate piece looking at Tom Cruise's career through the lens of his 1983 comedy Risky Business.
Box Office Mojo charts Valkyrie's success in its opening weekend.
Billboard reports that the new greatest-hits collection from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band will be available exclusively at Wal-Mart.
Jon Pareles' piece in the New York Times on coming to terms with musicians selling out.
Stephen's Slate piece on Springsteen and his guru Jon Landau.
Dana's list of the best films of 2008.
Slate's staff picks the best books of 2008.
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: HBO's documentary Jacques D'Amboise in China: The Other Side of the World
June's pick: The Archers, a quintessentially British radio show from the BBC, now available as a daily podcast
Stephen's pick: an upstart podcast from a trio of culture-gabbers, and a happy 2009.
Posted on Dec. 31 by Jacob Ganz at 11:57 a.m.
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 23 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner discuss Jay Leno's announced move to prime time, the troubles facing the book-publishing industry, and the rebirth of Mickey Rourke in the new movie The Wrestler.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:
The New York Times article on how Jay Leno was convinced to stay at NBC and move into a prime time slot.
Jimmy Fallon's "vlog" practice for his Late Night gig.
Daniel Engber's Slate article on the "crying while eating" viral video that won him a spot on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.
New York magazine's article on the sinking book-publishing industry.
The New York Times' piece on a particularly disastrous week for the publishing industry.
The Wrestler Web site.
Pat Jordan's profile of Mickey Rourke in the New York Times Magazine
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: Deborah Eisenberg's article on the work of Susan Sontag in the New York Review of Books.
Julia's pick: Fred Armisen's underestimated Obama impersonation on Saturday Night Live.
Stephen's pick: "Warmer Corners," the 2005 album by the Australian indie pop trio the Lucksmiths.
Posted on Dec. 17 by Jacob Ganz at 12:27 p.m.
Dec. 3, 2008
Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 22 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.
In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss Milk, Beyoncé, and Black Friday.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:
The official Milk Web site.
Dana Stevens' review of Milk.
Dennis Lim's analysis of whether Milk could have helped defeat California's Proposition 8 if it had been released earlier.
Beyoncé's new album, I Am … Sasha Fierce.
Beyoncé's video for the song "Single Ladies."
Beyoncé's video for the song "If I Were a Boy."
Jonah Weiner's piece on Beyoncé's odd new alter ego, Sasha Fierce.
David Carr's New York Times analysis of Black Friday.
The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:
Dana's pick: James Lipton's Inside the Actor's Studio interview with Paul Newman.
Julia's pick: Norman Rush's novel Mating.
Stephen's pick: Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.
You can reach the Culture Gabfest at culturefest@slate.com.
Posted on Dec. 3 by Amanda Aronczyk at 1:15 p.m.
On New Year's Day 2004, a runner named Quenton Cassidy finished second among high-schoolers in the Resolution Run 5K in Atlanta. In 2005, he finished first among an all-ages set in a Massachusetts 5K and third in the Fifth Annual Cure Autism Now 5K in Maryland. A year later, he seems to have lost a step, finishing fifth in the 2006 Des Moines Midnight Madness 5K.
Quenton Cassidy is not actually a real person, some itinerant jogger bent on winning charity races nationwide. Rather, he's the hero of John L. Parker Jr.'s novel Once a Runner, a cult object among serious distance runners. To demonstrate their devotion to the book, runners not infrequently take its hero's name as a race-day nom de guerre. (I can't help but notice that the Quenton who ran in the Maryland race—second picture down—looks an awful lot like my old track teammate Ben.)
Since its publication in 1978, Once a Runner has purportedly sold more than 100,000 copies and spawned a sequel and a movie. Yet Parker sold the last of his original self-published editions in 2004. Demand has never subsided. The cheapest used paperback on Alibris was recently going for $77.98. And according to Bookfinder—the Google of dead books—the novel has been the most-searched-for out-of-print fiction or literature book each of the past two years.
There won't be a threepeat: This time next year, Once a Runner will no longer be eligible. The novel's place atop Bookfinder's list caught the eye of Brant Rumble, an editor at Scribner, which is printing new copies in April. A nonrunner, Rumble told me he nevertheless found himself "completely engrossed" in the detailed descriptions of Quenton's runs.
That puts Rumble in a small minority. The paradoxical nature of the novel's popularity—it was the most-wanted book that not enough people wanted anymore—suggests an intense but narrow appeal. There's a reason Once a Runner has never managed to find a mainstream audience. It aggrandizes the insular world of running in a way that, with due respect to its new publisher, no nonrunner could possibly relate to. It is written for runners—and to keep nonrunners out. But it also nails the running life like no other novel ever has.
Quenton is an undergraduate miler at the fictional Southeastern University in the Florida panhandle. He spends most of his time training with the cross country team and with Bruce Denton, an Olympic gold-medalist distance runner who lives nearby. The plot pits the liberal, free-spirited runners against a counter-countercultural football coach and a retrograde university president. For vague, dubious reasons that include Quenton's authoring of a petition protesting a dress code, he is suspended from intercollegiate competition, prompting him to leave school altogether and move, alone, to a cabin in the woods. There he trains for a race in the spring at the university against, among others, a world-champion miler from New Zealand. If he can only figure out how to sneak into the competition, from which he has been banned …
That's pretty much the extent of the plot. As for the prose, it frequently reads like the work of an eighth-grader going through his Beat phase. The novel's goofy literary pretensions—Quenton's name, for example, is surely a not-so-sly reference to Faulkner's equally time-obsessed hero, Quentin—only make matters worse.
Most cult objects essentially invent their own cults (think The Rocky Horror Picture Show), but Once a Runner had a readership waiting for it. The book doesn't just have a cult, in other words—its subject is a cult, and it depicts the cult's rituals in the minutest detail. Parker captures how it all feels: how during a tough workout a random word or phrase will materialize in your mind and be turned over and played with like "seals with a beach ball"; how as you wander around a track meet you feel as though your personal record is the dominant fact of your life ("This gentleman here, perhaps you'd like to meet him, is 27:42"); how after a race your spine feels as though it's "made of bamboo." Reading these dead-on descriptions, a runner feels a pleasurable sensation of recognition. The nonrunner, I assume, feels nothing.
Like many cults, distance running has its mysteries, and The Secret—how you become a real runner—is Once a Runner's chief concern. ("As Denton's reputation grew," Parker writes, "a number of undergraduate runners decided they would train with him, thinking to pick up on The Secret.") But it turns out that The Secret is that there is no secret. The runner must pound the mileage, as we say. It's a grueling, tedious, insane lifestyle. So why do we keep doing it?
To understand the answer, you have to understand a bit about distance running. For one thing, it helps to know that only nonrunners talk about a "runner's high." It's not that it doesn't exist, that weird feeling of euphoria you sometimes get briefly after a tough day at the track or a superlong run. But no one could possibly be a runner just for the highs, whether brought on by natural chemicals or by winning a race. The running life is mostly just lots and lots and lots of miles. Only a few competitions punctuate the grind of thankless workouts on anonymous tracks, and you literally need a very loud gun to snap you out of the training existence and tell you it's time to save nothing for later. There simply isn't enough in the way of traditional rewards as compared with hard labor to make it worthwhile—that is, if you're only after the traditional rewards.
Once a Runner gets all this. It presents the distance running life as overwhelmingly mundane. It is appropriate that Quenton first shatters the all-important four-minute mile not in a race but during a random training session—"Just another goddamn workout." This being a sports novel, there is a Big Race at the end where Everything is on the line. But the book's true climax comes during one of Quenton's workouts in preparation for the race, an interval session requiring 60 quarter-miles (for those of you who've done quarters workouts, no, that's not a typo). Denton forces Quenton to run the final 20 alone: "I know you can do this thing because I once did it myself," Denton tells him. "When it was over I knew some very important things." And thus it is after the workout, and not the race, that Quenton achieves true self-knowledge, the end of any novel of growth. "I know," Quenton gasps afterward. "But it is a very hard thing to have to know."
The forthcoming edition is by far the handsomest copy of Once a Runner I've seen, but a part of me wishes the novel had stayed out-of-print. Not everyone is up for the running life, and not everyone should be able to get their hands on this book. It should take effort, whether that means borrowing (or stealing) it from someone or saving up $77.98. Once a Runner's portrait of running may smack of elitism, but it is a democratic elitism: Not everyone can be a runner, but a runner can come from anywhere.
There was a poetic justice in the recent charging of Melrose Place star Heather Locklear on one misdemeanor count of driving under the influence of drugs (the legal sort, but the law is rightfully blind when it comes to operating a motor vehicle). The traffic stop, which happened nearly a year ago, was generated by a tip to the California Highway Patrol from a "former US Weekly reporter." It seems cringingly appropriate that someone from the magazine that brought us "Stars, They're Just Like Us!" should have brought a celebrity down to earthly mug-shot justice—and is it just me, or does the work of the Santa Barbara PD in-house photographer have a rather ethereal beauty?
Heather's misfortune brought to light, yet again, the curious cultural construct of the "celebrity driver." Granted, things have slowed a bit since the tumultuous Year of the Celebrity DUI—2006—when it seemed as if any starlet worth her salt was found operating under the influence and driving on a suspended license. And the world is still gasping at the moving violations of Britney Spears—whose most creative act of 2006 was to cruise around with her infant son on her lap. Yet the questions are still with us: Why has celebrity driver become such a meaningful pair of words? And what does our fascination with bad celebrity drivers reveal about ourselves?
Mere logistics explain a lot. Most celebrities live in Southern California, a region that has brought us everything from drive-in churches to drive-up voting, and they naturally spend an inordinate amount of time in their cars. Research has shown that the more miles one travels, the higher one's "exposure" to risk becomes. There are simply more chances to get into trouble. Exposure is an interesting word in the celebrity context, for in driving, celebrities not only expose themselves to risk but expose themselves to the general public and the paparazzi—who stake out driveways, the threshold to public life in Los Angeles. At the destination, the vulnerability comes in the parking lot, so it's no surprise that valet parkers supplement their income with tips … to photographers.
Traffic is a ruthlessly democratic environment; you can drive a $300,000 Maybach with high-luster leather seats and still sit in the same congestion, still get cut off by a 1983 Corolla with a "Visualize Whirled Peas" bumper sticker, still hit the same pothole, and still fall prey to the speed gun. Driving is one of the central areas of life in which celebrities, inescapably, are "like us," and, not surprisingly, the vérité photographs are often taken in traffic: waiting at a light on Melrose, pumping gas on Wilshire, pulled over for speeding on Sunset. (There was a curious denouement in this respect recently when David Beckham, flagged in his black Porsche for driving too fast, was let off with a warning by an LAPD officer, who seemingly wanted to prevent the assembling paparazzi —who themselves can provoke bad celebrity driving with their own bad driving—from causing any more traffic chaos themselves.)
One wonders, given the incomes involved, why more celebrities don't simply hire drivers for their mileage-intensive nights of parties and premieres. Perhaps it's the privacy issue. (There are rumors of limo services installing cameras.) Perhaps it's because Hollywood driving itself, with its similarly motorized press corps, becomes a platform for image-making. "They don't want to spend the money to pay for a car service because they want to be photographed in their fancy cars," one "image consultant" told the Associated Press. Even arrests can be photo ops. "Paris Hilton being arrested just makes her more famous," publicist Michael Levine said after her DUI. Her agent, meanwhile, told MSNBC: "She's been known to have a drink or two."
Conversely, driving offers celebrities some illusion of normalcy. My wife, writer Jancee Dunn, once interviewed the Olsen twins. The "contrived activity" for the interview was to go shopping at a vintage clothing store. "I drove with Ashley, who could barely see over the dash of her enormous Range Rover," she recounts in her book But Enough About Me. "Ashley kept phoning her sister in her corresponding Range Rover, because the two of them weren't sure of how to get to the store." All the while, their discreet bodyguards trailed in yet another vehicle. Rather than carpool in a limo, a virtual motorcade was required. It's as if being driven by a chauffer is some relic of old Hollywood—cue the images of haughty Gloria Swanson carted around by the faithful Max (played by Erich Von Stroheim, who actually couldn't drive).
For a time, the staples of "just like us" photography were celebrities such as Nicole Richie or Lindsay Lohan, with handlers in tow, emerging from "traffic school"—that Californian institution where drivers are sent to do perfunctory penance. (Studies have suggested they do little to improve traffic safety.) "The 'Mean Girls' actress looked extra-girlie in a purple hoodie with pink shorts and black leggings," one Web site observed of Lohan as she emerged from traffic school before assuring us, "but later she got to kick back and enjoy her celebrity lifestyle at the grand re-opening of the flagship Fendi Boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California."
That sentence embodies the writhingly conflicted feelings we have toward celebrity. On the one hand, they are ultimately unknowable and out of reach to the average person, and so we seem to revel in the moments that, paradoxically, show them stripped of the mechanisms of fantasy that go into building this sense of exaltation. The U.K. reality show Britain's Worst Celebrity Driver plays on this feeling: dressing down celebrities who are still, at the end of the day, celebrities. (Britain's Worst Everyday Punter Driver doesn't quite have the same pizazz.) Perhaps contempt helps breed familiarity. Writing of the "Just Like Us" photographs, Virginia Heffernan aptly observed: "At first I thought, who cares? But then the magazines taught me to care, and mistake the new unkempt images for intimacy, if intimacy is something I might achieve by rooming with a celebrity at a mental hospital."
We also need to know, though, that celebrities can get away with things precisely because of their stardom; a counternarrative to the harsh blog judgment of celebrity drivers (type speeding tickets or DUI into TMZ.com) is the story of celebrities escaping a ticket with a smile and an autograph. In "celebrity driving," there is a poignancy in law-enforcement encounters because traffic is often the only place where most people actively experience the law in their lives. Who wouldn't want to have the moment, say, that Patrick Dempsey had, when pulled over for speeding: "The cop was really cool. He said, 'At least you're driving the Porsche properly.' He said 'Oh, I know you!' and I got out of it." Or how about William Shatner: "Most of them like to have a chat about when I was on Star Trek. Then they say, 'OK, Bill, not so fast next time.' " (Visions of "Warp speed, Scotty" jokes by troopers in mirror-tinted shades).
In this light, what is most revealing about the celebrity-driving episodes is what they show about our feelings toward those celebrities—and about driving. Writing in the Weekly Standard, Louis Wittig perceptively noted of celebrity DUIs, "the crime itself, which is more or less the equivalent of attempted criminally negligent homicide, takes a backseat to the hairdo. When Nicole Richie was popped—driving the wrong way down a six-lane highway, high on Vicodin, with her headlights off in the middle the night—the gossip blogs were, understandably, agog. But not for the reason you think. It was because the police report revealed that the scary-skinny Richie weighed just 85 pounds." When Mel Gibson was pulled over for DUI, it was his drunken slurs—not his driving—that attracted the most notice.
The lighthearted treatment of these episodes betrays the ways in which bad behavior in cars is still often viewed as a "folk crime"—something not entirely out of the bounds of normal behavior, something less than "real crime." Consider the case of DMX, one of a number of rappers known to be a menace on the road. (Note that traffic violations provide an easy way for gangsta rappers to burnish their non-law-abiding reputations without actually having to do hard jail time.) It is shocking that this repeat offender, arrested not only for DUI but for impersonating a federal agent while trying to avoid paying $9 worth of parking fees at JFK Airport, is still behind the wheel. His attorney hinted at our cultural laxity toward traffic laws when he declared, after his client was pulled over for going 104 in a 65-mph zone, "This is not a major concern and we are dealing with it appropriately. Basically, it's only a traffic violation."
Unless it crosses the thin line into a felony. That's the fate that befell the then-17-year-old Nick Bollea (a professional "drift" racer and the son of Hulk Hogan), who was jailed for "reckless driving involving serious bodily injury" (a third-degree felony) in a severe 2007 crash that left his passenger with permanent injuries. As the celebrity site TMZ noted, "[T]aking into account the last twelve months, anyone could have seen Nick Hogan's high speed car crash coming—from a mile away!" as Bollea's record was littered with at least four violations for excessive speed (and given a warning on at least one other occasion, according to one source, but not ticketed because of his half-celebrity status). There is a real question as to why he was still legally allowed to drive, given the violations and the risk profile for teen drivers, who die on the road at a rate higher than anyone. (In the United Kingdom, newly proposed legislation will see novice drivers lose their license after one speeding infraction.) But Bollea's case, viewed by some as just another celebrity driver behaving badly, reveals the big societal shrug we give to acting illegally behind the wheel. Celebrities drive just like us—they just get better publicity.
One way to measure the approach of the new year is to count the Holocaust films at your local multiplex. The holidays arrive just as studios begin wooing academy members with serious dramas, and there's nothing more serious than genocide. Over the decades, this award-baiting subject has enticed directors Otto Preminger, Sydney Lumet, and Steven Spielberg and stars such as Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Judy Garland, and Meryl Streep. This winter there's a slew of new additions to the genre, including Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, Stephen Daldry's The Reader, Edward Zwick's Defiance, and several smaller features like Good, Adam Resurrected, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
Or maybe new isn't quite the right word. If you watch several Holocaust films back to back, as I did recently (during the most wonderful time of the year, no less), you start to notice patterns. In fact, by my count, there are really only five basic Holocaust plots. Forthwith, Slate's taxonomy of the genre:
Good Germans
Before the Marshall Plan had run its course, Hollywood combed through the rubble looking for tales of German goodness. One of the earliest results of this search was The Desert Fox (1951), which tells the story of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. As commander of the Deutsches Afrikakorps, Rommel supposedly ignored orders to execute captured Jewish soldiers.
The Young Lions (1958) starring Marlon Brando fits into this category, too. Although protagonist Christian Diestl was not a virtuous type in Irwin Shaw's source novel, Brando insisted that his character be sympathetic. To accommodate the actor's ego, the screenwriters turned Christian into an honorable German who is shocked by his countrymen's atrocities.
Of course the most famous film about German decency is Schindler's List (1993). The real-life Oskar Schindler was, undoubtedly, good—he is the only person known to have gotten Jews out of Auschwitz. Lest that seem too slight, director Steven Spielberg threw in a rousing speech for Schindler, in which he declares "I could have done more." The latest good German is Tom Cruise's Claus von Stauffenberg in Bryan Singer's Valkyrie. Some might dispute the classification of Valkyrie as a Holocaust film, since it concerns the July '44 plot to assassinate Hitler and neither Jews nor concentration camps enter its frames. But the viewer is alerted to von Stauffenberg's goodness when the first thing he says he'll do "once we have control of the government" is "shut down all concentration camps."
Von Stauffenberg and his ilk were historical anomalies, but Hollywood seems not to have taken notice. In the mid-'60s, critic Judith Crist quipped, "[A] screenwriter, with a revolutionary glint in his eye was telling me the other day he's going all-the-way original; he's writing a World War II movie with bad Nazis."
Resistant Jews
Films about Jews during the war typically focus on resistance, which, unlike the camps, lends itself to moral uplift. Anne Frank never fired a rifle, but her survival for two years in an Amsterdam attic foiled the Nazis' ambitions—that is, at least until they found her. The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) is, in this sense, the first American film about Jewish resistance. It is not the darkest: Anne's despair is twice relieved by spontaneous group song.
Later resistance films lose the music as they move out of the attic and into the ghettos. Yet they retain the spirit of the line that Anne utters twice, shortly before she is deported: "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart." In the first American feature about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the television film The Wall (1982), a character similarly chimes, "[T]he only way to answer death is with more life." Another television film, Jon Avnet's Uprising (2001), also tells the story of the Warsaw Ghetto, and it ends with a triumphant speech by Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the resistance's surviving leaders: "The dream of my life has come true."
Edward Zwick's new film, Defiance, concerns the plucky Bielski Partisans, who fought against the Nazis in present-day Belarus, and focuses on Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig), who prances around the Belarusian forest on a white horse. At the film's end, a dying man tells Tuvia, "I almost lost my faith, but you were sent by God to save us."
Postwar Judgment
Culpability is a notoriously thorny issue among Holocaust scholars, since the scale of the crime blurred the line between perpetrators and bystanders. But Hollywood started issuing verdicts directly after the war.
Orson Welles' The Stranger (1946) was the first American feature film to incorporate documentary footage of the camps, which, it claims, were "all the product of one mind"—the fictional Nazi genius Franz Kindler, who "conceived the theory of genocide." The consolidation of German guilt into a single villain makes retribution rather simple, since all the protagonist has to do is find and punish Kindler.
Justice is more elusive in Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), which stars Spencer Tracy as an American judge flown in to preside over the trial of four German judges. The main defendant is Ernst Janning, the German minister of justice, who takes the stand against his lawyer's wishes at the film's climax and confesses, "If there is to be any salvation for Germany, we who know our guilt must admit it—whatever the pain and humiliation." So much for Janning, but Judgment also explores how the Cold War undermined America's determination to try rank-and-file Nazis. "There are no Nazis in Germany," an embittered American prosecutor tells Tracy at one point. "Didn't you know that, judge?"
The Reader likewise takes place at Nuremberg, where young law student Michael Berg witnesses the trial of his former lover Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). But the film is less concerned with Schmitz's crime than with her own personal tragedy. Embarrassed by the fact that she's illiterate, Hanna refuses to take a handwriting test to prove that she did not order the deaths of 300 Jews. Illiteracy, it would seem, is more shameful than the orchestration of mass murder and more dangerous, too: Hanna is sentenced to life, while her guilty-but-literate co-defendants get away with just a few years behind bars.
Survivors
There are two basic survivor narratives. Redemption stories, like The Juggler (1953) and Exodus (1960), frequently present Israel as the key to their heroes' deliverance and star good-looking men like Kirk Douglas and Paul Newman. By contrast, films like Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker (1964) suggest that the camp experience is inescapable and star homely actors like Rod Steiger.
Films that fall into the "no escape" group often unfold like mysteries, with the survivors' camp experiences functioning like clues to their present behavior. Sophie's Choice (1982) and Steven Soderbergh's The Good German (2006) fit the bill, as does this season's Adam Resurrected, which stars Jeff Goldblum as a mental patient who survived the Holocaust by playing the part of an S.S. commandant's dog.
The Fable
Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful (1997) is an Italian film, but Americans were happy to surmount the language barrier—the film grossed $57 million at the box office and Benigni won an Oscar for best actor. This story about a Jewish father who convinces his son that their internment is a game proved that you can depict concentration camps so long as you pretend they're something else. Two years later, Jakob the Liar (1999) tried a similar trick: Jakob (Robin Williams) spreads hope through a camp by making up stories about Allied victories. This season's entry is a British film, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which tells the story of the friendship between a Jewish boy and a German boy across a concentration-camp fence.
Though films across these five categories are rarely as outright cheery as, say, The Diary of Anne Frank, they almost all project the optimism that Lawrence Langer described in 1983: "[T]he American vision of the Holocaust … continues to insist that [the victims] have not [died in vain], trying to parlay hope, sacrifice, justice, and the future into a victory that will mitigate despair." As a Holocaust survivor puts it in the penultimate scene of The Reader: "Go to the theater if you want catharsis."
Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)
Dear Prudence,
I am a recent university graduate and am underemployed. After finding my field devastated by the economic collapse and jobs scarce, I started working as a clerk in a grocery store. The company is family-owned and offers excellent health benefits and a generous starting salary. I enjoy the work and have become friends with my co-workers, many of whom have made this their career. My problem is, when co-workers or customers find out about my diploma, I am inevitably asked what I am doing bagging groceries. This is a constant query as I frequently see former classmates and the occasional professor at my station. How do I explain that this job isn't for me without coming off as arrogant? I don't think I am better than my new friends at work, but I worked hard for my degree and am sometimes embarrassed not to be using it. How do I explain this without coming off as an elitist jerk?
—Underemployed
Dear Underemployed,
You're employed! For a recent college graduate, that's quite an accomplishment, especially if you were hoping to find a job in, say, the automotive industry, or finance, or journalism, or real estate, etc. The fact that you are grateful for the work and enjoy your colleagues must surely come through. And you say your co-workers know that this is just a temporary stop for you before you find something else, so they have probably been pleasantly surprised by you. So just answer people honestly, "Of course I'm still looking in my field, but until things turn around, I'm lucky that I found such a pleasant place to work so I can support myself." When you see classmates or professors, do remind them to let you know if they hear of any opportunities. And don't think of this time as wasted. (Here from the Forbes 400 list is someone who turned a job as a grocery clerk into a multibillion-dollar fortune.) You are learning many things that will be valuable to you when you move on in your career: being a reliable employee, getting along with your co-workers, and knowing what it feels like to stand on your feet all day so you can pay your bills.
—Prudie
Dear Prudie,
My mother was given up for adoption, and at 5 months old two wonderful people adopted her and gave her a very loving environment. She is now in her early 50s and has no desire to find her birth parents. I have two kids of my own and would like very much to find out our medical history for their sake. My adopted grandmother has the adoption papers, but when I have asked about them, she has never offered any information as to who the biological mother is. My mother knows the birth city and her original birth name, but that's all the information I have. I want my mom to find out who the biological mother is so I can find her and possibly learn about her family's medical history. I believe we would benefit from the findings, and if something were to ever happen to my mother (heaven forbid), I would not have the authority to open the file. How do I handle this?
—Looking for DNA
Dear Looking,
These wonderful people who adopted your mother are your grandparents, period. As you've mentioned, they are all the parents your mother has known or wants to know, and that should be good enough for you. For health purposes, your children have information about two biological generations—that's generally all doctors asks for in standard exams. If you're concerned about rare genetic diseases, like Huntington's, for example, only about 5 percent of people who actually know they have a probability of contracting it choose to be tested. As for the rest of the illnesses that stalk mankind—cancer, heart disease, diabetes—any doctor will tell you to feed your kids healthy food, make sure they get plenty of exercise, and get them regular checkups. It sounds as if you actually want this information not so much for medical purposes but to know your "real" family. You know your real family, so be grateful you have such a loving one.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence,
I've been dating my girlfriend for more than a year and half now and love her very much. We've recently moved in together and have been talking about getting married. This all seemed to come crashing down just a few days ago when I arrived home after work to find that she had gotten on my computer and sifted through my messages. She had become obsessed with a female friend of mine whom I used to date and am still fairly close to. The woman and I still talk maybe once a month and meet for coffee three or four times a year. My girlfriend found, in the course of her searching, that we had planned to meet for coffee a few weeks ago and that I had not told her about it. I see in hindsight I was wrong to keep this from her. However, I knew that she would obsess over the fact that I was seeing this former girlfriend. She went through e-mail, my Facebook account, and my cell phone to find out the last time we had talked. I feel very hurt that she doesn't seem to trust me at all and my privacy was violated so severely. I can't seem to get past it. What do I do?
—Bewildered and Scared
Dear Bewildered,
I think the best approach would be to offer to plant a listening device on yourself and hook your car and office up to a Girlfriend Cam, so she can stop snooping and just be free to monitor your every action. I know people are never supposed to snoop—but I have given passes to people whose trust has been violated in the past and now have grounds to feel it's happening again. However, there is no reason for your girlfriend to be suspicious about you. You should have the kind of open relationship in which you can say you're meeting your ex for coffee, but you understandably elided that information because you know your girlfriend is irrational about this. Now you've come home to find you've been more thoroughly monitored than Gov. Rod Blagojevich. And it doesn't even sound as if she's apologetic about this violation. She actually seems triumphant at getting "the goods" on what she already knew—that you stay in touch with your former girlfriend. You could try to work this out with her and establish guidelines about privacy and trust. But I'm afraid all this may be headed toward your realization that, unlike with your previous girlfriend, once you've broken up with this one, it won't even be possible to stay friends.
—Prudie
Dear Prudence:
I'm a musician who works periodically doing wedding ceremonies and receptions. The problem with this job is that friends love to line up events and try to get my services for free. One close friend, instead of asking me to be in the wedding, said that performing would "pay for my supper." I told her I couldn't make it. A few months ago, I agreed to play at a relative's ceremony and give her a "family discount"—which means my fee is a stipend. Now she wants me to also play for her cocktail party and asked if all my work could be a gift because wedding costs are getting high. This relative has a low tolerance for being offended, so it's difficult to find a succinct and nonoffensive way to turn her down. Any advice?
—Just Wants To Be a Guest
Dear Just,
Maybe your relative has such a low tolerance for being offended because she has such a high tolerance for giving offense. You know your mistake was agreeing to perform in the first place. In the future, tell friends and family that working during their social events means you can never enjoy the celebrations of those you care about most, and refer them to colleagues. Or if you're willing to do it, charge your full fee and don't budge. You're stuck having to play for this reception for a pittance, but she can't force you to entertain at the cocktail party or forgo your payment altogether. Tell her that you're sorry but you can't play at her cocktail party, and you're already giving her a steep discount but you need to be paid for your time because this is what you do for a living. Don't let her manipulate you into backing down, but do be prepared to be at the end of the line of her creditors.
—Prudie
Photograph of Prudie by Teresa Castracane.
This year, Dear Prudence letter-writers had questions about everything from diaper fetishes to food-spitters to self-mutilation. But the answers that got readers most riled up were those in which you felt I unfairly maligned three already outcast groups: supercilious boyfriends, smokers, and pit bulls.
My answer to In Love With a Supercomputer, who said she was dating a genius who had to win every argument, outraged many of you. I said he was a twit and a bully and suggested he read Emotional Intelligence. Many wrote I was the sexist bully because my estrogen-addled mind couldn't accept the fact that there are certain people—they're called "men"—who simply are always right. "This article is the senseless dribble people in your profession spout out about the differences between men and women. Never have any of you made the recommendation for a woman to find a partner who is more illogical, needlessly emotional, or with lower IQ," wrote one dissenter. According to another: "There's something you should have learned as a little girl: rationality and intellect drive the world we live in and contrary to popular belief your emotions are not good for the world. You strike me as an arrogant feminist who thinks you are better then men because you have a vagina." Oh, gentlemen, you sure know how to charm a gal!
Other readers offered armchair diagnoses for the boyfriend—from Asperger's syndrome to Narcissistic Personality Disorder to having the personality type INTJ. Whether any of these conclusions is correct, I was too harsh in the way I described this young man. But I won't back down from my belief that this boyfriend needs a new set of social tools because no matter his IQ, no one is always right.
Probably no letter got more angry mail than my reply to Nest-Featherer, who complained that her upstairs neighbors were tossing their cigarette butts into their shared yard, which she wanted to keep clean for her new puppy. I took the opportunity to trash smokers for their penchant for littering and their general defensive hostility about their habit. Smokers smoldered in response. Hundreds of you rebutted my remarks and said such gross stereotyping belongs in the ash heap. "The way you replied sounded like you believe all smokers are slobby pigs who also can't handle their emotions. You owe many decent, non-littering, considerate, and perfectly mentally normal folks a great big apology," fumed one. "The neighbors are rude people who happen to smoke—they are not rude people because they smoke," another argued.
The smokers were right—I unfairly tarred all of you. However, look at the sidewalks of any city, and you will notice that they are covered with cigarette butts. So, please, considerate smokers of America, intervene when you see your boorish brethren toss their trash in the street.
Everyone got mad at me for my answer to Uneasy. She was writing because her 20-year-old sister—a single mother with a toddler—just moved in with a roommate who had a nervous pit bull. I said both baby and dog must be intensely supervised when together and otherwise separated to avert a tragedy. Pit-bull lovers said my answer maligned their loyal, loving breed. Pit-bull haters said I exonerated these malevolent dogs and sent me articles from around the country on pit-bull maulings. Single mothers and others were outraged by what they felt was a gratuitous slap when I said that since the mother of the toddler had her while still a teenager, that indicated she lacked an ability to understand the consequences of her actions. "The fact that she is 20 and a new mother and single is why she's not able to clearly see the danger. But you lost me the minute you basically called her a slut," one reader bristled. "Two years ago, the woman had sex. God forbid! If you ever have pre-marital sex, you could end up with an unexpected pregnancy. So what?" asked another.
No, I did not call her a "slut," and, yes, I agree she is too young to be a mother. The "So what?" is that it's a tragedy that so many young women with no education, prospects, or partner are raising children alone.
I need to completely atone for my answer to Church Newbies about the young couple who were converting to Catholicism and found the elderly couple who were their church sponsors to be creepily huggy and free with their hands. I said the youngsters should tell off the oldsters, and, if that didn't work, instead of telling the priest, they should find a new parish. Wrong! As one reader, the Rev. Joshua Williams, wrote to me: "First, if this older couple might one day serve in some sort of an official capacity, their actions might leave the church open to lawsuits. Second, if I were in the priest's position, I would want to know so I could keep an eye out for the older couple and try to help them understand the detrimental effect their behavior is having on the church's attempts to reach out to new members."
I blew another theological question, according to many readers, in my answer to Oy Vey, a non-Jew employed at a small Jewish-owned firm whose bosses let other Jews leave early on Fridays in the winter for Sabbath but expect everyone else to work. Since she had complained to no avail, I agreed with her that the owners were behaving poorly. However, I advised she'd be best off to let it go. Many of you suggested she should take legal action. Instead, I agree with reader Dan Phillips, who suggested Oy Vey take the perfect Biblical passage, Deuteronomy 5:14, to her bosses and show them that this injunction means that on the Sabbath, all should enjoy a day of rest.
The dilemma of Terrible Twos, the father who got no pleasure out of interacting with his 2-year-old daughter, provoked a variety of reactions. I praised him for being able to acknowledge this unpleasant truth, suggested he might find his daughter more interesting when she became more independent, and urged that he look for ways to connect with her until then. One young woman in her 20s wrote that from girlhood her father was distant and uninterested, and when she became a teenager she made a difficult choice: "For the sake of both our sanity, I finally decided that the best way to have a relationship with my father was to have none. I hope Terrible Twos takes some of your suggestions. Otherwise, he's going to lose out on knowing his daughter and hurt her in ways he never consciously would intend."
One father acknowledged: "I could have written that letter myself three years ago. The important thing is that fathers who feel this way know that they are not alone. It's not an easy thing to admit to feeling. But now that our daughter is five, it's a different story. Your advice is right, time and growth change everything. I've gone from 'What did I do?' to 'I can't wait to get home to see her.' "
And one mother wrote in response: "I would love if my daughter would initiate play with either me or my husband. I would love if she turned to one of us and called us by name. You see, my daughter is autistic. That father should count his blessings that she has an interest in him and wants him to be a part of her world."
Thanks to this mother for the reminder that counting your blessings is good advice for us all. And one of my blessings is that I have such forthright, provocative, and insightful readers.
Photograph of Prudie by Teresa Castracane.
BATAM, Indonesia—It's not like there's a playbook on how to find a pirate. So what do you do? You start by heading to a region that's famous for piracy: the Strait of Malacca, a narrow channel tucked between Malaysia and Indonesia.
This probably would be a forgotten corner of the world if it weren't the sole waterway connecting the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea—and, eventually, the Pacific Ocean.
Every year some 70,000 ships pass through the Strait of Malacca. That's about two-thirds of the world's sea traffic, much of it crude-oil shipments heading from the Middle East to China and Japan.
Big foreign ships have been cruising through here for hundreds of years. So have pirates. That's because the strait is surrounded by hundreds of tiny islands populated by some of the poorest people in the world.
It's this contrast that has drawn me to the Strait of Malacca. I want to find a real pirate, not some Hollywood goofball wearing too much eye makeup. I want to know what it's like to be poor and to think the only way you can survive is to rob a ship. How hard could it be for me to find such a person?
My first contact is a local newspaper journalist named Iqbal. He has agreed to take me to a place he calls "the island of the ex-pirates." We're joined by another reporter, Arman, who will help translate.
We head to one of the main boat-taxi ports in the region. We walk down a long gangway that's propped up on stilts over murky, smelly water. We see row after row of pancung, the Malay word for long, thin wooden boats with outboard motors and brightly colored tarps to keep out the tropical rain.
This is what we'll take to the island of the ex-pirates.
The ride takes 15 minutes and costs about $1 per person. There's quite a bit of chop, but the boat sits low and its pointed bow easily cuts through the waves. Still, Arman gets spooked.
Out on the water, dozens of islands appear on the horizon, tiny footnotes to some ancient volcano. One sticks out from the rest: Singapore, the booming city-state. With its skyscrapers and Ferris wheels and malls and jet planes, it looks like a floating party from the future.
The rest of the islands are stuck in the past. Hilly and verdant, they have the look of so many islands in so many places along the equator: slow and sleepy and completely unaware of their own beauty.
We reach the island of the ex-pirates and disembark onto a gangway even more rickety than before. We head up to the main open-air market, much of which is also on stilts. Our contact, the ex-pirate, sends a message that he's not yet ready to meet. We should wait for him at the market.
We pass rambutans and mangosteens and dozens of kinds of fish piled up on the ground for sale, and we squeeze into a crowded cafe that at one time was painted baby blue. We take a table near the water.
Arman orders tea and the local specialty, prata, a crispy egg-and-potato pancake served with rich curry sauce on the side. A generous piece of galangal wallows in the sauce.
Iqbal says he thinks we'll have no trouble meeting pirates. They'll be proud to talk to an American, he says, proud to show us their stuff.
If all goes well, he says, we could be done in a few days. The ex-pirates will introduce us to current pirates, then we will choose one we like, follow him around, and be on our way.
I take a deep breath and let the curried steam fill my lungs. I look out onto the water—out to all the lush little islands dotting the view. I love my life, I think. Especially when it comes this easily.
Our man, Anto, strides into the cafe. He's strong and sturdy and talking on the phone. His shirt is unbuttoned down to the navel. He orders us up to his house with a wave of an arm. The house is just down the block. Word has it Anto owns half the market.
Situated on a couch in his sparse front room, Anto says modern-day Indonesian piracy started back in the '60s—and it all started on this island. The real name of the island is Belakang Padang; the words indicate the precise location in Indonesia. But never mind all that. Let's call it B.P.
Back in the day, Anto says, people came to B.P. from all over Indonesia looking for work. It was the closest they could get to booming Singapore and still be in Indonesia. B.P. was the land of opportunity.
At the time, Anto and his friends were just a bunch of young thieves. They would sneak out of their parents' houses at night to pull small jobs on the island. They eventually graduated to stealing motorbikes from Singapore and ferrying them back to B.P. at night.
At one point, they realized there was booty to be had on the water. Just next to B.P. is a waterway called Philip Channel, which is a section of the Malacca Strait. The channel is narrow and rocky and perilous, which means big ships have to slow down here.
Seeing this pattern, Anto and his friends started outfitting their own pancung with machetes and long bamboo poles with a hook fixed to one end. They would wait for a night with no moon, drive up behind a big ship, hook the ship with the bamboo poles, and climb up the side.
Once on deck, they would wave their knives at the captain and order him to give them the cashbox.
"We never hurt anybody," Anto assures us. This, I later learn, is what all pirates say. "We just showed them our machetes with one hand, and told them to be quiet with the other. They always did what we told them."
Afterward, the group—roughly seven or eight guys—would split the spoils and head to "happy-happy," which basically means booze and girls. It didn't take long to spend the takings. So a night or two later, it was back to sea again.
Anto says these days security is tighter than when he was a pirate. International attention to piracy in these waters has brought authorities from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore together to fight the problem.
But, Anto says, the underpaid local police aren't so diligent. They'd prefer to get a cut from the pirates' takings than to put pirates in jail and take home meager salaries.
I ask Anto whether we can meet some active pirates. He says he knows a few, but they're hard to contact. They come around only when there's an "operation" planned. Otherwise, they're hiding out on remote islands.
Anto promises he'll put the word out on my behalf, that he'll call a friend who knows a friend who knows a friend. And then he'll call us.
I leave thinking he actually will call.
BATAM, Indonesia—I spend the next three days meeting people who have no idea how to find pirates. On the fourth day, I wake up and realize I have nothing scheduled for the day, no solid plan.
I send a text message to Iqbal, the newspaper reporter who has been helping me. "Anto has disappeared," he writes. Anto is the shady ex-pirate we met a few days before. Iqbal promises to find me another ex-pirate, but he says it will take some time.
It takes a whole day before Iqbal calls to say he's found another ex-pirate. I practically run down to the hotel parking lot and jump into his car.
The ex-pirate has agreed to meet us in the back room of a recording studio owned by one of Iqbal's friends. He wears a black leather jacket and gold chains. He smokes pack after pack of Indonesian clove cigarettes and drinks sweet black tea.
He asks me to call him Mr. Black. He says the nickname is a description of his face, which is dark from too much time in the sun out at sea. He doesn't want me to know his real name.
Mr. Black says local boys become pirates for one reason: Singapore. Seeing those skyscrapers—that prosperity—just a few miles away is too tempting for a young Indonesian living on a poor island.
"In other parts of the world, poor people don't know what they're missing," Mr. Black says through my interpreter, Arman. "Here, it's right across the water. And it's why they become pirates."
Mr. Black could spend all night telling pirate stories from back in the day. I listen, even though what I really want is a pirate from right now. Still, I learn a lot about the business from Mr. Black. Like the Italian sailor who cried like a baby when Mr. Black snuck onto his vessel. The night his partner fell from the bamboo ladder as he was inching up the side of a cargo ship and was lost at sea for an hour. The Korean captains who always put up a fight.
Mr. Black says his group of pirates worked only on nights with no moon. That way they could stay hidden from the navy. He says they could rob three or four ships in a night, sometimes making tens of thousands of dollars. Then they would blow their money on "happy-happy."
"We had so much money, we would wash our feet with beer!" Mr. Black says. "But," he adds, wagging a finger, "what we didn't understand is that pirates never get rich."
"Why?"
"We enjoy too much!"
Mr. Black says that after a really big haul, his group would go to Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, book rooms at five-star hotels, hire half a dozen girls for each guy. When all the money was gone, they'd come back to the islands and start all over again.
It all came to an end when Mr. Black was arrested and did three months in jail for robbing an Indonesian ship. After that, he decided to go legit. He changed his name and got a job hawking food at a popular tourist site. He eventually started his own printing business.
Listening to him, I can't help wishing he had a son or a nephew who's still a pirate.
I try to tread more slowly with Mr. Black than I did with Anto, our first ex-pirate. Instead of asking him outright if he knows any active pirates, I say, "When you meet young guys who are still working as pirates, what advice do you give them?"
"I tell them to stop," Mr. Black replies. "I tell them there are only two ways a pirate's life can end: jail or death."
I try to keep him talking about these "young guys." At one point, I hear Mr. Black say the word nephew in Indonesian.
"They just won't listen to me," he says. "They won't give it up, no matter how much I tell them to quit."
By now, I know he's talking about his nephew. We talk for another half-hour before I politely ask whether I can meet this nephew. At first Mr. Black says that would be impossible. But then he says he'll think it over.
I thank him and ask for his phone number. Iqbal and Arman squirm, worried that I've offended Mr. Black. But this guy is clearly a sucker for the ladies. He gives me his number and says he'll do what he can to help.
Back in the car, I can't help it. I give Arman a high-five.
At the hotel I think about how bipolar this has been. One minute I'm dying of boredom; the next I'm totally high. Right now, I can just picture it all unfolding. The conflict between the pirate and his uncle. The scene at the seedy disco, planning the next attack while prostitutes serve us beer. The moonless night out at sea.
I wake up the next morning thinking I'm finally on a roll. I send a text message to Mr. Black, and he immediately messages back.
"Are you happy?" he writes.
"I am only happy if I meet you again," I write back. I'm still in bed, in my nightgown.
"I am free," he writes. "Try to call."
I do, but he says he's busy. He says he'll call me later. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow.
The next day I get a "How are you?" from Mr. Black. I text him back, but I get no response. I call an hour later, and he says he might come to my hotel tonight and meet me for a drink.
As the day passes, I want to call him again, just to confirm that we will meet. But I figure I should probably wait. I reckon it's like dating. Except with a pirate.
A tropical storm blows in, and I open the window of my hotel room to the cool, damp air. It rains and rains, and I wait and wait and wait.
I've been here more than one week.
The next day, I go through what has become a routine to pass the time. Clean the room, make tea, go to aerobics, watch movies, try to read.
I wonder if I'm being lulled into complacency or if my patience with Mr. Black will eventually pay off. I have no way of knowing which instinct is right. One thing I do know: I've spent way too much time in this hotel.
I start checking moon cycles online. I learn that the moon is waning, and in a week it will be gone from the sky. This means the time for a pirate operation is approaching. I want to get excited about this. But I'm wary of the letdown if I fail to meet Mr. Black's nephew.
Mr. Black calls and promises—"100 percent!"—that we will meet tonight. I shouldn't believe him, but I do. It's the beginning of a bad relationship.
BATAM, Indonesia—Mr. Black, the ex-pirate, doesn't exactly speak English. And I don't exactly speak Indonesian. The words we know in each other's languages are pretty basic. Eat, sorry, please, like, call, night, walk.
I try to call my interpreter, Arman, but his phone is off or out of battery power or out of credit. Here I've been waiting to meet Mr. Black for days, and when I finally do, I can't translate everything he says.
Mr. Black and I are strolling up to the second level of a shopping mall, heading toward the food court. He waves to a gaggle of guys sitting and drinking coffee and avocado shakes at a place called Godiva.
It takes me a minute to realize that one of these guys is Anto, the first ex-pirate I met—the guy who's been blowing me off for more than a week.
"I'm sorry, Kelly!" Anto says when he recognizes me. He speaks quite a bit of English. "I told you I was busy. I was busy with this!"
No problem, I say.
"But you should be happy now," he says. "You are sitting with all the pirates!"
Slowly it unfolds that the guys at the table are Yon, a notorious pirate just released from prison in Malaysia for hijacking a ship; Adi Bulldog, Anto's brother, who runs a crime syndicate; Jack, another pirate who recently did jail time in China; and some young guys who look like up-and-comers.
This could be exactly what I've worked toward all these days. Now where the hell is Arman?
Before I can ask too many questions, the guys invite me to go for "happy-happy." This is what pirates do with the money they make robbing cargo ships.
We pile into Anto's flashy SUV, and Mr. Black acts like I'm his date. Only he can open my door or offer me a french fry.
We drive up to an enormous nightclub called Pacific that looks like a beached cruise ship. We're waved through security and park in the back.
Inside, the belly of the ship is an eerie, unfinished concrete shell. There are rooms and hallways that haven't seen humans in years. I imagine myself locked in one of these rooms without food. After all, pirates have been known to kidnap people for ransom. I try to call Arman, but still no answer.
We take the back elevator to the top, the VIP section. I steal away to call Iqbal, the local reporter who's been trying to help me meet pirates. I tell him where I am, just in case something happens, and I beg him to try to find Arman.
Inside the VIP room we position ourselves on vinyl couches in front of a huge flat-screen TV and four smaller screens that list song choices. The songs on the list are old and out of date. "Feelings" and "My Way" are big favorites.
Anto starts queuing up songs with English lyrics. I know what this means.
First up is "Hotel California." Anto hands me the microphone. On the big screen are bizarre images meant to illustrate the song: shots from an old schoolhouse in Utah, fuzzy photographs of Jesus.
This is not the last time I will sing "Hotel California" tonight.
The music switches to Indonesian love songs, but still no Arman. I convince myself that even though I can't conduct elaborate conversations with these guys, I have to stay on. This is an important element of a pirate's life. This is why they never get rich.
Mr. Black sits next to me, trying to convince me to drink wine or whiskey, but I say no. Everyone else is having water and Coke.
Then Anto stands up and looks my way.
"Breaking news, Kelly! I'm sorry, but now we would like to take drugs!"
OK, I say. No problem.
"We like ecstasy. Would you like to join?"
No thanks, I tell him. I know exactly what he means when he says "ecstasy." Big, chalky, blue-green things that are some weird mix of speed, heroin, and hallucinogens.
"You sure it's OK?" Anto asks.
Go right ahead.
The guys line up in front of Yon, who distributes the pills. They really want me to have one. One guy puts a pill on top of my notebook. Every time he catches my eye, he points to the pill.
He finally realizes I'm not going to take it. So he pops it into his mouth instead. The music changes from Bee Gees karaoke to anonymous techno, and the pirates dance and dance and dance.
After a while, the lights go down, and Anto and his "girlfriend" tastefully slow-dance. Everybody is polite, offering to buy me things. But they're wary when I try to ask about what they do for a living.
Mr. Black puts my phone, pen, and glasses on top of a Kleenex so they won't get dirty. I notice he's slightly different from the others. He hasn't been taking pills.
I wonder whether he normally hangs out with these guys or if he's just doing it for my benefit. After all, he quit the pirate business and went legit.
Mr. Black watches me, too. He always checks to make sure I'm OK, even when he gets up to dance or take a phone call.
I start to understand that tonight might be his way of testing me, to see if he can trust me. I figure I should focus all my energy on Mr. Black so he'll introduce me to his nephew, the real pirate. I imagine the nephew as younger, more businesslike, and more forthcoming than these 50-year-olds.
I resolve to stay on as long as Mr. Black wants. I start dancing and finally accept his offer of a whiskey. Or two.
Hours later, Arman finally calls. By now the ex-pirates are too far gone for any kind of talk. I tell him to forget it for tonight. Mr. Black offers me a ride home.
Mr. Black drives an old white Indonesian-made truck with the steering wheel on the right side and rollbars out back. On the dashboard is sickly sweet air freshener set on some kind of time release.
Later, Mr. Black lights up a joint and offers me some. I tell him I don't smoke, but he won't let up. I finally take the joint and pretend to inhale.
"Maybe you give me some memory?" he asks in English.
"Sure," I say tentatively. "A photo?"
"Photos are for schoolboys," he says. "But a kiss is for a real man."
I tell him this will not be possible. But then I wonder if I could use a kiss as leverage. Something like, "I'll let you kiss me if you let me meet your nephew." After all, I think, it would only be on the cheek.
I look over at Mr. Black's lips and am disgusted with myself for thinking I could let him kiss me.
What is my problem? I think. Will I do anything to meet a real pirate?
I tell Mr. Black to drive me home.
BATAM, Indonesia—My relationship with Mr. Black, the ex-pirate with a nephew who's a real pirate, ends in breakup. He's too cagey, I'm too pushy. By the end, we're not only furious with each other; we're no longer speaking.
At this point, I've been stuck here in the northwest islands of Indonesia for nearly three weeks, and I've made no real progress toward meeting a pirate. The morning this hits me, I start to pack my bags. I'm ready to go home.
I check my e-mail one last time and see a message from a French academic I'd written to many weeks before.
This guy has done extensive field research on pirates in the Strait of Malacca, and I'd been hoping to hear from him while I was here in the islands. Today, the day I believe is my last day, he decides to write. I open the message.
"I've been on holiday for two weeks," he writes. "Sorry for getting back to you so late. Do you still need pirate contacts?"
Sure, I say. He sends me the names and numbers of two ex-pirates with strong connections to the current pirate syndicate.
More ex-pirates? I groan. But I figure I might as well try.
Something tells me the French guy's ex-pirates are different than the old-timers I met. The new guys still work as boat-taxi drivers around the islands. This is a common job for real pirates.
The French guy also puts me in touch with a sailor named Edi who's done legitimate work at sea and speaks some English. He'll help translate.
I call Edi, and 15 minutes later, he meets me in the hotel lobby. We call the two ex-pirates and arrange a meeting for later that afternoon.
The two men don't want me to publish their names, so let's call them Andi and Joni. We meet them in a hotel just a few blocks from mine.
From the moment I see them, I'm certain these guys are different from the other ex-pirates. They're scruffy, very dark-skinned, and they chain smoke. There's no artifice in the way they speak, no guile. I nearly squeal with delight when one of them burps.
We order coffee and juice, and I tell them I'm looking for a real pirate. They say the only way to meet one is to pay for it. Apparently the French academic and a group of European journalists paid Andi and Joni to put on masks and pretend they were pirates for a film documentary.
I tell them that's not going to work for me. I want a real pirate.
"I'm sorry," Andi says. "This will be very difficult." I've heard this sentence many times before.
I tell him I can't pay someone for talking to me. What I can do is pay for meals and travel expenses. Andi and Joni laugh and click their tongues.
"It's not enough," Edi translates. "Everything here takes money. This is Indonesia."
I tell them it's all I have to offer. I say it's really important.
"Why?" Andi asks. "Being a pirate is normal here."
"Americans have the wrong view of pirates," I say. "They think you are Johnny Depp or that you are helping terrorists."
The latter is a common claim made by American and Japanese officials—especially when they want to send their own navy patrols here to the Strait of Malacca. The Indonesian government has fiercely resisted outside involvement. Instead, they prefer to work with the Singaporean and Malaysian navies.
"I want to know the truth about pirates," I say. "About the way they live, about the reasons they turn to piracy to survive."
Edi translates. After a few hours of negotiating, Andi and Joni agree to go and look for a pirate. They say they have one in mind, but he's on a remote island. They say they need money for gas.
I give them about $50—with full knowledge that I may never see them again.
The next day, Edi and the boys are supposed to call by 10 a.m. By noon, I figure Andi and Joni have either run off with the money, failed to find a pirate, or, worse, found one but couldn't convince him to talk.
At 12:30, Edi calls from the lobby.
"We are here!"
"Who is here?" I ask.
"Me," he says. "With the guys."
"What guys?"
"Andi and Joni. And the one."
"He is here?" I say.
"Yes. He's here."
"And he's a real one?" I ask. "A real pirate?"
"Yes, Kelly, he is the real one."
It slowly dawns on me. After nearly a month of asking and waiting, he's here.
"What's his name?"
His name is Agus.
There is nothing romantic about Agus. He slouches a little when he walks up to shake my hand, crams his hands into his pockets as he steps into the hotel elevator. In my room, he sits politely near the window and refuses when I offer him a cold drink. His voice is soft and low.
He grew up in an Indonesian farming village more than 1,000 miles away from these islands. There, he made about $7 a day raising cocoa, but it wasn't enough to feed his wife, three kids, parents, and siblings.
"Then I met a man in my village who was successful," Agus tells me. "He owned a shop and his wife wore a lot of gold. I tried to stay close to him and ask him how he made so much money. After some time, he told me that he had been a pirate."
The shopkeeper told Agus to come to the islands and try his luck. He told Agus to start by working as a boat-taxi driver and slowly try to get introduced to pirates. Agus followed his advice. He joined a pirate group about four years ago.
He says he goes out on about six "operations" a year. The ideal night is one with no moon. Agus and his gang wear masks and black clothes. They fashion a long pole out of bamboo and fix a hook to the end of it.
They ride out in pancung, long wooden canoes with outboard motors, or in speedboats, depending how far they have to go.
Their destination is the Philip Channel, a small portion of the Strait of Malacca. It's a shallow and rocky waterway where international cargo ships have to slow down to pass.
Agus and the boys go out looking for prime targets. They call it "shopping."
"We do it in a team of seven," Agus says. They swing the bamboo pole up the side of the ship and hook it on.
"Then we climb up the pole to the ship. Two of us go to the bridge to catch the captain. The others stay and guard the crew. Sometimes the captain fights back. So we have to hit him and tie him up with rope. Then we tell him to give us all the money in the safe."
I ask Agus whether he's ever hurt anyone. One navy captain told me some pirates cut off captains' hands if they don't cooperate. Agus looks at me and shrugs.
"We only hit captains," he says. "That scares them enough to give us all their money."
If Agus and his partners manage to steal the money from the safe, each one can clear about $600 or $700.
"Sometimes we fail and come home with no money. But we still have to pay for the fuel. So we end up in debt."
I ask Agus to take me out in a boat and show me how it's done. I figure, like everyone else I've met here, he'll say no, it's "too difficult."
But not Agus. He thinks about it for a minute. Then he says OK.
BATAM, Indonesia—Here in Indonesia, it's pretty normal to believe in magic. Especially if you're doing one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.
Agus, the pirate, always visits a magician before an "operation." He brings the magician sugar, milk, and coffee as payment.
The magician's house is built on rickety, wooden stilts, the sole structure on a tiny island that's hours from any major town. It takes two cars and three boats to reach it.
Inside, there's a lot of yelling. The magician is hard of hearing and, his wife says, he has been sick. So sick he thought he was going to die.
Now he sits on the floor wearing a traditional Malay sarong and a fezlike cap. He waves a knobby hand at us to sit down. Closer in, I can see that he is blind.
Agus tells the magician he's planning to rob a big international cargo ship. He needs help staying hidden from the Indonesian navy. Agus has already been questioned by the navy once before. Now he wants to be extra careful.
The old man takes a bottle of water, shakes it, and puts it in his armpit. He mumbles to himself, then whispers into the bottle.
The whispers get louder and louder. At the end, he blows a big gust of air into the bottle and quickly caps it before his words can escape. The magician tells Agus that if he pours this water around the edges of his boat, it will make the boat invisible.
"OK," Agus says in English. "OK."
The magician repeats the same procedure with the second bottle of water. This one, he says, is for Agus' face.
It will make Agus invisible.
After this, the old man seems tired. We say goodbye and hurry back to our boat taxi. It's covered in centipedes. We push out of the thick mud with bamboo poles until the water's deep enough to start the filthy engine.
Back in town, Agus says he'll show me how he robs ships. We head to a row of small shops to buy supplies: a $10 machete, a face mask, a long bamboo pole, and a hooked knife.
On the edge of town, we climb down into another narrow, wooden boat with an outboard motor. This one's bigger than the centipede taxi. It's dark now, and we can see what must be thousands of lights out on the water. Some of them are tiny islands. Most of them are boats.
We steal out toward the Strait of Malacca. It is one of the most heavily trafficked waterways in the world. Seventy thousand ships pass through here each year. No wonder there's piracy.
Agus says it's too dangerous to take me with him on a real pirate operation. But he promises to record a future one for me on his mobile phone.
We pull up to a light tower that's about 20 feet tall. That's less than half as high as a cargo ship would be. The plan is for Agus to climb the tower as if he were robbing it.
He lashes the knife to the end of the bamboo stick. Then he swings the stick up to the top of the tower, hooks it on, and climbs up.
"I want to stop this work," he says, panting, when he comes back down. "It's dangerous out at sea. People have accidents, people die. I have a dream that one day I will make so much money I can quit this work and stop everything. But until then, what else can I do?"
Back on land, we walk to Agus' neighborhood, a slum set back a few hundred yards from the town square. Agus rents two tiny rooms in the house of a family from Sulawesi, a far-away Indonesian province. People flock here from such provinces looking for work and wealth. They rarely find either.
Agus' rooms are on the second story of the house, up a wooden ladder. The first room is completely bare, except for a blue plastic gas can. The second room has a mattress on the floor; a pink, oscillating fan next to the mattress; a broken-down dresser; and a pile of dirty clothes.
Agus sends one of the village kids to buy some water. He asks me for the two bucks to pay for it. We sit on the floor and talk.
Like so many Indonesians, Agus came here to get rich. He had a friend back in his village who'd made money here as a pirate. He told Agus to try his luck.
So Agus and his wife decided he would come here, make a nice chunk of money, then go home to buy some land or open a small shop.
That was eight years ago.
The problem, Agus explains, is that you just can't make enough money being a pirate. Sure, you might make thousands of dollars on one successful operation, but you might also lose money if you buy the fuel and supplies but then end up with nothing.
Needless to say, this has strained relations with the wife.
"Now my wife has managed to work for herself and make good money as a nurse," Agus tells me. "But I'm still doing this bad job and not making much money. For this reason, I feel ashamed. I cannot go back home with nothing. So I have to stay here."
Another reason Agus has a hard time saving money is "happy-happy." This roughly translates to booze and girls. But it's also an unwritten code among pirates: If you make money, you share the happy-happy with your buddies who might not have been as lucky as you.
The next night, Agus' friend is celebrating. He has just made a couple of hundred bucks stealing crude from an oil tanker and reselling it. He has invited us along.
Tonight, the happy-happy is a case of beer and a troupe of disco girls who travel from island to island and charge men to dance with them. The troupe assembles in the town square and blares techno music.
The girls wear jeans and white T-shirts and wait on folding chairs for partners. Agus points to the tallest one.
"See her? That's my girlfriend. Her name is Yuna."
Pretty soon Agus has spent his last $5 to be with Yuna. He doesn't touch her. He just closes his eyes, throws his head back, and dances and dances.
In the three days that I've known him, it's the first time I've seen Agus smile a real smile. I wave goodbye and take my final boat taxi away from the island.
Since that night Agus says he's been on two pirate operations. One was a success. He made nearly $1,000, a huge amount of money in Indonesia.
The other was not. There were too many navy boats out that night.
I called Agus a few times and asked about the recording he told me he'd make on his mobile phone. He kept promising to do it.
The last time I talked to him, though, he admitted he'd had to pawn the phone. Because, he said, he was broke. Again.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan—The fields stretched to the horizon beneath a mild winter sun. A stream ran through them, and somewhere off in the distance, behind a stand of apricot trees, smoke curled from the chimney of a mud-walled house. A narrow lane connected the house and the village life it evoked to the loud, modern asphalt highway skirting Peshawar. We stood alongside this highway, in one of the transport-company parking lots that have become the de facto boundary between Pakistan's ungoverned tribal belt and the city.
This wasn't always the boundary. The tribal lands don't officially start for another few miles beyond the outer edge of the highway, and those lands haven't always been thick with insurgents. But a series of violent attacks in December on shipping containers bound for NATO troops in Afghanistan are just one sign that the boundary between militant-held land and government-controlled territory is creeping inward with astonishing speed. One night last month, hundreds of Taliban fighters armed with rocket launchers crouched behind the apricot trees, moved purposefully through the grass, and finally, crying, "God is great," they launched a barrage of heavy artillery at the concrete wall that separates the lot—where the NATO shipping containers were parked—from the countryside. The wall came down, fighters streamed through the opening, and more militants appeared on the highway.
"I was on duty, but when I saw such a large number of militants, I ran," said Mohammad Rehan, a 21-year-old night watchman. "If you fire at them, it just creates a problem for you."
Militants have launched six such attacks in Peshawar since the beginning of December, destroying some 300 Humvees and other military vehicles as well as supplies worth millions of dollars. While these raids have obvious consequences for international troops in Afghanistan, they also mark a new level of insecurity for Peshawar, a city of universities, kebab stands, and carpet dealers that has always had an edgy border-town vibe but that now seems increasingly vulnerable to a Taliban takeover. Mahmood Shah, a retired army brigadier who lives in Peshawar, estimated that, based on the scale of the attacks on NATO supplies, it would take the Taliban as little as 20 minutes to gain control of the city's key administrative offices and essentially conquer it.
"It's just a question of time," Shah said. "Either the government becomes serious, or if the Taliban do it, I'm sure they will be faced …with a civil war sort of condition, because the people are arming themselves quietly. So you will find that the people will start resisting, thinking that the government is doing nothing."
Suicide attacks in Peshawar killed nearly 100 in 2008 and injured more than 200. In November, a U.S. aid worker and his driver were shot dead, two journalists were wounded in another shooting, and an Iranian diplomat was kidnapped. A December car bombing near a Shiite shrine at a busy market killed at least 18 and wounded dozens. Before dawn on Dec. 22, masked men attacked three of the city's elite English-language schools, two for boys and one for girls, tossing petrol bombs into classrooms, burning buses, and wounding several staff.
Since late summer, the Pakistani military has been fighting insurgents in the Bajaur Tribal Agency northwest of Peshawar, which lies on a key militant transit route between the Afghan province of Kunar and the disputed territory of Kashmir. It is also battling militants in the nearby Swat Valley, once a tourist destination, where insurgents recently declared a ban on female education and where reports of beheadings and public executions are frequent. The fighting has forced at least 200,000 people from their homes in Bajaur and pushed militants into areas that have historically been more stable, including Peshawar.
Malik Naveed Khan, inspector general of police for the North West Frontier Province, has primary responsibility for protecting Peshawar, a city of about 3 million. From his office in a compound straight out of the British Raj—white columned buildings, clipped lawns edged with chrysanthemums, servants bearing tea—he commands a force of 48,000 whose territory is effectively at war.
"I don't see this as a problem of the province, of the frontier, of Pakistan," Khan said. "I see it as a very, very serious international problem."
A gray-haired grandfatherly man who chain-smokes Dunhills, Khan estimates the enemy force at 15,000 to 20,000 fighters. But the problem is not so much numbers as resources. A police officer is paid $100 a month at most, Khan said, while the militants get about $165. Of the 1,000 police in the city of Peshawar, fewer than 100 are trained in counterterrorism tactics, only 300 have bulletproof vests, and one-third lack automatic weapons. Because of a shortage of ammunition and training, many police have not fired a bullet for the last four or five years. (For the sake of comparison, the New York Police Department requires officers to requalify on their weapons twice a year.)
"I want the West to know what we are in and to sound a bell of warning, because I have been telling everyone that this is not going to stop here," Khan said. "It will grow into the rest of Pakistan if it's not stopped here."
In 2007, Khan lost 72 police officers. By mid-December 2008, the annual toll was 148. More than 500 others have been injured, many seriously, losing limbs or eyes. Khan tries to raise morale by appealing to his officers' tribal pride, reminding them that the force has a long and brave history. Nevertheless, hundreds of cops have deserted in recent months at the urging of their families. Khan has raised death benefits for the relatives of officers killed in the line of duty from $6,300 to nearly $19,000 per cop, including insurance payouts, he said. Families of the dead are given a plot of land, and the sons and brothers of slain officers are offered jobs in the force.
To fund this, Khan persuaded the provincial government to raid its development budget, an unprecedented move. Like many, he sees development as key to countering the insurgency. He speaks of creating a version of Roosevelt's Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps in the tribal areas to educate people and put them to work.
"They'll have something to lose, and then they'll stand up to these Taliban," he said. "They have nothing to lose."
The attacks on NATO supply convoys have other consequences for Khan and his police. The containers aren't just being burned, Khan said; some are being raided by militants and thieves. In the markets of Peshawar, anyone can buy military uniforms, helmets, night-vision goggles, and high-tech weapon scopes, he said. He himself had bought 500 or 600 pairs of U.S. military boots, at $30 a pair, for use by his traffic police. (He had considered buying bulletproof vests, too, but they weren't the right grade for the weaponry his men faced.)
When I visited Karkhano market a few days later, I saw what he meant. The market stalls lead up to the arched gate that separates Peshawar from the tribal areas, lining the road to the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. A cop stood in front of the archway waving traffic through, while another, strapped with ammunition, eyed passengers sharply as they approached. The shops offered toy guns, toasters, and flowered bedroom slippers as well as a camouflage patrol cap made by Southeastern Kentucky Rehabilitation Industries, a nonprofit that employs people in work release and welfare-to-work programs, as well as the physically and mentally challenged, and describes itself as the "manufacturer of a multi-layered cold weather system … developed for Special Operation Forces."
We sat in the shop of a man named Mohammad Baz Afridi, whose shelves and display cases held DeWalt drill sets, various pieces of military gear, and, somewhat incongruously, a box of OB tampons. He showed me a Liberator II Soldier System Headset, covered in camouflage, with a mouthpiece and attached cord and plugs. The model is especially efficient because it can be used "with practically any portable radio model," according to the Web site of its manufacturer, Tactical Command Industries. (On the night of the attack at the transport lot I'd visited, the Taliban spoke constantly over wireless radios, and the night watchmen could hear commanders urging the militants on.)
Afridi served us tea in flowered china cups. He confirmed that some of his wares had probably been stolen from the NATO supply convoys.
"What will the transporters do if the Taliban come in their way and put guns on them and either kill the driver or the conductor?" he asked. "The transporter can't do anything, because the Taliban will kill him."
Among the more interesting items in Afridi's display case was a thick operator's manual for a laser aiming device that could be attached to a gun barrel, its cover marked "Department of the Army and Headquarters, Marine Corps." The manual described the product as "Class IIIb laser devices that emit a highly collimated beam of infrared light for precise aiming of the weapon." It continued: "The Aiming Lights are for use with Night Vision Devices and can be used as either handheld illuminator/pointers or can be weapon mounted with the included brackets and accessory mounts. In the weapon mounted mode, the Aiming Lights can be used to accurately direct fire as well as illuminate and designate targets." Afridi had sold the device, but whoever bought it had left the instruction manual behind.
Khan, the police chief, estimated that he would need about $300 million over the next three years to build a force that could stave off the militant threat to Peshawar. He said he would happily accept equipment in lieu of money, promising to return it when the fight was over. He had made his case to the government, members of parliament, think tanks, and the media.
"They come here, they listen to us and get very alarmed, but they do nothing," he said.
Indeed, the government in Islamabad seems numb to the threat. The day after the Dec. 22 school attacks in Peshawar, amid editorials calling them a milestone in insecurity for the city, the News, a Pakistani English-language paper, ran a story in which President Asif Ali Zardari declared that the situation in the North West Frontier Province was "improving." Last week, amid rising tensions with India in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan moved troops from the tribal areas to its eastern border. Although officials said the troops weren't engaged in combat, the areas they reportedly left behind—including South Waziristan, a tribal agency on the Afghan border southwest of Peshawar—are rife with insurgents.
On Tuesday, Pakistan shut down the road between Peshawar and the Afghan border while paramilitary forces raided the hideouts of criminal gangs and Taliban militants who officials say have banded together to carry out kidnappings and attack NATO supplies. But when the operation ends, the police will be on their own again. Peshawar is home to a military garrison and is considered well-defended, though the military presence seems to have had little effect on the deteriorating security situation. If Khan doesn't get more resources and training for his men, he fears that he won't be able to hold the militants back. And if he doesn't get help soon, it may be too late.
"These requests we fast-track, otherwise we don't need them," he said. "We lose the game."
When people talk about Iceland, they talk about numbers, distance, and the awesome lack of human imprint on the landscape. The Vikings settled the harbor. It is 2,600 miles from New York. The island's footprint is 103,000 square kilometers, an area larger than South Carolina but smaller than Virginia, and 79 percent of the terrain is what the U.S. government calls "wasteland." Nine-tenths of the country's heat is geothermally produced. Renewable sources provide all electricity. The population has grown to 313,000—this is slightly less than the residency of Manhattan's Upper West Side, up to 155th Street—and the temperature of the Blue Lagoon, because I know you were wondering, averages 100 degrees, even in winter. What else? Iceland's culture today is a model of North European savoir-vivre. Almost two-thirds of its university students are women; the literacy rate has been estimated at 99.9 percent; and the annual publishing output is, per capita, the largest in the world.
Data like these are trotted out whenever Iceland appears in the news—which, until this fall, was rarely—not because literacy rates are inherently telling but because they capture a vaguer sense of what the country signifies to outsiders. Iceland is, for many of us, the waist of the hourglass: the narrowest point in the flow of culture and commerce that buoys modern life, a place where the First World is winnowed and exposed. This is why we call its financial collapse a "crisis." It's the reason some of us with no clear stake are keen to learn what happened. And it's why, one afternoon not long ago, I stood in Austurvöllur Square in Reykjavík and watched a group of Icelanders rally against their government.
The protests have been a Saturday affair since mid-October, when the dust of the collapse first started to settle. Locals convene on a plot of grass downtown—just out of dumping range of a huge, ever-present flock of geese—and from a makeshift dais, speakers lay into the country's leadership. People go with homemade picket signs over their shoulders; collection buckets pass to fund the microphones and sound system. Everyone is in the loop. I hear about the protest from a waiter not an hour after I arrive in town. (And would I like more orange juice?) I get the details from a woman selling bus tours to a waterfall. "You will feel the anger and the disappointment," says a local writer just back from the countryside.
What I feel that afternoon, mainly, is cold. It's overcast and 23 degrees, and with powerful winds surfing off the bay not far away, it feels even rawer. Austurvöllur Square is nested between Iceland's squat, gray parliament house and an array of shops, posh eateries, and luxury hotels. Near the center, there's a statue of nationalist Jón Sigurðsson, immortalized with elbows out and hands drawn, roosterlike, toward his armpits. I do not speak Icelandic, so I spend the better part of the rally sidling up to people like a creep at a dive bar, asking them to translate what's being said over the loudspeakers.
"We have this huge problem, but all the people responsible still have their jobs," Tómas Holton, a local teacher, tells me, narrowing his eyes to paraphrase. He's tall and lanky and has a White Sox cap pulled down as far as it will go; through the rally, he's been hopping up and down athletically, like a boxer keying himself up, trying to keep warm. It's his fourth protest, he says proudly. He thinks the weather weeded out the rubberneckers. As the speaker prattles in an epic baritone, Holton talks about "transparency" and the desire for new blood in government, "people who don't have connections." I murmur that this all sounds familiar. Holton looks away to weigh a thought, and a slight grin plays across his cheeks. "Of course, it's difficult, in Iceland, to make something new," he says dryly. "There are so few people."
The protests are organized by a group called "Phalanx Against the Situation," which sounds like a James Bond movie, or a particularly boozy Dada cell, and the most prevalent picket sign reads "Óstjórnina burt!" which I am told translates to something like "Away with you, you corrupt government!" What, specifically, is being referred to here is open to interpretation. A woman in a turquoise hat passes petitions calling for the ouster of the finance leaders—one for the finance minister, another tailored to attack the bank heads. One grievance targets leaders' "lack of education," she explains; another blames them for trashing the "Icelandic image." A third is for (of course) "transparency." There are other signs: a piggy bank being roasted on a spit, a European Union flag X'ed out in red, and an austere black-on-white arrangement that says,
EURO NO
US DOLLAR YES
KRONA R.I.P.
Iceland's finances imploded in the manner of a dying star. To beef up its tiny economy, financiers had set up seductive online-banking systems, vacuuming in cash and loans from the world's powerhouse economies and then lending against this capital. Everything ballooned. One hundred percent mortgages were commonplace, and because Icelandic mortgages are keyed to inflation (debt rises as inflation goes up), locals found themselves dealing with, and owing, larger sums. Many took loans in foreign currency, planning to shuttle advantageously between that currency and króna. This was the burning ball of gas. As market concern spread this year, foreigners realized Icelandic banks were sitting on more capital than its government could ever insure. The market panicked. The fuel dried up. And Iceland's economic star began collapsing on itself.
These days, all that is back story. Iceland's more recent trials come from European circumspection, bad luck, and internal reticence. In October, Britain used anti-terrorism laws to freeze the British assets in one bank and seized the U.K. outpost of another. Meanwhile, the prime minister refused a call for parliamentary elections, saying the turnover could subvert Iceland's interception of its $2.1 billion IMF loan. Icelanders are upset about these things. They are unsettled by the cryptic management, and by the terrorist accusation, and by the IMF loan—or the idea of the IMF loan—and even by the prospect of joining the euro, which, some say, would straitjacket their work force. Their raw-goods market is in trouble, too: The price of aluminum, Iceland's biggest industry as of this year, has more than halved over the past five months. Fishing profits are down, in part thanks to a parasite infecting $20 million worth of exportable herring. Local sales of horse meat are, reportedly, way up.
In other words, to visit Iceland now, especially if you've been before, feels something like joy riding in the Maserati of a hospitalized friend. In 2006, when I first came to Reykjavík, a hamburger to go (squished-bun kind) cost something like $15. Restaurant entrées could easily set you back $60 each. Bound by a research stipend, I spent nearly a month that autumn, often hungry, based at the Salvation Army hostel, where the shower flooded daily by 11 and each Sunday, people (who were they?) would gather in some back room, thrum guitars, and sing spiritual songs. Still, I was in love: the cool, gray hills descending to the harbor; the oddly blue sunlight; the fervor of the clubs that sent licentious, dancing people out into the streets and home across the wee hours of the night. Iceland seemed to me then—it seems to me now—a place where the world can't wholly catch up with you.
What catches up instead, these days, is a peculiar, spent-too-long-in-art-school brand of grass-roots action. Just as the Austurvöllur rally ends, a string of firecrackers shoots above the parliament house, bursting like small flares. People huddle to the scene, and as they do, a vandal in a cheap Santa suit and gremlin mask ('tis the season) runs up and dumps a sack of potatoes on the parliament-house steps. They bounce and roll. The Santa gremlin disappears. An army of photographers kneels, essaying the potato-on-the-ground art shot. Iceland has become a "potato country," a woman says by way of explanation, so poor its people can subsist solely on tubers. "And also the leaders are, like, stupid, like a potato."
"Ah, I see," I say. I don't.
Early Sunday afternoon, I have coffee with Vigdís Grímsdóttir, a writer living in a quiet neighborhood just south of Reykjavík's main drag. Vigdís is the author of 11 novels, three collections of short stories, two volumes of poetry, a biography, and one children's book. The first thing she talks about after seizing my coat ("Take off your clothes. Not all of them") is how the couple downstairs lost their jobs and are moving out. As she speaks, her mind seems to commute between two moods—one distant and portentous, the other brisk, playful, and slightly frazzled. At one point, she stops midsentence to gape in horror at my coffee. "It must be cold!" she says in a half-whisper. "Is it bad?"
I've come to see her in the hope of finding out how one of Iceland's most prized assets—its national literature—is weathering the crash. Normally, early winter is the season of bounty, or what passes for bounty in Iceland, among local publishers. Almost every book is released in the two-month run-up to the holidays (called the jólabókaflóðið, or "Christmas book flood"), the idea being that hyperliterate, winter-bound Icelanders are, essentially, the world's most concentrated gift-book market. With production costs up and wallets slim this season, though, the plan risks falling flat. Roadblocks loom on the creative end as well: The government has paid tens of Icelandic authors' salaries every year, effectively helping to keep the country's literary output afloat. That sponsorship is almost certain to be scaled back, given changed regulations and the economic pinch.
At fiftysomething, Vigdís wears black the way some people wear red—a heavy shawl thrown dramatically around her shoulders, a whoosh of ebony hair—and she moves with the aloof intensity of an offstage actor. The literary world has come at the collapse with new fervor, she says, with previously standoffish authors stepping into the fray. "Now they're writing articles in the newspaper, much more than before," she tells me. "So many writers are coming from their shells." Vigdís has noticed a difference in public attention, too: Beginning last winter, when she was doing publicity for her latest book (a biography of an Icelandic everywoman), each reading she gave was packed. To her, this spelled impending crisis. "I could feel it in the air," she says. "There was something changing. People wanted to hear about—themselves, maybe." She thinks it showed readers' distrust of stories about highflying success and affluence.
So far, this year's jólabókaflóðið has not been hindered. Jóhann Páll Valdimarsson, publisher at the Icelandic house Forlagið, which is responsible for about two-thirds of the book market, says in an e-mail that sales this fall are strong and "probably up quite a bit from last year." He has deliberately kept book prices low, despite an increase in production costs, in anticipation of a larger-than-usual readership this winter—Icelanders, he thinks, seek solace on the page. Editorial cutbacks are inevitable, though. They will show up next year. "What we decided the day the first bank collapsed," he says, "was to postpone many titles we had in the pipeline for next year and 2010."
At a low table in Vigdís' kitchen, whose windows overlook the valley of southern Reykjavík, she talks about concern over next year's government stipends. Some writers have already started courting private donors, apparently; Vigdís has not. She says: "I always thought, 'Well, if someone wants to read me, he will find me.' " She also says: "I think we have to open our mind much more to the community of others, everybody, and stop rowing our boats alone, like the Vikings. … This beautiful little island—and it is beautiful—is just a picture of the world."
But what, exactly, is that picture? The next afternoon, en route to lunch, I stumble on a group of people gathered on the sidewalk outside the prime minister's office. They're dressed in black and carry black flags, one with the anarchist's symbol on it. The ringleader, a short, blond woman with a megaphone and a trash bag, shouts and pitches food at the building's facade. Mustard is squirted on the wall. So is something I've good reason to believe is rémoulade sauce. The woman with the garbage bag intones a spiteful-seeming speech, and then the crowd sets off across the street, over the grass of Arnahóll Hill.
Subsequent investigation of the crime scene reveals the thrown food to be raw meat, smoked lamb (deli-sliced), and two wedges of blue cheese. This, I learn, is "rat food," left for Geir Haarde, the prime minister. (It is also unsettlingly like my hotel breakfast.) The blonde is a witch who just cast an evil spell. By the time I follow them across the green, the witch has disappeared inside the jagged concrete bunker of the Central Bank, hoping to lure out (or perhaps to hex) Davíð Oddsson, the chairman of the bank's board of governors. The inner doors have locked behind her, so her posse waits in the foyer, where motion sensors nudge the outside doors open and shut.
The witch exits eventually, alone. Stopping to face the waiting crowd, she opens up her garbage bag and brandishes what looks like an oddly appointed sex doll. It has a pillow head, a hipster-tight white shirt with buttoned pockets, and a suit in the dimensions of Joe Pesci. A mop of yarn hair mimics Davíð's iconic thatch. The witch marches away from the bank, bearing the effigy on her forearms like an animal pelt, then she pulls its pants down and, with awkward flourish, whips the stuffed cloth buttocks with a clump of twigs. She throws cloth Davíð to the ground. She picks him up. She stuffs him back into the garbage bag and walks away.
Just a few years ago, this might have qualified as provocation, but today it's more like flogging a dead horse. For Iceland, Davíð Oddsson is an object lesson in diminishing political returns. He's spent most of his adulthood in government, first as Reykjavík's mayor and then, for an astounding 13 years, as prime minister. (He served briefly as foreign minister, too, before taking the reins of the Central Bank in 2005.) The Davíð doctrine is heavily inflected with the Reagan-Thatcher creed: At the peak of his power, he pushed for deregulation, privatization, and, eventually, tax cuts. He turned a budget deficit to surplus and set the groundwork for the growth of the past decade. From his last years as prime minister, though, he has been increasingly embroiled in controversy. Now he is the symbol of a leadership thought to have led its people off a cliff. The rush of criticism winds back to his actions well before the crash: Outside the bank, one protester lambastes him for enrolling Iceland in the coalition of the willing.
It is an accusation that sits uncomfortably, a reminder that this weird public Kabuki is, somehow, the glint off larger problems. The evening before, my girlfriend and I shared a geothermic pool with a National Guardsman en route home to the Midwest after a year abroad. "Afghanistan," he said softly. Steam spiraled from the water as he told us how he'd worked with Taliban defectors, trying to steer locals from the lure of short-term profit and from mullahs teaching a perverted, corrupt Islam. "They say, you know, 'hearts and minds,' but it's really more like carrots and sticks now." Across the pool, Icelandic twentysomethings on their stomachs in bikinis swirled their ankles in the air. A half-submerged couple nearby seemed for a moment to listen to the guardsman's stories; then they started talking softly in the tone that's used to plan the next day's errands.
Not long after my encounter with the witch, I come back to Arnahóll Hill. It is a holiday, the day Iceland got sovereignty from Denmark, and instead of a parade, there is a protest. Today's rally is just as inscrutable as the last one for me, so I talk with a group of people holding question-mark and exclamation-point signs against the wind. (The cumulative effect among the crowd is ??!?!!?!?, like punctuation in a late-night e-mail.) When I ask Sára Riel, who designed the signs, what they're supposed to signify, she looks at me as if I'm a moron. "I think it's pretty obvious," she says. "We have questions, and we have demands." I ask what the questions are. "Lots of questions," she says.
The rally ends. As people file back into the downtown streets, I talk with a guy selling civil-disobedience literature on a foldout picnic table, a guy who identifies himself, when I ask, as "Siggi, a local anarchist and nurse." Siggi directs me toward the bank, where "leftists" have resumed the heckling of Davíð. The insurgents made it past the foyer this time and to a second doorway where police in body armor hold a blockade line. The demonstrators raise their hands above their heads to show they are unarmed. Behind the police and their transparent shields, a gaggle of businessmen are milling. For nearly an hour, nothing changes. People occupy themselves as they might spend a boring car trip: They chant ("Davíð, come out!"). They sing. They play Icelandic hip-hop on a big, tubular ghetto blaster. Smokers light up, and the foyer of the bank starts feeling like a basement disco.
Finally, one of the bank administrators shuffles out behind the line of armored officers. He makes a little speech. The people cheer. The demonstrators turn and leave, exuberant. What happened? A bearded young man tells me, "They said, 'If you leave, then we'll leave.' And they left. And so now, we're leaving." He grins and pumps a fist into the air, then looks into the courtyard, where music is playing. It's twilight. The sky outside has the effect of being low and broad and slightly canted, like the fabric of a tent collapsing toward the pole.
"It was like a small victory," he says.
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Icelandic last names are patronymics: If Jóhann has a son named Leif and a daughter named Helga, the children's full names will be Leif Jóhannsson and Helga Jóhannsdóttir. (And if Leif has a daughter Þórdís, her full name will be Þórdís Leifsdóttir.) But because these aren't actual surnames—and because Iceland's population is relatively small and localized—first, not last, names dominate public life: Icelandic telephone directories are ordered by first name, and public figures are generally identified by first name in the press. Davíð Oddsson, who heads Iceland's Central Bank, would never be referred to as "Oddsson" alone—if a concise form of his name were needed, he'd be called "Davíð."
There are exceptions, of course. Some Icelanders have actual family names, passed unchanged from parent to child. These often date from before 1925, when it was legal to claim a family name by preference. In other cases, Icelanders have inherited a surname from a non-Icelandic ancestor. (This is the case for the prime minister, Geir Haarde: Haarde is Norwegian.) And sometimes last names are bestowed by a matronymic system instead. One of Iceland's soccer stars is Heiðar Helguson, whose name comes from Helga, his mother.
On New Year's Eve at 6:59:59 p.m. ET, an "international consortium of timekeepers" will add one second to the world's clock. How do you get to be an official timekeeper?
Earn a Ph.D. in astronomy and move to France. Tweaks to the official clock are announced by the Earth Orientation Center, a Paris-based subunit of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. The IERS was established in 1987 by two professional associations comprising thousands of astronomers and geodesists (people who measure the Earth and its movements) around the world. It has no dedicated staff or payroll, and it exists merely as a group of government agencies, universities, and foundations that have agreed to share data on the position of celestial bodies and ensure that our clocks are consistent with the Earth's rotation. Duties are divided among the member institutions: As the parent institution of the EOC, the Paris Observatory is responsible for deciding when to adjust the world's clocks. The task of data collection is shared among other facilities around the world.
So if you wanted official control over adding a leap second, you would have to convince the Paris Observatory board of directors to make you the director of the EOC. Even then, you'd have little discretion in the matter—the decision to push the second hand is automatically triggered when the world's clocks fall behind the Earth's actual rotational speed by more than 0.9 seconds. (All the director does is send out the official memo.) If you're interested in the day-to-day work of monitoring the Earth's rotation, you'd do better to seek employment at the U.S. Naval Observatory or other IERS member institutions where the data is actually collected. If you had the right credentials—e.g., a degree in astronomy or geodesy, with a focus on the behavior and orientation of the Earth—you might get hired for the job.
Timekeepers calculate precise and universal clock values with an array of radio telescopes located in Hawaii, South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and other locations, and focused on distant galaxies, called objects. Every day, astronomers at each telescope fill a series of hard drives with exact data on the radio signal from those quasars and ship them via common carrier to the other IERS institutions. Each institution compares the signals recorded at all the telescope sites and uses the differences to compute the speed of the Earth's rotation. Their calculations normally agree to within a few microseconds.
The system requires the close cooperation of scientists around the globe. Astronomers formed the first transnational society to observe polar motion in 1895, called the International Latitude Service. In 1919, the International Time Bureau was established in Paris and became responsible for adjusting a universal clock. (Until then, those decisions were left up to individual countries.) The bureau retained this authority until it was replaced by the IERS in the 1980s.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Dennis McCarthy of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Thanks also to Laurie Gabik for asking the question.
Israeli aircraft bombed Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip for the fourth day straight on Tuesday. Gaza officials said that, as of Monday, 364 Palestinians have been killed, and the United Nations noted that at least 62 were civilians. How did the U.N. determine which of the victims were combatants?
Gender and age. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency came up with the figure by sending emissaries to visit hospitals and other medical facilities. Under the Geneva Conventions and subsequent international law treaties, civilians are those who do not belong to the armed forces, militias, or organized resistance movements. But in Gaza City, UNRWA counted only female victims and those under the age of 18. North of the city, the agency attempted to get a more complete count by including adult men who were not wearing dark-blue police uniforms and whom community members identified as noncombatants.
At a Monday press conference, an U.N. staffer clarified that the count was only meant to give a credible minimum figure rather than a hard total. Nor did the agency intend to suggest that all men killed in Gaza City were combatants. Making clear distinctions between civilians and militants is difficult since Hamas (which is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, Israel, and other countries) engages in civic activities (like running schools) as well as military operations. Likewise, it's possible that some of the female victims and older children were Hamas combatants.
As a rule, the U.N. does not tally civilian casualties, relying instead on local governments for information. The agency made an exception in Gaza due in part to persistent questions from journalists who wanted to gauge the impact of the Israeli offensive on ordinary Palestinians.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
A disgruntled divorcee wearing a Santa Claus costume killed nine people last week when he arrived at his former in-laws' house and began shooting a semiautomatic handgun. The attacker set a fire before fleeing the scene but was burned badly in the blaze. The police found his body after he committed suicide and discovered that part of his costume had "literally melted to his body." What should you do if your Santa suit fuses to you in a fire?
Don't try to pull it off. It's possible for synthetic fabrics to fuse with burned human skin during a fire, especially when the blaze is intense enough to cause second- or third-degree burns. But the word fuse can be misleading: Your skin won't actually liquefy along with your clothing. (Flesh cooks under extreme heat; it doesn't melt.) Instead, a fabric can melt onto you like hot candle wax—when it cools off, it will be stuck to your skin. While you can safely peel off melted wax, it can be dangerous to rip off a fused piece of red-and-white polyester; if you're not careful, some healthy tissue will come off with the fabric and burned skin, and you'll leave the area vulnerable to infection or nerve damage. Instead, just run the burn under cool tap water to make sure it doesn't get any worse, and then head to the emergency room. There, doctors may be able to remove your burned epidermis and adhered clothing by sloughing it off with a clean towel.
A disposable Santa costume is one of the worst disguises you could wear if you're plotting an act of arson. Not only does baggy, ill-fitting clothing increase your risk of catching fire, but bargain costumes—like the economy option at MySantaSuit.com—are often made with polyester. Like many synthetic fibers, polyester takes longer to catch fire than cotton or linen, but when it does ignite, it melts. When the gluey substance reforms, it can stick to your epidermis. Melting fabric can be extremely dangerous, because it can cause scalding burns above and beyond direct fire damage. For that reason, the Marine Corps has banned some polyester- and nylon-based athletic wear in Iraq, where soldiers are in constant danger of fire exposure due to roadside bombs. (Pure cotton, on the other hand, quickly turns to ash, which crumbles and blows away from the body.)
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Louis Riina of the Nassau University Medical Center.
As a parent, you feel a special deep panic when you realize that your child—your beautiful, clever, funny child, who regularly surprises you with precocious bons mots, who built an ingenious bow out of tubing and rubber bands that can shoot a chopstick across the living room with remarkable accuracy—is having trouble learning to read. Meanwhile, all the other kids appear to be breezing along, polishing off Harry Potter books while your child stumbles over the difference between "how" and "now." You don't want to be one of those hysterical parents who gets all crazy about every little developmental bump in the road, but, hey, your kid can't really read yet, and the others can. In your darker moments you feel the desolate urge to ratchet down your ambitions for your child from valedictorian to graduating at all.
Such fears may be exaggerated, but they're not irrational. Reading ability does predict school achievement and success (which is, of course, related to income, health, and other factors), and reading gains ever greater importance beyond school, as more jobs are now based on information and technology. Failure to read places significant limits on how one fares in other parts of life. And a lot of people never do learn to read well: Approximately 40 percent of fourth-grade children in the United States lack basic reading skills; 20 percent of all graduating high-school seniors are classified as functionally illiterate (meaning that their reading and writing skills are insufficient for ordinary practical needs); and about 42 million adults in the United States cannot read. So you're not nuts to take a reading problem seriously.
Now for some perspective. First, let's take a moment to recognize that compared with the development of oral language, the acquisition of reading is unnatural. Speech and the ability to understand speech can be considered the result of a natural process in the sense that the requisite skills emerge without formal training. Several species of animal employ sounds such as clicking, whistles, song, or foot tapping in a fashion that constitutes focused and targeted communication (and dolphins actually seem to have names for one another). Before children can speak fluently, they move from sounds to words, words to phrases, and so on, acquiring their growing expertise from exposure to the speech around them. They then make efforts to speak, with little formal guidance. By contrast, children must be taught to read.
The good news for kids who have trouble reading is that while a deficiency in reading may look like an across-the-board failure, it is often a local problem in just one or two of the components that add up to the ability to read. Reading, like golfing or playing the guitar, is not one big global skill but a constellation of many smaller ones. When we read fluently, the little skills weave together so seamlessly that they look like a single expertise.
It's important to look at the components because a holdup in the development of any single one may be at fault in a child's poor performance in reading. If we can identify the component that's not doing its share, we can do a great deal to improve reading. The components that make up reading are interrelated and overlapping, but distinguishable:
Vocabulary: knowing the meanings of words. A child's comprehension of what is read depends on this. Better vocabulary better prepares a child for reading.
Comprehension: understanding and being able to interpret what is read, connecting the printed words and sentences with human experience.
Phonological awareness: identifying and manipulating units of oral language, such as words, syllables, and onsets (beginnings of words) and rhymes. Children who have phonological awareness can recognize that sentences are made up of words, words can be broken down into sounds and syllables, sounds can be deleted from words to make new words, and different words can begin or end with the same sound or have the same middle sound(s).
Decoding: breaking down words into their constituent sounds and building words from those sounds. This begins with blending sounds ("puh" plus "al" equals "pal") and extends into sounding out words the child has never seen before by recognizing the sounds of letters and syllables that form them.
Fluency: reading smoothly with accuracy, speed, and expression that conveys the sense of what's being read.
As a parent with no particular professional expertise in teaching literacy, there's a lot you can do on the level of normal play and routine home life to promote reading—and without turning it into a chore or a high-pressure struggle.
Parents can begin working on the components of reading when their child is still an infant and extend the process throughout childhood. To begin with, the more the child knows about oral language, the better. When she begins to read she will draw upon a reserve of expertise that she first built up as a speaker and listener: vocabulary, comprehension, phonological awareness, connecting words to things.
With infants, talk to the child and encourage him to make a range of talklike sounds. Begin reading to the child, and keep books around, including some within the child's reach. Do what you can to make reading fun, enjoyable, peaceful, and engaging, setting the stage for what comes next at the toddler level. You are building command of sounds, love of reading, and an appreciation of the value and importance of books.
With toddlers and preschoolers, it helps to connect reading to some routine such as bed time, nap time, or a pre- or after-meal lull. Select topics she likes; let the child select books for you to read. Get in the habit of activities or games that rhyme and otherwise play with sounds: songs, jingles, made-up phrases (e.g., "Billy is silly" to catch the rhyming sounds, "Sally sounds silly" to catch the sound of the initial S). Nursery rhymes are especially rich in words, rhyming, and other fundamentals. Talk about a greater range of subjects, even very mundane ones—like pointing to the parts of a car or animal in an illustration and labeling them. As you read, stop and ask a gentle question: "What do you think Babar is thinking here?" or "What do you think will happen next?" These are great for comprehension. If the question is too difficult, offer a little more guidance by attaching a statement: "I'll bet Babar is a little lonely. What do you think would make him feel better?" Also, you can encourage your child to experiment with writing, which helps reading because she uses sounds to try to write the word. You might see the child write "sn" for "sun," a great start that shows awareness of sounds and the breakdown of words into sounds.
As your child continues in elementary school and begins to work hard during the school day on reading, it's a good idea to continue reading with and to him, mixing in casual writing practice (some kids will go for the idea of alternating entries in a journal with a parent) and talking over dinner and in other family settings about what the child has read. If there's a series of books that speaks to one of your child's enthusiasms, helping him get into that series will allow him to become familiar with continuing characters and engage with a larger story, which makes even new books seem familiar. Keep a dictionary around and easily accessible, and use it once in a while, inviting your child to do this with you. The dictionary not only reinforces vocabulary and comprehension, it helps your child decode words by showing that they are composed of syllables that can be sounded out. Make up word games to play while driving or in a store. "Think of words that sound like snow" is good for a first or second grader, but you can work up to more complicated games for older children. If you make the play competitive (if your family's into that), please resist the temptation to rattle off 50 words in a row and then do your special taunting wiggly victory dance. And, of course, continue to show by your actions and not just your pronouncements that reading is engaging, relevant, and a path to fresh experiences. Keep books around where your child can pick them up in the natural course of things. And don't forget to pick up a book yourself. Model the desired intimacy with books; don't just preach it.
You can't add becoming a full-time reading tutor to the already full-time demands of parenting, and children will vary in interest, ability, and attention, so you'll inevitably have to select just a few of the many possible activities to promote reading skills. In general, go for regularity—a little almost every day, as part of a routine that links reading to the more relaxed moments in the day—rather than a Shakespeare marathon one Saturday a month. And when setting priorities, bear in mind that two activities are clearly the most critical:
Reading may be important and complex and very scary when your child has trouble with it, but parents should take heart in remembering that mundane low-pressure practice during games and other activities with you can make an enormous difference. Even a slightly increased sensitivity to breaking down sounds or rhyming, even a slightly heightened familiarity with books and motivation to engage with them, can provide a significant boost at school. Reading preparation is at the top of the list of factors that make a difference in school achievement. Such preparation need not—and should not—feature threats, severity, and drudgery. Instead, help your child to read by doing what you do anyway—playing with him, talking with her—in a slightly more purposeful manner.
You may well have questions. Here are some common ones.
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How will I know if my child has a reading problem?
The news usually comes in one or more of three ways.
Can't I just wait until the child gets to school, where they have teachers trained to teach reading?
You could, but it would be better if you did not. Practicing the components of reading in the home doesn't mean you force reading before your child is ready to, but you can help develop important skills without rushing the process, and the child who does practice those skills will do better when he does get to school and is ready to read in earnest. Studies show that having more of the component skills in place at age 5 predicts better school achievement at ages 7 and 15.
What do I do if I think my child has a reading problem?
A reading evaluation can be very important. A trained specialist can identify weakness in any of the component skills and will know how to work on it. Bear in mind that the child's negative reaction to reading alone will not necessarily show you where the problem is. Your best bet is to ask your child's teacher, school psychologist, or principal to bring in a reading specialist. Or if you prefer to seek out help on your own, you can do your own search for a reading specialist online or in the phone book. A little respectful tact in dealing with your child's teacher may well be necessary, but you're not questioning the teacher's competence or going over her head by consulting a specialist. Reading is a well-developed area of educational specialization, with masters and doctoral-level professionals who can offer very focused assistance that goes beyond what can happen in the classroom. Plan to work with the teacher, as will any reading specialist your child ends up seeing.
There are more serious problems—auditory disorders, dyslexia, pervasive developmental disorder—that can lead to reading impairment. One reason to go to a specialist is that there are different strategies associated with addressing each of the many causes of a reading problem.
What if my child can read, but just won't? What if my child just has an attitude problem?
You can be certain of motivational problems only if all of the component skills are well established. As a parent, you probably cannot determine this on your own. But if you've taken your child for a reading evaluation and the problem really is just motivational, then you might try the following: Establish more reading routines; engage in more talking about reading at the dinner table; have the child select a book to read together at the book store; switch to engaging magazines or something else other than a book that has words to read; read stories connected to movies, and see the movies with the child.
If my child is pulled out of class for an intensive reading program or I enroll her in an outside program for a few weeks, will that bring her up to speed?
A few weeks in an intensive reading program, all by itself, probably will not be enough. A program that is sustained and supported in the home is more likely to have staying power. Research suggests that much can be done to help the child and build the skills needed, and that steady progress takes precedence over a quick fix. Most of the time, the mundane, gamelike activities I've discussed above will go far to improve reading and complement school activities. If you can start early, all the better. If you have the option, select day care, preschool, and kindergarten that emphasize sounding out, rhyming, and other pre-reading skills.
But do not leave the teaching of reading to the school. Without becoming a whip-cracking achievement monster, you can accomplish a great deal as part of a regular routine of play and home life.
For more information, try these sources:
National Institute for Literacy
National Right to Read Foundation
The Tale of Despereaux runs 87 minutes, and for at least one-third of them, my 5-year-old son, Simon, watched the movie with a pained expression and his hands over his ears. The story, about a book-loving mouse who rescues a princess by defeating a horde of rats who have trussed her up in a dungeon, is rated G for general audiences. It seems pitched to the 4-to-maybe-7-year-old set—we'd listened to the audiobook on a long drive last summer, and my 8-year-old dismissed the movie for seeming too babyish. Simon and his 6-year-old friend Charlotte, on the other hand, sat down in the theater with their cherry Slush Puppies and settled in for a good fairy tale.
Why, given this likely audience, did the moviemakers feel the need to include extended sequences with fear-pumping music; a giant menacing cat that charges after Despereaux in a gladiator ring; and Botticelli, the torture-obsessed leader of Rat World? And what's the point of a G rating if movies like Despereaux fall into that category? This movie confirms my feeling that it's past time to replace G with better age-tailored guidance. I remember sad G-rated kids' movies from childhood: Disney classics like Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi. But my kids didn't find Bambi distressing. Instead, what's hard for them to handle are new movies, ostensibly created for their age group, from which they emerge metaphorically dripping in sweat, wrung out by an hour and a half of suspense and overexcitement.
The official description of G from the Motion Picture Association of America is "[n]o nudity, no sex, no drugs, minimal violence, and limited use of language that goes beyond polite conversation." But surely G doesn't reliably make good on the promise of "minimal violence"—or at least not with any definition of violence that actually reflects what kids find disturbing. Despereaux is the latest in a line of recent examples that have unwound my kids or the kids of friends. (Other villains: Finding Nemo, for the barracuda* that eats the mom and most of the eggs; The Lion King, for Mufasa's murder; Cars, for the wildly fast-paced action; Swiss Family Robinson, for the pirates; Wall-E, for the landing of the spaceship and attempted shooting; and Monsters, Inc., for all the roaring at the outset.)
Perhaps the problem stems from the changing nature of animation. When Road Runner sends Coyote hurtling off a cliff, kids generally shrug off the calamity because they understand that the cartoon is all an utter fake, played for humor. Despereaux, by contrast, has the kind of Shrek-like animation that left Simon and Charlotte debating, in their after-movie analysis, whether the rats and mice were real. Simon thought maybe they were, because the eyes and claws looked lifelike. Charlotte thought not, but she wasn't completely sure, and, in any case, she found the head of Ratworld really creepy.
When the animals (and people) are animated with such technical skill that they look like they could come to life, some kids lose their tolerance for watching them hurt each other. This is one of the reasons that listening to Despereaux, the book, read aloud was charming while watching it unfold on the movie screen wasn't. At the movie's denouement (spoiler warning), the huge cat follows Botticelli into the mouth of a dark chest. The door shuts behind him; muffled whimpers and rattling can be heard within. At this point, Simon shut his eyes in addition to covering his ears, and from a few rows of ahead of us—at that exact torturous moment—we heard distressed cries of "No! No!" from another child in the audience. Botticelli was clearly the movie's bad guy, but that didn't mean kids wanted to watch torture inflicted on him barely off screen.
Complaints from parents about the MPAA's ratings are an old story. But most of the debate I've followed has been about how much sex and cursing should appear in a movie rated PG or R; hence the addition of the midway point, PG-13. When my kids are older, maybe I'll care about that, but at the moment, sex and profanity matter much less to me than suspense and violence in movies made for kids. And, historically speaking, the G rating has shifted meaning over time. From 1968, when the ratings system began, until the mid-1970s, as I learned from this helpful Wikipedia entry, G included "mildly adult mainstream films such as Airport, Planet of the Apes, and 2001: A Space Odyssey." Then it became the rating for kids' films, which means that "G-rated movies from the 1960s and 1970s have often been re-rated PG in later years." At the same time, however, violence in G-rated movies increased through the year 1999. Kimberly Thompson, the Harvard public health researcher who made that finding in a 2000 medical journal article, noted a "great variation in the amount of violence in these films ranging from 6 seconds to 24 minutes, with an average of 9.5 minutes of violent scenes." That's a lot of heart-thumping.
In a follow-up review four years later, Thompson found that the level of violence in G movies declined slightly from 2001 to 2004. (Though that's not the case for PG and PG-13 movies, in which sex and violence increased.) And in the G movies, animation often meant license to kill. Looking at 79 G-rated films released since 1992, 50 of them animated and 29 not, Thompson found that the cartoons had "a significantly higher content-based score for violence." Connect that to the lifelike animation in films like Despereaux, and it's clear why G is useless for shielding a child from distress or nightmares. As Thompson concludes, "the current rating system may provide a false sense of security about violent content in animated films."
Which explains why alternate rating systems have appeared on the scene. Thompson's article directed me to two: Kids-in-Mind and Screen It. You have to pay to join the second one—the sample reviews on the part of the site that I could see for free looked potentially useful, but they weren't obviously attached to a numbers-based rating score. Kids-in-Mind is free, well-organized, lists a substantial number of G-rated movies, and offers a three-part ratings score for sex/nudity, violence/gore, and profanity. I wasn't sure, though, about the reviewers' conclusions. Despereaux was rated 1.3.1, giving it a score of three out of 10 for violence/gore—the same or a lower score as movies my kids have watched serenely, like Babe, Curious George, The King and I, and Muppet Treasure Island. Maybe this is about the difference between quickie punches, kicks, and shootings, which my kids don't usually mind, and extended suspense, which keeps them up at night.
I'll go back to Kids-in-Mind for suggestions of movies with scores of 1 or 2 for violence—the "minimal" kind that the G rating is supposed to ensure. And I'll also pay closer attention to the notes reviewers write about kids' movies, like this one in the New York Times from Manohla Dargis: " 'The Tale of Despereaux' is rated G (General audiences). Some children and city-raised adults might find all the hungry, scurrying rats a bit (or very) creepy." That doesn't capture all my concerns about this mouse misadventure. But it's better than that bland and empty G.
Correction, Dec. 31: The article said a shark ate Nemo's mother and siblings. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
It seems to have been agreed by every single media outlet that only one group has the right to challenge Obama's promotion of "Pastor" Rick Warren, and that group is the constituency of politically organized homosexuals. But why should that be? Last week, I pointed out that Warren maintains that heaven is closed to Jews and that his main theological mentor was a crackpot "end-of-days" ranter. Why is this not to count against him as well? Do we need our presidential invocation to be given by a bigmouth clerical businessman who is, furthermore, a religious sectarian? Let me add a little more to the mix. In November 2006, Warren made a trip to Syria and was granted an audience with the human toothbrush who has inherited control of that country and all its citizens. Bashar Assad, the dictator of Syria, is also a religious sectarian—his power base is confined to the Alawite sect—and in the intervals of murdering his critics in Lebanon, he does not expect to receive very many distinguished American or European guests. Of late, the most eminent I can think of have been David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and George Galloway of Britain's so-called Respect Party, and I believe only Galloway—an old fan of Baathism in all its forms—got an audience with the Grand Toothbrush himself.
Whatever time Warren managed to get with the dear bristled leader was not wasted—you should check out the hilarious parody of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza that accidentally results from the official photograph—and whatever hospitality he received from the Syrian authorities did not go unreturned. "Syria," he told his viewers back home by video, is "a moderate country, and the official government rule and position is to not allow extremism of any kind." This is a highly original way to describe a regime that is joined at the hip with the Iranian theocracy, that is the patron of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and that is the official and unabashed host of the fugitive Hamas leadership whose military wing directs massacre operations from Damascus itself. (One might also add that the Syrian Baath Party's veteran defense minister,* Mustafa Tlas, published a book under his own name that accused Jews of using the blood of non-Jewish children for the making of those ever-menacing Passover matzos. I suppose it depends how you define extremism.)
According to an undenied report from the Syrian state news agency, SANA, Warren followed his Assad meeting with another get-together, this time with a mufti. The resulting press communiqué read like this:
The Mufti called for conveying the real image of Syria, national unity and its call to spread peace, amity and justice to the American people which the US has distorted their image throughout the world. Pastor Warren expressed admiration of Syria and the coexistence he saw between Muslims and Christians, stressing that he will convey this image to his church and country.
(As one who has spent time in Syria, I can confirm that the official translations are indeed of that abysmal level. But Warren cannot wriggle out in this fashion, because most of the worst of what he said was recorded and transmitted in his own voice.) Our good pastor also found the time to tell his captive audience—if I may use such an unoriginal phrase in a literal way—that 80 percent of his countrymen opposed the administration's policy in Iraq. Assume yourself, dear reader, to be one of that possible 80 percent. Did you ever ask to be spoken for by Warren, who was a guest of a regime that sponsors al-Qaida infiltrators in Iraq, or to see him denounce the administration in front of an audience of Syrians that had no choice but to listen to whatever it was told? For shame.
And a shame, too, that on Inauguration Day we may also have to stand still—out of respect rather than fear, it is true—and listen to a man who is either a half-witted dupe, a hopeless naif, a cynical tourist who does favors for the powerful, a religious nut bag, a cowardly liar, or perhaps some unappetizing combination of all five. I personally think that the all-five answer is the correct one, because you cannot just find yourself in Syria, smirking into the face of the local despot and being treated like a treasured guest. The thing has to be arranged, and these things take time. So what was the motive? Listen again to Warren's driveling broadcast for the folks back home at the megachurch:
In fact, you know Saul of Tarsus—Saul was a Syrian. St. Paul, on the road to Damascus, had his conversion experience, and so Christians have been here the longest, and they get along with the Muslims, and the Muslims get along with them. There's a lot less tension than in other places.
I can absolutely see what Warren hoped to get out of this sordid little trip, the evidence of which he vainly tried to conceal when it threatened to become embarrassing. He wanted to be on video for his open-mouthed followers as he posed "on the road to Damascus." And he didn't care what deals he had to make, with Baath and Toothbrush Central Command, in order to bring off such a fundraising coup. But now it's the sandals of Obama that are being exploited by the same tub-thumper, and one has not merely a right but a duty to object to having as an inaugural auxiliary a man who is a pushover for anti-Semitism, Islamic sectarianism, "rapture" theology, fascist dictatorship, 10th-rate media trade-offs, and last-minute panicky self-censorship all at the same time. Is there nobody in the Obama camp who can see that this is not just a gay issue? And is there no gay figure who can say that Warren is objectionable for reasons that have more to do with decency, democracy, and the Constitution? The televised, Bible-bashing entrepreneur is perhaps the single most unattractive and embarrassing phenomenon that modern American culture has ever produced. It would be nice if we could begin a new era in the absence of this racket and these racketeers, and if enough people can find their voices, we still may be able to do so.
Correction, Dec. 29, 2008: This article originally identified Mustafa Tlas as the Syrian Baath Party's veteran foreign minister. In fact, he was the defense minister. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Dear Dorie and David,
Thank you both for joining me—I'm really looking forward to mulling over the state of the cookie with such inspiring bakers and writers. It is, of course, cookie season. Most of the food glossies have an elaborate cookie section in their December issues, and with this year's economic news, I suspect many people will make their holiday gifts rather than buying them. Also, Anita Chu's sweet little Field Guide to Cookies just came out. Organized by cookie taxonomy, it's a bit like a bird-identification book. Because the guide is so catholic, including such borderline species as gougères (cheese puffs), baklava, and Algerian almond tarts, it opens up a rather critical question (critical, at least, for those of us devoted to making life sweeter): Just what is a cookie, anyway?
It's actually quite hard to define a cookie when you get down to it. The adjective "sweet" usually comes to mind, but I was eating a Dutch windmill cookie the other day and was surprised at how savory it was—it could easily have been served with cheese. Chu has a great recipe for TV snacks, which are buttery little almond haystacks livened up with sea salt. Butter is a fairly universal cookie ingredient but not an essential one, either. Macarons and macaroons and meringues and the like are made with little or none of it. In the end, I suppose my definition of a cookie has something to do with portability and with guilty pleasure (although this diet doctor asserts that his high-protein cookies can help you get slim). Dorie and David—what makes a cookie a cookie for you?
A related question: What is it that makes a cookie American? You both spend a lot of time in Paris, so I'm hoping you'll share your expatriate perspective. When I think of an American cookie, I think chunky—in terms of heft and girth but also chunky with sedimentary matter like chocolate chips, raisins, M&M's, brickle bits, etc. Our penchant for chunk likely has something to do with the fact that we like to customize—we want our cookies to be ours in some fundamental way. Even people who aren't all that inventive in the kitchen feel as if they can hot-rod a basic cookie recipe with mix-ins like dried cherries and butterscotch chips. These tweaks often work quite well—my mother-in-law's chocolate-chip cookies, for example, have Rice Krispies mixed in for a clandestine crunch factor. But sometimes cookies have so many added ingredients that they get a little frenetic. As a rule, I'd say two textured add-ins—plus an optional flavor tweak like orange zest or almond extract—is about all a cookie-eating brain can process.
The size issue is a complicated one. I grew up when "monster cookies" were all the rage—those 9-inch cookies that you could decorate with frosting for someone's birthday. They were really bar cookies, because they ended up quite cakey. Today's bakery cookies tend to be 4 or 5 inches across, which is great, in some ways, because they allow a distinct chewy texture to develop at the center of the cookie while the edges stay crisp. On the other hand, many bakery cookies are too big for a single snack. (This problem has become more acute since I became a mother: I hear a lot of "just one cookie" entreaties.) Of course the size issue cuts across industries—here in the states we like big cars, big muscles, big lattes—you name it.
While we're defining things, I feel I should declare my cookie allegiances, just so you know where I stand. I do love a good chocolate chip cookie—one with a little too much chocolate and preferably no walnuts. I am also fiendish about very spicy hermits and chocolate-truffle cookies—the ones with a cocoa-rich dough and big chunks of dark chocolate inside. I am entirely indifferent to most shortbreads and to ordinary sugar cookies (the crisp kind). I prefer my cookies to have a certain chew to them, unless they are very, very thin. On that note, I am always drawn to recipes for thin nut cookies made with brown sugar, which are almost impossible to find at bakeries. Maida Heatter, one of the great cookie gurus and a Floridian, is an advocate, and so I associate them in my mind with a certain shade of coral lipstick and the click of mahjongg tiles. And, finally, I rarely make very fussy cookies. I frequently resolve to bake sandwiched French macarons or homemade fig newtons, but ultimately I'm too impatient for cookies that have multiple steps. David and Dorie, you've probably baked every cookie there is, but which ones do you keep returning to? Are there cookies from your childhood that stir your nostalgia like you-know-who's madeleines? (Sorry, sorry. I swore I could make it through a cookie discussion without mentioning Proust, but I couldn't.)
Yours,
Sara
Dear Sara and Dorie,
Thanks, Sara, for getting us started. Well, here's my attempt to define the cookie: I'd say that it's handheld (although I've seen a few that tip the scales in the other direction); it's something meant to be consumed in a few bites; and it absolutely, positively has to be round. OK, I just made that last one up. Of course, you're right to point out that there are plenty of minisized treats and bars out there, like Anita Chu's Viennese almond crescents, which put my theory in question. Still, I would say that, for me, a good cookie should be big enough for at least three bites. Maybe Dorie can be the brain on that, and I'll be the brawn?
I agree with your explanation of why the American cookie is a chunky one. We Americans are "customizers." If you go to any restaurant in America, it's practically de rigueur to ask whether the chef can change everything on the menu. And we also take a "more is better" approach. Most folks feel a restaurant is a good value if there's a lot of food on the plate.
As for those thin, nutty cookies you mentioned, you probably won't find them at bakeries, since they're a lot of work to roll, cut, and bake. And they're fragile, meaning there's going to be a certain amount of breakage. (When I worked in a restaurant kitchen, I never had trouble getting rid of broken cookies, due to the steady swarm of hungry chefs milling around the pastry department at all hours.) Cookies take a lot of time, and anything fancy or small is going to be more costly and time-consuming to produce. That's probably the appeal of larger cookies in bakeries and with home cooks. On that note, I couldn't eat a 9-inch cookie, but if a cookie is good, I want more than one tiny bite of it. So a happy medium is appreciated.
Here in Paris, if I buy cookies, I prefer the kind that are difficult to make at home (especially if your kitchen is postage-stamp-sized, as is mine). I often go for macarons, which, like baguettes and croissants, are readily available and inexpensive. When I'm back in the States, if I'm in the supermarket, I can't resist Mallomars: big puffs of marshmallow sitting on a graham-cracker-like base, covered with the thinnest layer of dark chocolate. Those, and sugar wafers, remind me a lot of my childhood. But of all the store-bought cookies, HeyDays were the best—long wafers covered with caramel and dark chocolate, completely blanketed with toasted nuts. Perhaps they disappeared from the marketplace since they fell in that dubious area between cookie and candy bar: You're entitled to eat a bag of cookies, but few folks feel comfortable plowing through a bag of candy bars!
Hi, Sara and David,
Thanks for giving me so much to think about. It's funny: I've never considered the definition of a cookie; I always figured I'd know one when I saw one. And since I love cookies immoderately, I say three cheers for Anita Chu for casting the net wide and including treats like profiteroles (little cream puffs filled with ice cream) and those Algerian almond tarts in her wonderful new Field Guide to Cookies. Of course, she couldn't get away with that in France, where a pastry chef's taxonomy of sweets is so precise: Profiteroles are classified as dessert, tarts are pastries, and bunches more of her sweets wouldn't qualify as cookies (which the French call gateaux secs), either.
Fun probably wouldn't be part of a scholarly definition of the cookie in any country, but I think one reason cookies are such a beloved part of the American culinary tradition is that you eat them with your fingers. They are, as both of you said, handheld or portable—when you've got to grab a fork to munch on a sweet, I think you've left cookiedom—and what's better than playing with your food?
David mentioned that you should be able to polish off a cookie in three bites. I'd add that cookies shouldn't be more than a bite larger. I really dislike what Sara calls "monster cookies." And don't get me started about those cookies that tip the scales at about 6 ounces and are almost raw in the center. In a perfect cookie world, cookies would be 3 inches around, crisp close to the edges, and just a little chewy in the center (just the way you like them, Sara). And they'd be fully baked. Again, not really a defining characteristic, but one I think makes a huge difference in the taste department—when you bake a cookie until it's truly golden, you get great caramel flavor from both the sugar and the butter. Cookies in this baker's paradise would not, however, have to be round! Sorry, David (even if you did only just make the point up). Limit cookies to roundness, and you miss out on bar cookies, like brownies—and my guess is that none of us would want to miss out on those!
Finally, I'm with you both on chunkiness and "sedimentary matter"—as Sara so adorably called mix-ins like chips and nuts—being a big part of what makes a cookie all-American. Maybe it's because, as you said, we Americans like to customize everything (David, I giggled when you wrote about how everyone wants to make changes in restaurant dishes), but I think it comes back to fun and, for me, surprise. When you've got lots of stuff in a cookie, it means that no two bites will be the same—some will have more chips, some more nuts, some a raisin, some a bit of brickle—and that you'll be surprised from first taste to last. I think it's part of what keeps us coming back for more.
Of course, coming back for more has never been an issue for me, and while my favorite cookies are crisp and crunchy and chockablock with mix-ins, I've got soft spots in my heart for lots of different kinds of cookies. I'd be happy to have Sara's spurned shortbreads and sugar crisps, which I love for their simplicity and luxurious butteriness. I could go through a box of Mallomars, one of David's favorites, any day and would eat them just the way I did as a child: First, I'd poke a hole in the chocolate covering the marshmallow, then I'd nibble away at the chocolate until the marshmallow sat naked on the graham cracker and I'd be able to pop the marshmallow into my mouth, whole, and chase it with the cracker. I'm always content when there are madeleines (really cookie-size cakes), Linzer cookies (spice cookies sandwiched with jam), rugelach (cream-cheese dough crescents rolled around jam, nuts, and currants), any kind of gingerbread or molasses cookie, and just about any kind of chocolate cookie in reach. And I'd never refuse a beautiful Parisian macaron. (Among my favorites are Pierre Herme's rose, raspberry, and litchi macarons, known as Ispahan.) But, pushed up against the cookie jar to name my desert-island fave, I'd reach for the chocolate-chippers and hope they'd be 3 inches in diameter, thin, crisp, well-browned, and overloaded with very dark chocolate.
Hi Dorie, hi David—
Yum! This discussion makes me realize what a huge role nostalgia plays in shaping our appetites. David, you've made me nostalgic for something I never actually tasted—those near-candy bar HeyDays. Isn't it upsetting when a childhood taste disappears from the markets? I was sad to see that a whole cookie line, Mother's, recently went under—their peanut butter Gauchos knocked the pants off Nutter Butters.
As Dorie points out, there's something "fun" about cookies. And nostalgia is a critical part of that fun—we allow ourselves to relate to cookies as if we were still children, including ritualistic ways of consuming these treats. Dorie, for example, mentioned she has a particular way of munching a Mallomar. Currently, I'm doing my best to pass my cookie ticks onto my 4-year-old son. I've taught him to disassemble Oreos (or, in our house, Newman O's) before eating them, to decapitate animal crackers, and to go at the petit beurres corners first. (OK—now there's a plain butter cookie I do like—give me a couple glasses of wine, and I will confess to delighting in crumbly sables as well.)
The actual baking process is an important aspect of cookie joy, too. It's rarely acknowledged that cookies take a while to prepare. (In general, individual treats like dropped or rolled cookies, cupcakes, and tartlets take longer to bake than cakes or pies.) Bar cookies are quicker, of course. And I'm always a fan of keeping frozen dough in the freezer, ready to slice and bake should the need for warm cookies strike with some urgency. But there's no reason baking should always be fast and easy. Indeed, there is much virtue in a certain kind of inconvenience. I love all the observation and anticipation that comes with baking: watching for the moment when the butter is creamed or the whites are whipped; tasting and analyzing the dough, and reanalyzing it again and again; the careful rotation of pans in the oven and waiting for that golden moment when you can finally pull them out of the heat.
On that note, Dorie, you are so right about underbaked cookies. There's something about a pallid cookie that just seems so wasteful—you can't stop thinking about how good it could have been with a few more minutes in the oven. Another key cookie sin, and a common one in this country full of chunky cookies, is untoasted nuts. There's nothing like the bitter bite of raw walnut skin to knock you out of your cookie reverie, while a golden-brown one adds divine toastiness.
But let's set aside these eternal baking issues. What's out there in groceries or bakeries or cookbooks that's exciting you today? Recently, my home cooking has taken on a more healthful bent, and I have been intrigued by cookie recipes that use whole grains and alternative sweeteners. Heidi Swanson has some especially neat ideas, though I still wonder if a healthy cookie is an untenable paradox. More specifically, I'm glad to find that some recipes are once again calling for instant espresso powder. I'd never use the stuff to make a cup of coffee, but I've found that it adds a bizarrely compelling coffee-salt tang to cookies. Dorie, you've written previously about how much salt we use in baked goods these days—a trend that's made sweets a whole lot more interesting, I think. On that note, I was just reading about saltine panna cotta at momofuku ssam bar, which got me thinking about how I might use crushed saltines in a cookie recipe, perhaps as a crumb crust or even as a sort of macaroon base. (I am totally American in my affection for tinkering.) What is it that sends you both scampering off to test a recipe? And what does the cookie jar of tomorrow hold? Certainly, there will always be room for chocolate chippers, but are there any overlooked cookie traditions due for a revival, any gizmo developments that could compete with the Silpat in cutting-edge cookie technology?
Yours,
Sara
Dear Sara and Dorie,
I feel like I'm becoming my parents whenever I say, "I remember when," but I can't help adopting the phrase since so many of the great, old-fashioned cookies seem to be disappearing. I remember when you could buy HeyDays at the supermarket! I remember Mother's white-frosted Circus Animal cookies! Thankfully, the trusty Girl Scouts still come 'round annually and remind us that some treats will always be in fashion. Although a couple of years ago in politically correct San Francisco, I saw the police rousting a gaggle of green-garbed girls from a shopping center. Their crime? Selling cookies without the necessary permits. I'm all for a crackdown on unlawful activity, but not having access to those chocolate-mint cookies is a crime in itself.
Sara, you hit the nail on the head with the idea that cookies need more care than other baked goods. Mixing and timing can be critical, and since someone (with more resolve than me!) might be eating only one cookie, it'd better be good. Keeping dough in the freezer is an excellent idea, and I usually have a few logs in there myself. In fact, over Thanksgiving weekend while everyone else was frantically cooking away, I calmly whipped a few bags of cookie dough out of the freezer—chocolate-coconut macaroons and chocolate chip cookies—and within 15 minutes, I was pulling freshly baked cookies out of the oven (and on my second glass of rosé). The only problem with being so well-prepared is that I had to guard the warm cookies with my life since no one wanted to wait until dessert to dive in.
Dorie and Sara, I do think underbaking can be advantageous, especially with treats like snickerdoodles or chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies, which should have a good chew. The hard truth is that you need to watch cookies like a hawk while they're baking. They can go from chewy, meltingly divine delights to sorry, crumbly discs in a matter of a minute.
I also beg to differ with the premise that a healthy cookie is "an untenable paradox." Who said that cookies are inherently unhealthy, anyway? I think folks should re-examine what "healthy" is. Is a low-fat cookie packed with sugar and hydrogenated fat better for you than a gingersnap made with butter and freshly ground spices? For that matter, I don't think a sweet treat made with real butter, eggs, and chocolate is all that bad for you. People should be selective about what they eat and go for quality over quantity, which is ultimately more satisfying.
I'm intrigued by any recipe that points out a new tip or technique. Alice Medrich wrote a wonderful book on cookies and brownies a few years back, which is sadly out of print, and each cookie I made from that book was the best of its species. (If I could only find my copy, I'd die a happy man.) Similarly with Dorie's recipes. I know everything that comes out of her kitchen is well-tested, and any cookie recipe that she publishes is a winner.
As for the future, I think cookies are a bit resistant to trends. Sure, we've gone through biscotti and plate-sized cookies, and now French macarons have taken the world by storm, but they are still prepared in a classic, time-honored fashion, because it's hard to improve on the original. That said, Americans are willing to take twists and turns to reflect current trends. Dorie brilliantly added a flurry of fleur de sel to chocolate cookies, Heidi Swanson mixed mesquite flour with her chocolate chip cookies (which if you haven't tried, you must!), and I've been putting cocoa nibs in shortbreads, which give them the explosive taste of chocolate without adding sweetness.
Yours,
David
Hi again, Sara and David,
On a sugar high from all our cookie talk, I went straight to the kitchen to bake—and to clear my head. Because cookies demand hawklike attention, as David said, and because, as Sara pointed out, every step in the cookie-making process is a pleasure, baking focuses me. There's something almost Zen-like in the repetition. Not that I understood the value of routine when I was fired from my first job after changing the restaurant's signature dessert … Actually, given what we've said about how Americans like to tinker with every recipe, maybe I wasn't done in by "creative insubordination"—that's what my boss called it—but rather by something nationalistic.
Speaking of things nationalistic, like David, I hope the Girl Scouts make their annual appearance. However, I'm not sure our neighborhood scout will be knocking on doors again. Last year, thinking the cookies had become too expensive, she sold them under duress and her opening line was, "You might not want to buy these." With this year's economy, who knows what she'll say.
But even if our supply of Thin Mints isn't guaranteed, the survival of some bedrock cookie customs, like disassembling Oreos and decapitating animal crackers, is assured. Sara, thank goodness you're teaching your son the proper way to eat cookies! Of course, I'm blithely assuming that Oreos and animal crackers have a future. But if the healthy cookie you both talked about becomes the norm, they, as well as my beloved Mallomars, could be (multigrain) toast, and that would be too sad. While I'm all for health, I'm not convinced we need a healthy cookie. I'm reminded of Julia Child, who ate all manner of things and counseled, "Everything in moderation." A cookie or three a day won't hurt if your diet is basically sound.
And I'm with you, David, on the need for cookies to be made with great ingredients. In fact, I think that's the future of the cookie. While the techno-chefs are deconstructing, gelifying, and atomizing desserts, I think we home bakers, and the people who buy cookies in supermarkets and bakeries, will be looking for a better cookie, one made with good butter, pure extracts and spices, organic milk and cream, premium-quality chocolate, and, if not whole grains, then organic flour. As you both mentioned, the ingredients might get more exotic—think flavored salts (David makes terrific seaweed-fleur de sel sables), savory herbs, and, yes, maybe even the saltines Sara talked about—but I'm not sure cookies are really going to change much. Sara, you asked if there might be a cutting-edge cookie technology, like Silpat, and I thought and thought, came up blank, and then decided it would be hard to bring cookies into the techno age—they're almost too basic.
And too basic is the way I hope they'll stay. Baking evangelist that I am, it's my dream that the cookie of the future will be homemade and that, even if it's baked in a space-age oven on silicone mats with the trendiest mix-in, it will be, like great cookies past and present, fun to eat, satisfying, and comforting.
Yours in chips, crunch, and crumbs,
Dorie
It's hard to imagine a world without Thin Mints! Although everyone I know is cutting back in one way or another, I think this could still be a good year for cookies. Butter is dear this season, to be sure, but that makes the gift of something baked all the more considerate. And after all, homemade cookies are both more frugal and more fragrant than fine leather goods or cashmere mittens.
In terms of innovation, I think Dorie is right that even with tweaks like mesquite (!) flour, it's the basics that make a cookie great. Even working within Fran Gage's sweet quartet of basic baking ingredients (sugar, almonds, eggs, and butter), there are plenty of decisions we can make to improve the state of our cookies. I grew up in a household that allowed only Blue Bonnet margarine in the butter compartment of the fridge—at the time, it was considered a healthy choice—and I still marvel at the sea change that took place when I started cooking with butter. Talk about an innovation! Beyond that, over the past decade or so we've watched our chocolate get better, our access to organic eggs and higher-fat butter grow, and our sugar options diversify.
And on the subject of sugar and butter and health: Dorie and David, I agree that cookies can be part of a healthful diet, even as I stay wary of "healthy" cookies. For the most part, I've been doing my best to replace mediocre sweets with smaller bites of more intensely flavored goodies. One delicious square of brownie is better—and, I wager, better for you—than omega-3 fortified biscuits by the handful. The more one can consciously appreciate the workmanship in a cookie— the shattering brown-sugar crisp of a lace cookie, the candied nougat chew of the inside of a meringue, or the anise fragrance of a biscochito—the easier it is to be satisfied with just three or four bites of goodness.
That reminds me: Much has been made of artisanal foods over the past decades. We shouldn't forget (and I'm sure neither of you do) that as home bakers, we are all artisans. That's true whether one is passing on long-standing traditions like Bubbie's mandelbrot or Aunt Pearl's bourbon balls or seeing whether oatmeal cookies could be even better with candied ginger and goji berries. Thanks so much for your wit and your passion, Dorie and David—I can't wait to see what you each bake next.
Yours,
Sara
In War and Peace, Tolstoy's Prince Andrei describes a woman who swoons at the sight of a calf being slaughtered: "She's so kind, she can't bear the sight of blood, but she eats the same calf in sauce with great appetite." This anecdote is really a metaphor for war, but it works just as neatly for, well, meat. Most of us carnivores are that lady, keeping the steer in the pasture mentally separated from the beef on our forks without too much consideration for how one becomes the other. In the past, this mental distance between the dinner table and the farm yard wasn't so easy to maintain; 19th-century Manhattanites, for example, might well have been confronted with the noises, smells, and sights of the unlicensed butcher in the tenement next to theirs slaughtering cows in his cellar. Over time, however, we've grown more and more alienated from how our meat gets to the table. In the grocery store, we choose from vast swaths of shrink-wrapped cutlets that seem to come from nowhere. How did this happen? Three recent beef-centric books help piece the story together.
Betty Fussell's American Steak takes a picaresque approach to the American beef industry, examining through character sketches the story of American beef both light (how to cook carne asada) and dark (what happens inside a beef processing facility). In Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World, Andrew Rimas and Evan DJ Fraser take a longer-term look at bovines—examining the history of cattle, their co-evolution with humans, and their deep significance in mythology and culture. And in the academic collection Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, edited by historian Paula Young Lee, several scholars examine the modern invention of the slaughterhouse as a dark countermelody to the history of urbanism.
As Rimas and Fraser point out, before the modern era, bovines were symbols of power, wealth, and fertility, and occasionally, as in Zeus' come-on to Europa, the embodiment of deities themselves. Cattle were valued for their farm labor, milk, and fertile dung perhaps more than as a source of meat. Ordinary farming families would probably kill a cow for food only once the animal was too old for labor.
The industrial and agricultural revolutions changed the cow's existence from four-legged co-worker to so much beef "on the hoof." Innovations like improved plows and, eventually, tractors made animal muscle less necessary for farm work. Meanwhile, the growth of huge cities vastly increased the demand for meat. With this appetite in mind, pioneering British agriculturalist Robert Bakewell developed new feeding and breeding methods at the end of the 18th century to raise tanklike "Dishley longhorns." These bovine behemoths, Rimas and Fraser explain, were not really suitable for milk production or field labor but amazing for sheer beef poundage. While Bakewell's ideas did not take hold immediately, his writings were highly influential for 19th-century British beef farmers as they ramped up production to feed a hungry empire (whose very symbol was the beef roast).
As our beef cattle grew bulkier, our approach to slaughtering these cattle became less intimate. Before the modern era, cattle were generally killed by the very butcher who would sell you your meat. Centralized slaughterhouses emerged first in post-revolutionary France. In 1807, Napoleon himself ordered four central slaughterhouses built to get the messy business out of Paris' streets. Not only was the act of slaughter consolidated in (or at the outskirts of) large cities, but it was also concealed in plain sight, with purposely forgettable architecture. It became easier and easier to avoid reflecting on how many animals need to be killed in order to feed a metropolis.
Nowhere did the bovine business become more efficient than here in the United States. Thanks to the development of refrigerated railway cars at the turn of the 20th century, Chicago meat kings like Philip Armour and Gustavus Swift could process vast quantities of cattle in a single location and then ship processed meat, rather than live cows, across the country. To keep up with the volume of meat being butchered, they converted the packing house into a sort of factory disassembly line—a system still basically in effect today. (Though these days such factories are even more remote from major cities, in places like Amarillo, Texas, and Greeley, Colo.) The line was mechanized where possible, but since cows' bodies are stubbornly variable, Fussell writes, echoing historian Roger Horowitz, "workers themselves had to become machines"—each one performing a single or limited series of repetitive tasks to carcass after carcass.
We've also lost touch with our livestock at a retail level. As any viewer of the Brady Bunch surely remembers, the butcher used to be a stock character in American culture—kind of sweet and burly, and maybe not so bright, but his trade has been in serious decline since the 1960s. The butcher provided service as well as meat: selecting animal carcasses or at least big quadrants, then dry-aging, cutting, and trussing these and, most importantly, schmoozing with customers. As Rimas and Fraser put it, "they were a human link between people and the animals they ate, a shortening loop in a chain that's grown longer as we've distanced ourselves from our food." Now real butcher shops are a luxury—they've been replaced by grocery stores with grab-and-go meat. Beef is broken down into parts at the packing house and Cryovacked in plastic, which despite the euphemistic name "wet aging" doesn't help meat develop flavor.
As Fussell points out in one of her liveliest chapters, the butcher's craft has been reincarnated as meat science. She profiles Bucky Gwartney, a meat researcher whose job it is to mine the lesser-loved parts of the cow carcass for new, potentially marketable cuts of meat and thus increase the value of each animal. Through advanced computer modeling, Gwartney's Web site makes the beef corpse look like a systemic AutoCAD plan of a building. Not only have centralized slaughterhouses allowed us to be ignorant of how animals are killed for our food, but increasingly, retail packaging makes it possible to avoid touching uncooked meat. Companies like Hormel offer "refrigerated entrees"—bags of precooked meat that can be jazzed up by the weeknight cook with a dash of soy sauce or a dollop of tomato sauce. Cutting boards are not necessary.
The forces of culture, commerce, and, yes, consumer squeamishness have done much to make us forget that the little brown patty we eat at cookouts and fast-food restaurants was once a cow, who was probably not treated with a great deal of dignity. Recently of course, there are signs that these connections are being made. Best-selling writers like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan have managed to get us to ponder the fate of feedlot-bound animals. Last year, a Humane Society video of feedlot workers dragging sick cows to slaughter forced the largest beef recall ever. And, most incredibly, Californians passed a proposition in November that will regulate how farmers raise their chickens and pigs and veal calves. If we want our meat supply to become safer and our relationship with animals to become less heartless, we need to keep examining—like Fussell, Rimas, Fraser, and Young—the long, strange path between lowing cattle and low, low prices on ground chuck.
In a 2006 article about Israel and the doctrine of proportionality, Lionel Beehner of the Council on Foreign Relations explained that applying the test of "proportionality" to Israel's military operations can be a tricky exercise. According to the doctrine—originated in the 1907 Hague Conventions—"a state is legally allowed to unilaterally defend itself and right a wrong provided the response is proportional to the injury suffered. The response must also be immediate and necessary, refrain from targeting civilians, and require only enough force to reinstate the status quo ante."
When Beehner wrote this backgrounder, Israeli forces were bombarding Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two soldiers and the consequent shelling of Israeli towns with rockets. Now, three years later, the question of proportionality is once again being discussed, especially by those who oppose Israel's actions against the Hamas government in Gaza. "In its efforts to stop amateur rockets from nagging the residents of some of its southern cities," writes Palestinian professor Daoud Kuttab in the Washington Post, Israel reacted with "disproportionate and heavy-handed attacks." In other words, "nagging" isn't enough to justify airstrikes.
But for Israel, the daily shelling of civilians with rockets—homemade or not, events of recent days have proved that they are capable of killing—was much more than nagging. And Israeli leaders will claim that the response is far from disproportionate. "Our goal is not to reoccupy the Gaza Strip," said Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Asked if Israel was out to topple Gaza's Hamas rulers, she said, "Not now." If reinstating the status quo ante is the test of proportionality, then Israel passes with flying colors. All it wants to do—as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert explained—is "to improve the security reality of southern residents in a thorough manner." A modest goal for a prime minister who promised two years ago, during the war in Lebanon, to "operate in full force until we … take control and terminate … radical, terrorist, and violent elements."
Today, Olmert's Lebanon war is not seen as a great success. The more ambitious the leader, the greater the chance for failure. Olmert was far too ambitious in 2006, but he is rather sober today. So when Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post wrote that "Olmert badly miscalculated in launching the 2006 offensive against Hezbollah—and he's probably making the same mistake in Gaza," Diehl was the one making a questionable assumption. He assumed that Olmert's success will be measured by the ability of Hamas to retain its power: "Hamas … almost certainly will still control Gaza, and retain the capacity to strike Israel, when Olmert leaves office in a few months." But Olmert never promised Israelis that he would dismantle Hamas' rule in Gaza.
Of course, Olmert might be bluffing. Maybe his real goal is to uproot Hamas, a policy that some of his Cabinet members support. Even then, he would still be able to claim that a return to the status quo ante was all that Israel was trying to achieve. That is because ante also needs a clearer definition: Is it the ante just before the Lebanon war or the days before Hamas took over the Gaza strip (an action that was described as a "coup" not by Israel but by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas)?
But there is no reason to think that Olmert isn't telling the truth. The fact that Hamas is likely to "still control Gaza" after the operation ends is irrelevant to its goals. If Olmert wants to leave office in March with some measure of success, he has to make sure Israelis—and the rest of the world—understand that. The problem is that clarifying the goals might undermine the chances for success: One of Israel's tools against Hamas is the subtle threat that it will topple the Hamas government if it does not acquiesce to some sort of settlement. Going into battle while promising the leaders of the other side that their position is safe might not be advisable.
Israel's failure in Lebanon was maddeningly visible, but the failure of the international community to provide better solutions is no less problematic. Security Council resolutions were implemented poorly, and the international forces sent to execute them have failed to achieve their goals. ("[T]here will be no weapons without the consent of the government of Lebanon and no authority other than that of the government of Lebanon.") Similar international community failures led to Israel's decision to go to war against Hamas in Gaza. The Egyptians and other mediators have failed to persuade Hamas to end the shelling of Israel. Those assisting the Palestinian Authority failed to prevent Hamas from taking over Gaza; they also failed to provide a strategy to tame Hamas after the group took control and to help the authority resume power in the territory. Complaining about Israel's failures is easy; providing alternatives is more difficult (except for those who think that Israel should just get used to living under rocket fire).
No reasonable, moderately compassionate human being can ignore the suffering of Gazans under Israeli attacks. But such is the tricky nature of modern warfare: How do we measure proportionality without reducing the concept to an impossibly pedantic tit-for-tat? (How would it work? For every rocket launched into an Israeli town, Israel would retaliate by launching a similar rocket? And even then, how could we achieve proportionality without making sure that Palestinians in Gaza have the same alarm systems and comparably effective shelters?) How do we measure "success" in a situation where no side is likely to bring real closure to a volatile situation?
The outcome of the military campaign, which is still in its early stages, will help observers decide whether the operation was a wise move on Israel's part. The outcome of negotiations leading to the conclusion of the campaign—the terms under which a renewed cease-fire will be achieved—will also determine whether the Gaza war was successful. But most of all, it is the expectations of all parties involved that will dictate how this round of violence will be perceived by Israelis, Palestinians, and the rest of the world. Anyone who expects this to be the last round is delusional. Anyone who hopes that the days of Hamas rule in Gaza are numbered is unrealistic. Only those who think Hamas will learn a lesson that might make it less likely to permit the shelling of Israeli citizens—while maintaining its power and its ability to cause trouble whenever it chooses—might be right. Time will tell.
This is the outcome Israel will call "victory." But so will the other side.
On Christmas morning, my husband found a CD of The Greatest Speeches of All Time in his stocking. It was, if I may say so, an inspired gift. The title did prove somewhat misleading: Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" speech really didn't belong, and I might not have chosen Winston Churchill's 1940 radio address as the sole example of his wartime rhetoric ("I have invincible confidence in the French army and its leaders"). There is also a fundamental problem with any such audio collection, which is by definition limited to the 20th century and can't include Lincoln, let alone Cicero. Anything called "the greatest speeches of all time," thus, has to be taken with a grain of salt.
Still, in the wake of a presidential campaign marked by an unusually high standard of political rhetoric, it was weirdly revealing to listen to Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan, JFK and RFK, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and even Nixon, one after the other, out of chronological order. For one thing, their themes were surprisingly consistent over the years, across parties, at different events and occasions. To some degree, this is to be expected: It's clear, when you listen to them together, that the authors of Ronald Reagan's 1987 Berlin Wall speech ("We come to Berlin, we American presidents, because it's our duty to speak, in this place, of freedom") had carefully re-read JFK's 1963 "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech ("lift your eyes beyond the dangers of today, to the hopes of tomorrow, beyond the freedom merely of this city of Berlin … to the advance of freedom everywhere").
But some of the other cross-echoes were less obvious. Who remembers now that Ronald Reagan's 1983 speech, forever famous because he used it to call the Soviet Union "an evil empire," also contained the following statement:
Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal. The glory of this land has been its capacity for transcending the moral evils of our past. For example, the long struggle of minority citizens for equal rights, once a source of disunity and civil war, is now a point of pride for all Americans. We must never go back.
In that one paragraph, there are echoes of JFK ("freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect"), as well as, of course, of King, who so brilliantly appropriated the language of the American founding documents and made them into an irrefutable argument for civil rights:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."
Once he'd said that, there was indeed no going back. From then on, American democracy was established as an evolving phenomenon, not a set of ideas frozen in stone. The notion of an America "with a capacity for transcending … moral evils," an America that can and will evolve, became a rhetorical staple, appearing in many subsequent "greatest speeches of all time," including those of our president-elect.
These are not remotely original thoughts, I realize. But they strike me as worth repeating this week, and not only because of next month's inaugural. On Sunday, a Russian TV station announced the results of an opinion poll conducted to determine the "greatest Russian of all time." First place went to Alexander Nevsky, a medieval prince who defeated German and Swedish invaders and thus symbolizes Russian defiance of the West. Second place went to Piotr Stolypin, a czarist minister and economic reformer-with-an-iron-fist, famous not only for agricultural reform but also for repressing peasant rebellions. Third place, I'm afraid, went to Josef Stalin.
There are other political traditions in Russia, the country whose dissidents almost single-handedly invented the modern human rights movement in the 1960s and '70s. But in this particular popularity contest, Russia's repressive, anti-Western, dictatorial traditions prevailed, though perhaps not by accident. The TV station that conducted the poll is Kremlin-owned, after all, and there have been complaints about manipulation.
Still, it made me think: Aren't we lucky that our Founding Fathers were so eloquent, so quotable, that their language belonged to the 18th-century Enlightenment tradition, which valued clarity, and not the 19th-century Hegelian tradition, which did not. More to the point, aren't we lucky that the political rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, as modified by Lincoln and King, has persisted into the present; that the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—and not, say, the language of Jefferson Davis or the Ku Klux Klan—has remained mainstream; that it still sets the standard by which modern political speeches are judged.
Aren't we lucky. Happy 2009.
Listen to the Gabfest for Dec. 31 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
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David Plotz, Terence Samuel, and Bill Smee talk politics. This week, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich appoints a senator to replace Barack Obama, war rages in Gaza, and it's NFL playoff time.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:
On Tuesday, embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich appointed Roland Burris to fill the remaining Senate term of President-elect Barack Obama. A quick reaction came from the U.S. Senate, where some members are vowing not to let Burris take office. David points to a Slate piece that advocated a speedy appointment.
Terence points out that with Obama leaving the Senate, there are now no blacks serving in that body.
Bill says the ongoing attacks by Israel in Gaza might lead to an outpouring of sympathy for Hamas leaders, at least in some quarters. David says the attacks will force Obama to take a stronger stand on the Mideast conflict.
It's playoff time in pro football, but one team set a historic regular-season low, prompting the group to ask, "The car companies may be in financial trouble, but who will bail out the Detroit Lions?"
Terence chatters about the inauguration. He says this weekend everyone in Washington will be talking about who is invited to which inaugural balls and who is leaving town because of the expected crowds. He predicts the hot ticket will be the Illinois inaugural ball.
Bill recommends two newspaper stories on the nation's financial mess: The New York Times' profile of the rise and fall of Washington Mutual and a three-part series in the Washington Post outlining how Wall Street stayed ahead of Washington regulators.
David hates Milk.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Posted on Dec. 31 by Dale Willman at 11:15 a.m.
Dec. 26, 2008
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Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics. This week, a free-flowing wrap-up of some of the year's most memorable stories.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:
Emily talks about the heightened role of women on the national political stage this year, especially Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Gov. Sarah Palin, R-Alaska. There was a knock-on effect for comedian Tina Fey, who grabbed attention with her portrayal of Palin during several Saturday Night Live sketches.
The group recalls the doubts many had that Barack Obama could win the general election in November.
They also ponder the political demise of former Sen. John Edwards, who began the political season as a strong contender for the Democratic nomination but flamed out amid revelations of an extramarital affair after his withdrawal from the race.
Which scandal was worse: that of John Edwards and his affair or the charges of corruption filed against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich?
Emily says it will be interesting to see how former President Bill Clinton behaves if Hillary Clinton gets confirmed as Obama's secretary of state.
Emily honors Harriet McBryde Johnson, who died on June 5, 2008. Johnson's response to the Terry Schiavo controversy was among the first things Emily edited when she began working at Slate.
David says his guilty pleasure of the year was listening to the musical group Vampire Weekend.
John chatters about the Canadian show Slings and Arrows, which he discovered this year.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Posted on Dec. 26 by Dale Willman at 10:47 a.m.
Dec. 19, 2008
Listen to the Gabfest for Dec. 19 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:
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Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics. This week: an inauguration controversy, a Kennedy mystery, and a torture debate.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:
Details of the live Gabfest in Washington, D.C., have been announced. The event will be held at 5 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 19, at the Sixth & I Synagogue. Those who have submitted ticket requests will soon be notified if they have won seats.
President-elect Obama has announced that the Rev. Rick Warren will present the invocation at his inauguration. Warren is the pastor of Saddleback Church, an evangelical megachurch in California. The announcement has drawn criticism from some gay rights leaders, as well as liberal organizations, because of Warren's positions on abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and stem-cell research.
The group discussed the latest news on the Obama Cabinet. John says he's pleased with the nomination of a Nobel physics laureate to the position of secretary of energy. Steven Chu is a strong proponent of combating climate change.
Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa, was nominated to head the Department of Agriculture. Vilsack is considered a friend of the biofuels industry.
Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of former President John F. Kennedy, announced this week that she wants to be considered as a possible replacement to fill New York Sen. Hillary Clinton's seat if Clinton is confirmed as the next secretary of state. Emily says she is apoplectic about the prospect. While Kennedy has raised money for New York City schools and has done other charitable work, she is not qualified to be a senator. Emily says appointing someone to such a powerful position on the basis of her last name does not serve feminism. Kennedy, meanwhile, is mirroring a tour of upstate New York that Clinton took when she decided to run for the Senate.
An investigation by the Senate armed services committee has found that top Pentagon officials were more involved in the development of torture techniques than had previously been thought. The group says this presents an interesting dilemma for Eric Holder, Obama's nominee for attorney general. It would be up to Holder to decide whether to investigate possible criminal misconduct in the use of torture.
Wall Street legend Bernard Madoff was arrested this week and accused of running a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme.
Emily chatters about Paul Tough's book Whatever It Takes.
David talks about an article in this month's Outside magazine about a discovery by MIT researcher Daniel Nocera and others. Nocera and his team have found a way to use solar power to derive hydrogen and oxygen from water.
John points out the good stuff at USA.Gov.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com . (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Posted on Dec. 19 by Dale Willman at 11:00 a.m.
Dec. 12, 2008
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Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics. This week, the Illinois governor faces charges, the incoming Obama administration names more Cabinet members, and journalism is in trouble.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:
A criminal complaint has been filed against Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, alleging the two men conspired to use their positions for personal and professional gain.
Emily talks about Patti Blagojevich, the governor's wife, and her involvement in the complaint against her husband. Emily points out that, according to the complaint, Blagojevich told her husband to hold up that "Cubs shit," a reference to issues with the Chicago Cubs baseball team and its owner, Sam Zell. Zell also owns the Chicago Tribune, which had been critical of the governor in its editorial pages.
David is less troubled about Blagojevich and his behavior. He compares selling the right to be named Illinois senator to President Bill Clinton allowing major contributors to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom.
John talks about how Obama looked when the Blagojevich complaint became public. According to the complaint, Blagojevich was angry that Obama would not play along with his effort to benefit by appointing the next senator. But John says Obama's first public statements concerning Blagojevich left a good deal to be desired.
John also discusses recent public-opinion polls that indicate Americans have high hopes for the Obama administration. In one poll, 52 percent of respondents said they feel there will be great unity and compromise during the Obama presidency. David says that's wishful thinking.
The group talked about the apparent demise of journalism. As many as 30,000 jobs have been lost in the newspaper industry in 2008 as publishers struggle with reduced revenues. This week, National Public Radio (a Slate partner) announced 64 layoffs.
David chatters about Shin Dong-hyuk, a North Korean born in a political prison. A portion of one finger was cut off as punishment for dropping a sewing machine on the floor, and he was tortured with fire when he was 14 because he could not explain why his mother had tried to escape. Shin is the author of Escape to the Outside World.
Emily discusses a Supreme Court case argued this week that will decide whether Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani citizen, can sue FBI Director Robert Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Iqbal alleges that Muslim men arrested in New York City following the Sept. attacks were abused, and he wants to hold government officials responsible.
John talks about the video, "Dear Mr. Obama," a hit in conservative circles during the presidential campaign.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Posted on Dec. 12 by Dale Willman at 5 p.m.
Dec. 5, 2008
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Emily Bazelon, David Plotz, and Hanna Rosin, sitting in for John Dickerson, talk politics. This week, Team Obama strengthens its identity, terrorism strikes India, and the Big Three automakers return to Capitol Hill.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:
President-elect Barack Obama officially announced his foreign-policy team, including Sen. Hillary Clinton as his nominee for secretary of state.
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Obama's pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security, was the subject of an offhand comment by Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. He said Napolitano was perfect for the job because she had "no life." Napolitano is not married and does not have children.
Hanna also discussed the announcement of Obama's economic team. Several are noted for having strong personalities. Many are also considered Washington insiders, so Emily wondered just how different the Obama administration's policies would be.
The trio discussed the terrorist attacks in India. David said the response to the attacks by citizens in India was twofold: First, outrage at the government response, and second, anger at the involvement of Pakistanis.
Automakers returned to Capitol Hill this week in hopes of receiving as much as $38 billion in government loans. So far, their efforts have not been successful. However, union officials say they will consider making concessions.
Emily encourages everyone to see the movie Slumdog Millionaire.
Hanna predicts that people will be talking about the vote by conservative Episcopalians to create a new branch of the church.
David chatters about the controversy surrounding an article in Women's Wear Daily that discussed what Michelle Obama should wear when she moves into the White House. It was illustrated with a number of fashion designers' sketches showing very light-skinned women. The team wonders why it is so difficult for designers to draw a black woman in designer clothes.
The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Posted on Dec. 5 by Dale Willman at 11:30 a.m.
Dear N'Gai, Seth, and Stephen,
I'm honored to welcome you—three of the smartest video game writers in the country and in Blogistan—back for Slate's second Gaming Club, the magazine's now-annual look at the year in games. As someone who spent 2008 on hiatus from formal game criticism, I'm especially grateful to be invited back inside the sacristy. I hope to act as an engaged moderator of this year's discussion, but I'm probably too much of a blowhard to pull that off and will instead end up posing as the Anton Ego of the Xbox.
Let me start off by picking a fight. Over at MTV's Multiplayer, Stephen has already asserted that 2008 is the best year in gaming history, even better than 2007 (my pick for Best Year Evuh!!!) and 2001 (his other contender).
Really? I guess by the standard you establish—"a 12 month period that was more well-balanced with good games than any January to December stretch that had come before"—you might be right, but I think that's the wrong standard. Were there any games this year that rank with Bioshock and Portal, my two favorite games from 2007? Both of those instantly ascended to the canon, the list of games that all gamers must at least be familiar with, even if they haven't played them all—like Space Invaders and Zork and Super Mario Bros. and SimCity and Myst and Doom and Deus Ex and Halo and whatever else. Everyone knew this in December. There are no games like that this year. Something like Grand Theft Auto IV is an astonishing accomplishment, but I think it's in a lower, if still very esteemed, tier. (Though I'm ready to be persuaded otherwise. And I'm not saying, yet, that GTA IV was the best game of 2008. I still haven't rendered that judgment.) The greatest year in gaming history should have one or two revelatory titles, not an abundance (a welcome abundance, mind you) of Assassin's Creeds—games that are very good but also flawed and unlikely to be added to the medium's canon.
Put me down instead, then, with Sean Sands of Gamers With Jobs, who summed up the year a couple weeks ago as a disappointment: "I appreciate a fun game as much as the next guy, and this year has been positively choked with safe bets and easy playtime. I walk away from 2008 with some nice memories of time spent happily indulging my pastime, but few moments of gaming that challenged me on anything but a functional and mechanical level."
While I agree wholeheartedly with that, I should add the caveat that I'm rendering an incomplete judgment. I've only nibbled Fallout 3 ("Mad Max: Beyond Oblivion"). I'm still playing Fable 2. I probably gave up on No More Heroes too quickly. I pretty much sampled Spore. I've only played the demos of Mirror's Edge and Left 4 Dead. (Oh Valve, I promise to make that pilgrimage soon.) I haven't touched LittleBigPlanet or World of Goo. (I'll get there, I'll get there.) Et cetera.
But I think I've tasted enough of these and other games to feel comfortable in my verdict. There were four games this year that grabbed me by the thumbs and never let go: Grand Theft Auto IV, Gears of War 2, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and Far Cry 2 (still grabbing me, at least). One of them is a failed masterpiece. One is exactly what it aims to be. One would merely be a pretty good PlayStation 2 game, but it's also the fourth-best (maybe better!) Star Wars movie ever made. And one—and this is admittedly a midgame judgment—is an "open-world shooter" set in postcolonial Africa that has me crossing my fingers that it's as good as it seems to be so far.
This is not necessarily my list of the year's four best games, though it might be by the time this week is over. But all four of them created places that I enjoyed living in for long periods of time. As a gamer, I can take months to plow through a title that I would have completed in a week if I were reviewing it for publication. I need games that are more than a nice spot to spend a long weekend. I want to be able to move there.
Now, go ahead, berate me for liking The Force Unleashed. I can take it.
One thing I've been wondering: Is it a good sign or a bad sign for the medium that this year's crop of games has produced such a wide divergence of opinion? Michael "the Brainy Gamer" Abbott thinks Fable 2 is perhaps "the most seductive game world ever created." Chris Dahlen thinks Fallout 3 "balances—and sometimes betters—the approaches of other videogame masterpieces: the retro immersion of 'BioShock,' the paranoia of 'Portal,' the exploration of 'Oblivion' and the seamless storytelling of 'Half-Life 2.' " The pseudonymous "Iroquois Pliskin" says GTA IV is "a classic, and stands head and shoulders above its previous iterations and nearly every other game released this year."
Those are three more of the smartest people writing about games. They each think their Game of the Year is a new addition to the canon. Maybe they're right. Or, more likely, this was a year of just-misses, which is why there's an absence of consensus.
Some more questions:
Is the PlayStation 3 now a system that a serious gamer really should own? Put economic considerations aside, as I mean this not as a financial question but as a gaming one. With Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and LittleBigPlanet being released this year, am I missing crucial developments for the gaming connoisseur by abstaining from buying a third console?
Is the Wii a commercial success but a critical flop?
Should I have played Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist?
And what did we think of Braid?
Chris
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Dear N'Gai, Seth, and Chris,
Let's start with a correction.
I did not write that 2008 was the best year in gaming history. I wrote that it was the most well-balanced year in games.
You've got a fine balance when you get:
I didn't hear much grumbling from gamers of any kind in 2008, except for hardcore Nintendo fans, who felt abandoned for about the past three months. (Yes, gamers are the kind of people who want satisfaction now!)
This was the year that Sony released interactive art for the PlayStation 3. Microsoft promoted a season of new small downloadable Xbox 360 games that were some of the best games of the year. And Nintendo put out a fantastic Scuba-diving simulator that let me virtually swim with sea turtles and whales.
So I cannot complain about gaming in 2008.
Chris, the four games you cited were all quite good. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a little bit of the weak link there, but it's quite a good-looking weak link. And don't feel bad about liking it. Time's Lev Grossman thought it was better than Metal Gear Solid 4, Fable II, and Fallout 3, those three games you say other people have cited as their Game of the Year.
Grand Theft Auto IV as Game of the Year? Maybe. If you don't mind that Rockstar made my home state of New Jersey the setting for the game's bland final third. I thought the game lost its zip after its first 20 hours. It stopped developing the morally compromised immigrant protagonist Niko Bellic, turning him into just another avatar for virtual homicide and costing the game its potential as a "classic."
Fallout 3 as Game of the Year? Possibly. I've still played only four hours of this game, which puts me about 46 hours behind my MTV colleague Patrick Klepek, who likes it quite a lot.
Fable II as Game of the Year? Getting warmer. In the reverse order of what happens in GTA IV, this game begins with a poorly defined character in an uninteresting medieval European fantasy world but winds up with you controlling a man or woman who is literally the shape of the choices you've made in the game. All that celery he ate made my guy skinny; his ample scars came because he was a clumsy swordsman; his youthful visage remained, because I chose not to sacrifice his looks when given the alternate option to sacrifice a maiden to the gods instead. Ten years from now, the world will remember Nov. 4, 2008, as the day America elected its first black president. I'll also remember that day, I'm sure, as the day when I was first emotionally affected by a video game. Pausing my DVR just after California was called for Obama, I had to go back to Fable II to make the game's final moral decision, a triple-optioned Sophie's choice involving money, loved ones, and community that would affect characters I'd interacted with for weeks. I'm still haunted by the pick I made. Obama's victory speech later that night distracted me from the unease that my final actions had put in my heart, but as I went to bed, with cheers still echoing down the Brooklyn streets near my apartment, I was haunted by the wonderful emotional pain I finally felt from a video game.
Yeah, that's my frontrunner for Game of the Year.
Chris, to answer your questions:
1) A serious gamer should own every console. Costs notwithstanding, to miss the PS3 is to miss not just LittleBigPlanet and Metal Gear Solid 4 but the burst of creativity that's on the PlayStation Network, small- and medium-sized games that are more unusual than most of what you can buy at the average game shop.
2) The Wii is a critical flop only to the critics who don't like having fun with a group of people gathered around their TV. What's more fun at parties than the Wii or arguing whether the auto companies should be bailed out? Rock Band and Guitar Hero? But they're on Wii, too.
3) I haven't played Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist, but I did play Braid. How can you not love a game that has a level in which time moves forward when you walk to the right, time moves backward when you walk to the left, and time stands still when you idle?
Hey, can we all agree about one thing that was a bit of a downer this year—what happened to handheld gaming? The burst of iPhone games notwithstanding, the creative excitement around the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable seemed to diminish significantly in 2008.
—Stephen
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Seth, Chris, and Stephen,
I'd say that it feels good to be back, but like last year, I'm feeling awkward and uncomfortable about having to sum up what this arbitrary unit of time means for video games. I'm in no rush to compile a top 10 list, to reduce the experiences I've had over the previous 12 months to A-is-better-than-B-but-not-as-good-as-C. Chris, you seem pretty comfortable in your assessment that 2007 was a better year for games than 2008. Stephen, you're insisting that 2008 was better balanced than 2007. But so much of this is by accident rather than by design.
Last year would have been more awesome and less balanced if the Brothers Four—Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4—hadn't missed their original holiday 2007 release dates. So? Did 2008 become less awesome but more balanced when those lazybones at Rockstar North failed to complete their planned expansion pack, The Lost and Damned, for this holiday? Maybe. But I don't know how meaningful those standards are beyond this brief moment in time, the week in December when we gather around our computers and fire off e-mails to one another about the year that just went by.
Last year, I said that one of my most important criteria for judging games was obsession. And on a game-by-game basis, 2008 scratched that itch just as much as 2007 did. Chris, I'd argue that the role-playing game Fallout 3 is easily as good as BioShock … but maybe that's because I'm an avowed RPG-hater who naturally skipped Bethesda Softworks' previously acclaimed hit, Oblivion. So even as I surprised myself by falling so hard for the bleak immersiveness of Fallout 3's stuck-in-the-'50s post-apocalyptic world, I had no way of telling whether it was just Oblivion in Mad Max fetish gear or something more. (Then again, I've never played BioShock's spiritual predecessors System Shock or System Shock 2; if I had, would BioShock have seemed quite as impressive?)
Even though I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons and other pen-and-paper role-playing games, I don't like playing their computer and video-game counterparts. I hate the presentation of dialogue trees. I don't like assigning points to my character's attributes. I prefer action to behind-the-scenes d20 dice rolls. I dislike managing a party. Fallout 3 doesn't overcome all of my RPG pet peeves, though the focus on solo play (i.e., sans A.I. buddies) and the credible first-person-shooter mechanics helped tremendously. Still, I think it was the seamless unity of its presentation—character creation at the moment of childbirth; stat management first via a children's book, then a wrist-worn computer; combat using the green screen, data-terminal-like overlay of the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System—that subconsciously allowed me to settle into Fallout 3. All of this meant that I was finally able to appreciate the best virtues of the RPG: how narrative, character, and location can blend to create a series of interlocking stories, stacking choice upon choice until you feel that even though the world is bigger than you, you're still having a meaningful impact upon it.
Chris, I'll also see your Portal and raise you Braid. For a game whose mechanics could have been extremely confusing, Braid somehow taught me to play each of its time-twisting levels without instructions as explicit as Portal's own. One reviewer—I think it was Chris Dahlen—suggested that the best way to play Braid is like a crossword puzzle: Solve the parts you can, skip the parts you can't, then go back and slowly pick your way through the unsolved parts until you're done. That's what I did with Braid over four play sessions, and it worked like a charm. One hard-to-get puzzle piece required me to take advantage of my character's brief death animation, and I was floored when I finally figured it out. Most games teach us to either dismiss player death or be entertained by it. Braid let me ignore it for a long time, then, um, upbraided me for doing so. A nice touch in an exceedingly clever and, in its final act, unexpectedly moving game.
These aren't the only two games I'm considering for whatever top 10 list I assemble whenever I assemble it; others include Patapon, Grand Theft Auto IV, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, The Last Guy, PixelJunk Eden, Gears of War 2, LittleBigPlanet, Left 4 Dead, and Play Auditorium. But I'll end here by asking each of you to name and discuss the game you've had the hardest time expressing your opinion of. For me, it's Resistance 2, a staggering work of heartbreaking mediocrity from one of the industry's most accomplished studios. Staggering in its we-put-every-dollar-up-on-the-screen production values, in its scope, in its careful borrowing from all the right touchstones of the shooter genre. Heartbreaking in that its overblown scale may have helped do it in, in that it has created a fictional world that over two games has never truly connected with me, in enemy encounters that hit all the notes without ever quite playing the tune. It's not mediocre in the way that most games are mediocre. It's just off, and for the life of me I still can't figure out a succinct way to explain why.
Any games from 2008 make you feel that way?
Cheers,
N'Gai
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Hi guys,
N'Gai's question may provide a better frame for my year in gaming than my kickoff e-mail did. For me, 2008 was more about confusion than disappointment.
What to think of Grand Theft Auto IV, a game whose setting is a more complicated, fully realized, and living creature than its protagonist? Niko Bellic is supposed to resent the killing work that is increasingly forced onto him as the game progresses. But the game is wholly unconvincing on that level—the conflict between your actions as a player and Bellic's words and behavior in cut scenes is too jarring. I never finished the game, and I quit right around the time Stephen says the game loses its way, not too long after Niko reaches Liberty City's equivalent of New Jersey.
So Rockstar failed in its grandest ambition, to create a Mean Streets or Dog Day Afternoon for gaming. But it succeeded in creating one of the most compelling game environments ever made. Liberty City is a real place. Just ask anyone who's been there. Writing about it makes me want to overlook the game's flaws and start wandering its streets again.
Or, what to think of Gears of War 2? The game is even more shamelessly derivative than the first one. I picked up allusions to, off the top of my head, Independence Day, Battlestar Galactica (the Ron Moore re-imagining), The Empire Strikes Back, and the speeder-bike chase scene in Return of the Jedi. Mitch Krpata of the Boston Phoenix pointed out on his Insult Swordfighting blog that one of the game's levels is a tribute to, or a rip-off of, the final level of Contra.
The story in Gears, which Seth complained about vociferously in his Times review, is a combination of big explosions and sentimental revenge fantasy that will be deeply familiar to anyone who sat through the early works of the governor of California. And even the game's level design—while generally up to its predecessor's high standard—holds an occasional disappointment. There's a little too much running forward and not enough crouching in terror. A couple of times—which is a couple of times more than ever happened in the first Gears—I got a little lost and couldn't figure out where the game wanted me to go next.
I think Gears of War 2 was the most fun game I played all year, and the game that most achieved the goals it set for itself. If you want to see what an interactive Sylvester Stallone movie looks like, play Gears. It's everything a big summer blockbuster should be. But this is awards season, right?
And in the fall, I've been confused for some time now by a triple-F dilemma—should I be playing Fable II, Fallout 3, or Far Cry 2? Stephen, N'Gai, and I seem to come down on different sides of this triangle, at least for now. I started with Fable II and was enchanted for a while, only to become bored, not long after finding the quest's first hero, with a game that encourages me to sit in the middle of a town square farting for applause. (And trust me, I'm not too good for fart jokes.) But Stephen has persuaded me to give it a second shot.
But how can I do that now, when N'Gai makes a fine case for Fallout 3? I adored the Vault, the setting for the opening scenes during the protagonist's childhood. When I left the Vault, I was so mesmerized that I sat and listened to the post-apocalyptic president's entire radio message. (I am prone to this—I did something similar at the beginning of Half-Life 2.) I explored Megaton, the game's first village. All of this is just the game's amuse-bouche, but I can tell it's a spectacular meal. Except, the first time I left Megaton to carry out a mission, I kept getting killed during an encounter with raiders on a stretch of broken bridge on my way out of town. After five or so deaths in a row, I decided to take Far Cry 2 for a spin instead.
A friend tells me there's a lot of boring leveling and grinding in Fallout 3 before the game really gets going, and I always planned to give it some serious attention. A little more handholding in the game wouldn't hurt. I had to pull out the manual—yes, the manual!— to figure out the combat system. GTA IV did a better job of mixing some linearity into its open world.
And for me, at least so far, Far Cry 2 is less frustrating and more obsession-inducing than the Fable and Fallout sequels. I like the mysteriousness surrounding the Jackal, the arms dealer supplying both sides of the civil war you find yourself embroiled in. I like how the game lets you make moral choices without beating you over the head with them. I love the game's setting so much that I enjoy just driving around in it. Last night, I saw a gorgeous storm and a zebra.
Finally, what to think of Braid? Loved the ending. Liked the puzzles. Loathed the writing. I second Steve Gaynor, who thinks that the game, for all its pleasures, has a reach that exceeds its grasp. But at the same time: more, please!
The short answer to your question, though, N'Gai, is that the game that most confuses me about how I should think of it is The Force Unleashed. But I've gone on so long that I'm going to have to save that for Round 3 of this exchange.
One question for the three of you, though. We all think—or so I presume—that too many games (see the aforementioned triple-F dilemma) come out in the fall and too few in the spring and summer. But are we demonstrating an end-of-the-year bias by not lavishing more praise on GTA IV? Wouldn't we think more of it if, like Fallout 3 or Fable II or Far Cry 2, it came out in late October?
Chris
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Why the long faces gentlemen?
You seem let down by gaming in 2008. Did games let you down?
Or did you let down gaming in 2008?
Where were you, Chris, when Fallout 3 needed you to play more than one-tenth of it? N'Gai, did you really do your part to give Resistance 2 a try? Meaning, did you play its eight-man cooperative mode, soldiering through some randomized battles with a specially trained squad of fellow players? Or did you just play the single-player mode and declare the game's mediocrity then and there? And Chris, maybe I was wrong and GTA IV is a classic. You could have defended it if you'd played it through.
To nongamers, it may seem like I'm being unkind to Chris and N'Gai. But nongamers should recognize that Chris and N'Gai are typical gamers. I judge them no more harshly than I do the guy at Wal-Mart who just bought an Xbox for Gears of War 2 or the mom who finally tracked down Wii Fit.
Gamers abandon games—even games that they like—before finishing them. Gamers get angry at games—even games they like—for being repetitious or derivative or for falling short of being as good as it seems like they could be. That's what you get when you, the gamer, indulge in a creative form that was created to convey satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action for a quarter per minute. This is the creative form that has somehow evolved into a medium of 25-hour, $60 collections of satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action without inventing many successful strategies for telling stories, figuring out how to develop characters, or turning into a more interesting way to spend an hour than listening to Beethoven or watching The Wire.
And you thought the people voting for the Grammys, the Oscars, and the Booker prize might have missed some of the glorious works in their fields?
Gaming people often lack the time, the money, and the patience to really get into a year's worth of games. Playing lots of games can be pretty unpleasant, not unlike going to the gym a lot. You like what you get out of it, but you've got to put in a lot of work, much of it tedious.
There was, however, plenty of good gaming in 2008, for those of us who have structured our lives in a way that allows games to dominate our entertainment-consumption food pyramid. You just had to dedicate lots of time to get to it. You needed to get more than five hours into Fable II. You needed to reach the zero-gravity space combat parts of Dead Space. You needed to play all of Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3 to appreciate the farewell those games were given by 2008's Metal Gear Solid 4. You needed to reach the last hour of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed's dozen to play the level most worth talking about. You needed to dig deep enough into No More Heroes to find out how Goichi Suda, the self-styled leader of the Punk games movement, crafted the greatest fight scene in gaming this year—not the one in which you fight an old lady, but the one in which someone else does the fighting for you. To enjoy the first-person parkour game Mirror's Edge you needed not to mind that the game might last "only" six hours (a complaint among many critics) and actually play it. You needed to put in the work to enjoy this stuff. Fun, right?
I didn't find the year in gaming any more confusing or any more full of flawed gems than previous years, including 2007. Chris, might I remind you that 2007's BioShock suffered a mood-killing shift from intellectual art-deco shooter to action movie in its final playable scene? Or that MTV's own Rock Band had a few flaws that needed patches (and 2008's Rock Band 2) to fix? Or that Portal's … nah, Portal was just about perfect. Most other games in 2007, however, had their faults.
Taking up N'Gai's request to name a game I had trouble articulating my reaction to, I choose Too Human. It's a game I may have dismissed had I not known its back story. Yet is that a fair reason to care about it? Here's a game that mixes The Matrix and Norse mythology and was gestating at development studio Silicon Knights in various stages for about a decade. Its lead creator, Denis Dyack, is a passionate spokesman for games as the "eighth artform" (the seventh was film, in case you didn't know). Dyack's personal and intellectual response to my question about why he hadn't abandoned the game after all this time was among the most heartfelt, ambitious, and reasonable statements about improving the gaming medium that I heard all year.
But Too Human isn't a great game. It has some good design, fun controls, and a whole lot of the previously mentioned tedium special to video games. It struggles to flesh out its characters even though it ends its story well.
Does context forgive execution? Does ambition justify imperfection? Had I not known Dyack or read a bunch of his interviews, I may have forgotten his game shortly after playing it in August, as I do so many other games. That wasn't possible, though. That's not how I consume my entertainment anymore. In this age, I know the creative back story of many of the games I play. The more revealing the game's creators are—and Dyack is among the most revealing of his peers—the more I care about the games they make.
I just don't know if all of that makes Too Human a game I can recommend, or if I simply would recommend that gamers learn more about the people who make their games.
So, did none of you play handheld games this year or what? No one's talking about them.
Stephen
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Hi, everybody. Sorry for coming late to the party. I wish I could tell you that keeping late hours had nothing to do with my sniffle this week, but that wouldn't be entirely accurate.
I come to our conversation from a bit of a different place than I was in last year. And in order to understand how I feel about video games these days, you need to understand how my relationship with games and the game industry has changed.
It has been an exhilarating, daunting, rewarding, and at times frightening journey in 2008 as I have become what amounts to the New York Times's first staff video-game critic. Since joining the culture department in 2005, I have always written some reviews and columns, but until this year I had mostly focused on news and features about games, gamers, and game makers.
Over the course of this year, starting in earnest with my review of Grand Theft Auto IV, I've been asked to shift toward building a critical voice through reviewing as many of the top games as I can get to. As a practical matter, that means spending a lot less time talking to and hanging out with people in the game industry and a lot more time sitting at home actually playing games (and writing about them).
The hardest part is that I have had to begin to distance myself from people in the game business. (I removed all my industry contacts from my Facebook!) As a reporter, you want to get close to people. You want them to like you and to want to give you information, especially in a scoop-crazed industry like video games. And a news reporter is able to maintain those relationships because he is not absolutely compelled to write for publication that his personal opinion was that a particular game had significant problems.
The critic does suffer that compulsion. And it can't matter whether or not the lead designer is a good guy or how bad you feel about how many millions of other people's dollars he has interminably wasted bringing his vision to the small screen. And it can't matter how much you have enjoyed socializing with the (often quite sociable) people whose job it is to get you to write nice things about their employers.
I had to confront this most squarely in my review of Fallout 3. I love the Fallout franchise. The first two installments are among my favorite role-playing games. And I really like the team at Bethesda Softworks. But I felt the game fell down in places and I had to say that.
One of the things I have really embraced about becoming a critic has been the process of learning to become a critic. Thankfully, at the Times I'm surrounded by some of the best in the world, whose work I now study much more closely than I used to. But as I struggled to come to terms with my ambivalence about Fallout 3, I finally discovered the touchstone of insight I needed from outside my paper, by way of both Roger Ebert and Robert Warshow. In a delightful item about his unorthodox review of Tru Loved, Ebert writes:
As the critic Robert Warshow wrote, "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." In other words, whatever you saw, whatever you felt, whatever you did, you must say so. For example, two things that cannot be convincingly faked are laughter and orgasms. If a movie made you laugh, as a critic you have to be honest and report that. Maybe not so much with orgasms.
For a variety of reasons that we will leave aside for the moment, there still aren't any decent pornographic video games, so game critics don't face all of Ebert's dilemmas. (And it is not a coincidence that the flap over Ebert's Tru Loved review revolved around the fact that he did not finish the movie: exactly the same issue Stephen is slagging Chris and N'Gai for here.)
Yet the point still stands. For those of us who have, as Stephen so baldly put it, "structured our lives in a way that allows games to dominate our entertainment-consumption food pyramid," we have to be honest about that to the public. For example, Blizzard was probably not entirely thrilled that my write-up about the new World of Warcraft expansion was in many ways an exploration of my concern about playing the game so much in the past. But I had to cop to it.
Over the course of this year, plowing through game after game, what surprised me most was simply how good most of them were. Though the crop of 2008 has demonstrated its talent in different ways, it seems clear that the overall level of production quality and creative talent is higher now in video games than it has ever been. This is the real golden age of gaming because only now is the audience large enough, variegated enough, and mature enough to support high levels of investment in such a broad portfolio of genres on such a wide range of devices and screens.
The major publishers have finally figured out that schlock is not a business strategy that can compete in the long term with producing a high-quality product. I have played through and reviewed most of the biggest games of the year, with a few formal reviews still to come, and the one word that keeps coming back to me is professionalism.
Of course, some people don't want their games to be professional—or polished, for that matter. They want their games to be art. They want to be inspired to grand heights of emotion and struck with epic depths of profundity. I understand that. I even succumb to it once in a while. (OK, a little more often than that.)
What made Portal and BioShock stand out last year was that they were different, in tone and narrative technique and, of course, in some basic play rules. And I agree that with the exception of Braid, we have not seen a ton of "wow, I never thought of that really working" new game concepts in 2008.
But what if I don't find time manipulation fun? Or what if I don't enjoy teleporting balls around in Portal or exploring a creepy underwater warren in BioShock? These are all very particular, perhaps even peculiar, games. And the strength of a creative form is not judged solely by its ability to deliver a few quirky new art projects every year. That strength is judged by the overall depth of output and in the ability to provide a suitably high-quality entertainment experience for everyone.
I don't think there is a single genre or demographic of gamer that hasn't benefited from a number of excellent games this year. As Stephen rightly said, only the hard-core Nintendo fan has had something to complain about. But across the board, if you are a gamer and you haven't been able to find anything you really like this year, maybe it is time for a new hobby, because the bounty of 2008 has been rich.
P.S. Hey, Stephen: For mobile, my DS is locked on Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution. I can beat Deity level maybe half the time these days.
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Stephen, it's just like old times. Our old dialogue feature, Vs. Mode, is on extended hiatus, but there you go again, taking shots at me for failing to play Resistance 2 all the way through. Pity you didn't select a better target, as there are oh so many games and game modes that I never touched, but the co-op mode in Resistance 2 was not one of them. I played it for quite some time when it was previewed in NYC; you were there, but the open bar was open, so I'll forgive you if you can't remember too much from that event. But you're a loyal subscriber to Edge magazine. Didn't you read the column in which I cited, among other things, Resistance 2's cooperative mode as one of the biggest breakthroughs of 2008? An excerpt:
Insomniac built a separate co-op campaign for up to eight players, modeled after raids in massively multiplayer online games. ... [Its] approach is at once the most intriguing and the least fully fleshed out, mainly because it appears to have been designed with just a single strategy for success: soldiers out front, spec ops in the middle, and medics bringing up the rear. Whether the enemy AI or the encounter design is to blame I can't be sure, but if Insomniac can find a way to mix things up more it has the template for something both unique and special in the world of consoles.
So, yes, when I referred to Resistance 2 as a "staggering work of heartbreaking mediocrity" that I'm still struggling to explain, it wasn't based solely on the campaign. Still, you're my gaming sensei, so I won't take issue with your assertion that anyone who's disappointed with 2008 (hello, Mitch Krpata, author of the year's most essential blog series, "A New Taxonomy of Gamers") may not have played as many games as they should have nor as deeply as they should have. Your analogy to working out at the gym is nearly perfect; it's not just that games are work, it's that they also require you to learn. Every game, no matter how bad, is teaching you how to play it from beginning to end. And a lot of the time, I simply don't want to work at learning something new. (Is this the point where our more fanboyish readers say, cry me a river and give me your job?) Perhaps that's why a game's ability to quickly tap into my obsessive side is one of my key criteria for determining greatness: Without obsession, how many fewer games would I play, complete, or replay?
If it weren't for my trainer, I'd never go to the gym, and without you, sensei, I might not have finished the campaign modes in Halo 3 last year or Gears of War 2 this year. From this, I've learned that one of the best things about cooperative play is that it encourages me to finish what I start. I loved and was obsessed by Fallout 3, playing it night after night. But once I got into Gears 2 (particularly the Horde multiplayer mode) and Left 4 Dead, my obsession cooled, no doubt helped along by the fact that, at Level 8, I'd finally hit a stretch of the game where I'd have to grind in order to progress. Had Fallout 3 been co-op, with you and I walking through the bombed-out streets of our nation's capital, I'd probably have completed the game weeks ago. Thankfully, Gears 2 was co-op, and I could add it to The Handful of Games I Completed in 2008.
Seth, thanks for explaining to the readers and us why you actually have the best job in the world. Stephen and I still have to do reporting, while you play games all day and write about them. For the New York Times, no less! In an age when there's all but a dead pool for movie critics, not to mention those who write about books, theater, dance, and television, it's great that the Old Gray Lady has staked out this fertile critical terrain. I'm not sure any other outlets will follow, given our current Great Depression, but it's a good sign nonetheless.
Still, I'm somewhat surprised that either the Times required you to give up reporting and industry contacts or you chose to do so, simply because you became the paper's chief game critic. You cited Ebert as an inspiration; he writes profiles and features and Q&A's in addition to reviewing as many movies as he can. Do you really believe that you have to keep developers and executives at arm's length in order to be a good critic, or were you permitted to shed your reporting obligations because playing games takes a lot more time than watching a movie or reading a book?
Your point about professionalism also intrigues me. You're correct that, by and large, the level of craft in the video game industry continues to grow each year, and 2008 was no exception. I wonder if, however, by settling for the professionalism inherent in the acknowledgment that "we are those men, and we had fun with these games," we let games off too easily when they take the easy way out, interactively speaking.
Here's where I get my Totilo on and start taking shots. In your review of Gears of War 2, you rightly criticized the story by writing, "With its unintentionally mawkish story line—there's no winking here—and sophomoric dialogue, Epic Games, developer of the series, is clearly trying to mix some emotional depth into the franchise's established recipe of explosions and hot lead. It doesn't work." And you rightly praised the gameplay, saying, "[W]hat makes Gears 2 such a consummately enjoyable popcorn game, is pitch-perfect pacing melded with some of the most carefully calibrated challenges and consistently enjoyable game design you will come across." Then you conclude by writing: "Just ignore what tries to pass here for story and character. And please, don't think too hard."
[SPOILER ALERT]
The thing is, there's a moment in this all-about-shooting game where the folks at Epic decide to do the shooting for you, and in doing so, rob the game of a potentially compelling intersection of gameplay and character. I'm referring to the moment when Dom, wingman to series protagonist Marcus Fenix, is finally reunited with his wife deep in enemy territory, only to discover that her mind has been completely destroyed by her Locust torturers. (This time, it seems, it's personal.) The ensuing cutscene and its dialogue were mawkish, as you observed, though I'd argue that one line ("Marcus, I … I don't know what to do") and its anguished delivery managed the requisite poignancy. But Dom's subsequent decision to kill his wife, no matter how much Epic tried to set it up in a previous cutscene, struck me as implausible.
Actually, I take that back. Dom didn't decide to kill his wife. Epic design director Cliff Bleszinski decided to kill his wife, and they wouldn't even let Stephen, who was playing as Dom, pull the trigger. Compare that with the sequence in the first God of War, in which our hero Kratos, trapped in Hell with the wife and child he inadvertently slaughtered, must now protect them by alternately holding them to him (using the game's grab mechanic to share his health bar with them) and fighting off an army of Kratos doppelgängers. It's gameplay, not a cutscene, and nearly four years after God of War's release, it still stands as one of the best examples of how narrative and interactivity can be synthesized to create, well, art.
Was Epic's handling of Maria's fate a failure of craft or art? I say it's worth thinking hard about, especially when writing for a mainstream audience like yours in the Times and mine at Newsweek. Because when we avoid such questions, we're gulling our readers into believing that story and gameplay are mutually exclusive—or that games are just like other media. Seth, that's something I accused you of before, here. And, in fairness, I fell prey to the same temptation here.
That's my last shot. Reloading!
Cheers,
N'Gai
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Seth, good call on Civilization for the DS. That game hooked me for a time as well. And, N'Gai, good call on co-operative game-play having a heyday (heyyear?) in 2008.
I'd like to wrap up my contribution to our club by citing some other notable releases this year.
• You Have To Burn the Rope: Here we had a free game you could play from beginning to end in about three minutes. Not only that, but it had something to say about the challenges developers make us face in games. It may be the perfect accompaniment to my games-as-gym-equipment metaphor from my previous letter. And while I could say more, I think people should really just open a new window in their browser for a moment and play it. As an added bonus, its ending-credits theme is the best song released in a video game—and made about video games—in 2008. Play the game. Listen. And think about it.
• Wii Fit: To save us the embarrassment of not having deeply discussed 2008's biggest gaming newsmaker, I must add that this game served a number of interesting roles. It presented to average people the idea that playing a game could be good for you, it convinced some gaming executives that fitness gaming is the next trend that must be followed, and it expanded the currently unlabeled category of Self-Help Video Games that Nintendo's brain-workout Brain Age software opened up in 2006 (and which may someday force gaming-sales charters to give self-help games their own list, the way the New York Times had to in 1983).
• The Korean release of FIFA Online 2: I knew nothing of this game until last month, when it was the first thing on EA Sports chief Peter Moore's mind when I asked him what the biggest success of 2008 was for the Madden-making sports division. But I do know of games like it, and they excite American gaming executives quite a lot—they look like your standard American-released sports and racing games, but their economic model is predicated on a free-base product that you can buy items in. Some items improve the look of your character. Some improve his/her/its abilities. These micro-transaction games aren't new, but they've yet to make it big in the United States. Still, what we saw plenty of in 2008 was game publishers trying to find ways to sell small add-ons long after people purchased the original disc. It seems more likely than ever that the future of many people's gaming lives will involve not just paying for a game once but continuing to pay for it, or pay to add more to it, month after month. This change could prove similar to the way people went from not paying to watch TV programming in the middle of the 20th century to now paying for multiple services to see their favorite programs.
• Any iPhone/iPod Touch game: Apple, the company that typically projects an image that it knows what we want better than we do, never made an impressive step into the gaming world until 2008. And the company did it not by being a leader but by standing (somewhat) back and letting everyone from amateur developers to professional studios create hundreds of applications and games. The result? An Apple that once used to advertise how much cooler its machines were than Windows computers—even though Windows computers were the only computers worth playing video games on—now makes commercials showing off iPhone games. Now that Apple finally thinks video games are cool, cell-phone gaming has suddenly become a lot more interesting, and Nintendo has a reason to sweat for the first time in a couple of years.
Guys, it's been fun to talk about the year in games with all of you. May you all have more time to play in 2009.
—Stephen
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Dear N'Gai, Seth, and Stephen,
Stephen wonders if we should be embarrassed for not discussing Wii Fit, and then he answers his own question by noting that it's a self-help game and therefore isn't really the kind of game that the four of us are talking about. Which reminds me: As games grow, and as they are played by more and more people, I think game critics will increasingly have to grapple with Stephen's mantra from last year's club: "Video games are not a genre; they're a medium."
I think this statement was more radical than Stephen intended it to be. I think I'm persuaded by it, but I have trouble wrapping my head around it sometimes. The boldness of the claim makes me want to resist it. Put the Internet aside for a moment—in time, we may see it as less a new medium and more a technology for the transmission of all media (including games!) under the sun—and you'll see that every other medium, at least that I can think of, qualifies under one of the big three rubrics: Print, Audio, Video. (Under this taxonomy, TV and movies, for example, aren't distinct media—they're just distinct ways of transmission for a particular medium, video.)
Stephen is saying that video games are a Fourth Medium, then, something truly new under the sun. (Maybe this is just a different way of saying that games are an Eighth Art Form, as Dennis Dyack says.) I often think that's right. But it also helps explain my long face, as Stephen puts it. Don't I have the right to expect something more from this marvelous new medium? Something more wondrous than beautifully and impeccably crafted worlds filled with enemies for me to kill?
What I want is a game with the elegant gameplay and level design of Gears of War 2 but with the story of The Force Unleashed. But I want it told in a manner like Braid—or even You Have To Burn the Rope—meaning, a telling of the tale that is consistent with the promise and the mechanics of this Fourth Medium (or Eighth Art Form).
I haven't played this game yet. Have any of you?
Stephen and Seth are right that if you put a space alien in front of this year's batch of games, the interstellar visitor—assuming his slippery, tentaclelike thumbs could handle the controller—would conclude that the games that are coming out right now are some of the finest examples of the promise of this new medium. But they are also captivating largely because they possess exactly that: promise. The best games are packed with the prospect of something more, something on the tip of everyone's tongue that no one has yet been able to put into words—or rather, games.
I don't feel guilty about dreaming of the day when a game designer puts it all together and I can finally, at long last, scratch the itch that all of us feel but none of us can find.
Until next year,
Chris
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OK, a lot to get to here.
In terms of N'Gai's questions about how my job at the paper has evolved, a few clarifications. I have not given up any contacts, just held them at a bit of arm's length while in this period of heavy reviewing. I just didn't feel it was appropriate to be taking one-on-one meetings with game executives and PR people while I was reviewing the products they would be trying to spin me about. N'Gai, I think I saw you at one group dinner with a game company, and I made very clear to them that I was there only because it was a group event. It sounds obvious, but ultimately the products speak for themselves. The millions of people whom these companies want to buy their wares aren't getting special access to game-makers. In trying to come at the games from a perspective similar to that of a thoughtful consumer, I wanted to distance myself from the industry a bit. And as a practical matter, if I want to update my Facebook status with a transitory thought about a game I'm playing before I have published what I'm paid to publish, I don't think it is helpful if that's being seen by a few dozen game developers and publicists.
That all said, there is no doubt that even though big games like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, GTA IV, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Wii Fit were released in the first half of 2008 (which I applaud), gaming remains a very seasonal business. So in the early parts of next year, I'm sure I'll write some broader and more thematic features just because there won't be as many new games to review. What I will have to think hard about, though, is doing some big hype piece on a game in development that I know I will have to review later. We saw years of prerelease puffery on a game like Spore (none of it, thankfully, with my byline), a game that failed to maintain more than a few weeks of somewhat ambivalent buzz once we all actually got to play it.
Enough about journalism. N'Gai, I didn't think you were coming at me with what you said about Gears 2 and the wife scene. I think you raised a few of exactly the right questions. And this also plays into some of Chris' concerns about how stories are told in games. The goal of that scene is to move the player into the plot's next emotional arc—to attach meaning to gunning down the next wave of bad guys. I agree that the scene could have been a lot more interactive, but the real challenge would not have been in simply giving the player a choice but in allowing that choice to really matter in the overall plotline.
And that might have been a lot harder than it seems at first. Here is this soldier who has been searching for his long-lost wife, and he finally finds her in this horrible ghoulish state. If you give the player a choice there, his natural inclination most of the time is going to be to try to find a way to cure her. That's a whole different story, and Epic has the right to want her to die there to give the rest of the action a revenge vibe. So, what are you going to do, force the player to pull the trigger? Set up a fight where you try to save her but, no matter what you do, she dies anyway? Now that would piss people off, including me. Once you start giving people choices, the game has to allow those choices to matter. It is not always as easy as saying, "I should have had some choice there, and I didn't. Epic messed up." I obviously didn't think the story was the strongest element of Gears 2, anyway, but I didn't have a huge problem at that moment because I saw the rabbit hole the game could fall into otherwise.
More broadly, this line of thought plays into Chris' desire for more different kinds of storytelling in games. The thing is, in all of these mainline console games (even the Portals and such), the story is still being told to you, or even at you. In none of these games does the player really have any role in determining the overall story arc. In that sense, you are still acting out a role that has been written for you and have been given choices only within a fairly limited sphere of the fiction that has been spun around you. Meanwhile, your interaction with other actual human beings in most conventional console games is limited to shooting them, shooting with them, or competing with them for a spot on a high-score list.
That's why with every passing year I grow deeper in my conviction that the most interesting and meaningful games are massively multiplayer online games in which you have thousands of people in emergent, persistent communities with their own politics, their own tribes. In a massively multiplayer game, every day is different because people are always different. As I've played through dozens of games this year for my job, it has been so vital to maintain a gaming home base, a center of gravity with a group of people that I can just hang out and play with. I've found that most of this year in Eve Online, the hard-core science-fiction MMO that continues to grow. Eve is the kind of game in which the group of people you play with is the most important part of the experience. These are the people I'm on IRC with even when I'm playing something else, and it is that sense of community, of getting to know people from around the world just a little bit, that is the most valuable thing in gaming for me, and it is something that other media usually fail to provide. (Actually, music probably brings people together more than any other traditional media. I saw the Grateful Dead around 90 times, and I still know people I met out there on the road.)
As far as the year in MMOs, I have to give major respect to Electronic Arts and Mythic for making the first legitimate competitor to World of Warcraft with Warhammer Online. Warhammer isn't anywhere close to WOW's size and has only a fraction of WOW's depth, but Warhammer's focus on player-vs.-player combat as opposed to player-vs.-computer-controlled-monster combat gives it an important niche.
WOW, of course, remains the juggernaut, and the recent expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, is pure Blizzard: It oozes polish and is totally accessible to casual players. Thing is, WOW is definitely now being built and designed almost entirely for casual players. The WOW of today is probably less than a third as difficult, overall, as it was even a couple of years ago. This is why the game has around 11 million players. But it is a bit of a joke when even the most hard-core players can blow through all of the new expansion's top-end content in a matter of days. I'm not sure what the people who used to enjoy spending weeks and months working through epic content are supposed be doing in WOW now for their $15 a month. The beautiful thing for Blizzard, though, is that if those people are going to go anywhere during the next couple years, they will probably stay on the Blizzard reservation by moving to coming games like StarCraft II, Diablo 3, and the as-yet-unrevealed new MMO it is working on.
Stephen: I must confess, I have not burned the rope.
And finally, of course games are a medium, not a genre. There are all sorts of games for all sorts of players now. The idea of a canon in games means nothing when there are Bejeweled addicts out there who wouldn't know Miyamoto if he showed up in their living room. For that matter, there are probably millions of Wii players who have no idea who Miyamoto is. There are people who play Guitar Hero who could not care less about World of Warcraft, and there are Pokémon gurus who have never touched Halo. That's all as it should be. Video games are the most vibrant and exciting new entertainment medium in the world right now because of their diversity. When so many millions of people are having fun in so many millions of different ways, something is going right.
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Gentlemen, I hope you won't mind if I take a break from talking about the art of games to focus on the business. Last night, the NPD Group released sales figures for the month of November. So rather than directly engage the "other notable releases" that Stephen discussed in his e-mail, I'll instead use them to make a larger point about the current health of the video-game industry.
Stephen mentioned You Have To Burn the Rope, Wii Fit, FIFA Online 2, and games for the iPhone/iPod Touch. These games all have something in common: They don't require the most powerful hardware on the market in order to function. You Have To Burn the Rope runs in a Web browser. Wii Fit runs on the Wii, of course, which, as one developer said in a memorable rant, is just two Gamecubes duct-taped together. (Please don't try that at home.) FIFA Online 2, if my Google skills haven't failed me, will operate on a Windows 2000 PC with a Pentium III chip and 256 megabytes of RAM. As for the iPhone/iPod Touch, while it does sit at the top of the smartphone food chain, it is no threat to the two-year-old MacBook Pro I'm typing this e-mail on, let alone a top-of-the-line gaming rig.
Two companies with a shrewd approach to minimum system requirements are Blizzard and Valve. Now, I don't want to overload you with a flurry of numbers. But if you compare the minimum specs for Blizzard and Valve titles like World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, Half-Life 2: The Orange Box, and Left 4 Dead with games like Crysis: Warhead, Call of Duty: World at War, and Fallout 3, you'll see that the former have designed their games to run on older, less-powerful machines. By doing so, they've made their games accessible to a wider audience.
Taking this back to consoles for a moment: Microsoft's Xbox 360 had a year's head start on the competition, and as its executives love to remind us, the bulk of all console sales during the last generation took place at $199 or less—the current entry-level price for 360. Sony was all set to achieve global domination coming off consecutive wins with PlayStation and PlayStation 2. Yet in just 24 months, Nintendo has blown past its rivals and continues to do so even though the 360 is now $50 cheaper than the Wii's suggested retail price. To put this Nintendominance in perspective, for the month of November, Wii (2.04 million) outsold Xbox 360 (836,000), PlayStation Portable (421,000), Playstation 3 (378,000), and PlayStation 2 (206,000) combined.
Now if that's Game Over as far as the console wars are concerned, why are the major developers and publishers continuing to spend the bulk of their budgets on Xbox 360, PS3, and high-end PC games? Part of it is because Nintendo's own games have historically dominated sales on its own platforms, and that's been true for Wii as well. Part of it is because the creatives and the suits at third-party publishers don't know how to address the expanded audience on the Wii; they've tried a number of things—some bad, some good—but many of their efforts have underperformed. Yet as Electronic Arts' well-publicized struggles demonstrate, the winner-take-all software market on 360, PS3, and high-end PC games can pose just as much risk to a publisher's bottom line.
Yes, the data show that the video-game industry's revenues continue to rise. But how sustainable is that when development budgets are tilted toward 360, PS3, and high-end PCs and away from the market-leading Wii and low-end PCs. If a remake of Resident Evil 4 sold extremely well on the Wii, surely there was an opportunity for Dead Space. The liberating sense of movement in Mirror's Edge could have translated well to the Wiimote and nunchuk. But because EA built those games for the top-of-the-line machines, the Wii wasn't even a possibility. So with Nintendo as top dog, I think it's time for publishers to throw it a much bigger bone by leading development on Wii, then up-porting the games to the more powerful systems, which should result in a larger addressable audience. (Hard-core gamers' flames coming in 3 … 2 … 1.)
Now that I've rendered unto Caesar, let's get back to the art. Chris, I have to say that I was somewhat confused by the game that you're asking for. Would you ask for a movie with the action choreography of Saving Private Ryan and the story of The Empire Strikes Back, told in the manner of Memento or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? The creator of Everyday Shooter, an abstract twin-stick shooter game, gave a speech at this year's Game Developers Conference where he talked about the need for developers to become more creative with inputs and outputs; as an example, he said that he'd been bored by Call of Duty 3 but that he might have been more interested if it looked like Rez. Me too.
While I suppose it's possible that Marcus and Dom could shoot Locusts with quotes from famous revolutionaries or turn their enemies into Seurat paintings, it sounds like you're asking for something more like Aliens-meets-The Thin Red Line, where commerce meets art in a $60 game. So I'll just say two things. One, if Truffaut was right when he declared that it's impossible to make an anti-war movie, because film makes war look exciting, imagine how much more true that is of AAA games and the accompanying imperative that they be "fun." Two, you should play thatgamecompany's Flower when it comes to Playstation Network next year. Thrilling controls; gorgeous visuals; minimalist but allusive narrative; it's so good that I've already said that "Flower is everything that Mirror's Edge should have been" while Stephen, in his rush to canonize, has declared it "The First Must-Play Game of 2009." It just may be what you're looking for.
Lastly, Seth: You're absolutely right about Epic's goal with Maria's scene in Gears of War 2. It's just that I question the goal. No one playing the game needs any more reason to kill the Locust than they've already been given. Just as You Have To Burn the Rope, You Have To Kill the Locust; we gamers are very good at following orders, and Gears 2 players are no exception. If we should ever become confused about our motivation, the way that the aiming reticule helpfully turns red when we move it over the enemy makes it clear: Shoot till they're dead, no questions asked. No, Maria's scene is there to engender emotion in the player, to add something approaching depth to the game, to show that Cliff Bleszinski and his team at Epic can do more than just bro-speak. It fails, not because of a lack of meaningful choice, but because they didn't let that impulse influence their game design.
(SPOILER ALERT)
We're told that, in our role as Marcus and Dom, we're shooting the Locusts to save Sera. Maria is from Sera, but Dom—Bleszinski, really—shoots her rather than save her. Compare that with the sequence in "Dirty Little Secret," the first chapter of Act 3, where Marcus and Dom must both hold either end of a "heavy bomb" and carry it to a door that must be destroyed. Both men are vulnerable during this sequence: They can't roadie run, their turning speed is reduced, and they can only use their pistols. So if you don't think that it would have worked to make the player carry out the mercy killing of Dom's wife, the sequence above is proof that Epic had the means to build an alternative interactive sequence around her. They chose not to.
They could have carried her to an extraction point on a stretcher while coming under fire. They could have defended Maria from a Locust assault while waiting for a rescue team to come get her. There were any number of interactive options at Bleszinki's disposal, yet he opted for the cheap, easy sentiment of women in refrigerators, shuffling her off the stage so that Marcus and Dom's great bromance could continue. When all is said and done, he lavished more care and attention—interactively speaking—on a bomb than he did on Dom's wife. You say Bleszinski avoided the rabbit hole. I hope that with Gears of War 3, he'll jump in.
Thanks for the exchange, and I'll see you all back here in 2009.
Cheers,
N'Gai
If, like me, you have always wanted to get a carved, elephant-ivory snuff box for that special someone, this holiday season may well be your last opportunity. The online auction site eBay announced on Oct. 20 that it would ban nearly all ivory sales on its auction sites effective Jan. 1. Last month, the company was embarrassed by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which estimated that it was hosting an elephant-ivory trade in the United States worth $3.2 million per year.
This may seem like another example of corporate greenwashing—a way for the auction site to paper over its misdeeds and parade around as a concerned environmental steward. In fact, the new policy is directly at odds with mainstream conservationists. Just one week after eBay made its big announcement, the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species—with support from WWF—was going forward with a one-time auction of government ivory stockpiles from elephants that either died of natural causes or had been culled in population-control programs in four southern African countries. These sales netted $15 million, earmarked for elephant conservation and local community-development programs. Although international laws governing the ivory trade are complex, the truth is that most of the ivory being sold on eBay was totally legal. More to the point, buying ivory online may actually be a good thing for conservation: The more snuff boxes we demand, the better chance that elephants and their ecosystems have to withstand the pressures of modernization.
Wild elephants are never going to be tolerated in Africa so long as locals cannot profit from the animals' most valuable asset: those 120-pound teeth. As journalist John Frederick Walker argues in his provocative new book, Ivory's Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants (to be published in January), the high regard with which American zoo-goers hold these proboscideans is not shared by poverty-stricken farmers in Kenya, who must contend with 4-ton living bulldozers rampaging their cassava fields and threatening their lives. Flip through African newspapers, and you'll find lurid headlines describing trampled schoolchildren, panicked villagers, and nightly curfews. Americans would not put up with life under those conditions, yet we have imposed this imperial vision on a far-off continent that we imagine as our private zoo.
The elephant problem is equally vexing inside the national parks of Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, whose burgeoning elephant populations must be managed to avoid their overwhelming the ecosystem. Elephants are the largest living land mammal, each consuming as much as 600 pounds of vegetation a day and drinking 50 gallons of water. In 1970, a hands-off policy to Kenya's elephants in Tsavo National Park provided a bitter lesson to those who opposed culling. After ravaging the park's fragile vegetation during a season of drought, elephants began dying by the thousands. Animals whose meat could have supported the region's desperate farmers and whose ivory could have provided $3 million for conservation were rotting in the blazing sun. In the years since, South African wildlife managers have refined culling procedures to minimize trauma to elephant family groups, and they catalog and store ivory under lock and key in anticipation of future auctions.
But pragmatic approaches to elephant conservation took a blow in 1989, when celebrities Brigitte Bardot and Jimmy Stewart joined animal rights campaigns to fight the "elephant holocaust" being conducted by poachers and, by implication, wildlife managers. According to Walker, the WWF and the African Wildlife Foundation "felt it prudent … to keep quiet about the value of sustainable use policies." Although no African or Western countries initially supported a ban on the ivory trade, by the end of the year they were on the losing end of the battle for public opinion. On Oct. 8, in Lausanne, Switzerland, CITES listed African elephants as Appendix I, effectively cutting off ivory sales, putting Asian importers and carving shops out of business, and turning "white gold" into a social no-no. "In the aftermath of the decision," Walker writes, "the ivory market collapsed as ivory prices plummeted."
The latest effort to humiliate eBay represents another example of an animal rights organization hijacking the African conservation agenda with an untenable vision that may do more harm than good. Advocates for a ban on ivory claim the CITES auction gives unscrupulous traders a chance to launder poached goods. But a wildlife trade monitoring program set up by WWF and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has found that illegal-ivory seizures have declined in the five years following the last ivory auction approved by CITES in 1999. It appears that a flush of legal ivory from these auctions knocks out black-market dealers. While poaching remains a problem in Central and East Africa, the data suggest that those activities feed domestic African markets, not online auctioneers in the United States.
Most of the ivory that was being sold on eBay may not have been illegal at all. A good deal of ivory in the country simply predates the 1989 ban, and interstate sale of ivory is not tightly regulated or monitored. As for imports, residents can bring in licensed hunting trophies for personal use or antique ivory items more than 100 years old. The IFAW report on eBay simply identified certain auctions as "likely violations" or "possible violations" of the law, based on the wording used in listings. According to the study, just 15.5 percent of ivory goods on the site fell into the "likely violation" category. Turn those figures around, and it's clear that eBay also supported a vibrant, legal ivory market.
The only way to improve this market is through transparency, and eBay was ideally suited to play such a role. Because the site maintains a database of every auction, the final sale price, and the parties involved, it could provide a valuable tool for law-enforcement officers and conservation organizations. With those data, it would be possible to track the volume of the ivory trade and help identify questionable buyers and sellers based on their transaction patterns. Once the market moves offline—and to classifieds sites such as Craigslist—this sort of monitoring will be largely impossible.
If eBay wanted to take a stand for conservation, it should have partnered with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service—and notified its users that any purchase or sale of wildlife products will be recorded in a government database. Add to this the eventual possibility of spot checks using DNA testing, and we'd be well on our way to a sustainable, digital marketplace. Given such a framework, ivory would regain its respectability, and it might even be possible to open our borders to the importation of newly worked ivory from registered sellers abroad. After two decades under the ban, it's finally time to admit that saving elephants requires pulling a few teeth.
It's been more than a year and a half since the Chinese melamine story first landed in the U.S. press, but the ripple effects continue to spread. Three months ago, the contaminant showed up in baby formula. (The earlier scare was limited to pet food.) In the last couple of weeks, we've learned that China is now investigating more than two dozen cases of animal feed contaminated with melamine, and its health officials have identified 17 other illegal food additives that demand scrutiny—including boric acid and Sudan Red dye. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has now resorted to random spot checks of hot dogs, chicken nuggets, frozen pizzas, and other foods processed with milk powder, and scientific organizations are discussing better ways to detect melamine in the global food supply. From the looks of it, this sprawling scandal will be with us for some time.
The deepening severity of the problem stands in sharp contrast to the continued insouciance of the Food and Drug Administration. When Canada voiced concern over milk-powder imports from the United States in late September, an FDA spokeswoman gave a dismissive response: "The public health crisis is in China." When, over the next several weeks, the administration finally discovered melamine in baby formula sold here in the United States, its first order of business was to set up a conference call to warn the companies that produce 90 percent of the world's milk powder—Abbott Labs, Mead Johnson, and Nestlé. But when it came to the general public, the FDA remained silent—at least until the Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the test results and published the news in late November. The Department of Agriculture declared (PDF) that it will follow the lead of the FDA on the melamine issue, which is why it's only just now begun to take action.
Conscientious consumers who have followed the melamine story are appropriately outraged. Some have written off the FDA as hopelessly corrupt and proposed that we all protect ourselves by eating locally grown food. But self-imposed culinary isolationism isn't going to solve this problem. Once milk power enters the nation's commercial bloodstream, it's difficult to avoid. The powder appears in a dizzying array of products—caramelized candies, whey protein supplements, power bars, powdered drinks, nondairy creamers, and baking mixes, among others. We don't have to persuade every American to avoid every one of these products. Instead, let's fix some of the obvious flaws with the FDA so the agency can start doing what it's supposed to do.
Over the course of the scandal, the government made three major mistakes. All of these have become part of the FDA's standard operating procedure, and each could be remedied with proper legislative action. The first involves the arbitrary adjustment of allowable levels of a contaminant. On Nov. 26, the agency confessed on its Web site to being "currently unable to establish any level of melamine and melamine-related compounds in infant formula that does not raise public health concerns." A day later, just after the milk-powder news hit CNN, Dr. Stephen Sundlof, head of the FDA's Center for Food Safety, described the baby formula results as "in the trace range, and from a public health or infant health perspective, we consider those to be perfectly fine." (The administration made a similarly arbitrary decision a few weeks ago concerning mercury levels in seafood.) Melamine is an adulterant. How can it go from being unsafe one day to being "perfectly fine" the next? If the FDA cannot answer this question—that is, if it has no scientific evidence to justify the flip-flop—the change should not be legally permissible.
The second mistake is to use the risk of acute poisoning as a reference for setting contaminant standards. There is a long tradition of business-friendly regulatory agencies avoiding reference to studies of chronic exposure when setting legal trace limits. The Department of Agriculture, for example, ignored long-term effects when it set fruit-residue limits for arsenic-based insecticides in the 1930s. The situation with melamine has been no different. Legal limits in food other than infant formula sit at 2.5 parts per million, a rate that is by most accounts relatively safe with respect to acute toxicity. As a toxicologist at the Minnesota Department of Public Health recently told me, however, there's not a single study out there on the impact of long-term, low-dose exposure to melamine. Meanwhile, we have seen a mysterious but dramatic increase in kidney stones among children and young adults. Medical doctors are largely confused about the underlying cause and more often than not blame obesity. But melamine is known to cause kidney problems like these, and long-term exposure could be responsible for the larger trend. In that case, the FDA would be forced to reduce allowable trace amounts to zero—which is exactly where they should be until studies of chronic exposure suggest otherwise.
A third mistake has to do with the FDA's tendency to regulate finished products at the expense of raw materials. By choosing to monitor the safety of imported food items instead of the ingredients that go into them, the FDA not only ignores the intricate nature of global food production but opens the door for Chinese wheat gluten, rice gluten, and milk powder to enter the U.S. food supply without the benefit of stringent regulation. To make matters worse, our so-called "country of origin" labeling laws don't apply to individual ingredients in packaged food products. It might seem unwieldy to require a separate label for each foreign ingredient in a can of soup, but the inconvenience would force the FDA to protect our food supply at its most vulnerable points.
These are grave problems, but there's an achievable regulatory solution for each of them. If the FDA were required by law to provide scientific evidence when it changes adulterant standards and to rely on studies of both acute and chronic toxicity when it set those standards, it would be far more difficult for the bureaucrats to coddle corporate concerns. Add to that a requirement for country-of-origin labeling for all imported foodstuffs, and we're more likely to escape major health scares like this in the future. Short of becoming a nation of locavores in a globalized world, that may be the best we can do.
Bernie Madoff, a much-respected Wall Street investment adviser and former NASDAQ chairman, was arrested last week after he confessed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that he'd committed securities fraud. Madoff told the FBI that his 50-year-old company, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, had been running a "giant Ponzi scheme" for years and that there was "no innocent explanation." The company has been placed in receivership.
Investigators for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI, and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation will surely have a few questions for the company's accountant, Friehling & Horowitz—a small tax-preparation firm located in a shopping center in tiny New City, N.Y.—about the $1.3 billion in assets that David Friehling signed off on in December 2006. At least one hedge-fund adviser, Aksia LLC, had last year warned clients that Friehling & Horowitz, which had only "three employees, of [whom] one was 78 years old and living in Florida [and] one was a secretary," seemed a peculiar choice given "the scope of Madoff's activities."
The two companies were, indeed, an odd match. On the Madoff Investment Securities Web site (Pages 2-4), which has now been removed and replaced with a trustee notice, the Wall Street powerhouse boasted of being "one of the first U.S. members of the London Stock exchange." Friehling led a more provincial life, delightedly relating last year in the "Trusted Professional," a newsletter for certified public accountants, that while touring Europe last year he and his wife foiled potential pickpockets by relying on a prepaid debit card rather than cash (below). "Although the seascape and the historical sites differ dramatically from those in the U.S.," Friehling wrote, "we are all operating in a 21st-century economy. When exiting ruins that are over 2,500 years old, there you find it: the bank ATM!"
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Does the Constitution allow the Senate to refuse to seat Roland Burris, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's surprise appointee? In a word, yes. Here's why.
Following English parliamentary tradition and early Colonial and state practice, the framers made the Senate its own gatekeeper and guardian. Each house of Congress is "the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own members," according to Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution. At the founding, Senators were elected by state legislatures. If the Senate believed that legislators in a given state had been bribed into voting for a particular candidate, the Senate could refuse to seat him.
Because of the word "returns" in Section 5, what is true of elected Senators is equally true of appointed Senators. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a "Return" in the time of the framers involved a report of an appointment made by a sheriff or other official. If the Senate may refuse to seat a person picked in a corrupt election, it likewise may refuse to seat a person picked in a corrupt appointment process. (Alternatively, we might think of an appointment as an "election" by one voter.)
A simple majority of the Senate would suffice to exclude Burris. Majority rule is the general default principle established by the Constitution, except where text, structure, or tradition indicates otherwise. When the Senate tries to expel a member who has already been seated, the rule is two-thirds (as it is when the Senate sits as an impeachment court). But the framers clearly understood that majority rule would apply when the Senate was judging the accuracy and fairness of elections or appointments.
The power to judge elections and returns has been used on countless occasions in American history, at both the state and federal level, to exclude candidates whose elections and appointments were suspect.
True, in the 1969 case of Powell v. McCormack, the Supreme Court properly held that the Constitution imposes limits on the power of the Senate and the House to exclude members. Some legal commentators say this decision trumps the Senate's power to exclude Burris. But the letter and spirit of Powell actually cut against him. The case involved an elected congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, whom the voters had clearly chosen in a fair election and whom the House nevertheless excluded—wrongly, the court held. The key fact is that there was no doubt whatsoever that Powell was the people's choice, and in issuing its ruling, the Warren Court repeatedly stressed this. The justices insisted that their ruling was aimed at protecting the people's right to vote. None of that spirit applies here. And that's why the case doesn't stand in the Senate's way now.
Powell also said that each house could "judge" the qualifications laid out in the Constitution (such as age) but could not make up new qualifications. Thus, if the Senate were to plausibly decide in good faith that a candidate failed to meet the Constitution's age requirement, Powell nowhere suggests that this senatorial determination should be set aside by ordinary federal courts. For similar reasons, federal courts should not interfere when the Senate plausibly and in good faith decides an election or return to be improper or corrupt. The critical point here is that the Constitution itself sets up the Senate as the highest court of Senate elections. When the Senate speaks as this court, its adjudications are legal judgments that no other court may properly reopen. If the Senate convicts a federal judge in an impeachment court, no other federal court may properly interfere. So, too, for Senate elections and returns.
What are the counterarguments in favor of seating Burris? Both he and Blagojevich say that the Senate should not hold the governor's sins against his would-be senator. To be sure, there is no evidence Burris bribed the governor to get this seat. But imagine if Burris had won election only because other candidates were wrongly and corruptly kept off the ballot. Surely the Senate could properly deem this an invalid election. Similarly, it now seems apparent that there were candidates that Blagojevich refused to consider for improper reasons—because one refused to "pay to play" early on, or because another is at the center of the impending criminal case against the governor. With the appointments process so inherently and irremediably tainted, the Senate may properly decide that nothing good can come from a Blagojevich appointment.
(And let's not feel too sorry for Burris, who, after all, has shown dubious judgment in accepting the nomination, given the circumstances. Weeks ago, Senate leaders announced that no Blagojevich appointee would be allowed to sit. What is Burris thinking? Many other arguably better candidates doubtless refused to have any dealings with Blagojevich once his crimes came to light; Burris got his shot at the Senate at their expense.)
Nor does it matter, from the Senate's point of view, that Blagojevich hasn't yet been convicted. In this context, the Senate itself is a judge, in the words of the Constitution, and can decide facts for itself. It need not follow the rules of criminal courts. That means it need not find Blagojevich guilty beyond reasonable doubt, as a court would if his liberty were in jeopardy. It is enough for the Senate to reject Blagojevich's appointee if a majority of senators are firmly convinced that Blagojevich is corrupt and that any nomination he might make is inherently tainted by such corruption.
To make sure its ruling sticks, the Senate should follow its own procedures with due deliberation. Burris' case can be referred to a committee for careful review. He need not be seated while this committee does its work, and it will be very hard for Burris to persuade any federal judge to interfere in the meantime, especially if Senate Democrats and Republicans unite. With any luck, Blagojevich will be out of office soon enough and a new appointments process (or a special election) can begin that would supersede the attempted Burris appointment.
Finally, the Senate can bulletproof its vote to exclude Burris by adopting an anticipatory "sense of the Senate" resolution declaring that if Burris were ever to take the matter to a federal court and prevail, the Senate would immediately expel him. Expulsion would ultimately require a two-thirds vote. If two-thirds of the Senate is ready to vote against Burris now, an anticipatory resolution would discourage him from going to court in the first place. It would also discourage any activist judges who might be tempted by his case. Whether to seat Burris is the Senate's call: It easily has the brute power—and the constitutional right—to stop Blagojevich.
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The Senate has been called upon to judge the return of an appointed Senator at least twice.
In 1893 (before the 17th Amendment provided for the direct election of senators), the Montana legislature adjourned without electing a senator. After the adjournment, Gov. John E. Richards appointed Lee Mantle to fill the vacant seat. By a three-vote margin, the Senate determined that a vacancy the legislature knew about and did not fill was not the sort of vacancy that the governor had the power to fill himself. Accordingly, Mantle was denied the seat.
In 1913, just after the 17th Amendment was ratified, Sen. Joseph Johnston of Alabama died. The Alabama legislature was in recess, and the governor appointed Frank Glass to fill the vacancy. The last provision of the 17th Amendment reads, "This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution." If this clause was read as attached to the Senate seat, then the 17th Amendment did not yet apply to it, and Glass was properly chosen under the pre-17th Amendment procedure. If, on the other hand, the amendment applied to the individual senator, then it was operative with regard to the Alabama seat. In that case, the appointment of Glass was unconstitutional, and the seat would have to be filled by special election. The Senate determined that the latter was the correct interpretation. Glass did not get the seat, which was filled instead by a special election.
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Houses of Congress have, in the past, found that certain elections were so tainted that the returned member should not be seated. For example, in 1854, it was alleged that the election for a territorial delegate from Kansas was disrupted "by an armed invading force" from Missouri—the beginning of the "Bleeding Kansas" episode in American history. A congressional committee determined that, under the circumstances, "a fair election could not be held," and the delegate was not seated. Although this election was for a nonvoting territorial delegate, rather than a full-fledged member, the House's procedure was no different than it otherwise would have been.
TOKYO—Call it the oxygen bar of the future, but with needles and nurses, vitamins, and a shot of human placenta.
Located in a tony complex—upstairs from L'Occitane and Armani, down the hall from Morgan Stanley—the clinic offers 10-minute intravenous drips to urbanites in need of a pick-me-up. (The place is called Tenteki 10, after the Japanese word for intravenous.) When I drop in, three women are on their way out, exuding relaxation, as if they've been to a spa. A technician tidies up the treatment room, where patients sit on elevated stools. IV bags release liquid into their veins as a flat-screen TV displays images of red leaves and water rushing over rocks. Many of the treatments include recognizable fare—vitamin C, biotin, and various amino acids—however questionable it may be to infuse unspecified doses of these "treatments" into healthy adults. But the kicker is the key ingredient in one of the cocktails: human placental extract.
Placental extract has been available in Japan since at least the late 1950s. The country's National Health Insurance covers placental treatments for liver disease and symptoms of menopause, though patients pay out of pocket for its other alleged benefits, like fighting fatigue, treating insomnia, and combating aging, according to several Japanese doctors. The academic literature on it remains thin, however. And the complex soup of placental compounds—including, potentially, hormones, growth factors, and immune molecules—might mean that fountain-of-youth seekers could face some risks, like unwanted immune reactions or viruses. Is placental extract a clinical treasure trove? Or do these infusions amount to freaky magical thinking?
The staff at Tenteki 10 is confident about its popular "placenta pack," which costs about $30. The bubbly receptionist tells me it's her favorite drip at the clinic—she personally receives it at least once every other week. The morning after, she says, she wakes up refreshed, her skin noticeably smoother and younger. The clinic's medical director, Ryuji Yasumura, a physician who telegraphs calm paternalism, is also a fan. "Some young doctors don't know about placenta because it's old," he says, gesturing to his own salt-and-pepper mop, though it's not clear exactly how far back it dates as a folk remedy. But he argues that placenta ought to be better recognized and covered by insurance for more uses, particularly for fatigue, which many people in Japan's workaholic culture suffer from.
It's hard to deny the poetry of placenta. Placenta plays a crucial role in sustaining pregnancy by supplying the fetus with oxygen and nutrients, allowing it to dispose of wastes, and helping it build blood vessels and protect itself from disease. The possibility that it could also serve as a fountain of youth or health for mom and dad has circle-of-life allure. In some cultures, people bury the placenta and plant a tree in the soil. Many mammals—including cats, bats, goats, and, possibly, Tom Cruise—eat the placenta after birth. One Japanese company sells a placental "health drink" that reportedly tastes like peaches.
So, poetry gives way to commerce. At least two Japanese companies produce human placental extract, and numerous sites advertise online sales. The extract is also exported from Japan to Korea, where it is approved for liver disease and menopausal symptoms and widely used for fatigue and "skin whitening" as well. A doctor in Yunoyama, Japan, who runs a "health and rejuvenation tour" that offers injections of placental extract, in part for menopausal women, tells me that the extract is effective for treating disease and "safer than aspirin, I'm sure, 100 percent." Still, he concedes, "pure scientists say, 'show me the evidence.' "
To date, at least, that evidence supporting placenta as a health treatment is scant. One small, randomized clinical trial from Korea published this spring suggests that injections of placental extract may help relieve symptoms of menopause and fatigue. The study followed roughly 80 women between ages 40 and 64. Those who received placental injections for eight weeks scored significantly lower on a scale of menopausal symptoms than those who received saline injections. They also seemed to experience decreased fatigue. The researchers speculate that immune molecules in placenta may act to reduce inflammation, which could have a positive effect on energy. The reduction in women's menopausal symptoms might be linked to estrogen, which is present in the extract. But estrogen may increase the risk of blood clots and strokes as well, as data from the landmark Women's Health Initiative suggested. Depending in part on the woman's age, it may also, together with progestins, increase the odds of a heart attack. The Korean group did not find an increase in cardiovascular risk factors. The researchers also note that their extract contained a relatively low dose of estrogen compared with hormone therapy. But they did not follow women for very long, and their sample was small, so it's hard to dismiss these worries out of hand.
As for liver and skin, some work suggests that placental extract may stimulate the regeneration of liver cells—in rats, at least. This may happen partly because placenta contains hepatocyte growth factor, which supports liver cell growth and tissue development. But without clinical trials, it's hard to know what the effects would be in people. The effects on skin are also fairly speculative. In theory, topical gels or creams containing placental extract might help chronic wounds to heal. That is plausible since placenta contains compounds that facilitate collagen formation and skin cell proliferation, says Michael Nelson of Washington University School of Medicine, who edits the scholarly journal Placenta. But this paper, at least, finds that the wound-healing effect is merely comparable to that associated with a common antiseptic. Nor did I turn up any clinical trials that demonstrate anti-aging effects on skin, at least in the peer-reviewed, medical literature. Perhaps the fountain-of-youth claims spring from a belief that substances connected with childbirth or infants must hold some power to turn the clock back. (The same leap seems to fuel hype about fighting wrinkles using cells from babies' foreskins—though foreskins themselves seem rather wrinkly!)
Placenta contains hormones, growth factors, immune molecules, lipids, and nucleic acids—hundreds of different compounds. Specific placental molecules isolated from the mix could turn out to have particular clinical applications. But the richness of placenta also makes casual infusion risky. To make an extract, according to one academic description, manufacturers simply gather human placentas from women who have just given birth and place the tissue on ice. Then, they cut it into pieces, test it for viruses, perform chemical separation and purification steps, and sterilize and seal the product. Some proteins may be rendered inactive by sterilization. And some manufacturers may remove specific groups of molecules. (Yasumura says Tenteki 10's infusion does not contain hormones.)
But it's hard to know what exactly is present and what the accumulated effects will be. For instance, some cytokines found in the placenta act to increase inflammation while others act to decrease it; some, like interleukin 6, can do either, depending on what other molecules are present, according to Ted Golos, an expert on placenta at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Rigorous clinical trials, using standardized extracts, would be crucial for sorting out what the actual effects might or might not be. And since extracts are made from human tissue, they could contain bacteria or viruses, some of which may not be tested for. As the staff at Tenteki 10 casually informs clients, those who receive placental infusions are no longer allowed to donate blood in Japan.
These dangers might seem important to wrestle with if placenta were shown to have genuine healing powers. But with little proven benefit, it seems questionable to turn to the extract, especially for conditions that have other available treatment options. For severe menopausal symptoms, for instance, it's hard to know whether placenta would prove better (or worse) than hormone therapy, unless more research, including head-to-head comparisons, were conducted. Meanwhile, claims that the extract aids both insomnia and fatigue are cause for some head-scratching.
Placental drips do not seem ready for prime time, even among the clinically adventurous. Nor are they likely to win approval in the United States anytime soon. Still, Tenteki 10 reports growing demand for all of its infusions, especially since the financial meltdown. When I drop by for a second visit, late in the afternoon, two businessmen are filling out intake forms in the reception area. Another is sprawled in the backroom VIP lounge, his eyes closed, his arm outstretched for the human cocktail. Regardless of the needle and drip, he seems, at least, to be getting a good nap.
I must have the opposite of Asperger's syndrome: I'm allergic to hierarchies, lists, and ranking. But like a hippie schoolteacher when report-card time rolls around, I have to haul out the red pen and mark the ledger this time of year—and if nothing else, it's an opportunity to kvell over the accomplishments of a few beloved pupils.
So, unranked and in alphabetical order, here are 10 of this year's best:
A Christmas Tale: Arnaud Desplechin makes films about intellectuals that thrum with emotional (and cinematic) life. The story of a matriarch with a rare blood disease (Catherine Deneuve) seeking a transfusion from one of her three angry, resentful grown children (the craziest of whom is played by Mathieu Amalric), A Christmas Tale is a glorious feast of a movie, with the bitter served right next to the sweet.
The Class: I said it all last week, but here's a recap: See this whip-smart vérité film about a Parisian teacher and his multiracial high-school class only if you happen to be interested in love, loyalty, race, class, language, or life.
The Edge of Heaven: Director Fatih Akin, a German of Turkish descent, made this little-seen movie that's everything Crash and Babel should have been. Yes, it's an interlocking series of stories about globalization and its discontents, but this time, the characters are beautifully realized individuals, not symbolic pegs on an international game board. A little poky getting going, but give this movie an hour, and it will give you the world.
Encounters at the End of the World: Though it lacks the conceptual purity of his masterpiece Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog's account of his visit to the McMurdo research station at the South Pole is an invaluable tour of one of the weirdest spots on earth, as seen through the eyes of our weirdest and wisest documentary filmmaker.
Frozen River: The astonishingly mature debut film of director Courtney Hunt is as uncompromising as the work of those Belgian masters of social realism, the Dardenne brothers. Yet Hunt's subject matter—the straitened circumstances that compel two very dissimilar women to smuggle illegal immigrants across the Canadian border—is uniquely, and bleakly, American.
Man on Wire: One morning in 1974, Philippe Petit, a French acrobat, walked a tightrope strung between the two towers of the World Trade Center. The stunt was simple and yet breathtaking—just like this documentary from British director James Marsh.
Milk: Many of the films we think of as landmark depictions of gay life (Philadelphia, Brokeback Mountain) suffer from a deficiency of joy. Gus Van Sant takes care of that in the giddy first 10 minutes of his sexy, buoyant biopic of slain activist Harvey Milk—and then goes on to break our hearts.
Wall-E: In this postapocalyptic Pixar fable, a battered VHS copy of Hello, Dolly! is the only thing that sustains the titular robot through centuries of loneliness as the sole sentient being on Earth. If Al Gore's nightmares do come true and you find yourself alone on the planet, your best bet for keeping hope alive may be a battered DVD of Wall-E.
Wendy and Lucy: The year's most haunting soundtrack may be the six-bar theme (composed by Will Oldham) that Michelle Williams hums throughout this quiet marvel of a film from director Kelly Reichardt. A transient young woman in the Pacific Northwest loses her dog: It sounds like a skimpy premise to hang a movie on, but then, you could say the same thing about Bicycle Thieves.
The Wrestler: It seems to have become de rigueur, when talking about Darren Aronofsky's latest, to praise Mickey Rourke's performance while expressing grave doubts about the movie as a whole. I intend to do nothing of the kind: I loved it all, from Marisa Tomei's sad-eyed pole dances to the bit parts played by nonprofessional actors to the graceful handheld camerawork by Maryse Alberti. Go ahead and try to make me say something bad about The Wrestler. But be warned: I have a stapler, and I will use it.
Weekly Standard, Jan. 5, 2009
Charles Krauthammer's cover story calls for a "net-zero" gasoline tax. A $1-per-gallon levy tempered by a $14-per-week reduction in payroll taxes would leave the average American no poorer (and his government no richer), but it would shrink gas demand. This would help keep the price of oil down, hurting the United States' hydrocarbon-exporting enemies and rivals. Krauthammer contends that currently cheap gas (about $1.65 per gallon) combined with the memory of extremely pricey gas (over $4 last July) has made the tax not only wise but also "politically palatable"—a "once in a generation opportunity"... "Obesity is the new smoking," argues one article, citing New York's "fat tax" on soda and a Binghamton, N.Y., ordinance barring discrimination against the overweight. The author ridicules progressives' use of epidemiological language to cast the obese as blameless victims of disease and wonders whether that soda tax might not run afoul of that anti-discrimination law.
New York, Jan. 5, 2009
A spotlight on former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who taught a course on faith and globalization at Yale last semester, argues that he is "a better American politician than most American politicians." Like Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, he has found a warmer reception stateside, where his strong personal faith is not anomalous, than he has back home. ... A column points to foreign policy to explain why George W. Bush and Barack Obama seem to have found themselves cast in a transition buddy comedy. The success of the troop surge aided Obama by minimizing the commander-in-chief question. Now Obama will control much of Bush's Iraq legacy. The author argues, "Obama's foreign-policy instincts bear a strong resemblance to those of George H.W. Bush, whose pragmatic realism looks more and more like the essence of an emerging new consensus in foreign policy"—especially given that Dubya, too, has recently adopted his father's global outlook.
The New Yorker, Jan. 5, 2009
A lengthy dispatch examines the Darfur conflict from the perspective of the United Nations employees who run 12 camps in eastern Chad, which together have taken in about 250,000 Sudanese refugees. The author marvels at the nascent economies the refugees have established but finds himself giving money to a few desperate inhabitants. Meanwhile, portraits of aid workers, doctors, and bureaucrats do justice to the article's title: "Lives of the Saints."... A review of sex books past and present describes the "explosion" produced by The Joy of Sex's 1972 release while criticizing its infamous hairy-man drawings, unfortunate heteronormative inclinations, and general Internet-age obsolescence. The author then applauds the P.C. revisions in a new edition of Joy ("crucially, rear-entry intercourse is no longer called sex "à la Négresse"), but critiques its odd prudishness: "What was revolutionary in 1972 seems obvious now, and to present the material otherwise feels silly and square."
GQ, January 2009
Robert Draper describes his experiences interviewing George W. Bush for his book Dead Certain. "Bush's greatest talent is personal diplomacy," Draper relates. "Conversation with him feels like a physical experience. He listens acutely, relishes argument, and is just as quick to concede a point as he is to pummel a specious one." The article discloses Bush's post-White House plans—"I'll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers"—as well as some dish: Lynne Cheney, Draper says, "seemed affronted by my every question—except for the ones that gave her an opportunity to say what an asshole John Edwards was." … A dispatch from Foreclosure Alley, the expanse of southern California where the housing and credit crashes are yanking 500 homes from their owners per day, features a 21st-century ghost town and a McMansion with "walls ... so thin a Chablis drinker could put a fist through them without dropping the Brie from his wafer."
New York Review of Books, Jan. 15, 2009
In a review of three new books on the Bush administration's harsh interrogation techniques, David Cole expresses sorrow and anger at the U.S. military's official adoption of what amounts to torture. In one book, former Pentagon official Douglas Feith "practically gloats" about constructing legal doctrines that exempt alleged al-Qaida members from the Geneva Conventions; another tome "convincingly makes the case that [Donald] Rumsfeld committed war crimes." Cole argues, "The best insurance against cruelty and torture becoming U.S. policy again is a formal recognition that what we did after September 11 was wrong." But an official "reckoning" is as unlikely as it is crucial. ... An article on U.S. Middle East policy indicts Bush for a "lethal mix of arrogance and ignorance" while noting that President Bill Clinton also failed to produce positive results. So what ought the United States do under Obama? The authors counsel patience and humility concerning the limits of the United States' ability to bring peace.
This month's classic poem is Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush," which Hardy dated "31 December 1900": the last evening of the 19th century. More than a decade ago (June 1998), as the millennial year approached, I offered Slate readers "The Darkling Thrush" as a hard-to-equal model for responses to the turn of a millennium.
Now, at what many hope is the start of a new era, and in time for the new year, here again is Hardy's vividly described little bird with its blend of comedy and pathos. The "blast-beruffled" thrush in its wintry landscape may represent Hardy's bow of his head toward John Keats and Keats' great "Ode to a Nightingale" of May 1819—when their century was much younger.
Expressively tentative or qualifying phrases like the repeated "seems," "I could think," and "I was unaware" enact Hardy's somewhat skeptical holding back from any declaration that the natural surroundings reflect his mood or the human calendar. The poet is alone, and he ends the first half of the poem with the word I: That pronoun suggests, to me, that the "fervorless" or haunted or corpselike quality of the landscape—like the bird's putative "hope" later—is something that the subjective observer at least half creates.
I leant upon a coppice gate
…..When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
…..The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
…..Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
…..Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
…..The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
…..The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
…..Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
…..Seemed fervorless as I.
At once a voice arose among
…..The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
…..Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small
…..In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
…..Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
…..Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
…..Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
…..His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
…..And I was unaware.
31 December 1900
…………................……—Thomas Hardy
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Robert Pinsky read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
Slate Poetry Editor Robert Pinsky will be participating in the Poem Fray this week. Post your questions and comments on "The Darkling Thrush," and he'll respond and participate.
People who work in politics have always had to worry about what they did before they worked in politics. But the sheer size and popularity of Facebook—140 million active users, at least 139.99 million of whom have been photographed drunk at a college party—present budding politicians (and budding political operatives) with a dilemma: How do they keep those pics from showing up on the front page?
Clearly, the safest way to protect yourself is not to have a Facebook account in the first place—or, alternatively, not to do stupid things. But neither of these pieces of advice is very practical. The whole point of being young, after all, is to do stupid things, and the whole point of Facebook is to record these acts for posterity. So here, as a public service, are some tips for those who feel they must be on Facebook and occasionally also feel the need to, say, feel up a cardboard cutout.
Use a Modified Name
Using a completely false name is against Facebook's terms of use, and accounts with questionable names are routinely deleted. However, using a modified version of your legal name, such as your first and middle name, is kosher. So something like J.S. McCain is OK, while Little Old Ladys Killer (an actual Facebook listing) might be suspect. This strategy isn't foolproof—Rudy Giuliani's daughter's profile was found despite her use of a modified name—but it can throw people off the trail for a while.
Remember That Friends Are Liabilities
In the case of Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, a friend of his posted the now-notorious photo. While merely "untagging" photos—that is, removing your name from the description of who's in the photo—will make them harder to find, the photograph will still remain on the Web. So you may be reduced to asking your friends not to upload photos of you in compromising situations. Obviously, there's no guarantee that said friends will oblige. But it's worth a shot, right? Also keep in mind that everything you write on anyone's wall can be seen by all of his or her friends. Which leads to:
Be Careful What You Write on People's Walls
Although Facebook has made it easier to completely delete your profile, some information that you have posted to others' pages won't be deleted. So while professing your—totally platonic! really!—love for your friend might seem like a good idea on a drunken Saturday night, just imagine the headlines during primary season. Even though the link to your profile will become inactive, your comment will be floating around cyberspace until your friend decides to delete his or her profile, too.
Segregate Your Friends
Segregation might seem cruel. But you wouldn't invite your boss to a kegger, so why would you let him see pictures of the one you attended last weekend? Privacy settings let you make lists of friends and allow each group to see different parts of your profile. So while you may want the guys at the frat house to see photographic evidence of your totally awesome keg stand, you may want the DNC chairman to see only that you're currently reading Crime and Punishment.
Understand Guilt by Association
People like to belong. But on Facebook, associations can make trouble for you—or, as the case may be, a close family member—later on. Giuliani's daughter, for example, joined the "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)" group. And try to avoid groups, such as "I Paint My Nails Like a Blind Parkinson's Patient," that may raise questions about your sensitivity years from now.
Of course, it's possible that all this careful strategizing is entirely unnecessary. Maybe, by the time you want to run for office, no one will care about all the seedy information out there. Even in the past few years, there's been a shift in political thinking. Transparency has evolved from Bill Clinton's "didn't inhale" to Obama's "I inhaled frequently; that was the point."
In a March story in the New York Times, Susan Dominus theorized that in a few years, the whole game will have changed. "When everyone has already seen everything (and is thoroughly bored by most of it), the theory goes, politicians will have to find another way to self-destruct," she writes. A Facebook spokesperson agrees. "It may be that in the future, instead of fearing politicians' online pasts, we may actually come to accept, and even expect, them as a helpful measure of authenticity," he wrote in an e-mail. And Daniel Liss, a graduate of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and self-described struggling idealist, thinks that the media will eventually tire of snooping through Facebook profiles for incriminating information. Right now, he says, they're still operating under the idea that anything they uncover is breaking news.
Then again, maybe the American public's hunger for celebrity gossip is insatiable. In which case, as you contemplate that run for Senate, think about how Fox News or MSNBC might use that photo from last Halloween of you dressed up as Sarah Palin.
You don't like Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's pick for the U.S. Senate? What's the matter with you? Don't you want to see another black guy in the World's Most Exclusive Club?
That was the tone of Blagojevich's press conference Tuesday afternoon, when he introduced former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris as his choice to fill the unexpired term of President-elect Barack Obama.
Blagojevich also reminded voters that if he hadn't acted, Illinois would be short-handed when the U.S. Senate convenes next week. A gubernatorial appointment is the only way to fill Obama's seat, since the General Assembly failed to schedule a special election.
"As governor, I am required to make this appointment," Blagojevich said. "If I don't, then the people of Illinois will be deprived of their voice and vote in the Senate."
Blagojevich likes to brag about his "testicular virility." This was a ballsy move by a governor who wants to show he's still running the state and wants to use racial politics to confound his enemies. Burris is an uninspiring but unobjectionable politician who served 16 years in statewide office as comptroller and attorney general. Burris made it through a decade and a half without a major scandal—a real achievement in Illinois. Even better, he wasn't one of the candidates Blagojevich discussed in phone conversations taped by the U.S. Attorney's Office. According to Burris, he and Blagojevich first discussed the appointment on Sunday night.
"Don't allow the allegations against me to taint this good and honest man," Blagojevich said.
That was Blagojevich using the term "good and honest," so reporters pointed out that Burris' law firm has contributed $14,000 to Blagojevich's campaigns. Burris' consulting firm also had a contract with the Illinois Department of Transportation to certify minority businesses.
Burris has been out of politics since 2002, when he ran against Blagojevich for governor. He didn't help himself in that campaign when called his opponents "unqualified white boys." But he did help Blagojevich, siphoning off black votes from the third candidate in that race, a popular Chicago school superintendent. Blagojevich squeaked through the primary with 38 percent and has credited Burris' presence in the race for his victory.
By 2002, Burris was starting to look like a shopworn politician. One of his favorite campaign lines was "I have never lost a race to a Republican." He's lost plenty to Democrats, though: He ran for governor three times and mayor of Chicago once. Paul Simon beat him in the 1984 Senate primary. Burris' tombstone in Oakwoods Cemetery, which lists all his achievements, has an empty space in the lower right-hand corner. He was hoping to fill it with "Governor of Illinois."
What are Burris' strengths? Besides his 16 years in office, he grew up downstate, in Centralia, Ill. He understands, more than most contenders for the seat, that there is an Illinois outside Chicago. And he's African-American. That helps Blagojevich at home. Blacks are the best friends he has left in Illinois, and they were expecting the governor to keep the Senate integrated. It also helps him in Washington. If Harry Reid stands on the Capitol steps next week and tries to bar Roland Burris, he won't just be rejecting Blagojevich's senator—he'll be rejecting black America's senator.
At the news conference, U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush dared the Senate to say no.
"This is not just a state of Illinois matter," said Rush, who hopes to rally the Congressional Black Caucus behind Burris. "Indeed, by this decision, it has tremendous national importance. We need to have an African-American in the U.S. Senate. I would ask you not to hang or lynch the appointee as you tried to do to the appointer."
Then he added, "I don't think that any U.S. senator wants to go on record to deny one black senator from being seated."
Burris called a potential challenge "a process we must look forward to."
But here's a piece of luck for Reid. Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, who is also African-American, says he won't certify Burris' appointment. That may not invalidate the choice, but it will allow discomfited Senate Democrats to point out that a black politician was the first to reject Burris.
In a way, Burris has a claim on this seat. When he was elected comptroller in 1978, he was the first African-American to hold statewide office in Illinois, beating a path that Barack Obama later followed to the U.S. Senate.
If Blagojevich has any political life remaining, "United States Senator" will fill that last line on Burris' tombstone.
Hey, Lions fans! No need to fret. Sure, your team just completed the worst professional football season of all time, including the CFL, the World League, even the XFL. But this is the NFL, where waiting until next year actually works. Check out the playoff-bound Miami Dolphins and Atlanta Falcons. In 2007, both franchises suffered through near-Detroit levels of decrepitude. Miami was 1-15. Meanwhile, Atlanta's rookie head coach bailed on the team for the University of Arkansas, and the team's dog-killing star quarterback was escorted to Leavenworth.
One season later, the Dolphins and the Falcons are preparing for the postseason ball while the ballyhooed Dallas Cowboys, the even more-hooed Brett Favre, and the New England Patriots, who won 18 straight games not too long ago, will have to watch the postseason on their plasma screens. For the benefit of the poor, destitute Lions, let's run through how the Miami and Atlanta shipwrecks got salvaged. The bullet points: leadership, astute drafting, quarterback smarts, improved line play, good health, and a dose of well-deserved luck.
The NFL is a top-down league, and owners have more influence than in other sports. In Arthur Blank and Wayne Huizenga, the Falcons and Dolphins are run by a pair of men who inserted their egos into team operations, found out the hard way it was a mistake, and backed off this season to let a football man run the show. Bill Parcells, a master renovator who should have his own show on HGTV, was the first choice of both teams. Atlanta thought it had the Tuna signed, but Parcells wiggled free and headed for South Florida instead. Atlanta settled for a canny personnel man from the Parcells tree, Thomas Dimitroff, late of the Patriots' omniscient scouting department. Both men set about remaking their organizations to prize toughness, accountability, and smarts.
In a league where players have such short careers and are so prone to injury, shrewd drafting is essential. It's no coincidence that both teams' personnel men hit it big with their first picks in 2008. Jake Long, a massive offensive tackle, was taken No. 1 overall by Miami. While the Dolphins' use of the Wildcat formation has gotten the most attention, Long and his mates on the offensive line were the biggest reason why the Dolphins' running game has taken off. Matt Ryan was a risky selection for Atlanta at No. 3, with many pundits and fans feeling the Falcons were reaching for a replacement for Michael Vick. But Atlanta hit the jackpot—Ryan is Peyton Manning Jr., a sharp, strong-armed quarterback who can make all the throws but doesn't force the action.
The Dolphins, too, found themselves a quarterback. Chad Pennington fell into Miami's lap after the Jets' shotgun marriage with Favre, and the smart, savvy leader has spent the season showing New York that they chose poorly. Like Ryan, Pennington is extremely risk-averse. While Favre led the league in interceptions, the Jets' old quarterback threw a mere seven picks; as a result, Miami led the league in turnover margin, with 17 more takeaways than giveaways. Another—more underrated—talent that Ryan and Pennington share is ball-handling expertise. Both guys are exceptional at faking to backs, holding linebackers for that all-important second, and making defenses wonder just who has the ball. Pennington's mastery was well known; Ryan's slick hands have been revelatory.
Along with their new QBs, both Atlanta and Miami brought in new coaches. Mike Smith and Tony Sparano have a lot in common. Neither one was a particularly hot name (see Steve Spagnuolo this year) or a reheated old head coach. Smith and Sparano were well-respected line coaches—the guys in charge of the most anonymous, most important personnel groups in the NFL. It's probably not a coincidence that Miami's and Atlanta's offensive and defensive lines surged to the top of the league. While sack differential doesn't get the same publicity as turnover differential, it's just as good of an indicator of winning football games. Miami was +14 and Atlanta +17, both right near the top of the table (Tennessee was an astounding +32). The quarterbacks helped here, too. One of Ryan's best and most precocious attributes is his ability to throw away balls rather than take sacks. Pennington has been beaten up so badly in his career that he learned the lesson the hard way, but he learned.
On the defensive side, both teams revamped a key weapon—sack artists off the edge. Joey Porter, misused by the Fins coaching staff in 2007, was reborn, amassing 17.5 sacks. John Abraham, who struggled in 2007, rebounded with 16.5 for the Falcons, Both added numerous pressures that forced opposing quarterbacks to dump the ball early, helping their teammates in the secondary.
Generally speaking, teams that make quick turnarounds lack depth—if they had a lot of great players then they wouldn't have been bad in the first place. Without quality backups, maintaining good health is crucial, and the Falcons and Dolphins took their vitamins. In a season defined by injuries to superstars like Tom Brady, Shawne Merriman, and Osi Umenyiora, Atlanta and Miami were the league's healthiest teams. Who would've thought that Chad Pennington would make it through 16 games? The lack of names on the injury report is a combination of improved conditioning and training staffs, and a whole lot of good luck.
Speaking of good fortune, the random turns of the NFL schedule helped both squads. Of the 16 games each season, half are played on a rotating basis against other divisions. Atlanta drew the mediocre NFC North and the putrid AFC West, and the Falcons went 7-1 in those games. Miami was even luckier, playing the AFC West and the truly awful NFC West, likewise winning seven of eight. The Dolphins also won a "road" game against the Bills in December in a Toronto dome, rather than having to play in the snow and wind of Buffalo.
Giddy fans in Hotlanta and South Beach might not want to hear this, but luck tends to even out. In the last 26 years, only one team, the 1976 Baltimore Colts, has sprung from winning four or fewer games in a season to winning 10 or more the next and then improved again the following season. One need only to gaze toward the wreckage in Cleveland to see what happens when expectations are raised, injuries mount, and the schedule toughens.
A return to earth by either team would help clear a path for a current weakling. That a laughable 2008 squad will turn into a surprise power in 2009 is practically guaranteed. If they draft well (no more wide receivers!), get a QB (Sam Bradford? Matt Cassel?), strengthen their line play, and stay healthy, that team just might be Detroit. The Lions have already taken a huge first step, finally dumping remarkably putrid team president Matt Millen this year. Detroit doesn't need a bailout, just some smart decision-making and a few bounces to go their way for once.
Last summer, Microsoft's marketing department pulled a strange stunt to prove that its latest operating system, Windows Vista, isn't as terrible as everyone on the Internet claims. The company invited 140 people who said they hated Vista to take part in a focus-group review of the new Microsoft OS, Windows Mojave. The malcontents were blown away by all of Mojave's amazing features, like how well it organized photos and music—why didn't the company put all this great stuff in Vista? That's when Microsoft's sales team dropped the bomb: Windows "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista! The company had rebranded its beleaguered OS to prove that much of what troubled the software was in people's heads, not in the program itself. As long as customers don't know they're using Vista, they love it.
Microsoft seems to have taken the results of that zany focus group to heart. Last week, copies of Windows 7, the first beta version of the new OS, leaked to file-sharing sites online. (The company plans an official release of the beta to developers and the public early in 2009.) I downloaded Windows 7 and installed it to my laptop, and after a couple days of using it, here's what I can report: "Windows 7" is actually Windows Vista—or at most a tidied-up retread.
Microsoft's next OS is not a whole-cloth reimagining of the sort you'd expect after a stinging failure. In building Windows 7, engineers didn't go back to the drawing board—they went back to the body shop. They tweaked many small details, fixing some of Vista's most persistent problems and adding several user-interface features that I found very handy. They also improved its speed and handling, rendering it snappier than Windows XP, the long-lived OS that many people—myself included—used in place of Vista.
The results are pretty great. Though still in beta, Windows 7 runs like a final version; it'll only improve as it nears its final release date (sometime in the summer or fall) and thus looks certain to strengthen Microsoft's hold over the PC desktop now and for years to come. That should come as no surprise: For all the bad press it received, Vista never posed any long-term danger to the Windows hegemony. True, sales of Macs have been up lately, but that's sort of like pointing out that soccer is gaining ground as an American spectator sport—perhaps technically true but somewhat beside the point. Nine out of every 10 PCs in the world run Windows. With this new version, the Windows world will now have a chance, after too long, to use an OS that doesn't feel like drudgery.
I installed Windows 7 on a new partition on a new hard drive—that is, uncluttered by a stack of old programs and any previous installation of the OS and thus probably not representative of what people will encounter when they install 7 over their current version of Windows (or on a new computer that's clogged with unnecessary apps installed by the manufacturer). That said, the results were impressive: With Windows 7, my machine booted up in less than 20 seconds and returned from sleep mode instantly. Under previous versions of Windows, rebooting the machine was an occasion for a long coffee break, and putting it to sleep went pretty much as that phrase suggests—sometimes, the sleep was permanent.
The speed improvements are of a piece with Windows 7's generally streamlined packaging. Ten years ago, Microsoft's practice of "bundling" extra applications into its OS blew up into a federal case. The company insisted that integrating programs like a Web browser benefited users while the government argued that Microsoft was aiming to leverage its OS monopoly into other areas of the software business. The feds won that argument in court; now Microsoft seems to have seen the business merits of what you might call unbundling. You'll still find Internet Explorer in Windows 7, but unlike previous versions, the new OS doesn't ship with an e-mail program, a calendar, a movie editor, and a photo manager. Instead, Windows 7 prompts users to get this software from Microsoft's Windows Live online service. This move surely follows its own business logic—Microsoft wants to encourage people to use its online apps in an effort to fight Google in the cloud software business, which many consider the future of the software industry. But in this case the business decision helps users, too: You no longer get an OS stuffed with apps you don't need and can instead stock your computer with free programs found online—whether from Microsoft, Google, Apple, or any other vendor.
Aesthetically, Windows 7 looks much more like Vista than XP or Mac OS X—its default color scheme is dark and businesslike, all slate grays and shiny blue-greens. Several attractive themes are built in, though—choose one, and you change the desktop image, window colors, and system sounds all at once. A few of these themes put your desktop's wallpaper on a slide show, switching the background image every few minutes; I picked one that showed stunning nature shots of various American landscapes.
The color scheme may be familiar, but the Windows taskbar—that menu at the bottom of your screen that shows what programs you're running—has received a major facelift. In fact, the redesign here is so fundamental that it could confuse a lot of Windows users and turn them off altogether on the whole OS.
To understand the significance of these changes, recall how the Windows taskbar differs from the corresponding element on the Mac, the dock. First introduced in Windows 95, the taskbar's main function has long been to show you what programs are currently running on your computer. Each on-screen window has a corresponding button in the taskbar, and in Windows the most obvious way to switch to another app—especially one that may be hidden somewhere on the screen—is to click its icon in the taskbar. The taskbar is, for many people, the heart and soul of the OS—the place you look most often to understand what's going on with your machine.
The Mac OS X dock is a more hydra-headed beast, combining many different functions into one interface: As in Windows, the dock puts up an icon for every program you've got open; you can switch among different running apps by clicking on their icons. But the Mac's dock is also a place to launch new applications—that is, some of the icons in the dock represent programs that you can choose to run if you'd like.
I prefer the Windows approach over the Mac's. It's not only simpler to grasp—everything down here is something I've got open—but it's also very useful, a quick way to see what's happening on your computer and to switch between different tasks. Over the years, though, Microsoft has made several changes to the taskbar that make it much more like the Mac's dock. Beginning in Windows XP, several similar taskbar items were grouped into one button; for instance, if you opened up a lot of Firefox windows, Windows would collapse them into a single icon on the taskbar. This makes the taskbar less useful as a window-switching tool—you've got to click on this one icon to see the different Firefox windows you're running. Microsoft also began to incorporate permanent shortcuts into the taskbar, turning it into a place to launch programs, not just switch between them. In Windows 7 the transformation is complete: The Windows taskbar now operates pretty much exactly like the Mac OS' dock.
An icon in the Windows 7 taskbar could represent one of several kinds of items: It could be a shortcut to a program that isn't currently running—if you click it, you'll launch that program. It could be a button representing an already open window—click that, and you'll switch to that window. Or it could represent a group of windows that are open—click on the Word icon, and you'll be able to choose which of several Word documents you'd like to switch to. Both the Mac and Windows use slight graphic clues to highlight these differences, but they're not as obvious as I'd like; it often takes some mousing around to figure out what exactly is being represented by an icon in the taskbar or dock. Still, Microsoft has implemented a few cool features that make this easier than on a Mac. For instance, if you simply move your mouse over a taskbar item, a large, transparent preview of that window appears on the screen. (To see this feature in action, watch this video.) Mac OS X engineers should swipe that feature.
Windows-watchers see the new taskbar as Windows 7's greatest weakness; Paul Thurrot, who writes the SuperSite for Windows, calls it "a whopper of a mistake, and one that will actively harm most Windows users." While I'm no great fan of the new taskbar, I think this is an exaggeration. If the worst that can be said of Windows 7 is that it copies one of the Mac's worst features, that's not so bad. The Mac OS, remember, is the one everyone loves. Borrowing liberally from Apple accounts for much of Windows' past success. If Microsoft is just a bit more diligent in its pilfering, glory will surely return.
There isn't much mystery to why a little-marketed computer known as the Eee PC has lately seized the top spot on Amazon's laptop best-seller list. The machine, a three-pound ugly duckling made by the Taiwanese company Asus, has a 10-inch screen, a nearly full-size keyboard, and offers what almost everyone wants in a portable computer: It's tiny and, at $390, very cheap. Of course, the Eee PC is missing some other things people tend to like in laptops—an attractive design, a DVD drive, a fully full-size keyboard, and enough processing power to run multiple demanding applications at the same time. But hey, these are tough times, and did I mention you can buy this machine for less than you're planning to blow on New Year's Eve?
Minimalism pervades Amazon's laptop list; over the last few weeks, the great majority of the 25 best-seller slots have been occupied by various permutations of the Eee PC and other souped-down, sub-$500 machines. In the computer industry, these miniature computers are known as "netbooks." The term is vaguely defined, but the best way to spot a netbook is to peek at the specs: Today's bigger laptops run on Intel's speedy Core 2 Duo processor, while netbooks use a smaller, less powerful, and cheaper Intel chip, the Atom. Netbooks also run older or more lightweight operating systems—generally Windows XP or some flavor of Linux.
PC companies are looking to these machines in much the same way John McCain once looked to the governor of Alaska—as an easy way to put a fresh face on an otherwise aging product line. Asus took an early lead in the category, but in 2008 nearly every major PC maker put out a netbook or two, including Dell, HP, and Lenovo. New netbooks will dominate CES, the consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas next week, and completely unsubstantiated rumors have it that a netbook will also debut at MacWorld, the Apple-centric confab that starts Monday in San Francisco. It's still unclear whether this season's sales represent a trend or a fad—netbooks offer a user experience that's far from perfect, and buyers may well come to regret their chintzy purchases and vow to pay full-fare next time. Netbooks' rise could also end badly for the PC industry. As a Sony exec predicted this year, cheap machines may spark a pricing "race to the bottom," further shrinking PC makers' already squeezed profit margins.
But netbook sales suggest pent-up demand for the kind of machine that no company has yet perfected—a machine that I predict could make for the next PC boom. At the moment, the laptop market is dominated by two kinds of machines: a bunch of cheap netbooks that don't do much, and a bunch of expensive Apple notebooks that do a lot and do it very well. (Seven of the top 25 best-selling laptops on Amazon are MacBooks.) Consumers are fleeing the middle range, which seems to make sense—if you want a laptop to surf the Web, why spend $800 on a machine that runs Windows Vista when you can spend $400 on a machine than runs the more highly regarded Windows XP? On the other hand, if you want a laptop to use as your main computer, why spend $800 for a machine that runs Windows Vista when you can spend $1,000 for a virus-free, hassle-free system that runs the Mac OS (and can also run Windows)?
But I argue that there's gold buried in the gap between these extremes: The success of the netbooks speaks to a desire for second PCs, for machines that we can use on the couch or on the train, rather than at a desk. Their popularity seems of a piece with customers' growing appetite for simpler, less frilly gadgets. The netbook is like the Flip camcorder of laptops, a device whose myriad limitations seem to enhance, rather than detract from, its appeal. But we need a better such machine: Someone needs to build a good-looking, easy-to-use, and not-too-terribly expensive portable computer that aims to do one thing well—surf the Web.
At the moment, netbooks could stand a great deal of improvement. First, they're ugly—many are more than an inch thick, which isn't bad for a standard laptop but looks kind of goofy on a little guy. They've also got a few flaws that keep them from excelling at their main task of lightweight network computing. In particular, many lack access to cellular networks—if you want Internet connectivity away from a Wi-Fi hot spot, you've got to get it through an add-on card or by connecting the computer to your cell phone. (Some newer models—like the Acer Aspire One—do carry a 3G chip, and we can likely expect some more 3G-equipped models at CES.) More importantly, netbooks need better operating systems—in particular, a very fast, mobile operating system that can download and install trusted applications on the fly, over the air.
It may sound like I'm calling on Apple to build a netbook. I'm not. For years, people have exhorted Apple to build cheaper computers, a clamor that's only risen during the recession. But CEO Steve Jobs has consistently disavowed this approach for pretty much the same reason cited by that Sony exec—a race to the bottom that ends in "junk" machines. More importantly, proponents of an Apple netbook forget that the company already makes an underpowered, ultraportable computer: It's called the Macbook Air. If Apple were to release a cheapo, tiny laptop, won't customers wonder what to make of its high-ticket, tiny laptop?
Instead, I'm suggesting that the thing we think of as a netbook should really be something else—a flat-panel, touch-screen tablet that can do photos, music, movies, e-mail, games, and full-function Web browsing. The device would include a small amount of onboard storage but would depend on the Internet cloud for most of its resources. Why no keyboard? Because then the device would be conceived as an appliance. You'd use it mainly for passive computing—for reading e-mail and Web pages, for looking at photos, for sharing documents in a meeting. You'd keep it on your lap to scan Facebook as you watch TV or bring it to bed to read the news before you go to sleep. You'd catch up on your e-mail as you ride the bus to work; you could respond to that e-mail using the on-screen keyboard, and when you get to the office, you could connect a USB keyboard.
Apple could make this, of course. What I'm talking about is basically a souped-up iPhone or iPod Touch—say, one that's 7 inches across instead of 3.5 inches and has a slightly faster processor. These could sell for $400 or $500 (plus the purchase of a data contract). Apple's fans have long called on the company to build a tablet computer, but this isn't just a suggestion for Jobs. A host of other firms could make such a device, including Sony, Samsung, Nokia, and Motorola. Or, a startup: Over the summer, the TechCrunch blog launched its own crowd-sourced project to spec and build a cheap Web tablet; as of now, the community has built a rough prototype. Any company that builds one of these things doesn't even have to worry much about software; that's because the computer industry now has free access to Google's open-source Android platform, which has a stylish interface, an intuitive touch display, and a marketplace for third-party programs. Google, of course, would also benefit tremendously from the proliferation of a network-capable device that would keep you addicted to the Web throughout your house. Indeed, there are so many potential beneficiaries here—Apple, Google, Intel, the cell companies, and, of course, Web-addled you and me—that I'll be surprised if we don't see a great Web tablet in 2009. I can't wait.
Dear John,
When we co-reviewed Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point for Slate in 2000, we agreed his book had much to say about networking and influence but not enough about the inherent quality that word-of-mouth hits usually need. His new book, Outliers, is a more sober look at success for a post-boom audience. But it rejects the Poor Richard self-help tradition. Gladwell is skeptical about innate genius and lonely struggle. He shows that we are the products of our social origins, the centuries-old values of our geographic roots, and even of the exact year and even month of our birth. That's what Outliers has in common with The Tipping Point: Both books apply sociology and social psychology to exceptional performance. The catalogers of the Library of Congress have assigned Outliers the subject headings "1. Successful People" and "2. Success," but they might have added one they used for the first book: "Context Effects (Psychology)."
Outliers offers hope. Exceptional ability is less important than the good old work ethic. Prodigies from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to computer programmer Bill Joy required the same 10,000 hours of practice for mastery as the rest of us; Mozart just began especially young. The Beatles considered their real break the intensive practice they received playing marathon sets in the Hamburg, Germany, red-light district. Many more of us could excel if we realized the time required and worked more patiently. Math students, for example, may simply be giving up too early in problem-solving.
In fact, Outliers is positively sunny about education and training. Do arbitrary cutoff dates for youth sports give kids born early in the year an unfair advantage? Change recruitment regulations. Does a legacy of social and linguistic hierarchy endanger airline safety by inhibiting timely warnings to captains? Hire outsiders to retrain your staff and shoot up in the safety rankings, as Korean Airlines did. Do American children, especially those in inner cities, lag behind Asian counterparts? Extend the school year.
But context also has an unfair, even fatalistic side. The suave, rich, and neurotic Robert Oppenheimer received only probation and psychotherapy after trying to poison his Cambridge physics tutor (Oppie as proto-Unabomber?), while the equally brilliant blue-collar American who may indeed have the world's highest IQ, Christopher Langan, with uncaring parents and teachers, dropped out of college and still is far from academic recognition. Memo to overscheduling, hovering, upper-middle-class mothers and fathers: Keep up the good work.
Time as well as class will tell. The founders of Microsoft and Sun Microsystems were all born between 1953 and 1956, coming of age just in time to work on a handful of early academic time-sharing computers when other scientists and engineers were still punching stacks of cards. Bill Gates' prep school had rare remote access to one such machine in 1968. The lesson, John, is that we should not only choose our parents wisely but also pick the year they have us.
Seriously, though, isn't Gladwell missing an opportunity to encourage his readers with a bigger picture? Gurus of information technology, recognizing and exploiting new tools, have appeared in every decade. Larry Ellison (born 1944), founder of Oracle, is the third-richest American. And don't forget Michael Dell (born 1965) and Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergei Brin (both born 1973). A dozen or more pioneers of computing, beginning with Grace Hopper (born 1906), who created plain-English programming language, never made fortunes but are revered in industry and academia. Are they unsuccessful?
Gladwell also shows how a generation of New York lawyers from Jewish garment-industry backgrounds struggled during the Depression, while the next such generation, favored by its small size and excellent education, flourished in merger-and-acquisition work originally disdained by snobbish old-line firms. Perfectly true. But many Jewish lawyers who came of age in the 1930s also found a way to succeed in the face of economic hardships and ethnic discrimination. Lawrence A. Wien invented real estate syndication and became a major philanthropist; Chicago's Pritzkers also built a fortune buying distressed properties that ultimately soared in value. Jewish lawyers helped implement the New Deal in Washington, while others (like Daniel J. Boorstin and Studs Terkel) entered academia and journalism. And Edith Spivack, who joined the New York City Law Department as an unpaid volunteer in 1934 and did not retire until 70 years later, became its unsung mastermind, helping avert financial collapse in the 1970s.
Yes, these men and women were atypical. They were outliers; isn't that the book's title, though? As with The Tipping Point, I loved Gladwell's combination of storytelling and academic social science even when I rejected his conclusions. But John, his soft demographic determinism makes me want to paraphrase Cassius in Julius Caesar: The fault is not in our birth cohorts but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Best wishes,
Ed
Dear Ed,
My reaction to The Tipping Point eight years ago was not quite as mild as you recall. That book, which sought to transform the truism that little causes can have big effects into an all-empowering revelation, irked me. I called Gladwell a "clever idea packager" whose "engaging case histories … cannot conceal the fatuousness of his core conclusions." In fact, my review was so nasty, even for me, that I was determined to give Gladwell's new book every benefit of the doubt.
As you note, Ed, Outliers features the same "combination of storytelling and academic social science" that animated The Tipping Point and Gladwell's second book, Blink, which is a tribute to snap judgment. Like you, I found Outliers entertaining and even fascinating at times. It also advances a much more consequential theme than Gladwell's previous books. Nurture, Gladwell argues, contributes at least as much as nature to our success or lack thereof. Delve into the history of "men and women who do things out of the ordinary," and you will find that their success stems from "hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies."
With this insistence on the importance of environmental factors as shapers of our lives, Gladwell is bucking a deplorable recent trend in science. Over the past few decades, fields such as evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics have tipped the scales toward the nature side of the nature-nurture debate, implying that innate factors largely determine our personalities and talents, and hence our destiny. I call this line of reasoning "gene-whiz science."
One notorious example of gene-whiz science is the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, in which Harvard scholars Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein asserted that blacks are innately less intelligent than whites. James Watson, the Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the double helix, reiterated this persistent claim a year ago, as did Slate's own William Saletan.
Gladwell has a personal stake in this debate. He concludes his book by telling the tale of his mother, Joyce, a Jamaican descended from African slaves. While attending University College in London, Joyce fell in love with a young mathematician, Graham Gladwell. They soon moved to Canada, where Graham became a math professor and Joyce a writer and therapist. They had three children, including Malcolm.
While acknowledging the ambition and intelligence of his mother and other ancestors, Gladwell repeatedly emphasizes the role that serendipity played in their upward journey. The first lucky break took place in the late 1700s, when a white plantation owner in Jamaica, William Ford, took a fancy to a pretty female slave, "an Igbo tribeswoman from West Africa." Ford bought the woman and made her his mistress, saving her—and, more importantly, her offspring—from a life of brutal servitude. She gave birth to Ford's son, John, who was defined as "colored" rather than black and hence under Jamaican law was free.
John, who became a preacher, was the great-great–great-grandfather of Joyce, Gladwell's mother. She was lucky, too. She received a scholarship to a private school in Jamaica only after another girl who had received two scholarships relinquished one. Without the scholarship, Joyce would probably never have gained admittance to University College, where she met Gladwell's father.
Gladwell's family history engaged and even moved me. But the lessons that he gleans from this and other case histories in his book are oddly anticlimactic, even dispiriting. He concludes that success "is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky." To be fair, Gladwell offers more substantive analysis of the link between race and achievement elsewhere in his book when he analyzes the mathematical performance of Asian-American children and of inner-city New York kids enrolled in a special school called KIPP. Last December, he provided a sharp refutation of the Bell Curve reasoning in the pages of The New Yorker—why didn't he incorporate that material into the book, too?
Perhaps now that a man of African descent has been elected president, we have truly transcended race. But I still can't help but feel that Outliers represents a squandered opportunity for Gladwell—himself an outlier, an enormously talented and influential writer and the descendant of an African slave—to make a major contribution to our ongoing discourse about nature, nurture, and race.
Ed, maybe my problem with Gladwell is that I just expect too much of him.
Dear John,
You're not expecting too much of Malcolm Gladwell. Where I come from—university press publishing—one philosopher explained pages of arguments accompanying a favorable recommendation: "Philosophers show respect by disagreeing with each other." Physicist Wolfgang Pauli put it more negatively about a junior researcher's paper: "Not even wrong." So, we should welcome Gladwell neither as a genius (a concept he dislikes, anyway) nor as a mere packager of others' ideas. Instead, let's treat him as a colleague who deserves careful attention.
Outliers isn't wrong, but neither is it necessarily right. Gladwell doesn't see, for example, that some outliers were just the first ones to seize a unique opportunity that others could not share—a "positional good," as economist Fred Hirsch called it in his book Social Limits to Growth. After ridiculing the idea of buying "a shiny new laptop" for every student, he asks rhetorically, "[I]f a million teenagers had been given unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968" like Bill Gates, "how many more Microsofts would we have today?"
Some academic reviewers have also dissented from much of the research Gladwell cites. One of his favorite sources is historian David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, which he uses to argue the strong persistence of values in American regional cultures over four centuries. The work, rightly admired for its rich scholarship, has also been blasted for its selective use of evidence to support its thesis. Fischer's idea (repeated by Gladwell) that the cult of honor in the U.S. South originated in medieval British border disputes has also been questioned. According to Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of the standard work Southern Honor, "colonial and backcountry historians in general stoutly reject" Fischer's book.
Cultures change more rapidly and thoroughly than Fischer and Gladwell acknowledge. Think of the cosmopolitan, lively Spain that followed the grim Franco years or the hypercapitalist and individualist China that came after Mao. What about postwar Germany, which now rates much lower on indexes of authoritarianism than France, at least according to one of Gladwell's notes? Or, for that matter, consider the changing values represented by Barack Obama's election victory that you mention, John, which overthrew structuralist dogmas of "blue" and "red" states and fears of concealed racism.
Obama's story has another dimension strangely neglected in Outliers: his abandonment by his father, the death of his mother, and his struggle for a new identity. The successes cited by Gladwell, including his own mother, go from strength to strength; cultural forces and good luck come together. Yet for all Obama's elite education, his years as a community organizer in Chicago while others of his age were launching lucrative careers only conforms to the "accumulative advantage" model endorsed by Gladwell in hindsight.
There isn't much suffering, for the sake of art or anything else, in Outliers. People fortunate enough to be born in the right time, place, cultural group, and profession are borne along by the current. Yet among previous presidents, even upper-class outliers had a lot to overcome. Think of Theodore Roosevelt's lifelong respiratory problems, Franklin Roosevelt's polio, John F. Kennedy's childhood scarlet fever and his war injuries. (When Kennedy said that life is unfair, he was referring to health and sickness.) John McCain's captivity was his own turning point, as PT-109 was Kennedy's. Americans aren't the only politicians to be proud of fighting adversity. Nicolas Sarkozy, with a multiethnic family tree and an absent father like Obama's, once declared, "What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood."
Gladwell credits some of J. Robert Oppenheimer's success to the aristocratic social skills he absorbed from his family. But there was another side of Oppenheimer, revealed when he contracted tuberculosis as a young professor and retreated with his younger brother Frank to the hills of New Mexico; his fascination with Los Alamos began during that interlude. When Oppenheimer took his Army physical before receiving his commission in 1943, he was nearly disqualified as 11 pounds underweight with a chronic cough. But according to Gladwell's main source on Oppenheimer, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's American Prometheus, the physicist was able to withstand the stress of preparing for the hearings on his security clearance; as his secretary later recalled, he "had that fantastic stamina that people often have who have recovered from tuberculosis. Although he was incredibly skinny, he was incredibly tough."
Misfortunes are not like cultivated homes and great schools; their effects are unpredictable, energizing some and crushing others regardless of social class and education. In rejecting the myth of self-made men and women—and very properly revealing all the help most of them had—Gladwell also ignores important, if often mysterious, realities of endurance.
John, if our economic emergency is as serious as it appears, "accumulative advantage" will matter less and dealing creatively with crises will count more. And if this sounds like the old-style success books that Outliers is trying to replace, I can only recall an aside made by historian of science Charles C. Gillispie in my college History 101 course: "There is nothing more embarrassing to the educated mind than a true cliché."
Best wishes,
Ed
Dear Ed,
Yes, as John McCain often reminded us during the campaign, suffering can be a terrific character builder. Your examples of men who triumphed in spite or because of their disabilities reminded me of Marianne Moore's poem "Nevertheless," which begins: "you've seen a strawberry/ that's had a struggle; yet/ was, where the fragments met, a hedgehog or a star-fish for the multitude of seeds."
It's true that prison, torture, disability, disease, and other misfortunes leave most of us embittered and broken. So we may be inclined to believe that some lucky souls simply have the temperament to overcome trauma and even be inspired by it. Gladwell is quite right to resist this fatalistic conclusion and to look for other, more useful correlates of success than innate traits. But as you remarked in your first post, Ed, some of the lessons that emerge from his case studies end up being just as restrictive as those he's trying to refute.
We learn that in 1968, a "Mothers' Club" at an elite private school in Seattle raised funds for a computer center better than those found in most universities; a student named Bill Gates, whose parents had placed him in the school so he would have these opportunities thus became a master programmer while still in eighth grade. Similarly, high-IQ children tracked for decades by psychologist Lewis Terman were much more likely to succeed if they had affluent, well-educated parents. At the opposite end of the spectrum is poor Christopher Langan. Although blessed with an IQ of 195, he never made much of himself because he grew up in a desperately poor home "dominated by an angry, drunken step-father."
So some people are just born to the right parents in the right place at the right time. Hard work helps, too, Gladwell emphasizes. He notes that achievers as diverse as Gates, lawyer Joe Flom, Mozart, and the Beatles spent at least 10,000 hours honing their skills at an early age. So, um, practice makes perfect? Tell us something we don't know, Malcolm!
Gladwell tries to do just that when he investigates why 70 percent of the Canadians in the National Hockey League were born in the first half of the calendar year. The reason is that youth hockey programs initially accept all boys born in a given year and then select the best players for the best teams. Boys born just after the Jan. 1 cutoff date are older, and hence bigger and stronger, on average, than boys born later in the year. That makes them more likely to be selected for the elite teams, where they get the best coaching and play the most games, compounding their early advantage.
Gladwell calls this phenomenon the "Matthew Effect" after this Biblical passage: "For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." The effect occurs in many other sports around the world—and in schools. Beginning in kindergarten, the oldest children in each grade are more likely to be placed in accelerated-learning programs, again giving them an "accumulative advantage." International studies of fourth graders have shown that the oldest children score as up to 12 percentage points higher than the youngest.
So the smart get smarter, the strong get stronger, and so on. That's life. But we don't have to accept this state of affairs. Gladwell proposes that athletic and academic programs sort children according to time periods shorter than a year. While cumbersome, this system would be much fairer and more efficient at recognizing talent. Schools and sports programs could also delay sorting according to talent until children are older, when age-related effects have decreased.
The "Matthew Effect" identifies a nontrivial and—most important—solvable problem. So does the chapter on the cultural causes for airline accidents. But what Gladwell calls the "Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes" has little to do with the "Matthew Effect," beyond sharing some vague connection to "success." The case studies in the book seem to have been chosen for their intrinsic interest rather than any coherent, mutually reinforcing perspective.
Outliers is nonetheless destined to become a best-seller in spite of its flaws—and certainly in spite of anything that we or other reviewers say, Ed. Gladwell's track record ensures that the book will be widely publicized by the media, prominently displayed in bookstores, and eagerly embraced by readers. Nothing succeeds like success.
Slate contributor Edward McClelland was online at Washingtonpost.com to chat with readers about Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's appointment of Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's Senate seat. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.
Edward McClelland: Good morning, everyone. I've been writing about Rod Blagojevich and the Illinois senate seat crisis from Chicago. I'm ready to answer your questions on that issue, and other aspects of Chicago politics.
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Washington, D.C.: The most important question is, can the Senate block the appointment? I seem to recall a case where the House refused to "seat" a corrupt member from Harlem in the 70s. What procedural options do they have?
Edward McClelland: The case you're referring to is Powell v. McCormack. In 1967, the House refused to seat Rep. Adam Clayton Powell of New York. Powell took his case to the Supreme Court, which ruled that Congress could only be the judge of a member's constitutional qualifications—in the case of a senator, whether he's 30 years old, nine years a citizen, and a resident of his state.
The Senate could refuse to seat Burris and invite a court challenge, hoping the current Supreme Court would give it more latitude in determining its' members qualifications.
Tying up the appointment in court could keep the seat empty until Blagojevich is removed from office. Then current Lt. Gov. Patrick Quinn could make a competing appointment, which the Senate would seat. That, of course, might also be challenged in court by Burris.
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Oakland, Calif.: Please comment on the precedent set by Blagojevich's actions. Can the governor be removed, and if so what are the guidelines? And is his appointment of a replacement for Senator Obama legal?
Edward McClelland: I think Blagojevich's action is legal. He's the sitting governor of Illinois, which gives him the authority to appoint a senator. Until he resigns or is removed from office, he can exercise all his powers.
It's interesting that nobody has challenged Blagojevich's authority to sign bills or pardon criminals, which he has done since his arrest. But there's a political element to this Senate appointment. Illinois Democrats don't want be stuck running on the same ticket as "Blagojevich's senator" in 2010. That'll be a tremendous issue for the Republicans. And Senate Democrats want to help them avoid that.
The Illinois General Assembly is already taking steps to remove Blagojevich. A committee has been appointed to decide whether to recommend impeachment to the full House. If Blagojevich is impeached, he would be tried by the state Senate. A two-thirds majority is required to convict. Same as the procedure for a president.
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Falls Church, Va.: Did Blago have to act before Jan. 1 for any particular reason? Or was he just looking to make this boring holiday week a little more interesting?
Edward McClelland: Blagojevich had to act before Jan. 6. Otherwise, Illinois would begin the 111th Congress short a senator. I think he wanted to do this before the holiday because we have a long weekend coming up, and Burris needed a week to prepare.
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Bethesda, Md.: How will the fact that Mr. Burris has accepted Blagojevich's appointment, and thus gotten himself involved in this affair, affect Mr. Burris' reputation and political career?
Edward McClelland: Burris no longer had a political career in Illinois. He was an uninspiring but honest state office holder in the '80s and '90s, but since then, he had lost three races for governor and a race for mayor. Burris has long been looking for that last big office. He already has a tombstone which lists all of his accomplishments. He left a blank spot in the lower right hand corner, hoping to fill it with "governor." I think he'll be just as happy to put "senator" there.
The view of some is that Burris' ego has allowed Blagojevich to use him as a dupe here. Burris does like to refer to himself in the third person. He named his children Roland II and Rolando. I think he'll try to run for a full term in 2010. He's a politician, and it's more exciting than reviewing minority contracts for the tollway authority.
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Arlington, Va.: What's the mood like in Chicago these days regarding this mess? It must be troubling to be buoyed by Obama and then deflated by Blago all at once.
Edward McClelland: For five weeks, Chicago was the beacon of the world, the city that gave America Barack Obama. Now we're back to our reputation for political sleaze.
Those are the bright and dark sides of Illinois politics. On the one hand, we lead the nation in racial progress. We produced Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama and more black statewide officials than anyone else. On the other hand, we have this freewheeling, pay to play political culture that produced Rod Blagojevich. So we have both the best and the worst politicians in the country, and yeah, we're a little proud of our colorful politics.
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Washington, D.C.: What is the latest on the Obama-Blagojevich connection? The only thing I heard reported by the media during these past weeks were repetitions of the statements made by Obama and his advisers that there were no "inappropriate" conversations between Obama's advisers and Blagojevich. However, that implies that there were conversations between the two. I appreciate that Obama and his advisers believe that the conversations were not inappropriate, but that is their opinion. Shouldn't we see transcripts or more details about the conversations that took place so we can judge for ourselves?
Edward McClelland: I think we'd all like to see transcripts of those conversations, but so far, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is holding them back. That's even complicating the work of the General Assembly, which wants to use the tapes in impeachment proceedings.
Obama and Blagojevich were never close. Blagojevich was seen as shady even before this episode, and Obama didn't invite him to the convention, or to Grant Park. Obama definitely took an interest in who would fill his old Senate seat, and used Rahm Emanuel to communicate Valerie Jarrett's name to Blagojevich. Actually, what I find inappopriate about that situation is that we had the soon-to-be leader of the executive branch trying to influence an appointment to the legislative branch. I also think it was inappropriate for Obama to back the Senate in refusing to seat Burris. He's the president-elect now. He has to respect the separation of powers and let the Senate police itself.
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Alexandria, Va.: What can you tell us about Burris? Is he Senate material? (Whatever that is these days...)
Edward McClelland: Burris has followed the same path as plenty of other senators. He spent 16 years in statewide office, first as comptroller, then as attorney general. Some people think this makes him a political hack or a party regular. He won't be the only one. While he's not as gifted an orator or as deep a thinker as Obama, he's got more political experience, and a broader knowledge of Illinois. He grew up in Downstate Centralia.
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Bethesda, Md.: What is Blagojevich thinking? Really. It seems like maybe the guy is delusional. Why hasn't he stepped down yet?
Edward McClelland: Blagojevich has a very expensive defense attorney who had no doubt advised him that stepping down will look like an admission of guilt. Also, he can't afford to step. Unlike Eliot Spitzer, Blagojevich is not independently wealthy. He has to pay his mortgage.
And yes, he is delusional. He's always wanted to president. On the tapes, he talked about appointing himself to the Senate to set up a 2016 run. Even before this scandal, he had a 13 percent approval rating. His response? He was going to get the people of Illinois to "love me again." As much as he loves himself, perhaps?
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Rockville, Md.: Is there any indication that Burris may have been one of the potential candidates referred to in the federal charges against Blagojevich for having offered to pay for the seat?
Edward McClelland: No. Burris is not one of the seven Senate candidates on the tape, which I'm sure was a qualification for the appointment.
Burris did lobby the governor for the job—he even held a press conference to promote himself—but Blagojevich never seriously considered him. Burris was seen as a political has-been, having lost four straight elections since 1994. So while he may not be tainted by involvement in Blagojevich's attempt to sell the Senate seat, he's may not be as high a caliber a senator as we would have gotten if the governor was free to choose anyone he wanted.
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Vienna, Va.: It's crazy to me that there aren't more African American Senators. Is there any chance that one of the other open seats might go to an African American? Or is Burris the only hope?
Edward McClelland: I don't know about the other open Senate seats. But if Lt. Gov. Patrick Quinn ascends to the governorship and makes a competing appointment, I'm sure it will be an African-American—maybe Rep. Danny Davis, who was Blagojevich's first choice. The fact is, Illinois has elected two of the three black senators since Reconstruction. That is a matter of great pride here, and some people think it's our role to provide a black senator.
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Charlottesville, Va.: You noted in your story that the Illinois Secretary of State may not certify Burris for the seat—what exactly does that mean and by what grounds would the Secy make that call?
Edward McClelland: I'm not sure that he can legally refuse. The Illinois Constitution says it's his job to endorse the governor's appointments. On the other hand, he's joined the game of legal chicken between Blagojevich and the Senate. Blagojevich is saying, "I dare you to reject my appointee." The Senate is saying, "Oh yeah, go ahead and sue."
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Crofton, Va.: What does this all mean for Jesse Jackson, Jr.? Are his chances at a future Senate run over?
Edward McClelland: I think Jesse Jackson Jr. would have been a hard sell as a Senate candidate to begin with. There was some concern, when open seat was first discussed, that he wouldn't be able to hold it in 2010. Now that he appears to have been bargaining for the seat with Blagojevich, his Senate prospects look even dimmer.
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D.C.: Why do you think Blagojevich picked Burris as opposed to someone else? Is Burris so far beyond reproach that Blago imagines that it helps his case and makes him look more honest? Or is it just that Burris is the only one that would have accepted, for the reasons you discussed above?
Edward McClelland: I think it's a little bit of both. Burris made through 16 years in Springfield without getting into a scandal, which is a huge accomplishment in Illinois. Even Republicans are calling him honest. Also, Burris was hungry to get back into politics, and, unlike other potentials, had nothing to lose. His political career was dead before this.
And of course, he's African-American. That allows Blagojevich to confound the Senate with racial politics, and appeal to blacks in Chicago, who are about the only friends he has left here.
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Insanity: What is taking the Illinois government so long to get Blagojevich out of power? This whole debacle is amazing to me in its inefficiency. You noted earlier that no one has questioned Blago's ability to pardon criminals or sign legislation since he's been charged. I next expect to see him issue an edict that would pardon himself from any future conviction of wrongdoing—and get away with it!
Edward McClelland: As a lawmaking body, the General Assembly has to follow the law. Blagojevich is entitled to due process in impeachment proceedings. If he doesn't get it, he could conceivably sue to prevent his removal. Lt. Gov. Quinn hopes the Senate will convict Blagojevich before Lincoln's 200th birthday, which is Feb. 12. (No one wants to see him on the dais at the Lincoln Library!) That may be soon. Blagojevich's lawyer, Ed Genson, is a master of delay. He kept R. Kelly out of court for six years.
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Washington, D.C.: Any word on what Patrick Fitzgerald thinks about all of this? He's an interesting figure in this investigation—he seems determined not to let Blagojevich get away with his crimes. Has Fitzgerald ever investigated Burris for any reason?
Edward McClelland: Patrick Fitzgerald has never investigated Burris because Burris was out of office long before Fitzgerald arrived.
When Fitzgerald announced the complaint against Blagojevich, I wondered how much the timing had to do with the fact that a Democrat was about to take over the White House, and potentially choose a new U.S. Attorney. Obama had voiced admiration for Fitz before, but after this, he committed to keeping him on. It would have looked shady for a Chicago Democrat to throw out a Republican U.S. Attorney while he was investigating another Chicago Democrat.
Fitzgerald has refused to comment on the Senate appointment.
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So...: ...if the Senate rejects Burris, then what? A special election? An appointment by Harry Reid or Obama himself once he takes office? This all seems so over the top!
Edward McClelland: I would expect Burris to sue for this Senate seat.
Harry Reid or Obama can't make an appointment. It can only come from Illinois.
Bobby Rush is trying to rally the Congressional Black Caucus behind the appointment. It is over the top. On the Early Show, he was comparing Harry Reid to Orval Faubus and Bull Connor.
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Detroit, Mich.: What's the latest on Mrs. Blagojevich? Is she still out in the world bleeping at people? Or has she been trying to keep a lower profile?
Edward McClelland: I haven't heard anything from Patti since her husband was arrested. I wasn't surprised to hear her use that language, though. After all, he father is an alderman.
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Washington, D.C.: Everyone agrees that Burris has violated no laws by accepting the appointment but some are attempting to assert that he has violated some vague ethical standard.
In truth, the issue is pure politics. Some of the people complaining either wanted to be appointed by the Lt. Governor or wanted to be elected in a special election. Of course, the Lt. Governor conducted a diatribe against the appointment that was so bitter it seemed Blagojevich had disrupted delicate negotiations of some sort.
What standard of conduct that existed prior to Fitzgerald's media event is Burris accused of violating?
Edward McClelland: Burris hasn't been accused of violating any standard of ethical conduct. It's guilt by association with Blagojevich. If Blagojevich is smart, he'll disappear and let this become about Roland Burris, a 71-year-old with an honest record as a public servant, the son of a railroad worker who grew up in a small town in central Illinois, and got started in politics by integrating the public pool. It's tough to be against a senator like that.
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The big question: Are Blago's aides sticking by him? And are they keeping good track of "the football" (his Paul Mitchell hairbrush)?
Edward McClelland: Blagojevich's aides aren't sticking by him. His chief of staff resigned the week of the arrest, and his legal counsel resigned this week. The "football" is entrusted to his state police detail, so as long as he's governor, he'll be able to maintain his high standard of personal grooming.
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Washington, D.C.: Isn't it sort of odd to criticize Burris for failing to advance through a corrupt system? He has been elected statewide four times, which, barring a special election, is the most democratic credential anyone can bring to a controversial situation.
Edward McClelland: Burris does have excellent credentials for the Senate. However, reaching the top of Illinois politics doesn't necessarily mean you're corrupt. Adlai Stevenson, Paul Simon and Barack Obama both got there.
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Oakland, Calif.: Could Blagojevich have been ordered not to perform his duties? If so, who would determine that and how? (Good point that no one's contested his approval of bills and pardons.)
The choice of Burris was audacious and well-considered for benefit to Blagojevich rather than Illinois. Thank you for the clarification of issues.
Edward McClelland: The only way Blagojevich can be ordered not to perform his duties is through impeachment. We're going through that process now, but until it's completed, he's governor.
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Wilmington, N.C.: Mr. McClelland, that was great re: Burris' tombstone; what a hoot, in a good way. With the situation with the economy and soon-to-be-approached stimulus plan, shouldn't our great leaders be busying themselves with more important issues? Or is it only one separate committee that would be involved the possible impeachment proceedings?
Edward McClelland: Right now, it's one separate committee of the Illinois General Assembly. But impeachment could soon consume all of Springfield, and the fight over seating Burris could consume the Senate. I agree that we have more important issues. The Senate should seat Burris and let the voters of Illinois work this out in 2010.
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Edward McClelland: Thanks for all your great questions, everyone. Hope I was able to illuminate you about this situation. Keep an eye on Chicago politics. There's always something interesting happening here. Great day!