SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2008

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Persuasion Tactics Marketing Tools Foster A Good Habit By CHARLES DUHIGG

sell their products. Stars showed up in nearly 14 percent of ads last year, according to Millward Brown, a marketing research agency. While that number has more than doubled in the past decade, it is off from a peak of 19 percent in 2004. Celebrities appear in 24 percent of the ads in India and 45 percent in Taiwan. Stars are likely to continue popping up in ads for a very simple reason: Celebrity sells. If consumers believe that a certain star or singer might actually use the product, sales can take off. “The reality is people want a piece of something they can’t be,” says Eli Portnoy, a branding strategist. “They live vicariously through the products and services that those celebrities are tied to. Years from now, our descen-

Social scientists have known for years that there is power in tying certain behavior to habitual cues through relentless advertising. The marketing world has used this knowledge to influence consumers. Now the same principles are being applied to a project with a noble purpose — saving lives in the developing world. Studies show that as much as 45 percent of what we do every day is habitual — that is, performed almost without thinking in the same location or at the same time each day, usually because of subtle cues. “Habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods,” said Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University in North Carolina. “If you regularly eat chips while sitting on the couch, after a while, seeing the couch will automatically prompt you to reach for the Doritos.” The urge to check e-mail or to grab a cookie is usually a habit with a specific trigger. Researchers found that most cues fall into four broad categories: a location or time of day, a series of actions, particular moods, or the company of certain people. The e-mail urge, for instance, probably occurs after you’ve finished reading a document or completed a familiar task. The cookie grab probably occurs when you’re walking out of the cafeteria, or feeling sluggish or unhappy. Aware of this, a self-described “militant liberal” named Val Curtis decided a few years ago that she could help save millions of children from death and disease if they could be trained to form a new habit: wash their hands with soap. Diseases and disorders caused by dirty hands — like diarrhea — kill a child somewhere in the world about every 15 seconds, and about half those deaths could be prevented with the regular use of soap, studies indicate. But getting people into a soap habit, it turns out, is surprisingly hard. So after years spent trying to persuade people in the developing world to wash their hands habitually with soap, Dr. Curtis, an anthropologist then living in Burkina Faso, contacted some of the largest multinational corporations and asked them to teach her how to manipulate consumer habits. She knew that over the past decade, many companies had perfected the art of creating automatic behaviors — habits — among consumers. These habits have helped com-

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SASCHA SCHUERMANN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Marketers have refined ways to manipulate consumers into changing their habits. An advertisement hovers above a pedestrian in Berlin.

A Booming Era for the Celebrity Pitchman By JULIE CRESWELL

COMPETITRACK

Nicole Kidman in a Chanel ad.

These days, it’s nearly impossible to surf the Internet, open a newspaper or magazine, or watch television without seeing a celebrity selling something, whether it’s umbrellas, soda, cars, phones, medications, cosmetics, jewelry, clothing or even mutual funds. But where the star ends and the product and pitch begin has grown less and less discernible in the era of the human billboard. Nicole Kidman sashays in ads for Chanel No. 5 perfume. Jessica Simpson struts for a hair extension company, HairUWear, and the acne skin-care line Proactiv Solution. And Jamie Lee Curtis spoons up Dannon Activia yogurt while promoting environmentally friendly Honda cars. Over the last decade, corporate brands have increasingly turned to Hollywood celebrities and musicians to

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If You Have a Lawn Chair, Who Needs a Rocket Ship? By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA

A lack of wings didn’t stop Kent Couch. On July 5 Mr. Couch, a 48-year-old gas station owner, escaped gravity in a device of his own making: a lawn chair attached to more than 150 helium-filled balloons. Taking off from Bend, Oregon, Mr. Couch drifted 380 kilometers to Cambridge, Idaho, in about nine hours. It was his third “cluster balloon” excursion since 2006. “Once you’re up, it’s really pleasant,” he said. “It’s so serene. That’s a word I never used before this.” Serene might be one description of the experience. Idiotic might be another. But there does seem to be an undeniable whimsy to the idea of floating in a comfortable chair buoyed by a panoply of shiny balloons. Jean Piccard, the aeronautical pioneer, may have been the first to use multiple balloons to fly. In 1937, he ascended to 3,350

Kent Couch floated 380 kilometers in a chair borne by heliumfilled balloons.

priest named Adelir Antonio de Carli took off from the meters over Minnesota and coastal city of Paranaguá, Iowa in a small gondola atbuoyed by 1,000 balloons. He tached to 95 1.2-meter-tall was reported missing eight balloons. He landed safely, hours later. The day before reportedly by popping Mr. Couch’s flight, rescuers balloons with a knife and recovered a body from the revolver to control his descent. ocean that they said may be PETE ERICKSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS The patron saint of the Father de Carli’s. everyman school of cluster ballooning Jonathan Trappe, who went aloft for is undoubtedly Lawrence Walters, also four hours on June 7 with 55 huge helium known as Lawn Chair Larry. In 1982, he tied balloons, prefers to take no chances. A 3542 weather balloons to a lawn chair in San year-old technical projects manager in RaPedro, California, christened the craft “In- leigh, North Carolina, Mr. Trappe carried spiration I” and shot up to more than 4,800 a clutch of safety equipment and alerted remeters. Adrift and out of control, he startled gional air traffic controllers ahead of time. at least two airline pilots. Upon descending Not that he didn’t inject some whimsy Mr. Walters snared a power line and was into his trip. Mr. Trappe’s gondola was acfined $1,500 by the Federal Aviation Admin- tually his office chair. “It represents a conistration. trast between the normal mundane world,” He was lucky. On April 20, a Brazilian he said, “and the world of my dreams.”

The Business of the Taliban

Conquering New Horizons

A quarry in Pakistan earns cash for the Afghan insurgency. WORLD TRENDS

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Modern zeppelins intrigue a new class of entrepreneurs. MONEY & BUSINESS 5

CAHIER DU « MONDE » DATÉ SAMEDI 19 JUILLET 2008, NO 19744. NE PEUT ÊTRE VENDU SÉPARÉMENT

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2008 O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY

EDITORIALS OF THE TIMES

On Energy Policy, Inaction and Abdication The Bush administration made clear earlier this month that it will do virtually nothing to regulate the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. With no shame and no apology, it snubbed the Supreme Court and exposed the hollowness of Mr. Bush’s claims to have seen the light on climate change. That is the import of an announcement by Stephen Johnson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, that the E.P.A. will continue to delay a decision on whether global warming threatens human health and welfare and requires regulations to address it. Mr. Johnson said his agency would seek further public comment on the matter, a process that will almost certainly stretch beyond the end of Mr. Bush’s term. The urgent problem of global warming demands urgent action. And the Supreme Court surely expected a speedier response when — 15 months ago — it ordered the E.P.A. to determine whether greenhouse gas pollution endangers human welfare and, if so, to issue regulations to limit emissions. Mr. Bush initially promised to comply, and last December, a task force of agency scientists concluded that emissions do indeed endanger public welfare, that the E.P.A. is required to issue regulations, and that while remedial action could cost industry billions of dollars, the public welfare and the economy as a whole will benefit. The agency sent its findings to the White House. The details of what happened next are not clear. But inves-

tigations by Senator Barbara Boxer and Representative Edward Markey have established that the White House, prodded by Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, refused at first to even open the e-mail containing them and then asked Mr. Johnson to devise another response that would relieve the administration of taking prompt action. Along the way, the administration engaged in what Senator Boxer has aptly called a “master plan’’ to ensure that the E.P.A.’s response to the Supreme Court’s decision would be as weak as possible. This campaign of obfuscation and intimidation included doctoring Congressional testimony on the health effects of climate change and promoting the fiction that the modest fueleconomy improvements in last year’s energy bill would solve the problem of carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles. Mr. Bush spent years denying there was a climate change problem. And while he no longer denies the science, he still insists on putting the concerns of industry over the needs of the planet. We were skeptical earlier this month when Mr. Bush joined other world leaders in a pledge to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century. We worried that without nearer-term targets there would be too little pressure on governments to act. Now we have no doubt that he was merely posturing. The next president, armed with the E.P.A.’s findings, can and must do better.

More Secrecy At the White House After watching wholesale lots of the Bush administration’s most important e-mails go mysteriously missing, Congress is trying to prevent further damage to history. The secrecy-obsessed White House is, of course, threatening a veto — one more effort to deny Americans access to how their leaders govern or misgovern. The House approved a measure recently that would require the National Archives to issue stronger standards for preserving e-mails and to aggressively inspect whether an administration is in compliance. Congressional investigators found that National Archives staff backed off from inspections of e-mail storage after the Bush administration took office. We fear we may never find out all that has gone missing in this administration, although we urge Congressional investigators to keep trying. What we do know is that the Bush gaps of missing e-mails run into hundreds of thousands during some of the most sensitive political moments. Key gaps

coincide with the lead-up to the Iraq war — and the White House’s manipulation of intelligence — as well as the destruction of videotapes of C.I.A. interrogations . Missing e-mails include entire blank days at the offices of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Also mysteriously wiped from the record are e-mails from Karl Rove, the president’s political guru, and dozens of other White House workers who improperly conducted government business on Republican Party e-mail accounts. The White House now claims that nothing has been lost, though officials previously acknowledged large-scale purging, claiming they were accidental. An administration with nothing to fear from the truth would be in the forefront of protecting the historical record. The Senate must stand with the House and ensure that at least future administrations are stopped from doing wholesale damage to history.

MAUREEN DOWD

Dreams of Laura Bush WASHINGTON The headline on the conservative blog, Townhall, stormed: “Book to Smear First Lady’s Sex Life.” Radar magazine proclaimed: “On the gossip front, the novel doesn’t disappoint,” adding that its steamy and lurid scenes were “sure to send the White House into a fury.” MSNBC.com called the sex scenes “too graphic to reprint.” The cover of this fantasy version of Laura Bush’s life, “American Wife,” is alluring, a woman’s shapely figure in a white gown, with white opera gloves and a diamond ring. The author is not Anonymous, or Eponymous or Pseudonymous, yet there is the air of a “Primary Colors” stunt about this political roman à clef, which is timed to come out during the Republican convention. Still, it’s not a salacious tell-all, and words like “smear” and “gossip” are misplaced. It’s a well-researched book that imagines what lies behind that placid facade of the first lady, a women’s bookclub novel by a young woman named Curtis Sittenfeld who has written two best sellers, including “Prep.” It’s the sort of novel Laura Bush might curl up with in the White House solarium if it were not about Laura Bush. It would be interesting to hear how that lover of fiction feels about being the subject of fiction. You don’t get any clues from Laura Bush. When you look into her eyes during an interview, you feel as if she is there somewhere, deep inside herself, miles and miles down. But though she is lovely

It Takes a School, Not Missiles Since 9/11, Westerners have tried two approaches to fight terrorism in Pakistan, President Bush’s and Greg Mortenson’s. Mr. Bush has focused on military force and provided more than $10 billion — an extraordinary sum in the foreign-aid world — to the highly unpopular government of President Pervez Musharraf. This approach has failed: the backlash has radicalized Pakistan’s tribal areas so that they now nurture terrorists in ways that they never did before 9/11. Mr. Mortenson, a frumpy, genial man from Montana, takes a diametrically opposite approach, and he has spent less than one-ten-thousandth as much as the Bush administration. He builds schools in isolated parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, working closely with Muslim clerics and even praying with them at times. The only thing that Mr. Mortenson, who is an Army veteran, blows up are boulders that fall onto remote roads and block access to his schools. Mr. Mortenson has become a legend in the region, his picture sometimes dangling like a talisman from rearview mirrors, and his work has struck a chord in America as well. His superb book about his schools, “Three Cups of Tea,” came out in 2006 and initially wasn’t reviewed by most major newspapers. Yet propelled by word of mouth, the book became a publishing sensa-

Dans l’article “Using Star Power to Spotlight Nigeria’s Successes,” page 7: LONG ODDS: peu de chance GRAFT: avantages acquis par corruption TO LURE: appâter LAVISHNESS: prodigalité MOGUL: magnat

tion: it has spent the last 74 weeks on the paperback best-seller list, regularly in the No. 1 spot. Now Mr. Mortenson is fending off several dozen film offers. “My concern is that a movie might endanger the wellbeing of our students,” he explains. Mr. Mortenson found his calling in 1993 after he failed in an attempt to climb K2, a Himalayan peak, and stumbled weakly into a poor Muslim village. The peasants nursed him back to

Mothers persuaded sons to abandon the Taliban and take up teaching. health, and he promised to repay them by building the village a school. Scrounging the money was a nightmare — his 580 fund-raising letters to prominent people generated one check, from Tom Brokaw — and Mr. Mortenson ended up selling his climbing equipment and car. But when the school was built, he kept going. Now his aid group, the Central Asia Institute, has 74 schools in operation. His focus is educating girls. To get a school, villagers must provide the land and the labor to assure a local

BRILLO BOXES: marque d’éponges à récurer

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 “Off Pacific, Algae Imperils an Ecosystem,” page 6 : TO SMOTHER: étouffer BUSHY: broussailleux REEF: récif TO GRAZE: brouter, paître RUBBLE: gravats FLIMSY: léger, peu solide THATCHED: de chaume SHALLOW: peu profond

of her high school, a cute star athlete she was believed to have had a crush on. He died instantly of a broken neck. As Ann Gerhart wrote in “The Perfect Wife”: “Killing another person was a tragic, shattering ARTHUR ALLISON/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY error for a girl to make at 17. It was and gracious, the main vibe she gives off one of those hinges in a life, a moment is an emphatic: “I am not going to show when destiny shuddered, then lurched in a new direction. In its aftermath, Laura you anything.” There’s only one vessel that can ferry became more cautious and less spontayou past Laura’s moat, and that’s fiction. neous, more inclined to be compassionMs. Sittenfeld has creatively applied her ate.” Laura has rarely spoken publicly crayons to all the ambiguous blanks in the coloring book. It isn’t an invasion of about it, except to say in 2000 that “it was privacy. Art has always been made out of crushing ... for the family involved and the stories of kings and queens. Fiction- for me as well.” How could a novelist not alizing historical figures is fine. Fanta- be drawn to such a tragedy? In 2004, Ms. Sittenfeld wrote a Salon sies about public figures are inevitable. And the story of the pretty librarian piece confessing that despite her “flamwho could suffer the fate of being an old ing” liberalism and disdain for W.’s polimaid if not rescued by the dashing hero cies, she loved Laura Bush. She called is a favorite American tale — from “The the first lady “an easy heroine to root for — smart and nice, but just flawed enough Music Man” to “It’s a Wonderful Life.” During her husband’s presidential (she still sneaks cigarettes!) to remain runs, many reporters shied away from likable.” In the novel, Alice, tormented by the asking Laura Bush about the freakishly horrible accident she had when she was choices her husband has made about the 17. Hurrying to a party, she ran a stop war that she’s stood by, blurts out to a sign in Midland, Texas, one night on grieving father that she thinks the war Farm Road 868 and ran into a car that should end. In life, we can only wonder turned out to be driven by the golden boy how Laura feels.

NICHOLAS KRISTOF

: AIDE A LA LECTURE

LEXIQUE

Curtis Sittenfeld’s third novel, “American Wife,” portrays a fictional version of Laura Bush in a sympathetic way.

UNWARRANTED: abusif, injustifié CRACKDOWN: répression ARSON: incendie volontaire TO SHOWCASE: présenter (comme dans une

vitrine) Dans l’article “On the Campaign Trail for McCain, an Ousted C.E.O. is Reborn,” page 7: TO OUST: évincer C.E.O.: P.D.G. (chief executive officer) SURROGATE: substitut TO PICK APART: défaire, démolir TO LAG BEHIND: être à la traîne TO BE WIRED IN: être très actif STANDARD-BEARER: porte –étendard

EXPRESSIONS Dans l’article “When Advertisers Freely Borrow Images, Artists Turn Vigilant,” page 8:

inventées en 1912, composées de paille de fer, et d’un savon à l’intérieur, vendues par boîtes de six. Dans l’article “Killer Beanstalks and Elves From a Director’s Hell,” page 8: TOOTHFAIRY: équivalent de la “petite souris” qui apporte des sous quand on perd une dent. BAG LADY: se dit de ces clochardes qui transportent tout ce qu’elles possèdent dans des sacs.

RÉFÉRENCES Dans l’article “Years After Apollo, Moon Rocks Provide Insights,” page 6: JOHNSON SPACE CENTER: centre de contrôle des missions spatiales habitées, situé à Houston, Texas, et nommé en l’honneur du président Lyndon B. Johnson. C’est dans ce centre composé de 100 bâtiments, que se trouve le fameux “Mission Control Center” (celui du “Allô, Houston” des films d’astronautes).Il y a en fait deux salles; l’une où 20 contrôleurs de vols suivent les missions de la navette spatiale,

“buy-in,” and so far the Taliban have not bothered his schools. One anti-American mob rampaged through Baharak, Afghanistan, attacking aid groups — but stopped at the school that local people had just built with Mr. Mortenson. “This is our school,” the mob leaders decided, and they left it intact. Mr. Mortenson has had setbacks, including being kidnapped for eight days in Pakistan’s wild Waziristan region. It would be naïve to think that a few dozen schools will turn the tide in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Still, he notes that the Taliban recruits the poor and illiterate, and he also argues that when women are educated they are more likely to restrain their sons. Five of his teachers are former Taliban, and he says it was their mothers who persuaded them to leave the Taliban; that is one reason he is passionate about educating girls. Suppose that the United States focused less on blowing things up in Pakistan’s tribal areas and more on working through local aid groups to build schools, simultaneously cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan manufactured exports. A better-educated and more economically vibrant Pakistan would probably be more resistant to extremism. Mr. Mortenson’s philosophy is simple: “Schools are a much more effective bang for the buck than missiles or chasing some Taliban around the country.”

et une autre, où 12 contrôleurs s’occupent de la station spatiale internationale. Créé en 1965, ce centre coordonne tous les vols spatiaux habités, et sert de centre d’entraînement des astronautes. Environ trois mille fonctionnaires, dont 110 astronautes y travaillent, ainsi que plus de 15 000 employés sous contrat. Dans l’article “Off Pacific, Algae Imperils an Ecosystem,” page 6: OAHU, KANEOHE BAY: Oahu est la troisième plus grande île de l’archipel de Hawai. C’est la plus peuplée (75% des habitants de l’Etat), sur laquelle se trouvent aussi bien Honolulu, la capitale, que Pearl Harbor ou Waikiki. Au nord-est de l’île, se trouve Kaneohe Bay; d’une surface de 45km2, elle est unique à Hawai en ce qu’elle est protégée de l’océan, accessible par un chenal, par un récif corallien, et qu’il y a donc un grand lagon, profond au plus de 12 mètres. On y trouve un banc de sable et quelques îlots, dont Coconut Island, sur laquelle se trouve le laboratoire de biologie marine de l’Université de Hawai. Le lieu est réputé pour sa beauté et se développe en station balnéaire.

SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2008

LE MONDE

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WORLD TRENDS

AFGHANISTAN

Area of detail

Chinarai Ziarat Jalalabad TORA BORA

PAKISTAN

MOHMAND Ka bul

Ghalanai Ri v er

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

The white marble from Ziarat is valued for its texture and purity. The Taliban settled a feud over rights to the quarry and are now earning revenue from stone shipped from there.

Restarted Trade in Marble A Sign of Taliban Power By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH and JANE PERLEZ

ZIARAT, Pakistan — The mountain of white marble shines with such brilliance in the sun it looks like snow. For four years, the quarry beneath it lay dormant, its riches captive to tribal squabbles and government ineptitude in this corner of Pakistan’s tribal areas. But in April, the Taliban appeared and imposed a firm hand. They settled the feud between the tribes, demanded a big fee and a tax on every truck that ferried the treasure from the quarry. Since then, Mir Zaman, a contractor from the Masaud subtribe, which was picked by the Taliban to run the quarry, has watched contentedly as his trucks roll out of the quarry with colossal boulders bound for refining in nearby towns. “With the Taliban it is not a question of a request to us, but a question of force,’’ said Mr. Zaman, a bearded, middle-aged tribal leader who seemed philosophical about the reality of Taliban authority here. At least the quarry was now operating, he said. The takeover of the Ziarat marble quarry, a coveted national asset, is one of the boldest examples of how the Taliban have made Pakistan’s tribal areas far more than a base for training camps or a launching pad for sending fighters into Afghanistan. A rare, unescorted visit to the region Pir Zubair Shah reported from Ziarat, and Jane Perlez from Peshawar.

this month, during which the Taliban detained for two days a freelance reporter and a photographer working for The New York Times, revealed how the Taliban were taking over territory, using the income they exact to strengthen their hold and turn themselves into a self-sustaining fighting force. The quarry alone has already brought the Taliban tens of thousands of dollars, Mr. Zaman said. The seizure of the quarry is a measure of how in recent months, as the Pakistani military has pulled back under a series of peace deals, the Pakistani Taliban have extended their reach through more of the rugged territory in northern Pakistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. Today the Taliban not only settle disputes in their consolidated domain but they also levy taxes, smuggle drugs and other contraband, and impose their own brand of rough justice, complete with courts and prisons. From the security of this border region, they deploy their fighters and suicide bombers in two directions: against NATO and American forces over the border in southern Afghanistan, and against Pakistani forces — police, army and intelligence officials — in major Pakistani cities. More American and coalition troops died in Afghanistan last month than during any other month since the Americanled invasion began in 2001. An assault on a NATO base on July 14 left nine Americans

AKHTAR SOOMRO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Pakistan cannot get a prized quarry running, so the Taliban step in.

dead, the deadliest attack in three years. The quarry operation here in the Mohmand tribal district, strategically situated between the city of Peshawar and the Afghan border, is a new effort by the Taliban to harness the abundant natural resources of a region where there are plenty of other mining operations for coal, gold, copper and chromate. A government body, the FATA Development Authority, failed over the last several years to mediate a dispute between the Masaud and Gurbaz subtribes over how the mining rights to the marble should be allocated, according to Pakistani government officials familiar with the quarry. A new government mining corporation, Pakistan Stone Development Company, offered last year to invest in modern mining machinery, but even with the lure of added value, the authority could not sort out the feud. The arguments were fierce because the tribes knew that the Ziarat marble was of

particularly fine texture and purity, according to an assessment done for the FATA Development Authority. The Taliban came eager for a share of the business. Their reputation for brutality and the weakness of the local government authorities allowed the Taliban to settle the dispute in short order. The Taliban decided that one mountain in the Ziarat area belonged to the Masaud division of the Safi tribe, and said that the Gurbaz subtribe would be rewarded with another mountain, Mr. Zaman, the contractor, said. The mountain assigned to the Masauds was divided into 30 portions, he said, and each of six villages in the area was assigned five of the 30 portions. Mr. Zaman said the Taliban demanded about $1,500 commission upfront for each portion, giving the insurgents a quick $45,000. The Taliban also demanded a tax of about $7 on each truckload of marble, he said. With a constant flow of trucks out of the quarry, the Taliban are now collecting up to $500 a day, Mr. Zaman said. The local tribes are profiting along with the Taliban. Once the trucks reach the processing plants, the government, too, collects a hefty tax, nearly double that of the Taliban, Mr. Zaman said, though there was no way to verify the claim. The Taliban appeared to have no problem with the government taking a

A Dissident’s Epic Escape From Iran

TURKEY

Tehran

Erbil s Tigri

Baghdad ates ph r Eu

By SCOTT SHANE and MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON — After three days on the run, Ahmad Batebi picked his way down a rocky slope to the stream that marked Iran’s border with Iraq. His Kurdish guides, who had led Mr. Batebi, an Iranian dissident, through minefields and dodged nighttime gunfire from border guards, passed him to a new team of human smugglers. At the age of 31, after nearly eight years in Iranian prisons, at times tortured, Mr. Batebi had fled. But in Iraq, his former captors had one more chilling message for him. Not long after his arrival in Erbil in March, his new cellphone, provided by United Nations officials, rang. “We know where you are,’’ said the familiar voice of the chief interrogator at one of Iran’s notorious prisons. “You must turn yourself in.’’ Instead, Mr. Batebi, one of Iran’s bestknown dissidents, received permission to enter the United States. He arrived on June 24. Mr. Batebi rose to fame in 1999, appearing on the cover of The Economist magazine holding the bloody T-shirt of a fellow student demonstrator — an image he first saw when a judge slapped it before him and declared, “You have signed your own death sentence.’’ Wary of being viewed as a pawn of American policy, Mr. Batebi said that the United States played no role in his departure from Iran, a fact American officials confirmed. Despite his soft-spoken Persian,

Caspian Sea

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Basra THE NEW YORK TIMES

BRENDAN HOFFMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

translated by Lily Mazahery, an Iranian-American lawyer, his contempt for Iran’s rulers is palpable. But he does not want a violent revolution. “No one with a healthy brain wants a revolution without a plan for what comes after,’’ he said. “That’s what happened in 1979.’’ At the University of Tehran in the mid1990s, Mr. Batebi studied photojournalism. He also joined in student protests, getting arrested three times. The demonstrations exploded in 1999 in what would become known as 18 Tir, the date according to the Iranian calendar. Mr. Batebi and hundreds of other students demonstrated against the closing of a newspaper, Salam. When the police fired into a crowd, a

bullet hit a young man next to Mr. Batebi, who pulled off the student’s shirt to try to stanch the bleeding. After carrying the wounded man to a makeshift clinic, he held up the shirt to warn other students against marching outside. A photographer caught the moment. Mr. Batebi was already in jail when The Economist published his picture. Mr. Batebi described 17 months in solitary confinement, including repeated torture by interrogators trying to force him to say on television that the famous T-shirt was stained with paint or animal blood. His jailers thrashed him with a metal cable, beat his testicles and kicked in his teeth, he said. They held his face

AHMAD BATEBI

down in a pool of excrement. Advocates around the world took up his cause. His death sentence, for “agitating people to create unrest,’’ was commuted, first to 15 years and then to 10. In 2005, allowed a day pass to take exams for a sociology degree, he fled. He remained free for five months. After Mr. Batebi was rearrested in 2006, the harshest treatment stopped. But he was sometimes forced to watch his friends being tormented. Last year, after Mr. Batebi suffered what was probably a stroke and several seizures, he was released for medical treatment. In March, he was ordered to return to prison.

share, he said. So far, he said, the Taliban were overseeing the operation with a light hand: a single armed Taliban fighter sat at a checkpoint not far from Mr. Zaman’s hut to ensure that the tax was paid. Working with Al Qaeda, the Taliban have steadily tightened their grip over much of the tribal areas in the last several years by cowing or killing hundreds of local tribal chiefs who were the area’s traditional authorities. In Mohmand, the Taliban have speedily consolidated control in the last year. They have filled a vacuum left by a vacillating government, unable and unwilling to assert its authority, said Munir Orekzei, a member of Parliament from Kurram, southwest of Mohmand, one of the seven districts, or agencies, in the tribal areas. “In every agency the most powerful man is the Taliban,’’ Mr. Orekzei said. “Because if someone says, ‘I’m in favor of the government,’ he will be killed.’’ Recently, Mohmand has become a center of kidnapping for ransom, a new activity that appears to be another important source of revenue for the Taliban. But the Ziarat quarry will be far more profitable, many people here say. One tribesman, known as Bahadar, who works there, predicted, “If this continues for two more years, they will take on America itself.’’

Ahmad Batebi, an Iranian dissident and photojournalist, filmed his escape from Tehran. Lily Mazahery is his lawyer.

On a Yahoo chat site, on March 13, Mr. Batebi contacted Ms. Mazahery, the lawyer, who he knew had helped other Iranians get into the United States. At the same time, through a connection made in prison, Mr. Batebi sought help from the underground Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran. His Kurdish helpers said he had to leave immediately. Carrying only a backpack containing his Dell laptop computer, a camera and a pocket-size video recorder, he climbed into the strangers’ car. He made a video of the journey that followed. The next two days were a blur, he said, as he was driven in a series of cars on a circuitous route to the northwestern border with Iraq, a straight-line distance of about 480 kilometers. Kurdish volunteers moved Mr. Batebi across the border and to the Erbil offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He was shaken one day by the unexpected phone call from the Iranian interrogator, a man known by the prison pseudonym Javad Javadi. The United Nations was arranging a placement in Sweden when Ms. Mazahery called to say that the United States had granted Mr. Batebi’s request for “humanitarian parole,’’ a relatively rare measure used in cases of danger or political importance. Mr. Batebi speaks of working from afar for peaceful change in Iran. He recoils when asked about the possibility of American military action against Iran, saying that if the United States attacked, “I might go back and fight for my country myself.’’

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2008 WORLD TRENDS

What Comes First: Product Placement or the Plot? By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

In the season finale of the television crime show “CSI: NY’’ in May, the program’s characters gathered around videoconferencing screens to share information about a shooting. “She wants everybody on a TelePresence call,’’ says an investigator, Lindsay Monroe. “O.K., we have a full house, network’s secure, you’re good to go, Stella.’’ The unlikely supporting player in the episode was Cisco Systems, which wanted to show off its TelePresence videoconferencing system. Cisco’s on-air cameo may seem puzzling to viewers more familiar with product placements for soft drinks or cars, but the placement resulted from careful deal-making by the company’s entertainment agency, Davie Brown Entertainment, with the CBS television network and the show. This is the kind of product placement woven into the plot of a popular show that is of growing concern to the United States government and consumer groups. Product placements are “a huge, out-of-control issue,’’ said Robert Weissman, the managing director of Commercial Alert, a nonprofit group that aims to limit commercial marketing. He said that the involvement of advertisers in the shaping of scripts and plots represented

“fundamental encroachments on the independence of the programming.’’ Recently, the Federal Communications Commission opened an inquiry into whether there ought to be frank disclosure of such deals. Among the suggestions are that the networks be required to display on-screen notices whenever a paid-for placement is seen on television. “We’re not saying they can’t do it

When advertisers revise a script, writers and regulators begin to worry. — we’re just saying they have to let the audience know what they’re doing,’’ said Jonathan S. Adelstein, an F.C.C. commissioner. Mr. Adelstein argues that more disclosure is necessary. He suggested considering that the brand names appear in a minimum font size, and for a minimum length of time, at the beginning or end of a show. For now, it is not clear whether the F.C.C. will take action; it is solicit-

ing comments for the next few months, and may or may not issue a ruling after that. But to Hollywood and the advertising world, the F.C.C.’s concerns appear archaic and intrusive. The type of pop-up warnings that the F.C.C. is considering would “completely disrupt the entertainment experience,’’ said Tom Meyer, the president of Davie Brown, a leading brand management agency in Los Angeles. “If their ultimate goal is, can they do something that kills integration, advertisers’ ability to integrate into a show, that would do it.” Some viewers, too, say the F.C.C.’s concerns are a little too much. Realistically, does anyone wonder why Simon Cowell has a huge Coke cup in front of him on every “American Idol’’? “I think that most people in the United States know that there’s some financial arrangement there,” said Ambar Rao, a professor of marketing at Washington University in St. Louis. He said that he did not oppose disclosure at the beginning or end of a show, but “people watch a show for entertainment, and if they’re constantly being reminded that somebody has paid for this product or that product, it just takes away from the experience.”

Booming Era For Celebrity Pitchman

ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES C. BEST JR./THE NEW YORK TIMES

buying commercials, which the network usually requires. “Everyone has an opinion now on whether or not we’re deceiving the public,” Mr. Meyer said. But “these shows have always been funded by advertising, and if advertising is changing, it has to be understood that the mechanics of how we deliver advertising must change, or advertisers will walk away.”

Marketing Tools Help Foster Life-Saving Habit in Africa From Page 1

From Page 1 dants may look at us and say, ‘God, these were the most gullible people who ever lived.’ ” Companies, trying to align themselves ever closer to A-list stars, are constantly seeking new ways to merge the alreadyblurry lines between the commercial and entertainment worlds. Television programmers and music producers are particularly eager to play along as joint marketing deals offer artists new ways to reach audiences while also defraying their own marketing costs. Celebrities have also grown much more sophisticated about the structure and payouts of endorsement deals. Last fall, the rapper-impresario Sean Combs created a 50-50 joint venture with Diageo, the spirits giant, for Mr. Combs to be the brand manager of the Ciroc vodka line. Mr. Combs says he made the profit-sharing deal only after refusing to work solely as a pitchman. “My brand is rocket fuel. It would take this brand 10 years to get to where I can take it in one year,” he says. “I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to do just endorsements. I want ownership.” In the few short years since she exploded onto the music scene, Rihanna, a 20-year-old singer from Barbados, has been involved in about a dozen endorsement and licensing deals. Early last year, marketing executives at Totes Isotoner, a Cincinnati company that had spent the previous 30 years putting out a reliable lineup of humble umbrellas, listened to her tune titled, appropriately, “Umbrella,” which eventually went on to become a huge, Grammy-winning hit. The song, not yet released at the time, had commercial, jingle-ready lyrics and a catchy hook: “You can stand under my umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh.” The song became a corporate rallying cry. Rihanna and her representatives wanted Totes to do more than merely use her to peddle a product. They wanted Totes to create customized umbrellas — all recommended by the emerging star and her team. Totes also guaranteed the singer a percentage of the sales of the umbrellas. “We’ve worked hard to build me and my name up as a brand,” Rihanna says. “We always want to bring an authentic connection to whatever we do. It must be sincere and people have to feel that.” But if some consumers don’t really trust celebrities, why do they still run out to buy their perfumes or fashions?

With agencies like Davie Brown becoming more sophisticated and demanding about how their clients’ products are depicted, the issue has grown murkier. These days consumer brands not only appear on shows, but are also elaborately woven into the plot, with advertisers having a lot of influence. Their agencies approve television scripts, suggest plots that hinge on the product, attend and critique the episode shoots, and review the rough cuts of episodes. “We almost consider ourselves to be the junior writers on the show,” Mr. Meyer said. Television writers are not happy about this development — the Writers Guild of America West sent a letter to the F.C.C. urging that an on-screen announcement disclose a placement at the moment it occurs — but the networks and producers are thrilled with the extra income they get from product placement. A one-episode integration on a moderately popular show costs at least $100,000 but rarely goes over $500,000, Mr. Meyer said. Then there is the cost of

THE IMAGE IS FAMILIAR

Artists have used images from advertising for decades. What happens when the roles are reversed? PAGE 8

COMPETITRACK

Marketers have become starstruck. Totes and Accenture made endorsement deals with Rihanna and Tiger Woods.

The answer, some analysts say, has its roots in two seismic shifts in the cultural landscape that began in the late 1990s. First has been the emergence of Web sites and magazines that chronicle the mundane activities of stars on a constant basis. A voracious public eager to peek at celebrities shopping for shoes and buying coffee wanted to buy those shoes and drink that coffee themselves. The other new force has been the explosive growth and mainstreaming of urban hip-hop music and marketing moves by artists like Mr. Combs,

Shawn Carter (better known as Jay-Z) and Jennifer Lopez to put their names on clothing lines and fragrances. “Hip-hop completely opened the eyes of other music genres as to how to relate to corporations and not be seen as sellouts,” says Steve Stoute, an ad executive who has matched such celebrities and brands as Justin Timberlake and McDonald’s, Gwen Stefani and HewlettPackard, and Jay-Z with Reebok. An emotional connection with a certain celebrity may help make a sale. “As consumers, we see over 3,156 images a day. We’re just not conscious of them,” says Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst of the consumer research firm NPD Group. “Our subconscious records maybe 150, and only 30 or so reach our conscious behavior. If I have a celebrity as part of that message, I just accelerated the potential for my product to reach the conscious of the consumer.” So are there any limits to what celebrities can endorse, or how far the celebrity pitch could go? Mr. Stoute points to a picture in the center of a framed front page from a newspaper showing a General Motors S.U.V. in a metallic blue concept color that Jay-Z helped to design. “That’s Jay-Z blue! We invented a color! There are no limits. There is no such thing as too far.”

placed pit latrines. So Dr. Curtis’s group had to create commercials that taught viewers to feel a habitual sense of uncleanliness surrounding toilet use. Their solution was ads showing mothers and children walking out of bathrooms with a glowing purple pigment on their hands that contaminated everything they touched. The commercials, which began running in 2003, didn’t sell soap use. Rather, they sold disgust. Soap was almost an afterthought, but the message was clear: The toilet cues worries of contamination, and that disgust, in turn, cues soap. “This was radically different from most public health campaigns,” said Beth Scott, an infectious-disease specialist who worked with Dr. Curtis on the Ghana campaign. “There was no mention of sickness. It just mentions the yuck factor. We learned how to do that from the marketing companies.” By last year, Ghanaians surveyed by members of Dr. Curtis’s team reported a

panies earn billions of dollars when customers eat snacks, apply lotions and wipe counters, often in response to a carefully designed set of daily cues. “There are fundamental public health problems, like hand washing with soap, that remain killers only because we can’t figure out how to change people’s habits,” Dr. Curtis said. “We wanted to learn from private industry how to create new behaviors that happen automatically.” If you look hard enough, you’ll find that many of the products we use every day — chewing gums, skin moisturizers, disinfecting wipes, air fresheners — are results of manufactured habits. “Our products succeed when they become part of daily or weekly patterns,” said Carol Berning, a consumer psychologist who recently retired from Procter & Gamble, the company that sold $76 billion of Tide, Crest and other products last year. So to teach hand washing, Dr. Curtis persuaded Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever to join an initiative called the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing With Soap. The group’s goal was to double the hand-washing rate in Ghana, where almost every home contains a soap bar but few adults regularly lather up after using the toilet. Ghana offered a conundrum: Almost half of its people were accustomed to washing their hands with water after using the restroom or before eating. And local markets were filled with cheap, colorful soap bars. But only about 4 percent of Ghanaians used soap as part of their post-restroom hand-washing regime, studies showed. “We could talk about germs until we were blue in the face, and it didn’t change behaviors,” Dr. Curtis said. So she and her colleagues VALERIE CURTIS asked Unilever for advice in designing surveys that ultimately An advertising campaign in Ghana studied hundreds of mothers and encouraged washing hands with soap. their children. They discovered that previous health campaigns had failed because 13 percent increase in the use of soap afmothers often didn’t see symptoms like ter the toilet. Another measure showed diarrhea as abnormal, but viewed them even greater impact: reported soap use before eating went up 41 percent. as a normal aspect of childhood. Public health campaigns elsewhere are The studies also revealed an interesting paradox: Ghanaians used soap being revamped to employ habit-formawhen they felt that their hands were tion characteristics. One American antidirty — after cooking with grease, for smoking campaign is explicitly focused example. This hand-washing habit, on habits, with commercials intended to studies showed, was prompted by teach smokers how to identify what cues feelings of disgust. And surveys also tell them to reach for a cigarette. “For a long time, the public health showed that parents felt deep concerns about exposing their children to any- community was distrustful of industry, because many felt these companies were thing disgusting. So the trick, Dr. Curtis and her col- trying to sell products that made peoleagues realized, was to create a habit ple’s lives less healthy, by encouraging wherein people felt a sense of disgust them to smoke, or to eat unhealthy foods, that was cued by the toilet. That disgust, or by selling expensive products people didn’t really need,” Dr. Curtis said. “But in turn, could become a cue for soap. A sense of bathroom disgust may seem those tactics also allow us to save lives. If natural, but in many places toilets are a we want to really help the world, we need symbol of cleanliness because they re- every tool we can get.”

LE MONDE

SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2008

5

MONEY & BUSINESS

Those Who Seek Growth Often Find It

Building a New Detroit in India By MARTIN FACKLER

ORAGADAM, India — On a dusty sunbaked field, in a ceremony presided over by a chanting Brahmin priest tossing water and rice, the Japanese carmaker Nissan Motor made a bold step into the Indian auto market. The traditional Hindu ritual last month, attended by a half-dozen sweating Japanese and European executives, blessed the site where Nissan will build its first passenger vehicle factory in India, a sprawling $1.1 billion complex where rice paddies once stood. The plant, built jointly with its French partner Renault an hour outside the southern city of Chennai, will produce 400,000 cars a year when completed in two years. Japan’s Big Three — Toyota, Honda and Nissan — led the world in factory automation and eco-friendly technology, but until now they have been cautious about venturing far from the roads they know: the mature markets of North America and developing markets closest to home, particularly China and Thailand. Now, in a radical shift, Japan’s staid Big Three are plowing into exotic terrain, from Saharan Africa to the former Soviet Union to the scorching plains of southern India. They are determined not to repeat the mistakes of a decade ago, when they were late to the market in China, and where they have since trailed rivals like Volkswagen and General Motors. They Bill Vlasic contributed reporting from Detroit.

have been particularly quick to expand in India, a nation of 1.1 billion that is just beginning its automotive revolution, and that many call the world’s next megamarket after China. The aggressive moves by traditionally cautious automakers are the latest signpost that the epicenter of the global auto industry is shifting increasingly to somewhere between Canton and Calcutta. The shift is also yet another sign of the waning centrality of the United States to the global economy. The Japanese are not alone. Just in Chennai, Ford, BMW and Hyundai Motors of South Korea have all built factories, leading some locals to call the city the “Detroit of India.” The large Japanese automakers also find themselves in the unaccustomed position of trying to catch their much smaller Japanese rival Suzuki, which became the largest car company in India by being one of the first to arrive, a quarter-century ago. “These developing markets used to be an afterthought” for Japanese automakers, said Hirofumi Yokoi, an analyst in Tokyo for CSM Worldwide, the auto market research company. “Now they are the industry’s future.” According to CSM, vehicle sales in developing regions are expected to rise by about 10 million units over the next six years, contributing 76 percent of the industry’s entire global growth. In the last seven years, Nissan’s vehicle sales in all developing nations have nearly tripled to 1 million units, out of the compa-

Auto companies are eager to invest in India. A parts plant serves Nissan and Honda.

ZACKARY CANEPARI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

ny’s 3.7 million vehicle sales last year. “It used to be that Honda relied on its U.S. business, maybe too heavily,” said Honda’s president in India, Masahiro Takedagawa. “Nowadays, we are trying to spread the sources of profits more globally, beyond just one market.” To be sure, the United States will remain the world’s biggest and richest market for the foreseeable future, contributing some 70 percent of the profits at most Japanese automakers. But in recent months, the big Japanese automakers have announced a slew of new factories in the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America. Breaking into far-flung emerging markets comes with its own hazards, especially when the Japanese carmakers’ strongest competitive edge is worldleading quality. This is especially true as they build factories in places where local parts suppliers are accustomed to lower standards — and where even electricity

is unreliable. In India, for instance, Nissan faces challenges like ensuring timely delivery of parts via half-finished roads clogged with trucks and bullock carts, and teaching its new workers and local suppliers exacting Japanese precepts like kaizen, or “constant improvement.” “The hardest part will be teaching the mindset and culture of kaizen,” said Shouhei Kimura, a former factory manager who now heads Nissan’s operations in India. Many here see enormous potential for the Japanese brands among Indians, many of whom became used to driving Nissans and Hondas while living abroad, and became accustomed to their quality and reliability. “Expectations are getting higher here when it comes to cars,” said Sudhir Natarajan, who runs Nissan’s sole dealership in Chennai. “This is a chance for the Japanese.”

For Entrepreneurs, Modern Airships Conquer New Horizons By JOHN TAGLIABUE

PARIS — Imagine gliding in a floating hotel over the Serengeti, gazing down at herds of zebra or elephants; or floating over Paris as the sun sets and lights blink on across the city as you pass the Eiffel Tower. Such flights may one day be possible, if the dream of Jean-Marie Massaud, a French architect, comes true. As the cost of fuel soars and the pressure mounts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, several schemes for a new generation of airship are being considered by governments and private companies. “It’s a romantic project,” said Mr. Massaud, 45, sitting in his Paris studio, “but then look at Jules Verne.” It has been more than 70 years since the giant Hindenburg zeppelin exploded in a spectacular fireball over Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 crew members and passengers, abruptly ending an earlier age of airships. But because of new materials, including nonflammable gases, and sophisticated means of propulsion, a diverse cast of entrepreneurs is taking another look at the behemoths of the air. Mr. Massaud, a designer of hotels in California and a stadium in Mexico, has not worked out the technical details, nor has he found financiers or corporate backers for his project — to create a 210-meter zeppelin shaped like a whale, with a luxury hotel attached, that he has named Manned Cloud. But not all projects are as fanciful as Mr. Massaud’s. For example, a French technology start-up, Aerospace Adour Technologies, is working with the French post office to study the feasibility of transporting parcels by dirigible. Also in France, Theolia, a company specializing in renewable energy, is financing a dirigible, and plans a test flight across the Atlantic. In Germany, Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei, the successor to the operator of the Hindenburg, has had success with a new generation of airship it uses to transport sightseers and scientific payloads. The trend is not entirely new. Zeppelin-Reederei carried 12,000 passengers on sightseeing tours over southern Germany last year. Aerophile, a French company that revived tethered balloons, which compete with dirigibles as carriers of passengers, advertising and scientific instruments, was founded by two young French engineers in 1993. The aircraft industry is not exactly bracing for competition. Mr. Massaud says that Emirates and Air France have expressed interest in Manned Cloud. But with top speeds of around 160 kilometers an hour and a maximum capacity of several dozen passengers, dirigibles are expected by most aviation experts to remain niche vessels for ferrying tourists, advertising and occasional scientific payloads.

Why do some people reach their creative potential in business while other equally talented peers don’t? After three decades of painstaking research, the Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck believes that the answer to the puzzle lies in how J�NET R�E-DUPREE people think about intelligence and talent. Those who believe they were born with all the smarts and gifts they’re ever going to have approach life with what she calls a “fixed mind-set.’’ Those who believe that their own abilities can expand over time, however, live with a “growth mind-set.’’ Guess which ones prove to be most innovative over time. “Society is obsessed with the idea of talent and genius and people who are ‘naturals’ with innate ability,’’ says Ms. Dweck, who is known for research that crosses the boundaries of personal, social and developmental psychology. “People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.’’ In this case, nurture wins over nature almost every time. While some managers apply these principles every day, too many others instead believe that hiring the best and the brightest from topflight schools guarantees success. The problem is that, having been identified as geniuses, the anointed become fearful of falling from grace. “It’s hard to move forward creatively and especially to foster teamwork if each person is trying to look like the biggest star in the constellation,’’

ESSAY

An overreliance on innate talent can stifle development.

COURTESY OF JEAN-MARIE MASSAUD

New materials make airships safer than those in an earlier era. A Zeppelin NT carries sightseers over Germany.

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GIFFARD AIRSHIP (MAIDEN FLIGHT: 1852)

Created by Henri Giffard, a French engineer and architect. The first powered aircraft, it used a propeller driven by a lightweight steam engine to travel 27 kilometers on its only flight.

Dirigibles, which use enormous balloon-like cells filled with lighter-than-air gas for lift, are drawing renewed interest. 44 meters; 1 pilot

LZ-129 HINDENBURG (1936)

More than 1,000 passengers traveled on 18 translatlantic trips to Rio de Janeiro and Lakehurst, New Jersey. But in May 1937, the Hindenburg caught fire and crashed while landing in Lakehurst. It was filled with hydrogren, a buoyant but highly flammable gas, not helium, which is inert.

245 meters long; about 50 passengers and about 50 crew

GOODYEAR GZ-20 (1968)

Well-known due to their prominence at sporting events, these blimps are some of many current airships used for advertising and broadcast.

BOEING 747-400

58.5 meters long; 6 passengers and 1 pilot

Sources: Boeing, Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei; Goodyear Blimp; “Graf Zeppelin & Hindenburg” by Harold G. Dick and Douglas H. Robinson, 1985 (Smithsonian Institution Press); “The Airships: A History” by Basi Collier, 1974 (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

ZEPPELIN NT (1997)

Built by ZLT Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik; the fourth NT airship is expected to begin service in California this fall, for sightseeing tours.

“A dirigible is something magical,” said Jérôme Giacomoni, who was 25 when he founded Aerophile with a friend. “But most of the ideas are crazy.” Dirigibles, he said, “are very sensitive to storms. Their size requires large landing spaces; economically they’re not feasible.” A dirigible, or rigid airship, has a metal frame, these days usually part aluminum, part carbon fiber, covered with a synthetic canvas. A blimp, in contrast,

69 meters long; 400 passengers

75 meters long; 12 passengers and 2 crew

is a big, inflatable balloonlike sack filled with a lifting gas. Blimps are far less maneuverable than dirigibles and can lift less. Today’s airships fly with helium, an inert gas, as did the Hindenburg until the United States imposed an embargo on what was then a fairly valuable commodity. Hence, the Hindenburg had to start using inflammable hydrogen on its flights. By the time of the explosion, zeppelins

THE NEW YORK TIMES

had carried about 405,000 passengers across the Atlantic. French political leaders are among those who believe the ships can do more than ferry tourists. For two years, JeanMarc Brûlé, a Green Party leader and mayor of Cesson, near Paris, has pushed through budget amendments to finance dirigible research. “With global warming and the oil crisis,” he said, “it’s good sense to realize this dream.”

Ms. Dweck says. In her 2006 book, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success,’’ she shows how adopting either a fixed or growth attitude toward talent can profoundly affect all aspects of a person’s life, from parenting and romantic relationships to success at school and on the job. She attributes the success of several high-profile chief executives to their growth mind-set. These include John F. Welch Jr. of General Electric, who valued teamwork over individual genius, and Louis V. Gerstner Jr. of I.B.M., who dedicated his book about I.B.M.’s turnaround to “the thousands of I.B.M.’ers who never gave up on their company.’’ But Ms. Dweck does not suggest that recruiters ignore innate talent. Instead, she suggests looking for both talent and a growth mind-set in prospective hires. After reading her book, Scott Forstall, senior vice president of Apple in charge of iPhone software, contacted Ms. Dweck to talk about his experience putting together the iPhone development team. Mr. Forstall told her that he identified a number of superstars within various departments at Apple and asked them in for a chat. Only people who immediately jumped at the challenge ended up on the team. “It was his intuition that he wanted people who valued stretching themselves over being king of their particular hill,’’ she says. Is it possible to shift from a fixed mind-set to a growth mind-set? Absolutely, according to Ms. Dweck. But, “it’s not easy to just let go of something that has felt like your self for many years,” she writes. Still, she says, “nothing is better than seeing people find their way to things they value.’’ Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2008 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

FINDINGS

Years After Apollo, Moon Rocks Provide Insights By GUY GUGLIOTTA

Eruptions Under the Sea In 1999, seismographs detected a swarm of earthquakes at a spot on the Gakkel ridge, a midocean ridge that traverses the Arctic. A few expeditions to the area, north of Siberia about 560 kilometers from the pole, produced indirect evidence of explosive eruptions deep on the seafloor. Explosive volcanism at such depths would be very unusual, said Robert A. Sohn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Seafloor volcanoes do erupt violently, but in relatively shallow water. The Gakkel ridge spot is 4,000 meters down, and at such great depths it had been thought that explosive eruptions could not occur because there is not enough gas in magma to overcome the immense pressure. So in 2007 Dr. Sohn led another expedition to the area, sending a homemade contraption down to the seafloor with high-definition video cameras and a sampling device. His team’s findings show conclusively that explosive eruptions occurred. The evidence came in the form of fresh pyroclastic deposits, small bits of volcanic rock, spread over an area greater than 10 square kilometers. The researchers even found evidence of Limu o Pele, fragments of the wall of an exploding bubble of magma. A map of the area created using sonar showed what appeared to be cratered volcanoes that probably were the focus points of the explosions. One possible explanation, Dr. Sohn said, is that carbon dioxide dissolved out of magma over a long period, forming a bubble of trapped gas perhaps 8 kilometers below the seafloor. Then the 1999 earthquakes would have weakened the crust, allowing the gas to rise, mix with rising magma and “blow the top off the seafloor,’’ he said. HENRY FOUNTAIN

LEIF PARSONS

Diet Soda Serves as a Potent Mixer Usually it is solely the liquor component of a cocktail — not the mixer — that determines its inebriating effects. But some people contend the artificial sweeteners in diet soda speed the absorption of alcohol. Research suggests it’s true. In a 2006 study, a team of scientists had subjects consume vodka cocktails. Sometimes it was a 0.6-liter drink mixed with a sugar-sweetened beverage, and other times it was a drink mixed instead with a diet beverage. In the diet-mixer conditions, the alcohol entered the subjects’ bloodstream about 15 minutes faster, and their blood-alcohol concentration was higher, peaking at 0.05 percent, compared with 0.03 percent with the regular mixer. One theory is that the alcohol is absorbed more quickly because there is no sugar to slow it down, which would mean that club soda would have a similar effect. A second study in 2007 also showed that alcohol was absorbed far more quickly when mixed with carbonated beverages than with flat mixers, possibly because of the effervescence. ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Benefits of Dried vs. Fresh Fruit How does dried fruit compare with fresh fruit in nutritional value? “There are pluses and minuses,’’ said Christina Stark, a nutritionist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “The main difference is that taking out the water concentrates both nutrients and calories.’’ This could be an advantage if you are hiking and want more calories that are easy to store and carry, she said. It could be a disadvantage if you are trying to lose weight. VICTORIA ROBERTS The heat used in drying fruit decreases the amount of some of the heat-sensitive nutrients, like vitamin C. The recommendation is to eat about two cups of fresh fruit a day, she said, the more variety the better; a half cup of dried fruit counts as a cup of fresh. Percentages of water, calories and amounts of vitamins and minerals vary. For example, for apricots, a cup of fresh halves is 86 percent water, with 74 calories, and a cup of dried fruit is 76 percent water, with 212 calories. Fresh apricots have 3.1 grams of fiber versus 6.5 for dried; 0.6 milligrams of iron versus 2.35 milligrams and 15.5 milligrams of vitamin C versus 0.8 milligrams. C. CLAIBORNE RAY

HOUSTON — In the lab, the Moon rocks look nondescript — dark gray basalt, a whitish mineral called anorthosite and mixtures of the two with crystals thrown in. Yet nearly 40 years after the Apollo astronauts brought the first rocks back to Earth, these pieces of the Moon are still providing scientists with new secrets from another world. “We call this one the ‘genesis’ rock, because it was formed close to the time the Moon solidified about 4.5 billion years ago,” said Carlton C. Allen, pointing to a light-colored stone about the size and shape of a large artist’s eraser, resting inside a glove box filled with inert nitrogen gas. “We know the Big Bang happened about 14.5 billion years ago,” Mr. Allen said, “and this rock is a third that old. You will never see a solid piece of stuff in our solar system that is any older.” Mr. Allen is the astromaterials curator at the Johnson Space Center, home of the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility, a secure repository opened in 1979 to house 382 kilograms of Moon rocks and soil collected by astronauts in six visits. The rocks on the lunar surface, lying virtually unchanged in a weatherless vacuum since their formation, offer opportunities to investigate the origin and evolution of the solar system available nowhere else, and the study deepens with each new generation of scientists and scientific instruments. Each year an independent peer review panel evaluates new research proposals, and curators mail out about 400 lunar samples to 40 to 50 scientists worldwide. Almost all are less than one gram in size. “We don’t hand them out, we only loan them,” Mr. Allen said. “We’re not planning to run out any time soon.” Over the years, the samples have provided uncounted insights into the nature of our closest celestial neighbor. Because of the samples, we have learned when the Moon was formed, probably (although it is still controversial) the result of a planetoid smashing into the young Earth, throwing a cloud of debris into space that subsequently came together in a sphere. The samples have confirmed that asteroid and meteor impacts, not volcanism, created the vast majority of craters that define the Moon’s topography, while a constant barrage of meteorites, micrometeorites and radiation melted and pureed the bedrock to create the blanket of finegrained soil and dust — known as

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NASA

Moon rocks help explain the origins of the solar system. White breccia, above, and Apollo 14 astronauts, with lunar rocks in 1971.

regolith — that now cloaks the lunar surface. And knowing the ages of Moon rocks, which can be computed to within 20 million years, has enabled scientists to establish a baseline that allows them to date geologic features throughout the solar system. The surface of the Earth, one of the solar system’s youngest topographies, is constantly changing, as it is faulted, folded, shaped and reshaped by eruptions, earthquakes and ero-

sion. By contrast, the Moon is as old as it gets. “It’s hard to wrap your mind around a place where nothing ever happens,” Mr. Allen said. “But the Moon is that place.” In recent years the rocks have also helped researchers to answer practical questions that have emerged since President Bush’s 2004 proposal to return to the Moon by 2020 and set up a permanent outpost. Planners are using the rocks to study the pernicious effects of regolith on machinery and astronaut health. They are learning how to extract oxygen and other vital elements from lunar rocks and soil. And they need to understand how to shield living spaces from the deadly radiation that eternally pounds the lunar surface. The samples — 2,200 of them — are kept in nitrogen-filled boxes in a stainless steel vault on the second floor of the repository, and are transferred to other parts of the lab in airlocks. The arrival of the first Moon rocks

Eucheuma algae, picked off a coral reef in Butaritari, a Pacific atoll, has been smothering corals to death and driving fish away.

Off Pacific, Algae Imperils An Ecosystem By CHRISTOPHER PALA

BUTARITARI, Kiribati — Off the palm-fringed white beach of this remote Pacific atoll, the view underwater is downright scary. Corals are being covered and smothered to death by a bushy seaweed that is so tough even algaegrazing fish avoid it. It settles in the reef’s crevices that fish once called home, driving them away. Dead coral stops supporting the ecosystem and, within a couple of decades, it will crumble into rubble, allowing big ocean waves to reach the beach during storms and destroy the flimsy thatched huts of the Micronesians. “We are catching less and less fish, and the seaweeds are fouling our nets,’’ says Henry Totie, a fisherman and Butaritari’s traditional chief. The area affected, about six kilometers long and 1.6 kilometers wide, lies off the island’s main village, an underwater examination showed. It looked strikingly similar to Kaneohe Bay in the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where the seaweed also has spread out of control. “This is one of the most damaging seaweeds I have ever seen,’’ says Jennifer E. Smith of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has studied the

in 1969 was eagerly anticipated by scientists. “We had no idea what the Moon was made of,” Mr. Allen recalled, and the first two decades of research focused on basic questions — the age and composition of the Moon rocks and the origin and evolution of the Moon’s geology and salient topographical features. Analysis of the lunar samples and impact craters has shown that the Moon’s surface was solid 4.3 billion years ago, yet the oldest impact rocks among the samples are 3.9 billion years old. Some researchers have suggested that impacts on the moon began to taper off 4.3 billion years ago, only to resume with a vengeance in a “cataclysm” 400 million years later. And if the cataclysm affected the Moon, it also affected the Earth — at a time when life was beginning. “This is very controversial,” said Charles Shearer, a lunar scientist at the University of New Mexico and the chairman of the lunar lab’s peer review committee. “It’s probably important to sample other terrains.”

CHRISTOPHER PALA

Hawaiian invasion for eight years. “If there is that much Eucheuma in Butaritari, it proves it can destroy a healthy reef as opposed to a degraded one like in Kaneohe.’’ Moiwa Erutarem, the Butaritari representative of the fisheries ministry, said the biggest losses were being felt by the most vulnerable: those who use nets in the shallow coral table and do not have the boats required to fish farther away. Seafood is virtually the only source of protein in Butaritari, complemented by breadfruit and coconut. This equatorial island of 4,000 people is the latest victim of a 30year global effort to encourage poor people in the coastal areas of the tropics to grow seaweed that, while not edible, produces carrageenan, an increasingly sought-after binder and

fat substitute used in the food industry, notably in ice cream. Today, about 120,000 dry metric tons a year are produced, mostly in the Philippines and Indonesia, where the two main algae originate. Kappaphycus alvarezii is most desirable because of its high carrageenan content; Eucheuma denticulatum is less valuable but easier to cultivate. Both were introduced in the past three decades to 20 countries around the world from Tonga to Zanzibar and the result in most of them has been failure or worse. In the Pacific, for example, the two algae were introduced to 10 countries and are said to be commercially cultivated in three: Kiribati, the Solomon Islands and Tonga. But in the case of Kiribati, interviews with seaweed officials in Tar-

awa, the capital of this nation of tiny islands, reveal that since the first effort to cultivate algae in 1986, the industry has lost money almost every year and the farmers have shown little enduring enthusiasm for the crop. Low prices or unreliable purchasers are blamed. Then there are cultural factors. Some Pacific countries, like Kiribati, are populated by what ethnologists call nonconsumers: people who need just a little cash to get by and once that need is met, prefer to spend time with their family, go fishing or sleep. There is also “pubusi,’’ the local tradition in which one person can ask another for pretty much anything, using the magic word, and the other person has to hand it over or face public opprobrium. The state-owned Atoll Seaweed Company in Kiribati was formed in 1991 to restart failed efforts by the fisheries ministry to introduce seaweed farming in the 1980s. Today, after the algae were introduced to 10 islands in Kiribati, only one, Fanning in the Line Islands, is producing anything. Today, Mr. Totie says the only way to prevent Eucheuma from destroying the entire lagoon is for the seaweed company to offer to buy it. “Then the people would go out and get it and it would be gone in a few months,’’ he said. “If they wait, the problem will just get worse.’’

SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2008

LE MONDE

7

PERSONALITIES

CARLETON S . FIORINA

On the Campaign Trail for McCain, an Ousted C.E.O. Is Reborn By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — Three years ago, Carleton S. Fiorina was the celebrity chief executive officer who was spectacularly fired by the Hewlett-Packard board. She produced a best-selling memoir, “Tough Choices,” but for the most part spent the years after her ouster in relative self-imposed exile from public life. No longer. Ms. Fiorina, known as Carly, is back, this time reincarnated as a bold surrogate for Senator John McCain. On television, Ms. Fiorina praised Mr. McCain’s fund-raising prowess with the announcement that he had raised $21.5 million in May. She pushed Mr. McCain’s proposal for a gasoline-tax holiday and ignored the fact that she could not name a credible economist who supported it. In the months before that, Ms. Fiorina tirelessly promoted Mr. McCain’s economic proposals. “When people were picking apart our tax cuts and saying, ‘This will cost a gazillion dollars,’ she’s very good about saying, ‘Come on, guys, let’s get the numbers and push back,’ ” said Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers. “She’s a very smart woman.” Ms. Fiorina’s official title is chairwoman of the Republican National Committee’s “Victory ’08” committee dedicated

to electing Mr. McCain as president, and she is typically described as an economic adviser to the candidate. To some extent, she is. But Mr. McCain’s campaign advisers say her real role within their circle matters more: A high-profile female face for a candidate whose support among women lags substantially behind that of his Democratic rival. “She has a great feeling for the economy, for technology and probably what women think about these things, and she’s wired in,” said Thomas J. Perkins, a pioneer venture capitalist and a leader on the Hewlett-Packard board in Ms. Fiorina’s ouster. In turn, a number of Republicans say Ms. Fiorina is using the McCain campaign to rebuild her image after her explosive tenure at Hewlett-Packard. They also say it is hard to see why a woman widely criticized for mismanaging one of Silicon Valley’s legendary companies is advising and representing a candidate who acknowledged last year that he did not understand the economy as well as he should. “Well, see, the good news about business is, results count,” Ms. Fiorina, 53, said. “And the results have been very clear. The results have been crystal clear. From the day I was fired, every quarter,

“From the day I was fired, every quarter . . . has been record after record. That doesn’t happen unless the foundation’s been built.” MARY ALTAFER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

even before they had a new C.E.O., has been record after record. That doesn’t happen unless the foundation’s been built.” Opinion is still split on whether Ms. Fiorina or her successor as chief executive, Mark V. Hurd, deserve credit for Hewlett’s success after Ms. Fiorina drove through the company’s $25 billion acquisition of Compaq in 2002. By many accounts, Ms. Fiorina was superb at marketing, mixed on strategy, bad at execution — and extraordinarily successful in

unifying the board against what Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management calls her “street bully” leadership style. “What a blind spot this is in the McCain campaign to have elevated her stature and centrality in this way,” said Mr. Sonnenfeld, the senior associate dean for executive programs at the management school. “You couldn’t pick a worse, nonimprisoned C.E.O. to be your standardbearer.” But Mr. McCain, as Ms. Fiorina put it,

does “clearly not” share the views of her critics. In the meantime, Ms. Fiorina has done little to tamp down speculation that she might run for office herself, including the California governorship in 2010. “I would be disingenuous if I said it has never occurred to me,” Ms. Fiorina said about running in general. “And in part it occurs to me because people keep asking. When I give speeches, people raise their hand — ‘run, run, run.’ ” For now, she said, “I’m focused on getting McCain elected.”

WLADYSLAW BARTOSZEWSKI

An Eyewitness to History And a Voice for Poland By NICHOLAS KULISH

Nduka Obaigbena, a media mogul, organizes events that celebrate Nigeria. The supermodel Naomi Campbell joined him in London last month. GARETH CATTERMOLE/GETTY IMAGES

NDUKA OBAIGBENA

Using Star Power to Spotlight Nigeria’s Successes By ANGELO RAGAZA

LAGOS, Nigeria — It’s hard to rehabilitate a country — especially Nigeria, which has consistently been rated as one of the most corrupt nations in the world by Transparency InternationalUSA. But Nduka Obaigbena is used to long odds. The Nigerian media mogul has been challenging his country’s often brutal and self-enriching rulers for decades. “Nduka obviously has a remarkable vision, real passion and a special message,” said the supermodel Naomi Campbell, an admirer. “He’s not just a promoter. The more I found out, the more I wanted to be involved.” Every year since 2000, Mr. Obaigbena has honored Nigerians who fight graft or injustice, in particular government officials and corporate executives who exemplify good governance through financial transparency, accountability and respect for the law. But he celebrates them by hosting the likes of Ms. Campbell and John Howard, the former Australian prime minister, at star-filled events, including the ThisDay Awards, named for his media empire and the influential independent newspaper at its center. Since 2006, Mr. Obaigbena has also held a mammoth concert series promoting Nigeria’s economic and political progress, the ThisDay festival, luring pop stars like Beyoncé, Jay-Z, P. Diddy and Shakira. Concerts are being held this year in Abuja, Lagos, Washington, D.C., and London. But can a party save a country? To some observers, the lavishness of Mr. Obaigbena’s events undermines their credibility and their message.

“All this talk about good governance does not go beyond sloganeering,” said Philip Ikita, a Nigerian journalist, sociologist and development worker. “We who have stayed connected with our rural population know that there is no progress for the Nigerian people.” Mr. Obaigbena disagrees. “We have the longest period of democracy in Nigeria, ever,” said the mogul in March, sitting in a suite at the St. Regis hotel in New York. “We have new leadership. We have to sustain that momentum.” Though no one is saying Mr. Obaigbena is responsible for those changes, he

“We have the longest period of democracy in Nigeria, ever. We have new leadership. We have to sustain that momentum.” has become their promoter. And his optimism is not completely unwarranted. To be sure, half of Nigeria’s population lacks access to potable water, and the infant mortality rate is 1 in 10 births. But foreign investment nearly quadrupled from 2000 to 2006, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Because of a financial restructuring and swelling oil prices, Nigeria has almost no foreign debt, almost $50 billion in foreign reserves and a growing trade surplus.

What role Mr. Obaigbena’s ThisDay Award has had in encouraging good governance is impossible to say — it has honored people whose efforts are already well known. Winners have included Bukola Saraki, the governor of Kwara state who invited Zimbabwean farmers persecuted by the regime of President Robert Mugabe to resettle in Nigeria; and Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former finance minister who negotiated $18 billion in debt relief for Nigeria and was named managing director of the World Bank in 2007. Mr. Obaigbena began ThisDay as a weekly, then called ThisWeek, in 1987. During a violent government crackdown on the press in the late 1990s, he was arrested for publishing articles criticizing the military regime of General Sani Abacha. After a brief detention, Mr. Obaigbena went into exile for two years, returning just a month after Mr. Abacha’s death. In December 2006, the editorial board chairman, Godwin Agbroko, a fearless critic of Nigeria’s ruling party, was found in his car after work hours, fatally shot. The next month, ThisDay’s offices suffered another arson attack. “We get threats every day,” Mr. Obaigbena said. “But it doesn’t matter. We’ll keep speaking the truth.” At the next festival, Mr. Obaigbena plans to promote microfinance as the way to empower Nigeria’s 146 million people. As he sees it, if the sleeping giant that is this consumer market, the largest in Africa, were to rouse, “African superpower” would no longer be a contradiction. “It’s a new country emerging,” he said. “And it’s time to showcase it.”

GDANSK, Poland — A bubbly and witty presence, the tall, older gentleman with the cane does not instantly come across as an Auschwitz survivor, or a fighter in the Warsaw Uprising, or a imprisoned dissident under Communism. In fact, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski is all those and more. Yet he is also the type of man who, on a busy day, stops to chat with the hotel maids and is sure to make them laugh before he goes on his way. The world is unlikely to produce many more Wladyslaw Bartoszewskis, and that is probably a good thing, given the events he lived through and witnessed from an early age. But while his life may have been forged through immense suffering, it never managed to define his outlook. “The optimists and the pessimists live identically long, but the optimists are considerably happier,” he said with an amused shrug, when asked about his famous good humor. Mr. Bartoszewski, 86, bears an alltoo-heavy history with a light touch. It is a gift that has allowed him, at an age when most of his generation has long since retired or died, to be a successful diplomat for Poland, as well as a source of moral authority. He has twice served as his country’s foreign minister and is working again as an adviser to Prime Minister Donald Tusk. His special responsibility is for two of Poland’s most complicated relationships, with Germany and Israel. Mr. Bartoszewski describes himself as just a normal man. Many Poles would disagree, speaking of him as a living national treasure. Yet he remains personable and approachable — if not the father of his nation, its wise but funny grandfather. “I’m on the side of the people in the middle rather than the extremists,” he said. “Mankind has suffered enormously due to the ideologically motivated extremists, in Europe and all over the world.” He was, unfortunately, in a good position to make that observation. Born in Warsaw in 1922, he was just 17 when he participated in the unsuccessful defense of his hometown as the Nazis conquered Poland in 1939. A year later, he was among many young Catholic Poles rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. After his release in 1941, he joined the resistance and helped found the Zegota, or Council for Aid to Jews, which gave money, hiding places and false identity papers to Polish Jews trying to flee the Holocaust. Such assistance was punishable by death under the Nazis. In 1965, he was named one of the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memo-

rial and museum. After the war, Poland fell into the Soviet sphere. Mr. Bartoszewski was again thrown behind bars for working to liberate his country and save his Jewish fellow citizens. “By the time I was 32, I had sat for eight years in prisons and camps,” he said. After he was freed in 1954 he became a journalist in Krakow and later a professor at the Catholic University of Lublin. He once again found himself part of an underground movement, a teaching network called the Flying University operating outside the official education system. When Poland’s last Communist leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski,

HARF ZIMMERMANN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Mankind has suffered enormously due to the ideologically motivated extremists, in Europe and all over the world.” declared martial law in December 1981 as part of an effort to suppress the Solidarity movement, Mr. Bartoszewski was imprisoned once more. By the time of the elections in 1989, which were seen as a victory for Solidarity, he was 67. But he was just getting started on his career as a diplomat, first as the ambassador to Austria and later as the foreign minister under two Polish governments. Mr. Bartoszewski says he plans to publish five books, one of which will be 100 short biographies of famous people he has known. He said his many projects give him motivation to keep working as long as he can. “What more could you really ask for?” he said, before heading out to meet with the Polish ambassador to Germany, and later with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

8

LE MONDE

SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2008 ARTS & STYLES

When Advertisers Freely Borrow Images, Artists Turn Vigilant By MIA FINEMAN

In February 2007 the Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay was installing a solo exhibition of his work in Paris when he received an e-mail message from a friend about a commercial for the Apple iPhone that had been broadcast during the Academy Awards show. The 30-second spot featured a rapid montage of clips from television shows and Hollywood films of actors and cartoon characters — including Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart and Dustin Hoffman — picking up the telephone and saying “Hello.” It ended with a shot of the iPhone. Mr. Marclay tracked down the ad on YouTube and watched it. “I was very surprised,” he said recently by phone from London. Like many in the art world he saw an uncanny resemblance between the iPhone commercial and his own 1995 video “Telephones,” which opens with a similar montage of film clips showing actors answering the phone. That seven-and-a-half-minute video, one of Mr. Marclay’s signature works, has been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States. Mr. Marclay said he spoke with a lawyer after learning of the commercial but decided not to pursue legal action. “When people with that much power and money copy you, there’s not much you can do,” he said. Contacted by telephone and e-mail, neither Apple nor its advertising agency,

SPENCER TUNICK

JAN VELICKY

A 2005 photograph by Spencer Tunick, left, and a scene in a 2007 commercial for Vaseline. Mr. Tunick said he saw “a close resemblance” to his work. TBWA/Chiat/Day, would comment on the iPhone ad for this article. Artists have been appropriating images from the advertising world for decades. In the 1960s Andy Warhol made silk-screened copies of Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans. In the 1980s Richard Prince rephotographed magazine ads for Marlboro cigarettes, enlarged the pictures and exhibited them as his own. Works like these are comments on consumer culture that also challenge the idea of originality itself. But what happens when the situation is reversed? Donn Zaretsky, a lawyer in New York who specializes in art law, is often approached by artists who perceive echoes of their own work in advertisements. “It does seem like advertising people are

pushing the envelope on this,” he said. “They’re being more and more brazen in their borrowing.” Recently Mr. Zaretsky was approached by the artist Spencer Tunick, who is known for his photographs of large installations of naked people in public places around the world. Mr. Tunick was concerned about a television commercial for Vaseline shown in Europe and the United States in 2007. The 60-second commercial, called “Sea of Skin,” features large groups of naked men and women posed in artful configurations in various outdoor settings. “There was such a close resemblance to my work that it was uncanny,” Mr. Tunick said in an interview. “When I saw the ad, I thought it was definitely in-

spired by my photographs and videos of installations.” Was it? Not according to Kevin Roddy, the executive creative director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York, who developed the commercial for Vaseline’s parent company, Unilever. “I’m familiar with Spencer’s work,” Mr. Roddy said, “but I can’t say that was an influence at all. Spencer is about masses of people and nudity. We’re about representing the functionality of skin. Sure, it’s hundreds of thousands of bodies, but they’re meant to represent one thing: skin.” Mr. Tunick said he had not decided whether to pursue legal action. In an age when sampling and appropriation have become widespread practices in contemporary art and in the

culture at large, some find it paradoxical that artists are now guarding their own creations more vigilantly. Michael Lobel, a professor of 20th-century art at Purchase College, about 30 kilometers north of Manhattan, said the availability of digital images on the Web had helped foster this defensiveness. “There’s a broader consciousness among artists about owning their work and keeping tight control over its distribution,” he said. Mr. Lobel said that while he sympathizes with artists who believe their work has been copied, they also need to recognize their own reliance on existing images. “Culture is about ongoing borrowing,” he said. “It’s about taking images, ideas and motifs and opening them up to new uses.”

A Director Mixes Cultures To Flavor a Greek Myth ‘‘We wanted the elf prince to use obliquely fairy-tale weapons to fight the humans. And one of the original weapons I thought would be cute was a magic bean. A giant beanstalk would come out . . . an elemental creature that then proceeded to start destroying the neighborhood.’’

‘‘This is Mr. Wink,’’ Guillermo del Toro said. ‘‘The idea of Mr. Wink was to create a reverse creature of Hellboy, with apish features and the sideburns and a big steel hand that he projects with a chain.’’

Killer Beanstalks and Elves From a Director’s Hell The common thread running through the films of Guillermo del Toro, from his 1993 horror feature debut, “Cronos,” to his 2006 Oscar-winning parable, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” is his deep affection for gruesome-looking beasts. “There’s nothing I enjoy more than creating fables about monsters, human or otherwise,” Mr. del Toro said in a recent phone interview from London. His latest movie, “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” gave him plenty of new monsters to play with. In the follow-up to his 2004 comic-book adaptation, he imagines a collision of the natural world and a world of magic hidden in the fring-

es of urban life. “What if tooth fairies were illegally imported in containers to work menial jobs in garbage collection?” Mr. del Toro said. “What would happen if trolls were just bag ladies collecting stray cats for eating?” The result is a tale of good versus evil in which Hellboy, a heroic demon who works for a secret government agency, squares off against a ruthless elf prince determined to destroy humanity. The creatures of “Hellboy II” did not spring fully formed from Mr. del Toro’s head; they began as drawings in his diaries, accompanied by annotations

in Spanish (he was born in Mexico) and English. He has kept similar journals for all his films (except for his forthcoming adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Hobbit,” whose characters are controlled by the author’s estate; for legal purposes he confines those sketches to loose papers or napkins). Someday, Mr. del Toro said, he may publish his artwork, or he may pass it along to his daughters, Mariana, 12, who also appreciates monsters, and Marisa, 6, who prefers Hello Kitty — “which I still think is a hydrocephalic mutant of a cat,” Mr. del Toro said. DAVE ITZKOFF

By SALLY McGRANE with that day. The son of an Italian military offiHOLSTEBRO, Denmark — A hush fell in the room at the experimental cer who died shortly after World War theater and members of an ensemble II, Mr. Barba emigrated to Norway from Bali were sitting on the floor in as a young man. In the early 1960s he sarongs. They were to perform in “The moved to Poland to study theater, beMarriage of Medea,’’ a new production fore returning to Oslo in 1964 to form presented in June by the Odin Teatret his own company, Odin Teatret, which moved to Holstebro two years later. in a town festival. He has directed more than 50 pro“The Jasonite family and friends,’’ said Eugenio Barba, the theater’s ductions for Odin, earning a reputafounder, pausing to indicate fresh-faced tion for an experimental approach to performers in flashy hip-hop-inspired theater. Certainly Mr. Barba had aesoutfits sitting behind him, who were to thetic reasons for creating the Jasonite play the Greek hero Jason’s followers group. He was looking for a culturally and family members, “are very, very and professionally heterogenous Westcurious to know who you are, Medea’s ern counterpart to the highly stylized people. We have the occasion now to Balinese dancers of the Gambuh Desa greet each other in our own theatrical Batuan Ensemble. “I wanted very young, vital power,’’ way. Then we will embrace each other and go back to work. The Jasonites will Mr. Barba said. “Something that could stand facing the exwork very hard; othpressive artistic powerwise my reputation er of the Balinese. Of will be spoiled.’’ course they can’t comEveryone laughed, pete with the Balinese though Mr. Barba, 71, in terms of skill. But I may not have been try to make a perforentirely joking. The mative fresco — this performances that is a contrasting elefollowed — a hip-hopment.’’ flavored song-andThe Jasonites also dance sequence, a developed a number of visiting Polish group’s smaller performances a cappella rendering to present as part of of a Georgian funeral the town festival. song, a Balinese dance “You are always solo, and a love-song thinking,’’ said Anduet in Chinese and drea de San Juan Portuguese between a Hazen, a 23-year-old Nanguan opera singer Spanish actress and and a Brazilian percircus performer who cussionist — were the can ride a 1.8-meter kinds of intercultural unicycle. “Your mind exchange that Mr. is an explosion of creBarba and his group ativity.’’ have been practicing TOMMY BAY The Jasonite group for almost half a cenalso included Álvaro tury. The Jasonites, The Odin Teatret in Rodríguez, 36, whose however, were some- Denmark is presenting theater group in Cothing new. lombia works with This summer Mr. ‘‘The Marriage of massacre victims, Barba, who usually di- Medea’’ with performers and Sabera Shaik, 56, rects only his own ac- from around the world. a director from Kuala tors and master pracLumpur, Malaysia, titioners of disciplines from Japanese Noh to classical Indian who served as the translator when the dance, invited an additional group of 33 Balinese leader became ill. In Mr. Barba’s productions it is not performers from 23 countries to spend four weeks at his theater in this small unusual for actors to speak onstage town. Early each morning, the per- in their native languages, and during formers took part in strenuous physi- rehearsal the language spoken could cal workouts drawn from Japanese and change five times in as many minutes. For Marcelo Miguel, 31, who grew Latin American traditions. They joined Odin actors in vocal up in a Brazilian favela and is now a and physical exercises. They worked theater teacher in Germany, watching with props like sticks and flags. They this led him to rethink his idea that as met with Mr. Barba to develop scenes, a nonnative German speaker, he could songs and dances. They cooked, not perform in German. “My horizons have been extended,’’ cleaned and, after dinner, watched live performances and acting demonstra- he said. “Acting is much larger than tions. Then, around 11 p.m., they began just language. What kind of a boundary rehearsing whatever they had come up is it, language?’’