Time Magazine September24

September 24, 2007 Vol. 170 No. 13

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY MICHAEL ELINS

COVER

The Real Running Mates

By KAREN TUMULTY

Elizabeth Edwards prides herself on her ability to explain the fine print of her husband's energy plan and the details of how John Edwards would respond to the next Katrina-size natural disaster. She can rattle off the number of people who lack health insurance in New Hampshire (about 127,000), how many schools there have failed to meet the Federal Government's standards for "adequate yearly progress" (191) and where the state ranks in teacher pay (24th). "I think it's important to learn policy, so that people don't have to dumb down their questions because I'm the spouse," she says. Nor, for that matter, does she feel a spouse should have to sand down her edges. When a woman at a house party in Bow, N.H., asked her one recent morning how her husband's campaign would respond to "the inevitable horrible mudslinging" that is part of presidential politics, you might have thought she was the one in the family who had grown up in a brawling mill town. "It's a question of being prepared and not having any hesitation," she said. "You go straight to the nose because then they walk away bleeding. And that's the point."

It's hard to imagine Laura Bush saying something like that. There is no handbook for the spouse of a presidential candidate, but the expectations have always been pretty clear. She (yes, that was the presumption) should first do no harm. Her safest bet: stand silently at his side, beaming with admiration and awe, the well-coiffed testament to a home life that was tranquil, drama-free and utterly traditional. When the spouse became the story, it was seldom good news for the principal.

Take what happened in 1992, when a certain Governor from Arkansas started throwing around quips like "Buy one, get one free" and musing about the possibility of giving his outspoken lawyer wife a Cabinet post. In no time, people were working out their own conflicted feelings about feminism and family by arguing over Hillary Clinton ̶ the influences she would bring to the White House, the state of her marriage, even her headbands. No less a political scientist than Richard Nixon, whose own spouse had been a paragon of cloth-coat humility, warned, "If the wife comes through as being too strong and too intelligent, it makes the husband look like a wimp."

Fast-forward four presidential cycles, and Hillary is leading the field for the Democratic presidential nomination, while Bill is the one learning to fit himself into the supporting role. With a spouse who can be counted on to outshine the candidate, her campaign has had to handle the former president as carefully as a tactical nuclear weapon. "A lot of people might have expected him to be out immediately, and instead, he's sort of behind the scenes and on the phone and doing fund raising," says Elizabeth Edwards, 58. "It is clearly more complicated for them ... I'm just glad that's their problem, not mine."

But Bill is far from the only spouse rewriting the rules of the road in presidential politics. Of the 2008 candidates ̶ and particularly among those in the top tier ̶ more than a few are married to outspoken, opinionated, professional women who are neither accustomed to nor inclined toward melting into the background. They are comfortable with, even eager about making news in their own right. Since the 2008 campaign promises to be more competitive, more expensive and more prolonged than any we've seen, the spouses are playing roles more typically associated with the running mate than the mate of the person who's running. In fact, the reality of today's politics seems to have turned Nixon's premise on its head. A strong, smart, fully engaged spouse is practically a prerequisite if you want to win. Sit down and talk to some of them, and you will realize that while they all are charting the terrain ahead in their own ways, they do so with the conviction that their partner can't get there without them. As Cindy McCain, 53, put it, "He and I are the only two in it in the end."

The Gladia t ors One reason campaigns are relying more heavily on spouses as surrogates is simply practical: two people can cover far more territory than one. "It's obviously different. Not only am I going out and speaking, but I'm also doing fund raising on my own," says Ann Romney, 58, whose five sons too are being deployed across the map. "There are so many states in play now that you can't possibly cover them all with the asset of just one candidate."

As the competition gets hotter, we'll see whether the traditional attack-dog role played by vice-presidential nominees falls to the spouses as well ̶ and whether they are given leeway to say things that their husbands wouldn't dare. There was no mistaking what Elizabeth Edwards meant when she said Hillary Clinton is "divisive and unelectable." She has blasted Barack Obama

for being "holier than thou" on the Iraq war, contended Hillary Clinton has had to "behave as a man" and "is just not as vocal a women's advocate as I want to see," and complained that her husband is not getting as much media attention as either of them because "we can't make John black; we can't make him a woman."

Edwards allows that she occasionally thinks, "Golly, I wish I hadn't said it that way." And she insists that she is merely being herself, not part of a campaign strategy. "There is no, and I mean zero, campaign discussion, calculation, anything with respect to this. The second thing is, I don't usually volunteer this," Edwards says of these comments about her husband's front-running rivals. "When I am specifically asked, I simply answer the question, and it's not a matter of attacking in particular."

But that doesn't mean all this is random. "My job is to move voters," Edwards says. "If you're not moving votes or moving voters to see the candidate himself or herself, then you're not using your time very wisely."

And that highlights another poignant and uncomfortable reality of the unique situation in which Edwards now finds herself. What she calls "my precious time" is even more so since it was revealed in March that her breast cancer, first diagnosed in the final days of the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004, had recurred as Stage IV and is incurable. Statistics suggest only 20% of patients in her situation live for five years. Is Edwards getting a sympathy pass? Rival campaigns think so, though they won't say so publicly. As one strategist puts it, "She's bulletproof."

Reporters are primed to hear an attack even when none is intended. When Michelle Obama, 43, mused last month in Iowa that "if you can't run your own house, you certainly can't run the White House" ̶ an innocent enough observation, the full context of her remarks shows, about the challenges of

juggling her children's schedule with her husband's ̶ it was immediately interpreted as a dig at the Clintons. "The claws come out," screamed a caption beneath her picture and Hillary Clinton's on Fox News. "That's a totally different context," Obama now says. "So that's one of those things where I take it, I learn a lesson, I say, 'O.K., let me be clearer' ... All I'm trying to do is talk to the American people about who we are, our shortcomings, our challenges. What I don't want to feel like is that we can't have any conversations about this ̶ values or morals or all of that ̶ because somebody's feelings might get hurt. This is tough stuff."

An important thing to remember about the extraordinary lineup of smart, savvy, engaged campaign spouses in the 2008 race is that none of this is entirely new. What's new is knowing so much about it.

First Ladies have been deeply involved in politics all through history. In 1776, even as John Adams was helping invent the Republic, Abigail was warning him, "Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could." Mary Todd Lincoln had such strong views about Cabinet members and Supreme Court nominees that some White House aides called her "the Hellcat." Edith Wilson secretly held the government together for her stroke-incapacitated husband, though she opposed giving women the vote. Rosalynn Carter was basically in charge of mental-health policy. As her husband staggered through 1979, columnist Jack Anderson dubbed her the "co-President."

"Many, many women have brought to the table so many different things," says Cindy McCain. "It just depends on how deeply you want to look."

McCain ̶ whom voters got to know as a smiling, beautiful, St. John-suited presence in her husband's 2000 campaign ̶ played a hard-knuckled tactical role this time around by engineering the shake-up of a high-priced

campaign organization that had spent itself into near insolvency. In large part at Cindy McCain's instigation, her husband's longtime political strategist John Weaver was fired; his 2000 campaign manager Rick Davis was brought back from internal exile to take over. "Truly, the only person my husband can trust is me," McCain says. "I don't have anything to lose by telling him not only what I think but what I think he did wrong."

In the pre-Hillary age, with different expectations for gender roles, that kind of influence was wielded privately ̶ over everything from policy to personnel to political strategy ̶ more than publicly. With the conspicuous exception of Eleanor Roosevelt, who was an outspoken and polarizing figure in her own right, the modern era saw a procession of generally pliant First Ladies: Bess, Mamie, Jackie, Lady Bird, Pat. It really was Betty Ford, arguably the archetype for today's aspiring First Spouses, who changed the rules. Faced with a traumatized electorate and an omnivorous press corps after Watergate, she responded in the way that came naturally ̶ which is to say forthrightly, answering whatever questions were thrown at her because her Midwestern manners precluded the idea that you could just ignore a question you didn't like. There was Betty on 60 Minutes saying she wouldn't be surprised if her teenage daughter Susan were having sex or if her kids had tried pot. When she observed to a columnist that the only question she hadn't been asked was how often she slept with her husband, the reporter came back with: "Well, how often do you?" Her answer: "As often as possible!" The Fords "flung open the White House windows and declared there are real people living here," says journalist Kati Marton, who wrote Hidden Power, a book on presidential marriages, and who herself is married to former Clinton Administration official Richard Holbrooke.

But then, Betty Ford got the First Lady's job without ever having to campaign for it. And not everyone was charmed by her candor. Some of

the President's aides wanted to muzzle her, and his pollsters said she could cost him 20 points with conservative GOP voters. First Lady aspirants have more typically acted as fabric softener. Tipper Gore made her husband look looser, as did Kitty Dukakis, though in both cases that wasn't saying much. Laura Bush has almost always been a more popular figure than W., though most people could not name a policy position that she's passionate about.

The current class of candidates' spouses has plenty who still fit the traditional mold ̶ like Mary Brownback, 49, who married Sam while she was in law school and proudly declares that she's never worked outside the home. "Basically," she says, "I live in the kitchen." Ann Romney calls herself the CFO ̶ chief family officer ̶ and her husband Mitt's campaign website says she "places primary importance on her role as a wife, a mother and a grandmother." Mike and Janet Huckabee were high school sweethearts; now 52, she was 18 when they married, and they renewed their vows in a covenant marriage on Valentine's Day, 2005. Jill Tracy Biden, 56, was a student teacher when she and Joe Biden married in 1977, and has dropped off the campaign trail now that the school year has begun again.

In fact, for a politician's spouse, some things never change. This is how Barbara Richardson, 58, a veteran of her husband Bill's successful campaigns for the House and the New Mexico governorship, summed it up before a debate in South Carolina: "While Mr. Wonderful is out there campaigning, the rest of us as spouses are still schlepping through the airport to a commercial plane with kids in tow. We miss our connections.

We're standing in grocery-store lines, and frankly, we're just trying to keep body and soul and house and home and family together, while they go out and make nice Mr. Popularity!"

Have voters really adjusted their ideas and expectations of a First Mate?

The spouses themselves don't sound so sure. "As much as it may sound a little archaic, I think the American voter wants a traditional situation," says Cindy McCain. "In other words, I don't believe they want a spouse who is involved in day-to-day politics. And I'm not criticizing any former Administration. I'm just telling you what people have told me. They still kind of want the traditional-looking family."

Even Elizabeth Edwards, for all her outspokenness, agrees. "There are certain baseline things people require in a First Lady ̶ a graciousness," she says. "There is sort of a sense of maternal capabilities that we might be looking for. I don't think that in any way disqualifies Bill, but I do think that if it's a woman, they're looking perhaps for something like that."

Marria ges Under the Micr osc ope Many a first marriage has been the subject of rumor and speculation, but the Clinton presidency put political marriage under the microscope in a way it never had been before. In this new season of full disclosure, there's Elizabeth Kucinich, 29, who told the Associated Press that a lazy day at home consists of getting up for brunch and then going back to bed until 4:30 p.m., "John Lennon and Yoko Ono-style." But it's hard to think of another spouse who has taken openness as far as Michelle Obama. Her idea of managing her husband's image seems to begin with knocking him off his pedestal.

In a Glamour magazine interview, Michelle Obama said her husband is so "snore-y and stinky" that her daughters won't cuddle with him in bed. She tells voters how he leaves his dirty socks around and invites them to tattle if they see him violating their deal in which she would allow him to run if he would stop smoking. Barack Obama has written with startling candor about

the strains that his political career has put on their marriage, particularly when both were in their formative years. "Leaning down to kiss Michelle goodbye in the morning, all I would get was a peck on the cheek," he wrote.

"By the time Sasha was born ̶ just as beautiful, and almost as calm as her sister ̶ my wife's anger toward me seemed barely contained."

But you could argue that her acknowledgment of his flaws makes her more effective when she turns that anger on his critics. "Don't be fooled by people who claim that it is not his time," she exhorts. "We've heard this spewed from the lips of rivals ... every phase of our journey: He is not experienced enough. He should wait his turn. He is too young. He is not black enough. He is not white enough."

Michelle Obama says she is betting that voters will not only accept that frankness but embrace it. "You win with being who you are and with being clear and comfortable with that," she says. "I'm finding that people completely understand me. For the most part, I think the women and the men and the families and the folks that we are meeting on the campaign trail understand the realities of families of today."

Oddly enough, it is the republican spouses who are stretching the limits of traditional values in ways they never have before. Ann Romney's story line ̶ the high school sweetheart and sunny stay-at-home mom who produced a close-knit, picture-perfect family ̶ actually sets her apart among the leading contenders' wives. Which doesn't hurt when you are trying to persuade voters, particularly evangelical conservatives, to consider putting a Mormon in the White House. "I think that people have seen Mitt and me.

They certainly know we have a very strong marriage and very strong family," she says. "I think that is clearly helpful to him in breaking down

barriers that people have had in the past." But, she adds, "I don't know if they've seen enough."

For the others, the question may be whether voters have seen too much.

The public displays of affection that front runner Rudolph Giuliani and wife Judith put on for Barbara Walters ̶holding hands and calling each other "baby" and "sweetheart" ̶ only served to remind viewers that this first blush of love is also the third marriage for each, and that wife No. 3 is one of the reasons his children with wife No. 2 won't campaign for him. "I have just recently begun ̶ I think they call it in the political world ̶ being 'rolled out,'" Judith, 52, told Walters, but the process has been anything but smooth. A scathing profile of Judith Stish Ross Nathan Giuliani in Vanity Fair pored over her two failed marriages (one of which she acknowledged only recently), the requirement that a separate seat on her plane be provided for the Louis Vuitton handbag that is known around Giuliani headquarters as Baby Louis, and the inconvenient timeline of their courtship, which started while he was still living with second wife Donna Hanover.

Through all this, Judith Giuliani is trying hard to keep her game face on. "It's a steep learning curve. It's all been new to me," she says. "What's really important is, it's my husband who's running for office. He is the one. I do think that is important for us to focus on. We aren't electing a spouse." And while Rudy Giuliani told Walters he would be "very, very comfortable" with having his wife, a nurse, attend Cabinet meetings ̶"I couldn't have a better adviser"̶ Judith downplays her influence and her interest in his campaign and in any future Giuliani Administration. "My role is really to support my husband in the ways I have always supported him. I love to take charge of his personal health needs, make sure he's exercising, getting the right food,

which is a real challenge on the campaign trail," she says. "I do attend some meetings, but more often than not, it's for my own edification."

For Fred Thompson's wife Jeri, 40, who is a quarter-century younger than he is, it's hard to figure out which female stereotype is more toxic: the siren whose tight, low-cut outfits had cable-television commentator and former gop Congressman Joe Scarborough speculating that she "works the pole" ̶ a phrase usually associated with strippers ̶ or the conniving Lady Macbeth who has been blamed for sending his campaign into disarray even before it was launched. She was a major force in persuading him to run but also a major one behind a series of shake-ups that had the campaign on its second manager and its fourth spokesman before Thompson even announced his candidacy.

Her defenders note that Jeri Thompson has worked for years as a political operative. "She gets Republican politics. She gets conservative politics. But most of all, she understands where this man is and how best to help him," says Mark Corallo, a well-respected strategist who helped launch the campaign. But then, on the eve of Thompson's much delayed announcement, Corallo himself resigned.

Their family portrait ̶ a man who qualifies for Social Security with a 40year-old blond, a toddler and a baby ̶ is a far cry from that of Ike and Mamie. "He sadly now looks like their grandfather," says Marton. "It's not what women want the presidential family to look like. No doubt unintentionally, but to a lot of women it's almost a rebuke. It's too unsubtle."

The New N ormal

In this campaign, which has produced so much buzz about political marriages, the challenge for the Clintons has been a different one: making the most remarkable situation of all look normal.

The first time his wife ran for office, Bill Clinton was in the White House, which kept him safely off her stage and minimized the amount of public distraction he caused. But behind the scenes, he was her political consultant in chief, reworking her speeches, stepping in when her staff was putting too much on her schedule, rehearsing her for debates and demanding she step up her ad buys.

That was two successful Senate campaigns ago. Now the man who jokes that he wants to be known as "First Laddie" downplays his role as she reaches for the biggest prize of all: his old job. He has joined his wife in a couple of campaign swings and is her star fund raiser. But he has yet to show up among the spouses in the audience at any of the Democratic debates. As for his role in any future Clinton Administration, both she and he have talked about the possibility that she might make him an unofficial emissary. "I think she will ask me and former President Bush and other people to go help the country. We have got to restore our standing in the world," Bill Clinton told CNN's Larry King recently. "I wouldn't be surprised if she [asked] every former President to do something."

But in the meantime, there's an election to win. And while Hillary Clinton has the best political strategist of her generation at her disposal, Bill is by all accounts keeping his obtrusions to a minimum. Campaign officials say that while the couple talks several times a day, he rarely gets involved with the workings of her campaign. "He's doing what he's asked, and he's doing what he can," says an aide, "but he's certainly not meddling." In part, that's because his own work

his foundation and a tour to promote his new book

̶ keeps him plenty busy. And it also reflects the fact that she has an enormous political machine around her that seems to be doing pretty well on its own.

"If she's writing an important article or giving an important speech, she'll ask me to read it," the former President told Oprah Winfrey. "And once in a while she'll ask me for some advice on something strategic. But she knows so much more about a lot of this stuff than I do because I'm far removed from it." Occasionally, he says, he gets a call from her while he's on the golf course, and she reminds him that she's 15 years older than he was when he did it, "and I say,

Well, nobody made you run.'"

Bill Clinton, 61, is also making a conscious effort to stay out of the fray, though when Elizabeth Edwards attacked Hillary as not vocal enough on women's issues, he rode to his wife's defense. "If you look at the record on women's issues, I defy you to find anybody who has run for office in recent history who's got a longer history of working for women, for families and children, than Hillary does," Clinton said in an interview with ABC's Good Morning America. As for Edwards' contention that Hillary had behaved "as a man," Clinton retorted, "I don't think it's inconsistent with being a woman that you can also be knowledgeable on military and security affairs and be strong when the occasion demands it."

But he has steered clear of criticizing Hillary's opponents. "This is a good time for us Democrats," he says. "We don't have to be against anybody. We can be for the person we think would be the best President." Of course, that's easy to say when your candidate is safely ahead in the polls. If their situation and that of the Edwardses were reversed, "would he be her biggest attack dog like Elizabeth Edwards is? Maybe," concedes a strategist. "But he gets to be the big guy ̶ at least for now." Then again,

he's in a supporting role that doesn't come with a script. No one knows that better than a Clinton. ̶ With reporting by Nancy Gibbs/New York and Jay Newton-

Small/Washington

Illness On the Tra il

By KAREN TUMULTY/WASHINGTON

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards Brooks Kraft / Corbis for TIME To follow her for a day on the campaign trail is to see an Elizabeth Edwards who looks the picture of health. Her hair is full, and her blue eyes as bright as ever. She has slimmed down since the 2004 campaign, but insists that is the hard earned badge of dieting, not disease. Still, every now and then, there comes a reminder. Before taking off her jacket recently in an uncomfortably warm living room in Bow, N.H., she asked a local television crew and a TIME photographer to move and shoot her from her left side, because her right arm is swollen from the treatment of her lymph nodes. Losing her train of thought in trying to answer a multi-part question someone asked her at a school in Manchester, she joked: "I call it chemobrain; I could blame it on the fact that I'm 58."

When it comes to the never-ending debate over Elizabeth and John Edwards' decision to continue his campaign after her diagnosis with incurable breast cancer, much of the blame has been directed at her. In devoting herself to her husband's goal, was she ignoring what might be best for her children? Earlier this month, Edwards got into a public spat with a Clinton supporter, who had blogged that she was a "terrible mother."

Elizabeth, a lifelong insomniac who spends her wakeful hours surfing the internet, came across the post and wrote back: "You don't get to judge me because you think you know exactly what you would do if you had my disease. I want to be really clear: you don't know."

But there is at least one person who did know. Ann Romney, who was diagnosed in 1998 with multiple sclerosis, called Elizabeth shortly after the Edwards made their announcement in March. "I totally understand why you're still fighting," Romney told her. "I totally get it."

It is an axiom of American politics that you've got to really, really want it before you decide to run for President, but there is a whole other dimension to the decision when one member of the family is also struggling with a debilitating, even life-threatening illness. This year, there are not one but two women on the campaign trail in that situation. Edwards calls Romney "a lovely woman." And while their husbands are of two different parties, pitted against each other for the biggest prize in politics, "the spouses are not at war with each other," says Edwards. "It's much easier to do this if you do not think of these other women who also making these sacrifices as the enemy. And in particular, we are both suffering from conditions that are likely to stay with us forever, so we have that connection."

While Romney is vigorous, and looks at least a decade younger than her age (like Edwards, she's 58), the disease has limited what she can do on the campaign, she says. Romney tries to travel no more than three days at a time, and keeps alert for signs that she is pushing herself too hard. "I've learned, even within myself, I can start telling when I'm wearing down," Romney says. "What happens to me is I almost can't talk. I get to the point where my brain doesn't even work, and I can hardly get words out and I

look at everyone with this glassy stare, like, "I'm done. I've hit empty. Bye. I don't care what you've got on my schedule.'" At that point, she goes home to the things that "recharge my batteries": her horse, acupuncture, reflexology and "a slower rhythm."

Her illness has meant she can't be campaigning with her husband as much as he would like, given how his mood lightens when she is around. "They call me the Mitt Stabilizer," she says. "I'm able to just make him laugh, and get more lighthearted about the whole thing, and not take it so seriously." But her limitations have also allowed her to touch voters in a way she couldn't otherwise. "Nine times out of ten, when someone comes up to me afterwards, they are encouraged by me being out there and giving hope to other people," Romney says. "They are grateful and their lives have been touched in an impactful way."

Elizabeth Edwards has an additional challenge, given that she must also factor in the needs of two young children. But she says her family has found a balance that works for them. Emma Claire, 9, and Jack, 7, are being home schooled, and join their parents on the campaign trail when they are going to be out for a while, or when they are going somewhere the children would find interesting, educational or fun. Sometimes that means upending their schedule: a few days on the road in the middle of the week; school on the weekend. Their parents make sure there is also time for friends, and for Jack's tae kwon do class.

Though there are plenty who wouldn't have done any of this the way she did ̶ and have said so ̶ Edwards seems not to have any doubts. "The choice we had to make was a very public choice, but the choice didn't belong to the public. The choice belongs to us," she says. "Around the country, every place that I've gone, people who have been in the same

shoes that I've been ̶ sadly ̶ have all made the same choice, to live, to embrace the things they care about."

As for herself, Edwards insists that the life she is living now is not being defined by the death she knows is coming sooner than it should. "I think about the cancer on my way to the doctor, while I'm in the doctor's office," she says. "I get back in my car and I'm not thinking about the cancer. "I don't talk about it. I don't think about it," she adds. "I'm just pushing on."

Life: Educa ti on - Fashion - Hist ory - Fo od - En vir onment - Health

The Grand Tra d ition of Flip Flopping Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By RICHARD BROOKHISER

The grand tradition of flip-flopping: Politicians change their minds for all kinds of reasons.

Lyndon Johnson spoke out against Truman s early efforts on racial equality and as Senate majority leader helped pass a civil right bill in 1957.

Donald Uhrbrock / Time & Life Pictures / Getty The line of politicians who have had a change of heart about the war in Iraq keeps getting longer. Republican Senator John Warner, who voted in October 2002 to authorize the use of force there, now wants the troops to start coming home. Democratic Congressman Brian Baird, who opposed the war, wants to give the surge a chance: "Progress is being made and there is real reason for hope." But politicians are often anxious about changing their minds. They know opponents are waiting to hammer them as opportunists or just plain confused, as Mitt Romney, dogged by accusations of flip-flopping over abortion, and John Kerry, who ineptly said he had voted for a supplemental funding bill before voting against it, can attest. Yet our nation's leaders often change their minds. If they didn't, we might still be slave-owning British subjects. When and why they do so can be instructive.

Wanting to be seen as responsible and practical, many politicians often claim to be reacting to new information. In 1966, during his first race to become Governor of California, Ronald Reagan pledged not to raise income taxes, declaring that his feet were "in concrete" on the issue. State income taxes were collected by withholding, and Reagan believed taxes should be obvious and painful. But once in office, he found that there was no other revenue stream that could balance the state budget, and so he submitted an economic plan that called for higher withholding taxes. "The sound you hear," he said at a press conference, "is the sound of concrete cracking."

Reagan wasn't the first pol to reverse himself when a new office brought with it a new worldview. When James Madison was a Congressman, he argued for a stronger Federal Government and took a lead role in creating one as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. But in 1798, as a leader of the fight against the war measures of President John Adams, he became an advocate of states' rights, urging his native Virginia and its fellow states to resist "dangerous" exercises of federal power. In 1815, when Madison was President, he had to fend off a threat by New Englanders to wield the power of their states against his war measures, which they found "dangerous." Madison had a supple mind--supple enough to reconcile his shifting position, which he attributed to changing circumstances. "The state of things at the time," he explained, was "always a key to the arguments employed." The most important circumstance, however, seems to have been where he sat.

Sometimes the desire for a job makes a politician see the light. For the first two decades of his career, Lyndon Johnson was a New Deal liberal, with white Southern views on race (he called Harry Truman's early efforts on civil rights "a farce and a sham"). This combination made him a popular Texas

Congressman and Senator, but he also wanted to be President. After a stumbling run as Texas' favorite son in 1956, he realized that his ambitions required him to change his profile on civil rights. The next year, after epic wheeling and dealing as Senate majority leader, he produced the first successful civil rights bill since Reconstruction. It was weak enough to be supported by fellow Southerners, who constituted his political base, yet it offered Northern liberals the prospect of future progress. This balancing act did not win him the Democratic nomination in 1960, but it allowed John F. Kennedy to make Johnson his running mate.

At their best, politicians change their minds because their principles tell them to. John Quincy Adams, son of Founding Father John Adams, became a national figure in his own right by working with Southerners. President George Washington, a Virginian, gave him his first job. President James Monroe, another Virginian, made him Secretary of State. And Speaker of the House Henry Clay, a Kentuckian, helped him win the presidency when the election of 1824 was thrown to the House of Representatives. For most of his career, Adams believed the South would handle slavery on its own, wiping the great blot from national life. By his 60s, however, he had heard too many Southerners praising slavery as a good thing. When elected to Congress after losing the White House in 1828, Adams spent the remainder of his life flaying slavery, supporting the mutineers on the slave ship Amistad and the right of citizens to deluge Congress with antislavery petitions.

No decision, of course, is ever the result of one pure motive. Johnson, his biographer Robert Caro argues, always had reservoirs of genuine compassion that his ambition finally allowed him to tap. John Quincy Adams became a principled scourge only after his ambition to be elected President had been gratified (and his ambition to be re-elected denied).

Concrete cracks for many reasons. The sound you hear is politics--and human nature--at work.

ESSAY

Hi ding Behind the General Wednesday, Sep. 12, 2007 By JOE KLEIN

Bush has made Petraeus the arbiter of Iraq policy when it should be set by the President.

Illustration for TIME by Stephen Kroninger, Petraeus: Susan Walsh / AP California Senator Barbara Boxer almost asked a good question at the Petraeus-Crocker festivities on Capitol Hill this week. She was reminiscing, as most of her colleagues did, about time spent on the ground in Iraq with General David Petraeus, but it was not a recent visit. It was back in 2005, when Petraeus was in charge of training the new Iraqi army. An aide pulled out a blown-up photograph of the Senator and the general. "You were so upbeat, General," Boxer said. "You said, 'You're about to see some terrific troops.'" There were 100,000 of them "ready to go ... You were as optimistic as anyone I've seen on the planet ... and I believed you!" The stage was set for Boxer to point out that the Petraeus effort to train the Iraqi army had failed and to ask, "So why should we believe your optimism now?" But she wandered off into an antiwar diatribe and never got around to asking it.

The unasked question was so profound that Petraeus, a proud man, chose to answer it anyway. "I believe that my optimism back when I showed those very fine Iraqi forces to Senator Boxer was justified," he said. The good

work was undone, though, in 2006, when Shi'ite militias "hijacked" whole units of the Iraqi military. But, he insisted, we are back on the right track now. Petraeus may well be right̶or maybe not. The nature of military leadership is congenital optimism; officers are trained to complete the mission, to refuse to countenance the possibility of failure. That focus is essential when you go to war, but it lacks perspective. That's why civilian leaders̶the Commander in Chief̶are there to set the mission, to change or abort it when necessary. The trouble is, George W. Bush's credibility on Iraq is nonexistent. And so he has placed David Petraeus, an excellent soldier, in a position way above his pay grade. He has made Petraeus not just the arbiter of Iraq strategy but also, by default, the man who sets U.S. policy for the entire so-called war on terrorism.

The cleverness of Bush's strategy was apparent when Senator Russ Feingold asked Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker a very important question: Which should have the higher priority in the war against al-Qaeda, Iraq or the rebuilt al-Qaeda leadership and terrorist camps, festering on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border? Feingold had forced Crocker, the elusive former ambassador to Pakistan, into a corner and then, inexplicably, let him off the hook and turned to Petraeus, who rightly claimed a lack of knowledge or authority to answer that question. The nonanswer stood as the Bush Administration's response to an essential strategic issue.

It seems clear the President has won this round. An optimistic general will trump a skeptical politician anytime. Even when Petraeus gave sketchy, disingenuous answers̶expressing hope about the three-way Shi'ite gang war in the oil-rich port city of Basra̶not even the most knowledgeable Senators had the facts to dispute him. The general was armed with the modern military's deadliest weapon, the PowerPoint-presentation-serried ranks of bar charts marching toward victory, which provided camouflage

for the gaping holes and contradictions in the Petraeus-Crocker story.

Crocker, for example, seemed particularly insistent on roping Iran into the scenario. "The Iranian President has already announced that Iran will fill any vacuum in Iraq," the ambassador testified. But Crocker also testified that the Iraqi Shi'ites were Arabs who had fought fiercely against the Iranians in the eight-year war and were very unlikely to cede control to their Persian neighbor without a fight. Petraeus described al-Qaeda in Iraq both as the greatest threat to stability and as the greatest loser in the struggle, its brand of Islamic extremism decisively rejected by the Sunni tribes.

No doubt Crocker and Petraeus believe they were merely stating the complexities of a difficult situation. But in a war, there is a need for executive decision making when it comes to priorities and contradictions: With al-Qaeda in Iraq on the run and, as Petraeus insisted, no need for American forces to resolve the Shi'ite chaos in the south, what was the rationale for keeping so many troops in Iraq? Why wasn't there a clearly defined strategic path for dealing with the country's political collapse?

Those issues̶the strategic ones̶were beyond the reach of Petraeus and Crocker. And the Senators were left with bland assurances that the two patriots would continue to do their considerable best to work really, really hard on the situation.

That's not nearly enough, of course. There was an important follow-up that Boxer didn't ask either: Without a strong, credible central government, for whom exactly is the re-retrained Iraqi army fighting? How can any Iraqi be loyal to a government that doesn't exist? And, finally, now that the Sunnis have decisively rejected the extremists, why should any American trooper sacrifice even a pinkie in this sectarian catastrophe?

C ommentary

The Rule-Breaking Campaign Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By WILLIAM KRISTOL

The Rule-Breaking Campaign. Most elections produce a surprise or two. Here is why this one could upend all assumptions.

Illustration for TIME by Dave Wheeler What a way to begin the fall! Perennial college-football power University of Michigan was ranked No. 5 in the preseason polls. It paid little Appalachian State University of Boone, N.C., about $400,000 to have its football team visit Ann Arbor to serve as a season-opening tune-up for the Wolverines. In a stunning upset, Appalachian State won 34-32-- kicking a field goal with 26 sec. left, then blocking a Michigan field-goal attempt on the game's last play.

Lesson: the improbable sometimes happens. And what's true in sports is true in politics. There hasn't been a major upset in a presidential-nomination race since Jimmy Carter's victory in 1976. We're due. And the 2008 presidential campaign is an especially good candidate to provide a surprise. Why? 1. It's an open-seat election. For the first time since 1952, there will be no incumbent President or Vice President on the ballot. As we know from state

and local elections, nonincumbent races are more volatile and less predictable than those with incumbents, which tend to be reasonably predictable referendums on the party in power. But in 2008 there won't be an incumbent, and there won't even be someone who resembles an incumbent: none of the leading Republicans have worked in or been particularly close to the Bush Administration. Indeed, the three leading Republicans and two leading Democrats have never run for national office before. Much more depends in such circumstances on unpredictable factors like candidates' errors, campaign dynamics and external events than in a traditional incumbent contest.

2. It's a wartime election. Wars are volatile. Eight months ago, we were losing in Iraq. Now it's not so clear. Where will Iraq stand four months from now, at the time of the Iowa caucuses--or 14 months from now, in November 2008? As wars are unpredictable, so are the politics of war. The fact that we were a nation at war helped the Republicans in 2002 and 2004. It hurt them badly in 2006. What about 2008? George W. Bush recently compared Iraq to Vietnam. Well ... is this 1968, when the party in power got punished, or 1972, when a dovish challenger got clobbered?

3. The primary schedule will be newly front-loaded and compressed. Will that make Iowa and New Hampshire more or less important? No one is certain. I suspect that the slingshot effect out of Iowa and New Hampshire could be greater than ever. In fact, in recent years Iowa has become an increasingly good predictor of the nominee: Bob Dole and Bush won Iowa in 1996 and 2000, respectively, and went on to win the GOP nomination; Al Gore and John Kerry won Iowa in 2000 and 2004 and prevailed on the Democratic side. But in a multicandidate field in Iowa, which it looks as if we'll have for both parties, a few thousand votes--a few hundred votes-could well mean the difference between first place and second and third or,

for that matter, third and fifth. And such a small difference could be utterly decisive for who survives and who gets knocked out, who has momentum and who falters.

4. The Democratic front runners are a woman and an African American--the first members of either group to have a good chance to win the presidency. Do the polls accurately reflect hidden support for--or hostility toward--such trailblazer candidates? And the woman in question happens to have as her husband a former President of the U.S. Will the prospect of having Bill Clinton back in the White House help or hurt Hillary Clinton when voters cast their ballots?

5. The leading Republican contenders are a Mormon from Massachusetts, a pro-choice New Yorker and a late-starting TV actor. Some Protestant churches teach that Mormonism is a cult. No pro-choice candidate has been able to compete seriously for the GOP nomination since 1980. No one has gone straight from the studio to the presidency (Ronald Reagan had long ago given up his acting career and had served two terms as Governor of California). This is a very unusual bunch of Republican front runners.

And what about a real Appalachian State--style upset? New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is in double digits in current polling in Iowa, within hailing distance of the three Democratic front runners. What if the leading candidates whack away at one another in TV ads and the personable Richardson sneaks into first or second? On the Republican side, John McCain is having something of a rally. If the situation in Iraq continues to improve and the other Republicans slip and slide, couldn't the old warrior pull off an upset? And what happens to a front runner once he or she

stumbles? The week after its defeat by Appalachian State, Michigan was still favored by a touchdown over Oregon. Michigan lost 39-7.

Every presidential election, it's been said, breaks one political rule. This one may break them all.

Pen Pal Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By STEVE RUSHIN One morning in March, while pulling out of the driveway, I saw a large manila envelope bound by a rubber band to the post of my mailbox, whose broken door hangs open in a permanent expression of disbelief.

The envelope rode shotgun beside me for several miles until I opened it at a red light, using a tire-pressure gauge from the glove box, at which time my jaw, like my mailbox door, fell open in astonishment.

Pressed for posterity between two slabs of cardboard--on stationery the color of New England clam chowder--was a handwritten fan letter from the President of the United States. I was touched and flattered--my ego swelled like a self-inflating raft. But more important, the letter has served in the months since as a Rorschach test for everyone who reads it: a minireferendum on the presidency, a war in Iraq writ tiny--but legibly, and even grammatically, with impeccable spelling.

"GW Bush," as he signed the letter, was writing to congratulate me on hanging up my column after two decades at his favorite weekly sports magazine. "Dear Mr. Sports Illustrated," he began, consecrating me with a presidential nickname, like Turd Blossom or Pootie-Poot or the immortal Brownie. "I read your final ... article in your literary home of 19 years. Like many who enjoy your work, I'll miss your humor, your style, and compassion ..."

I read these words to my wife, who is obstinately oblivious to my humor, style and compassion, and was surprised by her immediate reaction: "How did he get our address?" I'm sure Dick Cheney, in his undisclosed location, had no trouble finding our undisclosed location, I told her.

My wife, unblinking, said, "But seriously. We're not listed." I turned to our 2year-old and said, "They can't find Osama, but they tracked down yo' mama." The toddler adhered a Cheerio to my face and walked away.

What was supposed to be a celebration of my place on the President's reading list had turned into a debate about the Patriot Act. As the days passed, I began shamelessly showing the letter to everyone I encountered, as if I were a strip-joint leafleteer on a New York City street corner.

My father, who framed a copy of the letter, said with pride, "The President of the United States took the time to write you."

But others sometimes inflected the same sentence for maximum disdain: "The President of the United States has the time to write ... you?" Whether this is meant as a criticism of the President or as a criticism of me, I'm never able to tell. Both, I suspect.

Many blue-staters have made the same joke, each one thinking he is the first to do so. "He can write?" they say, always followed by, "He can read?" I have now passed the letter to countless Americans and a few nonAmericans--so many people that I ought to have the letter laminated, like a Waffle House menu. And the one thing that everyone agrees on--red-staters and Greenpeacers--is that he does come off on paper as funny and selfdeprecating.

"Please don't worry about the mud in the West Wing," he wrote to me, a reference to our brief meeting five years earlier, when I absentmindedly tracked mud from the Kentucky Derby track onto antique carpeting in the White House prior to an interview. "After a lot of scrubbing, I have finally cleaned the mess."

I had written in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED that the President didn't know my name during our interview (even though it was written in inch-high letters on a nameplate in front of me). And so he affixed a P.S.: "Good luck, Steve"-with my name boldly underlined to say, "I do too know your name, and I'm in on the joke, by the way."

And while the President no doubt forgot about the note the moment he set his pen down, I'll always remember it as a kind and humanizing gesture. And here I am, ungallantly airing it in public. For Presidents, no good deed goes unpunished.

I've put the letter away for now, back in its tattered envelope, where it will probably remain for the next 100 years, until some distant descendant has it appraised on Antiques Roadshow. However history judges this presidency, I'm confident it will be kind to me. "This was my great-greatgrandfather's," that descendant will say to some bow-tied document dealer.

"He was apparently a man of humor, style and compassion, the Shakespeare of his day."

WORLD

Is This Musharraf's Final Chapter?

Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By ARYN BAKER / ISLAMABAD

A disappointed Sharif supporter participates in a demonstration against the deportation of Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Stephanie Sinclair for TIME Like a Shakespearean tragedy, the final chapter of General Pervez Musharraf's reign began with an echo of the original sin of its first pages: the October 1999 coup by which he overthrew Nawaz Sharif, the democratically elected Prime Minister. Sharif's highly publicized return from exile on Sept. 10 lasted just four hours; Musharraf had him deported again.

But if the general's first expulsion of Sharif--then an unloved head of an inept and corrupt government--brought Musharraf to power amid widespread acclaim, the second may well hasten the President's downfall.

Musharraf's early departure is not guaranteed. He could drag things out by declaring martial law, but that would be highly unpopular, even within the military, which doesn't want a confrontation with an angry populace. Sharif's party faithful, undaunted by their leader's absence and the arrest of many of his aides, are planning mass protests. They are likely to be joined by a wide swath of Pakistani society, from Islamist parties to liberal lawyers and

professors. Al-Qaeda and other extremist militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, meanwhile, are capitalizing on popular discontent to reinvigorate their jihad against Musharraf's regime: terrorist attacks, once confined to tribal areas in the north, have spread across the country. Some of Musharraf's political allies and fellow military officers are backing away, and his enemies sense his vulnerability. "This is the death spasm of the general's rule," says Supreme Court lawyer Iftikhar Gilani. "He can't survive anymore as a political entity."

The most immediate threat to Musharraf comes from the Supreme Court, which can block his bid to remain in power by enforcing a constitutional ban on elected officials holding military rank. Musharraf previously got around that by obtaining an exemption from tame judges. That exemption expires on Nov. 15, and Supreme Court justices, who resent the general for trying to sack an independent-minded top judge earlier this year, are unlikely to give him another. If Musharraf sheds his uniform, they can block him with another constitutional provision: retired soldiers must wait two years before standing for office.

This is all alarming news for the Bush Administration, which regards Musharraf as a key ally in a highly unstable part of the world. The Administration is backing a power-sharing deal with another exiled former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, as the best way for the general to regain popularity. But Bhutto's own standing has plummeted since she started dealing with the dictator. Now negotiations are stalled over her demands that he resign as head of the military, drop corruption charges against her and give up the power to dissolve parliament. U.S. officials predict Bhutto's popularity will spike if she returns to power in an alliance with the general because she'll be seen as a counterweight to Musharraf. "The conventional

wisdom is that would be enough to steady her numbers," says a U.S. State Department official.

U.S. officials are counting on Musharraf to retain control over the military-Pakistan's most powerful institution--even if he gives up his uniform to keep the presidency. "The hope is that Musharraf will continue to influence policy in the war on terror as President," says the official. That may be wishful thinking. Lieut. General Hamid Gul, a former head of Pakistani intelligence, says the Americans are "naive" for thinking that Musharraf will have any clout once he steps down as military chief or that Bhutto will be able to control the army as Prime Minister. "The Pakistani army is a one-man show," he says. "Whoever is chief gets to call the shots ... no civilian leader can tell them what to do."

If a Musharraf-Bhutto deal were in fact to leave both leaders discredited and weakened, then U.S. interests in Pakistan--continued help in the war against al-Qaeda, protection of the country's nuclear arsenal and the strengthening of the moderate majority against the extremist fringe--might be better served by the man both leaders despise: Sharif. The Bush Administration is skeptical. The State Department official describes Sharif as "a player with a mixed record." As Prime Minister, he had a good relationship with the Clinton Administration, allowing the U.S. in 1998 to use Pakistani airspace for missile attacks against al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan. He also invited the CIA to train Pakistani commandos to capture Osama bin Laden: 60 soldiers started training, but the program was aborted when Sharif was deposed. Sharif's record in other areas is less than reassuring. His two stints as Prime Minister were marked by mismanagement and corruption. In 1998 he tested a nuclear bomb, earning the country devastating economic sanctions that were not lifted until 2001.

He dismissed a Supreme Court chief justice--shades of Musharraf--and a

President, and he promoted Islamic law. A senior Bush Administration official says Bhutto's party "has historically been more popular and closer to the moderate center than Nawaz's party."

What Sharif does have going for him is a groundswell of public support.

Unofficial polls conducted by government agencies show that even before his deportation, Sharif's numbers were climbing. Many of the groups that demonstrated across the country this summer when Musharraf tried to sack the Supreme Court justice have thrown their support behind Sharif. As a center-right politician, he also has close ties to religious parties, which would allow him to build a broad coalition. He lacks support in Washington, but as Musharraf and Bhutto continue to fade, that could--and should-change. with reporting by Massimo Calabresi / Washington

Who Killed Madeline McCann?

Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By JOHN CLOUD

The parents of missing toddler Madeleine McCann, Kate, background, and Gerry, carry their two-year-old twin children Sean and Amelie as they return to England four months after going on vacation on September 9, 2007. They deny any role in her disappearance.

Rui Vieira / AFP / Getty On May 3, nine days before her fourth birthday, Madeleine McCann, a British girl on vacation with her parents in Portugal, disappeared. She hasn't been found in more than four months despite one of the most intensive and far-flung missing-person searches in history. This past spring and summer, Europe and much of the rest of the globe became fixated on the disappearance, which carries both the international breadth of the Diana tragedy and the hypersentimental, at times prurient fascination that Americans brought to the unsolved case of another little blond girl, JonBenĂŠt Ramsey.

The Pope and even bigger global celebrities--David Beckham and J.K. Rowling among them--have taken an interest in the search for Madeleine.

People around the world have given more than $2 million to a private investigative fund begun by Drs. Kate Healy McCann and Gerry McCann, Madeleine's parents. Yet many Americans have only a vague sense of Madeleine's case and why it has mesmerized so many for so long. Only in the past few days, when it emerged that her parents might be charged with

accidentally killing her, has Madeleine's image begun to appear with regularity in the U.S. media.

And so here are some answers--frustratingly blurry and contradictory as they are--to some key questions in the wide-open case.

1. Where's the girl?

THE MCCANNS, WHO LIVE IN CENTRAL England, had gone on vacation with a few friends to Praia da Luz (Beach of Light), a tourist town in southern Portugal. The resort they chose, the Ocean Club, had a reputation for being kid-friendly. On May 3, the group was dining at the resort's tapas bar while the kids slept. At about 10 p.m., Kate McCann has said, she went to check on Madeleine and her siblings, 2-year-old twins Sean and Amelie.

Madeleine was gone. The McCanns were not initially suspected; they have consistently denied any role in the disappearance.

Relations between the family and the Portuguese police were difficult from the first hours. Police believed that, like most missing young children, Madeleine had simply wandered off and would soon be found. Crucial time was lost to that assumption. The Spanish border is less than two hours from Praia da Luz, yet authorities did not search cars leaving Portugal or distribute a description of the girl.

Police have since investigated thousands of leads and theories, some quite elaborate, including the much discussed idea that an international ring of pedophiles stakes out children for days and then extracts them with military precision. Another possibility explored was that a desperate childless couple paid a professional kidnapper to find a child. The rise of Hollywood theories--a cabal of James Bond pedophiles?--stemmed from the lack of physical evidence.

2. So, did the parents do it?

ON SEPT. 7, PORTUGUESE AUTHORITIES named the couple as suspects.

Three days later, officials apparently leaked word that Madeleine's DNA had been found in the trunk of a car her parents rented 25 days after the girl went missing. (The parents were still in Portugal at the time. Vowing not to return home without Madeleine, they stayed there until two days after being named suspects, when they returned to England.) At first, the DNA news seemed the first real break in the case in months, and a new theory presented itself: the McCanns wanted a night out with friends, so they drugged their little ones with painkillers or sedatives. Madeleine's dose was mismeasured, or she had an unexpected reaction. The parents somehow hid her corpse for weeks and then got the body out in the trunk of their rental car even though a phalanx of reporters was camped in Praia da Luz. The McCanns called the theory ludicrous, and this time they got some help in their denials from Portuguese authorities: police chief Alipio Ribeiro said on Portuguese TV that DNA tests on the car were not conclusive.

3. At the very least, aren't the McCanns guilty of negligence?

MADELEINE AND HER SIBLINGS WERE ALONE in their room while Kate and Gerry ate and drank with seven friends. How much the nine vacationers drank is another point of dispute; the amounts range from the just over four bottles of wine claimed by the McCanns to the 14 bottles alleged in some Portuguese news reports. The Ocean Club offers babysitters, but neither the McCanns nor their friends hired one. Instead, they apparently agreed to check on their kids every half hour. Once again, there are conflicting reports about whether the checks were carried out with precise regularity.

The tapas bar is roughly a 400-ft. (120 m) walk from the apartment where the McCann kids were sleeping. But the view from the bar to the apartment--a residential building occupied by locals as well as Ocean Club guests--is obscured by a wall, and the walk requires a circuitous route around the pool. What's more, the McCanns' apartment was on the ground floor, and the couple had left the place unlocked.

4. How did the case of one missing girl become so well known?

WITH ALL THE RUMORS THESE DAYS ABOUT the McCanns, it's hard to recall the early days in May and June when they were granted much sympathy, particularly in Britain. They are an attractive, accomplished and devout couple. They were also savvy about our particular media moment, quickly launching a website and posting YouTube videos about Madeleine.

They expressed regret for leaving the kids alone. Gerry started a blog, and they traveled as far as Africa to publicize Madeleine's case. The couple had a brief audience with the Pope, and Gerry flew to Washington to meet with then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

5. What happens next?

THE PORTUGUESE POLICE HAVE HANDED 3,000 pages of evidence to the district attorney, who in turn submitted them to a judge who must decide whether to bring charges against the parents. Given the usually glacial pace of the Portuguese justice system, the decision may not be quick.

Meanwhile, the McCanns are back in England, surrounded by a resolutely supportive family. Some in Britain have called for the other McCann children to be removed to protective custody. Kate and Gerry won't allow that without a fight. They have hired top lawyers, including one who barred the extradition of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. It was probably a bad

p.r. move, but after months of global Madeleine news, it's clear it will take more than p.r. to figure out what happened to her. with reporting by Martha De La Cal / Lisbon, Adam Smith / London

Postcard: Diego Garcia Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By WRITTEN BY MASSIMO CALABRESI, DIEGO GARCIA

Satellite image of airstrip on Diego Garcia, an atoll located in the heart of the Indian Ocean, some 1,000 miles (1,600 km) south off India's southern coast. Since the enforced depopulation of Diego Garcia in the years leading up to 1973, it has been used as a military base by the United States.

GeoEye Satellite Image Here's a mental exercise: picture a tropical paradise lost in an endless expanse of cerulean ocean. Glossy palm fronds twist in the temperate wind along immaculate, powder white beaches. Leathery sea turtles bob lazily offshore, and the light cacophony of birdsong accents the ambient sound of wind and waves.

Now add concrete. Lots and lots of concrete. And B-2 bombers. Toss in a few high-value terrorists, disembarking from an unmarked CIA jet, most likely hooded, shackled and headed for days and nights of the closest thing to torture that American interrogators can come up with while still claiming not to have violated the Geneva Conventions.

Welcome to Diego Garcia--6,720 acres (2,720 hectares) of restricted military base on a depopulated atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from the nearest continent. Back in 1966, the U.S. signed a secret agreement with Britain allowing the Pentagon to use the

territory as an air base in exchange for a big discount on Polaris nuclear missiles. Five years later, hundreds of Navy Seabees arrived by ship and began pouring the 12,000-ft. (3,600 m) runway that would become a bulwark of American cold war strategy and a key launchpad for the first and second Gulf wars and the invasion of Afghanistan.

When I touched down aboard Air Force One with President George W. Bush recently for a 90-minute refueling stop en route from Iraq to Australia, Diego Garcia looked drab: think early-'70s industrial park. But as a 1,700man springboard for the projection of military might to the far reaches of the world, it rivals anything 18th century Britain or Augustan Rome ever came up with.

Unfortunately, construction of the base in 1971 crossed the line from efficiency to cruelty. First, the British and Americans had the islanders' dogs loaded into sealed sheds and gassed, according to Professor David Vine of the American University in Washington. Then the British packed the inhabitants, known as Chagossians, onto ships and sent them off to Mauritius and the Seychelles, 1,200 miles (1,900 km) to the west across the Indian Ocean, where many live to this day. A court case seeking right of return is under way in Britain, and last year the Chagossians were allowed to visit their relatives' graves for the first time. Defense Department spokesman Commander Jeffrey Gordon says the U.S. gassed some dogs but only for humanitarian reasons and denies Diego Garcia is used for interrogations.

But its history and sensitive security role have helped keep the island pretty much off-limits to journalists. That has made it something of a holygrail dateline for reporters covering the military. Not that I saw much of it.

After Bush deplaned, he was greeted by an honor guard on the tarmac. We

were taken to an auditorium while Bush met the base commander and troops elsewhere on the grounds. When I tried to leave the building to look around, some courteous airmen said I didn't have the proper clearance.

But if I wasn't going to do any reporting on the expulsion of the Chagossians or on terrorist suspects like the Indonesian al-Qaeda leader Hambali, who is believed to have been held on the island, I at least wanted proof I'd been there. Some 20 years ago, TIME's chief of correspondents, Dick Duncan, offered a case of fine Bordeaux to the first correspondent who filed a legitimate story from Diego Garcia. The equivalent in 2007 media dollars is probably a box of Chablis, but I still wanted evidence.

I mentioned this to a civilian contractor, William Corke, who disappeared and came back with a bag of T shirts with pictures of scantily clad women and mermaids, bearing the words FANTASY ISLAND, DIEGO GARCIA. Before we were hustled back onto Air Force One, I managed to file a story for TIME.com on Bush's surprise visit to Iraq. I'd rather have had something on CIA detainees or the last remnants of Chagossian villages. Maybe next time.

NOTEBOOK

Global Warning Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By NANCY GIBBS In a week when cable screens were split among solemn ceremonies, falling governments, the first serious congressional debate over a war now in its fourth year and an economy with a nervous twitch, it was even harder than usual to catch the sirens in the distance--to hear the sounds of ice melting, species vanishing and cities choking the people who live in them. You can't really cover a story that hasn't happened yet, but sometimes the news about the future is the biggest story of all. was a week for warnings. U.S. government scientists announced that the Arctic ice cap is melting even more rapidly than they had feared; by 2050, 40% of the ice cover in the Arctic Ocean could be gone, a loss that wasn't supposed to happen for 100 years. One scientist called the news "astounding." Since greenhouse gases linger for decades, even drastic reductions in emissions won't be enough to prevent further decline.

The 2008 Old Farmer's Almanac predicts that the coming year will be the warmest in a century. It turns out that years ending in 8 are known for meteorological mischiefsupersize hurricanes, heat waves, floods and droughts. The World Conservation Union released its annual red list of threatened species and warned that a "global extinction crisis" looms as sprawling cities press deeper into habitats once left alone. The group tracks 40,000 of the planet's 15 million species; of these, more than 16,000 are at risk of extinction.

All this news is bad for polar bears. Bad for western lowland gorillas. And very bad for people as well. When the winter freeze comes later in China, a

disease-carrying water snail will have all kinds of new opportunities to make people sick. By 2085 an extra billion people will be at risk of contracting dengue fever because of changes in temperature and rainfall. And in yet another grim award ceremony, the Blacksmith Institute released its list of the world's most polluted places; it should not surprise anyone that people die faster in such spots.

"Earth, earth, riding your merry-go-round toward extinction," the poet Anne Sexton wrote. How fearsome must the headlines be about tomorrow before people change their ways today?

Japan's Leader Resigns Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By BRYAN WALSH

The political deathwatch on Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe began minutes after his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) suffered a historic defeat in elections at the end of July, leaving the opposition in charge of the legislature's upper house for the first time in Japan's postwar history.

Abe resisted immediate calls for his resignation and seemed ready to battle for his job in the face of public antipathy. But on Sept. 12 the "fighting politician," as Abe liked to call himself, suddenly lost his stomach for the fight and submitted his resignation to a shocked Japan. "The people need a leader whom they can support and trust," Abe told a national TV audience.

The LDP will choose a new leader--and the next Prime Minister--on Sept. 19, and the odds-on favorite is former Foreign Minister Taro Aso, who emerged as Abe's most influential Cabinet member. That decision could be followed by early legislative elections, and unless the LDP can quickly turn its fortunes around, it could find itself out of power for only the second time in its 52-year history. "The true nature of the LDP--a dying body on life support--has been exposed by Abe's resignation," says political analyst Hirotada Asakawa.

Once the dust clears, Abe's departure could also signal a return to the old Japan. Abe was elected less than a year ago, promising to centralize power in the Prime Minister's office--traditionally weak compared with those of other countries--and promote a more assertive Japan abroad. Instead, the influence has shifted back to behind-the-scenes power brokers, and the country appears to be retreating from the world stage. At this uncertain point, it seems Japan could go any way but forward.

Milestones Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 DIED THOSE FAMILIAR WITH the cognitive skills of African gray parrot Alex will never again use birdbrain as an insult. With help from researcher Irene Pepperberg, Alex learned to communicate, fueling debate over other species' ability to learn human language. He knew 100 words and could count, express frustration and differentiate among some colors, shapes and textures. His last words to Pepperberg: "You be good. See you tomorrow. I love you." He was 31.

NOW IT'S COOL TO BE GREEN, but in 1976, when Anita Roddick launched her eco-friendly Body Shop in Brighton, England, she was just odd. Taking cues from myriad cultures, the former U.N. worker infused her moisturizers and cleansers with natural ingredients, opposed animal testing, helped develop Third World communities and used her visibility to protest humanrights abuses. Roddick, who saw her company expand to 2,000 sites in 50 countries, died of a brain hemorrhage. She was 64.

FEW EUROPEANS CAN SAY they changed American jazz. But with his innovative electronic-piano playing and composing, most notably for Miles Davis in the 1960s, Vienna-born keyboardist Joe Zawinul pioneered the electrified genre of jazz fusion. He wrote the title song on Davis' first electric-jazz album, In a Silent Way, and later co-founded the seminal jazzrock band Weather Report, which he led for 15 years. Zawinul was 75.

AFTER several of her friends died within a short period, author Madeleine L'Engle aimed to make sense of her pain by writing about the universe.

Result: her iconic 1962 children's novel, A Wrinkle in Time, which follows

angst-ridden adolescent Meg Murry and her brother on a quest through time and space to rescue their imprisoned father on a planet governed by the sinister Dark Thing. With its mythic struggles, biblical and literary references and themes of good and evil--Dad is saved with the one gift Dark Thing lacks, the power of love--Wrinkle was seen by some as antiChristian and was often banned. (The spiritual author called it "great publicity.") Wrinkle, which won the 1963 Newbery Medal, has sold more than 8 million copies. L'Engle was 88.

BABY BOOMERS KNOW HER AS the icy matriarch on TV's hit prime-time soap Falcon Crest, as Ronald Reagan's first wife and as mother of Maureen and Michael Reagan. Yet in the 1950s, the unpretentious Jane Wyman was one of Hollywood's most respected stars. She broke out of B movies in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend and went on to vibrant performances in such films as 1948's Johnny Belinda (her portrayal of a deaf and mute rape victim won her an Oscar) and Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright. She broke her long silence on Reagan after his death, calling him a "great President and ... gentle man." Wyman was 90.

"YOU SEE THAT BLACK MUD? Put a little sugar in it ... add a little water, and you can paint all day." So said American folk artist Jimmy Lee Sudduth, who got his start in mud painting as a toddler, accompanying his healer mom through the Alabama woods. Using his fingers as a brush, plywood as canvas, and sugar, berries and turnip greens for color and texture, Sudduth, a star of the folk-art explosion of the 1980s, painted his life--his dog, farm animals and, after traveling, the U.S. Capitol. Sudduth's works are in the permanent collections of a number of museums and the Smithsonian. He was 97.

APPRECIATION

An Opera King's Final Curtain Call His family declined a state funeral in Rome, but the spirited, emotional farewell to singer Luciano Pavarotti in his hometown of Modena looked a lot like one THE CASKET The bow-tied Pavarotti's white maple coffin was lined with the maroon velvet used for the seats in La Scala and other houses. He held a rosary and the trademark white handkerchief he carried to mop his brow.

TRIBUTE The Pope sent a eulogy referring to the tenor's "divine gift of music"; 10 air-force planes flew overhead, trailing green, white and red smoke; in the two days before the funeral, 100,000 visited the open casket.

CONTROVERSY Some local priests decried giving the divorced Pavarotti a public viewing and funeral as a "profanation of the temple"--despite the fact that higher officials, including the Archbishop of Modena, approved.

FINALE As the service came to a close, a recording of Pavarotti and his baker father singing a duet--CĂŠsar Franck's hymn Panis Angelicus--brought tears and a last, several-minutes-long standing ovation.

With reporting by Harriet Barovick, Martha Bedford, Gilbert Cruz, Joe Lertola, Elisabeth Salemme, Carolyn Sayre, Kate Stinchfield, Nathan Thornburgh

New Clinton, Old Woe Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By MARK HALPERIN Who is Norman Hsu, and why does he matter? He has turned into major trouble for Hillary Clinton's campaign, which fears the revival of Clinton scandal fatigue. After all, even if people don't remember Travelgate, they probably recall the Lincoln Bedroom theme from the Clinton Administration: a reckless pursuit of political cash that led to shady Talented Mr. Ripley types turning up as major donors. Hsu fits the model: he came out of nowhere just a few years ago and quickly became a Democratic fund-raising hotshot, attaining the status of a "HillRaiser," which is how the top financial "bundlers" for the Democratic front runner are described. Hsu, 56, raised an extraordinary $850,000 from 260 donors on her behalf. He is also a two-time fugitive from justice, who fled a 1992 California fraud conviction in which he pleaded no contest to conning investors out of $1 million to allegedly purchase and resell nonexistent latex gloves. Then earlier this month, he skipped out on $2 million bail and eluded state officials who tried to corral him after learning his whereabouts from press reports about his role in the Clinton campaign. Federal investigators are looking at whether Hsu illegally reimbursed some of the Clinton donors, who include a postal carrier and a homemaker.

The Clinton campaign has blamed a faulty background check for its failure to scrub Hsu's past and says it will return the $850,000--the largest such single giveback in presidential-campaign history. And while there is no evidence that Hsu received any special governmental access for his largesse--either from Clinton or Barack Obama or any of the other numerous Democratic candidates he enriched--the role of bundlers like him will certainly come under more scrutiny from the press and the campaigns.

Clinton's advisers have already promised to take a close look at any future mysterious strangers bearing gifts.

Life: Educa ti on - Fashion - Hist ory - Fo od - En vir onment - Health

Beepocalypse Now? Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By BRYAN WALSH

Hanging on: The honeybee is built for hard work, but it's no match for colony-collapse disorder.

Getty In late 2006, whole hives of honeybees began dying overnight--victims of an unknown syndrome. Though the die-offs have afflicted nearly a quarter of U.S. beekeeping operations, scientists still aren't sure what causes them, but they've narrowed down the suspects: A VIRUS A team of scientists chiefly from Penn State and Columbia universities and the U.S. Department of Agriculture took samples from hives that had been afflicted with colony-collapse disorder (CCD)--the term for the syndrome wiping out the bees--and decoded the genetic material inside them. In a paper published in Science Express on Sept. 6, the group reported that one pathogen-- the recently discovered Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV)--was present in more than 90% of the samples, indicating that IAPV might be at least a good marker for CCD, if not a direct cause.

What the Doubters Say: Another group of researchers, which collaborated with the U.S. Army, has done its own studies on CCD-afflicted hives and found no clear links with IAPV. Also, the virus came to the U.S. from Australia, but there's been no CCD Down Under.

PARASITES A host of microscopic bugs afflicts honeybees, including the vampiric Varroa destructor, which sucks the blood of bees. The mites first appeared in the U.S. in 1987, and they've taken a severe toll on honeybees, which had been in decline even before CCD. The bites of the mites don't kill the bees, but they produce open wounds that leave the insects prone to further infections. Tracheal mites, which attack the respiratory system, are also a suspect.

What the Doubters Say: If Varroa is the sole cause, why did CCD not appear until late 2006? It's more likely that Varroa is working in concert with other parasites or pathogens to wear down bees' immune systems until the slightest thing can kill them. One reason to believe this: many hives have experienced CCD without the presence of the vampire mite.

PESTICIDE Pollinating bees may be a farmer's best friend, but that doesn't save them from being accidentally dosed by the pesticides used to rid fields of less welcome insects. One suspect is Imidacloprid, an insecticide ingredient discovered by Bayer. Now banned in France, it's been blamed for triggering a decline in bee populations. (Bayer denies that Imidacloprid is behind CCD.) What the Doubters Say: Despite France's 1999 ban, bee numbers there continued to drop. Studies of CCD have found no common environmental

factor, meaning that Imidacloprid too could be simply one of many causes.

All the unanswered questions have beekeepers buzzing. "Something out there is ruining my livelihood," says David Hackenberg, the Pennsylvania beekeeper who first reported CCD. "And there's nothing I can do about it."

Hyper Kids? Check Their Diet Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By CLAUDIA WALLIS

Color crazed: Some kids got revved up after consuming the amount of food dye contained in two 2-oz. (57 g) bags of candy — hardly a mega-dose.

White Packert / Getty Parents have long observed that some kids go bonkers after eating foods with a lot of artificial ingredients or neon-bright colors. Medical researchers--not to mention the food industry--have been skeptical; there was no proof of this effect, at least nothing like a double-blind, controlled study.

As so often happens, however, the parents turned out to be a step ahead of the pros. A carefully designed study published in the British journal the Lancet shows that a variety of common food dyes and the preservative sodium benzoate--an ingredient in many soft drinks, fruit juices and salad dressings--do cause some kids to become measurably more hyperactive and distractible. The findings prompted Britain's Food Standards Agency to issue an immediate advisory to parents to limit their children's intake of additives if they notice an effect on behavior. In the U.S., there hasn't been a similar response, but doctors say it makes sense for parents to be on the alert.

The study, led by Jim Stevenson, a professor of psychology at England's University of Southampton, involved about 300 children in two age groups: 3-year-olds and 8- and 9-year-olds. Over three one-week periods, the children were randomly assigned to consume one of three fruit drinks daily: one contained the amount of dye and sodium benzoate typically found in a British child's diet, a second had a lower concentration of additives, and a third was additive-free. The children spent a week drinking each of the three mixtures, which looked and tasted alike. During each seven-day period, teachers, parents and graduate students (who did not know which drink the kids were getting) used standardized behavior-evaluation tools to size up such qualities as restlessness, lack of concentration, fidgeting and talking or interrupting too much.

Stevenson found that children in both age groups were significantly more hyperactive when drinking the beverage with higher levels of additives.

Three-year-olds had a bigger response than the older kids did to the drink with the lower dose of additives, which had about the same amount of food coloring as in two 2-oz. (57 g) bags of candy. But even within each age group, some children responded strongly and others not at all. Stevenson's team is looking at how genetic differences may explain the range of sensitivity. One of his colleagues believes that the additives may trigger a release of histamines in sensitive kids. In general, the effects of the chemicals are not so great as to cause full-blown attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Still, the paper warns that "these adverse effects could affect the child's ability to benefit from the experience of school."

The Lancet paper may be the first to nail down a link between additives and hyperactivity, but as long ago as the 1970s, the idea was the basis for the restrictive Feingold diet, popularized as a treatment for ADHD. Some

clinicians still routinely advise parents of kids with ADHD to steer their kids away from preservatives and food dyes. "It matters for some kids, so I tell parents to be their own scientist," says psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, author of several books on ADHD. While a similar link between hyperactivity and sugar remains unproven, Hallowell cautions parents to watch the sweets too. "I've seen too many kids who flip out after soda and birthday cake," he says. "I urge them to eat whole foods. They'll be healthier anyway."

The food industry has responded cautiously to the study, calling for further research. The food dyes used in the study "have gone through substantial safety evaluations by government bodies," notes Cathy Cook of the International Association of Color Manufacturers.

The Lancet study will probably encourage other researchers to conduct food-additive work of their own. People with disorders ranging from autism to atrial fibrillation (a heart condition) have claimed that preservatives worsen their symptoms. "My guess is that if we do similarly systematic work with other additives, we'd learn they, too, have implications for behavior," says Dr. James Perrin, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard. "Kids drink crazy things with colors that are almost flashing," he says. The study is one more reason to cheer the trend toward less processed, more natural fare.

BUSINESS The Well

Coping With a Real-Estate Bust Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By JUSTIN FOX

The real estate slump has no quick fix, and could expand into a full-blown recession. Here, a For Sale sign stands in front of a home in Lee's Summit, Mo., on September 5, 2007.

Charlie Riedel / AP The housing market in Detroit is a mess. Such a mess that nobody tries to deny it, not even the real estate agents. "The market is very, very bad," laments Jennifer Weight, hosting a deserted Sunday open house in the suburb of Bloomfield Hills. "It's terrible."

Across the country, in the anti-Detroit that is San Diego, real estate is also slumping. The gloom, however, is far less pervasive. "Yes, it's a troublesome market, but it's not terrible," contends broker Leona Kline.

The reason for the difference in attitude is pretty simple. In metropolitan Detroit, the 11% drop in home prices over the past year was just one more sign of a local economy in decline thanks to the troubles of the auto industry. In San Diego, the drop of 7.3% came out of the clear blue sky.

The city still has jobs to offer. Beaches too.

But it is the downturn in sunny San Diego that poses the far bigger risk to the U.S. economy. Detroit, Cleveland and some smaller Rust Belt cities are experiencing a traditional bust, in which economic woes spread to housing.

In San Diego, the housing decline seems to be a self-generated phenomenon, the product of too-high prices and too-crazy lending practices. Now the "housing market is dragging down the rest of the economy," says Alan Gin, an economist at the University of San Diego. The same is true in and around Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami, Washington, New York City and Tampa, Fla.--all metro areas where house prices skyrocketed until 2006 and have since fallen in the face of otherwise positive economic news. Nationally, house prices dropped 3.2% in the 12 months ending in June, while the economy grew 1.9%.

For much of this year it was tempting to see this disconnect as a good thing: strength elsewhere was compensating for the slowdown in housing.

But when the Labor Department reported in September that job creation had lurched into reverse after four years of gains, the tune on Wall Street and elsewhere shifted abruptly. Economists began fretting that, for the first time, a real estate bust would throw the country into recession--a sustained period when the economy shrinks instead of grows and lots of people lose their jobs.

Forecasters are, as a group, notoriously bad at predicting inflection points, so you shouldn't take this dire talk to the bank just yet. At the Economic Cycle Research Institute, an outfit with a good record of at least noticing when recessions have begun, the indicators still point toward growth--albeit less convincingly than two months ago. "Having a jobs report come in negative does not mean that a recession has started," says managing director Lakshman Achuthan. But the risk is there, and Achuthan guesses it will worsen if loan markets fail to calm down. If a month from now a

borrower with good credit still can't get a jumbo mortgage at a reasonable rate, a recession will be much likelier.

HOUSING'S TRAPDOOR THAT A REAL ESTATE BUST MIGHT LAND US IN a recession is in a way fitting because it was a real estate boom that kept the last recession, in 2001, so brief and shallow. Trying to stave off deflation in the wake of the stock-market crash, Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve cut the short-term interest rates that determine what homeowners pay on adjustable-rate mortgages. Meanwhile, investors desperate for someplace other than the stock market to put their money piled into mortgage securities, driving down the cost of fixed-rate loans. Housing markets, already doing well amid the strong economic growth of the late 1990s, exploded.

To a remarkable extent, housing drove the entire economy. Real estate, residential construction and three other housing-related Labor Department job categories together add up to 6.6% of U.S. employment. But they accounted for 46% of the new jobs created in the U.S. between January 2001 and May 2006, when the sector peaked.

The main reason for the boom's doom was that in the nation's San Diegos, double-digit annual price increases put most homes out of the reach of middle-income buyers. The mortgage industry and its funders on Wall Street responded with laxer lending standards and creative loans (no downpayment, teaser rate, interest only, etc.) that really made sense for borrowers only if prices kept going up and they could sell at a profit or refinance. When prices stopped rising last year, the edifice began to crumble.

It's in the nature of real estate that the crumbling may continue for a while yet. "It's way too premature to be talking about light at the end of the tunnel--it's still pitch black," says Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, a research firm. Shepherdson, not a congenitally bearish sort, was one of several prominent forecasters who began warning of housing troubles in 2005. Now he sees huge quantities of unsold inventory, which will lead to more cutbacks in construction, which will lead to more job losses and so on. "I don't want to call it an endless loop, because it will end," he says. "But not anytime soon."

IT'S NOT LOCAL ANYMORE WHEN CONFRONTED WITH SUCH GLOOMY talk, many in the real estate business offer a classic response. "People don't buy real estate on a national basis," says Tom Kunz, CEO of real estate giant Century 21. "They buy it on a local basis." Sure enough, many parts of the country aren't in trouble. Prices are still rising in Seattle and Portland, Ore. In Atlanta, Dallas and Charlotte, N.C., prices never went up all that much, and they're not falling now. The same appears to be true in many smaller cities and towns.

But most of the country's big metro areas are caught in the downdraft.

With mortgage lending now very much a national business--and a troubled one--real estate may not be as local as it used to be. It may not even be national: house prices have been rising sharply in Europe, Australia, South Africa and China. Two countries at the leading edge of this boom, the U.K. and Australia, saw housing markets sputter in 2004 and 2005 but then recover. This may indicate that a quick recovery is possible in the U.S. It could also mean that the global boom will end only in a global bust--and U.S. mortgage troubles are now ominously making themselves felt around the world.

HOUSING'S MIXED HISTORY THESE ARE THE KINDS OF THOUGHTS THAT occupy Yale economist Robert Shiller, who with Karl Case of Wellesley has done more than anyone else to document the postmillennium real estate boom and warn about the inevitable bust. Shiller first made his name in the early 1980s attacking the notion, then widely accepted, that the stock market rationally reflects the true value of the companies whose shares are traded on it. He and real estate specialist Case then teamed up to show that home prices are even more subject to booms and busts than stocks. They did it by measuring repeat sales, which give a better picture of price movements than the figures published by the real estate industry. In 1991 they turned this into the business that supplied the price data used in this article.

After publishing a best-selling critique of the stock bubble, Irrational Exuberance, just as the market peaked in March 2000, Shiller set to work adding a chapter on real estate for the second edition. As part of that effort, he cobbled together an inflation-adjusted index of home prices going back to 1890, which showed that a) the price runup from 1997 to 2006 was by far the biggest on record and b) home prices can fall for decades. Put those two together, Shiller argues, and it's at least possible that we're due for an epic decline in prices. "People think that home prices go up a lot," he says. "But home prices in 1990 were at about the same level as in 1890." Shiller allows that the scarcity of property near the coasts might mean prices there will remain high, but then notes, "We can't make any more of the land, but we can build huge high-rises on the beach."

Huge high-rises on the beach, in fact, played a major role in Florida's boom and bust. There are 40,000 condominium units being built right now in greater Miami, and consultant Lewis Goodkin estimates it will take five to

seven years just to work through all that inventory. That's five to seven years of downward pressure on local housing prices, construction employment and the like. The great test of the coming months and years is whether the U.S. economy is strong enough to withstand that kind of pressure without buckling. Right now things aren't looking good, but this is an equation with too many variables--Fed rate cuts, congressional bailouts, the ebb and flow of the global economy--to solve in advance.

Apart from the risk that it will bring a recession, though, a housing boom turned bust is far from an unmitigated disaster. Some buyers will get great deals on Miami condos, that's certain. And in the San Diego suburb of La Mesa, the downturn has allowed Amy and John Tuttle to finally buy a house.

"We tried to buy homes a few years ago, but the homes were too expensive," says Amy, 31, a clinical psychologist. "We put three bids on three different houses, and I think we were simply outbid." In August they closed on a recently foreclosed house priced at $405,000--less than they had been willing to pay three years ago.

If Shiller is right that house prices are subject to bouts of irrational exuberance--and he seems to be--this is the happy flip side. Somewhere along the path to and from irrational pessimism, this real estate bust may deliver the place you've been looking for. with reporting by Elizabeth Keenan / Sydney, Joseph R. Szczesny / Detroit, Jill Underwood / San Diego

What Homeowners Can Do Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By BARBARA KIVIAT

The eternal question in response to any market volatility — be it up or down, in stocks or real estate — is a simple one: How does this affect me? In housing it depends, of course, on which rung of the real estate ladder you occupy.

Illustration for TIME by David Goldin Buyers: Maximizing The Advantage 1.With the number of homes on the market up 19% from a year ago, buyers (finally) hold the best cards. To play them, start entertaining all the offers homebuilders and real estate agents are hurling your way. How about a finished basement? Or having the seller pay your closing costs?

The downturn has yielded less obvious opportunities too. John Mead, a teacher in Calhoun, Ga., paid $120,000 for the three-bedroom house he found on Foreclosure.com a solid $40,000 less than similar offers he was considering from people not as desperate to sell. (Don't feel guilty about buying a foreclosure; it helps move inventory.)

True, lenders have tightened standards, and some buyers qualify for less house. Yet rates are still relatively low--though loans of more than $417,000 have gotten pricier faster.

Just keep in mind that the housing market hasn't hit bottom. Looking at the gap between how much it costs to rent a place or to buy one, Deutsche

Bank research analyst Lou Taylor concludes that in the bubbliest markets, renting is still the better short-term deal. Consider Sacramento, Calif., where rent runs about 40% of the monthly cost of buying, half of what it did a decade ago. Of course, not everyone can wait for the trough to become a homeowner. "If you just got married and your wife is pregnant with twins, you've not got much of a choice," says Taylor. "Just buy carefully and plan to stay for a number of years, because it may take that long for home prices to increase again."

Sellers: How to Limit the Damage 2. Real estate is largely a local matter. People selling houses in Bismarck, N.D., or Binghamton, N.Y., might find they have a relatively easy time of it, but in big chunks of the country, putting a home up for sale hurts.

The best way to avoid the fate of sellers who watch their property languish (the average sell time is eight to 10 weeks) is to hit the field with a bang; the house should look sharp (fresh paint, fresh flowers) and be priced to move. "People used to try a higher price and see what happened," says Realtor Judy Moore, based in Lexington, Mass. "Today, when the buyer has so many choices, you don't want to sit on the market for 30 days and then reduce your price. That buyer is long gone."

So sellers are sweetening the deal. Paying closing costs is common, as is ponying up cash for expenses like condo fees and renovations. If you fix the place up before you sell, stick to the kitchen and bathrooms, since renos in those rooms (along with new siding and windows) return the most, says a survey in Remodeling.

And try not to feel bad: there are larger forces at work, after all. "House prices are falling back in line with economic fundamentals," says

Economy.com housing economist Pat McPherron. Even granite countertops can't change that.

Debtors: Facing Up To Foreclosure 3. First, know that you are not alone: 1.4% of mortgages are now in foreclosure, which translates into roughly 730,000 homeowners. And that doesn't count the 5.1% (2.6 million) simply behind on payments.

The most important thing is to call your mortgage servicer--which may not be the outfit that made the loan--and talk to the loss-mitigation department as soon as you sense trouble. The more temporary the help you seek--a forbearance, say--the more likely you are to get it. Lenders prefer workouts to foreclosure, but attitude is key. "It's not easy to be polite when you feel dragged through the mud, but this is an art, not a science," says Scott Thompson, president of the realty group Mortgage Resolution Services. If you seek relief for an investment property or second home, more will be asked of you, such as tapping family for money.

A housing counselor can help with the process. HUD provides names at hud.gov or 800-569-4287. One option is to declare Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which forces a lender to accept a negotiated repayment plan.

Chicago bankruptcy attorney David Siegel says that saves a house about 30% of the time.

Investors: Heading Into Vulture Mode 4. In a typical year, about 250,000 foreclosures are scheduled for auction at county courthouses nationwide; so far this year there have been 440,000, according to RealtyTrac. Investors once lured by the prospect of flipping houses at ever inflating prices are now (if they sold in time) focused on scooping up distressed houses on the cheap and turning them

into rentals. "There's a whole crowd of people who say, 'Wow, what an opportunity,'" says William Bronchick, president of the Colorado Association of Real Estate Investors.

Sales of bank-owned repossessions like the one auctioneer Hudson & Marshall is hosting in Detroit later this month are sellout events (700 properties will be on the block, vs. 130 this time last year), but the real money is made by people who get their hands on houses before the banks do. By outbidding the bank at a courthouse foreclosure auction, return on investment can get as high as 25% to 35%. Make sure you are incredibly well versed in your state's real estate laws and prepared for tasks like evicting a family.

However you get your hands on a house, it's important to remember that foreclosures are often cheap for a reason, like having a cracked foundation. Says Terry Dunkin, president of the Appraisal Institute: "Just because it's priced less than other houses in the neighborhood doesn't mean it's a great deal."

Renters: In the Perfect Spot 5. Even though home ownership peaked during the boom, landlords didn't suffer, nor did renters benefit. Why? So many buildings were going condo, the apartment stock actually fell in 2005.

Now, with sales slowed, builders are reverting to rentals. In the second half of 2007, some 62,300 apartments will be added, double that of the first six months, according to real estate tracker Reis. In the short term, that gives renters the advantage, since their numbers aren't growing as fast as the apartment count is. "In some cases, vacancy rates are going up," says Reis chief economist Sam Chandan. Unless you're in a tight market like New

York City or San Jose, Calif., you might be able to win a free month or other concessions.

There's another upside playing out in slack markets. When Karin NeJame couldn't sell her Bethel, Conn., house after a year, she decided to rent it.

Now, for about $2,000 a month, her tenants get three bedrooms, a Jacuzzi and a landlady who gladly does the gardening. * Source: S&P/Case-Shiller 速 U.S. National Home Price Index

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Nature Boys Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By LEV GROSSMAN

Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder, left to right, photographed at the Regency Hotel in New York City on September 6, 2007.

David Johnson for TIME They're both rich and famous, they're both notoriously earnest and leftleaning, they both have reputations for being emotionally tortured. So it makes a kind of cosmic sense that Sean Penn and Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder would be friends; they have been since 1995, when Vedder wrote music for Dead Man Walking, in which Penn starred. Both are currently experiencing second acts, Penn as a director and Vedder as a film composer. The duo have now collaborated: Vedder has written the sound track for Penn's movie Into the Wild, based on the book by Jon Krakauer.

Later this month Vedder will release a CD of songs written for or inspired by the movie, the closest thing to a solo album he's ever done.

Into the Wild is the true story of Chris McCandless, a good kid from a prosperous but unhappy family, who left home, burned his money, changed

his name to Alexander Supertramp and in 1992 walked off into the Alaskan wilderness. He died there of starvation 16 weeks after he arrived. What was he looking for? Penn and Vedder--who are a lot funnier than they get credit for--talked to TIME'S LEV GROSSMAN about this and other profound questions, like how you keep a huge grizzly bear happy on a movie set.

TIME: What made you pick up Krakauer's book?

PENN: The cover grabbed me--the bus, the image of the bus with the title Into the Wild on it. I've made a lot of decisions in my life that you could call judging a book by its cover. And I've become a real advocate of it. So I took the book home, and I read it cover to cover twice, and I went to sleep in the wee hours and immediately got up in the morning, and I saw in essence the movie that you saw last night.

What was it about what McCandless did that got to you?

PENN: I really think that we shouldn't just accept rites-of-passage opportunities as they come, because what we'll find is that they don't come in our world anymore. And we shouldn't look at them as a kind of luxury or romantic dream but as something vital to being alive. McCandless quotes somebody else in the movie: "If just once you put yourself in the most ancient of circumstances ..." This is where nature comes into it--and I think that Eddie and I share this feeling--that every sober-minded person of any belief would probably agree that the biggest issue is quality of life. You've gotta feel your own life to have a quality of life, and our own inauthenticity, our corruptions, get in the way of that. The wilderness is relentlessly authentic.

Have you ever gone through anything like that? A rite of passage?

PENN: Formatively the experience I had, where I found the beginning of the map to figure out how to feel my own life, would have come from surfing as a kid. My wilderness is the ocean, and my experience with risk and conquering fear was the ocean.

Being alone like that can help people find themselves, but it can also make them fall apart.

VEDDER: See, I love it. I need it. I'm a better person because of it. I mean, I feel really blessed even to have had the opportunity of disappearing on an island or something and not seeing anybody for weeks. It makes me somebody that somebody else could live with. That's another thing, when you talk about the environment and how precious it is: it makes us better people.

How did you get into doing sound tracks, what with being a huge rock star and all? Is it a lot different from doing Pearl Jam? VEDDER: Yeah, it's easy. Really. I almost don't remember a thing. It was like I kinda went into some weird space for a week or two, and then I woke up out of this daze, and it was done. I don't really remember it.

That doesn't even sound like work.

VEDDER: I was thinking about it yesterday. I don't trust art that was made easy. If there's not some kind of pain involved, then I don't trust it. And I thought, Well, how can I be honest and tell people that it was easy? But what I figured out is that the hard part was 25 years ago, when I went through what this kid went through. I went through pain, but it was just a long time ago. And I guess what's a little bit worrisome to me is how easy it was to access it. You know? That I just had to barely put my finger in. It

was right there on the surface. I thought I'd grown up much more. I'm glad there was a use for it, but now I've got to tuck it away again.

So how does it work? Sean, do you just go to Eddie and say, "Here's a bit with a guy hitchhiking. Write a song that would sound good with that"?

PENN: Well, I'd written the script originally structured for songs. I love that kind of thing in movies. I was born in 1960, so you can do the math and figure out that I was just coming into my own with Harold and Maude, and earlier than that, Simon and Garfunkel and The Graduate, and Coming Home. It just added something, letting your songwriter be a co-author of the script in many ways.

VEDDER: It was like a factory, where I would sit in a chair and they'd hand me instruments. We'd just keep going, and I didn't have to teach anybody the part or talk them into the idea, the theory, the soul of whatever the piece was. I'd just sit in the chair, and they'd hand me a fretless bass, and they'd hand me a mandolin, and they'd take a second to do the rough mix, and then I'd write the vocal, and it was just quick. It was as in the moment as you could be, and in that way it's like a great feeling of being alive. You'd hear two pieces at the end of the day--or three--and feel like you were actually doing something on this planet while you were here.

Some of the vocals were wordless, just these howling chants ...

VEDDER: That was all stuff I did not-to-picture. In a way--like the music for the scene on the mountaintop--I don't think I would have done that [if I had seen the footage]. I would have felt too--like if you could be both vulnerable and pretentious at the same time?

PENN: [Laughs.] Leave that to me!

Emile Hirsch [who plays McCandless] goes through a truly shocking physical transformation to show McCandless starving to death. How'd you achieve that?

PENN: Turns out he has phenomenal willpower. A 21-year-old kid, who just got the right to go drinking with the guys in the bar, and he is by choice sober. By choice a monk for eight months. He was in a room watching his feet roll under him on a treadmill or doing pushups or eating another glass of water with lemon in it for dinner every night for eight months. You know, that's really, really hard.

He has a scene with a bear that got some audible gasps.

PENN: He was an 8-ft. 6-in. grizzly bear, and if he wasn't a good bear, I wouldn't be here right now. But no flinching from Emile--he just stood there, six inches away from that thing.

What do you do when the bear's not being a good bear?

PENN: You say, "Good boy," all day long. Or the trainer does. And he gives him a lot of chocolate whipped cream.

McCandless doesn't come off as a saint in the movie. I mean, he won't call his parents even though they're desperate to hear from him. He's angry.

PENN: You know, this is subject to a lot of personal stuff on anybody's part--yours, mine. My answer to "He should have called his parents" is "Who says?" I understand it, but I walked in my shoes, not his shoes. What I do know is that if you're not feeling your life, you are obligated first to do everything it takes to feel your life. I've done many things without the intention of hurting people that have hurt people. And I'm saying this

knowing that I've got two kids that are coming up to that age myself right now.

Eddie, you talked before about how much you have in common with McCandless. [Vedder has a famously difficult relationship with his stepfather, as McCandless did with his father.] Did doing the movie help you get over that pain at all?

VEDDER: Not enough. But it'll do for now. I don't think it's gonna go away. I think in the last 10 to 15 years, I've just been able to not let that person and that part of me be in charge--that guy is in the car, but we just don't let him drive. That's something Springsteen told me once, and it really works.

He'll be talking in your ear in the backseat, but just don't let him get behind the wheel. And you can be proud of it. I've talked to the people that raised me, and I've thanked them for giving me a lifetime's worth of material. I was talking to Bono in Australia last year, and we mentioned something about family histories, and he was like, Wow, they really gave you some good stuff to write about. It was like he wanted to hug them and thank them.

PENN: My mother was reading this article about me in Esquire last month, and she called me up, and she said [Penn does his mother's voice], "Well, I thought it was an interesting article, but you know, the one thing, every time I'm sitting with you, you have a Diet Coke. Why is it that you're an alcoholic? I'm the alcoholic!" It was as though I'd stolen her mantle!

The thing I can't figure out about Into the Wild is if it's a happy story or a sad one. McCandless experiences so much joy, but then he dies in the end ...

PENN: Let me tell you what I think. My Uncle Bill, who was dying--with 13 cousins that he had all with my Aunt Joan, they had a great, happy

marriage for all their years. So there he is on his deathbed. He'd been in a coma a couple of days, and a priest has come in to give last rites. This was the first time, Irish that they are, that my aunt let a tear fall, trusting that his coma would make him unaware of it. Well, open come the eyes, and he sees. He catches her--she can't get away with it. And his last words were "What're ya crying about? You're gonna die too." Chris McCandless lived too short, that's true, but he, in my view, put an entire life from birth to the wisdom of age into those years.

Arts: Movies - D owntime

A Kid Nation Divided Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By JAMES PONIEWOZIK

Go West, young 'uns: Kid Nation put its kids to work in a frontier town, far from parental doting.

Monty Brinton / CBS If the measure of a successful reality show is how many people it ticks off before airing a single frame (think Joe Millionaire), then CBS's Kid Nation is one of the most successful reality shows of all time. The series, in which 40 children, ages 8 to 15, create their own society in a New Mexico ghost town, has been accused of violating child-labor laws. Various publications have reported that several kids mistakenly drank bleach from an unmarked bottle, and one was spattered with hot grease while cooking.

Embarrassment-wise, CBS is only lucky that the cast is by definition too young to have DUI histories.

After Kid Nation debuts on Sept. 19--assuming it does--the hubbub could fade or snowball. (As of press time, CBS wasn't screening the program to critics, perhaps to keep the hype building.) But even without injuries, the show was bound to be controversial, and not just for putting kids in the TV spotlight. Rather, the show's premise--sending kids off on their own, to take

risks, experiment and possibly fail, without parental intervention--runs against the spirit of modern child rearing.

We are, after all, in the age of the involved parent, or the overinvolved parent. The theory of "attachment parenting" espouses sleeping in the same bed with Baby for early bonding. Schools complain of hovering "helicopter parents," a label that some moms and dads wear proudly. The amount of time candidates spend with their young kids is even an issue in the primaries. For the enlightened 21st century mom and dad, quality time has met quantity time. Never mind the bleach: the idea of having kids care for themselves, separate from parents, rings faintly abusive in itself.

As the hyperinvolved parent of two, I realize there are worse phenomena than people spending a lot of time with their kids. But it's also exhausting, and pop culture has started asking if kid life has overwhelmed adult life. In the book Perfect Madness, Judith Warner worries that a "total motherhood" culture makes moms feel inadequate, while in The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West argues (hyperbolically) that the eroding distinction between kids and adults is "bringing down Western civilization."

For parents, one of the more fascinating facets of AMC's period advertising drama Mad Men is its picture of child rearing in prechildproofed, pre-co-sleeping 1960. There is a sense here that parents and kids have separate lives, and the kids' lives seem as alien, independent and dangerous as in caveman times: they ride in cars un-seat-belted, play with dry-cleaning bags and get sent off to shoot BB guns while the grownups have cocktails.

Like the adult characters' smoking and sexism, this is not model behavior.

But does it make you a terrible parent to pine, just a little, for a time when the job was less all consuming? Contrast Mad Men with HBO's couples-

therapy drama Tell Me You Love Me, in which, despite the buzz over its explicit sex scenes, the most interesting couple is the pair who never have sex. Dave (Tim DeKay) and Katie (Ally Walker) are devoted parents who haven't been intimate in a year--in part, simply because of the exhaustion of everyday chores and staying close to the kids emotionally and physically.

(Katie, we learn, breastfed them until they were 2 1/2.) "I guess, yeah, I should be in the mood every time I clean out the gecko cage!" Dave yells, ranting sarcastically about the erotic stimulation of bedtime stories and minivan shopping. "Our entire life," Katie tells him, "that's what you just trashed."

Our entire life. Granted, it's a false choice to say that it's either sexless marriage or shipping the runts off to CBS reality camp. But beyond the cheap shock, I suspect Kid Nation has touched on a real anxiety in the era of extreme parenting: the horror, and yet the appeal, of children having lives separate from Mom and Dad's. Because even to a good parent, sometimes "kid nation" can sound like America by another name.

Geography Lessons Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By KATE BETTS

Geography lessons: The coolest designers redefine the idea of American style in an increasingly global business. Here, models present creations from the Diane Von Furstenberg spring 2008 collection during New York Fashion Week September 9, 2007.

Keith Bedford / Reuters The sidewalk surrounding Manhattan's Bryant Park is lined with posters promoting a new image of Lord & Taylor, the U.S.'s oldest departmentstore chain. In the pictures, members of some mythical extended suburban family smile as they frolic in their vintage Mercedes convertible or slide into a wooden canoe.

Despite their beauty, the photos and the inference that they epitomize American style seem jarringly anachronistic. At a time when fashion has become global thanks to the Internet and the access it provides to ideas, resources and products, American style is becoming increasingly difficult to define. At New York City's Fashion Week there were 259 designers of different nationalities--including Chinese, Thai, Brazilian, Japanese and Turkish--showing their spring 2008 collections.

"Fashion is no longer regional, and the notion of American sportswear is no longer valid, nor does it look current," says Robert Burke, a luxury consultant. "I've seen shows this week that could easily have taken place in

Paris or Milan." More and more, it is the itinerant lifestyles of multinational designers--many of whom frequently travel around the world to visit factories, stores and suppliers--and the global reach of the Internet that inspire the clothes they send down the runway.

Take Tia Cibani, the Canadian-born designer of Ports 1961, a line that is produced in southern China and shown in New York. While Cibani commutes between New York City and Xiamen, inspiration can come from as far away as East Africa, as it did this season. Her collection, called Safiri, pays homage to African women's spontaneous sense of style and their imaginative fabric treatments such as tie-dyeing, rolling and wrapping.

Other popular destinations for spring included Rome, with Vera Wang excavating ideas from the city's ancient polycultural society and translating them into toga-like dresses, and Bali, where Diane von Furstenberg found bold floral prints. Japan--specifically its traditional folded-and-dyed fabricprinting technique, shibori--turned up on the runways of designers like Narciso Rodriguez, Proenza Schouler and Thakoon Panichgul.

"We grew up in a time of complete globalization," says Lazaro Hernandez, 28, who, along with Jack McCollough, designs the label Proenza Schouler, "so the boundaries are not as strict. We're young, and we don't have the money to travel that much, but we travel in our heads. We go online. With technology, you can go anywhere on the Internet." This season they found a trove of vintage kimonos in McCollough's parents' attic, and the trapezoidal sleeve shape became a major motif of their collection.

One of the reasons designers look so far afield for ideas is to stay one step ahead of the mass-market manufacturers that copy trendy fashions and sell them for much less. Designers like Hernandez and Panichgul say craftsmanship is what sets their clothing apart. "I don't think we could have

survived in the late 1990s because minimalism, which was so popular then, is so easy to copy," says Hernandez. Indeed, consumers who want to buy a black sweater or a pair of black pants are inclined to go directly to H&M for the best price. As a result, Hernandez and McCollough feel the pressure to make their clothing even more ornate. This season, for example, they employed the French haute couture supplier Lemarie to embellish their clothing with rows and rows of tiny feathers.

"You have to develop a cult customer," says Panichgul, "someone who is looking for this kind of elaborate work every season." And someone who can afford it.

SOCIETY

Video Games That Keep Kids Fit Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By CAROLYN SAYRE

Road warriors: Racing on video-game bikes wins fans at Kirksey Middle School in Rogers, Ark. Marc F. Henning for TIME Gym teachers and video games have never been a happy mix. While one side struggles to pull kids off the couch, the other holds them fast. But Kim Mason, a phys-ed director in Rogers, Ark., with 28 years of experience selling kids on the virtues of sweat, did something unlikely last year: she persuaded her public-school district to invest $35,000 in brand-new videogame equipment.

That would be more surprising if students in Rogers were the only ones plugging into interactive workouts, but they're not. Some 2,000 schools in at least 35 states have begun to set up exergaming fitness centers with motion sensors and touch-sensitive floor mats to allow kids to control the action onscreen not just with their thumbs but also with their bodies. Do enough dancing or kung-fu kicks, and you just might get the same level of exercise as from chasing a soccer ball. What's more, this is a workout kids don't try to duck. "Physical education used to be a joke," says Dr. John Ratey, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and

author of Spark, an upcoming book about exercise. "That has changed simply because we are catching up with the gamer generation."

Finding a way to help this most sedentary age group is more important than ever. Nearly 17% of U.S. kids are considered overweight or obese, and many more are struggling. Meanwhile, as scale numbers are climbing, school budgets for P.E. are falling. As a result, fewer than 10% of elementary schools meet the National Association for Sport and Physical Education's standard of students spending 150 minutes a week in gym class.

The high-tech answer to the problem came two years ago when West Virginia University studied the health effects of an exergaming system called Dance Dance Revolution (DDR)--interactive games that instruct kids to use their feet to tap buttons on a sensor mat. After a pilot program found the games were beneficial, the state vowed to install consoles in all its public schools by next year. (It didn't hurt the study's credibility that it was funded in part by an insurance company, not by the gamemaker.) Since then, other districts have climbed aboard, helped by video-game makers like Nintendo and Sony, which are designing systems to meet the demand; small companies like Expresso Fitness that donate equipment; and federal grants and private donations that bankroll the purchase of equipment. "The old system is failing kids," says Phil Lawler, director of training and outreach at PE4life, a nonprofit based in Kansas City, Mo., that helps modernize P.E. "We are tricking them into exercising."

A gaming system, which can cost up to $4,000 a pop, is more expensive than, say, a kickball, but the fact is, it may work just as well. In January the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., found that obese kids burned six times as many calories playing DDR as they did with a traditional video game. And in

July the wonderfully named Alasdair Thin, a researcher of human physiology at Heroit-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, found that college students burned twice as many calories playing an active video game in which they dodged and kicked for 30 minutes as they did walking on a treadmill. Studies have not yet shown how the new games measure up against a real session of, say, soccer or wind sprints.

Of course, since a child told to hustle around a track pretty much has to do it, critics argue that there's no need for video games in gym classes even if they do have some health benefits. But there's a physical difference between an hour of exercise enthusiastically pursued and one that's merely plodded through. And, Lawler says, "most kids aren't volunteering to do pull-ups after school." Develop a taste for aerobic video games, however, and you just might carry the habit home.

But can anything hold the fruit-fly attention span of kids? "Video games are not the answer," says Warren Gendel, founder of Fitwize 4 Kids, a chain of traditional children's gyms. "Kids will get bored and be back on the couch."

Maybe, but that won't stop the games from coming. Fisher-Price just began selling a video-game bike for toddlers. No word yet on a version for the prewalking crowd--but don't bet against it.

No Gifted Chil d Left Behind ?

Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By JULIE RAWE First, the good news: it turns out, millions of kids from low-income families are acing standardized tests. According to the first nationwide analysis of high-achieving students based on income, more than 1 million K-12 students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches rank in the top quartile. Expand the category to include children whose families make less than the median U.S. income, and the total rises to 3.4 million--more than the entire population of Iowa. Now the bad news: nearly half of lowerincome students in the top tier in reading fall out of it by fifth grade. As economically disadvantaged brainiacs get older, 25% of them drop ranks in math in high school, and 41% don't finish college. "We're losing them at every stage in education," says Joshua Wyner, executive vice president of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which wrote the report with public-policy development firm Civic Enterprises.

These groups are trying to get the No Child Left Behind Act to at least start keeping tabs on advanced learners. One proposal on Capitol Hill would go a step further by giving schools credit for moving kids from proficient to advanced levels. But how to spot early potential?

To help increase opportunities for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds, Miami- Dade County public schools last year began testing all 23,000 first-graders using a culture-neutral, language-free assessment that requires no reading, writing or speaking. The result? The number of firstgraders screened for gifted placement shot up from some 100 the previous year to nearly 3,000. Says deputy superintendent Antoinette Dunbar of the decision to start testing every first-grader for giftedness: "Sometimes we overlook the very obvious."

Forget Morton's Salt Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By ANITA HAMILTON

Finishing salts aren’t meant for cooking. To get the most bang for you buck, use just a sprinkle on top of your favorite foods. Here, a saltshaker filled with six different types of salt.

From top to bottom: Fleur de Sel, Alderwood Smoked, Bolivian Rose, Cyprus Black, Hawaiian Red and Australian Pink.

James Worrell for TIME Salt is back. Blamed for everything from high blood pressure to hijacking the true taste of food, this essential chemical compound is once again welcome on the table. Step into any upmarket restaurant or food shop, and you'll discover a love affair with the flavor enhancer that was once on every nutritionist's hit list.

"Salt is the most important seasoning ingredient there is," says Thomas Keller, owner and chef of swanky eateries Per Se in New York City and French Laundry in Yountville, Calif. Keller offers diners nine varieties-including an ancient Jurassic salt extracted from a Montana copper mine and the jet black Molokai salt, which gets its color from volcanic ash and pairs well with foie gras. He even tops his chocolate caramel dessert with fleur de sel from Brittany.

Many of the flavor differences from one salt to another derive from the mineral deposits in its region, the shape of the crystals and the way the salt is harvested. For example, fleur de sel comes from the top of sea-salt marshes on the northwest coast of France, while the sharper-tasting Himalayan pink salt comes from ancient seabeds in Pakistan.

Selling for about 50 times as much per ounce as your basic Morton's, specialty salt comes in a mystifying array of colors, grinds and shapes. To help buyers choose the perfect one, some stores, like Williams-Sonoma and Whole Foods, offer tasting bars that allow you to try out different varieties.

If you still can't decide, the online gift company Red Envelope sells a 24-jar sampler of salts whose origins range from Italy to India for $165.

But wait--isn't salt bad for you? Yes and no. "It is the huge amount of sodium in processed food that's a problem," says Eve Felder, a dean at the Culinary Institute of America. Artisanal salts are meant to be used sparingly atop prepared food, so chances are those few extra sprinkles won't do you in. Although, at $6 for a 3-oz. jar of your basic fleur de sel, the price just might.

PEOPLE

10 Questions for 50 Cent Monday, Sep. 10, 2007 By NATHAN THORNBURGH

50 Cent pulled the title for his new disc from his birth name, which is Curtis James Jackson III. Patrick Fraser / Corbis Outline He was born Curtis Jackson, but he made his mark on the rap world performing under his childhood nickname. His third album, Curtis, debuted Sept. 11. 50 Cent will now take your questions Is it Curtis or 50 Cent? ̶Maggie Shaw, New York City It's 50, but the album title is Curtis. It made perfect sense for me to title it Curtis, considering my grandfather is Curtis Sr., his firstborn is Curtis Jr. and I'm his first grandchild, so my mom named me after him. I'm Curtis III, and this is my third album. 50 Cent was a name that kind of stuck. For me, it was a metaphor for change. That's what made me utilize it when I actually started rapping.

What should we expect fr om y our new al bum? ̶Ignacio Meza, Los

Angeles You should expect a lot of surprises. For my last two albums, I isolated myself to working with only members of G-Unit [50 Cent's original rap

group]. On this album I worked with Justin Timberlake, Robin Thicke, Mary J. Blige, Akon, Nicole from the Pussycat Dolls, Dr. Dre and Eminem. I'm in a place where I'm secure enough to have all these other talented people around me because I've proven myself, with my first two projects selling over 21 million copies.

Why d on't y ou do m ore hard-c ore stuff like y ou di d on Get Rich

or Die Tryin' [in 2003]? ̶Raveen Bhasin, Dallas I take into consideration what the music business is facing with things like the Don Imus situation. I think it would cause a full uproar if I wrote [hardcore] lyrics from that perspective all the way through my album. That's why I released Curtis instead of my next project, Before I Self Destruct. It's more of a hard-core sound, and it would be too aggressive for this period.

Is y our beef with Kanye [West] for real? ̶Erika Ramirez, Houston I said I would retire if his album [Graduation, also released Sept. 11] sold more than mine. I think people would like for it to be a beef. Then it would be really uncomfortable for Kanye, wouldn't it? I'm already conditioned for those things, but he'd have to adjust. My car's already bulletproof.

Why d o rap pers use so much slang that the avera ge 50-year- ol d can't understand them? ̶Gabriel Goldenberg, Montreal Some audiences have to come to you. You can't cater to everybody. Kanye West's record is aimed at a straight pop audience. It may work for him now, but I don't believe that will exist long. That base has no loyalty at all.

You t o ok a bullet t o y our face. Has that changed y our rapping style? ̶Ravi Rami, Houston It changed my voice. I still have a fragment of a bullet inside my tongue.

And I have a hole in the back of my mouth. This is the voice that works,

though. This is why I believe it happened for a reason. The voice before I got shot was the one that not many people listened to.

You have a home in suburban C onnecti cut. Why di d y ou m ove ou tside the cit y? ̶Susan Ashley, Houston I generate a lot of interest in New York City, so it's difficult. If I was going to a nightclub or if I was just getting out of the car to go to the store, it'd be difficult. It's way different here, because it's a country setting. I don't even leave my house to go to the store. I send somebody else to do it.

I kn ow y ou li ke t o w ork hard and p l a y hard. What's y our fa v ori te pla ce t o vac a ti on? ̶Janelle Robison, Brooklyn, N.Y. Vacation's at home. I do so much traveling that when I just stay at home, it feels like I'm on vacation. All you have to do is turn the phone off. The house is big as a country club anyway.

Are y ou endorsing a part icular candi da te in the '08 electi on? ̶

Haren Para, New York City No, but I like Hillary. I think she was already our President once. [Laughs].

Any pl ans for another mo vie? ̶Conor Egan, Belmar, N.J. I've got a film called Righteous Kill. It's myself, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Donnie Wahlberg, John Leguizamo. [Laughs]. If you ask me, I'm the next Denzel Washington.

SPECIAL SECTION

New Zealand's Great Performer Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By MARION HUME / QUEENSHEAD

Sam Neill, with his wife, Noriko Watanabe Neill, and daughter, Elena, tends the land at Two Paddocks, their Central Otago family-run winery.

Peter Hunt for TIME Call it a sideways moment. New Zealand vintners Sam Neill and Adam Peren are surveying a rugged hillside vineyard and discussing why Pinot Noir is the most sensuous and elusive of wines. "If Pinot were a woman, she'd be Audrey Tautou in AmĂŠlie," says Neill. "Kristin Scott Thomas," offers Peren.

"No, Kristin's a dry Riesling," Neill insists.

One guesses Neill might know, given that he co-starred with Scott Thomas in 1998's The Horse Whisperer (although he did not appear in the Oscarnominated 2004 Sideways, which established Pinot Noir as the grail of grapes to a global audience). Neill, who has more than 60 movie credits under his belt and who recently appeared on TV as Cardinal Wolsey in Showtime's The Tudors, leads something of a double life. Back in his native New Zealand, this son of three generations of importers of French vintages planted his first five acres (two hectares) of grapes in 1993. Neill has poured heart and soul not only into such successes as The Piano and the Jurassic Park movies but also into the alluvial-schist soil of the South Island

of New Zealand, where his great-grandfather settled in 1859 and where Neill helms Two Paddocks, which is dedicated to the quest for what he calls "the seductive Pinot Noir."

Those who recall the debates of Miles and Maya in Sideways (which, winemakers concur, has had a considerable influence on the popularity of Pinot) might remember that Pinot Noir can be unpredictable yet potentially spectacular. Part of the appeal lies in the fact that the vines thrive only on such steep slopes as Burgundy's 2-mile-wide (3 1/2 km), 30-mile-long (50 km) stretch of C么te d'Or (Burgundy and Pinot Noir are synonymous) and in just a few rocky pockets in such places as Australia, Canada, South America and Europe, along with Oregon's Willamette Valley and the coolest spots in California. As for New Zealand's Central Otago Pinots, the pioneers who planted this epic landscape with vines in the 1970s were deemed madmen.

With its craggy peaks and glacial valleys, Central Otago would appear to be the last place you could grow grapes. Located below the 45th parallel near the tip of New Zealand's South Island and with elevations of 650 to 1,475 ft. (200 to 450 m) above sea level, this is extreme-sports country.

The world's top snowboarders compete on mountains buffeted by winds from Antarctica. In fact, Pinot vines don't mind a blanket of snow as long as summer temperatures are warm enough for the slow ripening needed for intense flavors and complexities to develop. "Pinot Noir is not one of those grunty, stand-a-spoon-up-in-it wines. It's fickle and voluptuous and complex," says Neill. "People say there's a lot of wine in the world, but there's not a lot of Pinot Noir, and admirers are looking for regional differences."

Worldwide, Pinot Noir's uniqueness is that it seems to carry in the most pronounced way the taste of the land from which it hails. (The French refer to this as the go没t de terroir.) "Pinot from here does seem to reflect the mystery of this place," says Neill, whose merchant great-grandfather arrived during Otago's gold rush and grew wealthy from selling supplies, including alcohol, to miners. "So your family have been peddling hooch around here for 150 years," jokes Peren, who hails from such quintessentially Kiwi stock-as New Zealanders would call it--that his grandfather even had a breed of sheep named after him. Peren launched the Peregrine Wines label in 1998 in partnership with oenophile oncologist Murray Brennan of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. (Brennan visits for vacations.) Peren's connection with the land that Peregrine has under vine comes through his wife's grandfather, who won a small plot in a card game.

The Peren family also has a single-vineyard Pinot Noir called Two Sisters.

A great Pinot may taste heavenly, but it's a devil of a job to get it into your glass. Birds love the sugar-laden grapes (hence the surreal sight in early fall in Central Otago of what appear to be snow-filled valleys, which are in fact a vast expanse of white nets). If the grapes aren't picked exactly as they reach maturity, the thin-skinned berries shrivel on the vines--which, because they thrive on steep slopes, demand that harvesting be done by hand.

Yields are low--about 2 tons per acre (5 metric tons per hectare, which translates into about 350 cases of wine). Sauvignon Blanc vines would yield three times as much. Add to that the risk that the fruit will be unstable during the fermenting process (although we'll forgo the science lesson on the effect of Pinot's native yeasts and 18 amino acids).

But the greatest enemy of all needs just one night to destroy everything.

While vines don't mind snow, grapes hate frost, and the only reliable way to stop cold air from killing a crop is expensive and terrifying. Neill and Peren,

along with the other winemakers in a region that features such wine stars as Felton Road and the well-named Mt. Difficulty, are all too familiar with frost watch, which means helicopter flying at night. To keep the air moving, squadrons of choppers fly low, a maneuver rendered yet more perilous because the valleys are crisscrossed with electricity cables. "It scares the hell out of me," Neill admits. "We're desperate to find an alternative. We do use windmills too, but the problem is, on one night your windmill might not be in the right place."

It was the Sauvignon Blancs of the Marlborough region farther to the north--including Cloudy Bay, now owned by French luxury group MoĂŤt Hennessy Louis Vuitton--that really put New Zealand wines on the map. Yet plenty of wine connoisseurs remained skeptical about Central Otago Pinot Noir. Neill makes sure to credit his mentors: the late Rolfe Mills of Rippon winery, who started to plant in 1976, and Alan Brady, who today co-helms a two-man boutique winery called Mount Edward. "It's a small region, and we cooperate with each other," says Neill. "Everyone helps everyone else and pools their knowledge."

Rippon, now operated by Rolfe's son Nick Mills, is also significant because, situated on the banks of Lake Wanaka, it has what must surely be the most spectacular cellar-door point of sale on earth, attracting some 15,000 wine tourists a year. Peregrine Wines, too, has a robust cellar-door business, as do other wineries in Central Otago. But don't turn up at Two Paddocks. "We discourage it by being hard to find, because I like wandering around with my shirt off," says Neill, who prefers to drum up sales via a terse and amusing blog.

As for how he splits his time, Neill notes that both his professions are "very chancy and very weather dependent." But wine can be much harder work. "I

certainly wouldn't turn down a great acting gig so I could be on my hands and knees putting grapes in a bucket," he says with a laugh.

The Most Exclusive Vintage Is Yo ur Own Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 By LISA MCLAUGHLIN It's the secret dream of every oenophile: give up the desk job, move to a vineyard and spend the days crafting wines. Then reality sinks in--bills, obligations, bills--and the dream becomes a passing fancy.

But it's actually never been easier to make your own wine, often from the comfort of your nonvineyard home. Today's garagistes (French for the enthusiasts who create vintages in, well, garages) have upscale equipment and packaged kits to help them make their wines. Wineshops and vineyards are offering blending seminars, tutored tastings of grape varietals where you can create your own blend and take home a bottle of the mix. But for those who want the full winemaking experience, Crushpad, a San Francisco urban winery, allows clients to create a custom wine, from vine to uncorking, without having to move to wine country.

Crushpad is the creation of Michael Brill, a former home winemaker who once ripped up his San Francisco backyard to plant Pinot Noir and Syrah vines. He found that lots of people shared his desire for a wine-country lifestyle but lacked the millions of dollars needed to make their dream come true. Tired of his career in software marketing, he quit his job and created Crushpad in 2004 to connect amateur winemakers with West Coast vineyards. It's the best of both worlds. Customers get access to far finer grapes than they could grow themselves, at a fraction of the cost, along with on-site expertise to guide them through the process.

At Crushpad's new 30,000-sq.-ft. (2,800 sq m) warehouse headquarters, customer involvement varies. Purple-fingered zealots sort through the

grapes, while others sit at home in foreign countries fine-tuning their wine plans on the Web. Using Crushpad's online services and consultations with the staff winemaker, home enologists select grapes from specific vineyards (or provide their own) and are then led through the Crushpad 30, a list of options and decisions about the winemaking process: Duration of skin contact? Natural or cultured yeasts? What type of bottle closure?

Customers must commit to at least one barrel of wine, which ranges in price from $5,000 to more than $10,000, depending on the wine they make. One barrel produces about 25 cases, or roughly $17 to $40 per bottle.

Once the process has begun, home winemakers can remain in daily contact with their products via CrushpadWine.com where the Crushpad staff posts regular and contagiously enthusiastic fermentation updates and harvest reports ("From Southern California to Eastern Washington we're seeing grapes turn from green to red--the sign of veraison and a warning that the picking dates are only 40-60 days away").

The process continues remotely with online chats with Crushpad employees and a webcam that allows customers to keep a watchful eye on their wine.

They are also encouraged to visit Crushpad's processing center whenever a major step in the winemaking--such as grape crushing, bottling or labeling-takes place.

After a slow start, Crushpad is blooming. In 2004 it produced 200 barrels.

This year there will be more than 1,000. And Brill hopes to create more Crushpads to take the winemaking process closer to urban enologists. First up is Tokyo, where Crushpad Japan recently opened, bringing West Coast winemaking to the Far East.

LETTERS

Inbox Thursday, Sep. 13, 2007 Putting Ideals Into Action Managing Editor Richard Stengel is right: Americans are hungry to be asked to do something [Sept. 10]. During World War II, we all were asked to do something, and we did. Back then, we were joined in a common cause.

Today there is a void. We need to resurrect a sense of obligation to our country besides taxes and voting. One way to help accomplish this would be to institute a draft. Everyone should be obligated to serve the country in some fashion. Maybe then we would stop identifying ourselves with narrow labels such as liberal, conservative, Democrat and Republican and move toward what Patrick Henry expressed in saying "I am not a Virginian, but an American."

Bud Nielsen, San Miguel, Calif.

I am a sophomore in high school, and this article captured perfectly my hopes for this country and its citizens. I was in a state of euphoria as I read about some of the programs I had visited during a Civicweek in the Bronx, N.Y., co-sponsored by the Civic Education Project and Northwestern University. I fell in love with City Year, Teach for America and the Harlem Children's Zone during that amazing, eye-opening week. I hope that our national leaders will integrate service opportunities into our government and thus boost national pride.

Lily Austin, Springfield, PA.

Maybe it's because I'm one of those fringe libertarians, but it seems to me that there are ways to encourage volunteerism without the dubious help of state and federal governments. Significant growth of volunteerism and the proliferation of nonprofit start-ups are good signs that people have already found avenues for service without burdensome bureaucracy or taxfunded carrots. Even if a national-service system ends up costing only the relative pittance Stengel cited, the cost would be in addition to those of the Iraq war and federal prisons, not in their stead. Whether through conscription, graduation requirements or bonds funded by income or corporate taxes, a national-service system would be a drain on everyone and would cheapen the sacrifice of those who serve willingly.

Eric Dzinski, St. Louis, MO. I wholeheartedly support Stengel's call for national service. I have written my Representatives proposing an idea, to no avail. I suggest that instead of creating elaborate laws to solve the problem of illegal immigration, we should require that illegal aliens spend a year in national service--defending the country in the military, rebuilding infrastructure or combating climate change in a green corps--to become eligible for citizenship.

Dick Ehrle, Barrington, Ill. I'm a Gen X mother of two and a volunteer, and I see many peers also performing volunteer services that are making a difference locally and globally. I love my country, but the current Administration is operating so poorly, it will take generations to undo the damage. To offset this, I try to do my part to improve social conditions and the environment, which will affect generations to come.

Jennifer G. Morgan, Boise, Idaho

Stengel's national-service plan would butcher the very Republic he seeks to preserve. His proposal would require funding and create organizations for any number of corrupt officials to exploit. Such a plan would also obliterate the spirit of volunteerism, whose very nature and definition mean participation without incentives--monetary or otherwise. Americans do need to band together for the betterment of our delicate Republic' but amplifying the government's already expansive role and excessive expenditures is no answer.

Virginia Shields, Pittsburgh, PA. As a retired Chicago inner-city teacher and principal, I have long felt that conscripting high school dropouts in national service might reduce gang activity. Perhaps we should send teens who quit school to training camps that, like F.D.R.'s Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, would be far from cities so that gang ties would be cut. Do we need help in the national forests with multiple projects? You bet we do.

Roger Vernon, Elgin, Ill. Edwards Edges Toward '08 John Edwards is wasting his time campaigning, since Clinton is the anointed one [Sept. 10]. And unless Barack Obama attacks her more, he'll be wasting his time too. The Democratic field is terrified of the Clinton machine, which is expert at personal destruction and will stop at nothing to get her the nomination. It might be Obama's strategy not to attack Clinton because he wants to be on the ticket as V.P. Joe Spehar, Springerville, Ariz.

I guess we know whom Pooley is voting for. But if Edwards is elected President, Pooley can just keep soaking in that sweet-tea voice while Edwards raises taxes again--and again and again.

Eddie Tencza, San Antonio It is outrageous for Elizabeth Edwards to attack Hillary Clinton's electability. After all, the Clintons have a long track record of winning tough elections by comfortable margins, while John Edwards certainly can't make the same boast.

Reba Shimansky, New York City Healing Currents Congratulations to Jeffrey Kluger for his article "Rewiring the Brain," about how deep-brain stimulation with electric current can help treat the tremors of Parkinson's disease, among other possible applications [Sept. 10]. I've had Parkinson's for nearly 12 years, so I know the crazy ways the incurable disease chips away at my brain's control center. Stories like yours give all of us with Parkinson's hope. With the help of a charismatic personal trainer at my local ymca fitness center, I've learned to face this awesome disease by fighting back to reclaim my balance and range of motion. It's not easy, but it is satisfying when the hard work pays off.

David H. Anderson, Sarasota, Fla. Embracing the Silver Strands Thanks to Anne Kreamer and TIME for the article on whether women should color their hair [Sept. 10]. I'm 57 and started dyeing my hair in my mid-30s.

When I turned 50, I decided that since I'd been a grandma from age 39, it

was time I looked like one. Coloring your hair is a pain in the arse, as the Irish say. Your roots grow out in a week or two, and you have to touch them up or look like a skunk. Surely women have become liberated enough to do what they want. But if they decide to fake it, they should use a lighter dye to make it look more natural.

Lisa Singer-Hamilton, Cincinnati, Ohio I am 38 years old, and I don't understand what the big deal is over going gray. I've been getting steadily balder since I hit 30, and my remaining hair is turning gray. When I was growing up, my father made and serviced toupees. I thought they were ugly and reflected the wearer's incredible insecurity. I feel the same way about hair dye for men and women. Being who you are rather than putting up some kind of faรงade shows much stronger character. By all means, dress well, and stay healthy and fit. But dyeing your hair is right up there with dressing like a teenager when you are 40. For those who claim it's different for women, I respectfully reply that it shouldn't be--and perpetuating the supposed difference won't help.

Steve Rummel, Chicago I read "The Gray Wars" with smug amusement. When my glorious mane of auburn hair started turning gray more than 15 years ago, I tried to maintain it artificially and was mortified by the black-and-purple results. Today I am 51, long divorced, gray-haired and chunky, but I'm still very sexually active.

Boomers need to realize that if we fulfill our life expectancy, we will be gray much longer than we were brunet, blond or auburn. Embrace the silver.

People will choose to be around you if you are adventurous and love life.

You can't buy that in a bottle.

Kathy Pippin, Cookeville, Tenn. MAILBAG Biggest mail getter: Universal national service 76% A government call to service would enrich the nation 24% A government call to service would only violate the definition of volunteerism