October 6, 2008 Vol. 172 No.

14

Who Can Rescue The Economy?

MCCAIN BY OLIVIER DOULIERY/MCT/LANDOV; OBAMA BY KRISTOFFER TRIPPLAAR/SIPA PRESS; DETAIL FROM THE SCREAM: THE MUNICH MUSEUM/THE MUNICH-ELLINGSEN GROUP/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK (IMAGE FROM SCALA/ART RESOURCE, NY). INSETS: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY; EROS HOAGLAND/REDUX

COVER

Who Can Lead Us Out of This Mess?

By David Von Drehle Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

Illustration by Lon Tweeten for TIME; McCain: Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty; Obama: UPI / Landov

They are different in so many ways: one Republican, one Democrat; one in his 70s, one in his 40s; one white, one black. But John McCain and Barack Obama share the genome of the alpha pol. Timing and instinct are among the dominant traits. How else to explain the fact that both men chose precisely the same day nearly the same hour to field press questions for the first time about the collapsing financial sector and the government's proposed $700 billion bailout? Like the cicada crawling up from the earth precisely 17 years after its mom lays her eggs, or the monarch butterfly fluttering a thousand miles to a particular spot, they were driven by

something wired, not taught. And even more uncanny: they chose almost exactly the same words. Here was Obama: "It is wholly unreasonable to expect that American taxpayers would or should hand this Administration or any Administration a $700 billion blank check with absolutely no oversight or conditions when a lack of oversight in Washington and on Wall Street is exactly what got us into this mess." Here was McCain: "Never before in the history of our nation has so much power and money been concentrated in the hands of one person ... We won't solve a problem caused by poor oversight with a plan that has no oversight." More McCain: "There must be a path for taxpayers to recover the money that is put into this fund." More Obama: "If taxpayers are being asked to underwrite hundreds of billions of dollars to solve this crisis, they must be treated like investors. The American people should share in the upside as Wall Street recovers." McBama: "This plan cannot be a welfare program for Wall Street executives." O'Cain: "No Wall Street executives should profit from taxpayer dollars. It is wrong to ask teachers and farmers and small-business owners to fill the gas tanks of the helicopters of Wall Street tycoons." Is this what they mean by putting an end to partisan bickering? Reaching across the aisle to share focus groups? The lifeblood of the world's largest economy was clotting, but the men who would be President answered with shared simplifications: muttered prayers to the god of oversight, an idle hope that taxpayers might awaken one day to a windfall, and the timeless amusement of humble millionaires bashing arrogant millionaires on behalf of folks who may never breathe debt-free. So the first thing the crisis revealed about the would-be Presidents is that they are Senators not just in name but also by disposition. Americans were angry and confused about the crisis on Wall Street. The moment seemed to cry out for

someone to make sense of it all. Instead McCain and Obama explained how they would amend a draft of the bailout legislation. Then they got up the next morning and tried to negotiate a joint statement urging patriotic calm. And being Senators in today's Washington, both took the stage while shadowed by dubious supporters. Obama has ties to the men who pocketed fortunes while running Fannie Mae off a cliff. McCain's campaign manager was a high-priced adviser to, among others, the equally screwed-up Freddie Mac. One of these two Senators is about to be thrust into the White House, however, where the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression will shape his agenda and probably narrow his options for years to come. Beneath the armor of two politicians in crisis mode, there were signs of the kind of President each would be. Who Speaks for Thrift? Obama went first, repeating words that have become a sort of mantra for him as he surveys the economy: "It's not the time for fear or panic." Image is a very real part of the presidency, and it seems safe to say now, nearly two years into this campaign, that President Obama would do well should times call for unruffled calm. He wore a gray suit that fit like a mother's caress, nary a wrinkle or bead of sweat visible, and spoke in the same laconic tone you might use to discuss the weather with a coworker while sorting your e-mail at the same time. He met the press in Clearwater, Fla., the western end of a wide belt of suburbs along Interstate 4 that usually decides who wins the state's 27 electoral votes. A regional poll out that morning showed him surging, and not even a bank panic was going to make him lose his cool. Another part of the job is choosing advisers, and in preparing for this moment, Obama consulted a glittering cast, including former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker the man who whipped inflation and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who briefly erased the deficit. Yet another role of the President is to set priorities. That's where Obama stumbled.

Asked what impact this trillion-dollar crisis might have on his expansive and expensive array of policy proposals, Obama essentially answered, Maybe none. That's defensible in theory, because each of Obama's big ideas could be, in the long run, good for the U.S. economy. Overhauling the energy sector by selling credits to emit carbon could ignite a big new industry around alternative fuels. Reforming the inefficient health-care system could rein in the cost of insurance and allow employers to put more money into wages rather than into benefits. Drastically improving education ought to lead to a more skilled workforce that produces more valuable goods and services. But all these reforms would involve massive up-front costs, and the current crisis seems to mean that there will be less money available for the next President to invest. If you say, "Well, let's borrow some," you run into the very problem that underlies the financial meltdown in the first place. At every level of American life from the struggling homeowner who can't afford his mortgage to the failing investment banks that can't meet their collateral requirements to the Federal Government, which can't prop up the drooping dollar the bottom line is that we've borrowed too much money. We're all over-leveraged. Obama has said little about how he would tackle that fundamental issue as President. Indeed, his short-term proposals a second round of stimulus checks, for example, and some of his refundable tax credits for working families could have the opposite effect, spurring more consumer spending. That might make voters happy and briefly goose the economy, but it won't persuade America to stop living beyond its means. As far back as the penny-saving Ben Franklin and the conquistadores chasing their dreams of golden cities, this has been a country of mixed minds about how to get rich. We extol the conservative Warren Buffett model: selling 4 cent Cokes for a nickel and conscientiously saving the proceeds, investing in quality goods and wellrun enterprises and shunning a penthouse on Central Park when a five-bedroom home in Omaha, Neb., will do. At the same time, we're always on the lookout for the next gold rush, the next Powerball, the next bubble. The fact that Wall Street banks

were recently borrowing 30 or 40 times their available capital to place bets that home buyers would pay off mortgages 10 times the size of their annual paychecks suggests that America's cultural pendulum has swung too far in the direction of the casino. And Obama hasn't yet shown he's the man to put us back in touch with our thrifty side. Who Has the Courage to Cut? McCain strode to the microphones a short time later in Freeland, Mich., a little town near the spot where the thumb of the Michigan mitten meets the palm. The state's economy is the weakest in the country, and McCain was there to visit one of the few bright spots, a Dow Corning plant devoted to solar-power technology. Dressed in tan trousers, a blue blazer and a striped tie the unofficial uniform of the small-town Chamber of Commerce McCain cut quite a different figure from his opponent. He radiated toughness with an overlay of irritation. He tried to warn us two years ago that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were screwed up, he began, but did America listen? Now look at the trouble we're in. People like a President who seems to share their passions, tastes and grievances, so McCain probably struck a chord with his obvious loathing of the "Wall Street tycoons" and backroom Washington dealmakers he holds responsible for this mess. It's his nature to see problems in terms of personal culpability; while other leaders were debating the best way to set a price for distressed debt, McCain was calling for the head of Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Both Obama and McCain maintained that greed is the root cause of our troubles, but in Obama's mouth it sounded like a diagnosis, whereas from McCain the word landed like an indictment. McCain's advisers, like former Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, have helped him identify a tax proposal that speaks to the underlying cause of the meltdown. Compared with most other developed countries, the U.S. has relatively high taxes on corporations that produce goods and services and relatively low taxes on consumption. "For example," McCain observed, "Ireland now has an 11% business

tax. The United States of America has a 35% business tax. Where are businesses going to go?" McCain's solution is pretty basic: Cut the corporate tax. The trouble is that his corporate tax cut isn't part of a larger overhaul of the tax code that would reward savings and investment while curbing deficit spending whether by individuals, private institutions or the government. The cut is only one among many in a budget that is wildly out of balance. How would President McCain convince people that they can't have a bigger flat-screen than they can afford while he's running a government that promises more services than it has money for? Neither McCain nor Obama has put forth any concrete plan for deficit reduction. If, as the latest polls suggest, McCain is seen as less credible on the economy than Obama is and losing ground as a result the reason is probably that his evasion of reality feels staler than his opponent's. A Republican offering specific tax cuts but only vague pledges to reduce spending is old hat for today's voters. Although Sarah Palin helped McCain reclaim his maverick mantle for a few weeks, this meltdown has once again marked him with the Bush brand. Where Do They Stand? A year ago, most people thought this would be an election dominated by foreign policy. More recently, it looked like an election about gas prices. The candidates are still adjusting to a campaign about collateralized debt obligations. Obama and McCain have been cautious in adapting their messages to the new reality because no one is sure what the new reality actually means. But they may be reluctant to show their hands in an economy that can turn from forgiving to punishing overnight. On balance, McCain would be a lower-tax, lower-spending President who would agree to stiff regulation when necessary. Obama would be quicker to spend, quicker to regulate but also probably faster to react to economic weakness at home. The choice might be as much about reflexes as about ideology. Clearly, the meltdown poses a problem for the next President. But is it the problem a force so fundamental that it flattens everything in its path? Are the agendas and

ambitions, the pet policies and platforms of Senator Maverick and Senator Change about to be squashed under the weight of a long, deep recession? Neither of these men is an economist, and after eight years of an MBA President, America will forgive them for that. What we seek is a leader who can size up a problem, explain it in a way that seems both true and hopeful and match the nation's priorities to its needs. Here's the crisis which man is up to it? They have a month left to give us their answers. With reporting by Jay Newton-Small and Michael Scherer / Washington

NATION

Smear Wars: Welcome to Negative Ad Season

By Michael Scherer Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

The McCain-Palin "Sex Education for Kids" television ad, left, and the Obama-Biden "Bridge to Nowhere" ad

Until he got that fax at the Synagogue, Ralph Cohen thought he knew where Barack Obama stood on Israel. The word around Century Village, a reliably liberal Florida retirement community in Pembroke Pines, was that Obama strongly supported the Jewish state. But the Sept. 23 anonymous document alleged something else: Obama had "surrounded himself with some of the most anti-Semitic friends and anti-Israel advisers." Cohen did not know what to think. "I'm really confused because this is not the first time I have heard this rumor," he said that afternoon. "Obama doesn't really speak much about supporting Israel." Welcome to the late-stage-combat portion of the campaign to lead the free world. Tough attacks, misinformation and anonymous smears are multiplying as both campaigns surrender some control of the conversation to outside groups and dirty tricksters with deep pockets and technological know-how. Legitimate interest groups, high-powered unions and wealthy individuals plan to spend millions on television advertisements, direct mail and computer-generated phone calls over the coming

weeks, almost all of them negative. These efforts will be supplemented by a lot of stuff that is even worse, like the faceless fax blast Cohen received. Outside groups spent more than $550 million on the presidential election in 2004, a total that could be eclipsed this time around, though the money has become even harder to track. That's because many of the donors funding guerrilla campaigns absent any coordination with the candidates have opted to avoid so-called 527 groups, which require full disclosure of donors. Instead, they are using more established nonprofits, like 501(c)(4)s, to find loopholes in the law. "It brings everything off the books," explains Will Evans, who is tracking outside spending at the Center for Investigative Reporting. "It takes away the disclosure that used to happen." The partisan war has further escalated because of technological shifts that have made communicating en masse over the Internet all but free. Viral e-mail messages are spamming inboxes daily, with rumors and innuendo that range from the credible to the outrageously false, with no ready way for voters to distinguish between the two. Both sides have shown an affinity for such dark arts. For months, the AFL-CIO and its affiliates have been blanketing swing states with direct mail promoting Obama and attacking McCain for his "$520 Italian loafers." A union group called Wake Up Wal-Mart is running ads in swing states condemning McCain's "Bush-style corporate tax breaks," while the liberal group Catholics United has an ad saying McCain does not "defend all human life" because, among other issues, he supported the war in Iraq. McCain's allies are in on the game too. The National Rifle Association plans tens of millions of direct-mail pieces attacking Obama as being a threat to hunters, and has television ads already running in Colorado and New Mexico, where voters can cast their ballots early. An outfit known as BornAliveTruth.org has been advertising in swing states with the misleading claim that Obama supports the death of fetuses born after failed abortions. (Obama opposed an Illinois senate bill he said could have jeopardized other abortion statutes; at the time, Illinois law required doctors to save the lives of all viable fetuses after birth.) In Michigan, a political committee called

Freedom's Defense Fund has been running television spots that highlight Obama's ties to the controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright. The Republican Jewish Coalition, a conservative pro-Israel group, has been poll-testing anti-Obama messages in preparation for a large campaign of its own. "We are prepared to spend significantly more than we have in the past," says Matt Brooks, its executive director. The evidence deployed in these campaigns can be dizzyingly convoluted. One newspaper ad by Brooks' group cites the fact that Obama's foreign policy views have been praised by Pat Buchanan, a Republican and a longtime critic of American policy toward Israel. At the same time, the liberal group MoveOn.org has been sending around e-mails with the apparently false claim that Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, supported Buchanan in the 2000 election. (She wore a Buchanan button when he visited Alaska but says she never backed him.) All the money and outside effort has a single goal: reaching voters where the candidates have not. "This election is going to be decided by the grass roots," explains Phil Burress, a social conservative from Ohio who is helping to organize pastors and distribute church voter guides. "It's not going to be decided by the most media buys." Voters like Cohen, who serves as president of the Century Pines Jewish Center, are left to sort through the information on their own. When he received the fax casting doubt on Obama's support of Israel, he contacted Sophie Bock, who runs his condo community's local Democratic club. She told him it was just dirty tricks and pointed to Obama's support among a number of pro-Israel leaders. Then she called her Congresswoman's office to spread the word about the nasty messages being sent to the temple. "They said it's just electioneering," she explained. And it has another five weeks to run.

Three Men And a Bailout

By KAREN TUMULTY AND MASSIMO CALABRESI Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

From Left: Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Hank Paulson David Burnett / Contact for TIME (2); Mike McGregor for TIME

The largest government bailout in U.S. history was born before dawn on Sept. 17, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke woke up at 6 a.m., checked his BlackBerry and saw the very thing he had dreaded: the futures market in free fall. Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and New York Fed president Timothy Geithner had spent the past year staving off one disaster after another, for the most part working behind the scenes. Earlier in the month, they had let investment bank Lehman Brothers slide into oblivion and then ushered another, Merrill Lynch, into the arms of Bank of America. Just the night before, the trio had wrapped up a deal to rescue insurance giant American International Group and gone to bed praying it would halt the panic and worrying it wouldn't.

It didn't. On Sept. 17, the Dow plunged more than 400 points, and all three were picking up signs of an even bigger nightmare, one that most Americans were yet unaware of: the whole financial system was seizing up, from formerly rock-solid banks and money-market funds to the esoteric but vital market for foreign-exchange swaps. Credit--the access to cash that keeps the U.S. and other economies oiled-was simply drying up. Banks stopped lending to other banks, out of fear they would not get the money back. Big companies were having trouble raising cash on the overnight commercial-paper markets. If left unchecked, it would be only a matter of days, maybe less, before businesses would be unable to get the cash they needed to make purchases and meet payrolls. And after that? Think the unthinkable. On Sept. 18, Paulson and Bernanke laid out the dark scenario for stunned-silent congressional leaders: a stock-market crash, businesses going under, unemployment soaring, consumers unable to get so much as a car loan, banks failing so fast that they would quickly drain the federal deposit insurance fund--and with it, countless people's life savings. And unlike the chain reaction that came over the course of weeks and months in 1929, this one would happen in a matter of days, if not faster. "The chain reaction," said Paulson, "is quicker than in the past." And so Paulson and Bernanke asked for the world--and warned lawmakers they had only a few days to deliver it. Treasury needed $700 billion to buy up Wall Street's toxic mortgage-backed assets, which the government would eventually repackage and sell when the real estate market recovers, and a crisis might be averted. The proposal was simple, only three pages long. "Ben, Tim and I had talked for months about how there might be a need to do something like this, discussed the various plans," Paulson told TIME on Sept. 24. "The one thing we knew was that we couldn't or shouldn't go to Congress until we absolutely needed to, because the worst thing would be to go to Congress, ask for it and not get it." The notion that a massive, unprecedented intervention in the financial markets should be the final economic act of a Republican President was made all the more stunning by the sight of no less a free-marketeer than Vice President Dick Cheney

being dispatched to the Hill to sell it to furious Republicans. But Congress is coming late to this crisis. Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner--whose conference calls can number more than half a dozen a day--have been quietly trying to keep the ship in the channel for months. Treasury Secretary Paulson, 62, was one of Wall Street's toughest dealmakers as CEO of Goldman Sachs. Fed chief Bernanke, 54, is a quiet academic who was the chairman of Princeton's economics department and is one of the foremost scholars of the Great Depression and other economic catastrophes. Least known of the three is Geithner, 47, whose years at Treasury in the 1990s and position at the Fed's pivotal New York City office make him the trio's eyes and ears on Wall Street. There is some speculation that Geithner himself might be Treasury Secretary someday in a Democratic Administration. "A very unusually talented young man," said Paulson. "He understands government and understands markets." The three didn't know one another well when the dawning foreclosure crisis threw them together in August 2007. They bring contrasting--and sometimes contentious-styles to their countless strategy sessions, all-nighters and weekends spent away from their families. Paulson is profane and direct and talks in anecdotes. He is also the bearer of bad news, having been the one to let Lehman Brothers' chiefs know they were going down without a helping hand. Checking in from his tomblike suite of offices at the Federal Reserve on Constitution Avenue, where he monitors two computers and a TV while chewing on Necco Wafers, Bernanke is calmer, quieter and prone to offering up a fourth option when three are on the table. Paulson called him "pragmatic, intellectually curious--a courageous guy." Geithner, working from the New York Fed's imposing Manhattan headquarters on Liberty Street, often serves as the bridge between the other two back in Washington. "There isn't anything spoken in anger, but certainly these are men with ideas and can be forceful in how they express them," says one person familiar with their calls. "If there's a sense that someone was miffed or something, then there's a private call right afterward, and then the next call is fine." Who does what depends on which agency has the most authority for the task at hand. Paulson was the primary mover last fall in getting banks and mortgage companies to ease up on homeowners who faced foreclosure, while Bernanke

dropped billions into jittery credit markets with a surprise rate cut. Geithner engineered the rescue in March of the investment bank Bear Stearns. In the summer, Paulson horsed Congress into giving him broad authority to seize troubled lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--which he ended up having to use two months later. And when the three have run into interference from conservatives in the White House who didn't much care for their intervention in free markets--including, at times, aides in the Vice President's office--President Bush has told them, To hell with the flak--just get it done. But asking Congress for $700 billion overnight when lawmakers have been unable for years to find funds for all sorts of other national priorities provoked a bitter and bipartisan backlash. "Paulson confused venture-capital behavior with leading a free society," says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "I don't know why Bernanke thinks a problem largely created by the Fed and the Treasury is something that only the Fed and the Treasury are smart enough to fix." Others went further: "It's financial socialism," Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky told Paulson and Bernanke at a stormy Senate Banking Committee hearing, "and it's un-American." Bunning, a conservative, was echoed by Senator Chris Dodd, a Connecticut liberal: "After reading this proposal, I can only conclude that it is not just our economy that is at risk, but our Constitution as well." Nor could anyone guarantee that $700 billion, as staggering a figure as that is, would be enough to get the job done. After all, the people who would be brought in to do the deals would come from some of the very Wall Street firms that caused this problem in the first place. But as unpalatable as it is to bail out the wealthy financiers whose greed got the economy into this mess--and to do it, no less, in an election year when voters are already furious--the trio maintained that not doing it would be even worse. "We just haven't communicated as well as we need to. The average American looks at this as being about Wall Street. They're angry, and I'm angry too," Paulson said. "But the average American doesn't understand the implications this has for them."

Ultimately Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner must convince the public that fixing the financial mess requires a dramatic expansion of government power--and in particular, the power of their respective offices. That may be a tough sell, in part because the disaster was as much a failure of the political system as of the financial one. Over the past decade, politicians, scooping up campaign contributions from Wall Street, took down the guardrails that had existed since the Depression. And few were better connected in the corridors of power--or more successful at deflecting proposals for tighter government supervision--than mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So lawmakers looked the other way as financial firms grew and morphed and created financial instruments no one understood well enough to oversee. When housing prices caught fire, the big financial players jumped in with borrowed money that they in turn lent out to home buyers who didn't have the means to keep up with the payments. Then the banks sliced and diced those loans and sold them as exotic new securities. All of that left everyone naked and exposed when the market crashed. Congressional critics of the Paulson-Bernanke bailout have demanded to rewrite the plan before approving it, clamoring for aid to struggling homeowners, limits on executive pay at firms getting federal help, perhaps even requiring Treasury to get an equity stake in a firm in exchange for its subpar assets. In the interview with Time on Sept. 24, Paulson said, "I believe that we're going to get a bill that works and a clean bill. It certainly won't be exactly what we asked for--it never is--but it's got to be sufficient to let us do the job." But the bailout is just the beginning. Even if it works, that still leaves the job of making sure it never happens again. Congress needs to remake the 1930s-era patchwork of various federal agencies that oversee banks and financial institutions. "There's so much that needs to be done, so much work," Paulson said. "Some people want to say there's too little regulation. It's not that. It's just outdated, outmoded, ineffective. The architecture was put in place in a different era, and it hasn't kept pace with the evolving financial markets."

And as Paulson pondered the work before himself, Bernanke and Geithner, it was hard not to notice that, for the first time, he sounded like a very tired man.

North Carolina's Financial Center is Riding High

By Michael Grunwald Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

Charlotte's nine Fortune 500 companies include two banking giants. Andy McMillan for TIME

In 1791, George Washington called Charlotte, N.C., a "trifling place." In 1941 an author scoffed that the city had as much use for high-rises "as a hog has for a morning coat." By 1991, Charlotte was still a minor-league city without major-league sports, a cultural wasteland with a central business district that died every weekday after work. "No restaurants. No nightlife. Nothing," recalls seven-term Republican mayor Pat McCrory. "You could lie down in the street and never have to worry about getting run over." A local planner gained notoriety by proving it was impossible to find a Snickers bar downtown after 5 o'clock.

But there's no longer anything trifling about Charlotte. With $2 trillion in assets being managed from the glossy bank towers of Tryon Street, the city is now the nation's No. 2 financial center behind New York City. In early September, Bank of America, the behemoth of North Tryon and the largest U.S. bank, swallowed the beleaguered investment firm Merrill Lynch, while Wachovia, its competitor on South Tryon, considered a merger with Morgan Stanley. And while the rest of the country is sinking, Charlotte is soaring, with 28 construction cranes downtown. It's got the nation's least-battered metropolitan-housing market, lowest office-vacancy rates and fastest-growing airport. It hosts the NBA's Charlotte Bobcats and the NFL's Carolina Panthers. Its center-city population has doubled since 2000, and its light-rail system, just a year old, is already approaching its ridership goal for 2025. Meanwhile, ribboncuttings are scheduled for the NASCAR Hall of Fame, three museums, a theater and an African-American cultural center by 2010. "To understand Charlotte, you have to understand our ambition," says chamber of commerce head Bob Morgan. "We have a serious chip on our shoulder. We don't want to be No. 2 to anybody." Civic leaders often compare their city to New York, Chicago, and even London. On Sept. 11, 2001, McCrory notes, with a sly grin, that local banks swiftly evacuated their skyscrapers: "Everyone in Charlotte assumed we were next." The business of Charlotte was always business. The city began as a trading post at the intersection of two Indian trails, hosted America's first gold rush and first mint, and later blossomed into a transportation and textile hub. Charlotte's white leaders agreed to desegregation relatively early, concluding that turmoil was bad for business. And local banks exploited North Carolina's liberal acquisition laws to build the conglomerates that now dominate headlines. Today Charlotte's nine FORTUNE 500 companies help run the city, not only by writing checks--Bank of America and Wachovia have pledged $15 million apiece to build new cultural centers--but also by helping to write plans. "We're a pro-business city like none I've ever seen," says Center City Partners head Michael Smith. "It's true about Southern hospitality, but there's a real hunger here."

It can be jarring to hear Charlotte's power brokers explain that it's important to improve their city not for its own sake but for the sake of its businesses, which need high-quality culture to attract high-quality talent. But even if they sometimes make Charlotte sound like a New South wealth-generating machine that happens to contain people, their boosterism is producing real progress. Charlotte still has problems with smog, schools and sprawl, and a few condo projects have stalled in the credit crunch. But Charlotte's mix of climate, cheap housing, new urban amenities and old habits of materialism are attracting a new generation of workers, including a reverse migration of black professionals from the North. "If you have a solid rsum and you're willing to work hard, you'll be rewarded here," says Keith Parker, a 41-year-old African American who runs the city's wildly successful transit system. "It takes away the stereotypical fears about Southern cities." Charlotte might not be New York or London yet, but it's over its Snickers problem. "We don't mind when the competition thinks we're Mayberry," says McCrory. "We're happy to be America's best-kept secret."

ESSAY

There They Go Again

By Mike Murphy Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

Challenger Reagan was running behind incumbent Carter until they squared off in Cleveland. Afterward, the Republican never looked back. AP

Though it sounds secretive and glamorous, debate prep is magnificently unpleasant for everybody involved. The candidates have gripped and grinned their way through a savage jungle of fund raisers, powerful local idiots, soggy state-fair corn dogs and rabid, preening reporters just to get to the debates, a dangerous pinnacle where one slipup could cost the election. The campaign staffs are equally exhausted and by now more than a little frustrated with the candidate they have come to both love and hate. Put them all in a room together in what are often poorly planned prep sessions, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster: the staffers discover great catharsis in firing increasingly nasty "prep" questions at the candidates, who in turn become

more and more itchy under fire until finally exploding with a gusher of recriminations at their staffs for failing to prepare them for so many impossible questions. Good debate prep is designed to build up, not tear down, the candidate's confidence. The first trick is to practice with a stand-in who has memorized the opposing candidate's likely answers. This is far easier than it sounds. One of the best-kept secrets of politics is that there are only about 20 "typical" questions. Odds are that one's esteemed opponent has publicly answered every imaginable policy question by the time the debate finally occurs. It is vital that your candidate not hear your opponent's answers for the first time onstage, since that will often lead to panic if a candidate feels the opponent's answer is far better than his or her own. Hmmm.

Great answer. I've got nothing like that. I'm a loser. I'm going to lose this debate. In high school, Belinda would have wanted to go to the prom with him, not me. Anger. MUST ... ATTACK ... NOW!!! At that point something very bad usually happens.
A lot of debate prep is given over to mastering another basic rule: never make the rookie's mistake of actually trying to answer the question you are asked. Candidates are told instead to quickly "pivot" into their central campaign message whenever possible. Question: "Governor, why is your hair on fire?" Answer: "Nobody understands fire better than America's brave firefighters, which is why I'm so proud to say that the heroes who make up the National Firefighters Association took one look at my 11-point plan for comprehensive national health-care reform and strongly endorsed me as the only candidate in this race who is standing up for working, middle-class families who need health care now." Also, always keep talking until the moderator is forced to stop you with a foghorn blast or by reaching for an elephant gun under the desk. Airtime is gold. Consultants have spent the equivalent of entire geologic ages trying to come up with the one item every candidate deeply pines for: the devastating one-liner. To be really devastating, the line must appear to be true, clever and, especially, spontaneous. So teams of moonlighting Hollywood comedy writers have been churning out ideas for

weeks. The classic of the genre is Ronald Reagan's retort to Jimmy Carter in 1980: "There you go again." But nothing is worse than an overlabored gotcha line that falls horribly flat, so spin doctors must first do no harm. Part of this is to gently persuade the candidates to be totally relaxed and natural while simultaneously being very careful not to really be themselves. When Joe Biden squares off against Sarah Palin on Oct. 2, Biden must be cautioned to avoid his powerful urge to bring a laminated copy of his sat scorecard to the podium or to toss any well-meaning compliments at his opponent that include the word gams. It's probably a good idea to strip him of his beloved 4-lb. cuff links before he launches into any working-class-hero stuff as well. Palin should leave the overcooked hockey metaphors in the penalty box, lest we hear some clunker about the "puck" of reform smashing through the good-ol'-boy goalies of D.C.'s terrible status quo. And both will need to avoid the unintended subtext blunder (see "pig, lipstick on"). Finally, the savvy viewer should remember that any moment that looks too perfect to be true probably isn't. I once worked on a campaign in which we made a big show of opening our secret debate-prep session to reporters. The highlight was the part when the candidate dramatically rejected the lame, scripted debate answers we staffers had offered up, vowing instead to just tell it like it was. We were very proud of our candidate; that was precisely the bit we had carefully rehearsed.

Murphy is a GOP political consultant, and was senior strategist for Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential race

The Return of the Age of Activism

By Joe Klein Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

Illustration by Stephen Kroninger for TIME

It now seems clear that George W. Bush will be remembered for symmetrical disasters. His presidency began with the destruction of the Twin Towers by al-Qaeda terrorists. It is ending with the devastation of the Twin Trillions the money spent on a foolish war in Iraq ($653 billion and counting) and on the bailout of a financial industry gone hog wild during the Reagan-initiated Era of Deregulation. Bush has revived Big Government in the worst possible way: the middle class will pay, in perpetuity, for the sins of the powerful. It is hard to put a smiley face on this stinker. A crash and this one seems a doozy usually announces the arrival of hard times. The real economic woe is yet to come, as credit dries up and the economy slips into recession. The power of the next President seems destined to be severely constrained by huge debts and diminishing

tax receipts unless he finds some creative ways out of the morass ... and if he doesn't, his presidency will be a failure. One plausible path to success is proposed by the moderate Democratic scholars William Galston and Elaine Kamarck in a new Third Way paper appropriately titled, "Change You Can Believe in Needs a Government You Can Trust." Galston and Kamarck believe the next wave of activism is going to have to be different from government past precise, streamlined and accountable. In order to build credibility with a severely skeptical public, it will have to be accompanied by a major government reform effort. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have promised reform if they are elected. Both have promised to reregulate the markets (although McCain has always been a vehement deregulator). Both have promised to scrub the Federal Government for waste, fraud and abuse a perennial pledge, but one that will actually need to be met if either man hopes to have the credibility to propose any new government spending. Obama wants to spend more than McCain, so he has to work harder to prove his reform chops. Indeed, Obama has tacitly acknowledged the prevailing skepticism by building accountability into some of his policy proposals. Galston and Kamarck like Obama's proposed Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank "because it would take specific ... decisions [like the 'Bridge to Nowhere'] out of the hands of politicians" and put them under the control of an independent five-member panel, similar to the Federal Reserve Board. Obama's Infrastructure Bank illustrates two other principles that could work to the next President's advantage. First, at a cost of $6 billion per year, it is less than 1/100th the size of the proposed financial bailout a lot of programs that used to sound big seem like peanuts now. Second, it is a program that would create jobs and strengthen the economy. The next President will have to argue that any new policy program will be an investment in economic growth. Given the budgetary realities, it will be easier to get money through Congress for energy programs that produce tangible results like building windmills (or nuclear plants) than for complicated regulatory regimes to control carbon emissions.

Galston and Kamarck argue that the next President should start simple and build gradually on success, although they do acknowledge, "When an ambivalent public is demanding large changes even as it mistrusts government as the agent of change, patient incrementalism can convey the impression of weakness and lack of purpose." Which is why a major overhaul of the health-insurance system may be worth a try, especially if it can be sold as a reform as a means to make U.S. companies more competitive and the economy more efficient. The ground seems particularly ripe for a plan that would provide universal coverage while relieving U.S. businesses of their suffocating health-insurance responsibilities and does it without socializing medicine. Senators Ron Wyden (Democrat, Oregon) and Bob Bennett (Republican, Utah) have made such a proposal, the Healthy Americans Act, which has gained the support of 15 Senate co-sponsors, evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. It would have employers "cash out" their health-care benefits to employees and then would provide a tax deduction of up to $15,210, according to income and family status, for individuals to buy into a government-supervised group of private insurance plans. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Wyden proposal would eventually be revenue-neutral (that is, it wouldn't cost any additional money). According to health-insurance experts at the nonpartisan Lewin Group, it would save money for those making less than $150,000 per year. "It sounds good, but it's really hard to pass anything this complicated," Kamarck warns. "You tell people you're going to take their employer-provided health insurance away, and they'll rip your guts out. It would have to be done gradually." And it would have to be sold brilliantly. But we have seen our system of high finance transformed overnight. It may be time for a dramatic Information Age renovation of government as well.

The Ponzi Economy

By Michael Kinsley Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

Illustration by Brian Stauffer for TIME

They keep telling us that this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But there is at least one difference: in the Great Depression, nobody needed to be told they were in a depression. Today, except for relatively few investment bankers and somewhat more middle-class homeowners, who would guess that things are so dire? Life goes on, reasonably normally. Maybe it's easier to get a cab in New York City--a reliable real-life indication of an economic downturn--but then maybe the effect of the financial crisis is canceled out by the effect of that other crisis, the one about energy. Now, there is a crisis you can sink your teeth into. But this? It's like some terrible, ominous dream where you're being pursued by this huge, ugly, horrible ... what, exactly?

And this $700 billion that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson wants--it sounds like a lot. But then so does the $400 billion annual deficit that the Federal Government was already heading for before this new thing came along. And yet that didn't seem to have any real-life effect either. Nor have any of the other gargantuan numbers that have floated past us in the generation since Ronald Reagan declared in his first Inaugural Address that society is like a family and has to live within its means. We took this as an invitation for our families to start borrowing like the Federal Government. So now we have the national debt, credit-card debt, student-loan debt, plus Social Security and other government promises that amount to more debt (although they aren't on the official books). Then there is the debt that set off this crisis: mortgage debt. Overly easy mortgage borrowing financed the house-price bubble. The bursting of that bubble set off the chain reaction of financial implosions that we are experiencing at the moment. Yet you rarely hear politicians calling it a bubble. In fact, constantly rising real estate prices seems to be regarded as some kind of natural right, or at least a natural state to which we must return as soon as possible. Getting prices "moving again"--which means moving higher--is one all-but-explicit goal of the Paulson bailout. If house prices head back up, fewer mortgages will exceed the value of the asset that backs them up, foreclosures will drop, and bankers will be willing to lend again. More generally, in a nation of homeowners, people will get back that cozy feeling that they are getting richer without lifting a finger. "Confidence"--today's great missing ingredient--will be restored. The crisis will end. The dreamer awakes and takes out a second mortgage, and we all live happily ever after. But building restored confidence on real estate would be foolish. How is the country any richer if the exact same stock of existing housing is suddenly worth, say, 20% more? Other markets produce things. They sell what they produce. When prices go up, they produce more. Not so with real estate, for the most part. This market consists primarily of trading the same thing again and again. And you know the old saw about land: They're not making any more of it. Real estate is the only major consumer market in which how much you'll pay someone depends on your belief about how much someone else will pay you. In this market, prices go up when

people believe they will continue to go up. To restore confidence would mean restoring belief in the greater fool. That shouldn't be hard. It's built into human nature. This is why another term for a Ponzi or pyramid scheme is a confidence trick. It's been obvious for years that real estate was a bubble ready to burst. Politicians and government officials deserve the pounding they are getting for failure to take action sooner. Of course, there weren't a lot of warnings that houses were becoming too valuable (or calls for greater regulation of anything) from the politicians and commentators who are now so indignant. What was not so obvious was the ability of real estate, which has always had a slightly rakish air, to drag even the most respectable and conservative parts of the economy down with it. Other problem areas, like Social Security, also have a Ponzi-scheme flavor: the claims on some pile of money exceed the size of the pile. In many of these schemes, the average American plays both the victim and Ponzi himself. Cassandra has had a tough assignment during the past three decades. She keeps warning of catastrophe, yet things have kept getting better and better. But maybe this is her moment. Maybe this is when the economy stops being something you watch on television and starts being something you live with.

Lessons from The View

By James Poniewozik Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

Steve Fenn

No one would confuse ABC's The View with a serious news program. First, because when former President Bill Clinton appeared on the show on Sept. 22, the fivewoman panel began the hour by discussing the merits of pantsuits vs. skirts. Second, because the NewsHour probably does not employ a staffer who, as View panelist Sherri Shepherd said on air, does not know whether the earth is flat. And finally, because when Joy Behar questioned John McCain on a Sept. 12 episode about campaign ads of his that she believed were lying, she used the word lie. Serious news organizations do not do this! They say "misleading." They say "pushing the envelope." If they're feeling especially feisty, they might note, "Some say this is a lie." But they do not call what they believe to be a lie, a lie. At least not until the camera light goes off.

The View tends to get tossed into the category of "soft" media. But that raises the question, When The View gives an increasingly press-shy candidate his toughest interview in a while, when it and David Letterman prod the scars of the Democratic primary in interviews with Clinton, when pundits debate the fairness of Us Weekly covers and when Saturday Night Live crystallizes the discussion of sexism and vicepresidential choices, what's so soft about them? This campaign was tailor-made for The View. Like the show, it is saturated with identity politics, it is driven by issues respectable journalists are uncomfortable discussing openly, and from time to time, it becomes something of a train wreck. From the primaries to Sarah Palin, 2008 has been a year of topics--from working motherhood to Americans' inter- and intraracial attitudes--that the still mostly white and male journalistic lite have had to handle nervously with tongs. Not so The View, which has a personal-is-political philosophy and five women panelists, two of them African American. It jumped into the Palin controversies lustily, and in a June interview with Michelle Obama, Whoopi Goldberg raised the subject of the lack of media role models for dark-skinned black women. (Anyone who thinks that diversity in TV news is strictly a cosmetic issue should try to imagine Charlie Gibson asking about that.) The View's hosts (including executive producer Barbara Walters) get away with this because they do what the more fettered media believe they can't: address issues people actually care about--as opposed to those the respectable media care about-and say what they actually think. Once upon a time, journalists' circumspection was a source of authority; increasingly, it just seems like phoniness. And while traditional media are trying to adapt to a bloggier, more opinionated age, they're still largely accustomed to the old standards of equivalency: the notion that if candidate X commits a transgression, "balance" requires that you find an equivalent from candidate Y--or at least an X supporter willing to claim one.

The View--like blogs, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert--has no such problem. Are its panelists biased? Sure! They talk about their opinions all day. Goldberg and Behar are plainly pro--Barack Obama; Elisabeth Hasselbeck is an avowed conservative. Yet their interviews are actually newsworthy; Behar got McCain to go on the record supporting his surrogates' attack on Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark, and Hasselbeck, in a March interview, pressed Obama for seven minutes on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy. Granted, in that same interview Walters called Obama "sexy," which would have been a mite awkward coming from Wolf Blitzer. And Goldberg asked McCain if his support of strict-constitutionalist judges meant that she should be worried about the return of slavery, apparently unaware that the Constitution does ban slavery. But there are still things that traditional journalism could learn from The View. First, that transparency works: you know what the panelists believe and can judge their work accordingly. (If anything, The View would benefit from Walters dialing down her studied neutrality even more.) Second, that you can speak truth to power and, if you have a following, power will still have to come back to reach your audience. (You could call this election's crucial swing bloc Wal-Mart moms or mortgage moms--or you could just call them fans of The View.) And finally, that a confrontational interview is not necessarily a bad one. (Similarly, Obama probably did himself more good in his combative interview with Fox's Bill O'Reilly than in his softball talk with msnbc's Keith Olbermann.) Or in the words of Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton--on that supposedly soft outlet SNL--"I invite the media to grow a pair." Of which there are five examples every weekday morning on ABC.

SCIENCE

Unfrozen Tundra
By Bryan Walsh / Greenland Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

Melted ice runs over an iceberg in Disco Bay, Greenland. Hakan Ludwigson for TIME

From 30,000 ft. in the air, the Greenland ice cap seems impregnable, nearly 800 trillion gal. of frozen water locked safely away. But get closer and the cracks begin to emerge. Dancing by helicopter above the mouth of the Jakobshavn Glacier, near the western coast of Greenland, you can make out veins of the purest blue meltwater running between folds of ice. What you can't see is Jakobshavn's inexorable slide toward the sea at 65 ft. to 115 ft. a day--an alarming rate that has accelerated in recent years. As the glacier nears the coast, it breaks off into the Ilulissat fjord, a stream of churning ice that might have birthed the monster that sunk the Titanic. Those icebergs are spat out into Disko Bay, 20 billion metric tons' worth every year, where they loom above the tiny fishing boats that ply these deep, cold waters. Sail close and you'll find that these seemingly permanent cathedrals of ice, some 200 ft. to 300 ft. high, are leaking water like broken pipes. They're dying. Greenland is the front line in humanity's battle against climate change. The warming that is easy to dismiss elsewhere is undeniable on this 860,000-sq.-mi. island of fewer than 60,000 people. More and more of Greenland, whose frozen expanses are a living remnant of the last ice age, disappears each year, with as much as 150 billion metric tons of glacier vanishing annually, according to one estimate. If all the

ice on Greenland were to melt tomorrow, global sea levels would rise more than 20 ft.--enough to swamp many coastal cities. Though no one thinks that will happen anytime soon, what keeps glaciologists awake at night is that thinking is not the same as knowing--and no one can say with certainty what Greenland's fate will be. That's why researchers like Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, stationed on a barren speck of land near the heart of Greenland's ice sheet to decode the island's climatic history, is among TIME's heroes for the environment. These scientists, activists, financiers and political and religious leaders--chronicled in the following pages--display a passion for the planet that just might save it. I got a firsthand look at such heroism this summer when I joined a team of international researchers led by Dahl-Jensen at the NEEM camp in Greenland. NEEM stands for North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (the acronym is Danish, as are the leaders of the project), and the scientists are digging deep into the Greenland ice-more than a mile and a half deep to be precise--to try to understand its pedigree. Depth is time, and the lower you go, the further back in history you travel. As ice formed in Greenland, year after cold year, bits of atmosphere were trapped in the layers. Drilling into the ice and fishing out samples--ice cores--that contain tiny bubbles of that ancient air can reveal the temperature, the concentration of greenhouse gases, even the ambient dust from the year that layer was formed. It's like tree rings but for climatic history. "In order to predict the future, we have to understand the past," says Minik Rosing, a geologist at the University of Copenhagen. NEEM is focused on the Eemian stage, a period from about 115,000 to 130,000 years ago, right before the last ice age, when the world was warm--quite warm, about 9F hotter in Europe than it is today. Given that the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that temperatures could rise 3.24F to 7.2F over the coming century, the Eemian could offer a model for the effect such thermometer swings will have on Greenland's ice. A full climatic record of the Eemian has never been constructed, but over the next several summers (scientific work is seasonal on the freezing-cold island), the NEEM researchers hope to harvest cores that will help

them track the state of the ice throughout that era, when Greenland was warm enough to actually be green. Dahl-Jensen believes that with enough information, they will be able to project forward and understand just how vulnerable Greenland is to future melting. "With 10 years of intense research, I think we can reach a reliable estimate for that tipping point," she says. It's that type of confidence that serves as our light in the climatic darkness, living proof that hope hasn't vanished. You need that comfort when you're standing on a rocky hilltop in Greenland, watching the ice disappear. As Jakobshavn gives way to the fjord, a stadium-size iceberg suddenly implodes, disintegrating like a collapsing skyscraper. I watch as a plume of mist fills the air where the iceberg once was, while the fjord churns on. And then I wonder, Just how much time do Greenland and the rest of us have before it's too late? That may be up to us--and the heroes we choose to follow.

SOCIETY

A Spa That Slithers

By Tim McGirk / Talmei Elazar Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

At an offbeat spa in northern Israel, tourists - and repeat customers - relax as snakes knead and strangely soothe. Uriel Sinai / Getty for TIME

Most spas have names that conjure up an atmosphere of bliss and tranquillity. So I am a little taken aback by the sign outside the spa in the orange groves of northern Israel. It reads, ADA BARAK'S CARNIVOROUS PLANT FARM. Barak makes most of her income by showing off her plants, which eat everything from insects and reptiles to small mammals and schnitzel. She started grabbing one of the little snakes slithering in and out of the hungry plants' jaws and passing it around to visitors at the end of her act. And that was how she hit on the snakes' therapeutic value. "Some people said that holding the snakes made them feel better, relaxed," she says. "One old lady said it was soothing, like a cold compress."

Traditionally, snakes have gotten a bad rap in the Holy Land--just ask Eve--so I am surprised that Barak's technique has found acceptance here in modern Israel. After some experimenting, she eventually settled on a combo of big snakes for a deep massage (the king and corn snakes are heavy enough to produce a kneading sensation) and little ones, whose passage over the skin is a trembling flutter. "People either like it a lot or they hate it," says Barak. She makes this remark as a busload of Israelis arrives, and an 18-year-old with flowing brown hair agrees to lie down and let the snakes--all nonvenomous--make themselves at home on her bare belly. The little ones move over her neck and face like caressing fingers. She looks enraptured. I decide to get the $80 spa treatment, since I am dubious about both its calming and its curative effects. Barak's cousin Dr. Nava Becher reminds me that Moses coiled a bronze snake around his staff and thrust it upward to the sky ("to remind people of the Almighty," she says) and that the snake is a symbol for medicine ("meaning that what kills you can also cure you"). Many of Barak's regular clients claim that the snakes help ease migraines and soothe sore muscles. She leads me into a bright room with tropical plants. I strip off my shirt and trousers and lie on a massage table. (Just as I am psyching myself up for the treatment, I see one of the little snakes, with a string of brick-colored diamonds along its spine, open its mouth impossibly wide. Is it going to strike? No--it coughs up a half-digested mouse, leading me to assume that the snake is as queasy about giving me a massage as I am about getting one.) When Barak plops a writhing tangle of snakes on my belly, their first reaction, and mine, is panic. They race away in six directions, and she patiently plops them back, braiding them together to slow their getaway. Once my panic subsides, I can focus on the snakes moving across my skin. They're cool, dry and smooth. It's not unpleasant, except when a tiny one stops to nibble on my eyelashes. Their presence stirs something deep and peaceful in me. I come away relaxed and curiously light-headed, though I don't feel the urge to buy myself a python to continue this therapy at home.

It's a lot to ask a tourist to be swarmed by snakes. For a more traditional massage, many visitors head up to the Sea of Galilee. Secluded in the pine forests is the Bayit Bagalil, a boutique hotel offering tasty Mediterranean cuisine, views of the water Jesus supposedly walked on and a variety of massages for those who prefer a human's touch to a reptile's. It's also worthwhile to splash in the mineral-laden Dead Sea, renowned as a health spa ever since the Queen of Sheba raved about its medicinal properties 4,000 years ago. (Hint: resorts like the Mvenpick on the Jordanian side are more luxurious and, because they are less traveled, far cheaper.) Around the Dead Sea, though, stay away from the snakes: their touch might soothe, but their bite is fatal.

WORLD

Lula's Way
By TIM PADGETT AND ANDREW DOWNIE / BRASILIA Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

Claudio Edinger for TIME

With their endless string of pearl beaches, heavenly climate and sensual bossa nova culture, Brazilians consider themselves uniquely blessed. So when the first of two gigantic oil fields was discovered off the coast near Rio de Janeiro last fall, President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva saw it simply as further proof of a celestial bond. "God," Lula gushed, "is Brazilian." That kind of good fortune, divine or not, has helped Lula, 62, a former steelworkers' union leader and high school dropout, become Brazil's most popular President in a half-century. The oil find could make Brazil one of the world's largest crude

producers, but even without that bounty, the economy has been growing as vigorously as a guava tree in the Amazon rain forest, allowing Brazil to start reducing its epic social inequality. Economic strength has also allowed the country to flex its diplomatic clout as the hemisphere's first real counterweight to the U.S. Lula led the creation of a bloc of developing nations, the G-20, to thwart U.S. and European hegemony in global trade talks. "I believe implicitly that Brazil has found its way," Lula told Time at the Planalto presidential palace in Braslia. Now Lula is aiming for membership in the world's most exclusive club, the group of nations with permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, part of his effort to "change the world's political and commercial geography." Brazil, the world's fifth most populous country, has begun lobbying more ardently for membership, and in his speech to the General Assembly in New York City on Sept. 23, Lula argued that the council's "distorted representation is an obstacle to the multilateral world we desire." That may be a dream too far for the bearded, gravelly voiced President, but Lula's self-confidence is understandable: he has pulled off other unlikely feats. When he was first elected in 2002, many feared that Lula and his leftist Workers' Party would trash Brazil's emerging economy by pursuing socialist policies. Instead, Lula shrewdly embraced fiscal sobriety, strengthening Brazil's currency, the real, and reforming a bloated civil service pension system. Those policies and a windfall in commodities fueled a boom--the economy will grow 5% or more again this year, and inflation is historically low. Even his rivals acknowledge that despite his firebrand image, Lula has been a deft political operator. "The danger with Lula is that he can be rather messianic," says Rubens Ricpero, a Finance Minister in the 1990s, when Lula opposed the market reforms he now backs. "But he's one of the most intelligent politicians in the world." Just as important, Lula has steered Brazil between the Scylla and Charybdis of the right-wing Bush Administration and left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez, whose clashes have rocked Latin America. In Washington, Lula is seen as an important ally. "Our relationship is solid--there are lots of points of convergence,"

says Christopher McMullen, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. But while Lula bonds with Bush over biofuels--Brazil is a global pioneer in that area--he's also huddling with Chvez over plans to turn South America into an integrated economic bloc along the lines of the European Union. Lula, in fact, is one of the few leaders both Bush and Chvez will listen to. "I joke with them and tell them their fight is very weird," Lula says, "because oil makes them so dependent on each other." Lula's biggest challenge, though, has been bridging the huge chasm between Brazil's rich and poor--a gap that makes the country look more like the feudal monarchy it was in the 19th century than the modern democracy it wants to be in the 21st. Lula, who as an impoverished kid shined shoes on the streets of So Paulo, has pumped more than $100 billion into social projects ranging from microfinance to grants for families who keep their kids in school. As a result, 52% of Brazil's 190 million people are now designated as middle class, up from 43% in 2002. At the same time, he hopes to make Brazil more business friendly with a $280 billion Growth Acceleration Program to boost infrastructure and cut taxes. "It's called doing things right," Lula says, "allowing the rich to earn money with their investments and allowing the poor to participate in economic growth." For all his successes, though, some of Brazil's oldest maladies have proved stubbornly resistant to Lula's ministrations. Official corruption remains rampant; Lula blames a fetid political culture "that has been there for centuries," but that's an old excuse. One of his election promises was to clean up Brazilian politics, and with two years to go--rules forbid him to seek a third consecutive term--he'll have to start wielding the broom vigorously. The education system, despite increased funding and access, is still an embarrassment: Brazilian students continue to score at the bottom on international math and reading tests. Taxes are exorbitant, Amazon deforestation is rising again, and Brazil has one of the world's most wasteful public bureaucracies. To fix all those problems in two years would require much more divine intervention.

BUSINESS

America's No. 1 Export: Debt

By Justin Fox Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

Illustration by Harry Campbell for TIME

Japan and Germany make cars. Saudi Arabia pumps oil. China supplies the world with socks and toys and flat-screen TVs. What does the United States produce? Lots of stuff, but in recent years this country's No. 1 export--by far--has been debt. When you look at things this way, it becomes clearer what the frenzy in New York City and Washington is all about. There are major quality issues with our nation's flagship product. The authorities have acknowledged the problem--"This is a humbling, humbling time for the United States of America" is how Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson put it in one TV interview. So now Paulson & Co. are recalling defective financial products en masse, slapping GUARANTEED BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT labels on some of them and replacing others outright with U.S. treasuries.

It's textbook crisis management, similar to Johnson & Johnson's famously forthright and successful reaction to the Tylenol tampering scare of 1982. So far, so good. But while Johnson & Johnson was soon able to restore Tylenol's lost market share, the U.S. faces a different challenge. Our quandary is that we are apparently not capable of safely manufacturing $700 billion in debt securities to sell to foreigners every year, as we've been doing since 2005. (That this is the same total as Treasury's bailout plan is just a coincidence.) If we keep trying to borrow that much from overseas--as you've probably gathered, selling debt means borrowing money--today's quality problems may soon seem petty. For now, we can still reassure buyers around the world by slapping that GUARANTEED label on our debt. But as financial crisis and economic slowdown cause government debts to burgeon, and as commitments to Social Security and Medicare loom closer as baby boomers retire, that confidence could easily fade. So while today's crisis management makes a certain amount of sense, returning to the borrow-and-spend status quo afterward seems like a disastrous idea. If the U.S. is to have a future as an economic power, its long love affair with borrowed money has to end. Right? "I hesitate to say yes, because people--including me--have been saying that it had to come to an end now for years, and it hasn't," says R. Taggart Murphy, an expert on global capital flows who teaches at the University of Tsukuba's business school in Tokyo. Then he adds, "It looks pretty clearly like we're in the endgame right now." This country's move into big-time debt exports began with the big-time government deficits of the early 1980s--which had to be financed by somebody. "The Reagan Revolution was essentially an experiment in seeing how much money America could borrow from overseas," says Murphy, who at the time was an investment banker in Tokyo. The answer was lots. Guided by Murphy and his ilk, Japan snapped up U.S. treasuries and other debt, keeping interest rates here from exploding as many had feared.

In the early 1990s, as the U.S. got its fiscal house in order, the capital inflows from overseas shrank. Late in the decade, they returned, with a twist: foreign investors and companies were buying into corporate America to get in on an economic boom. That boom ended in 2001. But the Bush Administration soon began running deficits, and foreigners discovered an American financial product to which they'd never paid much heed before: mortgage securities. The result was a staggering increase in capital inflows. The inevitable flip side was a staggering rise in the current account deficit--basically, the trade deficit plus a few other things. It grew from $114 billion in 1995 to $417 billion in 2000 to a record $788 billion in 2006 before falling to $731 billion, or 5% of GDP, last year. Political discussion of this shortfall usually focuses on trade agreements and exchange rates. But if the U.S. simply stopped borrowing so much--that is, if Washington balanced its budget and restrained financial companies from loading U.S. households with ever more debt--the current account deficit would evaporate. The housing crash and resulting credit crunch are already forcing U.S. households to retrench. Government--fearing disaster if everybody retrenches at the same time-has stepped into the breach. Again, that makes sense in a crisis. But once the panic has passed, the U.S. will simply be steering toward another, even bigger, crisis unless it finds something to replace debt as its No. 1 export. Of course, less money borrowed means less money to spend. "Can you imagine McCain or Obama going around saying he wants to reduce your standard of living?" asks Murphy. Probably not. But maybe they could just sell it as, say, diversifying our product offering.

TECHNOLOGY

MySpace Launches a Free-Music Revolution

By Josh Quittner Wednesday, Sep. 24, 2008

I like to boast, smugly, that I haven't paid for a CD in years. Instead, I subscribe to a music service called Rhapsody that gives me all the tunes I want for $12.99 a month. But with social-networking giant MySpace unveiling its new music service Sept. 25, I'm becoming less smug by the moment. To begin with, MySpace Music is free, and users get instant access to a vast library of songs. The site has inked deals to upload the catalogs of the four major labels: EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. Throw in songs from the 5 million artists who already have pages on the site, and MySpace has a pretty good starter set. How good? MySpace won't say how big its song library is but admits it trails rivals like Rhapsody and iTunes. Although MySpace's agreements with those four mondo labels cover more than 2 million titles, a friend who works at one of the Big Four says the site is struggling to get the catalogs online and is also dealing with "artist sensitivities" meaning a few musicians are unwilling to make some of their albums available.

Over time, MySpace says its library will grow and be competitive with those of Rhapsody and iTunes, something that music industry insiders say is part of the Grand Plan for music. "A healthy ecosystem that's all we want," my friend says. "Music as a utility." In other words, the labels want to see the same library of music available everywhere, in every possible way: for free and by subscription; streaming from sites and pay-per-download; locked and unlocked. Let the best business model win! The labels make money every which way. Indeed, both Sony Ericsson and its rival, Nokia, are launching services overseas this year (and later in the U.S., my friend says) that would give cell phone users access to the same vast music library, for free. The tunes would be linked to the cellular handsets, but even if you dropped your mobile carrier, you could keep the songs you downloaded. The current size of its library notwithstanding, MySpace Music does a number of things that will excite music fans and might help the social network fight off rival Facebook, which since April has surpassed it in monthly traffic. A set of tools called MyMusic lets you create a limitless number of playlists (with as many as 100 songs on each) that you can listen to on the site or share with your buddies. Say, for instance, you're hankering for some Coldplay. Create a playlist, drag and drop all four albums, and you're good to go. The full-length songs stream at something less than CD quality (128 kilobits per sec.), but it's good enough on a computer. It almost goes without saying that MySpace will also happily sell you songs and albums its new service doesn't cover; the site has partnered with Amazon, which handles the transactions and sends you unlocked MP3s. Indeed, when you set up MyMusic, you can add an Amazon applet and install a music downloader (Mac and Windows are supported, I'm told) that will drop the purchased music wherever you want, including into iTunes, so you can transfer the songs to your iPod. (Songs range from 79 cents to 99 cents each.) That's all pretty cool, but MySpace's real boon is providing people a better way to find new music. Music discovery is all the rage these days; Apple's Genius feature and Microsoft's Zune music player both rely on a computer-mediated, algorithmic approach to recommendations. MyMusic's solution is simpler, and far better, I think:

it lets you know what your friends are listening to. Like Facebook, MySpace has a news feed, which figures out which of your friends interests you most and communicates their doings to you. So, if my musician brother Seth Augustus (a stage name) adds an interesting tune to his playlist, my news feed will report that. I can even subscribe to his playlists. That said, MySpace faces some hurdles. For one thing, Seth is my only friend on MySpace; the rest of my family and all of my friends are on Facebook. It remains to be seen whether MyMusic will be enough to get them to migrate. Also, Rhapsody streams music to my home music system, Sonos, which wirelessly connects to speakers throughout my house. By comparison, the free portion of MySpace Music streams tunes only to the computer at this point. So I'll keep subscribing to Rhapsody, but I'm guessing its days in my household, anyway are numbered.

Maligned Online? How to Retaliate Against Web Attacks

By Anita Hamilton Friday, Sep. 19, 2008

Nasty breakups are bad enough. But what if your ex broadcast your dirty laundry to millions? That's what British actress Tricia Walsh-Smith did infamously on April 10, when she posted the first of three YouTube videos in which she slammed her soonto-be-ex-husband for everything from his questionable character and inadequate sexual skills to his extended family, whom she disliked. Walsh-Smith's videos, which were collectively viewed more than 4 million times, reflect more than just the despair of a jilted woman. They're part of a larger and fast-growing problem: reputationwrecking online. Derogatory comments spread easily online and off, but in the real world, they are often easily forgotten. The same kind of malicious statement posted online can spread farther and last forever. "Now we have this giant megaphone of the Internet, where every little whisper about someone shows up in Google," says Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. These days, as more and more people join social-networking sites, comment on opinion-sharing sites like TripAdvisor.com and Yelp.com or otherwise participate in life online, personal attacks against individuals and businesses on the Web are being taken more seriously than ever. Barb-trading has escalated sometimes in front of thousands of witnesses and so too have the ways in which the maligned are

fighting back. Many try to discredit their attackers by posting a rebuttal to the offending post or by asking website managers to remove disagreeable material. Some folks sue their critics for defamation. Still others take the ultimate step, hiring online-reputation-management firms to help re-craft their Web image from scratch. If you had the resources, you could always launch your own counterattack: Barack Obama, frustrated with the false rumors being spread about his background and religious history, created a website in June called Fight The Smears to debunk them. But taking matters into one's own hands can be fraught. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was notoriously outed in 2005 for attempting to whitewash his own entry on the site (Wiki contributors noted that he deleted references to his Wikipedia cofounder, Larry Sanger, as well as to a search site he founded that included adult content). Now a monitoring program called WikiWatcher aims to unmask similar transgressions on other Wiki entries such as when ExxonMobil tried to downplay the environmental impact of the Valdez oil spill and when the FBI deleted aerial images of the Guantnamo Bay detention camp from the camp's entry. If you can't mute your critics on your own, suing them for defamation might seem like the most effective way to stop the problem. But to win a case, you'd have to prove that intentionally false statements have damaged a lot more than just your feelings. You would also have to know whom exactly to sue, which can be virtually impossible since so many Web posts especially on gossip sites like Juicy Campus, Faceliss and The Dirty are anonymous or pseudonymous. What's more, the 1996 Communications Decency Act frees site operators from any liability for posts made by visitors to their sites. "It is ridiculous how you can post something on the Internet and not be accountable for it," says Chris Martin, founder of the online-reputationmanagement firm Reputation Hawk. The primary goal of online-reputation-management firms like Martin's is to expunge the first page of a client's Google search results of all negative links. "We call the top five search results the 'danger zone,' because you don't even have to scroll down to see them," says Martin. For $1,500 a month, Reputation Hawk will actually create new Web pages that cast you in a positive light (usually with your name in the URL),

post links to positive Web mentions of you on social-bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us and start positive blogs on Blogger or WordPress. (Keeping the blogs upto-date is your responsibility, however.) "You take all this new information we create and put so much pressure on the top 10 results in Google that the false negative stuff gets pushed down," says Martin, who says it can take months to burnish an online image. "Once it's pushed out of the top 10, they're pretty much O.K." (Of course, it's not a perfect solution readers who click to the second page of your search results will uncover your cyberskeletons.) If you don't have a few thousand dollars to spare, a more reasonable approach is to confront your detractors directly. "The answer to bad speech is more speech," says Google's Matt Cutts, who's in charge of ranking search results. To start, he suggests setting up a free Google Alert, which e-mails you every time your name appears in a blog post or on a website; this at least lets you know if you have a problem and, often, with whom. Once you've found your critics, you have to figure out what to say. The right response will get you everywhere: Selena Kellinger, owner of the party-goods store Razzberry Lips in San Jose, Calif., apologized to a customer who had posted a critical review of her store on Yelp. Her critic, Jumoke Jones, was so impressed with Kellinger that she replaced her negative review with a positive one. Karl Idsvoog, a journalism professor at Kent Sate University in Ohio, took a more confrontational tack. He responded to students' accusations that he was a "rude, disrespectful, pretentious snob" on Rate My Professors by posting a Web video on Professors Strike Back that said, "We're not there to babysit. We're there to train professionals. Grow up." The upside of the ever churning online rumor mill is that it does justice to those subjects who have come by their bad reputations legitimately. "Every fraudster in the world thinks that we're here to help them out, but we're not," says Robert Russo, CEO of Defend My Name. For bad guys, the megaphone of the Web can be a very

useful thing. For everybody else, it's nice to know that when the virtual community starts to whisper, you can now shout back.

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Spike Lee Goes to War with Miracle at St. Anna

By Richard Corliss Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

The director on location in Tuscany for Miracle at St. Anna, his film about black soldiers in World War II Everett

Miracle at St. Anna opens with images of John Wayne and his men in the World War
II movie The Longest Day flickering on a TV screen in harsh black and white. Make that all white. An elderly African American (Laz Alonso) stares at the TV and murmurs, "Pilgrim, we fought for this country too." Earlier this year, Spike Lee picked a fight with Clint Eastwood over the lack of black soldiers in Eastwood's Iwo Jima films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo

Jima. Clint opined that "a guy like that should shut his face"; Spike replied, "The man

is not my father, and we're not on a plantation either." No doubt that Lee was voicing a social grievance, but he was also tub-thumping some early publicity for his own WW II film the one with the John Wayne clip and the typically smoldering Spike Lee quip. With 20 features since his 1986 debut She's Gotta Have It, plus music videos, excellent documentaries like 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke and, not least, his Nike commercials with Michael Jordan, Lee is more than just film history's leading black director. He has raised racial awareness, and hackles, while establishing a powerful brand name: Spike Lee. From the incendiary Do the Right Thing in 1989 to his box-office hit Inside Man two years ago, Lee has fashioned an ornery, instantly recognizable personality that stamps his films, his clothing line and his public statements. All seem like variations on the Mars Blackmon character he played in

She's Gotta Have It: fresh, feisty, indefatigable.

In doing so, Lee, 51, has become one of three New York directors all diminutive, all accomplished who are so well known, and whose movies constitute such a vivid collective biography of the city in the late 20th century, that strangers seeing them on the street are likely to hail them by their first names: "Woody!" "Marty!" "Spike!" A Producer of Genius Allen and Scorsese have their Oscars. Lee has never been nominated for Best Director. Granted, he's not quite in their league, though he loves zippy tracking shots as much as Scorsese, and the New York Knicks as much as Allen. But Lee is a producer of genius, and not just in his self-marketing which, don't knock it, is a boon to someone who's essentially an independent auteur. He chooses provocative projects, gets big stars when he needs them, makes vigorous, good-looking films and does it on half a Hollywood budget. All the money is on the screen, and so are his prickliness and passion. Tender, angry, unafraid of mixing comedy and sentiment, Lee's pictures bulge with so many ideas, they're hard to contain. Sometimes he holds them together through sheer nerve, as in the loopy racial satire Bamboozled; in other films, like Do the Right Thing, the

story eventually explodes in the moviegoer's face. All the audience can expect is to be lectured, hassled and entertained. That's the case with Miracle at St. Anna, an unwieldy epic that leapfrogs four decades and two continents while trying to cram the undertold history of black soldiers in World War II into a fable of the friendship between an Italian boy and his "chocolate giant." At more than 2 1/2 hours, it's a mess, but it's got battle scenes that thrill and horrify and a brilliantly choreographed slaughter of Italian innocents; the title could have been Massacre at St. Anna. Based on James McBride's novel and screenplay, the movie begins in 1983 with Hector Negron (Alonso), a New York City postal worker, standing behind his caged-in window at the post office. When a man approaches and asks for a stamp, Negron shoots him dead with a German Luger. Later, in Negron's apartment, police discover the head of a priceless statue. The rest of the film, a flashback to Italy in 1944, explains how Negron got the statue and why he executed the stranger. Negron was a member of the 92nd Infantry Division, the black GIs known as Buffalo Soldiers. Their white captain sends them on a suicide mission against the Nazis, but four of them Corporal Negron, Staff Sergeant Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), Sergeant Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy) and Private Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller) make it across a river and into a remote village. There they fend off the Germans and mix with the locals, especially the fierce Renata (Valentina Cervi), the crafty Partisan Rodolfo (Sergio Albelli) and 8-year-old Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi), whose life Train saves. Too Much and Not Enough Within each Spike Lee movie, a dozen different films are fighting to get out, and the best one doesn't always win. Miracle at St. Anna lugs its central narrative around much as Train does the statue head. And just as he rubs it for good luck, so Lee hopes the bonding of slow, sweet, huge Train and little Angelo a kitschy mix of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Charlie Chaplin's The Kid will propel audiences through the screeds on racism and the disasters of war.

Yet these are the strongest sections: a seductive broadcast by the Nazis' Axis Sally to the black soldiers; a vignette of the soldiers at a Louisiana restaurant run by a rancid racist; a montage of the Italians, the Germans and the Americans before battle, saying the same prayer in three languages; a shot of corpses in the river, one helmet floating from body to body; and the final shoot-out with the Nazis, where sudden death is both surprising and inevitable. "This is a white man's war," the cynical Cummings notes. "Negroes got nothin' to do with it." Yet it becomes their war when they're in an isolated village with mostly sympathetic Italians. The men certainly can't be indifferent to the atrocities visited on their hosts. One such scene (based on fact, like much of the novel and the movie) leaves the viewer in numbed bereavement. As Negron puts it, "They killed so many, they ran out of bullets. They burnt so many, they ran out of fuel." By the end of St. Anna, Lee and McBride have laid on so many miracles, the moviegoer runs out of patience. The film goes for broke and in the process breaks. It's too much and not enough. One could find a perfectly good movie, of normal length, by watching St. Anna on DVD and skipping the awful chapters to focus on the terrific ones. But that's a familiar test, or trap, in a Lee film. He loves to twist a picture out of shape, daring the audience to keep up with the abrupt shift of moods, the wagging finger of the director. And if you start arguing with Miracle at St. Anna, that's O.K. with him. Spike Lee has always loved a good fight.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist: Enchanted Evening

Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

Nick (Cera) and Norah (Dennings) in search of a favorite band

Though his voice is stuck in an uncomfortable prepubescent register, Michael Cera has the gift of appearing both wise beyond his years and not at all happy about it. In

Juno and Superbad and, before that, on Arrested Development, Cera has displayed
that stricken look, as if he'd received a vision of what life has in store for him, and it worries him sick. He seems prematurely 40, so that any teen trauma has the impact of a midlife crisis or some awful dream endlessly repeating itself. As Nick O'Leary in

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, he's the theoretically cool bass player in a band
playing a Manhattan club. Except that the band is called the Jerk Offs, the other two members are gay, their audience includes blas members of Nick's New Jersey high school, and one of them is Tris (Alexis Dziena), the girl Nick has nakedly and mostly unrequitedly adored for ages.

One of the acuities of this smart, sweet, bordering-on-adorable romantic comedy is its awareness that by senior year, teens have been stuck for so long in their designated roles nerd, vamp, rebel hottie that they feel like indentured servants to them. The most agreeable myth of the movie, directed by Peter Sollett and scripted by Lorene Scafaria, from a novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, is that spending a night in New York City can crack the shell of stereotype to reveal your utterly cool inner life to someone who turns out to be your soul mate. For Nick, that would be Norah Silverberg (Kat Dennings), whose top-girl hauteur masks her discontent with every punk-star wannabe who wants a recording contract with her music-producer father. She doesn't need leeches; she wants a boyfriend. Just not the quiet, doomed bassist in a queercore band. Awkward pain is not exactly news in teen movies. John Hughes got it just right in his Brat Pack pictures of the mid-'80s (Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink and their kin), and so did the never-to-be-equaled Heathers. Nick & Norah just takes adolescent isolation a step further by ditching the parent figures and leaving the kids to forge their own ethics and agendas on one make-or-break night in Gotham. The plot's twin spurs are that Norah has to keep tabs on her alkie friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) her nickname is Winehouse and that a favorite mystery band, Where's Fluffy, may be playing a concert tonight and the teens will stay in town until they locate the venue. Nick's pathetic ardor for Tris has a surface plausibility, since she's been assembled from the used parts of a teen boy's fantasy. With her full mouth, caterpillar eyebrows, Naugahyde breasts and the inspiration, when aroused, to crawl onto a guy's car hood and leave her lipstick imprint on the windshield, she could be this year's Angelina Jolie knockoff. On the downside is her habit of ignoring Nick or, if she notices the guy, humiliating him. ("Can we go straight to laughing about this?" he asks after one abashing incident. That's his cure for a broken heart: instant irony.) Tris is pretty catty to Norah as well. That's why Norah sidles up to Nick, at random, asks him to be her boyfriend for five minutes and gives him a kiss it'll be hard to shake off.

Who wouldn't be smitten by Norah? As incarnated by Dennings, who has come of age nicely since playing Catherine Keener's daughter in The 40 Year-Old Virgin three years ago, she has the poise of a privileged child getting hit on by guys is just an occupational hazard and is cocooned in her persona. So she's a good match for Nick, who is beyond being embarrassed by driving a battered yellow Yugo that strangers mistake for a taxi or carrying Handi Wipes in his pocket. They also like the same music, which can unite the most disparate souls. The big problem is his devotion to Tris, which baffles Norah ("I could floss with that girl"). That's Nick's cage; he's a bit too at home in his misery. He is who he is, until Norah helps him be someone better. Much of Nick & Norah was shot on the Lower East Side, a grimy area that Sollett polishes into a wonderland where parking spaces are always available and the street people are genial poets. He has also enlisted stalwarts from Saturday Night Live (Seth Meyers, Andy Samberg) and the Harold & Kumar movies (John Cho). But this film doesn't need the validation of older comics; it's got winning stars in their early 20s who are true both to this moment and to old star quality. In the 1930s, Hollywood had The Thin Man, with the married couple Nick and Nora Charles as the epitome of Manhattan swank. Though this Nick and Norah have a lot more angst, they're just as worth watching, admiring and cuddling up to.

Text and the City

By Lev Grossman Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

Candace Bushnell Illustration by Megan Hess for TIME

Candace Bushnell is the Evelyn Waugh of our time. Or she would be if Waugh had been a) a woman and b) a terrible writer. Waugh was a true wit and a master stylist who loved and despised his subjects (the English upper classes) with such a hopeless passion that he ended up capturing them completely. Bushnell does something very similar with rich people in New York City. Just without the wit or the style. Which is still no mean feat, and One Fifth Avenue (Hyperion; 433 pages) is no mean book, except in the other sense of mean. So far, 2008 is looking like a career year for Bushnell, what with the success of the Sex and the City movie and the success-or, at any rate, the renewal--of her NBC series Lipstick Jungle. She also just

announced a deal to write young-adult novels about the teen years of Carrie Bradshaw. One Fifth Avenue should round all that out nicely. It's certainly a page turner of practically Germanic efficiency. But it also reminds us of a weird truth about its author, which is that Bushnell on the page is a far darker, more interesting creature than Bushnell on the screen. One Fifth Avenue is a novel set in One Fifth Avenue, "a magnificent building constructed of a pale grey sandstone in the classic lines of the deco era." There was a time when writers and artists could live there--a few still do--but now the apartments start at $1 million-plus, making it strictly the domain of the wealthy. ("Money wants what it can't buy," Bushnell writes, "class and talent.") The friction between those two worlds--rich and poor, crass and cultured, New York present and New York past--gives the book its heat. Well, that and all the sex. The story begins with the death of one Mrs. Houghton, a patron of the arts and the occupant of the building's showpiece apartment, a three-story, 7,000-sq.-ft. (650 sq m) residence complete with a marble-floored ballroom. Into it, for $15 million, move Paul and Annalisa, a creepy hedge-fund manager and his sweet wife. Paul wants to install in-wall air conditioners, which is against the building's rules. That sparks a feud with Mindy, the shrewish president of the co-op board, who's married to James, an obscure literary novelist who has just authored a massive best seller. A few floors up, another writer, Philip, a Pulitzer winner who has fallen on hard times (he's at work on a screenplay titled--in a nod to Waugh--Bridesmaids Revisited), is sleeping with his 22-year-old gold-digging assistant, Lola, a viciously, flawlessly drawn avatar of the rising generation of postfeminist girl-women. But Philip still yearns for an old flame: Schiffer, an Oscar-winning actress whose new TV show is turning out to be a smash hit. Among these characters moves gentle, sophisticated, thwarted Billy Litchfield, a kind of freelance Guy Friday to rich people, who is very nice but way too poor to actually live in One Fifth. Bushnell's prose is breezy and careless, as if she composed One Fifth Avenue in a helicopter on the way to the Hamptons with a cigarette and a martini in her free hand and didn't worry too much if a page here or there flew out the window. (She

describes Mrs. Houghton's death as a "swift and speedy end," as if those two words meant different things. And it's amazing that anyone could write, let alone publish, the following sentence: "That was the defining moment of great sex--when the penis met the vagina.") Bushnell also seems to have no sense of self-preservation: she should never, ever write about blogs or indeed anything having to do with computers or the Internet or probably electricity. But her pacing is flawless, and the trash level is just right. And One Fifth Avenue has other virtues that are harder to explain. It has an actual Weltanschauung--it gets at the deep truth of shallow people. Women control men with sex. Men control women with money. With rare exceptions, marriage is a Punch-and-Judy slugfest that ends with either divorce or one party's total subjugation. Power and pleasure are the only things that are real, and they endlessly swap places as means and end. Everybody in One Fifth Avenue, good and bad, is bound by these rules, and the only difference is that some feel bad about it and some don't. "You know New York never changes," Philip says. "The characters are different but the play remains the same." These are bleak truths that Carrie Bradshaw could never grasp. Her life in Sex and the City is a fairy-tale fever dream of shopping and dating from which she will never awaken, no matter how many princes kiss her. She wouldn't last an hour at One Fifth Avenue. Bushnell knows this. She even slyly hints at it: Lola, the gold digger, "had watched every single episode of Sex and the City at least, as she claimed, 'a hundred times.'" Lola arrives in Manhattan expecting--nay, demanding--a West Village apartment and a Mr. Big. Suffice it to say that the show doesn't turn out to be a very practical guide to real life and real estate in the big city. She should have read the book instead. FIRST LINE It was only a part in a TV series, and only a one-bedroom apartment in New York.

5 Things You Should Know About

By Andrea Sachs Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008 Jenny Lewis Acid Tongue; out now Teed up for a solo breakthrough, the ex--child actress and Rilo Kiley singer delivers a dud. Lewis' singing is as lean as ever, but her songs--once models of dramatic efficiency--sprawl with misplaced ambition; more adventurous (with themes, tempos, minutes per track) does not necessarily translate into more meaningful. Only the title cut, with Lewis singing gently over a guitar about a performer's life and lies, sticks. C MOVIES Obscene Directed by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor; not rated; in limited release For publishing many of the past century's landmark works, including Howl, Naked Lunch, Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer, Barney Rosset's Grove Press earned the U.S. government's highest tribute: prosecution for obscenity. This zippy documentary distills all the zest and pain of Rosset's career. Like the man and his imprint, it's sensational. AThe Lucky Ones Directed by Neil Burger; rated R; out now Back from Iraq, three soldiers--a career Army man (Tim Robbins), a cute hillbilly (Rachel McAdams) and a guy made impotent by shrapnel (Michael Pea)--take the life lessons all road movies must provide. Each plot turn is predictable, but this awful film still has secrets: Why was it made? Why is it played as comedy? And who'd benefit from seeing it? D BOOKS The Given Day By Dennis Lehane; out now Wait, what is Lehane's name doing on a 700-page epic about union politics, a flu epidemic, immigration, baseball, an Irish cop and a black fugitive in Boston in 1919? He's gone big and literary on us, and the results are part home run and part homework. But he hasn't forgotten where he came from: there's great pulp storytelling in here too. B

Sarah By Kaylene Johnson; out now This surprise best seller about the Republican Veep candidate, which rocketed from 10,000 copies to 350,000 copies in a matter of weeks, is a blend of annoying hagiography ("It is a political Cinderella tale") and revealing detail (she shot her first rabbit at 10). Amid all the fluff, a portrait of a sharp-elbowed politico emerges. C+

State Secrets
By Lev Grossman Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008 Everybody's talking about who can bring America together. But who's going to take it apart? STATE BY STATE (Ecco; 572 pages) is an anthology of 50 essays by 50 writers about the 50 states. The idea is to celebrate disunity: to find aspects of each state that are still distinctive, that have resisted the forces of cultural homogenization. This could be about as exciting as studying for your ged, but the results are actually kind of great. A lot of the pleasure lies in the piquancy of the writer-state pairings. Some are more obvious--heavy hitter Jonathan Franzen handles New York. Some are less so-imagine the editors' relief when they remembered that Jhumpa Lahiri hails from tiny Rhode Island (which, as she points out, is not an island!). There's something about their home state that puts writers in confessional moods. Picture Anthony Bourdain lighting M-80s ("It's a quarter stick a dynamite!!") as a j.d. in Jersey or a teenage Joshua Ferris cruising the canals of Florida with Jimmy Buffett (at the time he didn't know who Buffett was). For better or worse, their states helped make these writers who they are. Vive la diffrence.

SPECIAL SECTION Leaders & Visionaries

Alice Waters
By JOEL STEIN

It has been a slow 30 years of progress for all environmentalists, but Alice Waters has more right than most to be frustrated. She wasn't asking anyone to install solar panels or convert their engines to run on biofuels she just wanted people to eat stuff that tastes better. And it wasn't like she was simply making claims that local, organic food tastes great. She was proving it every day at Chez Panisse, the Berkeley, California, restaurant she opened in 1971 a restaurant so good (the James Beard Foundation named Waters America's best chef in 1992 and Gourmet named Chez Panisse America's best restaurant in 2001) that it doesn't even have a menu. You eat what Waters found at the markets that day, and you like it. You really like it. Waters says she's thrilled that her cooking theories fresh, local ingredients, simply prepared have gone mainstream, thanks to health studies and the farmers' market movement. It's much easier to grasp this philosophy of food when you're at the farmers' market, she says. "When people become real and you learn about your

compost and how easy it is to make, you feel like you're empowered to do an everyday act that's good for your family and friends and the environment." While Waters' restaurant and cook-books are credited with launching the locavore movement in the U.S., her Edible Schoolyard project goes one step further. Started in 1994, it encourages students in Berkeley to help grow and shop for their lunches, and it has shown results not just in environmental awareness, but in tackling obesity. Now it's being tried in other cities. "Remember when Kennedy put physical fitness in schools?" Waters asks. "We had to exercise four times a week, and we all went for it. We need that kind of passion. Going into public schools and teaching [children] about the consequences of the food that they eat can have remarkable results." Waters, 64, is generally hopeful, not least about Barack Obama. "We need a President to speak about the issues of food, nourishment and stewardship," she says, "and I have great hope that will happen." She is also optimistic about the Slow Food movement, which she says is banding nations together to find the best heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables to plant for sustainability and nutrition and, of course, taste. Because that's how Waters wins any debate about the environment.

Moguls & Entrepreneurs

Peggy Liu
By BILL POWELL

Philip Gostelow for TIME

Three years ago, Peggy Liu was your typical overachieving MIT graduate. After leaving a job at consulting firm McKinsey, she cofounded a venture capital firm in Shanghai with her husband. One day Liu attended an alumni association meeting to hear a speech by MIT's new president, Susan Hockfield. Concerns about climate change were rising, and Hockfield's message was simple: unless China got a grip on its energy use and mounting environmental troubles and unless the developed world helped it in that effort everyone was going to be in a world of environmental hurt. Convinced that Hockfield was right, Liu helped organize an MIT-sponsored conference on global warming in the spring of 2007. Thanks partly to her Rolodex, it brought together high-powered business and government types from both the U.S. and China. Building on those discussions, Liu set up the Joint U.S.-China Cooperation on Clean Energy (JUCCCE), an NGO focused on bringing practical solutions to big problems. Liu's business background is critical in realizing that goal. Whether dealing with mayors or real estate developers, the one thing "they all respond to," she says, "are numbers" above all, projections on "how to make green by going green."

Liu's key role is to connect people, bringing Western entrepreneurs with green technology, say, face-to-face not just with Beijing policymakers but with people she sees as "implementers" the players "who actually get things done." One of her first recruits was Rob Watson, who founded a widely recognized environmental rating system for buildings in the U.S. and elsewhere. With China expected to add some 50,000 new skyscrapers by 2030, the energy-conservation potential is enormous but so is skepticism among developers that it's worth investing more to make a building energy-efficient. The number of buildings under development in China that meet Watson's standards has increased significantly just in the past year, he says, "and that would not have happened just through our efforts. Peggy and JUCCCE have been critical in spreading the word, at getting developers and local officials to look at green projects." "We're not about pilot projects," says Liu. "We want to be here for 10 years, and have a demonstrable record ... of having accomplished some things." So far, so good.

Activists

Van Jones
By MICHAEL ELLIOTT

Eros Hoagland / Redux for TIME

Oakland and Marin County, Calif., both look out onto San Francisco Bay. But that sublime body of water apart, the gritty port city and the New Age, crystal-gazing county, where (legend has it) the hot tub was invented, might be on different planets. Van Jones is trying to bring them together and help the U.S. think about how to build a green economy in a new way. Jones, 39, an African-American activist based in Oakland, started visiting Marin when he was burned out from years of running programs to find jobs for kids fresh out of jail. What he saw, he says, was a form of "eco-apartheid." In Oakland, his neighbors, working hardscrabble jobs when they could find them, had to deal with the sort of industrial pollution that brings asthma attacks. In pristine Marin, just a few miles away, a whole new economy was being built around organic food, solar-panel installation and the like. Jones' insight was to see that if the two sides of the Bay could be brought together, the economy of both would benefit. The result of that insight is Green For All, the pressure group that Jones leads. It's dedicated, as he puts it, to providing a "path to prosperity" for blue-collar workers, training them for jobs and skills that will be in demand when (or maybe if) the U.S. retrofits itself as a

low-carbon economy. "We can beat pollution and poverty at the same time," Jones says. "Fighting climate change is the closest thing to a full-employment program we've ever seen in this country." Green for All puts Jones in the vanguard of a necessary change in the green movement. In the past, environmentalism in the U.S. has been a mainly white and white-collar phenomenon, one that had little resonance among the working class and minorities. Timber workers thought that greens valued the spotted owl over their livelihoods; on car assembly lines, criticism of fossil fuels won you no favors. But Jones points out that recent environmental catastrophes in the U.S. have hit the poor hardest. It was African-Americans in New Orleans who suffered most from Hurricane Katrina, and it's Latino farmworkers in California who lose out when wildfires burn their homes. It won't be easy to show members of America's working class that a green economy can benefit them too. Old prejudices die hard. The symbol of environmental concern, says Jones, can't be a polar bear, fighting for its habitat it has to be a Rosie the Riveter figure, making wind turbines in Detroit. But Jones has a rich legacy to draw on. He sees his fight for green jobs as being in the great tradition of the civil-rights movement of the '50s and '60s while recognizing that times have changed. "You can't do black politics in the 21st century in the same way as you did in the 20th," Jones says. "This can't be about grievance; it has to be about opportunity." He's trying to convince America's minorities and working class that building a green economy is the opportunity of a lifetime.

Leaders & Visionaries

Arnold Schwarzenegger
By MICHAEL GRUNWALD

Justin Sullivan / Getty

There's something about Arnold Schwarzenegger's 21st century green crusade that recalls Samuel Johnson's 18th century crack about women preaching and dogs walking on their hind legs; the point is not whether it's done well, but that it's done at all. The Austrian bodybuilder turned Hollywood action hero turned California Governor was always an unlikely eco-freak, with his five Hummers and his conspicuous delight in conspicuous consumption. But after five years of pushing his state, his Republican Party and his adopted country to fight global warming, it's clear that this is something the Governator does very well. While President Bush has sat out climate change, denying the problem in his first term and avoiding it in his second, Schwarzenegger has signed agreements with Canada, Mexico and the United Nations encouraging cooperation on clean technology, while pushing greenhouse-gas reductions at home. He has enacted the first statewide cap on carbon emissions, the first statewide green building code and the first statewide fuel-efficiency standards. Bush has blocked his proposed tailpipeemissions cuts, but Schwarzenegger has sued, and 19 states will follow California's lead if he wins.

Schwarzenegger was always a genius as a promoter of bodybuilding, of his blockbusters and of himself. Now he's a global salesman for the war on carbon, spreading the message that you don't have to be a girly-man to help save the planet. He ridicules traditional environmentalists as prohibitionist scolds who want us to drive wimpy cars and live like monks; he's selling a future of a clean environment and a booming green-tech economy with all the gizmos anyone could want. "Guilt doesn't work," he told TIME last year. He's had one Hummer tricked out to run on biofuels, and another on hydrogen. He won't apologize for living large. This you-can-have-it-all message has not always endeared him to greens of longer standing. They believe Americans must adjust their lifestyles to reduce emissions, not only by installing solar panels in their mansions and driving electric cars but by living in smaller houses and California blasphemy! driving less. They grouse that Schwarzenegger acquired his green tint through political necessity in a green state with a Democratic-controlled legislature. They say he just commands more press because he's a political celebrity. But so what? If Al Gore is America's most powerful voice for green living, Schwarzenegger is its most powerful Republican voice. When Republicans were ridiculing Barack Obama for urging Americans to inflate their tires, Schwarzenegger was appearing at an event exhorting Americans to do just that. And when Bush called for meetings to secure commitments from China and India before the U.S. agreed to reduce emissions, Schwarzenegger replied: Enough meetings. Enough waiting for someone else to lead. "Leadership," he told TIME, "means action." And these times call for an action hero.

Activists

Jack Sim
By HANNAH BEECH

Jim Orca

Jack Sim is not afraid to talk about poop. In fact, the Singaporean wants everyone to think about just how much waste they produce. "I ask people, 'How many times do you eat a day?' and everyone knows," says the founder of the World Toilet Organization, a lesser known if still vital WTO. "But no one knows how many times they go to the toilet. It's so basic and so important, but the stigma around toilets makes it difficult to even discuss." Lack of proper sanitation is one of the developing world's most urgent problems. Some 2.6 billion people have no access to toilets, and groundwater contaminated by fecal matter is a major killer; as many as 2 million people die every year because of waterborne diarrheal diseases, often caused by poor sanitation. But getting rural villagers to realize the importance of toilets is difficult because of the embarrassment factor. Sim, a retired construction and real estate entrepreneur, founded the nonprofit WTO in 2001 to change that mind-set. "It's a question of marketing toilets as a status symbol," he says, noting that plenty of poor people buy cell phones as

soon as they've saved enough money. "I want people to aspire to owning a toilet, just like others aspire to own a Louis Vuitton bag." Sim isn't talking about some fancy Japanese commode that warms your rear or masks unpleasant noises with classical music. He means basic, ecologically sound latrines that can cost as little as $10. But Sim cautions against simply gifting toilets to poor villages, noting that without proper education the equipment often goes unused or the buildings are even converted into makeshift storehouses or slaughterhouses. Instead, through the WTO, which now boasts 133 member organizations from 50 countries, Sim is working to partner toilet makers with fertilizer businesses so that human waste can serve as a natural crop booster. He also touts an emerging technology that transforms sewage into biogas, which can be used as cooking fuel. Both are promising ideas in an age of global warming, and they make good business sense at a time when fertilizer prices have soared. Overall, the World Health Organization estimates that for every dollar invested in sanitation, the return is ninefold. Sim's lavatorial ambitions aren't limited to helping the unsanitary masses. In 2005, he convinced Singapore's government to build double the number of toilet cubicles for women as for men, since gents can also use urinals. "The current design of public toilets came before women's liberation," he says. "We should give women the toilets they deserve." Now that's the right kind of toilet talk.

Moguls & Entrepreneurs

Shai Agassi
By TIM MCGIRK

Ahikam Seri for TIME

Shai Agassi is part scientist, part visionary, with a lot of salesman thrown in. And he thinks big. By 2011, the Israeli-born entrepreneur wants to have 5,000 electric cars on the nation's roads; by 2015, he says, "I predict no more gasoline cars will be sold in Israel." Agassi envisions drivers plugging in their cars at night to recharge them with cheap electricity, topping up the battery while parked at work, then driving home with enough power left for a trip to the beach. For journeys beyond the 120mile (190 km) range of the electric car, there will be filling stations where depleted batteries are replaced free of charge. Right now, all Agassi has is loads of chutzpah, a prototype electric car made in collaboration with Renault, and a futuristic plan. Calm, athletic and self-possessed, Agassi, 40, is like his car: he goes from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in 8 seconds flat as he starts talking about "his mission." Says Agassi: "We're not trying to build a cool car, but to end the dependence on oil." Several years ago, a speech of his caught the attention of Israeli President Shimon Peres, who later called to say: "You spoke so beautifully, you have to make this a reality." The opportunity came when Agassi, then a wunderkind at software giant

SAP, was passed over for the top job. He quit, and in May 2007 launched Project Better Place, his electric-car start-up. Thanks to his connections and reputation, Better Place got backing from Renault and a promise from Israeli authorities to grant tax breaks to buyers of electric cars. He also secured $200 million in funding from Morgan Stanley, venture capital firms and Israeli industrialist Idan Ofer, who owns the country's biggest oil refinery. Their bet is that if Agassi's plan works in Israel, it can also be applied in other markets such as U.S. and Chinese cities. Agassi sees Israel as the perfect testing ground for a network of electric cars. It's the right size 150 filling stations will cover the country it has closed borders, and there is an added incentive: some of the world's top oil producers are unfriendly to Israel. One of Agassi's innovations is to charge users not for the car or battery, but for the electricity they consume, much as cell-phone companies profit from how much customers talk. At current prices, electric cars will be 20% cheaper to run than gasoline engines, Agassi says, and will produce zero carbon emissions. "We environmentalists made a mistake," he says. "We ask people to pay more to be green, and we should ask them to pay less." If he can pull that off, Israel could be the first nation to junk its gas-guzzling cars altogether.

Leaders & Visionaries

Habiba Sarabi
By ARYN BAKER

Zalmai for TIME

Habiba Sarabi should be wearing spurs and a sheriff's badge. The diminutive Governor of Bamiyan, one of Afghanistan's least developed provinces, is laying down the law. The environmental law, that is. With all its problems, Afghanistan is not an obvious environmental role model. Decades of war have left its land and waterways scarred by pollution. Forests have been leveled for firewood. Mines dot the pathways of migratory animals, and unchecked urbanization is putting pressure on scarce resources. Determined to reverse the damage, Sarabi has embarked on a crusade to turn Bamiyan into Afghanistan's icon of environmental practice leading the way, she hopes, for national change. "I am doing this for the future of my people," she says. "They may not understand now why it is so important, but if we can preserve the environment and our natural resources it will bring wealth for our children." As a start, she is establishing Afghanistan's first national park. The 220-sq.-mi. (570 sq km) area encompasses a cascading series of six brilliantly hued lakes, and naturally carved limestone fortresses that rival the Grand Canyon for awe-inspiring magnificence. Band-i-Amir, as it is known, was largely ignored during the war. Now

that relative peace prevails in the province, it is once again a favorite weekend destination for local tourists, who threaten to love it to death. Sarabi decided to step in. She banned picnickers from parking vehicles on the fragile banks. She stopped a popular motorboat service that ferried tourists from one end of the principal lake to the other, for fear that the vibrations and the fuel would disrupt the growth of the crystalline deposits that produce the area's spectacular geography. And, most controversially, she tore down the ramshackle restaurants and shops that had cropped up on the water's edge. They were an eyesore, she says, but more offensive was the fact that their owners dumped garbage and washed dishes in the lakes. "Normally you would allow people to build alternative shops before tearing down their livelihoods," says Peter Smallwood, country director for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which has partnered with Sarabi to create the park. But she got the job done. And these days, she doesn't have to do it alone. Sarabi has inspired local communities to join her environmental campaign: now she sits on a committee made up of village representatives who together decide on policy and plan education projects. The local businesses, which at first resisted her initiatives, have also taken up the cause. The only problem, complains park ranger Abdul Wahab, is the tourists: "Everyone here has learned to put the garbage in the right place. But the visitors don't, and we can't get angry because they don't know better."

That doesn't stop Sarabi. At the end of a ceremony to celebrate the opening of the new visitor center in June 2007, she watched the participants, including an Afghan National Army platoon, drift away leaving empty water bottles and food wrappers behind. Sarabi summoned the soldiers back and lectured them on littering. "I told them that their behavior was shameful, and that part of their national service was keeping their country clean," she says. You can almost hear those spurs clinking.

Activists

Marina Rikhvanova
By KRISTA MAHR

GUEORGUI PINKHASSOV / MAGNUM

Four hundred miles (640 km) long and up to a mile (1.6 km) deep, Siberia's Lake Baikal is the world's largest body of fresh water. It contains over 1,500 unique animal and plant species and 20% of the planet's unfrozen freshwater reserves. In the 1960s, the huge Baikalsk Pulp and Paper mill was set up beside the lake to help kickstart Siberia's impoverished economy. The mill, which allegedly discharges chemicals that harm the lake's ecosystem, would become the catalyst for the Soviet Union's first major environmental movement a grassroots effort to close it down. Today, the mill is still operating, and the fight to protect Baikal from threats old and new continues, thanks largely to Marina Rikhvanova. A scientist by education, Rikhvanova, 47, has been exploring Baikal since she was a child in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, where her father made films about the lake. In 1990, she co-founded the Baikal Environmental Wave (BEW), an NGO focused on protecting the lake from the side effects of development. In 2006, after BEW had spent four years staging protests and gathering signatures, Russia's then President Vladimir Putin publicly ordered the boss of state-owned Transneft to reroute an oil

pipeline planned to skirt the lake. It was proof, says Rikhvanova, "that people can change the decisions of government." There's no shortage of other problems to address: the toll of zinc and lead mining, agricultural runoff and air pollution. Still battling to close the mill, BEW has also started monitoring the impact of the lake's fast-growing tourist industry, and it's leading the charge to halt development of a uranium-enrichment center at a nuclearfuel plant in nearby Angarsk, which would leave the region with the additional burden of radioactive waste. Rikhvanova says Russian state authorities have harassed BEW, seizing computers and assets, and claims that the arrest of her son who is awaiting trial on charges relating to a 2007 attack by nationalists on a protest camp in which one person died is an attempt to discredit her campaign. "Sometimes I think Moscow doesn't hear us," says Rikhvanova. Which just means she'll have to shout a little louder.

PEOPLE

10 Questions for Mario Batali

By Mario Batali Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

Mario Batali Dennis Kleiman for TIME What drew you to Spain for your new show? Carly Harder, LAS VEGAS Well, the main reason is that I was fortunate enough to spend my high school years there. At that time, everything was kind of odd and just a little bit burnt and a little wet with oil. And just like the English have in the past 25 years, they've figured out in Spain that they have the most amazing products and this amazing tradition. What is your favorite Spanish dish? Sue Hansen, TALLAHASSEE, FLA. Probably the most eye-opening dish for me was something called berberechos a la plancha, kind of a cross between scallops and clams, just thrown on the griddle. There's nothing on them. Maybe lemon. And it was just the greatest thing.

Gwyneth Paltrow as a co-star? Are you kidding? Janet Martin, NEW YORK CITY Why not Gwyneth Paltrow? I think that perhaps you're thinking of Gwyneth as a macrobiotic vegan who is too thin for her own good. Gwyneth is a delightful person to hang around with. She also spent time in high school in Spain and speaks with a much more beautiful accent than I do. You have years of successful recipes. Have any attempts produced a disastrous dish? Jonathan Yost, POMONA, CALIF. Without a doubt, there have been as many disasters as there have been successes. What usually goes wrong is not anything technical. It's my misunderstanding of my clientele's basic trust for me. We did a pig's-ear salad that I found delightful and provocative, but it was a loser. Do you enjoy cooking for celebrities more, and do you change your cooking for them? Roby Dhanju, PLANO, TEXAS I don't change anything for someone unless I know they don't eat something. I don't create dishes that only celebs or friends would get. There's a democracy to the food that goes out in all my restaurants. I heard that you and the Food Network had a falling out. Is that true? Agnes Turner, IRVINE, CALIF. Absolutely not. The Food Network loves my presence on Iron Chef. They have a lot of new talent, and their business model isn't necessarily completely [in sync] with mine. What has been your favorite secret ingredient to work with on Iron Chef? Ben Doty, SYCAMORE, ILL. I think my favorite secret ingredient was probably Parmigiano-Reggiano. The potential for that ingredient is infinite. I also always love the live fish because I know

it's going to taste good. The freshness of the ingredient is always the most important thing. What country is the current epicenter of culinary vision? Joe Price, TULSA, OKLA. Spain. It is the place where the most outlandish and yet most often delicious places are. At El Bulli, they brought us a bowl of what looked like bean soup, but the beans were actually a bean puree that had been spherified. Why de-beanify it in the first place? The reason is that it provokes you to think something entirely different about that food. What was your favorite thing to eat as a child? Kristin Kelly, SPOKANE, WASH. My mom made something that I always requested for my birthday called mock chicken legs. She would take ground veal and ground pork and mix it up with a bunch of spices, and then take a Popsicle stick and put it inside a little ball of the meat. Then you bake them. It was like a veal-and-pork hamburger rolled in groundup Rice Krispies. It was delightful. If you could choose any chef in history to face in a cooking competition, who would it be? Mike Doyle ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. I think that the most interesting chefs on the planet right now are probably [Ferran] Adri, [Thomas] Keller, Pierre Gagnaire; but there's a whole world of Japanese cooking out there that I don't even understand. The most exciting thing for me would be to take a couple of us from Iron Chef America and drop us in Japan. That's where the real battle, I think, would ensue.

LETTERS

Inbox
By DEPARTMENT Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008 Thank you for the empowering issue about service [Sept. 22]. Three years ago, as a freshman in college, I became frustrated that my peers and I were constantly studying community problems but not actually doing anything to solve them. So I formed Students Serve, a national nonprofit organization run by college-student volunteers, to provide service grants to students. At this point, our grants have enabled college students to start a shelter for abused women, teach art classes to inner-city youth, create interactive history lessons and begin a wheelchair-recycling program. We the people can choose to make a meaningful difference by serving our nation and fellow human beings. Angela Perkey, WILLIAMSBURG, VA. Your issue on national service was thoughtful, provocative and, I hope, fruitful. I would like to offer a 22nd way to fix up America: create a U.S. public-service academy on par with the three major military academies, designed to attract the best and the brightest young people who want to make a difference. It should provide free college and postgraduate education, offer majors in both domestic and foreign public service, require strong prerequisite credentials like those demanded by the military academies and be apolitical and headed by a person of great prestige who is neither a politician nor a military officer. What better way for taxpayers to spend their money than on training talented future leaders? Frank R. Nataro, HUNTINGTON, N.Y. Most of us who want to serve cannot join the Peace Corps. One way you can serve your community in almost any town is by joining a service club. Many are looking for members to help with civic projects. When you sign on, you are working with some great people who want to help--and you have fun doing it. Jim Montgomery, GEORGETOWN, TEXAS

I was disappointed that there was no mention of donating blood in your article. For anyone who cannot give blood, groups such as the American Red Cross can always use volunteers to help contact donors (as I do each month) and greet them at contribution centers. Patrick Ivers, LARAMIE, WYO. As a third-grade teacher, I provide ways for students to make a difference by following my classroom motto: "Adding to the Good." Despite their young age, my students are now forming indelible memories that will be key to their future learning and lives. Sadly, elementary-school kids are often not given the same opportunities to serve as those in middle and high school. Anna Saldo-Burke, WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. The Palin Effect I must confess I'd been struggling to understand the recent surge in the popularity of Sarah Palin until Joe Klein put it all into sepia-toned perspective [Sept. 22]. I realized that her appeal reflects a wistful desire for an American abstraction, a wholesome place in our memory that is no more--and perhaps never was. We want to be reminded of who and what we think we were, not who we are. But yearning for our past, real or imagined, will not bring it back. And I fear that after the tribulations of the past eight years, we may not survive waking up on the wrong side of the bed for four more. I can only pray that by November we will stir from our sentimental slumber long enough to elect a President who has the vision and intelligence to lead us in the world in which we actually live. Kevin Thompson, MAPLEWOOD, N.J. Is it so hard to understand the nostalgia that many Americans feel for a reasonable return to the culture of small-town America--to its appreciation of education, traditional arts, the work ethic, hunting, community spirit and moderate churchgoing? Moderation and mutual cooperation within the international community are what we so desperately need in the U.S. That is the change that John McCain and Palin would bring. Jim Clemons, FREDERICKSBURG, VA.

Why do voters need to relate to the presidential candidates as if they were one of us? I don't want the President to be my friend, share a carpool or be a drinking buddy. I want my President to be qualified to lead the greatest nation on the planet. I want my President to bring all Americans back to playing on the same team, because I'm tired of the divisive anger and blame. We have a President now who seemed like one of us--and where has it gotten us? L. Bonomi, PALO ALTO, CALIF. The hundreds of thousands of people who live in and around the many small towns throughout northern Ohio might be shocked to learn that "suburbanites and city dwellers do the fighting and hourly-wage work now." Klein insults our intelligence, our work ethic and our values when he suggests that we live in a place where "myths are more potent than the hope of getting past the dour realities." Oh, I forgot--like our brethren in Pennsylvania, we embrace guns and religion to escape the harsh realties of our existence. Steve Mohr, BUCYRUS, OHIO No one in the media would be calling it "touching and credible" if a teen pregnancy had occurred in the Obama family. Everyone would be writing about the tragedy of teen pregnancy in the African-American community, the high school dropout rate of teen mothers and so on. Barack Obama's career would be under fire, and no one would be spinning myths to stop it. Catherine D. Nardi, CHICAGO Palin's myth, as described, seems to appeal to racist and homophobic people. McCain is certainly not the honorable man he claims to be if that is how he intends to win this election. If ignoring people who suffer at the hands of injustice is part of the American Dream the Republicans want to bring back, then they need to wake up, because America is about freedom. It's not about everybody's being just like you. Lisa Toms, CINCINNATI, OHIO The Kids Aren't All Right As a high school english teacher of at-risk students in an urban school, I have seen firsthand how sexuality is exploding [Sept. 22]. First of all, we need to have an honest conversation about protection. Also, girls don't have sex or get pregnant on their own. We need to start promoting male role models who don't just use women

and leave. We need to start teaching our boys to treat females and their own children with more respect. For both girls and boys: Use condoms every time. Don't have sex just to fit in. And babies won't make you happy. We adults must be willing to talk about these big issues. We can't simply squeeze our eyes shut to the situation and hope it will go away. If we continue to do that, by the time we open our eyes, our babies will have had their own babies. Stacy Lica, LAKEWOOD, CALIF. The Coen Brothers Burn It Up! Richard Corliss apparently does not have the same sense of humor my friends and I have [Sept. 22]. In the theater where I saw Burn After Reading, everyone laughed throughout. The Coen brothers are very smart about people who do stupid things. The scene in which the detective tries to speed away but has parked between two cars and cannot get out is right out of a Road Runner cartoon. Wile E. Coyote is alive and well! Judith Canaan, KALAMAZOO, MICH.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE Fine Tastes, Luxury Style

Southern Accents
By MARION HUME

Tasty Tapas Chef Jesse Gerner, left, and his wife Vanessa Gerner are the owners of Aada, a modern Spanish restaurant that is creating a buzz in Melbourne's funky Fitzroy District.

People tend to have a pretty good idea of what Sydney, Australia looks like, with its Opera House, harbor and of course, Bondi Beach. But Melbourne, the southern city on the banks of the Yarra River, which has an inner city population of only 86,000 because the vast majority of Melburnians live in the surrounding suburbs, is more enigmatic. "Sydney's about glamour and bikinis. We're about after dark," explains born-and-bred Melburnian, Karen Webster, who helms the city's annual fashion festival. "They live for the beach. We're foodies. We live to eat." The term "foodie" is often heard in Melbourne, such a mecca for good eating, you could call it the Southern Hemisphere Paris. Certainly, securing a reservation at chef Shannon Bennett's Vue de monde can be as tough to get as a table for two at one of Joel Robuchon's establishments. Culinary creations by Bennett, 34, a native of Melbourne who looks more like a surfer than a super chef, include what he calls a "virtual gnocchi," a cep puree treated to an in-kitchen chemistry lesson which defines its shape, then served accompanied by sauted king brown and shimeji mushrooms and zucchini flowers and finished with a tarragon emulsion. Another crowd pleaser is

the bouillabaise which is presented at the table in a glass-toped, 1950s-style coffee percolator filled with aromatic shellfish stock. After this concoction is brought to a boil, it is poured into a bowl of tartares of crayfish and king fish cloaked in buffalo mozzarella. Of course, many big cities these days have at least one restaurant which can challenge the best in the French capital, if not for stunning Belle poque interiors, then certainly for surprising cuisine. However part of what makes Paris so unique is also the old-world charm of its eateries. Yet those too can be found in Melbourne, which, with its grand foundations in the 1850s Gold Rush, has a long history of fine French restaurants, their chefs being imported from France, and, from the 1920s onwards, robust Italian eateries where the chefs were migrs, who stayed. The most bustling to this day is The Flo (which has no connection to the Paris brasserie chain), under whose Tuscan-inspired murals the likes of Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson and Rudolf Nureyev have all dined. Today, the owner-chef is Guy Grossi, and Grossi Florentino, the Flo's proper name, also features a street-level outdoor cafe which opened in 1956 when Melbourne hosted the Olympic Games. Ah, but what also makes Paris so delectable is constant reinvention. When the zinc bars become routine, there's always somewhere new to discover. Melbourne maintains a similar capacity for discovery, with a recent entry on the restaurant menu being Aada, opened by twenty-something husband and wife team, Jesse and Vanessa Gerner, (he's the chef, she runs front-of-house) in the funky Fitzroy neighborhood (Brooklyn's Williamsburg would be the New York equivalent). Locals are flocking here for tasty tapas plates such as white anchovies with hearts of palm or "raciones" (bigger plates) not only reminiscent of the Moorish tastes of Southern Spain, but also fulsome with the flavors of regional produce. Delicacies include slowcooked South Western Highland pork belly doused with fennel seeds and smoky eggplant as well as Anson Bay clams from the nearby island state of Tasmania, brightened with La Goya Manzanilla and mint. Melbourne is endowed with so many good restaurants, an aficionado of the city might wonder where the mentions are of favorite haunts like Flower Drum, Pearl,

Circa, Stokehouse, Taxi, and MoVida, to name a few. Or, indeed, for the newest, Bistro Guillaume or Seamstress, the latter a fun eatery in a building that has housed both a brothel and a buddhist temple. As for the Paris comparison, Melbourne also echoes the best in today's Milan, Madrid, Tokyo, and Shanghai. The rich culinary offering and heritage are due in part to the four seasons being much more distinct than, say, 550 miles to the north east in Sydney. Then there's the plethora of nature's bounty found within easy reach of a city surrounded by rich agricultural land and the sea. Produce for the world's cuisines is cultivated by passionate small growers, hence the city's bustling food markets. Although founded after Sydney, Melbourne was free-settled. (Think how that might have affected early expectations of what people put in their mouths). While its wide boulevards, perfect for outdoor dining, are the legacy of its gold rush riches, Melbourne's varied palate comes from waves of immigration. The city has the biggest Greek population outside of Athens and, as for the Italians, mostly, they hail from a different generation to their "cousins" in America, many of them having left the turmoil of the cities of postwar Italy, (while in contrast, the majority of New York's 19th century Italian immigrants were the southern, rural poor). Thus Australia's Italian food, even as it arrived here, cut through the strict, regional divides of the home country, especially as those from the north wed those from the south, further mixing things up in the kitchen. Today's Melburnians are a melting pot of Celtic, Southern European, Middle European, Middle Eastern, and Asian heritage, and what links them is the food scene. "Everyone here eats out all the time," says Tara Bishop, head of media relations for Crown Towers, a skyscraper hotel, shopping and casino complex which dominates the center of town and houses more than 40 restaurants, including a branch of Nobu. Being in the hospitality industry has taken Bishop, originally from Canada, all over the world. "But what I love about living here," she says, "Is that it is what I call a shoe and dinner town. In London, I'd have to choose between eating out somewhere great or splurging on a pair of Manolos. Here, while the heels are pricey, the food really isn't. I can have both."

"Melbourne is one of the great food cities of the world," says Donna Hay, who, with her eponymous empire of magazines, cookbooks and kitchen wares is the Antipodean Martha Stewart. A native of Sydney, the well-traveled Hay acknowledges that there is something very alluring about Melbourne's "incredibly well-informed waiters, the low lighting, the rich upholstered seating and the alleyways which hide espresso bars, chocolatiers, patisseries." Grossi believes that what makes the food scene so vibrant is the mix. Referring to himself as "a Melburnian chef with an Italian heritage," he adds, "I don't turn my back on ingredients just because they are not traditional. We don't have to be shackled to old rules. We've got these beautiful ducks livers on the bench today and we're going to saut them up and do a chestnut flavored pappardelle, which is not strictly Tuscan. People here are brave. You put tripe on the menu, they'll try it and while it may not be as popular as some other dishes, it's a little bit different for your loyal regulars. This restaurant has been here nearly 100 years. With Melbourne people, if you do the right thing, the clientele keeps coming. This isn't a city where the latest kid on the block gets all the attention." Joseph Licciardi, who was born in Sicily and who runs Kin, muses that Melburnians "treasured the food traditions they arrived with and became adventurous - you had to be, years ago, to come all the way here." His own restaurant, in the Carlton neighborhood, is its own multi-cultural microcosm: his wife, Rosa, who was born in Puglia in the south of Italy, cooks alongside their Australian-born son, Enrico, while their daughter, Agatha, waits tables. "When our kids were growing up here, they would go for yum cha (Chinese dim sum) and try the duck feet," he explains. "And today Rosa cooks unagi eel from Japan, but we offer it in an Italian way." Thus, while a tagliatelle with sweet pumpkin glaze, balanced with aged balsamic vinegar, tastes exactly as it would in Modena, the flavors of the freshest fish, caught nearby, are brought out by serving them raw, in an Asian marinade. "It isn't about "fusion," it's about not limiting yourself to the old ways," says Licciardi. Making the traditional fresh again has made a star of George Calombaris, 29, something of an Australian Gordon Ramsay. It has also inspired the Melbourne-born

chef of Greek origins to open restaurants in his ancestral homeland, where, he says, "they have been serving fried stuff and dips and cheese to tourists on the islands although that's not what we eat at home." Calombaris helms The Press Club, the Maha Bar and Grill, and Hellenic Republic in Melbourne as well as The Belvedere Club on Mykonos. Describing himself as a pioneer who has "taken a classical training and applied it to Greek food," one of his signature dishes is a delicate char-grilled octopus served with smoked butter kozani saffron makaronada (pasta) and edible amaranth blooms. Although in Melbourne you might need to hop on a city tram to get to your favorite Chinese or Thai place, undiscovered culinary gems lurk on almost every humble street throughout its sizeable suburban spread. Some might argue that the word-ofmouth on a joint called Cicciolina, in the once-rough St. Kilda beach area, has spread too far, given its No Reservation policy can mean long waits in the bar. The secret? "Me sticking to the stove," laughs head chef and co-owner Virginia Redmond, who has turned down offers to write cookbooks or open a second restaurant because she is content doing this one. Try the lightly battered brains with fried chives and aoli. "This is literally the only place in the world I would eat brains!" says Jacquie Byron, a Melbourne writer who says she has been "well-fed and watered here ever since I was a babe." Even children are welcome at most Melbourne restaurants. Formal places like the Press Club go to pains to point out that they will create child-sized portions of any dish. One Melbourne mother recalls the time she asked her twins as they were playing in the sandpit if they were making mud pies. "It's stuffed zucchini flowers," they replied. An answer worthy of a city that lives to eat.

NOTEBOOK

Pop Chart
By DEPARTMENT Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008 SHOCKING HOOTIE tops country chart, continues domination of American musical landscape R. KELLY on teenage girls: "How old are we talkin'?" JAMIE LYNN SPEARS breast-feeding pics disappear at Wal-Mart. R. Kelly not suspected Director of WANTED to produce MOBY DICK: "From Hell's heart, I shoot at thee with slow-motion bullets." EDDIE VEDDER writes song for Chicago Cubs, bringing trademark angst to angstridden team Despite recent Olsenesque attire, LINDSAY LOHAN to guest-judge on Project Runway premiere KANYE WEST developing hip-hop puppet show PREDICTABLE GOVERNATOR admits to having smoked weed with TOMMY CHONG JOSH GROBAN sings TV-theme-song medley at Emmys GWYNETH PALTROW launches new lifestyle website, Goop.com Apple.com already taken EMMYS' lowest-rated show ever. Nice work, Groban Novel about dogs is named next OPRAH book-club pick

New cat book, Dewey: The Small-Town Library CAT Who Touched the World. But not Oprah Months after Tatum O'Neal drug bust, RYAN O'NEAL AND SON arrested for meth possession. Here comes the reality show GEORGE MICHAEL arrested in public toilet, this time on drug charge. Can't he just learn to hold it? CANDACE BUSHNELL to pen Sex and the City books set in high school. Too bad it's already called GOSSIP GIRL CLAY AIKEN comes out. Also: sky blue; water wet SHOCKINGLY PREDICTABLE

A Brief History Of: The Model T

By Lon Tweeten and Andrea Ford Wednesday, Sep. 24, 2008 Oct. 1 marks the 100th birthday of Ford's Model T a car so affordable, it made automobiles necessities and launched American car culture. It's been quite a ride from there.

Verbatim
By DEPARTMENT Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008 'I don't know if the ghosts are going to be there. You can feel that, standing here-Babe Ruth, DiMaggio.' ALEX ALICEA, Union City, N.J., baseball fan, on the new Yankee Stadium 'Economic Pearl Harbor.' WARREN BUFFETT, investor, describing the nation's financial crisis, after purchasing $5 billion in Goldman Sachs Group stock 'America is like my distant uncle who doesn't remember my name but occasionally gives me pocket money.' CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, Nigerian writer, on receiving a $500,000 "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation 'If I were to ever build a house on the coast, I'm going to contact the guy who built this.' AARON REED, spokesman for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, marveling at a lone house that withstood Hurricane Ike 'Both the United States Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense have doctorates in Russian studies. A fat lot of good that's done us.' ROBERT M. GATES, Defense Secretary, on the U.S.'s strained ties with Russia 'This is an act of banditry, not of terrorism.' EGYPTIAN TOURISM MINISTRY, in a statement after gunmen kidnapped 19 tourists and their guides during an Egyptian desert safari 'It's the public school system. Let's be honest--it's full of liberal loons.' DANN DALTON, father of an 11-year-old Colorado boy who was suspended for wearing a T shirt with the slogan obama is a terrorist's best friend Back & Forth: Abortion

'A variety of things debunked by the medical community are advertised on the Internet.' KIM GANDY, president of the National Organization for Women, criticizing Google's decision to display antiabortion ads from religious groups "in a factual way" 'The issue of abortion is an emotive subject, and Google does not take a particular side.' GOOGLE, in a statement explaining its new policy as part of an out-of-court settlement with a British Christian organization Media 'Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization.' STEVE SCHMIDT, spokesman for John McCain, accusing the Gray Lady of being "150% in the tank" for McCain's Democratic presidential rival, Barack Obama 'It's our job to ask hard questions.' BILL KELLER, the newspaper's executive editor, saying candidates are "not always comfortable with that level of scrutiny" Water 'To see the Bush EPA just walk away is shocking.' BARBARA BOXER, chair of the Senate's Environment Committee, saying the Environmental Protection Agency bowed to pressure from the Pentagon in its decision not to remove a toxic rocketfuel ingredient found in the drinking water of nearly 400 sites in 35 states 'We have not intervened in any way.' PAUL YAROSCHAK, Pentagon deputy director for emerging contaminants, saying the EPA's decision was based on the Safe Drinking Water Act

The Page
By Mark Halperin Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

CAMPAIGN SCORECARD ROUND 1 2 3 4 ISSUE Economy (short-term) Economy (medium-term) Economy (long-term) Demeanor ACTION While Barack Obama was cool, confident and deliberate, John McCain was initially frantic and overheated and seemed as panicked as his advisers--who recognized their campaign could go down the economic drain. Obama was perhaps a tad cautious and reserved but stayed in sync with fellow Dems on Capitol Hill by letting the political benefits of nationwide alarm boost their case. Barring disaster, every aspect of the campaign will now be seen through the lens of the economy, an issue on which Obama and his party are more trusted by voters. Any hope the Republicans may have had of regaining many of the staggering 80% of voters who think the country is on the wrong track has gone right off the cliff. McCain's best hope in the economic crisis is for voters to seek his Washington experience. His gambit to become a powerful voice for a solution could pay dividends--if it works. Obama now has a permanent backdrop from which to argue for change and link McCain with President Bush. Temperamentally, Obama might just be the most even-keeled presidential candidate in a generation. He was unfazed by the McCain-Palin poll surge and self-assured when addressing the economic challenges, soothing anxious voters looking for a leader. McCain was either fervently focused or flounderingly futile--and thus far less comforting. RESULTS REPUBLICANS DEMOCRATS X X X TIE X

WINNER OF THE WEEK: DEMOCRATS

Despite pivoting from defense to offense, McCain was stuck in quicksand. The Republicans' post-convention bounce faded as it ran into the financial mess, and Obama moved back into the front-runner's position. NOT ALL ROUNDS ARE CREATED EQUAL The week's winner is based on the relative importance of each fight and by how much the winner takes each round. WEEK BY WEEK JUNE JULY AUG. X TIE X X 7 SEPT. OCT. TOTAL WEEKS WON 7 DEMOCRATS X X X

REPUBLICANS TIE XX X

TIE X X TIE X X X

TIME/CNN Poll. Battlegrounds remain tight It's a close race almost everywhere, drifting to Obama as his newfound nationalpolling edge is reflected in key states. COLORADO TIME/CNN poll: OBAMA 51, MCCAIN 47 2004 election results: BUSH 52, JOHN KERRY 47 MICHIGAN TIME/CNN poll: OBAMA 51, MCCAIN 46 2004 election results: KERRY 51, BUSH 48 MONTANA TIME/CNN poll: MCCAIN 54, OBAMA 43 2004 election results: BUSH 59, KERRY 39

PENNSYLVANIA TIME/CNN poll: OBAMA 53, MCCAIN 44 2004 election results: KERRY 51, BUSH 49 WEST VIRGINIA TIME/CNN poll: MCCAIN 50, OBAMA 46 2004 election results: BUSH 56, KERRY 43 All interviews were conducted via telephone by Opinion Research Corp. Sept. 21-23, 2008. Among likely voters, all five polls have an error margin of 3.5 percentage points. Too Big To Fail

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

By Barbara Kiviat Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business Life

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life By Alice Schroeder Bantam Books; 976 pages Warren Buffett the investor is widely known: his $5 billion bet on the battered Goldman Sachs on Sept. 23 surely came as no surprise to fans of his coolheaded strategy of buying good firms on the cheap. Buffett the person, on the other hand, is quite a surprise--an emotionally needy husband and absentee father who avoids anyone he fears might criticize him. Even people who don't care a whit about business will be intrigued by this portrait of a boy who endured a verbally abusive mother and grew into a man desperately dependent on a series of women to bolster his psyche--even as he became the richest person on the planet. Schroeder, a former insurance-industry analyst, spent years interviewing Buffett, and the result is a side of the Oracle of Omaha that has rarely been seen. When Buffett's daughter tells him he doesn't have to go to his wife's funeral, he is awash with relief: "'I can't,' he said.

To sit there, overwhelmed with thoughts of Susie, in front of everyone, was too much." Even the master is all too human.

The World
By Alex Altman Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008 1 | Israel Prime Minister Shuffle After the resignation of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is poised to become the nation's first female Premier since Golda Meir. Livni, a 50-year-old lawyer and former low-level Mossad agent with only about a decade of political experience, won her moderate Kadima party's elections on Sept. 17 and now has about six weeks to put together a majority coalition. She faces resistance from Benjamin Netanyahu's conservative Likud party, which opposes her recent peace talks with the Palestinians. 2 | Finland School Rampage A 22-year-old student killed 11 people, including himself, at a trade school in the town of Kauhajoki, some 180 miles (290 km) northwest of Helsinki, in the world's deadliest school shooting since gunman Cho Seung-Hui massacred 32 at Virginia Tech in April 2007. The incident bore eerie similarities to a killing spree that left nine dead at another Finnish school last November. In both cases, the perpetrator posted ominous videos on YouTube shortly before the attack. The Kauhajoki killer, identified as Matti Juhani Saari (below), had been interviewed by police in connection with the footage but was released. 3 | Tokyo A New Face for Japan On his fourth try for the Prime Minister's post, former Foreign Minister Taro Aso ascended to the top job on Sept. 24. A brash, freewheeling nationalist given to political gaffes (he has joked about Alzheimer's disease and said he wanted Japan to be an attractive destination for "rich Jews"), Aso, 68, cuts a sharply different figure from his dour predecessors, Shinzo Abe and Yasuo Fukuda--whose tenures were dogged, respectively, by scandal and partisan gridlock. A former Olympic sharpshooter and an avid fan of manga comics, he has stressed energizing Japan's flagging economy but must overcome voter disaffection with his long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party. 4 | New York Palin's New Friends Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin caused a media uproar Sept. 23 at the start of the U.N.'s 63rd General Assembly session. The McCain campaign allowed photographers (but not reporters) to sit in

during her meetings with eight world leaders. After news organizations threatened to boycott coverage of the events, the campaign responded by allowing a CNN producer access. The campaign called the snafu a misunderstanding. Hamid Karzai President of Afghanistan Manmohan Singh Prime Minister of India Viktor Yushchenko President of Ukraine Asif Ali Zardari President of Pakistan Mikheil Saakashvili President of Georgia Henry Kissinger Former Sec. of State Alvaro Uribe President of Colombia Jalal Talabani President of Iraq 5 | Arkansas Child-Porn Raid More than 100 state and federal authorities raided the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries in Fouke, Ark., as part of an investigation of child pornography and abuse. Six girls ages 10 to 17 have been taken into custody by the Arkansas Department of Human Services. Alamo, a convicted tax evader, claimed that the investigation was part of a government push to legalize same-sex marriage and that when it comes to sex with young girls, "consent is puberty." 6 | England Brown Faces Down Critics Prime Minister Gordon Brown scored a reprieve from those within his party pushing for his ouster. In a heralded speech at Labour's annual meeting in Manchester on Sept. 23, Brown said the country's current financial turmoil--echoing credit-crisis woes in the U.S.--meant this was "no time for a novice." He went on to refer to Labour as a "rock of stability." 7 | China Milk Recall: How It Happened A manufacturer at the center of China's latest food scandal knew its milk was making babies sick months before the company went public, according to a recent report on state television.

DEC. 2007 Manufacturer Sanlu gets first reports that its baby formula is making infants ill JUNE 2008 Sanlu finds melamine in its milk; the Chinese government is first informed of problems at the company AUG. 2 Fronterra, a New Zealand dairy company and Sanlu shareholder, urges recall SEPT. 5-8 New Zealand officials tell Chinese officials. Sanlu finally issues a recall on Sept. 11 SEPT. 16 Melamine is found in products from 22 powdered-milk companies, including Sanlu. Sanlu's general manager is fired SEPT. 22 Premier Wen Jiabao apologizes; China's food-and-product-quality head resigns. Four babies have died; 53,000 are sick so far SEPT. 23 Bans on Chinese milk products, including candy and ice cream, spread across Asia and Africa 8 | North Korea Just kidding After expelling U.N. inspectors on Sept. 24, North Korea announced that it would reactivate its Yongbyon nuclear plant. The nation began dismantling the complex last year but reversed its stance in August when the U.S. failed to remove North Korea from an official terrorism list. Meanwhile, speculation continues over the health of leader Kim Jong-Il, still absent from public events. 9 | Washington Immigration Slowdown New U.S. Census data reveal that while the U.S. foreign-born population--at 12.6%--is at its highest share since 1920, the influx has slowed sharply with the economy. The number of new immigrants declined from more than 1.8 million in 2006 to about 512,000 in 2007. On top of a changing job market, experts cite a crackdown on undocumented workers. Where they're coming from ... NORTH AMERICA 2.2% EUROPE 13.1% ASIA 26.8% OCEANIA 0.6% LATIN AMERICA 53.6% AFRICA 3.7%

(SOURCE: U.S. CENSUS) 10 | South Africa Mbeki Steps Down After accusations that he interfered in the corruption case of rival Jacob Zuma, President Thabo Mbeki resigned Sept. 21 at his party's urging. Several members of his Cabinet subsequently quit, deepening fears of a political crisis. The shift could also slow the progress of neighboring Zimbabwe's power-sharing deal, which Mbeki helped negotiate. Deputy party leader Kgalema Motlanthe will serve until next year's election, which Zuma is expected to win. * | What They're Listening to in Israel: In the Swinging Sixties, straitlaced Israel rejected the Fab Four's offer to perform. Four decades later, Beatlemania has gripped Tel Aviv, with a Sept. 25 Paul McCartney concert drawing at least 40,000 fans--who forked over as much as $1,500 a pop to see Sir Paul's performance despite death threats lodged against him by a Muslim extremist.

Milestones
By DEPARTMENT Thursday, Sep. 25, 2008 DIED During his 14 years as president and chief executive of the National Environmental Trust, Philip Clapp fought for legislation to combat global warming. He even once called into question Vice President Al Gore's commitment to the environment because of the White House's "failure to provide any leadership on the clean-air standards and on climate changes." Prior to his time with the Trust, Clapp worked on the U.S. House Budget Committee's environmental task force, where he tried, to no avail, to get the U.S. to ratify the Kyoto treaty. It has since been adopted by most developed nations. He was 54. During much of the 1960s and '70s, Norman Whitfield wrote and produced more than a dozen hit songs for Motown Records and his independent label, including Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and the Temptations' "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone." As one of Motown's most prolific and successful writers, he holds the title for penning the label's all-time best-selling single with "Grapevine." He was 67. When Hyman Golden co-founded the Snapple Beverage Corp. in 1972, the company took its name from one of its first products--a carbonated apple soda drink. After building its product line and name recognition in New York through pervasive "Snapple Lady" television ads and the introduction of flavored teas, the company became nationally known, earning $700 million in annual sales before being purchased by Quaker Oats Co. in 1994. Raised in Queens, N.Y., Golden earned his keep in pre-Snapple days by working as a window washer with his Romanian father and later as a business broker. He was 85.