My Life and Times

MK Mabry

May 8, 2005
The Perfect Storm That Could Drown the Economy
By DANIEL GROSS

WE seem to be living in apocalyptic times. On NBC's "Revelations," Bill Pullman and Natascha McElhone seek signs of the End of Days. In the Senate, gray-haired eminences speak of the "nuclear option."

The doomsday theme is seeping into the normally circumspect world of economics. In April, Arjun Murti, a veteran analyst at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, warned that oil could "super-spike" to $105 a barrel. And increasingly, economists are prophesying that the American economy as a whole may be sailing into choppy waters.

Just look at the many obvious and worrisome portents. The government each year spends much more than it brings in, and so the nation has a large budget deficit ($412 billion in fiscal 2004, and growing). Americans also import far more goods than they export, and so the nation has record trade and current account deficits.

As consumers, Americans personally spend significantly more than they earn. Worse, some imbalances are eerily reminiscent of conditions that helped touch off recent economic crises: Mexico in 1994, Asia in 1997, Russia in 1998 and Argentina in 2002. Throw in rising interest rates, warnings of a housing bubble and the potential for higher inflation and slower growth (a k a stagflation) - and you can understand why some economic analysts may be plumbing the New Testament for inspiration.

The forces propelling and buffeting the economy are like a series of interrelated and interconnected weather systems. Could they be setting the conditions for a perfect storm - a swift series of disturbances that causes lasting damage? If so, what would it look like?

"There's a pattern that is familiar from so many other countries that have gotten into debt problems," said Jeffrey A. Frankel, an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "A simultaneous rise in interest rates, fall in securities prices and depreciation of the curr

When celebrities blog!
Arianna Huffington's new project combines new-media buzz with Hollywood liberal glitz. But will it be "Star Wars" -- or "Ishtar"?

By Farhad Manjoo

May 10, 2005 | Very few new Web sites are heralded in the New York Times and the Washington Post before they launch. Credit Arianna Huffington's singular marketing savvy for managing this feat. For months, the syndicated columnist, one-time political candidate, one-time Senate candidate's wife and longtime Hollywood political maven has been regaling reporters with news of her upcoming project, the Huffington Post, which went live shortly after midnight Monday.

By inviting hundreds from Hollywood to participate, and by hiring Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge's right-hand man, to work on the site, Huffington (whose column, now on hiatus, appears in Salon) set the bar high. "As the day follows the night, Drudge will inspire its opposite" was how Warren Beatty, one of Huffington's celeb bloggers, described the project to the New York Observer. Though Huffington insists that she has never claimed to be a Drudge killer, the impression left by her advance press suggested a looming, epic Web grudge match: Arianna vs. Drudge, a fight in which the very future of American media might hang in the balance.

But whatever else it may be, the Huffington Post is not a left-wing Drudge Report. It is instead, you might say, both a lot more than Drudge and quite a bit less. It's not the disaster a riled Nikki Finke immediately proclaimed it to be in the L.A. Weekly (Finke, who has also written for Salon, called Huffington's new site "such a bomb that it's the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate rolled into one") -- nothing that features a regular contribution from Larry David can be so quickly dismissed. But it is not revolutionary, either. Huffington's site is, quite simply, a daily news roundup married to a very big group blog (with, curiously, very few participants under the age of 40 -- and possibly 50) and little to no original reporting content; like most bloggers, Huffington's high-profile opiners are generally trolling topics well covered elsewhere.

The one "exclusive" was an excerpt from Gerald Posner's book "Secrets of the Kingdom," to be released next week, which claims that the Saudi regime has set up an internal sabotage mechanism -- "including radioactive 'dirty bombs'" -- that would "cripple Saudi Arabian oil production and distribution systems for decades" should anyone try to topple the government. Gripping stuff, but not an exclusive for very long. After all the hype, you can't help looking at the site and asking, Is that all there is?

The Huffington Post is at the very least a marvel of organization, and a testament to the size of Huffington's Rolodex. Hundreds of smart, interesting, famous people, many of whom rarely speak out in other forums, have been given carte blanche to write about whatever they want, whenever they want, and to post their missives to the site themselves. In an interview on Monday, Huffington said the setup so far had proved successful. So many people were posting so much, she said, that the site's administrators faced the unexpected problem of early posts falling off the site's main blog page. Huffington was happy, too, that her contributors began blogging about one another's blog posts. "The response from the bloggers has been really thrilling," she said. "You had so many conversations going on, for instance Hilary Rosen and Richard Bradley going on about the iPod."

There was also Julia Louis-Dreyfus and husband Brad Hall's regrettable shtick about gay marriage (an idea better pulled off by comedy writer Adam Felber on his blog); playwright David Mamet's incoherent rant about computers; a nice tribute to Hunter Thompson by John Cusack; and Larry David's environmentalist wife Laurie's criticism of Ford's insufficient promotion of its hybrid vehicles. On Monday afternoon, Larry David popped up on the site with an inspired riff on why he sympathizes with John Bolton.

The site's main problem is in its abundance. In interviews, Huffington has described her site as a kind of dinner party, where hundreds of people are talking about dozens of subjects, whether art or politics or sex or whatever else they find interesting. (She's hardly the first to use that metaphor.) Today, though, the best blogs succeed on narrower grounds. You go to Daily Kos for its obsessive interest with lefty politics, and you go to Gizmodo for the latest in gadget news, while you visit most other blogs, from Andrew Sullivan's to Josh Marshall's to Rosie O'Donnell's, to experience a particular writer's unique take on the world. The Huffington Post is, by comparison, hard to figure out. What is its political sensibility? Who are its target readers? Are they people who like politics, or people who like art, or technology? Why should you read it, and what should you do with what you've read once you're done? Most important: Why would you go back?

"One thing that works well with politically oriented sites is the sense of outrage: We gotta do something now!" says Ken Layne, a longtime blogger who now writes at the new Sploid, the Gawker Media tabloid-news blog that has fashioned itself after the Drudge Report, and therefore something of a competitor to Huffington's site. "On Daily Kos or WorldNetDaily there's this sense, 'Jesus Christ the world's ending now and we know whose fault it is!'"

Layne concedes that, of course, reality is more complex than what you find on these sites, but he has a point -- when you read blogs you're looking for a unique, passionate voice. Judging from just the first day's dozens of posts, it's hard to discern a unique, passionate voice amid the cacophony. Indeed, the site reads a bit too much like a dinner party, where opinions are offered gently, not foisted aggressively, and where some people just ramble. "You've got David Mamet talking about aren't computers great -- what the fuck is that?" says Layne. "I couldn't even read that -- I respect his writing too much to read it."

Huffington, for her part, describes her site's point of view in the way Bill Clinton used to talk about his politics -- she's providing the third way, an information source different from the polarized debate that marks today's media culture. "The left-right way of looking at our world is obsolete and misleading," she says. "A lot of our issues are what I call '70 percent issues' -- issues where I don't think there's any broad disagreement, things we can solve if we can learn to speak to each other -- and that's one of the goals of the site." This middle-ground position is of a piece with Huffington's politics, but it can make for a blog that seems unfocused and lacking in verve. After all, does anyone go to a blog for a discussion of issues that most people agree on?

Huffington has also been criticized for her apparent belief that what the ailing American political culture needs now is more input from wealthy celebrities. "Do Americans really care what celebrities think about politics?" asks Glenn Reynolds, a law professor who runs the popular, right-leaning blog Instapundit. "People like to know who celebrities are sleeping with because they'd like to sleep with celebrities -- but we don't want to talk to celebrities about current affairs."

Xeni Jardin, one of the wizards who runs the group blog Boing Boing, points out another obvious problem with the idea of giving blogs to famous people: Celebrities don't exactly have a hard time getting themselves heard in the media as it is. "To me what's great about blogs is they provide a voice to people who didn't have voices in the past; they provide an avenue to information that was not accessible before blogs," Jardin said in an interview conducted before Huffington's site went live. "I don't get the idea of Walter Cronkite writing a blog. He's like a god to me, but I don't get that. People who have plenty of public exposure, they're exposed people." And Jay Rosen, the NYU media scholar and blogger, worries about whether we can ever take what celebrities say at face value. "Gwyneth Paltrow has no incentive to speak candidly and alienate future ticket buyers," he told the Times in April.

To be fair, many of the posts on Huffington's site are not from Hollywood stars -- conservative economist Kevin Hassett, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren and Nation columnist David Corn are among many there who've probably never been near a movie set. But the site's "featured posts" -- the ones published on the front page -- are all by people whose names are in lights. Huffington acknowledges that these people wouldn't have a hard time expressing their views elsewhere. If Larry David sent his post on John Bolton to the New York Times Op-Ed page, chances are the paper would have published it. But what's wrong with having a blog where busy people like David can just dash something off whenever the mood strikes them? Huffington asks. If you or I can have a blog, why can't Gwyneth Paltrow?

In an e-mail, Jay Rosen says that since he spoke to the Times in April, he has changed his thinking on the idea behind Huffington's site: "I have come to a more rounded view." He says that he remains "a skeptic," but the idea of celebrities blogging could prove fruitful: "Who knows how this will unfold, but I'd bet that one of the first things to draw big attention will be when one big name blogging at the Huffington Post attacks another blogging for the Huffington Post. Like, say, Nora Ephron blasts Norman Mailer, and Mailer blasts back: 'Obviously Nora did not read my post. If she had ...' You get the idea. When it happens between B-list bloggers it is boring. When it happens with big-name writers and moguls it is not."

Rosen is probably right; it would be great for Huffington's site if the sparks began to fly among her bloggers, if her dinner party turned into a brawl and if that brawl stretched across the Web, from her site to the millions of blogs online now. Because if you compare her site with Drudge's, what the Huffington Post seems to lack now is bite, and fight. Even the design signals the difference: Drudge is black, gray and big, and his caps-lock button has a tendency to get stuck in the "on" position. Visiting the handsome Huffington Post, by contrast, is like reading the news while enjoying a relaxing soak at a Brentwood spa -- the typeface is small, the "XXX WORLD EXCLUSIVE XXX" disclaimers are kept at bay, and the color scheme, a soothing emerald green highlighted with pastels, calms you down.

Drudge, who has made his distaste for Huffington's endeavor well known, is fond of taking his fight to his enemies. On Monday, he prominently featured a couple of links to articles critical of Huffington's launch. Huffington's site, meanwhile, doesn't mention Drudge anywhere, and she disclaims any desire to take on Drudge.

But would it be so bad if Huffington did act a bit more like Drudge? Say what you want about Matt Drudge -- call him a liar, a hack, a fool, a moralist -- you can't call him a failure. He runs an irresistible Web site. And whether or not you agree with his politics, and whether or not you put much stock in his occasional "WORLD EXCLUSIVES!!!!," what keeps you at his site is, as with all the best blogs, Drudge's own peculiar voice. And it's these obsessions -- with the sex lives of politicians, with "American Idol," with the Nielsen TV ratings, with bizarre weather stories -- that makes the Drudge Report compelling.

It would be unfair, after one day, to accuse Arianna Huffington's site of lacking a compelling worldview. "We see today as just the first day of a rollout," Huffington said. "It's not like a movie opening," whose pop-cultural value can be measured in one weekend's box office take. Instead, Huffington said, the success of her site will only be quantifiable over time. One measure will be profitability; at some point the site, which Huffington said has enough financing to run for a year, will begin to sell advertising space. Another measure is traffic. Huffington said the site received 1.2 million visits in a span of two hours on Monday, but it wasn't clear if she meant unique visitors, page views or hits -- all very different Web traffic concepts. (An assistant at the site's business office couldn't provide much guidance on this either.)

The most important measure for Huffington, though, is influence -- "a much less tangible measure about how we are affecting the national conversation." By that yardstick, she's certainly off to a good start. She has attracted some of the nation's cultural leaders to join her party, and on the first day, in the index that perhaps ought to matter most -- whether other bloggers are talking about her -- she has done well. The blog-monitoring site Technorati says that her blog, in its first day, was the talk of the Web. Fortunes turn quickly online, though, and what happens tomorrow is another story.

About the writer
Farhad Manjoo is a Salon staff writer.
 

United Press International

President John F. Kennedy in 1961 delivering his inaugural address, whose memorable phrases are still the subject of conjecture

May 10, 2005
Two Authors Ask About 'Ask Not'
By EDWARD WYATT
In an age when even a walk across the White House lawn can feel scripted, it is hard to imagine making a fuss over whether a speechwriter helped a president-elect compose his inaugural address. But when the president in question is John F. Kennedy, such questions never cease.

Recently two scholars examined the evidence around the authorship of Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address - poring over documents, interviewing still-living advisers - and came to opposite conclusions.

In "Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America," Thurston Clarke wrote last year that "important and heretofore overlooked documentary evidence" proves that Kennedy was "the author of the most immortal and poetic passages of his inaugural address," including the famous line that gives the book its title, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

But in "Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address" (Ivan R. Dee), to be published in July, Richard J. Tofel, a lawyer and a former assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal, concludes that "if we must identify" one man as the author of the speech, "that man must surely be not John Kennedy but Theodore Sorensen."

The question of whose hand held sway over the Kennedy inaugural address was an issue even before it was delivered, at least for Kennedy. Stung by accusations that a ghost writer was the real author of "Profiles in Courage," which won Kennedy the Pulitzer Prize in 1957, the president-elect went to great lengths to showcase his own involvement in the speech that has since become his most remembered.

The speech, which can be listened to at www.jfklibrary.org, is thought by many scholars to be among the finest inaugural addresses in the nation's history. With its declaration that "the torch has passed to a new generation of Americans," the speech also holds particular relevance for baby boomers, whose adulthoods were forged in the crucible of the 1960's.

For years, Mr. Sorensen, one of the men closest to Kennedy - he was a policy adviser, legal counsel and chief speechwriter - has steadfastly maintained that Kennedy was the driving force behind the speech.

"I'm of the very old school," Mr. Sorensen said in a telephone interview. "I've just simply refused to take credit when I didn't deserve the credit. That is not a philosophy that speechwriters of the last generation have necessarily followed."

Mr. Clarke, whose book was published by Henry Holt & Company, bases much of his conclusion around a key event in the preparation of the speech. On Jan. 10, 1961, during a flight from Washington to Palm Beach, Fla., Kennedy dictated portions of the speech to his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. Both Mr. Clarke and Mr. Tofel note that in doing so, Kennedy consulted a draft of the address previously prepared by Mr. Sorensen.

Mr. Clarke states that "the Sorensen material that Kennedy incorporated into his speech turns out to be largely a compilation of ideas and themes that Kennedy had been voicing throughout his adult life." In Mr. Clarke's account, that makes Kennedy not only the architect of the speech, but "its stonecutter and mason, too."

Mr. Tofel's research - which, like Mr. Clarke's, painstakingly details the evolution of nearly every word in the address - causes him to conclude differently. "It is simply not correct to say, as a recent book did, that with the Kennedy dictation, the speech became 'in every important respect' Kennedy's own handiwork," he writes. While Kennedy certainly had ample input into the speech, he said, others, particularly Mr. Sorensen, had more.

"Of the 51 sentences in the inaugural address, John Kennedy might be said to have been the principal original author of no more than 14," Mr. Tofel writes. "And this number credits Kennedy with every sentence the origin of which is unclear.

"On direct evidence," he adds, including impromptu changes made during the delivery of the speech and a transcription of dictation taken by Kennedy's secretary on Jan. 10, "only nine sentences were principally originally Kennedy's. This compares with eight sentences from Adlai Stevenson."

The two authors do not disagree on everything, however. Both take note of the contributions of Mr. Stevenson (who they say had angled to be appointed secretary of state but who wound up as Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations), as well as those of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

And neither disputes evidence unearthed by other Kennedy scholars long ago: that the provenance of the speech's most famous words, the "ask not" portion, has a less inspiring history.

The words hark back at least to Kennedy's years at Choate, the Connecticut prep school, where the headmaster regularly reminded his charges that what mattered most was "not what Choate does for you, but what you can do for Choate."

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Jumeirah Mosque
 

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The Mercato Mall has 90 shops and restaurants.
 

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Bar Juman mall
 

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Practice for camel racing near Nad Al Sheba racetrack.
 

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The Burj Al Arab is a hotel and an icon.
 

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The Madinat Jumeirah complex built canals
 

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Need cash? An A.T.M. at the Bur Juman shopping mall can help
 

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High-rise Dubai on Sheikh Zayed Road

May 8, 2005
The Oz of the Middle East
By SETH SHERWOOD

DOWN gleaming silvery escalators they glided, eyes afire and credit cards in easy reach. As a warm Tuesday night hung languidly over the Persian Gulf, a multicultural pageant of shoppers, diners and drinkers fanned out into the majestic, wintry-cool shopping mall beneath the Middle East's tallest building, the 1,163-foot Emirates Office Tower in Dubai.

Indian matrons in colorful saris and Middle Eastern women in black veils strolled through the pristine, white marble corridors, pausing to consider the worthiness of Gucci totes, Bottega Veneta shoes and Cartier diamonds. White-robed Middle Eastern businessmen, fat gold watches glittering from the edges of their sleeves, talked into green-glowing cellphones. Three Arab men in baggy jeans, looking like cast members from an Al Jazeera version of "The O.C.," chatted warmly with three young European-looking women in spangly tops. Just behind them, boisterous British expatriates in business suits tried to push into the fray of Ladies' Night at an overpacked bar called Scarlett's.

Outside, night-shift taxis and BMW's streamed down crowded highways, cruising near the soaring, sail-shaped Burj Al Arab, which bills itself as the world's highest hotel - snaking around the rising foundation for the world's tallest building (the Burj Dubai, which at more than 2,300 feet, will surpass the current pretender, the 1,667-foot Taipei 101, when it opens in 2008), and skirting the construction sites for two competing retail projects, each of which insists it will be the largest shopping mall in the world.

From out there, the illuminated Emirates Office Tower, rising silently over the throbbing music at Scarlett's, and its nearly identical neighbor, the slightly shorter Emirates Hotel Tower, looked like flaming arrows shooting toward the stars.

Bigger, taller, grander, richer, only. Dubai, one of the seven city-states of the United Arab Emirates, has already undergone an extreme makeover, in less than a decade, that would awe the most ambitious builder. And as it continues trying to write its own chapter in the record books, travelers from all over the globe are coming to luxuriate in otherworldly thread counts and truffle-loaded restaurants at the five-star hotels; romp in the surf at fine white beaches (bikinis allowed); dance to tunes spun by international D.J.'s in myriad nightclubs; and fill shopping bags, unhindered by sales taxes, at dozens of malls and the gold souk, the largest gold market in the world.

"Dubai will shock anyone who isn't from Las Vegas, Nev.," said Ole Bech-Petersen, 35, a Danish advertising executive, who pronounced himself "completely seduced" after his first trip to Dubai in March, when he stayed at the plush Emirates Hotel Tower, dined at the Burj Al Arab's underwater restaurant and made impulse buys in the gold souk and the new Mercato shopping mall.

Cynthia Moureto, a retailer in her 20's from Manhattan, sampled Dubai with her sister in February and came away equally impressed. "We'd heard from people that it was a very up-and-coming city full of great shopping and wonderful hotels, lots of tourists, lots of new business opportunities, lots of action, lots to do," she said. "They were right." She and her sister soaked up treatments at the Shangri-La hotel's spa and partied until the wee hours with an international crowd at the Trilogy nightclub.

Some 5.45 million travelers passed through the gates of this Middle Eastern Xanadu in 2004, a 9 percent jump over the year before and a nearly 20-fold increase from a mere decade earlier, according to Pascal Maigniez, the director of the Paris office of the Government of Dubai Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing. Two-thirds came on business, bound for places like Internet City, a five-year-old office park with offices of hundreds of technology companies including Microsoft, Oracle, I.B.M., Siemens and Sony. But more and more, Dubai is a tourist destination.

"When I first started going to Dubai, no one had heard of it," said Sandra Morgan, 42, who lives near London and has visited seven times in the past few years. "Now everyone wants to go." She likes the array of ethnic restaurants, the long beachfront and good values - especially in jewelry - and feels a friendly vibe. "The service is great," she said, "the hotels are first-class, and there are so many shops."

Joining the pleasure seekers and international executives are the fortune seekers, rich and poor, who fly in from India, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, the Philippines, Europe, Australia and South Africa. Only a fifth of Dubai's resident population of 1.2 million is made up of citizens. The other 80 percent are expatriates, including an underclass of foreign workers in construction and menial jobs, and though Arabic is the official language, English, the language of commerce, holds this global gumbo together. Only a third of Dubai's residents are female.

To accommodate the arriving masses, Emirates Airlines is spending $19 billion to scoop up 45 of the world's largest passenger planes, the new Airbus A380.

Concerned that Dubai is running out of beachfront, its crown prince, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, is having three palm-tree-shaped islands created on sand being dredged from the Gulf and held in place by enormous plastic membranes. Plans for the property include opulent apartment towers and as many as 100 new hotels, including Hydropolis, billed as the earth's first underwater resort. Also coming is an archipelago of artificial islands resembling a map of the earth, covered with plush part-time residences for far-flung millionaires and billionaires and called simply The World.

"It's like Sea Monkeys!" Laurence Thorpe, a frequent business traveler from Australia, shouted one evening between sips of Stella Artois beer in a deafeningly loud beachfront club-restaurant called Boudoir. (Sea Monkeys are a novelty powder, really dried brine shrimp, that transforms into swimming creatures in water.) "You start with nothing, just sand," he said, as a sea of well-off Lebanese travelers and expatriate professionals danced around him, toasting in Arabic and French. "You add water and - presto -instant city!"

Actually, you add oil. Petroleum has underwritten Dubai's boom. But its reserves will be depleted within a decade, and the country's rulers have deliberately diversified the economy. Oil now accounts for just 8 percent of national income. Tourism brings in 17 percent.

Dubai is a metropolis of bone-white apartment blocks, green palm trees and amazing, odd juxtapositions. Thudding jackhammers mingle with the call to prayer. At Nad al Sheba racetrack, old-world camel racing by day gives way to glitzy thoroughbred action by night (the $6 million purse for one annual race in Dubai is, of course, the world's richest). Cruising the city by taxi on a five-day visit in February, I was reminded of the hot, flat sprawl of Tampa or Houston - until I glimpsed a fully veiled woman driving alongside my cab and saw two men in checkered headdresses pulling their Lamborghinis parallel to chat. Glossy financial magazines share rack space with titles like International Falconer.

Buried deeper among the commercial towers and retail palaces, you can still find traces of the old Dubai, a sleepy fishing and pearl-diving village that grew into a modest city in the 19th century, fueled by trading and, some say, smuggling. Hidden in the Bastakiya neighborhood, where Arab and South Asian laborers pay a few coins to be ferried on traditional timber boats across Dubai Creek, are the city's oldest building, a late-18th-century fort holding the Dubai Museum, and its newest cultural innovation, its first gallery district.

A local art scene is "finally getting there," I was told by Sana Khan, a New Jersey transplant who manages XVA, a gallery, cafe and guesthouse in a converted barjeel, a traditional mansion with a rectangular open-air tower and a courtyard soaring wind tower.

Dark hair pulled back and wearing a loose-fitting black dress, she shuffled around an art-book-lined office while in the nearby exhibition area some middle-aged British women admired grainy photographs of Parisian street scenes and pocketed invitations to an opening for an Iraqi textile artist. But for a city of its size, Dubai still has surprisingly little cultural life.

The city has worked at image-building by holding golf and tennis tournaments featuring the likes of Tiger Woods and Venus Williams, and playing host to an international film festival and meetings of the World Bank. But overwhelmingly, a trip to Dubai is about sun and sand, food and partying - and above all, shopping.

The merchandise hunt reaches a glittering zenith in the gold souk, a network of streets where 400 storefronts drip with gold necklaces, earrings, watches, brooches, rings and toe rings. With the heat, the 24-karat cornucopia can be so exhausting to absorb that roving men with trays of Fanta sodas and bottled water - freelance waiters, basically - do good business offering refreshments to the sweating tide of dumbstruck international shoppers. The market's shadier dealers approach strolling tourists with unsubtle come-ons like "Hey, Boss, Bulgari-Tivoli-Gucci-Movado?"

The nearby spice souk, where the merchant stalls are crowded with large bins of fragrant saffron, coriander and other exotic ingredients, is considerably more tranquil.

Eventually, however, all roads lead to the malls - 40 of them, purveying everything from Korean toys to luxury cars and struggling to differentiate themselves from one another. Wafi City Mall works at rising above the crowd with an Egyptian theme, featuring ersatz pyramids and sphinxes; the planned Ibn Battuta Mall, named for an Arab explorer, will borrow architectural elements from countries he visited, including Persia, China and India. The developers say that it will also hold the world's largest maze.

On a busy afternoon at Mercato Mall, a colonnaded fantasyland modeled on a Renaissance-era Mediterranean village, the retail fever was epidemic. Emirati boys in white dishdashas and new baseball caps queued up for "Meet the Fockers." Heavily made-up Iranian women in black chadors fingered sunglasses and flashy scarves in a clubwear boutique. Russian tourists, arms well tanned from days at the beach, swiped credit cards at Cerutti and Nine West.

The city was celebrating what seemed a redundant event: the 10th annual Dubai Shopping Festival, basically a giddy month of sales and giveaways that rakes in more than a billion dollars a year, drawing feverish interest with a series of raffles with lavish prizes like a personal fleet of 10 Nissans. "One World, One Family, One Festival," ubiquitous signs declared, appealing to humanity's universal desire for a Chanel pantsuit.

At the Mercato's noisy Starbucks, two Libyan hipsters sat down with their lattes, visibly tired. "We've been mall-hopping all day," said Sufian Swed, a 24-year-old from Tripoli who was working in Dubai. He added with a laugh, "It's kind of sad." His friend, 29, an import-export specialist named Mohamed Abdulsaloum, surveyed the afternoon's haul: a nutrition book and some sweaters. "I think they bump the prices up two weeks before the festival and then knock them down and call it a discount," he said. Then they pulled out the day's main score, two Dubai Shopping Festival souvenir coins. Each one represented an entry in a drawing to win 100 kilograms of gold.

The festival's heady atmosphere can inspire outlandish behavior. One afternoon I watched a line of contestants hurl squadrons of paper airplanes into a slowly revolving convertible in hopes of driving it home. And at my hotel that evening, I held the elevator door for a college-age Middle Eastern woman loaded down by bags bursting with huge boxes of Kellogg's Corn Flakes.

"You came all the way to Dubai to buy cornflakes?" I asked in disbelief.

She shot me a confused, slightly offended look. "I love cornflakes," she said at last.

To fuel the legions of global power shoppers, Dubai bursts with restaurants. The slick Asha's, owned by the famous Indian singer Asha Bhosle, serves upscale Indian food. Fine French cuisine comes courtesy of another celebrity, the foul-mouthed former Scottish soccer player Gordon Ramsay, who landed three Michelin stars for the London restaurant that bears his name before starring in his own British reality television series, "Hell's Kitchen."

Downscale dining, though harder to find, can be more interesting. At Ravi, in a neighborhood of working-class South Asians and Iranians, men in long, loose shirts sit elbow to elbow devouring rice, curries and soft nan, the hand serving as spoon and fork. If you go there, order the succulent cubes of grilled mutton tikka - the waiter will resign himself to seeking real cutlery when he sees you're a stranger in town. At the waterside Fatafeet restaurant, couples smoke fragrant apple tobacco from the long tubes of billowing shisha pipes while families feast on tabbouleh and pomegranate juice.

Many Dubai vacationers bring children, who play at the beach and hurtle downhill on water slides at the Wild Wadi Water Park. In a challenge to a typical tourist reaction in Dubai - that the whole place is an overgrown Disney World - an immense patch of sand near downtown is now being transformed into a new $19 billion theme park, Dubailand, described on its Web site as "the biggest, most varied leisure, entertainment and tourism attraction on the planet."

At twilight at the week's end, you can almost hear the shouts of "Thank God it's Thursday." With no work on Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, Dubai goes into session as the Middle East party capital. From cheesy populist clubs animated by Filipino cover bands to the exclusive Skyview Bar at the Burj Al Arab hotel - where admission requires reservations days ahead and a cover charge of $45 (170 dirhams, at 3.75 dirhams to the dollar) - the Arabian night promises conviviality for every social stratum. Yet until the Maktoums build something along the lines of a liquorland - not likely in Islamic Dubai - alcohol is generally restricted to hotels, which can seem more like towering night life complexes where some people happen to sleep.

Amid the hullabaloo one Thursday at MIX, a huge club in a playful curvy-silver space that suggests both Frank Gehry and Dr. Seuss, the young expats bouncing to Nelly and 50 Cent didn't even notice T-Bone, a popular London D.J., as he slalomed through the mostly Anglophone crowd, the only black man in the place, and sidled up to the densely packed bar to wait for his turn in the D.J. booth.

Across town, in the Moroccan-themed Tangerine, a 20-something woman in a white miniskirt hung on to the sleeve of a 60-something man in an ill-fitting tweed blazer as both leaned jauntily against a wall. Whatever they spoke about, mouth to ear, was obliterated by the deafening, chest-crushing hip-hop beat that resounded off the carved wooden screens and mosaic tile floor.

In a dark corner nearby, a beanpole-like bald man from Liverpool looked at the odd old-young crowd and ersatz North African décor and made a remark that is probably repeated at least once every day in Dubai. "The whole thing is totally fake," he said to his date, "but no one seems to care."

Visitor Information

Getting There

Emirates, www.emirates.com, the national carrier for the United Arab Emirates, operates flights from Kennedy airport to Dubai International, with one stop. As of late April, fares in May started at $1,138. International carriers like Air France and Alitalia have one-stop flights to Dubai from New York. Continental, in partnership with Emirates, offers flights from Newark that connect through London or Paris. Fares start at $1,072.

Getting Around

Dubai has three main areas. Deira, the easternmost section of the city, is home to the major souks, the airport and several top hotels. Bur Dubai is the catch-all term for the many districts in the city's geographical and commercial center. Jumeirah, the coastal strip in the southwestern part of the city, contains many luxurious beachfront hotels.

Taxis are the most efficient means of getting around. Clean and abundant, they congregate at city hotels, malls and landmarks, and they can be hailed on the street. Fares operate according to the meter. Expect to pay $2.50 to $4 (prices based on 3.75 dirhams to the dollar) to cruise around Bur Dubai, $5 to $8 to go from Bur Dubai to Deira and $8 to $13 to make the trip from Bur Dubai to Jumeirah.

Numbered street addresses in Dubai tend to be vague or nonexistent. Fortunately, taxi drivers know the locations of nearly all the hotels, malls and major points of interest that travelers visit. If your destination isn't one of these, try to take along a map and a phone number for the driver.

Security

The United Arab Emirates maintains good relations with the United States. Still, it's perhaps worth noting that three of the Sept. 11 hijackers were from the emirates, and the country's proximity to reported terrorist hot spots - notably Saudi Arabia - has caused some Western governments like those of Britain and Australia to issue general warnings about travel in the region.

Where to Stay

With dozens of five-star hotels available and scads more on the drawing board, the city is a head-spinning buffet of gargantuan lobbies and stratospheric thread counts. In this country, three- or four-star hotels provide the "budget" option.

Madinat Jumeirah, (971-4) 366-8888, online at www.madinatjumeirah.com, the most discussed mammoth property of the last year, is a sprawling seaside complex containing two Arabian-themed hotels, 29 luxurious guest houses, a recreated traditional souk, a network of canals and more than 45 restaurants and bars. Double rooms from $520.

Dubai Marine Beach Resort and Spa, Beach Road, Jumeirah, (971-4) 346-1111, www.dxbmarine.com, is an oceanfront property with some of the hottest restaurant-clubs in town. Sho-Cho is a futuristic sushi lounge, while the bar-restaurant El Malecon is a slice of old-time Havana decadence. Boudoir, a sultry French restaurant, becomes a throbbing party scene in the wee hours. Doubles from $219.

The two modern Emirates Towers buildings, Sheikh Zayed Road, (971-4) 314-3555, www.emiratestowershotel.com, define the Dubai skyline and cater to a very upscale business clientele. The shopping arcade has many high-end clothing and jewelry stores, trendy bars, and a slew of restaurants. Doubles from $333. The chic 50th-floor restaurant and lounge, Vu's, (971-4) 319-8088, offers a wonderful panorama of the city.

The Ibis World Trade Center, at the Dubai World Trade Center, off Sheikh Zayed Road, (971-4) 332-4444, www.ibishotel.com, with only three stars, is practically a flophouse by Dubai standards. In other words, there are no butlers or helipads. Still, it's extremely clean, centrally located and served by a couple of restaurants and bars. Doubles from $79.

Where to Eat

The array of nationalities in Dubai translates into an abundance of global cuisines. Ethnic foods from nearby countries - especially India and Lebanon - should not be missed.

At Asha's, Waficity Pyramids, (971-4) 324-4100, www.ashasrestaurants.com, the stylish Bombay lounge interior is the right complement to the contemporary Indian cuisine. Choose between the traditional menu (samosas, kebabs) and the fusion menu, which includes a tandoori-smoked salmon appetizer ($9) and a duck breast cooked in cardamom and honey ($17).

Al Nafoorah, (971-4) 319-8760, in the lower level of the Emirates Towers, is an elegant Lebanese restaurant serving delights like lamb makenak (sausages in lemon juice, $5), lubia bil zaite (marinated green beans with tomato, garlic and olive oil, $4.50), and a mixed grill with three types of meat kebab ($12).

The British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay runs Verre, in the Hilton Dubai Creek, (971-4) 212-7551, a discreet haven of contemporary French cuisine. Start with quail breast cooked with wild mushrooms ($18.50) and move to Tasmanian salmon with seared scallops and caviar velouté or roasted lamb (each $35).

The Wharf, in the Mina A Salam hotel. (971-4) 366-6152, overlooking one of the faux (but charming) canals in the Madinat Jumeirah complex, the Wharf specializes in imaginative seafood dishes like crab and lobster salad with avocado and tomato salsa ($16), tuna carpaccio with pan-fried foie gras ($17) and roasted red snapper risotto ($25).

Where to Dance

Club life starts after 11 p.m. most nights, and places generally stay open until 3 a.m.

Tangerine, Fairmont Hotel, Sheikh Zayed Road; (971-4) 311-8100.

Trilogy, Madinat Jumeirah; (971-4) 366-6917.

MIX, Grand Hyatt Dubai; (971-4) 317-2570.

Where to Shop

The Egyptian-themed Wafi City Mall, (971-4) 324 4555, www.waficity.com, has what is probably Dubai's most comprehensive mix of upscale stores, fine dining, cool cocktail lounges and entertainment - as well as a spa.

The Mediterranean-style Mercato Mall, (971-4) 344-4161, www.mercatoshoppingmall.com, one of the newest additions, has 90 shops and restaurants and a lively, young atmosphere. Stores include Diesel, Mango, Polo Jeans, Fleurt and Cerruti.

For a less corporate retail outing, hit the dazzling gold souk in the Deira district (and haggle like crazy if you plan to buy) or the crowded street-level shops in the Al Karama neighborhood. You'll see all your favorite brands counterfeited with varying degrees of skill.

What to See

The Burj Al Arab, (971-4) 301-7777, the world's tallest and arguably most luxurious hotel - chauffered Rolls-Royce, anyone? - has become so iconic that its distinctive shape graces Dubai license plates. Rather than pay some of the world's tallest prices for a suite (they start at $1,467 for the smallest), go for a drink at the Skyview bar (which still charges $45 for the privilege, plus two drinks and canapés). Reservations, (971-4) 301-7600, are vital.

Camel racing takes place at Nad Al Sheba racetrack, (971-4) 336-3666, starting around 7 a.m. on Thursdays and Fridays in the winter and spring.

Dubai Museum, Al Faheidi Fort, Bastakiya, (971-4) 353-1862, is in a building from the late 1700's, and contains a recreated Bedouin village and exhibits on desert Arab life over the centuries. Admission is 80 cents.


SETH SHERWOOD is a freelance writer based in Paris.

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Jersey City Medical Center

May 9, 2005
States Propose Sweeping Changes to Trim Medicaid by Billions
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, May 8 - Governors and state legislators have devised proposals for sweeping changes in Medicaid to curb its rapid growth and save billions of dollars.

Under the proposals, some beneficiaries would have to pay more for care, and states would have more latitude to limit the scope of services.

The proposals, drafted by separate working groups of governors and state legislators, provide guidance to Congress, which 10 days ago endorsed a budget blueprint that would cut projected Medicaid spending by $10 billion over the next five years.

Many of the proposals resemble ideas advanced by President Bush as part of his 2006 budget. In some cases, the governors embrace Mr. Bush's proposals but go further. At the same time, they also reject some of the president's recommendations that they believe would shift costs to the states.

John Adams Hurson, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates who is president of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said: "I am a Democrat, a liberal Democrat, but we can't sustain the current Medicaid program. It's fiscal madness. It doesn't guarantee good care, and it's a budget buster. We need to instill a greater sense of personal responsibility so people understand that this care is not free."

A coalition of beneficiary advocates, labor unions and health care providers is already gearing up to fight any significant cutbacks in Medicaid. The coalition includes AARP, Families USA, pediatricians, hospitals and nursing homes.

State officials say their goal is not just to save money, but also to avoid wholesale cuts in coverage like those in Tennessee, which is dropping more than 300,000 people from its Medicaid rolls, and in Missouri, which is dropping 90,000.

Medicaid, the nation's largest health insurance program, covers more than 50 million low-income people. Though originally intended for the poor, it now covers people with incomes well above the poverty level in some states.

The National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislatures are still refining their proposals, with the aim of getting their recommendations to Congress for action this year. States, they say, should be allowed to impose higher co-payments and deductibles on Medicaid recipients with higher incomes.

Moreover, they say, states should not have to offer the same comprehensive set of benefits to all Medicaid recipients, but should be allowed to provide some people with more limited benefits, like those offered by commercial insurers and the Children's Health Insurance Program.

States should be able to establish "different benefit packages for different populations, or in different parts of the state," the governors say in a draft of their new policy.

The proposals developed over the last month by governors and state legislators have a substantial chance of becoming law. Congressional leaders have expressed a desire to rein in Medicaid costs, appear ready to act and are just waiting for advice from state officials. "We want to invite the governors to the table," said Representative Jim Nussle, Republican of Iowa, who is chairman of the House Budget Committee and a potential candidate for governor next year.

With Medicaid, as with welfare, states have an influential voice because they help finance the program.

Federal and state spending on Medicaid has grown an average of 10 percent a year over the last five years - much faster than federal or state revenues - and now totals more than $300 billion annually. Drug prices and hospital costs have risen at a brisk pace, but the increase in enrollment is a more important factor.

From 2000 to 2004, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the number of Medicaid recipients grew by one-third. This growth coincides with the erosion of employer-sponsored health benefits. As employers have cut back coverage and raised premiums, private insurance has become less available and less affordable to low-wage workers.

In recent months, the governors have drafted at least three versions of a paper titled "Medicaid Reform: A Comprehensive Approach." The documents, obtained by The New York Times, offer a vision of "Medicaid plus health care reform," including "incentives and penalties for individuals to take more responsibility for their health care."

The governors endorse the idea of tax credits to help individuals and small businesses buy insurance. Such credits, they say, could slow the increase in the number of people becoming eligible for Medicaid.

In their draft proposal, marked "for comment only - not for distribution," the governors say they believe that "Medicaid overpays for prescription drugs." Mr. Bush wants to reduce Medicaid payments to pharmacies, but the governors say Medicaid must also extract savings from drug manufacturers.

To achieve this goal, the governors say, Congress should increase the discounts and rebates that drug companies are required to provide state Medicaid programs - a change opposed by drug makers.

In addition, the governors say, Congress should encourage the formation of multistate purchasing pools to buy drugs at lower prices for Medicaid recipients, state employees and others in public programs.

State officials generally support Mr. Bush's proposal to limit the ability of elderly people to qualify for Medicaid coverage of nursing home care by transferring assets to their children. The governors say such restrictions "should be encouraged," because "Medicaid can no longer be the financing mechanism for the nation's long-term-care costs." Medicaid now pays for about two-thirds of nursing home residents.

Mr. Hurson, the president of the conference of state legislatures, who is also chairman of the health committee in the Maryland House, said, "Medicaid was never intended to be a middle-class entitlement program for nursing home care."

State legislators have discussed a proposal to give states a fixed amount of federal money for long-term care, a sort of block grant that would automatically be increased each year to keep pace with medical costs and demographic changes. State officials would have broad discretion to use the money for nursing homes and home health care, but individuals would not have an entitlement to such services.

State legislators are still weighing this proposal, which they know would be contentious because the legal entitlement to benefits is a bedrock of the Medicaid program.

Under current law, Medicaid officials cannot charge co-payments to pregnant women and cannot charge for specific services like family planning and emergency care. For other services, the maximum co-payment is generally $3.

"These rules, which have not been updated since 1982, prevent Medicaid from utilizing market forces and personal responsibility to improve health care delivery," the governors say in the latest version of their policy statement.

Governors seek "broad discretion" to set premiums, co-payments and deductibles, subject to certain limits. Congress, they say, could establish "financial protections to ensure that beneficiaries would not be required to pay more than 5 percent of total family income."

A more modest proposal, the governors say, is to charge higher co-payments to families with incomes above certain levels, say $22,000 a year for a family of three. Or, they say, states could charge co-payments to deter the overuse of specific services, including inappropriate use of hospital emergency rooms.

Advocates for Medicaid beneficiaries said such charges would discourage people from seeking care, so their ailments would worsen and treatment would cost more.

State officials also want to change what they see as one of the most onerous requirements of the Medicaid law. Under this provision, states must treat any health problems discovered in periodic examinations of children under the age of 21. About half of the states have been successfully sued under this provision.

The National Conference of State Legislatures says Congress should "provide more flexibility for states" to limit this benefit.

Jane Perkins, who has represented Medicaid recipients as a lawyer at the National Health Law Program, said "it would be a tragedy" if such changes were made. "These children need the full range of services because they are likely to have greater needs, more chronic illnesses and disabling conditions," she said.

Governors also want Congress to make it easier for them to persuade federal courts to set aside orders relating to their Medicaid programs.

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