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Supplemento al numero
odierno de la Repubblica
Sped. abb. postale art. 1
legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma
MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009
Copyright © 2009 The New York Times
The Painful Journey Home
A Reverse Exodus
Upends the Lives
Of Many Migrants
By RACHEL DONADIO, HIROKO TABUCHI
and NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
IX YEARS AFTER the Spanish construction boom
lured him here from his native Romania, Constantin
Marius Mituletu is going home, another victim of the
bust that is reversing the human tide that has transformed
Europe and Asia in the past decade.
“Everyone says in Romania there’s no work,” Mr. Mituletu,
30, said with a touch of bravado as he lifted his mirrored sunglasses onto his forehead. “If there are 26 million people there,
they have to do something. I want to see for myself.”
Mr. Mituletu, who is planning to return to Romania this month,
is one of millions of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Latin
America and Africa who have flocked to fast-growing places like
Spain, Ireland, Britain and even Japan in the past decade, drawn
by low unemployment and liberal immigration policies.
But in a marked sign of how quickly the economies of Europe and Asia have deteriorated, workers like Mr. Mituletu
are now heading home, hoping to find better job prospects,
or at least lower costs of living, in their native lands. Some
are leaving on their own, but others are being paid to leave
by their host countries. Japan in the 1990s encouraged Latin
Americans to come and help ease a labor shortage, but is now
paying these workers up to $3,000 to go back and not return.
In Western Europe the migratory trend has been pronounced.
Consider Ireland’s capital, which earned the nickname Dublinski as roughly 180,000 Poles, Czechs and
other Eastern Europeans went there in search of work
after the European Union expanded in 2004. Now, a stunning rise in the unemployment rate, currently 11 percent, is making even the most recent arrivals rethink
S
ÁNGEL FRANCO/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Migrants who left home in search of prosperity now may have to uproot
themselves again. This woman, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador, may have to leave New York. Page 4.
BETWEEN TWO HOMES
MONEY & BUSINESS
Technology giants
go shopping.
V
PERSONALITIES
Mike Nichols, a master
of invisibility.
Continued on Page 4
VII
ARTS & STYLES
Same old Starship,
a younger crew.
VIII
I NTEL L IG ENC E: Yoa n i S á nchez o n C u ba’s next m ove, Page I I.
The lawyer who commutes every
morning? He’s pretending. The businessman who carries a briefcase? He
was laid off. The construction worker
wearing a tool belt? He’s out of work.
In a world obLENS
sessed with labels
and where everyone is quick to
judge, keeping up
appearances and
projecting a certain image may
mean the most
important brand
of all may be ourselves.
Branding experts use slogans like
“Find your unique qualities and highlight Brand You!” Or, “You’re not a
worker, you’re not a job title! You’re
a brand!” wrote Alina Tugend in The
For comments, write to nytweekly@
nytimes.com.
Homemade Impressions
Times. “We have to create our own job
security, and branding is part of that.”
Faking it or not, that lawyer, businessman and construction worker
are managing others’ impressions
of who they are. “To the extent that
it sustains good habits and reflects
personal pride,” psychologists say,
“this kind of play-acting can be an
extremely effective social strategy,
especially in uncertain times,” wrote
The Times’s Benedict Carey.
Psychologists say projecting pride
can help people thrive in difficult social circumstances, he wrote. In one
experiment, Jessica L. Tracey of the
University of British Columbia found
that people tend to associate an expression of pride with high status —
even when they know that the person
wearing it is low on the ladder, wrote
Mr. Carey.
“So long as you’re a decent actor,
and people don’t know too much
about your situation, all systems are
go,” Lisa A. Williams, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northeastern
University in Boston, told Mr. Carey.
Being a decent actor or master
craftsman of an image is important
in a society with a penchant to judge.
First impressions about people are
crucial to the way we function, social
scientists say — even when those
judgments are wrong, wrote The
Times’s Pam Belluck.
“Stereotypes are seen as a necessary mechanism for making sense of
information,” David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New
York University told Ms. Belluck. “If
we look at a chair, we can categorize it
quickly even though there are many
different kinds of chairs out there.”
Standing out from the rest is essential when creating an image, especially when job hunting. Joining sites
like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter
is a way to brand yourself, wrote Ms.
Tugend. “If you don’t brand yourself,
Google will brand you,” said Sherry
Beck Paprocki, co-author of the
book “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to
Branding Yourself.”
It’s important to control what information comes up when your name is
searched online. And not being online
today is akin to not existing, wrote
Ms. Tugend. We sell ourselves by displaying what we do, write, eat, listen
to and read.
Well, maybe not “read” so much.
Because of the Kindle, an electronic
book reader, the practice of judging
people by their books may disappear,
wrote Joanne Kaufman in The Times.
If people stop buying books, it’s going to be hard to form opinions about
them by looking at their bookshelves.
Seeing which books someone has
is “the faux-intellectual version of
sniffing through someone’s medicine
cabinet,” Ammon Shea, who wrote
about his year spent reading the
Oxford English Dictionary, told Ms.
Kaufman.
Well, people can go to a Web site
like Goodreads and let everyone
know what they are reading (or pretending to). Because it is no longer
about keeping the medicine cabinet
closed, but rather opening it up and
carefully honing its contents for everyone to see.
Repubblica NewYork
II
MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009
O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY
EDITORIALS OF THE TIMES
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Closing In
On Islamabad
If the Indian Army advanced within
about 100 kilometers of Islamabad, you
can bet Pakistan’s army would be fully
mobilized and defending the country in
pitched battles. Yet when the Taliban
got that close to the capital on April 24,
pushing into the key district of Buner,
Pakistani authorities at first sent only
several hundred poorly equipped and
underpaid police forces.
Pakistan sent paramilitary forces,
backed by army helicopters and fighter jets, into Buner a few days later to
confront the militants. But the latest
advance by the Taliban is a frightening reminder that most Pakistanis —
from top civilian and military leaders
to ordinary citizens — still do not fully
understand the mortal threat that
the militants pose to their fragile democracy. And one more reminder to
Washington that it can waste no time
enabling such denial.
Pakistanis don’t have to look far to
see what life would be like under Taliban rule. Since an army-backed peace
deal ceded the Swat Valley to the militants, the Taliban have fomented class
revolt and terrorized the region by
punishing “un-Islamic” activities like
dancing and girls’ attending school.
The more territory Pakistan cedes to
the extremists, the more room the Taliban and Al Qaeda will have to launch
attacks on American and NATO forces
in Afghanistan.
And — most frightening of all — if
the army cannot or will not defend its
own territory against the militants,
how can anyone be sure it will protect
Pakistan’s 60 or so nuclear weapons?
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
was right when she warned recently
that Pakistan was “abdicating to the
Taliban.” American military leaders
in recent days have also begun to raise
the alarm, but for too long they insisted
that General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani,
chief of staff of the army, did recognize
the seriousness of the threat. We certainly have not seen it.
On April 24, even as Mr. Kayani insisted “victory against terror and militancy will be achieved at all costs,” he
defended the Swat deal. On April 26,
government officials insisted again
that the deal remained in force despite obvious Taliban violations. Mr.
Kayani complains that his troops lack
the right tools to take on the militants,
including helicopters and night-vision
goggles.
The army should have used some of
the $12 billion it received from Washington over the last seven years to
do just that, instead of spending the
money on equipment and training to
go after India. The next round of aid
should include these items but also
require that they be used to fight the
militants.
Pakistan’s weak civilian leaders, including President Asif Ali Zardari and
the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif,
are complicit in the dangerous farce,
wasting energy on political rivalries.
They must persuade General Kayani
to shift at least part of his focus and far
more resources away from the Indian
border to the Afghan border.
Things are not going smoothly on
the American side either. President
Obama was right to recognize the
need for an integrated strategy dealing with both Afghanistan and Pakistan. But his team has a lot more work
to do, including figuring out ways to
strengthen Pakistan’s government
and its political will.
Like Pakistan, Washington cannot
afford to waste any more time figuring out the way forward — not with the
Taliban 100 kilometers from Islamabad.
Islam, Virgins And Grapes
In Afghanistan, 300 brave women marched to demand a measure
of equal rights, defying a furious
mob of about 1,000 people who spat,
threw stones and called the women
“whores.” The marchers asserted
that a woman should not need her
husband’s consent to go to school or
work outside the home.
In Pakistan, the Taliban flogged a
teenage girl in front of a crowd, as two
men held her face down in the dirt. A
video shows the girl, whose “crime”
may have been to go out of her house
alone, crying piteously that she will
never break the rules again.
Muslim fundamentalists damage
Islam far more than any number of
Danish cartoonists ever could, for it’s
inevitably the extremists who capture the world’s attention. But there
is the beginning of an intellectual reform movement in the Islamic world,
and one window into this awakening
was an international conference in
late April at the University of Notre
Dame in Indiana on the latest scholarship about the Koran.
“We’re experiencing right now
in Koranic studies a rise of interest
analogous to the rise of critical Bible
studies in the 19th century,” said Gabriel Said Reynolds, a Notre Dame
professor and organizer of the conference.
The Notre Dame conference probably could not have occurred in a
Muslim country, for the rigorous application of historical analysis to the
Koran is as controversial today in the
Muslim world as its application to
the Bible was in the 1800s. For some
literal-minded Christians, it was
traumatic to discover that the ending of the Gospel of Mark, describing
encounters with the resurrected Jesus, is stylistically different from the
rest of Mark and is widely regarded
by scholars as a later addition.
Likewise, Biblical scholars distressed the faithful by focusing on
inconsistencies among the gospels.
The Gospel of Matthew says that
Judas hanged himself, while Acts describes him falling down in a field and
dying; the Gospel of John disagrees
with other gospels about whether the
crucifixion occurred on Passover or
the day before. For those who considered every word of the Bible literally
God’s word, this kind of scholarship
felt sacrilegious.
Now those same discomfiting analytical tools are being applied to the
Koran. At Notre Dame, scholars analyzed ancient texts of the Koran that
show signs of writing that was erased
and rewritten. Other scholars challenged traditional interpretations
of the Koran such as the notion that
some other person (perhaps Judas or
Muslim scholars
discuss new
interpretations
of the Koran.
Peter) was transformed to look like
Jesus and crucified in his place, while
Jesus himself escaped to heaven.
One scholar at the Notre Dame
conference, who uses the pseudonym
Christoph Luxenberg for safety, has
caused a stir and angered people by
suggesting that the “houri” promised
to martyrs when they reach Heaven
doesn’t actually mean “virgin” after
all.
He argues that instead it means
“grapes,” and since conceptions of
paradise involved bounteous fruit,
that might make sense.
One of the scholars at the Notre
Dame conference whom I particu-
larly admire is Nasr Hamid Abu
Zayd, an Egyptian Muslim who argues eloquently that if the Koran is
interpreted sensibly in context then
it carries a strong message of social
justice and women’s rights.
Dr. Abu Zayd’s own career underscores the challenges that scholars
face in the Muslim world. When he
declared that keeping slave girls and
taxing non-Muslims were contrary
to Islam, he infuriated conservative
judges. An Egyptian court declared
that he couldn’t be a real Muslim and
thus divorced him from his wife (who,
as a Muslim woman, was not eligible
to be married to a non-Muslim). The
couple fled to Europe, and Dr. Abu
Zayd is helping the LibForAll Foundation, which promotes moderate interpretations throughout the Islamic
world.
“The Islamic reformation started
as early as the 19th century,” notes
Dr. Abu Zayd, and, of course, it has
even earlier roots as well. One important school of Koranic scholarship,
Mutazilism, held 1,000 years ago that
the Koran need not be interpreted literally, and even today Iranian scholars are surprisingly open to critical
scholarship and interpretations.
If the Islamic world is going to enjoy a revival, if fundamentalists are
to be tamed, if women are to be employed more productively, then moderate interpretations of the Koran
will have to gain ascendancy. There
are signs of that, including a brand
of “feminist Islam” that cites verses
and traditions suggesting that the
Prophet Muhammad favored women’s rights.
Professor Reynolds says that Muslim scholars have asked that conference papers be translated into Arabic
so that they can get a broader hearing. If the great intellectual fires are
reawakening within Islam, after centuries of torpor, then that will be the
best weapon yet against extremism.
DAVID BROOKS
A Philosophy for Hard Times
We’re in the middle of the biggest crisis of capitalism in 70 years. We’ve got a
new administration in Washington active on every front. What’s all this done
to the public mind?
A poll by The National Journal, a
nonpartisan political magazine, and
Allstate, an insurance company, gives
Direttore responsabile: Ezio Mauro
Vicedirettori: Mauro Bene,
Gregorio Botta, Dario Cresto-Dina,
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Caporedattore centrale: Angelo Aquaro
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via Cristoforo Colombo 90 - 00147 Roma
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Responsabile trattamento dati (d. lgs.
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Reg. Trib. di Roma n. 16064 del
13/10/1975
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a pretty good view. As you’d expect,
there’s a lot of economic anxiety in the
country, spanning every income category. Sixty-four percent of Americans
believe there are more risks that endanger their standards of living today
than in their parents’ time.
On the other hand, there’s still some
sense of opportunity. Forty-two percent
believe there are more opportunities to
move up than a generation ago, compared with 29 percent who think there
are fewer. In short, there’s a feeling of
greater volatility, both up and down.
People don’t seem to feel as if they are
sliding into a hole, but neither do they
feel secure.
So whom do they turn to in times like
these? Themselves. Americans have
always felt that they are masters of
their own fate. Decade after decade,
Americans stand out from others in
their belief that their own individual
actions determine how they fare. That
conviction has been utterly unshaken
by the global crisis. In question after
question, large majorities say their own
actions will determine how much they
will make, how well they will endure
the recession, how healthy they will be
and so on.
The crisis has not sent Americans
running to government for relief. Nor
has it led to a populist surge in antibusiness sentiment. In a recent Gallup
poll, 55 percent of Americans said that
big government is the biggest threat to
the country. Only 32 percent said big
business. Those answers are near historical norms.
Americans have always been skeptical of activist government, and that
skepticism remains. When Gallup
asked specifically about the current
crisis, 44 percent of Americans said
they disapprove of an expanded role for
government during the crisis; 39 per-
In a time of crisis,
Americans still believe
in self-sufficiency.
cent said they approve of an expanded
role but want it reduced when the crisis
is over; and only 13 percent want to see
a permanently expanded role for government.
When asked by the National Journal
group more specifically where good
ideas and financial solutions come
from, 40 percent said corporate America and 40 percent said government.
When asked what could best enhance
income security, half of all Americans
said individual responsibility, 19 percent said government regulations like
increasing the minimum wage were
most effective and 15 percent said government programs.
The area where the National Journal
poll found the most desire for government activism is health care. A recent
Pew Research Center survey found
that while there is less support for a
health care overhaul than there was in
1993, the public still wants reform that
at least improves the current system.
My friend Ron Brownstein of The
National Journal looks at the data
and concludes that while Americans
are still skeptical of government, they
are open to rethinking what the social
safety net should look like in the 21st
century. I look at the data and conclude
that the tumult has not significantly
changed the way Americans look at
government, corporations or the social
contract. Americans are open to good
ideas from government, as always,
but they are still skeptical and fiercely
self-sufficient. The economic crisis has
produced a desire for change but not a
philosophical shift.
The big lesson for the Obama administration is that the American people
will continue to support its agenda as
long as they think it is competent. It
was not automatic that an administra-
tion led by a 47-year-old man with little
Washington experience would run a
professional, smoothly functioning operation. Yet he has. The administration
has unveiled a dazzling array of proposals with a high degree of efficiency
and managerial skill. This has inspired
confidence in his team, if not in the government as a whole.
If that aura of nonideological competence fades, however, support for the
agenda will disappear. There is little
philosophical backing for a government as activist as the one Obama is
proposing. Middle-class voters are not
willing to hand over higher taxes in exchange for more federal services. The
public is significantly to Obama’s right
on economic matters and needs constant evidence that he is not trespassing on personal freedom and individual
responsibility.
For Republicans, the message is that
all is not hopeless. Swing voters have
temporarily rejected the party, but not
its world view. After this crisis is over,
they still want a return to normalcy,
with balanced budgets and a limited
state. Americans still want to see power dispersed among a diversity of institutions, not concentrated in the hands
of supertechnocrats in Washington.
The Great Depression altered the national consciousness. So far, the Great
Recession has not.
•
Supplemento a cura di: Alix Van Buren,
Francesco Malgaroli
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Repubblica NewYork
MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009
III
O B A M A’ S WA S H I N G T O N
Bold but Ready to Compromise, Obama Faces Auto Industry Crisis
By JIM RUTENBERG, PETER BAKER
and BILL VLASIC
WASHINGTON — For a new president, the automobile industry crisis
has tested the boundaries of President Obama’s activist approach and
the acuity of his political instincts.
As with so many issues in his actionpacked 100 days in office, Mr. Obama
confronted choices few of his predecessors encountered.
His ongoing intervention in an iconic sector of the economy offers a case
study in the education, management
and decision-making of a fledgling
president.
Tutored by veterans of past administrations, Mr. Obama, often after dinner
with his wife and daughters, devoured
briefing papers until midnight to master the intricacies of the auto industry.
But he had advisers deal directly with
the car companies and never spoke
with the General Motors chief executive he effectively fired.
Methodical and dispassionate, Mr.
Obama aggravated powerful players in Congress and the unions that
helped elect him, then moved to assuage them. He encouraged internal debate but was forced to head off
tensions as his treasury secretary
and White House economic adviser
maneuvered for position. In the end,
he struggled with the proper balance
between government power and market forces, a theme that has defined his
first months in office.
“The issues were obvious — balancing his interest in seeing the companies survive and prosper for the benefit of the workers and communities
in which they operate and all the offshoot businesses, versus the interests
of American taxpayers,’’ said David
Dealing with
the ailing
American auto
industry has
been a learning
experience
for President
Obama.
MIKE THEILER/REUTERS
Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser. “And overlaid on that is, when
is it appropriate for the government to
intervene?’’
But for all Mr. Obama’s confidence
— even some friends refer to a certain
cockiness — this is a president just four
years out of the Illinois legislature and
very much learning on the job. His instincts for compromise, seen frequently in dealings with Congress, have left
him facing questions about his willingness to face down powerful interests.
With General Motors restructuring
as he demanded and the Chrysler bankruptcy being announced, the ultimate
success of Mr. Obama’s strategy may
rest in part on how far he will go to take
on constituencies like unions that have
been vital to his political standing.
A former community organizer with
little business experience, Mr. Obama
had developed a basic knowledge of the
auto industry during the campaign,
touring factories, stumping with Ron
Gettelfinger, a powerful ally as presi-
dent of the United Auto Workers, and
meeting with William Clay Ford Jr.,
the executive chairman of Ford who
later recalled discussing “the electrification of our industry.’’
As Mr. Obama prepared to take
office, he increasingly relied on his
closest aides, primarily Lawrence H.
Summers, his newly tapped economic
adviser, and Timothy F. Geithner, who
would become his treasury secretary.
Few in his inner orbit had much experience in business, much less the auto
industry.
Mr. Obama grew irritated at the
auto executives, who in his view had a
long history of bad decisions. “What
are these guys thinking?’’ Mr. Axelrod remembered Mr. Obama asking
when the chief executives of Chrysler,
Ford and General Motors flew to
Washington aboard corporate jets to
request a bailout. On NBC’s “Meet
the Press’’ in December, Mr. Obama
castigated automakers for “repeated
strategic mistakes’’ and “failure to
adapt to changing times,’’ adding
that voters were “fed up’’ — and so
was he.
But his tough language angered
some Democratic allies, like Representative John D. Dingell and Senator Carl Levin, both of Michigan, who
scolded him as talking down the industry.
“He comes from Illinois, which is auto-producing country, but apparently
not his part of Illinois,’’ Mr. Dingell
said. “Had he had an auto factory in
his town, he’d have had a better understanding of what was going on.’’
For good or ill, Mr. Obama has done
a lot in his first 100 days. The auto crisis
forced him to look at options once unthinkable, and, like many challenges,
remains unresolved.
In terms of leadership style, Mr.
Obama at times has seemed like a
cross between his two most recent
predecessors — intellectually curious, philosophically flexible and eager for input like Bill Clinton, while
disciplined, willing to delegate and
comfortable with bold decisions like
George W. Bush.
Mr. Obama is learning fast that he
cannot be all things to all constituencies, and the labor leaders who did so
much for him during the campaign
sometimes chafe at his approach.
The U.A.W. recently called on mem-
A fledgling president
has a major test of his
leadership style.
bers to send e-mail messages to the
White House demanding that it “stand
up for the interests of workers and retirees in these restructuring negotiations.’’
Mr. Obama is gambling that his
judgment is the right one to salvage
an industry at the heart of America’s
economic self-image.
“At this point, the administration is
just playing poker,’’ Mr. Dingell said.
“If he gets the damn loans and saves
the industry, I guess I won’t be able to
complain.’’
And if Mr. Obama does not, the next
100 days promise to be even more challenging than the first.
INTELLIGENCE/YOANI SÁNCHEZ
For the Castros,
A More Complicated Game
the impossibility to purchase cars or homes
An island in the Caribbean has been turned
are from our own government. We are also
into a chessboard, where for 50 years what
afraid to express our political views openly,
some call a revolution and others refer to as
found a political party or read newspapers
a dictatorship has held sway. The unwilling
with opinions other than those of the official
pawns here are Cuban people like Miguel,
state organ, Granma.
Yudeixis or myself, spectators in this chess
match between the United States and CuThe new spirit of the United States governban governments. Several generations of
ment will not, immediately, shorten the lines
Cubans have come of age during this long
in consulates for those who are seeking to
stalemate.
fulfill their dreams outside Cuba. However, it
In the last few weeks something has started
can help my downstairs neighbor get a coat
to change in this boring contest. The new ocof paint for his apartment, the taxi driver buy
cupant of the White House eased travel re— with money sent by his brother — the enstrictions so Cuban-Americans can visit the
gine he needs to repair his old Chevrolet, and
island, a sensitive issue in a country where
the manicure attendant receive, in a package
every one of us has a relative on the other
postmarked in Hialeah, the plastic nails her
shore. He also lifted
clients demand.
existing restrictions
All this is going to
on rem it t a nc es ,
help empower Cuban
indispensable for
citizens, make them
propping up many
more independent
families who would
from the governotherwise be unable
ment, less compliant
to make it to the end
to the official hand
of the month.
that moves them
Ba rack Oba ma
around the board as
also announced that
if they were chess
televison satellite
pieces.
companies are now
Ma ny mot hers
allowed to provide
with exiled children
their services to us,
pray that this loosTONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES
although those sigening of restrictions
nals — clandestinely
continues, and the
The Obama administration has placed
accessed with anmost stubborn seCuba’s leadership in a difficult position.
tennas — have long
niors think this is a
been an alternative
propitious time to
to the national programming that is heavy on
start a dialogue. The Cuban government did
ideology.
not expect the audacious proposal of “a new
beginning” in bilateral relations outlined by
Even though the embargo is still in place,
Mr. Obama in the Americas Summit. The rewe Cubans understand clearly which restricsponse so far has been cautious, at least on the
tions come from our own government and
side of the chess table we can observe.
which are imposed from abroad. The limitations to enter and leave the country, the conNonetheless, a lot of us have a feeling that
Raúl Castro cannot wait too long to make his
fiscation of émigrés’ property, the dual curmove; he can seek to prolong the conflict or to
rency we’ve endured for the past 15 years and
make a gesture that confirms a dialogue. He is
trapped in the chess dilemma known as zugYoani Sánchez, who lives in Havana, has a
zwang, where an opponent loses because he
blog at www.desdecuba/generaciony/.
is forced to make a fatal move when he would
This article was translated from the Spanish
rather not make a move at all.
by Carmen Spady.
Theworld
ischanged.
Seeitall
throughour
eyes.
Read the new-look IHT.
New eyes on a changed world.
Repubblica NewYork
IV
MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009
WORLD TRENDS
Family in One Country,
But Two Different Worlds
By DAVID GONZALEZ
For the father, the choice was obvious: An engineer with several jobs yet
little money, he saw no future for his
daughter and son in their struggling
country, Ecuador. Eight years ago,
he paid traffickers to smuggle him
into Texas, then headed to New York,
where his wife and children flew in as
tourists, and stayed.
But the consequences of that decision have been anything but simple.
The daughter excelled in her Queens
high school and graduated from college with honors, but at 22 is still living
in the United States illegally. She does
accounting for a small immigrant-run
business, fears venturing outside the
city and cannot get a driver’s license
in the country she has come to love.
Meanwhile, her 17-year-old brother,
who was born in the United States
during an earlier stay and is thus an
American citizen, enjoys privileges
his family cannot, like summers in Ecuador with his cousins. But bored and
alone most afternoons, he declared
last fall that he wanted to move back
to the old country.
“How can he even think that?” said
Many children of
illegal immigrants are
American citizens.
his mother, stunned. “We’re sacrificing ourselves so he can get a better
education and a better job. After giving up everything to come here, he —
the only one with papers — wants to
go back?”
These four — who declined to be
identified, for fear of being deported
— are part of a growing group of what
are often called mixed-status families.
Nearly 2.3 million undocumented families, about three-quarters of those who
are here illegally, have at least one child
who is a United States citizen, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
This Queens family illustrates how
the growing disparities within immigrant homes are pulling their members in opposite directions and complicating efforts to plan a common
future.
The mother, 47, who gave up her
fledgling career in Ecuador as a computer systems analyst and now babysits for money, has not had anywhere
near the same opportunities in this
country as the father, also 47, who
found rewarding work as a draftsman.
The parents are among a rising
proportion of illegal immigrants with
higher educations — at least one in every four are believed to have had some
college.
The father first came to New York in
1986, after graduating at the top of his
class from the polytechnic university
in Quito. He came legally, on a student
visa, for graduate studies in engineering at City College, intending to return
home to his wife.
But when the couple learned she
was pregnant with their first child, he
dropped out and took a factory job —
violating the terms of his visa — then
arranged to have his wife and baby
daughter smuggled into Texas and
then to New York, where he felt he
could best provide for them.
“I knew I was passing into illegality,” said the father, a trim, youthful
man. “It was a very difficult decision
to make. But I had to support them.”
They moved to Miami and had the
son, born an American citizen. But
their hopes of a prosperous American life eluded them, and in 1992 they
returned to Ambato, the agricultural
hub in Ecuador where the father had
grown up.
But as their daughter raced through
school there, outpacing her classmates, the father worried about the
quality of schooling in Ecuador. He
resolved to give her, and her brother,
the American education he never completed.
They arrived back in New York in
2001. The father found work with a
Queens construction company, taking
precise measurements at work sites
and turning them into computerized
drawings. He makes more than he
would in Ecuador.
The mother, meanwhile, cares for
children in cramped apartments not
nearly as nice as the rambling, modern house she grew up in.
The discrepancies between their
lives frayed an already strained relationship; they separated four years
ago. The children spend most weekdays with their father, in the narrow
attic of a dark house in Elmhurst,
Queens. On weekends, they take the
subway and a bus to the apartment
their mother rents in another Queens
neighborhood, Bayside.
The son is tightly tied to Ecuador.
As the only family member who can
travel freely, he has spent three summers there, playing soccer and going
to amusement parks with cousins.
He seems far less emotionally connected to Queens. But the family insists he stay in the United States. “As
a citizen, all doors are open for him,”
the mother said. “He knows there is
a difference, that he can do what we
cannot.”
ÁNGEL FRANCO/THE NEW YORK TIMES
The daughter of Ecuadorean immigrants has an American
college degree, but still cannot work legally in New York.
FRANCK ROBICHON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Rita Yamaoka, a Brazilian immigrant, cried as she considered a Japanese plan to pay her to return home.
Reverse Exodus Upends Migrant Lives
From Page 1
their plans.
“Since 2000, there has been a resurgence of intra-European migration,” said Rainer Münz, a migration scholar who is head of research
and development at Erste Bank in
Vienna. “To a certain extent, that’s
clearly unwinding now.”
Between April 2008 and the end of
April 2009, as many as 50,000 workers
are likely to have returned home from
Ireland, mostly to Eastern Europe,
according to Alan Barrett of the Economic and Social Research Institute
in Dublin.
“Things have changed quickly,”
said Monica Jelinkova, 25, who moved
to Dublin from the Czech Republic 18
months ago. “I used to know 15 people
here. Now there are only four friends
left.”
While unemployment is also rising in the Czech Republic, “it is much
easier to be at home with family and
with friends and not to have a job,”
she said, “than to be here and not to
have a job.”
The Czech government announced
in February that it, in turn, would pay
500 euros, or about $660, and provide
one-way plane tickets to each foreigner who has lost his job and wants to
go home.
And in Bucharest, Romania’s capital, workers from China have been
camped out in freezing weather in
front of the Chinese Embassy for two
months, essentially stranded after
their construction jobs disappeared.
Like the Czech Republic, Spain is
offering financial incentives to leave.
A new program aimed at legal immigrants from South America allows
them to take their unemployment
payments in a lump sum if they agree
to leave and not return for at least
three years. The Spanish government says only around 3,000 people
have taken advantage of the plan, but
many others are leaving of their own
accord.
Airlines in Spain are offering deals
on one-way tickets to Latin America,
and they say demand has increased
significantly. Every day, Barajas airport in Madrid is the setting for emotional departures, as families send
their jobless loved ones back home.
Japan has initiated a similar but
more stringent program that targets hundreds of thousands of Latin
American immigrants, part of a new
drive to encourage them to leave this
recession-racked country. So far, at
least 100 workers and their families
have agreed to leave, Japanese offiRachel Donadio reported from
Alcalá de Henares, Madrid and
Rome, Nelson D. Schwartz from
Paris and Vienna and Hiroko
Tabuchi from Hamamatsu, Japan.
Eamon Quinn contributed reporting from Dublin, and Davin Ellicson from Bucharest, Romania.
cials said.
But critics denounce Japan’s program as shortsighted, inhumane and
a threat to what little progress Japan
has made in opening its economy to
foreign workers.
“It’s a disgrace. It’s cold-hearted,”
said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of
the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, an independent research organization.
“And Japan is kicking itself in the
foot,” he added. “We might be in a recession now, but it’s clear it doesn’t
have a future without workers from
overseas.”
The program is limited to the country’s Latin American guest workers,
whose Japanese parents and grandparents emigrated to Brazil and
neighboring countries a century ago
to work on coffee plantations.
Until very recently, countries like
Spain, Ireland and Italy were nations
of emigrants, not immigrants.
That changed in the decade-long
expansion that began in the late
With jobs in flux, it’s
Dublin to Dublinski
and back again.
1990s. In Spain, where the growth has
been the most explosive, the foreign
population rose to 5.2 million last year
out of a total of 45 million people from
750,000 in 1999, according to the National Statistics Institute. Ireland’s
population, now 4.1 million, was also
transformed, with the percentage of
foreign-born residents rising to 11 percent in 2006 from 7 percent in 2002.
“In the U.S., it took generations to
build up a foreign-born population of
that size,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, head of the Migration Policy
Institute, a research group in Washington. “These countries have done
it at an unprecedented rate, but the
society and institutions haven’t even
begun to have a chance to catch up.”
The reverse exodus from more
prosperous countries in Western Europe is likely to add to the pressures
already buffeting Central and Eastern Europe, where migrants from developing countries are being encouraged to leave.
In 1990, the opposite case existed
in Japan. Facing a growing industrial
labor shortage, Japan started issuing thousands of special work visas
to descendants of Latin American
emigrants. An estimated 366,000
Brazilians and Peruvians now live in
Japan.
The guest workers quickly became
the largest group of foreign laborers
in an otherwise immigration-averse
country, filling the so-called three-K
jobs (kitsui, kitanai, kiken — hard,
dirty and dangerous).
But the nation’s manufacturing
sector has slumped as demand for
Japanese goods evaporated, pushing
unemployment to a three-year high of
4.4 percent. Japan’s exports plunged
45.6 percent in March from a year earlier, and industrial production is at its
lowest level in 25 years.
“There won’t be good employment
opportunities for a while, so that’s
why we’re suggesting that the Nikkei
Brazilians go home,” said Jiro Kawasaki, a former health minister and
senior lawmaker of the ruling Liberal
Democratic Party.
“Nikkei” visas are special visas
granted because of Japanese ancestry or association.
Under the emergency program,
introduced in April, the country’s
Brazilian and other Latin American
guest workers are offered $3,000 toward air fare, plus $2,000 for each dependent — attractive lump sums for
many immigrants in Japan. Workers
who leave have been told they can
keep any amount left over.
But those who take advantage of
the program will not be allowed to
reapply for a work visa. Stripped of
that status, most would find it all but
impossible to return.
Spain, with an unemployment rate
of 15.5 percent, allows immigrants to
reclaim their residency and work
visas after three years. And people
like Mr. Mituletu, the Romanian,
can return every three months to
sign for his Spanish unemployment
benefits.
Mr. Kawasaki, however, said the
economic slump was a good opportunity to overhaul Japan’s immigration policy as a whole.
“We should stop letting unskilled
laborers into Japan. We should make
sure that even the three-K jobs are
paid well, and that they are filled by
Japanese,” he said. “I do not think
that Japan should ever become a
multiethnic society.”
Rita Yamaoka and her husband,
Sergio, who settled in Japan three
years ago at the height of the export
boom, are undecided about their futures. But they have both lost jobs at
auto factories.
“I feel immense stress. I’ve been
crying very often,” Mrs. Yamaoka,
38, said after a meeting where local
officials detailed the offer in this industrial town of Hamamatsu in central Japan.
“I tell my husband that we should
take the money and go back,” she
said, her eyes teary. “We can’t afford
to stay here much longer.”
Others have made up their minds
to leave. “They put up with us as long
as they needed the labor,” said Wellington Shibuya, who came six years
ago and lost his job at a stove factory
in October. “But now that the economy is bad, they throw us a bit of cash
and say goodbye.”
Repubblica NewYork
MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009
V
MONEY & BUSINESS
Disney Digs Into Closets
To Fathom Minds of Boys
By BROOKS BARNES
the bottoms facing outward. (Boys
in real life carry them that way to
display the personalization, Ms.
Peña found.) The games portion
of the Disney XD Web site now features prominent trophy cases. (It’s
less about the level reached in the
game and more about sharing small
achievements, research showed.)
Fearful of coming off as too manipulative, youth-centric media
companies rarely discuss this kind
of field research. Disney is so proud
of its new “headquarters for boys,”
however, that it has made an exception, offering a rare window onto the
emotional hooks that are carefully
embedded in children’s entertainment. The effort is as outsize as the
potential payoff: boys 6 to 14 account
for $50 billion in spending worldwide,
according to market researchers.
Thus far, Disney’s initiative is
limited to the XD channel. But Disney hopes that XD will produce a hit
show that can follow
the “High School Musical” model from cable
to merchandise to live
theater to feature film.
With the exception
of “Cars,” Disney has
been notably weak
on hit entertainment
franchises for boys.
(“Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Toy Story”
are in a type of hibernation, awaiting new bigscreen installments.)
Disney Channel’s audience is 40 percent
male, but girls drive
most of the related
merchandising sales.
JOHN MEDLAND/DISNEY XD
Boys are trickier
In ‘‘Aaron Stone,’’ the main character is a
to pin down for a host
mediocre athlete but a video game champion.
of reasons. They hop
more quickly than
their female counterparts from
create new entertainment for boys
sporting activities to television to
6 to 14, a group that Disney used to
video games during leisure time.
own way back in the days of “Davy
They can also be harder to underCrockett” but that has wandered in
stand: the cliché that girls are more
the age of more girl-friendly Disney
willing to chitchat about their feelfare like “Hannah Montana.”
ings is often true.
Children can already see the reHollywood has been thinking of
sults of Ms. Peña’s scrutiny on Disboys too narrowly — offering all acney XD, a new cable channel and
tion or all animation — instead of a
Web site (disney.go.com/disneyxd).
more nuanced combination, said
It’s no accident, for instance, that the
Rich Ross, president of Disney Chancentral character on “Aaron Stone”
nels Worldwide.
is a mediocre basketball player. Ms.
He said that in Ms. Peña’s rePeña, 45, told producers that boys
search, boys across markets and
identify with protagonists who try
cultures described the television
hard to grow. “Winning isn’t nearly
aimed at them as “purposeless fun”
as important to boys as Hollywood
but expressed a strong desire for a
thinks,” she said.
new channel that was “fun with a
Actors have been instructed to
purpose.”
tote their skateboards around with
ENCINO, California — Kelly Peña, or “the kid whisperer,” as some
Hollywood producers call her, was
digging through a 12-year-old boy’s
dresser drawer. Her undercover
mission: to unearth what drives him
and use the findings to help the Walt
Disney Company reassert itself as a
cultural force among boys.
Ms. Peña, a Disney researcher, zeroed in on a ratty rock ’n’ roll T-shirt.
Black Sabbath?
“Wearing it makes me feel like
I’m going to an R-rated movie,” said
Dean, a shy redhead whose parents
asked that he be identified only by
first name.
Jackpot.
Ms. Peña and her team of anthropologists have spent 18 months
peering inside the heads of incommunicative boys in search of just
that kind of psychological nugget.
Disney is relying on her insights to
By buying Sun Microsystems, Oracle will move beyond software and compete more directly with other
technology companies that have been expanding their offerings.
ACQUISITIONS
SINCE JAN. 1, 2007
Oracle: 25
I.B.M.: 20
Cisco Systems: 19
Hewlett-Packard: 16
MAJOR
ACQUISITION
Sun
Microsystems
Cognos
WebEx
Communications
E.D.S.
SIGNIFICANCE
Oracle will move into
computer hardware
and gain critical
software and patents.
I.B.M. greatly
improved its software
that helps companies
analyze their data.
Collaboration software
became a new line of
business for Cisco.
H.P. became the
leading rival to
I.B.M.
$7.4 billion
$5 billion
$3.2 billion
$13.9 billion
SOFTWARE
HARDWARE
SERVICES
COST
Source: Company Web sites
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Computer Firms Vie to Build 1-Stop Shop
By ASHLEE VANCE
SAN FRANCISCO — Most consumers do not want to get a PC by purchasing microprocessors, hard drives and
operating system software from different suppliers and assembling them all
into a working computer. They prefer
to buy a complete, customized machine
from one supplier.
Corporate customers increasingly
want the same thing: a one-stop shop
for hardware, software and services.
And the largest technology companies
are deploying their huge cash hoards
to make acquisitions to bolster their
ability to be that single provider.
That trend drove Oracle, a leader
in business software, to recently announce that it was spending $7.4 billion to buy an ailing Sun Microsystems
and get into the computer hardware
business. Oracle beat out rival I.B.M.,
which considered buying Sun to enhance its own software offerings.
“Oracle will be the only company
that can engineer an integrated system — applications to disk — where all
the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves,”
Oracle’s chief executive, Lawrence J.
Ellison, recently said.
The drive to consolidate has made
life difficult for independent companies
like Sun, and the fall of such an industry stalwart highlights the mounting
pressure on smaller firms in the computer, storage and software industries
to find buyers. Even larger companies
like EMC and Dell could be vulnerable,
industry observers say.
“I believe that we are in the fifth inning of a nine-inning consolidation
game,” said William T. Coleman III, a
former Sun executive and co-founder
of BEA Systems, who is now chief of
the software start-up Cassatt. “It’s not
over by any stretch of the imagination,
and there are drastic things that still
have to happen.”
ISTOCKPHOTO
Five years ago, Oracle bought PeopleSoft for more than $10 billion, igniting a furious rush to scoop up other
business software makers. Oracle
alone has since bought more than 40
other companies, spending close to
$15 billion for BEA and Siebel Systems
alone.
Many of the companies purchased
by Oracle had carved out a niche for
themselves during the Internet buildout, providing unique functions that
assisted a rapid infrastructure expansion. After the dot-com bust, however,
customers grew weary of visits from
software salesmen peddling isolated
wares. A simpler model evolved, in
which a handful of companies like
Oracle, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard
bought dozens of smaller players and
then competed to sell most of the software needed to run a business.
While software companies led the
last round of consolidation, the hardware industry now appears poised for
its own reshaping. “I think we’re at an
inflection point,” said Patricia C. Sueltz, a former I.B.M. and Sun executive,
who runs the start-up LogLogic.
Over the last decade, H.P. has driven
much of the consolidation through a
series of large acquisitions. It bought
Compaq Computer in 2001, which affected both the PC and server markets
as other companies fought to expand
and match H.P.’s reach. For example,
the Chinese computer maker Lenovo
bought I.B.M.’s PC business, and Acer,
based in Taiwan, acquired Gateway,
which had already acquired eMachines.
With $34 billion on hand, Cisco has
more funds at its disposal than any
other technology company and has
been mentioned as a suitor for storage
makers like EMC and NetApp. H.P.,
too, has come up as a potential buyer
for NetApp. And Dell has pledged to
spend some of its billions on server,
storage and services companies.
“I think people have been a little
more fearful, but there’s still a ton of
cash out there,” said Peter Falvey, the
co-founder of Revolution Partners, an
investment bank centered on technology companies.
Software Keeps an Eye
On Those Working at Home
What happens in the information
age when workers are no longer there
in front of the manager, but working
from home? In many managers’ eyes,
workers wouldn’t do as much work.
No worries. New
software can monitor
workers who, conveniently, do most of
their work on computESSAY
ers. It can also measure their efforts and
direct work to those who do it best.
LiveOps, a rapidly growing company in Santa Clara, California, that operates virtual call centers — agents
working from home across America
— has also found that software can
perform other management tasks.
How it uses that software points to
the direction in which technology is
taking the workplace.
Founded in 2000, LiveOps fields
some 20,000 “home agents,” all independent contractors who take orders
DAMON
DARLIN
for products advertised on late-night
TV, sell insurance or transcribe recordings for other companies. The
agents even take pizza orders. If
there is a storm in a particular city
and pizza orders surge because no
one is going out, calls to the pizza
store are routed to LiveOps agents
thousands of miles away.
The virtual call center is nothing
new. A number of companies, like
Elance, oDesk and Guru, assemble
freelance work forces to take on
specific tasks so that companies
don’t have to run call centers or hire
additional employees. TopCoder and
RentACoder have done it specifically
for computer programmers. A startup, Serebra Connect, hires college
students in developing economies to
do work.
But Maynard Webb, the chief executive of LiveOps, says he thinks
that the company’s software gives
clients like Kodak, Colonial Penn and
LiveOps, a
virtual call
center, can track
the productivity
of operators
nationwide. Jeff
Veir, a manager
at LiveOps, shows
network traffic to
Maynard Webb, the
company chairman.
PETER DaSILVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
TristarProductions, a direct marketing company, an advantage. The
software moves a company beyond
simple cost-cutting. Mr. Webb says
greater efficiencies can be found
because the company’s software
measures the results from each agent
according to criteria determined by
the client.
If a client wants agents to persuade
callers to buy additional products,
the software tracks that — and then
directs calls to the agents who do it
best. Those agents prosper.
What about the agents who aren’t
so good? “No one gets fired,” Mr.
Webb said. “They just don’t get
work.”
He thinks the concept can be expanded to any line of work — like
health care, retailing, publishing and
law — where the output can be measured.
And the advantage for LiveOps,
which Mr. Webb says has been profitable since 2006, is a harbinger of
things to come. “The economics are
better. No buildings. No benefits,”
said Mr. Webb, a former eBay executive. (LiveOps’s 300 employees do get
benefits.)
Before everyone wrings their
hands at the horror of an economy
shifting to workers paid by the
minute doing piecemeal work at the
kitchen table while monitored by an
all-seeing computer, consider that
Mr. Webb isn’t having trouble finding
workers.
“There are way more people who
want to work in this model than we
have room for,” he said.
Repubblica NewYork
VI
MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Unraveling the Genome May Not Cure Diseases
By NICHOLAS WADE
The era of personal genomic medicine may have to wait. The genetic
analysis of common disease is turning out to be a lot more complex than
expected.
Since the human genome was decoded in 2003, researchers have been
developing a powerful method for
comparing the genomes of patients
and healthy people, with the hope
of pinpointing the DNA changes responsible for common diseases.
This method, called a genomewide
association study, has proved technically successful despite many skeptics’ initial doubts. But it has been disappointing in that the kind of genetic
variation it detects has turned out to
explain surprisingly little of the genetic links to most diseases.
The unexpected impasse also affects companies that offer personal
genomic information and that had
assumed they could inform customers of their genetic risk for diseases,
based on researchers’ discoveries.
“With only a few exceptions, what
the genomics companies are doing
right now is recreational genomics,”
said Dr. David B. Goldstein, a Duke
University geneticist who was among
the contributors to a recent issue of
The New England Journal of Medicine that appears to be the first public
attempt by scientists to make sense of
this puzzling result. “The information
has little or in many cases no clinical
relevance,” Dr. Goldstein said.
These companies are probably
not performing any useful service at
present, he added.
One issue of debate among researchers is whether, despite the
prospect of diminishing returns,
to continue with the genomewide
studies, which cost many millions
of dollars apiece, or switch to a new
approach like decoding the entire genomes of individual patients.
Unlike the rare diseases caused
by a change affecting only one gene,
common diseases like cancer and diabetes are caused by a set of several
genetic variations in each person.
Since these common diseases generally strike later in life, after people
have had children, the theory has
been that natural selection is powerless to weed them out.
The problem addressed in The New
England Journal of Medicine is that
these diseases were expected to be
promoted by genetic variations that
are common in the population. More
than 100 genomewide association
studies, often involving thousands
of patients in several countries, have
now been completed for many diseases, and some common variants have
been found. But in almost all cases
they carry only a modest risk for the
disease. Most of the genetic link to
disease remains unexplained.
Dr. Goldstein argues that the genetic burden of common diseases must
be mostly carried by large numbers
of rare variants. Schizophrenia, say,
would be caused by combinations of
1,000 rare genetic variants, not of 10
common genetic variants.
This would be bleak news for those
who argue that the common variants
detected so far, even if they explain
Detecting genetic risks
may have little clinical
relevance.
only a small percentage of the risk,
will nonetheless identify the biological pathways through which a disease
emerges. They argue that this would
lead to the drugs that may correct the
errant pathways. But if hundreds of
rare variants are involved in a disease, they may implicate too much of
the body’s biochemistry to be useful.
“In pointing at everything,” Dr.
Goldstein writes in the journal, “genetics would point at nothing.”
Two other geneticists, Peter Kraft
and David J. Hunter of the Harvard
School of Public Health, also writing
in the journal, largely agree with Dr.
Goldstein that probably many genetic variants “are responsible for the
majority of the inherited risk of each
common disease.”
But they disagree that there will
be diminishing returns from more
genomewide association studies.
“There will be more common variants to find,” Dr. Hunter said. “It
would be unfortunate if we gave up
now.”
Dr. Goldstein, however, said it was
“beyond the grasp of the genomewide association studies” to find rare
variants with small effects, even by
recruiting enormous numbers of
patients. He said resources should
be switched away from these highly
expensive studies, which in his view
have now done their job.
“If you ask what is the fastest way
for us to make progress in genetics
that is clinically helpful,” he said, “I
am absolutely certain it is to marshal
our resources to interrogate full genomes, not in fine-tuning our analyses of common variations.”
He advocates decoding the full
DNA of carefully selected patients.
Dr. Kraft and Dr. Hunter say that a
person’s genetic risk of common diseases can be estimated only roughly
at present but that estimates will improve as more variants are found.
RICK FRIEDMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Richard Wrangham has studied
the diets of wild chimpanzees.
At the Dawn
Of Man,
A Cookout
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Richard Wrangham, a primatologist
and anthropologist, has spent four decades observing wild chimpanzees in
Africa to see what their behavior might
tell us about prehistoric humans. Dr.
Wrangham, 60, was born in Britain
and since 1989 has been at Harvard
University, where he is a professor of
biological anthropology. He is about to
publish another book, “Catching Fire:
How Cooking Made Us Human.”
Q. In
Flying, Without Leaving the Ground
LANDSPEED
BUILT FOR SPEED
The North American Eagle, a converted jet fighter, on a test run in Nevada, where the crew will try to set a land speed record.
A computer
graphic showing the
flow of air around the
vehicle, which may
reach 1,300 kilometers
per hour.
By GUY GUGLIOTTA
SPANAWAY, Washington — When Ed Shadle was
growing up, you could buy
a beat-up car for a couple
hundred dollars, pound out
the dents, drop a big engine
in it, paint it candy apple
red, take it to the outskirts
of town and race from stoplight to stoplight until the
cops told you to go home.
Mr. Shadle, a retired IBM
field engineer, is 67 now,
and he is still racing. So a bit
over 10 years ago, he and his
good friend Keith Zanghi
bought an old vehicle in
Maine, pounded out the
dents, customized the exterior, dropped a big engine in
it and painted it red.
Except this was a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. The
real thing. The single-engine Mach
2.2 interceptor that ruled the skies
in the 1950s and 1960s. “In a post-9/11
world we probably wouldn’t have
been able to get one,” Mr. Shadle acknowledged. But in 1999 they drove
this one away for $25,000.
And next year — on July 4, perhaps — they intend to take the North
American Eagle to the hardpan desert at Black Rock, Nevada, and run it
through a measured mile to set a new
land speed record of about 1,300 kilometers per hour, 70 kilometers per
hour faster than the speed of sound.
Mr. Shadle is the driver.
The Eagle has stiff competition.
Late last year, Richard Noble and
Andy Green of Britain, who broke
the sound barrier on their way to setting the current record of 1,228 kilometers per hour in 1997, announced
the beginning of Bloodhound, a new
three-year project to build a jet-and-
A FORCE
rocket car capable of 1,610 kilometers
per hour.
Bloodhound enjoys private-sector
sponsorship, university technical
support and the endorsement and
some education financing from the
British government. The Eagle, on
the other hand, has about 44 volunteers giving up weekends and vacations to build the ultimate hot rod.
Mr. Zanghi said he and Mr. Shadle had bankrolled Eagle for about
$250,000 over the last decade with one
thought in mind: “What we want,”
Mr. Shadle said, with a slow drawl,
“is to go fast.”
From nose to tail, the Eagle is 17
meters long, weighs 5,900 kilograms
and is powered by a single General
Electric LM1500 gas turbine, better
known as a J79 when it flew in F-104s.
The engine is a loaner from S Turbine Services, a Canadian firm that
rebuilds J79s for repressurizing natu-
ral gas wells.
The rules are simple. Clock the
racer through a measured mile, turn
around and do it again, then average
the two speeds. The vehicle must have
at least four wheels — two of them
steerable — and be back at the original start line within 60 minutes. And
that’s it. “You race Formula One or
Nascar, the rule books are as thick as
the Bible,” Mr. Shadle said. “For this,
the rule book is a half-page long.”
But consider the challenges. Rubber tires turn to molten licorice at
anything above 560 kilometers per
hour, so the Eagle uses custom-built,
single-billet aluminum alloy wheels,
grooved for traction on soft surfaces.
The brakes are special alloy magnets
that generate 4,700 brake horsepower
as the magnetized drum approaches
the moving aluminum wheel, slowing
it gradually without ever locking up.
The Eagle team clipped the F-104’s
wings and ailerons, welded
new plates, stitched the
fuselage together with
thousands of new rivets
and hustled sponsors at
air and auto shows. Mr.
Shadle and Mr. Zanghi did
not have the money to buy
a J79 outright, but S Turbines leased one to them
for almost nothing.
The big imponderable is
the sound barrier. In the
LANDSPEED
sky, the shock wave simply
dissipates. But on land, it
bounces off the ground and can flip
a racer into the air. Since each car is
unique, the problem has to be solved
differently every time.
Mr. Zanghi is 54, a shortish, low-key
man with a buzz cut and spectacles.
He started crewing for race cars after high school. He met Mr. Shadle in
the mid-1990s when he volunteered to
work on a land-speed racer team. Mr.
Shadle was a part owner.
The partners thought an F-104
might do for the land speed record. It
took Mr. Shadle more than a year to
find the one in Maine. The Air Force
sold it to a Los Angeles company to
use as a template for spare parts, and
it was later junked. The engine had
been removed, half the plates were
ripped off and the rest were decorated
with graffiti and bird droppings.
“It was about two months from
being turned into beer cans,” Mr.
Zanghi recalled.
your new book, you suggest that
cooking was what facilitated our evolution from ape to human. Until now scientists have theorized that tool making
and meat eating set the conditions for
the ascent of man. Why do you argue
that cooking was the main factor?
A. All that you mention were drivers of
the evolution of our species. However,
our large brain and the shape of our
bodies are the product of a rich diet
that was only available to us after we
began cooking our foods. It was cooking that provided our bodies with more
energy than we’d previously obtained
as foraging animals eating raw food.
Modern chimps are likely to take the
same kinds of foods as our early ancestors. In the wild, they’ll be lucky to
find a fruit as delicious as a raspberry.
More often they locate a patch of fruits
as dry and strong-tasting as rose hips,
which they’ll masticate for a full hour.
Chimps spend most of their day finding and chewing extremely fibrous
foods. Their diet is very unsatisfying
to humans. But once our ancestors
began eating cooked foods — approximately 1.8 million years ago — their
diet became softer, safer and far more
nutritious.
And that’s what fueled the development of the upright body and large
brain that we associate with modern
humans. Our ancestors were able to
evolve because cooked foods were
richer, healthier and required less eating time.
Q. To cook, you need fire. How did early
humans get it?
A. The austrolopithicines, the predecessors of our prehuman ancestors,
lived in savannahs with dry uplands.
They would often have encountered
natural fires and food improved by
those fires. Moreover, we know from
cut marks on old bones that our distant ancestor Homo habilis ate meat.
They certainly made hammers from
stones, which they may have used to
tenderize it. We know that sparks fly
when you hammer stone. It’s reasonable to imagine that our ancestors ate
food warmed by the fires they ignited
when they prepared their meat.
Q. Since you believe that the raw fare of
prehistory would leave a modern person starving, does that mean we are
adapted to the foods that we currently
eat — McDonald’s, pizza?
A. I think we’re adapted to our diet. It’s
that our lifestyle is not. We’re adapted
in the sense that our bodies are designed to maximize the amount of energy we get from our foods.
So we are very good at selecting the
foods that produce a lot of energy.
However, we take in far more than we
need. That’s not adaptive.
Repubblica NewYork
MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009
VII
PERSONALITIES
AGUSTINA VIVERO
Pink Hair
And Photos
Lead to Fame
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
BUENOS AIRES — “Cumbio is here!”
a young girl shouted, after spotting
Agustina Vivero on the steps of the Abasto shopping mall here one recent Sunday.
Rushing over, the girl gave Ms. Vivero a
hug and then pulled out a camera, leaned
in to Ms. Vivero and snapped a shot with
an outstretched arm.
Within minutes dozens of teenagers
were swarming around, clamoring for a
few seconds with Ms. Vivero, an Internet and television celebrity with pinkstreaked hair and a pierced lower lip.
The past year has been a whirlwind
for Ms. Vivero, known here simply as
Cumbio for her love of cumbia music, a
fusion of Latin pop, salsa and dance that
is popular among Argentina’s lower
classes. She has catapulted herself to
stardom by transforming Internet fame
as Argentina’s most popular “flogger”
into marketing muscle, signing modeling contracts, promoting dance clubs
and writing a book about her life.
And she is all of 17.
“When people see me in the street
sometimes they cry or they want to hug
me or kiss me,” she said. “Or they hate
me. It is all very surprising.”
A filmmaker is shooting a documentary about her life. There is a Cumbio
“When people see me in the
street sometimes they cry
or they want to hug me or
kiss me. Or they hate me.
It is all very surprising.”
perfume and talk of a reality-based television show. Her unlikely popularity is
also redefining stereotypes of youth celebrity in Argentina.
Ms. Vivero, who is openly gay, describes herself and other floggers as
“androgynous” for their unisex clothing.
She is comfortable with not being modelthin, boasting of her love of junk food
and chocolate — a different message in
a country where women have high rates
of eating disorders.
“We are breaking a lot of barriers,”
she said.
Floggers take photos of themselves
and friends and post them on photo blogs.
Fotolog.com claims to have more than
5.5 million users in Argentina, which is
one of the two biggest markets for the
site; Chile is the other. Ms. Vivero’s site is
among the most viewed Internet sites in
Argentina, logging 36 million visits over
the past year, based on figures tallied by
fotolog, she said.
Her ride to fame started early last
year when she invited some friends over
to her family’s house in San Cristóbal, a
working-class neighborhood. They hung
out and took photos of themselves. By the
fourth week the number had swelled to
2,000.
“I’ll have fun with this while it lasts,”
Ms. Vivero said. “When it ends, well
that’s that. I’ll still have all the photos.”
Charles Newbery contributed reporting.
NICOLAS GOLDBERG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Agustina Vivero, center, has
cashed in on her Internet fame.
COURTESY MOMA FILM STILLS ARCHIVE
TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mike Nichols’s understated style of filmmaking is seen in “The Graduate’’ from 1967, starring Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman.
MIKE NICHOLS
Staying in the Background, Projecting a Vision
By CHARLES McGRATH
Except for a puzzling string of duds
in the mid-’70s, almost all of Mike
Nichols’s movies have made money,
and a few, like “The Graduate,’’ have
been recognized as cultural landmarks. But it’s sometimes hard to say
what makes a Nichols movie a Nichols
movie. They seem like vehicles for actors, not the director, whose stamp is
in leaving almost no trace of himself.
“If you want to be a legend, God help
you, it’s so easy,” Mr. Nichols said recently. “You just do one thing. You can
be the master of suspense, say. But if
you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it’s fun to do a lot of different
things.”
If his movies have a common denominator, it’s probably their intelligence and, though Mr. Nichols doesn’t
think of himself as a writer, they have
a writerly attention to detail.
Rajendra Roy, the organizer of a recent retrospective at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, said: “He’s
an example of how popular cinema
can be vision based.’’
Nora Ephron, who wrote the script
for Mr. Nichols’s movie “Heartburn’’
and co-wrote his film “Silkwood,’’ said
recently: “It’s supposed to be a given
that Mike doesn’t have the visual style
of, say, a Scorsese. But that isn’t fair.
Mike doesn’t use the camera in a flamboyant way, but he has a style just the
way a writer who’s crystal clear has a
style. He has an almost invisible fluidity.”
Mr. Nichols is now 77 but hardly
slowing down. His most recent film
was “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and he is
considering movies based on scripts
by David Mamet and Tony Kushner.
Still boyish looking, Mr. Nichols retains the deadpan, quicksilver wit that
for a while made him and Elaine May
the most innovative comedians in the
United States.
He was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky, the son of a White Russian doctor who emigrated to Berlin
after the Russian revolution, and he
arrived in New York in 1939, at the age
of 7, permanently hairless (a reaction
to whooping cough vaccine; he now
wears a wig and paste-on eyebrows)
and with almost no English. He en-
“If you want to be as
invisible as is practical,
then it’s fun to do a lot
of different things.”
rolled at the Dalton School, an elite private school, and set about cultivating
what he calls his “immigrant’s ear.”
“Semiconsciously I was thinking all
the time: ‘How do they do it? Let me
listen,’ ’’ he recalled. His father died
when he was 12, plunging the family
into genteel poverty. Lonely and selfconscious about his looks, he found
solace in the movies and theater.
He attended the University of Chicago, floundered a bit, and then was
heaped with success, first with Ms.
May, whom he met in college, and next
as a theater director. Mr. Nichols is
one of very few in the performing arts
to receive all four major American entertainment awards: he has a Grammy, an Oscar, four Emmys and eight
Tonys. He is a shrewd dealmaker, and
along the way there were countless
girlfriends, multiple wives, paintings,
cars, a stable.
The only thing he doesn’t have
enough of anymore is time. He used
to love to develop a play out of town,
then put it aside for a few months. “Everything gets simpler on the shelf,” he
said. He also recalled, with amazement, how long he was allowed to work
on “The Graduate,” which he directed
when he was in his mid-30s.
“It’s painful and hard to remember
now how long and how carefully we
worked,” he said.
But he has never lost his joy for
connecting with an audience: “The
greatest thrill is that moment when
a thousand people are sitting in the
dark, looking at the same scene, and
they are all apprehending something
that has not been spoken. That’s the
thrill of it, the miracle — that’s what
holds us to movies forever. It’s what
we wish we could do in real life. We
all see something and understand
it together, and nobody has to say a
word.’’
ELA BHATT
“Why should there
Building an Empire
With India’s Poor Women
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
AHMADABAD, India — Thirtyfive years ago in this once thriving
textile town, Ela Bhatt fought for
higher wages for women who ferried
bolts of cloth on their heads. Next, she
created India’s first women’s bank.
Since then, her Self-Employed
Women’s Association, or SEWA,
has offered retirement accounts and
health insurance to women who never had a safety net, lent working capital to entrepreneurs to open beauty
salons in the slums, helped artisans
sell their handiwork to new urban department stores and boldly trained
its members to become gas station attendants — an unusual job for women
on the bottom of India’s social ladder.
Mrs. Bhatt is a Gandhian pragmatist for the New India.
At 76, she is a critic of some of India’s embrace of market reforms, but
nevertheless keen to see the poorest
of Indian workers get a stake in the
country’s swiftly globalizing economy. She has built a formidable empire
of women-run, Gandhian-style cooperatives — 100 at last count — some
providing child care for working
mothers, others selling sesame seeds
to Indian food-processing firms — all
modeled after the Gandhian ideal of
self-sufficiency.
She calls it the quest for economic
freedom in a democratic India.
Her quest offers a glimpse into the
changing desires of Indian women.
Tinsmiths or pickle makers, embroiderers or vendors of onions, SEWA’s
members are mostly employed in the
informal sector. They get no regular
paychecks, sick leave or holidays.
The share of Indians employed in
the informal sector — where they are
not covered by socialist-era labor laws
from the time of the cold war — has
grown to more than 90 percent since
1991, according to a recent report.
Among them, the report found,
nearly three-fourths lived on less
than 20 cents a day and had virtually no safety net. “Why should there
be a difference between worker and
worker,” Mrs. Bhatt wondered aloud,
“whether they are working in a factory, or at home or on the footpath?”
With 500,000 members in western
Gujarat State alone, the SEWA empire
includes two profit-making firms that
stitch and embroider women’s clothing. More than 100,000 women are
enrolled in the organization’s health
and life insurance plans. Its bank
has 350,000 depositors and, like most
microfinance organizations, a repay-
be a difference
between worker
and worker,
whether they
are working in
a factory or at
home?’’
RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES
ment rate as high as 97 percent.
“We don’t have a liquidity problem,” its manager, Jayshree Vyas,
pointed out merrily. “Women save.”
A SEWA loan of roughly $250 allowed Namrata Rajhari to start a
beauty salon 15 years ago from her
one-room shack in a working-class
enclave called Behrampura.
With money from her business,
Mrs. Rajhari installed a toilet at
home, added a loft and bought a
washing machine. “Before, I felt
blank. I didn’t know anything about
the world,” she said the other day.
“Now, with my earnings, my children
are studying.”
“The computer is also from my
parlor money,” she added. A daughter, Srishti, is enrolled in a private
English school. She wants to be an
astronomer.
Born to a privileged Brahmin family, Mrs. Bhatt charted an unusual
path. She earned a law degree and
chose the man she would marry. She
began her career as a lawyer for the
city’s main union for textile workers,
the vast majority of them men, and
broke away in 1981 to create a new
union for women.
The fishmongers and quilt-makers
who were SEWA Bank’s earliest
customers sometimes stashed their
checkbooks in the bank’s steel cabinets, she recalled, lest their husbands
discover they had money of their
own.
At first, the women’s ambitions
were limited, she said. They wanted
toilets, hair shears or sewing machines for work and money to pay for
their children’s school fees. Slowly,
they began to dream big. Mothers
now want their daughters to learn
to ride a scooter and work on a computer.
“They didn’t see the future at that
time,” she said. “Expectations have
gone very high.”
Repubblica NewYork
VIII
MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009
ARTS & STYLES
A New Team Retrofits
The Old Enterprise
The Pop
Of Warhol
(Also Jazz
And Rock)
By FRED KAPLAN
Andy Warhol designed three milestone album covers in the 1960s and
’70s: “The Velvet Underground & Nico,” with the image of the banana that
you could peel, and two Rolling Stones
LPs, including “Sticky Fingers,” with
the provocative zipper that you could
unzip.
But who knew that Warhol, the pioneer of Pop Art, drew more than 50
album covers over the span of his career?
These works are the subject of a
lavishly illustrated, fastidiously documented book, “Andy Warhol: The
Record Covers, 1949-1987,” published
jointly by Prestel and the Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts. The author,
Paul Maréchal, is curator of the art
collection at the Power Corporation
of Canada, which consists mainly of
French decorative art of the 18th and
19th centuries.
But he has long had a penchant for
Warhol, and one day in 1996, he saw
Paul Anka’s 1976 album “The Painter,”
and that stopped him short. The cover
was clearly designed by Warhol. It
had the same look as his celebrity
portraits, which he did for hefty commissions, by taking a Polaroid photo,
enlarging it into a screen print, then
painting it over with scribbly lines and
pastel colors.
Mr. Maréchal called the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to ask if
there was more where that came from.
The archivist Matt Wrbican sent him
the titles of 23 albums whose covers
Warhol was known to have designed.
Over the next 12 years Mr. Maréchal
hunted down all of them, and in the
process found another 28, or 51 in all.
(Since the book was published, collectors in Europe have sent him two more,
including a 1984 album by the Swedish
band Rat Fab.)
In 2006, at an art exhibition in Marseille, France, Mr. Maréchal ran into
Stéphane Aquin, the curator of contemporary art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Mr. Maréchal told
him about his collection of album covers. Mr. Aquin decided to organize a
show not just on the album covers but
on the role of music in all of Warhol’s
work. (The show, “Warhol Live,” is
on display at the de Young Museum
in San Francisco and will open at the
Warhol Museum in June.)
When Warhol came to New York in
1949, fresh out of art school, the longplaying record had just hit the marketplace. Warhol called the big labels, offering to illustrate their covers. He won
an assignmentfrom Columbia Records,
for an LP called “A Program of Mexi-
EMI GROUP LIMITED/THE MONTREAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
Andy Warhol’s artwork for a 1957 record by Johnny Griffin and for a
1956 album by Kenny Burrell. A new book showcases his album art.
can Music.” His drawings, of ancient
drummers and dancers, were crude,
but they anticipated signature aspects
of his later works. He copied the figures
from 16th-century Aztec sketches that
he found in a Museum of Modern Art
catalog, a forerunner of his tendency to
make art from existing images.
Warhol’s cover for the jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell’s self-titled debut
album on the Blue Note label, in 1956,
was a drawing based on a photograph,
as were many of Warhol’s later portraits.
“Already you see the sense of movement, the low-angle perspective that’s
very much associated with film or
photographs,” Mr. Maréchal said. It’s
a precedent, he added, for Warhol’s
move a decade later into photographing pop stars and making movies.
The following year, on another Blue
Note album cover, the saxophonist
Johnny Griffin’s “Congregation,”
Warhol — again working from a photo
— painted fragments of colored flowers on Griffin’s shirt, which not only
imbued the drawing with a splashy
rhythm but also foreshadowed the giant flowers that Warhol would paint
over and over.
Warhol used the album cover as
a testing ground and template for
the styles he’d develop more fully
in the Pop age to come. And after he
crossed over from commercial illustrator to museum artist, he continued
the practice. “We’re accustomed to
distinguishing between high art and
mass commercial art,” Mr. Aquin
said. “Warhol never made that distinction.”
By DAVE ITZKOFF
failure we’ve ever had, because we
will have actually violated someLOS ANGELES — Engage J.J.
thing that means a lot to us.”
Abrams in conversation for even a
Their “Trek” movie puts them sifew minutes and he will gladly conmultaneously on a new trajectory
fess the role that “Star Trek” played
and right in the heart of the series’s
in his cultural coming of age. “I was
mythology. It tells the story of a
not a fan,” he said recently.
reckless 23rd-century youth named
Though Mr. Abrams would evenJames T. Kirk (played by Chris Pine)
tually become a creator of the telewho enrolls in the Starfleet Acadevision shows “Lost,” “Alias” and
my, driven in part by the death of his
“Fringe” — series that owe their
father, a starship officer who sacriexistence to boyhoods fueled by
ficed his life for his crew. He is drawn
syndicated television and secondinto a band of talented cadets, clashrun movies — when he grew up in
ing with the half-Earthling, halfthe 1970s and ’80s he had no interest
alien Spock (Zachary Quinto of the
in the voyages of the Starship Entertelevision series “Heroes”).
prise and its crew.
For the “Trek” faithful there are
Not that Mr. Abrams, now 42, had
plenty of nods to past television epianything against science fiction; he
sodes and movies. Perhaps more aujust preferred “The Twilight Zone”
daciously, this “Star Trek” also has a
and its supernatural morality plays.
time-travel story line that essentialThis would not be an especially rely gives those on its creative team
markable revelation except that Mr.
license to amend internal “Trek”
Abrams is to be the director of “Star
Trek,” the coming feature
film (opening worldwide in
May) that is Paramount’s
$150 million attempt to rejuvenate the decades-old
space adventure franchise,
the first movie to provide
an official origin story for
the Enterprise team.
Mr. Abrams’s admission, made offhandedly in
the lunchtime company of
his “Star Trek” collaborators, didn’t raise a single
eyebrow around the table.
INDUSTRIAL LIGHT AND MAGIC
From Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who created
The new “Star Trek” movie introduces
“Fringe” with Mr. Abrams
a new cast. Chris Pine, left, as James T.
and wrote the “TransKirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock.
formers” films) to Damon
Lindelof (a creator and
producer of “Lost”) and
history as they need to.
Bryan Burk (Mr. Abrams’s producWhat ultimately inspired him
ing partner), they’ve all heard his
about “Star Trek,” Mr. Abrams said,
pronouncements on “Trek” before.
was that in contrast to a scienceBut the remark is emblematic of
fiction saga like “Star Wars” “Trek”
why this particular team, compriswas not set a long time ago, in a galing broad sci-fi fans and a couple of
axy far, far away; it was a hopeful
“Trek” aficionados, has been handvision of what this planet’s future
ed control of a fantasy franchise that
could be.
is one of the most recognizable in en“We’ve become so familiar with
tertainment yet was in serious disrethe idea of space travel because of
pair, a victim of diminished expectaso many movies and TV shows that
tions and waning enthusiasm.
it’s lost its adventure and its possibilMr. Abrams and his partners are
ity, its sense of wonder,” Mr. Abrams
guys with mainstream pop-culture
said. “Forty-three years ago it was
aspirations; their forte is taking on
not a boring idea.”
genres with finite but dedicated fan
Mr. Abrams said that throughout
bases — science fiction, fantasy and
the production process Mr. Orci and
horror — and making them accesMr. Lindelof, both acolytes of “Trek”
sible to wider audiences. And what
history, were there to keep an eye on
they had in mind for their “Star
him. The filmmakers also received
Trek” movie is a film that is consisthe blessing of Leonard Nimoy, who
tent with 43 years of series history
created the role of Spock and agreed
but not beholden to it.
to reprise the character in the film.
“There’s just too much stuff out
“Any fan who would think that it’s
there to be loyal to everything,” Mr.
not ‘Trek’ has to say that to Leonard
Lindelof said.
Nimoy’s face,” Mr. Orci said. “Don’t
If “Star Trek” fails, Mr. Kurtzman
talk to me, talk to Spock.”
said, “it’ll be the biggest personal
For Today’s Leading Men, the Rolls of Fat Are as Weighty as the Roles
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES — A scene from
the new journalistic thriller “State of
Play” says it all.
Jeff Daniels, as the politician
George Fergus, squares off with
Russell Crowe, as the pen-wielding journalist Cal McAffrey. Two
men. One notebook. Four chins.
Hollywood’s pool of leading
men is getting larger — and not
necessarily in a good way.
Based on a close look at trailers, still photos and some films
already released, at least a dozen
male stars in some of the year’s
most prominent movies have gotten
noticeably fatter.
Russell Crowe is among the
movie stars gaining weight.
GLEN WILSON
In “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,”
a subway heist movie opening from
Columbia Pictures and MGM around
the world this summer, Denzel Washington, 54, goes cheek-to-jowl with the
bulky John Travolta, 55 — and they are
beginning to look like a matched set.
Mr. Washington is no longer the lean,
mean boxing machine he portrayed in
“The Hurricane” 10 years ago.
Hugh Grant, 48, who played the
skinny cad to a puffy Renée Zellweger
in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” just eight
years ago, may find the tables turned
in “Did You Hear About the Morgans?,”
a comedy to be released by Columbia
in December. His co-star, Sarah Jessica Parker, is the sleek one this time
around, while Mr. Grant’s famous dimples pop out where they used to pop in.
Even Leonardo DiCaprio, the young
heartthrob from “Titanic,” is better
padded these days, at 34. Photos from
the set of “Shutter Island,” a thriller on
tap from Paramount Pictures and the
director Martin Scorsese in October,
show a little bit more to love.
Hollywood’s women may have
weight issues of their own. But it is
somehow less noticeable, possibly because actresses who expand do not often get roles to showcase that growth.
But the men are still playing leads
into their 40s and 50s — giving glimpses of what age, and perhaps a little
inattention, can do to a most admired
physique.
“John Wayne always looked a bit
portly,” noted Lawrence Turman, a
veteran film producer who is chairman
of the Peter Stark producing program
at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. “Mike
Nichols once told me the one essential
for an actor to have is a large head, so
as to be seen,” Mr. Turman said.
Photos of midcentury stars — Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Clark
Gable and others — show them to have
remained rather gaunt at an age when
many of the current crop are anything
but.
The change in smoking habits may
have something to do with it. Possibly,
too, the audience has grown more tolerant of weightier men on screen as
the society at large has become heavier. Still, size can become an issue when
making a film.
“The bigger people are, the more concern there is about high blood pressure
or the possibility of strokes or heart attacks” during a shoot, said Brian Kingman, a managing director of Arthur J.
Gallagher & Company, which sells entertainment insurance. For all but the
oldest stars, however, an extra 5 to 15
kilograms is usually not a major underwriting concern, Mr. Kingman said.
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