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Slide 3: Table of Contents: March 22, 2010 IN THIS ISSUE EDITION: U.S. Vol. 175 No. 11 COVER 10 Ideas for the Next 10 years (10 Ideas) A thinker's guide to the most important trends of the new decade 1 The Next American Century (The Well / COVER) Don't believe the prophets of doom 2 Remapping the World (The Well / 10 Ideas) Good borders make good neighbors. Bad ones make wars 3 Bandwidth Is the New Black Gold (10 Ideas) And it's a scarce resource 4 The Dropout Economy (10 Ideas) The future of work looks a lot like unemployment 5 China and the U.S.: The Indispensable Axis (The Well / 10 Ideas) Their frenemy-ship will shape the decade 6 In Defense Of Failure (10 Ideas) Making mistakes is a great American freedom 7 The White Anxiety Crisis (10 Ideas) America is getting a new minority 8 TV Will Save the World (10 Ideas) In a lot of places, it's the next big thing Popular TV Shows Overseas A gallery of what they're watching overseas 9 The Twilight of the Elites (The Well / 10 Ideas) Why we have entered the post-trust era 10 The Boring Age (10 Ideas) The times, they aren't a-changin' TO OUR READERS Looking Around Corners With our annual 10 Ideas issue, we want to help you navigate the new reality and be prepared for the next decade
Slide 4: ESSAY Twitter and TV: How Social Media Is Helping Old Media (Commentary / Tuned In) A new medium gives an old one a lift, as TV fans gather around the Twittercooler Karl Rove's Memoir: Act of Vengeance (Commentary / In the Arena) In his tale of the Bush years, Karl Rove disses his critics and defends the boss. No news there How Millennials Perceive a New Generation Gap Millennials respect their elders, so why do they say the generation gap is wider than ever? NATION Arlen In the Middle (The Well / Nation) In 2009, Specter defected across party lines to survive. In 2010, he's pinned down in the partisan cross fire Scenes from the Pennsylvania Senate Race Incumbent Arlen Specter faces challenges from both a Republican and a Democrat Was the Navy's Female Captain Bligh a Victim of Sexism? (The Well / Nation) The first woman to command a Navy cruiser rose fast through the ranks--until reports of her abusive command style caught up with her. The inside story of Captain Holly Graf's stunning fall WORLD Postcard from Brooklyn A polluted canal seemed poised for renewal until a federal decision deferred the dream. On the banks of the toxic Gowanus Afghan Opium: To Crack Down — or Not? (The Well / World) Driving the Taliban out of Marjah was the easy part. To keep them out, U.S. and Afghan officials must wean the region from its drug dependency ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Whitney Biennial: Stars of the Arts (Exhibitions) Three artists to watch at the Whitney Biennial Green Zone: Bourne Takes Baghdad (Movies) Matt Damon trades amnesiac assassin for truth-seeking GI in this gritty, thrilling war fantasy What Ails Us (Books) In her new novel, Lionel Shriver makes the health care system her villain Winners (and Losers) Return to the Oscars Short List TIME'S PICKS FOR THE WEEK
Slide 5: SOCIETY Working for the Web's Big Content Machine (Life / Web Watch) Has the Hamburger Gone Stagnant? (Life / Food) At this year's Burger Bash and beyond, the best sandwich ever built hits a wall SPECIAL SECTION Icebreaker Is A Natural (Global Business / Strategy) It sells technical sportswear made of wool and connects shearer to wearer in sustainability Reconnecting (Global Business / Front and Center) Alcatel-Lucent has struggled for years. Its CEO looks to a future filled with mobile data to switch on the profits Big Ideas for Small Business (Global Business / Small Business) Credit is tight and customers scarce: it takes a little magic to maintain momentum Deere's Harvest (Global Business / American Re: Reinventing and Retooling The U.S. Economy) The tractor maker stayed flexible — and profitable — in the teeth of the downturn PEOPLE 10 Questions for Desmond Tutu (10 Questions) The South African Archbishop's new book makes the case for goodness. Desmond Tutu will now take your questions LETTERS Inbox (Inbox) NOTEBOOK The Moment (Briefing) 3|7|10: Baghdad The World (Briefing) 10 ESSENTIAL STORIES Should People Have Guns at Starbucks? (Briefing) Verbatim (Briefing) Brief History: Bracketology (Briefing) The Skimmer (Briefing) Book Review: The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar
Slide 6: Michael Foot (Briefing / Milestones) Carl Pope (Briefing / Milestones) Bruce Graham (Briefing / Milestones)
Slide 7: COVER 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES VICTORE FOR TIME 1 The Next American Century By ANDRES MARTINEZ Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN RITTER FOR TIME In 1941, prior to the U.S.'s entry into World War II, the co-founder of this magazine, Henry Luce, penned an essay in LIFE that exhorted "unhappy" Americans, "[distracted] with lifeless arguments about
Slide 8: isolationism," to "create the first great American century" — the first, mind you, not the last. We are now entering the second decade of what will be an even more markedly American century; in fact, the Americanization of the world will characterize the foreseeable future far more than the past. It's true that Brand America took a hit this decade. The global superpower botched an election at home and an occupation overseas. Its vaunted financial markets were roiled by sketchy accounting early in the decade, then triggered a global economic crisis later on, thanks to Wall Street's leveraged gamble that it had conquered risk once and for all. All these missteps dented the U.S.'s credibility but were also a reminder that, fairly or not, the U.S. retains an enviably large margin of error. And times of economic dislocation only accentuate America's competitive advantage — its nimbleness and adaptability. With only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. produces a quarter of the world's economic output. Even as the global economic crisis led to the expansion of the G-7 (or G-8, depending on who's counting) into the G-20, none of the newcomers offer a compelling challenge to the American way. If anything, they want to make sure the U.S. abides by its own rules. The dollar's status as the world's reserve currency has only been bolstered as the Greek debt crisis unveils the perils of a monetary union that lacks political and fiscal coherence. China, ostensibly the next big thing, continues its long march toward Western notions of private property, while Beijing bets on America's future by stocking up on billions of dollars' worth of Treasury bills. The rise of a consumerist middle-class society in nations like China, Brazil and India creates a more stable world, not to mention new markets for American products and culture. And yet doomsayers continue to decry America's decline. This isn't new. As far back as 1988, when Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was a best seller, the commentariat latched onto his (more hedged than remembered) warning that America ran the risk of "imperial overstretch" — "the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the United States' global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country's power to defend all simultaneously." So, what happened next? Well, the Berlin Wall collapsed, much of the world embraced market capitalism, and the U.S. shrank the globe and took it online with a revolutionary new technology that strengthens its cultural dominance. Meanwhile, the cost of keeping the Pax Americana has become far lighter. Despite the nation's two long-running commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 288,000 American service members posted or deployed overseas and a defense budget of 4.6% of GDP are near post–World War II lows (in 1987 the corresponding figures were 524,000 service members overseas and a defense budget in excess of 6% of GDP). And this historically modest investment dwarfs the military spending of the next nine powers combined. Still, we fret and we fret about our status. This is partly a good thing, because it beats complacency, but a bad thing when it begrudges the newfound wealth of others. The fact that millions of people in India and China are getting their first taste of prosperity shouldn't make Americans feel poorer. There are two ways of measuring American power and influence at a given point. If you measure them merely in terms of how much richer the U.S. is than the rest of the world, then 1945, when much of the rest of the world lay in ruins, would definitely be our heyday. At the end of World War II, the U.S. was responsible for a third of the world's manufacturing exports. And under that yardstick, the Marshall Plan,
Slide 9: aimed at rehabilitating Europe's lost prowess, would have been a mistake, as it was bound to eat into U.S. global market share. But a more appropriate measure of American influence and power is the combination of the country's wealth and its sway in the world. Back in 1941, Luce noted that "American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common." He had no idea: at a time when there are as many people studying English in China (or playing basketball, for that matter) as there are people in the U.S., seven of the 10 most watched TV shows around the world are American, Avatar is the top-grossing film of all time in China, and the world is as fixated on U.S. brands as ever, which is why U.S. multinationals from McDonald's to Nike book more than half their revenue overseas. If you bring together teenagers from Nigeria, Sweden, South Korea and Argentina — to pick a random foursome — what binds these kids together in some kind of community is American culture: the music, the Hollywood fare, the electronic games, Google, American consumer brands. The only thing they will likely have in common that doesn't revolve around the U.S. is an interest in soccer. The fact that the rest of the world is becoming more like us — in ways good and bad — underscores the extent to which we are living in an American century, even as it erodes, by definition, the notion of American exceptionalism. For all its egregious missteps around the world, the U.S. remains an inclusive superpower. Other nations are thriving under the Pax Americana, and the rise of second-tier powers makes the continued projection of U.S. might more welcome in certain neighborhoods. South Korea, Japan and even Vietnam appreciate having the U.S. serve as a counterweight to China; Pakistan and India want to engage Washington to counterbalance each other. According to last year's Pew Global Attitudes Survey, half the 24 nations questioned held a more favorable view of the U.S. than they did of China or Russia. (The most glaring exceptions, where Brand America has obvious problems for obvious reasons, were in the Middle East.) The most credible argument for American decline has to do with our society's profligacy and dysfunctional governance. The nation's mounting debts, however, result as much from a lack of discipline as from a lack of resources. In a time when the country is supposedly stretched to its limits, for instance, wealthier Americans can still claim a mortgage-interest deduction on a vacation home. We fret about our dependence on foreign oil but only very recently considered building more nuclear plants. And let's not even get into entitlement reform or the lack thereof. Americans, in short, have forgotten how to do the hard stuff, let alone what it means to truly mobilize to confront a serious challenge as they did to fight World War II. The country needs to find a way out of this political paralysis not only to retain its global leadership but also to exercise it. If it can be bothered, the U.S. commands enormous untapped capacity and wealth. Regardless of how sclerotic Washington is these days, the U.S. is still likely to innovate the next big thing, whether that be revolutionary life-extending medical technologies or new fuel-excreting life-forms that scientists are rushing to perfect at places like UCLA and Arizona State University. In terms of how we communicate and how we access and use information, bet on the looming showdown between Google and Apple to define this decade. And bet on the U.S. to be the nation that gives birth to the next Google.
Slide 10: As anyone raised in a different country will tell you, two of the strongest impressions someone has on arriving in the U.S. are 1) what a great country this seems to be, and 2) what a mess it must be, judging by the tenor of news coverage and political discourse. In most places, those two are reversed. Overwrought, constant hand-wringing about the nation's decline is one of America's competitive advantages, reflecting high standards and expectations — what Reinhold Niebuhr described as the hubris of a nation's "dreams of managing history." Americans have little tolerance for accidents or other calamities: we investigate, postmortemize and litigate bad stuff until it is clear who is to blame and why it won't happen again. Then we go on fretting about how the nation is falling apart. And that vigilance seems to immunize the country against that dreaded fate. So stay anxious, and alarmed, about the fate of the country. That's the best way to ensure that this century, like its predecessor, will be an American one. Martinez is the director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program at the New America Foundation. All the authors in this section, with the exception of Charles Kenny, are affiliated with the New America Foundation 2 Remapping the World By PARAG KHANNA Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 Political borders remain among the most fundamental obstacles to human progress around the world. And yet while a borderless world could be a great thing, we can't assume it into being. We have to actually build it. Nothing would make a greater contribution toward removing justifications for armed conflict and toward economic development. In the next decade, drawing a new map of the world won't be just a worthy goal, it will become a moral, economic and strategic imperative. The notion of a borderless world seems chimerical. Even in a globalized age, 90% of the world's people will never leave the country in which they were born. For them, borders still matter greatly — and even violently. From the Israeli-Palestinian "fence" to the U.S.-Mexican border, demarcating, monitoring and defending
Slide 11: borders is still the big business of the military-industrial complex. And yet, because we've been so focused on the inviolability of borders, we've neglected the fact that many of the very entities borders supposedly define were collapsing from within. Dozens of postcolonial states, from Congo to Pakistan, either don't really have or don't even deserve meaningful borders with their neighbors. And this has made long-standing dilemmas virtually intractable. Take the Middle East. Decades of diplomatic bickering and White House Rose Garden ceremonies haven't delivered Mideast stability, but an understanding about infrastructure might. One obstacle to the realization of a Palestinian state is the fact that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are not connected. Investing in an arc of roads and commuter-rail lines linking the West Bank and Gaza — in addition to building modern air and seaports — would help a Palestinian state eventually sustain itself. Independence without infrastructure is futile. The Kurds know this, which is why they have been signing oil-exploration agreements with companies from Canada to Norway in preparation for the day the entity known as Iraq officially ceases to exist. If we replaced all the post-Ottoman political borders on our maps with lines representing the region's oil pipelines, we'd have a much more accurate picture of the vectors of influence and interdependence — and potential avenues for creating peace. Kurdistan would, after all, be landlocked; it has no choice but to get along with its neighbors if it wants to get the oil out. Similarly, why do we lazily accept the continuing existence of Sudan, a British colonial construct joining Arab Muslims and African Christians in Africa's second largest country, a place so large that three disconnected civil wars — in Darfur, South Sudan and the east — are raging at the same time? A more stable and peaceful arrangement for Sudan would be to focus on independence for Darfur and South Sudan sooner rather than later, allowing them to rebuild themselves as smaller states at peace with their neighbors instead of facing Khartoum's persistent and nefarious undermining from within. Beyond Sudan, Africa would benefit hugely from a reimagining of its current borders. Some innovative transborder ideas have emerged, such as sharing hydropower projects in the Great Lakes region or even establishing transboundary conservation parks, as South Africa is doing with its neighbors. Africa can become economically viable only if its plethora of puny economies merge from more than 50 into just a few. Leaders seeking to respond to the global economic and underemployment crises should take a lesson from the world's most successful instance of a subordination of arbitrary borders: the European Union. The E.U. is the world's most peaceful multinational zone and its largest economic bloc, combining 27 countries, 450 million people and a $20 trillion GDP. The solution to the hundreds of lines that scar our political geography is to physically build the lines that connect people across them. If we spend just 10% of what we do on fighting over and defending borders on transcending them, the next decade — and the decades beyond — will be better than the last. Khanna is the author of The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the 21st Century (Random House, 2009)
Slide 12: 3 Bandwidth Is the New Black Gold By TIM WU Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY FOR TIME Everyone knows someone who has experienced the 21st century's quintessential gotcha moment: the unexpected, budget-breaking mobile-phone bill. Most aren't as bad as the $22,000 bill a California man received from Verizon Wireless for his teenager's Internet usage, or the New York family whose iPhones racked up nearly $4,800 by automatically checking for e-mails on a Mediterranean cruise. But these incidents aren't just stories of human folly or corporate greed, they're subtle signs of a deeper issue: the increasing shortage of bandwidth relative to Americans' growing appetite for it. In the U.S. in 2010, a family can easily spend hundreds of dollars a month on cable, mobile phones and Internet and telephone services. Some families already spend at least as much on bandwidth as they do on energy. Face it: Americans love their smart phones and Internet television as much as they love their cars and air conditioners. When you have a scarce resource, an industry run as an oligopoly and a population that can't get enough, you have all the ingredients for the first new resource crisis of the millennium. Technically, bandwidth is best defined as the capacity to move information through a channel. The more information you move through the channel, the more bandwidth you use; hence video uses much more bandwidth than, say, e-mail. A bandwidth shortage occurs at any point when the demand to move information exceeds the capacity of the channel. So when every iPhone user in New York City wants to watch a video or get online, AT&T's wireless channels get flooded, and no one can get through.
Slide 13: In time, the mere slowdowns we see today may be eclipsed by full-scale information traffic jams. But beyond that, the deeper problems will be with high prices and possible profiteering. As demand for bandwidth goes up, suppliers will logically be able to charge more, as happens in energy markets. Can we rely on private industry — the cable and telephone companies — to build its way out of these problems? In a word, maybe. On the one hand, each individual bandwidth supplier — Comcast, AT&T and so on — faces possible customer defections if its services get too bad, and to their credit, those companies are now investing billions of dollars in infrastructure upgrades. On the other hand, the industry collectively may be conflicted about how much capacity it really wants — and how much it wants to pay for. Since the 1970s, it has been obvious that installing fiber-optic cables, which use lasers to carry information, could solve most of the home-capacity problems for a very long time. Yet with the exception of Verizon and its FiOS program, the U.S. bandwidth industry has been reluctant to go beyond its copper wires. For one thing, upgrading to fiber is really expensive. For another, offering users massive Internet bandwidth can create a good reason for them to cancel cable and telephone services, because they would be able to get much of what they want from the Internet. Under the Obama Administration, the FCC regards bandwidth supply as an issue meriting national attention, and it has been formulating a plan to encourage home bandwidth. But there's reason to think that the most serious problems — the real bandwidth shortages — will be in wireless, where demand is growing and supply is weak. The industry cannot keep up with wireless demand, and we're already seeing more dropped calls and slow connections as well as those enormous bills for data plans. In a nightmare scenario, jams become the norm instead of the exception, just as they are for our cars. Wireless carriers could use the scarcity to profit, setting aside net neutrality and charging obscene rates for priority calls and guaranteed bandwidth. The bottom line is that if everyone keeps using the Internet and other services as much as they like, something will have to give. It is unlikely that the American appetite for bandwidth will diminish anytime soon, nor is it even clear that we want it to. But if we want the pleasure and convenience of a high-bandwidth society, someone will need to figure out a solution to the bandwidth dilemma soon. Wu is a professor of law at Columbia University and the author of the forthcoming book The Master Switch
Slide 14: 4 The Dropout Economy ILLUSTRATION BY PETER ARKLE FOR TIME Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college. Many economists attribute the sluggish wage growth in the U.S. to educational stagnation, which is one reason politicians of every stripe call for doubling or tripling the number of college graduates. But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won't exist, we're on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live. It's important to keep in mind that behavior that seems irrational from a middle-class perspective is perfectly rational in the face of straitened circumstances. People who feel obsolete in today's information economy will be joined by millions more in the emerging post-information economy, in which routine professional work and even some high-end services will be more cheaply performed overseas or by machines. This doesn't mean that work will vanish. It does mean, however, that it will take a new and unfamiliar form. Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones. Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the
Slide 15: young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias. Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian "hacktivists." Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they'll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it's coming. This transformation will be not so much political as antipolitical. The decision to turn away from broken and brittle institutions, like conventional schools and conventional jobs, will represent a turn toward what military theorist John Robb calls "resilient communities," which aspire to self-sufficiency and independence. The left will return to its roots as the champion of mutual aid, cooperative living and what you might call "broadband socialism," in which local governments take on the task of building high-tech infrastructure owned by the entire community. Assuming today's libertarian revival endures, it's easy to imagine the right defending the prerogatives of state and local governments and also of private citizens — including the weird ones. This new individualism on the left and the right will begin in the spirit of cynicism and distrust that we see now, the sense that we as a society are incapable of solving pressing problems. It will evolve into a new confidence that citizens working in common can change their lives and in doing so can change the world around them. We see this individualism in the rise of "freeganism" and in the small but growing handful of "cage-free families" who've abandoned their suburban idylls for life on the open road. We also see it in the rising number of high school seniors who take a gap year before college. While the higher-education industry continues to agitate for college for all, many young adults are stubbornly resistant, perhaps because they recognize that for a lot of them, college is an overpriced status marker and little else. In the wake of the downturn, household formation has slowed down. More than one-third of workers under 35 live with their parents. The hope is that these young people will eventually leave the house when the economy perks up, and doubtless many will. Others, however, will choose to root themselves in their neighborhoods and use social media to create relationships that sustain them as they craft alternatives to the rat race.
Slide 16: Somewhere in the suburbs there is an unemployed 23-year-old who is plotting a cultural insurrection, one that will resonate with existing demographic, cultural and economic trends so powerfully that it will knock American society off its axis. Salam is a policy adviser at the nonpartisan think tank e21, a blogger for the National Review and a columnist for Forbes.com 5 China and the U.S.: The Indispensable Axis By CHRISTINA LARSON Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN HERSEY FOR TIME The quest to secure Middle Eastern oil and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan consume much of the foreign policy establishment in Washington today. But in the next decade, more of the U.S.'s attention will shift to the new Middle East: China. Economists have been predicting this shift for decades. China is already the world's top manufacturer, top auto market, top cement producer and top polluter. Its military and naval capacity is growing. Its construction-driven hunger for natural resources, especially timber and energy, is reshaping the landscapes of Africa, Southeast Asia and South America. Experts may argue about the pace of China's economic ascent — Nobel laureate economist Robert Fogel predicts that China's economy will be an eye-popping 40% of global GDP by 2040, while others project somewhat more modest growth — but few question that it's happening dazzlingly fast. Some see a threat to our way of life in China's rise. Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World, imagines the rise of China toppling the cherished Enlightenment principles of the West. Others persist in using faulty cold war analogies, substituting China for the old U.S.S.R.
Slide 17: Rather than being cold war adversaries, however, the U.S. and China will form an indispensable axis for global governance. That doesn't mean the two will be best friends — don't expect a new special relationship similar to the U.S.-British alliance of the 20th century. There is no precedent for this unique evolving relationship, one in which the two sides will both compete and cooperate, perhaps simultaneously, as they shape and support a global system they can benefit from. In some ways, this axis might resemble the fluidity of the G-8, the group of industrialized countries that cooperate on economic issues where they share interests but go their separate ways on issues where they don't. Washington and Beijing will increasingly be the 800-lb. gorillas in multilateral architectures like the G-20 or Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation while developing a shifting bilateral relationship, working together closely on some issues and hampering each other's unilateral actions on others. But this is not a marriage of equals. The U.S. remains the unchallenged predominant global power. Certainly, China is becoming more influential economically, and its military is increasing its capacity. But it has little ability to project force beyond its borders, and Beijing has shown little interest in supporting or paying for the global commons that underpins the world economy. For now, China prefers to be largely a free rider on the international system that helps safeguard trade routes, sea lanes and relative regional stability — allowing Beijing to focus on pressing domestic challenges. At the Copenhagen climate conference in December, China had a chance to assume a greater leadership role, but Premier Wen Jiabao at crucial moments preferred not to meet directly with President Obama. Beijing appears not yet ready or willing to be a world leader. So don't expect smoke-filled summits on par with Yalta in which the leaders of two superpowers decide the world's fate. Instead, we can expect a much more ad hoc, varied and fluid relationship managed within multiple forums, both domestic and international. China will continue to flex its muscles and pursue its interests — including seeking oil, timber and mineral resources in far-flung corners of the globe as it strives to maintain high growth — in ways that will at times unsettle Americans. Yet the U.S. is not seeking to contain China's rise, nor can it feasibly do so. The real challenge for Washington will be structuring a relationship that encourages China to support the global commons that it benefits from. That will require our leaders to manage the complex partnership in a clear-eyed manner and not be consumed by the temptation to either coddle or demonize the world's next superpower. Larson is an editor at Foreign Policy magazine
Slide 18: 6 In Defense of Failure By MEGAN MCARDLE Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 ILLUSTRATION BY KELLY BLAIR FOR TIME It sounds like a dubious aspiration, but one of the more pressing priorities for America this decade is to preserve our cherished freedom to fail in this country. This freedom to fail may not have made it into President Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous declaration of the four freedoms that define America — it would have been bad karma on the eve of World War II — but it has long been one of the pillars of this country's exceptionalism. Call it the fifth freedom. America allows its citizens room to fail — and if they don't succeed, to try, try again. Somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all Americans report that they have considered starting their own business, whereas in Europe that number is only 40%. While the E.U. publishes documents on "overcoming the stigma of business failure," executives in Silicon Valley proudly make their bygone start-ups the centerpieces of their résumés. And when those start-ups shut down, America stands ready with corporate and personal bankruptcy systems that are the most generous in the world. But after the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that has followed it, many Americans are no longer feeling so exceptional. At this point, freedom to fail probably ranks right around freedom to remove your own appendix. That's a pity, because failure is one of the most economically important tools we have. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate failure; it should be to build a system resilient enough to withstand it. Our bankruptcy system's generosity, for instance, has been convincingly linked to higher rates of entrepreneurship. Similarly, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation system created during the New Deal has largely put an end to the bank runs that destroyed many sound banks; all it took was simply promising depositors that they can't lose all their money. This is costly, of course. But the bank runs were worse. It's telling that countries with less generous deposit insurance, like Britain, suffered bank runs during the recent crisis and were forced to raise their insurance limits or nationalize banks. Yet instead of celebrating all our successes in building systems that failwell, we've become wedded to the fantasy of a system that doesn't fail at all. Look at our underwhelming response to the financial crisis. Bubbles and financial crises are natural features of markets, and while there has been some real
Slide 19: suffering on the part of millions, the truth is that as these things go, we've gotten off lightly. When financial systems fail badly, you get the Great Depression: 25% unemployment, GDP falling by about a third, life savings wiped out, livelihoods lost. Largely because we studied the failures of that era, our financial policymakers learned that a whole bunch of things didn't work — and avoided a repeat. We should be searching for the lessons of this crisis, but we can't because we're too busy searching for bad guys. Watch a hearing held before the House Financial Services committee, and you don't see legislators absorbing sound policy advice; you see them mouthing talking points and beating up on bankers. There isn't really much evidence that the "unsafe" financial products vilified by some proponents of financial reform played a large role in the meltdown. While exotic loans certainly helped make the bubble larger, there's no reason to believe that we could have avoided it entirely. But the architects of the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency have made it very clear that they think they can tamp down bubbles by nudging people toward "plain vanilla" products. Many financial innovations eventually turn out to be bad ideas. But as with Edison's lightbulb filaments, the failures point the way to our successes. And so rather than launch a quixotic war on failure, we should be using what we've learned to build a system that fails better: increasing the reserves financial institutions hold against a crisis, improving our tools for modeling system-wide risks, creating better mechanisms for winding down the operations of failed institutions without triggering a market panic, and making better provisions for the people who are hardest hit. The real secret of our success is that we learn from the past, and then we forget it. Unfortunately, we're dangerously close to forgetting the most important lessons of our own history: how to fail gracefully and how to get back on our feet with equal grace. McArdle is the business and economics editor at the Atlantic
Slide 20: 7 The White Anxiety Crisis By GREGORY RODRIGUEZ Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID PLUNKERT FOR TIME Two competing narratives dominate our debate about the ongoing ethnic and demographic transformation of America. The first holds that non-European immigrants — O.K., let's be honest, Mexicans — will rip apart the nation's social fabric. The second has it that the diversity of younger generations of Americans will inevitably lead to a more integrated, postracial era. But both of these narratives are off the mark. With some minor differences, today's immigrants are assimilating into U.S. society in ways not terribly unlike those of millions before them. At the same time, it's likely that decades from now, Americans will still invest a lot of meaning in group distinctions. The most profound changes in American race relations, however, will revolve around the other side of the equation: native-born white Americans. As much as Americans pride themselves on the notion that their national identity is premised on a set of ideals rather than a single race, ethnicity or religion, we all know that for most of our history, white supremacy was the law of the land. In every naturalization act from 1790 to 1952, Congress included language stating that the aspiring citizen should be a "white person." And not surprisingly, despite the extraordinary progress of the past 50 years, the sense of white proprietorship — "this is our country and our culture" — still has not been completely eradicated. Even though we now have an African-American President, we still tend to treat minorities as parts and whites as representatives of the whole. This, along with the luxury of rarely feeling obliged to think self-consciously about one's racial background, has been one of the perks of belonging to the demographic majority.
Slide 21: But according to the Census Bureau, by 2050 whites will be a minority group in the U.S. How the current majority reacts to its incipient minority status is the most crucial sociodemographic issue facing the country in the decade to come. The most obvious impact will be political. If California's demographic transformation is any indication — Anglos dropped below 50% of the population there in 2000 — whites elsewhere may increasingly develop a stronger consciousness of their political interests as a group. In 1996, California's white voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 209, a ballot initiative that sought to eliminate state-sponsored affirmative action, because many of those voters felt that the playing field had begun to tilt against them. That decade, California also passed two other ethnically charged ballot measures, against illegal immigration and bilingual education. It's difficult not to conclude that these initiatives were part of a white backlash against the state's ethnic transformation. However, the very demographic trend that inspired those ballot initiatives has ensured that there haven't been any racially charged propositions since. With so-called minorities outnumbering whites, mainstream politicians have been reluctant to endorse any initiative that would invite a backlash from nonwhites. But California's ethno-political détente may not be in the cards for other regions of the country. Though whites will become a minority in the national population, the vast majority of individual states will probably remain majority white. (This is because the most profound demographic change is happening in a handful of the most heavily populated states.) A strong white-minority political consciousness is most likely to arise in regions that are nowhere near actually becoming majority-minority. It is in these regions, where white-minority status is more phantom than reality, that politicians and demagogues can best employ the rhetoric of white ethno-nationalism. This won't take the form of a chest-thumping brand of white supremacy. Instead, we are likely to see the rise of a more defensive, aggrieved sense of white victimhood that strains the social contract and undermines collectively shared notions of the common good. Way back in 1991, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote the best-selling book The Disuniting of America, in which he argued that identity-based multiculturalism threatened the integrity of the nation. "The cult of ethnicity," he wrote, culminated in an "attack" on a shared American identity. He decried the "separatist impulses" of nonwhites, "or at least their self-appointed spokesmen." Nearly two decades later, one can hear evidence of white grievance in many corners of the country. And it's not coming just from fringe bloggers. In the spring of 2008, candidate Hillary Clinton appealed to "hardworking white Americans" to help her campaign against an ascendant Barack Obama. Last March, conservative commentator Glenn Beck suggested that the white man responsible for the worst workplace massacre in Alabama history was "pushed to the wall" because he felt "silenced" and "disenfranchised" by "political correctness." The past decade has also seen a rise in the number of accusations of reverse discrimination and the emergence of high-profile court cases — like the one filed by firefighters in New Haven, Conn. — in which white men claim they were denied promotions because of their race. Over the next decade, we're likely to see more antidiscrimination suits filed and growing anger over reverse discrimination. Not only will traditional affirmative action run into greater resistance, but there will be demands for whites to be included in affirmative action and even in government set-aside programs.
Slide 22: In the face of growing demographic change, new groups will be dedicated to defending the interests and rights of European Americans. Candidates of both major parties will increasingly appeal to this sense of white grievance. This means race will continue to be a defining feature of our politics, but the dynamic will be the precise opposite of what it was a generation ago, when angry nonwhite activists were a centrifugal force in America. Instead, with the election of Obama, blacks are polling as more optimistic than they were before. Having pretty much abandoned their counter-cultural stance, Latino activists are not fighting against U.S. power but are instead demanding that immigrants be allowed to become part of it. Meanwhile, even though they are still the majority and collectively maintain more access to wealth and political influence than other groups, whites are acting more and more like an aggrieved minority. Schlesinger would be turning in his grave. Rodriguez is the author of Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America 8 TV Will Save the World By CHARLES KENNY Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 ILLUSTRATION BY SERGE BLOCH FOR TIME Forget Twitter and Facebook, Google and the Kindle. Forget the latest sleek iGadget. Television is still the most influential medium around. Indeed, for many of the poorest regions of the world, it remains the next big thing — poised, finally, to attain truly global ubiquity. And that is a good thing, because the TV revolution is changing lives for the better. Across the developing world, around 45% of households had a TV in 1995; by 2005 the number had climbed above 60%. That's some way behind the U.S., where there are more TVs than people, but it dwarfs worldwide Internet access. Five million more households in sub-Saharan Africa will get a TV over the next five years. In 2005, after the fall of the Taliban, which had outlawed TV, 1 in 5 Afghans had one. The global total is another 150 million by 2013 — pushing the numbers to well beyond two-thirds of
Slide 23: households. Television's most transformative impact will be on the lives of women. In India, researchers Robert Jensen and Emily Oster found that when cable TV reached villages, women were more likely to go to the market without their husbands' permission and less likely to want a boy rather than a girl. They were more likely to make decisions over child health care and less likely to think that men had the right to beat their wives. TV is also a powerful medium for adult education. In the Indian state of Gujarat, Chitrageet is a hugely popular show that plays Bollywood song and dance clips. The routines are subtitled in Gujarati. Within six months, viewers had made a small but significant improvement in their reading skills. Too much TV has been associated with violence, obesity and social isolation. But TV is having a positive impact on the lives of billions worldwide, and as the spread of mobile TV, video cameras and YouTube democratize both access and content, it will become an even greater force for humbling tyrannical governments and tyrannical husbands alike. Kenny, a development economist, is the author of a forthcoming book on innovation, ideas and the global standard of living POPULAR TV SHOWS OVERSEAS Australia: MasterChef Australia A competitive-cooking game show based on the British series MasterChef, MasterChef Australia has enjoyed steadily climbing ratings since it premiered in April 2009. In a roundup of the most popular shows that have aired in Australia since 2001, MasterChef is outranked only by the 2005 Australian Open tennis final between Aussie Lleyton Hewitt and Marat Safin and the 2003 Rugby World Cup final, in which Australia was beaten by England. The show's first-season finale was the most watched television program of 2009. Afghanistan: Afghan Star The same kind of singing competition that has made a huge success out of American Idol in the U.S., Afghan Star attracts an estimated audience of around 11 million, or approximately one-third of the country's population. Currently in its fifth season, the show offers a form of democracy by allowing the winner to be decided by viewer votes. It also breaks ground by promoting women's performances, a rarity in Afghanistan's highly traditional society. India: Yeh Rishta Kiya Kehlata Hai ("What Is This Relationship Called?")
Slide 24: Airing nightly at 9:30 p.m., this soap-like show revolves around the lives of two young women, using their lives to explore the dynamics of arranged marriage and marriage for love in modern-day India. On the air since 2009, the show recently taped its 300th episode. France: Les Guignols de l'Info ("News Puppets") A puppet show known for its sharp political satire, Les Guignols de l'Info has appeared on France's Canal+ channel since 1988, though it did not find a large audience until a few years later when, during the first Gulf War, it began to perform skits based on the news. Though it is now closely tied to another popular Canal+ offering, the political talk show Le Grand Journal, neither program can truly lay claim to being France's most watched television show. That would be the Amnerican import House, with Hugh Laurie. Russia: Zhdi Menya ("Wait for Me") There is nothing more beloved by Russians than a long, sad story (think Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky), and this show, now entering its seventh year on the air, delivers it in powerful bursts with each and every episode. Structured like a television newsmagazine, Zhdi Menya relates the story of a family or friends who have been separated by a tragic event — quite frequently, something that took place during during the oppressive Stalin years or World War II — then tells the story of their reunification. The stories typically include long descriptions of the tragedy that caused the separation, followed by details of how the producers tracked down the missing person, and end with tearful hugs, accompanied, of course, by shots of the studio audience, almost all of whom are weeping. England: EastEnders Depicting more often than not a depressing view of life in East London, the long-running BBC soap opera just celebrated its 25th anniversary with a live episode. The comings and goings of the residents of Albert Square, Walford, contained all the usual elements of a 30-min. episode (characters attempting to sort out issues, many scenes taking place in the Queen Vic pub) as well as some uncommon ones (fumbled lines! Hey, it was live TV), culminating in the grand reveal of who had killed someone else just after another character had plummeted to his death. This particular episode — one of four shown each week — drew 15.6 million viewers and was the BBC's highest audience figure in nearly six years. The show regularly
Slide 25: pulls in more than 10 million, though its glory days of three times as many watching "Dirty" Den Watts walk out on his wife during the 1986 Christmas Day episode is clearly behind it. South Africa: Generations Airing since 1994, this soap is set in the cutthroat world of media communications, its stories revolving around a single family, all of whose members have passed on, leaving things in the hands of a sole surviving member: a young, beautiful woman played by the model Connie Ferguson. Originally airing one night a week, the show was extended to five nights because of its popularity and has pulled No. 1 ratings since virtually the beginning of its run. A recent audit showed that it is viewed by almost 5 million people daily. Japan: Shoten ("Jokes for Points") A comedy airing on Sunday nights since 1966, Shoten consists of six comedians seated in a row who compete to tell the best jokes on topics announced by the host. The comedians are judged on their wit and their ability to respond quickly. Those who tell funny jokes are awarded zabutons, Japanese cushions, which are stacked atop of one another as the show goes on. A zabuton can also be taken away from the comedian for telling a bad joke, which leaves some to sit on the floor uncomfortably without a cushion. The first to stack 10 zabutons wins a prize. According to Yahoo! Japan's TV Guide ratings, this show was the country's second most viewed program in February 2010, bested only by the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games. China: Chinese Paladin 3 Video-game adaptations are usually hit or miss regardless of nationality, but Chinese broadcasters have found a recipe for success in adapting the popular Chinese video game The Legend of Sword and Fairy into the Chinese Paladin television series. Since debuting in 2009, Chinese Paladin 3, based on the third installment of the game, has topped the charts in multiple provinces, such as Hangzhou and Chengdu. The show is set in ancient China and embraces the fantastical side of the wuxia film genre. Midair sword fights, battles with an evil cult and a race to save the world from catastrophic destruction keep viewers on the edge of their seats.
Slide 26: Brazil: Big Brother Brazil Currently in its 10th season, this Portuguese-language version of the Dutch original, popularized in so many countries, enjoys particularly wide audiences in Brazil. The Brazilian Big Brother house is judged to be one of the most extravagant of all BB houses, and several of its cast members have gone on to much larger careers, most notably Season 5 contestant Grazielli Massafera, who has appeared on more than 100 magazine covers and landed a scripted television role in a soap opera. 9 The Twilight of the Elites By CHRISTOPHER HAYES Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 ILLUSTRATION BY EDEL RODRIGUEZ FOR TIME In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society — whether it's General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media — has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruins, replaced by mass skepticism, contempt and disillusionment. In the wake of the implosion of nearly all sources of American authority, this new decade will have to be about reforming our institutions to reconstitute a more reliable and democratic form of authority. Scholarly research shows a firm correlation between strong institutions, accountable élites and highly functional economies; mistrust and corruption, meanwhile, feed each other in a vicious circle. If our current crisis continues, we risk a long, ugly process of de-development: higher levels of corruption and tax evasion and an increasingly fractured public sphere, in which both public consensus and reform become all but impossible.
Slide 27: For more than 35 years, Gallup has polled Americans about levels of trust in their institutions — Congress, banks, Big Business, public schools, etc. In 2008 nearly every single institution was at an all-time low. Banks were trusted by just 32% of the populace, down from more than 50% in 2004. Newspapers were down to 24%, from slightly below 40% at the start of the decade. And Congress was the least trusted institution of all, with only 12% of Americans expressing confidence in it. The mistrust of élites extends to élites themselves. Every year, public-relations guru Richard Edelman conducts a "trust barometer" across 22 countries, in which he surveys only highly educated, high-earning, media-attentive people. In the U.S., these people show extremely low levels of trust in government and business alike. Particularly distrusted are the superman CEOs of yore. "Chief-executive trust has just been mired in the mid- to low 20s," says Edelman. "It started off with Enron and culminates in Citi." Such figures show that the crisis of authority extends beyond narrow ideological categories: Big Business and unions, Congress and Wall Street, organized religion and science are all viewed with skepticism. So why is it that so much of the country's leadership in so many different walks of life performed so terribly over this decade? While no single-cause theory can explain such a wide array of institutional failures, there are some themes — in particular, the concentration of power and the erosion of transparency and accountability — that extend throughout. Few people know this better than Terry McKiernan, 56, the founder of Bishop Accountability. Like nearly all Irish-American boys of his generation, McKiernan was raised in the Roman Catholic Church — altar boy, confirmation, a lifetime of Sundays. His uncle was a priest. When allegations of sexual abuse in the priesthood surfaced in 2002, McKiernan says, "the whole thing honestly hit me kind of hard." So he quit his job as a management consultant and started Bishop Accountability, which is in the process of procuring more than 3 million pages of records about the Church's sex-abuse scandal. According to McKiernan, the main institutional characteristics that produced the crisis were the Church's obsessive secrecy and its hierarchical nature. Those at the top of the pyramid, the bishops, were exempt from any corrective accountability from below. This dynamic isn't unique. "There are various ways in which the Church is a peculiar institution," McKiernan says. "But," he adds, "it is also simply an institution in which the rules of power apply and the effects of secrecy apply. I'm not surprised that people doing unexamined things do bad things." That dynamic has played itself out throughout society. Look at CEO pay. In 1978, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the ratio of average CEO pay to average wage was about 35 to 1. By 2007 it was 275 to 1. Nell Minow, a lawyer and corporate-governance expert, has for decades waged a one-woman crusade against excessive CEO pay. She has watched as CEOs have found ways to manipulate the levers of governance and devise ingenious methods of guaranteeing themselves windfalls regardless of their company's performance. "It's like going to a racetrack and betting on all the horses, except you're using someone else's money," Minow says. "You know one of them is going to win. As long as you're not paying for the tickets, you're going to come out ahead." Of course, it's not really news that very gifted and talented people can make poor, even colossally catastrophic judgments. But the fact is, a complex society like ours requires many tasks to be performed by experts and élites, and tackling some of the most difficult and urgent problems we face requires repositories of authority that can successfully marshal public consensus.
Slide 28: Take the problem of climate change. It's beyond our ability to recognize the imperceptible upward creep of global temperatures, so we must rely on the authority of those who are doing the highly complicated measuring. But at a moment when we desperately need élites and experts to use their social capital to warn the populace of the dangers of catastrophic climate change, skepticism is rising. A comprehensive Pew poll released in October found that only 57% of respondents think there's evidence of warming (down from 71% last year), and just 36% think it's because of human activity (down from 47%). This is the danger of living in a society in which the landscape of authority has been leveled: it's not there when you actually need it. The élites' failures of the past decade should teach us that institutions of all kinds need input from below. The Federal Reserve is home to some of the finest economists and brightest minds in the country, and yet it still managed to miss an $8 trillion housing bubble and the explosion of the subprime market. If, say, the Federal Reserve Act required several seats on the board of governors to be reserved for consumer advocates — heck, even community organizers — it would have been harder to miss these twin phenomena. If there are heartening countertrends to the past decade of élite failure, they're the tremendous outpouring of grass-roots activism across the political spectrum and the remarkable surge in institutional innovation, much of it facilitated by the Internet. In less than a decade, Wikipedia has completely overturned the internal logic of the Enlightenment-era encyclopedia by radically democratizing the process of its creation. Farmers' markets have blossomed as a means of challenging and subverting the industrial food-distribution cartel. Charter schools have grown for the same reason; local school systems are no longer viewed as transparent and democratic. This, one hopes, is just the beginning. All these new institutions are inspired by a desire to democratize old, big oligarchic hierarchies and devolve power downward and outward. That's our best hope in the decade to come. For at the end of the day, it's the job of citizens to save élites from themselves. Hayes is the Washington editor of the Nation 10 The Boring Age By MICHAEL LIND Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 ILLUSTRATION BY KELLY BLAIR FOR TIME
Slide 29: Viewing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in the year 2010 is a depressing experience. According to this 1968 movie, by now we were supposed to have moon colonies and regular passenger service on space planes. And anyone who struggles with automated receptionist messages or programmable televisions knows that today's computers are just as psychotic as HAL 9000, only dumber. We like to believe we live in an era of unprecedented change: technological innovation is proceeding at a rate with no parallel in all of human history. The information revolution and globalization are radically disruptive. Just as Barack Obama would like to be a transformational President, so the rest of us like the idea that we live in a thrilling epoch of transformation. But the truth is that we are living in a period of stagnation. Surprisingly, this stasis is most evident in an area where we assume we are way ahead of our predecessors: technology. In fact, the gadgets of the information age have had nothing like the transformative effects on life and industry that indoor electric lighting, refrigerators, electric and natural gas ovens and indoor plumbing produced in the early to mid-20th century. Is the combination of a phone, video screen and keyboard really as revolutionary as the original telephone, the original television set or the original typewriter was? Genuinely revolutionary technological innovations are rare, and when they appear, there is a long time lag before they begin to transform the economy and daily life. The steam engine was used for nearly a century to pump water from British mines before it was successfully applied to manufacturing and transportation. The gasoline-powered car was invented in the 1880s, but mass automobile use had to wait until the 1920s in the U.S. and the 1950s and '60s in Europe and Japan. There was a similar delay between the invention of the computer and the microprocessor and the widespread adoption of the PC in the 1990s and 2000s. Even if there are dramatic breakthroughs in nanotech or biotech tomorrow, we may not enjoy the benefits for decades, or generations. Technology has been remarkably stagnant in the areas of transportation and energy. As energy expert Vaclav Smil has pointed out, global jet transportation relies on the gas turbine, which was developed in the 1930s, and global shipping uses the diesel engine, invented in the 1890s. The fastest commercial airliners ever to fly reside in museums. The most cost-effective forms of mass transit everywhere, except for a few dense urban areas, are buses and planes. Whether the heat source is coal, natural gas or nuclear energy, most electricity today is generated by a variant of the steam turbine that has been around since the 1880s. The wind turbine and the solar-thermal and photovoltaic technologies beloved by greens are old enough to qualify for Social Security. And these elderly technologies are limited to those privileged enough to live in industrialized countries. A substantial minority of the human race still derives heat and warmth from wood and dung. In developing countries, the 21st century is likely to be the second age of the automobile. Everyone talks about China's money-guzzling high-speed-rail projects, but of far greater consequence is the less glamorous system of national highways it is building. Today there are nearly 668 million cars in the world; by 2050 there may be 3 billion. Many cars, perhaps most, will be powered by energy sources other than gasoline and may eventually come with robot brains connected to smart highways. But absent the
Slide 30: appearance of the long-awaited flying car, the cars, buses and trucks of the future will probably be variations of today's automobiles. What about politics? For decades, it has been possible to make headlines by predicting the imminent replacement of the ethnically or linguistically defined territorial nation-state with some radically different form of political organization, like city-states or supra-national federations along the lines of the European Union. Manhattan, however, has yet to declare its sovereignty, to the disappointment of many of its residents and other Americans alike. Another perennial strain of geopolitical futurism involves predicting the rise and fall of great powers. We are often told that China will surpass the U.S. in a few decades and usher in a Chinese century. But China's growth model, like Japan's, is based on exports, and in a saturated global market in which American consumers are tapped out, the Chinese export machine may choke. Even if China continues to grow, the country will be far poorer in terms of per capita income than the U.S., Europe or Japan for generations to come. In a decade or two, predictions about Chinese world domination may seem as quaint as those about Soviet global hegemony. Let me offer some predictions of my own. I predict that in the year 2050, the nation-state will still be the dominant form of political organization, with a few new nation-states added to the U.N. The U.S. will still be the dominant global economic and military power, even if China has a somewhat larger GDP because of its larger population. Most energy will still be derived from fossil fuels, and nuclear power will account for an increasing share of global electricity production, while wind and solar power will still be negligible. Most people will get from place to place by means of cars, buses, taxis and planes, not fixed rail. Thanks to biotech advances, people will live longer and healthier lives, and consequently the largest single occupation in 2050 will be — drumroll, please — nursing! I know, that's a boring vision of the future compared with a Chinese century in which everybody is a genetically modified immortal who rides monorails and eats algae grown in skyscrapers. But hey, in the future, phones will be really cool. Lind is the policy director of the New America Foundation's economic-growth program
Slide 31: TO OUR READERS Looking Around Corners The groundbreaking concepts explored in this year's 10 Ideas issue are the result of brainstorming with the New America Foundation. Illustration by Joe Zeff Design for TIME This week's cover, our third annual 10 Ideas issue, was itself a new idea: we joined with the New America Foundation to assess the most important concepts that will shape our world over the next decade. The New America Foundation, an 11-year-old nonpartisan think tank in Washington with Silicon Valley roots, emphasizes next-generation thinkers and ideas — and that's what you'll find inside. There's often something quaint about old ideas of the future — moving sidewalks, cars with wings, jet packs! But for this project, we were less interested in exploring new technologies than new ideas, especially ideas that are not tethered to the next election cycle. And we wanted concepts that range across as many fields and disciplines as possible. More than a year ago, I had lunch with Steve Coll, the president of the New America Foundation and a distinguished journalist himself, and we talked about projects we could do together. Time's Lev Grossman, who edited the cover package along with Romesh Ratnesar, started batting around ideas with Andrés Martinez, the director of the foundation's fellows program. In one sense, almost all the ideas are what we sometimes call conceptual scoops. In fact, the package begins with Martinez's essay "The Next American Century," which disputes the conventional wisdom that the U.S.'s best days are behind it. Even though we cover many topics, there are some broad themes, including how we are adjusting to the new norms of an altered economy. This isn't a matter of just scaling back but also of reconceiving how we live. As Christopher Hayes writes in one of the issue's most passionately argued essays, it's not just the market that has changed. The entire edifice of trust in authority that supported American life has been shaken, and the challenge of the next decade is to rebuild what we can and reroute our lives around what we can't. Reihan Salam writes about how in the 2010s, more and more people will live off the grid, working in a new underground economy that will fill in the gaps of the old one. Gregory Rodriguez speculates that with America on its way to becoming a majority nonwhite nation by 2050, we may see an aggrieved white minority that feels threatened and disenfranchised. In the context of an often risk-averse economy, Megan McArdle writes that we should not let an economic downturn prevent us from trying and
Slide 32: failing to start new businesses, because failure, particularly in America, is the key to our culture of innovation. Stories about the future often paint a picture of wonders that do not exist today. But we've tried to look past the latest gadgets to the social, cultural and economic currents that shape technology. Charles Kenny writes that for many millions of people around the world, old-fashioned television, not iPads or Xboxes, is the next big thing. TV is still a massive agent of social change and, even more than the Internet, is regarded as subversive by totalitarian regimes. Finally, Michael Lind takes exception to the idea that we live in an age of transformation, maintaining that in the ways that really matter, we're still running on the technological innovations of the early 20th and even the late 19th centuries. Ultimately, gadgets come and go, but it takes ideas to give them meaning and put them to work to make our lives better. This country was founded on an idea, one that will never be obsolete. Ideas were, are and always will be the next big thing.
Slide 33: ESSAY Twitter and TV: How Social Media Is Helping Old Media By JAMES PONIEWOZIK Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 Kelly Haffermann Each generation of media has an oedipal relationship with the last. New technologies are born — radio, TV, the Internet — and either kill what came before or render it less relevant. Just so for years, the story of big-network TV has been how it's slowly losing out to cable, video games and the Web. But a funny thing has been happening with big TV events of late: they have been dramatically and conspicuously not dying. The 2010 Super Bowl was the most watched U.S. TV show ever, surpassing the finale of M*A*S*H. This year's Olympics far outrated the 2006 Games. The Emmys, Grammys and Golden Globes all increased, and on March 7, about 41 million people watched the Oscars, 5 million more than last year. There may be plenty of reasons for the higher Oscars ratings: a blockbuster (Avatar) was nominated; there were twice as many Best Picture nominees; Twilight's dreamboat stars were trotted out like a big undead parade; and in a lousy economy, free TV is a cheap date. But another reason may be the likes of Twitter and Facebook — new media that aren't replacing TV but creating a new way to watch it. Along with the decline of evening-news, drama and sitcom ratings, the fall of watercooler TV has been playing out for years. When that happens, you can try to make better TV. Or you can find a better watercooler.
Slide 34: Now we have the Twittercooler. Facebook, Twitter et al., it turns out, are perfect for watching big events in a virtual living room of dozens — or thousands — of your closest fellow couch potatoes. Ever since people started buying 56K modems, we've seen goofy attempts at TV-Internet convergence, from play-at-home websites for game shows to Internet-shopping tie-ins. But the kind of convergence people really want is dishing about Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin's duologue with their Facebook friends. It's doubtful people tuned in by the millions to see the Oscars' interpretative-dance number, in which performers did the robot to the score of Up. Or maybe they did, but to make fun of it together. (In a way, social media are better for bad TV than for good TV, like ketchup on a mediocre burger.) We call things like Facebook social media, but contrary to its image, TV is also inherently social, at least when it comes to big games, big galas or American Idol finales. People throw parties around it; they watch it to be able to talk to other people about it. Social media enhance rather than replace events like the Oscars and — important when DVRs let people record shows and skip the ads — make watching them in real time worthwhile so people can be in on the conversation. Because as much as we like to watch, we like to talk. We also love to talk back. This year, the Oscars' In Memoriam clip reel conspicuously ignored the passing of Farrah Fawcett; within moments, Farrah Fawcett was a top phrase on Twitter's real-time "trending topics" list. When an unidentified woman Kanye'd the Best Documentary Short director, barging onstage and taking the mike as he gave his acceptance speech, viewers were baffled — unless they were following Twitter, whose hive mind quickly deduced that she was the film's producer, kept from accepting the award after a falling-out. On TV alone, the Oscars show was the usual gala of stars, thank-yous and back-patting. On social-media platforms, it was a conversation about fashion (what is J. Lo wearing?), race (why do they cut to Morgan Freeman every time Precious wins an award?) and politics (Fox News paranoiac Glenn Beck tweeted that Avatar vs. The Hurt Locker was "an anti US/human movie against an anti US/Troops movie"). TV with Twitter is like an instant DVD commentary. Social media aren't a panacea for the TV business; ordinary, nonevent shows are still losing viewers to video games, DVDs and every other modern distraction and niche offering. Rather, it seems that mostly the biggest shows are getting bigger. But there's a simple lesson here, not just for TV but also for the rest of old media, including print. As no less an old-media guy than longtime CBS chief Leslie Moonves told the New York Times, "The Internet is our friend, not our enemy." Yes, new technologies can change old institutions and sometimes end them. But they can also enhance old media and even help those of us in the contentmaking business do our jobs. (I kicked around ideas for this column by checking in with TV fans who were following my Twitter feed, twitter.com/poniewozik. At the least, TV's Twittercooler dividend suggests one thing for old-media folks wrestling with the problem of new media: don't look at it as a problem. Social media have turned the world into one big living room. The future belongs to those who pull up a chair.
Slide 35: IN THE ARENA Karl Rove's Memoir: Act of Vengeance By JOE KLEIN Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 Illustration by Stephen Kroninger for TIME; Rove: John Beale / AP; Bush: Jack Plunkett / AP There is not much news in Karl Rove's memoir, Courage and Consequence, which is something of a moral triumph for the author. Rove is nothing if not loyal, and these sorts of books tend to create a stir only when they betray the boss. A significant amount of dirt is dished here — an astonishing amount, actually; this is a work of titanic pettiness — but it's all tossed at enemies of George W. Bush. One example: Hillary Clinton is criticized for sitting down, rather than standing, for a photo with rescue workers three days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Bush, who had just arrived at ground zero, is standing for photos, and it simply doesn't occur to Rove that Clinton had already spent most of the past several days there, working desperately for her constituents. Rove is not always so unfair; he manages to demolish more than a few of the sillier attacks against him and the President. But this book is primarily an act of vengeance — and, in that sense, unintentionally revealing about the nature of the Bush presidency. The nugget that did make some news was Rove's admission that Bush could never have gotten congressional support for invading Iraq without the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Of course, Rove defends the decision to go to war. But his reason for doing so is laughably thin: everybody thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and therefore everybody thought Saddam was a threat. Rove offers a damning list of Democratic politicians acting like politicians — making bellicose
Slide 36: statements prior to the war, then criticizing Bush for rushing in when no WMD turned up. Touché. But then he goes a step too far. "Perhaps the most pathetic display of hypocrisy came from one of America's most embittered politicians: former Vice President Al Gore," Rove writes. He proceeds to quote a 2002 Gore speech: "We know that [Saddam] has stored away supplies of biological weapons and chemical weapons throughout his country." Rove's busy-beaver oppo researchers should get credit for digging up that one ... except that it was delivered in the midst of a vehement antiwar speech. Gore, in fact, was making a wise argument: war was not justified even if Saddam had WMD. But taking those sort of lines out of context is how you hammer your opponents in political campaigns — and Rove made sure Bush's White House was run as a perpetual political campaign, even when it came to war. This, not dirty tricks, is at the heart of the Rovian deficiency. A good chunk of Courage and Consequence is taken up by the Joseph Wilson affair and the outing of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA agent — an allotment that is justified from Rove's point of view, since he spent a good chunk of the Bush Administration fighting off an indictment in the case. In July 2003, Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times disputing Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. There was some exaggeration involved, but the bottom line was accurate. There was no uranium deal; Saddam didn't have a nuclear program. But Wilson's timing was exquisite: there was a growing realization that Bush's casus belli — WMD — was baloney. The White House went into panic mode, trying to discredit Wilson and rescue Bush's reputation; the outing of Plame made these efforts potentially felonious. The subsequent investigation devolved into a petty attempt to nail Rove and Scooter Libby on perjury charges for denying they had talked to journalists, and Rove has reason to be outraged by the fishing expedition. But it's also a diversion from the real story. In June 2003, just before the White House was transfixed by the Wilsons, Bush was told by the CIA that a classic insurgency was under way in Iraq. His Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, refused to acknowledge that. The war was criminally mismanaged for the next four years, until Rumsfeld was fired and David Petraeus was sent to Iraq to clean up the mess. Along the way, the situation in Afghanistan was criminally neglected as well. This remains an astonishing record of incompetence. Rove doesn't mention it at all. Rove's defense of Bush is partially successful: the President emerges as a man who put policy above politics. You can disagree with the policies, but not with Bush's sincere belief in them. And even though the war in Iraq remains one of the worst decisions ever made by an American President, the possibility of stability in Iraq, raised again by the recent elections, makes it, potentially, a mitigated disaster. Rove is less successful in defending himself: the crucial revelation here is that when you make a political consultant your senior policy adviser, spin supplants substance, oppo research rules and winning the news cycle becomes more important than winning the war.
Slide 37: Generation Next By NANCY GIBBS Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 Illustration by Gerard Dubois for TIME Come back with me 40 years to the rabid spring of 1970. President Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia, and campuses exploded. Kids who had never picked up a rock in their lives were occupying the classrooms they used to study in. When National Guardsmen shot four unarmed students at Kent State, virtually the entire system of higher education shuddered and stopped. The fabric of the country seemed to be tearing; everything about the older generation was contaminated, corrupt. Asked in a Gallup poll if there was a generation gap, 74% of the young people of that era said yes. And now? Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them. The members of the millennial generation, ages 18 to 29, are so close to their parents that college students typically check in about 10 times a week, and they are all Facebook friends. Kids and parents dress alike, listen to the same music and fight less than previous generations, and millennials assert that older people's moral values are generally superior to their own. Yet even more young people perceive a gap. According to a recently released Pew Research Center report, 79% of millennials say there is a major difference in the point of view of younger and older people today. Young Americans are now more educated, more diverse, more optimistic and less likely to have a job than previous generations. But it is in their use of technology that millennials see the greatest difference, starting perhaps with the fact that 83% of them sleep with their cell phones. Change now comes so strong and fast that it pulls apart even those who wish to hang together--and the future belongs to the strong of thumb. But we miss the point, warns social historian Neil Howe, if we weigh only how technology shapes a generation and not the other way around. The millennials were raised in a cocoon, their anxious parents afraid to let them go out in the park to play. So should we be surprised that they learned to leverage technology to build community, tweeting and texting and friending while their elders were still dialing long-distance? They are the most likely of any generation to think technology unites people rather than isolates them, that it is primarily a means of connection, not competition. That hunger for community further distinguishes them from the radical individualists of the baby-boom years. In fact, in some respects the millennials emerge as radically conventional. Asked about their life
Slide 38: goals, 52% say being a good parent is most important to them, followed by having a successful marriage; 59% think that the trend of more single women having children is bad for society. While more tolerant than older generations, they are still more likely to disapprove of than support the trend of unmarried couples living together. While they're more politically progressive than their elders, you could argue that their strong support for gay marriage and interracial marriage reflects their desire to extend traditional institutions as widely as possible. If boomers were always looking to shock, millennials are eager to share. But they are also unconventionally conventional. They are, for example, the least officially religious of any modern generation, and fully 1 in 4 has no religious affiliation at all. On the other hand, they are just as spiritual, just as likely to believe in miracles and hell and angels as earlier generations were. They pray about as much as their elders did when they were young--all of which suggests that they have not lost faith in God, only in the institutions that claim to speak for him. The greatest divide of all has to do with hope and heart. In any age, young folk tend to be more cheerful than old folk, but the hope gap has never been greater than it is now. Despite two wars and a nasty recession that has hit young people hardest, the Pew survey found that 41% of millennials are satisfied with how things are going, compared with 26% of older people. Less than a third of those with jobs earn enough to lead the kind of life they want--but 88% are confident that they will one day. "Youth is easily deceived," Aristotle said, "because it is quick to hope." But I'd rather think that the millennials know something we don't about the inventions that will emerge from their networked brains, the solutions that might arise from a generation so determined to bridge gaps and work as a team. In that event, their vision would be vindicated, not only for themselves but for those of us who will one day follow their lead.
Slide 39: NATION The Pennsylvania Senate Race: Specter Under Fire By KAREN TUMULTY Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 Senator Arlen Specter speaks with reporters at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland Charles Dharapak / AP Arlen Specter has always been a survivor. The Pennsylvania Senator has endured two bouts of Hodgkin's lymphoma and the chemotherapy that goes with it, a couple of procedures for a recurrent benign brain tumor, and heart-bypass surgery that sent him into cardiac arrest. And in a political career that has spanned 45 years, he has regularly sidestepped doom. Specter's most celebrated swerve came last April, when he switched parties to avoid a Republican primary against a conservative challenger he had barely beaten in 2004. He acknowledged he could never win the GOP nomination for a sixth term after voting for Barack Obama's economic stimulus package — a move that was one heresy too many for the shrinking Pennsylvania Republican Party. At the time, Specter's switch was hailed as a heady affirmation that Barack Obama had ushered the nation into a new, post-partisan era. With the defection of one of its last Senate moderates, what was left of the GOP appeared to be careering rightward, to a hard-core base that was beginning to resemble a cult as much as a political party. But a year later, those calculations have been tossed upside down. Obama's poll numbers have come back to earth. And the filibuster-proof Senate majority that Specter's defection delivered to the Democrats vanished when Massachusetts voters handed Teddy Kennedy's old seat to Scott Brown. Democratic control of the House is in jeopardy, and the party stands to lose at least a half-dozen seats in the Senate. "Unless something significant changes," political handicapper Charlie Cook wrote last month, Democrats "are headed toward the losses of the magnitude we saw in the midterm elections of 1958, 1966, 1974, 1994 and 2006." A Shifting Keystone Nowhere is the political shift more evident than in Pennsylvania, a quintessential swing state, where Specter now finds himself in the political fight of his life. Last year's party switch has left him exposed on
Slide 40: both his left and his right in a 2010 political environment that has turned decidedly toxic for incumbents. This is despite the fact that the Democratic establishment has locked arms around its 80-year-old convert. After Specter became a Democrat, he spent the next few months wooing party officials in all 67 Pennsylvania counties and reminding them of all the federal dollars he had brought home over the years. It paid off. The state Democratic committee endorsed him in February with an overwhelming 229-72 vote. "I have been involved in many, many elections but never one quite as thrilling as this one," Specter said as he accepted the party's benediction. "I feel good about being a Democrat and being able to continue supporting those Democratic values." Obama has also come through for him, raising more than $2.1 million at a single event in September for the party and its new champion. In addition, Democratic leaders tried to clear the field for Specter in the primary. But they couldn't stop Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak, a retired Navy admiral whom the party had initially been recruiting to run against Specter back when he was still a Republican. Sestak has said the White House went so far as to offer him a top job in the Administration to get him out of the race; he has declined to provide details but has hinted that it may have been Secretary of the Navy. The White House denies it. Sestak, who grew up in Delaware County, has the potential to draw the liberal Democratic base away from Specter in the May 18 primary. He's striking a chord with those who have spent the past three decades working to get Specter out of office. "I think there's been too much Republican lite and not enough real Democrats around," says Darwin Roseberry, a Democratic committeeman from West Rockhill Township who showed up to hear Sestak speak at a St. Patrick's Day breakfast in Bucks County. "Specter is not a real Democrat." Thus far, Sestak has failed to meet expectations; he was 24 points down in the latest Quinnipiac University poll. But the same survey revealed that Specter has vulnerabilities. More than half of the Pennsylvanians surveyed said their senior Senator does not deserve another term; among Democrats who know the candidates well enough to have an opinion of both, Sestak led Specter 54% to 37%. "My challenge is name recognition," Sestak says. "That's the one challenge I have." If so, it is one Sestak may be able to surmount once he starts tapping a campaign war chest that has grown to $5.2 million. If Specter survives the primary, he will face a stiffer test in November against former Congressman Patrick Toomey — the man whose candidacy drove Specter from the Republican Party. In 2004, Specter beat the far more conservative Toomey by a mere 17,000 votes of the million cast in the Republican primary — which is one reason Specter realized he couldn't win a rematch against him four years later in a primary that would be decided by a smaller, more conservative party base. After Specter's party switch, Toomey was down in the polls by 20 points against Specter in a general-election matchup. The GOP scouted unsuccessfully for a more moderate candidate, like popular former governor Tom Ridge. So dark were Toomey's prospects that Senator Orrin Hatch, the vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, lamented to Politico.com, "I don't think there is anybody in the world who believes he can get elected Senator there." Now it is Specter who is the underdog. Toomey — who stresses fiscal issues and downplays his conservatism on social issues — has been leading in most of the recent polls. He's raised more money than any other Senate challenger in the country, thanks in part to backing from the Club for Growth, a well-funded antitax organization, which Toomey ran from 2005 to 2009. He is also a favorite of Tea Party
Slide 41: activists, who account for so much political energy on the right these days. "It's an uphill battle in the general — no ifs, ands or buts about it," says Pennsylvania's Democratic governor, Ed Rendell, who has thrown the force of his political operation behind Specter. Principle — or Opportunism? Ultimately, what is going to save Specter or sink him is his record. It's hard to think of anyone else in politics who has charted a path so quirky and defiant of an ideological label. In fact, last year marked the second time he has switched parties; he started his career as a Democrat but became a Republican when he decided to run for Philadelphia district attorney in 1965. He is pro-choice and pro–gay rights. Conservatives have never forgiven him for sinking Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork in 1987; liberals feel the same about his zealous grilling of Anita Hill when her accusations of sexual harassment nearly killed Clarence Thomas' nomination in 1991. The question is whether Pennsylvania voters will see those kinds of moments as evidence of principle or opportunism. As I followed the candidates around the Philadelphia area recently, I found both sentiments. "He's an independent voice," insists Charles Johns, an Allentown retiree and lifelong Democrat. Johns says he has voted for Specter ever since watching the Bork hearings on C-SPAN. But for Debbie Goldstein, 54, who changed her registration to Republican to vote for him when she was 18, Specter's party switch was the last straw. "I always thought Specter was good for Pennsylvania. He fought to keep the Navy Yard open," says Goldstein, who is active in local Republican politics in the village of Plymouth Meeting. "But now he's kind of burned-out, more like a puppet being pushed around, and he doesn't know what he is doing." It doesn't help Specter's case that he had been vowing not to switch parties practically right up until the moment that he did. Only weeks before, he had argued that it was vital that he stand as a 41st Republican vote in the Senate: "If there's a Democrat in my place, they'll be able to do anything they want." And though Specter promised not to be a rubber stamp for his new party, he has since shifted leftward into its mainstream. He went from opposing a government-run public option on health care to supporting one and from voting for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 to urging for its repeal. Specter has also reversed himself to support the controversial idea of pushing health care legislation through with "reconciliation," a parliamentary process that would get it past a filibuster. "That kind of cynical political opportunism turns people off. It's what people think is wrong with Washington," says Toomey. "Not everyone is going to agree with every one of my positions and policies. But people know that I believe in what I say and that I will do what I say I will do." Meanwhile, Sestak warns fellow Democrats that they can't count on Specter to stay with them if he wins the primary: "He is a flight risk after May 18." But Specter professes that he has found a comfortable home in his new party. "Many, many, many people have told me, 'You're the only Republican I ever voted for. Now it's easier,' " he says. What's happening to him, he insists, is a function of larger forces at work. The Republican Party's "sole calculation is defeating Obama in 2012," he says. "The whole country is caught in the cross fire. I would not say no to the stimulus package when it looked to me that the country was about to slide into a 1929 Depression. After my stimulus vote, there were irreconcilable differences between the Republican Party and me."
Slide 42: Tough races, Specter adds, are nothing new for him. "It's a challenge, and that's what I've been doing for a lot of years. I think I'm on the right side of the issues," he says. "There are a lot of things I want to do in the Senate." The question now is whether Pennsylvania voters see Arlen Specter as a solution to America's broken politics — or a symptom of them. Scenes from the Pennsylvania Senate Race Incumbent Specter After switching from the GOP to the Democratic party in 2009, the senior Senator from Pennsylvania is locked in one of the most challenging election fights of his career.
Slide 43: Democratic Challenger Recruited by the Democrats back when Specter was still a Republican, retired Navy Admiral Joe Sestak has provided a threat to him from the left. Though he underperforms the incumbent in polls, Sestak has the potential to draw the liberal Democratic base away from him in the May 18 primary. The GOP Candidate Even if Specter can survive the primary, he will have a stiffer challenge in the fall, when he is likely to face conservative Patrick Toomey. A loser to Specter in 2004 by a mere 17,000 votes, Toomey now leads the incumbent in recent polls
Slide 44: Swing State The challenge to Specter's long reign is representative of Democrats in other states. Just a little over a year since the election of Obama and the Democrats ascension in the House, the party is anxiously eyeing the November elections, with at least a half-dozen seats in the Senate in danger. Handshake After switching parties, Specter worked hard to win the support of Pennsylvania Democrats. The state Democratic committee endorsed him in February with an overwhelming 229-72 vote. President Obama has also done his part, raising $2.5 million for him at an event last September.
Slide 45: Funded Sestak acknowledges that he lacks the name recognition of his Democratic opponent, but that is something he may be able to overcome in the coming weeks. He has amassed a significant war chest, around $5.2 million, that could help him overcome this disadvantage. Leading Light GOP candidate Toomey also boasts a substantial war chest, thanks in part to backing from the Club for Growth, an anti-tax organization that he ran from 2005 to 2009. Democratic Breakfast
Slide 46: The Pennsylvania race will most likely be decided on the basis of Specter's own record. Is he a man of principle or an opportunist? Did he switch parties to support Democratic issues or to save his own skin? Unwavering Candidate Sestak argues that Democrats cannot trust Specter. "He is a flight risk after (primary day) May 18," he says. Signs of the Times In November, GOP candidate Toomey is likely to fair well among the tea party activists who account for so much of the political energy on the right in this election cycle.
Slide 47: The Senator in His Office Specter, at least in public, seems unfazed by the difficulties he faces. Tough races are nothing new to him. "It's a challenge, and that's what I've been doing for a lot of years," he says. I think I'm on the right side of the issues. There are a lot of things I want to do in the Senate."
Slide 48: Sexism and the Navy's Female Captain Bligh By Mark Thompson / Washington Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 Illustration by John Ritter for TIME; Graf: U.S. Navy / AP; Ship: AP It should have been clear to the U.S. Navy that Holly Graf wasn't fit for command when her destroyer steamed out of a Sicilian port in 2003 on the eve of the Iraq war. Without warning, all 9,000 tons of the U.S.S. Winston S. Churchill shuddered as it cleared the harbor's breakwater. The screws stopped turning, and the 511-ft.-long ship was soon adrift. "What the hell happened?" Commander Graf demanded from the bridge. She grabbed her cowering navigator and pulled him onto the outdoor bridge wing. "Did you run my f___ing ship aground?" she screamed. Not only was this a possible naval disaster, but it was a diplomatic one as well: the navigator was an officer in the British Royal Navy, a billet unique to the Churchill. But amid all the chaos and shouting, the sound heard next was more startling. Sailors on the Churchill's stern, suspecting that their ship had run aground — meaning Graf's career would be instantly over — broke gleefully into song: "Ding dong, the witch is dead!" Newly arrived Navy chaplain Maurice Kaprow could not believe what he was seeing and hearing. "Someone came up to me and said, 'We've run aground — she's finished,' " he recalls. "I was flabbergasted. They were jumping for joy and singing on the fantail." As it turned out, one of the ship's propellers had broken. But seven years later, Kaprow still cannot fathom which was worse: that U.S. sailors were openly heckling a captain or that the captain seemed to deserve it. Graf's next command, as captain of the guided-missile cruiser U.S.S. Cowpens, would be her last. Graf was relieved of duty in January, after nearly two years on the Cowpens, for "cruelty and maltreatment" of her crew, according to a blistering Navy inspector general's report obtained by TIME. The report has rocked the service to its bilges because it calls into question the way the Navy chooses, promotes and then monitors its handpicked skippers. The saga of Holly Graf suggests the Navy had long ignored warning signs about her suitability for command. And while news of her spectacular fall instantly raised questions about institutional sexism, the lesson may be the opposite, as her case highlights how the Navy has pushed to integrate women into its war-fighting fleet.
Slide 49: Master and Commander Holly Graf had dreamed of skippering a Navy vessel ever since her high school days in Simsbury, Conn. Her father was a Navy captain, and her sister Robin wanted to go to sea too. (Robin eventually became an admiral — and married one; Holly is single.) After she graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1985, colleagues sensed that Graf was on a fast track to flag rank. Graf alternated tours aboard a destroyer tender, a frigate and a destroyer with shore assignments at the Pentagon and as a Navy ROTC instructor at Villanova University, outside Philadelphia. She earned a Bronze Star during the Iraq war (along with the Legion of Merit, Defense Meritorious Service Medal and two Meritorious Service Medals). Adding some academic heft to her résumé, Graf earned three master's degrees — in national security from the Naval War College, in civil engineering from Villanova and in systems analysis from the Naval Postgraduate School. Early in her career, there were few signs of the abusive commander she would become. "I knew Holly a long time ago," wrote one acquaintance on a naval blog last week. "My memory of her is nothing like how the posts on this and other boards are portraying her." Graf's darker side began to emerge when she was assigned to the destroyer U.S.S. Curtis Wilbur in 1997, as the executive officer (XO), or second in command. Kirk Benson, who retired from the Navy as a commander after a 20-year career, says his tour aboard the Curtis Wilbur with Graf was "the worst time in my life." Her constant berating of the crew led him to complain, he says, but nothing was done. "When I think of Holly Graf, even 12 years later, I shake," says Benson. "It was hard to imagine her as an XO, never mind getting command of two ships." If the Navy had warning signs about Graf after her time on the Curtis Wilbur, it didn't seem to pay them any heed. Instead, in 2003, Graf made U.S. Navy history by becoming the first female commander of a destroyer, the Churchill. Kaprow, the Jewish chaplain, recalls his time aboard the Churchill in 2003 as the strangest of more than 200 such visits to ships in his 20-year career. Morale was the lowest he had ever encountered on any vessel. Kaprow says he tried to talk to Graf about her leadership style after 10 days aboard. "I told her, 'I'm getting some vibes — you're a nice lady, and you have a hard job' — I'm telling her some of the junior officers are concerned and are really upset," Kaprow recalls. "I'm giving her the spiel, and she just goes bonkers and cuts me off. She said she didn't want to talk about it." Kaprow says she wouldn't talk to him for the rest of his stay. When he left the ship, he reported what he had witnessed to Graf's superior. But his complaints, like those made by Benson and others, produced no apparent change in Graf's demeanor and did not slow her rise. Graf's command of the Churchill ended in early 2004 when she was replaced, after 22 months, by Commander Todd Leavitt. It was a routine hail and farewell, recalls Paul Coco, a 2002 Naval Academy graduate who served as gunnery officer aboard the Churchill, except in one respect: "As soon as Commander Leavitt said 'I relieve you' to Commander Graf, the whole ship, at attention, roared in cheers." The Cruel Sea On June 1, 2007, 22 years after leaving Annapolis, Graf was promoted to captain. Her assumption of command of the U.S.S. Cowpens in March 2008 was a second special day for her and for women in the Navy. The 567-ft., 10,000-ton vessel is the Navy's largest surface combatant, and Graf was the first —
Slide 50: and is so far the only — woman to command this class of ship, with its 400-member crew. Driving a boxy cruiser requires ship-handling skills more deft than those needed to skipper a sleek destroyer or a frigate. But commanding the crew proved to be a far greater challenge for her. A six-month Navy investigation found that Graf assaulted members of her crew and pressured junior officers to do her improper favors. She grabbed them to get their attention — usually while in a heated discussion. She asked junior officers to play piano at her personal Christmas party and to walk her dogs. Then there were the things she failed to do, like train her crew adequately. This charge seemed to generate the most anger among young officers, who must make the most of their time at sea — and pass critical tests — if they are going to win promotion. "I don't have time to train junior officers," she allegedly told a fellow officer, even though the probe concluded that it should have been one of her "highest priorities." At times, she seemed to prefer humiliation as a teacher. The probe discovered that she put a "well-respected Master Chief" in "time out" — standing in the ship's key control room doing nothing — "in front of other watch standers of all ranks," which enraged Navy personnel. Most damaging, perhaps, was Graf's habit of verbal abuse. The language of naval command is supposed to be crisp and to the point. Orders pertaining to speed, direction and a host of other decisions needed to guide a warship are repeated back and forth among those on the bridge to reduce the chance of error. There's remarkably little conversation on the bridge at most times; swearing is extremely rare. (Belowdecks, among enlisted personnel, it is more common.) But according to 29 of 36 members of the cruiser's crew questioned by Navy investigators — whose names were redacted from the report and who therefore could not be contacted by TIME — Graf repeatedly dropped F bombs on them. "Take your goddam attitude and shove it up your f___ing ass and leave it there," she allegedly told an officer during a stressful maneuver at sea. Graf could be particularly withering toward females. One younger woman recalled going to Graf to seek her help. "Don't come to me with your problems," she said Graf responded. "You're a f___ing department head." The officer said Graf once told her, "I can't express how mad you make me without getting violent." A second female officer told investigators that Graf was "a terrible role model for women in the Navy," recalling what Graf allegedly said to her and a fellow officer on the bridge: "You two are f___ing unbelievable. I would fire you if I could, but I can't." Last summer, three crew members privately sought a probe into her handling of the Japan-based Cowpens. In her defense, Graf told investigators that she had "no recollection" of making such comments, and she "appeared incredulous at the accusations." Graf charged that a small group of disgruntled officers were spreading rumors among the crew "and convincing others that the command climate and [her] demeanor were far worse than they actually were." But she followed up with an email. "Many times I raised my tone (and used swear words) to ensure they knew this time, it was no kidding," she wrote. "I also did it on other occasions to intentionally pressurize the situation." The investigators gave Graf no quarter. Graf violated Navy regulations "by demeaning, humiliating, publicly belittling and verbally assaulting ... subordinates while in command of Cowpens," the report found. Her actions "exceeded the firm methods needed to succeed or even thrive," and her "harsh language and profanity were rarely followed with any instruction." Her repeated criticism of her officers,
Slide 51: often in front of lower-ranking crew members, was "contrary to the best interests of the ship and the Navy." When the 50-page report landed on the desk of Graf's superior, Rear Admiral Kevin Donegan, he relieved her of command. Was She Singled Out? The Holly Graf saga has left the Navy facing two uncomfortable questions: Would the Navy have relieved a man for the errors Graf committed? And if Graf's command style was so toxic, how did the Navy miss it in the first place? The answers are interrelated. Some officers seem to rise magically through the ranks, immune to criticism that would trip up others. Some who watched Graf climb the command ladder assumed she had an ally somewhere that mattered. But that doesn't appear to be the case. Though she came from a family with a long Navy background, she cleared every hurdle the Navy set up for her. Top officers simply didn't pay close enough attention to what happened after that. So was Graf relieved of her command simply because she is female? "She acted like a man, and now she was being punished for it," says retired commander Darlene Iskra, who in 1990 was the first woman to command a Navy ship, the U.S.S. Opportune, a salvage vessel. But Iskra's view is hard to square with the fact that the service promoted Graf at every turn, gave her two historic assignments and made her something of an example for younger female officers. In fact, Graf was slated for a top Navy staff job at the Pentagon when the IG report scuttled that assignment. More important, the consensus among active and retired Navy officers is that Graf would have suffered the same fate had she been male. A better explanation is that the Navy failed to move on Graf earlier not in spite of her gender but because of it. Following the Tailhook scandal — in which Navy aviators assaulted dozens of women at a 1991 convention — the service rushed women to sea to show it was no longer locked in the Dark Ages. The service was under political pressure to diversify its leadership, and Graf was part of the answer: the first woman to command both a destroyer and a cruiser. Some veterans believe Graf needed more time to prepare for those commands. "I have some sympathy for her," says Nicole Waybright, a young female officer who served with Graf on the Wilbur Curtis. "The Navy felt under pressure to take a woman and put her on the best and most complicated tactical platform," Waybright says. "But she didn't have much experience on it." Some rookies could have stepped up to that challenge, she adds, but not Graf. "She was," Waybright says, "a terrible ship handler." The Graf case is sure to make the lives of Navy recruiters more difficult. Shawn Smith is a retired Navy captain who — along with her husband, also a retired Navy captain — applauded their daughter's decision to join the Navy in 2007 after graduating from Notre Dame on a Navy ROTC scholarship. Erin Smith was "seriously considering" making the Navy a career, as her parents did, until she was assigned to the Cowpens. "Her experiences with Captain Graf definitely helped form her decision to do her time and leave the Navy," her mother says. "I was appalled that this happened, guilty — I think she went into the Navy because of us — and angry, because these kids did not deserve this kind of leadership."
Slide 52: Graf declined to be interviewed for this article. She is now headed for the Navy weapons lab at Dahlgren, Va., a bureaucratic backwater where she is virtually certain to face a follow-up hearing that could end her career — if she doesn't request retirement first.
Slide 53: WORLD Postcard from Brooklyn By KATE PICKERT Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 Industrial waste and raw sewage give the Gowanus a sometimes pungent odor. Jose Gaytan New York, a city of Islands and rivers, has almost no accessible waterfront. Highways line Manhattan's riverbanks. Frontage real estate in Brooklyn and Queens — which comprise the bulbous western end of Long Island — is largely postindustrial wasteland. Most New Yorkers rarely venture to Staten Island, and much of the daily commuter traffic across the Hudson and East rivers occurs underground in subways and tunnels. Perhaps this is why the possibility of a new, Venice-like waterway in the heart of Brooklyn held such appeal. Against all odds, for the past several years Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration has lobbied to turn the borough's Gowanus Canal — a foul, PCB-laden channel that winds for nearly two miles (about 3 km) — into a destination spot for condo dwellers and upscale retail developers. On March 2, however, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) offered the city a reality check when it designated the Gowanus a Superfund site. The distinction is reserved for the country's most hazardous waste sites and allows the federal government to direct cleanup and charge polluters for their share of the burden. The EPA's decision and the stigma that comes with it have deferred dreams of a Gowanus renaissance, if not quashed them altogether. During the past decade, as the real estate boom drove New York housing prices higher and higher, there seemed to be no land in the city that couldn't somehow be salvaged. The city joined local activists to zero in on the Gowanus Canal, hoping it could become the anchor for a
Slide 54: neighborhood renewal. Several developers announced plans to construct new apartments; Whole Foods, a harbinger of upward mobility, purchased a nearby parcel. In recent years, sightings of jellyfish, cormorants, bass and even a harp seal were celebrated as signs that the canal had a bright future. Some adventurous souls, seeking to highlight the canal's potential, even started a canoeing club. But pleasure boaters were warned not to touch the water — and for good reason. Recent testing revealed the presence of heavy metals and pesticides, along with cancer-causing PCBs, concentrated in sediment at the bottom of the canal. The magnitude of the cleanup task seemed to call out for federal intervention. The EPA says its plan will take up to 12 years; the city's more modest plan was judged inadequate by federal officials. After the waterway was carved out of wetlands in the 1860s, oil refineries, tanneries and chemical plants moved in and spewed noxious waste into the canal, where it mixed with raw sewage. Before long, Gowanus was a cesspool. Today the surface can appear brown, green, black and sometimes purple, earning the canal the moniker Lavender Lake. Neighborhood residents whisper that the bottom is littered with bodies dumped there by the Mafia. Cheap and crumbling spaces, however, often attract a city's most creative people. A vibrant artist community has settled into the decrepit industrial landscape around the canal, and some of its members are breathing a sigh of relief in the wake of the EPA decision. High-end-condo development "presents a danger of a different sort," says Tamara Pittman, who works at the Proteus Gowanus art gallery. Pittman says she knows the canal needs to be cleaned up but still can't help admiring its "beautiful neglect." The artists who have been attracted to the area's preserved detritus (and low rents) hope the EPA's ruling means they have at least a decade more to peacefully exist without fearing encroachment from condo towers. (One developer has already scrapped plans to construct a 460-unit complex.) Peter Reich, an artist and father of three, has lived and worked right next to the Gowanus since 1983. Charged with maintaining his apartment building's basement boiler, he sometimes wades through the water that rushes in during rainstorms. "It's nice to have an enclave to hang out in that no one wants to develop," says Reich. "We're still pioneers." Afghanistan's Fix By Tim McGirk / Kabul Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 When U.S. marines raided the notorious Lachoya opium bazaar in the southwestern Afghan region of Marjah at the start of their massive military offensive there last month, they found 700 kg of raw opium and 25 kilos of heroin. Anywhere else in the world, that would have been a major drug bust, but for
Slide 55: Marjah, it was mere crumbs. After all, when Afghan and U.S. counternarcotics agents raided the same market nearly a year ago, the haul was measured in tons, not kilos. But the Marines lacked the element of surprise; to minimize civilian casualties, U.S. and NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal had warned of the offensive weeks in advance. The drug traffickers and many of their Taliban protectors had cleared out long before Operation Moshtarak (Dari for together) began. Marjah is just a scattering of dusty villages set amid 17,000 hectares of poppy fields. But its backwater appearance is deceptive: until last month, it was the hub of a dozen international drug syndicates reaching across borders as far away as Europe, Russia and the Far East. The U.N. reckons Marjah has the world's highest concentration of opium production. So Operation Moshtarak is more than a military offensive; it is also the biggest counternarcotics operation ever attempted. It marks a new emphasis by the White House and the Pentagon on choking off the Taliban from their drug funds and ending their support among the Pashtun tribes of southern Afghanistan. U.S. Marines, responding to enemy fire, trample through a poppy field in Marjah. Opium is the region's economic mainstay, providing a livelihood for thousands. Tyler Hicks / The New York Times / Redux The crackdown is a big change from the Bush Administration's counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan, which never got beyond occasional attempts to raze poppy fields. Once the war in Iraq began, U.S. officials said they lacked the resources to fight both the drug syndicates and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Also, many of the Afghan warlords whom the U.S. relied on to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda were involved in the drug trade. Now, officials say, the Obama Administration is taking a tough approach to drugs in Afghanistan, sparing no one, not even friends and associates of President Hamid Karzai. "Everyone's fair game," says a Western counternarcotics official in Kabul. "If someone comes within reach of our investigation, nothing is going to stop us from making a case."
Slide 56: But Marjah is showing why separating the Taliban from their narcodollars is so difficult. Not only did the drug syndicates get away with much of their stash and their heroin labs, but also there's no consensus among NATO commanders, counternarcotics experts and Afghan Cabinet officials on what to do next. The opium trade is woven into the fabric of the economy of southern Afghanistan. In Marjah, as elsewhere, the Taliban protected the drug syndicates for a price, reaping millions of dollars from the opium bounty. But ordinary residents benefited from the drug trade too; it provided a lucrative crop for 70,000 farmers and their families, work for laborers and a source of graft for officials. Even the tribal council played a role in the trade, adjudicating disputes between drug lords. How to break that dependency? Many Western and Afghan counternarcotics experts recommend the cold-turkey approach: just destroy the poppy crop and make the farmers plant something else. Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand province, which includes Marjah, favors this plan. But according to Afghan officials, McChrystal and his military commanders have warned that destroying the crop would enrage the population. Mohammed Rahim Khan, who fled the invasion and has just returned to his poppy fields, tells TIME, "I spent lots of money on my field, and so did my neighbors. If the government destroys the fields, nearly all the people will rise against them." The military commanders advocate simply buying up this year's harvest and persuading farmers to grow something else next season. The counternarcotics officials strongly disagree. Paying the farmers would be tantamount to "rewarding criminality," says a Western official. He adds, "These people knew about the offensive, and they planted the crop anyway. They wanted to make a profit." These officials point out that swaths of eastern Afghanistan have been cleared of opium poppy by provincial counternarcotics teams without any farmers' revolt. Another option for Marjah is to let the farmers harvest the opium and sell it off — and then grab the men who try to smuggle it to the syndicates' heroin labs elsewhere in Afghanistan and in global markets beyond. This would punish the traffickers and their Taliban protectors without hurting the farmers. "Once the farmers are handed their money, we'll close in on the traffickers' trucks and labs," says a NATO general. But counternarcotics agents worry that the drug lords will find ways to get their hands on the opium anyway. The weak link in the chain is the Afghan security forces, which will be manning the checkpoints on the roads out of Marjah. A private in the Afghan National Army earns only $165 a month, making him and his comrades easy prey for a smuggler with a wad of bills. This Isn't OverWhen the military commanders and counternarcotics officials finally agree on what to do with the poppy crop — McChrystal is likely to win that debate — they will confront the next challenge: getting the farmers to eventually grow other crops instead. The last time officials in Kabul tried to get Marjah farmers to switch to wheat cultivation was in 2008, when opium was selling at $75 a kg, a long way down from the peak of $250 a kilo in 2003. Even so, the farmers turned down subsidized wheat seed and fertilizer, believing opium would be more profitable. They were wrong. When the next crop was harvested, says Rory Donohoe, a USAID official in Lashkar Gah, Helmand's provincial capital, "some wheat farmers made more than poppy farmers." That's because opium poppy is a high-maintenance plant and costs five times as much to grow as wheat. Poppy is also expensive to harvest, requiring many laborers, who must scour each poppy pod and manually extract the opium; wheat can usually be harvested by a single farmer.
Slide 57: Since wheat prices have continued to rise since 2008, officials believe the farmers will be more amenable to change. But much will depend on whether the farmers can be persuaded that they've seen the last of the Taliban. Many fear the insurgents will return and punish those who cooperated with U.S. and Afghan officials. A semblance of normality has returned to Marjah under the watchful presence of 15,000 NATO and Afghan forces. Even President Karzai, who seldom leaves his Kabul palace for fear of assassination, was emboldened to pay a flying visit to a local mosque on March 7. He listened while local elders scolded him over his choices of corrupt officials posted to Marjah and the civilian casualties caused by the NATO assault. They also demanded that he build schools and hospitals and provide jobs. "They had some very legitimate complaints — very, very legitimate," Karzai said soberly as he left the mosque. "They felt as though they were abandoned, which in many cases is true." American officials say Karzai knows he must deliver good government to Marjah — something he has failed to do in Kabul — and quickly, or the drug syndicates will be back. Much of the burden will fall to dozens of Afghan officials who arrived on the back of the military offensive to set up a new local administration — McChrystal's so-called government in a box. It has not gotten off to a promising start, though. Abdul Zahir Aryan, the man picked to be the district chief of the new Marjah administration, has a far-from-stellar record. He left for Germany in 1989 and bounced between odd jobs in hotels and laundries; according to U.S. and German press reports, he served four years in prison for the attempted murder of his stepson. (Zahir told TIME this was a "personal issue" that had been resolved.) Some Helmand officials complain he was chosen because of his friendship with the provincial governor rather than for any leadership abilities, but NATO officials say Zahir, despite his long absence from Helmand, is a well-respected tribal elder. Zahir claims that Marjah is "70% under control," but he adds that at night, masked Taliban fighters appear at houses and threaten to behead people if they work with the government. The insurgents need the farmers to stick with the poppy. According to U.N. experts, last year the Taliban reaped nearly $300 million from the drug trade; Afghan officials put the figure far lower, from $80 million to $100 million. Even at the low estimate, says a Western counternarcotics agent, "that's still enough to fuel the insurgency for a year." Nearly all of the Taliban's drug profits came from Helmand province, and a big chunk came from Marjah. While NATO troops remain in the area, the drug traffickers will stay away. Some have fled south to Pakistan's empty Baluchistan desert; others are holed up in the nearby mountains of Musa Qala, while the rest have decamped to Nimruz province, a major smuggler's crossing into Iran. Says Gretchen Peters, an author and expert on Taliban drug ties with traffickers: "Counternarcotics, just like counterinsurgency, is like playing whack-a-mole. You knock it out in one place, and it pops up somewhere else." And the drug lords will be looking for a chance to return to Marjah as soon as the NATO troops move on. That opportunity may present itself this summer. As McChrystal turns his attention to other Taliban strongholds in Helmand and neighboring Kandahar province, he will depend on Afghan security forces to protect Marjah. In the past, the drug lords have exploited the absence of Western troops to strike alliances with Afghan officials, getting them to play the Taliban's role of protectors of the drug trade. Khan, the farmer, has seen it happen before. "When there is no Taliban, the government men take money from
Slide 58: the smugglers to help them move drugs across the border," he says. NATO commanders say they will be on the lookout for bribe taking and will ensure that Kabul makes examples of corrupt officials. But given the prevalence of graft in the capital, it's hard to imagine Marjah will remain clean. Eventually the Taliban will want to return as well. Marjah is too big a prize — for its drug revenue and its propaganda value — to give up. Unlike the drug traffickers, insurgent fighters didn't have to go very far to hide from McChrystal's troops. Abdul Rahman Jan, a tribal elder and former Helmand-province police chief, points out that "hardly a single gun was captured by the NATO forces." He believes that many of the Taliban fighters simply moved back from their quarters inside Marjah's mosques and madrasahs to stay with their families. Wherever they are, the insurgents will keep an eye on the poppy crop. Says Jan: "When the trees and fields get greener and bigger, the Taliban will show themselves again." The battle for Marjah is far from over.
Slide 59: ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Whitney Biennial Exhibitions Painter Lesley Vance in her Los Angeles studio. Jeff Minton for TIME Places, everybody. It's time again for the Whitney Biennial, that giant souk of contemporary culture-product trucked out every two years by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City — very often to be denounced immediately by the critics as yet another fiesta of the trivial, meretricious, illegible and dull. In fact, it's rarely that bad. But because we still presume artists to be uniquely in touch with the spirit of their time, expectations around the Biennial become hopelessly inflated, notwithstanding that we know how rarely the show hits the mark. One of the earliest works by Bruce Nauman (who is not in this year's Biennial) was a wall piece that spelled out in neon light an earnest maxim, "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths." It was simultaneously a put-on, a proclamation of faith and a wistful statement of a hope we have a hard time letting go of. When that's where the bar is set, what mere Biennial can possibly clear it? The dauntless pair who put together this year's Biennial — the independent curator Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari of the Whitney — have had some fun with the show's perennial whipping-boy status by folding into the catalog several decades' worth of reviews, most of them bad, from the New York Times. They have also gone out of their way to lower expectations for this Biennial, which runs through May 30. Not only have they trimmed it down to a manageable 55 participants, but they also declined to impose a theme. They simply call their show "2010," as in "Here are some things that are happening now." For the curators to refuse to offer a thread linking, say, Charles Ray's madly articulated ink drawings of flowers to Marianne Vitale's video of herself barking orders at us and to Suzan Frecon's monumental variations on color-field abstraction may seem like a dereliction of duty. Actually, it's a good idea. It's been decades since there's been a prevailing style or practice in art any more than there is in ice hockey. Like hockey, contemporary art doesn't advance; it just keeps going. But unlike hockey, it sometimes really does help the world by revealing mystic truths.
Slide 60: So how is this year's Biennial? Not bad. Sure enough, there are stretches that are trivial, meretricious, illegible and dull. But there are also things not to be missed. These would be three of them. —Richard Lacayo Green Zone: Bourne Takes Baghdad By RICHARD CORLISS Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 Matt Damon in Green Zone Nobody goes to Iraq-war movies. Four or five years ago, at the height of the insurgency, that was because there were no Iraq-war movies. (Vietnam, while it raged, suffered the same Hollywood blackout.) But even when some directors grew a spine and attempted to dramatize the effects of the American adventure on its soldiers (In the Valley of Elah) and civilians (Lions for Lambs) or on U.S. foreign policy (Rendition), the response was tepid. No Middle East war film has earned even $50 million at the domestic box office, and the one that came closest, The Kingdom, was a gung-ho action picture. Nor has the public's apathy abated. The Best Picture, Director and Screenplay awards that The Hurt Locker won on Oscar night served only as a gigantic promotion for the movie's DVD. In theaters it was the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner of all time. Maybe Green Zone will be the breakthrough. Set in the first months of the U.S. occupation, the film has a churning urgency and a fierce verisimilitude, courtesy of director Paul Greengrass (United 93) and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (The Hurt Locker). Shot in Spain, Morocco and the U.K., the film straps you into a Baghdad state of mind. It's hell at 130°, with dust and dread tarping the streets as if to smother anyone who'd attempt to escape. Murderous intent abounds on both the U.S. and Saddam-loyalist sides; life is cheap, and the stakes are high. If you're not gripped and terrified by the movie, you haven't been paying attention. Green Zone also has Matt Damon, a real movie star, reteaming with Greengrass to essentially parachute their franchise's hero, Jason Bourne, into the toxic reality of Iraq. Like The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, this new collaboration rubs the nose of a fantasy plot into the gritty soil of political
Slide 61: intrigue. Roy Miller, the Army chief warrant officer played by Damon, is a good soldier who realizes that his mission — to unearth the weapons of mass destruction the Bush Administration used as a rationale for invading Iraq — is bogus. Now, dammit, he'll find what's behind that ruse, even if his life is threatened by renegade Baathists and the American high command. Soon he's a one-man army, going rogue or Rambo, dodging not-so-friendly fire and outwrestling an Iraqi thug. He's Bourne again, in Baghdad. Miller tangles with Washington's man in charge, Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear); gets mixed signals from Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), a journalist who fed her readers government misinformation about WMD; and finds an ally in Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), a grizzled old CIA hand. He also gets help from a reluctant Iraqi informant named Freddy (Khalid Abdalla, playing the film's richest character) in pursuing an elusive Saddamist general, al-Rawi (Igal Naor), who may hold the secret to the mystery. The viewer is free to infer that Poundstone is L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Dayne is the New York Times' Judith Miller. (Brown, the repository of weary espionage wisdom, is every CIA or MI5 spy out of a Graham Greene novel.) To complete the skein of conspiracy, the movie also has a stand-in for Washington's Iraq front man, Ahmad Chalabi. Heart of Obfuscation Brian Helgeland's script is "inspired" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran's 2006 book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone. In it, the Washington Post reporter detailed the arrogance and naiveté of the young zealots the Bush Administration sent to pacify Iraq: how they frolicked beside Green Zone swimming pools as if Baghdad were spring-break Fort Lauderdale, handed out tens of millions in cash to American and Iraqi connivers and blithely mismanaged the occupation into chaos. The movie alights on this tragicomedy, if only as background chatter. It's true: you'll have to sit through all the end credits to read that this is a work of fiction. But that it is should be obvious from the middle of Green Zone on, when Miller starts proving that only one good man is needed to corral war criminals of every stripe. He'll be Bourne plus Philip Marlowe plus Seymour Hersh — provided he makes it out alive. The movie, in other words, is made up; Chandrasekaran's book has as much to do with Green Zone as a history of Las Vegas does with The Hangover. Storytellers are of course free to spin fiction from historical fact. But what Greengrass does here, unlike in his scrupulous docudrama about the seizing of United Flight 93 on 9/11, is resolve thorny foreign policy issues from 2003 with 2010 hindsight and the truth-seeking missile of an action-hero superman. Greengrass might say you have to twist the facts to tell the truth, and his film does get to the heart of obfuscation in the early occupation of Iraq. Besides, in movies, entertainment trumps ethics. Green Zone has a fullness of character, a density of detail, a cunning mystery plot and so much stuff blowing up that audiences might not realize they're seeing an Iraq-war film. They'll be too scared stiff enjoying themselves.
Slide 62: What Ails Us By MARY POLS Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 Shriver does well with characters who see the worst in the world. Eva Vermandel / Contour / Getty Images Lionel Shriver has a history of conjuring up cranks and complainers who see everything wrong with the human condition. She usually manages to turn these characters into dark delights, whether they are the demographer in Game Control blithely planning a pandemic or the brittle mother in We Need to Talk About Kevin who abhors her child. Brilliantly funny and a superb plotter, Shriver is a master of the misanthrope. But there's no way to brace for the morass of misanthropy in her new novel So Much for That (Harper; 433 pages), which attacks the American health care system more savagely than any Democrat in Congress has but at no small cost to the reader. The first half overflows with the rantings of a half-dozen furious characters. It's brave, bold and so abrasive that you almost want to give up. You feel as if you're trapped in Michael Moore's head, being lectured on all his pet subjects. I was reading, but still, I almost went deaf. Glynis, a middle-aged artist who works in metals, takes the lead in the outrage stakes. She's mad at herself for not producing enough and at the art world for ignoring her, but she's most furious about having cancer, a rare form called mesothelioma, linked to asbestos exposure. Her family laments that illness is not bringing out the best in Glynis. She disagrees: "Maybe the best in me, to me, is hateful, vindictive and ill wishing ... I wish everyone else were ill, too." Her husband Shep nurses his own resentments. He's long planned to ditch the rat race for what he terms the Afterlife, early retirement in a dirt-cheap yet pleasant developing country. Now, as Glynis' medical bills come in, the prospect of the Afterlife is dwindling along with his savings. Shep's best friend, toxic pontificator Jackson, spends his waking hours taking mental notes for an anticapitalist manifesto he'll never write, but his real problem is heartbreak over his 16-year-old daughter Flicka, who was born with a
Slide 63: fatal genetic disease called familial dysautonomia. Flicka is angry because she is deformed, drooling and dying. These irascible characters get away from Shriver — or rather, they veer too close to one another; their anger may be justifiable, but their voices start to blend. All except Shep, who stands in for what all of us have faced or will face. He views Glynis' artistic life as an indulgence he has underwritten and doesn't think she stands a chance against her illness, but what is he going to do — stop subsidizing her will to survive? Health care in the 21st century is cruel territory, and sometimes, as Shep points out to Glynis' doctor, a positive attitude is the cruelest: "Nobody in this biz is ever sup posed to throw up their hands and call it quits, so long as there's any last teensy weensy, teeny-tiny smidgeon of a chance that some new therapy will eke out a few extra days." Our engagement with Shep's private war between doing the right thing heartwise and doing the right thing headwise saves the novel. In its second half, So Much for That becomes a page turner. Having let her characters amply articulate all the reasons life stinks, Shriver starts making a case for why even a lousy life is worth fighting for, and she does it with a biting honesty that rebukes all sentiment ality. For too long, this book had me thinking its title is dispiriting, a cynical flick at our throwaway dreams. In fact, says this viciously smart writer, the that in So Much for That is something we can choose. An Oscar Comeback: 'And the Winner Is ...' By Bryan Alexander / Los Angeles Monday, Mar. 08, 2010 Sandra Bullock accepts the Oscar for Best Actress at the 82nd Academy Awards in Los Angeles on March 7, 2010 Chris Carlson / AP Observant viewers of Sunday night's 82nd Academy Awards broadcast might have noticed something even more surprising than The Hurt Locker's near sweep of awards or the absence of Farrah Fawcett's face from the roll call of deceased celebrities. For the first time since 1988, winners were back.
Slide 64: Rather than the politically correct, nonjudgmental phrase that has been foisted on presenters for more than two decades — "And the Oscar goes to ..." — presenters this year introduced each winner with the blunt, old-fashioned but perfectly accurate phrase "And the winner is ..." Why the switch? No one at the Motion Picture Academy would give any explanation, though officials acknowledged that it was a decision made by producers Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman, with an O.K. from the Academy. Rival awards shows, which, like the Oscars, have for years forbidden the "winner" phrasing, were quick to notice the change. "I was surprised to hear that. It was kind of jolting," says John Leverence, a senior vice president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which gives out TV's Emmy awards. The rationale for the "award goes to ..." format is twofold: it plugs the award continuously, and it doesn't make losers feel any worse than they already do. "There's just a little bit of negative spin on saying, 'Oh yeah, this guy won this. The rest of you guys, by implication, did not win — hence are losers.' " says Leverence. The Grammy and Emmy ceremonies have no plans to change from their "award goes to" phrasing, according to spokespeople. As for next year's Oscars? That's a decision for the producers who are in charge next year. "It's not permanent," a show spokesperson tells TIME. The Short List of Things to Do WEEK OF MARCH 12 Crystal Bowersox Airing on FOX ILLUSTRATION BY SEAN MCCABE FOR TIME A couple of years ago, American Idol might not have been interested in the Sox. But the husky-voiced folkie has done Idol a favor by breaking its malleable-pop-star mold. Let's hope her health holds out (illness nearly knocked her off the show); losing her would put Idol in critical condition.
Slide 65: The Big To-Do Now in Stores On their eighth studio album of gritty Southern rock, Georgia's Drive-By Truckers sing songs about working-class romantics burdened with dead-end jobs, broken hearts and hangovers. If you don't own cowboy boots, the danceable "Get Downtown" will make you wish you did. Dillinger Is Dead Now on DVD To survive in our toxic society, you need a gas mask. That and a gun like the one John Dillinger had are the main accessories of Michel Piccoli's Glauco in this dark 1969 enigma from Italian provoc-auteur Marco Ferreri. We dare you to watch it — gas mask optional. God of War III Now in Stores No game has ever conveyed combat on a titanic, nay, Miltonic scale like God of War. Now that it's jumped from the mortal PlayStation 2 to the divine PS3, it's even bigger. You play Kratos, the titular god, who storms Olympus to slug it out with the entire Greek pantheon.
Slide 66: Ugly Americans Airing on Comedy Central Adjusting to New York City is tough for newcomers. Particularly when they're demons, zombies or flying, pantless man-birds. Mark Lilly (voiced by Matt Oberg) assists newbies in Comedy Central's sci-fi immigration satire. Give us your tired, your poor and your undead.
Slide 67: SOCIETY Working for Demand Media: The Web's Biggest, Scariest Content Machine By DAN FLETCHER Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 Illustration by Julie Teninbaum for TIME; Cranes: Getty Images (3) I'm hardly qualified to dash off authoritative articles on the theological bona fides of African critters. But one recent evening, I made $15 for writing tips on hard-disc data recovery, another $15 for telling people how to repair burnt carpet and $7.50 for teasing out the answer to that most pressing of questions: Is a giraffe sacred? The reason for my nighttime writing adventure was to see what life is like on a massive content farm. I was working for Demand Media, the content-provider start-up that has quickly become the Web's least understood and most vilified juggernaut. The company has come up with a ruthlessly efficient way to churn out stories it knows will be profitable online. The topics may seem bizarre, but the method, though controversial, is unquestionably a success. You've likely read some of Demand's content without realizing it. Founded in 2006, the company runs a slew of popular Internet portals, including eHow.com Cracked.com and Livestrong.com that receive 100 million hits a month — more traffic than any of the digital properties of Disney, NBC, ESPN or, yes, Time Inc. The company, based in Santa Monica, Calif., is also directing an army of freelancers to write stories that appear in traditional media outlets, most notably in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's weekly travel section, and a Demand executive says more deals with large off-line brands will be announced soon. The finely tuned assembly line is the brainchild of Demand's co-founder Richard Rosenblatt. Best known as the CEO of Intermix Media, owner of MySpace, when the company was sold for $580 million to News Corp. in 2005, Rosenblatt says he learned from his experience with social networks that there were plenty of people producing reams of data online. "But only 1% of that was relevant to more than just people's friends," he says. "What if we could find a way to find those content creators, tell them what to write and create a broader audience?"
Slide 68: It's a business model that starts with mountains of user-behavior data, culled from search engines, YouTube and Demand's websites. To make money, the company also needed to factor in advertising data and figure out which keywords are the most lucrative to create content around. All this gets fed into an algorithm that spits out only the most-in-demand story ideas, no human guesswork required. Sometimes the results make sense ("Nightlife in Paris," for example), but the computer often generates cryptic or oddly specific titles as well, like "How to Start a Lace-Wig Business in Maryland" or "How to Make a Room with a Waterfall." For now, though, Demand still needs humans — namely, writers, editors and video producers — to crank out content. That's where its horde of more than 7,000 freelancers comes in. One person earns a few cents for taking the algorithm's output and turning it into a headline. Another person writes the article, typically earning $3 to $15, depending on the specified length, and passes it on to a copy editor, who banks $3.50 for fact-checking and fiddling with grammar. All told, it may take less than a day, at a cost of less than $10, for a short article to move through the system and get posted on one of Demand's sites, where it immediately starts earning ad revenue. The result is a company that's able to produce profitable content on a scale that traditional news organizations can only envy. Demand estimates that it took in $200 million in revenue in 2009, enough to turn a profit. It helps that none but the company's most prolific content creators get health insurance or, for that matter, a minimum hourly wage. Critics have dubbed the company a digital sweatshop. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, has called Demand "demonic," and many writers prickle at the thought of being paid a few cents — rather than a few dollars — per word. It's not unfair criticism. The best way to make decent money through Demand, as I discovered, is to research and write at breakneck pace, and the result is content that only just squeaks through the system. Working as fast as possible, I could make close to $60 an hour at Demand, a nice improvement on what I'm paid for my day job, but I'd be producing articles that were thinly sourced and poorly written. Demand does have standards, however. Every article requires at least one source (no Wikipedia allowed), and would-be writers are required to submit a résumé and writing samples, and the company says the approval rate is less than 50%. I'm a journalism-school graduate with a full-time job at a magazine (the one you're reading right now); I got in, but a friend with less journalism experience did not. As part of my moonlighting experiment, I pushed through an article with a few factual errors. A copy editor bounced it back with a terse note to check my sourcing. When I strayed too far from an assignment's parameters, I was asked for a rewrite. All told, 40% of the 20 or so articles I submitted required some additional work before they got posted. My deliberate haste and sloppiness with Demand stories have led copy editors to give me, on a five-point scale, a pretty crummy 3.5 for grammar and 3.7 for research. If my scores dip too low, Demand will banish me from the system. If you fault its product, you're missing the point, says co-founder Shawn Colo. "It doesn't pay to do journalism," he says. He's right. Sending writers to Haiti, for example, would defy the company's No. 1 rule: Every piece has to be profitable. That's why Demand's algorithm favors quick explainer pieces like "How to Remove Dents in a Hair Dryer."
Slide 69: As much as Demand execs say they don't want to do journalism, they think they can offer it some help. The company envisions its how-tos running alongside stories in more traditional media, sharing revenue and reducing the need for news outlets to produce certain types of service-oriented content. "We're not saying we're going to save traditional media. That's arrogant," Rosenblatt says. "But we're definitely not going to kill it." That's only part of the company's vision. The other is to keep amping up its production: more writers, more sites and a lot more stories. One of the tenets in the company's manifesto is "Never rest." The same applies to all the cogs like me in Demand's ever whirring machine. After Google helped me track down an article that claims people near a small city in Kenya see the giraffe as a divine omen of good luck (close enough), which I used as a source for my piece, I am ready to tackle my next assignment: home remedies to remove cat urine from parquet floors. Florid prose it may not be, but according to Demand, it's what you want to read. TASTE OF AMERICA Can Anyone Improve Upon the Classic Burger? By JOSH OZERSKY Tuesday, Mar. 02, 2010 The prize-winning bacon cheeseburger from Michael's Genuine in Miami. Jackie Sayet
Slide 70: There is no greater spectacle in the hamburger universe than the annual Rachael Ray Burger Bash, held at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival in Miami. At this year's gastronomic gathering, which took place on Feb. 25, I tried all the burgers and talked to all the chefs, and one thing is clear: the hamburger is at a creative crossroads. What was most striking about this iteration of the event (as opposed to other ones I've gone to, either as a judge or an observer) was how similar so many of the burgers were. Yes, there were a few exotic ones, like Michael Symon's pastrami-topped Fat Doug burger, which won the People's Choice award, the night's biggest honor. Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto won critical raves for a Kakuni burger topped with Japanese pork belly and served with a house-made pickle so good, it could put Ba-Tampte out of business. And Daniel Boulud served what I thought was the most perfectly constructed burger of the night, a DBGB number that included very small amounts of pulled pork placed upon the beef that was nestled under a featherlight brioche bun. For all that flair, though, none of the hamburgers was really new. They were just hamburgers with unusual stuff on top of them. The judges weren't fooled, awarding Michael Schwartz of Miami's Michael's Genuine their top prize for a classically constructed bacon cheeseburger. Classic, in fact, was the watchword of the night. "I just wanted to do a straight-up, classic burger," said former Top Chef contestant Spike Mendelsohn of Washington's Good Stuff Eatery, the defending champion, clad in a boxer's robe and wearing a giant title belt. "We do classic burgers at Bill's," said Brett Reichler, chef of the upstart Bill's Bar and Burger, a first-time entrant who followed Mendelsohn's lead in having hot models stand around getting out the vote. "What can I say?" said Randy Garutti, czar of Danny Meyer's phenomenally successful Shake Shack. "The Shack burger is a classic." They're all right. The orthodox cheeseburger, with its pillowy, enriched white bun, Pythagorean square of tangerine-colored American cheese and blissfully unadulterated (and unspiced) beef, is an invention that cannot really be improved upon. Like sashimi or peaches and cream, it's a gastronomic end point. But this is America. We're about competition and reinvention — not just at the Burger Bash, but also in the omnipotent market, where fortunes rise and fall over the narrowest bits of brand differentiation. (Take away Ronald and the King, and only an expert can tell the basic McDonald's and Burger King hamburgers apart.) So the question that kept haunting me, as I got fuller and fatter as the evening wore on, was the old Peggy Lee refrain: Is that all there is? Everyone was putting their heart into it — father-and-son restaurant moguls Jeffrey and Zach Chodorow created a fine potato-bun burger out of pure love of the game, without even a restaurant to promote, and they looked almost stricken when they didn't win. But winning is hard, with everyone bashing their head on the ceiling of burger perfection. Whether or not we as a country can't make a better burger, it doesn't seem to be hurting the burger business. Bill's is about to open the largest independently owned hamburger restaurant in the world, a 500-plus-seat meat cathedral in New York City's Rockefeller Center, and the Shake Shack is next opening up in Miami, Dubai and, word has it, London. But each restaurant's primary burger would be easily recognizable to Warren G. Harding. One has a potato roll, the other a sesame bun, and both have custom grinds from meat guru Pat LaFrieda, but really, they're examples of perfection rather than creation. (To be fair, both have great specialty products — the Shack a remarkable breaded portobello
Slide 71: burger, and Bill's a double-patty onion-and-butter Fat Cat on an English muffin. But those aren't really core products, as they say in the fast-food business.) It's not lack of imagination that has caused this apotheosis of old-school burgers. It's convergent evolution. The best burgers are the simplest. Through painful trial and error, the burger barons have learned that the old ways are the best. And yet, out there, some brilliant young chef is thinking of a way to make a better burger, not by piling weird things on top, adding locavore cheeses that nobody likes or using grass-fed beef with no more juiciness than a withered cadaver. No, that young man or woman — and they may be out there now, building a "Hallelujah" chorus on Yelp — will find a way to do for the hamburger what the Koreans have done for fried chicken, what the wood-oven movement has done for pizza, what Chipotle did for the burrito. And when that happens, the nation will have a new hero — and the Rachael Ray Burger Bash will have a new victor. Josh Ozersky is a James Beard Award–winning food writer and the author of The Hamburger: A History. You can listen to his weekly show at the Heritage Radio Network and read his column on home cooking on Rachael Ray's website. He is currently at work on a biography of Colonel Sanders.
Slide 72: SPECIAL SECTION Icebreaker Is A Natural By BILL SAPORITO Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 Jeremy Moon, CEO and founder the outdoor clothing brand of Icebreaker. STEVEN BONIFACE FOR TIME As a young man in New Zealand, Jeremy Moon became fond of sheep. Wait a minute, let's start that again. As a newly minted cultural anthropologist making a living in market research, Jeremy Moon was given a T-shirt by a farmer in the Southern Alps of New Zealand and was asked what he thought of it. The T-shirt was not only remarkably soft, but it also refused to hold body odor. "It didn't look too good, but it felt amazing. And I kind of fell in love with the feeling of it," says Moon. The shirt was made of merino wool, and soon Moon was woolly-brained about merino. New Zealand has 40 million sheep ("We ate the other 20 million," he says), 2 million of which are merinos. The mountain-dwelling merinos provide the raw material for a surprisingly hot product in the world of sports apparel: woolen performance wear. At a time when highly technical synthetic fabrics rule the sports-gear business, the idea that wool can compete seems strange. Says Moon: "My purpose was to create a new category around natural-tech products. The tension has been creating something new from something very old." Moon's company, Icebreaker, boasts more than $100 million in sales featuring a fiber that predates the Romans but until recently was used mainly for men's suits and sweaters. In addition to woolen performance gear for skiers, runners, hikers and bikers, Icebreaker makes woolen underwear. Sustainable woolen underwear. Although merinos are not native to New Zealand — the colonizing Aussies brought their Spanish merino beasties with them in the 1840s — sheep stations have been New Zealand's agricultural engine for decades. The problem for the farmers was that the wool from those sheep had become a commodity. Farmers couldn't count on a predictable price, nor did they guarantee any particular quality. When he started his company in 1995, Moon bought wool the way everyone else did: a season at a time, the price varying each year according to supply. That sourcing method almost broke Icebreaker in the late '90s when its products began to unravel because of inconsistent fiber quality. So Moon broke the
Slide 73: commodity cycle. He began to offer farmers multiyear contracts at guaranteed prices, provided they could produce a uniformly high-quality fiber. At the same time, Icebreaker developed stringent quality standards. It's a deal that works for both sides: farmers have a predictable income, and Icebreaker a steady, high-quality supply. Icebreaker now buys about 20% of New Zealand's wool, says Moon. "We've set up a whole system of contracts with the growers, pay them a premium into the future, and we've created a whole shift in the whole agricultural base in New Zealand." If ever a nation was ripe for a sustainable business model, it would be a place of incredible natural beauty like New Zealand. Each of the garments Icebreaker makes has a "baacode" — groan — allowing the user to trace the lineage of his or her sweater or base layer back to the sheep station it came from. "It's a very rational story. You know, we get five tops from one sheep, and the sheep lives through summer and winter, and if it works for the sheep, it will work for you. It's quite a nice, simple mother story," says Moon. It's actually a good deal for the sheep too; they get to live out their days rather than getting culled for the slaughterhouse. Outdoor companies such as Patagonia and Columbia have spared no effort in creating sustainable, environmentally friendly products and practices to stay connected to consumers. Patagonia was the first outdoor-clothing manufacturer to offer fleece made from recycled soda bottles. That's still a petroleum-based fabric. Icebreaker is essentially using a natural material to offer a knockoff of a synthetic fabric; it's called Realfleece, and it's similar to the synthetic fleece but made of merino. Call it life imitating artifice. Sustainability is all touchy-feely and responsible, of course, but nobody would give a sheep's bottom about any of these products if they didn't perform well, especially considering that an item like the Coronet Sweater 320 sells for $160. Depending on how cold it is and what you're doing, you can choose from a product line that includes everything from undies to base layers, T-shirts and sweaters of varying insulation strengths. Icebreaker recently added a line of casual wear it calls Superfine. New Zealand's merinos produce a wool that has a very fine diameter, which makes it soft and breathable yet with high insulation value for warmth. Having field-tested the woolen underwear — c'mon, it had to be done — I can attest that it was comfortable and dry during an intense day of skiing in Canada. "Awesome" is how a salesperson at Paragon Sports in New York City describes the line. "It's like wearing your pajamas." Having established itself in Europe, Asia and, of course, New Zealand, Icebreaker is trying to break out in the U.S. To do that, Moon moved a chunk of the company — and himself — to Portland, Ore., the epicenter of the sports-apparel and -gear industry. Nike started in nearby Beaverton, and eight years ago, Adidas opened its U.S. headquarters in Portland. It's also the home of outdoor-wear companies like Columbia. In short, it's a place to compete for people, creativity and technology. It's filled with people who understand apparel branding. Moon has poached talent by offering marketers the opportunity to develop a relevant, cool and sustainable brand — in essence to re-create a Nike or an Adidas. "We've hired a lot of people out of Nike and Adidas, because they see a future in natural performance products. They are sick of working for big companies churning out synthetics," says Moon.
Slide 74: Of course, once upon a time, Nike was as small, innovative and edgy as Icebreaker is today. The cooler Nike became, the bigger it got. That's the general idea in business, isn't it? Moon says Icebreaker can remain a happy place with $300 million in sales — big enough to command attention but small enough to remain private, as it is now. "I know that we can get bigger, but I don't really care," he says. Besides, any bigger, and he may run out of sheep. Reconnecting By BARBARA KIVIAT Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 Ben Verwaayen, directeur general of Alcatel Lucent. Pascal Sittler / Rea / Redux In September 2008, Dutchman Ben Verwaayen took over as CEO of the struggling telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent. In February, the French company announced its first quarterly operating profit since its 2006 merger — but year-over-year sales were still off by 20%. He spoke with TIME's Barbara Kiviat. How much of an economic recovery do you see? It differs very much whether you sit in Beijing or in the West. People are, in general, willing to believe that the worst is behind us, but that does not necessarily mean the worst is behind us. Things are fragile. There is some robustness, but people are cautious. And it doesn't translate into employment yet. Speaking of which, you like to talk about the high rates of youth unemployment around the world. Why? We run the risk that we will have a generation that will miss those very important first years when you
Slide 75: gain experience on top of what you've learned in the classroom. That is very, very bad. We are in a recovery that is fragile, so I understand that companies individually are scared to embrace additional costs. But we cannot ignore these huge numbers for youth unemployment. There are countries that are talking 42%. That is a time bomb, because you are saying to a whole generation, "You've just invested in yourself, and we as society have no use for you." You're asking for serious long-term trouble. Has the recession changed the way you do business? For sure. Companies now do better due diligence about where they are going and how they spend. People are less willing to guess. And there is more core competence in what we do. You stay closer to what you know. You don't adventure so much into territories you don't know, both physically and in activity. Since Alcatel merged with Lucent in 2006, the combined company hasn't had a profitable year. What will get you back on track? We said 2009 would be around break-even, and we have delivered on that. We said we would fix a lot of the internal problems, and we have done that. 2010 will be a year where we have the market returning to very cautious growth, between 0% and 5%, and we will have some profit in 2010 on our way to what I call a normal company in 2011. We will reach profitability by the combination of our improved product portfolio, cost savings and new services. Where do you expect to find growth going forward? There are three specific things happening. Data is overwhelming the mobile networks that were built for voice. The journey from voice into data is a big area of growth. Second, there are millions of people per year who are added to networks around the world, and that's all about rural areas. The third element is the convergence between fixed and mobile networks that we talked about for years and is now really happening. The volume of communications is going up by double digits. The issue is how service providers translate the volume of communications into new revenues. That will determine how much they spend with companies like us. Are people figuring that out? They are. It's all about new services. One of the latest things we've seen is a connected car with a couple hundred functions in it. It's like a smart phone on wheels. If you look to the health care business, there is much activity to see what the mobile industry can bring — benefits to the users of the health care system that are more cost-efficient and deliver a better guarantee of quality. Innovation is now much more across businesses than within the depths of a business. The Green Touch consortium you head aims to make networks 1,000 times more energy-efficient. That's a bold goal. If you leave organizations to their own tasks, change will always be incremental. If you get them out of their comfort zones with leadership, then they rise to the occasion. Most people would say this is crazy, but it sets the bar for organizations to achieve, since it's competitive.
Slide 76: Tricks to Keep Growing By LORI IOANNOU Wednesday, Mar. 10, 2010 IMAGE SOURCE / GETTY IMAGES It is a good thing that Roger Dreyer has a passion for magic. Over the past 18 months, the 48-year-old tried nearly every trick in the book to find the expansion capital he needed to grow his business, Fantasma Toys Inc. He turned to traditional bank lenders for working capital, with no luck. Even though he had a backlog of orders from the likes of Costco and Toys "R" Us for his firm's specialty magic sets, the deep recession made credit disappear. So like the chief operating wizard he is, he found an innovative approach to his dilemma. The stars aligned last July after Dreyer's accountant suggested he opt for a specialized form of asset-based finance in which money is lent against a company's purchase orders. Since New York City – based Fantasma outsources its manufacturing to factories in China, this funding approach would work like a transactional line of credit, thereby giving foreign suppliers the letters of credit to secure 100% of the cash they need to produce the goods. Wells Fargo operates in this specialty niche and eventually provided $3.5 million so that Fantasma could fulfill its orders. Today the company has profits of $950,000 on $10 million in sales. "It was the game changer I needed to grow my business," Dreyer says. "Without it, my company's sales may have been cut in half." This tale demonstrates how during these challenging economic times, entrepreneurs like Dreyer have come up with inventive solutions to help their companies stay afloat and remain competitive. As Andrew Sherman, who works with emerging growth companies at Jones Day, a law firm in Washington, points out, "Now is the time business owners have to become bootstrappers and reinvent all their strategies — from how they finance their business to how they market and sell." While waiting for the economy to bounce back, here are some turnaround ideas that entrepreneurs are using.
Slide 77: Deere's Harvest By KATHLEEN KINGSBURY Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 Seth Perlman / AP At Deere & Co., It hasn't been so easy being green lately. Since the Great Recession began in December 2007, Deere, the world's largest maker of farm equipment and a major builder of construction machinery, has watched earnings plummet by half. Construction sales worldwide fell by 45% last year alone, and agricultural sales sank more than 15%. It is no small feat, then, that Deere earned $873 million in 2009 on sales of $23 billion. That's because the iconic manufacturer today is more focused on making profits than on just making tractors. Indeed, over the past decade, the firm's production capabilities have become leaner, smarter and faster as it has eliminated waste, pushed innovation and expanded its global footprint. "Deere's competitive advantage has always been a superior product and tremendous brand loyalty," says Morgan Joseph & Co. analyst Charles Rentschler. "But it performed better this down cycle than ever before because of the tight cost controls and excellent execution it already had in place." Deere, of course, operates in two of the most cyclic industries around. The $87 billion agribusiness sector, dependent on commodity prices, is about as predictable as the weather. Still, Deere can count on the fact that people need to eat. Growing populations and incomes in places like China and India mean food output must increase. Indeed, it could double by 2050; globally, farmers have planted more corn, soybeans, rice and wheat for two straight years. Construction remains troubled. Volumes shrank as much as 80% during the downturn's lowest point, about as much as in the Great Depression. Still, housing starts showed some signs of life in January, and after such a protracted drop, the $30 billion construction-machinery business can "expect a bounce as people simply need to replace equipment again," says Morgan Stanley analyst Robert Wertheimer. "So we do think there is a recovery at hand, though it could be in 2011, not 2010." John Deere is a brand about as American as apple pie. It's headquartered in Moline, Ill., not far from where it started in 1837 as a one-man blacksmith shop making steel plows for sod-busting pioneers. Under John's son Charles, who served as CEO for 49 years, the modern Deere emerged, a network of factories and dealers supplying tractors, wagons and combines to farms nationwide. It expanded to Mexico and Europe in the 1950s, complete with construction products and then credit operations.
Slide 78: Yet Deere's strong performance in the most recent downturn is hitched to CEO Bob Lane, who stepped down in June. Lane diligently cut costs, pared unprofitable businesses and inventories. He also added a novel profit driver: a capital charge of about 1% a month that managers must "pay" before they can report any gain internally — in other words, 12% annual profit before break-even. During Lane's tenure, Deere saw record earnings, soaring free cash flow and a quintupling of its stock price. When the housing bubble burst, a streamlined Deere was ready. Despite collapsing sales, it was able, for instance, to avoid major staff reductions — most of the 1,500 workers Deere laid off or furloughed are already back on the job — while maintaining enviable margins of nearly 10%. "Deere was ahead of the curve when it came to cost controls and data collection, so as soon as demand started to drop, it could shut down production and keep inventories low," says Alex Blanton, an analyst at Ingalls & Snyder. "That also means there will be little lag time in its recovery." That recovery will be driven by Deere's farm-equipment unit, which still comprises 90% of its sales. Even here, Deere's gotten tough, canceling franchise contracts with smaller dealers — who, like the farmers, are deeply brand-loyal — encouraging them to partner with higher-volume dealership chains. "Our customers now have to drive more than an hour to get parts," says Roy Dufault, whose family-run franchise in Fosston, Minn., closed in October after 80 years of selling John Deere products. "At harvest time, if a tractor breaks down, an hour means a lot of money lost." In reality, Deere is following its customers. For decades, smaller U.S. farms have been replaced by industrial, or factory, operations. It's not the storybook farm, but it's more efficient. "The amount of money a dealer has to invest to train its technicians or buy diagnostic tools continues to grow," says Deere CEO Samuel Allen, a company lifer. "So to be a great dealer requires making more money and that's gotten harder for smaller operations." Another factor in Deere's shrinking U.S. presence is that its biggest opportunities will be overseas: 60% of its current business is in North America, 40% in the rest of the world. Allen knows that ratio will change drastically. "Emerging markets hold the most potential," Buckingham Research Group analyst Joel Tiss says. "It makes no sense to open a new dealership in Dubuque, Iowa, anymore when they could put it in Santiago, Chile, where they can do 10 times the volume." Sales in South America are expected to rise as much as 15% in 2010. Likewise, Russia and Eastern Europe offer potential. Russia has arable land and an aging Soviet fleet of farm equipment, and the government has put a priority on being self-sufficient in food and agriculture. The recession has made financing hard to come by in the region, but "Deere is planting the seeds for when the markets normalize," says Lawrence De Maria, an analyst at the New York brokerage firm Sterne Agee. Still, De Maria adds, "it's sticking with assembly factories for now so that if they had to pick up and leave, it wouldn't kill the shareholders." Asia is a tougher row to hoe. The company opened a factory in Pune, India, in 2001 and has several operations and joint ventures in China. But the Indian tractor maker Mahindra & Mahindra has also begun selling its wares — less sophisticated but cheaper — in the U.S. "If Deere is making the Lexus or Mercedes of farm equipment, Mahindra is making Hyundai quality," Tiss says.
Slide 79: There are other challenges too. Deere has had to pump billions of dollars into engine technology to meet changing U.S. emission standards coming in 2011 and again in 2014 — costs it will pass on to customers through higher prices. "The 2011 product will go up several thousand dollars in price," Longbow Research analyst Eli Lustgarten says. "So when prices go up again just three years later, even the most price-inelastic customers will feel it." Questions also persist about whether Deere should remain in the low-margin lawn-mower business and whether it should shed its construction unit. Allen downplays such concerns. "All of our divisions must meet a sustainable level of business," he says. "We're happy where construction is now." Farmers today are even happier, since they now ride the most sophisticated stuff ever made. "Onboard GPS, leather seats, CD players — farmers fall in love when they walk into a Deere showroom," Rentschler says. "It's hard to resist buying the green."
Slide 80: PEOPLE 10 Questions for Desmond Tutu Desmond Tutu Stephen Voss / Redux After all you've seen and endured, are you really as optimistic as your book, Made for Goodness, says you are? Zelalem Dawit, ADDIS ABABA I'm not optimistic, no. I'm quite different. I'm hopeful. I am a prisoner of hope. In the world, you have very bad people--Hitler, Idi Amin--and they look like they are going to win. All of them--all of them--have bitten the dust. Africa has been given a single story line, where all we hear of from the media is hunger, civil war and corruption. How can younger generations correct this misperception? Anwar Hussaini Adamu KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA Well, part of it is true. You have bad governments. But we have good governments too. We have the world's icon--Nelson Mandela. But as I always say, Europe gives me a great deal of hope. They produced a Holocaust. They produced two world wars. They produced the gulags. Sometimes people forget that in South Africa, we've been free for only about 16 years, and they're expecting miracles from us. We're not doing too badly. Do you support the appointment of gay and lesbian clergy? Phillip Reinheimer PENN VALLEY, CALIF.
Slide 81: Of course. If I don't support them, why support the appointment of any other person? Their sexuality is as much a part of who they are as my race is. They don't choose it. I don't choose it. Two of my chaplains when I was Archbishop were gay. One is now a bishop, and the other is the dean of a cathedral. Have you ever had doubts about your faith? Michael Stanley, LONDON Doubts? No. Anger with God? Yes. Plenty of that. I've remonstrated with God quite frequently and said, "What the heck are you up to? Why are you letting these oppressors get away with this injustice?" But doubting that God is good? That God is love? No. What advice do you have for those trying to rebuild Haiti? Allison Hagen SANTA CLARITA, CALIF. First, I would say to them, Thank you for showing so much of your compassion. But I would say, especially to the people of Haiti, Your country has been destroyed, but it is also a chance to make a new beginning. Have a government that cares for the welfare of its people and not for lining its own pockets. An awful thing has happened, but we can squeeze a benefit out of it. What achievement are you most proud of? Fanice Thomas, MINNEAPOLIS Becoming a father. The day I was told our son, who was our first, was born, I felt a little like God. Wonderful. What is your favorite Bible verse, and why? Satu Rahikainen TAMPERE, FINLAND Romans 5: 8. "Whilst we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." It sums up the Gospel wonderfully. We think we have to impress God so that God could love us. But he says, No, you are loved already, even at your worst. As chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, did you feel you did enough to help South Africa move past that dark chapter in its history? Bemgba Nyakuma DELFT, THE NETHERLANDS
Slide 82: Had we not had the commission, South Africa would have gone up in flames. It was not a perfect instrument, but it did a heck of a good job. It lanced the boil. A festering soul was opened and cleansed, and balm was poured on it. What does Africa need most to begin to make progress? Jake Miller MECHANICSBURG, PA. A fair international economic system. Africa can produce goods, but farmers in Europe and the U.S. are paid subsidies and can sell similar goods at giveaway prices. It wreaks havoc with the economies of poorer countries. It's all stacked very much against Africa. We need fair trade. What impact will the World Cup have on South Africa? Tammy Stephenson LOS ANGELES [They've] built new stadiums. They've improved the infrastructure. They are doing the roads. They are building or improving hotels. Those things are going to remain.
Slide 83: LETTERS Inbox Chasing the Taliban How to take on the Taliban [March 8]? The real question should be, Why are we fighting the Taliban? If we are victorious, then what? We cannot afford to continue propping up puppet regimes worldwide. Haven't we learned a lesson from Iraq? David Walker, DARTMOUTH, MASS. Rather than pursuing President Obama's strategy of building while destroying, the U.S. and its allies should do what was done successfully with World War II: destroy the enemy's warmaking capabilities, then help rebuild the country while maintaining a military presence to ensure that it doesn't make war again. It worked with Germany and Japan. Why not in Afghanistan? Pierre Dumaine, MIAMI The Gospel of Jenny Re "Who's Afraid of Jenny McCarthy?" [March 8]: McCarthy's activism has merit. Instead of touting statistics based on studies that may not be asking the right questions, the medical community should view autism through a multifaceted lens and catch up to parents who already do. Judith Stone, SOUTH FORK, COLO. McCarthy has taken a personal family challenge and turned it into a crusade. She has tried to turn years of science on its head, and like many seeking answers, she has followed a path of blame. My role as a special educator has taught me that exceptional children do not benefit from this approach. What exceptional children require and deserve is acceptance, inclusion and the expectation of achievement and personal responsibility. If we try doing that, we may be pleasantly surprised. Anna Rubino, CROFTON, MD. As a pediatrician, I am convinced that McCarthy's unscientific antivaccine views confuse parents and cause harm to some unvaccinated children. It is a shame that Oprah Winfrey is again giving McCarthy a platform for her message. Michael Karp, VISTA, CALIF. As a teacher and a parent, I empathize with McCarthy. With dramatic developments in health care, we have seen death sentences turned into manageable conditions and people once destined for institutional care now returned to jobs, homes and families. However, to focus on vaccines as the cause of autism is closed-minded, especially in light of scientific evidence. I would hope that those who work with children
Slide 84: keep an open mind as to the causes of any symptoms outside the "normal" range and search for ways to make each child--and adult--live a happy, productive life. Carolyn Brown, APPLETON, MAINE TIME says "research conclusively shows that vaccines are safe for children." I recall my father, a biologist, insisting that science can prove falsity but not truth. As Albert Einstein said, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." James Pannabecker NATURAL BRIDGE STATION, VA. Hope in the West Bank Thank you for Joe Klein's article "West Bank Renewal" [March 8]. The West Bank and Gaza provide a study in contrasts. In the West Bank, where Palestinians made a commitment to peaceful coexistence, Israel has removed checkpoints, increased trade and invested in local businesses. In Gaza, where Hamas continues to threaten violence, the economy remains in ruins. Joel Margolis, HERNDON, VA. Thanks for Klein's thoughtful and moving words about how West Bank Palestinians have been trying to improve their circumstances. Such honest commentary is strangely rare in the U.S. But it's a little patronizing to mention Palestinian good behavior as if Palestinians have been bad students for no reason whatsoever. If someone stole our homes and land, we might act up too. Naomi Shihab Nye, SAN ANTONIO All You Need Is a Dollar And an App I read Brad Tuttle's article "Movies for Cheap" with interest, since Redbox, the DVD-rental company, is my family's new favorite thing [March 8]. I was surprised, however, that he and his wife stop at Redbox locations to check the in-stock availability of movies. A great Redbox feature is its phone app that supplies kiosk-location information and tells you which titles are available at individual locations. Jim Wells, MOLINE, ILL. I was surprised that Tuttle described public-library patrons as "true tightwads." Local libraries are terrific sources of free and often very recently released movie rentals. Russ Goodman, PELLA, IOWA Duty, Honor, Country and Sexual Assault
Slide 85: Nancy Gibbs' otherwise excellent article about sexual harassment and abuse of women in the armed services omits a glaring, well-documented fact [March 8]: one of the reasons so many incidents of harassment and even assault are not reported is that women who report them are routinely accused of being lesbians. Women (and men) in the military can be subject to intrusive, abusive and distracting investigations into their private lives based on a single unfounded allegation about their sexuality. As long as our nation's military has a policy that makes fear of gays and lesbians more important than punishing assault, this problem will continue to exist. Rick Villaseor, SAN DIEGO I am appalled that the military does not do more to protect its female members. Kelley Schacht, MADISON, WIS. In a military family--my son and daughter chose military careers--you don't want to acknowledge the "enemy within," but it inevitably becomes a specter in your consciousness. Military leaders must address the issue of the rapist who knows that if a complaint is filed, most likely the victim, not the rapist, will be reprimanded. Kathy Manney, SCHERTZ, TEXAS Gibbs' report should have been the cover story. Kathryn Kerns, TEMPE, ARIZ. Traitor Joe? In "Lonely Joe," Massimo Calabresi describes Senator Joe Lieberman as "the man who turned his back on the Democratic Party" [March 8]. Indeed, it was precisely the other way around: the Democratic Party turned its back on Lieberman in the 2006 primary. As for his 25% approval rating in Connecticut, he is doing quite well in comparison with the U.S. Congress, whose approval rating according to a Gallup poll is 18%. Mikhail Godkin, SAN DIEGO Yes, Lieberman has done some constructive things. But there's a reason he is lonely: his loyalties extend only to himself. Like a chameleon, he shifts his colors whenever he finds it advantageous to do so. Bob Madgic, ANDERSON, CALIF. Family Matters I appreciate that James Poniewozik, in "Family Guy Defeats Palin," was one of the few commentators who recognized that a recent episode of Family Guy did not "take a shot" at Sarah Palin's son Trig or at Down syndrome kids in general [March 8]. However, I am puzzled at his view that Family Guy was
Slide 86: mocking Palin. The fact that Palin has a child with Down is not something she is ashamed of, so how is the show's drawing attention to that fact automatically something negative? Phil Riley, AUSTIN, TEXAS I gave up on Family Guy when it joked about shaken-baby syndrome. Perhaps I could be convinced that this syndrome is a joke if the quip were made by a baby victimized by it, but I don't think that's likely. John Cinnamon, GREENWOOD, IND. Your article hit the nail on the head. If Palin wants to play in the big leagues, she needs to stop whining. Roger Dobrick, MADISON, WIS. Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts or samples before recycling
Slide 87: NOTEBOOK The Moment By Andrew Lee Butters Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 Iraqis are getting good at elections. On Sunday they went to the polls--for the fifth time since the fall of Saddam Hussein--to choose a new parliament despite election-day violence that killed 38. U.S. President Barack Obama congratulated Iraqis for voting "with enthusiasm and optimism." But running elections is one thing; running Iraq is another. The general election of 2005 empowered ethnic and sectarian leaders who proved incapable of compromise and took the country to the brink of civil war. The surge of U.S. troops in 2007 bought just enough security and time to give democracy one more shot. Superficially, Iraqi politicians appear to have learned the lesson. The major parties have joined broad "national unity" coalitions. But the leadership is the same, as are the problems: how to share power, oil and land. Votes may not be fully counted until late March, and no coalition is expected to win enough seats to form a government on its own. Iraqis are bracing for weeks of backroom dealing. Meanwhile, U.S. combat troops are scheduled to leave by August. Maybe Iraq will have a government by then. Maybe not. The World By Harriet Barovick; Laura Fitzpatrick; Alexandra Silver; Claire Suddath; Alyssa Fetini; Frances Romero; Kristi Oloffson; Kayla Webley Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 1 | Pennsylvania Hot Words on Health Care In his latest attempt to win over congressional naysayers and push his signature policy initiative over the finish line, President Obama took to the stump March 8 to tout the Democrats' proposed health care overhaul with some of his signature "Yes, we can" fire. "They've argued now is not the time for reform," he said of his critics, slamming analysts who say a push for health care could come at the expense of the Democratic majority in the November elections. "My question to them is: When is the right time? If not now, when? If not us, who?" Obama also had harsh words for the health-insurance industry, citing a need for greater accountability and more options for consumers. Under pressure from the White House to wrap up negotiations, Democrats in Congress struggled to iron out lingering differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill. 2 | Somalia Food Aid Routinely Diverted
Slide 88: Up to half the food aid sent to Somalia is pocketed by crooked contractors, local U.N. staffers and Islamic militants. That's the unsettling conclusion of a new Security Council report, which recommends an independent investigation into the U.N.'s World Food Programme operations in Somalia. Officials blame the failure in part on the troubled nation's lack of security: food trucks must evade militias, bandits and insurgents, whose activity makes close scrutiny difficult for aid groups. 3 | Israel Peace Talks 'Undermined' Two days after agreeing to indirect talks with the Palestinian Authority through U.S. envoy George Mitchell, Israel announced on March 9 the approval of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, whose five-day visit to the region makes him the highest-level member of the Obama Administration to visit Israel to date, condemned the plan, saying that it "undermines the trust" needed for negotiations to proceed after a 14-month deadlock. 4 | Pennsylvania 'Jihad Jane' Indicted Colleen LaRose, an American citizen from Pennsylvania who went by the online handle Jihad Jane, was indicted on March 9 for conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and plotting to murder a Swedish cartoonist whose depiction of the Prophet Muhammad had angered Muslims. LaRose, 46, had been in custody since October. Assistant Attorney General for National Security David Kris said the suspect's being a suburban American woman "underscores the evolving nature of the threat we face." 5 | Washington Protest Case Heads to High Court On March 8, the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether certain types of offensive protests are guaranteed First Amendment protection. A case to be argued this fall, Snyder v. Phelps, involves the fiercely anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kans., members of which wave signs that read "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" at military funerals. The group and its leader, Pastor Fred Phelps, believe that U.S. troops die in combat because America condones homosexuality. Albert Snyder, the father of a Marine killed in Iraq in 2006 whose funeral was protested by Westboro parishioners, sued the group for inflicting intentional emotional distress and won nearly $11 million in damages in 2007. (The award was later reduced.) But the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down that ruling in September, saying that while the speech was "repugnant," it was protected under the Constitution. 6 | Nigeria HUNDREDS SLAUGHTERED The latest clash in a decades-long sectarian rift resulted in the March 7 massacre of several hundred Nigerians, including unarmed women and children. The killings took place mainly in villages around Jos,
Slide 89: a city that sits on a cultural fault line that runs between the Muslim north and Christian south. Conflicts between the two groups have killed thousands over the past decade. This time, the dead were mainly Christians, targeted in retaliation for some 300 Muslim deaths near Jos in January. 7 | Britain Pound Problems Uncertainty surrounding the upcoming general election and news that the nation's economy has further contracted have caused the British pound to decline 7.3% against the U.S. dollar this year, with most of the drop occurring within the past month. Worth almost $2 in 2008, the pound now sits just below $1.50. [The following text appears within a chart. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual chart.] Jan. 28 $1.62 to £1 March 1 $1.49 to £1 Top unfilled federal posts Customs and Border Protection: The acting commissioner retired in January Drug Enforcement Administration: Has had an acting administrator since 2007 Federal Reserve Board: A recent resignation leaves three vacancies Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: Has had four acting administrators since 2006 8 | Washington Obama Taps TSA Chief On March 8, calling it "among the most important unfilled posts in the Obama Administration," Department of Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano announced the President's selection of retired Army general Robert Harding to run the Transportation Security Administration. Obama's first nominee, Los Angeles airport police official Erroll Southers, withdrew his name in January amid intense Republican opposition. 9 | Togo Election Contested Despite failed ballot-counting systems and allegations of fraud, Faure Gnassingbe, son of Togo's former dictator, declared victory after the nation's March 4 presidential election. Supporters of opposition leader Jean-Pierre Fabre held demonstrations that were quickly broken up by police wielding tear gas and water cannons. Gnassingbe's family has ruled Togo for 43 years; he has led since 2005.
Slide 90: Nations with the highest percentage of female legislators [This article consists of 5 illustrations. Please see hardcopy of magazine.] RWANDA 51% SWEDEN 46% CUBA 43% ICELAND 43% SOUTH AFRICA 43% SOURCE: INTER-PARLIAMENTARY UNION 10 | India The world's most populous democracy is moving to increase the proportion of its female lawmakers. On March 9, the upper house of India's Parliament passed a bill--first proposed nearly 15 years ago--that would reserve one-third of seats in the national and state legislatures for women. Opposition was intense: some lawmakers protested the vote, and seven members of Parliament were suspended for disorderly behavior. Ultimately, the bill passed with a large majority. * | What They're Returning in Chile: The images of looting that have dominated dispatches from Chile since an 8.8-magnitude earthquake rocked the country Feb. 27 gave way to an unexpected scene: during an informal amnesty period--and prodded by some 14,000 troops--filchers returned $2 million in stolen goods, loading them into police trucks. A poll found 85% of Chileans want looters prosecuted. The Open Carry Debate: Should People Have Guns at Starbucks? By ALISON STATEMAN Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 A typical frustration at starbucks is when the guy next to you is hogging the electrical outlets. But what if he openly wore a gun, like someone lost from a Clint Eastwood set? What would you do: take a seat next to him or get that cappuccino to go?
Slide 91: The patrons of at least five Starbucks locations in California's Bay Area have faced this dilemma in recent weeks. Gun owners have walked into various Starbucks--including in liberal enclaves like San Francisco, San Jose and Cupertino (the home of Apple)--openly wearing weapons while they drink their coffee. You might not think you would need to be armed to order a latte, but the Bay Area gun owners--who are loosely affiliated with a website called OpenCarry.org--are hoping to draw attention to what they see as a Second Amendment guarantee: the right to carry a gun without fear that it will be confiscated. In at least three states--including, oddly, Texas--it is illegal to carry a gun openly. The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in McDonald v. Chicago, a case that will decide whether state and local gun-control ordinances violate the Second Amendment. The court is expected to rule on the case before the Justices adjourn in June for the summer. In the meantime, gun advocates and opponents are fixed with anticipation and worry--hence the OpenCarry.org demonstrations of firepower. But why California, and why Starbucks? According to OpenCarry.org co-founder John Pierce, his group didn't formally organize the Starbucks displays. Rather, he says, gun-rights advocates who use his site to plan meet-ups decided to highlight what they see as shortcomings in California's gun laws. The state does have a rather strange--and among the 50 states, unique--law: you can carry a gun openly in California, but it can't be loaded. Every other state that allows you to carry a gun openly also allows it to be a functioning weapon, one that actually has bullets. (See map below.) Starbucks, which has been the target of similar pro-gun displays in other states, finds itself caught in the middle. The company issued a statement saying that "the political, policy and legal debates around these issues belong in the legislatures and courts, not in our stores." Gun opponents want Starbucks to exercise its legal authority to ban gun displays on its property, as Peet's Coffee & Tea and California Pizza Kitchen have done. "Guns are not protest signs," says Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. But because California law prohibits openly carried guns from being
Slide 92: loaded, they do seem more like symbols than weapons. Which gun-control proponents might regard as a kind of victory: the guns at Starbucks are no more potent than the espresso. Verbatim 'The real solution is to deliver services ... rather than turn Haiti into a military state.' TED CONSTAN, chief program officer for the relief organization Partners in Health, on the withdrawal of U.S. troops stationed in Haiti since the nation's Jan. 12 earthquake 'A ban on eating them would show China has reached a new level of civilization.' CHANG JIWEN, a professor at the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences, on the Chinese government's consideration of legislation that would make eating cats and dogs illegal 'We used to hustle on over the border for health care ... And I think, isn't that kind of ironic now?' SARAH PALIN, former governor of Alaska, admitting that her family used to go to Canada for medical treatment when she was a child; Canada has a single-payer system, which Palin opposes 'These were not professionals.' RAINER WENDT, German police-union head, on four bandits who stormed a poker tournament in Berlin and stole about $330,000 in jackpot money in a chaotic heist caught on videotape 'To the extent the State of the Union has degenerated into a political pep rally, I'm not sure why we're there.' JOHN ROBERTS, U.S. Chief Justice, questioning whether Supreme Court Justices should have to attend the yearly address, after having had to sit "expressionless" while some members of Congress cheered Obama's Jan. 27 criticism of the court's decision to overturn a ban on corporate political spending 'Law is mind without reason. I'll return.' LIL WAYNE, rapper, in a Twitter post the day he began a twice-delayed yearlong prison sentence on a weapons conviction 'Not only did I grope him, I tickled him until he couldn't breathe.'
Slide 93: ERIC MASSA, Democratic New York Congressman, on a staffer's sexual-harassment accusations; Massa, who resigned March 9, maintained that anything can be taken "out of context" TALKING HEADS Jerry H. Trachtman Downplaying the controversy over a child who directed air traffic at JFK International, on InjuryBoard.com "The recent report ... has the aviation alarmists in an uproar ... Unprofessional conduct by the controllers involved? Yes. Any effect on the safety of flight? No ... The boy was clearly saying what he was told to say ... There are enough real issues regarding aviation safety without having to manufacture phantom issues. The pilots on the receiving end clearly had no concerns. No one else should either." --3/3/10 Scott Mendelson Reflecting on Kathryn Bigelow's historic Oscar win, on the Huffington Post: "She was absolutely deserving ... Not because she's a woman and not because she's a woman who makes stereotypically 'guy' movies, but because The Hurt Locker was a damn good movie and she was the primary reason it worked ... The fact that it took 82 years for the Academy to give the Best Director award to a female filmmaker should be cause for shame and embarrassment, rather than self-lionizing accolades." --3/8/10 Anne Applebaum Explaining why Germany is tired of absorbing Europe's debt, on Slate: "The Germans ... don't want to bail out the feckless Greeks with their flagrantly inaccurate official statistics; they resent being Europe's banker of last resort; they object to the universal demand that they plug the vast holes in the Greek budget deficit in the name of 'European unity'; and for the first time in a long time they are saying it out loud." --3/8/10 Sources: AP; CNN; Calgary Herald; USA Today; AP; Twitter; Fox News
Slide 94: Brief History: Bracketology By SEAN GREGORY Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 Predicting how March Madness will play out is now a national pastime. Kelly Haffermann The first NCAA men's basketball tournament, held back in 1939, had only eight teams. What a boring bracket. America's obsession with college basketball has helped the tournament, more colloquially known as March Madness, grow into a 65-team sports celebration. Every year die-hard fans and clueless cubicle dwellers alike navigate the maze of March Madness seeding brackets trying to predict the winner in their office pools. Last March, President Obama's bracket received as much scrutiny as his economic policies. The tournament season has grown so mad, in fact, that a cottage industry has sprouted around the so-called science of forecasting which teams will make the cut, an enterprise now known as bracketology. This term first appeared in 1996, when the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that Joe Lunardi, a spokesman for St. Joseph's University and a college-hoops junkie, referred to himself as a "bracketologist" when projecting the tournament field. In 2002, ESPN.com featured Lunardi's "bracketology" predictions, and since then the word and Lunardi himself have become as ubiquitous a March presence as inebriated St. Patrick's Day revelers. Dozens of other "experts" have entered the bracketology game, and there's even a website that tracks the performance of the pundits, as if they were evaluating stocks or anything else of consequence. Bracketology has expanded beyond basketball too. For example, a 2007 book called The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything used the NCAA-tournament format to rank a wide range of minutiae, from cooking tools to hairstyles to animated characters. Bart Simpson outlasts Homer in a
Slide 95: stirring first-round matchup, and in the video-game tournament, Tetris beats Zelda to take the title. No upsets there. The Skimmer By ALEXANDRA SILVER Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 The Art of Choosing By Sheena Iyengar Twelve; 352 pages Your decision to read this book (or not) will be influenced by several factors. There's the title and the cover art--though you know you shouldn't judge a book, etc., etc. There's what you may hear from friends. There's also this review. Obviously, none of this is a matter of life and death, but a decision will have to be made nonetheless. Sheena Iyengar, a Columbia University business professor and social psychologist, is concerned with improving how we deal with all choices. She examines decisions both minor--like choosing the beverages we drink--and monumental, including the dilemma of parents faced with whether or not to keep brain-damaged infants on life support. Through personal stories, her own experiments and other research, she dissects perceptions of choice (do we actually have it, and how desirable is it?) and what those perceptions mean. While Iyengar's often strained attempts to affect a colloquial tone are jarring, her point is well taken. As she suggests, in a world with ever increasing options, understanding choice may be more important than the choices themselves. READ
Slide 96: SKIM [X] TOSS Michael Foot By CATHERINE MAYER Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 Many of the Britons mourning Michael Foot, who died March 3 at 96, did not vote Labour when he led the party. Some had not yet reached voting age when he (right, with his wife, the author and filmmaker Jill Craigie) helmed the party's 1983 parliamentary campaign. Some had not yet been born. And a thumping majority of those who were eligible to vote chose to retain Margaret Thatcher as prime minister, after Britain's 1982 Falklands-war victory burnished her popularity. Foot, though a sparkling orator with a brilliant intellect, did his part to contribute to Labour's defeat, pushing a left-wing manifesto that pledged unilateral nuclear disarmament and nationalization of the banks. It was dubbed by a colleague "the longest suicide note in history." The 2008 global financial crisis would finally force a partial implementation of the second policy, but Foot's legacy cannot be measured in concrete achievements such as laws or processes. His was the very British triumph of the underdog, of the nice guy who came in last and in so doing retained his principles and values. In a country that lost faith in its political classes after being chivied into the Iraq war on the basis of false intelligence and then lost any residual respect for Westminster amid revelations that some MPs subsidized their lavish lifestyles with taxpayers' money, Foot symbolized a more honorable age. "How politics could do with his integrity today," wrote the Labour MP Diane Abbott in a tribute to her onetime leader. After he retired as an MP in 1992, Foot turned down the peerage the Queen traditionally bestows on former party leaders. "I think the House of Lords ought to be abolished," he said, explaining his decision. "I don't think the best way for me to abolish it is to go there myself." Carl Pope At once America's most effective and least known wilderness advocate, Dr. Ed Wayburn, who died March 5 at 103, was not even a full-time conservationist. He was a practicing physician. Protecting our country's wild areas was a volunteer job for him.
Slide 97: In 1999, Ed was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton, who credited him with having saved more wilderness in the U.S. than any other living American. Always one to seize an opportunity, Ed, right after receiving the medal, turned around and began lobbying the President to save even more wilderness. In his time, he and his wife Peggy could take on a challenge like Alaska, recruit allies through the force of their personal conviction and leave behind 100 million protected acres as a legacy. He did the same thing with the redwoods and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. He also forged an unlikely alliance with a Congressman who almost never went outdoors--California's Phillip Burton--that saved hundreds of other spots. The work of environmental protection has become more institutional and less personal. But Wayburn fought his battles hard and never made an enemy if he could avoid it. He proved that you can get bigger things done if you lead with vision, not rancor. Pope is chairman of the Sierra Club Bruce Graham By RICHARD LACAYO Monday, Mar. 22, 2010 He was the master of the tall order. Bruce Graham, who died March 6 at 84, designed two of the biggest, most famous and most starkly beautiful buildings in the world, both for Chicago, where he spent almost his entire career at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. In 1970 the 100-story John Hancock Center was a revolution in skyscraper design. Working with Skidmore's brilliant engineer Fazlur Khan, Graham conceived a tapering tower with an exterior system of structural supports, including massive X-braces that made its façade a knockout emblem of architectural force. In 1974 Graham and Khan produced another masterpiece with the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower). Once the world's tallest building, it drew the severe black box of Mies van der Rohe into the setback forms of older skyscrapers like the Empire State Building. Graham's personal philosophy was as direct as his architecture. Buildings, he once said, should be "clear, free of fashion and simple statements of the truth."