SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2008

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times

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THE COMMODITIES CRISIS

Pushed to Alternatives C

oal, oil, salt — the rush to meet the world’s growing

the ground. Meanwhile, cooking grease has grown so valu-

demand for commodities has created new realities.

able as an alternative to oil-based fuel that thieves are now

The rising price of oil has made coal an attractive energy

stealing it from waste barrels in the backs of restaurants in

source once again, despite the threat of its contribution to

the United States. And as investment is pouring in, Djibouti

global warming and science’s failure so far to develop the

sees a path to riches paved with the salt deposited in ancient

technology that would pump the polluting carbon back into

lakes.

STUART ISETT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

High Oil Prices Turn Grease Into Gold By SUSAN SAULNY

The bandit pulled his truck to the back of a fast food restaurant in Northern California one afternoon in April armed with a hose and a tank. After rummaging around assorted restaurant rubbish, he dunked a tube into a smelly storage bin and, the police said, vacuumed out about 1,135 liters of grease. The man was caught before he could slip away. In his truck, the police found 9,500 liters of used fryer grease, indicating that the Burger King he was stealing from had not been his first fast-food craving of the day. Outside Seattle, cooking oil theft has become such a problem that the owners of the Olympia Pizza and Pasta Restaurant in Arlington, Washington, are considering using a surveillance camera to keep watch on its 190-liter grease barrel. Nick Damianidis, an owner, said the barrel had been hit seven or eight times since last summer by siphoners who strike in the night. “Fryer grease has become gold,’’ Mr. Dami-

anidis said. “And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away.’’ Much to the surprise of Mr. Damianidis and many other people, processed fryer oil, which is called yellow grease, is actually not trash. The grease is traded on the booming commodities market. Its value has increased in recent months to historic highs, driven by the even higher prices of gas and ethanol, making it an ever more popular form of biodiesel to fuel cars and trucks. In 2000, yellow grease was trading for 15 cents per kilogram. On May 29, its price was about 66 cents a kilogram, or almost 67 cents a liter. (That would make the 9,500 liters haul in the Burger King case worth more than $6,000.) Biodiesel is derived by processing vegetable oil or animal fat with alcohol. It is increasingly available around the United States, but it is expensive. With the right kind of conversion

Continued on Page 4

TIM WIMBORNE/REUTERS

STEPHEN CROWLEY/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Coal, Still Dirty, but Back in Demand By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON — Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, more countries are turning once again to coal-fired plants to supply their energy needs. European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades. Coal plants are fueling economic growth in China and India. The U.S., the world’s largest energy consumer, meets about half of its needs with coal. Japan’s high-cost mines are suddenly competitive again, and demand for their coal is booming. Production has jumped to its highest in nearly four decades. But coal remains one of the dirtiest fuels on earth and a root cause of global warming. For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea to reconcile the growing use of coal with the need to limit global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews

from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground. President Bush is for it, and indeed has spent years talking up the virtues of “clean coal.’’ The candidates to succeed him favor the approach. So do many other members of Congress. Coal companies are for it. Many environmentalists favor it. Utility executives are practically begging for the technology. But it has become clear in recent months that the effort in the United States to develop the technique is lagging badly. In January, the United States government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons. Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington State that would

Continued on Page 4

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For Dessert, Brussels Sprouts: A Tiny Fruit Tricks the Tongue By PATRICK FARRELL and KASSIE BRACKEN

Yuka Yoneda tilted her head back as her boyfriend, Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She swallowed and considered the flavor: “Doughnut glaze, hot doughnut glaze!” Nearby, Carrie Dashow dropped a large dollop of lemon sorbet into a glass of Guinness, stirred, drank and proclaimed that it tasted like a “chocolate shake.” They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in the Queens district of New York. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy. The host was Franz Aliquo, 32, a lawyer who presides over what he calls “flavor tripping parties.” Mr. Aliquo greeted new arrivals and took their $15 entrance fees. In

The miracle fruit makes bitter things like radishes taste sweet, temporarily.

return, he handed each one a Sina Najafi, editor in single berry from his jacket chief of the art magazine pocket. Cabinet, has featured “You pop it in your mouth miracle fruits at some of and scrape the pulp off the the publication’s events. seed, swirl it around and hold it in your mouth for about JOE FORNABAIO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES At a party in London last October, the fruit, he said, a minute,” he said. “Then you’re ready to go.” He ushered his guests “had people testifying like some baptismal to a table piled with citrus wedges, cheeses, thing.” Lance J. Mayhew developed a series of Brussels sprouts, mustard, vinegars, pickdrink recipes with miracle fruit foams and les, dark beers and strawberries. The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcifi- extracts for a recent issue of the cocktail cum, is native to West Africa and has been magazine Imbibe and may create others known to Westerners since the 18th cen- for Beaker & Flask, a restaurant opening tury. The cause of the reaction is a protein later this year in Portland, Oregon. He cautioned that not everyone enjoys called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when the berry’s long-lasting effects. Despite it comes in contact with acids, according to warnings, he said, one woman became a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda irate after drinking one of his cocktails. He Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s said, “She was, like, ‘What did you do to my mouth?’ ” Center for Smell and Taste. OYSTER PERPETUAL YACHT-MASTER II

Warnings From Vienna on a Nuclear Iran

A Traveler’s Worst Enemy

The International Atomic Energy Agency has the credibility to address Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. WORLD TRENDS 3

A cure for jet lag? Viagra worked for hamsters, but it’s uncertain whether it helps people fight fatigue. BUSINESS TRAVEL 5

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2008 O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY

EDITORIALS OF THE TIMES

Cluster Bombs, Made In America On May 30, 111 nations, including major NATO allies, adopted a treaty that sets an eight-year deadline to eliminate stockpiles of cluster arms — pernicious weapons that scatter thousands of small bombs across a wide area, where they pose a long-term deadly threat to innocents. The Bush administration not only failed to sign the treaty but vigorously opposed it. After marching in lockstep for years, even Britain broke with America’s position and agreed to withdraw its weapons from use. That dealt a much-needed blow to Washington’s long-standing opposition to this sort of sensible arms control, and in particular to this treaty-averse administration. The campaign to ban cluster munitions, pressed by human rights activists, never attained quite the high profile of the one to ban land mines, a treaty that Washington also refused to sign. But the two weapons have this in common: Both wreak more damage on civilians than soldiers and present a threat long after war ends. Cluster munitions, fired from aircraft or artillery, spray small “bomblets” over an expanse the size of two or three football fields. Many do not explode on impact but can be easily triggered by unsuspecting civilians. The most appalling of these can look like a desired object — a can of food or a toy. No one has more invested in cluster munitions than the United States, which Human Rights Watch says has been the largest producer, stockpiler and user, using them in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Others that have used them include Britain, France, Sudan, NATO, Israel and Hezbollah. United States officials insist the Pentagon must have such munitions. That is what the Clinton administration said when it opposed the land-mine treaty in 1997. It is a weak argument: cluster bombs are weapons for conventional wars with conventional battlefields. America is less likely to fight big conventional wars than counterinsurgency conflicts in population centers, no place for munitions that kill indiscriminately. As the main holdout, the United States gives cover to countries like Russia and China, which also rejected the ban. The treaty is weaker for it: together, these three nations have more than a billion cluster munitions stockpiled, far more than the number of weapons expected to be destroyed. At least this treaty, like the land-mine ban, will stigmatize cluster munitions and make it harder to use them. Since the landmine treaty entered into force, experts say more than 40 million have been destroyed, trade in land mines has virtually ended, and in 2007 only two countries — Russia and Myanmar — used them. The United States has paid $1.2 billion (more than any other nation) to defuse land mines and clean up war zones. Modern nations need a range of weapons to protect their legitimate interests. Cluster munitions that disproportionately harm civilians are not among them. President Bush must resist the temptation to further sabotage this worthy treaty and let it take effect. It is not clear where the candidates stand on the treaty, but the next president should repudiate Mr. Bush’s opposition and sign it.

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Terrorism and the Olympics K ASHGAR, China The reports of terror plots emanating this year from this Muslim region in the far west of China might seem fanciful: A foiled plot to blow up a plane; a cache of TNT to bomb the Summer Olympics; even a “violent terrorist gang” that planned to kidnap Olympic athletes. But these aren’t whispers on the Internet. They’re reports coming from the Chinese government. So I flew out here to Kashgar — an oasis on the ancient Silk Road, where the minarets and camels and carpets provide a Middle Eastern ambience — to look for terrorists. Instead, China’s State Security Ministry found me. I had been in Kashgar just a few hours when my videographer, who is ethnically Chinese, called to say that two plainclothes officials were interrogating him. They asked him not to tell me since American journalists tend to be touchy about such things. The interrogation was a sign of the authorities’ anxiety about stability in China’s Muslim west. Separatists here in the Xinjiang region aim to create the nation of “East Turkestan” and have periodically blown up police stations — even bombed three public buses in 1997. The Chinese government has claimed that 162 people were killed in such terror attacks by Uighur separatists between 1990 and 2001. Meanwhile,

China uses security concerns to justify a crackdown on Uighurs.

China has sentenced more than 200 people to death since 1997 for engaging in such separatist crimes. Last year, Chinese officials said that 18 people had been killed when police raided a Uighur terrorist training camp with ties to Al Qaeda. The raid netted 1,500 grenades. Then in March, China announced that it had foiled a plot “to create an air crash,” in a passenger plane shortly after it took off from the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi. In April, the authorities said that they had confiscated explosives from Uighurs who were planning suicide bomb attacks. “This violent terrorist gang secretly plotted to kidnap journalists, visitors and athletes during the Beijing Olympics,” The Associated Press quoted Wu Heping, a spokesman for the Public Security Ministry, as saying. Then just last month, a crowded bus blew up in Shanghai, killing three people and injuring many more. No one publicly claimed responsibility, but it recalled the 1997 Uighur bus bomb-

ings. Ronald Noble, the secretary general of Interpol, cited these incidents — and also reports of a separatist plot to disrupt the Olympic Games with poison gas — and told a press conference that a terror attack at the Olympics was “a real possibility.” It’s not entirely clear what to make of all this, for as I strolled around Kashgar I found the situation remarkably calm. I wasn’t expecting to uncover a terrorist cell, but I had anticipated more hostility toward the government. Ordinary Uighurs I spoke with offered measured complaints, but they weren’t seething as Tibetans are. “Nobody likes it when the Chinese all move in here,” said a Uighur shopkeeper. “Of course, we’re all upset. But what can we do?” One young woman offered a different take. “When I was a little kid, my mom would tell me, ‘Don’t wander or the Han Chinese will steal you away. They eat human flesh.’ ” She laughed and added: “But now we see more Han, and we’re not afraid of them. Relations are O.K.” Some young Uighurs criticized the Beijing Olympics, saying the Games will drain local budgets. But I could have found stronger anti-government sedition on any street corner of Manhattan. The only excitement I found in Kashgar was playing tour guide to State Se-

curity officers who followed me whenever I left the hotel. Normally, the Chinese government downplays security risks, but human rights groups argue persuasively that China is using concerns about Uighurs as an excuse to crack down on peaceful Uighur dissidents. After 9/11, China declared its own war on terror in Xinjiang, but Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented that this often has targeted Uighurs who are completely nonviolent. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has largely backed this Chinese version of the war on terror. Indeed, a Department of Justice report last month suggests that American troops softened up Uighur prisoners in Guantánamo Bay on behalf of visiting Chinese interrogators. The American troops starved the Uighurs and prevented them from sleeping, just before inviting in the Chinese interrogators. That was disgraceful; we shouldn’t do China’s dirty work. It was one more example of the Bush administration allowing the war on terror to corrode our moral clarity. We should encourage China to tolerate peaceful protesters even as it prosecutes terrorists. But instead of clarifying that distinction, in recent years we have helped China blur it. The risk of terrorism during the Olympics is real, but that shouldn’t force us to do violence to our principles.

ROGER COHEN

The Obama Connection It’s the networks, stupid. More than any other factor, it has been Barack Obama’s grasp of the central place of Internet-driven social networking that has propelled his campaign for the Democratic nomination into a victory over Hillary Clinton. Her campaign was so 20th-century. His has been of the century we’re in. That’s not surprising. Obama spent only 10 years of his adult life in the split world of the cold war, double that in a post-Berlin Wall world of growing interconnectedness. MAC — mutually assured connectivity — has replaced the MAD — mutually assured destruction — of cold-war days. For Clinton, born in 1947, that ratio is different. Her mental paradigm is division. When her husband last ran for president in 1996, the Internet was marginal. The thinking and people from that campaign proved unable to fast-forward a dozen years. They were left like deer blinded by the Webcam lights of the Obama juggernaut. This cultural failure has been devastating for Clinton. As Joshua Green chronicles in an important piece in The Atlantic, Obama has used social networking and his user-friendly Web site to develop the money machine, and the youthful engagement, that has swept him forward. Green notes, “Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete.” He gives some other Obama campaign numbers: 750,000 active volunteers

and 8,000 affinity groups. In February, a month in which he raised $55 million ($45 million over the Internet), 94 percent of donations were of $200 or less, a number dwarfing small contributions to Clinton and John McCain. Obama has been a classic Internet-start up, a movement spreading with viral intensity and propelled by some of Silicon Valley’s most creative minds. As with any online phenomenon, he has jumped national borders, stirring as much buzz in Berlin as he does back home. He could not have achieved this without a sense of history, a conviction that the nature of the post-post9/11 world — the one beyond war without end — is going to be determined by sociability and connectivity. In the globalized world of MySpace, LinkedIn and the rest, sociability is a force as strong as sovereignty. I’ve searched in vain for a sense of this pivotal historical moment in Clinton. Her threat to “totally obliterate” Iran, her stomach-turning reference to the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy as a reason to stay in the race, her Bosnian fabrications, all reflect a view of history as something that’s there for political ends rather than as a source of inspiration or reflection. It’s history as “Me, me, me.” That tends to be blinding. Her most crippling blindness has been to networks, national and glob-

: AIDE A LA LECTURE

LEXIQUE

Dans l’article “For Savvy Users, Social Sites Are a Platform to Job Hunt,” page 7: SAVVY: avisé PROCRASTINATOR: qui remet au lendemain TO BE TAKEN ABACK: être interloqué Dans l’article “A Long List to Humble the Literate,” page 8: MANDATORY: obligatoire COMPELLING: irrésistible TO BULLY: brutaliser

In 21st-century politics, an understanding of the Web is essential. our politics remains inescapably national, centered in the nation states that are the only loci of sovereign decision making.” The Bush administration has accentuated global awareness of this disjuncture. Connected people around the world were appalled by Bush policies — from the trashing of habeas corpus to renditions — but felt powerless to influence them. The overwhelming global interest in the current United States election is tied in part to a spreading belief that America’s leader may be as important to French lives, for example, as the in-

RÉFÉRENCES

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 “A Chance at Healing the Psyche,” page 6: HALLMARK: marquee distinctive FAD: mode éphémère TO RELIEVE: soulager TO SOOTHE: calmer

al, the threads that bind and have changed society. As David Singh Grewal writes in his excellent new book, “Network Power,” a core tension in the world is that: “Everything is being globalized except politics.” Grewal continues: “We live in a world in which our relations of sociability — our commerce, culture, ideas, manners — are increasingly shared, coordinated by newly global conversations in these domains, but in which

Dans l’article “When Beauty and Brutality Collide for a Macabre Master,” page 8: TO STAB: poignarder TO THROTTLE: étrangler CAMEO: petit role, joué par une vedette TO WREAK HAVOC: causer des ravages

EXPRESSIONS Dans l’article “Seeking a Stimulating Space to Energize a Meeting,” page 5: GENERATION X: terme qui désigne la génération née entre les années 60 et 80; on les a aussi appelés les “baby-busters”, par allusion et opposition aux “baby-boomers” à qui ils succèdent; c’est une génération perçue comme désabusée, et cynique. On parle à présent de “Generation Y” pour désigner ceux qui ont eu vingt ans en l’an 2000.

Dans l’article “Questions on Placebo Pills,” page 6: GALVESTON: petite ville texane de 55,000 habitants, sur le Golfe du Mexique, à proximité de Houston, Galveston est une ville historique importante: elle est en partie située sur une île reliée au continent par un pont à péage. L’île a d’abord été occupée par deux tribus indiennes, puis l’explorateur Cabeza de Vaca (tête de vache) en partit en 1528 pour sa fameuse expédition Jusqu’à Mexico (il perdit presque tous ses hommes mais devint l’ami des indigènes). A la fin du 17ème siècle, Cavelier de la Salle en fait une possession française qu’il nomme Fort Saint Louis, mais le lieu n’est habité de façon définitive qu’au début du 19ème siècle d’abord par des pirates français, alors que le Texas était province espagnole, puis mexicaine. En 1836, Galveston devient la capitale de la République du Texas, avant que celui-ci ne rejoigne l’Union. Pendant la Guerre de Sécession, la bataille de Galveston fut une importante victoire sudiste. Le port était un des plus grands des Etats Unis

cumbent in the Élysée Palace. Obama’s people get that. Connectivity means going it alone is a fool’s errand: that’s a basic lesson of Iraq. If Obama has promised to appoint a chief technology officer, to open up government via the Web, and to make dialogue rather than war a centerpiece of policy, it’s because he knows he must speak to a 21st-century world. Grewal writes: “Politics is the only effective countervailing power that we have with which to refashion the structures that emerge through sociability.” Accumulated personal choices expressed through networks fashion sociability. Short of global governance, only sovereignty can channel that will. In concrete terms, you won’t make globalization more equable in its distribution of income without politics. But first you must see sociability for what it is: a form of 21st-century personal sovereignty that rivals national sovereignty. Clinton never saw this. McCain, whose Internet fund-raising has been negligible, also shows little grasp of MAC. Of course, connection is no panacea, or guarantee against violent threats: Al Qaeda uses the Web effectively. But without understanding connectivity, you can no more beat terrorism than win an election. It’s the networks, stupid, and the generations that go with them.

(transport du coton), mais le déclin vint après un ouragan effroyable, en 1900, considéré, malgré Katrina, comme le plus dévastateur de l’histoire des Etats Unis: la ville fut anéantie et il y eut entre 6,000 et 8,000 morts. La ville de Houston s’est développée et aujourd’hui Galveston est surtout devenue une destination touristique, avec son immense plage et ses bateaux de croisière. Dans l’article “A Long List to Humble the Literate,” page 8: DON DE LILLO: né en 1936, il est considéré par certains comme un romancier postmoderne majeur. Connu surtout pour les romans “White Noise” ( Bruits de Fond, 1985) et “Underworld” (Outremonde, 1997), qui furent de vrais bestsellers. Les thèmes qu’il explore sont ceux du consumérisme, de la déshumanisation de la société, de la saturation par les médias, de certains aspects positifs de la violence, du renoncement de l’individu. Des auteurs comme Bret Easton Ellis considèrent qu’il les a fortement influencés, et pour Martin Amis, il est un des quatre auteurs américains contemporains les plus importants.

SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2008

LE MONDE

3

WORLD TRENDS NEWS ANALYSIS

Baghdad’s Jews Have Dwindled To a Fearful Few

ROBERT NICKELSBERG/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By STEPHEN FARRELL

BAGHDAD — “I have no future here to stay.’’ Written in broken English but with perfect clarity, the message is a stark and plaintive assessment from one of the last Jews of Babylon. The community of Jews in Baghdad is now all but vanished in a land where their heritage recedes back to Abraham of Ur, to Jonah’s prophesying to Nineveh, and to Nebuchadnezzar’s sending Jews into exile here more than 2,500 years ago. Just over half a century ago, Iraq’s Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community’s heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric. Among those who remain is a former car salesman who describes himself as the “rabbi, slaughterer and one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Iraq.’’ Although many of his Muslim friends and immediate neighbors know he is Jewish, he was wary of being named because it could draw more dangerous attention to him or his friends. To protect him, he is referred to as Saleh’s grandson, because his or his father’s name would be too easily recognizable here. He lamented that Jews in Baghdad had had no meeting place since the Meir Tweig synagogue, the last in the city, was closed in 2003, after it became too dangerous to gather openly. “I do my prayer in my house because we closed the synagogue from the war until now. If we open it, it will be a target,’’ he wrote, adding later: “I have no future here, I can’t marry, there is no girl. I can’t put my kova on my head out of the house. If I’m out of Iraq, I’ll share

Jews were once a wealthy part of Iraqi society. The tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel, top, was a pilgrimage site for Jews. with people in all our feasts and do my prayer in the synagogue and will be with my family.’’ Now in his early 40s, he exists as anonymously and discreetly as he can. He cannot reliably hide his religion: it is stamped on his official identity card, which he must present at any security checkpoint. So he stays mainly in his own neighborhood, protected by Muslim neighbors who have been family friends for decades. His fears are all too real in a city where bodies are still found dumped in the street almost daily, despite a fall in the overall death toll. Christians, a far larger group, have fled Iraq by the thousands, and even Sunni and Shiite Muslims, who live among millions of their fellows, remain fearful of religious and sectarian fanatics. Jews were once a wealthy and politi-

cally active part of the spectrum of Iraq. In a volume of the Iraq Directory of 1936, the “Israelite community,’’ then numbering about 120,000, is listed along with Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and Sabeans. However, the directory predates decades of trauma: the 1941 Farhud pogrom in which more than 130 Jews were killed during the Feast of Shavuot, World War II, the Holocaust, the anti-Zionism of Saddam Hussein and the post-2003 rise of Islamic militants. Among these fragments of their civilization live the moribund huddle of holdouts. Saleh’s grandson is now alone. His mother died two decades ago, his older brother left in 1991, and his father, now 87, was among the last handful of Jews taken from Iraq by the Jewish Agency after 2003, reducing the current community to single figures. The agency has offered to relocate the entire group of Jews left in Iraq. Some of the remaining handful are middle class, including two doctors. Others, including Saleh’s grandson, are poor and unemployed, dependent on handouts. Some Jews say they are too old to leave. Some do not want to leave their friends behind. The few remaining Jews ignore the entreaties of worried relatives and friends abroad and await an unlikely renaissance, demographic extinction or a more sudden end. The holdout’s father says that he regrets leaving Iraq, the country of his birth, five years ago, but that he would not return in the current dangerous climate. “Why did we have to leave?’’ he said, sighing. “In Iraq I was always with my friends. Everyone was very, very, very, very nice. I had Muslim friends for 50 to 60 years. They were friends, like family. I used to spend more time with Arabs than Jews.’’ His son says he knows the risks. “I’d like to leave, but I have my house, I can’t leave it,’’ he wrote. “I have no future here to stay.’’

U.N.’s New Urgency On a Nuclear Iran By WILLIAM J. BROAD

In the history of role reversal, the switch by the United Nations’ atomic detectives in Vienna and the American intelligence community has been striking. Having long taken a secondary role to the Bush administration in publicly challenging Iran’s nuclear program, the global inspectors recently seized control of the situation, demanding that Tehran acknowledge any progress it has made toward building a bomb. What’s going on? Quite simply, the Americans have stepped back from the confrontation with Iran. After challenging Iran’s atomic efforts with diplomatic crusades and shows of military force, the Americans backed off late last year, based on a new intelligence finding that Tehran had suspended work in late 2003 on the design of nuclear arms. With President Bush’s second term expiring at the end of the year, it would be difficult for them to try to press for a new confrontation. But early this year, Washington also turned over a trove of its own intelligence to the atomic investigators in Vienna, who put it together with clues gathered from many foreign capitals and findings from their own long years of inquiries. Over the last few months, the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency have come to worry that Iran, before suspending its work nearly five years ago, may have made real progress toward designing a deadly weapon. The issue crystallized publicly when the inspectors recently issued an uncharacteristically blunt demand for more information from Tehran and, even more uncharacteristically, disclosed the existence of 18 secretly obtained documents that suggest Tehran had high interest in designing a nuclear weapon before the program was suspended. The presentation posed a central question and gave it urgency: Just how far did Tehran get toward designing a bomb before the program was halted? That question could transform the debate over what to do about Iran, particularly because it is being posed now by an international agency that retains high credibility overseas, something the Bush administration lost long ago. In their recent report, the Viennabased investigators called the evidence of the early warhead work “a matter of serious concern,” and said that uncovering the real story “is critical to an assessment of the nature of Iran’s past and present nuclear program.” As they have for years, the Iranians repeated their assertion that there was no such armaments program — that their nuclear program is intended solely for peaceful purposes like generating electricity. But the inspectors showed their impatience with such responses, and with the lack of cooperation from Iran in general, by discussing the 18 suspicious docu-

By VICTORIA BURNETT

A gastronomic clash pits high-tech ingredients vs. the Mediterranean diet.

them of producing pretentious food they would not eat themselves — and potentially poisoning diners with chemicals that he says have no place in the kitchen. “Some chefs are offering a media spectacle rather than concerning themselves with healthy eating,’’ Mr. Santamaría said as he accepted a recent prize for his new book, “La Cocina al Desundo’’ (“The Kitchen Laid Bare’’). In it, the burly, outspoken chef, who trumpets his own dedication to natural ingredients, assails the proliferation of junk food culture. “We have to decide, as chefs, if we want to continue to use the fresh products of our Mediterranean diet or opt for using

additives,’’ he told journalists in Madrid recently, when he repeated a call for the Spanish authorities to investigate restaurants’ use of, for example, liquid nitrogen, for instant freezing, and methyl cellulose, a gelling agent. Mr. Santamaría singled out Ferran Adrià, godfather of the Spanish (and global) avant-garde movement and the country’s most celebrated chef. Despite his “enormous respect’’ for Mr. Adrià, he said he felt “a huge divorce, both ethical and conceptual, with Ferran.’’ Mr. Adrià and other chefs argued back that many of the products they use are natural and those that are not, are harmless. A spokesman for the Spanish Food Safety Agency said all additives used in Spanish restaurants complied with European Union standards. Methyl cellulose, used by Mr. Adrià to create magenta films of “hibiscus paper’’ is not dangerous, he said. He also noted that liquid nitrogen was not ingested. “This has been a terrible couple of weeks for us chefs,’’ Mr. Adrià said by

Atomic inspectors take the lead as the Bush era nears an end. national Security, a private group in Washington that tracks the spread of nuclear weapons, said its analysis of the new inspectors’ report showed that the Iranians are steadily overcoming problems and enriching uranium fuel at faster rates. American intelligence agencies say the earliest Iran could have enough fuel for a nuclear warhead is 2009, but 2010 to 2015 is a more likely time frame. Any estimate in that range could put the potential for a crisis squarely on the agenda of the next American president. Senior officials who oversaw preparation of the American intelligence report say Iran’s weapon-design work, with the right fuel, might have progressed enough by 2003 to make a bomb comparable to the 4.5-metricton weapon dropped on Hiroshima. But that does not mean they have a workable design for the most frightening kind of bomb — one miniaturized to about one metric ton so it can sit atop a missile, which is much faster and harder to stop than any plane. Such a weapon, say military strategists, can change a region’s balance of power without ever being fired. Officials in Vienna say it could take months to come to definitive conclusions about the true nature of the Iranian program. In the meantime, the Institute for Science and International Security has concluded that Iran will find it hard to deny that it sought the secret of making nuclear arms. “These documents,” the institute concluded, “make a powerful case.” The question remains, though: How far did Iran get?

Ferran Adrià, godfather of the avant-garde movement, has been criticized for producing pretentious food.

Chefs Squabble as Spain Gains Culinary Clout MADRID — With inventions like parmesan snow, chilled sauces that “boil’’ with dry ice and green olives made of “spherified’’ juice, Spain’s avant-garde chefs have created an international buzz for a national cuisine long considered second-rate. But dozens of restaurants around the country now rate a star from the revered Michelin guide. (Six currently hold its top honor: three stars.) Some food critics believe Spanish chefs have replaced their French counterparts at the vanguard of culinary innovation. Such acclaim is another cause for celebration in a country that has gained a reputation as a center of fine wine and cutting-edge architecture as well as food. But after several years in the spotlight, Spain’s usually collegial top chefs have done the unthinkable, or perhaps the inevitable. They have turned on each other. Santi Santamaría, one of the country’s most prominent chefs, has attacked his avant-garde counterparts, accusing

ments. They also revealed that an Iranian scientist once displayed photos of the world’s first nuclear blast, in 1945, alongside equations for calculating its destructive power. Why the emphasis now on sins Iran may have committed in the past? Wasn’t the finding that warhead design stopped in 2003 reassuring enough? No, say nuclear experts inside and outside the international agency. Candor about Iran’s progress in designing a weapon matters because Tehran’s scientists continue to move forward on learning how to make uranium fuel. And if they already have a good warhead design, the lack of fuel may be the one thing standing between them and the ability to make a bomb. “Fuel is usually the limiting factor,” said Robert S. Norris, author of “Racing for the Bomb,” a history of the Manhattan Project. “The other stuff is relatively easy.” The Institute for Science and Inter-

PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

telephone recently from France. His restaurant, el Bulli, in northeastern Spain has three Michelin stars. “Everything that Santi has said about our ingredients is untrue, but it is damaging.’’ In a recent telephone interview, Mr. Santamaría said that he felt dutybound to raise public awareness of techniques and ingredients that had catapulted Spanish cuisine to fame but were at odds, in his view, with Spanish traditions and a dedication to local and organic produce. “How can we, the defenders of nat-

ural, local products, include unnatural products in our cooking?’’ said Mr. Santamaría. Andoni Aduriz, a protégé of Mr. Adrià, said Mr. Santamaría was simply trying to scare people. “Santi is the Hugo Chávez of gastronomy,’’ Mr. Aduriz said. “He loves to spark controversy with his populist talk.’’ Mr. Aduriz, who forages in the countryside for nettles and unusual herbs, said he saw no conflict between a respect for natural produce and high-tech kitchen methods. “It’s a false debate,’’ he said. Still, Mr. Santamaría’s claims resonate for some. In a letter to the Spanish newspaper El País, one reader, Jorge Gutiérrez Berlinches, said Mr. Santamaría represented ’’all of us who like pasta with tomato, a nice plate of potatoes, a fried egg and blood sausage.’’ “We need to return to simple things, what’s natural and what tastes good and what is affordable,’’ he wrote.

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SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2008 WORLD TRENDS

Balancing Demand for Coal With Its Polluting Emissions bility of a profitable new business, and G.E. signed a partnership recently with Schlumberger, the oil field services company, to advance the technology of carbon capture and sequestration. But only a handful of small projects survive, and the recent cancellations mean that most of this work has stopped, raising doubts that the technique can be ready any time in the next few decades. And without it, “we’re not going to have much of a chance for stabilizing the climate,’’ said John Thompson, who oversees work on the issue for the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group. The fear is that utilities, lacking proven chemical techniques for capturing carbon dioxide and proven methods for storing it underground by the billions of tons per year, will build the next generation of coal plants using existing technology. That would ensure that vast amounts of global warming gases would be pumped into the atmosphere for decades. But the situation is not hopeless. In Wisconsin, engineers are testing a method that may allow them to bolt machinery for capturing carbon dioxide onto the back of old-style power plants; Sweden, Australia and Denmark are planning similar tests. And German engineers are exploring another approach, one that involves burning coal in pure oxygen, which would produce a clean stream of exhaust gases that could be injected into the ground. But no project is very far along, and it remains an open question whether techniques for capturing and storing carbon dioxide will be available by the time they are critically needed. The Electric Power Research Institute, a utility consortium, estimated that it would take as long as 15 years to go from starting a pilot plant to proving the technology will work. The institute has set a goal of having largescale tests completed by 2020. “A year ago, that was an aggressive target,’’ said Steven R. Specker, the president of the institute. “A year has gone by, and now it’s a very aggressive target.’’

From Page 1

JEHAD NGA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Djibouti is hoping to become an African trade center. Workers prepared to dig in salt beds of an ancient lake.

Tiny State Sees Big Riches in Plentiful Salt By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

DJIBOUTI — For centuries, nomads have dropped down from the rocky hills around here to carve bricks of salt from an ancient lake and haul them away on the backs of camels. But a new salt miner is giving it a try, and he may be a harbinger of what’s happening here. “As a salt person, my first impression was why was all this salt just sitting here,’’ said Daniel R. Sutton, an American salt miner who is overseeing a new $70 million operation to industrialize the collection of Djibouti’s plentiful salt. “There’s 50 square miles of salt. It runs 20 to 30 feet deep. This could be huge.’’ Djibouti is becoming the little country of big dreams. Hundreds of millions of dollars of overseas investment is pouring in, promising to turn this sleepy, sweltering mini-state, which right now does not even have a stoplight, into something of an African trade center. There are gold miners from India, geothermal experts from Iceland, Turkish hotel managers, Saudi oil engineers, French bankers and American military contractors. Tycoons from Dubai are pumping in a billion dollars just on their own, largely for the country’s port, a gateway to the region. There is even a project on paper to build a multibilliondollar, 29-kilometer bridge across the Red Sea, captained by Tarek bin Laden, the half brother of Osama bin Laden. Djibouti does not have many people — about 500,000 — and few outsiders have heard of it. Its soil is mostly sand, it is unearthly hot — often more than 38 degrees Celsius — and just about everything, from bottled water to rice to gasoline, is imported. But if there was ever an example of location, location, location, it is here. Djibouti sits at the mouth of the Red Sea, where Africa and Asia nearly touch. It overlooks some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, especially for oil heading from the Persian Gulf to Europe and the United States. And because of its strategic position, both France and the United States have military bases here. Shipping is already big business in this country — and it’s getting even bigger, with investors from Dubai hop-

Mediterranean Sea

LIBYA

EGYPT

SAUDI ARABIA ERITREA

CHAD SUDAN

YEMEN

DJIBOUTI Indian ETHIOPIA Ocean

Red Sea

YEMEN

ERITREA ETHIOPIA

Bab al Mandab Strait

DJIBOUTI

Gulf of Aden

Djibouti Dikhil

Kms.

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SOMALIA THE NEW YORK TIMES

Djibouti sits along some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. ing to expand the Port of Djibouti to 3 million containers a year from its current capacity of 300,000. Dubai World, a large holding company, has also bought a controlling share in a local airline and built an industrial park, new roads and a $200 million, five-star hotel, with gurgling fountains and possibly the greenest lawn in the Horn of Africa. “Djibouti is perfectly positioned to become a services and logistics hub,’’ explained Jerome Martins Oliveira, the chief executive officer of the port, which is operated by a subsidiary of Dubai World. He said Djibouti could become the central link between the raw materials of Africa and the oil wealth of Arabia, with Dubai as its main partner. Dubai is actually the country’s model for development, said Djibouti’s foreign minister, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf. “We’re a small country with a big port,’’

he said “And we’re even better located than Dubai.’’ Clearly, little Djibouti has a long way to go. While Dubai, one of the seven United Arab Emirates and a very rich city-state, is building the world’s tallest building, the highest building here is six stories. Djibouti is ranked 149 out of 177 on the United Nations human development index, which measures life span, education and income. But Djibouti’s smallness — it basically has one city, known as Djibouti town — is a virtue, business people say. “If you need something, the government responds very fast,’’ said Nikhil Bhuta, the chief financial officer for the JB Group, an Indian mining company. Mr. Bhuta said he had set up mines across Africa but never had he experienced such generous terms of business, like the deal he struck with the Djiboutian government to split gold profits 80 percent for his company, 20 percent for the government. “In Africa, you never even get 50 percent,’’ he said. Local customs can be a bit hard to comprehend. The population is predominantly Muslim, divided between Somalis and Afars, a nomadic group that plies the desert and sticks to its traditions. And there’s a very visible cloud on the horizon: Eritrea. Djibouti’s prickly neighbor recently moved more than 1,000 soldiers into a disputed border zone, and Djiboutian officials fear war may break out at any moment. The troops are heavily armed and literally centimeters apart. But other selling points are a stable currency that is pegged to the American dollar, excellent French food and the fact that Djibouti is an outpost of relative stability in the Horn of Africa, a region constantly plagued by war, famine and drought. “If you want to participate in the development of this region, Djibouti is the only place to be,’’ said Ould Amar Yahya, the director of a commercial bank that opened a branch in Djibouti a year ago. “Ethiopia has too many regulations. Sudan has the embargo. Eritrea has serious problems, and Somalia is too violent.’’

have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been canceled or thrown into regulatory limbo. Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring that it will continue to be used. But the failure to start building and perfecting carbon capture and storage means that developing the technology may come too late to make coal compatible with limiting global warming. “It’s a total mess,’’ said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. “Coal’s had a tough year,’’ said John Lavelle, head of a business at General Electric that makes equipment for processing coal into a form from which carbon can be captured. Many of these projects were derailed by the short-term pressure of rising construction costs. But scientists say the result, unless the situation can be turned around, will be a long-term disaster. Plans to combat global warming generally assume that continued use of coal for power plants is unavoidable for at least several decades. Therefore, starting as early as 2020, forecasters assume that carbon dioxide emitted by new power plants will have to be captured and stored underground, to cut down on the amount of global-warming gases in the atmosphere. Yet, simple as the idea may sound, considerable research is still needed to be certain the technique would be safe, effective and affordable. Scientists need to figure out which kinds of rock and soil formations are best at holding carbon dioxide. They need to be sure the gas will not bubble back to the surface. They need to find optimal designs for new power plants so as to cut costs. And some complex legal questions need to be resolved, such as who would be liable if such a project polluted the groundwater or caused other damage. Major corporations sense the possi-

Turning Coal Into a Gas In January, the U.S. government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant in Illinois to generate electricity from “clean” coal while the carbon emissions were stored underground. Here’s how the plant would have worked: 1 Powdered coal is

cooked into a gas of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is mixed with water to produce additional hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide

2 Other pollutants are filtered out once the gas cools: sulfur is removed in a form that can be sold.

kit (easily found on the Internet) anyone can turn discarded cooking oil into a usable engine fuel that can burn on its own, or as a cheap additive to regular diesel. “The last time kids broke in here they went for the alcohol,’’ said Mr. Damianidis, who fries chicken wings and cheese sticks. “Obviously they’re stealing oil because it’s worth something.’’ While there have been reports of thefts in multiple states, law enforcement officials do not compile national statistics and it remains unclear whether this is part of a passing trend or something more serious. The suspects in a growing number of grease infractions fall into a range of

categories, people interviewed on the matter said, as grease theft is a crime of opportunity. They include do-it-yourself environmentalists worried about their carbon footprints, warring waste management firms trying to beat each other on the sly, and petty thieves who are profiting from the oil’s rising value on the black market. “It’s a new oddity,’’ said Officer Seth Hanson of the Federal Way Police Department, near Tacoma, Washington. He said thefts occur outside at least a couple of restaurants there each week. “We’re trying to get an eyeball on how well-organized it is, if at all. To date, we haven’t been very successful in finding anybody.’’ Thefts have been reported in at least

Cooking oil goes out of the frying pan, and onto the spot market.

20 states, said Christopher A. Griffin, whose family owns Griffin Industries, one of the largest grease collection and rendering companies in America. The problem has gotten so bad, Mr. Griffin has hired two detectives to investigate thefts around the country. “Theft is theft,’’ said Mr. Griffin, who is based in Cold Spring, Kentucky. “I don’t

a turbine, producing electricity. Excess heat makes steam that runs another turbine for more electricity. Hydrogen can also generate electicity through a fuel cell. GAS TURBINE

FUEL CELL

PLANT

Hydrogen COAL BED INJECTION WELL

CAP ROCK SALINE RESERVOIR

4 Carbon dioxide is compressed into a dense, liquid-like state and

stored, more than a mile below the ground, into deep soil layers that have chemical ability to absorb the gas. Monitoring devices determine whether any was escaping back to the atmosphere. Source: The FutureGen Alliance

As Oil Prices Soar, Restaurants Learn to Lock Up Old Grease From Page 1

3 Hydrogen burns in

care if you’re stealing grease or if you’re stealing diamonds.’’ Fryer oil from a restaurant that does a high volume of frying one kind of food — for example, a fried-chicken chain — is at a premium because of its relative purity. The large-scale producers of grease, restaurants mostly, own their old oil and in recent months have even made a small profit by selling it to collectors. Because of the grease’s rancid odor, most restaurants usually store it out back with the trash. “Once you put something in the trash, it’s abandoned property,’’ said Jon A. Jaworski, a lawyer in Houston who represents accused grease thieves. “A lot of times, it’s not theft.’’ Even so, most restaurant owners and

THE NEW YORK TIMES

grease collectors say that grease is not free for the taking. “There’s a new fight for the product, definitely a whole new demand sector,’’ said Bill Smith, a market reporter for Urner Barry’s Yellow Sheet, an industry newsletter that tracks yellow grease. A typical fast-food restaurant produces 68 to 114 kilograms of grease a week. Many do not even know when a theft occurs because it usually happens overnight. At Olympia Pizza and Pasta, Mr. Damianidis, who now sells his grease for a small monthly fee, finds the problem of stolen fryer oil quite annoying and distracting. And he wants to stop the thefts. He is leaning toward a security camera and hoping for the best. “I cook food,’’ Mr. Damianidis said. “I’m not going to stay up until 2 in the morning trying to catch someone stealing a barrel of grease.’’

SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2008

LE MONDE

5

B U S I N E S S T R AV E L

A Cure-All For Jet Lag? Try Caffeine And a Nap By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Last June, researchers in Argentina identified a promising potential treatment for jet lag: sildenafil. You might know the drug by its more common brand name, Viagra. The study, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that our circadian rhythms, the body’s inner clock, could be shifted with the drug. The press was excited about this, but the news is not as clear as the reports might make it seem. The single study only showed effectiveness of sildenafil in hamsters. Will the results be borne out in further studies? Will the drug have the same sleep-shifting effect on humans? Nobody knows. That’s why Mark R. Rosekind, a founder of Alertness Solutions, a consulting firm in Cupertino, California, that helps businesses deal with issues like shift-work alertness and jet lag, said he was cautious whenever he heard of a purported miracle cure. He wants to see solid scientific evidence to support any product’s promise of being good for what ails travelers. What ails travelers is that groggy feeling, along with the edginess and distorted sleep patterns that can make longdistance travel a misery. Dr. Rosekind said data from his own research showed that “when you disrupt sleep or the clock, you’re looking at a 20 to 50 percent reduction in performance” in activities requiring attention and vigilance. Experts like Dr. Rosekind and Dr. Martin Moore-Ede, the chairman of Circadian, a sleep-consulting company near Boston, say a great deal is now known about the body’s rhythms and how to shift them. But making the cycles

ANGEL FRANCO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Travelers can combat jet lag by taking steps to reset their bodies’ inner clocks, sleep experts say. shift is tricky, and it’s just as easy to get it wrong as it is to get it right. Experts recommend trying to adjust to a new time zone in small ways. Catching sunlight once you arrive in another time zone can help reset the body’s clock, Dr. Moore-Ede said. Dr. Rosekind underscored the need to get as much sleep as you can before and during travel. Some travelers swear by drugs like Provigil, a prescription medicine for narcolepsy that helps to hold off sleep. Dr. Moore-Ede warned that the use of such powerful medications had not yet been proved effective for sleep cycle adjustment. Similarly, no research has yet proven that melatonin, a popular aid to resetting the clock, is effective for most people. In fact, experts said, for most trips it might be best to make the most of the alertness you can muster when you need it. That comes down to “naps and caffeine,” Dr. Rosekind said. Studies of pilots showed that a 26minute nap in flight — while a co-pilot took the controls, of course — increased performance by 34 percent and overall alertness by 54 percent. Using caffeine in conjunction with naps during a trip is a winning strategy, Dr. Rosekind said. Caffeine takes 15 to 30 minutes to work, and an effective nap should be less than 45 minutes, to avoid the kind of deep sleep that leaves people groggy. So a cup of coffee just before a nap can ensure that you awaken with a little extra zip. The caffeine and nap together “can actually show a performance boost greater than either one alone,” he said. “It’s not rocket science.”

BARBARA P. FERNANDEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Businesses are seeking more intimate meeting places. The Setai in South Beach, Florida, offers spaces on the roof, in a lounge or at poolside.

Seeking a Stimulating Space to Energize a Meeting By PAUL BURNHAM FINNEY

Small corporate meetings have a virtue — they’re small. That means they usually cost less than big meetings. They can be held at smaller hotels. Their agenda can be better attuned to the particular needs and interests of participants. And they are all the more valuable in a tough business climate. At many companies, some 70 percent of meetings consist of 50 or fewer participants. And their popularity is growing in the United States, according to Bjorn Hanson, a hotel expert at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Along with the trend toward smaller gatherings, the style of the typical meeting is changing, too, with the avowed goal of keeping the participants from getting drowsy. “Companies now want a meeting to be a creative experience,” said Christine Duffy, president of Maritz Travel, which manages an estimated 600 small corporate meetings and events annually. Instead of booking partitioned hotel meeting rooms known for their blandness, companies are turning to chic boutique hotels like the Setai in South Beach, Florida, where the setting for a two-day gathering may be a lounge, library, rooftop or pool. Some companies book teepees at Canadian resorts just to be different. “They want unique meeting spaces

that aren’t boring,” said Michael Shepard of Design Hotels, whose properties range from converted architectural antiques to the stylish Chambers hotel in New York. Mr. Hanson said the types and locations of meetings have changed, in part, to respond to the interests of a younger generation. “The 60 million Gen Xs have changed the whole meeting demographic,” he said, referring to members of what

For smaller groups, boutique hotels offer a unique venue. is called Generation X. “Meetings today aren’t arranged to please aging boomers who like etchings of hunting scenes on hotel walls. The Gen Xs like an aura of casualness. And if a corporate meeting doesn’t look interesting — and they have a choice — they’ll bow out.” Some meetings have moved from chain hotels to boutiques because of the price escalation at big city hotels like in New York, according to Christina Wilkes, a specialist in business travel at American Express. Boutique hotels

can reduce some of the costs of the huge meetings in Chicago, Las Vegas and Orlando, Florida. But the big hotel chains have also been part of the trend. Bob Brooks, a Hilton vice president, said, “There’s big demand for small meetings.” Basic meeting prices range from $4,000 to more than $50,000 at Hilton properties, which include Conrad, Doubletree, Embassy Suites and Hampton Hotels. “We’ve moved from managing 800 meetings in 2006, our first year with online service, to 5,500 meetings in 2007 and an anticipated 20,000 this year,” Mr. Brooks said. Some 20 percent are corporate with the rest devoted to leisure travel and weddings. “Companies are after cost savings — doing more with less,” Mr. Brooks said. “Localize your meetings and cut travel costs. Instead of holding a national meeting, a company will stage, say, four nearly identical meetings around the country to introduce a new product or explain a new business plan.” Elite Meetings International, with headquarters in Santa Barbara, California, helps simplify and speed meeting arrangements. Its chief executive and founder, Kelly Foy, said his company sorts out the great, good and less-good meeting sites. “You don’t have to go to 40 Web sites

to get to what you want,” he said. Some of the traditional spontaneity and informality of small meetings remains. But there are executives who want to talk things over in privacy who meet in places like the Setai. The Indonesian-style oceanfront hotel is the site of some 36 small meetings of fewer than 30 participants each year. “The other hotels in South Beach have a party atmosphere,” the sales director, Jorge Collazo, said, describing his pitch to the financial groups (“especially hedge funds”) that dominate the Setai’s clientele. “The automotive people do a lot of incentive business here, too. Instead of one large meeting of 100 or so attendees, they find they have a better experience when they break it up into 25-guest groups.” The bill at the end can be sobering: $60,000 to $75,000 for 25 rooms for two nights with breakfast, lunch and one dinner included. “Not cheap,” Mr. Collazo said, “but you can make the get-together more interactive when the meeting is small.” Ms. Duffy of Maritz Travel said that “there are wonderful properties in Canada you can get to by helicopter.” But she added: “At the end of the day, it’s the practicality of conducting business that matters. The participants won’t be happy if they’re meeting at a location where their BlackBerrys don’t work.”

On a Private Business Jet, Sailing Past the Sound Barrier By JOE SHARKEY

As sales of business jets boom, it should be no surprise that the first business jet to fly faster than the speed of sound — an $80 million plane now in development by the Aerion Corporation — has already attracted much interest. Aerion, whose principal investor is Robert M. Bass of a wealthy Texas family, says it has 40 orders for this supersonic business jet, with $250,000 initial payments on each. It plans to have the jets on the market in 2014. Aerion’s 10-year business plan envisions sales of 300 of the new jets, which are designed to fly over oceans at Mach 1.6. (Mach 1 is the speed of sound, about 1,240 kilometers an hour.) The plane will fly at slightly under the speed of sound, at Mach 0.98, overland in the United States, where supersonic flight by civilian aircraft is prohibited because of the annoyance of sonic

booms. (These thunderclap-like noises can be heard on the ground as a result of a high-altitude shock wave created when an aircraft exceeds the speed of sound.) Elsewhere in the world, where regulations are more lax, the plane will fly overland at Mach 1.1, with a wing and airframe designed to alleviate sonic boom problems. “Our shock wave at 1.1 or 1.2 over land is imperceptible,” said Brian E. Barents, vice chairman of Aerion, and a former chief executive of Learjet. A nonmilitary supersonic aircraft has not been in the skies since the Concorde, flown by British Airways and Air France, was retired in 2003, a victim of high operating costs. The Aerion jet is being marketed worldwide by the ExecuJet Aviation Group, a Swiss company, and in the Americas by Aero Toy Store, a big pri-

BARBARA P. FERNANDEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A model of the supersonic business jet that Aerion Corporation is promising to deliver by 2014. The company already has 40 orders. vate-aircraft sales and service company based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Aero’s clients account for 12 of the existing Aerion orders, said C. Steven McMillan, Aero’s chairman. Mr. McMillan, a former chief executive of the Sara Lee Corporation, said there was a limit to what a subsonic business jet could do. “I was at Sara Lee for 30 years in vari-

ous executive capacities, and in most of that time I had access to private aircraft” including long-haul jets, he said, adding: “Yet I flew the Concorde more than 75 times — just because if you’ve got to be in two meetings in a short period of time, each one on a different continent, you can do that efficiently only by flying supersonic.”

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SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2008 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Through Mindful Meditation, A Chance at Healing the Psyche By BENEDICT CAREY

cravings, improve attention, lift despair and reduce hot flashes. Yet so far, the evidence that mindfulness meditation helps relieve psychiatric symptoms is thin, and in some cases, it may make people worse, some studies suggest. Buddhist meditation came to psychotherapy from mainstream academic medicine. In the 1970s, a graduate student in molecular biology, Jon Kabat-Zinn, intrigued by Buddhist ideas, adapted a secular version of its meditative practice. In the 1980s Dr. Kabat-Zinn published a series of studies demonstrating that two-hour courses, given once a week for

A Buddhist technique helps some, but others call it a fad.

JOAO PINA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Tourists Flock to Dinosaur Graveyard By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

LAKE BARREALES, Argentina — As Jorge Calvo strode along the dusty banks of this Patagonian lake, he scanned the reddish dirt, pointing to the remains of a dinosaur in the desert sun. He scampered down into a 2.5-meter deep pit and waved to Marcela Milani, a technician who was chipping away at a rock. She was looking for a missing hip bone believed to be part of Mr. Calvo’s most famous discovery, Futalognkosaurus, a new genus of plant-eating dinosaur more than 30.5 meters long from tail to nose. It is one of the three biggest dinosaurs ever found. “That one lived nearly 90 million years ago,” said Mr. Calvo, an Argentine geologist and paleontologist. “We are full of dinosaurs here. If you walk, you will find something.” Mr. Calvo, 46, has his office here at this vast dinosaur graveyard. He is not pursuing the traditional academic path of paleontologists, collecting in the field for distant museums. After discovering the Futalognkosaurus bones in 2000, he moved here two years later. Mr. Calvo’s Dino Project, about 90 kilometers north of the city of Neuquén, consists of a handful of trailers with portable bathrooms and a flimsily constructed museum. The operation exists mainly on donations from local energy companies, which are drilling for natural gas in the area. Mr. Calvo has been able to attract 10,000 tourists a year from all over the globe. In the summer here, December to March, Mr. Calvo often works with paleontologists from around the world.

and longest-term record for dinosaurs in all of the Southern Hemisphere, ARGENTINA Buenos a record from the first to Aires the last dinosaurs,” said Neuquén James I. Kirkland, a state paleontologist with the Utah Geological Survey. That record, spanning ���� �� R. about 150 million years, ���������� is distinct from that of the Los Barreales Northern Hemisphere, Neuquén Lake he said, because during Chocón the Jurassic period and Lake Eziquiel most of the Cretaceous the Ramos Mexia continents were breaking up, separating the hemi160 Kms. spheres. Distinct types THE NEW YORK TIMES of dinosaurs evolved in In the last 20 years, several each region. But around dinosaur museums have opened 70 million years ago, just 5 million years before dinear Neuquén, Argentina, keeping local finds close to home. nosaurs became extinct, a land bridge formed that allowed some dinosaurs His approach to paleontol- from each hemisphere to cross ogy has sparked controversy. over. The country’s first dinosaur Rodolfo Coria, a paleontologist at the Carmen Funes Museum fossils were discovered near near Neuquén, said the fossils Neuquén in 1882. For decades Mr. Calvo was extracting were museums in Buenos Aires and “hostages” and should be in a La Plata seemed to scoop up all proper museum. “I don’t agree the region’s fossils. The buildwith using those fossils in a tour- ing of regional museums around Neuquén the past two decades ist project,” Mr. Coria said. The Patagonian region of has helped keep the fossils at Argentina has become one of home and has created a sort of the most active areas of explo- dino-tourism. Mr. Calvo dreams of turning ration for dinosaur fossils in the world, along with the Gobi his isolated spot into a bigger Desert in China and the fossil- tourism destination. He showed rich American West. Argentine off a scale model of a $2 million scientists have unearthed the paleontology museum that largest plant-eating dinosaur, would have a tunnel blasted the Argentinosaurus, and the through the red-rock mountain largest carnivore, the Gigano- leading to a section devoted to tosaurus carolinii, which at the history of the native Mapuabout 13 meters long was slight- che Indians. “I could search for dinosaur ly longer and about 2.7 metric tons heavier than the famed bones for all my life and two Tyrannosaurus Rex found in more lifetimes and still not be done,” he said. “One thing we the United States. “Argentina has the richest have here is time.” ARGENTINA

uén Neuq

eight weeks, reduced chronic pain more effectively than treatment as usual. Word spread, discreetly at first. “I think that back then, other researchers had to be very careful when they talked about this, because they didn’t want to be seen as New Age weirdos,” Dr. KabatZinn, now a professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Massachusetts, said in an interview. “After a while, we put enough studies out there that people became more comfortable with it.” In 2000, a group of researchers at the Medical Research Council in England published a study that found that eight weekly sessions of mindfulness halved the rate of

relapse in people with three or more episodes of depression. WithDr. Kabat-Zinn, they wrote apopularbook,“TheMindfulWay Through Depression.” Psychotherapists’ curiosity about mindfulness, once tentative, turned into “this feeding frenzy of sorts,” Dr. Kabat-Zinn said. Mindfulness meditation is easy to describe. Sit in a comfortable position, eyes closed, preferably with the back upright and unsupported. Relax and take note of body sensations, sounds and moods. Notice them without judgment. Let the mind settle into the rhythm of breathing. If it wanders (and it will), gently redirect attention to the breath. Stay with it for at least 10 minutes. After mastering control of attention, some therapists say, a person can turn, mentally, to face a threatening or troubling thought — about, say, a strained relationship with a parent — and learn simply to endure the anger or sadness and let it pass. For all the hopeful signs, the science behind mindfulness is in its infancy. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality last year published a comprehensive review of studies on several types of meditation. The study found that over all, the research was too sketchy to draw conclusions. A recent review by Canadian researchers, focusing specifically on mindfulness meditation, concluded that it did “not have a reliable effect on depression and anxiety.” Since mindfulness meditation may have different effects on different mental struggles, the challenge for its proponents will be to specify where it is most effective — and soon, given how popular the practice is becoming.

ANDES

The patient sat with his eyes closed, submerged in the rhythm of his own breathing, and after a while noticed that he was thinking about his troubled relationship with his father. “I was able to be there, present for the pain,” he said, when the meditation session ended. “To just let it be what it was, without thinking it through.” The therapist nodded. “Acceptance is what it was,” he continued. “Just letting it be. Not trying to change anything.” “That’s it,” the therapist said. “That’s it, and that’s big.” This exercise in focused awareness and mental catch-and-release of emotions has become perhaps the most popular new psychotherapy technique of the past decade. Mindfulness meditation, as it is called, is rooted in the teachings of a fifth-century B.C. Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha. It is catching the attention of talk therapists of all types, including academic researchers, Freudian analysts and skeptics who see all the hallmarks of another fad. The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process — and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach. “The interest in this has just taken off,” said Zindel Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where the above group therapy session was taped. The National Institutes of Health is financing more than 50 studies testing mindfulness techniques, up from 3 in 2000, to help relieve stress, soothe addictive

Questions on Placebo Pills for Children By CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN

Get a free trial subscription to the International Herald Tribune and receive 28 days of balanced, open minded news coverage. No credit card details are required, just your name and the address you want it delivered to. Simply visit offer.iht.com/global5 or call 00800 44 48 78 27 and quote offer code EUR7 today.

Jennifer Buettner was taking care of her young niece when the idea struck her. The child had a nagging case of hypochondria, and Ms. Buettner’s mother-inlaw, a nurse, instructed her to give the girl a Motrin tablet. “She told me it was the most benign thing I could give,’’ Ms. Buettner said. “I thought, why give her any drug? Why not give her a placebo?’’ Studies have repeatedly shown that placebos can produce improvements for many problems like depression, pain and high blood pressure, and Ms. Buettner reasoned that she could harness the placebo effect to help her niece. Ms. Buettner, 40, who lives in Severna Park, Maryland, with her husband, 7-month-old son and 22-month-old twins, envisioned a children’s placebo tablet that would empower parents to do something tangible for minor ills and reduce the unnecessary use of medication. With the help of her husband, Dennis, she founded a placebo

company, and, without a hint of irony, named it Efficacy Brands. Its chewable, cherry-flavored dextrose tablets, Obecalp, for placebo spelled backward, went on sale on June 1 at the Efficacy Brands Web site. The Buettners have plans for a liquid version. But some experts question the premise behind the tablets. “Placebos are unpredictable,’’ said Dr. Howard Brody, a medical ethicist and family physician at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. “Each and every time you give a placebo you see a dramatic response among some people and no response in others.’’ He added that there was no way to predict who would respond. “The idea that we can use a placebo as a general treatment method,’’ Dr. Brody said, “strikes me as inappropriate.’’ Much of the power of the placebo effect seems to lie in the belief that it will work, and some experts question whether this expectation can be sustained if the person giving it knows it is

a sham. Most clinical trials that have shown benefits from placebos are double blinded. Neither the recipient nor the giver knows that the pills are fake. EvenifObecalpprovedhelpful, some doctors worry that giving children “medicine’’ for every ache and pain teaches that every ailment has a cure in a bottle. “Kids could grow up thinking that the only way to get better is by taking a pill,’’ Dr. Brody said. If they do that, he added, they will not learn that a minor complaint like a scraped knee or a cold can improve on its own. Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist who studies placebos at the Stanford School of Medicine in California, said conditioning children to reach for relief in a pill could also make them easy targets for pharmaceutical pitches later. “They used to sell candied cigarettes to kids to get them used to the idea of playing with cigarettes,’’ he said. Ms. Buettner acknowledged that “we expect controversy with this,’’ but she added, “We are not promoting drug use.’’

SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2008

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7

LIVING: ONLINE

In her blog, Penelope Trunk writes about the collapse of her 15-year marriage.

After a Divorce, Beware Of the Ex-Spouse’s Blog By LESLIE KAUFMAN

Laurie, a Manhattan mother, started podcasting DivorcingDaze.com during her divorce in 2006. Each week Laurie and a divorced friend have a glass of wine and tape their discussions of the day’s topics — spas, their boyfriends, the latest scandal — and then post to the Web. The 10,000 monthly listeners she says download DivorcingDaze episodes have heard Laurie say that she discovered her ex-husband was having an affair with his boss from e-mail on his BlackBerry, and that he had told their older daughter he wasn’t cheating because the marriage, in his mind, was already over. In an era when more than one in 10 adult Internet users in the United States have blogs, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, many people are using the Web to tell their side of a marital saga. It is impossible to say just how many people are blogging about divorce, but the percentage of Internet users with personal blogs has quadrupled in five years, according to Pew. In April, the potential of the Internet to expose and disgrace when marriages fall apart came into stark relief as Tricia Walsh Smith, a British actress who is being divorced by Philip Smith, a theater executive, put a video on YouTube announcing that they never had sex, and yet she found him hoarding Viagra, pornography and condoms. Not surprisingly, Mr. Smith’s lawyer, David Aronson, called the video “appalling” and said: “Mr. Smith is a very private person. This is obviously embarrassing.”

In separation, of course, one person’s truth can be another’s lie. Often the postings are furtive. But even when the ex-spouse is well aware that he or she is starring in a blog and sues to stop it, recent rulings have showed the courts reluctant to intervene. When Laurie’s husband found out about the podcasts last year, he sued her. He argued that they included statements that were “obnoxious, derogatory or offensive” and that they violated the terms of the divorce settlement that she not “harass” or “malign” him. Laurie had never told her ex-husband she was doing the programs because they were meant as advice to others and not as retribution, she said. She does not use her last name or her ex-husband’s in her talks and asked that both names be withheld for this article. In a decision a few months ago, a justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York said Laurie’s husband’s complaints were not grounds for blocking the podcast. While Laurie’s statements may be “ill-advised and do not promote coparenting,” the court wrote, they were covered by the First Amendment, which protects free speech. Obviously, divorce lawyers are taking note. Deborah Lans of Cohen Lans, a Manhattan law firm with a thriving matrimonial practice, said, “The last thing you want to see is angry people making uncontrolled statements.” Ms. Lans said her divorce agreements included a confidentiality provision that forbade either party to publish even fic-

ANDY MANIS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

tionalized accounts of the marriage, but not every lawyer insists on that. Earlier this year, a court in Vermont did tell William Krasnansky to take down his lightly disguised account of his divorce, in which he described his exwife in an unflattering light and blamed her for forcing him to sell their home at “a ruinous loss.” Mr. Krasnanksy’s ex-wife had complained that it was “defamatory.” But after a firestorm of criticism, the court reversed itself and gave him the right to continue to publish. For some ex-spouses, revenge is not the point. Writing about divorce can be good for readership. “The bloggers who are doing the best are those who are injecting their person-

al lives,” said Penelope Trunk, the author of the Brazen Careerist blog, who has written frequently in the past year about the collapse of her 15-year marriage. Ms. Trunk wrote about going to what she thought was a first session with a new marriage counselor chosen by her husband only to discover it was a divorce lawyer’s office. That was one of her most popular posts. More painfully, she has written about the problems of a son who has Asperger’s syndrome and said that both she and her husband believed the challenges of raising him helped cause their divorce. But this kind of brutal honesty is not a good idea for children, especially since most harbor feelings of guilt about their

parents’ divorce anyway, said Irene Goldenberg, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It is not good for children to get personal information in that way,” Dr. Goldenberg said. “And people have to consider doing things in the heat of the moment. The way they feel now will not be how they feel in two years, and there is no way it can be retrieved.” Ms. Trunk disagrees. “It is a generational issue,” she said. “We think it will be a big deal, but it won’t be to them. By the time they are old enough to read it, they will have spent their entire life online. It will be like, ‘Oh yeah, I expected that.’ ”

For Savvy Users, Social Sites Are a Platform to Job Hunt By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GETTY IMAGES (WOMAN) AND ICONICA/GETTY IMAGES (STUDENTS); ILLUSTRATION BY THE NEW YORK TIMES

Hiding Bad Grades From Parents Just Got Harder By JAN HOFFMAN

A profusion of online programs that can track a student’s daily progress, including class attendance, missed assignments and grades on homework, quizzes and tests, is changing the nature of communication between American parents and children, families and teachers. With names like Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer and PowerSchool, the software is used by thousands of schools, kindergarten through 12th grade. Although a few programs have been available for a decade, American schools have been using them more in recent years as reporting requirements have expanded and home computers have become more common. Citing studies showing that parental involvement can have a positive effect on a child’s academic performance, educators praise the programs’ capacity to engage parents. At best, the programs can be an antidote for forgetfulness, an early warning system and a lie detector. But sometimes there is unintended damage: exacerbated stress about daily grades and increased family tension. “The good is very good,” said Nancy Larsen, headmaster of Fairfield Ludlowe High School in Connecticut, which uses Edline. “And the bad can become very ugly.” At an age when teenagers increasingly want to manage their own lives, many

Chris Tarantino goes online to learn about her daughters’ school day.

MICHAEL NAGLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

parents use these programs to tighten the grip. College admission in the United States is so devastatingly competitive, parents say, they feel compelled to check online grades frequently. With some programs, not only is a student’sgraderecalculatedwitheveryquiz, but parents can monitor the daily fluctuations of their child’s class ranking. The availability of so much up-to-the-minute information about a naturally evasive teenager can be intoxicating: one Kansas parent compared watching PowerSchool to tracking the stock market. Many students, in fact, like the programs, which let them monitor their records. Their biggest complaint is their parents’ unfettered access. “I don’t think kids have privacy,” said Emily

Tarantino, 13, a middle-school student from Farmingdale, New York. In thousands of Facebook postings about the programs, teenagers bitterly denounce parental access as snooping. Emily Cochran, 18, a Pittsburgh senior, writes on Facebook about Edline, “It’s like having our parents or guardians stand over us and watch us all day at school, waiting for us to slip up.” Nicole Dobbins, a mother of three in Alpharetta, Georgia, is unapologetic about her monitoring of her children’s schoolwork. “I know,” she said, “I’m the mom with big horns. But it’s been a fabulous parenting tool. I think every school should implement it, especially in high school, when kids don’t talk to parents and parents can’t talk to each teacher.”

Social-networking sites are designed to be entertaining. If there wasn’t so much fun to be had, there wouldn’t be so many articles warning that what you post on your profile — photos of you drinking and partying — could one day cost you a job. Yet sites like Facebook, Friendster and MySpace are evolving beyond their reputations as a spot for procrastinators. With American consumer confidence at a 26-year low and one in seven workers telling the Pew Research Center that they fear they will be laid off, social-networking sites are becoming, for some users, platforms from which to network for job leads, to forge professional contacts or even to announce to friends that you are out of work. Getting a job through a social network not designed for that purpose appears to be a rarity. But savvy users say the sites can be effective tools for promoting one’s job skills and allaround business networking. Even human resource professionals are encouraging people to log on. In a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers published in March, employers indicated that whereas in the past they used social-networking sites “to check profiles of potential hires,’’ said Marilyn Mackes, the group’s executive director, today “more than half will use the sites to network with potential candidates.’’ Christine Pon Chin, a real estate agent with Bellmarc Realty in Manhattan, uses Facebook for both social and professional networking. “It’s helping me get additional buyers and sellers for the future,’’ said Ms. Chin, who began posting some of her exclusive property listings on Facebook a couple of months ago, when business slowed. Sonia Meertins, 32, who relocated to Los Angeles when her husband accepted a job, went virtual with her own job hunt recently. A recruiter suggested she create profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn (designed expressly for business networking). But Ms. Meertins, who is looking for work in sales and marketing, has been taken aback by the strangers and ghosts of classmates past who have “friended’’ her on Facebook. “You have absolutely no idea why they want to be connected to you,’’ she said, adding that LinkedIn feels more appropriate for job hunting. Still, she said: “Every resource that’s available, you try to use it.’’ Last year, Facebook itself began fa-

cilitating professional networking with the introduction of “pages’’ (profiles for businesses or professionals that other Facebook users can become “fans’’ of and receive updates about). “When somebody joins your group on Facebook, they’re much more likely to be receptive to your message,’’ said Dustin Luther of Calabasas, California, who leads real estate seminars for sales agents and is the founder of the popular Seattle blog RainCityGuide .com. “My last seminar, a group of us all went out to dinner and we were able to post photos and videos. It kind of keeps everybody engaged in what you’re doing in an informal way.” But plenty of people think social-networking sites are incompatible with the formality of the workplace. Those who professionally network on Facebook and MySpace respond that all business is personal, and that it’s the informality of the social sites that makes them useful. Leila Hebden, who said that when

Some employers use Facebook and MySpace to check potential hires. she began her career in music management she could not have lived without networking on MySpace, likes the site’s casualness and lack of hierarchy. Music industry executives have long seen the advantage of scouring social-networking sites to find new talent, make professional connections and promote their work. One could argue that most other industries are simply behind. Still, Ms. Hebden said, if she were in serious economic trouble, MySpace would not be a savior. “In the face of ‘upheaval,’ ’’ she said in an e-mail message, “I still think 9 out of 10 people would drag their contacts list out of their Outlook work e-mail than turn to their MySpace community.’’ Steve Biegel, the creative director of Scarlet Heifer, a small Manhattan advertising agency, also uses his Facebook profile for professional ends. “You can share your entire portfolio, which is a nice way to network,’’ he said. “My partner and I are constantly on these sites mingling with prospective clients or people we can hire for our company,’’ he added. “It’s like pollination. You just go from flower to flower.’’

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SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2008 ARTS & STYLES

A Long List To Humble The Literate An odd book fell into my hands recently, a large volume with the irresistible title “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.” That sounds like a challenge, with a subtle insult embedded in the premise. It suggests that you, the supposedly educated reader, might have read half the list at best. The book is British. ESSAY Of course. The British love literary lists and the fights they provoke. In this instance Peter Boxall, who teaches English at Sussex University, asked 105 critics, editors and academics to submit lists of great novels, from which he assembled his supposedly mandatory reading list of one thousand and one. Assume, for the sake of argument, that a reasonably well-educated person will have read a third of them. (My own score, tallied after I made this estimate, was 303. You can find the full list at www.listology.com.) Two potent factors make “1001 Books” compelling: guilt and time. It plays on every serious reader’s lingering sense of inadequacy. Page after page reveals a writer or a novel unread, and therefore a demerit on the great report card of one’s cultural life. Then there’s that bullying title, with its ominous allusion to the final day when, for all of us, the last page is turned. I appreciate the sense of urgency because I feel it myself. But when Professor Boxall brings death into the picture, he sets the standard very high. Let’s have a look at some of these mandatory titles. Not only is it not necessary to read “Interview With the Vampire” by Anne Rice before you die, it is also probably not necessary to read it even if, like Lestat, you are never going to die. If I were mortally ill, and a well-meaning friend pressed Anaïs Nin’s “Delta of Venus” into my hands, I would probably leave this world with a curse on my lips. If the “1001 Books” program seems quirky, even perverse, it’s no accident.

The opera ‘‘Monkey: Journey to the West,’’ based on an ancient Chinese story much loved by children and animators, combines Eastern and Western traditions. An actor, below, plays the title role of the Monkey, the hero of the tale.

WILLIAM GRIMES

PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILLIAM STRUHS

Opera Combines Pop and Acrobats To Tell a Beloved Chinese Tale By DANIEL J. WAKIN

CHARLESTON, South Carolina — The opening scene is a vast cartoon projected on a screen. An egg bursts and gives birth to Monkey, then the stage is filled with acrobats and a monkey tribe flying from bamboo pole to bamboo pole. The score pulsates with an electronic beat. So begins “Monkey: Journey to the West,’’ a new sort of opera based on an old Chinese tale. It traces the Monkey King’s search for wisdom and immortality with singing, acrobatics, martial arts and cartoon segments. It is circus spectacle striving to become art — or maybe art infused with spectacle. The show was conceived by the Chinese actor and director Chen Shi-Zheng, with music provided by Damon Albarn, the lead singer of the British pop band Blur. Design, animation and costumes were done by Jamie Hewlett, who collaborated with Mr. Albarn on the popular animated “cartoon band’’ Gorillaz. The work is a recent example of the blending of pop strains and classical opera form, a trend seen particularly in Britain, where the English National Opera commissioned the hip-hop Asian

Dub Foundation to make a work about the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar elQaddafi. Not exactly opera, musical theater or circus, “Monkey,’’ Mr. Albarn said, is a “new kind of thing.’’ And it is true: most operas do not have acrobats playing crustaceans in shopping carts juggling parasols with their feet, or extended fight sequences like Hong Kong kung-fu movies. And most circuses do not have pit orchestras, a narrative or opera singers. The score is a mix of hip-hop beats, washes of electronic sound, dissonant brass fanfares, sweet Chinese pop melodies and percussive effects. Ten vocalists sing in Mandarin with Chinese opera inflection. The show was a hit when it first played, at the Manchester International Festival in England last year, and the creators have high hopes of cloning it in commercial sites and other opera houses, particularly in Asia. It made its debut in the United States at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. on May 24. Working on “Monkey,’’ Mr. Albarn said, has taught him about orchestration, and he is working on another “clas-

sical’’ piece, which he calls a tone poem. The chance to make musical works longer than a pop song is liberating, he said. “It’s definitely changed my course,” he said, adding, “I love being the author of stuff now.” “I just want to keep doing things that take longer to listen to, that doesn’t just happen in three minutes.’’ His compositional technique involves creating demo tapes or sitting at a keyboard and playing a passage, which an orchestrator then expands upon and notates. The production was born when JeanLuc Choplin, director of the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, and Mr. Chen discussed the possibility of a new production. Mr. Chen said he had long wanted to do an opera about the Monkey story. He was introduced to Mr. Albarn and Mr. Hewlett, who themselves were fans of the cult-hit “Monkey’’ live-action show from Japan that was on British television in the 1980s. The men made long trips to China to-

gether. Mr. Albarn recorded sounds, and Mr. Hewlett made sketches. Mr. Chen scouted circuses and found the “very young, very hip kids’’ he needed in Dalian, the port city in northeast China. Most of the singers are young graduates of Chinese conservatories who studied either Chinese opera techniques or music theater singing or both. Mr. Chen said he knew he couldn’t use Western music. “It’s a story children love,’’ he said. “The instrumentation has to be very eccentric. The Monkey is like a boy. It has to be a boy’s sound.’’

When Beauty and Brutality Collide for a Macabre Master PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY THE NEW YORK TIMES

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

“I wanted this book to make people furious about the books that were included and the books that weren’t, figuring this would be the best way to generate a fresh debate about canonicity, etc.,” Professor Boxall said in an e-mail message. The tastes of others are always inexplicable, but “1001 Books” embodies some structural irregularities. More than half the books were written after World War II. Already I feel my irritation rising. Does not the age of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy dwarf its earnest, fitfully brilliant but ultimately punier successor? And if the 20th century can put up a fight, the real firepower is concentrated in the period of 1900 to 1930. I admire Ian McEwan, but does he really merit eight novels on the list, to Balzac’s three? Something is wrong here. Paul Auster gets six novels. Don DeLillo seven. Thackeray gets one: “Vanity Fair.” Since Professor Boxall is keen to start an argument, let me oblige. Drop the bloated, self-indulgent “Ada” from an otherwise correct Nabokov list (“Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” “Pnin”) and insert “Laughter in the Dark” or “The Gift.” J. M. Coetzee, with 10 novels on the list, can afford to lose 1 or 2. That would open up space for “The Cossacks” by Tolstoy and “A Hero of Our Time” by Mikhail Lermontov. There should be another five Balzacs. I could go on and on. But no matter how well read you are, you’re not that well read. If you don’t believe it, pick up “1001” and start counting. Come to think of it, I have a personal white whale: “Moby-Dick.” I really must read it before I die.

For nearly 40 years Dario Argento, the so-called Italian Hitchcock, has had blood on his hands: deliberately, unashamedly, very near literally. When a deranged killer stabs, slashes, throttles, garrotes or otherwise violates the corporal integrity of a screaming victim in one of Mr. Argento’s films — this happens with some frequency — the hands inside the black gloves have traditionally been those of the director himself. (It’s his version of the Hitchcock cameo.) The hands may be the same, but the blood has changed a bit over the years, from the bright comic-book red of his early thrillers like “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” (1970) and “Deep Red” (1975), in which the vital subFRANCO BELLOMO/MITROPOULOS stance is roughly the color of maraschino cherries, to the dark, almost black Dario Argento’s latest film, ‘‘Mother of Tears,’’ stars his daughter Asia, stuff that gushes so freely in his latest and is the conclusion to a trilogy begun in 1977 with ‘‘Suspiria.’’ film, “Mother of Tears.” It’s never quite the colShe gets her chance in “Mother of apparently abandoned. or of real blood, though, In the earlier films the Tears,” though she seems to have which is, for the sanity of audience learned of the evolved in the intervening years into the viewer, fortunate, and existence of three power- a bare-bosomed vamp commanding is also perfectly consistent ful witches: Mater Sus- a coven of comparably endowed and with Mr. Argento’s aespiriorum, the Mother of similarly undressed young women. It’s thetic: his brutal and often Sighs, who wreaks havoc apocalypse, Italian style. beautiful movies touch reThis national tradition of dubiously in a German ballet acadality very lightly, if at all. emy in “Suspiria”; Mater tasteful screen horror is clearly a much “Mother of Tears” is one Tenebrarum, the Mother stronger influence on Mr. Argento than of a small minority of his of Darkness, who cranks the acknowledged source of the threefilms in which the agencies CHRISTOPHE SIMON/ AFP-GETTY IMAGES up the stress on the jittery mothers concept, which is, of all things, of evil are supernatural, explicitly unreal. The movie is the long- New Yorkers of “Inferno”; and Mater the writings of the great Romantic esdelayed — and, for many of his fans, Lachrymarum, the Mother of Tears, sayist Thomas De Quincey, author of breathlessly anticipated — conclusion briefly glimpsed in “Inferno” as a volup- “Confessions of an English Opiumto a kind of trilogy begun in “Suspiria” tuous, smoky-eyed temptress, waiting Eater” (1821). In his sequel to that work, (1977), an enormous hit, continued in patiently, it appears, for just the right “Suspiria de Profundis” (published 24 years later), De Quincey describes an “Inferno” (1980) and then, for 28 years, opportunity to lure Rome to its doom.

opium dream in which these three women appear to him, but he doesn’t say a word about the grisly skills they display in Mr. Argento’s trilogy: decapitation, disembowelment, eye gouging. And he doesn’t even mention their breasts. Making fun of this sort of over-the-top horror isn’t difficult. What’s tougher to account for in Mr. Argento’s work is the often extraordinary grace of his filmmaking, which shows itself in the long, tense intervals between outbursts of gore. Mr. Argento, 67, has devoted most of his career to the Italian suspense genre known as giallo, which designates a kind of hyperbolic serial-killer mystery, generally with urban settings and disturbingly creative murders. (The word giallo means yellow, and refers to the covers of a popular series of paperback thrillers published by Mondadori.) The genre lets Mr. Argento do what he does best, which is stylizing reality, turning the everyday strange. It’s no accident that the most memorable scenes in his movies are often those that involve stalking, the slow-motion pursuit of a victim by his (or more commonly, her) killer, because he uses these little danses macabres to lay out, stage by agonizing stage, the progress of awareness on the part of the victim. There’s a stubborn kind of integrity in Mr. Argento’s refusal to look beyond the immediate, moment-to-moment sensations movies can supply, his persistent avoidance of anything approaching a meaning. He isn’t, as some have charged, a sadist: he’s too detached. He may be a nihilist. What he is most fundamentally is a serial hands-on aesthete. And there’s nothing scarier than that.