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Table of Contents: January 11. 2010 IN THIS ISSUE EDITION: U.S. Vol. 175 No. 1 COVER The Lessons of Flight 253 (The Well / Cover) Missed signs, cumbersome lists and spotty screening permitted a terrorist to take a makeshift bomb on a Christmas flight to Detroit. What the U.S. should learn from a near calamity Please Remain Standing (Viewpoint) Alert passengers averted disaster on Flight 253. So let's stop acting like helpless victims

NATION Can Megachurches Bridge the Racial Divide? (The Well / Religion) Sunday morning remains the most segregated time in America. How some Evangelicals are bridging the divide

ESSAY 2010 and On: Pundits Get Ready for Their Close-Up (Commentary / Tuned In) Pundits are turning media stardom into political power. How far will it take them?

The Left's Idiocy on Health Reform (Commentary / In the Arena) The left is attacking health care reform as a sellout--and helping right-wing populists in the process Remembrance of Things Future (Commentary) The start of a new year is a chance to plan ahead before history changes everything

WORLD Postcard from Banda Aceh (Postcard) Five years after the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, a reporter returns to the disaster's ground zero. A town rebuilt, but scars remain A Bold Opening for Chess Player Magnus Carlsen (Profile) Computer trained yet deeply intuitive, Magnus Carlsen, the youngest No. 1 player in chess history, is reinvigorating the game of kings Merkel's Moment (The Well / World) A trailblazer and the unchallenged leader of Europe's largest economy, Germany's Chancellor now faces an uncomfortable question, How should her country use its power?

LETTERS Inbox (Inbox)

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT The Downward Spiral of David Mamet (Theater)

He's America's most influential playwright. But his new play shows how far wrong he's gone Sherlock Holmes (Holiday Movies) It isn't surprising that Guy Ritchie would turn Sherlock Holmes into an action hero. What's surprising is how bland the results are Nine Richard Corliss takes the measure of the film version of the Broadway musical based on Fellini's genre-creating movie It's Complicated Nancy Meyers' wronged-woman's fantasy, starring Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, is crippled by its own wish fulfillment Did You Hear About the Morgans?

The Morgans offers what might seem a welcome respite from all the Oscar-wannabe dramas where Grim Death gargles at you from every scene, but its faux-funniness is no less depressing Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel How is it possible that a movie as bad the Squeakquel earned more than $75 million in its first five days of release?

Short List TIME'S PICKS FOR THE WEEK

BUSINESS Can Microfinance Make It in America? (The Well / Business) Grameen makes loans to tiny businesses in the developing world. With credit tight, now seems like the right time to reach the "unbanked" in the U.S. But money isn't everything

SOCIETY Google Builds a Better Browser (Life / Techland) What does the king of search bring to Web browsing? Simplicity — and speed Why Overcoming Phobias Can Be So Daunting (Life / Mental Health) Amid new data on erasing fear, one man's quest to quash his (odd) source of dread How to Fix a Phobia Three common treatments, plus a promising new one

PEOPLE 10 Questions for Brian Williams (10 Questions) The veteran anchor talks Katrina, Jon Stewart and NBC Nightly News. Brian Williams will now take your questions

NOTEBOOK Brittany Murphy (Briefing / Milestones) Brief History: Fad Diets (Briefing) The World (Briefing) 10 ESSENTIAL STORIES Percy Sutton (Briefing / Milestones) Kim Peek (Briefing / Milestones) The Moment (Briefing) 12|27|09: Tehran The Skimmer (Briefing) Book Review: Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters Spotlight: Al-Qaeda in Yemen (Briefing) Verbatim (Briefing)

COVER

What We Can Learn from Flight 253

By Michael Duffy and Mark Thompson Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009

CNN

The 23-year-old son of a banker from Nigeria should have tripped every alarm in the global aviation-security system put in place after 9/11: He bought a $2,831 ticket for flights from Lagos to Amsterdam to Detroit and paid for it in cash. He left no contact information with the airline. He checked no bags. Seven months earlier, he had earned himself a spot on a security watch list in Britain after applying for a visa to attend a dubious English university. And when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab broke off contact with his family in October to join the war on the West, his own father reported him as a possible threat at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, where he met with a CIA officer.

But American officials either missed all these warnings or failed to act on them. Not until Northwest Flight 253 was beginning its final descent into Detroit, at about 11:40 Christmas morning, did a handful of passengers step in to do what all the early-warning systems and security personnel could not: stop a terrorist trying to detonate a bomb on a plane on the quietest morning of the year. Just as the cabin crew strapped in for landing, an explosion — it sounded like a firecracker — came from the left side of the fuselage just over the wing. Alain Ghonda — a 38-year-old, Silver Spring, Md., real estate consultant, who was sitting in seat 18H — immediately stood up, in defiance of the seat-belt sign, and looked to his left. Ghonda remained upright another minute and soon saw thick, dark gray smoke coming from the man

in seat 19A. He pointed across the cabin and yelled, "Fire!" As he did, flames began to shoot from Abdulmutallab's lap.

Instantly, a second passenger, Jasper Schuringa, a Dutch video producer sitting two seats behind Ghonda, leaped up, hopscotched across the middle section of seats and threw himself on top of the bomber, shouting at his fellow passengers to pass water bottles and blankets his way. Other passengers screamed; some ran to other cabins. "I don't want to die! I want out!" yelled one. Two flight attendants, alarmed by the smell of smoke, rushed past the dozens of passengers out of their seats to find fire extinguishers. They doused Abdulmutallab and Schuringa as well as the burning seat, the floor, the walls and the surrounding area. Abdulmutallab, his pants torched, naked from waist to knees, was hustled by Schuringa and crew members to the first-class cabin, where he was restrained. The whole thing had taken less than 10 minutes.

Passengers later said there was something curious about the spare young man who had tried to bring down their plane: he was silent throughout the attack. He didn't panic. He didn't yell any last-second religious slogans. He was calm and methodical as he set himself on fire. It was as though he had been trained.

The story of Flight 253 exposed a raft of glaring flaws in the global aviation-security network. Almost all are well known to aviation experts. Yet what President Obama eventually called a "systemic failure" caught his Administration flat-footed for the first 72 hours after the attack, as officials initially tried to play down the weaknesses of the web Abdulmutallab slipped through. More than eight years after 9/11 and 21 years after Pan Am Flight 103 exploded in midair over Scotland, the attempted Christmas bombing revealed that the array of protective measures put in place around the world still can't stop terrorists from smuggling explosives onto packed jetliners.

The attack reverberated beyond airport security lines, though those have already become longer and more complicated. The airline scare represented the second time in the past 12 months that purported Islamic terrorists have tried to launch a strike on American soil — and may be the first time that such an assault was directed from Yemen. That's a reminder that the struggle against jihadism is not confined to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where U.S. forces are now concentrated. In its provenance and near catastrophic outcome, the story of Flight 253 is a reminder that the war on terrorism is far from over — and may be spreading. To prevent another attack, here are four lessons the U.S. and its allies will need to learn: 1. Our methods for tracking terrorists still aren't working It turns out that Washington's way of ranking likely terrorists, which was overhauled after Sept. 11, still resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption. There are four different U.S. terrorism databases, and yet Abdulmutallab's name never rose above the least threatening one.

One day after his father visited the U.S. embassy in November and told the CIA of his son's growing radical nature, U.S. officials from at least four agencies met to share the information. But exactly what, if anything, happened next is unclear. Abdulmutallab's name was added to the more than half a million others on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) list. A spot on that roster means ... well, not very much. Abdulmutallab's open visa to visit the U.S., granted in 2008 and valid through June 2010,

wasn't revoked once he made that list. Only more-damning evidence could have kicked his name up to the next level — the Terrorist Screening Database (TSD), a list of 400,000 people who merit closer watch.

That would not necessarily have affected his journey to Detroit. That's because the TSD list has two sublists: one consisting of about 14,000 people who are permitted to fly to the U.S. after extra airport screening, and a set of 3,400 on the no-fly list, who cannot board commercial aircraft in or bound for the U.S. under any condition. Unfortunately, Abdulmutallab was a long way from a spot on either.

But another government had identified him as a person of some concern. British officials barred Abdulmutallab from entering last May after he submitted the name of a questionable school in an application to extend his student visa. That fib bounced him to a U.K. suspicious-persons list. "If you are on our watch list," British Home Secretary Alan Johnson told BBC Radio on Monday, "then you do not come into this country." But under British policy, this information was not shared with U.S. officials because Abdulmutallab had not been linked to terrorism.

Will any of this change now? Some lawmakers are pushing for less restrictive rules about who may and may not be put on the no-fly list. And Obama seemed to call for more-aggressive investigation of people when they are first named to the TIDE list. But that will take time and manpower and political will.

2. The search-and-scan system at airports can be beat Security teams have beefed up airport body-scanning and searching protocols continually since 9/11, but terrorists have been far more aggressive about exploiting their weaknesses. Part of the problem is our chronically reactive approach to airline security: in military terms, the authorities are always fighting the last war. Ever since Richard Reid tried to ignite his shoes, loaded with the explosive pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), on a flight from Paris to Miami in 2001, U.S. travelers have had to remove their footwear for scanning before boarding. After a plot to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic with small amounts of liquid explosives was uncovered in London in 2006, travelers were barred from carrying containers with more than 3.4 oz. (100 ml) of fluid each through security checkpoints.

Around the world, security measures remain inconsistent — and inconsistently applied. Abdulmutallab tried to get around the barriers by sewing an 80-g packet of PETN into the crotch of his underpants, betting that if he boarded in Lagos and transferred in Amsterdam, he would make his way undetected onto the Detroit-bound flight. That worked: during his layover, Abdulmutallab most likely encountered nothing more than ID checks and a metal detector at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. He was betting that any pat-down — unlikely as that was — would not come close to the tiny bomb in the crotch of his trousers. Fellow passenger Ghonda, who transferred to Flight 253 after a flight from Ghana, reported that although he passed through a metal detector, neither his bags nor his body were hand-searched.

Experts say the undergarment bomb probably would have shown up on the new generation of whole-body imaging scanners that are chiefly designed to detect explosives. These devices, using millimeter waves or X-rays, generate a picture so detailed that the officials reviewing them are located elsewhere for the sake of passenger modesty. But Amsterdam's Schiphol has only about 15 of these machines serving some 90 gates, and they are used on a voluntary basis only on short-haul flights within Europe. That's partly because the wave scanners are costly — they sell for $180,000 — and partly because American airlines and the E.U. remain wary of devices that electronically undress passengers.

The scanners are rare in the U.S.; in June, the House of Representatives voted in an amendment to a

transportation bill to ban the use of scanners for routine screenings. "You don't need to look at my wife and 8-year-old daughter naked in order to secure that airplane," said Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican from Utah, during the debate.

So five years after the bipartisan 9/11 commission recommended that Congress and the Transportation Security Agency "give priority attention" to screening passengers for explosives, the practice remains overwhelmingly the exception and not the rule. Only about 40 millimeter-wave devices are in use, at 19 U.S. airports. Standard magnetometers, which are used at the vast majority of the more than 2,000 checkpoint lanes nationwide, can detect metal in guns and knives but are worthless against explosives like PETN. The U.S. has spent nearly $800 million trying to develop sniffers and scanners that could be more widely used — a whole-body imager, a bottled-liquid scanner, an automated explosive-detection system for carry-on baggage and another made especially for shoes, designed to work while they're still on your feet.

But they have been slow to be deployed. Only one device, which sniffs the air for trace explosives, is in relatively widespread use, at just 36 airports — and it would not have detected Abdulmutallab's bomb.

Even the fanciest machines, however, won't make the system fail-safe. Security experts say the hunt for the perfect shield is misplaced: bullets always outrun armor, and the same is true of terrorists and scanners. Or as Winston Churchill warned of a different threat in a different war, "The bomber will always get through."

3. Al-Qaeda is bigger than Osama bin Laden As Obama sends 30,000 more troops to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a haven for terrorists, it is obvious that al-Qaeda has set up franchises to wage offensive war against the U.S. in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Yemen, which has vast tracts of lawless countryside, has been harboring — and nurturing — terrorists for years. It is the site of the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors, as well as the stomping ground of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric and cyber–pen pal of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood, Texas, shooter who killed 13 people in November.

Abdulmutallab visited Yemen at least twice, most recently from August to December 2009, studying Arabic — and, apparently, bombmaking.

The Yemeni government, under pressure from neighboring Saudi Arabia and the U.S. — and facing internal threats — has recently stepped up operations against al-Qaeda within its borders. With American help, it carried out air strikes Dec. 17 and 24, killing more than 60 militants. But al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), is a distinctly creative branch. In August a supposedly repentant member of AQAP drew close to Saudi Arabia's Deputy Interior Minister before detonating a bomb secreted in his anal cavity, according to Stratfor, a well-regarded private intelligence outfit based in Texas. Although the attacker died, his target was only slightly wounded. A Stratfor report issued five days later concluded, "The operation could have succeeded had it been better executed" — a judgment that sounds a great deal like the early verdict on Flight 253.

4. Downplaying the threat doesn't help Though Obama learned of it while vacationing in Hawaii soon after the attack was foiled, it took him more than 72 hours to make a live, on-camera comment about the near tragedy. (There is some evidence that

Democratic partisans were privately pleading with the White House to say something after 24 hours.)

Obama's cause was not helped by the comments of his Homeland Security chief, Janet Napolitano, who announced on Sunday, "Once the incident occurred, the system worked." Say what? Napolitano has eschewed the word terrorism for "man-caused disasters," explaining, "We want to move away from the politics of fear." That probably reflects the no-drama Obama team's desire to close the books on the George W. Bush era and its obsession with the war on terrorism. But this episode suggests there are some things no government can afford to soft-pedal.

Is there any good news here? If there is, it mostly falls in the category of cold comfort. Al-Qaeda's high command in Pakistan is under pressure from the U.S.'s steady campaign of drone strikes, and the jihadists' indiscriminate cruelty has earned more revulsion than support from ordinary Muslims. And yet even if terrorists have been reduced to wearing explosives in their underwear, they are still able to find aimless, religiously fired or underloved young men to carry out suicide missions. And while al-Qaeda scientists in Yemen and western Pakistan have not fully mastered the chemistry of high-temperature charges needed to detonate compact high explosives — or acquired deadlier weapons of mass destruction — it is reasonable to assume they eventually will. Security experts say the chemical packet Abdulmutallab carried was more than enough to blow a good-size hole in the side of the fuselage, had he successfully triggered it.

Of course, Abdulmutallab's plot failed not just because of technical difficulties but also because of the bravery of the people he was trying to murder. The one hopeful outcome of the saga is that, thanks to the swift action of passengers on Flight 253, Abdulmutallab was captured alive and is being held at a federal facility southwest of Detroit, where he may well prove to be a source of intelligence. It was an unexpected but valuable gift from those who moved quickly on an otherwise quiet Christmas morning.

— With reporting by Karen Tumulty, Deirdre van Dyk and Sophia Yan / Washington

The Lesson: Passengers Are Not Helpless

By AMANDA RIPLEY Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009

Dutch filmmaker Jasper Schuringa led the effort to subdue the would-be bomber.

CNN / SIPA

Since 2001, airline passengers — regular people without weapons or training — have helped thwart terrorist attacks aboard at least five different commercial airplanes. It happened again on Christmas Day. And as we do each and every time, we miss the point.

Consider the record: First, passengers on United Flight 93 prevented a further attack on Washington on 9/11. Then, three months later, American Airlines passengers wrestled a belligerent, biting Richard Reid to the ground, using their headset cords to restrain him. In 2007, almost a dozen passengers jumped on a gun-wielding hijacker aboard a plane in the Canary Islands. And this past November, passengers rose up against armed hijackers over Somalia. Together, then, a few dozen folks have helped save some 595 lives.

And yet our collective response to this legacy of ass-kicking is puzzling. Each time, we build a slapdash pedestal for the heroes. Then we go back to blaming the government for failing to keep us safe, and the government goes back to treating us like children. This now familiar ritual distracts us from the real lesson, which is that we are not helpless. And since regular people will always be first on the scene of terrorist attacks, we should perhaps prioritize the public's antiterrorism capability — above and beyond the fancy technology that will never be foolproof.

Instead, we hear this blather from President Obama: "The American people should be assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep you and your family safe and secure during this busy holiday season." He forgets that Americans have never really wanted the government to do "everything in its power" to keep us safe. That would make this a terrible place to live. And yet, after eight years of paternalistic bluster from President George W. Bush, we have grown accustomed to the cycle of absurd promises followed by failure and renewed by fear. Bush liked to say that the authorities have to succeed 100% of the time and terrorists only once. The truth is, authorities never succeed 100% of the time at anything. And they never will.

By definition, terrorism succeeds by making us feel powerless. It is more often a psychological threat than an existential one. The authorities compound the damage when they overreact — by subjecting grandmothers to pat-downs and making it intolerable to travel. Even though the Christmas bombing suspect had been stopped, stripped and cuffed before the plane landed, we still talk like victims. "[This] came close to being one of the greatest tragedies in the history of our country," New York Congressman Peter King said on CNN, criticizing Obama for not holding a press conference sooner.

When Obama did speak, three days after the incident, he first listed all the security reviews to be conducted while the rest of us sit tight. Only then did he briefly acknowledge reality: "This incident, like several that have preceded it, demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist."

Here are some things Obama did not say: He did not propose that we find ways to leverage the proven dedication and courage of the public. He did not call for Congress to cut spending on homeland-security pork and instead double the budget of Citizen Corps — the volunteer emergency-preparedness service that was created after 9/11 and that most Americans have never heard of. He did not demand that the government be more open with us about the threats we face. He did not discuss the government's

obligation, as homeland-security expert Stephen Flynn puts it, to "support regular people in being able to withstand, rapidly recover and adapt to foreseeable risks."

Karen Sherrouse was a flight attendant on the jet that Richard Reid tried to blow up. When one of her colleagues tried to stop Reid, Sherrouse rushed to help. But she couldn't get down the aisle because so many passengers had already joined the melee. "They were instantly on him," she remembers. "It was a group effort." And so it should be. The flight attendants can't be everywhere at once. Nor can TSA officers or the FBI. After the passengers of Flight 253 deplaned in Detroit, they were held in the baggage area for more than five hours until FBI agents interviewed them. They were not allowed to call their loved ones. They were given no food. When one of the pilots tried to use the bathroom before a bomb-sniffing dog had finished checking all the carry-on bags, an officer ordered him to sit down, according to passenger Alain Ghonda, who thought it odd. "He was the pilot. If he wanted to do anything, he could've crashed the plane." It was a metaphor for the rest of the country: Thank you for saving the day. Now go sit down.

NATION

Can Megachurches Divide?

Bridge

the

Racial

By DAVID VAN BIEMA Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

At Willow Creek, people of different ethnicities worship together Matthew Gilson for TIME

One Sunday last fall, Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor at the Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago's northwest suburbs, was preaching on the logic and power of Jesus' words "Love thine enemy."

As is his custom, Hybels was working a small semicircle of easels arrayed behind his lectern, reinforcing key phrases. Hybels' preaching is economical, precise of tone and gesture. Again by custom, he was dressed in black, which accentuated his pale complexion, blue eyes and hair, once Dutch-boy blond but now white. Indeed, if there is a whiter preacher currently running a megachurch, that man must glow.

Yet neither Hybels' sermon, nor his 23,400-person congregation, is as white as he is. Along with Jesus, he invoked Martin Luther King Jr. Then he introduced Shawn Christopher, a former backup singer for Chaka Khan, who offered a powerhouse rendition of "We Shall Overcome." As the music swelled, Larry and Renetta Butler, an African-American couple in their usual section in the 7,800-seat sanctuary, exchanged glances. Since Hybels decided 10 years ago to aggressively welcome minorities to his

lily-white congregation, Renetta says, few sermons pass without a cue that he is still at it. "He always throws in something," she says. She's been around long enough to recall when this wasn't the case.

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. famously declared that "11 o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week ... And the Sunday school is still the most segregated school." That largely remains true today. Despite the growing desegregation of most key American institutions, churches are still a glaring exception. Surveys from 2007 show that fewer than 8% of American congregations have a significant racial mix.

Since Reconstruction, when African Americans fled or were ejected from white churches, black and white Christianity have developed striking differences of style and substance. The argument can be made that people attend the church they are used to; many minorities have scant desire to attend a white church, seeing their faith as an important vessel of cultural identity. But those many who desire a transracial faith life have found themselves discouraged — subtly, often unintentionally, but remarkably consistently. In an age of mixed-race malls, mixed-race pop-music charts and, yes, a mixed-race President, the church divide seems increasingly peculiar. It is troubling, even scandalous, that our most intimate public gatherings — and those most safely beyond the law's reach — remain color-coded.

But in some churches, the racial divide is beginning to erode, and it is fading fastest in one of American religion's most conservative precincts: Evangelical Christianity. According to Michael Emerson, a specialist on race and faith at Rice University, the proportion of American churches with 20% or more minority participation has languished at about 7.5% for the past nine years. But among Evangelical churches with attendance of 1,000 people or more, the slice has more than quadrupled, from 6% in 1998 to 25% in 2007.

Call it the desegregation of the megachurches — and consider it a possible pivotal moment in the nation's faith. Such rapid change in such big institutions "blows my mind," says Emerson. Some of the country's largest churches are involved: the very biggest, Joel Osteen's Lakewood Community Church in Houston (43,500 members), is split evenly among blacks, Hispanics and a category containing whites and Asians. Hybels' Willow Creek is at 20% minority. Megachurches serve only 7% of American churchgoers, but they are extraordinarily influential: Willow Creek, for instance, networks another 12,000 smaller congregations through its Willow Creek Association. David Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame studying the trend, says that "if tens of millions of Americans start sharing faith across racial boundaries, it could be one of the final steps transcending race as our great divider" — and it could help smooth America's transition into a truly rainbow nation.

Hybels and his Willow Creek church are already headed down that path. Though Willow is not the most advanced example of multiracial church, it makes an excellent window into the new desegregation because of its size, its influence and the ferocious purposefulness with which Hybels has deconstructed his all-white institution. Willow may also be emblematic in that Hybels appears to have stopped short of creating a fully color-blind church. His efforts illustrate both the possibilities and the challenges that smaller churches may face as they attempt to move beyond black and white.

The Making of a (White) Megachurch Willow Creek Community Church's main complex, in South Barrington, does not tower so much as

sprawl: eight low-slung buildings, landscaped on a swampy and thus underdeveloped grassland amid Chicago's bustling, affluent northwest suburbs. As the church has grown — especially with the 2004 completion of a new sanctuary building with an escalator and interior waterfall — it has become more self-consciously handsome. But like Hybels himself, it abandons pious overstatement for corporate efficiency: church as conceived by Jack Welch.

Willow Creek is a paradigmatic religious success story. In 1974, Hybels was a youth pastor whose meetings outdrew the church he worked for by a factor of three. In '75, he and several friends founded Willow, aiming at people with little Christian affiliation, informally dubbed "unchurched Harry and Mary."

The congregation boomed — the word megachurch was reputedly coined to describe it — and Hybels became the poster boy for the new movement of exurban big-box churches.

Yet Harry and Mary were white: Willow attracted almost nobody of color. The gurus of the megachurch explosion were church-growth consultants, who endorsed the "homogeneous unit principle": people like to worship with people who are similar to them — in age, wealth and race. Hybels, while denying intentional exclusivity, says that "in the early days, we were all young, white, affluent, college-educated suburbanites, and we all understood each other. When we reached out to our friends, it became self-reinforcing."

In 1999, however, that changed. Hybels was leaving on vacation when Willow's only African-American pastor, Alvin Bibbs, passed him a book titled Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, by a then obscure academic named Michael Emerson. The book's polls showed that Evangelicals tended to "believe that their faith ought to be a powerful impetus for bringing people together across race." Yet they had fewer minority acquaintances than non-Evangelicals. Most regarded racial inequality as either illusory or the wages of personal sin, rather than as a societal flaw. This and other buried assumptions created church climates that unofficially discouraged minority participation. Far from reconciling the races, Emerson concluded, Evangelicalism acted to "drive them apart [and] contribute to the racial fragmentation of American society."

Hybels, a former chaplain for the Chicago Bears with many black friends, says, "I thought I was gonna faint." He was stunned to realize that racism is "not just an individual issue but a justice issue" with "structural and [systemic] aspects" violating dozens of biblical admonitions. "I went from thinking 'I don't have a race problem' to 'There is a huge problem in our world that I need to be part of resolving.'"

The catch was that "I hadn't [preached] about it in 24 years." So he promised his congregation, "I'm not going to overwhelm you." Yet he persisted, sermonizing repeatedly about America's racial history and continuing inequities. He pledged to open Willow to every ethnicity. In 2003, he recalls, he threw down the gauntlet, telling his flock that the church's racial outreach was "part of who we are, and if it can't be part of who you are, you probably need to find a church that doesn't talk about this issue."

How Willow Got Religion Larry Butler first visited Willow Creek in the 1970s and left fast. "I liked the teaching, but I didn't see anybody like me," says Butler, 57, a solidly built, hazel-eyed African-American pharmacist from Oklahoma. "I didn't have any problem with the people, but I didn't know if they had a problem with me. So I thought, 'I'll go elsewhere.' " Other minorities who sampled the church felt similarly uncomfortable. Yet

Butler returned to Willow in the early '80s, later inviting his wife Renetta and, as he says, "hoping things would change."

And they did, as Hybels and Bibbs re-engineered the church to match its preaching. They built "Bridging the Racial Divide" gatherings into Willow's massive grid of laity-led "small groups." The meetings were essential, says Renetta, who ended up running five: they were a ground-level "safe haven" where congregants could express and dispel received stereotypes. At the very first, in 2001, a well-meaning white woman kept using the phrase "you people." "Do you people want to be called blacks?" she asked.

"Or African Americans? I never know what to call you people." Eventually it became too much, and Larry, along with Renetta and his brother Garnett, explained to the woman and eight other white congregants in the room that "every time you say 'you people,' you're holding us back — it's like we're not included," Renetta said. The woman burst into tears and asked, "Well, what do you like to be called?" Renetta quipped in response, "I personally like to be a brownie with nuts." She says, "It broke the ice."

There were also larger race-oriented seminars and reconciliation-themed book clubs. Bibbs founded an annual "Justice Journey," busing Willow staff and black Chicago pastors together to bloodstained civil rights pilgrimage sites. Hybels added black, Hispanic and Asian performers to Willow's music and worship teams. In 2006, Willow introduced a Spanish-language service for Latinos, who were streaming into the area.

Some white congregants left. But total attendance kept climbing — and people of different races now clasped one another's hands during prayer. When Bibbs disclosed that he had booked speaking engagements elsewhere on Martin Luther King Jr. Day because Willow did not observe it at the time, Hybels inaugurated an annual 48-hour celebration, and Bibbs recalls breaking down as the entire Willow staff joined in on "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the "black national anthem." In 2008 an 18-minute multimedia presentation on the King holiday received a deafening 20,000-person standing ovation. "I've never been so proud of the church," Bibbs says. "It was like everybody had crossed over."

By February 2009, Willow had hit the 20%-minority threshold that signifies an integrated congregation.

Today its membership is 80% Caucasian, 6% Hispanic, 4% Asian, 2% African American and 8% "other" ethnicities. Says Bibbs: "The church would never be the same again."

Stalled Out? Yet in the past few years, desegregation proponents have wondered whether Willow's commitment extends to giving minorities a truly representative voice. Organizational shifts in the church resulted in the disbanding of many small groups, including those concerned with race. Hybels, with his convert's zeal on the topic and unique authority, left the main pulpit for several years. Most disturbing, according to about a dozen minority congregants, was that Hybels never promoted a nonwhite member to a pulpit pastorship or senior staff position at the main Willow campus. (Bibbs, never a "teaching pastor," now advises other churches on multiculturalism at the Willow Creek Association.) An African American recently joined Willow's elder board. Curtis Sallee, a black 15-year "Creeker," comments that while "what Bill has done racially has been nothing less than miraculous, there needs to be someone who speaks for the church, a teaching pastor or staff, who's a minority. That's the next step. I don't know whether they are ready to take it. But they're going to have to address it sooner or later."

Hybels acknowledges the situation as "extremely frustrating" and attributes it to the fact that paid leadership is drawn from the longest-serving church volunteers, who are still mostly white. The argument, however, doesn't account for the homogeneity of Willow's pulpit pastors, the past several of whom have been out-of-church hires.

Willow's predicament is hardly surprising. To some white congregants, naming a person of another color to tell you what Scripture means, week in and week out, crosses an internal boundary between "diversity" (positive) and "affirmative action" (potentially unnerving). Daniel Hill, a former Willow young-adult pastor who founded his own fully multicultural River City Community Church in Chicago, says, "There's a tipping point where the dominant group feels threatened." Consciously or unconsciously, Hybels stands at that point.

Still, observers inside and outside Willow applaud him. David Anderson, founder of the multicultural Bridgeway Community Church in Columbia, Md., says, "I bet they've done it faster and better than anyone else with a church that large starting off as all white." When I ask Hybels how important racial reconciliation is to Christianity, he says, "It's absolutely core to the Gospel. It speaks to whether all humans are made in the image of God and have the capability of being redeemed and used by God to perform his work. I'm going to persevere on this for the rest of my life." In December, Willow announced that 80% of its Hispanic attendees were undocumented and had a speaker give a talk explaining "God's heart on immigrants," a positive biblical analysis. Harvey Carey, pastor to a vibrant mixed-race congregation in Detroit, did a stint as a guest preacher.

Some think the integration of American churches is inevitable. Willow Creek Association head Jim Mellado cites the Census Bureau projection that by 2050 the U.S. will contain no racial majority. "Every church will have to deal with that or find itself on the side of the road," he says. Hybels differs, saying that "there will still be people who will only want to worship amongst their own kind."

Yet there is one part of Willow already living 2050. It is not the sanctuary. At Promiseland, Willow's vast Sunday-school complex, Jim and Ellen Strasma wrangle a band of 2-year-olds: seven Caucasians, a Caucasian-Asian, six Hispanics, an Indian American and an African American. A boy in a T-shirt and sporty maroon track pants shares a miniature plastic baguette with a ponytailed Latina. He looks like a preschool Bill Hybels, yet one of his parents is Asian American. The Indian-American girl and the African-American girl dance together. As pickup time approaches, Ms. Ellen explains that Jesus loves everyone. Sixteen small faces of various hues gaze up at her. God wants them all to be friends, she concludes — but the message seems superfluous. Here, today, Martin Luther King Jr.'s observation about Sunday school is finally refuted. In one room of one huge church striving to do the right thing, the harmony of His kingdom has already arrived.

ESSAY

2010 and On: Pundits Get Ready for Their Close-Up

By JAMES PONIEWOZIK Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

Francisco Caceres for TIME

When Lou Dobbs announced in november that he was quitting CNN after nearly 30 years, his decision was surprising. More so were reports that the outspoken Dobbs was considering running for Senate or even for President as an independent. Is he leader material? Could he become America's most beloved cranky old xenophobe since Jack Albertson's character on Chico and the Man? Dobbs could be a credible spoiler. One poll showed him attracting Perot-like presidential support, in the low teens. And the temptation is understandable, because the barrier between politics and media stardom has been getting more porous. Al Franken went from SNL star to radio host to Senator. Mike Huckabee has a show on Fox News. Sarah Palin left Alaska's governorship to be an author and a media gadfly. Glenn Beck recently announced a political-activist movement involving a "100-year plan" for America.

Knowing how to work the media, of course, has long been essential for a serious politician. But in 2010, a media career is itself a viable basis for political power--and even a political career.

Most of the recent pundit-politician activity has taken place to the right of center. Since Obama took office, the GOP seems to have divided into two parties: the party in office, holding down the minority in Congress, and the media party, holding forth on Fox and on the radio. And the media party--unencumbered by the responsibilities of office--has been having much more fun.

For instance, unlike elected, Wall Street--tied conservatives, media conservatives could full-throatedly embrace, and be embraced by, the conservative-libertarian tea-party phenomenon, which Fox News has practically owned. This should worry the officeholding GOP: a December Rasmussen poll found that if the Tea Party were an actual party, it would win more votes for Congress than Republicans would. Fox News and the tea parties may now be hotter political brands than the GOP. It used to be that media skills were necessary but secondary to political seasoning. Ronald Reagan's TV-spokesman work on General Electric Theater marked him as a rising conservative star, but his political career unfolded over decades. In 1936, radio demagogue Father Charles Coughlin--the Glenn Beck of his time--founded a third party, with little success.

But the tea-party era seems like a more propitious moment for media stars as politicians precisely because they are outside government. We live in an era when--after the best and brightest got the housing bubble, the banking crisis and Saddam's WMD capability wrong--official, expert authority has been discredited.

If anything, experience may be a liability. Huckabee was considered a front runner for the GOP nomination in 2012, until an ex-con he pardoned while governor of Arkansas murdered four police officers in Washington State. Polls since then show Huckabee still runs strong, but if he has a political future, it may be in spite of his governing record, not because of it.

Palin may have had the right idea. Yes, leaving Alaska's governorship marked her as a quitter to some voters. But resigning has freed her to be a national figure (making a mint from her book) and shape the national conversation just by updating her Twitter feed. And if she can take credit for any Republican gains in 2010, that might be a better credential than drafting a state budget.

That's the attraction of media stardom as a political base: a title without accountability, a platform without encumbrances. A pundit turned candidate can operate in the realm of the ideal, issuing prescriptions without making actual unpopular decisions. Complaining from the sidelines while doing nothing is a failing if you're a politician. But if you're a pundit, it's your job!

In fact, that raises the question, Is there more power to be gained by influencing politics from the outside than by running for office? Fox News chief Roger Ailes recently knocked down rumors that he was considering a presidential run, and no wonder. Running the network, he has more influence on conservatism than John Boehner or Michael Steele does. Besides, talk is cheap, but politics is expensive.

One of America's most successful media figures turned politician is New York City's Michael Bloomberg--a mogul rather than a screen personality--and he was barely able to buy a third term as mayor.

So the aspiring pundit cum politician should always have something to fall back on. Dobbs still has his radio show. Palin has her royalties. And Beck calls his political movement the Plan--which also happens to be the title of a book he's publishing in August, when he'll hold an unveiling rally for the Plan in Washington. It may finally be better to be kingmaker than king (or queen). It certainly pays better.

The Left's Idiocy on Health Reform

By JOE KLEIN Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009

Illustration by Stephen Kroninger for TIME

In the snarkier precincts of the left-wing blogosphere, mainstream journalists like me are often called villagers. The reference, so far as I can tell, has to do with isolation: we live in this little village on the Potomac — actually, I don't, but no matter — constantly intermingling over hors d'oeuvres, deciding who is "serious" (a term of derision in the blogosphere) and who is not, regurgitating spin spoon-fed by our sources or conjuring a witless conventional wisdom that has nothing to do with reality as it is lived outside the village. There is, of course, some truth to this. Washington is insular; certain local shamans are

celebrated beyond all logic; some of my columnar colleagues have lost touch with everything beyond their armchairs and egos.

But there is a great irony here: villagery is a trope more applicable to those making the accusation than to those being snarked upon. The left-wing blogosphere, at its worst, is a claustrophobic hamlet of the well educated, less interested in meaningful debate than the "village" it mocks. (At its best, it is a source of clever and well-informed anti-Establishment commentary.) Indeed, it resembles nothing so much as that other, more populous hamlet, the right-wing Fox News and Limbaugh slum. Hilariously, as we stagger from one awful decade into the next, there has been a coagulation of these extremes — a united front against the turgid ceremonies of legislative democracy, like compromise, and disdain for the politician most responsible for nudging our snarled checks and balances toward action, Barack Obama. The issue that has brought them together is opposition to the Senate's health care–reform bill, which makes some sense on the right, but none at all on the left.

The prejudices of the tea partiers, birthers, deathers, Palinites and other assorted "real" Americans are well known; the historic conservative opposition to universal health care isn't news. The dyspepsia of the left blogosphere is less easily explained, though. It has its roots in an issue the left got right and almost everyone else got wrong: the war in Iraq. There is still intense, unabated anger on the left because its opposition to the war was often ridiculed and almost always ignored in 2003. The anger at so-called moderates — actually, Democratic conservatives like Joe Lieberman — who supported the war is especially intense. This was the anger that fed the Howard Dean movement in 2004, and it sets the emotional parameters for other issues far more complicated than the war, like health care. Those who were wrong about Iraq can't be trusted on anything else.

Actually, both the left and right opponents of health care reform are drinking from the same watercooler.

Activists on both sides — consulting their focus groups, no doubt — found that the message that most roused their troops was the same: a government takeover of health care. The tidbit in the plan that came closest to embodying that message was a worthy but relatively minor provision called the public option, which would offer something like Medicare as one of a menu of choices for several million Americans not receiving health insurance from their employers. For the right, this was socialism. For the left, it was a step toward stripping private insurers of their choke hold on the system. When the public option was killed — by Lieberman, of all people — the left saw Iraq redux and rebelled. Not only was there no public option, but people would also be mandated — forced! — to patronize the same insurance companies that exploit them now. There would be a windfall of 30 million new customers for the insurers and drug companies. What a sellout! Bloggers at sites like Daily Kos, the Huffington Post (including Arianna herself) and FireDogLake held a village bonfire. Dean materialized to help fan the flames.

To be sure, the bill that emerged from the Senate has problems. But it is landmark social legislation that guarantees and subsidizes health care coverage for 30 million Americans who don't have it now. Yes, this means a lot of new customers for the insurance companies — but the insurers will face strict new regulations, and many of their new customers will be people they refused to cover in the past. Ultimately, it means an annual income redistribution of $200 billion to help the working poor pay for insurance, which is why Republicans oppose the bill. But Jacob Hacker, the leading promoter of the public option, favors it.

Every Democratic Senator, including those like Ohio's Sherrod Brown who have impeccable liberal records, favors it.

The denizens of the left blogosphere consider themselves the Democratic Party's base. But they are not.

For Democrats, as opposed to Republicans, the wing is not the base; the legions of loyal African Americans, union members, Jews, women and Latinos are. In the end, the sillier left-village practitioners are stoking the same populist exaggeration — the idea that Washington is controlled by crooks and sellouts — that conservative strategists like Bill Kristol believe will bring the Republicans back to power.

The perversity of this is beyond comprehension.

Remembrance of Things Future

By NANCY GIBBS Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

Gerard Dubois for TIME

Year-end lists and new year's resolutions are as easy to mock as they are to make. But in uncertain times, reviewing and previewing are serious business. They let us imagine we can impose some order on the fresh calendar page — marking holidays, graduations, movie premieres, tax-free back-to-school shopping week — even as we wait to see which days, now anonymous or devoted to watching groundhogs, will be raised from obscurity to eternity in the history books.

"It's tough to make predictions," Yogi Berra said, "especially about the future." A whole lot of predicting went on 10 years ago, at the door to the new millennium. (We were so unsure about it that we couldn't even get the word right: in 1999, newspapers and magazines misspelled millennium 4,709 times.) In TIME's pages, writers predicted cures for the common cold and baldness (sadly, no). We would give up meat. Religion would replace politics as the prime shaper of American society (sure feels that way sometimes). Retirement would disappear (sadly, yes), along with much of major league baseball. Teeth would become a fashion accessory, like fake nails, and the only thing we wouldn't be doing online is brushing them.

People stockpiled gold and grain and canned chicken chow mein in anticipation of the apocalypse that didn't happen. But few foresaw the apocalypses that did, not to mention the then inconceivable phenomena — Twitter, Twilight, Rachael Ray. So we come to a new calendar eager to assign certainty; each month has its rituals, and somewhere, someone is forever celebrating something. January, naturally, is National Oatmeal and Hot Tea Month. April, less naturally, is Irritable Bowel Syndrome Awareness Month. July seems a strange month to choose as Bioterrorism/Disaster Education and Awareness month. I don't want to be aware of anything disastrous in July other than tan lines. But July is also National Hot Dog Month, Ice Cream Month and Cell Phone Courtesy Month, as well as National Share a Sunset with Your Lover Month.

Official bodies at every level, intent on drawing our attention where it would not otherwise turn, carve the year into un-anniversaries marking those things that haven't happened but apparently should. The new year begins the U.N.'s Decade for Deserts and the Fight Against Desertification. It is also the Year for Biodiversity and the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures, whose mandate is to build "the defenses of peace in the minds of men." Presumably, the other half of the human population is already sufficiently peaceable.

Then there are the real anniversaries; how we mark where we've been tells us something about where we are. This is the centennial of the Boy Scouts, and South Africa, and Krazy Kat. It's the 75th anniversary of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, the 60th anniversary of the Korean War, the 50th anniversary of the Pill, the 40th of the Beatles' breakup — how many Rock Band requiems will be held that night? Then there's the 30th anniversary of CNN and the 20th of the invasion of Kuwait.

And there's our once-a-decade constitutional ritual: the U.S. Census, in which we attempt to become more certain about ourselves. The last Census, in 2000, determined that there were 281.4 million of us, more than three times as many as in 1900. Half of us live in suburbs. The center of population shifted 324 miles west and 101 miles south, to Phelps County, Missouri. America used to be majority male, but by 2000 only seven states, all in the West, had more men than women. In 1900, the average household contained five people; by 2000, it had dropped by two.

So what will we learn 10 years later? Conspiracy theorists, notes Wired magazine, worry that Census workers equipped with GPS devices rather than paper maps to pinpoint each housing unit will enable the New World Order to "launch Predator Drone missile attacks ... against a long list of undesirables" in the U.S. or help President Obama cede authority to the U.N. Or maybe we'll just discover that there are now more Starbucks in America than there are churches.

Finally, those who believe that language shapes reality eagerly await the annual Lake Superior State University Banished Words List, due out New Year's Day — words and phrases that have earned retirement because of overuse. The 2009 list included Wall Street/Main Street, iconic and game changer, but who could have foreseen that the iconic Tiger Woods scandal would become a game changer that reverberated from Wall Street to Main Street? Whatever is in store for 2010, it's a comforting thought that we'll at least know how not to describe it.

WORLD BANDA ACEH

Memories of Aceh: Indonesia Five Years After the Tsunami

By ANDREW MARSHALL Friday, Dec. 25, 2009

Indonesian workers walk at a construction site in Banda Aceh on December 4, 2009.

Beawiharta / Reuters "The destination you have dialed does not exist."

It is Jan. 9, 2005. I have spent two weeks in Thailand reporting on a tsunami that has transformed its famous beach resorts into corpse-strewn ruins. One night, exhausted, my clothes reeking of death, I try calling a colleague in the hard-hit Indonesian province of Aceh. I simply misdial, but the recorded message gives me chills: "The destination you have dialed..."

Aceh did exist, of course, but with 166,000 dead or missing it had borne the brunt of the Indian Ocean tsunami, triggered by a 9.15-magnitude earthquake off the Indonesian coast on Dec. 26, 2004. It was a truly international catastrophe: the tsunami struck 13 countries, killing 226,000 people of 40 nationalities.

Five years later, a first-time visitor to the worst-affected countries — Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand — might find the wave's terrible path hard to detect, thanks to a multinational, multi-billion-dollar reconstruction effort. Across Aceh, thousands of houses were built with foreign aid in what were once wastelands. In Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, new homes surround a 2,600-ton ship pushed a mile inland by the Tsunami. It is now a tourist attraction.

When I traveled to Aceh in 2005, three weeks after the wave struck, some 3,000 bodies were still being pulled from the rubble every day. Most aid-workers and journalists saw more dead in their first few days than in a lifetime of conflicts and emergencies, yet it was the living who haunted us. I will never forget a gaunt, dignified Acehnese woman called Lisdiana, who was combing the debris for any trace of her four-year-old nephew Azeel. She had dreamed he was still alive. "He's a very handsome boy," she told me, "with skin as white as yours." Did she find Azeel? Probably not. The missing stayed missing, the dead stayed dead.

A return to Aceh today is a heartening experience. Billions of dollars in reconstruction funds have poured into the province, and it shows. Banda Aceh, where the tsunami killed 60,000 people — a fifth of the population — is now bustling and prosperous. There is a new hospital and airport, and tourist shops selling I-love-Aceh T-shirts.

There is also peace. The tsunami helped extinguish a decades-old conflict between Indonesian government troops and separatist rebels of the Free Aceh Movement (known as GAM by its initials in Bahasa Indonesian), who laid down their weapons in 2005. Despite sporadic political violence, Aceh's war is over. One enterprising local travel agent even offers "guerrilla tours" to GAM's former jungle strongholds.

That's not to say Acenese have truly healed, or that they ever will. Syamsiah, 47, runs a food stall in Calang, a tsunami-annihilated town about 90 miles from Banda Aceh that was rebuilt by the Red Cross.

She seemed unfazed by the prospect of another tsunami ("That's God's business. Why should I be afraid?") but is tormented by the loss of many of her relatives, including her parents, when the wave swept over their coastal village. Syamsiah had found only their bones. "It broke my heart," she sobbed.

While most Tsunami-hit areas have been rebuilt, "there's still more work to be done," says Patrick Fuller of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). Top of the list: preparing for the next disaster. A regional tsunami early-warning system has been up and running since 2006. But getting timely and accurate information to imperiled communities is problematic. Time is of the essence: Aceh, for example, sits on the northern tip of the seismologically hyperactive island of Sumatra, where an earthquake in the western city of Padang killed more than 1,000 people in September.

This month, thousands of bereaved worldwide will observe the tsunami's fifth anniversary as solemnly as its first or its 50th. The rest of us can take some solace in the fact that while the tragedy of the tsunami touched every continent, so too did the relief effort that followed. More than 100 countries took part in the tsunami response. Some $13.5 billion was pledged in aid, with an unprecedented $5.5 billion donated by the general public. Not since the Live Aid famine-relief concerts of 1985 had the world's compassion been so galvanized. At one point, Britons were donating nearly $14,000 a minute to the main tsunami relief fund. The wave slammed into Asian and east African shores, but the whole world seemed to absorb some of its impact, some of its grief. Today we can reflect upon what our overwhelming response five years ago means as we face other global emergencies: that out of nature's darkest hour can come one of humanity's finest.

A Bold Opening for Chess Player Magnus Carlsen

By Eben Harrell / London Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

Not Bobby Fischer "It's easy to get obsessed with chess," Carlsen says. "I don't have that same obsession."

Pal Hansen for TIME Vladimir Kramnik, former world chess champion and current No. 4, is playing in the first round of the London Chess Classic, the most competitive chess tournament to be played in the U.K. capital in 25 years. Tall, handsome and expressionless, he looks exactly as a man who has mastered a game of nearly infinite variation should: like a high-end assassin. Today, however, he is getting methodically and mercilessly crushed.

His opponent is a teenager who seems to be having difficulty staying awake. Magnus Carlsen yawns, fidgets, slumps in his chair.

He gets up and wanders over to the other games, staring at the boards like a curious toddler. Every now and then, he returns to his own game and moves one of his pieces, inexorably building an attack so fierce that by the 43rd move Kramnik sees the hopelessness of his position and resigns.

Genius can appear anywhere, but the origins of Carlsen's talent are particularly mysterious. In November, Carlsen, then 18, became the youngest world No. 1 in the game's history. He hails from Norway — a "small, poxy chess nation with almost no history of success," as the English grand master Nigel Short sniffily describes it — and unlike many chess prodigies who are full-time players by age 12, Carlsen stayed in school until last year. His father Henrik, a soft-spoken engineer, says he has spent more time urging his young son to complete his schoolwork than to play chess. Even now, Henrik will interrupt Carlsen's chess studies to drag him out for a family hike or museum trip. "I still have to pinch my arm," Henrik says. "This certainly is not what we had in mind for Magnus."

Even pro chess players — a population inured to demonstrations of extraordinary intellect — have been electrified by Carlsen's rise. A grand master at 13 (the third youngest in history) and a conqueror of top players at 15, he is often referred to as the Mozart of chess for the seeming ease of his mastery. In September, he announced a coaching contract with Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest player of all time, who quit chess in 2005 to pursue a political career in Russia. "Before he is done," Kasparov says, "Carlsen will have changed our ancient game considerably."

In conversation, Carlsen offers only subtle clues to his intelligence. His speech, like his chess, is technical, grammatically flawless and logically irresistible. He dresses neatly but shows a teenager's

discomfort with formality. (He rarely makes it through a game without his shirt coming untucked.) He would seem older than 19 but for his habit of giggling and his coltlike aversion to eye contact.

Carlsen joins chess's élite at a time of unprecedented change. He is one of a generation of players who learned the game from computers. To this day, he's not certain if he has an actual board at home. "I might have one somewhere. I'm not sure," he says. Powerful chess programs, which now routinely beat the best human competitors, have allowed grand masters to study positions at a deeper level than was possible before. Short says top players can now spend almost an entire game trading moves that have been scripted by the same program and that such play by rote has removed some of the mystique of chess. He likens chess computers to "chainsaws chopping down the Amazon."

But Kasparov says Carlsen's mastery is rooted in a "deep intuitive sense no computer can teach" and that his pupil "has a natural feel for where to place the pieces." According to Kasparov, Carlsen has a knack for sensing the potential energy in each move, even if its ultimate effect is too far away for anyone — even a computer — to calculate. In the grand-master commentary room, where chess's clerisy gather to analyze play, the experts did not even consider several of Carlsen's moves during his game with Kramnik until they saw them and realized they were perfect. "It's hard to explain," Carlsen says.

"Sometimes a move just feels right."

Not that Carlsen lacks computational prowess, though. He often calculates 20 moves ahead and can comfortably play several games simultaneously while blindfolded simply by hearing each move in notation. The fear surrounding any such beautiful mind is that a life spent probing the edges of the infinite — the possible permutations of a chess game outnumber the estimated number of atoms in the universe — will eventually lead to madness. Grand masters say Carlsen's precociousness is reminiscent of Bobby Fischer's. The great American player spent his later years in isolation, reappearing only to spout anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. "It's easy to get obsessed with chess," Carlsen says. "That's what happened with Fischer and Paul Morphy," another prodigy lost to madness. "I don't have that same obsession."

Although firmly atop the chess rankings, thanks in part to his victory in London, Carlsen must now fight his way through a series of qualifying competitions in order to earn a chance to play for the world-championship title — the game's highest prize, which is contested every two or three years. His father says he is more concerned about "whether chess will make him a happy person." It seems to be doing just that. "I love the game. I love to compete," Carlsen says. Asked how long he will continue to enjoy chess and where the game will take him, Carlsen pauses to ponder the variables. "It's too difficult to predict," he concludes. So far, at least, he's been making all the right moves.

Angela Merkel's Moment

By Catherine Mayer / Berlin Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

Angela Merkel Oliver Mark / Focus

Diminutive in the imposing vastness of her office, Angela Merkel appears surprisingly frail for someone who's spent the past 20 years upending political norms. Now 55, Merkel, Germany's first Chancellor raised in the communist East, is the head of a democratic form of government and the guardian of individual freedoms that she was denied until her 30s. She outsmarted phalanxes of gray-haired, gray-suited machine politicians to set two other precedents, becoming the first woman to occupy the Chancellery as well as its youngest incumbent. Then in September, after four tricky years helming a coalition that yoked her conservative Christian Democrat bloc with the Social Democratic Party, she won a new mandate, with center-right coalition partners of her choosing. Now, as the emboldened leader of Europe's most populous nation and most powerful economy, Merkel has the ability to make her personality and priorities count on a global stage. But what, exactly, does she want to do with her power? And how will she go about doing it?

Merkel has spent decades being underestimated. There are still plenty of observers of the German political scene who regard her myriad achievements as flukes. "Merkel has never given a speech that stayed in the memory," wrote her most recent biographer. She can indeed seem reserved and self-effacing at times, but there should be little doubt that she has confidence and ambition aplenty. "You could certainly say that I've never underestimated myself," she says with a smile that in another context could only be described as kittenish. "There's nothing wrong with being ambitious."

The daughter of a Protestant pastor who settled in the East German state of Brandenburg, Merkel excelled at math and science and originally pursued a career as a physicist. But growing up where she did, she discovered early on that there were limits to what she would be permitted to do. "In East Germany," she says, "we always ran into boundaries before we were able to discover our own personal boundaries."

Paradoxically, Merkel's life under communism may have helped when it came to starting a political career as the Iron Curtain began to crumble. She knew how to navigate around blockages and when to keep a low profile. Her rise to prominence went all but unnoticed, except by the rivals she deftly derailed along the way. Elected to the first parliament of the reunited Germany, she was appointed a Cabinet minister by Chancellor Helmut Kohl just one year later. He called her das M채dchen, "the girl." She was used to

sexism. "There was no real equality in the German Democratic Republic," she says. "There were no female industrialists or members of the politburo." So she smiled her feline smile and made no protest but quickly distanced herself from her patronizing patron once he became entangled in a party finance scandal.

Childless and twice married, Merkel was cast as an indulgent mother to the electorate during the 2009 campaign. Though she claims to bake the occasional plum cake, she doesn't exactly match the ideal of a German hausfrau. Her second husband, an eminent chemist, often ducks out of official events. "He needs the working day for his science," says Merkel. Such attitudes may have annoyed traditionalists, but her quiet determination has helped her gain broad support well beyond the Christian Democrats' core voters. Even among those who identify themselves as Social Democrats, Merkel's unstuffy pragmatism, social liberalism and commitment to fighting climate change — a key issue in Germany — have made her surprisingly popular. A December poll by Germany's Infratest Dimap Institute showed Merkel was Germany's favorite politician, with 70% of Germans proclaiming themselves satisfied with her work.

The Quiet Giant So what will she do now? Given Germany's modern history, it is hardly surprising that the nation — and whoever leads it — rarely seeks to thrust itself into acrimonious global issues. German political debate overwhelmingly concerns itself with sustaining and extending the widely shared prosperity and personal security that was a hallmark of the old West Germany. When the Great Recession began at the end of 2008, Merkel initially drew fire for her handling of the crisis, and in 2009, the German economy contracted 5% overall. Critics said she was doing too little, too slowly and that her efforts were targeted at the wrong industries. She argues that her response has been vindicated. The German economy began to rebound in the second half of 2009, and helped by an aggressive "short time" work program, its unemployment rate has steadily declined to 7.5%, compared with 10% in the U.S. No economy is free from the threat of backsliding yet, however, and the head of Germany's federal labor agency has predicted joblessness will rise again this year. But as world trade picks up, the mighty German export machine should click into gear once more, delivering decent growth.

While Merkel may be able to look at Germany's domestic conditions with some confidence, there are profound international challenges ahead. Some sense of Merkel's priorities can be gleaned from her Nov. 3 speech to Congress. (She is only the second German Chancellor accorded the honor.) The speech, with its heartfelt and moving thanks and tributes to the U.S., could have been made only by someone who grew up in a Soviet satellite state. Throughout, it was easy to see how her past had shaped her view of the world. There should be, she said, "zero tolerance towards all those who show no respect for the inalienable rights of the individual and who violate human rights." That is one reason she has taken a tough line on Iran's nuclear program, criticized its crackdown on protestors after last summer's elections and risked the ire of China by meeting with the Dalai Lama.

With such commitment to humanist and democratic values, Merkel has declared herself willing to pursue policies that could cost her country dearly. Germany is Iran's largest trading partner in Europe, and many German businesses oppose any restrictions on trade with the country. But she has recently suggested that she would back new sanctions if the government in Tehran does not curtail its nuclear ambitions. In the past, U.S. officials doubted whether Germany's actions on Iran would match its tough words, but they seem to have confidence that Merkel means what she says. "When it comes to crunch time" on Iran,

says a senior U.S. State Department official, "we'll be looking closely at what Russia and China are willing to do. But we have no concerns about Germany."

For Merkel, Afghanistan is an even trickier diplomatic and economic mire. Germany is a generous donor of humanitarian aid there — as it is elsewhere in the developing world. But at 4,300 troops, Germany also provides the third largest contingent of forces in the theater, after the U.S. and Britain. In December the German parliament voted to extend the deployment in Afghanistan for another year, and the European allies — as U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has acknowledged — have reduced the number of so-called caveats that limit when troops may be deployed in combat. (Most German troops, for example, have been based in the north of the country, which has been relatively safer than the south. As of mid-December, 36 German troops had died in Afghanistan in 2009, compared with 935 Americans in the same period.)

But even comparatively low casualty figures are shocking for many in Germany — a country that eschewed armed conflict for more than 50 years — who had persuaded themselves that their nation's role was solely humanitarian. Then in September, German forces called in a U.S. air strike in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan to destroy oil tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban. Some 140 people were killed, many of them civilians. That changed the perception of the mission among the German public and politicians alike. Franz Josef Jung, who was Defense Minister at the time of the bombing, resigned over the controversy, but other German officials declared that the event galvanized the country's commitment to being a full partner in the conflict, despite the inherent brutality of any war. "We have made clear," said Merkel's new Defense Minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, on a visit to Washington in November, "that German soldiers are not any longer in the north only to dig holes for water and to wave at children. More and more, we are also in combat situations."

That view did not go down well at home. Most Germans — 69% in a recent poll — want their troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. Merkel is now under growing pressure from Washington and other contributors to the Afghanistan mission to boost the German presence as part of Barack Obama's surge strategy. As a genuine Atlanticist, she will not want to snub the U.S. call for help. But as an arch-pragmatist, she knows that public opinion in Germany will not blithely countenance a significant increase. She refuses to comment on her plans until she attends an international conference on Afghanistan in London on Jan. 28. Many German political analysts think she may compromise by keeping the number of troops steady but pledging a bigger role for Germany in training Afghan security forces.

Giving Up Power However Merkel chooses to settle policy on Iran and Afghanistan, her style of decision making will remain her own. Merkel, like Obama, believes that nations cannot tackle an issue like economic turmoil, terrorism or climate change by themselves. Where she differs from most other leaders is in the direction this analysis takes her: that true leadership involves the surrender of power. Again, history is important; Germany's past has convinced its leaders that trouble beckons when the country acts alone and that happiness comes from working with others. "With the European Union," Merkel says, "we Europeans have realized a dream for ourselves. We live in peace and freedom. That naturally entails giving up some powers to Brussels, which isn't always pleasant. But it's necessary. The greatest consequence of globalization is that there aren't any purely national solutions to global challenges."

It might seem odd that a woman whose climb to power was so arduous should contemplate giving away even a smidgen of it. But for a politician, Merkel keeps her ego remarkably in check. Indeed, to people who have never tamed their impulses for fear of drawing the attention of malign authorities nor tempered their dreams before an authoritarian state can trample them, her self-control can seem inhuman. On Nov. 9, 1989, as East German authorities gave up the struggle and opened the Berlin Wall, Merkel kept her regular appointment at a sauna. But the Chancellor's poise and self-confidence cannot obscure the question that the challenges of Afghanistan and Iran pose to her nation: When you are as rich and secure as modern Germany now is, what are your obligations to the world outside? — With reporting by Tristana Moore / Berlin and Mark Thompson / Washington

LETTERS

Inbox Moving Images The photos in your Year in Pictures issue made me cry [Dec. 21]. I was particularly moved by James Nachtwey's photo of the Afghan amputee and his comments on "veteran" amputees doing physical therapy with those who recently lost a limb. The work of these physical therapists may be repetitive and unspectacular, but it's exactly these acts of mercy that keep the world from falling apart.

Dinka Souzek, DANBURY, CONN. "The Fatigue of War," showing bone-weary Marines dug in for the night in Afghanistan, broke my heart.

In a perfect world, these brave young men would be in college, at a football game or laughing with friends over burgers and fries. Maybe next year.

Tracy Leverton, VIENNA, VA. Thank you for sharing "The Fatigue of War." As a Cuban refugee, I cherish my freedom in the U.S., while others less lucky will never know how it feels to be free.

Maggie Salazar, BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH. Toys 101 Thank you, Nancy Gibbs, for your essay "The Power of Play-Doh" [Dec. 21]. My suggestion for those looking to develop good toys: an advisory board of octogenarians who can remember the magic of Christmas when it was still a time for the child.

Emelyn McKay, UNIVERSITY PLACE, WASH. ... And a Partridge in a Pear Tree Re "Brief History: The War on Christmas" [Dec. 21]: I was raised in a nondogmatic Christian environment.

We should stop the discussion on how Christmas is being attacked and let people of each faith celebrate the season in their own ways and places of worship.

Lynne Larson, TRUCKEE, CALIF. It's Our War Too DISSENT OF THE WEEK The title of your Dec. 14 issue, "It's His War Now," demonstrates a problem with modern media. While our young men and women are suffering physical and emotional calamities overseas, the talking heads

and magazine editors remain obsessed with declaring winners and handicapping horse races. We are a nation at war, and this war, like all others, does not belong to one man.

Mike Keller, TAMPA, FLA. It's Obama's everything now. The fact that he faces a complete mess left by the previous Administration cannot be ignored. It took many years to get us into it. It will take some time to get us out.

Corey Seeman, SALINE, MICH. Person of the Year--Not! Although I respect your choice of Ben Bernanke for Person of the Year, I find it really weird that not a single mention is made of the Iranian protesters [Dec. 28--Jan. 4]. In the online poll you launched over the past weeks, the popular choice was quite clearly oriented toward these freedom fighters. I find it offensive not to have even a mention of them in your letter to readers.

Jacopo Giuntoli DELFT, THE NETHERLANDS Very poor choice. Bernanke and his ilk should be replaced with officials unconnected to Goldman Sachs--a firm that now practically runs the country. Maybe they'll have the interests of the people at heart.

Bob Paolini, DENVER Few could qualify for taking on the responsibility that Bernanke, an expert on the Great Depression, did.

His readiness was evident not just from his academic background but from his oft cited 2002 speech on deflation. In the speech, Bernanke showed the creativity and open-mindedness that have been hallmarks of the bold actions he has taken during the financial crisis.

Tony Crescenzi, NEWPORT BEACH, CALIF.

Your choices of Bernanke this year and Barack Obama last year cause me to wonder: Who is next? The captain of the Titanic?

William Reid, ESSEXVILLE, MICH.

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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

The Downward Spiral of David Mamet

By RICHARD ZOGLIN Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

Spade, Washington and Grier in the Broadway production of Race Sara Krulwich / The New York Times / Redux What ever happened to David Mamet? It may seem an odd question to ask about a playwright who is so constantly with us. No fewer than three of his plays--American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna--have been revived on Broadway in just the past year or so. His terse, fragmented, elliptical dialogue; his rogue's gallery of hustlers, con men and losers; his twisty, shaggy-dog plots; his cynical take on the American dream--Mamet's style and themes have seeped into nearly every pore of American theater. (Non-American theater too: Martin McDonagh, whose Irish black comedies are clear descendants of Mamet's work, has called American Buffalo his favorite play.)

And yet Mamet's reputation as a major playwright rests on a surprisingly slim body of work, rapidly receding into the distance. Only two or three of his plays--American Buffalo (1975), Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) and perhaps his scalding one-act Edmond (1982)--can fairly be called masterpieces. What's more, Mamet, 62, has been on a steady downhill slide for nearly two decades, bottoming out with his labored period piece Boston Marriage, in 1999, and his brutally unfunny political farce November, which landed on Broadway two years ago.

None of which prevented his new play, Race--with its blunt title promising a no-holds-barred look at Topic A of the Obama era--from becoming, sight unseen, the dramatic event of the Broadway season. The fact that, once it was seen, the play turned out to be a dud was not especially surprising. But it was cause for a hard look at whether the playwright's own race has finally run its course.

Like most of Mamet's plays, Race is a relatively slight affair: three scenes, four characters, one unnecessary intermission. It opens with two principals of a law firm, one white (James Spader) and one black (David Alan Grier), quizzing a prospective client (Richard Thomas) who has been charged with raping a young black woman. In Scene 1 the lawyers badger him mercilessly, scoffing at his claims of innocence, dismissing his naive hopes that the legal system might exonerate him. By Scene 2, however, the white lawyer has done a nifty 180 (and managed to negate virtually all of his Scene 1 pontificating) by passionately arguing for the man's innocence on the basis of one piece of evidence: the victim claimed that the accused man tore off her sequined dress, yet no sequins were found at the crime scene. (Perry Mason, you've got nothing to worry about.) The racial politics grow a little more complicated as the focus shifts in the last scene to the play's fourth character, a black legal aide (Kerry Washington) who, in the manner of most females in Mamet's male-dominated universe, turns out to be a snake in the grass.

Almost none of this is plausible, or even logically consistent. In old Mamet, themes and character revelations bubbled up naturally, almost imperceptibly, out of the rambling dialogue--that miasma of indirection, euphemism and profanity that has been dubbed Mametspeak. The new Mametspeak is more like Mametshout: thematic statements imposed from on high and delivered with an epigrammatic stun gun. Racism is universal and unavoidable. ("I didn't do anything." "You're white.") Justice is an illusion. ("The legal process is only about three things. Hatred, fear or envy.") Free will is a joke. ("Why does he want to confess?" "All people want to confess.")

The turning point for Mamet's theater work, it now appears, was Oleanna, his 1992 play in which a college professor's patronizing efforts to help a female student lead to an unjust charge of sexual harassment. Though the staccato dialogue was Mametspeak at its purest, a political agenda drove the characters in a way it never had any of Mamet's previous slimy, but at least self-directed, small-time crooks or real estate sharpies.

Yet Oleanna seemed to grow out of the authentic passions of a particular time (just after the Clarence Thomas hearings), when sexual harassment and political correctness were ripe issues. Race, by contrast, seems like a relic of another era. The advent of Barack Obama may not have invalidated Mamet's cynical view of race relations, but it has made it seem shockingly glib and opportunistic. "This isn't about sex. It's about race," goes the exchange that brings down the curtain in one scene. "What's the difference?" Make sense of that line, and you just might be able to make sense of where the most important American playwright of his generation has gone wrong. Good luck.

Sherlock Holmes: Unmemorable Action

Impressive

Abs,

By MARY POLS Friday, Dec. 25, 2009

Robert Downey Jr., left, and Jude Law star in Sherlock Holmes.

Since his introduction to the world in 1887 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes has been much celebrated for his cleverness. He's a cerebral detecting machine, able to slip in and out of disguises and make it all look "elementary." But have his steely abs ever been given their proper due? Have we remarked enough on what a cutie pie he is, especially when bantering with Dr. Watson?

No and no, but director Guy Ritchie is trying hard to correct our mistake with his populist version of Sherlock Holmes, which features Robert Downey Jr.'s six-pack in a starring role and Jude Law as his partner more in bromance than crime solving. Ritchie's Holmes is smart, to be sure, as he's been in dozens of movies and television series, but his legendary embarrassment of mental riches isn't going to embarrass anyone. In this movie, his ability to throw a right hook or dodge a flying fist matters just as much as his brain. Our new Holmes fights bare-chested in the street, and when he gets into trouble, he talks through his moves in his head, computing the angle of the blow and the damage it will inflict before actually striking, which we see in slow motion.

This gives Ritchie an opportunity to show the action twice, a technique that worked well enough to provide the backstory on shell games and heists in previous Ritchie movies like Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. But here it feels like he's just trying to maximize the violence because it's so much more fun for him than the brainy stuff. Holmes' actual crime-solving scenes slip by in an unmemorable instant; there's even one central mystery that's resolved by him dipping into a volume called The Book of Spells. Frankly, the guys on CSI use more deductive means of reasoning.

The story begins with Tower Bridge in the final stages of construction — quick, where do you think the final fight sequence will take place? — and Dr. Watson (Jude Law) about to leave Holmes for a girl, Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly). Holmes is jealous, to put it mildly, and they bicker like something out of a much lesser Judd Apatow movie. "My rooms," says Watson, referring to the Baker Street apartments they share. "Our rooms," Holmes retorts. "My dog," says Watson, referring to the corpulent white dog Ritchie

cuts to for an occasional punchline. "Our dog," Holmes says tartly. They'd be "The Odd Couple" if they were funnier and actually mismatched (Law is too pretty to play Watson).

The crime involves a member of the House of Lords, Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong, his hair shaped in a shiny black cap that makes him look like one of the Fisher Price little people), with a penchant for the perverse and the supernatural. He's caught by Holmes in the film's opening scenes in the middle of some Satanic ritual and condemned to death by hanging, but threatens to return from the grave. Holmes' favorite dangerous lady, "the woman," Irene Adler is also on hand. She's played by Rachel McAdams, who is saucy and fetching, but we don't believe for a minute that this is really a woman who would give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money. Or rather, the Sherlock Holmes, the one we never imagined was hiding a six-pack under his tweeds.

It isn't surprising that Ritchie, a director who essentially keeps making the same glib, lively movie over and over again (with the exception of 2002's Swept Away, which stands alone in defiant atrocity) would turn Holmes into an action hero. Nor does it feel like a sin against humanity or literature; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was fun but he wasn't exactly Henry James. What is surprising is how bland the results are. The explosions and action sequences have an odd cheapness to them and the central plot is one of those dreary take-over-the-world routines. (Blackwood has "set his sights on America." Don't they all?) Even more surprising is that Robert Downey Jr. doesn't manage to overcome all that. In theory, he seems like such a good casting choice for a new Holmes; no actor of the appropriate age working today seems more quick-witted or verbally agile. Holmes was a late-19th-century bad boy, known for dipping into the cocaine here and there, and Downey Jr., reformed though he may be, is still our favorite bad boy. To imagine him in a different Sherlock Holmes movie, one darker, smarter and less desperate to entertain, invigorated by a less standard-issue plot, is to dream of what could have been.

Nine: Not a 10 and Certainly Not an 8-1/2

By RICHARD CORLISS Friday, Dec. 25, 2009

Daniel Day-Lewis in Nine

You (Daniel Day-Lewis) are a famous director scheduled to make your next film. Your producer is throwing money at you; a hundred skilled technicians are ready to turn your whims into cinema reality; and everywhere, beautiful women (Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren) throw themselves at you, begging you to use them. So of course you/re miserable — because, at the moment, as a creative filmmaker, you can't get it up.

Nine, the perplexing new film based on the 1982 Broadway musical, is inspired by Federico Fellini's landmark 1963 comedy-fantasy 8-1/2. After achieving a worldwide smash with La Dolce Vita, Fellini was besieged with questions about his next film. What would it be about? How will you top yourself, maestro?

He had the bold brainstorm to make a movie about a man who can't make a movie. And since the notion was just slightly autobiographical, the movie would be made, in a way, by the man the movie is about.

The premise contained its own absurdity — nobody makes a movie without a script, a theme, a setting — but 8-1/2 was a work of great bustle and brio, built around the exhausted, passive Guido (Marcello Mastroianni). Finally, at the point of suicide, Guido has an epiphany: he will put his problems, his job, his life, all his women, into the circus of a movie, with himself as the ringmaster.

8-1/2, besides being a wondrous entertainment, was a lightning bolt to other filmmakers. The movie told them they were interesting enough to be the subjects of their own pictures. Egotism could be the highest form of artistry. For a while, every ambitious American director wanted to do his own 8-1/2. That license may have been issued a bit cavalierly — self-referential cinema, as it was called, could easily turn self-reverential — but it spawned some fascinating films, including Paul Mazursky's Alex in Wonderland, Woody Allen's Stardust Memories and above all Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, a collision of song and dance, skyrocketing neurosis and open-heart surgery, energy and entropy. Nine hit Broadway three years later, with Raul Julia declaiming Maury Yeston's songs in Tommy Tune's black-and-white, beyond-chic production.

That was a very distant time. Today, film directors prefer to make movies based on old movies, not plumb the pools of their own artistry. Hollywood looks back, not inward. Nine, directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago) and scripted by Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) and Michael Tolkin (The Player), wants to do both: engage in a little navel-gazing while summoning the glories of Italian cinema in the Cinecitta era of the 1960s. Find a role for Sophia Loren! Cast Kidman as an amalgam of Claudia Cardinale and Anita Ekberg! And, just as anachronistic, have people sing their troubles, on a single bare stage.

Attractive notions, all. So why don't they coalesce into a fully satisfying film? In part, because they expose the show's structure as a variety program, an episodic fashion show. Each of the women in Guido's life comes on, talks about her life, performs a song, then fades into the crowd. Some of these solo spots are pretty wow-y: Cruz's writhing sensuality in "A Call from the Vatican," the surprising sass and vocal authority that Judi Dench brings to "Folies Bergere" and a nicely gaudy turn by the pop star Fergie as a zaftig whore who urges the perpetually pre-adolescent Guido to "Be Italian." A few numbers are duds, like Hudson's attempt (in a new number, "Cinema Italiano") to channel Madonna in her "Vogue" period.

But each one is there to explain a situation, not advance the plot; they're ornamental, not organic. After a while, Nine plays like some Hollywood charity revue where Oscar-winning stars (the movie has six: Day-Lewis, Cotillard, Dench, Kidman, Cruz and Loren) prove that, hey, they can sing too.

Javier Bardem, the Spanish hunk who won an Oscar as the killer in No Country for Old Men, was originally to play Guido. When he dropped out, the role went to Day-Lewis, an actor nearly the opposite of Bardem. He's coiled, wary, and has a spirit that's not even slightly Mediterranean. In 8-1/2, Mastroianni was such a natural charmer — so, we have to say, Italian — that he made indolence attractive; in that film, a perpetual sexual adolescence was not a flaw but a goal (especially because women kept throwing themselves at him, and what woman wouldn't?). Day-Lewis has wit, looks and a furious dedication to every role, but he's so tense and intense that he can't unleash the showman that has to be at the heart of any musical star. Smiling is an ordeal to him, singing an imposition, dancing a form of enforced calisthenics.

Only Cotillard, as Guido's long-suffering wife Luisa, is in command of her character whether she's singing, speaking or just staring darts at her philandering mate. Pain rarely seemed so proud, or hurt so regal, as in Cotillard's rendition of the melancholic rhapsody "My Husband Makes Movies." There, a lovely scene when the ex-actress Luisa, while watching screen tests Guido has made for his new project, sees him lavishing exactly the same attention on a new girl that he did on her when she was just starting in pictures; the kind words and gestures she thought were meant for her alone are revealed as a trick directors use to flattter an actress into giving a stronger performance. It's a moment of emotional truth at the heart of this expertly made but hollow enterprise. The rest is vaudeville.

It's Complicated: But Not Complicated Enough

By MARY POLS Thursday, Dec. 24, 2009

Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin star in It's Complicated In It's Complicated, Jane, a woman in her late 50s, played by Meryl Streep, 60, is an object of great desire. Her ex-husband, Jake (Alec Baldwin), who left her 10 years ago for a skinny meanie, has suddenly taken to eyeing Jane as if she were the comeliest pole dancer in his favorite strip club.

Meanwhile, a lonely, reasonably attractive architect named Adam (Steve Martin) wants to take her to French film festivals and do the Wild and Crazy-guy dance with her.

We should all be grateful that there's a movie about a senior citizen, who isn't French or Julie Christie, having a sex life, right? By we, I mean feminists and/or anyone who can check off the yes box for at least two items on the following list: is a victim of divorce or infidelity; a believer in retribution; menopausal; bigger than a size 6; perimenopausal; loves Baldwin's 30 Rock character, Jack Donaghy, more than any TV boss since Lou Grant; has heard of menopause; loves Meryl Streep; or is just generally outraged by how little respect and attention Hollywood gives to women of a certain age (or women of any age).

I would like to say that writer/director Nancy Meyers' film is cause for celebration, but it's a bit more complicated than that. Meyers has written some astute scenes about aging and regret, heartbreak and hope. In the role of a successful businesswoman — Jane owns and operates an upscale bakery/cafÊ — who finds herself in the unlikely position of having an affair with her ex-husband, Streep is radiant, funny and endearingly vulnerable.

But Meyers demonstrates, as she did in Something's Gotta Give and The Holiday, an extraordinarily limited worldview. Her heroines are allowed just one problem, and it will never, ever include a lack of taste. Jane's semi-rural Santa Barbara home is a hydroponic dreamland, where tomatoes grow implausibly round and fully ripe in springtime. Her spacious, beautiful kitchen is filled with shelves of cake plates and creamy white platters, just waiting for this formerly unappreciated domestic goddess to fill them with homemade bounty. Producers of porn employ "fluffers" on their sets. I believe Meyers, as a producer of lifestyle porn, requires a fulltime bleacher, making sure every pristine surface and outfit stays that way. No matter how good Streep is, watching her in these surroundings feels akin to seeing Sarah Bernhardt trapped in a live-action edition of Martha Stewart Living.

Moreover, Jake, who seems like such a cheery rogue in all the film's trailers, is so odious that the affair makes little sense. It's not Baldwin's fault; he's good at being bad, and Jake's awfulness does lend itself to comedy of the oh-no-he-didn't variety. "Home!" Jake proclaims, as he lies in bed with Jane after their first sexual encounter in a decade. This would be sweet, if he weren't saying it as he's clapping his hand over her groin with all the subtlety of a baseball player adjusting his cup. It's almost as if her womanhood was chattel he mislaid and is now reclaiming. I'd hazard a guess that the last time Jake looked this pleased with himself, he was at his mother's teat.

He's missed his first wife/second mother's roast chicken and chocolate layer cake. He's missed sharing nuclear family time with Jane and their three grown children, Lauren (Caitlin Fitzgerald), Luke (Hunter Parrish) and Gabby (Zoe Kazan), who look and act as though they've been ordered from the J. Crew catalogue. So what's in it for Jane? We understand that she wants the validation of finally hearing her husband admit he made a mistake. The second wife, Agness (Lake Bell), is a huge disappointment: temperamental, with "a big job," a demanding child who diminishes Stepdad Jake every chance he gets, as well as a feverish desire to get pregnant again. Jake wants to flee, and like a wandering dog he just wants to get back home again.

It's a wronged woman's dream scenario, and Meyers' intent in showing the reality of the fantasy coming true is clever and fresh. But It's Complicated is positioned more as a which-guy-will-she-choose story,

and thanks to Jake's clear-cut case of permanent jerkitis, there's not a lot of dramatic tension to feed that plot line. Men are babies, Meyers is telling us, and only a humble one like Adam, who was cuckolded by his ex-wife, is really worthy of any successful, independent woman's while. Speaking of Adam, you know how he and Jane met? He's the architect on her remodel. Apparently Jane needs a bigger kitchen. All those cake plates of hers must be feeling squeezed for space.

Did You Hear How Bad The Morgans Is?

By RICHARD CORLISS Friday, Dec. 18, 2009

Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant star in Did You Hear About the Morgans?

You think my job is easy. I'm paid to see the movies you pay to see. But there are times when I wonder if I shouldn't have tried a less onerous trade, like defusing IEDs or chairing the Fed. Such dark thoughts percolated during the 103 minutes I spent in the company of Did You Hear About the Morgans?, a comedy about a married couple on the outs (Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant) who, after exchanging glances with a mob hit man, are relocated in the FBI's Witness Protection Program to a Wyoming hamlet where two earth-salt older folks (Sam Elliott and Mary Steenburgen) teach them life lessons on why it's good to eat pork and pack a rifle. Though The Morgans offers what might seem a welcome respite from all the Oscar-wannabe dramas where Grim Death gargles at you from every scene, its faux-funniness is no less depressing. The movie is like a car wreck in which no one is injured but the onlookers.

Interviewing Grant on Wednesday's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart mistakenly called the film What Happened to the Morgans? Stewart might have asked what happened to romantic comedy, once the crown jewel of Hollywood genres. At best, nothing new; at worst, it died of exhaustion. The Morgans' writer-director, Marc Lawrence, has no special gift for character nuance or witty dialogue. To him, rom-com is simply the recycling of a tired fugitive-couple premise from other bad movies (My Blue Heaven, Witless Protection) and the application of the genre's most formulaic shtick-in-trade: forcing an uncomfortable intimacy on two people who don't like each other.

Lawrence has been plowing this fallow field for more than a decade: with Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck in Forces of Nature, Bullock and Grant in Two Weeks Notice, Michael J. Fox and a sassy child felon in Life with Mikey. He also co-wrote the Bullock vehicle Miss Congeniality, which had actual entertainment value. So why didn't Lawrence reteam with his favorite actress? Perhaps because Bullock was off making The Proposal, which is virtually the same movie — including the compulsory re-education in American values and Steenburgen as the adoptive mother figure — and with Alaska standing in for Wyoming.

Instead, Lawrence cast Sarah Jessica Parker, on hiatus between her two Sex and the City feature films, as the heroine. Parker, I have to say, is a startling presence on the big screen. Large-featured, rail-thin and well-toned, she always looks as if she's just completed a session at the poshest workout spa in the gulag. But her sinewy perkiness makes an appropriate contrast to Grant's soft features and stammering charm. They are the opposites who might conceivably attract. As moneyed Manhattanites Meryl and Paul Morgan, she's a homegrown real estate agent and he's a lawyer from Chicago. But since this Grant makes no more serious an attempt to hide his English accent than Cary did, Chicago sounds more like Chichester.

Grant seems to think he's in a better movie, and a few times makes it better (though he was more relaxed, clever and ingratiating on The Daily Show). After his first night away from New York's 24-hour symphony of noise, Paul awakens to observe that Wyoming is "very quiet. I thought I could actually hear my cells dividing." His role as sinning husband is to confess and win his wife back, but Grant's function in the film is to provide a running commentary on Parker's cartoonishly tense career gal. ("A week ago," he tells his Wyoming hosts, after Meryl proves her mettle with firearms, "she was basically Amish.") Grant can't do much with the rest of the movie's banter, long mothballed in the Museum of Old Jokes. One bit comes from the Jack Benny Gagbook, circa 1937. FBI agent to Meryl: "Would you rather live somewhere else than die in New York?" Meryl: — long pause — "I'm thinking."

Elliott and Steenburgen lend a human dimension to the roles of a small-town sheriff and his wife. The ease with which they inhabit these characters suggests that somewhere inside the charred husk of The Morgans is the premise for an O.K. movie, or maybe a sitcom, about two middle-aged marrieds who give shelter and wisdom to outsiders on the lam. But Elliott and Steenburgen are mere supporting figures to the grating central couple ... and to the sound track of numbers way older than Meryl and Paul ... and to the picture's constant badgering about how much more wonderful a one-horse town with a grizzly bear, an imported killer and a guy who smokes in the local restaurant is than dirty old Gotham. Hey, if Wyoming were so fabulous, wouldn't everyone live there? And if they did, wouldn't it be just as unlivable as New York?

These were some of the thoughts I shouted to myself while sitting through The Morgans. But the ordeal did help me realize my true calling: I'm your critical Early Warning System. I see movies so you don't have to. And, I have to admit, it beats working.

Alvin 2: The Unspeakable Squeakquel

By RICHARD CORLISS Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel 20th Century Fox / AP Do kids know what's good for them? In movies, that is? A child of the decade just ending has been exposed to some of the grandest, most imaginative entertainment in film history: the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series, to be sure, but mainly the animated features from Pixar, Dreamworks and Aardman. These films did more than teach life lessons about the value of friendship, loyalty and initiative; they gave priceless instruction in what movies can be, and how to watch them. Seeing Finding Nemo, Kung Fu Panda and Chicken Run — not to mention this year's Up, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Coraline and The Princess and the Frog — should create in kids the demand that any movie aimed at them must be at least within shouting distance of those masterpieces. If the good doesn't drive out the bad, it should at least stir in young minds a healthy skepticism toward movie mediocrity — and zero tolerance for crap.

Explain to me, then, why Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel earned more than $75 million in its first five days of release. Was the boffo gross due to brand recognition after the 2007 movie about Simon, Theodore and Alvin was a hit? But that's no guarantor of success; the Stuart Little, Scooby-Doo and Garfield sequels all tanked. Were parents seeking a celluloid babysitter over the Christmas holiday?

They could have taken the cherubs to The Princess and the Frog or Disney's A Christmas Carol, worthy efforts that, together, took in only about a fifth of the Chipmunks' revenue in the same period. No,

somebody — somebody young — must be enjoying this soul-sapping would-be comedy. Maybe I'm missing the wit in the Alvin 2 pileup of purloined plot points, toilet and fart jokes and tired references to old movies. (The "You talkin' to me" bit from Taxi Driver simply must be retired from overuse.) Or maybe kids aren't as cinematically precocious as I thought they were.

Last time out, our singing rodents followed the guidance of their perplexed owner Dave (Jason Lee) and became international rock stars. This time Dave, in traction in Paris, sends them back to Los Angeles, where their caretaker is Toby, a PlayStation addict and all-around loser played by Zachary Levi (star of TV's Chuck). His main function — except for failing in public, then being romantically rewarded for it — is to make sure the chipmunks go to ... high school? Affirmative action in California admission policies now apparently applies to 8-in.-tall brown animals.

Send in the teen clichés. Alvin (voiced by Justin Long) joins the football team and wins a game; Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler) gets a toilet swirlie from the jock bullies; Theodore (Jesse McCartney), fretting that his brother act is close to breakup, runs away from home and gets menaced by an eagle at the zoo.

There's also a musical-talent sing-off that pits the little guys against a female trio of chipmunks, the Chipettes, laboring under the management of evil Ian Hawke (David Cross), the villain from the first movie.

The musical numbers, especially those performed by the Chipettes, have a generic verve; that's the best that can be said about the movie's CGI animation. (As in G-Force, the animated rodents interact with the live-action humans.) But when it talks, or tries to develop a situation, Alvin 2 relies on shtick that sinks below even the dismal standards of high school comedies and buddy farces. Pain is the key here: the movie has more gags that involve hitting, hurting and humiliating than you'll find in an entire Super Bowl's worth of commercials.

What's really frustrating about Squeakquel is the pedigree of some of the movie's perps. I don't mean the director, Betty Thomas, the Hill Street Blues actress who helmed one good movie (the Howard Stern Private Parts) before loading her résumé with the sort of dispiriting comedies (Doctor Dolittle, 28 Days, I Spy, John Tucker Must Die) that help give a bad name to the movies shown on airplanes. Instead, consider the stars who lend their voices to the Chipettes: Christina Applegate, Amy Poehler and Anna Faris, smart comediennes all. As for the movie's writers — Jon Vitti, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger — they've spent a decade or two creating clever words and strange thoughts for characters on The Simpsons and King of the Hill, and Aibel and Berger helped script Kung Fu Panda and Monsters vs Aliens. Writing funny for animals should not be a chore for these guys. What the heck happened?

Squeakquel seems not to have been written so much as manufactured from an unwarranted pride in the first Alvin and desperation about what to do next. (If the director played by Daniel Day-Lewis in Nine had seen this movie, his sudden awareness of what the competition was producing would have instantly unblocked his creative sinuses.) The picture's single triumph, true to the mercantile nature of the enterprise, is thunderously obvious product placement. During one of their many demolition scenes, the Chipmunks perform the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" while opening a bag of Utz Cheese Balls. The whole movie follows suit: empty calories, no comic nutrition. Seeing Squeakquel is like gorging on Cheese Balls for an hour and a half.

Enjoy, kids.

The Short List of Things to Do WEEK OF JAN. 1

Chuck: The Complete Second Season Now on DVD

In Season 1, a big-box-store clerk (Zachary Levi) received an errant e-mail that turned him into a superspy. In its second year, this action-comedy (returning to NBC Jan. 10) found a higher gear as Chuck embraced his geeky superbadness. Nerd wish fulfillment doesn't get funnier than this.

Freedom™ Now in Stores

Daniel Suarez came out of nowhere — or at least the book-world equivalent: he self-published his first techno-thriller, Daemon, an enthralling, convincing tale about a murderous AI loose on the Net. Now he has a publisher and a sequel, Freedom™. It's even better.

Summertime Now in Stores

Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace) ends his fictionalized-memoir

trilogy

biographer

together

piecing

by his

imagining life

a

through

interviews with four women who knew him as a lonely soul in his 30s. It's a bracing read: no one critiques Coetzee better than he does.

Police, Adjective Now in Theaters

A Romanian cop (Dragos Bucur) assigned to a minor drug case debates the meaning of justice with his boss (Vlad Ivanov of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). In its darkly comic way, Corneliu Porumboiu's procedural proves that less can be more — mordant and oddly moral.

The Happiness Project Now in Stores

Gretchen Rubin wasn't happy. Or at least not happy enough. So, aided by her formidable intelligence and willingness

to

try

anything,

she

spent

a

year

road-testing every theory about happiness she could get her hands on, using her own life as the road.

Christine Baranski's Short List Baranski had a 20-year career onstage, racking up two Tonys before landing a role on the hit TV show Cybill, for which she won an Emmy. She went on to add several TV and movie roles to her resume and currently can be seen as a brassy lawyer on the CBS drama The Good Wife. In her downtime this bookworm might be found with a volume about female pioneers in her hands or lost in London memories.

X chrome — accented I'm drawn to reading any kind of book about women — novels, biographies, autobiographies. My all-time favorite is The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, a novel I reread every few years. And, as I play a tough feminist lawyer on The Good Wife, I read Living History by Hillary Clinton this summer.

The empire of Abba When I was in London filming Mamma Mia!, I was engrossed in Niall Ferguson's book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. One of my happiest days that summer was a rainy afternoon spent in the Cabinet War Rooms followed by a walk through St. James's Park, where a small band was playing a medley from ... Mamma Mia! Pioneering women I adore books about adventurous women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who spent time in Africa or the Middle East. The Wilder Shores of Love by Lesley Blanch is a classic. There's also West with the Night by Beryl Markham. That's a book I read to both of my preadolescent daughters.

Big-screen fave My favorite film from the time I saw it when I was a student at Juilliard is Lawrence of Arabia ... so cinematic!

West meets East Gertrude Bell was the female Lawrence of Arabia. I read her bio by Janet Wallach just as the U.S. was about to invade Iraq. An amazing woman! Born in England, she spent much of her life in the Middle East, and she established the National Museum of Iraq. I sent the book to Ridley Scott, thinking that with his fascination for East meets West, he would be the perfect director for her story.

BUSINESS

Can Microfinance Make It in America?

By BARBARA KIVIAT Sunday, Jan. 11, 2009

A loan from Grameen America allows Altagracia Familia to buy ingredients for the empanadas and sweets she sells from her cart.

Boogie for TIME Emily Medina isn't running a pyramid scheme, despite what people often think. As the petite 26-year-old works her way through some of New York City's poorer neighborhoods, she approaches women selling food and trinkets on the street and offers to lend them money to grow their businesses. The organization Medina works for, Grameen, is one of the world's largest microfinance outfits and has a Nobel Prize to its name for this work. But in New York neighborhoods where loans to street vendors tend to come with interest rates north of 40%, it can take a while to build trust.

"I didn't believe it until I had the $1,500 check in my hand," says jewelry seller Rosa Lopez.

Thirty years ago Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen franchise, started lending small sums to poor entrepreneurs in Bangladesh to help them grow from a subsistence living to a livelihood. His great discovery was that even with few assets, these entrepreneurs repaid on time. Grameen and microfinance have since become financial staples of the developing world, but by coming to the U.S. Grameen is taking on a different sort of challenge: one of the planet's richest countries. Yes, money may be tight in the waning recession, but this is still a nation of 100,000 bank branches.

Yet Yunus believes that in just a few years Grameen America will be so successful that it turns a profit, thanks to 9 million U.S. households untouched by mainstream banks and another 21 million using the likes of payday loans and pawnshops for financing. Profit has long eluded U.S. microfinanciers. "If it's not profitable, it's not microlending — it's charity," Yunus said on a recent trip to the U.S. The question, then, is whether there is a role for a Third World lender in the world's largest economy.

Here is how Grameen is trying to establish one: on a Thursday afternoon, Medina and 10 borrowers gather in Ziomara Suarez's apartment in the northern prong of Manhattan. As the borrowers — all women, all immigrants — pack into a room with shelves full of the herbal health remedies Suarez sells,

they each hand Medina a small blue ledger with a loan payment tucked inside. If any one of the women doesn't pay her weekly installment, credit will be cut off to the entire group — stunting the small businesses they've each developed. Collateral and credit scores may be missing, but peer pressure is powerful. The result: a 99% repayment rate in the U.S. Since 2008 Grameen has collected 1,700 borrowers in New York City, and last June it opened a second branch in Omaha, Neb. Other cities in its sights include San Francisco, Boston and Charlotte, N.C. — anywhere local businesspeople raise seed capital and a bank will host low-cost savings accounts for borrowers with just a few dollars, since savings are a key part of the Grameen philosophy. "There are whole populations that aren't being reached by the banking sector," says Bob Annibale, director of microfinance at Citibank, which partners with Grameen in New York. Like other financial giants, Citi sees a lucrative new market in the unbanked. But attracting those customers isn't easy, and Citi is overjoyed to have Grameen deliver them.

That was also true when Grameen first came to the U.S., in the late 1980s, and tripped up. Under Grameen's tutelage, Southern Bancorp started making microloans to entrepreneurs in Arkansas. At first, the loss rate was a shocking 30%. Even after getting that under control, Southern found that what people really needed wasn't seed capital but broader help developing work skills and finding jobs.

The folks running Grameen America say that this time around results will be different because Grameen employees themselves are making the loans, not training an American bank to do it. In New York City, Shah Newaz, who started working for Grameen in 1982, hands out checks to borrowers at Grameen America headquarters — a sparsely furnished one-room office above a laundromat. In Omaha, Habib Chowdhury, who has worked for Grameen since 1985 and is a veteran of its Kosovo start-up, has found more than 250 borrowers since June and has already lent $378,000, mostly to Mexican immigrants stocking up on inventory for small businesses selling things like cosmetics, clothing and Herbalife weight-loss products.

Imported talent helped Grameen rival Acción, a big player in Latin American microfinance, establish a presence in the U.S. in the early 1990s. And yet even after years of making loans to small and upstart businesses, Acción still isn't profitable — an example of the challenge Grameen faces if it thinks it won't have to depend on donations for funding.

The working microfinance equation consists of borrowing funds cheaply and keeping loan defaults and overhead expenses sufficiently low. Microlenders overseas, including Grameen, do that by charging hefty interest rates — as high as 60% or 70%. (Yes, that's a colossal rate but one that's necessary to compensate for the risk and to attract bank funding.) But in the U.S., loans at rates much above Grameen America's standard 15% would most likely be attacked as usurious.

In the U.S., Acción has probably gotten closer to self-sufficiency than any other microlender by using technology and partnerships to boost efficiency. Acción Texas now underwrites loans for 12 different microfinance organizations, a pooling of talent designed to help all the groups more quickly remove their dependence on grants and community-reinvestment money.

Grameen's approach is different, since unlike most U.S. microfinanciers, it uses the group-lending model.

Costs are kept down by having borrowers vet one another, tying together their financial fates and eliminating expensive loan officers entirely. Whether that setup will eventually allow Grameen to stand on its own two legs is a huge question mark.

And even if it can, it is still important to keep in mind exactly what a $1,500 loan can do. The ultimate promise of Grameen — and of microfinance more broadly — is to use business lending as a way for people to lift themselves out of poverty.

Grameen America provides a fascinating lens through which to view that ideal. More often than not, the borrowers Grameen finds in the U.S. already have jobs (as factory workers or home health aides, for example) as well as side businesses — selling toys or Amway products, cleaning houses or giving haircuts. The loans from Grameen, by and large, provide a steadier source of funding, but they don't create businesses out of nothing.

Take, for instance, Altagracia Familia, a former schoolteacher in the Dominican Republic who now lives in New York City and sells empanadas and coconut sweets. Her vending cart used to be wooden, but then she upgraded to metal. Not by way of a loan, though. Familia slowly saved profits and bought a new cart once she had amassed $7,000. What she spent her Grameen loan on is much less flashy: ingredients and cart repairs.

That's not to say the money isn't helpful. But according to Familia, one of the main things she gets from Grameen is something else: "their interest is in developing women workers," she says through a translator. "Women share their ideas and help each other out."

That correlates with what Jeffrey Ashe found in the 1990s when he ran a group-lending outfit. Working Capital, which had branches from Burlington, Vt., to Miami, eventually collapsed, but at its height the entrepreneurs were tremendous sources of support to one another, says Ashe. "I'd say that might have been more important than the loans," he recalls. "After they stopped borrowing, a lot of the groups would still meet — to help with bookkeeping, to refer customers to each other." Even if microlending isn't a clear-cut pathway out of poverty — and years of studies have yet to settle that debate — it could still be doing something very useful.

Back at Ziomara Suarez's apartment, the formal loan collection ends, but the women of the Progressives — what the group has named itself — stick around. As Emily Medina leaves to deposit the cash she's collected, the borrowers continue to chat and laugh and swap stories about the ups and downs of business. Then one of them opens up a suitcase and starts selling jeans and T-shirts out of it.

— With reporting by Natasha del Toro

SOCIETY

Google Builds a Better Browser

By PETER HA Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

Hinterland for TIME

We spend an inordinate amount of time browsing the Web every day. As a Google exec put it, "Many users probably spend more time in their browser than they do in their car." Yet most of us barely notice which browser we're using — we tend to stick with whatever comes loaded on our computer, as long as it allows us to check our e-mail, do a little shopping, peruse Facebook and send the occasional tweet. We live and work within a browser, and it makes no difference whether it's Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari or Mozilla's Firefox, as long as it gets the job done, right? But things are different now.

After years of dominating search on the Web, Google is looking to change the way we go about surfing it.

A little more than a year ago, it launched the beta version of Google Chrome for Windows. It was simple, clean and fast. In December the company released Chrome for Mac and Linux, which helped catapult the browser past Safari in total market share. It now trails only Firefox and the ultimate preloader, Explorer.

Chrome's many virtues include security and stability. (For example, if a site crashes on you, the rest of the tabs in your browser will keep working — no need to relaunch the whole thing.) But speed stands out as its key differentiator. Independent studies show that Chrome boots up and loads Web pages faster than Explorer or Firefox. Who doesn't want that?

Chrome is not only fast; it's free. So why has Google been putting so much effort into developing it? For one thing, because of the rise of Web-based applications. These let you create documents and spreadsheets (Google Apps, Zoho, Microsoft Office Online), listen to music (Pandora, iLike, Lala), edit photos (Piknik, Photoshop.com and check your voice mail (Google Voice) online. "But the pace of innovation in the browser space wasn't keeping up," says Brian Rakowski, director of product management for Google Chrome. "So we decided to start designing a browser from the ground up to see if we could build one that is faster, easier to use and fundamentally more secure." So far, more than 40 million users have downloaded it.

But Google's plan for world domination is far from complete. Scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of 2010 are netbooks that will run on Chrome OS rather than Windows or some other operating system.

These devices will be optimized for the Web and will boot up directly into the browser, with no desktop as we know it today. It's unclear whether Google will license the operating system to manufacturers like HP and Acer or put out its own hardware in the form of an official Google Chrome OS netbook. Either way, you won't be able to purchase Chrome OS to install on your computer. You will have to buy a new netbook if you want the full Google experience.

If there's any doubt that Google has been gunning for Microsoft, then Chrome OS certainly puts that to rest. It's your move, Microsoft. Good luck.

Why Overcoming Phobias Can Be So Daunting

By LEV GROSSMAN Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

Let's get this out of the way right up front: I'm afraid of people eating. Some people are scared of snakes or flying or heights or other things that can actually be dangerous. I'm filled with overpowering, irrational dread by the sight or sound of another human being eating or drinking. It doesn't make any more sense to me than it does to you. But that's what a phobia is: a fear that has nothing to do with logic or common sense.

Weird as it sounds, phobias are not that unusual. According to a study published in 2008 by the National Institute of Mental Health, 8.7% of people in the U.S. over the age of 18 have a specific phobia of some kind or other. It doesn't take much to set mine off. A swig from a water bottle can do it, or someone chewing gum. Every morning when I get on the subway, I scan the passengers like an air marshal looking for terrorists. At any moment, somebody could whip out a bagel or a danish. I do well in restaurants, where there's a lot of ambient noise and distraction, but one-on-one meals are a minefield.

And don't get me started on popcorn. When I go to a movie theater, every movie is a horror movie.

The treatment for a phobia like mine is simple and routine, and I avoided it for as long as humanly possible. That's because it involves deliberately, systematically exposing yourself to the thing you fear.

It's part of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. It's a very practical kind of therapy — it has no truck with mystical Freudian mumbo jumbo. CBT views your symptoms not as clues to the secrets locked in your tormented unconscious but as a set of learned behaviors and bad habits that you can be trained to give up. As far as CBT is concerned, my phobia was just a piece of bad neural wiring that needed troubleshooting.

That isn't a model of my brain that I feel especially comfortable with. I like to think of my brain as profound and mysterious, full of demons and neuroses and fascinating dreams that I can bore my co-workers with.

But when you're fighting a phobia, CBT is your weapon of choice. It's reliable and well documented.

Insurance companies love it. Often you can cure a phobia like mine in about 12 sessions.

Researchers at New York University have even gone beyond CBT. According to a study published in December in Nature, when a person's phobia gets activated, there's a period immediately afterward when the traumatic memory that the phobia is based on becomes vulnerable. During that time — which lasts about six hours — you can reshape the memory, rewrite it in a way that removes the fear.

The results of memory-reconsolidation experiments are impressive. The participants in the Nature study were first trained to fear a certain arbitrary stimulus — they were shown colored cards while receiving mild electric shocks — then reconditioned during the reconsolidation period. The fear went away. It was still gone when the participants were retested a year later.

How to Fix a Phobia Three common treatments, plus a promising new one

Flooding Develops patients tolerance of a feared object, like a spider, through a high degree of exposure e.g., a roomful of spiders DOWNSIDE Patients may not be willing to undergo such immersive therapy

Desensitization Employs muscle-relaxation techniques to help patients tolerate gradual increases in exposure to a feared object DOWNSIDE Therapists say the process risks lowering patients self-esteem

Medication Uses antidepressants called monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors to reduce panic and increase confidence DOWNSIDE Side effects can include decreased sexual ability and weight gain

Reconsolidation Uses noninvasive methods to rewrite traumatic memories with information that prevents the return of fear DOWNSIDE Practicality and durability are still uncertain, but lab results show promise

PEOPLE

10 Questions for Brian Williams

Marc Bryan-Brown / WireImage / Getty

What do you consider the most important story of this decade?

— Jared May, Boston

I would say 9/11. We're fighting two wars in its name. It changed how we are viewed in the world and changed how my children's generation will grow up as Americans. It changed how I entered this building today.

The most surprising news story in my lifetime is the Soviet Union's collapse. What is yours?

— Ed Winters, Suffolk, N.Y.

I was born in 1959 in Ridgewood, N.J., so if you think back, it's very hard to single out one thing in a lifetime of 50 years. We lost a very visible war in Vietnam. We won a very visible space race. Though the end of the Cold War and all it has wrought is probably as good an answer as any.

Have you interviewed anyone who made you really nervous?

— Barb Micetic Lancaster, Gridley, Ill.

The worst interview I ever conducted was with TV host Steve Allen, who was having a bad day and decided that one-word answers should suffice. The interview felt like about a week and a half, and I think it took 20 minutes.

How do you expect TV journalism to change in the next five years?

— Debra Turner, New York City

I've seen a lot of death notices come and go about what I do for a living. Not only are we still standing; I'm proud to report that NBC Nightly News viewers have increased over last year. I think with media rapidly multiplying, the choices we have, have perhaps become so dizzying that there is a kind of "Come home, America" aspect to our increased audience.

Do you actually wear pants while doing the news?

— Curtis Ohl, Escondido, Calif.

I choose to. I know colleagues — and I'm not going to use any coy initials here, Al Roker — I know people in the industry who don't: Garrison Keillor. I don't celebrate that. I think it's a tawdry trick, Matt Lauer.

Why are there no ugly people reading the nightly news?

— David Keyes, Sandpoint, Idaho

I have some buddies in New Jersey who would argue that there's a big ugly one anchoring NBC Nightly News. There are a whole bunch of us on television who look normal. Has there been traditionally a fiendish double standard for men and women on television? Yes. It's not right. Especially with the advent of high-definition television, it's a cruel, cruel medium.

What are your thoughts on losing TIME.com's "most trusted name in news" poll to Jon Stewart?

— Kirk Bado, Shawnee, Kans.

This is a bitter and divisive issue. We have evidence that it wasn't fair, that someone tinkered with the machinery of the "most trusted" poll. I got played. In real life, as they say, I love the guy. I consider Jon Stewart and The Daily Show and their freakishly talented staff to be an entire branch of government.

They play a role in holding media and politicians accountable.

Have you ever thought about giving up journalism and doing comedy?

— Matthew Thacker, Bowling Green, Ohio

Thanks, but no. I'm working in my first love. I don't know what I would do for a living if I couldn't work in journalism.

When are you going to start Twittering?

— Tracy Marino, Austin, Texas

Our team has used Twitter on occasion. I see it as kind of a time suck that I don't need any more of. Just too much "I got the most awesome new pair of sweatpants." I'm going to go ahead and assume that people buy awesome sweatpants every day and that I don't need to know them by name.

What story have you felt most passionate about covering?

— Keith Spencer, Everett, Mass.

I think probably Hurricane Katrina. I cover a lot of perfectly horrible things. I'd love to shake what we saw in Baghdad. I'd love to shake what we saw in Banda Aceh, where 30,000 people died. But I can't shake the sight of a dead body on a major street corner next to the Superdome and how these people were failed by grownups and their government, whom we entrust to protect us.

NOTEBOOK

Brittany Murphy Actress, 32

REBECCA MCALPIN / RETNA

An actress more famous in death than in life, Murphy, 32, became a year-end tabloid and Twitter sensation when she was found unconscious in her West Hollywood home on Dec. 20 and died before police could get her to the hospital; autopsy results have not been released. A natural entertainer who as a kid convinced her mother to move them from Edison, N.J., to Los Angeles, Murphy soon landed the role of the tough, gauche girl who gets a makeover from Alicia Silverstone in the 1995 hit Clueless. While not becoming the star she dreamed of, she did strong work in 8 Mile, Uptown Girls and Girl, Interrupted and kept busy working on other movies and scores of TV shows, though her recent career was marked by trouble: she was fired from one movie, and so seemingly addled while shooting another that a new character had to be hastily written in to pick up Murphy's slack.

She was a hot property, though, in the specialized field of voice work for cartoons. Her most endearing, enduring roles were ones she was never seen in: Gloria, the hero penguin's girl friend, in Happy Feet and, for 12 glorious years, Luanne Platter on the Fox cartoon series King of the Hill. A dizzy blond with a knack for disastrous relationships, Luanne busted out of stereotype thanks to the deep-throated Texas texture Murphy provided for the character, and her vocal ability to switch in a trice from humor to pathos as Luanne's inane enthusiasms would explode into fortissimo fears. Luanne will be a shining legacy for an actress with a comic gift and a tragic fate.

—Richard Corliss

A BRIEF HISTORY OF

Fad Diets

By DAN FLETCHER Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2009

Masterfile / Radius Images / Corbis

The holidays are upon us, which means 'tis the season to overindulge. But once the calendar turns, we'll have to shed some of those pounds, which is why Dr. Sanford Siegel appeared on the Today show on Dec. 14 to tout a mouthwatering diet plan: eat six cookies a day as part of a limited-calorie diet, and watch that extra weight melt away.

Forgive our skepticism, as these aren't snickerdoodles or chocolate-chip cookies but rather protein- and nutrient-packed biscuits that stretch the definition of cookie. The cookie-meal plan has actually been around since 1975, but the quest for the magic diet solution goes back much further. There's a (possibly apocryphal) story that after becoming too fat to ride his horse, William the Conqueror devised an alcohol-only diet in 1087. The monarch didn't grow thinner; instead, he died later that year after falling from his beleaguered steed, leaving his subjects to struggle with finding a coffin big enough to fit the corpulent king.

Despite its dubious beginnings, fad dieting gained mass appeal in the 19th century. In 1829, Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham touted the Graham diet — centered on caffeine-free drinks and vegetarian cuisine and supplemented by the eponymous graham cracker — as a cure for not just obesity but masturbation (and the subsequent blindness it was thought to cause). The diet became so popular that the students of Oberlin College were forced onto it for a brief period in the 1830s before they successfully rebelled through mass dissent in 1841. Thirty-five years later, an English casketmaker named William Banting became famous by pioneering the concept of a low-carbohydrate diet, which helped him lose 50 lb. He published his results in the 1864 "Letter on Corpulence," and the plan became so popular that banting became a synonym for dieting across Britain.

From there, things got a little strange. In 1903 self-taught nutritionist Horace Fletcher became known as the Great Masticator for advancing the notion that one should chew food exactly 32 times before spitting it out completely. (Pleasant dinner guests, Fletcher's acolytes were not.) In 1928 dieters could choose between eating only meat and fat (sometimes in trimmings bought directly from the butcher) on the Inuit diet, or skim milk and bananas on Dr. George Harrop's aptly named bananas-and-skim-milk diet. As late as the 1960s, Dr. Herman Taller was touting the Calories Don't Count diet, which held that the quantity of food consumed was unimportant provided that you chased it with vegetable oil.

The bizarre early history of planned weight loss makes recent fad diets seem enlightened by comparison.

The Atkins diet, a modern-day Banting plan that has eaters eschew carbs in favor of protein-rich meals, was written in 1972 and became in later years a weight-loss plan favored by millions. (Critics say it can also cause high cholesterol and bad breath.) Its success spawned imitators like the popular South Beach diet, a more lenient version that invokes the same low-sugar principle. But other modern diets remain pretty far-fetched. One example is the cabbage-soup diet, which promises that adherents will lose 10 lb. in a week by eating only cabbage soup. A more challenging competitor might be the lemonade diet, which requires dieters to subsist on a concoction of lemon juice, maple syrup, red pepper and hot water for as long as 10 days. While it may not rely on sound science, Siegal's cookie diet looks that much more appealing by comparison.

The World

By Harriet Barovick; Laura Fitzpatrick; Alex Altman; Claire Suddath; Alyssa Fetini; Frances Romero; Tamara Weston; Kristi Oloffson Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

1 | Detroit Terrorism in the Air On a Northwest/Delta plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, allegedly tried to ignite explosives concealed in his underwear but was overpowered by other passengers. The incident prompted a swift escalation of security measures by airlines, snarling holiday transportation on one of the year's busiest weekends. The apparent lapse that allowed Abdulmutallab to travel--he had been placed on a list of persons of interest but not on the so-called no-fly list after his father warned authorities about his radical tendencies--has led to increased scrutiny of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration and its policies. Abdulmutallab, who was charged in federal court with attempting to destroy an aircraft, told U.S. officials that he was given the explosives and instructions on how to use them by an al-Qaeda group in Yemen.

2 | New York City Shopping Spree The 2009 holiday season proved merrier than expected for U.S. retailers, with MasterCard estimating a 3.6% increase in sales vs. 2008. Analysts credit the surge in part to an extra day of shopping between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

2009 holiday retail sales compared with 2008

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

ONLINE SHOPPING +15.5% ELECTRONICS +5.9% JEWELRY +5.6% FOOTWEAR +5.0% LUXURY +0.8% APPAREL -0.4% DEPARTMENT STORES -2.3% SOURCE: MASTERCARD ADVISORS SPENDINGPULSE 3 | Iran Turmoil in Tehran At least eight people were killed and hundreds more arrested in the most violent antigovernment protests in Iran since those that followed June's disputed presidential election. Authorities accused foreign governments of backing the demonstrations, which were held as Iran marked the major Shi'ite holiday of Ashura. Among those killed was 43-year-old Ali Mousavi Khamane, nephew of opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

4 | Argentina Gay-Marriage Firsts

Although on Dec. 21 Mexico City became the first Latin American metropolis to vote to legalize same-sex marriage, two Argentines led the charge to the altar. On Dec. 28, Jose Maria Di Bello and Alex Freyre became the first gay couple in Latin America to wed. Because Argentina's constitution does not declare that marriage must be between a man and a woman, the men asked for and were granted special permission from the governor of the southern province of Tierra del Fuego, to which they traveled to be pronounced husband and husband.

5 | China A Foreigner Executed ...

Amid an international outcry, China carried out the death sentence of a British man convicted of smuggling heroin into the western province of Xinjiang. London had sought clemency for Akmal Shaikh, 53, arguing that he was mentally ill and had been exploited by other smugglers. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was "appalled" by the Dec. 29 lethal injection, which Chinese officials defended as being in accordance with the law.

6 | China ... A Dissident Imprisoned In a crackdown on challenges to the government, Beijing sentenced Liu Xiaobo, 54, to 11 years in prison for activities that include co-authoring last year's Charter 08 petition calling for freedom of speech and religion. Rights groups, the U.S. and the E.U. condemned the sentence; authorities dismissed criticism of the activist's trial as "gross interference" in China's internal affairs.

7 | Pakistan A HOLY DAY MARRED BY BLOODSHED Pakistan's minority Shi'ite community was rocked by a suicide attack on a religious procession in Karachi during the holy festival of Ashura. The Dec. 28 bombing, which killed at least 40 people, was the third in a week to target Shi'ites. Sunni extremist groups were accused of orchestrating the attack, and government officials have asked Shi'ite clerics to delay upcoming processions for safety reasons. Critics of President Asif Ali Zardari pointed to the events as evidence of his inability to combat increasing sectarian violence in the country.

8 | Dublin Implicated Priests Step Down Four Roman Catholic bishops resigned in December after being named in a report that allegedly documents the Dublin archdiocese's practice of safeguarding priests--at least 170 of them from 1975 to 2004--accused of sexually abusing children. The report, issued by the Irish government in November, also alleges that Irish police repeatedly failed to investigate claims of abuse and conspired to protect Catholic clergy.

9 | Washington Health Care Reform Clears the Senate Now that the U.S. Senate has passed a wide-ranging health care reform bill, lawmakers in the two houses of Congress must reconcile the small but critical differences in their versions before President Obama can sign a bill into law. Both proposals are expected to expand health coverage to more than 30 million uninsured Americans.

Some crucial health care sticking points [This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine.]

10 | Thailand Sending the Hmong Home The Thai government began forcibly repatriating more than 4,000 ethnic Hmong to their native Laos on Dec. 28, despite expressions of concern from the U.N. and foreign governments and pleas from the refugees, who say they face persecution at home. The Hmong fought on the side of the U.S. in the conflicts that ravaged Southeast Asia in the 1970s, and a handful of rebels are still waging an insurgency against Laos' communist government. Although 158 deportees are legitimate refugees, as declared by the U.N., Bangkok refused to continue providing them asylum. Some 300,000 Hmong have fled to Thailand since the '70s, but most have already been repatriated or resettled in other countries. * | What They're Talking About in India: Indian tabloids are buzzing over the saga of Narain Dutt Tiwari, the 86-year-old governor of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, who resigned Dec. 27 after a video surfaced allegedly showing him cavorting in bed with three young women. Another woman purportedly provided the consorts in exchange for a mining lease. Women's-rights groups have protested Tiwari, who denies any wrongdoing.

Percy Sutton

By The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. Monday, Jan. 11, 2010 In Harlem they called him the Big Rock: when it hit the water, the concentric waves kept going. Percy Sutton, who died Dec. 26 at 89, was a Renaissance man--a gentle, scholarly, tough social transformer; a long-distance runner; and a former Tuskegee Airman. In his long career as one of the nation's most influential black political and business figures, he made plenty of waves.

Percy, who was born in Texas and studied law at Columbia University and Brooklyn Law School on the GI Bill, became Manhattan borough president in 1966--making him the highest-ranking black official in

the state at the time. His 1977 run for mayor was unsuccessful, but his work cleared the way for politicians like Representative Charlie Rangel and David Dinkins, who in 1989 was elected the city's first black mayor.

When Percy went to join the civil rights marchers in Selma, Ala., he took along Rangel, Dinkins and Basil Paterson, the father of New York's current governor. One day, after hearing Malcolm X speak in Harlem, Percy went to his office and said, "Malcolm, you need a lawyer." Percy represented him until his 1965 assassination.

Percy was a tireless advocate for African Americans' economic rights. In 1971 he bought WLIB-AM. It became the first black-owned radio station in the city. He had to go to 62 banks to get the money for it.

His belief was that radio was the only way blacks running for office could get their message out. After the Apollo Theater's lights went out in 1975, Percy invested $250,000 to help revive the institution.

Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King died violently. Percy's friends in the military died violently. But God let Percy down easy. He lived 40 years longer than Dr. King and Malcolm and made good use of that time.

So many of us are indebted to him. We always want some special gift for Christmas. I suppose this time, heaven wanted a present.

Kim Peek

By ALEX ALTMAN Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

When Kim Peek was 9 months old, doctors pronounced him so mentally retarded that he would never walk or talk. One physician suggested he be institutionalized; another later recommended a lobotomy.

Peek, who died of a heart attack Dec. 19 at 58, was indeed riven by disabilities throughout his life. Born without a corpus callosum--the nerve tissue that connects the brain's hemispheres--he never learned to brush his hair or button his shirt without help.

But buried beneath these afflictions was a mighty intellect unique in the world. Peek was a so-called megasavant, a man with such dazzling recall that he seemed to have ingested encyclopedias whole. He could read both facing pages of a book--one with each eye--in seconds and could instantly tell you everything from the day of the week for a bygone date to esoteric facts about sports history or Shakespeare's canon.

In 1984, Peek's skills floored screenwriter Barry Morrow and helped inspire Dustin Hoffman's savant character in the Oscar-winning drama Rain Man. Peek became an overnight star and spent the rest of his life showcasing his gifts to more than 64 million people. Had he chosen to, he might have memorized every name.

The Moment

By HOWARD CHUA-EOAN Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

At the heart of Shi'a Islam is a 1,400-year-old passion play of political succession: the hero is Hussain, grandson of the Prophet; the villain is Yazid, the usurper of the Caliphate; and each year on the holy day of Ashura, their bloody conflict is re-enacted as a Shi'ite cri de coeur. Iran, the pre-eminent Shi'ite nation, commemorated Ashura amid its own power struggle. Tens of thousands took to the streets, chanting, "We are the army of Imam Hussain ... supporters of Mir-Hossein." Hussain had become Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the declared loser in last June's presidential election to the "usurper" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The authorities reacted ferociously, with bullets and batons, killing several people. The opposition responded with fists and stones, almost boastful of its long-lived defiance. The protesters, whose campaign has lasted for more than six months, acted on the belief that light will eventually overcome darkness. It's worth remembering, however, that Ashura is not a joyful festival but a day to mourn martyrs: in history, Yazid defeated the beloved Hussain. And for now, darkness still reigns in Tehran.

Brief History: Fad Diets PAGE 18

The Skimmer

By ANDREA SACHS Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

By Ethan Watters Free Press; 306 pages The U.S. exports plenty of things that much of the world would gladly send back: the Golden Arches, Jerry Bruckheimer movies and Baywatch, to name a few. But in addition to the cultural flotsam that drives the rest of the world crazy, America is literally exporting its mental illnesses. "In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been, for better and worse, homogenizing the way the world goes mad," writes journalist Ethan Watters.

He traces how conditions first widely diagnosed in

the U.S., such as anorexia and PTSD, have spread abroad "with the speed of contagious diseases." The growth of Big Pharma and the widespread adoption of U.S. health standards have made the ailing American psyche the primary diagnostic model. By 2008, for example, GlaxoSmithKline was selling over $1 billion worth of Paxil a year to the Japanese, who didn't know they had a problem with depression until drug marketers informed them. Though Watters' indignation can be wearying at times, he is on to something worth pondering.

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Yemen: Al-Qaeda's New Staging Ground?

By TIME STAFF Monday, Dec. 28, 2009

Yemenis in the Radfan district of Lahj protest the government raid that targeted suspected al-Qaeda members

AFP / Getty The claim of responsibility was a haughty cackle, even if the operation it reveled in had ended in failure.

In an Internet post* on Dec. 28, 2009, the group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula declared that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's alleged attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas had demonstrated the "frailty" of American intelligence, "making all they have spent upon security technologies a waste to them." In an additional shout-out, it praised "the hero mujahid [Major] Nidal Hasan," the accused perpetrator of the Fort Hood, Texas, massacre, as an exemplar of the mission "to kill every crusader with all means that are available."

The letter, posted on the jihadist Shumukh al-Islam Network, really let loose its rage on the American people: "Receive the tidings about what will happen to you. Since we are coming to you with slaughter and we have prepared for you men who love death as much as [you love life], and God willing will come to you with something for which you are not prepared, and as you are killing [so] will you be killed."

The Detroit incident, the group claimed, was retaliation for U.S. military–assisted attacks on "the noble Yemenite tribes in Abyan and Arhab, and finally in Sibwa" in which "scores of Muslim women and children, and families in their entirety" were killed — assaults that took place in the preceding week.

Under pressure in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, al-Qaeda began turning the lawless mountain areas of Yemen into a new staging area. That staging area is now sending more and more violent probes out into the world.

Stretched around the southern heel of the Arabian Peninsula and home to 23.8 million people — compared with 28.7 million in geographically much larger Saudi Arabia — Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. It came into being when North and South Yemen merged in 1990. Long a source of jihadis, the region sent hundreds of fighters to the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and — to judge by the number of captured, killed and identified insurgents in Iraq — continues to be one of the biggest suppliers of fighters to regional conflicts. It is common knowledge in the tearooms of the Yemeni capital of Sana'a and in Western embassies that the government of northern Yemen used jihadis to help defeat the south in the civil war that ended in 1994. But the symbiotic relationship between the government and al-Qaeda shifted after 9/11 and the American invasion of Iraq, when the Yemeni government worried that it too might be on the receiving end of U.S. military action. Sana'a helped the U.S. with the assassination of an al-Qaeda leader in 2002 by missile attack from a Predator drone, even as it turned a blind eye to other extremists as long as they didn't cause trouble.

The post-9/11 cooperation between the U.S. and Yemeni governments met with considerable success — so much so that Yemen later fell off the radar to some extent as the Bush Administration shifted its focus back to battling insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the past two years, al-Qaeda in Yemen began to regroup, spurred by the dramatic 2006 prison break of its leader Naser al-Wahishi and 22 other members. Early this year, Wahishi announced a merger between his organization and al-Qaeda's Saudi branch to form al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — a move that caused the U.S. director of national intelligence to note that Yemen was "re-emerging as a jihadist battleground and potential regional base of operations for al-Qaeda." With a base in Yemen, al-Qaeda could launch attacks on the Red Sea gateway to the Suez Canal as well as stage operations against Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.

The recent U.S.-assisted attacks on alleged al-Qaeda strongholds in Yemen appear to be a stepped-up attempt to stamp out the threat. However, Gregory Johnsen, a Princeton University expert on Yemen, contends the strategy will ultimately prove counterproductive: "You can't just kill a few individuals and the al-Qaeda problem will go away." Indeed, a primary target in the attacks — Qasim al-Raymi, the al-Qaeda leader who is believed to be behind a 2007 bombing in central Yemen that killed seven Spanish tourists and two Yemenis — is still at large. And reports of a U.S. role, plus mass civilian casualties at the sites of the attacks, have sparked public outcry and added to anti-American sentiment across the country. "They missed that individual," says Johnsen of the targeted al-Qaeda chief. "And at the same time, they ended up killing a number of women and children in the strike on Abyan. So now you have something where there are all these pictures of dead infants and mangled children that are underlined with the caption 'Made in the USA' on all the jihadi forums. Something like this does much more to extend al-Qaeda."

Meanwhile, the Sana'a government is in the middle of another ferocious war, against its Houthi minority, Yemeni followers of the Zaydi sect of Shi'ite Islam. That introduces the shadow — both real and imagined — of the primary Shi'a power in the region, Iran, which is happy to take credit even if its actual influence may still be negligible. When Iran is mentioned, however, both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, the predominant Sunni power in the region, start quaking. And al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, no friend to any of the parties, is happy to sow destabilization so it can thrive.

It thrives off the ruins of Yemen's economy, which is in tatters; its population complains of neglect and development woes; and 50% of Yemeni children suffer from malnutrition. Observers warn that poverty and unemployment are prime recruitment factors for al-Qaeda, something they say the U.S. and other foreign powers should have done more to address. Yemen also struggles with a severe water shortage, in large part because of the national addiction to khat, a shrub whose young leaves contain a compound with effects similar to those of amphetamines. The top estimate is that no fewer than 90% of men and 25% of women in Yemen chew the leaves, storing a wad in one cheek as it slowly breaks down and enters the bloodstream. Astonishingly, most of the country's arable land is devoted to the plant, which accounts for approximately a third of the country's water usage.

Meanwhile, analysts say Yemen has been slow to confront the al-Qaeda threat with the gusto that the U.S. has been pushing for, in large part because going after the Islamist group hasn't always been in the government's best interests. Indeed, some experts say that al-Qaeda seeks not to overthrow the government but only to establish a base in Yemen — a link between the Horn of Africa and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula — and that so long as Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh leaves al-Qaeda alone, they'll do the same for him.

The Yemeni government insists it is doing its utmost in the war against al-Qaeda. "We have been cooperating closely with the U.S., much more than the Pakistanis, for instance, in the fight against al-Qaeda," says a Yemeni official. "The strike last week [that killed top al-Qaeda commanders in Yemen] was a huge blow to them. With one strike, we cut off their head. We are investigating [Abdulmutallab] according to what the FBI told us. If there was a plot from Yemen, it's possible that it happened before last week's strike. Is al-Qaeda using Yemen as a base to attack the U.S.? That may be their ambition, but first they are attacking Yemen itself, trying to destabilize the country and destroy the government. Our priority is to prevent this, and it also coincides with American interests."

Indeed, one of the jihadi commanders reportedly killed in the pre-Christmas raids in Yemen was al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula founder Naser. But though that head may have been cut off, the claim of responsibility made it clear that the voice and the ambitions of al-Qaeda in Yemen have not. — Reported by Andrew Lee Butters, Bobby Ghosh and Abigail Hauslohner *The al-Qaeda claim was translated into English by yhe Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

Verbatim 'It may be his prerogative to be dumb, but that's really not a very good idea.'

TERRY O'NEILL, president of the National Organization for Women, referring to Anthony Cucolo III, a U.S. Army general in Iraq who directed that female soldiers who become pregnant--as well as the male soldiers who impregnate them--be punished 'I hate to sound cold and uncaring and contract breaking, but I'm really O.K. with it.'

HEATHER BAKER, a suburban-Washington homeowner who is purposely defaulting on her mortgage despite having the money to pay it. She cites the property's devaluation as her reason 'This is for my friend Ted Kennedy: aye!'

ROBERT BYRD, 92-year-old Democratic Senator from West Virginia, dedicating his vote in favor of the chamber's health care bill, which passed on Dec. 24, to the late Massachusetts Senator, who made health care reform the hallmark issue of his career 'The Israeli government proves every day that it is not ready for peace.'

NABIL ABU RDAINAH, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, after Israel announced plans to build nearly 700 homes in East Jerusalem. The decision prompted criticism from U.S. and E.U. officials 'The system worked.'

JANET NAPOLITANO, Homeland Security Secretary, defending the department in the wake of a failed terrorist attack aboard a Northwest Airlines flight on Dec. 25. Napolitano later said screening measures did not work "in this instance" 'If this country does not stop its prattling, it will receive a slap in its face.'

MANOUCHEHR MOTTAKI, Iranian Foreign Minister, threatening Britain for allegedly fomenting the unrest that has erupted in Iran after a spate of opposition protests 'I said, "You can call me Dad," and he didn't say anything.'

DAVID GOLDMAN, after winning a five-year custody battle for his 9-year-old son Sean. The child had been living with his deceased mother's family in Brazil when a judge ordered on Dec. 22 that he be returned to his father TALKING HEADS Nader Mousavizadeh Writing about Iran in the Times of London: "For all the concern about a fitful and still highly vulnerable nuclear program, a far greater prize is in sight: the Iranian people and their manifest aspirations for a freer society and an accountable government. The question is whether a Western policy of pressure, threats and further isolation aimed at forcing a nuclear deal with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will risk [the] promise of real change."

--12/22/09 Ross Douthat Discussing President Obama's willingness to cut deals with his political opponents, in the New York Times: "The upside of this approach is obvious: It gets things done. Between the stimulus package, the pending health care bill and a new raft of financial regulations, Obama will soon be able to claim more major legislative accomplishments than any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. The downside, though, is that sometimes what gets done isn't worth doing."

--12/25/09 DeWayne Wickham Criticizing Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman's threat to join a health care filibuster, in USA Today:

"2009 has turned out to be the year of the antihero. It is the year in which Joe Lieberman gets my nod--cynical though it is--as 'American of the Year.' A Democrat of convenience, Lieberman has succeeded in doing what Benedict Arnold couldn't. In a masterful act of treachery, he retains a position of trust among the very people he betrayed."

--12/29/09

Sources: ABC News; NPR; Huffington Post; Reuters; CNN; AP (2)