SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008

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Calls for More Regulation As Global Finance Teeters

Just before JPMorgan Chase announced its deal to buy Bear Stearns last month, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, held an extraordinary conference call. The participants were Wall Street’s biggest power brokers and top American govECONOMIC ernment officials. ANALYSIS The purpose of the half-hour session on a Sunday evening was to raise a rallying cry in support of Bear Stearns — and more broadly, the financial markets, which, as it was described on the call, were on the verge of a major meltdown. “It was much worse than anyone realized; the markets were on the precipice of a real crisis,’’ said one participant. Given that Bear held trading contracts worth $2.5 trillion with companies

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

around the world, “we were talking about the possibility of a global run on the bank.’’ In another era, the participants in the phone call would have been limited to the exclusive fraternity of high-powered Americans. But this conversation was also filled with accents from beyond the United States — from UBS, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and beyond. While that diversity of voices seemed to take notice today’s global finance, it was still more of a courtesy to those outside the United States than it was a genuine effort to gather outside views. The “possibility of a global run on the bank’’ may have been real, but the important decisions had been made long before the folks in London, Dubai and Hong Kong were let in on the plans. So goes the self-centered world of Wall Street — when it comes

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How to Turn A Herd on Wall Street Experts have long known that a classic phenomenon called herd behavior has a great deal to do with the wild swings of panic and exuberance that can seize Wall Street in the wake of surprising economic news. But lately they have tried to confront a related question: ESSAY What makes a herd, financial or otherwise, stop and turn around? Specifically, behavioral experts want to know if there are psychological cues that can help trans-

BENEDICT CAREY

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form this bear market into a bullish one. “The dynamics of these turning points are much harder to understand’’ than the original herd behavior itself, perhaps particularly in economics, “and the field is only just beginning to look at them,’’ said Terrance Odean, a professor of finance at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Researchers who study nonconformity, fads, even game theory, agree that in any declining market, investors will inevitably begin to bet against the behavior of the herd. Many of these

initial contrarians may be working from their own analyses of economic fundamentals, or from tips, or maybe they are simply jumping at the chance to pick up “distressed’’ products like mortgages and bank loans on the cheap. But other investors will defect for individual, idiosyncratic reasons. Two recent psychological studies at Arizona State University point to what it might take for individuals to leave the herd. In the studies, researchers demonstrated

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that young men rating the attractiveness of facial photographs significantly changed their ratings, up or down, in line with what they thought were peers’ ratings (but were in fact generated by a computer program). Yet when encouraged beforehand to think of meeting a romantic partner, the men were highly likely to dissent. “The goal to attract a mate generally led them to go against the preferences of others,’’ the authors concluded.

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Italy Frets as Foreign Chefs Cook the Pasta By IAN FISHER

European Rules Threaten Old Ways Farmers find it hard to survive in Poland’s new landscape. WORLD TRENDS

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Gifts of Fish To Evolution Many characteristics of humans have their roots in the water. SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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ROME — In March, Gambero Rosso, the prestigious reviewer of restaurants and wine, sought out Rome’s best carbonara, a dish of pasta, eggs, pecorino cheese and pig cheek that defines tradition here. In second place was L’Arcangelo, a restaurant with a head chef from India. The winner: Antico Forno Roscioli, a bakery and innovative restaurant whose chef, Nabil Hadj Hassen, arrived from Tunisia at 17 and washed dishes for a year and a half before he cooked his first pot of pasta. “To cook is a passion,’’ said Mr. Hassen, now 43, who went on to train with some of Italy’s top chefs. “Food is a beautiful thing.’’ Spoken like an Italian. But while much of the rest of the world learned about pasta and pizza from poor Italian immigrants, now it is foreigners, many of them also poor, who make some of the best Italian food in Italy. With Italians increasingly shunning sweaty and underpaid kitchen work, it can be hard now to find a restaurant where at least one foreigner does not wash dishes, help in the kitchen or, as is often the case, cook. Egyptians have done well as pizza makers, but restaurant kitchens are now a snapshot of Italy’s relatively recent immigrant experience, with Moroccans, Tunisians, Romanians and Bangladeshis at work. “If he is an Egyptian cook, nothing changes — nothing,’’ said Francesco Sabatini, 75, co-owner of Sabatini in Trastevere, one of Rome’s oldest

neighborhoods. His restaurant serves classic Roman dishes like oxtail, yet 7 of his 10 cooks are not Italian. For Mr. Sabatini, the issue is not the origin of the cook but the training — his chefs apprentice for five years — and keeping alive Italy’s culinary traditions. “That’s why I’m here,’’ he said. “If not, I’d just go to the beach.’’ But in a debate likely to grow in the coming years, others argue that foreign chefs can mimic Italian food but not really understand it. “Tradition is needed to go forward with Italian youngsters, not foreigners,’’ said Loriana Bianchi, co-owner of La Canonica, also in Trastevere, which hires several Bangladeshis, though she does the cooking. “It’s not racism, but culture.’’ Qunfeng Zhu, 30, a Chinese immigrant who opened a coffee bar in Rome’s center, makes an authentic espresso in a classic Italian atmosphere. “Some people come in, see we are Chinese and go away,’’ he said. But in the last few years, he said, that happens less frequently, one sign that Italy is opening up to other kinds of food. Pierluigi Roscioli, a member of the family that runs the restaurant that won the best carbonara award, said there was a risk that tradition would slowly erode if Italian chefs did not oversee those foreign ones who had less training. “Without supervision, they tend to drift toward what is in their DNA,’’ he said. “When it’s by choice, it’s great, but not when it happens because someone isn’t paying attention.’’

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SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008 O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY

EDITORIALS OF THE TIMES

Some Truth About Trade There’s nothing like international trade to help bridge America’s ideological divide. As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton travel the country’s former manufacturing centers, the Democratic candidates seem to be eschewing the advice of their economic advisers and turning to Karl Rove’s methods. It was Mr. Rove, President Bush’s political adviser, who urged Dick Cheney in 2000 to forget the free trade talk and promise voters in West Virginia that a Bush administration would protect American steel from cheap imports. “If our trading partners violate our trade laws, we will respond swiftly and firmly,” Mr. Cheney thundered. Those words seem to echo in Mr. Obama’s attacks against “unfair” trade deals — including Nafta, Cafta and President Bill Clinton’s decision to establish regular trade relations with China. Mrs. Clinton seems to draw inspiration as well, railing to the largest labor union in Pennsylvania against alleged dumping of Chinese steel: “When I’m President, China will be a trade partner not a trade master,” she said. Democrats need to tell voters the truth: First, trade is good for the economy, providing cheap imports and markets for exports, spurring productivity and raising living standards. And second, while trade can drive down some wages and displace some jobs, Democrats have real ideas to help workers cope. Mrs. Clinton

and Mr. Obama should base their approach on these ideas. They would not only make sound policy, they would also provide a competitive advantage over John McCain. Fortunately, presidents don’t have as much power on these matters as candidates claim. When President Bush put stiff tariffs on imported steel in 2002, he infuriated European allies and then had to lift the tariffs when the World Trade Organization declared them illegal. Senators Clinton and Obama know protectionism could have disastrous consequences. American workers need more to help them cope in a globalizing economy. Workers need affordable health insurance that will not disappear when they are laid off. Unemployment insurance needs to be strengthened, perhaps to include some form of insurance to shore up the wages of displaced workers who are forced to take lesserpaying jobs. A more progressive tax policy could help redistribute some of the gains of trade accruing to those on the top of the income scale. More investment in physical and human capital would enable businesses and workers to better compete. Senators Clinton and Obama can offer policies that will help American workers embrace rather than fear a globalized world. American voters certainly deserve a more serious discussion about trade.

Editorial Observer/EDUARDO PORTER

Vatican and Modernity: Tinkering With Sin It’s hard to erect rules to last forever. The recent suggestion by a bishop from the Vatican’s office of sin and penance that globalization and modernity gave rise to sins different from those dating from medieval times seemed to many like an acknowledgment that the world is, indeed, changing. Norms encoded hundreds of years ago to guide human behavior in a smallscale agrarian society could not account for a globalized postindustrial information economy. Polluting the environment, drug trafficking, performing genetic manipulations or causing social inequities, new sinful behaviors mentioned by Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, regent of the Vatican Penitentiary, are arguably more relevant to many contemporary Catholics than contraception. “If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has a value and resonance that is above all social, because of the great phenomenon of globalization,” Monsignor Girotti told the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. Sin, however, doesn’t take well to tinkering. Many Catholic thinkers reacted strongly against the idea that new sins were needed to complement, or supplement, the classical canon. They accused the press of exaggerating Monsignor Girotti’s words. Their reaction underscored how tough it is for the church to manage a moral code grounded in eternal verities at a time of furious change.

Twisted Rationale for Torture You can often tell if someone understands how wrong their actions are by the lengths to which they go to rationalize them. It took 81 pages of twisted legal reasoning to justify President Bush’s decision to ignore federal law and international treaties and authorize the abuse and torture of prisoners. Eighty-one spine-crawling pages in a memo that might have been unearthed from the dusty archives of some authoritarian regime and has no place in the annals of the United States. It is must reading for anyone who still doubts whether the abuse of prisoners were rogue acts rather than calculated policy. The March 14, 2003, memo was written by John C. Yoo, then a lawyer for the Justice Department. He earlier helped draft a memo that redefined torture to justify repugnant, illegal acts against Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. The purpose of the March 14 memo was equally insidious: to make sure that the policy makers who authorized those acts, or the subordinates who carried out the orders, were not convicted of any crime. The list of laws that Mr. Yoo’s memo sought to circumvent is long: federal laws against assault, maiming, interstate stalking, war crimes and torture; international laws against torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; and the Geneva Conventions. Mr. Yoo, who, inexplicably, teaches law at the University of California,

Berkeley, never directly argues that it is legal to chain prisoners to the ceiling for days, sexually abuse them or subject them to waterboarding — all things done by American jailers. His primary argument, in which he uses 19th-century legal opinions justifying the execution of Indians who rejected the reservation, is that the laws didn’t apply to Mr. Bush because he is commander in chief. He cited an earlier opinion from administration lawyers that Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were not covered by the Geneva Conventions — a decision that put every captured American soldier at grave risk. Then, should someone reject his legal reasoning and decide to file charges, Mr. Yoo offered a detailed plan for escaping accountability. After the memo’s general contents were first reported, the Pentagon said in early 2004 that it was “no longer operative.” Reading the full text, released recently, makes it startlingly clear how deeply the Bush administration corrupted the law and the role of lawyers to give cover to existing and plainly illegal policies. The memo is also a reminder of how many secrets about this administration’s cynical and abusive policies still need to be revealed. When the abuses at Abu Ghraib became public, we were told these were the actions of a few soldiers. The Yoo memo makes it chillingly apparent that senior officials authorized unspeakable acts and went to great lengths to shield themselves from prosecution.

Dans l’article “Quirks and Pitfalls of Zapping Food”, page 7: QUIRK: lubie PITFALL: piège, embûche TO SCALD: ébouillanter TO CHAR: carboniser TO BROIL: faire cuire au gril TO KEEP TABS ON: avoir à l’oeil TO TOUGHEN: durcir

of education and income, more marriage and less divorce. Such a club needs strong, believable rules. Like marriage, membership will be more valuable the more committed the other participants are to the common cause. Demanding rules — say celibacy, or avoiding meat during Lent — help enhance the level of commitment. Strict rules, says the Nobel-winning economist Gary Becker, screen out free riders who wish to enjoy the benefits of membership but are unwilling to invest the necessary zeal in the enterprise. Larry Iannaccone, an economist at

U.S. and China’s Faltering Romance In the aftermath of the Tibet upheavals, the complicated romance between America and China is degenerating into mutual recriminations, muttering about Olympic boycotts and tensions that are likely to rise through the summer. It would be convenient if we could simply denounce the crackdown in Tibet as the unpopular action of a dictatorial government. But it wasn’t. It was the popular action of a dictatorial government, and many ordinary Chinese think the government acted too wimpishly, showing far too much restraint toward “thugs” and “rioters.” China and the United States clash partly because of competing interests, but mostly because of competing narratives. To Americans, Tibet fits neatly into a framework of human rights and colonialism. To Chinese, steeped in education of 150 years of “guochi,” or national humiliations by foreigners, the current episode is one more effort by imperialistic and condescending foreigners to tear China apart or hold it back. So what do we do? A boycott of the Olympic Games themselves is a nonstarter. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has raised the possibility of a boycott of the opening ceremony, and that is plausible. The best answer is: Postpone the decision until the last minute so as to extort every last ounce of good behavior possible out of the Chinese government — on Darfur as well as Tibet. But at the end

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.

Dans l’article “MSG Is the Secret Behind Food’s Savor”, page 7: PHYSICIAN: médecin NUMBNESS: engourdissement TO TAG: étiqueter TO SLATHER: répandre abondamment REAM: rame (de papier) KELP: varech

Redefining religious strictures for a changed world carries risks.

George Mason University in Virginia who has studied religions, notes that some of the most successful, like Jehovah’s Witnesses or Pentecostal Christians, which have very fervent congregations, have strict requirements. Religions relax the rules at their own peril. “Religions are in the unusual situation in which it pays to make gratuitously costly demands,” Mr. Iannaccone said. “When they weaken their demands they make on members, they undermine their credibility.” The Vatican is particularly attentive to these strictures. Catholicism has lost sway in many parts of the world. Many traditionalists attribute the church’s decline to the weakening of its strictures. They believe it was damaged by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which tried to bring the church closer to the people, proclaimed religious freedom, embraced people of other Christian faiths and acknowledged truth in other religions. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the church has been pushing the other way. Pope Benedict XVI has brought back rites abandoned after Vatican II and reasserted the church’s hold on truth. In this context, it could be tricky to update sins in a way that could de-emphasize individual trespasses and shift the focus to social crimes bearing a collective guilt. New sins might be a better fit for the modern world, but they risk alienating the membership.

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

: AIDE A LA LECTURE

LEXIQUE

The core benefits of religions, unlike other, worldly institutions, often relate to the afterlife. Some social scientists argue, however, that many benefits of church membership are to be had this side of death. The gains are not unlike the advantages of a club of like-minded people. Religions provide rules to live by, solace in times of trouble and a sense of community. Some economic studies suggest that this can promote higher levels

Dans l’article “Bold, Bad and Legendary: A Bette Davis Century”, page 8: PRIME: apogée PROTRACTEDLY: de manière prolongée CLUBFOOT: pied-bot GUN MOLL: pépée, prostituée SHADY: louche WARY: circonspect, méfiant TO PUMP LEAD INTO: truffer de plomb PRONE: prostré, allongé sur le ventre PARAMOUR: amant

EXPRESSIONS Dans l’article “Bold, Bad and Legendary: A Bette Davis Century”, page 8: TO BE A TROUPER: a trouper, c’est un acteur, souvent avec la connotation un vieux de la vieille, qui sait ce que faire partie “de la troupe” veut dire. Ici, cela signifie que Margo ne joue pas à la star.

of the day, if there have been no further abuses, President Bush should attend — for staying away would only inflame Chinese nationalism and make Beijing more obdurate. If President Bush attends the ceremonies, however, he should balance that with a day trip to a Tibetan area. Such a visit would underscore American concern, even if the Chinese trot out fake monks to express fake contentment with fake freedom. President Bush and other Western leaders should also continue to consult with the Dalai Lama, even though this infuriates Beijing. The Dalai Lama is the last, best hope for reaching an agreement that would resolve the dispute over Tibet forever. He accepts autonomy, rather than independence, and he has the moral authority to persuade Tibetans to accept a deal. The outlines of an agreement would be simple. The Dalai Lama would return to Tibet as a spiritual leader, and Tibetans would be permitted to possess his picture and revere him, while he would unequivocally accept Chinese sovereignty. Monasteries would have much greater religious freedom, and Han Chinese migration to Tibet would be limited. The Dalai Lama would also accept that the Tibetan region encompasses only what is now labeled Tibet on the maps, not the much larger region of historic Tibet that he has continued to claim. With such an arrangement, China

TO FALL OUT: ici: se disputer; s’il s’agit de bombe: retomber. Le substantif fall-out veut dire retombée; dans l’armée, signifie rompre les rangs ; et plus généralement, peut vouloir dire se passer, arriver, avoir pour résultat que . . .

RÉFÉRENCES Dans l’article “A Weekend Full of Dread, for the Approaching Monday”, page 5: JOHN UPDIKE: romancier, nouvelliste, poète et critique littéraire, John Updike est né en 1932 en Pennsylvanie. Il étudie la littérature anglaise à Harvard puis les Beaux Arts à Oxford. Ecrivain très prolifique (il a écrit 22 romans et publié 11 recueils de nouvelles), il est surtout connu pour sa tétralogie de “Rabbit”, dont deux des romans ont obtenu le Prix Pulitzer. Il chronique la vie de la bourgeoisie protestante dans la petite ville américaine; on a dit de lui qu’il faisait “la chronique de l’adultère de banlieue chic”. Plusieurs de ses romans ont été des best-sellers; ainsi “The Centaur” (1963) qui décrit un père et un fils coincés ensemble pendant trois jours du fait d’une tempête de neige, obligés de se confronter à leur relation; l’ouvrage est entrecoupé de références mythologiques, en particulier au

could resolve the problem of Tibet, improve its international image, reassure Taiwan and rectify a 50-year-old policy of repression that has catastrophically failed. But don’t hold your breath. Instead, President Hu Jintao — who made his reputation by crushing protests in Tibet in 1989 — will make up for failed policy within Tibet by trying to stir up Chinese nationalist resentments at nosy foreigners. America and China get on each other’s nerves partly because they are so similar. Both are big, self-absorbed, and insular nations; both are entrepreneurial overachievers; both are infused with nationalism and yet tread clumsily on the nationalism of others — whether in Vietnam or Iraq, or Tibet and the Muslim region of Xinjiang. Both the United States and China also hurt themselves by petulantly refusing to engage leaders they don’t like. Americans sometimes think that the Tibetan resentments are just about political and religious freedom. They’re much more complicated than that. Tibetan anger is also fueled by the success of Han Chinese shop owners, who are often better educated and more entrepreneurial. So Tibetans seek solace in monasteries or bars, and the economic gap widens and provokes even more frustration — which the spotlight of the Olympics gives them a chance to express.

centaure Chiron et à son sacrifice pour l’homme. De même, “The Witches of Eastwick” (1984) connaîtra un grand succès et sera porté au cinéma (avec Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon et Michelle Pfeiffer dans les rôles principaux). Son roman le plus récent “Terrorist” (2007) explore l’esprit d’un jeune musulman fondamentaliste du New Jersey. Dans l’article “Bold, Bad and Legendary: A Bette Davis Century”, page 8: ALL ABOUT EVE: grand film classique, sorti en 1950, considéré par beaucoup comme le meilleur film qu’ait jamais tourné Bette Davis, dirigée par un Joseph Mankiewicz magistral. Il raconte dans un grand flashback l’histoire de la star vieillissante, Margo Channing, de sa rencontre avec une jeune fan, Eve, qui devient proche pour très vite menacer de la supplanter auprès de son amant, ses amis et dans sa carrière. A la fin du film, on voit Eve rencontrer une jeune fan et le cycle peut recommencer. Ce film, dans lequel Marilyn Monroe joue un petit rôle, fut nominé 14 fois aux Oscars (chiffre record) et en obtint 6, dont celui du meilleur film et du meilleur réalisateur.

SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008

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WORLD TRENDS

Loyalty to Old Ways Brings New Pain to Polish Farms By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

STRYSZOW, Poland — Depending on your point of view, Szczepan Master is either an incorrigible reactionary or a visionary. A small farmer, proud of his pure high-quality products, he works his land the way Polish farmers have for centuries. He keeps his livestock in a strawfloored “barn” that is part of his house, entered through a kitchen door. He slaughters his own pigs. His wife milks cows by hand. He rejects genetically modified seeds. Instead of spraying his crops, he turns his fields in winter, preferring a workhorse to a tractor, to let the frost kill off pests residing there. Mr. Master’s way of farming — indeed his way of life — has been badly threatened in the two years since Poland joined the European Union, a victim of sanitary laws and mandates to encourage efficiency and competition that favor mechanized commercial farms, farmers here say. If they want to sell their products, European law requires farms to have concrete floors in their barns and special equipment for slaughtering. Hygiene laws prohibit milking cows by hand. As a result, the milk collection stations and tiny slaughterhouses that until a few years ago dotted the Polish countryside have all closed. Small family farming is impossible. “We need to reward them for being ahead of the game, rather than behind it,” said Sir Julian Rose — an organic farmer from Britain — who, with his Polish partner, Jadwiga Lopata, founded the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside and has been fighting the regulations. “The E.U. has adopted the same efficiency approach to food as it has to autos and microchips,” he said. “Everything is happening the reverse of what it should be if they care about food and the environment.” All 16 states of Poland have now banned genetically modified organisms in defiance of European Union and World Trade Organization mandates. Last

Polish farmers Helena and Szczepan Master struggle to preserve traditional methods.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAFAL KLIMKIEWICZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

In a market with huge players, small farmers are being overwhelmed.

month, the Polish Agriculture Ministry announced that it planned to ban their import in animal fodder, another refusal to accept European Union policy. In Brussels, headquarters of the European Union, officials say they have no desire to undo Polish tradition. “We are not advocating the industrialization of European farming — from our side we

think there is a place in Europe for all shapes and sizes of farms,” said Michael Mann, spokesman for the European Commission Agriculture Directorate. But, he said: “There has to be some restructuring to become more competitive and less reliant on subsidies. Farming is a business. They will have to look for market niches.” The European Union currently pays farmers who meet health and sanitary standards a subsidy, to help maintain Europe’s farming tradition and as an acknowledgment that it is more expensive to farm in Europe than in other parts of the world. “They don’t need to change anything if they don’t want to,” Mr. Mann said. “But they have to survive in business. If

A nurse made her rounds at a hospital in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, where patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis are involuntarily confined.

you’re still milking cows by hand, maybe you would want to use the money to put in a new system.” While overall farm income in Poland has gone up since the country has joined the European Union, that is certainly not the case for the small farmers here. In Poland, 22 percent of the work force is employed in agriculture, and the country boasts by far the highest number of farms in Europe. Most of them are tiny. The average farm size is about 7 hectares, compared with about 24 hectares in Spain, France and Germany. There are 1.5 million small farms in Poland. Only Italy, with its high-end niche agricultural products, compares to Poland in its abundance of small producers. But in a market newly saturated with

huge efficient players, these small traditional farmers are being overwhelmed. The American bacon producer Smithfield Farms now operates a dozen vast industrial pig farms in Poland. Importing cheap soy feed from South America, it has caused the price of pork to drop strikingly in the past couple of years. Since European Union membership, the prices of pork and milk have dropped 30 percent. In a small barn covered with matted straw, Barbara and Andrzej Wojcik say they feel like outcasts. They used to make a decent living selling pork from pigs they raised as well as the milk and butter from their six cows. But they said that with the price of pork so low they could not afford to raise pigs slowly, the traditional way. As for milk, their local collection station has closed. So they have no way to get their products to market. Now they have sold all but two of their cows and reverted to subsistence farming. They live off their parents’ pensions, barter and a bit of money selling sewed crafts. “The new laws are killing us,” Ms. Wojcik said. “They tend to be very individualistic,” Ms. Lopata said of Polish farmers. “They think they survived Communist efforts to collectivize them, so they will survive this. They don’t realize the European Union and the global market are even harder.”

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MARIELLA FURRER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

South Africa Fights Disease, and Fear By CELIA W. DUGGER

PORT ELIZABETH, South Africa — The Jose Pearson TB Hospital here is like a prison for the sick. It is encircled by three fences topped with coils of razor wire to keep patients infected with lethal strains of tuberculosis from escaping. Escaped patients have been tracked down and forced to return; the hospital has quadrupled the number of guards. Many patients fear they will get out of here only in a coffin. “We’re being held here like prisoners, but we didn’t commit a crime,’’ Siyasanga Lukas, 20, who has been here since 2006, said before escaping recently. “I’ve seen people die and die and die. The only discharge you get from this place is to the mortuary.’’ Struggling to contain an epidemic of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, known as XDR-TB, the South African government’s policy is to hospitalize those unlucky enough to have the disease until they are no longer infectious. Hospitals in two of the three provinces with the most cases — here in the Eastern Cape, as well as in the Western Cape — have sought court orders to compel the return of runaways. The public health threat is grave. The disease spreads through the air when patients cough and sneeze. It is resistant to the most effective drugs. Drug resistance emerges in large part because health care systems too often have failed to ensure that patients successfully complete treatments with first- and second-line drugs, according to international health officials. And in South Africa, where these resistant strains of tuberculosis have reached every province and prey on those whose immune systems are weakened by AIDS, it will kill many, if not most, of those who

contract it. As extensively drug-resistant TB rapidly emerges as a global threat to public health — one found in 45 countries — South Africa is grappling with a sticky ethical problem: how to balance the liberty of individual patients against the need to protect society. Most other countries are now treating drug-resistant TB on a voluntary basis, public health experts say. But health officials here contend that the best way to protect society is to isolate patients in TB hospitals. Infected people cannot be relied on to avoid public places, they say. And treating people in their homes has serious risks: Patients from rural areas often live in windowless shacks where families sleep jammed in a single room — ideal conditions for spreading the disease. “XDR is like biological warfare,’’ said Dr. Bongani Lujabe, the chief medical officer at Jose Pearson hospital. “If you let it loose, you decimate a population, especially in poor communities with a high prevalence of H.I.V./AIDS.’’ But other public health experts say overcrowded, poorly ventilated hospitals have themselves been a driving force in spreading the disease in South Africa. The public would be safer if patients were treated at home, they say, with regular monitoring by health workers and contagion-control measures for the family. Locking up the sick until death will also discourage those with undiagnosed cases from coming forward, most likely driving the epidemic underground. “It’s much better to know where the patients are and treat them where they’re happy,’’ said Dr. Tony Moll, chief medical officer at the Church of Scotland Hospital in Tugela Ferry.

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SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008 WORLD TRENDS

An American Credit Crisis Hobbles Swiss Bank Giant By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

BASEL, Switzerland — Normally, St. Jakob’s Hall here is home to soccer tournaments or the occasional hockey game. But on a sunny morning in February, the stadium offered a corporate face-off every bit as contentious as any athletic event. More than 6,000 shareholders of the Swiss banking giant UBS packed the house to vent their fury to UBS’s chairman, Marcel Ospel, over tens of billions in losses on American subprime mortgages and what they saw as an insult to traditional Swiss values like prudence and thrift. “The American El Dorado has become a scene from a Western,” declared one middle-aged shareholder, Therese Klemenz. “UBS was the figurehead of

UBS posts $37 billion in losses, more than any other bank in the world. Swiss business. As a good housewife, I know you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. A bank is not a casino.” Thomas Minder, a local shareholder activist, was even more outraged. “What happened here is a scandal,” he thundered. “You’re responsible for the biggest loss in the history of the Swiss economy. Put an end to the Americanization of the Swiss economy!” At that point, Mr. Minder charged the podium, only to be dragged away by security guards. The consequences of millions of home foreclosures across the United States are also being felt far overseas. Nowhere is that more true than in this serene land of snowy peaks, ice-cold lakes and staid banks long considered to be among the most cautious in the world. Until now, that is. That’s because UBS — with $3.1 trillion in assets, Switzerland’s biggest bank — made an astonishingly large bet on risky mortgage securities. At one point, that wager amounted

to $80 billion, a gambit the bank lost. UBS has already been forced to write down about $37 billion of that financial roll of the dice — more than any other bank in the world. After months of fierce criticism, Mr. Ospel, 58, abruptly announced on April 1 that he would step down as chairman later this month. Shares of UBS rallied, but that’s of little comfort to people like Mrs. Klemenz, who have watched the stock drop by half since last summer. During an interview at UBS’s headquarters in downtown Zurich on April 4, the steely composure Mr. Ospel brandished at the Basel meeting was gone. Sitting in a room adorned with maps of the world and the United States, his hands trembled and his eyes were cast downwards. “I’m the chairman of this firm and ultimately responsible for what has happened,” he said, taking a long drag on a cigarette. “But I have the highest respect and confidence for the leadership as it is now in charge.” Mr. Ospel said he first became aware of the extent of the threat UBS was facing in early August — three months after its Dillon Read Capital Management hedge fund unit was closed after big trading losses. This was six weeks after the implosion of two highly leveraged Bear Stearns hedge funds kicked off the credit crisis for the rest of Wall Street. “I remember when I came back from summer vacation, Rohner explained we had this gigantic exposure,” he recalled, referring to UBS’s chief executive, Marcel Rohner. Like others at UBS interviewed for this article, Mr. Ospel said the bank’s failure stemmed from a fundamental misreading of the market for mortgage securities. But he also acknowledged that the losses showed that UBS’s vaunted riskmanagement system had broken down. “The key issue is that the system operated within its limits, given the assumed quality and liquidity of the assets,” he said. “Clearly, there was a problem when you build such a concentrated exposure and it doesn’t appear on any of the appropriate radar screens.”

ALESSANDRO DELLA BELLA/KEYSTONE, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Marcel Ospel was still in charge at UBS when he spoke during a meeting in February in Basel, Switzerland. And he ruefully noted that until UBS’s disastrous foray into what turned out to be Wall Street’s riskiest market, the bank’s success in the United States was a source of satisfaction in Switzerland. “People were proud that a Swiss firm had established such a significant footprint in the most competitive market on the globe,” he said. “So the greater the disappointment with what they have had to digest.” UBS bought mortgage-backed securities on Wall Street, rather than making loans directly to American home buyers with bad credit histories and no assets, but that’s a distinction lost on the Swiss public. “A large part of the population thinks

How to Turn Investor Herd On Wall Street

These days, UBS executives are rushing around the globe reassuring clients that the bank doesn’t face the kind of threats that brought down the investment bank Bear Stearns last month. That’s especially true in the United States, where UBS employs roughly 30,000 people, slightly more than in Switzerland itself. “It’s been hard emotionally because we were the safe bank, the conservative bank, and we worked very hard on that,” says Daniel Coleman, an American who is a top equities executive with UBS’s investment bank in Stamford, Connecticut. “Mortgages were viewed as a safe, liquid asset, which turned out to be wrong.’’

Calls for More Regulation As Global Finance Teeters

From Page 1 Other sorts of strong urges can similarly overwhelm the social pressures to conform, some experts said. Investors trying to preserve their reputation as mavericks, for example, or to show confidence under spiraling pressure, might favor a contrarian strategy. “When you’re working with other people’s money you’re going to be looking to hit for average and minimize risk, period,’’ said Charles Osborne, president of Osborne Partners Capital Management in San Francisco. “But you sometimes see people who feel they have little to lose make a contrarian move; they may feel they’re going to lose the client anyway,’’ and so bet against the crowd. Early dissenters usually pick up allies quickly. One model that researchers have used to study contrarian behavior is called the minority game. The game is based on a now-classic problem posed in 1994 by the economist W. Brian Arthur set in a bar called El Farol. Everyone likes El Farol but also knows that the place is not fun when it’s crowded. What, then, is the best strategy to maximize the fun? Avoid weekends? Try Thursdays and Sundays? Won’t everyone else be doing the same? Experiments testing various versions of this game have shown that many players flip strategies in the middle of playing, simply because they have set some private threshold for changing, like trying one strategy three times, “and if it doesn’t work, switch to the other one,’’ said Willemien Kets, a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, an independent research and education center in New Mexico. Dr. Kets contends that this switching strategy can be successful precisely because others decide to stick to a con-

we did what Countrywide did,” says Mr. Rohner, the UBS chief, referring to Countrywide Financial, the troubled California company that is the largest American mortgage lender. “People think we gave subprime mortgages in the U.S. We did not.” Maybe so, but even after the huge write-downs, UBS still has more than $30 billion in exposure to securities linked to the kind of risky mortgages that Countrywide and other lenders doled out. And there’s no guarantee that there will be no more losses. “We still have positions, and I can’t foretell the future,’’ Mr. Rohner acknowledges. “The real issue is that if liquidity dries up, there is no way out.”

RON BARRETT

Experts see psychological factors in making bulls out of sheepish bears. gested road. The behavior “suggests that a variety of contrarian strategies will evolve naturally in the course of any such game because there are people who are more conservative in their strategies,’’ he said. Once people start thinking in this way, they subconsciously recruit evidence that supports their view, and not only from other investors. Simply bumping into an acquaintance who shares a contrary opinion — at the gym or in line at the grocery store — can seem like an affirmation. Not that the market cares about any of this; it will destroy anyone who’s early, late or wrong. But under the right circumstances, key investors and traders pick up on the same contrarian cues, and the herd can change course very quickly. From research, Dr. Jonah Berger, a

psychologist in the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, concludes that a fad can reverse itself when group members decide it’s no longer distinctive. “This is why hipsters will suddenly lose interest in a band when they think others are poaching it,’’ Dr. Berger said. Those investors who stay in the business long enough know from experience who tends to be on the right side of trades, and who grazes with the sheep. And if the ratio of sheep to non-sheep in the neighborhood gets too high, they hop the fence out. “People say picking where the market’s going to turn is all gut feeling, but that’s really a misnomer,’’ said Tom Baldwin, a legendary trader in Treasury bond futures at the Chicago Board of Trade. “You don’t have to be the first one in. You’re really watching what certain other people do.’’ He added: “They don’t have to be huge, market-moving people, just traders you know from experience who tend to be right, and if you take the other side, you’re going to lose money. Then it’s a matter of believing what you see. You have to believe it, that’s the hard part.’’

From Page 1 to opening up its secret society to foreigners, oddly, doing so is still an afterthought. But that may not be so much longer. For while America’s top financial officials, from investment houses to government offices, may still have views that are more local than global, there are increasing calls from experts and officials for their vision to broaden. This is not just a problem in business. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, for example, often check in with their counterparts in other nations. But when they act, their attention is first at home. One of the participants in that conference call on March 16 was Henry Paulson, the secretary of the Treasury and formerly of Goldman Sachs. He has the power to propose a radical plan to regulate the financial industry in the United States, as he did recently, but that doesn’t address the larger problem: the United States is now so interconnected with the markets abroad, whether it be Japan or even Brazil, that whatever it does on its own is almost beside the point. “We need much tighter global coordination,’’ Bruce Wasserstein, the chairman of Lazard, said. “It is myopic to look at things in a narrow box. Where we’ve been moving right, the E.U. is moving left. That doesn’t seem sensible.’’ If the United States, for example, were to limit the amount of leverage — or debt — that investment banks or hedge funds could use, that would not offer any protection from debt-fueled implosions at rival firms abroad. A blowup at a highly leveraged fund in China would still ripple across the system. Superleveraged funds have been a major culprit in the latest market gyrations, because their use of debt to increase returns has amplified negative effects. When things go bad, the fallout

does not stop at national borders. A fund in London may be connected to another in Thailand and not even know it. Who would have imagined that dentists in Germany owned subprime mortgages in Texas? (They did, or rather, still do — at a huge loss.) The explosion in the use of financial instruments that balance investors’ risk has only tightened the global links — and made a worldwide meltdown easier to imagine. By using these derivaives, banks and hedge funds across the world are routinely on opposite sides of contracts tied to debt, interest rates or other, more esoteric benchmarks. The collapse of one party (or sometimes just the possibility of a collapse) can be disastrous for the other. Bear’s downfall will very likely induce new calls to address the unnerving problem of “counterparty risk.’’ To be more than just a public-relations campaign, any such effort will need to have global reach. In case there’s a question about how interconnected the world really is, just witness the global markets’ near collapse in January when Société Générale, the French bank, blamed what it said was a rogue trader, Jérôme Kerviel, for $7.1 billion in losses. Société Générale’s efforts to unwind its positions — before announcing them publicly — came close to creating a market panic. George Soros, who was attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, declared at the time: “This is not a normal crisis. It is the end of an era.’’ The Fed, itself unaware of Société Générale’s ordeal, felt compelled to lower interest rates. But that didn’t do much, and three months later, the economy is in worse shape. As Mr. Soros said then, “I question how far the Fed can go given the reluctance of people to hold dollars.’’ In the end, he agreed, there will have to be worldwide regulation of some sort. “The financial system needs a global sheriff.’’

SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008

LE MONDE

5

MONEY & BUSINESS

Stock Market Bubbles in Asia Are Bursting By DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — A year ago, investors like Guan Ling were ebullient. Chinese share prices had climbed over 500 percent in the span of two years, setting off a nationwide stock buying frenzy. When experts periodically warned about the possibility of a bubble, prices would dip temporarily then soar even higher, breaking records and inciting another mad dash to buy equities. “The market was going wild,” says Mr. Guan, 49, who a few years ago closed his real estate company to invest in stocks full time. “Everybody was talking about how much they had earned, how much more they would invest, and which stocks had jumped 20 times, or even 30 times.” That was last year. The Shanghai composite index has plunged 45 percent from its high, reached last October. The first quarter of this year, which ended March 31 with a huge sell-off, was the worst ever for the market. Suddenly, millions of small investors who were crowding into brokerage houses, spending the entire day there playing cards, trading stocks, eating noodles and cheering on the markets with other day traders and retirees, are feeling depressed and angry. “These days my family quarrels a lot,” says Zhang Liying, 55, a retired hotel waitress who with her husband invested all their savings in the stock market. “My husband asked me to sell; I wanted to hold for a while. Now my husband condemns me as so stupid that we lost our family’s savings.” Si Dansu, 68, and a retired engineer, is even more distraught, but she blames Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Chen Yang contributed research from Shanghai.

What Went Up Just Came Down The Shanghai Composite index, which had more than doubled in 2006 and had more than doubled again in 2007 by its October peak, has fallen sharply since then. 6,000

October 16, 2007 6,092.06

5,000 4,000

Shanghai Composite index

3,000 April 1, 2008 3,329.16

2,000

RYAN PYLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Guan Ling, left, and his business partner watch their investments at their broker’s office in Shanghai, where shares have lost nearly half their value.

1,000 0

January 4, 2006 1,180.96 2006

Source: Bloomberg

the government. “I devoted my whole life to the country. I went to the countryside after graduation, and worked as an engineer in a Shanghai factory until retirement. I invested almost all my savings and retirement fund in the market 10 years ago. But now I’m totally penniless. All my stocks went down.” Other parts of Asia are as bad, or worse. In India, stock prices have plunged 31 percent in Mumbai; they are off 31 percent in Japan and a whopping 53 percent in Vietnam, another booming economy. Angry investors have burned a securities regulator in effigy in Mumbai, and some are in tears in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. “Some of them have cried,” says Nguyen Quang Tri, 74, a retired cement company manager who was visiting a Ho

2007

’08 THE NEW YORK TIMES

Chi Minh City brokerage house recently. “I have my own equity, but most of the people here borrowed money from the bank.” The market mayhem began after concerns grew late last year about inflation at home and an American financial crisis. Now, even though China’s economy is growing at its fastest pace in over a decade, stock prices have fallen, crushing small investors on the way down. There are worries that a prolonged downturn could reverberate through China’s financial markets — especially since a large number of corporations had aggressively shifted money, sometimes secretly, to play the market. By some estimates, 15 to 20 percent of the profits reported last year by pub-

licly listed companies in Shanghai that are not involved in banking or finance (which usually invest in stocks) came from stock trading gains. But the big companies were following the small investor. JPMorgan estimates that 150 million people in China were invested in the Chinese stock market as of the end of last year. That may still be a small slice of China’s 1.3 billion people, but it is a huge new constituency, and it has led to the birth of both a new source of potential popular discontent and a new lifestyle: the diehard investor. Chen Donghao is one convert. A 22year-old recent college graduate, he is now a regular at a Shanghai brokerage house. In April 2006, when he was still a student majoring in art design, his family gave him about $70,000 to invest in the stock market. It was an ideal time to get in. “When I started the stock market was

around 1,700,” he says, noting that despite the drop, the Shanghai composite index is still up at about 3,400. “I made a lot of money. So since the beginning of this year I decided to open a restaurant. I’d like to open a chain of famous restaurants in Shanghai.” Shopkeepers, real estate brokers, even maids and watermelon hawkers are said to have become day traders. But now, many investors cannot bear to look at their screens. “I’m getting out of the game,” said Yuan Yuan, 23, a researcher at a fund company in Shenzhen who also invests on his own. Mr. Guan says: “It’s a deformed market, an unhealthy market. We’ve always had long bear markets and short bull markets.” “Look,” he said, “it took two years to go from 1,000 to 6,000 but two months to go from 6,000 to 3,500.”

A Weekend Full of Dread, For the Approaching Monday By KELLEY HOLLAND

Many younger music fans, who are used to instant downloads, no longer have the patience to shop for CDs.

JACOB SILBERBERG/REUTERS

You Want It, You Click It (Absolutely No Waiting) The Virgin Megastore in Times Square in New York was bustling recently during the lunch hour, but with two remarkably different universes of consumers. One group of shoppers — none of whom appeared to be under 40 — were browsing manually through CDs, no doubt some of them drawn by ESSAY Virgin’s profit-killing $10 price. Nearby, clusters of young people were trading headphones at listening posts as they riffled their way through songs that they would no doubt go home and download later (legally, of course). It was the same throughout the store, with teenagers treating the store as a playground, jamming on Guitar Hero while an older cohort shopped for the remastered CD of Neil Young’s 1974 album “On the Beach.” The magazine rack was decorative furniture — no one stopped in the 10 minutes I watched — and the book section had three people in it. “You were looking at a wasting asset no matter what floor you were on. The need to hold media that you consume — the physical purchase — is going away,” said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program and the author of a new book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.” The book suggests that the Web is not

DAVID CARR

competition for traditional media, but a completely different system, a place where choice is not only an option, but an imperative. In that world, the idea that someone would buy a physical object that contained a finite number of songs selected by someone else seems quaint. (Recognizing as much, Sony BMG and Warner both said recently that they are looking at subscription services.) According to Mr. Shirky, consumers expect exactly what they want, when and how they want it. Music sellers, networks and movie studios are adjusting to a new paradigm where the customer is not only always right, but expects to be able to exercise that judgment quickly and easily. “Forget 15-year-olds; my 4-year- old saw a show on broadcast television at our baby sitter’s house and asked to see it again when she went back there,” Mr. Shirky said. “When told it wasn’t on television right then, she asked, ‘Is it broken?’ ” Last month at the McGraw-Hill media conference, Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of Disney, suggested that the television is not the screen of the future. “In the years ahead, broadband on the computer will be the primary source of entertainment for kids,” he said. “It’s just as important to them as the TV set now.” Mr. Shirky said consumers increasingly live in “the cloud,” a wireless uni-

verse of always-available content. He added that the combination of cheap, ubiquitous technology and the ability to publish anything — how drunk you were last night replete with supporting pictures, for example — means they contribute their own content to be absorbed by their community. “We are all generating more media than we can consume. The amount of photography, recorded material, text, the cloud of metadata that we are all leaving behind, is overwhelming,” he said. Does this mean we will all leave big media behind? Mr. Shirky thinks not. “Storytelling is a hard problem that is cognitive rather than technological,” he said. “It requires a specific set of skills, and there are business models that enable storytelling, but maybe don’t require the whole manufacturing or broadcasting business that goes with them.” It’s becoming a matter of embracing, rather than trying to control, choice. “What would happen to a Barnes & Noble that only had one copy of every book, but could print it on the spot and give it to you? And music stores could burn your CD on the spot?” Mr. Shirky said. “In both instances, the consumers would get their choice and you’d get rid of all the inventory needs, the upstream and downstream waste, and you might be able to turn that sampling into a sales opportunity.”

The feeling is familiar: you are savoring the last of a leisurely Sunday lunch or a long walk in the park when you abruptly realize that your weekend will be over in a matter of hours. In an instant, you are deep in what John Updike called the “chronic sadness of late Sunday afternoon.” As you envision the pile of work on your desk, the meetings on your calendar and that business trip on Tuesday, your mood shifts again, your muscles tense and your head begins to ache. You have a case of workplace-related stress. You also have plenty of company. Poll results released last October by the American Psychological Association found that one-third of Americans are living with extreme stress, and that the most commonly cited source of stress — mentioned by 74 percent of respondents — was work. That was up from 59 percent the previous year. Some people would not be alarmed by this. When David W. Ballard, the association’s assistant executive director for corporate relations and business strategy, talks to executives, “the concept that stress can be a bad thing is sometimes foreign to them,” he said. “They say stress is a good thing. It motivates them.” But excessive stress is different, and expensive for employers. Highly stressed employees are absent more often and are much more likely to leave their jobs. When at work, they tend to be significantly less productive, which can be even more expensive than frequent absences, Dr. Ballard said. More than half the respondents to the survey said they had left a job or considered doing so because of stress, and 55 percent said that stress made them less productive at work. With costs like that, you’d think that companies would devote considerable resources to fighting the problem. But a survey published last year by Watson Wyatt suggests that they are not. For example, some 48 percent of the employers in the survey said stress created by long hours and limited resources was affecting business performance, but only 5 percent said they were taking strong action to address those areas. “Everybody knows it’s an issue, but no one wants to look at it and address it,” said Shelly Wolff, Watson Wyatt’s North American leader for health and

productivity. Employers view excessive workplace stress as an enormously costly problem that no one quite knows how to fix, she said. “There’s a fear of opening up something you can’t control,” she said. “They feel it’s going to open Pandora’s box.” One problem is that stress can be subjective. Some people may feel permanently tethered to the office by their cellphones and laptops, but for others those devices are liberating. One person’s dreaded business trip is another’s respite from pressures at home. That means there is no standard way for employers to reduce office stress. But putting in place a variety of initiatives is still simpler and less expensive than dealing with extreme stress once it arrives. PricewaterhouseCoopers addresses stress in multiple ways. For example, in annual surveys, employees asked for more coaching and opportunities

Employers may shrug, but employee stress hurts productivity. to connect with more experienced colleagues — and got them. Over the past two years, the firm has also created market teams for various business lines, which means that 80 to 100 people work together on a portfolio of client accounts. Employees can cover for one another more easily, easing some of the pressure. Michael J. Fenlon, managing director for people strategy at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said his firm has made efforts to reduce stress among workers. The goal was “to create an environment where there’s openness and a sense of mutual support,” he said, “where I can work through life-cycle events and no one’s going to think less of me.” Until recently, if employees sent e-mails on weekends or after office hours, an automatic message would appear asking the sender to wait, if possible, and let others enjoy their time off. The message was discontinued after the company determined that workers had taken this stress-reducing sentiment to heart.

6

LE MONDE

SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

What Human Beings Owe to Fish: A Lot Being a resolute hydrophobe who has no real desire to go for a swim, I admit I never thought of myself as a large, scaleless fish out of water. Yet after reading Neil Shubin’s brisk new book, “Your Inner Fish,’’ and speaking with other researchers who use fish to delve into the history of vertebrates in general and ourselves in particular, I realize that many traits we take pride in, the body parts and behaviors we ESSAY exalt as hallmarks of our humanity, were really invented by fish. You like having a big, centralized brain encased in a protective bony skull, with all the sensory organs conveniently attached? Fish invented the head. You like having pairs of those sense organs, two eyes for binocular vision, two ears to localize sounds and twinned nostrils so you can follow your nose to freshly baked bread or the nape of a lover’s irresistible neck? Fish were the first to wear their senses in sets. They premiered the pairing of appendages, too, through fins on either side of the body that would someday flesh out into biceps, triceps, rotating wrists and opposable thumbs. Or how about that animated mouth of yours, with its hinged and muscular jaws, its enameled, innervated teeth? Fish founded it all. “The backbone that holds us upright, that’s a fish invention,’’ said Dr. Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum. “The cranial nerves that we use to control the muscles in our jaw, that we use to talk and to hear, they relate to a fish’s gill arches. The basic wiring in our skull, the body plan we take for granted, that’s part of our story. It’s all from fish.’’ New research reveals that many fish display a wide range of surprisingly sophisticated social behaviors, pursuing interpersonal, interfishal relationships that seem almost embarrassingly familiar. “Fish have some of the most complex social systems known,’’ Michael Taborsky, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, said. “You see fish helping each other. You see cooperation and forms of reciprocity.’’ Dr. Taborsky and his colleagues have studied the social lives of African cichlids, colorful freshwater fish from Lake Tanganyika. The cichlids live in relatively large groups of 10 or so individuals, a dominant breeding pair and a retinue of adult and adolescent helpers. The helpers share in all duties, Dr. Taborsky said. They defend territory, they help

NATALIE ANGIER

KIM KYUNG-HOON/REUTERS

Many traits of the human body come from fish, but new research reveals that fish also display a range of social behaviors surprisingly similar to those of humans.

RICHARD CHUNG/REUTERS

keep the nests tidy and they clean, fan and oxygenate the breeding pair’s eggs. When the eggs hatch into larvae, the helpers take up the babies in their mouths for cleaning — all the while forgoing their own breeding efforts. Significantly, the helper fish are often unrelated to the royal pair over whose spawn they take care of. What’s in it for the helpers? “Helpers are al-

lowed to stay in the territory and gain security and protection against predators.,” Dr. Taborsky said. “But they have to pay rent, so to speak, or they risk being expelled.’’ Researchers have identified many other surprising analogies between humans and fish. Dr. David Reznick of the University of California, Riverside, has discovered that female guppies go through a

kind of menopause, surviving well beyond their reproductive life span, a finding that may bear on the evolution of menopause among women. Fish are the oldest group of vertebrates, the earliest possessors of rudimentary teeth, skulls and spinal cords having arisen from wormlike predecessors maybe 550 million years ago. Spurring the evolution of the vertebrate body plan, Dr. Shubin said, was a benefit of being an active predator. The origin of jaws and teeth “was a great equalizer,’’ he said, adding, “It allowed smaller fish to eat bigger fish.’’ The advent of teeth demanded protection against those teeth, and the earliest skulls were little more than thousands of tiny teeth fused together. Through the pairing of sense organs up front, in the well-shielded head, fish gained spectacular new powers to seek food and escape the seekers. “The increasingly competitive landscape was a cauldron for the invention of new things,’’ Dr. Shubin said — including, 365 million years ago, the power to hoist your scaly self out of the sea and begin eating the plants and arthropods that preceded you on dry ground. In 2004, Dr. Shubin and his colleagues reported discovering the fossil of one such pioneer, a halffish, half-amphibian creature they named Tiktaalik. It had rudimentary shoulders and enough upper body muscle to do push-ups.

A Prank Can Serve a Purpose. No Joking. By BENEDICT CAREY

Keep it fair, stop short of total humiliation and, if possible, mix in some irony, some drama, maybe even a bogus call from the person’s old love or new boss. A good prank, of course, involves good stagecraft. But it also requires emotional intuition. “You want to play on people’s weaknesses or dislikes, but not go too hard,” said Tommy Doran, a fireman and paramedic in Skokie, Illinois, who as a rookie in Montgomery County, Maryland, was lured into the station’s kitchen and blasted with multiple cream pies. “For me it’s just the sort of dark humor we use to cope with the job and each other. Nothing dangerous or illegal.” Psychologists have studied pranks for years, often in the context of harassment, bullying and all manner of malicious exclusion and prejudice. Yet practical jokes are far more commonly an effort to bring a person into a group, anthropologists have found — an integral part of rituals around the world intended to temper success with humility. And recent research suggests that the experience of being duped can stir self-reflection in a way few other experiences can, functioning as a check on arrogance or obliviousness. The 1960s political activist and prankster Abbie Hoffman reportedly divided practical jokes into three categories. The bad ones involve vindictive skewering, or the sort of head-shaving, shivering-in-underwear college fraternity hazing that the sociologist Erving Goffman described as “degradation ceremonies.” Neutral tricks include wrapping the toilet bowl in cellophane, or pulling some electronic stunts on a coworker’s keyboard (though on deadline this falls quickly into the “bad” category). What Hoffman called the good prank, which humorously satirizes human fears or failings, is found in a wide variety of initiation rites and coming-of-age rituals. The Daribi of New Guinea, for example, have children make a small box and bury it in the ground, telling them that after a while a treasure will appear inside but they must not peek, according to Edie Turner, a professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia. Invariably the youngsters succumb to curiosity — only to find a sample of human feces.

TAMARA SHOPSIN

In a prank, people learn if they are too trusting, or not trusting enough. The Ndembu of Zambia have an adult in a monstrous mask sneak and terrify boys camping outside the village as part of a coming-of-age ritual in which they are showing their bravery. “These kind of tricks are very common,” Dr. Turner said, “and they are really a way to put a person down before raising them up. You’re being reminded of your failings even as you’re being honored.” In a paper published last year, three psychologists argued that the sensation of being duped — anger, self-blame, bitterness — was such a singular one that it forced an uncomfortable kind of self-awareness. How much of a dupe am I? “Being duped holds up this mirror to people,” said Kathleen D. Vohs, a consumer psychologist at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota and one of the authors of the study, “and may in fact show them where they are on the scale” — too trusting or too vigilant. Paranoia, too, has its costs, and it can sour relationships. Running back the tape mentally, in this case meditating on how an embarrassing event might have turned out otherwise, is known to psychologists as counterfactual thinking. “The feeling of ‘I should have known better’ is the sort of counterfactual that serves to highlight your own shortcomings,” said Neal Roese, a psychologist at the University of Illinois. “A good deal of research has shown that these counterfactual insights can bring about new behaviors, new self-exploration and, ultimately, selfimprovement.” A good prank is, in the end, a simulation of a crisis and not the real thing. And it serves as a valuable reminder that not every precious box contains precisely the treasure you might expect.

Humorous antics can be cruel or serve as a helpful initiation rite.

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SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008

LE MONDE

7

T H E W AY W E E AT

MSG Is the Secret Behind Food’s Savor By JULIA MOSKIN

In 1968 a Chinese-American physician wrote a rather lighthearted letter to The New England Journal of Medicine. He had experienced numbness, palpitations and weakness after eating in Chinese restaurants in the United States, and wondered whether the monosodium glutamate used by cooks here (and then rarely used by cooks in China) might be to blame. MSG, a common flavor enhancer and preservative used since the 1950s, was tagged as a toxin, removed from commercial baby food and generally driven underground by a new movement toward natural, whole foods. Even now, after virtually all studies since then confirmed that monosodium glutamate in normal concentrations has no effect on the overwhelming majority of people, the ingredient has a stigma that will not go away. But then, neither will MSG. Cooks around the world have remained dedicated to MSG, even though they may not know it by that name. As hydrolyzed soy protein or autolyzed yeast, it adds flavor to the canned chicken broth and to the packs of onion soup mix used by some home cooks, and to cheese crackers and low-fat yogurts.

It is the taste of Marmite in the United Kingdom, of Golden Mountain sauce in Thailand, of Goya Sazón on the Latin islands of the Caribbean, of Salsa Lizano in Costa Rica and of Kewpie mayonnaise in Japan. “It’s all the same thing: glutamate,’’ said Dr. Nirupa Chaudhari of the University of Miami, who was part of the research team to identify human glutamate receptors. In September Dr. Chaudhari will take part in the University of Tokyo’s centenary celebrations honoring Professor Kikunae Ikeda’s 1908 discovery of glutamate flavor. The Japanese company Ajinomoto turned that discovery into crystalline powder form, MSG, and patented it in 1909. “Just like salt and sugar, it exists in nature, it tastes good at normal levels, but large amounts at high concentrations taste strange and aren’t that good for you,’’ Dr. Chaudhari said. If you live in the United States and like spicy tuna rolls, Puerto Rican roast pork or Thai noodles, there is a good chance you are eating MSG. And if you like to keep a global kitchen, some of these MSG-laden ingredients may deserve a place in your cupboard. “I don’t cook with MSG because that’s not my training, but it definitely has its place,’’ said Zak Pe-

But it is in Japan that MSG has been most thoroughly integrated into popular food, through two main delivery systems: instant ramen noodle soup and mayonnaise, laccio, a New York chef. One of now popular on pizza, omelets and suthe dishes that made him famous shi. Japanese mayonnaise is flavored was a sandwich of roasted salmon with MSG and rice vinegar, giving it on pumpernickel bread slathered an addictive roundness and tang. with wasabi aioli: wasabi from a In upscale restaurants, chefs are tube mixed with mayonnaise. unlikely to use monosodium glutaIn regions where meat and meaty mate. “We don’t need to use Ajinomoto flavors have been out of reach for because we can get the ingredients that most cooks, MSG has long filled the have natural umami: shiitake mushgap. “My father called Maggi sauce ILLUSTRATION BY rooms, egg yolks, shellfish, masago,’’ la segunda venida, the second comTHE NEW YORK TIMES said Sotohiro Kosugi, the chef of Soto in ing, because he was not a very good cook and it saved him,’’ said Irma Cecilia Sanchez, a New York. Although umami is only a small player in Japahome health aide in New York from Puebla, Mexico. Maggi sauce is a 19th-century Swiss creation, a gen- nese cuisine, reams of breathless prose have been eral flavor enhancer now made with MSG, sweeten- produced on it, the elusive fifth taste supposedly linked to the profoundly pure, deep-sea flavors of ers and extracts. Maggi sauce is extremely popular in regions of kelp and dried tuna. Umami has been positively identified as the flavor India, Mexico, the Philippines and the Ivory Coast. One of Thailand’s favorite late-night street foods, of glutamic acid, an amino acid naturally present in pad kee mao, or drunkard’s noodles, relies on its many savory foods, from seaweed to soppressata. “Too much MSG and you get that harsh, acrid sweet-salty-meaty taste; the Malaysian version is taste,’’ said Mr. Pelaccio, who uses an empty barrel called Maggi goreng. Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, a of Ajinomoto-brand MSG he found on the street as a rub for pork shoulder or flank steak is Goya Sazón: plant stand in his Chinatown apartment. “But get it MSG and salt, cut with garlic, cumin and annatto. just right and that dish will sing.’’

By JULIA MOSKIN

Chocolate’s dark mood is lightening at last. Until recently, midnight-black, bittersweet bars with punishing percentages of cacao were, like coffee and wine, on a quest for brooding intensity. Milk chocolate was left behind, dismissed as child’s play, an indulgence in sweetness and nostalgia. Now, some chocolatiers are fighting back, with expensive, suave “dark milk” chocolates that reinvent milk chocolate by increasing its cacao content, reducing its sweetness and carefully refining it to give it the snap and velvet of dark. “Personally, if I had to choose one or the other, I prefer dark chocolate,” said Joseph Whinney, founder of Theo Chocolate, a small producer based in Seattle, Washington. “But there is no product on the planet that can match that lush, melted-chocolate mouth-feel of milk chocolate.” Percentages tell nothing about the taste or the quality of chocolate, said Chloé Doutre-Roussel, a Parisbased expert and former chocolate buyer for Fortnum & Mason in London. The percentage tells how much of the bar is cacao solids — the pure, unsweetened content of the cacao pod. But the flavor and quality are determined by many other factors: how the pods are fermented, how long they are roasted, how the cacao is ground. Two milk chocolates, both

Dark May Still Be King, But Milk Chocolate Makes a Move

Reviving the creamy pleasure of that childhood candy bar. with 45 percent cacao solids, might have utterly different levels of sugar and dairy content. “Seventy percent of bad cacao is still 70 percent,” Ms. Doutre-Roussel said. “It is all about the producer and the recipe, especially when you are talking about milk chocolate.” “Producing milk chocolate,” said Andrea Slitti, a chocolate maker in Tuscany, “is much more complicated than producing dark chocolate, as you can see in the marketplace: there are far more good dark chocolates available. At each step, we have to work to keep the clean taste of milk and not overwhelm it with the strength of the cocoa mass, then balance them both with sweetness.” ILLUSTRATION BY TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES Mr. Slitti is one of several serious chocolatiers — including Pra- Dark chocolate has been the favorite of connoisseurs, but new milk chocolates have full flavor. lus, Bernachon and Amedei — that have forged new hybrids that, at Cacao cultists have provoked chocolate makers their best, can please partisans on both sides of 65 percent cacao solids that come from a different Indonesian plantation. to keep stripping chocolate down, eliminating disthe dark-versus-milk divide. Milk chocolate is the solid form of hot chocolate, tractions like emulsifiers, vanilla and sometimes “In our tastings, I found that lovers of milk chocolate felt a little bit uncomfortable in admitting that popular in Europe for 200 years before a Swiss con- even sugar. The 100 percent cacao bars that have they prefer it to plain chocolate,” he said. He spent fectioner, Daniel Peter, made it into a solid in the arrived recently on the market are virtually inedmore than a year developing Lattenero, one of the 1870s. He hit on using the condensed milk invented ible, but are no less joyfully greeted by connoisfirst “dark milk” chocolates. Instantly popular, it by his compatriot Henri Nestlé to serve as infant seurs who worship their intensity and purity. is the only milk chocolate available in five cacao formula. However, some tasters have realized that perMilk chocolate became one of the great cheap centages can go too high. “The extremes of bitterlevels, from 45 to 70 percent. Top chocolatiers frequently experiment by luxuries of the industrial age. Eventually, milk ness have been reached with dark chocolate,” said making chocolate with pods from a single region chocolate also acquired the stigma of being an Alex Landuyt, director of research and developor plantation. Such refinement has usually been “industrial” product. Milk went from being an ment for Barry Callebaut, one of the largest chocoreserved for dark chocolate. But Bonnat, a pro- enrichment to just another filler: condensed milk late manufacturers in the world. “And as we move ducer in Voiron, near the French Alps, makes a was gradually replaced by combinations of nonfat in that direction, the more we need the rounding of trinity of excellent milk chocolates. Each contains milk powder and even vegetable oil. the milk to balance it out.”

Quirks and Pitfalls Of Zapping Food By HAROLD McGEE

The microwave oven is a quirky appliance. Sure, it cooks and reheats many foods quickly and well, and in containers that can go right to the table or come right from the fridge. But it can also cause a mug of hot water to erupt scaldingly, char nuts and breads on the inside, and blow up eggs and butter. To make the most of the microwave, it helps to know its quirks, and ways to work around them. The strange powers of the microwave arise from the basic fact that it cooks indirectly, with radio energy. Conventional baking, broiling, boiling or frying transmits a particular level of heat directly to the food. But when we zap, the air in the microwave oven barely gets warm. Instead, the oven emits radio waves that penetrate the food from all directions and generate heat within the food itself — until the oven turns off. Of the substances in food, water is especially quick to absorb microwave energy. When it does, the water molecules move faster, crash into the more sluggish proteins, carbohydrates and fats, and jolt them into motion, raising the temperature of the food as a whole. This constant heat generation can create temperatures beyond the boiling point. That often means trouble. Microwave an egg in a shell long enough to turn some of its moisture into steam — about a minute — and the pressure shatters it. Microwave butter long enough to melt it, then continue heating the water that settles to the bottom, and that water will boil and splatter butterfat all over the oven. Microwave a mug of water long enough, and it can superheat past the boiling point without bubbling, then bubble violently the moment you disturb it. So keep close tabs on cooking, and turn off the oven as soon as the food is done. Medium and low oven settings are useful because they pulse the radio waves on and off and slow the heating. The lack of precise temperature control in a microwave means that it is not ideal for meats, fish or egg dishes, which toughen when slightly overcooked. Even when reheating stews, it is best to remove the meat or fish, microwave the liquid to a boil, then recombine. Because the microwave oven energizes the food’s moisture first, there is a general drying effect: it causes moisture to evaporate out of the food. So it’s usually best to cook in a container that will retain most of the vapor around the food surface. Leave small openings for some vapor to escape, otherwise the container will burst open. Microwave energy can instantly penetrate food to a depth of about an 2.5 centimeters, instead of working its way in from the surface by conduction. If the food is less thick, it’s essentially cooking all at once. That rapid heating generally means that the food retains more of its vitamins than it does when it’s boiled, steamed or baked. Microwave energy doesn’t build up at the surface the way ordinary heat does, so it doesn’t brown the food; its effect is more like steaming. Only when food dries out can microwaves cause browning. It’s easy for nuts and stale bread to char inside while the outside looks unchanged. The nut or bread surface stays relatively cool while the heat inside keeps building. Low oven settings can help prevent this. Once you get used to these quirks, you’ll come up with some convenient techniques. My current favorites: POPCORN FLAVORED WITH SPICES In conventional

popping, the spices burn. Coat kernels with spices and a little oil, and zap in covered ovenware. NONERUPTING POLENTA

Gradual heating eases water absorption, and the polenta bubbles just as it becomes done.

HOT FOAMED MILK FOR COFFEE Put cold milk into

a jar, close, and shake until foamy. Open, and microwave until hot.

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008 ARTS & STYLES

Bold, Bad and Legendary: A Bette Davis Century By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

Bette Davis, born 100 years ago April 5, made her first appearance on film in 1931 and her last in 1989. Part of what makes Davis, I think, the greatest actress of the American cinema — was, you could tell what she was thinking and feeling from across the room, even a very large one like the ballroom she swoops into, wearing a red dress, in William Wyler’s “Jezebel’’ (1938), scandalizing the fashionable society of 1852 New Orleans; unmarried young women like her character, Julie Marsden, are expected to wear white. But Julie wants to make an impression, and she does; and as she takes a turn on the dance floor with her stiff-backed escort, you can see, although most of the sequence is in long camera shots, her growing awareness that she has made a terrible mistake, that she has gone, for once, too far. On the occasion of her centennial, it’s worth remembering Davis as she was in her prime, in the 1930s and ’40s, when she commanded the screen with something subtler and more mysterious than the fierce, simple will that carried

An actress specialized in playing women who never apologized. her through the mostly grim work that followed. In her heyday, as the reigning female star at Warner Brothers, she was as electrifying as Marlon Brando in the ’50s: volatile, sexy, challenging, fearlessly inventive. Her breakthrough role came in John Cromwell’s 1934 adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel “Of Human Bondage,” in which she plays the coldhearted Cockney temptress Mildred Rogers, a vile specimen who cruelly — and protractedly — abuses the affections of a sensitive, artistic, clubfooted young medical student. Davis persisted in playing women who were frankly, unapologetically bad: characters like Stanley Timberlake in John Huston’s odd, disturbing Southern melodrama “In This Our Life” (1942); Rosa Moline in King Vidor’s overheated “Beyond the Forest” (1949); and especially Leslie Crosbie and Regina Giddens, the heroines of two further collaborations with William Wyler. In Lloyd Bacon’s terrific “Ma rked Woman” (1937), for instance, in which she plays a n ightclub hostess (read

prostitute), you see a kind of distillation of all the tramps, gun molls and shady dames she’d played as an eager young nonstar under contract to studios that didn’t know what to do with her. Her character in “Marked Woman” is a wonderfully complex creation, a wary survivor who’s both proud of her sex appeal and slightly uncomfortable with it: not a hooker with a heart of gold, exactly, but a prostitute who prefers to keep her heart as much to herself as possible. In one of her most celebrated roles, as the panicky aging actress Margo Channing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “All About Eve” (1950), Davis trots out every bad habit she’d developed over the years, every “Bette Davis” mannerism, and makes them all seem, strictly speaking, necessary: real aspects of an unmistakably real woman. Margo, mannerisms and all, seems surprisingly level-headed. In the end she’s a trouper. Davis never retired from acting and lasted, improbably, to 81, after a lifetime of abusing alcohol, nicotine and, often, her directors. Her best director was Wyler, who abused her back, productively. The three movies they made together represent one of the great collaborations of a filmmaker and an actor in the history of movies, because Wyler’s theatrical intelligence was a match for hers. They fell out during “The Little Foxes” (1941), perhaps because both realized, on some level, that they couldn’t hope to surpass the intimate anatomy of evil they had together managed to get on the screen in “The Letter” (1940). That picture’s heroine, a Singapore planter’s wife, is, like so many of Davis’s most vivid characters, a creature of urgent need, but she’s cooler, more controlled than most. She kills her lover and lies to her husband (and the court) with remarkable equanimity. And because Wyler persuaded Davis — “persuaded” may be too mild a word — to mute her mannerisms, her every glance and movement seems to register with particular force, passion straining to burst free of its confinement. Watching the first scene of “The Letter” is as good a way as any to remember Davis on her birthday. She strides out, with that fast, purposeful walk of hers, onto the veranda, pumps some lead into her prone paramour, then pauses, lowering her gun hand slowly, to contemplate what she’s done, striking a pose (in medium long shot) that looks both melancholy and defiant. That’s Bette Davis as she was at her best: first in furious motion, then eerily, eloquently still. She was no drama queen. She was drama in the flesh.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Bette Davis, born 100 years ago, captivated audiences with her electrifying screen presence.

Schooling the Artists’ Republic of China By DAVID BARBOZA

BEIJING — On a recent afternoon Wang Haiyang, a student at China’s top art school, was packing away some of his new oil paintings in the campus’s printmaking department. He is 23, and he just had his first major art exhibition at a big Beijing gallery. Many of his works sold for more than $3,000 each, he said. And he hasn’t even graduated. “This is one of my new works,’’ he said proudly, gesturing toward a sexually provocative painting of a couple embracing. “I’ll be having another show in Singapore in March.’’ For better or for worse — depending on whom you talk to — Beijing’s state-run Central Academy of Fine Arts has been transformed into a breeding ground for hot young artists and designers who are quickly snapped up by dealers in Beijing and Shanghai. The school is so selective that it turns away more than 90 percent of its applicants each year. Many of its faculty members are millionaires and its alumni include some of China’s most successful new artists, including Liu Wei, Fang Lijun and Zhang Huan. And with the booming market for contemporary Chinese art, its students are suddenly so popular that collectors frequently show up on campus in search of the next art superstar. “I can say we have the best students and the best faculty in China,’’ said Zhu Di, the school’s admissions director. “And we give students a bright future.’’ Yet as the academy reshapes its mission and campus, its flowering relationship with the art market is stirring unease among those who feel that students should be shielded from commercial pressures. “The buyers are also going to the school to look for the next Zhang Xiaogang,’’ said Cheng Xindong, a dealer in Beijing, referring to an art star, one of whose paintings sold for $3.3 million at a Sotheby’s sale in London in February. “And immediately they make contact with them, even before they graduate from school, saying, ‘I will buy everything from you.’ ’’ “This can be a dangerous thing,’’ he said. “These young artists need time to develop.’’ Yet many counter that the school’s soaring fortunes also result from the Chinese government’s growing tolerance of experimental art, which was once banned. While Beijing still censors art that it deems politically offensive, including overtly critical portrayals of the

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MIRANDA MIMI KUO-DEEMER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

With a booming art market, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing has become a breeding ground for popular young artists. Top, Yu Hong, a faculty member, painting at her studio. Sui Jianguo (in jacket), one of China’s most acclaimed sculptors, with students. ruling Communist Party, economic and market reforms have changed the way the government thinks about art and the way the Central Academy trains young artists. In the 1980s the school occupied a modest plot of land near Tiananmen Square in central Beijing where the faculty rigidly taught Soviet-style Realist art to about 200 students, many of whom were destined to work for the state. Today the school has a new 13-hectare campus and more than 4,000 students. It is the only arts college directly supported by the central government in Beijing. In the old days, Mr. Zhu said, students had a passion for art. “They viewed art as a way of life,’’ he said, “and Central Academy was a talent pool. Now, as society has changed, more and more students view art as a job. Students are more practical.’’ Faculty salaries average just $700 a month, but the pay means little to most of these teachers, whose canvases might as well be painted in gold. Liu Xiaodong, a Central Academy graduate who has been on the faculty since 1994, often portrays China’s disadvantaged, for example people displaced in the Three Gorges Dam area, site of one of China’s biggest development projects. Yet Mr. Liu is among the country’s wealthiest artists; a huge Three Gorges painting sold at auction last year for $2.7 million,

The Bricklayer’s Son Who Masterminded 9/11 Steve Coll’s riveting new book, “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in BOOKS OF shaping his thinking, his THE TIMES ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics. “The Bin Ladens” uses the prism of one family to examine the mind-boggling, culture-rocking effects that sudden oil wealth had on Saudi Arabia. It also sheds light on the “troubled,

MICHIKO KAKUTANI

compulsive, greed-inflected, secretburdened” relationship that developed between that desert nation and the United States, and the conflicts many Saudis felt, pulled between the traditional pieties of their ancestors and the glittering temptations of the West. By focusing on Mr. bin Laden’s conflicted relationship with his family and that family’s complicated relationship with the West, Mr. Coll has added fascinating new details to our understanding of how Mr. bin Laden evolved from a loyal family adjutant into an angry outcast, intent on lashing out at the very people — the Saudi royal family and the United States of America — that his father and brothers had cultivated in their

business dealings for years. Mr. Coll’s book also traces a host of bizarre connections among its cast of characters, suggesting that there is often little separation when it comes to the new globalized world of international finance. We learn, for instance, that Muhammad bin Laden, Osama’s father, began his rise by working as a bricklayer and mason for Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company. That organization had been formed to manage the oil rights of the Standard Oil Company of California, and the huge international company that the bin Ladens built would come to do business with wellknown American firms like General

Electric. In doing so, they drew on advice from the law firm Baker Botts, headed by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and Bush family adviser. But increasingly at odds with the Saudi royal family, Osama bin Laden left the kingdom in 1991 for the Sudan, where he bought a farm and raised horses and sunflowers while training jihadis. “Osama seemed to believe during this period,” Mr. Coll writes, “that he could have it all in Sudan — wives, children, business, horticulture, horse

a record for a contemporary Chinese artist at the time. Sui Jianguo, the school’s dean and one of the country’s most acclaimed sculptors, has seen his works sell at auction for as much as $150,000. The students seem less interested in politics and more concerned about their personal struggles and issues of identity, not unlike artists in the United States and Europe. Students, once required to paint the same figurative portrait again and again, are now encouraged to look deep within themselves and to be creative. Chi Peng, who graduated in 2005 with a new-media degree, is viewed as a success story. He broke into the international art market a few years ago, at 25, with a series of photographs in which his naked image sprinted through the streets of Beijing with blurry red planes in hot pursuit. Today he sells his computer-enhanced photographs for as much as $10,000 apiece. A decade ago Central Academy graduates who were lucky enough to sell a painting shortly after graduation would have been delighted to earn $100. As for the pressures of the fast-moving art marketplace, he acknowledges some ambivalence. Reflecting on his career ascent, he said: “It’s fast, really fast. I never could have imagined this, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing for me.’’

breeding, leisure, pious devotion and jihad — all of it buoyed by the deference and public reputation due a proper sheikh.” By 1995, Mr. Coll writes, there was “a hint of King Lear in the wilderness” to his exile: he was out of money, one of his wives had divorced him, and his eldest son had left him to return to Saudi Arabia. Isolation fueled Mr. bin Laden’s self-righteousness, and his wrath increasingly focused on the United States, particularly after Washington put pressure on the government of Sudan to expel him from Khartoum, leading to his exile in 1996 to Afghanistan.