SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2007

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The urge to improve one’s life spurs markets as diverse as inspirational speakers and marriage brokers. Bui Thi Thuy and Kim Tae-goo, far left, and To Thi Vien and Kim Wan-su wed in Vietnam days after they met and will live in South Korea. Thi Thuy’s father, top left, worried about the couple’s age gap. Thi Vien cried after her wedding.

Photographs

by Norimitsu

w York Times Onishi/T he Ne

Reaching for a Better Life Think Positively, and Buy the DVD By ALLEN SALKIN

There are some surprising secrets behind “The Secret.” For one, most of the millions of people who have seen “The Secret,” a documentary that is the biggest thing to hit the New Age movement since the Harmonic Convergence, may not know that there are two versions of the film. In both, “The Secret” intersperses interviews with authors and inspirational speakers who specialize in personal transformation with short dramatized episodes to deliver a message about how positive thinking will improve one’s health, wealth and love life. The secret that the movie purports to reveal after millenniums is “the law of attraction.” This principle, said to be known by an elite few, including Beethoven and 19th-century tycoons, holds that the universe will make your wishes come true if only you really, truly believe in them. “Ask, believe, receive,” the movie instructs. There is no better example of the magic than the success of “The Secret” itself and of its creator,

Rhonda Byrne, an Australian documentary producer turned spiritual entrepreneur. With no advertising or theatrical release, the movie has sold 1.5 million copies of a DVD at $34.95, according to the producers. More than half the copies have sold in the last month, as word-of-mouth appeal crossed over from New Age circles to the mainstream. A book based on the movie, also called “The Secret,” which Ms. Byrne wrote in less than a month, jumped to No. 1 late last month on the New York Times best-seller list of hardcover advice, howto and miscellaneous books. “Secret” support groups have formed around the United States. In Southern California, real estate brokers show the 92-minute movie to motivate sales representatives. The talk show host Oprah Winfrey, one of the richest women in America, dedicated two shows to “The Secret.” She said its positive philosophy is the way she has long lived her own life. In the film a woman says the law of attraction

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Wives and Worries in Marriage Market By NORIMITSU ONISHI

HANOI, Vietnam — It was midnight here in Hanoi, or already 2 a.m. back in Seoul, South Korea. But after a five-hour flight on a recent Sunday, Kim Wan-su was driven straight from the airport to the Lucky Star karaoke bar here, where 23 young Vietnamese women seeking Korean husbands sat waiting in two dimly lighted rooms. “Do I have to look at them and decide now?’’ Mr. Kim asked, as the marriage brokers gave a brief description of each of the women sitting around a U-shaped sofa. Thus, Mr. Kim, a 39-year-old auto parts worker from a suburb of Seoul, began the mildly chaotic, two-hour process of choosing a spouse. In a day or two, if his five-day marriage tour went according to plan, he would be wed and enjoying his honeymoon at the famed Perfume Pagoda on the Huong Tich Mountain southwest of here. More and more South Korean men are finding wives outside of South Korea, where a surplus of bachelors, a lack of marriageable Korean part-

No Longer Taboo, Pole Dancing Unleashes Suburbia’s Wild Side By TINA KELLEY

Pictures on the Radio Radio stations, struggling in the digital age, are adding videos to their Web sites. 5

Iran’s Ancient Glory An exhibition celebrates the art of the Sasanians, who once reigned along the Silk Road. 8

KINNELON, New Jersey — Johnna Cottam was showing a group of her girlfriends how to do a move called the Fireman. As music by Shakira played, she strode up to grab the portable pole in the living room of her lakefront home here, wrapped her right leg around it, swung wide with her left, and spun. When she reached the bottom, Ms. Cottam, in a pink “Got Pole?” tank top and black workout pants, tossed her hair back. “Kick it right out of the ballpark, just kick it,” she encouraged her five friends and neighbors. Ms. Cottam then backed into a rocking chair draped with feather boas that partly covered her twin sons’ two teddy bears. Pole dancing, once exclusively the province of exotic dancers, has flared up as a Hollywood exercise craze, and has seeped into the collective unconscious

through television shows like “The Sopranos” and “Desperate Housewives.” Now the pole — think ballet barre turned vertical — is the new star at racier versions of at-home parties in wealthy areas like this one in northern New Jersey, about 50 kilometers northwest of Manhattan. Billed as “femme empowerment,” such at-home pole dancing lessons are taking place in the realm of book clubs, with mothers — and grandmothers — learning slinky moves for girls’ nights in, bachelorette send-offs, even the occasional 60th birthday celebration. “I want the women to feel strong within themselves,” explained Ms. Cottam, 29, who teaches pole dancing at a local gym as well as at home parties. Noting that some middle-aged suburban women lose themselves and their sense of sexuality as they are consumed by the responsibilities of motherhood, she

ners and the rising social status of women have combined to shrink the domestic market for the marriage-minded male. Bachelors in China, India and other Asian nations, where the traditional preference for sons has created a disproportionate number of men now fighting over a smaller pool of women, are facing the same problem. The rising status of women in the United States sent American men who were searching for more traditional wives to Russia in the 1990s. But America’s more balanced population has not led to the shortage of potential brides and the thriving international marriage industry found in South Korea. Now, that industry is seizing on an increasingly globalized marriage market and sending comparatively affluent Korean bachelors searching for brides in the poorer corners of China and Southeast and Central Asia. The marriage tours are fueling an explosive growth in marriages to foreigners in South Korea, a country whose ethnic homogeneity

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Pole dancing has migrated from the strip club to the family living room. said Ms. Schotanus, who had such a good time that she promised to soon plan a pole party of her own. Though Ms. Cottam operates independently, more than 350 poledance instructors in 34 states and Canada have signed up since August 2006 with an international company, EPM EmpowerNet, to run their own businesses in the model of Avon sales or other companies that sell goods by inviting potential customSylwia Kapuscinski for The New York Times ers to a party in the seller’s home. At Ms. Cottam’s house, there was talk added: “When you come to my class you are beautiful, you are. I want to show about getting the local women’s club, them that strength inside, and unleash whose activities normally run more to community dinners and Lifeguard Apthat sexual kitten.” At the party here, Karen Schotanus, preciation Day, involved in a session. “It was great fun,” said Ms. DaCaroa 42-year-old dental hygienist who met Ms. Cottam at a neighborhood garage lis, who spent much of the lesson comsale, encouraged Carolyn DaCarolis, plaining about being left-handed, and 52 and also a hygienist, as she practiced who left with a pair of red marabou a tentative strut around the pole. “Pull platform pumps. “But I need a lot of out the hair tie and throw those glasses,” practice.”

CAHIER DU " MONDE " DATÉ SAMEDI 3 MARS 2007, NO 19317. NE PEUT ÊTRE VENDU SÉPARÉMENT

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2007 O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY BOB HERBERT

The Real Patriots

BERTRAMS Het Parool Netherlands

EDITORIALS OF THE TIMES

A Dubious Partnership Misspent your country’s wealth? Waged war against an ethnic minority? Or just tired of those pesky good governance requirements attached to foreign aid by most Western governments and multilateral institutions? If you run an African country and have some natural resources, you’ve got a friend in Beijing ready to write big checks with no embarrassing questions. That’s nice for governments, but not so nice for their misgoverned people. China’s president, Hu Jintao, recently completed a 12-day, 8-nation African tour in which he dispensed billions of dollars’ worth of debt relief, discounted loans and new investments. His itinerary included established democracies like South Africa and hopeful newer ones like Liberia. But it also included Sudan and Zimbabwe, two of Africa’s worstgoverned and deadliest dictatorships. Beijing’s huge purchases of oil and other resources have made it the continent’s third-largest trading partner. Its callous yuan diplomacy is a growing problem for

some of Africa’s worst-off people. China’s oil appetite has drawn it into an ugly partnership with Sudan, which is waging a genocidal war in Darfur that has already killed at least 200,000 people. China has blocked the United Nations Security Council from ordering Sudan to accept an effective peacekeeping force and has shielded Sudan from any serious punishments. On this trip, Mr. Hu wrote off Sudanese debts and provided an interest-free loan for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to build a new presidential palace. Another favorite is Zimbabwe’s president-for-life, Robert Mugabe. That is bad news for Zimbabweans hoping for free elections, sane economic policies or merely a peaceful transition once the octogenarian finally departs. A flood of cheap Chinese manufactured goods has pushed some of the poorest workers deeper into poverty. China isn’t the first outside industrial power to behave badly in Africa. But it should not be proud of following the West’s sorry historical example.

American Liberty at the Precipice In another low moment for American justice, a federal appeals court ruled on February 20 that detainees held at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, do not have the right to be heard in court. The ruling relied on a shameful law that President Bush stampeded through Congress last fall that gives dangerously little consideration to the Constitution. The right of prisoners to challenge their confinement — habeas corpus — is enshrined in the Constitution and is central to American liberty. Congress and the Supreme Court should act quickly and forcefully to undo the grievous damage that last fall’s law — and the recent ruling — have done to this basic freedom. The Supreme Court ruled last year on the improvised system of military tribunals that the Bush administration established to try the Guantánamo detainees, finding it illegal. Mr. Bush responded by driving through Congress the Military Commissions Act, which presumed to deny the right of habeas corpus to any noncitizen designated as an “enemy com-

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batant.” This law raises insurmountable obstacles for prisoners to challenge their detentions. And it gives the government the power to take away habeas rights from any noncitizen living in the United States who is unfortunate enough to be labeled an enemy combatant. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which rejected the detainees’ claims by a vote of 2 to 1, should have permitted the detainees to be heard in court — and it should have ruled that the law is unconstitutional. With the Democrats now in charge, it is in a good position to pass a new law that fixes the dangerous mess it has made. The Bush administration’s assault on civil liberties does not end with habeas corpus. Congress should also move quickly to pass another crucial bill, introduced by Senator Christopher Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut. That measure, among other steps, would once and for all outlaw the use of evidence obtained through torture.

If we could manage to get past the tedious and the odious — like the empty speculation on whether a woman can win, or whether Barack Obama is black enough — we might be able to engage the essential issue facing the United States at this point in our history. And that is whether, once the Bush administration has finally and mercifully run its course, the country goes back to being a reasonably peaceful, lawful, constructive force in the world, or whether we continue down the bullying, warlike, unilateral, irresponsible, unlawful and profoundly ineffective path laid out by Bush, Cheney & Company. The question is not so much whether a Republican or a Democrat takes the White House in the next election; it’s whether the American people can take back their country. I don’t think most Americans are up for perennial warfare. And whatever the polls might say, it’s very hard for me to accept that the men and women who rise from their seats and cover their hearts at the start of sporting events are really in favor of dismantling the system of checks and balances, or holding people in prison for years without charging them, or torturing prisoners in American custody, or giving the president the raw power and unsavory privileges of an emperor. It was Richard Nixon who said, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, operating under the guise of national security, took this theoretical absur-

Rethinking Human Nature, Again. Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don’t even notice until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness. This belief, most often associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, begins with the notion that “everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Human beings are virtuous and free in their natural state. It is only corrupt institutions that make them venal. They are happy in their simplicity, but social conventions make them unwell. This belief had gigantic ramifications over the years. It led, first of all, to the belief that bourgeois social conventions are repressive and soul-destroying. It contributed to romantic revolts against tradition and etiquette. Western culture has seen a string of antiestablishment rebellions led by people who wanted to shuck off convention and reawaken more natural modes of awareness. In education, it led to progressive reforms, in which children were liberated to follow their natural instincts. Politically, it led to radical social engineering efforts, because if institutions were the source of sin, then all you had to do was reshape institutions in order to create a New Man. Therapeutically, it led to an emphasis of feelings over reason, self-esteem

Dans l’article “Wary of Iran, Arab States Build Up Arsenals and Enhance Links to U.S.,” page 3: WARY: circonspect, méfiant SHOPPING SPREE: débauche, orgie d’achats

over self-discipline. In the realm of foreign policy, it led to a sort of global doctrine of the noble savage — the belief that societies in the colonial world were fundamentally innocent, and once the chains of their oppression were lifted something wonderful would flower. Over the past 30 years or so, however, this belief in natural goodness has been discarded. It began to lose favor because of the failure of just about every social program that was inspired by it, from the communes to progressive education on up. But the big blow came at the hands of science. From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest. Humanity did not come before status contests. Status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations. Moreover, human beings are not as pliable as the social engineers imagined. Human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules, which dispose people to act in certain ways. We strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams. This darker if more realistic view of human nature has led to a rediscovery of different moral codes and different political assumptions. Most people today share what Thomas Sowell calls

With New Plays,” page 8:

Pour aider à la lecture de l’anglais et familiariser nos lecteurs avec certaines expressions américaines, Le Monde publie ci-dessous la traduction de quelques mots et idiomes contenus dans les articles de ce supplément. Par Dominique Chevallier, agrégée d’anglais.

Dans l’article “More Sabers to Rattle and Fewer to Thrust,” page 3: TO RATTLE: faire un bruit de ferraille TO THRUST: ici, pointer pour attaquer KEG: tonnelet TAP: robinet BARREL: tonneau FUNGIBLE: interchangeable TO PARRY: parer (une attaque) TO ENTICE: attirer ARMORED: blindé TO TALLY: dénombrer

Undermining checks and balances here at home and acting unilaterally abroad have made us less safe, said Mr. Schwarz. Senator Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who is running for president, has introduced legislation that would definitively bar the use of evidence obtained by torture or coercion, reinstate full United States adherence to the Geneva Conventions and restore rights of habeas corpus for certain terror suspects that were stripped away by the federal government last year. (Habeas corpus is a legal proceeding that allows suspects to challenge their detention in a court of law. To get a sense of its significance, imagine that you were locked up somewhere and were not permitted to show that a mistake had been made, that you were innocent. Imagine that you, or a loved one, were held under those circumstances for a period of years, or forever.) Senator Dodd said this corrosion of the rule of law has been tolerated primarily because “people have been frightened.” As he put it, in an atmosphere of crisis, “the temptation to succumb to the demagoguery of these things is strong.” The senator and Mr. Schwarz, in their different ways, are among the many quiet patriots who are spreading the word that the very meaning of the United States, the whole point of this fragile experiment in representative democracy, will be lost if the nation’s ironclad commitment to the rule of law is allowed to unravel.

DAVID BROOKS

: AIDE A LA LECTURE

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dity to heart and put it into widespread practice. There are, however, many thoughtful Americans who want to stop this calamitous disregard for the rule of law, two of whom I’ll mention here — Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr. and Senator Chris Dodd. Mr. Schwarz is one of the most decent men I’ve known. I covered him when he was the chief lawyer for New York City during the administration of Mayor Ed Koch. He was then, and still is, an eminently trustworthy man. In the 1970s Mr. Schwarz was chief counsel for the Church Committee (named after its chairman, Senator Frank Church), which uncovered extraordinary abuses and led to historic changes in the nation’s intelligence services. He is now the senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. In a book to be published this month by The New Press, “Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror,” Mr. Schwarz and a colleague at the Brennan Center, Aziz Z. Huq, write: “For the first time in American history, the executive branch claims authority under the Constitution to set aside laws permanently — including prohibitions on torture and warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. A frightening idea decisively rejected at America’s birth — that a president, like a king, can do no wrong — has reemerged to justify torture and indefinite presidential detention.’’

PRONE TO: sujet à, enclin à TO SQUABBLE: se chamailler FLUSH: qui a de l’argent à flots

EXPRESSIONS Dans l’article “The Beautiful Violence of Iran’s Gilded History,” page 8: GILDED: doré, plaqué or; s’utilise de façon péjorative dans l’expression “The Gilded Age”, l’Age du Toc, titre d’un roman de Mark Twain, pour caractériser cette époque de la fin du 19ème siècle, celle de l’acier, des fortunes des Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frisk et autres “Robber Barons”. On dit aussi “to gild the lily” pour indiquer l’ajout inutile d’un ornement artificiel à quelque chose de naturellement beau. Dans l’article “A Rare Broadway Spring Blooms

A LONG SHOT: un coup à tenter, un coup risqué,

qui a peu de chances de réussir; by a long shot: de beaucoup; not by a long shot (ou chalk): loin de là...

RÉFÉRENCES Dans l’article “Radio Adds Pictures for the Internet Era,” page 5: MARSHALL MCLUHAN: (1911-1980), pape des théoriciens de la communication, dont le propos essentiel est résumé dans la formule “the medium is the message”, c’est à dire que si le contenu s’adresse à la conscience rationnelle, c’est le canal de transmission qui s’adresse au niveau empirique de la conscience et qui transforme la société. Ainsi, changeons l’étiquette d’une bouteille de vin et notre perception du contenu s’en trouve modifiée. Dans son livre “The Gutenberg Galaxy” (1964), il expose comment d’après lui, l’invention de l’imprimerie conditionne le développement de l’individualisme, de la démocratie, du capitalisme et du nationalisme. C’est lui aussi, dans “Understanding Media”, qu’il invente la

the Constrained Vision, what Steven Pinker calls the Tragic Vision and what E. O. Wilson calls Existential Conservatism. This is based on the idea that there is a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don’t understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting each other’s throats are valuable and are altered at great peril. Today, parents don’t seek to liberate their children; they supervise, coach and instruct every element of their lives. Today, there really is no antinomian counterculture — even the artists and rock stars are bourgeois strivers. Today, communes and utopian schemes are out of favor. People are mostly skeptical of social engineering efforts and jaundiced about revolutionaries who promise to herald a new dawn. Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state. This is a big pivot in intellectual history. The thinkers most associated with the Tragic Vision are Isaiah Berlin, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Friedrich Hayek and Hobbes. Many of them are conservative. And here’s another perversity of human nature. Many conservatives resist the theory of evolution even though it confirms many of conservatism’s deepest truths.

formule “the global village” (le village planétaire), dont il n’a pas une vue positive, car il y voit un potentiel de totalitarisme. Dans l’article “A Rare Broadway Spring Blooms With New Plays,” page 8: JOAN DIDION: Née en 1934, cet écrivain américaine est à la fois journaliste et romancière. Elle a écrit cinq romans où se retrouvent un panthéon de personnages californiens paranoïaques, voire sociopathes; elle explore le mythe de la frontière, s’interroge sur le prix du progrès. En 2005, elle publie “Year of Magical Thinking”, livre de réflexion sur le chagrin et le deuil, où la structure narrative lui permet de revenir, à chaque fois sous un angle différent, sur le moment où son compagnon de 40 ans s’effondre et meurt après une visite à leur fille, à l’hôpital où elle est très malade, toujours avec cette distanciation analytique caractéristique de son écriture. C’est ce livre, adapté pour la scène en pièce à un seul personnage, dont il est question dans l’article, et que dès fin mars 2007, Vanessa Redgrave interprétera à Broadway.

LE MONDE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2007

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WORLD TRENDS NEWS ANALYSIS

With American forces committed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are questions about the limits of U.S. military power.

More Sabers to Rattle And Fewer to Thrust By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — With just enough flourish to give North Korea something to think about, a squadron of radarevading F-22 Raptors landed in Japan recently, the first overseas deployment of the United States Air Force’s new ground-attack jet. In a decision intended to give Iran similar pause, a second aircraft carrier arrived soon after in waters within easy sail of the Persian Gulf. These moves seemed like perfectly logical geopolitical responses to heightened dangers. But they also helped mask another reality. Because the military today does not have enough available ground troops to use for intimidation, the moves were pretty much the only options available. In the past, certain Army brigades were designated to be on standby, ready to rush to global hot spots in 18 to 72 hours. But the Army and Marines are carrying out the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan with large and sustained deployments, so warplanes and warships are replacing boots on the ground elsewhere. Senior military planners do not deny that the recent deployments reflect a deep concern in the Pentagon that the United States simply may not have enough ready and available resources to go around. Moves like these have become necessary to offset enemy notions that being tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan have made America weak and in no position to exert any kind of force outside of those conflicts. There is ample cause for concern. In addition to a shortage of available ground troops, military planners worry, armor and other combat gear being rushed to Iraq might not be around for use in another crisis.

Recently, the nation’s highest-ranking officer, General Peter Pace, secretly upgraded to “significant’’ the risk the military faces this year in carrying out its full national security mission. He unwaveringly stated that the armed forces would succeed at any mission ordered by the president; the response would just be slower, less elegant, more dangerous. Taken together, the active-duty military and the reserves number more than two million, but the military is struggling to fill a roster of about 160,000 troops to carry out President Bush’s strategy in Iraq. Part of the strain is simple inefficiency. As General Peter J. Schoomaker, the departing Army chief of staff, has said, the military deployment system is like a keg of beer, with the tap put too near the top to drain the whole barrel. In a reflection of these strains, the Army is preparing to go public with its detailed plans for training and equipping the five Brigade Combat Teams being rushed to Iraq under Mr. Bush’s stabilization strategy — the so-called surge. “Those B.C.T.’s are needed in Iraq sooner than the Army had planned to have them ready, and that increases the risk, of course,’’ said one senior Army officer. To meet the orders to deploy, and to reassure the troops and their families that every soldier landing in the desert will be certified ready for the mission, those brigades will focus on training relevant only to the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq, leaving for another day the full spectrum of training desired by the Army to have its units prepared for any emergency, a senior officer said. “At the end of the day, strategy is the management of risk, whether personal or military strategy,’’ said Jeffrey D.

other parts of the military. Aircraft and ships are the moving pieces to thrust and parry on the global chess board. That, and billions in new spending. Money has been requested to increase the military by 92,000 people over the number in uniform on September 11, 2001, with new money to recruit soldiers and entice experienced ones to stay longer. The 2007 budget has new allocations of $17.1 billion to reset Army equipment and $5.8 billion for Marine gear, with a separate fund of $13.9 billion in emergency spending power to replace or repair gear destroyed, damaged or worn in combat. General Pace’s risk assessment is based on hard facts: numbers of troops deployed in combat zones, recruiting successes and shortfalls, armored vehicles to be replaced or repaired or drawn out of emergency depots to fulfill the Iraq mission, availability of transport planes, aerial refueling tankers, remotely piloted surveillance vehicles. But there are important intangibles, mostly of perception. While General Pace’s assessment is classified, he has said in public that potential adversaries like Iran or North Korea should not miscalculate because the United States retains the military capability to carry out any mission ordered by President Bush. A range of officials who read the assessment noted with concern that it did not factor in the 20,000-plus troops ordered to Iraq in January. “There is no doubt that we can still conduct all of the missions assigned to us under the national military strategy,’’ said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. He noted that when the active-duty military, the reserves and Pentagon civilians are tallied, the rolls top three million, and that is without any call to national mobilization.

Orlin Wagner/Associated Press

McCausland, a retired Army colonel who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council in New York. “The question is, how much risk are we willing to live with? We are taking a significant amount of strategic risk today because, if you look at our ground forces, we have pulled almost everything out of the box already. So if a major problem arises somewhere else, what do we turn to?’’ As a consequence, he said, the United

States has lost much of its historic military flexibility. “We know that,’’ he said. “So do our adversaries. To some degree, Iran and North Korea can play this round of poker more boldly.’’ American military planners are adapting to this new world of threat by deciding that its forces are fungible, and that the role traditionally assigned to the ground brigades designated for emergency deployment can be filled by

Wary of Iran, Arab States Build Up Arsenals and Enhance Links to U.S.

Tamara Abdul Hadi for The New York Times

Gulf leaders are now more open about the weapons they are buying. A military trade fair in Abu Dhabi last month drew crowds.

LE PRIX DAN DAVID FÉLICITE

les Lauréats 2007 pour leur contribution au progrès de l’humanité dans les arts, les sciences et les lettres. Le Prix Dan David, d’un rayonnement international, est financé par la Fondation Dan David et administré par l’université de Tel Aviv. Chaque année, trois Prix d’un million de Dollars sont remis à des personnalités et/ou institutions pour leurs contributions exceptionnelles à la société humaine dans les trois dimensions temporelles - Passé, Présent et Futur.

Historien du Moyen-Age Européen

Zubin Mehta

James Hansen

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Chef d’Orchestre de renommée mondiale

Pascal Dusapin

Eminent Compositeur

D.R.

Jacques Le Goff

Pour la Dimension Temporelle du Futur La recherche de l’Energie

D.R.

Pour la Dimension Temporelle du Présent Musique Contemporaine

D.R.

Pour la Dimension Temporelle du Passé Historiens : Auteurs de travaux majeurs

D.R.

that the United States could pull out of the region in the future, even as it has raised concerns about a potential American confrontation with Iran, accidental or intentional. As tensions with Iran rise, many gulf countries have come to see themselves as the likely first targets of an Iranian attack. Some have grown more concerned that the United States may be overstretched militarily, many analysts say, while almost all the monarchies, flush with cash as a result of high oil prices, have sought to build a military deterrent of their own. “The message is first, ‘U.S., stay involved here,’ and second, ‘Iran, we will maintain a technological edge no matter what,’ ” said Emile el-Hokayem, research fellow at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a research center based in Washington. “They are trying to reinforce the credibility of the threat of force.” Military officials from throughout the region descended last month on the Idex military trade fair, a biennial event that has become the region’s largest arms market, drawing nearly 900 weapons makers from around the world. They came ready to update their military capacities and air and naval defenses. They also came armed with a veiled message of resolve. “We believe there is a need for power to protect peace, and strong people with the capability to respond are the real protectors of peace,” said Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of the emirate of Abu Dhabi, at the exposition. “That is why we are keen to maintain the efficiency of our armed forces.” The Persian Gulf has been a lucrative market for arms. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman spend up to 10 percent of their gross domestic product on the military, amounting to nearly $21 billion, $4 billion and $2.7 billion, respectively, estimates John Kenkel, senior director of Jane’s Strategic Advisory Services. If they follow through on the deals announced recently, it is estimated that countries like the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia will spend up to $60 billion this year. “It is a message to enemies that ‘We are taking defense seriously,’ ” Mr. Kenkel said, emphasizing that the new arms were for deterrence. The most marked change is in the public nature of the acquisitions. “They have been doing these kinds of purchases since the ’90s,” said Marwan Lahoud, chief executive of the European missile maker MBDA. “What has changed is they are stating it publicly. The other side is making pronouncements so they have to as well,” he said, speaking of Iran’s recent announcements.

D.R.

By HASSAN M. FATTAH

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — As fears grow over the confrontation between Iran and the West, Arab states across the Persian Gulf have begun a rare show of muscle flexing, publicly advertising a shopping spree for new weapons and openly discussing their security concerns. Typically secretive, the gulf nations have long planned upgrades to their armed forces, but now are speaking openly about them. American military officials say the countries, normally prone to squabbling, have also increased their military cooperation and opened lines of communication to the American military here. Patriot missile batteries capable of striking down ballistic missiles have been readied in several gulf countries, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, analysts say, and increasingly, the states have sought to emphasize their unanimity against Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “There has always been an acknowledgment of the threat in the region, but the volume of the debate has now risen,” said one United Arab Emirates official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject. “Now,” he said, “the message is there’s a dialogue going on with Iran, but that doesn’t mean I don’t intend to defend myself.” The Persian Gulf monarchies and sheikdoms, mostly small and vulnerable, have long relied on the United States to protect them.The expansion has helped calm fears among gulf governments

Sarah Kurtz & Jerry Olson

National Renewable Energy Laboratory Pour la première fois en France, sous le haut Patronage du Président de la République Française, la cérémonie de remise des Prix aura lieu le jeudi 8 mars 2007, à Paris au Palais Garnier.

La cérémonie de remise des Prix pour les jeunes chercheurs aura lieu le lundi 14 mai 2007, à l’Université de Tel Aviv, Israël.

UNIVERSITÉ DE TEL AVIV, POB 39040, Ramat Aviv, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israël, E-mail: [email protected] , www.dandavidprize.org

4

LE MONDE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2007 WORLD TRENDS

Job Boom in India Opens Path to the Sky By SOMINI SENGUPTA

NEW DELHI — This is a story that Abhinanda Shukla, 25, is fond of telling at job interviews, so perfectly honed that it has the ring of an overdrawn fairy tale. As a child, she had flown only once, and was so riveted by the flight attendant that she determined to become one. Her father, a gas station owner in central India, was dead set against it. “He thought it was like being a waitress,” she said. After months of her pleading, he relented. He said he would pay for the tuition at her preferred flight-attendant training school. Not only that, he would allow her to do what would have been considered radical not long ago — she could move from their home in Indore to Pune, a larger city to the west, where the opportunities would be greater, and then, she could fly across the world. Until recently, many Indian families would have frowned on the idea of a young woman dressing in a short skirt and serving strangers on a plane. But a rapidly expanding economy has helped to transform the ambitions, habits and incomes of India’s middle class in ways that would have been unimaginable just a generation ago, not least for young women. One consequence of India’s new prosperity is a hunger among the young to pursue careers that were unavailable to their parents, for wages that would have been beyond their elders’ comprehension. A new crop of private airlines has provided one of the broadest avenues of opportunity. Once entirely dependent on famous British-era railways, Indians are traveling by air more than ever before, so much so that last year, according to government figures, airline passenger traffic grew by a whopping 50 percent.

Four private carriers have started flying in just the past two years, doubling the number of private airlines. One recruiting firm estimated that India would need 40,000 cabin crew staff members in the next three to four years to meet the demand. Starting salaries are in the range of $500 a month, an astounding amount for a high school graduate. Even so, finding suitable workers is proving to be difficult in that industry and many others. Employers complain of a severe shortage of skilled workers and an education system largely unable to deliver what the economy demands.

Indians are now flying more and flight attendants are needed to serve them. Increasingly, that skills gap is being filled by a new crop of vocational schools, like the flight-attendant training school Ms. Shukla had chosen. She and her fellow students all had college degrees but they all felt they needed this extra reinforcement to enter the work force. On this afternoon, her hair pulled back in a French roll, sitting as straight as a librarian, Ms. Shukla sat in a small windowless office, undergoing a mock-interview at the Frankfinn Institute of Air Hostess Training in her limited English. Her fellow students came one by one to the mock interview and gave their own best shots. “I am Amruta Patil, 20; I want to fly high,” a young woman in lowslung jeans said by way of introduction.

The proliferation of the training schools, which, as private ventures, are unregulated by the government, are a window on the dearth of skilled workers, whether for retail or finance or even the country’s legendary call centers. Judging by the sheer number of billboards even in the smallest Indian town, schools like this one have surfaced everywhere, pitching training for a vast array of careers — would-be pedicurists, nurses’ aides, bartenders, technology workers and, most of all, flight attendants. Training at Frankfinn includes grooming and communication skills, first aid, and serving cocktails. It also includes a week of sitting in a hulk of an ancient Airbus, built sometime in the early 1970s, long before most of Frankfinn’s students were born. No matter. Ms. Shukla said it was invaluable practice just being inside a plane. She had now set her sights on a job with Qatar Airways. Asked about marriage and family, Ms. Shukla said she would one day want to be a wife and a mother, but never by giving up her career. She was deeply aware that her life would be very much unlike that of her mother, a homemaker. “I want to make my own identification,” is how she put it. “I want to enhance my personality. I want to famous my own name in my family and in my friends’ circle.” She had dismissed the prospects of working for a domestic airline. “I want to see the whole world,” she said. The foreign carriers, she said, also paid better. By early February, Ms. Shukla had cleared the final round of interviews for Qatar Airways. Her mother had organized prayers at home. Soon, she said, she expected to hear about a job.

For Brides, A New Life And Worries

Think Positively and Buy The DVD and the Book phrase contained its own negativity. The audience applauded. The Hickses spend most of the year cured her cancer, but many followers traveling the country, leading worksettle for more prosaic victories. Victo- shops based on the teachings they say ria Moore, a saleswoman in Silicon Val- Abraham has given them. They record ley, said the principles of “The Secret” the workshops and have 10,000 subhelp her find coveted parking spots. scribers, who pay up to $50 a month for “But if I let in the slightest bit of doubt, it CDs and DVDs of Abraham’s wisdom. When Ms. Byrne asked Ms. Hicks doesn’t happen,” she added. But behind the success of “The Se- to appear in “The Secret,” as the most cret” is a darker story about the ori- prominent interpreter of the law of atgins of the film. It involves big money traction, she agreed to give the Hickses and what some participants say are approval over much of the movie, acthe broken promises of Ms. Byrne. The cording to a contract. But when the coustar of the first version of the movie, re- ple saw the first cut, they were livid. Ms. leased in March last year, demanded to Hicks’s voice, channeling Abraham, was used as narration throughout the be cut out of the current version. That star, Esther Hicks, 58, has been film, but her face was never shown. After negotiation, Ms. Hicks’s image promoting her own version of the law of attraction with her husband, Jerry was edited into the film and it was reHicks, in books and seminars for two leased, ultimately netting the Hickses decades. “We teach that you keep say- $500,000, Ms. Hicks said. But the couple were unhappy with the ing it the way you want it to distribution. be, and if you keep saying The Hickses consulted it the way you want it to be, their lawyer, and Ms. Bythe universe will line up rne in turn demanded and give you exactly what changes to the contract, you’ve said you wanted,” both sides said. No agreeMs. Hicks said. ment could be reached. Ms. Byrne had promMs. Byrne, 55, moved forised Ms. Hicks 10 percent ward with a second version of DVD revenues to apof “The Secret,” replacing pear in “The Secret,” both the Hickses with other selfparties said. But they had help gurus. a dispute, and Ms. Hicks Stephanie Diani The clash between the could not even bring herHickses and Ms. Byrne self to watch Ms. Byrne Rhonda Byrne’s seems mainly over who last month on “Oprah,” book and DVD, deserves credit, and the the movement’s moment “The Secret,” have wave of mainstream of triumph. earned millions. publicity, for this latest Although “The Secret” version of prosperity conis an overnight phenomenon, its message of think-and-grow- sciousness. Without knowing what others have rich is but the latest version of a selfhelp formula dating back more than a written, friends of the Hickses said, it century, with roots both secular and is easy to understand why they believe they did the most to popularize the law religious. One evening in mid-February, the of attraction before “The Secret.” “Some of the people who are in the Hickses relaxed in their $1.4 million luxury bus parked outside the Rancho Cor- movie, I agree, have clearly listened to dova Marriott near Sacramento, where Abraham tapes,” said Cynthia Black, they had just finished a six-hour work- the president of Beyond Words Publishshop on the law of attraction in the hotel ing, who is both a longtime friend of the ballroom. Three hundred people had Hickses and the publisher of Ms. Bypaid $195 each to hear Ms. Hicks, a for- rne’s book version of “The Secret.” “But mer secretary, summon otherworldly Abraham has never said ‘This is just spirits she says speak through her. The mine, don’t share it with everyone.’ ” Walking along the Pacific Ocean spirits, who use the name Abraham, anat surf’s edge in mid-February, Ms. swered participants’ questions. “I don’t have a lover yet,” one woman Byrne said no one owns the law of attraction because it is universal, like said. Abraham, whose speaking voice is another famous law. “I can’t go ‘law of gravity, that’s more computerlike than Ms. Hicks’s voice, explained that the women’s mine,’ ” she said.

Continued From Page 1

Continued From Page 1 lies at the core of its self-identity. In 2005, marriages to foreigners accounted for 14 percent of all marriages in South Korea, up from 4 percent in 2000. After an initial setback — his first three choices found various reasons to decline his offer — Mr. Kim narrowed his field to a 22-year-old college student and an 18-year-old high school graduate. “What’s your personality like?’’ Mr. Kim asked the college student. “I’m an extrovert,’’ she said. The 18-year-old asked why he wanted to marry a Vietnamese woman. “I have two colleagues who married Vietnamese women,’’ he said. “The women seem devoted and family-oriented.’’ One Korean broker said the 22-yearold, who seemed bright and assertive, would adapt well to South Korea. “Well, since I’m quiet, I’ll choose the extrovert,’’ Mr. Kim said finally, adding quickly, “Is it O.K. if I hold her hand now?’’ She went over to sit next to him, though neither dared to hold hands. She spelled out her name in her left palm: Vien. Her name was To Thi Vien. In South Korea, billboards advertising marriages to foreigners dot the countryside, and fliers are scattered on the Seoul subway. The business began in the late 1990s by matching South Korean farmers or the physically disabled mostly to ethnic Koreans in China, according to brokers. But by 2003, most of the customers were urban bachelors, and the foreign brides came from a host of countries. The widespread availability of sexscreening technology has resulted in the birth of a disproportionate number of South Korean males. And South Korea’s growing wealth has increased women’s educational and employment opportunities, even as it has led to rising divorce rates and plummeting birthrates. “Nowadays, Korean women have higher standards,’’ said Lee Eun-tae, the owner of Interwedding, an agency that last year matched 400 Korean bachelors with brides from Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Mongolia, Thailand, Cambodia, Uzbekistan and Indonesia. “If a man has only a high school degree, or lives with his mother, or works only at a small- or medium-size company, or is short or older, or lives in the countryside, he’ll find it very difficult to marry in Korea.’’ Critics say the business demeans and exploits poor women. But brokers say

J. Adam Higgins for The New York Times

Young Indians like Abhinanda Shukla, front, are leaving small towns to study at schools like Frankfinn Institute of Air Hostess Training.

Norimitsu Onishi/The New York Times

Kim Wan-su, seated, and Kim Tae-goo were introduced to potential Vietnamese brides at a Hanoi bar in a tour set up by marriage brokers. they are merely matching the needs of Korean men and foreign women seeking better lives. Mr. Kim, urged on by an older sister, decided to go to Vietnam after a last effort to meet a Korean woman in December failed. A high school graduate, he lives with his mother and his sister, and he works on the assembly line of a small manufacturer of car keys. The other client who traveled with Kim Wan-su was Kim Tae-goo, 51, who grows ginseng and apples on the land he owns in Yeongju. He had recently divorced a Chinese woman he married after the death of his first wife, a Korean woman.

From Seoul to Hanoi, a brief courtship, and back to life in Korea. He lives with his 16-year-old daughter and his elderly mother. “My 16-year-old daughter lives with me, and I’m a farmer,’’ Mr. Kim said to one of the women at the Lucky Star Karaoke bar. “Is that O.K. with you?’’ “I know how to farm,’’ said Bui Thi Thuy, 22, the woman Mr. Kim eventually chose. Afterafewhours’sleep,thenewcouples and the brokers squeezed into a van for the four-hour ride to the women’s home province, Quang Ninh, about four hours east of Hanoi. There, the couples would be interviewed by the local authorities before registering for their marriages. Both Ms. Vien and Ms. Thuy had friends who had married Korean men and lived, happily it seemed, in South Korea. Like many Vietnamese, they were also avid fans of Korean television

shows and movies. “To be honest, I don’t know much about Korea except what I’ve seen on television,’’ Ms. Vien said. “But the Korean landscape is beautiful. Korean men look sophisticated and affectionate. They seem responsible, and they live in harmony with their family members and their colleagues.’’ Ms. Vien had registered two years earlier with a broker for marriages with Koreans. Her father, a construction worker, was able to send herto college. By contrast, Ms. Thuy, 22, was one of five children of rice farmers. She had registered with the agency soon after graduating from high school. “A friend of mine married a Korean man and now lives in Seoul,’’ Ms. Thuy said. “We talk on the phone sometimes. She’s very happy. She says there are so many people and tall buildings in Seoul.’’ About 40 hours after landing here in Hanoi, the Korean men married their Vietnamese brides in a double ceremony. The brides’ relatives waited at a large restaurant here with expectant looks. Standing next to her daughter and her new son-in-law, Ms. Thuy’s mother, Nguyen Thi Nguyet, 56, said: “This is a poor country, but conditions are much better in Korea. I hope my daughter will have a better life there.’’ But Ms. Thuy’s father, Bui Van Vui, 52, was displeased that his daughter was marrying a man just one year younger than he was. “I’m slightly relieved now that I see my son-in-law for the first time,” he said. “But I can’t stop worrying.’’ Later, Ms. Thuy said: “I was my father’s favorite. He really adores me and is worried.’’ She, too, was worried. “I know Korea only from television, but it must be very, very different from reality. I don’t know whether my new family will like me, and I don’t know how I’ll adapt. I’m overwhelmed with worries.’’

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2007

LE MONDE

5

MONEY & BUSINESS

Radio Adds Pictures For the Internet Era By RICHARD SIKLOS

Ted Stryker, a D.J. at KROQ in Los Angeles, considers it a benefit of the job to wear shorts and T-shirts to work. But on February 11 as he dressed for the Grammy Awards, he pulled out his best blazer and a flashy belt buckle, knowing three video cameras would stream live coverage of his show to the Web sites of 147 CBS radio stations. “What’s great about radio is no one knows what you’re wearing,” Mr. Stryker said by telephone as he made his way through the throng at the Grammys. “I wanted to make myself a little bit more presentable.” America’s commercial radio stations have seen the future, and it is in, of all things, video. As a result, the stereotype of a silken-voiced jockey like Mr. Stryker, slumped and disheveled in the studio chair, may never be the same. Mr. Stryker, who has done some TV work in the past, said that to create his best radio voice, he often must contort

Shorter Attention Spans 25 hours

20

Average time spent listening to the radio in a week

15

10

5

For all people in the U.S. age 12 and over listening 6 a.m. to midnight

’94

’98

Source: Arbitron

’02

’06

The New York Times

Skeptics Say Pollution Without Guilt Doesn’t Exist By JAMES KANTER

PARIS — Two years ago, Sami Grover, an environmentally minded Englishman, vowed to take his last trip by airplane. Then a summer romance in North Carolina turned into a longdistance love affair — and then into months of busy trans-Atlantic travel. To compensate for the tons of greenhouse gases the couple’s plane trips helped spew into the atmosphere, Mr. Grover quietly began paying Climate Care, a British company, to help make the world a little greener for him and his girlfriend. “I didn’t want her to think I was some kind of eco-fascist,” said Mr. Grover, 28. “I did it for her flights, too, but I did it in secret.” Mr. Grover could no longer be called an environmental zealot. Indeed, he is now in the mainstream of a budding market where individuals can buy and sell rights to offset “carbon footprints” from their personal activities, such as driving a car, using disposable diapers, even flying across the Atlantic. These days, pop stars, chief executives and politicians vaunt how they offset carbon emissions by planting trees or investing in renewable energy projects — many in poorer countries in Africa or in India. Pledges by celebrities, like Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and members of the band Coldplay, have helped generate huge publicity for these carbon-offset trading companies. In turn, the companies have actively sought out a green glitterati and concerned consumers in Europe and the United States. The operations reflect a new consciousness about climate change, but scientists and environmental watchdogs say that the carbon trading actually may be producing little of real

his face in embarrassing ways. “It’s so different doing radio compared to TV,” he said. “Who knows what faces I make when I’m talking on the radio? I hope I’m not making the same faces today.” Across the country, radio stations are putting up video fare on their Web sites, ranging from a simple camera in the broadcast booth to exclusive coverage of events like the Super Bowl to music videos, news clips and Web-only musical performances. “This is a visual medium now,” said Dianna Jason, the senior director of marketing and promotions at Power 106, a Los Angeles hip-hop radio station. Whereas video was once said to have killed the radio star — according to the pop song by the Buggles that was the first video shown on MTV in 1981 — it is now emerging as an unlikely savior for an industry facing an array of challenges. In the age of YouTube, this might not seem all that remarkable, except that the radio industry has been unusually tardy in embracing the interactive age. But now many of the largest radio companies are trying to stay relevant as their listeners’ attention is drawn in many directions — i-Pods, cellphones, satellite radio and various streaming and downloading musical offerings from companies like Yahoo and AOL. “A lot of our stations are starting to embrace video and generate new revenue streams,” said Joel Hollander, the chief executive of CBS Radio, the nation’s second-largest radio company, after Clear Channel Communications. “I hope video helps the radio star. Maybe radio will save the video star?” More than 90 percent of Americans still listen to traditional radio. But the amount of time they tune in over the course of a week has fallen by 14 percent over the last decade, according to Arbitron ratings. Industry revenues are flat, and the Bloomberg index of radio stocks is down some 40 percent over the last three years. Video now makes up only a tiny frac-

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Radio hosts like Adam Carolla, a Los Angeles D.J., videotape their shows for viewing over the Internet.

As the Web audience expands, old media learns new tricks. tion of the $20 billion a year that radio generates in advertising sales. But it could represent a much-needed new source of growth in a rapidly expanding online video market that everyone from Google to newspapers wants to be in. Radio executives and personalities say their video efforts will be different because they capitalize on radio’s traditional strength in using on-air personalities and local events to draw in listeners. And radio and video may be a more natural fit than expected. In his book “Understanding Media,” the cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote that

Jenny Butler and Sami Grover send money to an environmental group when they take transatlantic flights. ments like tree-planting may be ineffective, and they are shifting their focus to what they say is reliable activity, like wind turbines and cleaner burning stoves, or buying up credits that otherwise would allow companies to pollute. At least 60 companies sold offsets worth about $110 million to consumers in Europe and North America in 2006, up from only about a dozen selling offsets worth $6 million in 2004, according to Abyd Karmali of ICF International. John Hay, a spokesman for the secretariat of the Karen Tam for The International Herald Tribune United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn, Germany, said that carbon offsets are “good first steps” because they raise awareness about climate change with the public. But one perverse effect, say critics, is that some types of carbon-offset initiatives may actually slow the changes aimed at coping with global warming by prolonging consumers’ dependence value to the environment. Climate Care, for example, has on oil, coal and gas, and encouraging linked up with Land Rover, a maker of them to take more short-haul flights sport utility vehicles, to help the com- and drive bigger cars than they would pany offset its own emissions. As part otherwise have done. “These companies may be operatof a promotional program, Climate Care also helps purchasers of new ing with the best will in the world, but Land Rovers offset their first 72,000 they are doing so in settings where it’s not really clear you can monitor and kilometers of driving. In that way, the program may actu- enforce their projects over time,” said ally help sell “larger cars with higher Steve Rayner, a senior professor at emissions” and thus contribute more Oxford and a member of a group workto global warming, according to Mary ing on reducing greenhouse gases for Taylor, a campaigner with the energy the International Panel on Climate and climate team at Friends of the Change. “What these companies are allowing people to do is carry on with Earth. Some carbon-offset firms have be- their current behavior with a clear gun to acknowledge that certain invest- conscience.”

Payments that clear the conscience, but maybe not the air.

“the effect of radio is visual.” Taking a cue from YouTube and the rise of user-generated video, a polished, TV-quality product is often not the objective. A rock station, 94.7 FM in Portland, Oregon, last fall began a “Bootleg Video” series in which a listener is lent a video camera to record a clip of a local performance by a hot band for the Web site. “Sometimes it’s a little shaky, but we want that,” said Mark Hamilton, manager at the station, which is owned by Entercom Communications. “We don’t want it to be perfect.” The Web site for the radio station WFLZ in Tampa, Florida, features a video series called “Naked,’’ on the lives of its hosts away from the microphone. Ms. Reid, who is 26, said being videotaped was odd, but in the year that the radio station has been producing monthly installments of the show for downloading, it has not yet caused her and her colleagues to

alter their hair or wardrobe. “Maybe we should, but we don’t,’’ she said. Producers for Adam Carolla, the Los Angeles morning host whose program is carried on many CBS Radio stations, regularly record vérité clips featuring Mr. Carolla and a co-host for posting on the Web. Radio industry executives emphasized that, so far, their video efforts could be considered experimental and only one facet — along with blogs and audio podcasts and a nascent service called HD Radio — of how the industry is adapting. “People are either going to have to get with the program or get lost,” Fatman Scoop, a disc jockey on Hot 97, an FM station in New York, said in an interview. “People don’t sit in front of a radio for three hours like they used to. If they don’t hear a song they like, they go to the Internet.”

Trying to Escape Debt, Some Turn to Blogs for Assistance By JOHN LELAND

When a woman who calls herself Tricia discovered a few weeks ago that she owed $22,302 on her credit cards, she could not wait to spread the news. Tricia, 29, does not talk to her family or friends about her finances, and says she is ashamed of her personal debt. Yet from the laundry room of her home in northern Michigan, Tricia does something that would have been unthinkable — and impossible — a generation ago: she goes online and posts intimate details of her financial life, including her net worth (now negative $38,691), the balance and finance charges on her credit cards, and the amount of debt she has paid down since starting a blog about her debt last year ($15,312). Her journal, bloggingawaydebt.com, is one of dozens that have sprung up in recent years that take advantage of Internet anonymity to reveal to strangers fiscal intimacies the authors might not tell their closest friends. Like other debt bloggers, Tricia believes the exposure gives her the discipline to reduce her debt. “I think about this blog every time I’m in the store and something that I don’t need catches my eye,’’ she told readers last week. “Look what you all have done to me!’’ A decade after the Internet became a public stage for revelations from the bedroom, it is now peering into the really private stuff: personal finance. Tricia started her blog after reading the online account of another woman, thedebtdefier.blogspot.com, who said she had paid off her credit card debt of $19,794.23 in a little more than a year. Like other bloggers interviewed for this article, Tricia said she and her husband had arrived at their debt gradually, not by big financial crises but by regularly spending more money than they made, using credit that was offered freely by credit card companies. For the engaged couple who say they are behind a blog called “Make Love, Not Debt’’ (makelovenotdebt.com; net

worth: negative $70,787.94), the feedback from readers has not always been gentle. “People have very strong feelings about debt,’’ said the blog’s female half, who calls herself Her. “People were appalled by my spending, like buying a $500 pair of shoes.’’ “Just having the amount of debt we have is offensive to a lot of people,’’ said Him, the blog’s other half. “People will levy personal attacks for mistakes we acknowledge. We don’t think that’s quite necessary.’’ When they discussed wanting a $25,000 wedding, one reader scolded them: “Grow up, a wedding isn’t about

Theo Rigby for The New York Times

Debtors who blog say feedback ranges from support to censure. how much debt you put yourself or your parents into. If you are worried about that, in my opinion, you are not ready for marriage.’’ Tricia said the comments she had gotten had been overwhelmingly supportive. But she acknowledges that the fear of censure can be useful as well. “I feel embarrassed about it,’’ she said of her debt. “I try not to, though. I try to put a spin on it when I start to get too down. I think to myself if we didn’t get in this mess and get out of it, we would’ve just kept going the way we were. But now we have health insurance, we’re saving for retirement. We could’ve just been living on the edge, but not underneath.’’

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2007 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

In the World of Life-Saving Drugs, an Epidemic of Deadly Fakes By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Asia is seeing an “epidemic of counterfeits” of life-saving drugs, experts say, and the problem is spreading. Malaria medicines have been particularly hard hit; in a recent sampling in Southeast Asia, 53 percent of the antimalarials bought were fakes. Bogus antibiotics, tuberculosis drugs, AIDS drugs and even meningitis vaccines have also been found. Estimates of the deaths caused by fakes run from tens of thousands a year to 200,000 or more. The World Health Organization has estimated that a fifth of the one million annual deaths from malaria would be prevented if all medicines for it were genuine and taken properly. “The impact on people’s lives behind these figures is devastating,” said Dr. Howard A. Zucker, the organization’s chief of health technology and pharmaceuticals. Internationally, a prime target of counterfeiters now is artemisinin, the newest miracle cure for malaria, said Dr. Paul N. Newton of Oxford

Photographs by Paul N. Newton/Oxford University

Fake drugs are produced on an industrial scale. Packaging for phony malaria medicine from China tries to replicate the hologram seal of real Guilin Pharma, left.

Counterfeit medicines cost millions of dollars and thousands of lives. University’s Center for Tropical Medicine in Vientiane, Laos. His team, which found that more than half the malaria drugs it bought in Southeast Asia were counterfeit, discovered 12 fakes being sold as artesunate pills made by Guilin Pharma of China. A charity working in Myanmar bought 100,000 tablets and found that all were worthless. “They’re not being produced in somebody’s kitchen,” Dr. Newton said. “They’re produced on an industrial scale.” China is the source of most of the world’s fake drugs, experts say. In December, according to Xinhua, the state news agency, the former chief of China’s Food and Drug Administration and two of his top deputies were arrested on charges of taking bribes to approve drugs. The director, Zheng Xiaoyu, was in office from the agency’s creation in 1998 until he was dismissed in 2005 after repeated scandals in which medicines and infant formula his agency had approved killed dozens of Chinese, including children. “The problem is simply so massive that no amount of enforcement is going to stop it,” said David Fernyhough, a counterfeiting expert at the Hong Kong offices of Hill & Associates, a risk-man-

agement firm hired by Western companies to foil counterfeiters. The distribution networks, he said, “mirror the old heroin networks,” flowing to Thai distributors with financing and money-laundering arranged in Hong Kong. The penalties are less severe than for heroin. Daniel C. K. Chow, an Ohio State University law professor and an expert on Chinese counterfeiting, said he believed that the authorities would pursue counterfeiters “ruthlessly” for killing Chinese citizens but be more lax about drugs for export. “The counterfeiters aren’t stupid,” he said. “They don’t want anyone beating down the door in the middle of the night and dragging them away, so they

make drugs for sale outside the country.” A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said that he had “no idea” whether most of the world’s counterfeits came from China, but that Mr. Zheng’s arrest proved China was cracking down. He also said counterfeiters would get the same punishment no matter whom they hurt. Many of the fake artesunate pills found by Dr. Newton’s team were startlingly accurate in appearance — and much more devious in effect than investigators had suspected. Not only did the pills look correct, as did the cardboard boxes, the blister packing and the foil backing, but investigators found 12 versions of the tiny hologram added to prevent forgery.

Write First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one another a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem. “Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,’’ Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what DANIEL they said in the message. It makes GOLEMAN things tense.’’ Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude. The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face. Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,’’ which psychologists apply to

ESSAY

The human brain seems to need the face-to-face cues that help nurture civility. the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace. In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming. The emerging field of social neuroscience, the

study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming. This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track. Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses. Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say. True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame, emoticons that cleverly arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. They surely lack the neural impact of an actual smile or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on. And if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how the other person

In the United States, finding counterfeit drugs in pharmacies is very rare, “but we’ve seen a lot from Internet sellers posing as legitimate pharmacies,” said Dr. Ilisa Bernstein, director of pharmacy affairs for the Food and Drug Administration. Fake drugs have a long history; the film noir masterpiece from 1949, “The Third Man,” based on a real criminal case, involves adulterated penicillin in post-war Vienna. And in the 1600s, after conquistadors discovered that South American cinchona bark cured malaria, Europe was flooded with fake bark. “It caused a great loss of confidence in it as a cure,” Dr. Newton said. “We’re seeing history repeat itself.” The problem with antimalarials is worst in Asia, but is growing rapidly in Africa. For example, in September, Nigerian authorities found $25,000 worth of counterfeit malaria and blood pressure drugs concealed in a shipment of purses from China. The temptation for counterfeiters is likely to grow because money to fight malaria is being poured into the third world. A global alert system for counterfeit drugs has existed for 16 years, first by fax, and now on the World Health Organization Web site, said Dr. Valerio Reggi, chief of the anticounterfeiting task force created last year by the organization. “But it isn’t used very much,” he said. “Regulators are human beings, and it’s difficult to identify a benefit for those who report to it.” Dr. Reggi said the task force would try to change that by drawing attention to the problem and getting harsher laws passed. As he pointed out, in many countries, “counterfeiting a T-shirt means 10 years in jail, but counterfeiting a medicine can be a misdemeanor.”

Ancient Peppers Leave a Hot Trail

Christian Northeast

is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail. Our emotional impulses disinhibited, we type some infelicitous message and hit “send’’ before a more sober second thought leads us to hit “discard.’’ We flame. All this reminds me of a poster on the wall of classrooms I once visited in public schools in New Haven, Connecticut . The poster shows a stoplight. It says that when students feel upset, they should remember that the red light means to stop, calm down and think before they act. The yellow light prompts them to weigh a range of responses, and their consequences. The green light urges them to try the best response. Not a bad idea. Until the day e-mail comes in video form, I may just paste one of those stoplights next to my monitor.

Hot peppers have been inflaming palates around the planet for centuries. But the earlier history of jalapeños, habaneros and the like in their native region, the Americas, is far from complete. The remains of peppers don’t keep in humid climates, so they are almost never found at archaeological sites. A discovery by Linda Perry of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History is helping to change all that. She found that chili peppers do leave fossil clues, in the form of tiny grains of starch. Using that evidence, she and colleagues report in the journal Science that chili peppers were used in cooking at least 6,000 years ago. “Microfossils” of starch grains from foods like maize and manioc have been found in cooking vessels, grinding stones and other implements from archaeological digs. The grains differ from species to species, so they can be used to identify where and when certain foods were common. In the course of research, Dr. Perry and others had been finding another, unidentifiable starch grain, which she called the “ubiquitous Chris Gash unknown.” Then one day Dr. Perry realized what those grains might be from. “I had heard that peppers can cause digestive problems,” she recalled. “My first thought was that that’s odd — things like that are usually caused by undigestable starches, and peppers don’t have starches. “That’s when the light bulb went off,” she said. “Perhaps peppers do have starches.” It didn’t take much detective work to determine that the starch grains were indeed from hot peppers. In all, the researchers found them in samples from seven sites from about 500 to 6,000 years ago. The 6,000-year-old site is in Ecuador, which is not thought to be an area where peppers were domesticated, so even older civilizations elsewhere had developed sophisticated spicy cuisines. “And now that we know that fruits in this particular family produce diagnostic starches,” Dr. Perry said, “identifying tomatoes and tomatillos won’t be far behind.” HENRY FOUNTAIN

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2007

LE MONDE

7

H E A LT H & F I T N E S S

TRENDS

Efficacy of an Abdominal Exercise Is Now Questioned

Binge Eating Is Found To Be Relatively Prevelant Binge eating is not yet officially classified as a psychiatric disorder. But it may be more common than the two eating disorders now recognized, anorexia nervosa and bulimia. The first nationally representative study of eating disorders in the United States, a nationwide survey of more than 2,900 men and women, was published by Harvard researchers in the February 1 issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry. It found a prevalence in the general population of 0.6 percent for anorexia, 1 percent for bulimia and 2.8 percent for binge-eating disorder. The diagnosis of binge eating disorder requires that a person eat an excessively large amount of food in a twohour period at least twice a week for six months, feel a lack of control over the episodes, and experience marked distress regarding the practice. Lifetime rates of the disorders, the researchers found, are higher in younger age groups, suggesting that the problem is increasingly common. Eating disorders are about twice as common among women as men, the study reports. The survey, partly financed by two pharmaceutical companies, was carried out from 2001 to 2003 among adults 18 and older. So far, binge eating disorder is not considered a definitive diagnosis like anorexia and bulimia. Rather, it is one of a number of categories requiring further study. Some suspect that establishing it as a psychiatric diagnosis is merely an attempt by psychiatrists or drug companies to “medicalize” what would otherwise be considered simply ordinary, if unfortunate, human behavior. But Dr. James I. Hudson, the lead author of the new study, said binge eating was associated with obesity, particularly severe obesity. “This brings in a lot of medical consequences and suggests it’s a major health problem,” he said. NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Stuart Goldenberg

When the Load Is Heavy, Longer Breaks Are Advised People whose jobs involve a lot of lifting may need to take longer breaks than is often the case now to avoid back injuries, a new study finds. This seems to be especially true for people new to the job. Writing in a recent issue of Clinical Biomechanics, researchers said the breaks that are now typical in industry might not be enough. “It is possible that with shorter rest and continued work,’’ the study says, “the muscle cannot recover and at some point will not be able to keep pace with the increased oxygen demand.’’ The lead author of the study was Gang Yang of Ohio State University. For the study, the researchers asked volunteers to lift boxes onto a conveyor belt for as long as eight hours at a time, with three breaks totaling an hour over the eight-hour period. Some volunteers had experience lifting at places like distribution centers and grocery stores, while other had no experience at all. The boxes weighed about 1 to 12 kilograms, and the volunteers were asked to lift them at rates of 2 to 12 lifts a minute. As they did, the researchers monitored the changing oxygen levels in their back muscles. Although lower back pain is a common problem in the workplace, it is not clear what exactly causes it, the authors say. Some researchers say it may be that as muscles tire, others come into use, changing the load on the spine. And the inability to keep oxygen levels high enough may contribute to muscle fatigue, the study said. ERIC NAGOURNEY

By PAUL SCOTT

It used to be that the only time someone told you to suck in your gut was when the family had lined up for a photo at the Grand Canyon. Today, the advice to draw your navel to your spine is ubiquitous and has little to do with vanity. Drawing in (as the move is called) is supposed to engage a deep abdominal muscle called the transverse abdominus. (The technique involves inwardly pulling in, distinguishing it from the more general advice to contract the abdominals.) Fire the transverse abdominus, the thinking goes, and the torso temporarily acts like a muscular corset, protecting the lower back. Practice firing that muscle enough, and over time not only will you get a strong midsection, but the transverse abdominus will eventually fire on its own. But new questions are being raised about whether it is an appropriate technique for all kinds of exercisers. Critics, including personal trainers and specialists in the spine and biomechanics, are now saying that drawing in may not make sense while, say, lifting weights or performing a crunch. In fact, some say, drawing in may even be counterproductive. “If you hollow in, you bring the muscles closer to the spine, and you reduce the stability of the spine,’’ said Stuart McGill, a professor of spine biomechanics in the department of kinesiology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. Try rising from a chair with a hollowed out stomach; not only are you “weak,’’ he said, but “it’s very difficult.’’ Dr. McGill, who has treated patients with back disorders for 25 years, has measured spinal loading forces and their effects on spinal stability with computer models and in test subjects wired to computers. His findings dispute not only the validity of drawing in, but also the very notion that the transverse abdominus plays a pivotal role in stability. All abdominal and back muscles are important, not just this one, Dr. McGill said. Some trainers are now having second thoughts. Vern Gambetta, the author of “Athletic Development: The Art & Science of Functional Sports Conditioning,’’ now thinks the move is difficult to teach and too unnatural for athletes to maintain while being at their competitive best. “In most sporting activities, things happen too fast to consciously think about contracting a specific muscle,’’ Mr. Gambetta said. Dr. McGill said there is a better way than drawing in to protect the spine and build the core. For those about to lift something heavy or, say, leap for a rebound, he recommends bracing all the abdominal muscles — something he said the body does more naturally during exertion. “Bracing is stiffening the abdominal wall,’’ he said, explaining the difference. It’s a neutral position. “It’s not sucking in and it’s not pushing your belly out,’’ he said. The easiest way to teach it: “Pretend

Leela Corman

you are going to get whacked in the belly,’’ he said. The body’s natural response is bracing. It is unclear how drawing in became such a fitness mantra. Originally, it was devised as a treatment for sufferers of low back pain. Australian researchers discovered in 1996 that the firing of the transverse abdominus was slightly delayed during certain tasks in patients who complained that their lower back hurt. Carolyn Richardson, one of the original Australian researchers, said that when she helped write the 1998 manual that popularized the technique, she never dreamed that personal trainers

and coaches across the globe would make it as much a part of their regimen as stretching. “We only wrote the book about treating back pain,’’ she said, referring to her three co-authors. “I’ve found that for the fitness industry, it’s quite a poor instruction.’’ As an alternative way for healthy people to protect their backs while exercising, she recommends stretching tall through the back of the head and relaxing the shoulders. Not every advocate of drawing in uses it indiscriminately. “If it’s a healthy individual with no back pain we actually don’t instruct them to do drawing in,’’ said Micheal Clark, the chief execu-

tive of the National Academy of Sports Medicine, a certification organization for fitness professionals. But considering that 80 percent of the adult population has or has had back pain, he said, most people, particularly those new to the gym, “would be candidates for this kind of retraining.’’ Where the drawing-in technique gets in the way, trainers said, is during lifting, running and other exercise. As a top high school sprinter in Illinois in the late 1990s, Jason Krantz found that drawing in left him frustrated. “If I focused on drawing in while sprinting I actually ran a lot slower,’’ he said. “My energy was focused on drawing in.’’

Ensuring That Lipstick Isn’t Hiding Ugly Truths By NATASHA SINGER

For decades, companies that make everything from after-shave to lip gloss have conducted safety testing on grooming products to be sold to consumers, all with very little government involvement. And over the years, there have been few health or safety problems associated with the myriad grooming products and cosmetics on the market. Nonetheless, momentum has been building for greater oversight of the chemicals in everyday products, with the European Union and California taking the lead in imposing new rules for monitoring what is in the perfumes, creams, nail polish and hair sprays that are sold. The California Safe Cosmetics Act, which took effect on January 1, requires cosmetics companies to tell state health authorities if a product contains any chemical on several government lists covering possible cancer-causing agents or substances that may harm the reproductive system. The cosmetics industry is already taking steps to heighten self-monitoring. No rigorous large-scale clinical trials have been conducted that would indicate that cosmetics trigger major diseases in humans. But some small case

reports published in medical journals suggest that a few substances used in cosmetics may affect hormone function in humans. Scientists are particularly interested in a group of chemicals called phthalates — used in some nail polishes, fragrances, medical devices and shower curtains — some of which have had an effect on the reproductive systems of lab animals and can be absorbed and

The long-term effects of cosmetics becomes a cause of concern. excreted by the human body. Although the cosmetics industry considers the phthalates used in its products to be safe, some companies have voluntarily removed dibutyl phthalate, which California considers harmful to the reproductive system, from their nail polishes. But some environmentalists are pressing for a deeper analysis of the possible long-term effects of exposure

to these chemicals. Some have formed a group called the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics to publicize their concerns. Since 1938, when Congress gave the Food and Drug Administration limited authority over beauty products, cosmetics has been a largely self-regulating industry. Prescription and over-the-counter drugs must submit safety data to the agency before it approves them for sale to the public. But cosmetics do not need agency approval because they are defined as topical products that alter neither the structure nor the function of the skin. Industry representatives said their goal is increased self-regulation, not government oversight. Toward that aim, the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association, an industry trade group, in January began to offer companies a voluntary program to make their safety data available to the Food and Drug Administration and to report adverse reactions to the agency. They also said manufacturers would be more accountable to the guidance of an industry panel that reviews the safety of cosmetic ingredients. Antonia M. Calafat, lead re-

Mary Ann Smith

Governments are scrutinizing the safety of ingredients in cosmetics. searcher at the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said the body’s absorption and excretion of chemicals do not necessarily indicate an impact on human health. “All we can say at the moment is that humans are exposed to these chemicals, but the presence of a chemical in the body does not necessarily constitute a negative effect,’’ said Dr. Calafat, who added, “There need to be comprehensive, well-designed studies to understand whether indeed these compounds are harmful for humans.’’

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LE MONDE

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2007 ARTS & STYLES

The Beautiful Violence Of Iran’s Gilded History NEW YORK — The opening of Asia Society’s glinting and glowing show of pre-Islamic art from Iran was surrounded by suspense last month when dozens of objects coming from Paris were held up by customs at Kennedy International Airport because of the United States’ longstanding embargo ART on Iranian imports. REVIEW “Glass, Gilding and Grand Design: Art of Sasanian Iran (224-642 A.D.)’’ is a radical reduction of a much larger exhibition from the Musée Cernuschi in Paris that included loans from Iranian museums impossible to bring to the United States. But with about 70 pieces — ancient silver dishes, carved document seals and silk textiles — the New York version is still substantial. And it arrives, coincidentally, just as the Bush administration has sharpened its focus on Iran’s role in war-ravaged Iraq. Over the last 30 years, scholars have learned a lot about the Sasanians,

HOLLAND CARTER

Cincinnati Art Museum; Corning Museum of Glass, right

The multicultural world of ancient Iran is visible in a new exhibit, which includes a a bowl in a GrecoRoman style, above, and a glass cup.

though we still don’t know very much. For about four centuries they ruled a territory that covered present-day Iran, Iraq, parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan and stretched to North Africa. The Sasanians came to power when the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean was in full flow, and they absorbed influences from the many cultures that traveled it. One of the first things you see in the galleries is a silver-and-gilt bowl decorated with a male royal portrait head, while a wine vessel nearby, in the shape of an antelope’s head, has stylistic roots in the remote borderlands of Central Asia. In art, the Sasanians generated widespread and long-lasting influences of their own. Exquisite textiles of Sasanian design have been found in Egypt. Certain types of images seem specific to its imperial culture, namely those that refer to the state religion of Zoroastrianism. But even here cross-cultural sampling prevails. The religion’s principal female deity, Anahita, the goddess of fertility, assumes various guises. In a stucco relief she is a formidable Mesopotamian matron with dangly earrings. But she is also a Hellenistic bacchante scintillating over the surface of a chunky silver vase. One image occurs more often than any other: the king. Among the exhibition’s largest pieces is a royal “portrait’’ bust in stucco found at the royal site of Kish in Iraq. Traditionally each sovereign distinguished himself visually with a custom-designed crown. And the subject of this bust is sometimes identified as Shapur II, as is the face in a Sasanian silver bust at the Met, which has its bulbous, stand-out-in-a-crowd headgear intact. More commonly, though, rulers are depicted in action, specifically in the act of hunting. On one silver plate, King Yazdegerd I, haloed and beribboned, impales a stag with his spear. In the

seventh century a third king, probably Khosrow II, commissioned a muralsize rock carving of a royal boar hunt, with the king standing, weapons at the ready, at its center, as attendants drive hundreds of panicked animals into a pen for the slaughter. In Zoroastrian understanding, boars embodied the warrior virtue of aggressive courage; for a ruler to kill one was to demonstrate matching courage. In dispatching them, he fulfilled his role as preserver of the empire and universal master. So, in cosmic terms, which are always basically earthly terms with spin, these

images of domination through combat are political art, or more precisely, political advertising. What is the difference, after all, between a carved relief of an ancient king-of-king’s victory in a hunt and a press photograph of a modern leader declaring victory in a war? Aesthetics is one difference, a big one. Most of the objects in the show — organized by Françoise Demange, chief curator of Asian antiquities at the Louvre, with Prudence O. Harper, curator emerita of ancient Near Eastern art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Michael Chagnon, a curatorial consultant — are superbly beautiful in formal

terms, beautiful enough to smooth over the reality that control through violence is a primary theme. A large part of art’s allure is its ambiguity; you can take it as you wish. This exhibition is a reminder of that. But the ancient Sasanians were surely clear about what they were seeing in their imperial art. And in some sense the viewers who understand art as political advertising most directly today are iconoclasts, the suppressors and destroyers of art. They may be the only people for whom art actually does speak for itself, but for whom beauty truly is not enough.

A Rare Broadway Spring Blooms With New Plays By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Ricoh Gerbl

In the film “The Rape of the Sabine Women,” an ancient myth moves forward to the 1960s.

New Style for Old Tale of Brutality and Empire Like the Neo-Classical history paintings on which it is based, Eve Sussman’s film “The Rape of the Sabine Women’’ never lets you forget that it is serious art. Extravagantly beautiful, endlessly noble and largely devoid of humor, it self-consciously pushes every aspect of movie-making toward ART sensorial overload. REVIEW Made by Ms. Sussman and the Rufus Corporation, this dialogue-free work, which could be called a video-opera, is dense, lavish and drawn out. It is larded with art historical references, startling juxtapositions and brilliant camera work and enriched by the faces, bodies, movements and general sexiness of a tribe of handsome young actors. Intricately edited, it jumps back and forth in time and alternates between color and black-and-white scenes, sharp and grainy definition, slow-motion and normal speed. Cinematic space deepens and then flattens. We see the actors in character, but also in their dressing rooms; we also glimpse cameras, crews and the musicians. Most notably, all dialogue is replaced by an amazing original score by Jonathan Bepler. He worked with a host of musicians and singers, who sometimes improvised during filming. The heady weaving of sound and im-

ROBERTA SMITH

age is the work’s greatest strength. The total experience of watching and listening to this extraordinary yet ponderous meditation on love, community and the senselessness of war is like eating a chocolate chip cookie made of nothing but the chips. There’s so much to savor that you may start hankering for a clear, cool glass of water. Shot in Berlin, in Athens and on the Greek island of Hydra, the movie is an avant-garde costume drama in

A ‘video opera’ is a variation on the myth of the Sabine women. five acts. Its story is a variation on the ancient myth of the Sabine women, who after being abducted, raped and forced into marriage by Roman warriors, wade into a pitched battle between their husbands and their Sabine relatives to secure peace and the future of Western civilization. The movie’s heroics and pageantry are inspired by the Sabine paintings of Poussin, Rubens and David — especially David’s “Intervention of

the Sabine Women’’ of 1799. But Ms. Sussman’s “Sabine Women’’ is set in the endlessly stylish, initially optimistic 1960s. The Roman warriors are trim young men in shiny suits with narrow lapels. The women wear French twists, richly patterned mod dresses and big dark glasses. The story begins after Romulus and his warriors establish Rome and realize that they must find mates and procreate if this city on the Tiber is to endure. Diplomacy fails; abduction is the only option. A sports festival — to which the inhabitants of surrounding cities are invited — is the trap. For womenless Rome, Ms. Sussman substitutes the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, shot in glamorous black and white to the sounds of walking, coughs and murmurs. A few young men orbit a statue of an enthroned emperor and eye a stone Greek goddess. A museum guard looks on; he appears as an onlooker in every act, like the stage manager in “Our Town.’’ Despite their utopian veneer, the 1960s were arguably the beginning of the situation in which the world now finds itself. So it is not surprising that in Ms. Sussman’s version of the Sabine myth, everyone simply fights to the death, albeit in a stagey, slow-motion, painterly way. Ms. Sussman has recast the birth of a society as destruction.

NEW YORK — In a typical Broadway season the impending arrival of “Coram Boy,” which opens at the Imperial Theater in a little more than two months, would already be causing murmurs among the small but loyal population of Broadway playgoers. After all, with a cast of 40, this play will undoubtedly be one of the most expensive ever staged on Broadway, as well as the first to open at the Imperial in 30 years. Its earlier run at the National Theater in London won raves. And it’s an ambitious play, not a musical, which means it’s a rarity on Broadway. Right? Not this spring. Each new Broadway season opens with a cherished ritual. The play is proclaimed dead, killed by — choose one or more — the musical, the tourists, the unions, the cost of advertising or the general decline of American culture. And those few plays that somehow make it through are inevitably burdened with caveats: That one’s British, so it doesn’t really count. That one is being staged only because of that famous actress in the lead. That one’s just a revival. And that one is being produced by a nonprofit theater. But the Broadway play never seems to stay dead for good. Between January and June there will be 12 plays opening on Broadway (counting “Salvage,” the third installment of Tom Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia”). What is more surprising, nine of them are being produced commercially, and almost all have directors with pedigrees. By contrast three, maybe four, commercially produced musicals are scheduled. So what are we witnessing? A renaissance of the Broadway play? Alas, no. But we are seeing something remarkable: a quirk of timing, a precious pocket of breathing space between musical-heavy seasons that happens to coincide with a scheduling hole for busy British directors. “I think you have to nod your head to say that we have some alternatives this year,” said Emanuel Azenberg, a Broadway producer who often bewails the state of the play on Broadway. “I don’t know that it’s encouraging,” he added. “But it’s unlike previous years.”

First, the caveats. Three of the plays are appearing at nonprofit theaters. Four were recent hits on the West End in London and are either transferring as a whole or being staged by the same directors. (Five of the directors with plays this spring are American.) And half are revivals. That still leaves six straight plays making their New York debuts, three by American authors: “Radio Golf,” the last of August Wilson’s 10-part play cycle; “Deuce,” by Terrence McNally; and “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Joan Didion’s stage adaptation of her 2005 memoir. The other three — “Coram Boy,” “Frost/ Nixon” and “Salvage” — are by British authors but have not been seen here. Given the dreary success rate of plays on Broadway, it’s worth asking: Are all

A precious pocket of serious drama between musical-heavy seasons. of these producers — and their investors — a little crazy? Not only is it getting more expensive to put on plays, but also the number of people going to plays — a fifth of the number going to musicals — has hardly budged over the last seven years, according to surveys last season by the League of American Theaters and Producers. So what can the producers realistically expect this time around? “We’re thinking that it’s the completion of the August Wilson cycle,” said Rocco Landesman, a producer of the play and the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, who named one of his theaters after Mr. Wilson. “I think it’s something you have to do.” So it’s just philanthropy? “Are we thinking that we’re going to get rich off this?’’ he said. “Probably not.” But he added: “There’s a difference between something that’s a long shot and a hopeless cause. I think there’s always hope.”