MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2009 Copyright © 2009 The New York Times

Supplemento al numero

odierno de la Repubblica

Sped. abb. postale art. 1

legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

LENSThey’re hungry, they’re critical,

they’re creative, and they’re rising up

against the status quo, the tried and

true. Restaurants, fashion magazines,

Hollywood and even plain and simple

cash had better watch out as their power

diminishes and a new order bubbles up.

Away from white-tablecloth restau-

rants, gourmands are gathering off the

radar. They are learning how to slaugh-

ter a 70-kilogram boar at a guerrilla cooking

school, or indulging in ambitious meals in unli-

censed restaurants in apartments in cities like

New Yorkand London.

“Mainstream it’s not — and that’s just how the

organizers like it,” wrote The Times’s Melena

Ryzik.

These underground restaurants are run by

groups like Whisk & Ladle and A Razor,

a Shiny Knife in New York. The partici-

pants are not aspiring to become restau-

rateurs. They’re in it for the community

and creative freedom, wrote Ms. Ryzik.

Those two ideals also motivate Poly-

vore, a user-generated fashion Web

site. Just as a Michelin-rated restaurant

can be deemed mainstream, so too are

the likes of Vogue and InStyle. But on

Polyvore, users can play fashion editor and

create collages with pictures of clothing and

accessories from the Web. If readers click on a

blouse, they are taken to the Web site that sells

it. Polyvore tripled its traffic in the last year,

while other fashion magazine sites have been

struggling to maintain an audience.

“There’s this aspirational side and entertain-

ment side, which none of the sites up until now

have done a good job at tapping into,” Peter

Fenton, a partner at Benchmark Capital, which

invested $2.5 million in Polyvore, told The

Times.

People want their glamour and glitz, but they

want to be able to have more say in it. And that’s

what’s happening in Hollywood. The standard

movie ratings system by the Motion Picture As-

sociation of America — G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-

17 — is coming under attack via the Web, and

it has left Hollywood veterans fretting about a

drop in attendance and profits, according to The

Times. The system now competes with Internet-

based ratings alternatives like SceneSmoking.

org, which monitors tobacco use in movies, and

Movieguide.org, which rates movies from a

Christian perspective .

“We think there is a critical mass build-

ing against the M.P.A.A. on the Web that will

hopefully result in major changes to its ratings

practices,” Susan Linn, director of the advocacy

group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Child-

hood, told The Times.

Maybe you don’t want to pay to go see that

movie anyway. And you don’t have to, because

you can barter for tickets instead. Postings on

Craigslist’s barter section have increased, and

the trading site U-Exchange.com has seen an

influx of participants from Spain, South Africa,

Britain and the United States, reported The

Times.

One user, Rich Rowley, who owns R House

Construction in Washington, offered remodel-

ing and home repairs in exchange for dental

care and a boat. “We have to learn to adapt to

the changing landscape,” he told The Times.

“Part of that is bartering. The exciting thing is

this is another part of the puzzle that gets us to

where we’re going.”

And that place just might be from the ground

up.

By STEVEN ERLANGER

MARRAKESH, Morocco

THE ELECTION OF Barack Obama as presi-

dent of the United States seemed to most Euro-

peans to be unadulterated good news, marking

an end to the perceived unilateralism and indifference

to allied views of former President George W. Bush.

But nine months into Mr. Obama’s presidency,

trans-Atlantic relations are again clouded by doubts.

Europe and the United States remain at least partly

out of sync on Afghanistan, the Middle East, Iran and

climate change.

Many Europeans argue that Mr. Obama has not bro-

ken clearly enough with Bush administration policies

that they dislike, while some Americans argue that

the Europeans are too passive, watching Mr. Obama

struggle with difficult issues, like Afghanistan and the

detention center at Guantánamo Bay, without provid-

ing much substantive help.

Mr. Obama remains popular with the European

public, but a senior European official said that he

was worried about an underlying disaffection. “It’s

dangerous, because we must not get into a spiral of

dissatisfaction on both sides,” he said. These general-

izations lack real substance, he said, but the criticism

runs that “the U.S. thinks that Europeans don’t want

to do anything to help and the Europeans feel that the

U.S. is naïve and not delivering enough.”

Another senior European official said that for “all

the talk of multilateralism” and the European contri-

bution of aid and NATO troops to the fight against the

Taliban, which has brought more than 500 European

deaths, Afghanistan remained an American show.

“Europeans are sitting around waiting for Washing-

TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The United States and Europe still have tensions over issues like Afghanistan and Iran. President Obama joined NATO leaders on the French-German border in April.

Consumers Take Control

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Where consumption

is still conspicuous.

ARTS & STYLES

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greatest partnership.

Doubts About Obama

For comments, write to nytweekly@nytimes.com.

An initial euphoria after the end of

the Bush era gives way to a trans-

Atlantic ‘spiral of dissatisfaction’ . . .

IIIWORLD TRENDS

A pilgrimage to

Sorte Mountain.

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O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA R Y

II MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2009

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Microchips and MonopoliesFollowing a 16-month-long formal inves-

tigation, and years of dithering during the

Bush administration, the Federal Trade

Commission is reportedly within weeks

of filing an antitrust complaint against

Intel for abusing its dominant position in

the microchip market to shut out a smaller

rival, Advanced Micro Devices.

The rest of the world has not waited.

Since 2005, antitrust authorities from Ja-

pan, South Korea and Europe have taken

action against Intel for anticompetitive

behavior. In May, the European Commis-

sion fined the company nearly $1.5 billion

for offering illegal rebates to computer

makers that bought all or nearly all their

chips from Intel, and delayed or canceled

the introduction of products with A.M.D.

chips.

Four out of five PCs in the world run on

Intel’s microchips. If Intel is abusing its

outsize clout to marginalize rivals and

hinder the development of competitive

products, it should be made to stop.

Intel and its allies in Congress have

been trying to protect its advantage. The

company wants the F.T.C. to delay any ac-

tion until the end of a civil lawsuit between

Intel and A.M.D. that is scheduled to go to

trial in March after years of pretrial inves-

tigation. Intel is appealing the European

decision, arguing that the commission

selectively chose evidence and relied on

e-mails from ill-informed low-ranking

executives. And it has been talking to

members of Congress from states, such as

Oregon or Arizona, where Intel employs

more than 25,000 people in total.

A letter to the F.T.C. signed by nearly two

dozen members of Congress, Republicans

and Democrats, blasted the fine as part of

“a troublesome trend in Europe towards

regulatory protectionism.” They claimed

the chip market was highly competitive —

pointing to a fast decline in prices — and

urged the Obama administration to be “an

advocate of the ‘American Way.’ ”

But the F.T.C. must focus on the issues,

not the politics. A decade of Supreme

Court decisions hostile to antitrust en-

forcement has let monopolists get away

with a lot of abusive behavior because con-

sumers weren’t suffering higher prices.

This approach ignores the importance of

consumer choice in high-tech industries,

which depend on competition to provide

the incentive to innovate. Competition

needs competitors.

Despite Intel’s objections, the European

Commission’s evidence shows Intel lean-

ing heavily on computer makers. In one

e-mail, a Lenovo executive points to an

Intel deal, in exchange for which “we will

not be introducing AMD based products

in 2007 for our Notebook products.” A sub-

mission from Hewlett-Packard stated that

to get rebates from Intel from 2002 to 2005

it had to submit to a requirement “that HP

should purchase at least 95 percent of its

business desktop system from Intel.” A

2003 Dell presentation noted that if Dell

were to switch any chip supplies to A.M.D.,

Intel’s retaliation “could be severe and

prolonged with impact to all LOBs [Lines

of Business].” We don’t consider that the

American way.

Afterglow

E D I T O R I A L S O F T H E T I M E S

According to the Food and Agri-

culture Organization of the United

Nations, feeding humanity in 2050

— when the world’s population is ex-

pected to be 9.1 billion — will require

a 70 percent increase in global food

production, partly because of popula-

tion growth but also because of rising

incomes.

The organization hopes that this in-

crease can be brought about by greater

productivity on current agricultural

acreage and by greening parts of the

world that aren’t now arable. It is also

“cautiously optimistic” that, even with

climate change, there will be enough

land and probably enough water to do

so. It’s important to look at this projec-

tion in light of another United Nations

goal — preserving biodiversity — and

ask whether the two are compatible.

In 2003, 123 nations committed

themselves to “a significant reduction

of the current rate of biodiversity loss”

by 2010. According to scientists at a re-

cent United Nations-sponsored biodi-

versity conference, that target will not

be met.

The authors of the United Nations

food report believe that humanity will

somehow be able to produce more food

while still honoring the value of other

species by protecting their habitat.

And it’s true that this is not a zero-sum

game. A 70 percent increase in food

production doesn’t necessarily mean

a 70 percent reduction in habitat.

But the Food and Agriculture Orga-

nization also warns that agricultural

acreage will have to grow by some 120

million hectares. Add to this the ongo-

ing rate of habitat destruction — in-

cluding deforestation, often for fuel but

usually for producing more food — and

other threats like the growing produc-

tion of biofuels, and it is hard to argue

that there isn’t a profound conflict be-

tween what our species will need to

survive by 2050 and the needs of nearly

every other species on this planet.

The question isn’t whether we can

feed 9.1 billion people in 2050 — they

must be fed — or whether we can find

the energy they will surely need. The

question is whether we can find a way

to make food and energy production

sustainable — and whether we can

act on the principle that our interest

includes that of every other species on

the planet.

The only way to do that is to think

about the habitat of all other species

as the frame of our activities. Unless

habitat is part of the equation, we’re

simply not talking realistically about

the character, much less the future, of

our planet. We have no idea what the

“right” amount of biodiversity on this

planet should be. And we struggle to

find reasons why other species and

ecosystems are important, searching

mostly for utilitarian arguments (their

value as medicines, for instance) that

specify their usefulness to us.

My own answer is less utilitarian:

They have the value of their own exis-

tence. I adhere to a conclusion reached

long ago — by James Madison in 1818,

who said, simply, that it cannot be right

for all of Earth’s resources to “be made

subservient to the use of man.”

We need to act on that principle.

That will mean more than sim-

ply preserving habitat. It will mean,

among other things, a new and far

more modest idea of food prosperity,

more limited and almost certainly less

meat-driven than the present Ameri-

can model.

It will mean a new idea of food equity,

a more balanced way of sharing and

distributing food to reduce the devas-

tating imbalance between the gluttony

of some nations and the famine of oth-

ers. It will mean that we all have to do

what we can — wherever we live — to

localize and intensify food production.

Above all, it will mean restraint, in or-

der to protect, and perhaps one day in-

crease, the remaining biodiversity.

In April, NASA’s space-based Swift sat-

ellite sent back a text message announcing

that it had detected a gamma-ray burst,

the remains of an extraordinarily vio-

lent explosion that ended the life of a dis-

tant star. Since then, astronomers using

ground-based telescopes have been able

to measure the spectrum of the burst’s in-

frared afterglow and estimate its distance

from Earth.

When you look at the stars, you are look-

ing at light that comes from the past. This

gamma-ray burst, officially GRB 090423,

is, in fact, the most distant and oldest

object yet detected in our universe; it is

some 13.1 billion light-years away. In other

words, this is the vestige of an explosion

that took place a mere (when it comes to

the life of the universe) 630 million years

after the Big Bang.

Light coming to us from such a distance is

stretched because the universe is expand-

ing. The greater the stretching — called

redshift — the more distant the object. The

previous most-distant object, a galaxy, has

a redshift of 6.96. GRB 090423 has a red-

shift of 8.2 and appears to observers as an

extremely red point of light. When that ex-

plosion took place, the universe was more

than nine times smaller than it is now.

It’s one thing to explore such remote

recesses of time in theory. It’s something

else again to witness their afterglow. And

GRB 090423 is an invitation for all of us to

unfetter our imaginations. We imagine

looking outward from that distant point

knowing that our own exploration still lies

some 13 billion years in the future.

Dispatching more troops to Afghanistan would be a

monumental bet and probably a bad one, most likely

a waste of lives and resources that might simply em-

power the Taliban. In particular, one of the most com-

pelling arguments against more troops rests on this

stunning trade-off: For the cost of a single additional

soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could

build roughly 20 schools there.

It’s hard to do the calculation precisely, but for the

cost of 40,000 troops over a few years — well, we could

just about turn every Afghan into a Ph.D.

The hawks respond: It’s naïve to think that you can

sprinkle a bit of education on a war-torn society. It’s

impossible to build schools now because the Taliban

will blow them up.

In fact, it’s still quite possible to operate schools in

Afghanistan — particularly when there’s a strong

“buy-in” from the local community.

Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea,” has

now built 39 schools in Afghanistan and 92 in Pakistan

— and not one has been burned down or closed. The

aid organization CARE has 295 schools educating

50,000 girls in Afghanistan, and not a single one has

been closed or burned by the Taliban. The Afghan In-

stitute of Learning, another aid group, has 32 schools

in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with none closed by the

Taliban (although local communities have temporar-

ily suspended three for security reasons).

In short, there is still vast scope for greater invest-

ment in education, health and agriculture in Afghani-

stan. These are extraordinarily cheap and have a bet-

ter record at stabilizing societies than military solu-

tions, which, in fact, have a pretty dismal record.

In Afghanistan, for example, we have already in-

creased our troop presence by 40,000 troops since

the beginning of last year, yet the result has not been

the promised stability but only more casualties and

a strengthened insurgency. If the last surge of 40,000

troops didn’t help, why will the next one be so differ-

ent?

Matthew P. Hoh, an American military veteran who

was the top civilian officer in Zabul Province, resigned

over Afghan policy, as The Washington Post reported

in October. Mr. Hoh argues that our military presence

is feeding the insurgency, not quelling it.

Schools are not a quick fix any more than troops

are. But we have abundant evidence that they can,

over time, transform countries, and in the area near

Afghanistan there’s a nice natural experiment in the

comparative power of educational versus military

tools.

Since 9/11, the United States has spent $15 billion

in Pakistan, mostly on military support, and today

Pakistan is more unstable than ever. In contrast, Ban-

gladesh, which until 1971 was a part of Pakistan, has

focused on education in a way that Pakistan never did.

Bangladesh now has more girls in high school than

boys. (In contrast, only 3 percent of Pakistani women

in the tribal areas are literate.)

Those educated Bangladeshi women joined the

labor force, laying the foundation for a garment in-

dustry and working in civil society groups like BRAC

and Grameen Bank. That led to a virtuous spiral of

development, jobs, lower birth rates, education and

stability. That’s one reason Al Qaeda is taking refuge

in Pakistan, not in Bangladesh, and it’s a reminder

that education can transform societies.

When I travel in Pakistan, I see evidence that one

group — Islamic extremists — believes in the trans-

formative power of education. They pay for madras-

sas that provide free schooling and often free meals

for students. They then offer scholarships for the best

pupils to study abroad in Wahhabi madrassas before

returning to become leaders of their communities.

What I don’t see on my trips is similar numbers of

American-backed schools. It breaks my heart that we

don’t invest in schools as much as medieval, misogy-

nist extremists.

For roughly the same cost as stationing 40,000

troops in Afghanistan for one year, we could educate

the great majority of the 75 million children worldwide

who, according to Unicef, are not getting even a pri-

mary education. Such a vast global campaign would

reduce poverty, cut birth rates, improve America’s

image in the world, promote stability and chip away

at extremism.

Education isn’t a panacea, and no policy in Afghani-

stan is a sure bet. But all in all, the evidence suggests

that education can help foster a virtuous cycle that

promotes stability and moderation. So instead of

sending 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, how about

opening 40,000 schools?

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

More Schools, Not Troops

Editorial Observer/VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Food, Humanity, Habitat and How We Get to 2050

For the cost of

one American

soldier in

Afghanistan

for a year, 20

schools could

be built. A girls’

high school.

The Intelligence columnwill return next week.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2009 III

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A short

midlevel cleric, with a neat white

beard and a clergyman’s calm bear-

ing, Mehdi Karroubi has watched

from his home in Tehran in recent

months as his aides have been ar-

rested, his offices raided, his news-

paper shut down. He himself has

been threatened with arrest and,

indirectly, the death penalty. His re-

sponse: bring it on.

Once a second-tier opposition fig-

ure operating in the shadow of Mir

Hussein Moussavi, his fellow chal-

lenger in Iran’s discredited presi-

dential election in June, Mr. Karrou-

bi has emerged in recent months as

the last and most defiant opponent of

the country’s leadership.

The authorities have dismissed as

fabrications his accusations of offi-

cial corruption, voting fraud and the

torture and rape of detained protest-

ers. A former confidant of Ayatollah

Ruhollah Khomeini and a longtime

conservative politician, he has lately

been accused by the government of

fomenting unrest and aiding Iran’s

foreign enemies.

Four months after mass protests

erupted in response to the dubious

victory claims of President Mah-

moud Ahmadinejad, the opposi-

tion’s efforts have largely stalled in

the face of unrelenting government

pressure, arrests, long

detentions, harsh sen-

tences, censorship and

a strategic refusal to

compromise.

But for all its success

at preserving author-

ity, the government

has been unable to

silence or intimidate

Mr. Karroubi, its most

tenacious and, in many

ways, most problem-

atic critic. While other

opposition figures, in-

cluding Mr. Moussavi

and two former presi-

dents, Mohammad

Khatami and Ali Akbar

Hashemi Rafsanjani,

are seldom heard now,

Mr. Karroubi has been

unsparing and highly vocal in his

criticism of the government, which

he feels has lost all legitimacy.

Recently, a special court for the

clergy began to consider whether

Mr. Karroubi, 72, should face charg-

es. His response, in a speech to a stu-

dent group that was reported on a

reformist Web site, was withering.

“I am not only unworried about

this court,” he wrote. “I wholeheart-

edly welcome it since I will use it to

express my concerns regarding

the national and religious beliefs of

the Iranian people and the ideas of

Imam Khomeini, and clearly reveal

those who are opposed to these con-

cerns.”

Despite such provocations, Iran’s

conservative leadership has so far

not arrested him, apparently fear-

ful of making a powerful symbol of

a man so closely associated with the

founding of the Islamic republic.

“His potential arrest is an acid test

of the internal meltdown of the upper

echelon of the regime and the final

breakdown in its legitimacy facade,”

said Hamid Dabashi, a professor of

Iranian studies at Columbia Univer-

sity in New York. “We had heard that

revolutions eat their own children,

but his seems to be a case of revolu-

tionary parricide.”

Mr. Karroubi’s disenchantment

with the revolution he helped cre-

ate began not with

the elections in June,

but with the ballot-

ing that brought Mr.

Ahmadinejad to office

four years ago.

If Mr. Karroubi had

restricted his com-

plaints to voting ir-

regularities, he might

have been ignored. But

he has gone far beyond

that with his accusa-

tions that state secu-

rity officers raped,

sodomized and tor-

tured men and women

who were arrested for

taking part in the pro-

tests.

The allegations have

unnerved the leader-

ship, threatening its legitimacy and

religious standing .

After the government dismissed

those allegations in September, Mr.

Karroubi was summoned to appear

before a three-judge panel inves-

tigating his actions. He welcomed

the invitation. “It will be a good op-

portunity for me to talk again about

crimes that would make the shah

look good,” he said, according to the

Green Freedom Wave Web site.

By SIMON ROMERO

SORTE MOUNTAIN, Venezuela —

A medium lit the candles around him.

The pounding of drums filled the air. A

crowd of pilgrims repeatedly shouted

“fuerza” — strength — with such fer-

vor that beads of sweat dropped from

their brows. Even his tipple was ready:

a helper poured Johnnie Walker Swing

whisky into a hollowed bull’s horn.

But Erik the Red was not in the mood

to party.

Instead Erik, a Norse spirit who pos-

sesses some of the devotees of María

Lionza — a figure at the center of the

Venezuelan religion that draws thou-

sands of pilgrims each October to this

remote mountain in the northwest —

looked a bit uncomfortable.

Blood trickled from points on his

face, which he had punctured with a

nail. He staggered under his red cape.

Yet he went on with his duties, blessing

a teenage girl in search of good fortune

in romance and rubbing the belly of a

middle-aged housewife suffering from

a hernia.

“One is born with this ability to

channel positive energies,” explained

the medium, Juan Antonio Castillo, 42,

a shoe salesman who said he had been

possessed by the Erik and carried out

the ritual accordingly. “Erik,” he said

admiringly, “was first a pirate, then a

farmer, then a great warrior who made

it to Greenland.”

María Lionza, with its ever-growing

pantheon of saints and spirits, has

emerged as one of the New World’s

most malleable religions, blending

Catholicism with West African tradi-

tions and many other customs. Across

Venezuela, it is symbolized in statues

depicting a sensuous María Lionza,

an Indian woman riding a tapir — the

South American herbivore related to

the rhinoceros — while holding a hu-

man pelvis in her upstretched arms.

As many as 30 percent of Venezuela’s

27 million people, from varying social

classes, take part in its rites, accord-

ing to anthropologists.

María Lionza is said to draw on

centuries-old rituals by Caquetío and

Jirajara Indians who resisted Catho-

lic evangelization, but historians say

it crystallized around the end of the

19th century or the start of the 20th,

around the time the teachings of Léon

Dénizarth-Hippolyte Rivail, a French-

man who popularized trance commu-

nications under the name Allan Kar-

dec, became fashionable in Caracas

and other Latin American cities.

Since then, María Lionza has con-

stantly evolved, absorbing with each

generation new spirits that can offer

guidance. Followers channel the souls

of both local heroes like Pedro Camejo,

known as Negro Primero, a slave who

fought in the independence war here

against Spain, and despots, like the leg-

endary dictator Juan Vicente Gómez.

The pilgrimage to Sorte Mountain

here in Yaracuy State each October

offers a glimpse into the rituals of

María Lionza. More than 5,000 devo-

tees come from Venezuela and abroad,

including Colombia, the Dominican

Republic and the Caribbean islands of

Curaçao and Aruba.

The pilgrims visit shrines to María

Lionza, whom they call “the queen.”

Some devotees smoke cigars and re-

cite chants as they pray for good for-

tune in the months ahead. Others go

much further. They draw designs on

the ground with chalk, and lie within

them awaiting cleansing before spirits

possess them. They prick their faces

with razor blades or make incisions in

their chests with machetes.

“Our time in Sorte gives us the op-

portunity to get away from the daily

burdens of our lives,” said Delwin

Rodríguez, 35, who works as a fabric

salesman in Guarapiche in eastern

Venezuela.

The pilgrimage’s most frenzied

point comes at midnight, at the start

of the Day of Indigenous Resistance.

The fire dance begins. To the hypnotic

pounding of drums, more than 20 devo-

tees dressed as Indians jump through

burning pyres of wood, a chance to

demonstrate imperviousness while

possessed by spirits.

They dance on the embers. Some

put pieces of burning wood in their

mouths. A helper shadows them, tak-

ing swigs of cocuy, a Venezuelan liquor

made from the agave plant. The helper

spits out the cocuy in a spray aimed at

the feet of each devotee.

“I feel wonderful,” said Anderson

Rodríguez, 23, a participant in the fire

dance, showing his unscathed feet

afterward. He said he hoped that his

devotion would advance his wishes to

get a job at the Morón oil refinery near

here.

“I adore my queen,” he said.

A Lonely Cleric Defies The Government of Iran

Where Adoration Meets a Blend of Traditions

Mehdi Karroubi

shows no sign of

backing down.

MERIDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A former Khomeiniconfidant is a major irritant to Tehran.

ONLINE: A PILGRIMAGE

Venezuelans commune with the spirit of María Lionza:nytimes.com/world

Devotees of the

María Lionza

religion across

Venezuela

perform rituals

each October.

A purification

ceremony took

place in a river.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2009

ton to decide what the Afghanistan

policy is going to be,” he said.

On Iran, Europeans, and especially

the French, are concerned that Mr.

Obama could sacrifice the principle

of preventing Tehran from enrich-

ing uranium — as demanded by the

United Nations Security Council — to

get what seems like an agreement for

broad talks with Iran on regional and

bilateral issues.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France

went so far as to chide Mr. Obama in

public at the United Nations General

Assembly in September, saying: “I sup-

port America’s outstretched hand. But

what has the international community

gained from these offers of dialogue?

Nothing but more enriched uranium

and centrifuges.”

A lot of the problem is the fault of the

Europeans themselves, said Hubert

Védrine, a former French foreign min-

ister. “Europe for Obama is not a prior-

ity, not a problem and not a solution for

his problems,” he said in an interview

here. “Obama keeps a distance and has

a kind of hauteur” with European lead-

ers, Mr. Védrine said. “But that’s not a

sufficient reason for Europeans to act

like spectators” as Mr. Obama tries to

cope with his challenges. “I think it’s

necessary to help him,” he said.

European nations have been slow to

help Mr. Obama with the major points

on his agenda. They have so far agreed

to take only a handful of detainees

from the Guantánamo detention cen-

ter, which Mr. Obama vowed to close

within a year.

And European countries that be-

long to NATO have also been slow to

provide Mr. Obama much extra help in

Afghanistan, in part because many Eu-

ropeans strongly oppose the war and

Washington has not yet agreed upon a

compelling new strategy to succeed in

Afghanistan.

Jean-David Levitte, Mr. Sarkozy’s

diplomatic counselor and former am-

bassador to the United States, said that

Europe nonetheless remained Wash-

ington’s best ally. Mr. Obama’s election

was enthralling to Europeans, he said,

“transforming the image of the United

States in just several months.” He said,

“We all feel a stake in the U.S.”

Is Europe ready to respond? “Of

course it is,” he said, citing more than

35,000 European troops now in Afghan-

istan. “If not the Europeans, who would

there be? No one else.”

In a recent report, the European

Council on Foreign Relations, an inde-

pendent research group, urged Euro-

pean Union governments to shake off

illusions about the trans-Atlantic rela-

tionship if they wanted to avoid global

irrelevance.

The report argues that Europeans

retain key and damaging “illusions”

they acquired over “decades of Ameri-

can hegemony,” which produces “an

unhealthy mix of complacency and ex-

cessive deference” to a United States

that has a “rapidly decreasing inter-

est” in a Europe that cannot pull its own

weight.

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — It has

been just one year since Barack

Obama’s election, a year since that

moment when his supporters felt

everything was possible amid the

lofty talk of “remaking this nation”

and the determined chants of yes,

we can.

The hope and hubris have given

way to the grind of governance,

the jammed meeting schedule

waiting in the morning, the thick

briefing books waiting at night,

the thousand little compromises

and frustrations that come in

between. The education of a presi-

dent is a complicated process. And

as Mr. Obama has spent the last

12 months learning more about

wielding power, his country has

spent it learning more about him.

He has proved to be an activist

president, one with an appetite for

transformative ideas even as he

avoids defining them, or himself,

too sharply. He is a study in contra-

dictions, bold yet cautious, radical

yet pragmatic, all depending on

whose prism you use.

He has discovered that the

power of oratory that proved so

potent on the campaign trail has

its limits in a world where words

mean only so much. His faith in his

ability to bring people together has

foundered in a polarized capital, as

has his interest in trying.

After tackling the deepest reces-

sion in generations, Mr. Obama

now presides over an economy fi-

nally growing again but still losing

jobs and piling on debt. Now con-

fronting what may be the two most

defining issues of his presidency

in health care and Afghanistan, he

is coming to grips with their com-

plexity in ways he clearly never did

during the campaign. And beyond

those issues loom Iran, climate

change, immigration and financial

regulations, among others.

“The central question that

emerges after these months is

can he make it all work?” said

Lee Hamilton, a former Demo-

cratic congressman who in recent

years helped lead the commission

that investigated the attacks of

September 11, 2001. “I think he’s

learned that governing is harder

than campaigning and I think he’s

learned it with a vengeance.”

In the White House, the wist-

fulness for the simpler days is

palpable.

“The day was just suffused with

emotion and hope and warmth,”

David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s

senior adviser, recalled about

Election Day last year. “But it is

an emotional peak that you can’t

maintain day to day as you do the

business of government. The chal-

lenge is to maintain that degree

of idealism and optimism as you

work through the meat grinder.

“Everything about the politics of

Washington,” he went on, “works

against hope and optimism and

unity. So you have to push against

that every day, understanding that

it’s going to be an imperfect end

result.” He added: “That night was

sublime. And much of what goes

on in Washington is prosaic. Or

profane.”

By NICHOLAS KULISH

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — Forced to

confront the rising insurgency in once

peaceful northern Afghanistan, the

German Army has been engaged in

sustained and bloody ground combat

for the first time since World War II.

At issue are how long opposition in

Germany will allow its troops to stay

and fight, and whether they will be

given leeway from their strict rules

of engagement to pursue the kind of

counterinsurgency being advocated

by American generals. The question

now is whether the Americans will

ultimately fight one kind of war and

their allies another.

After World War II, German soci-

ety rejected using military power for

anything other than self-defense, and

pacifism has been a rallying cry for

generations .

German leaders have chipped away

at the proscriptions in recent years,

in particular by participating in air-

strikes in the Kosovo war. Still, the leg-

acy of the combat ban remains in the

form of strict engagement rules and an

ingrained shoot-last mentality that is

causing significant tensions with the

United States in Afghanistan.

Driven by necessity, some of the

4,250 German soldiers here, the third-

largest number of troops in the NATO

contingent, have already come a long

way. On October 20, they handed out

blankets, volleyballs and flashlights

as a goodwill gesture to residents of

the village of Yanghareq, about 35 ki-

lometers northwest of Kunduz. Barely

an hour later, insurgents with machine

guns and rocket-propelled grenades

ambushed other members of the same

company.

The Germans fought back, killing

one of the attackers, before the dust

and disorder made it impossible to tell

fleeing Taliban from civilians.

“They shoot at us and we shoot

back,” said Staff Sergeant Erik S., who,

according to German military rules,

could not be fully identified. “People

are going to fall on both sides. It’s as

simple as that. It’s war.”

He added, “The word ‘war’ is grow-

ing louder in society, and the politi-

cians can’t keep it secret anymore.”

Indeed, German politicians have re-

fused to utter the word, trying instead

to portray the mission in Afghanistan

as a mix of peacekeeping and recon-

struction in support of the Afghan

government. But their line has grown

less tenable as the insurgency has ex-

panded rapidly in the west and north

of the country, where Germany leads

the regional command and provides a

majority of the troops.

In part, NATO and German officials

say, that is evidence of the political as-

tuteness of Taliban and Qaeda leaders,

who are aware of the opposition in Ger-

many to the war. They hope to exploit

it and force the withdrawal of German

soldiers — splintering the NATO alli-

ance in the process — through attacks

on German personnel in Afghanistan

and through video and audio threats of

terrorist attacks on the home front.

General Stanley A. McChrystal, the

senior American and allied command-

er in Afghanistan, is pressing NATO

allies to contribute more troops to the

war effort, even as countries like the

Netherlands and Canada have begun

discussing plans to pull out. Germany

has held out against pleas for addition-

al troops so far.

Ties between Germany and the Unit-

ed States were strained in September

over a German-ordered bombing of

two hijacked tanker trucks, which

killed civilians as well as Taliban.

Many Germans, from top politicians

down to enlisted men, thought that

General McChrystal was too swift to

condemn the strike before a complete

investigation.

Soldiers from the Third Company,

Mechanized Infantry Battalion 391,

said they were understaffed for the in-

creasingly complex mission here. Two

men from the company were killed in

June, among 36 German soldiers who

have died in the Afghan war.

The soldiers expressed frustration

over the second-guessing of the air-

strike not only by allies, but also by

their own politicians, and over the ab-

sence of support back home.

German soldiers usually stay in

Afghanistan for just four months.

The mandate also caps the number of

troops in the country at 4,500.

A NATO official, who spoke on condi-

tion of anonymity, called the mandate

“a political straitjacket.”

A company of German paratroopers

in the district of Chahar Darreh, where

insurgent activity is particularly pro-

nounced, fought off a series of attacks

and stayed in the area for eight days

and seven nights.

“The longer we were out there, the

better the local population responded

to us,” said Captain Thomas K., the

company’s commander. Another com-

pany relieved them for three days but

then abandoned the position, where in-

telligence said that a bomb was waiting

for the next group of German soldiers.

“Since we were there, no other com-

pany has been back,” the captain said.

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

President Sarkozy of France, center, criticized President Obama’s

policy on Iran in a speech at the United Nations in September.

MOISES SAMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Despite limits on war dating to World War II, German troops are fighting in Afghanistan. A soldier burned a flare in Kunduz Province.

Stefan Pauly contributed reporting from Berlin.

German Pacifism Confronts a Harsh Afghan Reality

NEWS ANALYSIS

An

Education

For Obama

‘A Spiral of Dissatisfaction’On Both Sides of the Atlantic

Promises give way tothe difficult realities of politics.

The Taliban may be exploiting a nation’sshoot-last mentality.

From Page I

Repubblica NewYork

M O N E Y & B U S I N E S S

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2009 V

MINH UONG /THE NEW YORK TIMES

By GRAHAM BOWLEY

For most of the 217 years since its

founding under a buttonwood tree

on Wall Street, the New York Stock

Exchange was the high temple of

American capitalism.

Behind its Greco-Roman facade,

traders raised a Dante-esque din in

their pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Good times or bad, the daily action

on the cavernous trading floor made

the Big Board the greatest market-

place for stocks in the world.

But now, even as the Dow Jones

industrial average topped 10,000

for the first time since the financial

crisis sent it tumbling, the exchange

and its hometown face an unsettling

truth: the Big Board, the symbolic

heart of New York’s financial indus-

try, is getting smaller.

Young, fast-moving rivals are

splintering its public marketplace

and creating private markets that,

their critics say, give big banks and

investment funds an edge over ordi-

nary investors.

Some of the new trading venues —

“dark pools,” the industry calls them

— are all but invisible, even to regu-

lators. These stealth markets enable

sophisticated traders to buy and sell

large blocks of stock in secrecy at

lightning speed, a practice that has

drawn scrutiny from the Securities

and Exchange Commission.

These upstarts are utterly unlike

the old-school Big Board, which is

struggling to make its way as a for-

profit corporation after centuries of

ownership by its seat-holding mem-

bers. Last year, its parent company,

NYSE Euronext, lost $740 million.

Wall Street’s judgment has been

swift and brutal. Since January 2007,

the share price of NYSE Euronext

has lost nearly three-quarters of

its value, even though stock trading

over all has soared.

While the exchange has been un-

der assault since the beginning of

the decade, its decline has acceler-

ated in recent years as aggressive

competitors have emerged. Today,

36 percent of daily trades in stocks

that are listed on the New York Stock

Exchange are actually executed on

the exchange, down from about 75

percent nearly four years ago. The

rest are conducted elsewhere, on

new electronic exchanges or through

dark pools.

The old Big Board was far from

perfect. Its floor brokers —

who occupy a privileged, and

potentially lucrative, niche

between buyers and sellers

— have sometimes enriched

themselves at their customers’

expense.

But changes inside the ex-

change’s grand Main Hall are

startling. For decades, the New

York Exchange was the kind of

place where sons followed their

fathers onto the trading floor.

But half of the jobs there have

disappeared over the last five

years. Many of the 1,200 or so

remaining workers retreat qui-

etly to their computers shortly

after the opening bell clangs at

9:30 a.m.

The Big Board has been

forced to close one of its five

trading halls, and it has re-

populated two others with

business from the American

Stock Exchange, which NYSE

Euronext bought last year.

The Main Hall — the soaring,

gilded room opened in 1903 —

can seem little more than a colorful

backdrop for CNBC.

“It has not been pretty,” said Benn

Steil of the Council on Foreign Rela-

tions in New York. “All the big estab-

lished exchanges around the world

have experienced the same phe-

nomenon, but the New York Stock

Exchange has taken the biggest

beating.”

It is a remarkable comedown for

the New York Exchange, and for New

York. Once the undisputed capital of

capital, the city is struggling to re-

tain its dominance in finance as the

industry globalizes. “Wall Street”

seems to be no longer a place, but a

vast, worldwide network of money

and information.

“What’s going on here is a rein-

vention,” said Lawrence Leibowitz,

head of United States markets and

global technology at NYSE Euron-

ext. “How can you bring this institu-

tion forward into the 21st century?”

By BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES — Movie studios,

desperate to return their home en-

tertainment divisions to growth, are

scrambling to shape the post-DVD

era.

Until very recently, most Hollywood

heavyweights were loath to speak too

openly about the promise of digital en-

tertainment — the downloading and

streaming of movies and television

shows on computers, Internet-enabled

televisions and mobile devices. No-

body wanted to anger retail partners

like Wal-Mart or do anything that

might slow the DVD profits.

But business currents have shifted.

While DVD and Blu-ray will remain a

huge profit center for years to come,

studio executives are finally confront-

ing an uncomfortable reality: little sil-

ver discs — for reasons of convenience,

price and consumer burnout — may

never recover their sales power. To

grow, studios need to figure out digital

distribution.

Disney announced recently that it

had developed a system to track digi-

tal ownership, so people won’t have to

buy the same movie or television show

multiple times for different devices.

But that’s just the latest, most likely

not the last, approach.

“I expect these guys to try many dif-

ferent ways to figure out an endgame

to digital entertainment,” said Doug

Creutz, a media analyst at Cowen and

Company, which offers investment

banking services.

“In the meantime, you will find a lot

of false starts.”

Everyone is trying to solve one prob-

lem: consumers, the industry believes,

will be reluctant to open their wallets

for digital movies and TV shows un-

til they get more portability and can

watch the same content on several de-

vices. Studios want to make consum-

ers collect digital entertainment the

way they would DVDs or books.

In the third quarter, studios’ home

entertainment divisions generated

about $4 billion, down 3.2 percent from

a year ago, according to the Digital

Entertainment Group, a trade consor-

tium. But digital distribution contrib-

uted just $420 million, an increase of

18 percent.

Standing in the way are technology

hurdles — how to let consumers play

a video on various devices without

letting them share it with 10,000 close

friends on a pirate site — and the re-

luctance of studios to cooperate too

closely with rivals

for reasons of anti-

trust scrutiny and

sheer competitive-

ness.

The Walt Disney

Company in the

coming weeks will

introduce its new

system for track-

ing digital owner-

ship, which it calls

Keychest.

It would allow

consumers to buy permanent access

to digital entertainment — a specific

film, for instance — that then could be

watched on computers, cellphones and

cable on-demand services. Analysts

speculate that Apple will be a partner.

A consortium of movie studios (ba-

sically everyone but Disney) have

joined with companies like Comcast

and Intel to pursue a different strat-

egy. Their initiative, called the Digital

Entertainment Content Ecosystem, or

DECE, involves coming up with a com-

mon set of standards and formats.

Other ideas are floating out there,

too. Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief ex-

ecutive of Time Warner, is promoting

something called TV Everywhere, to

offer consumers a vast array of televi-

sion online and on devices — provided

they are paying cable-TV customers.

Add in digital entertainment competi-

tion from companies like Apple, Ama-

zon and Netflix.

As always, the pressure to be first is

considerable. “The last thing studios

want is a third party coming up with

a solution, because that party would

take a big chunk of the revenue with

them,” said Mr. Creutz, the media ana-

lyst.

In a Reinvention, Microsoft Is Looking Beyond the PC

ED ZURGA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Places like the BATS Exchange in

Lenexa, Kansas, have their own

high-speed trading floor.

Brad Stone contributed reporting from San Francisco.

After denial andanger, Hollywoodmoves on to exploreits digital options.

New York Stock ExchangeShrinks as Rivals Move In

By ASHLEE VANCE

REDMOND, Washington — Ray

Ozzie, the chief software architect at

Microsoft, bristles when asked wheth-

er people think that new versions of his

company’s flagship software — like

Windows and Office — are exciting.

“It’s tremendously exciting,” he

exclaims defensively. “Are you kid-

ding?”

Normally subdued and cerebral,

Mr. Ozzie inhabits a spacious office at

Microsoft’s headquarters here. His

shelves and desks are uncluttered,

and one of the first I.B.M. personal

computers ever made sits atop a squat

bookcase.

If only the world — or at least the

business world — were so immaculate

and neatly organized. But Mr. Ozzie

and his colleagues at Microsoft rec-

ognize, of course, that very little in the

technology universe ever stays the

same.

“What’s the old movie line from

‘Annie Hall’? Relationships are like

sharks; they move forward, or they

die,” says Steven A. Ballmer, Micro-

soft’s chief executive, referring to the

Woody Allen movie. “Well, technol-

ogy companies either move forward,

too, or they die. They become less rel-

evant.”

And according to Mr. Ozzie, we have

entered an age that’s a far cry from

that of the PC enshrined on his altar to

beige-box antiquity. Consumers and

workers have been gripped, he says,

by a “gizmo revolution.”

But gizmos are only half the battle

for Microsoft. True, fashionistas ob-

sess over whether a new laptop will

fit into their purses. Corporate execu-

tives exude pride as they whip ultra-

thin computers with exotic finishes out

of their satchels. Yet the most desir-

able devices these days are those that

also allow information addicts on the

move to untether themselves from the

desktop PC and communicate through

the so-called “cloud.”

With the recent arrival of Windows

7 and a host of complementary, slick

computers, Microsoft intends to un-

dermine those Apple ads that mock

PCs and their users as stumbling

bores.

In a play for its piece of the cloud,

Microsoft plans to release a software

platform, Windows Azure, this month

that represents its bid to lure busi-

nesses with online services. While

late to cloud computing in spots and

a lackluster participant in the mobile

market, Microsoft, Mr. Ozzie says, has

a shot at reinventing itself and moving

beyond the desktop.

“This gives us an opportunity as a

software vendor to refresh our value

proposition,” he says. “I just think it’s

an exciting time for Microsoft.”

These days, Microsoft has legions of

doubters. Brand experts say consum-

ers stumble when trying to define what

the company stands for and whether

it can create a grander technological

future.

Critics of Microsoft say it has hugely

underestimated market changes and

plotted a long and winding course

toward irrelevance. It remains too

fixated on its old-line, desktop-based

franchises, they say.

“They are trapped in their own psy-

chosis that the world has to revolve

around Windows on the PC,” says

Marc Benioff, the C.E.O. of Salesforce.

com, which competes against Micro-

soft in the business software market.

“Until they stop doing that, they will

drag their company into the gutter.”

While Mr. Ozzie welcomes the gizmo

revolution, much of what it appears

to entail runs counter to Microsoft’s

historical strengths. The revolution

stretches well beyond a fascination

MIGUEL VILLAGRAN/GETTY IMAGES

Steven A. Ballmer says Microsoft

is investing broadly.

Studios Seek LifeAfter the Fall

Of DVDs

with the aesthetic appeal of a comput-

ing device; it also marks a transition

in which the consumer, not the office

worker, is the dominant force shaping

the tech landscape.

Mr. Ballmer contends that Micro-

soft is the only company prepared and

positioned to merge computing from

both ends — the desktop and the cloud.

“We’re just investing more broadly

than everybody else,” he says

Repubblica NewYork

S C I E N C E & T E C H N O L O GY

VI MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2009

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

A new examination of skulls from

the royal cemetery at Ur, discovered

in Iraq almost a century ago, appears

to support a more grisly interpreta-

tion than before of human sacrifices

associated with elite burials in an-

cient Mesopotamia, archaeologists

say.

Palace attendants, as part of royal

mortuary ritual, were not dosed with

poison to meet a rather serene death.

Instead, a sharp instrument, a pike

perhaps, was driven into their heads.

Archaeologists at the University

of Pennsylvania reached that con-

clusion after conducting the first

CT scans of two skulls from the

4,500-year-old cemetery.

The cemetery, with 16 tombs grand

in construction and rich in gold and

jewels, was discovered in the 1920s.

A sensation in 20th century archae-

ology, it revealed the splendor at the

height of the Mesopotamian civiliza-

tion.

The recovery of about 2,000 buri-

als attested to the practice of human

sacrifice on a large scale. At or even

before the demise of a king or queen,

members of the court — handmaid-

ens, warriors and others — were put

to death.

Their bodies were usually arranged

neatly, the women in elaborate head-

dress, the warriors with weapons at

their side.

C. Leonard Woolley, the English ar-

chaeologist who led the excavations,

a collaboration between Penn and

the British Museum, decided that the

attendants had been marched into

burial chambers, where they drank

poison and lay down to die. That be-

came the conventional story.

Among the many human remains,

only a few skulls were preserved, and

those had been smashed into frag-

ments — not in death but from the

burden of earth accumulating over

the centuries to crush skulls flat as

pancakes. That had frustrated earlier

efforts to reconstruct the skulls.

In planning for a new exhibition of

Ur artifacts, which recently opened at

Penn’s Museum of Archaeology and

Anthropology, Richard L. Zettler, the

co-curator and a specialist in Meso-

potamian archaeol-

ogy, said researchers

had taken CT scans of

skull bones of a wom-

an and a man. From

those they obtained

three-dimensional

images of each frag-

ment and so deter-

mined where the

pieces fit.

The researchers,

led by Janet M. Mon-

ge, a physical anthro-

pologist at Penn, ap-

plied forensic skills to

arrive at the probable

cause of death in both

cases.

There were two

round holes in the sol-

dier’s cranium and

one in the woman’s,

each about 2.5 centi-

meters in diameter.

But the most convincing evidence,

Dr. Monge said in an interview, were

cracks radiating from the holes. Only

if the holes were made in a living per-

son would they have produced such

a pattern of fractures along stress

lines. The more brittle bones of a

person long dead would shatter like

glass, she explained.

Dr. Monge surmised that the holes

were made by a sharp instrument and

that death “by blunt-force trauma

was almost immediate.”

Ritual killing associated with a

royal death was practiced by other

ancient cultures, archaeologists say,

and raises a question: Why would

anyone, knowing their probable fate,

choose a life as a court attendant?

“It’s almost like mass murder and

hard for us to understand,” Dr. Mon-

ge said. “But in the culture these were

positions of great honor, and you lived

well in the court, so it was a trade-off.

Besides, the movement into the next

world was not for them necessarily

something to fear.”

On a brighter note, Dr. Zettler said

the site of the ancient city-state Ur,

near present-day Nasiriyah in Iraq,

has been spared in the recent war-

fare that brought damage and looting

to other ancient digs.

Ur is protected within the perime-

ter of an air base, which was recently

handed back to the Iraqis.

By JOHN MARKOFF

Despite a six-year effort to build

trusted computer chips for military

systems, the United States Defense

Department now manufactures in

secure facilities run by American

companies only about 2 percent of the

more than $3.5 billion of integrated

circuits bought annually for use in

military gear.

That shortfall is viewed with con-

cern by current and former United

States military and intelligence

agency executives who argue that

the menace of so-called Trojan hors-

es hidden in equipment circuitry is

among the most severe threats the

nation faces in the event of a war in

which communications and weapon-

ry rely on computer technology.

As advanced systems like aircraft,

missiles and radars have become de-

pendent on their computing capabili-

ties, the specter of subversion caus-

ing weapons to fail in times of crisis,

or secretly corrupting crucial data,

has come to haunt military planners.

The problem has grown more severe

as most American semiconductor

manufacturing plants have moved

offshore.

Only one-fifth of all computer chips

are now made in the United States,

and just one-quarter of the chips

based on the most advanced tech-

nologies are built here, I.B.M. execu-

tives say. That has led the Pentagon

and the National Security Agency

to expand significantly the number

of American plants authorized to

manufacture chips for the Pentagon’s

Trusted Foundry program.

Despite the increases, semiconduc-

tor industry executives and Pentagon

officials say, the United States lacks

the capacity requirements needed to

manufacture computer chips for clas-

sified systems.

“The department is aware that

there are risks to using commercial

technology in general and that there

are greater risks to using globally

sourced technology,” said Robert

Lentz, who before his retirement

in September was in charge of the

Trusted Foundry program as the

deputy assistant defense secretary

for cyber, identity and information

assurance.

Counterfeit computer hardware,

largely manufactured in Asian facto-

ries, is viewed as a significant prob-

lem by private corporations and mili-

tary planners. A recent White House

review noted that there had been sev-

eral “unambiguous, deliberate sub-

versions” of computer hardware.

“These are not hypothetical

threats,” the report’s author, Melissa

Hathaway, said in an e-mail message.

“We have witnessed countless intru-

sions that have allowed criminals to

steal hundreds of millions of dollars

and allowed nation-states and others

to steal intellectual property and sen-

sitive military information.”

Cyberwarfare analysts argue that

while most computer security efforts

have until now been focused on soft-

ware, tampering with hardware cir-

cuitry may ultimately be an equally

dangerous threat. That is because

modern computer chips routinely

comprise hundreds of millions, or

even billions, of transistors. The in-

creasing complexity means that sub-

tle modifications in manufacturing or

in the design of chips will be virtually

impossible to detect.

In the future, and possibly already

hidden in existing weapons, clandes-

tine additions to electronic circuitry

could open secret back doors that

would let the makers in when the us-

ers were depending on the technol-

ogy to function. Hidden kill switches

could be included to make it possible

to disable computer-controlled mili-

tary equipment from a distance. Such

switches could be used by an adver-

sary or as a safeguard if the technol-

ogy fell into enemy hands.

A Trojan horse kill switch may

already have been used. A 2007 Is-

raeli Air Force attack on a suspected

partly constructed Syrian nuclear

reactor led to speculation about why

the Syrian air defense system did not

respond to the Israeli aircraft.

Accounts of the event initially in-

dicated that sophisticated jamming

technology was used to blind the

radars. Last December, however,

a report in an American technical

publication, IEEE Spectrum, cited a

European industry source in raising

the possibility that the Israelis might

have used a built-in kill switch to shut

down the radars.

Separately, an American semicon-

ductor industry executive said in an

interview that he had direct knowl-

edge of the operation and that the

technology for disabling the radars

was supplied by Americans to the Is-

raeli electronic intelligence agency,

Unit 8200.

The disabling technology was giv-

en informally but with the knowledge

of the American government, said the

executive, who spoke on the condition

of anonymity. His claim could not be

independently verified.

In 2005, the Defense Science Advi-

sory Board issued a report warning

of the risks of foreign-made comput-

er chips.

“The more we looked at this prob-

lem the more concerned we were,”

said Linton Wells II, formerly the

principal deputy assistant defense

secretary for networks and informa-

tion integration. “Frankly, we have

no systematic process for addressing

these problems.”

Ancient Ritual Deaths Were Anything but Serene

HARRY CAMPBELL

If you’ve ever had a problem with

rodents and woken up to find that

mice had chewed their way through

the food boxes in your kitchen, you

will appreciate just how freakish is

the strain of labora-

tory mouse that lacks

all motivation to eat.

The mouse is physi-

cally capable of eating.

It still likes the taste of

food. It will chew and

swallow, all the while wriggling its

nose in apparent rodent satisfaction.

Yet left on its own, the mouse will

not rouse itself for dinner. The mere

thought of walking across the cage

and lifting food pellets from the bowl

fills it with overwhelming apathy

and within a couple of weeks, it has

starved itself to death.

Behind the rodent’s ennui is a se-

vere deficit of dopamine, one of the

essential signaling molecules in the

brain. Dopamine has lately become

quite fashionable, today’s “it” neu-

rotransmitter, just as serotonin was

“it” in the Prozac-laced ’90s.

People talk of getting their “dop-

amine rush” from chocolate, music,

the stock market, the BlackBerry

buzz on the thigh — anything that

imparts a small, pleasurable thrill.

Familiar agents of vice like cocaine,

methamphetamine, alcohol and

nicotine are known to stimulate the

brain’s dopamine circuits.

In the communal imagination,

dopamine is about feeling good, and

wanting to feel good again, and if you

don’t watch out, you’ll be hooked, a

slave to the pleasure lines cruising

through your brain.

Yet as new research on dopamine-

deficient mice and other studies re-

veal, the image of dopamine as our lit-

tle Bacchus in the brain is misleading,

just as was the previous caricature of

serotonin as a neural happy face.

In the emerging view, discussed

in part at the Society for Neurosci-

ence meeting recently in Chicago,

dopamine is less about pleasure and

reward than about drive and motiva-

tion, about figuring out what you have

to do to survive and then doing it.

“When you can’t breathe, and you’re

gasping for air, would you call that

pleasurable?” said Nora D. Volkow, a

dopamine researcher and director of

the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

“Or when you’re so hungry that you

eat something disgusting, is that

pleasurable?”

In both responses, Dr. Volkow said,

the gasping for oxygen and the eating

of something you would ordinarily

spurn, the dopamine pathways of the

brain are at full throttle.

In addition, our dopamine-driven

salience detector will focus on fa-

miliar objects that we have imbued

with high value, both positive and

negative: objects we want and objects

we fear. If we love chocolate, our

dopamine neurons will most likely

start to fire at the sight of a pert little

chocolate bean. But if we fear cock-

roaches, those same neurons may fire

even harder when we notice that the

“bean” has six legs.

The pleasurable taste of chocolate

per se, however, or the anxiety of

cockroach phobia, may well be the

handiwork of other signaling mole-

cules, like opiates or stress hormones.

Dopamine simply makes a relevant

object almost impossible to ignore.

SERGE BLOCH

ESSAY

NATALIE

ANGIER

Molecule

Of Motivation

Excels at Task

Sabotage triggers could be hiddenin weapon circuitry.

Old Trick Threatens New Arms

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

At Ur, women were buried with adornments

after being put to death by a blow to the head.

Repubblica NewYork

Is there any human invention

more duplicitous than the personal

computer? These machines were

manufactured and initially marketed

as devices to help us at work. We were

told they would per-

form amazing feats

— adding up rows of

numbers effortlessly,

turning our musings

into beautiful mag-

azine-quality docu-

ments, and letting us collaborate with

one another across continents.

Boy, that turned out well, didn’t it?

Sure, you could use your PC to analyze

stats for the annual sales report. But

look at this — someone

wants to be your friend on

Facebook! And wait a sec-

ond: A zany couple decided

to start off their wedding

by dancing down the aisle,

and they posted the video

on YouTube. And did you

hear what that ignorant

congressman just said

about health care? Now

you’ve got no choice but to

spend the next five minutes

crafting an impassioned comment to

express your outrage.

And so it goes: You get to your PC

every morning with hours of produc-

tive time ahead of you. Next thing

you know, it’s 5 p.m. and you’ve spent

most of the day on news blogs, watch-

ing old TV shows and your fantasy

sports league.

Recently, I’ve been using a variety

of programs to tame these digital

distractions. They fall into three cat-

egories. The most innocuous monitor

my online habits in an effort to shame

me into working more productively.

Others reduce visual distractions on

my desktop to keep me focused.

And then there are those that let

me actively block various parts of the

Internet .

The first category is epitomized

by a program called RescueTime,

which keeps track of everything that

happens on your computer, and then

reports your habits in charts and

graphs. I found its analysis tremen-

dously illuminating.

I learned, for instance, that in a typ-

ical month I spend more than 70 hours

surfing the Web, much of it on news

and social-networking sites. By com-

parison, I spend only about half as

much time in Microsoft Word, which,

as a writer, is where I do my work.

For stronger medicine, there’s

LeechBlock, a free add-on for the

Firefox browser that works like a

stern nanny: You tell it

which Web sites to keep

you away from, and at the

appointed hour, it stops

you. Try to go to Face-

book and you get a warn-

ing to go back to work.

But LeechBlock suf-

fers a crucial limitation:

if you want to get around

it, all you have to do is

load up another browser.

One Mac application that

has found a way to solve this problem

is called Freedom, which blocks all

of your computer’s networking func-

tions for a predetermined number of

minutes. In other words, once you set

it, you’ve got no Web, no instant mes-

saging, no e-mail — and the only way

to undo Freedom’s block is to restart

your machine.

I wish I could say these digital

nannies revolutionized the way I

work. They didn’t, really. But I did

notice that net-blocking software got

me to at least consider all the ways

that I was wasting my time. When

LeechBlock threw a roadblock in my

path, it gave me pause; when I went

around it, I was at least conscious that

it wasn’t the right thing to do. Some-

times a little shame is all you need.

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA

At high schools and colleges across

the United States, students are hard

at work, tilling their land and har-

vesting their vegetables.

“It is clear this obsession with

FarmVille is an issue, especially since

it is taking away time from studying

and schoolwork,” Danielle Susi wrote

recently in The Quad News, a student

newspaper at Quinnipiac University

in Hamden, Connecticut.

Adults, too, are blaming their prob-

lems on FarmVille, an online game

in which people must tend their vir-

tual farms . On blogs like FarmVille

Freak, people share tips on fertilizer

and complain about, for example, a

spouse’s addiction. An anonymous

blogger who said she was pregnant

wrote: “I was starving ... and he

told me I’d have to wait a few more

minutes so he could HARVEST HIS

RASPBERRIES! ”

FarmVille has quickly become the

most popular application in the his-

tory of Facebook. More than 62 mil-

lion people have signed up to play the

game since its debut in June, and 22

million log on at least once a day, ac-

cording to Zynga, the company that

brought FarmVille into the world.

Devotion to FarmVille has moved

beyond Facebook. Players gather

online to share homemade spread-

sheets showing which crops will pro-

vide the greatest return on invest-

ment. YouTube is rife with musical

odes to the game. There is a “Farm-

Ville Art” movement, in which people

arrange crops to resemble familiar

images like the Mona Lisa. And many

a promising dinner date has been cut

short to harvest squash.

“I can’t hang out with any of my

friends without talk of apple fields

and rice paddies,” said Taylor Lee

Sivils, a student at the University of

California, Riverside, in an e-mail

message. “I have to wait for my

friends’ soybeans to grow, because

we can’t chill until they’ve been har-

vested. All I want is to be able to go

back to talking about anything tan-

gible, but FarmVille overcomes.”

The game starts off simply: You

are given land and seeds that can be

planted, harvested and sold for on-

line coins. As you accrue currency,

you can buy things, from basics like

rice and pumpkin seeds to the truly

superfluous, like elephants and hot-

air balloons.

But like The Sims and Tamagotchi

pets, FarmVille soon becomes less of

a game than a Sisyphean baby-sitting

assignment. Crops must be harvest-

ed in a timely fashion, cows must be

milked, and social obligations — like

exchanging gifts and fertilizing your

neighbor’s pumpkins — must be met.

Jil Wrinkle, a 40-year-old medical

transcriber in the Philippines, sets

his alarm every night for 1:30 a.m.,

when he wakes up, rolls over and har-

vests his blueberries. “I keep my lap-

top next to my bed,” he said by phone.

“The first thing I do when I wake up

in the morning is harvest, then I har-

vest again at 10 in the morning, then

again in midafternoon, then in the

evening, and then again right before

going to bed.”

MyFarm and FarmTown, which

are made by different companies,

also have huge followings.

“The whole concept of ‘I’m sick of

this modern, urban lifestyle, I wish

I could just grow plants and vegeta-

bles and watch them grow,’ there is

something very therapeutic about

that,” said Philip Tan, director of the

Singapore-M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab,

a joint venture between the Mas-

sachusetts Institute of Technology

and the government of Singapore to

develop digital games.

Of course, real-life farming is quite

a bit messier and more dangerous

than FarmVille. Some of the game’s

biggest fans are farmers.

“I was having all these deaths on

the farm and hurting myself on a

daily basis doing real farming,” said

Donna Schoonover of Skagit County,

Washington, who raises sheep, goats

and Satin Angora rabbits. “This was

a way to remind myself of the mythol-

ogy of farming, and why I started

farming in the first place.”

By RUTH LA FERLA

Some people are hard-pressed to

make the rent, much less spend on a

pagoda shoulder jacket from Balmain.

But Vixie Rayna seems not to be feel-

ing the pinch. Not a month goes by in

which she isn’t spending as much as

$50,000 on housing, furniture or her

special weakness: multistrap plat-

form sandals, decorated with feathers

and beads.

Recession or no, Ms. Rayna isn’t

reining in her fantasies, or her expen-

ditures — at least not in the virtual

world. In a simulated universe like

There.com, IMVU.com or Second Life.

com, Ms. Rayna, an avatar on Second

Life, can sip Champagne, teleport to

private islands and splurge on luxury

brands that are the cyber equivalent of

Prada waders or a Rolex watch. Real-

world consumers may have snapped

shut their wallets. But in these lav-

ishly appointed realms it is still 2007,

and conspicuous consumption is all

the rage.

“Throughout the recession we ac-

tually saw an increase in spending,”

said Mike Wilson, the chief executive

of There.com, an avatar-based social

arena. That’s because the wares are

relatively inexpensive.

In most virtual worlds, member-

ships are free, but players trade real

money for virtual currencies, used to

buy products, save up in an account

or eventually redeem for real money.

About 70,000 Therebucks on There.

com, or 10,000 Lindens in Second Life,

each about $40, can buy a choice of

simulated wares, from several pairs

of thigh-high boots to a plot of land.

What’s more, as Mr. Wilson pointed

out: “Everything fits; things don’t

wear out. The virtual world represents

a different value proposition.”

In their day-to-day lives, shoppers

like Mandy Cocke, Vixie Rayna’s real-

life alter ego, have sharply trimmed

their spending. When times were

good, Ms. Cocke, a nurse in Virginia,

No Budget,No Boundaries:It’s the Real You

LINDEN RESEARCH

FARHAD

MANJOO

ESSAY

A Facebook gameplayed by 22 million people a day.

On the Virtual Farm, WorkIs Never Done

Taming Your

Digital Distractions

SHARRON SCHUMAN

Fashion sales are booming

in the virtual world, home

to shows like one hosted by

Angie Mornington, above. Even

audience members, left, can

afford high-end boutiques.

Players log on daily to manage crops and livestock for digital farms.

FRANK CHIMERO

spent as much as $1,000 a month on

designer shoes and clothing. Lately,

though, “pretty much every possible

expense makes me ask, ‘Do I really

need this?’ ” she said.

But online, their acquisitive lust

rages unabated, fueling a robust

economy driven mostly by avatar-

to-avatar transactions estimated

at between $1 billion and $2 billion a

year in real dollars. Second Life, the

most successful and most familiar

of such sites, does not disclose retail

revenues. But it reported a 94 percent

surge in its overall economy in this

year’s second quarter over the same

period a year ago.

While industry analysts say per cap-

ita expenditures on virtual goods have

remained roughly the same through-

out the recession, aggregate spending

has spiked as more and more users

discover these 3-D animated realms.

A proliferation of new sites and games

have piqued a new wave of interest in

virtual worlds.

“A year or two ago virtual goods

were a quirky little corner of the online

world,” said Dan Jansen, a partner in

Virtual Greats, which sells simulated

representations of branded fashions

like Rocawear in the online commu-

nity. “Now it’s mainstream.”

Jonty Glaser, a partner in Stiletto

Moody, a Second Life shoe brand, de-

clined to provide figures, but said sales

had “definitely grown since the reces-

sion began.” Mr. Glaser noted that “as

fewer people travel or spend on enter-

tainment, we have seen them focus on-

line and accelerate purchases.”

Style-struck cybervixens can shop

at virtual stores on Xstreet, Second

Life’s e-commerce platform, check out

fashion blogs or grab a front-row seat at

online runway shows. There is even a

weekly talk program, “Fabulous Fash-

ion With Angie Mornington,” broadcast

on Treet TV, Second Life’s television

network, which draws nearly 15,000

viewers an episode, said Ludele Tomp-

kins, Ms. Mornington’s creator.

Building an identity on networks

like Second Life is “kind of like when

people in the last recession used to

watch ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Fa-

mous’ on television,” said Eric Span-

genberg, a consumer psychologist

and the dean of the business school

at Washington State University. “It’s

the newest manifestation of how peo-

ple live vicariously: if I can’t afford a

Bentley, my avatar can.”

Small wonder that virtual worlds

seem to be breeding a generation of

high rollers, who, for fees that rarely

exceed the cost of a few movie rentals,

can acquire an online persona that is

unassailably chic.

Certainly her real-world occupation

as a nurse affords Ms. Cocke scant

opportunity “to rock my new leather

Gucci messenger bag or Jimmy Choo

sandals,” she said. In contrast, “Vix-

ie’s style is a better representation of

my true self,” she said, “as it’s hard to

be fashionable in hospital scrubs.”

L I V I N G : O N L I N E

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2009 VII

Repubblica NewYork

A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2009

By MARK HARRIS

“I really am fascinated by actresses,

by everything they do,” said the writ-

er-director Pedro Almodóvar, “even

by the dressing room, which is the

sanctum sanctorum of any actress.

And I am especially fascinated by ac-

tresses who play actresss.”

Which is precisely what Penélope

Cruz does in “Broken Embraces,” Mr.

Almodóvar’s fourth collaboration with

her — and, she said, her most difficult.

She plays Lena, a rich man’s kept

woman, who has the chance to fulfill,

however briefly, her long-deferred

dream of being a movie star when she

becomes romantically involved with a

director (Lluís Homar).

Lena, a heartbreaking figure whose

own identity is so unformed that she is

only too eager to become someone else

(early in the movie she is costumed

and styled as Audrey Hepburn), is

“maybe the saddest character I ever

wrote,” Mr. Almodóvar said in an in-

terview in New York, seated across

from Ms. Cruz.

“She has a past she doesn’t like at

all, so when she finds she can imper-

sonate someone, it’s like having a new

life. She is hard — a fallen angel. And

that is the biggest challenge I have

given Penélope so far.”

Mr. Almodóvar’s films with Ms.

Cruz have often found the sweet spot

where the trappings of melodrama

eventually fall away to reveal deeper

and more complicated emotions.

They’ve also offered Ms. Cruz some of

her richest opportunities.

In the 1997 thriller “Live Flesh,”

she plays an impoverished prostitute

By MELENA RYZIK

Julian Casablancas, savior of

debauched New York City rock

’n’ roll, is sober now and living

in Los Angeles. The shaggy-

haired frontman of the Strokes,

who not so long ago could be

seen stumbling home from

Manhattan bars around dawn,

is currently renting a white

Spanish-style house. He likes

the sunshine. He is smitten.

“It’s fun; I won’t lie,” he said

on a visit back to New York.

“L.A.’s kind of, like, seven real-

ly cool towns. It’s so laid-back.

If you go in the right spot, you

can walk around, and you don’t

need a car. It’s a lot easier to eat

healthy. And the weather!”

The move is temporary —

probably — but it’s emblematic

of the changes in his life in the

last few years: from wild-living

rock star to steady artist and

mindful family man, with he

and his wife, Juliet, expecting

their first child. This month, his

first solo album, “Phrazes for

the Young,” will be released on

Cult Records/RCA. Cult is his

own, newly started and self-

financed imprint. He wrote

and arranged all the music and

played much of it himself. In

Los Angeles he’s been getting

a band together and working

hard to prepare for a tour.

Far from the disaffection of

the Strokes’ records, “Phraz-

es” seems well adjusted. “I’m

a happy guy,” he said.

Still, he added: “I never

wanted to do a solo record, to

be honest. I just felt like I had

no choice.”

When the Strokes released

their debut album, “Is This

It,” in 2001, they were hailed

as an urban gathering point,

common-man anthems from

the indie set.

This cultural weight was

a heavy burden for five wan

guys who went to private

school in New York. About half

their intended audience criti-

cized them heavily for lacking

authenticity. The group re-

sponded in appropriately blasé

fashion: with drunken nights,

celebrity trysts and fights, be-

having like the baby rock stars

they were. Asked to describe

their early days, the Strokes’

manager, Ryan Gentles, said

the success “happened fast.”

“Is This It” went platinum,

but their next albums — “Room

on Fire” (2003) and “First Im-

pressions of Earth” (2006) —

were less well received, each

selling around half as much as

the preceding record. And the

group tussled over creative

control; it was all with Mr.

Casablancas. Though he was

married — his wife had been

the group’s assistant manager

— and had given up drinking

by “First Impressions,” the

burnout was evident. “I’ve

got nothing to say,” he sang on

“Ask Me Anything.” “I’ve got

nothing to give.”

As he struggled, his band-

mates worked on solo projects

and formed side groups; sev-

eral also married or started

families.

After the Strokes returned

from a Japanese tour for “First

Impressions,” they announced

a break, and Mr. Casablancas

retreated. “I was kind of like

broken for like six months,” he

said. “I just literally, today, for

the first time, don’t feel hung

over.”

Despite a privileged up-

bringing — his father, John

Casablancas, is the founder of

Elite Model Management; his

mother, Jeanette Christiansen,

was a model; and he was also

raised and heavily influenced

by his stepfather, the artist

Sam Adoquei — Mr. Casablan-

cas is charmingly self-effacing .

But he is also a workaholic and

a perfectionist. He is hoping

that having all that solo con-

trol will allow him to ease up

with his band. “The thing is,

with the Strokes stuff, I used to

do every detail, and now I just

want everyone to get along and

be happy,” he said. “With this

I can do every detail without

having to argue — not argue,

but you know what I mean.

Compromise.”

Cruz and AlmódovarAre Cinematic Soul Mates

Strokes Singer Steps Into the Sunshine

TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

RAHAV SEGEV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

From left, Nikolai Fraiture,

Nick Valensi and Julian

Casablancas of the Strokes.

Penélope Cruz and the director Pedro Almodóvar have made four

films together in 12 years. Their latest is ‘‘Broken Embraces.’’

in 1970 Madrid who gives birth on a

city bus. Two years later, when he was

casting “All About My Mother,” which

would win the Oscar for best foreign-

language film, Mr. Almodóvar called

upon her again, this time to play a nun.

Even as she falls into an affair with a

transvestite and becomes H.I.V.-posi-

tive, she remains the film’s sweet-

est, purest presence.

And in the 2006 drama “Volver,”

she earned her first Academy

Award nomination for playing a

determined widow, an amalgam

of women from Mr. Almodóvar’s

childhood in La Mancha, with a

little Sophia Loren thrown in.

“Someone asked me, ‘Is she

a muse for you?’ ” said Mr. Al-

modóvar. “Well, yes. She is a muse

for me in the sense that a muse is

someone who makes you better

than you are.”

“No, no,” Ms. Cruz said, shaking

her head and smiling calmly. “I

know exactly how good you are.”

The chemistry Mr. Almodóvar, 60,

and Ms. Cruz, 35, share would almost

seem romantic if he were not one of

the world’s best-known openly gay

directors and she were not linked in

the tabloids to the actor Javier Bar-

dem. Their easy, affectionate rapport

has developed over half of Ms. Cruz’s

life — she was 17 the first time she met

the director, who rejected her for the

role of a 35-year-old woman in his 1993

comedy “Kika” but told her he’d call

her in a few years.

And while she wants to try direct-

ing eventually — “Maybe in 10 years,”

she suggested; “Earlier, I think,” he

answered — she said she would do so

only with his blessing. “You have it!”

he told her.

If “Broken Embraces” didn’t strain

their bond, it was still taxing. “This

was the movie where I cried the most

between takes,” Ms. Cruz said.

Mr. Almodóvar took pleasure even

on the hardest days of shooting. “All

the difficulties actresses have at the

moment they are acting really interest

me,” he said. “At that time, the direc-

tor is like the husband, the lover, the

friend, the mother, the father, the psy-

chiatrist. But there’s also a point when

the director has to be terribly cruel.”

Repubblica NewYork