My Life and Times

Adventure Antigua - a blog about island life spent with sun, sea and sand.: Caribbean Sargasso Sea Weed Mystery - Solved (sort...

2011-08-29T14:45:00.000-07:00

Adventure Antigua - a blog about island life spent with sun, sea and sand.: Caribbean Sargasso Sea Weed Mystery - Solved (sort...: Thousands of people have been trying to figure out why this weed is coming ashore and where it's coming from. New evidence spotted on Thursd...

Michael P. Whelan

2011-08-07T14:22:00.000-07:00

Bad news from Benghazi

2011-07-29T21:46:00.000-07:00

Jul 29th 2011, 10:15 by M.S.

THE murder of General Abdel Fatah Younes in still largely unexplained circumstances is the worst possible news for those Western governments, such as Britain’s and America’s, that have just taken the step of recognising the rebel Transitional National Council (TNC) as the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people. It appears that General Younes, the commander of the rebel forces and a former interior minister in the regime of Muammar Qaddafi who defected in February, was recalled to Benghazi from the eastern front near the oil town of Brega to answer charges of negotiating secretly with Tripoli. Three hours after his supposed arrival in Benghazi, the head of the TNC, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, another former minister, announced his death and that of two other officers at the hands of an armed gang, at least one of whose members had been arrested. As news of the killing spread, forces loyal to General Younes, mainly from his Obeidi tribe, began heading for Benghazi, while other fellow tribesman began spraying the hotel from where Mr Jalil had made the announcement with automatic rifle fire.

General Younes had been from the moment of his defection an ambiguous figure for many in the rebel camp who doubted whether he had really burnt his bridges with his old ministerial chums and the Qaddafi family. In April, the Colonel’s daughter, Aisha, suggested in a television interview that one member of the TNC’s ruling council was still loyal to her father. She refused to rule out speculation that this was General Younes. There was also tension between General Younes and Khalifa Haftar, a former army officer who also claimed to be the leader of the rebel military forces, which had contributed to the dysfunctionality of the military effort in the east.

The death of General Younes raises a number of tricky questions for the TNC and its supporters in the international community. If General Younes was indeed attempting to negotiate a settlement with the regime in Tripoli, was he freelancing or doing it with the blessing of at least some other members of the TNC? Mr Jalil recently raised the possibility that Colonel Qaddafi might be allowed to remain in Libya, though not in power, as part of a peace deal, only to be quickly contradicted by some of his colleagues. To what extent was the murder of General Younes motivated by tribal rivalries? The TNC has determinedly stressed that its goal of a democratic Libya ruled by law transcended tribal bickering. But as the prospect of negotiated settlement looms larger and with it the way in which the country’s resources, especially its oil, may be divvied up, the potential for tribal factionalism to rear its head is there. More immediately, with the onset of Ramadan next week, what does the removal of General Younes from the scene mean for the attempt to break the military stalemate in the east? Should the forces there begin to splinter, the outlook could quickly change for the worse.

So far, there are more questions than answers, but General Younes’s death is an ominous precedent.

Lacey Firefighters Rescue 6-Year-Old 40 Feet Up In Tree

2011-07-12T21:53:00.000-07:00

Lacey Firefighters Rescue 6-Year-Old 40 Feet Up In Tree

This had to be a nightmare come to life for this little guy's parents. My own son Michael was the original"no fear" little boy. We would spend our weekends at Mandalay Bay wave pool, where at the time the waves were turned way up, and he would ride them all day, repeatedly startling the people around us, who would try to rescue that boy who must be drowning. He was 31/2. He also had this infernal habit of strolling off at whim. One day he began a sojourn from the Beach at Mandalay Resorts, and I followed behind him.If you are familiar with the layout there, you know the main tower of the Hotel is set way back from the pool area. He never looked back to see me trailing him, I subtly signaled to people who observed this little boy who appeared to be walking alone, and Michael never paused a step until he entered the lower level of the main Hotel Tower, and ambled directly to the Bank of elevators and pressed the button to bring him to the next level. At this time, I spoke to him from behind, and he turned and smiled, as I asked him what time his flight for Rome was departing from McCarran Airport. Completely nonplussed, he looked up and said, "Hi, DA." Kids will drive you half crazy sometimes, but for me, my children have been the greatest joy and Blessing in my entire Life. They have done so much more for me than I could ever do for them in ten lifetimes

NASA HD-TV, Ustream.TV: If you are watching from a mobile device or slower connection, watch the Mobile Feed for NASA Television Here NASA TV airs...

2011-07-08T02:44:00.000-07:00

NASA HD-TV, Ustream.TV: If you are watching from a mobile device or slower connection, watch the Mobile Feed for NASA Television Here NASA TV airs...

Go for Launch, Las Vegas, Nevada. The last historical Launch of any Space Shuttle, this being the Space Shuttle, Atlantis. God Speed, Atlantis.

Fernando Alonso leads Lewis Hamilton in Valencia practice

2011-06-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

Fernando Alonso leads Lewis Hamilton in Valencia practice

Doris Whlean and Michael Patrck Whelan

2011-06-21T04:27:00.000-07:00

2011-06-11T22:50:00.000-07:00

Whelan Family

2011-05-07T20:04:00.000-07:00

F1 Turkey 2011 Sebastian Vettel Crash FP1

2011-05-07T03:08:00.000-07:00

Hungry Eyes: THE WIGWAM MOTEL

2011-05-04T11:26:00.000-07:00

Hungry Eyes: THE WIGWAM MOTEL

Who will get bin Laden’s $25 million bounty?

2011-05-03T17:37:00.000-07:00

Who will get bin Laden’s $25 million bounty?

2010-12-21T01:16:00.000-08:00

Michael P. Whelan

2010-11-11T21:39:00.000-08:00

MSN

2010-11-05T21:17:00.001-07:00

Very complete and in depth coverage of what is happening in the World at Large. Good starting point to disover what is cureent and important.

in reference to: MSN.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

2010-10-17T00:55:00.000-07:00

My Blogs

2010-10-05T18:57:00.001-07:00

Some archival value for sure.

in reference to: Home - Windows Live (view on Google Sidewiki)

2010-09-02T06:05:00.000-07:00

Jersey Chore, Getting it Right. Gratuitous Stereotypes and the Jersey Shore, Season Two

2010-05-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Looking forward to a very happy and healthy summer. I eagerly anticipate spending some time on the Eastern Seaboard,all with family and close friends. An invitation of a guest shot with Jersey Shore Season 2 has become a matter of serious consideration. I know I could lend some legitimacy to that oft maligned HBO reality series. Those kids have captured the imagination of a large viewing audience. They are filming the second installment because HBO is gonna" Bank it Like Hank."

Myself and almost everyone I grew up with in Jersey City, Hoboken, Hudson, Essex, and Passaic Counties, and even a few guys from Bergen County, intuitively understand what "The Situation" and the rest of his "crew" is experiencing during a summer in Seaside Heights. Unexpected and uncalled for, is what we would use to describe some of the more complex events as they unfolded.

Jersey Shore Season Two, just needs to step it up a notch, past the gratuitous stereotyping and blow away the whole host of critics by reaching back to the day when there was no HBO, but there damn sure was a Seaside Heights, and a Belmar, and Matawan, and Asbury Park, Lavalette, Avon, Bradley Beach, and well, the list is well known.

One or two episodes, we bring those kids up to speed, bada bing bada boom. It's all good. You wanna' see Jersey Shore, we will be happy to show it to you. Our invitation is extended with respect, as we only ask that while we are your Hosts, you extend us the same courtesy.

To the current cast, my utmost respect and congratulations. You have the one dog down, and Season Two is where it all happens. You have an audience, they are your fans, they are watching YOU GUYS. You have an established platform, the reality of that platform is your reality. YOU OWN IT!.ALLOW NO ONE TO BOX YOU IN. . Use it well, make me proud. And hey, don't sweat it, Frankie and I will be down to see ya.

.All The Best,

Mike.

vegasmike433.

Las Vegas, May 11, 2010

2007-06-01T12:32:00.000-07:00

Today's Papers,Comedy Business,Hillary Clinton,Giuliani,Concussions,Depression,Mafia,Marriage, Socie
Man With TB Apologizes
ABC News via Associated Press
In an image from ABC News, Diane Sawyer shaking hands with Andrew Speaker during a "Good Morning America" interview airing today
June 1, 2007
Man With TB Apologizes for Putting Others at Risk
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN and JOHN HOLUSHA
The Atlanta lawyer who flew on crowded airplanes while infected with a dangerous form of tuberculosis said today he did not think he presented a danger when he flew and he apologized to his fellow passengers.
Andrew Speaker, interviewed on the "Good Morning America" program on the ABC network in his hospital room in Denver, said "I don't expect those people to ever forgive me. I just hope they understand that I truly never meant them any harm."
Mr. Speaker, 31, flew to Europe for his wedding in Greece and a honeymoon trip last month after being notified he was infected with drug resistant TB, but said he was not flatly forbidden to travel.
The dispute appeared to be based on his interpretation of language used by cautious public health officials. Mr. Speaker, 31, said he was told he was not contagious or a danger to anyone, but that officials would prefer that he did not fly.
His father, also a lawyer, recorded the meeting, he said.
"My father said, "OK, now, are you saying, prefer not to go on the trip because he's a risk to anybody, or are you saying that to cover yourself," he said. "And they said, we have to tell that to cover ourself, but he's not a risk."
Mr. Speaker, who defied instructions to turn himself into Italian health authorities, flew from Prague to Montreal and then drove to the United States, despite a notice to Customs agents to detain him.
Congressional investigators, who plan to hold hearings on how the case has been handled, say that the border agent at the Plattsburgh, N.Y., border crossing with Canada decided that Mr. Speaker did not look sick and so let him go.
Russ Knocke, press secretary for the Homeland Security Department, would not confirm the agent's rationale for releasing the man, saying only that the case was under investigation by the department's internal affairs and inspector general's offices.
In another twist to a story that seems to grow murkier with each new revelation, Mr. Speaker's father-in-law, Robert C. Cooksey, is a tuberculosis researcher who has worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Cooksey said he "was not involved in any decisions my son-in-law made regarding his travel." He also said that he was often tested for tuberculosis and had never been found to be infected.
The centers said that the strain of tuberculosis that Mr. Speaker has does not match any of the strains in its laboratories. And Dr. Cooksey said, "My son-in-law's TB did not originate from myself or the C.D.C.'s labs, which operate under the highest levels of biosecurity."
The form of tuberculosis Mr. Speaker has is extremely resistant to standard antibiotics.
Although health officials said there was a low risk of Mr. Speaker's transmitting tuberculosis to his fellow passengers, the case raised troubling new questions about the nation's ability to defend its borders against the entry of dangerous infectious diseases and about the C.D.C.'s ability to handle such threats, despite extensive training exercises. Mr. Speaker's odyssey has also set off an international hunt for his fellow passengers.
Mr. Speaker came back into the United States at Plattsburgh, N.Y., at 6:18 p.m. on May 24 in a car he had rented at Pierre Trudeau International Airport in Montreal after flying there from Prague on Czech Air.
A day earlier, on May 23, the disease control centers alerted the Atlanta office of Customs and Border Protection, a part of the Homeland Security Department, that a man with a serious medical condition might try to enter the United States and the information was entered in the department's computer system.
The department instructed any border control agents who encountered the man to "isolate, detain and contact the Public Health Service," Mr. Knocke said.
If Canadian officials had known about the detention order, a quarantine officer would have isolated Mr. Speaker, escorted him to a hospital and arranged his secure transport back to the United States, said Jean Riverin, a spokesman for the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Also, Italian officials said that they did not learn about the case until Mr. Speaker had left Italy. Cesare Fasari, a spokesman for Italy's Health Ministry, said that had the Italian health officials been notified in time, they would have "intercepted the man and invited him to be treated in a hospital" with his permission.
Early yesterday morning, the disease control centers flew Mr. Speaker, who wore a mask, in a chartered plane to Denver, where he was taken by ambulance to National Jewish Medical and Research Center for definitive treatment of his infection.
Dr. Gwen A. Huitt, an infectious-disease expert at the centers, described Mr. Speaker as tired, cooperative, emotional and concerned about the publicity his case was receiving. He was not coughing, had no fever and was "very relieved to be in Denver" for definitive treatment. If tests determine that the infection is confined to one area of a lung, doctors may perform major surgery to remove a part or lobe.
Whatever drug treatment Mr. Speaker receives is expected to continue for years and will involve risks of side effects that could damage his kidneys and liver, Dr. Huitt said.
Mr. Speaker is being confined to a standard two-bed hospital room that is equipped with special ventilation to suck out air and then pass it through ultraviolet light and a filter that kills microbes. He is likely to be confined to the room for several weeks.
After examining Mr. Speaker, Dr. Huitt said she was "very optimistic" about his future because he was young and athletic.
At a news conference, Dr. Huitt said her initial impression was that Mr. Speaker contracted the dangerous strain from someone else and did not develop resistance from anti-tuberculosis treatment that C.D.C. officials said he took earlier. Treatment in Denver was expected to start today, she said.
Dr. Huitt said Mr. Speaker had traveled extensively over the last six years to countries where tuberculosis is more common than in this country, but she declined to say where.
One key test was encouraging. It indicated that Mr. Speaker was at low risk of transmitting the infection to others. The test involved collecting sputum from induced coughing. Dr. Huitt and others added chemical stains to a smear of the sputum on a glass slide and examined it under a microscope. They saw no tuberculosis bacteria. The same findings came from tests performed in Atlanta earlier in the year and at Bellevue Hospital and Grady Memorial Hospital in recent days.
Dr. Huitt said her team would repeat the test over the next two days, for a total of three times, as is standard practice.
In 17 percent of tuberculosis cases, the source is a patient whose smear is negative, according to studies from Vancouver, British Columbia, and San Francisco.
Mr. Speaker's wife is with him. A skin test performed earlier in the year showed that she was not infected.
"We have not done any new tests on her," Dr. Huitt said.
Andrew Speaker flew to Paris from Atlanta on Air France Flight 285 (Delta co-share 8517) on May 12 for his wedding in Greece, and planned to return from a honeymoon on June 5.
Jason Vik, 21, a passenger on the outgoing flight who just graduated from the University of South Carolina, Aiken, is now waiting for results of a TB skin test.
Mr. Vik spoke angrily about Mr. Speaker's behavior. "He stepped on a plane with 487 people, one of the largest aircraft that Boeing makes, and he put us all at risk, just so he could go get married," he said.
Dr. Mario Raviglione, who directs the World Health Organization tuberculosis department, said that despite technology and communication technology "we're not there yet, and there is the possibility for infectious people to cross borders without the knowledge of authorities."
Reporting was contributed by Dan Frosch from Denver; Brenda Goodman from Atlanta; Denise Grady from New York; Gardiner Harris from Washington; Christopher Mason from Toronto; and Elisabeth Rosenthal and Betta Povoledo from Rome.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Today's Papers
A Convenient WarmingBy Daniel PolitiPosted Friday, June 1, 2007, at 5:21 A.M. E.T.
The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today lead, and the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox, with President Bush's call for a new set of meetings to discuss ways to cut greenhouse-gas emissions globally. Environmental groups immediately criticized the plan as too little, too late. But, as all the papers note, the announcement marked a shift in an administration that had been criticized for its skepticism regarding the need to cut emissions. As the WSJ puts it, the announcement "effectively removes the U.S. as the last doubter among big developed nations on the need for cooperative reductions."
The Los Angeles Times leads with news that the man who is infected with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was allowed to enter the United States from Canada even though his passport immediately generated a warning to the border-control agent. Adding another strange layer to the story was yesterday's revelation that Andrew Speaker's father-in-law, Robert Cooksey, is a researcher at the CDC's tuberculosis division. In a statement, Cooksey insisted that he had never tested positive for tuberculosis and "was not involved in any decisions my son-in-law made regarding his travel."
In his announcement, Bush said he wants to hold talks between the world's top 10 to 15 polluters (USAT has a handy chart that lists who they are) to set up what his chief environmental adviser calls "aspirational goals" by the end of 2008. Bush said he would present his proposal at next week's G8 meeting, where it was widely expected that his administration would come under fire for its failure to act on global warming. Some think that Bush is effectively trying to "hijack" the ongoing talks about the issue and use the discussions as a tactic to delay any concrete actions until after he is out of office. Environmentalists also immediately picked up on the fact that Bush was not talking about mandatory cuts, which are seen as essential for any plan to be successful.
Although some European leaders offered tepid support, it is still unclear how receptive they will be to the proposal since many seem to be ready for a more drastic step. Germany has called for a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, which the administration has said is impractical.
The WP points out that yesterday's announcement is one of several Bush made this week on issues that were bound to elicit criticism at the G8 summit. The NYT says it's an example "of the kind of policy adjustment that is becoming increasingly common" as Bush's time at the White House comes to an end. The LAT fronts a look at how mending relations with "old Europe" might be easier now that "Britain, France and Germany are fielding potentially the most pro-U.S. group of leaders to emerge in Western Europe in years."
The border-control agent ignored the warning that said Andrew Speaker was contagious apparently because the 31-year-old Atlanta lawyer looked healthy. Members of Congress said this once again raises questions about the security of the country's borders and vowed to investigate. Although Speaker had been told by the CDC to stay in Italy, where he was on his honeymoon, he said he decided to take an alternate route back into the United States out of fear that he would be confined to a hospital in a foreign country. He was finally taken to a hospital in Denver yesterday where he will have to stay for months. In an interview with ABC News, Speaker asked for forgiveness for exposing airline passengers, but says he has a tape recording of a meeting with health officials where they allegedly told him it was all right for him to travel.
The NYT off-leads, and the WP and WSJ front, the family that controls Dow Jones & Co. announcing that it would consider purchase offers. The Bancroft family said it plans to meet with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to discuss Murdoch's $5 billion bid but emphasized it is also open to other deals. "Dow Jones & Co.'s 125-year history as an independent media company could be nearing an end," writes the WSJ. The NYT says some suspect the initial rejection of Murdoch's bid might have been a bargaining tactic but everyone notes the family seemed particularly concerned about the planned merger of Reuters and Thomson Corp., which could make things more difficult for Dow Jones Newswires.
The LAT and WP go inside with Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno's warning that September might be too early to judge whether the buildup of troops in Iraq is working. Odierno, the top U.S. ground commander in Iraq, said he might ask for more time when he presents his report. In his briefing, Odierno also said that commanders in Iraq now have the authority to reach out to militants and negotiate cease-fire agreements. The Post emphasizes that both Odierno and Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressed support for a long-term plan for troops in Iraq that would be similar to what exists in South Korea.
The LAT and WP go inside with the head of NASA saying in an interview that he's not sure global warming is "a problem we must wrestle with." Lawmakers have criticized NASA for cutting programs that track climate change.
The papers report the new spelling champion is 13-year-old Evan O'Dorney from California. His final word was "serrefine."
And this little piggy fought against gay marriage: The LAT fronts a look at Eric Jackson's quest to publish children's books that have a conservative message. His first book, Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! sold 30,000 copies, and he's now looking to publish one that exposes the lies about global warming.Daniel Politi writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

Thursday, May 31, 2007
The Story on Sushi
Letter from Tokyo
Maguro no kaiwa, the almost surgical process of disassembling tuna, is practiced by a tuna dealer. The average bluefin yields 10,000 pieces of sushi. Photograph by Tetsuya Miura.
If You Knew Sushi
In search of the ultimate sushi experience, the author plunges into the frenzy of the world's biggest seafood market—Tokyo's Tsukiji, where a bluefin tuna can fetch more than $170,000 at auction—and discovers the artistry between ocean and plate, as well as some fishy surprises.
by Nick Tosches June 2007
It looks like a samurai sword, and it's almost as long as he is tall. His hands are on the hilt. He raises and steadies the blade.
Two apprentices help to guide it. Twelve years ago, when it was new, this knife was much longer, but the apprentices' daily hours of tending to it, of sharpening and polishing it, have reduced it greatly.
It was made by the house of Masahisa, sword-makers for centuries to the samurai of the Minamoto, the founders of the first shogunate. In the 1870s, when the power of the shoguns was broken and the swords of the samurai were outlawed, Masahisa began making these things, longer and more deadly than the samurai swords of old.
The little guy with the big knife is Tsunenori Iida. He speaks not as an individual but as an emanation, the present voice, of the generations whose blood flows in him and who held the long knife in lifetimes before him, just as he speaks of Masahisa as if he were the same Masahisa who wrought the first samurai sword, in the days of dark mist. Thus it is that he tells me he's been here since 1861, during the Tokugawa shogunate, when this city, Tokyo, was still called Edo.
Iida-san is the master of the house of Hicho, one of the oldest and most venerable of the nakaoroshi gyosha, intermediate wholesalers of tuna, or tuna middlemen, if you will.
The tuna that lies before Iida-san on its belly was swimming fast and heavy after mackerel a few days ago under cold North Atlantic waves. In an hour or so, its flesh will be dispatched in parcels to the various sushi chefs who have chosen to buy it. Iida-san is about to make the first of the expert cuts that will quarter the 300-pound tuna lengthwise.
His long knife, with the mark of the maker Masahisa engraved in the shank of the blade, connects not only the past to the present but also the deep blue sea to the sushi counter.
Everything around him seems to turn still for a breath as he draws the blade toward him and lays open the tuna with surgical precision. And everything around him is a lot, for we are in the frantic heart of a madness unto itself: the wild, engulfing, blood-drenched madness of Tsukiji.
Until the summer of 1972, bluefin tuna was basically worthless to American fishermen. Nobody ever ate it, and its sole commercial use was as an ingredient in canned cat food. The only tuna that people ate, the white stuff, also in cans, was processed from smaller, albacore tuna, and even that probably would not have gotten into the American diet if a California cannery hadn't run out of sardines and begun selling it in 1903.
Theodore C. Bestor is the author of Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, the standard work on the subject. He, the chair of the Anthropology Department of Harvard, and I, the chair of nothing, spent some time together in Tokyo. It was Ted who taught me how to correctly pronounce the name of this place: "tskee-gee." (In her new book, The Sushi Economy, Sasha Issenberg says it's "pronounced roughly like 'squeegee,'" but it's not. Her book, however, is an engaging one.)
"I grew up in central Illinois," Ted told me, "and as a kid I don't remember ever eating fresh fish. I'm not sure I ever even saw one. As far as I knew, fish came frozen, already breaded and cut into oblongs for frying. And tuna, of course, was something that appeared only in cans like hockey pucks and ended up in sandwiches. I had absolutely no idea of what a tuna looked like, its size or anything else."
Tuna is the main event at Tsukiji, but everything from the sea—fresh fish, live fish, shrimp—is auctioned and sold here. At five in the morning, preceding the tuna auction, in another hall, there's the sea-urchin-roe auction. The most prized uni come from Hokkaido and its islands, and it's said that if you want to taste the best, freshest uni you must go there and eat it straight from the sea. But much of the uni laid out here in little boxes, often repackaged in Hokkaido, comes from California or Maine. Only in July, when sea urchins from the United States aren't available, are these boxes of uni not present. Color means more than size, and men roam the hall before the auction, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from paper cups, searching for uni of the most vibrant orange-golden hues. The northern-Japanese uni can fetch about ¥7,000, or about $60, for a little, 100-gram box, while the Maine uni go for much less, from a low of about ¥800 to a high of about ¥1,500, or between $6 and $13. Being from Newark, I wonder if they ever douse these things with dye.
This place, the all of it—formally the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Central Wholesale Market, a name by which few know it—is, as Ted Bestor puts it, the "fishmonger for the seven seas." Its history reaches back 400 years, to the Nihonbashi fish market, which was located not far from the present site of Tsukiji, in the Chuo Ward. On September 1, 1923, Tokyo was devastated by the Great Kanto Earthquake, which killed more than 140,000 people. Nihonbashi was gone, and a new market came into being in the town of Tsukiji, within Tokyo. Tsunenori Iida, whose great-grandfather had a fish-selling stall at the old market, is one of only four men whose family businesses began at Nihonbashi and are still in operation at Tsukiji today.
It's hard to say how much of what is sold at Tsukiji is exported to high-class sushi chefs abroad.
"My guess, and it is a guess," says Ted Bestor, "would be that the total amounts are probably on the order of a thousand or two kilograms worldwide each day. This is minuscule by comparison with the roughly two million kilograms of seafood Tsukiji handles every day."
Two million kilos is about four and a half million pounds, more than 2,000 tons. The Fulton Fish Market, in New York City, the second-largest fish market in the world, moves only 115 tons a year, an average of less than half a ton each working day.
Tsukiji occupies about 22½ hectares on the Sumida River—about 55½ acres, or well over two million square feet: bigger than 40 football fields. Near the Kaiko Bridge entrance, tucked away in relative serenity, an altar bell is rung by rope at the Namiyoke Jinja, a small Shinto shrine whose name can be translated as the Shrine to Protect from Waves. Outside the shrine are stone monuments honoring the seafood that passes through Tsukiji: a big black sculpted fish, a big egg-like roe. Marketmen leave offerings of sake at these deific figures. And for a few yen a miniature scroll of oracular hoodoo can be had. It was thus, after I had genuflected before the uni god, that it was revealed to me that the last dangerous year that a man passes through in life is his 62nd, while a woman is free of danger after 38.
At the main gate, not far from the shrine but far from serenity, a sign warns entrants to please pay attention to the traffic and walk carefully because the market is crowded with trucks and special vehicles and the floor in the market is very slippery.
Big trucks, little trucks, forklifts. And, everywhere, these things called turret trucks: high-lift vehicles designed to negotiate narrow passages and aisles. Old, diesel-fueled turrets; new, battery-powered turrets: every one of them driven by a single standing man who seems invariably to have both hands occupied with lighting up a smoke rather than with steering as he careens round and among the other vehicles that lurch and speed every which way, a surprise at every turn, over the bloody cobblestones amid the pedestrian traffic of the rest of the 60,000 or so people who work at Tsukiji. While no-hands driving seems to be purely optional, smoking at times does seem to be obligatory, and smokers outnumber by far the many no-smoking signs that are posted everywhere. Only the lowly Chinese stevedores who push or draw carts are deprived of the option of no-hands driving, and they squint through the smoke of teeth-clenched cigarettes as they trudge.
Lethal Delicacy
Wandering through Tsukiji in the good company of Ted Bestor and Tomohiro Asakawa, the senior commercial specialist of the Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa) at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, I become aware that the full array of the Lord's fishy chillun on sale here is beyond knowing.
There are shrimp from everywhere and of every kind, live and sprightly, in open plastic sacks in Styrofoam boxes with bubbling aeration tubes: red Japanese shrimp, sweet Japanese shrimp (ama-ebi), striped Asian kuruma shrimp, along with Alaskan shrimp and Maine shrimp on ice, and frozen shrimp of every size and sort. Live lobsters in boxes of wood shavings; abalone; fresh and frozen marlin, fresh and frozen swordfish, from Japanese waters or caught off Cape Town or Iran. The swordfish, Tom tells me, is not too popular here for sushi. Most of it goes to mountain resorts that serve it as sashimi to tourists.
There are tanks of live fugu swimming madly about. These are the costly blowfish with neurotoxic poison in their genital areas, a sometimes lethal delicacy which a sushi chef needs a special license to prepare and serve. Tetrodotoxin, the poison in fugu, can also produce a sense of euphoria when ingested in less than lethal amounts. The best fugu is from the waters of Kyushu, in the South.
In other tanks, live sea bass (suzuki), live sea bream (tai), and live flounder (hirame). There are flying fish (tobiuo), Pacific mackerel (saba), Spanish mackerel (sawara), and horse mackerel (aji).
From a profile of "the Controller in Charge of Horse Mackerel" in the corporate literature of Chuo Gyorui, one of the largest wholesalers here: "When Mitsuo Owada joined Chuo Gyorui in 1974, he became charmed by horse mackerel Owada used to eat several horse mackerel almost every day.… Both shippers and buyers … say, 'Depend on this man for horse mackerel traded at Tsukiji.'" The honored controller moves about 25 tons of horse mackerel through the market every day.
There are sardines and there are salmon, fresh from Norway and Japan. The salmon is not to be eaten raw, Tom explains, as its movement between freshwater and salt water renders it the host to many parasites. I ask him why I see no shark for sale. Shark, he says, can be eaten raw when fresh from the hook, but its muscle tissue is loaded with urea, which breaks down fast after death, releasing levels of ammonia that stink and can be toxic.
Eels: tanks, barrels, bushels, and bins of eels of all the shapes, colors, and sizes of slitheration, from the prized conger eel (anago) of the seas to the freshwater eel (unagi) of the rivers and lakes. All manner of squid—baby squid, big squid—and all manner of crabs—baby crabs, giant crabs; scallops and oysters and clams; periwinkles, cockles, and—what?—barnacles, yes, even barnacles, going for ¥1,600, or about 14 bucks, a kilo. I'd always thought these black footstalks were only an ugliness to be scraped from the hulls of old wooden ships.
"Broth," says Tom. "Some people make broth with them." He smiles, shakes his head. He apparently is not one of those people.
Giant oysters from Tsuruga Bay, with sea steaks of meat inside them; tairagi-gai, the enormous green mussels from the Aichi waters. Bizarre white fish laced with black, Paraplagusia japonica, known colloquially as "black-tongues." Sunfish intestines—chitlins of the sea—priced at ¥1,000, or about $8.50, a kilo; grotesque scorpion fish; monkfish; freshwater turtles, which the Japanese much prefer to the saltwater kind. Amid sizzle and smoke, a guy is selling grilled tuna cheeks. From his tuna stall, Tsunenori Iida frowns on him. He says that the cheek of the tuna is eaten by poor young workers. It's their subsistence and it's not right to make money from tuna cheeks. Actually, he says, the head and tail of the tuna should be used for fertilizer.
Sheets of kombu (kelp) covered with herring roe; big white sacs of octopus roe. Among a biochromatic wealth of mysterious mollusks and other sea invertebrates of unknown nature, I see the weirdest creature I've ever seen. Now, that's a fucking organism. Tom Asakawa looks at it awhile, too.
.. Hoya, or sea pineapple. Photograph by Tetsuya Miura. "Sea pineapple," he says. "Attaches to rocks in the ocean. Tastes something like iodine. Sendai people like it." It looks nothing like a pineapple. It looks like something that could exist only in a purely hallucinatory eco-system. It looks like, I don' the know, maybe an otherworldly marital aid inscrutable purpose for brides Satan.
"I need to eat that," I say.
"I'll see what I can do," Tom says.
And there, near the seaweed stalls, in those orange packages—yes, that's what the label says in Japanese: research whaling. And that's what it is: whale meat.
Twenty-four people have been to the moon. Only two have been to the deepest trench in the sea, and that was more than 45 years ago. They saw strange fish down there, and I'm sure that if those strange, abyssal fish could be brought to the surface they'd be here, at Tsukiji.
But as I said, tuna will always be the main event. The bluefin tuna, which can grow to more than 1,500 pounds and almost 12 feet in length, is a migratory fish that can be found in many parts of the world. According to Tsunenori Iida, the source of the best and most costly bluefin changes from season to season. In the winter, the most prized tuna is from the waters of northern Japan, near Oma and Hokkaido. But in the summer it is from the northeastern waters of the United States. This wasn't known in Japan until the summer of 1972, when the first such tuna was successfully brought fresh by air to Tokyo for sale at Tsukiji. (An account of the events leading up to that first successful tuna flight can be found in Sasha Issenberg's book.) Since then, fishers off the New England coast have seen the value of what used to be cat food rise to tens of thousands of dollars for a single fish. That's a lot of Puss 'n Boots.
And here, right here, let's stop trying to make sense, because very little of what is about to unfold harbors much sense.
A commercial trawler unloads its bluefin at a dock in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Awaiting the bluefin are agents of one or more of the five big fish wholesalers from Tsukiji, who set about examining the tuna.

Photograph by Tetsuya Miura.
"I tell you, Nicky, these Japanese guys, they take a little, thin slice from the tail, hold it to the light, look at it for a minute, then make an offer. God knows what they see."
This is what a Sicilian fish seller in New York once told me, describing a scene that occurs not only in Gloucester but also in ports throughout the world.
What the Japanese buying agent determines by his quick and practiced analysis of that sliver of tail is an indication of the tuna's inner color, its oil content, and the presence, if any, of parasitic disease. A smooth-grained and marbled tail is a prime indication of quality. The richness of the tuna's lipid content, its fat, can be gauged by how slippery the slice of tail feels between the fingers. Pockmarks reveal parasites. It's a complex diagnostic method that is mastered only with years of practice. The overall form and color of the tuna are also quickly assessed at the same time. The ideal of these qualities, inner and outer—the word for this ideal is kata—is also a bit of a mystery to outsiders.
If a tuna is deemed worthy, negotiations begin immediately. The buyer sees to it that the fish is properly gutted, packed with coolant, wrapped or sacked in polyethylene, and placed in an insulated box known as a "tuna coffin." In the case of a Gloucester catch, the tuna coffin is transported to John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York, and secured in the refrigerated hold of the next flight to Narita International Airport, where it is unloaded and trucked to the Tsukiji market, in central Tokyo, a few days after having left the sea.
The five big fish wholesalers at Tsukiji are also the five big auction houses at Tsukiji. In the dark of early morning, their tuna are graded and laid out in long rows on aluminum pallets in pools of blood in the big tuna-auction hall, in a quay of the main building. These tuna are from everywhere. Some were caught off the Australian coast, others were farmed in Mexico. Every one of them has the number of its grading painted on it in red. The tuna that bears the number 1 this morning is from Boston and weighs 150 kilos. No. 2 is from Spain. No. 3 is from the seaport of Sakai, south of Osaka.
Prospective bidders and their bidding agents roam the ranks of the dead fish, hunkering down here and there to peer intently into belly cavities with flashlights, and take notes.
The fish are auctioned in a squall of finger signals and utterances that are a language unto themselves. Assistants to the auctioneer execute invoices with astounding rapidity as the auctioneer's bellowing voice moves the bidding with speed from one fish to another. Bids are in yen per kilogram. These auctions are closed to the public. Tom Asakawa has hung a special permit around my neck. As we walk among the rows of tuna, Tom tells me that he has lived in Tokyo almost all his life and that, 30 or 35 years ago, long before he came to the U.S. Embassy, he worked here as a seafood importer. From the agents on the docks to the graders to the guys poking around in body cavities with flashlights, the challenge is the same: to evaluate through clues the inside of a fish that you can't simply cut open, because you don't yet own it.
Bluefin Madness
Occasionally tuna mania overtakes an auction. Hiroyasu Ito, the president of Chuo Gyorui, the biggest of the wholesalers and auction houses in terms of sales volume, tells me of a January morning in 1999 when an Oma tuna came to auction through his firm. It appeared to be the perfect tuna, a vision of true kata.
Ito-san remembers that the auction started modestly at ¥9,000, or about 75 bucks, per kilo. "And then ¥10,000, ¥20,000, ¥30,000, and ¥40,000. And then three men wanted that tuna very badly." The bidding among them escalated furiously. "At ¥50,000 per kilo, one of them gave up." The remaining two continued to compete. "Ninety thousand, and then ¥100,000 was the last."
The tuna weighed 200 kilos. At ¥100,000 per kilo, the possessed bidder had paid ¥20 million—the equivalent of more than $170,000—for a fish whose parceled meat could never recoup that amount.
"Big loss, big loss."
Tsunenori Iida remembers that unfortunate winner very well. He was a very wealthy man who was driven to have the most expensive tuna. He went bankrupt, Iida-san says, is out of the business, and is seen no more.
In December of 2005, Ito-san's company auctioned off a 285-kilo tuna from Oma for ¥39,000 per kilo: a total of ¥11,115,000, or about $95,000—the company's second-highest auction price.
As soon as a tuna is sold at auction, it is hauled off to the buyer's stall by cart. This morning the No. 1 tuna, the 150-kilo tuna from Boston, has been won by Iida-san, who paid ¥5,700 per kilo. Given the tuna's weight of 150 kilos, this comes to ¥855,000, or a bit over $7,250, a little less than $23 a pound.
A tuna's quality can't truly be judged until it is laid open with the long knife—that is, until after it has been bought. Iida-san isn't so impressed with this No. 1 tuna his man has brought him. He says that its quality isn't worth its price. Nonetheless, many of his regular customers, including some of the best sushi chefs and their apprentices, have already visited his stall, seen the tuna, and placed their orders. These include the owner of Nakahisa, in Roppongi, which Iida-san considers to be one of the three best sushi restaurants in Tokyo. (The others are in the Ginza district. They all have one thing in common: they are his patrons.)
With a smaller knife, the long quarters of the fish are cut into sections. Iida-san uses the breadth of four fingers to measure these sections before cutting.
"Generally speaking, Japanese man has eight centimeter."
The work area of the classic sushi counter is 26 centimeters deep. Three widths of Iida-san's hand equal 24 centimeters.
"Just right for the counter of 26."
Iida-san's is one of 1,677 stalls at Tsukiji, and his is one of 1,677 licenses to bid at the Tsukiji auctions and to resell what he has bought. Some of the other licensed buyers and resellers serve an international market, filling the orders of master sushi chefs in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. And so it is that our bluefin tuna from Gloucester, Massachusetts, flown from New York to Tokyo, where it is auctioned, bought, and cut into pieces of three hand widths at Tsukiji, is flown back to New York and delivered—three to nine days after it has left the sea—to a sushi chef there, or even in Boston. The average bluefin can yield more than 10,000 half-ounce pieces of sushi tuna from cuts that, like cuts of beef, vary in kind, quality, and price.
The words of the late movie director Don Siegel come to mind. He once took me to a very fancy and very formal seafood restaurant in Beverly Hills. We ordered some kind of fish that was presented in phyllo pastry, into which the eyes, fins, gill lines, and scales of the fish within had been etched with exacting care. Siegel looked down at it and said, "Imagine going through all that trouble for a dead fish."
Some say that good tuna is like good beef, that aging enhances it, up to a point. As to the enhancement of the price, there is no question. From dock to auction to resale to restaurant, the price of the fish steadily increases. And, as we've seen in the case of Tsunenori Iida's No. 1 tuna of this morning, the quality of the "best" bluefin varies from day to day, and so the quality of the tuna offered by a sushi chef, be it in Tokyo or New York, who serves only the "best" is also bound to be better on one day than another. The greatest of the sushi masters will tell you that the quality of fish served as sashimi should be higher than the quality of the fish served as sushi. But this distinction seems rarely to be evident in practice, and slices from the same piece of fish are usually used for both, whether or not that piece is of the highest quality.
Frozen bluefin, from tuna boats with flash-freezers, are auctioned separately at Tsukiji. The hard, frost-covered tuna are inspected with the aid of tekagi, the hand hooks that, like rubber boots, seem to be an essential accessory among all who work here. And the subtle cutting art of maguro no kaiwa, "the conversation of the tuna," as practiced by Iida-san and others, is replaced by loud electric bandsawing in an outdoor area, where the frozen tuna are cut into icy five-kilo blocks and run under water to speed thawing. The auctions are smaller and less spectacular. A few buyers prefer frozen tuna, saying that flash-freezing captures the freshness of the fish at its peak.
While auction prices for fresh fish are more volatile, there is little difference in the bids for the fresh and for the frozen. Sushi eaters rarely know if what they are eating is "fresh" (having remained so on its long transoceanic journeys to and from market in and out of its coffin) or thawed. The same supplier will often provide different sushi chefs with different grades of fish, depending on what the chef wants, what sort of operation he's running. A piece of tuna sushi that goes for 6 bucks at one restaurant and a piece of tuna that goes for 20 bucks at another restaurant may be from the same supplier but of very different quality. Likewise, a $20 piece of sushi is not necessarily the same at one sushi restaurant as at another, if the sources are different. Some suppliers get better fish than others. As I think it says somewhere in the Bible, "He who knows dead fish shall know me." Beware always of those "spicy" rolls sold at lower-end sushi places. The spices are often used to disguise the taste of fish that is bad or going bad.
High-end retail food markets in major American cities have taken to describing their tuna as "sushi-grade." Judging by the wide range of quality represented by the fish auctioned off at a wide range of prices every day at Tsukiji, one can only ask: What isn't sushi-grade tuna? "The label 'sushi-grade' doesn't ensure that the fish is safe for raw consumption," advises Hiroko Shimbo in her excellent book The Sushi Experience. "Most fishmongers don't sell sushi fish." I would go further and say that the label "sushi-grade" doesn't even ensure that the fish is any good whatsoever, raw or cooked. Be especially wary of tuna that has a fresh, rich crimson color but a dull, gelatinous texture. This is an indication of cat-food-grade tuna, no matter what it's called. It's likely that it has been gassed with carbon monoxide, which binds with hemoglobin to arrest the browning and graying of a fish whose time, even in death, has passed.
Evolving from a way to preserve fish in rice to a way to serve fresh fish on rice, sushi has been around for many centuries.
In the United States, where frozen fish sticks and canned albacore represented the bounty of the sea, the uni god has come only recently to threaten the sovereignty of Mrs. Paul and Charlie the Tuna. Today the Gorton Fisherman works for Nippon Suisan Kaisha of Tokyo.
The rise of sushi in America, and more lately in Europe, came at a time when omega-3 had turned into a shibboleth of the middle class and the so-called Mediterranean diet captured its cholesterol-ridden heart.My grandfather's sister, my great-aunt Helen, lived well into her 90s. She enjoyed fish, and she never drank coffee, only tea. But her older brother, my great-uncle Giovanni, who lived even longer than she, breakfasted on fried salsiccia and a can of Rheingold beer, and enjoyed raw eggs, which he sucked through a hole he had poked in the shell. He was from a poor region in Southern Italy, and he once revealed to me in few words the real Mediterranean diet: "Eat everything you can get your hands on."
The one thing they had in common, along with every other very old person I've ever known, is that they never, ever ate anything simply because it was supposed to be "good for you," and they never, ever took any of the "nutritional supplements" that are the snake-oil nostrums of our ever growing modern-day medicine show.
Alice Mabel Bacon, who spent much time in Japan, introduced the word "sushi" into the English language in 1893, in her book A Japanese Interior. It is doubtful that this sushi, which she described as "rice sandwiches," was made with fish. We do know that the "sushi" included on the menu of a Japanese dinner in the fall of 1894 at the Club of All Nations in Manhattan was not. Almost 30 years later, in the spring of 1924, "sushi" was served on the lawn of the Vanderlip estate, in Scarborough-on-Hudson, at a fund-raising event for a women's college in Tokyo, but it is almost certain that no raw fish was involved. All these early references to sushi are likely to variations of the simple treats of sweet sushi rice wrapped in seaweed or in little soybean cakes that were so popular among Japanese children.
In 1929, Ladies' Home Journal evinced an awareness of sushi and sashimi in an article introducing American housewives to Japanese cooking: "Any recipes using the delicate and raw tuna," said the magazine, were "purposely omitted." Our first account of raw fish being served in America also dates to 1929. In its coverage of a celebration in honor of the arrival of two Japanese cruisers in Los Angeles Harbor, the Times of that city noted, on August 24, that "sashimi, raw fish," was on the menu "at a dinner last night at the Japanese Cafe." The newspaper account referred to "Little Tokio," explaining that it was "the Japanese quarter of the city on East First street."

Hana and Takichi Kato (circa 1936), the original owners of Kawafuku. Like most Japanese restaurants in pre-70s America, theirs was primarily known for its sukiyaki. Courtesy of the Tsugio Kato family.
It was at 204 East First Street, in the heart of Little Tokyo, that the Kawafuku Cafe was located, having moved there from Weller Street, where it had opened in 1923. Like Miyako, the Japanese restaurant in New York that since 1910 had occupied a former brownstone mansion at 340 West 58th Street, Kawafuku was a swanky sukiyaki restaurant, run by Takichi and Hana Kato. An advertisement published on July 30, 1932, the opening day of the Los Angeles Olympics, described the "beautifully decorated" Kawafuku as "Featuring Japanese and Chinese Foods: 'sukiyaki' our Specialty." The Chinese cook, Chester, who worked for the Katos, is said to have made a mean chashu pork. But it's not for old Chester's pork that Kawafuku is remembered.
Kawafuku may have been the first restaurant in America to serve sushi. "My grandparents never dreamed that Caucasians would ever eat sushi," says Becky Kato Applegate, the granddaughter of Takichi and Hana Kato. But in 1946, Nakajima Tokijiro took over Kawafuku from 63-year-old Takichi Kato, and his dreams were different.
"The Suki-yaki Is Genuine"
Throughout the 30s, New York and Hollywood sophisticates had remained provincial in their taste. In 1930, Rian James, in Dining in New York, wrote of Miyako as a restaurant where "white-coated Japs hover about you" and "there are no American dishes for the timid adventurer. Here, you will eat your beef Suki-yaki." A year later, in Nightlife: Vanity Fair's Intimate Guide to New York After Dark, Charles G. Shaw praised Miyako as "the best Japanese cooking on Manhattan Isle," but the cooking he praised was fairly Westernized: "The shrimp soufflé and steamed fish with rice are mouth-watering delights." It was much the same in 1939, when George Rector, in Dining in New York with Rector, declared that "the suki-yaki is genuine."
On February 19, 1942, Executive Order 9066 was issued in the United States by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Japanese in America were rounded up and put into concentration camps, or "internment camps," as we more politely had it. Miyako had already been hit, shut down by the police on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed.
When the years of war and internment ended, Little Tokyo was reborn with a strengthened sense of identity. In the summer of 1950, the Los Angeles Times reporter Gene Sherman ventured there during Nisei Week.
"War-inspired incidents are nil now. Slang-slinging Nisei are too concerned with their festival to give them much thought. And I am too concerned with sukiyaki." He went to the Kawafuku Cafe, the restaurant that Nakajima Tokijiro had taken over from Takichi and Hana Kato.
"Just sukiyaki," the round-eyed man told the waitress. As he explained to his readers, "She asked if I would like some sashimi. That's fresh raw fish."
He held out for his sukiyaki, and he got it.
"The idea of eating raw fish may be repellent to Americans, but only until they recall that they do the same with oysters and clams," wrote June Owen in The New York Times of August 18, 1954. She went on to tell of a man named Tom Tamura who sold "fish for sashimi" at his Kinko Fish Market, on Amsterdam Avenue. "His customers include not only those of Japanese background but also Caucasians who have tasted and liked this specialty."
Kabuki opened in downtown New York in early 1961. "Not all of the dishes at the Kabuki will appeal to American palates. Count among these sashimi, or raw fish," wrote Craig Claiborne in the Times. Nippon, with its sushi bar, opened in Midtown Manhattan in 1963, the year that Ronald McDonald entered the world through the McMiracle of parthenogenesis. "New Yorkers seem to take to the raw fish dishes, sashimi and sushi, with almost the same enthusiasm they display for tempura and sukiyaki," wrote Claiborne. But McDonald's Filet-o-Fish sandwich, introduced in 1964, was the real vanguard of fish-eating in America.
By 1967, Miyako, which had reopened on West 56th Street, was looked upon as a place of the past. "New Yorkers may have become spoiled by a wealth of adventurous Japanese restaurants, and at the Miyako the food seems more Westernized than in some of the more recent ventures," wrote Claiborne. Eventually, even Miyako began serving sushi.
Regardless of what Claiborne said, it was Benihana, the restaurant that Rocky Aoki opened on West 56th Street in 1964, that defined the new Japanese food of America into the 70s. Serving steak cooked on hibachis at the center of diners' tables, Benihana was all the rage and soon became a chain that spread through the country, where most people still hadn't yet heard of sushi.
In July 1971, McDonald's came to Japan, opening in the Ginza Mitsukoshi department store, in Tokyo. It was the summer before that first New England tuna to be auctioned at Tsukiji made its transoceanic journey. And it was at this time, the early 70s, that an increasing number of people in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago became increasingly familiar with the increasing number of sushi restaurants in their cities.
These sushi eaters remained somewhat in the dark as to the subtleties of what they were eating. Wasabi was referred to as horseradish by The New York Times in 1954, and it was still referred to as horseradish by the Times in 1963. Used as a food and a medicine in Japan for more than a thousand years, wasabi, like horseradish, is a rootstock of the mustard family, but there is a world of difference between them. Wasabi grows naturally only in Japan, only on the northern slopes of shaded valleys near cold running streams, where it takes two or three years to mature. In preparing it for sushi, the chef or his apprentice finely grinds the root to a paste on a piece of rough sharkskin affixed to a small wooden board. Wasabi loses much of its flavor and pungency within minutes after it's grated, and so its preparation is timely.
Almost all the real wasabi used by sushi chefs today is farmed, and the more distinct and intense taste of wild wasabi, which grows much smaller than its farmed variant, is all but unknown to modern sushi eaters. If one is fortunate enough to encounter the rare sushi chef who prepares his own wasabi, it will almost invariably be farmed wasabi, the best of which comes from the paddies of Amagi, in Shizuoka Prefecture. But these days even fresh farmed wasabi is hardly ever used by sushi chefs. As Hiroko Shimbo says in The Sushi Experience, cheaper sushi restaurants—I would say most sushi restaurants—rely on wasabi powder, which is mixed with water, or wasabi paste from a tube. "These are not really wasabi at all; they are mixtures of ordinary white horseradish, mustard powder, and artificial flavor and color." Or worse. Far removed from those shaded valleys and cold running country streams, one common commercial "wasabi" is concocted of horseradish, lactose, corn oil, sorbitol, salt, water, artificial flavoring, turmeric, xanthan gum, citric acid, FD&C Yellow No. 5, and FD&C Blue No. 1.
If referring to wasabi as horseradish—and even one of the first, and still one of the best, Japanese-authored English-language guides to sushi, The Book of Sushi, brought out by Kodansha, in 1981, does so—is like referring to horseradish as wasabi, referring to the artificially flavored, artificially colored gunk of today as wasabi is even more absurd. Such stuff is a fitting complement to those little pieces of green sawtooth plastic used in presentation in many sushi places. These green plastic things are called baran, the name of a type of actual bamboo leaf on which sushi was often traditionally placed.
The ascent of sushi's popularity in urban America in the years 1972 to 1982 was phenomenal, as was its ascent throughout the rest of the country in the decades that followed. This ascent reached its peak on January 1, 2004, when a place called Tiger Sushi opened at the Mall of America, in Minnesota. Since then, like the ruler of two domains, sushi has reigned as America's new favorite fast food and favorite slow food as well, and its imperium is extending to Europe and beyond.
Why? I'm sure there are social-anthropological theories, all of them bound to be as boring as they are meaningless. The real answer, I think, is simple.
America is addicted to sugar, but it seeks increasingly to veil its addiction. Power Bars. Sounds healthy. Main ingredient: fructose syrup. Almost 25 percent sugar. The guy, Brian Maxwell, who got rich selling these things, selling sugar as nutrition, swore by them and croaked at the age of 51. Eat a Power Bar and nobody gives a glance. Run up a bag of dope and people look at you funny. I don't get it. How about a nice, large Tazo Chai Frappuccino Blended Crème from Starbucks? Sounds healthy—I mean, after all, chai—and classy too: crème? Sugar content: 17 teaspoons.
A killer sugar addiction, a preoccupation with health, no matter how misguided, and pretensions, or delusions, of worldly sophistication. Sushi perfectly satisfies them all.
In a nation that never ate much fresh fish, it's interesting that eel sushi is so very popular. I mean, from fish sticks and Filet-o-Fish sandwiches to conger eels? "Mommy, Mommy, I want eels, I want eels." This can't be understood other than in light of the fact that the sauce, anago no tsume, used in confecting eel sushi is a syrupy reduction made with table sugar, sake, soy sauce, and the sweet wine called mirin, and that during this reduction caramelizing causes the browning sugar to grow in mass through the formation of fructose and glucose. The oldest known menu from Kawafuku, probably from the 50s, lists broiled eel along with sashimi and sushi among its à la carte dishes, at the head of which is still to be found that old standby, sukiyaki.
As for the other types of sushi, they are all made with rice to which both table sugar and sweet rice vinegar have been added. Gari, the pickled ginger served with sushi, is also made with rice vinegar and table sugar. If it's cobalt pink rather than pale rose in color, it has been treated with a chemical bath of dye and extra sweetening agents.
But what care I for health? Sloth and gluttony alone vie within me for dominion, and I've already outlived the Power Bar guy. So let's get down.
The difference between a bad sushi joint and a good sushi joint is: at a good sushi joint the sweetness of the sushi doesn't challenge the taste of the fish. The difference between a good sushi joint and a very good sushi joint is: at a very good sushi joint the sweetness of the sushi doesn't challenge the taste of the fish, and the fish is very good. The difference between a very good sushi joint and a great sushi joint is: at a great sushi joint the sweetness of the sushi doesn't challenge the taste of the fish, the fish is excellent, and, piece after piece—sushi should never be served more than one piece at a time; each piece should come freshly made directly from the chef's hands to you—the meal unfolds in a concert of many varied tastes, some delicate and some strong, all in a sequence of subtle harmony and balance that leaves you exquisitely satisfied, in a way that Mrs. Paul never could.
Some Breakfast
In the end, it is all in the eating, and Tokyo, with Tsukiji at its heart, is surely a place to eat it.
Everyone at Tsukiji seems to know Tom, who has been coming here for more than 30 years, first as a seafood importer, later as a representative of noaa, and Ted, who speaks Japanese and also has been coming here for years, is a familiar figure as well. But on my second morning at the market, when we walk through the aisles and narrow passageways with Hiroyasu Ito, the president of Chuo Gyoru, one of the most powerful of the wholesalers and auction houses, he is more than recognized. Most of those we pass bow to him.
Yesterday, at his office in the Tsukiji compound, I asked him to tell me the name of the best sushi restaurant in Tokyo. He smiled and was silent. It was an awkward matter. After all, he knew many great sushi chefs personally, and he wished to offend no one. So, without directly answering my question, he said that we should meet in the morning and we would eat.
Now we wind through Tsukiji toward the northeastern outskirts of the market. It strikes me that here we are in the biggest fish market in the world and there is not a fishy whiff to be had. I've been told that only bad fish smells, but this is remarkable. When I pass the fish section at my local Food Emporium back home in New York, it stinks. When I pass Nobu on a summer morning, after the garbage has been hauled away, it stinks. Here the only smell is the sweet, smoky scent of the newly shaved flakes of dried bonito at the katsuobushi stand in the outer market.

Daiwa, a sushi joint within Tsukiji. Photograph by Tetsuya Miura.
Hiroyasu Ito leads us to a small, nondescript restaurant on a narrow street with no name. It's barely seven in the morning, and already there's a long line of people waiting to enter. Tom Asakawa tells me it's almost impossible to get into this place. People from all over Japan, from all over the world, come here in search of it. Ito-san looks at the queue and gestures for us to follow him. We turn a corner to another nameless, alley-like street, and come to an open kitchen door. The young girl scrubbing pans outside greets Ito-san with a happy smile. We enter through this back door, and emerge amid bows in a poky restaurant with a counter that seats fewer than a dozen. But somehow there are seats awaiting us. Small glasses and big bottles of Asahi Super Dry beer are set before us. The owner and chef, Shinichi Irino, immediately starts talking to Ito-san about the water's being good in this or that fishing port right now, and this or that fish came from this or that port; and as he talks, he prepares and serves us sushi made with this or that fish from this or that port.
"Southern bluefin. Indian Ocean."
Irino-san buys from 15 different dealers at Tsukiji, including five different tuna dealers.
The maguro toro sushi—the fatty bluefin-belly-meat sushi—is almost synesthetic and, to coin a phrase, melts in the mouth.
Daiwa, the name of this place, means "great harmony." Irino-san directs our eyes to the sign on the wall that bears this name in four-character calligraphy. He tells us proudly that it was painted by Kitanoumi, the youngest sumo wrestler to achieve the top rank of Yokozuna and now the chairman of the Japan Sumo Association.
"Personal friend."
Sardine sushi. Mackerel sushi. Uni sushi. More beer. This is breakfast as she should be et, Jack-san.
I ask Irino-san who is the best sushi chef in New York.
"Keita Sato. Hatsuhana restaurant."
Has Irino-san ever been to New York?
No. But he was invited to Norway last year.
It's explained to me that Keita Sato, the owner of Hatsuhana, is an old friend of his.
Hiroyasu Ito smiles with satisfaction. "This," he says, "is the absolute best way to eat sushi, just sitting at a small counter, talking to the chef, and having piece by piece unfolding in front of you."
"And always a joke."
Tomohiro Asakawa is a man of his word. He hasn't forgotten about me and the sea pineapple. On my last day in Tokyo, he gives me the name of a restaurant that serves sea pineapple. It's a drinking place, he says, a sake place. "They serve mostly whale meat, but they also have sea pineapple." He pauses and smiles. "And other things."
Whaling in Japan dates back to the prehistoric Jomon period. Today the Japanese government allows a number of certain species to be killed by permit every year. Many of them are from Antarctic waters and the seas of the Ogasawara Islands, an archipelago of more than 30 subtropical islands, including Iwo Jima, some one thousand kilometers, or about 540 nautical miles, a day's journey by ship, south of Tokyo. These whales, I'm told, are captured for "research." I recall the label on those packages of whale meat: research whaling.
Kabukicho, ablaze with neon, is Tokyo's red-light district. It's where the pleasure-houses are, and the fugu joints, and the clubs where yakuza gamble with flower cards. It's where, on the fifth floor of an old building on Kabukicho Street, the whale-meat restaurant is to be found. The name of the restaurant is Taruichi, which means something like "No. 1 sake barrel."
My companion, the Japanese translator Eva Yagino, speaks to the chef, Hiroyoshi Gota, who tells her that, among the many sakes sold here, there's a special sake, made by the Miyagi brewer Uragasumi, that's rarely available. The waitress pours us some, letting the cold sake overflow to the ceramic saucer beneath the masu, the sake box, made of the same pale wood, hinoki—a cypress that grows only in Japan—from which the best sushi-bar counters are crafted. A ceramic dish of sea salt is placed on the table, and Eva-san sets me straight: I'm to put a pinch of the salt on a corner of the masu, drink from that corner, raising the masu and ceramic saucer together, replenish the salt in the corner whenever I want, and in the end drink all the spillage in the saucer; then order more sake and do it again. As we sip our salted spillage, Eva-san translates the menu for me.
"Nodo-kuro," she says. "A white fish with a black throat from the Sea of Japan. It is rarely caught."
As she continues, I recall the way Tom Asakawa smiled when he said, " … and other things."
"Anglerfish liver. Ayu-fish guts. Sea-cucumber guts. Oh, and look at all these whale dishes: whale sushi; hari-hari nabe—that's whale meat with mizuna, a sort of Japanese mustard green that looks like a dandelion green; whale bacon; whale skin; whale tongue; whale brain; shinzo (that's whale heart); whale ovary—and, oh, here's your hoya sashi, your raw sea pineapple. Sashi is what the restaurant people call sashimi."
As I ponder my choices, Eva-san tells me about mamushi-zake. It's a sake to which, during fermentation, a mamushi is added. The mamushi, a type of pit viper, is one of the two species of poisonous snakes indigenous to Japan. Introduced live into the fermenting sake, it releases its poison into the brew as it leaves this vale of tears. Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese are not big on snake eating, but there is this sake.
"I need to drink that," I say.
But this is my last night in town, and the Asakusabashi snake store will be closed for the evening. She'll send it to me by air. Good. Back to the menu.
Just my luck: they're out of the whale ovary. I get me a big, juicy, red-meat whale steak. I get some whale heart too. And, of course, the sea pineapple, which comes with a little dipping bowl of su, rice-wine vinegar. I'm living. And what more fitting an end than whale ice cream, made with green-tea powder and whale morsels? Mmm, no?
Sea pineapple, good. Whale heart, bad. The ice cream, I don't remember.
I want to know what kind of whale I've eaten. Eva-san talks to the boss.
"Minke. A sort of small baleen."
I want to know what kind of whale makes for the best grub. Eva-san talks to the boss. He makes a forlorn gesture to a poster on the wall that pictures all the species of whales in the sea, and, forlornly, he expounds awhile.
The great blue whale, the largest animal that has ever lived, is by far the best, he says. But, as it's considered one of the world's most endangered species, it has been unobtainable for more than 35 years. I feel for the guy.
"No black market?"
"Too big to hide."
The Full Abundance
Some may have the temerity to disagree with me, but, for my money, the greatest Japanese restaurant is Sugiyama, in New York. There is no sushi here, no wasabi, but no shortage of raw fish, if you like it straight.
Nao Sugiyama, who is from Okayama, is a master of kaiseki. Of Zen origin, kaiseki is held as the highest form of Japanese cuisine, presenting through a series of courses and interludes the finest tastes of the shun, or season. But, more than that, Sugiyama-san is a master at bringing out—and allowing you to luxuriate in—the complexity that lies in simplicity and the simplicity that lies in complexity.
I've tried for a long time to better describe what Sugiyama-san does with what he carefully selects, on this day or that, in this season or that, from the full abundance of sea, stream, and woods. But whatever the secret is, it more than eludes description (he himself only shrugs and smiles at what he does); it subdues and silences the very desire to describe it as it bears you away.
He arrives at his restaurant at half past nine in the morning, prepares until half past five, then opens the door at six. I last ate there on an evening when lingering winter was giving way to spring. Here's what he fed me:
First, a course of monkfish liver, vinegared baby eel, which seems to have been filleted, and a jelly cake of crab and vegetables. (Later, I find out that the "baby eel," noresore, which I assumed to have been filleted, is actually pre–baby eel—the flat, transparent larvae, whose season is brief and now, of the Japanese conger.) Then slices of raw bluefin tuna, raw bluefin toro, raw hamachi, raw hamachi toro, raw tilefish, steamed octopus, ama-ebi (sweet shrimp; the sweetness is in the meat of the brain), a raw Kumamoto oyster, and a fragrant spray of small, purple shiso flowers. Then a clear soup of seaweed, whitefish cake, bamboo, and asari (a sort of springtime Japanese littleneck). Then grilled black cod from Toyama and crisp-roasted mild green peppers. Then half a lobster (served with a spoon to blend the soft, dark meat of the head into the white tail meat) and shiitake and oyster mushrooms. Then a miso soup with straw mushrooms and seaweed. Then minced grilled eel, tilefish, and bonito steamed in a mixture of botan rice and sticky rice, wrapped in a large, salted houba leaf, served with pickled Japanese radish. Then hoji tea, which Sugiyama-san describes as "sticky" tea. He means it was made from tea twigs, and "sticky" is to be taken as an adjectival form of "stick," which in fact turns out to be the first definition of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then a grapefruit-and-cream thing, invented by Sugiyama-san many years ago, made from hand-squeezed grapefruit juice, powdered sugar, lemon, Chardonnay, and scotch—all of which, magicked into a chilled semi-solid sphere, somehow ends up seeming to be an idealized peeled grapefruit, with no fibrous membranes, no pulp, no pits—served in very cold cream with a sprig of mint.
As to what all this looked like and how it tasted, well, you can't eat metaphors, and if I ever use words such as "succulent," shoot me, but suffice it to say that I remember thinking as I walked into the night: If the Roman emperors can be said to have missed out on anything, it was this.
Unless you've an intense jones for something special, food at the hands of a Japanese master chef should always be taken omakase, entrusting all to him. This is true of sushi, and it is certainly true of kaiseki. But once, when I was sick, I requested that Sugiyama-san prepare me a meal built around a hard-to-find Japanese turtle that he mentioned could cure me of what ailed me. It took him some days to get the turtle, but he did it. Whether it fixed me, I'll never know. By the time he secured the turtle, I was probably about to get better anyway.
Sugiyama-san is one of a handful of chefs in America with a fugu license, allowing him to prepare this poisonous and mildly intoxicating fish. I find it pretty bland, and I never got off on it, but Sugiyama-san does a great imitation of someone overdosing on the stuff and begging for more, as has been known to happen in the old country.
Masa, the New York sushi restaurant of Masayoshi Takayama, is within short walking distance of Sugiyama, and from one to the other, you could eat yourself to death, or new life, in a manner most sublime. If you could afford it, that is. Masa is the most expensive restaurant in the country, if not the world. It is also the best sushi restaurant in the country, if not the world.

Chef-owner Masayoshi Takayama of New York's Masa, where dinner for two is routinely more than $1,000. Photograph by Eric Ogden.
It's a beautiful place. The small sushi bar, crafted from a single, solid, $60,000 piece of blond virgin-forest hinoki, is cared for daily: lightly sanded, cleaned, buffed to renew its soft, natural luster by apprentices, who also, like those of Tsunenori Iida at Tsukiji, spend hours each day tending to knives that are kept razor-sharp and brilliantly gleaming. The surface on which Takayama-san uses those knives is an imposing thick block of ginkgo. Hinoki, he says, is a very hard wood, even though it looks quite soft. But the wood of the ginkgo tree—a unique tree, a botanical "living fossil" that constitutes a genus of its own—is soft and perfectly suited for knifework, as it won't dull the blade during the trimming and oblique slicing of piece after piece of raw fish that must be performed with uninterrupted and meticulous precision from the first to the last course of a sushi meal.
Watching Takayama-san at work at his block of ginkgo, or Sugiyama-san at his Yamaken low-density polyethylene (jyushi) manaita—as when watching Tsunenori Iida at his stall in Tsukiji—there is something to be sensed of the ancient belief in the soul, tamashii, of the knife.
As when I was last at Sugiyama, winter is giving way to spring. Behind Takayama-san as he works are big fresh-cut branches of spring-blooming Asian forsythia, their yellow, bell-shaped flowers blossoming bright. The plates, bowls, and cups, everything here right down to the ohashi-oki, the little ceramic chopstick rests, have been made by craftsmen in Japan especially for Takayama-san according to his own exacting designs. Even the spoons are of his design, carved of Ishikawa wood from the seaside north of Kyoto, then finished with the sap of the tree from which they were made. The door through which one enters Masa is made of 2,000-year-old Japanese bogwood.
This is a far cry from Daiwa, the hole-in-the-wall at Tsukiji, which Takayama-san agrees has the best sushi in Tokyo, though he adds that the best sushi restaurant in all Japan is Kameki, in Sendai, in the Northeast.
But you don't eat wallpaper. You eat this: baby firefly squid (hotaru ika) in a sauce of Japanese mustard (karashi) with rape-blossom buds (nanohana). Then chopped raw toro topped with caviar. Then seared bonito (katsuo tataki) with crispy seaweed (ogo), woodland ginger and bamboo (myoga take), wasabi greens, and those little purple shiso flowers. Then steamed asari clams from Chiba in their broth. Then icefish (shirauo)—tiny, almost translucent fish with buggy little black eyeballs which can be had for only a few weeks in early spring—served in sizzling white-sesame oil with Kalamata-olive paste and sprigs of newly budded prickly-ash leaves (kinome). Then a hot pot of cherry trout (sakura masu), whose season also lasts only a few weeks in spring. And then, after the kaiseki overture, the sushi feast begins.
Each piece of sushi is prepared individually and served immediately, as Takayama-san slices the fish, reaches into a cloth-covered barrel of rice, applies fresh-made wasabi paste to the side of the sliced fish that will be pressed to the rice, and, piece after piece, forms perfect sushi with dexterous rapidity in the palm of one hand with the nimble fingers of the other, placing it before you on a stoneware dish. He tells you to eat it with your hand. At humble little Daiwa, in Tsukiji, we had respectfully followed Hiroyasu Ito's manner of eating sushi with chopsticks. Now here, in the most opulent sushi restaurant on earth, the guy is telling me to use my hands. It's really just a matter of preference, but you don't want to piss this guy off while he's feeding you. You're given a small bowl of shoyu, into which only certain sushi should be dipped, and another small bowl of pale pickled ginger to be nibbled between courses.
The toro sushi is first. Then, in succession: striped jack; fluke; sea bream; snapper; squid; ama-ebi (the little shrimp with the sweet brain); cockle; red clam; giant clam; baby scallop; Nantucket scallop (freshly caught by a diver who sells only to Takayama-san and a few others); grilled toro sinew; herring; horse mackerel; uni; octopus; cooked shrimp; sea eel; freshwater eel; shiitake sushi; black-truffle sushi; a seaweed-wrapped roll of chopped toro and green, negi onion; young ume, a sort of Japanese plum, enclosed in a shiso leaf.
"And that's all," says Takayama-san with a smile.
Then there's a slice of Japanese muskmelon and buckwheat tea. (Also shoot me if I use the word "infusion.") And, of course, there's the check. My cohort and I drank two bottles of water, one Hoyo sake, and one glass of Sancerre. Our bill for two, including a 20 percent service charge but not including the additional tip, was $1,102.74.
My meal at Daiwa was free because the owner and chef, Shinichi Irino, wouldn't charge Hiroyasu Ito or anyone with him. Ted Bestor, who was with us that morning, says, "We were undoubtedly being served the top-of-the-line stuff, since we were guests of Mr. Ito, president of Chuo Gyorui, so who knows what it might have cost, but probably no more than ¥6,000 or ¥7,000"—50 or 60 bucks—"per person. I was in Daiwa early this month, and their standard menu price for the 'in-season chef's selection' was around ¥4,500," or about $38. "I also had dinner for four at an excellent and tiny Ginza sushi restaurant, with a celebrity chef. Four of us had a superb dinner for ¥15,000," or about $125, "per person."
The funny thing is, Masa's prices don't seem to be as exorbitantly jacked up as they might first appear. There's no way of knowing what you're paying for a particular piece of sushi, as dinner here is at the fixed price of $400 a person. But next door, at Bar Masa, there's a bar menu, and one of the items on it is toro tartare with caviar, the customary second course of a dinner at Masa, and the price is $68. Toro is costly, and the Sterling Royal caviar Takayama-san uses goes for about $70 an ounce, so what could the profit margin be? This dish alone is nearly a fifth of the cost of a dinner at Masa that includes five other overture dishes and 23 varieties of sushi, among them rare and expensive delicacies such as icefish. (In the past, he's also offered fish such as sayori, needlefish, and hamo, daggertooth conger pike, an eel-like summer-season thing so bony that no one could figure out how to eat it until the people of Kyoto devised a special technique called hone-giri, to which Takayama-san has added variations of his own.)
I first encountered Takayama-san in Beverly Hills, where he had Ginza Sushi-ko, named for the Tokyo restaurant where, after leaving his hometown of Kuroiso, in the mountainous prefecture of Tochigi, north of Tokyo, he served his years of apprenticeship. His own apprentice on the West Coast, Hiro Urasawa, took over the place, renamed it Urasawa, and Takayama-san moved to the East Coast and opened Masa in February 2004, at about the same time Tiger Sushi opened at the Mall of America. Since then, he seems not to have raised the price of a meal all that much. In the end, it's one of those choices we have to make in life: icefish and tuna sinew or that new H.D. TV for the next season of American Idol.
Guess what Takayama-san does when he takes his vacation every August? He goes to the mountains of Japan to fish and hunt for wild wasabi. And he is a fool for hoya, sea pineapple, too. These things say something.
I first ate Nobuyuki Matsuhisa's food years ago on the West Coast as well, when Matsuhisa, also in Beverly Hills, was the only restaurant he had. It was a good place. As for his Nobu in New York, my friend Chiemi Karasawa put it best: "a theme park of a restaurant, sort of a homogenized extraction of the real thing for the masses: a bunch of Caucasians serving things they don't even know how to pronounce."
High Holy Fish
From both Sugiyama-san and Takayama-san, I get intimations that Tsukiji's rule is no longer absolute. They both have suppliers who fly in most of their fish from Tokyo. The relationship between them, chef and supplier, and the process of choosing fish long-distance, involves much established trust and a daily and complicated exchange of faxes and calls. Besides a supplier who provides from Tsukiji, Takayama-san also has a supplier who provides from the smaller fish market in Osaka, for, he says, there are some northern fish, such as icefish and certain eels, that are more readily available in desirable quality and quantities in Osaka than in Tokyo. He told me the names of his suppliers on the condition that I would not reveal them. Sugiyama-san isn't so guarded as to his sources, and he told me his primary supplier is True World Foods, which runs fleets of boats and dozens of distribution centers, and supplies most of the sushi chefs in the United States.
True World, a major presence from Gloucester to Tokyo, is part of the global empire of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the 87-year-old founder of the Unification Church and self-proclaimed "Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord, and True Parent" of all humanity. Representatives of the firm were not forthcoming when I tried to arrange a meeting with True World buyers at the Tsukiji market. Later a representative of True World did tell me that the True World buyer arrives at Tsukiji every morning at two o'clock. "We purchase in the neighborhood of 30,000 pounds of fresh fish monthly from Tsukiji and other Japanese fish markets, of which over 6,000 pounds makes its way to customers in the Greater New York area."
Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord. Hell, no big deal. Maybe Charlie the Tuna was a Satanist, or a Scientologist even. I long ago lost interest in religion and politics except in their most extreme and entertaining forms. But I will say this: His High Holiness, or whatever the fuck he is, sure deals some damned good fish.
In partnership with Kyokuyo, which, like Hiroyasu Ito's Chuo Gyorui, is one of the biggest of the wholesalers and auction houses at Tsukiji, True World has recently introduced Polar Seas Frozen Sushi, which may become what frozen fish sticks and frozen fish cakes were in pre-sushi America.
Like Masa's primary supplier, True World now obtains many fish directly from their sources. At both Sugiyama and Masa on the nights I last visited them, the uni was from California and had been delivered directly from there. The shared feeling seems to be that if a box of 15 Maine or California uni are of high-enough quality and can be had for 15 bucks, why should one pay 65 for a similar small box of Hokkaido uni that comes through Tsukiji? And at Masa, in addition to the Nantucket scallops procured by a private diver, the bluefin tuna, which was from Spain, had been purchased at the Fulton Fish Market by one of Takayama-san's apprentices.
Now that the Japanese economy isn't what it was, Takayama-san says, more of the best tuna can be found locally, where it can fetch almost as good, or as good, a price as if it were sold to the Tsukiji buyers. Both men try simply to get the best fish they can, and the best fish is no longer to be found only at Tsukiji.
I tell Ted Bestor about encountering a Fulton Fish Market bluefin at Masa, and of my puzzlement as to how, on any particular day, one could figure out if the tuna is better at Tsukiji or here.
"I am not surprised that he gets Spanish tuna directly from Fulton rather than from Tokyo," Ted tells me. "Everyone at Tsukiji says Japanese buyers are increasingly being outbought by buyers from other countries. China, Taiwan, the U.S.—all with strong economies and a newly vigorous demand for the finest seafood, for sushi and for other cuisines, create stronger markets for the best fish in places other than Japan.
"The long-distance calculus of determining whether the fish are better at Tsukiji or at Fulton would be fascinating to figure out. I would guess that it involves a fair amount of hunchwork but also very close communications among people who have worked together for a very long time."
Thus, what was written so recently, by Sasha Issenberg, in The Sushi Economy—that a fish market such as Rungis, south of Paris, "in effect serves as a destination for Tsukiji's Mediterranean leftovers (and for tuna from other oceans that don't meet Japanese standards)"—is no longer necessarily so. In fact, there is now a very good sushi restaurant in Paris, Isami, on the Quai d'Orléans, on Île Saint-Louis, and the chef, Katsuo Nakamura, who is from Hokkaido, gets almost all his stuff from the Rungis market. The French—who often still associate Japanese food strictly with older restaurants such as Taka, in Montmartre—are warned when calling to make a reservation at Isami that only raw fish is served. (This isn't exactly true. There is carrelet grillé, grilled plaice, a European flatfish that has both eyes on the right side of its head.)
There are relocation plans under way for Tsukiji, and the market is scheduled to move, in 2012, to an even bigger site, in the Toyosu district, an industrial area on the other side of Tokyo Bay.
The bay is very polluted. The local fishing industry that once busied its wharves died off after the war. One small live-fish boat remains docked at Tsukiji, near where the Sumida River empties into the bay. It is a relic that goes nowhere.
Tsunenori Iida wipes the blood from the long knife. His family has been here at Tsukiji since the beginning. They were here, doing what they did, doing what he does, long before this market was here, back in the final days of the shoguns, in the old Nihonbashi market, when Tokyo was Edo. And he has been here all his life. What does he think of this move to come?
"I don't think there will be a big difference," he says. He returns his attention to the knife. "I don't like to think."
The fate of the market unsettles many at Tsukiji. Meanwhile, in the candyland of the West, where few people have ever heard of Tsukiji, what once was repulsive—the raw flesh of that laid-open tuna, the raw flesh of all that swims and slithers at Tsukiji—is now craved, more widely and more ravenously each day.
After returning from Japan, I see that one of the joints in my neighborhood has posted a new menu in an attempt to revive its dying business. Now, besides the cheeseburger deluxe, there is yellowtail pastrami and bigeye-tuna mignon with potato "gnocci" and red-wine, mushroom, and foie-gras broth. Around the corner from that place is a sushi place called Tokyo Bay, whose name now evokes dioxins. Contaminated-sediment sushi. Nearby are Ninja New York, a gimmicky and overpriced place where, as The New York Times put it, "servers, in black costumes, play the parts of ninjas and perform magic, something the kitchen doesn't do," and Kuki Sushi, describing itself as "Korean-Japanese cuisine" and offering take-out tuna, and of course eel, sushi at a buck seventy-five a piece. The local natural-food dump sells vegetarian sushi. The two local supermarkets sell prepared, refrigerated sushi. The supermarkets are close to yet another sushi place. From my windows I can see three more sushi restaurants.
From "the sukiyaki is genuine" and not for "the timid adventurer" to this. I'm waiting for the uni ice cream to hit those supermarket freezers.
My snake sake arrived, as Eva-san promised it would. It's right here, the dead viper coiled with its fanged mouth open at the bottom of the jar, looking as if it's trying to tell me something from beyond. He sure doesn't seem to be at peace, if you get my drift. What can I say? I don't know. I will drink responsibly.
Nick Tosches is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

Social Climbing to Starting Over: A First Wife’s Lot
Paul A. Broben/USA Network
THE STARTER WIFE Peter Jacobson, left, Debra Messing and Joe Mantegna in this new USA mini-series.
In the Magazine: Gigi's Novel Life (May 22, 2005)
Todd Anderson/ABC
EX-WIVES CLUB In a new reality show, Marla Maples, center, is counselor to Kevin, whose wife had an affair.
Lifetime Television
ARMY WIVES Kim Delaney and Brian McNamara as husband and wife in this new Lifetime series.
May 31, 2007
The TV Watch
Social Climbing to Starting Over: A First Wife's Lot
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Feminism didn't bridge the divide between men and women, it broke the barriers separating best friends.
Betty Friedan made the suburbs safe for sisterhood. By the time "Sex and the City" rolled around, female bonding — especially over fancy cocktails — was as much a part of popular culture as fishing trips and fraternity hazing rites.
The fact that nowadays women are allowed to like one another, even at the expense of men, is at the core of ladies-night hits like "Grey's Anatomy." So atavistic series like "The Bachelor" and "Desperate Housewives" that play down female camaraderie and instead showcase hissy fits and catfights have a naughty, contrarian tang.
That retro allure is what drives tonight's premiere of "The Starter Wife," a USA mini-series that explores the plight of the discarded Hollywood socialite. It's a satire-lite soufflé that follows all the steps of the chick-lit recipe. (If "Jane Eyre" were written according to today's rules, the orphaned governess would be dragged to a bar by two female friends and a gay male pal and plied with mixed drinks and pool boys until she forgot all about Mr. Rochester and his mad starter wife.)
Debra Messing ("Will & Grace") plays Molly Kagan, whose studio mogul husband, Kenny (Peter Jacobson), tells her by cellphone that he wants a divorce. Based on a best-selling novel by Gigi Levangie Grazer, the wife of the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer, "The Starter Wife" is a throwback to "The Women," Clare Boothe Luce's 1936 play about divorce among the rich and pampered. "The Starter Wife" is set in Malibu and Brentwood, not Park Avenue, so it's also a lot like the 1940s radio show "Mary Noble, Backstage Wife" and the novels of Jackie Collins.
These kinds of tell-all tales mix satirical flicks at the follies of the rich and famous (Kenny prepares their young daughter for school by saying, "Don't forget to share your cookies with Violet Affleck") with the voyeuristic spectacle of grown-up women channeling their inner Mean Girls.
All soap operas centered on women include vixens and villainesses, so the difference lies mainly in the proportion. Molly Kagan has a few loyal female friends — and a gay decorator — but the juice of her tale comes from the snooty, gossiping frienemies who snub her in restaurants and kick her off charity committees when she loses her status as The Wife of.
And the beauty of cable lies in the gradation of expectations. On premium networks like HBO or Showtime, "The Starter Wife" would seem trite and a little too obvious. On USA, it's an escapist hoot.
"The Starter Wife" serves as a comic chaser to "Army Wives," a more serious, and surprisingly engrossing, Lifetime series on Sunday about what happens to spouses left on base when their soldiers are deployed to combat zones (a lot). It's a little like "The Unit," the CBS drama about an elite team of commandos and their wives, but the focus of this Lifetime drama is on the women behind the men in uniform.
"Army Wives," which stars Kim Delaney, examines women of varying age, rank and serial blunder who come together under the stress of military life — and the needling of a few bad women. Not all the bonding spouses are female, however. One member of the clique is an army psychiatrist whose wife returns from a two-year rotation in Afghanistan with a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Female solidarity — or the lack of it — seems to be a popular theme this summer. ABC even ordered up a reality show, "Ex-Wives Club," featuring Marla Maples, the former Mrs. Donald Trump; Angie Everhart, who was once engaged to Sylvester Stallone; and Shar Jackson, who is the mother of two of Kevin Federline's children and who lost him to Britney Spears. Those three professional exes lend their expertise to ordinary people who are suffering the pain of rejection.
Their methods can be brutal. On the premiere, the scornees are sent to a life coach, Debbie Ford, who runs an emotional boot camp in Palm Springs, Calif. The schedule begins early: "8:00 a.m. — Anger."
But the founding members of "Ex-Wives Club" also offer empathy. Ms. Maples was careful in the first episode on Monday to speak well of her ex-husband, but at times she couldn't resist a lateral dig. Ms. Maples helps Kevin, a would-be mortgage broker, organize a networking party in the real estate community. "I did this so many years with my ex-husband," she replies when he thanks her. "And to be here with someone like you who appreciates it ..." Tearing up, she breaks off.
Molly could use that kind of support. Instead, when Kenny dumps her for a sexy young pop singer named Shoshanna, Molly finds herself shunned by her fellow worshipers at what she calls the Church of Perpetual Upkeep. After losing her gym membership and even her coveted spot in a Mommy and Me class, she runs away. Not far, however. She retreats to the Malibu house of her oldest and hardest-drinking friend, Joan (Judy Davis), who has entered rehab. Lonely, Molly befriends the security guard, Lavender (Anika Noni Rose of "Dreamgirls"), who is preoccupied with college loans, not collagen.
Molly's decorator, Rodney (Chris Diamantopoulos), sticks by her, but Cricket (Miranda Otto) is torn. Her husband is a director of blockbuster comedies who wants Kenny's studio to back a serious film, "The Dutch Bureaucrat's Son," and doesn't want Kenny to think he and Cricket side with Molly. It doesn't take long for Cricket to come to her senses. Molly's senses are divided between the flirty overtures of her husband's boss, Lou (Joe Mantegna), and a buff Malibu beach bum, Sam (Stephen Moyer).
"Army Wives" is a street-smart homage to those who also serve because they stand and wait. "The Starter Wife" is not exactly groundbreaking social satire, but it's a sassy look at those who stand behind their Hollywood men, and are waited upon by servants.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Politics and the Mafia
Salvatore Laporta/Associated Press
All but one of the Naples garbage dumps are closed, and residents' anger rises as fast as the smelly mounds
May 31, 2007
Naples Journal
In Mire of Politics and the Mafia, Garbage Reigns
By IAN FISHER
MELITO DI NAPOLI, Italy, May 29 — Business at Pizzeria Napoli Nord is down 70 percent, and no one has the slightest doubt why: The reasons include eggshells, scuzzy teddy bears, garlic, hair that looks human, boxes for blood pressure medicine, moldy wine bottles — all in an unbroken heap of garbage, at places 6 feet high, stretching 100 or more yards along the curb to the pizzeria's doorstep.
"If you see all this trash, you don't have much desire to eat," said the owner, Vittorio Silvestri, 59, who, like most people in and around Naples these days, is very angry at his leaders.
For a dozen years, Naples and surrounding towns like this one have periodically choked on their refuse, but the last two weeks have flared into a real crisis, as much political as sanitary: trash began piling high in the streets as places to dump it officially filled up. Then, on Saturday, the last legal dump closed.
As the piles rose and the stench spread, 100 or more refuse fires burned some nights — one of many trash-related protests that included, inevitably, mothers clutching rosaries on railroad tracks. And while a patchwork of emergency measures has eased the crisis in the past few days, even the beleaguered men whose job it is to collect the trash sympathized.
"The people are right," said Guido Lauria, in charge of sanitation for a large section of the city, including the Soccavo neighborhood, where his workers cleared away heaps of garbage. "You smell this. People have children, but animals come, then insects. And then they complain."
The problems around Naples, a city long defined by both its loveliness and its squalor, are complicated, raising worries about tourism, inequity in southern Italy and the local mafia, the Camorra.
But put simply, the bottom line seems the failure of politics, never a strong point here.
As trash dumps filled over the years, it proved impossible to find new places or ways to get rid of garbage, largely because of local protests or protection by one politician or another. But years of postponing the problem finally caught up with Naples (and by bad luck just as the temperature rose, creating as much stink as unsightliness).
"This is a situation that is tied to the incapability of the political structure," said Ermete Realacci, an environmental expert and member of Parliament for the center-left Daisy Party. Namely, he said, politicians of all stripes have been unwilling "to make strong choices" to build new dumps or incinerators.
And so, as the world's news media fixed on trash fires burning in the streets, the nation's president, Giorgio Napolitano, issued an unusual "extremely energetic appeal" to all levels of government and to politicians of the left, right and center finally to solve the crisis. At stake was not just public order, he said, but "the image of the country."
The president's office normally holds itself above daily politics. But in this case Mr. Napolitano, a courtly native of Naples, used his prestige to persuade the residents of one town — led by one devout and praying woman called La Passionaria di Parapoti — to allow a closed local dump to be reopened for a brief 20 days.
That, combined with several other temporary measures, is allowing Naples and the surrounding communities to finally begin digging out — and to lower tempers a little, too.
Already the center of Naples, amid worry about the risk to a tourist trade it depends heavily on, seems largely clean, and in the last few days, the sanitation department has clicked into an emergency mode that has cleared away an impressive amount of trash.
But the dumps are temporary, the fires have not stopped and much trash remains, compounding longstanding problems in the poorer south of Italy, especially in the peripheral neighborhoods of dingy high-rises already plagued by drugs and the Camorra.
On Tuesday in Scampia, one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods, drug dealers sat across the street from a Dumpster spilling over with construction debris and unidentifiable mushy rot.
"It's never been like this — I can't tell you why," said Sabato D'Aria, 37, owner of a small grocery nearby.
Politicians, he said, only "talk, talk, talk, but in the end you see very little."
"Unfortunately, here in the south we are always more penalized. Italy is divided."
There is also the problem of the Camorra, which profits extraordinarily in the endless crisis over trash, much as arms dealers thrive in war.
The Camorra controls many of the trucks and workers used to haul away trash. But it also operates illegal dumps used more in times of crisis — and far more harmful than legal ones to humans and the environment.
In theory, a permanent solution is not difficult, and has been proposed by an emergency commission: greater recycling and the opening of several incinerators and new dumping sites in Naples and the neighboring provinces. But as has happened in several of the identified towns over the last two weeks, local people protest loudly.
"The reaction is very strong," said Marta di Gennaro, a deputy to Guido Bertolaso, the government's "trash czar." She called it "an exaggerated Nimby syndrome," in which the "not in my backyard" protestors get disproportionately shrill media coverage.
And so, a dozen years after the crisis began, the only definite new waste site has been started in Acerra, just north of Naples — and residents there have been complaining too, perhaps with more reason than most. Three grey smokestacks for the region's only incinerator, set to go on line in several months, rise from the town's edge.
But a field across the road has also been used during the last few weeks as a temporary dump, whose smell and pickings attracts clouds of seagulls. Nearly every day, protesters have lain in the road to block garbage trucks. Trash was thrown in the mayor's yard.
"Acerra shouldn't die," said one protester, Filippo Castaldo, an unemployed 50-year-old. "It should fight."
So the question remains whether Naples is really ready to overcome its trash crisis, whether politicians can finally agree where new dumps and incinerators should be located. (Shipping garbage abroad does not seem to be an option: Romania, one of the few possibilities, recently said it would not take Italy's trash.)
If difficult decisions are not made — and quickly — nearly everyone fears that trash will begin piling up again, with still more fires, anger and questions about how this can still happen in Europe.
There are many skeptics. Giorgio Lanzaro, a Naples city councilor in charge of the environment, noted how strong the protests had already been in communities where the trash might be stored only temporarily.
"I have some doubts whether this is over," he said.
Peter Kiefer contributed reporting from Naples and Rome.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Concussions Tied to Depression

Jim Davis/The Boston Globe
The former New England player Ted Johnson has said that his depression had been linked to concussions.
May 31, 2007
Concussions Tied to Depression in Ex-N.F.L. Players
By ALAN SCHWARZ
The rate of diagnosed clinical depression among retired National Football League players is strongly correlated with the number of concussions they sustained, according to a study to be published today.
The study was conducted by the University of North Carolina's Center for the Study of Retired Athletes and based on a general health survey of 2,552 retired N.F.L. players. It corroborates other findings regarding brain trauma and later-life depression in other subsets of the general population, but runs counter to longtime assertions by the N.F.L. that concussions in football have no long-term effects.
As the most comprehensive study of football players to date, the paper will add to the escalating debate over the effects of and proper approach to football-related concussions.
The study, which will appear in the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, found that of the 595 players who recalled sustaining three or more concussions on the football field, 20.2 percent said they had been found to have depression. That is three times the rate of players who have not sustained concussions. The full data, the study reports, "call into question how effectively retired professional football players with a history of three or more concussions are able to meet the mental and physical demands of life after playing professional football."
In January, a neuropathologist claimed that repeated concussions likely contributed to the November suicide of the former Philadelphia Eagles player Andre Waters. Three weeks later, the former New England Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson not only revealed that his significant depression and cognitive decline had been linked by a neurologist to on-field concussions, but also claimed that his most damaging concussion had been sustained after his coach, Bill Belichick, coerced him into practicing against the advice of team doctors.
While consistently defending its teams' treatment of concussions and denying any relationship between players' brain trauma and later neurocognitive decline, the N.F.L. has subsequently announced several related initiatives. The league and its players union recently created a fund to help pay the medical expenses of players suffering from Alzheimer's disease or similar dementia. Last week, N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell announced wide-ranging league guidelines regarding concussions, from obligatory neuropsychological testing for all players to what he called a "whistle-blower system" where players and doctors can anonymously report any coach's attempt to override the wishes of concussed players or medical personnel.
The N.F.L. has criticized previous papers published by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes — which identified similar links between on-field concussions and both later mild cognitive impairment and early-onset Alzheimer's disease — and reasserted those concerns this week with regard to the paper on depression.
Several members of the league's mild traumatic brain injury committee cited two main issues in telephone interviews this week: that the survey was returned by 69 percent of the retired players to whom it was mailed, and that those who did respond were relying solely on their memories of on-field concussions. One committee member, Dr. Henry Feuer of the Indiana University Medical Center and a medical consultant for the Indianapolis Colts, went so far as to call the center's findings "virtually worthless."
Dr. Ira Casson, the co-chairman of the committee, said, "Survey studies are the weakest type of research study — they're subject to all kinds of error and misinterpretation and miscalculation."
Regarding the issue of players' recollection of brain trauma, Dr. Casson said: "They had no objective evaluations to determine whether or not what the people told them in the surveys was correct or not. They didn't have information from doctors confirming it, they didn't have tests, they didn't have examinations. They didn't have anything. They just kind of took people's words for it."
According to other experts, the 69 percent return rate was quite high for such survey research, which has been widely used to establish preliminary links between smoking and lung cancer, explore the relationship between diet and health, and track trends in obesity and drug use.
After reading the depression study and considering the league's issues with recollective survey research, Dr. John Whyte, the director of the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute in Philadelphia and an expert in neurological research methodology, said he did not share the league's criticisms.
"To the person who says this is worthless, let's just discard a third of the medical literature that we trust and go by today," said Dr. Whyte, who has no connection with either the N.F.L. or the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes, which is partly funded by the N.F.L. players union. "Here, the response rate was good and not a relevant issue to the findings. We have some pretty solid data that multiple concussions caused cumulative brain damage and increased risk of depression, and that is not in conflict with the growing literature.
"Do I think this one study proves the point beyond doubt? No. Does it contribute in a meaningful way? You bet."
The study, which underwent formal, anonymous peer review before publication, reported that of the 595 players who recalled sustaining three or more concussions on the football field, 20.2 percent said a physician found they had depression. Players with one or two concussions were found to have depression 9.7 percent of the time, and those with none, 6.6. (Respondents were on average 54 years old and had played almost seven seasons in the N.F.L. A minimum of two seasons was required for inclusion in the study.)
The study considered concussions sustained in high school and college as well, not just in the N.F.L. Because the diagnosis of concussions has undergone substantial refinement since the 1960s and 1970s, when many of the survey respondents had played, a modern description of symptoms — such as nausea or seeing stars following a strong blow to the head, not simply being knocked unconscious — was provided.
Members of the N.F.L. concussion committee criticized the use of such a retrospective definition. They also cited a mail survey by doctors at the University of Michigan, results of which were published two months ago in the same American College of Sports Medicine journal, that found the self-reported incidence of depression among retired N.F.L. players to be 15 percent — similar to that of the general population — and that such depression was strongly correlated with the chronic pain many N.F.L. retirees experience.
The associate editor-in-chief of the journal who handled the review of both papers, Dr. Thomas Best, said in a telephone interview yesterday that the studies did not conflict. Dr. Best explained that the Michigan study did not consider concussions specifically, and that the North Carolina study in fact used statistical tests to account for players' chronic pain and found that the strong correlation between number of concussions and depression remained virtually unchanged.
"The North Carolina paper is not saying that N.F.L. players are or are not at risk for depression," said Dr. Best, the medical director of the Ohio State University's Sportsmedicine Center. "What we learned from the paper is that there's a correlation between the number of concussions sustained and depression they experience later in life."
Mr. Goodell said last week that the league's concussion committee had just begun its own study "to determine if there are any long-term effects of concussions on retired N.F.L. players."
Dr. Casson, the committee's co-chair, said that players who retired from 1986 through 1996 would be randomly approached to undergo "a comprehensive neurological examination, and a comprehensive neurologic history, including a detailed concussion history," using player recollection cross-referenced with old team injury reports. He said that the study would take two to three years to be completed and another year to be published.
Given that the average N.F.L. retirement age from 1986 to 1996 was approximately 27, a random player from that period would be approximately 46 at the N.F.L. study's completion, eight years younger than those considered by the paper being released today.
Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz, the center's research director and the principal author of the study, said that even with those differences he was confident the N.F.L. study would corroborate his group's conclusions.
"It sounds as if they need to study the question themselves to believe the findings," Dr. Guskiewicz said. "I think they're going to be very surprised at what they find, compared with what they've been led to believe by members of their own committee."
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Giuliani
Giuliani's Unwelcome Birthday Guests
by Azi Paybarah Published: May 29, 2007
Tags: Politics, Jim Riches, New York City Fire Department, Rudolph Giuliani
..
Here's an unwelcome birthday gift for Rudy Giuliani, as he travels around the city raising money: protests from fire fighters and family members of September 11th victims.
They've shown up in the past at Giuliani's presidential events. Today, they're gathering in Bay Ridge, and they have plans to follow him nationwide starting sometime around January, according to Jim Riches, a deputy chief with the fire department whose son was killed in the World Trade Center attacks.
"We have all the UFA, the UFOA, and the fire members are all behind us -- the International Association of Fire Fighters," said Riches. "And we're going to be out there today to let everybody know that he's not the hero that he says he is."
The group's complaints center on the faulty radios used by the fire department that day and what they say was a lack of coordination at Ground Zero.
And Riches disputes the notion that Giuliani provided any form of leadership on September 11 or in the days following.
"If somebody can tell me what he did on 9/11 that was so good, I'd love to hear it. All he did was give information on the TV"
"He did nothing," Riches continued. "He stood there with a TV reporter and told everyone what was going on. And he got it from everybody else down at the site."

Hillary Clinton
What Makes Hillary Stumble?
by Ana Marie Cox Published: May 29, 2007
Tags: Politics, Carl Bernstein, Hillary Clinton
This article was published in the June 3, 2007, edition of The New York Observer.

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Photo: Getty Images
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Carl Bernstein: First Nixon, now Hillary.
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A WOMAN IN CHARGE: THE LIFE OF HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON By Carl Bernstein Alfred A. Knopf, 628 pages, $27.95
Carl Bernstein is a rarity in the American electorate: He's ambivalent about Hillary Clinton. Recent polls show as little as 3 percent of Americans have no opinion of the former First Lady, and the 97 percent that do split almost evenly between favorable and unfavorable. So what to make of a book that exhaustively (over 600 pages of exhaust) plumbs the depths of the known Hillary record—we learn about her prom dress, her religious beliefs, her endometritis, her fears of indictment—only to conclude, lamely, that she "is neither the demon of the right's perception, nor a feminist saint, nor is she particularly emblematic of her time," and, shockingly, "the jury remains out."
Tell it to the Scaife Foundation, Carl. Or, for that matter, to her passionate supporters, who see her not as a mere leader, but as a symbol of national redemption. If the "jury remains out" on Hillary Clinton, it is only because they're hung.
Of course, her ability to polarize is what makes writing a mainstream biography of Mrs. Clinton so difficult. The non-hack must provide enough detail about the numerous Clinton scandals to make news, but cannot dim the lights too much on her considerable accomplishments, lest he derail the one thing that's truly interesting about Hillary Clinton: She might be our next President.
At times, Mr. Bernstein seems self-conscious about the tightrope that he's walking, taking the time to implicitly distance himself from hatchet jobs like Edward Klein's The Truth About Hillary (which he describes as "an ideological screed, which contains barely smidgens—and no context—about what the title promises"), but also to judge, primly, in the style of high wingnuttery, such irrelevant details as the fact that "[h]er ankles were thick," and to harp on both the "entitlement attitude of" and "holier-than-thou attitude of"—attributes that get their own index entries, along with such weirdly psychographic points of interest as "egregious errors and failures of" (10 references), "friendship capacity of" (eight references), "anger, temper, and hurt of" (23 references) and "clothes of" (25 references).
One is tempted to observe that the attention given to these areas says as much about Carl Bernstein as it does Hillary Clinton; though Mr. Bernstein has obvious and strong credentials as a journalist, his skill as an arbiter of what makes a relationship work—or a woman happy—has been rather famously questioned. (Heartburn, a roman à clef by his ex-wife, Nora Ephron, is about Mr. Bernstein leaving her for another woman while Ms. Ephron was pregnant with their child.) Indeed, his investigation of the central mystery of the Clintons' marriage—what has kept them together—is curiously flat-footed: Apparently, they have some kind of partnership. Or, as he puts it in one of several iterations: "It was obvious that Bill and Hillary could never have achieved what they had without each other." Not exactly worth a siren on Drudge.
Mr. Bernstein's solution to wrapping the divergent opinions about Hillary—is she pragmatic or an idealist? Spiritual or hard-edged? Politically savvy or tin-eared?—into one neat (or neat-ish) package is not to clarify which view of Hillary might be true, but to proclaim that one doesn't have to choose. He tells us, repeatedly, that it is Mrs. Clinton's "extraordinary capability for change and evolutionary development" that makes sense of the contradictions in her life, "from Goldwater Girl to liberal Democrat, from fashion victim to power-suit sophisticate, from embattled first lady to establishmentarian senator." In his grand narrative, events unspool like just-so stories, with Hillary learning An Important Lesson from her triumphs and defeats. When Bill loses his first election (to represent Arkansas in Congress) because—argues Mr. Bernstein—Hillary was unwilling to take a shady contribution, Mr. Bernstein writes: "Subsequently, she would be far less committed to the high road, and much more concerned with results." This is, however, a lesson she also learned at Wellesley, where "[s]he was more interested in the process of achieving victory than in taking a philosophical position that could not lead anywhere."
And, just to make sure, she learns it again after Bill first loses re-election as governor, upon which she and Dick Morris adopt a strategy of "do[ing] whatever it took to get elected and us[ing] the same philosophy to govern."
Hillary Clinton was never slow to learn. Mr. Bernstein gets closer to what might be the truth when he observes that her approach is more like "military rigor: reading the landscape, seeing the obstacles, recognizing which ones are malevolent or malign, and taking expedient action accordingly." She's less about evolution than adaptation. And as much as Mr. Bernstein wants to talk about "Clinton, Hillary. personal growth and change of" (the index is in many ways more interesting than the book), his portrayal of her is remarkably unsurprising.
The aforementioned prom dress "reflected Hillary's developing perfectionism." At a debate among the candidates for Wellesley student-body president, she engages in "the same kind of vagueness that would work to her advantage as a candidate for the U.S. Senate," even as she exhibited "one of her strengths as a leader, still evident today: her willingness to participate in the drudgery of government rather than simply direct policy from Olympian heights." I suspect her quest to "find a better system for the return of library books" went better than health-care reform.
Which brings us to health-care reform. Mr. Bernstein's rehearsal of the opening fiasco of the first Clinton administration goes into extensive detail about an era that most Democrats would prefer to forget. (Mr. Bernstein's recollection of the sad "Reform Riders" bus tour that was supposed to rally support for the measure is particularly cringe-inducing.) We know how this movie ends, but it doesn't make the plot points any less pathetic. Her 500-person task force, meeting in secret, inadvertently offered up the first of what would become a destructive pattern for the Clinton administration: a lawsuit, followed by frantic legal maneuvering, followed by more lawsuits, and so on. Mr. Bernstein suggests that "Hillarycare" may even have been the first link in the chain of events that led from Vince Foster's suicide to the investigation of Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky to impeachment. But as central as Hillary's mismanagement of health-care reform is to the story of the Clinton Presidency—and of the Clintons—Hillary's behavior during that period seems to be the one true outlier in Mr. Bernstein's otherwise unintentionally consistent portrait.
The pragmatist who ran the Wellesley student body with an eye toward results and not "philosophy" became embroiled in a political standoff that heightened the appearance of almost unhinged egotism. Mr. Bernstein depicts her as imperiously interrupting the President's advisors, who wanted her to take a more gradual approach: "You're right" and "You're wrong." Approached by liberal Republican John Chafee with a possible compromise, she barreled through with her plan anyway, setting up a confrontation with Republicans that would make the midterm elections all but unwinnable. Lawrence O'Donnell, at the time a senior aide to Senator Patrick Moynihan, lays at her feet nothing less than ruination: "Hillary Clinton destroyed the Democratic Party," he tells Mr. Bernstein, using the health-care fight as his sole piece of evidence. "Hillary was a disaster for what we were trying to do in government."
A chorus of Democratic Hill staffers insists that Hillary's good intentions were undermined by arrogance, but that's hardly what makes the health-care episode unique. (Arrogance, frankly, is right up there with ambition and pragmatism when one looks for her personality's connective tissue.) Rather, it's her naïveté and her tactical blunders—errors hardly in keeping with the cool mind that surveys the landscape with "military rigor" and that supposedly engineered the Deal of the Century, post-Lewinsky (i.e., trading the opportunity to leave Bill for a shot at the White House).
Mr. Bernstein offers a few possibilities for what made Hillary stumble so badly—she didn't "get" Washington, mainly—but leaves alone Mr. O'Donnell's sweeping characterization that somehow she brought down the modern Democratic Party with her. Of course, all sorts of people attribute to her a vast influence. Early on in the book, Mr. Bernstein posits, "With the notable exception of her husband's libidinous carelessness, the most egregious errors of the Bill Clinton presidency … were traceable to Hillary." (Yes, other than that, Mr. Starr, how did you like the play?) That a First Lady could be held responsible for so much overlooks some practical facts of governing, but it says a lot about the level of awe that she inspires in both supporters and critics. Mr. Bernstein isn't sure which side he comes down on—and, even more unsatisfying, he doesn't do much to tell us what the real source of that awe is.
In assessing the Clintons' strengths going into the 1992 election, Mr. Bernstein writes, "the book on Hillary was awfully thin, suspiciously repetitive, and contextually lacking, whether the media narrative in question was admiring, hostile, or an honest attempt to separate the real Hillary from the myth generated by the Clinton campaigns past and present." I'll say this for A Woman in Charge: It's not thin.

Ana Marie Cox is the Washington editor for Time.com.

Copyright © 2007 The New York Observer. All rights reserved.

Comedy Business

Will Ferrell as a destitute tenant facing an unlikely landlord in a modest but extremely popular short video.

"The Landlord" took 45 minutes to shoot and cost little to produce. It appears on FunnyOrDie.com, where viewers leave their comments.
May 31, 2007
Comedy Business Turns to the Web
By LAURA M. HOLSON
LOS ANGELES — For Will Ferrell, who commands up to $20 million for movies like "Anchorman" and "Blades of Glory," starring in a short Web video may not seem like the best use of time.
But one afternoon in early March, Mr. Ferrell walked to a guest cottage at his Los Angeles home with a small crew that included Adam McKay, who is his production partner and the director of "Anchorman."
With a camcorder rolling, Mr. Ferrell improvised a sketch as a down-on-his-luck tenant being harassed by a foul-mouthed, booze-sodden landlord. The actor playing the landlord was Mr. McKay's 2-year-old daughter, Pearl.
"The Landlord," which took 45 minutes to shoot and cost next to nothing to produce, was posted on the new Web site FunnyOrDie.com on April 12.
As of yesterday, the sketch had been viewed about 30 million times, and the newly posted outtakes have been watched more than 1.6 million times. (This being Hollywood, Mr. Ferrell and Pearl have already shot a sequel: "Good Cop, Baby Cop.")
Another punch line of the story, though, is that Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay started the site with the financial backing of Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that made a name for itself, not to mention billions of dollars, by investing early in YouTube and Google.
The Internet, of course, is already filled with cheap laughs — YouTube alone offers a lifetime's supply of home videos (some funny, most not). But now many experienced comedians, talent agents and financiers are seeing the Web as a way to showcase talent while trying to turn a profit. In January, for example, Turner Broadcasting began SuperDeluxe.com, which features videos created by comedy pros and amateurs. And last year, IAC/InterActiveCorp, controlled by Barry Diller, bought a 51 percent stake in the parent company of CollegeHumor.com for an estimated $20 million.
Already, the seven-week-old FunnyOrDie.com, which highlights short videos by veteran comics like Mr. Ferrell as well as videos submitted by amateurs, is in discussions with potential advertisers.
The actor and his colleagues have enlisted some famous friends to volunteer their services. Brooke Shields, who is married to Chris Henchy, a writer and partner in FunnyOrDie.com, is a playground mom in one short video. And Bill Murray is planning to make a video, too, Mr. McKay said.
Clients of Creative Artists Agency, which helped broker the deal with Sequoia, have also made short videos for the site — including the actor and comedian Ed Helms, who created a series of clips called "Zombie American," and the boxer Oscar De La Hoya.
In an interview last week at his second-floor office on a side street along Hollywood Boulevard, Mr. Ferrell acknowledged that he had been ambivalent about the site at first. "But then we thought, 'Maybe this could work,' " he said. "We are not putting so much pressure on every piece that it be perfect. Everything isn't, 'Oh my God! This has to be so funny.' It's amusing, observational. We're trying not to make it so slick."
The pairing of Hollywood talent and Silicon Valley financiers has all the familiarity of a movie sequel. When the first Internet boom reached its peak in the late 1990s, many actors, writers and directors made the pilgrimage to the headquarters of the venture capital firms along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., to seek financing to create entertainment for the Internet.
Many of those ventures failed, largely because traditional Web shows were expensive to create and the technology at the time made it cumbersome to watch videos online. Among those that faltered were Pop.com, Digital Entertainment Network and Icebox.
Another cruel reality is that it is hard to be consistently funny, even with the help of deep pockets. Last summer, for example, Time Inc. closed its OfficePirates.com Web site, a satirical look at workplace issues, because it did not have a big enough audience.
A big change from the late 1990s, though, is that there is now better technology to stream videos, and audiences seem more willing to watch them, leading many investors and Hollywood talent to see a new opportunity.
"Our responsibility is to continue to make it better," said a Sequoia partner, Mark D. Kvamme, referring to FunnyOrDie.com. "If it doesn't succeed, it is our fault."
The idea for the site started with Mr. Kvamme, who approached Creative Artists in 2006 with his pitch to finance a site for experienced comics.
"If you look at all the sites out there, a large portion of them have comedy," he said, "but it is a mish-mash. There was no place that had a good smattering of professional videos and user-generated content."
Agents at Creative Artists introduced Mr. Kvamme to Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay last year. Then Mr. Kvamme visited the two men on the set of "Blades of Glory" to persuade them to join the new venture.
Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay, who had worked together on "Saturday Night Live," were reluctant at first. "I don't really know much about the Internet," Mr. Ferrell said.
The reality of having to sit through three weekly meetings and spend hours reviewing videos and writing comments for the site also seemed daunting to them, not to mention a distraction from their more lucrative movie and television careers (the time they are devoting to FunnyOrDie.com is all sweat equity at this point, since they are not being paid).
Even so, they came around to seeing the venture as an opportunity to experiment with their own material and to be exposed to ideas from other comics that they could later develop into television shows and movies.
Once Mr. Ferrell started making short videos, he enjoyed it. "You get to exercise that same muscle you did at the show," he said, referring to his days on "Saturday Night Live."
Mr. McKay also came up with the categories that voters use to rate their favorite videos — "immortal" if a video was great, "the crypt" if it was not.
And while Mr. McKay and Mr. Ferrell review the 20 most popular videos posted, they also have been careful not to censor the site.
When a user posted a video poking fun at Alec Baldwin, whom they know from "Saturday Night Live," they briefly took it down, but posted it again because they did not want to set a precedent for banning videos that made fun of their friends.
"Unless it's a hate crime or porn, it goes up," Mr. McKay said. The actor Nick Thune posted a video based on his stand-up routine about masturbation, which became the third most popular video on the site, viewed more than a million times.
Mr. Thune said that Mr. Ferrell's involvement in the site lent credibility to sketches like his. "The thing about YouTube is that it is so broad," Mr. Thune said. "If Will Ferrell is there, it must be good."
Sequoia and Gary Sanchez Productions — Mr. Ferrell's company, where Mr. McKay is a partner — declined to disclose specifics about their initial investments, though Mr. McKay said that he and Mr. Ferrell had been given a budget of $5,000 to create their first videos. (The rest of the money — which Mr. Kvamme estimated to be in the "hundreds of thousands of dollars" — was spent building the site.)
But because of the heavy traffic on FunnyOrDie.com, Sequoia has increased its investment to several million dollars and hired 10 full-time employees, with plans to expand the staff to 25.
Mr. McKay says they hope to share revenue with other video makers once the site starts to make money. For now, though, the site gives comics and actors a way to attract potentially huge audiences without the help of a Hollywood studio.
Creative Artists, which Mr. Kvamme said also owned a stake in the venture, is already using the site to promote its clients. Michael Yanover, the head of business development for Creative Artists, said that he had approached Mr. Ferrell and his colleagues about creating a video featuring Oscar De La Hoya ahead of his May 5 fight against Floyd Mayweather.
They agreed and, in 30 minutes, shot a video, "The Fight After the Fight," which has been viewed more than 185,000 times as of yesterday.
"Basically he got a commercial that someone else financed and shot," Mr. Yanover said.
But Mr. McKay warns that any videos that smack of Hollywood manipulation are going to be a turnoff to visitors. "That's when a site starts smelling bogus," he said.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Today's Papers
Presidential IntentBy Daniel PolitiPosted Thursday, May 31, 2007, at 6:00 A.M. E.T.
The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post lead with news that a divided U.N. Security Council voted to establish an international tribunal to prosecute those suspected of carrying out the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. It will be the first tribunal of its kind in the Middle East. The New York Times leads with a new study that reveals that U.S. immigration courts are anything but consistent when dealing with asylum seekers. When deciding who should get asylum, there are troubling differences between courts and the specific judge who hears a case.
USA Today leads with word that the new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles that have been touted as better protection from roadside explosions are vulnerable to a new type of bomb, which is known as an explosively formed penetrator. The military has prioritized getting these new vehicles to Iraq and has vowed to spend millions in the effort, but now it seems they will have to be outfitted with more armor. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with the hundreds of U.S. and Iraqi troops who entered Baghdad's Sadr City yesterday and aggresively searched for the five British citizens who were kidnapped in Iraq Tuesday. There is growing suspicion that cleric Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army militia was responsible for the well-coordinated kidnapping.
Ten of the Security Council's 15 countries voted to approve the tribunal, while five, including Russia and China, abstained, saying that it would unnecessarily interfere with domestic politics, which would lead only to more internal conflict in Lebanon. The prospect of a tribunal has caused much debate in Lebanon's parliament as many pro-Syrian leaders have vehemently opposed an international investigation. Analysts interviewed by the Post predict that violence is likely to increase in the coming months. The LAT, meanwhile, brings up Iraq and notes that, for the Bush administration, "raising tensions with Syria … could prove costly on other fronts."
The study of asylum seekers reveals that courts in some states may be more willing to grant asylum to specific nationalities than others, and the differences aren't minor. For example, a Chinese asylum seeker has a 76 percent chance of success in a court in Orlando, Fla., while in Atlanta it's a mere 7 percent. These same striking differences exist between different judges in the same court, as female judges are much more likely to grant asylum than their male colleagues. "Oftentimes, it's just the luck of the draw," the executive director of a legal assistance group tells the NYT. The study's authors say the discrepancies are more disconcerting now because changes instituted by the Bush administration in 2002 resulted in a lower likelihood of successful appeals.
Everyone notes that Fred Thompson has stepped up his efforts to seek the Republican nomination for president, and USAT fronts an interview with the actor in which he states his intentions to run. The former Tenneessee senator wants to be seen as an outsider and appeal to people who, like him, are disillusioned with politicians. The Law & Order star hasn't officially announced his candidacy, but, as the WP and NYT also front, Thompson told supporters that he's creating a committee to raise money for the race. The conventional wisdom is that no Republican candidate has really stood out as a front-runner, and the news that Thompson was stepping into the fray "sent ripples through the party," says the NYT. Although he does plan to bring back the famous red pickup from his Senate campaign, he will now focus his efforts on the Internet, which will allow him "to cut through the clutter and go right to the people," Thompson said.
The LAT fronts a look at how the former U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Tom Heffelfinger, who was frequently praised as an effective prosecutor, ended up on the infamous Department of Justice list of U.S. attorneys who could be fired. It increasingly looks like Heffelfinger's work to protect the voting rights of Native Americans was at least partly to blame. His name appeared on the list only three months after his office began questioning a state directive that would have forbidden tribal ID cards as a valid form of identification at the voting booth. Meanwhile, everyone goes inside with word that an internal Justice Department investigation has broadened and will now look into whether party affiliation played a role in hiring decisions in several areas of the department.
The WSJ goes inside with a look at how U.S. military leaders are currently assessing whether the "surge" strategy can succeed and what they can do to maximize the effectiveness of the recent troop increase in Iraq. Those reviewing the strategy seem to conclude that the United States must take a more hands-on approach to dealing with the Iraqi government and making sure that things get done. If any politicians are impeding progress, U.S. officials should apply pressure until they're replaced. "We've been too passive and deferential to Iraqi sovereignty," a military official tells the paper.
The LAT is alone in devoting a separate nonwire story to how Bush sees the long-term role for troops in Iraq similar to the presence of the U.S. military in South Korea. American forces have been based in South Korea for more than 50 years, and there are currently 30,000 U.S. troops in that country.
The WP and LAT go inside with news that a NATO helicopter crashed in Afghanistan and killed five American soldiers as well as a Canadian and a Briton. The crash is still under investigation, but the Taliban is claiming responsibility for shooting down the helicopter.
In honor of Fred Thompson, the WP's Style section takes a look at other actors who used their star power to join politics and their legacy. The list includes the obvious (Ronald Reagan) but also some that many might have forgotten about (the mechanic on The Dukes of Hazzard).Daniel Politi writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

Myspace.com

2007-05-09T14:17:00.000-07:00

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Forests Destroyed in China's Race to Feed Global Wood-Processing Industry

2007-04-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

Forests Destroyed in China's Race to Feed Global Wood-Processing Industry
Corruption Stains Timber TradeForests Destroyed in China's Race to Feed Global Wood-Processing Industry
By Peter S. Goodman and Peter FinnWashington Post Foreign ServiceSunday, April 1, 2007; A01
MYITKYINA, Burma -- The Chinese logging boss set his sights on a thickly forested mountain just inside Burma, aiming to harvest one of the last natural stands of teak on Earth.
He handed a rice sack stuffed with $8,000 worth of Chinese currency to two agents with connections in the Burmese borderlands, the men said in interviews. They used that stash to bribe everyone standing between the teak and China. In came Chinese logging crews. Out went huge logs, over Chinese-built roads.
About 2,500 miles to the northeast, Chinese and Russian crews hacked into the virgin forests of the Russian Far East and Siberia, hauling away 250-year-old Korean pines in often-illegal deals, according to trading companies and environmentalists. In the highlands of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Africa and in the forests of the Amazon, loggers working beyond the bounds of the law have sent a ceaseless flow of timber to China.
Some of the largest swaths of natural forest left on the planet are being dismantled at an alarming pace to feed a global wood-processing industry centered in coastal China.
Mountains of logs, many of them harvested in excess of legal limits aimed at preserving forests, are streaming toward Chinese factories where workers churn out such products as furniture and floorboards. These wares are shipped from China to major retailers such as Ikea, Home Depot, Lowe's and many others. They land in homes and offices in the United States and Europe, bought by shoppers with little inkling of the wood's origins or the environmental costs of chopping it down.
"Western consumers are leaving a violent ecological footprint in Burma and other countries," said an American environmental activist who frequently travels to Burma and goes by the pen name Zao Noam to preserve access to the authoritarian country. "Predominantly, the Burmese timber winds up as patio furniture for Americans. Without their demand, there wouldn't be a timber trade."
At the current pace of cutting, natural forests in Indonesia and Burma -- which send more than half their exported logs to China -- will be exhausted within a decade, according to research by Forest Trends, a consortium of industry and conservation groups. Forests in Papua New Guinea will be consumed in as little as 13 years, and those in the Russian Far East within two decades.
These forests are a bulwark against global warming, capturing carbon dioxide that would otherwise contribute to heating the planet. They hold some of the richest flora and fauna anywhere, and they have supplied generations of people with livelihoods that are now threatened.
In the world's poorest countries, illegal logging on public lands annually costs governments $10 billion in lost assets and revenues, a figure more than six times the aid these nations receive to help protect forests, a World Bank study found last year.
Environmental activists have prodded some of the largest purveyors of wood products to adopt conservation policies. Industry leaders and conservationists have crafted standards meant to give forests time to regenerate. They certify operations that comply and encourage consumers to buy certified goods.
But such efforts are in their infancy and are vulnerable to abuse. Corruption bedevils the timber trade in poor countries.
"What we've done very well so far with certification is to reward the best players in the marketplace," said Ned Daly, vice president of U.S. operations for a leading certification body, the Forest Stewardship Council. "What we haven't done very well is to figure out how to exclude the worst players. We're having a hard time getting the criminals to label their products 'illegal.' "
This story is the result of a year-long Washington Post investigation involving reporting in China, Russia, Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, Singapore and the United States. The Post interviewed government officers, diplomats, logging companies, traders, retailers, environmental scientists and advocates. Given the risks of discussing illegal activity, The Post sometimes granted anonymity to its informants -- particularly in Burma, where the agents who brokered a logging deal with military commanders displayed their bribe ledgers on the condition they not be named.From Asian Forests to Ikea Showrooms
The industry that connects forests in Asia with living rooms in the United States via the sawmills of China is a quintessential product of globalization. As transportation links expand and technology erodes distance, multinational manufacturing operations can draw supplies from almost anywhere and ship goods everywhere.
No company better symbolizes this reality than Ikea, the Swedish home-furnishings giant. Ikea cultivates a green image, filling its cavernous stores -- including three in the Baltimore-Washington corridor -- with signs asserting that its products are made in ways that minimize environmental harm.
But in Suifenhe, a wood-processing hub in northeastern China, workers at Yixin Wood Industry Corp. fashion 100,000 pine dining sets a year for Ikea using timber from the neighboring Russian Far East, where the World Bank says half of all logging is illegal.
"Ikea will provide some guidance, such as a list of endangered species we can't use, but they never send people to supervise the purchasing," said a factory sales manager who spoke on condition she be identified by only her family name, Wu. "Basically, they just let us pick what wood we want."
China is Ikea's largest supplier of solid wood furniture, according to the company. In 2006, about 100 Chinese factories manufactured about one-fourth of the company's global stock. Russia is Ikea's largest source of wood, providing one-fifth of its worldwide supply. Ikea executives said they are confident this wood is legal, because the company dispatches auditors and professional foresters to factories and traces wood to logging sites.
But Ikea has only two foresters in China and three in Russia, the company said. It annually inspects logging sites that produce about 30 percent of the wood imported by its Chinese factories, more commonly relying on paperwork produced by logging companies and factories.
"Falsification of documents is rampant," acknowledged Sofie Beckham, Ikea's forestry coordinator. "There's always somebody who wants to break the rules."
Sending more people to inspect logging sites would make Ikea's products more expensive.
"It's about cost," said Ikea's global manager for social and environmental affairs, Thomas Bergmark. "It would take enormous resources if we trace back each and every wood supply chain. We can never guarantee that each and every log is from the right source."
Two years ago, Ikea set a goal that by 2009, at least 30 percent of the wood for its products will be certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. But now, the company says, only 4 percent of the wood used to make its wares in China meets that grade.The Ecosystem Effect
China's voracious appetite for foreign timber is the direct result of its campaign to protect its own forests, even as its demand for wood has exploded.
In 1998, floods along China's Yangtze River killed 3,600 people. The government, blaming deforestation, imposed logging bans -- particularly in Yunnan province, bordering Burma. What logging goes on must adhere to plans for regeneration.
China also unleashed an ambitious replanting effort, expanding its forest cover by an area the size of Nebraska from 2000 to 2005. A 2005 assessment of the world's forests by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization pointed to China's replanting as the primary reason Asia's total forest cover grew during that period, even as deforestation continued worldwide "at an alarmingly high rate."
But in those same years, unprecedented expansion has unfolded at China's factories, requiring enormous quantities of wood. In 2005, China exported $8.8 billion worth of wood furniture, an eightfold increase from 1998, according to Chinese customs data. About 40 percent landed in the United States. China's exports of all timber products, including plywood and floorboards, exceeded $17 billion in 2005, nearly five times the 1997 level.
All that wood had to come from somewhere. In the years since China enacted its logging bans, it became the world's largest importer of tropical logs, according to the FAO. Its log imports swelled nearly ninefold in a decade, reaching $5.6 billion in 2006, according to China's State Forestry Administration.
China's imports of wood and exports of finished wood products are both expected to double again over the next decade, according to Forest Trends.
Whatever environmental benefits have resulted from China's replanting have been undone by the damage to the tropical regions now supplying so many of its logs, said Mette Wilkie, the U.N. officer in Rome who coordinated the FAO report. China is primarily adding tree plantations with little biological diversity. Much of the logging in Burma, the Russian Far East, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea is assailing natural forests that hold creatures and plants found nowhere else.
"You're losing tropical rainforest, and you're gaining areas of plantation, and that of course is a concern," Wilkie said. "A lot of the biodiversity is found in the moist forests."
The FAO report found grave environmental risks -- particularly in Indonesia, home to 10 to 15 percent of all known animal, plant and bird species. Several species are imperiled, among them the Sumatran tiger, according to the World Conservation Union in Switzerland. In Burma, tigers, red pandas and leopards are threatened as logging roads open forests to a range of exploitation, a dynamic at play across Southeast Asia.
"The arrival of logging operations has an immediate and devastating effect," said Jake Brunner, a regional environmental scientist for Conservation International. "We see a fragmentation of the forest and a collapse" in wildlife.
More than 1 billion people in poor countries depend on forests for their livelihoods, according to the World Bank. As forests are degraded, and as logging proceeds on steep slopes, allowing soil to wash away, communities are suffering from flooding, forest fires and a dearth of game.
"Whole ecosystems are being wiped out," said Horst Weyerhaeuser, a forester with the World Agroforestry Centre research group who advises the Chinese government.
Meanwhile, the spoils of the timber trade are monopolized by those who control the trees, typically local authorities acting with military groups.
"For local people, it just gets more difficult," said a community leader in Kachin state, in Northeastern Burma, bordering China, where Chinese logging has stripped mountains bare. He spoke on condition that he be identified only by his given name, Shaung, citing threats to his safety. "The commanders sell our natural resources and our local people get nothing."'Take-and-Run System'
The buzzing sawmills and clattering furniture plants in China explain why the pace of logging in Papua New Guinea is four times faster than legally permitted, according to Forest Trends. It explains why ships ferry logs to China from the African nation of Gabon, where 70 percent of logging is illegal, according to the World Bank. It explains why Chinese traders armed with cash line the Russian border, overwhelming the regulators charged with preserving trees.
"There is no strategy for forest resources," said Alexei Lankin, a researcher at the Pacific Geographical Institute in Vladivostok, Russia. "What you have is a take-and-run system."
Chinese authorities acknowledge they rarely challenge imports. As long as shipments are accompanied by harvest permits issued by authorities in the country of origin, customs officers allow the wood in, making no effort to authenticate the paperwork.
"China can only ensure that the logging companies and traders obey Chinese law," said a researcher in Beijing affiliated with the State Forestry Administration. "What they do in other countries is not something the Chinese government can control."
Each year, illegal logging costs Indonesia at least $600 million in lost royalties and export taxes, more than double what the government spent to subsidize food for the poor in 2001, according to the World Bank. Five years ago, China pledged to help Indonesia halt shipments of merbau, a threatened tree species. Shippers have evaded an Indonesian ban on exports of merbau logs by transporting them through Malaysia, forging documents saying that the trees were harvested there, Chinese traders said.
But China has done nothing to follow through.
"They said they have no authority to implement this kind of agreement," complained Tachir Fatmoni of the Indonesian Forestry Ministry. "Merbau is still getting to China."
North of Shanghai, the Zhangjiagang port has become perhaps the largest trading place on Earth for tropical logs. According to state figures, $500 million worth of wood passed through the port in 2004.
One morning a year ago, tens of thousands of logs laid stacked on the muddy banks. A four-story hotel next to the port had become a trading house where buyers from furniture and flooring factories haggled over cups of green tea. A bulletin board in the lobby was jammed with offers for logs from South America and Africa, and one trader whispered to a visitor that for the right price, he could get his hands on merbau.Bribery at the Border
In the rugged mountains of southwestern China, automobiles worth more than many villagers earn in a lifetime traverse dirt roads, a testament to the riches that Chinese timber merchants are extracting from next-door Burma. The trade amounts to a joint venture between China's frontier capitalists and corrupt Burmese generals leading one of the world's most repressive regimes.
For more than four decades, Burma's military dictatorship has plundered the country's natural resources. In the northeast, ethnic Kachin minority communities resisted the regime's rule with a long-running guerrilla war, until they signed cease-fire deals with the Burmese government in the 1990s. The Kachin had been sustained by jade mining, but as those rights went to the government, they shifted aggressively into logging, leaning on Chinese partners for capital, laborers and transport.
The cross-border log trade swelled by 60 percent between 2001 and 2004, reaching $350 million in 2005, according to a London environmental group, Global Witness. With competing Burmese generals involved and some using force to evict villagers in the way, control over land is in flux, contributing to forest destruction: Chinese logging crews work fast, cognizant that new armed forces could show up any minute and shut them down.
"You bribe one army and you get the right to cut everything," said Li Tao, a Chinese logger preparing last May to sneak across the border from the Chinese town of Ruili. "Then another army comes and threatens to arrest you, and you have to bribe them, too."
Ethnic Kachin agents working for a Chinese logging boss consented to interviews in Myitkyina, a town in northeastern Burma, on the condition of anonymity, citing fears they would be imprisoned or killed. They said they wished to publicize the details of the trade to bring international pressure on Burma's government to aid local people.
"We know what we are doing is rotten," one agent said. "There is nothing else for us to do. This is how we are surviving."
They displayed a logbook showing records of the bribes they said they paid to facilitate teak logging in the Sinpo area beginning in October 2004 through March 2006: $200 per year to the local police, $250 to the forestry department, $225 to the Burmese military special intelligence and $950 to the local brigade of the Burmese army, plus $8,000 worth of gold to battalion-level leaders. The Chinese boss independently funneled $4,000 each to five officers in the northern regional command, the Kachin men said.
In January 2005, the agents said, a crew of more than 120 Chinese workers slipped into Burma and set up camp on a mountaintop near the town of Bhamo, adding the whine of chainsaws to the screeching of jungle insects. "They cut the whole mountain," one agent said. "They cut it all."
Caravans of 10 and 20 trucks, each carrying about 20 logs, ferried the wood into China. The Kachin agents said they rode ahead on motorbikes, giving soldiers $40 per truck at eight government checkpoints. Where the government's control yields to the territory of a separatist group, the Kachin Independence Organization, they paid $125 per truck to Burmese soldiers, $83 to the forestry department and $25 to the drug police. At Laiza, the final stop before the border, the Kachin group collected a tax from the Chinese truckers, then issued documents declaring the shipments legitimate.
In the first six months of 2005, this operation hauled 150 truckloads of teak into China, with each truck carrying about 20 tons, the men said. On the other side of the border, each ton fetched nearly $1,000, making the total haul worth about $3 million.
Last May, in one hour, a reporter counted six big trucks loaded with logs as they made their way down a narrow, winding road from the border toward the Chinese town of Yingjiang.'This Keeps My Child in School'
At the opposite edge of China, along the meandering border with Russia, the logging trade has transformed backwater towns into bustling hives. Russia has become China's primary wood supplier, with shipments multiplying 20-fold in less than a decade.
In Vostok, a Russian town of 4,000 with crumbling Soviet-era apartment blocks, villagers receive about $100 a month to haul logs from the forest. Chinese workers run sawmills across the region.
South of Vostok, just outside the Russian town of Roshino, eight Chinese workers sliced oak and ash trees into planks one day last year, at a small plant where they also live, sleeping on cots in converted offices. Piles of oak and ash awaited the saw blades. At the railyard in the city of Dalnerechensk, freight cars bore loads of Korean pine and linden trees -- both protected species -- with the cargo bound for furniture factories in China.
Shi Diangang is typical of the entrepreneurs who control the trade. He once sold clothing to Russian tourists on the border. Now he brings laborers from China into Russia, paying them $375 per month to work 12- to 15-hour days, prying wood from the forest. He sells timber to Chinese traders who supply Chinese factories that he says make furniture for Ikea. He is shopping for a villa in Macau, the gambling mecca. He tells time with a gold watch.
"It's been hell to heaven," he said.
Shi operates inside Russia largely free of regulation, with his business partner's government pedigree rendering everything legal, he said.
"The Russian company settles all the documents," he said. "Russia has very loose controls."
Already, logging has laid bare much of the Russian forest bordering China. Crews are moving farther into the interior, penetrating officially protected terrain. In the Primorsky region -- an area rich with wildlife, including 450 Amur tigers, the world's largest cat -- Yappy lumber company struggles to satisfy orders from its Chinese customers for unprocessed oak and ash logs.
"The forest is exhausted," complained Alexander Sobchenko, the company's general-director.
The Russian Forest Service issues licenses for cutting in protected areas under the guise of so-called sanitation logging, to remove sick or fallen trees. In Primorsky, one-third of exported logs have been cut under such licenses, according to Josh Newell, a researcher at the University of Washington.
"Sanitation logging is a cover to get into areas that should be protected," he said.
Last year, Russia's environmental prosecutor opened a criminal investigation of Forestry Service officials after 14 firms with such licenses harvested 1.3 million cubic feet of wood in a protected zone near Vostok. The logs were exported to China with documentation, prosecutors said. How much more passed through undetected no one really knows: About the size of Florida, Primorsky has 12 forest inspectors.
"Barbaric" is one word Russian President Vladimir Putin has used to assail the "critical problem" of illegal logging. By shipping logs out of the country, Russia is exporting tens of thousands of jobs that would go to Russians if the country had more sawmills and furniture factories. "Our neighbors continue to earn billions of dollars relying on Russian timber," Putin said.
Across the border, in the Chinese city of Suifenhe, 11 freight trains were loaded with logs one morning about a year ago, some being offloaded, others bound for factory towns throughout the country. Shacks of corrugated tin and discarded tree bark encircled the rail yard -- homes for migrant workers who have swelled the city's population to more than 100,000 from 20,000 a decade ago.
On seemingly every lane, sawmills filled the air with black smoke, the scent of fresh sawdust and the screech of metal blades biting wood. Some were jury-rigged operations manned by workers lacking safety goggles and gloves. At Jindi Wood company near the rail yard, four men strained to haul huge logs to the saws with slats hung over their shoulders. They earn $250 a week for seven days of work.
"This keeps my child in school," said Xiao Jifeng, 35, whose wife and son remained in his village, a six-hour bus ride away.
Construction crews were filling the horizon with brick villas for the bosses, as a modern city took shape on once-empty plains.
"Four years ago, there was nothing here," said Su Guanglin, chairman of Guofeng Wood Co., a Hong Kong firm that employs 500 workers at a floorboard plant in Suifenhe. Guofeng ships nearly all its products overseas, about one-third to the United States, mainly through Armstrong, a prominent Pennsylvania brand of floor products.
A China-Russia trading office was going up behind the factory. Empty grassland had been transformed into a public square fringed with neon-lighted restaurants and nightclubs offering Cognac and hired female companionship. Oxcarts shared dusty roads with black Audi sedans.Moving to Certification
The Forest Stewardship Council, a body created by environmental and industry groups in 1990, sets standards for the sustainable use of forests. The movement has gained high-profile members, including Ikea and Home Depot.
Home Depot conducts top-to-bottom investigations of the products on its shelves, refusing to buy from vendors who cannot verify the wood's origin, said Ron Jarvis, the company's merchandising vice president.
Home Depot sold some $400 million in products certified by the FSC in 2005, compared with $15 million in 1999. Still, those recent sales represented less than 5 percent of the company's total wood-product sales.
"If we could get 100 percent of our wood certified, we would do it tomorrow," Jarvis said. "But we have to do it on a commercial basis."
In China, 20 companies per month are gaining certification, said Alistair Monument, the FSC's country director in Beijing. In the floorboard and furniture factories of Guangdong province in southern China, management vernacular now includes forest conservation.
"All the big Chinese companies exporting to the United States are really paying attention to this issue now," said She Xuebin, president of one of China's largest flooring companies, Yingbin (Guangdong) Wood Industry Co.
But many major Western brands have declined to join. Four-fifths of Yingbin's exports go to the United States, some to Armstrong. Much of Yingbin's wood comes from a sawmill in Indonesia, where as much as 80 percent of the logging is illegal, according to the World Bank. Yingbin's president acknowledged "there's a gap between the law and enforcement," though he said his company plays by the rules.
Armstrong does not require that Yingbin or its four other China suppliers meet the standards of a certification body such as the FSC. Armstrong buys Southeast Asian merbau for flooring that it sells as "exotic," listing only the country of final manufacture -- typically the United States -- but not the wood's source.
"I just don't think there's a need for it," said Frank J. Ready, chief executive of Armstrong Floor Products North America.
Ready and his counterpart at Yingbin said they do not trade in wood from one country that is synonymous with human-rights abuse -- Burma. Yet as a reporter toured Yingbin's flooring factory in the Chinese city of Zhongshan last spring, a pile of teak boards sat on the floor.
"It's from Burma," a worker said.
In the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, merchants at Yuzhu lumberyard hawked piles of Burmese teak to buyers from surrounding furniture factories. In Shanghai, marketing representatives for one of China's largest flooring companies, Anxin, boasted that they had a large and steady supply of Burmese teak.
They were exporting it to the United States, they said.
Through which channels, they would not say.
Goodman reported from China, Burma, Thailand and Singapore. Finn reported from Russia. Correspondent Ellen Nakashima in Indonesia, special correspondent Eva Woo in China, and staff writer Justin Gillis in Washington contributed to this report.

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The Missing Groom

2006-12-18T18:29:00.000-08:00

It is very rare that I will post an introduction to something I am copying and pasting here, but I feel that this story must be acknowledged simply as one of the purest, most romantically moving and inspiring examples of all attempts to describe, portray, define or experience "true love".
Nine years and finally the willingness to wait and the reluctance to settle, rewards the author with happiness that eludes everyone except those willing to risk everything in the refusal to break under fear of societal opprobrium and bone wearing lonliness. It inspires to never give up and never loose site of our dreams in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.
December 17, 2006
Lives
The Missing Groom
By SOHA HAGE as told to KATHERINE ZOEPF
I dread this season, these weeks before Christmas in Beirut. I was 18 in December 1988, during the height of the Lebanese Civil War, and I was to be married on Christmas Day. But it didn't happen that way.
I met my fiancé, Emile, at my cousin's house, but we never spoke. I was only 15 and too shy. And at first, when my cousin told my father that Emile wanted to ask for my hand, my father said I was too young. But my parents invited Emile home, and he started to spend time with us, and I found that I loved Emile from the bottom of my heart. My parents said we had to wait until after I finished high school to marry, but graduation day finally came. And that fall, an unusually dry, windy fall, we started to get ready for the wedding.
A week before the ceremony, Emile disappeared. We called the company where he worked, and they said he'd left for the day, and his mother said he hadn't returned home. After a few days we could only assume that he'd been shot or kidnapped by one of the Christian militias that were fighting one another then. Emile was only 23, and he had never been politically active, but during those days many people became the victims of misdirected acts of retribution and violence.
I can't describe the devastation I felt. During the next three months, the fighting in Beirut got much worse, and my family had to move to a safer area. Even if Emile's family had news of him, they would not have been able to inform us. The battles were terrible, Beirut's neighborhoods were isolated from one another and there was no telephone and no electricity. People were simply stuck where they were. My family was convinced that Emile was dead. Still, he would come to me in my dreams, saying, "Wait for me." When you are very scared and you feel you have nothing to live for, you start to search your dreams for hope.
When the war ended and reconstruction began, I continued my studies and worked very hard, and I tried not to show my parents how much I was suffering. Over the years, from time to time, I heard rumors about Emile. Some said he died. Others said he was in Syria. Some said that he'd been liberated and had married someone else. There was no way to find out for sure.
I didn't want to meet any other men, but in our world it's difficult for a girl to marry after 25. As I grew older, my whole family began turning against me. "You're crazy," they said. "You're burning up your life." For a while, I dated a dentist, and even though I didn't love him, we became engaged. But as the wedding date neared, I realized I couldn't go through with it.
One day in 1997, nine years after Emile was kidnapped, my brother bumped into Emile's uncle in the street. He said that Emile was in Lebanon. My brother told him I was unmarried and working as a teacher.
I was in class a few days later when the phone rang. I usually turn the phone off while I'm teaching, and at first I wasn't going to answer it. But I did.
"Hello, Soha?" a voice said. And I knew it was Emile. For 30 seconds I couldn't move.
"Soha, I'm back," he said, "and I have only one question: Do you still love me?"
Seconds passed, I don't know how many, before I managed to say, "Yes."
I trembled on the way to see him, and when I did, my heart jumped. But then it was as if I'd seen him only the day before. It felt like when you take a cassette and you press Pause and then you continue. We couldn't believe we'd found each other.
Emile had suffered much more than I. He was held captive for two years, and he still has torture scars on his body. Finally he was put on a boat and forced to leave the country. The Red Cross in Cyprus helped him find his family, who had moved to Canada, and some relatives helped him get work in West Africa. He assumed I would be married; we had moved, and eventually he gave up on finding me. But then he came back to Lebanon to help start a company, and two days later my brother met his uncle. Five weeks after Emile's phone call, we married.
So, after nine years, I found my love, my future — everything I had lost. Now I have three girls of my own, and I wonder how my parents could have ever stayed in Lebanon during that terrible time. When the Syrians left Lebanon last year, we were so happy. The sight of all those Lebanese flags was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. But that hope of a new Lebanon is gone. We are praying that the demonstrations now will remain peaceful, but if there's another civil war, I won't raise my children here. The weather this fall has been exactly as it was in 1988 — a little bit of rain in October and then sun all through November and early December. There's the same smell in the air, the same wind.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Spine Surgery

2005-12-01T21:15:00.000-08:00

The nose cells that may help the paralysed walk again
Surgeons in London to try revolutionary stem cell technique on crash victims

Sarah Boseley, health editor
Wednesday November 30, 2005

Guardian

Surgeons will attempt early next year to mend the severed nerves of young people who have suffered motorbike accidents in the first trial of a simple but potentially revolutionary technology that could one day allow the paralysed to walk again.
At least ten operations will be carried out to test in humans a technique pioneered in animals by the neuroscientist Geoffrey Raisman, who heads the spinal repair unit of University College, London. He discovered 20 years ago that cells from the lining of the nose constantly regenerate themselves. Professor Raisman's team believes that if those cells were implanted at the site of the damage they would build a bridge across the break, allowing the nerve fibres to knit back together.

Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman and became paralysed after falling from a horse, had hoped that Prof Raisman's work would bring a breakthrough, and they had planned to meet shortly before Reeve died.

The first operations will not enable someone as badly hurt as Reeve was to walk again, but they could heal the common motorbike injury sustained when the nerves in the arm are pulled out of the spinal cord. Until now, such injuries have been inoperable.

"I don't know that it will work, but I think it will work," Prof Raisman said yesterday. "If you forced me to bet, I would bet on it working.

"I have been patient. I didn't jump in the dark. I have grown through the research all these years. It was in 1985 I discovered the cells. It has taken 20 years before I felt we had the technology to apply this to people. After spending this amount of time developing it, I'm not in a hurry. This is not the final stage, but it is the crucial stage of the research."

Studies in animals have established that the cell implants can restore nerve functions. Rats with severed nerves have regained functions of a forepaw. But the first human study, which tests the safety of the procedure, will be limited to patients with one very specific and similar injury to ensure the results are clear.

But there is no doubting the significance the results could hold. "If this works well, it opens the door to an enormous area," Prof Raisman said. "This is a door which has never been opened: to repair injuries to the brain and spinal cord caused by the disconnection of nerve fibres. The best possible outcome will be that these patients will get a return of sensation to the arm and a reduction of the pain associated with that injury."

If successful, with refinement and research the procedure could be tried on people in a wheelchair. It also has the potential to heal other nerve injuries, such as those caused by stroke, blindness and deafness. "This is proof of principle," Prof Raisman said. "If it is proved, I think there will be so much publicity we will be lucky to stay in the field. It will be like a tidal wave. But the only race I'm in is the human race. This has got an enormous future but I don't have the illusion I'm going to see it all the way through."

At the beginning of the year, when he and his team moved from the national institute for medical research in the US to set up the UCL spinal repair unit, he predicted the first attempts in humans would not take place for two to three years.

"I was wrong. Isn't that nice?" he said. The unit moved to a base at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen's Square, and the team came together, he said. Funding is still an issue, however. The unit is £1m short of its target. Although things were going well, it had not always been easy, he said. "We have been mavericks in this research all my research life. I have never been on the side of the majority view.

"This is not the most popular way of attempting to heal spinal injuries. That would be to produce patented chemicals, which drug companies can make and sell. What we're proposing could be carried out by any very modestly equipped hospital with neurosurgery. There are no patents. It makes it a very unpopular form of research.

"We're producing a procedure where the patient is their own cure. You can't patent a patient's own cells, thank God."

FAQ
Why the nose is unique

What sort of cells are going to be used to try to repair nerve damage?

Cells from the nose. The all-important discovery made in 1985 showed that in one section of the nervous system, a part of the nasal cavity concerned with smell, nerve fibres are in constant growth - even in adulthood. Though people with a bad cold may lose their sense of smell, it does come back.

The nasal cells have the added advantage of belonging to the patient, so there is no risk of their being rejected.

What do the cells do when transplanted into the spinal cord of rats?

They mend the break in the pathway that nerve fibres need to take if they are to rejoin. When a nerve is severed, it tries to regrow, but the pathway has been disrupted. The transplanted cells have the capacity to integrate with the pathway cells, laying a "bridge" across the gap and enabling the nerve fibres to reconnect.

What improvements were shown in the animals?

The transplants enabled animals that had been paralysed to reach with a paw and to climb. They also restored the ability to breathe.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Frank Rich

2005-11-27T20:04:00.000-08:00

Frank Rich: “It’s A Losing Game To Ask What Lies The White House Told Along The Way [To Iraq]…What Was Not A Lie?”…

Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ... By Frank Rich The New York Times
Sunday 27 November 2005
George W. Bush is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.
The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.
The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.
Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.
The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).
Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."
The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.
What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.
The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "
If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.
Sooner or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.
No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.
"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.
-------

2005-08-09T15:56:00.000-07:00

August 9, 2005
Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00
By DOUGLAS JEHL

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 -
More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.

The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.

A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta's name.

The report produced by the commission last year does not mention the episode.

Mr. Weldon first spoke publicly about the episode in June, in a little-noticed speech on the House floor and in an interview with The Times-Herald in Norristown, Pa. The matter resurfaced on Monday in a report by GSN: Government Security News, which is published every two weeks and covers domestic-security issues. The GSN report was based on accounts provided by Mr. Weldon and the same former intelligence official, who was interviewed on Monday by The New York Times in Mr. Weldon's office.

In a telephone interview from his home in Pennsylvania, Mr. Weldon said he was basing his assertions on similar ones by at least three other former intelligence officers with direct knowledge of the project, and said that some had first called the episode to his attention shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The account is the first assertion that Mr. Atta, an Egyptian who became the lead hijacker in the plot, was identified by any American government agency as a potential threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 19 hijackers, only Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been identified as potential threats by the Central Intelligence Agency before the summer of 2000, and information about them was not provided to the F.B.I. until the spring of 2001.

Mr. Weldon has long been a champion of the kind of data-mining analysis that was the basis for the work of the Able Danger team.

The former intelligence official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not want to jeopardize political support and the possible financing for future data-mining operations by speaking publicly. He said the team had been established by the Special Operations Command in 1999, under a classified directive issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble information about Al Qaeda networks around the world.

"Ultimately, Able Danger was going to give decision makers options for taking out Al Qaeda targets," the former defense intelligence official said.

He said that he delivered the chart in summer 2000 to the Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and said that it had been based on information from unclassified sources and government records, including those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

"We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something about them," the former intelligence official said.

The unit, which relied heavily on data-mining techniques, was modeled after those first established by Army intelligence at the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center, now known as the Information Dominance Center, at Fort Belvoir, Va., the official said.

Mr. Weldon is an outspoken figure who is a vice chairman of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee. He said he had recognized the significance of the episode only recently, when he contacted members of the military intelligence team as part of research for his book, "Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America and How the C.I.A. Has Ignored It."

Mr. Weldon's book prompted one veteran C.I.A. case officer to strongly dispute the reliability of one Iranian source cited in the book, saying the Iranian "was a waste of my time and resources."

Mr. Weldon said that he had discussed the Able Danger episode with Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and that at least two Congressional committees were looking into the episode.

In the interview on Monday, Mr. Weldon said he had been aware of the episode since shortly after the Sept. 11 attack, when members of the team first brought it to his attention. He said he had told Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, about it in a conversation in September or October 2001, and had been surprised when the Sept. 11 commission report made no mention of the operation.

Col. Samuel Taylor, a spokesman for the military's Special Operations Command, said no one at the command now had any knowledge of the Able Danger program, its mission or its findings. If the program existed, Colonel Taylor said, it was probably a highly classified "special access program" on which only a few military personnel would have been briefed.

During the interview in Mr. Weldon's office, the former defense intelligence official showed a floor-sized chart depicting Al Qaeda networks around the world that he said was a larger, more detailed version similar to the one prepared by the Able Danger team in the summer of 2000.

He said the original chart, like the new one, had included the names and photographs of Mr. Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, as well as Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi, who were identified as members of what was described as an American-based "Brooklyn" cell, as one of five such Al Qaeda cells around the world.

The official said the link to Brooklyn was meant as a term of art rather than to be interpreted literally, saying that the unit had produced no firm evidence linking the men to the borough of New York City but that a computer analysis seeking to establish patterns in links between the four men had found that "the software put them all together in Brooklyn."

According to the commission report, Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi were first identified in late 1999 or 2000 by the C.I.A. as Qaeda members who might be involved in a terrorist operation. They were tracked from Yemen to Malaysia before their trail was lost in Thailand. Neither man was put on a State Department watch list before they flew to Los Angeles in early 2000. The F.B.I. was not warned about them until the spring of 2001, and no efforts to track them were made until August 2001.

Neither Mr. Shehhi nor Mr. Atta was identified by the American intelligence agencies as a potential threat, the commission report said. Mr. Shehhi arrived in Newark on a flight from Brussels on May 29, 2000, and Mr. Atta arrived in Newark from Prague on June 3 that year.

The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn" cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta arrived in the United States. The former intelligence official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission staff about Able Danger when they visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.

The official said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a member of a Qaeda cell in the United States. He said the staff encouraged him to call the commission when he returned to Washington at the end of the year. When he did so, the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.

Mr. Felzenberg, the former Sept. 11 commission spokesman, said on Monday that he had talked with some of the former staff members who participated in the briefing.

"They all say that they were not told anything about a Brooklyn cell," Mr. Felzenberg said. "They were told about the Pentagon operation. They were not told about the Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefers had mentioned anything that startling, it would have gotten their attention."

As a result of the briefing, he said, the commission staff filed document requests with the Pentagon for information about the program. The Pentagon complied, he said, adding that the staff had not hidden anything from the commissioners.

"The commissioners were certainly told of the document requests and what the findings were," Mr. Felzenberg said.

Philip Shenon and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.

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Fatigue de guerre

2005-08-09T15:36:00.000-07:00

The Pentagon

War Plans Drafted To Counter Terror Attacks in U.S.
Domestic Effort Is Big Shift for Military

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 8, 2005; A01

COLORADO SPRINGS -- The U.S. military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country, according to officers who drafted the plans.

The classified plans, developed here at Northern Command headquarters, outline a variety of possible roles for quick-reaction forces estimated at as many as 3,000 ground troops per attack, a number that could easily grow depending on the extent of the damage and the abilities of civilian response teams.

The possible scenarios range from "low end," relatively modest crowd-control missions to "high-end," full-scale disaster management after catastrophic attacks such as the release of a deadly biological agent or the explosion of a radiological device, several officers said.

Some of the worst-case scenarios involve three attacks at the same time, in keeping with a Pentagon directive earlier this year ordering Northcom, as the command is called, to plan for multiple simultaneous attacks.

The war plans represent a historic shift for the Pentagon, which has been reluctant to become involved in domestic operations and is legally constrained from engaging in law enforcement. Indeed, defense officials continue to stress that they intend for the troops to play largely a supporting role in homeland emergencies, bolstering police, firefighters and other civilian response groups.

But the new plans provide for what several senior officers acknowledged is the likelihood that the military will have to take charge in some situations, especially when dealing with mass-casualty attacks that could quickly overwhelm civilian resources.

"In my estimation, [in the event of] a biological, a chemical or nuclear attack in any of the 50 states, the Department of Defense is best positioned -- of the various eight federal agencies that would be involved -- to take the lead," said Adm. Timothy J. Keating, the head of Northcom, which coordinates military involvement in homeland security operations.

The plans present the Pentagon with a clearer idea of the kinds and numbers of troops and the training that may be required to build a more credible homeland defense force. They come at a time when senior Pentagon officials are engaged in an internal, year-long review of force levels and weapons systems, attempting to balance the heightened requirements of homeland defense against the heavy demands of overseas deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Keating expressed confidence that existing military assets are sufficient to meet homeland security needs. Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe, Northcom's chief operations officer, agreed, but he added that "stress points" in some military capabilities probably would result if troops were called on to deal with multiple homeland attacks.

Debate and Analysis

Several people on the staff here and at the Pentagon said in interviews that the debate and analysis within the U.S. government regarding the extent of the homeland threat and the resources necessary to guard against it remain far from resolved.

The command's plans consist of two main documents. One, designated CONPLAN 2002 and consisting of more than 1,000 pages, is said to be a sort of umbrella document that draws together previously issued orders for homeland missions and covers air, sea and land operations. It addresses not only post-attack responses but also prevention and deterrence actions aimed at intercepting threats before they reach the United States.

The other, identified as CONPLAN 0500, deals specifically with managing the consequences of attacks represented by the 15 scenarios.

CONPLAN 2002 has passed a review by the Pentagon's Joint Staff and is due to go soon to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and top aides for further study and approval, the officers said. CONPLAN 0500 is still undergoing final drafting here. (CONPLAN stands for "concept plan" and tends to be an abbreviated version of an OPLAN, or "operations plan," which specifies forces and timelines for movement into a combat zone.)

The plans, like much else about Northcom, mark a new venture by a U.S. military establishment still trying to find its comfort level with the idea of a greater homeland defense role after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Military officers and civilian Pentagon policymakers say they recognize, on one hand, that the armed forces have much to offer not only in numbers of troops but also in experience managing crises and responding to emergencies. On the other hand, they worry that too much involvement in homeland missions would diminish the military's ability to deal with threats abroad.

The Pentagon's new homeland defense strategy, issued in June, emphasized in boldface type that "domestic security is primarily a civilian law enforcement function." Still, it noted the possibility that ground troops might be sent into action on U.S. soil to counter security threats and deal with major emergencies.

"For the Pentagon to acknowledge that it would have to respond to catastrophic attack and needs a plan was a big step," said James Carafano, who follows homeland security issues for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.

William M. Arkin, a defense specialist who has reported on Northcom's war planning, said the evolution of the Pentagon's thinking reflects the recognition of an obvious gap in civilian resources.

Since Northcom's inception in October 2002, its headquarters staff has grown to about 640 members, making it larger than the Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America, but smaller than the regional commands for Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. A brief tour late last month of Northcom's operations center at Peterson Air Force Base found officers monitoring not only aircraft and ship traffic around the United States but also the Discovery space shuttle mission, the National Scout Jamboree in Virginia, several border surveillance operations and a few forest firefighting efforts.

'Dual-Use' Approach

Pentagon authorities have rejected the idea of creating large standing units dedicated to homeland missions. Instead, they favor a "dual-use" approach, drawing on a common pool of troops trained both for homeland and overseas assignments.

Particular reliance is being placed on the National Guard, which is expanding a network of 22-member civil support teams to all states and forming about a dozen 120-member regional response units. Congress last year also gave the Guard expanded authority under Title 32 of the U.S. Code to perform such homeland missions as securing power plants and other critical facilities.

But the Northcom commander can quickly call on active-duty forces as well. On top of previous powers to send fighter jets into the air, Keating earlier this year gained the authority to dispatch Navy and Coast Guard ships to deal with suspected threats off U.S. coasts. He also has immediate access to four active-duty Army battalions based around the country, officers here said.

Nonetheless, when it comes to ground forces possibly taking a lead role in homeland operations, senior Northcom officers remain reluctant to discuss specifics. Keating said such situations, if they arise, probably would be temporary, with lead responsibility passing back to civilian authorities.

Military exercises code-named Vital Archer, which involve troops in lead roles, are shrouded in secrecy. By contrast, other homeland exercises featuring troops in supporting roles are widely publicized.

Legal Questions

Civil liberties groups have warned that the military's expanded involvement in homeland defense could bump up against the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts the use of troops in domestic law enforcement. But Pentagon authorities have told Congress they see no need to change the law.

According to military lawyers here, the dispatch of ground troops would most likely be justified on the basis of the president's authority under Article 2 of the Constitution to serve as commander in chief and protect the nation. The Posse Comitatus Act exempts actions authorized by the Constitution.

"That would be the place we would start from" in making the legal case, said Col. John Gereski, a senior Northcom lawyer.

But Gereski also said he knew of no court test of this legal argument, and Keating left the door open to seeking an amendment of the Posse Comitatus Act.

One potentially tricky area, the admiral said, involves National Guard officers who are put in command of task forces that include active-duty as well as Guard units -- an approach first used last year at the Group of Eight summit in Georgia. Guard troops, acting under state control, are exempt from Posse Comitatus prohibitions.

"It could be a challenge for the commander who's a Guardsman, if we end up in a fairly complex, dynamic scenario," Keating said. He cited a potential situation in which Guard units might begin rounding up people while regular forces could not.

The command's sensitivity to legal issues, Gereski said, is reflected in the unusually large number of lawyers on staff here -- 14 compared with 10 or fewer at other commands. One lawyer serves full time at the command's Combined Intelligence and Fusion Center, which joins military analysts with law enforcement and counterintelligence specialists from such civilian agencies as the FBI, the CIA and the Secret Service.

A senior supervisor at the facility said the staff there does no intelligence collection, only analysis.

He also said the military operates under long-standing rules intended to protect civilian liberties. The rules, for instance, block military access to intelligence information on political dissent or purely criminal activity.

Even so, the center's lawyer is called on periodically to rule on the appropriateness of some kinds of information-sharing. Asked how frequently such cases arise, the supervisor recalled two in the previous 10 days, but he declined to provide specifics.

? 2005 The Washington Post Company

2005-07-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

Raikkonen on pole for German GP
Racing series F1
Date 2005-07-23

By Nikki Reynolds - Motorsport.com

As many people expected, McLaren's Kimi Raikkonen breezed to pole position in qualifying for the German Grand Prix, the Finn over four tenths quicker than his nearest rival with a time of 1:14.320. BAR's Jenson Button will start alongside in second and the Renaults of Fernando Alonso and Giancarlo Fisichella were third and fourth respectively.

The conditions were still quite cool but fine and dry, with a track temperature of around 30 degrees at the start of the session. Newly promoted to the ranks of F1 race drivers rather than testers, Minardi's Robert Doornbos was the first man out and recorded a time of 1:18.313 on his debut qualifying run. A rather cautious lap for the Dutchman.

Jordan's Narain Karthikeyan had a couple of off-track excursions and aborted his lap. The second Minardi of Christijan Albers made a good effort and clocked 1:17.519, eight tenths up on Doornbos. Tiago Monteiro's Jordan completed his lap without incident but was a second slower than Albers, so both Minardis were ahead of the Jordans.

BAR's Takuma Sato, unsurprisingly, was two seconds up on Albers to take the top spot with a time of 1:15.501. Christian Klien was the next runner and he held the Red Bull's good pace from the morning practices to take second, just over a tenth down on Sato. The track temperature had climbed to the mid thirties after 15 minutes.

Jacques Villeneuve was the first Sauber out and had a few lock ups, which put him behind Klien. David Coulthard couldn't outdo his teammate but put his Red Bull comfortably in front of Villeneuve. Nick Heidfeld's Williams had a good start and carried it through to take provisional pole, 1:15.403, a tenth up on Sato.

Mark Webber followed on in the second Williams and was fractionally faster through sectors one and two, and crossed the line just over three tenths up on Heidfeld, 1:15.070. Sauber's Felipe Massa made a bit of mistake at the hairpin but managed to just sneak ahead of Villeneuve by a couple of thousandths for provisional sixth.

Jarno Trulli's Toyota had a reasonable lap to slot in behind Sato for fourth and teammate Ralf Schumacher was a couple of tenths slower for seventh. Rubens Barrichello led out for Ferrari and could only manage tenth. The earlier cars were suspected to be running quite light but even so, Rubens didn't look particularly happy out there.

Michael Schumacher, on softer tyres and a lighter fuel load than his teammate, took a surprising provisional pole, 1:15.006, just six hundredths quicker than Webber. It didn't last long for Michael though, as Button went out a posted 1:14.759 to demote the Ferrari by a couple of tenths.

Fisichella slotted his Renault in behind Button and Raikkonen was out next. The McLaren was comfortably faster through all three sectors to take provisional pole by over four tenths, 1:14.320. Championship rival Alonso couldn't match it and went third after making a mistake at turn one which lost him time.

That left Juan Pablo Montoya as the last to run. He was on Raikkonen's pace through the first two sectors but he pushed just a bit too hard and the McLaren spun off into the gravel at the final corner. The car sustained some damage but Montoya was fine. But bad news for the team's constructors' title hopes as Juan Pablo will now have to start at the back.

"I just lost it," Montoya shrugged. "My car was a bit nervous in the corners and in the last sector it was very understeery. I can rescue some points but I just want to win races. I think I can get a podium here, we have the pace." McLaren boss Ron Dennis was not happy. "There was one corner to go, he only had to get round it," he grumped.

So, once again it's Raikkonen and Button on the front row of the grid, with Alonso and Fisichella looming behind. Michael finished fifth, which was not too bad but we will have too see how everyone's strategies pan out tomorrow. If Raikkonen can hold the lead at the start there's a good chance the speed of the McLaren will be unbeatable.

"I am happy to be on pole which is the position that the team deserves after all the hard work," said Raikkonen. "Surprisingly the car wasn't handling as well as in free practice this morning. My qualifying performance wasn't perfect as I had a short moment when I slid a little too much at the second to last corner due to oversteer. Anyway it's good to start from pole position, but I expect a tough race tomorrow."

Button is hoping to take advantage of his front row start. "I'm obviously delighted to be on the front row again -- for the second race in a row," he commented. "We have made progress since Silverstone but not quite enough to challenge the front runners yet, I don't think. We will be closer though and happy with that because it provides us with momentum to keep moving forward throughout the year."

Alonso was happy enough with third. "I knew I was down after the first sector, and really pushed after that to make up some time, which I managed to do," said the Spaniard. "We know that qualifying speed is our weak point at the moment, but the R25 is much quicker in race trim. I hope to make up a place at the start, and I am sure we have the right strategy. I want at least a podium -- and perhaps we will be able to fight for the win."

Both Williams drivers were in the top ten, which is what they were aiming for, and Sato's lap turned out to be good enough for eighth. The Toyotas were a bit disappointing, Trulli ninth and Ralf 12th, but the Red Bulls looked quite good, Klien 10th and Coulthard 11th. The Saubers were pretty much where one would expect, Massa 13th and Villeneuve 14th.

Barrichello ended up a lowly 15th, a full 10 places behind Michael so it'll be interesting to see how their strategies work out. Alonso will need to get ahead of Button at the start to be in with the chance of challenging Raikkonen -- it looks hopeful for a good race. Final top eight classification: Raikkonen, Button, Alonso, Fisichella, M. Schumacher, Webber, Heidfeld, Sato

2005-07-18T12:48:00.000-07:00

Alexander Chadwick/Associated Press

July 17, 2005
Battlefields
By RICHARD A. CLARKE

The carnage in the London Underground follows an even more horrendous attack on Madrid commuters 16 months ago. When President Bush sought recently to reassure Americans about his Iraq policy, he emphasized that we are fighting terrorists in Iraq so that we do not have to fight them here at home. Unfortunately for Britain and Spain, fighting terrorists in Iraq did not immunize them from attacks at home.

Earlier this year the administration revealed that Osama bin Laden had communicated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of ''Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia,'' urging him to send some of his many fighters to the homelands of the United States and its coalition allies. Zarqawi's network has apparently been quite successful in recruiting new terrorists in Arab nations and in Islamic communities in Europe. Before the London attacks, the police arrested Zarqawi recruiters in Britain, Germany, Spain and elsewhere. (Among those arrested in Spain was a terrorist thought to be connected to the Madrid attacks.) Iraq acts both as a motivator for the new jihadis and as a training ground. It has replaced Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia. Now, Muslim radical youth go to Iraq to prove themselves and learn the trade of terror.

A recent C.I.A. analysis reportedly concluded that those being recruited by Zarqawi are receiving better training and preparation by fighting in Iraq than previous terrorists received from bin Laden in Afghanistan. The report went on to say that these new terrorists will probably leave Iraq and practice their skills elsewhere. A Canadian Intelligence Security Service analysis reportedly says that terrorists trained in Iraq are likely to be involved in attacks in other countries. Commenting on the report, a former Canadian security officer said that terrorists are ''still planning very imaginative actions like we saw on 9/11.''

Although the United States made legal entry into the country more difficult after 9/11, it is still possible for potential terrorists to come here. Many of the new jihadis are citizens of European nations to which we grant visa-free entry. A jihadi might also come illegally, as millions of people do each year. Thus many security experts believe that it is only a matter of time until another attack occurs in the United States.

Members of the 9/11 Commission recently warned that the absence of an attack here in the last four years has created an atmosphere of complacency in which needed security improvements are given inadequate attention. Their warning should be heeded. The London Underground bombings highlighted, for example, one of the many areas where we remain vulnerable. Although the federal government has spent approximately $18 billion since 9/11 upgrading airline security, it has spent only $250 million on passenger-rail security. Any regular traveler can see the results. While I have been unable to carry a small scissors onto an aircraft, I have successfully carried a gun onto a passenger train.

In the hours after the London attacks, police officers flooded subway systems in the United States to beef up security. The fact that they had to do so is further evidence that these systems lack adequate protection. Increased use of closed-circuit cameras, uniformed guards and undercover officers in stations and on trains would reduce the likelihood of a successful attack on commuter rail lines.

The best way, however, to stop such attacks is through intelligence penetrations of terrorist circles. Only last month, almost four years after 9/11, did the administration agree to create a National Security Service within the F.B.I. to enhance our ability to perform such penetrations. It will be more years before this service is fully operational.

Why do we still find ourselves with so many domestic vulnerabilities? One major reason is that we have not spent what is necessary. When the Department of Homeland Security was created, the White House said it should be ''revenue neutral,'' i.e., no new money. Since then, homeland security spending has grown very slowly. The amount budgeted has not been based on needs assessment but on arbitrary decisions in an overall fiscal environment made difficult by skyrocketing spending in Iraq. Unfortunately, spending in Iraq will not immunize America from terrorist attacks at home any more than it did Spain or Britain.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Back to Top

2005-07-15T17:00:00.000-07:00

July 10, 2005
Will Any Organ Do?
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

Last summer at one hospital in Dallas, four people died from rabies, an unheard-of level of incidence of this rare disease. As it turned out, each patient was infected by an organ or tissue -- a kidney, a liver, an artery -- that he or she received in a transplant several weeks earlier. Their shared donor, William Beed Jr., a young brain-dead man, had rabies, caught apparently through a bite from a rabid bat, something the surgeons never suspected. They all thought he had suffered a fatal crack-cocaine overdose, which can produce symptoms similar to those of rabies. ''We had an explanation for his condition,'' says Dr. Goran Klintmalm, a surgeon who oversees transplantation at Baylor University Medical Center, where the transplants occurred. ''He'd recently smoked crack cocaine. He'd hemorrhaged around the brain. He'd died. That was all we needed to know.''

Since the rabies deaths, recriminations have flown, procedural reviews have begun and sorrow and regret have dogged the families of the organ recipients. But the outbreak also exposed a controversy that until then was roiling only the rarefied world of transplant specialists. The issue, although freighted with monetary and bio-ethical complexities, can be boiled down to one deceptively simple question. Should transplant surgeons be using organs from nearly anyone?

Organ transplanting has become, in fundamental ways, a victim of its own success. Not long ago, transplant surgery was a dodgy, last-ditch response to end-stage kidney failure. But with the advent of better antirejection drugs and surgical techniques, transplantation has become the treatment of choice for a growing range of conditions, including chronic kidney failure, end-stage lung or liver disease and some congestive heart failure. Kidneys are implanted routinely, as are increasing numbers of livers, hearts and pancreases.

Fifteen years ago, about 20,000 people in the United States were on waiting lists for organs. Today, about 88,000 are. The number of donors has not come close to keeping pace. There were about 15,000 transplants completed with organs from cadavers in 1993 and about 20,000 last year. Patients used to wait weeks for an organ. Now they wait years. On average, 18 people on organ waiting lists die every day.

Doctors, patients and politicians concerned about transplantation have responded with proposals for increasing donations. In 2002, the American Medical Association voted to endorse pilot projects to give families financial incentives, like cash payments to help cover the costs of funerals, for donating their deceased loved ones' organs. The next year, Congress held hearings on the topic. Representative James Greenwood, Republican of Pennsylvania, introduced a bill that would have authorized demonstration projects to determine whether offering financial incentives to families of brain-dead patients would increase donation rates. There was a public outcry against ''buying'' organs and the bill died. (A few states offer tax incentives to families who donate relatives' organs.)

Increasingly desperate people in need of transplants have turned to highway billboards and Internet sites to solicit donors. Donations from living people have helped. Today the number of living kidney donors is greater than the number of dead donors. But living donations of other organs are rare because they can be dangerous or are impossible.

All of which has led transplant specialists to quietly begin to relax the standards of who can donate. As a result, according to surgeons I spoke with and reports in medical journals, the transplanting of what doctors refer to as ''marginal'' or ''extended criteria'' organs, organs that once would have been considered unusable, has increased considerably in the last several years. The definition of a marginal organ differs from transplant center to transplant center and also from one type of organ to another. This makes it difficult to quantify the increase in the use of these organs. But the expansion is undeniable and has become a much-discussed issue in the field, a topic of ethics papers, surgical conferences and soul-searching on the part of many of the surgeons involved.

Fifteen years ago, William Beed Jr. would not have qualified as an organ donor. When he died in May 2004, he was 20, unemployed and had been living with his mother and sister in a bat-infested apartment building in Texarkana, Ark. Throughout his life, Beed had been in and out of trouble, his mother acknowledged when I spoke to her recently. Marijuana and cocaine were found in his urine at the time of his death, according to a report in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Beed's drug use alone would have disqualified him as a donor. (It still would keep him from giving blood.) ''What people have to understand is that donors now, except for the 75-year-olds who die of intracranial bleeds, are not part of the church choir,'' Klintmalm told me when I met with him in Dallas earlier this year. ''The ones who die are the ones you don't want your daughter or your son to socialize with. They drink. They drive too fast. They use crack cocaine. They get caught up in drive-bys.''

The donor pool was different in the early days of transplantation. Beginning in the 60's and through the 80's, a majority of donors were head-trauma victims, people who had been involved in car accidents, botched suicides or tumbles off horses or ladders. These donors were almost all young, between 15 and 45. (In the 80's, few transplant surgeons would take a 50-year-old organ.) They were of average weight, with no history of diabetes, cancer, infectious disease, imprisonment, high blood pressure, cigarette-smoking habits, tattoos (which have been associated with blood-borne illnesses) or unsafe sexual behaviors. The chosen organs, said Klintmalm, who has been in practice for about 25 years, ''were pristine.''

It was easy to adhere to those standards at first. ''We didn't perceive any shortage of organs back in the day,'' says Dr. Nicholas Tilney, the Francis D. Moore professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and one of the nation's premier kidney-transplant surgeons. ''If a patient had to wait a few weeks for a kidney, that seemed long. We never foresaw the kind of situation we have today.''

Conditions began to change in the 90's. Seat-belt use was more common by then, and fewer Americans were dying of head injuries, depriving transplantation of its most reliable sources of pristine organs. At the same time, the demand for transplants was growing. Surgeons had little choice but to start looking to alternative sources for organs.

On April 28, 2004, William Beed Jr. complained to his mother that he was feeling sick. ''He couldn't swallow,'' his mother, Judy, a practical nurse, recalled when I spoke with her earlier this year. They decided he should go to an emergency room, she said, and the doctors there examined him and sent him home with medication, saying he was dehydrated. By that evening, he was drooling, throwing up, shaking and still having difficulty swallowing. His fever was rising. He started vomiting blood. His father drove him to another E.R.

Diagnosis is often a matter of context. Because of doctor-patient confidentiality rules, doctors involved with this case would not talk about it on the record, but a few did say that had Beed not had cocaine in his blood, the E.R. doctors might have investigated his symptoms more aggressively instead of assuming he had overdosed. (Because no autopsy was done, doctors have not been able to establish whether the rabies or the drugs actually killed him.)

Soon after, Beed fell into a coma and was put on a ventilator. After a few days, his mother said, the doctors told her and her family that their son was brain-dead. Transplant surgeons use organs from brain-dead patients because they still have a heartbeat, and if the patients are placed on a ventilator, their organs continue to get oxygen. Without oxygen, the organs degrade within minutes.

According to Judy Beed, a transplant coordinator approached her and asked whether she would be willing to donate her son's organs. She agreed, and in the middle of the night on May 4, the parents of Joshua Hightower received a phone call offering them William Beed's kidney.

Joshua Hightower, who lived in Gilmer, Tex., had had kidney problems since he was 2. They had grown progressively worse over the years. ''When he was 16, things got really bad,'' said his mother, Jennifer Hightower, a special education assistant in the public schools, when I met with her in February. ''He was pale and droopy. He weighed 112 pounds. He was sleeping all the time.'' His teachers at Gilmer High School walked him up and down the halls between classes to help him stay awake. A doctor urged his parents to get him on the waiting list for a kidney. In the meantime, Joshua began daily dialysis at home. The process, which purified his blood of toxins, required that he be home every evening by 10. Once there, he was tethered to the dialysis machine for between 9 and 16 hours. When the Hightowers received the call from the hospital, they jumped at the opportunity.

It is impossible to know now when the first less-than-pristine organ was retrieved and transplanted. But over the course of the 90's, according to surgeons I spoke with, many barriers fell. Age was almost certainly the first to go. Instead of accepting donors 45 and younger, some transplant centers began, gradually, to take those who were 48, 49, 50 and then up from there. ''I wrote a paper for The Journal of the American Medical Association back in 1989,'' Dr. Lewis Teperman, director of transplantation at New York University Medical Center, told me when I talked to him earlier in the spring. ''It was looking at the outcomes of using older donors. By older donors, we meant someone over 60. That was considered really, really old.'' Recently, N.Y.U. transplanted a liver from a deceased 80-year-old. A couple of years ago, a Canadian hospital used a 93-year-old liver from a deceased donor.

Almost imperceptibly, most of the other traditional prohibitions evaporated. Surgeons started accepting lungs from people who had smoked, sometimes for decades. They accepted hearts and kidneys from those who had had high blood pressure or had been obese. They took organs from alcoholics and drug users. (Because cocaine is flushed from the body relatively quickly, it is considered one of the least problematic drugs in donors.) Infectious disease was no longer an automatic disqualifier, either. Most surgeons would have once discarded organs from someone with hepatitis C, for instance, since it destroys the liver. But the virus, often spread by injected drug use, is now so common in urban areas that few transplant surgeons will immediately turn down an organ infected with it. Ideally the surgeons implant these infected organs into patients who already harbor hepatitis C. But lately there have been cases in which doctors, as a last resort, have transplanted infected livers into patients who don't have hepatitis C. There is little published data yet about the long-term outcomes for these patients.

The expansion into ''marginal'' or ''extended criteria'' organs has not been systematic. One transplant surgeon will use a marginal organ from, say, a morbidly obese donor or a drug user. His patient survives. Then he will repeat it again and again. At the next big transplant conference, he will talk to his colleagues about his success, and they will go back to their own transplant centers and accept, for the first time, an obese donor or a crack-cocaine user. ''You sometimes have to experiment,'' Klintmalm says.

Klintmalm and other surgeons I spoke with who work in urban areas say that marginal organs are well on their way to being the majority of organs they transplant. Klintmalm, though, takes issue with the very definition of marginal. ''Older organs should not be called 'marginal,''' Klintmalm maintains, referring to donors over age 55. ''They're standard for us.'' But two years ago, when the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the private organization that oversees organ transplantation in the United States, published its first definition of extended-criteria organs, age was prominent. The UNOS classification, which applies only to kidneys, defines a marginal kidney as one that comes from a deceased person over 60 or one over 50 with two of three characteristics: stroke, hypertension or abnormal kidney function. The definition does not mention smoking, diabetes, hepatitis, alcoholism, obesity or drug use.

No government agency sets standards for what makes an organ acceptable. The Department of Health and Human Services contracts with UNOS to handle the day-to-day logistics of the transplant system (getting organs to the next person on the list and so on). But the government's main concerns in policing transplants are that donors and recipients be matched for blood type and that organs be distributed primarily based on medical need, not the wealth, race or celebrity of the recipients. So decisions about whether organs are usable are made on the spot by individual surgeons.

To date, not many peer-reviewed studies have been published that examine the long-term outcomes of using marginal organs. The research that has been done mostly looks at kidneys.

Recent studies of older kidneys (usually defined as over 50), for instance, have shown that they can function almost as well as younger ones. They don't work for as long, however. In a report presented by UNOS, which adjusted for the health of the recipient, among other things, about a third of extended-criteria kidneys failed within three years. (About 20 percent of non-extended-criteria organs also failed within three years.) Transplantation, even under the best of circumstances, still involves risk. In assessing marginal organs, it is difficult to know whether a bad outcome -- the recipient's death or the organ's failure -- was caused by the organ, the surgery or the fragile health of the recipient.

Except for age-related research, few large-scale studies have yet investigated the effects of other extended-criteria kidneys. Do kidneys from diabetics, the obese, alcoholics, smokers or drug users generally work over the long term? Surgeons and scientists can't say for sure.

There is even less information about imperfect livers, hearts or lungs. Surgeons do know that livers, for some reason, don't age at the same rate as their original owners. Sixty- or 70-year-old livers can be in fine shape. Hearts and lungs aren't as durable and are more likely to fail as they get older. But surgeons are using them. A 2003 report by the UNOS-administered Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network stated: ''The need to more agressively utilize available organs for the candidate population as a whole competes with the expectation of each individual.''

And this is, ultimately, the crux of the matter. The marginality of any given organ is relative. It depends on how sick the waiting recipient is. There is a kind of mad, desperate arithmetic that goes into calculating whether to use a marginal organ and when. ''We're all trying to quantify the risks,'' Lewis Teperman, the N.Y.U. transplant director, says. ''If we know that there's a 0.7 increase in relative risk of an extended-criteria organ failing, which is about what we've seen in kidneys so far, you take that number, look at your patient's chances for survival, which might be 90 percent with a perfect organ and 80 percent with an extended-criteria one and. . . . '' He trails off. ''It sounds very clinical when I put it like that, which isn't what I want.'' He starts again. ''It's easy enough to come up with these kinds of calculations. But it's difficult for any of us to apply them in practice, when we're dealing with very sick people's lives.''

Dr. Marlon Levy, a liver-transplant surgeon in Fort Worth and the medical director for the Southwest Transplant Alliance, the group that unwittingly collected and distributed the rabid organs last year, told me: ''You have this immensely complex weighing of benefits and risks in each of these cases. Is the recipient sick enough to justify using any organ, even a really marginal one, to try and save his life and give him a few more years? Or say you have a slightly healthier patient, and you think he's doing well enough to pass on a marginal organ and wait for a better one. Then, suddenly, he develops complications and dies before another organ becomes available. Were these decisions wrong?''

It is extremely difficult to predict outcomes. ''The best thought-out decision doesn't work out all the time,'' Teperman says. ''I have put in extended-criteria organs that worked perfectly, and the person walked out the door a week later. Other times, a patient has gotten an extended-criteria organ and remained hospitalized for months. I've also waited, thinking a better organ would come along, and the patient has died in the meantime.''

To some extent, surgeons' hands are tied. In general, the current system requires that the most desperately ill patient must get the next organ that comes in, whether it is the best organ for that patient or not. ''Things would work best if we could put the most extended-criteria organs into the less critically ill patients and the healthiest organs into the sickest patients,'' Teperman says.

The calculus may be even more complex from the patient's perspective. Dr. Grant Campbell, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had a liver transplant in 1990. At that time, he was chronically ill and knowingly accepted an organ infected with cytomegalovirus, a common and usually mild disease but one that can be serious in immunosuppressed transplant patients. Fortunately, he didn't become sick.

Even the most rational attempts to weigh the risks and benefits of marginal organs tend to fall apart in the face of truly boundless human despair. ''We would have taken any lungs,'' said Harry Littlejohn, 59, of Lewisville, Tex., whose 28-year-old daughter, Carmen, died in 2001 of cystic fibrosis. She had been No. 1 on the state waiting list for new lungs for eight weeks by then. None became available. ''We would have done anything to save her,'' he said, ''anything. But there was nothing we could do.''

Joshua Hightower turned 18 on May 10, 2004, in the transplant recovery ward at Baylor University Medical Center. Photos from around that time show him propped up in bed, looking wan, but smiling.

Joshua had been added to the lengthy transplant waiting list the year before. The doctors said they could not estimate how long the wait would be, Jennifer Hightower, his mother, told me.

After the Hightowers received the call from the hospital, his mother recalled, she had wondered about the donor. Anonymity has been crucial to the workings of the organ-transplant system. Donation is supposed to be a blind act of altruism. Donor families aren't told at the time who will receive the organs, and recipients generally are told only the age and sex of the donor.

''You don't want people coming in and saying, 'I'll only donate to Italians.' Or 'I only want them to go to someone in the Ku Klux Klan,''' says Sheldon Zink, director of the program for transplant policy and ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. You also don't want recipients turning down organs because of their own biases.

But how much should a surgeon tell a patient who is about to receive a compromised organ? Should he explain that the new kidney comes from a retiree, a drug user or an alcoholic, a chain smoker or a member of a motorcycle gang? Does he have to tell a patient that the organ he is about to receive is considered marginal?

"I wish we had been told more,'' Jennifer Hightower says. Her son, she went on to say, would have declined the kidney had they known more about Beed's background and his death. Joshua, she says, was not so sick that he couldn't wait. ''I would have made him pass on it.''

Her attitude worries Zink, the ethicist. ''I would question anyone's motivation in refusing an organ from a drug user,'' she told me. ''They aren't responding to clinical information, because the available clinical data'' -- the anecdotal reports from doctors -- ''indicates that organs from crack-cocaine users are fine, in general. So they must be responding to preconceptions about that person's lifestyle. That's only one small step from declining an organ because the donor is black or Hispanic.''

At the moment, no formal national medical standards dictate what transplant surgeons should tell their patients about organs other than kidneys or what they can withhold. Each doctor makes that decision based on how he feels about the ethics of the situation.

''I believe in erring on the side of telling the patient as much as possible,'' Teperman says. ''We have a lengthy consent form here at N.Y.U., and it goes into the use of marginal organs. We ask patients if they will accept one. You don't want to be calling someone at 2 a.m. and saying: 'You can take this organ we just got in that may not be very good or you can wait and maybe die. What do you want to do?' That's an unrealistic burden to put on a patient. We try to have the conversation early on, when patients are a little more clearheaded. That's not always an easy conversation to have. Some patients would rather not think about it. They'd rather the doctor just make the decision for them.''

Some surgeons insist on making decisions about marginal organs unilaterally. ''There are transplant surgeons who think they absolutely know best,'' Zink says. ''They don't bother asking the patient if he wants a marginal organ because they don't want the patient having a choice. They make it for him.''

When Zink recently asked surgeons at a major transplant conference how many of them always tell their patients if they are about to implant a marginal organ, ''about half said they tell the patient,'' Zink told me. ''Half said they don't.''

Some surgeons withhold information because they are concerned about litigation (better to say nothing than to say that an organ might be compromised, have your judgment proved right and be sued for it). Others are prodded by compassion. ''There are doctors out there who think that a patient will recover better if he isn't worrying about the quality of the organ inside of him,'' Zink says.

Wry pragmatism also plays a role. ''At some large urban transplant centers, virtually all organs nowadays are extended-criteria organs,'' Zink points out. Why discuss the option of accepting or declining an imperfect organ? If a patient says he doesn't want one, he'll most likely never get an organ at all. ''I've had doctors tell me they don't even tell their patients that they're about to get an organ that might be infected with hepatitis C because so many of the donated organs may have it,'' Zink says.

On Friday, May 28, 24 days after his transplant, Joshua Hightower, who had been released from the hospital, graduated from high school. He clutched his diploma, climbed up into the stands and threw up, Jennifer Hightower said. He didn't stop vomiting all through the celebrations that followed. The next day, he was stumbling, and by the evening, he was having convulsions. Spit dribbled down his face. Doctors at the nearest emergency room hurriedly transferred him to the E.R. at Baylor.

Upstairs in the transplant wing, around the same time, three other patients who had received donations from William Beed Jr. lay dying, each with convulsions, delirium or pain. Within two weeks, all but Joshua were dead. Rabies was confirmed as the cause of death a few weeks later.

There is no formal system that tracks the short-term fate of individual organs from a particular donor. Surgeons report raw data about deaths and severe surgical complications to UNOS. Had all of the people who received an organ from William Beed Jr. not come back to the same hospital and died, one after another, their rabies may not have come to light.

In May, three people died who had received organs from the same donor in New England. As it turned out, the donor had passed along lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, a rare illness transmitted to humans from rodents like hamsters. Two of the recipients, after getting ill, went to the same hospital, which helped doctors there determine that the transplant was the cause.

''I doubt very much that this is the only time'' that rabies has killed transplant patients, says Charles Rupprecht, the C.D.C.'s rabies expert about the Beed case. ''And I doubt that it will be the last.'' In February, doctors in Germany announced that four patients there had been infected with rabies after receiving organs from a rabid young woman who had died, they had thought, of a heart attack associated with an overdose of cocaine and Ecstasy.

''Rabies is a sentinel disease,'' argues Dr. Matthew Kuehnert, the assistant director for blood safety at the C.D.C., who has studied outbreaks of disease in transplant recipients. ''It tells us we should be paying attention, that something needs to change.''

What, though? ''We cannot start testing every donor for rabies or any of the other once-in-a-lifetime diseases that might crop up,'' Klintmalm says. ''We don't have time. It would cost too much. You might as well shut down every transplant center. If another case came in today exactly like that one, a young man who used crack cocaine and died, I would not demand more explanation. Why? We'll never get the risk of transplants down to zero. It's stupid to pretend we can. That young man appeared to be a perfect donor. I wish we had more like him.''

The broader question is what, if anything, should change in transplantation as marginal organs become everyday organs? ''We at the C.D.C. wish that there were more formal disease surveillance and follow-up of transplant patients,'' Kuehnert said. ''We simply don't know the risks of using certain types of donors at this point.'' The C.D.C. has no authority to require such follow-up and study, though. Only other regulatory agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services or state agencies can set such mandates.

In June 2004, the New York State Department of Health became the first regulatory agency in the country to start formally looking into the growing use of marginal organs and to formulate recommendations about what patients should be told and what kinds of organs should be allowed. Its report is due soon.

In the meantime, the United Network for Organ Sharing has created a designation for patients who say they will accept a marginal kidney. At the end of February, 42 percent of the adults waiting for a kidney in the United States said they would take a marginal organ.

A year ago, while Joshua Hightower lay unconscious but alive, the doctors decided to surgically remove his transplanted kidney. But by then, rabies (not yet identified as the culprit) was everywhere in him. His condition worsened. On June 18, a Friday, doctors tested for brain activity. They found none and declared him brain dead. Stung with grief, Jennifer Hightower and the rest of her family sat with the boy through a wrenching weekend while he remained on a ventilator. On that Monday, his parents agreed to end life support. That afternoon, with his family watching, doctors turned off the ventilator. His mother held him as his heart stopped.

It will not be a simple matter in the years ahead to decide how best to save lives with transplants. At some point this year, the number of people on transplant waiting lists in the United States will very likely top 100,000. Unless there is an enormous effort, probably from the federal government, to increase organ donation, the shortage will only grow. ''All these kids we see with diabetes,'' Nicholas Tilney says, ''so many of them will need a new kidney in a few years. Where are those organs going to come from?''

Gretchen Reynolds frequently writes about medical topics. Her last article for the magazine was about epidemiologists tracking the avian flu.

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2005-07-15T14:10:00.000-07:00

2005-07-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

Flavio Briatore
F1 > British GP, 2005-07-09 (Silverstone): Saturday practice 1

2005-07-15T13:52:00.000-07:00

Mr. Berinie Ecclestone. British Grand Prix, 2005.
All in all, this season has been gratifying since Fernando Alonso has been so incredibly quick and consistent. For his youth, he seems a very mature driver, and he appears to have the balance of his emotions and ego placed in proper perspective. In short, the guy is super talented and very cool. This is the best thing that could happen to Formula 1.

As far as Indianapolis is concerned, I believe there were unseen forces that may be quite pleased to see Formula 1 fall flat on its face here in America. Of course, when viewed from a strictly fan perspective, the entire episode was one giant farcical disappointment.

Several matters come to mind. Michelin, the internationally known and recognized tire company somehow did not do the necessary research and showed up in America without a tire that was capable of performing on the Indy track surface. Granted, Bridgestone had been at the 500, so they naturally would have had more data on the track surface and so were well advised in what compounds they had chosen prior to arriving at the Brickyard. It is astounding however, when you analyze the sequence of events. That first and foremost, a tire company participating in Motor racing at the highest level of international competition with billions of dollars involved throughout the entire enterprise, would be capable of going in blindly without having at least examined what options they might need to have or what kind of obstacles they might be expected to incur. It was not a secret that the race track had been resurfaced in some way or another which resulted in a grittier more abrasive characteristic.

Michelin shows up and discovers that the tires they have are relatively useless and worse yet they are dangerous. Ralf Schumacher goes off in a high speed shunt, and one other driver whose name escapes me now, goes out as well, and all the while Michel in have no clue. Except they do realize and admit that the safety of the drivers precludes them from simply pressing forward and acting as if everything would be alright. For this I give them a certain degree of respect.

So when the windup ensues you have the race itself, and all that it represents in terms of the perennial desire for Formula 1 to someday, somehow establish itself firmly and loyally in the minds and hearts of American racing fans.

And then you have the internecine intrigue between the intricately drawn factions of the International Grand Prix circus. Here we enter into cultural, financial, philosophical, and not the least, personal conflicts and long standing animosities.

From the Bridgestone perspective, why would they have wished to smooth over a gaffe that exposed their world's greatest rival as something of a complete incompetent?

From the FISA point of view, I suppose they felt they would open a Pandora's box of possibilities wherein which rules that are so incredibly complex, must be continuously revised and reformatted to account for so many variables within the sport and the technology that it draws from in large measure. These rules would perhaps then be the constant point of negotiation as other points of departure would come into question.

Finally, Scuderia Ferrari was showing as much compassion as the Italian Expeditionary Tank forces extended to Hailee Sallase and his vastly out numbered, camel bourne , sling shot bearing defense force in Ethiopia. Another less than memorable episode in 20th century Italian history.

FISA was in no way potent enough by way of silent persuasion to effectuate an ultimate compromise. Max Mosley would have been wise, in my opinion, to have made his way to the paddock and the negotiating table, because the entire BRAND of Formula 1 was suffer ring a devastating blow to its credibility, marketability, and general point of popular acceptance.

As it turns out, he remained somewhere in Europe, Paris I suppose, and from that distance felt safe enough while allowing Ecclestone to bear all of the justifiable ire and resentment from those fans who made their weekend around seeing a genuinely competitive International Grand Prix. They deserve, and I believe they eventually will receive, their money for admission refunded.

Furthermore, Mr. Ecclestone is one person who would have, if he were able, in and of his own will, put together a compromise solution so as to have the racing fans enjoy what they had come to see. There is no one that I know, in or out of Formula 1 who is more desirous of establishing a permanent presence and appreciation for Grand Prix racing in the U.S. than Bernie Ecclestone. He has made repeated attempts to educate, if you will, the civic leaders here in Las Vegas about the kind of product that Formula 1 confirms as unique and attended by a very high end marketing segment with disposable income far greater than what is demographically described by the NASCAR and other forms of all American motor racing.

The unfairness in regards to Ecclestone and the vents at the recent American Grand Prix, is that there are limits to what he personally can do without risking the opposite side of the critics corner wherein which he is accused of wielding totalitarian and dictatorial control over every aspect of the entire enterprise.

To my way of thinking, to the extent that in every instance where to a greater or lesser degree, "The Ecclestone as Czar model" is accurate, then the entire Formula 1 world and everyone involved in this endeavor in any way large or small, should be thankful for all of the years of incessant determination and unrelenting focus and vision with which Bernie Ecclestone has dedicated himself towards bringing together the very essence of what is accepted as the world?s premier Motor Racing series.

Most knowledgeable people with even the slightest awareness of Motor racing in general, will acknowledge that Grand Prix Formula 1 exists on a level of technical and physical challenge unlike any other form of entertainment in the world today. The very fact that Ecclestone has traveled from year to year from race to race, from airport to hotel to airplane to helicopter to jet to hotel and back around again is testimony to the superior discipline, motivation, intellect and abounding business genius that mark the achievements of this leader of the world of Grand Prix Motor Sport.

His comment about the women being advised to wear dresses the color of kitchen appliances was simply his "East End" London sense of humor flexing itself as a leit motif to a very stressful situation.

I know from first hand, personal experience that Bernie Ecclestone is a genuine humanitarian and extraordinarily generous to those he loves and cares about. He is unsparingly loyal to those loyal to him, and he is a person who has done innumerable acts of great kindness to help those less fortunate through times of overwhelming adversity.

His financial success should not be held against him, because every pound note Bernie may hold he well deserves because he has worked his butt off and taken many risks, suffered many personal setbacks and disappointments integral to the dangers of Formula 1 and survived it all to stand as the single most influential leader in the world of Motor Sport since the beginning of organized and sanctioned competition.

No one that I can identify comes even close to having been able to accomplish so much from every angle to see that so many people realized so much more as drivers, team owners, promoters, journalists, photographers, and accessory entrepreneurs of every ancillary stripe.

All persons related to this unique form of incredible excitement and test of competitive skill and technical expertise owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Mr. Ecclestone, and those persons who have character and real integrity within the sport itself realize this only too well.

Without him, Grand Prix Motor Racing as we know it today, would not exist. Case Closed
Michael P. Whelan Las Vegas, July 12, 2005.

2005-07-08T18:12:00.000-07:00

Write Line
FIA and Michelin Teams: A Letter of Concern
2005-06-24
Kaylie Broughton
The FIA have recently published their views on the USA Grand Prix and in general showed that they care little for their fans and that it is not important to please them, but let me take this opportunity to remind everyone of something. Without us, there are no viewing figures and money spent on race weekends, without that there are no sponsors willing to come into F1, with no sponsors there are no F1 teams, with no teams there is no F1. Perhaps you should sit down for awhile and look at it from someone else's perspective instead of just trying to cover your own portion of blame in the matter. Maybe you should try running a series without fans, go to races with no one watching in the stands or on the tv and see how far you get before you fail.
The events which I witnessed unfolding in the USA Grand Prix were totally disgusting for a global sport such as F1, but post race dealings have gone from disgusting to unacceptable and this is why you find me writing this letter.
I am in complete support of the Michelin teams who withdrew from the USA Grand Prix on the formation lap (note that they did start the race) and find it shocking that you blame the matter totally on these teams and come up with reasons which contradict your own rules. I am right in believing there is a rule which states at least 12 drivers should take part in a race otherwise it can be cancelled, so if you deem that the Michelin teams did not start then you should have also stuck to this rule.
I believe that Michelin are to fault for providing tyres that were unsafe for the grand prix in which they should have been used for, but instead of dragging the sport further through the mud perhaps you should be concentrating on how to ensure or decrease the chance of this happening again.
Michelin teams pulled out on grounds of safety and there are several team bosses out there that know all to well about fatalities and injuries that are possible in F1. Even the solutions that were offered did not guarantee anymore safety than just racing at full speeds, as the root cause of these problems had not been identified.
As one of the younger fans of the sport I know how unpopular the sport has become in recent years, but I have stuck through the less interesting seasons and intend to celebrate my 10th year of watching the sport by attending the Silverstone grand prix, however the last week has made me question the sport and indeed my support for it and if the teams are punished for their correct actions last weekend then come race weekends you can forget any viewing figures come from me.
I hope the hearing on the 29th June clears the Michelin teams of any part of bringing the sport into disrepute and I would like to emphasise that they have my full support on this matter.
Regards,
Kaylie Broughton

2005-06-27T16:35:00.000-07:00

June 26, 2005
The Newspaper of the Future
By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN
Lawrence, Kan.

EVERY Little League player in this town of about 85,000 people can be a star. Regardless of how he or she hits or fields, each tyke and teenager is eligible for a personalized electronic trading card - replete with a picture, biography, statistics and an audio clip of the player philosophizing about the game - that can be posted on the Web site of the local newspaper, The Lawrence Journal-World.

Lawrencians buying tickets for University of Kansas football games can visit the same site, LJWorld.com, and find photographs offering sightlines from each of Memorial Stadium's 50,000 seats. Law aficionados can find transcripts of locally significant court cases posted on the site and participate in live, online chats debating the pros or cons of some cases - sometimes with experts who are involved in the proceedings.

A related Web site, lawrence.com, is aimed at college readers. It allows visitors to download tunes from the Wakarusa Music Festival, find spirited reviews of local bars and restaurants and plunge into a vast trove of blogs, including the Gay Kansan in China Blogger, who recently had his first "disgusting" experience with a woman, to the Born-Again Christian Blogger, who offers videotaped huzzahs to the Nascar legend Dale Earnhardt Sr.

The steward of this online smorgasbord is Dolph C. Simons Jr., a politically conservative, 75-year-old who corresponds via a vintage Royal typewriter and red grease pencil while eschewing e-mail and personal computers. "I don't think of us as being in the newspaper business," said Mr. Simons, the editor and publisher of The Journal-World and the chairman of the World Company, the newspaper's parent. "Information is our business and we're trying to provide information, in one form or another, however the consumer wants it and wherever the consumer wants it, in the most complete and useful way possible."

Owned by the Simons family since 1891, The Journal-World is a small-town paper emphasizing small-town news, but it is hardly restrained by a small-town mentality. Indeed, at a time when newspapers big and small are facing financial and journalistic crossroads, media analysts say The Journal-World, with a circulation of just 20,000, offers guidelines for moving forward.

The Simons family, through the World Company, enjoys an unfettered and often-criticized media monopoly in Lawrence. But the family has used that advantage to cross-pollinate its properties, ranging from cable to telephone service to newspaper and online publishing, and to take technological and financial risks that other owners might have avoided.

Mr. Simons and his associates describe their overall goals as a shared belief in quality, a deep attachment to Lawrence as a community and a constant reinvention of their business's relationship with readers, viewers and advertisers.

"We believe that journalism has been a monologue for so long and now is the perfect time for it to become a dialogue with our readers," said Rob Curley, 34, the World Company's director of new media. "We want readers to think of this as their paper, not our paper."

LAWRENCE has a long history as an independent, contrarian town. Founded in 1854 by New England abolitionists, it became one of the most violent, bloody battlegrounds in the slavery debate and was burned to the ground by pro-slavery raiders in 1861.

The University of Kansas opened its doors here just after the Civil War; women made up almost half of its first class. Haskell Indian Nations University, a college for Native Americans, opened here in 1884. After Mr. Simons's grandfather arrived in town more than a century ago, he bought the local paper for $50.

Today, Lawrence is a regional anomaly, anchoring a Democratic county in a solidly Republican state. Its large student population brings spunk to Lawrence, the university adds academic sophistication and sports fanaticism, and the town, dotted with funky restaurants and boutiques, has become a favorite of artists and activists.

Lawrence is also peppered with tidy, attractive homes and schools that draw middle- and upper-class families headed by professionals who commute to work in Topeka and Kansas City. "It's a real town with a real soul where people like to get involved," said Paul Carttar, a Lawrence native who is executive vice chancellor for external affairs at the University of Kansas. "People here care about what Lawrence will become."

Mr. Simons says his family takes its Lawrence roots seriously. "My dad told me that if you take care of Lawrence, Lawrence will take care of you," he said.

To that end, Mr. Simons has been an aggressive consolidator of local news and information services while resisting what he described as repeated offers over the years from larger companies wanting to buy him out. He has also been an early adopter of new technologies. The World Company began laying cable in 1968 and offered cable programming to residents in 1971, paying for the expansion with profits from The Journal-World - long before most larger media companies would embrace cable.

Today, about 80 percent of homes in Lawrence have cable connections. The Journal-World began publishing on the Internet in 1995, the same year that Sunflower, the broadband subsidiary of the World Company, first offered cable modems to customers. In 1999, the newspaper and its television station began sharing talent, using reporters to write for The Journal-World and appear on the company's news stations.

"We're not afraid to jump outside of the box, and that's because of who our owners are," said Patrick Knorr, 32, Sunflower's general manager, who also oversees strategic planning for the World Company. "They're determined not to lose because they were asleep at the switch."

Mr. Knorr said that World, which employs a total of about 600 people, did not try to offer new content to broadband subscribers until it had solid relationships with its customers and a robust pipeline through which it could pump media offerings.

"Content is absolutely critical and king," Mr. Knorr said. "But consumers have more power than ever over who gets crowned."

On a sweltering midsummer morning in 2001, Mr. Simons convened most of his media staff in the basement of a handsomely restored former post office at the corner of New Hampshire and Seventh Streets. The building was World's new "converged news center," where the company's television, newspaper and online staffs would all be housed.

Mr. Simons told his editors and reporters that they were going to do more than merely work shoulder to shoulder; they were going to share reporting assignments, tasks and scoops - whether they liked it or not.

Many did not like it at all, and some World reporters say they sometimes still feel taken advantage of - when they are asked to squeeze multiple print, television and online duties into the course of a single day. Print reporters and their editors have, at times, been reluctant to share scoops or ideas with their television counterparts, and vice versa. But many reporters also said that, over time, they have adapted.

"You can really teeter on the edge of, 'I'm not enjoying this and it's not fair,' to, 'This is one of the coolest things I've ever done,' " said Deanna Richards, a television reporter who works in World's converged newsroom. The company currently has 81 news employees, an unusually large number for an operation of its size.

In 1993, Mr. Simons recruited Bill Snead, an award-winning photographer from The Washington Post, to oversee the Journal-World newsroom. Now a senior editor, Mr. Snead, 67, has written, photographed and shot video for feature assignments on topics such as farm strife, cheerleaders and cowboys. He said that while he had never shot video before arriving at The Journal-World, he had no trouble adapting.

"Technology is our servant; it's our valet; it gets our stuff out there - but it's still about the content," he said, adding that his company's online and cable properties have helped to forge a closer relationship with readers. "If you show people respect and don't treat them like a novelty, you'll have free rein. That's what we're doing here."

For as ambitious and creative as the Journal-World team is, the newspaper still offers a menu of stories that is relentlessly, sometimes numbingly, local. Weather, local trials, local sports and other local comings and goings dominate. Some critics say that controversial topics, like divisive land-use debates, are soft-pedaled in the paper's pages.

"They control the dialogue on local news," said Charles Goff III, 46, a political activist and artist in Lawrence. "Every viewpoint goes through their filter and is tied to the Chamber of Commerce and the moneyed elite."

Mr. Goff conceded, however, that he was unaware of the depth of offerings on the Web site of The Journal-World. He also said that while he felt that the paper's editorial and opinion pages were staunchly and unsparingly conservative, he thought that the news pages usually offered more balanced viewpoints.

Mr. Simons and his news staff vehemently deny that controversial topics are sidestepped.

And while some residents bemoan The Journal-World's local navel-gazing, those overseeing the publication are unapologetic and enthusiastic examiners of all things Lawrence. "When the space shuttle blew up, we didn't have it on our home page; when the war in Iraq started, we didn't have it on our home page," Mr. Curley said. "It's focusing entirely on local stories that we think made our Web traffic go crazy."

Mr. Simons recruited Mr. Curley to the World Company three years ago, when The Journal-World's Web site snared about 500,000 page views a month. Mr. Curley says the number is now about seven million. The company said its online operation was losing about $15,000 a month when Mr. Curley arrived; it expects the online business to become profitable this year.

Ralph Gage, World's chief operating officer, is a no-nonsense taskmaster whom Mr. Simons deputized to make sure the company's trains ran on time. Online revenue comprises only about 1.5 percent of World's total revenue, he said, while the bulk comes from broadband, at 53 percent, and the newspaper operation, at 37 percent.

But Mr. Gage says the company expects newspaper revenue to slacken over time, with online ventures eventually being a much more significant source of sales. For that reason, World has been willing to use its broadband funds to underwrite its online ventures until the online profits become more meaningful, probably by the end of the decade.

ACCORDING to a recent survey by Nielsen/NetRatings, newspaper Web sites nationwide had a 12 percent increase in unique visitors from May 2004 to May 2005, with a significant portion of readers aged 35 to 44 switching from a newspaper to the same paper's Web edition for their daily read.

"Newspaper circulation has been tanking since the 60's and now we're finally growing our audience online, so when I hear people complain about having to give their content away for free on the Internet I think they just don't get it," Mr. Curley said. "I'm a capitalist, and I respect people who want to make a ton of money, but, dude, I'm a journalist and I want to build cool things."

Of course, building cool things simply for the sake of building cool things suffered a notable national flameout during the dot-com bust. But through the newspaper Web site and lawrence.com, Lawrence comes alive in a fashion rare for a town of its size. (Lawrence.com is also published as a print weekly.)

The town, once home to the poet Langston Hughes and the novelist William S. Burroughs, has a rich literary tradition. Journalists at World are assembling a lushly embroidered Web site devoted to Mr. Burroughs that includes rare letters, photographs and other archival material.

During a local election, a list of questions reporters had asked of all candidates as part of a voter's guide were posted online. That allowed voters to answer the same questions themselves. Then they could use an online tool to find the candidates whose answers most closely matched their own - an example of civic journalism on steroids.

The paper also routinely files local freedom-of-information requests and uploads piles of public records to its Web site. In 2003, World installed about 30 wireless hot spots around Lawrence. That same year, it began sending daily content to cellphones. For example, subscribers can have real-time scores and statistics from the University of Kansas's football and basketball games delivered on demand.

The company has begun offering daily "podcasts" of news and other information to Apple iPod owners or anyone else carrying an MP3 player. It plans to offer a service that automatically loads information onto a docked MP3 player in the early-morning hours before students head to school.

About a third of the 18 employees in the online operation are interns, and their presence allows Mr. Curley to have data, video, photos and other material collected and uploaded at little cost, a process he grinningly refers to as "internology."

"People come here from thousands of miles away expecting to see something very high tech and expensive, but a lot of what we do we do on the cheap," Mr. Curley said. "So it just amazes me when people say they can't do what we do because they don't have the resources."

Still, it is financial resources, not content, that is behind the handwringing in newspaper circles everywhere.

While print advertising stagnates or slips, it is not yet being replaced in a meaningful way by online advertising revenue - especially at companies that lack a source of bridge financing like World's broadband operation. Although journalists may cringe to hear it, the near-term battle for corporate survival is likely to be waged and won primarily by inventive business and advertising teams at media companies.

The World Company's advertising staff said that its sales force had embraced convergence enthusiastically and that offering customers multiple advertising platforms - on TV, on the Internet and in print - has become a strong pitch.

But the company is still finding it difficult to persuade readers to interact with online display ads. And, while willing to adapt to news advertising demands, the company refuses to turn its Web site into an advertising billboard, believing that the clutter would undermine the quality and integrity of its journalism.

"I think as we've converged the content we're going to converge the advertising," said Dan Simons, president of the company's broadband operations and a son of the chairman. "I think you'll have to adapt to how buyers want to convey their messages so we're not just sellers of space and time. We have to be both advertisers and public relations advisers so we can help companies create their messages."

As effervescent as the new media are in Lawrence, analysts balk at making grand extrapolations from World's efforts.

"It's a market dominated by one company so you have to be very careful when holding them up as a paragon," said Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning at the Poynter Institute, which operates a Web site devoted to journalism. "Are they creative? Without a doubt, but I'm cautious about it being seen as a single solution or a model."

Others are more laudatory but equally cautious about Lawrence's online innovations. "Nobody else is close to doing what they've done," said David Card, a new-media analyst at Jupiter Research. "But you also wouldn't necessarily be able to duplicate what they're doing in towns like San Francisco or New York."

Dolph Simons, who writes a cantankerous Saturday column that draws barbs from Lawrence's liberals, is a gentle, self-effacing man who still serves Thanksgiving turkey to his newsroom employees. He says he considers himself a "little fish in a big pond" and is reluctant to be seen as a know-it-all by colleagues and competitors in the news business.

Even so, his opinion about the future of the news business is clear.

"I'm terribly concerned about readership in the country and I think we all have to learn new things as fast as we can. Otherwise other people are going to beat us to it," he said. "We need to be driving with our brights, because if we're driving with our dims somebody's going to come in from the side of the road and knock us off."

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2005-06-27T15:56:00.000-07:00

Christophe Vorlet

June 26, 2005
Maybe Saving Money Is Just for Chumps
By DANIEL AKST

ON a recent tour of Europe, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow talked about the need for Americans to save more. Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, recently told Congress that "our household saving rate remains negligible." From time to time, various economists, pundits and others in the financial peanut gallery chime in on this theme as well. If there's one thing Americans have to do more of, everyone seems to agree, it's save.

But why should we? What if there are good reasons for the seemingly low savings rate? If there really is such a thing as the wisdom of crowds, maybe it makes sense to consider whether most Americans know something that all the worrywarts don't.

I think they do. I think they've noticed that, given the way society is organized and the way the securities markets have been acting lately, saving doesn't make a lot of sense.

First, how can anybody take savings exhortations seriously from a government that seems to revel in fiscal profligacy? Secretary Snow is part of an administration whose policies have plunged the federal budget deep into the red with tax cuts, an expensive prescription plan for older Americans and a costly war in Iraq.

The government's shortfalls are seriously undermining national savings, and they strongly imply higher taxes down the road. Somebody will have to cover all those deficits, and a climbing ratio of retirees to workers will mean increased levies to pay for Social Security and health care for the elderly.

Higher taxes tomorrow make saving less appealing by reducing future after-tax investment returns. That is especially the case for tax-deferred retirement savings: why defer taxes if they're going only higher?

Retirement savers may also worry that when the great waves of baby-boomer retirees hit the Social Security system without adequate private savings, the prudent will be taxed even more to cover the costs of the imprudent. That's another reason not to save.

Maybe parents have noticed that the same reasoning can be applied to saving for college - a process that is unlikely to help get financial aid. Why show up on campus with your piggy bank full if the bursar is likely to expropriate the money?

Taxpayers have had decades to notice that the income tax system, which penalizes working and saving by taxing the earnings from each, is yet another good reason not to save.

In a rational world, we would have a progressive consumption tax that would penalize high levels of spending instead of earning and saving. As it stands now, the system encourages gigantic homes and commensurately large mortgages, because mortgage interest is tax deductible.

Potential savers have certainly noticed, too, that there is no good place to invest their money. Returns are dismal across the board. That makes saving less attractive - and requires extra risk to achieve any given level of reward.

There is also the problem of purchasing power. Signs that inflation may be reviving suggest that your money may be worth less later than it is now. And sooner or later, the dollar will fall against the yuan, making much of what we buy - from China, anyway - cost more.

Given all this, perhaps what we have here is not truly a failure to save. Perhaps it's something closer to rational profligacy.

Under the circumstances, is it any wonder that our main savings vehicle is our homes - or that home prices are soaring? In the long run, houses outperform inflation, provide tax-advantaged financing and capital gains, tend not to implode like Enron and, at the very least, provide a comfortable place to live.

The funny thing is that while society discourages saving, Americans probably save more than the numbers suggest. The government's system of measuring personal saving fails to capture changing asset values, mishandles pensions and has other shortcomings that cause it to understate actual savings, at least in the opinion of some economists.

EVERYONE needs a rainy-day fund, of course. But if we really want society to save more, we have to stop penalizing thrift, stop taxing earned income and stop the federal deficits.

Until that happens, consider the bright side. If Americans started saving seriously, they would have to cut back on consumer spending. That would kick the last prop out from under the global economy. Instead, we're gamely fighting world poverty, one purchase at a time.

Daniel Akst is a journalist and novelist who writes often about business. E-mail: culmoney@nytimes.com

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2005-06-24T13:39:00.000-07:00

Gen. John P. Abizaid

June 24, 2005
U.S. General Sees No Ebb in Fight
By DAVID S. CLOUD and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, June 23 - The top American commander for the Middle East said Thursday that the insurgency in Iraq had not diminished, seeming to contradict statements by Vice President Dick Cheney in recent days that the insurgents were in their "last throes."

Though he declined during his Congressional testimony to comment directly on Mr. Cheney's statements, the commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, said that more foreign fighters were coming into Iraq and that the insurgency's "overall strength is about the same" as it was six months ago. "There's a lot of work to be done against the insurgency," he added.

His more pessimistic assessment, made during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, reflected a difference of emphasis between military officers, who battle the intractable insurgency every day, and civilian officials intent on accentuating what they say is unacknowledged progress in Iraq.

Mr. Cheney, in an interview with CNN after General Abizaid spoke, repeated his assertion that the insurgency was facing defeat, which he said was driving it to increase attacks to disrupt the United States-backed political process aimed at defusing the violence.

"If you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a violent period," he said in the interview. "The terrorists understand if we're successful at accomplishing our objective, standing up a democracy in Iraq, that that's a huge defeat for them. They'll do everything they can to stop it."

Persuading the public that the American-led effort in Iraq is succeeding is a White House priority this month. President Bush will meet Friday with the Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, at the White House, and on Tuesday, he will give a speech on the first anniversary of the end of the American occupation.

Dr. Jaafari, speaking at the Council of Foreign Relations here, supported the White House argument that the situation in Iraq was steadily improving, despite continuing attacks. He also warned against setting a timetable for troop withdrawal. When he was asked Thursday evening about Mr. Cheney's recent comments, he sidestepped the issue.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his top commanders appeared at all-day hearings, starting with the Senate Armed Services Committee in the morning and continuing with the House Armed Services Committee in the afternoon.

"Any who say that we've lost this war, or that we're losing this war, are wrong - we are not," Mr. Rumsfeld said in the morning session.

He added that consideration of troop reductions in Iraq, as some Democrats have called for, would "throw a lifeline to terrorists, who in recent months have suffered significant losses and casualties, been denied havens and suffered weakened popular support."

General Abizaid had just returned from a visit to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, where he said he was surprised at how many American commanders and soldiers asked whether the military was losing support at home for their missions overseas. "It was a real concern," he said.

He added that Afghan and Iraqi military officers had raised the same concern. "They worry we don't have the staying power to see the mission through," he said.

Several lawmakers warned that public support for the American troop presence in Iraq would continue to decline, which could eventually force a withdrawal of the troops, unless progress could be made at stemming the violence.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, told Mr. Rumsfeld at the Senate Committee hearing: "We will lose this war if we leave too soon, and what is likely to make us leave too soon? The public going south. That is happening, and it worries me greatly."

No senator called for an American withdrawal, but several Democrats urged the administration to consider setting a timetable for troop reductions if Iraqi officials fail to approve a constitution by a self-imposed August deadline, which could be extended for six months. The constitution is scheduled to be voted on in October, and if it is approved, a national election would be held in December.

"An open-ended commitment to the Iraqis that we will be there even if they fail to agree on a constitution would lessen the chances that the Iraqis will make the political compromises necessary to defeat the jihadists and end the insurgency," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Dr. Jaafari urged the United States on Thursday night not to set a timetable for a troop withdrawal, saying insurgents would seize on the action to "spread terror across the nation to weaken the country."

He said the only viable military strategy was to wait until Iraqi troops are "trained to a very high level," a process he insisted was already well under way.

His reluctance to set deadlines appeared synchronized with the position taken by Mr. Bush, who has declined to set a goal for withdrawal.

Yet despite his care not to differ with the White House, Dr. Jaafari appeared at one point to side with General Abizaid, who told Congress that foreign fighters were still entering Iraq. Mr. Jaafari agreed that Iraq's borders were still not secure and that terrorists continued to flow into Iraq. He made no effort to quantify how many have entered the country, or how important they have been in the insurgency.

In the afternoon session, Representative Loretta Sanchez, a California Democrat, repeatedly pressed Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq, on whether the insurgency was in its final throes, as Mr. Cheney said, or was essentially holding its own, as another top American officer, Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, stated this week.

Pressed repeatedly to choose between the two, General Casey said: "There's a long way to go here. Things in Iraq are hard."

But General Casey insisted that the allied forces had significantly weakened the insurgency even though the number of attacks against American forces has remaining steady at about 60 a day for the last several weeks.

The most heated exchange of the day occurred between Mr. Rumsfeld and Senator Edward M. Kennedy. After a six-minute recitation of what he said were Mr. Rumsfeld's mistakes and misjudgments, the senator, a Massachusetts Democrat, accused him of putting "our forces and our national security in danger" and called for Mr. Rumsfeld to resign, as he has several times previously.

"Well, that is quite a statement," Mr. Rumsfeld responded, saying Mr. Bush has rebuffed his offers to resign twice.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting for this article.

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2005-06-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman

June 24, 2005
The War President
By PAUL KRUGMAN

VIENNA

In this former imperial capital, every square seems to contain a giant statue of a Habsburg on horseback, posing as a conquering hero.

America's founders knew all too well how war appeals to the vanity of rulers and their thirst for glory. That's why they took care to deny presidents the kingly privilege of making war at their own discretion.

But after 9/11 President Bush, with obvious relish, declared himself a "war president." And he kept the nation focused on martial matters by morphing the pursuit of Al Qaeda into a war against Saddam Hussein.

In November 2002, Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, told an audience, "I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war" - but she made it clear that Mr. Bush was the exception. And she was right.

Leading the nation wrongfully into war strikes at the heart of democracy. It would have been an unprecedented abuse of power even if the war hadn't turned into a military and moral quagmire. And we won't be able to get out of that quagmire until we face up to the reality of how we got in.

Let me talk briefly about what we now know about the decision to invade Iraq, then focus on why it matters.

The administration has prevented any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did.

And then there's the Downing Street Memo - actually the minutes of a prime minister's meeting in July 2002 - in which the chief of British overseas intelligence briefed his colleagues about his recent trip to Washington.

"Bush wanted to remove Saddam," says the memo, "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." It doesn't get much clearer than that.

The U.S. news media largely ignored the memo for five weeks after it was released in The Times of London. Then some asserted that it was "old news" that Mr. Bush wanted war in the summer of 2002, and that W.M.D. were just an excuse. No, it isn't. Media insiders may have suspected as much, but they didn't inform their readers, viewers and listeners. And they have never held Mr. Bush accountable for his repeated declarations that he viewed war as a last resort.

Still, some of my colleagues insist that we should let bygones be bygones. The question, they say, is what we do now. But they're wrong: it's crucial that those responsible for the war be held to account.

Let me explain. The United States will soon have to start reducing force levels in Iraq, or risk seeing the volunteer Army collapse. Yet the administration and its supporters have effectively prevented any adult discussion of the need to get out.

On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its "last throes," says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.

We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.

The good news is that the public seems ready to hear that message - readier than the media are to deliver it. Major media organizations still act as if only a small, left-wing fringe believes that we were misled into war, but that "fringe" now comprises much if not most of the population.

In a Gallup poll taken in early April - that is, before the release of the Downing Street Memo - 50 percent of those polled agreed with the proposition that the administration "deliberately misled the American public" about Iraq's W.M.D. In a new Rasmussen poll, 49 percent said that Mr. Bush was more responsible for the war than Saddam Hussein, versus 44 percent who blamed Saddam.

Once the media catch up with the public, we'll be able to start talking seriously about how to get out of Iraq.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

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2005-06-24T12:05:00.000-07:00

The Life

Inside the brothel, days and nights are an unusual mix of strict rules, camaraderie, and sex for money. Richard Abowitz gets to know the women of the Chicken Ranch.
By Richard Abowitz

? The Life

? Aspen's Journal

It is 5 p.m. on Friday when I arrive at what looks like a typical small-town saloon?a television is turned to sports and two guys are having drinks at the bar. But there are also about a half-dozen girls spread around the room. Two are playing a game of pool. A thin girl with blond hair arches her back just so, less, it seems, to make the shot than to display her?is the correct word G-string or thong? (I could be wrong; she sinks the ball in smoking style.) A thought passes through my head, and it's the first time I have ever surveyed a room with this kind of confidence, the sort that rock stars have: I can have sex with any girl in this room any time I want. It's an unbelievable high.

Five minutes later, Debbie Rivenburgh, 48, the general manger of the Chicken Ranch, gives me a tour. Debbie, for all purposes, is the boss of the Chicken Ranch, responsible for all the prostitutes, maintenance, security, staff and shift mangers. Everyone answers to her.

Despite the building's campy front fa?ade and porch, the comfy bar and the plush, spacious parlor where the lineups take place, I am surprised to discover that within its depth the Chicken Ranch is a maze made up of five double-wide trailers interconnected by wooden passageways and other rooms added on in what seems an architecturally haphazard fashion. The walls are decorated with glamour- shot photographs of working girls, some of which seem to date from decades ago. Another hallway has a series of framed Marilyn Monroe photos. There are also some watercolors, faded perhaps from years of hanging around low ceilings and hallways that can be thick with cigarette smoke. There is huge a kitchen with three large tables, a gym, more bedrooms for girls to work than I can count jutting off in all directions, a shift manger's office, and a larger office for Debbie in the back. Behind the brothel is a pool surrounded by bungalows and a fenced back yard.

"You are about to make history," Debbie tells me as she rounds up sheets and pillowcases for me. She doesn't say this with any pleasure. She has been employed here for 18 years and never before has a reporter been allowed to move into a working girl's room for a few days to live unmonitored by her. In fact, it is her day off and she is only here to orient me before returning to her residence, which is another double-wide, placed further behind the brothel.

Over the years this has occasionally made for a thin line between her life and work. "It is a complicated business to run and it consumes your life. My personal life has suffered. I've missed events when kids were growing up because my job had to come first." It's a balance she's better at now. She just completed months of taking care of her grandkids while her daughter served in Iraq. (She's instituted a discount at the brothel for veterans as well as those currently serving.)

She doesn't think she's unusual. "The people who work here could be your next-door neighbor, because we are. All of the staff that work here are Pahrump locals that are raising families. We are just normal people."

Debbie was never a prostitute?"I took this job working part-time as a shift manager as well as two other part-time jobs. I was a change girl at Saddle West, and I did dishes in a restaurant. That's how desperate I was for work ... After six months here it turned to full-time and now it's been 18 years and I still look forward to every day I come to work. Not many people can say that about their job."

Even in our phone conversations leading to my trip?which was arranged so the dates didn't conflict with her family obligations and took place after her daughter's safe return from Iraq?Debbie made clear that to her core she's a strong traditionalist when it comes to the brothel industry:

"The man who owned the Chicken Ranch started here in 1982 and he learned the business from the working girls who were here at that time who taught him the business. He taught me the business."

The Chicken Ranch is perhaps the most famous brothel name in the United States. The original Chicken Ranch has a history that goes back to the 19th century in Texas (serving soldiers from the Civil War through WWII, cowboys, and eventually the workers drawn in by the Texas oil boom). Though prostitution was always illegal in Texas, it wasn't until 1973 that the authorities moved to close the brothel. They succeeded in shutting down the Texas establishment, but the story memorialized in the movie Best Little Whorehouse in Texas made the Chicken Ranch name legendary, and a brothel owner in Nye County acquired the rights to that name for a legal brothel. Though Debbie isn't sure, she thinks some of the older paintings on the wall may be from the original Chicken Ranch in Texas. The current owner, Kenneth Green, purchased The Chicken Ranch in 1982. Next to Debbie's desk hangs a framed photo of the front of the Chicken Ranch back then: The road leading to the brothel is still dirt, there is no front porch. Green clearly knew it wasn't much to look at. Underneath the frame is a plaque inscribed: "Would You Pay $1.25 Million for this?" (Currently the brothel is for sale and though there is no sign out front, the prices bandied about are in the $6.1 million-to-$7 million range, though the publicist for the Chicken Ranch told me that the worth of the place has been estimated at $10 million.)

"Things have evolved over the years since then to a point," Debbie says. "But I am a creature of habit. When I'm told to do something a certain way I do it that way and I don't change the way I do it. I was taught in 1987 that this is what you say, this is how you do a lineup and I still do it that way."

And that's why although radio, television and the Atlantic Monthly have all passed through the Chicken Ranch of late, Debbie still focuses on the significance of my staying in a room that would usually house a working girl as "making history," and making history in general is not something of which Debbie is inclined to approve, particularly when it involves the press. "We have been burned again and again by the press."

Mostly, Debbie's view of press falls more on the side of public service rather than with a mind toward promoting the Chicken Ranch. For example, she frequently does interviews by e-mail with college students doing research papers. She tells me that the man who ran the place before her had the same policy.

But it isn't just press. Debbie will never be excited about doing anything new at the Chicken Ranch. Take the issue of cell phones. Until quite recently they were not welcome at the Chicken Ranch. "I did not trust all of the working women to not answer their phones if they had clients in the room. And that would have been a nightmare, just a nightmare. So we didn't let the working girls have cell phones while they were here."

So even years after cells became acceptable at other brothels, the Chicken Ranch still held out. "We had two pay phones, and one was an old phone booth so the girls could have privacy." But according to Debbie, the working girls' constant complaining eventually reached a fever pitch. "They said they needed their phones to keep in touch with their families and check up on their children and all these different reasons."

Debbie was at last convinced. After much thought and discussion (about 18 months ago), a perfect solution was reached. In the shift manger's office, Debbie points to a series of little wooden cubbyholes against the far wall of the office. Each wooden box has a room number.

"We decided that we would let them keep cell phones. But when they book a client they have to check the cell phone. And they can pick up the phone when they are through with the party. It works, and we don't have to worry about the more immature girls wanting to answer their phones and talk to their husbands and boyfriends while there are customers around. It's working and I'm amazed."

Even when it comes to something as potentially profitable as setting up the website for the Chicken Ranch, the brothel was slow in coming to a decision. Debbie recalls:

"I know when the Internet started to be a big thing and people all started to get it in their homes, me and the man who taught me the business were reluctant to engage in having a website. We were old- school, and we held back because we didn't want to venture into that area because it was something we didn't know, and we were afraid of it. I know some of the other brothels and we were hearing that it was helping increase their business because guys could research. So we reluctantly gave in and got a website. I have noticed a vast change in business."

It was more than Debbie's temperament that accounted for the reticence, however. The brothels in Nevada are the only legal ones in the United States, and they exist because of the Silver State's unique history and quirky traditions. The truth is, all they have is that past; there is no guarantee of a future. Debbie fully realizes this. "Is it ever going to be legalized anywhere else? Probably not. Most people can't see past 'prostitution'; it's such a bad word." And therefore, time is likely not on the side of the Nevada brothels and particularly those near Pahrump.

When Debbie arrived in Pahrump in 1987, the population was about 3,000. It's now a town of over 30,000. The week after I left the Chicken Ranch?in what the Review-Journal reported to be one of the largest crowds ever to show up at a Pahrump Town Board meeting?a motion to lift a ban against brothels within Pahrump city limits to allow the annexation of the tiny bit of Nye County that includes The Chicken Ranch and neighboring Sheri's Ranch, was rejected. The town board member who sponsored the brothel amendment is quoted in the paper as estimating that this would've meant about $13 million over the next decade for cash-starved Pahrump; probably more tax revenue than any other business in the town. Though the bill would have created no new brothels and there was a common-sense financial benefit to making this annexation, Pahrump's citizens didn't want to have as part of their city the same brothels that were already a long-standing part of their community.

It's not an isolated case.

The Nevada Legislature just approved a massive new entertainment tax on topless strip clubs and, despite the brothel industry's lobbying efforts, the legal prostitution houses were exempted from the tax. On June 10, the R-J's John G. Edwards, reporting on the bill, noted, "Legal brothels, which operate in places such as Pahrump, will continue to avoid the entertainment tax even though a brothel-industry representative asked that brothels be included." In the history of the United State has there ever been another industry that has lobbied to pay more taxes? And that's the rub?the nation's only legal brothels exist always a vote away from extinction, with only a long tradition to protect them in a fast-growing community like Pahrump, with increasingly fewer people connected to local history. It can't be a good thing when politicians are scared to tax you.

I ask Debbie if she feels the days of legal brothels in Nye Country are numbered.

"I think they will stay legal into the future, but how far into the future I don't know. As this town grows and you have your younger families raising children moving to town, you're hearing more and more opposition to us being here. But we stay down here where we're at, we don't abuse the emergency services in town?I have been here 18 years and I've never once had to call the sheriff's department to assist us. We like to be a good neighbor to the people who live down in this area. As long as we continue to stay down here, be good to the town and don't bother anybody, then we'll be OK."

So while the brothels near Reno?where the population boom is far less extreme and threatening to the legality of the brothels?have been active in courting publicity, porn-star appearances and, these days, even presenting the occasional reality television fodder for cable, things have stayed far more traditional in Southern Nevada. And that's especially true at the Chicken Ranch.

? ? ?

This desire to stay on the lowdown is also perhaps a significant factor in what everyone agrees is the most onerous practice of brothels in Nevada, the lockdown. Lockdown is custom, not law, and it is practiced primarily by Southern Nevada brothels including the Chicken Ranch and neighboring Sheri's Ranch.

During the periods the women work?which can last for months at a time (the minimum stay at the Chicken Ranch is 10 days with girls always spending the first few days unable to work until STD test results arrive from a clinic in Las Vegas)?prostitutes are not allowed beyond the gates that enclose the brothel. Debbie admits that lockdown is hard on the girls:

"People tend to lose sight?and even I tend to lose sight?in the day-to-day grind, that they have lives outside of here. To completely leave your life and go be locked up in a place for a couple weeks at a time, well, your personal life doesn't come to a standstill."

The girls are more blunt in referring to life under lockdown as "pussy prison."

The only exception to lockdown is on Tuesday, dubbed "Doctor Day," where the girls are allowed into Pahrump on their own for no more than four hours?divided into morning and afternoon shifts so there are always women available for customers back at the brothel, which is open 24/7. But even on this day there are limits. First off, at least an hour of that precious time away from the Chicken Ranch is spent at the doctor's office getting more STD tests.

Unofficially, the girls are discouraged from going to casinos, hotels and any other high-profile place or places they could conceivably ply their trade outside of the legal confines of the brothel. They are also asked to dress modestly and behave appropriately.

In fact, the brothel management, according to a few working girls, is so nervous about the weekly outings to Pahrump that according to one girl, "That pretty much just leaves Wal-Mart, the grocery store, the gas station and fast food as the places we can go." On the Doctor Day I am there, despite having spent a week straight bottled up in the brothel, all of the girls who went out that Tuesday morning returned more than an hour before curfew. There just isn't much they can do in Pahrump.

The tour ends in front of my home for the next few days. Room 7 is a Spartan affair with a bureau, a mattress hoisted up on four cinder blocks next to a small nightstand, the lower drawer of which?where the Gideon Bible would be in a hotel?is filled with medical waste bags to dispose of condoms. The carpet has that meaningless gray-tan color that would be immediately recognizable to apartment renters in Las Vegas. There is a television with a reading lamp placed next to it. I figure they are being thoughtful, knowing that as a writer I will be making use of the lamp. I put it on the nightstand and adjust it to reflect on my notebook, thinking it pretty convenient. It is only the next morning that I learn the lamp's actual purpose: the girls use it to perform dick checks on customers to make sure they have no visible signs of an STD.

I share a bathroom across the hall with T. and any of T.'s customers who want to use it. She's a tall blond in her late 30s who is completing the testing for a regular job in the medical field and wishes to be identified only as T. There are nicer rooms with faux-wood floors, and one I saw even had a private bathroom. But those are for the girls who are regulars. My room is meant for the more transient girls. And while there is certainly a lot of turnover in a business like this one, there are also some surprisingly long-term working girls employed at the Chicken Ranch. One tall blond who can't yet be 30 has been living here more or less since 1997, and every morning she walks the brothel's dog, Heidi, and pays for and feeds the brothel cat, Meow Meow.

After showing me to my room, the first thing Debbie does is call a mandatory meeting to introduce me to the working girls and staff and to make sure everyone is aware that I will be around reporting a story. They have just finished dinner?meals are served at noon and 5 p.m. and so the gathering takes place in the kitchen. A few days earlier, Debbie told me over the phone about the considerable effort and time on her part it took to prepare the girls for my arrival. She said it wasn't easy. The girls were used to the routine under lockdown and having anyone?but especially a man?stay over at the house was very troubling to some of them. So Debbie's regulations seemed compiled more to meet the concerns she heard from those girls along the way than to protect the brothel from my snooping. She gives us all a handout labeled "Richard" with a dozen rules. Typical among them:

"Do not listen to or include in your article any private conversations between working girls."

"Do not enter the working girls' bedrooms unless you are invited by one of the interview participants."

"Above all, respect the privacy of the women who are not participating with you."

Even the girls who had appeared to be party animals (who I am introduced to as Trinity and Diamond) in the bar just a few moments before are now fully focused employees paying close and sober attention. It turns out, there were no fast times going on in the bar, anyway, at least not when I got here. The scene I had witnessed in the bar when I arrived at the Chicken Ranch was nothing more than a "barlor," a display of the wares meant for the two men who had been sitting watching the television. ("Barlor" comes from "bar" and "parlor".)

When the customers request a barlor, the working girls must all file into the bar and introduce themselves, and after that comes the awkward period when the men must make some decisions for things to go forward. The decision of which, if any, girl to choose is one I soon learn guys love to agonize over and put off making. During the next few days I will see countless barlors and they tend to all end up like a bad high-school dance: boys on one side of the room, girls on the other. After introductions, the men tend to talk among themselves and the girls must wait to be asked back to their room, and so amuse themselves by playing pool or sitting together chatting. Some girls resent this waste of time since so many men arrive simply as gawkers.

Photo by Benjamen Purvis

"I don't really like barlors," Eden tells me. "Unless there is a barlor, most of us who don't really drink much never go in there." (Eden has great hair and a lovely face and no illusions about her number-one selling point, her chest: i.e., her website address, Eden38dd.com). Eden explains that she tends to prefer the more traditional lineup that, while somewhat more demeaning, involves less socializing and works better for keeping the customers from procrastinating. Actually, it isn't too long after Eden and I start talking that I get to go see for myself, as the bell rings to signal to all the girls in the house that a customer has arrived for a lineup.

There is nothing more ritualized and traditional at the Chicken Ranch than the lineup. The customer or customers sit on thick, comfortable sofas while the girls all crowd in the hallway adjacent to the parlor, around the corner, passing back intelligence reports on the age, nationality and whatever other details of the men become available from sneaked glimpses.

"Ladies you have a visitor," the shift manger says. And, with that, the girls file out and stand single file in a row in front of the sofas. A curtain covering the back wall parts, revealing a mirror behind the girls that allows customers a rear view. Each girl introduces herself, but is not allowed to say anything else. As in the barlors, customers tend to not want to make up their mind, and that can be agonizing for the girls who must stand half- naked (and, if it is late enough, half asleep, too) fully displayed. The girls try to hide their discomfort and smile and project a sensual attitude, but it is hard for them not to inwardly groan when, as usually happens, the customers will stall for time with something like, "Wow, they are all so lovely. Can I have all of them?" Mostly, the girls are good-natured enough to laugh as if amused by this line they hear every day. If the men take too long, it is up to the shift manager to nudge things along with "Are you ready to go back with one of the girls now?" or "I really can't have them just keep standing out here like this. Is there someone who you would like to spend time with?"

After being picked?either by lineup or barlor?the girl then takes the customer back to her room to negotiate money. Though the menu of available services itself is posted on the website ( www.chickenranchbrothel.com), it is without prices since the working girls are independent contractors and they fix their own rates. One of the few truly sensitive areas to both the brothel and the working girls is the discussion?to be blunt?of how much specific sex acts cost. The truth is, even for the girl the amount can vary. A customer can strike a better deal during a slow time than during one that is busy. The problem is that it's almost impossible for a customer to know which times are busy and when things are slow.

On Saturday night I ask the shift manager when the rush begins. "Who knows?" she says. "This isn't a nightclub." And that's true. Saturday night turned out to be far quieter than Saturday afternoon, when the bell rang over a dozen times before noon. Monday evening seemed busier than Saturday night. Who would've guessed?

Diamond, Trinity and T. call themselves the three musketeers. All sexy and ready do business on Saturday night, instead they sit crashed out together on the couch watching three movies in a row on the Lifetime channel. According to Trinity: "We also watch Jerry Springer and every day at 2 there is our soap opera, Passions." I could be wrong, but based on their dedication, my guess is there will be no discounting from these girls when Passions is on.

Over my time there I am stunned at how cheap guys can be. Especially, since?and, of course, there is no way for customers to know this?behind the scenes every little difference means more than you think to the working girls. I am sure it has to do with the deeply personal nature of what they are selling. But there are probably no other workers whose income can easily enter the six figures annually whose personal happiness is so much increased by performing an act for $600 instead of $500. The girls don't use the word "date," preferring "party," and if you kick in the extra hundred it really does make the girl feel more like she is at a party.

Interestingly, no girl would admit to performing the act differently or more enthusiastically on account of money. The sex a girl provides for $800 would be little different than the sex for $400 (if you can get her to agree to it). In short: halfhearted sex is not for sale at a discount. During my time at the Chicken Ranch the range was extraordinary, with deals cut that ranged from $200 to $3,000 (for a bungalow). All of this money is split 50/50 with the brothel. The girls must also pay $30 room and board to the brothel as well as pay for their own medical testing (about $60 a week) and even provide their own condoms. So in general, the girls who make the most money are doing it through volume rather than a few high rollers. According to Eden, "I don't have notches in my bedpost, because at this point my bedpost would be shredded to a toothpick."

Still, making the girls' happy isn't the only reason to err on the side of bringing too much money to the Chicken Ranch if you go, because not having enough can mean a long, wasted trip from Vegas. Amazingly it happens all the time. On Saturday morning at 7 a.m. a man paid $150 to arrive by taxi from Vegas, only to not have enough money left for what he came here for.

By my estimate about half of the men who actually go back with a girl wind up leaving because they are unwilling to reach an agreement. Often though, the deal-breaker isn't money but the customer wanting an activity that is either banned by law (oral sex without a condom, for example) or something that the girls refuse to do, according to Eden: "For most girls it's: no kissing on the mouth, no fingering, and don't bite me."

Still, according to Eden, customers tend to be respectful. Eden says of the typical customer: "I would say generally it is 35- to 65-year-old professional men. It is a demographic of people with the disposable income and that generally is pretty nice guys."

A marketing major a few credits shy of graduation, Eden explains her approach to prostitution as a mix of entrepreneurship and post-post-post (hell, this kind hasn't even started yet) feminism. "I go about it as a business. I am a smart girl and I am an attractive girl so I know I can do many, many different things. But this is fulfilling an aspect of my sexual life. Most people don't embrace their sexuality for all it's worth. If you are a sexual person, you enjoy all the aspects of sex, the different things. Just because it is not mainstream doesn't mean it's wrong. Sex is such a crazy thing. Whatever is enjoyable sexually is in the mind and body and spirit no matter what it may be. And I am just a very sexual person and I am making a business out of it. Would I be doing this for free? No!"

Eden, of course, realizes she is an exception and this job is not always the career of first choice. "Lots of girls that do this line of work aren't good for anything else. I don't know how to say it without being politically incorrect, but this is all they can do. They are out here because they have no home, no place else to go. They have nothing. This is all they are good for. That seems very sad. But I also think they have the potential (because of the amount of money they earn) to do so much more with themselves but they opt not to do it. They are doing what they want to do with it and so I don't criticize them."

In a society where being a model for Playboy has become a status symbol of the highest order, most of the adult entertainment jobs that used to be a lifetime stain are now acceptable (two weeks ago a former stripper was elected to a judgeship). Also, to a large extent, strippers and even porn stars are now glorified by the mainstream media. But prostitutes are the day laborers of the sex business. The cultural status of a prostitute is as loathsome now as it was 20 years ago and the workers at the Chicken Ranch feel it acutely. And for all her independence, her pride in her ability to earn money and to manage her career and, most of all, to be exactly who she wants to be, even with all of that, Eden feels the sting of society's disapproval:

"In general with everything else I don't care what you think. I don't care what you think about what I look like; I don't care what you think about the way I dress; I don't care what you think about my car; I don't care what you think about me in any way, shape or form whatsoever. But yet when it comes down to this I don't tell people. Instantly, no matter how good a person you are, no matter how religious you are, what a good mother you are, what a good cook, no matter what it is you do that you are excellent at, at that point that you tell someone you are a prostitute you become a scum of the Earth. In general you are instantly degraded for that to the bottom of the barrel."

So why would Eden?so smart and capable?choose work that generates such hostility in the outside world such that even someone as fearless as she is balks at mentioning her work to people? "There are three factors. What order they go in, I don't know. It varies day by day. To me money is a factor, to me being able to use my sexuality in a positive way for me appeals to me, too." She then turns silent for a full minute. I can see in her face that she is struggling for a way to express the third factor, and I try to imagine what it could possibly be and draw a blank. When she starts talking again it is without her usual lucidity. Her sentences start, then stop, then try again. Yet this is clearly the most important thing of all to her:

"Third, um. Then probably third. Probably." There is another long pause. "I can't tell you how wonderful it is to have somebody thank you for being so nice to them and making them feel so good ... um ... making them appreciate life again. I mean, I have had someone say to me that coming out here ... Someone can enjoy themselves enough to go back to appreciating life. I have had someone say something that deep to me. Sometimes people come out here and you personally create a life-altering experience for that person. That to me is very rewarding."

This is Eden's story of that customer:

"A gentleman came out here. He was probably about 60. We went back and I gave him a menu. He says, 'No, this is going to be a special situation.' I'm like, 'OK, just talk to me.' He proceeded to tell me it was the two-year anniversary of his wife dying of cancer. Since she had passed away he had not been able to get past the fact that he loved his wife and that she is gone. He had not been able to have any relationships or to allow his life to move on because he had this guilt. He said, 'I am trying to make my life go on and to believe that just because my life goes on I don't love my wife any less. I picked you because my wife had red hair and was built like you. You actually resemble her. All I want you to do is just lay here next to me and let me hold you. I don't need you to talk to me or do anything. I just want to lay here and hold you and think of you as my wife and think about how much I loved her and what she felt like to me. I just want to say my good-byes to the only woman in my life.' We had no sexual contact whatsoever. He lay there for an hour and he held me in a spoon position, and he just cried. It took everything I had not to wail, but I figured that I couldn't break down because I was there being strong for him."

Eden kept in touch with the man until he sent a final e-mail telling her that he was remarrying and thanking her for helping him begin to move forward.

The girls frequently develop friendships with customers that can be hard for an outsider to fathom. One of the few customers willing to talk to me was Ernest, 37, of Las Vegas, a contractor with sandy blond hair standing about 6 feet 2 inches tall with a bit of a belly. He was Diamond's friend though not her customer?well, not exactly. "I don't party with her," Ernest says. "I did a two-girl party once with her and she was in the way and so technically I never partied with her. She's not my type." Rather Diamond is charged with picking the girl for Ernest to party with.

Ernest and I are sitting at the bar discussing this while watching Diamond and Trinity play pool, and Trinity is topless, because those are the stakes, and she is losing. As Diamond had told me earlier, "Sometimes we have drinks and play pool and wait for guys to come in. I always beat her. Trinity is a good friend but a bad pool player."

"Would you party with me?" Trinity asks Ernest.

His diplomatic answer: "I would have fun, but you probably wouldn't be my type."

"I knew it!" Trinity says.

I ask Ernest: "What's your type?"

"I'll tell you," Trinity says. "He likes a little bit of an older woman." Trinity is 21. Diamond is 25.

"Is that true?" I ask Ernest.

"I tend to enjoy myself more with the older women."

The women here today range from 21 to 41.

Ernest recalls his first trip to Chicken Ranch: "I'd been divorced for awhile. I hadn't been with anybody and so I decided to come out here. I was certainly nervous. I did the lineup. I've only done one lineup and that was the first time." That was about a year ago. These days he drops by a couple nights a week.

Two more men come in for a barlor and the room fills up suddenly with girls. I ask Ernest how many of the girls now in the room has he partied with? He surveys the area and then to my embarrassment he points and starts counting out loud like the Cookie Monster: "Um, 1, 2, 3, let's see, ah, 4, 5, 6. I guess around 7."

Ernest uses all of the clich?s to compare the brothel experience to the dating world: "The cost is about the same. I am serious. I am a numbers person, and I've gone through the numbers. I justify it. Here if I go back with somebody, I am going to be going back with somebody who I know is clean. That's the main thing. But the other thing is that I get what I want. I usually get treated really well. I feel comfortable with a girl when I go back with her. There have been a couple times when I partied with a girl and I would never party with her again, but I never felt cheated. They are courteous. I feel like I am at home out here. Everyone treats me like part of the family." But Ernest's popularity has not come cheap: "Since December of last year I've spent about $12,000." Still, not every visit is a party. "Sometimes I go months without a party."

"Are you going to party tonight?" I ask him.

"I haven't decided yet," he says. He sips his beer, not taking his eyes off Diamond.

"When do you make the decision?"

"When the mood hits me. And who knows when that will be?"

Ultimately, the mood hits Ernest, and Diamond picks the third Musketeer, T., for him. "I picked her because she is an older woman and I thought they would have more in common than someone my age and that would make him more comfortable. I know what he likes and doesn't like," Diamond says.

The friendship between the girls themselves is less complicated and in many ways more intense because they live together in such close quarters for such extended periods of time. When I arrive, for example, Diamond has been working at the Chicken Ranch for over three months straight. "The first two and half months were a piece of cake, but now I am starting to get a little crazy. Sometimes I am not in the mood and sometimes I get irritated fast." It is a position few could understand and this is how she defines the Three Musketeers:

"A couple girls came in and I got attached to them. We kind of hang out together, drink together and party together with guys. And of course, we watch movies on Lifetime. When you are down and out they are like family who are in the same business. They can tell you how to get through it. And we can be there to give each other support. It is a bond that we make between us three."

But even among the girls who don't seem particularly close there are surprising relationships. Eden and Diamond appear polar opposites. Think what you want of her work; Eden is sophisticated, thoughtful and articulate. Diamond is brash, tough and has a street education that at first appalled me with some ignorant comments she made about HIV positive people. I never once saw Eden speaking to Diamond or to any of the other Three Musketeers. I didn't see Eden so much as glance at the television that Diamond seems to watch with every free moment of time available to her. I thought of them as residing in different universes even within the limited space of the brothel. I assumed in fact that they probably did not even like each other. Even Debbie remarked at the contrast: "Diamond is more a little-girl personality whereas you have Eden who is more serious."

Then one night Eden takes me aside:

"This is going to surprise you. But you would never guess that one of the girls I am closest here with is Diamond. It surprises me. We are so different. I don't think we would have ever become friends if we had met outside of here. But we share a bathroom here and we are both neat freaks. She and I both tend to earn a lot of money and so there are occasionally jealousy issues with other girls. We have that in common. I am picking her up at the airport when she next flies out next time, and she is spending the night at my place."

The friend I see Eden spend most of her time talking with is Aspen. Eden, in fact, talked Aspen, whose previous work experience was as a sixth-grade teacher, into coming to work at the Chicken Ranch. "Yes, I recruited Aspen," Eden admits with a laugh. "She is a personal friend of mine back in Vegas, and once I got to know her I figured out she was very open, very nonjudgmental and very sexual. I had been telling her I was a stripper when I was actually out here. But when I got to the point that I was comfortable with her and I told her what I did, she thought it was really neat. And at that point we talked openly about it, and she thought it would be interesting to try and do just for the experience. So she came out here with me in January and really liked it."

? ? ?

It was Aspen who wound up being picked from the lineup to take care of a severely handicapped 32-year-old man whose parents took him to the brothel. I found out from Eden later that the father? on vacation from Florida and who I couldn't help notice was bedecked in gold neck chains that suggested finances were not a serious issue for the family?lowballed Aspen on the price. While Aspen was with their son the parents watched television in the bar. Their son had very limited use of his hands and feet and as the parents worried that Aspen would charge more to dress him afterwards, they suggested she send for them when she was finished so they could put his clothes back on.

"His parents told me what he wanted," Aspen explained to me later. Aspen thinks the man was probably a virgin though she is not sure. "He told me, 'I don't have a girlfriend. I probably won't ever have a girlfriend.' So, I really, really wanted him to have a good time. I wanted it to be a very good experience for him so he would have that memory."

"Eden told me you weren't paid very much?"

"No I wasn't."

"She said it was the lowest you could take."

"Well, yes, but ..."

"But nothing. I saw the chains around the dad's neck. That family could have paid you a lot more."

Aspen sighs: "I gave them a range and they went to the lower end. But they weren't asking for anything outrageous and he was very nice, a very bashful man. The parents wanted me to come get them to dress him. But I thought if I could undress him I could dress him again. I just thought it would be more comfortable for him if I did it. And I did it. It was no problem."

"And you didn't mind going the extra mile for people who didn't want to pay you a penny more than they could get away with?" I ask.

Aspen waves her hand dismissing the notion and then she says: "I think he probably has the heart of a trouper himself. In some strange way I was grateful, because he reminded me of my husband."

It is one of those many moments at the Chicken Ranch where expectations, preconceptions and everything else explodes. "Excuse me?" I ask.

It turns out that Aspen is a widow. "My husband wasn't quite like that, but after he had a stroke he lost a lot of the use of the left side of his body." Aspen took care of her husband for three years like that before he passed on in 2001. Because she is widow of a man who knew he was dying, Aspen was taken care of financially to some extent. She is one of the few girls at the Chicken Ranch who is definitely not there primarily for the money. She too is seeking to explore her sexuality, though she does admit to earning good "furniture money" for her house.

Over days living with the working girls if I formed one real bond, it was with Aspen. I tell Debbie that Aspen is the sort of person who I would be friends with in the "real world." It is the truth. Aspen and I spend hours talking and very little of it winds up being about the Chicken Ranch. We both like Edgar Allan Poe, can spend an afternoon discussing Shakespeare, have an interest in biblical scholarship and enjoy debating philosophy. We get each other's taste enough to recommend books to each other. Not that we are identical. Aspen enjoys karaoke and has a fondness for Meatloaf's singing that I find hard to abide. But one night, sprawled on the floor of Aspen's room listening to Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (someone has to save her from a life of Meatloaf fandom) I feel exactly like I am back at my college dorm hanging out in a friend's room. When the bell rings for a lineup it is a shock to be reminded that in reality I am sitting in working girl's room in a brothel in Nye County.

Yet, as diverse as all the working girls I meet at the Chicken Ranch are, I do notice that there are some similarities. Aspen is not alone in possessing a nurturing personality. Even Diamond, when asked what she would like to do if she could choose any career answers without hesitation: "My dream is to go to college so that I can be a nurse." This desire to take care of people is perhaps the greatest vulnerability the working girls share. And it is exploited.

Many of the girls have boyfriends and husbands and about the only common denominator among them: None of the men in their lives seem to have regular work. Of course, one has to be careful about stereotyping; there were many working girls at the Chicken Ranch I did not speak with and some girls I did interview chose not to discuss their private life at all, a decision that was respected. Some girls put up a valiant fight, too, claiming that their man was needed to watch children (as if millions of single parents don't pull that miracle off each week and work, too) while they were under lockdown, or that he was engaged in crucial home- improvement projects that otherwise would need to be paid for by a contractor (another feat pulled off by millions of working folks who keep the registers at Home Depot humming), or, perhaps, he is needed to handle the time-consuming task of paying bills and running the business affairs for a girl while she was at the Chicken Ranch (all of which can be done from the brothel thanks to phones and Internet access, not to mention: How could the few things left be too much to allow time for a job?). There were other answers, too. All foolish.

I tell Debbie that I have noticed a pattern. "That's just part of life and you can't judge them for that," Debbie says. "I learned early on that there was part of me that just needed to understand. If there was a girl who was willing to discuss her personal life with me she had to take whatever feedback I had or whatever questions I wanted to ask. But I gave up asking those kinds of questions, because there is always a reason. To me, 'Why does he not he have a job?' you just take as part of the business. And after awhile you just don't pay attention to it anymore, it just doesn't faze you."

And, when Debbie says she doesn't judge the working girls, she means it. She stops me cold when I offer my theory that on some level the answer to why men are able to accept their girlfriends/wives working at a brothel is that they are living off the proceeds. "That's a difficult area," Debbie interrupts. "I am not going to try to figure it out. I gave up trying to figure it out. There's a lot of things I gave up trying to figure out years ago and that's one of them."

Trinity is one of the few girls who is single and so is willing to discuss it. I ask her about the dismal employment rate among the partners of working girls. "Pretty much, yeah. A lot of times the other half chooses not to work because we woman make enough. We make a lot of money." Trinity estimates her monthly income at $9,000 to $12,000 a month. Another girl tells me she shoots for $500 for each day she works. Another is preparing to leave after an extended stay with close to $40,000 saved.

Of course, only the more successful girls are willing to talk to me about their earnings, and there are plenty of whispered horror stories of women who don't earn enough to cover their room, board and bar tab (girls drink if they want to, but not to excess). Not making enough to cover those bills, by the way, would be a good hint to get out of the business. Even Aspen, who is a relative newbie with only a half-dozen trips to the brothel (most lasting only a couple weeks) has had just one day when she did not have at least one customer. Few jobs make it easier at giving you the news that it is time to stop. It is certainly true that I had less sex?none, yeah, you needed to know, didn't you??than any other resident in the history of Room 7 at the Chicken Ranch.

But one thing my time at the brothel taught me is that nothing is straightforward, no judgment fully comfortable to make once you allow yourself into the details of a brothel's reality. Even something as seriously twisted as lockdown occasionally has strange benefits. Debbie points out: "I've seen girls come here who have a pimp. They come here and they start to get a clearer picture of the controlling abuse and the negatives that guy is having on their life. Because they are away from it and they can see it. And the girls support each other when and if they are fed up with the man. I've seen that a lot."

Of course, one person's idea of a pimp is another person's spouse and the distinction can be a very slender one in relationships where the man produces no income. Besides, lockdown can place significant stress on even the most stable relationship. Eden and Aspen (who met the man she lives with now about a year after her husband's death) have both been with the same partner for years. But they admit the topic of whether their boyfriend cheats during the weeks while they are out at the Chicken Ranch is one they can't stop talking about with each other. And Eden and Aspen both have seen plenty of cheating husbands at the Chicken Ranch. Both, of course, tell me that they are sure their man isn't a cheater, though Aspen seems to have more conviction on this point than Eden.

But mostly it is the little indignities of lockdown that are so hard on the girls; even meals take on ridiculous importance. Debbie puts it this way:

"I try to impress upon a new cook how important meal times are to a girl, because of the fact that they are locked up in here, they look forward to their meals. That is the one thing that changes every day in their life."

Debbie's mom Joan is a cook, and says, "Out here they like spaghetti. They like meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy. They like fried chicken and Mexican. I cook for them like I cooked for my family." Many girls also snack from one of the stocked refrigerators, and all say they gain weight at the brothel.

Still, while it seems trivial, Diamond and Trinity got very excited Sunday afternoon when I offered to bring them back whatever they wanted when I decided to make a run to Subway. On my way out I remembered one of the dozen rules was "Check in with the shift manager anytime you want to do something not covered here." So, thinking it routine, I asked at the shift office when I went to be buzzed out of the gate. Debbie wasn't around, and there was a change going on in shift managers. Standing with them was an office employee. But when I asked about bringing back some subs an intense three-way conversation broke out (one shift manager was inclined to say yes, and the other no with the office worker firmly disapproving to shift the balance). Permission was denied. Still in shock I find Diamond, who didn't seem at all surprised by the decision. "Don't worry about it. Don't get yourself in trouble," she tells me.

This is typical of the flip side of lockdown. Whatever the legitimate arguments for the practice, the prostitutes at a brothel on some level should always be treated as adults who are at work. Yet a shift manger has it in her power (they are all women) to treat an employee more like a prisoner than an independent contractor who is residing at her work location. The humiliation of this sort of treatment can sometimes be staggering to outsiders. I can almost see the sign on the cage: DON'T FEED THE HOOKERS. The power that brothels wield over the working girls who reside there can land in ways that are as overwhelming as they are arbitrary.

In the end, I smuggle back a contraband Subway sub for Diamond and Trinity to split.

? ? ?

My time at the Chicken Ranch was clearly coming to an end, and not just because I proved unable to follow the rules for more than a few days. On Monday a new batch of girls arrived for quarantine and Debbie had not prepped them for a reporter living at the Chicken Ranch. Their hostility was palpable. For the girls who had existed under lockdown for days straight before I arrived that Friday afternoon, having me around had turned out to be a novelty, but for these new girls, having a guy in one of their rooms was a distraction at best and at heart seemed to throw off the balance of their private space.

I realize now that Debbie had not been exaggerating when she spoke about how much effort it took her to get the working girls to be OK with my being at the Chicken Ranch these few days. It probably didn't help that a girl who has been assigned to Room 7 was being forced to live in a bunk bed (she was quarantined still, and could not work so didn't yet need the room) in another room while waiting for me to vacate so that she could set the place up as she wanted it. Though I had agonized about if it would be perceived as rude to bring my own sheets to the brothel (ultimately deciding not to do so), most girls bring way more than sheets; they completely personalize their rooms from the drapes to the art on the walls.

So on Tuesday morning I pack up my stuff to vacate. It is Doctor Day and Eden, Aspen, Trinity and Diamond all are on their morning excursion to Pahrump. I decide to wait for them to return to say farewell before leaving. But just as they get back my friend John arrives at the brothel with a friend of his I don't know. We are all sitting in the bar when the unthinkable happens; he starts to behave like a customer, and not one of the nicer ones. First he demands a tour of the brothel. Then after ordering a drink he begins to crack witticisms like, "How much would you charge to let me fart in your face?" Having already introduced him as a friend I decide the only thing to do is just slink out the door like anyone in the midst of a shame spiral. And I make it as far as the front porch when Aspen calls me back to the door of the parlor she has raced around the bar to get to in order to catch me before I escaped beyond the gate, outside the range of her lockdown.

"Hey, don't sneak off. It's fine about your friend. We get stuff like that all the time. Maybe you'll write something that helps people understand us better."

"I am really sorry about John."

She reaches over and pulls me into a quick hug. It is my first physical contact at the brothel. We say nothing for a moment. We are both looking over at Meow Meow, who is making a rare afternoon appearance on the porch where her food bowl is kept under a chair. Inside, I can hear John's laughter. He borrowed some cash from me before I left (an accident in Southern Nevada took out the ATM that morning so he can't use his card) and I wonder if he'll wind up spending it. I feel bad keeping Aspen since I hope she gets his money as much as anyone. They all deserve it for putting up with him. "What a strange way for your story to end," she says

"No," I tell Aspen, "This is the perfect ending."

I reach over and hug her back and then head to my car

Las Vegas Weekly. All Rights reserved

2005-06-24T12:03:00.000-07:00

Illustration by The New York Times

June 24, 2005
An Army of Soulless 1's and 0's
By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON, June 23 - For thousands of Internet users, the offer seemed all too alluring: revealing pictures of Jennifer Lopez, available at a mere click of the mouse.

But the pictures never appeared. The offer was a ruse, and the click downloaded software code that turned the user's computer into a launching pad for Internet warfare.

On the instructions of a remote master, the software could deploy an army of commandeered computers - known as zombies - that simultaneously bombarded a target Web site with so many requests for pages that it would be impossible for others to gain access to the site.

And all for the sake of selling a few more sports jerseys.

The facts of the case, as given by law enforcement officials, may seem trivial: a small-time Internet merchant enlisting a fellow teenager, in exchange for some sneakers and a watch, to disable the sites of two rivals in the athletic jersey trade. But the method was far from rare.

Experts say hundreds of thousands of computers each week are being added to the ranks of zombies, infected with software that makes them susceptible to remote deployment for a variety of illicit purposes, from overwhelming a Web site with traffic - a so-called denial-of-service attack - to cracking complicated security codes. In most instances, the user of a zombie computer is never aware that it has been commandeered.

The networks of zombie computers are used for a variety of purposes, from attacking Web sites of companies and government agencies to generating huge batches of spam e-mail. In some cases, experts say, the spam messages are used by fraud artists, known as phishers, to try to trick computer users into giving confidential information, like bank-account passwords and Social Security numbers.

Officials at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department say their inquiries on the zombie networks are exposing serious vulnerabilities in the Internet that could be exploited more widely by saboteurs to bring down Web sites or online messaging systems. One case under investigation, officials say, may involve as many as 300,000 zombie computers.

While the use of zombie computers to launch attacks is not new, such episodes are on the rise, and investigators say they are devoting more resources to such cases. Many investigations remain confidential, they say, because companies are hesitant to acknowledge they have been targets, fearful of undermining their customers' confidence.

In one recent case, a small British online payment processing company, Protx, was shut down after being bombarded in a zombie attack and warned that problems would continue unless a $10,000 payment was made, the company said. It is not known whether the authorities ever arrested anyone in that case.

Zombie attacks have tried to block access to Web sites including those of Microsoft, Al Jazeera and the White House. In October 2002, a huge but ultimately unsuccessful attack was mounted against the domain-name servers that manage Internet traffic. The attackers were never caught.

Federal officials say the case involving the athletic jerseys was solved after some college computers in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were found to be infected with software code traced to a user whose Internet name was pherk. That hacker, a high school student in New Jersey, told investigators that he was acting at the behest of a merchant - the owner of www.jerseydomain.com.

The merchant, an 18-year-old Michigan college student, could face trial later this year in a federal court in Newark. The case offers a rare glimpse both into the use of zombie computers and into the way that law enforcement officials are trying to combat the problem.

More than 170,000 computers every day are being added to the ranks of zombies, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, a research engineer at CipherTrust, a company based in Georgia that sells products to make e-mail and messaging safer.

"What this points out is that even though critical infrastructure is fairly well secured, the real vulnerability of the Internet are those home users that are individually vulnerable and don't have the knowledge to protect themselves," Mr. Alperovitch said. "They pose a threat to all the rest of us."

Mr. Alperovitch said that CipherTrust had detected a sharp rise in zombie computers in recent months, from a daily average of 143,000 newly commandeered computers in March to 157,000 in April to 172,000 last month.

He said that the increase was attributable to two trends: the rising number of computers in Asia, particularly China, which do not use software to protect against zombies and the worldwide proliferation of high-speed Internet connections.

Aside from the use of tools like CipherTrust's within businesses, experts say consumers can largely make their computers off limits to zombie activity by using up-to-date antivirus and antispam software.

One factor helping those seeking to create zombie networks, known as botnets, is the increasing use of high-speed Internet connections in the home. Aside from being able to handle (and generate) more traffic, such households are more inclined to leave computers running - the computers recruited as zombies need to be on when called by the master.

Eric H. Jaso, an assistant United States attorney in Newark who is prosecuting the New Jersey case, said the zombie cases often wind up damaging more than just the target.

"The effects of these attacks on the Internet itself are far ranging and highly damaging to innocent parties," he said. "The ripple effect is that when one server is attacked, other servers are affected and damaged. Web sites crash. Backup systems become unavailable often to entities like hospitals and banks that are part of the critical infrastructure of the country."

The overall damage in the New Jersey case is estimated by the authorities at $2 million.

That investigation began last July 7, when an online sports-apparel merchant, Gary Chiacco, told federal authorities that traffic to his site, jersey-joe.com, had been disrupted for several days, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost sales. When customers tried to gain access to the site, they would be greeted with an error message.

The attacks continued through the fall of last year and became so severe that they affected service to other customers of the Web-site hosting company used by Jersey Joe.

The host company ultimately told Jersey Joe to go elsewhere, as did two other companies that it then tried to use and that suffered problems from the zombie attacks.

Federal and state investigators say the case was cracked through a combination of luck and sleuthing. While the F.B.I. continued to monitor the attacks on Jersey Joe, student computers at colleges in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were found to be infected with the software that converted them into zombies.

Hackers "find computers on colleges to be particularly attractive because they have a larger bandwidth and are able to send more packets of data," said Kenneth R. Sharpe, a deputy attorney general in New Jersey involved in prosecuting the case.

A close examination of those computers disclosed the software had been trying to communicate with a user named pherk. Investigators traced the name and an Internet computer address to a 17-year-old high school student from Edison, N.J., named Jasmine Singh.

Confronted by law-enforcement authorities, Mr. Singh acknowledged his involvement and said it was at the behest of an 18-year-old businessman, Jason Arabo, whom he had met through a mutual friend. Mr. Arabo ran a sports jersey business from his home, selling online at www.customleader.com and www.jerseydomain.com.

Investigators determined that Mr. Singh had spread the rogue software through file-sharing networks like Kazaa, using the Jennifer Lopez come-on, and instructed the zombie computers to attack two of Mr. Arabo's competitors - Jersey Joe and another online shirt company, Distant Replays of Atlanta. His compensation, he said, was three pairs of sneakers and a watch.

The F.B.I. then set up a sting operation against Mr. Arabo. According to court papers, an undercover investigator held a series of instant-messaging chats with Mr. Arabo on America Online in December. Mr. Arabo told the undercover agent that he had previously recruited Mr. Singh and that those attacks had not done enough harm to keep his rivals offline, the court papers assert.

According to the court papers, Mr. Arabo asked the agent to mount denial-of-service attacks against rivals in exchange for sports apparel and watches. In later chats that month, he asked the agent to "take down" Jersey Joe's server and redirect its Internet traffic to a pornographic site, the court papers say, and repeatedly asked the agent to "hit them hard."

Mr. Arabo, a student at a community college in a Detroit suburb, was arrested in March and charged in a federal criminal complaint with conspiracy to use malicious programs to damage computers used in interstate commerce. He remains free on $50,000 bail and the condition that he stay off computers and the Internet. (The jerseydomain.com site now carries the notice "Under New Management.") He faces a maximum sentence of five years.

His lawyer, Stacey Biancamano, did not respond to several messages seeking comment.

For his part, Mr. Singh pleaded guilty last month in New Jersey Superior Court to charges of computer theft. Under a plea agreement, he faces a maximum sentence of five years at a youth correction center when he is sentenced in August, but the state prosecutor's office says it will not object to probation.

Mr. Sharpe, the New Jersey prosecutor in the case, said that Mr. Singh had boasted to his high school friends about his ability to create the zombie networks. "It was an ego thing," Mr. Sharpe said. "Hacking in its purest form is not about compensation or about wrecking a Web site. Hacking in its pure form is to show what you can do."

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2005-06-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988, porcelain.
DOUGLAS M. PARKER STUDIO/BROAD ART FOUNDATION, SANTA MONICA/©JEFF KOONS

The Selling of Jeff Koons

He made banality blue chip, pornography avant-garde, and tchotchkes into trophy art. How Jeff Koons, with the support of a small circle of dealers and collectors, masterminded his fame and fortune

By Kelly Devine Thomas

E arlier this year some of the most powerful players in the art world attended a 50th birthday party for Jeff Koons, the controversial art star who rose to fame in the 1980s. Jeffrey Deitch, who helped bankroll Koons’s ambitious and outsize “Celebration” series and nearly went bankrupt for it in the 1990s, hosted the party at his SoHo gallery, where examples from Koons’s oeuvre were projected on large screens and miniature versions of Balloon Dog, an iconic work, were handed out as party favors.

Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988, porcelain.
DOUGLAS M. PARKER STUDIO/BROAD ART FOUNDATION, SANTA MONICA/©JEFF KOONS
Among the high-profile museum directors, curators, artists, and collectors in the room that night were Koons’s longtime New York dealer Ileana Sonnabend, with whom he has worked on and off since 1986; Larry Gagosian, who recently began showing Koons’s new works and is now producing his “Celebration” sculptures; Robert Mnuchin, chairman of C&M Arts, which hosted a comprehensive Koons exhibition last May; and dealer William Acquavella.

The deep-pocketed gathering was indicative of the level of support currently invested in Koons, the former Wall Street commodities broker who has polarized opinion in the art world for more than two decades and whose pieces have fetched as much as $5.6 million at auction. Koons disappeared from the art-world radar for much of the 1990s, when he went through a messy divorce and struggled to deliver his “Celebration” series—sculptures and paintings depicting toys and childhood themes blown up to fantastical proportions, such as the ten-foot-tall, stainless-steel Balloon Dog that weighs more than a ton. “He has a vision that goes beyond his collectors,” says Gagosian. “It’s a huge vision, and it’s out there. But he connects the dots in one of the more interesting ways I’ve seen.”

Koons’s auction prices skyrocketed in 1999, when newsprint magnate Peter Brant paid a then record $1.8 million at Christie’s for Pink Panther (1988), a sculpture of the cartoon character hugging a buxom blonde, which was the first of Koons’s major porcelain works to appear at auction. Before 1999 his highest auction price was $288,500. Since the Pink Panther sale, more than 15 works have been auctioned for more than $1 million each. Four years ago Norwegian collector Hans Rasmus Astrup paid a record $5.6 million for Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), which was originally priced at $250,000, and last May financier Thomas H. Lee paid $5.5 million for Jim Beam J. B. Turner Train (1986), which was originally priced at $75,000.

How did an artist who sold his works for relatively modest prices two decades ago reach such peaks? Collectors, dealers, curators, and auction specialists who spoke with ARTnews say that Koons has masterminded his fame and fortune through a combination of charm, guile, and a talent for creating expensive art that inspires critical debate. Despite repeated requests, Koons declined to be interviewed for this article. “As Koons likes to point out, someone in every generation has to be held up as a shining example of what is wrong with current art,” Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, once observed. “It is a dirty job, but Koons, who has the single-mindedness of a missile, has taken on the duty. Koons’s conceptual strategy is to reveal his ambition.”

Koons has achieved his ambition, sources say, with the help of a close circle of dealers, including Sonnabend, Deitch, Gagosian, and, more recently, Mnuchin, as well as a core group of collectors, among them, Brant, Los Angeles real estate developer Eli Broad, Greek construction tycoon Dakis Joannou, Chicago collector Stephan Edlis, and Christie’s owner François Pinault, who have made him a cornerstone of their collections and continue to acquire many of the new works that come out of his studio.

Over the years, Koons has persuaded patrons to pay for the fabrication of his sculptures, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He has limited supply by placing these works with important private and public collections from which they are unlikely to be sold; and he has created artworks whose seductive surfaces, expensive scale and quality, and flawless execution cast them as luxury consumer objects. “He is a trophy artist,” says Chicago dealer Donald Young, who worked with Koons on his 1988 “Banality” series. “And he isn’t against being a trophy artist.”

While artists typically separate art and money, Koons’s art addresses market forces head on. Says art historian Robert Pincus-Witten, director of exhibitions at C&M Arts, “Jeff recognizes that works of art in a capitalist culture inevitably are reduced to the condition of commodity. What Jeff did was say, ‘Let’s short-circuit the process. Let’s begin with the commodity.’”

As Dan Cameron, chief curator at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, notes, “If all you want is a good time, he won’t let you down. But underneath the primitive thirst for delight and pleasure in his works, I think he is deeply engaged in some philosophical questions. Both Marxists and kids can enjoy it.”

Critical response to Koons’s encased vacuum cleaners, floating basketballs, gilded celebrities, and stainless-steel and porcelain tchotchkes has been extreme. Even his fans have had trouble reconciling their love-hate relationship with him. Peter Schjeldahl, now an art critic for the New Yorker, once proclaimed, “Jeff Koons makes me sick. He may be the definitive artist of this moment, and that makes me the sickest. I’m interested in my response, which includes excitement and helpless pleasure along with alienation and disgust . . . I love it, and pardon me while I throw up.”

Koons, who was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania and lives today in a 13-room town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, came of age as an artist during a decade when contemporaries like Julian Schnabel were aggressively promoting themselves, eager to expand their markets to the level of music and movie legends. Koons’s breakthrough exhibition took place in 1985 at International with Monument, in the East Village, when the neighborhood was the haunt of collectors like British advertising mogul Charles Saatchi on the hunt for young talent.

Koons moved to New York when he was 22 and got a job selling memberships at the Museum of Modern Art. His earliest supporter was dealer Mary Boone, who met him in 1979 when she bought his green Mercedes as a birthday gift for Schnabel. Boone sold two of his works—to Saatchi and collectors Donald and Mera Rubell—but after a year Koons left her for dealer Annina Nosei, with whom his relationship was also short-lived.

Koons’s work, with its roots in Pop, Conceptual, and Minimalist art, was out of step with the brash Neo-Expressionist style of artists like Schnabel and David Salle, which was in favor at the time. Frustrated by a lack of sales, Koons moved to Florida in the summer of 1982 to live with his parents and save enough money to move back to New York in the fall.

For the next few years, he personally financed his art by working as a Wall Street commodities broker. Koons has said he spent a lot of his time at Smith Barney consumed with a new series of sculptures, calling physicists to help him figure out how to suspend basketballs in water.

“Equilibrium,” his groundbreaking 1985 show at International with Monument, included basketballs floating in aquariums, lifesaving devices cast in bronze, and reproductions of Nike advertisements featuring black basketball stars. The basketball tanks, in editions of two, originally sold for $3,000, and the lifeboats, in an edition of three plus one artist’s proof, sold for $8,000, but those prices doubled within a matter of months. In recent years a lifeboat and an aqualung have sold for about $2 million each at auction. Less in demand are the basketball tanks, whose top price at auction is $244,500, because, sources say, they are difficult to maintain and the balls deteriorate.

“With Jeff Koons, I was absolutely obsessed,” says art adviser Estelle Schwartz, who placed about a dozen works from “Equilibrium” with clients. “I was a more voracious collector than even my clients. I remember saying to a collector, ‘If I’m buying a snorkel vest, you should be buying an aqualung.’”

“Equilibrium” set off a whirlwind of exhibitions by Koons. Between 1985 and 1991, he showed five distinct but often overlapping series of works at galleries across the country and overseas. He also began to work with multiple dealers, including Daniel Weinberg of Los Angeles, who, like other dealers who have worked with Koons, helped the artist fund his ideas in exchange for a share of the profits.

Over the past two decades, Koons, who has been quoted as saying that the “great artists of the future are going to be the great negotiators,” has built what he describes as a power base. “I have a platform now,” he told an interviewer in 1990. “I have all the support possible, as far as a stage for Jeff Koons to do his work.”

In addition to an increasing number of dealers who compete to handle his new works and buy those that appear at auction, Koons convinced collectors Joannou, Brant, and Broad, along with dealers Deitch, London’s Anthony d’Offay, and Cologne’s Max Hetzler, to invest heavily in the fabrication of the “Celebration” series. Koons began the series after his ex-wife Ilona Staller, a Hungarian-born porn star in Italy, and the inspiration for Koons’s sexually explicit 1991 “Made in Heaven” series, left him in 1993 and took their son to Italy, sparking a long-running custody fight.

Koons has always acted as the head of a complicated operation that requires the cooperation and support of many people, but never before on the scale required by “Celebration,” which Koons has said was an attempt to communicate with his estranged son. Deitch, Hetzler, and d’Offay funded the project in part by selling works to collectors before they were fabricated. But the sculptures, which were sold for between $1 million and $2 million in the late 1990s, proved more difficult and expensive to fabricate than anticipated.

Eli Broad paid for Balloon Dog (1994–2001) and Cat on a Clothesline (1994–2001) in 1996, but he didn’t receive them until 2001. “Jeff won’t let go of a work until he thinks it’s perfect,” Broad says. The delays tested his patience and required more money from Broad, who declined to specify what he paid for them. He says he didn’t threaten to take legal action against Deitch, Hetzler, and d’Offay but did make his expectations clear. “These were three responsible dealers, and we had a contract where they had to perform.”

At one point, more than 75 artists were working for Koons around the clock as he tried to finish the project in time for a “Celebration” exhibition at the Guggenheim, originally scheduled for 1996 but repeatedly postponed and ultimately canceled. “It was a pure panic situation,” says an artist who worked for Koons at the time. “I would get a call from a manager saying that they’d run out of money and were going to have to shut down the studio for a week or so.”

In the mid-1990s, Koons sold most of his artist’s proofs to Broad and others to help finance his work and pay his bills. Broad bought three: Rabbit, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, and St. John the Baptist (1988). Says Sonnabend director Antonio Homem, “Jeff is an extremely romantic artist. He is ready to ruin himself and anyone involved with him for an artwork to be what he wants it to be. He wants it to be beyond perfection. He wants it to be a miracle.”

In an extreme example of his attention to detail, Koons insisted about two years ago that Broad’s Balloon Dog, which had been exhibited at several major museums, be repainted a different shade of blue, at Koons’s expense.

Koons did not exhibit a new series of work for much of the 1990s, when the slow production of “Celebration,” caused what Brett Gorvy, Christie’s international cohead for postwar and contemporary art, describes as a “cloud of confusion to hang over his market.” He reappeared on the art scene with a new series of cartoonish mirrors and surrealistic paintings called “EasyFun” at Sonnabend in 1999, the same year that two of his major works appeared at auction.

When the nearly life-size Buster Keaton (1988) was offered at Christie’s in May 1999, it ignited a bidding duel between d’Offay, who bought the work for $409,500, and Philippe Ségalot, head of Christie’s contemporary-art department at the time, who was bidding on behalf of an anonymous client. The competition for Pink Panther was even more intense six months later, when it doubled its estimate of $600,000 to $800,000.

Exhibitions of Koons’s works in the past five years have often coincided with the appearance of high-profile works at auction. Most of the art in the C&M Arts show last May—the same month as Christie’s well-publicized sale of Jim Beam J. B. Turner Train—was on loan from Brant, Edlis, Sonnabend, and other public and private lenders. Few of the works were for sale, but the exhibition set new price levels for those that were available. Mnuchin, according to sources, sold Wall Relief with Bird (1991) for about $2 million, three times the price it sold for at Sotheby’s five years ago.

A 1993 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was Koons’s last major museum exhibition in the United States, despite the Guggenheim’s desire to present a retrospective of his works. “The question of a retrospective is still ongoing,” says Guggenheim deputy director and chief curator Lisa Dennison. “Determining the point when you want a retrospective that sums up your career is a tough one for any artist. I think it’s particularly tough for Jeff.” Sources say that Pinault—who has been approached about financing a new sculpture of an intermittently chugging train engine suspended by a 150-foot crane—plans to open his art foundation in Paris in about three years with a major Koons exhibition.

A much-delayed exhibition of the “Celebration” sculptures, most of which went directly into private hands and have never been shown as a group, is at least 18 months away, says Gagosian, who is still financing the production of some of the works and selling them for $2 million to $6 million.

While critics over the past 20 years have faulted Koons for debasing art with consumer fetishism, his supporters say they believe he is one of the most important artists of his generation.

“I think it was hard in the 1980s to take seriously a man who was saying that banality is the white elephant of our culture,” says the New Museum’s Dan Cameron. “But I think in 2005 we’re moving closer to Jeff. I think we’ll look back and say that he had it right on the money.”

Kelly Devine Thomas is senior writer of ARTnews.

This article has been edited for the ARTnews Web site.

2005-06-24T11:28:00.000-07:00

June 24, 2005
The Outtakes of Brando's Large Life
By CARYN JAMES

Hidden in one of the Japanese imitation-lacquer boxes that belonged to Marlon Brando and that will be auctioned at Christie's next week are a few of his little treasures: a plastic bagel that, when lifted, reveals a big plastic cockroach; a fake finger, bloodied at one end; and other pint-size practical jokes. It's not exactly a surprise that one of the greatest actors of our time was also a joker. We might have guessed that from some of his bizarre public appearances, like the television interview, from his bloated and nonsensical later years, in which he kissed Larry King on the mouth. And Johnny Depp, in a brief remembrance written for the Christie's catalog, lovingly recalls his friend's childlike sense of humor, with memories that are largely about whoopee cushions.

Still, it's a jolt to see the evidence in the stuff he left behind. And much of what is for sale does seem like stuff, leftover odds and ends desirable only because Brando touched them. (The public can view the items, all 320 lots of them, beginning tomorrow at Christie's. The auction is on Thursday.)

There is nothing exquisite, and certainly nothing that says "movie star," about the furniture removed from Brando's house on Mulholland Drive after he died last year at 80. It includes an ordinary brown leather couch and some weathered wooden garden chairs.

There are more intriguing personal objects that clearly meant something to him: conga drums, which he became passionate about playing when he was an unimaginably brilliant, intense and gorgeous young actor in the 1950's; a small American Indian dreamcatcher that hung over his bed.

But the true riches in this sale are his papers, an invaluable cache of film scripts annotated with his comments, along with letters to him from Mario Puzo, Jack Kerouac and Francis Ford Coppola. The film-related material was not found in the house, but was stashed in storage buildings on the grounds, the way other people might toss an old bike in a garage. The papers were, after all, relics of his glory days.

The question that haunts Brando's life is: What went wrong? Why did an actor of such genius throw his art away, twice? The first downslide began with his self-indulgence on the set of 1962's "Mutiny on the Bounty"; and his 70's comeback in "The Godfather" and "Last Tango in Paris" led to the second decline, into ballooning weight and junk roles taken only for money.

His possessions and even his papers don't begin to explain that, but the objects on sale offer detailed evidence of both the artist and the guy who loved whoopee cushions. Two items have generated the most inquiries, Christie's says: Brando's annotated script for "The Godfather" and the Foosball table from his den.

Brando knew that celebrity tchotchkes don't reveal much. "Fame has been the bane of my life, and I would have gladly given it up," he wrote in his cockeyed but often illuminating memoir, "Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me." Because of celebrity, he wrote, "People don't relate to you as the person you are, but to a myth they believe you are, and the myth is always wrong."

What is on display at Christie's does not reveal the man behind the myth, but the elements that make up that myth, organized into neat little lots reflecting what we know (or think we know) about his taste and social causes. So here is the Brando who championed the rights of the American Indian: there's a headdress, turquoise jewelry, a fringed coat and a vest, as well as a photograph of Brando wearing that vest. Here is the Brando with an affinity for Asia, evident in a collection of small statues, including two Buddhas, some kept in a shrine-like recess in a wall of his bedroom. There are shells and bits of coral from the Tahitian atoll he owned, and an aerial photograph of that island. These ordinary objects reinforce our kaleidoscopic image of the many Brandos. (There is a collection of eight kaleidoscopes for sale, too.)

Even the silliest film memorabilia are more eloquent because they could have belonged only to him. A leather belt inscribed "Mighty Moon Champion" in big bright colors was a gift from his co-stars on the set of "The Godfather," where Brando, James Caan and Robert Duvall amused themselves by mooning one other.

Because his performance in "The Godfather" was so enduring and iconic, there is an almost talismanic aura about his working script for the film. Scribbled on the back page, with Brando's frequent misspellings and typical crosshatches, is a list of notes about how to play Don Corleone and about his character's sons Michael and Sonny:

# through the nose

# High voice

# Nose broken early in youth to account for difficulties

# Mihecl's discision to kill

# Broken nose Sonny

Although he later sneered that he made films only for money, Brando's notes about characters appear even on scripts for late, lesser movies like "The Score," from 2001. For "Mutiny on the Bounty" there are such voluminous annotations on many versions of the script, and so many obsessive notes about the production (a notoriously troubled, overbudget shoot) that you can practically see him spinning out of control. (There are no scripts here from the 1950's films that established him and inspired generations of actors, like "A Streetcar Named Desire," "The Wild One" and "On the Waterfront.")

Many of the letters he received are illuminating, too. There is the irresistibly understated, handwritten note from Puzo that begins, "I wrote a book called THE GODFATHER," and goes on, "I think you're the only actor who can play the Godfather with that quiet force and irony the part requires." The note was sent even before Mr. Coppola made the famous screen test in which Brando stuffed toilet paper in his cheeks to transform himself.

In a long typewritten letter, Kerouac asks Brando to "buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it." He adds, "you play Dean and I'll play Sal." Too bad that potentially hilarious buddy movie was never made.

And there is a letter from Mr. Coppola about "Apocalypse Now" (which made the troubled "Mutiny" seem like a breeze), in which he struggles to make sense of Brando's character, Kurtz, then called Leighley.

These papers are much more than Hollywood trinkets, and they belong in a library or archive where they would be available to film historians and biographers. But all the film material Brando left behind will be auctioned. Through a spokesman, the estate's executors said that "within the will, there was no provision for any charitable donation," meaning they couldn't have donated anything if they had wanted to. Brando didn't specify what should be done with his papers, either, apparently content to let the myth go where it would.

Christie's estimate for the sale is modestly given as "in excess of $1 million." But celebrity auctions routinely surpass the estimates, which don't account for the passion some fans can bring to anything in a movie star's orbit. Christie's is guessing that someone will pay $4,000 to $6,000 for the black tunic that Brando wore as Jor-El in "Superman," $300 to $500 for two of his driver's licenses from the 1990's, $600 to $800 for (no kidding) an exercise machine. For Brando, so cynical about his fame, getting the public to buy his old stuff might be his final practical joke.

The Personal Property of Marlon Brando auction will begin at noon on Thursday at Christie's, 20 Rockefeller Plaza, Manhattan, where the 320 lots of stage, screen and personal objects can be viewed starting tomorrow and continuing through Wednesday. Information: (212) 636-2000.

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