MONDAY, JUNE 2, 2008 Copyright © 2008 The New York Times

Supplemento al numeroodierno de la Repubblica

Sped. abb. postale art. 1legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

P U B B L I C I T Á

Look Who’s Down And Who’s Up

By JAN HOFFMAN

The neighbor, a jovial presence at the school bus stop in the mornings, disappeared for a while last fall. Nobody saw him for weeks. Finally he began to venture out — at afternoon pickup, in jeans and a T-shirt. A senior manager of a technology department, he had been laid off. Neighbors didn’t know what to say to him.

Across the soccer fields of suburbia, conversa-tions are stilted these days; the bravado has a tin-ny ring, the gallows humor is more prevalent, the deft change of topic more abrupt. As classes let out at a city school, a normally chatty woman, whose banker husband was recently escorted out of his office building, rushes in, sweeps up her child and dashes off, avoiding glances.

The newly jobless are learning an ungainly new language: How to explain their situation to other parents. How to convey nonchalance during paus-es in the golf-club locker rooms. How to fend off

inquisitive family members at barbecues.For so many, the loneliness is palpable. “I

stopped getting together with colleagues from the office,” said a Manhattan man who had worked for nearly two decades in sales and trading for a large investment bank and was laid off in January.

His office friends could offer little solace, he said. They are preoccupied with their own anxious limbo. Still trying to slough off his anger, he said: “I see less of my closest friends in these past three or four months. Everyone I know works.”

American companies have shed 240,000 jobs in the first three months of the year, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Business-page headlines announce layoffs by the thousands at major American corporations: 2,000 at AOL, 5,000 at Morgan Stanley, 4,000 at Merrill Lynch.

Despite the pervasiveness of the cuts, many

By JOHN TAGLIABUE

ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands — If you want to know about honkbal, Robert Eenhoorn is the man to ask. Honkbal is the Dutch word for baseball, and Mr. Een-hoorn, besides being a former player for the New York Yankees, coaches the Dutch national team.

Mr. Eenhoorn, 40, started playing ball at Neptunus, the club outside this port city, before playing 37 games in the Amer-ican major leagues. And the Dutch team he coaches was the only one in Europe chosen to compete in the Summer Olym-pics in Beijing.

Asked what Dutch youngsters like about baseball, Mr. Eenhoorn said: “It’s American; it’s a summer sport, filling the gap left by soccer in spring and early summer. You know, we did research and found that kids like baseball, they like hitting the ball with the bat, they like the clothing. I don’t think it’s peaked.”

His father played ball, he said, recall-ing the years under the German occupa-

tion in World War II, when Dutch children turned to American baseball in defiance of the German occupiers.

Most Dutch baseball teams were start-ed by soccer clubs in search of a sport for the months between soccer seasons. Mr. Eenhoorn said his own years as a soccer player improved his baseball game. “As an infielder,” he said, “I was always a good defensive player, because I played soccer, where footwork is important.”

Of course, the Dutch have to contend with a rainy climate, which is not condu-cive to baseball. “Sometimes you wait till the rain stops,” said Pim van Nes, a retired diplomat and part-time sports-writer. “But in Holland, sometimes the rain never stops.”

In 2007, five Dutch nationals were play-ing in Major League Baseball in the Unit-ed States, among a total 250 foreign play-ers, according to the Baseball Almanac.

Some of the best Dutch players are from Dutch territories in the Caribbean, like the Netherlands Antilles. Eugene

Kingsale grew up playing ball in his na-tive Aruba, but in 1996, at 19, he joined the Baltimore Orioles organization, and later went on to Seattle and San Diego, for 211 major league games.

“We sent five guys to the major leagues in six or seven years, on an island with not even 100,000 people,” Mr. Kingsale, 31, said, taking a break from a practice ses-sion. In 2004, he was knighted by Queen Beatrix with two other major league play-ers from Aruba, Calvin Maduro and Sid-ney Ponson.

Still, the Dutch baseball federation, with its 30,000 members, cannot compete with soccer, whose federation boasts 1.5 million.

Tim Roodenburg, a 19-year-old pitcher with Sparta Feyenoord who got a tryout with the Yankees last year at a camp in the Dominican Republic, can attest to the gap.

“I’ve seen it on the street,” he said. “Kids will take a softball, drop it on the ground, then kick it.”

LALO DE ALMEIDA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; LEFT, TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The news has been grim in the financial world, with up to 65,000 jobs lost. But in places like Brazil, above, consumers are borrowing and spending freely.

Losing a Job, and Social Status

Boom Inspires Confidence in Brazil

The Dutch Love Soccer, but Take a Swing at Baseball

Continued on Page IV

Needs Ice, Oysters and LoveSmart, musical and social, walruses face a

new threat. SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY VI

By ANDREW DOWNIE

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Thanks to a newfound economic stability and vitality, here and in much of the region, Latin America is looking less depen-dent on the fortunes of the United States.

While American consumers are cutting back, Brazilians are spending like there’s no word in Portuguese for recession.

Middle-class Americans are surrounded by a rising tide of angst; Brazil’s middle class is grow-ing.

Even some creditworthy Americans cannot find a mortgage; Brazilians are taking out loans like never before.

“It used to be that when the U.S. sneezes, Brazil catches pneumonia, but that is no longer the case,’’ said Marcelo Carvalho, executive director of re-search at Morgan Stanley in Brazil.

“There is hard decoupling taking place,’’ Mr. Carvalho said. “The Brazilian economy is grow-

ing fast as the U.S. is, in our view, already in reces-sion.’’

Brazil is doing well thanks to a combination of factors. High commodity prices, pushed by de-mand from China, have brought in hard currency and created jobs.

Foreign investment last year doubled, to $34.6 billion, much of it into the stock market, which is one of the fastest growing in the world. The curren-cy is strong, hitting a nine-year high against the dollar recently, and will likely strengthen further given Standard & Poor’s recent decision to raise Brazil’s investment grade.

Inflation, which ended 2007 at 4.5 percent, is under control and the economy has grown consis-tently, if not spectacularly, thanks to the compe-tent management of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. His far-reaching assistance program has

Continued on Page IV

Mexico’s Deadly Drug WarPolice officers are being killed in the fight

against the drug cartels. WORLD TRENDS III

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The FailuresOf Mr. Mbeki

In 1950, Dr. Seuss published a chil-dren’s book called “If I Ran the Zoo.’’ It contained the sentence: “I’ll sail to Ka-Troo, and bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO, a NERKLE, a NERD, and a SEERSUCKER, too!” According to the psychologist David Anderegg, that’s believed to be the first printed use of the word “nerd” in modern English.

The next year, Newsweek noticed that nerd was being used in Detroit as a sub-stitute for “square,” or uncool. But, as Anderegg writes in his book, “Nerds,” the term didn’t really blossom onto mass consciousness until it was used on a pop-ular TV comedy, “Happy Days,’’ in the 1970s. And thus began what you might call the ascent of nerdism in modern America.

At first, a nerd was a geek with bet-ter grades. The word described a high school or college outcast who was per-secuted by athletes, fraternity boys and sorority sisters. Nerds had their own he-roes (Stan Lee of comic book fame), their own vocations (Dungeons & Dragons), their own religion (supplied by George Lucas and “Star Wars”) and their own skills (tech support).

But even as “Revenge of the Nerds” was gracing American movie screens, a different version of nerd-dom was per-colating through popular culture. Elvis Costello and The Talking Heads’s Da-vid Byrne popularized a cool geek style that’s led to Moby and Weezer and even self-styled “nerdcore” rock and geeksta rappers.

The future historians of the nerd as-cendancy will likely note that the great empowerment phase began in the 1980s with the rise of Microsoft and the digi-tal economy. Nerds began making large amounts of money and acquired eco-nomic credibility, the seedbed of social

prestige. The information revolution produced a parade of highly confident nerd moguls: Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and so on.

Among adults, the words “geek” and “nerd” exchanged status positions. A nerd was still socially tainted, but geek-dom acquired its own cool countercul-ture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked.

Geeks distinguished themselves from alienated and self-pitying outsiders who wept with recognition when they read “Catcher in the Rye.” If Holden Caulfield

was the sensitive loner from the age of nerd oppression, then Harry Potter was the magical leader in the age of geek em-powerment.

But the biggest change was not Silicon Valley itself. Rather, the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The athlete can shine on the football field, but the geeks can dis-play their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of design-ers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis.

They can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experi-ment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names. They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated. In “The Laws of Cool,” Alan Liu writes: “Cool is a feeling for information.” When someone has that dexterity, you know it.

Tina Fey, the actress and television writer who once was on the cover of Geek Monthly magazine, has emerged as a symbol of the geek who grows into a swan. There is now a cool geek fashion style, which can be found on shopping sites all over the Web (think Japanese sneakers and text-laden T-shirts). Sch-winn now makes a retro-looking Sid/Nancybicycle,whichissweetandclunky even though it has a faux-angry name. There are now millions of educated-class types guided by geek manners.

The news that being a geek is cool has apparently not permeated either junior high schools or the Republican Party. George Bush plays an interesting role in the tale of nerd ascent. With his disdain for intellectual things, he’s energized and alienated the entire geek cohort, and with it most college-educated Ameri-cans under 30. Newly militant, geeks are more coherent and active than they might otherwise be.

People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.

So, in a relatively short period of time, the social structure has flipped. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the earth.

Chávez’s Unsavory Friends

George Bush’s disdain for intellectuals has helped energize the geek sector.

E D I T O R I A L S O F T H E T I M E S

Dangerous theories on AIDS. Ex-treme and widening levels of incomeinequality. Enabling Zimbabwe’sRobert Mugabe and only belatedlytrying to halt mob atrocities againstdesperate Zimbabwean and otherAfrican immigrants. This is thelegacy of South Africa’s president,Thabo Mbeki, who has one moreyear in his second term.

It would be hard to imagine amore depressing contrast with theleadership of Nelson Mandela, Mr.Mbeki’s predecessor and one of the20th century’s great heroes.

History will laud Mr. Mandelafor leading his country, peacefully,from hateful apartheid to demo-cratic majority rule, marvel at hiscommitment to honesty and heal-ing and celebrate his promotion ofSouth Africa as a diverse and toler-ant “rainbow nation.”

If it remembers Mr. Mbeki at all,it will be for appointing a healthminister who favored garlic andbeet root as treatment for SouthAfrica’s more than five million citi-zens infected with H.I.V., the virusthat causes AIDS, and for his stub-born refusal to use South Africa’seconomic and political clout to stopZimbabwe’s horrors.

Instead, Mr. Mbeki declared thatthere was “no crisis,” even as Zim-babwe’s electoral count was beinghijacked, opposition supporters ter-rorized and thousands of its citizensfleeing over the border to South Af-rica, where they still have not foundsafety. The only explanation is hismisplaced loyalty to Mr. Mugabe,who was once a hero for leadingZimbabwe to majority rule.

South Africa is the richest, mostdeveloped country south of theSahara and the continent’s larg-est, most exemplary democracy.Africa badly needs its enlightenedleadership. A decade ago, under Mr.

Mandela, South Africa was swiftlyemerging as the respected leader ofa proud, postcolonial Africa.

Under Mr. Mbeki’s leadership,the fruits of the nation’s hard-foughtvictory over apartheid have gonemainly to officials and former offi-cials of the ruling African NationalCongress, not to the millions of poorpeople in the townships who faceddown the dogs, the bullets and thepass laws and still must live withoutadequate jobs, education, housingor health services.

The resulting frustration and an-ger helps explain, though it cannotjustify, the recent outbreak of xeno-phobic violence in the shantytowns.At least 42 victims have been killed— many beaten, stabbed, hackedor burned to death — and some25,000 have been chased from theirhomes.

Mr. Mbeki’s most likely succes-sor, Jacob Zuma, the current leaderof the A.N.C., is no Nelson Mandelaeither. While more popular amongthe poor than the arrogant andaloof Mr. Mbeki, he has offered fewcoherent ideas for addressing theireconomic plight. He has been morewilling to criticize Mr. Mugabe’selectoral manipulations, but overlycautious in proposing solutions(though that is Mr. Mbeki’s job, nothis). His ignorance on AIDS andappalling attitudes toward women— revealed in a 2006 rape trial thatended in his acquittal — stained hispersonal reputation. Serious cor-ruption charges against him arestill pending.

South Africa can ill afford anotherfive years of failed leadership andfrustrated hopes. Whoever suc-ceeds Mr. Mbeki must look long andhard at all that has gone wrong andvow to do better. South Africans andall of Africa need and deserve bet-ter.

President Hugo Chávez of Ven-ezuela has been caught. Despitehis protestations of innocence,Interpol has corroborated the au-thenticity of thousands of computerfiles captured during a ColombianArmy raid on a FARC rebel campin Venezuela. Only a small share ofthis trove has been released, but itleaves little doubt that Venezuelahas been aiding the guerrillas’ ef-fort to overthrow Colombia’s demo-cratically elected government.

The Colombian government re-leased documents from the com-puters that suggest Venezuelanintelligence officials tried to secureweapons for the FARC and that Mr.Chávez’s government offered therebels oil and a $250 million loan.Information in the files has already

led to the seizure of FARC funds inCosta Rica.

Colombia can now take the issueto the Organization of AmericanStates, the United Nations SecurityCouncil or the International Courtof Justice. But it might need furthercorroborating evidence, as Interpolonly certified that the Colombiangovernment did not tamper withthe files but said nothing about theveracity of their content.

Mr. Chávez has a more importantchoice to make: he can sink into therole of regional pariah, to be con-tained or isolated in the name ofregional stability, or he can committo becoming a responsible neighbor.All of his neighbors, and all Venezu-elans, should urge him to choose thelatter course.

Responsibility means that Mr.Chávez must halt all aid to theFARC, which long ago chose drugtrafficking over political liberation,and use his influence to get the reb-els to lay down their arms and jointhe demobilization process thatis under way for Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary groups.

Mr. Chávez’s posturing as a popu-list liberator is becoming tiresomeat home, where voters defeatedhis proposal to overhaul the Con-stitution so he could stay in powerindefinitely. It is also wearing thinabroad, where Mr. Chávez has usedVenezuela’s oil riches to meddle inArgentina, Bolivia and Nicaragua,among others.

Latin America’s leaders need torealize that his actions threaten thestability of the entire region and thatcheap oil does not lessen that threat.They need to remind Mr. Chávez ofthe commitment to noninterventionand democratic rule in the Organi-zation of American States charter.And they need to make clear that hehas only two possible moves fromhere: he can become a responsibleneighbor or be ostracized in thehemisphere.

DAVID BROOKS

Why Geek Is Newly Chic

BADUI, ChinaChina’s biggest health disaster isn’t

the recent terrible Sichuan earthquake. It’s the air.

The quake killed at least 60,000 peo-ple, generating a response that has been heartwarming and inspiring, with even schoolchildren in China donating to the victims.Yetwith littlenotice,somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 Chinese die prematurely every year from the ef-fects of outdoor air pollution, according to studies by Chinese and international agencies alike.

In short, roughly as many Chinese die every two months from the air as were killed in the earthquake. And the problem is becoming international: just as Californians can find Chinese-made shoes in their stores, they can now find Chinese-made haze in their skies.

This summer’s Beijing Olympics will showcase the most remarkable econom-ic explosion in history, and also some of the world’s thickest pollution in both air and water. So I’ve returned to the Yellow River in western China’s Gansu Province to an isolated village that has haunted me since I saw it a decade ago.

Badui is known locally as the “village of dunces.” That’s because of the large number of mentally retarded people here, as well as the profusion of birth defects, skin rashes and physical defor-mities. Residents are sure that the prob-lems result from a nearby fertilizer fac-tory dumping effluent that taints their drinking water.

“Even if you’re afraid, you have to drink,” said Zhou Genger, the mother of a 15-year-old girl who is mentally retard-ed and has a hunchback. The girl, Kong Dongmei, mumbled unintelligibly, and Ms. Zhou said she had never been able to speak clearly.

Ms. Zhou pulled up the back of her daughter’s shirt, revealing a twisted, disfiguring mass of bones.

A 10-year-old neighbor girl named Hong Xia watched, her eyes filled with wonder at my camera. The neighbors say she, too, is retarded.

None of this is surprising: rural China is full of “cancer villages” caused by pol-lution from factories. Beijing’s air some-times has a particulate concentration that is four times the level considered safe by the World Health Organization.

Scientists have tracked clouds of Chinese pollution as they drift over the

Pacific and descend on America’s West Coast. The impact on American health is uncertain.

In fairness, China has been better than most other countries in curbing pol-lution, paying attention to the environ-ment at a much earlier stage of develop-ment than the United States, Europe or Japan. Most impressive, in 2004, China embraced tighter fuel economy stan-dards than the Bush administration was willing to accept at the time.

The city of Shanghai charges up to $7,000 for a license plate, thus reducing the number of new vehicles, and China has planted millions of trees and dras-tically expanded the use of natural gas to reduce emissions. If you look at what China’s leaders are doing, you wish that President Bush were half as green.

But then you peer into the Chinese haze — and despair. The economic boom is raising living standards substantially in many ways, but the toll of the result-ing pollution can be brutal. The filth is prompting public protests, but the gov-ernment has tightly curbed the civil so-ciety organizations that could help moni-tor pollution and keep it in check.

An environmental activist named Wu Lihong warned for years that Lake Tai, China’s third-largest freshwater lake, was endangered by chemical factories along its banks. Mr. Wu was proved right

when the lake filled with toxins last sum-mer — shortly after the authorities had sentenced him to three years in prison.

Here in Badui, the picture is as com-plex as China’s development itself. The government has taken action since my previous visit: the factory supposedly is no longer dumping pollutants, and the villages have been supplied with water that, in theory, is pure. The villagers don’t entirely believe this, but they ac-knowledge that their health problems have diminished.

Moreover, economic development has reached Badui. It is still poor, with a per-capita income of $100 a year, but there is now a rough dirt road to the village. On my last visit, there was only a footpath.

The road has increased economic op-portunities. Farmers have dug ponds toraise fish that are trucked to the markets,butthefishareraisedinwatertakenfromthe Yellow River just below the fertilizerfactory. When I looked in one pond, thefirst thing I saw was a dead fish.

“Weeatthefishourselves,”saidthevil-lage leader, LiYuntang. “Weworryaboutthe chemicals, but we have to eat.”

Now those fish from this dubious water are sold to unsuspecting residents in the city of Lanzhou. And the complexities and ambiguities about that progress of-fer a window into the shadings of China’s economic boom.

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Where Breathing Can Be Deadly

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF/THE NEW YORK TIMES

China’s pollution is linked to mental retardation and birth defects.A 6-year-old girl, center, is the size of a 2-year-old.

Repubblica NewYork

WOR LD TR ENDS

MONDAY, JUNE 2, 2008 III

SINALOA

Pacific Ocean

TEXAS

MEXICO

NEW

MEXICOARIZONA

CALIF.

MORELOS

Nuevo

Laredo

Ciudad

Juárez

Mexico City

Tijuana

Kms. 645

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

The assassination was an in-side job. The federal police com-mander kept his schedule secret and slept in a different place each night, yet the killer had the keys to the official’s apartment and was waiting for him when he arrived after midnight.

When the commander, Com-missioner Édgar Millán Gómez, the acting chief of the federal police, died with eight bullets in his chest on May 8, it sent chills through a force that had increas-ingly found itself a target. The violence shows no sign of abat-ing. On Tuesday, seven federal police officers were killed in a shootout in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa State.

The police said Commissioner Millán’s killer had been hired by a disgruntled federal police offi-cer who worked for a drug car-tel in Sinaloa. The inside nature of the killing underscored just how difficult it is for President Felipe Calderón to keep his vow to clean up police corruption and end drug-related violence.

Since coming to office in De-cember 2006, Mr. Calderón has sought to revamp and profes-sionalize the federal police force, using it, with the army, to mount

huge interventions in cities and states once controlled by drug traffickers.

The result has been mayhem: a street war in which no target has been too big, no attack too brazen for the gangs.

Opposition politicians and even some police officials have begun to question whether the president’s ambition has ex-ceeded his grasp, with danger-ous and destabilizing conse-quences.

Top security officials who were once thought untouchable have been gunned down in Mex-ico City, four in the last month alone. Drug dealers killed an-other seven federal agents this year in retaliation for drug busts in border towns. Others have died in shootouts.

Several terrified local police chiefs have resigned, the most recent being Guillermo Prieto, the chief in Ciudad Juárez, who recently stepped down after his second in command was killed a few days earlier.

“It is not just happening in Ciu-dad Juárez,’’ Mayor José Reyes Ferriz said at the funeral for the deputy commander, Juan Anto-nio Roman García. “It’s happen-ing in Nuevo Laredo, in Tijuana, in this entire region. They are attacking top commanders to destabilize the police.’’

Drug traffickers have killed at least 170 local police officers as well since Mr. Calderón took office.

The president has vowed to stay the course, portraying the violence among gangs and at-tacks on the police as a sign of success rather than failure. The government has smashed the cartels, he says, forcing a war among the splinter groups. The killing of Commissioner Millán, he has said, was “a desperate act to weaken the federal police.’’

The violence between drug cartels has worsened over the past year and a half. The death toll has jumped 47 percent to 1,378 this year, prosecutors say.

One reason for the surge in violence is that Mr. Calderón and his public security minister,

Genaro García Luna, have upset longstanding arrangements be-tween the police and drug traf-fickers at every level of govern-ment, several experts on crime in Mexico said.

Last year, Mr. García Luna removed 284 federal police com-manders across the country, replacing them with his own handpicked officers who had

been closely vetted for signs of corruption.

The government has raised the starting pay for officers and greatly improved training. But even with about 3,000 new recruits, the Calderón adminis-tration has yet to purge the force of thousands of career officers with roots in the old force, which was rife with corruption.

When he took office, President Calderón merged the investiga-tive agency with the existing federal police force.

At the same time, Mr. Calde-rón and his predecessor have largely dismantled the state security apparatus that kept an iron grip on Mexico for decades when it was ruled by a single party, the Institutional Revolu-

tionary Party. Some police com-manders say corrupt officers are less of a problem than the lack of information about drug dealers. Commissioner Javier Herrera Valles oversaw Presi-dent Calderón’s efforts to re-store order in various states for 10 months until he was demoted last February after openly criti-cizing the operations in a letter

to the president. Mr. Herrera maintains that

the federal police have very little hard evidence from under-cover officers, wiretaps or sur-veillance. “They don’t have any good intelligence gathering,’’ he said. “We were patrolling with-out any direction. ’’

Mr. Calderón and his top se-curity officials disagree. They point out that the government has made record drug seizures and scores of arrests over the last year and a half.

Police Become the Victims in Mexico’s War on Drugs

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Drug cartels in Sinaloa have infiltrated the police forces.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, JUNE 2, 2008

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Domestic car sales Houses bought eachyear with mortgages

Credit as a shareof G.D.P.

Sources: ANEF, using Central Bank numbers; World Bank; Brazilian Savings and Loan Trade Association; National Association of Automotive Vehicle Manufacturers

’01 ’07’05’03 ’01 ’07 Japan Brazil’05’03

United StatesEurope

2.5

2.0

1.5

1.0

0.5

million vehicles

150

100

50

400

300

200

100

%200,000 houses

By DAVID STREITFELD

HARRISON TOWNSHIP, Michigan — So many people have so many things they can no longer afford. This is an ex-cellent time to be in the repossession business.

When a boat owner defaults on his loan, the bank hires Jeff Henderson to seize its property. The former Army de-tective tracks the boat down in a back-yard or a marina or a garage and hauls it to his storage area and later auctions it off. After nearly 20 years in the repos-sessionbusiness,Mr.Henderson,arepo man, has never been busier.

“I used to take the weak ones,’’ he said. “Now I’m taking the whole herd.’’

Boating was traditionally the pas-time of the wealthy, but the long hous-ing boom and its time of easy credit changed that. People refinanced their homes and used the cash for down pay-ments on a cruiser, miniyacht or sail-boat. From 2000 to 2006, retail sales for the recreational boating industry rose by more than 40 percent, to $39.5 billion, while the average loan amount more than tripled to $141,000.

Last year, as real estate faltered, the

gears went into reverse. The number of boats sold fell 8 percent. Many boats are fuel hogs, and rising gasoline and diesel prices meant a weekend trip could cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Owners found they could not sell a boat for what they owed and could not refi-nance either.

The solution for some is simply to stop paying on their boats. Then one day they come home and it is gone.

Mr. Henderson’s company, Harrison Marine, has seven employees as well as half a dozen part-timers, making it one of the largest boat repo operations in the United States. Mr. Henderson, 48, is repossessing nearly a boat a day, most from the Great Lakes area.

A few kilometers from Mr. Hender-son’s office is a house with a boat tied up on the canal in back, a 12-meter Silverton yacht. “I’ve taken this boat before,’’ Mr. Henderson said. Own-ers of repossessed boats have a few weeks to redeem them, and this fellow had availed himself of the opportunity. Now, a few years later, he was in trouble again. Mr. Henderson shrugged. “I took it before, I’ll take it again. After I take it

a few more times, he’ll be eligible for a Christmas card. One guy, I took his boat four times.’’

Boat loans give the bank permission to recover its collateral in the case of default, which explains why a repo man can go into a yard without technically trespassing.

In search of Toy Box, a 10-meter Donzi Express with green stripes, he called about two dozen marinas, finally finding it on the Detroit River. On a re-cent afternoon, he had it pulled out of winter storage.

Toy Box was rocketing up Lake St. Clair when Mr. Henderson’s cellphone rang. It was the marina he had just left, saying the owner had shown up looking for his boat.

The possibility of violence shadows every repo man. “Sometimes people have a bit of an attitude,’’ Mr. Hender-son said. He was seizing a pontoon boat

from a yard in northern Michigan when a woman came out pointing a hunting rifle. Another time, an off-duty police officer pulled a gun, perhaps confusing the repo man with a thief.

But when he steered Toy Box up to his dock, no fighting ensued. Robert Dah-men, a lanky 49-year-old, was peaceful, even apologetic. He wanted to salvage whatever he could off the boat.

Some people lose their house or their boat to abrupt setbacks: illness, job loss, divorce. Mr. Dahmen, who works as a technology manager for a car man-ufacturer, belongs to a second, probably larger group: he simply spent beyond his means. He is one of the millions of reasons the consumer-powered Ameri-can economy did so well for most of this decade, and one of the reasons its pros-pects look so bleak now.

“There’s a certain sense of failure about all this, to tell you the truth,’’ Mr.

Dahmen said. “There really is.’’Toy Box cost $175,000. With the trade-

in and a down payment, Mr. Dahmen ended up with a $125,000 loan. “You pay the interest up front,’’ he observed, “and the principal never goes down.’’ After seven years he still owed $111,000, about twice what the boat is worth. Meanwhile, he lost his condominium when his mortgage readjusted and those payments went up.

“I oversaturated myself with long-term debt,’’ he said. “It was a risk, a calculated risk. I obviously lost.’’ He is declaring bankruptcy.

From now on, Mr. Dahmen said, the consumer economy would have to get by without him. “I have no intention of ever buying anything, ever,’’ he said. “I don’t think I could if I wanted to.’’

Mr. Dahmen gave Toy Box a hug. “O.K., I’m going to go cry now,’’ he said.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY FABRIZIO CONSTANTINI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Easy Credit, Flashy Boats And an Unhappy Ending

given the poor cash to spend. Wages are rising and unemployment is falling.

In short, more Brazilians have more money.

Mr. da Silva calls it a miracle. But in reality, it is something Latin Americans long lacked: confidence.

With both government and outside analysts insisting the economy can withstand the effects of a global slow-down, banks and companies are san-guine enough to lend to consumers over longer periods than ever before. At the same time, an increasingly secure mid-dle class is confident enough to borrow — to such an extent, analysts say, that domestic consumption has taken over from exports as Brazil’s main economic driver, reducing the effect of what hap-pens in, say, the United States.

Because of the twin economic and credit booms, major purchases like houses, cars and electronics are within the reach of up to 20 million more Bra-zilians than ever before, Erico Ferreira, the president of the National Associa-tion of Credit, Financing and Invest-ment Institutions, estimated.

“People that weren’t consumers are now consumers,’’ Mr. Ferreira said. “Everyone is taking more money home. If you want credit, you can get it.’’

For items like cars and houses, wherepayingincashisrarelyfeasible, thenum-bersarerevealing.Thenumberofhousesbought with mortgages rose 72 percentlast year to its highest number ever, andthe amount of money being borrowed tobuy vehicles jumped 45 percent.

The credit explosion is a regional phenomenon, according to economists. Though Latin American nations have little tradition of consumer credit, the amount of money being lent is growing rapidly, said Gregorio Goity, an Argen-tine economist and former head of the Iberoamerican Federation of Finan-cial Associations. “I can’t think of one where it isn’t growing,’’ he added, re-ferring to Latin America. “People who

didn’thaveafridge,awashingmachine, a sewing machine, a heater for winter, an air-conditioner for summer, they can buy this now and improve their quality of life substantially.’’

The new reality is clearest in Brazil — where the amount of money put on credit cards rose 20 percent last year — and particularly in the auto market. A record 2.46 million vehicles were driv-en off car lots last year, according to the National Association of Automotive Vehicle Manufacturers. Sales are up 31

percent so far this year.The reason, Mr. Lula and

experts agree, is the change in payment plans. Until re-cently, interest rates were so high and Brazil’s econ-omy so unpredictable that banks would not lend for ex-tended periods of time.

Sergio Troczynski, a 24-year-old commercial con-sultant, finally picked upa silver Fiat Punto in Apriland fulfilled his dream ofowning a new car. A fewyears ago he could not af-ford the exorbitant install-ments. Today, however, heis paid enough to make adownpaymentonhisdream

vehicle — and on an 81-centimeter tele-vision.Hewill paytheequivalentof$455a month over 36 months for the car, andabout $121 a month over 12 months forthe television.

“I can only manage this because of the financing. There’d be no other way for me to afford it without that,’’ Mr. Troczynski said. “Before the banks didn’t have any confidence and neither did the salespeople. Credit is much eas-ier to get and that makes it easy to buy a car, a house and pay it up over years.’’

people contacted for this article were unwilling to speak for attribution, citing confidentiality agreements or, simply, embarrassment.

In general, middle-aged profession-als seem more anxious and demoral-ized than younger ones; men tend to be more close-mouthed than women.

When Janette La Vigne, an insur-ance company executive from Clin-ton Township, New Jersey, was laid off last month, she immediately told her female friends. The women were empathetic and bracing, particu-larly those whose husbands had been through layoffs, said Ms. La Vigne, who had been with the same company for 21 years.

“But the guys are speechless,” she said. “They don’t know how to handle it. Their body language says, ‘Eww, I’m so glad I’m not you right now.’ ”

Breaking the news to parents who grew up under the shadow of the Great Depression is especially hard. Last summer, when Diane Gelman, a single mother, was laid off as a finan-cial analyst at a Manhattan bank, she called her mother, masked her own shock and put on a show of optimism.

“I’ve been unhappy for so long at my job, Mom,” she recalled saying. “And now they’re offering me money to leave! It’s not personal, it’s a busi-ness decision, and I am so fine with it.” She has since found a position.

Those on the sidelines are also un-comfortable, fumbling for a protocol, an etiquette to support their strug-gling neighbors, while also respecting their dignity.

Deborah Tannen, a linguistics pro-fessor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., explained the inar-ticulateness of the well-intentioned. “People feel caught between two con-flicting concerns,” said Dr. Tannen, the author of “You Just Don’t Under-stand: Women and Men in Conver-sation.” “You’re caught between the need to show you care and the fear of offending because you’re reminding them of something painful.”

How are friends supposed to re-spond? “People say, ‘Oh, well, it’s not so bad, it’s happening everywhere,’ ” said Anne Baber, co-author of “How to Fireproof Your Career,” which is based on interviews with several hun-dred laid-off employees. “But to the person getting laid off, it is that bad.”

Although layoffs are becoming dis-mayingly common, the term still has a lingering stigma. “It helps people who are still employed to believe that peo-ple who have been laid off did some-thing wrong,” Ms. Baber said. “If you can blame them, then you can feel protected. If it’s just random — ‘they moved customer service to Dallas’ — then nothing will protect you either, and that’s scary to people.”

Certainly the sheer volume of lay-offs is making disclosure with a shrug more acceptable. Job agencies urge

networking: Tell everyone you know. Because you never know.

But networking on such a local, backyard level is hard for some, espe-cially the innately private or shy and the staunchly proud.

Many people remain uncertain about whether a call intended to ex-press concern to those laid off will be interpreted as condescending or intrusive. But an investment banker from Manhattan who has seen many colleagues laid off recommended err-ing on the side of being helpful:

“Call! Say: ‘Hey, I have no idea what you’re going through or what you need, but I’d love to have coffee with you. Maybe there are a couple of introductions I can make,’ ” said the banker, Joshua Schwartz. “Even if you can’t be helpful or they don’t take your offer, it’s the right thing to do.”

Job Loss Brings a SenseOf Lowered Social Status

From Page 1

From Page 1

The etiquette of layoffs: how to disclose, and how to comfort.

As the American

economy has faltered, many

boat owners have defaulted. Banks hire Jeff

Henderson to seize boats

when loans go unpaid.

In Boom Time,Brazilians Feel Confident

LALO de ALMEIDA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sergio Troczynski, 24, of São Paulo, took outa loan to buy his new Fiat Punto. Easy creditis fueling middle-class consumption in Brazil.

Repubblica NewYork

B U S I N E S S O F G R E EN

MONDAY, JUNE 2, 2008 V

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

ROME — In the past year, as the diversion of food crops like corn and palm to make biofuels has helped to drive up food prices, investors and politi-cians have begun promoting newer, so-called sec-ond-generation biofuels as the next wave of green energy. These, made from non-food crops like reeds and wild grasses, would offer fuel without the risk of taking food off the table, they said.

But now, biologists and botanists are warning that they, too, may bring serious unintended con-sequences. Most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species — that is, weeds — that have an extraordinarily high potential to escape biofuel plantations, overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc in the process, they now say.

At a United Nations meeting in Bonn, Germany, on May 20, scientists from the Global Invasive Spe-cies Program, the Nature Conservancy and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, as well as other groups, presented a paper with a warning about invasive species.

“Some of the most commonly recommended species for biofuels pro-duction are also major invasive alien species,’’ the paper says. Control-ling the spread of such plants, theexpertssaid, could produce “greater financial losses than gains.’’

The scientists com-pared the list of the most popular second-generation biofuels with the list of invasive species and found an alarming degree of overlap.

“With biofuels, there’s always a hurry,’’ said Geoffrey Howard, an invasive species expert with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “Plantations are started by investors, of-ten from the U.S. or Europe, so they are eager to generate biofuels within a couple of years and also, as you might guess, they don’t want a negative as-sessment,’’ he said.

The biofuels industry said the risk of those crops morphing into weed problems is overstated.

“There are very few plants that are ‘weeds,’ full stop,’’ said Willy De Greef, incoming secretary general of EuropaBio, an industry group. “You have to look at the biology of the plant and the en-vironment where you’re introducing it and ask, are there worry points here?’’ He said that biofuel farmers would inevitably introduce new crops carefully because they would not want growth they could not control.

From a business perspective, the good thing about second-generation biofuel crops is that they are easy to grow and need little attention. But that is also what creates their invasive potential.

“Thesearetoughsurvivors,whichmeansthey’regood producers for biofuel because they grow wellon marginal land that you wouldn’t use for food,’’Dr. Howard said. “But we’ve had 100 years of ex-perience with introductions of these crops thatturned out to be disastrous for environment, peo-ple, health.’’

New Varieties Of Biofuels Come With New Risks

Ancient Indian

Ways Are Used

To Revive the Land

By JAMES KANTER

GOTHENBURG, Sweden — Something unusual is happening in Swedish waters. Crews docking at the Port of Gothenburg are turning off their en-gines and plugging into the local power grid rather than burning diesel oil or sulfurous bunker fuel — a thick, black residue left over from refining oil.

“I always knew these extremely dirty bunker fuels were helping produce acid rain that falls so heavily over this part of Sweden,’’ said Per Lindeberg, the port’s electrical manager and an avid fisherman. “I was very happy when we could switch off the ships.’’

Similar technologies have been introduced at Zeebrugge in Belgium, and in Los Angeles and Long Beach in California. But as at Gothenburg, only a small fraction of ships are equipped with plugs, so the benefits from shore-side electricity so far have been limited.

And despite the growing availability of cleaner technologies, the shipping industry has made little progress toward becoming greener, even as traffic grows heavier on existing routes and new routes open up in the Arctic. Recent efforts to tackle the problem have met resistance — less from the ship-ping industry, however, than from the big oil com-panies that supply the dirty fuel.

Shipping is responsible for about twice the emis-sions of carbon dioxide as aviation. Yet airlines have come under greater criticism even though the aviation industry is responsible for only about 2 percent of global emissions of greenhouse gases. In addition, particles emitted by ships burning heavy bunker fuel, described by some seafarers as “black yogurt’’ for its consistency, also contain

soot that researchers say captures heat when it settles on ice and could be accelerating the melt-ing of the polar ice caps.

Health experts say the particulates worsen re-spiratory illnesses, cardiopulmonary disorders and lung cancers, particularly among people who live near heavy ship traffic.

Ship engines also produce large quantities of ni-trogen, which contribute to the formation of algal blooms at sea. Those use up oxygen when they de-compose and create so-called marine dead zones in heavily trafficked waters, like the Baltic Sea.

“The sheer volume of pollutants from shipping has grown exponentially along with the growth of our economies and of global trade,’’ said Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Na-tions Environment Program. “Shipping is just less visible than other industries, so for too long it has slipped to the bottom of the agenda.’’

With the harm growing increasingly evident, the International Maritime Organization, a Unit-ed Nations body, recently proposed reducing the sulfur content of marine fuels starting in 2010 on all ships. It also proposed steps reducing nitrogen oxide emissions from engines on new ships from 2011, with the organization intending to adopt all the measures in October.

The organization is continuing to work on sepa-rate measures to deal with the more difficult issue of carbon dioxide emissions.

The European Commission, the executive armof the 27-nation European Union, has said that ifthe International Maritime Organization fails tomake concrete proposals on carbon dioxide bythe end of the year, it would consider regulating

the matter itself, perhaps by including shipping inthe European carbon trading system. That couldoblige ship owners to buy pollution permits fromother sectors.

The shipping industry has supported the orga-nization’s recommendations because they would apply globally and be introduced gradually. But the fuel industry immediately called for a review of the most important element: a global cap on sul-fur content of marine fuels of 0.5 percent by 2020 from the current level of 4.5 percent.

That target poses “risks to security of supply and to shippers and truckers,’’ said Isabelle Mull-er, the secretary general of Europia, an industry group representing BP, Exxon Mobil and other oil companies.

Ms. Muller said the fuel industry would not be

able to build refining operations quickly enough and that oil companies would be penalized for doing so, because refining contributes heavily to greenhouse gas output.

In Gothenburg, ship crews hook up vessels us-ing the shore-side electricity system with a single giant plug within about 10 minutes of docking. The technology cuts emissions of sulfur, nitrogen and particulate emissions by berthed ships to nearly zero, and cuts engine noise, too.

Mr. Lindeberg, the port manager who developed the technology, said the rewards would be as much personal as professional.

“In the past all we needed to do was to throw a net into the river to catch the salmon,’’ he said. “It’s especially when I’m fishing that I think about the damage.’’

By ELISABETH MALKIN

SAN ISIDRO TILANTONGO, Mexico — Jesús León Santos is a Mixtec Indian farmer who will soon plant corn on a small plot next to his house in time for the summer rains. He plows with oxen and harvests by hand.

Under conventional economic logic, Mr. León is uncompetitive. His yields are just a fraction of what mechanized agriculture churns out.

But to him, that is beside the point. The Mixteca highlands here in the state of

Oaxaca are burdened with some of the most bar-ren earth in Mexico, the result of more than five centuries of erosion that began even before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, their goats and their cattle. Over the past two decades, Mr. León and other farmers have worked to reforest and reclaim this parched land, hoping to find a way for people to stay and work their farms.

“We migrate because we don’t think there are options,” Mr. León said. “The important thing is to give options for a better life.”

Mr. León and the farmers’ group he helped found, the Center for Integral Campesino Devel-opment of the Mixteca, or Cedicam, have reached into the past to revive pre-Hispanic practices. To arresterosion,Cedicamhasplantedtrees,mostly native ocote pines, a million in the past five years, raised in the group’s own nurseries.

Working communally, the villagers built stone walls to terrace the hillside, and they dug

long ditches along the slopes to halt the wash of rainwater that dragged the soil from the moun-tains. Trapped in canals, the water seeps down to recharge the water table and restore dried-up springs.

As the land has begun to produce again, Mr. León has reintroduced the traditional milpa, a plot where corn, climbing beans and squash grow together. The pre-Hispanic farming prac-tice fixes nutrients in the soil and creates natural barriers to pests and disease.

Along the way, the farmers have modernized the ancient techniques. Mr. León has encouraged farmers to use natural compost as fertilizer, in-troduced crop rotation and improved on tradi-tional seed selection.

Mr. León plows with oxen by choice. A tractor would pack down the soil too firmly.

In the eight villages in the region where Cedi-cam has worked, Mr. Leon said, yields have risen

about three- or fourfold, to about 16 to 24 bushels per hectare.

“The people here are saying that we have to find a way to produce our food and meet our basic needs, and that we can do it in a way that is sustainable,” said Phil Dahl-Bre-dine, a Maryknoll lay worker who has worked with Cedicam for sev-en years and written a book about the region.

The key to determining the project’s success will be if it can produce enough to sustain families during the bad years, said James D. Reynolds, an expert on desertification at Duke University who visited Cedicam last month. The land of the Mixteca region is so degraded that “the overall potential is not that high,” he said.

Mixtec farmers typically grow enough cornto feed their families and sell the excess in lo-cal markets. But the price they get has been dis-torted by subsidized American imports and thedominance of just a handful of large buyers. Itdoes not cover the increase in the cost of fertil-izer, which has more than doubled in the pastyear.

“We have to think about a different form of pro-duction,” said Mr. León, who won the prestigious Goldman Prize for grassroots environmentalists last month. “Conventional methods are not pos-sible in a globalized market.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Making Ships Green, in Port and at Sea

DEAN C.K. COX FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

A rush to plant invasive species for fuel may backfire.

A ship using the shore-side electrical plug

in Gothenburg can shut down its engines and burn less of its dirty, sulphur-

based fuel.

Jesús León Santos advocates traditional farming practices to increase plant yields. María Magdalena Vicente, 71, raises sheep, a source of cash for many of the subsistence farmers.

Repubblica NewYork

S C I E N C E & T E C H N O L O GY

VI MONDAY, JUNE 2, 2008

A

RCTIC

CIRCLE

NORTH

POLE

ALASKA

CANADA

GREENLAND

S I B E R I A

RUSSIA

Perennial

sea ice

Arctic

Ocean

Barents

Sea

Pacific

Ocean Atlantic

Ocean

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THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sources: Alaska Natural Heritage Program; Norwegian Polar Institute

Timbuktu

MALI

Bamako

NIGER

GUINEA

BURKINA

FASO

ALGERIA

MAURITANIA

400Kms.

MALI

AFRICA

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

The written words of Timbuktu, the legendary African oasis, are being de-livered by electronic caravan. A lode of books and manuscripts, some only recently rescued from decay, is being digitized for the Internet and distrib-uted to scholars worldwide.

These are works of law and history, science and medicine, poetry and theol-ogy, relics of Timbuktu’s golden age as a crossroads in Mali for trade in gold, salt and slaves along the southern edge of the Sahara. If the name is now a syn-onym for mysterious remoteness, the literature attests to Timbuktu’s earlier role as a vibrant intellectual center.

In recent years, thousands of these leather-bound books and fragile manu-scripts have been recovered from fam-ily archives, private libraries and store-rooms. The South African government is financing construction of a library in Timbuktu to house more than 30,000 of the books. Other gifts support renova-tions of family libraries and projects for preserving, translating and interpret-ing the documents.

Now, the first five of the rare manu-scripts from private libraries havebeen digitized and made available on-line (www.aluka.org) to scholars andstudents. At least 300 are expected to

be available online by the end of theyear.

The project to collect the digital man-uscripts is being organized by Aluka, an international nonprofit company de-voted to bringing knowledge from and about Africa to the scholarly world.

“The manuscripts of Timbuktu add great depth to our understanding of Africa’s diverse history and civiliza-tions,’’ said Rahim S. Rajan, the collec-tion development manager at Aluka.

In partnership with a consortium of private libraries in Timbuktu and with

financing from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Aluka enlisted media tech-nicians from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, to design and set up a high-resolution digital photo studio in Timbuktu.

Although the writing is mostly in Ara-bic, quite a few manuscripts are in ver-naculars adapted to the Arabic script.

Researchers have been struck by therangeofsubjectsthatattractedTimbuk-tu’s scholars over several centuries andinto the 19th century. Most of the firstdigitized ones are from the 17th through19thcenturies.Thetopicsincludethesci-ences of astronomy, mathematics andbotany; literary arts; Islamic religiouspractices and thought; and historicalaccounts.

“It is a rich corpus of historical and intellectual literature that is just be-ginning to become more widely under-stood and accessible to a broader group of scholars and researchers,’’ said Mr. Rajan, a specialist in Middle East stud-ies.

Even if Timbuktu today is a dusty, mud-brick shadow of its past renown, living mainly on the few tourists at-tracted by its name and legend, the pages of its history are emerging from obscurity and, in some cases, are being disseminated by the speed of light.

By NATALIE ANGIER

In the public ranking of marine mam-mals, dolphins are adored, whales revered, and seal pups make people swoon. But walruses remain perverse-ly, lumpishly obscure.

Dr. Ronald J. Schusterman of the Uni-versity of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied them for years, says that to meet a walrus is to fall in love with wal-ruses — the mammals are that smart, friendly and playful. “They’re pussy-cats!” he said, even though adult males grow to 1,000 kilograms.

Dr. Schusterman and his colleagues say Odobenus rosmarus is a magnifi-cent creature, behaviorally, anatom-

ically, acoustically and taxonomically in a category all its own. The walrus belongs to the pinniped suborder, the group of blubbery, fin-footed carnivores that includes seals and sea lions.

But whereas there are 19 species in the family of so-called true seals, and 14 in the family of fur seals and sea lions, the walrus is the only living representa-tive of the family Odobenidae.

“I’ve worked with marine mammalsfor a long time, and with many differentspecies of pinniped, but I’ve never expe-rienced anything like walruses,” saidColleen Reichmuth of the Long MarineLaboratory at the University of Califor-nia, Santa Cruz. “They are fantastic.”

Yet she and her colleagues despair for the walrus’s future. Like the polar

bear, which the United States recently granted protection

under the Endangered Species Act, the walrus

depends on the sea-sonal rhythms of the polar ice cap for ev-ery phase of its life, which means it is vulnerable to the warming of the earth’s climate.

As researchers have lately deter-mined, the walrus shares with other

big-brained spe-cies an unusually

extended childhood. Walrus calves remain

with their mothers for several years, compared

with several weeks or months for the young of other pinnipeds,

and that sustained dependency “could very well provide an op-

portunity for learning,” said Dr. Reich-muth.

A walrus is beautifully suited for Arctic life. Its thick hide of blubber and skin keeps it warm. With its elongated pair of canine teeth, its hallmark tusks, the walrus can heave itself from water and onto slippery ice — hence the fam-ily name, Odobenidae, which in Latin means those that walk with their teeth.

It turns out that Odobenus is also an acoustic genius, its body an all-in-one band. Males woo females with lengthy musical compositions.

Walruses sing with their fleshy and muscular lips, tongues, muzzles and noses. They sing by striking their flip-pers against their chests to hit their pharyngeal pouches, balloon-like ex-tensions of the trachea that are unique to Odobenus and that also serve as flo-tation devices.

In full breeding frenzy, the bulls sing

nonstop for days at a time, and their songs can be heard up to 16 kilometers away.

Nobody yet knows what a female listens for while she hears one or more suitors singing, but listen she appar-ently does, for she eventually dives from her icy perch and into the water to mate with a male, and evidence sug-gests she will shun anyone who can’t carry a tune.

Pinnipeds are thought to be descen-dants of bear-like terrestrial ances-tors that, around 30 million years ago, turned amphibious to better exploit marine prey.

Walruses eat huge numbers of bi-valves, maybe 7,000 a day. They creep along the seabed, their whiskery vibris-sae probing the surface to feel for the tubes of buried mollusks. They dislodge their prey with a scoop of their flippers, or by sucking in water and blasting it

back out in targeted jets.They are able to locate, excavate and

extract the meat from an oyster in six seconds, said Nette Levermann of the University of Copenhagen, “and all this without the help of hands and in total darkness.”

Evidence suggests that the bonds between walruses are exceptionally strong: the animals share food, come to one another’s aid when under attack and nurse one another’s young.

“Walruses are very gregarious, and they like to be near other walruses,” said Chad Jay, who heads the walrus research program for the United States Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center in Anchorage. “They like hang-ing out together, touching each other, socializing. Even when it’s hot and they have plenty of space, they prefer to clamber on top of each other and huddle together.”

Tusks Made for WalkingAnd a Snout Full of Songs

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A Musician Who Performs With His Scalpel in Hand

Treasures Of Timbuktu Are Digitized

By DAVID DOBBS

For Claudius Conrad, a 30-year-old surgeon who has played the piano seriously since he was 5, music and medicine are entwined — from the academic realm down to the level of the fine-fingered dexterity required at the piano bench and the operating table.

“If I don’t play for a couple of days,’’ said Dr. Conrad, a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School who also holds doctorates in stem cell biology and music philosophy, “I can-not feel things as well in surgery. My hands are not as tender with the tis-sue. They are not as sensitive to the feedback that the tissue gives you.’’

Like many surgeons, Dr. Conrad says he works better when he listens to music. And he cites studies, includ-ing some of his own, showing that music is helpful to patients as well — bringing relaxation and reducing blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones, pain and the need for pain medication.

But to the extent that music heals, how does it heal? The physiological pathways responsible have remained obscure, and the search for an under-lying mechanism has moved slowly.

Now Dr. Conrad is trying to changethat. He recently published a provoca-tive paper suggesting that music mayexert healing and sedative effectspartly through a paradoxical stimula-tion of agrowthhormone generallyas-sociated with stress rather than heal-ing.

This jump in growth hormone, said Dr. John Morley, an endocrinologist at St. Louis University Medical Center who was not involved with the study, “is not what you’d expect, and it’s not precisely clear what it means.’’

But he said it raised “some wonder-ful new possibilities about the physiol-ogy of healing,’’ and added: “And of course it has a nice sort of metaphori-cal ring. We used to talk about the neuroendocrine system being a sort of neuronal orchestra conductor di-recting the immune system. Here we have music stimulating this conductor to get the healing process started.’’

Born in Munich, Dr. Conrad took upthe piano when he was 5 and trained

in elite music schools in Munich, Augs-burgandSalzburg,Austria.Afterhighschool he served his obligatory mili-tary service as a sniper in the GermanArmy’s mountain corps, where hiscommander found every opportunitytoflyhimoutoftheAlpsforsomepianotime.

Dr. Conrad’s recent paper focused on specific mechanisms that may help explain music’s effects on the body. In the paper, published last December in the journal Critical Care Medicine, he and colleagues revealed an unex-pected element in distressed patients’ physiological response to music: a jump in pituitary growth hormone, which is known to be crucial in heal-ing. “It’s a sort of quickening,’’ he said, “that produces a calming effect.”

He hopes to expand his study of music’s effects on growth hormone in intensive-care patients. He is also planning similar studies of how mu-sic affects a surgeon’s performance. That line of study goes way back — at least to 1914, when The Journal of the American Medical Association pub-lished “The Phonograph in the Oper-ating Room,’’ by E. Kane.

“When I was a resident, you just picked a radio station,’’ said Dr. Ran-dall Gaz, an attending surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital who is one of Dr. Conrad’s teachers and an amateur pianist as well.

“This new wave of surgeons bring their iPods,’’ he continued. “They bring whole mixes. It’s like they have the whole thing choreographed.’’

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Claudius Conrad explores therole of music in medicine.

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that the walrus is socially

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in �imbuktu, imaging teams digitize rare

works, like a

map, near left, and a legal opinion on the

rules for buying

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goods, far left.

Repubblica NewYork

P ER SONA L I T I E S

MONDAY, JUNE 2, 2008 VII

By SETH SCHIESEL

It’s O.K. to liken Shigeru Miyamoto to Walt Disney.

When Disney died in 1966, Mr. Miya-moto was a 14-year-old schoolteacher’s son living near Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital. An aspiring cartoonist, he adored the classic Disney characters. When he wasn’t drawing, he carved his own wooden puppets.

Even as he has become the world’s most famous and influential video-game designer — the father of Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda and, most recently, the Wii — Mr. Miyamoto still approach-es his work like a humble craftsman, not as the celebrity he is to gamers around the world.

Perched on the end of a chair in a hotelsuiteinManhattan,theyouthful-appear-ing 55-year-old Mr. Miyamoto radiatedthe contentment of someone who hasalways wanted to make fun. And he has.AsthecreativemastermindatNintendoforalmostthreedecades,Mr.Miyamotohasunleashedmassentertainmentwithaglobalbreadth,culturalenduranceandfinancial success unsurpassed sinceDisney’s fabled career.

In the West, chances are that Mr. Miyamoto would have started his own company a long time ago. He could have made billions and established himself as an entertainment celebrity. Instead, despite being royalty at Nintendo and a cult figure, he seems like just another salaryman (though a particularly cre-ative and happy one) with a wife and two children at home near Kyoto.

“What’s important is that the people that I work with are also recognized and that it’s the Nintendo brand that goes forward and continues to become

strong and popular,” he said. “And if people are going to consider the Nin-tendo brand as being on the same level as the Disney brand, that’s very flatter-ing and makes me happy to hear.’’

Mario, the mustached Italian plumb-er he created almost 30 years ago, has become by some measures the planet’s most recognized fictional character, ri-valed only by Mickey Mouse. He is the creator of the Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda series (which have collectively sold more than 350 million copies), and is the person who oversees every Nin-tendo game.

But it isn’t just traditional gamers who are flocking to Mr. Miyamoto’s lat-est creation, the Wii. Eighteen months ago, Mr. Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s chief executive, practically reinvented the industry. Their idea was revolutionary in its simplicity: rather

than create a new generation of games that would titillate hard-core players, they developed the Wii as an easy-to-use, inexpensive diversion for families. So far the Wii has sold more than 25 mil-lion units, besting the competition from Sony and Microsoft.

Mr. Miyamoto graduated from the Kanazawa College of Art in 1975 and joined Nintendo two years later as a staff artist. He rose quickly at the com-pany, and his name has been synony-mous with Nintendo since the 1980s.

Since then Mr. Miyamoto has been directly involved in the production of at least 70 games, including recent hits like Mario Kart Wii, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Mr. Miyamoto’s work is evolving from a reliance on invented characters and fanciful, outlandish settings. With games like Nintendogs, Wii Sports, Wii Fit and coming next, Wii Music, Mr. Miyamoto is gravitating toward every-day hobbies: pets, bowling, yoga, Hula-Hoop, music.

“I would say that over the last five years or so, the types of games I cre-ate has changed somewhat,” he said. “Whereas before I could kind of use my own imagination to create these worlds or create these games, I would say that over the last five years I’ve had more of a tendency to take interests or topics in my life and try to draw the entertain-ment out of that.”

By JOHN MARKOFF

PALO ALTO, California — Daphne Koller, a researcher at Stanford Univer-sity whose work has led to advances in artificial intelligence, sees the world as a web of probabilities.

There is, however, nothing uncertain about her impact.

A mathematical theoretician, she has made contributions in areas like robotics and biology. Her biggest ac-complishment — and at age 39, she is expected to make more — is creating a set of computational tools for artificial intelligence that can be used by scien-tists and engineers to do things like predict traffic jams, improve machine vision and understand the way cancer spreads.

Ms. Koller’s work, building on an 18th-century theorem about probabil-ity, has already had an important com-mercial impact. Her techniques have

been used to improve computer vision systems and in understanding natural language.

“She’s on the bleeding edge of the leading edge,’’ said Gary Bradski, a ma-chine vision researcher at Willow Ga-rage, a robotics start-up firm in Menlo Park, California.

Ms. Koller was recently honored with a new computer sciences award of $150,000 sponsored by the Associa-tion for Computing Machinery and the Infosys Foundation. The award cited her research that has helped transform artificial intelligence from science fic-tion into an engineering discipline that is creating an array of intelligent ma-chines and systems. In 2004, Ms. Koller also received a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship.

Since arriving at Stanford as a pro-fessor in 1995, Ms. Koller has led a group of researchers who have reinvented

the discipline of artificial intelligence. Recent developments in the field have made possible spam filters, Microsoft’s new ClearFlow traffic maps and the driverless robotic cars that Stanford teams have built.

“When I started in the mid- to late 1980s, there was a sense that numbers didn’t belong in A.I.,’’ she said. “People didn’t think in numbers, so why should computers use numbers?’’

Ms. Koller is beginning to apply her algorithms more generally to help sci-entists discern patterns in vast collec-tions of data. “The world is noisy and messy,’’ Ms. Koller said. “You need to deal with the noise and uncertainty.’’

That philosophy has led her to do re-search in game theory and artificial intelligence, and more recently in mo-lecular biology.

Her tools led to a new type of cancer gene map based on examining the be-

By LOUISE STORY

George Soros will not go quietly.At the age of 77, Mr. Soros, one of the

world’s most successful investors and richest men, leapt out of retirement last summer to safeguard his fortune and legacy. Alarmed by the unfold-ing crisis in the financial markets, he once again began trading for his giant hedge fund — and won big while so many others lost.

Mr. Soros has always been a con-troversial figure. But he is becoming more so with a new, dire forecast for the world economy. In his latest book, his 10th, he warns that the financial pain has only just begun.

“I consider this the biggest financial crisis of my lifetime,’’ Mr. Soros said. A “superbubble’’ that has been swell-ing for a quarter of a century is finally bursting, he said.

Mr. Soros, whose daring, controver-sial trades came to symbolize global capitalism in the 1990s, is promoting his latest book, “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets.’’ And yet this is not the first time that Mr. Soros has prophesied doom. In 1998, he pub-lished a book predicting a global eco-nomic collapse that never came.

Mr. Soros , who came of age in Nazi-occupied Hungary, yearns to be re-membered not only as a great traderbut also as a great thinker. The mar-ket theory he has promoted for twodecades and espoused most of his life—somethinghecalls“reflexivity”—isstill dismissed by many economists.The idea is that people’s biases andactions can affect the direction of theunderlyingeconomy,underminingtheconventional theorythatmarketstendtoward some sort of equilibrium.

Mr. Soros said all aspects of his life are driven by reflexivity, which has to do with the feedback loop between people’s understanding of reality and their own actions. Society as a whole could learn from his theory, he said. “To make a contribution to our under-standing of reality would be my great-est accomplishment,” he said.

Mr. Soros has been worrying about the fragile state of the markets for years. But last summer, at a luncheon at his home in Southampton, New York, with 20 prominent financiers, he struck an unusually bearish note.

Mr. Soros was one of only two peo-ple there who predicted the American economy was headed for a recession, he said. Afterward, he interrogated his portfolio managers and external hedge funds that manage his fund’s money, and he took on new positions to hedge where they might have gone wrong. His last-minute strategies con-tributed to a 32 percent return — or roughly $4 billion for the year.

The more Mr. Soros learned aboutthe crisis, the more certain he becamethatheshouldrebroadcasthistheories.Inthebook,Mr.Sorosfaultsregulatorsfor allowing the buildup of the housingand mortgage bubbles. He envisionsa time, not so distant, when the dollaris no longer the world’s main currency

andpeoplewillhaveahardertimebor-rowing money.

“I may well be proven wrong,’’ he said. “I would say that I’m the boy who cried wolf three times.’’

Many of the people Mr. Soros wants to influence may view him with skep-ticism, in part because of how he made his fortune. In 1992, his fund made a bold bet against the British pound and helped force the British government to devalue the currency. Five years later, he bet — correctly — that Thai-land would be forced to devalue its currency, the baht.

Asked if it bothers him that people accuse him of causing economic pain, he said: “Yes, it does, actually, yes.”

Asked if those people are right to blame him, he says, “Well, no, not en-tirely.” No single investor can move a currency, he said. “Markets move cur-rencies, so what happened with the

British pound would have happened whether I was born or not, so there-fore I take no responsibility.”

WhenMr.Sorosbecamerich,peoplebeganlistening.Healsostartedgivinglarge sums to charities, and in EasternEurope, as the Soviet Union crumbled,he distributed copy machines to en-courage free speech in his native Hun-gary.Hehasgivenmorethan$5billionaway through his foundations.

Yet even Mr. Soros acknowledges that many economists still slight his theories. “I am known as a hedge fund manager and I am known as a philan-thropist, and it’s very hard for, say, academics to accept that a hedge fund manager may actually have some-thing to say about economics,’’ Mr. Soros said. “So that has been difficult for me to overcome.’’

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL NAGLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Shigeru Miyamoto created games that have sold more than 350 million copies. He demonstrates Wii Fit, a new fitness device from Nintendo.

“To make a contribution

to our understanding

of reality would be my

greatest accomplishment.”

GEORGE SOROS

Billionaire Craves RespectFor Theories, Not Money

A ModestMastermindFuels SuccessAt Nintendo

DAPHNE KOLLER

Pursuing the Next Level of Artificial Intelligence

JOEL SAGET/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

“I spend most of my

time thinking about

things like how does a

cell work or how do we

understand images in the

world around us?”

SHIGERU MIYAMOTO

“What’s important is that

the people that I work with

are also recognized and

that it’s the Nintendo brand

that goes forward and

continues to become strong

and popular.”

havior of a large number of genes that are active in a variety of tumors. From the research, scientists were able to de-velop a new explanation of how breast tumors spread into bone.

One potentially promising area to ap-ply Ms. Koller’s theoretical work will bethe emerging field of information ex-traction, which could be applied to Websearches.

“I find it distressing that the view of the field is that you sit in your office by yourself surrounded by old pizza boxes and cans of Coke, hacking away at the bowels of the Windows operating sys-

tem,’’ she said. “I spend most of my time thinking about things like how does a cell work or how do we understand im-ages in the world around us?’’

She tries to persuade undergraduatesto stay in academia and not rush off tobecome software engineers at start-upcompanies. She acknowledges that theallure of Silicon Valley riches can be se-ductive.

“My husband still berates me for not having jumped on the Google bandwag-on at the beginning,’’ she said.

Still, she insists she does not regret her decision. “I like the freedom to ex-plore the things I care about,’’ she said.

Repubblica NewYork

By JOHN F. BURNS

LONDON — Any writer who has struggled to “do the words’’ would take heart from the self-effacing assessment written for himself by Ian Fleming, the raffish Englishman born 100 years ago in May who became one of the most suc-cessful authors of his time through the creation of the world’s best-loved spy, James Bond.

Fleming died in 1964, at 56, of com-plications from pleurisy after playing a round of golf in Oxfordshire though he had a heavy cold. But the real cul-prits were years of smoking up to 80 cigarettes a day, and drinking heavily. Perhaps because of the difficulty he found in resisting life’s indulgences, he adopted a strict writing routine in his last 12 years, the period in which he wrote more than a dozen Bond novels that spawned the multibillion-dollar film franchise.

Rising early for a swim in the aqua-marine waters in the cove below hisidyllic Jamaican retreat, Goldeneye,Fleming tapped away at his Reming-ton portable typewriter with six fin-gers for three hours in the morningand an hour in the afternoon — 2,000words a day, a completed novel in twomonths.

Fleming, who saw 40 million copies of his books sold in his lifetime but died be-fore the Bond franchise became wildly successful, had no literary pretensions. He described his first Bond book, “Ca-sino Royale,’’ as “an oafish opus,’’ and offered further disparagement in a 1963 BBC radio interview. “If I wait for the genius to come, it just doesn’t arrive,’’ he said. Asked if Bond had kept him from more serious writing, of the kind achieved by his older brother, Peter, a renowned explorer and travel writer, he replied: “I’m not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.’’

Fleming’s workaday approach to writing is among the revelations draw-ing crowds of Bond lovers to “For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond,’’ an exhibition that opened at the Imperial War Museum in London in April and runs through March 2009.

The display explores the relation-ship between Fleming and Bond, ex-amining how much of the fictional spyis built on the author’s character — thedegree to which Bond was his “fantasy

version of himself,’’ said Terry Char-man, the museum’s senior historianand curator of the Bond exhibition.Also, it shows how the debonair Flem-ing drew on his experiences as a manabout town and as a prewar foreigncorrespondent, in the world of bank-ing and investment, in his postwarsojourns in Jamaica, and as a WorldWar II aide to the head of Britain’s di-rectorate of naval intelligence, to givewhat he described as “verisimilitude’’

to Bond’s world of spies and villainsand romance.

Of his Bond plots, Fleming, ever pro-saic about his talent, said, “I extracted them from my wartime memories, dolled them up, attached a hero and a villain, and there was the book.’’

For M, Bond’s irascible, domineer-ing secret service overseer, he had as a model Rear Admiral John Godfrey, his wartime intelligence chief.

Bond himself, Fleming said, was “acompound of all the secret agents andcommandos I met during the war,’’but his tastes — in blondes, martinis“shaken, not stirred,’’ expensivelytailored suits, short-sleeved shirtsand Rolex watches — were Fleming’sown.

But not all the comparisons wereones the author liked to encourage.Bond, he said, had “more guts than Ihave’’ as well as being “more hand-some.’’

NEW YORK — Without horses, where would we be? Trousers might never have become fashionable. The violin might never have come into existence. The Aztecs might have

thrived another few centuries. The Indus-trial Revolution might have sputtered out before its time. And the American Museum of Natural History would

have had to find another subject for its sprawling, charming and illuminating exhibition: “The Horse.’’

The exhibition relies mainly on a history of the ways in which humans and horses became, as the show says, “powerfully linked.’’ Those links may be as slight as fashions in clothing (trousers, we are told, were developed for the riding of horses) and as impor-tant as the fate of empires (“Next to God,’’ Cortés is supposed to have said about the conquest of Mexico, “we owed our victory to the horses.’’).

The exhibition is suggestive aboutthe evolution of the arts. (The 13th- and14th-century Mongols, who held theirimmense empire together with the aidof the horse, also used hair from its tailto create the ancestor of the modernviolin bow.) And it invites speculationabout the course of technology. (TheIndustrial Revolution ultimately dis-placed horse power with horsepower,but not before horses shared the burdenwith machines: on display is a horse-drawn, steam-powered firetruck from19th-century Pennsylvania.)

Created by Ross MacPhee, the cura-tor of mammalogy in the Division of Vertebrate Zoology at the museum, and Sandra Olsen, the curator of an-

thropology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Penn-sylvania, this show makes it clear just how crucial a role the horse has played. With the aid of dioramas, interviews, marvelous computer graphics, varied skeletons, archaeological finds, repro-ductions of cave paintings and objects including a World War I gas mask for a horse, the history of the horse becomes humanized.

The majority of horse species origi-nated in the Americas. About 10,000 years ago, horses became extinct there, perhaps because of environ-mental change and overhunting.

From the moment horses were first used to pull chariots into battle (per-haps 1500 B.C.) until their valedictory cavalry campaigns in the Second World War, horses were bound up in human warfare. Similarly with human welfare: In 1900, there were 130,000 horses working in Manhattan alone.

Now we are mainly aware of horses through the remnants of horse-in-spired vocabulary, by the persistence of sports like polo and, as a video shows, from ceremonies from around the world that use the horse to dis-play power and grace. But the show reminds us just how recent a phenom-enon this diminution of importance is.

Recent archaeological research in northern Kazakhstan, displayed in a diorama, suggests that the Botai people of Central Asia were among the first to domesticate horses. In domes-tication, horses didn’t change much

physiologically — something that, as the exhibition notes, cannot be said of the boar when it was transformed into a domesticated pig, or the wolf into a domesticated dog. They were easily trained and relatively free from the territorial viciousness of related spe-cies, like zebras.

Among the gentry of Europe, the domestication of the horse came to re-flect personal cultivation and accom-plishment. The French, Spanish and English words for gentleman, the show points out — chevalier, caballero and cavalier — all mean horseman.

Could interaction between humans and any other animal bear this sort of examination? Dogs may inspire more intense and complex friendships, but horses were almost more than com-panions; they were partners in agri-culture, war, industry and commerce.

The ancient Greeks, the show points out, might have been so surprised by their first sight of warriors on horse-back that they imagined that they were centaurs. The exhibition almost seems to suggest that this mythology touches on a deeper truth: The connection is so strong, we are all of us centaurs.

EDWARD

ROTHSTEIN

EXHIBITION

REVIEW

How Civilization

Arrived on Horseback

Metalheads From Iraq, Eager to Rock Again

The Not-So-Secret LifeOf Fleming, Ian Fleming

RUBY WASHINGTON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

By MELENA RYZIK

It was already an unlikely story: Around 2000, a group of Iraqi school friends weaned on bootleg Metallica and Slayer tapes formed their own metal band with an imposing name, Acrassicauda (derived from the name of a species of black scorpion).

Though their kind of music was es-sentially forbidden under Saddam Hussein’s regime, they managed to perform a few times for several hun-dred fellow headbangers and consid-ered themselves a center of the (deep-ly) underground hardcore scene.

When American forces entered their country a few years later, they lost a lead singer — he fled to Canada — but gained a new audience in West-ern journalists eager to write about local culture. Vice magazine profiled the band in its January 2004 issue. In 2006, the company’s managers trav-eled to Baghdad for what was intended to be a short video starring the group. Instead they turned the footage into a feature-length documentary, “Heavy Metal in Baghdad,’’ which opened re-cently in New York. A DVD will be re-leased June 10.

The band has a MySpace page at www.myspace.com/wwwacrassicaudas5com.

The film follows Acrassicauda from 2003 to 2006 as the four remaining

members struggle to stay together even as Iraq falls apart. Their rehears-al space is bombed, their audience dwindles and eventually, they, too, flee to Syria, then to Turkey. Two years later, filmmakers and band members have remained committed to one an-other and to the youthful idealism of the movie.

“It was life-changing, nothing short of,” Eddy Moretti, 36, a director of the film, said of making it. In addition to

helping the band, he said, “the big am-bition is to get people to change the discourse on the war a little bit, to get people started talking about, wanting to know about, the Iraqi refugee situ-ation.’’

But for Acrassicauda’s members, now living in exile at Vice magazine’s expense in Istanbul, the life change was not uniformly positive.

The band’s three unmarried mem-bers — Marwan Hussain, 23, the

drummer and designated spokesman; Tony Aziz, 29, the lead guitarist; Faisal Talal, 25, the singer and rhythm gui-tarist — and a cat share an apartment over a kindergarten. Firas Al-Lateef, 27, the bassist, lives with his wife and young son nearby.

“We’re isolated, literally isolated,’’ Mr. Hussain said by telephone.

Mr. Moretti admitted that he didn’t know why the band members got into metal in the first place. Instead he and his co-director, Suroosh Alvi, 39, focused on capturing the band mem-bers’ experiences as metalheads first, and as Iraqis second — the way Acras-sicauda preferred.

“Whenwestartedthebandwenever said, ‘Oh, we’re from Iraq, maybe we should take advantage of it, be like cir-cus freaks,’ ’’ Mr. Hussain said. “We’re just like normal people, passionate about the music.’’

Heavy metal appealed to him for the same reason it has drawn millions of adolescents the world over: pure, hon-est rage.

“The life there, it doesn’t give you much choices and options,’’ he said. “We find that heavy-metal music at first is a release. Later when we got more mature about it, we found we can actually use it as a good guide to direct and to say whatever you want, as loud and as fast as you can.’’

AHMET POLAT

HORST TAPPE/HULTON ARCHIVE — GETTY IMAGES

The life of James Bond’s creator is the subject of a London exhibit.

RICHARD PERRY/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Artifacts and artwork in “The Horse” from Iran, right, and New York, above, show the links between humans and horses.

A documentary followsmusicians as their countryfaces war and upheaval.

Acrassicauda, an Iraqi metal

band, fled to Turkey after the

United States invaded.

A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, JUNE 2, 2008

Repubblica NewYork