New York Times 7

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009 Copyright © 2009 The New York Times
Supplemento al numero
odierno de la Repubblica
Sped. abb. postale art. 1
legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma
LENS
The doldrums of the Great Reces-
sion has given way to the do-over
era. Sitting still and waiting it out
may mean getting left behind. In-
stead, businesses are thinking of
ways to repack-
age, rename
and revise their
products and
strategies to
make the cus-
tomer feel good
about spending
again.
“There’s a
saying: ‘When times are good,
advertise. When times are tough,
advertise more,’ ” Dan Beem, presi-
dent at Cold Stone Creamery, an ice-
cream chain based in Arizona, told
The Times’s Stuart Elliott.
The recession has become the
mother of reinvention. And what
better time than now to revamp
with some plastic surgery? Maybe
those sagging jowls are as much of
a weight as a lackluster retirement
account. But a face-lift is no longer
just a face-lift. It’s now branded as
the Lifestyle Lift or the QuickLift,
wrote The Times’s Catherine Saint
Louis. Patients pick an advertised
operation, and are then referred by
a national organization to a doctor
who will perform the procedure,
wrote Ms. Saint Louis.
“What’s new is this is plastic sur-
gery being marketed to the public
as a widget,” or product, Dr. Brian
Regan, a plastic surgeon in San
Diego, told Ms. Saint Louis. “People
are buying, so buyer beware.”
The retail industry is also get-
ting a face-lift. High-end stores like
Neiman Marcus and Saks will offer
more midpriced merchandise, wrote
The Times’s Stephanie Rosenbloom.
J.C. Penney is installing self-service
computers to help customers
browse. And Macy’s stores will be
stocking merchandise that custom-
ers request and getting rid of items
they complain about.
“I think in this economy we’re
seeing a lot more of an open dia-
logue with the retailers than we had
in the past,” Adele Arkin, who runs
an exercise-and-socialize group in
New York that gathers in shopping
malls, told Ms. Rosenbloom.
Companies now want to show
that they are on the same level as
the customer and are approach-
able, which means names and logos
are changing.
“Logos have become less official-
looking and more conversational,”
Patti Williams a professor of mar-
keting at the University of Pennsyl-
vania’s Wharton School, told The
Times’s Bill Marsh. “They’re not
yelling. They’re inviting. They’re
more neighborly.”
Bold, block capital letters are
replaced by lower case to soften the
voice of corporate authority. Sprigs,
bursts and friendly flourishes of
logos like Kraft Foods and Amazon.
com create logos that smile, Mr.
Marsh wrote. And happier colors
abound: electric blue, yellow, red,
purple, orange and green.
All these efforts are trying to
get the consumer to feel better
about buying more stuff. And there
is plenty of new stuff: food, cars,
drugs and soap.
But many marketers are bringing
out new products under the ban-
ner of brands that consumers are
already familiar with, wrote Mr.
Elliott. After all, companies don’t
want to rebrand themselves out
of existence. Häagen-Dazs Five,
an ice cream made of five natural
ingredients (basically the same as
the ingredients in its regular ice
cream), sells under its brand of su-
perpremium desserts. The product
might be new, or rather, new-ish, yet
it’s already familiar.
Aliza Freud, chief executive at
She-Speaks, which helped the Häa-
gen-Dazs Five campaign, told Mr.
Elliott: “This is a very good time for
brands to get out there in new and
different ways.”
Even if it’s about selling the same
old product.
O
N JULY 20, 1969, at 9:56:20 p.m. at
NASA headquarters in Houston,
Texas, Neil A. Armstrong stepped
from the ladder of Apollo 11’s lunar mod-
ule to the surface of the
Moon. His first words:
“That’s one small step for
man, one giant leap for
mankind.” He presumably
meant “one small step for
a man,” but the “a” was
lost in the static, or perhaps he simply for-
got it in his understandable excitement.
Mr. Armstrong tested the footing and
determined that he could move about eas-
ily in his bulky white spacesuit and heavy
backpack while under the influence of
lunar gravity, which makes everything
weigh one-sixth of what it weighs on
Earth. After 19 minutes, he was joined
outside by another astronaut, Edwin E.
Aldrin Jr. The two immediately set up a
TV camera away from the spacecraft to
give people back home a broader view of
the lunar landscape and their operations.
Years later, the third crew member,
Michael Collins, who remained in lunar
orbit in Apollo 11’s command module while
Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin walked on
the moon, would recall the world tour the
astronauts took after the mission. He was
warmed by their reception, not so much by
the adulation as the expressions of shared
accomplishment. People they met felt they
had participated in the landing, too.
In the 2007 documentary film “In the
Shadow of the Moon,” Mr. Collins said:
“People, instead of saying, ‘Well, you
Americans did it,’ everywhere they said:
‘We did it!’ We, humankind, we, the hu-
man race, we, people did it!”
It occurred to me, as I covered the land-
ing for The Times at Mission Control in
Houston, that if Christopher Columbus
or Captain James Cook were alive, they
might be less astonished by two men land-
ing on the Moon than by the millions of
people, worldwide, watching every step of
the walk as it happened. Exploring is old,
but instantaneous telecommunications is
new and marvelous.
In just 1.3 seconds, the time it takes for
radio waves to travel the 383,000 kilome-
ters from Moon to Earth, each step by
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NASA, EXCEPT TOP RIGHT
Astronauts from the United States’ Apollo 11 mission took a walk on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquillity in 1969 and set up a television camera so millions around the world could watch.
JOHN NOBLE
WILFORD
ESSAY
From Bailouts to Burnishing
III
VIII
VI
WORLD TRENDS
American recruits
join jihad groups.
ARTS & STYLES
Toyo Ito’s quest to
find balance.
MONEY & BUSINESS
Oil’s volatile swings
hobble industry.
Our Moon
For comments, write to
[email protected].
Con tin ued on Page IV
40 Years Ago, the World Watched Humans Set Foot on Lunar Soil
Repubblica NewYork
THE NEW YORK TIMES IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY IN THE FOLLOWING NEWSPAPERS: CLARÍN, ARGENTINA G DER STANDARD, AUSTRIA G LA RAZÓN, BOLIVIA G FOLHA, BRAZIL G LA SEGUNDA, CHILE G EL ESPECTADOR, COLOMBIA
LISTIN DIARIO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC G LE MONDE, FRANCE G 24 SAATI, GEORGIA G SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, GERMANY G ELEFTHEROTYPIA, GREECE G PRENSA LIBRE, GUATEMALA G THE ASIAN AGE, INDIA
LAREPUBBLICA, ITALY GASAHI SHIMBUN, JAPAN GSUNDAYNATION, KENYA GKOHA DITORE, KOSOVO GEL NORTE, MURAL AND REFORMA, MEXICO GLAPRENSA, PANAMA GEXPRESO, PERU GMANILA BULLETIN, PHILIPPINES
ROMANIA LIBERA, ROMANIA GDELO, SLOVENIA GEL PAÍS, SPAIN GUNITED DAILY NEWS, TAIWAN GSUNDAYMONITOR, UGANDA GTHE OBSERVER, UNITED KINGDOM GTHE KOREA TIMES, U.S. GNOVOYE RUSSKOYE SLOVO, U.S.
Direttore responsabile: Ezio Mauro
Vicedirettori: Mauro Bene,
Gregorio Botta, Dario Cresto-Dina,
Massimo Giannini, Angelo Rinaldi
Caporedattore centrale: Fabio Bogo
Caporedattore vicario:
Massimo Vincenzi
Gruppo Editoriale l’Espresso S.p.A.
•
Presidente: Carlo De Benedetti
Amministratore delegato:
Monica Mondardini
Divisione la Repubblica
via Cristoforo Colombo 90 - 00147 Roma
Direttore generale: Carlo Ottino
Responsabile trattamento dati
(d. lgs. 30/6/2003 n. 196): Ezio Mauro
Reg. Trib. di Roma n. 16064 del
13/10/1975
Tipografia: Rotocolor,
v. C. Colombo 90 RM
Stampa: Rotocolor, v. C. Cavallari
186/192 Roma; Rotonord, v. N. Sauro
15 - Paderno Dugnano MI ; Finegil
Editoriale c/o Citem Soc. Coop. arl,
v. G.F. Lucchini - Mantova
Pubblicità: A. Manzoni & C.,
via Nervesa 21 - Milano - 02.57494801
•
Supplemento a cura di: Alix Van Buren,
Francesco Malgaroli
OPI NI ON & COMME NTARY
II MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009
Tangled Trade Talks
The World Strategy for Iran
When George Washington was a young man, he copied
out a list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in
Company and Conversation.” Some of the rules in his list
dealt with the niceties of going to a dinner party or meet-
ing somebody on the street.
“Lean not upon anyone,” was one of the rules. “Read no
letter, books or papers in company,” was another. “If any
one come to speak to you while you are sitting, stand up,”
was a third.
But, as the biographer Richard Brookhiser has noted,
these rules were not just etiquette tips. They were de-
signed to improve inner morals by shaping the outward
man. Washington took them very seriously. He worked
hard to follow them. Throughout his life, he remained
acutely conscious of his own rectitude.
In so doing, he turned himself into a new kind of hero.
As the historian Gordon Wood has written, “Washington
became a great man and was acclaimed as a classical he-
ro because of the way he conducted himself during times
of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off
from other men.”
Washington absorbed, and later came to personify what
you might call the dignity code. The code was based on the
same premise as the nation’s Constitution — that human
beings are flawed creatures who live in constant peril of
falling into disasters caused by their own passions. Artifi-
cial systems have to balance and restrain their desires.
The dignity code commanded its followers to be disin-
terested — to put national interests above personal inter-
ests. It commanded its followers to be reticent — to never
degrade intimate emotions by parading them in public.
It also commanded its followers to be dispassionate — to
distrust rashness and political enthusiasm.
Remnants of the dignity code lasted for decades. For
most of American history, politicians did not publicly cam-
paign for president. It was thought that the act of publicly
promoting oneself was ruinously corrupting. For most of
American history, memoirists passed over the intimacies
of private life. Even in the 19th century, people were ap-
palled that journalists might pollute a wedding by cover-
ing it in the press.
Today, Americans still lavishly admire people who
are naturally dignified, whether they are in sports (Joe
DiMaggio and Tom Landry), entertainment (Lauren
Bacall and Tom Hanks) or politics (Ronald Reagan and
Martin Luther King Jr.).
But the dignity code itself has been completely obliter-
ated.
We can all list the causes of its demise. First, there is
capitalism. We are all encouraged to become managers
of our own brand, to self-promot e and broadcast our own
talents. Second, there is the cult of naturalism. We are all
encouraged to to liberate our own feelings. Third, there
is charismatic evangelism with its penchant for public
confession. Fourth, there is radical egalitarianism and its
hostility to aristocratic manners.
The old dignity code has not survived modern life.
Every week there are new scandals featuring people
who simply do not know how to act. For the first few weeks
of summer, three stories have dominated public conversa-
tion, and each one exemplifies a branch of indignity.
First, there was the press conference of Mark Sanford,
the Republican governor of South Carolina. Here was a
guy utterly lacking in any sense of reticence, who was
given to rambling self-exposure even in his moment of
disgrace. Then there was the death of Michael Jackson
and the discussion of his life. Here was a guy who was ap-
parently untouched by any pressure to live according to
the rules and restraints of adulthood. Then there was Sar-
ah Palin’s press conference. Here was a woman who as-
pires to a high public role but is unfamiliar with the traits
of equipoise and constancy, the sources of authority and
trust. In each of these events, one sees people who simply
have no social norms to guide them as they try to navigate
the currents of their own passions.
Americans still admire dignity. But the word has be-
come unmoored from any larger ethical system.
But it’s not right to end on a note of cultural pessimism
because there is the fact of President Obama. Whatever
policy differences people may have with him, we can all
agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and traits
associated with dignity. The cultural effects of his presi-
dency are not yet clear, but they may surpass his policy
impact. He may revitalize the concept of dignity for a
new generation and embody a new set of rules for self-
mastery.
There are few things that could do
more damage to the already battered
global economy than an old-fashioned
trade war. So we have been increas-
ingly worried by the protectionist
rhetoric and policies being espoused
by politicians across the globe.
Against this bleak backdrop, it is
especially good news that the world’s
leading developed and developing na-
tions have committed to complete a
stalled global trade agreement (the
so-called Doha Round) by next year.
For that to happen, leaders — espe-
cially in the United States, Europe,
India, China and Brazil — are going to
have to muster real sense and political
courage.
The World Trade Organization fore-
casts that exports from developed
countries will fall 14 percent this year,
while exports from developing nations
will contract 7 percent. The collapse is
particularly damaging for poor coun-
tries that are heavily dependent on
exports. But it is also intensifying the
downturn in many rich countries. Re-
viving trade is essential for recovery.
The talks, begun in Doha, Qatar,
in 2001, had long been in limbo. They
broke down last year after big devel-
oping countries — China and India, in
particular — rejected demands from
the wealthy nations that they lower
tariffs on imports of goods and open
service sectors to more competition.
But there are signs that the collapse
in trade have awoken many leaders to
the advantages of strong internation-
al rules to keep trade channels open.
This is particularly true of China,
which has suddenly found its exports
on the receiving end of tariff increases
and antidumping suits.
There is no guarantee that a deal
can be pulled off. President Obama
will have to provide lots of leadership
to convince developing countries to
make serious offers on market access,
and to convince reluctant members of
the United States Congress that they
will have to make concessions, too.
Big developing countries have
been reluctant to reduce tariff ceil-
ings, allowing themselves the option
to increase their tariffs at any mo-
ment. They have been unwilling to
open service sectors, like accounting
or electricity generation, to foreign
competition. They insist on being able
to increase their barriers to protect
farmers against sharp increases in
food imports from cheaper producers
abroad. They must be willing to make
concessions on these points.
The rich West will also have to give
more. The United States and Europe
must slash agricultural subsidies
more aggressively and refrain from
adding more. The United States will
have to reduce its own agricultural
barriers and might have to offer more
visas to professionals from countries
like India.
The Doha Round was originally con-
ceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks
as a way to encourage development
in the poorest countries by providing
them access to export markets in the
rich world. This is still its goal.
The Group of 8 industrialized na-
tions took an important step on Thurs-
day by pledging to invest $20 billion
over three years to bolster agricultural
production in some of the world’s poor-
est countries. We were made nervous
by reports on Friday that suggested
some contributors might already be
rethinking their generosity.
So far, Mr. Obama has been reluctant
to spend any political capital at home
on trade. But it is important for the
president to follow through. The talks
opened in Doha were supposed to help
the world’s poorest countries. They
have now acquired an even broader
purpose: reviving global cooperation
and the global economy.
E D I T O R I A L S O F T HE T I ME S
The world’s wealthy nations have
given Iran until late September to
agree to restraints on its nuclear pro-
gram. If there is no progress, President
Nicolas Sarkozy of France declared at
this week’s Group of 8 summit, “we
will have to take decisions” on impos-
ing tougher sanctions.
We hope Mr. Sarkozy and the other
G-8 leaders mean it. For seven years,
the world powers have pursued a feck-
less strategy that failed to halt Iran’s
efforts to master nuclear fuel produc-
tion. More deadlines, without any real
follow-through, will send a dangerous
message to nuclear wannabes who al-
ready see Iran and North Korea defy-
ing repeated demands from the United
DAVID BROOKS
In Search of Dignity
People always ask: What can I do to make a differ-
ence?
So many people in poor countries desperately need as-
sistance. So many people in rich countries would like to
help but fear their donations would line the pocket of a cor-
rupt official or be lost in an aid bureaucracy. The result is a
short circuit, leaving both sides unfulfilled.
That’s where Scott Harrison comes in.
Five years ago, Mr. Harrison was a nightclub promoter
in Manhattan who spent his nights surrounded by friends
in a blur of alcohol, cocaine and marijuana. He lived in a
luxurious apartment and drove a BMW — but then on a
vacation in South America he underwent a spiritual crisis.
“I realized I was the most selfish, sycophantic and mis-
erable human being,” he recalled. “I was the worst person
I knew.”
Mr. Harrison, now 33, found an aid organization that
would accept him as a volunteer photographer — if he paid
$500 a month to cover expenses. And so he did. The orga-
nization was Mercy Ships, a Christian aid group that per-
forms surgeries in poor countries with volunteer doctors.
“The first person I photographed was a 14-year-old boy
named Alfred, choking on a four-pound benign tumor in
his mouth, filling up his whole mouth,” Mr. Harrison re-
called. “He was suffocating on his own face. I just went
into the corner and sobbed.”
A few weeks later, Mr. Harrison took Alfred — with
the tumor now removed — back to his village in the West
African country of Benin. “I saw everybody celebrating,
because a few doctors had given up their vacation time,”
he said.
Mercy Ships transformed Mr. Harrison as much as it
did Alfred. Mr. Harrison returned to New York two years
later with a plan: he would form a charity to provide clean
water to save lives in poor countries.
Armed with nothing but a natural gift for promotion,
Mr. Harrison started his group, called charity: water —
and it has been stunningly successful. In three years, he
says, his group has raised $10 million from 50,000 individ-
ual donors, providing clean water to nearly one million
people in Africa and Asia.
The organization now has 11 full-time employees, al-
most twice as many unpaid interns, and more than half
a million followers on Twitter (the United Nations has
3,000). New York City buses were plastered with free ban-
ners promoting his message, and Saks Fifth Avenue gave
up its store windows to spread Mr. Harrison’s gospel.
American schools are signing up to raise money.
“Scott is an important marketing machine, lifting one
of the most critical issues of our time in a way that is sexy
and incredibly compelling — that’s his gift,” said Jacque-
line Novogratz, head of the Acumen Fund, which invests
in poor countries to overcome poverty.
Mr. Harrison doesn’t actually do the tough aid work. He
partners with humanitarian organizations and pays them
to dig wells. In effect, he’s a fund-raiser and marketer —
often the most difficult piece of the aid puzzle.
So what’s his secret? Mr. Harrison’s success seems to
depend on three precepts:
First, ensure that every penny from new donors will go
to projects in the field. He accomplishes this by cajoling
his 500 most committed donors to cover all administra-
tive costs.
Second, show donors the specific impact of their contri-
butions. Mr. Harrison grants naming rights to wells. He
posts photos and G.P.S. coordinates so donors can look up
their wells on Google Earth. And in September, Mr. Har-
rison is going to roll out a new Web site that will match
even the smallest donation to a particular project that can
be tracked online.
Third, leap into new media and social networks. This
spring, charity: water raised $250,000 through a “Twes-
tival” — a series of meetings among followers on Twitter.
Last year, it raised $965,000 by asking people with Sep-
tember birthdays to forgo presents and instead solicit
cash to build wells in Ethiopia. The campaign went viral
on the Web, partly because Mr. Harrison invests in clever,
often sassy videos.
One popular video shows well-heeled Manhattanites
stepping out of their luxury buildings and lining up to fill
jerrycans with dirty water from a lake in Central Park.
We watch a mother offer the murky water to her children
— and the upbeat message is: you can help ensure that
other people don’t have do that, either.
Mr. Harrison’s underlying idea is that giving should
be an infectious pleasure at the capacity to bring about
change.
“Guilt has never been part of it,” he said. “It’s excite-
ment instead, presenting people with an opportunity —
‘you have an amazing chance to build a well!’ ”
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Clean, Sexy Water
The Intelligence column will return next week.
Nations Security Council.
We don’t know if there is any mix
of incentives or sanctions that would
work. Certainly President George W.
Bush, for all his tough talk and bully-
ing ways, never tried to find it.
We also know that if any strategy
has a serious chance of success, it must
be fully embraced not only by the Eu-
ropeans but also by Russia and China.
So it was disheartening to hear Rus-
sian officials boasting about watering
down the G-8 statement on Iran.
Dealing with Tehran is even harder
after last month’s bogus presidential
election sparked weeks of protest and
repression. President Obama and the
other G-8 leaders were right to deplore
the violence. But Mr. Obama is also
right to stay open to engagement, even
if it’s a long shot.
Iran’s political tug of war is far from
over. There are signs that Mr. Obama’s
offer of direct talks may have helped
deepen fissures inside the political
establishment. The bad news is that
American hard-liners are still encour-
aging Israeli hard-liners to fantasize
about a military strike.
President Obama told CNN that
Washington has not given Israel a
“green light” to attack. He needs to
make sure the Israelis believe him. A
strike would only feed Iran’s nuclear
appetite and drive its program even
further underground.
The United States must make clear
to Iran the advantages of coming in
from the cold. It must work to craft a
tough package of sanctions that could
make Iran’s clerical and military elite
rethink their destructive plans. Ten
weeks is not a lot of time. And Iran’s
program is moving ahead.
Repubblica NewYork
WOR L D T RE NDS
MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009 III
Gulf of Aden
Indian
Ocean
1991 A civil war leads
to the collapse of
Somalia’s last
functioning
government.
2006 An Islamist
group controls
Somalia for six months
until Ethiopian forces,
backed by the U.S.,
invade. The event
prompts a political
awakening among
young Somalis around
the world.
2007 The first wave of
Minneapolis residents
travel to Somalia and
join the Shabaab
militia.
2009 Ethiopians
withdraw, and the civil
war intensifies.
THE NEW YORK TIMES Source: UNHCR Somalia
Note: Numbers collected from April to June. Regional boundaries in Somalia are disputed.
20,000
150,000
1,000
SOMAL I A
ETHIOPIA
42,800
SOMALILAND PUNTLAND
KENYA
297,400
DJIBOUTI
YEMEN
142,000
Bossaso
The civil war
in Somalia has
displaced nearly
two million people,
most in the last
three years.
Shirwa
Ahmed’s
suicide attack
Mogadishu,
Burhan
Hassan was
killed here
The Shabaab, a
radical Muslim
militia, controls
almost the entire
south and
central portions
of Somalia.
Major events
REFUGEES
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
MINNEAPOLIS — For a group of students who
often met at the Carlson School of Management
on the University of Minnesota campus, the motto
“Nowhere but here” seemed especially fitting.
They had fled Somalia as small boys, escap-
ing a catastrophic civil war. They came of age as
refugees in Minneapolis, becoming naturalized
United States citizens and embracing basketball
and school dances, hip-hop and shopping malls.
By the time they reached college, their dreams
seemed within grasp: one planned to become a
doctor; another, an entrepreneur.
But last year, in a study room at Carlson, the
men turned their energies to a different enter-
prise.
“Why are we sitting around in America, doing
nothing for our people?” one of the men, Moham-
oud Hassan, a skinny, 23-year-old engineering
major, pressed his friends.
In November, Mr. Hassan and two other stu-
dents dropped out of college and left for Somalia.
Word soon spread that they had joined the Sha-
baab, a militant Islamist group aligned with Al
Qaeda that is fighting to overthrow the fragile
Somali government.
The students are among more than 20 young
Americans who are the focus of what may be the
most significant domestic terrorism investiga-
tion since 9/11. One of the men, Shirwa Ahmed,
blew himself up in Somalia in October, becoming
the first known American suicide bomber. On
July 13, authorities in Minneapolis unsealed an
indictment that charges Salah Osman Ahmed
and Abdifatah Yusuf Isse with providing mate-
rial support for terrorism. And two other Soma-
li-American men suspected of fighting with the
Shabaab were shot dead July 10 in a battle in the
Somali capital.
An examination by The New York Times re-
veals how a far-flung jihadist movement found a
foothold in America’s heartland. Most of the men
are former Somali refugees who left the Twin
Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in two waves,
starting in late 2007. While religious devotion may
have predisposed them to sympathize with the
Islamist cause, it took a major geopolitical event
— the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006 — to
spur them to join what they saw as a legitimate
resistance movement, said friends of the men.
Generation of Refugees
In the first wave of Somalis who left were men
whose uprooted lives resembled those of immi-
grants in Europe who have joined the jihad. They
faced barriers of race and class, religion and lan-
guage. Mr. Ahmed, the 26-year-old suicide bomb-
er, struggled at community colleges before drop-
ping out. His friend Zakaria Maruf, 30, fell in with
a violent street gang and later stocked shelves at
a Wal-Mart.
If failure had shadowed this first group of men,
the young Minnesotans who followed them to So-
malia were succeeding in America. Mr. Hassan,
the engineering student, was a rising star in his
college community. Another of the men was a pre-
medical student who had once set his sights on an
internship at the prestigious Mayo Clinic.
A ‘Crisis of Belonging’
At Roosevelt High School, Shirwa Ahmed was
a quick study. He memorized hip-hop lyrics. He
practiced on neighborhood basketball courts.
He took note of the clothing and vernacular of his
African-American classmates, emulating what
he could.
Much as he tried, he failed to fit in.
You’re not black, his peers taunted. Go back to
Africa.
Somali and African-American students clashed
frequently at the school. “How can they be mad at
me for looking like them?” Mr. Ahmed’s friend Ni-
cole Hartford recalled him saying. “We’re from
the same place.”
Even as Mr. Ahmed met rejection at school,
he faced disapproval from relatives, who com-
plained he was mixing with “ghetto people,” Ms.
Hartford recalled. It was a classic conundrum for
young Somalis: how to be one thing at school and
another at home.
News developments from Somalia, followed ob-
sessively by the adults, held little interest among
teenagers. Yet young men like Mr. Ahmed re-
mained tethered to Somalia by the remittances
they were pressed to send. After school every day,
he joined a stream of teenagers headed for the
airport, where he pushed passengers in wheel-
chairs. He sent half of his income to Somalia, to
“relatives we don’t even know,” his friend Nimco
Ahmed said.
After graduating from high school in 2000, Mr.
Ahmed seemed to flounder, taking community
college classes while working odd jobs, friends
said. But he had done better than many peers,
who turned to crime and gangs.
At the root of the problem was a “crisis of be-
longing,” said Mohamud Galony, a science tutor
who was friends with Mr. Ahmed and is the uncle
of another boy who left. Young Somalis had been
raised to honor their families’ tribes, yet felt dis-
connected from them. “They want to belong, but
who do they belong to?” Galony, 23, said.
The first wave of men to leave for Somalia were
in their 20s and 30s and had been fixtures at the
Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, the larg-
est Somali mosque in Minneapolis. “All this talk of
the movement must stop,” the imam, Sheikh Ab-
dirahman Sheikh Omar Ahmed, recalled telling
a crowd at the mosque. “Focus on your life here. If
you become a doctor or an engineer, you can help
your country. Over there you will be a dead body
on the street.”
In the audience were several young men who
also would soon disappear.
An Inquiry Intensifies
“Never did I imagine that I would step into this
here, in the Midwest,” said Ralph S. Boelter, a
square-jawed Wisconsin native who took over
the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Minneapo-
lis office in early 2007.
While federal investigators had tracked the
movements of American recruits to the Shabaab
since at least early 2008, the F.B.I.’s case accel-
erated after Shirwa Ahmed’s suicide attack that
fall.
Investigators in Minneapolis approached So-
malis on the street, in their homes, at the Abuba-
kar mosque and on the University of Minnesota
campus. Community leaders say that more than
50 people were subpoenaed to appear before a
federal grand jury in Minneapolis and another
jury was convened in San Diego. In April, F.B.I.
agents raided three Somali money-wiring busi-
nesses in Minneapolis. By then, the investigation
had expanded to smaller Somali communities
around the country.
Young Somali Immigrants in America Answer a Call to Jihad
Ramla Bile contributed reporting from Minne-
apolis and Margot Williams from New York.
MUSTAFA ABDI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
NICOLE BENGIVENO/THE NEW YORK TIMES
There are indications that three Twin Cities
men have returned, possibly after defecting from
the Shabaab. A friend of the men still in Somalia
said they had no thought of attacking America.
“Why would I do that?” the friend recalled the
former pre-medical student, Adbisalan Ali, say-
ing on the phone last spring. “My mom could be
walking down the street.”
The central question driving the F.B.I. inves-
tigation is whether American citizens have pro-
vided material support to the Shabaab, either in
the form of personnel or money.
Meanwhile, some Somali parents in the Twin
Cities have taken to hiding their sons’ passports.
The tension in the community has turned in-
ward at times, with some blaming the Minneapo-
lis mosque for “brainwashing” the young men
and possibly raising money for Islamist groups
in Somalia.
The mosque’s leaders denied this, in turn ac-
cusing families of shirking responsibility for
their children. “That’s their obligation, to know
where their kids are going,” said Farhan Hurre,
the mosque’s executive director.
For many older Somalis in Minnesota, the deep-
est mystery is why so many young refugees would
risk their lives and futures to return to a country
that their parents struggled so hard to leave.
Some Somali-
Americans abandoned
their inner-city
neighborhood in
Minneapolis,
above, to fight in
Somalia. Shabaab
fighters participate
in a drill near
Mogadishu.
Repubblica NewYork
WOR L D T RE NDS
IV MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009
A Flight to the Moon Changed Our View of the Earth
ONLINE: AN HISTORIC JOURNEY
Full coverage, including interactive
features, photos and video:
nytimes.com/space
From Page I
Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin
was seen, and their voices heard,
throughout the world they had for the
time being left behind. In contrast to
exploration’s previous landfalls, the
whole world shared in this moment.
During their 2-hour, 21-minute
Moon walk, the astronauts planted
an American flag, deployed three
scientific instruments for collecting
data in the months after their
departure, and picked up samples of
rock and soil.
Mr. Aldrin, at one point, described
the bounding kangaroo hops of their
movements in the low lunar gravity.
“Sometimes it takes about two or
three paces to make sure that your
feet are underneath you,” he said.
“And about two or three, maybe four,
easy paces can bring you to a fairly
smooth stop.”
The astronauts paused for a tele-
phone call from the White House.
“Because of what you have done,”
President Richard M. Nixon told them,
“the heavens have become a part of
man’s world.”
The year before the first landing, an
earlier mission in the lunar program
had set out to circumnavigate the
Moon for the first time. The flight of
Apollo 8 came at the end of one of the
most tumultuous years in American
history. The country in 1968 was di-
vided and demoralized.
Opposition to the Vietnam War had
forced President Lyndon B. Johnson
to withdraw from a run for another
term. The Reverend Dr. Martin Lu-
ther King Jr. fell dead in Memphis,
Tennessee, from an assassin’s bullet,
a tragedy that incited a riot of arson
and looting in scores of cities. The
mourning and fury had hardly sub-
sided when Robert F. Kennedy was
cut down by another assassin’s bullet,
in Los Angeles.
No one in power, as I recall, seri-
ously advocated canceling or defer-
ring the Apollo mission. Yet amid a
shooting war abroad and bitter unrest
at home, going to the Moon slipped
lower in the public’s order of priori-
ties. It dismayed me to think that in
this climate, the first human voyages
to the Moon might wind up as irrel-
evancies. Selfishly, I wanted the story
to be as big and inspiring of awe as
I had counted on when I took the as-
signment. I wanted the same country
that had decided to go to the Moon to
be relieved and enthralled when at
last we succeeded.
Earthrise, 1968
Apollo 8 proved to be an inspiration
at this crucial time. The astronauts
— Frank Borman, James A. Lovell Jr.
and William A. Anders — flew to the
Moon and circled it 10 times in orbits
within 100 kilometers of the lifeless
surface. Their television camera
recorded the gray plains and wide
craters, one scene after another of ev-
erlasting desolation.
On the fourth orbit, as Apollo
emerged from behind the Moon, Mr.
Borman, the commander, exclaimed:
“Oh, my God! Look at that picture
over there! Here’s the Earth coming
up. Wow, that is pretty!” The astro-
nauts gasped at the sight of Earth, a
blue and white orb sparkling in the
blackness of space, in contrast to the
dead lunar surface in the foreground.
The sight moved the poet Archibald
MacLeish to write in The Times: “To
see the Earth as it truly is, small and
blue and beautiful in that eternal
silence where it floats, is to see our-
selves as riders on the Earth together,
brothers on that bright loveliness in
the eternal cold — brothers who know
now they are truly brothers.”
NASA later released the pictures
the astronauts had taken of “Earth-
rise.” These were even more inspiring
and humbling, the mission’s prized
keepsake. Time magazine closed out
the troubled year with the Earthrise
photograph on its cover, accompanied
by a one-word caption, “Dawn.”
In a 2008 book, “Earthrise: How
Man First Saw the Earth,” Robert
Poole contends that the picture was
the spiritual nascence of the environ-
mental movement, writing that “it is
possible to see that Earthrise marked
the tipping point, the moment when
the sense of the space age flipped
from what it meant for space to what it
means for Earth.”
Another Apollo 8 surprise was in
store. Late on Christmas Eve 1968, on
one of the final orbits, Mr. Anders an-
nounced, “The crew of Apollo 8 have a
message that we would like to send to
you.” While a camera focused on the
Moon outside the spacecraft window,
Mr. Anders read the opening words
of the creation story from the Book of
Genesis.
“In the beginning God created the
heaven and the Earth,” he began.
“And the Earth was without form,
and void; and darkness was upon the
face of the deep.” Mr. Lovell then took
over with the verse beginning: “And
God called the light day, and the dark-
ness he called night.” Mr. Borman
closed the reading: “And God called
the dry land Earth; and the gathering
together of the waters called He Seas;
and God saw that it was good.”
The Genesis Flight
At the conclusion, a hushed audi-
ence throughout the lands of Earth
heard Mr. Borman sign off from the
Moon: “And from the crew of Apollo
8 we close with good night, good luck,
a Merry Christmas and God bless all
of you — all of you on the good Earth.”
Today, Apollo 8 is still spoken of as the
Genesis flight.
The inclusiveness of these experi-
ences was remarkable, given the
space race’s origins in an atmosphere
of fear and belligerence. It all started
with the Sputnik alarm in 1957, when
the Soviet Union launched the first
spacecraft, giving rise to invigorated
United States efforts in science and
technology. It was followed by Presi-
dent John F. Kennedy’s challenge to
the nation in 1961 to put astronauts on
the Moon by the end of the decade.
Looking back, three of the nine
Apollo lunar missions stand out from
the others as especially emotional
experiences.
Apollo 11 made history. Kennedy’s
bold commitment was fulfilled, and
those alive then have never forgotten
where they were and their feelings
when humans first walked on the
Moon. Apollo 13 was an epic suspense
unfolding in real time to a global audi-
ence. Three astronauts went forth,
met disaster, faced death and barely
limped back to the safety of home.
And Apollo 8, as the first flight of
humans beyond Earth’s low orbital
confines, restored momentum and
magnitude to the adventure of reach-
ing for the Moon.
Mr. Collins, who was the capsule
communicator in Mission Control
for Apollo 8, said that the essence of
that flight was about leaving, and
that Apollo 11’s was about arriving.
“As you look back 100 years from now,
which is more important, the idea
that people left their home planet or
the idea that people arrived at their
nearby satellite?” he asked himself.
“I’m not sure, but I think probably you
would say Apollo 8 was of more sig-
nificance than Apollo 11, even though
today we regard Apollo 11 as being the
showpiece and zenith of the Apollo
program, rightly so.”
The Launching
In memory, after all this time,
Apollo 11 resists relegation to the past
tense. In the wee hours of July 16, 1969,
the summer air of the Florida coast is
warm and still as we drive toward a
light in the distance. Its preternatu-
ral glow suffuses the sky ahead but,
strangely, leaves the land where we
are in natural darkness.
After the first checkpoint, where
guards at Kennedy Space Center
inspect our badges and car pass, the
source of the light comes into view.
The sight is magnetic, drawing us on.
Strong xenon beams converge on Pad
39A, highlighting the mighty Saturn 5
rocket as it is being fueled.
A few more kilometers, another
checkpoint, and Doug Dederer, a free-
lancer for The Times, and I approach
the Vehicle Assembly Building, a
mammoth presence rising above the
flat terrain of sand, palmetto and la-
goons stretching to the Atlantic.
Along an embankment stretches a
line of trailers for the larger news or-
ganizations and imposing studios for
the three major television networks.
At The Times’s trailer, Doug and I un-
load the car. We switch on the air-con-
ditioner and fill the refrigerator with
sandwiches and cans of soda. We hook
up small TV sets and a telephone, and
spread the spacecraft manuals and
press kits on a desk. I stretch out on
the floor to catch some sleep.
In the early light of dawn, the three
Apollo 11 astronauts take the drive
from their quarters to the launching
pad. Everything is on schedule for a
liftoff at 9:32 a.m.
Precisely on schedule, Jack King,
the “voice of Apollo,” intones the final
countdown. 5-4-3. Ignition. Orange
flame and dark smoke erupt from
huge nozzles at the base of the Saturn
5. The rocket hesitates, held down by
heavy steel arms. 2-1, King continues.
“We have liftoff.”
Once at full thrust, and unbound,
the 3,463-metric-ton spaceship
strains to overcome gravity, and for a
heart-stopping second or two appears
to be losing the fight. Then, ever so
slowly, it rises and clears the tower.
Only now do the staccato thunder-
claps from the engines reach the press
site, confirming once again that sound
travels more slowly than light. The
blasts beat on your chest and shake
the ground you stand on. The experi-
ence is visceral, the Saturn moving
earth and smacking us with good-
byes. The spacefarers are off over the
ocean, fire and vapor trailing behind,
on their way to the Moon.
Apollo’s Legacy
Apollo 11 effectively ended the space
race. The Russians conceded as much
by their subsequent space endeavors.
Handicapped by failures in testing
their own heavy-lift rocket, they never
attempted a human flight to the Moon
and turned instead to long-duration
flights in low orbit.
American astronauts made six
more journeys to the Moon, all suc-
cesses, excepting Apollo 13. But public
interest was flagging. A battlehad
been won, people seemed to feel, so
bring the boys home.
By the end of 1972, the last of the 12
men to walk on the Moon packed up
and returned home. The uncertain
future for human spaceflight muted
the celebrations at the space center
in Houston. At the conclusion of that
flight, Apollo 17, I solicited historians’
assessment of the significance of these
early years in space. Arthur M. Schle-
singer Jr. predicted that in 500 years,
the 20th century would probably be
remembered mainly for humanity’s
ventures beyond its native planet. At
the close of the century, he had not
changed his mind.
How brief the space race was, the 12
years from Sputnik to the first Moon
walk, but thrilling, mind-boggling,
even magnificent at times. No one has
been back to the Moon since 1972.
Yet spaceflight is now embedded
in our culture, so much so that it is
usually taken for granted — a far cry
from the old days when the world held
its breath for the United States’ early
Mercury missions of Alan B. Shepard
Jr. and John Glenn, and watched,
transfixed, the pictures from the moon
in July 1969. That was then; no astro-
nauts today are household names. Yet
space traffic is thick and integral to the
infrastructure of modern life.
Seldom does it cross our minds that
our voices and text messages are car-
ried across continents and oceans via
satellites. Our weather and the effects
of global warming are tracked from
space. Our news, including reports of
astronaut missions now relegated to
back pages, is disseminated through
space. We view the spectacular im-
ages from the planet Saturn and the
far cosmos with less thought to how
they were obtained than of the beauty
and abiding mystery they call to our
attention.
The United States has now em-
barked on a program to return astro-
nauts to the Moon by 2020 to establish
a more permanent research presence
there and prepare for eventual human
flight to Mars. But in the absence of
the cold war motivation, the effort
lacks the money and the political man-
date that favored Apollo. Another en-
terprise on the scale of Apollo is, in the
foreseeable future, unimaginable.
Someday, however, a party of space
travelers may make the pilgrimage
to Apollo 11’s landing site on the Sea
of Tranquillity, a broad basin that
is a smudge on the right face of the
Moon, as seen from Earth on clear
nights. The encampment, known
as Tranquillity Base, should be just
as Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin
left it. Change comes slowly on the
arid, airless Moon, and barring an
intervening shower of meteorites, the
American flag and the forlorn base
of the lunar module should look like
new. And the astronauts’ boot prints
should still appear fresh in the gray
powdery regolith.
An Age of Heroes
For a brief time, when spaceflight
was fresh and exciting, we embraced
astronauts as heroes who took risks to
reach grand goals. We believed then
more readily in heroes, people who re-
flect what it is that we feel is admirable
in humanity, who inspire us at least to
strive to live up to some ideal image.
Only four years before Sputnik,
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay
were hailed as heroes for making the
last “giant leap for mankind” of the
pre-space-age generations. Their
ascent to the top of Mount Everest, as
high as anyone can aspire and still be
rooted on terra firma, culminated an
era of crossing oceans, penetrating
continental interiors and reaching the
ends of the earth. They crested a di-
vide in exploration between the more
individual exploits of yore and the
greater team efforts mobilized to chal-
lenge newer frontiers of achievement.
On this side of the divide, potential
heroes get lost in the crowd of col-
laborators and overshadowed by
their enabling technology. Even the
amazing technology itself, so swiftly
domesticated for the workplace and
home, soon seems too ordinary to be
remarkable. Our laptops have a great-
er capacity than any of the computers
in the Apollo Project.
Neil Armstrong has earned the
last word. “I think we’ll always be in
space,” he said in a 2001 interview for
the American space agency’s oral-
history program. “But it will take us
longer to do the new things than the
advocates would like, and in some
cases it will take external factors or
forces which we can’t control and
can’t anticipate that will cause things
to happen or not happen.”
Mr. Armstrong then struck a note
that resonates with his contempo-
raries, and that includes me. He and
his Apollo 11 crew were born in the
same year, 1930, three years before I
was; we were the right age at the right
time and places to participate in a sin-
gular adventure in history, whatever
its legacy as seen through the eyes of
later generations.
“We were really very privileged,”
he said, “to live in that thin slice of
history where we changed how man
looks at himself and what he might
become and where he might go.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NASA
EXPLORERS Neil A.
Armstrong, top, was
the first to step onto
the Moon, followed
19 minutes later by
Edwin E. Aldrin Jr.,
center. Apollo 11’s
lunar module, known
as the Eagle, carried
the two astronauts
to the surface from
lunar orbit.
Repubblica NewYork
WOR L D T RE NDS
MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009 V
0 kg 25 50 75 100 125 150 175
CAR
BUS
SCOOTER
MINIBUS
2.5 people
40
1.5
gasoline
diesel
electric
natural gas
two-stroke
four-stroke
gasoline
diesel
diesel
natural gas
hydrogen fuel cell
12
Mode
Average occupancy
Mass transit in developing countries generates far fewer
greenhouse-gas emissions per passenger than private vehicles do.
CO
2
-equivalent emissions
per passenger-kilometer (estimated range)
Sources: International Energy Agency; “Transportation in
Developing Countries”, Pew Center on Global Climate Change THE NEW YORK TIMES
Clean Buses Versus Traditional Vehicles
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
OVERTURINGEN, Sweden — It
was a lousy blueberry season in
2007, said Siv Wiik, 70, one of a pair of
Swedish grandmothers now credited
with discovering what experts say
may be one of the richest gold depos-
its in Europe. “That year it was too
cold in the spring, so there were few
berries,” she said.
Berry picking is a serious business
to Mrs. Wiik, who was born in this
village of 171, and her friend, Harriet
Svensson, 69. For 40 years the two,
widows with children and grandchil-
dren, have explored every patch of
field and forest clearing in the region,
hunting for mushrooms and wild
berries — blueberries, raspberries,
blackberries, cloudberries.
But the women are also amateur
geologists. They never leave home
for a stroll in forests or fields without
their geologists’ hammers, with their
12-centimeter handles, and their
magnifying eyepieces, dangling from
ribbons around their necks.
So in that terrible August when the
blueberry crop failed, they decided to
poke around for minerals. They went
to a place called Sorkullen, far down
an unpaved logging road, where trees
had recently been felled, upending
the earth and exposing rock to the air.
Using their hammers, they cleared
soil from around the stones, dig-
ging for about six hours, deeper and
deeper, until they found a rock with a
dull glimmer.
The women phoned Arne Sund-
berg, of the Geological Survey of
Sweden in Uppsala, who came the
following day. “When he looked, he
thought something was wrong with
his eyepiece,” said Mrs. Svensson,
laughing. Analysis showed that the
stone contained more than 23 grams
of gold per ton; most active mines in
Sweden yield less than 5 grams.
The women entered a sample in
an annual geological competition
run by Mr. Sundberg. “You must find
something that’s new and unusual,
that looks promising for the future,”
Mr. Sundberg said by telephone. “It
could be a new mine, not just gold, but
something new. It was the first time
the ladies entered.”
Needless to say, they won.
They proceeded to obtain the rights
for a large area around the find, then
entered into negotiations, alone and
without lawyers, with about 20 min-
ing companies from Sweden and
abroad, finally choosing Hansa Re-
sources, of Vancouver, Canada.
This month, Hansa began boring
at the site to obtain samples to send
to Vancouver for analysis. “Whether
it’s gold or not, even with a high-grade
ore, you cannot see it with the naked
eye,” said Anders Hogrelius, project
manager for the drilling. “This was a
surprise, and I think it’s positive, since
it shows that it’s worthwhile to go out-
side the traditional mining areas.”
The windfall for the women has un-
til now been modest. Hansa paid the
women about $125,000 for the mining
rights, and if a second round of boring
is authorized this fall, the company
will pay an additional $225,000. But
the women have also been given a 20
percent stake in any future mining
activities, which could yield a bonan-
za for many years to come.
“By then I’ll be out in the church-
yard,” Mrs. Wiik said with a laugh.
MUNICH — The collapse of Com-
munism in the East two decades ago
did not provide much of an opening
for the Catholic Church to influ-
ence economic policy, but perhaps
the near-collapse of
Western capitalism
will. Two German
authors — one named
Marx, the other his
patron in Rome — are
certainly hoping so.
The first is Reinhard Marx, arch-
bishop of Munich and Freising, who
has written a best seller in Germany
that he titled “Das Kapital” (and in
which he addresses that other Marx
— Karl — as “dear namesake”). The
second is Pope Benedict XVI, who
recently published his first papal
encyclical on economic and social
matters. It has a more gentle title,
“Charity in Truth,” but is based on
the same essential line of thinking.
Indeed, Archbishop Marx had a
hand in advising the pope on it.
The message in both is that global
capitalism has lost its moral com-
pass and that Roman Catholic teach-
ings can help set Western economics
right by encouraging
them to focus more on
justice for the weak
and closely regulating
the market.
ArchbishopMarx
and other Catholics
yearn for reform, not
class warfare. In that, they are fol-
lowing a long and fundamental line
of church teaching. What is different
now is that some of them see this eco-
nomic crisis as a moment when the
church’s economic thinking just may
attract serious attention.
“There is no way back into an old
world,” Archbishop Marx said in a
recent interview, before the encycli-
cal was issued. “We have to affirm
this world, but critically.”
Catholic voices have long had
influence on the debate in the West
about social justice, but never as
much as the church would have
wished. Pope John Paul II was an
important voice in bringing down
Communism. But he had to watch
in the 1990s as Eastern Europe em-
braced its polar opposite — a rather
pure form of secular capitalism,
instead of any Catholic-influenced
middle way.
“John Paul II was often very clear
what he was against: He was against
unbridled capitalism and the kind of
socialism of the Soviet sphere,” said
John Allen, the National Catholic
Reporter Vatican watcher. “What he
was for was less clear.”
Now Archbishop Marx, 55, is try-
ing to develop a new approach. In
his book, he offers a vision of a world
governed by cooperation among na-
tions, with a welfare state as the core
of a market economy that reflects
the love-thy-neighbor imperatives of
Catholic social thought.
On the first point, Archbishop
Marx is in good, cosmopolitan com-
pany; many officials, from New York
to London to Beijing, are calling
these days for a world in greater reg-
ulatory harmony. He
sounds considerably
more German when
exhorting the world to
create, or recast, the welfare state.
People need the welfare state before
they “can give themselves over to
the very strenuous and sometimes
very risky games of the market
economy,” Archbishop Marx said.
Of course, the archbishop says
he realizes that a European’s
ideal of welfare states and border-
straddling institutions might not
have universal appeal. At the end
of his book, he quotes Jean-Claude
Juncker, the prime minister of Lux-
embourg, who has said, “I approve
of the notion that Europe sees itself,
unpretentiously, as a model for the
world, but the consequence of that
is that we would have to constantly
change that model because we are
not the world.”
Neither, he might have added, is
the Roman Catholic church.
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Like most
thoroughfares in booming cities of the
developing world, Bogotá’s Seventh
Avenue resembles a noisy, exhaust-
coated parking lot — a tangle of cars
and minibuses that have long provid-
ed transportation for the masses.
But a few blocks away, sleek red ve-
hicles full of commuters speed down
the four center lanes of Avenida de
las Américas. The long, segmented,
low-emission buses are part of a novel
public transportation system called
bus rapid transit, or B.R.T. It is more
like an above-ground subway than a
collection of bus routes, with seven in-
tersecting lines, enclosed stations that
are entered through turnstiles with
the swipe of a fare card and coaches
that feel like trams inside.
Versions of these systems are being
planned or built in dozens of develop-
ing cities around the world — Mexico
City, Cape Town, Jakarta, Indonesia,
and Ahmedabad, India, to name a few
— providing public transportation
that improves traffic flow and reduces
smog at a fraction of the cost of build-
ing a subway.
But the rapid transit
systems have another
benefit: they may hold
a key to combating cli-
mate change. Emissions
from cars, trucks, buses
and other vehicles in the
booming cities of Asia,
Africa and Latin Amer-
ica account for a rapidly
growing component of
heat-trappi ng gases
linked to global warming.
While emissions from
industry are decreasing,
those related to trans-
portation are expected to
rise more than 50 percent
by 2030 in industrialized
and poorer nations. And
80 percent of that growth
will be in the developing
world, according to data
presented in May at an in-
ternational conference in
Bellagio, Italy, sponsored
by the Asian Development
Bank and the Clean Air Institute.
Bus rapid transit systems like Bogo-
tá’s, called TransMilenio, might hold
an answer. Now used for an average of
1.6 million trips each day, TransMilen-
io has allowed the city to remove 7,000
small private buses from its roads,
reducing the use of bus fuel — and as-
sociated emissions — by more than 59
percent since it opened its first line in
2001, according to city officials.
In recognition of this feat, Trans-
Milenio last year became the only
large transportation project approved
by the United Nations to generate and
sell carbon credits. Developed coun-
tries that exceed their emissions lim-
its under the Kyoto Protocol can buy
credits from TransMilenio to balance
their emissions budgets, bringing Bo-
gotá an estimated $100
million to $300 million so
far, analysts say.
“Bogotá was huge and
messy and poor, so people
said, ‘If Bogotá can do it,
why can’t we?’ ’’ said En-
rique Peñalosa, an econo-
mist and a former mayor
of the city who took Trans-
Milenio from a concept to
its initial opening in 2001
and is now advising other
cities. In 2008, Mexico City
opened a second success-
ful bus rapid transit line
that has already reduced
carbon dioxide emissions
there, according to Lee
Schipper, a transporta-
tion expert at Stanford
University in California,
and the city has applied to sell carbon
credits as well.
But bus rapid transit systems are
not the answer for every city. In the
United States, where cost is less con-
straining, some cities, like Los Ange-
les, have built B.R.T.’s, but they tend
to lack many of the components of
comprehensive systems like Trans-
Milenio, and they serve as an addition
to existing rail networks.
In some sprawling cities in India,
where a tradition of scooter use may
make bus rapid transit more difficult
to create, researchers are working to
develop a new model of tuk-tuk, or mo-
torized cab, that is cheap and will run
on alternative fuels or with a highly
efficient engine. “There are three mil-
lion auto rickshaws in India alone, and
the smoke is astonishing, so this could
have a huge impact,’’ said Stef van
Dongen, director of Enviu, an environ-
mental network group in Rotterdam,
the Netherlands, that is sponsoring
the research.
TransMilenio moves more passen-
gers per kilometer every hour than
almost any of the world’s subways.
Most poorer cities that have built sub-
ways, like Manila and Lagos, Nigeria,
can afford to build only a few limited
lines. And bus rapid transit systems
can be built more quickly, according
to Walter Hook, executive director of
the Institute for Transportation and
Development Policy, in New York.
“Almost all rapidly developing cit-
ies understand that they need a metro
or something like it, and you can get
a B.R.T. by 2010 or a metro by 2060,’’
he said.
Bogotá’s Buses Offer a Lesson in Green Transport
POOL PHOTO BY L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO-VATICAN, VIA GETTY IMAGES
SCOTT DALTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A bus rapid transit system in Bogotá, Colombia, improves
traffic flow, saves money and reduces carbon emissions.
CARTER
DOUGHERTY
ESSAY
OVERTURINGEN JOURNAL
A Eureka
Moment
In Sweden
Catholicism as Antidote
To Turbo-Capitalism
A bad season for
blueberries turns into a
good year for gold.
Pope Benedict
XVI, signing his
encyclical on
economic matters,
which called for
“greater social
responsibility” on
the part of business.
Repubblica NewYork
MONE Y & B U S I NE S S
VI MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009
’84 ’83 ’85 ’86 ’87 ’88 ’89 ’90 ’91 ’92 ’93 ’94 ’95 ’96 ’97 ’98 ’99 ’00 ’01 ’02 ’03 ’04 ’05 ’06 ’07 ’08 ’09
The Return of Volatility
The wide swings in the price of oil in recent months are similar to only two
other periods in recent decades: the gulf war in 1990-91 and the OPEC price
wars of the mid-1980s.
Source: International Monetary Fund; Bloomberg
SPOT PRICE PER BARREL OF CRUDE OIL
Adjusted for inflation
+20%
+10
-10
-20
-30
$150
120
90
60
30
0
Gulf war
Asian
financial crisis
September
11 OPEC price wars
DAILY CHANGE IN SPOT PRICE
THE NEVYORK TIMES
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
In a different economy, Billy
Mitchell and Nicole Drucker of San
Francisco might have spent $10,000
on an engagement ring. But Ms.
Drucker is out of work and they need
to save for a house. So in April, Mr.
Mitchell got down on one knee and
proposed with a $4,000 diamond ring
he had bought on the Internet.
“We had to decide, where do we
want the money?” he said. “On her
finger?”
In this economy, many consum-
ers would rather keep their money
in their wallets than on their fingers,
necks or ears. As people re-examine
their budgets, jewelry is one of the
easiest places to cut back.
“The half-carat is the new three-
carat,” explained Hayley Corwick,
who writes for Madison Avenue Spy,
a blog about designer sales.
The new frugality is putting a
painful squeeze on the jewelry in-
dustry. It has forced diamond mines
to curtail production, led to deep dis-
counting at jewelry chains, spurred
hundreds of store closings and re-
sulted in job cuts at boutiques and
department stores.
Because jewelry is expensive in-
ventory that moves slowly even in
better economic times, many stores
are laden with debt — even though
wholesale global prices of polished
diamonds were down 15.4 percent in
June compared with a year earlier.
Experts say that when the shake-
out is over, far fewer jewelers will be
left. About 20 percent more Ameri-
can jewelers will go out of business
this year than did last year, accord-
ing to Kenneth Gassman, president
of the Jewelry Industry Research
Institute .
The jewelry chains that have filed
for bankruptcy in the last year or so
include Fortunoff, Whitehall Jewel-
ers, Friedman’s, Christian Bernard
and Ultra Stores.
Still in business but posting losses
are big jewelry chains, both high end
and low — from Harry Winston and
Bulgari to Zales and Claire’s Stores.
And while the venerable Tiffany
& Company is still making money,
sales have dropped 34 percent at its
stores in the United States that have
been open at least a year.
Major mass-market retailers in-
cluding Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, BJ’s
Wholesale Club and Costco have
cited jewelry as one of their worst-
performing categories this year.Of
the consumers still buying jewelry,
many are trading down to less ex-
pensive items. Blue Nile, the online
jeweler, said some people were opt-
ing for engagement rings made of
semiprecious stones .
For the retailers the good news,
relatively speaking, is that the
chains say the rate of deceleration
has slowed in the last three months.
No one is declaring a recovery, or
even that the market has reached a
bottom. But Tiffany, which has been
selling its signature six-pronged di-
amond solitaire engagement rings
since 1886, is confident the sparkle
will return.
“We’re going through a business
cycle,” Mark L. Aaron, vice presi-
dent for investor relations at Tiffany
said. “There will eventually again be
a rising tide of affluence around the
world.”
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
FONTAINEBLEAU, France —
French workers normally take off
much of the summer, but this month
there is something of a revolution go-
ing on here at this former royal cha-
teau southeast of Paris. The throngs
of tourists will be jostling alongside
stonemasons, restoration experts and
other artisans paid by the French gov-
ernment’s $37 billion economic stimu-
lus program.
Their job? Maintain in pristine con-
dition the 800-year-old palace of more
than 1,500 rooms where Napoleon bid
adieu before being exiled to Elba and
where Marie Antoinette enjoyed a
gilded boudoir.
Besides Fontainebleau, about 50
French chateaus are to receive a face-
lift, including the palace of Versailles.
Also receiving funds are some 75 ca-
thedrals, including Notre Dame in
Paris. A museum devoted to Lalique
glass is being created in Strasbourg,
while Marseilles is to be the home of a
new 10 million euro center for Mediter-
ranean culture.
All told, Paris has set aside 100 mil-
lion euros for what the French like to
call their cultural patrimony. It is a
French twist on how to overcome the
global downturn, spending borrowed
money avidly to beautify the nation
even as it also races ahead of the Unit-
ed States in more classic Keynesian
ways: fixing potholes, upgrading rail-
roads and pursuing other projects.
“America is six months behind; it
has wasted a lot of time,” said Patrick
Devedjian, the minister in charge
of the French stimulus. By the time
Washington gets around to doling out
most of its money, he sniffed, “the cri-
sis could be over.”
The confidence evident in the words
of Mr. Devedjian, a close adviser to
President Nicolas Sarkozy, echoes a
broader pride among French business
and political leaders that their govern-
ment has done a better job dodging the
worst of the economic turmoil than its
European neighbors.
Yet France remains highly vulner-
able to rising unemployment. The Or-
ganization for Economic Cooperation
and Development, expects the French
jobless rate, currently 8.9 percent and
lower than the 9.5 percent rate in the
United States, to hit 11.2 percent by the
end of 2010.
Under French regulations, unem-
ployed workers are guaranteed up to
67 percent of their former salary and
can collect as much as 70,000 euros
annually in benefits for two years.
“We’re insulated from the shocks, but
the next generation will pay for it,”
warned Hervé Boulhol, head of the
France desk at the O.E.C.D.
For now, though, the deluge seems
far off into the future at Fontaineb-
leau, much as it did to Louis XIV, the
Sun King, who spent each fall here
for his annual hunt. The well-tended
gardens and canals shimmer, while
artisans repair the courtyards and
kitchen buildings where royal feasts
were once prepared.
“This was the heart of the castle
because court life revolved around
meals,” said Jacques Dubois, a spokes-
man for the Château de Fontainebleau.
“And this money allows us to finish
construction that’s been going on for
years.”
By JAD MOUAWAD
The extreme volatility that has
gripped oil markets for the last 18
months has shown no signs of slowing
down, with oil prices rising sharply
since the beginning of the year despite
an exceptionally weak economy.
The instability of oil and gas prices
is puzzling government officials and
policy analysts, who fear it could
jeopardize a global recovery. It is also
hobbling businesses and consumers,
who are already facing the effects of a
stinging recession, as they try in vain
to guess where prices will be a year
from now, or even next month.
A wild run on the oil markets has
occurred in the last 12 months. Last
summer, prices surged to a record
high above $145 a barrel. As the global
economy faltered, oil tumbled to $33 a
barrel in December. But oil rose 55 per-
cent since the beginning of the year, to
$70 a barrel, before falling less than $60
early this week.
“To call this extreme volatility
might be an understatement,” said
Laura Wright, the chief financial of-
ficer at Southwest Airlines, a compa-
ny that has sought to insure itself by
buying long-term oil contracts. “Over
the past 15 to 18 months, this has been
unprecedented. I don’t think it can be
easily rationalized.”
Volatility in the oil markets in the
last year has reached levels not re-
corded since the energy shocks of the
late 1970s and early 1980s, according to
Costanza Jacazio, an energy analyst
at Barclays Capital in New York.
These gyrations have rippled across
the economy. The automakers Gen-
eral Motors and Chrysler have been
forced into bankruptcy as customers
shun their gas-guzzling automobiles.
Airlines are on pace for another year
of deep losses because of rising jet
fuel costs. And households, already
crimped by falling home prices,
mounting job losses and credit pres-
sures, are once more forced to monitor
their discretionary spending .
The recent rise in oil prices is re-
prising the debate from last year over
the role of investors in the commod-
ity markets. Federal regulators in the
United States announced July 7 that
they were considering new restric-
tions on “speculative” traders in mar-
kets for energy products.
Government officials around the
world have become concerned about
a possible replay of last year’s surge.
Energy officials from the European
Union and OPEC, meeting in Vienna
last month, said that “the speculation
issue had not been resolved yet and
that the 2008 bubble could be repeat-
ed” without more oversight.
Many factors that pushed oil prices
up last year have returned. Supply
fears are creeping back into the mar-
ket, with a new round of violence in Ni-
geria’s oil-rich Niger Delta crimping
production. And there are increasing
fears that the political instability in
Iran could spill over onto the oil mar-
ket, potentially hampering exports.
The OPEC cartel has also been re-
markably successful in reining in
production in recent months to keep
prices from falling. Even as prices re-
covered, members of the Organization
of the Petroleum Exporting Countries
have been unwilling to increase pro-
duction.
Top officials said that OPEC’s goal
was to achieve $75 a barrel oil by the
end of the year, a target that has been
endorsed by Saudi Arabia, the group’s
leading member.
“Neither the organization, nor its
key members, has any real interest
in halting the rise in oil prices,” said a
report by the Center for Global Energy
Studies, a consulting group in London
founded bya former Saudi oil minister.
For the global airline industry, the
latest price surge is certain to translate
into more losses this year, according
to the industry’s trade group, I.A.T.A.
“Airlines have not yet felt the full im-
pact of this oil price rise,” according to
I.A.T.A.’s latest report. Likewise, au-
tomobile showrooms emptied out as
gasoline prices rose, forcing General
Motors and Chrysler to cut production
as they wade through bankruptcy.
For Jeroen van der Veer, who re-
tired as chief executive officer of Royal
Dutch Shell, prices are increasingly
dictated by long-term assessments of
suply and demand, rather than current
market fundamentals. He advised tak-
ing a long-term view of the market.
“Oil has never been very stable,” Mr.
van der Veer said.
Wild Swings in the Price of Oil Jeopardizes Economic Recovery
ED ALCOCK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Restoration work on the Grand Commun, next to the Palace of
Versailles, is part of France’s $37 billion plan to help the economy.
France Fights
Downturn
With Cultural
Restorations
For Jewelers, Recession
Has Dulled the Sparkle
Alice Pfeiffer contributed reporting
from Paris.
Repubblica NewYork
Location of
glass boxes
103rd floor
The glass observation boxes extend
1.3 meters out of the building.
The new 103rd-floor observation booth at the Sears Tower,
in Chicago, takes advantage of new technology to use
glass as a load-bearing element.
Don’t Look Down
Supporting
steel frame
Glass floor
Glass walls
support the
weight of the
floor and the
viewers,
and transfer
the load to
the steel
frame.
Glass box shown in
retracted position below
Gasket deflated
The floor, sides and ceiling of
the observation boxes are made
of three sheets of half-inch
tempered glass bonded
together with polymer film.
Glass elements are joined
together with stainless steel
fasteners. Some joints have
a silicone layer to allow for
thermal expansion.
A gliding mechanism driven
by an electric motor allows
the four glass boxes to be
pulled inside the tower for
cleaning and maintenance.
MECHANISM
An inflatable gasket seals the glass box
in place. Deflating the seal allows the
box to be moved in and out. Heating
cables prevent ice buildup and keep
the seal from freezing to the glass.
WALL
INFLATABLE
GASKET
HEATING
CABLES
BUILDING
FACADE
SEAL
TEMPERED
GLASS
SHEET
Laminated glass
POLYMER FILM
Sources: Skidmore, Owings
& Merrill; MTH Industries
GLASS FLOOR
GLASS WALL
FASTENER
STRUCTURAL GLASS FASTENER
EXTENDED
POSITION
GLASS BOX RAILS AND BEARINGS MOTOR
RETRACTED
POSITION
MAINTENANCE
POSITION
Side view
MIKA GRÖNDAHL/THE NEW YORK TIMES
S CI E NCE & T ECHNOL OGY
MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009 VII
The visions seem to intrude from
the brain’s depths at the worst pos-
sible times — during a job interview, a
meeting with the boss, an apprehen-
sive first date, an important dinner
party. What if I started
a food fight with these
hors d’oeuvres?
Mocked the host’s
stammer? Yelled out a
racial slur?
“That single thought
is enough,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in
“The Imp of the Perverse,” an essay
on unwanted impulses. “The impulse
increases to a wish, the wish to a de-
sire, the desire to an uncontrollable
longing.”
He added, “There is no passion in
nature so demoniacally impatient, as
that of him who, shuddering upon the
edge of a precipice, thus meditates a
plunge.”
Or meditates on the question: Am
I sick?
In a few cases, the answer may be
yes. But a vast majority of people
rarely, if ever, act on such urges, and
their susceptibility to rude fantasies
in fact reflects the workings of a nor-
mally sensitive, social brain, argues a
paper published recently in the jour-
nal Science.
“There are all kinds of pitfalls in
social life, everywhere we look; not
just errors but worst possible errors
come to mind, and they come to mind
easily,” said the paper’s author, Daniel
M. Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard.
“And having the worst thing come to
mind, in some circumstances, might
increase the likelihood that it will hap-
pen.”
The exploration of perverse urges
has a rich history, running through
the stories of Poe and the Marquis
de Sade to Freud’s repressed desires
and Darwin’s observation that many
actions are performed “in direct op-
position to our conscious will.” In the
past decade, social psychologists
have documented how common such
contrary urges are — and when they
are most likely to alter people’s be-
havior.
At a fundamental level, function-
ing socially means mastering one’s
impulses. The adult brain expends at
least as much energy on inhibition as
on action, some studies suggest, and
mental health relies on abiding strat-
egies to ignore or suppress deeply
disturbing thoughts — of one’s own
inevitable death, for example. These
strategies are general, subconscious
or semiconscious psychological pro-
grams that usually run on automatic
pilot.
Perverse impulses seem to arise
when people focus intensely on avoid-
ing specific errors or taboos. The
theory is straightforward: to avoid
saying that a colleague is a raging
hypocrite, the brain must first imag-
ine just that; the very presence of that
catastrophic insult, in turn, increases
the odds that the brain will unleash it.
“We know that what’s accessible
in our minds can exert an influence
on judgment and behavior simply
because it’s there, it’s floating on the
surface of consciousness,” said Jamie
Arndt, a psychologist at the University
of Missouri.
The empirical evidence of this in-
fluence has been piling up in recent
years, as Dr. Wegner documents in
the new paper. The risk that people
will slip depends in part on the level
of stress they are undergoing, Dr.
Wegner argues. Concentrating in-
tensely on not staring at a prominent
mole on a new acquaintance’s face,
while also texting and trying to follow
a conversation, heightens the risk
of saying: “We went to the mole — I
mean, mall. Mall!”
“A certain relief can come from just
getting it over with, having that worst
thing happen, so you don’t have to
worry about monitoring in anymore,”
Dr. Wegner said.
All of which might be hard to ex-
plain, of course, if you’ve just insulted
the dinner party.
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
CHICAGO — To truly appreciate how glass
can be used structurally, make your way to 233
South Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago. More
precisely, make your way 412 meters above South
Wacker, to the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower.
Once there, take a few steps over to the west
wall, where the facade has been cut away. Then
take one more step, over the edge.
You’ll find yourself on a floor of glass, suspend-
ed over the sidewalk just over a kilometer below.
If you can’t bear looking straight down past your
feet, shift your gaze out or up — the walls are
glass, too, as is the ceiling. You’ve stepped into
a transparent box, one of four that jut 1.3 meters
from the tower, hanging from cantilevered steel
beams above your head. The glass walls are con-
nected to the beams, and to the glass floor, with
bolts. But what’s really saving you from oblivion
is the glass itself.
The boxes, which opened recently as part of an
extensive renovation of the tower’s observation
deck, are among the most recent, and more out-
landish, projects that use glass as load-bearing
elements.
But all glass structures have at least a bit of dar-
ing about them, as if they are giving a defiant an-
swer to the question: You can’t do that with glass,
can you?
You can. Engineers, architects and fabrica-
tors, aided by materials scientists and software
designers, are building soaring facades, arching
canopies and delicate cubes, footbridges
and staircases, almost entirely of glass.
They’re laminating glass with polymers
to make beams and other components
stronger and safer — each of the Sears
Tower sheets is a five-layer sandwich —
and analyzing every square centimeter
of a design to make sure the stresses
are within precise limits. And they are
experimenting with new materials and
methods that could someday lead to
glass structures that are unmarked by
metal or other materials.
“Ultimately what we’re all striving
for is an all-glass structure,” said James
O’Callaghan of Eckersley O’Callaghan
Structural Design, who has designed
what are perhaps the world’s best-known
glass projects, the staircases that are a
prominent feature of every Apple Store.
Through it all, they’ve realized one
thing. “Glass is just another material,”
said John Kooymans of the engineering
firm Halcrow Yolles, which designed the
Sears Tower boxes.
It’s a material that has been around for
millennia. Although glass can be made in count-
less ways to have any number of specific uses — to
conduct light as fibers, say, or serve as a backing
for electronic circuitry, as in a laptop screen —
structural projects almost exclusively use soda-
lime glass, made, as it has always been, largely
from sodium carbonate, limestone and silica.
“For years, the basic composition of soda-lime
glass has not changed much,” said Harrie J. Ste-
vens, director of the Center for Glass Research at
Alfred University in western New York State. It’s
the same glass, more or less, that is used for the
windows in your home and the jar of jam in your
refrigerator.
Pristine glass is very strong. But like a new car
that plummets in value the moment it is driven off
the lot, glass starts to lose its strength the instant
it’s made. Tiny cracks begin to form through con-
tact with other surfaces, or even with water vapor
and carbon dioxide.
Even one gas molecule can break a silicon-
oxygen bond in glass, generating a defect, said
Carlo G. Pantano, a professor of materials science
at Pennsylvania State University. While glass is
very strong in compression, tensile stresses will
make these tiny fissures start to grow, bond by
bond. “That’s what makes glass break,” Dr. Pan-
tano said. “And if it doesn’t break, it weakens it.”
Unlike steel or other materials, glass does not
deform or otherwise give advance warning of fail-
ure. If breakage occurs, maintaining the integrity
of the structure is paramount so that people on or
below it are safe.
Already, some engineers are starting to use
adhesives to join glass directly to glass. Lucio
Blandini, an engineer with Werner Sobek Engi-
neering and Design in Stuttgart, Germany, used
adhesives to create a thin glass dome, 8 meters
across, for his doctoral thesis in a clearing in Stut-
tgart. “I think adhesives are the most promising
connection device,” Dr. Blandini said. “It allows
glass to keep its aesthetic qualities.” His firm is
using adhesives in parts of structures being built
at the University of Chicago and in Dubai.
Making Glass
Bear Its Share
Of the Load
BENEDICT
CAREY
ESSAY
Inappropriate urges
arise when we try to
avoid taboos.
When Mischief Takes Over the Brain
Repubblica NewYork
By PATRICK HEALY
BEIRUT — Along the Beirut River
just outside of the city center is an in-
dustrial neighborhood of small ware-
houses and factories, car dealerships
and crumbling, squat buildings that
bear the scars of bullets from Leba-
non’s wars. It is a place, in other words,
where a cultural space that would be
the envy of New York has come to life.
The Beirut Art Center, a 1,500-square-
meter space occupying two floors of a
former factory, opened on January 15,
and it has quickly emerged as a popular
destination for Beirutis, tourists and
art critics across Lebanon.
Through July 14 it housed a provoca-
tive exhibition of work by 20 Lebanese
artists titled “The Road to Peace:
Paintings in Times of War, 1975-1991,”
a collection of pieces that portray the
trauma of the Lebanese civil war. Most
of the work had not been shown publicly
before, the exhibition organizers say,
and reflected the art center’s ambitions
to become a major cultural player in a
modern, peaceful Lebanon.
Planning for the art center began
in 2005. Lamia Joreige, a visual art-
ist, and Sandra Dagher, previously
the director of the gallery Espace SD
in downtown Beirut, said that they
thought that the city lacked the mu-
seums and cultural spaces worthy of
a metropolis of its size and history.
Specifically, they said in an e-mail
interview, they saw a need for a con-
temporary art center that could mount
solo and group shows of Lebanese art-
ists to complement the government-
supported museums in Beirut.
The war between the Hezbollah
paramilitary forces and Israel dur-
ing the summer of 2006 slowed their
search, but eventually they agreed
on the factory space in the Jisr el-Wati
neighborhood, where construction of
residential projects and a municipal
school are also bringing new life to the
streets.
“Although Beirut Art Center has not
been open for a long time, it has very
quickly become a cultural landmark in
the city,” Ms. Dagher said.
The title of the recent exhibition
came from a series of print drawings
by Aref Rayess that depict Lebanese
survivors of war. In one drawing a
family takes shelter with a gunman
behind a brick wall as chaos ensues
nearby; in another, shadowy faces
with pained expressions are etched
into city buildings.
The specter of death suffused the
exhibition. Theo Mansour’s “Mass
Grave” blends red, crimson and other
bloodlike colors in acrylic forms of
corpses and writhing bodies, many
with their mouths agape as if scream-
ing.
In the work “The April the Lilies
Died” by Mohammad Rawas, etch-
ings and stencil drawings depicting
destruction during 1983 include the
bombed-out barracks where, in Oc-
tober of that year, 241 Americans who
were part of a multinational peace-
keeping force were killed.
“When I came back to Beirut in 1981,
I deliberately ignored and avoided
working on the theme of war until
1983, when the war had its severe toll
on me through the death of a very close
friend,” Mr. Rawas said in a statement
posted near the work. “The war made
me aware of the futility of art whose
raison d’être was considered to simply
please the eye.”
The most surprising piece was in a
small, windowless room off the main
gallery space. Three adult-size cas-
kets were arranged on the floor; they
were filled with small lighted candles
that dripped wax and with stacks of
books about art and creation; on the
top of one pile was a book whose cover
simply read, “Imagination” — a visual
cue that stayed in the mind of visitors
to the art center as they poured back
onto the streets of a newly vital Beirut
neighborhood.
TOKYO — After nearly four
decades of work, Toyo Ito has earned
a cult following among architects
around the world, although he is little
known outside his home country,
Japan. Through
his strange and
ethereal buildings,
he has created a
body of work almost
unmatched in its
diverse originality.
Over the past decade, as many
of his contemporaries have piled
up one commission after another,
Mr. Ito has largely remained on the
sidelines. He is rarely mentioned in
conversations about semicelebrities
like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid or
Jacques Herzog.
Mr. Ito’s status may finally be
about to change. A stadium with a
pythonlike form that he designed
for the World Games was recently
unveiled to a global audience in
Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Even more ambitious are his
plans for the Taichung opera
house, which is scheduled to go into
construction sometime next year.
A work of striking inventiveness,
it has already been touted as a
masterpiece. Its porous exterior,
which resembles a gigantic sponge,
is as wildly imaginative in its way
as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim
museum in Bilbao, Spain. Its design
was a large reason Mr. Ito was
recently awarded his first American
commission, the Berkeley Art
Museum in California.
But even if Mr. Ito begins to land
the big, lucrative commissions that
he so obviously deserves, he may
never be completely accepted by a
broad popular audience. He does not
have the intimidating, larger-than-
life persona of a Koolhaas. Nor is he a
flamboyant presence like Ms. Hadid,
who is often compared to an opera
diva because of her striking looks
and imperial air.
Mr. Ito, by comparison, can be
unassuming. A small, compact
man with a round face framed by
rectangular glasses and dark
hair, he is easygoing and rarely
flustered. And he has the rare
ability to consider his projects
with a critical eye.
His career can be read as a
lifelong quest to find the precise
balance between seemingly
opposing values — individual
and community, machine and
nature, utopian fantasies and
hard realities.
His ability to find such
balances consistently has made
him one of our great urban poets.
The Tama Art University
Library, west of Tokyo, is set at the
edge of a dreary hillside campus. It
was conceived as an irregular grid of
delicate concrete arches. Inside, the
arches are arranged at odd angles to
one another. The floor of an informal
exhibition space follows the slope of
the surrounding landscape so that
from inside, the relationship of the
two seems fluid.
The result is a kind of
antimonument. The image we hold
of a heavy, traditional arch becomes
something fragile and ethereal. The
design’s aim is to liberate us from
the oppressive weight of history and,
in the process, open up imaginative
possibilities.
Since the library’s completion his
ambitions have led to a startling
range of new designs, like his
recently opened Za-Koenji Public
Theater in Tokyo. The theater’s
uneven tentlike form seems to be a
result of the forces colliding around
it, like speeding trains and arcane
zoning requirements.
The design for the 44,000-seat
Kaohsiung stadium, by contrast,
seems to be as much about the
anxieties of a mass event as about
a shared emotional experience. It
seeks to maximize our awareness of
the outside world while still creating
a sense of enclosure. By embracing
ambiguity, his work forces us to look
at the world through a wider lens.
“I sometimes feel that we are
losing an intuitive sense of our own
bodies,” Mr. Ito lamented. “Children
don’t run around outside as much as
they did. They sit in front of computer
games. Some architects have been
trying to find a language for this new
generation, with very minimalist
spaces. I am looking for something
more primitive, a kind of abstraction
that still has a sense of the body.”
“The in between,” he added, “is
more interesting to me.”
TOMIO OHASHI; LEFT, MARC BIBO
Irregular concrete arches define the Tama Art University Library,
above, designed by Toyo Ito. Mr. Ito’s recent projects include a
stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, left.
NICOLAI
OUROUSSOFF
ESSAY
Buildings That Suggest the World Beyond
Face of War
Pervades
Art Center
It was ridiculous when some
conservative religious leaders
complained of a hidden homosexual
agenda lurking behind the jellyfish
and floating plankton of “SpongeBob
SquarePants.”
Ridiculous, but
not totally absurd.
Adults have been
trying to detect
some sort of subtext
to that cheerful,
almost inexplicably popular cartoon
series on the children’s television
network Nickelodeon since it first
bubbled to the surface a decade ago.
There have been books,
dissertations and seminars
dedicated to the study of the fun-
loving yellow kitchen sponge
who lives in a pineapple under
the sea. There was a theatrical-
release movie version. President
Obama said during the campaign
that SpongeBob was his favorite
television character. David Bowie
and Johnny Depp are among the
many stars who boast or blog about
having been guest stars.
To fete the show’s 10th
anniversary, Nickelodeon recently
ran a 50-episode weekend marathon
that included 10 new episodes
of “SpongeBob,” while its sister
network, VH1, planned to show a
documentary, “Square Roots: The
Story of ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ ”
that interviews its creator, Stephen
Hillenburg, an illustrator and
marine biologist, and others.
The series celebrates its first
decade as popular as ever and without
having disclosed any higher meaning
to Bikini Bottom, the name of the
underwater city where it takes place.
Part of the show’s mystique is
precisely that it has so little edge or
subversiveness. The writers take
on all sorts of American quirks
and conventions while placing
them underwater, but gently and
benignly. “SpongeBob” remains
distinctive, if only for its retro look:
Mr. Hillenburg and his colleagues
drawtheir animation by hand, with
each episode requiring more than
20,000 drawings.
Mostly it’s the sensibility that is
a throwback to a less sardonic era.
“SpongeBob” became a huge hit
in the early ’00s when some of the
most popular cartoons, like “South
Park,” had a cynical, perverse edge
that appealed to both teenagers and
adults.
SpongeBob is an optimist, a naïf
and a child, and the unifying joke is
that he is impervious to danger or
dislike. SpongeBob loves his friends
and doesn’t realize that some,
notably his neighbor Squidward and
even Mr. Krabs, his miserly boss at
the Krusty Krab food shack, do not
exactly reciprocate.
At times, the writers seem to poke
fun at some of the sick humor so
prevalent on “South Park” and other
more sophisticated animated series.
In one episode SpongeBob
inadvertently drives a school-
crossing guard to abandon her post
and flee; a line of tiny schoolchildren
cross the street by themselves and
right into oncoming traffic. They
aren’t crushed and smeared across
the sidewalk, as some “South Park”
viewers have come to expect.
Instead the approaching vehicles
turn out to be a slow-moving, colorful
parade, to the delight of SpongeBob
and the children.
It’s been 10 years now, and
“SpongeBob” still seems refreshing
and innocent compared with so
much other precocious children’s
programming.
Edward Gorey, the master
illustrator of the macabre, once said
that there is no such thing as “happy
nonsense.” “SpongeBob” could be
the exception.
NICKELODEON
ALESSANDRA
STANLEY
ESSAY
Fun-Loving Sponge
Keeps It Clean
‘‘SpongeBob SquarePants’’
remains both innocent
and hugely popular.
AR T S & S T YL E S
VIII MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009
Repubblica NewYork