MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009 Copyright © 2009 The New York Times

Supplemento al numero

odierno de la Repubblica

Sped. abb. postale art. 1

legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

LENS

The lawyer who commutes every

morning? He’s pretending. The busi-

nessman who carries a briefcase? He

was laid off. The construction worker

wearing a tool belt? He’s out of work.

In a world ob-

sessed with labels

and where ev-

eryone is quick to

judge, keeping up

appearances and

projecting a cer-

tain image may

mean the most

important brand

of all may be ourselves.

Branding experts use slogans like

“Find your unique qualities and high-

light Brand You!” Or, “You’re not a

worker, you’re not a job title! You’re

a brand!” wrote Alina Tugend in The

Times. “We have to create our own job

security, and branding is part of that.”

Faking it or not, that lawyer, busi-

nessman and construction worker

are managing others’ impressions

of who they are. “To the extent that

it sustains good habits and reflects

personal pride,” psychologists say,

“this kind of play-acting can be an

extremely effective social strategy,

especially in uncertain times,” wrote

The Times’s Benedict Carey.

Psychologists say projecting pride

can help people thrive in difficult so-

cial circumstances, he wrote. In one

experiment, Jessica L. Tracey of the

University of British Columbia found

that people tend to associate an ex-

pression of pride with high status —

even when they know that the person

wearing it is low on the ladder, wrote

Mr. Carey.

“So long as you’re a decent actor,

and people don’t know too much

about your situation, all systems are

go,” Lisa A. Williams, a doctoral can-

didate in psychology at Northeastern

University in Boston, told Mr. Carey.

Being a decent actor or master

craftsman of an image is important

in a society with a penchant to judge.

First impressions about people are

crucial to the way we function, social

scientists say — even when those

judgments are wrong, wrote The

Times’s Pam Belluck.

“Stereotypes are seen as a neces-

sary mechanism for making sense of

information,” David Amodio, an assis-

tant professor of psychology at New

York University told Ms. Belluck. “If

we look at a chair, we can categorize it

quickly even though there are many

different kinds of chairs out there.”

Standing out from the rest is es-

sential when creating an image, espe-

cially when job hunting. Joining sites

like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter

is a way to brand yourself, wrote Ms.

Tugend. “If you don’t brand yourself,

Google will brand you,” said Sherry

Beck Paprocki, co-author of the

book “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to

Branding Yourself.”

It’s important to control what infor-

mation comes up when your name is

searched online. And not being online

today is akin to not existing, wrote

Ms. Tugend. We sell ourselves by dis-

playing what we do, write, eat, listen

to and read.

Well, maybe not “read” so much.

Because of the Kindle, an electronic

book reader, the practice of judging

people by their books may disappear,

wrote Joanne Kaufman in The Times.

If people stop buying books, it’s go-

ing to be hard to form opinions about

them by looking at their bookshelves.

Seeing which books someone has

is “the faux-intellectual version of

sniffing through someone’s medicine

cabinet,” Ammon Shea, who wrote

about his year spent reading the

Oxford English Dictionary, told Ms.

Kaufman.

Well, people can go to a Web site

like Goodreads and let everyone

know what they are reading (or pre-

tending to). Because it is no longer

about keeping the medicine cabinet

closed, but rather opening it up and

carefully honing its contents for ev-

eryone to see.

By RACHEL DONADIO, HIROKO TABUCHI and NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

SIX YEARS AFTER the Spanish construction boom

lured him here from his native Romania, Constantin

Marius Mituletu is going home, another victim of the

bust that is reversing the human tide that has transformed

Europe and Asia in the past decade.

“Everyone says in Romania there’s no work,” Mr. Mituletu,

30, said with a touch of bravado as he lifted his mirrored sun-

glasses onto his forehead. “If there are 26 million people there,

they have to do something. I want to see for myself.”

Mr. Mituletu, who is planning to return to Romania this month,

is one of millions of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Latin

America and Africa who have flocked to fast-growing places like

Spain, Ireland, Britain and even Japan in the past decade, drawn

by low unemployment and liberal immigration policies.

But in a marked sign of how quickly the economies of Eu-

rope and Asia have deteriorated, workers like Mr. Mituletu

are now heading home, hoping to find better job prospects,

or at least lower costs of living, in their native lands. Some

are leaving on their own, but others are being paid to leave

by their host countries. Japan in the 1990s encouraged Latin

Americans to come and help ease a labor shortage, but is now

paying these workers up to $3,000 to go back and not return.

In Western Europe the migratory trend has been pro-

nounced.

Consider Ireland’s capital, which earned the nick-

name Dublinski as roughly 180,000 Poles, Czechs and

other Eastern Europeans went there in search of work

after the European Union expanded in 2004. Now, a stun-

ning rise in the unemployment rate, currently 11 per-

cent, is making even the most recent arrivals rethinkÁNGEL FRANCO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

BETWEEN TWO HOMES Migrants who left home in search of prosperity now may have to uprootthemselves again. This woman, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador, may have to leave New York. Page 4.

Homemade Impressions

V VII VIIIMONEY & BUSINESS

Technology giants

go shopping.

PERSONALITIES

Mike Nichols, a master

of invisibility.

ARTS & STYLES

Same old Starship,

a younger crew.

The Painful Journey Home

INTELLIGENCE: Yoani Sánchez on Cuba’s next move, Page II.

For comments, write to nytweekly@nytimes.com.

A Reverse ExodusUpends the Lives Of Many Migrants

Con tin ued on Page 4

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O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA R Y

II MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009

Closing InOn Islamabad

In Afghanistan, 300 brave wom-

en marched to demand a measure

of equal rights, defying a furious

mob of about 1,000 people who spat,

threw stones and called the women

“whores.” The marchers asserted

that a woman should not need her

husband’s consent to go to school or

work outside the home.

In Pakistan, the Taliban flogged a

teenage girl in front of a crowd, as two

men held her face down in the dirt. A

video shows the girl, whose “crime”

may have been to go out of her house

alone, crying piteously that she will

never break the rules again.

Muslim fundamentalists damage

Islam far more than any number of

Danish cartoonists ever could, for it’s

inevitably the extremists who cap-

ture the world’s attention. But there

is the beginning of an intellectual re-

form movement in the Islamic world,

and one window into this awakening

was an international conference in

late April at the University of Notre

Dame in Indiana on the latest schol-

arship about the Koran.

“We’re experiencing right now

in Koranic studies a rise of interest

analogous to the rise of critical Bible

studies in the 19th century,” said Ga-

briel Said Reynolds, a Notre Dame

professor and organizer of the con-

ference.

The Notre Dame conference prob-

ably could not have occurred in a

Muslim country, for the rigorous ap-

plication of historical analysis to the

Koran is as controversial today in the

Muslim world as its application to

the Bible was in the 1800s. For some

literal-minded Christians, it was

traumatic to discover that the end-

ing of the Gospel of Mark, describing

encounters with the resurrected Je-

sus, is stylistically different from the

rest of Mark and is widely regarded

by scholars as a later addition.

Likewise, Biblical scholars dis-

tressed the faithful by focusing on

inconsistencies among the gospels.

The Gospel of Matthew says that

Judas hanged himself, while Acts de-

scribes him falling down in a field and

dying; the Gospel of John disagrees

with other gospels about whether the

crucifixion occurred on Passover or

the day before. For those who consid-

ered every word of the Bible literally

God’s word, this kind of scholarship

felt sacrilegious.

Now those same discomfiting ana-

lytical tools are being applied to the

Koran. At Notre Dame, scholars ana-

lyzed ancient texts of the Koran that

show signs of writing that was erased

and rewritten. Other scholars chal-

lenged traditional interpretations

of the Koran such as the notion that

some other person (perhaps Judas or

Peter) was transformed to look like

Jesus and crucified in his place, while

Jesus himself escaped to heaven.

One scholar at the Notre Dame

conference, who uses the pseudonym

Christoph Luxenberg for safety, has

caused a stir and angered people by

suggesting that the “houri” promised

to martyrs when they reach Heaven

doesn’t actually mean “virgin” after

all.

He argues that instead it means

“grapes,” and since conceptions of

paradise involved bounteous fruit,

that might make sense.

One of the scholars at the Notre

Dame conference whom I particu-

larly admire is Nasr Hamid Abu

Zayd, an Egyptian Muslim who ar-

gues eloquently that if the Koran is

interpreted sensibly in context then

it carries a strong message of social

justice and women’s rights.

Dr. Abu Zayd’s own career under-

scores the challenges that scholars

face in the Muslim world. When he

declared that keeping slave girls and

taxing non-Muslims were contrary

to Islam, he infuriated conservative

judges. An Egyptian court declared

that he couldn’t be a real Muslim and

thus divorced him from his wife (who,

as a Muslim woman, was not eligible

to be married to a non-Muslim). The

couple fled to Europe, and Dr. Abu

Zayd is helping the LibForAll Foun-

dation, which promotes moderate in-

terpretations throughout the Islamic

world.

“The Islamic reformation started

as early as the 19th century,” notes

Dr. Abu Zayd, and, of course, it has

even earlier roots as well. One impor-

tant school of Koranic scholarship,

Mutazilism, held 1,000 years ago that

the Koran need not be interpreted lit-

erally, and even today Iranian schol-

ars are surprisingly open to critical

scholarship and interpretations.

If the Islamic world is going to en-

joy a revival, if fundamentalists are

to be tamed, if women are to be em-

ployed more productively, then mod-

erate interpretations of the Koran

will have to gain ascendancy. There

are signs of that, including a brand

of “feminist Islam” that cites verses

and traditions suggesting that the

Prophet Muhammad favored wom-

en’s rights.

Professor Reynolds says that Mus-

lim scholars have asked that confer-

ence papers be translated into Arabic

so that they can get a broader hear-

ing. If the great intellectual fires are

reawakening within Islam, after cen-

turies of torpor, then that will be the

best weapon yet against extremism.

Muslim scholarsdiscuss new interpretationsof the Koran.

E D I T O R I A L S O F T H E T I M E S

If the Indian Army advanced within

about 100 kilometers of Islamabad, you

can bet Pakistan’s army would be fully

mobilized and defending the country in

pitched battles. Yet when the Taliban

got that close to the capital on April 24,

pushing into the key district of Buner,

Pakistani authorities at first sent only

several hundred poorly equipped and

underpaid police forces.

Pakistan sent paramilitary forces,

backed by army helicopters and fight-

er jets, into Buner a few days later to

confront the militants. But the latest

advance by the Taliban is a frighten-

ing reminder that most Pakistanis —

from top civilian and military leaders

to ordinary citizens — still do not fully

understand the mortal threat that

the militants pose to their fragile de-

mocracy. And one more reminder to

Washington that it can waste no time

enabling such denial.

Pakistanis don’t have to look far to

see what life would be like under Tali-

ban rule. Since an army-backed peace

deal ceded the Swat Valley to the mili-

tants, the Taliban have fomented class

revolt and terrorized the region by

punishing “un-Islamic” activities like

dancing and girls’ attending school.

The more territory Pakistan cedes to

the extremists, the more room the Tal-

iban and Al Qaeda will have to launch

attacks on American and NATO forces

in Afghanistan.

And — most frightening of all — if

the army cannot or will not defend its

own territory against the militants,

how can anyone be sure it will protect

Pakistan’s 60 or so nuclear weapons?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

was right when she warned recently

that Pakistan was “abdicating to the

Taliban.” American military leaders

in recent days have also begun to raise

the alarm, but for too long they insisted

that General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani,

chief of staff of the army, did recognize

the seriousness of the threat. We cer-

tainly have not seen it.

On April 24, even as Mr. Kayani in-

sisted “victory against terror and mil-

itancy will be achieved at all costs,” he

defended the Swat deal. On April 26,

government officials insisted again

that the deal remained in force de-

spite obvious Taliban violations. Mr.

Kayani complains that his troops lack

the right tools to take on the militants,

including helicopters and night-vision

goggles.

The army should have used some of

the $12 billion it received from Wash-

ington over the last seven years to

do just that, instead of spending the

money on equipment and training to

go after India. The next round of aid

should include these items but also

require that they be used to fight the

militants.

Pakistan’s weak civilian leaders, in-

cluding President Asif Ali Zardari and

the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif,

are complicit in the dangerous farce,

wasting energy on political rivalries.

They must persuade General Kayani

to shift at least part of his focus and far

more resources away from the Indian

border to the Afghan border.

Things are not going smoothly on

the American side either. President

Obama was right to recognize the

need for an integrated strategy deal-

ing with both Afghanistan and Paki-

stan. But his team has a lot more work

to do, including figuring out ways to

strengthen Pakistan’s government

and its political will.

Like Pakistan, Washington cannot

afford to waste any more time figur-

ing out the way forward — not with the

Taliban 100 kilometers from Islam-

abad.

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Islam, Virgins And Grapes

We’re in the middle of the biggest cri-

sis of capitalism in 70 years. We’ve got a

new administration in Washington ac-

tive on every front. What’s all this done

to the public mind?

A poll by The National Journal, a

nonpartisan political magazine, and

Allstate, an insurance company, gives

a pretty good view. As you’d expect,

there’s a lot of economic anxiety in the

country, spanning every income cate-

gory. Sixty-four percent of Americans

believe there are more risks that en-

danger their standards of living today

than in their parents’ time.

On the other hand, there’s still some

sense of opportunity. Forty-two percent

believe there are more opportunities to

move up than a generation ago, com-

pared with 29 percent who think there

are fewer. In short, there’s a feeling of

greater volatility, both up and down.

People don’t seem to feel as if they are

sliding into a hole, but neither do they

feel secure.

So whom do they turn to in times like

these? Themselves. Americans have

always felt that they are masters of

their own fate. Decade after decade,

Americans stand out from others in

their belief that their own individual

actions determine how they fare. That

conviction has been utterly unshaken

by the global crisis. In question after

question, large majorities say their own

actions will determine how much they

will make, how well they will endure

the recession, how healthy they will be

and so on.

The crisis has not sent Americans

running to government for relief. Nor

has it led to a populist surge in anti-

business sentiment. In a recent Gallup

poll, 55 percent of Americans said that

big government is the biggest threat to

the country. Only 32 percent said big

business. Those answers are near his-

torical norms.

Americans have always been skep-

tical of activist government, and that

skepticism remains. When Gallup

asked specifically about the current

crisis, 44 percent of Americans said

they disapprove of an expanded role for

government during the crisis; 39 per-

cent said they approve of an expanded

role but want it reduced when the crisis

is over; and only 13 percent want to see

a permanently expanded role for gov-

ernment.

When asked by the National Journal

group more specifically where good

ideas and financial solutions come

from, 40 percent said corporate Amer-

ica and 40 percent said government.

When asked what could best enhance

income security, half of all Americans

said individual responsibility, 19 per-

cent said government regulations like

increasing the minimum wage were

most effective and 15 percent said gov-

ernment programs.

The area where the National Journal

poll found the most desire for govern-

ment activism is health care. A recent

Pew Research Center survey found

that while there is less support for a

health care overhaul than there was in

1993, the public still wants reform that

at least improves the current system.

My friend Ron Brownstein of The

National Journal looks at the data

and concludes that while Americans

are still skeptical of government, they

are open to rethinking what the social

safety net should look like in the 21st

century. I look at the data and conclude

that the tumult has not significantly

changed the way Americans look at

government, corporations or the social

contract. Americans are open to good

ideas from government, as always,

but they are still skeptical and fiercely

self-sufficient. The economic crisis has

produced a desire for change but not a

philosophical shift.

The big lesson for the Obama admin-

istration is that the American people

will continue to support its agenda as

long as they think it is competent. It

was not automatic that an administra-

tion led by a 47-year-old man with little

Washington experience would run a

professional, smoothly functioning op-

eration. Yet he has. The administration

has unveiled a dazzling array of pro-

posals with a high degree of efficiency

and managerial skill. This has inspired

confidence in his team, if not in the gov-

ernment as a whole.

If that aura of nonideological compe-

tence fades, however, support for the

agenda will disappear. There is little

philosophical backing for a govern-

ment as activist as the one Obama is

proposing. Middle-class voters are not

willing to hand over higher taxes in ex-

change for more federal services. The

public is significantly to Obama’s right

on economic matters and needs con-

stant evidence that he is not trespass-

ing on personal freedom and individual

responsibility.

For Republicans, the message is that

all is not hopeless. Swing voters have

temporarily rejected the party, but not

its world view. After this crisis is over,

they still want a return to normalcy,

with balanced budgets and a limited

state. Americans still want to see pow-

er dispersed among a diversity of insti-

tutions, not concentrated in the hands

of supertechnocrats in Washington.

The Great Depression altered the na-

tional consciousness. So far, the Great

Recession has not.

DAVID BROOKS

A Philosophy for Hard Times

In a time of crisis, Americans still believe in self-sufficiency.

Repubblica NewYork

O B A M A’ S WA S H I N G T O N

MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009 III

Seeitallthroughoureyes.

Theworldischanged.

Read the new-look IHT.New eyes on a changed world.

By JIM RUTENBERG, PETER BAKER

and BILL VLASIC

WASHINGTON — For a new presi-

dent, the automobile industry crisis

has tested the boundaries of Presi-

dent Obama’s activist approach and

the acuity of his political instincts.

As with so many issues in his action-

packed 100 days in office, Mr. Obama

confronted choices few of his prede-

cessors encountered.

His ongoing intervention in an icon-

ic sector of the economy offers a case

study in the education, management

and decision-making of a fledgling

president.

Tutored by veterans of past adminis-

trations, Mr. Obama, often after dinner

with his wife and daughters, devoured

briefing papers until midnight to mas-

ter the intricacies of the auto industry.

But he had advisers deal directly with

the car companies and never spoke

with the General Motors chief execu-

tive he effectively fired.

Methodical and dispassionate, Mr.

Obama aggravated powerful play-

ers in Congress and the unions that

helped elect him, then moved to as-

suage them. He encouraged inter-

nal debate but was forced to head off

tensions as his treasury secretary

and White House economic adviser

maneuvered for position. In the end,

he struggled with the proper balance

between government power and mar-

ket forces, a theme that has defined his

first months in office.

“The issues were obvious — balanc-

ing his interest in seeing the compa-

nies survive and prosper for the ben-

efit of the workers and communities

in which they operate and all the off-

shoot businesses, versus the interests

of American taxpayers,’’ said David

Axelrod, the president’s senior ad-

viser. “And overlaid on that is, when

is it appropriate for the government to

intervene?’’

But for all Mr. Obama’s confidence

— even some friends refer to a certain

cockiness — this is a president just four

years out of the Illinois legislature and

very much learning on the job. His in-

stincts for compromise, seen frequent-

ly in dealings with Congress, have left

him facing questions about his willing-

ness to face down powerful interests.

With General Motors restructuring

as he demanded and the Chrysler bank-

ruptcy being announced, the ultimate

success of Mr. Obama’s strategy may

rest in part on how far he will go to take

on constituencies like unions that have

been vital to his political standing.

A former community organizer with

little business experience, Mr. Obama

had developed a basic knowledge of the

auto industry during the campaign,

touring factories, stumping with Ron

Gettelfinger, a powerful ally as presi-

dent of the United Auto Workers, and

meeting with William Clay Ford Jr.,

the executive chairman of Ford who

later recalled discussing “the electri-

fication of our industry.’’

As Mr. Obama prepared to take

office, he increasingly relied on his

closest aides, primarily Lawrence H.

Summers, his newly tapped economic

adviser, and Timothy F. Geithner, who

would become his treasury secretary.

Few in his inner orbit had much expe-

rience in business, much less the auto

industry.

Mr. Obama grew irritated at the

auto executives, who in his view had a

long history of bad decisions. “What

are these guys thinking?’’ Mr. Axel-

rod remembered Mr. Obama asking

when the chief executives of Chrysler,

Ford and General Motors flew to

Washington aboard corporate jets to

request a bailout. On NBC’s “Meet

the Press’’ in December, Mr. Obama

castigated automakers for “repeated

strategic mistakes’’ and “failure to

adapt to changing times,’’ adding

that voters were “fed up’’ — and so

was he.

But his tough language angered

some Democratic allies, like Repre-

sentative John D. Dingell and Sena-

tor Carl Levin, both of Michigan, who

scolded him as talking down the in-

dustry.

“He comes from Illinois, which is au-

to-producing country, but apparently

not his part of Illinois,’’ Mr. Dingell

said. “Had he had an auto factory in

his town, he’d have had a better under-

standing of what was going on.’’

For good or ill, Mr. Obama has done

a lot in his first 100 days. The auto crisis

forced him to look at options once un-

thinkable, and, like many challenges,

remains unresolved.

In terms of leadership style, Mr.

Obama at times has seemed like a

cross between his two most recent

predecessors — intellectually curi-

ous, philosophically flexible and ea-

ger for input like Bill Clinton, while

disciplined, willing to delegate and

comfortable with bold decisions like

George W. Bush.

Mr. Obama is learning fast that he

cannot be all things to all constituen-

cies, and the labor leaders who did so

much for him during the campaign

sometimes chafe at his approach.

The U.A.W. recently called on mem-

bers to send e-mail messages to the

White House demanding that it “stand

up for the interests of workers and re-

tirees in these restructuring negotia-

tions.’’

Mr. Obama is gambling that his

judgment is the right one to salvage

an industry at the heart of America’s

economic self-image.

“At this point, the administration is

just playing poker,’’ Mr. Dingell said.

“If he gets the damn loans and saves

the industry, I guess I won’t be able to

complain.’’

And if Mr. Obama does not, the next

100 days promise to be even more chal-

lenging than the first.

Bold but Ready to Compromise, Obama Faces Auto Industry Crisis

MIKE THEILER/REUTERS

Dealing withthe ailingAmerican autoindustry has been a learning experiencefor President Obama.

A fledgling president has a major test of his leadership style.

An island in the Caribbean has been turned

into a chessboard, where for 50 years what

some call a revolution and others refer to as

a dictatorship has held sway. The unwilling

pawns here are Cuban people like Miguel,

Yudeixis or myself, spectators in this chess

match between the United States and Cu-

ban governments. Several generations of

Cubans have come of age during this long

stalemate.

In the last few weeks something has started

to change in this boring contest. The new oc-

cupant of the White House eased travel re-

strictions so Cuban-Americans can visit the

island, a sensitive issue in a country where

every one of us has a relative on the other

shore. He also lifted

existing restrictions

on remitta nces,

indispensable for

propping up many

families who would

otherwise be unable

to make it to the end

of the month.

Barack Obama

also announced that

televison satellite

companies are now

allowed to provide

their services to us,

although those sig-

nals — clandestinely

accessed with an-

tennas — have long

been an alternative

to the national programming that is heavy on

ideology.

Even though the embargo is still in place,

we Cubans understand clearly which restric-

tions come from our own government and

which are imposed from abroad. The limita-

tions to enter and leave the country, the con-

fiscation of émigrés’ property, the dual cur-

rency we’ve endured for the past 15 years and

the impossibility to purchase cars or homes

are from our own government. We are also

afraid to express our political views openly,

found a political party or read newspapers

with opinions other than those of the official

state organ, Granma.

The new spirit of the United States govern-

ment will not, immediately, shorten the lines

in consulates for those who are seeking to

fulfill their dreams outside Cuba. However, it

can help my downstairs neighbor get a coat

of paint for his apartment, the taxi driver buy

— with money sent by his brother — the en-

gine he needs to repair his old Chevrolet, and

the manicure attendant receive, in a package

postmarked in Hialeah, the plastic nails her

clients demand.

All this is going to

help empower Cuban

citizens, make them

more independent

from the govern-

ment, less compliant

to the official hand

that moves them

around the board as

if they were chess

pieces.

Many mothers

with exiled children

pray that this loos-

ening of restrictions

continues, and the

most stubborn se-

niors think this is a

propitious time to

start a dialogue. The Cuban government did

not expect the audacious proposal of “a new

beginning” in bilateral relations outlined by

Mr. Obama in the Americas Summit. The re-

sponse so far has been cautious, at least on the

side of the chess table we can observe.

Nonetheless, a lot of us have a feeling that

Raúl Castro cannot wait too long to make his

move; he can seek to prolong the conflict or to

make a gesture that confirms a dialogue. He is

trapped in the chess dilemma known as zug-

zwang, where an opponent loses because he

is forced to make a fatal move when he would

rather not make a move at all.

INTELLIGENCE/YOANI SÁNCHEZ

For the Castros, A More Complicated Game

Yoani Sánchez, who lives in Havana, has ablog at www.desdecuba/generaciony/.This article was translated from the Spanishby Carmen Spady.

TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Obama administration has placedCuba’s leadership in a difficult position.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009

their plans.

“Since 2000, there has been a re-

surgence of intra-European migra-

tion,” said Rainer Münz, a migra-

tion scholar who is head of research

and development at Erste Bank in

Vienna. “To a certain extent, that’s

clearly unwinding now.”

Between April 2008 and the end of

April 2009, as many as 50,000 workers

are likely to have returned home from

Ireland, mostly to Eastern Europe,

according to Alan Barrett of the Eco-

nomic and Social Research Institute

in Dublin.

“Things have changed quickly,”

said Monica Jelinkova, 25, who moved

to Dublin from the Czech Republic 18

months ago. “I used to know 15 people

here. Now there are only four friends

left.”

While unemployment is also ris-

ing in the Czech Republic, “it is much

easier to be at home with family and

with friends and not to have a job,”

she said, “than to be here and not to

have a job.”

The Czech government announced

in February that it, in turn, would pay

500 euros, or about $660, and provide

one-way plane tickets to each foreign-

er who has lost his job and wants to

go home.

And in Bucharest, Romania’s capi-

tal, workers from China have been

camped out in freezing weather in

front of the Chinese Embassy for two

months, essentially stranded after

their construction jobs disappeared.

Like the Czech Republic, Spain is

offering financial incentives to leave.

A new program aimed at legal immi-

grants from South America allows

them to take their unemployment

payments in a lump sum if they agree

to leave and not return for at least

three years. The Spanish govern-

ment says only around 3,000 people

have taken advantage of the plan, but

many others are leaving of their own

accord.

Airlines in Spain are offering deals

on one-way tickets to Latin America,

and they say demand has increased

significantly. Every day, Barajas air-

port in Madrid is the setting for emo-

tional departures, as families send

their jobless loved ones back home.

Japan has initiated a similar but

more stringent program that tar-

gets hundreds of thousands of Latin

American immigrants, part of a new

drive to encourage them to leave this

recession-racked country. So far, at

least 100 workers and their families

have agreed to leave, Japanese offi-

cials said.

But critics denounce Japan’s pro-

gram as shortsighted, inhumane and

a threat to what little progress Japan

has made in opening its economy to

foreign workers.

“It’s a disgrace. It’s cold-hearted,”

said Hidenori Sakanaka, director of

the Japan Immigration Policy Insti-

tute, an independent research orga-

nization.

“And Japan is kicking itself in the

foot,” he added. “We might be in a re-

cession now, but it’s clear it doesn’t

have a future without workers from

overseas.”

The program is limited to the coun-

try’s Latin American guest workers,

whose Japanese parents and grand-

parents emigrated to Brazil and

neighboring countries a century ago

to work on coffee plantations.

Until very recently, countries like

Spain, Ireland and Italy were nations

of emigrants, not immigrants.

That changed in the decade-long

expansion that began in the late

1990s. In Spain, where the growth has

been the most explosive, the foreign

population rose to 5.2 million last year

out of a total of 45 million people from

750,000 in 1999, according to the Na-

tional Statistics Institute. Ireland’s

population, now 4.1 million, was also

transformed, with the percentage of

foreign-born residents rising to 11 per-

cent in 2006 from 7 percent in 2002.

“In the U.S., it took generations to

build up a foreign-born population of

that size,” said Demetrios Papadem-

etriou, head of the Migration Policy

Institute, a research group in Wash-

ington. “These countries have done

it at an unprecedented rate, but the

society and institutions haven’t even

begun to have a chance to catch up.”

The reverse exodus from more

prosperous countries in Western Eu-

rope is likely to add to the pressures

already buffeting Central and East-

ern Europe, where migrants from de-

veloping countries are being encour-

aged to leave.

In 1990, the opposite case existed

in Japan. Facing a growing industrial

labor shortage, Japan started issu-

ing thousands of special work visas

to descendants of Latin American

emigrants. An estimated 366,000

Brazilians and Peruvians now live in

Japan.

The guest workers quickly became

the largest group of foreign laborers

in an otherwise immigration-averse

country, filling the so-called three-K

jobs (kitsui, kitanai, kiken — hard,

dirty and dangerous).

But the nation’s manufacturing

sector has slumped as demand for

Japanese goods evaporated, pushing

unemployment to a three-year high of

4.4 percent. Japan’s exports plunged

45.6 percent in March from a year ear-

lier, and industrial production is at its

lowest level in 25 years.

“There won’t be good employment

opportunities for a while, so that’s

why we’re suggesting that the Nikkei

Brazilians go home,” said Jiro Kawa-

saki, a former health minister and

senior lawmaker of the ruling Liberal

Democratic Party.

“Nikkei” visas are special visas

granted because of Japanese ances-

try or association.

Under the emergency program,

introduced in April, the country’s

Brazilian and other Latin American

guest workers are offered $3,000 to-

ward air fare, plus $2,000 for each de-

pendent — attractive lump sums for

many immigrants in Japan. Workers

who leave have been told they can

keep any amount left over.

But those who take advantage of

the program will not be allowed to

reapply for a work visa. Stripped of

that status, most would find it all but

impossible to return.

Spain, with an unemployment rate

of 15.5 percent, allows immigrants to

reclaim their residency and work

visas after three years. And people

like Mr. Mituletu, the Romanian,

can return every three months to

sign for his Spanish unemployment

benefits.

Mr. Kawasaki, however, said the

economic slump was a good oppor-

tunity to overhaul Japan’s immigra-

tion policy as a whole.

“We should stop letting unskilled

laborers into Japan. We should make

sure that even the three-K jobs are

paid well, and that they are filled by

Japanese,” he said. “I do not think

that Japan should ever become a

multiethnic society.”

Rita Yamaoka and her husband,

Sergio, who settled in Japan three

years ago at the height of the export

boom, are undecided about their fu-

tures. But they have both lost jobs at

auto factories.

“I feel immense stress. I’ve been

crying very often,” Mrs. Yamaoka,

38, said after a meeting where local

officials detailed the offer in this in-

dustrial town of Hamamatsu in cen-

tral Japan.

“I tell my husband that we should

take the money and go back,” she

said, her eyes teary. “We can’t afford

to stay here much longer.”

Others have made up their minds

to leave. “They put up with us as long

as they needed the labor,” said Wel-

lington Shibuya, who came six years

ago and lost his job at a stove factory

in October. “But now that the econo-

my is bad, they throw us a bit of cash

and say goodbye.”

By DAVID GONZALEZ

For the father, the choice was obvi-

ous: An engineer with several jobs yet

little money, he saw no future for his

daughter and son in their struggling

country, Ecuador. Eight years ago,

he paid traffickers to smuggle him

into Texas, then headed to New York,

where his wife and children flew in as

tourists, and stayed.

But the consequences of that deci-

sion have been anything but simple.

The daughter excelled in her Queens

high school and graduated from col-

lege with honors, but at 22 is still living

in the United States illegally. S he does

accounting for a small immigrant-run

business, fears venturing outside the

city and cannot get a driver’s license

in the country she has come to love.

Meanwhile, her 17-year-old brother,

who was born in the United States

during an earlier stay and is thus an

American citizen, enjoys privileges

his family cannot, like summers in Ec-

uador with his cousins. But bored and

alone most afternoons, he declared

last fall that he wanted to move back

to the old country.

“How can he even think that?” said

his mother, stunned. “We’re sacrific-

ing ourselves so he can get a better

education and a better job. After giv-

ing up everything to come here, he —

the only one with papers — wants to

go back?”

These four — who declined to be

identified, for fear of being deported

— are part of a growing group of what

are often called mixed-status families.

Nearly 2.3 million undocumented fami-

lies, about three-quarters of those who

are here illegally, have at least one child

who is a United States citizen, accord-

ing to the Pew Hispanic Center.

This Queens family illustrates how

the growing disparities within immi-

grant homes are pulling their mem-

bers in opposite directions and com-

plicating efforts to plan a common

future.

The mother, 47, who gave up her

fledgling career in Ecuador as a com-

puter systems analyst and now baby-

sits for money, has not had anywhere

near the same opportunities in this

country as the father, also 47, who

found rewarding work as a drafts-

man.

The parents are among a rising

proportion of illegal immigrants with

higher educations — at least one in ev-

ery four are believed to have had some

college .

The father first came to New York in

1986, after graduating at the top of his

class from the polytechnic university

in Quito. He came legally, on a student

visa, for graduate studies in engineer-

ing at City College, intending to return

home to his wife.

But when the couple learned she

was pregnant with their first child, he

dropped out and took a factory job —

violating the terms of his visa — then

arranged to have his wife and baby

daughter smuggled into Texas and

then to New York, where he felt he

could best provide for them.

“I knew I was passing into illegal-

ity,” said the father, a trim, youthful

man. “It was a very difficult decision

to make. But I had to support them.”

They moved to Miami and had the

son, born an American citizen. But

their hopes of a prosperous Ameri-

can life eluded them, and in 1992 they

returned to Ambato, the agricultural

hub in Ecuador where the father had

grown up.

But as their daughter raced through

school there, outpacing her class-

mates, the father worried about the

quality of schooling in Ecuador. He

resolved to give her, and her brother,

the American education he never com-

pleted.

They arrived back in New York in

2001. The father found work with a

Queens construction company, taking

precise measurements at work sites

and turning them into computerized

drawings. He makes more than he

would in Ecuador.

The mother, meanwhile, cares for

children in cramped apartments not

nearly as nice as the rambling, mod-

ern house she grew up in.

The discrepancies between their

lives frayed an already strained re-

lationship; they separated four years

ago. The children spend most week-

days with their father, in the narrow

attic of a dark house in Elmhurst,

Queens. On weekends, they take the

subway and a bus to the apartment

their mother rents in another Queens

neighborhood, Bayside.

The son is tightly tied to Ecuador.

As the only family member who can

travel freely, he has spent three sum-

mers there, playing soccer and going

to amusement parks with cousins.

He seems far less emotionally con-

nected to Queens. But the family in-

sists he stay in the United States. “As

a citizen, all doors are open for him,”

the mother said. “He knows there is

a difference, that he can do what we

cannot.”

FRANCK ROBICHON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Rita Yamaoka, a Brazilian immigrant, cried as she considered a Japanese plan to pay her to return home.

ÁNGEL FRANCO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The daughter of Ecuadorean immigrants has an Americancollege degree, but still cannot work legally in New York.

Family in One Country,But Two Different Worlds

Reverse Exodus Upends Migrant LivesFrom Page 1

With jobs in flux, it’sDublin to Dublinski and back again.

Many children ofillegal immigrants are American citizens.

Rachel Donadio reported fromAlcalá de Henares, Madrid andRome, Nelson D. Schwartz from Paris and Vienna and HirokoTabuchi from Hamamatsu, Japan.Eamon Quinn contributed report-ing from Dublin, and Davin Ellic-son from Bucharest, Romania.

Repubblica NewYork

M O N E Y & B U S I N E S S

MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009 V

SOFTWARE

HARDWARE

SERVICES

ACQUISITIONSSINCE JAN. 1, 2007

Oracle: 25 I.B.M.: 20 Cisco Systems: 19 Hewlett-Packard: 16

MAJORACQUISITION

SunMicrosystems

CognosWebEx

CommunicationsE.D.S.

COST $7.4 billion $5 billion $3.2 billion $13.9 billion

SIGNIFICANCE

Oracle will move into computer hardware

and gain critical software and patents.

I.B.M. greatly improved its software that helps companies

analyze their data.

Collaboration software became a new line of business for Cisco.

H.P. became the leading rival to

I.B.M.

Source: Company Web sites THE NEW YORK TIMES

By buying Sun Microsystems, Oracle will move beyond software and compete more directly with other technology companies that have been expanding their offerings.

By BROOKS BARNES

ENCINO, California — Kelly Pe-

ña, or “the kid whisperer,” as some

Hollywood producers call her, was

digging through a 12-year-old boy’s

dresser drawer. Her undercover

mission: to unearth what drives him

and use the findings to help the Walt

Disney Company reassert itself as a

cultural force among boys.

Ms. Peña, a Disney researcher, ze-

roed in on a ratty rock ’n’ roll T-shirt.

Black Sabbath?

“Wearing it makes me feel like

I’m going to an R-rated movie,” said

Dean, a shy redhead whose parents

asked that he be identified only by

first name.

Jackpot.

Ms. Peña and her team of an-

thropologists have spent 18 months

peering inside the heads of incom-

municative boys in search of just

that kind of psychological nugget.

Disney is relying on her insights to

create new entertainment for boys

6 to 14, a group that Disney used to

own way back in the days of “Davy

Crockett” but that has wandered in

the age of more girl-friendly Disney

fare like “Hannah Montana.”

Children can already see the re-

sults of Ms. Peña’s scrutiny on Dis-

ney XD, a new cable channel and

Web site (disney.go.com/disneyxd).

It’s no accident, for instance, that the

central character on “Aaron Stone”

is a mediocre basketball player. Ms.

Peña, 45, told producers that boys

identify with protagonists who try

hard to grow. “Winning isn’t nearly

as important to boys as Hollywood

thinks,” she said.

Actors have been instructed to

tote their skateboards around with

the bottoms facing outward. (Boys

in real life carry them that way to

display the personalization, Ms.

Peña found.) The games portion

of the Disney XD Web site now fea-

tures prominent trophy cases. (It’s

less about the level reached in the

game and more about sharing small

achievements, research showed.)

Fearful of coming off as too ma-

nipulative, youth-centric media

companies rarely discuss this kind

of field research. Disney is so proud

of its new “headquarters for boys,”

however, that it has made an excep-

tion, offering a rare window onto the

emotional hooks that are carefully

embedded in children’s entertain-

ment. The effort is as outsize as the

potential payoff: boys 6 to 14 account

for $50 billion in spending worldwide,

according to market researchers.

Thus far, Disney’s initiative is

limited to the XD channel. But Dis-

ney hopes that XD will produce a hit

show that can follow

the “High School Musi-

cal” model from cable

to merchandise to live

theater to feature film.

With the exception

of “Cars,” Disney has

been notably weak

on hit entertainment

franchises for boys.

(“Pirates of the Carib-

bean” and “Toy Story”

are in a type of hiberna-

tion, awaiting new big-

screen installments.)

Disney Channel’s au-

dience is 40 percent

male, but girls drive

most of the related

merchandising sales.

Boys are trickier

to pin down for a host

of reasons. They hop

more quickly than

their female counterparts from

sporting activities to television to

video games during leisure time.

They can also be harder to under-

stand: the cliché that girls are more

willing to chitchat about their feel-

ings is often true.

Hollywood has been thinking of

boys too narrowly — offering all ac-

tion or all animation — instead of a

more nuanced combination, said

Rich Ross, president of Disney Chan-

nels Worldwide.

He said that in Ms. Peña’s re-

search, boys across markets and

cultures described the television

aimed at them as “purposeless fun”

but expressed a strong desire for a

new channel that was “fun with a

purpose.”

By ASHLEE VANCE

SAN FRANCISCO — Most consum-

ers do not want to get a PC by purchas-

ing microprocessors, hard drives and

operating system software from differ-

ent suppliers and assembling them all

into a working computer. They prefer

to buy a complete, customized machine

from one supplier.

Corporate customers increasingly

want the same thing: a one-stop shop

for hardware, software and services.

And the largest technology companies

are deploying their huge cash hoards

to make acquisitions to bolster their

ability to be that single provider.

That trend drove Oracle, a leader

in business software, to recently an-

nounce that it was spending $7.4 bil-

lion to buy an ailing Sun Microsystems

and get into the computer hardware

business. Oracle beat out rival I.B.M.,

which considered buying Sun to en-

hance its own software offerings.

“Oracle will be the only company

that can engineer an integrated sys-

tem — applications to disk — where all

the pieces fit and work together so cus-

tomers do not have to do it themselves,”

Oracle’s chief executive, Lawrence J.

Ellison, recently said.

The drive to consolidate has made

life difficult for independent companies

like Sun, and the fall of such an indus-

try stalwart highlights the mounting

pressure on smaller firms in the com-

puter, storage and software industries

to find buyers. Even larger companies

like EMC and Dell could be vulnerable,

industry observers say.

“I believe that we are in the fifth in-

ning of a nine-inning consolidation

game,” said William T. Coleman III, a

former Sun executive and co-founder

of BEA Systems, who is now chief of

the software start-up Cassatt. “It’s not

over by any stretch of the imagination,

and there are drastic things that still

have to happen.”

Computer Firms Vie to Build 1-Stop Shop

JOHN MEDLAND/DISNEY XD

In ‘‘Aaron Stone,’’ the main character is amediocre athlete but a video game champion.

Software Keeps an Eye

On Those Working at Home

Disney Digs Into ClosetsTo Fathom Minds of Boys

What happens in the information

age when workers are no longer there

in front of the manager, but working

from home? In many managers’ eyes,

workers wouldn’t do as much work.

No worries. New

software can monitor

workers who, con-

veniently, do most of

their work on comput-

ers. It can also mea-

sure their efforts and

direct work to those who do it best.

LiveOps, a rapidly growing compa-

ny in Santa Clara, California, that op-

erates virtual call centers — agents

working from home across America

— has also found that software can

perform other management tasks.

How it uses that software points to

the direction in which technology is

taking the workplace.

Founded in 2000, LiveOps fields

some 20,000 “home agents,” all inde-

pendent contractors who take orders

for products advertised on late-night

TV, sell insurance or transcribe re-

cordings for other companies. The

agents even take pizza orders. If

there is a storm in a particular city

and pizza orders surge because no

one is going out, calls to the pizza

store are routed to LiveOps agents

thousands of miles away.

The virtual call center is nothing

new. A number of companies, like

Elance, oDesk and Guru, assemble

freelance work forces to take on

specific tasks so that companies

don’t have to run call centers or hire

additional employees. TopCoder and

RentACoder have done it specifically

for computer programmers. A start-

up, Serebra Connect, hires college

students in developing economies to

do work.

But Maynard Webb, the chief ex-

ecutive of LiveOps, says he thinks

that the company’s software gives

clients like Kodak, Colonial Penn and

PETER DaSILVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

LiveOps, a virtual call center, can track the productivityof operators nationwide. JeffVeir, a manager at LiveOps, shows network traffic toMaynard Webb, the company chairman.

ISTOCKPHOTO

DAMON

DARLIN

ESSAY

Five years ago, Oracle bought Peo-

pleSoft for more than $10 billion, ignit-

ing a furious rush to scoop up other

business software makers. Oracle

alone has since bought more than 40

other companies, spending close to

$15 billion for BEA and Siebel Systems

alone.

Many of the companies purchased

by Oracle had carved out a niche for

themselves during the Internet build-

out, providing unique functions that

assisted a rapid infrastructure expan-

sion. After the dot-com bust, however,

customers grew weary of visits from

software salesmen peddling isolated

wares. A simpler model evolved, in

which a handful of companies like

Oracle, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard

bought dozens of smaller players and

then competed to sell most of the soft-

ware needed to run a business.

While software companies led the

last round of consolidation, the hard-

ware industry now appears poised for

its own reshaping. “I think we’re at an

inflection point,” said Patricia C. Suel-

tz, a former I.B.M. and Sun executive,

who runs the start-up LogLogic.

Over the last decade, H.P. has driven

much of the consolidation through a

series of large acquisitions. It bought

Compaq Computer in 2001, which af-

fected both the PC and server markets

as other companies fought to expand

and match H.P.’s reach. For example,

the Chinese computer maker Lenovo

bought I.B.M.’s PC business, and Acer,

based in Taiwan, acquired Gateway,

which had already acquired eMa-

chines.

With $34 billion on hand, Cisco has

more funds at its disposal than any

other technology company and has

been mentioned as a suitor for storage

makers like EMC and NetApp. H.P.,

too, has come up as a potential buyer

for NetApp. And Dell has pledged to

spend some of its billions on server,

storage and services companies.

“I think people have been a little

more fearful, but there’s still a ton of

cash out there,” said Peter Falvey, the

co-founder of Revolution Partners, an

investment bank centered on technol-

ogy companies.

TristarProductions, a direct mar-

keting company, an advantage. The

software moves a company beyond

simple cost-cutting. Mr. Webb says

greater efficiencies can be found

because the company’s software

measures the results from each agent

according to criteria determined by

the client.

If a client wants agents to persuade

callers to buy additional products,

the software tracks that — and then

directs calls to the agents who do it

best. Those agents prosper.

What about the agents who aren’t

so good? “No one gets fired,” Mr.

Webb said. “They just don’t get

work.”

He thinks the concept can be ex-

panded to any line of work — like

health care, retailing, publishing and

law — where the output can be mea-

sured.

And the advantage for LiveOps,

which Mr. Webb says has been prof-

itable since 2006, is a harbinger of

things to come. “The economics are

better. No buildings. No benefits,”

said Mr. Webb, a former eBay execu-

tive. (LiveOps’s 300 employees do get

benefits.)

Before everyone wrings their

hands at the horror of an economy

shifting to workers paid by the

minute doing piecemeal work at the

kitchen table while monitored by an

all-seeing computer, consider that

Mr. Webb isn’t having trouble finding

workers.

“There are way more people who

want to work in this model than we

have room for,” he said.

Repubblica NewYork

S C I E N C E & T E C H N O L O GY

VI MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009

By GUY GUGLIOTTA

SPANAWAY, Washing-

ton — When Ed Shadle was

growing up, you could buy

a beat-up car for a couple

hundred dollars, pound out

the dents, drop a big engine

in it, paint it candy apple

red, take it to the outskirts

of town and race from stop-

light to stoplight until the

cops told you to go home.

Mr. Shadle, a retired IBM

field engineer, is 67 now,

and he is still racing. So a bit

over 10 years ago, he and his

good friend Keith Zanghi

bought an old vehicle in

Maine, pounded out the

dents, customized the exte-

rior, dropped a big engine in

it and painted it red.

Except this was a Lock-

heed F-104 Starfighter. The

real thing. The single-engine Mach

2.2 interceptor that ruled the skies

in the 1950s and 1960s. “In a post-9/11

world we probably wouldn’t have

been able to get one,” Mr. Shadle ac-

knowledged. But in 1999 they drove

this one away for $25,000.

And next year — on July 4, per-

haps — they intend to take the North

American Eagle to the hardpan des-

ert at Black Rock, Nevada, and run it

through a measured mile to set a new

land speed record of about 1,300 ki-

lometers per hour, 70 kilometers per

hour faster than the speed of sound.

Mr. Shadle is the driver.

The Eagle has stiff competition.

Late last year, Richard Noble and

Andy Green of Britain, who broke

the sound barrier on their way to set-

ting the current record of 1,228 kilo-

meters per hour in 1997, announced

the beginning of Bloodhound, a new

three-year project to build a jet-and-

rocket car capable of 1,610 kilometers

per hour.

Bloodhound enjoys private-sector

sponsorship, university technical

support and the endorsement and

some education financing from the

British government. The Eagle, on

the other hand, has about 44 volun-

teers giving up weekends and vaca-

tions to build the ultimate hot rod.

Mr. Zanghi said he and Mr. Sha-

dle had bankrolled Eagle for about

$250,000 over the last decade with one

thought in mind: “What we want,”

Mr. Shadle said, with a slow drawl,

“is to go fast.”

From nose to tail, the Eagle is 17

meters long, weighs 5,900 kilograms

and is powered by a single General

Electric LM1500 gas turbine, better

known as a J79 when it flew in F-104s.

The engine is a loaner from S Tur-

bine Services, a Canadian firm that

rebuilds J79s for repressurizing natu-

ral gas wells.

The rules are simple. Clock the

racer through a measured mile, turn

around and do it again, then average

the two speeds. The vehicle must have

at least four wheels — two of them

steerable — and be back at the origi-

nal start line within 60 minutes. And

that’s it. “You race Formula One or

Nascar, the rule books are as thick as

the Bible,” Mr. Shadle said. “For this,

the rule book is a half-page long.”

But consider the challenges. Rub-

ber tires turn to molten licorice at

anything above 560 kilometers per

hour, so the Eagle uses custom-built,

single-billet aluminum alloy wheels,

grooved for traction on soft surfaces.

The brakes are special alloy magnets

that generate 4,700 brake horsepower

as the magnetized drum approaches

the moving aluminum wheel, slowing

it gradually without ever locking up.

The Eagle team clipped the F-104’s

wings and ailerons, welded

new plates, stitched the

fuselage together with

thousands of new rivets

and hustled sponsors at

air and auto shows. Mr.

Shadle and Mr. Zanghi did

not have the money to buy

a J79 outright, but S Tur-

bines leased one to them

for almost nothing.

The big imponderable is

the sound barrier. In the

sky, the shock wave simply

dissipates. But on land, it

bounces off the ground and can flip

a racer into the air. Since each car is

unique, the problem has to be solved

differently every time.

Mr. Zanghi is 54, a shortish, low-key

man with a buzz cut and spectacles.

He started crewing for race cars af-

ter high school. He met Mr. Shadle in

the mid-1990s when he volunteered to

work on a land-speed racer team. Mr.

Shadle was a part owner.

The partners thought an F-104

might do for the land speed record. It

took Mr. Shadle more than a year to

find the one in Maine. The Air Force

sold it to a Los Angeles company to

use as a template for spare parts, and

it was later junked. The engine had

been removed, half the plates were

ripped off and the rest were decorated

with graffiti and bird droppings.

“It was about two months from

being turned into beer cans,” Mr.

Zanghi recalled.

By NICHOLAS WADE

The era of personal genomic medi-

cine may have to wait. The genetic

analysis of common disease is turn-

ing out to be a lot more complex than

expected.

Since the human genome was de-

coded in 2003, researchers have been

developing a powerful method for

comparing the genomes of patients

and healthy people, with the hope

of pinpointing the DNA changes re-

sponsible for common diseases.

This method, called a genomewide

association study, has proved techni-

cally successful despite many skep-

tics’ initial doubts. But it has been dis-

appointing in that the kind of genetic

variation it detects has turned out to

explain surprisingly little of the ge-

netic links to most diseases.

The unexpected impasse also af-

fects companies that offer personal

genomic information and that had

assumed they could inform custom-

ers of their genetic risk for diseases,

based on researchers’ discoveries.

“With only a few exceptions, what

the genomics companies are doing

right now is recreational genomics,”

said Dr. David B. Goldstein, a Duke

University geneticist who was among

the contributors to a recent issue of

The New England Journal of Medi-

cine that appears to be the first public

attempt by scientists to make sense of

this puzzling result. “The information

has little or in many cases no clinical

relevance,” Dr. Goldstein said.

These companies are probably

not performing any useful service at

present, he added.

One issue of debate among re-

searchers is whether, despite the

prospect of diminishing returns,

to continue with the genomewide

studies, which cost many millions

of dollars apiece, or switch to a new

approach like decoding the entire ge-

nomes of individual patients.

Unlike the rare diseases caused

by a change affecting only one gene,

common diseases like cancer and di-

abetes are caused by a set of several

genetic variations in each person.

Since these common diseases gener-

ally strike later in life, after people

have had children, the theory has

been that natural selection is power-

less to weed them out.

The problem addressed in The New

England Journal of Medicine is that

these diseases were expected to be

promoted by genetic variations that

are common in the population. More

than 100 genomewide association

studies, often involving thousands

of patients in several countries, have

now been completed for many diseas-

es, and some common variants have

been found. But in almost all cases

they carry only a modest risk for the

disease. Most of the genetic link to

disease remains unexplained.

Dr. Goldstein argues that the genet-

ic burden of common diseases must

be mostly carried by large numbers

of rare variants. Schizophrenia, say,

would be caused by combinations of

1,000 rare genetic variants, not of 10

common genetic variants.

This would be bleak news for those

who argue that the common variants

detected so far, even if they explain

only a small percentage of the risk,

will nonetheless identify the biologi-

cal pathways through which a disease

emerges. They argue that this would

lead to the drugs that may correct the

errant pathways. But if hundreds of

rare variants are involved in a dis-

ease, they may implicate too much of

the body’s biochemistry to be useful.

“In pointing at everything,” Dr.

Goldstein writes in the journal, “ge-

netics would point at nothing.”

Two other geneticists, Peter Kraft

and David J. Hunter of the Harvard

School of Public Health, also writing

in the journal, largely agree with Dr.

Goldstein that probably many genet-

ic variants “are responsible for the

majority of the inherited risk of each

common disease.”

But they disagree that there will

be diminishing returns from more

genomewide association studies.

“There will be more common vari-

ants to find,” Dr. Hunter said. “It

would be unfortunate if we gave up

now.”

Dr. Goldstein, however, said it was

“beyond the grasp of the genome-

wide association studies” to find rare

variants with small effects, even by

recruiting enormous numbers of

patients. He said resources should

be switched away from these highly

expensive studies, which in his view

have now done their job.

“If you ask what is the fastest way

for us to make progress in genetics

that is clinically helpful,” he said, “I

am absolutely certain it is to marshal

our resources to interrogate full ge-

nomes, not in fine-tuning our analy-

ses of common variations.”

He advocates decoding the full

DNA of carefully selected patients.

Dr. Kraft and Dr. Hunter say that a

person’s genetic risk of common dis-

eases can be estimated only roughly

at present but that estimates will im-

prove as more variants are found.

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Richard Wrangham, a primatologist

and anthropologist, has spent four de-

cades observing wild chimpanzees in

Africa to see what their behavior might

tell us about prehistoric humans. Dr.

Wrangham, 60, was born in Britain

and since 1989 has been at Harvard

University, where he is a professor of

biological anthropology. He is about to

publish another book, “Catching Fire:

How Cooking Made Us Human.”

Q. In your new book, you suggest thatcooking was what facilitated our evolu-tion from ape to human. Until now sci-entists have theorized that tool makingand meat eating set the conditions for the ascent of man. Why do you arguethat cooking was the main factor?A.All that you mention were drivers of

the evolution of our species. However,

our large brain and the shape of our

bodies are the product of a rich diet

that was only available to us after we

began cooking our foods. It was cook-

ing that provided our bodies with more

energy than we’d previously obtained

as foraging animals eating raw food.

Modern chimps are likely to take the

same kinds of foods as our early an-

cestors. In the wild, they’ll be lucky to

find a fruit as delicious as a raspberry.

More often they locate a patch of fruits

as dry and strong-tasting as rose hips,

which they’ll masticate for a full hour.

Chimps spend most of their day find-

ing and chewing extremely fibrous

foods. Their diet is very unsatisfying

to humans. But once our ancestors

began eating cooked foods — approxi-

mately 1.8 million years ago — their

diet became softer, safer and far more

nutritious.

And that’s what fueled the develop-

ment of the upright body and large

brain that we associate with modern

humans. Our ancestors were able to

evolve because cooked foods were

richer, healthier and required less eat-

ing time.

Q.To cook, you need fire. How did early humans get it?A. The austrolopithicines, the prede-

cessors of our prehuman ancestors,

lived in savannahs with dry uplands.

They would often have encountered

natural fires and food improved by

those fires. Moreover, we know from

cut marks on old bones that our dis-

tant ancestor Homo habilis ate meat.

They certainly made hammers from

stones, which they may have used to

tenderize it. We know that sparks fly

when you hammer stone. It’s reason-

able to imagine that our ancestors ate

food warmed by the fires they ignited

when they prepared their meat.

Q.Since you believe that the raw fare of prehistory would leave a modern per-son starving, does that mean we areadapted to the foods that we currentlyeat — McDonald’s, pizza?A.I think we’re adapted to our diet. It’s

that our lifestyle is not. We’re adapted

in the sense that our bodies are de-

signed to maximize the amount of en-

ergy we get from our foods.

So we are very good at selecting the

foods that produce a lot of energy.

However, we take in far more than we

need. That’s not adaptive.

Unraveling the Genome May Not Cure Diseases

LANDSPEED

BUILT FOR SPEED The North American Eagle, a converted jet fighter, on a test run in Nevada, where the crew will try to set a land speed record.

RICK FRIEDMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Richard Wrangham has studied the diets of wild chimpanzees.

LANDSPEED

Detecting genetic risks may have little clinicalrelevance.

Flying, Without Leaving the Ground

At the DawnOf Man,A Cookout

A FORCE A computergraphic showing the flow of air around the vehicle, which mayreach 1,300 kilometersper hour.

Repubblica NewYork

P E R S O N A L I T I E S

MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009 VII

By CHARLES McGRATH

Except for a puzzling string of duds

in the mid-’70s, almost all of Mike

Nichols’s movies have made money,

and a few, like “The Graduate,’’ have

been recognized as cultural land-

marks. But it’s sometimes hard to say

what makes a Nichols movie a Nichols

movie. They seem like vehicles for ac-

tors, not the director, whose stamp is

in leaving almost no trace of himself.

“If you want to be a legend, God help

you, it’s so easy,” Mr. Nichols said re-

cently. “You just do one thing. You can

be the master of suspense, say. But if

you want to be as invisible as is practi-

cal, then it’s fun to do a lot of different

things.”

If his movies have a common de-

nominator, it’s probably their intelli-

gence and, though Mr. Nichols doesn’t

think of himself as a writer, they have

a writerly attention to detail.

Rajendra Roy, the organizer of a re-

cent retrospective at the Museum of

Modern Art in New York, said: “ He’s

an example of how popular cinema

can be vision based.’’

Nora Ephron, who wrote the script

for Mr. Nichols’s movie “Heartburn’’

and co-wrote his film “Silkwood,’’ said

recently: “It’s supposed to be a given

that Mike doesn’t have the visual style

of, say, a Scorsese. But that isn’t fair.

Mike doesn’t use the camera in a flam-

boyant way, but he has a style just the

way a writer who’s crystal clear has a

style. He has an almost invisible fluid-

ity.”

Mr. Nichols is now 77 but hardly

slowing down. His most recent film

was “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and he is

considering movies based on scripts

by David Mamet and Tony Kushner.

Still boyish looking, Mr. Nichols re-

tains the deadpan, quicksilver wit that

for a while made him and Elaine May

the most innovative comedians in the

United States.

He was born Michael Igor Pe-

schkowsky, the son of a White Rus-

sian doctor who emigrated to Berlin

after the Russian revolution, and he

arrived in New York in 1939, at the age

of 7, permanently hairless (a reaction

to whooping cough vaccine; he now

wears a wig and paste-on eyebrows)

and with almost no English. He en-

rolled at the Dalton School, an elite pri-

vate school, and set about cultivating

what he calls his “immigrant’s ear.”

“Semiconsciously I was thinking all

the time: ‘How do they do it? Let me

listen,’ ’’ he recalled. His father died

when he was 12, plunging the family

into genteel poverty. Lonely and self-

conscious about his looks, he found

solace in the movies and theater.

He attended the University of Chi-

cago, floundered a bit, and then was

heaped with success, first with Ms.

May, whom he met in college, and next

as a theater director. Mr. Nichols is

one of very few in the performing arts

to receive all four major American en-

tertainment awards: he has a Gram-

my, an Oscar, four Emmys and eight

Tonys. He is a shrewd dealmaker, and

along the way there were countless

girlfriends, multiple wives, paintings,

cars, a stable.

The only thing he doesn’t have

enough of anymore is time. He used

to love to develop a play out of town,

then put it aside for a few months. “Ev-

erything gets simpler on the shelf,” he

said. He also recalled, with amaze-

ment, how long he was allowed to work

on “The Graduate,” which he directed

when he was in his mid-30s.

“It’s painful and hard to remember

now how long and how carefully we

worked,” he said.

But he has never lost his joy for

connecting with an audience: “The

greatest thrill is that moment when

a thousand people are sitting in the

dark, looking at the same scene, and

they are all apprehending something

that has not been spoken. That’s the

thrill of it, the miracle — that’s what

holds us to movies forever. It’s what

we wish we could do in real life. We

all see something and understand

it together, and nobody has to say a

word. ’’

COURTESY MOMA FILM STILLS ARCHIVE TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Mike Nichols’s understated style of filmmaking is seen in “The Graduate’’ from 1967, starring Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman.

MIKE NICHOLS

Staying in the Background, Projecting a Vision“If you want to be as

invisible as is practical,

then it’s fun to do a lot

of different things.”

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

BUENOS AIRES — “Cumbio is here!”

a young girl shouted, after spotting

Agustina Vivero on the steps of the Abas-

to shopping mall here one recent Sunday.

Rushing over, the girl gave Ms. Vivero a

hug and then pulled out a camera, leaned

in to Ms. Vivero and snapped a shot with

an outstretched arm.

Within minutes dozens of teenagers

were swarming around, clamoring for a

few seconds with Ms. Vivero, an Inter-

net and television celebrity with pink-

streaked hair and a pierced lower lip.

The past year has been a whirlwind

for Ms. Vivero, known here simply as

Cumbio for her love of cumbia music, a

fusion of Latin pop, salsa and dance that

is popular among Argentina’s lower

classes. She has catapulted herself to

stardom by transforming Internet fame

as Argentina’s most popular “flogger”

into marketing muscle, signing model-

ing contracts, promoting dance clubs

and writing a book about her life.

And she is all of 17.

“When people see me in the street

sometimes they cry or they want to hug

me or kiss me,” she said. “Or they hate

me. It is all very surprising.”

A filmmaker is shooting a documen-

tary about her life. There is a Cumbio

perfume and talk of a reality-based tele-

vision show. Her unlikely popularity is

also redefining stereotypes of youth ce-

lebrity in Argentina.

Ms. Vivero, who is openly gay, de-

scribes herself and other floggers as

“androgynous” for their unisex clothing.

She is comfortable with not being model-

thin, boasting of her love of junk food

and chocolate — a different message in

a country where women have high rates

of eating disorders.

“We are breaking a lot of barriers,”

she said.

Floggers take photos of themselves

and friends and post them on photo blogs.

Fotolog.com claims to have more than

5.5 million users in Argentina, which is

one of the two biggest markets for the

site; Chile is the other. Ms. Vivero’s site is

among the most viewed Internet sites in

Argentina, logging 36 million visits over

the past year, based on figures tallied by

fotolog, she said.

Her ride to fame started early last

year when she invited some friends over

to her family’s house in San Cristóbal, a

working-class neighborhood. They hung

out and took photos of themselves. By the

fourth week the number had swelled to

2,000.

“I’ll have fun with this while it lasts,”

Ms. Vivero said. “When it ends, well

that’s that. I’ll still have all the pho-

tos.”

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

AHMADABAD, India — Thirty-

five years ago in this once thriving

textile town, Ela Bhatt fought for

higher wages for women who ferried

bolts of cloth on their heads. Next, she

created India’s first women’s bank.

Since then, her Self-Employed

Women’s Association, or SEWA,

has offered retirement accounts and

health insurance to women who nev-

er had a safety net, lent working capi-

tal to entrepreneurs to open beauty

salons in the slums, helped artisans

sell their handiwork to new urban de-

partment stores and boldly trained

its members to become gas station at-

tendants — an unusual job for women

on the bottom of India’s social ladder.

Mrs. Bhatt is a Gandhian pragma-

tist for the New India.

At 76, she is a critic of some of In-

dia’s embrace of market reforms, but

nevertheless keen to see the poorest

of Indian workers get a stake in the

country’s swiftly globalizing econo-

my. She has built a formidable empire

of women-run, Gandhian-style coop-

eratives — 100 at last count — some

providing child care for working

mothers, others selling sesame seeds

to Indian food-processing firms — all

modeled after the Gandhian ideal of

self-sufficiency .

She calls it the quest for economic

freedom in a democratic India.

Her quest offers a glimpse into the

changing desires of Indian women.

Tinsmiths or pickle makers, embroi-

derers or vendors of onions, SEWA’s

members are mostly employed in the

informal sector. They get no regular

paychecks, sick leave or holidays.

The share of Indians employed in

the informal sector — where they are

not covered bysocialist-era labor laws

from the time of the cold war — has

grown to more than 90 percent since

1991, according to a recent report.

Among them, the report found,

nearly three-fourths lived on less

than 20 cents a day and had virtu-

ally no safety net. “Why should there

be a difference between worker and

worker,” Mrs. Bhatt wondered aloud,

“whether they are working in a fac-

tory, or at home or on the footpath?”

With 500,000 members in western

Gujarat State alone, the SEWA empire

includes two profit-making firms that

stitch and embroider women’s cloth-

ing. More than 100,000 women are

enrolled in the organization’s health

and life insurance plans. Its bank

has 350,000 depositors and, like most

microfinance organizations, a repay-

ment rate as high as 97 percent.

“We don’t have a liquidity prob-

lem,” its manager, Jayshree Vyas,

pointed out merrily. “Women save.”

A SEWA loan of roughly $250 al-

lowed Namrata Rajhari to start a

beauty salon 15 years ago from her

one-room shack in a working-class

enclave called Behrampura.

With money from her business,

Mrs. Rajhari installed a toilet at

home, added a loft and bought a

washing machine. “Before, I felt

blank. I didn’t know anything about

the world,” she said the other day.

“Now, with my earnings, my children

are studying.”

“The computer is also from my

parlor money,” she added. A daugh-

ter, Srishti, is enrolled in a private

English school. She wants to be an

astronomer.

Born to a privileged Brahmin fam-

ily, Mrs. Bhatt charted an unusual

path. She earned a law degree and

chose the man she would marry. She

began her career as a lawyer for the

city’s main union for textile workers,

the vast majority of them men, and

broke away in 1981 to create a new

union for women.

The fishmongers and quilt-makers

who were SEWA Bank’s earliest

customers sometimes stashed their

checkbooks in the bank’s steel cabi-

nets, she recalled, lest their husbands

discover they had money of their

own.

At first, the women’s ambitions

were limited, she said. They wanted

toilets, hair shears or sewing ma-

chines for work and money to pay for

their children’s school fees. Slowly,

they began to dream big. Mothers

now want their daughters to learn

to ride a scooter and work on a com-

puter.

“They didn’t see the future at that

time,” she said. “Expectations have

gone very high.”

“When people see me in the

street sometimes they cry

or they want to hug me or

kiss me. Or they hate me.

It is all very surprising.”

NICOLAS GOLDBERG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Agustina Vivero, center, has cashed in on her Internet fame.

“Why should there

be a difference

between worker

and worker,

whether they

are working in

a factory or at

home?’’

RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Charles Newbery contributed reporting.

ELA BHATT

Building an EmpireWith India’s Poor Women

AGUSTINA VIVERO

Pink HairAnd Photos

Lead to Fame

Repubblica NewYork

A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, MAY 4, 2009

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES — A scene from

the new journalistic thriller “State of

Play” says it all.

Jeff Daniels, as the politician

George Fergus, squares off with

Russell Crowe, as the pen-wield-

ing journalist Cal McAffrey. Two

men. One notebook. Four chins.

Hollywood’s pool of leading

men is getting larger — and not

necessarily in a good way.

Based on a close look at trail-

ers, still photos and some films

already released, at least a dozen

male stars in some of the year’s

most prominent movies have gotten

noticeably fatter.

In “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,”

a subway heist movie opening from

Columbia Pictures and MGM around

the world this summer, Denzel Wash-

ington, 54, goes cheek-to-jowl with the

bulky John Travolta, 55 — and they are

beginning to look like a matched set.

Mr. Washington is no longer the lean,

mean boxing machine he portrayed in

“The Hurricane” 10 years ago.

Hugh Grant, 48, who played the

skinny cad to a puffy Renée Zellweger

in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” just eight

years ago, may find the tables turned

in “Did You Hear About the Morgans?,”

a comedy to be released by Columbia

in December. His co-star, Sarah Jes-

sica Parker, is the sleek one this time

around, while Mr. Grant’s famous dim-

ples pop out where they used to pop in.

Even Leonardo DiCaprio, the young

heartthrob from “Titanic,” is better

padded these days, at 34. Photos from

the set of “Shutter Island,” a thriller on

tap from Paramount Pictures and the

director Martin Scorsese in October,

show a little bit more to love.

Hollywood’s women may have

weight issues of their own. But it is

somehow less noticeable, possibly be-

cause actresses who expand do not of-

ten get roles to showcase that growth.

But the men are still playing leads

into their 40s and 50s — giving glimps-

es of what age, and perhaps a little

inattention, can do to a most admired

physique.

“John Wayne always looked a bit

portly,” noted Lawrence Turman, a

veteran film producer who is chairman

of the Peter Stark producing program

at the University of Southern Califor-

nia’s School of Cinematic Arts. “Mike

Nichols once told me the one essential

for an actor to have is a large head, so

as to be seen,” Mr. Turman said.

Photos of midcentury stars — Hum-

phrey Bogart, James Stewart, Clark

Gable and others — show them to have

remained rather gaunt at an age when

many of the current crop are anything

but.

The change in smoking habits may

have something to do with it. Possibly,

too, the audience has grown more tol-

erant of weightier men on screen as

the society at large has become heavi-

er. Still, size can become an issue when

making a film.

“The bigger people are, the more con-

cern there is about high blood pressure

or the possibility of strokes or heart at-

tacks” during a shoot, said Brian King-

man, a managing director of Arthur J.

Gallagher & Company, which sells en-

tertainment insurance. For all but the

oldest stars, however, an extra 5 to 15

kilograms is usually not a major under-

writing concern, Mr. Kingman said.

By DAVE ITZKOFF

LOS ANGELES — Engage J.J.

Abrams in conversation for even a

few minutes and he will gladly con-

fess the role that “Star Trek” played

in his cultural coming of age. “I was

not a fan,” he said recently.

Though Mr. Abrams would even-

tually become a creator of the tele-

vision shows “Lost,” “Alias” and

“Fringe” — series that owe their

existence to boyhoods fueled by

syndicated television and second-

run movies — when he grew up in

the 1970s and ’80s he had no interest

in the voyages of the Starship Enter-

prise and its crew.

Not that Mr. Abrams, now 42, had

anything against science fiction; he

just preferred “The Twilight Zone”

and its supernatural morality plays.

This would not be an especially re-

markable revelation except that Mr.

Abrams is to be the director of “Star

Trek,” the coming feature

film (opening worldwide in

May) that is Paramount’s

$150 million attempt to re-

juvenate the decades-old

space adventure franchise,

the first movie to provide

an official origin story for

the Enterprise team.

Mr. Abrams’s admis-

sion, made offhandedly in

the lunchtime company of

his “Star Trek” collabora-

tors, didn’t raise a single

eyebrow around the table.

From Roberto Orci and Al-

ex Kurtzman (who created

“Fringe” with Mr. Abrams

and wrote the “Trans-

formers” films) to Damon

Lindelof (a creator and

producer of “Lost”) and

Bryan Burk (Mr. Abrams’s produc-

ing partner), they’ve all heard his

pronouncements on “Trek” before.

But the remark is emblematic of

why this particular team, compris-

ing broad sci-fi fans and a couple of

“Trek” aficionados, has been hand-

ed control of a fantasy franchise that

is one of the most recognizable in en-

tertainment yet was in serious disre-

pair, a victim of diminished expecta-

tions and waning enthusiasm.

Mr. Abrams and his partners are

guys with mainstream pop-culture

aspirations; their forte is taking on

genres with finite but dedicated fan

bases — science fiction, fantasy and

horror — and making them acces-

sible to wider audiences. And what

they had in mind for their “Star

Trek” movie is a film that is consis-

tent with 43 years of series history

but not beholden to it.

“There’s just too much stuff out

there to be loyal to everything,” Mr.

Lindelof said.

If “Star Trek” fails, Mr. Kurtzman

said, “it’ll be the biggest personal

failure we’ve ever had, because we

will have actually violated some-

thing that means a lot to us.”

Their “Trek” movie puts them si-

multaneously on a new trajectory

and right in the heart of the series’s

mythology. It tells the story of a

reckless 23rd-century youth named

James T. Kirk (played by Chris Pine)

who enrolls in the Starfleet Acade-

my, driven in part by the death of his

father, a starship officer who sacri-

ficed his life for his crew. He is drawn

into a band of talented cadets, clash-

ing with the half-Earthling, half-

alien Spock (Zachary Quinto of the

television series “Heroes”).

For the “Trek” faithful there are

plenty of nods to past television epi-

sodes and movies. Perhaps more au-

daciously, this “Star Trek” also has a

time-travel story line that essential-

ly gives those on its creative team

license to amend internal “Trek”

history as they need to.

What ultimately inspired him

about “Star Trek,” Mr. Abrams said,

was that in contrast to a science-

fiction saga like “Star Wars” “Trek”

was not set a long time ago, in a gal-

axy far, far away; it was a hopeful

vision of what this planet’s future

could be.

“We’ve become so familiar with

the idea of space travel because of

so many movies and TV shows that

it’s lost its adventure and its possibil-

ity, its sense of wonder,” Mr. Abrams

said. “Forty-three years ago it was

not a boring idea.”

Mr. Abrams said that throughout

the production process Mr. Orci and

Mr. Lindelof, both acolytes of “Trek”

history, were there to keep an eye on

him. The filmmakers also received

the blessing of Leonard Nimoy, who

created the role of Spock and agreed

to reprise the character in the film.

“Any fan who would think that it’s

not ‘Trek’ has to say that to Leonard

Nimoy’s face,” Mr. Orci said. “Don’t

talk to me, talk to Spock.”

By FRED KAPLAN

Andy Warhol designed three mile-

stone album covers in the 1960s and

’70s: “The Velvet Underground & Ni-

co,” with the image of the banana that

you could peel, and two Rolling Stones

LPs, including “Sticky Fingers,” with

the provocative zipper that you could

unzip.

But who knew that Warhol, the pio-

neer of Pop Art, drew more than 50

album covers over the span of his ca-

reer ?

These works are the subject of a

lavishly illustrated, fastidiously doc-

umented book, “Andy Warhol: The

Record Covers, 1949-1987,” published

jointly by Prestel and the Montreal

Museum of Fine Arts. The author,

Paul Maréchal, is curator of the art

collection at the Power Corporation

of Canada, which consists mainly of

French decorative art of the 18th and

19th centuries.

But he has long had a penchant for

Warhol, and one day in 1996, he saw

Paul Anka’s 1976 album “The Painter,”

and that stopped him short. The cover

was clearly designed by Warhol. It

had the same look as his celebrity

portraits, which he did for hefty com-

missions, by taking a Polaroid photo,

enlarging it into a screen print, then

painting it over with scribbly lines and

pastel colors.

Mr. Maréchal called the Andy War-

hol Museum in Pittsburgh to ask if

there was more where that came from.

The archivist Matt Wrbican sent him

the titles of 23 albums whose covers

Warhol was known to have designed.

Over the next 12 years Mr. Maréchal

hunted down all of them, and in the

process found another 28, or 51 in all.

(Since the book was published, collec-

tors in Europe have sent him two more,

including a 1984 album by the Swedish

band Rat Fab.)

In 2006, at an art exhibition in Mar-

seille, France, Mr. Maréchal ran into

Stéphane Aquin, the curator of con-

temporary art at the Montreal Mu-

seum of Fine Arts. Mr. Maréchal told

him about his collection of album cov-

ers. Mr. Aquin decided to organize a

show not just on the album covers but

on the role of music in all of Warhol’s

work. (The show, “Warhol Live,” is

on display at the de Young Museum

in San Francisco and will open at the

Warhol Museum in June.)

When Warhol came to New York in

1949, fresh out of art school, the long-

playing record had just hit the market-

place. Warhol called the big labels, of-

fering to illustrate their covers. He won

an assignmentfrom Columbia Records,

for an LP called “A Program of Mexi-

can Music.” His drawings, of ancient

drummers and dancers, were crude,

but they anticipated signature aspects

of his later works. He copied the figures

from 16th-century Aztec sketches that

he found in a Museum of Modern Art

catalog, a forerunner of his tendency to

make art from existing images.

Warhol’s cover for the jazz guitar-

ist Kenny Burrell’s self-titled debut

album on the Blue Note label, in 1956,

was a drawing based on a photograph,

as were many of Warhol’s later por-

traits.

“Already you see the sense of move-

ment, the low-angle perspective that’s

very much associated with film or

photographs,” Mr. Maréchal said. It’s

a precedent, he added, for Warhol’s

move a decade later into photograph-

ing pop stars and making movies.

The following year, on another Blue

Note album cover, the saxophonist

Johnny Griffin’s “Congregation,”

Warhol — again working from a photo

— painted fragments of colored flow-

ers on Griffin’s shirt, which not only

imbued the drawing with a splashy

rhythm but also foreshadowed the gi-

ant flowers that Warhol would paint

over and over.

Warhol used the album cover as

a testing ground and template for

the styles he’d develop more fully

in the Pop age to come. And after he

crossed over from commercial illus-

trator to museum artist, he continued

the practice. “We’re accustomed to

distinguishing between high art and

mass commercial art,” Mr. Aquin

said. “Warhol never made that dis-

tinction.”

The PopOf Warhol(Also JazzAnd Rock)

GLEN WILSON

A New Team Retrofits The Old Enterprise

For Today’s Leading Men, the Rolls of Fat Are as Weighty as the Roles

EMI GROUP LIMITED/THE MONTREAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

Andy Warhol’s artwork for a 1957 record by Johnny Griffin and for a 1956 album by Kenny Burrell. A new book showcases his album art.

INDUSTRIAL LIGHT AND MAGIC

The new “Star Trek” movie introducesa new cast. Chris Pine, left, as James T.Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock.

Russell Crowe is among the movie stars gaining weight.

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