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Heath Ledger's Lonesome Trail: Rolling Stone's 2006 Cover StoryHis dad wanted him to race cars. Hollywood wanted him to play Spider-Man. But he wanted to play a gay cowboy. He became a huge star — but he wasn't happy about it
 Share330 By David Lipsky
January 20, 2011 7:16 PM EDT
When actors become movie stars, it puts a strain on everybody. Family members get phone-called with no adjustment for the time difference; paparazzi stake out a fresh address; the rest of us lift our eyes to another personality we're obliged to have an opinion about. This is a drag for Heath Ledger, who is twenty-six and has learned to keep his personality locked in the house — where it whines at doors, tears up furniture, gets into the yard at just the worst moments. "In the past," he says, "I've tried so hard to withhold myself — even down to giving a smile." The actor, who is Australian, speaks with a commonwealth accent that's both arch and street. "I didn't want to be people's opinions of who I am or what I said," he says.

One day, his girlfriend, Michelle Williams, wrote a song title — "Old Man River" — on his forearm. Ledger got a tattoo artist to run the needles over her words, the way a shopkeeper will frame his first dollar. The song comes from a sad musical, and contains this key advice: "He must know somethin', he don't say nothin'." So last summer, when the couple, first saw Brokeback Mountain — sitting in one of the poker-faced office towers of Manhattan — it should have been perfect: no people, no opinions. The room went dark. Ledger rides a horse, falls in love with another man, breaks his heart, misses out on the chance of his life. The lights came up, Ledger and Williams moved through the lobby. And Ledger had no idea what he'd just seen. "I understood that it flowed, it was presented well. But whether it was good, whether it was bad — we walked out not knowing what we'd just watched."

Video: A Look at Heath Ledger's Best Performances

And sometimes the dog gets loose. When we meet, Ledger discusses a rough moment: Williams, playing his unlucky wife, slips to a doorway in find Ledger in an embrace with co-star Jake Gyllenhaal. In a tight shot, you see her see her face cloud over: Williams understands she'll never make the man she loves happy. Ledger wants to hear about audience response. I say they gasped. Ledger takes this in. "Yeah," he says. "Her poor character. Michelle played it so well — just that look on her lace." He shrugs. "Every time I see it, I can't help but laugh."

This article appeared in the March 23, 2006 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.

It's months later, and everything has changed. David Letterman is doing the top ten signs of being a gay cowboy. Brokeback has become a cultural moment, a film to take sides about, the toll charge for entering the national conversation. Ledger arrived in Hollywood as a flyaway figure. Now he's receiving the media attention that usually goes to kids in wells. Oscar bowed deepest this year to Brokeback Mountain, crowning Ledger with his first nomination as Best Actor. Ledger retains his physical size and shape: in every other aspect, he's becoming larger.

Photos: Leading Men on the Cover of Rolling Stone

Ennis Del Mar is Ledger's starmaker role, and if you strip off the coating, he's done it the old-fashioned way. It's the part Robert Redford made a career out of in The Way We Were: the love, object who doesn't want to be loved, who flickers out of reach.

His approach to being interviewed is not dissimilar. For Ledger, reporters are the sadistic border guards of a country he must pass through. Last August, when he disliked an Australian interviewer's questions, he clammed up, peeled an orange on live TV. So when he wants to meet for lunch in New York, my canny move is to dress like him, When I arrive at a tidy New York espresso bar in shorts, T-shirt, crapped-up jacket. Ledger's eyes drift right past me. "Wouldn't have picked you for a journalist," he says. "Which is good."

The Lord gave Ledger marketable looks — a Connery brow and jawline, framing a mouth peaked for kisses — but lots of days he looks like he woke up inside an oil drum. He has the handsome star's mixed feelings: It's the invitation that gets you through the door, which you ditch in a flowerpot once inside the party. He's got a zip-up hoodie that says Brooklyn, black earrings, wispy goatee, wraparound sunglasses he never once removes, Frankenstein boots.

Ledger clomps us into an Australian restaurant, where he becomes all slouch, wit and charm. He doesn't put stock in the nice word around his performance. "It's a relief," he says. "But I've had people say it" — he laughs — "about a lot of really bad films I've done." He's shrewd about work — and generally, when actors dip into shop talk, you wish they'd get onto something interesting, like photocopier repair. "I'm always gonna pull myself apart and dissect it. I mean, there's no such thing as perfection in what we do. Pornos are more perfect than we are, because they're actually fucking." He's not a fastidious eater — there's finger-sucking, a belch, an "excuse me." Throughout, he retains something slyly mocking, a driver submitting to the roadside breathalyzer when he knows he hasn't been near a drink. And though Ledger makes the crazy money actors make, he doesn't throw it around. The check arrives, Ledger goes for his wallet; I assure him I've got it. "Good, because I've only got, like, two dollars." If I hadn't brought cash? "Then we'd be fucked." he says. "We'd be back there doing the dishes."

Ledger did not grow up with money. "Or movies or art," he says. Like a million families: solid middle-class parents — Kim Ledger designed race cars, Sally kept the home — with a couple of kids, riding out a problem marriage. After dinner, his dad might crack open a Lee Iacocca boss-people-my-way paperback; his mom would find relief in Danielle Steel. Manning the VCR, Ledger would pop in Chuck Norris. "I'm not knocking Delta Force," Ledger says. "I love Chuck."

This was in Perth, western Australia — Ledger calls it "the most isolated city in the world." He was eleven when his parents finally divorced. "I'm sure there was, like, one week where they didn't speak to each other." Otherwise, they became the kind of ex-couple, theorized by psychiatrists, who share family dinners and joint trips. For Ledger, the divorce provided a lifestyle boot camp. "I enjoyed being at one house for three weeks, then going, 'OK, right, I'm off,"' he says. "It set me up for this bohemian life I've been leading — I feel like I've been traveling with the same bag since I was eleven."

At the same time, Ledger split with the child he'd been. "Every kid up to age thirteen thinks they are their parents, basically," he says. Ledger had crossed over. His long apprenticeship in disappointing people, in moving out under his own orders, began. His father had manly, family-line ambitions: Ledger would race cars ("I was prepped to be the next Michael Schumacher"). Instead, he stepped into the drama department.

Ledger had an advantage: He already looked like Heath Ledger. Golden hair, bold features — like many child performers, his face seemed to already exist in a tight adult focus. His older sister was making feints toward an acting career. Ledger met her agent, walked out with an audition. "I started to realize that acting was gonna give me more money, and more time off," he says. "I didn't really give a shit. I was still pretty caught up in just being a teenager."

Here's a cool fact for Nostradamus fans. Ledger's first big role — in the Australian TV series called Sweat — was a gay bicyclist. And in A Knight's Tale, the 2001 film that would bring Ledger his first wide notice, there's the scene where — for funny, apropos reasons — Ledger receives a peck from a guy on his jousting crew.

Watching Sweat for the first time, the seventeen-year-old Ledger was in for another kind of shock. "I was crap," he says. The show chugged ahead. "I remember just burying my face in my hands thinking, 'This is the end, it hasn't even begun."'

Ledger enlisted his mother on a reassurance mission: He was really just terrible in the show — wasn't he? He couldn't act at all — could he? "And she just said, 'Well, that's OK.' The honesty kind of slipped out of her, in the most beautiful way. She didn't even bother with 'No, honey, you were great, I'm so proud of you." No one else around you, except your mum, is going to tell you that, you suck. She straight-up told me. 'There are other things to do in life."'

Ledger does a rueful head shake. "I think that's the problem with a lot of actors in the industry. We all just think we're brilliant, you know? And ninety-eight percent of us are crap. And we've got to realize that, before we can improve."

He began picking apart his performance, the way he'd watched his dad reassemble car engines. He wasn't listening to the other actors; he wasn't connecting; he was doing way too much blinking. "I started to make changes," he says, "to… direct myself."

Halfway through eleventh grade, Ledger sat for his graduation exams, "got my marks and fucked off." ("I was a bit of a punk at that age. I had a problem with authority.") School is an airport terminal, organized waiting; he'd already caught his flight. He packed a car, drove the 2,000 miles to Sydney, which is where Australians go to meet their fates. He borrowed gas money from his parents, and never took anything from them again.

Ledger deciders on a walk. this being Little Italy, sedans creep by with guys in suits staring out, guys to whom Ledger is not a film star but one more invader turning the old neighborhood into a damned hipster sandbox. I ask Ledger for a cigarette; he turns out to have quit a year ago. Why? "I couldn't breathe properly." He leads me to a store anyway — and there's Ledger, bobbing and craning to get a fix on something behind the counter. "Try those," he says, pointing to a brand of cigarettes. "They're buttery."

As before, it's difficult to tell: Is this street theater or legitimate tobacco interest? Later, at a bench in one of the city's subatomic parks, I turn to Ledger: "It is buttery." He flicks a quick, nostalgic ex smoker's grin. "It is, right?"

By the late Nineties. Ledger had found his way to Los Angeles. He'd done an Australian gun movie, Two Hands. He'd top lined a Fox TV sword-and-sandals drama called Roar, which laid down its arms after thirteen episodes. ("It started off quite dignified and Braveheart-esque. But as they got desperate for ratings, slowly no one's wearing clothes. I'm like, 'Why is there a gang of fucking bikini models fighting?"') He and a girlfriend lived in a group house, the sort of place where people swap food and social contacts. Somebody knew a screenwriter dreaming up a teen comedy, 10 Thing I Hate About You. Ledger played the boyfriend — after which he refused offers in play high school bullies, loners, wooers. "But what had I done to prove myself otherwise? I had to make an effort to cut the line." He stuck in the house, broke and hungry, ignored the gossip he was developing the big head, and waited.

He turned out to be waiting for Mel Gibson. Midway in his 1999 audition to play Gibson's son in The Patriot he'd lowered his script, told producers he was wasting their time and his. "I am the worst auditioner in the world," he says. "I really am fucking shit. You're being tested — I almost, like, rebel against the situation." He recalls, "I got this movie, without auditioning." This was A Knight's Tale, a summer epic he would carry himself.

Ledger was just nineteen; as the film's release approached, he had a slippery feeling in his stomach. Every day, drivers could see his giant-size head, in the billboard exhibition along Sunset Boulevard; all across the country, his face, the title, the tagline: "He Will Rock You." "It freaked me the fuck out," he says. "I was like, 'What if I don't rock 'em?'

As Ledger grew nervous — "I pretty much had anxiety attacks about just leaving the house" — the studio turned enthusiastic. At meetings, executives mapped out a career with the shape of an Entourage season: tours, paydays, more billboards, bigger projects — they wanted Ledger to play Spider-Man. It made him less confident. "I didn't feel like I deserved it," he says. "I didn't really know how to act properly yet." Ledger sat, listening. "I started to feel like a bottle of Coke," he says. "And there was a whole marketing scheme to turn me into a very popular bottle. And, you know, Coke tastes like shit. But there's posters everywhere so people will buy it. So I felt like I tasted like shit, and I was being bought for no reason."

As the executives finished their presentation, every head at the table clocked toward Ledger together. Ledger stood up. "Could you … could you wait one second, please?" He slipped to the bathroom, slammed the door. "And pretty much burst into tears. I was so full of 'Oh! Oh, fuck!' I was hitting my head, hitting the walls. It was a full-on anxiety attack."

That's when Ledger's rep as a difficult presence began to spread. "I'd been concentrating on how to act," he says, "not how to… be a salesman. Agents, publicists — they all say, 'Go out and create a character!' I don't want to create a fucking character, but on the same hand I don't want to give myself, I either. When you don't go on Letterman and say, 'Hey! I've got a joke!' — when you sit there honest and nervous and like a normal human being, you get written down as boring and ungrateful."

Ledger keeps trying to find a better position to slouch in, as his memory has become an uncomfortable place. "Obviously now, I've….uh… found more diplomatic ways to approach it. But back then, it was just 'Fuck this.'"

He set about finding roles to dirty himself up: The Four Feathers, The Order, Ned Kelly. "I wanted to take the blond out of my career, kill the direction it was going. I wanted to be bad, I wanted to be good. I was like, 'Well, now, how am I gonna make this a career I would like to have?"' If no audiences came, "Good. That's gonna help me out."

On this strange quest, Ledger met success. "I got to the point where it worked: Nobody wanted to work with me." He laughs. "I'd finally — whether consciously or unconsciously — I perfectly sabotaged any studio interest in working with me."

In 1997, Annie Proulx wrote a story about intensely filmable people (modern cowboys) getting up to something' pretty unfilmable (having sex with each other). Actors had been romancing Brokeback Mountain, as if it were a beautiful rancher's daughter with a drug problem. Who'd be man enough to play gay?" My agent told me, 'I think you're perfect for this one.'

It's a simple story. Ennis Del Mar falls in love with Jack Twist, then spends two decades frustrating the other man's attempts to love him at close range. Producers initially saw Ledger as Jack. He, of course, said no. "Because unlike Jake [Gyllenhaal], who had to pretend he was comfortable, Ennis was fucking… fighting it." After all, for years, what, had Ledger been doing but Ennis Del Mar? Subtract the romance, and Ennis was who Ledger had been playing since he left his dad's garage.

The film shot for four months in the mountains of Calgary, Alberta, winter melting off to a cool, stubby spring. At night, Ledger was falling in love with Michelle Williams. By day, the work with Jake. For eight weeks, the sex scenes loomed ahead of them, the motel and bedroll stuff that had run other actors off.

"My biggest anxiety," Ledger says, "wasn't having to kiss Jake." For a decade, he'd been hoping for the right part — the chance to show what he could do. "It was a perfect script, and Ang Lee was the perfect director. So the anxiety for me was — I didn't want to be the one to fuck it up." He laughs. "And I was willing to do anything..."

So that's how you approached the love scenes? He looks at me sharply. I mean, you'd never thought—

"About going out and fucking a guy for the first time?" he asks.

"Look, I've experienced love. I know how to love a woman — and I've been in love with many women, and I am in love with the most beautiful woman right now — so I know the extent of love. I guess you'd love for me to say that it was difficult, that I wanted to vomit. But the straight sact is, it was just another person. Now, by no means do I wanna fuck him, we're both very straight and sensible. It wasn't like Ang said, 'OK, guys, just have fun with it — roll camera!' We had to choreograph, it was definitely like walking on the moon for the first time. But it wasn't… the butt of a mule: I was kissing a human being with a soul. And part of the magic of acting is, you harness the infinite power of belief. Because if for a second we stopped believing, and looked into Heath and Jake's eyes, it would have been 'Oh, God. OK. Hmm. This is…'"

"I've Been in Love with many women, and I'm in love with the most Beautiful Woman right now."

His eyes move away, then back to me. "You know when you see the preachers down South? And they grab a believer and they go, 'Bwoom! I touch you with the hand of God!' And they believe so strongly, they're on the ground shaking and spitting. And fuck's sake, that's the power of belief." He shakes his head. "Now, I don't believe in Jesus, but I believe in my performance. And if you can understand that the power of belief is one of the great tools of our time and that a lot of acting comes from it, you can do anything."

Ledger stands, asks the time, nods. "I've gotta get back to my girl. Girls." In October, Michelle Williams gave birth to the couple's daughter: Matilda Hose. Ledger jokes that he's carrying twenty-five extra pounds of sympathy weight. "Don't want to be away too long. I've gotta keep the house clean, my girls fed. I've got duties."

Heading down the sidewalk to his motorcycle, he asks, "How many more questions you got on you? Do you maybe want to come out to Brooklyn, then? In the next few days — we'll grab a few beers, go for a walk."

As weeks pass, it's clear: I've been Ennis-ed. There's no call to Brooklyn. So in the interim, I speak with Annie Proulx, who wrote the story "Brokeback Mountain." She has won a Pulitzer Prize and speaks in a voice that's small and precise as a granite chip. "Heath understood the character better than I did," she says. "It scared me how much he got inside Ennis."

And I call Ang Lee. Lee knew the picture simply could not work if Ennis wasn't right: "He anchors the movie." During production Lee watched the actor become a star. "You spend so much money to make movies, and usually it rests on a face or two." Lee says. "The audience identifies with themselves, with human faces. You need good actors. But you also need the image to carry the movie on — and that's the movie star. I think Heath is both. I didn't know for sure before. After this movie. I hope people will want to bet their movie on him."

The backstage romance — Ledger falling for Williams — Lee saw as a good thing. "On the set I push him toward Jake," he says, "and off the set he has this great escape the other way." The director is pleased for the couple. "The baby keeps staring at me. Michelle said she doesn't usually stare at people like that. I said maybe she remembers I am the reason she came into existence."

When I speak with Ledger again, we're on the phone. It's a few weeks later. His voice is backed by clucking people and shutting doors. "We've got Michelle's parents — Michelle's mom and, um, her boyfriend — and Michelle's sister is in town. So we're all running around frantically here. I'm kind of pulling the tired-father card."

The phone offers one consolation. When I ask about his former girlfriends, there's less chance of Ledger pitching a fit. He once dated Heather Graham and Naomi Watts, and like any sensible human being I'm interested in hearing about it.

"Well, I don't…" Ledger begins. "I'd honestly, out of respect for both Naomi and Michelle, I really would rather not dive into the past." Which is about as sporting a demur as you're going to get. For the record, he dated Graham for less than a year, when he was twenty-two and she was just past thirty. For the record, he dated Watts for nearly two years — she was thirty-five, he twenty-five — with a one-month, neutral-corners breather in the middle. She described their breakup to a reporter as sad and inevitable: "I think deep down we both knew there wasn't a forever plan."

But then Ledger gives the particulars on how he met Williams, 25, who's still probably best known as Jen, the girl with the darkest back story on Dawson's Creek. It was the first day of shooting. "We were knee-deep in snow," he says. "And on the fifth take, Michelle and I tobogganing down the hill, we were supposed to fall off. having a fun time, ho ho ho. And Michelle was screaming in pain. And I thought she's acting: ha ha ha. 'No, I'm really in pain.' She'd twisted her knee — she was pretty much on crutches for the rest of the shoot." Ledger thinks it over. "And I felt I always had to look after her after that."

They never made any firm decision about having kids: "We just fell very deeply into one another's arms. Our bodies definitely made those decisions for us. I mean, the second you acknowledge it as a possibility, the body just inevitably hits a switch and it happens." They conceived outside Sydney, in a resort called Byron Bay, a place favored by surfers and travelers seeking enlightenment. "It's very romantic," he says. "It's very spiritual. There are a lot of hippies out there."

Alter Williams gave birth, the Brooklyn neighbors started turning up with casserole dishes. "It was very sweet," says Ledger. "I made a big feast for them, we got to know each other."

I ask Ledger how old his own father was when he was born. "Um… good question. Hmm! I'm pretty sure my dad was the same age I was."

Right now, career decisions are on hold. Candy, the Aussie film in which he plays a heroin addict, opens in April. Then what? "I've had a year off," he says. "If my agent had his way, I'd be working every fucking day of my life." He's being careful. "Because in this industry, interest in you comes in waves, it's so tidal. And so I don't really want to jump on the first wave that comes along."

Award season has ended now, The system, which Ledger calls "the monster," follows the political model; you've got to go campaigning. For Ledger it's been a tough trail. He wins the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor but doesn't show up to collect the prize — he's back in Australia, where a paparazzi shoots him with a water pistol, and it's international news. Every Hollywood week seems to bring another bungle. He delivers a speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards that seems to mock Brokeback's content. But if you know Ledger, what he's making fun of is the award-speech genre itself. Then he announces that George Clooney deserves the same Best Supporting Actor award that Jake Gyllenhaal is nominated for. Word circulates that Ledger is a bad boy — not, perhaps, in the good way voters like. But all of this is honorable, Many stars pocket the benefits of saying they're rebellious, claiming they dislike the system, at no cost to themselves. Ledger really seems not to know any way to act but as himself — he's still playing to his own standard of goofball, prickly honesty. I remember the last thing he said on the phone: "It's not that hard to understand, right? I'd like to be responsible for my own actions. If you're gonna paint a picture, you want to pick the colors yourself, and where and how they go."

And there was the moment we got up from lunch. When he was twenty, Ledger had felt like a soda bottle, just an item to be marketed. But as he stood, Ledger realized he could do with a drink. He flagged a waitress: "I wouldn't mind a Coke — could I get a Coca-Cola?" She said they were out.

Isn't that the way it goes? You give in to the system, just a little, and you still walk outside the restaurant thirsty.

The Private Life of Natalie Portman: Rolling Stone's 2002 Cover StoryAs a psych major at Harvard, the 'Star Wars' queen saw the sexual side of art and life, but said 'I don't go wagging my boobs around in people's faces'
 
Photograph by Albert Watson for RollingStone.com
Share  By Chris Heath
January 20, 2011 3:12 PM EDT
When we first meet, Natalie Portman is feeling under the weather. She has been in bed most of the day, though she went to her nine o'clock lecture and to a meeting of the committee she's on, to discuss which bands will come here next. Here being Harvard, where Portman, 20, is majoring in psychology. Right now, though, she is pushing the committee to choose OutKast, while a student poll favors Dave Matthews.

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At college, Portman finds that for the most part she is allowed to fit in quietly; that people are "sort of just unimpressed" that she is the actress chosen by Star Wars czar George Lucas to play queen-turned-senator Padmé Amidala, future wife of Anakin Skywalker, in a trilogy of prequels to the most successful movie series of all time. Portman was sort of unimpressed, too, when Lucas considered her for the role. "I was like, 'Star what?'" says this child of parents who emigrated to America from Jerusalem when she was a child. (Portman isn't her real name; she borrowed it from her grandmother to protect her father, a fertility specialist, whose name is distinctive.) Her first Star Wars experience, 1999's Phantom Menace, left her acting with special effects and feeling lost. She warms more to the just-opened Attack of the Clones, in which the love story between Padmé and Anakin, played by Hayden Christensen, let her become, as she has put it, Revealing-Outfit Girl. "There's a lot of bare midriff and shoulders this time."

This article appeared in the June 20, 2002 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.

On our way to attend an evening reading by novelists Salman Rushdie and Jamaica Kincaid and poet John Ashbery, Portman chats about student life on campus. "My peers here are pretty frickin' accomplished," she says. "It's just a different kind of accomplishment I've had that they don't necessarily see as above what they've done. But you also have a lot of ambitious people who do want to rub shoulders — you've got to be wary of that."

During the readings, Portman listens keenly and, when laughter is earned, responds with the loudest laugh in the room. Her hair is plaited evenly on both sides of her face, a quiet tribute. "My style icon now is Willie Nelson," she says. "You're lucky I didn't rock the bandanna, too." Afterward, we head for her favorite tearoom off campus.

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Portman says she's used to getting A's; she can graduate this semester, though she's thinking about coming back next spring to do more work. "But," she says, "I think the really smart people don't get A's. They realize it doesn't matter whether they hand in their paper on time. Whereas all my papers are on time. I don't challenge the guidelines much."

Natalie Portman was born on her mother Shelley's birthday — June 9th. More oddly — a fact that her father, Avner, stumbled onto recently — the most probable date of her conception was her father's birthday. "This," their daughter informed them, "is the grossest piece of information I've ever learned." (Though, as she teased them, she figures that she knows what her father got for his birthday.)

Memory is a prime interest of Portman the student. The experiment she has planned for her thesis next year concerns the theory that "your identity is how you construct your memories into your life story." She credits her own late memory onset, from age four or five, to the fact she was brought up with two languages. She lived in Israel until she was four, when the family moved to Maryland, the first of several stops to accommodate her father's medical career. What she remembers best about Maryland is the pink carpet and her dolls. She had a lot of dolls. "I remember them being very sexual," she says. "I don't really remember ever not having my dolls have sex with each other."

So what would you have them do?

"It's very odd," she says, "because I don't remember ever talking to my parents about sex ... but I always knew about it. And all my dolls would get it on together. Even the Barbies would get it on with other Barbies, and the guys would get it on with each other."

So, I clarify, there was a whole poly-sexual orgy in your toy room?

"Yes," she says. "And my tub toys also had sex." She says that she didn't know how sex happened, so the dolls would just kind of get rubbed together. But she rebuffs my suggestion that she picked this up from her father's job.

"I barely saw my dad when I was little," she says, "because he was doing his residency." (I ask what exactly he does as a fertility specialist. "He inseminates and does surgery, and he's a reproductive endocrinologist," his daughter says matter-of-factly.) "The smell of a hospital is like the smell of my dad to me."

I involuntarily make a face.

"You're like, 'Natalie's such a creepy person,'" she declares, both accusing and laughing.

Portman is an only child. "The only sibling I ever wanted," she says, "was an older brother, so he could introduce me to cute boys. I would never have been an actress if I weren't an only child, because my parents would never have let me be the star of the family at the expense of another child." It made her feel like her parents were her friends: "All through my childhood, I went to their parties. I've known how to make believe that I'm an adult."

When Portman was eight, she gave up meat out of "respect for life." I point out to her that PETA has nominated her in its Internet poll of sexiest vegetarians (she has since won).

"No way," she says. "I don't know what being sexy and being... well, who am I up against?"

Jude Law ... David Duchovny ... Angela Bassett ...

"Those all are pretty sexy people," she says with a grin. "I don't know how my chances are after those names."

Do you date non-vegetarians?

"Yeah," she answers. "It's kind of unusual to find guys who are vegetarian. That makes Jude Law even sexier to me."

He's very married, though, I say.

"I know," she says. "I should shut up. That's not nice. But, I mean, I guess someone can still be sexy even if they're married. I mean, I would never go after him at all...."

The story of how Portman was discovered and became an actress involves her being approached in a Long Island pizza restaurant by someone looking to cast a Revlon campaign. Portman didn't want to model, but she used the opportunity to get an acting agent. Her film debut, in The Professional, didn't come immediately; her first part was as an understudy in the off-Broadway musical Ruthless. The play had featured another young hopeful: Britney Spears.

Natalie and Britney were able to reminisce about this recently. Portman was invited to a Spears party, an invitation she forwarded to her guy friends as a joke. "They told me they would murder me if I didn't go and take all of them, so I went with six boys," she says; her Ivy League posse drove down, after classes, to New York and Britney. "It was basically the thrill of their lives."

About six months after her play, she auditioned for The Professional, about a lonely hitman (Jean Reno) and a twelve-year-old girl. When the film was released, her parents came in for some stern, and inaccurate, criticism for "letting me do a Lolita film," Portman says. As a result, her parents became very protective. "They never wanted me to have to walk down the street wondering if people can visualize me naked."

There has been the occasional disturbance. A couple of years back, Portman was in St. Barts in the Caribbean. She had jumped off a sailboat with a girl-friend and swum to a deserted island, where they frolicked in the shallows, topless. Photos subsequently appeared in the seamier press. "The creepy thing was there was someone there, someone following us," she says. "I was just so angry — it just makes you feel dirty inside.... OK, everyone's seen boobs, but I just don't like being objectified. I don't go wagging my boobs around in people's faces. I was on a deserted beach." She shrugs. "Today's paper is used to pick up tomorrow's poop — right?"

But first, people read them. The consequences can be ugly. Her father told her that, in the photographs' aftermath, some of his colleagues, eyes raised appreciatively, would say to him, "Saw your daughter!..."

Though Portman grew up untouched by the lure of Star Wars, she has her equivalent: her movie obsession growing up.

Dirty Dancing.

"I mean, Patrick Swayze was sex for me," she says. "He is still my Number One. It's all about the jaw."

There were other fixations, such as New Kids on the Block. She liked Joey McIntyre best. "The one I had decided to worship," she says. Last year she got a call saying that McIntyre wanted to go out. "I was too chicken. I didn't want him to think I was going to, like, date him. That's sort of sketchy when celebrities just call and ask you out."

Portman would like to make plain that this clear-stated, sensible policy may be immediately jettisoned under certain circumstances.

"Hey, I mean, honestly, if it was Brad Pitt — which obviously is, like, a moot point, since he's, like, happily married to an amazing woman — if he called up, I'd be like, 'OK.' I'd ignore my boycott."

So if they're hot enough, the principle goes out the window?

"Of course! Don't all morals go out the window if they're hot enough?

Most of Portman's early roles, such as Timothy Hutton's jailbait fixation in her second starring role, Ted Demme's Beautiful Girls, found her playing kids who were preternaturally adult, not unlike herself. "Kids are the Shakespearean fools in Hollywood movies," she says. "They hold the keys to wisdom in their innocence, or are so creepily adult they make us reflect on how creepy adults are."

Were you aware of that at the time?

She scrunches up her face. "I thought I was pretty smart," she concedes. "Until I was about thirteen. And then the teasing that goes on in adolescence sort of shuts that up, and that's when you learn humility."

She had a bad time for a while. "I probably deserved it," she says, "but it wasn't pleasant even if I did deserve it. Kids can be pretty unkind. Things like, I remember I had a boyfriend, and I kissed him on the first date, and they would call me 'whore.'"

When Portman was thirteen, because she couldn't stand it anymore, she transferred to public school: "All of a sudden there are 500 kids, and even the kids that get picked on, they have their friends." (She figures that she "was probably part of the generic JAP-y group.")

After those first two movies, her career went quieter. (Asked which of her movies she's most proud of, she picks these first two, and only one since — the mother-daughter drama with Susan Sarandon, Anywhere But Here — though she says she's proudest of all of her stage performance in The Seagull last summer in New York.) Portman has only ever worked in the summer holidays (except when she played Anne Frank on Broadway, when she would go to school as usual during the day). She tended to find herself playing small parts in fairly prestigious movies: Michael Mann's Heat, Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! "I'm not going to say my greatest cinematic moment was as Taffy in Mars Attacks!" she says. "But I got to hang out with Tim Burton, and Jack Nicholson tried to teach me how to whistle." (He failed.)

Portman's commitment to the three Star Wars prequels allows her to maintain her ambivalence about acting while making sure that she has a healthy career after college if she wants it. "It was my way of trying not to fall into the trap," she says. "I've always found actor-y people to be really creepy." She laughs and stares me down. "You know exactly what I'm saying. The people who are, like, 'Yes! It's my life!' They seem really fake."

Do you think you grew up too fast?

"No. The problem with most child actors is that they think they're grown up. But they're not at all. And when they get to be older, they're not as grown up as their peers, because they just thought they were."

We head for Portman's small apartment, near campus. "Excuse my carpet," she says, explaining that she bought it in Morocco last summer — her first trip on her own. Unlike all the other rugs she saw, with their dazzling woven symmetry, this one has random blotches of color that stirred her. Since there is no space to hang the rug on the wall, as she'd prefer, the rug is turned upside down on her floor, so that the backstage tufts of its creation head upward into the room; that's how she likes it best.

For her first two years of college, Portman lived on campus, sharing a bedroom. "That's pretty rough," she says. "I really missed that time when I could just stay up late and read and play the kind of music that I want."

Her current apartment is very modest. There are no signs that this is the home of a successful actress, except perhaps for the Björk backstage pass inelegantly stuck to her computer. There are pictures tacked on the walls, including a photograph of George W. Bush with a turkey. "I just thought that was a funny picture — when he was pardoning the turkey it was, like, going down on him," she says, giggling. "He seems to be enjoying it or something."

I ask her what recurring dreams she has had. She names one, but has no interest at all in ascribing any meaning to it. Freud and his followers, to her mind, are bunk. "The thinking now," she says, "is that dreams are basically, like, the farts of the mind."

It's late; she should sleep. "You can meet me in a week," she says, "and see I'm wearing the same outfit, haven't recovered, smell a little funky...."

Through an open door, I can see the head of her bed, a couple of stuffed creatures slumped there. Portman was sure as a child that her stuffed dolls talked to one another. One is a frog — the one who is supposed to turn into a prince. It used to have a crown, she says. The crown is gone, but the frog remains.

Soon Portman must find her first home as a grown-up. She wants to get a place in New York, but she seems most excited about finding her own place in Jerusalem. "I really love the States," she says, "but my heart's in Jerusalem. That's where I feel at home."

Portman's mother grew up in Cincinnati; her grandparents were from Russia and Austria. She met Portman's father at Ohio State University — she was selling tickets for a movie at the Jewish student center, and though he bought a ticket, he never even made it inside. He went back to Israel, and they just corresponded. Two years later, she came out on her cousin's bar mitzvah tour, and they decided to get married.

Avner's parents moved to Israel in the late Thirties. His Polish grandfather had headed the Jewish youth movement in Poland. His grandmother was Romanian. "She spied for the British, traveling through Europe," Portman says. "She was blond, so she could totally pass as a non-Jew. Men, they would always try and pick her up because she was a gorgeous young woman... I'll show you."

Portman pulls out a wallet, and from inside that an old photograph of two women: "This is a picture of her taken in Romania with her best friend. A couple of years younger than me..."

Her grandfather came to Israel, expecting to send for his family later. There was no later; history swept it away. His parents were taken to Auschwitz. This is the heritage within which Portman grew up.

Recent events in Israel have troubled Portman deeply. "Anytime anything happens to anyone there, it's like a limb's been ripped off," she says. She adds, perhaps concerned that her entire political position should be assumed from this: "I'm very protective of Israel, obviously, but I'm more protective of humanity than of any of my own personal desires."

Of her religion, Portman says, "I'm much more like the product of a doctor than I am a Jew." She is uncomfortable about the concept of the afterlife. "I don't believe in that. I believe this is it, and I believe it's the best way to live."

In New York the following week, Portman is wearing different clothes, the Willie Nelson braids are gone, there is no apparent funkiness of smell about her, and she is feeling better. I ask some questions:

When do you feel most calm?

"When I'm in love," she says, and kind of giggles.

Have you ever wondered, growing up, whether you were gay?

"Sure. I've never dated a woman or anything like that. But, I mean, I think it's much more the person that you fall in love with — and why would you close yourself off to fifty percent of the people? ... [Returning to the subject later] I think my personality is more compatible with men than women. Women in environments like my school and my work are sort of trained to be competitive. I mean, I have some girlfriends who I love. I just... in school it's much easier to be friends with guys."

She talks a little more about Star Wars.

"The main people who are impressed are little kids," she says, "basically, the only people I care about impressing."

Why?

"Because it's sweet, and it's uncalculated admiration."

But you can get that from kids by handing out candy.

"Exactly," she says, "and the equivalence of the two is great. You get the same reaction by being Queen Amidala or by giving them a Snickers bar."

Portman chats like this; confident perspectives and theories flying out as they can do when you're twenty years old, just for the joy of it. Though at one point — perhaps it's just the excuse she needs to carry on after an appropriate pause — she interrupts herself.

"Basically, everything I'm saying is completely wrong," she announces. "But at least it'll make someone else think they're right."

I don't know whether it's better to argue with her or say nothing.

"Make like a psychologist," she suggests, "and shut-up."

How Video Games Can Make Us Heroes
Jane McGonigal explains how to harness gaming energy to do good.
By Michael Agger
Updated Monday, Jan. 24, 2011, at 7:05 AM ET
I've known the joy of preparing to qualify, of leveling up with magic mushrooms, of speeding the flight of an angry bird. Yet video games often leave me feeling stale and restless. Shouldn't I be outgrowing these electronic entanglements? When one of my sons catches me playing a game on my iPhone, I think of the old-school Princeton basketball coach, Pete Carril, who disliked seeing his players eat candy. Here's the line from a Sports Illustrated profile: "He would wince when he saw a member of his team eating candy. Kids eat candy; he wanted his players to be men, and men drink beer."

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FacebookDiggRedditStumbleUponCLOSE+10 Pole Position reference.
-5 Gratuitous mention of family.

The game theorist Jane McGonigal, in her new book, Reality Is Broken, advises me to eat candy and eat it without shame. My editor asked me to say a more about who McGonigal is, but I couldn't really pin her down. She seems to be one of those lucky people who delivers keynote addresses at prestigious conferences and thinks about the future for a living—at Stanford. Let's call her a Keynotist. Anway, my desire to play games makes perfect sense, she argues, because games offer structured environments, clear goals, and instant feedback on success or failure. The real world is uninspiring and dull in contrast. We rarely have the chance to feel heroic when working at our jobs or going about our daily business. "We are starving, and our games our feeding us," McGonigal writes.

+5 Decent quote.
-10 Lame word-coinage.

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That statement zeroes in on the great paradox of video games: People who are motivated to do little else will show extraordinary focus and foresight when playing a game. This power was present in video games from the very beginning. McGonigal discusses the first video-game memoir, Pilgrim in the Microworld, published in 1983, by a 43-year-old college professor named David Sudnow. He was obsessed with Atari's Breakout: "This was a whole different business, nothing like I'd ever known, like night and day … Thirty seconds of play, and I'm on a whole new plane of being, all my synapses wailing." Again, this was while playing Breakout.

-5 Use of the word paradox.
+10 Acceptable alliteration.

McGonigal's project is to explain why games have this tractor-beam-like hold on our attention, and to suggest how we might harness this energy for real-world good. In this way, her book represents a new wedge into the video game argument. Nongamers are too quick to write them off as addictive—on par with drugs—while gamers oversell games as some kind of new art form. McGonigal asks us to look objectively at the "genuine human needs" that games satisfy. To do this, she turns to the field of positive psychology. In her view, the best games are like portable mini-generators of happiness.

-20 Use of "addictive" in article about gaming.
-5 Dubious metaphor.

She marries the two fields nicely. We want "satisfying work," and games give us plenty of shiny boxes to play within. We want to "crave the experience, or at least the hope, of being successful," and games give us reasonable challenges and unlimited chances for victory. We want "social connection," and multiplayer games like World of Warcraft have inspired the creation of tightly knit guilds that conduct missions together. And, least convincingly, we "crave meaning" or "something that has lasting significance beyond our own individual lives." Her example is when players of Halo collectively reached 10 billion kills of the game's enemy.

-30 World or Warcraft example.
-5 Halo example

It's that number—10 billion kills—that forms a crux of McGonigal's argument. She quotes from Halo message boards about how this mission imbued the game's players with a strong sense of fellowship. She notes how Halo players have collaborated on careful and detailed guides to the game. It's undeniable that Halo has organized and channeled a massive amount of human endeavor, but for what purpose? McGonigal's take: "Joining any collective effort and embracing feelings of awe can help us unlock our potential to lead a meaningful life and leave a meaningful mark on the world." Racking up virtual kills with our fellow virtual soldiers makes us more likely to pitch in when we step away from the screen.

+20 Avoidance of the word wiki.

Hmm … It's not hard to think of "collective efforts" that didn't work out so well for all involved. And the evidence that gaming fellowship carries over into soup-kitchen fellowship is slight. Another way of looking at those 10 billion kills is suggested by the book's epilogue, an anti-virtual world sentiment that McGonigal sets out to challenge. It's from Exodus to the Virtual World by the philosopher Edward Castronova: "Anyone who sees a hurricane coming should warn others … . You can't pull millions of person-hours out of a society without creating an atmospheric-level event." It's a haunting idea. What small acts of human creativity and connection do we forfeit while enjoying our pixelated pleasures? It's worth noting that McGonigal's book grew out of an officially sanctioned "rant" she delivered at a gaming conference. On one level, she's addressing the collective guilt of the gaming industry. What good are these elaborate creations besides the generation of distraction and profit?

-15 Rhetorical question overload.

McGonigal writes of the self-critical side of game designers. There's a growing sense that it's not enough to make just an addictive game. Instead, game designers should strive to make us into lifelong gamers, to build "sustainable attention." That may sound like mere image-enhacing semantics, but there is a real industry interest at work in the effort to rescue their ingenious creations from the realm of obsession. David Sudnow burned out on Breakout; the game also wreaked havoc on his regular life. That pattern continues in the more sophisticated games of today. The challenge is how to make people integrate games into their lives in such a way that they still have a life.

-5 Semicolon.
+10 Buzz-phrase unpacking.

McGonigal takes this idea a big step further. Not only do games teach us how to structure our lives to be happy, the principles of gameplay can in turn be used to make our lives better. When McGonigal had trouble recovering from a freak head-injury, she invented a game called SuperBetter in which she was Jane the Concussion Slayer and all her friends and husband were enlisted in various roles. The game helped organize her social-support system and definitely sped her recovery. What isn't really clear is whether the game motivated McGonigal's close friends to do things they would have done in any event.

-10 Predictable quibble.

McGonigal offers other examples of "positive impact" games or games that "leverage the play of the planet," but her most convincing case isn't technically a game, it's Wikipedia. As Wikipedians themselves have pointed out, the user-generated encyclopedia has "good mechanics." You see your edits instantly, you can set yourself the task of improving certain subfields or particular entries, and the gameworld of the encyclopedia has an engaged community that argues over the merits of various changes, patrols for vandalism, and expands the site into new territories of knowledge. In its shaggy, often imperfect way, Wikipedia has added to our common good. Especially if you care about Star Trek.

-15 Grating use of second person.
-20 Star Trek joke.

McGonigal is very smart about what makes a good game tick, both online and off, but she underemphasizes the importance of escapism. Part of the joy of playing tennis is that you are not trying to do good or save the world. You are trying to hit the ball as hard as you can. Likewise for Halo and its bretheren. Games are an escape hatch. If the game is getting better at your job, is that still really a game? Or think of all the people who turn a beloved hobby into a profession, only to watch as their enthusiasm fades. It's fun to play golf; not as fun to be a golf pro.

-10 Restating the obvious.

But there's also the possibility that we just don't have the right games yet. I'm not the first to point out that video games are in the same cultural position that comic books were 60 years ago: A pop-cultural phenomenon preys upon the minds of the young and impressionable. Lo and behold, comic books have become graphic novels—both an esteemed member of the literary pantheon and a powerful new way of telling stories and changing minds. Video games have the chance to take a similar journey to mainstream respectability and artistic heights. McGonigal's idea-stuffed book will be raided by game designers who are looking to create games that are perceived as "adult" and a good use of one's time to improve one's self and mind. (There is a glimmer of what's to come in the craze for "brain training" games or sites like Lumosity.)

-5 False modesty.
-15 Genuflecting at graphic novels.

In just the United States, there are presently 183 million active gamers, and as the gaming industry grows it will continue to seek new niches. There will be more big-budget, massively multiplayer worlds like the recent LEGO Universe , just as there will be more games such as Epic Win ("Level-up your life") that turn your to-do list into a challenge or the Nike+ system that turn your runs into a friendly rivalry. Most of us are only going to get more connected with and responsive to the Internet playing field. Like it or not, the game is on. As the "game layer" gets added to our lives, we should remember McGonigal's key criteria for good games: They make us happy, not guilty. They take us deeper into life, not farther away.

+10 No mention of person in China who died playing video games.
-500 Distracting meta-gimmick.

Game Over. Play Again?

Gym Rats and Dope Fiends
Exercise can help reduce drug cravings. But is exercise itself a kind of drug?
By Daniel Engber
Posted Friday, Jan. 21, 2011, at 6:51 PM ET
See the rest of Slate's Fitness Issue.

A few years ago, a team of Iranian scientists in the city of Isfahan put about two dozen male rats on a strict exercise program: The animals were forced to run on a treadmill, not unlike the ones in your local gym, at a gentle incline and for 90 minutes each day. After their workouts, the rats were allowed half an hour for a brief cool-down. Then they got high on drugs.

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FacebookDiggRedditStumbleUponCLOSEThe point of the experiment was to show that an exercising animal—a real-life gym rat—would be less inclined to tap a lever for a dose of morphine. It wasn't a new idea: The interplay of physical activity and the use of addictive drugs has been a subject of intense study for at least 20 years. Robin Kanarek of Tufts University, for one, has shown that spending time in a running wheel makes rats less susceptible to the effects of nicotine, morphine, and amphetamines. It's also known that an animal with an exercise habit drinks less alcohol in its cage, and takes fewer bumps of cocaine. What about the rodents in Iran? Yes, they took fewer hits from the lever after their workouts.

Humans with drug problems might get some of the same benefits from working out. Habitual smokers report having fewer withdrawal symptoms and less intense cravings for a cigarette after they've been to the gym; even mild workouts and stretching can help stave off a relapse. (Efforts to get heavy drinkers into slimnastics have been less successful.) We've also heard that fitness routines can mend broken cortical circuits and stimulate the growth of new neurons. Apparently you can use exercise to "train your brain" to ward off dementia and depression, and treat the symptoms of ADHD. And it seems these benefits accrue whether you're riding the elliptical or lifting weights.

But if exercise works as a treatment for drug addiction, we don't know exactly why. It's possible that a sweaty session at the club merely serves as a distraction: You're not thinking about your next fix when you're focusing on your next set. Or it could be that we use the gym to relieve stress, which is a major risk factor for backsliding into drug abuse.

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There's another, slightly more disturbing theory for why exercise helps stave off relapse—that working out helps people (and rats) resist drugs because of its similarity to those drugs. Have you ever felt irritable after skipping a yoga class or two? Or a little depressed and lethargic when you don't have time for the gym? These might be construed as withdrawal symptoms—the eventual outcome of an activity or habit that mimics, in some important ways, the effects of morphine and cigarettes and dope. To put it another way—and maybe one that sounds less like vapid neuropunditry: Exercise may prevent drug use by helping us to replace one compulsive, feel-good behavior with another.

To be clear, exercise is not like heroin, at least not in the sense of fundamental psychopathology. And it's best to avoid the semantic controversy over whether any behavior—weightlifting, shopping, eating, fucking, playing World of Warcraft—should properly be termed an "addiction," or a "dependence," or even appear at all, in the official manual of psychiatric diagnoses. But the story of how we came to think about the relationship between exercise and addictive drugs—the similarities between them, and the ways they interact—is worth telling.

It begins about 35 years ago, with a peculiar confluence of trends in neurobiology and popular culture. First, the science: In 1973, researchers discovered that we all have a set of opiate receptors in our brains some of which can be found in a kind of "pleasure center" for neural activity. That mesolimbic reward pathway could be engaged by normal and natural stimuli, they realized—such as listening to music or eating ice cream—but it could also be hijacked by certain drugs that send it into overdrive. According to the theory, everything that felt good had something to do with this basic system in the brain.

The idea of a common reward system opened the door for new varieties of addiction: If drugs could overwhelm the brain's reward pathway, what about compulsive behaviors? Over the next few years, psychologists delivered a cascade of new behavioral diagnoses. In 1978, it was proposed that for some people, sex might act on the brain in the same way as morphine; "Don Juanism" was reconstrued as "sex addiction." By 1980, doctors had given "pathological gambling" its own formal diagnosis. And more behavioral addictions were soon to come.

Meanwhile, another trend was rapidly gaining momentum during the Carter years. As Gina Kolata outlines in her book, Ultimate Fitness, Americans were exercising in record numbers. And not just any which way—people were putting on athletic shoes and running like crazy. Kolata cites a Frank Deford article from Sports Illustrated in 1978: "I am sick of joggers and I am sick of runners," he wrote. "I don't care if all the people in the U.S. are running or planning to run or wishing they could run. All I ask is, don't write articles about running and ask me to read them." In the early 1960s, there were 100,000 self-identified runners in the nation. By the late 1970s, there were 30 million.

It wasn't long before the ranks of psychologists and packs of joggers ran headlong into one another. More and more people were working out, and clinicians noticed that some of them were hurting themselves. What's more, their devotion to marathon training or aerobics was taking on some of the qualities of an addiction: Runners claimed to experience a "natural high," and some were steadily increasing their distances to achieve the same level of satisfaction. Scientists wondered if this had something to do with one of the body's naturally occurring pleasure peptides, the beta-endorphin, which gets released during exercise. (Endorphin is a shortened version of the "endogenous morphine.") Were runners getting "addicted" to endorphins? Sometimes they showed signs of withdrawal—increased anxiety and depressive tendencies—when they missed a visit to the track.

Soon these obsessive joggers were being described as victims of an exercise addiction, though in deference to diagnostic conservatives their affliction was also termed obligatory exercise, overtraining syndrome, or exercise dependence (the "other" ED). Some researchers felt the condition was merely an outgrowth or subset of anorexia nervosa and declared the combination of undereating and overtraining responsible for the Female Athlete Triad, or FAT. (Its three components are disordered nutrition, amenorrhea, and osteoporosis.) And since men were diagnosed as anorexics less often than women, it was further proposed that overtraining might be the masculine version of an eating disorder.

(In the following ngram, I've plotted the concurrent rise of the phrases brain reward system, recreational runners, and exercise addiction in Google Books.)

 

What's more, a very similar and startling phenomenon had been demonstrated in rodents. In 1967, a pair of psychologists at Northwestern developed a standard procedure for inducing a kind of overtraining syndrome in the lab: Under the right conditions, a captive rat would become exorexic. The scientists noticed that if they limited a rat's access to food to one hour per day, the animal would start to lose weight before adapting to the new schedule and consuming more food when it had the chance. But if they gave that same rat the opportunity to exercise in a running wheel, it never adjusted. Instead, the rat would get slightly deranged: running more and more, and eating less and less, until it became too scrawny and weak to move. Without intervention, the animal would starve to death within two weeks.

Further studies revealed that rats derived some kind of pleasure from running on the wheel, or at least they could become dependent on the behavior. The Lewis strain of lab rats, for example, is especially prone to drug addiction. Lewis rats are also inclined to habitual exercise: When given regular access to a wheel, they'll engage in longer and longer bouts of running, until they're doing more than 6 miles per day. (That's a serious haul for a critter with tiny legs.) Rats of the Fischer strain, which aren't as likely to press a lever for drugs, also aren't as vigorous on the wheel—they only run for about a mile. Rats can also be trained to do things in exchange for access to the running wheel, too. Instead of a food pellet reward, they get the chance to exercise.

The fact that rats find physical activity rewarding doesn't mean they're always killing themselves by doing too much of it. Aside from its many well-established physical effects, exercise provides mental benefits for rats as well as people. It staves off melancholy and anxiety, for one thing, and seems to improve the well-being of a particular strain of rat—the Flinders sensitive line—that's been bred as a model of human depression. (The animals are usually sluggish, with sleeping problems and small appetites.)

So is exercise a kind of "positive addiction," as William Glasser put it in 1976—a habit-forming behavior that can displace a habit-forming substance or mitigate its negative effects? What should we make of the many similarities between the biochemical effects of exercise and those of the drugs of abuse? Both stimulate the release of dopamine and neuropeptides in the striatum; both lead to changes in brain circuitry and the formation of new neural connections; both apparently induce tolerance, and—in some cases—withdrawal symptoms and physical injury. Yet as Vaughan Bell has pointed out in Slate, there's no straightforward relationship between brain chemicals and addiction, and knowing a bit of neurochemistry doesn't tell you whether an activity is harmful or beneficial. To take just one of many examples, falling in love might lead to dopamine release, and an unexpected breakup could produce very real feelings of withdrawal. Do we wring our hands and wonder whether love is an addiction?

It would be silly—and very unhealthy—to avoid exercise on account of its habit-forming properties. But we shouldn't ignore the facts. A regular exercise program may improve your mood and prolong your life. It may help you quit smoking and keep your wits about you as you age. That doesn't mean it's unreasonable to weigh the bad against the good, however. I try to go to the gym three or four times per week, and I get a little annoyed when I can't make it. That's OK; the downside is worth it. But a few years ago, I was addicted to stretching, too: Every morning, I'd spend 15 minutes limbering up before leaving the house. It felt great when I did it, but terrible if I missed a day. I'd twist my legs under my desk for hours, trying to make my calves less stiff and my joints less creaky. That would have been a small price to pay, I suppose, if stretching offered some other, more important benefit. But when I discovered that it doesn't actually prevent sports injuries, the whole thing started to seem like a bad habit. So one day I quit. Cold turkey.

The Triumph of Hacker Culture
Stuxnet and the iconic, pioneering hacker Captain Crunch.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Friday, Jan. 21, 2011, at 11:55 AM ET

Iranian President Mahmoud AhmadinejadIt's the best of times and the worst of times for hacker culture. On the one hand, this is a moment of history-making triumph for a cyber-worm, the complex computer virus known and feared as "Stuxnet." A stunning evolutionary leap in development of "malware" (the generic term for the mischief-making software a virus embeds in computers via digital networks). Composed, it has been reported, of 15,000 lines of code. Stuxnet exhibited virtual superpowers last fall by penetrating, taking control of, and jamming into self-destruction some 1,000 precisely calibrated uranium-refining centrifuges in Iran's Natanz nuclear facility.

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FacebookDiggRedditStumbleUponCLOSEAnd then, under another alias, another digital disguise (I see the worm in a Bogart-like virtual trench coat), Stuxnet surreptitiously slipped into the brand-new Iranian nuclear reactor at Bushehr last fall as well. This is the reactor that had just taken delivery of nuclear fuel from the Russians (though it still hadn't been loaded in), the one proclaimed to be for peaceful uses, nonetheless capable of making bomb-grade plutonium as a "byproduct."

Stuxnet seized the control panel of the Bushehr reactor and did its Stuxnet thing and shut that huge, $1 billion complex down. Just like that. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was compelled to concede the reactor had been the source of "problems" but claimed they'd been "fixed." That was two months ago. The reactor is still shut down. Some analysts estimate that Iran's attainment of nuclear bomb-making capacity has been pushed back at least two years.

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And the problems may be permanent, perennial, with malicious features as yet unrevealed by the worm. That's the thing, both admirable and potentially disturbing about Stuxnet: We don't yet know whether it's exercised its full capabilities. We don't know what other tricks Stuxnet has in store. Or whether it can ever be eradicated from an infected machine. Whether it can turn on us. We just know it's awesome.

Perhaps the ultimate tribute to it was by a computer security expert who called its advent—and the swath of destruction it cut through Iran's nuclear program—"an Oppenheimer moment" in the history of hacking. A moment in which malware viruses had made the leap from troublemaking but controllable depredations to potentially unstoppable, history-changing weapons, their capabilities miles ahead of their predecessors', the way the first nuclear weapon Oppenheimer built at Los Alamos left mere TNT in its wake and shadowed the world we live in with the threat of cataclysmic extinction.

Computer-security experts who have handled the most complex "malware" virus infections are agog.

As a German based computer security consultant, Ralph Langner, put it, "The Iranians don't have the depth of knowledge to handle the worm or understand its complexity." The "disruptive technology" blog Next Big Future quoted Langner thus:

"Here is their problem. They should throw out every personal computer involved with the nuclear program and start over, but they can't do that. Moreover, they are completely dependent on outside companies for the construction and maintenance of their nuclear facilities. They should throw out their computers as well. But they can't," he explained. "They will just continually re-infect themselves."

"With the best of expertise and equipment it would take another year for the plants to function normally again because it is so hard to get the worm out. It even hides in the back-up systems. But they can't do it."

But an Oppenheimer moment means more than a quantum leap in the power and deceptiveness of the virus. It means dramatic geopolitical ramifications. If the original Oppenheimer moment may have guaranteed that WWII would end with the horrific Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings, the Stuxnet Oppenheimer moment may have bequeathed us an unexpected last-minute reprieve from what seemed like a potential outbreak of nuclear warfare. Consider the fact that Stuxnet disabled Iran's key nuclear facilities (and infected an estimated 60,000 of its computers) just at the moment when the Israelis were giving out signals that they were prepared to use air strikes on Iranian facilities, using whatever weapons it took (and, of course, they have an undeclared nuclear arsenal), to prevent Iran from getting the bomb. Whatever you think of the Israeli position, there was little doubt they'd do it if there were no other options, and in doing so risk not only Iranian retaliation but nuclear retaliation from Iranian sympathizers in Pakistan's military, which all-too-loosely controls Pakistan's "Islamic bomb," the generic term for the 60 to 100 nuclear warheads the Pakistanis possess.

The world was on the verge of a regional nuclear war with unknowable further consequences. Until Stuxnet did its work.

Oh, it will probably happen sooner or later, that regional nuclear war, but Stuxnet may have postponed the flashpoint for at least a couple of years. Although there is some disagreement about how much time Stuxnet and other measures have bought.

No wonder one satirical blog named the Stuxnet worm "Man of the Year" and I half-seriously suggested the worm be offered the Nobel Peace Prize, a modest proposal echoed by other blogs.

It has indeed been a season of triumph for the hacker and hacker culture.

(A "hack," it should be emphasized, is any unauthorized intrusion into a computer's innards, whether that intrusion is carried out by a lone hacker or agents of a hostile government. The one flaw in the New York Times' enterprising recent investigation of Stuxnet's origins is that it seems to deny Stuxnet was the product of "hackers," because the hack may have been created by a government, by U.S. and/or Israeli teams of hackers. A hacker is a hacker is a hacker, government-employed or not. It is common knowledge, for instance, that the Chinese military has an entire division of its army devoted to cyber warfare—which is no less hackery for being government sponsored.)

And the recent triumphs of hackerdom range beyond Stuxnet. We also saw the more crude but voluminous Wikileaks, the Gawker hack, the Facebook worm that spammed and phished people last fall. It began to seem as if no one, no system, was invulnerable. An ominous piece on the front page of USA Today on Jan. 11 claimed "Experts fear cyberspammers are plotting new attack modes," citing the sharp drop-off of traditional criminal botnet hacker networks, the ones that infect thousands of PCs and turn them into "zombie" computers to serve their ends. The sudden abandonment of this profitable mode of computer crime, the story claimed, might presage a sinister new twist in hacker tactics.

Which makes it particularly ironic that at this best of times for hackers and their worms and "weaponized malware," the legendary godfather of hackerdom, the "epic iconic figure" (as Computerworld* calls him), the real-life mythic ghost in the machine, superhero to generations of nerds and geeks including the founders of Apple, the man known as "Captain Crunch," suffered a sudden mysterious debilitating injury that left him with excruciating pain and nerve damage, incapacitated and fighting for the use of the hands that—almost singlehandedly—created hacker culture. This news comes just at the moment when we might well need a hacker superhero, someone to deal with the unknown new challenges the super-cyber-worms represent. Because just as the Oppenheimer moment at Los Alamos was a scientific triumph and a human tragedy, Stuxnet and its analogs may have a profoundly unsettling dark side.

I'm not alone in thinking this. I've written here of the 50 nuclear missiles that went rogue in Wyoming for an hour back in late October. The 50 Minutemen nukes stopped responding to communications from their launch control center at F.E. Warren AF Base*. It was reported that their communications link had been disrupted after some malfunction had caused their missile-to-missile pinging to speed up and slow down out of phase, causing them to cut themselves off from what might be an outside intrusion.

Probably just an accident, but accounts of Stuxnet's disabling of the Iranian centrifuges spoke of the way it seized control of their operating controls and sped up and slowed down the centrifuge speed cycles, leading to jamming and crashing. While doing some background research for this column, I came across a comment about the Wyoming incident on the extremely well-informed Armscontrolwonk.com* blog that simply said: "Why not stuxnet?"

The implications are vastly unsettling. If a Stuxnet-like worm can disable Iranian nuclear manufacturing controls, there is reason to be concerned that a similar or more highly evolved worm (devised by the much-feared Chinese military cyber corps, perhaps) could seize control of our nuclear missile launch-control capacity. Maybe not yet. But the potential can't be ruled out.

The possibility may remind some of what was once a futuristic fantasy in the Terminator movies: a nuclear weapons control program called "Skynet" that turned on its masters and sought to use its power to destroy humanity.

No one really believes machines are capable of such apocalyptic mischief on their own. But human beings...It seems not only prudent but urgent that we mobilize all the best hackers in the nation to devise defenses against the malicious use of Stuxnet worms to start cataclysmic wars. Or would you rather depend on Pentagon bureaucrats?

And first among such a team of supergeek recruits would be Captain Crunch, who may have started it all.

I first got to know the Captain when I was writing "Secrets of the Little Blue Box," a 1971 Esquire story that began with a focus on proto-hacker "phone phreaks"—among them blind electronic teenage geniuses who devised ways of hacking into the long-distance circuits of then-monopoly AT&T. Into which the Captain (real name John Draper) inserted himself because he was making a key transition from phone phreaking (using "blue boxes" which replicated the internal signal cycles of the phone company) to modem-based hacking into computer circuitry.

He was known for cruising around what was later to be called Silicon Valley in a Volkswagen van equipped with his "computerized unit" as he called it, stopping by isolated phone booths and hooking himself into circuitry all over the world. The first hacker superhero, complete with phone booth.

After my story came out, both good and bad things happened for the Captain. The good thing was that the Steves—Jobs and Wozniak—reached out to him. First for help in their own attempts to manufacture blue boxes in their parents' garage. Then, after they formed the Apple partnership, they took him on as a skilled techie who helped them devise Apple's early word processing program, EZ Writer. It's also said he had key input in designing the first PCs as well. The bad things were that he talked too much about his nonlegal hacking exploits and the feds locked him up for a time.

Nonetheless he was never what has come to be called a "black hat hacker"—one who uses his skills for criminal ends. He was more of what has been called a "look-at-me" hacker. One of those superadept wizards who liked to show off by showing up, virtually, behind the firewalls, the anti-virus immunizations, and all the defenses that the most super-secure sophisticated computer security people could devise.

Not just to show off, such hackers would maintain, but to perform a public service, by "demonstrating vulnerabilities" in the computer systems around them. Even more culturally significant, Captain Crunch made hacking "cool" to a subculture of supersmart geeks who were not content with their code-and-cubicle life but wanted a dimension of James Bond-like daring in their lives. (I am of the opinion that the relative immunity of Apple and Macs from hacker attacks has something to do with the coolness factor that their association with Captain Crunch gave them in the hacker subculture.)

Crunch is a progenitor of the joyfully anarchic sensibility, the Robin Hood outlaw outlook, that drew some of the best unconventional minds in tech, many of whom later got hired away to became cyber-security experts because they knew so much about causing cyber insecurity.

So I found it shocking and dismaying this month when I was Googling around for the latest developments in hacker culture and Stuxnet lore and came on a site called Saving Captain Crunch, which gave some minimal details that other sympathetic Web sites filled in for me.

According to PC World, the epic hacker icon was minding his own business at a computer conference when an apparently overenthusiastic fan gave him a kind of bear hug around the neck, which wrenched some vertebrae—already delicate from recent surgery—to the point where they cut off almost all nerve communication to his arms and hands. He was in terrible pain and was suffering terrifyingly progressive paralysis of his hands.

The accident took place back in October and the Captain and his friends made an appeal for support because he couldn't afford the extensive and expensive surgery required, despite Medicaid.

The PC World piece brings good news, however. The operation got performed. In the comments section of the PC World online article, the Captain himself reports that he is recovering.

There's something both awful and eerie about the confluence of Stuxnet's paralysis of a nuclear facility nerve system and the nerve damage that rendered Captain Crunch's talented hands paralyzed.

I think we are entering an age of increasing anxiety about the "robustness" of the cyber structures that now are the invisible foundations of our personal and geopolitical existence. The shadowy figure of the anonymous hacker, Black Hat or White Hat, may have more power over our lives and fate than Zuckerberg, Jobs, and Brin and company, for all their billions.

In a way, I'm glad I wasn't aware of Captain Crunch's dire straits until he had what looks like a successful operation. It would have been too painful to contemplate the irony. But now with rumors that variations on Stuxnet have become available on the black market, or may be ramped up to commandeer nukes by hostile nations, it's good to have the Captain back in action. He is, if not a national treasure, a great national resource of man-vs.-machine savvy and guile, the triumph of the infinite creative deviousness of the human mind over silicon circuitry.

Get well soon, Captain.

Correction, Jan. 21, 2011: This piece originally stated that 50 nukes had gone rogue at Warrenton AF Base; it was F.E. Warren AF Base. The piece also mistakenly called Computerworld magazine Computer World and referred to the blog Armscontrolwonk as Amscontrolwonk. (Return to the corrected page.)

The PicturesApemanby Nick Liptak
January 31, 2011 .Peter Elliott
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"Project Nim";Peter Elliott;British Actors;James Marsh;Research Chimpanzees;Documentaries;Sundance Film FestivalWhen the credits rolled, at Sundance last week, on "Project Nim," a documentary about the research chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky by the director James Marsh ("Man on Wire"), audience members could be forgiven for not recognizing one of its stars. Peter Elliott, a British actor who played the chimp in some re-created footage, may have one of the most inconspicuous faces in the business.

Elliott's career began in the late nineteen-seventies, during preproduction for "Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes." The movie's creative team had suffered a setback: the forty or so actors who had been hired to play Tarzan's ape friends were not apelike enough. Producers tried out a mime wearing an animatronic ape costume, but determined that they needed another approach. Elliott's screen test—very apelike—had caught the producers' attention. They decided to send him on a fact-finding assignment for the production to the Institute for Primate Studies, at the University of Oklahoma. "The idea was to see if I could socially integrate into a group of chimps," he said. "For the behavior, for the look of it, you need to learn all the sounds and faces." He returned armed with techniques to present to the cast. The producers were thrilled, and he followed the success of "Greystoke" by playing some of the subsequent decades' most iconic movie apes—Simba, in "Gorillas in the Mist"; Buddy, in "Buddy"—and becoming Hollywood's go-to man for teaching others the craft, as he did for "Congo" and the (non-ape) creatures in last year's "Where the Wild Things Are."

Elliott, who is fifty-four, spent a few days last fall in the back yard of a mansion in Yonkers, shooting scenes for "Project Nim." In his dressing room, he explained his approach. "You have to have a different breathing rhythm, a different backbone, a different weight. You treat it like a normal acting role. It's Method chimping."

High-quality costuming is important, too. For fifteen years, many of his suits have been built by Nik Williams and Tina Foster. "You've got to try and lose the human leg length," Elliott said. He got down on all fours. "You can do that with the costume a little bit, by dropping the crotch."

"Pete, do you want a glass of water before we put the head on?" Foster asked. Elliott declined, because bathroom breaks are cumbersome once the suit is on. "You're sometimes blind," he said. "You're usually incredibly hot. Breathing can be a big problem." With the head in place, Elliott and his team huddled with Marsh to discuss how it would appear on camera.

"I think we're going to need more blood and bits," Marsh said, after the first take.

"We've got the blood—got the bits," Williams said. He and Foster went over the mask with paintbrushes, and, when they finished, Williams used a remote-controlled dial to maneuver the lips into a snarl, exposing a row of bloodied teeth. Marsh grinned. "That's really horrifying, isn't it?" he said.

Elliott climbed onto an apple box and, when the camera rolled, began jumping up and down.

"Do the gesture—do the signing," Marsh called. Elliott began making high-pitched screams—one of five sounds that a performance in a film about apes might call for, along with grunts, hoots, whimpers, and barks. Afterward, Williams pulled two plastic tubes from a compartment in the costume's stomach and plugged them into a metal cooling box—"like the ones race-car drivers use," Elliott said.

Elliott excels at playing apelike humans, too: in "Quest for Fire," he played a member of a semi-verbal prehistoric tribe, and he had the title role in "Missing Link." He said, "Because you're living in the 'now,' it's almost completely stress-free." He paused. "I've learned a whole lot more about people. It's as though you've stripped away the cultural overlay." Last year, he filmed an Italian Web TV series sponsored by the apéritif brand Crodino, in which he played a talking gorilla who casually dates a famous talk-show host. "A gorilla with his own sitcom," he said. "It's very Italian." ♦

 

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/01/31/110131ta_talk_liptak#ixzz1ByWVJl00

Where I Got These Absby Bob Odenkirk
January 31, 2011 .You are probably wondering where I got these amazing abs. They're so ripply and rock hard, they're difficult to fathom. If I were a character on a reality show about me and my middle-aged acquaintances, I might be nicknamed the Conundrum, in reference to these abs of mine. See, the abs don't match the visage. My perturbed, puffy face sets you up for a blubbery gut. But then you see these abs, stacked like bricks, clearly delineated, and you have to ask, "Does he work out for two or three hours a day, or does he just work out all day?" Or perhaps you think I purchased them from a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. My secret is simple—dynamic tension! Constant dynamic tension. Tension that is tense, and dynamic, and never-ending—the best kind of tension there is! I have analyzed each ab and where it draws its tension from so that you, too, can get the abs you've always dreamed of!

The ab on the upper right is taut and sinewy thanks to middle school. Specifically, the effort of trying to get my two kids placed in a topnotch middle school. Filling out forms, attending open houses, prepping for interviews, taking the entrance exams—it's a lot of work, and I am there every step of the way, standing behind them, leaning over their shoulders, looking down (that's what tightens the ab), swallowing hard (also good for the ab), and clenching and unclenching my fists (good for the fists). Thanks, kids—Dad loves you and Dad loves the ab you've given him.

The middle right ab bulges handsomely thanks to talk radio. I simply tune in to conservative talkers when I am driving, and my screaming at the host tightens this ab for an extended, uninterrupted rep. Plus, disagreeing with someone on the radio gives me that powerless, overwhelmed feeling I've become addicted to. It's better than a drug, because you get the abs!

The upper left ab pops out impressively from the effort of lugging five-gallon water jugs into our kitchen. Actually, the lugging does nothing for the ab; it's the part where you have to tip the full jug and place its spout into the dispensing reservoir, without spilling, that strains and sculpts this beautiful ab. The short moment of dread focusses tension on this ab like a ray gun. Afterward, slipping on the spilled water can be great for a whole-body clench.

The middle ab on the left (not my left, your left, if you are looking at me) is called Terrence. It's a dignified ab. It tenses each time I read an op-ed article about global warming. The article's point of view is immaterial; simply being reminded that I can do nothing to stop the horrific future of floods and catastrophe gives this ab a taut yank that lingers, burning calories in my well-creased forehead at the same time. Best to do right before bed, as the accompanying nightmares keep those abs pumping into the early-morning hours!

from the issuecartoon banke-mail this.The bottom right ab, the biggest of all the abs—and therefore the most impressive—is from not having sex. This ab is always quietly tensed. Has been for years now. Can you imagine the Dalai Lama's lower right ab? Must be huge. I, however, did not take a vow of chastity, so it would be a sad situation, if it didn't yield such an amazing ab.

The bottom ab on the left is harder to explain, but I believe that this ab is simply self-aware. It quivers with tension at all times, even more so when I am supposed to be relaxing, and I believe it is searching for a sense of purpose for itself and no answer is forthcoming. Nothing works this ab like a vacation. The aimless uncertainty, the absence of all deadlines, tightens and sculpts like nothing else. After ten days in Hawaii, this ab looks amazing.

Finally, you've got to appreciate my extra abs. That's right, I have two abs more than most people. They are in my lower back, and, I'll admit it, they were put there by my Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. I was told that they are the latest thing. God, I hope so. They hurt like hell. ♦

 

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/01/31/110131sh_shouts_odenkirk#ixzz1ByWc9uAS

BooksAmerica's Top ParentWhat's behind the"Tiger Mother" craze?by Elizabeth Kolbert
January 31, 2011 .SharePrintE-MailSingle PageRelated Links
The tiger-mother furor, in the U.S. and China.Keywords
Amy Chua;"Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother";Mothers;Parenting;China, Chinese;Children;Wall Street Journal"Call me garbage."

The other day, I was having dinner with my family when the subject of Amy Chua's new book, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" (Penguin Press; $25.95), came up. My twelve-year-old twins had been read an excerpt from the book by their teacher, a well-known provocateur. He had been sent a link to the excerpt by another teacher, who had received it from her sister, who had been e-mailed it by a friend, and, well, you get the point. The excerpt, which had appeared in the Wall Street Journal under the headline "WHY CHINESE MOTHERS ARE SUPERIOR," was, and still is, an Internet sensation—as one blogger put it, the "Andromeda Strain of viral memes." Within days, more than five thousand comments had been posted, and "Tiger Mother" vaulted to No. 4 on Amazon's list of best-sellers. Chua appeared on NPR's "All Things Considered" and on NBC's "Nightly News" and "Today" show. Her book was the topic of two columns in last week's Sunday Times, and, under the racially neutral headline "IS EXTREME PARENTING EFFECTIVE?," the subject of a formal debate on the paper's Web site.

Thanks to this media blitz, the basic outlines of "Tiger Mother"'s story are by now familiar. Chua, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, is a Yale Law School professor. She is married to another Yale law professor and has two daughters, whom she drives relentlessly. Chua's rules for the girls include: no sleepovers, no playdates, no grade lower than an A on report cards, no choosing your own extracurricular activities, and no ranking lower than No. 1 in any subject. (An exception to this last directive is made for gym and drama.)

In Chua's binary world, there are just two kinds of mother. There are "Chinese mothers," who, she allows, do not necessarily have to be Chinese. "I'm using the term 'Chinese mothers' loosely," she writes. Then, there are "Western" mothers. Western mothers think they are being strict when they insist that their children practice their instruments for half an hour a day. For Chinese mothers, "the first hour is the easy part." Chua chooses the instruments that her daughters will play—piano for the older one, Sophia; violin for the younger, Lulu—and stands over them as they practice for three, four, sometimes five hours at a stretch. The least the girls are expected to do is make it to Carnegie Hall. Amazingly enough, Sophia does. Chua's daughters are so successful—once, it's true, Sophia came in second on a multiplication test (to a Korean boy), but Chua made sure this never happened again—that they confirm her thesis: Western mothers are losers. I'm using the term "losers" loosely.

Chua has said that one of the points of the book is "making fun of myself," but plainly what she was hoping for was to outrage. Whole chapters of "Tiger Mother"—admittedly, many chapters are only four or five pages long—are given over to incidents like that of the rejected smiley face.

from the issuecartoon banke-mail this."I don't want this," she tells Lulu, throwing back at her a handmade birthday card. "I want a better one."

In another chapter, Chua threatens to take Lulu's doll house to the Salvation Army and, when that doesn't work, to deny her lunch, dinner, and birthday parties for "two, three, four years" because she cannot master a piece called "The Little White Donkey." The kid is seven years old. In a third chapter, Chua tells Sophia she is "garbage." Chua's own father has called her "garbage," and she finds it a highly effective parenting technique. Chua relates this at a dinner party, and one of the guests supposedly gets so upset that she breaks down in tears. The hostess tries to patch things up by suggesting that Chua is speaking figuratively.

"You didn't actually call Sophia garbage," the hostess offers.

"Yes, I did," Chua says.

When the dinner-party episode was read in class, my sons found it hilarious, which is why they were taunting me. "Call me garbage," one of the twins said again. "I dare you."

"O.K.," I said, trying, for once, to be a good mother. "You're garbage."

If Chua's tale has any significance—and it may not—it is as an allegory. Chua refers to herself as a Tiger because according to the Chinese zodiac she was born in the Year of the Tiger. Tiger people are "powerful, authoritative, and magnetic," she informs us, just as tigers that walk on four legs inspire "fear and respect." The "tiger economies" of Asia aren't mentioned in the book, but they growl menacingly in the background.

It's just about impossible to pick up a newspaper these days—though who actually picks up a newspaper anymore?—without finding a story about the rise of the East. The headlines are variations on a theme: "SOLAR PANEL MAKER MOVES WORK TO CHINA"; "CHINA DRAWING HIGH-TECH RESEARCH FROM U.S."; "IBM CUTTING 5,000 SERVICE JOBS; MOVING WORK TO INDIA." What began as an outflow of manufacturing jobs has spread way beyond car parts and electronics to include information technology, legal advice, even journalism. (This piece could have been written much more cost-effectively by a team in Bangalore and, who knows, maybe next month it will be.)

On our good days, we tell ourselves that our kids will be all right. The new, global economy, we observe, puts a premium on flexibility and creativity. And who is better prepared for such a future than little Abby (or Zachary), downloading her wacky videos onto YouTube while she texts her friends, messes with Photoshop, and listens to her iPod?

"Yes, you can brute-force any kid to learn to play the piano—just precisely like his or her billion neighbors" is how one of the comments on the Wall Street Journal 's Web site put it. "But you'll never get a Jimi Hendrix that way."

On our bad days, we wonder whether this way of thinking is, as Chua might say, garbage. Last month, the results of the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, tests were announced. It was the first time that Chinese students had participated, and children from Shanghai ranked first in every single area. Students from the United States, meanwhile, came in seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science, and an especially demoralizing thirty-first in math. This last ranking put American kids not just behind the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Singaporeans but also after the French, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Slovenians, the Estonians, and the Poles.

"I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable," Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, told the Times. "The United States came in twenty-third or twenty-fourth in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we're being out-educated."

Why is this? How is it that the richest country in the world can't teach kids to read or to multiply fractions? Taken as a parable, Chua's cartoonish narrative about browbeating her daughters acquires a certain disquieting force. Americans have been told always to encourage their kids. This, the theory goes, will improve their self-esteem, and this, in turn, will help them learn.

After a generation or so of applying this theory, we have the results. Just about the only category in which American students outperform the competition is self-regard. Researchers at the Brookings Institution, in one of their frequent studies of education policy, compared students' assessments of their abilities in math with their scores on a standardized test. Nearly forty per cent of American eighth graders agreed "a lot" with the statement "I usually do well in mathematics," even though only seven per cent of American students actually got enough correct answers on the test to qualify as advanced. Among Singaporean students, eighteen per cent said they usually did well in math; forty-four per cent qualified as advanced. As the Brookings researchers pointed out, even the least self-confident Singaporean students, on average, outscored the most self-confident Americans. You can say it's sad that kids in Singapore are so beaten down that they can't appreciate their own accomplishments. But you've got to give them this: at least they get the math right.

Our problems as a country cannot, of course, be reduced to our problems as educators or as parents. Nonetheless, there is an uncomfortable analogy. For some time now, the U.S. has, in effect, been drawing crappy, smiley-face birthday cards and calling them wonderful. It's made us feel a bit better about ourselves without improving the basic situation. As the cover story on China's ascent in this month's Foreign Policy sums things up: "American Decline: This Time It's Real."

It's hard to believe that Chua's book would be causing quite as much stir without the geopolitical subtext. (Picture the reaction to a similar tale told by a Hungarian or an Austrian über-mom.) At the same time, lots of people have clearly taken "Tiger Mother" personally.

Of the zillions of comments that have been posted on the Web, many of the most passionate are from scandalized "Western" mothers and fathers, or, as one blogger dubbed them, "Manatee dads." Some have gone as far as to suggest that Chua be arrested for child abuse. At least as emotional are the posts from Asians and Asian-Americans.

"Parents like Amy Chua are the reason why Asian-Americans like me are in therapy," Betty Ming Liu, who teaches journalism at N.Y.U., wrote on her blog.

"What's even more damning is her perpetuation of the media stereotypes of Asian-Americans," Frank Chi, a political consultant, wrote in the Boston Globe's opinion blog.

"Having lived through a version of the Chinese Parenting Experience, and having been surrounded since birth with hundreds of CPE graduates, I couldn't not say something," a contributor to the Web site Shanghaiist wrote after the Wall Street Journal excerpt appeared. "The article actually made me feel physically ill."

Chua's response to some of the unkind things said about her—she has reported getting death threats—has been to backpedal. "RETREAT OF THE 'TIGER MOTHER' " was the headline of one Times article. (It, too, quickly jumped to the top of the paper's "most e-mailed" list.) Chua has said that it was not her plan to write a parenting manual: "My actual book is not a how-to guide." Somehow or other, her publisher seems to be among those who missed this. The back cover spells out, in black and red type, "How to Be a Tiger Mother."

According to Chua, her "actual book" is a memoir. Memoir is, or at least is supposed to be, a demanding genre. It requires that the author not just narrate his or her life but reflect on it. By her own description, Chua is not a probing person. Of her years studying at Harvard Law School, she writes:

 

I didn't care about the rights of criminals the way others did, and I froze whenever a professor called on me. I also wasn't naturally skeptical and questioning; I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it.

"Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" exhibits much the same lack of interest in critical thinking. It's breezily written, at times entertaining, and devoid of anything approaching introspection. Imagine your most self-congratulatory friend holding forth for two hours about her kids' triumphs, and you've more or less got the narrative. The only thing that keeps it together is Chua's cheerful faith that whatever happened to her or her daughters is interesting just because it happened to happen to them. In addition to all the schlepping back and forth to auditions, there are two chapters on Chua's dogs (Samoyeds named Coco and Pushkin), three pages of practice notes that she left behind for Lulu when she could not be there to berate her in person, and a complete list of the places that she had visited with her kids by the time they were twelve and nine:

 

London, Paris, Nice, Rome, Venice, Milan, Amsterdam, The Hague, Barcelona, Madrid, Málaga, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Munich, Dublin, Brussels, Bruges, Strasbourg, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Manila, Istanbul, Mexico City, Cancún, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, La Paz, Sucre, Cochabamba, Jamaica, Tangier, Fez, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and the Rock of Gibraltar.

Chua's husband is not Chinese, in either sense of the word. He makes occasional appearances in the book to try—ineffectually, it seems—to shield the girls. Chua has said that she wrote more about their arguments, but her husband didn't like those passages, so they've been cut. Perhaps had more of his voice been included it would have provided some grit and at least the semblance of engagement. As it is, though, it's just her. "I'm happy to be the one hated," she tells her husband at one point, and apparently she means it.

Parenting is hard. As anyone who has gone through the process and had enough leisure (and still functioning brain cells) to reflect on it knows, a lot of it is a crapshoot. Things go wrong that you have no control over, and, on occasion, things also go right, and you have no control over those, either. The experience is scary and exhilarating and often humiliating, not because you're disappointed in your kids, necessarily, but because you're disappointed in yourself.

Some things do go wrong in Chua's memoir. Her mother-in-law dies; her younger sister develops leukemia. These events get roughly the same amount of space as Coco and Pushkin, and yet they are, on their own terms, moving. More central to the story line is a screaming fit in a Moscow restaurant during which a glass is thrown. The upshot of the crisis is that Lulu is allowed to take up tennis, which Chua then proceeds to micromanage.

Chua clearly wants to end her book by claiming that she has changed. She knows enough about the conventions of memoir-writing to understand that some kind of transformation is generally required. But she can't bring herself to do it. And so in the final pages she invokes the Founding Fathers. They, too, she tells her daughters, would not have approved of sleepovers. ♦

 

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The Sporting SceneDoes Football Have a Future?The N.F.L. and the concussion crisis.by Ben McGrath
January 31, 2011 .The violence of football has always been a matter of concern and the sport has seen periodic attempts at safety and reform. But recent neurological findings have uncovered risks that are more insidious.
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National Football League (N.F.L.);Concussions;Craig Heyward (Ironhead);Pittsburgh Steelers;Alan Schwarz;Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (C.T.E.);SportsI still remember my first football game. It was 1983. I was six. My father took me to our local high school, in northern New Jersey, and we sat on the home team's side, but it wasn't long before my allegiance began to waver. The opponents, from a town called Passaic, were clearly superior—or, rather, they had a superior player whose simple talents were easy to identify in a game so complex and jumbled-seeming that even lifelong fans do not fully understand it. He wasn't the biggest person on the field, and probably not the fastest, but he was strangely fast for a big person and unusually big for a fast person. He played both sides of the ball: running back and linebacker. He was also the kicker, and he returned punts. In my memory, he scored a touchdown, kicked a field goal, and sacked the quarterback for a safety. 12–0. As my father and I searched for his name in the program, a man seated a couple of rows in front of us spun around and said, "They call him Ironhead." I was smitten.

Ironhead, whose given name was Craig Heyward, went on to become a star at the University of Pittsburgh and then a pro with several N.F.L. teams, although he was probably more famous for his nickname and for his physique than for his accomplishments on the field. He was strictly a running back after high school, but he looked more like a lineman: a "bread truck with feet," as one writer called him. Heyward did not run sweeps. He ran up the middle: into, through, and over, but seldom around, defenders. His style of play embodied Newton's second law of motion: force equal to mass times acceleration. I think of him every time I see the Old Spice commercial in which the Baltimore Ravens star Ray Lewis emerges from the shower naked except for a suit of fake soapsuds, because Ironhead, as a spokesman for Zest body wash, in the mid-nineties, was a pioneer of the genre. He was that crucial thing in the marketing of football: a cuddly warrior. It's easier to marvel at the gladiatorial nature of the game when the participants appear to be laughing about something as trivial as personal hygiene.

"He would lower his head into opponents' stomachs, and one opponent said it hurt so much that Heyward's head had to be made of iron": that explanation for the name that made him my favorite player appeared in Heyward's obituary in the Times, in 2006. The anecdote referred to his habit while playing "street football," without a helmet, as a "wayward" boy in Passaic. He was only thirty-nine when he died, from a brain tumor. Even the hardest of heads is vulnerable to disease. I've never read or heard any suggestions that the cancer was related to Heyward's football career, but when the executives at the N.F.L.'s headquarters, in Manhattan, talk about "changing the culture" of the sport, as they have been doing with increasing urgency in the past few months, in response to growing public concern over concussions, the use of the head as a battering ram, with or without a helmet, is near the top of the list of things they'd like to disown.

from the issuecartoon banke-mail this.I thought of Ironhead last month as well, while standing in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel, where a special meeting of the league's Head, Neck, and Spine Injury committee was convening in one of the function rooms. Bert Straus, an industrial designer with a background in bathroom fixtures, dental-office equipment, and light-rail vehicles, was showing off a prototype of a new helmet called the Gladiator, whose primary selling point is that it has a soft exterior. A colleague of Straus's handed me a pamphlet titled "Collision Physics for Football Helmets." This stuff goes way beyond Newton: elastic versus inelastic collisions, "Complex Modulus = f (Rate of deflection, Young's modulus, % compression)." I picked up the helmet. It felt awfully heavy. It also didn't feel very soft. The Gladiator is made of reaction-molded polyurethane, like the bumper on your car. Truly soft shells run the risk of causing friction, which is bad for the neck.

Colonel Geoffrey Ling, a neurologist with the Defense Department, had come to the InterContinental to share some of the government's research with the N.F.L.'s medical brain trust. (Concussions among the men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, one doctor told me, could be "the next Agent Orange.") "If you look historically, what really hurts our soldiers from blasts is artillery shells, mortar shells," Ling said. "The combat helmet was designed particularly for mitigation of fragments. It does have some ballistic protection. You could shoot at the thing point blank with a 9-millimetre pistol, and you won't penetrate it. That's pretty doggone good. I'm surprised New York City policemen aren't wearing the doggone thing. But, like, I wouldn't play football with the thing. It ain't that good."

Was Ironhead a role model for a sport with no future?

We've been here before, historians remind us, and we have the pictures to prove it: late-nineteenth-century newspaper and magazine illustrations with captions like "The Modern Gladiators" and "Out of the Game." The latter of those, which appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1891, describes a hauntingly familiar scene, with a player kneeling by his downed—and unconscious—comrade, and waving for help, as a medic comes running, water bucket in hand. It accompanied an essay by the Yale coach Walter Camp, the so-called Father of American Football, whose preference for order over chaos led to the primary differentiating element between the new sport and its parent, English rugby: a line of scrimmage, with discrete plays, or downs, instead of scrums.

Camp viewed football as an upper-class training ground, not as a middle-class spectator sport. But the prevalence of skull fractures soon prompted unflattering comparisons with boxing and bullfighting. Another image, which ran in the New York World, depicted a skeleton wearing a banner labelled "Death," and was titled "The Twelfth Player in Every Football Game." Campaigns in Chicago and Georgia to outlaw the sport were covered breathlessly in the New York dailies. That was in 1897, "the peak of sensationalized football violence," as Michael Oriard, a former offensive lineman for the Kansas City Chiefs who is now an associate dean at Oregon State University, explains in "Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle."

The crisis surrounding football's brutality at the turn of the twentieth century was so great that it eventually inspired Presidential intervention. Greg Aiello, the N.F.L.'s present-day spokesman, told me, "You should research Teddy Roosevelt's involvement in changing the game in 1905." Roosevelt, whose son was then a freshman football player at Harvard, summoned college coaches to the White House to discuss reforming the sport before public opinion turned too far against it. Eighteen people had died on the field that year. The idea, or hope, was to preserve the game's essential character-building physicality ("I've got no sympathy whatever with the overwrought sentimentality that would keep a young man in cotton-wool," Roosevelt wrote) without filling up the morgue. The next year, the forward pass was legalized, thereby transforming football from a militarized or corporatized rugby to something more like "contact ballet," as Oriard calls it.

Aiello's point was that the game goes on; you reform it as needed. Dave Pear, a retired Tampa Bay Buccaneer, brought up the same example with the opposite lesson in mind. "Look at the historicity of football and Heisman," he said, referring to John Heisman, who was among the leading advocates of the forward pass in 1906. "Football almost ended in the early nineteen-hundreds." Pear's view is that the game always has been "hazardous to your health, like smoking cigarettes," and that trying to remove violence from football, as the N.F.L. now seems bent on doing, is like trying to remove the trees from a forest. "Now it's not an instant death," he said. "Now it's a slow death." You could say that Dave Pear holds a grudge: he has a minuscule pension, is uninsurable, and estimates that he has spent six hundred thousand dollars on surgeries and other medical issues (fused disks, artificial hip, vertigo) related to his football career. "I'm not trying to end football," he said. "It's not that I don't like football." But: "I wish I had never played."

Introducing the forward pass may have saved the sport from marginalization, or even banishment, but it did not resolve the inherent tension in our secular religion. With increased professionalization, in the middle decades of the last century, came specialization within the sport, and the demise of players who covered both offense and defense. And with specialization came increased speed and intensity, owing, in part, to reduced fatigue among the players, as well as skill sets and body types suited to particular facets of the game. "Savagery on Sunday" was the headline on a Life story in 1955. Walter Cronkite produced a half-hour special, "The Violent World of Sam Huff," about a New York Giants linebacker who had declared, "We try to hurt everybody."

The increased attention—football was on its way to surpassing baseball as the nation's favorite spectator sport—brought more reforms, many of them related to equipment: chinstraps, the rubber bar, full-on face masks. "Even as the discussion of the game's violence was at its shrillest, the sport was becoming safer," Michael MacCambridge writes in "America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation." But, even as the game was becoming safer, through better equipment and further tweaking of the rules (calling a play dead as soon as a knee touched down, say, to limit bone-crunching pileups), it was evolving in such a way that it also became more dangerous, as players, comfortably protected by their face masks, learned to tackle with their heads instead of with their arms and shoulders. When Michael Oriard played for the Chiefs, in the early nineteen-seventies, he weighed two hundred and forty pounds; his counterpart on today's Chiefs roster weighs about three hundred and ten, and is probably no slower. Players didn't obsessively lift weights in Oriard's day.

From all these developments, we got smash-mouth football and, later, the spectacularly combustive open-field collisions that seem to leave players in a state of epileptic seizure nearly every weekend now. "We had a lot of discussions right after I became commissioner about this subject," Paul Tagliabue, who served as the N.F.L.'s chief executive from 1989 until 2006, told me recently. "And one by-product of that was the question of whether defensive players were acquiring a sense of invulnerability, and playing the game with a level of abandon and recklessness that was not warranted. We created a committee with Mel Blount and Willie Lanier and some others. They raised the idea that it was no longer tackle football. It was becoming collision football. The players looked like bionic men. Whatever was the violence of Sam Huff, I don't think he felt invulnerable, like a bionic man."

Throughout most of the Super Bowl era, football was understood to be an orthopedic, an arthroscopic, and, eventually, an arthritic risk. This was especially obvious as the first generation of Super Bowl heroes retired and began showing up at reunions and Hall of Fame induction ceremonies walking like "Maryland crabs," as a players'-union representative once put it. But a couple of incidents early in Tagliabue's tenure left him with a sense of foreboding. "In 1991, my second season, Mike Utley went down," he said, alluding to the paralysis of a Detroit Lions offensive lineman. "A year later, Dennis Byrd went down. Once you see two injuries like Mike Utley's and Dennis Byrd's, you begin to see that there are long-term consequences to injuries on the football field." He meant long-term consequences of a sort that you can't joke about, while patting your fake knee or hip and complaining that you can no longer navigate stairs or play with your grandkids. Byrd, who was a defensive lineman for the Jets, gradually taught himself to walk again, after being given a prognosis of partial paralysis, and delivered a rousing pep talk to the Jets before their upset victory over the Patriots in the conference semifinals, earlier this month. Utley's moral is a grimmer one. As he was being carried off the field on a stretcher, he didn't yet know that he was paralyzed from the chest down. He stuck his thumb up, and the fans applauded.

What was missing from this picture was the effect of all that impact on the brain. You got your "bell rung," they used to say. You're "just a little dinged up." This was not merely macho sideline-speak; it was, as recently as a decade and a half ago, the language of the N.F.L.'s leading doctors. Elliot Pellman, who served until 2007 as the Jets team physician, once told a reporter that veteran players are able to "unscramble their brains a little faster" than rookies are, "maybe because they're not afraid after being dinged."

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., is the name for a condition that is believed to result from major collisions—or from the accumulation of subconcussions that are nowhere near as noticeable, including those incurred in practice. It was first diagnosed, in 2002, in the brain of the Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, who died of a heart attack after living out of his truck for a time. It was next diagnosed in one of Webster's old teammates on the Steelers' offensive line, Terry Long, who killed himself by drinking antifreeze. Long overlapped, at the end of his career, with Justin Strzelczyk, who was also found to have C.T.E. after he crashed, fatally, into a tanker truck, while driving the wrong way down the New York Thruway.

Credit for the public's increased awareness of these issues must go to the Times, and to its reporter Alan Schwarz, whom Dr. Joseph Maroon, the Steelers' neurosurgeon and a longtime medical adviser to the league, calls "the Socratic gadfly in this whole mix." Schwarz was a career baseball writer, with a heavy interest in statistics, when, in December of 2006, he got a call from a friend of a friend named Chris Nowinski, a Harvard football player turned pro wrestler turned concussion activist. Andre Waters, the former Philadelphia Eagles safety, had just committed suicide, and Nowinski was in possession of his mottled brain. The earliest cases of C.T.E. had been medical news, not national news. Nowinski's journalist contacts, as he recalls, were in "pro-wrestling media, not legitimate media." He needed help.

Schwarz, acting more as a middleman than as a journalist pitching a hot story, set up a meeting between Nowinski and the Times' sports editor, Tom Jolly, for whom Schwarz had been writing Sunday columns about statistical analysis on a freelance basis. Rather than assign the story to one of his staffers, Jolly suggested that Schwarz write it. The result, "Expert Ties Ex-Player's Suicide to Brain Damage from Football," wound up on the front page, on January 18, 2007. It described Waters's forty-four-year-old brain tissue as resembling that of an eighty-five-year-old man with Alzheimer's, and cited the work and opinions of several doctors whose research into the cumulative effect of head trauma was distinctly at odds with that of the N.F.L.'s own Mild and Traumatic Brain Injury committee (M.T.B.I.), which had been created by Tagliabue. "Don't send them back out on these fields," Waters's niece told Schwarz, referring to young would-be football players.

Ted Johnson, a recently retired New England Patriots linebacker, read the Waters piece and called Schwarz. He was thirty-four- years old and had been locking himself in his apartment with the blinds drawn for days at a time. He believed that his problems had started in 2002, when, he said, his coach, the sainted Bill Belichick, ignored a trainer's recommendation that Johnson practice without contact while recovering from a concussion. Schwarz accompanied Johnson to a meeting with his neurologist, Dr. Robert Cantu, who said, "Ted already shows the mild cognitive impairment that is characteristic of early Alzheimer's disease." Two weeks after the Waters piece, Schwarz landed another freelance submission on A1: "Dark Days Follow Hard-Hitting Career in N.F.L."

Schwarz's phone kept ringing. Several of the callers were the mothers and wives of football's damaged men. They represented a readership far less likely to have come across, say, the annual men's-magazine features about mangled knees, wayward fingers, and back braces, which had hardened almost into a sportswriting trope. In March, Schwarz published another front-pager: "Wives United by Husbands' Post-N.F.L. Trauma." Glenn Kramon, an assistant managing editor at the Times who oversees long-term, Pulitzer-worthy projects, read this piece and decided to intervene. Schwarz was given a full-time position, with no responsibilities other than to broaden his new beat's focus beyond the N.F.L. to the more than four million amateur athletes who play organized football. Although Schwarz was assigned to the sports desk, the Times framed the story as a matter of public health, akin to tobacco, asbestos, and automobile safety. Schwarz covered high schools, helmets, workmen's comp, coaching, and so on, earning the nickname Alan Brockovich among friends. "You can imagine how many lawyers I hear from," he once told me.

Schwarz's expansive focus, as he reiterated it, one piece at a time, threatened to affect the so-called pipeline, the future sons of football, whose non-sports-fan mothers were reading his accounts. The reaction of the football establishment, both at the league office and at stadiums around the country, was not warm. "I remember hearing voices within the game, at the club level: 'We don't need this muckraking reporter doing this,' " Michael MacCambridge told me.

"Their initial reaction was 'This guy's out to get football,' " Gregg Easterbrook, the author of ESPN's popular "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" column, said. "I felt a little of that myself."

Schwarz may not have been out to get football, but he was clearly less emotionally invested in it than most of his predecessors and peers, who had helped build the sport into the de-facto national pastime with romantic coverage of heroic sacrifice. He was not a fan. "I'd been pitching this to reporters for years," Nowinski told me, of the head-injury problem in general. "People in football told me, point blank, 'I don't want to lose my access.' It literally took a baseball writer who did not care about losing his access, and didn't want the access, to football."

Schwarz's math background came in handy, too, as he batted away the statistical objections about the unknown incidence of C.T.E. from skeptical doctors. And Schwarz had the backing of a news organization that did not see itself as having any symbiotic ties to the game's economic engine. (ESPN, which drives the national conversation on sports, invests more than a billion dollars a year in football broadcasting.) "There's certainly been a lot of tension between Alan and the N.F.L., and the N.F.L. and our editors," Jolly said. "Their communications people made it clear that they were not happy with the reporting. Some of their folks were pretty brusque and not particularly eager to work with Alan."

What we now know, from reading Schwarz, is that retired N.F.L. players are five to nineteen times as likely as the general population to have received a dementia-related diagnosis; that the helmet-manufacturing industry is overseen by a volunteer consortium funded largely by helmet manufacturers; and that Lou Gehrig may not actually have had the disease that bears his name but suffered from concussion-related trauma instead. (Since 1960, fourteen N.F.L. players have had a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is about twelve more than you would expect from a random population sample.) In the manner of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Dr. Maroon has delineated four stages in the N.F.L.'s reaction to the reality of brain damage: active resistance and passive resistance, shifting to passive acceptance and, finally, in the past few months, active acceptance. "What we're seeing now is that major cultural shift, and I think Alan took a lot of barbs, and a lot of hits, initially, for his observations," Maroon said.

When I ran into Schwarz in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel, last month, he mentioned that his story tally on the beat was at "a hundred and twenty-one and counting." We were both there for the meeting of the N.F.L.'s Head, Neck, and Spine Injury committee, a newly rebranded version of the M.T.B.I. group, which had come in for so much Schwarz criticism from the beginning. Several of the old doctors, including the Jets' Elliot Pellman, were gone. Some of the new committee members were longtime sources of Schwarz's.

The meeting was closed to the press. Although Schwarz told me he'd heard from various participants that they were advised not to speak with him, he'd been getting live updates on his cell phone from sources inside the room. The gadfly was enjoying his moment. During a midday break in the proceedings, five doctors, including Robert Cantu, Ted Johnson's neurologist, emerged to take questions. About two dozen journalists had showed up. By my count, twelve questions were asked, eight of them by Schwarz.

"They may never give Alan himself credit, but he's done the work of angels," Easterbrook said.

"There's no question that HD television is remarkable," Art Rooney II, the president of the Pittsburgh Steelers, said, the week before Thanksgiving. "But it also, at times, may give us a view of something that we didn't always have before, and in some cases it may be shocking to people, I guess." Rooney was sitting in his office at the team's practice facility, on the south side of the Monongahela River, and reflecting on the state of pro football, a Rooney family business since 1933. His Steelers, who are among the most successful and beloved franchises in all of professional sports, had recently drawn better ratings for a midseason Sunday-night matchup against the New Orleans Saints than had Game Four of the World Series. They had also become a focal point in football's culture war. "I mean, we had the one weekend where we had three or four hits that some may have overreacted to," Rooney went on. "But in general, from what I've been able to observe, it's been a robust debate."

On the weekend in question, which one writer called Black and Blue Sunday, and which fell in the middle of October, at least eleven N.F.L. players were concussed, about one or two more than average. A few of the hits were cringe-worthy—helmet-knockers that lent themselves especially well to modern replay technology, where the elasticity of the human neck is on full display. What's more, they followed on the heels of a tragic accident that was still fresh in the news from the day before, involving a Rutgers student who was paralyzed while defending a kick return at New Meadowlands Stadium, the home of the Giants and the Jets. If the reaction of the league—levying a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in fines on three hard hitters and threatening suspensions for future infractions—could be considered excessive, then so, certainly, were the inevitable gripes that followed, about putting pink skirts on the players. October is a month in which the N.F.L. has taken to courting female fans by celebrating breast-cancer awareness. A number of players, victims and offenders alike, were already wearing pink accessories (gloves, cleats, chinstraps) in honor of the cause.

A couple of the concussive hits that Rooney referred to had been delivered by the Steelers' linebacker James Harrison, a onetime Defensive Player of the Year, who made the mistake, in the locker room afterward, of being honest about his understanding of football, which was, after all, the same as Sam Huff's: "I try to hurt people." Successfully hurting people hadn't earned him any penalty flags in this particular game, and a photograph of him flattening one of his victims was briefly available as a souvenir for sale through the N.F.L.'s Web site, the next day. But he was villainized in the national press, and fined seventy-five thousand dollars, anyway, and it left him at a loss. "What we saw Sunday was disturbing," Ray Anderson, the N.F.L.'s executive vice-president of football operations, said. "We're talking about avoiding life-altering impacts." The rules remained the same; the league just seemed to want them enforced differently, and with an eye toward outcome and appearance as much as technique. Harrison took a day off and contemplated retirement ("James is very concerned about how to play football," his agent said), while his teammates rallied around him and joked about how they might have to start tweeting opponents before tackling them, as a precautionary measure. If there were to be no more "devastating hits," as Anderson had indicated, and if "defenseless" receivers were to be somehow protected by their opponents, then was this really football?

"I understand our players when they say they're not sure what they can do at this point," Rooney said, cautiously. "We are asking a lot of our defensive players, in terms of watching where they hit somebody, when everything's happening so fast out there. What we're asking them to do is not easy. That's in addition to the fact that we're also asking them to do something different from what they've been trained to do over the years."

Two generations ago, the Rooney men were boxers. They are now lawyers and diplomats, the civic paragons of Pittsburgh, and also of the N.F.L. They epitomize what family-run businesses can mean to a place, because of the implied trust and moral responsibility involved. The so-called Rooney rule, under which N.F.L. teams are required to interview at least one minority candidate for all head coaching and G.M. jobs, is named after Art's father, Dan, the team's chairman emeritus and also our Ambassador to Ireland. (His public endorsement of Barack Obama, during the most recent Presidential campaign, was a major event in coal country.) Here was a man who is revered by progressive, charitably minded people, not your typical asbestos-plant manager. The Steelers had been the first team to keep a neurosurgeon with them on the sidelines, and the first to introduce any kind of objective measurement of cognitive function. It wasn't enough, and the norms of polite society were shifting underneath Rooney.

In the month following Black and Blue Sunday, the Steelers found it more useful to view themselves as victims of a different kind of culture war, between the suits on Park Avenue and the grunts in Pittsburgh. Their coach, Mike Tomlin, had objected to efforts by the league to demonstrate that Harrison was changing his behavior to comply with the new mandate. The previous week, against New England, the Steelers' captain, Hines Ward, had left the game with what the team at first described as a neck injury, which would allow reëntry at the player's discretion, instead of a concussion, which, as of last year, forbids it. But a concussion it was. "It's my body," Ward complained afterward. "I feel like if I want to go back out there I should have the right."

"Hines would go back in the game with a broken leg, so that's just the kind of player he is," Rooney said. "I do think that there's been a connection between our team and our region, let's say, that is based on a blue-collar-work-ethic-type approach to life, and certainly people that grew up working in the mill were tough people that had to work hard and had to work tough jobs. And so I think the reason football became so popular here in western Pennsylvania was because of that—because the area was populated by people who were accustomed to and appreciated hard work and tough work, and wanted their football team to reflect that." He mentioned that Harrison, a man who earns several million dollars a year for his toughness, had been receiving unsolicited donations from Steelers fans to help pay his fines. "So I think our fans want to see our players continue to play football the way they understand football should be played," he said.

The robust debate over how football should be played is further complicated by a contentious labor situation that threatens to result in the cancellation of the 2011 season. The league and the owners would prefer an eighteen-game schedule. The players, naturally, have tried to characterize this as hypocrisy: if the game has become disturbingly dangerous, why play more? They doubt that anyone has ever really had their long-term interests in mind, and maintain a deeply felt sense that fans and owners can't begin to appreciate how hard football is, and how tenuous the line is between fearlessness and vulnerability.

"I don't think there's enough of them up there that have actually played the game," James Harrison said, of the league executives in Manhattan, when I visited the Pittsburgh locker room after a big win against the Oakland Raiders, late in the season. "You got Merton Hanks that, you know, played the game so many years ago. I mean no disrespect, but the game's a lot faster than it was when he played. When we're right there, and it's bang-bang, you don't have time to adjust." Hanks, who is the N.F.L.'s director of game operations, was an All-Pro safety for the San Francisco 49ers. He retired in 1999, which hardly seems like that many years ago, but twelve years is four times the average length of a professional football career.

Up in the press box, I'd noticed a casual disdain for the initial efforts to sanitize the game as the referees tossed yellow flag after yellow flag. "Apparently, you can't tackle the quarterback now," one writer mused, after one of Harrison's fellow-linebackers was called for roughing the passer. "Unbelievable!" another said, after a personal foul on Harrison—who had landed with the full force of his body weight on the QB—negated a Steelers interception. The Steelers had wound up with more penalty yards in this game than in any previous game, and the writers saw this as an opportunity to highlight the differences between the league and the team.

When I brought up the call for change with the Steelers' Troy Polamalu, an All-Pro safety who plays with brilliant abandon, and mentioned that the sport's popularity seemed to be unflagging, he cut me off. "Is that your opinion? That it doesn't need to be changed?" He later added, "This game's on the verge of getting out of hand," and defended the refs, who, he said, were "just trying to protect it." This from a guy who, a few weeks earlier, had complained that there was "a paranoia that is unneeded," and that if people wanted to watch soccer they could and would.

"In the past, it was a style of ball that was three yards and a cloud of dust, so you didn't see too many of these big hits, because there wasn't so much space between players," Polamalu said. "I mean, with the passing game now, you get four-wide-receiver sets, sometimes five-wide-receiver sets. You get guys coming across the middle, you get zone coverages. You know, there's more space between these big hits, so there's more opportunity for these big hits." The Times, in 1906, celebrated the dawn of the forward-passing era as an opportunity to "open up the game," and to showcase speed and skill instead of mere brute strength. Bill Walsh, the late 49ers coach, and the man most often credited with popularizing the passing-dominated approach to offense that Polamalu was describing, was committed to changing the sport's militaristic culture. "Too many high-school coaches, in his opinion, were veterans who viewed football like preparing for combat," Paul Tagliabue recalled.

Troy Polamalu is about as dynamic an athlete as I have ever seen, and as soft-spoken in person as anyone I have ever met. He is football's Dalai Lama. He has had at least seven concussions. "Honestly, it hurts both players, you know, and, whenever you see those big hits, it's not just offensive guys lying on the ground," he said. The statistics bear this out: defensive backs were the most extensively concussed group of players on the field this N.F.L. season, followed by wide receivers. Contact ballet can kill.

The fastest running on a football field often occurs during kickoffs and punts, when some members of the defending team are able to build up forty or more yards of head-on steam before a possible point of impact. (The forty-yard dash, the standard measurement for judging the speed of potential draft picks, is so named because it was thought to be the distance a player would have to sprint to catch up with a punt.) One proposed reform that I've heard about would involve removing this element from the game, through automatic fair catches, or at least neutering it, by shortening the distance travelled by the kicking team. The most frequent head-butting on a football field, meanwhile, occurs at the line of scrimmage, where linemen often begin in what's known as a three-point stance: crouching and leaning forward on one hand, and then exploding upward in a meeting of crowns. Another suggestion: banning the stance and requiring linemen to squat, sumo style. And then, more important, there's simply teaching proper tackling technique. As one recently retired player put it to me, "Instead of telling a kid to knock the snot out, you say, 'Knock the wind out of him.' "

"The reality is you're going to need about twenty fixes that reduce risk by a couple of percentage points each," Chris Nowinski said. "There's still going to be four downs. Still going to be a football. Still going to be eleven guys on the field—and touchdowns. Other than that, everything's in play."

Technology, naturally, is another big component of the discussion. The agenda for the Head, Neck, and Spine meeting was dauntingly ambitious and impressive, with presentations on subjects like "Finite element modelling in determining concussion thresholds" and "On-field testing of impact biomechanics." Telemetric feedback from accelerometers may soon give trainers on the sidelines a more objective, real-time perspective on the abuse that each player is suffering, which could prove valuable in quickly diagnosing concussions. Yet, in the absence of a concussion-proof helmet, which is not looming, and will likely never arrive, there is perhaps as much to be gained from using technology to help address the necessary abstraction that allows fans to view their football heroes as characters rather than as people with families. (Ironhead Heyward led a troubled life off the field, with alcohol-abuse issues and sporadic run-ins with the police; the news accounts somehow only made me more fascinated.) Markus Koch, a defensive lineman for the Washington Redskins in the nineteen-eighties, asked me whether it might not be more valuable to communicate real-time information about the physicality of the game to the people at home on their sofas, happily consuming Budweiser and buffalo wings. "So maybe you'd have a mouth guard that registers the impact they're getting on the field, and at certain g-forces the helmet shell would crack and explode and leak gray matter and blood," Koch said, only half kidding. "Or what about a whole pneumatic suit that a fan could step into, and that would be telemetrically linked to a player on the field, at seventy per cent or fifty per cent—you could adjust the dial to your liking—and actually have the fan experience what the player is going through?" Koch broke his lumbar vertebrae in his third season, and, because he was otherwise in such good shape, continued to play for three more years. He now suffers from depression, and is sometimes unable to get out of bed for extended periods. His legs go numb if he stands for too long.

Two weeks after Black and Blue Sunday, on October 28th, an honor student in Spring Hill, Kansas, returned to the sidelines after making an interception at his high school's homecoming game and told his coach that his head was hurting. Soon afterward, he fell to the ground, suffered a subdural hematoma, and died. The next week, Jim McMahon, the ex-quarterback, confessed at a twenty-fifth reunion of the 1985 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears that his memory is "pretty much gone," and that he often walks into a room without knowing why. "It's unfortunate what the game does to you," he said. I was reading about McMahon during a commercial break in the "Monday Night Football" game between the Steelers and the Cincinnati Bengals—a commercial break that included a surprising Toyota promotion involving football. It began with a woman discussing her worries, as a mother, about her son playing the sport: "Which is why I'm really excited, because Toyota developed this software that can simulate head injuries in an accident. . . . So, you know, I can feel a bit better about my son playing football."

A few days later, a Cleveland Browns linebacker collapsed at his locker-room stall, after practice, in the presence of reporters, and was taken to the hospital. Shortly after that, two high-school players died on the same day—one on the field, in Massachusetts, of a heart stoppage, and the other, in North Carolina, by suicide, five weeks after suffering a season-ending concussion. The same week, two Division I college players announced their retirement, out of concerns relating to concussions, and team doctors at the University of Utah "medically disqualified" a sophomore from continuing his career.

This kind of anecdotal momentum is inherently distorting, of course. Jim McMahon added that he has no regrets, and that football "beats the hell out of a regular job." (The fallen Brown later attributed his condition to anxiety over the impending birth of his son.) But I didn't exactly have to go digging for it. "Now, with the Internet, we're all talking to each other, and this is the league's worst nightmare," Dave Pear, the ex-Buccaneer, told me. Pear publishes a blog for "independent football veterans," where, in addition to railing against the N.F.L.'s treatment of retired players, he tracks the sport's latest gloomy news. I've also begun reading the Concussion Blog, which is written by a high-school athletic trainer in Illinois named Dustin Fink, who was moved to devote his life to the cause of player safety and awareness after suffering depression that he attributes to "many" concussions. From Fink's research, for instance, I know that the rate of reported concussions in the N.F.L. did not decline after the stern warnings in October; it increased. Some of this may be attributable to greater conscientiousness on the part of players and medical staffs, which is a good thing, but the "disturbing" hits, as the league's Ray Anderson called them, were just as prevalent, if not more so, as the season wore on. When I called Fink, he told me about a friend of his who plays in the N.F.L., a longtime taxi-squad member who had finally caught on as a starter. Earlier this season, the friend showed up in the concussion database that Fink compiles from news reports and other sources. "I texted him and asked how it happened," he said. "He texted back, 'I'm always concussed, they just caught me this week.' "

Fink was an offensive lineman in high school, but his own injury history clouds the picture somewhat. "I trace my first one back to fourth grade, in 1986," he said. "I hit my head on one of the basketball uprights while playing touch football in the recess yard." He got another one in a fight with a classmate, in eighth grade, and still another as a high-school sophomore, when he was struck by a batted baseball while standing on the pitcher's mound. "My most recent one was in 2006," he said. "While I was helping out at basketball practice, I fell back and hit my head pretty hard." His depression set in late in 2008. Only one of his concussions, as far as he knows, came from playing tackle football. So what do we blame, other than bad luck and a larger society that was slow to recognize the fragility of the human head?

In fact, reading the Concussion Blog exposes you to a steady drip of news that is not so good for your anterior insula, the part of the brain associated with worry. Rugby, lacrosse, baseball: concussions are seemingly epidemic everywhere. The problem with having access to better information about the risks we all take is that most leisure pursuits start to seem inherently irresponsible. What are we to do about skiing, bicycling, sledding?

"Hockey, by the way, has a higher incidence of concussions than football," Dr. Maroon told me. This is true of women's college hockey, at least, which doesn't even allow body-checking. (Women, in general, seem substantially more prone to concussions, and explanations vary, from weaker necks to a greater honesty in self-diagnosis.) And in December, 2009, Reggie Fleming, a New York Rangers defenseman in the nineteen-sixties who was known more for his fighting than for his scoring, became the first pro hockey player to be given a diagnosis of C.T.E. Hockey may now have a concussion crisis on its hands, with the N.H.L.'s best and most marketable player, Sidney Crosby, having been blindsided during the sport's annual Winter Classic; attempting to play again, four days later, he was drilled into the boards, and he hasn't played since. I play hockey twice a week myself, and was once concussed, or so I now believe, while skating outside, on a frozen pond, without a helmet.

Troy Polamalu suggested soccer as an alternative for squeamish fans. But soccer players collide sometimes, too (Taylor Twellman, a forward with the New England Revolution, recently retired because of ongoing symptoms from a neck injury sustained in 2008), and the ball is harder than you think. The g-forces involved in most headers are equivalent to minor car crashes. "Twenty-five years from now, I wouldn't be surprised to see everybody on a soccer field wearing some kind of headgear," Michael MacCambridge said.

Still, there is an element of protesting too much on the part of football defenders when it comes to citing the risk factors of other sports. Between 1982 and 2009, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Injury Research, two hundred and ninety-five fatalities directly or indirectly resulted from high-school football. From 1977 to 2009, at all levels, three hundred and seven cervical-cord injuries were recorded. And between 1984 and 2009 there were a hundred and thirty-three instances of brain damage—not slowly accruing damage, as in the case of C.T.E., but damage upon impact. The injury incidence is far lower in most sports. And in the case of similarly treacherous activities, like gymnastics and boxing, far fewer people participate.

Some of the most effective proposed reforms seem to involve limiting contact during practice, and forbidding children to tackle until adolescence or beyond. (Developing brains are vulnerable to "second-impact" syndrome.) "Seventy-five per cent of the hits are in practice," Nowinski said. "You could drop the exposure by fifty per cent without changing the game at all." You could, perhaps, but it does also make you wonder about a game whose preservation is couched largely in terms of reducing the frequency with which people really play it. The sport as it stands requires fifty men on a side just to be able to field a team once a week, for a competition that involves a mere ten or eleven minutes of live action; and the news cycle between games is dominated by questions surrounding which players are "probable," which "questionable," and which definitively out of commission.

"What happens if football players become like boxers, from lower economic classes with racially marginalized groups?" the ex-Chief Michael Oriard wondered. "If it gets to the point where it's rich white guys cheering on hits by black guys and a Samoan or two, Jesus, I hate to imagine we're indifferent to that."

And yet we are, for the most part, already indifferent to that. Two-thirds of N.F.L. players are African-American, and the white players do not typically come from New Canaan. The sport has long had a heavy underclass or, at least, working-class strain. "Football was something you tried to play to get out of the mill," Dan Rooney once said. The people most inclined to ask the question "Would you let your kid play football?" did not play football themselves growing up, because their parents were put off by the sport's brutish culture, regardless of any understanding of brain science. "Any parent who has let their child play football in the past fifty years and claimed never to have understood the risks involved was either kidding himself or an idiot," Buzz Bissinger, the author of "Friday Night Lights," wrote last week in the Daily Beast. Dustin Fink, on the other hand, told me that he would have no problem allowing his five-year-old boy to play, given the current level of medical awareness.

How many of the men on the field in the Super Bowl will be playing with incipient dementia? "To me, twenty per cent seems conservative," Nowinski said. C.T.E., as of now, can be observed only with an autopsy. The ability to detect it with brain scans of living people is at least a couple of years off. "It's not going to be five per cent," Nowinski went on. "The reality is we've already got three per cent of the brains of people who have died in the last two years confirmed, and that's not alarming enough to people. What number is going to be the tipping point? People are O.K. with three per cent. They may look sideways at ten per cent. Maybe it needs to be fifty per cent."

A race to collect cadaver brains is now under way, with Bennet Omalu, the original discoverer of C.T.E., leading one group, out of West Virginia University. Ann McKee, a co-director of Boston University's new Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, is a leader of the other group. The Boston University center, which is aligned with Nowinski's Sports Legacy Institute, received a million-dollar donation from the N.F.L. last spring, and Nowinski returned the favor by honoring the league's commissioner, Roger Goodell, with an "Impact" award last October, three days after Black and Blue Sunday. Omalu is from Biafra, and has no personal connection to football. He is often the more strident critic, and prone to making antagonistic remarks about his fellow-doctors for their slowness to accept his findings. McKee, on the other hand, is "a longtime football fan," as Malcolm Gladwell noted in these pages in 2009. Each group sees its relationship to the game as a plus: true independence, on the one hand, and a connection to the people who can make the biggest difference, on the other. Competition, in any case, is always good.

Like nearly everyone else I talked to, Nowinski, the former wrestler, made sure to absent himself from any moral determination about the game's future. "I used to go through tables for a living from the top ropes," he said. "I'm a firm believer that adults should be able to decide for themselves." Dustin Fink's Concussion Blog comes with a disclaimer—"IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS DO I BELIEVE THAT WE SHOULD OUTLAW OR 'WUSS DOWN' CONTACT SPORTS!!!"—that begs a question few people are really willing to ask. The campaign to ban boxing has been going on for decades—the Times endorsed the idea in 1967, and the American Medical Association lobbied for it in 1983—to no avail. Boxing has a bigger problem: it has slipped into cultural irrelevance.

As for football's fate, "I don't think it'll be driven by public opinion, but by lawyers and insurance companies," David Meggyesy, who played linebacker for the St. Louis Cardinals in the nineteen-sixties, told me. Meggyesy was put off by the sport's cultural overlap with American imperialism, as he saw it, and wrote a book, "Out of Their League," that served as football's "Ball Four": a startling exposé that reads, a generation later, as largely unsurprising. He wrote, "When society changes the way I hope it will, football will be obsolete." He also mentioned to me in an e-mail, not long ago, that he had reacted with "big pride" when his rugby-playing daughter confessed to him, "You know, Dad, I really love to hit." The tension is within us all. But with new medical evidence may come new legal risk and liability, and recalibrated insurance premiums, for schools as well as for individuals. "Football may go the way of gymnastics, where these private entities will come forward and have teams," Meggyesy said, envisioning a scenario in which the social pecking order at American high schools is not driven by quarterbacks and their doting cheerleaders.

"There's a potential lawsuit out there that's devastating," the Steelers Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw said on Fox's pregame show, the weekend after James Harrison threatened retirement. I know of two groups of lawyers preparing class-action suits, on behalf of recent players, against the N.F.L., with an eye toward filing in the first six months of this year. At issue is what the league knew and when, and, ultimately, what responsibility it has to its players, with a likely focus on the difference between two documents that were distributed in locker rooms as safety guidelines. The first, a pamphlet written in 2007, left open the question of whether "there are any long-term effects of concussion in N.F.L. athletes," while the second, a poster that was introduced before the start of this season, mentioned that "concussions and conditions resulting from repeated brain injury can change your life and your family's life forever." Trial lawyers, tort reform, the nanny state: this is no small part of football's future.

The N.F.L.'s idea of a "good football story," to judge from the Twitter feed of Greg Aiello, the league's spokesman, is one that calls attention to the uptick in passing touchdowns this year: more points, fewer hits. The league is nothing if not serious about its messaging. It was unhappy with the Toyota commercial that aired during "Monday Night Football," and urged the automaker to alter the spot. (Toyota complied, and excised a scene dramatizing a helmet-to-helmet collision.) Earlier this month, the league also issued warnings to several teams about midweek trash talking, of the "His days are numbered" variety.

Buzz Bissinger, who came away from his yearlong experience reporting "Friday Night Lights," in Odessa, Texas, in 1988, with a strong sense that the priorities of football culture were warped, declared in his Daily Beast column that he had since changed his mind. "It may be time for the Times to move on," he wrote. "Violence is not only embedded in football; it is the very celebration of it. It is why we like it. Take it away, continue efforts to curtail the savagery, and the game will be nothing, regardless of age or skill." Tiki Barber, the former Giants running back, and a man who boasted, in his playing days, of listening to the BBC, voiced a surprisingly similar sentiment when I spoke with him last fall. "They can't try to do more," he said. "They can't afford to change what it is: an aggressively fast, physically brutal game." He added that he believes he will die with traces of C.T.E. in his brain tissue; he now views C.T.E. as "a necessary side effect of contact activity. . . . It's scary."

I'm not so convinced that violence fully explains football's popularity as a spectator sport, or that the language of war that suffuses the game (blitz, bomb, sack) is meaningfully connected any longer to actual, rather than notional, bloodlust. The game is more narrative than any other. It unfolds at a pace that is at once slow enough for us to unpack (we spend more time watching replays than watching the live action) and fast enough, in bursts, to rattle our nerves. Go to YouTube and search for "Austin Collie 3rd Concussion." Look at the faces of the fans, many of them with their hands instinctively covering their mouths, as medics attend to the felled Indianapolis Colts wide receiver. Those aren't expressions of morbid curiosity. They reflect a guilty fear that, one of these days, millions of us are going to watch a man die on the turf.

To my mind, the most exciting moment in this football season was not a demonstrative QB sack or a bruising, Ironhead-like run, or even a perfectly executed Hail Mary, but a punt return. The recipient of the punt was the Eagles' DeSean Jackson, one of the most flagrant victims of Black and Blue Sunday, and the victim, a year earlier, of a concussion that sidelined him for a week. There were fourteen seconds left on the clock in a tie game against the Giants, in December. That the Eagles were still in the game at all was an almost miraculous testament to the acrobatic exploits of their quarterback, Michael Vick, who had led them forward from a twenty-one-point deficit with only eight minutes left in the game. (Vick's season-long redemption after going to jail for promoting dogfighting was the uplifting counterweight to Concussiongate.) The Giants meant to kick the ball out of bounds, but somehow didn't. Jackson bobbled the ball at his own thirty-five-yard line, and you winced with instinctual worry; he is, at a hundred and seventy-five pounds, one of the smallest men in the N.F.L. The Giants' gunners—so named because their job is, in essence, to impersonate speeding bullets—were closing in.

Instead of falling on the ball—the safer option—Jackson picked it up, and quickly retreated to the thirty before turning to face upfield again, with a fraction of a second's worth of room to accelerate away from trouble. The first defender dived at his feet and missed. Then Jackson cut right. Another dive. Another miss. He found a seam running diagonally toward the sideline. Suddenly, as he hit the fifty, the field opened up in front of him. Could this really be happening? The only question now involved the clock: would he reach the end zone before it expired, thereby requiring his own team to kick back the other way for an encore? Jackson raised the ball in the air and began to slow down. Finally, just to make sure, he made a sharp left in front of the goal line and began running parallel to it, indulging the stalling maneuver for long enough so that it could no more be thought shrewd. This was hubris, of the sort that ends up getting a small man hurt.

It's all there in the replay: the exuberant Jackson hurling the ball twenty rows deep into the stands; the angry Giants coach, Tom Coughlin, throwing his headset in disgust and tearing into his dumbfounded rookie punter; the blocked tacklers lying on the field like fallen soldiers. Setting aside regional partisanship, you don't root for the man carrying the ball to be tackled at moments like this. You stop breathing and root for the near-miss. Averted danger is the essence of football.

But what if he'd been clobbered? And what if some of those blocked tacklers whom we laugh at are hearing bells and are too ashamed to admit it? ♦

Mike Bloomberg Will Save Us from Ourselves If Only We Let Him
He's liberal. He's conservative. He's idealistic. He's pragmatic. He's egalitarian. He's the elite of the elite. He's not running for president. But he just might consider a hostile takeover.
By John H. Richardson
 
mike bloomberg

Edward Keating
Exactly four minutes after the appointed time, which is so on time it's actually a bit early, in a drab room in the diabetes center of a Brooklyn hospital, Mike Bloomberg steps to the podium. Just like that, the governor of New York takes a place at his elbow and a chorus line of city and state officials array themselves behind him. They're facing an audience of TV cameras and twenty reporters on folding chairs. "Good morning," Bloomberg begins, his voice crisp and direct. He thanks his hosts —

But stop. Let's focus on that voice for a moment: reasonable, plain, confident, firm, measured — the voice of authority stripped of all the obnoxious trappings of the voice of authority, no booming echo, no bombast, no deep sonorities intended to lull you back to childhood awe, a tone so deliberately flat it elevates the unadorned to the level of life philosophy. When Bloomberg cracks a joke, it's always dry and usually seems to be aimed at amusing himself. Sometimes there's a hint of impatience or disdain.

And what is he saying? Obesity rates, sadly, are especially high in low-income communities, and the latest studies show ...

When he was a young man, Bloomberg had a bullet-headed strength and cocky energy that translated as good looks. Now he's just shy of seventy and his public expression often borders on cigar-store Indian, his face a narrow expressionless wedge with high cheekbones and no upper lip at all. Is he aloof? Serene? Detached? Determined? It's hard to tell, which is a little unsettling, so it's tempting to trust his voice instead and take him for how he sounds:

Research shows that drinking just one sugar-sweetened beverage per day can increase a child's risk of obesity by 60 percent ...

He's talking about his latest push to improve the habits of New Yorkers, this time by making it illegal to buy sugary drinks with food stamps. If passed, this rule will join the rule about no smoking in restaurants and bars and the rule about requiring that homeless people have saving accounts if they want to stay in city shelters and the rule about — this is a man who spent half his autobiography listing his rules for conducting business and donating to charity with barely a page left over for his wife and children. He seems happiest when he runs through the data — more than 50 percent of adults are overweight, 40 percent of children, 6 percent of food stamps go to sugary drinks, $75 to $135 million is wasted, obesity-related illnesses cost $770 a year per New York household, poor adults get diabetes at twice the rate of the wealthy. There is strength in numbers, and he is strong. He's Bloomberg the man and also Bloomberg L.P., the limited-liability partnership that made him a billionaire. He will fix things if we let him. "Let's try it for a period of two years. We'll measure the results and see if it works."

Of course, the yapping dogs of the media try to nip him with their velvety gums. Doesn't he serve soda at Gracie Mansion?

"You didn't ask the right question," he says.

Is he bullying the poor?

"It's not unreasonable and it's not picking on anyone. The numbers are what they are."

The failure of his sugar tax?

"Did it fail on the merits? Come on, it's Albany."

The idea that even people on food stamps should be free to make their own decisions?

"Keep in mind what happened with smoking — everybody said everybody was gonna go to Nassau County to smoke? Wrong. Everybody from Nassau County came into New York City so they wouldn't have to breathe somebody else's smoke."

As Bloomberg often points out, life expectancy in New York City has increased 1.7 years since he took office. How many mayors increase life expectancy? It's obvious.

And the upside? As a previous mayor used to say, New York is where the future comes to audition. "If New York does it and it works, the rest of the world copies."

Bloomberg — a man who made his very name a part of the English language — is thinking big again. He's got a coalition with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell on building American infrastructure. He's got five hundred mayors in his gun-regulation coalition, Mayors Against Illegal Guns. He's got his new postpartisan group, No Labels, a coalition of national figures from both parties who preach the primacy of centrism. Plus there's the influence of his charitable spending, well over $100 million every year, and the increasing impact of an unusual series of political endorsements last year that included politicians as different as Meg Whitman and Harry Reid. Soon he's heading off to Hong Kong to take control of an international coalition of mayors that represents 13 percent of the world's people. He dreams of creating an alternative to the political system as we know it, a coalition of centrist politicians and businesspeople who are good managers and who are focused on the most important problems of our time — a coalition of the practical. In the words of Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark and a Bloomberg disciple: "He doesn't give a damn about party, because he's about progress."

Mike Bloomberg has become important because he represents a great American dream, not the one about owning a home or becoming more successful than your father but the one beneath all of those, the foundational American dream — the dream of freedom from politics. Freedom from the ugliness and corruption and compromise of democracy, with its raised voices and perpetual fights over who is more equal than the others. Bloomberg is the ultimate independent, the calm modern technocrat rooted in metrics and cleansed of ideology, come to drain the swamps of government with his amazing modern business-management techniques ... unless he's actually just an old-fashioned autocrat looking down on us from above and tinkering with our lives like a science experiment, stripping our noisy polis of all its native poetry. Unless the messiness we want to get rid of is actually our soul. We've never tried someone like him before — someone with his beneficence and his highly evolved notions for the rest of us and more money than most countries. Able to spend hundreds of millions out of his own pocket on a mere city office.

In other words, who defines practical?

Bring up the spotlight. The audition has begun.

 
mike bloomberg subway

Edward Keating
Bloomberg's up ahead, moving fast through a tangle of tunnels and flyways in central Hong Kong. Bodyguards and deputy mayors bunch around him like tackles around a quarterback. "You wanna move closer to him," someone warns. "When he starts to move, you either keep up or you get lost."

He doesn't slow down at all, or even look around to see if people are keeping up. Photographers run backward, clicking away.

The flyways connect all the downtown buildings at the second floor, creating one vast and luxurious mall. Tunnels open into shopping floors with stores like Chanel and Coach. As Bloomberg bustles past them, the CEO of the transit system feeds him data about the Hong Kong commuter trains. The transit authority retains the right to develop the land around the stations, he says, so they've been turning the stations into giant malls where trains arrive. The customers are delivered right to the mall near their office, and then that mall delivers them back to the mall near their home. "Of course," he says, "there is profit from the development, advertising, telecom services, and so on, and that pays for a third of the fare. So that actually creates an integrated business."

Bloomberg is in China to accept the chairmanship of C40, an international coalition of mayors who are trying to fight climate change. On the side, he's conducting a diplomatic mission that includes a meeting with the mayor of the industrial city of Shenzhen, tours of high-tech factories, and inspections of several train systems because Bloomberg is famous for riding the subway to work, and it fits with the climate-change theme of the trip. But this is almost too perfect — a climate-saving form of socialistic public transportation that is also a business. "So you have the ongoing rent from the stores?"

"That's right."

"Is it a competitive tender for that?"

"It is, yes. We own the land but we don't develop the property. We rely on the professionals."

"But the values are different, right? Some areas have a strong market already... ."

And they're off, the renowned global supercapitalist and the technocrat from the People's Republic of China, speaking the modern language of business and authority. The Chinese man can't help bragging about the mighty Chinese trains, which go up to 240 miles an hour. And their station malls have the power to turn an entire district from light industrial to commercial residential overnight.

Again Bloomberg pounces. "Do you have the authority to do that? Or did you have to work with the government in terms of changing the zoning?"

The guide smiles. "The government always takes the lead, okay? But we help plan."

Here in the modern China, where the government is in firm control but also mad for unleashing the power of business, everything seems extremely efficient. "The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority is just starting to look for recurring revenue," Bloomberg kvetches. "People complain about it, but then they complain when there isn't another train or when the rates go up."

The guide nods in sympathy. "Of course, the citizens all do complain."

This guy gets it. No nonsense, ready answers, cool but a little cocky — Bloomberg's kind of guy. "If you ever want a job," he says, "you can come to New York."

Bloomberg loves this — loves moving through the world taking in data and being decisive. This is a fundamental fact about him. And he loves being the man too, his style always superconfident but low-key, unruffled, almost deadpan — direct is the word people use most, often followed by sardonic, likable qualities that acquire a slightly more aggressive edge when you have $18 billion in the bank. Does it matter if Bloomberg meant a job at City Hall or a job at Bloomberg L.P.? The line has always been blurred, more so out in the big world where Bloomberg News is so ubiquitous, it's the first thing the Chinese mention when they meet him, followed by his famous terminals or his vast personal fortune. Then his lil' old job as mayor of New York City.

Plus he has that great American story: hardworking father and tough-minded mom, well-adjusted Eagle Scout, sociable, not particularly ambitious, off to college to study engineering and join a frat — then the early death of his father, followed by Harvard Business School, a swift rise through Wall Street, the invention of the Bloomberg terminal and the creation of a global brand.

The compound force of all this seems to dazzle the Chinese reporters, who regard him with awe and treat him like a celebrity. Everywhere he goes, they ask him, "Mr. Bloomberg, are you going to run for president?"

As Bloomberg likes to say, that's not the right question. Especially back home, where opinion polls show that he is currently esteemed at roughly the same level as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. But the polls at this point are meaningless, as are protestations about the possibility of one's candidacy. And in any case, Gingrich doesn't have billions of dollars to move his numbers.

He heads down another gleaming tunnel, this time to a train that has Wi-Fi and luxe padded seats, and arrives at a platform with the feel of an interstellar docking station and returns to the sour preoccupation the Chinese trains have aroused in him. "In America, the ultimate capitalist system, government is getting in the way of everything," he declares.

It's an astonishing moment, and a clarifying one — one of the most successful businessmen in the world, and certainly the most successful executive-cum-politician in American life, the leader of a city so important that its police force is bigger than the armies of most countries, expressing something close to envy for one of the most ruthlessly planned economies in the world, a system that still treats its people as disposable bits of an immense machine, where the government doesn't get "in the way of everything" because the government is everything. Can the American government really be that bad? Is the sheer power to do things your way that compelling? Is this where the nonpartisan dream goes to die?

"You may see something familiar here," the guide says.

Bloomberg looks up — high on the wall overlooking the passageway into this latest train-station mall, there's a giant Bloomberg screen. And it's playing a Bloomberg-financed TV show. "Charlie Rose! Bloomberg! Way to go!"

As they walk along, Bloomberg tells a favorite story about a Chinese immigrant in New York who works as a janitor and has a daughter at Harvard, a son at Yale, and another son at Swarthmore. Bloomberg asked the man, "How can you afford it?" The immigrant answered, "Oh Mayor Bloomberg, America's the most wonderful country in the world. My wife and I, we can each have two jobs."

Bloomberg loves the gospel of hard work, but in his case there's a machismo that's more Wall Street than John Calvin. "You've got to come in early, stay late, lunch at your desk, take projects home nights and weekends," he says in his autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg, by Michael Bloomberg. "While you're reading this, we're thinking about how our competitors are plotting to take the food from our children's mouths ... in life, unlike children's games, second place is first loser!"

He can't get over this mall, resplendent in its futuristic sheen. Back in New York, he tried to build grand projects like the West Side stadium on the west side of Manhattan, which would have cost $2 billion and been fit for the Olympics. That was to have been built around a train station, too. But the corrupt state pols up in Albany killed it. "Grand Central doesn't bring in nearly this much revenue," he says.

The guide expresses sympathy. "It is odd. The rents for the stores in this station are among the most expensive in Hong Kong."

Bloomberg grunts and delivers his ultimate judgment, which floats free of politics and history to the happy place where laws are absolute. "Listen, capitalism works. If they weren't making money, they wouldn't survive."

 
mike bloomberg ray kelly

Edward Keating
Back in New York, frankly, things aren't so great. He's in his third term, trying to recharge the batteries and bring in lots of new people. His bragging rights on education reform were hurt by news that test scores across the state had been systematically inflated, earning him a rare rebuke in The Wall Street Journal: "Mr. Bloomberg spent an additional $8.5 billion on education, but the scores of city students on the ... two national tests not susceptible to local manipulation ... remain flat." The fight to change the law on term limits also tainted him in many eyes. "He looked like an ordinary politician trying to hold on to his job," says Randy Mastro, a deputy mayor under Giuliani.

Lots of people are mad at him. "There's a we-never-make-mistakes attitude that makes it hard to fix problems," says Steve Banks of the Legal Aid Society. "I don't get the sense that he hears what I'm saying when I talk to him directly," says city comptroller John Liu. "I believe he's the least in touch with ordinary people of any mayor in modern history," says Joel Berg of the Coalition Against Hunger. Small-business advocate Richard Lipsky says Bloomberg's cigarette taxes are costing bodegas and delis $250 million a year. "He called it a minor economic issue — that shows the hauteur." In Brooklyn, councilwoman Letitia James is icy. "Ask my colleagues in Brownsville or East New York what he's done in their districts. Ask them when was the last time they saw the mayor out there, or has the mayor ever visited?"

All the news isn't bad. Crime is low, graduation rates are up, the city is bouncing back from the recession faster than the rest of the country. But it's a far cry from the glory days. When he came into office, a brand-new Republican pushed heavily by his friends on Wall Street and in the media, Bloomberg surprised everyone by raising taxes to protect city services — his very own stimulus program. He said that New York City was a "luxury product" and luxury required polish. "He made a case for the public sector," says Ester Fuchs, a left-leaning professor of public affairs at Columbia University. "Giuliani wanted to privatize hospitals. Bloomberg said, 'Every child in New York City deserves a public education, regardless of income and race.' "

Fuchs surprised her friends by going to work for him, joining an elite team of investment bankers and lawyers and other outsiders in a massive effort to reinvent city government. They took control of the city's schools, centralized leadership at City Hall, launched ambitious development projects and a creative array of pilot programs on education, infrastructure, and the environment — it was an exciting time.

Now even the number crunchers have become skeptical, a real blow to the plexus for the ultimate M.B.A. politician. "What he didn't do was get concessions out of labor unions," says Charles Brecher of the Citizens Budget Commission. A schoolteacher with twenty-two years' experience now makes $100,000, for example. The last numbers for the city budget showed a rise of almost twice the rate of inflation during the Bloomberg years, from $41.7 billion to $63.1 billion. Bloomberg's reaction is a complete pivot from his earlier stimulus approach to a troubled economy, a reversal a more ideological politician would have trouble defending. "Now we're in stage three," Brecher says. "He says he's not going to return to tax increases. He says he's going to cut. But we have yet to see how good a budget cutter he is."

 
mike bloomberg c40 china

Edward Keating
After the convoy comes to a stop, a Chinese border guard rips open the door and points a gun dead at the center of Bloomberg's forehead. Bloomberg doesn't even react, just keeps talking to a tall and bony man named J. Michael Evans, the chairman of the Asian division of Goldman Sachs. They're riding in a long silver Mercedes accompanied by four white vans, the sky is a gray drizzling mist, and the immigration building is a daunting fortress of gray communist cement, but it's warm and comfortable in the soft leather seats and he's having a good time chatting with Evans — they just ran down the list of people they have in common and it turns out they're both scheduled to go to the same birthday party back in New York. Small world!

The gun moves to another forehead, then another and another. It's some kind of laser thermometer. One second at each forehead tells your temperature. The Chinese are very worried about swine flu.

Twenty minutes later, the convoy passes a new building that looks like a giant bird's nest and enters the industrial city of Shenzhen, which has a gleaming downtown, lots of drab workers' buildings with laundry and rust stains, many factories and industrial parks with wide empty streets. Bloomberg is here to meet the local mayor, learn about the Chinese railroad system, and visit a couple of high-tech factories. He's brought along deputy mayor Patti Harris, a stylish woman in a black jacket with one horizontal stripe, plus a squad of bodyguards, a Chinese handler, an official photographer he calls Artzie, assorted drivers, a small group of local reporters, and New York City comptroller John Liu — who is, oddly, a rival and critic of Bloomberg's.

The first stop is a modern steel-and-glass building called Citizens' Center, their pointed translation of City Hall. Bowing ensues, plus shaking hands and the interesting Asian custom of presenting business cards with both hands, followed very rapidly — it starts before everyone is seated — by a high-speed presentation on their high-speed train system, the speaker's red laser flitting like a firefly across schematics.

Ten minutes later, the lights come on. "And thank you, Mayor Bloomberg, for listening. We know that you take the metro to go to work every day, and here we want to express our highest respect."

Never one for superficial bonhomie, Bloomberg answers in his usual dry tone. "Our trains don't run as fast as your trains, unfortunately."

With that, they bow him into the Hall of the Honored Guests, where he joins the mayor of Shenzhen and other dignitaries in a half circle of deep chairs decorated with giant white lace doilies and a portion of flowers large enough for a rich man's funeral. The symbolism of this moment is particularly rich, since Shenzhen is the place where Deng Xaioping decided that "to become rich is glorious" and launched the modern state capitalism of China. In thirty years this place has exploded from a fishing village to a city of about fourteen million people, one of the fastest-growing cities in the world.

"I bring you greetings from 8.4 million New Yorkers," Bloomberg begins, launching into a flowery speech about their wonderful hospitality. He makes a point to introduce John Liu, who hails from the heavily Chinese area of Flushing, Queens. (When I ask Liu why the mayor invited him, he answers, "I expect he had his purposes.") He pitches New York like he's from Madison Avenue, praising its diversity and cutting-edge technology and fashion and media and medicine, and he's not shy about strutting his personal mojo. "My company has a big office in Hong Kong, so I used to come a lot. Now I don't get a chance to travel as much."

This leads to an almost comical bout of mayoral one-upmanship — the mayor of Shenzhen says he'd love to show Bloomberg his amazing solar grid, and Bloomberg says he'd be delighted to offer him a ride on the New York City subway. Then it's time for the ritual of photos and gifts, posing in front of a giant painting of cherry blossoms and handing over one of those famous teal boxes from Tiffany's. Inside there's a life-size crystal apple, really a very heavy rock, a gift from the people of New York. "This is also useful if somebody in your office gets out of hand," Bloomberg jokes.

As he leaves the building, a Chinese reporter shouts out: "Mr. Bloomberg, will you run for president?"

Hang on a second. All these ceremonial visits and urgently efficient assistants rushing things along leave little room for ordinary human functions. So where's the freakin' bathroom?

One of the bodyguards points to a door, the kind of door that swings as you push through it, an ordinary brown high school door, and it swings and there's Bloomberg standing alone, staring at the white tiles on the wall.

This is unexpected. Usually, the bodyguards who protect politicians block off the bathroom when the boss is inside, protecting him from any uncomfortable encounters with cameras or tape recorders.

There's only one other stall.

No need to violate the man's privacy. On the other hand, an American bows before no man, not counting ceremonial occasions. He's not royalty.

Bloomberg doesn't care. He's a big skier and pilot, a manly man in his day, and he's comfortable in his body. As he left the last place, he says, he realized there wasn't going to be any easy way to stop in the middle of all the handshakes and go to the bathroom. So this was a relief.

He's been going since before 4:30 in the morning, when his plane landed after an eighteen-hour flight, and he seems as fresh as he did eight hours ago.

He zips up and heads for the door. "You just do what you have to do," he says. "You have eternity to rest after you die."

 
mike bloomberg thanksgiving

Edward Keating
As it turns out, his bodyguards have standing instructions not to keep people away from him, a rather vivid example of an unusually egalitarian approach to management that forbids titles, private offices, and executive parking spaces. "My rule of thumb with the security guys is anybody coming up and walking to me, I should be accessible," he tells me. "It's the job. You don't like to run the risks, don't take the job."

Put that together with his uncompromising speeches on unpopular subjects — the Ground Zero mosque, gay marriage, gun control, and the need for relaxed immigration laws — and Bloomberg seems to be a liberal's dream, a patrician progressive in the mold of FDR.

Now zoom to a completely different New York, elegant offices on Fifty-seventh Street with a sweeping God's-eye view of Central Park, the headquarters of a global investment firm, Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts, in the mid-1990s. Henry Kravis raised money for the Partnership for New York City, a group of CEOs who promoted various efforts at civic betterment through a network of patrons at the center of the city's elite social world. Michael Bloomberg wanted to start participating in civic events.

He started with a million-dollar check.

"He was very much the same as he is now, a smart, somewhat sardonic guy," says Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership. She remembers Bloomberg going out to explore the city and coming back to Fifty-seventh Street rattling off statistics and tales of distant boroughs. So many different kinds of people! So much potential! All it needed was a little work in infrastructure and the education system and it would be the perfect platform for global business. For the first time since the distant days of David Rockefeller, Bloomberg's enthusiasm made civic virtue chic. "Cocktail-party conversation changed dramatically in the city's social circles when Mike Bloomberg decided to get interested in public policy," Wylde says.

By the time he was ready to run for mayor, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase was the guy sponsoring Bloomberg's coming-out breakfast and a virus in the kitchen would have devastated global finance. The rich didn't back off after the election either, helping Bloomberg in the fight for mayoral control of public education, raising $75 million to fund a school to teach principals how to run schools, whispering in the right ears down in Washington when he was trying to get more money for the new World Trade Center. Later, many of them would join his pro-immigration coalition of CEOs and mayors — cochair, Rupert Murdoch.

He returned the favor after the market crashed in 2008, when Washington politicians poured hundreds of billions into Wall Street and some of them pushed for drastic countermeasures — break up the "too big to fail" banks, ban derivative trading, even dramatically increase political control of the New York Fed. "Our members were panic-stricken," Wylde says. The way they saw it, they had to compete against giant international banks like HSBC, the New York Fed was the key to international trade, and derivatives were the exclusive Russian vodka of commerce, great when not abused by the peasantry.

With the combined authority of New York City and his billions, Bloomberg helped to block the most stringent regulations.

So far, everything Bloomberg has done in China has had an ecological theme — the global-warming conference, the trains, a solar factory. But now he's stopping at Hepalink Pharmaceutical, the world's largest supplier of a drug that stops blood clots, which is owned by the richest couple in China, and the first thing he does is acknowledge the chairman of the Asian division of Goldman Sachs. "We just spent an hour in the car together. It turns out that his best friend is one of my best friends."

The Chinese nod agreeably and move on to formal expressions of regard. "Of course, Mayor Bloomberg, we know your news organization in China."

Bloomberg loves that. "Don't ever talk to any other news organization!"

As the tour begins, comptroller Liu approaches Evans. "What's the Goldman Sachs connection?"

There are so many ways to answer that question. The connection is that Goldman invested $4.9 million in Hepalink and made more than a billion dollars' profit when it went public last summer. That Goldman is vital to the economic health of New York City. That some of Bloomberg's top appointees came from Goldman's upper ranks. That Goldman leases many thousands of Bloomberg terminals. But Evans just says they had a position in the company, which is interesting because it is operating at a high level of industrial complexity — not making T-shirts or cheap toys, that's for sure. It is the new China, the China of the future.

They come to a stop at a porthole and gawk through the glass at workers dressed head to foot in sanitary white unitards, like extras in a George Lucas movie.

On his way out, Bloomberg does a quick Q&A with a group of Chinese reporters. They're pretty smooth, warming him up with softballs before getting down to business. "So why do you choose these two companies, because there are many companies here in Shenzhen?"

"I wanted to pick the couple of companies that were really ahead of their times, pushing the envelope and making a great difference, and I also depended on Goldman Sachs for advice."

"So they give you this kind of suggestions?"

"Yes, both these companies were picked or suggested by Goldman Sachs. I turn to the experts."

The Chinese reporters turn to the pressing question of the Fed's latest purchase of bonds, which they are alarmed about. They get specialized, talking about firewalls and hot money, and Bloomberg's right there with them, respecting the right of a central bank to engage in quantitative easing but always wishing the best for both nations as they work together to build a better world. Then he thanks the people of Shenzhen and heads for the Mercedes.

On the way out, Evans catches his eye and gives him a little nod: Thank you.

 
mike bloomberg cathie black

Edward Keating
When Bloomberg gets back to New York, he plunges directly into a noisy controversy over his surprise pick of a publishing executive for the new school chancellor. His enemies say he chose her because she's part of his superrich social circle, that he's secretive and high-handed and refuses to consult with outsiders.

That's when he invites me up to his sanctum sanctorum on the second floor of City Hall, the central office he designed to look like a trading floor or a newsroom. They call it the bullpen. It's a remarkable sight in the world of politics, where perks are treated with the gravity of mortgages and wills. There's a giant split-screen TV at one end with a digital ticker listing complaints answered and potholes filled, a field of cubicles so low that you can see over into your neighbor's business when you stand up, a line of clocks showing the time in different places except it's Brooklyn and Queens instead of London and Tokyo, and the time is all the same. Opposite the big TV, there's a raised snack bar with three cafeteria tables.

A few moments later, Bloomberg comes up the stairs to the snack bar and holds out his hand. Sitting down at one of the tables, he makes relaxed small talk about problems with eyeglasses. "I get up, I put my contacts on, everything's blurry, and then I realize I forgot to take the ones out the night before. Why do I do that? You want some coffee or something?"

He starts off with a few remarks about the fine people he's been able to attract to city politics, but it's only a minute or two before he arrives at the annoyance of the moment. He had breakfast this morning with the senior staff from the Department of Education and reminded them that 63 percent of the kids get a high school diploma now, thanks to all of them, but the mayor had a little part in it too. "I picked Joel Klein, I supported him, I took the grief, I got the money."

He wants to be remembered for pushing metrics and detailed public accounting, which he calls a "sea change in government." Also the smoking ban, a 35 percent reduction in crime, education reform, and the lovingly detailed twenty-five-year environmental plan he calls PlaNYC. Now people who are running for office on both the national and state levels want to be seen with him.

As he talks, Bloomberg gets charged up and leans in close, putting his elbows on the table, heedless of any conventional assumptions of station. Never mind that the cafeteria table he's sitting at is right out there on display, visible to all and audible to anyone who passes by. There's definitely something about Bloomberg that doesn't like barriers — you see it in the long hours, the high salaries, even his sense of loyalty. There's a joke around City Hall that the best way to ensure job security is to get the newspapers to criticize you, and it's not really a joke. He likes to keep people close.

Down below, there's Bloomberg's desk smack in the middle of the office floor, surrounded by a cubicle exactly the same size as all the other cubicles — really, he has no private office. If he rolls backward, he could bump into the person behind him. Despite a fortune that gives him an unlimited freedom other cubicle dwellers can't begin to imagine, he has worked down there for nine years.

But he doesn't like being questioned, at least not about his efforts to defeat financial regulation. Immediately, a note of exasperation enters his voice. "Lemme step back. We had an explicit public policy, which I happen to think is the right policy, to encourage home ownership. We did this through Fannie and Freddie. And the way they raised money was by taking the mortgages and packaging them, otherwise it would have been just commercial banks making local loans and no expansion of the economy and spending on transportation and all of the infrastructure stuff. So it went through a downturn. Is it any worse than other downturns? In some places yes. They overbuilt in Florida, they overbuilt in Arizona. Were there abuses? Yes. People pushed on the mortgages. You pay a mortgage salesman to sell mortgages, will they sell them to everybody? Yeah, if somebody lies about their income. So you gotta say, 'a consequence of a very expansive housing market is that there will be a downturn and lead to lots of defaults. But on balance, we're better off because of it.' And by the way, the people that own those mortgages are in these package deals. Mortgage derivatives were sold to professional investors. Now people say, 'Oh but I didn't understand what I was buying.' This is ridiculous. They should have done the research."

He does support regulations to increase transparency, as well as higher reserve standards and more vigorous oversight. Beyond that, he says, we need to accept the ups and downs of market cycles. "We encouraged this. We wanted everybody to take mortgages. Can you imagine Congress saying, 'Let's slow down the housing boom in this country'? Get serious."

What about the fight over term limits? Some say that stained his legacy.

"The law said the city council can change the rule. They voted, nobody put a gun to their head. That's the law. If you don't like the law, change the law. Don't complain about somebody living within the law."

But when other people proposed doing the very same thing, you said it was an outrage.

"Sometimes, number one, things change, okay? So let's not be — I mean, sometimes you change your views. Sometimes the world is different, okay?"

And the ruckus over his giant urban development projects, the West Side stadium in Manhattan and the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn? The charges of insider dealings and broken promises?

"Okay, there's two out of all of the things! And incidentally, the West Side stadium is a project that should have been built. The West Side stadium denied employment to an enormous number of people starting their way up the economic ladder."

How about education? After the scores went down —

"No no, time out. Scores did not go down, scores went up. We changed the level that we were aspiring to."

And the decision to appoint Hearst Magazines executive Cathie Black (Hearst owns Esquire), which was done in a rather autocratic way?

His exasperation flashes again. "Where are the people manning the barricades? They had a big thing on the steps of City Hall, I don't think they had fifty people. There's no great outcry here! The New York Times is on a jihad."

Clearly, it's frustrating having to explain himself like this, especially after all he's done for the city, especially to people who don't understand how the world works. "It's the mayor's decision," he says, "that's what mayoral control means — they serve at the mayor's pleasure, all his commissioners, all his deputy mayors, and you don't do a public search. What are you talking about?

What world do you live in? Did you ever do a search for president of a university?"

Um, no.

"I was chairman of the board for Johns Hopkins, I did two searches, okay?"

He's so forceful, so absolutely certain of himself. His confidence is a thing with texture and size, grown vast in the hothouse of his fortune.

"I'm not certain," he says. "I'm right."

 
mike bloomberg local interview

Edward Keating
After a small but humiliating compromise, Bloomberg gets his way on Cathie Black and goes back to the daily business of being mayor. He attends the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, accepts some plug-in cars from a Toyota executive, opens a science park, cuts half a million dollars for homeless and runaway kids. He's the most powerful man in New York City, but he's restless in the role, already looking three years ahead. All his life, he's done big things. Consider that 1.7 years he's added to the life expectancy of New Yorkers. Multiply that by the eight million stories in the naked city and you have 13.6 million extra years of life in New York City alone. He did this despite the resistance of Philip Morris, which retaliated by moving its headquarters out of New York. Then he put a sizable chunk of his personal fortune into fighting tobacco all over the world. By this standard, he's the greatest humanitarian in history.

He just wants us to be reasonable. Business is the great engine of progress. This is the theme tying together all his ideas, the reason why we have to keep the borders open, rebuild the national infrastructure, restrict guns in cities, and support cosmopolitan freedoms like gay rights and religious tolerance. We need a modern educated country for the new age of global competition. Is that so hard to understand?

"We see, when it comes to politics, the same way," Arnold Schwarzenegger told me. "We feel like let's just get the job done and worry about it later who'll be smarter to claim that it's their idea. Let's just reform the political system without worrying about Democrats stand for this and Republicans stand for that."

As Cory Booker says, "He's the Obi-Wan Kenobi to all of us young Jedi knights."

Although Bloomberg is preparing the way to power, with alliances and coalitions and political favors, just as he did during the period when he was dissembling about running for mayor of New York, he continuously deflects the question of his ultimate goal, and is plainly dismissive of the national electorate. The way he sees it, "25 percent of the country would vote Democratic even if Sarah Palin were their candidate, and 25 percent would vote Republican even if Trotsky were their candidate." At most, he hopes to nudge the great wheel of progress and win some friends for the great city of New York.

Honest.

But that's not the right question. There's only one right question in the independent nation of Mike Bloomberg: What does Mike Bloomberg want? The answer comes in the details. We're riding the Airport Express in Hong Kong. He's got his iPad in his lap, flirting with a pretty young reporter from the China Daily. He says cheese when the camera snaps. Then he turns to me. "Where do you live?"

I tell him.

"I think kids should grow up in the city," he says. "I'll tell you a great story — when my oldest went to Princeton, the first three weeks, she hated it. I said, 'Emma, why?' She said, 'Daddy, all they do is drink!' I said, 'Emma you've never turned down a drink in your life.' She said, 'Daddy, I did this in the tenth grade.' "

Spoken like a true New Yorker — in fact, the ultimate New Yorker, with the spending power of a state and complete indifference to the petty concerns of ordinary political hypocrisy.

In the conference center where he's officially named chairman of the C40 group, the mayors and technocrats of all the major cities of the world have gathered to hear him speak. He strides onto the stage with his usual confidence and a genial smile. "Jóu sàhn!"

That's "good morning" in Cantonese. As mayor of the most international city on earth, Bloomberg needs to know these things. But he'll continue in English, another language he keeps struggling to master.

But seriously, it's an honor to be selected as chairman, and thanks to David for his passionate work on fighting climate change — and thanks to the people of Hong Kong. Dò jèh! We salute you!

Then Bloomberg launches into one of his startlingly blunt speeches. The data is in. Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. National governments have failed. Cities are on the front lines of rising sea levels and extreme weather. They produce 70 percent of the world's greenhouse gases. The leaders in this room represent 21 percent of the global gross domestic product. They must be bolder, stronger, more ambitious, more collaborative — when London introduced congestion pricing, nine other cities followed. Bogotá showed the way on rapid-transit bus systems. And now New York City has created the most ambitious sustainability plan in the U. S., PlaNYC, which will save $700 million a year and create seventeen thousand new jobs and reduce greenhouse gases 30 percent by 2030.

His gift to all: PlaNYC in Chinese.

Because government always gets in the way, unless you become a government unto yourself.

At the press conference immediately afterward, he introduces himself to the world with a wry smile: "Mike Bloomberg, I'm not running for president."

Jack LaLanne: What I've Learned
The late, great guru on living, dying, and getting busy trying real hard

By Cal Fussman

[more from this author]

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Everett Collection

Originally published in the August 2004 issue

I'm going to be ninety in September. Everybody else can have a piece of the birthday cake, but not me. I have rules, and I follow 'em. No cake, no pie, no candy, no ice cream! Haven't had any in seventy-five years. It makes me feel great not eating birthday cake. That's the gift I give myself.

Forget about what you used to do. This is the moment you've been waiting for.

Don't ask me about politics. I don't like to get into Barbra Streisand-ism. Let's stick to what's important.

When I was younger, I drank a quart of blood a day for about six weeks. I'd get it at the slaughterhouse. I'd heard about those Masais, you know, those seven-foot African guys; they'd drink cattle blood for strength. Then one day a little clot got stuck in my throat and that was it for me.

As long as the emphasis is on winning, you're gonna have steroids.

If man makes it, don't eat it.

Of course I have fears. But what good is thinking or talking about them? Billy Graham is about the hereafter. I'm for the here and now.

You've got to satisfy you. If you can't satisfy you, you're a failure.

I work out for two hours every morning, seven days a week -- even when I'm traveling. I hate it. But I love the result! That's the key, baby!

The only way you can hurt your body is if you don't use it.

Look, are you a suckling calf? Name one creature on earth that uses milk after it's weaned. Man's the only one. And man's the only one who lives out only half his life span. A cow has four stomachs. You don't. You can't handle whole milk.

I'd like to talk to Jesus about those twelve disciples. They were a great public-relations team.

If you want to change somebody, don't preach to him. Set an example and shut up.

Scales lie! You lose thirty pounds of muscle and you gain thirty pounds of fat and you weigh the same, right? Take that tape measure out. That won't lie. Your waistline is your lifeline. It should be the same as it was when you were a young person.

If you lose a couple of inches off your stomach, your business down there will look an inch longer.

Sex is giving, giving, giving. The more energy you have, the more you're going to please.

Now, I'm not as sexually active as I was when I was younger. But look at my wife -- she's still smiling!

The guy who's most impressed me is Paul C. Bragg. He completely saved my life. When I was a kid, I was addicted to sugar. I was a skinny kid with pimples and boils. Used to eat ice cream by the quart. I had blinding headaches. I tried to commit suicide. And then one day, my life changed. Bragg was a nutritionist. My mother and I were a little late getting to his lecture. The place was packed, and so we started to leave. But Bragg said, "We don't turn anybody away here. Ushers, bring two seats. Put those two up on the stage." It was the most humiliating moment. There I was, up on stage. I was so ashamed of the way I looked; I didn't want people to see me. Little did I know they had problems, too. And Bragg said, "It doesn't matter what your age is, what your physical condition is. If you obey nature's laws, you can be born again." From that moment on, I completely changed my diet, began to exercise, and went on to become captain of the football team. And do you know something? Every time I get ready to lecture, I think, If I can just help one person like I was helped...

Show me the guy who doesn't get nervous in front of a crowd and I'll show you a lousy speaker.

Would you get your dog up every day, give him a cup of coffee, a doughnut, and a cigarette? Hell, no. You'd kill the damn dog.

You learn as you go. When I first went on television in 1951, I pulled out a loaf of Langendorf's white bread, squeezed it into a ball, and threw it down -- boom. "That's what it does when it hits your stomach!" I said. Only problem was that Langendorf's was one of the network's sponsors! Oh, jeez, the phone calls. That's the last time I ever showed a label.

Go on, have a glass of wine with dinner. What is wine, anyway? Pure grapes. A glass of wine is much better for you than a Coke.

If I don't know what I'm doing by now, I must be pretty stupid.

What I do isn't about money. Can you put a price on a human life?

Any stupid person can die. Dying's easy. Living's a pain in the butt.

I can't afford to die. It'll wreck my image.

 

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/ESQ0804-AUG_WIL#ixzz1ByX16HZn
Neverware Means Never Buying a New Computer Again
     Email Print More...By Ben Popper
January 20, 2011 | 7:34 a.m.
 
Computer genius, volunteer firefighter, mensch.
+Enlarge There is something odd about the computer Jonathan Hefter keeps at his desk in the Dogpatch Labs tech incubator just off of Union Square. The space is filled with employees from some of New York's most promising startups, most of whom are coding away on top-of-the-line-machines or fiddling with their cherished iPads. But Hefter sits me down at his workstation in front of a Dell GX150, considered state of the art in 2000, now available for $70 from a second-hand dealer online.

Hefter boots up the computer and in a flash I'm logged into Microsoft's newest operating system, Windows 7. I open up a document and type a few paragraphs, then pop into MS Paint and create a quick image. I log on to the internet, check my email and stream a video. Microsoft recommends a machine with at least 1 gigahertz processor and 1 gigabyte of RAM in order to work in Windows 7, but this computer seems to handle it just fine.

"Most people are surprised when I show them how well an old machine can handle a new operating system," says Hefter, cracking a grin. "Especially when I tell them I also took out the hard drive."

Heftner has transformed this old Dell into a what's known as a virtual desktop. The processing power, the memory, even the operating system itself are being delivered from a small unit the size of a pizza box tucked into a closet down the hall. That single piece of equipment, dubbed the "juicebox" by Hefter, can power hundreds of terminals on a cloud based network.

"Most schools and city governments and non-profits in America are stuck on an expensive treadmill," Hefter explains. Every four to five years they have to upgrade their computer systems, a process known as the hardware refresh cycle. "If you could break that pattern of planned obsolescence, you would generate huge savings, not just on the economic level, but from an environmental standpoint as well."

It's an idea that excites cash strapped institutions looking for a new model, and terrifies the big PC manufacturers accustomed to annual paydays. Hefter has named his company Neverware, "Because with us, they will never have to buy a new computer again."

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The Neverware project began in May of 2009, after Hefter, now 25, had graduated from Wharton with a degree in economics. He had several job offers on the table, but decided to move back in with his parents in Long Island and set up shop in the garage. "I noticed a lot of old computer s we had out there started to disappear," said his father, Harold Hefter. "Which was good, because I wasn't sure how to throw them out anyway."

At first Hefter's parents were concerned about his startup ambitions. "I wanted him to go get his PhD," said his mother, Eva. "But he just kept telling me he wanted to change the world. He can be quite the mensch."

Despite his lack of formal training, Hefter, a self-taught computer whiz, created a working prototype of the Neverware technology in under a year and in May of 2010 was invited to join Dogpatch Labs in New York. There he caught the eye of Diana Rhoten, co-founder of Startl, an organization that looks to identify and accelerate interesting projects in the realm of education technology. "Jonathan fit the profile of entrepreneurs we're looking for," says Rhoten. "Young, passionate and committed to a truly disruptive idea."

Before founding Startl, Rhoten was the program director at the National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure. "It was me and a bunch of supercomputing folks, and we spent a lot of time thinking about virtual desktops and cloud computing and how to make that work for schools," says Rhoten. "When I saw what Jonathan had done, I realized that this was the solution I kept picturing in my head but didn't know how to create myself."

The key difference between what was on the market and what Neverware was offering, says Rhoten, is that Hefter's project was built from the ground up to be lean and light. "The virtual desktop solutions that most of the big corporations offer are too expensive and complex for schools to deploy," says Rhoten. Hefter's technology, by comparison, was cheap, worked with whatever computer the school already had and reduced the amount of oversight needed on a daily basis.

Take this case study offered by HP about how they helped St. Peter's Anglican Primary School. In it they replaced 160 traditional PCs with 80 blade PCs and 90 thin clients. That costs approximately $100,000 and generates 2 tons of e-waste. Hefter solves the same problem with two "juiceboxes" powering the original 160 PCs. Cost = $20,000. E-waste = 0.

It seemed too good to be true, so Rhoten spent the next few months trying to poke holes in Hefter's project. "I brought in infrastructure guys to look at it, computing folks, people from school districts at both the local and federal level." The response was always the same: this looks very promising, but there are a lot of people trying to do virtual computing with more experience and resources than this kid.

Rhoten eventually showed Neverware to an ex-Google engineer, who like everyone else, dismissed it at first. "I'll never forget, about a week later this engineer emailed me up, it was on Thanksgiving day," says Rhoten. "He said,I might have been wrong. I can't stop thinking about Neverware. This might actually work."

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The changes powering Hefter's vision are all around us. "The history of personal computers until recently was bigger and faster," says the technology writer Nicholas Carr "But now, with more and more computing done out of the cloud the size of your hard drive doesn't matter anymore. From Facebook to mobile apps, cloud computing has become the dominant model for individual consumers, whether they know it or not."

The big PC companies, however, aren't going down without a fight. Early on in Neverware's history, Hefter contacted Dell and Intel, eager to share with them his approach. It was the equivalent of calling the major oil companies to show them a design for a solar powered car. "I also don't know that we'd be interested in "radically extending the life...of desktop PCs," was the reply Hefter got from a higher up at Intel.

"Sometimes I just feel like screaming," Hefter told me one afternoon, as we walked briskly down University towards Union Square. "It's like I'm Russel Crowe from The Insider, and I have this truth that I just want to get out there, but nobody wants to listen."

Slowly but surely, however, people are starting to listen. Hefter took a recent trip to Silicon Valley, where he met with several of the major players in the cloud computing and virtual desktop space. This week he will be speaking at the Aspen Institutes forum on innovation in education in D.C..

"There is a perfect storm brewing for adoption," said Peter Baynes, executive director of the New York State conference of mayors. "We see folks are becoming more comfortable with the cloud and, at the same time, budget concerns are forcing them to take a hard look at how they spend."

In fact, according to a city hall source, New York City is considering a pilot program that would deploy Neverware in local schools. "I think at a time like this, when cities are trying to squeeze every last drop from their budgets," says the source, "Neverware has the potential to be a real game changer."

The way Hefter sees it, schools are a beachhead from which to remake the whole PC market, and soon, the market for mobile computing devices. "Perhaps it was a little naive of me to think that these companies would want to hear about ideas that could hurt their businesses," says Hefter. "But to me, if you're just protecting the status quo, if you are no longer concerned about innovation, then you don't deserve to be setting tech policy for the rest of us."