Nocturne

"In a world in which every action has intentional meaning, most people must seem either like stuttering fools or like the creators of surreal collages (and you stare dumbfoundedly, head half-cocked, like a puzzled dog.) The graceful aesthete may go unnoticed by the rest of the world but you, with your intentional language, can pick him right out. Everyone else, for example, might only see a guy with a green shirt spilling his coffee on a small pile of books. But, to you, it is sublime poetry."

one of my best friends from school (well, actually the little liberal arts school up the road in cambridge) has been in town for his birthday. it's reminded me of the good old days when i first moved back to NYC after school, and we would be out 4-5 nights a week (on average!), going to a little marathon of locales each night.

after getting off the plane, i took him to meet some friends at the second night of Michael Ault's newest place, Nocturne, and the energy felt like an evening from the mid-90s. we got there at 10, and there was already a crowd of people that Irv and Wass were keeping at bay. everyone seemed to be out again. and we were out past 5am at Bungalow 8 afterwards. NYC has been longing (even before 911) for a new hip club that is "The" place, and with a night like that, perhaps this could finally be it. at least until the spring. things move on fast here.

anyway, it was great to see so many people out. people we've known from a decade plus in the fashion/club scene. which makes me think, do i really want to leave all this and move to asia/HK? i think the answer is still a strong and affirmative "Yes".

and now to chinatown for some dim sum...

Free Web Hosting

check this out. a web developer friend sent me this and it looks like a real deal. went to their parent site, etc. they are a european web hosting company that is trying to enter the US market.
http://www.united-internet.de/
http://www.united-internet.com/content/ir/analystenstimmen.html

anyway, the deal is three years free hosting. 500Mb of space. and 5Gb of traffic. free for three years. i guess they've calculated that instead of paying for advertising to launch in the US, they'd get better word of mouth by using the money to fund free services.
http://order.1and1.com/xml/static/Home;jsessionid=77750C9799411B11C53C065DAE03B822.TC60b

Madame Chiang, 105, Chinese Leader's Widow, Dies

Madame Chiang, 105, Chinese Leader's Widow, Dies
By SETH FAISON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/24/international/asia/24CHIANG.html

Madame Chiang Kai-shek, a pivotal player in one of the 20th century's great epics - the struggle for control of post-imperial China waged between the Nationalists and the Communists during the Japanese invasion and the violent aftermath of World War II - died on Thursday in New York City, the Foreign Ministry of Taiwan reported early Friday. She was 105 years old.

Madame Chiang, a dazzling and imperious politician, wielded immense influence in Nationalist China, but she and her husband were eventually forced by the Communist victory into exile in Taiwan, where she presided as the grand dame of Nationalist politics for many years. After Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975, Madame Chiang retreated to New York City, where she lived out her last quarter-century.

Madame Chiang was the most famous member of one of modern China's most remarkable families, the Soongs, who dominated Chinese politics and finance in the first half of the century. Yet in China it was her American background and lifestyle that distinguished Soong Mei-ling, her maiden name (which is sometimes spelled May-ling).

For many Americans, Madame Chiang's finest moment came in 1943, when she barnstormed the United States in search of support for the Nationalist cause against Japan, winning donations from countless Americans who were mesmerized by her passion, determination and striking good looks. Her address to a joint meeting of Congress electrified Washington, winning billions of dollars in aid.

Madame Chiang helped craft American policy toward China during the war years, running the Nationalist Government's propaganda operation and emerging as its most important diplomat. Yet she was also deeply involved in the endless maneuverings of her husband, Chiang Kai-shek, who was uneasily at the helm of several shifting alliances with Chinese warlords vying for control of what was then a badly fractured nation.

A devout Christian, Madame Chiang spoke fluent English tinted with the Southern accent she acquired as a school girl in Georgia, and presented a civilized and humane image of a courageous China battling a Japanese invasion and Communist subversion. Yet historians have documented the murderous path that Chiang Kai-shek led in his efforts to win, then keep, and ultimately lose power. It also became clear in later years that the Chiang family had pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid intended for the war.

Madame Chiang had a notoriously tempestuous relationship with her husband, and then with his son by a previous marriage, Chiang Ching-kuo, who became Taiwan's leader after Chiang Kai-shek's death. Madame Chiang had no children.

Her skill as a politician, alternately charming and vicious, made her a formidable presence. She made a play for Taiwan's leadership after Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988, even though she was 90 and living in New York at the time.

Although she suffered numerous ailments, including breast cancer, Madame Chiang eventually outlived all her contemporary rivals. She was said to credit her religious faith - she told friends she rose at dawn for an hour of prayer each day - for her good health.

Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell, who worked closely with her when he commanded American forces in China during the war, described Madame Chiang in his diary as a "clever, brainy woman." "Direct, forceful, energetic. Loves power, eats up publicity and flattery, pretty weak on her history. Can turn on charm at will and knows it."

Love of Money, Power and China

Soong Mei-ling's rise to power began when she married Chiang Kai-shek in an opulent ceremony in Shanghai in 1927, bringing together China's star military man with one of the nation's most illustrious families.

Her eldest sister, Soong Ai-ling, directed the family's affairs and innumerable money-making ventures with the help of her husband, H.H. Kung, a scion of one of China's wealthiest banking families.

Madame Chiang's second sister, Soong Qing-ling, was the wife of Sun Yat-sen, China's first president after the last emperor was toppled in 1911. After Sun Yat-sen's death, Soong Qing-ling carried his banner over into the Communist camp, causing an irreparable rupture in the family.

When the vanquished Nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949, Soong Qing-ling stayed behind. The Communist Party leadership called her the only true patriot in the Soong family, and named her honorary chairman of the People's Republic in 1980, a year before her death.

Today, Chinese still remember the three sisters with a telling ditty: "One loved money, one loved power, one loved China," referring to Ai-ling, Mei-ling and Qing-ling.

Madame Chiang's elder brother, T.V. Soong, often called Nationalist China's financial wizard, served at various times as China's finance minister, acting prime minister and foreign minister, where his primary role was raising money from the United States.

Although Madame Chiang developed a stellar image with the American public, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other leaders became disillusioned with her and her husband's despotic and corrupt practices. Eleanor Roosevelt was shocked at Madame Chiang's answer when asked at a dinner at the White House how the Chinese Government would handle a strike by coal miners. Madame Chiang silently drew a sharp fingernail across her neck.

"She can talk beautifully about democracy," Mrs. Roosevelt said later. "But she does not know how to live democracy."

By the end of the war, the loyalty of Nationalist officials melted away as the Government grew corrupt and fiscally traitorous, printing money so aggressively that the Chinese currency fell to an exchange rate of several million yuan to the dollar. Many Nationalist soldiers were reduced to begging for food because they went unpaid, yet American diplomats discovered that military supplies sent from the United States to China sometimes appeared on the black market soon after arrival.

Even at the busiest times of war, Madame Chiang often left her husband and disappeared into seclusion in New York for months at a time. The Chiang camp was too secretive to deny rumors about marital troubles, but Madame Chiang's retreats may also have been caused by a debilitating skin condition.

During the 1950's, Madame Chiang and her husband blamed the United States for the Nationalist loss of China, and continued to campaign for help from Washington to retake the mainland. Although that hope eventually faded, American support for Taiwan remained strong for years, delaying Washington's recognition of Beijing as the capital of China until 1979, three decades after the Communists had seized power.

By then, Madame Chiang had moved to New York, where she lived in an apartment on Gracie Square in Manhattan. In March 1999, as she turned 101, hard of hearing but still quick-witted, she told visitors that she read the Bible and The New York Times every day.

The Soong family's saga, a story that cuts across many strands of modern Chinese history, began when Madame Chiang's father, Charlie Soong, sailed to the United States at the age of 12. Coming from a family of traders in Hainan Island in the South China Sea, Mr. Soong was taken in by Methodists in North Carolina and converted to Christianity in hopes of sending him back to spread the word of Jesus in China.

After returning to Shanghai in 1886, Mr. Soong, a genial wheeler-dealer, passed up missionary life to start a business printing Bibles, earning a fortune. He also printed political pamphlets secretly for Sun Yat-sen, then working to overthrow China's last emperor. On Jan. 1, 1912, Sun was named China's first president.

Sun lasted in office only a few months before his coalition disintegrated, and after he fled to Japan, he hired Charlie Soong's second daughter, Soong Qing-ling, as a secretary. They soon married, despite the age difference: he was 50 and she was 21.

At the time Mei-ling Soong, who was born in Shanghai in 1898, was already studying in the United States. At the age of 10, she had followed her elder sisters to the Wesleyan College for Women in Macon, Ga.

She entered Wellesley College near Boston in 1913; her brother, T.V., was enrolled at Harvard. She majored in English literature, and was remembered by her classmates as a chubby, vivacious and determined student. She graduated in 1917 and returned to Shanghai speaking English better than Chinese.

She was introduced to her future husband in 1922. By that time, she had matured into a slender beauty and taken to wearing full-length body-hugging gowns.

Chiang Kai-shek, a severe-looking military aide to Sun Yat-sen who established a school for officers in southern China, may have been as attracted to the Soongs' financial and political connections as he was to their youngest daughter. His initial overtures to her were rebuffed, and after Sun's death in 1925, as Chiang Kai-shek took the title Generalissimo and tried to succeed him as the leader of the Nationalist cause, he proposed to Sun's young widow, Soong Qing-ling. She said no.

General Chiang allied himself with warlords in southern and central China and with the Soviet Union, where Stalin regarded the Nationalists as more progressive than the warlords who still controlled Beijing and northern China. Communist rebels, not yet led by Mao Zedong, felt they deserved Moscow's support. But Stalin insisted on supporting the Nationalists.

In 1927 General Chiang shocked his Soviet backers by carrying out a massacre of leftists in Shanghai. Edgar Snow, the American journalist, estimated that General Chiang's forces executed more than 5,000 people.

The massacre caused a permanent rent in the Soong family. Soong Qing-ling, as Sun Yat-sen's widow, led a faction of Nationalists who voted to expel General Chiang from all his posts. T.V. Soong resigned as finance minister, though he was later persuaded to resume his alliance with General Chiang.

General Chiang also allied himself with Shanghai's notorious underworld, then led by an opium-dealing gangster named Du Yuesheng, widely known as Big-Eared Du. In a fractious city, separated into sectors run by competing foreign powers, Du was the most powerful man, dominating banking, smuggling and opium.

A Suitable Husband and Dubious Friends

When General Chiang renewed his interest in Soong Mei-ling in 1927, she told him that she would consent to marry only if he could win the approval of her mother, who had reservations about a man who was neither Christian nor single. General Chiang had already fathered a son in a marriage that was arranged when he was only 14, and had adopted a second son and married a second wife, Chen Chieh-ru. General Chiang promised to convert, and eventually sent Chen away to the United States, where she enrolled at Columbia University and earned a doctorate.

The Chiang-Soong wedding took place in Shanghai on Dec. 1, 1927. A small Christian ceremony was held at the Soong mansion on Seymour Road, followed by a political ceremony at the Majestic Hotel, beneath a portrait of Sun Yat-sen.

According to the North China News, the event was a highlight of Shanghai's social calendar, attended by more than 1,300 of the cosmopolitan city's elite. A photograph shows Chiang Kai-shek in a morning suit, with a thin stubble of hair on his head. Madame Chiang looks like a 1920's coquette, with a white lace veil crawling down her forehead to her eyebrows.

Madame Chiang became a true political partner to her husband, traveling with him, advising him on military and political matters, turning her charm on allies and foes alike. Chiang spoke almost no English, though his wife taught him to call her "darling," and she served as his interpreter, often interspersing her own views.

However, she was continually reminded of the limits of the general's authority. Ilona Ralf Sues, a Polish journalist who worked briefly for Madame Chiang and later wrote "Shark Fins and Millet," documenting the treacherous politics of Shanghai, described how Madame Chiang was kidnapped by "Big-Eared Du" after she tried to convince her husband that as the leader of the Nationalists, he no longer needed to pay protection money to Du's underworld operation, the Green Gang.

Madame Chiang went out shopping in her limousine one afternoon, and did not return home by evening. When Du was reached on the phone, he said that Madame Chiang was fine, but that she had been found motoring alone in the streets of Shanghai, "a very imprudent thing to do considering the ever-present hazards." Money changed hands, and Madame Chiang was henceforth cautious with the Green Gang.

Madame Chiang's highly political life was often lonely, according to Ms. Sues. "She had admirers, but no true friends," she wrote of Madame Chiang in 1944. "She wants to be First Lady of the World."

Madame Chiang developed what she called the New Life Movement, a series of principles for modernizing China through social discipline, courtesy and service. She engineered public hygiene campaigns and denounced traditional superstitions.

While many ordinary Chinese resisted it, the campaign was popular with foreigners, particularly with Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, who was born to missionaries in China. He named the couple "Man and Woman of the Year" in 1938.

Madame Chiang pushed her husband to build up the Nationalist air force, and helped hire Claire Chennault, who commanded a mercenary force of pilots that came to be known as the Flying Tigers.

Madame Chiang also helped defuse one of the gravest crises of her husband's career, when he was kidnapped by rebellious generals in December 1936 in what came to be known as the Xian Incident.

Their rebels' leader, Gen. Zhang Xueliang, had long advocated better efforts at fighting the Japanese, who had gained control of Manchuria in 1931 and continued to make inroads in northern China, and criticized General Chiang's preoccupation with the Chinese Communist forces then based in China's northwest.

When General Chiang refused to redirect his military focus, General Zhang engineered a kidnapping at dawn on Dec. 4 at a hot springs resort where General Chiang was camped. General Chiang tried to escape in his nightclothes, badly injured his back scaling a back wall, and was found hours later, cowering and shivering between some rocks up a hill, minus his false teeth.

General Chiang refused to negotiate with his captors. Yet as Madame Chiang deliberated with other Nationalist leaders in the capital, Nanjing, it became apparent that some of General Chiang's rivals were advocating a military strike that could end in General Chiang's death. Madame Chiang flew to Xian to help mediate.

Communist leaders were also called in, and they were split over whether to execute General Chiang or to follow Stalin's instructions to unite with the Nationalists against the Japanese. Weeks of murky negotiations ensued. Finally, after T.V. Soong authorized a large payment to insure General Chiang's release, an agreement was reached on Dec. 31.

Retribution against General Zhang was swift and lasted a lifetime. General Chiang placed him under house arrest, where he was kept, on the Chinese mainland and then in Taiwan, until he was in his 90's. He later moved to Hawaii, where he remained until his death in 2001.

Diva-Like Petulance and a Winning Way

During the war, the relationship among General Stilwell, Madame Chiang and Chiang Kai-shek proved contentious. Stilwell accused General Chiang of hoarding resources, deliberately avoiding battle with the Japanese to spare his men to fight the Communists.

Madame Chiang was in the middle, sometimes interceding on Stilwell's behalf when resisting him threatened American support. But she also plotted against Stilwell, telling journalists that he was incompetent. She and her husband lobbied Washington to have Stilwell replaced, and he was, in 1944.

Madame Chiang also emerged as China's most important ambassador, frequently charming American visitors like Wendell Willkie, the Republican politician, who came to China in 1942 after losing a presidential campaign against Roosevelt in 1940.

According to Sterling Seagrave, who wrote a scathing portrait of Madame Chiang in his racy history, "The Soong Dynasty," she was also capable of diva-like petulance. Madame Chiang was in New York in 1943 when she learned that Winston Churchill was on his way to Washington. She suggested that the British Prime Minister stop in New York to see her. He responded that she should join him for lunch with Roosevelt in Washington.

Churchill recalled with some amusement in his history of the war that she turned him down "with some hauteur." "In the regrettable absence of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the President and I lunched alone in his room and made the best of things," he wrote.

Madame Chiang made a splash in Washington soon afterward. She spoke forcefully and passionately to Congress, winning a roaring ovation. She then traveled across the country, appearing at Madison Square Garden and at the Hollywood Bowl.

But she earned the enmity of American G.I.'s when she returned to China's wartime capital, Chungking, with several suitcases, one of which plopped open to reveal luxurious cosmetics, lingerie and fancy groceries.

It was a small sign of the growing corruption within the Nationalists that would speed their undoing. After Japan was defeated in 1945 and the civil war between Nationalists and Communists accelerated, the Communists swiftly expanded their control into the northeast.

The Nationalists received considerable American aid, but as John Service, a longtime Foreign Service officer in China, warned in a memorandum about General Chiang: "He has achieved and maintained his position in China by his supreme skill in balancing man against man and group against group, and his adroitness as a military politician rather than as a military commander, and by reliance on a gangster secret police."

Other American officials in China also warned against the vast amounts of graft among Nationalists. More than $3 billion was appropriated to China during the war, and most of it was transmitted through T.V. Soong, who as China's foreign minister was based in Washington. It later became apparent that the Soong family suffered vicious infighting over the purloined funds.

Madame Chiang traveled to Washington again in November 1948 to plead for emergency aid for the war against the Communists. Yet Congress had recently assigned another $1 billion to China, and President Truman was impatient with the Chiangs and what had become an apparently hopeless effort to shore up the Nationalist Government. Madame Chiang never returned to China.

"I can ask the American people for nothing more," she said. "It is either in your hearts to love us, or your hearts have been turned from us."

In her frustration, she publicly likened American politics to 'clodhopping boorishness." Coming after years of generous American support, that irritated Truman.

"They're thieves, every damn one of them," Mr. Truman said later, referring to Nationalist leaders. "They stole $750 million out of the billions that we sent to Chiang. They stole it, and it's invested in real estate down in SÄao Paolo and some right here in New York."

General Chiang resigned as president of Nationalist China in January 1949 and fled to Taiwan that May, taking with him a national art collection that was kept in crates in Taiwan for years as the Chiangs clung to the ever-diminishing hope that they would some day take it back to Beijing.

In the United States, the Chiangs set up what would become one of the most sophisticated lobbying efforts ever in Washington, learning how to distribute millions of dollars indirectly through law firms and public relations companies. The operation continues today.

Madame Chiang made several trips to the United States in the 1950's to oppose efforts by the People's Republic of China to win a seat at the United Nations. Only in 1971 did the United Nations allow the government of the world's most populous country to be represented, a prelude to President Nixon's trip to Beijing in 1972.

After Nixon met Jiang Qing, a radical leftist who was Mao's wife, he wrote that she seemed the opposite of Madame Chiang: severe on the outside, but weak within; Madame Chiang had a soft appearance, but was steely inside.

Madame Chiang's health wavered over the years, and in 1976 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy, and later, a second one.

Even after she moved to permanent residence in New York after Chiang Kai-shek's death in 1975, Madame Chiang kept her finger on the pulse of Nationalist politics. She returned to Taiwan after her stepson died in January 1988. Even though she was nearly 90, Madame Chiang tried to rally her old allies. But Lee Teng-hui, chosen as vice president both because he was Taiwan-born and because he was considered a pushover by fellow Nationalists, proved more adept at politics than expected, and he gradually solidified his control.

Madame Chiang lived out her final years in New York, with a pack of black-suited bodyguards who cleared the lobby of her Gracie Square apartment building every time she entered or left. She returned to Congress for one last appearance in 1995.

Her life gradually grew quiet, as friends preceded her to the grave. She stopped visiting a family estate on Long Island in Lattingtown, where she had often spent time with her younger relatives.

Courageous Arab Thinkers

Courageous Arab Thinkers
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/opinion/19FRIE.html

I should have known something was up when a Saudi diplomat recently asked me, "Do you know what kind of woman is most sought after as a wife by Saudi men today?" No, I said, what kind? "A woman with a job."

I thought of that when I read last week's announcement that within a year Saudi Arabia would conduct its first real elections — for municipal councils. Most people thought it would snow in Saudi Arabia before there would be elections. So what's up?

What's up are three big shocks hammering the Arab system. First, with oil revenues flat, there isn't enough money anymore to buy off, or provide jobs to, the exploding Arab populations. Hence the growing need for wives with work. The second is the Iraq war shock. Even with all the problems in Baghdad now, virtually every autocratic Arab regime is starting to prepare for the uncomfortable possibility that by 2005 Iraq will hold a free election, which will shame all those who never have. As Lawrence Summers, Harvard's president, likes to say, "One good example is worth a thousand theories." Iraq — maybe — could be that example.

But there is another tremor shaking the Arab world. This one is being set off by a group of courageous Arab social scientists, who decided, with the help of the United Nations, to begin fighting the war of ideas for the Arab future by detailing just how far the Arab world has fallen behind and by laying out a progressive pathway forward. Their first publication, the Arab Human Development Report 2002, explained how the deficits of freedom, education and women's empowerment in the Arab world have left the region so behind that the combined G.D.P. of the 22 Arab states was less than that of a single country — Spain. Even with limited Internet access in the Arab world, one million copies of this report were downloaded, sparking internal debates.

Tomorrow, in Amman, Jordan, these Arab thinkers will unveil their second Arab Human Development Report, which focuses on the need to rebuild Arab "knowledge societies." The report is embargoed until then, but from talking with the authors I sense it will be another bombshell.

Those who worked on this report do not believe in the Iraq-war model of political change. They prefer evolution from within. But they believe there must be serious change. They are convinced that Islam has a long history of absorbing knowledge. But in the modern era an unholy alliance between repressive Arab regimes and certain conservative Muslim scholars has led to the domination of certain interpretations of Islam that serve the governments but are hostile to human development — particularly freedom of thought, women's empowerment and the accountability of governments to their people.

The result? There are just 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab region today, compared with the global average of 78.3 per 1,000, and only 1.6 percent of the Arab population has Internet access. In 1995-96 alone, 25 percent of all graduates from Arab universities with B.A. degrees emigrated, while 15,000 medical doctors left the Arab world from 1998 to 2000.

The number of scientists and engineers working in R.&D. in the Arab region is 371 per million citizens, compared with a global rate of 979 per million. Although the Arab region represents 5 percent of world population, it produces only 1.1 percent of the books in the world. There is an abundance of religious books published in the Arab region — more than triple the world average — but a paucity of literary and artistic works. Tons of foreign technology is imported, but it's never really internalized or supplanted by Arab innovations.

The authors are convinced of something any visitor to the region can feel: that there is abundant Arab human capital to reclaim Arab knowledge — just note how many Arabs thrive as doctors and scientists when they come to the West. But this rebirth requires a massive investment in education, to move it away from uncritical repetition, and steps by the insular Arab states to encourage greater interaction with other nations and cultures and an easing of their social and political restrictions on criticism, the press and importing of ideas from abroad.

What should America's response to all this be? We should stop talking about "terrorism" and W.M.D. and make clear that we're in Iraq for one reason: to help Iraqis implement the Arab Human Development Reports, so the war of ideas can be fought from within. Then we should get out of the way. Just one good model — one good Arab model that works — and you will see more than just municipal elections in Saudi Arabia.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/18/opinion/18BROO.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists

When it comes to the future of Iraq, there's not just one Democratic Party; there are three.

First, there are the Nancy Pelosi Democrats. These Democrats voted against Paul Bremer's $87 billion plan for the reconstruction of Iraq. The essence of their case is that the Bush administration is too corrupt and incompetent to reconstruct Iraq. If Bush is for it, they're against it.

Their hatred for Bush is so dense, it's hard for them to see through it to the consequences of their vote. But if Pelosi's arguments had carried the day, our troops in Iraq would be reading this morning about the death of the Bremer plan and the ruination of our efforts to rebuild Iraq.

Saddam Hussein would be jubilant in Pelosi's Iraq. He has long argued that America is a decadent country that will buckle at the first sign of trouble. If the Pelosi Democrats had won yesterday's vote, the Saddam Doctrine would be enshrined in every terrorist cave and dictator's palace around the world: kill some Americans and watch the empire buckle.

A few days ago the Pelosi Democrats came up with a fig leaf alternative to the Bremer plan, which would have reduced U.S. control of reconstruction and shifted power to the World Bank. When that plan went nowhere, the Pelosi Democrats were faced with a choice: trust Americans or choke off the funds. They voted to choke off the funds.

And so in Pelosi's Iraq, there would be little money for children's hospitals, jails, clean water and schools. In Pelosi's Iraq, everyone would begin preparing for the post-U.S. power vacuum. The Kurds would rush to independence, the Sunnis would stock up on weapons, and the Shiites would call in Iran to help them in the coming civil war. The dream of an Iraqi constitution would die in its crib.

For the roster of the Pelosi Democrats, look at those who voted against the Bremer plan. Some names are obvious: Dennis Kucinich, Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer. But there are some names you wouldn't expect to see on that list: John Kerry and John Edwards. France, Russia and Syria don't oppose the Bremer plan, but the Pelosi Democrats are to the left of Bashar al-Assad.

Next we come to the Evan Bayh Democrats, named after the Indiana senator. These Democrats can see past their dislike of the president. They would appropriate some money for Iraqi reconstruction. But siding with the anti-foreign-aid Republicans, they'd turn the rest of the aid into loans. The Iraqi people have been raped, tortured and left bloodied on the floor. The Bayh Democrats say to them: Here's a credit card. Go buy yourself some treatment, and you can pay us back later.

The Bayh Democrats are centrist but not visionary, and they seem to worry more about adding an extra $10 billion to the deficit than about the future of the Middle East. They may have read memos from the Democratic pollsters on the unpopularity of the $87 billion plan, but they don't seem to have read about the Versailles Treaty and what happens when strong nations impose punitive burdens on proud ones.

Finally we come to the Cantwell Democrats. This group could be named after Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman or Dick Gephardt, but Maria Cantwell, the Washington senator, sits at Scoop Jackson's old desk on the Senate floor. The Cantwell Democrats are dismayed with how the Bush administration has handled the postwar period. They'd like to see the rich pay a bigger share of the reconstruction cost. But they knew yesterday's vote wasn't about George Bush. It was about doing what's right for the Iraqi people and what's right, over the long term, for the American people. These Democrats supported the aid package, and were willing to pay a price to give the Iraqis their best shot at a decent future. This week, Gephardt, who has to win over Iowa liberals to have any shot at the White House, is the bravest man in Washington.

Those are the three Democratic visions — the good, the bad and the ugly. Right now the Pelosi wing of the party is dominant, and the Cantwell wing is beleaguered. So this is a party teetering on the brink of full-bore liberal isolationism.

Who is going to pull it back? Probably not Wesley Clark. The Clark Democrats are actually the fourth category in the party: the ones who are too mealy-mouthed to take a stand either way.

The Wifely Art of Standing By

The Wifely Art of Standing By
By KATE ZERNIKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/fashion/19WIVE.html

THE disgraced former chairman of Tyco International, L. Dennis Kozlowski, might seem like a man alone in the world these days, the symbol of corporate greed, his extravagant taste in shower curtains a practiced punch line. But as he strolls the hallway outside the courtroom in Lower Manhattan where he is on trial for defrauding his company of $600 million, there is always someone at his side — his wife, Karen.

Formerly known as the woman whom her husband feted at a $2.1 million 40th-birthday party on Sardinia (prosecutors say he billed half to Tyco), Mrs. Kozlowski has appeared daily in court, dressed in a black turtleneck and muted suits, a simple wedding band and diamond studs. During recesses she accompanies her husband from the courtroom, gently patting his back as he exits, adjusting his tie ever so slightly as they wait to re-enter. She sits three rows behind him, hands folded, listening intently to testimony.

Meanwhile, outside a courtroom in Colorado, the big question is: Where's Vanessa? The absence of Mrs. Kobe Bryant next to her husband at the preliminary hearings for his trial for rape has been widely parsed for significance. The flash of the $4 million diamond he bought her after admitting adultery is fading behind the question: What does her absence mean?

It may be true that behind every powerful man is a woman, but even more true is that next to every powerful man in trouble, the public expects to see a woman propping him up.

The role of the woman standing by her man was written long before Hillary Rodham Clinton mocked it (yet played it), long before Maria Shriver rescued Arnold's campaign or Karen Kozlowski started dressing like a widow. It is not just accepted, it is expected, so much so that lawyers and trial consultants have developed a playbook for wifely comportment — what to wear, when to touch, how to cry.

Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, a trial consultant for O. J. Simpson and now Scott Peterson, says wives can be so significant in a case that lawyers in less public cases have hired actresses to play the part in the courtroom. "It's how we've all been socialized; it's become a cultural norm," Ms. Dimitrius said. "Stand by your woman — we don't see that in the movies."

If the prosecutors' aim is to make the corporate defendant look like a pig at the trough, the wife's role is to make him seem human.

"In the portrait of the big powerful man you sort of visualize them steamrolling their wives," said Ms. Dimitrius, a co-author of "Put Your Best Foot Forward: Make a Great Impression by Taking Control of How Others See You," published in 2000. "Having the wife there is contradicting that stereotype by saying, `No matter what he's being accused of, I love him and I'm with him.' What they do after the trial is anybody's guess, but it's of the utmost importance that they stand there and give their husband support."

It's unclear whether Mrs. Bryant will ultimately attend her husband's trial, should there be one. His defense lawyer, Pamela Mackey, is refusing to comment on the case or her strategy.

Standing by your man is sometimes a temporary state. Cristina Ferrare, former wife of John Z. DeLorean, filed for divorce almost as soon as he was acquitted on cocaine conspiracy charges in 1984. Seema Boesky, the Karen Kozlowski of the 1980's, divorced her husband, Ivan, the year after he finished his two-year prison term for stock fraud. She later told Barbara Walters that her instinct was "to reach out to him" when she heard the accusations against him — inspiring her to stick by him even after she discovered, 10 days later, that he was also cheating on her.

But while they stand by, high-profile wives present certain challenges. They should be present, but not ostentatious; attractive, but not excessively so, according to the experts who make this their business.

"You can't make them not look rich, but you want to make them not look haughty and obscene," said Howard Varinsky, a trial consultant in Los Angeles.

Mrs. Kozlowski, who is her husband's second, younger wife, is in a particularly rough spot. Beyond the $15,000 poodle-shaped umbrella stand and the $6,000 shower curtain that, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, graced her home, the birthday party her husband gave her is one of the most prominent symbols of his excess. Prosecutors may show a videotape of it in the courtroom (his lawyers have argued to have it suppressed), which means she may have to sit by as jurors watch party guests being served by waiters in togas and drinking vodka spouting from an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's "David."

Still, said Jerry Shargel, a criminal defense lawyer in New York, "I don't think the answer is that she shouldn't be there."

"The answer is to dress down and look concerned," he said. "The human emotion that stems from family is stronger than the human emotion that stems from greed."

That means minimal jewelry. Diamonds are fine, but "ditch the colored stones, too jazzy for court," said Ann Harriet Cole, president of Ann Cole Opinion, Research and Analysis.

"You can have an engagement ring, but not a Liz Taylor diamond," she said.

As for tears, "Crying is good," said Elaine Lewis, president of Courtroom Communications in Manhattan, but only to a degree. "You can dab your eyes, but don't go into a puddle. It's a distraction to what's going on."

And remember, the court of public opinion stays in session outside the courtroom. "You don't want to be seen being dropped off in front of the courthouse berating a cab driver," said Steven M. Cohen, a former federal prosecutor and partner in the New York firm of Kronish Lieb Weiner & Hellman.

For some legal advisers, the model stand-by-your-man wife would be someone like Nancy Reagan.

"People remember her as a caricature, but she wasn't," Mr. Cohen said. "What she had the ability to do was sit there and look like she cared; she had an innate understanding of when to nod, when to mist up.

"I don't mean to be cynical about it, but there is a talent to tearing up at the right moment, there is a talent to looking hurt and concerned."

Others lean toward Laura Bush. "The wife needs to be demure, but you don't want a Stepford wife robot," Ms. Cole said. "You want intelligent, engaged; you don't want her looking like she's been Xanaxed out and is sitting there on drugs — even if that's often the case."

In that respect, Karen Swartz, the wife of Mark H. Swartz, Mr. Kozlowski's co-defendant, is probably a good model. She smiles politely and dresses in the kind of suit a first lady might choose.

Ms. Cole said the best performance she has ever seen was by Lynda Carter, television's Wonder Woman, who stood by her husband, Robert A. Altman, as he was tried on charges of misleading bank regulators about the dealings of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in the early 90's.

Her husband was acquitted. (But no one is recommending a leotard or a cape.)

For lawyers, trophy wives — generally defined as much younger than their husbands and as a second or third (or fourth) wife — can pose a particular problem. "That engenders animosity on the part of the jurors,'` Mr. Varinsky said. "That says this is a guy who dumped his first wife; the women notice that right away."

Judy Taubman, a generation younger than her husband, A. Alfred Taubman, stayed away from the courtroom where he was convicted last year in the Sotheby's price fixing scandal.

Mr. Taubman's spokesman, Christopher Tennyson, said the decision was one made jointly by the Taubmans; Mr. Taubman was in ill health and wanted to be able to separate home life from life in the courtroom. But Mr. Tennyson acknowledged that the lawyers, too, considered the effect Mrs. Taubman might have.

"Whoever is in the courtroom should be there every day," he said. "The jury can read all sorts of things in her absence." Since Mrs. Taubman could not be, he said, Mr. Taubman's daughter, Gayle Kalisman, stood by his side.

Mafia wives might prove the trickiest to coach.

"If you say to someone like Kozlowski's wife to tone it down, she understands," said a lawyer who defends those accused of organized crime. "It's different if you have to go tell somebody's wife that baby blue skin-tight pants and pumps don't do it. They think they're attractive; they want to look good for their man."

But Ms. Cole cautioned that a wife's presence in the courtroom is not always a good thing.

"The attorney has to make an assessment about how angry the wife is at the husband, and if this anger is likely to show," she said. "If they're going to have an argument in the hallway, then it's a problem. If she's a total advocate and is furious at the world because her poor innocent husband has gotten sucked into this, that's a problem, too."

Then there is always the question of how wives are to behave when the trials are over if their husbands are locked up. Like Penelope waiting for Odysseus?

Or maybe not. While Mr. Taubman was serving his nine-and-a-half-month prison stay, Mrs. Taubman flew to London to a ball in honor of a favorite Parisian jewelry designer, dressed in couture and several of the jeweler's pieces. When friends asked about the propriety of all this, they said, she explained, "I'm not going to dance."

Santorini Eruption and the Demise of the Minoan Civilization

Scientists Revisit an Aegean Eruption Far Worse Than Krakatoa
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/science/earth/21VOLC.html

For decades, scholars have debated whether the eruption of the Thera volcano in the Aegean more than 3,000 years ago brought about the mysterious collapse of Minoan civilization at the peak of its glory. The volcanic isle (whose remnants are known as Santorini) lay just 70 miles from Minoan Crete, so it seemed quite reasonable that its fury could have accounted for the fall of that celebrated people.

This idea suffered a blow in 1987 when Danish scientists studying cores from the Greenland icecap reported evidence that Thera exploded in 1645 B.C., some 150 years before the usual date. That put so much time between the natural disaster and the Minoan decline that the linkage came to be widely doubted, seeming far-fetched at best.

Now, scientists at Columbia University, the University of Hawaii and other institutions are renewing the proposed connection.

New findings, they say, show that Thera's upheaval was far more violent than previously calculated — many times larger than the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, which killed more than 36,000 people. They say the Thera blast's cultural repercussions were equally large, rippling across the eastern Mediterranean for decades, even centuries.

"It had to have had a huge impact," said Dr. Floyd W. McCoy, a University of Hawaii geologist who has studied the eruption for decades and recently proposed that it was much more violent than previously thought.

The scientists say Thera's outburst produced deadly waves and dense clouds of volcanic ash over a vast region, crippling ancient cities and fleets, setting off climate changes, ruining crops and sowing wide political unrest.

For Minoan Crete, the scientists see direct and indirect consequences. Dr. McCoy discovered that towering waves from the eruption that hit Crete were up to 50 feet high, smashing ports and fleets and severely damaging the maritime economy.

Other scientists found indirect, long-term damage. Ash and global cooling from the volcanic pall caused wide crop failures in the eastern Mediterranean, they said, and the agricultural woes in turn set off political upheavals that undid Minoan friends and trade.

"Imagine island states without links to the outside world," Dr. William B. F. Ryan, a geologist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Scientists who link Thera to the Minoan decline say the evidence is still emerging and in some cases sketchy. Even so, they say it is already compelling enough to have convinced many archaeologists, geologists and historians that the repercussions probably amounted to a death blow for Minoan Crete.

Rich and sensual, sophisticated and artistic, Minoan culture flourished in the Bronze Age between roughly 3000 and 1400 B.C., the first high civilization of Europe. It developed an early form of writing and used maritime skill to found colonies and a trade empire.

The British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans called the civilization Minoan, after Minos, the legendary king. His unearthed palace was huge and intricate, and had clearly been weakened by many upheavals, including fire and earthquakes.

Nearby on the volcanic island of Thera, or Santorini, archaeologists dug up Minoan buildings, artifacts and a whole city, Akrotiri, buried under volcanic ash like Pompeii. Some of its beautifully preserved frescoes depicted Egyptian motifs and animals, suggesting significant contact between the two peoples.

In 1939, Spyridon Marinatos, a Greek archaeologist, proposed that the eruption wrecked Minoan culture on Thera and Crete. He envisioned the damage as done by associated earthquakes and tsunamis. While geologists found tsunamis credible, they doubted the destructive power of Thera's earthquakes, saying volcanic ones tend to be relatively mild. The debate simmered for decades.

In the mid-1960's, scientists dredging up ooze from the bottom of the Mediterranean began to notice a thick layer of ash that they linked to Thera's eruption. They tracked it over thousands of square miles.

Dr. McCoy of the University of Hawaii, then at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod, took part in these discoveries, starting a lifelong interest in Thera. By the early 1980's, he was publishing papers on the ash distribution.

Such clues helped geologists estimate the amount of material Thera spewed into the sky and the height of its eruption cloud — main factors in the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Its scale goes from zero to eight and is logarithmic, so each unit represents a tenfold increase in explosive power. Thera was given a V.E.I. of 6.0, on a par with Krakatoa in 1883.

The similarity to Krakatoa, which lies between Sumatra and Java, helped experts better envision Thera's wrath. Krakatoa hurled rock and ash more than 20 miles high and its blasts could be heard 3,000 miles away. Its giant waves killed thousands of people.

Despite the power of Thera, the Danish scientists' evidence raised doubts about its links to the Minoan decline. Their date for Thera's explosion, 1645 B.C., based on frozen ash in Greenland, is some 150 years earlier than the usual date. Given that the Minoan fall was usually dated to 1450 B.C., the gap between cause and effect seemed too large.

Another blow landed in 1989 when scholars on Crete found, above a Thera ash layer, a house that had been substantially rebuilt in the Minoan style. It suggested at least partial cultural survival.

By 1996, experts like Prof. Jeremy B. Rutter, head of classics at Dartmouth, judged the chronological gap too extreme for any linkage. "No direct correlation can be established" between the volcano and the Minoan decline, he concluded.

As doubts rose about this linkage, scientists found more evidence suggesting that Thera's eruption had been unusually violent and disruptive over wide areas. Scientific maps drawn in the 1960's and 1970's showed its ash as falling mostly over nearby waters and Aegean islands.

By the 1990's, however, the affected areas had been found to include lands of the eastern Mediterranean from Anatolia to Egypt. Scientists found ash from Thera at the bottom of the Black Sea and Nile delta.

Dr. Peter I. Kuniholm, an expert at Cornell on using tree rings to establish dates, found ancient trees in a burial mound in Anatolia, what now is in the Asian part of Turkey. For half a decade those trees had grown three times as fast as normal — apparently because Thera's volcanic pall turned hot, dry summers into seasons that were unusually cool and wet.

"We've got an anomaly, the biggest in the past 9,000 years," Dr. Kuniholm said in an interview.

More intrigued than ever, Dr. McCoy of the University of Hawaii two years ago stumbled on more evidence suggesting that Thera's ash fall had been unusually wide and heavy. During a field trip to Anafi, an island some 20 miles east of Thera, he found to his delight that the authorities had just cut fresh roads that exposed layers of Thera ash up to 10 feet thick — a surprising amount that distance from the eruption.

And Greek colleagues showed him new seabed samples taken off the Greek mainland, suggesting that more ash blew westward than scientists had realized.

Factoring in such evidence, Dr. McCoy calculated that Thera had a V.E.I. of 7.0 — what geologists call colossal and exceedingly rare. In the past 10,000 years only one other volcano has exploded with that kind of gargantuan violence: Tambora, in Indonesia, in 1816, It produced an ash cloud in the upper atmosphere that reflected sunlight back into space and produced the year without a summer. The cold led to ruinous harvests, hunger and even famine in the United States, Europe and Russia.

"I presented this evidence last summer at a meeting," Dr. McCoy recalled, "and the comment from the other volcanologists was, `Hey, it was probably larger than Tambora.' "

Dr. Ryan of Columbia has woven such clues into a tantalizing but provisional theory on how distant effects might have slowly undone Crete. First, he noted that winds at low and high altitudes seem to have blown Thera's ash into distinct plumes — one to the southeast, toward Egypt and another heavier one to the northeast, toward Anatolia. Even if the changes wrought by Thera helped trees there, they apparently played havoc with delicate wheat fields.

Mursilis, a king of the Hittites, set out from Anatolia on a rampage, traveling between the plumes to strike Syria and Babylon and seize their stored grains and cereals. The subsequent collapse of Babylon into a dark age, Dr. Ryan said, also undid one of its puppets, the Hyksos, foreigners who ruled Egypt and traded with the Minoans.

He theorized that the new Egyptian dynasty had no love of Hyksos allies. So Minoan Crete, already reeling from Thera's fury, suffered new blows to its maritime trade.

In an interview, Dr. Ryan said he and other scholars were still refining dates on some of the ancient events, promising to better fix their relation to the eruption. The outcome of that work, he said, could either strengthen or undermine his thesis.

Even without such distant upsets, some prominent archaeologists have concluded that the volcano's long-term repercussions meant the end of Minoan Crete. For instance, they argue that the revolt of nature over the predictable certainties of Minoan religion probably crippled the authority of the priestly ruling class, weakening its hold on society.

In scholarly articles, Dr. Jan Driessen, an archaeologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and Dr. Colin F. MacDonald, an archaeologist at the British School in Athens, have argued that changes to Cretan architecture, storage, food production, artistic output and the distribution of riches imply major social dislocations, and perhaps civil war.

By 1450 B.C., Mycenaean invaders from mainland Greece seized control of Crete, ending the Minoan era.

Thera's destructiveness was probably the catalyst, Dr. Driessen and Dr. MacDonald wrote, "that culminated in Crete being absorbed to a greater or lesser extent into the Mycenaean, and therefore, the Greek world."

Through the Lens, the Severe Beauty of Nuclear Test Blasts

Through the Lens, the Severe Beauty of Nuclear Test Blasts
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/science/21SUN.html

These mushroom clouds, rising bug-eyed over the desert, spreading like an alien sun over the ocean, are the nagging headache behind what passed for reality for a generation.

From July 1945 until November 1962, American scientists and the military, exploring the apocalyptic new powers they had unleashed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the war, exploded 216 bombs in the atmosphere, according to public records. Afterward, until 1992 when they were banned, the explosions went underground.

In a new book, "100 Suns," published this week by Knopf, the photographer Michael Light has retrieved images of these blasts from government and scientific archives and presented them in all their stark and severe beauty. They document a menace that continues even though we can no longer photograph it.

As Mr. Light reminds us, some hundred thousand nuclear weapons have been built and remain on the earth. That is what makes these old photographs "utterly relevant" today.

"Photographs only tell us about the surface of things, about how things look," Mr. Light writes. "When it's all we have, however, it's enough to help understanding. It exists. It happened. It is happening. May no further nuclear detonation photographs be made, ever."

China's Boom Adds to Global Warming Problem

China's Boom Adds to Global Warming Problem
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/science/22WARM.html

ZHANJIANG, China — China's rapid economic growth is producing a surge in emissions of greenhouse gases that threatens international efforts to curb global warming, as Chinese power plants burn ever more coal while car sales soar.

Until the last few months, many energy experts and environmentalists said, they had hoped that China's contribution to global warming would be limited. Its state-owned enterprises have become more efficient in their energy use as they compete in an increasingly capitalist economy, and until recently official Chinese statistics had been showing a steep drop in coal production and consumption.

But new figures from Chinese government agencies confirm what energy industry executives had suspected: that coal use has actually been climbing faster in China than practically anywhere else in the world.

But new figures from Chinese government agencies confirm what energy industry executives had suspected: that coal use has actually been climbing faster in China than practically anywhere else in the world.

To the extent that global warming is caused by humanity, as many scientists believe, this is a serious problem because burning coal at a power plant releases more greenhouse gases than using oil or natural gas to generate the same amount of electricity.

China's rising energy consumption complicates diplomatic efforts to limit emissions of global warming gases. The International Energy Agency in Paris predicts that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions from 2000 to 2030 in China alone will nearly equal the increase from the entire industrialized world.

China is the world's second largest emitter of such gases, after the United States. But China's per-person energy use and greenhouse gas emissions remain far below levels found in richer countries. The emissions are, for example, roughly one-eighth of those per capita in the United States.

As a developing country, China is exempt from the Kyoto Protocol, the pending international agreement to limit emissions of greenhouse gases. When President Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol two years ago, he portrayed China's exemption as a serious flaw. The protocol has been embraced by most other big nations, however, and only requires ratification by Russia to take effect.

Another developing country exempt from the protocol, India, is also showing strong growth in emissions as its economy prospers. General Motors predicts that China will account for 18 percent of the world's growth in new car sales from 2002 through 2012; the United States will be responsible for 11 percent, and India 9 percent.

Official Chinese statistics had shown a decline in coal production and consumption in the late 1990's, even as the economy was growing 8 percent a year. But many Western and Chinese researchers have become suspicious of that drop over the last several years.

They point out that the decline assumed that local governments had followed Beijing's instructions to close 47,000 small, unsafe mines producing low-grade coal and many heavily polluting small power plants. Yet researchers who visited mines and power plants found that they often remained open, with the output not being reported to Beijing because local administrators feared an outcry if they shut down important employers.

China's National Bureau of Statistics has not revised its coal figures for the late 1990's, but its latest data show that coal consumption jumped 7.6 percent last year. A Chinese official said the bureau was likely to report a similar increase for this year. Even those figures may be low: Chinese coal industry officials have estimated that coal consumption may be rising more than 10 percent a year.

China is now the world's largest coal consumer, and its power plants are burning coal faster than its aging railroads can deliver it from domestic mines, most of which are in the north. So the country is importing coal from Australia. This steamy city of 640,000, with its deep-water port, is the main receiving point in southern China.

As fishermen in wooden boats brought conical wicker baskets full of silvery, sardine-size fish ashore at dawn on a recent morning, the sun began illuminating an enormous, coal-fired power plant with a big freighter from Australia tied up next to it.

The plant is only nine years old. Zhanjiang drew its electricity over high-tension lines from other cities to the north before then. But the power plant is already inadequate for the area's needs, even though it is twice the size of a standard coal-fired plant. With blackouts frequent here for lack of power, construction has just begun on another, adjacent power plant, that one oil-fired.

Other figures from the Bureau of Statistics have also shown very large increases in energy consumption lately. China's electrical power generation, the main use of coal in China, jumped 16 percent in the first eight months of this year, nearly four times as much as Western experts expected. Power generation is poised to grow swiftly in the years to come, with China's output of equipment for new power plants rising by two-thirds in a single year.

China has also become the world's fastest-growing importer of oil, with foreign purchases surging nearly a third this year, although some of those imports went into stockpiles in January and February as a precaution in case the war in Iraq disrupted shipments from the Middle East.

The Chinese are using more energy in their homes, too, as China has turned into the world's largest market for television sets and one of the largest for many other electrical appliances.

A 53-year-old retired saleswoman here said that for more than half her life, her only electrical appliance at home was a light bulb.

She and her husband bought a black-and-white television set in 1984, then a refrigerator in 1988. Now she has an air-conditioner, which she acquired in 1998, along with two color televisions, an electric rice cooker, a radio, the refrigerator and many lights.

"Only the old people do not have air-conditioning now," said the woman, Ms. Long, who, like others interviewed in this militarily important city, insisted on giving only her family name.

Environmental groups that once promoted China as a good example are now increasingly worried. "If they're seeing 6 and 7 percent growth, that is obviously a concern," said Dan Lashof, a climate change expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has done several studies of Chinese energy use.

But environmentalists are also loath to criticize China too strongly, partly because Chinese emissions per person are still so much lower than those in the developed world, and partly because China has been trying with some success to improve the energy efficiency of its industries. Programs like requiring electrical appliances and building designs to waste less energy show considerable promise, said Barbara Finamore, the director of the Clean China Program at the council.

The central government in Beijing has had repeated difficulties in forcing provincial governments to pursue recent efficiency programs. China no longer has the central planning mandates to order improvements, but has not yet developed market-based incentives, like higher prices, to encourage people to curb their consumption of fossil fuels, Ms. Finamore said.

China's central bank is nervous that some sectors of the economy, especially luxury housing construction, are growing too fast, and it is trying to restrain them. If it succeeds, that could temper somewhat the increase in energy use.

China is not alone in consuming a lot more energy, although its enormous population of roughly one and a quarter billion, and rapid economic growth mean that its increases dwarf those of any other country in the developing world. India, for example, is also showing rapid growth in energy use. In populous countries from Indonesia to Brazil, power plants are burning more and more coal and oil to meet ever growing demand for electricity from industry and households.

Even some climate experts in developing countries are conceding that their emissions need to be addressed when international talks begin in 2005 on what will follow the Kyoto agreement, which calls for industrialized nations to reduce their emissions by 2012. Considerable reluctance persists among developing countries, however, to accept the kind of specific limits prescribed for wealthy countries by the Kyoto Protocol. "There's going to be a fairly heated debate about what developing countries should do in the next round," said Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian engineer who is the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that assesses the causes and consequences of rising temperatures.

The Chinese government is drafting a series of new economic policies, some of which will concern energy, and is expected to release them soon. Senior Chinese officials did not respond to requests for interviews over the last two months.

Two fairly senior Chinese officials said in earlier, separate interviews, after President Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang Zemin in March, that an active debate was under way over the extent to which conservation should be balanced against economic growth.

Growth in Chinese coal consumption should slow somewhat in the next four years. Completion of the Three Gorges dam and five nuclear power plants will provide considerable additional electricity for China's national grid by 2007, although posing different environmental risks from coal. But Larry Metzroth, a coal and electricity specialist at the International Energy Agency, warned that with no further large hydroelectric or nuclear power projects planned in China, coal consumption "is going to pick up again after 2007."

Beijing's official New China News Agency recently predicted that China's capacity to generate electricity from coal would be almost three times as high in 2020 as it was in 2000.

If China can continue to sustain 8 percent annual economic growth, then the next big growth area in greenhouse gas emissions is likely to be cars. China is already the world's fastest-growing car market, with sales up 73 percent this year.

China has just one-twentieth as many cars now as the United States, because car sales were tiny until the last three years. But a swift expansion of auto factories in China, together with rising household incomes and the growing availability of auto loans, has led to the surge.

Here in Zhanjiang, downtown streets are already clogged with cars. One of the best businesses in town seems to be a corner store in the city's old quarter, an area of tightly packed three-story homes with traditional tile roofs. The corner store sells every possible kind of fuse, tubing and wiring for electricians, and it was so busy that the store's owners barely had time to speak.

"People are rewiring a lot," said Mr. Pong, the patriarch of the family that runs the store. "Or they just demolish the old and build new."

Is Shanghai Sinking?

Shanghai Journal; Splendid Skyline. Do You Feel Something Sinking?
By JIM YARDLEY (NYT) 887 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 4 , Column 3
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/14/international/asia/14SHAN.html

ABSTRACT - Residents of Shanghai, China, complain about diminishing quality of life following 1990's construction frenzy that brought countless skyscrapers, traffic and pollution; now city, which was built on swamp, may be sinking seriously; city's urban planning bureau is expected to revise local building laws to limit, if not ban, high-rise development; photo (M)

Morning Sun

[another film in the Long Bow tradition by the husband and wife team of carma hinton and richard gordon. can
t wait to see it!]

The Loss of Relationships Under Mao's Rough Revolutionary Hand
By ELVIS MITCHELL
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/movies/22SUN.html

The documentary "Morning Sun" does a thoughtful job of streamlining the bloody realities — both literal and psychological — of China's Cultural Revolution into roughly two hours of film. The movie, which opens today at the Film Forum, begins with clips from a 1964 "musical extravaganza" — as the narrator, Margot Adler, puts it — called "The East Is Red."

"In dark, old China, the earth was dark, the sky was dark," we hear in a scene from "The East Is Red," and we see a production that looks like a Chinese high school combination of "The Good Earth" and "Porgy and Bess." "The East Is Red," photographed in volcanic color, splashes its propaganda in terms so simple that the scenes become almost Brechtian; more specifically, it's a crude Minnelli musical essentially produced by Mao, the Arthur Freed of Communism.

The pieces of this musical shown in "Morning Sun" are so fulsomely straightforward that being denied a chance to see it in its entirety feels like a form of deprivation. That is, until the directors — Carma Hinton, Geremie R. Barmé and Richard Gordon — focus on the adults who were indoctrinated under the firm, unambiguous hand of Mao.

Then deprivation is defined in truly horrific terms. One describes the Revolution in grimly elegant fashion: "It was an age ruled by both the poet and the executioner; poets scattered roses everywhere, while the executioner cast a long shadow of terror."

One particularly transfixing interview comes from a former Red Guard member whose features are obscured by shadow; his recollections of violence inflicted in Mao's name are darkened by shame. He, like many others, can never quite forgive himself for being sucked into the stream of propaganda; it was a force that, as "Morning Sun" reminds us, molded a new generation into killers without any sense of the long and tortured history of a China that existed before Mao brutally eliminated all traces of it.

"Morning Sun" effectively explains Mao's strangulation of outside influences, cutting off the Western arts that were still offered to children until the 1960's. Another spellbindingly simplistic film played a big part in Communist China — a 1955 Russian movie adaptation of "The Gadfly," an 1897 novel by Ethel Lilian Voynich.

Clips from this operatic Italian-set story of Arthur, a man rejecting all the lessons of his youth, including those of the church, are shown in "Morning Sun." Arthur confesses his loss of faith to his mentor, a priest, who turns the young man in to the authorities — a priest who is later revealed to be his father. The ideals exposed in the wildly overstated "Gadfly" — the protagonist later becomes a heroic revolutionary — took hold of Chinese youth. (It also similarly affected Russians, according to "Morning Sun.") And as young Communists age, the movie's impact shifts with them. Eventually "Gadfly" was too complex for Mao, who removed it from circulation in favor of one-dimensional dramas that were far more blatant. When "Gadfly" is finally available and its fans see it again as adults, the movie's impact — and the eddies of the father-son-revolutionary — takes on other shadings; it's the losses in the relationships that resonate for them.

One of the few subtle points of "Morning Sun" is that even simple, lurid dramatic tragedy looks different to its admirers as they mature. The eloquence of the interview subjects — and the clips — have a power that the written narration, which tends to sound like an "All Things Considered" segment, often lacks. And, as in "Gadfly," loss echoes throughout this documentary, too.

"Chairman Mao said, `You young people are like the morning sun; our hope is placed on you,' " remembers Li Nanyang, who was a child of 1960's China. And as "Morning Sun" unfolds, she is shown to be one of the Cultural Revolution's victims. Her father, Li Rui, who rose through the ranks to become Mao's secretary, made the mistake of criticizing a failing policy during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950's, when farms were converted into small factories and the resultant shortages nearly crippled the nation; his reward was being publicly repudiated and sent away, and his daughter, 9 at the time, was ridiculed until she denounced him.

"Morning Sun" ends with a reunion of father and daughter after 11 years.

"Finally, I was free to speak my mind, unlike 1967," Li Rui says, and the familial resemblance — a proud, strong mouth — is evident. "I finally came out with it, and he cried," his daughter says, remembering when she called him Dad, something she wasn't permitted to do since his disgrace. The movie closes with this scene, the ascension of a different sun.

MORNING SUN

Directed by Carma Hinton, Richard Gordon and Geremie R. Barmé; written (in English and Mandarin, with English subtitles) by Ms. Hinton and Mr. Barmé; director of photography, Mr. Gordon; edited by David Carnochan; music by Mark Pevsner; produced by Ms. Hinton, Mr. Gordon and Mr. Barmé. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue, South Village. Running time: 117 minutes. This film is not rated.

The Unseen China

The Unseen China
Jack Birns’s wrenching photos of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime were commissioned but never published—until now
By Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
http://www.msnbc.com/news/979270.asp

Oct. 20 issue — What kinds of images of war-torn countries should influential news organizations show? The question currently looms large, as arguments rage over which satellite-fed images from the Middle East should be aired on television. And it grants an eerie timeliness to “Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution” (141 pages. University of California Press) —even though it’s been more than five decades since Jack Birns shot these startling images while covering Asia for Life magazine.

THE BOOK IS unexpectedly topical for two reasons. First, as Carolyn Wakeman, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, notes in her introduction, back in the 1940s a Life photograph functioned in the same way that a dramatic piece of CNN footage does today: as a powerful shaper of popular opinion about an international event. And second, despite the high esthetic value and poignancy of the images in “Assignment Shanghai,” most were buried because of political sensitivities at the time.

To put it bluntly, Birns portrayed all too accurately China’s troubled state on the eve of the communist victory in 1949. His photos range from disturbing shots of children’s corpses and the severed head of an executed communist to lighter pictures that convey the rhythm and texture of urban life during China’s civil war. The camera reveals a country coming apart at the seams, due largely to the corrupt, oppressive nature of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime. What’s clear in them is the obscene gulf that separated the lifestyles of a few wealthy Chinese and privileged foreigners (including U.S. servicemen) from those of the country’s ordinary citizens. Looking at these pictures, it is easy to see why so many Chinese embraced a revolutionary movement calling for total transformation.

This image of late-1940s China was in keeping with the written reports filed by the best foreign journalists at the time. But it undermined a notion that Time-Life chief Henry Luce—born in China to missionary parents—held dear and insisted his influential publications disseminate: namely that the fervently anti-communist Chiang Kai-shek, a Christian convert, was China’s only hope for salvation. So while Life frequently ran shots that Birns took of other Asian hotspots, his China photos were routinely rejected.

Curious to see what Life was saying about China while refusing to publish such shots, I rifled through issues from 1948 and discovered a glowing account of a national election—from which, of course, communist candidates were excluded. One story stresses that, though Chiang Kai-shek won by the predicted landslide, his favorite was not elected vice president. This, readers were told, showed that the Republic of China was evolving rapidly into a “mature” pluralist state. It is true that the ROC (since 1949 located on Taiwan) has indeed become just that, but the transition was hardly swift. Throughout most of the second half of the 20th century, one-party regimes and harsh repression of dissent were the rule on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

In fact, the pictures in “Assignment Shanghai” are notable for their foreshadowing of events to come. Several photos portray confrontations between agents of the state and unarmed protesters. It is hard to look at these—especially a 1948 photograph showing a Nationalist Army tank stationed menacingly outside a university’s main gate—without thinking of Tiananmen Square and the Communist Party’s brutal 1989 crackdown. That’s not to say that the world would have been any less shocked by such a tragedy if it had been privy to images such as Birns’s earlier. But they certainly help us make sense of China’s political traumas in a way that earlier readers would no doubt have welcomed, too.

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Wasserstrom is the director of Indiana University’s East Asian Studies Center. He is the editor of “Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches,” published earlier this year by Routledge. He is currently at work on a new book, “Global Shanghai.”

Low-Cost Supercomputer Put Together From 1,100 PC's

Low-Cost Supercomputer Put Together From 1,100 PC's
By JOHN MARKOFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/technology/22SUPE.html

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 21 — A home-brew supercomputer, assembled from off-the-shelf personal computers in just one month at a cost of slightly more than $5 million, is about to be ranked as one of the fastest machines in the world.

Word of the low-cost supercomputer, put together by faculty, technicians and students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, is shaking up the esoteric world of high performance computing, where the fastest machines have traditionally cost from $100 million to $250 million and taken several years to build.

The Virginia Tech supercomputer, put together from 1,100 Apple Macintosh computers, has been successfully tested in recent days, according to Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains a listing of the world's 500 fastest machines.

The official results for the ranking will not be reported until next month at a supercomputer industry event. But the Apple-based supercomputer, which is powered by 2,200 I.B.M. microprocessors, was able to compute at 7.41 trillion operations a second, a speed surpassed by only three other ultra-fast computers.

The fastest computers on the current Top 500 list are the Japanese Earth Simulator; a Los Alamos National Laboratory machine dedicated to weapons design; and another weapons oriented cluster of Intel Pentium 4 microprocessors at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

Officials at the school said that they were still finalizing their results and that the final speed number might be significantly higher.

"We are demonstrating that you can build a very high performance machine for a fifth to a tenth of the cost of what supercomputers now cost," said Hassan Aref, the dean of the School of Engineering at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. The computer was put together in a virtual flash. Scientists from the school met with Apple executives two days after the company introduced its new 64-bit desktop computer in June.

Apple agreed to put the school at the head of the line for the new machines. Starting when they returned to school in September, student volunteers, who received free pizzas for their labor, helped with the assembly of the system, essentially an array of large refrigerators to keep the computers from overheating. Virginia Tech's president offered free football tickets to the technicians who were spending long hours on the project.

"When you have a small budget," said Srinidhi Varadarajan, a leader of the project, "you have to take risks."

The ranking is a coup for Apple, which for several years has lagged behind, in terms of raw computing speed, the PC world controlled by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices microprocessors. It is also an indication that the supercomputer industry, which has been in eclipse since the end of the cold war, is again playing a more vital role.

"On the surface this is a pretty impressive machine," Mr. Dongarra said. "It shows that the processors are getting to the point where this kind of performance will be quite common."

The performance of the new computer highlights the challenge to highly expensive custom-designed machines — like the Earth Simulator of Japan, which is assembled from 5,120 custom processors that have special circuitry for performing long strings of mathematical operations — from computers put together by linking more common off-the-shelf components in fairly simple ways.

The Japanese computer was measured at 35.8 trillion operations a second last year but American computer experts estimate that it cost as much as $250 million. By contrast, the fastest cluster machine, the Lawrence Livermore system consisting of 2304 Intel Xeon processors, is capable of 7.63 trillion operations a second, at a price estimated at $10 million to $15 million. The Virginia Tech computer makes the cost-to-performance equation even starker.

In Pioneering Duke Study, Monkey Think, Robot Do

In Pioneering Duke Study, Monkey Think, Robot Do
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE (NYT) 753 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 14 , Column 1
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/science/13BRAI.html

ABSTRACT - In experiments at Duke Univ, implants in monkeys' brains pick up brain signals and send them to robotic arm, which carries out reaching and grasping movements on computer screen driven only by monkey's thoughts; achievement is significant advance in continuing effort to devise thought-controlled machines that could be great benefit for people who are paralyzed, or have lost control over their physical movements; experts agree that thought-controlled personal robots are many years off, but Duke Univ team has shown that humans produce brain signals like those of experimental monkeys; study is published in inaugural issue of The Public Library of Science, peer-reviewed journal (M)

WELFARE SPENDING SHOWS HUGE SHIFT

WELFARE SPENDING SHOWS HUGE SHIFT
By ROBERT PEAR (NYT) 1216 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 1 , Column 5
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/politics/13WELF.html

ABSTRACT - Cash assistance payments now account for less than half of all spending under nation's main welfare program, as growing amount of money is shifted into noncash assistance such as child care, education, training and other services intended to help poor people get jobs and stay off welfare; proportion has been declining steadily since 1996, when Congress revamped welfare and abolished guarantee of cash assistance for nation's poorest children; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, main welfare program is financed jointly by federal government and states; since welfare reform law was passed in 1996, number of people on welfare has plunged, to 5 million from 12.2 million; federal government provides total of $16.5 billion a year to states regardless of how many people are on rolls, allowing states to spend larger share on services; graph (M)

A Struggling LVMH Unit Looks Beyond the Handbag

A Struggling LVMH Unit Looks Beyond the Handbag
By TRACIE ROZHON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/business/22LUXU.html

Fendi, an old and worthy name in Italian leather goods and furs, but one whose label has become a bit shopworn, is rushing to refashion itself.

A squabbling founding family, dilatory deliveries and a groping search for the next hit handbag to replace the formerly hot but now stale Baguette, have taken their toll on Fendi in recent years. And the brand has not been helped by rumors that Karl Lagerfeld, Fendi's chief designer — and an acknowledged maestro of fur coats — may be on the verge of leaving. (Mr. Lagerfeld, it appears, is not leaving, at least not any time soon.)

Last week Fendi's controlling shareholder, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world's largest group of luxury brands, stepped in by naming Michael Burke, the former chief operating officer of Dior Couture, as Fendi's latest chief executive. He succeeded Giancarlo di Risio, who was brought in a year and a half ago. Mr. Di Risio, who has left the company, was not available for comment.

LVMH is hoping to bring the Rome-based Fendi back into profitability. Fendi lost approximately 20 million euros in 2001 and again in 2002, according to people in LVMH. Although publicly held, LVMH does not break out Fendi's sales and earnings. Christian Oddono, an analyst with Actinvest in London, said that Fendi's revenue for the first half of 2003 fell by 6.3 percent, to 1.89 million euros, compared with the first six months of 2002.

Even before last week's announcement, LVMH had shuffled Fendi's management. In May, Sidney Toledano, the head of Dior, was given an oversight role at Fendi, supervising Mr. Di Risio. Dior, which had a rocky start after it was bought in 1984, has become a winner under Mr. Toledano (and the designer John Galliano). Last year sales at Christian Dior Couture, which includes couture, ready-to-wear clothing and accessories, increased 41 percent over the year before.

With the naming of Mr. Burke, who had served under Mr. Toledano, the fashion press began suggesting that Fendi would soon be subjected to an intense "Diorization."

Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Burke said it was premature to comment on any actions he might take. But Mr. Toledano said in an interview last week that Fendi would never become a clone of Dior.

"Dior is a French couture house, with an enormous business in perfume and ready-to-wear clothes," Mr. Toledano said. "Fendi is a very expensive Italian brand, with a core business in leather and fur."

Because LVMH does not break out figures for its brands or individual products, there is no way of knowing what percentage of Fendi's sales have been pegged to the Baguette, a simple handbag that comes in multiple styles and price ranges. On Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Fendi this week offered a selection spanning the silk Baguette for $999 to one in white mink for $3,000. But some Baguettes have hit $10,000.

In an interview, Mr. Toledano acknowledged that the Baguette's best days might be behind it. He said that Fendi designers were working on new lines of handbags and were not "obsessing over one bag."

Last week, Mr. Toledano said Fendi's new team would move quickly to improve sales in the Fendi stores, reorganize marketing, and overhaul the process for making deliveries to retailers, which is notoriously slow. As merchants realized that the Baguette's buzz had a limited life span, for example, they begged for immediate deliveries. But the hand-sewn bags take time to make, and analysts said deliveries were further delayed — or missed altogether — by poor organization within the company.

Mr. Toledano said he planned to expand further into retail lines like shoes and watches, while strengthening the ready-to-wear clothing business.

If LVMH's new strategy works, Mr. Oddono, the analyst, estimated that Fendi could be profitable by 2007. The unusual structure of the company — with Carla Fendi, a member of the founding family, still acting as chairman and a minority owner of the 78-year-old concern — makes Fendi's path "more complex," Mr. Oddono said.

But he said the incipient rebound within the luxury segment, coupled with LVMH's renewed commitment to the brand, boded well for Fendi.

Bernard Arnault, LVMH's chairman, has said publicly that he wants Fendi to be making "15 to 20 percent" operating profit margins. "Fendi," he said last week in an interview, "is coming back."

Some analysts, though, say they worry that Fendi is a "one trick pony" that may never come up with a successor to the Baguette, introduced in 1997.

In a sense, Fendi's success with the Baguette laid the path to the company's decline, by inciting one of the fashion industry's most vicious and, ultimately, unusual bidding wars. In November 1999, Prada teamed up with LVMH to buy 51 percent of Fendi for an estimated $545 million — considered even then a high premium for the brand.

By 2001, Prada was struggling with its own problems and sold its 25.5 percent Fendi stake to LVMH. Last spring, LVMH increased its ownership to 84.1 percent, paying representatives of the Fendi family $218.5 million for the additional 17.2 percent. That brought LVMH's total outlay to $1.1 billion for its Fendi stake. A person inside LVMH said there were currently no plans to buy out the remaining Fendi shares.

Calls to Carla Fendi, who people within LVMH say holds the remaining 15.9 percent of the company, were not returned.

Some analysts still question whether LVMH spent too much for Fendi — and wonder how the company will recoup its investment.

When the question was posed to Yves Carcelle, the chairman of Louis Vuitton and until recently the executive in charge of all of LVMH's fashion and leather goods, he shrugged.

"Did we overpay?" he said in an interview last week. "Those times were very competitive, and we did what we had to do; we didn't want anyone else to get Fendi. Now, we have to make it work."

There is much more to Fendi than pocketbooks. Fashion critics have lauded Mr. Lagerfeld's two most recent ready-to-wear collections for Fendi. For the last several years, rumors have intermittently swirled that Mr. Lagerfeld, who is also Chanel's design director, would leave or be pushed out.

But last week, LVMH executives said privately that Mr. Lagerfeld would not be leaving anytime soon — unless the designer himself decided to quit. "Arnault and Lagerfeld are close friends," one executive whispered.

For his part, Mr. Lagerfeld said, "I will stay put." Among other goals, Mr. Lagerfeld said he wanted to rebuild Fendi's famous fur line, whose sales have been crimped in recent years by antifur protests and the general decline in luxury shopping. But now, the luxury market is coming back, and, according to one executive, Fendi's fur sales are starting to rebound — everywhere except in Britain, where the haters of fur coats are still a serious obstacle to sales.

Will there be another Baguette?

"We always hope," Mr. Lagerfeld replied. "My hopes are modest. I just propose. I am not a fortune teller."

Here Come the Glamour Gumshoes

Here Come the Glamour Gumshoes
By WARREN ST. JOHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/fashion/19SNOO.html

FOR a seasoned private investigator like Richard Dietl, it was a standard case. A wealthy Greenwich, Conn., executive was desperate to find his 15-year-old daughter, who ran away to follow the band Phish. Mr. Dietl knew that the easiest way to track her down was to go undercover as a tie-dyed Phish fan. But for someone his age (52) and sartorial tastes (pinstripes with white collars and French cuffs), blending in wasn't an option.

So Mr. Dietl called upon a 24-year-old associate, Sean Lanigan. Mr. Lanigan flew to Las Vegas, where Phish was playing. He disguised himself as a hippie, hit the parking lot party scene and soon found the girl — selling peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from the back of a Volkswagen van. By nightfall, her father was on board his private jet, on his way to pick her up.

"You send in a 40-, 45-year-old retired police officer, he looks suspicious," Mr. Lanigan said. "When you see me, your first impression is not `This guy's a cop.' "

In the old days, private investigation firms were staffed mostly by former police officers supplementing their pensions with a little gumshoe work. But times, along with the investigation and security industry, have changed. Private investigators now devote themselves to corporate background checks, high-tech surveillance, retrieving deleted e-mail messages from company hard drives and, of course, the occasional old-style sleuthing, like trailing cheating spouses.

These new snoops are more likely to have liberal arts or computer science degrees than experience walking a beat. They're much more likely to pack iPods than .38 Specials. And unlike Jake Gittes, the reluctant P.I. played by Jack Nicholson in "Chinatown," who urges the suspicious wife Mrs. Mulwray to "let sleeping dogs lie," today's young sleuths comb through databases to learn the particulars of private lives with the same sense of eagerness with which they might Google their next dates or play the latest edition of Grand Theft Auto.

"It's exciting and voyeuristic to be looking into people's lives." said Amy Gray, 28, a graduate of Brown, who wrote about her three years as a private investigator in "Spygirl" (Villard). "The work intrinsically has a satisfying quality of solving a puzzle or playing a video game. There's a `getting the bad guys' kind of feeling."

In recent years the number of college students studying forensic science has boomed, in part because media portrayals of private eyes and crime solvers in shows like "CSI" and "Cold Case" have glamorized the field, especially its computer-driven technical side. Where in the past P.I.'s were portrayed as "fumbling, bumbling people,'` said Robert J. Louden, a professor of science and protection management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, "more and more they're showing digital video and the use of electronic devices, which portrays it as high-tech and exciting."

Another reason is simple economic opportunity. Although there are no statistics about employment in the risk management industry — as private investigation companies now call themselves — many firms say that in the wake of last year's corporate scandals and the threat of terrorism, the paranoia business is booming. Revenues at Kroll, a 2,300-employee company with offices around the globe, were up nearly 40 percent in 2002, to $289 million, compared with 2001. Robert Tucker, 33, who is the chairman and chief executive of T&M Protection Resources, one of New York City's largest security and investigations firms, said his company now has 800 employees, six times as many as it had in 1999.

"If you're good at it, there's an untold amount of work," he said.

Perhaps the biggest change has been in the industry itself, which has come to favor computer-savvy database wizards over the old-school door-knocking detective. Mike Pattishall, 26, a researcher at Corporate Risk International in Fairfax, Va., said that by searching the online services his company subscribes to, he can get the skinny — court records, motor vehicle information, property filings, even photographs — on almost anyone.

"Where in the past it required sending a field agent out to gather information," he said, "now 9 times out of 10 you can find it online."

A walk around the Midtown office of Beau Dietl & Associates, Mr. Dietl's firm, paints a vivid picture of this new way of sleuthing. While former police officers occupy the corner offices — law enforcement plaques on their walls, pistols on their desks — a group of people in their 20's with "Law & Order" looks sit in a row of cubicles, clicking away at computer terminals and checking résumés of potential hires of Fortune 500 companies to see, for example, if they really graduated from the schools they list.

Around town, other investigation firms have similarly youthful staffs. At BackTrack Reports, a background checking firm with offices in a Flatiron district loft, most of the staff members are in their 20's, according to the company's president, Chris Manthey, 37, and no one is older than 40. Mr. Tucker of T&M Protection said that his company employs perhaps 100 people in their 20's, mostly as researchers, to work alongside former F.B.I. agents and police officers.

At Kroll, only about 5 percent of the employees are former police officers, said Jules B. Kroll, the company chairman. The rest, he said, "are the same people who go for analyst positions at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, consulting positions at McKinsey or paralegal positions at top law firms."

At Beau Dietl & Associates, the young researchers are supervised by Frank Renaud, who has a Ph.D. in economics and whose desk is neatly stacked a foot high with color-coded case files. Mr. Renaud said he is less interested in the educational backgrounds of job candidates than in their curiosity.

"I like people who play chess and do crossword puzzles, people trained to ask questions," he said. Starting salaries at a large firm can range from $35,000 to $50,000, depending on experience and expertise. Top-notch investigators can make well into six figures.

Jennifer Elliott, 24, a researcher on Mr. Renaud's team, said that in the course of her computer searches, she had found executives at prominent companies who lied about their college educations. ("We got 'em," she said.) She has been on a couple of surveillances and has found she is good at what the industry refers to as "pretext calls" — calling people under false pretenses to get information from them.

"People will tell you anything about themselves," she said.

Ms. Elliott said there is an additional benefit to her job — telling dates what she does for a living. "I guess you could say they're impressed," she said.

A few desks over, Stephen Heskett, 27 a graduate of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy — "My formal training," he says — is working on behalf of a businessman who says he was wrongly accused of attempted murder by a jilted former spouse. Mr. Heskett is out to establish that the accuser is unstable, and he says he is well on his way.

"I don't have a gun and we never jump on cars," Mr. Heskett said when asked if the job lived up to its television billing. "The only weapons we have are laptops."

About 1 of every 10 background checks shows something negative in a person's past, said Peter Turacek, 35, a managing director at Kroll. Many times, he said, the company that asked for the background check ignores alarming information. Mr. Turacek once discovered that a subject was a "bag man" in a murder for hire, but his client was unfazed.

"They said, `It was 15 years ago,' " he said.

While the majority of P.I. work takes place on a computer, there is still the occasional need for old-school sleuthing, and even that pursuit has been made easier by technology. Mr. Lanigan, the surveillant, has a trove of electronic eavesdropping gadgets, including a pair of sunglasses with a pinhole video camera mounted in the bridge. (He also has a more traditional implement: a gun.) Mr. Lanigan has gone undercover at a nursing home as a janitor; he once caught a 78-year-old woman being unfaithful to her 80-year-old husband; he tailed a rabbi recovering from sex addiction to make sure he had not reverted to his old ways (he had not). And more than once, Mr. Lanigan has had to tell a tearful, suspicious wife that her husband is cheating. "You never like to tell anybody that their worst fears are confirmed," he said. "But it's part of the job."

Mr. Dietl said he is careful to give recruits a reality check about what they can expect if he senses they've been watching too much "CSI."

"A lot of young people are getting the idea from TV that this life is more glamorous than it really is," he said. "The majority of it is tedious work." Even surveillance can be dull, he said. "You're out there for 12 hours looking at a freakin' door."

Ship of Glass for Chelsea Waterfront

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Ship of Glass for Chelsea Waterfront
By HERBERT MUSCHAMP (NYT) 888 words
Late Edition - Final , Section E , Page 1 , Column 1
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/14/arts/design/14MUSC.html

ABSTRACT - Herbert Muschamp Critic's Notebook column assesses Frank Gehry's design for InterActive Corp's New York headquarters; holds low-rise building with articulated glass facade, to be constructed on West Side Highway opposite Chelsea Peirs sports complex, evokes grand tradition of Empire State Building and Chrysler Building but on more human scale; artist's rendering (M)

Seductive Electronic Gadgets Are Soon Forgotten

Seductive Electronic Gadgets Are Soon Forgotten
By KATIE HAFNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/15/technology/15GADG.html

Adam Lipson cannot decide which of the many gadgets he bought in the last couple of years proved most useless.

Perhaps it was the microscope that hooked up to his computer. Then again, maybe Mr. Lipson, 42, would choose the universal remote control that came with a manual as thick as a Russian novel. But that would be shortchanging the Webcam — a video camera that transfers images over the Internet — that he used once, stashed in a closet and finally threw away.

Mr. Lipson, who runs a computer security consulting company in Pearl River, N.Y., is but one of many shoppers who have bought electronic devices lately that end up stuffed into a bottom drawer, on the high shelf of a closet, or in the back of a garage. The lucky ones manage to unload them to somebody else through eBay, which is full of offers these days for "barely used" products or items still "new in box," a term that has become so common it is often shortened to "NIB."

Gadgets bought and barely used are the technology world's equivalent of exercise equipment. Often purchased in a well-intentioned bout of self-improvement, they are opened, used once or twice, then abandoned. Sometimes they never make it out of the box.

On eBay — originally established as an online flea market for selling used goods — a recent search for "like new" consumer electronics products yielded 30,000 items. While the company does not keep records allowing comparisons with earlier periods, it has detected a significant increase in such offerings.

"We definitely have seen an increase in the number of new items on the site," said Jamie Patricio, an eBay spokeswoman.

People acquire these things — hand-held personal digital assistants, flatbed scanners, compact disc copiers and a host of other objects — because they promise to make life more efficient, more fun, or, some confess, simply because they appear to help them keep up with what their "wired" friends and neighbors have.

But many such products are simply too complicated for their own good. And all too often, the buyers find that they cannot really change their lives just by acquiring something new and different.

"There's always the concept that a product we buy will make the connection between who we are and who we'd like to be," said Paco Underhill, author of "Why We Buy" (Simon & Schuster, 2000) and the forthcoming "The Call of the Mall" (Simon & Schuster, January 2004).

Jonathan Chatham, 23, a mortgage broker in San Antonio, may have carried that point to an extreme. Before a trip to Russia with a church group, he spent $3,000 on a video camera with the idea of making a documentary about "The New Russians," as he describes it, and thereby start himself on a new career as a filmmaker. But no one seemed particularly interested in providing financial backing for his project.

"I thought all I had to do was buy the camera and everyone would be throwing these opportunities at me," he said.

Like other serial acquirers, Mr. Chatham is surprisingly introspective. "There's the theoretical life you live and the actual life you live," he said. He was hoping the camera would bridge the gap between theory and reality.

Mr. Chatham blames himself, but only in part. He also blames advertisers for persuading him of the transformative powers of the latest gear.

"The way it's advertised is that if I just buy it," he said, "all these other things will fall into place in my life."

Mr. Underhill, a consultant who studies shopping habits, agreed that gadget makers depend, in part, on exploiting such impossible dreams. "Part of the problem with the consumer electronics industry," he said, "is that they're in the constant act of reinventing stuff because they're trying to sell us new stuff every season."

Gender, of course, plays a role. In many cases, Mr. Underhill said, the consumer electronics industry aims its gadgets directly at men who cannot resist the lure of buttons and screens. Yet there is no shortage of women who succumb as well.

Veronica Vichit-Vadakan, 29, a freelance film editor in Portland, Ore., is all too familiar with the problem of buying things she does not use. Her digital camera sits, as if glued in place, on a bookshelf in her bedroom. And Ms. Vichit-Vadakan's CD burner, which was supposed to allow her to make copies of music she loves for her friends, is the embodiment of a promise gone awry.

"I was hoping to get organized about backing up my files and burning CD's for friends and making copies of CD's and making copies of my software, which they say you're supposed to do," she said. "But nope, I never did any of that."

It's not all her fault. She never did get the CD burner to work on her computer. Weeks, then months passed, and she finally boxed it back up to get it off her desk. Now she is trying to sell it on Craig's List, a Web site built around classified advertisements, but so far there are no takers.

"I guess CD burners have gotten a lot faster," she said. "No one wants this one."

Consumer electronics devices often make the rounds among friends before ending up gathering dust. Mr. Lipson gave his $300 universal remote to a friend, Jeff Kimmelman. Although both men are engineers, neither of them could figure out how to use it.

When Mr. Lipson visited Mr. Kimmelman at his home in Stow, Mass., a year or so later, he spotted the device, still in the box, in the corner of a closet. "He tried to give it back to me," Mr. Lipson said, "but I wouldn't take it."

Mr. Kimmelman did the same thing with a Global Positioning System receiver he bought a couple of years ago. He used it once, to mark property lines around his house, then shoved it in a drawer. When Mr. Kimmelman told a friend, Rachel Amado, about it, she insisted he send it to her, which he did gladly.

Ms. Amado, a jewelry designer in Los Angeles who has a tendency to become lost while hiking, thought the G.P.S. receiver would help. And for the month that she used it, it did.

"I was fascinated by it," she said. "It was completely accurate. It knew where I was in the middle of nowhere. I was never going to get lost again. I was telling everybody I knew that they should buy one."

But then she stopped using it. "Every time I go on a hike I think I should take it with me and I always forget," she said.

The same thing happened with the cordless keyboard she bought. And the cordless mouse. The CD burner, too. A flat-screen monitor for her computer. "Maybe I'm just an easy sell," Ms. Amado said.

Gadgets acquired as gifts can be especially problematic. Ms. Vichit-Vadakan not only weighs her purse down with an idle Palm organizer but makes sure the battery stays charged because it was a present from her boyfriend. Carrying it around with her helps allay any guilt she might feel for never using it.

For her birthday a few years ago, Ann Kirschner, an educational consultant and long-distance runner in New York, was given an exercise gadget that was supposed to help her prepare for a coming marathon.

Hooked to her belt, she was told, it would monitor her running. The gadget could then be connected to a computer and, via an Internet connection, it would offer customized training advice.

"It sounded wonderful but the setup was byzantine," Ms. Kirschner said, emphasizing that this was a charitable description of the problems she had getting it to work. A few months passed and, feeling guilty for not using something given to her as a gift, she went to the company's Web site for further instruction.

But she was too late. The company that made the product had apparently fallen on hard times, perhaps deservedly so. "Not only did the hardware go away," she said. "The whole company went away."

Ms. Kirschner, 52, has developed a theory, which she said applied not only to herself but to most anyone buying gadgets. "If the setup is hard and you're not sure why you need it, chances are it will head to the graveyard," she said. "If you really need it, by dogged determination you'll make that thing work."

Julie Marcuse, 57, a psychoanalyst in Manhattan, has the advantage of knowing how to apply cogent psychological analysis to a behavior pattern she knows all too well.

Not long after buying a Webcam that eventually ended up back in its box, Dr. Marcuse bought a scanner. That, too, was a bust. The scanner software created a series of conflicts with other software on her computer. She gave it away.

"I just wanted it out of my house," she said.

"I think we're usually pursuing a fantasy of empowerment when we buy these things," Dr. Marcuse said.

Asked why people have trouble learning to be more wary, Dr. Marcuse referred to "an endearing optimism" on the part of consumers. "Hope springs eternal, you know."

Eternal hope could well be what Mr. Chatham suffers from. Having momentarily forgotten about his expensive misadventure with the video camera, Mr. Chatham waxed enthusiastic on the latest gadget to catch his eye. "Apple has this awesome new Webcam coming out," he said. "It's really nice. Totally awesome."