My Digest

Matt Gross: Footloose in Spain’s Capital of Style, Barcelona

2007-11-06T07:17:58+00:00

HOSTEL, a fellow tourist once warned me, is Dutch for “Bring your own towel!”

Actually, she used stronger language, and her hostility was so raw that I began to squirm. Her comment came to mind last May, when I began planning a cheap weekend trip to Barcelona, Spain’s capital of sophisticated style and consumption. Visions of design hotels danced in my head, alongside images of the fantastical science-lab cuisine and ultrafashionable footwear that I imagined were every Barcelonan’s birthright.

But a weekend at, say, Casa Camper, the boutique hotel (215 euros a night, about $280 at $1.30 to the euro) run by the shoemaker of the same name, would have gutted my entire weekend budget of $500. And I had to banish any thought of eating at El Bulli, where the 20-course tasting menu of black-olive waffles and rose foam (165 euros) has earned its owner, Ferran Adrià, a reputation as the world’s greatest chef (or at least its most innovative).

Worse, every hotel I could afford was booked. Desperate, I posted a plea for a “hip but cheap” place on Superfuture.com, an online forum for style hounds. The reply came back quickly: the 24-room Hostal Gat Raval. I shuddered. A hostel? No, a design hostel. Skeptical, but enchanted by the price (42 euros a night) and location (right behind the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona), I gave it a shot. I would have to share a bathroom, but that bathroom might very well have Philippe Starck fixtures — and I wouldn’t even have to bring my own towel.

So one Friday last May, I found myself hauling my suitcase down a narrow Barcelona street, into a dim foyer and up two flights of stairs. An inauspicious start, but Gat Raval turned out to be quite nice: the lobby was bright (white and Kermit the Frog green), and my room was cheery, with a sink, full-length mirror and petite balcony facing the sunlit street. After relaxing for 15 minutes, I left to explore the Raval neighborhood, but not before examining the hallway bathrooms — no Starck, but functional and clean. It would do.

Raval had been described to me as the equivalent of Manhattan’s East Village, a bohemian area where young artists, musicians and designers congregated. And indeed, the people I saw on the streets were all trendily attractive, with vintage sneakers, designer boots or flip-flops on their feet. Mesmerized, I spent a good hour observing them on the plaza in front of the museum, where they sunned themselves on the warm slate while skateboarders kick-flipped around them.

All that people-watching made me hungry, so I popped into Mamacafé, around the corner on Carrer Doctor Dou. In a sleek dining room painted in sunset colors, I devoured tart and garlicky gazpacho, a fried egg over patatas bravas (the spicy Catalan home fries) and lemon sorbet — all made with ingredients from La Boqueria, the famous marketplace that dates back to the 13th century. A glass of red wine, included in the set menu, and an espresso brought the bill to 10.55 euros — far less than I’d expected for such a fresh, filling meal.

I waddled back to the Museu d’Art Contemporani, where 6 euros opened the doors to both the permanent collection (ho-hum Cy Twomblys and Philip Gustons) and a special exhibition of pop music albums, from Patti Smith’s “Horses” by Robert Mapplethorpe to Raymond Pettibon’s covers for Black Flag. As I stood at a listening station, I realized this was just what I’d hoped to find — the coolest of pop culture treated as high art.

With culture under my belt, I made my obligatory visit to La Rambla, the parklike pedestrian thoroughfare that leads to the harbor. This was once the epicenter of Barcelona street life, a place for performers, protestors and, in the 1970’s and 80’s, prostitutes and drug addicts. But since the 1992 Summer Olympics, the area has been cleaned up — or, to some, Disneyfied à la Times Square. People in overly elaborate costumes (witches and knights figured heavily that day) strolled next to gawking tourists while boisterous groups of perpetually tipsy bachelorettes who routinely wing in from England on easyJet and Ryanair snapped up sombreros from street vendors. Sombreros!

Luckily, I was soon rescued by George, an American expatriate I’d met through a friend. We hurried over to Irati, a narrow tapas bar far enough from the Rambla to discourage most tourists. The bartender poured us glasses of Txakoli (pronounced cha-ko-LEE), a dry white wine from the Basque region, as we sampled the toothpick-skewered tapas piled before us: bread slathered with goat cheese, anchovy crostini and olives (1.50 euros each).

I told George about my frugal mission. He laughed. I was in the wrong place, he said — the Catalans drive a hard bargain. “Look,” he added, as the bartender counted our used toothpicks to compute the bill (14.10 euros), “you’ll never see that in Madrid.”

As night fell, George led me through El Barri Gòtic, a knotty old neighborhood of brick alleys and squares fronting medieval churches. Miró had lived here, as had a teenage Picasso, whose second-floor window remains. No sooner was I completely lost than George announced he had to leave; his wife expected him home for dinner. I stumbled my way to a main road and caught a taxi to meet Alex, another friend of a friend.

Our plan was to feed off of El Bulli’s glamour by eating at Inopia, a much-cheaper tapas bar run by Mr. Adrià’s brother, Albert. But Alex, a Catalan-speaking local, wanted to make sure I also saw Barcelona’s darker side.

He lured me into L’Ovella Negra, a cavernous bar full of foreign students, all immeasurably drunk on 1.20-euro draft beers (or, as www.ovellanegra.com puts it, “beeeeeeeeer”). Alex explained that, back in his university days, this had been his primary haunt. We stayed for a couple of rounds, quietly mourning our passing youth, when a blotto Irish girl mistook us for Frenchmen and introduced us to her friends as Pierre and François. It was our cue to leave.

Too bad it hadn’t come sooner. By the time we arrived at Inopia, at the civilized hour of 11:30 p.m., the kitchen was inexplicably and disturbingly closed. We went across the street to the utterly empty Rossell and ate uninspiring cheese-and-mushroom fondue (16 euros each). I was back at the Gat by 1 a.m. and drifted off, pondering the meaning of inopia: clueless.

Less than four hours later, my alarm clock screamed. I had a mission: to watch La Boqueria wake up. Anyone can browse the market’s jam-packed stalls in the day, but I wanted to go behind the scenes to get a vendor’s-eye view of the action. When I arrived at 5, butchers were slicing whole pigs into pork chops, fishmongers were arraying glistening sheets of crushed ice and greengrocers were erecting rainbow ziggurats of apples, oranges, tomatoes, cherries, peppers and pears. Best of all, I was the only tourist.

La Boqueria is also a great place to grab a cheap breakfast. After taking a million photos, I ordered a cortado (a small strong coffee with a small amount of milk) and croissant (2 euros) at Pinotxo, one of the handful of tapas bars. By 6, serious shoppers were starting to crowd in, and I was already exhausted.

So I returned to the hostel for a nap; I’d need more sleep and a shower if I wanted to keep up with late-night Barcelona. But I’d forgotten that unwritten rule of hostels: last one into the shower is a rotten egg. The drain was clogged, and the stall was so tiny that I burned my forearm on a hot water pipe. I emerged feeling dirtier than I did going in.

Still, I was glad for the rest. The weather was perfect and the hostel desk clerk insisted I visit Parc Güell, up in the hills overlooking the city. The park was designed by Antoni Gaudí, whose avant-garde architecture is evident everywhere, from the animal-themed fountains to the cracked-tile benches undulating around the Plaça del Teatre Grec.

The park also contains Gaudí’s house, now a museum of his designs (admission is 4 euros). But the greatest work of Barcelona’s most famous architect lies down the hill at La Sagrada Familia, the über-ambitious church he spent 43 years building — without ever finishing. (Other architects have carried on the work, now projected to be completed in 2022.) Admission was 8 euros, but by showing my Gaudí museum ticket, I got in for 5. I gaped at the bifurcating columns, which imitate the natural structure of tree trunks, and marveled at the postmodern grid of the surrounding scaffolding. The contrast made my heart soar, but not in the way that Gaudí, a devout and conservative Catholic, probably intended.

For a moment, I considered climbing the stairs to get a view from the spires, but after walking around all day, my feet hurt. It was time to replace my beat-up Merrells. A 5-euro taxi ride brought me to El Born, the SoHo to Raval’s East Village, full of chichi boutiques and trendy restaurants. None, however, carried the shoes I wanted, at least nothing under 150 euros.

By now, the sun was setting, and I wondered where the day had gone. Sure, I’d spent so little, but I had seen so little, too — I wished I could buy an extra half day with my remaining wad. So I splurged on a cab and headed back to Inopia.

I arrived to find George, his wife, Lucie, and their friend David standing at Inopia’s sidewalk counter. Inside, the fluorescent-lighted space looked more like an industrial kitchen than the restaurant of a semifamous chef. But that’s Inopia’s point: straightforward tapas, without foams, airs or mummified mackerels. Over glasses of Sierra Cantabria and bottles of Moritz pilsner, we nibbled textbook-perfect patatas bravas, a plate of olives that spanned the flavor spectrum from bitter to sweet to spicy, and a torta cañarejal — a block of cheese so liquid and rich you could drink it like buttermilk.

But better than this food, better even than the price (somehow, my share came only to 25 euros), was the clubby atmosphere. Throughout the night, friends of George and Lucie would swing by and gossip in English, Spanish or Catalan, and I began to appreciate Barcelona’s true attraction. It isn’t necessarily the museums or restaurants, but its cosmopolitan people, vibrant street life and Paris-meets-Miami architecture that makes the city exciting. The sophistication I’d been seeking wasn’t something I needed to spend a lot of money to find.

I awoke the next morning to twin unpleasantries: once again, I was not the first to the shower, but worse, it was Sunday and all the stores were closed — no chance to drop my extra euros on a pair of awesome kicks. Instead, I ate lunch at Origen 99.9%, a minichain of bistros devoted to traditional Catalan recipes like baby octopus in chocolate sauce and Monserrat tomatoes stuffed with cheese and anchovies. Lunch was delicious and, at 15.57 euros, affordable. But despite my epiphany the previous night, I couldn’t get past my failure to find new shoes.

Disappointed, I shuffled down to the beach, possibly Barcelona’s most picturesque feature. Right there, at the edge of Barceloneta, a dense urban neighborhood, was a golden field of sand whose beauty was matched only by that of the young people sprawled across it. I dropped my bag and towel near a trio of topless women (I couldn’t help it, there were so many), kicked off my worn-out shoes and walked into the Mediterranean, my pockets full and my feet bare.

TOTAL 341.10 euros, including taxis; two 1.20-euro subway rides; the books “Gaudí’s Barcelona” and Robert Hughes’s definitive “Barcelona”; and a 70-euro pair of super-cool Castañer espadrilles, which, alas, I bought in Italy — not at the company’s shop in Barcelona.

VISITOR INFORMATION

WHERE TO STAY

Hostal Gat Raval, Joaquin Costa 44; (34-93) 481-6670; www.gataccommodation.com. If the Web site lists no vacancies, try www.bootsnall.com, a booking resource for backpackers.

Hostal Gat Xino, Hospital 155; (34-93) 324-8833; www.gataccommodation.com.

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK

Inopia Classic Bar, Tamarit 104; (34-93) 424-5231; www.barinopia.com.

Irati, Cardenal Casanyes 17; (34-93) 302-3084.

Mamacafé, Doctor Dou 10; (34-93) 301-2940.

Origen 99.9%, four locations; www.origen99.com.

Rossell, Tamarit 109; (34-93) 424-1505.

La Cova Fumada, Baluard 56; (34-93) 221-4061. Hidden in the wafer-thin buildings of Barceloneta, La Cova Fumada is a slice of old-school Catalonia with a kitchen that produces workingmen’s classics like butifarra sausage, bombas (potato and meat croquettes) and cod in myriad forms.

WHERE TO SHOP

Castañer, Mestre Nicolau 23; (34-93) 414-2428; www.castaner.com.

La Boqueria, Plaça de la Boqueria; (34-93) 318-2584; www.boqueria.info. Closed Sundays.

Nubius, Espaseria 7; (34-93) 319-1006; and Avinyó 21; (34-93) 304-2420; www.nubius.es. The shop embroiders T-shirts and button-downs with images like a skyscraper wrapped in alien tentacles.

Ras, Doctor Dou 10; (34-93) 412-7199; www.rasbcn.com. It features design books and magazines and has a gallery for the work of art-minded architects.

William Safire: Islamofascism

2007-11-06T07:17:41+00:00

Every war is entitled to a name. World War II was a warmed-over name, and the Korean conflict was not at first even given the name of “war,” which Vietnam rated until it was overtaken by “syndrome.” And not until 1947 was our intense but not-hot war against the Soviet Union named — in a speech by Bernard Baruch, written by Herbert Bayard Swope — the cold war.

We are now engaged in what many stay-the-coursers like to call “the long war,” which may turn out to be its name in history unless good fortune shortens it. But more important than the name of the war — at least to the people on our side fighting and supporting it — is the name of the enemy. To allow a sworn enemy to remain nameless is to grant it the propaganda advantage of eternal mystery.

Accordingly, President Bush and his legion of the resolved tried out “war on terror.” But that was derivative (“war on poverty,” “war on drugs,” “war on” a variety of isms), and terror was the method used by the enemy, not the enemy itself — an amorphous idea of intimidation rather than a specific, belligerent nation or a hostile people.

What rallying title to use? Not the “Iraqi war”; the elected Iraqi government is on our side. The “war on Saddam” is over, and the “war on bin Laden” would only build up a TV ghost. The “war on Islam”? No; we’re not fighting a whole religion. Bush tried narrowing that to “Islamic radicals,” but that formulation was denounced by Democratic senators and nonradical Muslims. “There was a conscious desire not to use just one definitive word,” said Michael Gerson, until last year the president’s chief speechwriter, now a Newsweek columnist, “because there wasn’t a perfect word.”

Bush has been sensitive from the first days after 9/11 to the wrong of tarring the vast majority of Muslims with guilt-by-association rhetoric. In straining to be fair, however, he set out a few suggested labels but declined to choose: “Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant jihadism; still others, Islamofascism. Whatever it’s called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam.”

That’s the tie-salesman approach to war-naming. (“You like this one? How about this one? Or this?”) This was not typical, ringing, forthright Bush oratory; rather, it was as if the president had taken the contribution of the speechwriters Gerson and David Frum years ago and fused Saddam’s Iraq, the mullahs’ Iran and nuclear-armed North Korea into an “axis of whatever.”

But the option preferred by “still others” bears closer scrutiny: Islamofascism treats the opening Islam as the specifying modifier for the dominant noun, the repugnant ideology of fascism.

What’s a fascist? In 1922, the Italian politician Benito Mussolini turned to a symbol of the ancient Roman imperium, the fasces, which the Penn State professor of classics Daniel Berman informs me was “a bundle” of birch rods and an ax standing for penal authority. Il Duce’s Partito Nazionale Fascista stood for militarism, social elitism and fierce nationalism, combined with contempt for democracy and anger at the rise of Communism. In Germany soon afterward, Adolf Hitler’s version of fascism — his party was called National Socialism, or Nazi — added to that menacing bundle of sticks a fury against “decadence” represented by the despised weak and intellectual, demanding the replacement of “feminine lamentation” with “virile hatred” of Marxists and, above all, Jews.

But in current usage, fascism is remembered less as an ideology than as a dictatorship employing violent repression at home and military aggression abroad. Because of its anti-Communist beginnings and despite early socialist pretensions, the intolerant “axis” of Rome and Berlin, and later Tokyo, is semantically associated with ultraconservativism. The imprecation fascist has been more often flung at the far right by the extreme left than vice versa.

That’s been changing in recent years. Fascism is not so much taken to be a left or right political ideology; rather, it has become a word defining hate-based practices employed by a totalitarian regime or movement — bundling such punishing birch-whip words as “dictatorial,” “bigoted,” “jack-booted,” “racist,” “sexist,” “power-famished.”

To address the “some, others, still others” range of “ism” choices to describe Al Quaeda and affiliated terrorists:

First, Islamic radicalism seems long, bookish and weak, because a radical need not be any kind of terrorist.

Second, militant jihadist is redundant if you take jihad to mean “holy war.” But some Muslim scholars translate the Arabic word as “spiritual struggle,” from jahada, “to strive,” and besides, jihad is too unfamiliar to many English-speakers to register quickly as a label.

Third, Islamofascism. A popularizer of the term has been Christopher Hitchens, who writes for The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair and Slate. He declines coinage credit, informing me that he wrote that the 9/11 attacks represented “fascism with an Islamic face,” (a play on Susan Sontag’s phrase about the Polish coup of 1981, “fascism with a human face,” in turn based on the 1968 “Prague spring” theme, “Communism with a human face”). The first use I can find is in The Independent of Sept. 8, 1990: “Authoritarian government, not to say ‘Islamo-fascism,”’ wrote Malise Ruthven in the London newspaper, “is the rule rather than the exception from Morocco to Pakistan.”

The O.E.D. has a half-dozen citations of the Islamo combining form dating to 1906, from IslamoArab to Islamocentrist. Why the connective “o” and not a divisive “ic”? Euphony; the Greek construction flows more easily. That’s why Islamofascism may have legs: the compound defines those terrorists who profess a religious mission while embracing totalitarian methods and helps separate them from devout Muslims who want no part of terrorist means.

October 1, 2006

Walter Benn Michaels: Last Words

2007-11-06T07:17:41+00:00

The subject of disappearing languages has been in the news for some time — the standard prediction is that roughly half of the 6,000 languages currently spoken are, as Unesco puts it, “doomed” — but it has recently been given new impetus in the United States by the fear expressed by some conservative commentators that English is being added to the list. Will American English survive “the immigrant flood” of Spanish-speaking migrants, recent columns in the weekly Human Events have asked. Their answer is, “tragically,” no. But would it really be a tragedy if English vanished?

Of course, the idea that English is a vanishing language seems a little implausible (it’s the second-most-spoken language in the world), but then it was only a few years ago that the U.S. dominated world basketball, and look what has happened there. Furthermore, there’s a long history on this continent of immigrant languages killing off the indigenous ones. Scholars believe that there used to be as many as 300 Native American languages. Now there are fewer than 200. What happened? Well, one thing that happened was that missionaries and the federal government did their best to get the Indians to stop talking in what J.D.C. Atkins, a 19th-century commissioner of Indian affairs, called their “barbarous dialect” and to start talking in “civilized” languages like English. And another was that even when they couldn’t kill off the language, they were often quite effective at killing off the people who spoke it. Hence English flourished, and languages like Tlingit, for example, didn’t.

Things are obviously better today. Not only are almost no English speakers being murdered by linguistically evangelizing Mexicans; no Spanish speakers are complaining about how barbarous English is. In fact, few people today think that any languages are either barbarous or civilized. “No language,” as the linguist John Edwards has written, “can be described as better or worse than another on purely linguistic grounds”; all “languages are always sufficient for the needs of their speakers.” Which is why the effort to get people to stop speaking in their own tongues (taking them away to special boarding schools, punishing them when they didn’t speak English) and to start speaking in yours looked then, and still looks now, like an essentially arbitrary use of power. Theirs is just as good as yours: why should they give it up?

So the good news is that progress has been made; no one any longer thinks that one language is better than another. But the bad news is that many languages are dying anyway. In fact, for various social and economic reasons, they are dying faster than ever. Many of the Native American languages that still exist are spoken by a very few old people, and while no one is trying to force them to stop speaking whatever it is they speak, no one is having much success in persuading their children and grandchildren to continue speaking it. So where the tragic figure of 19th-century language loss was a child discouraged from speaking her own language and made to speak English instead, the tragic figure of 21st-century language loss is an elder allowed, and even encouraged, to speak her own language but with no one around to speak it to. The 19th-century problem was about people who couldn’t use their languages; the problem now is about the languages themselves — “tragically,” they’re disappearing.

But why would it be a tragedy if English disappeared? Why is it a tragedy if Tlingit disappears? Although we can all agree it’s a bad thing to try to get people to stop using their language, it’s hard to see why it’s a bad thing if their language disappears. Why? Because the very thing that made it a mistake for the missionaries to try to stop people from speaking Native American languages (it’s not as if English was better) makes it a mistake to care whether people continue to speak Native American languages (it’s not as if English is worse).

We can see the point clearly by pretending for a second that English really is starting to vanish. Suppose our children start speaking a little Spanish, our grandchildren become bilingual and our great-grandchildren speak only Spanish. Since we can’t speak Spanish, we can’t talk to them. But if that’s a problem, it won’t last for long, and once it is solved, there will be no problem left. Just as the language we speak does everything we need it to do, the language they speak will do everything they need it to do. No doubt it’s unfortunate that our descendants won’t be able to read Shakespeare in the original. But, truth to tell, we’re not doing much of that ourselves anyway. It’s not as if we’re native speakers of Elizabethan English. That’s why there’s a market for “No Fear Shakespeare”: the Bard on one page; a “translation into modern English — the kind of English people actually speak today” on the other. And, of course, instead of Shakespeare and Joyce, our descendants will be able to read Cervantes and Borges — the classics of their literature if not of ours.

Which is the whole point. Our language is the one we speak, not the one our ancestors spoke. My great-grandparents could read only Yiddish. Am I supposed to feel a stronger connection to Abramovich’s “Kliatche” (“Mare”), a book I never heard of until I looked up Yiddish classics on the Web two minutes ago, than, say, to “Vanity Fair,” a book my ancestors wouldn’t have understood one word of? And are my descendants supposed to feel they are losing their cultural heritage just because the old books they are reading are not the same as the old books I read?

Obviously not. Their cultural heritage will be the books they read; their language will be the one they speak. A language will have been lost, but like the old joke about the great train robbery (no loss of train), no one will have lost his language. And no one will have lost his literature or his cultural heritage or what our English supremacists say they most want to retain, their American identity. You can read “No Fear Cervantes” in Spanish; you can sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Spanish; you can invade Iraq in Spanish; you can even lose the finals of the World Basketball Championship in Spanish. Although this year (Spain 70, Greece 47), it didn’t happen.

Walter Benn Michaels teaches English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His new book, “The Trouble With Diversity,” will be published this month.

October 1, 2006

Molly Moore: After Machismo's Long Reign, Women Gain in Spain

2007-11-06T07:17:41+00:00

MADRID -- When Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega graduated from law school in the 1970s, Spanish law prohibited her -- and any other woman -- from becoming a judge, serving as a witness in court or opening a bank account.

Today, the angular, outspoken 57-year-old is Spain's first female vice president, helping orchestrate a cultural revolution in the boardrooms and living rooms of the country that coined the word machismo -- male chauvinism -- five centuries ago.

"We have a prime minister who not only says he's a feminist -- he acts like a feminist," Fernandez de la Vega said in her cavernous office of polished wood floors and cream-colored sofas. "In two and one-half years, we have done more than has ever been done in such a short time in Spain."

Her Socialist government is requiring political parties to allot 40 percent of their candidate lists to women and is telling big companies to give women 40 percent of the seats on corporate boards. Half of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero's cabinet members are women -- the highest proportion in any government in Europe.

New divorce laws not only make it easier for couples to split but stipulate that marital obligations require men to share the housework equally with their wives.

To draw more women into the armed forces, the government is shrinking the height requirements for women entering the National Guard and opening child-care centers on military bases.

Not even the royal family is immune: Zapatero wants to abolish the law giving male heirs first rights to the throne.

The push for gender equality in one of Europe's most macho cultures comes as both internal and outside forces are creating seismic social shifts: Spanish women are taking greater control of their own lives by waiting longer to marry and having fewer children. The European Union is exerting more pressure on members to enforce equality. And the growth of high-tech businesses with a greater sensitivity to hiring women is expanding job opportunities.

The chief executives of Spain's IBM, Microsoft and Google operations are all women. In many cases, they are not only hiring more female employees than traditional industries, but they are attempting to make the workplace more family-friendly.

Microsoft chief Rosa Maria Garcia, a 40-year-old mother of three, said she has mandated that no company meetings be scheduled before 8:30 a.m. or after 5:30 p.m. -- a revolutionary move in a country where workdays routinely stretch until 9 or 10 p.m.

Despite the advances, Fernandez said, "There is resistance. We have a long way to go."

Business organizations are attacking the proposed quotas for women on corporate boards. Some Catholic Church officials denounce decisions allowing gay couples to marry and liberalization of abortion laws as "demonic." Despite new laws cracking down on domestic violence, the number of women murdered by their partners has escalated this year -- in part, some sociologists believe, because men are striking back even harder at spouses who dare to report abuses to police.

Many men scoff at the law's efforts to legislate home life.

"Just because Zapatero says by law men have to do dishes, men are not going to do dishes," said Alberto Fuertes, a stocky, square-faced 37-year-old owner of a small factory. "That's ridiculous. It's totally absurd."

A recent government-sponsored television advertisement showed a man meticulously washing his car and admonished that if a guy can clean his auto, there's nothing unmanly in helping his wife pick up around the house.

Some women also take potshots at Zapatero's reforms and the women he has promoted to help him run the country.

After Zapatero filled eight of his 16 cabinet positions -- including the vice presidency -- with women, "the first thing they did was have a picture taken dressed up in party dresses and full of furs," sniped Ana Pastor, a member of the lower house of parliament and one of the most senior women in the opposition Popular Party. She was referring to a controversial photo spread of the female cabinet members in the Spanish edition of Vogue two years ago. "The vice president of the government, Fernandez de la Vega, is known as Fernandez de la Vogue."

Zapatero, elected in part on his promises to improve the station of women, has said his mission is to make up for lost time.

"One thing that really awakens my rebellious streak is 20 centuries of one sex dominating the other," Zapatero said shortly after his election. "We talk of slavery, feudalism, exploitation -- but the most unjust domination is that of one-half of the human race over the other."

During the height of the sexual revolution in the United States and other parts of Europe, Spain was just beginning to emerge from decades of dictatorship under Generalissimo Francisco Franco and a legal system that did not recognize rights for women. Domestic violence was considered a means of disciplining wives rather than a criminal violation, and many jobs were closed to women.

Despite advances in government opportunities for women, the Spanish private sector remains one of the most chauvinistic in Europe. Women sit on less than 5 percent of corporate boards and overall earn 30 percent less than their male counterparts. It remains common practice for companies to fire pregnant women, according to women's organizations and victims.

"The culture and tradition of machista is very deeply ingrained in the mentality of everyone," said Carmen Bravo, secretary for women's issues for Spain's largest labor union, known by the initials CCOO.

Fuertes, whose small factory makes mattress covers, said he has no problem hiring women -- all 11 of his employees are women, most between the ages of 46 and 55.

"The older generation of women are used to working hard," said Fuertes, balancing his 2 1/2 -year-old daughter on his lap after returning home at the end of a recent workday. "If I hire a 36-year-old, the problem is that she's going to take a lot of days off to take her child to the doctor. She knows her rights and knows I can't do anything about that."

At home, Fuertes said, it's not Zapatero's laws, but his working wife who has persuaded him to share in the cooking and cleaning.

At his parent's home, "My father crosses his arms and says to my mother, 'Bring me my coffee,' " Fuertes said. "My mother does everything -- she irons and cooks and cleans. Women now don't want to be like their mothers."

And if Alba, his daughter, grew up to marry a man like grandpa?

"I would not be happy," said Fuertes, as his toddler nestled against his chest. "It would go against everything I've tried to teach her."

Saturday, October 7, 2006; A01

Jim Yardley: Dead Bachelors in Remote China Still Find Wives

2007-11-06T07:17:06+00:00

CHENJIAYUAN, China — For many Chinese, an ancestor is someone to honor, but also someone whose needs must be maintained. Families burn offerings of fake money or paper models of luxury cars in case an ancestor might need pocket change or a stylish ride in the netherworld.

But here in the parched canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple.

“They happen pretty often, especially when teenagers or younger people die,” said Yang Husheng, 48, a traveling funeral director in the region who said he last attended such a funeral in the spring. “It’s quite common. I’ve been in the business for seven or eight years, and I’ve seen all sorts of things.”

The rural folk custom, startling to Western sensibilities, is known as minghun, or afterlife marriage. Scholars who have studied it say it is rooted in the Chinese form of ancestor worship, which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants — or risk the consequences. Traditional Chinese beliefs also hold that an unmarried life is incomplete, which is why some parents worry that an unmarried dead son may be an unhappy one.

In random interviews in different villages across the Loess Plateau, which spreads across parts of Shanxi and Shaanxi Provinces, everyone acknowledged the custom. People say parents of a dead son depend on an informal network of friends or family, or even a well-connected fixer, to locate a family that has recently lost a single daughter. Selling or buying corpses for commercial purposes is illegal in China, but these individual transactions, usually for cash, seem to fall into a fuzzier category and are quietly arranged between families.

In some villages, a son is eligible for such a spouse if he is 12 or older when he dies. None of the people interviewed considered the custom shameful or overly macabre. Instead, it was described as a parental duty to a lost child that reflected Confucian values about loyalty to family.

“Parents have a sense of responsibility for their son,” said one woman, Li Yinlan. She said she had attended ceremonies where the coffins were placed side by side and musicians played a dirge. “They have this custom everywhere,” she said of her region.

The Communist Party has tried, with mixed success, to stamp out beliefs it considers to be superstition. But the continued practice of the ancient custom in the Loess Plateau is a testament to the region’s extreme isolation. In other parts of rural China, it is difficult to know how often, if at all, the custom is followed.

The Loess Plateau, a dense warren of eroding canyons where some villages are unreachable by roads, is separated from much of the change stirring up China. Many young people have fled the arid hills, while those left behind struggle to raise a crop. Many of the men left behind also struggle to find a wife.

The reason is that many women have left for work in cities, never to return, while those women who remain can afford to be picky. No family would approve of a daughter marrying a man too poor to afford a dowry and a decent future. Families of the poorest bachelor sons sometimes pool their savings to buy a wife from bride sellers, the traveling brokers who lure, trick or sometimes kidnap women from other regions and then illegally sell them into marriage.

In the tiny village of Chenjiayuan, a farmer named Chen Xingwu, 57, stabbed a spade into his field overlooking the Yellow River and said minghun represented the final effort by parents to find a bride for a son. He said the parents of a local disabled man were so worried their son would die before finding a spouse that they recently gave a gold ring and earrings to a woman’s family to secure her as a bride.

Mr. Chen said his own marriage, at 35, was a lucky stroke, coming after he lobbied the family of a younger woman in another village. It allowed him to have three children and carry on his family name. But he said the pool of available brides was limited, a scarcity that increased their value — an irony, given that some rural families, conscious of China’s one-child policy, abort female fetuses before birth or abandon newborn girls.

“For girls, it doesn’t matter about their minds, whether they are an idiot or not,” he said. “They are still wanted as brides.” Dead or alive, he added, as he peered at the river.

“There are girls who have drowned in the river down there,” he said. “When their bodies have washed up, their families could get a couple of thousand yuan for them.”

Villagers and Mr. Yang, the funeral director, said a family searching for a female corpse typically must pay more than 10,000 yuan, or about $1,200, almost four years of income for an average farmer. Families of the bride regard the money as the dowry they would have received had death not intervened.

The existence of such a market for brides has led to scattered reports of grave robbing. This year, a man in Shaanxi Province captured two men trying to dig up the body of his wife, according to a local news account. In February, a woman from Yangquan tried to buy the remains of a dead 15-year-old girl, abandoned at a hospital in another city, to satisfy her unmarried deceased brother. She said the brother’s ghost was invading her dreams and demanding a wife, according to a news account.

Guo Yuhua, a sociology professor at Qinghua University in Beijing, an expert on folk traditions and burial customs in the Loess Plateau, said the minghun custom stemmed from both dread and sympathy for the dead. She said parents with dead daughters, like those with dead sons, were also carrying out an obligation to their child. They will sell their bodies as a way of finding them a place in a Chinese society where tradition dictates that a daughter has no place on her father’s family tree.

“China is a paternal clan culture,” said Professor Guo, who did postdoctoral work in anthropology at Harvard. “A woman does not belong to her parents. She must marry and have children of her own before she has a place among her husband’s lineage. A woman who dies unmarried has no place in this world.”

Pinpointing the origins of minghun is difficult, but scholars have found allusions to the practice in different ancient texts, including the Rites of Zhou, a guidebook of appropriate Confucian behavior written around the third century B.C. Commentators on the Confucian classics have argued that the ancient educated elite disapproved of the custom.

Yet Professor Guo emphasized that the values of Confucianism, later blended with Buddhism and Taoism, are the basis of folk customs like minghun, which share a reverence for family.

In the village of Qinjiagelao, where roughly one in four eligible men are unmarried, Qin Yuxing, 80, is a genial grandfather unashamed of the minghun practice or the fact that he bought living brides for both his sons.

His younger son, now 40, had tried to find a spouse but the family was too poor. The elder Mr. Qin saved his money and bought a bride from a man who showed up at a local market offering a woman for $500. The woman bore Mr. Qin’s son a child and then left three years ago to visit her family — and never came back.

“People aren’t willing to come here,” the elder Mr. Qin said to explain why he was willing to purchase a woman for his son. His village is perched atop a cliff and had no road until last year. Women often face backbreaking work. Mr. Qin said similar pressures weighed on a neighboring family after their unmarried son died in a gas explosion more than a decade ago. That family spent $500 for an afterlife marriage, he said. Mr. Qin’s wife, Cao Guoxiang, 76, recalled another case involving parents buying a dead bride for their unmarried son, a trucker who died in an accident.

She said the size of afterlife ceremonies depended on a family’s wealth. “Poor people just bring the bodies over and put them in the earth,” she said. “People with money will have a reception and slaughter a pig or a sheep for friends.”

She added: “It’s superstition and religion. People live as couples. If they die, they should live as a couple, too.”

And that is why families too poor to afford a minghun bride also follow a similar custom in some villages: They make a figure of straw and bury it beside a dead son as the spouse he never had.

Gaby Wood: The quiet American

2007-11-06T07:17:06+00:00

'Everybody has a cartoon of themselves,' suggests David Remnick, the editor of a magazine famous for them. 'Mine is: I write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time.'

As New Yorker cartoons go, the image wouldn't appear to hold much promise of a punch line, but Remnick doesn't mind it, and it contains, after all, a certain amount of truth. 'I'm not the slowest writer that you know,' he admits, adding with characteristic wryness: 'For better or for worse, by the way. AJ Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.'

Remnick, who was for many years the New Yorker's star reporter, covering - in the tradition of AJ Liebling - an almost alarming range of subjects with grace and dexterity, has edited the magazine for the past eight years and quietly, seriously, changed its fortunes. He is the fifth editor in the New Yorker's 81-year history and, by reputation - as his thumbnail self-portrait implies - its least eccentric.

So many memoirs have now been written about the distinguished publication that Harold Ross, its founder and first editor, has gone down in history as a maddening, well-connected workaholic who sacrificed three marriages to his literary invention. It is widely known that his successor, William Shawn, was neurotic, nuanced, almost pathologically shy, and that Robert Gottlieb, a gifted interloper, possessed a museum-worthy collection of plastic purses. In more recent memory, Tina Brown hired big-name writers at vast expense, threw celebrity-strewn bashes to promote the magazine (all of which resulted in a rumoured loss of up to $20m annually) and was supposed to have rejected any story that couldn't hold her attention on the StairMaster.

It could be said that Brown's methods were not eccentric but merely attuned to the demands of Eighties and Nineties culture. Equally, Remnick's non-partying ethic and commitment to world affairs might be thought the only appropriate way forward for a post-9/11 magazine. Remnick, who was hired by Brown, has never been critical of her tenure, and is inviolably modest about his own contribution. 'My background is as a reporter and foreign correspondent, but it's hard to separate what one's natural inclinations are from the times,' he tells me. 'My time as editor has been overlapped by a crisis - a prolonged, labyrinthine, tragic, seemingly non-ending crisis - that involves the prehistory of 9/11, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, fraught histories between the United States and almost everyone.' Remnick's colleague Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestselling books The Tipping Point and Blink, says, similarly, that 'we live in a suddenly serious time, where people have an appetite for intelligent, thoughtful explanations of consequential topics'.

Yet how can Remnick's editorial strategy be considered inevitable when no one else is doing what he does? However frequently Graydon Carter may address the bungles of the Bush administration in his letters from the editor in Vanity Fair, he feels compelled, more often than not, to feature a cover star in a bikini. Meanwhile, on another floor of the Conde Nast building, the New Yorker puts Seymour Hersh's investigations of national security on the cover and has the highest subscription renewal rate of any magazine in the country. It has a circulation of over 1m, and although it is privately owned and such figures are not publicly available, it is thought to be turning a profit of around $10m.

Celebrity culture is far from over; if you wrote a plan for a magazine and said you thought you could make a profit by publishing 8,000-word pieces on the future of various African nations, hefty analyses of the pension system and a three-part series on global warming, hordes of people would laugh in your face. So how has Remnick done it? Before I met him, I asked this of an acclaimed New York journalist, who said: 'If you can work that out, you will have the scoop of the century. No one knows.'

Remnick is well aware of the apparent mystery, which is why no focus group is ever involved in an editorial decision. As he puts it, it doesn't take a genius to work out that one hundred per cent of his readers are not going to get home from work, put their keys down and say: You know, honey, what I need to do now is read 10,000 words on Congo. 'So you throw it out there, and you hope that there are some things that people will immediately read - cartoons, shorter things, Anthony Lane, Talk of the Town. And then, eventually, the next morning on the train, somebody sees this piece, and despite its seeming formidableness, they read it.'

You might say that what looks at first like common sense is David Remnick's most winning eccentricity.

We meet at the New Yorker offices in Times Square on an obscenely hot day in August. Remnick extends a courtly, ironic offer of rehydration: 'Coffee? Water? Drip?' His glass box of an office is decorated with original cover art and scattered photographs - a portrait of AJ Liebling sitting under an apple tree; Dean Rohrer's wonderful image of Monica Lewinsky as the Mona Lisa. On his desk is a rare book about Jean-Luc Godard, in French.

He has just returned from Arkansas, where he met Bill Clinton for a long profile he is writing, and he spent the end of last week editing a cover story on Hizbollah by John Lee Anderson with an exceptionally fast turnaround. Another reporter calls from the Middle East as I arrive. Yet here is Remnick, blithe and witty as anything, behaving more or less as Fred Astaire would, if only a role had been scripted for him by Philip Roth.

Reporting, a new collection of Remnick's writing from the New Yorker, has just been published. It reveals not only the scope of his interests - he is as lucid about the PLO as he is touching about Solzhenitsyn, as excruciatingly accurate about Tony Blair as he is compelling on the subject of Mike Tyson's trainer - but also the deceptive straightforwardness of his style.

Remnick won a Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Lenin's Tomb, in 1994, and the great pleasure of that book, which gives a kaleidoscopic account of the fall of the Soviet Union, was that you felt party to the open mind of a reporter (originally at the Washington Post) who followed his instincts at every turn. He didn't mind telling you, for instance, that his wife's family had been interned in camps in the country to which they were now returning; if he saw someone handing out flyers in the street, he would delve deeply into their purposes; he was not shy of doorstepping ancient members of the KGB. In that first book, as in his others - a follow-up about Russia called Resurrection; a collection of pieces entitled The Devil Problem; a story about Muhammad Ali called King of the World; and Reporting - simply turned sentences open up vistas of complication. Yet the quality that Remnick shows most in conversation is his capacity for self-deprecation. He opens a profile of Katharine Graham, the imperious proprietor of the Washington Post and his sometime boss, with a story about his own involvement in the Post's historic interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in 1988:

'As the junior man in the bureau, I was given the task of finding the hairdresser. I would not insist that Moscow was short on luxury in those days, except to note that I did not so much find a hairdresser as create one. At one of the embassies, I found a young woman who was said to own a blow-dryer and a brush. I rang her up and explained the situation. Gravely, as if we were negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, I gave her an annotated copy of Vogue, a mug shot of Mrs Graham, and a hundred dollars.

"You're on," she said.

'Apparently, the interview went well. It was featured, with a photograph, in the next day's edition of Pravda. Mrs Graham looked quite handsome, I thought. A nice full head of hair, and well combed. I felt close to history.'

In a piece about Tony Blair written just before the last election, Remnick witnesses, behind the scenes, the Prime Minister's utter humiliation at the hands of Little Ant and Little Dec. In a profile of Al Gore he reveals that Gore employs a private chef who still addresses him, years after his presidential defeat, as 'Mr Vice-President'. He gets to hang out with the famously publicity-shy Philip Roth in his most feverishly creative period; he visits Solzhenitsyn and his wife as they prepare to return to Russia. Yet in a preface to the book, Remnick alerts the reader to the fact that most of his subjects are public figures who do their best not to let their guard down. Why offer the warning? To suggest we'll never find out about them?

'No,' he replies, 'so that you'll find out about them in a different way.' With politicians, 'you've got press secretaries, and you've got a very, very self-conscious actor, who's performing in public and the course of whose career is dependent on how he's going to appear to some degree. And he's very experienced at it. And any question you ask him, he's heard, and he has a little tape loop in his head. So when something like Ant and Dec comes along,' - Remnick grins broadly and looks up to the skies in gratitude - 'Happy birthday. The gods of non-fiction have provided an unscripted scripted moment!'

Remnick pauses for a moment to tell a story about the glorious predictability of journalism. 'There was a wonderful thing Slate did years ago, when it was just getting started, called the Hackathlon. It was Michael Specter, Malcolm Gladwell and I forget who else.' (Specter and Gladwell are both old friends of Remnick's from the Washington Post, and both now colleagues at the New Yorker.) 'Each day there would be an event. You had to write a 500-word lede [an American term for an article's opening paragraph] in the Vanity Fair style to a Richard Gere profile: Ready, begin. Then you had to do an Economist situationer on Tanzania - first 400 words. Then maybe a Rolling Stone lede to a ... you know: Mick Jagger is angry. Period. Paragraph. Very Angry. Period. The limo is late. You know, one of those. And then maybe a New Yorker thing on the history of sand. I don't remember the specifics.'

Remnick leans in with a smile of utter glee, and goes on: 'Specter beat Gladwell. He came from behind, but his lede on the Richard Gere, comparing the colour of his hair to his grey cashmere sweater, was just so brilliant that he overwhelmed him in the Hackathlon. I mean, he could do nothing else in his career and his New York Times obituary would read: "Michael Specter, winner of the 1997 Slate Hackathlon, died today of complications of a hernia operation. He was 98."'

David Remnick was born in 1958 and grew up in Hillsdale, New Jersey, where his father was a dentist and his mother an art teacher. The extent of his early gifts, to hear others tell it, borders on the embarrassing. Richard Brody, a close friend Remnick met at Princeton, remembers a story Remnick told him at the time about his activities in high school.

'He was interested in journalism already, and in literature and poetry,' Brody tells me. 'So he interviewed poets, and put together a collection of those interviews for a small literary magazine, and I think some of them were collected in a book. So even in high school he had not only the idea, but let's say the lack of false modesty to go ahead and do something which many people much older would not have dared to do. '

Brody and Remnick found that they shared a love of Bob Dylan, a Jewish upbringing in the suburbs, and 'a literary school of sorts'. As Brody puts it: 'There was a whole generation of Jewish American writers - when Saul Bellow won his Nobel Prize, I guess when we were all freshmen or about to enter school. There were people like Philip Roth and Norman Mailer and Bernard Malamud and Joseph Heller. We sort of had a canon of fathers. I think we weren't postmodernists, temperamentally. We had read our Thomas Pynchon and our John Barth, but that wasn't what excited us. We were excited by the late flowering, among the children of Jewish immigrants, of the late 19th-century novel.'

(Remnick, still an enduring fan of Roth, tells me that he would have published Roth's latest novel, Everyman, in its entirety in the magazine, but Roth's agent wouldn't allow it.)

When he left Princeton with a degree in Comparative Literature, Remnick got a job at the Washington Post, where his early days were occupied by covering the night-cop beat, or doing celebrity interviews for the Style section, or writing about sport. In 1987, the Post decided it needed a second person in Moscow, and, as Remnick now recalls, 'Nobody else wanted to go. It's cold, in those days if you wanted a box of coffee, you had to order it from Denmark. Nowadays there are rich people and stores and all kinds of stuff. (It's still cold - pace global warming.) So I got to go - I was 28, 29 - and it was the best kind of foreign story: really exciting, constantly changing, intellectually fascinating, ethnically various. It was heaven for a reporter.' Before he left he married Esther B Fein, a reporter for the New York Times, who also filed stories from Russia.

'When we were at the Post he was a kind of legendary figure and I was a little underling,' remembers Malcolm Gladwell. 'People have forgotten that - and this is not by any means an exaggeration - David was the great newspaper reporter of his generation. And had he never been anything but a newspaper reporter he would be, right now, the best. At the Washington Post there was one day when he had three stories on the front page, which I don't think has ever been repeated. He was in a league by himself. So the idea that he would have a second act where he would outperform his first act is kind of unbelievable.'

When Remnick was offered the editorship of the New Yorker, he had never edited anything before - with the exception, as he likes to remind people, of his school magazine. The decision to abandon writing - which, for the most part, he has (he now only writes two long pieces a year, plus commentary in the magazine) - was made on the basis of 'a very simple calculation': 'I had about two days - a day - I had seconds to decide, actually. Where could I make the bigger contribution? The ability to affect this magazine and its place in the culture - now, I may cock it up as an editor, I don't know, but the capacity for potential was greater doing this.'

Tina Brown left on a Wednesday in 1998. Remnick, who had written over 100 pieces for the magazine in the six years he'd been there, and who was, as Brown put it, 'a key member of my dream team', consulted on all kinds of editorial matters, was offered the job the following Monday, and took over straightaway, rallied by a five-minute ovation from his colleagues. 'And then Tina was gone and the magazine had to come out the next week - and the week after that, and on and on,' says Remnick now, looking amusingly baffled. 'And I was an absolute novice. And the only saving grace is that there were these people around who were so good.'

It wasn't easy. There have been times, even recently, when his instinct has failed him. He came out in favour of the war in Iraq, for instance, on the grounds of concern about weapons of mass destruction, and says now that 'I was wrong about that, totally wrong, as events proved very quickly.' The job, as Robert Gottlieb once memorably described it, is 'like sticking your head into a pencil sharpener'. To make matters worse, in some quarters Schadenfreude kicked in early; a profile of Remnick in the New York Times took offence at his choice of interview venue - a formica-topped table in a coffee shop, which was seen to suggest that the 'buzz' of the Tina years had fizzled out on the spot.

Michael Specter, Remnick's close friend of 20 years, tells me that a couple of months after Remnick took over, they went to Paris. 'We took a walk and he said, "The worst thing is, everybody comes up to me and says: 'Oh my God! You must be enjoying it so much!' And I just want to say: 'Yeah, it's like enjoying cancer!'" Because it was really scary, and I think it was a lot to take on that job, never having been an editor, when the magazine was financially in trouble. '

In a profile he wrote many years ago of the legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee, Remnick remarked: 'Generalship is not about fighting the battle; it's about inspiring the enlisted.' It's a notion Remnick has clearly kept in mind in his own work as General. Asked to illustrate his editorial methods, Remnick reaches for a baseball analogy: Joe Torre, the manager of the Yankees, 'gives players the confidence they need to play their best, then he gets the hell out'. He adds: 'I don't believe in swagger. I think it's infantile.'

The magazine's editorial director, Henry Finder, says drily that Remnick 'has something very scarce in this city: an aura of sanity. He exudes a sort of calm that most New Yorkers get to experience only with prescription medication. As an editor, I think that aura of equipoise turns out to be very helpful, because you have so many people here who are professional neurotics, always acting out, drama queens, who have one form of craziness or another. And I think he sees it as his job to be... sane.

When I ask Malcolm Gladwell what he thinks the legend of Remnick's tenure will be, he says: 'How exactly things got so effortless.'

Specter says he'd like some sort of atomic clock so he could 'divide 24 by Remnick time' and work out how he fits everything in. (Remnick himself has minted the immortal dictum: 'There are only 30 hours in the day - and that's if you're lucky enough to change time zones.') It's not just the work: he has a family too. Remnick and Esther Fein have two teenage sons and a seven-year-old daughter. He does his fair share of ferrying to music lessons and little league games. Asked to explain how he manages to balance these things, Remnick shrugs and says he doesn't do anything other than spend time with his family and work. 'It's not like I build toy ships, or travel to Tahiti. I don't go surfing. I don't know: what do people do?'

He admits that certain pleasures have largely fallen by the wayside. 'My son said to me - we were reading one night, he his book for school and I a stack of manuscripts - and he said: "You don't read anything with covers any more."' Remnick cringes. 'Dombey and Son immediately came down from the shelf!'

Yet there are other things he seems to make time for, somehow. Specter says the only person he knows who watches more television than Remnick is his own ex-wife, Alessandra Stanley, the TV critic for the New York Times. He remembers calling Remnick when one of their old favourites, the BBC version of John le Carre's Smiley's People, came out on DVD. 'I said, "Are you watching it?" He said, "Yes." He was writing a piece. He said: "I'm giving myself three hours of writing, one hour of Smiley." And I just thought, Jesus Christ. I watch three hours of Smiley, then I have lunch, then I write for a couple of minutes. '

I tell Specter how proudly Remnick told me of his triumph in the Hackathlon, and that I wondered afterwards what he meant by extolling such bare-faced bad writing. 'If you do it to change the world, you can get really bummed out,' replies Specter. 'The Hackathlon was a celebration of the fact that it's a day job.' He thinks for a second and laughs. 'I think he's happy when we do well. But he was much more excited about the Hackathlon than he was about any science writing or global health award I've ever received.'

'The things about him that I wish ...' Specter goes on, a little awkwardly. 'He's an incredibly good friend. I mean, he's a better friend than he is an editor. And he's very funny. My daughter thinks he's hilarious. She said: "You know, David's the coolest of your friends, Dad." Then she said: "Actually, he's not cool, but he's the best of them."'

Sunday September 10, 2006

Nicholas D. Kristof: Where Gorillas and the Antelope Play

2009-04-13T04:25:47+00:00

The first thing they tell you here is not to play with the gorillas or the elephants.

A young male elephant gored a young Italian woman here when he attempted to play with her. And if you creep too close to the gorillas, a 375-pound silverback will charge you and, if you're lucky, stop inches from you and slap the ground in rage.

But even if you can't play with the animals, you can ogle them -- and there are few places in the world as good for that as this remote jungle where the Central African Republic, Cameroon and the Congo Republic come together. And now the three countries have joined forces to preserve this jungle by establishing adjoining national parks that cover an area the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

It's part of a growing trend that deserves strong support from the West: poor countries seeking economic opportunities by protecting nature rather than pillaging it. The grandest and most unlikely of these experiments is this one, for the Central African Republic may be the single most wretched country in the world: life expectancy is 38, and every year it falls by another six months. One-fifth of children die by the age of 5. Outside the capital, government is only a rumor.

Yet while many national parks in Africa exist primarily on paper, this one is real. Game wardens patrol vigorously: they pursue poachers across international borders, and seized 70,000 snares last year alone.

This is the only place in the world to see western lowland gorillas (even more elusive than the mountain gorillas of Rwanda). Casey Parks, the student journalist traveling with me, and I spent two hours with 13 gorillas.

We stayed at least 30 feet away to avoid being charged, but there was one moment when our guide froze and whispered to us that a female was asking the silverback to charge us. Fortunately, the silverback adopted a typical husband's approach in dealing with a demanding wife: he pretended he didn't hear.

The World Wildlife Fund is nurturing this attempt to develop ecotourism. It has a team, including American student volunteers, hanging out with gorillas all day every day, habituating them so that tourists can see them.

It's a delicate balance, for the tourists could bring diseases that would kill gorillas. It may also be more difficult for a silverback to entice females into his harem if humans are around. Yet if the gorillas can lure rich Westerners here, ecotourism could become a more sustainable economic pillar than slash-and-burn logging. For now, fewer than 1,000 foreigners visit the park each year.

Many Africans resent the parks, partly because they allocate vast resources to saving animals for rich foreigners to enjoy -- in regions where humans routinely die for lack of a few dollars.

''That's where conservation got it wrong in the past,'' said Chloe Cipolletta, an Italian who has lived with the gorillas for the last nine years. It's crucial, she said, that conservation programs benefit people as well as animals, and so the WWF has hired 31 of the local Bayaka Pygmies as trackers and guides, and others earn money by showing tourists how to catch antelope with nets.

The first night I arrived here, crossing a river from Cameroon in a canoe and then jouncing over ruts to get to a Pygmy village, I was led to somebody I thought was a local chief -- and then he stepped from the darkness and turned out to be a tall white man who greeted me in very American English. Louis Sarno, originally from New Jersey, explained that he once heard Pygmy music on the radio and was so entranced that he made a visit 20 years ago -- and stayed.

Mr. Sarno married a local woman and learned the language. He endures bouts with malaria, goes on weeks-long hunting trips in the jungle with the others, and fits in remarkably well (except that he's a lousy spear hunter).

Now he has become a fierce advocate for the ''forest people,'' as Pygmies often prefer to be called. Mr. Sarno notes that logging has benefited corrupt leaders while doing nothing for the villagers, and so he welcomes the ecotourism experiment as a last best hope for local people.

Africa can be a grim continent, and the news usually focuses on genocide, corruption and disease. But in the audacious dream to preserve this rain forest and the way of life of people in it, you see Africa's glory, fighting to survive.

Sep 26, 2006. pg. A.23

Joseph Kahn: Shanghai Party Boss Held for Corruption

2007-11-06T07:16:01+00:00

BEIJING, Monday, Sept. 25 — Chinese security officers have detained the powerful party boss of Shanghai for corruption, as President Hu Jintao expands a crackdown on graft that has focused on prominent political opponents.

Chen Liangyu, the Communist Party’s top official in the wealthy East Coast enclave and a member of the ruling Politburo, was formally detained on Sunday afternoon, Chinese state media confirmed Monday afternoon.

It is exceedingly rare in China for members of the ruling Politburo to face legal trouble, even when the authorities have evidence of corrupt activities by them or people close to them. Mr. Hu almost certainly would not have approved of the action unless he considered Mr. Chen an obstacle to his political control or his policy agenda.

The action seems intended mainly to reduce local resistance to edicts by Mr. Hu and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, while also smashing the remnants of the political clique that had been tied more closely to Jiang Zemin, China’s former paramount leader, than to Mr. Hu.

Mr. Hu is seeking to reshuffle the members of the Politburo and all the leading government and provincial posts at the 17th Party Congress to be held next year. He has sought to extinguish opposition to his priorities among senior party members ahead of that event and to anoint his own successor.

Mr. Chen’s political machine has long been considered one of the strongest and most corrupt in a country where the powerful find ways to claim a big share of the country’s prosperity, despite almost constant anti-corruption campaigns within the ruling party.

As Shanghai party boss, Mr. Chen enjoyed considerable leeway to run China’s wealthiest urban region. Friends and relatives of Mr. Chen are suspected of using access to public funds, including Shanghai’s pension fund, to enrich themselves, people informed about the investigation said. They said at least half a dozen other officials and many prominent local deal makers have also been arrested in recent weeks.

Mr. Chen, 60, inherited the political base of Mr. Jiang, who rose to prominence as Shanghai party boss in the 1980’s and subsequently promoted many of his cohorts to top national party and government posts. He was once seen as having the potential to join the Politburo Standing Committee and compete for China’s top political titles.

The so-called Shanghai faction did not operate like a cohesive political clique in recent years and failed to help Mr. Jiang himself retain his final post as military chief in 2004, when Mr. Hu forced him into retirement and consolidated his own power.

But Mr. Chen resisted central government demands to reduce speculative real estate investment and tamp down economic growth to prevent waste and overheating. He offered a prominent symbol of the strength of local party machines even in the face of heavy pressure from the Beijing leadership, so his downfall seems likely to signal Mr. Hu’s rising authority.

The last time a sitting Politburo member lost his post for corruption was in 1995, when Mr. Jiang, then China’s top leader, purged Chen Xitong, the Beijing party chief Mr. Jiang considered a formidable rival.

Chen Liangyu, who is not related to Chen Xitong, was detained under “double regulations,” a form of house arrest for members of the Communist Party suspected of wrongdoing. Such detentions do not necessarily lead to legal charges, but after losing the confidence of the top leadership, Mr. Chen will almost certainly be stripped of his political posts.

His detention is a black mark for Shanghai, which China has built into a showcase market economy and financial center in an attempt to present its most sophisticated face to the outside world.

The ongoing investigation into corruption provided a glimpse into another side of the city’s stunning growth. Mr. Chen’s political machine controlled a great swathe of Shanghai’s economy, including prime portions of real estate and major infrastructure projects.

A huge investigation by the central government into corruption there focused on the misuse of pension funds to invest in building projects tied to local leaders and their business cohorts.

But Mr. Chen, his relatives and friends were also implicated in a major real estate scandal in 2003 that resulted in a short prison term for one well-connected Shanghai businessman, Zhou Zhengyi, but did not focus on Mr. Chen or officials close to him directly. Issues related to the handling of that investigation were revived during the latest crackdown, people informed about the investigation said.

Mr. Hu’s corruption crackdown began last spring and picked up pace during the summer months. It has so far resulted in the arrests of lower-level officials and well-connected businessmen in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Fujian and other areas.

Most of the people implicated in the scandals are viewed as old loyalists of Mr. Jiang or members of the Politburo not considered among the core supporters of Mr. Hu, leading to suspicions that Mr. Hu has used the fight against corruption as a tool to eliminate opponents.

Some party officials acknowledge that it is rare for officials in China to climb the political ladder without quietly securing economic benefits for themselves or their friends and relatives. The party-run security apparatus usually does not seek to stop such behavior unless the officials in question fall from political favor, they say.

Howard W. French: Scandals Emerging in Shanghai as Political Season Nears

2007-11-06T07:16:01+00:00

In a reversal of fortunes that may say as much about Chinese power politics as it does about corruption, China's richest commercial city has come under investigation by the central government for a huge pension fraud scheme.

So far, the budding scandal, which has been written about in unusual detail in the country's news media, has ensnared the chief of the city's Labor and Social Security Bureau, or pension fund, along with the chairman of the Shanghai Electric Group, a municipal utility.

The two, along with the heads of at least two of the city's districts, including a former top aide to the city's Communist Party leader, have been taken to Nanjing, where they are being held by investigators for interrogation.

Meanwhile, the presence of more than 100 investigators from the party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, who have been sent here from Beijing and have taken up residence in a historic old hotel, has fed widespread speculation that the arrest or demotion of others, possibly including more senior municipal and party officials, may follow.

The Chinese government routinely bans publication of articles on subjects it deems sensitive or embarrassing, so the widespread reporting on the scandal here has led many to conclude that it is the first act in what may be a long season of political jockeying leading up to the 17th Communist Party Congress next year, in which the next generation of national leaders will be selected.

In recent years Shanghai appeared to be all but immune to high-level scandals, with the city's leaders benefiting from the patronage of Jiang Zemin, the country's former leader, who rose to national prominence as mayor of the city and cultivated it as a power base.

Indeed, three years ago a large team of investigators descended from Beijing to look into collusion between officials and real estate developers, only to be recalled abruptly to Beijing, reportedly at Mr. Jiang's insistence.

That scandal began with residents' claims that they had been forced to relocate after developers secured rights to their land through illegal payments to city officials. After the investigation was quashed, the news media were ordered not to write about corrupt land deals, and the lawyer for the displaced residents, Zheng Enchong, was jailed for contacting international human rights groups.

But with Mr. Jiang having relinquished the last of his important titles in 2004, many here say, the way has been opened for a new investigation that many see as an attack on Mr. Jiang's old power base by allies of a younger generation of leaders.

In the current scandal, according to reports in the Chinese news media, city officials arranged for $1.2 billion of municipal pension funds to be lent to an obscure private holding company for investment in a toll expressway between Shanghai and the nearby city of Hangzhou.

Chinese journalists who have reported on the case say the loan was nearly paid off when employees at the highway company informed on their superiors, bringing the arrangement to light.

Chinese news reports have said that if the investigators are allowed to pursue their work to its conclusion, the highway deal may in the end prove to be a modest piece of a much larger web of corruption linking city officials, banks and developers.

The newsweekly Caijing, for example, has carried detailed reports of how money from the city's Social Security Bureau was funneled into private real estate projects as long ago as the early 1990's.

''At the center of the issue is the bureau's dual role as both administrative regulator and investment manager of the fund, despite public demand to entrust the fund to market-oriented operators,'' the magazine wrote in a cover story on the scandal. ''The monopoly it created is at the root of the fund's current problems.''

Besides weakening the city's national political standing, the pension scandal constitutes a blow to Shanghai's ambition to emerge as China's pre-eminent financial center. As with the suppressed real estate scandal, the reported pension dealings highlight the lack of transparency in a system in which the news media and the courts are subjected to political direction.

Sep 5, 2006. pg. A.3

Joseph Kahn: Shanghai Party Boss Held for Corruption

2007-11-06T07:16:01+00:00

His detention is a black mark for Shanghai, which China has built into a showcase market economy and financial center in an attempt to present its most sophisticated face to the outside world.

A huge investigation by the central government into corruption there focused on the misuse of pension funds to invest in building projects tied to local leaders and their business cohorts.