Time

Table of Contents: August 2, 2010 IN THIS ISSUE EDITION: U.S. Vol. 176 No. 5 COVER The Case Against Summer Vacation (Cover) It's an outdated legacy of the farm economy. Adults still romanticize it. But those months out of school do the most damage to the kids who can least afford it Summer Programs Keep Kids' Minds Sharp Photos: Programs in Indianapolis and Baltimore help fight against "summer learning loss"

ESSAY Apocalypse Not (Commentary / In the Arena) The capital is crawling with prophets of doom for the Democrats, but they may be overstating the case With Stocks, It's Not the Economy (Commentary / The Curious Capitalist) Companies are no longer tied to their home GDPs. Yet we still invest that way Tony Robbins Kissed My Hand and I Liked It (Commentary) In which master motivator Tony Robbins shows me the path to my better self

NATION Stopping The Oil Spill (The Well / Nation) As BP shows some success capping its runaway well, Time goes on board the drilling rigs that are faced with the challenge of fixing the disaster once and for all Drilling the Relief Well Photos: TIME gets on board the drilling rigs that will fix the Deepwater Horizon disaster once and for all The Once And Future Governor? (The Well / Nation) Jerry Brown's California Comeback Tour The Unorthodox Political Career of Jerry Brown Photos: The man nicknamed Governor Moonbeam during his first stint as California's boss hopes to return to Sacramento again Detroit's Hair Wars: Part Art, Part Trade, All Attitude (The Well / Assignment Detroit) An annual showcase of hairstylists in Detroit highlights the creative spirit of a city that might be down, but refuses to be out Detroit's Hair Wars Photos: In a city where hairstyling is big business, the annual display of salon talent is part art, part entertainment and all attitude. Here is a selection of the best from Hair Wars 2010

WORLD Soldiers Of Fortune (The Well / World) To cement its wealth and power, Burma's junta is prepping the next generation of military and business elites, even as economic disparities grow wider and wider

LETTERS Inbox (Inbox)

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Magic Kingdom (Theme Parks) The Wizarding World of Harry Potter lets ordinary Muggles step into J.K. Rowling's universe Exclusive: The Harry Potter Theme Park Photographer Colby Katz gets a sneak preview of the magical new attraction at Universal Studios in Orlando, Fla Angelina Jolie: Worth Her Salt (Movies) Sure, if the double (or triple) agent in this brisk spy thriller is played by Angelina Jolie Mad Men Returns, With the Rebirth of a Salesman (Television) As Mad Men returns, Don Draper is starting over — and figuring out who, exactly, he wants to be Giving E-books a Spot on the Charts (List Watch) Short List TIME'S PICKS FOR THE WEEK

SOCIETY On the Scene (Life / Web Watch) As traditional newspapers wither, hyperlocal websites are taking over coverage of neighborhood news A Watchdog in Their Pocket (Life / Parenting) Who's texting your child's cell phone? A new service can monitor sexual predators Sandwich Philanthropy (Life / Cash Crunch) Can Panera's pay-what-you-want cafĂŠ survive rough times? The bottom line may surprise you

PEOPLE 10 Questions for Jon Hamm (10 Questions) He reprises his role as ad exec Don Draper on AMC's Mad Men July 25. Jon Hamm will now take your questions

NOTEBOOK The Skimmer (Briefing) Book review: Voyager by Stephen J. Pyne The Moment (Briefing) 7|20|10: Shanghai

The World (Briefing) 10 ESSENTIAL STORIES A Midsummer Miscellany (Briefing) Should Warren Run the Agency She Conceived? (Briefing) Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine (Briefing) Verbatim (Briefing) Brief History: War Games (Briefing) Hank Cochran (Briefing / Milestones) Stephen Schneider (Briefing / Milestones)

COVER

The Case Against Summer Vacation

By David Von Drehle Thursday, Jul. 22, 2010

Cass Bird for TIME Recently I reread the adventures of Tom Sawyer after many years, and I was stunned to discover that Tom's summer vacation doesn't begin until the end of Chapter 21. Memory plays tricks.

Tom's glorious idyll of mud, mild rebellion, chaste romance and rampant imagination electrified by a dash of danger and a blaze of heroismhad been filed in my mind under the heading of complete summer freedom. Even the most vivid scenes of Tom in school had been washed out by the brilliance of Tom barefoot and unbound. In reality, though, our hero spent much of his summer vacation pathetically bedridden with the measles. I mention this because my muddled recollection is a small version of a broad misunderstanding, a skewed view of childhood and summertime. We associate the school year with oppression and the summer months with libertyand nothing is more American than liberty. Summer is red, white and blue. It's flags and fireworks, hot dogs and mustard, cold watermelon and sweet corn. School is regimen; summer is creativity. School is work; summer is play. But when American students are competing with children around the world, who are in many cases spending four weeks longer in school each year, larking through summer is a luxury we can't afford. What's more, for many childrenespecially children of low-income familiessummer is a season of boredom, inactivity and isolation. Kids can't go exploring if their neighborhoods aren't safe. It's hard to play without toys or playgrounds or open spaces. And Tom Sawyer wasn't expected to care for his siblings while Aunt Polly worked for minimum wage.

Dull summers take a steep toll, as researchers have been documenting for more than a century.

Deprived of healthy stimulation, millions of low-income kids lose a significant amount of what they learn during the school year. Call it "summer learning loss," as the academics do, or "the summer slide," but by any name summer vacation is among the most pernicious, if least acknowledgedcauses of achievement gaps in America's schools. Children with access to high-quality experiences keep exercising their minds and bodies at sleepaway camp, on family vacations, in museums and libraries and enrichment classes.

Meanwhile, children without resources languish on street corners or in front of glowing screens. By the time the bell rings on a new school year, the poorer kids have fallen weeks, if not months, behind. And even well-off American students may be falling behind their peers around the world.

The problem of summer vacation, first documented in 1906, compounds year after year. What starts as a hiccup in a 6-year-old's education can be a crisis by the time that child reaches high school. After collecting a century's worth of academic studies, summer-learning expert Harris Cooper, now at Duke

University, concluded that, on average, all students lose about a month of progress in math skills each summer, while low-income students slip as many as three months in reading comprehension, compared with middle-income students. Another major study, by a team at Johns Hopkins University, examined more than 20 years of data meticulously tracking the progress of students from kindergarten through high school. The conclusion: while students made similar progress during the school year, regardless of economic status, the better-off kids held steady or continued to make progress during the summer, but disadvantaged students fell back. By the end of grammar school, low-income students had fallen nearly three grade levels behind, and summer was the biggest culprit. By ninth grade, summer learning loss could be blamed for roughly two-thirds of the achievement gap separating income groups.

During a June visit to the Argentine neighborhood of Kansas City, Kans., I received a quick tutorial on the realities of summer. I met a group of teenagers who were being paid through a private foundation to study writing and music and history for about 10 hours per week, and I asked them what they would be doing if the program weren't available. They told me about the swimming poolone public pool for all of Wyandotte County (pop. 155,000). They noted that their working-class neighborhood had a basketball hoop. And a soda machine. And that's about it. "There is an idyllic view of summer, but we've known for decades that the reality is very different for a lot of underprivileged kids," says Ron Fairchild, CEO of a nonprofit organization in Baltimore called the National Summer Learning Association. "We expect that athletes and musicians would see their performance suffer without practice. Well, the same is true of students."

Fairchild and his organization are part of a growing movement to stop the summer slide by coordinating, expanding and improving summer enrichment programsespecially for low-income children. Supporters range across the political spectrum from Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana to Democrats in the Department of Education under President Obama, who has created a National Summer Learning Day to call attention to the issue. Some of the nation's largest private donorsincluding the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wallace Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Atlantic Philanthropiesare putting their muscle into the cause.

The romance of summer is so ingrained that this flock of reformers might remind some readers of another character from Tom Sawyer's world, the wealthy Widow Douglas, who "introduced [Huckleberry Finn] into society, no, dragged him into it, hurled him into it and his sufferings were almost more than he could bear. The widow's servants kept him clean and neat, combed and brushed ... The bars and shackles of civilization shut him in and bound him hand and foot." As our modern-day reformers strive to civilize summer as an educational resource, the trick is to seize the opportunity without destroying what's best about the season: the possibility of fun and freedom and play.

Barriers of Cost and Culture Experts believe that a majority of the 30 million American kids poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches do not attend any kind of summer enrichment program. The obvious way to reach that large a group is through the public schools. And indeed, education reformers have been talking about lengthening the school year to make America's students more competitivefor at least a generation, going back to the publication in 1983 of the blockbuster report on our troubled schools A Nation at Risk. Long summer holidays are the legacy of our vanished agrarian past, when kids were needed in the fields during the growing season. Leaders in a number of states have tried to add days or

even weeks to the academic calendar, but they quickly run into barriers of cost and culture. In this bad economy, state and local governments are cutting, not growing, their school budgets. And entire industries depend on the rhythms of summerthink travel, camping, sports and theme parks. They use their influence to keep summers as long as possible. In fact, the statute that prevents Virginia schools from reconvening early in August is known as the Kings Dominion Law, in honor of an amusement park north of Richmond.

For these reasons, many summer-learning initiatives fall to an informal alliance of education entrepreneurs. In the bare basement of an old church on the Near Eastside of Indianapolis, a group of kids whose world is normally measured in city blocks were experiencing Italy one late-June morning.

Some of the children were quietly writing newspaper articles about Italian life. Others were attempting the Italian tradition of family conversation at the dinner table. Still others were making cannoli, stuffing pastry tubes with a creamy, sweet cheese mixture. There's a summer discovery for you: Who ever heard of sweet cheese?

For some 80 elementary-school children in this low-income neighborhood, the summer of 2010 is as close to world travel as they've ever been. The all-day program at the East 10th United Methodist Church is built this year around a World Cup theme. Each week the focus turns to another country, and while the kids are exploring foods and landmarks and cultural traditions, they are, unwittingly, doing math as they measure ingredients and learning science as they raise vegetable gardens with plants native to each land. Fridays are for field trips; to study Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the kids rode buses to the aquarium in Chicago.

Mike Bachman is the executive director, a young man with clear eyes and obvious enthusiasm.

"Everything that happens is enrichment. It all has an educational purpose, but we don't want the kids to think that they're in school," he explains. "We infuse the education into everything we do." That can mean sneaking leadership lessons into afternoon soccer games, teaching principles of fitness during outings to the local swimming pool or wrapping planning skills into preparations for a picnic at a state park. "It was the first time some of them had ever seen charcoal," Bachman says. Indianapolis is ahead of most cities in making better use of summer, according to Fairchild of the National Summer Learning Association.

And that's mainly because a group of local philanthropies, led by the Lilly Endowment, decided in the 1990s to coordinate their efforts to provide safe places for children to go when they were out of school. In recent years, says Lilly's Willis Bright, the focus has increasingly been on "the learning element"a critical need, given that the Indianapolis public schools graduate fewer than half of their students. "But that doesn't mean you make it just another classroom," Bright adds. "You can teach physics with a basketball."

Together, 11 charitable organizationsranging from United Way to small family foundationspool about $3 million per year to support nearly 200 summer programs around Indianapolis. Not all of the programs are educational, but that's where the emphasis lies. Grants support everything from those buses to the Chicago aquarium to salaries of certified teachers to day-camp visits by professional artists and musicians to an urban garden created by retired biochemist Aster Bekele, where city kids explore plant science alongside Bekele's former colleagues from the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical labs.

Rather than engineer a vast new initiative, the strategy is to build on the city's existing patchwork of day camps, community centers, sports camps and summer-jobs programs. The activists hope to improve quality while keeping costs low, coordinate training for staff members and encourage a philosophy of educational enrichment. Over the years, Bright has seen a volunteer tutoring effort by 100 Black Men of Indianapolis grow into an all-day summer academy for some 200 students from kindergarten to eighth grade. Supported by the pool of grant money, academy students receive innovative math training through Project SEED, study music through the Young Audiences' Summer Arts for Youth and practice reading through an interactive software program called Ticket to Read. But it's not all desk work. The students know it's summer when they burst outside for tennis lessons and when they study the stars to understand how slaves navigated the Underground Railroad. Total tuition: $125 for seven weeks.

Meanwhile, a group of Indianapolis firefighters have gone from volunteering on ball fields to enrolling more than 100 students in an eight-week summer leadership camp named for St. Florian, the patron saint of firefighters. Each morning, the camp "cadets" study math, science, creative writing and public speaking. Afternoons are reserved for sports and field trips. Senior cadetshigh schoolersfocus on learning the skills they need for a job hunt: writing rsums, impressing an interviewer, dressing for success.

"We keep up our learning so we don't fall behind," says Isaiaah Quarles, a buoyant 12-year-old with a cascade of dreadlocks. As Quarles escorted me through the camp, whip smart and charming, I could picture him persuading his friends to paint Aunt Polly's fence. I asked him how he would spend his summer if St. Florian Center didn't exist. Dismayed, he answered, "I would just be sitting at home."

Stealth Learning I saw a lot of eager, engaged kids in Indianapolis and met a number of vibrant teachers and volunteers.

But every camp and academy I visited had dozens of children stranded on a waiting list. And for each of those students, there were no doubt hundreds of kids whose parents had not even bothered to find a summer program and fill out an application. A recent study sponsored by the Wallace Foundation estimated that only 25% of students currently participate in organized summer learning programs, although a majority of parents said they would enroll their children if more programs were available.

Fortunately, some public schools have begun to tackle the problem of summer learning loss. In Cincinnati, Ohio, a program called Fifth Quarter offers an additional month of classes, specially tailored for summer, at 16 schools serving low income students. Houston schools offer four weeks of math and science education for at-risk students and report that participants average a boost of more than 10% in their test scores.

In the Appalachian town of Corbin, Ky.home of Harland Sanders and his famous fried chickenthere was no one but the school district to fend off summer slide. Karen West, director of Corbin's Redhound Enrichment program, says, "Eighty-eight percent of our children live in latchkey families, and we have no YMCA, no Boys & Girls Clubs. Really, there was almost nothing for them to do." Hired in 2006 by the Corbin independent school district, West began building what is now a 10-week operation, running 10 hours per day, from the day after school lets out until the day before classes resume. Lessons in reading, math, science and social studies fill much of the day, but nothing about Redhound Enrichment feels like dreaded summer school.

Each summer, West builds on a theme. This year it's "Lights, camera, action!" Every week revolves around a subtheme, and for the week when Toy Story 3 was to open, West picked "To infinityand beyond!" On Monday, students took a field trip to watch the movie. Throughout the week, teachers integrated space exploration into their classrooms. On Friday, the kids put on a science fair, and a mobile planetarium paid a visit. The entire community of Corbin pitches in. Restaurants host meals at which students can practice etiquette. The swimming pool invites the kids each Wednesday. Baptist Regional Medical Center organizes the Longest Day of Play to promote health and fitness. The department of fish and wildlife leads a session on conservationthen takes all the students fishing. As the kids weigh and measure their catch, they think they're just trying to win first prize, but West notes that they are also doing a day's worth of math. Summer educators like to call this sort of thing "stealth learning."

"We have over 30 partners," West says, and their in-kind contributions nearly match her annual budget of $60,000. "When everyone gives a little, we can do miracles." The proof: students in the Corbin program not only don't fall behind through the summer; they move ahead. More than half of the participants improve by a full letter grade or more in both reading and math.

For Fairchild, successes like the ones in Cincinnati, Houston and Corbin show the possibilities in a new approach to summer school. "That phrase has such a bad ring to it," he notes. "We need to push school districts to frame summer school as a good thing, something extra, not a punishment. There is a cultural barrier that we have to overcome. We're not the Grinch that stole summer vacation." With billions of dollars for improved education bulging from last year's economic-stimulus package, Fairchild hopes to persuade school districts across the country to steer some of the money into the neglected months of June, July and August. But a report by Education Sector, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, highlights a problem with relying on public schools for summer enrichment. "In the best schools, there would be an ample increase in academic learning time," author Elena Silva wrote. "But in poorly managed schools, with inexperienced teachers and a host of other challenges," a longer school year just means more lost days. If school districts fail during the traditional year, what are the chances that competence and creativity will suddenly blossom when the weather turns hot? In the best summer-only programs, bureaucracy is lean and change is easy. There's an informality to the summer culturemaybe it's those bare feet and damp swimsuits and homemade lanyardsthat fosters easy innovation and rapid improvement. As Terry Ogle, a former middle-school principal who runs the Indianapolis Algebra Project, told me, things happen more quickly outside school systems: "A few years ago, we were teaching kids at two summer sites. Now we're in 29." It was during a summer vacation from Harvard Law School that Earl Phalen had his first teaching experience, as a volunteer at an impoverished school in Jamaica. He says he knew immediately that "this was what I wanted to do with my life." But like many other big thinkers drawn to education in recent years, Phalen saw the existing public schools as a roadblock, not a career path.

So Phalen has become one of the country's leading education reformers by seizing opportunities to reach kids outside the traditional school day. One of his nonprofit ventures, Reach Out and Read, engages pediatricians to evangelize for literacy. His latest project, sponsored by an innovative Indiana undertaking called the Mind Trust, uses summer to make an end run around the ingrained habits and intractable bureaucracies of inadequate schools.

Called Summer Advantage, the program offers five weeks of intensive, all-day education to children from kindergarten to eighth grade. Phalen hires only certified teachers and chooses them on the basis of talent, not seniority. The curriculum ranges from math, reading and writing to cooking, dance and musicbut the consistent element is strong teachers working in small groups with excited students. I visited a Summer Advantage school in Indianapolis, and perhaps the best way to describe it is to say, first, that all the students are in economic and academic need and, second, that I wasn't there five minutes before a boy looked me in the eye and announced, "I'm going to be an aeronautical engineer." Summer Advantage is operating at a dozen sites across Indiana this year, serving some 3,100 "scholars," as Phalen insists his students be called. His goal is to enroll 100,000 scholars five years from now and to be "part of the cadre that changes the way this country does education." He has support from Washington, where a friend from Harvard Law now sits in the Oval Office. The U.S. Department of Education has put money into Summer Advantage, Phalen says, "because we're part of their agenda to prove that hiring teachers based on quality instead of seniority will produce good results." So far, the data look promising. Summer Advantage launched last year, and its scholars improved their performance on state math and reading tests by an average of 14 percentage points, Phalen says. On the basis of that, he projects that scholars who spend three seasons with Summer Advantage will raise their scores from an average baseline in the low 30th percentiles into the 70th percentiles in math and reading.

"If you want to drive the dropout rate even higher, just extend the school year by another 30 days," says Phalen. Instead, he argues, we should embrace the fact that summer is the opposite of school to make it the season of true educational reform. But here's the hard part: if summer enrichment is the innovative, cost-effective answer to one of the nation's thorniest problemsthe failure to educate many of our neediest kids how do we address so large a problem without creating another stultifying version of the failed status quo? How do we increase participation and raise standards without crushing creativity and imposing bureaucracy? Can we really entrust something so important to a haphazard network of camp counselors, volunteers and entrepreneurs? Well, maybe. In places all over the countryfrom inner cities to Appalachia, inside rec centers and church basements, on bumpy ball fields and pocked playgroundskids are learning this summer, and they're having a blast. While it's true that NASA runs one of the largest summer enrichment programs in the country, this isn't rocket science. If ever there was a movement suited to local experiments, informal innovations and seat-of-the-pants efforts, surely it's the campaign to squeeze more from summer. Because revolutions come from the grass roots, and everyone knows when grass is thickest.

In summer.

Summer Programs Keep Kids' Minds Sharp

More than Fun and Games In the past several years, a number of programs have sprouted to help children enjoy summer without losing the skills they gained during the academic year. At the St. Florian Center, above, a program in Indianapolis, kids begin the day with calisthenics before moving on to pursuits like math, science, sports and field trips.

Out in Front

The eight-week St. Florian Center program was developed by local firefighters in 1992. The curriculum includes a lesson from the firemen on how to rappel from a building.

Motto The kids at St. Florian wear shirts that read, "Do Something Positive — Be Someone Positive — Have Something Positive."

Set for Success

Isaiah Quarles, 12, center, and other students at St. Florian learn about making a television commercial.

Senior cadets — high schoolers — also learn about important job-preparation skills like writing résumés, impressing interviewers and dressing for success.

Hands Up At Summer Advantage USA, another program in Indianapolis, founder Earl Phalen reads to second-graders. A five-week, all-day education experience, Summer Advantage accepts children from kindergarten through eighth grade.

Martial-Arts Lesson Summer Advantage operates at a dozen sites across Indiana, serving some 3,100 "scholars," as founder Phalen insists his students be called. He hopes to enroll 100,000 scholars five years from now and to be "part of the cadre that changes the way this country does education."

Experiment Students at Summer Advantage engage in a lesson in science through cooking.

Food for Thought Summer Advantage scholars are provided with nutritious meals to fuel their minds and bodies.

Three R's Students at the Parks & People Foundation's SuperKids Camp at the Baltimore School of the Arts listen during an instruction period. A recent study concluded that, on average, all students lose about a month of progress in math skills each summer, while low-income students slip as many as three months in reading comprehension behind middle-income students.

Cool The SuperKids curriculum includes swimming. For many children — especially those from low-income families — summer is a season of boredom, inactivity and isolation. Kids can't go exploring if their neighborhoods aren't safe.

Boating Lesson The summer programs help keep kids from being stuck at home in front of a TV or languishing on a street corner. "If you want to drive the dropout rate even higher," argues Summer Advantage founder Phalen, "just extend the school year by another 30 days." Instead, he says, summer should be embraced as the opposite of school to make it the season of true education reform.

ESSAY IN THE ARENA

Apocalypse Not: Are the Dems Really Facing Doom?

Illustration by Stephen Kroninger for TIME; Obama: Ethan Miller / Getty Images

In the midst of the mid-July doldrums, Barack Obama suddenly was beset by a zeitgeist tornado blowing in — hard — from the media and the opposition. A Washington Post headline blared that "6 in 10 Americans Lack Faith in Obama." The Drudge Report, rippling off the poll, screamed, "CREDIBILITY CRISIS." The New York Times asked 15 brilliant people to give the sinking Prez advice on its op-ed page. Charles Krauthammer, the neoconservative columnist, argued that the worst part of Obama's failure was that he was succeeding — he was reversing Reaganism, with legislation like the health care and financial-reform bills. The President's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, noted, accurately, that the Democratic Party might lose the House of Representatives in the coming elections. This droplet of candor rendered the Speaker of said House, Nancy Pelosi, inexplicably apoplectic. Various commentators began to speculate that it was possible that the Democrats could lose the Senate as well.

Yikes. With all the hyperventilation, it was easy to gain the impression that something was actually happening. In truth, not much was. Take that Washington Post poll, for example. It was true that 57% of those surveyed had only some or no faith in the President's ability to solve the country's problems. But that was pretty good compared with, well, everyone else in town: 67% lacked faith in the congressional Democrats, and a mere 72% felt that way about the Republicans. By the way, the lack of faith in the President's ability to fix the economy seems entirely rational to me: another short-term stimulus burst is needed, and so are long-term deficit-reduction fixes, but both seem beyond the Administration's capability right now. On the other hand — in the midst of a fierce recession and the oil spill and a massive Republican smear campaign — Obama's approval rating stood at a buoyant 50%, which was slightly higher than most other polls had him, all of which were higher than Ronald Reagan's at a similar point in his presidency.

It was certainly true that the Democrats were poised to take a shellacking in the coming elections. That's business as usual; congressional campaigns almost always give heartburn to sitting Presidents. But the intensity of the reflux remains a mystery. The Lost Senate scenario depended on the Democrats' dropping every last race imaginable — and even as the dire prognostications were being propounded, Harry Reid was rising from the dead in his Nevada Senate race (on the strength of the weird Tea offered by his Republican challenger), a pattern that could repeat itself in other states where the Republicans have settled on test-tube libertarians who want to privatize old-age entitlements, believe that people

receiving unemployment insurance are lazy and still have doubts about the legality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Even on the House side, the picture wasn't entirely clear. A composite index of polls had the Republicans slightly ahead in a generic ballot (albeit with a far more enthusiastic potential electorate). But in the tawdry area of fundraising, a very precise leading indicator of success in congressional races, Democrats were thrilled by the fact that many of their vulnerable candidates — Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, Chris Carney in Pennsylvania, for example — had significantly outraised their Republican opponents. Here, too, the Republicans were evening the odds by offering strange brews of Tea against Democrats who tended to be solid, moderate Blue Dog sorts. (Several polls had the Tea Party's initial, mildly favorable public impression turning sour.)

This is not to say the President doesn't have problems. The public is distressed by the recession and confused by Obama's solutions. The financial-reform bill that the President signed on July 21 may tourniquet some of Wall Street's excesses, but who could explain it? The big banks remain intact, with only a byzantine regulatory process standing between them and another bailout. There is no transaction tax to discourage the casino gambling in financial derivatives that fueled the crash. Indeed, the most accessible news from the bill is that one unpopular big (Wall Street) was impinged upon by another (government regulators), who don't have a fabulous track record when it comes to being outsmarted by the Madoffs of this world. The other headline was that the bill funds 68 government studies, all of which — I'm sure — will be carefully read and implemented.

This is a "solution" that doesn't connect with the "problem" perceived by the electorate, which is the government's affinity for bailouts. "The big guys got taken care of," says Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, one of 53 congressional Democrats who lost their seats in the 1994 Republican tsunami, "and everyone else is getting hammered. There is enormous frustration about that, and people tend to take it out on the party in power."

And so it will surely be this year, though perhaps not the apocalypse the zeitgeist warriors are predicting.

With Stocks, It's Not the Economy

By ZACHARY KARABELL Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Illustration by Harry Campbell for TIME

From the beginning of May until late June, stock markets worldwide declined sharply, with losses surpassing 10%. The first weeks of July brought only marginal relief. Ominous voices began to warn that the weakness of stocks was a direct response to the stalling of an economic recovery that has lasted barely a year. Anxiety over debt-laden European countries — most notably Greece — combined with stubbornly high unemployment in the U.S. to create a toxic but fertile mix that allowed concern to blossom into full-bloom fear.

The most common refrain was that stocks are weak because global economic activity is sagging. A July 12 report by investment bank Credit Suisse was titled Are the Markets Forecasting Recession? With no more stimulus spending on the horizon in the U.S., Europeans on austerity budgets and consumer sentiment best characterized as surly, the sell-off in stocks was explained as a simple response to an economy on the ropes.

It's a good story and a logical one. But it distorts reality. Stocks are no longer mirrors of national economies; they are not — as is so commonly said — magical forecasting mechanisms. They are small slices of ownership in specific companies, and today, those companies have less connection to any one national economy than ever before.

As a result, stocks are not proxies for the U.S. economy, or that of the European Union or China, and markets are deeply unreliable gauges of anything but the underlying strength of the companies they represent and the schizophrenic mind-set of the traders who buy and sell the shares. There has always been a question about just how much of a forecasting mechanism markets are. Hence the saying that stocks have correctly predicted 15 of the past nine recessions. At times, stocks soar as the economy sours (in 1975, for instance) or sour when the economy soars (as with China's stock market, the Shanghai stock exchange, in the past year).

At other times, stocks have tracked or even anticipated a nation's economic strength — but that happened in an era when a strong relationship existed between the companies that traded on a particular exchange (American companies on the New York Stock Exchange, British companies in London) and the country in which they traded. For many years, American companies did most of their business in the U.S., so their results could be expected to parallel the larger economy.

But since the turn of the millennium, business and capital have gone truly global. The companies of the S&P 500 now make about half of their sales outside the U.S., and if you remove geography-bound utilities and railroads, regional banks and a fair number of retailers, the percentage is higher. Tech and industrial firms such as 3M, Hewlett-Packard and Intel derive two-thirds or more of their sales beyond the U.S. That means that even if the U.S. economy is a total wash, they can access other markets to maintain their growth. The same might be said of a German conglomerate like Siemens, a Dutch powerhouse like Philips or a Korean company like Samsung.

This is known within companies, though CEOs are often susceptible to the false story — which makes some sense, given that most CEOs are older than 50 and once operated in a world where what was good for GM was indeed good for America. But look at the actual balance sheets of thousands of global companies, large and small, and you'll find that their fortunes have diverged from those of their national economies.

Over the past two years, as unemployment in the U.S. has soared and GDP has stumbled, companies have been minting money. Tons of it. The Shaw Group, an engineering firm that makes things like nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia, trades at about $32 a share and has $19 per share in cash. It would be as if you owned outright a $500,000 home and had $300,000 in the bank. That is the case for most companies. Their position is almost the opposite of governments' and consumers': lots of growth, little debt and mounds of money.

They have amassed that hoard of cash, and are now growing on average 20% a year, at a time when the economies of Europe, the U.S. and Japan are flat. But you'd never know that from the continued drumbeat about how markets reflect economies. Every time Apple unveils a new product and millions rush to buy it, we should pause for a moment and wonder which jobs report — the one released by the U.S. government every month or the Steve Jobs report on Apple's health — tells us more about the world.

As companies report their earnings for the second quarter of 2010, it will be harder than ever to escape the fact that corporations now inhabit their own thriving economy, unencumbered by many of the ills of nation-states. That may be exhilarating (if you're an investor) or troubling (if you're a citizen), but either way, it's time to let go of the false belief that as goes the economy, so go companies and their stocks.

Tony Robbins Kissed My Hand and I Liked It

By JOEL STEIN Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Illustration by John Ueland for TIME

I did not go to meet Tony Robbins, the motivational speaker famous for infomercials in which he commands people to "unleash the power within," to mock him. I figured that part would just come naturally. And I was not too worried about Robbins converting me to his system of optimism and self-worth. Robbins may have 33 years' experience speaking in front of 4 million people, but I have been successfully unmotivated for 39 years.

What I didn't realize is that Robbins likes to give people assignments — impossible tasks like getting a quadriplegic shut-in to skydive on his upcoming NBC reality show, Breakthrough with Tony Robbins. And while he never explicitly said so, it was clear by the end of our five hours together that he was issuing me the toughest assignment he'd ever given: to write a column about Tony Robbins without making fun of him.

Robbins approaches me in a whiz of enthusiastic glee; he has even more energy in person than he does on TV. "If I talked on TV the way that I do in real life, people would think I'm insane," he says. Robbins talks quickly and loudly, often cursing and sometimes crying, and he puts his 6-ft. 7-in. body right next to mine, touching my arms and chest. When telling a story about someone kissing someone else's hand, Robbins kisses my hand. Which motivates me to yank my hand back.

After hearing all about his show and his estate in Fiji, I ask Robbins to guide my life. He takes a page from my notebook, on which he draws his theory, LC=BP: happiness is when your life conditions are the same as your blueprint. After asking me a bunch of questions about what I'm proud of (my career, my involvement in my community ... O.K., just my career), we deduce that the things I value most are significance and variety. "I would say love is what you really want, but your strategy is to be significant to get people to love you," he says. Throughout, Robbins quotes a shocking number of articles I've written, which makes me feel very, very loved.

I am so enthralled by Robbins' figuring me out that I try to trick him into telling me another story about men kissing hands. I ask him how I can accept my imperfections, which seems easier than actually changing my life. To which he says, "Your model is not to accept," then asks, "What is it?"

"To judge," I say.

Robbins fist-bumps me hard, which takes me by surprise after the hand kiss. "That's why I said, 'Do I want to be interviewed by this guy today?'" he says. "'He's sarcastic. He judges.' I have a different job. It's to understand and help."

I point out that this sounds a lot like judging. But he argues no. "We need critics," he says.

I do not believe he thinks critics are as valuable as people who inspire quadriplegic shut-ins to have full lives. Mostly because they are not.

"No," he insists. "The model you have is hierarchical. Which is why you judge." Until that moment, I had assumed I judge people because otherwise there's nothing to do while pretending to listen to them.

At dinner, Robbins' hot wife Sage sits at a different table so Robbins can focus on me. Robbins is a major focuser. The vast majority of times I've had sex, I have not been this focused on. I ask him how I can become friends with the celebrities I meet, as he does; Robbins is tight with Bill Clinton, Anthony Hopkins, Andre Agassi and Quincy Jones. "I'm looking to understand and help them, which makes it easy to be a friend," he says. "But that's not your goal. There are only so many friends you can have." I think this is Tony Robbins' way of telling me he doesn't want to be my friend.

Next I ask Robbins how I can improve. This is one of many words he doesn't like. "Your opportunity is to be less judgmental of yourself. I can own myself. I don't have to lower someone else for me to be higher," he says. He argues that I'll be less critical of others if I stop believing that I lucked into a gig in which I seem funny only because I'm in the world's least funny magazine without the word science in the title.

Before I leave him, Robbins says — no doubt touching me somewhere — "Whatever you write, I'll still like you. And I'm sure you'll test me." But even though I have about 20 solid Tony Robbins jokes ready to go, it turns out I don't want to make fun of him. Not because I want him to be my friend but because I want to be my own friend. God, I hope this wears off soon.

NATION

Stopping The Oil Spill

By Bryan Walsh / New Orleans Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Workers in the control room of Development Driller II drive the rig as it works on relief wells in the Gulf of Mexico Stephen Wilkes for TIME

How do you stop an oil spill that is the result of offshore drilling gone awry? As it turns out, you drill some more. A couple of weeks after the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, creating the worst oil spill in U.S. history, BP began drilling a relief well — a parallel pathway to the oil reservoir deep beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico — that will eventually intersect with the original well. (At the insistence of U.S. officials, the company began drilling a backup relief well later in May.) When the linkup is made, BP will be able to pour mud and then concrete into the original well, finally cutting off the flow of oil for good.

While BP and the government have struggled during the past three months over attempts to temporarily stop the spill — top hats, containment domes, top kills, junk shots — the relief wells have made quiet and steady progress. The drilling begins vertically, pushing down some 10,000 ft. below the surface of the Gulf. That's the easy part. Then the drill's path has to curve into the original well. The companies involved use sophisticated sensors to determine the correct angle of the hole, steadily threading the drill toward the blown well. Magnetometers in the drill help guide the way. They can detect the electromagnetic field created by an electric current that runs down the original well's casing. As of July 20, the main relief well was less than 5 ft. from its target: the original well's 7-in.-diameter steel casing, more than 3 miles below the surface of the water. "We're absolutely perfectly positioned," said BP senior vice president Kent Wells, who is leading the effort.

Of course, little in the spill response has gone as planned, though so far BP's latest containment cap seems able to stanch the flow of oil without damaging the sensitive wellbore. But even if the cap remains sealed, the only way to ensure that the well never bleeds again is to finish the relief drilling, which could be done by the end of the month. "The relief well," said retired Coast Guard admiral Thad W. Allen, in a July 16 briefing, "is the final solution." It's about time.

On Board the Rig Drilling the Relief Well

Rig Control Room After the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, BP began to drill two relief wells — parallel pathways to the oil reservoir beneath the floor of the Gulf of Mexico — that will eventually intersect with the original well. In this photo, workers in the control room on one of the platforms drive the rig as it works.

Ships of the Spill

The platform (far right, with flame) is supported by numerous craft, including the Discoverer Enterprise (center, with the tall tower), which was the first ship to collect oil from a cap placed over the well; the Helix Producer (near right, with green helicopter landing pad), a containment ship that is on hold while the well remains capped; and a small flotilla of ships that operate remote-operated vehicles, the underwater robots that carry out procedures on the wellhead.

On Board the Rig The drilling begins vertically, pushing down some 10,000 ft. (3,000 m) below the surface of the Gulf. Then the drill's path has to curve into the original well.

High Rise The task presents an extraordinary challenge: the drill must strike a tiny target more than 3 miles (5 km) beneath the surface of the ocean. As of July 20, the main relief well was less than 5 ft. (1.5 m) from its goal. "We're absolutely perfectly positioned," says BP vice president Kent Wells, who is leading the effort.

Fireman When the linkup is made, BP will be able to pour mud and then concrete into the original well, finally cutting off the flow of oil for good.

Protected The rigs are located about 40 miles (65 km) off the southeast Louisiana coast — a 75-min. helicopter ride from Houma, La., where booms protect the marshland, above.

Thick Even after the spill is permanently stopped, a vast amount of cleanup work in the affected areas of the Gulf will remain to be done.

Can Jerry Comeback?

Brown

Make

One

More

By Karl Taro Greenfeld Saturday, Jul. 24, 2010

Jerry Brown, speaks to a small crowd at the Nokia Theater in June.

Jerry brown, weedy thin in white-collared shirt and gray slacks, silver hair shorn so scalp gleams in fluorescent light, sits by himself in the far right corner of a vast converted garage in downtown Oakland.

He looks tiny here, a solitary figure silhouetted against a brick wall, his head bobbing as he eats almonds from a jar. Rows of bookcases bulge with volumes (novels, philosophy, history); phones in a pile wait to be plugged in; computers wait to be booted—the tools of a campaign just now getting going. ("Do people still use copy machines," he asks at one point, "or do they just print everything?") Then you hear his voice, the familiar staccato honk, the rapid cadence, the insistent tone. ("What, you want more? I answered you.

I told you. I'll tell you again until you understand.")

How do you want us to tell the Jerry Brown story? As a comeback tale? A mystery? A quest? A love story?

A little-guy-makes-good story? He is all of them, the comeback kid at 72, the former two-term Democratic governor and three-time presidential candidate who fell from grace, searched for spirituality, found love and worked his way up from two-term mayor of Oakland (1998 to 2006) to current state attorney general to, possibly, if he can get those phones hooked up and empty desks staffed, governor again. He is a one-man political dynasty (scion of an actual dynasty, since his father Edmund "Pat" Brown was also governor), begetting yet another reborn version of himself, wiser, more empathetic, more effective, though he will argue that is a conundrum. "If I say I've learned anything, then it means I didn't know anything before. If I say I didn't learn anything, then I'm not learning anything." In this dark season of deficits and crises and panic and electorate revulsion at Sacramento gridlock—a version that makes Washington look positively efficient—he claims to be, all conundrums aside, —exactly who California needs.

Much has been made of California's crisis, of schools underfunded (some schools ended classes a week earlier than scheduled because of the budget shortfall), prisons overcrowded, highways rutted, water polluted, businesses fleeing, house prices still collapsing, and the sense of crisis is omnipresent, from the potholes that jar you as you drive down I-880 to get to Brown's garage to the foreclosed properties that surround the charter schools he founded. Yet the ideas floated to fix the state by Republican candidate Meg Whitman are blandishments that sound good—yes, we should focus on jobs, schools and making government more efficient—but that Brown will tell you are consultant-conceived generalities. He is quick to contrast himself with Whitman, pointing out every instance where her theories crumble against the realities of actually governing. "I've done this," he explains. "I've been in government and overseen

thousands of businesses. I've run charter schools. Those are businesses. She ran her ... her website.

[Whitman was the first CEO of eBay, one of the most successful Internet companies in history.] That's one business. She can say whatever she wants. But if you have never worked in government, with civil service, collective bargaining, local activists, public records, public exposure, the meetings, you don't know. It's a different world. That's like someone who's never dove in a river and says, I know what swimming in a river is like."

Brown is reacting to the Whitman campaign's hard sell—her TV ads are inescapable in California—that business-savvy Whitman is a red-tape-cutting pragmatist who knows "how to balance a budget." In conversations, she casts Brown as the ultimate apparatchik, "100% beholden to the special interests," she told me a few weeks before winning the Republican primary. Yet Californians have heard this pitch from a supposed outsider before, and now Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger enjoys approval ratings as low as Gray Davis' when he was recalled.

The contrast in styles between the two campaigns is striking. Whitman has employed, at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars a week, dozens of the top political consultants in California and has already gone through an estimated $91 million of her billion-dollar fortune. Brown had spent approximately $400,000 by the time he won his largely uncontested June 8 Democratic primary. Whitman is rarely unaccompanied by one of her consultants, who also sit in on interviews. She is relentlessly on message (she seldom strays far from these three points: schools, jobs, budget), yet the conversation is muted, and even after meeting her, one leaves with little sense of who she is. The latest Rasmussen poll has Whitman leading among likely voters, 47% to 46%.

Brown, standing here alone in his converted garage, is unhappy with talk of generalities and will perk up only when he can get specific. Education? He puts down his almonds, goes back to the desk and returns with a thick binder outlining California's application for the national Race to the Top program, an initiative in which states demonstrating excellence qualify for additional federal education money. "Here, look," he says. "Here is an example of the problem, a specific example." He points to where California is proposing to "create an assessment item bank advisory board," what Brown calls "a whole new layer of bureaucracy," which will advise "the data systems steering committee" of this bank that aggregates test scores, teacher assessments and school performance. The layers of bureaucracy infuriate Brown. "Who are these people? These are people who advise people who collect data somewhere. We need more accountability, not less ... We need great teachers. We need fewer testing hours, with faster results. Kids now are taking state tests in April, May. They're getting the results six months later. Who does that help?

It's just testing for the sake of testing." I ask him if this sort of impatience with the self-perpetuating nature of bureaucracy is something that he has developed since serving as mayor of Oakland and attorney general. "You're trying to fit me into this procrustean notion that you have of me. You're trying to say that I've changed. Well, yes, people change. I've changed, but the ideas have been consistent. But I've learned, O.K.? Does that make you happy? I've learned."

He was never as eccentric as his governor Moonbeam reputation would suggest. He was a budget hawk before that term was fashionable: he rejected the governor's mansion to live in a Sacramento apartment, was chauffeured in a Plymouth Galaxy instead of a limousine and declined his own pay raises. Yet what he was as a callow 30-something governor, he will admit, was good-hearted, smart and earnest but naive.

His ideas were the right ones, he believes, but he didn't know what he knows now about business and

people and real lives, what it is like, for example, to try to renovate a building in Oakland—he did several—and deal with stringent environmental regulations that can delay a project for years. He can list dozens of experiences as mayor, from rushing downstairs from his apartment at 27th Street and Telegraph Avenue because a man had been shot to starting up his beloved charter schools. "Five hundred kids, raising millions of dollars, staffing, finding good people, all this while there are guys selling drugs on the corner. That's what I mean. This is real-world stuff. Concrete. Concrete!"

His wife Anne Gust, a former corporate lawyer who now works on the campaign, says Brown's reputation as a bit spacey—the Dead Kennedys sang about him in 1979 as the governor whose "aura smiles and never frowns"—was undeserved and based more on lifestyle. He was shacking up back then with pop star Linda Ronstadt and practiced, as he still does, Zen meditation. "That was all a bit overstated. He was very focused on the environment, the budget. He knew that budget inside and out, to the point where it drove people crazy. And he never raised [income or property] taxes," Gust says. "But he's also someone who has learned from his mistakes. He's different than he was 30 years ago. Who isn't?"

He still runs three miles every day and tries to make it to the gym every other day. He no longer meditates daily, however. "I should," he admits, "but I don't. But I do have a meditation room I built in my house." The biggest difference may be Gust. They met in 1990, when she was defending the California Democratic Party from a lawsuit. Brown was in his first postgubernatorial political job, as state party chairman. The two dated for 15 years before marrying in 2005, a union that Gust laughingly describes as "well, a bit exhausting ... He's a handful. That's a polite way of putting it. There's not a lot boring with him."

She describes him as aggressively inquisitive. Remember his space-exploration promises during the '92 presidential campaign? A trip to the grocery store, Gust says, can turn into 20 minutes of Brown questioning a bewildered produce man about the history, origin and flavor of various strains of tomatoes.

"I see the grocery store as a chore, and he sees it as a learning opportunity."

It is a warm, sunny saturday in west Oakland, and families are sweltering on folding plastic chairs set up on an AstroTurf field at the Oakland Military Institute, a charter school of 600 students that Brown founded in 2001. He is this year's commencement speaker. In fact, he is every year's commencement speaker. He takes the microphone and almost shouts his praise and joy at the accomplishments of this class of low-income Hispanic, African-American and Asian-American kids, most of whom are headed for four-year colleges, a statistically unlikely outcome for this demographic from his community. "You know!

You know how hard we all fought to be here." Brown raises a million dollars a year for this school, and later, after commencement, when we are sitting down in the school secretary's office, beneath bookcases with binders marked "incidents" and "medication," Brown laments the state of education in California. "No one has a quick fix for the education system. They throw charter around like it's a magic bullet." (Whitman has said more charter schools will be part of her education plan.) He explains that in some parts of Oakland, you don't have the parental engagement to support the school and you can't raise the additional funds that so often make charter schools in wealthier communities successful. Brown brought in some of his classmates from St. Ignatius High School (now St. Ignatius College Preparatory), class of 1955, to help him make Oakland Military a reality. "You need great, engaged people who are willing to take this on. Just calling a school a charter school doesn't magically transform it."

Yet he is unwilling to make broad education proposals of his own. The Whitman campaign has been critical of Brown's vagueness on many of the issues, saying his policies are "the failed policies of the

past." Rather than lay out some sweeping vision, he studies specific issues—like tomatoes—and can come up with surprisingly non-doctrinaire positions. He supports the death penalty, for example, and as attorney general sided against gun-control advocates and often against consumer advocates. His terms as mayor have made him more vocally pro-business, and as attorney general, he says he cut $228 million from the state budget and eliminated 750 jobs. "You need to bring money in to drive criminals out," he says. This has resulted in a candidate who sounds far less tolerant of regulation and red tape than the Whitman campaign will likely portray him. While her campaign can seem like a factory of policy statements and charts and graphs illustrating what is going wrong, Brown, because he didn't face a primary challenge, has been able to float above the fray and only now is having to answer broader questions about topics like education. With just $20 million in the bank— a huge war chest in any other state but a pittance in California if you're running against a self-funded billionaire—he may have no choice but to hang fire over the summer. His allies will make up some of that spending gap. California Working Families, a coalition of liberal groups, is among the Democratic organizations that have already been on the airwaves with ads comparing Whitman to George W. Bush.

Brown walked into the Coffee Bean, where we are meeting alone, slipping on his jacket as he went, stopping for a moment at the glass display case before deciding he didn't want to order anything. The issue of billionaire candidates is one that angers Brown. "There is a pressure now to select superwealthy people as the people's representatives, and that is not a healthy development for democracy at all."

(Later, as I was transcribing the recording of our meeting, there was a loud banging that made his words harder to hear. I couldn't figure out what it was until I remembered that Brown had been pounding the table as he spoke.)

At one point, Brown shakes his head. "But you know what decides it? Who f____ up. Who says the wrong thing. Who insults someone. That will be the deciding factor ... I'm not one to stay on message.

Maybe not. But if I say something, you know I mean it. You know who it's coming from. That much hasn't changed."

He stands up. "O.K., O.K.? Is that enough?" He's got to run. He's got donors to see, money to raise and empty desks to fill.

The Unorthodox Political Career of Jerry Brown

Political Family The son of California Governor Edmund Gerald Brown Sr., who served from 1958 to 1966, Edmund Jr., known as Jerry, attended a seminary and worked at a prestigious Los Angeles law firm before pursuing a career in politics. He is pictured at left here with, from left, his mother Bernice, his father (known as Pat) and his sister Kathy.

Governor's Race

After holding office as California's secretary of state in 1970, Brown ran for the governorship in 1974. He quickly established his individual approach to politics. In an interview with TIME, he asked a reporter, "Is it a liberal program? Is it a conservative program? It's my program. I'm consistent with myself. I don't have to fit some predetermined mold."

Sworn In Despite low voter turnout, Brown prevailed in the November 1974 election over his Republican opponent, Houston I. Flournoy. On inauguration day, he substituted a simple prayer breakfast for the standard celebration of balls and parades.

Austerity Upon assuming office, Brown demonstrated a willingness to make personal sacrifices to demonstrate fiscal responsibility. He turned down a raise for himself and rejected the governor's Cadillac limousine in favor of a nondescript 1974 Plymouth Satellite from the state motor pool.

Campaign Again Even as he was serving as Governor, Brown aimed his sights higher, running for the U.S. presidency twice during his time in Sacramento (and once after leaving). In this photo, he campaigns in Los Angeles

during the 1976 primaries.

On the Bus In the 1976 race, Brown, seen here campaigning in Massachusetts, won several primaries but entered the contest too late to obtain enough delegates to win the party nomination.

Heart like a Wheel While serving as Governor, Brown was linked romantically to singer Linda Ronstadt, with whom he made

a headlines-grabbing trip to Africa in 1976, above.

Longhairs Brown poses with the rock band Journey in 1981. He was also welcomed onstage by the Eagles.

The 1992 Run Brown joins fellow Democratic presidential hopefuls at a debate in New Hampshire at the outset of the 1992 election season. They are, from left, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, Brown, Nebraska Senator Bob

Kerrey, former Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas and Arkansas Governor (and eventual winner) Bill Clinton.

Brown Today Currently California's attorney general, Brown will face Republican Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, in his bid to return to the governor's office.

Detroit's Hair Wars: Part Art, Part Trade, All Attitude

By MADISON GRAY Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

"Beautiful Butterfly" styled by Niecy Hayes, modeled

by Taja Hill, prep time 10 hours Peter Hapak for TIME

The audience in the Met Hotel's Grand Ballroom screams as the models take the stage. Their hair is perfectly — and outlandishly — teased and set. One woman's coiffure includes a birdcage made of woven-in braids. Another sports the legendary "hairy-copter" hairdo, which debuted in 1991, complete with a rotor that spins blades of flat-ironed hair.

This is not some eccentric reality show. This is Hair Wars, a 25-year-old Detroit tradition, this year featuring about 34 stylists and 300 models, that has become one of the premier hairstylist events in the U.S. The talent and exuberance on display takes the notion of an economically and psychologically depressed city, and turns it on its beautifully sculpted head. Hair salons are one of the few thriving businesses in Detroit, a hub of innovation in the $9 billion black-haircare industry, and Hair Wars can be a springboard to fame. One alum, "Weaven" Steven Noss, has styled such stars as Lady Gaga.

Noss understands why people spend days or even weeks working on fantasy designs for Hair Wars. "It gives stylists a break from being behind the chair and lets their creativity run wild," he says.

The show was started by promoter David Humphries, a.k.a. Hump the Grinder, as a way to get more people to clubs where he was deejaying. Back then, as now, men and women wanted to be sure they looked "fly" for nights on the town. That desire helped stylists make a living creating new — and ever wilder — hair designs.

"This is a city of aggressive people," says Humphries, taking a break from the show. "People here know how to hustle." Becoming a hairstylist is a good way to show their natural talent and, Humphries adds, to turn it into a six-figure salary.

"When I first saw the stage presentations, I knew I had to do something that would stand out," says Teddie "the Braid Artist" Nairobi, who began styling natural hair for military personnel while stationed with her husband in various parts of the world. She participated in her first Hair Wars in 1994 and over the years has showcased styles like 'the Oriental Goddess,' an ode to the Han Dynasty that included thigh-length locks and ribbons made of brightly colored hair, and 'the Future,' which featured a model wearing an outfit made of compact discs and a hairdo that consisted of braids piled high in an abstract sculpture. Her 'Spider Queen' design made it onto Ripley's Believe It or Not. "Now I'm considered a hair character."

Before long, Hair Wars outgrew night clubs and became so big it started booking space in hotels. For 13 years, the show also had a traveling component, and Humphries says he is waiting for the right TV deal to come along.

Other cities like Baltimore and Atlanta host hair trade events too, but nobody can touch Detroit's hair entertainment. "Detroit will set the trend," says Humphries. "Our stylists know they are original, and people follow them for years, saying 'What you got next?'"

Detroit's Hair Wars

Beautiful Butterfly Styled by Niecy Hayes, modeled by Taja Hill. Prep time: 10 hr.

Dominatrix / Pin-Up Styled by O'Kela Nevauex, modeled by Chenise Smith. Prep time: 3 hr.

The Hummer Styled by Little Willie, modeled by Sharv Bailey. Prep time: 1 day

Peacock Styled by Nakysha Nicole, modeled by Jasmine Kelley McBride. Prep time: 1 hr. 30 min.

Braided Mohawk Styled by Ms. Love, modeled by William. Prep time: 30 min.

Fun-House Clown Styled by Lucky Luq, modeled by Noriah McCann. Prep time: 1 hr.

Alice in Wonderland Styled by Teddie the Braid Artist, modeled by Denai Williams. Prep time: 7 hr. 30 min.

Oreo Confusion Styled by Teddie the Braid Artist, modeled by Candis Benford. Prep time: 8 hr.

Birdcage Styled by Niecy Hayes, modeled by Neshia Sutton. Prep time: 1 hr.

Rock-Star Wings Styled by Ali Dushuas, modeled by Dionte Thomas. Prep time: 2 hr.

Can't B Tamed Styled by Lucky Luq, modeled by Symone Bailey. Prep time: 45 min.

Exotica Styled by Stephanie Moye, modeled by Malaysia Johnson. Prep time: 3 hr. 30 min.

Newport Chic Styled by Kristina, modeled by Refina Varnado. Prep time: 3 hr.

Marilyn Monroe Styled by Nakysha Nicole, modeled by Alexcia Dunson. Prep time: 3 hr.

Hollywood Styled by De Derrick, modeled by Joselyn Barnes. Prep time: 30 min.

ana Styled by Stephanie Moye, modeled by Carmen Malloy. Prep time: 1 month

Asian Persuasion Styled by Kevin Carter, modeled by Shari Montville. Prep time: 2 hr.

WORLD

Soldiers Of Fortune

By HANNAH BEECH / PYIN U LWIN Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Ruling class Army cadets at ease in a juice bar in Pyin U Lwin, home to top military academies for training officers Reportage / Getty Images for TIME The weekend invasion begins with the click-clack of thumbtack-adorned shoes. For four hours, senior cadets from Burma's Defense Services Academy (DSA) and its sister technological institute march through the streets of Pyin U Lwin, briefcases in hand, maroon berets perched on proudly angled heads.

Most are preoccupied with securing the rations of daily life: soap, socks, kung fu DVDs. But even as the stern-faced students contribute to the local economy, shopkeepers whisper about the arrogance of kids who are indoctrinated to believe they are, as the massive English sign in front of the DSA campus proclaims, the "triumphant elite of the future." Even after the elections promised for later this year, Burma will remain one of the most militarized states in the world. No wonder the privileged young men striding through this central Burmese town expect nothing less than to one day rule their cowed nation.

At a juice bar in this agreeable former British hill station, I chat with a group of cadets hunched over glasses of strawberry milk. One baby-faced 20-year-old tells me his major is naval architecture and

shares his dreams of designing warships for a nation that boasts 450,000 soldiers and dedicates 21% of its spending to the military, according to lowball official statistics. Another student is focusing on hydroengineering; he plans to build dams, a lucrative new pursuit of Burma's military dictatorship, which sells energy to neighboring nations while leaving two-thirds of local households without access to electricity. Yet another narrow-shouldered cadet, who is studying nuclear chemistry, confides, "My specialty is uranium and plutonium studies." His chosen subject is particularly topical: the U.S. State Department has recently expressed concerns over a possible Burmese nuclear program.

Later, I wander into an Internet cafĂŠ packed with cadets waiting for the electricity to be restored so they can play World of Warcraft. I ask if they are skilled at the computer game. "Of course we are good," says an English-speaking nuclear-physics major, his tone factual, not boastful. "We are students at the DSA. We are very superior." A Burmese friend, who passed all the requirements for the DSA but was rejected at the last moment because he has flat feet, fills me in on the cadets' mentality. "The point of going to the DSA is so you can become a rich and powerful person," he says, relating the trajectory of a schoolmate who attended Burma's West Point. His childhood buddy is now a rising star at a northern regional command, which means he can profit from government timber and mining businesses. "He is rich. His parents are rich. His brothers and sisters are rich. His children will be rich," says my friend. "They don't worry about anything."

Burma may be one of the poorest and most isolated nations on earth, but an emerging elite--a burgeoning officer class, attendant business cronies and the coddled offspring of both groups--is only getting richer, more powerful and less accountable. Over the past few years, the Burmese economy has been transformed as the junta has auctioned off the nation's plentiful natural resources to the highest foreign bidder, Western sanctions notwithstanding. The influx of cash has been reserved for the razor-thin top stratum of Burmese society, whose ostentatious displays of wealth shock a citizenry struggling just to survive. "For a long time, as the regime ran the economy into the ground, there was a feeling that most everyone was growing poor equally," says Sean Turnell, an economist at Macquarie University in Sydney who studies Burma. "But now you see a small elite growing immeasurably richer while others are getting poorer."

Western sanctions were supposed to choke off Burma's military regime, which has ruled since 1962 and turned what was once one of Asia's rice bowls into a byword for backwardness. Former First Lady Laura Bush made a rare venture into foreign policy when she argued for the need to strengthen U.S. economic penalties against the regime and its cronies. But high-minded principles have meant little as countries like China have used the Western absence in Burma to their economic advantage. The West's helplessness was only underlined when burgundy-robed monks took to Burmese streets in 2007 to march for universal values: freedom, democracy, food to fill bellies. The junta responded with machine-gun fire. Burma's populace is cowed still, and the nation's elite has taken the opportunity to pillage the economy with ever more abandon.

Poor Little Rich Country Burma is no tropical North Korea. Amid the crumbling colonial buildings, Rangoon, the country's largest city, boasts glittering nightclubs, day spas and even espresso bars. In fact, because of mushrooming foreign direct investment (FDI) in the country's natural bounty--in 2009, 100% of implemented FDI went

into resource extraction--the government has more than $5 billion in foreign-currency reserves at its disposal, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The revenue from natural gas, oil, timber, gems and other commodities hasn't been used for the betterment of the Burmese. Instead, over the past two decades, the regime has doubled the number of soldiers in the Tatmadaw, as the Burmese armed forces are called. Billions are spent on massive vanity projects. Five years ago, the country's military rulers built a sprawling new capital out of scrubland. Tens of thousands of people were forced to move there, while Rangoon remains as densely populated as ever.

On the outskirts of Pyin U Lwin, another costly megaproject is materializing: a cybercity whose vastness belies the fact that Burma is one of the least wired nations on earth. In the big cities and beyond, construction crews are busy outfitting Burma's upper classes with marble-lined mansions, fancy vacation homes and towering Buddhist pagodas chiseled with the names of generals and their cronies.

The building boom has surged, even as at least a third of the nation lives on less than $15 a month. On the recently built highway from Rangoon to Naypyidaw, the new capital, I meet a 15-year-old girl who spends her days in the 110째F heat carrying chunks of rock on her head. She has been working on this road since she was 11. Her daily pay: $1.50. But she dreams of one day reaching the end of her road. "I have heard that Naypyidaw has so much electricity that nighttime looks like day," she says. "Can you imagine such a beautiful place?"

Following the Money By rights, Burma's poor should expect things to get better: for the first time in two decades, a general election is scheduled for later this year--though the regime has not bothered to say exactly when polling will take place. But rather than raise hopes of democracy and reform, the run-up to the polls has sparked a scramble among the elite to strengthen their hold on the nation's wealth and power. The junta ignored the results of Burma's 1990 polls, in which the military's proxy party lost badly to Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy. (She remains under house arrest.) This time, top posts like the presidency and key Cabinet seats, as well as a big chunk of parliament, will be reserved for military members. But to maintain the appearance of a transition to civilian government, the junta has in recent months privatized dozens of state-owned (read: military-owned) companies.

Auctioning off these enterprises creates cash to fund the military's proxy Union Solidarity Development Party in the upcoming polls. Control of factories and banks, gas stations and ruby mines has been handed over, without exception, to a select circle of military progeny and favored businessmen. These cronies burnish ties with the junta through directorships, donations and even marriages. "The problem with this system is that these robber barons aren't creating an environment for sustained growth or the building of industry," says economist Turnell. "It's just pure racketeering."

I see how wealthy the Burmese elite have become when I tour the Mindhama Residences, a new housing development in Rangoon: the mansions start at $850,000 and go up to $1.2 million, not counting interior decor. All but one have been sold--this in a nation where per capita GDP is just $442, according to the IMF. Might I be interested in the remaining one? The agent allows me to gawk at the splendor: swirls of gilt and meters of marble, Jacuzzi bathtubs, crystal chandeliers. I ask who have bought the other

houses. "Some businessmen," he says. "But mostly ..." He trails off, then taps his fingers to his shoulders, the Burmese code for army stripes.

Hardwired The red sign blocking the main entrance to the half-built Yadanabon Cybercity advertises menace: "This area is under military order 144," it says in Burmese. "Shoot to capture." It's a measure of Burma's peculiar mix of isolationist paranoia and technological ambition that its future Silicon Valley has been declared a military zone inaccessible to civilians. Inside the 10,000-acre construction site, I drive along empty stretches of tarmac, past plots of land that will soon boast offices for Burma's biggest crony companies. Thai, Malaysian, Russian and Chinese firms have staked their ground too. State media report that foreign companies have so far invested $22 million in the first phase of Yadanabon.

Ever since images of protesting monks were leaked from Burma during the soon-to-be-crushed demonstrations of 2007, the regime has been scrambling to centralize control over the Internet.

Thousands of websites have been blocked, cyberdissidents jailed and debilitating strikes launched against exile-media websites. Yadanabon will be the nerve center of Burma's Internet operations.

Near one construction site, a farmer toils on a sliver of land that has belonged to her family for at least three generations. Soon the cybercity will eat up this tiny plot too. The woman doesn't expect any compensation, since she received nothing when the rest of her fields were confiscated a year ago. "We are little people, so we cannot complain," she says. "All we can do is concentrate on feeding ourselves."

The man entrusted to oversee Yadanabon is not a businessman. But being the grandson of junta leader Than Shwe brings perks. A scrawny soccer fan with no discernible skills on the pitch, Nay Shwe Thway Aung was once added to the Burmese national team when prominent Japanese player Hidetoshi Nakata went to Rangoon for an exhibition match. Other privileged Burmese youths have made an impression off the field. The most notorious among them was an informal collective of military offspring called Scorpion, which was forced to disband after two members spooked the junta's No. 2, General Maung Aye, by riding up to his car on motorcycles and making menacing gestures. Maung Aye responded by outlawing most motorcycles in Rangoon, a ban that holds today.

Even beyond Scorpion, there are plenty of other rich kids roaming Rangoon. At the packed JJ nightclub--where the bidding at "model shows," as prostitute auctions are called, reaches $2,500 for a comely maiden--one manager complains about the impunity with which military officers and their sons operate. "They drink for free and can pick girls for free," he says. "Nobody dares say no. Otherwise we will be finished."

Inside Burma

LETTERS

Inbox Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Singletons on the Rise I was surprised that in "One and Done," Lauren Sandler barely mentioned the absence of siblings, brushing off the topic with a comment about "not necessarily missing what I don't have" [July 19]. As one of five siblings, I find it hard to imagine not having the range of emotions and experiences my brothers and sisters brought to bear on my existence. I look forward to having them around to remind me of where I came from, long after my parents are gone.

Phil Dailing, WOODSTOCK, ILL. Thank you, TIME! I'm a parent of an only child, and I am so tired of hearing comments like "Oh, he must be lonely." I had a very difficult pregnancy and am so blessed to have my son. We are able to provide for his every need and give him our undivided attention, and we don't have to deal with sibling issues. (My husband and I both have siblings.) People choose to have one child for a variety of reasons; the choice should be respected. Do you go up to the woman with four kids and say, "Geez, when will you start using birth control?"

Andrea Lerum, DEFOREST, WIS. What supermarket is Sandler shopping at? I am a supermarket cashier and union member. We do not earn minimum wage. We earn a little better than $20 an hour.

Kim Green, ALAMEDA, CALIF. Though Elvis Presley did grow up an only child, his situation differed from typical onlies in that he had a twin who was stillborn after his birth. His brother's death haunted him throughout his life.

David Meyer, ANN ARBOR, MICH. I will quickly tell you the strengths of my big family: the camaraderie, the give and take, the lifelong friendships. But I will also tell you the challenges: the chaos, the paucity of alone time with each child, the hurdles to help each develop into a unique self. Sandler's piece would have benefited from acknowledging there are downsides to not having siblings and upsides to a full house.

Sarah Nielsen, WESTON, MASS. Take the U.S.A. Train As you suggest in "All Aboard?" faster trains are a great idea, but it will be hard to persuade Americans to get out of their cars as long as driving is subsidized [July 19]. We give tax breaks to oil companies and build roads with taxes. If we eliminate car subsidies, fast trains will fly.

Charles E. Wilson, WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. Michael Grunwald makes the antiautomobile bias of his article clear at the outset with the question "Is a car-crazed nation ready to add rails to the mix?" The nation is not car-crazed. A strong, fact-based case can be made that for most personal trips, the private car is the best choice. Cars are most often the cheapest, least time-consuming, most flexible and, with point-to-point specificity, most practical form of transportation.

William Bowen, SALT LAKE CITY I look forward to the time when our country once again has modern and extensive rail service to rival the deteriorating air age.

Roger F. Moran, HOBE SOUND, FLA. Beyond the World Cup Your column on Africa's future captured the zeitgeist of this place without shying away from the realities [July 19]. I am a graduate student, and through living here I am constantly inspired to have hope for the future and joy in the human spirit.

Lisa Kane, CAPE TOWN Signs of Suffering Thank you for your article on hoarding [July 19]. It is something that many people do not understand unless they or someone they live with struggles with it. My 9-year-old daughter has hoarding issues and other symptoms that were brought on, we discovered, by two recurrent strep infections. She was diagnosed with the little-known PANDAS (pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with strep), and with antibiotics, she is struggling to recover.

Danielle Jackson, LEXINGTON, MASS. We hoarders outsource our memories to our souvenirs. If we had better recall, we would not have to hoard. Take our stuff away and you take away our lives.

Donald A. Windsor, NORWICH, N.Y. Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts or samples before recycling

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Magic Kingdom

By Richard Corliss / Orlando Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Park visitors can enjoy a mug of sweet, nonalcoholic Butterbeer Chip Litherland One reason so many wizards wanted to get rid of Albus Dumbledore was that he was soft on Muggles.

Now he's gone too far: the headmaster has let those decidedly unmagical humans into Hogwarts. Tens of thousands a day swarm through the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a 20-acre (8 hectare) swatch of Universal's Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando, Fla. Beneath the looming redoubt of Hogwarts School, these undocumented aliens clog the quaint main street of Hogsmeade, buying Sneakoscopes and Fanged Flyers at Zonko's Joke Shop, mailing postcards (with special Potter stamps) from the Owlery, posing for a photo in front of the Hogwarts Express, slurping Butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks restaurant. Why, the clerk of the Hogsmeade branch of Ollivander's is bestowing holly wands on Muggle children. The whole spectacle is enough to turn a pureblood's stomach. Somebody alert the Ministry of Magic! Page Lucius Malfoy! This may require the attention of ... You-Know-Who. The visitors are all votaries of J.K. Rowling's seven Potter novels, which have sold more than 400 million copies worldwide, and the six movies the books have so far spawned, which have earned nearly $5.5 billion in theaters and quillions more on DVD. Universal has spent a reported $265 million (or about the production cost of the sixth film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) to concoct a grand, obsessively accurate replica of Rowling's vision.

The author made sure of that. Rowling had final approval on all aspects of the Wizarding World. From her home in Scotland, she signed off on the design, rides and some 600 pieces of merchandise, most of them unique to the park. Her involvement helped induce many of the films' stars — including Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Emma Watson (Hermione) and Rupert Grint (Ron) — and artists (designers Stuart Craig and Alan Gilmore) to work with Universal's park sorcerers, Mark Woodbury and Thierry Coup.

Rowling may hope to transform Muggles into wizards. Universal's goal is to turn the Potter legions' ardor into a major magnet for the company's two Florida theme parks and three hotels.

The great age of theme-park creation in the Sunshine State spanned a decade, from Disney-MGM Studios in 1989 to Islands of Adventure in 1999, with Universal Studios Florida and Animal Kingdom in between. The four parks, along with Disney's existing Magic Kingdom and Epcot, consolidated the Orlando area's status as a top vacation destination. This millennium has seen less expansion: a new attraction here (Universal Studios' the Simpsons, the funniest, best-scripted ride ever), a fireworks display there (the entrancing Wishes at the Magic Kingdom). The Great Recession took a big bite out of family-vacation budgets — attendance at Universal's Florida parks dropped about 10% last year — and stifled the ambition to build. Even the Wizarding World is just a new section of an existing park.

World of Wonder But what's here is choice. Unlike the candy-colored palette of any Disney park, black, gray and white are the dominant shades at the Wizarding World: the daunting slate of Hogwarts, the subtly ornamented shops, all capped by the rooftops' perpetual snow, which in the oppressive summer heat serves as both a daydream and a taunt to sweltering guests. Cute, or Disney's robust American form of it, is out. Quaint, British-style, is in. The Wizarding World is a bit like Stratford-upon-Avon, except that Rowling, not Shakespeare, is the presiding genius. And you don't walk into the house she once lived in; you experience the dream she created.

Parks need rides, and the Wizarding World has three — two borrowed from the Lost Continent, a part of Islands of Adventure that Universal foreclosed on to make room for Harry. One is the Dragon Challenge, formerly Dueling Dragons: a coaster ride on twin tracks that sends the two speeding trains into 360-degree orbit and occasionally within 18 in. (46 cm) of each other. It's been adapted into a race from the Triwizard Tournament in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, with the tracks renamed Hungarian Horntail and Chinese Fireball and the preshow area decorated with the Goblet, the Triwizard Cup and other Potter totems. The Flight of the Hippogriff (previously the Flying Unicorn) is a more sedate ride showcasing one of Hagrid's favorite magical creatures. At one point, an animatronic hippogriff bows to you. Bow back.

The big new attraction is Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, which blends the scenic vistas of Disney's wondrous Soarin' ride with the jolting narrative adventure of Universal's Spider-Man. Strapped into your broomstick pod, you are led by Harry, Ron and Hermione on a forbidden journey (remember, you're a Muggle) skyward out of Hogwarts, observing a Quidditch match, eluding the grasp of a cranky Whomping Willow and practically getting heatstroke from a fire-spuming dragon. It's an impressive, harrowing, high-octane trek — not for the little ones.

But take them anyway so they can enjoy the splendid preshow. (They stay in a waiting room while you're on the ride.) As the line snakes through the "Gryffindor common room," wizards in wall frames chat cattily about you; a holographic Dumbledore — the great Michael Gambon — explains the school rules; and Harry, Ron and Hermione appear to invite you on the journey. Postride, you exit through Filch's Emporium of Confiscated Goods, which sells many of the books' gadgets, from Death Eater masks to the coveted Golden Snitch. Then stop for a meal at the Three Broomsticks, with traditional English food like fish and chips and Cornish pasties (of high quality for a theme-park eatery) and the Hogsmeade-exclusive Butterbeer — basically cream soda with a secret foam topping, and delicious.

No question, the Wizarding World is a hit. That's clear from all the blogs grousing about the hours visitors can spend waiting to get on a ride or even to be admitted into Potterland. Some of the shops are so small that crowds often must line up outside just to buy stuff. (Guests staying at Universal hotels get into the park an hour before the official opening. Or you can just wait for an off-peak month in the fall.)

But even if you don't have time for the Forbidden Journey, you can get the full Potter experience just walking around, admiring the evocative precision of the decor, immersing yourself in Hogsmeade. Here, as at Disney, the park is the ride. And the Wizarding World is one fabulous trip.

Exclusive: The Harry Potter Theme Park

Re-Creation The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, including Hogwarts Castle, is set to open on June 18, 2010.

Brought to Life A Hogwarts Express conductor welcomes guests. Universal has re-created several of the places featured in the Harry Potter series, including the shops Dervish and Banges, Honeydukes and Ollivander's Wand Shop.

Almost Ready Rides include the Dragon Challenge, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, and the Flight of the Hippogriff, above. A limited number of guests were allowed to visit the attraction before its grand opening.

Refreshment Bartender Maria Torres serves up ice-cold butterbeer, one of Harry's favorites.

It's Magic Mason Webb, 9, of Preston, England, receives a wand at Ollivander's.

Dark Wizard?

Jake Webster, 12, tries out Voldemort's wand at the Owl Post Office. Jake and his family traveled from Florence, S.C., to visit the attraction.

Diagon Alley Guests wander past shops in the attraction.

House Colors Tess Barao, who traveled from Toronto to visit the attraction, wears a Gryffindor robe.

Treat A chocolate frog for sale at Honeydukes.

Young fans Sam Myers, 7, left, brought his Harry Potter robe and glasses all the way from his home in England to visit the attraction, while Kaitlyn Edly, 7, from Orange County, Florida, dressed up as a witch.

Photo Op Lee Hughes and Turner Campbel, both 12, pose with the girls of Beauxbatons Academy of Magic and the boys from the Durmstrang Institute.

All Smiles Two of the girls of Beauxbatons Academy pose for pictures.

Fierce Competitors The boys from the Durmstrang Institute welcome guests.

A Tough Read The Monster Book of Monsters sits in a cage at Dervish and Banges.

Lightning Bolt Chocolate-covered Rice Krispies treats shaped like the hero's scar are offered for sale at Honeydukes.

Fun, Fun, Fun Lena and Mike Czernec enjoy a butterbeer after buying some souvenirs, including a wand and a Firebolt broom.

Angelina Jolie: Worth Her Salt

By RICHARD CORLISS Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Superspy Jolie on the run K.C. Bailey / Columbia Pictures

To prove you're worth your salt as an international spy (thriller-movie division), all you have to do is: create a stink-bomb bazooka out of ordinary office fixtures; walk barefoot out of a locked-down CIA office where a platoon of feds has you cornered; use window-ledge terpsichore to escape from your high-rise apartment (with a backpack full of artillery, disguises and your spouse's poisonous spider); blast your manacled way out of a police car using a Taser; jump off a highway bridge onto the top of a speeding semi, then onto another truck in the next lane; wear disguises that involve changing your hair color and, at least once, your sex; and all the while, look faaabulous.

A male action drama can be handed to any guy who looks fit enough to do a chin-up. (I mean, honestly: Ashton Kutcher in Killers?) The female action genre: that's pretty much Angelina Jolie. With her slim, voluptuous body, her Easter Island-idol facial features and that smoldering I-dare-you look, Jolie is one of the few contemporary star actresses who doesn't seem locked in perpetual girlhood; she was born grown up, sure of herself and ready to rumble. That makes her perfect for ballsy ladies like tomb raider Lara Croft, the assassin in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (targeting her real-life beau Brad Pitt), the daredevil pilot in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the seductive witch-goddess of Beowulf and a secret-society supervixen — the definitive Jolie character — in Wanted. She's got what no other Hollywood woman even tries for, and which is embodied among recent international stars perhaps only by Hong Kong action star Michelle Yeoh: feminismo.

In Salt, her new medium-fun espionage caper, A. Jo takes a role originally written for Tom Cruise — he chose to make the jokier Knight and Day instead — and manages to ratchet up the testosterone level.

She's Evelyn Salt, a CIA operative who's endured torture by the North Koreans without blowing her cover.

Two years later, happily married to an arachnologist who doesn't know what she does for a living, Evelyn is fingered as a double agent by a Russian defector named Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski). Cue the dragnet, the frenetic chases and the pounding James Newton Howard score. Salt spends the rest of the movie on the run from her friendly boss (Liev Schreiber), a relentless G-man (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and nearly every federal, state and city cop in the Northeast corridor. And because in a spy movie the hero needs to be pursued by outlaws as well as lawmen, Evelyn also has to watch out for a nest of Slavic superkillers bred in the Soviet Union and planted in the U.S. to carry out an assassination plot targeting two world leaders.

Honoring the core premise of a bond or Bourne film — that the main character is bold and resourceful, everyone else is slow and stupid — screenwriter Kurt Wimmer (he did the thrillers Equilibrium and Law Abiding Citizen) gets the talky parts over early and creates a series of set pieces to be efficiently executed by Australian director Phillip Noyce, whose resume has alternated action stuff like Clear and Present Danger with more thoughtful political dramas: Rabbit Proof Fence, The Ugly American. No more a fan of facetiousness than Jolie is, Noyce keeps the tone serious; he ignores the story's preposterous elements and lets the audience decide whether to laugh, shudder or both — and whether to cheer Salt on when she is revealed to be a Cold-War Russian agent with a U.S. President in her sights.

Noyce's methods of crafting suspense are defiantly old-fashioned: low-angle shots for maximum viewer disorientation and a preference for daredevil stunt work over CGI cheating. The truck-jumping scenes recall similar acrobatics performed by Yeoh and Jackie Chan in the Police Story series from Hong Kong's golden age of action movies. (The game Jolie is said to have done many of her own stunts.) Some of the action work is even more venerable: Orlov overcomes two captors in an elevator with the old switchblade-in the-shoe-toe trick memorably used by Lotte Lenya as SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb in the

second Bond film, From Russia With Love. And since the movie is rated PG-13, it can't linger over the violent scenes. But they can still be jarring, as when Evelyn breaks a man's neck with a pair of handcuffs — a blow whose impact is more gruesome because it happens, it's over and Salt moves on to further mayhem.

Another item on the movie's nostalgia menu: choosing a nonexistent superpower, the former Soviet Union, as the collective antagonist. During his interrogation, Orlov lets the CIA in on a piece of alternate U.S. history: that the Lee Harvey Oswald who returned from the U.S.S.R. to America in 1962, with a Russian wife in tow, was actually a Soviet lookalike — and it's the lookalike who killed JFK. Pretty silly, eh?

A Russian who looks like an American, setting up a domestic life while building an undercover agenda...

Wait a minute. Maybe the plot isn't so silly. Think of Anna Chapman, the sexy New Yorker recently arrested and deported as part of a cell of Russian spies. Give "Agent 90-60-90" (her measurements in centimeters) a gun, a minidress and a charismatic pout, and you've got Salt.

Angelina Jolie must appreciate the connection. According to the New York Post, she and the filmmakers invited Chapman to this week's Moscow premiere of their movie. Only problem: they can't find her.

Maybe Chapman is on her latest mission, and in disguise. Look for a curvaceous guy with spiders.

Mad Men Returns, With the Rebirth of a Salesman Mad Men Returns, With the Rebirth of a Salesman

Draper (Hamm) moves on after his marriage ends Mike Yarish / AMC

Advertisers love to offer choice. More brands! More flavors! More ways to be the best you that you can be!

It's the American promise in consumable form: not just abundance but individuality, self-determination, liberation.

Yet the side effect of limitless choice is paralysis. At the beginning of Season 4 of Mad Men (AMC, Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.), Don Draper (Jon Hamm) has made a clean break with the past, having ended his marriage and started his own ad business. Successful and in his prime, he can remake himself

however he likes. But when we first see him, he's struggling to answer a simple question from an Advertising Age reporter: "Who is Don Draper?" He stares across the lunch table, blank, like a shopper boggling at 93 varieties of potato chip.

In the first three seasons of Mad Men — the Emmy-winning drama whose swellegant style and Cheeveresque writing has won it a passionate following — we learned who Don Draper was. Born Dick Whitman, a poor country kid from a loveless family, he enlisted and shipped out to Korea, where he took advantage of a freak accident to assume the identity of a dead comrade. He began a new life as an adman on Madison Avenue and a family man in suburban Ossining, N.Y., hiding his identity from his co-workers and even his wife Betty (January Jones).

But when Betty learned the truth last season, the lie — along with Don's serial skirt chasing — ended their marriage. Meanwhile, Don left his old ad agency to start his own shop with several colleagues.

In a way, Don has achieved what Dick Whitman wanted: his liberty. He works for himself. He's romantically unattached. He is free — in fact, expected — to relaunch his brand. But how? As whom?

Don extricates himself from the reporter's question by falling back on his earliest identity: "I'm from the Midwest," he says. "We were taught that it's not polite to talk about yourself."

Hamm has a face that could be engraved on a coin, but he shows the tension thrumming under Don's stoicism. The reporter, excusing himself from the table, stumbles on an artificial leg. He lost the limb in Korea, the war Don/Dick deserted unscathed.

The Past Is Always Present The idea that you can't escape the past is fitting for a show that details its era so acutely. Creator Matthew Weiner likes to (ahem) vigorously suggest that critics keep mum about the date that each season's action begins. (If you want to remain totally unspoiled, stop reading here.) Let's just say that since we left off near the end of 1963, a certain amount of time has elapsed — is that safe to say? — more than five minutes, less than a decade, enough to see the beginnings of change in the characters and the culture.

As usual, Weiner and company show these changes subtly, avoiding the hackneyed period cues of other '60s dramas. The color palette seems to have changed — in the advertising campaigns, in Don's new offices — brightening from its early modernist cool into saturated Kodachrome. There are no Beatles references, but the end of the premiere episode kicks in with the chords of "Tobacco Road," by British Invasion band the Nashville Teens — a clear but nonobvious signal that we've entered the rock years.

(The song's lyrics are more or less the life story of orphaned Dick Whitman: "Mama died and my daddy got drunk ... Gonna leave, get a job/ With the help and the grace from above.")

In Mad Men's privileged milieu, the era's other big change, in race relations, is evident only around the edges (a reference, over an expensive dinner, to the murder of civil rights workers in Mississippi). Gender equality is percolating at the office, but slowly. Sexual liberation is more prominent, but it's no party.

Somehow, Don's sex life as a free man is even sadder and guiltier — to the point of self-punishment — than his philandering was.

Meanwhile, Betty — a model turned housewife always torn between independence and security — has found freedom too, only to immediately land a new husband, Henry (Christopher Stanley). The new arrangement is a strain on the families of both spouses, as crystallized by an excruciating showdown with Betty's daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka) during a holiday dinner. Sometimes it seems the entire series is one long setup for Sally's inevitable therapy visits.

Which isn't to say the premiere is all angst. The script, written by Weiner, crackles with dark wit; when partner Roger Sterling (John Slattery) tries to brush off Don's bad interview with the one-legged journalist, he cracks, "They're so cheap, they can't even afford a whole reporter." And there's a buoyancy in the new offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce as the firm hustles to establish itself among larger competitors.

As Don tells a client reluctant to try a daring ad campaign, "You can be comfortable and dead or risky and possibly rich." The changes that have come to Mad Men can be discomfiting to watch. But they're rich with possibility.

Giving E-books a Spot on the Charts

By ANDREA SACHS Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Illustration by Mark Nerys Will 2010 be the year of the e-book? With Apple's iPad, Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook and a host of other e-devices now on the market, readers have more alternatives to old-fashioned paper and ink than ever. And as a result, digital sales are soaring: the Association of American Publishers reports that e-book sales jumped 207% in the first five months of this year, and on July 19, Amazon announced that it now sells more Kindle e-books than it does hardcover volumes.

But don't bother looking for your favorite e-title on a bestsellers list: With the exception of USA Today, national print lists don't track e-books or include their revenues in sales figures. With these digital downloads now accounting for more than 8% of the total consumer book market, though, that's going to start changing soon. "We're certainly looking at it really closely, and will find some way, I think, to inform

readers about e-book sales," says Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the influential New York Times Book Review. "But what kind of list it will be, at this point, is undecided."

The stakes are high for publishers and readers. There's no better sales gimmick than being able to slap the words "bestselling author" on an ad. Readers look to bestsellers lists to find out what's hot in the bookstore; with thousands of titles jostling for attention being No. 1 is just about the most important honorific a book can receive. And authors often get bonuses when their books make it onto the lists.

But as publications with bestseller lists try to figure out how to include e-books in their tallies, they have discovered that there are as many questions as there are titles. Should e-books have a list of their own?

If the same book comes in hardcover and digital form, should the sales figures be combined — even though e-books are much cheaper? Should the numerous free e-books, from small-market original titles such as All Tied Up: Pleasure Inn to public-domain standards like Pride and Prejudice — be included on the list at all? (For its part, USA Today rather unconventionally puts paid e-books, hardcovers and paperbacks — both fiction and nonfiction — on one list. "We've always wanted our list to very simply tell readers what the most popular titles are that week," says editor Anthony DeBarros.)

The biggest problem for media outlets is whether e-book sellers will be forthcoming with the needed numbers. While Amazon makes its book rankings public, it is reluctant to share figures on total unit sales or revenues. "In the digital world, led by Amazon, they are hypersensitive about sharing any data whatsoever," says Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly's co-editorial director. "Not that the book industry is great [in that regard]." Amazon, Apple and Google (which will publish e-books later this year), "like to control the way their data is portrayed," says Michael Cader, founder of the industry newsletter Publishers Lunch.

Amazon has created two of its own e-book bestseller lists, one for free e-books and one for paid ones.

The online retail giant divided the list into two after publishers complained that Amazon was unfairly giving an advantage to free e-books that weren't really on the market. (Sniffs Milliot, "It's not hard to give away things.")

More of that sort of cooperation from e-book sellers could go a long way toward resolving the issue. It's hardly as though adding e-books to print bestseller lists would violate some sacred science of record-keeping. Each publication has a unique alchemy for creating its list, with different bookstores reporting their sales by different means, often resulting in a wide variation in rankings from publication to publication. And experts say that excluding the new format leads to a distorted sense of what's popular with the public. Says Cader, "It's quite clear that the bestselling books in e-book format can move a lot of units in a week. There is a significant stream of data that's not being captured through standard industry sources." As Kindles, iPads and Nooks multiply, more listmakers may decide the time has come to end the digital divide.

The Short List of Things to Do WEEK OF JULY 23

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty Now in stores

Twelve years is more like 80 for video games, which makes

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1998

space

opera–strategy game one of the longest-awaited sequels ever. With mouthwatering graphics and improved single- and multiplayer modes, it could keep gamers busy for another decade or so.

Faithful Place Now in stores

At 19, Frank Mackey and his girlfriend plotted an escape from Faithful Place, the rough Dublin neighborhood where they grew up. But she never showed. Twenty-two years later, Frank, now a cop, finds out why in Tana French's hypnotic Hibernian noir.

Life During Wartime Now in theaters

Even people who do terrible things are worth trying to understand. Todd Solondz proved that in his 1998 family comedy-drama, Happiness, and does it again in this kind-of sequel with a different cast but just as daringly conceived and acted. This one's a must-see.

Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour Now in stores

Don't wait for the movie: the final book in Bryan Lee O'Malley's series of graphic novels about a Canadian slacker battling his girlfriend's "evil exes" is a tour de force of manic

cartooning,

emotional

loopy

revelations

comedy

and

disguised

as

video-game-style showdowns.

Red Hook Road Now in stores

A gorgeous young couple get married on a gorgeous summer afternoon in Maine. Later that day, they die in a car accident. Ayelet Waldman's novel charts the fallout between their two families — one rich, one not — with a moving mix of melodrama and intuition.

SOCIETY

Are Hyperlocal Newspapers?

News

Sites

Replacing

By GARY MOSKOWITZ Wednesday, Aug. 04, 2010

Illustration by Mr. Bingo for TIME

Correction Appended: July 22, 2010 All politics may be local, but apparently not enough journalism is. As newspapers keep cutting back on staff and printing skimpier editions, journalists, entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens have responded by creating websites to cover the local news they feel is going underreported — like the serious windstorm that hit Tracy Record's Seattle neighborhood in 2006. "Every day we break stories," says Record, the editor and primary reporter for West Seattle Blog, a site she and her husband created as an information hub after the storm. "In the past hour, I learned a major parks project is being delayed because of drainage trouble and just broke that on our site." She also covers car crashes, crime, council meetings, bake sales and walkathons for the 70,000 or so Seattle residents who live west of the Duwamish River.

"If they were able to get the local news they needed elsewhere, we wouldn't have wound up doing this," says Record.

Hyperlocal has become a buzzword as familiar to news junkies as eat local is to foodies. The idea is to get residents involved in the reporting not just by sending in tips but by writing content about important local issues such as school boards and transportation. In professional newsrooms, "we spend too much time on craft and not enough time on community," says Michele McLellan, a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri who spent the past year studying nearly 70 of the best hyperlocal sites. "Many of the new sites, even if they don't have the most polished reports, are flipping that: community first."

McLellan, who will present her findings in September at the Block by Block: Community News Summit 2010 in Chicago, concluded that 1 in 10 hyperlocal sites is producing "good" content, some good enough to give traditional journalism a run for its money — sometimes literally. After years of relying on donation drives to keep going, Record's West Seattle Blog made six figures in revenue last year before taxes; the same is expected for 2010.

Sensing the potential of niche news, the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit journalism organization, has given out roughly $20 million in grants since 2006 to help nurture the most promising sites. Last August, msnbc.com bought EveryBlock, which posts public records and news searchable by ZIP code in 16 cities.

And in March, AOL announced plans to invest up to $50 million in local initiatives like Patch, which provides community-specific news in 65 towns and expects to service hundreds more by the end of this year.

Megasites like EveryBlock are also pushing the boundaries of hyperlocal. EveryBlock runs individual community sites from its headquarters in Chicago and populates them mostly with publicly available data such as crime reports, building permits and restaurant inspections. "Many journalists would say good journalism is about good storytelling," says EveryBlock founder and former WashingtonPost.com editor Adrian Holovaty. "As much as I love a compelling story, I think good journalism can also be about organizing information in intelligent ways and giving people tools that let them help each other."

Databases vs. Shoe Leather Most hyperlocal sites don't have the budget for flashy graphics or searchable databases. Their content comes from observant neighbors (and local gadflies) who care about both large and small goings-on around town. Hyperlocal sites also frequently publish upbeat accounts of parades and high school sports, as well as information on which local vendors sell the best produce. Recent headlines on Record's site noted a "mega-low" tide and an upcoming garden tour.

Some traditional news organizations, in addition to partnering with hyperlocal sites and helping train their contributors, are creating their own local outlets. In 2009 the New York Times launched the Local, a project that involved two news sites, serving northern New Jersey and parts of Brooklyn, which were produced by residents and student journalists with oversight from Times staff. (The paper handed off its Jersey coverage to another hyperlocal site at the end of June; the Brooklyn site is now run by the City University of New York in partnership with the Times.) Next up for the Times is a collaboration with New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute to cover Manhattan's East Village. "Our goal is to support good journalism, be good partners to two of the leading journalism graduate schools in the country, and share information, ideas, resources and initiatives, with the goal of figuring out new relationships that will allow news organizations to extend their reach," says Mary Ann Giordano, the Times's deputy Metro editor, who oversees collaborative and hyper-local coverage. "The bonus is we also get to serve these two communities."

Record spent 30 years as a journalist, but it's her work on the West Seattle Blog — where she oversees (and pays) a handful of freelance contributors — that is earning her awards and teaching gigs. For two years, she has been teaching at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism training center in St. Petersburg, Fla. In May she was one of a dozen so-called digital entrepreneurs invited to participate in a News Entrepreneur Boot Camp at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she coached others on sustainable business models, revenue strategies and social-networking tactics.

But on a day-to-day basis, Record sits in her living room reinventing the role of an old-school newspaper editor. In June, when a "For sale" sign went up on a prominent, long-vacant building owned by the federal government, a devoted reader sent Record a quick e-mail with an attached photo. Record then went to

work reporting the story. "Not Woodward-Bernstein stuff," she says. "But this apartment building is now long abandoned, overgrown, boarded up, graffiti-vandalized, and thousands of people drive by it every week. They want to know what's happening with it. So this is a story, and we will continue to follow it."

The original version of this story said MSNBC bought EveryBlock. EveryBlock was bought by msnbc.com, a separate company from MSNBC. This story appeared in the August 2, 2010 issue of TIME Magazine.

A Watchdog in Their Pocket

By BONNIE ROCHMAN Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Danny Kim for TIME Mike Harris, a 52-year-old detective in Jefferson County, Colo., spends much of his time as a teenage girl.

Part of an Internet-investigations unit set up to ensnare sexual predators online, Harris hangs out undercover in chat rooms and on social-networking sites where predators might lurk. But in the past couple of years, he's noticed that the guys who proposition him quickly try to move the conversation off-line to cell-phone calls or text messages, under the assumption that such communications are harder to monitor.

These predators obviously haven't heard of My Mobile Watchdog (MMWD), a cell-phone surveillance service that can capture e-mails, texts and photos and store them online. Since Harris' office started using the service in 2008, it has caught more than 180 perps, including 42 so far this year.

Although there's no shortage of companies that monitor kids' activities online--check out Net Nanny, which recently added mobile monitoring, or CYBERsitter--MMWD is one of the only services that comprehensively tracks cell-phone usage. It's no niche market: at least 74% of U.S. teens carry cell phones, according to the Nielsen Co., as do more than 1 in 3 kids ages 8 to 12. The software is the brainchild of Bob Lotter, CEO of California-based mobile-technology company eAgency, who was

inspired to develop it after helping a friend investigate the case of an 11-year-old girl exposed to lewd photos and text messages from a 29-year-old she'd met at a water park. Lotter provides the service free to law-enforcement agencies; it's now being used in a dozen jurisdictions around the country.

Thousands of parents have registered for the service ($9.95 a month for up to five kids per family) since it became commercially available last year, in hopes of deterring predators, as well as cyberbullying and sexting. Anytime an unapproved person communicates with a child, the parent gets a copy of the message. A pending upgrade will allow it to work with more devices--MMWD is available only for smart phones--and let parents know who communicates most with their kids. (If the number of texts from your daughter's soccer coach suddenly balloons, for example, it could be cause for concern or at least curiosity.) "There just aren't enough police in the world to protect our children," says Lotter.

That's why Mychael Martin of Thornton, Colo., signed up her daughter Brityn Mykhail, 17, for the service.

Two years ago, Brityn was stalked by a 30-something man from Pittsburgh with whom she'd been texting; he sent her nude pictures and showed up at her school. Now Martin evangelizes about the software to anyone who'll listen. "I'm always like, You've got to get this on your phone," she says.

Not everyone's so gung-ho. MMWD is not spyware: the user receives a periodic message that the phone is being monitored, and there's nothing to prevent an angry teen from bypassing the software by using a friend's phone or buying a cheap, prepaid one on the sly. MMWD "has a very good upside," says Sharon Nelson, president of Sensei Enterprises, a Fairfax, Va., computer-forensics firm. "But it has a downside: the kid is going to hate it."

Sandwich Philanthropy

By Sean Gregory / Clayton Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Illustration by Tamara Shopsin for TIME

Customers who walk into the Saint Louis Bread Co. in Clayton, Mo., often stop, glance up at a sign and gape. Too many choices? Hardly. "We encourage those with the means to leave the requested amount or more if you're able," the sign reads. "And we encourage those with a real need to take a discount."

Huh? I'm about to buy lunch at a fairly upscale sandwich joint, and I can name my own price?

Two greeters are available to confirm my suspicions: at this establishment, you can pay what you want.

Panera Bread--the quick-serve soup-and-sandwich chain that owns Saint Louis Bread Co. and has 1,400 locations in 40 states--is experimenting with a nonprofit model in this St. Louis suburb. The hope is that enough generous customers will donate money above and beyond the menu's "requested amount" to subsidize discounted meals for those who really need a hand. It is a café kept afloat on the milk of human kindness.

Launched in May as a nonprofit, this corporatized version of the honor system has had surprisingly promising returns. "People are stepping up," says Ron Shaich, Panera's former CEO, who developed the idea and remains executive chairman of the board. In the café's first few weeks of operation, Shaich says, consumers are paying an average of 90% of the retail price, and total transactions are up 5% to 10%, keeping overall revenue flat. The nonprofit will use its net income to fund community programs.

Elsewhere, smaller cafés have offered "pay what you want" products, but if a big chain like Panera can pull it off, look for others to copy the model. Panera plans to open two more nonprofits by year's end; Detroit is one city being considered.

There will always be consumers who game the system. One college kid, Shaich recalls, ordered $40 worth of food and charged $3 on his father's credit card. ("I wanted to jump over the counter," Shaich says.) But the store has also served many families hit hard by the recession. One unemployed teacher, who struggles to feed his four kids, stops in weekly for a discounted snack. "Thank God for the Bread Company," he wrote in a letter to Panera.

Clayton, an affluent community, may seem an odd fit for this concept. But the strategy needs well-heeled residents who can splurge for soup so the store's lower-income customers--like the hundreds of government workers in Clayton, the St. Louis County seat--can take advantage of the deal.

The loudest critics of the plan so far are the Saint Louis Bread Co.'s neighbors. Marquitta Jones, the owner of the Clayton Diner next door, says her sales have dropped 40% since the nonprofit opened and that its pay-what-you-want policy is close to putting her out of business. "How do I compete with free?" she asks.

Panera says the nonprofit plan hasn't had much impact on mom-and-pop shops, noting that foot traffic at the store has increased only modestly. "It's a hand up, not a handout," says Shaich. "If enough people don't feel responsible, we're going to close." Panera is confident responsibility will reign.

PEOPLE

10 Questions for Jon Hamm Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Scott Council / Contour by Getty Images Is Mad Men really about men or about women? —Ellen Speicher, COLUMBUS, OHIO I'll give a lame answer: both. There are at least three phenomenal female characters on our show in Peggy, Joan and Betty. It's very much about how they are dealing with this world that these men nominally run. I don't think you can have a show about men that doesn't deal with women. But the overarching presences are the men.

Don can be a cad at times. What do you think are his redeeming qualities? —Sarah Fisher, SANTA MONICA, CALIF. You have to understand that Don is an incredibly damaged human being, had a terrible childhood. What he has accomplished, he has accomplished through the strength of his own will and his own ambition. I think that's what resonates throughout the show. It's a constant striving to be better. He fails, and he makes bad decisions. He's not a superhero by any stretch of the imagination.

Do you think Don would be as popular if he had to pay for his crimes, so to speak? —Jessica Jones, SYDNEY I think in many ways Don has had to pay for his crimes. Certainly not in the literal sense, but definitely karmically. His dishonesty with his family and with himself has come back to reap dividends, and not in a good way.

What qualities do you think men lack today that were present in those from the Mad Men era?

—Octavio de la Torre, PALMDALE, CALIF. There's a cordialness that men had when dealing with the opposite sex, even when they were being blatantly sexist. It's a weird conundrum. But that's been replaced with men treating women like absolute garbage and not even being polite about it, which is too bad.

What's your view on how the show has dealt with the racial and political issues of the '60s?

—Leonard Colvin, NORFOLK, VA. We've dealt with them in an honest way. I've read reviews that take us to task for not having more African Americans or dealing with gay issues or women's issues. And I think that criticism is fundamentally flawed because the show is not a travelogue through the '60s. It's about very specific people in a very specific place at a very specific time. That comes with warts and all.

You have twice hosted Saturday Night Live and guest-starred on 30 Rock. Which do you prefer — dramatic or comedic roles? —Janette Benson, DENVER They're both fun. Believe it or not, it is actually fun to do the hard, emotional, dramatic stuff too. It's part of why I like being an actor.

Has playing Don Draper influenced your personal style? —Lyse Garant, DOVER, N.J. I'm more conscious of what goes into dressing up. My personal style is not quite up to snuff with Mad Men. But the difference between a nice suit and a suit that isn't tailored to fit you is significant. It's very much a statement about a person who's ready to look like he's in control of a situation.

Are you concerned about becoming typecast as Don Draper? —Greg Jaghab, TAMPA, FLA. I think it's more of a concern of just being the guy in the suit in the period piece. It may be hard for other people — as the show becomes more popular — to see me and not see Don. But the challenge of being an actor is being able to create another persona and portray that accurately.

Are those real cigarettes you're smoking on camera? —Chris Hollenback, MADISON, WIS. ]They are not. They are a blend of some kind of herbs and spices that burn and look like real cigarettes.

But there's no nicotine or tar.

How do you get your hair to stay so perfectly coiffed on the show? I'm trying to replicate it on my husband. —Rian Curley, CAMARILLO, CALIF. Have your husband come into hair and makeup, and they will load it up with about three pounds of hair spray and gel, and it won't move. It is locked down. Crispy.

NOTEBOOK

The Skimmer

By JEFFREY KLUGER Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Voyager

By Stephen J. Pyne Viking; 444 pages It's easy to forget the Voyager spacecraft. They haven't been seen on Earth since 1977, and neither one is even within the solar system any longer, depending on how you measure such things. But Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 might well be the two most remarkable space probes ever made, and Stephen J. Pyne's Voyager tells their thrilling tale gracefully and well. The Voyagers were built back in the days when NASA had cash to burn, when the agency would build matching ships for twofer missions, just in case one failed. Launched 16 days apart, the Voyagers were intended to fly by only Jupiter and Saturn. But in 1965, NASA discovered something nifty: in the late 1970s, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would fall into a rare conga-line configuration, making it possible for a well-flown spacecraft to barnstorm them all. Pyne details the politics that drove the construction of the Voyagers and the innovation that made the four-planet grand tour a reality for one of them. For space geeks, it's a sweet read; for everyone else, it's an eye opener.

READ [X] SKIM TOSS

The Moment

By BRYAN WALSH Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

The U.S. auto industry has shriveled, the stock market is anemic, and that World Cup match against Ghana was just depressing. But for more than a century, the U.S. has been at the top of the charts when it comes to consuming energy. Americans burned oil as if they could just find it on the beach (which, thanks to BP, you now probably can). No longer, however. According to a new analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA), China became the world's biggest energy consumer in 2009. Not all

is lost: thanks to Americans' wasteful ways (and wealth), the average American consumes five times as much energy as the average Chinese. But the news signals, as the IEA's Fatih Birol told the Wall Street Journal, that we've entered a "new age in the history of energy." And that age will be one of scarcity and environmental calamity unless governments push cleaner sources of energy. China is doing its part: it will spend $738 billion on clean energy over the next decade. And the U.S.? The Senate can't pass climate and energy legislation, no matter how watered down it gets. It seems the U.S. can still waste energy; it just can't lead.

The World

By Harriet Barovick; Nate Rawlings; Frances Romero; Alexandra Silver; Claire Suddath; Ishaan Tharoor; Kayla Webley Monday, Aug. 02, 2010 Correction Appended: August 5, 2010 1 | Afghanistan Leaders Gather in Kabul During the first major conference of foreign governments in Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban, attendees endorsed President Hamid Karzai's goal for Afghan forces to take hold of the country's security in 2014. The gathering was undercut, however, by the grim situation on the ground. As violence continues to rise--June was the nearly nine-year war's deadliest month for coalition forces--questions remain over whether local forces will be prepared to assume control, especially given plans to start drawing down U.S. and British troops in 2011.

2 | Australia A Lady in Waiting In June, Julia Gillard became Australia's first female Prime Minister after ousting the previous PM--the unpopular Kevin Rudd--in an internal party putsch. Now, having called for an Aug. 21 general election, she hopes to win over the rest of the country. Her ruling Labour Party is ahead in polls by only a thin margin, and Gillard will have to show even more political acumen to preserve her job.

3 | Washington Free, but Not Forgiven Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi cast a long shadow over the U.S. visit of British PM David Cameron, who condemned Scotland's August 2009 release of the Libyan--freed because he was thought

to have only three months to live. Yet al-Megrahi is still alive, a fact that has revived suspicions that oil interests, including those of BP, led to a backroom Anglo-Libyan deal.

A Bomber's Tale Dec. 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 explodes en route to New York, killing all 259 people on board and 11 in the Scottish town of Lockerbie Jan. 2001 After years of investigation and political wrangling, a court sentences extradited Libyan al-Megrahi to life in prison July 2009 Al-Megrahi is released by Scottish authorities, who cite the Libyan's terminal illness. Critics see a BP-inspired plot 4 | Mexico A New Tactic, a New Low In the first use of a car bomb by a Mexican gang, La Linea--enforcers for the Ju谩rez drug cartel--detonated a device in the volatile city on July 15, killing four, including a federal police officer. La Linea claimed that the strike was payback for the arrest of one of its commanders. Three days later, another suspected gang murdered 17 people in the northern city of Torre贸n.

5 | Syria Face Veil Banned in Universities In hopes of preserving the nation's secular identity, On July 18, Syria's Education Ministry banned the niqab--a full-face Islamic veil--in both public and private universities. The move in the predominantly Muslim country comes on the heels of similar attempts in a handful of European nations. The ban will not affect the hijab, the commonly worn headscarf that does not cover the face.

6 | Puerto Rico Drug Kingpin Nabbed After 10 years on the run, Jose Figueroa Agosto--the Caribbean's biggest drug lord, likened to Colombian Pablo Escobar-- was caught in Puerto Rico's capital, San Juan. Authorities had been searching for Figueroa ever since he walked out of a prison using a forged release order; at the time, he was serving 209 years for murder.

7 | China HIGH WATERS Violent rainstorms have been battering central and southern China for weeks, killing hundreds of people and destroying property in nearly a dozen provinces. On July 20, fast-flowing floodwater from the Yangtze River tested the soundness of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric structure, as authorities evacuated more than 16,000 people from nearby towns and villages. So far, an estimated 200,000 people have been affected by the storms, said to be the worst China has seen in more than a decade.

8 | Israel White Out In an effort to reduce the number of civilian casualties in future conflicts, the Israeli military announced plans to halt the use of white phosphorous, which ignites when it comes into contact with air, sticks to skin and burns until its oxygen supply is cut off. The chemical was used during Israel's 22-day assault on Gaza in 2008, which left at least 1,100 Gazans dead.

9 | North Carolina More Than Just a Heat Wave The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed what many might have suspected from their own recent experiences: this past June was the warmest on record. The combined global land and ocean temperature was 1.22째F (0.68째C) above the 20th century average. According to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, 2010 is well on its way to becoming the warmest year worldwide since 1880, the earliest date for which global data is available. Not every place was hotter, though: Spain marked its coolest June since 1997.

[The following text appears within a chart. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual chart.]

Average global temperature in June 1910 59.3째 THEN 2010 61.1째 NOW Source: NOAA 10 | Washington

New Rules for Wall Street President Obama signed an extensive financial-reform bill into law on July 21, marking a policy triumph for his Administration. The legislation--meant to prevent another financial crisis--broadens federal regulation of Wall Street firms. Among the law's provisions is the establishment of both an independent consumer bureau, which will act as a watchdog when it comes to products like mortgages and credit cards, as well as a council to keep track of risky activity. Republican critics fear an expanded bureaucracy will stifle growth. | What They're Publishing in the U.K. : Luxury publisher Kraken Opus has created a limited edition of the biography of star Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar--containing a pint of the athlete's blood. The 10 copies have a signature page made of a mixture of paper pulp and the fluid and have already sold for $75,000 each. The company explained that, to many, Tendulkar is a "religious icon." Proceeds from the sales are slated for the sportsman's Mumbai charity.

The original version of this story stated that publisher Kraken Opus created a limited edition of Sachin Tendulkar's autobiography. The publisher is releasing a biography.

WASHINGTON MEMO

A Midsummer Miscellany (with a Nod to Larry King)

By MARK HALPERIN Wednesday, Jul. 21, 2010

Illustration by Wes Duvall for TIME. Based on photographs by Getty Images

It's hard to imagine Nancy Pelosi staying on — as minority leader — if Republicans take control of Congress ... Fall campaign travel schedules to watch for: Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, Al Gore, Jeb Bush and George W. Bush (the former President's memoirs launch nationwide the week after Election Day) ...

If you look up dead in the dictionary, you'll find "Democratic legislative action on energy, immigration and entitlement reform in 2010." But expect Barack Obama to dangle big deals in front of Republicans on all three in his State of the Union address early next year ... You know what's harder than finding an egg

cream and a handful of pretzel rods for five cents in Tulsa? Finding a corporate type or Washington pol of either party who has kind words to say these days about the White House. One reason: the President still hasn't seen fit to put into a top job an experienced businessperson who has met a private-sector payroll ...

I listen pretty closely, and I haven't heard a single Republican candidate with a deficit-reduction plan that will help the party win seats in the midterms ...

Life lesson: putting the rent money on the roulette wheel gets you better odds than wagering against Nevada Senator Harry Reid ... Independent Florida Senate candidate Charlie Crist's ability to get out of a jam makes him look like a white-haired Houdini ... Democratic bigwigs start to worry about losing Senate seats in Wisconsin and Washington State ... I don't know about you, but I never get tired of listening to Joe Biden talk ... Same with John Kasich, who's having a tougher time in his race for governor of Ohio than I thought he would have (and he thought he would have!) ... If there's a better app for the iPad than the White House's, I haven't seen it ... If the guests at Chelsea Clinton's wedding are half as excited about the big event as the media are, that is going to be one rocking party ...

Should Warren Conceived?

Run

the

Agency

She

By MICHAEL SCHERER Thursday, Jul. 22, 2010

Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer, right, looks at Congressional Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren, as she answer a question during the Women in Finance Symposium at the Treasury Department in Washington.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

It was Elizabeth Warren's idea back in 2007 to create a federal body to protect consumers from the "tricks and traps" of complex financial products, it was her scholarship that caught the attention of Barack Obama, and it was her efforts with the Administration in the past 18 months that helped make the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection a reality. So all of Washington is wondering, Will the President tap her to run the organization she invented?

The question is an electric one. Warren, an outspoken consumer advocate, is as beloved by progressive activists as she is distrusted by business lobbyists. Armed with petitions and press releases, liberals and labor groups have been fighting for her appointment, just as many in the business community, wary of

Warren's take-no-prisoners approach, tremble at the prospect. Senator Chris Dodd, the Banking Committee chair, has even raised questions about whether Warren can be confirmed. The White House, which has lately been trying to restore its relations with Wall Street, says Obama has not decided.

Nonetheless, the three front runners for the post have been identified as Warren, Assistant Treasury Secretary Michael Barr and Eugene Kimmelman, a Justice Department attorney. "We are confident Warren is confirmable," says a White House spokeswoman.

Warren, meanwhile, has worked to stay busy as chair of the Trouble Asset Relief Program oversight panel, where she has been critical of the Treasury Department's handling of the bank bailouts. She has been careful not to openly campaign for her appointment and has not yet been interviewed for the position. Her message to the White House has been that whomever Obama chooses, it should be someone who can attract real talent to the new agency. "If you appoint a milquetoast as first director," says someone familiar with the discussions, "it's hard to get the agency off on the right foot."

All of the uncertainty suggests one likely outcome for Warren and the agency she created. Whether or not she is named to run the place, she will likely remain the most closely watched judge of how it carries out its mission.

Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine

By ALICE PARK Thursday, Jul. 22, 2010

A lab technician at Novo Nordisk conducts in vitro research in Malov, Denmark John Mcconnico / Bloomberg via Getty Images

AIDS PREVENTION

Short of a Vaccine, New Hope for an Anti-HIV Gel For the first time, AIDs researchers have reported success with an HIV-prevention tool that can be controlled by women: a vaginal gel containing the antiretroviral drug tenofovir. Women account for nearly half of all new HIV infections each year yet have scarce options for protection. They rely on condoms or practice abstinence — strategies that require cooperation from often unwilling partners.

That could soon change. In a preliminary study of 889 women in South Africa, the gel, which contains 1% tenofovir in an antimicrobial solution, reduced HIV infection by 39% over 2½ years compared with a placebo; in women who used the gel most faithfully before and after intercourse, it cut infection risk by 54%. What's more, it halved the chances of contracting the genital-herpes virus, another risk factor for HIV. The gel isn't the first of its kind. But unlike previous, failed versions of vaginal microbicides, which attempted to either neutralize HIV on contact or create a physical barrier between the virus and healthy cells, the new formulation incorporates a potent anti-HIV drug that appears to block infection more effectively.

REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH

Gauging Cancer Risks in IVF Babies Many infertile couples who turn to in vitro fertilization (IVF) to start a family a sk the same question: Is it dangerous for my child's health?

Since 1978 — when Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was born — 3.5 million infants have been conceived in the lab. So researchers now have sufficient data to examine whether the procedure has any long-term impact on IVF children's health and development. Indeed, studies have shown that in vitro babies experience more health issues, including birth defects and heart and respiratory problems, than their naturally conceived counterparts.

On July 19, in the first analysis of its kind, researchers at Lund University in Sweden reported that IVF infants also have a 42% greater risk of childhood cancers compared with other babies; most of the malignancies occurred in the first three years. But the authors say the overall risk of childhood cancer is small, and even the higher odds in IVF babies translated into a tiny absolute increase in cancer cases.

And when the authors adjusted for the effect of the parents' infertility, the association between IVF and cancer disappeared. So researchers speculate that the bump in cancer risk was most likely related to the reproductive issues that led parents to IVF and didn't stem from the procedure itself.

FROM THE LABS

Flu Shot in a Patch Those scary needle jabs may soon be a thing of the past. Researchers have designed a tiny patch embedded with 100 dissolving microneedles that deliver flu vaccine painlessly into the skin. Mice inoculated against influenza with the patch showed stronger immune responses to the virus than those that received traditional flu shots.

Stroke, Straight Up? Just one alcoholic drink can double the risk of stroke during the hour after it's consumed, a new study found. Beer, wine or liquor can make blood platelets stickier and raise blood pressure, which may promote the clots that cause stroke. But the authors didn't balance this risk against alcohol's potential health benefits, particularly for the heart, so they aren't suggesting you abandon the bar just yet.

BE STILL, BEATING HEART Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been left without a pulse, thanks to a ventricular assist device

(VAD) doctors implanted to treat his heart failure. (VADs keep blood flowing continuously instead of pumping it; hence the elimination of a pulse.) Originally used to bridge patients to a heart transplant, VADs are sustaining patients longer and longer and even allowing some to avoid transplant.

DATA SET 50s Age at which PTSD rates peak in women, compared with the early 40s in men 29% Percentage of teens who started smoking after visiting stores with cigarette ads, compared with 18% of teen smokers who went to stores without them Sources: Annals of General Psychiatry; AP; Institute of Food Technologists annual meeting; Nature Medicine; Pediatrics (2); Science and XVIII International AIDS Conference; Stroke

Verbatim 'Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.'

SARAH PALIN, tweeting her disapproval of a plan to build an Islamic cultural center and mosque near Ground Zero; Palin was subsequently mocked for her use of a nonexistent word 'I'm addicted to perfection. Problem with my life is, I was always also addicted to chaos. Perfect chaos.'

MIKE TYSON, lamenting his erratic behavior during his heyday as a champion boxer 20 years ago 'This is a small town, and we have more moles here than a vegetable garden.'

JIM LANGAN, editor of the Hudson Valley News, on rumors that Rhinebeck, N.Y., will be the location of former First Daughter Chelsea Clinton's July 31 wedding 'The donkey screamed, and children cried.'

LARISA TUCHKOVA, police spokeswoman in southern Russia, after a donkey was made to parasail as part of an advertising stunt; an animal-cruelty investigation ensued 'I saw the bodies. My father-in-law's was quite well preserved. I recognized his black winter coat with some holes in it.'

MIRCEA OPREAN, son-in-law of former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, whose bodies were exhumed in an attempt to confirm the location of their long-disputed graves

'This was my decision, and it was a decision I regret having made in haste.'

TOM VILSACK, Agriculture Secretary, apologizing for firing Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod (right) after a conservative website posted misleading video footage of a speech in which she appeared to make racist statements; it was later revealed that the editing of the video left out Sherrod's greater point about racial reconciliation 'Play, don't play. Goddamn, people are getting sick of it. I'm getting sick of it!'

BUS COOK, agent for NFL player Brett Favre, after learning that Favre is once again drawing out his decision of whether to return to the game this season TALKING HEADS Cord Jefferson Explaining why the Old Spice Guy is good for black America, on theroot.com "He's everywhere, topless and smoldering. And not only are his strength, intelligence and beauty at the forefront of his character, they're heralded as being at the apex of manhood. No man, black or white, can ever be as sexy, dynamic, talented and worldly as he ... In days past, Old Spice Guy would have been seen as threatening, aggressive, certainly unfit for a million-dollar ad campaign. But here in 2010, far from being fearful, America is rushing wildly into his sturdy embrace."

--7/14/10 Bill O'Reilly Defending the Tea Party, in the Boston Herald, against accusations of racism by the NAACP: "Even if they existed, is it fair to demonize an entire movement because a few nuts are associated with it? ... One of the weaknesses of the NAACP is that it has rarely acknowledged black racism. The organization is silent on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan. Yet it is outraged about the Tea Party. There might be something hypocritical about that."

--7/18/10 Phil Gordon The mayor of Phoenix, writing in the Arizona Republic: "Regardless of your stance on immigration, there's one thing all of us can agree on: Boycotting Arizona is wrong. It's economic retribution that deeply wounds all of us to make a statement against some of us ...

The Arizona of SB 1070 isn't the only Arizona ... It's our hope that the many do not suffer for the decisions of a few."

--7/18/10 Sources: Twitter; Details; ABC News; AFP; BBC; CNN; Men's Journal

Brief History: War Games

By NATE RAWLINGS Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

"Offload, LCACs and Tank, California, 2006

of US Marines doing a war game on

a California beach.

An-My L

/ Murray Guy, New York

If war is a political instrument, then it stands to reason that the simulation of war can also be used to influence nations. On July 20, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George Washington would join the South Korean navy for a four-day war-game exercise in the Yellow Sea. Dubbed Invincible Spirit and comprising 8,000 troops, 20 warships and more than 100 planes, the drills are "designed to send a clear message" against North Korean aggression following the March sinking of a South Korean warship.

While militaries have long conducted practice exercises, modern-day war games, with their focus on strategy and counterstrategy, are only a few centuries old. In the early 1800s, the Prussians moved away from chesslike board games and began to use topographical maps to test potential war tactics. The Americans picked up the concept later that century, and war games became part of the U.S. Naval War College curriculum in 1894. In the 20th century, war became more complex. As cavalry units gave way to tank brigades and fighter squadrons, war games moved into the actual field, with the military conducting live exercises. Since World War II, the U.S.--on its own and with allies--has simulated hundreds of aerial dogfights, beach invasions and parachute assaults.

In today's war games, computer simulations do much of the heavy lifting. As commanders maneuver in the field, programs much more complex than the rogue computer in the film War Games calculate casualty rates, adjust for weather factors and render a score, allowing the games to come as close to war as possible without inflicting real violence. Yet for all the effort, war games can sometimes be about

simply sending a message: "Don't even think about it." Occasionally, as Secretary Gates seems to be saying, you have to fake a fight to prevent one.

Hank Cochran

By LARRY GATLIN Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

Hank Cochran, who died july 15 at 74, was one of the greatest songwriters--and characters--ever. We all called him the Legend, and he called himself that too. Years ago, when I was a young songwriter in Nashville, he said, "Listen, young man, don't ever say anything really clever around the Legend. The Legend has a very creative memory."

Hank wrote many hits, including the fabulous "Make the World Go Away" and, with Harlan Howard, Patsy Cline's "I Fall to Pieces." Jeannie Seely (below), whom he married, won a Grammy for singing his ballad "Don't Touch Me." But one of my favorites is "He Little Thinged Her (Out of My Arms)." It was so intuitive.

Usually when men and women fall apart, it's because the little things were neglected--maybe smiling at your mate across breakfast, saying thank you. And so "He Little Thinged Her." Hank got it.

There's a famous story among songwriters who knew him: Hank was asleep in his house, where Red Lane was writing a song, which went something like "Her love was so sweet, that I can still taste it ..."

Red kept singing that over and over, but he couldn't think of the next line. All of a sudden Hank opened his eyes and said, "She made her mark and then erased it," and he went back to sleep.

Hank taught me that it doesn't have to be complicated, that simplicity is the key. You can put 54 chords in a song, but, boy, you can make a lot of money and write quality songs with just three or four.

The last time I saw him, after many years apart, we did as old friends do. He shaped his goatee into a point, and I lifted my chin and said, "Are you still the Legend? Do you still have that creative memory?"

We started right back where we left off.

Gatlin is a Grammy-winning songwriter. His most recent album with the Gatlin Brothers is Pilgrimage

Stephen Schneider

By BRYAN WALSH Monday, Aug. 02, 2010

The last major article that climatologist Stephen Schneider wrote was a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finding that some 97% of climate researchers believed in man-made climate change--and that the few who didn't weren't up to academic snuff. It was controversial and opinionated and was attacked by global-warming skeptics. In other words, vintage Schneider.

The Stanford University climatologist, who died July 19 at age 65, was a scientific warrior. As a young researcher, he entered climatology not only because it was a cutting-edge field but also because it fit his environmental ideals--"a marriage of convenience and deep conviction," he once said. In the 1970s and '80s, Schneider worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, writing hundreds of articles that buttressed the case that global warming was real and dangerous. In 1992 he moved to Stanford, and he was a major part of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

More than most of his colleagues, Schneider took the fight against climate change to the public, and he was willing to bear the bruises. For him, the planet was too important. His last book, published in 2009, was fittingly titled Science as a Contact Sport. "I've been on the ground, here in the trenches, for my entire career," he wrote. Schneider is gone too soon, but the example he set as a politically engaged scientist will endure.