V VI VIII - La Repubblica.it

Supplemento al numero
odierno de la Repubblica
Sped. abb. postale art. 1
legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma
MONDAY, MAY 10, 2010
Copyright © 2010 The New York Times
Life Gets
Complicated
L
ADIES AND GENTLEMEN, the state of our
union is stumped.
The Great Recession and the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, arguably the toughest problems we’ve
confronted in decades, are nothing if not spectacularly complicated. Trying to size up these
DAVID puzzles is like gaping at a homemade conSEGAL traption that has mysteriously evolved into
something even its designers can no longer
ESSAY
fathom, let alone operate and dismantle.
Is there an owner’s manual for this thing? Can it be
unplugged? If we figure out where it’s getting fuel, can
we starve it and hope it expires?
Look at the military’s PowerPoint slide of the
Afghanistan war, a labyrinth of cross-thatching lines
and arrows swirling around words like INSURGENTS
and COALITION CAPACITY & PRIORITIES which was
meant to portray the complexity of American military
strategy. “When we understand this slide,” said General Stanley A. McChrystal, who leads the American
effort in Afghanistan, “we’ll have won the war.”
At the same time, we’re learning more about the
financial instruments that caused our economic collapse, and it’s now clear that “exotic,” the adjective
of choice, won’t suffice. Synthetic collateralized debt
obligations are impenetrable on purpose, built for maximum opacity. They’re also lethal mysteries to
Continued on Page IV
CHRISTOPH NEIMANN
MONEY & BUSINESS
Wal-Mart builds ties
with India’s farmers.
V
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
DNA researchers are
learning new limits.
INTELLIGENCE:
VI
ARTS & STYLES
Julia Roberts finds a
happy medium.
VIII
The age of plagiarism, Page II.
ADVERTISEMENT
Working Outside the Box
The monotonous cubicle farm, the
in the digital world.”
hallmark of corporate culture, may
Walls are not the only things to
be getting phased out, and not just
disappear in offices; chairs are, too.
because the ranks of the jobless have
Medical researchers have found that
swelled. If you’re lucky enough to
people who stand at work tend to be
be employed, you may find
healthier than those who sit.
LENS
yourself in a changing work
And in the last few years,
environment: It’s more
several office supply comtransparent, free-flowing
panies have begun selling
and collaborative.
desks that are tall enough to
The new office paradigm
work on the computer comis the opposite of the vealfortably while standing.
fattening pen, where workers
toil in isolation. The adverSo, beware the chair. And
tising giant Grey Group is
the walls. And also not havone of the many companies that have
ing enough interaction with your
switched to an open layout, moving its
co-workers, a problem that freelance
workers or those with work-from1,200 employees, most of whom had ofhome jobs confront. For them, the
fices, to six floors instead of 26, reportconcept of co-working solves that. Coed The Times. Now, there are three ofworking companies set up an office
fices, and the creative and production
space and rent out the desks to anyone
departments lack cubicle walls.
who needs one. For a fee, it’s a quiet
“We’ve created a faster environplace to work with office amenities
ment, one that is more open and collike conference rooms, copiers, printlaborative,” Tor Myhren, the chief
ers and Wi-Fi, but more importantly,
creative officer of Grey New York, the
an instant community, wrote The
largest subsidiary, told The Times.
Times. People work independently,
“This space reflects what’s happening
but there is the opportunity to share
For comments, write to
ideas, socialize and even network.
[email protected].
Marissa Lippert, who runs Nour-
ish, a company that offers nutrition
and lifestyle counseling, works out of
In Good Company Workplaces, a coworking space in Manhattan for women entrepreneurs where a basic plan
costs $300 a year. “It’s the best of both
worlds,” she told The Times. “You run
your own schedule and company, but
you have the benefits of a corporate
culture.”
The concept of a temporary, freeflowing space seems to have carried
over into career shaping. Economists
believe that there are a growing number of people who prefer their lives as
independent contractors as opposed
to having a fixed corporate position,
wrote The Times.
Michael Sinclair worked at a marketing and strategy consulting firm
near Atlanta until he was laid off last
year. He started to sell himself as a
consultant and got several part-time
projects. “I just saw you really can’t
rely on a company,” he told The Times.
“I think too many people, even in this
day, still think you can rely on a company for security.” He would rather
rely on himself, he said.
“I see this as the way more people
will work in the future.” ANITA PATIL
Repubblica NewYork
II
MONDAY, MAY 10, 2010
O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY
EDITO RIAL S O F T H E T IMES
What About
The Rating Agencies?
Everyone (except Wall Street bankers) seems to be outraged about Wall
Street banks, which made billions by
trading complex confections of risky
mortgages and then passed us the tab
when the investments went bust. But
what about the agencies that bestowed
triple-A ratings on many of the noxious
financial products?
Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and
Fitch, whose ratings assured investors
that the investments were as safe as
United States Treasury bonds, arguably bear as much responsibility for the
financial crisis as the banks that put the
investments together. But the raters
have mostly avoided scrutiny, and from
the look of Democrats’ current proposals to overhaul financial regulation, it
looks as if they will avoid blame.
From 2004 to 2007, agencies made
hundreds of millions of dollars rating thousands of deals in residential
mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. Their
fees could exceed $1 million per transaction, on top of annual “ratings surveillance” fees of tens of thousands
of dollars. Ninety-one percent of the
triple-A securities backed by subprime mortgages issued in 2007 have
been downgraded to junk status, along
with 93 percent of those issued in 2006
and 53 percent of those issued in 2005.
On January 30 of 2008 alone, Standard
& Poor’s downgraded over 6,300 subprime residential mortgage-backed
securities and 1,900 C.D.O.’s.
Triple-A is what the raters assign to
United States government debt. Had
they warned investors that the new
mortgage-based products were just
high-tech junk bonds, it is unlikely
so many financial institutions would
have loaded up on it.
It is not just that ratings agencies are
incompetent, made wrong assumptions
about the housing market and used
flawed models to evaluate mortgagebacked securities. Their business is rife
with conflicts of interest. The banks pay
the raters and have an enormous incentive to shop around. E-mail made public
in April indicates that raters give in to
the temptation to manage their ratings
to acquire more business.
A 2004 e-mail message from one
Standard & Poor’s employee to another referred to a meeting to “discuss
adjusting criteria for rating C.D.O.’s of
real estate assets this week because of
the ongoing threat of losing deals.’’ A
2007 e-mail message from a Moody’s
employee to a Chase banker suggested a colleague was “looking into some
adjustments to his methodology that
should be a benefit to you folks.’’
Yet the financial reform bills before
Congress have only vague proposals
to fix the agencies. They would have
to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Senate
bill would allow the S.E.C. to pull their
registration if they were consistently
wrong. Raters would have to disclose
conflicts of interest, and investors
would be able to sue for blatant recklessness.
Some better ideas are around. If raters are considered to be a public good,
they should be financed like a public
good, with a tax or other levy, and paid
by the government. Another option
would be to let banks pay for ratings
but take away their ability to choose
who rates their bonds, letting the S.E.C.
decide based on raters’ performance.
If there is no way to improve raters’
record, consider eliminating them, or
at least eliminate the legal requirement
that some insurance companies, pension funds and other entities hold assets with high ratings, a rule that gives
the raters enormous quasi-regulatory
power. This is not a perfect solution. A
world with no rating agencies would
leave many investors at sea. But it is
not much of a life raft if agencies cannot do better than they did during the
housing bubble.
A Close-Up of the Sun
There has always been something
miraculous about transmissions
from space — those thin datastreams
trickling toward Earth from research
spacecraft. Over the years, the transmissions have grown more and more
robust, richer in information, giving
us dazzling and detailed panoramas of
Saturn’s moons and rings and the surface of Mars. But there has never been
anything like the Solar Dynamics Ob-
Direttore responsabile: Ezio Mauro
Vicedirettori: Gregorio Botta,
Dario Cresto-Dina,
Massimo Giannini, Angelo Rinaldi
Caporedattore centrale: Fabio Bogo
Caporedattore vicario:
Massimo Vincenzi
Gruppo Editoriale l’Espresso S.p.A.
•
Presidente: Carlo De Benedetti
Amministratore delegato:
Monica Mondardini
Divisione la Repubblica
via Cristoforo Colombo 90 - 00147 Roma
Direttore generale: Carlo Ottino
Responsabile trattamento dati
(d. lgs. 30/6/2003 n. 196): Ezio Mauro
Reg. Trib. di Roma n. 16064 del
13/10/1975
Tipografia: Rotocolor,
v. C. Colombo 90 RM
Stampa: Rotocolor, v. C. Cavallari
186/192 Roma; Rotocolor, v. N. Sauro
15 - Paderno Dugnano MI ; Finegil
Editoriale c/o Citem Soc. Coop. arl,
v. G.F. Lucchini - Mantova
Pubblicità: A. Manzoni & C.,
via Nervesa 21 - Milano - 02.57494801
•
Supplemento a cura di: Alix Van Buren,
Francesco Malgaroli
servatory. Launched in mid-February,
it is shipping a torrent of data from its
orbit above the Sun.
The Goddard Space Flight Center
took the craft online, releasing the first
videos and still images it shot. The quality of these images is extraordinary, 10
times the resolution of high-definition
television, according to NASA.
We have seen the surface of the Sun
before, but never with this clarity.
Every 10 seconds, the satellite photographs the it in eight different wavelengths, and what emerges is stirring
and disorienting. The Sun is the most
constant object in our lives, but what
we see in these videos is a livid, roiling
star, mottled and seething on every
wavelength. It is a thing of intense, disturbing beauty.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory
follows on the work of other important
solar projects, including the Solar and
Heliographic Observatory and the
twin satellites of the project known as
Stereo, for Solar Terrestrial Relations
Observatory, which has its own iPhone
app. For the next five years and more,
this new satellite will be studying the
patterns of solar energy that affect life
on Earth, like the solar storm that lit
up the aurora borealis in the past few
weeks and can disrupt navigation and
communications. And it creates a new
solar effect, which is the ability of humans to peer into the most familiar of
stars and realize how alien it is.
INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN
Plagiarism for All
NEW YORK
T.S. Eliot once observed that “immature poets imitate, mature poets
steal.” That was before the digital
age of aggregation, cut-and-paste
and, let’s face it, rampant theft. So
easy is it these days to go online, read
an item and copy it that school teachers say they have a hard time getting
kids to understand what plagiarism
is.
The Associated Press has become
so incensed by the theft of its copy
that it’s setting up a digital news
registry designed to protect content
against unauthorized use by tagging
and tracking articles. Rupert Murdoch is, it seems, equally incensed
and has plans to charge for all his
newspapers’ online content.
It remains to be seen how well such
attempts to control an electronic
medium, whose essence is its viral
ability to propagate itself, will work.
I have my doubts. There’s nothing
new about plagiarism, of course.
Writers down the ages from Virgil to
Goethe have sometimes blurred the
thin line between the borrowed and
the original.
What does seem to be new, however, is the erosion of the very awareness of any distinction between
originality and plagiarism; or, put
it another way, the emergence of the
notion that the very act of creation
may be none other than cutting and
pasting others’ ideas in order to express the nature of the zeitgeist. If
Send comments to intelligence@
nytimes.com.
our online world is increasingly our
world itself, how can authors reflect
reality without resorting to the plagiaristic currency of the Web?
That may appear a strange question. Plagiarists steal passages or
ideas without attribution. There’s
nothing intrinsic to the digital universe that should prevent giving
credit where credit is due. Except
that the very ease and facility and
volume of what’s “out there” creates
a universe where ownership gets
blurred.
‘Credit where credit is
due’ strikes a younger
generation as quaint.
In this context, I’ve been intrigued
by the case of the 17-year-old German
author Helene Hegemann whose
“Axolotl Roadkill,” chronicling the
wild and substance-rich Berlin club
scene, has been a bestseller. The
book garnered a lot of critical praise
before it was pointed out that some of
it was lifted from a novel called “Strobo” by a blogger called Airen, whose
line “Berlin is here to mix everything
with everything” is reproduced in
the book.
Hegemann has been defiant, in essence saying that you old-fogey critics don’t get it, this is our world, one
of stealing things, one where lines of
originality blur to non-existence, and
part of the point of the book was to illustrate just that. “There’s no such
thing as originality, anyway, just authenticity,” she declared.
So “Axolotl Roadkill” is “authentic” in that it reflects the universe of a
17-year-old German, one in which, as
a character in the book says, “I help
myself everywhere I find inspiration.” Hegemann has also said there
is “absolutely nothing of myself” in
the book, adding that she does not
even own herself.
As Laura Miller has pointed out in
Salon.com — credit where credit is
due — “It’s as if people under 25 have
become the equivalent of an isolated
Amazonian tribe who can’t justly be
expected to grasp our first-world prohibitions against polygamy or cannibalism — despite the fact that they’ve
grown up in our very midst.”
Well, yes, that’s about how I feel
sometimes when I look at my teenage children. It is a different world
out there.
Two last points. First, the cacophony is such out there that I find the
only way to begin to think for myself
is simply to tune out from time to
time. The second is that aggregation
is a lot cheaper than originality. It
costs money to report a story rather
than “aggregate” it. The 21st-century
economy is plagiarism-generating
machine.
The question is: What happens
when nobody wants to pay to generate original content and there is nothing left to plagiarize?
PAUL KRUGMAN
The Euro Trap
Not that long ago, European economists used to mock their American
counterparts for having questioned
the wisdom of Europe’s march to
monetary union. “On the whole,’’ declared an article published just this
past January, “the euro has, thus far,
gone much better than many U.S.
economists had predicted.’’
Oops. The article summarized the
euro-skeptics’ views as having been:
“It can’t happen, it’s a bad idea, it
won’t last.’’ Well, it did happen, but
right now it does seem to have been
a bad idea for exactly the reasons the
skeptics cited. And as for whether it
will last — suddenly, that’s looking
like an open question.
To understand the euro-mess —
and its lessons for the rest of us — you
need to see past the headlines. Right
now everyone is focused on public
debt, which can make it seem as if
this is a simple story of governments
that couldn’t control their spending.
But that’s only part of the story for
Greece, much less for Portugal, and
not at all the story for Spain.
The fact is that three years ago
none of the countries now in or near
crisis seemed to be in deep fiscal trouble. Even Greece’s 2007 budget deficit was no higher, as a share of G.D.P.,
than the deficits the United States ran
in the mid-1980s, while Spain actually
ran a surplus. And all of the countries
were attracting large inflows of foreign capital, mostly because markets
believed that membership in the euro
zone made Greek, Portuguese and
Spanish bonds safe investments.
Then came the global financial crisis. Those capital inflows stopped;
revenues plunged and deficits soared;
and membership in the euro, which
had encouraged markets to love the
crisis countries not wisely but too
well, turned into a trap.
What’s the nature of the trap? During the years of easy money, wages
and prices in the crisis countries rose
much faster than in the rest of Europe. Now that the money is no longer
rolling in, those countries need to get
costs back in line.
But that’s a much harder thing to
do now than it was when each European nation had its own currency.
Back then, costs could be brought
in line by adjusting exchange rates.
Greece could cut its wages relative to
German wages simply by reducing
the value of the drachma in terms of
Deutsche marks. Now that Greece
and Germany share the same curren-
Greece can’t
manipulate currency
to end its fiscal crisis.
cy, however, the only way to reduce
Greek relative costs is through some
combination of German inflation and
Greek deflation. And since Germany
won’t accept inflation, deflation it is.
The problem is that deflation — falling wages and prices — is always and
everywhere a deeply painful process.
It invariably involves a prolonged
slump with high unemployment. And
it also aggravates debt problems, both
public and private, because incomes
fall while the debt burden doesn’t.
Hence the crisis. Greece’s fiscal
woes would be serious but probably
manageable if the Greek economy’s
prospects for the next few years
looked even moderately favorable.
But they don’t. Earlier In late April,
when it downgraded Greek debt,
Standard & Poor’s suggested that
the euro value of Greek G.D.P. may
not return to its 2008 level until 2017,
meaning that Greece has no hope of
growing out of its troubles.
All this is exactly what the euroskeptics feared. Giving up the ability to adjust exchange rates, they
warned, would invite future crises.
And it has.
So what will happen to the euro?
Until recently, most analysts, myself
included, considered a euro breakup
basically impossible, since any government that even hinted that it was
considering leaving the euro would
be inviting a catastrophic run on its
banks. But if the crisis countries are
forced into default, they’ll probably
face severe bank runs anyway, forcing them into emergency measures
like temporary restrictions on bank
withdrawals. This would open the
door to euro exit.
So is the euro itself in danger? In a
word, yes. And the deficit hawks are
already trying to appropriate the European crisis, presenting it as an object lesson in the evils of government
red ink.
What the crisis really demonstrates, however, is the dangers of
putting yourself in a policy straitjacket. When they joined the euro, the
governments of Greece, Portugal and
Spain denied themselves the ability to
do some bad things, like printing too
much money; but they also denied
themselves the ability to respond
flexibly to events.
And when crisis strikes, governments need to be able to act. That’s
what the architects of the euro forgot
— and the rest of us need to remember.
THE NEW YORK TIMES IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY IN THE FOLLOWING NEWSPAPERS: CLARÍN, ARGENTINA ● DER STANDARD, AUSTRIA ● LARAZÓN, BOLIVIA ● FOLHA, BRAZIL ● LASEGUNDA, CHILE ● EL ESPECTADOR, COLOMBIA
LISTIN DIARIO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC ● LE FIGARO, FRANCE ● 24 SAATI, GEORGIA ● SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, GERMANY ● ELEFTHEROTYPIA, GREECE ● PRENSA LIBRE, GUATEMALA ● THEASIAN AGE,INDIA ● LAREPUBBLICA, ITALY
ASAHI SHIMBUN, JAPAN ● EL NORTE, MURAL AND REFORMA, MEXICO ● LA PRENSA, PANAMA ● MANILA BULLETIN, PHILIPPINES ● ROMANIA LIBERA, ROMANIA ● NOVAYA GAZETA, RUSSIA ● DELO, SLOVENIA
EL PAÍS, SPAIN ● UNITED DAILY NEWS, TAIWAN ● SABAH, TURKEY ● THE OBSERVER, UNITED KINGDOM ● THE KOREA TIMES, UNITED STATES ● NOVOYE RUSSKOYE SLOVO, UNITED STATES ● EL OBSERVADOR, URUGUAY
Repubblica NewYork
MONDAY, MAY 10, 2010
III
WORLD TRENDS
A Culture of Tax Cheating Aggravates Greece’s Debt Crisis
By SUZANNE DALEY
ATHENS — In the wealthy northern suburbs of this city, where summer temperatures are often well over
30 degrees Celsius, just 324 residents
checked the box on their tax returns
admitting they owned swimming
pools.
So tax investigators studied satellite
photos of the area and came back with
a decidedly different number: 16,974
pools. That kind of wholesale lying
about assets points to the staggering
breadth of tax dodging that has long
been a way of life in Greece.
Such evasion has played a significant role in Greece’s debt crisis, and
as the country struggles to get its financial house in order, it is going after
tax cheats as never before.
Various studies, including one by
the Federation of Greek Industries
last year, have estimated that the government may be losing as much as $30
billion a year to tax evasion — a figure
that would have gone a long way toward solving its debt problems.
“We need to grow up,” said Ioannis
Plakopoulos, who, like all owners of
newspaper stands, will have to give
receipts and start using a cash register under the new tax laws passed last
month. “We need to learn not to cheat
or to let others cheat.”
Many Greeks say they feel chastened by the financial crisis that has
pushed the country to the edge of
bankruptcy and forced the government to agree to years of austerity
measures in a bailout agreement with
the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
But changing things will not be easy.
Experts point out that avoiding taxes is
part of a broader culture of bribery and
corruption that is deeply entrenched.
To get more attentive care in the
country’s national health system,
Greeks routinely pay doctors cash on
the side, a practice known as “fakelaki,” Greek for little envelope. And
bribing officials to get the cooperation
of bureaucrats is so standard a practice that people know the rates. They
say, for instance, that 300 euros, about
$400, will get you a vehicle emission
inspection sticker.
Some of the most aggressive tax
evaders, experts say, are the self-employed, a huge pool of people in this
country of small businesses. It includes
not just taxi drivers, restaurant owners
and electricians, but also engineers, architects, lawyers and doctors.
The cheating is often quite bold.
When tax authorities recently surveyed the returns of 150 doctors with
offices in the fashionable Athens
neighborhood of Kolonaki, more than
half had claimed income of less than
$40,000. Thirty-four of them claimed
less than $13,300, a figure that exempted them from paying any taxes.
Ilias Plaskovitis, the general secretary of the Finance Ministry in charge
of revamping the tax laws, said the
government had set a goal of collecting
at least $1.6 billion more than last year
— a modest objective, he believes.
But European Union officials were
so skeptical, he said, that they would
not even allow the figure to be included in a budget forecast used in negotiations over the bailout package. “They
said, ‘Yes, yes, we have heard that before, but it never happens,’ ” he said.
Over the past decade, Greece actual-
Incomes that defy
belief help push a
nation to the brink.
ly lost ground in collecting taxes, even
as the economy was booming. A 2008
European Union report on Greece tax
shortfalls found that between 2000 and
2007, the country’s average growth in
nominal gross domestic product was
8.25 percent. Its taxes grew at just 7
percent.
Some attribute the state of affairs to
Greece’s long history under Turkish
occupation, when Greeks got used to
seeing the government as an enemy.
Others point out that, classical history
aside, Greece is actually a relatively
young democracy.
The Finance Ministry believes
that the new tax laws have laid the
groundwork for better enforcement.
In the past, the tax code gave many
categories of workers special status.
Entire professions were allowed to
file a set income. Now, most of these
exceptions have been eliminated and
the tax code has been simplified. It
also offers incentives to make people
collect receipts — an important step,
officials say, in shrinking the off-thebooks economy.
But how fast progress will come is
an open question. The changes have
provoked protests and deep resentment in some circles.
Whether the tax collectors are up to
the task is also unclear. Many Greeks
say tax collectors have a reputation
for being among the easiest officials
to bribe.
Froso Stavraki, who has been a tax
collector for 27 years and is now a highranking official in the union, concedes
that there is corruption in the ranks.
But she contends that the politicians
never wanted toughness.
“The orders from above were to do
everyday tax processing,” she said.
“We were busy going over forms,
checking on those who pay taxes, not
those who didn’t.”
Whispers of Scams
At an Auction House
By SCOTT SAYARE
Many Haitians
on Avenue
Poupelard
live in small
encampments.
Five people sleep
in the back of a
truck, below.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ÁNGEL FRANCO/THE NEW YORK TIMES
On a Ravaged Street, Haitians Feel Abandoned
By DEBORAH SONTAG
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — More
than 100 long days after the earthquake, Ginette Lemazor, her husband
and their impish 5-year-old boy are still
living in a filthy mechanics’ lot on Avenue Poupelard.
At least, Ms. Lemazor said, they are
no longer sleeping in a junked car, but in
a flimsy structure fashioned from plastic sheeting and salvaged wood. They
have a bed and a chair. Yet their yard
remains a jumble of rusty wrecks
and their future a question mark.
“The owner wants to evict us,”
Ms. Lemazor said of the 100 postquake squatters who remain, out
of 300, in the Union Garage lot.
“But he knows we have nowhere
to go. Really, who would stay here
if they did?”
If Avenue Poupelard bustled
with a desperate, survivalist energy two weeks after the earthquake, it now emits a low-level
hum as residents, vendors and
business owners adjust to the
snail-like pace of recovery.
On this centrally located street,
the state of emergency is over: the
corpses have disappeared, the stench
of death has lifted and the foreign doctors who took over the community clinic
have gone home. Louis Fils, a 66-yearold coffin maker who churned out wooden boxes for premium prices right after
the quake, is holding a liquidation sale.
But Avenue Poupelard is still a tableau of destruction, dotted with a few
signs of progress: some newly hammered kiosks, towers of debris dredged
from shells of buildings, and uniformed
children under tarps in one wrecked
school’s courtyard.
“Some of them are still so sad,” said
Émile Jean Louis, whose Compassion of
Jesus School reopened under tarps last
month. “Look at these little girls lying
on their desks! They don’t sleep well,
and they’re probably hungry. I wish I
could offer them a hot meal. But without
help from the government, I’m operating on a budget of faith.”
Avenue Poupelard provides a less
encouraging picture of the reach of aid
and services than that found in official
reports. Tucked into encampments too
small to have attracted the nongovernmental groups operating in the big tent
cities, many here feel that they are on
their own.
With large-scale food distribution
winding down, many families are subsisting on rice bought from street vendors. But several women said the free
food had never been easy to get, anyway; the man dispensing ration cards
on Avenue Poupelard demanded sex or
money in exchange. “That guy, he threw
the card in the sewer if you didn’t agree
to his terms,” Huguette Joseph, at the
mechanics’ lot, said, hissing, “Evil!”
Asked if her situation had improved
since immediately after the earthquake, Ms. Joseph paused and said, “I
guess it smells better with the bodies
gone.”
She and others on the street are still
looking for sturdy tarpaulins or tents
and wondering how to secure a foothold
in the new temporary relocation sites,
like the one north of this city in Corail
Cesse Lesse, to which thousands from
the camp at the Pétionville country club
were recently moved.
“I’d love one of those places
with latrines,” Ms. Joseph said.
“The hole we dug for our toilet
here is filthy and sick, and now we
go inside broken-down houses to
relieve ourselves.”
In the makeshift garage itself,
six men worked on a single broken
carburetor. Clédor Fils Antoine, a
mechanic, watched listlessly, saying none of them knew how to find
cash- or food-for-work jobs in the
cleanup effort. “The only money
to be made is in debris removal,
but I can’t get a piece of that,” he
said. “It’s hard to know what’s
happening out there. Our government does not communicate except to
scare us to death.”
Mr. Fils Antoine was referring to
remarks in April by President René
Préval, who warned of the inevitability
of another earthquake, perhaps more
powerful than the last. “I do not know
when, but we know that this will happen, and it’s best to be prepared,” he
was quoted as saying by Le Nouvelliste,
a newspaper.
The president’s comments set off a
panic, prompting many Haitians like
Mr. Fils Antoine, who had just moved
back into his home, to return to the
streets.
PARIS — In a warren of side
streets not far from the stately
Boulevard Haussmann is a squat
concrete building that contains
another world.
The Hôtel Drouot is France’s oldest, largest, most storied and most
profitable auction site, a frenetic
three-story bazaar of marvels
and junk: Picassos and Basquiats,
stamps and used handbags, dusty
carpets, couches, clattering glassware.
For years, the authorities largely
ignored the whispers of swindles,
scams, employees who steal.
But in December, the French
police exposed what is said to be
an extensive art-trafficking ring
within the auction house. A dozen
people were arrested on suspicion
of coordinated thefts, most of them
“commissionaires,” members of
Drouot’s clannish corporation of
handlers and transporters; since
then, four more have reportedly
confessed to stealing. The police
are said to have recovered more
than a hundred missing objects
and artworks, including several
Chagall lithographs and a Courbet
valued at as much as $135,000.
But perhaps more surprising
than the thefts themselves is the
culture of casual corruption that
Justice Ministry investigators uncovered when they conducted their
own investigation after the scandal broke. Crooked practices, they
found, were not only widespread
but broadly condoned. Drouot regulars were not surprised.
The auction house denies any
wrongdoing, but has nonetheless
announced a series of procedural
changes aimed primarily at limiting, if not ending, its 158-year relationship with the commissionaires.
But with the auction house’s dominance threatened by Christie’s and
Sotheby’s — they were effectively
barred from the auction market
until 2001 — the recent upheaval
has stirred fears that Drouot may
never be the same.
“You have to know the dirty
tricks, there are dirty tricks,” said
Claude Pariset, 68, an antiques
dealer from Champagne and a
Drouot devotee for near 50 years.
“It’s a racket,” he continued. “But
that’s the job.”
December’s arrests came as
little surprise, he said.
“The problem is that honesty
is not rewarded in this business,”
said Zareh Achdjian, 26, a thirdgeneration antiques merchant and
Drouot regular.
Since its founding in 1852, Drouot
has been owned and overseen by
the same auctioneers who wield
the hammer there, a structure that
long ago institutionalized many of
the practices that have led to the
scandal, say detractors and enthusiasts alike. In a practice known as
“ballot stuffing,” auctioneers, who
make a commission on each sale,
fake bids in order to push prices
higher, Drouot merchants say.
They say, as well, that as many
as half their colleagues operate
in auction rings, illegal schemes
in which buyers agree not to bid
against one another, keeping prices down. Conspirators then resell
the objects elsewhere and share
the profits.
Perhaps the most persistent rumors have concerned practices of
outright theft: valuables slated for
sale at Drouot are known to disap-
Casual corruption
at Paris’s storied
Hôtel Drouot.
pear from homes and trucks before
they ever reach the auction house,
apparently stolen by the auctioneers and handlers hired to inventory, pack and sell them.
“These are things that go on,
that have always gone on,” said
a justice official with knowledge
of the ministry’s investigation,
which is to be concluded in coming
weeks. He spoke on the condition
of anonymity, citing the continuing investigation.
Drouot’s president, Georges Delettrez, denied the auction house’s
complicity in any theft. “We were
stolen from. It is not Drouot that
steals,” said Mr. Delettrez, an auctioneer himself, referring to the
crimes uncovered in December.
Many Drouot auctioneers say
the authorities were right to intervene. Drouot, they say, must modernize to survive.
“A catastrophe has befallen us,”
said Claude Aguttes, a prominent
Drouot auctioneer. “It’s exactly
the sign we needed.”
Repubblica NewYork
IV
MONDAY, MAY 10, 2010
WORLD TRENDS
NEWS ANALYSIS
The Spill Versus
A Need to Drill
By JAD MOUAWAD
More than 40 years ago, a thick and
pungent oil slick washed over the sandy-white beaches of Santa Barbara
and went on to soil 65 kilometers of
Southern California’s scenic coastline.
The Santa Barbara disaster of 1969
resulted from a blowout at an offshore
platform that spilled 100,000 barrels
of crude oil — almost 16 million liters
in all. It marked a turning point in the
oil industry’s expansion, shelving
any chance for drilling along most of
America’s coastlines and leading to
the creation of dozens of state and federal environmental laws.
Is history about to repeat itself in
the Gulf of Mexico?
It may seem so. Emotions are running high as an oil slick washes over
the Gulf Coast’s fragile ecosystem,
threatening fisheries, shrimp farmers and perhaps even Florida’s tourism industry. Thousands could see
their livelihoods ruined. A cleanup
could take years.
Beyond railing at BP, the company
that owns the well now spewing oil,
some environmental groups have
demanded an end to offshore exploration and urged President Obama to
restore a moratorium on drilling. The
White House has said no new drilling
permits will be approved until the
causes of the accident are known. Additional government oversight seems
inevitable.
But whatever the magnitude of the
spill at the Deepwater Horizon drilling
rig, 80 kilometers off the coast of Louisiana, it is unlikely to seriously impede
offshore drilling in the Gulf. The country needs the oil — and the jobs.
Much has changed since 1969. The
nation’s demand for oil has surged,
rising more than 35 percent over the
past four decades, while domestic
production has declined by a third. Oil
imports have doubled, and the United
States now buys more than 12 million
barrels of oil a day from other countries, about two-thirds of its needs.
The politics have also changed.
Republicans want to boost domestic
oil production to reduce America’s
dependence on foreign oil. High on
the Democratic agenda is reducing
carbon emissions that cause global
warming. To bridge the gap, the
White House has backed a compromise that would expand domestic
offshore exploration in exchange for
Republican support for its climate
policy.
There is another reason offshore
drilling is likely to continue. Most
of the big new discoveries lie deep
beneath the world’s oceans, including in the Gulf of Mexico. For the oil
companies, these reserves are worth
hundreds of billions of dollars and
represent the industry’s future.
The Gulf of Mexico is the fastestgrowing source of oil in the United
States. It accounts for a third of the
nation’s domestic supplies, or 1.7 million barrels a day, mostly from the
deepwater region.
A similar expansion is happening
around the world, most notably off
the coast of Brazil, where billions
of barrels of oil reserves have been
PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Gulf of Mexico is the fastest-growing source of oil in America. Spilled oil in the Gulf recently.
discovered. Big discoveries have also
been made off the coasts of Ghana
and Sierra Leone by Anadarko Petroleum, using technology pioneered in
the Gulf of Mexico, where it is a leading explorer.
This latest spill could have the
same pronounced impact on public
policy as the Exxon Valdez accident
in 1989, which dumped 257,000 barrels of oil into the sensitive waters
of Alaska’s Prince William Sound.
After that spill, tankers were forced
to follow more stringent safety measures, and the owner of a rig or vessel
was made legally responsible for
cleaning up a spill. But tankers still
roam the oceans.
Some in the environmental movement believe that public outrage will
also push the government to aggres-
try to rethink its approach to safety
in an effort to reconcile offshore
production and safe environmental
practices.
“We have not yet learned how to
manage the challenges associated
with energy development,” said
Steve Cochran of the Environmental
Defense Fund. “We assume our practices are safe, until a disaster strikes.
That’s the hubris of mankind.”
But are there acceptable alternatives?
“A fossil-fuel free future isn’t inconceivable but it is decades away,”
wrote Samuel Thernstrom, a fellow
at the American Enterprise Institute,
on The Times’s Room for Debate
blog. “Meanwhile, we can’t drill our
problems away, but drilling still has a
role to play.”
Life Gets Complicated,
Leading to More Headaches
Social Value
Of Networks
Questioned
From Page I
By HILARY STOUT
Children used to actually talk to
their friends. Those hours spent on the
family phone or hanging out with pals
in the neighborhood after school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting
on cellphones or via e-mail is passé.
For today’s teenagers and preteens,
the give and take of friendship seems
to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts
and instant messages, or through the
very public forum of Facebook walls
and MySpace bulletins.
To date, much of the concern over
all this use of technology has been
focused on the implications for children’s intellectual development. But
psychologists and other experts are
starting to take a look at a profound
phenomenon: whether technology
may be changing the very nature of
kids’ friendships.
“In general, the worries over cyberbullying and sexting have overshadowed a look into the really nuanced
things about the way technology is
affecting the closeness properties of
friendship,” said Jeffrey G. Parker, an
associate professor of psychology at
the University of Alabama, who has
been studying children’s friendships
since the 1980s. “We’re only beginning
to look at those subtle changes.”
The question on researchers’ minds
is whether all that texting, instant
messaging and online social networking allows children to become more
connected and supportive of their
friends — or whether the quality of
their interactions is being diminished
without the intimacy and emotional
give and take of regular, extended
face-to-face time.
It is far too soon to know the answer.
Writing in The Future of Children, a
sively develop alternatives to oil.
They argue that the risks of oil production far outweigh the benefits.
“This is potentially a watershed environmental disaster,” said Wesley
P. Warren, the director of programs
at the Natural Resources Defense
Council. “This one is a gigantic wakeup call on the need to move beyond oil
as an energy source.”
But developing credible, cheap and
abundant alternatives to oil will take
many decades, and in the meantime,
cars need gasoline and planes need
kerosene. The United States is still
the world’s top oil consumer by far.
Even as China grows, the United
States consumes twice as much oil.
In the wake of this Gulf spill, the
government almost certainly will
tighten oversight and force the indus-
ERIK LESSER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Experts are studying how technology affects the friendships of children.
Andy Wilson, 11, left, and his brother Evan, 14, go on Facebook.
journal produced through a collaboration between the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research center,
and the Woodrow Wilson Center at
Princeton University, Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield,
psychologists at California State University, Los Angeles, and U.C.L.A. respectively, noted: “Initial qualitative
evidence is that the ease of electronic
communication may be making teens
less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends. More
research is needed to see how widespread this phenomenon is and what
it does to the emotional quality of a
relationship.”
But the question is important, people who study relationships believe,
because close childhood friendships
help kids build trust in people outside
their families and help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships.
“These good, close relationships — we
can’t allow them to wilt away. They are
essential to allowing kids to develop
poise and allowing kids to play with
their emotions, express emotions, all
the functions of support that go with
adult relationships,” Professor Parker
said.
What many who work with children
see are exchanges that are more su-
perficial and more public than in the
past. One of the concerns is that today’s youths may be missing out on
experiences that help them develop
empathy, understand emotional nuances and read social cues like facial
expressions and body language. With
children’s technical obsessions starting at ever-younger ages their brains
may eventually be rewired and those
skills will fade further, some researchers believe.
Others who study friendships argue
that technology is bringing children
closer than ever. Elizabeth HartleyBrewer, author of a book published last
year called “Making Friends: A Guide
to Understanding and Nurturing Your
Child’s Friendships,” believes that
technology allows them to be connected to their friends around the clock. “I
think it’s possible to say that the electronic media is helping kids to be in
touch much more and for longer.”
And some parents agree. Beth Cafferty, a high school Spanish teacher
in the New York City suburb of Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, estimates that her 15-year-old daughter
sends hundreds of texts each day. “I
actually think they’re closer because
they’re more in contact with each other,” she said.
companies like A.I.G., an insurance
firm whose supposed expertise is
assessing risk. A.I.G. needed an $85
billion government loan to remain
solvent.
You sense that the march toward
complexity has turned into a sprint
in the debate about health care
reform and even the gargantuan
oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, challenges so baroque, and with so many
disparate and moving parts, the best
you can do is hope that someone in
charge understands them. Complexity used to signify progress — it was
the frisson of a new gadget, some advance in technology. Now complexity lurks behind the most expensive
and intractable issues of our age.
“Are We Doomed?” read the
headline to an article in New Scientist, a British magazine that last
year took a long look at complexity.
(The conclusion: maybe.) There
is a lot of end-of-days talk when it
comes to this subject. Unless the
subject is TV remote controls, most
people have a fondness for complexity, or at least for ideas and objects
that are hard to understand. In part
that is because we assume complicated products come from sharp,
impressive minds, and in part it’s
because we understand that complexity is a fancy word for progress.
Just about every profession has
become more complicated in recent
decades. The sheer volume of data
and rules that must be grasped by
a certified public accountant has
exploded, says Gary Giroux, a professor of accounting at Texas A&M
University. The bible of the business
is the portentously named “Original Pronouncements,” a book that
at its heftiest a few years ago ran to
roughly 10,000 pages.
A century ago, Mr. Giroux says,
there were no accounting courses,
let alone “Original Pronouncements,” because accountants were
just guys who double-checked the
math of corporations to ensure
there wasn’t internal fraud. What
happened? “There was no income
tax until 1913,” he says, “and before
the New Deal, there was no Securities and Exchange Commission.”
What we need, suggests Brenda
Zimmerman, a professor at Schulich School of Business in Ontario,
is a distinction between the complicated and the complex. It’s complicated, she says, to send a rocket to
the moon — it requires blueprints,
math and a lot of carefully calibrated hardware and expertly written software. Raising a child, on
Instead of progress,
complexity now
means more problems.
the other hand, is complex. It is an
enormous challenge, but math and
blueprints won’t help.
“We get seduced by the complicated in Western society,” Ms.
Zimmerman says. “We’re in awe of
it and we pull away from the duty to
ask simple questions, which we do
whenever we deal with matters that
are complex.”
But complexity has a way of defeating good intentions. There is no
point in hoping for a new age of simplicity. The best we can do is hope
the solutions are just complicated
enough to work.
Repubblica NewYork
MONDAY, MAY 10, 2010
V
MONEY & BUSINESS
Wal-Mart Cultivates
A Market in India
By VIKAS BAJAJ
HAIDER NAGAR, India — At first
glance, the vegetable patches in this
north Indian village look no different
from the many small farms that dot the
country.
But up close, visitors can see some
curious experiments: insect traps
made with reusable plastic bags; bamboo poles helping bitter gourds grow
bigger and straighter; and seedlings
germinating from plastic trays under
a fine net.
These are low-tech innovations, to be
sure. But they are crucial to the goals
of the benefactor that supplied them:
Wal-Mart.
Two years after Wal-Mart came to
India, it is trying to do to agriculture
here what it has done to industries
around the world: change business
models by using its hyper-efficient
practices to improve productivity and
speed the flow of goods.
Not everyone is happy about the
company’s presence here. Many Indian activists and policy makers abhor
big-box retailing, fearing that it will
drive India’s millions of small shopkeepers out of business. Some legislators are suspicious of the company’s
motives. The government still does
not allow Wal-Mart Stores and other
foreign companies to sell directly to
consumers.
But Wal-Mart is persisting because
its effort in India is critical to its global
strategy. Confronted with saturated
markets in the United States and other
developed countries, the company
needs to establish a bigger presence in
emerging markets, like India, where
modern stores make up just 5 percent
of the country’s retail industry.
Establishing good relations with
farmers is a centerpiece of the company’s plans. Though Wal-Mart is pushing many of its traditional products in
India, like clothes and home goods, perhaps none is as essential as food. WalMart needs high-quality produce at low
prices to draw customers in volume.
The challenges are significant. Buying and transporting produce are difficult tasks because India has millions
of small-scale farmers and an agriculture system riddled with middlemen.
Here in Haider Nagar, in the bread
basket state of Punjab, farmers who
supply vegetables to Wal-Mart say
they like working with the company. It
typically pays 5 to 7 percent more than
they earn from local wholesale markets, they said. And they do not have to
pay to transport produce because WalMart picks it up from their fields.
Abdul Majid, who sells cucumbers
to Wal-Mart, says his yields have risen
The Wal-Mart distribution center
near Haider Nagar supplies
produce for the company’s joint
venture with Bharti in India.
KEITH BEDFORD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
about 25 percent since he started following farming advice about when
to apply fertilizers and which kinds
— more zinc, less potash — from the
company and its partner, Bayer CropScience.
Mohammad Haneef, a farmer in a
nearby village, said he had sold to two
other companies before Wal-Mart, but
one shut down and the other cheated
him and paid him late. Wal-Mart is
much better, he said, but its buyers are
picky, taking the best vegetables and
leaving him with inferior ones that he
still must truck to wholesale markets.
“You have to establish trust,” he said
in Hindi. “Wal-Mart has been paying
on time. We would just like them to buy
more.”
Bootleg Goods Hidden
Away for World Expo
“It’s very important to me
to push out my character
and hopefully my good
reputation as far as
possible …
I simply have nothing to
hide.”
By DAVID BARBOZA
MARK BROOKS
Web consultant
MELISSA LITTLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Indulging the Urge to Share Everything Online
By BRAD STONE
SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Brooks
wants the whole Web to know that he
spent $41 on an iPad case at an Apple
store, $24 eating at an Applebee’s,
and $6,450 at a Florida plastic surgery clinic for nose work.
Too much information? On the
Internet there seems to be no such
thing. A wave of Web start-ups aims
to help people indulge their urge to
divulge — from sites like Blippy,
which Mr. Brooks used to broadcast
news of what he bought, to Foursquare, a mobile social network that
lets people announce their precise
location to the world, to Skimble, an
iPhone application that people use
to reveal, say, how long they spend
in yoga class.
Not that long ago, many were leery
of using their real names on the Web,
let alone sharing potentially embarrassing personal details about their
shopping and lifestyle habits. But
these start-ups are exploiting a mood
of online openness, despite possible
hidden dangers.
“People are not necessarily thinking about how long this information
will stick around, or how it could be
used and exploited by marketers,”
said Chris Conley, a technology and
civil liberties fellow at the American
Civil Liberties Union.
The spirit of sharing has already
run into some roadblocks. Amazon.
com was so wary of the security
ramifications of Blippy’s idea of letting consumers post everything they
bought that, for several months, it
blocked the site from letting people
publish their Amazon purchases.
Many Indian companies have abandoned or scaled back efforts to run
supermarkets. Some companies grew
too quickly and flamed out. But many
others were undone by the numerous
Gordian knots that hold back Indian
agriculture: laws limit who can buy
farmers’ crops, 35 percent of fruits
and vegetables are wasted because of
inefficient transportation and farmers
earn too little to invest in their marginal farms.
Wal-Mart is also limited by New Delhi’s ban on foreign-owned retail chains
that prevent it from selling directly to
Indian consumers.
“Not having access to our own retail
stores through our own investments is
a serious impediment,” said Raj Jain,
who heads Wal-Mart’s Indian operation. “How do you pay for that big back
end if you are not going to have access
to the front end?”
Right now Wal-Mart operates in India through a 50-50 joint venture with
Bharti Enterprises, a conglomerate
that also owns India’s largest cellphone
company. Their partnership, Bharti
Wal-Mart, supplies retail stores that
are fully owned by Bharti and runs a
wholesale store that sells to shopkeepers, hotels and other businesses.
In the 1990s, Wal-Mart set up shop
in China, Mexico and Brazil and now
has hundreds of stores there. By comparison, Bharti Wal-Mart has just one
wholesale store and will soon open two
more.
Wal-Mart has spent the last two
years building relationships with
farmers and suppliers. It is building
a big distribution center outside New
Delhi to supply Bharti stores, which
are branded Easy Day, in and around
the capital.
Mr. Jain was optimistic. He said the
company would add more farmers
and stores in Punjab and neighboring
Haryana State, then begin expanding
further. This is “a controlled experiment,” he said. “It will take some time
to make it sustainable and economically viable. Then once that happens,
we need to take it to some other geographies and prove the model.”
In March, Blippy sidestepped
Amazon by asking its customers for
access to their Gmail accounts, and
then took the purchase data from the
receipts Amazon had e-mailed them.
Blippy says thousands of its users
have supplied the keys to their e-mail
accounts.
There is no way to quantify these
start-ups, but they are the rage
among venture capitalists. Although
some doubt whether the sites will
gain true mainstream popularity
— and whether they will make any
money — the entrepreneurs involved
think they are on to something.
Blippy, which opened last fall,
was the first to introduce the notion
of publishing credit card and other
purchases. Recently it attracted
around 125,000 visitors and closed
an investment round of $11 million
from venture capitalists. It hopes to
make money by, among other things,
taking a commission when people
are inspired to imitate their friends’
purchases posted on the site.
The people behind Swipely, a site
soon to arrive and similar to Blippy,
are also optimistic. “We will help
people discover a great restaurant
or movie through their friends and
make it easy to recommend their
own purchases,” said Angus Davis,
32, a veteran of Netscape and Microsoft who is testing Swipely with a
small group. “I really believe the lens
of your friends is fast becoming the
most powerful way to discover things
on the Internet.”
Mr. Brooks, a 38-year-old consultant for online dating Web sites,
seems to be a perfect customer. He
publishes his travel schedule on Dopplr. His DNA profile is available on
23andMe. And on Blippy, he makes
public all he spends with his credit
card, along with his spending at Netflix, iTunes and Amazon.com.
“It’s very important to me to push
out my character and hopefully my
good reputation as far as possible,
and that means being open,” he said,
dismissing any privacy concerns by
adding, “I simply have nothing to
hide.”
To Silicon Valley’s deep thinkers,
this is all part of a trend: People are
becoming more relaxed about privacy, having come to recognize that
publicizing little pieces of information about themselves can result in
serendipitous conversations — and
ego gratification.
Still, only two years ago, Facebook members rebelled when the
site introduced its notorious Beacon
service, which published members’
online transactions back to the site
— essentially the same concept as
Blippy and Swipely. But there is the
worry about identity theft.
“Ten years ago, people were afraid
to buy stuff online. Now they’re sharing everything they buy,” said Barry
Borsboom, a student at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who this
year created an intentionally provocative site called Please Rob Me.
The site collected and published
Foursquare updates that indicated
when people were out socializing
— and therefore away from home.
“Times are changing, and most people might not know where the dangers lie,” Mr. Borsboom said.
SHANGHAI — The latest mystery
in Shanghai, complete with sliding
bookshelves, secret passageways and
contraband goods, is this: Why are all
the popular DVDs and CDs missing
from this city’s shops?
But it’s a mystery easily solved.
In China, embarrassments are usually hidden from sight when the world
comes visiting, and that is what happened to a large supply of bootleg
DVDs and CDs as Shanghai prepared
for the World Expo, which is expected
to attract 70 million visitors.
A few weeks ago, government inspectors fanned out across the city
and ordered shops selling pirated music and movies to stash away their illegal goods during the expo, a six-month
extravaganza that opened May 1.
But shop owners found a novel way
to comply — they simply chopped their
stores in half. Nearly every DVD shop
in central Shanghai built a partition
that divides the store into two sections: one that sells legal DVDs (often
films no one is interested in buying),
and a hidden one that sells the illegal
titles everyone wants — Hollywood
blockbusters like “Avatar” (for a dollar) and Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland.”
The stores, which are even frequented by American and European
customers, are brightly lighted with
rows of neatly stocked shelves.
Intellectual property rights experts
say they are outraged by what looks to
be a sham crackdown. And the Motion
Picture Association of America, which
represents Hollywood studios, calls
the situation troubling.
“Although various senior Chinese
officials have made numerous statements in support of intellectual property protection and the fight against
piracy, their talk has not been followed
by sufficient action,” Mike Ellis, president of the Asia Pacific division, said in
a statement in response to a reporter’s
question.
City officials, however, insist that
the crackdown has been effective.
Since March, more than 3,000 shops
have been closed for selling pirated
music and movies, they say.
Bao Beibei contributed research.
They also strongly deny encouraging stores to build secret rooms. “That
is impossible,” says Zhou Weimin, director of the city’s cultural market administrative enforcement team. “No
inspector dares to say that to the store
operator. Hinting like that is definitely
illegal.”
Mr. Zhou acknowledged that “some
stores have adopted a more covert way
to run their business,” but he said that
this was not a new phenomenon and
that they would not get away with it.
As for DVD shop workers, they seem
as divided as their stores.
When asked what was going on,
clerks at Even Better Than Movie
World (across the street from its rival Movie World) readily acknowledged to a visitor that they had been
told to hide the illegal goods, and that
inspectors would pretend not to notice the clandestine backroom operation.
After a few months, they say, the
wall will come down and the store will
go back to selling illegal DVDs out in
the open.
But later, when the same visitor returned, identified himself as a journalist and asked the same question, the
clerks pretended there were no secret
rooms.
“I don’t know about the existence
of that small room,” a clerk at Movie
World said. Pressed, she said: “I’m not
the boss.”
Douglas Clark, a lawyer at Lovells
and a specialist in intellectual property rights law in its Shanghai office,
says counterfeiting here is rampant.
He says the sophistication of the system and the public nature of it are
mind-boggling. “These are not fly-bynight operations,” Mr. Clark said by
telephone. “The only way these guys
can get away with this is if they’re protected.”
There is one development that may
at least cut down on the sale of bootleg DVDs. Many young people say the
search for pirated music and movies
has moved online to countless Web
sites that offer free downloads. “I
don’t even buy DVDs anymore,” said
Qi Wen, a 24-year-old travel agent. “I
usually watch the movies online or
download them to my computer; it’s
fast and simple.”
Repubblica NewYork
VI
MONDAY, MAY 10, 2010
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Baby Fat
Not So Cute
After All
Disputes have arisen when
DNA taken for one project is
used in a different one. Left,
Rex Tilousi of the Havasupai
tribe, whose members gave
DNA samples to university
researchers starting in 1990.
By RONI CARYN RABIN
More and more evidence points to
pivotal events very early in life — during the toddler years, infancy and even
before birth, in the womb — that can
set young children on an obesity trajectory that is hard to alter by the time
they’re in kindergarten. The evidence
is not irrefutable, but it suggests that
prevention efforts should start very
early.
Among the findings are these:
¶ The chubby cherub-like baby who
is growing so nicely may be growing
too much for his or her own good, research suggests.
¶ Babies whose mothers smoked
during pregnancy are at risk of becoming obese, even though the babies
are usually small at birth.
¶ Babies who sleep less than 12 hours
are at increased risk for obesity later.
If they don’t sleep enough and also
watch two hours or more of TV a day,
they are at even greater risk.
Some early interventions are already widely practiced. Doctors recommend that overweight women lose
weight before pregnancy rather than
after, to cut the risk of obesity and diabetes in their children; breast-feeding
is also recommended to lower the obesity risk.
But weight or diet restrictions on
young children have been avoided. “It
used to be kind of taboo to label a child
under 5 as overweight or obese, even
if the child was — the thinking was
JOYCE HESSELBERTH
that it was too stigmatizing,” said Dr.
Elsie M. Taveras of Harvard Medical
School.
The new evidence “raises the question whether our policies during the
last 10 years have been enough,” Dr.
Taveras said. “That’s not to say they’ve
been wrong — obviously it’s important
to improve access to healthy food in
schools and increase opportunities for
exercise. But it might not be enough.”
Much of the evidence comes from an
unusual long-term Harvard study led
by Dr. Matthew Gillman that has been
following more than 2,000 women and
babies since early in pregnancy.
One in 10 children under age 2 in the
United States is overweight, and childhood obesity is a growing problem in
the developed world. The percentage
of American children ages 2 to 5 who
are obese increased to 12.4 percent in
2006 from 5 percent in 1980. Yet most
prevention programs have shied away
from intervening at very young ages,
partly because the American school
system offers an efficient way to reach
large numbers of children, and partly
because the rate of obese teenagers is
even higher than that of younger children — 18 percent.
Things are starting to change: late
last year an Institute of Medicine
study committee was charged for the
first time with developing obesity prevention recommendations specifically
for the 0-to-5 set. The report will look
at the role of sleep and early feeding
patterns, as well as physical activity.
“Everybody’s been pointing to this
early period and saying that it looks
like something is going on and it has
long-lasting effects,” said Dr. Leann L.
Birch, director of Penn State’s Center
for Childhood Obesity Research, who
is leading the committee.
JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES; RIGHT, PETER DaSILVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Donors Want Input on DNA Research
By AMY HARMON
The cultural gap between the impoverished Havasupai Indians who
view their blood as sacred and the
Arizona State University researchers who helicoptered in to their Grand
Canyon home to collect it was at the
heart of a lawsuit over the scope of a
genetic study that ended with a settlement for the tribe.
But the case, scientists and bioethicists said, serves as a cautionary
tale about the equally significant gap
between scientists and all research
subjects, who often seem to hail from
different cultures even when the surface differences are less apparent.
At issue in the case was whether an
Arizona State geneticist had obtained
permission from tribal members to
use their DNA for anything other
than finding clues to Type 2 diabetes.
More than 200 of the 650-member
tribe signed a consent form stating that their blood could be used
to “study the causes of behavioral/
medical disorders,” but many said
they had believed they were donating it only for the study of diabetes,
which tribal members suffer from at
extraordinarily high rates.
When they learned years later that
the DNA samples had been used to investigate things they found objectionable, they felt betrayed. Researchers
had investigated genes thought to be
associated with schizophrenia, a condition the tribe considered stigmatizing, and traced the tribe’s ancestral origins to Asia, contradicting traditional
stories holding that the Havasupai had
originated in the Grand Canyon.
The university’s Board of Regents
agreed on April 20 to pay $700,000
to 41 of the tribe’s members, return
the blood samples and provide other
forms of assistance to the impoverished Havasupai
Stephen J. O’Brien, a geneticist
who runs the Laboratory of Genomic
Diversity at the National Institutes
of Health, said he sympathized with
the position of Dr. Therese Markow,
the geneticist who had overseen the
research at Arizona State and who
insisted that she had received consent from her subjects. But it was her
responsibility, Dr. O’Brien added, to
make sure her subjects understood.
He noted that a similar question
arose recently about what should be
done with some 200,000 DNA samples
that government-backed scientists
had collected for studies of specific
diseases.
Troubling questions, some involving other lawsuits, have surfaced
recently among a range of research
subjects who have learned that their
genetic material is being used in ways
they were not consulted about. Scientists are debating how to better apply
the principle of “informed consent”
to large-scale genetic research. At
stake, they say, is the success of such
research, which relies on voluntary
participation by increasingly large
numbers of human subjects.
Some have proposed an international tribunal akin to the Helsinki human
rights agreement, which would lay
out the ethical obligations to research
participants. Others suggest staying
in touch with subjects so they can be
A gap between
scientists and research
subjects.
consulted on new projects.
American courts have ruled that
individuals do not have a property
right to their cells once they are taken
in the course of medical care, but they
do, under federal guidelines, have a
right to know how they will be used.
Complicating matters is the increasing impossibility of ensuring that
DNA data can remain anonymous.
Do participants need to be told that
their privacy cannot be guaranteed?
Can wide-ranging consent up front
be sufficient, or is even that misleading because researchers cannot adequately describe the scope of studies
they have yet to design? Is it O.K. to
use DNA collected for heart research
to look for genetic associations with
intelligence, mental illness, racial differences?
First, “we have to communicate a
hell of a lot better to the public what is
going on when we put their specimens
in our biobanks,” said Dr. O’Brien.
Studies have estimated that most
individuals, perhaps more than 90
percent, are willing to allow their
data to be used for a range of biomedical research. It is when they are not
asked that problems arise.
Some researchers are trying out
new models. In pursuit of the huge
volume of research participants that
appear to be necessary to find the
many gene variants that contribute
to common diseases like diabetes,
the Children’s Hospital Boston, for
instance, is pioneering a project that
lets researchers report whatever
they find directly to the subjects.
“We talked a lot about how this kind
of information can be shocking and
nerve-racking, and the things people
can find out,” said Chellamal Keshavan, 21, a senior at Wheelock College
in Boston. Then, readily, she gave her
consent.
Labs Where 3-D Is Just the Beginning
LOS ANGELES — In the late
1980s, research and development in
the movie business often took place
in sessions like the ones some people
called “the never-ending Disney day
camp.”
Executives at the
Walt Disney Company’s film operation,
then run by Jeffrey
ESSAY
Katzenberg, were occasionally locked in
a conference room at an out-of-town
resort from 9 in the morning until
6 in the evening, to thrash out concepts for pictures like “Cocktail” or
“Ernest Saves Christmas.”
“You’d sit there pitching out ideas,
and see what stuck,” recalled Peter
McAlevey, a film producer and a
former Disney executive who spent
time in Mr. Katzenberg’s sessions.
Back then, that’s what used to pass
for research and development. Hollywood research and development
has since become more sophisticated. But not without a struggle.
As films have become more complex and technology-driven, studios
here and there are trying to over-
A lab at the
University
of Southern
California’s
cinema
school does
research and
development
for the movie
business.
MICHAEL
CIEPLY
J. EMILIO FLORES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
come their conservative business
habits to engage in systematic thinking about the industry’s eternal challenge: What’s next?
In the last few months, for instance, Sony Pictures Entertainment created a new 3-D technology
center, meant to train and nurture
future experts in three-dimensional
entertainment, whether or not produced by Sony.
With luck, the venture will fare
better than Sony’s high-definition
television center, which closed in 2001
after its video mavens tried to share
their expertise with a film production
world that, in the 1990s, wasn’t quite
ready for the digital revolution.
But can a concerted R.& D. effort,
of the kind that drives aerospace and
biotech companies, have immense
power to change film? The notion
was affirmed, of course, in the last
half-year by James Cameron and
“Avatar.”
That movie appeared after about
15 years of interlocking research into
video technology and story development. It created a new cinematic universe, and a breathtaking $2.7 billion
in worldwide ticket sales.
Yet Mr. Cameron, for all the sup-
port he received from 20th Century
Fox and others over the years, financed much of his R.& D. privately.
In fact, no studio has so far been
willing to finance some Hollywood
equivalent of the Skunk Works, the
free-wheeling advanced development program that cooked up the
U-2 spy plane and the F-117 Stealth
fighter at Lockheed.
The film industry’s closest approach to deep research is probably
occurring at the University of Southern California. There, the School
of Cinematic Arts — with backing
from George Lucas, a principal supporter, along with the likes of Robert
Zemeckis, Fox, Sony and Electronic
Arts — has evolved into a transmedia training center. It has a penchant
for the kind of experimentation that
results-conscious movie companies
avoid.
“We can afford the trial-and-error
process that studios can’t,” said Elizabeth M. Daley, the cinema school’s
dean, during a recent conversation
about research projects that might
ultimately take movies where nobody expects them to go.
Repubblica NewYork
MONDAY, MAY 10, 2010
VII
N E W YO R K
Coney Island Gets
An Italian Makeover
Changes
Refashion
Garment
District
How is the New York garment
district like a coral reef? A coral reef
shelters diverse species of sponges,
snakes, clownfish and barracudas. So
does the garment district. A coral reef
is a rich universe with
its own organically
evolved architecture.
Garment district
buildings are the
ESSAY
same. Plunge down
alongside a reef and
hang in the flow, and as the designer
Yeohlee Teng said recently, “You never know what is going to swim by.”
Ms. Teng was standing outside a
building on far West 36th Street, a
17-story structure not very different
from other buildings throughout an
area that at one time produced close
to 90 percent of all clothing manufactured in the United States.
That domination began to wane
a half-century ago, around the time
large-scale garment manufacturing
began its inexorable migration offshore, well before the late 1990s, when
shrewd real estate investors began
amassing and colonizing a matchless stock of undervalued Midtown
structures.
New developers tenanted their
old buildings with people who spent
their lives hunched not over sewing
machines but over keyboards. And
gradually the garment district, an
area that for a century served as a
civic revenue engine, a threshold for
immigrant employment, a generator
of innovation, started in another way
to resemble the reefs of the planet. It
began to die.
“Designers rely on a highly complex
ecosystem of support,” said Deborah
Marton, the executive director of
the nonprofit Design Trust for Public Space. Recognizing that truth,
the Council of Fashion Designers of
GUY
TREBAY
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
MICHAEL NAGLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Scenes like these workers making belts were once common all over
the garment district in Midtown Manhattan.
America partnered last year with the
Design Trust to study a commercial
ecosystem that was close to vanishing
before the real estate crash provided it
with an unlikely reprieve.
That study, which is to be released
in June, found that even now the apparel industry represents 28 percent
of all manufacturing jobs in New York
City. Its authors also concluded that
the garment district is a more vital
Fashion hopefuls
still come, but now
so do others.
cultural force than many imagine, an
incubator of ideas and innovation and
a magnet for all those hopefuls who
flock to New York believing, as boosters claim, that the city is the fashion
capital of the world.
“Come!” Ms. Teng commanded
a reporter, as she set out to explore
347 West 36th Street — a broad
9,300-square-meter structure designed in the 1930s by the architect
brothers George and Edward Blum
ANDREW TESTA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
with the humanizing roofline setbacks of the era; with a marble lobby
and enormous freight elevators;
and with floor plates thick enough to
support heavy industrial machines.
“Let’s see who is still here.”
As it happens, a fragile balance
holds at 347 West 36th Street. Figures
obtained from the city indicate that
roughly 38 percent of the building’s
tenants are in businesses related to
fashion. The rest are a diverse lot that
include the sculptor Keith Edmier,
a tenant in the rooftop penthouse;
or Steve Giralt, a commercial photographer; or the National Comedy
Theater, which occupies the street
level storefront; or Amyas Naegele, a
dealer in African antiquities.
“When I started in this building 14
years ago, it was all sweatshops and
me,” Mr. Naegele recalled. “Then it
all changed,” he said. The building
was sold over a decade ago.
“In the beginning everybody was
like, ‘Oh, I’m not moving to the garment district!’ ” said Barry Bernstein, senior director of the Winokur
Group, managing agents for the
building, referring to non-apparel
businesses. “But then they realized
that it’s so convenient to transportation and the rents were cheaper, and
then suddenly everybody says, ‘Let’s
move to the garment district.’ ”
ALTAVILLA VICENTINA, Italy — Alberto Zamperla sweeps
through the cavernous workshop
here where his amusement rides are
manufactured while workers measure and bang and solder enormous
platforms, oddly shaped beams and
assorted fiberglass vehicles.
Spring is a busy time for his company, and attractions are being prepared for the summer season that is
about to open in theme parks around
the world.
This year, one destination has Mr.
Zamperla racing against the clock:
Coney Island in Brooklyn, where in
just a few weeks he will present a
new amusement park featuring 22
rides, including the Tickler, a family-oriented roller coaster; the whirly
Mega Disko; and Air Race, a heartgulping aerobatic experience.
Coney Island is the largest investment yet in the 50-year history of
the Zamperla Group. Zamperla is
the majority shareholder of Central
Amusement International, the New
Jersey-based company that signed
an agreement in February with
New York City to build and manage
the amusement area. So far, Central
Amusement has spent $15 million on
the refurbishment of the park, about
half of the $30 million it expects to
invest.
“Ride manufacturers have been
operating rides in parks or fairgrounds for many years,” said Andreas Veilstrup Andersen, executive
director of the European office of the
International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. “However, a project as big as Coney Island
is very unusual.”
Time has been tight, with the
park’s opening set for the end of
May.
“We had a pretty good idea of what
we could produce on time,” said Mr.
Zamperla, who is chief executive and
president. “There’s a lot of pressure,
because all eyes are on us. Things
just can’t be good, they have to be
perfect.”
Luigi De Vita, managing director
of the company, added: “When we’re
under pressure, we give the best of
ourselves.”
The Coney Island project will be
called Luna Park, after the original
playground that stood there until
World War II. Drawings for the new
main gate on Surf Avenue mimic the
original design, but flashier.
The park at Coney Island “had
its glory but lacked an innovative
spirit,” Mr. Zamperla said of a site
that in recent decades had become
rundown.
The Zamperla Group was chosen
because it had a sound track record
in operating amusement parks, including the Victorian Gardens, a
children’s amusement area at Wollman Rink in Central Park in Manhattan. And it was known as the
producer of “some of the most exciting rides in the world,” said Seth W.
Pinsky, president of the New York
City Economic Development Corporation.
“Their specific proposal was a
nice blend of honoring the history of
Coney Island while developing it as
a modern 21st-century amusement
park,” Mr. Pinksy said.
The Zamperla family has been
building amusement park attractions in Altavilla Vicentina since the
early 1960s. Alberto’s grandfather,
Umberto Zamperla, opened one of
the first movie houses in Italy, then
moved into carnival attractions. His
father, Antonio Zamperla, worked in
traveling shows before deciding to
Mixing history and
innovation at an
amusement park.
settle in this Veneto town to start inventing and manufacturing rides.
Alberto Zamperla, 58, the eldest
of five children, took the show on
the road, so to speak, and there are
now factories or sales offices in several countries, including the United
States, China and Russia.
In well-established markets like
the United States, long-term success in the amusement ride industry
depends on novelty, Mr. Andersen
said.
This year, Air Race, an airborne
experience that the company describes as “the ultimate thrill ride”
will have its debut at Coney Island,
alongside more placid family fare.
Next year, rides are expected in the
Scream Zone, an addition to the park
that will feature several Zamperla
roller coasters intended mostly for
teenagers.
“In the end, all we want to do is
build rides that people will enjoy,”
Mr. Zamperla said. And Coney Island, he said, “will be the perfect
showcase.”
RICHARD PERRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Ray Tomkinson in London and Alvaro Gallego in New York like their old-fashioned cabs.
Trans-Atlantic Taxi Swap Keeps Meters Running
By A. G. SULZBERGER
More than a decade after the last
Checker cab was taken out of service
in New York City, a small collection of
the unmistakably boxy yellow cars,
complete with mechanical meters,
rate information decals and left-side
steering wheels are now seen on the
streets of London.
And just as some Checkers motor
on abroad, a collection of antique London black cabs, with the conservative,
even dowdy styling reminiscent of an
old tuxedo, have found a home in New
York.
Behind these cab-out-of-water foreign fleets is the relationship between
two men with overlapping personal
and business interests, identical
yet inverse automotive niches and a
friendship that spans 5,600 kilometers.
For more than a decade, the two
men, Ray Tomkinson of Manchester,
England, and Alvaro Gallego of
Queens, both taxi entrepreneurs
with a love of vintage vehicles, have
swapped these signature vehicles of
their homelands — along with modern
models, parts and other taxi paraphernalia — across the Atlantic Ocean,
typically on barter.
“Basically no cash changes hands,”
Mr. Tomkinson said. “We were just
paying for each other’s shipping, and
the cabs were going across the Atlantic backward and forward.”
Mr. Tomkinson, who took over his
family taxi company in Manchester
in the early 1970s, has amassed a large
collection of antique cabs from around
the world. Mr. Gallego, a Colombian
immigrant and a former cab driver,
has run a company that specializes in
taxi meter repairs for 38 years, collecting vehicles on the side.
Their cars are rented out for film
shoots and promotional campaigns —
like when British Airways hired one
of Mr. Tomkinson’s Checker cabs to
drive around London and one of Mr.
Gallego’s black cabs to drive around
New York to advertise flights between
the two cities.
The two men have done business for
about 12 years but have never met. “I
consider him my friend,” Mr. Gallego
said. “We’ve been so long together
talking about taxis, business. We have
a passion for what we do.”
The designs of both the Checker and
black cabs — largely unchanged since
the 1950s — have come to symbolize
their home cities. But the bulk that
made the cars so endearing to generations of riders also drove up costs and
drove down fuel efficiency. Once the
most common taxi model in New York,
the Checker ended production in 1982
after it proved unable to compete with
converted passenger vehicles like the
once-ubiquitous Ford Crown Victoria.
The final Checker retired from service
in New York 17 years later. The black
cab still accounts for an overwhelming majority of the London taxi fleet,
though it too has been pressed by new
models.
Mr. Gallego and Mr. Tomkinson
speak with pride about the cabs they
have traded for. “It’s good to see these
old cabs not retire,” Mr. Tomkinson
said. “They’re still earning a living
somehow.”
DAVE YODER FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
Workers in Italy prepare a ride at the Zamperla amusement
ride firm, which is manufacturing rides for Coney Island.
Repubblica NewYork
VIII
MONDAY, MAY 10, 2010
ARTS & STYLES
Julia, the Mega-Star, Happily Balanced
By LEAH ROZEN
MALIBU, California — Tom Hanks
is on the line. “What am I,” he joked,
“just another in your long line of I Love
Julia calls?”
Well, yes, as it happens. Call around
to movie industry associates about Julia Roberts and the love gushes forth.
Mr. Hanks, who starred with her in
“Charlie Wilson’s War” (2007), said
flat out: “There’s no professional I admire more than Julia. Working with
her is like having a fabulous dinner
conversation with somebody you really like and who really likes you and is
loaded with energy and intelligence.”
Mike Nichols, who directed her in
“Closer” (2004) and “Charlie Wilson,”
said, “Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep and
my wife” — Diane Sawyer — “those
are the three women I love.”
Her newest admirer is Ryan Murphy, who directed her in “Eat Pray
Love,” which opens August 13 in the
United States and in many other countries this fall. “We laughed within 30
seconds of meeting each other and
haven’t stopped since,” said Mr. Murphy, who is best known as one of the
creators of the television show “Glee.”
“She was a real collaborator on making the movie and a real leader on the
set.”
Also a fan is Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” the best-selling 2006 memoir on which the movie
is based. “There’s this luminousness
to Julia,” Ms. Gilbert said. “It’s almost
as if she was always lit from behind. If
she wasn’t a movie star, the only other
job she could have would be professional fairy.”
The object of all this affection sits
curled up in a comfortable chair in her
sewing room, upstairs in her sprawling but unpretentious, family-friendly
house in Malibu. Her latest sewing
project is making personalized, oversize pillows for her three young children to sit on while reading.
At 8:59 a.m., Ms. Roberts was securing her 5-year-old twins, Phinnaeus
and Hazel, into a car so that her husband, the cinematographer Daniel
Moder, could drive them to school.
“Have fun,” she told the kids, waving
goodbye.
Fun is something Ms. Roberts is
having a lot of these days. She is relishing marriage and motherhood — “We
are happy as clams,” she said — and
works only when she wants to. “I am
fulfilled by my own life on an hourly
basis. Every little moment is amazing
if you let yourself access it. I learn that
all the time from my kids; children are
so filled with wonder. My youngest
son” — Henry, almost 3 — “woke up
at 5 a.m. the other morning and said
to me, ‘It’s a beautiful day, Mama!’
What’s more precious than that?”
Ms. Roberts has been a major movie
star — the biggest female box office
draw — for 20 years, ever since she
fetchingly laughed her way through
the romantic comedy “Pretty Woman”
in 1990. She was 22 at the time.
“She was young, but just fearless,
and she was obviously popping off
the screen,” recalled Garry Marshall,
who directed her in “Pretty Woman,”
“Runaway Bride” (1999) and this
year’s “Valentine’s Day.” “Watching
her grow up has been one of my pleasures.”
Now 42, Ms. Roberts still has a smile
as wide and a laugh as infectious,
but a lot has happened since “Pretty
Woman”: two marriages (the first to
the singer Lyle Lovett, the second to
FRANÇOIS DUHAMEL/COLUMBIA PICTURES
“You have to learn to find peace
within yourself, to exorcise that
restlessness and judgment.”
JULIA ROBERTS
Mr. Moder in 2002); motherhood to
her brood of three; winning an Oscar
as best actress for “Erin Brockovich”
(2000); and roles in more than 30 movies, including crowd-pleasers like “My
Best Friend’s Wedding” (1997), “Notting Hill” (1999) and “Ocean’s Eleven”
(2001).
Along the way, she has blossomed
as an actress. Mr. Nichols said she
has a probing intelligence, comes to a
role preternaturally prepared and has
such a crystal-clear understanding of
the character she is portraying that
she seemingly glides through scenes.
In “Eat Pray Love,” which also stars
Javier Bardem, James Franco and Viola Davis, Ms. Roberts gets to display
bushels of emotion as a woman seeking answers to life’s big questions.
The role was the most difficult she has
taken on — she’s in every scene and
traveled the globe during the nearly
four-month shoot — since she had her
children.
Ms. Roberts said the emotional and
spiritual journey depicted in the book
resonated with her. “We all kind of
have that moment in our lives,” she
said, “sometimes it’s just for a weekend, or a month, or even a year, when
you think, ‘There’s no way out.’ You
have to learn to find peace within
yourself, to exorcise that restlessness
and judgment. You have to learn, ‘Why
can’t I just be happy with my life?’ ”
Among the things that make Ms.
Roberts happy now is having her family with her when she’s working.
Ms. Roberts confirmed that she is
indeed choosy about roles these days,
weighing the juiciness or challenge of
a part against family considerations.
“I say you can call me, but I don’t necessarily call everybody back now,” she
said, laughing.
“I’m not off the market, but my decision-making has more components
than it used to.”
Inspired Amateurs Learn
To Put a Viral Spin on It
By JULIE BLOOM
A video that involves Lady Gaga
and Beyoncé is bound to draw a lot of
eyeballs, and sure enough, this particular YouTube sensation has been
viewed more than 800,000 times. But
it’s not the clip for their recent collaboration, the single “Telephone.”
No, this viral hit features a 14-yearold boy and other students at the
International Dance Academy in
Hollywood whipping through a fastpaced combination — with hip swivels, head snaps and shimmies — created by their teacher, Dejan Tubic,
and inspired in part by Lady Gaga
and Beyoncé’s music and moves.
This interpretation of “Telephone,”
one of more than a dozen that can be
found online, is the latest example
of how dance-focused music videos
and their offshoots — tributes, stepby-step lessons, parodies — have put
a viral-media spin on the old concept
of hit songs with their own dances,
like the twist.
The updated trend can be traced
to “Crank That (Soulja Boy).” When
it was released in 2007 the song and
its accompanying dance spread like
wildfire across the Web. Beyoncé’s
“Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),”
released in 2008, continues to spawn
dozens of imitations, demonstrations
and mash-ups, like a recent tribute
that mixed the video with 1960s-era
clips of Motown girl groups.
As with other viral phenomena,
the professional productions inspire
others who learn the choreography
and share videos of their performances online. Then the tributes
lead to tributes.
“Usually on a daily basis I get an
e-mail with a new video from somebody from around the world being
like, ‘Hey will you watch this, I’ve
learned your moves?’ ” said Mr.
Tubic, 20. “There are kids with no
dance training at all who are able to
pick up my dance style and my choreography and make it look good.”
With the success of “Single Ladies” and “Telephone” have come
more big production videos: Usher’s
new “OMG,” featuring will.i.am; Ciara’s steamy “Ride,” released in late
April, which also features Ludacris;
and Christina Aguilera’s “Not Myself Tonight” (the first single from
her “Bionic” album, out in June) all
have strong dance components.
“People are realizing if you put a
video online with dance in it, you’ll
get millions of people to watch it,”
Mr. Tubic said.
The popularity of dance-focused
videos also reflects a shift in how
we experience music. “Dance has
come in and given people a way
and motivation to experience the
records, to feel that music and that
joy,” said Laurieann Gibson, the
creative director and choreographer for “Telephone” and other Lady Gaga projects. “If you don’t have
dance as part of your visual, there’s
no way these kids are gravitating to
the songs.”
Mr. Tubic said his main goal was to
help viewers learn to dance at home.
“One thing I saw online was a lot of
people were putting up tutorials of,
you know, how to play piano, how
to play this song on a keyboard, so
I wanted people to have this page
where people can watch and learn
these moves.”
Lady Gaga, left, with Beyoncé in ‘‘Telephone,’’ which has
motivated viewers to videotape their own dance moves.
DAVID SILVERMAN/GETTY IMAGES
Jordi Savall’s
album
‘‘Jerusalem’’ is a
tonal homage to
the city, which
is holy to three
religions.
City’s Complicated History Evoked in Sounds
By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH
For Jordi Savall — early-music pioneer and master of the viola da gamba
— music is always more than fleeting
sounds. It enfolds histories. It reflects
worlds. To draw a distinction between
musicology and the sheer joy of performance is next to impossible.
“I combine both,” Mr. Savall, 68,
said recently by Skype from his home
in Bellaterra, Spain, outside Barcelona. “Reality is always somewhere
between theory and practice. It’s difficult to know.”
Many specialties of his — songs of
the troubadours, say — require as
much intuition as scholarship. What
exactly do the notes on parchment
mean? How much is unwritten? How
much room is there for personal flourishes?
The chronicle of Mr. Savall’s voyages of discovery is written in the discography of Alia Vox, a label founded
in 1998 to produce and release his
recordings and those of his circle of
like-minded adventurers: his wife,
the crystalline soprano Montserrat
Figueras; their children, Arianna and
Ferran Savall, instrumentalists and
singers; the vocal consort La Capella
Reial de Catalunya; and the periodinstrument ensembles Hespèrion XXI
and Le Concert des Nations.
But the project that may illustrate
Mr. Savall’s vision at its most majestic
is “Jerusalem,” a homage, as the liner
notes put it, to “the city endlessly built
and destroyed by man in his quest for
the sacred and for spiritual power.”
According to a contested etymology, the name Jerusalem translates
as “City of the Twofold Peace,” referring to peace on earth and in heaven.
But through century after century of
crusade and jihad, that peace has existed more as a wish than as a reality.
In more than two and a half hours of
music on two CDs the transcendental
longings of Jew, Christian and Muslim
are accorded equal dignity, with distinguished guests from Israel, Palestinan territories, Armenia, Greece,
Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Morocco and Afghanistan enhancing the exotic palette. The printed material appears
in eight languages, including Arabic,
Hebrew and, as always, Mr. Savall’s
native Catalan.
“For believers the earthly Jerusalem was always the mirror of the
heavenly Jerusalem,” Mr. Savall said.
“When the earthly city was destroyed,
they thought the heavenly city still existed. At the beginning of the recording we represent the heavenly aspect
of Jerusalem by three different prophecies of the Last Judgment, which all
Music of churches,
synagogues and the
Arab quarter.
three religions predict will take place
there. That’s why the cemetery space
is so expensive.”
The zealotry, xenophobia and aggression that have scarred the history
of Jerusalem never blaze forth from
the fresco, but in a smothered way the
evidence is there. Songs that fall gently on the ear advocate the slaughter
of the depraved. As a matter of historic
conscience, Mr. Savall also incorporates Pope Urban II’s call to arms of
1095, which set off the crusades. But
the delivery of the text, in French, is
bland, and the fire and brimstone will
be lost on listeners who fail to read
along.
Mr. Savall stepped onto the early-
music scene as a scholar and virtuoso
four decades ago; his broader celebrity dates from 1992 and the release of
Alain Corneau’s film “Tous les Matins
du Monde.” It revolved around the
French Baroque composer Marin
Marais, whose austere meditations
for viol (a Renaissance string instrument that has frets, like a guitar, but
is played with a bow and held between
the knees, like a cello) are among the
glories of a long-forgotten repertory.
On screen Gérard Depardieu mimed
the aged Marais at his instrument, but
Mr. Savall’s hand drew the bow off
camera. The soundtrack remains the
Number 1 seller in the Alia Vox catalog, with 130,000 copies sold, a formidable figure in the niche within a niche
of early music.
Authenticity, in the sense of a materially accurate reconstruction of a
past beyond recall, is seldom if ever
Mr. Savall’s objective. “Music doesn’t
have any lasting existence,” he said.
“You can only play music of today.”
For the Jerusalem project he and his
collaborators gathered musical impressions in the city’s synagogues and
churches and in the Arab quarters. For
“The Forgotten Kingdom” they traveled to Carcassonne and Montaillou in
southern France, centers of the radically spiritual, ruthlessly suppressed
Cathar faith.
“Real life plays as important a role
in our work as what we discover in libraries,” Mr. Savall said. “Real places
help us understand many things that
are not written in books. The process
of discovery takes a long time. With
study you can get close to ancient
times, to feel how people sang and improvised long ago. But when we put all
that together with our musicality, our
taste, our fantasy, what you hear is
something contemporary, the same as
when you see living actors in a scene
from ‘Hamlet.’ ”
Repubblica NewYork