MONDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2010 Copyright © 2010 The New York Times

Supplemento al numeroodierno de la Repubblica

Sped. abb. postale art. 1legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

LENS

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

PARIS

IN A “SEX AND THE CITY” epi-

sode, Miranda goes speed-dating

and wastes her eight-minute pitch

three times by giving away that she is

a corporate lawyer. The fourth time she

says she is a stewardess and gets asked

out by a doctor.

What made the episode poignant was

not just that Miranda lied about her

success, but that her date did, too: it

turned out he worked in a shoe store.

Is female empowerment killing

romance?

Sexual attraction

in the 21st century,

it seems, still feeds

on 20th-century

stereotypes. Now,

as more women

match or overtake men in education

and the labor market, they are also

turning traditional gender roles on

their head, with some profound conse-

quences for relationship dynamics.

There is a growing army of suc-

cessful women in their 30s who have

trouble finding a mate . There are the

alpha-women who end up with alpha-

men but then decide to put career

second when the babies come. But

there is also a third group: a small but

growing number of women who out-

earn their partners, giving rise to an

assortment of behavioral contortions

aimed at keeping the appearance of

traditional gender roles intact.

Anne-Laure Kiechel is an investment

banker in Paris who makes more than

five times more than her boyfriend, a

communications consultant. She keeps

watch on their finances and pays for all

big invisible expenses, like vacations.

But in public, it is he who insists on

pulling out his credit card to avoid, he

said, looking like a “gigolo.”

’’It makes me laugh,’’ Ms. Kiechel

said. ’’But if it pleases him, that’s fine.’’

(Not long ago, he asked her to book

hotels in his name because he doesn’t

like being referred to as ’’Mr. Kiechel’’

upon arrival; future bookings would

be made in both names, she said.)

Timothy Eustis, once a teacher in

New York City, is a proud stay-at-home

dad and occasional wine consultant,

who moved to France with his wife,

Sarah, when she was offered a senior

management post at the French lin-

A virtual strip search may sound like an activity only your avatarwould partake in, but that’s what critics of the full-body scanners

in airports arecalling them. As more peopleencountered the machines, which create imagesof a near-nakedbody, there werecomplaints thatthe scanners were

indecent and threatened privacy.Really? These days, when most

people have a lens pointed on them-selves and each other, everyone

should be used to all the watching . Big Brother says it has a reason to

watch: fighting terrorism and ensur-ing safety. But for others, it’s not soclear. Fame, curiosity, power, bore-dom? It doesn’t seem to really matter.And that, perhaps, makes ordinaryvoyeurs scarier than Big Brother.

There is always a cellphone cameraready. A new Barbie doll even comesequipped with a video camera and screen on her back. And a photogra-phy professor at New York Universityjust implanted a camera in the back ofhis head that will take photographs ev-ery minute for a year for an art project.

Because prices are declining, cam-eras are no longer out of reach for the average person. And more homeown-ers, outraged by neighbors’ misdeedsthat harm personal property, are

buying surveillance kits to catchthem in the act, The Times reported.

Steve Miller of Florida purchased a $400 video surveillance kit to record his neighbor tossing dog excrement onto his lawn. The offender was given a citation, but because he didn’t apol-ogize, Mr. Miller told The Times that he had a little fun and posted a video of the neighbor on YouTube, drawing more than 4,000 views.

In India, people have no problemturning in their fellow citizens fortraffic violations. When the Delhi Traffic Police started a Facebook page last summer, residents — inOrwellian fashion — became digital informants, posting photos of driv-ers breaking traffic laws, The Times wrote. This ability to publicly hu-miliate wrongdoers “taps into a very

basic primal part of who we are ashuman beings,” Gaurav Mishra, the chief executive of a social business consultancy, told The Times.

Others are content with random fame. When Allen S. Rout of Florida posted photos of his 5-month-old son on his Web site, they took on a life of their own. He found a smiling picture of Stephen surrounded by Japanesewriting: “Don’t call me baby! Call meMr. Baby!” Other images showed Ste-phen’s face pasted onto Kurt Cobain’shead, carved into Mount Rushmore and tattooed onto David Beckham’s torso, reported The Times. Somehow,Stephen’s face had ended up in Japa-nese visual culture, even showing upon TV game shows. The photos had become “an Internet meme: an idea, image, catchphrase or video that goes

viral, mutating amateur remixes into unexpected forms,” wrote The Times.Why? No real reason.

Sometimes the results of online postings are tragic. In September,a Rutgers University student, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide after his roommate used a camera in their dor-mitory room to stream an intimateencounter of Mr. Clementi’s on the Internet.

In a constant stream of photo-graphs and videos, where we are the creators, consumers and consumed, people are watching, just because.

Jay Risner of Michigan, who in-stalled surveillance cameras at his home, told The Times: “I’m not sure now whether to worry more about myneighbors or strangers.”

ANITA PATIL

The Other Big Brother

IIIWORLD TRENDS

In Spain, Gypsies

find an easier path. VIIIARTS & STYLES

Ever popular, flesh-

eating zombies.VMONEY & BUSINESS

As Google grows,

some talent leaves.

When Sex and Success Don’t Mix

INTELLIGENCE: History’s greatest what-ifs, Page II.

For comments, write tonytweekly@nytimes.com.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Female Achievers Sometimes Find Romance Elusive

THE FEMALE FACTORArticles in this series examine the most recent shifts in women’s power,prominence and impact on societies around the world, and try tomeasure the influence of women on early 21st century development.global.nytimes.com/femalefactor

Con tin ued on Page IV

AT WORK, PERSONAL STYLE

Today’s trousersafford women a

new individuality.PAGE VII

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AIDS FightAdvances

ST.-MARC, HAITI

Cash is so 20th century.I’ve been experimenting with a

21st-century alternative, using moneyon a cellphone account to buy goodsin shops. It’s a bit like using a creditcard, but the system can also enableyou to use your cellphone account to transfer money to individuals or com-panies domestically or internation-ally. And it’s more secure because athief would have to steal not only yourphone but also your PIN to get access to your money.

What’s really astonishing, though,is the site of my experimentation with“mobile money.” Not in the bankingcapitals of New York City or London, but in this remote Haitian town of St.-Marc.

Mercy Corps, through a UnitedStates government-financed pro-gram, is providing food for peoplehere in St.-Marc who have taken inearthquake survivors. The standard method would be to hand out bagsof rice, or vouchers. Instead, MercyCorps will be pushing a button oncea month, and $40 will automaticallygo into each person’s cellphone sav-ings account — redeemable at localmerchants for rice, corn flour, beans or cooking oil.

I took one of these phones andwalked into a humble little grocery shop with no electricity — “RosieBoutique,” named for the owner’s

little daughter — and became thefirst person to make a cellphone pur-chase there. I typed the codes into myphone, and then both my phone andthe store’s phone received instanta-neous text messages saying that the transfer was complete. The food was now mine.

“It doesn’t get any cooler than this,”said Kokoévi Sossouvi, the MercyCorps program manager. She’s right — and the technology isn’t just cool,

but could be a breakthrough in chip-ping away at global poverty.

You see, the world’s poor face aproblem even bigger than beingfleeced by bankers. It’s being ignoredby bankers.

Most poor people around the world don’t have access to banks. In par-ticular, one of the biggest challenges for the poor is how to save money. The poor often have money coming in just a few times a year — after a harvest,or after a temporary job of picking

coffee beans — but each time theyhave no way to save it.

Banks typically won’t accept tinydeposits. In West Africa, privatemoney dealers accept deposits, butthey charge 40 percent annual inter-est rates on them. So money is more likely to be kept under a mattress, andstolen or squandered.

The poor do establish their ownsavings accounts in the form of chick-ens, goats or jewelry that they canbuy and later sell. “But what if yourgoat gets sick and dies?” notes Ms.Sossouvi.

That’s why the most powerful ideain microfinance isn’t microloans, butmicrosavings — helping the poorsafely store their money. And mobilephones offer a low-cost way to makemicrosavings feasible and extendfinancial services to the poor. About three-fourths of Haitians have accessto a mobile phone, and similar num-bers are found in many poor parts of the world.

Kenya has been a leader in mobilemoney, but many other developingcountries in Africa, Asia and theAmericas are now participating aswell. For the poor, mobile telephones could have as profound an impact onfinance — on banking the unbanked— as they have on communications.

One terrific poverty-fighting or-ganization in Haiti, Fonkoze, is alsoexpanding into financial services

through mobile phones. It is imple-menting a system whereby Haitians in America will be able to use cell-phones to send unlimited remittanc-es to the phones of relatives back inHaiti. On the Haitian side, the recipi-ent of the money would be able to go into any Fonkoze branch and cash out— or, better yet, use the remittance asthe start of a savings account.

Nothing goes as planned in thedeveloping world, and that’s trueof mobile banking. Many people inthe program here in St.-Marc are il-literate and have trouble masteringthe codes, and the first time I tried a transaction I lost a cell signal. Centralbanks and regulators are sometimes wary of telephone companies engag-ing in finance.

But Robin Padberg, the chief execu-tive of the Voilà cellphone companythat Mercy Corps is working with,says that early in the new year themobile money system will be expand-ed so that anyone will be able to makepurchases, put money into a mobile phone account or take cash out. Thatwill be a milestone in the inclusion of the poor in the world of financial ser-vices.

And some day, I’m pretty sure, I’llengage in as sophisticated a financialtransaction as Haitians — say, walk-ing into a deli and buying a pastramion rye with my BlackBerry — withouteven leaving Manhattan.

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

Promising scientific developmentsto prevent AIDS, not just treat its vic-tims, have sparked hope among healthofficials, researchers and advocacygroups struggling to control the epi-demic. Unfortunately, the global reces-sion and soaring deficits in advancednations have made it unlikely that suf-ficient money will be available to fully seize the new opportunities. Some ago-nizing choices will have to be made.

The most encouraging breakthroughwas proof last month that a pill contain-ing two standard drugs used to treat AIDS could prevent the disease if givento gay men not infected with H.I.V. In atrial conducted in the United States andfive other countries, healthy gay men who took the pill daily were 44 percentless likely to get infected than thosegiven a placebo. Even better, those whoadhered most closely to the daily regi-men achieved a 73 percent reduction inthe risk of contracting H.I.V.

These results come a few monthsafter a separate study found that avaginal gel could cut a woman’s risk of infection with H.I.V. by 39 percent overall and by 54 percent among those who used it most regularly.

Two other developments last month also buoyed hopes for faster progress. Pope Benedict XVI expressed theview that condoms could be used toprevent disease transmission. Thatcould make it easier for ecclesiasticalworkers and AIDS prevention pro-grams to promote their use.

Meanwhile, the United NationsAIDS program announced that atleast 56 countries have managed tostabilize or slow down the rate of H.I.V.infections. Fewer people are becominginfected with H.I.V. and fewer peopleare dying of AIDS than at the peak of the epidemic.

The problem is that people are stillbecoming infected twice as fast as theycan be put into treatment programs.Five years ago, fewer than 500,000people were receiving AIDS drugs;now five million are. But another 10million should be receiving treatment and aren’t getting it because donornations and the afflicted countries feel too strapped to pay the bill. Now that the same drugs used for treatmentlook like a valuable tool to preventinfections, the financial shortfall willonly grow worse.

Further studies are under way toconfirm that the pill and gel work aswell as initial studies suggest, to eval-uate long-term safety, and to assesswhat groups might benefit most. The next big challenge will be to determinehow best to allocate scarce resources between these promising prevention tools and life-saving treatments forpeople already infected.

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

I’ve Seen the Future (in Haiti)

A pound of rice and beans, paid for with a text message.

LONDON

Haruki Murakami, the Japanesenovelist, writes books in which theeveryday and the fantastic fusestrangely. Reading an essay of histhe other day, I was struck by thispassage:

“Let’s call the world we actuallyhave now Reality A and the worldwe might have had if 9/11 had neverhappened Reality B. Then we can’thelp but notice that the world of Real-ity B appears to be realer and morerational than the world of Reality A.To put it in different terms, we areliving a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world.What can we possibly call this if not ‘chaos’?”

This chaos feeling, of uncontrol-lability or strangeness, does seemintense today. The world’s mostpowerful nation devotes billions ofdollars and its accumulated mightto pursuing a handful of jihadists,led by a man who may or may not bealive and may or may not be a cavedweller, in a place actually calledWaziristan.

Cascading weirdness envelopsthe world financial system, whether in New York or Dublin. Sums incon-ceivable are devoted to averting the ne plus ultra of disintegration wheremoney becomes valueless. Stalin not-ed that one death was a tragedy but a million a statistic. Giant bailoutshave become works of statistical wiz-ardry, vaguely menacing but aboveall intangible.

An organization called WikiLeaks,of no fixed abode, publishes a quar-ter-million private or secret UnitedStates diplomatic cables, to which anordinary American soldier had ac-cess, in the name of the people’s right to know what governments hide.America is indignant but largely im-potent, the emperor unclothed for all

to see in Waziristan.Now, would Reality A, without 9/11,

if Mohammed Atta and his cohortshad been stopped before boarding the planes they would turn into missiles,have been more real, more rational, than all this?

After all, nobody would have heard of Waziristan — or Helmand Provinceor renditions. America, unburdenedby two wars, would have avoidedthe financial meltdown of 2008. Youwould not have had travelers in Unit-ed States airports routinely submit-ting to a state of undress for invisible security agents. The end of history, to use Francis Fukuyama’s post-cold-war phrase, would not have been sospectacularly aborted.

How tempting, and haunting, thehypothetical in history is! I hardlyspend a day without thinking of what might have happened in June 2009when two million Iranians took tothe streets to protest the theft of their presidential election and the Islamic republic stood on a razor’s edge. Whatif that crowd I was in had turned onthe presidential palace? What if theworld-war-inducing bullet that killedArchduke Franz Ferdinand of Aus-tria in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, had missed? What if?

In the end, of course, this is Mu-rakami’s realm — fiction. If some-thing had not happened, 9/11 for ex-ample, something else presumablywould have, and on and on and on. We

need fiction to understand the mes-merizing possibilities of reality for,as the Israeli novelist Amoz Oz hasnoted, “Sometimes the facts threatenthe truth.”

There are more and more facts,a relentless torrent of ineradicabledata and information, growing by theday whether in Reality A or Reality B,and overwhelming any intelligenceanalyst’s ability to sift through them, as well as, one day, any historian’s re-search into the truth.

Chaos has indeed overwhelmed us. But I’m not sure that Reality A would have been more rational than Reality B. My sense is that the deeper trendsare inexorable, whatever particularexpression they find.

In other words, irrespective ofwhat did or did not happen on aclear day in September, govern-ments were getting weaker in 2001before the advance of technologyand its networks, America was get-ting weaker before the emergenceof China and other rising powers,and the global financial system wasgrowing increasingly vulnerable byvirtue of its very speed and intercon-nectedness. We might merely havegotten to a similar place by a differ-ent route.

The world turns in its gyre. As Ozhas also written: “When my fatherwas a young man in Vilna, everywall in Europe said, ‘Jews go hometo Palestine.’ Fifty years later when he went back to Europe on a visit, thewalls all screamed, ‘Jews get out ofPalestine.’ ”

You laugh. You cry. Or you do bothand create Reality C to explain it all.

Send comments tointelligence@nytimes.com.

INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN

A World That Might Have Been

Imagining a different kind of reality, one without 9/11.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The hypothetical in history can be tempting. What if ArchdukeFranz Ferdinand of Austria had not been killed?

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2010 III

By SUZANNE DALEY

and RAPHAEL MINDER

MADRID — Throughout Europe,Gypsies frequently survive in isolatedencampments, reviled as beggars and petty thieves.

But things are different in Spain.Gypsies are often called Roma, but not in Spain, where the Spanish word for gypsy, “gitano,” is uttered with pride.

Here, more than 30 years of govern-ment programs to help Gypsies havebegun to show signs of success. Virtu-ally all young Gypsy children are in el-ementary school. Nearly half of their parents own their own homes. Andmany are holding down mainstreamjobs, moving away from more tradi-tional Gypsy livelihoods like sellingcattle and other goods.

Spain has become so successful that it now serves as a model for other Eu-ropean countries, including Romania,Bulgaria and Hungary. Some experts

say Spain’s secret is that it has concen-trated on practical issues, such as ac-cess to housing and jobs.

“A lot of money has been spent inother parts of Europe to integrateGypsies but with few results,” saidIsidro Rodríguez, director of Fun-dación Secretariado Gitano, a state-financed organization that adminis-ters the Acceder, or “to access,” jobprogram. “The Spanish approach has really been different because it hasbeen first and foremost about improv-ing living standards.”

There are still problems. The school dropout rate for Gypsy children be-tween 12 and 18 is a staggering 80 per-cent. Nearly 4 percent of the popula-tion still live in shacks.

And tales of indignities are nothard to come by. At present, a troupeof Gypsy women is touring the coun-try in a production of “The House ofBernarda Alba” by the poet Federico

García Lorca, a performance that has won largely rave reviews.

But in Madrid, the actresses — who live in a shantytown in Seville anddress in traditional long Gypsy skirts— had trouble getting a taxi.

Still, even advocates for the Romasay that Spain is way ahead of the rest of Europe. One 2009 study conducted for the Fundación Secretariado Gita-no looked at the housing of Gypsies inBulgaria, the Czech Republic, Greece,Portugal, Romania, Slovakia andSpain, and found that over all a third lived in substandard housing, mostly apartments lacking heat, hot water or electricity.

In Spain, 92 percent of Gypsies livein standard apartments or houses,according to the same study. Another survey, in 2005, found that 50 percent were formally employed, government officials said.

“It addresses one of the basic

myths about Gypsies,” said JuanMato Gómez, a director general in the Ministry of Health, Social Policy and Equality, “that Gypsies cannot holddown a steady job.”

Since the 1970’s, when Spain’s dem-ocratic Constitution gave Gypsiesrights as citizens, the government,whether leaning left or right, has con-sistently financed integration pro-grams for Spain’s estimated 700,000Gypsies. Between 2007 and 2013, it will

spend more than $130 million on such programs — about $60 million fromEuropean Union funds.

But whether the Spanish model canbe translated elsewhere is unclear.Experts say that some countries —particularly Romania and Bulgaria,which have large Roma populations— do not have the capacity to admin-istrate them.

“The fact is that Gypsies in somecountries have lower living standardstoday than 15 years ago,” said JoséManuel Fresno, a European Union ad-viser on Roma issues.

In Spain, the government has helpedmore than 37,000 Gypsies get jobssince 2001.

On a recent day, Emilia JiménezGonzález, who was trained to be amanicurist by Acceder, waited forcustomers in a mall on the outskirts of Madrid. “It’s like a bridge for me,” shesaid. “Because sometimes if you are a Gypsy, it is not so easy.”

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

WARSAW — The newlyopened science and technol-ogy center here was con-ceived not only as a place toexcite young minds aboutscience and discovery, butalso as a chance for Poland to overcome at least one legacyof war and occupation — thedecline of math and scienceeducation.

“I see this as a vanguardin a revolution in education,”said Professor Lukasz Tur-ski, a physicist with the Pol-ish Academy of Sciences who lobbied the government tobuild the Copernicus ScienceCenter, which opened in No-vember.

The idea is to overcome aview of the hard sciences asinferior to the arts and hu-manities, a lingering percep-

tion that is today hamperingPoland’s efforts to advance.

In a nation that struggledto remain a nation even whileit did not exist, wiped off themap for more than a century,the arts proved to be a thread that bound generations ofPoles together.

“The only form to create na-tional identity was literature,”said Janusz Reiter, a formerambassador to Germany andthe United States.

So the humanities were im-portant to Poland’s survival,while math and the scienceslanguished.

“The reason we had a poormathematical tradition israther clear,” wrote WieslawZelazko, a mathematics pro-fessor with the Polish Acad-emy of Sciences. “In the 19thcentury, a period of great de-velopment of mathematics inWestern Europe, Poland wasnot an independent country.”

Poland, Professor Zelazkocontinued, did have a periodof math excellence that beganafter World War I, though inthe sweep of history it was arelatively brief period, cut off by World War II, when the Na-zis silenced, drove out or killed

Poland’s intellectuals. Later,after 40 years of Soviet domi-nation, Poland moved quickly to overhaul its school system. But it failed to change the at-titude toward math.

In 2001, the Education Min-istry ruled that math wasnot needed to graduate fromhigh school, Professor Turskisaid.

So lots of people just skippedmath — a legacy that Poland’sfledgling high-tech sector isstruggling with today.

Dziennik Gazeta Prawna,a Polish daily newspaper,recently reported that jobopportunities in these areasoutnumbered applicants by10 to 1.

Economists say that Poland lags far behind other nations of comparable resources inpatent applications, and thatin 2012 Poland will probablylose out on European Unionfinancing for research and de-velopment.

“I am not qualified to beconsidered intelligentsia inthis country,” Professor Tur-ski said. “It is more important to sit and discuss Plato than to know how the chip in the com-puter works.”

The decision to make mathstudies optional was finallyreversed this past May, Pro-fessor Turski said, part of along, slow process of trying topersuade Poles to forge val-ues relevant to the modernworld, and to get past valuesthat evolved in very different times.

But it is still not clear, hesaid, that there is a generalunderstanding of the need toimprove education in scienceand math.

He is hoping that the Co-pernicus Center can at leastinspire people to embrace sci-ence and math.

The center is always filled,with families on weekendsand schoolchildren during the week.

Ilona Rusin was watch-ing as her son, Sebastian, 10,dropped marbles into a longmaze.

“No,” she said, “when Idid my studies, I did not takemath.”

Her son looked up and saidwith a shy smile that he loved computers.

“Everything in the worldhas something to do withmath,” he said.

Literature bonded

Poles when their

nation didn’t exist.

LOURDES SEGADE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

In Spain, an Easier Path for Gypsies

Arts-Loving PolandNow Turning to Math

A Spanish program helps Gypsy children stay in school.

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Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2010

gerie brand Etam. Neither has aproblem that she is the chief earn-er and her salary aliments the jointaccount. But both cherish what he calls “those little traditions” tokeep the romantic spark alive.

“I make an effort to hold thedoor, I almost always drive thecar, and when it’s time to pay thebill, I pay the bill,” he said. “Sarahprobably intentionally lets me dothese things because she thinks itbenefits the relationship.”

Some men have more fundamen-tal issues. One 38-year-old Italian manager complained that her boy-friend suggested she change jobsbecause he no longer felt able to“seduce her” after her salary rose above his. A French managementconsultant said her husband, ateacher, stopped coming to partieswith her because he felt inadequateevery time anyone asked him whathe did. A German banker said onereason her ex-husband left her for aphysiotherapist was “because she would have more time for him.”

“It is amazing how even manyliberal-minded men end up havingsexual and emotional difficulties being with more obviously success-ful women,” said Sasha Havlicek, the 35-year-old chief executive of aLondon research group. A friend ofhers resorted to feigning helpless-ness with her partner to promote his sense of masculinity. “The maleego can be a more fragile thing thanthe female ego, which is used to a regular battering and has hencedeveloped a sense of humor!”

Anke Domscheit-Berg of Micro-soft Germany, who has stories ofpast would-be boyfriends fleeingafter seeing “director” (of com-munications) on her businesscard, put it this way: “Success isnot sexy.”

“Men don’t want successful wom-en, men want to be admired,” saidGesine Haag, 43, who used to run match.com in Germany. “It’s im-portant to them that the woman isfull of energy at night and not play-ing with her BlackBerry in bed.”

Bernard Prieur, a psychoanalystand author of “Money in Couples,” says men who earn less than their partners struggle with two insecu-rities: “They feel socially and per-sonally vulnerable. Socially, theygo against millennia of beliefs and stereotypes that see them as thebreadwinner. And the success oftheir partner also often gives them a feeling of personal failure,” Mr.Prieur said in the November issueof the French magazine Marie-Claire.

But are things changing as thenumber of female high achieversincreases?

Ms. Kiechel in Paris says herboyfriend encourages her careerand brags to friends how intelli-gent and hard-working she is. Ms. Haag and Ms. Domscheit-Bergboth earn more than their hus-bands and report that their menactually enjoy watching the wait-er’s reaction when they say theirwife will pick up the tab.

Ms. Domscheit-Berg, who is alsoactive in the European Women’sManagement Development Inter-national Network, advised well-paid women: Leave the snazzycompany car at home on the first date; find your man in your 20s, be-fore you’ve become too successful.And go after men who draw their confidence from sources other thanmoney, like academics and artists.

“The more different their activ-ity from your own, the better,” saidMs. Domscheit-Berg .

By NILANJANA S. ROY

NEW DELHI — The stories come infrom all over India. In the northeast-ern state of Manipur, Mary Kom’s box-ing academy gets queries every week from young girls in the insurgency-torn region who hope to train with Ms. Kom and emulate her achievements asWorld Boxing Champion.

“People thought I was crazy whenI began training,” Ms. Kom said at anews conference after she won herfifth consecutive championship title inSeptember in Bridgetown, Barbados.“But I never let their criticism affectme.

“It was a real struggle,” she said,“but the love of boxing saw me throughthe difficult years.”

In Bhiwani district, embedded in therural heart of Haryana State in north-ern India, the villagers can’t stop talk-ing about the success of “their girls”— Gita and Babita Singh, who wereshowered with praise at a receptionin the village after the two sisters won silver and gold medals in October at

the Commonwealth Games in NewDelhi.

The Games have given the country a new set of heroines: Kavita Raut,athletics star; Gagandeep Kaur andJhano Hansdah, archers; Saina Ne-hwal, badminton player. Women ath-letes won 13 of India’s 38 gold medals, and contributed 56 total gold, silverand bronze medals to the final tally of 101, their success setting off a chain of celebrations.

One aspect that has caught the at-tention of the news media is the socialbackground of many of the top ath-letes. Theirs is the world of small-townIndia, rural India, urban middle-class India. Few of the women are from so-cially privileged or wealthy families.

Ms. Kom’s family in Manipur wor-ried when she insisted several yearsago that she wanted to be a boxer. Her

father has said that he thought thetraining would cost more than theycould afford.

Gita and Babita Singh owe much of their success to their father, Mahavir Singh Phoghat, a former wrestler who trained his daughters and nieces in hisown training camp. In the absence of expensive equipment, he used tradi-tional techniques — making the girls sprint and perform old-fashioned sit-ups .

Many of the stories these women tellcould have been lifted from “Chak DeIndia!,” a 2007 hit movie about the tra-vails and ultimate triumph of a wom-en’s field hockey team. In the film, as inthe real world, most of the women are from relatively modest backgrounds.

Sharda Ugra, a veteran sports jour-nalist who now writes for the Web site Cricinfo, said: “That hockey film isvery, very accurate. One of the rea-sons why women have taken to sport in low-income families is that it’s anaccess line to a job.”

She was referring to governmentand corporate arrangements thatoften guarantee athletes, especiallywomen, a position and financial secu-rity in the workplace.

“The upper class and the middleclass still look at Olympic sport — es-

pecially sports like weightlifting orwrestling or till recently, track-and-field events — as sports for the rustic,’’ Ms. Ugra said. “It’s patronizing, butthe old humility and deference is be-ginning to go, as today’s sportswomen become more confident.”

Much of that confidence, though,still comes from the family’s support and encouragement.

“Until recently, women’s sportsand sportswomen were treated likesecond-class citizens,” Ms. Ugra said. “So the Commonwealth Games’ suc-cess — and the success of women,especially from states like Haryana,Manipur and Kerala, in the annualNational Games, might help changethat attitude.”

Some of the first signs of chang-ing attitudes have been documentedby the television and film industries.If “Chak De India!” followed the upsand downs of a fictional but true-to-life hockey team, the 2009 TV series“Palampur Express” followed an-other familiar story — the dreams of a young girl from a rural background who wants to be a runner and win anOlympic medal.

Anju Dubey Pandey, director of the Gender Training Institute at the Cen-ter for Social Research, a research or-

ganization in New Delhi that focuses on women’s issues, cautions againstinterpreting the recent achievementsof women athletes as a measure of the progress Indian women have madeover all. Because several of the ath-letes are from Haryana, a traditionallypatriarchal state, there’s a temptation to turn this event into a larger success story for women, she said.

“What we’re seeing is the stories of individual women who have overcome all kinds of difficulties to be wherethey are,” she said. “My worry is that we might read too much into this, and ignore the very real challenges —the repressive mind-sets of the khappanchayats,” or community elders,“the wave of honor killings, the highrate of female feticide — that womenin these states continue to face.’’

Her caveat is a useful one. But in the wake of Indian women athletes’ suc-cesses, the real victory may lie beyond simple medal tallies.

The achievements of a Saina Neh-wal or a Mary Kom have already in-spired many young women to believe that they, too, can move past the manysocietal barriers and gender prejudic-es that surround them, and perhapssome day bring home their own goldmedals.

Sports Offer Escape for Indian Women RomanceElusiveFor FemaleAchievers

MANISH SWARUP/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Continued From Page I

India’s newest star

athletes defy poverty

and male domination.

By JOHN LELAND and NAMO ABDULLA

DOKAN, Iraq — Honor killing has a long history in Iraq and here in the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan.

More than 12,000 women were killedin the name of honor in Kurdistan from1991 to 2007, according to Aso Kamal of the Doaa Network Against Violence.Government figures are much lower,and show a decline in recent years,and Kurdish law has mandated since 2008 that an honor killing be treatedlike any other murder. But the practicecontinues, and the crime is often hid-den or disguised to look like suicide.

As some Iraqi lawmakers try tocrack down on honor killing, one case illustrates how difficult it can be to up-root a deep-seated tribal honor code.

Sirwa Hama Amin fell in love withher neighbor, Aram Jamal Rasool, inthis northern Iraqi village.

Ms. Amin, 22, and Mr. Rasool, 27,grew up across the dusty road fromeach other. Mr. Rasool’s father, Jamal Rasool Salih, 58, a retired general inthe Kurdish military, or pesh merga,helped Ms. Amin’s family move toDokan from Iran in 1993, and the two families became intertwined.

Like General Salih, Ms. Amin’sbrothers and uncles joined the peshmerga and the town’s dominant politi-cal party. One of her brothers married the general’s daughter and became hisbodyguard; the general’s son Aram of-ten visited Ms. Amin’s home.

The couple at first hid their relation-

ship. General Salih said he consideredMs. Amin’s relatives unruly soldiersand hellcats. Ms. Amin’s mocked Mr. Rasool because he limped.

Then Ms. Amin’s brother caughther sending a text message to Mr.Rasool on her cellphone. In sociallyregimented Iraq, cellphones and theInternet have enabled lovers to com-municate outside the censorious eyes of their families, but at a price, said Be-har Rafeq, director of the Shelter forThreatened Women in Erbil. Of the 24women in the shelter on a recent day,15 had encountered threats or violencebecause of their communications oncellphones or Facebook, she said.

Ms. Amin said her male relativesthreatened to drown her and tookaway her phone. Qadir Abdul-RahmanAhmed, Ms. Amin’s uncle, denied thethreats. If the two wished to marry, hesaid, the appropriate way was for Gen-eral Salih to ask for her hand. Instead,he sent surrogates.

She became a captive in her home.One of Mr. Rasool’s brothers said that when he visited, he found Ms. Amintearful and beaten, her face swollen,

The couple became desperate, shesaid, and plotted ways to kill them-selves. On September 2, 2009, shesneaked out of the house. Mr. Rasoolwas waiting in an SUV, with a grenade he had stolen from his father. Theywent to the police, explaining thatthey had been threatened becausethey wanted to marry. Mr. Rasool was

held for possession of the grenade; Ms.Amin was sent to a shelter for batteredwomen.

“He was arrested because I wantedhim arrested for safety,” General Sa-lih said. “The day they ran away, her uncle, a military captain, called meand said, ‘I’ll burn your house and killyou all if you don’t get the couple back today.’ ”

The couple appealed to the court,and two weeks later, they married.

Ms. Amin said her family agreed to a truce: if the newlyweds promisedto leave Dokan and never return, her relatives agreed not to hunt her down.

The couple settled in Sulaimaniya,an hour away. Three and a half monthslater, Ms. Amin said, she heard gun-shots and her husband shouting hername.

She found him covered in blood, and one of her brothers aiming a gun at her.Gunmen had shot Mr. Rasool 17 times; Ms. Amin, two months pregnant, was shot 4 times.

According to Mr. Ahmed, the broth-

er who did the shooting was HusseinHama Amin, a soldier. Mr. Amin de-nied killing his brother-in-law but saidhe paid $10,000 to another brother, andto one of Mr. Rasool’s brothers, to killthe couple.

“Why should she live after she hasbeen that irresponsible about the hon-or of her family?” Mr. Amin said.

No one has been arrested.Their local political party, tribal

leaders and clerics brought the fami-lies together in a formal council ses-sion in front of more than 4,000 localresidents. General Salih said he waspressed to forgive his son’s killers and promise not to kill them. Ms. Amin’sfamily was made to promise not to killher.

“May God kill her,” Hussein HamaAmin said. “We will not kill her.” Her relatives said they have disowned herbut would not harm her.

Ms. Amin now lives with her infantson less than 100 meters from her fam-ily. She fears they will try to kill her.When she leaves the house, she is es-corted by armed in-laws. By Kurdish custom she is now disgraced and un-suitable for marriage.

General Salih remains bitter at his neighbors and the tribal leaders, who have refused to make any arrests.“I’m a powerful person,” he said. “Icould kill them. But I don’t.”

“They should get arrested,” he said. “Instead they get salaries. “There isno law.”

A Slaying, and a Custom That Refuses to Die

A persistent tribal code

that puts honor above

love and law.

Women,including GagandeepKaur, won 56 of India’s 101 medals at the CommonwealthGames in October.

Repubblica NewYork

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

MONDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2010 V

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Google, which only 12 years ago was a scrappy start-up in a garage, nowfinds itself viewed in Silicon Valley asthe big, lumbering incumbent. Someof the company’s best engineers arechafing under the growing bureau-cracy and are leaving to start or workat smaller, nimbler companies.

Recent departures include promi-nent managers like Lars Rasmussen,who helped create Google Maps andWave before he left for Facebook, andOmar Hamoui, the founder of AdMobwho was vice president for mobileads at Google and is now looking for

his next project. At least 142 of Face-book’s 1,700 employees came fromGoogle.

Corporate sclerosis is a problemfor all companies as they grow. Buta hardening of the bureaucracy anda slower pace of work is even moreperceptible in Silicon Valley, wherecompanies grow at Internet speedand pride themselves on constant in-novation.

For Google, which has 23,000 em-ployees and $23.7 billion in revenue,the risk is that, as employees leave, itwill miss the best people and the nextgreat idea.

“It’s a short step from scale to scle-rosis,” said Daniel H. Pink, an author and analyst on the workplace. “It be-comes a more acute problem in Silicon Valley, where in a couple years, youcould have some competitor in a ga-rage ready to put you out entirely.”

Google’s chief executive, Eric E.Schmidt, says that people who thinkGoogle faces brain drain are “funda-mentally wrong.”

Nevertheless, Google’s maturation worries him. “There was a time when three people at Google could build aworld-class product and deliver it,and it is gone,” Mr. Schmidt said. “So I think it’s absolutely harder to getthings out the door. That’s probablyour biggest strategic issue.”

As a result, Google is taking aggres-sive steps to retain employees. Google has given several engineers who saidthey were leaving to start new compa-nies the chance to start them withinGoogle. They work independently and can recruit other engineers and useGoogle’s resources.

Google Wave, a way for people towork together online, was one ex-ample. The engineering team, basedin Sydney, Australia, worked inde-pendently and got equity in the proj-ect. But Google shut down Wave thisyear.

Google is considering opening astart-up incubator inside the company,according to two people briefed on the plans.

From the beginning, Google’s found-ers, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, havetried to prevent atrophy. Employeesget time — called 20 percent time atthe company — to work on their own

projects. But new products createdduring 20 percent time are less likely to get anywhere these days.

Popular Google products like Gmailgrew out of 20 percent time. But engi-neers say they have been encouragedto build fewer new products and focus on improving existing ones.

Part of Google’s problem is that the

best engineers often have the mostentrepreneurial thirst.

Some of them now want to leave asthey become frustrated with the pro-cesses and procedures. Josh McFar-land, a former Google product man-ager, left last year and started TellA-part, which helps retailers advertiseonline.

“I think that there is a class of per-son who is able to walk away from thisrelatively easy, consistent money be-cause they are so dissatisfied with theprocesses of a big company,” he said.

For others, it is about making more money elsewhere. Start-ups have ariskier and potentially more reward-ing lure: shares in a company beforean initial public offering.

Google, which has always been gen-erous with salary, stock options andbenefits like massages and free food,is going a step further to keep employ-ees happy. Last month, Google gaveevery employee a raise of 10 percentor more. People who have other job of-fers have been persuaded to stay withseven-figure bonuses. Google says 80percent of people who get a counterof-fer stay.

Mr. Schmidt dismissed the idea that Facebook was poaching Google’s bestpeople, saying, “We hire more peoplein a week than go to Facebook in itslifetime.”

Google remains remarkably inno-vative when it wants to be. In October,for instance, it unveiled robotic carsthat drive themselves. And Googlehas been acquiring new technolo-gies, like Android, instead of invent-ing them.

“People are dying to come here and they’re staying,” Mr. Schmidt said.“So I guess they’re putting up with the complexity.”

By HIROKO TABUCHI

IWAMIZAWA, Japan — Atsushi Kono consid-ers it the gravest threat to his family’s farm in a century of rice-growing: a free-trade initiativethat could dismantle Japan’s protective tariffs,opening up the country to cheap, foreign pro-duce.

In a move pitting Japanese farmers against the nation’s export industries, Prime Minister Naoto Kan is pushing to join negotiations for an American-backed free-trade zone called theTrans-Pacific Partnership that would span thePacific Rim.

The new zone would give Japanese export-ers of cars, televisions and other manufactured goods greater access to the United States and other markets. But a trade agreement coulddismantle the generous protections that havesustained Japanese farms for years — most no-tably, Japan’s 777.7 percent tariff on importedrice.

Free trade was high on the agenda of theback-to-back summit meetings of the Groupof 20 and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperationforum last month in South Korea and Japan, at-tended by leaders including President Obama and Mr. Kan.

“Japan is determined to more actively open up to the world,” Mr. Kan said at the G-20 meet-ing in Seoul, South Korea. Meanwhile, Pacific Rim trade ministers in Yo-kohama, Japan, vowed totake steps to create a vastfree-trade area that wouldinvolve over half of theworld’s economic output.

But Japan’s politicallypowerful agriculture indus-try is not cheering. The Ag-ricultural Ministry warnsthat if Japan were to join theproposed trade zone, 90 per-cent of the nation’s rice cul-tivation would disappear,and wheat, sugar, dairy and beef output would also beadversely affected — cost-ing the country about 4 tril-lion yen, or $49 billion, inlost production and 3.4 mil-lion lost jobs.

“This is the end of the roadfor my farm,” said Mr. Kono, 60, who grows rice, wheat,red beans and cabbage onseven hectares of farmland

in Iwamizawa, on Hokkaido, Japan’s northern-most main island.

“Farming communities across Japan willface ruin,” added Mamoru Moteki, who heads an umbrella organization for Japanese agricul-tural cooperatives. “We must prevent this by allmeans.”

Mr. Kan is eager for Japan to join negotiationsfor the American-backed Pacific trade partner-ship, which seeks to remove all tariffs amongits members. Though preliminary negotiationsinvolve just nine countries, including the UnitedStates and Singapore, the plan would be a build-ing block for a wider pan-Pacific free-tradezone. A deal is expected by next November.

The Japanese business lobby has gone all-outin support of the drive, saying it would help ex-porters — like automakers and electronics man-ufacturers — regain their competitive edge. Theexporters have been particularly vocal as theiroverseas earnings suffered from a strong yen,which can make Japan-made products more ex-pensive overseas and erode earnings.

Although Japan has negotiated free-tradeagreements with a handful of smaller trad-ing partners, Tokyo has always insisted thatagricultural produce like rice and dairy stayexempt from the tariff reductions. Besides the rice tariffs, Japan levies a 252 percent tariff on imported wheat, 360 percent on butter, 328 per-

cent on sugar and 38.5 per-cent for beef.

Partly as a result of thatrigid stance, Tokyo hasyet to conclude free-tradeagreements with China, the United States or the Euro-pean Union, which are Ja-pan’s main export markets— a major impediment togaining market share, ex-porters argue.

Staying out of a pan-Asianfree-trade bloc would shaveat least 1.5 percent, or 10.5trillion yen ($128 billion),from the Japanese grossdomestic product and elim-inate eight million jobs, ac-cording to a recent estimateby Japan’s trade ministry.“To be globally competi-tive,” said Osamu Suzuki,chief executive at SuzukiMotor, “we need to be ableto play by the same rules.”

Its Start-Up Days Long Over, Google Sees Talent Leaving

Free Trade Imperils Japan’s Farmers

THOR SWIFT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A Silicon Valley

giant works to avoid

corporate sclerosis.

HIROKO TABUCHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A free-trade agreement could eliminate a tariff on beefimports in Japan, affecting Koichiro Honda.

Google is trying to stop anexodus. Josh McFarland, far left, with Mark Ayzenshtat, quit tostart his own firm.

Repubblica NewYork

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

VI MONDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2010

By ANDREW POLLACK

For the last decade cancer drugdevelopers have tried to jam the ac-celerators that cause tumors to grow.Now they want to block the fuel line.

Cancer cells, because of their rap-id growth, have a voracious appetite for glucose, the main nutrient usedin energy. And tumors often use glu-cose differently from healthy cells,an observation first made by a Ger-man biochemist in the 1920s.

That observation is already usedto detect tumors in the body usingPET scans. A radioactive form of glu-cose is injected into the bloodstreamand accumulates in tumors, lighting up the scans.

Now, researchers are trying totreat the disease by disrupting thespecial metabolism of cancer cellsto deprive them of energy.

The main research strategy of the last decade has involved so-calledtargeted therapies, which interfere with genetic signals that act like ac-celerators, causing tumors to grow.But there tend to be redundant ac-celerators, so blocking only one witha drug is usually not enough.

In theory, depriving tumors ofenergy should render all the accel-erators ineffective. “Nutrient sup-ply and deprivation is becoming po-tentially the next big wave,” said Dr. David Schenkein, chief executive of Agios Pharmaceuticals.

One factor spurring interest is theintriguing interplay between can-cer and diabetes. People with Type 2diabetes have a higher risk of certaincancers. And early evidence suggeststhat metformin, the diabetes pill,might be effective against cancer.

There is some evidence that thedrug works in part by inhibiting glu-cose metabolism in cancer cells.

This gets to the Warburg effect,named after Otto Warburg, the Ger-man biochemist and Nobel Prize win-ner who first noticed the particularmetabolism of tumors in the 1920s.

Most healthy cells primarily burnglucose in the presence of oxygen to

generate ATP, a chemical that acts asfuels. But when oxygen is low, glucosecan be turned into energy by anotherprocess, called glycolysis, whichproduces lactic acid as a byproduct.What Dr. Warburg noticed was that tumors tended to use glycolysis evenwhen oxygen was present.

But not all tumor cells use glycoly-sis, and some normal cells do. It couldbe difficult to develop drugs that canhurt tumors but not normal cells.

Two early efforts, by ThresholdPharmaceuticals, did not work wellin clinical trials. One of Threshold’sdrugs, called 2DG, delivers a form ofglucose that cannot be metabolized.Work is continuing on finding a wayto deliver enough 2DG to a cell to de-stroy it.

The other Threshold drug, glufos-famide, consisted of glucose linkedto a standard chemotherapy agent.The idea was that the tumors would eagerly ingest the glucose and bepoisoned. In a trial involving morethan 300 patients with advancedpancreatic cancer, glufosfamide pro-longed lives but not by a statistically significant amount.

A new company, Eleison Pharma-ceuticals, plans to repeat the trialin the belief that it would have suc-ceeded had it excluded 43 diabetics who were taking insulin, which isknown to impede PET scanning for tumors.

Another approach is not to starvea tumor of energy but to give it more energy, and that is the idea behinddichloroacetate, or DCA. Dr. Evan-gelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Canada came up with theidea. He says there is a mechanism by which defective cells commit sui-cide for the greater good of the body.

But cancer cells usually do not killthemselves. Dr. Michelakis says thiscould be because they lack sufficientenergy.

DCA, a chemical formed in smallquantities when drinking water ischlorinated, inhibits an enzymecalled pyruvate dehydrogenase ki-nase. The effect of that inhibition isto move metabolism away from lac-tic acid-producing glycolysis.

This spring, Dr. Michelakis re-ported results of the first humantesting of DCA, in five patients withglioblastoma multiforme, a deadlybrain cancer. There was evidencethat the drug promoted cell suicide.

“We have only assumptions andtheoretical excitement,” Dr. Michela-kis said. Still, he added, “There’s no question that this is a new direction that is logical and very appealing.”

By BENEDICT CAREY

OTTAWA — Advances in artificialintelligence and computer modelingare allowing researchers to gain in-sight into how people are affected byinteractions with virtual humans — or by inhabiting avatars of themselves.

Autonomous, virtual humans canevoke the same tensions as in real-life encounters. People with social anxietyare struck dumb when asked questionsby a virtual stranger. Heavy drinkers feel strong urges to order somethingfrom a virtual bartender. And thera-pists can advise patients at the verymoment those sensations are felt.

In experiments, researchers haveshown that people internalize thesevirtual experiences and their respons-es to them — with effects that carryover into real life.

The virtual figures are clearly nothuman. Some are mute; many have a two-dimensional quality.

But the faces are mobile, alive, thebody language and gestures seem-ingly natural; in some cases, they are good enough to conduct a stiff but con-vincing conversation. The result is aliving presence that is responsive butnot judgmental.

The Canadian military has investedheavily in virtual-reality research; sohas the United States Army. Its pro-grams are used for training officersand treating post-traumatic stressreactions.

The emerging field, called cy-bertherapy, has already generated afew critics.

“Even if this approach works, there will be side effects that we can’t antici-pate,” said Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and author of “You Are Not aGadget: A Manifesto.” “ I would worryabout defining humans down: definingwhat’s normal based on what we canmodel in virtual environments.”

But most researchers say that vir-

tual therapy is no more than a thera-pist’s tool, to be used only when it ap-pears effective.

In a study at the Institute for Cre-ative Technologies at the Universityof Southern California, researchershave found that a virtual confidantenamed Angelina elicits from peoplethe crucial first element in any ther-apy: self-disclosure. People with so-cial anxiety confessed more of theirpersonal flaws, fears and fantasies to virtual figures than to live therapists,the study found.

The researchers are incorporatingthe techniques learned from Ange-lina into a virtual agent for the UnitedStates Army, called SimCoach.

“It does not give a diagnosis,” saidJonathan Gratch, a co-author of theAngelina study. But, he said, “the Sim-

Coach would ask people if they would like to see a therapist.”

A therapist can then use virtual tech-nology to simulate threatening situa-tions — and gradually guide patientsthrough them, calibrating the intensityof the experience.

At U.S.C., Albert Rizzo, a psycholo-gist, has designed a program for vet-erans of the Iraq war.

In a study at the University of Cali-fornia, Davis, researchers are trying to improve high-functioning autisticchildren’s ability to think and talkabout themselves. The hope is similar for people with social anxiety.

In a study last year at the University

of Quebec, patients who got virtualtherapy achieved the same gains asthose with a real therapist withouthaving to practice interactions in thereal world, deliberately putting them-selves in dreaded encounters.

“The figures themselves don’teven have to be especially realistic toevoke reactions,” said a psychologist, Stéphane Bouchard, who directs theuniversity’s cybertherapy program.

At the Virtual Human InteractionLab at Stanford University in Califor-nia, Jeremy Bailenson, the director ofthe lab, and a colleague recently had50 students acquire a virtual body, anavatar, by looking through a virtualreality headset. The students partici-pated in a negotiation game.

Some of the avatars were taller thantheir human counterparts; otherswere shorter. Those made taller nego-tiated in the game much more aggres-sively than those made shorter. A laterstudy found that this effect carriedover into face-to-face negotiations.The researchers have demonstrated a similar effect in the case of attractive-ness. “The remarkable thing is howlittle a virtual human has to do to pro-duce fairly large effects on behavior,”said Dr. Bailenson.

Recent research led by Mel Slater, a computer scientist at the University of Barcelona, showed that men will men-tally take on the body of a woman, for instance, if that’s the body it appears they’re walking around in virtually.“You can see the possibilities,” saidDr. Slater. “You can put someone witha racial bias in the body of a person of another race.”

For some, the experiments are liber-ating. “The great thing about it,” saidGary, a civil servant, who participatedin the Quebec anxiety study, “is that you can do anything you want and justsee what happens. You get to prac-tice.”

When Danish and Czech scien-tists exhumed the remains of the astronomer Tycho Brahe in Prague last month, they dug up much more than bones and hairs: a story worthy

of Hollywood was re-vealed.

The plot would fea-ture a deadly strugglefor the secret of the universe betweenTycho, the swashbuck-ling Danish nobleman

with a gold-and-silver prostheticnose, and Johannes Kepler, his frail,jealous German assistant.

The movie would open with the duel in 1566 that cost the 20-year-oldTycho his nose. Before long Tycho has a metal nose as well as an island witha castle and an observatory, financedby the king of Denmark and equippedwith the most precise instruments

built for tracking the planets and stars. After the king dies, Tycho goes to Prague and a new patron, Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor.

Over the years, Tycho wins renownby identifying new stars, including asupernova. Tycho hopes to prove that all the planets except Earth revolve around the Sun, which in turn re-volves around the Earth.

To help, he brings in Kepler, a 28-year-old who believes that God created cosmic “harmony” by ar-ranging the planets’ orbits around the Sun so that they’re spaced at distances corresponding to certain geometrical figures.

Tycho lobbies for Kepler’s appoint-ment as imperial mathematician.

But before Kepler’s appointment isformalized, Tycho suddenly becomes terribly ill after a banquet and dies 11days later, at the age of 54. His death was blamed on his failure to relieve himself while drinking profusely at the banquet, supposedly injuring his bladder .

But then, in the 1990s, hairs from Tycho were analyzed. Researchers reported elevated levels of mercury,including one brief high dose that was absorbed within 10 minutes duringthe final 24 hours of his life.

Those findings inspired “HeavenlyIntrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One of History’s Greatest Scientific Discov-eries,” a 2004 book by a pair of mar-

ried journalists, Joshua Gilder andAnne-Lee Gilder.

They argue that the evidence fromthe hairs points to two incidents of mercury poisoning, one at the time of the banquet and the other just before death, and that Kepler is the prime suspect. As anassistant living at Tycho’s home, Kepler had access to toxic mercury compounds in Tycho’s alchemical lab and could have poisonedhim, the Gilders write.

“Kepler’s ambition was to prove his vision of the divine architecture of God’suniverse,” Mr. Gilder said. “Every time he feels Tycho

is getting in the way, he blows up athim. Kepler had felt himself despisedand outcast his whole life. This wouldmake him famous.”

After Brahe’s death, Kepler gotthe mathematician job. He nevermanaged to prove his divine-architecture model, but he became

famous, thanks to Tycho’srecords and his own hunch that

the Sun exerted some kind ofpull on the planets.

Using Tycho’s data, heformulated his famous

three laws of planetarymotion.

The scientists cautionthat even if they confirm

suspicions that Brahe waspoisoned by mercury, thatwouldn’t necessarily prove he was murdered, much lessidentify the killer.

JOHN

TIERNEY

ESSAY

Cancer cells need

glucose; new drugs

may starve them.

Using cybertherapy

to teach people to

manage their fears.

Tumors’ Fuel Lines Are the New Target

Virtual Help in Facing the Real World

Heavenly Mystery Is Unearthed

MICHAL CZERWONKA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Arno Hartholt, a researcher at the University of Quebec, interacts with avatars in a Wild West setting.

UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA

Dr. Evangelos Michelakisis working on a method toencourage cell suicide.

VIKTOR KOEN

Repubblica NewYork

FA S H I O N

MONDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2010 VII

By SUZY MENKES

PARIS — After a decade of post-fem-inism — all girly dresses and shoes notmade for walking — designers are tak-ing a serious look at appropriate dress-ing for a working woman.

In the Western world, at least, wom-en are no longer battling a masculine ruling class; it is nearly half a century since the “power woman” pantsuit,that symbol of emancipation, made itsdebut.

But while a man has a business “uni-form” — a suit that works for most oc-casions — his partner has no equiva-lent. Women tinker with appropriatelooks, swapping a jacket for a cardiganor wearing a sleek dress as feminized severity.

But women are now coming to ma-turity without the baggage of the femi-nist revolution. The current bellweth-er of style, Phoebe Philo, creates sleekoutfits for the French brand Céline.Her classic combinations of skirt and blouse or tailored coat have no refer-ence to the “secretary” style of the1950s or the androgyny of the ’80s.

“It is the only way I know how to de-sign clothes, by using myself as a mir-

ror,” said Ms. Philo, who works out of London. “I feel I know myself more inmy 30s.”

In Western societies, women are in-creasingly more educated than men.Modern mothers juggle demandingjobs and parenting, managing stressand sex. Building a working wardrobeoften means trying to find something as anodyne and universally accept-able as the way a man dresses.

That is why political women whogrew up in the feminist era, fromChancellor Angela Merkel of Germa-ny to Secretary of State Hillary Rod-ham Clinton, use pants as a uniform.Some — notably Christine Lagarde,the French economics minister, andNancy Pelosi, the speaker of the Unit-ed States House of Representatives— give their streamlined looks an el-egant spin.

Two male designers, Tomas Maierat Bottega Veneta and Raf Simons for Jil Sander, offered for the autumn col-lection the streamlined modernism of a plain, impeccably cut suit, thoughshaped close to a womanly body.

“I don’t think it is necessary to beconnected to a certain style to say, I

am independent, I am strong,” saidMr. Simons. In Hamburg now work-ing on her +J line for Japan’s UniqloMs. Sander still champions femalemodernity. “In business,” she said,“one should mix understatement withindividualism, be subtle but not self-effacing. ”

The Israeli designer Alber Elbaz of Lanvin is shifting from the simplic-ity of the dress to the power of pants.“Pants are coming back becausewomen are wearing the pants today,” he said.

Christopher Bailey, chief creative of-

ficer at Burberry, said: “Dressingfor work, as witheverything, isabout contradic-tions — hard and soft. Too hardand the look istoo tough and ag-gressive, too softand the look is too relaxed.”

There is clearly a difference be-tween women who are connected to a fashionable, design-conscious worldand those who are in a work situation where there is a more defined code.

As chief executive of Yves Saint Lau-rent in Paris, Valerie Hermann is in a unique position to re-think the female wardrobe. The essence of her clothes for work, weekend and vacation is her desire for “simple things,” with a re-jection of any kind of what she called“costume.”

She wears pants, shirts and jackets,many selected from the collections of

the current YSL designer, Stefano Pi-lati.

Ms. Hermann said that the moderncatchall is what she calls the “threehole dress,” a tunic style that goes overthe head with arms protruding, so thatthe sleeveless outfit can be workedwith a sweater, shirt, pants, skirt and even a jacket.

But she also said she believed in self-awareness. “With three daughters of 22, 19 and 15, I begin to get a notion of the evolution of age and the cycle oflife,” she said. “You have to be clearwhat you are doing.”

The board director and deputychairwoman of Sotheby’s Europe inLondon, Melanie Clore, agrees.

“Clearly in the 1980s, women wereso grateful to have serious jobs in anutterly male world they felt they had todress like men to remain there and to blend in,” Ms. Clore said. “This is now no longer the case.”

But she added, “I do think it is sadwhen women still feel the need to dresslike men — female politicians are the worst culprits.”

The one “politician” who has repudi-ated all the wardrobe certainties is Mi-chelle Obama, who has favored mod-ern separates with a cardigan, rather than a jacket: a major statement.

Mrs. Obama has yet to wear a stark pantsuit. If she does, it may be a sym-bol not of a retrograde vision, but of a woman with the confidence to make a man’s world her own.

By GUY TREBAY

Has anyone seen the Dior man?You know the one, that scrawnyyoung rocker with a chicken chest, a size 36 suit and a face sprouting itsfirst crop of peach fuzz.

It has been almost a decade since Hedi Slimane, then the designer forDior men’s wear, jump-started anaesthetic shift away from stiffly tra-ditional male images. On catwalksand in advertising campaigns theprevalent male image became thatof a skinny skate-rat, a juvenile withpipe-cleaner proportions.

But that was when the economywas flush. Consumers were content then to indulge designer subversionsof age and gender expectations, saidJoe Levy, the editor in chief of Max-im magazine. When the recessionlodged in the landscape, “suddenly the notion of having a job or a career is in doubt,” he said. “So you fall backon old notions of what it meant to bea man or to look likeone.”

You lose the T-shirt and the skateboard.You buy an interviewsuit and a package of shaving blades. Yougrow up. Suddenly ev-idence of a new phase in the cycle of evolv-ing masculine im-agery was splashedacross magazine covers and all over the catwalks in the runway seasonthat recently ended.

“It’s not just models, it’s actors, it’sadvertising, it’s the movies,” saidSam Shahid, an advertising cre-ative director. “ Everyone’s suddenlyjumping on it.”

“It’s also, like comfort food, about the economy,” he said. “ In toughtimes, people want a strong man.”

Or, at the very least, they want im-ages of men who look old enough to vote. “The twink thing seems over,”said Jim Nelson, the editor of GQ.“When people open GQ, I don’t wantthem to feel like they’re looking atclothes on 16-year-olds.”

It is not merely a matter of bodytype, Mr. Nelson noted. “When wecast, we want a model with some heftto him and a few years on him,” hesaid. “Someone who has aged a littlebit and who feels like he’s a man.”

What they want, in short, is JonHamm, who plays Don Draper in

the hit television series “Mad Men.” That the square-jawed Don Draper resembles an archetypal father on atime-travel visa from an era of post-war expansion and fixed genderroles can hardly be incidental to the show’s success.

“At a time of underemploymentand digitized labor that doesn’t havereal products at the end of the pro-cess, people want to be reminded”through images from pop culture,Mr. Nelson said, “that we as men do work, we do labor, we do still makethings.”

Designers, for their part, alert to a burgeoning interest in the trappingsof manual labor, have respondedwith a wholesale revival of so-called “heritage” labels and work wear.And they are casting their runwayshows and ad campaigns with in-creasingly hirsute, well-built, ma-ture types — men who certainly look as if they’ve never been waxed or

had a manicure.Even Prada and

Louis Vuitton em-braced the new imag-ery in the recent run-way season, castingwhat Jason Kanner,the president of themen’s division of Ma-jor Model Manage-ment, termed mas-culine, manly men.

“They look like throwbacks to thedays of Herb Ritts,” he said.

Is it entirely a coincidence that Mr. Ritts himself is enjoying a posthu-mous revival? A new volume fromRizzoli celebrates his work as a pho-tographer and equally the Amazons and Olympians he memorialized inhis career. When casting a recentfashion pictorial, the editors of De-tails magazine concluded that, in adepressed economy, the Details manwas not well represented by the boysso fashionable a moment ago.

So they cast Gabriel Aubry, a blondCanadian who two years ago would have been thought of no longer vi-able in the business. “For us it wasabout how relatable this guy is to the reader,” Dan Peres, the magazine’seditor in chief, said. “It’s about what connection a reader is going to makewith some waify 17-year-old versus a 34-year-old man, albeit a 34-year-old man who has washboard abs and who fathered Halle Berry’s kid.”

Pants at Work Go FromUniform to Unique Style

In Fashion, the BoysGive Way to Men

By RUTH LA FERLA

GOLDEN BEACH, Florida — Bruce Weber’s photographic universe — one of sinewy boys in britches, solitaryathletes, preppies toting footballs,models and society dames — is free,by design, of meanness, squalor andunsightliness.

It is not unlike the world he hasconjured for his current project: anexhibition of portraits of the Haitiancommunity in Miami at the Museumof Contemporary Art in North Miami,his first major show in an Americanmuseum.

Many of the images first appearedin 2003, in the aftermath of the boatdisaster that left hundreds of refugeesstranded and held in Miami detention centers.

Like his later photographs of Hai-tians being treated in Miami after the earthquake that destroyed much ofPort-au-Prince in January, and in thelight of the cholera epidemic devastat-ing the island, they carry an urgentemotional weight.

More than that, they cast Mr. Weber,64, a professional chronicler of beauty, in the unaccustomed role of activist.

In a way, he said, the label fits. Chat-ting on his beachfront patio , he said:“Ansel Adams was an activist. Hedrew your attention to all the greatnational parks. If you’re any kind ofphotographer, you are an activist.”

Bearded, burly, his pate swathedin the trademark bandanna he wearseven while swimming, an ancient Rol-leiflex slung from his neck, he is every inch a self-styled outsider, document-ing his world from a position of safetybehind the lens.

“As a photographer, you’re alwaysmaking a fool of yourself,” he said,“telling subjects, ‘Oh, I think you’re sowonderful, can I take your picture?’That’s a vulnerable thing.”

Discernible in each of his 75 portraitsin the Miami show is a wellspring ofempathy, the pictures tugging at view-ers’ feelings in ways unanticipated byMr. Weber’s critics. Some have saidthat in his earlier work, he accentu-ated his subjects’ beefcake qualitiesin ways that bring to mind Fascist-eraimagery.

Mr. Weber, who has been influencedby American Scene painters likeThomas Hart Benton, bristled. “Just

because you sit on the ground andpoint your camera upward does notmean you want to emulate Leni Rie-fenstahl,” he said.

Bonnie Clearwater, the director and chief curator of the Miami museum,allowed that Mr. Weber’s subjects can at first seem unapproachable. His pic-tures “have the effect of a sculpture,” she said. “But because you feel youcan caress the subject — man, woman or child — the experience of seeingbecomes almost tactile. And because you feel you can touch these people,you care about them.”

Until now Americans have seenthese people only as “wet, frightenedand fighting for their lives,” Mr. We-ber said. But he trained his lens on an-other side of the Haitian community,his view shaped by years of shooting fashion advertising for Ralph Lau-ren, Calvin Klein and Abercrombie & Fitch, and stylish editorials for Vogue and Vanity Fair.

“If I hadn’t had the background oftaking fashion pictures,” he said, “Iwouldn’t have been able to make pic-tures of these people. I wouldn’t havecaptured their elegance.”

King of Style Is SwitchingTo Empathy

‘In tough times,

people want a

strong man.’

BRUCE WEBER

The idealized, elegant photographs in Bruce Weber’s latest exhibit, about Haitians resettled in Miami, are meant to trigger emotions.

TULLIO M. PUGLIA/GETTY IMAGES; FAR RIGHT, GIUSEPPE ARESU/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Pants fromthe Bottega Veneta autumncollectiondisplay astreamlinedmodernism.

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A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2010

BERLIN — In January workers digging for a new subway station nearCity Hall unearthed a bronze bust of a woman, rusted, filthy and almost unrecognizable.

Researchers learned the bust was a portrait by EdwinScharff, a nearly for-gotten German mod-ernist, from around 1920. In August, more

sculpture emerged nearby: “Stand-ing Girl” by Otto Baum, “Dancer” byMarg Moll and the remains of a head by Otto Freundlich. Excavators alsorescued another fragment, a differ-ent head, belonging to Emy Roeder’s“Pregnant Woman.” October pro-duced yet a further batch.

The 11 sculptures were survivors ofwhat the Nazis notoriously called “de-generate art.” Several works, records showed, were seized from Germanmuseums in the 1930s and paraded in the fateful “Degenerate Art” show. They were last known to have beenstored in the depot of the Reichspropa-gandaministerium, which organized the “Degenerate” show.

Then the sculptures vanished. A modest exhibition of the discov-

eries has been organized and re-cently opened at the Neues Museum, Berlin’s archaeological collection, theperfect site for these works.

Like the sculptures, the museumrose from the ruins of war. In thearchitect David Chipperfield’s inge-nious reconstruction of the building, ithas become a palimpsest of Germanhistory, bearing witness to a violencethat time has been unable to erase.

This little show is unexpectedlymoving. Its effect ends up being all out of proportion to the objects dis-covered, which are, aesthetically, fine but not remarkable. They are works of quasi-Cubism or Expressionism,mostly not much more than 30 centi-meters high, several newly cleaned but still scarred.

They’re like the dead, these sculp-tures, ever coming back to us, radiantghosts.

Archaeologists have determinedthat the recovered works must havecome from 50 Königstrasse, acrossthe street from City Hall. The buildingbelonged to a Jewish woman, EdithSteinitz; several Jewish lawyers arelisted as her tenants in 1939, but theirnames disappear from the record by1942, when the house became propertyof the Reich.

Among its subsequent occupants,German investigators now believe,the likeliest candidate to have hidden the art was Erhard Oewerdieck, a tax lawyer and escrow agent.

Oewerdieck is not widely known,but he is remembered at Yad Vashem,the Holocaust memorial in Israel. In1939, he and his wife gave money to a Jewish family to escape to Shanghai.He also hid an employee in his apart-ment. In 1941 he helped the historianEugen Täubler and his wife flee to America, preserving part of Täubler’s library. And he risked his life by writ-ing a job recommendation for Wolf-gang Abendroth, a Nazi opponent.

The current theory is that when fire from Allied air raids in 1944 con-sumed 50 Königstrasse, the contentsof Oewerdieck’s office fell through the

floor, and then the building collapsed on top. Tests are being done on ash from the site for remains of inciner-ated paintings and wood sculptures.How the lost art came into Oew-erdieck’s possession still isn’t clear.

But at least it’s now back on view. Scharff’s bust, of an actress named Anni Mewes, brings to mind Egyptianworks in the museum. Karl Knappe’s“Hagar,” a bronze from 1923, twistedlike knotted rope, has been left withits green patina of rust, making italmost impossible to decipher, saveas evidence of its fate. On the other hand, Freundlich’s glazed terra cotta“Head,” from 1925, gnarled like an old olive tree, loses little of its power for being broken. The Nazis seized the Freundlich from a museum in Ham-burg in 1937, then six years later, inFrance, seized the artist and sent him

to Majdanek, the concentration campin Poland, where he was murdered on the day he arrived.

Nearby, the Deutsches Histo-risches Museum’s Hitler exhibition, today’s version of a “Degenerate”show, means to warn viewers about succumbing to what present law de-clares morally reprehensible. How could any decent German ever havebeen taken in? the show asks.

That happens to be the question the Nazis’ “Degenerate” show posed about modern art. Many more Ger-mans visited that exhibition than theconcurrent one of approved Germanart.

In any case, today’s Germany has salvaged the pieces and has organized this display. Redemption sometimes comes late and in small measures.

By CELIA McGEE

Dueling books about Jacque-line Kennedy Onassis’s years inpublishing are due out this month:“Reading Jackie: Her Autobiogra-phy in Books,” by William Kuhn; and “Jackie as Editor: The Liter-ary Life of Jacqueline KennedyOnassis,” by Greg Lawrence .

The first, from Doubleday, is adeparture from the company’srule of not publishing anythingabout Mrs. Onassis, its former em-ployee. The other is from ThomasDunne Books/St. Martin’s Press.

The books both contend thatMrs. Onassis’s two decades inpublishing reveal much about her as a person: the intellect behindthe fashion plate, the analyticalmind behind the famous face. The little girl who loved books grew upto spend more years as an editorthan as first lady and the wife of a Greek shipping tycoon combined.

In 1975, Mrs. Onassis had just ar-rived at Viking , at a weekly salaryof $200. Each book recounts how in1977, after a break with Viking overthe publication of the assassination-plot thriller “Shall We Tell the Pres-ident?,” she joined Doubleday. Its“Jackie” book is under the imprintof the editor Nan Talese, who knewMrs. Onassis when the former first lady was starting out in publishing.“Jackie would line up just like ev-eryone” to see the publisher in hisoffice, Ms. Talese reports.

In both biographies, colleaguesremember Mrs. Onassis’s smalloffice, her big glasses, and her hairsmelling of cigarettes. Her editorialtastes ran to cultural histories of court life, the power of myth, biog-raphies of unconventional women and civil rights heroes, and bookscelebrating past gilded ages.

She got the singer Carly Simon towrite children’s books. She signedup Michael Jackson’s “Moonwalk.”Ms. Talese remarked that Mrs.Onassis displayed her intellectualcredentials early on. But “we alsogrew up in an era when womenweren’t taken seriously, and younever get over that. I think it’s why she took a job in which she was ableto use her mind.”

Mr. Lawrence depicts Mrs.Onassis as a crusader against the conglomeration of publishing — in1986 Doubleday was acquired bythe German firm Bertelsmann— and budget-cutting. But, Ms.Talese said, “she signed up a novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and toldme, ‘Sometimes you have to dosomething for your soul.’ ”

But Mrs. Onassis, whose sal-ary eventually rose to $100,000,understood the value of her name. “She once said to me, ‘Well, I’m thehunter, and I do it when they wantme,’ ” Ms. Talese said.

You can’t add much depth to a zom-bie. It can’t talk or think and it’s onlymotive is the consumption of flesh. Youcan’t humanize a zombie, unless youmake it less zombie-esque. There are

slow zombies, andthere are fast zom-bies — that’s prettymuch the spectrumof zombie diversity.

But roughly 5.3 million people inthe United States

watched the first episode of the televi-sion series “The Walking Dead,” or 83percent more than those who watched the Season 4 premiere of “Mad Men.”Something about zombies is becom-ing more intriguing to us. And I think I know what that something is.

It’s not that zombies are changing to fit the world’s condition; it’s that the condition of the world seems more like a zombie offensive.

A lot of modern life is exactly likeslaughtering zombies.

If there’s one thing we all under-stand about zombie killing, it’s that the act is uncomplicated: you blast one in the brain from point-blank range (preferably with a shotgun). That’s Step 1. Step 2 is doing the same thing to the next zombie that takes its place. Step 3 is identical to Step 2, and Step 4 isn’t any different from Step 3. Repeat this process until (a) you perish, or (b) you run out of zombies.That’s really the only viable strategy.

Every zombie war is a war of at-trition. And it’s more repetitive thancomplex. In other words, zombie kill-ing is philosophically similar to read-ing and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gos-sip out of obligation, or performing te-dious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche.The principle downside to any zombieattack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principle downside

to life is that you will be never be fin-ished with whatever it is you do.

The Internet reminds us of thisevery day.

Here’s a passage from a youngish writer named Alice Gregory, taken from a recent essay on Gary Shteyn-gart’s dystopic novel “Super Sad True Love Story” in the literary journaln+1: “It’s hard not to think ‘deathdrive’ every time I go on the Inter-net,” she writes. “Opening Safari isan actively destructive decision. I amasking that consciousness be takenaway from me.”

Ms. Gregory’s self-directed fear isthematically similar to how the zom-bie brain is described by Max Brooks, author of the fictional oral history “World War Z” and its accompanying

self-help manual, “The Zombie Sur-vival Guide”: “Imagine a computer programmed to execute one func-tion. This function cannot be paused,modified or erased. No new data can be stored. No new commands can beinstalled. This computer will performthat one function, over and over, until its power source eventually shuts down.”

This is our collective fear projec-tion: that we will be consumed.Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have. All of it comes at us endlessly (and thoughtlessly), and — if we surrender — we will beovertaken and absorbed. Yet thiswar is manageable, if not necessarily winnable. As long as we keep delet-ing whatever’s directly in front of us, we survive. We live to eliminate the zombies of tomorrow. We are able to remain human, at least for the time being. Our enemy is relentless and co-lossal, but also uncreative and stupid.

Battling zombies is like battlinganything … or everything.

If you like zombies, you like the entire zombie concept. You’re in-terested in what zombies signify,you like the way they move, and you understand what’s required to stopthem. And this is a reassuring at-traction, because those aspects don’treally shift. They’ve become sharedarchetypal knowledge.

A few days before Halloween I was in upstate New York with three other people, and we somehow ended up at the Barn of Terror, outside a town called Lake Katrine. The bestpart was when we were taken to a cornfield nearby. The field was filledwith amateur actors, some playing military personnel and others what they called the infected. We were toldto run through the moonlit corn mazeif we wanted to live; as we ran, armedsoldiers yelled contradictory instruc-tions while hissing zombies emerged from the corny darkness. It was de-signed to be fun, and it was.

But just before we immersed our-selves in the corn, one of my compan-ions said: “I know this is supposedto be scary, but I’m pretty confident about my ability to deal with a zombieapocalypse. I feel strangely informedabout what to do in this kind of sce-nario.”

I could not disagree. We all knowhow this goes: if you awake from acoma, and you don’t immediately see amember of the hospital staff, assume azombie takeover has transpired. Don’ttravel at night and keep your drapesclosed. Don’t let zombies spit on you.If you knock a zombie down, direct asecond bullet into its brain stem. Butabove all, do not ever assume the waris over. The zombies you kill today willmerely be replaced by the zombiesof tomorrow. But you can do this, myfriend. It’s disenchanting, but it’s notdifficult. Keep your finger on the trig-ger. Don’t stop deleting. Return yourvoice mails and nod your agreements.This is the zombies’ world, and we justlive in it. But we can live better.

One of two new biographies about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ life in publishing.

THOMAS PETER/REUTERS

A sculpture by Edwin Scharff, an example of what the Nazis called‘‘degenerate art,’’ was unearthed and is on display in Berlin.

SETH WENIG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Walking corpses have become more appealing to people. A group ofzombies on the Brooklyn Bridge publicizes ‘‘The Walking Dead.’’

MICHAEL

KIMMELMAN

ESSAY

CHUCK

KLOSTERMAN

ESSAY

Modern Life, Full of Zombies

Deleting e-mails, shooting the undead. It’s all the same.

Recovered GhostsOf Berlin’s Nazi Past

Two BooksOn a LifeIn Books

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