Table of Contents: February 21, 2011

IN THIS ISSUE EDITION: U.S. Vol. 177 No. 7

COVER
2045: Singularity (Cover) n: The moment when technological change becomes so rapid and profound, it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history

ESSAY
Road Map for Reform (Commentary / In the Arena) What the U.S. can do to encourage democratization in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East The Asian Experience (Commentary / Viewpoint) What the region can and cannot teach the Arab world about democracy through revolution Scent of a Nerd (Commentary) Want to be a writer or just smell like one? Introducing my celebrity fragrance

NATION
Just Don't Call Him Lucky (The Well / Nation) Antiterrorism czar John Brennan is Obama's secret weapon

WORLD
Postcard from Copiap Under the Chilean desert, thousands of independent gold miners trade safety for the slim chance of hitting a mother lode. The risks and rewards of life as a pirquinero Revolution, Delayed (World) After the high drama of the first wave of antigovernment protests, many Egyptians are beginning to grow anxious about what the uprising has wrought The Brotherhood (World) Is the uprising changing the Islamist group so feared in both Egypt and the West?

LETTERS
Inbox (Inbox)

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Great Performances They may lose an arm or a spouse, become a billionaire or a vigilante, but the actors we celebrate here are sorcerers who, by pouring self into story, created indelible characters worth admiring or reviling and always worth treasuring

BUSINESS

The Groupon Clipper (Business) Andrew Mason runs the hottest website in social commerce. Will it make investors rich?

SOCIETY
Pay Phone (Life / Money) A new chip embedded in smart phones could let U.S. consumers leave their wallets at home Wired for Distraction? (Life / Technology) Like it or not, social media are reprogramming our children's brains. What's a good parent to do?

SPECIAL SECTION
Paying for Nature (Global Business / Sustainability Inc.) Dow Chemical wants to put hard numbers on exactly how much the environment is worth to business

PEOPLE
10 Questions for Jim Parsons (10 Questions) The actor stars as Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory. Jim Parsons will now take your questions

BRIEFING
The Moment 2|8|11: Cairo Can Hatch Tame The Tea Party? (Washington: The Politics Page) The World 10 ESSENTIAL STORIES The Big Questions: By Mark Halperin (Washington: The Politics Page) Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine Verbatim Brief History: The Sun The Skimmer When Movie Sex Was Art (Milestones) Milestones (Milestones) Milestones (Milestones)

COVER

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

By LEV GROSSMAN Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011

Photo--Illustration by Phillip Toledano for TIME

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists they included a comedian and a former Miss America had to guess what it was. On the show (see the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200. Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blas about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher. But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence. That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity our

bodies, our minds, our civilization will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away. Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing. True? True. So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties. If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there's no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks to play Farmville. Probably. It's impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity. The difficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It's not a fringe idea; it's a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth. There's an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while the Singularity appears to be, on the face of it, preposterous, it's an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation. People are spending a lot of money trying to understand it. The three-year-old Singularity University, which offers inter-disciplinary courses of study for graduate students and executives, is hosted by NASA. Google was a founding sponsor; its CEO and co-founder Larry Page spoke there last year. People are attracted to the Singularity for the shock value, like an intellectual freak show, but they stay because

there's more to it than they expected. And of course, in the event that it turns out to be real, it will be the most important thing to happen to human beings since the invention of language. The Singularity isn't a wholly new idea, just newish. In 1965 the British mathematician I.J. Good described something he called an "intelligence explosion": Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. The word singularity is borrowed from astrophysics: it refers to a point in space-time for example, inside a black hole at which the rules of ordinary physics do not apply. In the 1980s the science-fiction novelist Vernor Vinge attached it to Good's intelligence-explosion scenario. At a NASA symposium in 1993, Vinge announced that "within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create super-human intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." By that time Kurzweil was thinking about the Singularity too. He'd been busy since his appearance on I've Got a Secret. He'd made several fortunes as an engineer and inventor; he founded and then sold his first software company while he was still at MIT. He went on to build the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind Stevie Wonder was customer No. 1 and made innovations in a range of technical fields, including music synthesizers and speech recognition. He holds 39 patents and 19 honorary doctorates. In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology. But Kurzweil was also pursuing a parallel career as a futurist: he has been publishing his thoughts about the future of human and machine-kind for 20 years, most recently in The Singularity Is Near, which was a best seller when it came out in 2005. A documentary by the same name, starring Kurzweil, Tony Robbins and Alan Dershowitz, among others, was released in January. (Kurzweil is actually the subject of two current documentaries. The other one, less authorized but more informative, is called The Transcendent Man.) Bill Gates has called him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence." In real life, the transcendent man is an unimposing figure who could pass for Woody Allen's even nerdier younger brother. Kurzweil grew up in Queens, N.Y., and you can still hear a trace of it in his voice. Now 62, he speaks with the soft, almost hypnotic calm of someone who gives 60 public lectures a year. As the Singularity's most visible champion, he has heard all the questions and faced down the incredulity many, many times before. He's good-natured about it. His manner is almost apologetic: I wish I could bring you less exciting news of the future, but I've looked at the numbers, and this is what they say, so what else can I tell you? Kurzweil's interest in humanity's cyborganic destiny began about 1980 largely as a practical matter. He needed ways to measure and track the pace of technological progress. Even great inventions can fail if they arrive before their time, and he wanted to make sure that when he released his, the timing was right. "Even at that time, technology was moving quickly enough that the world was going to be different by the time you finished a project," he says. "So it's like skeet shooting you can't shoot at the target." He

knew about Moore's law, of course, which states that the number of transistors you can put on a microchip doubles about every two years. It's a surprisingly reliable rule of thumb. Kurzweil tried plotting a slightly different curve: the change over time in the amount of computing power, measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), that you can buy for $1,000. As it turned out, Kurzweil's numbers looked a lot like Moore's. They doubled every couple of years. Drawn as graphs, they both made exponential curves, with their value increasing by multiples of two instead of by regular increments in a straight line. The curves held eerily steady, even when Kurzweil extended his backward through the decades of pretransistor computing technologies like relays and vacuum tubes, all the way back to 1900. Kurzweil then ran the numbers on a whole bunch of other key technological indexes the falling cost of manufacturing transistors, the rising clock speed of microprocessors, the plummeting price of dynamic RAM. He looked even further afield at trends in biotech and beyond the falling cost of sequencing DNA and of wireless data service and the rising numbers of Internet hosts and nanotechnology patents. He kept finding the same thing: exponentially accelerating progress. "It's really amazing how smooth these trajectories are," he says. "Through thick and thin, war and peace, boom times and recessions." Kurzweil calls it the law of accelerating returns: technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly. Then he extended the curves into the future, and the growth they predicted was so phenomenal, it created cognitive resistance in his mind. Exponential curves start slowly, then rocket skyward toward infinity. According to Kurzweil, we're not evolved to think in terms of exponential growth. "It's not intuitive. Our built-in predictors are linear. When we're trying to avoid an animal, we pick the linear prediction of where it's going to be in 20 seconds and what to do about it. That is actually hardwired in our brains." Here's what the exponential curves told him. We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity never say he's not conservative at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today. The Singularity isn't just an idea. it attracts people, and those people feel a bond with one another. Together they form a movement, a subculture; Kurzweil calls it a community. Once you decide to take the Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers known as Singularitarians. Not all of them are Kurzweilians, not by a long chalk. There's room inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the Singularity means and when and how it will or won't happen. But Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space

you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence. In addition to the Singularity University, which Kurzweil co-founded, there's also a Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, based in San Francisco. It counts among its advisers Peter Thiel, a former CEO of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. The institute holds an annual conference called the Singularity Summit. (Kurzweil co-founded that too.) Because of the highly interdisciplinary nature of Singularity theory, it attracts a diverse crowd. Artificial intelligence is the main event, but the sessions also cover the galloping progress of, among other fields, genetics and nanotechnology. At the 2010 summit, which took place in August in San Francisco, there were not just computer scientists but also psychologists, neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, molecular biologists, a specialist in wearable computers, a professor of emergency medicine, an expert on cognition in gray parrots and the professional magician and debunker James "the Amazing" Randi. The atmosphere was a curious blend of Davos and UFO convention. Proponents of seasteading the practice, so far mostly theoretical, of establishing politically autonomous floating communities in international waters handed out pamphlets. An android chatted with visitors in one corner. After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension. Biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent and inevitable Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarian ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny it seems. It's not just wishful thinking; there's actual science going on here. For example, it's well known that one cause of the physical degeneration associated with aging involves telomeres, which are segments of DNA found at the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter, and once a cell runs out of telomeres, it can't reproduce anymore and dies. But there's an enzyme called telomerase that reverses this process; it's one of the reasons cancer cells live so long. So why not treat regular non-cancerous cells with telomerase? In November, researchers at Harvard Medical School announced in Nature that they had done just that. They administered telomerase to a group of mice suffering from age-related degeneration. The damage went away. The mice didn't just get better; they got younger. Aubrey de Grey is one of the world's best-known life-extension researchers and a Singularity Summit veteran. A British biologist with a doctorate from Cambridge and a famously formidable beard, de Grey runs a foundation called SENS, or Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. He views aging as a process of accumulating damage, which he has divided into seven categories, each of which he hopes to one day address using regenerative medicine. "People have begun to realize that the view of aging being something immutable rather like the heat death of the universe is simply ridiculous," he says. "It's just childish. The human body is a machine that has a bunch of functions, and it accumulates various types of damage as a side effect of the normal function of the machine. Therefore in principal that damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. It's really just a matter of paying attention. The whole of medicine consists of messing about with what looks pretty inevitable until you figure out how to make it not inevitable."

Kurzweil takes life extension seriously too. His father, with whom he was very close, died of heart disease at 58. Kurzweil inherited his father's genetic predisposition; he also developed Type 2 diabetes when he was 35. Working with Terry Grossman, a doctor who specializes in longevity medicine, Kurzweil has published two books on his own approach to life extension, which involves taking up to 200 pills and supplements a day. He says his diabetes is essentially cured, and although he's 62 years old from a chronological perspective, he estimates that his biological age is about 20 years younger. But his goal differs slightly from de Grey's. For Kurzweil, it's not so much about staying healthy as long as possible; it's about staying alive until the Singularity. It's an attempted handoff. Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they'll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans. Alternatively, by then we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots. He and many other Singularitarians take seriously the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal. It's an idea that's radical and ancient at the same time. In "Sailing to Byzantium," W.B. Yeats describes mankind's fleshly predicament as a soul fastened to a dying animal. Why not unfasten it and fasten it to an immortal robot instead? But Kurzweil finds that life extension produces even more resistance in his audiences than his exponential growth curves. "There are people who can accept computers being more intelligent than people," he says. "But the idea of significant changes to human longevity that seems to be particularly controversial. People invested a lot of personal effort into certain philosophies dealing with the issue of life and death. I mean, that's the major reason we have religion." Of course, a lot of people think the Singularity is nonsense a fantasy, wishful thinking, a Silicon Valley version of the Evangelical story of the Rapture, spun by a man who earns his living making outrageous claims and backing them up with pseudoscience. Most of the serious critics focus on the question of whether a computer can truly become intelligent. The entire field of artificial intelligence, or AI, is devoted to this question. But AI doesn't currently produce the kind of intelligence we associate with humans or even with talking computers in movies HAL or C3PO or Data. Actual AIs tend to be able to master only one highly specific domain, like interpreting search queries or playing chess. They operate within an extremely specific frame of reference. They don't make conversation at parties. They're intelligent, but only if you define intelligence in a vanishingly narrow way. The kind of intelligence Kurzweil is talking about, which is called strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn't exist yet. Why not? Obviously we're still waiting on all that exponentially growing computing power to get here. But it's also possible that there are things going on in our brains that can't be duplicated electronically no matter how many MIPS you throw at them. The neurochemical architecture that generates the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too complex and analog to replicate in digital silicon. The biologist Dennis Bray was one of the few voices of dissent at last summer's Singularity Summit. "Although biological components act in ways that are comparable to those in electronic circuits," he argued, in a talk titled "What Cells Can Do That Robots Can't," "they are set apart by the huge number of different states they can adopt. Multiple biochemical processes create chemical modifications of protein molecules, further diversified by association with distinct structures at defined locations of a cell.

The resulting combinatorial explosion of states endows living systems with an almost infinite capacity to store information regarding past and present conditions and a unique capacity to prepare for future events." That makes the ones and zeros that computers trade in look pretty crude. Underlying the practical challenges are a host of philosophical ones. Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being in other words, a computer that could pass the Turing test. (Very loosely speaking, such a computer would be able to pass as human in a blind test.) Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know? Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you're still staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socioeconomics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient? And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity? Kurzweil admits that there's a fundamental level of risk associated with the Singularity that's impossible to refine away, simply because we don't know what a highly advanced artificial intelligence, finding itself a newly created inhabitant of the planet Earth, would choose to do. It might not feel like competing with us for resources. One of the goals of the Singularity Institute is to make sure not just that artificial intelligence develops but also that the AI is friendly. You don't have to be a super-intelligent cyborg to understand that introducing a superior life-form into your own biosphere is a basic Darwinian error. If the Singularity is coming, these questions are going to get answers whether we like it or not, and Kurzweil thinks that trying to put off the Singularity by banning technologies is not only impossible but also unethical and probably dangerous. "It would require a totalitarian system to implement such a ban," he says. "It wouldn't work. It would just drive these technologies underground, where the responsible scientists who we're counting on to create the defenses would not have easy access to the tools." Kurzweil is an almost inhumanly patient and thorough debater. He relishes it. He's tireless in hunting down his critics so that he can respond to them, point by point, carefully and in detail. Take the question of whether computers can replicate the biochemical complexity of an organic brain. Kurzweil yields no ground there whatsoever. He does not see any fundamental difference between flesh and silicon that would prevent the latter from thinking. He defies biologists to come up with a neurological mechanism that could not be modeled or at least matched in power and flexibility by software running on a computer. He refuses to fall on his knees before the mystery of the human brain. "Generally speaking," he says, "the core of a disagreement I'll have with a critic is, they'll say, Oh, Kurzweil is underestimating the complexity of reverse-engineering of the human brain or the complexity of biology. But I don't believe I'm underestimating the challenge. I think they're underestimating the power of exponential growth." This position doesn't make Kurzweil an outlier, at least among Singularitarians. Plenty of people make more-extreme predictions. Since 2005 the neuroscientist Henry Markram has been running an ambitious initiative at the Brain Mind Institute of the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland. It's called the

Blue Brain project, and it's an attempt to create a neuron-by-neuron simulation of a mammalian brain, using IBM's Blue Gene super-computer. So far, Markram's team has managed to simulate one neocortical column from a rat's brain, which contains about 10,000 neurons. Markram has said that he hopes to have a complete virtual human brain up and running in 10 years. (Even Kurzweil sniffs at this. If it worked, he points out, you'd then have to educate the brain, and who knows how long that would take?) By definition, the future beyond the Singularity is not knowable by our linear, chemical, animal brains, but Kurzweil is teeming with theories about it. He positively flogs himself to think bigger and bigger; you can see him kicking against the confines of his aging organic hardware. "When people look at the implications of ongoing exponential growth, it gets harder and harder to accept," he says. "So you get people who really accept, yes, things are progressing exponentially, but they fall off the horse at some point because the implications are too fantastic. I've tried to push myself to really look." In Kurzweil's future, biotechnology and nanotechnology give us the power to manipulate our bodies and the world around us at will, at the molecular level. Progress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life. We can scan our consciousnesses into computers and enter a virtual existence or swap our bodies for immortal robots and light out for the edges of space as intergalactic godlings. Within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe. This is, Kurzweil believes, our destiny as a species. Or it isn't. When the big questions get answered, a lot of the action will happen where no one can see it, deep inside the black silicon brains of the computers, which will either bloom bit by bit into conscious minds or just continue in ever more brilliant and powerful iterations of nonsentience. But as for the minor questions, they're already being decided all around us and in plain sight. The more you read about the Singularity, the more you start to see it peeking out at you, coyly, from unexpected directions. Five years ago we didn't have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives over a single electronic network. Now we have Facebook. Five years ago you didn't see people double-checking what they were saying and where they were going, even as they were saying it and going there, using handheld network-enabled digital prosthetics. Now we have iPhones. Is it an unimaginable step to take the iPhones out of our hands and put them into our skulls? Already 30,000 patients with Parkinson's disease have neural implants. Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. There are more than 2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan alongside the human troops. This month a game show will once again figure in the history of artificial intelligence, but this time the computer will be the guest: an IBM super-computer nicknamed Watson will compete on Jeopardy! Watson runs on 90 servers and takes up an entire room, and in a practice match in January it finished ahead of two former champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. It got every question it answered right, but much more important, it didn't need help understanding the questions (or, strictly

speaking, the answers), which were phrased in plain English. Watson isn't strong AI, but if strong AI happens, it will arrive gradually, bit by bit, and this will have been one of the bits. A hundred years from now, Kurzweil and de Grey and the others could be the 22nd century's answer to the Founding Fathers except unlike the Founding Fathers, they'll still be alive to get credit or their ideas could look as hilariously retro and dated as Disney's Tomorrowland. Nothing gets old as fast as the future. But even if they're dead wrong about the future, they're right about the present. They're taking the long view and looking at the big picture. You may reject every specific article of the Singularitarian charter, but you should admire Kurzweil for taking the future seriously. Singularitarianism is grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after another. Kurzweil likes to point out that your average cell phone is about a millionth the size of, a millionth the price of and a thousand times more powerful than the computer he had at MIT 40 years ago. Flip that forward 40 years and what does the world look like? If you really want to figure that out, you have to think very, very far outside the box. Or maybe you have to think further inside it than anyone ever has before.

ESSAY
IN THE ARENA

Joe Klein: How the U.S. Should Support Middle East Reform
By JOE KLEIN Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011

Photo-Illustration by Stephen Kroninger for TIME; Desert: Brooke Whatnall National Geographic / Getty Images

The battle lines were clear as Egypt's revolution devolved into trench warfare in its third week. Two new leaders had emerged. On the government side, there was Vice President Omar Suleiman, who seemed intent on slow-walking the pro-democracy protesters into oblivion. Egypt's "culture," he said, was not ready for democracy. And on the protesters' side, there was Wael Ghonim, the passionate Google executive how perfect! who tweeted as he was released from prison: "Freedom is a bless that deserves fighting for it." The U.S. stood somewhere between these two sides, which actually was not a bad place to be. There was a coherent middle path a gradual transition to democracy and the Obama Administration was trying hard to sell it. The plan involved compromises by both sides. The government would have to lift the 30-year state of emergency, which Suleiman seemed loath to do. And the protesters would have to accept that President Hosni Mubarak would not be humiliated by public defenestration, that he would remain a figurehead in a government led, in effect, by Suleiman until the next elections. It would take time to organize those elections; they would certainly occur no sooner than September. There was general agreement in the region, and within the U.S. government, that this was a reasonable plan. There was no pretense, outside Egypt, that Mubarak could survive. "That era is over," a Middle Eastern diplomat said. Indeed, it was not just the Mubarak kleptocracy that was ending, but an era in American diplomacy. "We have to recognize that there is a strong, fresh wind blowing, powered by these new information technologies," Senator John Kerry told me. "It will be increasingly difficult for dictators to impose their will through sheer brutality." But how could the U.S. change its decidedly awful image in the region? For 60 years we had supported any autocrat willing to take our side against the Soviet Union, and we stuck with them after the Soviets

disappeared. And we had backed Israel unequivocally against the claims of the Palestinians. Both were intensely unpopular positions on the so-called Arab street. Neither could be modified easily. But the Administration's efforts in Egypt clumsy and tentative as they sometimes were pointed the way forward: our allies in the region would have to be nudged toward democratization. No longer could the autocrats' trump card the fear of an Islamist takeover be dispositive. Of course, our leverage is not exactly overwhelming. Dictating to dictators doesn't work; they are congenitally delusional about their own indispensability. "The best way to do this is through incentives, not threats," says Kenneth Pollack, whose book A Path Out of the Desert is an essential road map for the reform of basic Middle Eastern institutions crony-ridden economies; schools that emphasize rote learning; the absence of rational justice systems. "We should offer financial support to programs in education and economic development that move the system in the right direction." Pollack cites Saudi Arabia, which doesn't need our financial support: King Abdullah has overhauled the educational system, shifting the curriculum from religious dogmatism toward intellectual freedom. "It doesn't make headlines like Tahrir Square," Pollack adds. "But it is precisely the sort of thing we should be encouraging." The U.S. should also support democracy demonstration projects under way in Iraq and the West Bank, which we need to bolster any way we can. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has supervised major advances in security and economic freedom that are threatened by the Israeli settler movement. "Fayyad's impressive," said Kerry, who saw him challenge other Arab leaders on the need for democracy in a private meeting recently. "He did it with a boldness that I've not seen before in the Arab world." Which raises the question of our unflinching support for Israel. This is not an issue in Tahrir Square. But it soon will be when the U.N. Security Council votes on a resolution to condemn Israel for its West Bank settlements, illegal under international law. The U.S. won't support the resolution. It probably won't even abstain, although a major argument in favor of doing just that is taking place within the Administration. But we should be clear about this: Israel's illegal behavior in the occupied territories stands at odds with the values the U.S. is trying to promote in the region. Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren speaks about the "strategic alliance" between the U.S. and Israel. But support for Israel is more a strategic liability than a strength. The moral alliance between the U.S. and Israel is far more significant. It is an alliance undertaken, despite the disadvantages to the U.S., to support a democracy and redress a historic wrong. This is an argument that can be made, profitably, to the young people in Tahrir Square but only if Israel respects the territory and democratic rights of the Palestinians.

The Asian Experience

By HANNAH BEECH Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

March 1986, Manila People power alone isn't enough David H. Wells / Corbis How, my overseas friends asked me, had I survived living in a battleground? Given that some of my journalistic colleagues were living in real war zones, the question was almost embarrassing. Life in Bangkok, with its gilded temples and hedonistic spas, shouldn't have been worthy of commiseration. And yet, it is true: last year, after months of antigovernment protests that paralyzed the business district, the Thai capital convulsed in violence. While my children napped at home, I drove 10 minutes to cover the clashes between security forces and so-called Red Shirt demonstrators. All told, the mayhem of April and May claimed around 90 lives, including those of a couple of foreign journalists. A motorcycle-taxi driver who worked near my home was among the dead. Friends complained of bullet holes pockmarking the facades of their office towers, while other buildings were reduced to burned-out carcasses. I've been thinking about the Thai protests as civil unrest has flared halfway across the globe in Tunisia, Yemen and, most dramatically, Egypt. At first glance, the plotlines of Bangkok and Cairo seem similar: thousands of brave souls potentially sacrificing their lives to crusade against a rigid, out-of-touch government. But Thailand's political crisis the result of a bloody deadlock between two bitterly opposed political camps that shows no sign of abating is no model of democratic rebellion. It is a mockery of it. Back in 1992, protesters in Thailand did indeed overthrow a military regime. Since then, the country has failed to nurture its newfound democracy. Every few years, Thai ballots are cast; faith in this ritual is so stunted, however, that many dissenters prefer to unleash their anger on the streets. Asia gave birth to people power in 1986, when a sea of yellow-clad demonstrators peacefully overthrew a dictator in the Philippines. Other popular uprisings against authoritarianism followed, from Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan to Mongolia and Indonesia. Watching the events unfold in the Arab world, Asia's fledgling democracies can be forgiven for indulging in a moment of nostalgia. While revolutionary zeal may have toppled the region's strongmen, however, too few of their successors have bothered to build the institutions needed to sustain democracy beyond its first flush. Democracy through revolution is heady stuff, but it's not always a template for building lasting freedom and justice.

The withered potential of people power is best examined on its home turf. This month, the Philippines will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the start of its historic uprising. Those following the events in Egypt will find many parallels. Ferdinand Marcos, a corrupt, aging, U.S.-backed dictator, was ousted by a populace that rallied, in part, thanks to technology. (Then it was radio, not Facebook or Twitter.) But a quarter-century later, with the son of people-power heroine Corazon Aquino now serving as President, the Philippines is still beset by the poverty, cronyism and nepotism that provoked the 1986 protests. These failings are not the Philippines' alone. Across Asia, elections are held, but vote buying taints the results. Politics is dominated by the same old families. Economic growth often rewards the few rather than the many. And from Malaysia and East Timor to Taiwan and Thailand, I have met local journalists who passed information on to me because they felt it was too dangerous to write about the issues themselves. Without the crucial check of a free press or independent legislatures and courts, for that matter democracy exists in name only. Still, Asia also offers heartening lessons for the Arab world. There's South Korea, for instance, which overthrew a U.S.-backed military dictatorship, then carefully constructed a prosperous democracy. And then there's Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority nation. In 1998, after 32 years in power, strongman Suharto was forced out by massive street protests. Since then, change in Indonesia has occurred not in one cataclysmic jolt but instead through years of brick-by-brick nation building. That may not sound sexy, but it works. Indonesia has now peacefully cycled through several secular-minded leaders, and its civil society is flourishing. The country's problems are still immense: graft and poverty persist, as does sectarian conflict. But Egypt could do a lot worse than to follow the model of this moderate, Muslim-majority democracy. Beech, who is now TIME's Beijing bureau chief, spent the past few years in Thailand

Scent of a Nerd
By JOEL STEIN Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

Photo-Illustration by John Ueland for TIME; Perfume bottle: Sean Brosmith

The ultimate goal of any career is to have other people smell like you. And while I contemplated many methods of accomplishing this, the only scalable one was to create my own fragrance. Until a decade ago, to pull this off you had to be seriously famous, like Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Lauren or Cher. But now there are hundreds of celebrity fragrances, including ones from reggaeton singer Daddy Yankee, the wife of English soccer player Wayne Rooney and Japanese Vogue editor-at-large Anna Dello Russo. It's probably just weeks before TIME readers can choose to smell like Nancy Gibbs instead of me. I needed to act quickly. I called Kecia Coby, a consultant who has guided the personal scents of celebrities such as 50 Cent and Kim Kardashian, who has one of the top-selling celebrity perfumes in the country. I met Coby at her office in Los Angeles. After nearly two decades of reporting, I could tell just by looking at Coby that she was very, very pretty. Coby told me it would be the first of several meetings we'd have to create my cologne. This, I was pretty sure, was not how celebrities did things. I wanted her to make the cologne and for me to go on talk shows and tell people about how I made the cologne. But she insisted that both Kim Kardashian and 50 Cent were very involved, coming up with names, rejecting scents, asking for heavier caps. If I didn't truly know my cologne, I wouldn't be convincing when I talked about it. Coby had a way of making being famous seem a lot less fun. I went to Sephora with my lovely wife Cassandra, smelled a bunch of cologne and reported back to Coby. Apparently, I like soapy, woodsy scents and for Cassandra not to wander off through the rest of the store while our baby knocked over bottles. When I asked Coby why I was smelling stuff instead of market testing my readers' preferences, she said that if I'd been honest in my career, my readers would tend to be soapy, woodsy people too. Kim Kardashian's perfume smells sexy because she is sexy. Lady Gaga's upcoming perfume will smell like blood and semen because Lady Gaga is trapped in a male prison. Next, we had to decide what to call my cologne. This was tough, since all the good ones were taken: Kimora Lee Simmons' Fabulosity, Mariah Carey's Lollipop Bling, Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Lovers Sunshine Cuties Lil' Angel. Coby and I decided, after much discussion, to call my cologne Snarky, since that seemed a little more playful than my first choice, Joel Stein by Joel Stein. For our third meeting, we talked to Lisa Popoli, a senior account executive at Givaudan, the largest fragrance company in the world. She sent me five sample bottles, all of which smelled great. For more than a month, I tried on one each day and made Cassandra smell me, pretending to listen to her comments but really just recording whether she had sex with me that night. This went on for months until, unable to decide, I asked Kim Kardashian for help. "Fragrance is such a personal thing--it took me two years to develop my scent," she told me. "The idea is to create something that's a true reflection of yourself, so when you share it with people, it reminds them of you." Looking at the list of ingredients in the samples, I wasn't sure if my true reflection smelled like "clean aldehydes," "T-shirt accord," "juicy melon" or "skin musk," because I didn't know what those things were. I eventually settled on one with top notes of plum-and-citrus bouquet; a heart of plum, tobacco flower and heliotrope; and a dry down of tobacco accord, amber and musk. You might not think people want to smell like cigarettes, but Snarky disagrees.

For Snarky's bottle, we met with Sean Brosmith, chief creative officer of Maesa Studio. At one point, when I was telling him about my interests, he very earnestly asked me, "What does nerd smell like?" After I suggested a 20-sided die from Dungeons & Dragons, Brosmith went to work. He came up with a design that looked just like a really swank 12-sided die, which is used to determine damage from a battle-ax, so it's a pretty cool die. You pull open the top of the die to reveal the little spray thing. "There's a humor element to that," Brosmith said. The bar to clear for humor in fragrance bottles is even lower than it is in TIME magazine. Snarky will retail for about $79 for 3.4 oz. (100 ml) and will be sold at high-end stores once I've found 15,000 people interested in me, Dungeons & Dragons and smelling like cigarettes. Which only sounds challenging until you think about all the people who want to smell like Kim Kardashian.

NATION

Obama's Counterterror Czar Steps Out of the Shadows

By MICHAEL CROWLEY Monday, Feb. 28, 2011

Andrew Cutraro / Redux John Brennan works underground. His basement office in the White House has low ceilings and no windows. It is an extra-secure enclave within one of the world's most secure buildings, with a keypad lock on its outer door, a gleaming steel safe in its anteroom and a prohibition on electronic devices, such as BlackBerrys and cameras, which could scoop up some of America's most sensitive secrets. The location makes sense. President Obama's top adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism mostly works in the shadows. Brennan's is a world of spycraft and special operations, one requiring a delicate balance between protecting American lives and upholding American values. The job involves some grim conversations with the President. Brennan is often the first to notify Obama when something terrible has happened he delivered the news that Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been shot in Tucson or when word surfaces of a particularly alarming new threat. You can imagine that Obama clenches a little when he sees Brennan, with his broad shoulders, thick hands and stern face, appearing in the Oval Office doorway for an unscheduled meeting. "I will not disagree with that view," says Brennan, a career intelligence professional, a muted grin breaking through his poker face. Then he turns serious again: "The issues that I speak to [Obama] about are life-and-death." Brennan's portfolio covers a hair-raising spectrum of horribles, including everything from cyberattacks to earthquakes and pandemics. But his top priority is the continuing threat of radical Islamists who have mounted a series of attacks on the U.S. during Obama's tenure that came close to killing countless innocents. "He has become the de facto head of the intelligence community, at least on terrorism issues," says Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and Brennan colleague. He has also become something of a folk hero among Obama aides, who lavish praise on his skills and work ethic. "He is the most effective person I've seen in the government," says Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough.

The political turmoil spreading across the Middle East may complicate Brennan's job. The autocratic regimes in Arab countries like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are all crucial, if imperfect, U.S. partners in the fight against Islamic extremism. Brennan's role during this period, says a White House spokesman, is "to stay vigilant for the potential for a terrorist dimension to develop as the situation unfolds." Yet Brennan himself strikes a hopeful note. "There are certainly risks," he says. "But there are also opportunities." Even on the quiet days, the ones in which the world seems safe and calm, Brennan speaks to Obama several times. "Anytime I need to see the President," he says, "I just run up the stairs." Sometimes the news is good. He might dash in to tell him that a terrorism suspect has been captured, a bomb defused. Sometimes he just e-mails. When Scandinavian authorities arrested suspected Islamist militants in late December, he notified the President by e-mail with a Shakespearean reference in the subject line: "Something is rotten in Denmark no more." It takes a wry sense of humor to stay sane in the world of counterterrorism, where Brennan, 55, has spent much of his career. On a shelf above his office desk, the former CIA operative keeps two small figurines of the dueling secret agents from Mad magazine's classic Spy vs. Spy feature. Clad in black and white hats and trench coats, the cartoon pair endlessly battle away, always living to fight another day. Brennan's world is not so benign. "It is intensely, 24 hours a day, dealing with death preventing death, and causing it," says Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser to three Presidents. So on any given day, Brennan might lead an exercise simulating a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city or help plan drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan or learn that several of his former colleagues were killed in a December suicide bombing at a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. (See pictures of the history of the CIA.) The alarms real and false never stop going off. Brennan constantly gets alerts about suspicious airline passengers. "We had a couple this morning," says Brennan, sitting in his office on a January afternoon. "Is this just an inebriated passenger? You're trying to make sure that you understand the nature of the threat." The passenger is almost always a drunk. But the constant possibility of something worse means that Brennan might be the hardest worker in a White House of workaholics. "I don't know that John ever sleeps," says National Security Council staffer Ben Rhodes. A vacation means following the President to some sunny clime and working there, nonstop. As Obama golfed on Martha's Vineyard last August, for instance, Brennan was spotted in a suit and tie. On Christmas Day in 2009, Brennan was cooking dinner when he got a call reporting that a Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had tried to blow up a Detroit-bound plane with explosives sewn into his underwear. Brennan worked through New Year's Day. "It's impossible to have downtime. It's just the nature of the work," he says. The hours take their toll: "He was dead tired the last time I saw him," says a friend. In Brennan's line of work, the margin for error is almost zero. And he knows who will be the first one grilled if terrorists strike: "Next time something happens, I'm sure I'm going to be blamed by some of the folks in Congress [who will say] that, you know, we didn't do enough," he says.

For all those reasons, Brennan is watching events in the Middle East. The U.S. gets invaluable assistance from friendly Arab states. In Yemen, for example, a fragile government has turned its army against radical Islamists. Though pessimists warn of Iran-style revolutions that could leave Islamists in power in many countries, Brennan sees a bright side. "I think it's going to have profound implications across the region in terms of moving ahead with political reforms that are overdue," he says of the peaceful demonstrations. "In many respects, I think it's a refutation of bin Laden and al-Qaeda's agenda of violence." Brennan has long thought that the U.S. must show a more benevolent face to the Muslim world. He emphasizes the ways in which the Obama Administration has broken with Bush-era policies like waterboarding and secret prisons "a way to signal to the world that America is a country of values," as he puts it. Brennan has pressed to close the Guantnamo Bay detention camp. And he has toned down the rhetoric, abandoning phrases like "the war on terrorism" and the word jihad to describe the mission of Islamic terrorists. "Jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam meaning to purify oneself or one's community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children," he explained in a May speech. Such talk has not endeared him to hard-line conservatives. And Brennan doesn't take their criticism lightly. After an editorial in USA Today questioned whether Obama was tough enough on terrorists, Brennan wrote a combative response that accused Republicans of fearmongering that "serve[s] the goals of al-Qaeda." That led some GOP stalwarts including House Homeland Security Committee chairman Peter King, who dubbed Brennan an "egomaniac" to call for his ouster. Then, when federal officials read Miranda rights to Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber only after he stopped cooperating with interrogators Republicans howled that terrorists should not be treated like ordinary criminals. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, for one, said Brennan "has lost my confidence." Yet for every conservative who thinks Brennan is too soft, there's a liberal who sees him as Obama's Dick Cheney. Much of U.S. counterterrorism policy remains largely unchanged since the second Bush term. Obama is moving ahead with military trials for terrorism suspects, which civil libertarians call unconstitutional; he has multiplied the rate of drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Pakistan; and Guantnamo is still open. Obama's Justice Department has fended off multiple lawsuits challenging its practices including one from the American Civil Liberties Union contesting reported efforts to kill the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen based in Yemen, on the grounds that a President has no power to target a fellow American for assassination. Brennan says simply that any U.S. citizen plotting terrorist attacks abroad "will face the full brunt of a U.S. response." The embattled CIA certainly loves him. "I can't tell you how important it is to have someone at the White House who understands what the hell we're doing," says CIA Director Leon Panetta. And he has fans in more surprising places. Last month, no less than former Vice President Cheney told the Today show he thinks Obama "has learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate." Sunrise in the Desert

As the world watches the drama in Egypt unfold, Brennan has fond memories of Cairo's Tahrir Square. As a junior at Fordham University, he spent a year studying at the American University in Cairo, whose main campus was then just a few blocks from the square. "That's where I spent a lot of my time," he says, browsing through the neighborhood's stores. On New Year's Eve in 1976, Brennan climbed the pyramids and watched the sun rise over the desert. A few years later, Brennan returned to the region. As a young CIA agent based in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, he loved camping in the desert with Saudi tribesmen. "It was sitting around the campfire, telling stories and jokes," Brennan recalls. Sometimes there were goat roasts. And sometimes Brennan would go off and explore the desert alone on camelback. "That's why I take very personally what al-Qaeda has done," he says. "They have besmirched the image of Arab hospitality." Born in North Bergen, N.J., Brennan makes for an unlikely John of Arabia. But there may have been an element of destiny in his career choice: his birthday is the day the British hanged Nathan Hale, the first American spy. When, as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, Brennan spotted a CIA recruitment ad in the New York Times, he signed up. In 1980 the CIA sent Brennan to the Middle East, just as anti-Western religious fundamentalism was exploding from Iran to Saudi Arabia. By 1996, Brennan was the CIA's station chief in Saudi Arabia, where he proved his mettle. Once, in the hope of enlisting a double agent, he walked up to the car of a senior Iranian intelligence operative and knocked on the window. "Hello. I'm from the U.S. embassy, and I've got something to tell you," he said. (Disappointingly, the Iranian stammered and sped away.) In what would be a fateful tenure at the agency's top levels, Brennan became CIA Director George Tenet's chief of staff in 1999, and then the CIA's deputy executive director. In 2003 he left to set up the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, a clearinghouse of intelligence data. After exiting government in 2005, Brennan was earning a high-six-figure salary at a security consulting firm when he was approached by Obama's campaign. Brennan says he is "neither Democrat nor Republican," but he was frustrated by a belief that the Iraq war and other Bush-era counterterrorism policies were making America less safe, and he admired Obama's promise of a fresh start in the fight against radical Islam. Obama, meanwhile, lacked a seasoned intelligence pro in his inner circle. The candidate quickly grew to appreciate Brennan's vast knowledge of dark secrets and concise, no-nonsense briefing style. Obama liked him enough to consider making Brennan his CIA director. But when that word leaked in November 2008, liberal bloggers who scoured Brennan's public record turned up quotes suggesting sympathy for aggressive interrogation techniques. In one 2006 interview, Brennan agreed that the U.S. had to "take off the gloves in some areas" with terrorists. In another, he called the definition of torture debatable: "I think it's torture when I have to ride in the car with my kids and they have loud rap music on." Brennan insists he was not responsible for crafting interrogation and detention policies during the Bush Administration and that he opposed extreme interrogation methods like waterboarding. He claims the Bush White House resented him enough to block him from two different high-level job appointments for which he was being considered. But the incoming Obama team was not interested in a fight involving the CIA's past, and Brennan took himself out of consideration.

Brennan "was disappointed" not to get the CIA post, says one friend. And yet by most accounts he is more powerful today, in the White House, than he would have been at CIA headquarters in Virginia. "It's very ironic that a guy who they thought could not get confirmed as CIA director and who they stuck in a windowless room in the White House basement has all the power," says a senior member of Congress who deals with intelligence issues. "He's the President's guy." The Point Person Some critics complain that's true to a fault. One former government official with counterterrorism experience in more than one Administration calls Brennan a micromanager who calls intelligence analysts outside the official chain of command. "He is involved in the tactical details of every current threat," says the former official. Others say Brennan hoards power, overshadowing the Director of National Intelligence position that Congress created in 2005 to oversee the entire intelligence community. Obama officials sharply bat down such talk. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper calls Brennan "assiduous in not overstepping bounds." But it's no secret that Brennan clashed with Clapper's predecessor, Dennis Blair, who was forced out after friction with the White House. Some members of Congress want to know more about this dynamic but can't call Brennan to testify because, as a White House staffer, he is not subject to congressional oversight under the Constitution. "It does concern me that Mr. Brennan is clearly the point person and yet is not accountable to Congress," says Senator Susan Collins, ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee. For Brennan, such critiques are overshadowed by his overriding priority: preventing another catastrophe. For now, the most important thing to him is that al-Qaeda hasn't successfully struck the U.S. under his watch. Several terrorist attacks have come close. The embittered Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad managed to light the fuse on his explosives-laden SUV in Times Square last spring, but his improvised bomb didn't detonate. Neither did Abdulmutallab's underwear. The al-Qaeda-trained Najibullah Zazi was apprehended on the George Washington Bridge last Sept. 10, days before he planned to detonate bombs in the New York City subway. To some critics, these near misses are evidence that America's defenses are not strong enough. "We cannot depend on dumb luck, incompetent terrorists and alert citizens to keep our families safe," then-Senator Kit Bond, a Republican, complained last May. But nothing shakes Brennan from his calm quite like the word luck. The U.S. has severely weakened al-Qaeda's ability to recruit and train, he argues. "And so what comes out of that pipeline, I think, is a much less capable, much less expert terrorist. If their underwear doesn't explode the way it's supposed to, it's not just because the guy was incompetent. It's because the training he got, the person who provided him the IED, the materials that went into it all were less efficient, less suitable to the challenge. I take strong issue with somebody saying, 'They're just lucky,'" Brennan says. "That's bulls___. And I rarely ever curse." And with that, he excuses himself. He is due for a meeting on Pakistan in the White House Situation Room, just steps down the hall from the underground office he didn't want but where he now seems quite comfortable.

WORLD

Postcard from Copiap

By AARON NELSEN Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

A pirquinero walks out of a small-scale mine near Copiap, in northern Chile Tomas Munita

Armed with only a lantern and basic tools, Aladino Olivares crawls down a crude mine shaft little more than 3 ft. (1 m) high inside a mountain near Copiap in Chile's northern Atacama Desert. He does this so often that he doesn't wear a helmet anymore, only a stocking cap holding a pack of cigarettes and two lighters. "It's just a little bit farther," Olivares, 58, says about 200 ft. (60 m) down. At 300 ft. (91 m), he slides into a parallel shaft. The only ceiling supports are rocks that he's stacked over the years. "Right there, that's the vein," he says, pointing to a red strip along the cave's wall. "That's where we find gold." After softening the rock by blasting two sticks of dynamite inside the wall, Olivares chips away and fills his bag with 90 lb. (40 kg) of material that will yield flecks of gold. He sells about 50 g (1.75 oz.) each month on the black market, earning some $1,200, more than three times Chile's monthly minimum wage. But when Olivares emerges on this day, he learns that another solo miner was recently found dead in a similar shaft nearby, buried under several tons of collapsed rock. Olivares shrugs off the news. "It's a sacrifice," he says of the dangers he faces every day. "But nobody tells me what to do in my mine." That freedom is part of the allure of being a Chilean pirquinero, or small-time independent miner. It's also a big part of the problem. The miraculous rescue of 33 company-employed miners trapped far below the Atacama last year showcased the pride that Chile, the world's leading copper producer, takes in its mining industry. But long before that, the self-employed, self-reliant Chilean pirquineros held a special place in South American mining lore, ever since the most famous of them, Juan Godoy, discovered in 1832 the Chaarcillo silver mine. It became one of the largest in the Americas and helped make the Atacama region a mining powerhouse. "The pirquineros are like [something out of] the California gold rush," says Liver Rojas, a mineralogy professor at the University of Atacama. Still, the drama of "Los 33" also sparked a call to fix Chile's shameful mine-safety record. President Sebastin Piera has made a push for reforms in larger company operations, which employ some 140,000 miners. But many Chileans feel the 40,000 or so pirquinero ventures need just as much, if not

more, regulatory scrutiny. Indeed, says Fernando Pinto, head of operations in northern Chile for the state-run mining firm Enami, "the percentage of fatalities in those smaller mines is higher." Chilean authorities rarely if ever visit tiny mine camps like Olivares'. This is odd as well as tragic, since in many cases the government rents out the mine tracts in which pirquineros work. Olivares, for example, pays the Chilean government an annual license fee of 30,000 pesos (about $60). Most pirquineros work in groups of four or five, using beat-up air compressors to blast holes into the mountainsides and rudimentary winches to haul up buckets of rock. Usually, the amount of gold or copper they find isn't enough to be sold directly, so they sell it either on the black market or to Enami, which exports the pirquinero product in bulk. Occasionally, hard work and a bit of luck pay off with a mother lode, and some prospectors can make a decent living. But more commonly, pirquineros languish in poverty, their fortunes inexorably tied to the vagaries of commodity prices. In addition, says Pinto, regular companies often find pirquineros unemployable because they are unpredictable or have poor health or legal troubles. Says Rojas: "The pirquinero doesn't have a plan other than extracting gold and selling it." That's why even when a pirquinero does strike it rich, it doesn't always last. In that sense too, Godoy's story is sadly emblematic: apparently he cashed in his find and quickly squandered it, dying as destitute as he was before his magnificent discovery. Even so, pirquineros like Olivares make it clear what they think is most important. "After everything," he says, "I'm my own boss."

Egypt: What Happens When the Revolution Is Delayed

By Bobby Ghosh Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011 On Feb. 10, enormous crowds gathered in Tahrir Square to cheer the hoped-for resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. Those hopes were quashed when Mubarak, in another meandering and legalistic speech, reiterated his intention of staying in office until a new President is elected in September. The people in Tahrir, some of whom had come from as far away as Aswan in the south, were furious but also at a crossroads. What else could they do short of turning what has, on their part, been a largely peaceful protest into something bloodier? Tahrir Square has been a barometer of anti-regime feeling for more than two weeks now, the numbers who gather rising and falling with public support. The question now is, will anger swell the streets with protest again? Or will the failure to get Mubarak out only increase anxieties over instability and economic stagnation (the crucial tourist industry, for example, is a shell of its former self.) There was speculation that Mubarak's latest speech was an attempt to divide public opinion even further, targeting older Egyptians frustrated that life was not getting back to normal. Even before Feb. 10, Egyptians were expressing both hopes and anxieties, as TIME reports:

It's been barely a fortnight since the first demonstrations broke out in Cairo's Tahrir Square, but Mohammad Ibrahim Abdel-Mohsin already refers to the revolution in the past tense. The lawyer and father of three says he marveled at the valor and steadfastness of the mostly young protesters; in the uprising's first heady week, he twice visited the square to witness their heroism for himself. And he was delighted when a plainly rattled President Hosni Mubarak pledged he wouldn't stand for re-election in September. But now Abdel-Mohsin, 45, wishes the kids would just go home. "They secured very big concessions, and they should let things return to normal and life to continue," he says. Mona Abdel-Salem, too, is impatient for a return to normality; for the divorced mother of five, who manages a small teahouse in the Agouza neighborhood, revolution is bad for business. Unlike the lawyer, she feels no sympathy, much less admiration, for the Tahrir Square youths. She remembers the first week of protests only for the violence and looting they unleashed. Despite the risk and the scarcity of customers Abdel-Salem, also 45, kept her teahouse open. She had no choice, she says: "Otherwise, how were we going to eat?" That pragmatic outlook informs her politics as well: Mubarak is the devil she knows. "We don't know how a new President will treat us, so let's stick with the old one," she says.

Opposition supporters gather in their stronghold of Tahrir Square, in Cairo Feb. 10th, 2011.

Suhaib Salem / Reuters

Revolutions are often a contest between yes and no. Calls for caution, the ifs and buts, are frequently drowned out. But as Egypt, a society weaned on the absolute certainties that come with authoritarianism, enters its third week of political upheaval, many feel a mounting anxiety about what lies ahead. For the political activists and amateur protesters who have brought the revolution this far, the challenge now is to persuade Egyptians like Abdel-Mohsin and Abdel-Salem to set aside their misgivings, sacrifice short-term economic interests and get behind the push to topple the regime. It's a tough sell. The unease is heightened by the absence of a charismatic, reassuring leader among the protesters the revolution is missing a Vaclav Havel or Corazon Aquino. Nor is there a Mikhail Gorbachev, an insider

happy to shake the system up; the regime's new center of power, Vice President Omar Suleiman, is no reformist. Although he has opened negotiations with opposition groups, Suleiman has shown great reluctance to drop the emergency powers Mubarak has used for three decades to curb dissent. And he has sought to undermine the uprising by blaming it on old bogeymen: unnamed foreign forces and the Muslim Brotherhood. If all this feeds the fears of anxious Egyptians, it also sows a sense of apprehension in Washington, where the Obama Administration, having nudged Mubarak toward the exit, is now trying to help manage Egypt's change to a more democratic system. That leaves the White House with a fine line to walk. It must reassure Suleiman and the Egyptian military, perhaps the country's true arbiter of power, that the U.S. will not stampede them into a messy democracy like, say, Russia's under Boris Yeltsin while simultaneously restraining them from cracking the heads of protesters. The Administration has reached out, through Ambassador Margaret Scobey and special envoy Frank Wisner, to opposition leaders like Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former head of the U.N.'s nuclear-watchdog agency Mohamed ElBaradei, advising restraint and providing assurance that democratic freedoms are on the way. Under Egypt's constitution, Mubarak's resignation would trigger an election in 60 days a challenging amount of time, a State Department spokesman says, for the country to prepare for its first-ever free and fair elections. But, as President Obama told Fox News, "Egypt is not going to go back to what it was." Mubarak, naturally, is keen to give the impression of business as usual: he met with the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates and with Russia's envoy to the Middle East. (His new Cabinet also announced a 15% raise for all state employees, an unsubtle attempt to curry favor with the 6 million people on the government payroll.) For the young Egyptians at the vanguard of the uprising, Mubarak's photo ops are a provocation. But to many others, they are an assurance of stability and continuity. In a country where there had been no political change for a generation, sudden shifts can be a frightening prospect. "We must have a slow, gradual transition," says Abdel-Mohsin, the lawyer. "It doesn't help to create a power vacuum now." Yasser Salaheddine, 36, a rug repairman who attended several pro-Mubarak rallies, worries that opposition groups have disparate agendas a recipe for chaos. "The Muslim Brotherhood have their ideas. The other opposition groups have ideas. So what is going to happen after Mubarak leaves?" he asks. "The best thing that [Mubarak] did was that he didn't leave. If he had, things would be very difficult now." Mubarak's Man Suleiman, 74, has anxieties of his own. The former general and Egypt's top spymaster hopes to engineer a face-saving exit for his boss and friend. But he must also protect the interests of the institution that commands the loyalty of both men: the military. Egypt's armed forces need the $1.3 billion annual stipend they receive from the U.S. as much as the respect they enjoy among ordinary Egyptians. Both those considerations rule out the use of military force against the revolution. Besides, many ordinary soldiers have shown sympathy for the protesters.

The military leadership comes from more conservative stock, however, and regards the protesters as dangerous rabble; Suleiman has described them as working for "foreign agendas." The top brass are also leery of calls for economic reforms, since they may threaten the military's vast business interests, including a network of military-owned factories that produce everything from olive oil to Jeep Cherokees. How can Suleiman protect the military and Mubarak? By conceding as little as possible to the protesters. Since being named Vice President on Jan. 29, Suleiman has talked a good game about reforms, investigations into abuses and negotiations with the opposition. But the emergency law remains in force, allowing police and intelligence officials to harass and detain opposition figures, human-rights activists and journalists. Suleiman has formed committees to consider constitutional amendments a key demand of the opposition but also has said he doesn't think Egyptians are ready for democracy. (This earned him a sharp rebuke from Washington: White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described that comment as "unhelpful.") This is Suleiman's stock-in-trade: as head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service (GIS) since 1993, he has been the enforcer of the emergency law's most draconian statutes. Suleiman's intelligence agency and the Interior Ministry are generally credited with undermining the Muslim Brotherhood after the Islamist group won one-fifth of the vote in elections in 2005. But GIS was also responsible for the repression of secular opposition groups, ensuring that the National Democratic Party routinely won huge majorities in elections. The President relied on Suleiman for delicate international tasks as well, including mediating between Israelis and Palestinians. As secretive as any other spymaster, Suleiman is something of a mystery to most Egyptians. Successive Administrations in Washington regarded him as a friend. Dispatches from the U.S. embassy in Cairo obtained and released by WikiLeaks show the esteem in which he was held: one letter, from Scobey, described Suleiman as a "pragmatist with an extremely sharp analytical mind." A cable from 2006 labeled him "the most successful element" of U.S.-Egypt cooperation in the Middle East peace process. Leaked letters from the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv suggest that the Israelis, too, held Suleiman in the highest regard. A 2008 cable noted that of the likely successors to Mubarak, "there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar [Suleiman]." U.S. diplomats, to be sure, could see through some of Suleiman's games. One WikiLeaks document detailed how an ambassador described Suleiman's "long history of threatening us with the [Muslim Brotherhood] bogeyman." Yet other cables suggest Suleiman didn't always agree with his political master: he was said to detest Mubarak's son Gamal, his rival for the presidency. But he remained loyal nonetheless. In his first interview to state TV after being made Vice President, he described Mubarak as "father and leader." That sort of history means that Suleiman is nobody's idea of an honest broker, and his negotiations with opposition groups may have been doomed to failure even if he'd been sincere in promising reforms. Even including the Muslim Brotherhood in the talks brought him little credit opposition parties and unaffiliated protesters alike see him as just an extension of the Mubarak regime and suspect he's merely stalling for time, hoping public opinion will turn against the revolution or that the protesters will simply tire and go home.

Stars and Stalwarts But they haven't yet. In fact, on Feb. 8, Tahrir Square once again filled to the brim as the protesters found a new hero: Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who had created a Facebook page titled We Are All Khaled Said, on which he had called for the first protest, on Jan. 25, in Tahrir Square. (Khaled Said was a 28-year-old businessman brutally killed by police in Alexandria last June.) The unexpected success of the protest inspired others across the country and spiraled into the revolution. Ghonim was arrested two days later by state security and held for 12 days; not even his family knew where he was. Released on Feb. 7, Ghonim, 30, tweeted a powerful rallying cry: "Freedom is a bless that deserves fighting for it." That evening he gave an interview to a popular Egyptian satellite station, Dream TV. Shown a montage of images of some of the 300 protesters who had died since his arrest, he broke down in tears and walked off the set; the display of raw emotion touched a nerve among viewers and turned Ghonim, previously known only to a handful of activists, into the revolution's poster child. About 130,000 people have already joined a Facebook group called I Delegate Wael Ghonim to Speak in the Name of Egypt's Revolutionaries. The mild-mannered executive now finds himself burdened with the expectations of millions. For Fatma Gaber, 16, Ghonim's TV appearance was the moment she stopped being fearful of the uprising: he represented its human face. "The media had said there were fights and things," she says. "But when I saw Wael Ghonim, I really got affected by his words and understood that a lot of people suffered in this revolution. I really wanted to be part of it." Gaber and her mother made their way to the square on Feb. 8 to hear Ghonim speak. In Tahrir Square, Ghonim was greeted as a superstar but made no claim to leadership. "I'm not a hero, but those who were martyred are the heroes," he said. Such modesty is rare in a political culture of bombast and self-promotion, and the crowd roared with approval. "We will not abandon our demand, which is the departure of the regime," he said to even more raucous cheers. Even if Ghonim resists the pressure to take the reins of the revolution, his performances on TV and in the square have reinvigorated the uprising, just when the regime seemed to be succeeding at waiting out the protesters. The turnout on Feb. 8 easily matched that of Feb. 1, the day Mubarak pledged he would step down in the fall. Large crowds also gathered in Alexandria, Suez and Asyut, belying the regime's claim that the protests were limited to Tahrir Square. The rally and Ghonim's speech at it was a reaffirmation for Mustafa Nabil, one of the Tahrir Square stalwarts. "This is a real, honest Egyptian, and I'm proud of him like I'm proud of everyone I've seen [in the square], sleeping in the cold every night," he says. Nabil, 29, is a medical doctor who first went to Tahrir Square on Jan. 29 to treat people hurt in clashes with police and has hardly been home since. Moved by the determination of the protesters, he joined their cause, and when armed pro-Mubarak mobs stormed the square on Feb. 2, he alternated between throwing stones at them and attending to the injured. There's been little violence since, allowing Nabil to bask in the square's convivial atmosphere. He talks excitedly about three couples who got married there "because they feel that this is the only place in Cairo that is free." His parents and sister, who were vehemently opposed to his joining the protests, have

recently visited him in the square. Thousands of people have arrived to check out the scene, and many have chosen to stay on. Yet exultant though they sound when describing their revolution, even Tahrir Square veterans like Nabil feel a sense of uncertainty. Many fear that the regime, its police and plainclothes thugs having failed to dislodge the protesters, may try some underhanded tactic. "We don't know what will happen tomorrow or anytime," Nabil says. "We don't know [but] this is our territory of freedom." It's the sort of claim that young, idealistic men and women have been making on the barricades for more than 200 years. And it leaves Abdel-Salem, the teahouse manager, unimpressed. Given her difficulty in making ends meet, she reasons that the protesters must be receiving money and food from an unknown power. (Suleiman's propaganda to that effect has not been in vain.) "They're not like us I get up early, and I work until it's late," Abdel-Salem says. "They're being paid and fed for doing nothing." State media have indeed portrayed the protesters as spoiled brats from the upper middle class who have little concern for the difficulties their actions place on working-class Egyptians like Abdel-Salem. In similar circumstances elsewhere, that has been a powerful argument, but not everyone is buying it. Mohammed, a taxi driver who refuses to give his full name and who has had little income since the uprising began, remains firmly on the side of the protesters. If their continued presence in Tahrir Square messes up Cairo traffic for weeks on end, so be it. "They are staying there for things we believe in," Mohammed says. "They are outlining their demands before the people." Having driven some protesters to the square, Mohammed feels protective of them. He worries that if they disperse, the police and intelligence agencies will be able to pick them off for imprisonment and torture. If the regime attacks the young people again, says Mohammed, "I will go down to the square myself to protect them." The most important thing, he says, is for the revolution to maintain its momentum. The alternative is too grim to consider: "I'm afraid that these people will leave [the square] and things will return to the old ways or be even worse." Wherever the revolution goes from here, there's plenty more anxiety to come. With reporting by Abigail Hauslohner, Rania Abouzeid and Yasmine El Rashidi/Cairo and Michael Scherer and Massimo Calabresi/Washington

The Brotherhood
By Abigail Hauslohner; Andrew Lee Butters / Cairo Monday, Feb. 21, 2011
Fathi Mohamed Hassan doesn't stand out among the thousands upon thousands who have gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square to demand the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. A father of four, Hassan, 43, hails from the working-class factory sprawl of the Nile Delta sort of Egypt's Midwest

and with his round, bearded face and blue-plaid flannel shirt, he looks like the kind of guy who sells computer parts, which he does. But he's also a rank-and-file member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political group banned in Egypt one with a reputation that many in the country as well as the West find foreboding. "I'm here because who likes a dictatorship?" Hassan says as the two men with him chuckle. They are strangers to him but also members of the Brotherhood. Individuals may not stand out in the massive protests, but clumps of them do. Hassan and his comrades do not disguise the fact that there is planning behind their presence. "It's all organized by province and district," Hassan explains. "For example, some will come for two days, then go home and come back." He adds, "The Muslim Brotherhood has a good sense of organization and work ethic. They are very committed." Persistence has been at the heart of the Brotherhood since its birth in 1928. Taking some inspiration from Cairo's Young Men's Muslim Association, founded the year before, it combined nationalism and anticolonialism with the belief that Islam and its tenets were the solution to the challenges facing Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. A network of cells took on paramilitary capabilities. In late 1948, the Brotherhood assassinated Egypt's Prime Minister, and the government retaliated by killing the group's founder a couple of months later.

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Tahrir Yuri Kozyrev / Noor for TIME In the 1950s, Sayyid Qutb, a theoretician of the Brotherhood, came up with an ideology of jihad against non-Islamic entities. Qutb's work inspired firebrands like Ayman al-Zawahiri, now Osama bin Laden's deputy in al-Qaeda, and Omar Abdel Rahman, the "Blind Sheik" who inspired the first bombing of the World Trade Center, as well as other terrorist groups. Qutb fell afoul of the popular and secular regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had him executed in 1966. The government persecution of the Brotherhood continued under Nasser's successors, Anwar Sadat and Mubarak. The pressure changed the Brotherhood, and by the 1980s, though still banned, it was professing nonviolent opposition to the regime. It channeled its energies into social reform, education and political representation by making informal alliances with legal parties and fielding independent candidates. In 2005 it won 88 out of 454 seats in parliament, becoming the second largest bloc after the ruling National

Democratic Party. Brotherhood leaders in Tahrir Square consistently speak of their commitment to the nonsectarian nature of Egypt. "The Muslim Brotherhood takes Islam as a template, but we don't have a religious state or God-ordained rule," says Ibrahim Zakaria, a Brotherhood official and former member of parliament. "We believe in democracy and all its rules. We believe in the principle that the people are the origin and source of sovereignty and that the people choose their leaders in free and secret ballots." In November 2010, however, after elections that were widely seen as rigged, the Brotherhood was not able to win a single seat. That disenfranchisement helped send individual members into the streets when the uprising began on Jan. 25, even though their leadership at first kept a polite, if not cool, distance. "Why didn't the Muslim Brotherhood go in at the beginning?" Hassan asks rhetorically. "They didn't because then the whole world would have thought that the Muslim Brotherhood was leading the revolution." But members were willing to shed their own blood. "The Brotherhood was here in the middle of the people," Hassan says of that first day of rebellion. "Some of them died, and some of them were injured." The Brotherhood's peaceableness over the past three decades, however, has not made it reputable among some Egyptians who still view it as an enemy within that continues to preach bilious intolerance, as some members indeed do. Yasser Salaheddine, a 36-year-old supporter of the President who repairs rugs for a living, says, "When you speak of the Brothers, you have to speak of Hizballah, of Hamas and of Iran. They are all tied together." Mohammad, 38, a cabdriver, sees a threat to his livelihood. Egypt, he says, "cannot be ruled by people who will tell you that ... a taxi driver can't pick up a female who doesn't have a male guardian." Other Egyptians point out that Shari'a has been the constitutional basis of legislation since 1982, that Islam is the state religion and that all the Brotherhood wants is a stricter adherence to it. Speaking of the Brothers, Osama Hussein Hafiz, a 40-year-old lawyer, says, "Some of them are very good, and some of them, I'm not so sure about. Just like any party, there is good and bad in it." As Hassan sees it, "the main goal of the Brotherhood is to raise individual Muslims" with emphasis on individual. The diversity of the crowds in Tahrir may also have an effect on the Brotherhood, exposing members to the breadth of opinion now freely visible. The square buzzes not just with chants against the government but also with conversations among Egyptians of all types. Hassan sounds just like any one of them. "I'm protesting for freedoms political freedom, freedom of expression, freedom for people to be able to do and say what they want, for rights," he says. Elsewhere in the square, Mohammed Chalabi, an Arabic teacher, surveys the strange, singular amalgam of Tahrir. "It was the government that created false enemies because it had no legitimacy," he says. "When we are a free country, we won't need any enemies."

LETTERS

Inbox
Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

Opposites Attract You couldn't just do a story about the legacy left by Ronald Reagan on the 100th anniversary of his birth, could you ["The Role Model," Feb. 7]? Instead, your cover implies some sort of symbolic embrace of President Obama by Reagan. Where in your liberal minds did you come up with that one? Do you honestly think Reagan, a man who made his place in history by cutting the size of government, would embrace the policies of a man who thinks bigger government will solve everything? Ann Craig-Cinnamon, GREENWOOD, IND. When I first saw your cover, I thought in disgust, How could they Photoshop together two such diametrically opposed people? But the article was a well-written, enlightening read on the lessons our political leaders can learn from one another behind the scenes. Kudos to Obama and Reagan for taking notes on political style from their predecessors: Obama from Reagan and Reagan from another diametric opposite, Franklin Roosevelt. Adam Scott Kunz, WASHINGTON Seeing Presidents Reagan and Obama on your cover sent me back to my 1980s childhood. As the daughter of a public-school teacher, I remember the look of ever increasing worry on my parents' faces while we tried to survive Reaganomics. The glorification of his presidency mystifies me. Mary Pirkl, KAMPSVILLE, ILL. Arizona's Struggles Thanks for putting a spotlight on the many ways in which Arizona is trying to push itself back to the Stone Age, politically and socially ["Arizona's Great Divide," Feb. 7]. Most of us here love our state, and we're perpetually embarrassed by the legislature and the governor. They've just passed a bill allowing them to violate the property rights of the sovereign Tohono O'odham nation. One hopes national attention would put a damper on these things, but Governor Jan Brewer, state senator Russell Pearce and the rest seem to have no sense of shame. Jeffrey J. Mariotte, DOUGLAS, ARIZ. I was offended by Nathan Thornburgh's reference to the courageous man who saved Representative Giffords' life as "gay and Hispanic." Here is a man who showed courage and levelheaded thinking amid chaos, and Thornburgh chose to label him. If I had been the hero, would he have written "straight and white"? Jeffrey Parenteau, WEST GREENWICH, R.I.

In the article on Arizona, the terms documented and undocumented are used. Surely, legal and illegal were meant. Charles E. Stanford, LIVERPOOL, N.Y. Sizing Up SOTU I have read at least a dozen reports and reviews of the State of the Union address, and none of them nailed it as Joe Klein did ["Hello, Sunshine," Feb. 7]. Kudos. Gene Davis Reese, WESTPORT, KY. Trivial anecdotes do nothing to answer the hard policy questions the Administration faces. Was Obama's speech a political success? Yes. A policy outline? By no means. Brady Sharp, CONWAY, ARIZ. When will journalists like Klein stop using phrases like "the stranglehold of teachers'-union work rules"? In addition to keeping conditions reasonable, the union protects students, as it did when a fellow teacher was recently forced to accept 37 kids in her class, many of whom were struggling. After the union stepped in, the district hired another teacher. Susan Keeney, SAN JOSE, CALIF. Beep Beep Concerning "Traffic Gem" [Feb. 7], on the diverging-diamond interchange: Why couldn't the approach leg on each side elevate earlier (or later) than the oncoming traffic lane, crossing over the oncoming traffic and thereby eliminating the need for traffic lights? In this case, it seems more traffic lights would only create more hazards while gumming up traffic flow. Haskell Small, WASHINGTON Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts or samples before recycling

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Great Performances
By Richard Corliss and Mary Pols Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011 A king and a terrorist. A tattooed hacker and a crazy mama. They may lose an arm or a spouse, become a billionaire or a vigilante, but the actors we celebrate here are sorcerers who, by pouring self into story, created indelible characters worth admiring or reviling and always worth treasuring

Hailee Steinfeld
True Grit Fictional characters don't come much more self-assured than Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old heroine of True Grit, and the young actress who plays her in the Coen brothers' remake shares some of that moxie. Cinching a man's belt over her thick wool coat helped her get into Mattie's mind-set: "When she straps on that belt," says Steinfeld, "you can tell she feels ready." Steinfeld felt ready too. She remembers no jitters, only the surreal elation of her very first take with co-stars Matt Damon and Jeff Bridges. When the Coens called, "Cut," she recalls, Bridges turned to her with a twinkle and asked, "How are you doing? It's fun, right?" Truly.

James Franco
127 Hours If Franco, 32, gave a singular performance as trapped hiker Aron Ralston in 127 Hours, it's partly because he had the best research material of his career: Ralston showed him the videos he made when he thought he was going to die. "He's not an actor giving a Shakespeare death soliloquy," Franco says of the footage. "He didn't want to lose himself, because that would make it harder for his mother to watch. I knew that if I captured that somehow, it would feel very authentic and powerful."

Tilda Swinton
I Am Love Possibly the supreme film actress of our time, with a 2008 Oscar for Michael Clayton, Swinton, 50, often plays wild or haughty women. In I Am Love, she went demure, glam and romantic as a timid wife liberated by adultery. Nurturing the project for 11 years meant "going across a very long tightrope, trying to make sure the balance is right," she says. "We were aiming for all-out operatic drama and fantasy. But when you get to the end of the tightrope, you're just glad to be able to kick the box."

Annette Bening
The Kids Are All Right Bening, 52, had plenty of standout scenes in Kids as Nic, the crabby, cuckolded half of a lesbian couple. But this was the one she couldn't wait to film: when Nic tries desperately to be fun at a dinner with her wife, her bemused kids and their hot sperm-donor dad. So she breaks awkwardly into a Joni Mitchell song. "I loved that scene," she says. "It was hard in the way you want things to be when you are trying to find something."

Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth

The King's Speech The extraordinary relationship between Bertie, the future King, and Lionel, the commoner who teaches him not to stammer, turns out to have been pretty special for the actors playing them as well. Firth, 50, and Rush, 59, spent three weeks together rehearsing, dining and socializing. Even so, when filming began, Rush was startled by Firth in action. He "made me better," Rush says. "I didn't have to act listening. I was mesmerized by the hidden areas of truth he was uncovering."

Jesse Eisenberg
The Social Network To get inside The Social Network's fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg, Eisenberg perfected the laser gaze. "There's a sort of aloof stare that I tried to develop," he says, "and once I captured it, I felt more comfortable." Eisenberg, 27, who broke out in 2005's The Squid and the Whale, is pleased with his Best Actor Oscar nomination but says, "It's more challenging to work on a character that's not as rich as the one Aaron Sorkin wrote. In a way, it feels strange to receive so much attention for this."

Michelle Williams
Blue Valentine Williams, 30, won raves for her performance as one half of an unraveling young couple. Does she count it among the best of the year? "No," she says after a pause, "but I appreciate you feeling that way." For her, the investigation of a character's mysteries is never complete. "I'll have moments of deep connectedness, but I've never thought, Gotcha." So don't expect her to rest on her laurels. "Maybe if I ever thought I had done something great," she muses, "then I would be done."

Noomi Rapace
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo For a year and a half, she poured such fury and craft, so much of herself, into Lisbeth Salander the tattooed hacker in the three Swedish films of Stieg Larsson's best sellers that friends told her, "You've been in there a while now, Noomi. Maybe it's time to come out." And when the shoot was over, she says, "my body just threw her out from me. I was sick for a week." The trilogy was a worldwide hit, and Rapace, 31, was the great new face of 2010. She won't reprise Lisbeth in the U.S. remake, but it'd be a shame if Hollywood let this 21st century Garbo stay in Sweden.

dgar Ramrez
Carlos With his electrifying performance as Carlos the Jackal in Olivier Assayas' 5-hour docudrama, the Venezuelan actor vaulted to stardom from supporting roles in Domino, The Bourne Ultimatum and Che. "I feel very privileged to portray the life of such a complex man," Ramrez, 33, says of the terrorist mastermind whose brute brilliance and sexual charisma he incarnates so fiercely. "You must discover a character like Carlos conflict by conflict. Otherwise you kill the life of what you're trying to accomplish."

Jacki Weaver
Animal Kingdom She's quite a mother, this blond tornado they call Smurf: Ma Barker meets Medea. The matriarch of a Melbourne crime family, she coddles and disciplines her drug-dealing, sociopathic sons, none of whom is as ruthless as she. A staple of Australian theater, film and TV since the '60s, Weaver, 63, had a tough, splendid time imbuing Smurf with charm and menace. "I found some of my scenes intense and emotionally draining, but that's the nature of the beast. I enjoy that."

BUSINESS

The Groupon Clipper

By Bill Saporito / Chicago Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, in a room built for an imaginary employee. The company has been hiring more than 100 real employees each month Ryan Pfluger for TIME Andrew Mason says he's had better ideas than Groupon. "To me, as somebody who likes to come up with ideas, it's kind of stupid," he explains. "Like, I've had way better ideas, way cooler ideas." Maybe, but Groupon has attracted, like, stupid money. So have rivals such as LivingSocial, as investors rush in like a school of tuna hitting a chum slick to get a piece of the Web segment known as social commerce. It's a segment that has grown wildly in the past year: some 200%, according to Needham & Co., an investment-banking firm. Groupon, the category leader, offers its subscriberswho number more than 50 million and are growing at a clip of 3 million a monthdiscounts on goods and services, but only if a critical mass of people agree to buy the deals that are e-mailed to them each day. The discount could be up to 90% off on a car wash, a restaurant meal, a cooking class, dental work or just about any product or service available in the 500 cities and 35 countries where Groupon operates. Social commerce, the Web's next big honeypot, has a three-way payoff: you get a better price, the merchant gets a guaranteed slug of added business and potential new customers, and Groupon takes a cut. "Groupon has cracked the code on a model for local advertising and local commerce," says James Slavet, a partner at Greylock Partners, a venture-capital firm in Silicon Valley and a Groupon investor. "Long term, this is a business that will do for retail what Google's done to search and search advertising." A company with Google-like potential? No wonder Google felt compelled to buy Groupon, making an astonishing offer of $6 billion for it last December. Equally astonishing, Mason and his partners turned the Googleplexers down. "We have a lot of options," says Mason. "Every decision we make starts from this core of an idea that there will be a company that transforms the way people buy from local business. We can be one of the great defining brands of the 21st century."

Mason, 30, a musician, programmer, public-policy wonk and social activist (hey, who isn't?) is as much provocateur as Web entrepreneur. At the company's Chicago headquarters, he displays magazine covers that feature famous Web flameouts Friendster, Napster, Pets.comnext to his own cover appearance in Forbes. "I think a lot about those companies and what went wrong. And the majority of the time, it's those companies losing to themselves. It's not competitors that beat them," he says. "If you look at Myspace, Facebook was a better product. It's as simple as that." Mason knows all about getting it wrong. He majored in music at Northwestern and worked at a Chicago recording studio but found out that he was a better composer of computer codes, which paid the rent. By 2006 he had veered into the University of Chicago's graduate school of public policy, dabbling in Internet start-ups along the way. Three months into the term, serial entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky offered him $1 million in funding to develop an idea Mason had created called the Point. The point of the Point was to herd people into collective social action: marches, protests, stay-home-from-work days, etc. It didn't take Mason and Lefkofsky long to realize that shopping was more profitable than social action. By late 2008, Groupon was launched. It workedspectacularly, virally, to the point of overwhelming some merchants who were early participants: think of a flash mob that gets hungry for Greek food or decides to go bowling. Within a year, Groupon had 1 million adherents. Merchants across Chicago, and then in neighboring cities and states, lined up to get in. The VCs got bug-eyed about Groupon's financials. The business had gone from zero to $500 million in sales in 18 months. No start-up had grown as fast. More important, it's extremely scalable, meaning Groupon can be replicated around the world using the same model. Today it's in 35 countrieshaving recently added the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. "Groupon hasn't been like anything we've seen," says Lefkofsky. "I've been involved with high-growth tech companies. I thought I had seen hypergrowth, but this is hypergrowth squared." It all plays to the beat of Mason's slightly trippy leadership. His official bio reports that "Andrew graduated with a degree in music, the uselessness of which served as a chief inspiration to not be useless." Silliness is almost a core value at Groupon. The place is overflowing with new hires150 to 200 a month in Chicago aloneyet on one floor, Mason has constructed a space decorated like a schoolboy's bedroom, which is reserved for an imaginary employee. One day, Mason decided to buy all his employees blue exercise balls to sit on, so the place looks like a romper room for 20-somethings. His sense of humor can backfire. One of Groupon's Super Bowl commercials starred actor Timothy Hutton archly mocking Tibet as a political cause before delivering the product message: "The people of Tibet are in trouble... but they still whip up an amazing fish curry. And since 200 of us bought at Groupon.com, we're each getting $30 of Tibetan food for just $15." Critics scorned its way-too-hip approach, but true to Mason's activist instincts, Groupon is sponsoring a link on its website to the Tibet Fund, a charity that helps Tibetan exiles. Fortunately, Mason isn't silly enough to think he can run Groupon solo. "If I told people that I knew what I was doing, nobody would believe me," Mason says, "so why even try and fake it?" The company brought in former Yahoo! exec Rob Solomon as COO; Lefkofsky served as temporary CFO until the company hired Jason Child from Amazon for that role in December. One of their jobs will be to build on what is a deceptively simple business model. Groupon appears to be an online version of the coupons you get in

the mail from local merchants or find in the Yellow Pages. Yet that's a huge market in itself. About $100 billion is spent annually on local advertising in the U.S. alone. A lot of that money is wasted, because local commerce is highly segmented and inefficient. A small shop can't acquire customers or advertise with the efficiency of a chain that has a number of locations in town. Groupon is poised to fix that broken model, and that fix could be worth billions. Why? Because tactically speaking, says Slavet, social shopping is going to be a "winner takes most" business: one in which a single brand takes command of a piece of turf and it becomes increasingly difficult for rivals, no matter how good, to make inroads. Groupon has held the top spot with both first-mover advantage and extremely robust technology. Think about other winner-takes-most businesses, such as search (Google), social networking (Facebook) and operating systems (Microsoft). Google is worth $198 billion, or roughly $6.70 for each dollar of sales. Apple, a hugely successful but low-market-share company, is worth $327 billion (it has twice Google's sales) but only $4.25 for each dollar of sales. Dominance pays. That's clearly what Groupon's funders are counting on. The company has accepted $950 million from a Who's Who of VCs, including Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. (In typical Mason cheek, the headline of the press release read, "Groupon raises, like, a billion dollars.") Still, the Google turndown has left some bankers shaking their heads. "Very few companies can emerge like Facebook has," says Scott Munro, a partner at Pagemill Partners, a VC company that isn't in the deal. "They must know something that I don't know to turn down that amount of dough." In any case, Google is no longer a buyerit's a competitor. It has plans for its own social-commerce site, called Google Offers. Groupon's biggest rival, LivingSocial, is taking the other tack; it recently got a $175 million infusion from Amazon. The linkup provides LivingSocial with a technology platform from which to expand its base of 10 million subscribers. The need for speed is essential because hundreds of competing sites have cropped up globally. Mason doesn't see much of a threat yet; the company is still gaining market share. But to hold off that herd, he is developing what he calls Groupon 2.0. The first phase of social commerce was connecting local merchants with the localsshotgun blasts of discounts that were targeted generally. The next phase is hyper-local: knowing where subscribers live and what their interests are, curating their commercial experiences and sharing with friends. Think of yourself walking around with a locationally aware smart phone and Groupon knowing not just what you like but also what might pique your curiosity. "So you have this awareness stream of interesting deals as they've been introduced to people and popularized through Twitter and Facebook, and we think what we're doing at Groupon lives at the intersection of those two," says Mason. To get there will require the kind of data massaging that's well beyond the average social-shopping site. In fact, Groupon's investors believe its strength is in its data mining and not necessarily in its consumer interface, which is easily copied. These are the algorithms that conjure perfect deals at perfect times. Says Slavet: "The data is the defensibility of their model." Groupon is going to get a test of that defensibility as it plants its flag around the globe. The company is trying to line up China, although that goofball Tibet ad isn't going to help much. "One of the challenges of

innovation is figuring out how to wipe your mind clean about what you should be doing at any given moment," says Mason, "and not having a religious attachment to what's gotten you there thus far." His investors might quibble with the sentiment, but that's how Mason's mind works. It's out there looking for, like, the next coolest idea.

SOCIETY

Pay Phone
By DOUG AAMOTH Saturday, Mar. 05, 2011

Illustration by Brown Bird Design for TIME

Which are you more likely to have with you at any given moment your cell phone or your wallet? Soon you may be able to ditch your billfold altogether and pay for things with a quick wave of your smart phone over an electronic scanner. In January, Starbucks announced that customers could start using a bar-code app on their phone to buy coffee in some 6,800 of its stores. This is the first big pay-by-phone initiative in the U.S., but we're likely to see more wireless payment options as something called near field communication (NFC) gets embedded into America's consumer electronics. In December, Google unveiled its Nexus S smart phone, which contains an NFC chip. The next iPhone is rumored to have one too, as are several BlackBerry models that are due out this year. Already in use in parts of Asia and Europe, NFC allows shoppers to wave their phones a few inches above a payment terminal a contact-free system built for speed and simplicity. But before NFC becomes widely adopted in the U.S., a few kinks need to be worked out, like who will get to collect the lucrative transaction fees from retailers. Although Visa and MasterCard have been experimenting with wave-and-pay systems that use NFC-enabled credit or debit cards, cellular-service providers may try to muscle their way into the point-of-sale market. Three of the big four providers (AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon i.e., everyone except Sprint) have formed a joint venture that is set to roll out over the next 15 months. Its goal, "to lead the U.S. payments industry from cards to mobile phones," is hardly a subtle shot at Visa and MasterCard, but the consortium also seems to have hedged its bets by making Discover part of the venture. Meanwhile, Google claims it will be content to partner with payment processors to handle purchases made with its smart phones even though the company has its own payment platform, Google Checkout. And who knows? If the next iPhone does come with NFC, the device may route mobile payments through Apple's iTunes store. The other big NFC issue, aside from how payments will be processed, is security. For instance, what's to stop a sophisticated thief with a concealed payment terminal from digitally pickpocketing you? "We're still

not at the point where an attacker can just brush against you in a crowd and steal all the money out of your phone," says Jimmy Shah, a mobile-security researcher for McAfee. Although NFC-eavesdropping devices exist, he says, they "tend to require the attacker to play the man in the middle between your NFC-enabled phone and the cash register." To protect consumers, NFC apps can encrypt data transmissions. Users may be able to set transaction limits as well, perhaps requiring a pass code to be entered for larger purchases. Still uneasy about this digital-wallet business? Keep in mind that if you lose your smart phone, it can be located on a map and remotely deactivated. Plus, your phone can be password protected. Your wallet isn't.

Wired for Distraction?

By DALTON CONLEY Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

Ghiotti / Getty Images

Most parents who worry about their kids' online activity focus on the people or content their children might encounter: Are they being cyberbullied? Do they have access to age-inappropriate material? Can sexual predators reach them? What I worry about, as a sociobiologist, is not what my kids are doing on the Internet but what all this connectivity is doing to their brains. Scientific evidence increasingly suggests that, amid all the texting, poking and surfing, our children's digital lives are turning them into much different creatures from us and not necessarily for the better. For starters, there is the problem of what some researchers refer to as continuous partial attention, a term coined by former Microsoft executive Linda Stone. We know the dangers of texting or talking on the phone while operating a motor vehicle but what about when forming a brain? A Kaiser Family Foundation report released last year found that on average, children ages 8 to 18 spend 7 hours and 38 min. a day using entertainment media. And if you count each content stream separately a lot of kids, for example, text while watching TV they are logging almost 11 hours of media usage a day.

You (or your children) might think the people who have had the most practice dealing with distractions would be the most adept at multitasking. But a 2009 study found that when extraneous information was presented, participants who (on the basis of their answers to a study questionnaire) did a lot of media multitasking performed worse on a test than those who don't do much media multitasking. In the test, a trio of Stanford University researchers showed college students an image of a bunch of rectangles in various orientations and asked them to focus on a couple of red ones in particular. Then the students were shown a second, very similar image and asked if the red rectangles had been rotated. The heavy media multitaskers were wrong more often because, the study concluded, they are more sensitive to distracting stimuli than light media multitaskers are. We have separate circuits, it turns out, for top-down focus i.e., when we set our mind to concentrate on something and reactive attention, when our brain reflexively tunes in to novel stimuli. We obviously need both for survival, whether in the wilds of prehistory or while crossing a street today, but our saturated media universe has perhaps privileged the latter form and is wiring our kids' brains differently. "Each time we get a message or text," Anthony Wagner, one of the Stanford study's co-authors, speculates, "our dopamine reward circuits probably get activated, since the desire for social connection is so wired into us." The result, he suggests, could be a forward-feeding cycle in which we pay more and more attention to environmental stimuli Hey, another text! at the expense of focus. Constant distraction affects not only how well kids learn but also how their brains absorb the new information. In 2006, UCLA scientists showed that multitaskers and focused learners deploy different parts of the brain when they learn the same thing. Multitaskers fire up their striatum, which encodes the learning more like habit, or what's known as procedural memory. Meanwhile, those who were allowed to focus on the task without distraction relied on the hippocampus, which is at the heart of the declarative memory circuit that comes into play, say, in math class when you need to apply abstract rules to novel problems. The upshot of the study was that the focusers could apply the new skill more broadly but the multitaskers could not. Multitaskers' reliance on rote habit would be all well and good if we want our offspring to work on assembly lines, but to do the kind of high-level thinking that experts agree will be key to getting well-paying jobs, we'd better exercise our collective hippocampus. Some technology observers, like Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, claim that social media are getting a bum rap and that the real problem lies in the hyperprotective way we parent today. "Over and over, kids tell me that they'd rather get together in person, but then they list off all of the things that make doing so impossible" like their overscheduled after-school lives or parents' fears of kids navigating the streets alone, she says. Stone has observed something similar in technology use among adolescents: "When they're with friends, they won't answer their cell phone. And if they get an SMS, they will just answer, 'BZ, L8R.' " Perhaps this is a sign that our kids will be better than we are at learning how to prioritize tasks something that will come in handy when they become workers and spouses and parents. But I am still concerned about the effect that 24/7 connectivity has on my kids and on my 11-year-old son in particular. School-lunchroom behavior gossipy whispers, competition for attention, etc. now goes on around the clock. There's no downtime, no alone time for him to develop his sense of self.

So what's a good dad to do? I've set some rules that are designed to aid his social and cognitive development: no Facebook during school, and no electronic devices after 9:30 p.m. The latter prohibition is designed to help him get more sleep, which, according to some studies, is when our brains prune connections among neurons, preserving and speeding up the ones that matter and flushing out the ones that don't. "Unfortunately, the new modes of communication and hours spent using them are preventing already sleep-deprived teens from getting any, which affects memory consolidation and behavioral regulation," says B.J. Casey, director of Cornell's Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology. Even if kids get nine to 10 hours of sleep but sustain multiple interruptions from, say, a buzzing iPhone next to the pillow they will suffer cognitively and feel tired the next day. Hence my 9:30 rule, which falls into that age-old parenting category: Do as I say, not as I do.

SPECIAL SECTION

Paying for Nature

By BRYAN WALSH Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

A Dow plant in the Netherlands recycles city water Siebe Swart / Hollandse Hoogte / Redux How much are the birds of heaven worth? How about the lilies of the field? Or clean air and water, verdant forests and untouched grassland, healthy coral reefs and lush mangroves? By the environmentalist's accounting, they're invaluable because nature has a worth all its own. But to business, untouched nature typically hasn't had a value at least not one that could be put in a ledger. Until now. Many greens and a growing chorus of corporate suits are arguing that nature in its own right provides economically valuable services that underpin business. A virgin forest is pleasant to look at, of course, but it also prevents soil erosion and improves water quality at no cost valuable if you happen to own a beverage plant downstream that depends on clean water. That same forest might provide a habitat for bees, which can pollinate plants in surrounding cropland a vital function if you run a coffee plantation nearby. By this reckoning, nature provides "ecosystem services" from clean water to carbon sequestration whose benefits for business are increasingly measurable in hard, cold dollar figures. "All the things that nature does for us fuel our prosperity," says Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy (TNC), a Washington-based environmental group. Until recently, the concept of ecosystem services was mentioned only in obscure scientific journals, the province of a few ecologists trying to figure out the dollar value of the atmosphere. But the threat of government action on carbon emissions (which now have a price of about $20 a ton on the European market), insistent shareholder pressure on green issues and growing concern over limited natural resources have prompted an increasing number of companies, including giants like Coca-Cola, to examine their ecological numbers just as closely as they would any other part of their balance sheets. Last month, Dow Chemical took the trend to a new level, announcing a five-year, $10 million collaboration with TNC to eventually tally up the ecosystem costs and benefits of every business decision. The Michigan-headquartered company will look to make environmental factors part of its profit-and-loss statements a move that could signal to other companies that nature can no longer be ignored. "Our

planet's natural resources are more and more under threat," says Dow CEO Andrew Liveris. "But protecting nature can be a profitable corporate priority and a smart global business strategy." Historically, conservationists and corporations were usually on opposite sides of the environmental debate, and few greens wanted to see the nature they loved tainted by consideration of dollar figures. Yet as climate change emerged as a concern in the 1990s and, with it, the accounting of carbon dioxide emissions even the deepest green began to understand that nature's value would really be understood only once it was quantified. A 1997 study in the journal Nature attempted to estimate the value of the planet's ecosystem services: forests and oceans, air and climate regulation, even cultural and recreational benefits. The researchers came up with a very rough figure of $33 trillion nearly twice the global gross national product at the time. (The authors came to that calculation in part by estimating the public's willingness to pay for certain ecosystem services like waste treatment and pollution cleanup.) The Flowers of the Forest More recently, scientists working for the U.N.'s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and a just published study, "The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity," have drilled down to find hard numbers on specific natural services. Scientists from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) looked at a coffee plantation in Costa Rica and found that flowers near forests received twice as many bee visits and twice as much pollen as flowers far from trees meaning that extra bee pollination was worth an additional $62,000 a year, or 7% of the farm's income. Razing those trees to allow cattle grazing a common way to monetize forests in the developing world would earn only $24,000 a year. "There's a library of similar case studies that show the economic impact of nature conservation," says Taylor Ricketts, WWF's director of conservation science. "We only value something when we measure it." Dow and TNC have already been involved in a smaller ecosystem-services project in So Paulo, which helped lay the groundwork for their new partnership. Some 9 million people in the city get their drinking water from the nearby Cantareira system in Brazil's Atlantic Forest. The forest has been under pressure from logging, agriculture and ranching for decades, and the resulting deforestation harms both water quality and the wildlife that depends on the forest. (Deforestation can lead to soil erosion, creating turbid water that requires more intensive and expensive treatment downstream.) Conserving the upstream land is a cheaper way of protecting downstream water quality than building costly treatment plants. New York City did this in the 1990s, purchasing or protecting over 70,000 acres (28,000 hectares) of its watershed upstate to avoid the need for a $6 billion treatment plant. So Dow donated $1.5 million through its charitable foundation to support a joint effort with TNC and So Paulo water utilities to restore 865 acres (350 hectares) of forest surrounding the Cachoeira reservoir. Not only will that money protect biodiversity, generate carbon credits and create green jobs for locals living near Cachoeira, but it should also cut the amount of sediment flowing into the water system by over 60%. That will benefit people and businesses in So Paulo including Dow. The details of the larger collaboration between TNC and Dow are still being worked out, but Dow will donate $10 million to TNC over the next five years. In exchange, TNC scientists will apply scientific models, biodiversity analysis and ecosystem-services estimates to assess Dow's business decisions. If Dow decides to build or expand a plant, TNC will be able to advise the company about the economic value of the ecosystem impacts of those plans, positive and negative. The partnership will begin with pilot

programs at three Dow manufacturing plants at least one of which will be in the U.S. but the ultimate aim is to make ecosystem services an essential part of Dow's entire business model. Numbers are hard to come by, in part because the collaboration is meant to generate fresh data on ecosystem services, but Liveris sees that $10 million as an investment in Dow's future one he expects will pay off by preparing the company for the prospect of tighter environmental regulations and scarcer natural resources. "I think that in 10 years we'll look back and wonder why we didn't do this earlier," he says. Both Dow and TNC expect water to be the initial focus of the collaboration. As ecosystem services go, water is the closest to actually being part of a market although its low price rarely reflects its true value. And Dow's chemical plants are unusually dependent on water a fact the company's leadership has begun to recognize. Since 2007, the Dow production plant in Terneuzen, a city in the southwestern Netherlands, has recycled 2.6 million gal. (9.8 million L) of municipal wastewater a day for its operations cheaper and greener than tapping river water. "If you have insufficient water, it can stress the ecosystem, and it can cause production problems," says Neil Hawkins, Dow's vice president of sustainability and environment. "Understanding those impacts can help us make better decisions." The Dow-TNC collaboration is just the latest piece of business news to suggest that environmental responsibility and corporate success aren't always opposed. In 2007, Goldman Sachs released a landmark report showing that companies that were considered leaders in environmental, social and governance policies tended to outperform the general stock market and their peers. Other major international companies have begun experimenting with ecosystem services. Coca-Cola has invested nearly $30 million in watershed programs around the world, replenishing for communities and nature the equivalent of 31% of the water used in its finished beverages in 2010. SABMiller is working with TNC in Bogot to protect the basin that provides the Colombian capital with much of its drinking water. SABMiller's Colombian subsidiary, along with several other Bogot businesses, has begun paying to protect the watershed and ensure a supply of clean water. So far they've spent about $700,000, and estimates are that the investment will pay off through reduced water-treatment costs in four to five years. "In the past, the big concern for companies on the environment was just to avoid risk," says Glenn Prickett, TNC's chief external-affairs officer and the point person for the Dow deal. "The difference is now they can look at nature as a source of business values." If it all sounds too good to be true or too fuzzy it's because ecosystem services are just being defined as a concept. Services beyond water like biodiversity are harder to price, and corporations won't stop pushing back against government environmental regulations they consider onerous. But in a world with a growing population and demand for resources, smart companies will learn to value ecosystem services, not just exploit them. "It's not a choice to play a zero-sum game anymore," says Liveris. "The economy and the environment are interdependent." And they're united by one color: green.

PEOPLE

10 Questions for Jim Parsons

Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

Maarten De Boer / Contour by Getty Images Has playing a physicist on television changed how you regard science? Wen Zhang, ATHENS, OHIO I was very fascinated with meteorology at a young age. I lived on the Gulf Coast, and hurricanes blew through there. That is the class I failed in college: meteorology. I didn't have an interest in the particulars but what a wonderful basis for a show. I think it's one of the greatest things we have going for us [on The Big Bang Theory]. But I'm not watching more Nova. How do you manage to make an easily unlikable character a likable one? Julia Hall, MADERA, CALIF. [The writers] are careful to soften the edges of the harsher words. The other thing is the way the characters are reacting to him with exasperation and a resignation that they're going to put up with it. That translates to the audience as, Oh, well, they're saying it's O.K. I don't try to soften it. Frankly, a lot of times the point is to irritate. Do you find yourself inadvertently mimicking Sheldon's odd qualities? Michelle Lacy, BRICK TOWNSHIP, N.J. I have a tendency to rattle like he does. I can prrrrr like he does. There's a musicality to the way he talks. That will sometimes carry over into my own speech. But which came first? Was I doing that before I did this part? I'm not entirely sure. Although it hasn't been addressed on the show, Sheldon clearly has some degree of Asperger's or autism. How did you prepare to play such a character? Michelle Shea, FALLS CHURCH, VA. I didn't. We had already shot and aired several episodes before I was ever asked the Asperger's-or-autism question. I asked the writers, and they were like, No, he doesn't have it. It's been useful to us to utilize some of those "Aspergian" traits, but we need to be able to move away from it if we want to. To what extent do you learn about the science in a particular episode before taping? Rachelle Haynik, BROOKLYN, OHIO

Enough to get by. With certain theories, I try to get a cursory knowledge to understand what's apropos in the conversation. Do Sheldon's jokes ever go over your head? Rick Morgan, SEATTLE Yes and no. David Saltzberg, our science consultant, will [sometimes] put a written joke in formula form on the whiteboard that I don't get. And sometimes, even after explanation, I just don't find it funny. That's not because it's not funny. It's because I am probably a little too dumb to get it. Every once in a while they write a joke in plain English that I don't understand how to make work, and I will find out that I have missed the boat on their intent. That's been blessedly rare. Are you worried about being typecast? F.J. Vargas, BERLIN It already happens to a certain degree. All I can do is keep working, keep auditioning, keep talking to people and whatever it takes to show other colors. It doesn't bother me. I love playing this part. (See the top 10 TV episodes of 2010.) Which one of Sheldon's T-shirts would you keep? Natalia Capel, ATHENS, GREECE There's a black Batman shirt I really like. There's also a light blue T-shirt with the test-color bars from TV. I like that one a lot. What are some of your favorite sci-fi books, TV shows or movies? Suzi Beerman, NEWCASTLE, WASH. My favorite sci-fi movie of all time is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I was a huge Star Wars fan as well but Close Encounters, I love. It creeped me out and made me feel comforted at the same time. There is life out there. If you were stranded on an island with no technology, what three things would you bring? Marc Bigras, STURGEON FALLS, ONT. A piano. A notepad. What else? This is hard. You know what? I'm going to leave the notepad, and I'm going to take both my dogs. But they'd die.

BRIEFING

The Moment
Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

'I am not a hero, O.K.? I am not a hero. I am a very ordinary person. The heroes are the ones in the street.' WAEL GHONIM, the Google exec who helped organize Egypt's initial protests, following his release from jail; the next day, Ghonim (above, center) addressed a huge rally in Tahrir Square

Can Hatch Tame The Tea Party?

By ALEX ALTMAN Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

Alex Wong / Getty Images

Before the Tea Party emerged, it was unthinkable that a solid conservative like six-term Senator Orrin Hatch would have to fret about losing a Republican primary. Now Hatch, who faces re-election next year, is scrambling to defuse tensions with the movement that unseated his closest colleague in 2010. It won't be easy. Hatch has backed the bank bailouts, earmarks and the Dream Act, which would give citizenship to some illegal immigrants. He's partnered with Democrats like the late Ted Kennedy. By any standard, he flunks the Tea Party purity test. His state's political process worsens his plight. Utah's 3,500 GOP delegates have the power to pick the party's nominee--and they're an unforgiving bunch. Last May, in the movement's first victory, those activists dumped the state's junior Senator, Bob Bennett, another conservative who had cast some heretical votes, in favor of a young rebel from their ranks.

Hatch is determined to avoid the same fate. That's why he turned up at a Feb. 8 Tea Party Express town hall in Washington alongside movement stars like Representative Michele Bachmann, Senator Rand Paul and Mike Lee, the guy who took Bennett's job. It was no lovefest. Tea Party Express chairwoman Amy Kremer welcomed Hatch with all the enthusiasm of a sports-arena announcer introducing the visiting team. Hatch thanked the Tea Party for its work and laced his remarks with jabs at last year's health care reform law and bromides about taking America back. The crowd's response was muted. When Hatch mentioned his 34 years in the Senate, one activist muttered that it was time to "move on." But even if the Tea Party hasn't fully warmed to Hatch, the Senator's persistent efforts are thawing the frost. When Hatch asked to speak at the Utah Tea Party's first gathering in the spring of 2009, "we basically told him to drop dead," says the group's founder, David Kirkham. Undeterred, Hatch invited Kirkham to his office for a long meeting, and the two have since spoken regularly. At the same time, Hatch's recent voting record suggests he's sipping the tea. He's given up earmarks, dropped his support for the Dream Act and backtracked from his TARP vote. Taking no chances, Hatch is off to his earliest start ever in a re-election bid, says his campaign manager, Dave Hansen. Hatch has already hired campaign advisers and built up his war chest to $2.5 million. Could he finagle an endorsement from a group founded in part to end his career? "No chance," says Kirkham. "An endorsement is one thing. Tolerance is another." Hatch will take it. Better to be tolerated than targeted.

The World
By Harriet Barovick; Ishaan Tharoor; Austin Ramzy; Alexandra Silver; Claire Suddath; Frances Romero;
Kayla Webley; Josh Sanburn Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

1 | Cambodia
Ancient Temple, New Battle An uneasy lull settled over Preah Vihear, an 11th century Hindu temple on the Thai-Cambodian border, after four days of fighting between troops on both sides led to six reported deaths and dozens of injuries to soldiers as well as civilians caught in the cross fire. A 1962 U.N. ruling determined that the long-disputed temple complex sits on Cambodian soil, but the decision still rankles some Thai nationalists, who tend to exploit popular resentment over the UNESCO World Heritage site when waging their own political battles in Bangkok. It's not yet clear what sparked the current clashes--this militarized patch of jungle has seen its fair share of violence in recent years--but the confrontation has accentuated hostilities on either side of the border, with few signs pointing toward peace. 2 | Tunisia

Ruling Party Shut Down Tunisia's interim government paved the way for the eventual dissolution of the political party that had held a viselike grip on the nation until Jan. 14, when a popular uprising chased President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali into exile. The offices of Ben Ali's party, the Democratic Constitutional Rally, were shuttered and its members barred from meeting. While events in Tunisia have inspired similar revolts against authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the region (like Egypt), protests and clashes with police continue. Many remain wary of the interim government, which, though promising reform and open elections, has prominent figures from the old regime in its ranks. 3 | Pakistan Not So Innocent Abroad Raymond Davis, an American diplomat employed by the U.S. consulate in Lahore, was at the center of a political storm after killing--in self-defense, he says--two Pakistanis he claims were armed and pursuing him on motorbikes. Among a multitude of murky reports, some suggest the two men were intelligence agents monitoring Davis, whose activities Washington has yet to clarify. The Obama Administration insists Davis is entitled to diplomatic immunity, but he remains behind bars in Lahore, having become the target of long-standing Pakistani frustrations over CIA drone attacks and other U.S. operations in the region that have killed civilians. 4 | Italy Sex Scandal May Go to Trial Prosecutors in Milan announced they would seek to immediately take Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to trial on charges of criminal prostitution and abuse of office. Berlusconi, 74, is accused of paying for sex in 2010 with a then minor, Karima El Mahroug (left), and using his office to cover up the deed. While Berlusconi, who denies any wrongdoing, has lost some political support, his party maintains a slim parliamentary majority. 5 | China Drought Hits Wheat Crop A punishing drought in China prompted the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization to issue a special alert about the threat to the country's winter wheat crop. China, the world's biggest wheat producer, may have to rely more heavily on imports this year, further stoking global food prices. On Feb. 8, wheat futures hit 30-month highs, a level that signals even higher global food costs, which the FAO said last month were at a historic peak. More than a third of China's wheat crop is at risk 5.16 MILLION HECTARES

The drought affects man and beast 2.57 MILLION PEOPLE 2.79 MILLION LIVESTOCK SOURCE: U.N. FAO 6 | Sudan IT'S OFFICIAL Ninety-nine percent of the nearly 4 million southern Sudanese voted in last month's referendum to secede from Sudan. Sudan's President, Omar al-Bashir, accepted the final results, but disputes remain over oil rights and political boundaries. In recent clashes, some 50 people were killed in a border region. The new nation, likely to be called South Sudan, is expected to declare its independence July 9. 7 | Russia Chechen Terrorist Emerges Doku Umarov, a Chechen warlord whom Russian state news had previously reported dead, appeared in two Internet videos in which he claimed to be the mastermind of the Jan. 24 suicide bombing of Moscow's largest airport, which killed 36 people. Sitting next to him in one of the videos is the man Russian investigators suggest may have carried out the airport attack. Umarov styles himself as a protector of Muslims in Russia, particularly those living in the restive republics of the North Caucasus, where Chechnya is located. He is said to have tenuous links with al-Qaeda. 8 | Indonesia Wave of Islamic Anger Hundreds of Muslims in central Java set fire to two churches and attacked a court, claiming that a five-year prison sentence given to a Christian who had allegedly blasphemed Islam was too lenient. The attacks followed an incident in which a mob assaulted members of a minority Islamic sect deemed heretical by more orthodox Muslims. Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, often promotes its pluralism and diversity as an example for the Islamic world. 9 | Brazil Carnaval Costumes Ablaze A month before Rio de Janeiro's streets are due to be filled with the dancers, drummers and glittering floats of the annual Carnaval, a fierce fire burned through a warehouse complex known as Samba City, destroying a year's worth of festival preparations, including 8,400 costumes. At least three samba schools may no longer be able to participate, but officials say the show must go on.

10 | Washington Electronics Not to Blame in Toyota Probe A 10-month U.S. government investigation concluded that mechanical problems and in some cases user error, not electronics flaws, may have caused the sudden unintended acceleration of some Toyota vehicles. The defects plunged the automaker into international crisis and led to the recall of millions of cars and trucks last year. While the findings offer Toyota some consolation, they do not repair the damage done by the recalls, which hurt the once peerless company's prestige as well as its sales.

The Big Questions: Deficit Reduction

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Mark Halperin's answers in this week of TIME. Is Washington serious about deficit reduction? Yes. President Obama truly believes that stemming the flow of red ink is good policy and good politics, and he wants to strike a deal with Republicans. Many congressional GOPers want deficit reduction too, especially Tea-infused members who made cutting government the centerpiece of their campaigns. Other than job creation, no issue is more pressing, and little can get done on domestic policy until the deficit monster is tamed. Then why are the two parties playing chicken? Leaders on both sides know that real deficit reduction will mean cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Pentagon. Honest Republicans understand that tax increases will also be required (but they cant say so out loud). Democrats worry that Medicare and Medicaid reductions could involve revisions in their brand-new health care law (but they cant acknowledge that as they fend off

conservative repeal efforts). Any agreement that can pass Congress will require each side to speak hard truths. But nobody wants to cry uncle first. What is the most likely path to a megadeal? Despite a timid start to this years budget process, strategists on both sides predict that months of quiet consultation by the White House with the GOP, business leaders and moderate Democrats will produce a historic compromise with the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. Then the unlikely team of Barack and Mitch will sell the deal to the Hill with enough Social Security and health care cuts to make many liberals balk and enough revenue increases (maybe a gas-tax hike) to get conservatives grousing. But if the center holds because of the sheer too-big-to-fail size of the deal voila.

Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine

By JEFFREY KLUGER Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

Robert Yager / Getty Images

MENTAL HEALTH Pot and Schizophrenia: A Dangerous Mix A mind is a terrible thing to scramble. Doctors studying schizophrenia have long warned that one of the worst things someone at risk for the disease can do is smoke marijuana, as research suggests that it can hasten the onset of the disorder. Skeptics, however, point out that because males are more likely than females both to smoke pot and to develop schizophrenia early, the apparent causal link is merely coincidence. A new meta-analysis sought to settle the matter. Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia reviewed 83 studies and found that pot smokers who developed psychotic disorders did so 2.7 years earlier than nonsmokers. But the use of any illegal drug accelerated the onset of those diseases by two years, so pot's effect was only a bit worse.

The greater risk may be to people with a family history of psychosis. For them, one study found, pot sped up the onset of the disease by three years and worsened symptoms too. The explanation may lie in the brain's endocannabinoid receptors, which respond to the active chemicals in pot and play a role in dopamine regulation, possibly increasing the likelihood of psychotic episodes. DIET AND IQ In a British study of children and nutrition, kids who ate a healthy diet (lots of fruits, veggies, rice and pasta) at age 3 had higher IQs at age 8 than kids who ate meals made up of a lot of fats, sugars and processed foods. The average difference was slight--less than two IQ points--but that can add up. Disturbingly, improving the kids' diets after age 3 could boost their overall health, but it didn't change their intelligence scores. BREAST CANCER Less-Extensive Surgery May Be O.K. Breast-Cancer surgery may never be routine, but there are standard ways to go about it. One rule is that if there is any involvement in the lymph nodes under the arm, all those nodes must go. Now, research funded by the National Cancer Institute calls that protocol into question. In a study of nearly 900 breast-cancer patients with early-stage disease (known as T1 or T2 tumors), researchers assigned half to a group that had standard surgery, radiation and chemo as well as extensive node removal. The other half had only the sentinel nodes removed--the ones that were tested for the presence of the cancer--but their treatment was otherwise the same. The five-year survival rates for both groups were similar--about 92%. There was no recurrence of cancer at that point in 83.9% of the women who had the extensive node surgery. For the ones who had the limited surgery, the rate was a slightly lower 82.2%--a statistically insignificant difference. The findings clearly apply only to women with T1 or T2 tumors--about 20% of breast-cancer patients--but even in those cases, doctors and women must balance the risks and benefits in making a treatment choice. For those who opt for the traditional surgery, risks include infection and later pain and mobility problems in the arm. FROM THE LABS Late-Breaking Chocolate Bulletin Good news for chocolate lovers: not only can your favorite indulgence improve your overall cholesterol levels, but researchers now know why it works that magic. Japanese investigators have found that polyphenols in cocoa attach to genes in the liver and intestines, activating the ones that produce HDL, or good cholesterol, as well as those that help suppress LDL, or bad cholesterol. The Long-Ago Roots of Cancer

Our most feared disease may be a billion years old. A new paper says the rapid cell division that defines cancer may have originated in single-cell organisms battling for supremacy of the ancient planet. Studying the genes of their one-celled descendants may give scientists new clues about how to stop or control the disease. FETAL-SURGERY BOON Researchers report a better way to help babies with spina bifida, a birth defect in which the spinal bones do not fuse properly. Corrective surgery is typically done after birth, but in the first study of its kind, doctors found that performing the operation in utero reduces complications--including the need to divert fluid away from the brain--and improves children's mental and motor function.

Verbatim
Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

'The Taliban are part of the Afghan society.' HAMID KARZAI, Afghan President, saying he would like to reconcile with members of the Taliban "as soon as possible," as long as they part ways with al-Qaeda and are willing to swear allegiance to the Afghan constitution '[We need] a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism.' DAVID CAMERON, U.K. Prime Minister, arguing that Britain's policy of "multiculturalism" has led to segregated communities in which Islamic extremism can thrive 'The country would have been better off if I had.' DONALD RUMSFELD, former U.S. Defense Secretary, saying he should have resigned from the post in 2004 after the release of photos showing abuse at Abu Ghraib prison 'I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often, considering the knives they put on those birds.' JOHN GOODWIN, of the Humane Society, commenting on the death of Jose Luis Ochoa, a 35-year-old California resident, after he was stabbed in the calf by a cockfighting bird wearing a blade 'I'm not a big fan of young kids' having Facebook. It's not something they need.' MICHELLE OBAMA, during an appearance on the Today show, on why she doesn't allow First Daughters Sasha and Malia to join the popular social-networking site

'He had his first surgery when he was 3 months old.' JENNIFER PAGE, mother of 6-year-old Max, star of a Volkswagen Super Bowl commercial in which the boy dressed as a mini Darth Vader; Max was born with a congenital heart defect 'I've signed with the Yankees.' KEITH OLBERMANN, former MSNBC star, joking about his next gig; Olbermann will actually head to cable's Current TV, where he will host a prime-time news program TALKING HEADS Tim Wu Urging the U.S. to drop its pursuit of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, in Foreign Policy: "Pressing forward with efforts to prosecute an Internet publisher at home while standing up for an open Internet in Egypt and the world at large is an increasingly tenuous position. The WikiLeaks case endangers the reputation of the United States as a defender of free speech and an open Internet globally ... At a time when the Internet is increasingly recognized as a medium of global resistance to authoritarian rule ... the Obama administration and the United States must make sure that they stand on the right side." --2/4/11 Mary Anastasia O'Grady Contrasting the power of the people in Egypt with the stasis that exists in Cuba, in the Wall Street Journal: "Why does a similar rebellion against five decades of repression there still appear to be a far-off dream? ... In Cuba there are no opposition political parties or nonstate media; rapid response brigades enforce the party line ... If peaceful dissidents with leadership skills can't be broken, they are eventually exiled. Or they are murdered." --2/7/11 Ben Brantley Reviewing the much maligned Spider-Man musical in the New York Times: "The sheer ineptitude of this show ... loses its shock value early. After 15 or 20 minutes, the central question you keep asking yourself is likely to change from 'How can $65 million look so cheap?' to 'How long before I'm out of here?'" --2/7/11 Sources: Washington Post; New York Times; NPR; UPI; Today (2); Twitter

Brief History: The Sun

By CLAIRE SUDDATH Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

London Residents gaze at a solar eclipse on June 30, 1954 Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis It guides our calendars, nourishes our crops and provides us with light and warmth. Sometimes we have even mistaken it for a god. Nothing has commanded our attention so completely as the sun. And yet for all our thousands of years of study and worship, there is still relatively little known about the 4.6 billion-year-old ball of gas. We seem to have gotten one step closer, though. On Feb. 6, NASA released the first 360-degree image of the star. The earliest recorded observations of the sun date back to Chinese astronomers in 2300 B.C. A thousand years later, the Egyptians invented the sundial. For many centuries after that, it was believed that the earth was at the center of everything. It was only in 1543 that astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus theorized that the earth revolves around the sun. "Who would place this lamp in another or better position," he reasoned, "than that from which it can light up the whole thing at the same time?" In 1610, Galileo Galilei used the newly invented telescope to confirm this theory as well as the existence of sunspots--cooler, dark patches on the sun's surface. By the 1870s, scientists began to realize the myriad effects that solar activity could have on our planet. (Flares and sunspots are connected to magnetic storms on earth.) But we still believed our solar system to be at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. We know now that it's actually located many light-years off to the side. And after we spent millennia being touched by the sun, the space age allowed us to try to touch it back. Ulysses, the first spacecraft to travel in polar orbit around the star, launched in 1990 and stayed active for almost 20 years. Such a life span is but a flicker to the sun. It was here yesterday. It will be here tomorrow. It will continue to blaze bright long after we have gone dim.

The Skimmer
By ANDREA SACHS Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age By Susan Jacoby Pantheon; 332 pages It is a baby-boomer article of faith that if you go to the gym religiously, watch your weight and avoid stress, you'll live practically forever. But here comes scholar Susan Jacoby bearing a jarring message: No, you won't, and you may not want to anyway. "We need to face reality and base both our individual planning and social policy on the assumption that by the time men and women reach their eighties and nineties, not the best but the worst years of their lives generally lie ahead," she writes in her cogent new book. "Anyone who lives beyond 85 has about a 50-50 chance of winding up in a nursing home--just as he or she has close to a 50 percent chance of developing dementia." Bummer, right? But Jacoby's tough-minded refusal to buy the rosy image painted by advertisers and the "anti-aging industry"--a greedy crowd that includes bogus health gurus, pill pushers and other medical hucksters--is empowering. Never Say Die is a call for boomers to look at what Jacoby, 65, calls "real old age, as opposed to fantasyland." READ [X] SKIM TOSS

Dead Sex Kittens: Farewell to Three Icons of Movie Eroticism

By RICHARD CORLISS Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011

A trio of movie actresses died within a day of one another last week: Maria Schneider, 58, in Paris on Thursday; Lena Nyman, 66, in Stockholm and Tura Satana, 72 (or maybe 75), in Reno on Friday. Each was known mainly for a single film, and the three could be written off as one-hit wonders, except that the films they starred in Satana in Russ Meyer's 1965 Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Nyman in Vilgot Sjman's 1967 I Am Curious (Yellow) and Schneider in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1972 Last Tango in Paris stand today as monuments to cinema's wildest and most adventurous decade. In the Vietnam era, which saw the toppling of so many social standards, these actresses gave face and especially form to a seismic, worldwide change in movies, when suddenly everything could be said and shown. They provided a view of the bold, confrontational, sexually liberated woman from the perspective, that is, of the avid, controlling men behind the camera and in the audience. In the mid- to late 1960s, as young America exploded in opposition to the Vietnam engagement and French youth shut down their country in the manifestations of May '68, a cultural revolution was brewing in movies. Just a few years before, U.S. jurisdictions had banned films showing an unseemly amount of skin; in 1964, Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity. The Hollywood factory was still grinding out family films starring Doris Day, Jerry Lewis and Elvis Presley and handing out Oscars to the likes of The Sound of Music and Oliver! But in corners of the cinema world some directors threw out the playbook that had held since the coming of talking pictures in the 1920s. The new rule was that there were no rules; movies could spout obscenities, show nudity and copulation, operate under the same freedoms that applied to artists in any other medium. Within a decade, every movie outrage that had been a crime became the Hollywood norm, and hard-core pornography was both public and chic.

Tura Satana The filmmakers who shattered the old icons came from two different directions: up from the grind house and over from the art house. Meyer, a combat cameraman in World War II and then a cheesecake photographer (his portrait of his wife Eve was used as an early Playboy centerfold), graduated to feature films with the 1959 nudie-cutie The Immoral Mr. Teas, which was made for $24,000 and grossed more than $1 million. Within a few years Meyer had ditched the color comedy genre for mad melodrama in monochrome: epics like Common Law Cabin, Mudhoney and Motor Psycho, all featuring convoluted plots, ripe dialogue and riper starlets. Deemed disposable drive-in fodder on their first release, they quickly found adherents among film critics and proto-fanboys, and in 1969 Meyer was hired by a major studio, 20th Century Fox, to direct Beyond the Valley of the Dolls from a script by one of his young critical admirers, Roger Ebert.

Tura Satana in Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! the title encapsulates Meyer's tripartite vision of movies: speed, babes and violence has plenty of those commodities, but, surprise, no nudity. Its narrative tone, though, is lurid to the max. The movie follows three strippers, led by Satana as Varna, who love racing their cars on the California salt flats. They race one guy who's brought his girlfriend along; ber-tough Varna gets into a fight with the guy, snaps his spine and kills him and takes the girl as a hostage. Hearing of a rich coot (Stuart Lancaster) with a hidden fortune, Varna and the three women pay him a visit, only to discover that he's as crazy and ruthless as they are. But the old man is accurate enough in his appraisal of Varna. "She's a cold one, all right," the coot says. "More stallion than mare. There's too much for one man to handle." Meyer's films are filled with bosomy, dominating women, and Satana might be the prototype ad apotheosis. Dressed in black, with gloves to match, and sporting a tight top with a V or W neckline, she scowls at the world and spits emasculating aphorisms in its face. When a randy gas-station attendant stares at her cleavage and chirps, "Now that's what I believe in, seeing America first," she snaps, "You won't find it down there, Columbus." And when one of the other strippers is worried about whether she can fool the old man, Varna gives her Lesson No. 1 in the Russ Meyer Performance Manual: "You don't have to believe it, honey. Just act it." Satana had the biography to back up her grit. Born Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1938 (or 1935), from a Japanese-Filipino father and a Cheyenne-Scots-Irish mother, she was interned with other Japanese-Americans in a California camp during World War II. She played bits as strippers and whores in such Hollywood films as Irma La Douce and Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed? before getting her big chance in Pussycat and making the most of it. Her face is a rigid Kabuki mask of predatory sensuality, her deep voice clipped and authoritative, her figure a series of dangerous curves, her long stride that of a wartime general masquerading as a runway model. She wasn't a sex object called upon to act; she was the total package of commanding movie presence and acting chops. Seeing Satana here, you'll wonder why she didn't find a deep Hollywood niche, at least as a character actress. But neither

Meyer nor any director of his stature used her again. Pussycat was her one shot at immortality, and her aim was true. Lena Nyman She enjoyed a 50-year career in Swedish movies and theater, including a good role as Liv Ullmann's damaged sister (and Ingrid Bergman's daughter) in Ingmar Bergman's 1978 Autumn Sonata; but Nyman's notoriety sprang from, and pretty much ended with, the two I Am Curious films the first called Yellow, the second Blue, for the colors of the Swedish flag. In both she plays, more or less, herself. Released at home in 1967 and 1968, the films were acquired by Barnet Rosset's Grove Press in the U.S. The reels were immediately seized as obscene by U.S. Customs, until a Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that they could be shown. The ruckus created a must-see aura for Curious (Yellow), with enthusiasts paying up to $4.50 for a ticket when the average price was $1.50. Made for less than $100,000, Curious (Yellow) grossed $20 million in the States the equivalent of at least $100 million today. And all for a movie with some vivid simulated sex encased in a screed about the Swedish welfare state.

Lena Nyman in I Am Curious (Yellow)

Sjman's idea was to create, on the fly, a docu-portrait of his homeland and interlace it with the sexual and political adventures of Nyman, then 22, who had acted in his previous film, 491, and here would appear as the director's mistress, muse and plaything. His producing studio, Sandrews, gave him 100,000 meters of black-and-white film stock and the intoxicating license to do as he wished. "I had been taught to let every whim and idea pop up," Sjman recalled in 1992. "So I began to look for actors who thought it would be fun not to have a written manuscript, but liked developing an idea I had invented that same morning." Trailed by Sjman's small crew, Nyman interviews passers-by about government policies and sexual equality. She also quizzes Martin Luther King Jr. and Olof Palme, the Education Minister who became Sweden's Prime Minister (and like King, was later assassinated), as well as Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. A movie on the subject of whether Sweden is socialist enough does not attract the raincoat brigade; scenes of coitus and fellatio do. Nyman, who goes by her own name in the films, strays from her lover Sjman for a tryst with a young actor, Brje Ahlstedt, and it is they who make love everywhere: up a tree, on a balustrade of the Royal Palace and in bedrooms hither and yon. Since Ahlstedt remains flaccid through the ardor, the sex scenes that raised the ire of the Customs Department stirred little tumescence among U.S. viewers and critics. Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote that the film "is not merely not erotic. It is anti-erotic. Two hours of this movie will drive thoughts of sex out of your mind for weeks. See the picture and buy twin beds." TIME's Jay Cocks, who gave the film a more measured notice, nonetheless titled his review "Dubious Yellow." Generally, the film was seen as a swindle. Well, a movie can be not erotic, or anti-erotic, and still worth watching. What's of interest today is the relationship of director to actress and the elfin, exhibitionist vitality of Nyman. Between sex talk with a girl

chum (they discuss using shower nozzles, vibrators and vacuum cleaners) and asking each of her 23 lovers to answer a questionnaire on their sexual experiences and political affiliations, the pudgy star eventually tires of Brje, dreaming of castrating him with a knife. Her beau too grows alienated: he glances at a bedroom ornamented with Che and Marx photos and snarls, "Put dieting posters up on your wall instead," and drives away with a dismissive "I don't want those tits in my MG." Behind these sexual skirmishes is a standard movie-set romance, which may begin in erotic attraction and end in a who's-using-whom catfight. "You want a girl in your film and a girl in your bed," Lena tells Sjman. "And if you can combine the two, all the better, right?" She feels manipulated by her master and he by her: "She's using me, that damned girl," Sjman complains. "This movie is her chance, and she knows it. And, boy, does she take advantage of it!" All this may be fiction, but it reflects the familiar synergy and abrasion of a director and his leading lady. And if we take the movie at its word that Sjman and Nyman were bedmates when Curious was made, we're left with the odd spectacle of a director filming his girlfriend having sex with another man. Maria Schneider In their big films, Satana and Nyman were acting with unknowns. Schneider's onscreen partner in her first prominent role was Marlon Brando, fresh from The Godfather. She played Jeanne, a young bride-to-be who goes scouting for an apartment, meets a middle-aged man there (Brando's Paul) and enters into an intense, claustrophobic affair in which, at the man's insistence, no names or biographical details will be exchanged. At heart a movie about two people in a room, having sex and talking about sex, Last Tango was a '70s sensation not for what it showed, exactly though a scene in which Paul sodomizes Jeanne, using butter as a lubricant, might have been a movie first but because Brando was doing it. Schneider was the woman he did it to. In the storm of agitation, the rhetoric of both the movie's defenders and its detractors ascended to operatic heights. Writing in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael proclaimed: "The movie breakthrough has finally come ... This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made." (The review would become nearly as famous as the picture; in subsequent years, when other critics referred to Last Tango, they'd say, "That was Pauline's film.") The movie's event status was certified by a TIME cover story; so incendiary was the article's judicious description of the sex scenes that an unprecedented number of outraged readers canceled their subscriptions. Last Tango doesn't deserve either extreme response. The movie is long and lumpy, with such empty grand gestures as door punching and floor rolling and a few acting arias that show more bravado than behavioral truth. There's an ill-fitting subplot involving Jean-Pierre Laud as Jeanne's filmmaker fianc, who wants to make a documentary about her life (the exact same notion that informed I Am Curious.) But Tango exerts an enduring fascination: for its ruthless intimacy, for the elegance of its spare, swank visual style, for the master class Brando gives in character improvisation particularly in one four-minute closeup in which Paul recalls the indignities of his youth and for the beguiling mixture of kewpie doll and sex toy that was Maria Schneider. The daughter of actor Daniel Glin and model Marie Christine Schneider, Maria spent her teens vagabonding through Montparnasse and Marrakech, living in communes, taking men and women as

lovers. With curly hair ringing a puffy, pouty face, and large breasts on an otherwise boyish frame, Schneider telegraphed the try-anything spirit of a sexually swashbuckling age. That wasn't the image that Bertolucci had hoped to set against the rutting desperation of Paul, Brando's character. The director originally cast the blond, seraphic Dominique Sanda, who had illuminated his previous film, The Conformist, and who in Last Tango could represent a kind of modern virgin goddess, defiled and then deified by her goat lover. The idea was for Paul to drag Jeanne down sexually to his level not for him to dive into the lower depths and find her waiting for him. But Sanda got pregnant (by Brando's old pal Christian Marquand), and Schneider, 20 at the time, won the job by the ease with which she disrobed at Bertolucci's request. Undressed, he said, "she became much more natural." Since Jeanne would be naked in much of the movie Brando too, but only metaphorically the director needed an actress who didn't feel violated every time she had to take her clothes off. A blas exhibitionist, Schneider fit the bill. Now she had to convince the star she was worthy of spending a film with him. Taking Schneider to a bar, Brando said he wanted her not to talk, just stare at him as hard as she could. She managed the trick, and Schneider recalled, "From then on he was like a daddy." She said they never had sex, onscreen or off. Quoting Schneider from the TIME story: " 'He's almost 50, you know, and' she runs her hand down her torso to her midriff 'he's only beautiful to here.' " The Paul-Jeanne affair begins in animal passion (they have sex within moments of meeting), blossoms in moments of erotic caprice ("That's your happiness," he says in their postcoital bliss, "and my hap-penis"), sours as they swap insults (she telling him he's old, he responding, "In 10 years you're gonna be playin' soccer with your tits") and reaches its brutal nadir in the sodomy scene. When Jeanne accepts her fianc's proposal of marriage, Paul realizes that she means more to him than a vessel of anonymous sex. Suddenly he's all charm, gushing with details of his life ("I've got a prostate like an Idaho potato, but I'm still a good stickman ... Anyway, you dummy, I love you") and taking her on the last tango that will lead to his death. Her final words: "I don't know him ..." An instant celebrity, Schneider got another big role in a 1975 film (The Passenger) by a major director (Michelangelo Antonioni) and with an American superstar (Jack Nicholson). But her wild, drug-addled life throttled her career. She walked off one film to enter a mental institution to be with her girlfriend of the moment, and in 1977 she was fired from Luis Buuel's That Obscure Object of Desire; Buuel puckishly replaced her with two actresses alternating in the same part. Bob Guccione offered Schneider the female lead in his 1979 porno-epic Caligula; she rejected it, saying she wanted to be known as an actress, not a sex performer. "I'm much more free sexually than Bernardo or Brando," Schneider boasted during the Last Tango furor. Later, though, she bore both men grudges, saying that they "manipulated me, using me without thinking about me. I took years to forgive them." Nearly 40 years later, upon Schneider's death, Bertolucci made his mea culpa. "Maria accused me of robbing her of her youth, and only today I ask myself if she wasn't perhaps right," he told the Ansa news agency. "Her death arrived too soon, before I could re-embrace her tenderly and tell her that I still felt close to her, and ask her at least once for her forgiveness." We do well to remember that, in the great movie revolution of the mid-'60s to mid-'70s, intimacy was in large part simple voyeurism, and an actress's first casualty was her modesty. Stripped naked, literally

and often emotionally, she lived out the fantasies and compulsions of the man directing her. All actors are in a sense exhibitionists, parading themselves, costumed only by the characters they play; but the more private the parts they reveal, the more of their secret, vulnerable selves they expose. Some women, like Tura Satana, enjoy the attention; others, like Lena Nyman, take it in stride; still others, like Schneider, feel they're the victims of cinematic rape. All, though, whether eager volunteers or reluctant draftees, were soldiers in the battle for a free and mature movie culture. Schneider, Satana and Nyman deserve our respect for fighting in the vanguard, on the front lines, of a war over the movies that was won in the '60s and is largely forgotten today.

Milestones
By ALEXANDRA SILVER Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

ACQUIRED Net stalwart AOL will pay $315 million in cash and stock for the Huffington Post, the flourishing news site that launched in 2005 with a $1 million investment. Arianna Huffington--a co-founder and the editor in chief of the eponymous website--said of the Feb. 6 deal, "This moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet." It's a jet that Huffington will have a significant role in piloting. As president and editor in chief of the new, all-encompassing Huffington Post Media Group, she'll also be in charge of AOL's wide-ranging content. As for AOL, this is its biggest acquisition since its ill-fated merger with Time Warner (TIME's parent company) ended in 2009.

Milestones
Monday, Feb. 21, 2011

PLEADED A closed-door trial of three Americans charged as spies began Feb. 6 in Iran. The three, who were arrested while hiking along the nation's border with Iraq in 2009, are accused of illegal entry and espionage. Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, who are in their late 20s and have been jailed in Tehran's Evin prison for 18 months, pleaded not guilty in court. A not-guilty plea was also entered for Sarah Shourd, Bauer's fiance, who returned to the U.S. in September after being released on $500,000 bail. The hikers' attorney, Masoud Shafii, said he had been denied access to the men before the trial. While noting this in a joint statement, the families of Bauer and Fattal also said, "Now that the court has heard their testimony firsthand, we hope and pray that truth and justice will at long last prevail."