MONDAY, MAY 19, 2008 Copyright © 2008 The New York Times

Supplemento al numero

odierno de la RepubblicaSped. abb. postale art. 1

legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM—AsIsraelmarks its60th anniversary this month, rejoicing in Jew-ishnational rebirthanddemocraticvalues, the Arabs who make up 20 percent of its citizenswill notbecelebrating.Moreafflu-entandbetter integrated thanever in their history, freer than a vast majority of other Arabs, Israel’s 1.3millionArabcitizensare still far less affluent than Israeli Jews and feel increasingly unwanted. For most Israelis, Jewish identity is cen-

tral to thenation, thereasontheyareproud to live here, the link they feel with history. But Israeli Arabs, including the most suc-cessfully integrated ones, say a new iden-

tity must be found for the country’s long-term survival. For them, Israel’s birth still represents the “nakba,” or catastrophe.“I am not a Jew,” protested Eman Kas-

sem-Sliman, an Arab radio journalist with impeccableHebrew,whosechildrenattend a predominantly Jewish school in Jerusa-lem.“HowcanIbelong toaJewishstate?If theydefine thisasaJewishstate, theydeny that I am here.”The leftand theright increasinglyseeIs-

raeliArabsasoneof thecentral challenges for Israel’s future — one intractably bound to the search for an overall settlement be-

Murdoch and the MandarinsHow a successful media titan

met his match in China.

MONEY & BUSINESS V

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia’s young men and women may chafe against the religious and cultural demands of the Mus-lim world’s most conservative so-ciety. At times, they may even try to evade them. And they can be merciless in their condemnation of those who flout them too brazenly.But what stood out in dozens of

interviews with young men and women here was how completely they are committed to perpetuat-ing the rules with their own chil-dren.That suggests that Saudi Ara-

bia’s strict interpretation of Islam, largely uncontested at home by

the next generation and spread abroad by Saudi money in a time of religious revival, will increasingly shape how Muslims around the world will live their faith. Consider, for example, Nader al-

Mutairi. One recent day, he was intent on

getting the phone number of one of the young women working as a receptionist at a dental clinic. He stiffened his shoulders, clenched his fists and said, “Let’s do our mission.” Then he stepped into the cool, empty lobby of the clinic. Asking a woman for her number

can cause a young man anxiety anywhere. But in Saudi Arabia, getting caught with an unrelated

womancanmeanarrest, apossible flogging and dishonor, the worst penalty of all in a society where preserving a family’s reputation depends on faithful adherence to a strict code of separation between the sexes. Above all, Nader, 22, feared that

his cousin Enad al-Mutairi would find out that he was breaking the rules. Nader is engaged to Enad’s 17-year-old sister, Sarah. “Please don’t talk to Enad about this,” he said. “He will kill me.” As Nader entered the clinic

his resolve faded. His shoulders drooped,hishandsunclenchedand

By MARTIN FACKLER

KAGOSHIMA,Japan—Spread-ing out in small teams, the men ingray jumpsuits scour the streetsandrooftopswithbinoculars,seek-ing to guard this city from a grow-ing menace. They look for signs:a torn garbage bag, a pile of twigsatop an electric pole or one of theblack,wingedculprits themselves.“There’s one!” a shout goes up.Sureenough,oneof theirquarry

flies brazenly overhead: a crow, giving a loud, taunting caw as it passed.This is the Crow Patrol of the

utility company Kyushu Elec-tric Power, on the hunt for crows whose nests on electric poles have causedastringofblackouts in this city of a half-million on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu. Blackouts are just one of the

problems caused by an explosion in Japan’s population of crows. Communities are scrambling to find ways to relocate or reduce their crow populations, as ever larger flocksof loud, ominousbirdshave taken over parks and nature reserves, frightening away residents. It is a scourge straight out of Alfred

Hitchcock’s“TheBirds.”Thecrowshere look and act the part, with wing spans of nearly a meter and intimidating black beaks and sharp claws.Attacks, thoughrare,dohappen.Hun-

gry crows have bloodied the faces of childrenwhile tryingtostealcandyfrom their hands. Crows have even carried

away baby prairie dogs and ducklings from Tokyo zoos, city officials said.While no one knows the precise num-

ber of crows in Japan, bird experts and government officials in cities across the nation say populations have increased enormously since the 1990s. Tokyo says the number of crows it has counted in large parks rose to 36,400 in 2001 from 7,000 in the late 1980s, prompting a trap-ping plan that cut the numbers to 18,200 last year. However, ornithologists say

that the actual number in Tokyo is closer to 150,000 birds, and that some crows may have moved to different areas to avoid the traps.Behind the rise, experts and of-

ficials say, has been the growing abundanceofgarbage,aproductof Japan’s embrace of more wasteful Western lifestyles. This has cre-ated an orgy of eating for crows, which are scavengers. The crows have proven clever

at foiling human efforts to controlthem.InKagoshima, theyareeventrying to outsmart the Crow Pa-trol.Thebirdshavebegunbuildingdummy nests as decoys to drawpatrol members away from theirrealnests.“Japanese react to crows be-

cause we fear them,” said MichioMatsuda, a board member of theWildBird Society of Japan and au-thorofbooksoncrows.“Wearenotsure sometimeswho is smarter, usor thecrows.”The crow explosion has created

a moral quandary for Japan, a na-tion that prides itself on nonviolence andharmony with nature, because cullingprograms are the only truly effectivemethodofpopulationcontrol.“In the old days, crows and humans

could live together peacefully, but now thespeciesareclashing,” saidNaokiSa-tou, thechiefofplanning inTokyo’senvi-ronmental department, which conducts crow countermeasures. “All we really want to do is go back to that golden age of co-existence.”

KO SASAKI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Crows, which eat garbage and nest atop utility

poles, have caused blackouts in Japan.

A Black-Winged Menace Plagues Japanese Cities Robots Wielding ScalpelsFor some operations, machines

may take over from the surgeon.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY VI

Continued on Page IV Continued on Page IV

Unsettled States

Love and Tradition Vex Young Saudis

SHAWN BALDWIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Nader al-Mutairi, left, and his cousin Enad al-Mutairi, on the outskirts of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, try to balance Islam’s strict rules with romance.

In a Land They Never Left,

Israeli Arabs Remain Outsiders

Repubblica NewYork

OP I N I O N & COMMENTARY

II MONDAY, MAY 19, 2008

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Georgia, NATOAnd Mr. Medvedev

Food Emergency

The fight for the Democratic nomi-nation is not completely over, but the odds now overwhelmingly favor Barack Obama.Assuming that Mr. Obama is the

nominee, he’ll lead a party that, judg-ing by the usual indicators, should be poised for an easy victory — perhaps even a landslide. Yet Democrats are worried. Are those worries justified?Before I try to answer that question,

let’s talk about those indicators.Political scientists, by and large,

believe that what happens on thecampaign trail, while it gives talkingheadssomething to talkabout, ismoreor less irrelevant to what happens onElectionDay. Instead, theyplace theirfaith in statistical analyses that iden-tify threemaindeterminants of presi-dential voting.First, votes are affected by the state

of the economy — mainly economic performance in the year or so preced-ing the election.Second, the approval rating of the

current president strongly affects his party’s ability to hold power.Third, theelectorateseemstosuffer

from an eight-year itch: parties rarely manage to hold the White House for more than two terms in a row.Thisyear,allofthesefactorsstrongly

favortheDemocrats. Indeed, theDem-ocraticPartyhasn’tenjoyedthis favor-ableapoliticalenvironmentsince1964.Robert Erikson, a political scientist atColumbiaUniversity inNewYork, tellsme:“Itwouldbedifficult to findanyse-rious indicator that does not point to aDemocraticvictory in2008.”There’s just one thing that should

give Democrats pause — but it’s a big one: the fight for the nomination has divided the party along class and race lines in a way that I believe is unprec-edented, at least in modern times.Ironically, much of Mr. Obama’s ini-

tial appeal was the hope that he could transcendthesedivisions.At first, vot-ing patterns seemed consistent with this hope. In February, for example, he received the support of half of Vir-ginia’s white voters as well as that of a huge majority of African-Americans.Mr. Obama, while continuing to win

huge African-American majorities, lostNorthCarolinawhitesby23points,

Indiana whites by 22 points on May 6. Then on Tuesday, he was trounced by Hillary Clinton in West Virginia, a state with a large percentage of work-ing class whites. Mr. Obama’s white support continues to be concentrated among the highly educated.Discussions of how and why Mr.

Obama’s support narrowed over time have a Rashomon-like quality: differ-entobserversseeverydifferenttruths. But at this point it doesn’t matter whose fault it was. What does matter is thatMr.Obamaappears tohavewon thenominationwithadeepbutnarrow baseconsistingofAfrican-Americans and highly educated whites. And now he needs to bring Democrats who op-posed him back to the party.It’spossible that thiswillhappenau-

tomatically — that bad feelings from the nomination fight will fade away of their own accord. In recent decades, Democrats have had little trouble uni-fying after hard-fought primary cam-paigns.But this time the division seems to

go deeper than ordinary political ri-valry. The closest parallel I can think of is the bitter intraparty struggles of the 1920s, which pitted urban, often Catholic Democrats against Protes-tant farmers.So what can be done to heal the par-

ty’s current divisions?More tirades from Obama support-

ers against Mrs. Clinton are not the answer — they will only further alien-ate her grass-roots supporters, many ofwhomfeel that shereceivedaunfair deal.Nor is it helpful to insult the groups

that supported Mrs. Clinton, either by suggesting that racism was their only motivation or by minimizing their im-portance.AfterthePennsylvaniaprimary,Da-

vid Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, dismissed concerns about working-classwhites, sayingthat they have“gone to theRepublicannominee for many elections.” Recently, Donna Brazile, theDemocratic strategist, de-clared that “we don’t have to just rely on white blue-collar voters and His-panics.” That sort of thing has to stop.One thing the Democrats need to do

is give disputed delegates from Flori-da and Michigan — representatives of citizens who voted in good faith, and whose support the party may well need this November — seats at the convention.And to the extent that campaign-

ing matters, Mr. Obama should cen-ter his campaign on economic issues that matter to working-class families, whatever their race.The point is that Mr. Obama has an

extraordinary opportunity in thisyear’s election. He should do every-thingpossible toavoidsquandering it.

Russia is playing a game of cat-and-mouse with neighboring Georgia that, if everyone is not a lot more careful, could quickly turn deadly.The Kremlin has never been happy

with Georgia’s pro-Western prefer-encesandwas infuriatedby itspush for membership intheNorthAtlanticTrea-ty Organization. Because of Moscow’s fierce objections, the Atlantic alliance decided last month to postpone mem-bership talks with Georgia. Instead of calming down, Moscow saw that as confirmation that its bullying and threats work — and decided to bully and threaten even more.First, Russia announced plans to

strengthen ties with two pro-Russian breakaway regions in Georgia — Ab-khazia and South Ossetia. In late April, it sent hundreds of extra “peacekeep-ers” to Abkhazia. Russian officials said the troops are needed to protect the province fromaGeorgian invasion,and it insisted that the contingent would remain within the 3,000-troop limit allowed under a 1994 United Nations-brokered cease-fire. The deployment almost certainly violated the peace-keeping mandate because it was done without Georgia’s approval.Georgia also charged that a Russian

MIG-29 fighter jet shot down one of its unmanned reconaissance drones over

Abkhazia. Moscow denied it.Russia’s new president, Dmitri Med-

vedev, needs to move quickly to calm things down, first by telling his aides to cool the rhetoric. There are questions about whether Mr. Medvedev will be his own man or just a creature of Presi-dent Vladimir Putin, and this would be a way to prove his independence.Georgia’s leadersmustalsoresistbe-

ing baited into a fight by Moscow. That will surely doom their dream of NATO membership. They should reconsider their recent threat to block Russia’s membership in the World Trade Orga-nization and make a serious effort to lower tensions with Abkhazia by offer-ingeconomicdevelopmentandpolitical autonomy. The United Nations Security Council

should also consider replacing Russian peacekeepers in Abkhazia with genu-inely independent troops.NATO needs to work with both sides

todefusethegrowingcrisis.Franceand Germany, which argued for putting off Georgia’s membership, have a special responsibility. They can start by send-ing envoys to meet with Mr. Medvedev andmakeclear that they,andtherestof NATO, are committed to Georgia’s se-curity and independence — and will be watching closely to see how he handles this first crisis.

The Death Penalty Returns

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

As soaring food prices threaten to unleashhungeracrossAfricaandother poor countries, President Bush is right to press Congress for more food assis-tance.Heisalsoright to insist thatsome of that aid be given in cash to buy food from local farmers. Unfortunately, the American farm lobby, which supports food aid as long as it gets the profit, is fighting any change to the system.The situation has become increas-

inglydesperateasrisingenergyprices, growing world demand and govern-ment-subsidized ethanol production — in theUnitedStatesandEurope—have drivencornpricesupby25percentover the lastyear.Wheatandsoybeanprices havedoubled.Therehavealreadybeen food riots in several countries, includ-ing Haiti, Egypt and Somalia.Beyond the emergency aid, wealthy

donors also need to do a lot more to help Africa and other developing countries increase food production. That will re-quireassistancetodevelopagricultural markets. Providing cash to buy food lo-cally would help stimulate farming in

needy countries.Other rich nations are already work-

ing to untangle their international food aid from their domestic farm supports. Western Europe has provided all of its food aid in cash since the 1990s. The United States, still buys all of its aid from American farmers and then pays to ship the food overseas. This wastes millionsonshippingcosts, and farmers in the developing world are discour-aged from investing by the competition with subsidized American food.PresidentBushisaskingCongressfor

anadditional $770 million,whichwould boost American food aid to roughly $5 billion over the next two years. Con-gress should approve that assistance. The developing world needs to devel-

op its own ability to feed itself. For that to happen, American farmers will have to be weaned from American food aid. There is more that Washington must do. Especially with corn and oil prices as high as they are, the time has come to put an end to subsidies to transform corn into ethanol.

Roughly 15 death row prisoners are scheduled to be put to death in America betweennowandOctober, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. This flood of executions is the result of the Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld theconstitutionalityofa troubling form

of lethal injection. As states put their machinery of death into overdrive, it is an ideal timefor thenation torethink its commitment to capital punishment.Last month, the Supreme Court up-

held Kentucky’s method of lethal injec-tion. Although there was convincing evidence that the three drugs that Ken-tucky injects can cause excruciating pain, thecourt ruled that itdoesnotvio-late the Eighth Amendment’s prohibi-tion of cruel and unusual punishment.After the court accepted the case last

fall, many states halted executions. Now, the Death Penalty Information Center projects that by the end of the year, there could be 50 to 60 execu-tions. Thesescheduledexecutionscomeata

time when many Americans are, right-ly, turning away from capital punish-ment.Webelieve that the takingofa life by thestate is inall caseswrong,but it is particularly so with the deeply flawed system that exists today. Many defen-dants lack adequate legal representa-tion at their trials, race distorts who is sentenced to death for what crimes and juries are “death qualified” — jurors with moral objections to the death pen-alty are removed. As the recent rash of DNA exonerations has shown, judges and juries too often sentence innocent people to death.With executioners gearing up across

thecountry tostartputtingprisoners to death, it is time forordinaryAmericans to join the debate.

PAUL KRUGMAN

Thinking About November’s Election

For years, American and Britishpolitics were in sync. Reagan camein roughly the same time asThatcher,and Clinton’s Third Way approachmirrored Blair’s. But the British con-servatives never had aGingrich revo-lution inthe1990sortheBushvictoriesthereafter. They got their losing inearly, and, in the wilderness, they re-thought modern conservatism whiletheir American counterparts wereclinging topower.Today, British conservatives are on

the way up, while American conser-vatives are on the way down. Britishconservatives have moved beyondThatcherism,whileAmericanconser-vatives hope for another Reagan. TheBritish Conservative Party enjoyeda series of stunning victories in localelections recently, while polls showAmericanvoters thoroughlyrejectingtheRepublicanbrand.The flow of ideas has changed di-

rection. It used to be that AmericanconservativesshapedBritishpoliticalthinking. Now the influence is goingtheotherway.TheBritishconservativerenovation

begins with this insight: The centralpoliticaldebateofthe20thcenturywasover the role of government. The rightstood for individual freedomwhile theleft stood for extending the role of thestate.But thecentraldebateof the21stcentury is over quality of life. In thisnewdebate, it is insufficient to talkon-ly about individual freedom. Politicalleaders have to also talk about, as oneTory politician put it, “the whole waywe liveour lives.”That means, first, moving beyond

the Thatcherite tendency to put eco-nomics first. As Oliver Letwin, oneof the leading Tory strategists put it:“Politics, once econo-centric, mustnow become socio-centric.” DavidCameron, the Conservative Party

leader,makes it clear thathisprimaryfocus is sociological. Last year he de-clared: “The great challenge of the1970sand1980swaseconomicrevival.Thegreatchallenge in thisdecadeandthe next is social revival.” In anotherspeech, he argued: “Weused to standfor the individual.Westill do.But indi-vidual freedoms count for little if soci-ety isdisintegrating.Nowwestandforthe family, for theneighborhood—inaword, for society.”Thishasledtoalotof talkaboutcom-

munity, relationships, civic engage-ment and social responsibility.DannyKruger, a special adviser toCameron,wrote a much-discussed pamphlet,“OnFraternity.” These conservatives

are not trying to improve the souls ofcitizens.They’re trying tousegovern-ment to fosterdensesocial bonds.Theywant voters to think of the To-

riesasthepartyofsocietywhileLaboris thepartyof the state.Theywant thecountry to see the Tories as the partyofdecentralizedorganicnetworksandtheLaboritesas thepartyof top-downmechanistic control.Assuch, theConservativePartyhas

spent a lot of time thinking about howgovernment should connect with citi-zens. Basically, everything should besmaller,decentralizedandinteractive.Theywantagreatervarietyofschools,with local and parental control. Theywant to reverse the trend toward big

central hospitals. Health care, Cam-eron says, is as much about regularlong-termcareasmajor surgery.Cameron also believes government

shouldhelpsocialentrepreneursscaleup their activities without burdeningthemwithexcessiveoversight.ThisfocusmeansthatConservatives

talknotonlyaboutwarandeconomics,but also the softer stuff. There’s beenmore emphasis on environmental is-sues,civility,assimilationandthemor-alclimate.Cameronhasspentanenor-mous amount of time talking aboutmarriage, familiesandchildren.Some of his ideas would not sit well

with American conservatives. Hewants tocreate4,200morehealthvisi-tors, who would come into the homesof newparents andhelp themmanageday-to-day stress. But he also talksabout rewriting the tax code to makeit more family friendly, making childcaremore accessible, andmaking thestreets safer.Cameron is often disdained as a

merecharmer.Butpolitically itworks.The Tory modernization project hasproducedstunningsupport inLondon,thesouthernsuburbs, theWelshheart-landsandtheailingnorth. It’snotonlythatvotersaretiredofLabor.TheCon-servatives have successfully “decon-taminated”theirbrand.They’reoffer-ingsomething in tunewith the times.Cameron describes a new global

movement, with rising center-rightparties inSweden,Canada,Australia,France,Germany, theCzechRepublic,California and New York (he admiresGovernorArnoldSchwarzeneggerandMayorMichaelBloomberg).Americanconservativeswon’tsimplyimportthismodel.But there’sa lot to learn fromit.The only question is whether Republi-canswill learnthose lessonssooner,orwhether they will learn them later, af-teradecadeorso in thewilderness.

Conservatives in Englandhave learned importantlessons since Thatcher.

DAVID BROOKS

British Conservatives Influencing Americans

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

The bitter campaign has divided Democrats along class and race lines.

Repubblica NewYork

WOR LD TR ENDS

MONDAY, MAY 19, 2008 III

www.austrian.com

I miglioriper l’Est.

Ad Est siamo i migliori: con 48 destinazioni in 24 paesi,Austrian Airlines non ha rivali. Non solo per le innumerevoli

destinazioni, ma anche per l’incredibile frequenza dei volie l‘eccellente servizio di bordo.

Partenze via Vienna da: Bologna, Firenze, Milano, Roma, Napoli, Venezia e Verona.

Accumula miglia con Miles&More.

By NICHOLAS KULISH

WEIMAR, Germany — A body at rest tends to stay at rest, unless it is suspected of being that of the German writer Friedrich Schiller. For nearly 200 years, the dozens of candidates for that honor have been disinterred and subjected to forensic science.The latest inquiry, conducted by a film crew

making a documentary called “The Friedrich Schiller Code,” was supposed to be a tale of two skeletons, with DNA tests showing which of the leading contenders — both kept in the ducal vault in Weimar — was the real Schiller. The answer was neither, or in fact none of them, because the two skeletons proved to contain bones from at least six people.Now a blue sign stands

at the top of the stone stair-case to the vault, explaining to visitors that while both of the famous twin oak coffins bearing the names of the re-nowned friends Goethe and Schillerarestill there, the lat-ter sits empty.In the two decades after

Schiller’s death and burial in the communal vault at Jacob’s cemetery in 1805, a common practice then for the town’s leading citizens, Schiller grew tremendously in renown. A common burial place was no longer fitting for a literary lion.So, in 1826 the mayor of

Weimar entered the com-munal vault to find Schiller’s remains. He brought back 23 skulls, one of which was de-termined with the help of two doctors and even Schiller’s son Ernst to be that of the poet.The debate over whether that skull and the ac-

companying skeleton they found really belonged toSchillercontinued,and in1911ananatomist,Au-gust von Froriep, descended into the vault at Ja-cob’s cemetery. He emerged with 63 more skulls. His selection, again with a seemingly matching skeleton, was placed in a separate coffin in a side room of the ducal vault. But the questions never went away.While the country was divided, Weimar lay in

EastGermany.UnderCommunism,a teamexam-ined both sets of skeletons in 1959. It was not sci-entists’ only foray into the coffins of the poets. In 1970, East German scientists exhumed Goethe’s body,photographing itandtreatingtheboneswith chemicals to help preserve them.

“It was a matter of time before someone ended up testing these skulls with DNA,” said the film-maker Ute Gebhardt, who made “The Friedrich Schiller Code.” The tests went beyond genetics to chemical analysis and facial reconstruction, with a price tag of around $170,000 just for the testing. Fivemembersof theSchiller familywereexhumed to provide DNA samples. No matching DNA was found among either of

the poet’s supposed bodies.Researchers found that the skull found by Mr.

von Froriep actually belonged to a hunchbacked woman.Throughanalysisof thebonesandhistori-cal records they later showed that she was a lady of thecourt,whomSchillerwasknowntohavedis-

liked. The jawbone belonged to another woman entirely.Theotherskullwassosimi-

lar to Schiller’s death mask that it confounded even con-temporary anthropologists. The fact that this close match had seven strange teeth in-serted post-mortem has led oneexpertwhoworkedonthe documentarytoconcludethat it was fixed to look like Schil-ler’s skull — a stand-in for the real one, which was stolen.Adherents of Franz Joseph

Gall, the founder of phrenol-ogy, the discredited pseudo-science based on the belief that personality traits could be “read” in the bumps and fissures on a person’s head, avidly collected the skulls of geniuses to study them. The head of the composer Haydn, for instance, was stolen in 1809 shortly after his burial.Thesearch isnowover, said

Hellmut Seemann, president of the Foundation of Weimar Classics, which is responsible for the Goethe-Schiller archive. His goal was not to find Schiller’s body, just to settle the questions about the ones they had.“It is likewithapainting,”hesaid. “Is it byRem-

brandtoronlyaworkshoppainting?Youhavealso responsibility for the skulls you have.”Local officials grumbled that an empty Schiller

coffin might be bad for tourism, but neither tour-ists nor locals interviewed here were bothered by the news. NorbertEckstein, 54, a socialworker fromSuhl,

about an hour’s drive away, said it did not matter because Schiller’s work was his legacy. “But you know there are people who are still out there look-ing,” he said.

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

It’shardtooveremphasizeGazprom’srole in the Russian economy. It’s a sprawling company that raked in $91 billion last year; it employs 432,000 people, pays taxes equal to 20 percent of the Rus-sian budget and has subsidiaries in industries as disparate as farming and aviation. Its former chairman, Dmitri A. Medvedev, was

sworn in as president on May 7, after being hand-picked as the successor of President Vladimir V. Putin. His victory in the election in early March confirmed that in today’s Russia, the line separat-ing big business and the state is almost nonexis-tent. The revolving door between Gazprom and the

government is spinning especially fast this year: Mr. Medvedev, 42, replaced Mr. Putin as presi-dent; Mr. Putin became prime minister, replac-ing Viktor A. Zubkov; and Mr. Zubkov is expected to take Mr. Medvedev’s place as Gazprom’schairmanatagen-eral shareholders meeting in June.Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Pu-

tin “are as close to a dream team as Gazprom could ever hope for,” said Jonathan P. Stern, author of “The Future of Russian Gas and Gazprom.” The company is a major supplier of natural gas

toEurope, and it isbecomingan important source of gas to fast-growing Asian markets like China and South Korea. If crude oil and natural gas are considered together, Gazprom’s daily production of energy is greater than that of Saudi Arabia. When Mr. Putin was still president, he used

Gazprom’swealthandeconomicmight to fightpo-litical enemies insideRussia, to reassert influence over formerSoviet republics, togain leverageover Western European countries by increasing their dependence on Russian gas, and to wrest Russian energy assets back from foreign companies. Now that Russia is seeking to reclaim the geo-

political clout it had in Soviet days, it is wielding its vast energy resources, rather than missiles, to reassert itself.Moreoften thannot, itsmostpotent

weapon is Gazprom itself.“Energy should not be used for a policy

tool, but it is,” said Vladimir Milov, presi-dent of the Institute of Energy Policy, an independent research organization in Moscow, and a former deputy minister of energy.At a Gazprom worksite in the Yuzhno-

Russkoye field in Siberia one day last win-ter, it was so cold that two dozen diesel en-gines were left roaring day and night, lest they would freeze until spring. Every win-ter, some Russian oil workers get frostbite. “Your skin just peels a little,” said Sergei

G.Koshel, adrillingsupervisor, dismissing the dangers.The Yuzhno-Russkoye field alone has

proven reserves of 800 billion cubic me-ters of natural gas, or enough to meet the gas demand in the United States for more than a year, and it is only the firstofhalfadozenhuge developments that are planned in the north. Back in the 1990s,

Gazprom was the ar-chetypeof theunreformedSo-

viet enterprise. While oil companies were being privatized and sold to investors, Gazprom stayed intact and under government control. It bank-rolled many of the Kremlin’s pet projects and the lavish lifestyle of a generation of company execu-tives. Gazpromsaysthatmanyof the investments that

critics once labeled political, like the purchase of television stations and newspapers, have in fact turned out to be highly profitable. Now Russian leaders consider Gazprom the

template for a new industrial policy. In a global-ized world, their thinking goes, strategic Russian companies should be controlled by the govern-ment, yet open to the capital and skill of Western investors—justasGazpromis. It’sa throwback to the Soviet economic model, with an emphasis on gigantism and economies of scale.

Richas it is,Gazpromfacesbigchallenges in the Medvedev era. Like other Russian companies, it invested little money maintaining or upgrading equipment in the 1990s. To meet demand, Gaz-promwill have tospendat least$75billion tobring its two largest fields in the Arctic into production within the next decade, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates. “Thecomplexityandthesizeof it iswhatcreates

a huge challenge for Russia and for Gazprom,” said Vitaly V. Yermakov, director of research for theRussianandCaspianregionatCambridgeEn-ergy Research Associates. Critics say that Gazprom muscled its way into

theranksof theworld’senergygiantswithblatant and often clumsy tactics. The Yuzhno-Russkoye field,whichGazprompoints toasanexampleof its resurgence, is one example.Richard W. Moncrief, an oilman from Fort

Worth, Texas, says he is the rightful owner of 40 percentof the field,whichhesayshebought inase-ries of agreements with Gazprom about a decade ago. But he says that Gazprom didn’t recognize his contract, instead granting BASF, a Germany company, a 35 percent stake in the field. Mr. Mon-crief is suing Gazprom in Berlin, contending that his stake is now worth $12 billion.Gazprom maintains that the agreements were

notbinding:“Thecompanydeniesanyobligations toward Moncrief Oil in relation to the Yuzhno-Russkoye field,” the company said in a statement.Mr.Moncriefdisagrees,but ispessimisticabout

his legal position. “Nobody has ever gotten a Rus-siancompany intoacourt thatcouldenforceacon-tract,” he said. “In the end, the Russians are going to do exactly what they want to, and they’re going to ride thebackofWesterncommerce to fundtheir country.”

Russia’s Future Is MirroredBy Gazprom and Its Outlook

Critics say the Kremlin uses its gas company as a weapon.

JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Gazprom blurs the line between Russian business and government. A gas pipeline in Russia.

ECKEHARD SCHULZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Germans have followed the

search for Friedrich Schiller’s

bones for almost two centuries.

200-Year Mystery Over Writer’s Skeleton

Repubblica NewYork

WOR LD TR ENDS

IV MONDAY, MAY 19, 2008

Israeli Arabs Are Outsiders in Their Birthplace

Rules of Love and Tradition Are Vexing to Young Saudis

his voice began to quiver. “I am not lucky today; let’s leave,”

he said. YoungmenlikeNaderandEnadare

taught that they are the guardians of the family’s reputation, expected to shield their female relatives from shame and avoid dishonoring their families by their own behavior. It is a classic example of how the Saudis havemeldedtheir faithwith theirdes-ert tribal traditions. “One of the most important Arab

traditions is honor,” Enad said. “If my sister goes in the street and someone assaults her, she won’t be able to pro-tect herself. The nature of men is that men are more rational. Women are not rational. With one or two or three words, a man can get what he wants from a woman.”Enad, a 20-year-old police

officer, has an explosive tem-per and a fondness for teasing. Nader is soft-spoken, with a gentle smile and an inclination to follow rather than lead. Theyaremore thancousins;

they are lifelong friends and confidants. That is often the case in Saudi Arabia, where families are frequently large and insular. Enad and Nader are among

several dozen Mutairi cous-ins who since childhood have spent virtually all their free time together. They are average young

Saudi men, not wealthy, notpoor, not from themore liberalsouth or east, but residentsof the nation’s conservativeheartland, Riyadh. It is a flat,clean city of five million people thatgleams with oil wealth, two glassskyscrapers and roads clogged withoversize S.U.V.’s. It offers youngmenvery little in the way of entertain-ment, with no movie theaters andfew sports facilities. If they are un-married, they cannot even enter themallswherewomen shop.If there is one accessory that al-

lows abit of self-expression for Saudimen, it is their cellphones. Nader’s isfilled with pictures of pretty womentaken from the Internet, tight faceshots of singers and actresses. Hisring tone is a love song inArabic (oneof themostpopular ring tonesamonghis cousins is the theme song to “Ti-tanic”).“I’m very romantic,” Nader said at

a hotel cafe. “I don’t like action mov-ies. I like romance. ‘Titanic’ is No. 1. I like ‘Head Over Heels.’ Romance is love.” To Nader and Enad, prayer is es-

sential. In Enad’s view, jihad is, too, not the more moderate approach that emphasizesdoinggooddeeds,but the idea of picking up a weapon and fight-ing in places like Iraq and Afghani-stan. “Jihad is not a crime; it is a duty,”

Enad said in casual conversation. The concept is such a fundamen-

tal principle, so embedded in their psyches, that they do not see any con-flict between their belief in armed ji-had and their work as security agents of the state. As a police officer, Enad helps conduct raids on suspected terrorist hideouts. Nader works in the military as a communications of-

ficer. Each earns about 4,000 riyals a month, about $1,200, not nearly enough to become independent from their parents.Enad’s house remains a haven for

Enadandhiscousins,whooftenspend their free time sleeping, watching television talk shows like Dr. Phil and Oprah with subtitles, drinking carda-mom coffee — and smoking. Nadersneakssecretphonecallsand

textmessageswithSarah,his fiancée. When she calls, or writes a message, hisphone flashes“MyLove”over two interlocked red hearts. These conversations are taboo and

could cause a dispute between two families. Enad teases Nader, saying, “In a year you will find my sister with a mustache and him in the kitchen.” “Not true,” Nader said, mustering

as much defiance as he could. “I am a man.”

tween Jews and Arabs. Jews fear ulti-mately losing thedemographicbattle to Arabs, both in Israel and in the larger territory it controls. Most say that an end to the nation’s

Jewish identity would mean an end to Israel.But theyfearthat failureto instillin Arab citizens a sense of belonging isdangerous as Arabs promote the ideathat, 60 years or no 60 years, Israel is apassingphenomenon.“I want to convince the Jewish peo-

ple that having a Jewish state is bad for them,” said Abir Kopty, an advocate for Israeli Arabs. Across Israel, especially in thenorth,

are the remains of dozens of partly un-used Palestinian villages, scars on the landscape from the conflict that gave birth to the country in 1948. Yet some original inhabitants and

their descendants, all Israeli Arab citizens, live in packed towns and vil-lages, often next to the old villages, and are barred from resettling them while Jewish communities around them are urged to expand.One recent warm afternoon, Jamal

Abdulhadi Mahameed drove past kib-butz fields of wheat and watermelon, up a dirt road surrounded by pine trees and cactuses, and climbed the worn remains of a set of stairs, declaring, “This was my house. This is where I was born.”He said what he most wanted now,

at 69, was to leave the nearby crowded town, come to this piece of uncultivat-ed land with the pomegranate bushes planted by his father and work it, as generations had before him. He has

gone to court to get it.He is no revolutionary and, by nearly

any measure, is a solid and successfulcitizen.Hischildrenincludeadoctor,twolawyers and an engineer. Yet, as an Ar-ab,hisquest forareturntohis landchal-lengesa longstandingIsraelipolicy.“We are prohibited from using our

own land,” he said. “They want to keep it available for Jews. My daughter makes no distinction between Jewish andArabpatients.Whyshouldthestate treat me differently?”The answer has to do with the very

essence of Zionism, the movement of Jewishrebirthandcontrolover the land

whereJewishstatehoodfirst flourished more than 2,000 years ago.“Landispresence,”remarkedClinton

Bailey, an Israeli scholar who has fo-cused on Bedouin culture. “If you wanttobepresenthere,youhavetohaveland.The country is not that big. What youcede to Arabs can no longer be used forJewswhomaystillwant tocome.”Antagonism runs both ways. Many

Israeli Arabs express solidarity with their Palestinian brethren under occu-pation, and some Arabs in Parliament routinely accuse Israel of Nazism. Meanwhile,severalright-wingrabbis

haveforbiddenJewsfromrentingapart-

ments toArabsoremploying them.Anda majority of Jews, polls show, favor atransferofArabsoutofIsraelaspartofatwo-state solution, a view that a decadeagowas thoughtextreme.Arabs here reject that idea partly be-

cause theyprefer the certainty of an im-perfect Israeli democracy to whateversystemmay evolve in a shaky Palestin-ian state. That is part of the paradox oftheIsraeliArabs.Theirangerhasgrown,butsohastheirsenseofbelonging.In fact, there is a real level of Jewish-

Arab coexistence in many places, and the government has recently commit-ted itself to improveArabaccess toedu-cation, infrastructure and government employment. “We know that they need more land,

that their children need a place to live,” said Raanan Dinur, director general of the prime minister’s office. “We are working on building a new Arab city in the north. Our main goal is to take what are today two economies and integrate them into one economy.”Still, there is a concern that time is

short.Mr. Mahameed and his fellow villag-

ers will arrive at the Supreme Court in July with the goal of obtaining 20 hect-ares of their families’ former land that sits uncultivated except for pine trees planted by the Jewish National Fund. Abdulwahab Darawshe, a former

member of Israel’s Parliament and thecurrent head of the Arab DemocraticParty,sat inhisNazarethofficerecentlyand said: “Nomatterwhat happens,wewill not leavehereagain. Thatwasabigmistake in 1948. Yet our identity is be-comingmoreandmorePalestinian.Youcannotcutus fromtheArabtree.”

RINA CASTELNUOVO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

As Kuwait Falls Behind, Trust in Democracy Begins to Falter

SHAWN BALDWIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Saudi men in Riyadh shopping for

cellphones, which give them a chance

to contact women in secret.

From Page I

Arabs are forbidden to

return to land set aside

for Jewish settlers.

By ROBERT F. WORTH

KUWAIT — In a vast, high-ceil-inged tent, Ali al-Rashed sounded an anguished note as he delivered the first speech of his campaign for Parlia-ment.“Kuwait used to be No. 1 in the econ-

omy, in politics, in sports, in culture, in everything,” he said, his voice floating out in thewarmeveningair tohundreds ofpotentialvotersseatedonwhitedam-ask-lined chairs. “What happened?”It is a question many people were

asking as this tiny, oil-rich nation of 2.6 million people held its latest round of elections. And the unlikely answer be-ing whispered around, both here and in neighboring countries on the Persian Gulf: too much democracy. In a region where autocracy is the

rule,Kuwait isa remarkableexception, with a powerful and truculent elected Parliament that sets the emir’s salary and is the nation’s sole source of legis-lation. Women gained the right to vote and run for office two years ago, and a popular movement won further elec-toral changes. Despite thosegains,Kuwaithasbeen

overshadowed by its dynamic neigh-bors — Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar —whereeconomiesareboomingunder absolute monarchies. Efforts to over-haulKuwait’swelfarestatehavestalled in its divided Parliament, and scandals led the emir to dissolve the chamber in April for the second time in less than two years, forcing new elections.

All thishas leftmanyKuwaitisdisen-chanted with their 50-member elected legislature. The collapse of the Bush administration’s efforts to promote de-mocracy in the region and the continu-ing chaos in Iraq have also contributed to a popular suspicion that democracy itself isoneWestern import thathasnot worked.“People say democracy is just slow-

ing us down, and that we’d be better off if we were more like Dubai,” said Waleedal-Sager, 24,who isadvisinghis father’s campaign for Parliament.Like many Kuwaitis, Mr. Sager

quickly said he disagreed with that view. But in the days before parliamen-tary elections were held Saturday, with near-constant coverage in a dozen new newspapers and on satellite television stations, candidates referred again and again to a “halat ihbaat” — state of frustration. Mr. Sager’s father, Mo-hammed al-Sager, a longtime member of Parliament, delivered his own open-ing campaign speech shortly after Mr. Rashed recently, and spent much of it reminding his listeners of the need for an elected assembly. “Some people have called for a per-

manent dissolution of Parliament,” he said, his face telecast on an enormous screen to a thick overflow crowd out-side the tent. “But everywhere in the world — in Africa, in Palestine, in the old Soviet Union — people have turned to elections to solve their problems, not away from them. Whatever problems

we have in our Parliament, we must re-member that it is much better than no Parliament at all.”The current political malaise is espe-

cially striking because most Kuwaitis take pride in their nation’s relatively democratictraditions.TherulingSabah familyacquired itspositionnot through conquest,butwithanagreementamong the coastal traders of the region in the mid-18th century. After Kuwait gained independence from the British in 1961, the emir approved a written Constitu-tion that sharply limited his power in relation to Parliament.

“This ruling family is different fromany other ruling family in the region,”saidGhanimal-Najjar,anewspapercol-umnistandprofessorofpoliticalscienceat Kuwait University. “They are part ofthepoliticalprocess,noton topof it.”In some ways, Kuwait is the most

democratic country in the Arab world, aside from Lebanon. There are Arab republics — in Yemen, Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Iraq and Tunisia — but despite theirdemocratic forms, thosecountries have generally been more autocratic and repressive than the region’s mon-archies.

In Kuwait, tensions between the ma-jority Sunnis and minority Shiites are minimal. Kuwaitis of all backgrounds mix socially at diwaniyas, the tradi-tional evening gatherings where politi-cal and social gossip is shared over tea and coffee. And while there have been setbacks — the royal family suspended Parliament in the late 1970s and again in the late 1980s — Kuwait has grown steadily more democratic. Two years ago, popular pressure

forcedachange in theelectoraldistrict-ing law, making it harder to buy votes. Women gained the right to vote and run in elections (though none have won seats). Inmid-April,Kuwaitidemocrats won yet another battle after the gov-ernment tried to pass a law restricting public gatherings. There were popular demonstrations against the proposal, and the government backed down. It is unlikely that many Kuwaitis

would be willing to trade their political rightsand freedoms formoreeconomic opportunity.But thenotion thatdemoc-racy is somehow holding Kuwait back is common.“It’s true, the friction in our politics

delays things,” said Kamel Harami, an oil analyst. “The sheik of Abu Dhabi cansay, ‘Gobuild this,’ and it’sdone.He doesn’t have me, the press, the TV sta-tions, theParliament,gettinginhisway. But what people need to understand is that democracy isn’t the problem; it’s that democracy isn’t being used cor-rectly.”

BRYAN DENTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Some Kuwaitis says autocrats in neighboring countries have an

advantage. Parliamentary candidates attend a rally.

Monael-Naggarcontributedreporting.

From Page IAbu Abed, 84,

recently visited

the site of his

Arab village in

northern Israel.

He fled with

his family in

1948.

Repubblica NewYork

MONEY & B U S I N E S S

MONDAY, MAY 19, 2008 V

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Arielle Green, a publicist in Manhat-tan, knows what most of her friends earn, whether it is $28,000 a year or $100,000.Andshedoesnot seempartic-ularly shy about disclosing her income ($30,000 a year, plus overtime). At 22, Ms. Green, like her friends, is

less afraid to flirt with what many over 35 consider the last taboo in American life: discussing salary openly with friends and colleagues. “There’s just moreofa feelingofopenness indiscuss-ing what you make,” Ms. Green said. Her friends, she said, consider frank

talk about income a valuable tool. It helps them strategize — when to push for a raise, when to start looking around. Yes, elders find it strange. For them, a blunt reference to sal-

ary in a social setting still represents the height of bad manners. But for many young professionals, salary in-formation is fair game, at least among friends. Bill Coleman, the chief compensa-

tion officer of Salary.com, which tracks income figures for numerous occupa-tions, said that he had noticed more candor about income among those who live by social networking than among those who don’t — what he calls the “MySpace/Facebook rift.”And, he said, the new openness on

salaries is reflective of a deeper accep-tance of networking, offline as well as online. “This is a generation that is much

more attuned to teamwork, collabora-tion and sharing information,” he said. “Everything they do is a kind of group event. How do you know, when you get your first job offer, if $45,000 is a good offer, a bad offer or an O.K. offer? You

go to your friends.” Jim Wang, 27, until recently a soft-

ware developer living in Columbia, Maryland, blogs about his personal fi-nances. Two years ago, he said, several of his friends who worked in the same industry started to get restless. “People started leaving firms to go

to other companies, and they were get-ting 15, 20, 25 percent raises,” recalled Mr. Wang, who can name what his 30 or so closest friends earn “within a band-width of $5,000.” “I thought, why not go out and see

what my true market rate is? I found out that there were two companies both willing to pay 18 percent more, so I left.”Several workers under 35 said that

greater salary transparency among friends only makes sense in an age whenthere issomuch information free-ly available online. Young profession-als, in fact, have all sorts of ways to find out how much their friends make, even withoutasking.Associatesat law firms anonymously report their own salaries

to Web sites like www.greedyassoci-ates.com. Many professionals interviewed

said that theybelievesalary talk isbest confined to friends within the same tax bracket, to spare feelings. Others, how-ever, insisted that a little generosity by the haves could help stave off jealousy by their have-not friends. Some young Wall Street profession-

als said that since everyone knowseveryoneelse’sbonus, it is common for friends with the biggest paydays to celebrate by picking up the check at a restaurant or nightclub.Still, there aregood reasons

that generations of parentshave instructed their childrento keep quiet aboutmoney, so-cial scientists say. In a meri-tocratic country, money hasalwaysbeen thegreat divider,the primary way Americansconnote status. Thus it is im-possible to engage in a con-versation about income thatis entirely innocent, saidHerbGoldberg, a clinical psycholo-gist in Los Angeles who haswritten about financial is-

sues.“When people talk about money,” he

said, most people traditionally have presumed that there is “a motive be-hind it, and the motive is what makes it seem impolite.” People bombarded with unwelcome salary information, or pressed to disclose it, assume someone is raising the topic to subtly brag, or put someone else down, he said.

By JULIA PRESTON

MorethanthreemillionLatinAmer-ican immigrants in the United States, responding to the economic downturn and new uncertainties about their future, have stopped sending money home to their families in the last two years, according to a survey released recentlyby theInter-AmericanDevel-opment Bank in Washington. Only 50 percent of some 18.9 million

Latino immigrants in thiscountrynowsend money regularly to relatives intheir home countries, compared with73 percent two years ago, the surveyfound.The drop in the number of people

sending remittances is a sign of pres-suresonLatino immigrantsasaresult of the slump in the low-wage job mar-ket and of the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, the survey shows. Of the immigrants interviewed, 47 percent said they did not have legal status. The others were American citizens and legal immi-grants. But Latino immigrant workers who

participated in focus groups as part of the survey said they were not ready to leave the United States quite yet, said Sergio Bendixen, the Miami-based pollster who conducted the survey. Instead of going home, the immi-

grants said they were taking jobs at lower wages or sometimes working two jobs to try to maintain their in-come, he said. “These are resourceful people who

will do whatever job is available,’’ Mr. Bendixen said. “The major dynamic that is holding them back from send-ing money is fear. They don’t know whether they won’t be able to get a job anymore.’But while the number of immigrant

senders declined, the total amount of remittances actually rose slightly between 2006 and this year, the study reported. It estimated total remittanc-es to Latin America at $45.9 billion in

2008, an increase of $500 million over 2006. The amount did not decrease more sharply because Latino immi-grants who continued to send funds home sent more money more fre-quently. However, the total amountofmoney

transfersreportedbythedevelopment bank slackened abruptly after a five-year period of huge growth in remit-tances to the region. Between 2001 and 2006, the amount of the transfers tripled, to $45 billion from $15 billion, according to figures from the bank. “The longstanding pattern of in-

creasing numbers of Latin Ameri-can immigrants sending increasing amounts of money back home has

stopped,’’ said Donald F. Terry, the general manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund at the bank and the official in charge of the survey. With lower income and less job security, Latino immigrants are saving their money here rather than sending it to supportchildren, spousesandparents at home, the study indicated. Latino immigrants said they

stopped sending money to their fami-lies because life is becoming more difficult for them here. Of those inter-viewed,81percentsaid itwasharder to find a good-paying job. Almost 40 per-cent said they were earning less this year.The largestgroupof immigrants in the survey, 18 percent, worked in construction, which has been espe-cially hard hit in the slowdown.A large majority of the Latino immi-

grants in the survey — whether or not

they were illegal — said they experi-enced increasing hostility as a result of federal and state efforts to curb il-legal immigrationandpunishemploy-ers who hire unauthorized immigrant workers. Asaresultofthedifficulties, thenum-

bersof immigrantswhosaid theywereconsidering going back to live in theirhome countries increased notably.Among immigrants who have been inthe United States less than five years,49 percent said they were thinking ofreturning home, while only 41 percentsaid they planned to remain. Over all,just under one-third of the immigrantssaid they were thinking of leaving thecountry.In2001, the last timeasimilarsurvey

asked a comparable question, about20 percent of all the immigrants inter-viewed said they were thinking of go-inghome.Despite the worsening conditions

in the United States, 69 percent of the immigrants in the survey said their financial situation was good or excel-lent compared with their prospects at home. The families of an estimated 3.2mil-

lion immigrants who would lose in-comebecause theywouldno longerre-ceive transfers from theUnited Stateswere among the poorest in the region,and the majority were inMexico, saidMr.Terry.Yolanda, a 45-year-old illegal immi-

grant fromMexico living in Phoenix, said thatshehadstarted to thinkofgo-ing home, after 13 years in the United States. Before November, she was sending at least $400 a month to Mex-ico City to support her three children. This year she can manage only $300 every two months, she said.“We can’t keep up with expenses

and also send money,” she said in Spanish. “If you can’t even eat, what’s the point? This is the worst it’s been, because we’ve never not had enough for food and our bills.’’’

Rupert Murdoch seems to have become an unending story — even, or especially, in media he does not own. He is often portrayed as either a mas-ter Machiavellian who always gets his

way or a greedy low-brow impresario. He may be neither.The phenomenal suc-

cess of the News Cor-poration, of which Mr. Murdoch is chairman,

owes a lot to his shaking up the busi-ness side of media properties — and to risk taking. “Rupert Murdoch’s China Adventures’’ by Bruce Dover offers a smart read on a big bet by Mr. Murdoch that confounded him: trying to reach China’s 380 million television households with Fox-style news and entertainment. Mr. Dover, the News Corporation’s

representative in China from 1992 to 1998, takes us inside the business and the mind of its boss. He indicates that an organizational chart of the global company “would have Murdoch at the top and under him a single straight line to everyone else.’’ The billionaire Mr.

Murdoch, seen as a colossus in New York and London, is shown getting lost alone for hours in Kowloon, nearly being killed by a bus in Shanghai, and delighting in ac-quiring cut-rate silk ties from stall ven-dors or getting a $1 haircut (“including massive tip’’). Mr. Murdoch, writes the author, “was forever in search of a good bargain.’’ China, however, turned out to be no bargain.Much of the book

concerns the conse-quences of a speech to advertisers that Mr. Murdoch gave in 1993, saying that “advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.’’ These were the heady days after the Soviet collapse.But the News Corporation had just

acquired Star TV, a satellite broad-caster based in Hong Kong, with a plan to gain access to homes in mainland China. Responding to the Murdoch threat, Mr. Dover shows, Beijing banned the sale of private satellite dishes. Mr. Murdoch, a zealous anti-Communist, began a decade of obse-quious damage control in China, hurt-ing his company’s reputation in the United States, Britain and Australia.His company dropped the BBC (and

its uncensored news on China) from Star TV; canceled publication of the memoirs of Chris Patten, the last Brit-ish colonial governor of Hong Kong; and paid an advance for a hagiography of Deng Xiaoping, then the paramount leader, by his daughter. Mr. Murdoch

also mounted a “joint venture’’ — sup-plying the capital — with the Commu-nist Party mouthpiece, The People’s Daily. Matters become interesting when

Liu Changle, a Chinese tycoon, ap-proaches Mr. Murdoch to suggest a Chinese-language channel, Phoenix, in partnership with China’s state tele-vision, CCTV. Mr.Liuappears tohelpmakethis

happen,andPhoenix’s realityandtalkshowsproveahitwithChina’saspirational class.But theeffort,Mr.Doversays, lost$53million in its firstthreeyears.CCTV, for itspart, gotaMurdoch-financedcourse inhis tradesecrets.Andthewhole time,Mr.Doverwrites,Mr.LiuenabledBeijing’sse-curityservices tomonitor the internaloperationsof theNewsCorporation inChina.So, the wily Communists stole Mr.

Murdoch’s recipe and spied on him, and he paid for it.Mr. Murdoch’s checkbook stayed

wide open. In December 1998, after years of pleading, he finally landed an audience with Jiang Zemin, then

China’s party chief, to try to convince him to end the sat-ellite ban that was costing Star TV so much cash.Mr. Murdoch,

according to Mr. Dover, put $60 mil-lion into a venture of Mr. Jiang’s son. Mr. Murdoch also relocated his own son James to China. While the elder Mr. Murdoch went on to disparage the Dalai Lama in 1999, his son disparaged the Falun Gong in 2001.The satellite ban

stayed in force. “Murdoch,” this

chronicleconcludes,“wasbynomeans

infallible.”Beijing,despitevariousper-sonnel changes—involvingChinesecharacterswhoenliven thebook—heldtoastrategy:using theNewsCorpora-tion tohelp thecentrallycontrolledme-dia learnmodern techniques.All the while, in democratic India,

Mr. Dover reports, Star TV was mint-ing money, with close to all of the 50 most-watched programs on cable, including “Indian Idol.” Yet even after Mr. Murdoch had obtained broadcast access to one province of China — in exchange for giving Chinese state pro-paganda access to global media mar-kets — his shows were called a threat to Chinese morals.That was not just by the censors, but

also by the newly risen commercial media interests that had brazenly cop-ied him.A Chinese version of “American

Idol,” not owned by Mr. Murdoch, had 400 million viewers. The conquest he so craved was achieved, but on the Communist regime’s terms.

ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

BOOK

REVIEW

STEPHEN

KOTKIN

How China Frustrated

Murdoch’s Business Plans

In the MySpace age, sharing information, even about income.

Latino Struggles in U.S. Are Felt at Home

For a Younger Generation, Salaries Are Not a Secret

FERNANDO ARIZA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

A new book dissects Rupert

Murdoch’s failures in China.Job losses and tougherimmigration enforcementdeal a double blow.

KELLY BLAIR

Remittances

by Latino

immigrants

are off. Money

sent by her

son allowed

Elia Lopez to

build a house in

Mexico.

Repubblica NewYork

S C I E NC E & T ECHNO LOGY : G ADG E T S

VI MONDAY, MAY 19, 2008

" $-'-/+( %&0 /- #)&, /*) #)&./

AL GRANBERG/THE NEW YORK TIMESSource: Hansen Medical

Surgery performed with robots is still finding its role in the medical marketplace. A new remote robotic system, used to treat electrical malfunctions in the heart linked to stroke and heart failure, is a closely watched touchstone for how successful robotics can be for patients, doctors and ultimately, investors.

Open-heart surgery to treat the electrical malfunctions has been largely replaced by the use of miniature tools at the end of long catheters. Robots are used to control the catheter, which could lead to better results.

Catheters go in the femoral vein in the patient’s thigh and move to the heart.

X-rays provide a real-time image of the heart.

Stray electrical currents can cause abnormal contractions.Catheters are used to scar the muscle to block the pathways of the stray signals.

HEART SURGERY WITH LESS CUTTING . . .

INSIDE THE HEART

X-rays and ultrasound images allow doctors to monitor work inside the heart. The robot enables doctors to avoid the fatigue of five hours at an operating table wearing a lead vest to limit exposure to X-rays.

. . . AND LESS FATIGUE

Patient’s vital information

X-ray and ultrasoundimages

3-D map of the heart

HEART FEMORAL

VEIN

By BARNABY J. FEDER

What do you call a surgeon who operates without scalpels, stitching tools or a powerful headlamp to light the patient’s insides? A better doctor, ac-cording to a growing number of surgeons who prefer to hand over much of the blood-and-guts portion of their work to medical robotscontrolled fromcomputer consoles. Many urologists performing

prostate surgery view the pre-cise, tremor-free movements of a robot as the best way to spare nervescrucial tobladdercontrol and sexual potency. A robot’s ability to deftly handle small tools may lead to a less invasive procedure and faster recovery for a patient. Robots also can protect surgeons from physical stress and exposure to X-rays that may force them into prema-ture retirement.A generation ago, the debate

in medicine was whether robot-icswouldeverplayarole.Today, robots are a fast-growing, diver-sifying $1 billion segment of the U.S. medical device industry. It is remarkable how often

Frederic H. Moll comes up in any discussion of medical ro-bots. Dr. Moll, 56, founded Intui-tive Surgical, the company that now dominates the field, and is now best known as chief execu-tive of Hansen Medical, a pub-licly traded robotics company focused on minimally invasive cardiac care. Plenty of health care provid-

ers and insurers are cautious. They’re looking for more evi-dence that robotics improves outcomes for patients at a cost hospitals can absorb. WinifredHayes, chief execu-

tive ofHayes Inc., a health caretechnology consulting firm inLansdale, Pennsylvania, says thatmost clinical data doesn’t supportcontentions that patients fare betterwith robotic surgery. Most hospitalsand clinics are losing money or mak-ing poor returns on their robots, shesays.“The real story is that this is a tech-

nologythathasbeendisseminated fair-

ly widely prematurely,” she says.Robots revolutionized manufactur-

ing during the 1980s, thanks to advanc-es in computing, motion controls and software design. Visionaries like Dr. Richard M. Satava, who oversaw U.S. government-funded medical robotics research at the time, predicted that ro-bots would eventually be able to oper-

ate as precisely as the world’s greatest surgeons and far more tirelessly, per-haps even in remote locations, through satellite links. A project that Dr. Satava’s group fi-

nanced to build a remotely controlled medical robot for the battlefield caught Dr. Moll’s eye in 1994. Dr. Moll became convinced that the technology could

be adapted to make surgery much less invasive in the hands of civilian sur-geons. He took the idea to his employer at

the time, Guidant, a medical device company. Guidant decided that it was too futuristic and too risky, so Dr. Moll rounded up backers, resigned and in 1995 founded Intuitive Surgical.

The company prospered by proving that robots could deftly handle rigid surgical tools like scalpels and sewing needles through small incisions in a pa-tient’s skin. In prostate surgery, it is rapidly becoming unusual foraurologist tooperatewithout using one of Intuitive’s da Vinci robots, which sell for $1.3 mil-lion, on average. Intuitive is now marketing the da Vinci to other specialists, including gynecolo-gists and heart surgeons.Dr.Moll left Intuitive in2002 to

pursueamoreambitiousconcept at Hansen Medical: robots that manipulate the tips of thin, flex-iblecatheters thatdoctors insert deep in theheart. If hesucceeds, the Sensei robotic systems from Hansen, costing about $675,000, may become the preferred tools for treating many circulatory problems.Doctors who use catheters

generally gain access to the cir-culatorysystemthroughasmall incision in the major veins that run through the thigh or arm. Both the makers of rigid tools and the catheter companies are competing inanother fast-devel-oping field of “scarless” therapy involving operations performed through the urinary tract and other natural openings. Dr.Moll isbetting that flexible

tools like those that work with the Sensei will dominate as this movement matures. Fans include Dr. Davendra

Mehta, chief arrhythmia spe-cialist at Mount Sinai Medical Center, who last fall became the first doctor in New York City to order a Sensei. “This is like pow-er steering versus conventional steering,” saidDr.Mehtaduring a recent procedure.Dr. Moll says robotics will ad-

vance on other fronts, because it can help doctors of varying ability perform at the level of the world’s top surgeons. “The public has no idea of the extent

ofdifferencebetween topsurgeonsand bad ones,” he said. “Robots are good at going where they are supposed to, re-membering where they are and stop-ping when required.”

By BRAD STONE

Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executiveand fieldgeneral, has Napoleonic dreams of global conquest for his 10-month-old wonder gadget, the iPhone. So it may be fit-ting that he’s encountering his most seriousresistance inacity called Waterloo.Thatiswhere,44kilometerswest

of Toronto in Ontario, 19 nonde-script, low-riseofficebuildingscom-prise the headquarters of ResearchInMotion,makerof theBlackBerry.R.I.M. is theNorthAmerican leader

in building smartphones, those ver-satile handsets that operate more likecomputers than phones. But R.I.M.mayhave trouble dominating themar-ket’s next phase. Once the exclusivedomainof e-mail-obsessedprofession-als, smartphones are now prized byconsumers who want easy access totheWeb, digital music and video evenmore than an omnipresent connectionto their in-boxes.Since the iPhone went on sale last

summer, amid long lines of shoppersand media adulation, the contours ofthe smartphonemarket have begun toshift rapidly towardconsumers.That means R.I.M., which has his-

torically viewed big corporations andwirelesscarriersas itsmost importantcustomers, needs to alter its DNA in ahurry. While business is booming inWaterloo, analysts are raising an im-portantquestionaboutR.I.M.’s future:Can a company that defined mobile e-mail for a generation of thumb-typistswithbadposturealsodominatethenewconsumermarket forsmartphones?“Thevulturesarecircling,”saysRog-

er L. Kay, president of Endpoint Tech-nologies Associates, a research firminWayland, Massachusetts. “There isthis sense that the R.I.M. franchise isunderassault.”

In the short term, Apple’s noisy en-tranceintothesmartphonemarkethaselevated the visibility of smartphonesand enhanced the prospects of mostof its rivals. Worldwide, smartphoneshipments jumped 60 percent in thelast threemonthsof2007overthesameperiod the previous year, according toIDC, the tracking firm.R.I.M. added 6.5million subscribers

in its last fiscalyear, twicethepreviousyear’s amount, and its stock soared,more than doubling in value as inves-tors anticipated the coming Age of theSmartphone. And R.I.M. has alreadyintroducedcatchymainstreamgadget-ry. The BlackBerry Pearl and Curve,twophonesaimedexplicitlyat thecon-sumermarket, have sold well and nowaccountforamajorityofR.I.M.’sdevicesales.But there are also signs that R.I.M.

faces steeper challenges. At the end oflast year, BlackBerry had a 40 percent

shareoftheUnitedStatessmartphonemarket, down from45 percent at theendof2006,thankslargelytothe17.4percent share the iPhone grabbedin its first sixmonths.

In March, Mr. Jobs announcedthat Apple would take the rarestep of licensingMicrosoft’s cor-porate e-mail technology, to al-low iPhones to connect directlyto business computers — adagger aimed at the heart ofR.I.M.’sstrengthinthecorpo-ratemarket. Apple is also ex-pected to introduce anew3Gversionof the iPhone inJune,which will work on speedierwirelessnetworks .In describing the threat that

Apple poses to R.I.M., Charlie Wolf,an analyst at Needham & Company,an investmentbankingfirm,describeshis wife’s entirely common use of theiPhone,whichshetakestobedwithhereachnight tobrowse theWeb.“Some consumers who might have

considered the BlackBerry, who don’thave the e-mail urgency of a mobileprofessional, are going to start select-ing the iPhone,” Mr. Wolf says. “Thisisn’t going to stopR.I.M., but it is goingtoslowthemdown.”Up in Waterloo, R.I.M. executives

appear unperturbed. Though theywould not reveal details, R.I.M. itselfis expected to unveil a new 3G phonesometime inMay.R.I.M. employees and outside devel-

operswhoarewritingprogramsforthenew phone say that it will have fasterprocessors and a better browser thatmore closely resembles theWeb expe-rienceonacomputer.Indeed, two independent develop-

erswriting software for comingR.I.M.devices say that a touch-screen Black-Berry is in the works, and that R.I.M.engineers privately refer to it as theA.K.—for“AppleKiller.”

By ERIC A. TAUB

WhenBarryGordonwatches aDVDonhis 3-meter diagonal-measurementhome theater screen at his home inMerritt Island,Florida, he’snot simplywatching TV; he’s watching a majorproduction.The lights dim, the stereo plays

“Hooray for Hollywood” and eachvideo and audio component switcheson automatically. All Mr. Gordon hasto do is take his seat, having accom-plished all this with a single push ofone finger.Mr.Gordon, a retireddirector of sys-

tems engineering forNorthropGrum-man and a home-theater enthusiast,uses a universal remote control, thePronto TSU9600 from Philips, to runthe whole show. But simplicity doesnot necessarily come cheap. With aprice that matches the price of someTVs—$800—thePronto is overkill formost people.Still, the popularity of universal re-

motes points to a problem— andmar-keting opportunity—as people createtheir own home theaters and homeautomation systems: remote controlproliferation.It is not unusual to be deluged with

remotes, givenall the boxeshookedupto today’s TV. Owning a DVD player,an old VCR, a cable box, a TiVo and asound system can easily mean havinghalf a dozen remotes.Here are a number of new universal

remotes that can do as much as the$800 device, though often not quite aselegantly.LOGITECH HARMONY 1000:

Equippedwith anL.C.D. touch screen,this tabletop unit, with a price of $330,gets its commands through the Har-monyWeb site. Once you create an ac-count online, the site asks for themake

and model of your components, andwhich ones need to be turned on for aparticular task.When the remote is connected to

the PC via a U.S.B. cable, all essen-tial commands are downloaded to theunit.LOGITECH HARMONY ONE: At

about two-thirds the price of the Har-mony 1000, the hand-held HarmonyOne combines a touch screen and awide assortment of buttons. It is easyto hold, with intuitive keys.PHILIPSPRESTIGOSRU8015: The

Philips unit uses a mechanical scrollwheel that borrows its concept fromthe circular touchpadonApple’s iPod.The scroll wheel turns to navigateamong component brands during set-up and to select activities once theunitis configured.BIG BUTTON: For those who like it

big and simple, the $20 Big Button isforyou.Thegiantbuttonsare simple topush, and the lighted keypad is helpfulin darkened rooms.Don’t look for fancymacros or learn-

ing abilities with this unit. But if youare simply looking for an easy way towatchaDVDwithout holdinga remotein each hand, thisworks.

In the Operating Room, Robot Hands Programmed for Perfection

Universal

remotes, like

Logitech’s

Harmony

One, can

reduce the

clutter.

Juggling Remotes? Go Universal

BlackBerry’s Quest: Fend Off the iPhone

TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

BlackBerry introduced the

Pearl, left, and the Curve

to challenge the iPhone.

Repubblica NewYork

N EW YORK

MONDAY, MAY 19, 2008 VII

NEW YORK — A continuing decline in the number of neighborhood supermarkets has made it harder for millions of New Yorkers to find fresh and affordable food within walking distance of their homes, according to a recent city study. The

dearth of nearby supermarkets is most severe in minority and poor neighborhoods already beset by obesity, diabetes and heart dis-ease.According to the food workers

union, only 550 decently sized supermarkets — each occupying at least 3,000 square meters — remain in the city.In one corner of southeast Queens, four super-

markets have closed in the last two years. Over a similar period in East Harlem, six small super-markets have closed, and two more are on the brink, local officials said. The supermarket closings — not confined to

poor neighborhoods — result from rising rents and slim profit margins, among other causes. The lack of easily available fresh food has prompted city and state officials to address the public health implications. “Many people in low-income neighborhoods

are spending their food budget at discount stores or pharmacies where there is no fresh produce,’’ said Amanda Burden, the city’s planning direc-tor. “In our study, a significant percentage of them reported that in the day before our survey,

they had not eaten fresh fruit or vegetables. Not one. That really is a health crisis in the city.’’A recent study by the Department of City Plan-

ning found that there is enough need in the city to support another 100 groceries or supermarkets. To spur supermarket growth, officials could consider using city-owned property or economic incentives, or relaxing requirements to make it easier to set up stores in areas zoned for manu-facturing, Ms. Burden said.“We have to determine why the stores are clos-

ing and what the barriers are,’’ Ms. Burden said. “Stimulating the investment of supermarket owners in these communities is essential to the future of the city.’’Jimmy Proscia, the co-manager of a Key Food

in Flushing, in the borough of Queens, says the business has gotten a lot harder in the 33 years since he started. Competitors, he said, cut costs by hiring nonunion workers. Big-box stores buy in bulk and further eat into his sales. Some days it looks like everybody is in the food business.“You got gas stations now selling milk for

$2.99,’’ he said. “Go to the drug store and they’re selling what we have. It’s ridiculous.’’InSt.Albans,Queens, severalemptysupermar-

kets line thestreets.Everyday,DesireeGaylordwalkspastashutteredAssociatedstoreonFarm-ersBoulevardandontoherelderlymother’shouse.“Before Igo towork, I call toseewhatshe

needs,’’Ms.Gaylordsaid. “I’ll buy it somewhereelseandbring it toher. Idon’tknowwhytheyclosed thatstore. Itwasanasset, especially for theelderly.NowIsee themonthebuswith theshop-pingcarts.’’Executives at Pick Quick Foods, which owns a

Key Food store in a shopping plaza in the borough of the Bronx, fear their landlord wants to push them out. They say that Vornado Realty Trust, which bought the shopping plaza for $165 million last year, wants to double their rent. At stake are more than 100 jobs, many of them

filled by local residents, including teenagers and single mothers. Some of the employees started as teenagers with part-time, unionized jobs. The pay and benefits have helped them support their

families, and even prosper.“What does this job mean to me?’’ said James

Hutcherson, 46, the store’s frozen foods manager. “I got a house and a daughter in college. That’s what I got out of this place.’’Whatever plans the company has for the site

are bound to face opposition from the local com-munity board. Enrique Vega, the chairman of Community Board 9 in the Bronx, said the board would not allow anything but a supermarket on the site.“They are in deep trouble if they think they

are going to put another type of store there,’’ Mr. Vega said. “They’ll need a variance or an agree-ment with the community board, and they are not going to get it. We want a supermarket.’’

PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD PERRY/THE NEW YORK TIMES

STEPHEN

HOLDEN

ESSAY

As Supermarkets Vanish,A Health Crisis Spreads

A Barber ShopIs Also a ShrineTo Gangster Films

The Sounds of a More Elegant Time Begin to Fade

By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI

NEW YORK — Mike Welsh walked into Lar-ry’s Barber Shop, a tiny place on 57th Street near 10th Avenue in Manhattan. “What are we watching today?” Mr. Welsh

asked Larry Babizhaev, the shop’s owner, re-ferring to a small television in the shop.“ ‘The Godfather: Part II,’ ” Mr. Babizhaev

replied, his scissors dancing atop a customer’s head. Mr. Babizhaev, 29, and his family left Ba-ku,Azerbaijan, for theMidwoodneighborhood of Brooklyn, 12 years ago.“We were furriers back in Baku,” he said. “I

came here and started thinking that cutting hair would be a good job, so I went to barber’s school and opened this place six years ago.”Along the way, some of his customers start-

ed recommending films like “The Godfather,” “Goodfellas” and “A Bronx Tale.”“I just got hooked,” Mr. Babizhaev said. He began spending a good portion of his tips

on mob movies and “anything to do with gang-sters.”His DVD collection lines several shelves in

his shop . On one counter sits a small velvet cof-fin that Mr. Babizhaev opened slowly to reveal a “Scarface” DVD resting peacefully inside. Mr. Babizhaev’s shop is the kind of place

whereMartinScorsesemightnotmindgetting a trim. Framed portraits and posters of real-life gangsters like John Gotti and Bugsy Siegel crowd wall space with some of the actors who portrayed such men, James Cagney, James Gandolfini, George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, Joe Pesci. Mr. Welsh, an accountant at CBS, says he

enjoys it when Mr. Babizhaev blurts out lines from mob movies, including “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” (Mr. Cagney in “White Heat”); “I’mfunnyhow,Imean, funny likeI’maclown? Iamuseyou?”(Mr.Pesci in“Goodfellas”);and “Sayhello tomy little friend,” (AlPacinowitha machine gun in “Scarface.”)Mr. Babizhaev said that working long hours

and spending time with his family — he lives in Midwoodwithhiswife,Esmeralda, and their 1-year-old daughter, Nicole — sometimes gets in the way of watching a good mob plot unfold.For instance, it took him weeks to open a

Christmas gift from a customer, a DVD of “The Pope of Greenwich Village.”“I watched it with a few of my customers,”

Mr. Babizhaev said. “We all loved it.”

NEW YORK — For the last 14 years, some of the most welcoming sounds in Midtown Manhattan have been the voice and piano of Daryl Sherman, heard as you enter the Waldorf-Astoria hotel at Park Avenue and 49th Street. As you ascended

the green carpeted stairs to the lobby, her music invited you into a world of elegance where the spirit of Cole Porter, a longtime resident of the Waldorf, still hovered.As of May 4, those sounds have

been stilled. A few weeks ago, Ms. Sherman received word that for economic rea-sons her tenure at the cocktail terrace between the Empire and Hilton Rooms would end. Last year, the Hilton hotel chain, which owns

the Waldorf-Astoria, was sold to the Blackstone Group of investors. Such sales almost always en-tail streamlining the operations and cutting back expenses. Ms. Sherman is one the very last and finest of

a vanishing breed of singer-pianists who used to hold forth in the lobbies of luxury hotels in Man-hattan. Ms. Sherman, an effervescent 50-something

woman, makes music suited to the foreground as well the background. The piano she has played is not any old keyboard but Cole Porter’s piano, a brown, hand-painted midsize Steinway grand adorned with decorative scrolls and courtly, be-wigged dancing figures. Constructed in 1907, it was presented by the ho-

tel in 1945 to Porter, who had already lived there for six years; it was moved to the lobby after his death in 1964. It is an impressive instrument, especially in the lower register, whose resonance Ms. Sherman sometimes demonstrated to pa-trons sipping tea (there is a full tea service in the

afternoon) or cocktails. If you spent enough hours on the terrace listen-

ing to her play, sing, and spin anecdotes from her storehouse of musical lore, sooner or later you might absorb most of the history of American popular song. Introducing Porter’s perennially requested

“Night and Day” early one Friday evening, she remarked, “This is not me playing — this is Cole Porter’s spirit playing by Ouija board.” After finishing the instrumental introduction, she sang the rest of the song, then smiled and said, “That was me, just so you’ll know.” Songs from the Porter musicals “The New

Yorkers” and “Jubilee” followed, as well as her own song, “Welcome to Manhattan,” which she described as “a contemporary song that sounds like a ’30s song,” and it does. “The ’30s are my de-cade — Depression,’’ she joked. Ms. Sherman grew up in Woonsocket, Rhode

Island, the daughter of the jazz trombonist Sammy Sherman, who took her to jam sessions as a child. In 1974, three years after graduating from the University of Rhode Island, she moved to New York and began performing in Manhattan jazz clubs, both as a soloist and in small ensem-bles. She has many distinguished jazz mentors, most notably the trumpet player Dick Sudhalter, who introduced her to the classics of the Bing Crosby-Paul Whiteman era. Vocally, Ms. Sherman is frequently compared

to Blossom Dearie, who has a similarly light touch and sly playfulness, but Ms. Sherman’s voice is fuller with a sweet twirling vibrato.Some of the best advice about singing she ever

received, she recalled, was from the great jazz interpreter Sylvia Syms, who died in 1992: “Stop listening to the sound of your own voice and find the crux of the song and work back from that.”Ms. Sherman has an optimistic attitude. “I’ve been very lucky,” she emphasized, “and

I’m grateful for the last 14 years.’’ Then she giggled. “Now all I have to do is find a rich man to buy the hotel and pay for a facelift when I really need it.”

DAVID

GONZALEZ

ESSAY

TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

EARL WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Larry Babizhaev cuts hair and shows

gangster movies in his shop.

Supermarkets

like Key Food

in the Bronx

are threatened

by high rents

and slim profit

margins.

In the Waldorf-Astoria, top,

Daryl Sherman played a

piano the hotel gave Cole

Porter, which was noted by a

commemorative plaque, above.

Repubblica NewYork

AR T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, MAY 19, 2008

By JAMES R. OESTREICH

The 59-year-old pianist Mitsuko Uchida — born near Tokyo, trained in Viennaand longaresidentofLondon— is, in more ways than one, a musician’s musician. Her performances and re-cordings of Classical and Romantic standards — especially works by Mo-zart, Beethoven and Schubert — have consistently fedareputation forelegant and profound musicianship.Ms. Uchida has always worked in a

selectiveandconcentrated fashion.She made her name in the 1980s with cycles of the Mozart sonatas and concertos, performed in London and Tokyo and recorded.Mozart remains a major preoccupa-

tion. As artist in residence at the Cleve-land Orchestra from 2002 to 2007, Ms.UchidaworkedherwaythroughtheMo-zart concertosaspianistandconductor.

Despitethis longexperiencewithMo-zart, she said, “I find it more and more fascinating to play his music.”But the other topic Ms. Uchida

was especially eager to discuss was Beethoven,whosesonatasshehasbeen recording to high acclaim. Here, too, far from dulling her enthusiasm, long familiarity with the material has only enhanced it.“I am getting to truly understand the

strengthandgrandeurandhumanityof Beethoven,”shesaid. “It’sas ifhecould understand the universe, not just the earth.”What Ms. Uchida’s interviewer

most wanted to explore, however, was Schubert, particularly the final sonata, in B flat (D. 960). There are works so much grander than any individual per-formancesof themthatyouspendmuch of your life looking for an adequate one,

and this seemed doomed to remain one of them. Even hopes stirred by a previ-ously unreleased recording by Arthur Rubinstein in the end failed to deliver.It was Ms. Uchida’s recording of 1998

that finally proved worthy of the work, catching both its majesty and its mys-tery. It was at its most eloquent in the silences and in those odd, isolated soft grumblings in the bass.“Actually, I prefer silence to noise,”

Ms. Uchida said. “And also I was born to play quietly rather than noisily. Peo-ple complained about my playing when

I was young, and now they complain less.”The last two movements of the B flat,

whichcanoftenseememptyrattlingaf-ter theprofunditiesof the first two, took on stature and heft in her recording, perhaps inkeepingwith thesubtextshe finds in the work.“In the first movement you are basi-

cally dying,” she said, “and in the slow movement you are already dead. In the scherzo, the daughters of the Erlkönig are dancing around, and in the last movement the gate closes in front of

your nose: Bang! You want to go to the other side, and you are not let in. And it goes on and on until the end, this very strangemajorending,and fast.Hegoes running through the gate, happily. So it is actually about whatever it means to come to terms with death. Schubert knew that death was near, and sudden-ly he was open. And that’s the beauty of that piece.”Ms. Uchida finds a similar program

in the C minor Sonata.“It has all the sufferings and fear and

tragedy of life,” she said. “And in spite of the unbelievable consolation of the slow movement, the last movement is a death rite.“It isactuallyamuchmore terrifying

piece than the ‘Erlkönig.’ You’re rid-ing the horse. It’s really the noise of the hooves, and behind you the hounds of hell are yapping. You’re riding and rid-ing and riding, and you go straight into hell.”

Time Travel That Adds a Punk SensibilityBy RUTH LA FERLA

“Meet Showtime,” said Giovanni James, a musician, magician and inventor of sorts, introducing his prized dove, who occupies a cage in Mr. James’s apartment in Midtown Manhattan. Showtime is integral to Mr. James’s magic act and to his décor, a sepia-tone universe straight out of the gaslight era. The lead singer of a neovaude-

villian performance troupe called the James Gang, Mr. James owns a flat-screen television, but he has modified it with a burlap frame. He uses an iPhone, but it is encased in burnished brass. Even his clothing — an unlikely fusion of current and neo-Edwardian pieces (polo shirt, gentleman’s waistcoat, paisley bow tie) — is an expression of his keenly romantic worldview. It is also the vision of steampunk,

a subculture that is the aesthetic ex-pression of a time-traveling fantasyworld,onethatembracesmusic, film,design and fashion, all inspired bythe extravagantly inventive age ofdirigibles and steam locomotives.First appearing in the late 1980sand early ’90s, steampunk haspicked upmomentum in recentmonths, making a transition

from what used to be mainly aliterary taste to a Web-propagatedwayof life.“Tome, it’sessentiallytheintersec-

tionoftechnologyandromance,”said Jake von Slatt, a designer in Boston and the proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop (steampunkworkshop.com). “Thereseems tobe this sort ofper-

fect storm of interest in steampunk right now,” Mr. von Slatt said. “If you go to Google Trends and track the number of times it is mentioned, the curve is almost algorithmic from a yearandahalf ago.” (At thiswriting,

Google cites 1.9 million references.) It is an enticing marketing hook.

A steampunk fantasy game, Edge of Twilight, will be introduced by Xbox 360 and PlayStation next year.Devotees of the culture read Jules

Verne and H. G. Wells, as well as more recent speculative fiction by Paul Di Filippo, the author of “The Steampunk Trilogy,” the historical science fiction novellas that lent the culture its name. They watch films like “The City of Lost Children” and “The League of Extraordinary

Gentlemen,” and they listen to melo-deons and Gypsy strings mixed with industrial goth. And, in keeping with the make-it-

yourselfethosofpunk, theyassemble their own fashions, an adventurous pastiche of neo-Victorian, Edward-ian and military style accented with sometimes crudely mechanized accouterments like brass goggles and wings made from pulleys. Ste-ampunk style is corseted, built on bustles, crinolines and parasols and high-arced sleeves not unlike those favored by the movement’s designer idols: Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balen-ciaga, Alexander McQueen and, yes, even Ralph Lauren. Steampunk fashion is that rarity,

a phenomenon with the potential to capture a wider audience, offering a genteelanddisciplinedalternative to both theslack lookofhip-hopand the menacing spirit of goth. If steampunk has a mission, it is, in

part, to restoreasenseofwonder toa technology-jaded world. “Today sat-ellite photos make the planet seem so small,” lamented Robert Brown, the lead singer for the steampunk band Abney Park. “Where is the ad-venture it that?” In contrast, steam-punk,with itsairships, test tubesand time machines, is, he said, “sort of a dream,thewayweusedtodaydream. It’s like part of your childhood’s just bursting forward again.”

A Pianist’s Imagination Finds The Quiet Depths of Schubert

ROBERT WRIGHT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW, BENOIT TESSIER/REUTERS

Steampunk culture fuses modern expressions with design ideas from the industrial and Victorian eras.The James Gang, a performance troupe, above, share a vision with Alexander McQueen’s fashions, left.

RICHARD TERMINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The pianist Mitsuko Uchida says of her approach, “I was born to play quietly rather than noisily.”

A Lost Siren Of Nabokov, Still Singing

By STEVE COATES

Before Vladimir Nabokov, the author of “Lo-lita,” “Pale Fire,” “Speak, Memory” and other masterworks, died in Montreux, Switzerland, in July 1977, he had been hard at work on an-other novel. The previous December, he told The New York Times that the “not quite fin-ished manuscript” was called “The Original of Laura,” that it had already been “completed in my mind.” Shortly afterward, Nabokov’s edi-tor at McGraw-Hill revealed that the author was about to do the actual writing, in pencil on index cards (Nabokov never worked with a typewriter). Then, in words repeated by the editor, Nabokov would “deal himself a novel.”Nabokov, however, was able to build only

part of the complete deck — 138 index cards, withmanyerasuresandmuchediting—before falling ill for the last time.Knownasan artistic perfectionist and a literary purist, he left be-hind instructions that the cards were to be de-stroyed. But neither his wife, Véra, nor his son, Dmitri, now nearly 74, could bring themselves to carry out Nabokov’s instructions. Now, Dmitri Nabokov has announced that

“Laura” will indeed be published, and sug-gests inan interviewconductedbye-mail that, in fact, her peril has been exaggerated.

Q.It’s been three decades since your father’s death. Why did it take you so long to decide the fate of “Laura,” and how did you come to your final decision? How difficult has it been?A. It took the passing of time, the input of a few good advisers, and, above all, some concen-trated thinkingonmypart, for the idea tocrys-tallize of what exactly to do with the precious cards. Safekeeping, no matter how secure, would never guar-antee their perma-nent immunity from revelation.

Q. It is said to involve a corpulent scholar married to a wildly promiscuouswoman named Flora; is that accurate?A. So far so good.

Q.How long will it be? I recently re-read the very mov-ing “Mary,” your father’s first novel. It’s only a little over 100 pages.A. That is a good approximation of the “Laura’’ volume’s total length.

Q.Would you describe “Laura” more as an outline, or as fragmentary? I mean, are there portions that are more or less finished? I know your fatherdescribedhismethodasassembling sections of a puzzle.A. Or picking up the cards and dealing himself a novel. I am afraid that the situation is so un-usual that Icannotbespecific,other thantosay that, in addition to the principal portion, there is much else that appears complete.

Q.Whomightappreciate thenovelmost?Schol-ars? Readers? Both?A.I would not divide prospective consumers of this work by category, but rather by their eye for image and the capacity of their spine to tingle.

CARL MYDANS/TIME & LIFE

PICTURES — GETTY IMAGES

Vladimir Nabokovoften worked in hiscar, writing on cards.

An aesthetic where iPhones, goth and steam trains meet.

Repubblica NewYork