SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2008

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The rogue investor at Société Générale is not alone. The thrill of taking chances can drive some people over the edge.

Traders Crave A Money High

Fast Drivers Find Thrills In Stock Deals

By JENNY ANDERSON

If you get speeding tickets, watch out: The chances are good that you will also engage in possibly dangerous investing behavior, too. That is the implication of a new study that found that individuals who receive more speeding tickets tend to change their portfolio holdings frequently. MARK HULBERT The study, “Sensation Seeking, Overconfidence and Trading Activity,’’ has been accepted for publication by The Journal of Finance. The authors are Mark S. Grinblatt, a finance professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Matti Keloharju, a finance professor at the Helsinki School of Economics. (A version is at http://www.anderson. ucla.edu/documents/areas/fac/finance/06-06.pdf.) The professors were able to find a correlation between speeding tickets and trading frequency after receiving access to several data sets of Finnish investors. Though the professors did not have access to the investors’ identities, one of these databases contained details of speeding tickets issued between mid-1997 and the end of 2001 to residents of Helsinki and surrounding areas. Another had information on the portfolios and trading records of all Finnish households from 1995 through 2002. The Finnish government also provided data on the incomes, age, marital status, gender, occupation and homeownership status of all those filing tax returns in 1998 and 1999. These data sets enabled the professors to eliminate from consideration other possible causes of trading activity and focus on the distinct influence of speeding tickets. They found that, other things being equal, an investor’s portfolio turnover rate rose 11 percent after each additional speeding ticket he received. In an interview, Professor Grinblatt acknowledged that the propensity to speed did not remain constant throughout life. As people grow older, they are likely to become more conservative

ESSAY

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PETER ANDREWS/REUTERS

It is easy to dismiss Jérôme Kerviel, the rogue trader at Société Générale, as a fluke. So here is a sobering thought for Wall Street: There may be a bit of Mr. Kerviel in all of us. A small group of scientists, including some psychologists, say they are starting to discover what many Wall Street professionals have long suspected — that people are hard-wired for money. The human brain, these researchers say, responds to high-stakes trading just as it does to the lure of sex. And the riskier the trades get, the more the brain craves them. French prosecutors have likened Mr. Kerviel’s trades to a drug habit. That is no surprise to Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University in California and a pioneer in neurofinance, an emerging field that combines psychology, neuroscience and economics, to examine how the brain makes decisions. Mr. Knutson has sent volunteers through high-power imaging machines to map their brains as they trade. He concludes that sometimes, people get high on making money. “The more you think you can gain from the risk, the more you take the risk and the more activation in the circuitry,’’ Mr. Knutson said. Neuroeconomics has not won many converts on Wall Street. Researchers like Mr. Knutson have yet to show how their work can be applied effectively in the markets. And some academics question whether the field is of any use in economics. “Economics is about equilibrium, and supply and demand, and forces that come to some stabilized system,’’ says Stephen A. Ross, the Franco Modigliani Professor of Finance and Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s not about atoms or how little people behave.’’ Even so, the field seems to be gaining attention. Last year Jason Zweig, who edited the 2003 edition of “The Intelligent Investor’’ by Benjamin Graham, wrote a 352-page book entitled “Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help

Researchers say high-stakes trading can be addictive. The riskier the activity, the more the brain craves it.

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Would You Like Some High Notes With That Hamburger? By ANDREW MARTIN

A Preschool Nightmare Parents in India struggle to enroll their young children in top private schools. WORLD TRENDS

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Circle Skirts and Suits Designers reach back to the sleek silhouettes of the Grace Kelly era. LIVING: FASHION

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DUNMORE, Pennsylvania — Might as well call it “Corporate Idol.” In a contest modeled on popular televised singing competitions like “American Idol” and “Pop Idol,” McDonald’s put out a call for auditions to its 1.6 million restaurant workers worldwide and was overwhelmed by the response. Videos came in from 3,600 singing workers across the globe, all vying for a chance to win the $25,000 prize (sorry, no recording contract). Now, 14 finalists are practicing every chance they get for a final showdown in April at a McDonald’s convention in Orlando, Florida. That is why a McDonald’s cashier, Aziah Bolling, 20, burst into a gospel tune here the other day as she handed a customer, Bill Osborne, a sausage McMuffin and coffee. Her rendering of “Amazing Grace” drew admiration from a group of retirees who had gathered at McDonald’s for breakfast. By small-town Pennsylvania standards, she is already a star. “She’s a lovely worker,” said Rich Burdyn, 65. “She’s always singing here. Beautiful.” The contest, Voice of McDonald’s, was first held in 2006 when a Brazilian worker named Elisangela Silva Dos Santos, 20, was crowned the winner. It was such a hit McDonald’s decided to do it every two years. This time, with the addition of online voting by the public, the contest bears an even closer resemblance to

Aziah Bolling, left, is one of 14 employee finalists in a McDonald’s contest based on ‘‘American Idol.”

RICH SCHULTZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“American Idol.” A Web site includes biographies and videos of the finalists, including Ms. Bolling’s version of “Son of a Preacher Man.” Zulfiya Zagashtokova delivers a throaty rendition of “Yesterday” in a thick Russian accent. Frank Steding of Germany croons “Stand by Me” while tending bar with

what appears to be an intoxicated puppet. And Mary Yu of the Philippines offers a video that shows her own version of “Son of a Preacher Man.” Ms. Bolling, a college student who was raised in a musical family, said she was thrilled and surprised to be a finalist. She applied for seven jobs last year to earn spending money, but only McDonald’s called her back. “I had a bad taste in my mouth from fast-food restaurants,” she said, explaining that she had previously worked at a competitor. “It

was like fate.” McDonald’s executives debated between singing and dancing, but settled on the former because it would be easier for contestants to show off at work. “It’s hard to dance and serve your fries,” said Lisa McComb, a company spokeswoman.

CAHIER DU « MONDE » DATÉ SAMEDI 16 FÉVRIER 2008, NO 19616. NE PEUT ÊTRE VENDU SÉPARÉMENT

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2008 O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY

EDITORIALS OF THE TIMES

DAVID BROOKS

Climate of Fear In Iran

Two Cheers for Wall Street

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and his hard-line allies rail against the United States and other external “enemies,” but who they really fear are their own citizens. The president and his crowd are increasingly nervous about losing next month’s parliamentary elections, and next year’s presidential vote. Their cowardly solution? Keep potential rivals off the ballot and silence anyone who can give Iran’s people a voice — like Zanan, the country’s premier women’s magazine, and Shahla Sherkat, its courageous managing director. The government shut Zanan down recently. Mr. Ahmadinejad — with the backing of Iran’s most conservative mullahs — won election in 2005 promising economic reform and an end to political corruption. He has failed to deliver either. In an era of $100 a barrel oil, Iran’s people are struggling with food shortages, high unemployment and spiraling inflation. He has tried to divert attention from those failures with threats against Israel, Holocaust denials and a confrontation with the United Nations Security Council over nuclear ambitions. Iranians are not so easily fooled. Fearing just that, Mr. Ahmadinejad and his allies are pressing the vetting committees to keep a much higher than usual number of moderates and reform candidates off the ballot. Already large numbers of reformers have been told that they will not be allowed to run. According to government data, 8.16 percent of the current candidates for Parliament are women. That is down from 9.89 percent four years ago. Some women are now talking about trying to enter the race with an all-female slate of candidates — challenging the government to throw them off. The order to close Zanan, which means women, is the latest outrage and a sign of how much Mr. Ahmadinejad and the mullahs fear any debate. It should be reversed immediately. Ms. Sherkat, a former religious revolutionary turned pragmatic feminist, has kept Zanan open for 16 years and 152 issues, despite financial and political pressures. She has managed to inform her readers without overly infuriating the mullahs — until now. According to reports from Iran, authorities said that the magazine was a “threat to the psychological security of the society” because it showed Iranian women in a “black light.” The truth is, the magazine respected and celebrated Iranian women by offering articles on health, parenting, legal issues, literature and women’s achievements. The only psychological threat Zanan posed was to the regime’s authoritarian and anti-feminist pathology. Mr. Ahmadinejad may be able to stifle debate, for a while longer. If Iran’s mullahs think that he’s strengthening the country, they don’t understand Iran’s people.

There is roughly a 100 percent chance that we’re going to spend much of this year talking about the subprime mortgage crisis, the financial markets and the worsening economy. The only question is which narrative is going to prevail, the Greed Narrative or the Ecology Narrative. The Greed Narrative goes something like this: The financial markets are dominated by absurdly overpaid zillionaires. They invent complex financial instruments, like globally securitized subprime mortgages that few really understand. They dump these things onto the unsuspecting, sending destabilizing waves of money sloshing around the globe. Economies melt down. Regular people lose jobs and savings. Meanwhile, the financial insiders still get their obscenely rich bonuses. The morality of the Greed Narrative is straightforward. A small number of predators destabilize the economy and reap big bonuses. The financial system is fundamentally broken. Government should step in and control the malefactors of great wealth. The Ecology Narrative is different. It starts with the premise that investors and borrowers cooperate and compete in a complex ecosystem. Everyone seeks wealth while minimizing risk. As Jim Manzi, a software entrepreneur who specializes in applied artificial intelligence, has noted, the chief tension in this ecosystem is between innovation and uncertainty. We could live in a safer world, but we’d have to forswear creativity. The United States has generally opted for financial innovation. This has worked out pretty well. America has enjoyed 25 years of strong economic growth, in part because capital has been efficiently allocated to companies that can use it well. Financial instruments like adjustable-

Reconciling the tension between innovation and uncertainty.

again hedge funds have dampened market instability. If a currency, a company or a stock market starts to spiral downward, wealthy funds, detecting bargains, will come in and stabilize its assets. If a company’s price is rising to unsustainable levels, contrarian funds bet against the hype. Most of the time, the complex new instruments diversify risk and serve the public good. But life requires trade-offs, and, as we’re being reminded recently, the innovation process involves a painful adolescence. When a new instrument enters the market, it takes a while before people understand and institutionalize it. Whether the product is high-yield bonds or mortgage-

backed securities, there’s a tendency to get carried away. In the first stage of this adolescence, investors look around and see everybody else making money off some new instrument. As Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University in California notes: “They assume they are fine because they see everyone else buying it.” Then there’s a moment when people realize how stupid they have been. They’ve bought a pile of subprime mortgages without really knowing what they’ve purchased. The ratings agencies suddenly don’t look so reliable. The cycle of overconfidence becomes a cycle of underconfidence because nobody knows who is holding worthless paper. Then, finally, maturity sets in. Those who have lost great amounts of money get fired. People still find the new product useful, but within parameters and with greater safeguards. The lesson of the Ecology Narrative is that, in most cases, the market corrects itself. Maybe this year banks will change their pay structure so there’s not so much emphasis on short-term results. Maybe companies will change their boards to improve scrutiny over complex new instruments. In short, markets adapt. People who embrace the Ecology Narrative don’t like the offensive bonuses that get handed out on Wall Street. They don’t like the periodic crises, but don’t see how government can prevent them without clamping down on innovation. The Ecology Narrative is not morally satisfying. I wouldn’t bet on its popularity as a backlash against Wall Street and finance sweeps across a recession-haunted country. But the Ecology Narrative has one thing going for it. It happens to be true.

BOB HERBERT

Where’s the Big Idea?

Bush’s Cult Of Secrecy There’s no end to President Bush’s slyness in subverting new Congressional law and clinging to the secrecy that has been the administration’s executive cloak. When a vital measure to strengthen the tattered freedom-of-information law won unanimous approval by both houses of Congress, the president was forced to soften his stand and quietly sign it into law on New Year’s Eve. But, of course, even as open-government groups celebrated, the White House had another plan. A bit of fine print inserted in the president’s new budget proposal would weaken a major provision of the law — the empowerment of a new ombudsman to mediate disclosure disputes and prod agencies to end disgraceful delays. Rather than fulfilling Congress’s bipartisan mandate to establish the ombudsman at the respected National Archives, the Bush budget attempts a secret switch of the new watchdog to the Department of Justice. This is the very administration-friendly agency already responsible for defending agencies against lawsuits by citizens denied their information requests. It’s not hard to see what the administration has in mind, for it was former Attorney General John Ashcroft who exploited 9/11 panic and notoriously urged federal agencies to use all legal means to kill public document requests. This has remained de facto policy. The information law passed four decades ago set a 20-day deadline for agencies to reply to requests — a standard that soon became the bureaucracy’s joke on the public. The new law sets penalties for unjustifiable delay. The ombudsman’s independence is at the heart of repairing the information law. Congress must strike down the president’s tactic and keep the new watchdog at the National Archives, alert to the public’s understandable suspicions about its government.

BERKELEY, California There is plenty for Democrats to admire in the candidacies of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. They are smart, appealing and politically gifted. Their success to date represents advances in American society that many would have seen as unthinkable just a few years ago. There’s actually a lot for Americans of all political persuasions to admire this election season. This is how we change regimes in the United States — peacefully. I had a long conversation the other day with a writer from Kenya, Edwin Okong’o, who is visiting the University of California campus here. He found it difficult to hide his grief as he spoke of the murderous violence that has followed a disputed election in his country. Then he managed a smile. “It’s all about corruption,” he said. “I am always amazed when people say they are leaving the American government because they have to make more money. In my country, you go into the government to make the money.” But there is something important missing from this year’s presidential campaign. In an era that cries out for real change, John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is selling himself to voters not as the maverick he may once have been, but as a faithful follower of policies the country should be eager to discard.

: AIDE A LA LECTURE Pour aider à la lecture de l’anglais et familiariser nos lecteurs avec certaines expressions américaines, Le Monde publie ci-dessous la traduction de quelques mots et idiomes contenus dans les articles de ce supplément. Par Dominique Chevallier, agrégée d’anglais. LEXIQUE Dans l’article “A return to the Silhouettes of Simpler Times,” page 7: OUTFIT: tenue SHEATH: fourreau TO SHUN: éviter TO HARKEN BACK: retourner avec nostalgie HARBINGER: signe avant-coureur INFATUATION: engouement TO CINCH: serer étroitement, sangler TO GRAZE: effleurer CALVES: mollets BRASSIERE: soutien-gorge STAPLE: produit de base FASTIDIOUS: difficile à contenter UNALLOYED: sans mélange TO BEMOAN: déplorer REBUKE: réprimande DISHEVELED: échevelé

rate and subprime mortgages have allowed millions of people to get homes they could not otherwise purchase, and research shows that most of these tools have been used intelligently. Hedge funds have proliferated to help investors manage risk. These things exist precisely because investors want to smooth out volatility. In the old days, a blow to, say, the Texas economy could have dried up lending in Texas, but now funds flow globally, and money from one part of the world can shore up weakness in another. As Sebastian Mallaby of the Council on Foreign Relations has pointed out, time and

Dans l’article “Great Literature? Depends Who Wrote it,” page 8: SETTLEMENT: accord LOWBROW: terre à terre, peu intellectuel SLUMMING: s’encanailler TO TAKE EXCEPTION TO: s’offusquer de RACY: osé RESTIVE: rétif TO THWART: contrarier, contrecarrer Dans l’article “For the Beatles, a Prolific Meditation,” page 8: BLUNT: brutal TROVE: trésor SHORTCOMINGS: défauts, travers RUT: ornière TO TAP INTO: se brancher sur

With the Democrats, we seem obsessed with whether Senator Obama can get his new voters to the polls, and whether Senator Clinton can keep enough cash coming in, and whether there’s any substantive differences between their positions on health insurance and the war in Iraq. Where, in this alleged season of change, is the big idea? What’s missing in this campaign is a bold vision of where the United States should be heading in these crucially important early years of the 21st century. In their different ways, Senators Clinton and Obama have shown themselves to be inspirational and at times even heroic figures. But neither has offered the vision for the country that this moment in history demands. We’re excited more by who they are than by what they’ve promised to do. All the candidates have detailed policy proposals — masterpieces of minutiae. But do we have any real sense of what Senator Obama will do to stop the stagnation of the middle class and resuscitate the American dream? Do we have any reason to believe that during a Clinton presidency we’ll see a transformation of the nation’s decaying infrastructure? Does John McCain have the stuff to lead us from a long debilitating period of dependence on foreign oil to a new and exciting world of energy efficiency and innovation?

EXPRESSIONS Dans l’article “Great Literature? Depends Who Wrote It,” page 8: TO LIVE UP TO: se montrer à la hauteur de; vivre en accord avec; to live down, en revanche signifie se faire pardonner, faire oublier.

RÉFÉRENCES Dans l’article “Great Literature? Depends Who Wrote It,” page 8: ROBERT LITTELL: né en 1935, cet écrivain américain connu pour ses romans d’espionnage est le père de Jonathan Littell (prix Goncourt 2006, et Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française pour Les Bienveillantes). Grand journaliste à Newsweek pendant la Guerre Froide, où il est spécialiste du Moyen Orient, il publie ensuite, sous forme de feuilleton, dans l’Express — car il partage sa vie entre les Etats-Unis et la France — son premier roman. Ses romans d’espionnage, à grand succès, tournent surtout autour de la CIA et de l’Union Soviétique à l’époque de la Guerre Froide. The Company (la Compagnie: le grand roman de la CIA), publié en 2002, a été tourné

The essential question the candidates should be trying to answer — but that is not even being asked very often — is how to create good jobs in the 21st century. Thirty-seven million Americans are poor, and roughly 60 million others are near-poor. (These are people struggling to make it on incomes of $20,000 to $40,000 a year for a family of four.) Now the country is faced with a possible recession and the likelihood of moving further backward rather than forward on employment. The most direct route to the middle class has always been a good job. An obvious potential source of new jobs would be a broad campaign to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure — its roads, bridges, schools, levees, water treatment facilities and so forth. Another area with big job creation potential is the absolutely vital quest to develop alternative sources of energy. There are moments in history that demand not just talent in a nation’s leadership, but greatness — men or women with the courage to dream bigger and the ability to convince others that those dreams can be realized. The presidential candidates don’t seem to be rising to the nation’s many crucial challenges with the sense of urgency and the creative vision that is called for. Not yet, at least.

sous forme de mini-série en 2007. Dans l’article “For Jasper Johns, a Long Career Inspired by Shades of Gray,” page 8: CY TWOMBLY: Artiste peintre et sculpteur américain, né en 1928, associé au début de sa carrière à l’expressionisme abstrait, et influencé par Paul Klee. Après des Etudes aux Beaux Arts de Boston, il se rend à Asheville , Caroline du Nord, au Black Mountain College, qui à l’époque rassemble des artistes et des intellectuels aussi bien musiciens (John Cage) et danseurs chorégraphes (Merce Cunningham) que peintres et poètes, et permet des échanges intellectuels de grande richesse. Puis il se rend à Rome où il s’installe définitivement, et se tourne vers la sculpture abstraite (toujours recouverte de peinture blanche). Il revient au dessin et son œuvre est souvent comparée à un tableau d’écolier couvert de gribouillis enfantins ou graffiti où parfois se laissent déchiffrer des citations (de Mallarmé par exemple). La fondation de Ménil, à Houston, a fait construire par Renzo Piano un musée entièrement dévoué à son œuvre, exposée aussi à Avignon à la fondation Lambert.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2008

LE MONDE

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WORLD TRENDS

‘Minister of Ideas’ Helps Chart the Future of Brazil By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

BRASÍLIA — When Roberto Mangabeira Unger looks at Brazil, the country of his birth, he sees a “big, seething caldron of life, whose most salient characteristic is its vitality.’’ But Mr. Unger, a 60-year-old Harvard University law professor, also sees the people of Brazil as ambivalent about the idea of becoming a great country that “would open a unique path in the history of the world.” The search to turn “imagination into the possible,” as he puts it, is at the heart of Mr. Unger’s three-decade quest to be a factor in shaping the future of South America’s largest country with an estimated 190 million people. For years Mr. Unger has toiled in the background of Brazilian politics, a would-be kingmaker and political philosopher but never the front man of any political success story. But now he has a chance to chart the future of Brazil from inside the government. Mr. Unger, who three years ago denounced the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as the “most corrupt in Brazil’s history,” is now serving the president as his min-

LALO DE ALMEIDA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“This is an immense frontier of the imagination. The country can reinvent itself by changing the Amazon.” ROBERTO MANGABEIRA UNGER

Brazil’s minister for strategic affairs

ister for strategic affairs, a post many refer to as the “minister of ideas.” Taking a leave from Harvard, where he has taught since he was 24, Mr. Unger is trying to finally make his mark in the country where his maternal grandfather, Otávio Mangabeira, was a political legend. He was a former astronomy professor who became one of the most powerful governors of Bahia State. “I regard myself as a man without charm in a country of charmers,’’ he said from his office here in Brazil’s capital. “But I am very tenacious, and I have never given up.’’ Mr. Unger today calls Mr. da Silva a “person of great magnanimity and vision” for his stalwart support, and says now that some of his criticisms were “mistaken and overwhelmed by political passion.” The broad challenge for Mr. Unger,

known for his failed efforts to tilt Latin American politics to the left with a carefully defined alternative to neoliberalism, is to help chart a development path for Brazil. His object is to do away with Brazil’s traditional development model of transferring wealth from the international sectors of the economy, what he calls a “neo-Korean model,’’ which has traditionally rewarded the largest businesses with favorable tax treatment. “This would require institutional reconstruction, and we as Brazilians don’t know how to do that,’’ he said. “The Brazilian people would need to reshape their institutions without the instigation of a great national crisis, like a war.’’ He sees the future in small enterprises. A rapid expansion of credit to smaller producers and a decentralized network of technical support centers could help broaden the middle class from below, not above, he said. “We could light up a revolution in the Brazilian economy,’’ Mr. Unger said. He worries that Brazil will increasingly be caught between low-wage and high-productivity economies. With more than half of all Brazilian workers employed in the informal economy, paying little or no taxes and receiving little or no benefits, he is calling on the government to reduce the onerous payroll taxes that discourage employment of low-skilled workers in the formal economy. Mr. Unger also wants to help the government define an economically and ecologically responsible plan for development in the Amazon rain forest. “The Amazon is not just a set of trees,’’ he said. “It is a set of 25 million people. If we don’t create real economic opportunities for them, the practical result is to encourage disorganized economic activities that results in the further destruction of the rain forest.’’ But he does not claim to have the answers yet. “This is an immense frontier of the imagination,’’ he said. “The country can reinvent itself by changing the Amazon.’’ Many Brazilians in the political elite doubt that Mr. Unger will have success in translating his ideas into concrete policies. “Unger is too messianic for this place,’’ said Bolívar Lamounier, a political analyst here. Supporters say Mr. Unger’s intellect is an asset to Mr. da Silva. “He turns out ideas in a machine-like pace,’’ said Jorge Castañeda, a former foreign minister of Mexico and a close friend of Mr. Unger. If the post does not work out, Mr. Unger says, he will always have the “garden’’ — the safe haven of Harvard, where he has written some 16 books in English and Portuguese. “A situation like I had at Harvard is like a paradise,’’ he said. “The freedom is extraordinary. But there is a problem with life in a garden. It is not dangerous enough. Nothing in it can happen that will really shake you up and make you live. “The supreme good of life is vitality. And vitality is always seeping away.’’

American Universities Find a Global Market PHOTOGRAPHS BY TAMARA ABDUL HADI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By TAMAR LEWIN

The American system of higher education is becoming an important export as more universities take their programs overseas. In a kind of educational gold rush, American universities are competing to set up outposts in countries with limited higher education opportunities. American universities — along with Australian and British ones, which also offer instruction in English, the standard language of academia — are starting, or expanding, hundreds of programs and partnerships in booming markets like China, India and Singapore. And many are now considering full overseas branch campuses, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East. Already, students in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar can attend an American university withouttheexpense,cultureshockorpost-9/11 visa problems of traveling to America. At Education City in Doha, Qatar’s capital, they can study medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, international affairs at Georgetown, computer science and business at Carnegie Mellon, fine arts at Virginia Commonwealth, engineering at Texas A & M, and soon, journalism at Northwestern. “Where universities are heading now is toward becoming global universities,” said Howard Rollins, the former director of international programs at Georgia Tech, which has degree programs in France, Singapore, Italy, South Africa and China, and plans for India. “We’ll have more and more universities competing internationally for resources, faculty and the best students.” SincetheterroristattacksofSeptember 11, 2001, internationalization has moved high on the agenda at most universities, to prepare students for a globalized world. Overseas programs can help American universities build international relationships, attract top research talent and gain access to a new pool of tuition-paying students, just as the number of college-age Americans is about to decline. But some are skeptical. Amy Gutmann,

president of the University of Pennsylvania, said, “The risk is that we couldn’t deliver the same quality education that we do here, and that it would mean diluting our faculty strength at home.” While universities with overseas branches insist that the education equals what is offered in the United States, much of the faculty is hired locally, on a short-term basis. And certainly overseas branches raise fundamental questions: Will the programs reflect American values and culture, or the host country’s? Will American taxpayers end up paying part of the bill for overseas students? What happens if relations between the United States and the host country deteriorate? And will overseas branches that spread American expertise hurt American competitiveness? “A lot of these educators are trying to present themselves as benevolent and altruistic, when in reality, their programs

Competition among parents is fierce to enroll their children in the best private schools in New Delhi. A woman checks an admissions list.

Indian Parents Pray for Glory Of Preschool By SOMINI SENGUPTA

NEW DELHI — They offer prayers. They set aside bribe money. Their nights are restless. This is the winter of disquiet for parents of small children in India, especially here in its prospering, fast-growing capital, where the demands of ambition and demography collide with a shortage of desirable schools. This year, admissions for prekindergarten seats in Delhi begin for children as young as 3, and what school they get into now is widely felt to make or break their educational fate. The anxiety over school admissions is a parable of desire and frustration in a country with the largest concentration of young people in the world. About 40 percent of India’s 1.1 billion citizens are younger than 18; many others are parents in their 20s and 30s, with young school-age children. Today, for all but the very poor, gov-

Overseas campuses of American universities include Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, top, and New York Institute of Technology in Abu Dhabi.

are aimed at making money,” said Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who has criticized the rush overseas. But David J. Skorton, the president of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, said the global drive benefited the United States. “Higher education is the most important diplomatic asset we have,” he said. “I believe these programs can actually reduce friction between countries and cultures.” George Mason University, a public university in Fairfax, Virginia, has opened a campus in Ras al Khaymah, another one of the emirates. George Mason expected to have 200 undergraduates in 2006, and grow from there. But it had just 57 degree students — 3 in biology, 27 in business and 27 in engineering — at the start of this academic year, joined by a few more students and programs this semester. The project, an hour north of Dubai’s skyscrapers and 11,000 kilometers from Virginia, is still finding its way. “I will freely confess that it’s all been more complicated than I expected,” said Peter Stearns, George Mason’s provost. The Ras al Khaymah campus has had a succession of deans. Simple tasks like ordering books take months, in part because of government censors. And it has not been easy to find interested students with the admissions test scores and English skills that George Mason requires. The Ras al Khaymah students include Bangladeshis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Indians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians and more, most from families that can afford the $5,400-a-semester tuition. The students say they love the small classes, diversity and camaraderie. “At my local school in Abu Dhabi, it was all what the teachers told you, what was in the book,” said Mona Bar Houm, a Palestinian student. “Here you’re asked to come up with your personal ideas.” But what matters most, they say, is getting an American degree. “It doesn’t need to be Harvard,” said Abdul Mukit, a business student. “It’s good enough to be just an American degree.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOMAS MUNITA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

ernment schools are not an option because they are considered weak, and the competition for choice private schools is fierce. The scramble is part of the great Indian education rush, playing out across the country and across the socioeconomic spectrum. The striving classes are spending hefty amounts or taking loans to send their children to private schools. In some cases, children from

small towns are commuting more than 60 kilometers every day to good, or at least sought-after, schools. New private schools are sprouting, as industrialists, real estate developers and even a handful of foreign companies eye the Indian education market. A retired civil servant, Vir Singh, 68, recognized this shift in his own family. One of his sons attended government school and moved to the United States to

work as an engineer. Another attended a decent private school here in Delhi and went on to work for a multinational company, but today that same son refuses to send his daughter to his own alma mater. Mr. Singh said that son wanted his child to attend none but the city’s best. “Now they want more high-fly schools,’’ is how he put it. “It’s a changed society.’’ The admissions process has never been easy in elite Indian schools. Once, private school admissions were based on an opaque mix of connections, money and preferences for certain kinds of families for certain kinds of schools. Today, as a result of litigation, court-mandated rules in Delhi have been devised to make the process fairer and more transparent, at least on paper. Schools are allowed to set their own admissions criteria, but those must be made clear to parents and followed consistently. Many schools this year have created a point system that rewards girls, students with older siblings in the same school, children of alumni and, to encourage neighborhood schooling, those who live nearby. Over the past few weeks, it was hard to find parents who were not complaining

about the new rules. Sridhar and Noopur Kannan, seeking admission to the Delhi Public School (as in Britain, “public” means private) for their 4-year-old son, found it absurd that girls were being rewarded, even as they counted their one enviable blessing: Mr. Kannan was an alumnus of the school, and a member of the screening committee remembered him as a good student. Rumana Akhtar’s alma mater, where her daughter would have had an advantage, was impractical because it was far across town from where she lives. Alok Aggarwal’s efforts to ply his connections had done nothing to secure a seat for his 4-year-old son. Ashok Gupta rued his own lack of connections, but had set aside more than $2,500 in case a “donation’’ would open doors. Many parents said that despite the new criteria, some schools continued to make exceptions in exchange for contributions to school funds. “Theyneedtoopenanewschoolforchildren who haven’t gotten in anywhere,’’ said Sarika Chetwani, 28, who had applied unsuccessfully to 12 schools for her 4-year-old daughter. “I’m totally messed up. I don’t know what to do next.’’

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2008 WORLD TRENDS

Helping Teenagers Reduce Risky Behavior By JANE E. BRODY

Last January in Freehold Township, New Jersey, a car driven by a 17-year-old high school student, with two fellow students as passengers, passed a car being driven by another teenager at about 110 kilometers per hour in an 80-kilometer zone. The passing vehicle crashed into an oncoming van. Three boys and the 68year-old van driver were killed. It is an all too familiar tale, prompting parents and school officials alike to wonder why risky behavior is so common among teenagers and what might be done to curtail it. Is it that teenagers think that they are immortal or invulnerable, immune to the hazards adults see so clearly? Or do they not appreciate the risks involved and need repeated reminders of the dangers inherent in activities like driving too fast, driving drunk, having unprotected sex, experimenting with drugs, binge drinking, jumping into unknown waters, you name it? None of the above, says Valerie F. Reyna, professor of human development and psychology at the New York State College of Human Ecology at Cornell in Ithaca, New York. The facts are quite the opposite. Scientific studies have shown that adolescents are very well aware of their vulnerability and that they actually overestimate their risk of suffering negative effects from activities like drinking and unprotected sex. For example, a study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that teenagers were more likely than adults to overestimate risks for every outcome studied, from lowprobability events like contracting H.I.V. to higher-probability ones like acquiring more common sexually transmitted diseases or becoming pregnant from a single act of unprotected sex. “We found that teenagers quite rationally weigh benefits and risks,’’ Dr. Reyna said in a recent interview. “But when they do that, the equation delivers the message to go ahead and do that, be-

cause to the teen the benefits outweigh the risks.’’ For example, she said: “The risk of pregnancy from a single act of unprotected sex is quite small, perhaps one chance in 12, and the risk of contracting H.I.V., about one in 500, is very much smaller than that. We’re not thinking logically; they are.’’ For that reason, Dr. Reyna and Frank Farley, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and past president of the American Psychological Association, noted last June in an article in Scientific American Reports that traditional programs that appeal to teenagers’ rationality “are inherently flawed, not because teens fail to weigh risks against benefits,’’ but because “teens tend to

Notions of invulnerability may have little to do with reckless behavior.

weight benefits more heavily than risks when making decisions.’’ As for perceptions of invulnerability, a national study of 3,544 teenagers a decade ago found that their own estimates of their risk of dying were very much higher than the actual risk. Because adolescents already feel so vulnerable, showing them photos or films of fatal car crashes may do nothing to reduce future risk-taking. “It now becomes clearer why traditional intervention programs fail to help many teenagers,’’ Dr. Reyna and Dr. Farley wrote. “Although the programs stress the importance of accurate risk perception, young people already feel vulnerable and overestimate their risks.’’

In Dr. Reyna’s view, inundating teenagers with factual risk information could backfire, leading them to realize that behaviors like unprotected sex are less risky than they thought. Based on what she and others have learned about how teenagers react to risky choices, Dr. Reyna, co-director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research at Cornell, and her colleague Charles J. Brainerd are testing a new approach to adolescent risk prevention. She explained that as people grew older and more experienced, they became more intuitive, and more of their decisions were based on what she calls “gist,’’ an overall sense of what is the best course of action. This approach enables adults to reach a conclusion more quickly and, in the process, reduce their risky behaviors. Forexample,whileanadolescentmight consider playing a game with a gun that has one bullet in the chamber for a $1 million payoff, a normal adult would not give it a moment’s thought. The adult would immediately be more inclined to think: “No way! No amount of money is worth a one in six chance of dying.’’ “Young people don’t get it,’’ Dr. Reyna said. “They don’t get the gist of a situation. Gist is based on one’s culture, background and experiences, and experience is what teens lack.’’ Teenagers need “practice at recognizing cues in the environment that signal possible danger before it’s too late to act,’’ the two experts urged in a 44-page review of adolescent decision making published in September 2006 in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. At the same time, Dr. Reyna warned: “Younger adolescents don’t learn from consequences as well as older adolescents do. So rather than relying on them to make reasoned choices or to learn from the school of hard knocks, a better approach is to supervise them.’’

STUART BRADFORD

Fast Drivers Find Thrills In Stock Deals

Traders Crave A Money High From Page 1 Make You Rich.’’ One of his findings was that brain images of drug addicts who are about to take another hit are indistinguishable from those of traders who are making money and about to place another trade. “That tells us pretty confidently that if you make money and make money again,’’ Mr. Zweig said, “it is very similar to a chemical addiction and it becomes very hard to let go.’’ Mr. Kerviel, 31, told prosecutors that he was thrilled when his surreptitious trades in European stock index futures began to pay off. By late December, he had made a profit of about $2 billion. “That produced a desire to continue,’’ Mr. Kerviel said. “There was a snowball effect.’’ But when the markets turned against him, Mr. Kerviel made an all-too-common mistake: He refused to cut his losses, which would balloon to more than $7 billion as the bank frantically unwound his positions on January 21-22. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, showed that individuals do not always act rationally when faced with uncertainty in decision making. When faced with losses, individuals may seek to take more risk rather than less, contrary to what traditional economic thought might suggest. “When you are threatened with extinction, you act like nothing matters,’’ said Andrew Lo, a professor at M.I.T. who has studied the role of emotions in trading. Mr. Kerviel, he said, is a case study in loss aversion. Mr. Lo and Dmitry V. Repin of Boston University have studied traders to determine how stress and emotions affect investment returns. They monitored traders’ vital signs like heart rate, body temperature and respiration as their subjects darted in and out of trades. The findings, while preliminary, suggest — perhaps unsurprisingly — that traders who let their emotions get the best of them tend to fare poorly in the markets. But traders who rely on logic alone don’t do that well either. The most successful ones use their emotions to their advantage without letting the feelings overwhelm them. “The best traders are the ones who have controlled emotional responses,’’

From Page 1

RICHARD DREW/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Brain images of drug addicts about to take another hit are similar to those of traders placing another trade.

When faced with losses, individuals may actually seek to take more risk. Mr. Lo said. “Professional athletes have the same reaction — they use emotion to psych them up, but they don’t let those emotions take them over.’’ Or, as Warren E. Buffett once put it, “Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.’’ Of course most traders do not breach ethical boundaries like Mr. Kerviel, who manipulated e-mail messages to hide his unauthorized trades. But unbridled ambition and the hit from the money high are a dangerous combination.

People like to think that logic prevails in the financial markets, that traders and investors always act rationally. “Clearly, institutional investors want to believe it’s all scientific,’’ said Mark W. Yusko, president of Morgan Creek Capital Management in North Carolina. But Wall Street can get carried away. The Internet boom and bust were followed by an even bigger boom and bust in mortgage lending. Wall Street is now saddled with more than $100 billion in losses stemming from mortgage investments, and the economy may be sliding into recession. Alpesh Patel, principal at the Praefinium Group, an asset management company, said that when traders get too emotional, they start making bigger, more frequent trades. “You know you are damaging yourself, and there’s no gain in a financial sense, but the highs from the winning lead you to take bigger risks,’’ said Mr. Patel, who has written 11 books on trad-

ing psychology and risk management. Legendary Wall Street traders like Steven A. Cohen and Julian H. Robertson Jr. are students of human emotion. Mr. Cohen, who runs a $15 billion hedge fund called SAC Capital Advisors, keeps Ari Kiev, a psychiatrist, on hand to work with his legions of traders, people from SAC say. Mr. Robertson, the founder of Tiger Management, which at its peak in 1998 managed $22 billion, turned to a psychoanalyst, Dr. Aaron Stern, to test and evaluate Tiger’s traders. Dr. Kiev, author of the forthcoming “Mastering Trading Stress: Strategies for Maximizing Performance,’’ said many traders, professionals and everyday investors, fail to manage their risks. “It is more common for people to hold onto losers and see their investment go to zero, or shorts go to the sky, than it is for them to practice good risk management and get out,’’ Dr. Kiev said.

drivers — and, not coincidentally, to trade less often. But he stressed that he and his co-researcher controlled for factors like age when conducting their tests. So one way to interpret their findings is that, between two people of the same age, the one who gets a speeding ticket is likely to have 11 percent more turnover in his portfolio. One possible explanation that the professors explored was overconfidence. But after studying for that trait, they concluded that it was not the source of the link. The professors’ findings about overconfidence, along with results of other complex tests they conducted, led them to conclude that the correlation between speeding tickets and more frequent trading was caused by something quite different: thrill-seeking. They found that thrill seekers trade more often not because they have an inflated belief that they can beat the market, but because they find a static portfolio too boring. Did the thrill seekers nevertheless improve their returns by trading often? No, the professors found. They found that the stocks bought by the thrill seekers fared no better, on average, than those they sold. If anything, Professor Grinblatt said, the thrill seekers were worse off, after considering transaction costs. They “cannot justify their trading in terms of their performance,’’ he concluded. The study provides yet more evidence that psychological motivations play a large role in investment decisions. The implication is that, before we initiate any trade, it’s wise to engage in some honest self-reflection about our motivations. Are we trading because there is compelling evidence supporting it, or simply because we find our long-held stocks aren’t exciting enough? Undoubtedly, all of us would benefit from periodically asking ourselves this question, but Professor Grinblatt said that it was especially important to ask it after we’ve been pulled over for speeding. Mark Hulbert is editor of The Hulbert Financial Digest, a service of MarketWatch.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2008

LE MONDE

5

MONEY & BUSINESS

Office Gossip Is Information By Another Name

South Africa is grappling with frequent power failures. An armed security guard keeps watch at the entrance to a clothing store in downtown Johannesburg during a power outage.

Q. Office colleagues are constantly gos-

siping about one another and about management. It’s hard to resist joining in, but it feels subversive to spread information this way. Is it? A. Not necessarily. Most gossip is just communication, a way that people form networks of trusting relationEILENE ZIMMERMAN ships. The word “gossip’’ has a negative connotation, but you could also call it strategic information sharing, counseling or mentoring, said Michael Morris, a research psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Columbia Business School in New York who studies social cognition. As long as the information you’re spreading is not intended to hurt another person, it can actually be good for the company. Especially during times of major change, like downsizing or layoffs, gossip can be cathartic for employees, Professor Morris said.

CAREER COUNSELOR

Q. Can gossiping ever help your career? A. It can give you an advantage because

it tends to be surprisingly accurate, said David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist, anthropologist and professor at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. “A company newsletter will never replace gossip, because you get much more and better information from gossip,’’ he said. Gossip is your workplace radar, keeping you abreast of changes at the company, even if there is no official communication about them. You can use that information to your advantage, Professor Morris said. Q. When does gossip go from being harmless speculation or venting to something more destructive? A. When it’s done to shame or humili-

office in June 1999, tried unsuccessfully to induce private investors to build additional power plants. Only belatedly did it permit Eskom to begin the necessary expansion. “The president has accepted that this government got its timing wrong,’’ Alec Erwin, the public enterprises minister, said recently at a much-anticipated news briefing that broke a mystifying public silence. This statement was a rare admission of fault by a prideful, postapartheid government. Mr. Mbeki, now in the final year of his second term, can legitimately boast of many successes, among them the provision of electricity to the impoverished masses. Since the African National Congress came to power in 1994, South Africa has doubled the percentage of its population connected to the grid to more than 70 percent. Though the government insists it will not allow the power crisis to jeopardize future industrial projects and interfere with plans to play host to the 2010 World Cup in ANTONY KAMINJU/ASSOCIATED PRESS soccer, many experts consider the power shortage a lamentable foulup likely to undo some of Mr. Mbeki’s economic accomplishments. “The warnings were wellknown, but the government was ernment-controlled utility, could not too aloof and arrogant to act,’’ said guarantee enough power to ventilate William Mervin Gumede, the author and cool the deep underground shafts. of “Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for Companies that mine gold and platinum the Soul of the A.N.C.’’ “This is simply restarted production only after emer- disastrous for the economy. You can gency negotiations with Eskom, South throw out all the goals of 6 percent economic growth.’’ Africa’s Chamber of Mines said. South Africans are appalled by the “The shutdown of the mining industry is an extraordinary, unprecedented daily interruptions to their lives. Workevent,’’ said Anton Eberhard, a busi- ers sit idle, televisions flick into darkness school professor at the University ness and silence, elevators stall beof Cape Town and an energy expert. tween floors, gas stations cannot pump, “That’s a powerful message, massively cakes remain forever half-baked. Every damaging to South Africa’s reputation intersection with disabled traffic lights for new investment. Our country was becomes a four-way stop, with drivers in each direction maddeningly delayed as built on the mines.’’ The current crisis stems from Es- the endless lines of cars inch forward. Most merchants are losing a day of kom’s lack of capacity to generate enough power, and its inability to keep sales each week because of the blackouts. In Alexandra, the poor township many of its plants working. In 1998, a government report warned just blocks from Sandton, John Kendia that at the rate the economy was grow- shuts his clothing shop with each power ing, the nation faced serious electric- failure. “We’ve had the lights go out for ity shortages by 2007 unless capacity four and five hours,’’ he said. “Who exwas expanded. The government, led by cept thieves want to be in the store in President Thabo Mbeki, who assumed the dark?’’

Power Cuts Imperil South Africa’s Gains By BARRY BEARAK and CELIA W. DUGGER

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — At first, the power blackouts seemed a mere nuisance, the electricity suddenly dead for two or three hours at a time, two or three times a day. Radio announcers jocularly advised listeners to make their morning toast by vigorously rubbing two pieces of bread together and wisecracked about amorous uses for the extra darkness. But after three weeks of chronic failures — after regularly irregular vexations with lifeless computers, stove tops and stoplights — public forbearance has given way to outrage. This nation, long a reliable repository of cheap, plentiful electricity, finds itself pitifully short of juice. The government has confessed to an “electricity emergency’’ and has begun a program of rationing for industrial usGavin du Venage contributed reporting from George, South Africa.

ers. This is a mortifying turn for a country that considers itself the powerhouse of Africa and resists comparisons to its underdeveloped, famine-plagued neighbors. But the electricity shortages, which are now expected to be a fact of life for the next five years, are more than a national embarrassment. They threaten continued strong growth here in a nation that accounts for a third of subSaharan Africa’s economic output and ranks among the world’s top 25 countries in gross domestic product. Because South Africa is an engine of growth for the region, a slowdown here would also affect its neighbors, undermining global efforts to reduce poverty and damaging South Africa’s own drive to slash its woeful unemployment rate of 25.5 percent. One of this nation’s largest employers, the mining industry, virtually halted production for four days recently because Eskom, the dominant, gov-

The Sale of Yahoo Could Hurt Small Fish in the Tech Sea By BRAD STONE and MIGUEL HELFT

CHRIS REED

ate someone else, or involves negative speculation about a person’s character or competence, said Anna Maravelas, president of TheraRising, a leadership development and conflict resolution firm in St. Paul, Minnesota, and author of “How to Reduce Workplace Conflict and Stress.’’ Malicious gossip erodes trust among co-workers and escalates conflict, preventing them from working together effectively. That leads to anger, resentment and lower morale, which affect productivity, she said. Q. Can gossiping hurt your career or

jeopardize your job? A. Someone who gossips negatively often

has other problems with co-workers, said Peggy Klaus, president of Klaus & Associates, a communication and leadership consulting firm in Berkeley, California, and author of “The Hard Truth About Soft Skills.’’ Ms. Klaus said that nasty gossip is often accompanied by anger problems. “As a manager, if you have to resort to gossiping about others, you’re not very good at giving feedback or managing people,’’ she said. That sort of gossip could qualify as sexual harassment or discrimination, which could be grounds for dismissal, said Jennifer Berman, a lawyer and managing director of CBIZ Human Capital, a human resources outsourcing firm in Chicago.

SAN FRANCISCO — For decades, Silicon Valley has been the land of eternal optimism and high anxiety, traits that heighten anytime a seismic business event affects the landscape here — like, for example, Microsoft’s blockbuster $45 billion bid for Yahoo. The high-tech entrepreneurs who have set up camp here with clever ideas, a willingness to scramble for financing and the energy to weather round-theclock days have typically tethered their dreams to a getting fabulously rich by selling to one of the three Internet giants, Microsoft, Google or Yahoo. But if Microsoft’s takeover bid for Yahoo succeeds, that calculus becomes more harrowing because of a simple reality: the field of large, lushly endowed suitors will narrow by one. And that is sure to jangle nerves already strained by fears of an economic recession. “From a start-up and investor perspective, if there are more companies trying to vie for the same businesses, there are more exits,’’ said Bismarck Lepe, a former Google employee and now chief executive of Ooyala, a yearold video host and advertising company. “It’s not great for competition if there are only two acquisition targets instead of three.’’ Even though on February 11 Yahoo rejected the initial bid as inadequate, Microsoft has indicated that it plans to pursue its hostile takeover. To be sure, a Microsoft-Yahoo deal could be good for Silicon Valley, funneling money into the economy and triggering a round of copycat deals as other players like Google and the News Corporation look to keep up.

DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Max Levchin, a PayPal founder, says start-ups will cut spending. CHRISTOPHE VORLET

But Microsoft is buying Yahoo because it has steadily fallen behind Google in the lucrative online search market and because the future of computing may not be forever linked to the desktop market that Microsoft now dominates. Apparently unable to keep up with Google through internal efforts, the software giant in Redmond, Washington, has gone outside to solve its problems by trying to buy Yahoo. So the rationale for the proposed mega-deal is based on Microsoft’s own particular corporate needs and may not be a harbinger of rampant deal-making in the Valley. Moreover, with an economic recession looming in the United States, the unsolicited bid for Yahoo comes at a difficult time for the normally confident world of high tech. Visibly, much of the region maintains an almost obstinate belief that

it can weather any economic storm that emerges. Consumers are still flocking online and advertising is following. Venture capitalists also raised nearly $35 billion last year, more than at any other time since before the dot-com crash, according to the National Venture Capital Association. But as the stock market lolls and an outsider, Microsoft, bids to gobble up a company that once was one of Silicon Valley’s crown jewels, the region’s innovators and corporate stewards appear to be growing ever more anxious. Max Levchin, the chief executive of Slide, says that Silicon Valley start-ups could be headed for a venture capitalmandated round of belt tightening. So Mr. Levchin, who co-founded PayPal, a company that successfully weathered the dot-com crash, decided to take the money while the going was good: He

recently raised $55 million in additional financing for Slide, a company that makes video- and photo-sharing tools. “We determined that if we were going to raise money, we would have a much easier time of it at the end of 2007 than at any time during 2008,’’ he said. “I don’t think I was the only guy in town who thought that.’’ Many in the typically overconfident venture capital world say it is foolish to believe the technology sector is somehow sheltered from the storm. “All markets are linked,’’ says Peter Rip, a general partner at Crosslink Capital, adding that the pain might trickle down from the public markets to large private companies and eventually to smaller start-ups. “We just asked every one of our companies to take a sharp pencil to their hiring plan this year. It is going to be a bumpy ride for a while.’’

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2008 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

FINDINGS

In Sleep, the Brain Recharges Researchers who study the brain know that it’s far from an immutable object. “It’s much more plastic than most people think,’’ said Giulio Tononi, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “It’s changing all the time.’’ One area of change is the synapses, the connections between neurons, which are altered as the brain receives stimuli. “What happens when you’re awake is you produce an overall strengthening of synapses,’’ Dr. Tononi said. “That’s good, because that’s how you learn.’’ But that is unsustainable in the long run, because stronger synapses require more energy and material, and there’s a limit to how much of both is available. Stronger synapses are also bigger, but the brain cannot grow bigger or denser. “If you strengthen synapses because you learn, soon you’d reach a point where you can’t learn further,’’ Dr. Tononi said. So Dr. Tononi and a colleague, Chiara Cirelli, have hypothesized that during sleep, the synapses weaken. The downscaling is across the board, so those that have been used (those involved in learning) stay stronger than those that haven’t. Drs. Tononi and Cirelli say this weakening is a crucial role of sleep, because it restores the brain for the next period of learning. But their ideas run counter to another theory, that brain circuits that were activated during wakefulness become reactivated during sleep, consolidating learning by making these synapses stronger. Now the researchers have produced experimental findings in rats that support their hypothesis. In a paper in Nature Neuroscience, they show that rats had stronger synapses after periods of wakefulness than after periods of sleep. The results, Dr. Tononi said, suggest that after sleep “we get a leaner brain — there’s a gain in terms of energy, space and supplies, and you are ready to learn anew.” HENRY FOUNTAIN

Age and Decision-Making For the especially unscrupulous con artist, the elderly are a tempting target. Now researchers have confirmed in the lab what frauds already knew: as they grow older, even people who seem in control of things may have trouble making good decisions. The researchers based their findings on a series of tests given to two groups of healthy people, one ages 26 to 55, the other 56 to 85. The goal was to see how well the older volunteers used the skills often demanded of them when making decisions in real life about activities like investments, insurance and estate planning. “Such decisions would be a challenge even for young adults,’’ the researchers note in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. But when age is taken into account, they said, the challenge becomes even greater. STUART GOLDENBERG Even someone with high intellect and good memory, the study said, may be undergoing changes in the prefrontal part of the brain that affects behavior. “The first manifestation of this cognitive decline may be exercising poor judgment and decision making in many important real-life matters,’’ the study said. The researchers, led by Natalie L. Denburg of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, used a gambling-style test in which people draw from four different decks of cards. Two decks are bad. They give short-term rewards but long-term losses. The other two decks do the opposite. Most people draw a lot from the bad decks first and switch. In the study, many of the older participants stuck with the bad decks. ERIC NAGOURNEY

Risk Associated With Soda Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels, and elevated blood pressure. The scientists gathered dietary information on more than 9,500 men and women ages 45 to 64 and tracked their health for nine years. Over all, a Western dietary pattern — high intakes of refined grains, fried foods and red meat — was associated with an 18 percent increased risk for metabolic syndrome, while a “prudent” diet dominated by fruits, vegetables, fish and poultry correlated with neither an increased nor a decreased risk. But the risk of developing metabolic syndrome was 34 percent higher among those who drank one can of diet soda a day compared with those who drank none. “This is interesting,” said Lyn M. Steffen, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and a co-author of the paper, which was posted online in the journal Circulation. “Why is it happening? Is it some kind of chemical in the diet soda, or something about the behavior of diet soda drinkers?” NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Marketing Stem Cells Several companies now offer stem cell extraction and storage services, though viable therapies may be years away. COMPANY CELLS TAKEN FROM COLLECTED BY COLLECTION AND PROCESSING FEE STORAGE FEE

BioEden Baby teeth Customer $595 for one tooth. $89 a year

C’elle (Cryo-Cell) Menstrual blood Customer $499 for one specimen and first year of storage. $99 a year

NeoStem Marrow, via blood apheresis Doctor $7,500 plus about $800 for injections of Neupogen. $699 a year

Store A Tooth Baby teeth Dentist or oral surgeon $699 for up to four teeth and first year of storage. $120 year

COLLECTION KIT OR EQUIPMENT

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Questioning the Allure of Saving Cells for a Cure By ANDREW POLLACK

Can a woman’s period save her life years later? A company called Cryo-Cell International says that it can — that menstrual fluid has stem cells that may one day be used for medical treatments. The company has not published research verifying the claim. But using the slogan “Your monthly miracle,’’ it is offering, for a fee, to collect and store cells from the fluid for a woman’s future use. Cryo-Cell, in Oldsmar, Florida, is one of several companies trying to make a business out of banking stem cells. Although businesses that store umbilical cord blood have operated for years, the new services have a potentially broader appeal, to people who are not having babies at the moment. There are companies that offer to extract and store stem cells from adult blood, from fat removed by liposuction, from children’s baby teeth after they fall out and from leftover embryos at fertility clinics. But some experts say consumers should think twice before spending money on such services, because it is not clear how useful such cells will be. “In the stem cell area, we have a problem with truth in advertising,’’ said Christopher Scott, director of the Program on Stem Cells in Society at Stanford University in California. “Some of these companies are skirting right on the edge of what’s truthful.’’ The companies, some of them small and financially uncertain, are capitalizing on the excitement surrounding stem cells. “There are potentially scores of applications that could emerge over time,’’ said Mercedes Walton, chief executive of Cryo-Cell. The fee for collection and processing the cells ranges from $499 to $7,500, depending on the company. There is also a yearly fee of $89 to $699 for storing the cells in liquid nitrogen.

into a diverse range of tissues, but the question is unsettled. Stem cells in the pulp of baby teeth can clearly turn into part of the teeth. But contentions that the cells can also form other types of cells, like nerve cells, are more controversial. “There’s never been a demonstration that these cells actually form nerve cells that can function as nerve cells,’’ said Pamela Gehron Robey, who headed the lab at the National Institutes of Health, where the baby-teeth stem cells were discovered. Yet the services offering to store baby teeth talk about diseases that stem cells might treat one day. “One day, the Tooth Fairy could save your child’s life’’ is the slogan of BioEden Inc. of Austin, Texas. Dr. Lily Eng, a dentist in Lower Manhattan, said she had learned about the service just in time to send in the last suitable tooth from her son Leo, who is now 12. “I heard some mixed reviews about how viable this option is,’’ Dr. Eng said. But she added that she had regretted not storing the cord blood from Leo’s birth, so she decided to try the tooth. “There’s no other option left, and I decided to take it,’’ she said. MARINA LUZ Menstrual fluid is the newest service, and the least is known about these cells. cells. But experts say it could be years, if ever, for Cryo-Cell has long been in the cord-blood-banking business, but in November it began a service such treatments to become available. One cell bank, StemLifeLine, offers to make such called C’elle for the menstrual blood. embryonic stem cells from the embryos couples One expert, Dr. Camillo Ricordi of the University have left over after undergoing in vitro fertiliza- of Miami, said he had not finished his analysis of tion. The cells, which would cost a couple at least the procedure but added that the cells did prolifer$4,000, would not be a complete genetic match to ei- ate very rapidly. ther parent or to any of their children, which could Dr. Ricordi said he had told his two daughters, conceivably limit their usefulness. ages 19 and 20, about the service. “They’ve been Other cell banks are working with adult cells, complaining to me that I didn’t save the cord blood which are present in the body throughout life. when they were born,’’ he said. “At least this one is There is evidence that some of these cells can turn not a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’’

Some people buying the services say there is little to lose except money, even if the chance that the cells will be needed or useful is slim. “The idea is just to have them,’’ said Stephanie Seidman, a patent lawyer in San Diego with a doctorate in molecular biology. “Once you get sick, it’s too late.’’ Scientists say it is quite unlikely a person will ever need such cells. And the technology could change so much that cells stored now may not be needed if a person falls ill in 10 or 20 years. The companies’ Web sites often talk about all the diseases that may one day be treated with stem

Feel Like a Fraud? At Times, Maybe You Should Stare into a mirror long enough and it’s hard not to wonder whether that’s a mask staring back, and if so, who’s really behind it. A similar self-doubt can cloud a public identity as well, especially for anyone who has just stepped into a new role. College graduate. New mother. Medical doctor. Even, for that matter, presidential nominee. Presidents and parents, after ESSAY all, are expected to make crucial decisions quickly. Doctors are being asked to save lives, and graduate students to know how Aristotle’s conception of virtue differed from Aquinas’s conception of — uh-oh. Who’s kidding whom? Social psychologists have studied what they call the impostor phenomenon since at least the 1970s, when a pair of therapists at Georgia State University in Atlanta used the phrase to describe the internal experience of a group of high-achieving women who had a secret sense they were not as capable as others thought. Since then researchers have documented such fears in adults of all ages, as well as adolescents. Their findings have veered well away from the original conception of impostorism as a reflection of an anxious personality or a cultural stereotype. Feelings of phoniness appear to alter people’s goals in unexpected ways and may also protect them against subconscious self-delusions. Questionnaires measuring impostor fears ask people how much they agree with statements like these: “At times, I feel my success has been due to some kind of luck.’’ “I can give the impression that I’m more competent than I really am.’’ “If I’m to receive a promotion of some kind, I hesitate to tell others until it’s an accomplished fact.’’

BENEDICT CAREY

Researchers have found, as expected, that people who score highly on such scales tend to be less confident, more moody and affected by performance anxieties than those who score lower. But the dread of being found out is hardly always paralyzing. Two psychologists at Purdue University in Indiana, Shamala Kumar and Carolyn M. Jagacinski, gave 135 college students a series of questionnaires, measuring anxiety level, impostor feelings and approach to academic goals. They found that women who scored highly also reported a strong desire to show that they could do better than others. They competed harder. By contrast, men who scored highly on the impostor scale showed more desire to avoid contests in areas where they felt vulnerable. Yet if feelings of phoniness were all bad, it seems unlikely that they would be so familiar to so many emotionally welladapted people. In a 2000 study at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, psychologists had people who scored highly on an impostor scale predict how they would do on a coming test of intellectual and social skills. Sure enough, the self-styled impostors predicted that they would do poorly. But when making the same predictions in private — anonymously, they were told — the same people rated their chances on the test as highly as people who scored low on the impostor scale. In short, the researchers concluded, many self-styled impostors are phony phonies: they adopt self-deprecation as a social strategy, consciously or not, and are secretly more confident

than they let on. “Particularly when people think that they might not be able to live up to others’ views of them, they may maintain that they are not as good as other people think,’’ Dr. Mark Leary, the lead author, wrote in an e-mail message. “In this way, they lower others’ expectations — and get credit for being humble.’’ In a study published in September, Rory O’Brien McElwee and Tricia Yurak of Rowan University in New Jersey had 253 students take tests assessing how people present themselves in public. They found that psychologically speaking, impostorism looked a lot more like a self-presentation strategy than a personality trait. Dr. McElwee said that as a social strategy, projecting oneself as an impostor can lower expectations for a performance and take pressure off a person — as long as the self-deprecation doesn’t go too far. It’s the difference between saying you got drunk before taking a big test and actually doing it, she said. “One provides a ready excuse, and the other is self-destructive,’’ she said. From her study, Dr. McElwee concluded that impostor fears most likely came and went in most people, and were most acute when, for example, a teacher first had to stand up in front of a class, or a new mechanic or lawyer took on real liability. At those times feeling like a fraud amounts to more than the stirrings of an anxious temperament or the desire to project a protective humility. It reflects a respect for the limits of one’s own abilities, and an intuition that only a true impostor would be afraid to ask for help.

Using self-deprecation as a social strategy, consciously or not.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2008

LE MONDE

7

L I V I N G : FA S H I O N

A Return to the Silhouettes Of Simpler Times Stephanie LaCava has glimpsed fashion’s future, and she likes what she sees. “I’ve really been into this kind of sculptured feminine silhouette,” said Ms. LaCava, 24, an editor at Vogue. To judge by the outfit she wore at the Winter Antiques Show in Manhattan recently — a sedate cream-colored sheath ESSAY — Ms. LaCava has embraced the fashions of the Kennedy years without irony. “I like the idea of good tailoring and clothes that are not so demonstrative,” she said. “We’re getting beyond the idea of ‘look at me, look at me.’ Fashion today is more about calmness than flash.” Some of the fashion world’s most influential tastemakers are invoking in their latest collections the proprieties, the seamless appearances and the tony aspirations of midcentury Middle America. They are, in short, going bourgeois to the core. In collections for fall that American designers presented during Fashion Week in New York which ended February 8, many shunned the baby-doll dresses, the thigh-high skirts and the disco boots of the spirited Warhol years — touchstones of recent seasons — in favor of a meticulously tailored look that evokes the White House years of Jacqueline Kennedy. “That moment resonates with a lot of people and how they want to live,” said Michael Kors, whose runway show on February 6 catered to the fantasy. “There is not a minidress to be found,

RUTH LA FERLA

not a platform shoe in sight. And ‘suit’ is not going to be a dirty word.’’ His show and others’ paid homage to a period, the late ’50s and early ’60s, that was, in retrospect, an interlude of prosperity and stability, one enriched by material comforts. The past — in fashion and elsewhere — seems to call strongly to the present, as America grows nervous about a possible recession and a diminished role on the world stage. “We have certainly reached the time where people want to feel good again,” said Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst with the NPD Group, a market research firm. “Boomers especially are harkening back to a day before there were issues” like global warming. A harbinger of the current romance with midcentury America surfaced on television late last summer with the debut of “Mad Men,” the hit television drama set in the streamlined steel and glass landscape of the New York advertising world in 1960. Around the same time, hints of an infatuation with the era emerged on the runways. In a collection Miuccia Prada offered for “prespring,” which arrived in stores late last year, she trotted out bouffant skirts that cinched the waist and grazed the calves. Frida Giannini of Gucci has reissued the bandeau brassiere, that late-’50s staple, and Dolce & Gabbana is offering poppy-patterned circle skirts. Marc Jacobs incorporated vintagestyle bras and corsets into the designs he paraded in his New York show for spring.

LARS KLOVE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; LEFT, DAN JACKSON/COURTESY OF LOUIS VUITTON

Recent fashions reflect a trend to a more conservative look; a Marc Jacobs design, left, and British Vogue. Some find the moment refreshing. “I’m thrilled that Grace Kelly is being talked about in fashion circles,” said David Wolfe, the creative director of the Doneger Group, which forecasts fashion and retail trends. Mr. Wolfe noted that repeated references to Kelly and her fastidious contemporaries were “absolutely without irony.” “That’s what makes them so exciting,” he said. In reviving fashion archetypes like the little beige dress, the circle skirt and the princess-seamed coat, “we’re enabling people to recognize quality, and maybe to develop personal

taste instead of hiring a stylist.” Unlike previous portrayals of the late ’50s and early ’60s as a time of unalloyed optimism, fashion’s latest embrace of the past appears to reflect America’s darkening mood. “It is the fashion equivalent of comfort food — I think we need it,” said Sam Shahid, an art director whose clients include Abercrombie & Fitch. “Even in photography, everything we’re seeing has a classicism about it,” he added. “Things are timeless right now, or you want them to be.” But some style watchers bemoan such

conservative attitudes, arguing that they represent a creative retreat. “Fashion is supposed to be about change,” Mr. Cohen said. “Fashion is risk.” Some designers view the resurrection of a more formally controlled aesthetic as a rebuke to young Hollywood’s disheveled style. Thakoon Panichgul, who showed a collection of body-skimming dresses with subtle ’60s details, maintains that such looks are timely. “There is an energy about being proper,” he said. “It’s not about wholesomeness, it’s about respectability, about having manners again.”

Luxury Brands Limit Sales As a Way to Protect Profits By ERIC WILSON

Beverly Bond, right, and Justine Delaney are among a growing number of female D.J.s who influence the fashion tastes of music fans.

ANGELA JIMENEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW, ALEXANDER THOMPSON

With a Feminine Touch, Setting the Beat and Style By RUTH LA FERLA

Justine Delaney speaks fashion like an expert. She is drawn to hipster clothing brands like Preen and Comme des Garçons, and is as well acquainted with the Bauhaus aesthetic as she is with Vivienne Westwood or Siouxsie Sioux. A onetime Goth, she describes her current style as “preppy, but with a darker edge.” Listening, you would think she was an independent designer. In fact, Justine D., as she is known to her public, is more comfortable with a turntable than with a cutting table; her medium is vinyl — the kind that spins. A high-profile D.J., she plays at private parties in New York. Like others in the growing contingent of female D.J.’s commanding the dance floor and building cults on the Web, she has an avid following. Scores of young women have picked up on her sound, and with it, her style, a graphic amalgam of black shirts with white bib tops and slinky halter dresses accessorized with tattoos and cataracts of cola-tone hair. “I did have several female club-goers ask me, ‘How does it make you feel that everyone is dressing like you now?’ ” Ms. Delaney said. “ ‘Does it make you angry?’ ” Not so much. “Is someone Jake Bernstein contributed reporting.

really going to realize that I’m going for the Diane Keaton look in Woody Allen’s ‘Manhattan’? I doubt it,” she said briskly. Her crowd, of course, is far too young to even catch that reference. Not that it matters. To them, Ms. Delaney is part of a formidably groovy sisterhood of wellestablished style-setters like Beverly Bond, Sarah Lewitinn (D.J. Ultragrrrl) and Skye Nellor in London; and younger influencers like Samantha Ronson in

Los Angeles. “When you go into a club and the D.J. is wearing something, it almost gives it idol status,” said Frannie Schultz, 21, a college student from Brooklyn.“If you see a girl who is D.J.-ing, wearing a certain shirt or brand of shoes,” she said, “it makes people want to buy that item.” A decade ago, only a handful of women, including Ms. Bond and Ms. Nellor, could claim the kind of style clout that comes with a presence in the D.J. booth. “D.J.-dom has definitely been a boy’s club, a kind of cabal,” said Alexandra Wagner, the editor of Fader, a magazine that covers emerging music and fashion. It is a club, she noted, that women are only now penetrating in significant numbers. “Cultural dominatrixes,” in Ms. Wagner’s phrase, they have a fashion influence that is a direct extension of their power on the stage. Unlike pop stars, who tend to be molded by production teams, the female D.J. is distinctly in charge, she observed: “The music that gets played is what she decides.” From the vantage of the dance floor, she added, “the D.J. booth is like the altar in the sky.’’ “The woman who commands it can be a really powerful icon,” Ms. Wagner said.

For products that are truly in demand, like Wii game consoles and tickets to big sporting events, it may seem reasonable to limit the number a customer can buy at one time. But readers of the fine print on the Web sites of luxury retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman may be surprised to discover that such a policy also now applies to designer handbags, like Prada’s latest ruched nylon styles, which cost $1,290; Bottega Veneta’s signature woven leather hobos, at $1,490; and the new rectangular Yves Saint Laurent clutch that looks like a postcard addressed to the designer (with a $1,395 stamp). “Due to popular demand,” potential shoppers are warned, “a customer may order no more than three units of these items every 30 days.” The policy doesn’t have anything to do with popular demand. Rather, it is the fear that overseas buyers, taking advantage of the severely weakened United States dollar, will hoard the bags, then resell them in Europe or Asia, where the same items in Prada and Gucci stores typically cost 20 to 40 percent more. The Yves Saint Laurent Downtown bag, which is restricted to three per customer at Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman, costs $1,495. At Harvey Nichols in London, the same bag is £910 (or about $1,796). Foreign tourists who are treating American department stores as if they were a nationwide sale have largely been viewed as beneficial to retailers. But that spending power has not been so welcome to luxury companies like Gucci and Prada, which have spent the last decade trying to reach those customers in their home countries by opening expensive new shops throughout Europe and Asia. Now those companies stand to suffer from a gray market of designer goods resold from American stores. Ron Frasch, the chief merchant of Saks Fifth Avenue, which has 54 stores across the country, said the number of foreign shoppers trying to buy multiple items in stores was “pretty minor,” but he added, “it is certainly an issue that we watch.” Besides restricting online sales, Saks may deny a customer’s purchases of duplicate merchandise in stores on a case-by-case basis.

For now, the policies of Saks, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman apply only to online sales of handbags and shoes from Prada and the Gucci Group labels (Gucci owns Yves Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta), but not other luxury brands like Dior or Givenchy, which are owned by the competing fashion conglomerate LVMH. Meanwhile, LVMH sells its Louis Vuitton handbags online only on its own site, www.eLuxury.com, where the policy is even more strict: two of each style per customer, per calendar year. During the luxury boom of 2000 and 2001, when shoppers lined up in the street outside Gucci, Hermès and Vuitton shops in Paris, the companies drew criticism for putting into effect bagper-customer limits that appeared to be aimed primarily at Asian shoppers. Some Asian customers complained they had been banned from Vuitton stores, and they could be found on the ChampsÉlysées offering to pay Western tourists

Gray marketers buy goods in U.S. stores, then resell them in Europe and Asia. to buy bags for them. In the ’80s, American and Asian tourists shopped for luxury bargains in Italy, when the lira was weak against the dollar. But since the value of the dollar against the euro has declined more than 40 percent since 2000, tourists who are looking for bargains are heading to the United States. Last month, Patricia Pao, an independent retail consultant, arrived at Newark Airport from Los Angeles and was approached by a young woman who asked her to help close a suitcase by sitting on it. The woman was returning to Slovenia with what appeared to be 200 pairs of designer jeans, the least expensive bearing a price tag of $228. “She said that by selling the jeans back home she could not only cover the expenses of her trip, but she could also make a profit,” Ms. Pao said. “The weakened dollar makes everything here look like a bonanza.”

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2008 ARTS & STYLES

Great Literature? Depends Who Wrote It In a British court recently, an author said, in effect, that glue-sniffing had made her write a thriller. The author, Joan Brady, is a 68-year-old American who has lived in England for the last several decades and in 1993 became the first woman to win the Whitbread book prize. She received a £115,000 outESSAY of-court settlement after arguing that fumes from the glue and solvents used in the Conker shoe factory next to her home in Totnes had poisoned the air and made her sick. She suffered nerve damage, she said, and a loss of concentration that caused her to abandon the literary novel she was working on and instead write a less intellectual story called “Bleedout.” “Fumes Made Me Go Lowbrow, Says Writer” was the headline in The Times of London, and Ms. Brady took exception, claiming that the voice in the new book

CHARLES McGRATH

Writers feel forced to choose between their ego and their plot. was the same as the one she had used in her highbrow Whitbread winner. What’s behind the Brady controversy, of course, is the assumption that genre fiction — mysteries, thrillers, romances, horror stories — is a form of literary slumming. The distinction between genre writing and literary writing is actually fairly recent. Dickens wrote mysteries and horror stories, only no one thought to call them that. Later, pulp writing was often crude and formulaic, but it could also be thrillingly racy, taking on themes that polite fiction ignored, and eventually a few of the pulp writers — Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, for example — got promoted into the mainstream. The puzzling thing

is that such promotions don’t happen more often. Both Ian Rankin, the British mystery writer, and Stephen King, the horror master, have complained about a double standard among critics and reviewers that tends to ghettoize genre writing and prevent its practitioners from being taken seriously. But if there is a conspiracy it’s one that authors — highbrow authors, anyway — are complicit in, frequently adopting pseudonyms when they want to dabble in, say, crime writing. The most curious case recently is that of John Banville, the Booker Prize winner who has published two highly regarded mysteries under the name Benjamin Black but hasn’t bothered to keep his true identity a secret. The Black books belong, in fact, to that interesting category of novels that are often said to “transcend” their genre. This false praise used to be awarded all the time to John le Carré’s cold war thrillers. To transcend its genre, a book has to more nearly resemble a mainstream novel. A good example is the mysteries of P. D. James, justly praised for a characterization so rich and detailed that you can forget you’re reading a crime story in the first place. But is that always what we want — to forget why we’re reading what we’re reading? In a review of a Robert Littell thriller, John Updike wrote about genre writers — Mr. le Carré and Ms. James included — who sometimes give signs of wanting to be “real” novelists and seem restive about living up to their implicit contract with the reader, which is to deliver on the promise that a particular genre entails — whether it’s a murder solved, a cold war plot thwarted, a horror unmasked, a love requited. What we look for in genre writing, Mr. Updike suggested, is what the critics complain about; the predictability of a formula successfully executed. We know exactly what we’re going to get, and that’s part of the appeal. Does that make the books lesser, or just different? Probably both on occasion. But it doesn’t necessarily make them easier or less worthwhile to write.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

For the Beatles, a Prolific Meditation

ALLAN KOZINN

For Jasper Johns, a Long Career Inspired by Shades of Gray By CAROL VOGEL

After the Beatles went to India to meditate under the instruction of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, here in 1967, they had a burst of creativity.

“Maharishi — what have you done? You made a fool of everyone.’’ That was the opening line of a sarcastic song about Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who died on February 5, that John Lennon wrote in 1968, not long after the Beatles abruptly left the maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India, and ESSAY declared themselves no longer his spiritual disciples. It wasn’t released that way. In the end the other Beatles, particularly George Harrison, argued that whatever disagreements they had with the maharishi, his work demanded respect, and it was unfair to be so blunt. Mr. Lennon changed the song’s title, and the references to the maharishi in its lyrics, to “Sexy Sadie,’’ the form in which it can be heard on “The Beatles,’’ commonly called the White Album. “Sexy Sadie’’ was part of a huge trove of songs Mr. Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison wrote during and just after their visit to Rishikesh. Whatever shortcomings the Beatles’ interaction with the maharishi may have had, the experience — which lasted only eight months, from August 1967 to April 1968 — seems to have opened a floodgate of creativity and got them out of what threatened to be a creative rut. The Beatles’ first encounter with the maharishi was at a lecture in London, not long after the release of “Sgt. Pepper.’’ The Beatles were still trying to tap into the cosmic subconscious, or eternity, or whatever, by using LSD. The

JASPER JOHNS WORKS COURTESY OF THE ARTIST; BOTTOM, THE NEW YORK TIMES

‘‘Within’’ (2007), a drawing by Jasper Johns inspired by an earlier work; the painting ‘‘Near the Lagoon’’ (2002), below; Mr. Johns in 1966 with one of his flag paintings.

maharishi’s transcendental meditation techniques promised to get them there without the chemicals. In February 1968, the Beatles flew to Rishikesh to devote themselves fully to his instruction. Ringo Starr left after the first week, saying he was unable to eat spicy food. Mr. McCartney left about three weeks later, and Mr. Lennon and Mr. Harrison left about two weeks after that, after hearing rumors that the maharishi had made sexual advances to one of the women in the ashram. During the 1990s both Mr. Harrison and Mr. McCartney were suitably convinced of the maharishi’s innocence that they reconciled with him. What is often overlooked is the influence the maharishi — or at least the experience of going to Rishikesh — had on the group. They wrote like demons. The main body of evidence is the White Album. In May 1968, a week before the White Album sessions began, the Beatles gathered at Mr. Harrison’s house in Esher, England, to run through their Rishikesh songs and decide which to record. Most of the songs on the Esher tape found their way to the White Album. But included as well are Mr. Lennon’s “Mean Mr. Mustard’’ and “Polythene Pam,’’ which appeared on the “Abbey Road’’ album, in 1969. Maybe meditation would have made them so prolific that they’d have continued together, releasing a double album every six months or so. Well, probably not. But the maharishi, in 1968, was good for what ailed them.

ST. MARTIN — Only one artwork hangs in Jasper Johns’s Caribbean home here. It’s a nearly three-meter-tall canvas in three sections: a harlequin pattern that cascades down on the right, a series of colored circles on the left, and a montage of gray encaustic brush strokes in the center. Two overlapping wooden slats are attached to the painting. “You can’t really have art down here because of the weather,” said Mr. Johns, 77, who keeps most of his art collection — works by Degas, Picasso and Duchamp as well as old friends like Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg — in the Connecticut farmhouse where he lives for most of the year. “Somehow,” he said, “encaustic is impervious to the climate.” Completed in 2005, the work, “Bushbaby,” encapsulates many of Mr. Johns’s familiar themes. There’s the encaustic, an ancient technique in which pigment is suspended in wax, giving each brush stroke a distinct materiality; the harlequin pattern, a nod to early Modern masters like Cézanne and Picasso; the strips of wood, introducing a three-dimensional element to an otherwise flat canvas; a string hanging from one slat, a suggestion of movement; and the color gray, which Mr. Johns has explored off and on throughout his nearly six-decade career. To hear it from curators, gray is not just a familiar color for Mr. Johns but the essence of a long metaphysical journey, an exploration of “the condition of gray itself.” That’s the premise of an exhibition of his work that opened recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But when pressed on the show’s focus, he said simply: “Yes, gray has been important to me. But I don’t tend to think of it as separate from the rest of my work.” The response is classic Johns. In a parallel to his mysterious grays, suggesting both effacement and a resolute ambiguity, Mr. Johns seems to have perfected the art of talking about his work without ever revealing too much. For decades now his interpretation of flags and targets, numbers and letters

— things, as he has often said, “the mind already knows” — have become as embedded in the American art psyche as Andy Warhol’s soup cans or Jackson Pollock’s drips. Yet until this exhibition was organized, his use of gray had not been singled out for sustained attention. The show insists that attention must finally

be paid to what Mr. Johns once said was his “favorite color.” Throughout this career he has relentlessly pushed his work to new places, from the flags of the 1950s to the maps of the ’60s to the “Seasons” cycle of the ’80s. In 1980 the Whitney Museum of American Art spent $1 million for “Three Flags,” then the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist. In 1988 his painting “False Start” (1959) brought $17 million at an auction at Sotheby’s. In 2006 the Hollywood mogul David Geffen sold “False Start” to the Chicago hedgefund manager Kenneth C. Griffin for $80 million. “False Start” thus holds the title of most expensive painting by a living artist and is a star in the Met’s show. A riot of blues, reds and oranges with stenciled letters spelling out the names of colors (including gray), it plays off the exhibition’s premise. Mr. Johns has been preoccupied with the “Gray” show and with a large exhibition of drawings that opened recently at the Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea. “These shows bring you into a different frame of mind because you’re having to think a lot about things that you have already done rather than about what you’re doing,” he said. The idea for the “Gray” show originated when Mr. Johns produced a predominantly gray untitled drawing in 2001 that paved the way for a large 2002 painting. After the Art Institute purchased the work on paper, said Douglas Druick, chairman of its medieval through modern European painting and sculpture department, “we loved the drawing so much that we were intrigued to know how the painting would turn out.” So he and James Wood, then the museum’s director, visited St. Martin to view the painting, “Near the Lagoon,” which measures nearly 3 by 2 meters and, like the drawing, was inspired by Manet’s “Execution of Maximilian” from 1867-68. The Art Institute ended up buying the painting. “It was a eureka moment,” Mr. Druick said. “It was then we thought by tracing an idea like gray, we could look at his entire career afresh.”