Thursday, December 02, 2004
December 2, 2004OP-ED COLUMNIST
The 9/11 BubbleBy THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
he Washington Post had a story on Monday that contained possibly the greatest hint to a sitting cabinet secretary to start looking for another job that has ever been printed. The article reported, "One senior administration official said Treasury Secretary John W. Snow can stay as long as he wants, provided it is not very long."
Provided it is not very long!
Yo, Mr. Secretary, I'd say someone in the White House wants you gone! If I were you, I wouldn't renew any leases for more than a month at a time - or buy any really green bananas for the office. And those books you checked out of the Treasury library? Could you, like, maybe return them in the next few days? You know, just in case. I mean, it all depends on what the meaning of "long" is.
I feel sorry for Mr. Snow. Reading your career obituary over breakfast can't be much fun. But I feel even more sorry for the country. I can't recall a time when the Treasury Department has been so emasculated by a White House. I went by the Treasury the other day and noticed a big sign outside saying it was being remodeled. Why bother? Who would know if it was gutted? The country would get more fiscal benefit by renting out the Treasury rooms for weddings, graduations and bar mitzvahs than it's gotten in the past four years from any advice coming from there.
Here's a trivia question for you: Who is the deputy Treasury secretary? It's a pretty important job, but I have no clue who it is.
This is a time when we really need a strong Treasury secretary capable of speaking up for fiscal sanity. We are about to embark on a 10-year period in which recent tax cuts and runaway spending are expected to add $5 trillion to the cumulative deficit. In my lifetime we will have gone from the Greatest Generation to the Profligate Generation to the Bankrupt Generation. Yes, I'm talking to you 20-year-olds. President Bush has called for sacrifice - but not by his generation. He's passing the bill onto your generation.
"The 9/11 crisis has been used as a license to spend and cut taxes rather than to set priorities and focus our resources on what is critically important to our nation's security," said Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.
And Congress has played right along, as have people like Josh Bolton, Stephen Friedman and Gregory Mankiw - Mr. Bush's key White House economic advisers. "You know that all these guys know better," said Clyde Prestowicz, head of the Economic Strategy Institute.
There have been lots of strong Republican and Democratic Treasury secretaries in recent years: George Shultz, Nick Brady, Jim Baker, Bob Rubin, Larry Summers. But right when we really need one with common sense and the will to set priorities, all indications are that this White House is looking for someone even weaker than Mr. Snow.
David Rothkopf, a former Clinton Commerce Department official who just wrote a history of the National Security Council, said that President Bush is obviously "seeking consensus and homogeneity. But the system works better when the president gets choices. If everyone is on the same page and it turns out to be the wrong page - you're really up a creek."
The very reason Mr. Bush had the luxury of launching a war of necessity in Afghanistan and a war of choice in Iraq, without a second thought, was because of the surpluses built up by the previous administration and Congress. Since then, the Bush team has been slashing taxes in the middle of two wars, weakening the dollar and amassing a huge debt burden - on the implicit assumption that nothing will go wrong in the future.
But what if there is another 9/11 or war of necessity? We're cooked. The tax revenue won't be there, so the only option will be more borrowing and a weaker dollar. But what happens if the Chinese and other foreigners, who now hold over 40 percent of our Treasury securities, decide they don't want to hold these depreciating dollars anymore, let alone buy more?
It is now clear to me that we have followed the dot-com bubble with the 9/11 bubble. Both bubbles made us stupid. The first was financed by reckless investors, and the second by a reckless administration and Congress. In the first case, the public was misled by Wall Street stock analysts, who told them the old rules didn't apply - that elephants can fly. In the second case, the public was misled by White House economists, peddling similar nonsense. The first ended in tears, and so will the second. Because, as the dot-com bubble proved, elephants can fly - "provided it is not very long."
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December 2, 2004
Inspectors Said to Seek Access to Sites in IranBy WILLIAM J. BROAD, DAVID E. SANGER and ELAINE SCIOLINO
IENNA, Dec. 1 -International inspectors are requesting access to two secret Iranian military sites where intelligence suggests that Tehran's Ministry of Defense may be working on atomic weapons, despite the agreement that Iran reached this week to suspend its production of enriched uranium, according to diplomats here.
The inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency base their suspicions on a mix of satellite photographs indicating the testing of high explosives and procurement records showing the purchase of equipment that can be used for enriching uranium, the diplomats said. Both are critical steps in the development of nuclear arms.
The suspicions were aired here as an Iranian opposition group was preparing to release what it called new information that Iran was secretly developing a nuclear-capable missile whose range is significantly greater than what the Iranians have publicly acknowledged to date.
Iran has insisted that its uranium enrichment program is entirely for civilian nuclear energy production, but the areas the I.A.E.A. wants to visit are all in secure military bases. Traditionally, such facilities are considered off limits to the agency, whose primary mandate is to monitor civilian nuclear programs, unless there is strong evidence of covert nuclear activity at the military sites. Weapons experts cautioned that the equipment purchases and other activities could have nonnuclear purposes.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the I.A.E.A., said in an interview here on Wednesday that he had repeatedly asked Iran for access to the two sites, but that it had not yet been granted.
"We are following every credible piece of information," he said. Understanding the exact significance of what is happening at the two military sites is "important," he added. "We still have work to do, a lot of work." He estimated that even with full Iranian cooperation, it would take at least two years to resolve all of the outstanding questions surrounding the country's nuclear program.
"We're not rushing," he said. "It takes time."
The deal the Europeans signed with Iran, which the United Nations atomic agency blessed on Monday, was designed to defuse the most urgent problem, Tehran's enrichment of uranium at civilian sites, which could have given it quick access to the raw material for making bomb fuel.
With that problem at least temporarily under control, inspectors and the United States are now turning to the question of whether Iran has a parallel military nuclear program that it has not declared. Last year, the country admitted to inspectors that it had hidden critical aspects of its civilian program for 18 years.
The inspectors now want to examine the military sites to see whether secret nuclear work is under way. Much of the equipment needed for centrifuges - which spin at supersonic speeds to purify uranium for reactors and bombs - is "dual use," meaning it could be used for peaceful purposes as well.
Some officials close to the atomic agency said a last-minute disagreement over centrifuges in Iran's civilian program, which emerged before this week's accord was signed, may have been designed as a diversion by Tehran to take attention away from the agency's request for access to its military bases.
An Iranian official who was one of the negotiating delegation dismissed the idea of opening up the military sites, saying Tehran had no responsibility to do so. "There is nothing required for us to do," he said.
"They should have evidence that there are nuclear activities, not just 'We heard from someone that there is dual-use equipment that we want to see.' "
Diplomats and weapons experts here said in interviews that the intelligence on Iran's military activities came from several sources, including nations that are members of the United Nations nuclear agency.
One of the suspect military sites under investigation by the I.A.E.A. is a huge, decades-old facility southeast of Tehran, the Parchin military complex. Inspectors believe Iran's military may be testing conventional high explosives at the site, of a type used to detonate nuclear weapons.
If their suspicions are correct, inspectors say it could explain what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was referring to nearly two weeks ago when he disclosed new American intelligence suggesting that Iran is working to shrink a nuclear device to a size that could fit atop the country's missiles.
While the United States has declined to discuss the intelligence Mr. Powell saw, the American representative to the I.A.E.A.'s board of governors, Jackie W. Sanders, at a meeting of the board on Monday, raised questions about Iranian efforts to obtain equipment "in the nuclear military area" and demanded a specific list of Iran's purchases "so we can make our own decisions about Iran's intentions."
But because there is no hard evidence now of actual nuclear material at Parchin, the international agency is left in the awkward position of asking Iran to admit its monitors to the site voluntarily, to prove what one European diplomat called "the absence of nuclear material."
The second site is a relatively new facility, called Lavisan II, built in northeastern Tehran, near the site of an older facility that was dismantled within the past year. The existence of the new facility was highlighted last month by an Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance, the political front for the People's Mujahedeen. Even though the State Department has called the group a terror organization, American officials have been intrigued by the intelligence it has gathered on Iran's program.
Inspectors say they now possess procurement records showing that the military ordered a long shopping list of high-tech equipment for the Lavisan facilities - including specialized power supplies that smooth electrical currents to meet the exacting requirements of centrifuges.
A European diplomat who is dealing with the Iranian government on nuclear issues, said of the array of ordered equipment, "We believe it's related to enrichment and uranium conversion." He added that "it's something they need to explain for us."
The diplomat called the equipment orders "a little bit of everything" short of actual centrifuges. Each of the technologies on the order list, the expert said, had plausible uses both for nuclear and nonnuclear programs, making them "dual use" items.
"But when you combine them all together," he said, "it looks like a shopping list for an enrichment program."
He said it would make no sense for the military to buy the equipment on behalf of a civilian program. The more likely explanation, he said, was that the military itself "did the experiments," which would undercut Iran's argument that it has solely civilian nuclear projects under way.
The Parchin military complex has hundreds of bunkers, buildings and test sites scattered over a vast area about 20 miles southeast of Tehran. For decades, it has developed and made such things as ammunition, rockets and high explosives.
In September, the Institute for Science and International Security, an arms control group in Washington, issued a report claiming that Parchin contained "an isolated, separately secured site which may be involved in developing nuclear weapons."
The European expert on the Iranian program said that Parchin had helped develop Iran's long-range missiles and that evidence from satellite photographs and other sources suggested that some of its explosives work now centered on perfecting nuclear arms.
"If you go for nuclear weapons development, you need those places at a fairly early stage of your program," he said. International inspectors, he said, need to inspect the site rule out such work and "assure the absence of nuclear material."
Iran has so far refused to allow access to the military sites, even while denying that it has any hidden military program to develop nuclear arms.
European experts and diplomats said they remained hopeful that the Iranians might eventually permit access to the disputed military sites, citing past cooperation.
In October, 2003, they noted, Iran let the I.A.E.A. visit three locations at an industrial complex in Kolahdouz in western Tehran that the military controls. Despite rumors to the contrary, the inspectors found no work at those locations that could be directly linked to the enrichment of uranium. Moreover, the results of environmental sampling showed no signs of any use of nuclear materials.
One European official said the Iranians might be stalling for time to clean up the sites and remove all evidence of nuclear research.
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December 2, 2004OP-ED COLUMNIST
It's Still a Man's World on the Idiot BoxBy MAUREEN DOWD
t's the End of an Era. A momentous change.
Tonight on NBC, one tall and handsome white male anchor with bespoke clothes will replace another tall and handsome white male anchor with bespoke clothes.
Even Tom Brokaw is a little surprised that he has been succeeded by someone who looks like the love child he and Peter Jennings never had.
"I honestly thought, eight or nine years ago, that when we left," Mr. Brokaw said, referring to himself, Peter and Dan Rather, "that it would be the end of white male anchor time."
Nah. Those guys are hard to kill off. Indeed, white men are ascendant in Red State America.
As my mom said, discussing her belief that Martha Stewart had been railroaded by jealous men, "If men could figure out how to have babies, they'd get rid of us altogether."
The networks don't even give lip service to looking for women and blacks for anchor jobs - they just put pretty-boy clones in the pipeline.
"I think we're still stuck in a society that looks at white males as authority figures," Mr. Brokaw conceded.
Bill Carter, a TV reporter at The Times, agreed: "Katie Couric may be a much bigger star and even more experienced than Brian Williams. But when the next 9/11 happens, it'll be Brian, not Katie, in the central role. The attitude still seems to be, 'We want a daddy in that chair.' "
And then there's biology. Asked why there couldn't be an anchorette as we enter 2005, Mr. Brokaw, the father of three accomplished daughters and the husband of one strong, cool wife, Meredith, replied: "You know, honestly, what happens is career interruptus by childbirth and a couple of other things. It's unfair to women that they have to juggle all this stuff, but it plays some role, I think."
At CBS, the Dan Rather look-alike John Roberts is locked in a battle with the Dan Rather sound-alike Scott Pelley to succeed Dan, and executives are considering four guys - three of them white - to replace Craig Kilborn on "The Late Late Show."
At NBC, Conan O'Brien is locked in to succeed Jay Leno in 2009, and executives have groomed Brian Williams for a decade to replace Tom Brokaw. I asked Brian in December 1995 if he was a Tom pod person. "I can deny the existence of a factory in the American Midwest that puts out people like me," he said, deadpan, looking at me with those green anchor eyes.
Roger Ailes says he has joked about Mr. Williams having too many shirts, but says he'll "do better than people think. ... He has that Tom Brokaw look of somebody every mother wants her daughter to marry."
Even if I felt like raising a ruckus about Boys Nation, who would care? Feminism lasted for a nanosecond, but the backlash has lasted 30 years.
We are in the era of vamping, self-doubting "Desperate Housewives," not strong, cutting "Murphy Brown." It's the season of prim "stay in the background" Laura Bush, not assertive "two for the price of one" Hillary. Where would you even lodge a feminist protest these days?
"You ought to call the Lifetime network or, as we say, the 'Men Are No Damn Good Network,' and protest it," Mr. Ailes slyly suggested.
I know that women have surpassed men, in many respects, by embracing their femininity and frivolity. Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer, who mix news with dish, cooking and fashion in the morning, are the real breadwinners of their news divisions, generating more ratings and revenue than the cookie-cutter men of the night.
Yet, as Mr. Ailes says, "network anchoring is still Mount Olympus." I checked around for feminist outrage, but couldn't find any. Women told me the nightly news was an anachronism, so why shouldn't the anchor be? "Caring about having a woman in the showcase or figurehead role seems so 80's," one said.
Another friend said she devotes the "one little ounce of feminist annoyance" she has left for the excess of "young fluffs" on cable news - as opposed to substantial newswomen, like CNN's bespectacled Pentagon reporter, Barbara Starr, "who looks like she could hit those generals with a handbag if they didn't give her answers."
But my pal admits that she watched Mr. Brokaw partly because he was "eye candy," and declares women at fault in this matter: "Women like to read books about men and go to movies about men. But men don't like to read books about women or go to movies about women. The only way this is going to change is if women refuse to watch men. And the problem is, women like watching men."
E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com
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10x10Described as "an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time," 10×10 is the brainchild of graphic designer Jonathan Harris. The site automatically collects and graphically displays the most important words and photographs from three of the Internet's top news sources (Reuters World News, BBC World Edition, and New York Times International News). The result is a grid of 100 images, each connected to a single word. Click on an individual photo, and the image enlarges in a pop-up window that includes a series of related headlines linking to the day's news reports. Images and articles are updated hourly, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Because it runs without human intervention, it reveals the most important issues of the moment -- free of bias, politics, and hidden agendas. Take ten for 10×10 and see what's happening now. (in News & Media)
10x10Described as "an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time," 10×10 is the brainchild of graphic designer Jonathan Harris. The site automatically collects and graphically displays the most important words and photographs from three of the Internet's top news sources (Reuters World News, BBC World Edition, and New York Times International News). The result is a grid of 100 images, each connected to a single word. Click on an individual photo, and the image enlarges in a pop-up window that includes a series of related headlines linking to the day's news reports. Images and articles are updated hourly, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Because it runs without human intervention, it reveals the most important issues of the moment -- free of bias, politics, and hidden agendas. Take ten for 10×10 and see what's happening now. (in News & Media)
eggheadThe Man Behind the MemeAn interview with Richard Dawkins.By Jim HoltPosted Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2004, at 3:38 AM PT
Richard Dawkins, champion of Darwinism and scourge of religion, is a courtly and attractive man, although not much given to humor. If one finds oneself smiling frequently in the presence of this Oxford don—who was recently voted Britain's No. 1 public intellectual—it is out of sheer enjoyment at his gift for rendering the most subtle evolutionary ideas absolutely lucid.
The other week, Dawkins was in New York to promote his book The Ancestor's Tale. I had the chance to chat with him for an hour or so in the lobby of his hotel, as a particularly noisome soft-jazz Muzak system droned in the background.
Dawkins' new book doesn't push a thesis about evolution, the way his earlier ones did. Instead, it lays out a set of facts about the history of life on Earth in a particularly clever order. The guiding conceit (inspired by the Canterbury Tales) is that of a pilgrimage heading backward in time to the very origin of life. Along the way, we humans meet up with other modern species at various points where we share a common ancestor. Surprisingly, it turns out that there are only 39 such rendezvous points. The first lies 6 million years in the past, when we encounter chimpanzees and bonobos (who themselves had already joined up at a common ancestry point a mere 2 million years ago). The last is where we meet up with bacteria at the pilgrimage's ultimate goal, the beginning of life. At each rendezvous point, one of the pilgrim species with whom we join forces tells a tale that illustrates some principle of evolution.
These tales are terrifically entertaining. At rendezvous 16, for example, some 310 million years in the past, we humans and the other mammal species meet up with thousands of bird and reptile species at a common ancestor. One of them gets to hold forth, and so we hear—execrable pun!—the Peacock's Tale. It turns out to be about sexual selection, and largely about humans.
"Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection," Dawkins said. Hairlessness advertises your health to potential mates, he explained. The less hair you have on your body, the less real estate you make available to lice and other ectoparasites. Of course, it was worth keeping the hair on our heads to protect against sunstroke, which can be very dangerous in Africa, where we evolved. As for the hair in our armpits and pubic regions, that was probably retained because it helps disseminate "pheromones," airborne scent signals that still play a bigger role in our sex lives than most of us realize. (It occurred to me that becoming hairless also meant we didn't have to spend all our leisure grooming one another to remove lice, like other primates, thereby freeing up time to create capitalism. But I kept this thought to myself.)
"Sexual selection works as a kind of amplifier, causing small and perhaps arbitrary trends to get exaggerated in a runaway fashion," Dawkins continued. "It's still a Darwinian process, but it's one that allows for contingent extravagance."
The word "contingent" made me prick up my ears. Did Dawkins think that the development of a large-brained species like us was an accident, one that probably wouldn't be repeated if the tape of evolution were rewound and replayed? Shades of Stephen Gould!
"That's one of the questions that I deal with in the last chapter of my book," he said. "The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it—language, art, science—seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't."
Dawkins didn't turn out to be very far apart from the late Stephen Jay Gould on this issue. So, why did they always seem to be at loggerheads? Gould, like Dawkins, was brilliant at explaining Darwinian thought to the masses. Also like Dawkins, he was a sworn enemy of creationism and other forms of anti-Darwinian nonsense. As far as I could see, the biggest difference between the two was that Gould considered himself a Darwinian "pluralist." He thought that natural selection operated at many levels in the biological hierarchy: not just at the level of genes and organisms, but also at the "higher" level of species and entire ecosystems. For example, competition at the species level—called "species selection" by those who believe in it—would favor those species that spawned lots of daughter species. Dawkins, by contrast, seemed convinced that natural selection among genes was the only game in town; hence the title of his first big book, The Selfish Gene. For this, Gould denounced him as a "Darwinian fundamentalist." I asked Dawkins if he still believed that competition among genes accounted for everything that's interesting about evolution.
"The devil is in the phrase, 'everything that's interesting,' " he said. "Steve was very interested in diversity, but other biologists are more interested in adaptation—in looking at an organism and asking, what's the good of this or that feature? It's very seldom, I suspect, that an animal is the way it is because of species selection. If you want to explain why Africa has one set of antelopes rather than another, the answer might involve species selection. But if you want to know why a species of antelope has a horn that's curvy rather than straight, the explanation is going to be found at a more basic level."
But Gould would surely have conceded that, I said. Where was the real disagreement?
"I suppose it's really a matter of emphasis," he replied. "For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator—the gene."
Another kind of selfish replicator to which Dawkins has called attention are "memes"—things like ideas, fashions, tunes, and so forth that multiply by leaping from mind to mind. When Dawkins introduced the meme concept a couple of decades ago, hopes were raised that the evolution of culture, or even of the human mind, might be explained as a sort of Darwinian competition among memes. But little has come of this project, even if the word "meme" does continue to get tossed around quite a bit by pretentious intellectuals. I asked Dawkins if he had cooled on the meme idea over the years.
"My enthusiasm for it was never, ever as a contribution to the study of human culture," he said. "It was always intended to be a way of dramatizing the idea that a Darwinian replicator doesn't have to be a gene. It can be a computer virus. Or a meme. The point is that a good replicator is just a replicator that spreads, regardless of its material form."
At this point, Dawkins' wife, the actress Lalla Ward, shimmered into the lobby to collect him. One could not help noticing that, in her radiant blondness, she is even more attractive than her husband. Book tours are hard work, so I regretfully relinquished the celebrated author. Still, I could not forbear asking one more question as he walked away.
"You've called religion a 'dangerous collective delusion' and a 'malignant infection,' " I said. "Don't you think you're underplaying it a bit?"
Dawkins turned, smiled a small fox smile, and said, "Yes!"Jim Holt writes the "Egghead" column for Slate. He also writes for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2110249/
if
Richard Dawkins, champion of Darwinism and scourge of religion, is a courtly and attractive man, although not much given to humor. If one finds oneself smiling frequently in the presence of this Oxford don—who was recently voted Britain's No. 1 public intellectual—it is out of sheer enjoyment at his gift for rendering the most subtle evolutionary ideas absolutely lucid.
The other week, Dawkins was in New York to promote his book The Ancestor's Tale. I had the chance to chat with him for an hour or so in the lobby of his hotel, as a particularly noisome soft-jazz Muzak system droned in the background.
Dawkins' new book doesn't push a thesis about evolution, the way his earlier ones did. Instead, it lays out a set of facts about the history of life on Earth in a particularly clever order. The guiding conceit (inspired by the Canterbury Tales) is that of a pilgrimage heading backward in time to the very origin of life. Along the way, we humans meet up with other modern species at various points where we share a common ancestor. Surprisingly, it turns out that there are only 39 such rendezvous points. The first lies 6 million years in the past, when we encounter chimpanzees and bonobos (who themselves had already joined up at a common ancestry point a mere 2 million years ago). The last is where we meet up with bacteria at the pilgrimage's ultimate goal, the beginning of life. At each rendezvous point, one of the pilgrim species with whom we join forces tells a tale that illustrates some principle of evolution.
These tales are terrifically entertaining. At rendezvous 16, for example, some 310 million years in the past, we humans and the other mammal species meet up with thousands of bird and reptile species at a common ancestor. One of them gets to hold forth, and so we hear—execrable pun!—the Peacock's Tale. It turns out to be about sexual selection, and largely about humans.
"Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection," Dawkins said. Hairlessness advertises your health to potential mates, he explained. The less hair you have on your body, the less real estate you make available to lice and other ectoparasites. Of course, it was worth keeping the hair on our heads to protect against sunstroke, which can be very dangerous in Africa, where we evolved. As for the hair in our armpits and pubic regions, that was probably retained because it helps disseminate "pheromones," airborne scent signals that still play a bigger role in our sex lives than most of us realize. (It occurred to me that becoming hairless also meant we didn't have to spend all our leisure grooming one another to remove lice, like other primates, thereby freeing up time to create capitalism. But I kept this thought to myself.)
"Sexual selection works as a kind of amplifier, causing small and perhaps arbitrary trends to get exaggerated in a runaway fashion," Dawkins continued. "It's still a Darwinian process, but it's one that allows for contingent extravagance."
The word "contingent" made me prick up my ears. Did Dawkins think that the development of a large-brained species like us was an accident, one that probably wouldn't be repeated if the tape of evolution were rewound and replayed? Shades of Stephen Gould!
"That's one of the questions that I deal with in the last chapter of my book," he said. "The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it—language, art, science—seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't."
Dawkins didn't turn out to be very far apart from the late Stephen Jay Gould on this issue. So, why did they always seem to be at loggerheads? Gould, like Dawkins, was brilliant at explaining Darwinian thought to the masses. Also like Dawkins, he was a sworn enemy of creationism and other forms of anti-Darwinian nonsense. As far as I could see, the biggest difference between the two was that Gould considered himself a Darwinian "pluralist." He thought that natural selection operated at many levels in the biological hierarchy: not just at the level of genes and organisms, but also at the "higher" level of species and entire ecosystems. For example, competition at the species level—called "species selection" by those who believe in it—would favor those species that spawned lots of daughter species. Dawkins, by contrast, seemed convinced that natural selection among genes was the only game in town; hence the title of his first big book, The Selfish Gene. For this, Gould denounced him as a "Darwinian fundamentalist." I asked Dawkins if he still believed that competition among genes accounted for everything that's interesting about evolution.
"The devil is in the phrase, 'everything that's interesting,' " he said. "Steve was very interested in diversity, but other biologists are more interested in adaptation—in looking at an organism and asking, what's the good of this or that feature? It's very seldom, I suspect, that an animal is the way it is because of species selection. If you want to explain why Africa has one set of antelopes rather than another, the answer might involve species selection. But if you want to know why a species of antelope has a horn that's curvy rather than straight, the explanation is going to be found at a more basic level."
But Gould would surely have conceded that, I said. Where was the real disagreement?
"I suppose it's really a matter of emphasis," he replied. "For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator—the gene."
Another kind of selfish replicator to which Dawkins has called attention are "memes"—things like ideas, fashions, tunes, and so forth that multiply by leaping from mind to mind. When Dawkins introduced the meme concept a couple of decades ago, hopes were raised that the evolution of culture, or even of the human mind, might be explained as a sort of Darwinian competition among memes. But little has come of this project, even if the word "meme" does continue to get tossed around quite a bit by pretentious intellectuals. I asked Dawkins if he had cooled on the meme idea over the years.
"My enthusiasm for it was never, ever as a contribution to the study of human culture," he said. "It was always intended to be a way of dramatizing the idea that a Darwinian replicator doesn't have to be a gene. It can be a computer virus. Or a meme. The point is that a good replicator is just a replicator that spreads, regardless of its material form."
At this point, Dawkins' wife, the actress Lalla Ward, shimmered into the lobby to collect him. One could not help noticing that, in her radiant blondness, she is even more attractive than her husband. Book tours are hard work, so I regretfully relinquished the celebrated author. Still, I could not forbear asking one more question as he walked away.
"You've called religion a 'dangerous collective delusion' and a 'malignant infection,' " I said. "Don't you think you're underplaying it a bit?"
Dawkins turned, smiled a small fox smile, and said, "Yes!"Jim Holt writes the "Egghead" column for Slate. He also writes for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2110249/
if
the middlebrowTom BrokawIt's not his journalism you love.By Bryan CurtisPosted Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2004, at 4:02 PM PT
What makes a great network anchorman? That he's covered every presidential election since [fill in the blank]? That he's seen history with his own eyes, kibitzed with world leaders, and comforted the nation in times of mourning? Such are the cosmic tributes being heaped upon Tom Brokaw, who exits NBC Nightly News Wednesday night after 22 years. Why do they feel so inappropriate to explain Brokaw's strange appeal?
Brokaw's official NBC biography credits him with dozens of network "firsts": "In 1995, Brokaw was the first network evening news anchor to report from the site of the Oklahoma City bombing, and in 1996, from the scene of the TWA Flight 800 tragedy." It's a curious honor, being the first to stand in front of the smoking ruins of the Murrah Federal Building or along the New York seashore after a plane crash—and it's an accolade more properly awarded to Brokaw's NBC travel agent. The network goes on to praise Brokaw for many more "firsts": everything from the "first exclusive U.S. one-on-one" interview with Mikhail Gorbachev to the first interviews with Charlie Trie and Johnny Chung, the campaign-finance scamps.
It's telling that the network that has employed Brokaw for three decades should grope so awkwardly to explain his legacy and that it would fail to mention a single word Brokaw uttered during these many "firsts." It points out a problem in eulogizing departing anchormen, a process we must get used to as Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings shuffle off to their prime-time specials. The problem is, no one has any idea of what makes an anchorman great, journalistically speaking, outside of whether they find him personally appealing.
I prefer Brokaw to Rather and Jennings, but if you asked me who had been a sharper journalist since assuming the evening-news throne, I wouldn't have a clue. The only honest case I can make for Brokaw is based on style. Brokaw's on-air manner is something you might call elegant roboticism. He's like a mechanical man come to deliver the news. The Nightly News begins with a Brokaw voice-over that billboards the coming stories with pithy headlines; on Monday, the headlines were "Terror Tape," "Deadly Crash," and "Condition Critical." Then Brokaw appears, his sunken eyes swiveling dramatically up from the floor like the Terminator's. He never sits behind a desk and rarely moves. Most news anchors practice the shopworn technique of hammering certain words to add fortissimo to their copy, but Brokaw has made this a science, pounding every third or fourth word with uncanny precision. Moreover, Brokaw performs each night without seeming too eager or intense; his composure is such that when he surged past Dan Rather in the ratings in 1987, Rather's producers forced their anchor to dial down his intensity to emulate Brokaw's cool.
Brokaw says he draws his directness from his red-blooded American childhood. (Between him and Little Russ, NBC must pass red-blooded childhoods out at the door.) A native South Dakotan, Brokaw had a father named "Red" who built dams. The defining event in young Brokaw's life was a kiss-off letter he received from Meredith Auld, his future wife, after he had spent a few high-flying years in college. Auld made up with Brokaw and later became Miss South Dakota. After awaking from his collegiate slumber, Brokaw's path to network glory was swift and relentless: local anchor, White House correspondent, Today co-host (with Jane Pauley), evening news anchor.
Part of Brokaw's genius is that he has never pandered to his base. His competitors have done just the opposite: Rather became too corn-pone, too Texan; Peter Jennings too intellectualized. When Brokaw delivered a prime-time special, it was about a mildly engaging topic like cocaine or bored grade-school students; while you could never quite imagine him breaking major news, you could never imagine him waving phony National Guard documents, either. His best-selling book, The Greatest Generation, took a great baby boomer plaint—our parents are better than we are—and stretched it to 400 pages. (And with impeccable timing: He delivered it almost simultaneously with the release of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, another gilded tribute to geezer greatness.) It's no wonder that Karl Rove, according to the New York Times, was pestering Brokaw to call the race for George W. Bush on Election Night, figuring that Brokaw's imprimatur would carry more weight than anyone else's.
That's Brokaw's style. As for the quality of his journalism, it's anyone's guess. Take his most sensational "first," the 1987 interview with Mikhail Gorbachev. Brokaw deserves few points for corralling Gorbachev. According to press reports, NBC landed the interview because CBS News had been too harsh on the Soviet behavior in Afghanistan and because of the heroic efforts of NBC "fixer" Gordon Manning, whom Mark Singer celebrated in the pages of The New Yorker. Nor did Brokaw squeeze much from the Soviet: just Gorbachev's comment, in passing, that the Soviets were pursuing their own version of the "Star Wars" strategic defense initiative. The transcript records few rhetorical flourishes from the anchor, though he did prod Gorbachev about Jewish émigrés and human rights. It was, in sum, a chance for Brokaw—and not Mike Wallace or Peter Jennings—to be sitting across the table when the Soviet general secretary said, "We have built up a new atmosphere in the country, an atmosphere of glasnost, openness, and we have plans to go on moving forward." That's something, I suppose.
Or take a less momentous occasion, Brokaw's "A Day in the Life of the White House," a special produced in 1990 that had NBC cameras shadowing George H.W. Bush's minions for a day. The cameras went to staff meetings and ceremonies with astronauts. As with much TV news, NBC confused access with journalism, with Brokaw insisting, ludicrously, that he had pushed viewers "beyond the carefully managed images" of the Bush administration. (Maybe John Sununu didn't borrow the chopper that day.) At the end of the special, the Washington Post's Tom Shales recorded Brokaw gushing, "The nation is in love with Barbara Bush," and "Barbara Bush makes everyone feel comfortable"—a carefully manufactured image the White House would have paid for.
One might argue (with apologies to Susan Sontag) that for news anchors, it's futile to try to separate style (i.e., delivery) and content (i.e., journalism). If that's the case, then shouldn't we admit that our collective Brokaw love stems from something a bit less exalted (and a bit more complicated) than his "journalism"? Before Brokaw had even left, his heir, Brian Williams, was already being pelted in the press. An NBC executive moaned to the Times that while Williams looked great and talks well, he won't have Brokaw's reporting experience when he assumes the desk. To which some of us would respond, "How would anyone be able to tell?"Bryan Curtis is a Slate staff writer.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2110492/
What makes a great network anchorman? That he's covered every presidential election since [fill in the blank]? That he's seen history with his own eyes, kibitzed with world leaders, and comforted the nation in times of mourning? Such are the cosmic tributes being heaped upon Tom Brokaw, who exits NBC Nightly News Wednesday night after 22 years. Why do they feel so inappropriate to explain Brokaw's strange appeal?
Brokaw's official NBC biography credits him with dozens of network "firsts": "In 1995, Brokaw was the first network evening news anchor to report from the site of the Oklahoma City bombing, and in 1996, from the scene of the TWA Flight 800 tragedy." It's a curious honor, being the first to stand in front of the smoking ruins of the Murrah Federal Building or along the New York seashore after a plane crash—and it's an accolade more properly awarded to Brokaw's NBC travel agent. The network goes on to praise Brokaw for many more "firsts": everything from the "first exclusive U.S. one-on-one" interview with Mikhail Gorbachev to the first interviews with Charlie Trie and Johnny Chung, the campaign-finance scamps.
It's telling that the network that has employed Brokaw for three decades should grope so awkwardly to explain his legacy and that it would fail to mention a single word Brokaw uttered during these many "firsts." It points out a problem in eulogizing departing anchormen, a process we must get used to as Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings shuffle off to their prime-time specials. The problem is, no one has any idea of what makes an anchorman great, journalistically speaking, outside of whether they find him personally appealing.
I prefer Brokaw to Rather and Jennings, but if you asked me who had been a sharper journalist since assuming the evening-news throne, I wouldn't have a clue. The only honest case I can make for Brokaw is based on style. Brokaw's on-air manner is something you might call elegant roboticism. He's like a mechanical man come to deliver the news. The Nightly News begins with a Brokaw voice-over that billboards the coming stories with pithy headlines; on Monday, the headlines were "Terror Tape," "Deadly Crash," and "Condition Critical." Then Brokaw appears, his sunken eyes swiveling dramatically up from the floor like the Terminator's. He never sits behind a desk and rarely moves. Most news anchors practice the shopworn technique of hammering certain words to add fortissimo to their copy, but Brokaw has made this a science, pounding every third or fourth word with uncanny precision. Moreover, Brokaw performs each night without seeming too eager or intense; his composure is such that when he surged past Dan Rather in the ratings in 1987, Rather's producers forced their anchor to dial down his intensity to emulate Brokaw's cool.
Brokaw says he draws his directness from his red-blooded American childhood. (Between him and Little Russ, NBC must pass red-blooded childhoods out at the door.) A native South Dakotan, Brokaw had a father named "Red" who built dams. The defining event in young Brokaw's life was a kiss-off letter he received from Meredith Auld, his future wife, after he had spent a few high-flying years in college. Auld made up with Brokaw and later became Miss South Dakota. After awaking from his collegiate slumber, Brokaw's path to network glory was swift and relentless: local anchor, White House correspondent, Today co-host (with Jane Pauley), evening news anchor.
Part of Brokaw's genius is that he has never pandered to his base. His competitors have done just the opposite: Rather became too corn-pone, too Texan; Peter Jennings too intellectualized. When Brokaw delivered a prime-time special, it was about a mildly engaging topic like cocaine or bored grade-school students; while you could never quite imagine him breaking major news, you could never imagine him waving phony National Guard documents, either. His best-selling book, The Greatest Generation, took a great baby boomer plaint—our parents are better than we are—and stretched it to 400 pages. (And with impeccable timing: He delivered it almost simultaneously with the release of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, another gilded tribute to geezer greatness.) It's no wonder that Karl Rove, according to the New York Times, was pestering Brokaw to call the race for George W. Bush on Election Night, figuring that Brokaw's imprimatur would carry more weight than anyone else's.
That's Brokaw's style. As for the quality of his journalism, it's anyone's guess. Take his most sensational "first," the 1987 interview with Mikhail Gorbachev. Brokaw deserves few points for corralling Gorbachev. According to press reports, NBC landed the interview because CBS News had been too harsh on the Soviet behavior in Afghanistan and because of the heroic efforts of NBC "fixer" Gordon Manning, whom Mark Singer celebrated in the pages of The New Yorker. Nor did Brokaw squeeze much from the Soviet: just Gorbachev's comment, in passing, that the Soviets were pursuing their own version of the "Star Wars" strategic defense initiative. The transcript records few rhetorical flourishes from the anchor, though he did prod Gorbachev about Jewish émigrés and human rights. It was, in sum, a chance for Brokaw—and not Mike Wallace or Peter Jennings—to be sitting across the table when the Soviet general secretary said, "We have built up a new atmosphere in the country, an atmosphere of glasnost, openness, and we have plans to go on moving forward." That's something, I suppose.
Or take a less momentous occasion, Brokaw's "A Day in the Life of the White House," a special produced in 1990 that had NBC cameras shadowing George H.W. Bush's minions for a day. The cameras went to staff meetings and ceremonies with astronauts. As with much TV news, NBC confused access with journalism, with Brokaw insisting, ludicrously, that he had pushed viewers "beyond the carefully managed images" of the Bush administration. (Maybe John Sununu didn't borrow the chopper that day.) At the end of the special, the Washington Post's Tom Shales recorded Brokaw gushing, "The nation is in love with Barbara Bush," and "Barbara Bush makes everyone feel comfortable"—a carefully manufactured image the White House would have paid for.
One might argue (with apologies to Susan Sontag) that for news anchors, it's futile to try to separate style (i.e., delivery) and content (i.e., journalism). If that's the case, then shouldn't we admit that our collective Brokaw love stems from something a bit less exalted (and a bit more complicated) than his "journalism"? Before Brokaw had even left, his heir, Brian Williams, was already being pelted in the press. An NBC executive moaned to the Times that while Williams looked great and talks well, he won't have Brokaw's reporting experience when he assumes the desk. To which some of us would respond, "How would anyone be able to tell?"Bryan Curtis is a Slate staff writer.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2110492/
today's papers
Delay of Gain
By Eric Umansky
Posted Thursday, Dec. 2, 2004, at 12:22 AM PT
Everybody leads with the Pentagon's announcement that it's boosting troop strength in Iraq by 12,000, mostly by keeping GIs and marines already there a few months past their return dates. The order will bring the total number of troops to about 150,000, the highest figure since the occupation began. There has long been talk of an increase, but the New York Times says the announced figure was "larger than many officers had expected."
(The washingtonpost.com had some issues last night; TP couldn't see many of the articles there.)
As USA Today teases on Page One, Iraq's appointed president, an influential Sunni, backed the January 30 elections. Many Sunni groups have demanded a delay.
The NYT says on Page One that U.N. inspectors, in a seemingly aggressive move, have told Iran they want access to two secret military sites where they suspect nuclear skullduggery. Normally military bases are considered off-limits, especially since inspectors acknowledge they don't have iron-clad evidence of nukes development. But there do seem to be some pretty good hints: One European diplomat said the inventory of items showing up at the site, "looks like a shopping list for an enrichment program." Iran hasn't agreed to the requests yet.
As the Los Angeles Times and NYT front, the opposing camps in Ukraine have agreed on the outlines of a deal that paves the way for a revote and takes some power away from the office of the presidency. In another sign of the opposition's strengthening position, the parliament passed an, essentially symbolic, vote of no-confidence against the government. Meanwhile, protestors ended their blockade of government buildings.
The Washington Post fronts a Democratic congressional study concluding that students in federally-funded abstinence courses are learning such, ah, facts as: HIV can be spread by sweat, touching of genitals can cause pregnancy, and abortion can lead to suicide. Of 13 curricula examined, 11 had boo-boos or falsehoods, though "some" were only minor mistakes. (How many?)
The NYT fronts and Wall Street Journal goes high with popular Palestinian leader, and current prisoner, Marwan Barghouti reversing his previous position and entering the race for president. Until now, Fatah's anointed candidate, Mahmoud Abbas, who's favored by the U.S., had no serious opposition. Barghouti, is serving five life-terms in Israel for murder. He was once widely touted as a moderate, and still supports a two-state solution, but was also one of the organizers behind the latest intifada. "Marwan is running in solidarity with the uprising and out of loyalty to President Arafat," said his wife, who registered him for the vote.
The WSJ details the prime minister of Thailand's plan to quell the beginnings of a rebellion in the Muslim south. His idea: origami. "A flock of at least 63 million cranes—one Japanese-style water bird of folded paper for each Thai man, woman and child" will be dropped from the bomb bays of Thai air force planes, says the Journal. Opposition politicians aren't impressed. Until now, the prime minister has relied on crackdowns in the south that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds. The government's "policy is to depend on repression," said one Thai senator, "and litter."
Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com.
Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2110534/
Delay of Gain
By Eric Umansky
Posted Thursday, Dec. 2, 2004, at 12:22 AM PT
Everybody leads with the Pentagon's announcement that it's boosting troop strength in Iraq by 12,000, mostly by keeping GIs and marines already there a few months past their return dates. The order will bring the total number of troops to about 150,000, the highest figure since the occupation began. There has long been talk of an increase, but the New York Times says the announced figure was "larger than many officers had expected."
(The washingtonpost.com had some issues last night; TP couldn't see many of the articles there.)
As USA Today teases on Page One, Iraq's appointed president, an influential Sunni, backed the January 30 elections. Many Sunni groups have demanded a delay.
The NYT says on Page One that U.N. inspectors, in a seemingly aggressive move, have told Iran they want access to two secret military sites where they suspect nuclear skullduggery. Normally military bases are considered off-limits, especially since inspectors acknowledge they don't have iron-clad evidence of nukes development. But there do seem to be some pretty good hints: One European diplomat said the inventory of items showing up at the site, "looks like a shopping list for an enrichment program." Iran hasn't agreed to the requests yet.
As the Los Angeles Times and NYT front, the opposing camps in Ukraine have agreed on the outlines of a deal that paves the way for a revote and takes some power away from the office of the presidency. In another sign of the opposition's strengthening position, the parliament passed an, essentially symbolic, vote of no-confidence against the government. Meanwhile, protestors ended their blockade of government buildings.
The Washington Post fronts a Democratic congressional study concluding that students in federally-funded abstinence courses are learning such, ah, facts as: HIV can be spread by sweat, touching of genitals can cause pregnancy, and abortion can lead to suicide. Of 13 curricula examined, 11 had boo-boos or falsehoods, though "some" were only minor mistakes. (How many?)
The NYT fronts and Wall Street Journal goes high with popular Palestinian leader, and current prisoner, Marwan Barghouti reversing his previous position and entering the race for president. Until now, Fatah's anointed candidate, Mahmoud Abbas, who's favored by the U.S., had no serious opposition. Barghouti, is serving five life-terms in Israel for murder. He was once widely touted as a moderate, and still supports a two-state solution, but was also one of the organizers behind the latest intifada. "Marwan is running in solidarity with the uprising and out of loyalty to President Arafat," said his wife, who registered him for the vote.
The WSJ details the prime minister of Thailand's plan to quell the beginnings of a rebellion in the Muslim south. His idea: origami. "A flock of at least 63 million cranes—one Japanese-style water bird of folded paper for each Thai man, woman and child" will be dropped from the bomb bays of Thai air force planes, says the Journal. Opposition politicians aren't impressed. Until now, the prime minister has relied on crackdowns in the south that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds. The government's "policy is to depend on repression," said one Thai senator, "and litter."
Eric Umansky writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@hotmail.com.
Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2110534/
