Is Fashion Still Cool?

Is Fashion Still Cool?
By GUY TREBAY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/fashion/14FASH.html

Who killed the cool in fashion? What exactly was it that drained the excitement out of this fascinating, frivolous, inspiring, transformative, gossamer and endlessly diverting business, one that also happens to be among the largest employers in New York City?

It seems mere moments ago that the attention of mainstream America alighted on the humble garment business, transforming models into household names, designers into media darlings and movie stars into dress dummies whose forays onto red carpets became notable less for celebrity pixie dust than for the labels inside their clothes.

This interlude — roughly the mid-1980's to the late 90's — was a time when fashion was a cultural product generated on the streets of New York by members of a determined but slightly madcap cognoscenti made up of people not likely to find gainful employment in many other fields. Theirs was a world in which people employed deliriously kooky argot, in which fashion editors were heard to say of a dress that it was "worked to its finest inch of nanosecond perfection," where ingenious drag queens counterfeited tickets to runway shows, where obscure models were at the center of personality cults and where creative people found it perfectly acceptable to seek inspiration from the way that heroin addicts or homeless people put themselves together at the start of each day.

"Is cool still cool?" asked Anna Sui, a designer who served as an unofficial arbiter of fin-de-siècle cool in the cash-rich 90's. Throughout the decade, Ms. Sui's runway presentations were hipster catnip. One was as likely to spot the Beastie Boys perched in the front row of her shows of wittily girlish designs as the sexually ambiguous actor Jaye Davidson, with Kate Moss on his lap. Naomi Campbell once strutted Ms. Sui's catwalk in backless chaps. The standing-room crowd practically hung from the rafters trying to catch a glimpse.

Ms. Campbell now poses for second-string hip-hop clothing lines and seems destined for the scrap heap of demicelebrity. Ms. Moss, the onetime poster girl for loaded issues like eating disorders and heroin chic, has become domesticated as a new mother and part-time artist's muse. Isaac Mizrahi, former darling of the cognoscenti, has designed a collection for the mass-market retailer Target. Ms. Sui herself is now less engaged with scene-making than, like many other Americans, with corporate survival. As she prepared for her spring 2004 show in the tents of Bryant Park during another Fashion Week, which began Friday and continues through next Friday, Ms. Sui casually noted the passing of fashion as a crossroads of all things lustrous and desirable in a boom economy culture. "I'm not sure cool is even a concept anymore," she said.

This is far from the first time the point has been made. Two years ago, after the 9/11 attacks, fashion joined the rest of the culture in a period of self-appraisal, or at least of enforced sobriety.

If an irrepressible spirit of expression gradually returned to the business, it did so haltingly and burdened by an unexpected problem, one that had less to do with a terrorist menace than the subtler incursions of the corporate world. It was as if no one knew whom to consult for direction and where to look for the spirited, rebellious or else indifferent outsiders who have historically infused fashion with the unstudied vigor of their style.

Who would act the role played until it became parodic by people like Sarah Lerfel, the owner of Colette, the relentlessly chic Paris store, where no-name designers were the sine qua non, until it became hipper to wear designers whose products were most often encountered in duty-free shops — Gucci, Chanel and Louis Vuitton? Who had anything like the spare time to challenge what scholarly journals used to call "the fashion system," when anyone with a pincushion was frantically trying to stay employed?

"Maybe the concept of edginess doesn't work anymore," Ms. Sui said, adding that the outsider postures of many musicians and entertainers now crowding the airwaves smack less of rebellious expression than careful market research. "You look at Pink, with her red hair and punk clothes, and you think she might be punk, but then she belts out a torch song," Ms. Sui said. "You watch the MTV Video Music Awards, and every single person is saying Coldplay is awesome, but they sound like Michael Bolton to me. You look at Christina Aguilera, and she has all the affectations of somebody who would be a rocker, and then you hear her songs and you think, Is this the Julie London of today?"

In other words, as the retailer and television stylist Patricia Field noted: "Fashion got flipped around. It got to be just about money and about industry, the way in the 80's the art world became an industry and was killed off."

James LaForce, a seasoned fashion publicist, said: "Fashion used to be about worlds upon worlds you didn't have access to. It was about decadence, excitement, a passion for clothes, that margin for error." Nowadays, Mr. LaForce added, "everything creative has to be done by formula from the moment you say you want to be a fashion designer. The chances for lightning to strike are rare."

In the not-too-distant past, said Kim Hastreiter, the editor of Paper magazine, "there was real excitement, some bated breath" about the surprises new designers might come up with. Ms. Hastreiter's magazine has been missionary in its pursuit of the new for almost 20 years.

"That's all gone," she said, "except for Marc." Ms. Hastreiter was referring to Marc Jacobs, a designer whose assertions that he is mystified by the aura of hip that envelops his every association ("I'm the least cool person I know," he has said) can seem coy.

Consider, after all, the irresistibly offhand allure of the advertising campaigns that Juergen Teller photographs for the Marc Jacobs collections and the phenomenally successful designs Mr. Jacobs commissioned from Stephen Sprouse and Takashi Murakami to add a dimension of superficial hipness to Louis Vuitton bags.

"Fashion has gone out into Middle America, where Fifth Avenue meets Main Street," Ms. Hastreiter observed, with a sly reference to ads for the Isaac Mizrahi collection picturing the designer at the imaginary and, one would have thought, implausible intersection of the two thoroughfares.

Few would grudge Mr. Mizrahi his affiliation with Target, whose knack for hiring insider talents and moving them onto a mainstream stage has proved to be a bottom-line success. But the man once beloved of the fashion claque for his theatrical éclat, his knack for tweaked historicism and his droll effeminacy clearly relinquished some of his insider credibility when he took up selling $15 blouses at his new address.

Or did he?

"The mainstream marketers have everybody figured out," said Evan L. Schindler, the creative director of Black Book, a fashion-oriented lifestyle magazine. "They know how to bottle the subversive, the margins, the fringe." When even ferocious protopunk drug anthems are sanitized to become jingles for television cruise line ads, as happened with Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life," "you have to rethink your ideas of what it means to be cool," Mr. Schindler said.

It would appear that in fashion, as in music and other art forms, there is at the moment "no new movement, no strong movement of coolness," the filmmaker John Waters said. "I'm sure at some point the children will think of something cool to get on the nerves of the generation before them," he added. But, in fashion, an event like that seems pretty far off.

The truth of this becomes acute as Fashion Week gets under way with the industry celebrating the 10th anniversary of the centralization of the collections under the Bryant Park tents. It is no overstatement to say that in the decade since Seventh on Sixth, the fashion industry trade group, first consolidated a loosely organized collection of presentations into a twice-a-year multistage spectacle, the fashion industry itself has also been transformed.

Seventh on Sixth gave logistical coherence to the presentation of new designer wares. And the central location strikingly increased press coverage, leading to a glut of runway images in popular magazines and on network and cable television and turning designers into celebrities.

The value of blanket global media coverage of fashion in the form of sexy women strutting the catwalks in expensive clothes is not lost on Mercedes-Benz, Olympus cameras, Fiji water, North Fork Bank or Siemens mobile phones, which are among the nearly 20 official sponsors of this season's Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.

What is much less clear is how much an association with, say, Ortho Evra, the weekly birth control patch, which will be staging an "every woman" fashion show on Tuesday at the Bryant Park tents, adds to the profession's allure.

"Traditionally, we thought of fashion as something that came from houses, editors, designers, experts, and that has very much gone by the boards," said Virginia Postrel, the author of "The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness" (HarperCollins), a book that examines the cultural obsession with aesthetics.

"Part of what made fashion seem like high school," Ms. Postrel said, was the existence of " `in' groups, `in' people, who knew and decided what was cool."

The velocity of information flow is probably too great now for any group to sustain `in' crowd status for long. Magazine editors, for decades the creative autocrats of the business, have been forced to relinquish some of their power in favor of the consumer-friendly catalog-style editorials originated in Japanese magazines like Olive and Cutie and brought to a high state of polish by Lucky, Condé Nast's phenomenally successful shopping magazine.

IF there is any single trend among designers of the moment, it would seem to be one that unexpectedly mimics socially conscious movements like Slow Food and that favors unhip issues like political engagement and the sources for raw materials, and that actually entertains ideas less historically suited to fashion types than to policy wonks and nerds.

"Whatever we do, we don't call it fashion," said Angela, a member of the Manhattan design collective As Four, whose members live communally and eschew last names. "We have been very bored ourselves, lately," she said of fashion, criticizing its uniformity and the insinuating presence of corporate affiliations.

"It's like `The Devil Wears Prada,' " said Kai, a German-born member of the collective, referring to Lauren Weisberger's roman à clef about a magazine much like Vogue. "I don't understand why everybody is so willing to let themselves be taken over by other corporate identities, everybody all the time wearing gray and black. If your body is the host of your soul, why put it in a gray hut when you can build a fantastic house of gold?"

Few people in style history attained insider status faster than Miguel Adrover, a Majorca-born designer who became famous in an instant when his second collection was shown in 2000, only to be abruptly forgotten a year later, when he lost his design bearings, his media appeal and also his business. Mr. Adrover has emerged from this sobering experience with a philosophy better suited, it would seem, to a Peace Corps mission statement than to a business in which insiders rhapsodize about Hedi Slimane's new free-agent status or the cut of an Olivier Theyskens sleeve.

"What is fashion at the end of the day?" said Mr. Adrover, who now shows just once a year and whose clothes will be presented Monday night at the tents. Although they are termed a spring-summer 2004 collection, they are meant, he said, to be stylistically durable enough to be worn until they fall apart. "It is not enough to have buzz and show it off," Mr. Adrover declared. "It is not good that fashion is creating these unreal worlds."

Fashion is one frivolous undertaking that might benefit from regarding its own cultural impact more seriously, he suggested. "Fashion says something about the moments in which we live, and for a while now it has lost reality with what's going on in the world.

"People are gradually forgetting their individuality and how much power clothes have, that what you wear can get you sex or get you killed," Mr. Adrover added with emotion.

At various points in recent memory, Mr. Adrover's assertions might have smacked of disingenuousness or, worse, deadly earnestness. At the moment, however, they seem fairly cool.

File-Sharing Battle Leaves Musicians Caught in Middle

File-Sharing Battle Leaves Musicians Caught in Middle
By NEIL STRAUSS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/technology/14MUSI.html

Since the Recording Industry Association of America began its campaign against file-sharing services and unauthorized song swapping online in 1999, it has offered one chief justification for its actions: downloading songs is stealing money from the pockets of musicians.

But the musicians themselves have conflicted responses to file sharing and the tactics of the association, a trade group that represents record labels, not the musicians themselves, who have no organization that wields equal power.

So, many musicians have found themselves watching helplessly from the sidelines as the recording industry has begun suing people who are their fans, their audience and their consumers — who also share music online without authorization. Last week, 261 lawsuits were filed, the first battle in what the association says will be a long campaign of litigation against the most active music fans sharing songs on services like KaZaA.

"On one hand, the whole thing is pretty sick," said John McCrea, a singer and songwriter in the rock band Cake. "On the other hand, I think it'll probably work."

Many musicians privately wish file sharing would go away, though they are reluctant to admit it, because they do not want to seem unfriendly to their fans. So they have been happy to have the industry group play the role of bad cop. But with the escalation of the battle last week (with lawsuits filed against, among others, a 71-year-old grandfather and a 12-year-old girl), some musicians say they are beginning to wonder if the actions being taken in their name are a little extreme.This is especially true because, regardless of file sharing, they rarely see royalties.

"It would be nice if record companies would include artists on these decisions," said Deborah Harry of Blondie, adding that when a grandfather is sued because, unbeknownst to him, his grandchildren are downloading songs on his computer, "it's embarrassing."

The artist Moby, on his Web site, offered a similar opinion, suggesting that the music companies treat users of file-sharing services like fans instead of criminals. "How can a 14-year-old who has an allowance of $5 a week feel bad about downloading music produced by multimillionaire musicians and greedy record companies," he wrote. "The record companies should approach that 14-year-old and say: `Hey, it's great that you love music. Instead of downloading music for free, why don't you try this very inexpensive service that will enable you to listen to a lot of music and also have access to unreleased tracks and ticket discounts and free merchandise?' "

A few artists, like Metallica and Loudon Wainwright III, have come out strongly in favor of the record industry's crackdown. It could be seen as a gutsy move, considering the criticism Metallica faced from music fans when it campaigned against the file-sharing service Napster, which was declared illegal.

In a new song, "Something for Nothing," Mr. Wainwright makes fun of the mentality of file sharers, singing: "It's O.K. to steal, cuz it's so nice to share." As for the lawsuits, he said that he was not surprised. "If you're going to break the law, the hammer is going to come down," he said.

At the same time, other influential musicians and groups — like Moby, System of a Down, Public Enemy, and the Dead — contend that the record industry's efforts are misguided and that it must work with the new technology instead of against it.

But most seem ambivalent, or confused.

"I see both sides," said Rodney Crowell, a country music singer and songwriter. "In some ways, I think the record companies have it coming, but at the same time, being a writer and therefore in the business of copyright, they're saying it's impacting our business by 30 percent or more, so we have to do something."

The Recording Industry Association says there has been a 31 percent drop in sales of recorded music since file sharing became popular more than three years ago, but statistics from Forrester Research show that the sales decline since 2000 has been half that, or 15 percent, and that 35 percent of that amount is because of unauthorized downloading.

The situation has become so thorny that many top-selling artists, even those who have been outspoken about embracing new technology, declined to comment on the lawsuits on the record, for fear of upsetting their labels. In interviews, some musicians and their representatives said that their labels had asked them not to talk. And in a dozen cases, record labels did not grant interviews with musicians on the subject.

"I don't think anyone really understands the impact of what's happening, and they don't want to make a mistake," said Allen Kovac, who runs 10th Street Entertainment, an artist management company in Los Angeles. "The impact of lawsuits on fans is a double-edged sword. If you're a record company, do you want record company acts being persona non grata at every college campus in America?"

Much of the stated concern over file sharing has centered on the revenue that record companies and musicians are losing, but few musicians ever actually receive royalties from their record sales on major labels, which managers say have accounting practices that are badly in need of review. (Artists do not receive royalties for a CD until the record company has earned back the money it has spent on them.)

Even the Backstreet Boys, one of the best-selling acts of the 1990's, did not appear to have received any CD royalties, their management said.

"I don't have sympathy for the record companies," said Mickey Melchiondo of the rock duo Ween. "They haven't been paying me royalties anyway."

Musicians tend to make more money from sales of concert tickets and merchandise than from CD sales. In fact, many musicians offer free downloads of their songs on their Web sites to market themselves.

For some of them, the problem with file sharing is control. Before a CD is released, early versions of the songs often end up on file-sharing services, where fans download the music under the misconception that it is the finished product. Other times, songs online by one act are credited to another act. And fans exchange studio outtakes, unreleased songs, and live performances that some artists would prefer remain unheard.

Serj Tankian of the hard-rock band System of a Down, for example, said he thought that the free exchange of songs by his band and others online was healthy for music fans, but objected when that free exchange included unfinished studio recordings.

Ween, which recently left a major record label, Elektra, to release its records independently, has found a way to coexist with file sharing, which the band actually supports by encouraging fans to record and trade shows.

At the same time, Ween fans police eBay for people who are selling live recordings and KaZaA for people who are leaking songs before an album is released. "Before `Quebec,' came out," Mr. Melchiondo said, referring to Ween's latest CD, "our fans would message people on KaZaA who were sharing tracks and ask them to take the music down. And they also mounted a campaign where they put up fake copies of our record to throw people off."

Mr. Melchiondo said that Ween's fans acted out of respect for the band, not because of intimidation from the record industry or sympathy with it. "We never asked them to do this," he said. "They just took it upon themselves."

Whatever Will Be Will Be Free on the Internet

Whatever Will Be Will Be Free on the Internet
By STEVE LOHR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/weekinreview/14LOHR.html

THE recording industry's long-running battle against online music piracy has come to resemble one of those whack-a-mole arcade games, where the player hammers one rubber rodent's head with a mallet only to see another pop up nearby. Conk one, and up pops another, and so on.

Three years ago, the music industry sued Napster, the first popular music file-sharing network on the Internet. That sent Napster reeling, but other networks for trading copyrighted music — KaZaA, Grokster, Morpheus and others — sprang up. Last week, in the latest swing of the hammer, the Recording Industry Association of America filed 261 lawsuits against individual file sharers, which will surely make some of their estimated 60 million compatriots think twice — for now. Earth Station Five, a company based in the West Bank, surfaced recently with claims of being at war with the industry association. It promises the latest in anonymous Internet file sharing. Its motto: "Resistance is futile."

Since Gutenberg's printing press, new technologies for creating, copying and distributing information have eroded the power of the people, or industries, in control of various media. In the last century, the pattern held true, for example, when recorded music became popular in the early 1900's, radio in the 1920's and cable television in recent years.

But the heritage and design of the Internet present a particularly disruptive technology. Today's global network had its origins in the research culture of academia with its ethos of freely sharing information. And by design, the Internet turns every user in every living room into a mass distributor of just about anything that can be digitized, including film, photography, the written word and, of course, music. Already, Hollywood is trying to curb the next frontier, film swapping. The inevitable advance of technology will make reading on digital tablets more convenient than reading on paper, so the publishers of books, magazines and newspapers have their worries as well. "Nobody is immune," observed Michael J. Wolf, managing partner in charge of the media practice at McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm.

"The cultural and technical principle embedded in today's Internet is that it is neutral in the sense that the people who use it have the power to determine its use, not corporations or the network operators," said Jonathan Zittrain, a co-director of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. "The plan for the Internet was to have no plan."

The Net's free-range design, combined with the global proliferation of personal computing and low-cost communications networks, laid the foundation for the surge of innovation and new uses that became so evident by the late 1990's. The World Wide Web is the overarching example, but others include instant messaging, online gaming and peer-to-peer file sharing. And while companies are free to build proprietary products and services in cyberspace, the basic software and communications technology of the Internet lies in the public domain — open for all to use.

It was inevitable, then, that the Internet would eventually force a radical rethinking of intellectual property rights, and the music industry's current travails represent a particularly dramatic example of the mutating rules — though not the only one. Consider, for example, the rise of so-called open-source software. The poster child of open-source projects is GNU Linux, an operating system whose computer code is distributed freely over the Internet and is maintained and debugged by a loose-knit global community of programmers. Linux has become a genuine challenge to Microsoft because programmers around the world can see and modify the underlying source code — instead of jealously guarding it as a trade secret.

That concept of open-source is inseparable from the Internet, because it provides the vehicle for free exchange and widespread distribution — the same idea that is at the heart of file sharing and one that is spreading well beyond the techies. A group, led by Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, has established a "creative commons" project for collecting and putting creative works including music, film, photography and literature in the public domain, inspired by the open-source software model.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is posting the content of 500 of its courses online this fall, a project called OpenCourseWare. In Britain, a small group of artists and editors has set up a Web site for Jenny Everywhere, an increasingly popular open-source cartoon. Its only requirement is that any "Jenny" cartoon include its license, which states "others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed."

What all this means for the future of intellectual property, and some businesses, is as unpredictable as the open-source revolution itself. In the music business, it seems remarkable that only a few believe the technology cannot be held in check.

One of those few is David Bowie. "I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing," Mr. Bowie said in an interview last year. The future of the music industry, he suggests, is that songs are essentially advertisements and artists will have to make a living by performing on tour.

Others fear that, as the futility of technological fixes becomes clearer, the response may be onerous legal restrictions on the Internet and how people use it. "You don't want to break the kneecaps of the Internet to protect one relatively small industry, the recording business," Mr. Lessig, the Stanford professor, said.

William Fisher, a Harvard law professor, offers a solution for the recording industry's Internet challenge, and one that borrows from the past. When radio became popular in the 1920's and 1930's and began broadcasting copyrighted songs, the record companies, singers and bands protested. The answer was to have the radio stations pay the copyright holders and set up a measuring system so the largest payments went for the most popular songs.

In a book to be published next year, Mr. Fisher recommends placing a 15 percent tax on Internet access and a 15 percent tax on devices used for storing and copying music and movies like CD-burners, MP3 players and blank CD's.

The funds raised, he estimates, would be about $2.5 billion in 2004, roughly the projected amount the recording industry and Hollywood would lose to online piracy. The music business and Hollywood would get refunds based on what works were the most popular downloads.

"It's not perfect," Mr. Fisher admitted.

Still, it does represent what is not much in evidence today — some sort of middle ground that would compensate rights holders but also move with the march of technology and consumer behavior instead of merely trying to fight it.

"With music file sharing, you have a cultural norm that is being established by what is technologically possible," said Daniel Weitzner, a director at the World Wide Web Consortium. "That is very hard to resist."

Big Hopes for Filling China's Garages

Big Hopes for Filling China's Garages
By MARK LANDLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/12/business/worldbusiness/12cars.html

FRANKFURT, Sept. 11 - Canvas the top automotive executives at the Frankfurt International Motor Show about what gives them hope for their industry's future, and the answer is the same: China.

With their home countries in the doldrums, and the outlook for 2004 scarcely better, the eyes of the world's automakers are fixed firmly on the market in China, where sales of cars and trucks are rocketing.

"Growth in China is absolutely amazing," said Rick Wagoner, the chairman of General Motors, in an otherwise subdued speech here on Wednesday. "The Volkswagen brand sold more vehicles during the first quarter of 2003 in China than they did in Germany. Last month, G.M. sold more vehicles in China than we did in Germany."

To understand what that means, consider that G.M. owns one of Germany's major car companies, Adam Opel.

Mr. Wagoner's theme was echoed by the chief executive of DaimlerChrysler, Jürgen E. Schrempp, who increasingly regards China as the cure for what ails his trans-Atlantic colossus.

And China is also on the mind of the chairman of BMW, Helmut Panke, who likened the company's foray there to its decision to open an assembly plant in Spartanburg, S.C., in 1994.

It is easy to understand what is fueling the euphoria. Automobile sales in China are growing at an annual rate of more than 50 percent, compared with about 3 percent in the United States and Europe.

By 2013, Mr. Schrempp predicted, China will be the world's second-largest car market, after the United States, with 8 percent of global sales. In trucks, where it already accounts for a quarter of worldwide demand, China will be the world's largest market within a decade.

"The auto industry certainly hopes that China will be the cavalry pouring over the hilltop, with bugles blaring," said Garel Rhys, director of the automotive industry research institute at Cardiff University in Wales.

But, he added, "the industry would be very foolish if they thought China was the answer to all their problems."

Mr. Rhys said the euphoria masked a range of potential threats: too many foreign carmakers entering China, the lack of a genuine used-car market, the development of consumer credit in a country with debt-laden banks, and the simple question of whether torrid growth in China is inevitable.

"In 1976, it was confidently predicted that Brazil would be an eight-million-car-a-year market by 1996," he said. "It didn't happen."

As with the makers of everything from laundry detergent to cellphones, car manufacturers look at China and see a rapidly growing middle class of perhaps 400 million, with rising incomes and a taste for consumer products that will show off their newfound affluence.

The new assembly plant of BMW in Shenyang, in northeastern China, will be equipped to turn out 30,000 5-series sedans a year. Chinese drivers, Mr. Panke noted, tend to favor cars with the most powerful engines. He expects China to become the largest market for the 12-cylinder engines of BMW.

DaimlerChrysler signed an agreement on Monday to produce its C-class and E-class cars with a Chinese partner, the Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Company. Mercedes-Benz also has a thriving business importing its top-of-the-line S-class sedans, which can cost more than $100,000.

Indeed, DaimlerChrysler, like other foreign investors, wants Chinese officials to drop a regulation that requires carmakers to maintain separate distribution channels for imported and domestically produced cars.

"Does it make sense to have separate sales channels for S-class and C-class and E-class? Absolutely not," said Eckhard Cordes, a senior DaimlerChrysler official who helped negotiate the China venture.

Mr. Cordes, who accompanied Mr. Schrempp to a meeting with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China earlier this week, said he was confident that the government would ultimately drop the requirement.

The investment in trucks in China by DaimlerChrysler might prove to be as important as its venture in cars. It agreed to buy a stake in Beiqi Futian, a Chinese truckmaker that is controlled by Beijing Automotive.

The venture, Mr. Cordes said, would allow DaimlerChrysler to produce a full range of commercial vehicles, from the relatively simple trucks of Futian to the sophisticated ones of Mercedes. As China's economy develops, he expects buyers to gravitate to the Mercedes end of the market.

"The trucks you see today in China are the trucks we made 30 or 40 years ago," Mr. Cordes said.

DaimlerChrysler will also be helped by the emphasis of China on roads, not railway lines, as a way to open its vast hinterland. That will make trucks and buses the main means of moving people and goods.

To some extent, DaimlerChrysler is playing catch-up in China. Most of the global carmakers already have joint ventures there. Volkswagen, an early entrant, controls nearly half the Chinese passenger car market, and is well represented in the luxury range by its Audi brand.

General Motors, which has an assembly plant in the Pudong industrial park next to Shanghai, has had success selling its Buick Regal sedan to Communist Party officials and executives at state-run enterprises.

Even Rolls-Royce, the venerable British carmaker owned by BMW, has set up dealers in Beijing, Shanghai and the southern city of Guangzhou to handle sales of its new Phantom, which retails for $330,000.

Not every company is joining the eastward march. Renault, the French carmaker, is content to sit on the sidelines for now. The chairman of Renault, Louis Schweitzer, told reporters here that he would decide by next spring whether to make a major investment in China.

Renault has a big presence in Asia through its 44 percent stake in Nissan Motor of Japan. But it has struggled in other countries, notably Brazil. And the China market is every bit as crowded as Brazil's.

"With everyone rushing into China, there's not a lot of visibility right now," Mr. Schweitzer said.

Beyond Voice Recognition, to a Computer That Reads Lips

Beyond Voice Recognition, to a Computer That Reads Lips
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/technology/circuits/11next.html
By ANNE EISENBERG

PERSONAL computers have changed a lot in the last few decades, but not in the way that people communicate with them. Typing on a keyboard, with the help of a mouse, remains the most common interface.

But pounding away at a set of keys is hard on the hands and tethers users to the keyboard. Automatic speech recognition offers some relief - the systems work reasonably well for office dictation, for instance. But voice recognition is not effective in noisy places like cars, train stations or the corner cash machine, and it may stumble even under the best of conditions. Humans are still much better than any computer at the subtleties of speech recognition.

But teaching computers to read lips might boost the accuracy of automatic speech recognition. Listeners naturally use mouth movements to help them understand the difference between "bat" and "pat," for instance. If distinctions like this could be added to a computer's databank with the aid of cheap cameras and powerful processors, speech recognition software might work a lot better, even in noisy places.

Scientists at I.B.M.'s research center in Westchester County, at Intel's centers in China and California and in many other labs are developing just such digital lip-reading systems to augment the accuracy of speech recognition.

Chalapathy Neti, a senior researcher at I.B.M.'s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., has spent the past four years focusing on how to boost the performance of speech recognition with cameras. Dr. Neti manages the center's research in audiovisual speech technologies. "We humans fuse audio and visual perception in deciding what is being spoken," he said. A computer, he said, can be trained to do this job, too.

At I.B.M., the process starts by getting the computer and camera to locate the person who is speaking, searching for skin-tone pixels, for instance, and then using statistical models that detect any object in that area that resembles a face. Then, with the face in view, vision algorithms focus on the mouth region, estimating the location of many features, including the corners and center of the lips.

If the camera looked solely at the mouth, though, only about 12 to 14 sounds could be distinguished visually, Dr. Neti said - for instance, the difference between the explosive initial "p" and its close relative "b." So the group enlarged the visual region to include many types of movements. "We tried using additional visible articulators like jaw movements and the lower cheek, and other movements of tongue and teeth," he said, "and that turned out to be beneficial." Then the visual and audio features were combined and analyzed by statistical models that predicted what the speaker was saying.

Using inexpensive laptop cameras, the group tested the new system repeatedly. When they introduced a lot of background audio noise, Dr. Neti said, the combination audio and visual analysis of speech worked well, demonstrating up to a 100 percent improvement in accuracy compared with using audio alone.

These were promising results, but as Dr. Neti pointed out, a studio is not the world. Many camera-based systems that work well in the controlled conditions of a laboratory fail when they are tested in a car, for instance, where the lighting is uneven or people face away from the camera.

To handle circumstances like this, he and his colleagues are developing several solutions. One is an audiovisual headset, now in prototype, with a tiny camera mounted on the boom. "This way, the mouth region can always be seen," he said, independent of head movement or walking. I.B.M. is also exploring the use of infrared illuminators for the mouth region to provide constant lighting.

Dr. Neti said that such headsets might prove useful in workplaces where people fill out forms or enter data by using speech recognition software.

Another solution to changing video conditions is a feedback system devised by the I.B.M. research group. "Our system tracks confidence levels as it combines audio and visual features," making a decision on the relative weight of the two sources, Dr. Neti said. When a speaker faces away from the microphone, he said, the confidence level becomes zero and the system ignores the visual information and simply uses audio information. When the visual information is strong, it is included.

"The more pixels you can get for the mouth region," he said, "the better information you'll have."

The goal of the system is always to do better than when relying on an audio or video stream alone. "At worst, it is as good as audio," Dr. Neti said. "At best, it is much better."

At Intel, too, researchers have developed software for combined audiovisual analysis of speech and released the software for public use as part of the company's Open Source Computer Vision Library, said Ara V. Nefian, a senior Intel researcher who led the project. "We extract visual features and then acoustic features, and combine them using a model that analyzes them jointly," he said. In tests, the system could identify four out of five words in noisy environments.

"The results were as good for Chinese as for English," Dr. Nefian added, suggesting that the system could be introduced elsewhere.

Aggelos Katsaggelos, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., is also developing an audiovisual speech recognition system. He said that a future application might be improved security, using such a system, for instance, to determine whether recent videos that have surfaced indeed showed Saddam Hussein himself or an imposter. "In principle, if one can use both video and audio analysis one can have a better accuracy in identifying people," he said.

Iain Matthews, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute who works mainly on face tracking and modeling, said that audiovisual speech recognition was a logical step. "Psychology showed this 50 years ago," he said. "If you can see a person speaking, you can understand that person better."

Some New Riffs on the Rollaway

Some New Riffs on the Rollaway
By ELAINE LOUIE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/garden/11WEEL.html

In his SoHo loft, Chico Lledo, a graphic artist, is the master of a 4,200-square-foot urban universe. Every piece of furniture — bed, sofa, coffee table, bookcase, television cabinet and an 18-foot-long titanium dining table — is set on casters. With just one hand, Mr. Lledo, 29, who shares the loft with his companion, Doris Fontanilla, 28, an olive oil importer, can reconfigure the space all day long — and sometimes, it seems as if he does.

The bed is in constant motion. "If I work in the back," he said, "she'll sleep in the front. Or if I watch TV in the front, the bed goes in the back." If it's cold, the couple roll the bed to the fireplace. For dinner parties, the sofa is rolled to the kitchen counter. Even Mr. Lledo moves on casters, riding a scooter on his gleaming hardwood floor.

"I'm restless," Mr. Lledo said. Mobile furniture, he added, is a "great stress relief. It's a mood changer. But some people are set in their ways."

The architect of the loft, Deborah Berke, says much the same thing. "People fantasize that flexibility is desirable, but they rarely examine their lives for the need for flexibility," she said. Ms. Berke designed the furniture for Mr. Lledo's loft, including the $14,000 bed, with Stephen Brockman, a member of her firm, Deborah Berke & Partners, in Manhattan. The furniture and the loft renovation, which together cost $200,000, was finished last year. Mr. Lledo's apartment may be an extreme example of Roller Derby decoration, but mobile furniture appears to be emerging — or re-emerging, as variations have been around for years — as a conspicuous design trend.

And for good reason, some observers said.

"Society has become more nomadic and mobile, so mobile furniture is necessary," said Andrew Blauvelt, the design director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

"You can plug in anywhere," he explained, "and you're still connected but in a different way. You're erasing the internal boundaries of the house." Not everyone is quite so ready for wheels. "Probably 60 percent of movable furniture is not moved," said George Beylerian, the president of Material ConneXion, a clearinghouse for innovative products and materials in Manhattan. His own desk, for example, is mounted on casters, but he has never wheeled it around. At least, not on purpose. It moves constantly, he said, though "sometimes I wish it wouldn't."

Still, manufacturers of mobile furniture are convinced that its time has come. "We live in smaller spaces and dynamic spaces that have to be re-arranged for a new co-worker, a new child, a dinner party," said Ivan Luini, the president of Kartell U.S., which manufactures portable furniture, some by architects like Antonio Citterio. Kartell's sales figures appear to buttress Mr. Luini's case: last year, mobile furniture made up 20 percent of the company's sales, double the amount sold 10 years ago.

At Ligne Roset, a French manufacturer, sales of wheeled cabinetry in the United States have risen from negligible to 5 percent over the past 10 years, said Herve Laurent, executive vice president of Roset U.S.A.

Julie Westcott; her husband, David Lahar, a private investor; and their daughters, Djuna, 12, and Livia, 9, have shared space with mobile furniture for the last four years. They live in Bolinas, Calif., in a 3,000-square-foot house designed by Richard Fernau and Laura Hartman of Fernau & Hartman Architects of Berkeley.

Ms. Westcott, who is researching the life of Elizabeth Bishop, the poet, said that the family's favorite pieces are two daybeds, also by Fernau & Hartman, that roll from the living room to the courtyard. Latches allow the beds, $4,350 each, to be joined together to form a queen-size bed. "When the kids were younger, they asked us to lock the bed, and everyone climbed in," she said.

Mobile furniture is often ideal for small spaces. Stephen Burks, founder of Readymade Projects, a design studio in Manhattan, and his wife, Claudette Marasigan-Burks, the manager and buyer for Marni, a SoHo clothing boutique, live in a 1,000-square-foot loft in Brooklyn and have no room for a conventional closet.

The answer was casters. Mr. Burks tucked closets underneath their loft bed, hiding them behind two plywood bookcases he made, each on wheels. Ms. Marasigan-Burks gets to her closet by pushing the right bookcase aside. To get to his closet on the left, Mr. Burks pushes both bookcases to the right. Pushed together, the cases measure 12 feet long. They are 5 feet 6 inches high (a similar pair would cost $2,500).

Joan Halperin, an interior designer in Manhattan, needed a table for a tiny breakfast nook. When she couldn't find one with legs delicate enough to please her, she went to Crate & Barrel, bought a Butterfly desk for $119, and attached its wheeled legs to a maple top, which she designed. She sells copies of her new improved table for $850.

For each room in the Alex Hotel, scheduled to open next month in Midtown Manhattan, David Rockwell, the president of the Rockwell Group, designed four mobile pieces of furniture — an easy chair, a night stand, a low game table and a coffee table that rises to dining table height. The chair has casters only on its front legs, and doesn't move unless it is lifted from the back, like a wheelbarrow.

A similar idea occurred to Richard Fernau, the Berkeley architect, who decided to improve the Adirondack chair. "You have those large arms, and you stack books on one side, and have your coffee on another side, and when you get up, your books go down," he said. So he added a broad wheelbase and red nylon casters. The price is $1,800 to $3,600, depending on the wood.

Kitchen equipment is available with casters, too. In June, Bulthaup, a German kitchen manufacturer, repositioned System 20, a collection of 19 stainless steel and aluminum furnishings. Once advertised as a minimalist alternative to the traditional kitchen, it is now touted for its mobility. The line includes a trash bin, shelves, a preparation table and a table with a sink and dishwasher. Six of the smaller items roll. A System 20 kitchen, not including a refrigerator or cooktop, costs about $20,000. Prices range from $1,250 for a three-container trash bin to $6,300 for a worktable with a sink and cooktop.

For those who like mobile furniture with an industrial edge but a less breathtaking price tag, there is Gladiator GarageWorks. The company makes worktables, storage or gear boxes, a refrigerator/freezer and more, all of cold-rolled steel. The collection was introduced last year as a way to tidy up a garage. The prices range from $200 for a wall-mounted storage cabinet that measures 30 inches by 30 inches to $1,300 for the refrigerator/freezer.

Jan Kelly, a freelance media escort in Seattle who accompanies authors on publicity tours, remodeled her kitchen this year with the help of Vawn Greany, a designer at Kitchen Studio in nearby Bellevue. They added three mobile storage cabinets, each with a maple top, and a maple worktable, all from Gladiator. Still, the question remains: Does Ms. Kelly actually move the cabinets from their moorings? When she bakes, yes.

As for Chico Lledo, the man of the movable loft, he yearns for even greater mobility. As he looked at the monitors of his computers, he said, "I'm going wireless!"

Blood on the Street, and It's Chic

Blood on the Street, and It's Chic
By MICHAEL BRICK
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/nyregion/11GANS.html

Michael Diamond walked past the trucks for Woolco, Sysco and the meat purveyors yesterday as he crossed Little West 12th Street. A famed rap performer and Spiritual Guy, he is the obligatory Beastie Boy on hand to assure the followers of fashion eating brunch at outdoor cafes that they had arrived at the scene of a scene.

It was another day in Gansevoort Market, a neighborhood described by its boosters as "gritty." Though the streets are still cobblestone and in some places covered in the blood of cattle, the century-old meat markets have in recent years lost some ground to other sorts of meat markets:, nightclubs and boutiques patrolled by skinny women and men with expensive sunglasses.

Gritty sells, though. Gritty evokes a New York of gangs and huddling masses, and it attracts filmmakers and clubgoers seeking a veneer of danger. So the owners of disparate businesses in this neighborhood have formed an unlikely alliance to preserve certain parts of the market's appearance. This week, they won designation by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission for a historic district in an area bordered by 14th and 15th Streets on the north, Horatio Street on the south, West Street on the west and Hudson Street on the east.

The district's borders are a puzzle piece in part because this is a neighborhood where the streets of the old Greenwich Village grid collide at a 45-degree angle with those of the Manhattan grid. The designation requires approval by the commission for any significant alterations to the facades of buildings within the boundaries.

Perhaps the most readily apparent examples of the neighborhood's distinctive architecture are the metal awnings jutting out from the brick facades, put here to provide shade and an anchor for the pulleys that workers use to load carcasses from trucks to warehouses.

"It has a completely unique sense of place," said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, a group that worked to secure the designation. "It's for that reason that it's become popular in recent years. The trick is not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg."

Mr. Berman has found allies in the meatpacking unions and restaurant owners, who have collectively decided that the goose-killers they have in mind are developers of residential real estate.

Already at the spot where the cobblestone of Gansevoort Street meets the asphalt of Hudson Street, there rises a sleek silver exoskeleton with panels befitting a spaceship and balconies too small for chairs, a project of the Hotel Gansevoort Group of Garden City. On the western side of the market, the developer Stephen Touhey has proposed a 32-story luxury building to straddle the old High Line railroad.

The historic designation, Mr. Touhey said, will not affect his plans because his battlefield is at the Department of City Planning, which oversees zoning.

"My plan has always been to build a building that fits in with the historic architecture of the neighborhood," Mr. Touhey said, adding that his plans were changing to build something more like a hotel than a condominium building.

The business owners-cum-preservationists say they do not want people to live here because residents would inevitably complain about the traffic and the noise and the mess that industry produces.

Florent Morellet, owner of the restaurant that bears his first name and a chief campaigner for the historic district designation, conceded that he himself made residential development appealing by opening a French bistro among the warehouses.

"Progress is inevitable," Mr. Morellet said. "What I'm trying to do with this is to try to channel it."

There were no historic districts to channel development and change a century ago, when this district actually was residential. People moved into tenements here in the 1820's to escape epidemics in what was then the main part of New York. The neighborhood shifted to become a market, first for produce and, after the development of reliable refrigeration, for meat. Gansevoort Market became a commercial district, its looks of concern to few.

Walmir Meats is among the meatpackers that still operate here. Its owners and unions joined the campaign for a historic district.

"Nothing ever stays the same," said Raymond DeStefano, shop steward at Walmir for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 342. "But when they're squeezing you out and you could only buy a hot dog in a boutique, that's what it all boils down to."

Mr. DeStefano said that the smell of the block is in his blood and in the cobblestone. He stood under a series of hooks as he said this, and bleeding hindquarters and forequarters swung around his head, producing the smell he spoke of.

Walmir Meats is cold. Décor is limited to a small plastic cow, picture postcards of skiers and a portrait of Miss September pulling at her teddy as if it is full of sand.

"Once this is gone, this whole block is gone," Mr. DeStefano said.

Signs abound of the delicate balance between true grit and those using grit as a backdrop to underscore their beauty. Across from Western Beef, there is a series of stores each selling the wares of a different Western European designer, with a maximum of five outfits on display in the middle of a wide space, smooth surfaces and inventive lighting. Lampposts jut out from the old brick facades. Four of them atop the Rio Mar restaurant illuminate an outsized billboard featuring a woman standing next to a printed name, offering a pouting glare to the diners across the street as if to say "Look but don't touch" or perhaps "I have recently watched the film `Amélie.' " It is unclear what the billboard is selling, but the model's clothes are a solid bet.

"The charm is that it's so diverse," said Birgitte West, a vice president of Bodum, a Danish purveyor of household goods that is converting a meatpacking warehouse into a call center to sell fancy kitchenware on the Internet. "It does smell of meat in the morning."

Whatever It Takes

Whatever It Takes
By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/09/opinion/09BROO.html

The Bush administration has the most infuriating way of changing its mind. The leading Bushies almost never admit serious mistakes. They never acknowledge that they are listening to their critics. They never even admit they are shifting course. They don these facial expressions suggesting calm omniscience while down below their legs are doing the fox trot in six different directions.

Sunday night's presidential speech was a perfect example. The policy ideas Bush sketched out represent such a striking series of policy shifts they amount to a virtual relaunching of the efforts to rebuild Iraq. Yet the president unveiled them as if they were stately extensions of the policies that commenced on Sept. 11, 2001.

Fortunately, while in public members of the administration emphasize their own incredible foresight, in private they are able to face unpleasant facts and pivot in response. Sometime around the middle of August, while the president was on the ranch, members of the Bush team must have done a candid and scathing review of how things were going in Iraq.

This was the time, remember, when leading Republicans were falling out of love with Donald Rumsfeld. They were outraged with Rumsfeld's unwillingness to even consider the possibility that the U.S. might need more troops in Iraq and a much bigger Army over all. Several Republicans were also coming to doubt the competence of the people running Iraq policy. While on visits to Baghdad, they were finding that civilian reconstruction efforts were absurdly underfinanced and understaffed. What's more, there were no Iraqis in Paul Bremer's administrative headquarters. The Iraqi Governing Council had been appointed, but its members were being treated like figureheads.

By the time the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad was bombed on Aug. 19, President Bush was willing to strike out on a new course. It was in a phone call that day with Condoleezza Rice, a close Bush adviser reports, that Bush observed that the tragedy of the bombing might be turned into an opportunity to internationalize the rebuilding effort. Colin Powell was dispatched to talk with Kofi Annan about a resolution authorizing a greater U.N. role. Annan was receptive.

The decision to go to the U.N. is not the most important policy revision Bush executed. The coming U.N. debate will give a lot of second-tier powers the chance to preen about sending troops they don't have and making contributions they can't afford, but nobody should fool themselves into thinking it is in any way crucial to the region. Powell has estimated there may be a mere 10,000 to 15,000 additional international troops. Some technocrats from the Sorbonne may supplement the ones from Johns Hopkins, but the U.N. offensive is a long journey for only a modest reward.

The truly important initiatives Bush launched were, first, to sharply increase the level of spending on Iraq, and therefore increase the likelihood that major infrastructure problems will be addressed. With this, Bush is not only taking on the antiwar Democrats, but also the so far silent but oh-so-sullen fiscal conservatives in his own party.

Second, Bush has finally signaled that the U.S. is going to hand over real authority to newly selected Iraqi ministers. Yesterday, Bremer released a seven-step process for handing power back to the Iraqis that reads like a treatment program for Imperialists Anonymous. If this process is carried out, Americans administrators will be serving Iraqi executives, not the other way around.

Some close advisers suspect the violence may not abate in Iraq until early next year, and it will be interesting to see whether Americans can sustain their morale over that time. Still, as Bush makes these pivots, I'm reminded of the way Ronald Reagan made his amazing policy shifts at the end of the cold war, some of which outraged liberals (Reykjavik) and some of which outraged conservatives (the arms control treaties with Mikhail Gorbachev). Presidents tend to be ruthless opportunists, no matter how ideological they appear. Even as he announced his strategy on Sunday night, Bush left open the possibility that he might be compelled to shift again and send in more U.S. troops if circumstances warrant.

The essential news is that Bush will do whatever it takes to prevail, and senior members of his administration are capable of looking honestly at their mistakes. You will just never be able to get any of them to admit publicly they've ever made any.

Why Are We In Iraq?

Why Are We In Iraq? (And Liberia? And Afghanistan?)
By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/magazine/07INTERVENTION.html

In the back alleys of Iraq, the soldiers from the 101st Airborne and First Armored Divisions are hot, dirty and scared. They want to go home, but instead they're pinned down, fighting off hit-and-run attacks and trying to stop sabotage on pipelines, water mains and electric grids. They were told they would be greeted as liberators, but now, many months later, they are an army of occupation, trying to save the reputation of a president who never told them -- did he know himself? -- what they were getting into. The Muslim fighters rushing to join the remnants of Saddam Hussein's loyalists in a guerrilla war to reclaim Iraq have understood all along what the war has been about -- that it was never simply a matter of preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction; rather, it was about consolidating American power in the Arab world. Some in the administration no doubt understood this, too, though no one took the trouble to explain all their reasons for going to war to the American people or, for that matter, the rest of the world.

But now we know. Iraq may become for America what Afghanistan became for the Soviet empire: the place where its fight against Islamic jihad will be won or lost. Nor is the United States the only target. The suicide bomb that killed Sergio Vieira de Mello and decimated his team has drawn the United Nations into the vortex. The United Nations came to Baghdad to give American nation-building a patina of legitimacy. Now the world body has been targeted as an accomplice of occupation. If the United States fails in Iraq, so will the United Nations.

To see what is really unfolding in Iraq, we need to place it in the long history of American overseas interventions. It is worth remembering, for example, that when American soldiers have occupied countries before, for example Japan and Germany, the story started out much the same: not enough food, not enough electricity, not enough law and order (and, in Germany, ragtag Nazi fighters). And if this history is part of what drove us into Iraq, what doctrine, if any, has determined when and where Americans are sent to fight? Before the United States sends troops to any future front -- Syria? North Korea? Iran? -- it is crucial to ask: What does the history of American intervention teach us to hope and to fear? And how might the United States devise a coherent strategy of engagement suited for the perils -- and possibilities -- of the 21st century?

II.
From the very beginning, the American republic has never shrunk from foreign wars. A recent Congressional study shows that there has scarcely been a year since its founding that American soldiers haven't been overseas ''from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,'' chasing pirates, punishing bandits, pulling American citizens out of harm's way, intervening in civil wars, stopping massacres, overturning regimes deemed (fairly or not) unfriendly and exporting democracy. American foreign policy largely consists of doctrines about when and where to intervene in other people's countries. In 1823, James Monroe committed the United States -- militarily, if it came to that -- to keeping foreign colonial powers out of the entire Western Hemisphere. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt added a corollary giving the United States the right to send in troops when any of its Latin American neighbors engaged in ''flagrant wrongdoing.'' Most Latin Americans, then and now, took that to mean that the United States would topple any government in the hemisphere that acted against American interests. Early in the last century, American troops went ashore to set up governments in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and chased Pancho Villa around Mexico. And this kind of intervention wasn't just confined to pushing around Latin Americans. Twelve thousand troops were sent to support the White armies fighting the Communists in the Russian Civil War that began in 1918. In the 1920's, during the civil war in China, there were 6,000 American soldiers ashore and a further 44 naval vessels in the China Sea protecting American interests. (Neither venture was much of a success. Both Russia and China eventually went Communist.)

Despite George Washington's call to avoid foreign entanglements and John Quincy Adams's plea that America should abjure slaying monsters abroad, splendid isolation has never proved to be a convincing foreign policy for Americans. First in 1917 and then again in 1941, American presidents thought they could keep America out of Europe's wars only to discover that isolation was not an option for a country wanting to be taken seriously as a world power -- which, from the beginning, is precisely what America desired. Intervention required huge sacrifice -- the haunting American graveyards in France are proof of this -- but American soldiers helped save Europe from dictatorship, and their hard fighting turned America into the most powerful nation on earth.

Americans may think that their troops used to stay at home and that intervention and nation-building used to be rare. In fact, regime change is as old a story in American foreign policy, as is unilateralism. Until the United Nations came along in 1945, the United States did all this intervening without asking anyone's permission. But after watching America be dragged into world war because the League of Nations had been so weak, Franklin Roosevelt decided to back the creation of a muscular world body. He was even willing to hand over some authority over interventions to the United Nations Security Council, leaving it to the council to decide which threats to international peace and security gave states the right to send in military force. Cold-war deadlock on the council, however, frustrated the Roosevelt dream. Besides, a substantial body of American opinion has always questioned why the United States should ask the United Nations' permission to use force abroad.

After World War II, the boys may have wanted to come home, but Truman kept American soldiers on guard around the world to defend free governments from Communist overthrow. This meant shoring up the Greeks in 1947 and sending troops to prevent South Korea from going under in 1950. But anti-Communism had its limits. It did not mean going to the aid of the Hungarians when they rose up against Soviet domination in 1956. When the Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest, Eisenhower turned a deaf ear as the Hungarians begged over the airwaves for American help. Ike decided that intervention that risked conflict -- perhaps nuclear conflict -- with a great power was not worth the candle.

III.
Never pick on someone your own size, which in our time means someone with nuclear weapons: this has been Rule No. 1 of intervention since the end of the Second World War. Minor rogues, would-be tough guys like Saddam Hussein, perhaps, but never someone who can actually deliver a nuclear bomb. (We are about to see whether this rule holds with regard to North Korea.) Even the enormous American intervention in Vietnam took great care to avoid a direct clash with Russia and China.

When Lyndon Johnson sent half a million troops to Vietnam, he thought he was containing Communism in Asia (without threatening either the Chinese or Russian regimes that were financing North Vietnam's campaign). Johnson never realized his ultimate enemy was Vietnamese nationalism. The 58,000 names carved into the black granite of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington are the measure of Johnson's mistake. Rule No. 2 of American intervention evolved out of Vietnam: Never fight someone who is more willing to die than you are. (This is the rule now being tested by the hit-and-run attackers and suicide bombers in Iraq.) The Vietnam veterans who came to command the American military -- led by Colin Powell -- also settled on Rule No. 3, which remains much debated: Never intervene except with overwhelming force in defense of a vital national interest. (Thus this summer's gingerly approach to Liberia.)

But what has been the national interest once the cold war ended and the threat of a growing Communist empire evaporated? No clear national interest has emerged. No clear conversation about the national interest has emerged. Policy -- if one can even speak of policy -- has seemed to be mostly the prisoner of interventionist lobbies with access to the indignation machine of the modern media. America in the 1990's intervened to oust an invader (the first gulf war), to stop civil war (Bosnia), to stop ethnic cleansing (Kosovo), to feed the starving (Somalia) and to prevent a country from falling apart (Macedonia). America also dithered on the sidelines and watched 800,000 people die in three awful months in Rwanda, when airstrikes against the government sponsors of the genocide, coupled with reinforcement of the United Nations troops on the ground, might have stopped the horror. Rule No. 4: Never use force except as a last resort (sometimes turned into an alibi for doing nothing).

During the Clinton years, there were presidential directives that sought to define exactly what the Clinton doctrine on intervention might be. But no doctrine was ever arrived at. There was a guiding principle: reluctance to shed American blood. Thus, Rule No. 5 in American interventions: When force is used as a last resort, avoid American casualties. Since the Clinton administration's interventions were not of necessity to protect the national interest -- whatever that was at the time -- but matters of choice, this made a certain amount of sense, at least in terms of domestic politics.

The problem with Rule No. 5 is that it made force protection as important as mission accomplishment and may have sent the wrong signal to the enemy. By cutting and running after the botched intervention in Somalia in 1993, for instance, Clinton might have led Osama bin Laden to believe that Americans lacked the stomach for a fight. Ten years later, we may still be paying the price for that mistake.

By the end of the 1990's, conservative commentators were complaining that Clinton's intervention doctrine, such as it was, had lost touch with national interest and had degenerated into social work. The Bush campaign vowed that the 101st Airborne wouldn't be wasted escorting foreign children to school and promised to bring the boys home from Bosnia. (They remain.) As far as the Bush administration was concerned, too much intervention, where too little was at stake, was blunting the purpose of the military, which was to ''fight and win the nation's wars.'' Of course, at the time he became president, the nation had no wars, and none loomed on the horizon.

Then came Sept. 11 -- and then came first Afghanistan and then Iraq. These two reversed Rule No. 4. (Only use force as a last resort.) Now the Bush administration was committing itself to use force as a first resort. But the Bush doctrine on intervention is no clearer than Clinton's. The Bush administration is committed to absolute military pre-eminence, but does anyone think that Clinton's military was less determined to remain the single -- and overwhelming -- superpower? The Bush doctrine is also burdened with contradiction. The president took office ruling out humanitarian interventions, yet marines did (finally) go ashore in war-torn Liberia. During the 2000 campaign, George Bush ruled out intervention in the cause of nation-building, only to find himself staking his presidency on the outcome of nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq. Having called for a focused intervention strategy, he has proclaimed a war on terror that never clearly defines terrorism; never differentiates among terrorist organizations as to which explicitly threaten American interests and which do not; and never has settled on which states supporting or harboring terrorists are targets of American intervention. An administration whose supposed watchword is self-discipline regularly leaks to the press, for example, that its intervention list might include Syria or Iran -- or might not, depending on the day of the week you ask. The administration, purposefully or not, routinely conflates terrorism and the nuclear threat from rogue nations. These are threats of a profoundly different order and magnitude. Finally, the administration promises swift and decisive interventions that will lead to victory. But as Afghanistan shows (and Iraq is beginning to show), this expectation is deluded. Taking down the state that sheltered Osama bin Laden was easy; shutting down Al Qaeda has proved frustratingly difficult. Interventions don't end when the last big battle is won. In a war on terror, containing rather than defeating the enemy is the most you can hope for. Where is the doctrine acknowledging that truth?

The Bush administration, as no administration before it, has embraced ''pre-emption.'' It's a strategy of sorts, but hardly a doctrine. Where is the definition of when pre-emption might actually be justified? The angry postwar debate about whether the American public (and the British public, too) were duped into the Iraq war is about much more than whether intelligence estimates were ''sexed up'' to make the threat from Hussein seem more compelling. It is about what level of threat warrants pre-emptive use of force. Almost 20 years ago, George P. Shultz, as Reagan's secretary of state, gave a speech warning that America would have to make pre-emptive intervention against terrorist threats on the basis of evidence that would be less than clear. Since Shultz, no one has clarified how intervention decisions are to be made when intelligence is, as it is bound to be, uncertain. As Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush administration's deputy secretary of defense, has candidly acknowledged, the intelligence evidence used to justify force in Iraq was ''murky.'' If so, the American people should have been told just that. Instead, they were told that intervention was necessary to meet a real and imminent threat. Now the line seems to be that the war wasn't much of an act of pre-emption at all, but rather a crusade to get rid of an odious regime. But this then makes it a war of choice -- and the Bush administration came to power vowing not to fight those. At the moment, the United States is fighting wars in two countries with no clear policy of intervention, no clear end in sight and no clear understanding among Americans of what their nation has gotten itself into.

IV.
There has always been an anti-intervention party in American politics, one that believes that the Republic should resist the temptations of empire and that democracy at home is menaced when force is used to export democracy abroad. During the war to annex the Philippines in 1898, the fine flower of the American intellectual and moral elite was dead set against the war: the humorist Mark Twain, the union leader Samuel Gompers, the multimillionaire Andrew Carnegie, the social critic and activist Jane Addams. From these luminaries of yesteryear to the luminaries of today -- Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky, the Dixie Chicks -- intervention has been excoriated as an imperial misadventure, justified in the language of freedom and democracy but actually prosecuted for venal motive: oil, power, revenge, political advantage at home and nefarious designs abroad.

The anti-intervention party in American politics often captures the high moral ground but usually loses the war for public opinion. With the single exception of Vietnam -- where the sheer cost in blood made the exercise seem futile both to moralists and realists alike -- the American public has never been convinced that the country would lose its soul in overseas wars. On the contrary, Americans have tended to get caught up in the adventure. They have also believed at times that intervention can serve their interests. When anti-interventionists in the months before the invasion of Iraq thundered, ''No blood for oil!'' many Americans no doubt thought, ''If you won't fight to defend the oil supply, what will you fight for?''

Still, Americans want even this kind of interest backed by principle. Whether it is because America is a religious country at heart, ever concerned with the state of its soul, or just trying to set a better example than the nasty imperialists of old, its leaders have always justified intervention in righteous -- or at least disinterested -- terms. Teddy Roosevelt incessantly spoke of the restoration of civilized values when he laid hands on Cuba and the Philippines. His ulterior motives -- guarding the sea lanes to the Panama Canal he planned to open, securing naval bases in the Pacific -- were played down, lest they introduce a note of vulgar calculation into the proceedings. Likewise in Iraq, much mention was made of human rights and democracy and much less about the obvious fact that the operation was about oil, not in the callow sense of going to war for the sake of Halliburton but in the wider sense of America's consolidating its hegemonic role as the guarantor of stable oil supplies for the Western economy.

Yet oil is not the whole story, as capitalist interest has never been. From Teddy Roosevelt to George W. Bush, moral feeling has made a real difference to the timing and scope of interventions. Just compare Bush the father with Bush the son. The father is a cold-eyed realist. In 1991, he did not think the oppression of the Kurds and Shiites justified going all the way to Baghdad. His son is more a hotblooded moralist. Bringing freedom to the Iraqis seems to matter to him, which is why, perhaps, he rushed to Baghdad not caring whether he had a coalition behind him or not. This is not to say that this president's moralism is unproblematic or that it has gone unchallenged. When he went to the United Nations in September 2002 to make his case for action against Hussein, Amnesty International released a statement objecting to his citation of Hussein's abject human rights record as a ground for the use of force. Nothing makes human rights activists angrier than watching political leaders conscript human rights into a justification for aggression. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, both of which had denounced Hussein's tyranny for some 20 years with little or no support from successive American administrations, had good reason to be suspicious of the motives of a presidential Johnny-come-lately to the human rights cause. Nonetheless, this put human rights advocates in the curious position of denouncing Hussein but objecting when someone finally proposed to do something about him. To oppose an intervention that was bound to improve the human rights of Iraqis because the man leading that intervention was late to the cause would seem to value good intentions more than good consequences.

Some of the immediate consequences of the Iraq intervention have been good indeed: a totalitarian regime is no longer terrorizing Iraqis; Shiites marching in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate at their shrine at Karbala, along with professors, policemen and office workers demonstrating in the streets of Baghdad, are tasting freedom for the first time; Iraqis as a whole are discovering the truth about the torture chambers, mass graves and other squalid secrets of more than two decades of tyranny. The people may be using their freedom to demand an early exit of the troops who won it for them, but that is exactly how it should be. If the consequence of intervention is a rights-respecting Iraq in a decade or so, who cares whether the intentions that led to it were mixed at best? But it does matter that American intentions were never really spelled out and that the members of the Bush administration do not seem to have a clear intervention policy on Iraq or anywhere else. Establishing and sustaining a rights-respecting Iraq will depend, in part, on setting a policy and convincing the American people of it. And future interventions will depend on policy coherence, too.

Yet it is also true that if a rights-respecting regime is not the result in Iraq, blame cannot simply be laid on the Bush administration. Anti-interventionists assume that all the bad consequences of an intervention derive from ignoble American intentions, just as pro-interventionists tend to accord American good will miraculous power. In this, both sides mistake the true limits of American capacity to determine outcomes. The way things are going in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III and his proconsuls in Baghdad must be fondly wishing that the reality of Iraq could be shaped by any American intentions at all.

The anti-interventionist party also charges that American good intentions in Iraq might be more credible if the United States defended human rights more consistently throughout the world -- though how this might be brought about without sending in the troops from time to time is at best unclear. Tony Blair, whose human rights bona fides are not in much dispute -- he had already dispatched British troops to prevent massacre and chaos in Sierra Leone before signing on for the Iraq invasion -- says he thinks the demand to intervene consistently or not at all is an argument for sitting on your hands. In the early days of the Iraq war, when British opinion was still against him, Blair remarked to a journalist at 10 Downing Street: ''What amazes me is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don't get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot? Yes, let's get rid of them all. I don't because I can't, but when you can, you should.'' A lot of people who would call themselves defenders of human rights opposed intervention in Iraq for sound, prudential reasons -- too risky, too costly, not likely to make America safer -- but prudence also amounted to a vote for the status quo in the Middle East, and that status quo had at its heart a regime that tortured its citizens, used poison gas against its own population and executed people for the free exercise of religious faith.

Human rights could well be improved in Iraqi as a result of the intervention. But the Bush administration did not invade Iraq just to establish human rights. Nor, ultimately, was this intervention about establishing a democracy or saving lives as such. And here we come to the heart of the matter -- to where the Bush administration's interventions fit into America's long history of intervention. All such interventions have occurred because a president has believed going in that it would increase both his and his country's power and influence. To use Joseph S. Nye Jr.'s definition, ''power is the ability to obtain the outcomes one wants.'' Presidents intervene because successful interventions enhance America's ability to obtain the outcomes it wants.

The Iraq intervention was the work of conservative radicals, who believed that the status quo in the Middle East was untenable -- for strategic reasons, security reasons and economic reasons. They wanted intervention to bring about a revolution in American power in the entire region. What made a president take the gamble was Sept. 11 and the realization, with 15 of the hijackers originating in Saudi Arabia, that American interests based since 1945 on a presumed Saudi pillar were actually built on sand. The new pillar was to be a democratic Iraq, at peace with Israel, Turkey and Iran, harboring no terrorists, pumping oil for the world economy at the right price and abjuring any nasty designs on its neighbors.

As Paul Wolfowitz has all but admitted, the ''bureaucratic'' reason for war -- weapons of mass destruction -- was not the main one. The real reason was to rebuild the pillars of American influence in the Middle East. Americans may have figured this out for themselves, but it was certainly not what they were told. Nor were they told that building this new pillar might take years and years. What they were told -- misleadingly and simplistically -- was that force was justified to fight ''terrorism'' and to destroy arsenals of mass destruction targeted at America and at Israel. In fact, while Hussein did want to acquire such weapons, the fact that none have been found probably indicates that he had achieved nothing more than an active research program.

The manipulation of popular consent over Iraq -- together with and tangled up with the lack of an intervention policy -- is why the antiwar party is unresigned to its defeat and the pro-war party feels so little of the warm rush of vindication. Even those who supported intervention have to concede that in justifying his actions to the American people, the president was, at the least, economical with the truth. Because the casus belli over Iraq was never accurately set out for Americans, the chances of Americans hanging on for the long haul -- and it will be a long haul -- have been undercut. Also damaged has been the trust that a president will need from his people when he seeks their support for intervention in the future.

V.
Critics view Iraq as a perilous new step in the history of American intervention: unilateral, opposed by most of the world, an act of territorial conquest. The truth is we have been here before. The Iraq operation most resembles the conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902. Both were wars of conquest, both were urged by an ideological elite on a divided country and both cost much more than anyone had bargained for. Just as in Iraq, winning the war was the easy part. The Spanish fell to Commodore Dewey even more quickly than Hussein's forces fell to Tommy Franks. But it was afterward that the going got rough. More than 120,000 American troops were sent to the Philippines to put down the guerrilla resistance, and 4,000 never came home. It remains to be seen whether Iraq will cost thousands of American lives -- and whether the American public will accept such a heavy toll as the price of success in Iraq. The Philippines also provides a humbling perspective on nation-building in Iraq. A hundred years on, American troops are back in the Philippines, hunting down guerrillas, this time tied to Al Qaeda, and the democracy that Teddy Roosevelt sought to bring to that nation remains chronically insecure.

Roosevelt's ''splendid little war'' may not have done much for the Philippines, but it did a lot to make America a leading power in the Pacific. If Bush succeeds in Iraq, he will reap geostrategic benefit on the same scale. America's enemies understand this only too well. The current struggle in Iraq is much more than the death throes of the old Hussein regime. The foreign fighters who have crossed into Iraq from Syria, Iran and Palestine to join Hussein loyalists in attacks on American soldiers know how much is at stake. Bloodying American troops, forcing a precipitous withdrawal, destroying the chances for a democratic Iraq would inflict the biggest defeat on America since Vietnam and send a message to every Islamic extremist in the region: Goliath is vulnerable.

But the American Goliath recovers quickly from failure, and this keeps presidents throwing the interventionist dice. Nor is the risk of imperial overstretch -- which kept the Romans and the British from battering every available barbarian rogue -- a very real constraint on America's propensity to intervene. The occupation of Iraq is forcing the military to run at a high operational tempo, but still there appear to be enough troops to land in Liberia and garrison Bosnia and South Korea and all the other outposts of the imperium. Indeed, intervention is getting cheaper. The second gulf war cost half as much as the first gulf war and required about half the number of troops, and actual combat lasted a little more than half the time. If neither the risk of failure nor the cost of deployment is likely to restrain American use of force, what about the risk of casualties? While Clinton believed that Americans didn't want their sons and daughters dying in wars of choice, studies show that Americans are prepared for casualties in wars -- if they understand them as wars of necessity. Besides, Americans count on precision missiles and stealth aircraft to deliver crushing lethality at low risk to American troops. Impunity lowers the threshold of risk for intervention. But that threshold does remain, and an army of occupation is particularly vulnerable. Nobody knows whether one of the president's Democratic opponents will manage to turn the deadly drip of bloodshed in Iraq into an electoral liability. Only one president -- Lyndon Johnson -- was brought down by a botched intervention, but no president since has been able to afford to ignore that warning.

VI.
If we take stock and ask what will curb the American appetite for intervention, the answer is, not much. Interventions are popular, and they remain popular even if American soldiers die. Even failure and defeat aren't much of a restraint: 30 years after Vietnam, America is intervening as robustly as ever. What Thomas Jefferson called ''decent respect to the opinions of mankind'' doesn't seem to exert much influence, either. About Iraq, the opinions of mankind told the Bush White House that the use of force was a dangerous and destabilizing adventure, but the intervention went ahead because the president believes that the ultimate authority over American decisions to intervene is not the United Nations or the world's opinion, but his constitutional mandate as commander in chief to ''preserve, protect and defend'' the United States. This unilateral doctrine alarms America's allies, but there is not a lot they can do about it. When Bush went to war, he set the timetable, and not even Tony Blair, who desperately needed more time to bring his domestic opinion with him, was able to stretch it out.

To date, the only factor that keeps the United States from intervening is if the country in question has nuclear weapons. One of the factors driving pre-emptive action in Iraq was the belief that were Hussein to acquire a nuclear or mass-casualty chemical or biological weapon, it would then be too late to use force. No wonder a Pakistani general is supposed to have remarked in 1999 that the chief lesson he drew from the display of American precision air power in Kosovo was for his country to acquire nuclear weapons as quickly as possible.

After Iraq, the key question is when the nuclear taboo will be broken. Already in 1994, over the last crisis with North Korea, the Clinton administration gamed out the possibilities of a conventional strike against a North Korean reactor where it believed nuclear weapons were being produced. Fortunately, it decided not to, realizing that any strike, either with conventional or the small precision nuclear weapons the United States is known to possess, might trigger horrendous military retaliation against South Korean or even Japanese cities.

There is actually a more daunting intervention possibility on the horizon. The United States recognizes one China but guarantees the security of Taiwan. Clinton sent the Navy into the China Sea in 1996 to make sure the Chinese respected that commitment. The freedom of Taiwan, one of the great success stories of American power in Asia, remains precarious. Were the Taiwanese to provoke the mainland, were the Americans to fail to hold them back or were the Chinese leadership to seek to divert attention from troubles at home with bellicose nationalism abroad, America might find itself having to decide how to confront a nuclear power of more than a billion people in defense of an imperative commitment to the freedom of 23 million. Doing so would require the president to break, or at least to threaten to break, the nuclear taboo that has restrained American intervention strategy since Hiroshima. Given American history, which seems to say that resolute use of force always pays dividends, it is difficult for the United States not to believe that it can get its way by relying on military force alone. Yet such a doctrine might end up endangering everyone, including itself.

VII.
For all its risks, Americans, by and large, still think of intervening as a noble act in which the new world comes to the rescue of the old. They remember the newsreels of G.I.'s riding into Rome in 1943 or driving through the lanes of northern Europe in 1944, kissing the girls and grabbing the bouquets and wine bottles held out to them by people weeping with gratitude at their liberation. All this has changed. There were few tearful embraces when the marines rode into Nasiriya, no bouquets and prayers of thanks when the Army rode into Baghdad. True, Iraq is not the first time an American intervention has been unpopular. Iranians were not happy that the C.I.A. engineered the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, Chilean democrats didn't like what was done to Allende and students the world over protested against Vietnam. But these occasions apart, and right through the Kosovo intervention in 1999, our allies kept faith with American good intentions. Now all that moral capital has been spent. Some Europeans actually think, to judge from a few polls, that George Bush is more of a threat to world peace than Osama bin Laden. This may be grotesque, but it makes it much harder for American interventions to find favor in world opinion.

Its allies wept with America after Sept. 11 and then swiftly concluded that only America was under attack. The idea that Western civilization had been the target was not convincing. While America and its allies stood shoulder to shoulder when they faced a common Soviet foe, Islamic terrorism seemed to have America alone in its sights. Why cozy up to a primary target, America's allies asked themselves, when it will only make you a secondary one? Indeed, after Sept.11 an astonishing number of the United States' friends went further. They whispered, America had it coming. Aggrieved Americans were entitled to ask, For what? For guaranteeing the security of their oil supplies for 60 years? For rebuilding the European economy from the ruins of 1945? For protecting innumerable countries from Communist takeover? No matter, after Sept. 11, memories of American generosity were short, and the list of grievances against it was long.

As the Iraq debate at the United Nations showed so starkly, the international consensus that once provided America with coalitions of the willing when it used force has disappeared. There is no Soviet ogre to scare doubters into line. European allies are now serious economic rivals, and they are happy to conceal their absolute military dependence with obstreperously independent foreign policies. Throughout the third world, states fear Islamic political opposition even more than American disapproval and are disposed to appease their Islamic constituencies with anti-American poses whenever they can get away with it.

There are those who think that the damage done by the Iraq debate at the United Nations can be repaired and that a coalition of the willing, at least one with more active players, might have been possible if the United States hadn't been so backhanded with its diplomacy. Yet the days when the United States intervenes as the servant of the international community may be well and truly over. When it intervenes in the future, it will very likely go it alone and will do so essentially for itself.

If this is the new world order, it will have costs that the rest of the world will have to accept: fewer humanitarian interventions on behalf of starving or massacred people in the rest of the world, fewer guarantees of other people's security against threat and invasion. Why bother with rescue and protection if you have to do everything alone? Why bother maintaining a multilateral order -- of free trade, open markets and common defense -- if your allies only use it to tie Gulliver down with leading strings?

American unilateralism will have costs for the United States too. The first gulf war was paid for by a coalition of the willing. The cost of the second one will be borne by the American taxpayer alone. The Bush administration affects not to care about the price tag of unpopularity abroad; foreigners don't vote. But Iraq has shown the costs, monetary and otherwise, that are added to the exercise of power when friends don't trust your intentions.

But can a war on terror be fought alone? The allies have intelligence networks and some good counterterrorist squads, and in a battle with Al Qaeda, the biggest breaks have come from the police work of specialists in Spain, Britain, Germany and Pakistan. In a war on terror, an isolated America whose military power awakens even the resistance of its friends may prove a vulnerable giant.

VIII.
There is a way out of this mess of interventionist policy, but it is also a route out of American unilateralism. It entails allowing other countries to have a say on when and how the United States can intervene. It would mean returning to the United Nations and proposing new rules to guide the use of force. This is the path that Franklin Roosevelt took in 1944, when he put his backing behind the creation of a new world organization with a mandate to use force to defend ''international peace and security.'' What America needs, then, is not simply its own doctrine for intervention but also an international doctrine that promotes and protects its interests and those of the rest of the international community.

The problem is that the United Nations that F.D.R. helped create never worked as he intended. What passes for an ''international community'' is run by a Security Council that is a museum piece of 1945 vintage. Everybody knows that the Security Council needs reform, and everybody also knows that this is nearly impossible. But if so, then the United Nations has no future. The time for reform is now or never. If there ever was a reason to give Great Britain and France a permanent veto while denying permanent membership to Germany, India, Brazil or Japan, that day is over. The United States should propose enlarging the number of permanent members of the council so that it truly represents the world's population. In order to convince the world that it is serious about reform, it ought to propose giving up its own veto so that all other permanent members follow suit and the Security Council makes decisions to use force with a simple majority vote. As a further guarantee of its seriousness, the United States would commit to use force only with approval of the council, except where its national security was directly threatened.

All this is difficult enough, but the next step is tougher still. The United Nations that F.D.R. helped create privileged state sovereignty ahead of human rights: a world of equal states, equally entitled to immunity from intervention. One result has been that since 1945 millions more people have been killed by oppression, abuse, civil war and massacre inside their states than in wars between states. These have been the rules that made tyrants and murderers like Saddam Hussein members in good standing of the United Nations club.

This is the cruel reality of what passes for an ''international community'' and the comity of nations. United Nations member states will have to decide what the organization is actually for: to defend sovereignty at all costs, in which case it ends up defending tyranny and terror -- and invites a superpower to simply go its own way, or to defend human rights, in which case, it will have to rewrite its own rules for authorizing the use of force.

So what rules for intervention should the United States propose to the international community? I would suggest that there are five clear cases when the United Nations could authorize a state to intervene: when, as in Rwanda or Bosnia, ethnic cleansing and mass killing threaten large numbers of civilians and a state is unwilling or unable to stop it; when, as in Haiti, democracy is overthrown and people inside a state call for help to restore a freely elected government; when, as in Iraq, North Korea and possibly Iran, a state violates the nonproliferation protocols regarding the acquisition of chemical, nuclear or biological weapons; when, as in Afghanistan, states fail to stop terrorists on their soil from launching attacks on other states; and finally, when, as in Kuwait, states are victims of aggression and call for help. These would be the cases when intervention by force could be authorized by majority vote on the Security Council.

Sending in the troops would remain a last resort. If the South Africans can persuade Mugabe to go into retirement, so much the better. If American diplomats can persuade the Burmese junta to cease harassing Aung San Suu Kyi, it would obviously be preferable to using force. But force and the threat of it are usually the only language tyrants, human rights abusers and terrorists ever understand. Terrorism and nuclear proliferation can be contained only by multilateral coalitions of the willing who are prepared to fight if the need arises.

These rules wouldn't require the United States to make its national security decisions dependent on the say-so of the United Nations, for its unilateral right of self-defense would remain. New rules for intervention, proposed by the United States and abided by it, would end the canard that the United States, not its enemies, is the rogue state. A new charter on intervention would put America back where it belongs, as the leader of the international community instead of the deeply resented behemoth lurking offstage.

Dream on, I hear you say. Such a change might lead to more American intervention, and the world wants a lot less. But we can't go on the way we are, with a United Nations Charter that has become an alibi for dictators and tyrants and a United States ever less willing to play by United Nations rules when trying to stop them. Clear United Nations guidelines, making state sovereignty contingent on good citizenship at home and abroad and licensing intervention where these rules were broken might actually induce states to improve their conduct, making intervention less, rather than more, frequent.

Putting the United States at the head of a revitalized United Nations is a huge task. For the United States is as disillusioned with the United Nations as the world is disillusioned with the United States. Yet it needs to be understood that the alternative is empire: a muddled, lurching America policing an ever more resistant world alone, with former allies sabotaging it at every turn. Roosevelt understood that Americans can best secure their own defense and pursue their own interests when they unite with other states and, where necessary, sacrifice unilateral freedom of action for a common good. The signal failure of American foreign policy since the end of the cold war has not been a lack of will to lead and to intervene; it has been a failure to imagine the possibility of a United States once again cooperating with others to create rules for the international community. Pax Americana must be multilateral, as Franklin Roosevelt realized, or it will not survive. Without clear principles for intervention, without friends, without dreams to serve, the soldiers sweating in their body armor in Iraq are defending nothing more than power. And power without legitimacy, without support, without the world's respect and attachment, cannot endure.

Michael Ignatieff, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is director of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Snacker's Paradise: Devouring Singapore's Endless Supper

Snacker's Paradise: Devouring Singapore's Endless Supper
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/10/dining/10SING.html

SINGAPORE -- "FOOD is the purest democracy we have," K. F. Seetoh said as we dug into breakfast bowls of bak kut teh, a peppery, restorative Teochew soup of pork ribs, mushrooms and kidneys. "Singaporeans recognize no difference between bone china and melamine."

Slurp, slurp. Yum, yum. The clear, aromatic broth, full of tender, close-grained pork, perked up by herbs and whole garlic cloves, was cooked in a hole in the wall next to a busy expressway and eaten at a sidewalk table. Cab drivers, teachers and a few junior executives slurped around us. Bak kut teh is the city's preferred hangover remedy, and Ng Ah Sio makes the best, which is why Mr. Seetoh took me there.

This was the start of 16 hours of almost continuous talking and eating, with the rollicking Mr. Seetoh — "K. F. stands for King of Food," he joked — as my guide and noshing companion. Racing around this island city-state in his Mitsubishi van, with two brief pauses to shower and change clothes (eating in Singapore can be messy), we would make 18 stops before midnight.

"Don't eat, just taste," he kept saying. I tried, but I failed. More gourmand than gourmet, I finished much of what was put before me at a dizzying array of food stalls, storefronts and hawker centers, which are so called because they were built by the government of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to get open-air food-sellers, or hawkers, off the sidewalks and indoors.

Fish balls followed chwee kueh, soto ayam followed roti prata and rojak followed chicken rice, in a multicultural parade of gastronomic hits that issued, in most cases, from kitchens no longer than walk-in closets. With so little overhead to defray, gluttony was cheap: $2 a plate on average.

Singapore is one of the most food-mad cities in an ever more food-mad world, with more than 6,500 restaurants and 11,500 food stalls jammed into its 250 square miles. They offer Cantonese, Teochew, Hokkien, Hakka and Hainanese dishes — all with roots in China — plus curries from south India, tikkas from north India, Malay and Indonesian and Thai specialties, and adaptations and mixtures of all of them.

It adds up to a feast fit for the gods, but for the ordinary visitor, even one who has been here often, it can seem more like culinary chaos. Which is where Mr. Seetoh, 40, steps into the picture. Once by his own description "a useless street kid," he skipped university, learned photography in the army.

But food was his passion, and in 1998, he and Lim Moh Cher, an equally enthusiastic eater, started a guide to street food.

They called it Makansutra, from the Malay word for eat and the Sanskrit word for a set of rules or maxims. It has grown into a small empire, including a Web site and television programs as well as an amazingly comprehensive guidebook, whose current, 456-page edition contains detailed information about thousands of eating places.

Now Singapore's unchallenged makan guru, instantly recognizable in his trademark sunglasses and his crumpled cap, Mr. Seetoh is greeted by one and all as he chugs by on the yellow Vespa or the Canondale mountain bike he uses — when he isn't lugging an elderly visiting makan maven around town.

I THINK the knock on Singapore is way overdone. Sure, it's squeaky clean and modern, but come on: does anyone actually prefer the beggars, rubbish and shantytowns that deface many large Asian cities? Not the poor souls who live in them. It's plenty tough on miscreants, but hardly deserving of William Gibson's woundingly dismissive tag line, "Disneyland With the Death Penalty."

Under Goh Chok Tong, Lee Kwan Yew's successor, individualism has gained a little more breathing room. The longstanding and much-ridiculed ban on chewing gum has just been relaxed. Censorship guidelines are currently under high-level review. Nightclubs, once invisible, now throb into the wee hours. And the louchest of Maugham's or Conrad's characters would feel right at home in the seedy bars and brothels off Geylang Road, east of the city center.

Having spent many years bulldozing old buildings, Singapore is now busy saving others and putting them to new uses. One of these, a grandiose neo-Palladian pile close to the Padang, the city's central green, was once the General Post Office; now it is the Fullerton, a luxury hotel with one of the city's best upmarket dining rooms, Jade. Having spent years in headlong pursuit of Mammon, Singapore is now busy chasing culture, as exemplified by the new, $343-million Esplanade arts center, known colloquially as the Durian because its spiky profile resembles that of a local fruit.

"We are witnessing many changes," said Tommy Koh, the country's dynamic former ambassador to the United States and the United Nations, who helped to bring many of the new developments about.

One thing that hasn't changed is the Botanic Gardens, founded in 1859, which I would nominate as the island's top tourist attraction. Its brilliant orchid collection is the world's largest, with 700 species and 3,000 hybrids, many named after leaders like Elizabeth II and Nelson Mandela.

My wife, Betsey, and I ate the best European meal of our recent stay in Singapore at Au Jardin Les Amis, a restaurant in the gardens created by one of the city's superstar chefs, Justin Quek. Small portions of worldly food with punchy flavors — truffled sandre (pike-perch) with girolles, rabbit with mustard sauce — were enhanced by artful presentation on glacier-white plates, fine French and Australian wines, lush flowers and silky service.

There were few Asian grace notes that evening, but for lunch in a private dining room at Jade a few days later, Sam Leong, another local culinary wunderkind, pulled together a stunning pan-Asian, European-influenced menu.

A classic Peking duck with skin as crisp as parchment was accompanied, for example, by five-spice duck foie gras. Crisp prawns were served with wasabi mayonnaise. Meltingly soft tofu, better than any I had ever tasted before, was house-made with puréed spinach, like tagliatelle verde. A jellied dessert was flavored with lemon grass. It was Singapore on a plate, or rather several plates, brought up to date: traditions blended without strain.

BUT back to Mr. Seetoh and the magical makan tour. From Ng Ah Sio we headed west to the Tiong Bahru Cooked Food Center, a low, shedlike structure adjacent to an apartment complex.

We picked up one dish from each of the stalls that he considered first-rate and carried them to the roofless central courtyard of the building, where several tables sat around an angsana tree.

"Always try the soup first," my food philosopher advised. If it really stinks, he added, "call the police."

It didn't, even though it was (gulp!) my second bowl of pig soup that morning — a rich, porky brew, full of chunks of chitterlings, liver and spleen, made by Koh Brothers (no relation to Mr. Koh). Incredibly, given the ingredients, there was no acrid taste or aroma. I was reminded of the ways the French transform tripe.

Next, fish balls, made of flaked fish and flour and fried on the spot. "Too springy," Mr. Seetoh said. "Inconsequential taste," I told myself, "and unappealing texture."

Then onward to the cake stalls.

I had no complaints about humdrum flavor when I bit into Jian Bo's famous chwee kueh, which are steamed rice cakes topped with fried preserved radishes, called chai poh, and chili. The radishes taste slightly of bitter chocolate, and the chili provides a welcome bit of bite. People drive from all over town to taste this dish.

Chai tau kueh was another winner — omelettelike savory fried rice cakes with shredded radishes and carrots, topped with sweetened soy sauce that resembles the Indonesian kecap manis.

If my soy-stained notes are right, this tidbit is Hokkien, cooked by people who trace their origins to Fujian province, between Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Before we left Tiong Bahru, whose stall holders are all ethnic Chinese, we tasted further evidence of the Asian genius for making a lot from a little, in the form of mee chiang kueh, a thick pancake filled with coconut and peanuts crushed before our eyes in an ancient heroically clanking and banging contraption.

But my favorite Tiong Bahru specialty was suckling pig spit-roasted in the Cantonese style, right there in a 6-by-8-foot kitchen.

Remember the crackling on your mom's roast pork? Here they never got rid of it. Thin layers of fat tucked between layers of lean melted in my greedy mouth.

"That's char siew, my friend," Mr. Seetoh said. "These people have been making this for 30, 40 years. Cooking is not about creating and evolving for them. It's all tradition."

LUNCHTIME (I kid you not). We stopped at the hotel to pick up Betsey, who had spent the morning on more pressing business, then swung by Nasi Padang River Valley for some beef. Our porkfest was over. Nasi padang, named for a city on the Sumatran coast, is a dish of rice (nasi) surrounded by a variety of spicy side dishes — proto-rijstafel. The star of River Valley's spread, which is laid out on utilitarian metal tables, is beef rendang, a grainy, coconut-based curry, made not with the usual off-cuts but with juicy rib eye. No doubt that's why Malaysia's Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, stops there often.

Mr. Seetoh traded jibes with Zulfa Hamid, the chef, and told me, much more soberly, that nasi padang had begun as "desperation food," developed by the poor to make cheap meat and fish more palatable.

From Indonesia, we traveled to Malaysia, gastronomically speaking — to Janatul Jalan Kayu, a roti prata stand halfway across town, tucked beneath a modern low-rise building. There Anwar the roti master, decked out in yellow sneakers and a kangaroo T-shirt, pounded and stretched a large pancake, flipped it into the air like a practiced Neapolitan pizzaiolo, slapped it onto a hot grill greased with ghee, trapping air inside, and folded it like a napkin.

The result was crisp and fluffy, absolutely perfect for dipping into a rich, thick curry sauce and stuffing into waiting mouths.

Almost next door, at a little stand called Inspirasi, we tucked into bowls of soto ayam, which was the first Singapore street food I ever ate, back in the late 1960's. A gloriously full-bodied Javanese chicken soup, flavored with galangal and star anise, it is garnished with parsley, fried shallots and bean sprouts. Every day, hungry customers line up 40 minutes before noon, when Inspirasi's doors open. That's how Singaporeans feel about food, and that's the reputation of this place.

"Food writing is a godly calling," Mr. Seetoh said, smacking his lips. "Chefs are the soldiers who defend Singapore's culinary heritage. They are my heroes. Without them, it would all disappear in a few years."

A brisk crosstown dash ensued, to visit Karu's, a new Seetoh discovery near the Bukit Gombak military base. All but hidden by hardware stores and hubcap dealers, it serves a breathtaking fish-head curry, laced with tamarind and turmeric — another example of desperation food, created by Indian cooks here from fish heads their British colonial masters threw away.

Served on a banana leaf with tomatoes, okra and a superb pilau of long-grain rice, the curry is eaten with the right hand. No cheating with the left, and no fork.

Fish heads contain some of the most succulent flesh on the animal, of course; cod cheeks are a delicacy much appreciated in Spain (and increasingly in New York). But if the whole idea seems too anatomical, don't despair. Chicken rice, Singapore's all-time favorite dish, is made just for you.

Chicken rice originated among the descendants of immigrants from Hainan Island, in the South China Sea. It consists of a whole bird poached in stock and cut into easily managed, skin-on pieces, with aromatic rice sautéed in chicken fat or oil, then boiled in stock with garlic and ginger. It may sound unexciting, banal, white-on-white. But if the rice is right, the dish has the allure of a fine risotto.

Everyone who serves it offers sliced cucumbers on the side and a special condiment to flavor the chicken. At the chicken-rice shrine where we ate, a modest stall beneath the corrugated roof at the Maxwell Road Food Center, the dipping sauce (lime peel, chili and garlic) packed a punch.

THAT evening, we stopped at the grandly named but mundane-looking Old Airport Road Emporium and Cooked Food Center for a few light hors d'oeuvres.

Of course we didn't need them, but moderation in the pursuit of flavor is no virtue. So we sampled rojak, a remarkably complex salad freshly assembled by an elderly couple from turnips, pineapple, green mango, dried tofu, peanuts, shrimp paste, tamarind paste, charcoal-grilled crullers and many, many other ingredients; fried Hokkien mee, an utterly addictive dish of egg noodles cooked with cuttlefish, shrimp and pieces of belly pork, enlivened with squirts of juice from a fresh lime; and that old skewered standby, satay, made of chicken.

More morsels awaited at the Zion Road Food Center, but time was fast running out. So it will have to wait until next time.

We ended our peregrinations, for that day at least, at a rickety table on the sidewalk at Sin Huat, a garishly lighted seafood joint in Geylang, the red-light district. Dishes arrived and vanished, arrived and vanished, amid excited chatter from Mr. Seetoh and our first wine of the day, brought by one of his buddies: sweet little bay scallops in their shells, with black bean sauce; baby bok choy with oyster sauce, not quite raw, not quite cooked, and delicious; prawns steamed, tossed in a wok and showered with blanched garlic.

But what we had come for, what has made the name of Danny Lee, the chef, and what has earned Makansutra's ultimate accolade, "Die, die, must try," was the crab bee hoon. After a considerable wait (everybody waits at Sin Huat, even the makan guru) a platter of huge, bright orange-red crustaceans appeared. They were piled atop a tangle of rice vermicelli, in a sticky sauce made from spring onions, ginger, red chili and Mr. Lee's "secret stock." The sweetness of the crabs and the tang of the spices had been fried right into the noodles.

"Do you smell it?" Mr. Seetoh exclaimed, fanning the aroma toward us with his hand. "Mama! Mama!"

It was the best crab dish we tasted in a city famous for crabs. (All the top chefs, intriguingly enough, use the meat-packed jumbos from Sri Lanka.) It was better than the excellent, magnificently messy chili crabs at Roland's, whose owner's parents invented the dish, and better than pepper crabs laden with pungent, lip-searing, freshly ground black Tellicherry pepper.

But more work lay ahead. The next morning, Tommy Koh's son, Aun, a photographer, and Aun's slim, glamorous wife, Tan Su-Lyn, an editor, took me to a traditional kopi tiam, or coffee shop, where we ate another of Singapore's national dishes, char kwey teow — broad, stir-fried rice noodles with sausage and cockles, dressed with soy sauce as thick as molasses — and then to Ya Kun, a 50-year-old cafe now installed in a rehabbed Chinatown building.

Ya Kun's specialty is kaya roti, a dish created by Nonyas, the female descendants of intermarriage between Chinese and Malays. It consists of thin brown bread grilled over charcoal, rather like melba toast but less dry, spread with a rich egg custard and coconut jam. Starbucks, please copy!

Realizing that he had not yet exposed us to laksa, Mr. Seetoh asked us to join him for lunch that day at a favorite spot, Marine Parade Laksa, which has such a following that imitators surround it. Often it sells 600 bowls of noodles a day, drenched in coconut chili curry and flavored with daun kesom, also known as Vietnamese coriander.

Peranakan cooking, the cooking of the Nonyas and (occasionally) their male counterparts, the Babas, is unique to Singapore, Malacca and Penang — the old Straits Settlements. We saved it for last, as a summing-up of the city's food culture. Saucers of tiny, bright-flavored local limes and fiery sambal waited on every table at the House of Peranakan Cuisine, and the menu was dotted with unusual, complicated and, as it turned out, captivating dishes.

Three of them shot our lights out: otah-otah, spicy sticks of mackerel paste wrapped in fresh banana leaves and grilled over a smoky fire; chap chye, a mixture of lily flower buds, cabbage, bok nee tree fungus and bean curd, cooked in a clay pot; and ayam buah keluak, chicken cooked with the black, nutlike fruit of the kepayang tree, sometimes called the Asian truffle.

It is exacting and exhausting food to prepare, Bob Seah, the restaurant's owner, told us, but "full of rare flavors worth preserving for posterity." Like so many flavors and aromas here in Singapore.

An Indonesian Leader Wins Attention for Her Clean Politics

An Indonesian Leader Wins Attention for Her Clean Politics
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/08/international/asia/08JAKA.html

KEBUMEN, Indonesia — On special occasions in this rural Javanese town, women cover their heads, wear long flowing clothes and, according to Muslim custom, sit separately from the men in a place where they are barely seen and certainly not heard.

But no one seemed to mind when the district leader, Rustriningsih, addressed an audience not long ago (the men in front, the women off to the side) in a green uniform that stopped at the knees and with her glossy black hair on show for everyone to see. Nor did they mind when she earnestly lectured them about the responsibilities of living in a new democracy.

Ms. Rustriningsih broke all the norms here three years ago when she was elected Bupati, a title that roughly corresponds to that of regional governor.

Now she is one of only 5 women among more than 400 Bupati in Indonesia, and people are taking notice of her not just because of her sex or her youth. (She is 36.)

Ms. Rustriningsih has carved out a reputation for being rigorously honest, a rare attribute in a government official in a country that regularly scores in international surveys as among the world's most corrupt.

Under new decentralization laws in Indonesia, local leaders have gained much power. They can decide how to spend money for schools and roads and hospitals — which, during the nearly three-decade authoritarian Suharto era that ended in 1998, was the exclusive domain of the central government.

Because Ms. Rustriningsih has done such audacious things as appoint school principals on the basis of merit rather than bribery, she has been invited by the United States Agency for International Development to seminars to explain her methods. The Australian ambassador, eager to find ways to give assistance to projects that are not riddled with graft, invited her to a cocktail party. The World Bank has held her up as the paradigm of a new, clean Indonesia.

Ms. Rustriningsih is a good politician, so she is grateful for all the fuss. But at heart, she said, what she has done is based on common sense.

The elementary schools in her district were in such bad condition when she took office that 16 children who had been taking an exam were killed when the roof of their classroom collapsed.

She began a program to repair schools, pledging to provide a portion of the money to the village leader if the local parent association matched the grant. "They loved that idea because usually the money goes to the contractor," she said. "In this way, the local people are participating, they keep the costs down and they monitor — because they want to know where the money is going."

She started a similar program with road repairs. She gave asphalt to the local village leader on the understanding that the village would provide the rocks and sand. "Now I'm running out of asphalt," she said.

Ms. Rustriningsih's flair for government comes from listening to her father's political discussions at home and from an intuition at an early age that she wanted to be a leader. "My father liked biographies of leaders," she said. "I read about the American leaders from Woodrow Wilson to Richard Nixon."

She learned a lot about politics at the movies. "My father had a movie theater, so every day I could watch and I didn't have to pay," she said. "I learned from the movies that if the enemy is going to make a move, you have to know an alternative move."

In the mid-1990's, when sentiment against Suharto was increasing, Ms. Rustriningsih was applying some of those strategic lessons from the movies. By then she was a senior official in the opposition Indonesian Democratic Party and had to find a way to skirt the government's ban on meetings of more than 10 people. At one point, she organized a fake wedding with about 1,000 guests — she found friends who were willing to be bride and groom. That allowed Megawati Sukarnoputri, the party leader then and now the president, to address a crowd.

A year later, Suharto resigned, and there was violence in many cities, particularly against ethnic Chinese. Ms. Rustriningsih was determined, she said, that violence would not engulf her hometown. She organized shelters for Chinese residents at local Democratic Party posts, and ordered party supporters to plaster the town with posters of Mrs. Megawati and the party's flag.

"We knew that if the provocateurs came and saw so much support for our party, they would be too afraid to attack," she said.

In the first presidential election after the fall of Suharto, her political party did exceedingly well in her home district.

By that time, Mrs. Megawati was also the most popular leader in Indonesia, and she invited Ms. Rustriningsih to join the national Parliament. But Ms. Rustriningsih felt she could be more effective locally.

She is a politician as well as a public servant, and she will be up for re-election in 2005. Her heroine in politics, President Megawati, has faded in popularity, in part because of perceptions that she has allowed a corrupt national government to flourish.

But Ms. Rustriningsih has increased her own popularity with a radio call-in show, "Good Morning Bupati," and she is soon to have a television show as well.

Ms. Rustriningsih can see the need for a little distancing. "I'm on my own," she said of her relationship with Mrs. Megawati. "Now I depend on the people."

For Flight Attendants, Stress Comes With the Job

For Flight Attendants, Stress Comes With the Job
By FRANCINE PARNES
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/12/business/12ATTE.html

First the passenger cursed Mary Sutphen for refusing to serve him another whiskey on the flight from New York to Amsterdam. Then he kicked her in the knee. Then he decided to get her attention by urinating on her jump seat. On arrival, he was met by the local authorities at the aircraft door.
''I will never understand what happens to people when they get on an airplane,'' said Ms. Sutphen, a recently laid-off flight attendant who lives in Manhattan and is hoping to get a call soon to return to work. ''Some people check their brains with their bags.''

You think your business travels have become more stressful? Put yourself in the shoes of flight attendants (and even they sometimes have to take them off for the security guards). The free time they are allotted in cities where they stay overnight has become shorter. The list of security measures they must take, from watching passengers' behavior to checking for unusual bags, has become longer. The travelers they serve have become surlier. And their financial prospects have become bleaker.

It used to be that flight attendants' biggest complaints were substandard meals, early wake-up calls and crowded crash-pad apartments. Now, they also have to worry about layoffs, wage and benefit cuts and other job concessions, to say nothing of threats of terrorism and another epidemic like SARS.

For many, job security is issue No. 1. About 22 percent of all flight attendants in the United States have been laid off since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, said Pat Friend, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, a union representing about half the attendants in the United States airline industry.

For those still working, even seemingly minor changes can cause a succession of annoyances, says Rene Foss, a flight attendant and author of ''Around the World in a Bad Mood: Confessions of a Flight Attendant'' (Hyperion, 2002), which details the vexations of the trade.

For example, charging for meals invariably prompts grumbling by some passengers. That, in turn, forces Ms. Foss to put on her fake ''flight attendant's smile'' and thank them for their input, she said. Then, she has to make change for $20 or $50 bills, no small matter in a hectic schedule. ''We're working with a minimum crew,'' Ms. Foss said. ''We're not an A.T.M. on wings.''

Worst of all, the food can run out, forcing her into an unwelcome arbitrator's role. ''If there are 200 passengers but only 25 meals, what am I supposed to do if 26 people want to eat?'' she asked. ''Who gets that last meal, the little old lady, the unaccompanied child or the grumpy businessman? When people are hungry, they're mean.''

It isn't just free food that passengers are being deprived of these days; all sorts of once-standard perks are being withheld. To deflect complaints, some flight attendants are taking pre-emptive action.

''I try to pass it off as if we never had it,'' said Louis Rudy, a flight attendant from Manhattan. ''I divert their attention with a little smile or 'let me help you with that.' Maybe they won't notice, and I won't have to explain one more thing.''

Seasoned business travelers are often the first to notice when the plug is pulled on creature comforts, Mr. Rudy says. ''You see in their eyes and mannerisms that something is off,'' he said. ''They make comments like 'so-and-so airline still offers hot towels,' as if I have any control over this. In my head, my response is always 'well, hooray for them.' ''

He does understand their complaints, he says, and realizes he is only a convenient target for their frustration over the problems of flying. But that frustration has made many travelers downright unfriendly, further damaging the flight crew's morale.

''Often, we arrive with our beverage carts, obviously ready to take their drink order, but the customer will wait until we have asked once or twice before removing their headphones and saying, 'What?' '' said Robert Ward, a flight attendant in San Francisco. ''They're civil under duress. It's a feeling that 'I am being nice because I have to be nice, and I'm not going to be any nicer than I have to be.' ''

Alin Boswell, a US Airways flight attendant based in Washington, has gotten the same cold shoulder. On a flight in May, he said, ''I got to row four before I heard a single 'please' or 'thank you.' I had gone through 13 people.''

Flight attendants are also acting out their anxieties. Marshal Cohen, a business traveler and market research analyst in Port Washington, N.Y., said he recently realized he had boarded the wrong flight and rushed to the front of the plane at full speed, yelling that the plane must not leave. ''The look on the flight attendant's face probably thinking I was running towards him to hijack the plane was something out of a comic book,'' he said. ''He immediately screamed and instinctively grabbed a flashlight as if it would be a weapon or something to protect himself.''

Like Mr. Cohen, some flight attendants are suddenly figuring out that it is time to get off the plane -- for good.

Mr. Rudy, the flight attendant from Manhattan, is thinking about switching careers and is already working as a restaurant manager on his nonflight days.

''Ask any flight attendant; when we all took this job, it was for the lifestyle, the freedom,'' said Mr. Rudy, who started in 1986. ''But it's changed so much, with mergers and layoffs and concessions and service reductions and waiting for pay cuts. The thrill is gone. It's become,'' he said, pausing for the right phrase, ''such a job.''

He added: ''We have a whole different mindset when we go to work now. We're having security briefings and reinforced doors and air marshals and fewer flight attendants and shorter layovers and longer hours. It's basically a big cattle car.''

Sharon B. Wingler, a flight attendant for 33 years who runs a Web site, TravelAloneAndLoveIt.com, says that she, like many of her colleagues, is contemplating a Plan B profession. ''I just flew with a co-worker who's got at least 20 years with the company,'' she said. ''Now she's taking nursing classes.''

Of course, the reason most flight attendants are looking into other lines of work is probably less their declining satisfaction with their job than its feared disappearance.

The Association of Professional Flight Attendants, the union representing those employees at American Airlines -- which has laid off more than 6,000 flight attendants since the terrorist attacks in an effort to avoid filing for bankruptcy protection -- said it had had a tenfold increase in the number of ''anxious phone calls'' from members in the last six months. ''They're desperate for guidance,'' said George Price, a spokesman for the group.

However much conditions have deteriorated, many flight attendants still love working at 30,000 feet -- or, if they have been laid off, yearn to do so again. Getting a call from her former employer to come back to her old job would be ''like oxygen for me,'' said Ms. Sutphen, the out-of-work flight attendant in New York. ''It's kind of masochistic; you just love the lifestyle.''

Readers are invited to send stories about business travel experiences to businesstravel@nytimes.com.

Selling One (or More) for the Gipper

Selling One (or More) for the Gipper
By DANNY HAKIM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/business/yourmoney/07STOC.html

TROY, Mich.

SMACK in the middle of a blackout and with only a battery-powered lamp to guide him through his first quarterly news conference, David A. Stockman started his new life as a chief executive inauspiciously here last month.

Mr. Stockman, Ronald Reagan's former whiz kid, was once youthful and prematurely gray, but he is now closer to prematurely white. He still talks about bold visions that sound good, at least in theory. And Mr. Stockman, the former budget wonk, still has stacks of binders like the kind he was famous for toting around all over Washington under his arm. This time, however, they are white instead of black and are chock-full of notes about auto parts instead of the federal budget.

On Aug. 11, Mr. Stockman, 56, took over as chief executive of Collins & Aikman, a struggling auto supplier based in this suburb of Detroit. Much, or at least a decent chunk, of his life since leaving the White House has been spent assembling this company, which is trying to corner the market on car rugs, convertible tops, dashboards and other parts of the auto interior. Until last month, he served only as its chairman.

But now Mr. Stockman's baby is in a tough spot.

Collins & Aikman, with 25,000 workers worldwide and close to $4 billion in annual revenue, is highly leveraged, does not make money and operates in an increasingly embattled industry.

The stock, which traded at more than $28 in May 2002, now trades at $2.96, though it bottomed out at near $2 shortly before Mr. Stockman became chief executive. He is the third man in the job in about a year.

The Big Three automakers account for roughly three-fourths of the company's customers at a time when the Big Three are shrinking, living meagerly on thin margins and beating suppliers over the head to cut costs. Making matters worse, Collins & Aikman is feuding with its top customer, the Chrysler Group.

As if all that were not enough, Collins & Aikman's accounting firm, KPMG, has not signed off on its second-quarter results. KPMG is looking into accusations by two former executives related to dealings between the company and a director, as well as the acquisition in 2001 of a plastics component maker. Collins & Aikman has said the accusations are "without merit."

How did one of the main spark plugs of the Reagan revolution end up commuting from his home in Greenwich, Conn., where he lives with his wife and teenage daughter — another daughter is at college — to run an industrial salvage operation like this?

"Since the vision for this company was originally mine, going all the way back to 1988, now was the time to step in myself and really bring this together, bring some intensity, a heartbeat to the company," he said from an office overlooking a mall far different from the one in Washington. No obelisk monument here, but a big sign visible from Mr. Stockman's window advertises Sears, Marshall Field's and J. C. Penney.

"You make your bed; you sleep in it," he said. "This was my idea; I'm going to stick with it. I'm going to make it happen and make sure it becomes a great success."

There are skeptics, of course.

Last month, Sean J. Egan, of the independent credit rating firm Egan-Jones, which has rated the company's debt as junk, said Collins & Aikman "might be the next wreck in the auto sector."

"Collins & Aikman is not alone," Mr. Egan said in an interview. "Many of the weaker suppliers are faced with some of the most trying times in the last couple of decades."

Martin King, a credit analyst at Standard & Poor's, which also has the company's debt at a junk rating, was more optimistic. "They made a number of acquisitions that doubled the size of the company, and it's been a bit of a rough road for them in bringing the companies together," he said. But, he added, "they have started to make some improvements and progress."

Another securities analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity, was also pessimistic.

"He's got in over his head, and it's not working out," he said of Mr. Stockman. "He had a great concept which hasn't panned out. The concept was to consolidate subsectors of the parts industry where he could have a dominant position."

But Mr. Stockman is accustomed to doubters.

Financial analysts? They are "nervous Nellies and hand-wringers" who do not understand Detroit, he says. That was why he started his investment group, Heartland Industrial Partners, in 1999, because his partners at the Blackstone Group, the private equity powerhouse where he worked for more than a decade, were reluctant to sink too much new money into the old economy.

The idea was that he and his partners would build credibility in Detroit, where long product cycles mean that automakers view financial engineers warily. The money would be locked up for more than a decade — investors include AIG, J. P. Morgan and a pension fund for Michigan state employees — while the Heartland partners built three or four industrial companies that would dominate niches of the market.

The idea of a manufacturing investment fund appeals to unions. In fact, the trustees who oversee the pension fund for the Steelworkers of America decided to invest $25 million with Heartland.

At a time when domestic manufacturing jobs seem to be disappearing rapidly, he contends that suppliers to the Big Three can succeed if they cut costs, globalize operations — going to China for low cost parts, if necessary — and focus on particular swaths of the market. He says that demographic trends point to increasing auto sales and that worries over the Big Three, like their pension liabilities, are overblown.

He also says that because modern automakers require rapid delivery of parts to assembly plants, demand will remain strong for local parts manufacturing. "I believed in it," Mr. Stockman said of the auto sector, "and I still do, profoundly."

SO whatever happened to David Stockman anyway?

First, a recap of the early years, which were well-worn journalistic turf during his time in the White House: Growing up in western Michigan, he was an idealistic, precocious and conservative farm boy, but he drifted sharply to the left at Michigan State University in the 1960's. His collegiate involvement in an antiwar group, Vietnam Summer, even put him on a watch list kept by a branch of the Michigan State Police known as the Red Squad.

He graduated in 1968, with a liberal arts major. The young Mr. Stockman was curious about spiritual and political matters; his foremost mentor in college was a liberal pastor who led him to study the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian and social philosopher.

His next stop was Harvard Divinity School, where he cast off his left-wing flirtation and, among other things, became a baby sitter for Daniel Patrick Moynihan's children, a stratagem he says was aimed more at learning about politics than about child care, according to his 1986 book, "The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed." When Mr. Moynihan, an idiosyncratic Democrat, and sometime professor turned Nixon adviser, was in town, Mr. Stockman picked up skills like how to properly mix Bloody Marys. He also says he read a decade's worth of Congressional Quarterly to keep up with Mr. Moynihan in late-night conversations.

Having caught the political bug, his first job in Washington was working for John Anderson, the Republican congressman who would become the independent third man in the 1980 presidential race. This would later come in handy for Mr. Stockman, who was asked by Mr. Reagan's campaign to play the part of his old boss in a mock debate.

Introduction made.

Mr. Stockman was elected to Congress in 1976, when he was in his late 20's. He was part of a coterie of econophiles that included Jack Kemp and preached the then-obscure doctrine of supply-side economics, theorizing that big tax cuts would stimulate spending, productivity and growth.

When Mr. Reagan decided to tap Mr. Stockman, his John Anderson stand-in, as budget chief, supply-side theory got its shot at the big time.

"We were considered like kooks," he said. "What do you mean low tax rates are going to do any good? What do you mean capital gains shouldn't be taxed? What do you mean that if you provide powerful incentives for risk taking that you will get an acceleration in technology?"

Judging from the $400 tax refund checks that the Bush administration has been sending, it is not just a kooky theory anymore — though many Democrats would beg to differ.

"The whole world has gone to supply-side economics," Mr. Stockman said, adding, "all these ideas have been fully vindicated and almost universally adopted."

He has even changed his tune on the Reagan days. Then, he was often outspoken, and skirted firing after a confessional story in The Atlantic Monthly in 1981, by William Greider, had him bemoaning Reagonomics' failure to shrink the government.

What became a particular source of frustration for him was the intent of the president's other men to ratchet up military spending, which made the task of reining in deficits impossible. He contended that no department should be exempt from the cleaver, but he was often outflanked. In one presentation to the president, Caspar W. Weinberger, the defense secretary, included a picture of three soldiers; one, a rifleless Pygmy, represented the Carter military budget.

"The second was a four-eyed wimp who looked like Woody Allen, carrying a tiny rifle. That was — me? — the O.M.B. defense budget," he wrote in his book. The third soldier, a G.I. Joe with an M-16 trained on the four-eyed wimp, was the Defense Department's own budget.

The Reagan revolution, he argued in his book, failed badly in its mission to shrink the government. It "was not the advent of a new day, but a lapse into fiscal indiscipline on a scale never before experienced in peacetime."

Today, he sees it much differently.

"He was absolutely right on defense, and I was totally wrong," Mr. Stockman said of Mr. Reagan. "The deficit was ballooning and anything I could cut I was for cutting. He was a hundred percent right because that is what brought the Soviet Union down, that is what ended and purged the world of the scourge of Communism, that is what really allowed for the flowering of liberal democracies in the 90's," he said. In Mr. Stockman's view, it also allowed for lower military spending in future years.

How dogmatic was his smaller-government theology? He was the only Michigan congressman to vote in 1979 against the Chrysler bailout. Today, the Chrysler Group is Collins & Aikman's largest customer. But to Chrysler's new German management, that's all history.

With Chrysler still struggling, after all these years, DaimlerChrysler executives are focused on a much fresher grievance. The automaker contends that Collins & Aikman owes it $16 million, part of a refund formula traditionally computed as cost savings accrue over product life cycles. But Collins & Aikman says the numbers add up differently and the total is considerably smaller, people with knowledge of the dispute said.

The standoff, first reported last week by The Detroit Free Press, has strained relations. Chrysler recently stopped using Collins & Aikman as the supplier of bumper parts for its Jeep Liberty, an unusual step in the midst of a production cycle, though the contract is a small fraction of Chrysler's business.

"When we do have a supplier issue, Chrysler Group has a long history of working collaboratively with its supply base in resolving business matters," said David Barnas, a Chrysler spokesman, when asked about the matter.

Mr. Stockman said he valued Chrysler's business but added, "we do have continuous disputes about how their cost reduction goals, and our cost management capabilities, and our profit requirements, can be balanced."

"From time to time, that results in either tension or market tests where we have to choose to abandon work or meet and beat the competition," he said. "This is daily life in the auto supply base today."

A LACK of leverage on pricing has been a killer for many auto suppliers that focus on the Big Three, said Maryann Keller, an auto analyst. Collins & Aikman "just happens to be in the part of the automotive component market where I don't know what you do to get enough pricing leverage to generate an attractive return on assets," she said. "It's tough on a commodity product."

Richard E. Dauch, the chairman and chief executive of American Axle, a supplier on much firmer footing than Collins & Aikman, said Mr. Stockman, a friend for many years, should not be counted out.

Mr. Stockman worked his supplier revivalism thesis successfully while a partner at Blackstone, where he ended up after a stint in the mid-1980's at Salomon Brothers. While Blackstone had a controlling stake in American Axle, Mr. Dauch said, Mr. Stockman helped the company expand globally, diversify its customer base and finance modernization.

"David Stockman did a brilliant job helping us," said Mr. Dauch, a Chrysler executive in the bailout years. "He voted the wrong way," he said, "but he's a fine man."

He likened the current pressures between Detroit and its suppliers to "an economic shakedown" that could make relations difficult. "Sometimes there's a conflict of objectives," he said, "and that's where management becomes an art."

Mr. Stockman's chosen Blackstone specialty, Rust Belt reclamation projects, led him to Collins & Aikman, then a division of the California-based Wickes Companies — he called it a "1980's-era conglomerate that made no sense whatsoever." Collins & Aikman had its origins in the mid-1800's as a window shade company but diversified into a variety of textile-related businesses.

Wickes "had a furniture company, ladies' swimsuits, hosiery, a home improvement chain," he said. "Our view at Blackstone was, `Let's buy this conglomerate, sell the parts off, get down to the core,' which we thought was a great company, Collins & Aikman, and then try to build that."

Today, the most potentially lucrative business is dashboard assemblies. Collins & Aikman makes them for vehicles as mainstream as the Chevrolet Impala and as fancy as Porsche's new Cayenne sport utility. But competition is considerably more heated for dashboards than for car rugs.

Detroit's long price war, Mr. Stockman said, is good for business.

"This whole so-called rebate war that has Wall Street's teeth chattering, because they don't understand anything really about the car business, is actually, simply, a marketing tool that is brilliantly succeeding and G.M. has figured that out," he said of his second-largest customer.

"For the interior guy, it's manna from heaven," he added, because many buyers want more luxurious models. That has created a vibrant market for more complicated, feature-laden dashboards, with navigation systems, CD changers and a host of instrumentation that "plays right down our fairway," he said.

In his first weeks on the job, Mr. Stockman has promised to shutter unproductive factories and cut 14 percent of the salaried work force of 5,400. He says he will bring the principles of lean manufacturing to other parts of the business.

"On the factory floor, 20 defects per million is about all the customer will tolerate," he said. "We have in our headquarters operation a lot of places where they're making 10,000 errors per million."

BEYOND Collins & Aikman, it is hard to read too deeply into how Heartland is faring because the other three companies are privately held. The most notable is Metaldyne, a metal forger that makes parts for engines, chassis and transmissions and is run by another Heartland partner, Timothy D. Leuliette.

Mr. Stockman said of Collins & Aikman: "We're not particularly focused on measuring quarterly changes. Our ultimate realization for our investors will be the value of the stock many years down the road."

He says he is neither "in the C.E.O. business as a career" nor an interim executive. But he is glad not to be a politician.

"Politics is a young man's sport," he said. "You have to have a combination of idealism and naïveté, and I had both. It's draining and taxing and exhilarating all at once."

"The thing I didn't like about government is that nobody had a report card," he added. "You could always blame the other party, the last administration or some defunct figure of the past."

"In this business," he said, "if you don't make your numbers, we get our report card."

Primedia Said to Be Selling New York Magazine

Primedia Said to Be Selling New York Magazine
By DAVID CARR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/10/business/media/10CND-MAG.html

Senior executives of New York magazine are meeting with employees today to inform them that the magazine is in the process of being sold, a company executive said. Primedia Inc., which owns the magazine, is expected to be looking for a price in the neighborhood of $80 million for the weekly, which would be a very high price and reflects the company's belief that there will be interest from a number of competing buyers.

It would also be a large payout for a a magazine with a circulation of 433,000 and business trend lines that are not promising. Last year, New York had a profit of $1 million to $2 million on revenue of slightly more than $43 million, according to an executive at the company. In 1995, profit was more than $7.8 million on much higher revenue, according to an executive at the company then.

Yet, while typical valuations given media properties would make a magazine like New York worth $20 million to $30 million, it could sell for much more, although publishing analysts have said that $80 million would be a very high price. Given New York magazine's status as an icon of publishing, the general principle of pricing media properties on a multiple of earnings could be replaced by an equation based on the size of the buyer's ego.

In the past, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, owner of the The Daily News of New York and U.S. News & World Report, has expressed interest, as has Jann Wenner, the owner of Rolling Stone, US Weekly and Men's Journal. William F. Reilly, the former chief executive of Primedia who is now chairman of Aurelian Communcations, has expressed interest in the magazine as well.

Since its founding in the 1968 out of the ashes of the New York Herald Tribune's Sunday magazine, New York has always inspired a great deal of passion and interest in the magazine community. It was something of a prototype for the legion of city magazines that followed and has had a unique and storied existence as a hybrid of national and city interests. The magazine has published Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Nicholas Pileggi, Gloria Steinem, Gail Sheehy, Jimmy Breslin, Ken Auletta and Richard Reeves, among many others.

A Star's Real Life Upstages His Films

A Star's Real Life Upstages His Films
By BERNARD WEINRAUB
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/09/movies/09TAB.html

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 8 — Over the past 20 years Tab Hunter, whose blond, Malibu beach boy looks made him one of the biggest screen idols of the 1950's, has had a heart attack, a quadruple bypass and a stroke. But at 72 he still looks like, well, a beach boy, albeit older. And his career and personal life, if not exactly sunny, are far livelier than most of his films, which he groans about.

"Years ago," Mr. Hunter said, "this great producer at Paramount, Howard Koch, told me I should write a book, and I laughed and said, `I don't have the guts.' "

He has the guts now, it seems. Mr. Hunter has signed a contract to write his memoir for Simon & Schuster, which plans to publish the book in two years. Mr. Hunter, who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., is writing the book with Eddie Muller, author of "Dark City Dames," about the actresses who starred in film noir movies. (One of those actresses in the book, Evelyn Keyes, a friend of Mr. Hunter's, suggested Mr. Muller.)

The book is to cover his troubled childhood, his years as an archetypal Hollywood star in the waning days of the old-time studio system and his struggle to hide his homosexuality out of fear that it would damage his career. What led to Mr. Hunter's change of heart about writing his memoir?

"I just began feeling, people write all kinds of stuff after someone is gone," Mr. Hunter said on the phone. "It's appalling. You can't answer what's written about you. I figure, get it from the horse's mouth."

One of the most important elements in the book will be his homosexuality. Mr. Hunter said that as a boy he was abused by a church choirmaster. As an actor in the 1950's he was periodically the target of scandal magazines, which implied he was gay. He also had a relationship with Anthony Perkins "for a few years," he said.

"I didn't flaunt things," Mr. Hunter said. "I know when Tony and I went to the movies, he would say, `Let's go in disguise.' We always wore baseball caps. Or he'd say: `You go at a certain time. I'll go later.' I knew people were talking. I didn't like that." Mr. Hunter has lived for many years with a partner but declines to name him.

No actor of the 1950's matched Mr. Hunter for his blond, boy-next-door looks. He played roles, in films like "Island of Desire," that seemed as fabricated as his name. "No one took me seriously," said Mr. Hunter, who spoofed himself years later in the campy, "Lust in the Dust," with Divine, the transvestite.

"I was a product of Hollywood," Mr. Hunter said. "I wanted so much to be accepted as an actor. It was only later, when I did live television drama, shows like `Playhouse 90,' that I began working with great directors like Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer and Arthur Penn." Mr. Hunter said he also took lessons from the well-known acting coach Jeff Corey and is proud of his television work with actors like Geraldine Page. In recent years his film activity has been dormant because of his health problems.

He was born in New York City, the son of two German immigrants, a Lutheran mother, Gertrude Gelien, and a Jewish father, Charles Kelm. Mr. Hunter said that his father was so physically abusive that his mother, a nurse, soon fled to California with him and his brother. They lived in San Francisco, Long Beach and Los Angeles. Mr. Hunter said that as a teenager in the Coast Guard he went to his father's apartment in New York and introduced himself to a woman who opened the door.

"I said, `Tell him his son came by,' " he recalled. "She slammed the door in my face."

Mr. Hunter, whose mother had changed her son's name to Arthur Gelien, never saw his father again. It was one of several painful episodes in his past: his mother later had a nervous breakdown. His older brother, Walt, a Navy medical corpsman, was killed in the Vietnam War, leaving a widow and seven children.

Mr. Hunter said that he had always been an avid horseman, a sport that led to his career. "Horses have been my touch of reality in an unrealistic world," he said.

In his early teens, he said, he hung out at a riding academy in Los Feliz, where he became friendly with Dick Clayton, an actor and later an agent who urged him to try the movies. Mr. Hunter enlisted in the Coast Guard at 15, lying about his age. "In the Coast Guard they nicknamed me `Hollywood' because I went to movies so much," he said. "All the guys went to bars. I went to Hollywood Boulevard to see movies."

Still in his teens, Mr. Hunter was introduced by Mr. Clayton to the agent Henry Willson, who handled stars like Rock Hudson, Guy Madison and Rory Calhoun. Mr. Willson got Mr. Hunter a job on a Joseph Losey film, "The Lawless," in which his one line, "Hi, Fred,"' was cut. Mr. Hunter's first big role was in "Island of Desire," in 1952; he played a marine shipwrecked on an island. The female lead was Linda Darnell. `

`The picture was so bad," Mr. Hunter said. "I was so scared. When I had to kiss her, I was shaking. She pinched me and said, `I'm good luck for newcomers.' When I finished the love scene, she said, `That was good.' Linda was a terrific person."

Although his acting was often stiff, teenage girls adored him, and the Warner Brothers publicity machine took over. By the time "Battle Cry," directed by Raoul Walsh, was released in 1955, Mr. Hunter was a major star. He went on to appear in about 50 movies, including "The Pleasure of His Company, "That Kind of Woman," "They Came to Cordura," "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" and "Damn Yankees," one of his favorites.

Mr. Hunter had also developed a successful singing career, and his first hit, "Young Love," in 1957, was his biggest, remaining the No. 1 song in the country for six weeks. As he grew older Mr. Hunter turned increasingly to television, working with top directors, and appearing in dramas and series like "Benson," "The Love Boat" and "Ellery Queen." He also appeared on Broadway with Tallulah Bankhead in "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore" by Tennessee Williams.

Mr. Hunter's name was created in true Hollywood style by Mr. Clayton, who later became his agent, and by Mr. Willson. As Mr. Hunter recalled, Mr. Willson said, "We've got to tab you something." So Tab was the first name. Then Mr. Willson asked Mr. Clayton, what did the young actor enjoy doing. Mr. Clayton replied that he liked to ride horses: hunters and jumpers. That's how the last name came about.

"I suppose it could have been Tab Jumper," Mr. Hunter said.

Muting the Obsessions

Muting the Obsessions
By NANCY WARTIK
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/09/health/psychology/09CONV.html

Dr. Katharine A. Phillips thought she knew a lot about mental illness. As a psychiatric resident at Harvard from 1988 to 1991, she was well versed in ailments like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

But one day, when a distraught patient said his hair was the cause of all his misery, Dr. Phillips was stymied. Searching the psychiatric literature, she found references to an obscure diagnosis known as body dysmorphic disorder, or B.D.D. Its sufferers, she learned, are tormented by the notion that some part of their body — hair, nose, skin, hips — is ugly, abnormal or deformed, when it actually is not.

Their obsessions with the imagined flaws may cause them to spend hours staring in mirrors, to shun other people, to seek unnecessary cosmetic surgery or even attempt suicide. "If you haven't known someone with B.D.D., it's easy to trivialize it," she said. "But if you see how devastating this disorder can be, you take it very seriously."

Today, Dr. Phillips is a leading expert in the disorder, having written a book on it ("The Broken Mirror") and founded treatment programs at both the McLean Hospital near Boston and the Butler Hospital in Providence, where she is a psychiatrist at Brown Medical School.

Dr. Phillips estimates that body dysmorphic disorder affects 1 to 2 percent of Americans, men and women. "B.D.D. remains vastly underrecognized and vastly underdiagnosed," Dr. Phillips said. "Most people probably know someone with B.D.D. but just don't realize it."

Q. If body dysmorphic disorder is as widespread as you believe it is, why has it gotten such short shrift?

A. The biggest reason is because people are so secretive about it. I once saw an 80-year-old woman with typical B.D.D., she'd had it since she was a teenager. She thought her skin was hideous, that she had horrible, ugly moles. She had suffered over this for about 60 years. She had avoided friends, social interactions. And she had never even told her husband about it. She said she had a very close relationship with him; she told him everything, but not this. It was too embarrassing.

People with B.D.D. are afraid they'll be considered vain or superficial, that they won't be taken seriously. I've seen patients who have been in weekly psychotherapy for 10 years, 20 years. They never told their therapist, even though some of these people said it was the major problem they had. If, as a clinician, you don't ask about B.D.D., you're not likely to hear about it.

Q. Is there any way of knowing if someone has body dysmorphic disorder, if the sufferer doesn't tell you?

A. People with B.D.D. look normal, and some are quite attractive. You can't tell by looking at them that they have this concern. Now, sometimes there are clues. The person may spend a lot of time looking in the mirror, or may be always fixing their hair, or always wear sunglasses inside.

Sometimes, the camouflage people use is unusual and draws attention to them. One woman I describe in my book was housebound for about five years. She was quite attractive but thought she was so horribly ugly; she stayed up on the third floor of her parents' house and walked back and forth down the hallway between the bedrooms, just thinking about how ugly she looked, and contemplating suicide.

Finally, her grandmother forced her to go to the dentist because a tooth had fallen out. The only way she'd agree to leave the house was to cover her entire face in surgical bandages, so that she looked like a mummy. Most people with B.D.D. do not do these kinds of things. But most of them do use camouflage of some sort, more conventional things like heavy makeup, or a hat, or long sleeves and pants when it's 105 degrees out.

Q. Rates of body dysmorphic disorder are about equal in men and women, but does it manifest differently in the sexes?

A. Women are more likely to worry about their hips and their weight, whereas men are more likely to worry about being too scrawny. Both worry about hair, but women are most likely to worry they have too much body hair; men don't worry about that. Women are more likely than men to seek cosmetic surgery.

Q. In one sense, the disorder sounds peculiarly modern, a product of our appearance-obsessed media age. How long has it been around?

A. There are descriptions from over 100 years ago of patients just like those I was seeing in the 1990's. The descriptions were nearly identical.

Q. Do you think our culture's strong emphasis on appearance is causing body dysmorphic disorder rates to increase?

A. Appearance has always been important. But I suspect it's possible that the rate of B.D.D. is increasing, as women get bombarded with media images of perfection. Lots of studies have shown that the more you see images of perfection around you, and the more you compare yourself with those images, the worse you tend to feel about yourself.

Q. What are some other factors that contribute to dysmorphic disorder?

A. Studies have quite consistently shown that the majority of people with B.D.D. improve with a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. That suggests a serotonin imbalance is in involved, that it's partly biologically determined.

Q. What is daily life like for someone with the dysmorphic syndrome?

A. One patient who comes to mind is a quite attractive woman, about 30, with fair skin, blond hair, thin and lovely. She thinks she looks really ugly, hideous. She thinks her skin has terrible blotches all over it, that she has big ugly pimples, that her hair is sticking out in the wrong direction. But her skin is reasonably clear; if you looked really, really close you would see she has a pimple or two.

She asks her mother 10, 20 times a day, "How do I look? How does my skin look?" She has a good job and she performs it pretty well. But she tends to avoid other people at work. She won't go to the cafeteria to eat lunch. She avoids interacting with co-workers, which is a problem because she needs to do that to effectively do her job.

Q. Do people try to get medical treatments or surgery for the flaws they perceive?

A. Studies have found that somewhere in the range of 6 percent to 15 percent of people seeking cosmetic surgery have B.D.D.; put another way, about a quarter of B.D.D. patients have had cosmetic surgery. And about 40 percent of patients I have seen have had dermatologic treatment.

Q. How effective are current treatments for body dysmorphic disorder? Do they involve therapy, as well as medication?

A. We treat a lot of patients with medications, some with therapy and some with both. If you have very severe B.D.D., you're going to definitely need medication and you'll probably also benefit from therapy. If you have milder B.D.D., you could probably go with either.

I did a review of my medical records recently and looked at how people had done. Ninety percent of people improved to at least a reasonable degree. They weren't necessarily symptom free, but a majority of those with this disorder can experience significant improvement in their symptoms. Many patients welcome just getting the diagnosis. They're so relieved that there are other people like them, that this is a known problem, with the hope of getting better.

Babies Are Riding High

Babies Are Riding High
By DAVID HOCHMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/fashion/07NOTI.html

SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- THE supermoms in the organic bread aisle couldn't stop staring. And who could blame them? My new baby was surely the finest-looking creation the store had ever seen, what with the adorable curves, the crimson bonnet and the ergonomically correct brushed-aluminum chassis.

So what if my wife wasn't scheduled to deliver our firstborn for another three weeks? As soon as our tricked-out red Bugaboo stroller arrived from Babystyle.com, I had to take the little addition for a spin.

Designer diaper bags do nothing for me. Sippy cups are for kids. But the $700 Dutch-engineered Bugaboo Frog had me rolling down the path of conspicuous conception. Maybe it was the 12-inch all-terrain tires or the squishy grip bar or the fact that the Bugaboo steered more like a Porsche than a pram, but there I was, wheeling an empty stroller through a grocery store for the adrenaline rush.

I wasn't alone. From Central Park West to Santa Monica's trendy Montana Avenue, the Bugaboo is the chariot of choice. Miranda has a Bugaboo on "Sex and the City." Julianne Moore showed hers off to Barbara Walters. And Noah Wyle rarely leaves home without his. "The Bugaboo's design surpasses anything that's out there," said Mr. Wyle, the star of "E.R." who has a 9-month-old named Owen. "I mean, have you seen the shocks on this thing?"

Though baby strollers have been around for more than 250 years, a new generation of exotic, expensive imports is redefining the way well-heeled parents push their kids around.

With once-prestigious brands like Peg Pérego and Aprica glutting baby stores, the strollers with cachet now come from little-known design firms in places like New Zealand and Sweden, and at prices upward of $2,000. And these aren't just chick vehicles anymore. Marketers are wooing new fathers like me (not to mention David Beckham, Matthew Broderick and David Duchovny) by packaging these ultra-prams — leather seats, pneumatic braking systems and all — as if they were little Lexuses.

"Suddenly, it's all about who's got the Techno, who's got the big wheels, who's got the limited edition," said Bryan Pulice, owner of Traveling Tikes, a Los Angeles children's store that sells four Bugaboos a day. He said he sold one to Mr. Duchovny and his wife, Téa Leoni.

The flaunt factor is definitely part of the appeal. Jim Folker, a patent lawyer from Chicago, gets stopped two or three times whenever he takes out his Bugaboo, er, his 8-month-old son, Nathaniel, for a stroll in the West Loop warehouse district. He likes that he can push the stroller with one hand, "which makes it feel less girly."

A Dutch designer, Max Barenbrug, developed the Bugaboo. His concept was to create a stroller with the mobility and visual simplicity of a bicycle, something "that gave women a feeling of freedom, yet with an uncomplicated design that men would find appealing," Mr. Barenbrug said by telephone from the Netherlands. With assistance from his brother-in-law, Eduard Zanen, a physician who advised Mr. Barenbrug on ergonomics and safety, the Bugaboo was introduced to Europe in 1997 and brought to the United States a year later.

"No matter how many extras we added," Mr. Barenbrug said, "the initial design impulse never changed. You should look at the buggy and know exactly what it can do."

And yet, seeing one for the first time surprises people. "A cabdriver chased us down to ask about it," Mr. Folker said. "You certainly don't get that reaction with bibs and stuff."

Stroller envy is nothing new. When the English architect William Kent designed the first baby carriage for the third Duke of Devonshire's children, nobles everywhere soon followed suit. That was in 1733. But since 2001, when the British company Maclaren released its $2,000 limited edition Titanium Techno model, with leather seats and a super-lightweight body, the top end of the market has exploded.

As Alan Fields, who with his wife, Denise, wrote the "Baby Bargains" shopping guidebooks, said, "If you don't own a car, as many New Yorkers don't, then your stroller is your primary vehicle."

An old Buick would probably be cheaper than many of these elite rides. Five hundred dollars buys a limited edition German-made Teutonia Y2K stroller with blinking rear fender light and velvet-smooth suspension (it was seen on "Friends" last season). The Swedish Emmaljunga (the "l" is silent) is supremely stylish but only available abroad and runs $600. And the Silver Cross Silver Stream from England, the white-wheeled buggy favored by European royalty, has swaddled the heirs of Sarah Jessica Parker and Mr. Broderick, Madonna and Guy Ritchie, and Victoria Adams and Mr. Beckham. The classic hand-painted pram retails for as much as $2,500 — that is, if you can find it. This summer, the company stopped producing the carriage for at least two years. F. A. O. Schwarz rushed to buy the remaining stock.

Like members of every subculture, stroller aficionados find meaning on the Internet. "The Web has given stroller fanatics a forum to lust 24/7 and to search out those obscure brands," said Mr. Fields, whose "Baby Bargains" bulletin board at windsorpeak.com is one of several sites where obsessed parents find the hottest buggies. "The low point for me," said Stephanie Williams, a professional fund-raiser and stroller fanatic from Tulsa, Okla., "was cruising German eBay after midnight with an old high school dictionary trying to figure out the German word for rain canopy."

The more I learned about stroller lust, the more I realized my infatuation with the Bugaboo was pretty tame. "If I see a stroller I like, I will search literally to the ends of the earth to find it," said Janet McLaughlin, a television writer from Santa Monica, known in chat rooms as Stroller Queen. The mother of two children under 6, she has owned more than 50 strollers. She has had six Emmaljungas, two Teutonias and two Silver Crosses, and was the first American to buy the rugged $500 three-wheeled Mountain Buggy stroller from New Zealand. "Everything lights up inside when I see a beautiful stroller," she said. "I'm like, I have to touch it, I have to push it. Parents flip because they think I want to steal their babies."

Ms. McLaughlin may not be able to contain herself in the year ahead.

Maclaren is about to expand its fleet of Kate Spade prams, unveil a new line by Philippe Starck and introduce an exclusive collection of Burberry buggies. Next year, Mountain Buggy will introduce a 12-pound collapsible stroller that could carry an 85-pound child. And the French company Bébé Confort is marketing a deluxe stroller to fathers under the tagline "the paternal instinct." It even has a Web site that resembles a sports car ad at www.la-kart.com.

This month, Silver Cross releases its $2,000 Balmoral and $2,600 Kensington prams (the first Kensington model went to Brooke Shields this summer by special air delivery from England). Entirely made by hand in northern England, each is numbered and comes with a certificate of authenticity signed by the craftsman. There are three coats of high-shine lacquer paint on the steel bodies, the leather is local and the lining is decorated by hand.

Even the Bugaboo, named the best all-around stroller of the year by Fit Pregnancy magazine, is going more upscale. Eager to maintain its boutique appeal as more buggies hit the streets, the company is introducing new colors, including a limited edition denim model handcrafted in Morocco. The price will be significantly higher, and there will probably be a waiting list. Perhaps we'll get our name on it. That is, as soon as the baby is born.

A Catalonian Fantasy

A Catalonian Fantasy
By JULIA CHAPLIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/fashion/07BOIT.html

DURING celebrities to the sleek, dimly lighted lounges in downtown Manhattan these days seems as competitive as the tabloid wars between Us Weekly and People. So it makes sense that the Flat, a bar in the East Village, was opened by Gregory Link, a celebrity-wrangler who used to work with the public relations firm Harrison & Shriftman, and Granville Adams, who has appeared on the television shows "Oz" and "Homicide: Life on the Street." (Massimo Felici, a restaurateur, is the third partner.)

"I thought if I can get celebrities, models and tastemakers to come to events, then I could get them to come to my bar,' " said Mr. Link, who has delivered A-list celebrities to events including the Entertainment Weekly "It List" party and Maxim's Super Bowl bash.

On opening night, which was Wednesday, the lounge was stocked with stylishly coiffed women, fashionable men and television actors. (Mr. Link said many movie stars were at the after-party for the premiere of "Party Monster," at Plaid on East 13th Street. He planned to go about 1 a.m. to corral a bunch of them down to his bar.)

In the V.I.P. area, an elliptical room where the walls are covered in red velvet, Katherine Atkinson, a talent manager, was having her birthday party.

"Greg always throws good parties," said Ms. Atkinson, clad in a spaghetti-strap dress and sipping a cocktail.

Nearby, Dulé Hill, an actor from "The West Wing" who was visiting from Los Angeles, was seated next to Victor Rasuk (the star of the indie film "Raising Victor Vargas") and Lauren Vélez of "Oz."

"It's much more laid back here than places in L.A.," Mr. Hill said.

The Flat, as in an apartment in London (English people are sexy, Mr. Link explained), does not have a door policy, to keep from upsetting the egalitarian artist equilibrium of the East Village. The décor is hyperactive stage set but was intended as a departure from the minimalist lounges popular in the late 1990's. John Beckmann, the designer, who also did the lounges Parlay and Magnum, described it as Catalonian futurism with serpentine red velvet banquettes, Eero Saarinen cocktail tables and walls painted gold with blue biomorphic patterns inspired by the artist Joan Miró.

Around midnight, Mr. Link was standing with a cocktail peering out the windows by the front door. "You'll be reading about our parties in all the magazines soon," he said.

Ebay

Bought this 15Gb super light ipod two months ago for my girlfriend, but it didn't arrive in time for me to take with me before i left to meet her in asia for an extended trip!! (Thanks to an idiot at buy.com who had assured me it would come within the week before i left. Had to buy another one here at full retail plus NYC sales tax! arrrgh! @#%%@#!!)

So now i'm selling the one that came after i left. what a pain!! so please tell all your pals! Help me sell it!