1. society
2. unrest and war

SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008
Copyright © 2008 The New York Times
Une sélection hebdomadaire offerte par
Balance
Out of
Calls for More Regulation
As Global Finance Teeters
Just before JPMorgan Chase announced its deal to buy Bear Stearns last month, the chairman of the
Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke,
held an extraordinary conference
call. The participants were Wall
Street’s biggest
power brokers and
top American govECONOMIC
ernment officials.
ANALYSIS
The purpose of
the half-hour session on a Sunday evening was to
raise a rallying cry in support of
Bear Stearns — and more broadly,
the financial markets, which, as it
was described on the call, were on
the verge of a major meltdown.
“It was much worse than anyone
realized; the markets were on the
precipice of a real crisis,’’ said one
participant. Given that Bear held
trading contracts worth $2.5 trillion with companies
ANDREW
ROSS SORKIN
around the world, “we were
talking about the possibility of
a global run on the bank.’’
In another era, the participants in the phone call would
have been limited to the exclusive fraternity of high-powered
Americans. But this conversation was also filled with accents
from beyond the United States —
from UBS, Credit Suisse, Deutsche
Bank, HSBC and beyond.
While that diversity of voices
seemed to take notice today’s
global finance, it was still more
of a courtesy to those outside the
United States than it was a genuine
effort to gather outside views.
The “possibility of a global run on
the bank’’ may have been real, but
the important decisions had been
made long before the folks in London, Dubai and Hong Kong were let
in on the plans.
So goes the self-centered world
of Wall Street — when it comes
Continued on Page 4
How to Turn
A Herd on Wall Street
Experts have long known that a classic phenomenon called herd behavior has a great deal
to do with the wild swings of panic and exuberance that can seize Wall Street in
the wake of surprising economic
news.
But lately they have tried to
confront a related question:
ESSAY
What makes a herd, financial or
otherwise, stop and turn around?
Specifically, behavioral experts want to know if
there are psychological cues that can help trans-
BENEDICT
CAREY
MIN
form this bear market into a bullish one.
“The dynamics of these turning points are
much harder to understand’’ than the original
herd behavior itself, perhaps particularly in
economics, “and the field is only just beginning
to look at them,’’ said Terrance Odean, a professor of finance at the University of California at
Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Researchers who study nonconformity, fads,
even game theory, agree that in any declining
market, investors will inevitably begin to bet
against the behavior of the herd. Many of these
initial contrarians may be working from their own analyses of
economic fundamentals, or from tips, or maybe
they are simply jumping at the chance to pick up
“distressed’’ products like mortgages and bank
loans on the cheap.
But other investors will defect for individual,
idiosyncratic reasons. Two recent psychological studies at Arizona State University point to
what it might take for individuals to leave the
herd. In the studies, researchers demonstrated
H UO
NG
that young men rating the attractiveness
of facial photographs significantly changed
their ratings, up or down, in line with what they
thought were peers’ ratings (but were in fact
generated by a computer program). Yet when
encouraged beforehand to think of meeting a
romantic partner, the men were highly likely to
dissent. “The goal to attract a mate generally led
them to go against the preferences of others,’’
the authors concluded.
Continued on Page 4
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Italy Frets as Foreign Chefs Cook the Pasta
By IAN FISHER
European Rules
Threaten Old Ways
Farmers find it hard
to survive in Poland’s
new landscape.
WORLD TRENDS
3
Gifts of Fish
To Evolution
Many characteristics
of humans have their
roots in the water.
SCIENCE &
TECHNOLOGY
6
ROME — In March, Gambero Rosso, the prestigious reviewer of restaurants and wine, sought
out Rome’s best carbonara, a dish of pasta, eggs,
pecorino cheese and pig cheek that defines tradition here.
In second place was L’Arcangelo, a restaurant
with a head chef from India. The winner: Antico
Forno Roscioli, a bakery and innovative restaurant whose chef, Nabil Hadj Hassen, arrived from
Tunisia at 17 and washed dishes for a year and a
half before he cooked his first pot of pasta.
“To cook is a passion,’’ said Mr. Hassen, now 43,
who went on to train with some of Italy’s top chefs.
“Food is a beautiful thing.’’
Spoken like an Italian. But while much of the
rest of the world learned about pasta and pizza
from poor Italian immigrants, now it is foreigners, many of them also poor, who make some of the
best Italian food in Italy.
With Italians increasingly shunning sweaty
and underpaid kitchen work, it can be hard now to
find a restaurant where at least one foreigner does
not wash dishes, help in the kitchen or, as is often
the case, cook. Egyptians have done well as pizza
makers, but restaurant kitchens are now a snapshot of Italy’s relatively recent immigrant experience, with Moroccans, Tunisians, Romanians and
Bangladeshis at work.
“If he is an Egyptian cook, nothing changes —
nothing,’’ said Francesco Sabatini, 75, co-owner
of Sabatini in Trastevere, one of Rome’s oldest
neighborhoods. His restaurant serves classic Roman dishes like oxtail, yet 7 of his 10 cooks are not
Italian. For Mr. Sabatini, the issue is not the origin
of the cook but the training — his chefs apprentice
for five years — and keeping alive Italy’s culinary
traditions.
“That’s why I’m here,’’ he said. “If not, I’d just
go to the beach.’’
But in a debate likely to grow in the coming
years, others argue that foreign chefs can mimic
Italian food but not really understand it.
“Tradition is needed to go forward with Italian
youngsters, not foreigners,’’ said Loriana Bianchi, co-owner of La Canonica, also in Trastevere,
which hires several Bangladeshis, though she
does the cooking. “It’s not racism, but culture.’’
Qunfeng Zhu, 30, a Chinese immigrant who
opened a coffee bar in Rome’s center, makes an
authentic espresso in a classic Italian atmosphere.
“Some people come in, see we are Chinese and go
away,’’ he said. But in the last few years, he said,
that happens less frequently, one sign that Italy is
opening up to other kinds of food.
Pierluigi Roscioli, a member of the family that
runs the restaurant that won the best carbonara
award, said there was a risk that tradition would
slowly erode if Italian chefs did not oversee those
foreign ones who had less training.
“Without supervision, they tend to drift toward
what is in their DNA,’’ he said. “When it’s by
choice, it’s great, but not when it happens because
someone isn’t paying attention.’’
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LE MONDE
SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008
O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY
EDITORIALS OF THE TIMES
Some Truth About Trade
There’s nothing like international
trade to help bridge America’s ideological divide. As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton travel the country’s former
manufacturing centers, the Democratic candidates seem to be eschewing the
advice of their economic advisers and
turning to Karl Rove’s methods.
It was Mr. Rove, President Bush’s political adviser, who urged Dick Cheney
in 2000 to forget the free trade talk and
promise voters in West Virginia that
a Bush administration would protect
American steel from cheap imports.
“If our trading partners violate our
trade laws, we will respond swiftly and
firmly,” Mr. Cheney thundered.
Those words seem to echo in Mr.
Obama’s attacks against “unfair”
trade deals — including Nafta, Cafta
and President Bill Clinton’s decision to
establish regular trade relations with
China. Mrs. Clinton seems to draw inspiration as well, railing to the largest
labor union in Pennsylvania against
alleged dumping of Chinese steel:
“When I’m President, China will be a
trade partner not a trade master,” she
said.
Democrats need to tell voters the
truth: First, trade is good for the
economy, providing cheap imports
and markets for exports, spurring
productivity and raising living standards. And second, while trade can
drive down some wages and displace
some jobs, Democrats have real ideas
to help workers cope. Mrs. Clinton
and Mr. Obama should base their approach on these ideas. They would not
only make sound policy, they would
also provide a competitive advantage
over John McCain.
Fortunately, presidents don’t have as
much power on these matters as candidates claim. When President Bush put
stiff tariffs on imported steel in 2002,
he infuriated European allies and then
had to lift the tariffs when the World
Trade Organization declared them illegal.
Senators Clinton and Obama know
protectionism could have disastrous
consequences.
American workers need more to help
them cope in a globalizing economy.
Workers need affordable health insurance that will not disappear when
they are laid off. Unemployment insurance needs to be strengthened,
perhaps to include some form of insurance to shore up the wages of displaced
workers who are forced to take lesserpaying jobs. A more progressive tax
policy could help redistribute some of
the gains of trade accruing to those on
the top of the income scale. More investment in physical and human capital would enable businesses and workers to better compete.
Senators Clinton and Obama can
offer policies that will help American
workers embrace rather than fear a
globalized world. American voters
certainly deserve a more serious discussion about trade.
Editorial Observer/EDUARDO PORTER
Vatican and Modernity: Tinkering With Sin
It’s hard to erect rules to last forever.
The recent suggestion by a bishop from
the Vatican’s office of sin and penance
that globalization and modernity gave
rise to sins different from those dating
from medieval times seemed to many
like an acknowledgment that the world
is, indeed, changing.
Norms encoded hundreds of years
ago to guide human behavior in a smallscale agrarian society could not account for a globalized postindustrial
information economy. Polluting the environment, drug trafficking, performing genetic manipulations or causing
social inequities, new sinful behaviors
mentioned by Monsignor Gianfranco
Girotti, regent of the Vatican Penitentiary, are arguably more relevant to
many contemporary Catholics than
contraception.
“If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has a
value and resonance that is above all
social, because of the great phenomenon of globalization,” Monsignor Girotti told the newspaper L’Osservatore
Romano.
Sin, however, doesn’t take well to tinkering. Many Catholic thinkers reacted
strongly against the idea that new sins
were needed to complement, or supplement, the classical canon. They accused
the press of exaggerating Monsignor
Girotti’s words. Their reaction underscored how tough it is for the church to
manage a moral code grounded in eternal verities at a time of furious change.
Twisted Rationale for Torture
You can often tell if someone understands how wrong their actions are by
the lengths to which they go to rationalize them. It took 81 pages of twisted
legal reasoning to justify President
Bush’s decision to ignore federal law
and international treaties and authorize the abuse and torture of prisoners.
Eighty-one spine-crawling pages
in a memo that might have been unearthed from the dusty archives of
some authoritarian regime and has no
place in the annals of the United States.
It is must reading for anyone who still
doubts whether the abuse of prisoners
were rogue acts rather than calculated
policy.
The March 14, 2003, memo was written by John C. Yoo, then a lawyer for
the Justice Department. He earlier
helped draft a memo that redefined
torture to justify repugnant, illegal
acts against Al Qaeda and Taliban
prisoners.
The purpose of the March 14 memo
was equally insidious: to make sure
that the policy makers who authorized
those acts, or the subordinates who
carried out the orders, were not convicted of any crime. The list of laws that
Mr. Yoo’s memo sought to circumvent
is long: federal laws against assault,
maiming, interstate stalking, war
crimes and torture; international laws
against torture and cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment; and the Geneva
Conventions.
Mr. Yoo, who, inexplicably, teaches
law at the University of California,
Berkeley, never directly argues that
it is legal to chain prisoners to the ceiling for days, sexually abuse them or
subject them to waterboarding — all
things done by American jailers.
His primary argument, in which he
uses 19th-century legal opinions justifying the execution of Indians who
rejected the reservation, is that the
laws didn’t apply to Mr. Bush because
he is commander in chief. He cited an
earlier opinion from administration
lawyers that Al Qaeda and Taliban
prisoners were not covered by the Geneva Conventions — a decision that put
every captured American soldier at
grave risk. Then, should someone reject his legal reasoning and decide to
file charges, Mr. Yoo offered a detailed
plan for escaping accountability.
After the memo’s general contents
were first reported, the Pentagon said
in early 2004 that it was “no longer operative.” Reading the full text, released
recently, makes it startlingly clear how
deeply the Bush administration corrupted the law and the role of lawyers
to give cover to existing and plainly illegal policies.
The memo is also a reminder of how
many secrets about this administration’s cynical and abusive policies still
need to be revealed.
When the abuses at Abu Ghraib became public, we were told these were
the actions of a few soldiers. The Yoo
memo makes it chillingly apparent that
senior officials authorized unspeakable acts and went to great lengths to
shield themselves from prosecution.
Dans l’article “Quirks and Pitfalls of Zapping
Food”, page 7:
QUIRK: lubie
PITFALL: piège, embûche
TO SCALD: ébouillanter
TO CHAR: carboniser
TO BROIL: faire cuire au gril
TO KEEP TABS ON: avoir à l’oeil
TO TOUGHEN: durcir
of education and income, more marriage
and less divorce.
Such a club needs strong, believable
rules. Like marriage, membership will
be more valuable the more committed
the other participants are to the common
cause. Demanding rules — say celibacy,
or avoiding meat during Lent — help enhance the level of commitment.
Strict rules, says the Nobel-winning
economist Gary Becker, screen out free
riders who wish to enjoy the benefits of
membership but are unwilling to invest
the necessary zeal in the enterprise.
Larry Iannaccone, an economist at
U.S. and China’s Faltering Romance
In the aftermath of the Tibet upheavals, the complicated romance between
America and China is degenerating into
mutual recriminations, muttering about
Olympic boycotts and tensions that are
likely to rise through the summer.
It would be convenient if we could simply denounce the crackdown in Tibet
as the unpopular action of a dictatorial
government. But it wasn’t. It was the
popular action of a dictatorial government, and many ordinary Chinese think
the government acted too wimpishly,
showing far too much restraint toward
“thugs” and “rioters.”
China and the United States clash
partly because of competing interests,
but mostly because of competing narratives. To Americans, Tibet fits neatly
into a framework of human rights and colonialism. To Chinese, steeped in education of 150 years of “guochi,” or national
humiliations by foreigners, the current
episode is one more effort by imperialistic and condescending foreigners to tear
China apart or hold it back.
So what do we do? A boycott of the
Olympic Games themselves is a nonstarter. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
has raised the possibility of a boycott of
the opening ceremony, and that is plausible.
The best answer is: Postpone the decision until the last minute so as to extort
every last ounce of good behavior possible out of the Chinese government — on
Darfur as well as Tibet. But at the end
Pour aider à la lecture de l’anglais et familiariser nos lecteurs avec certaines expressions
américaines, Le Monde publie ci-dessous la traduction de quelques mots et idiomes contenus
dans les articles de ce supplément. Par Dominique Chevallier, agrégée d’anglais.
Dans l’article “MSG Is the Secret Behind Food’s
Savor”, page 7:
PHYSICIAN: médecin
NUMBNESS: engourdissement
TO TAG: étiqueter
TO SLATHER: répandre abondamment
REAM: rame (de papier)
KELP: varech
Redefining religious
strictures for a changed
world carries risks.
George Mason University in Virginia
who has studied religions, notes that
some of the most successful, like Jehovah’s Witnesses or Pentecostal Christians, which have very fervent congregations, have strict requirements.
Religions relax the rules at their own
peril.
“Religions are in the unusual situation
in which it pays to make gratuitously
costly demands,” Mr. Iannaccone said.
“When they weaken their demands they
make on members, they undermine their
credibility.”
The Vatican is particularly attentive
to these strictures. Catholicism has lost
sway in many parts of the world.
Many traditionalists attribute the
church’s decline to the weakening of its
strictures. They believe it was damaged
by the Second Vatican Council in the
1960s, which tried to bring the church
closer to the people, proclaimed religious freedom, embraced people of other
Christian faiths and acknowledged truth
in other religions.
So it is perhaps unsurprising that the
church has been pushing the other way.
Pope Benedict XVI has brought back
rites abandoned after Vatican II and reasserted the church’s hold on truth.
In this context, it could be tricky to
update sins in a way that could de-emphasize individual trespasses and shift
the focus to social crimes bearing a collective guilt. New sins might be a better
fit for the modern world, but they risk
alienating the membership.
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
: AIDE A LA LECTURE
LEXIQUE
The core benefits of religions, unlike
other, worldly institutions, often relate
to the afterlife. Some social scientists
argue, however, that many benefits of
church membership are to be had this
side of death. The gains are not unlike
the advantages of a club of like-minded
people. Religions provide rules to live by,
solace in times of trouble and a sense of
community. Some economic studies suggest that this can promote higher levels
Dans l’article “Bold, Bad and Legendary: A Bette
Davis Century”, page 8:
PRIME: apogée
PROTRACTEDLY: de manière prolongée
CLUBFOOT: pied-bot
GUN MOLL: pépée, prostituée
SHADY: louche
WARY: circonspect, méfiant
TO PUMP LEAD INTO: truffer de plomb
PRONE: prostré, allongé sur le ventre
PARAMOUR: amant
EXPRESSIONS
Dans l’article “Bold, Bad and Legendary: A Bette
Davis Century”, page 8:
TO BE A TROUPER: a trouper, c’est un acteur,
souvent avec la connotation un vieux de la vieille,
qui sait ce que faire partie “de la troupe” veut dire.
Ici, cela signifie que Margo ne joue pas à la star.
of the day, if there have been no further
abuses, President Bush should attend
— for staying away would only inflame
Chinese nationalism and make Beijing
more obdurate.
If President Bush attends the ceremonies, however, he should balance that
with a day trip to a Tibetan area. Such
a visit would underscore American concern, even if the Chinese trot out fake
monks to express fake contentment with
fake freedom.
President Bush and other Western
leaders should also continue to consult
with the Dalai Lama, even though this
infuriates Beijing.
The Dalai Lama is the last, best hope
for reaching an agreement that would resolve the dispute over Tibet forever. He
accepts autonomy, rather than independence, and he has the moral authority to
persuade Tibetans to accept a deal.
The outlines of an agreement would be
simple. The Dalai Lama would return to
Tibet as a spiritual leader, and Tibetans
would be permitted to possess his picture and revere him, while he would unequivocally accept Chinese sovereignty.
Monasteries would have much greater
religious freedom, and Han Chinese migration to Tibet would be limited. The
Dalai Lama would also accept that the
Tibetan region encompasses only what
is now labeled Tibet on the maps, not the
much larger region of historic Tibet that
he has continued to claim.
With such an arrangement, China
TO FALL OUT: ici: se disputer; s’il s’agit de
bombe: retomber. Le substantif fall-out veut
dire retombée; dans l’armée, signifie rompre les
rangs ; et plus généralement, peut vouloir dire se
passer, arriver, avoir pour résultat que . . .
RÉFÉRENCES
Dans l’article “A Weekend Full of Dread, for the
Approaching Monday”, page 5:
JOHN UPDIKE: romancier, nouvelliste, poète et
critique littéraire, John Updike est né en 1932 en
Pennsylvanie. Il étudie la littérature anglaise à
Harvard puis les Beaux Arts à Oxford. Ecrivain
très prolifique (il a écrit 22 romans et publié
11 recueils de nouvelles), il est surtout connu
pour sa tétralogie de “Rabbit”, dont deux des
romans ont obtenu le Prix Pulitzer. Il chronique
la vie de la bourgeoisie protestante dans la
petite ville américaine; on a dit de lui qu’il faisait
“la chronique de l’adultère de banlieue chic”.
Plusieurs de ses romans ont été des best-sellers;
ainsi “The Centaur” (1963) qui décrit un père et un
fils coincés ensemble pendant trois jours du fait
d’une tempête de neige, obligés de se confronter
à leur relation; l’ouvrage est entrecoupé de
références mythologiques, en particulier au
could resolve the problem of Tibet, improve its international image, reassure
Taiwan and rectify a 50-year-old policy
of repression that has catastrophically
failed.
But don’t hold your breath. Instead,
President Hu Jintao — who made his
reputation by crushing protests in Tibet
in 1989 — will make up for failed policy
within Tibet by trying to stir up Chinese
nationalist resentments at nosy foreigners.
America and China get on each other’s
nerves partly because they are so similar. Both are big, self-absorbed, and insular nations; both are entrepreneurial
overachievers; both are infused with
nationalism and yet tread clumsily on
the nationalism of others — whether in
Vietnam or Iraq, or Tibet and the Muslim
region of Xinjiang.
Both the United States and China also
hurt themselves by petulantly refusing
to engage leaders they don’t like.
Americans sometimes think that the
Tibetan resentments are just about political and religious freedom. They’re
much more complicated than that. Tibetan anger is also fueled by the success of Han Chinese shop owners, who
are often better educated and more
entrepreneurial. So Tibetans seek solace in monasteries or bars, and the economic gap widens and provokes even
more frustration — which the spotlight
of the Olympics gives them a chance to
express.
centaure Chiron et à son sacrifice pour l’homme.
De même, “The Witches of Eastwick” (1984)
connaîtra un grand succès et sera porté au
cinéma (avec Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan
Sarandon et Michelle Pfeiffer dans les rôles
principaux). Son roman le plus récent “Terrorist”
(2007) explore l’esprit d’un jeune musulman
fondamentaliste du New Jersey.
Dans l’article “Bold, Bad and Legendary: A Bette
Davis Century”, page 8:
ALL ABOUT EVE: grand film classique, sorti
en 1950, considéré par beaucoup comme le
meilleur film qu’ait jamais tourné Bette Davis,
dirigée par un Joseph Mankiewicz magistral.
Il raconte dans un grand flashback l’histoire
de la star vieillissante, Margo Channing, de sa
rencontre avec une jeune fan, Eve, qui devient
proche pour très vite menacer de la supplanter
auprès de son amant, ses amis et dans sa
carrière. A la fin du film, on voit Eve rencontrer
une jeune fan et le cycle peut recommencer.
Ce film, dans lequel Marilyn Monroe joue un
petit rôle, fut nominé 14 fois aux Oscars (chiffre
record) et en obtint 6, dont celui du meilleur film
et du meilleur réalisateur.
SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008
LE MONDE
3
WORLD TRENDS
Loyalty to Old Ways Brings New Pain to Polish Farms
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
STRYSZOW, Poland — Depending on
your point of view, Szczepan Master is
either an incorrigible reactionary or a
visionary. A small farmer, proud of his
pure high-quality products, he works
his land the way Polish farmers have for
centuries.
He keeps his livestock in a strawfloored “barn” that is part of his house,
entered through a kitchen door. He
slaughters his own pigs. His wife milks
cows by hand. He rejects genetically
modified seeds. Instead of spraying his
crops, he turns his fields in winter, preferring a workhorse to a tractor, to let the
frost kill off pests residing there.
Mr. Master’s way of farming — indeed
his way of life — has been badly threatened in the two years since Poland
joined the European Union, a victim of
sanitary laws and mandates to encourage efficiency and competition that favor
mechanized commercial farms, farmers
here say.
If they want to sell their products, European law requires farms to have concrete floors in their barns and special
equipment for slaughtering. Hygiene
laws prohibit milking cows by hand. As
a result, the milk collection stations and
tiny slaughterhouses that until a few
years ago dotted the Polish countryside
have all closed. Small family farming is
impossible.
“We need to reward them for being
ahead of the game, rather than behind
it,” said Sir Julian Rose — an organic
farmer from Britain — who, with his Polish partner, Jadwiga Lopata, founded
the International Coalition to Protect the
Polish Countryside and has been fighting the regulations.
“The E.U. has adopted the same efficiency approach to food as it has to autos
and microchips,” he said. “Everything is
happening the reverse of what it should
be if they care about food and the environment.”
All 16 states of Poland have now
banned genetically modified organisms
in defiance of European Union and World
Trade Organization mandates. Last
Polish farmers Helena and
Szczepan Master struggle to
preserve traditional methods.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAFAL KLIMKIEWICZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
In a market with huge
players, small farmers are
being overwhelmed.
month, the Polish Agriculture Ministry
announced that it planned to ban their
import in animal fodder, another refusal
to accept European Union policy.
In Brussels, headquarters of the European Union, officials say they have no
desire to undo Polish tradition. “We are
not advocating the industrialization of
European farming — from our side we
think there is a place in Europe for all
shapes and sizes of farms,” said Michael
Mann, spokesman for the European
Commission Agriculture Directorate.
But, he said: “There has to be some restructuring to become more competitive
and less reliant on subsidies. Farming
is a business. They will have to look for
market niches.”
The European Union currently pays
farmers who meet health and sanitary
standards a subsidy, to help maintain
Europe’s farming tradition and as an acknowledgment that it is more expensive
to farm in Europe than in other parts of
the world.
“They don’t need to change anything
if they don’t want to,” Mr. Mann said.
“But they have to survive in business. If
A nurse made
her rounds at a
hospital in Port
Elizabeth, South
Africa, where
patients with
drug-resistant
tuberculosis are
involuntarily
confined.
you’re still milking cows by hand, maybe
you would want to use the money to put
in a new system.”
While overall farm income in Poland
has gone up since the country has joined
the European Union, that is certainly not
the case for the small farmers here. In
Poland, 22 percent of the work force is
employed in agriculture, and the country boasts by far the highest number of
farms in Europe. Most of them are tiny.
The average farm size is about 7 hectares, compared with about 24 hectares
in Spain, France and Germany. There
are 1.5 million small farms in Poland.
Only Italy, with its high-end niche agricultural products, compares to Poland in
its abundance of small producers.
But in a market newly saturated with
huge efficient players, these small traditional farmers are being overwhelmed.
The American bacon producer Smithfield Farms now operates a dozen vast industrial pig farms in Poland. Importing
cheap soy feed from South America, it has
caused the price of pork to drop strikingly
in the past couple of years. Since European Union membership, the prices of pork
and milk have dropped 30 percent.
In a small barn covered with matted straw, Barbara and Andrzej Wojcik
say they feel like outcasts. They used to
make a decent living selling pork from
pigs they raised as well as the milk and
butter from their six cows.
But they said that with the price of pork
so low they could not afford to raise pigs
slowly, the traditional way. As for milk,
their local collection station has closed.
So they have no way to get their products
to market.
Now they have sold all but two of their
cows and reverted to subsistence farming. They live off their parents’ pensions,
barter and a bit of money selling sewed
crafts. “The new laws are killing us,” Ms.
Wojcik said.
“They tend to be very individualistic,”
Ms. Lopata said of Polish farmers. “They
think they survived Communist efforts
to collectivize them, so they will survive
this. They don’t realize the European
Union and the global market are even
harder.”
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MARIELLA FURRER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
South Africa Fights Disease, and Fear
By CELIA W. DUGGER
PORT ELIZABETH, South Africa — The Jose
Pearson TB Hospital here is like a prison for the sick.
It is encircled by three fences topped with coils of razor wire to keep patients infected with lethal strains
of tuberculosis from escaping.
Escaped patients have been tracked down and
forced to return; the hospital has quadrupled the
number of guards. Many patients fear they will get
out of here only in a coffin.
“We’re being held here like prisoners, but we
didn’t commit a crime,’’ Siyasanga Lukas, 20, who
has been here since 2006, said before escaping recently. “I’ve seen people die and die and die. The
only discharge you get from this place is to the mortuary.’’
Struggling to contain an epidemic of extensively
drug-resistant tuberculosis, known as XDR-TB, the
South African government’s policy is to hospitalize
those unlucky enough to have the disease until they
are no longer infectious. Hospitals in two of the three
provinces with the most cases — here in the Eastern
Cape, as well as in the Western Cape — have sought
court orders to compel the return of runaways.
The public health threat is grave. The disease
spreads through the air when patients cough and
sneeze. It is resistant to the most effective drugs.
Drug resistance emerges in large part because
health care systems too often have failed to ensure
that patients successfully complete treatments with
first- and second-line drugs, according to international health officials.
And in South Africa, where these resistant strains
of tuberculosis have reached every province and
prey on those whose immune systems are weakened
by AIDS, it will kill many, if not most, of those who
contract it.
As extensively drug-resistant TB rapidly emerges
as a global threat to public health — one found in 45
countries — South Africa is grappling with a sticky
ethical problem: how to balance the liberty of individual patients against the need to protect society.
Most other countries are now treating drug-resistant TB on a voluntary basis, public health experts
say. But health officials here contend that the best
way to protect society is to isolate patients in TB hospitals. Infected people cannot be relied on to avoid
public places, they say. And treating people in their
homes has serious risks: Patients from rural areas often live in windowless shacks where families
sleep jammed in a single room — ideal conditions for
spreading the disease.
“XDR is like biological warfare,’’ said Dr. Bongani
Lujabe, the chief medical officer at Jose Pearson
hospital. “If you let it loose, you decimate a population, especially in poor communities with a high
prevalence of H.I.V./AIDS.’’
But other public health experts say overcrowded,
poorly ventilated hospitals have themselves been
a driving force in spreading the disease in South
Africa. The public would be safer if patients were
treated at home, they say, with regular monitoring
by health workers and contagion-control measures
for the family.
Locking up the sick until death will also discourage those with undiagnosed cases from coming
forward, most likely driving the epidemic underground.
“It’s much better to know where the patients are
and treat them where they’re happy,’’ said Dr. Tony
Moll, chief medical officer at the Church of Scotland
Hospital in Tugela Ferry.
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4
LE MONDE
SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008
WORLD TRENDS
An American Credit Crisis
Hobbles Swiss Bank Giant
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
BASEL, Switzerland — Normally, St.
Jakob’s Hall here is home to soccer tournaments or the occasional hockey game.
But on a sunny morning in February,
the stadium offered a corporate face-off
every bit as contentious as any athletic
event. More than 6,000 shareholders of
the Swiss banking giant UBS packed the
house to vent their fury to UBS’s chairman, Marcel Ospel, over tens of billions
in losses on American subprime mortgages and what they saw as an insult to
traditional Swiss values like prudence
and thrift.
“The American El Dorado has become a scene from a Western,” declared
one middle-aged shareholder, Therese
Klemenz. “UBS was the figurehead of
UBS posts $37 billion
in losses, more than any
other bank in the world.
Swiss business. As a good housewife, I
know you shouldn’t put all your eggs in
one basket. A bank is not a casino.”
Thomas Minder, a local shareholder
activist, was even more outraged. “What
happened here is a scandal,” he thundered. “You’re responsible for the biggest loss in the history of the Swiss economy. Put an end to the Americanization
of the Swiss economy!” At that point, Mr.
Minder charged the podium, only to be
dragged away by security guards.
The consequences of millions of home
foreclosures across the United States
are also being felt far overseas. Nowhere
is that more true than in this serene land
of snowy peaks, ice-cold lakes and staid
banks long considered to be among the
most cautious in the world.
Until now, that is. That’s because UBS
— with $3.1 trillion in assets, Switzerland’s biggest bank — made an astonishingly large bet on risky mortgage securities. At one point, that wager amounted
to $80 billion, a gambit the bank lost. UBS
has already been forced to write down
about $37 billion of that financial roll of
the dice — more than any other bank in
the world.
After months of fierce criticism, Mr.
Ospel, 58, abruptly announced on April
1 that he would step down as chairman
later this month. Shares of UBS rallied,
but that’s of little comfort to people like
Mrs. Klemenz, who have watched the
stock drop by half since last summer.
During an interview at UBS’s headquarters in downtown Zurich on April
4, the steely composure Mr. Ospel brandished at the Basel meeting was gone.
Sitting in a room adorned with maps
of the world and the United States, his
hands trembled and his eyes were cast
downwards.
“I’m the chairman of this firm and
ultimately responsible for what has happened,” he said, taking a long drag on a
cigarette. “But I have the highest respect
and confidence for the leadership as it is
now in charge.”
Mr. Ospel said he first became aware
of the extent of the threat UBS was facing
in early August — three months after its
Dillon Read Capital Management hedge
fund unit was closed after big trading
losses. This was six weeks after the
implosion of two highly leveraged Bear
Stearns hedge funds kicked off the credit
crisis for the rest of Wall Street.
“I remember when I came back from
summer vacation, Rohner explained we
had this gigantic exposure,” he recalled,
referring to UBS’s chief executive, Marcel Rohner.
Like others at UBS interviewed for this
article, Mr. Ospel said the bank’s failure
stemmed from a fundamental misreading of the market for mortgage securities. But he also acknowledged that the
losses showed that UBS’s vaunted riskmanagement system had broken down.
“The key issue is that the system operated within its limits, given the assumed
quality and liquidity of the assets,” he
said. “Clearly, there was a problem when
you build such a concentrated exposure
and it doesn’t appear on any of the appropriate radar screens.”
ALESSANDRO DELLA BELLA/KEYSTONE, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Marcel Ospel was still in charge at UBS when he spoke during a meeting in February in Basel, Switzerland.
And he ruefully noted that until UBS’s
disastrous foray into what turned out
to be Wall Street’s riskiest market, the
bank’s success in the United States was
a source of satisfaction in Switzerland.
“People were proud that a Swiss firm
had established such a significant footprint in the most competitive market on
the globe,” he said. “So the greater the
disappointment with what they have had
to digest.”
UBS bought mortgage-backed securities on Wall Street, rather than making
loans directly to American home buyers
with bad credit histories and no assets,
but that’s a distinction lost on the Swiss
public.
“A large part of the population thinks
How to Turn
Investor Herd
On Wall Street
These days, UBS executives are rushing around the globe reassuring clients
that the bank doesn’t face the kind of
threats that brought down the investment bank Bear Stearns last month.
That’s especially true in the United
States, where UBS employs roughly
30,000 people, slightly more than in Switzerland itself.
“It’s been hard emotionally because
we were the safe bank, the conservative
bank, and we worked very hard on that,”
says Daniel Coleman, an American who
is a top equities executive with UBS’s
investment bank in Stamford, Connecticut. “Mortgages were viewed as a
safe, liquid asset, which turned out to be
wrong.’’
Calls for More Regulation
As Global Finance Teeters
From Page 1
Other sorts of strong urges can
similarly overwhelm the social
pressures to conform, some experts
said. Investors trying to preserve
their reputation as mavericks, for
example, or to show confidence under spiraling pressure, might favor a
contrarian strategy.
“When you’re working with other
people’s money you’re going to be
looking to hit for average and minimize risk, period,’’ said Charles
Osborne, president of Osborne
Partners Capital Management in
San Francisco. “But you sometimes see
people who feel they have little to lose
make a contrarian move; they may feel
they’re going to lose the client anyway,’’
and so bet against the crowd.
Early dissenters usually pick up allies quickly. One model that researchers have used to study contrarian behavior is called the minority game. The
game is based on a now-classic problem
posed in 1994 by the economist W. Brian
Arthur set in a bar called El Farol.
Everyone likes El Farol but also knows
that the place is not fun when it’s crowded. What, then, is the best strategy to
maximize the fun? Avoid weekends?
Try Thursdays and Sundays? Won’t
everyone else be doing the same?
Experiments testing various versions of this game have shown that
many players flip strategies in the
middle of playing, simply because
they have set some private threshold
for changing, like trying one strategy
three times, “and if it doesn’t work,
switch to the other one,’’ said Willemien
Kets, a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa
Fe Institute, an independent research
and education center in New Mexico.
Dr. Kets contends that this switching
strategy can be successful precisely
because others decide to stick to a con-
we did what Countrywide did,” says Mr.
Rohner, the UBS chief, referring to Countrywide Financial, the troubled California company that is the largest American mortgage lender. “People think we
gave subprime mortgages in the U.S. We
did not.”
Maybe so, but even after the huge
write-downs, UBS still has more than
$30 billion in exposure to securities
linked to the kind of risky mortgages
that Countrywide and other lenders
doled out. And there’s no guarantee that
there will be no more losses.
“We still have positions, and I can’t
foretell the future,’’ Mr. Rohner acknowledges. “The real issue is that if liquidity
dries up, there is no way out.”
RON BARRETT
Experts see psychological
factors in making bulls
out of sheepish bears.
gested road. The behavior “suggests
that a variety of contrarian strategies
will evolve naturally in the course of
any such game because there are people who are more conservative in their
strategies,’’ he said.
Once people start thinking in this
way, they subconsciously recruit
evidence that supports their view, and
not only from other investors. Simply
bumping into an acquaintance who
shares a contrary opinion — at the gym
or in line at the grocery store — can
seem like an affirmation.
Not that the market cares about any
of this; it will destroy anyone who’s
early, late or wrong.
But under the right circumstances,
key investors and traders pick up on the
same contrarian cues, and the herd can
change course very quickly.
From research, Dr. Jonah Berger, a
psychologist in the Wharton School of
Business at the University of Pennsylvania, concludes that a fad can reverse
itself when group members decide
it’s no longer distinctive. “This is why
hipsters will suddenly lose interest in a
band when they think others are poaching it,’’ Dr. Berger said.
Those investors who stay in the business long enough know from experience who tends to be on the right side of
trades, and who grazes with the sheep.
And if the ratio of sheep to non-sheep
in the neighborhood gets too high, they
hop the fence out.
“People say picking where the
market’s going to turn is all gut feeling,
but that’s really a misnomer,’’ said Tom
Baldwin, a legendary trader in Treasury bond futures at the Chicago Board
of Trade. “You don’t have to be the first
one in. You’re really watching what certain other people do.’’
He added: “They don’t have to be
huge, market-moving people, just traders you know from experience who tend
to be right, and if you take the other
side, you’re going to lose money. Then
it’s a matter of believing what you see.
You have to believe it, that’s the hard
part.’’
From Page 1
to opening up its secret society to foreigners, oddly, doing so is still an afterthought.
But that may not be so much longer.
For while America’s top financial officials, from investment houses to government offices, may still have views
that are more local than global, there
are increasing calls from experts and
officials for their vision to broaden.
This is not just a problem in business.
The Federal Reserve and the Treasury
Department, for example, often check
in with their counterparts in other nations. But when they act, their attention
is first at home.
One of the participants in that conference call on March 16 was Henry Paulson, the secretary of the Treasury and
formerly of Goldman Sachs. He has the
power to propose a radical plan to regulate the financial industry in the United
States, as he did recently, but that doesn’t
address the larger problem: the United
States is now so interconnected with the
markets abroad, whether it be Japan or
even Brazil, that whatever it does on its
own is almost beside the point.
“We need much tighter global coordination,’’ Bruce Wasserstein, the
chairman of Lazard, said. “It is myopic
to look at things in a narrow box. Where
we’ve been moving right, the E.U. is
moving left. That doesn’t seem sensible.’’
If the United States, for example,
were to limit the amount of leverage
— or debt — that investment banks or
hedge funds could use, that would not
offer any protection from debt-fueled
implosions at rival firms abroad.
A blowup at a highly leveraged fund
in China would still ripple across the
system.
Superleveraged funds have been a
major culprit in the latest market gyrations, because their use of debt to increase returns has amplified negative
effects. When things go bad, the fallout
does not stop at national borders. A fund
in London may be connected to another
in Thailand and not even know it. Who
would have imagined that dentists in
Germany owned subprime mortgages
in Texas? (They did, or rather, still do
— at a huge loss.)
The explosion in the use of financial
instruments that balance investors’
risk has only tightened the global links
— and made a worldwide meltdown
easier to imagine. By using these
derivaives, banks and hedge funds
across the world are routinely on opposite sides of contracts tied to debt,
interest rates or other, more esoteric
benchmarks. The collapse of one party
(or sometimes just the possibility of
a collapse) can be disastrous for the
other. Bear’s downfall will very likely
induce new calls to address the unnerving problem of “counterparty
risk.’’ To be more than just a public-relations campaign, any such effort will
need to have global reach.
In case there’s a question about
how interconnected the world really
is, just witness the global markets’
near collapse in January when Société
Générale, the French bank, blamed
what it said was a rogue trader, Jérôme
Kerviel, for $7.1 billion in losses. Société
Générale’s efforts to unwind its positions — before announcing them publicly — came close to creating a market
panic. George Soros, who was attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, declared at the time: “This is not a
normal crisis. It is the end of an era.’’
The Fed, itself unaware of Société Générale’s ordeal, felt compelled to lower
interest rates. But that didn’t do much,
and three months later, the economy is
in worse shape.
As Mr. Soros said then, “I question
how far the Fed can go given the reluctance of people to hold dollars.’’ In
the end, he agreed, there will have to
be worldwide regulation of some sort.
“The financial system needs a global
sheriff.’’
SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008
LE MONDE
5
MONEY & BUSINESS
Stock Market Bubbles in Asia Are Bursting
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI — A year ago, investors
like Guan Ling were ebullient. Chinese
share prices had climbed over 500 percent in the span of two years, setting off a
nationwide stock buying frenzy.
When experts periodically warned
about the possibility of a bubble, prices
would dip temporarily then soar even
higher, breaking records and inciting
another mad dash to buy equities.
“The market was going wild,” says Mr.
Guan, 49, who a few years ago closed his
real estate company to invest in stocks
full time. “Everybody was talking about
how much they had earned, how much
more they would invest, and which stocks
had jumped 20 times, or even 30 times.”
That was last year. The Shanghai composite index has plunged 45 percent from
its high, reached last October. The first
quarter of this year, which ended March
31 with a huge sell-off, was the worst ever
for the market.
Suddenly, millions of small investors
who were crowding into brokerage houses, spending the entire day there playing
cards, trading stocks, eating noodles
and cheering on the markets with other
day traders and retirees, are feeling depressed and angry.
“These days my family quarrels a lot,”
says Zhang Liying, 55, a retired hotel
waitress who with her husband invested
all their savings in the stock market.
“My husband asked me to sell; I wanted
to hold for a while. Now my husband condemns me as so stupid that we lost our
family’s savings.”
Si Dansu, 68, and a retired engineer,
is even more distraught, but she blames
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting
from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and
Chen Yang contributed research from
Shanghai.
What Went Up Just Came Down
The Shanghai Composite index, which had more than doubled in
2006 and had more than doubled again in 2007 by its October
peak, has fallen sharply since then.
6,000
October 16, 2007 6,092.06
5,000
4,000
Shanghai Composite index
3,000
April 1, 2008
3,329.16
2,000
RYAN PYLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Guan Ling, left, and his business partner watch their investments at their
broker’s office in Shanghai, where shares have lost nearly half their value.
1,000
0
January 4, 2006
1,180.96
2006
Source: Bloomberg
the government. “I devoted my whole
life to the country. I went to the countryside after graduation, and worked as
an engineer in a Shanghai factory until
retirement. I invested almost all my savings and retirement fund in the market
10 years ago. But now I’m totally penniless. All my stocks went down.”
Other parts of Asia are as bad, or worse.
In India, stock prices have plunged 31 percent in Mumbai; they are off 31 percent in
Japan and a whopping 53 percent in Vietnam, another booming economy. Angry
investors have burned a securities regulator in effigy in Mumbai, and some are in
tears in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
“Some of them have cried,” says Nguyen Quang Tri, 74, a retired cement company manager who was visiting a Ho
2007
’08
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Chi Minh City brokerage house recently.
“I have my own equity, but most of the
people here borrowed money from the
bank.”
The market mayhem began after concerns grew late last year about inflation
at home and an American financial crisis. Now, even though China’s economy
is growing at its fastest pace in over a decade, stock prices have fallen, crushing
small investors on the way down.
There are worries that a prolonged
downturn could reverberate through
China’s financial markets — especially
since a large number of corporations had
aggressively shifted money, sometimes
secretly, to play the market.
By some estimates, 15 to 20 percent
of the profits reported last year by pub-
licly listed companies in Shanghai that
are not involved in banking or finance
(which usually invest in stocks) came
from stock trading gains.
But the big companies were following
the small investor. JPMorgan estimates
that 150 million people in China were invested in the Chinese stock market as of
the end of last year. That may still be a
small slice of China’s 1.3 billion people,
but it is a huge new constituency, and it
has led to the birth of both a new source
of potential popular discontent and a
new lifestyle: the diehard investor.
Chen Donghao is one convert. A 22year-old recent college graduate, he is
now a regular at a Shanghai brokerage
house. In April 2006, when he was still a
student majoring in art design, his family gave him about $70,000 to invest in
the stock market. It was an ideal time to
get in.
“When I started the stock market was
around 1,700,” he says, noting that despite the drop, the Shanghai composite
index is still up at about 3,400. “I made
a lot of money. So since the beginning of
this year I decided to open a restaurant.
I’d like to open a chain of famous restaurants in Shanghai.”
Shopkeepers, real estate brokers, even
maids and watermelon hawkers are said
to have become day traders.
But now, many investors cannot bear
to look at their screens.
“I’m getting out of the game,” said
Yuan Yuan, 23, a researcher at a fund
company in Shenzhen who also invests
on his own.
Mr. Guan says: “It’s a deformed market, an unhealthy market. We’ve always
had long bear markets and short bull
markets.”
“Look,” he said, “it took two years to
go from 1,000 to 6,000 but two months to
go from 6,000 to 3,500.”
A Weekend Full of Dread,
For the Approaching Monday
By KELLEY HOLLAND
Many younger
music fans, who
are used to instant
downloads, no
longer have the
patience to shop
for CDs.
JACOB SILBERBERG/REUTERS
You Want It, You Click It (Absolutely No Waiting)
The Virgin Megastore in Times
Square in New York was bustling recently during the lunch hour, but with
two remarkably different universes of
consumers. One group of shoppers —
none of whom appeared
to be under 40 — were
browsing manually
through CDs, no doubt
some of them drawn by
ESSAY
Virgin’s profit-killing $10
price.
Nearby, clusters of young people
were trading headphones at listening
posts as they riffled their way through
songs that they would no doubt go home
and download later (legally, of course).
It was the same throughout the store,
with teenagers treating the store as a
playground, jamming on Guitar Hero
while an older cohort shopped for the remastered CD of Neil Young’s 1974 album
“On the Beach.” The magazine rack was
decorative furniture — no one stopped in
the 10 minutes I watched — and the book
section had three people in it.
“You were looking at a wasting asset
no matter what floor you were on. The
need to hold media that you consume
— the physical purchase — is going
away,” said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications
Program and the author of a new book,
“Here Comes Everybody: The Power of
Organizing Without Organizations.”
The book suggests that the Web is not
DAVID
CARR
competition for traditional media, but
a completely different system, a place
where choice is not only an option, but
an imperative.
In that world, the idea that someone
would buy a physical object that contained a finite number of songs selected
by someone else seems quaint. (Recognizing as much, Sony BMG and Warner
both said recently that they are looking
at subscription services.)
According to Mr. Shirky, consumers
expect exactly what they want, when
and how they want it. Music sellers, networks and movie studios are adjusting
to a new paradigm where the customer
is not only always right, but expects to
be able to exercise that judgment quickly
and easily.
“Forget 15-year-olds; my 4-year- old
saw a show on broadcast television at
our baby sitter’s house and asked to
see it again when she went back there,”
Mr. Shirky said. “When told it wasn’t
on television right then, she asked, ‘Is it
broken?’ ”
Last month at the McGraw-Hill media conference, Robert A. Iger, the chief
executive of Disney, suggested that the
television is not the screen of the future.
“In the years ahead, broadband
on the computer will be the primary
source of entertainment for kids,” he
said. “It’s just as important to them as
the TV set now.”
Mr. Shirky said consumers increasingly live in “the cloud,” a wireless uni-
verse of always-available content.
He added that the combination of
cheap, ubiquitous technology and
the ability to publish anything — how
drunk you were last night replete
with supporting pictures, for example
— means they contribute their own content to be absorbed by their community.
“We are all generating more media
than we can consume. The amount of
photography, recorded material, text,
the cloud of metadata that we are all
leaving behind, is overwhelming,” he
said.
Does this mean we will all leave big
media behind? Mr. Shirky thinks not.
“Storytelling is a hard problem that
is cognitive rather than technological,”
he said. “It requires a specific set of
skills, and there are business models
that enable storytelling, but maybe
don’t require the whole manufacturing
or broadcasting business that goes with
them.”
It’s becoming a matter of embracing,
rather than trying to control, choice.
“What would happen to a Barnes &
Noble that only had one copy of every
book, but could print it on the spot and
give it to you? And music stores could
burn your CD on the spot?” Mr. Shirky
said. “In both instances, the consumers
would get their choice and you’d get rid
of all the inventory needs, the upstream
and downstream waste, and you might
be able to turn that sampling into a sales
opportunity.”
The feeling is familiar: you are savoring the last of a leisurely Sunday
lunch or a long walk in the park when
you abruptly realize that your weekend will be over in a matter of hours. In
an instant, you are deep in what John
Updike called the “chronic sadness of
late Sunday afternoon.” As you envision the pile of work on your desk, the
meetings on your calendar and that
business trip on Tuesday, your mood
shifts again, your muscles tense and
your head begins to ache.
You have a case of workplace-related
stress. You also have plenty of company.
Poll results released last October by
the American Psychological Association found that one-third of Americans
are living with extreme stress, and
that the most commonly cited source
of stress — mentioned by 74 percent of
respondents — was work. That was up
from 59 percent the previous year.
Some people would not be alarmed
by this. When David W. Ballard, the
association’s assistant executive director for corporate relations and business strategy, talks to executives, “the
concept that stress can be a bad thing
is sometimes foreign to them,” he said.
“They say stress is a good thing. It motivates them.”
But excessive stress is different,
and expensive for employers. Highly
stressed employees are absent more
often and are much more likely to leave
their jobs. When at work, they tend to
be significantly less productive, which
can be even more expensive than frequent absences, Dr. Ballard said.
More than half the respondents to
the survey said they had left a job or
considered doing so because of stress,
and 55 percent said that stress made
them less productive at work.
With costs like that, you’d think that
companies would devote considerable
resources to fighting the problem. But
a survey published last year by Watson Wyatt suggests that they are not.
For example, some 48 percent of the
employers in the survey said stress
created by long hours and limited resources was affecting business performance, but only 5 percent said they
were taking strong action to address
those areas.
“Everybody knows it’s an issue, but
no one wants to look at it and address
it,” said Shelly Wolff, Watson Wyatt’s
North American leader for health and
productivity. Employers view excessive workplace stress as an enormously costly problem that no one quite
knows how to fix, she said. “There’s a
fear of opening up something you can’t
control,” she said. “They feel it’s going
to open Pandora’s box.”
One problem is that stress can be
subjective. Some people may feel permanently tethered to the office by their
cellphones and laptops, but for others
those devices are liberating. One person’s dreaded business trip is another’s respite from pressures at home.
That means there is no standard way
for employers to reduce office stress.
But putting in place a variety of initiatives is still simpler and less expensive
than dealing with extreme stress once
it arrives.
PricewaterhouseCoopers addresses
stress in multiple ways. For example,
in annual surveys, employees asked
for more coaching and opportunities
Employers may shrug,
but employee stress hurts
productivity.
to connect with more experienced colleagues — and got them.
Over the past two years, the firm has
also created market teams for various
business lines, which means that 80 to
100 people work together on a portfolio
of client accounts. Employees can cover for one another more easily, easing
some of the pressure.
Michael J. Fenlon, managing director for people strategy at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said his firm has made
efforts to reduce stress among workers. The goal was “to create an environment where there’s openness and
a sense of mutual support,” he said,
“where I can work through life-cycle
events and no one’s going to think less
of me.”
Until recently, if employees sent
e-mails on weekends or after office
hours, an automatic message would appear asking the sender to wait, if possible, and let others enjoy their time off.
The message was discontinued after
the company determined that workers
had taken this stress-reducing sentiment to heart.
6
LE MONDE
SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
What Human Beings Owe to Fish: A Lot
Being a resolute hydrophobe who has no real
desire to go for a swim, I admit I never thought of
myself as a large, scaleless fish out of water.
Yet after reading Neil Shubin’s brisk new book,
“Your Inner Fish,’’ and speaking with other researchers who use fish to delve into
the history of vertebrates in general
and ourselves in particular, I realize that many traits we take pride
in, the body parts and behaviors we
ESSAY
exalt as hallmarks of our humanity,
were really invented by fish.
You like having a big, centralized brain encased
in a protective bony skull, with all the sensory
organs conveniently attached? Fish invented the
head.
You like having pairs of those sense organs,
two eyes for binocular vision, two ears to localize
sounds and twinned nostrils so you can follow your
nose to freshly baked bread or the nape of a lover’s
irresistible neck? Fish were the first to wear their
senses in sets.
They premiered the pairing of appendages, too,
through fins on either side of the body that would
someday flesh out into biceps, triceps, rotating
wrists and opposable thumbs.
Or how about that animated mouth of yours,
with its hinged and muscular jaws, its enameled,
innervated teeth? Fish founded it all.
“The backbone that holds us upright, that’s a fish
invention,’’ said Dr. Shubin, a paleontologist at the
University of Chicago and the Field Museum. “The
cranial nerves that we use to control the muscles in
our jaw, that we use to talk and to hear, they relate
to a fish’s gill arches. The basic wiring in our skull,
the body plan we take for granted, that’s part of
our story. It’s all from fish.’’
New research reveals that many fish display a
wide range of surprisingly sophisticated social
behaviors, pursuing interpersonal, interfishal
relationships that seem almost embarrassingly
familiar.
“Fish have some of the most complex social
systems known,’’ Michael Taborsky, a behavioral
ecologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland,
said. “You see fish helping each other. You see cooperation and forms of reciprocity.’’
Dr. Taborsky and his colleagues have studied
the social lives of African cichlids, colorful freshwater fish from Lake Tanganyika. The cichlids live
in relatively large groups of 10 or so individuals, a
dominant breeding pair and a retinue of adult and
adolescent helpers. The helpers share in all duties,
Dr. Taborsky said. They defend territory, they help
NATALIE
ANGIER
KIM KYUNG-HOON/REUTERS
Many traits of the human body come from
fish, but new research reveals that fish
also display a range of social behaviors
surprisingly similar to those of humans.
RICHARD CHUNG/REUTERS
keep the nests tidy and they clean, fan and oxygenate the breeding pair’s eggs. When the eggs hatch
into larvae, the helpers take up the babies in their
mouths for cleaning — all the while forgoing their
own breeding efforts.
Significantly, the helper fish are often unrelated
to the royal pair over whose spawn they take care
of. What’s in it for the helpers? “Helpers are al-
lowed to stay in the territory and gain security and
protection against predators.,” Dr. Taborsky said.
“But they have to pay rent, so to speak, or they risk
being expelled.’’
Researchers have identified many other surprising analogies between humans and fish. Dr. David
Reznick of the University of California, Riverside,
has discovered that female guppies go through a
kind of menopause, surviving well beyond their reproductive life span, a finding that may bear on the
evolution of menopause among women.
Fish are the oldest group of vertebrates, the earliest possessors of rudimentary teeth, skulls and
spinal cords having arisen from wormlike predecessors maybe 550 million years ago.
Spurring the evolution of the vertebrate body
plan, Dr. Shubin said, was a benefit of being an active predator. The origin of jaws and teeth “was
a great equalizer,’’ he said, adding, “It allowed
smaller fish to eat bigger fish.’’
The advent of teeth demanded protection
against those teeth, and the earliest skulls were little more than thousands of tiny teeth fused together. Through the pairing of sense organs up front,
in the well-shielded head, fish gained spectacular
new powers to seek food and escape the seekers.
“The increasingly competitive landscape was
a cauldron for the invention of new things,’’ Dr.
Shubin said — including, 365 million years ago,
the power to hoist your scaly self out of the sea and
begin eating the plants and arthropods that preceded you on dry ground.
In 2004, Dr. Shubin and his colleagues reported
discovering the fossil of one such pioneer, a halffish, half-amphibian creature they named Tiktaalik. It had rudimentary shoulders and enough
upper body muscle to do push-ups.
A Prank Can
Serve a Purpose.
No Joking.
By BENEDICT CAREY
Keep it fair, stop short of total humiliation and,
if possible, mix in some irony, some drama, maybe
even a bogus call from the person’s old love or new
boss. A good prank, of course, involves good stagecraft. But it also requires emotional intuition.
“You want to play on people’s weaknesses or
dislikes, but not go too hard,” said Tommy Doran,
a fireman and paramedic in Skokie, Illinois, who
as a rookie in Montgomery County, Maryland,
was lured into the station’s kitchen and blasted
with multiple cream pies. “For me it’s just the sort
of dark humor we use to cope with the job and each
other. Nothing dangerous or illegal.”
Psychologists have studied pranks for years, often in the context of harassment, bullying and all
manner of malicious exclusion and prejudice.
Yet practical jokes are far more commonly an effort to bring a person into a group, anthropologists
have found — an integral part of rituals around the
world intended to temper success with humility.
And recent research suggests that the experience
of being duped can stir self-reflection in a way few
other experiences can, functioning as a check on
arrogance or obliviousness.
The 1960s political activist and prankster Abbie
Hoffman reportedly divided
practical jokes into three categories. The bad ones involve
vindictive skewering, or the
sort of head-shaving, shivering-in-underwear college fraternity hazing that the sociologist Erving Goffman described
as “degradation ceremonies.”
Neutral tricks include wrapping the toilet bowl in cellophane, or pulling some electronic stunts on a coworker’s keyboard (though on deadline this falls
quickly into the “bad” category).
What Hoffman called the good prank, which
humorously satirizes human fears or failings, is
found in a wide variety of initiation rites and coming-of-age rituals.
The Daribi of New Guinea, for example, have
children make a small box and bury it in the
ground, telling them that after a while a treasure
will appear inside but they must not peek, according to Edie Turner, a professor of anthropology at
the University of Virginia.
Invariably the youngsters succumb to curiosity
— only to find a sample of human feces.
TAMARA SHOPSIN
In a prank, people learn if they are too
trusting, or not trusting enough.
The Ndembu of Zambia have an adult in a monstrous mask sneak and terrify boys camping outside the village as part of a coming-of-age ritual in
which they are showing their bravery.
“These kind of tricks are very common,” Dr.
Turner said, “and they are really a way to put a
person down before raising them up. You’re being reminded of your failings even as you’re being
honored.”
In a paper published last year, three psychologists argued that the sensation of being duped
— anger, self-blame, bitterness — was such a singular one that it forced an uncomfortable kind of
self-awareness. How much of a dupe am I?
“Being duped holds up this mirror to people,”
said Kathleen D. Vohs, a consumer psychologist at
the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota and one of the
authors of the study, “and may
in fact show them where they
are on the scale” — too trusting
or too vigilant.
Paranoia, too, has its costs,
and it can sour relationships.
Running back the tape mentally, in this case meditating
on how an embarrassing event
might have turned out otherwise, is known to psychologists as counterfactual
thinking.
“The feeling of ‘I should have known better’ is
the sort of counterfactual that serves to highlight
your own shortcomings,” said Neal Roese, a psychologist at the University of Illinois.
“A good deal of research has shown that these
counterfactual insights can bring about new behaviors, new self-exploration and, ultimately, selfimprovement.”
A good prank is, in the end, a simulation of a crisis and not the real thing.
And it serves as a valuable reminder that not every precious box contains precisely the treasure
you might expect.
Humorous antics can
be cruel or serve as a
helpful initiation rite.
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SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008
LE MONDE
7
T H E W AY W E E AT
MSG Is the Secret Behind Food’s Savor
By JULIA MOSKIN
In 1968 a Chinese-American physician wrote
a rather lighthearted letter to The New England
Journal of Medicine. He had experienced numbness, palpitations and weakness after eating in
Chinese restaurants in the United States, and wondered whether the monosodium glutamate used by
cooks here (and then rarely used by cooks in China)
might be to blame.
MSG, a common flavor enhancer and preservative used since the 1950s, was tagged as a toxin, removed from commercial baby food and generally
driven underground by a new movement toward
natural, whole foods.
Even now, after virtually all studies since then
confirmed that monosodium glutamate in normal
concentrations has no effect on the overwhelming
majority of people, the ingredient has a stigma that
will not go away.
But then, neither will MSG.
Cooks around the world have remained dedicated
to MSG, even though they may not know it by that
name. As hydrolyzed soy protein or autolyzed yeast,
it adds flavor to the canned chicken broth and to the
packs of onion soup mix used by some home cooks,
and to cheese crackers and low-fat yogurts.
It is the taste of Marmite in the United Kingdom,
of Golden Mountain sauce in Thailand, of Goya
Sazón on the Latin islands of the Caribbean, of Salsa Lizano in Costa Rica and of Kewpie mayonnaise
in Japan.
“It’s all the same thing: glutamate,’’ said Dr. Nirupa Chaudhari of the University of Miami, who was
part of the research team to identify human glutamate receptors.
In September Dr. Chaudhari will take part in the
University of Tokyo’s centenary celebrations honoring Professor Kikunae Ikeda’s 1908 discovery
of glutamate flavor. The Japanese company Ajinomoto turned that discovery into crystalline powder
form, MSG, and patented it in 1909.
“Just like salt and sugar, it exists in nature, it
tastes good at normal levels, but large amounts at
high concentrations taste strange and aren’t that
good for you,’’ Dr. Chaudhari said.
If you live in the United States and like spicy tuna
rolls, Puerto Rican roast pork or Thai noodles, there
is a good chance you are eating MSG. And if you like
to keep a global kitchen, some of these MSG-laden
ingredients may deserve a place in your cupboard.
“I don’t cook with MSG because that’s not my
training, but it definitely has its place,’’ said Zak Pe-
But it is in Japan that MSG has
been most thoroughly integrated
into popular food, through two
main delivery systems: instant ramen noodle soup and mayonnaise,
laccio, a New York chef. One of
now popular on pizza, omelets and suthe dishes that made him famous
shi. Japanese mayonnaise is flavored
was a sandwich of roasted salmon
with MSG and rice vinegar, giving it
on pumpernickel bread slathered
an addictive roundness and tang.
with wasabi aioli: wasabi from a
In upscale restaurants, chefs are
tube mixed with mayonnaise.
unlikely to use monosodium glutaIn regions where meat and meaty
mate. “We don’t need to use Ajinomoto
flavors have been out of reach for
because we can get the ingredients that
most cooks, MSG has long filled the
have natural umami: shiitake mushgap. “My father called Maggi sauce
ILLUSTRATION BY
rooms, egg yolks, shellfish, masago,’’
la segunda venida, the second comTHE NEW YORK TIMES
said Sotohiro Kosugi, the chef of Soto in
ing, because he was not a very good
cook and it saved him,’’ said Irma Cecilia Sanchez, a New York.
Although umami is only a small player in Japahome health aide in New York from Puebla, Mexico.
Maggi sauce is a 19th-century Swiss creation, a gen- nese cuisine, reams of breathless prose have been
eral flavor enhancer now made with MSG, sweeten- produced on it, the elusive fifth taste supposedly
linked to the profoundly pure, deep-sea flavors of
ers and extracts.
Maggi sauce is extremely popular in regions of kelp and dried tuna.
Umami has been positively identified as the flavor
India, Mexico, the Philippines and the Ivory Coast.
One of Thailand’s favorite late-night street foods, of glutamic acid, an amino acid naturally present in
pad kee mao, or drunkard’s noodles, relies on its many savory foods, from seaweed to soppressata.
“Too much MSG and you get that harsh, acrid
sweet-salty-meaty taste; the Malaysian version is
taste,’’ said Mr. Pelaccio, who uses an empty barrel
called Maggi goreng.
Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, a of Ajinomoto-brand MSG he found on the street as a
rub for pork shoulder or flank steak is Goya Sazón: plant stand in his Chinatown apartment. “But get it
MSG and salt, cut with garlic, cumin and annatto. just right and that dish will sing.’’
By JULIA MOSKIN
Chocolate’s dark mood is lightening at last.
Until recently, midnight-black,
bittersweet bars with punishing
percentages of cacao were, like coffee and wine, on a quest for brooding intensity. Milk chocolate was
left behind, dismissed as child’s
play, an indulgence in sweetness
and nostalgia.
Now, some chocolatiers are fighting back, with expensive, suave
“dark milk” chocolates that reinvent
milk chocolate by increasing its cacao content, reducing its sweetness
and carefully refining it to give it the
snap and velvet of dark.
“Personally, if I had to choose
one or the other, I prefer dark
chocolate,” said Joseph Whinney,
founder of Theo Chocolate, a small
producer based in Seattle, Washington. “But there is no product
on the planet that can match that
lush, melted-chocolate mouth-feel
of milk chocolate.”
Percentages tell nothing about
the taste or the quality of chocolate,
said Chloé Doutre-Roussel, a Parisbased expert and former chocolate
buyer for Fortnum & Mason in London. The percentage tells how much
of the bar is cacao solids — the pure,
unsweetened content of the cacao
pod. But the flavor and quality are
determined by many other factors:
how the pods are fermented, how
long they are roasted, how the cacao
is ground. Two milk chocolates, both
Dark May Still Be King,
But Milk Chocolate Makes a Move
Reviving the creamy
pleasure of that
childhood candy bar.
with 45 percent cacao solids, might
have utterly different levels of sugar
and dairy content.
“Seventy percent of bad cacao is
still 70 percent,” Ms. Doutre-Roussel said. “It is all about the producer
and the recipe, especially when you
are talking about milk chocolate.”
“Producing milk chocolate,” said
Andrea Slitti, a chocolate maker
in Tuscany, “is much more complicated than producing dark chocolate, as you can see in the marketplace: there are far more good dark
chocolates available. At each step,
we have to work to keep the clean
taste of milk and not overwhelm it
with the strength of the cocoa mass,
then balance them both with sweetness.”
ILLUSTRATION BY TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mr. Slitti is one of several serious chocolatiers — including Pra- Dark chocolate has been the favorite of connoisseurs, but new milk chocolates have full flavor.
lus, Bernachon and Amedei — that
have forged new hybrids that, at
Cacao cultists have provoked chocolate makers
their best, can please partisans on both sides of 65 percent cacao solids that come from a different
Indonesian plantation.
to keep stripping chocolate down, eliminating disthe dark-versus-milk divide.
Milk chocolate is the solid form of hot chocolate, tractions like emulsifiers, vanilla and sometimes
“In our tastings, I found that lovers of milk chocolate felt a little bit uncomfortable in admitting that popular in Europe for 200 years before a Swiss con- even sugar. The 100 percent cacao bars that have
they prefer it to plain chocolate,” he said. He spent fectioner, Daniel Peter, made it into a solid in the arrived recently on the market are virtually inedmore than a year developing Lattenero, one of the 1870s. He hit on using the condensed milk invented ible, but are no less joyfully greeted by connoisfirst “dark milk” chocolates. Instantly popular, it by his compatriot Henri Nestlé to serve as infant seurs who worship their intensity and purity.
is the only milk chocolate available in five cacao formula.
However, some tasters have realized that perMilk chocolate became one of the great cheap centages can go too high. “The extremes of bitterlevels, from 45 to 70 percent.
Top chocolatiers frequently experiment by luxuries of the industrial age. Eventually, milk ness have been reached with dark chocolate,” said
making chocolate with pods from a single region chocolate also acquired the stigma of being an Alex Landuyt, director of research and developor plantation. Such refinement has usually been “industrial” product. Milk went from being an ment for Barry Callebaut, one of the largest chocoreserved for dark chocolate. But Bonnat, a pro- enrichment to just another filler: condensed milk late manufacturers in the world. “And as we move
ducer in Voiron, near the French Alps, makes a was gradually replaced by combinations of nonfat in that direction, the more we need the rounding of
trinity of excellent milk chocolates. Each contains milk powder and even vegetable oil.
the milk to balance it out.”
Quirks and Pitfalls
Of Zapping Food
By HAROLD McGEE
The microwave oven is a quirky appliance. Sure, it
cooks and reheats many foods quickly and well, and
in containers that can go right to the table or come
right from the fridge. But it can also cause a mug of
hot water to erupt scaldingly, char nuts and breads
on the inside, and blow up eggs and butter.
To make the most of the microwave, it helps to
know its quirks, and ways to work around them.
The strange powers of the microwave arise from
the basic fact that it cooks indirectly, with radio energy. Conventional baking, broiling, boiling or frying transmits a particular level of heat directly to
the food. But when we zap, the air in the microwave
oven barely gets warm. Instead, the oven emits radio waves that penetrate the food from all directions
and generate heat within the food itself — until the
oven turns off.
Of the substances in food, water is especially
quick to absorb microwave energy. When it does,
the water molecules move faster, crash into the
more sluggish proteins, carbohydrates and fats,
and jolt them into motion, raising the temperature
of the food as a whole.
This constant heat generation can create temperatures beyond the boiling point. That often means
trouble.
Microwave an egg in a shell long enough to turn
some of its moisture into steam — about a minute
— and the pressure shatters it. Microwave butter
long enough to melt it, then continue heating the water that settles to the bottom, and that water will boil
and splatter butterfat all over the oven. Microwave
a mug of water long enough, and it can superheat
past the boiling point without bubbling, then bubble
violently the moment you disturb it.
So keep close tabs on cooking, and turn off the
oven as soon as the food is done. Medium and low
oven settings are useful because they pulse the radio waves on and off and slow the heating.
The lack of precise temperature control in a microwave means that it is not ideal for meats, fish
or egg dishes, which toughen when slightly overcooked. Even when reheating stews, it is best to remove the meat or fish, microwave the liquid to a boil,
then recombine.
Because the microwave oven energizes the food’s
moisture first, there is a general drying effect: it
causes moisture to evaporate out of the food. So it’s
usually best to cook in a container that will retain
most of the vapor around the food surface. Leave
small openings for some vapor to escape, otherwise
the container will burst open.
Microwave energy can instantly penetrate food
to a depth of about an 2.5 centimeters, instead of
working its way in from the surface by conduction.
If the food is less thick, it’s essentially cooking all at
once. That rapid heating generally means that the
food retains more of its vitamins than it does when
it’s boiled, steamed or baked.
Microwave energy doesn’t build up at the surface
the way ordinary heat does, so it doesn’t brown the
food; its effect is more like steaming. Only when
food dries out can microwaves cause browning.
It’s easy for nuts and stale bread to char inside
while the outside looks unchanged. The nut or bread
surface stays relatively cool while the heat inside
keeps building. Low oven settings can help prevent
this. Once you get used to these quirks, you’ll come
up with some convenient techniques.
My current favorites:
POPCORN FLAVORED WITH SPICES In conventional
popping, the spices burn. Coat kernels with spices
and a little oil, and zap in covered ovenware.
NONERUPTING POLENTA
Gradual heating eases
water absorption, and the polenta bubbles just as
it becomes done.
HOT FOAMED MILK FOR COFFEE Put cold milk into
a jar, close, and shake until foamy. Open, and microwave until hot.
8
LE MONDE
SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2008
ARTS & STYLES
Bold, Bad and Legendary:
A Bette Davis Century
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
Bette Davis, born 100 years ago April
5, made her first appearance on film in
1931 and her last in 1989. Part of what
makes Davis, I think, the greatest actress of the American cinema — was,
you could tell what she was thinking and feeling from across the room,
even a very large one like the ballroom
she swoops into, wearing a red dress,
in William Wyler’s “Jezebel’’ (1938),
scandalizing the fashionable society of
1852 New Orleans; unmarried young
women like her character, Julie Marsden, are expected to wear white. But
Julie wants to make an impression, and
she does; and as she takes a turn on the
dance floor with her stiff-backed escort, you can see, although most of the
sequence is in long camera shots, her
growing awareness that she has made
a terrible mistake, that she has gone, for
once, too far.
On the occasion of her centennial, it’s
worth remembering Davis as she was
in her prime, in the 1930s and ’40s, when
she commanded the screen with something subtler and more mysterious
than the fierce, simple will that carried
An actress specialized
in playing women who
never apologized.
her through the mostly grim work that
followed. In her heyday, as the reigning
female star at Warner Brothers, she
was as electrifying as Marlon Brando
in the ’50s: volatile, sexy, challenging,
fearlessly inventive.
Her breakthrough role came in John
Cromwell’s 1934 adaptation of the W.
Somerset Maugham novel “Of Human
Bondage,” in which she plays the coldhearted Cockney temptress Mildred
Rogers, a vile specimen who cruelly
— and protractedly — abuses the affections of a sensitive, artistic, clubfooted
young medical student.
Davis persisted in playing women
who were frankly, unapologetically
bad: characters like Stanley Timberlake in John Huston’s odd, disturbing
Southern melodrama “In This Our
Life” (1942); Rosa Moline in King Vidor’s overheated “Beyond the Forest”
(1949); and especially Leslie Crosbie
and Regina Giddens, the heroines of
two further collaborations with
William Wyler.
In Lloyd Bacon’s
terrific “Ma rked
Woman” (1937),
for instance, in
which she plays
a n ightclub
hostess (read
prostitute), you see a kind of distillation
of all the tramps, gun molls and shady
dames she’d played as an eager young
nonstar under contract to studios that
didn’t know what to do with her. Her
character in “Marked Woman” is a
wonderfully complex creation, a wary
survivor who’s both proud of her sex
appeal and slightly uncomfortable
with it: not a hooker with a heart of gold,
exactly, but a prostitute who prefers to
keep her heart as much to herself as
possible.
In one of her most celebrated roles,
as the panicky aging actress Margo
Channing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s
“All About Eve” (1950), Davis trots out
every bad habit she’d developed over
the years, every “Bette Davis” mannerism, and makes them all seem, strictly
speaking, necessary: real aspects of
an unmistakably real woman. Margo,
mannerisms and all, seems surprisingly level-headed. In the end she’s a
trouper.
Davis never retired from acting and
lasted, improbably, to 81, after a lifetime of abusing alcohol, nicotine and,
often, her directors. Her best director
was Wyler, who abused her back, productively. The three movies they made
together represent one of the great collaborations of a filmmaker and an actor in the history of movies, because
Wyler’s theatrical intelligence was a
match for hers.
They fell out during “The Little Foxes” (1941), perhaps because both realized, on some level, that they couldn’t
hope to surpass the intimate anatomy
of evil they had together managed
to get on the screen in “The Letter”
(1940). That picture’s heroine, a Singapore planter’s wife, is, like so many of
Davis’s most vivid characters, a creature of urgent need, but she’s cooler,
more controlled than most. She kills her
lover and lies to her husband (and the
court) with remarkable equanimity.
And because Wyler persuaded Davis
— “persuaded” may be too mild a word
— to mute her mannerisms, her every
glance and movement seems to register
with particular force, passion straining
to burst free of its confinement.
Watching the first scene of “The Letter” is as good a way as any to remember Davis on her birthday. She strides
out, with that fast, purposeful walk of
hers, onto the veranda, pumps some
lead into her prone paramour, then
pauses, lowering her gun hand slowly,
to contemplate what she’s done, striking a pose (in medium long shot) that
looks both melancholy and defiant.
That’s Bette Davis as she
was at her best: first in
furious motion, then
eerily, eloquently
still. She was no
drama queen.
She was drama
in the flesh.
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Bette Davis, born 100 years ago,
captivated audiences with her
electrifying screen presence.
Schooling the Artists’ Republic of China
By DAVID BARBOZA
BEIJING — On a recent afternoon
Wang Haiyang, a student at China’s top
art school, was packing away some of his
new oil paintings in the campus’s printmaking department. He is 23, and he just
had his first major art exhibition at a big
Beijing gallery.
Many of his works sold for more than
$3,000 each, he said. And he hasn’t even
graduated.
“This is one of my new works,’’ he said
proudly, gesturing toward a sexually
provocative painting of a couple embracing. “I’ll be having another show in Singapore in March.’’
For better or for worse — depending on
whom you talk to — Beijing’s state-run
Central Academy of Fine Arts has been
transformed into a breeding ground for
hot young artists and designers who are
quickly snapped up by dealers in Beijing
and Shanghai.
The school is so selective that it turns
away more than 90 percent of its applicants each year. Many of its faculty
members are millionaires and its alumni
include some of China’s most successful
new artists, including Liu Wei, Fang Lijun
and Zhang Huan. And with the booming
market for contemporary Chinese art, its
students are suddenly so popular that collectors frequently show up on campus in
search of the next art superstar.
“I can say we have the best students
and the best faculty in China,’’ said Zhu
Di, the school’s admissions director.
“And we give students a bright future.’’
Yet as the academy reshapes its mission and campus, its flowering relationship with the art market is stirring unease among those who feel that students
should be shielded from commercial
pressures.
“The buyers are also going to the
school to look for the next Zhang Xiaogang,’’ said Cheng Xindong, a dealer in
Beijing, referring to an art star, one of
whose paintings sold for $3.3 million at
a Sotheby’s sale in London in February.
“And immediately they make contact
with them, even before they graduate
from school, saying, ‘I will buy everything from you.’ ’’
“This can be a dangerous thing,’’ he
said. “These young artists need time to
develop.’’
Yet many counter that the school’s
soaring fortunes also result from the
Chinese government’s growing tolerance of experimental art, which was
once banned. While Beijing still censors
art that it deems politically offensive, including overtly critical portrayals of the
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MIRANDA MIMI KUO-DEEMER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
With a booming art market, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing
has become a breeding ground for popular young artists. Top, Yu Hong,
a faculty member, painting at her studio. Sui Jianguo (in jacket), one of
China’s most acclaimed sculptors, with students.
ruling Communist Party, economic and
market reforms have changed the way
the government thinks about art and the
way the Central Academy trains young
artists.
In the 1980s the school occupied a modest plot of land near Tiananmen Square
in central Beijing where the faculty rigidly taught Soviet-style Realist art to
about 200 students, many of whom were
destined to work for the state. Today the
school has a new 13-hectare campus and
more than 4,000 students. It is the only
arts college directly supported by the
central government in Beijing.
In the old days, Mr. Zhu said, students
had a passion for art. “They viewed art
as a way of life,’’ he said, “and Central
Academy was a talent pool. Now, as
society has changed, more and more
students view art as a job. Students are
more practical.’’
Faculty salaries average just $700 a
month, but the pay means little to most
of these teachers, whose canvases might
as well be painted in gold. Liu Xiaodong,
a Central Academy graduate who has
been on the faculty since 1994, often
portrays China’s disadvantaged, for
example people displaced in the Three
Gorges Dam area, site of one of China’s
biggest development projects. Yet Mr.
Liu is among the country’s wealthiest
artists; a huge Three Gorges painting
sold at auction last year for $2.7 million,
The Bricklayer’s Son Who Masterminded 9/11
Steve Coll’s riveting new book, “The
Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the
American Century,” not only gives
us the most psychologically detailed
portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind
yet, but it also reveals
the crucial role that his
relatives and their relationship with the royal
house of Saud played in
BOOKS OF
shaping his thinking, his
THE TIMES
ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics.
“The Bin Ladens” uses the prism of
one family to examine the mind-boggling, culture-rocking effects that
sudden oil wealth had on Saudi Arabia.
It also sheds light on the “troubled,
MICHIKO
KAKUTANI
compulsive, greed-inflected, secretburdened” relationship that developed
between that desert nation and the
United States, and the conflicts many
Saudis felt, pulled between the traditional pieties of their ancestors and the
glittering temptations of the West.
By focusing on Mr. bin Laden’s conflicted relationship with his family and
that family’s complicated relationship
with the West, Mr. Coll has added fascinating new details to our understanding of how Mr. bin Laden evolved from
a loyal family adjutant into an angry
outcast, intent on lashing out at the very
people — the Saudi royal family and the
United States of America — that his father and brothers had cultivated in their
business dealings for years.
Mr. Coll’s book also traces a host of
bizarre connections among its cast of
characters, suggesting that there is
often little separation when it comes
to the new globalized world of international finance.
We learn, for instance, that Muhammad bin Laden, Osama’s father, began
his rise by working as a bricklayer
and mason for Aramco, the Arabian
American Oil Company. That organization had been formed to manage the oil
rights of the Standard Oil Company of
California, and the huge international
company that the bin Ladens built
would come to do business with wellknown American firms like General
Electric.
In doing so, they drew
on advice from the law
firm Baker Botts, headed by James A. Baker
III, the former secretary of state and Bush
family adviser.
But increasingly
at odds with the Saudi
royal family, Osama bin Laden left the
kingdom in 1991 for the Sudan, where
he bought a farm and raised horses and
sunflowers while training jihadis.
“Osama seemed to believe during
this period,” Mr. Coll writes, “that he
could have it all in Sudan — wives,
children, business, horticulture, horse
a record for a contemporary Chinese artist at the time.
Sui Jianguo, the school’s dean and one
of the country’s most acclaimed sculptors, has seen his works sell at auction
for as much as $150,000.
The students seem less interested in
politics and more concerned about their
personal struggles and issues of identity,
not unlike artists in the United States
and Europe.
Students, once required to paint the
same figurative portrait again and again,
are now encouraged to look deep within
themselves and to be creative. Chi Peng,
who graduated in 2005 with a new-media
degree, is viewed as a success story. He
broke into the international art market
a few years ago, at 25, with a series of
photographs in which his naked image
sprinted through the streets of Beijing
with blurry red planes in hot pursuit.
Today he sells his computer-enhanced
photographs for as much as $10,000
apiece. A decade ago Central Academy
graduates who were lucky enough to
sell a painting shortly after graduation
would have been delighted to earn $100.
As for the pressures of the fast-moving
art marketplace, he acknowledges some
ambivalence.
Reflecting on his career ascent, he
said: “It’s fast, really fast. I never could
have imagined this, and I’m not sure it’s
a good thing for me.’’
breeding, leisure, pious devotion and jihad
— all of it buoyed by the
deference and public
reputation due a proper
sheikh.”
By 1995, Mr. Coll writes,
there was “a hint of King
Lear in the wilderness”
to his exile: he was out of
money, one of his wives had
divorced him, and his eldest
son had left him to return to
Saudi Arabia. Isolation fueled
Mr. bin Laden’s self-righteousness, and
his wrath increasingly focused on the
United States, particularly after Washington put pressure on the government
of Sudan to expel him from Khartoum,
leading to his exile in 1996 to Afghanistan.