The Media Equation
In Leno Fiasco, a Window to the Midlife Crisis of NBC
By DAVID CARR
The syndrome is a familiar one. Men of a certain age — and it is almost always men — wake up one day and find that they are no longer the center of the universe. Women fail to look their way, co-workers don’t scurry to fetch them coffee and bosses stop thinking of them as someone on the rise.
And while some respond by adjusting to a new reality where their relevance is on the wane, others do really dumb things. They grow goatees — I think mine looks great, by the way — they buy cars only two people can fit in and start wearing clothing that attracts attention for all the wrong reasons. If they are lucky, when the temporary insanity ends, they still have jobs, spouses and homes.
Or you end up like NBC, with broken furniture everywhere and divorce seeming like the only sensible option. In an effort to transition “The Tonight Show” franchise, let’s just say that the network had, ah, some issues of adjustment to a new world of increased options and less relevance for broadcast networks.
In the old paradigm, networks operated from Olympian heights, but with cable outlets multiplying, a network’s size and mass audience are not always an advantage. While cable networks can pick and choose their spots, building discrete successes while living off a combination of fees and advertising, broadcast networks are at the top of a huge ecosystem where their every move lands forcefully on affiliated locals.
For big corporations, it is often about defense, so it made some sense to put Jay Leno on a timer in order to hang on to the very talented Conan O’Brien. And when NBC struggled to compete with its network brethren because of bad programming bets, it addressed the decline by changing the game, busting up the prime-time grid and inserting Mr. Leno at 10 p.m.
At the time, it was viewed as a way to cut costs and keep a proven talent away from competitors, while making room for the ascendance of Mr. O’Brien to “The Tonight Show.” Everybody hugged. It was win-win, right?
But the not-so-reinvented, not-so-funny “Jay Leno Show” had the ratings of a night light, setting off a revolt from affiliates that, according to Ad Age, had a terrible year, with a breathtaking 22.4 percent drop in revenue from 2008. And it didn’t help that Mr. O’Brien was pummeled on Mr. Leno’s old perch. The fiasco suggests that networks mess with the inertia of viewing habits at their extreme peril.
On Thursday night, Mr. Leno had no trouble finding the funny in the rumors his show might be canceled, suggesting NBC stands for “Never Believe your Contract.” He may play a nice guy on television, but he seemed oddly thrilled by the disarray. Of course, the mayhem was terrible news for another NBC guy, a by-now veteran performer who has to be wondering what this failed experiment means for his future in the business.
That would be Jeff Zucker.
Sure, it was not a great night to be Conan O’Brien, who managed no jokes on Thursday about the fact that his time slot might be in jeopardy and appeared so small, so bereft, that he looked as if he were being filmed from outer space. But it was Mr. Zucker who decided to fix the network’s problems in prime time by putting late night franchises in play and it was, in the end, Mr. Zucker who decided that the solution to bailing out a leaky boat was to blow more holes in the bottom.
Mr. Zucker has a three-year contract with his incoming bosses at Comcast, who will probably notice that everything around him is now horribly damaged. Not since New Coke has a storied brand been so thoroughly maimed. “The Tonight Show,” once a gilded entertainment franchise, is now just one more broken toy in the mistake pile.
“You have the combination of expired content, in terms of current public taste, appearing at the wrong time on a medium that has lost its salience, by whatever standards you use,” said Paul Levinson, professor of communication at Fordham University.
After a series of bold moves, the network is now trying to hedge its way out of the corner, by slipping “Leno” later back in the schedule, which effectively pushes Mr. O’Brien and Jimmy Fallon of “Late Night” deeper into the night. On Sunday, official word came at the Television Critics Association’s winter event, where Jeff Gaspin, chairman of NBC Universal’s television division, said that Mr. Leno would be back at 11:35 p.m. with a half-hour show, but added that the network had yet to reach an agreement with Mr. O’Brien.
The message to the younger talent is one thing — wait for a turn that may never come or may be taken back at any second — but the message to younger audiences is even clearer: a legacy industry will default to legacy assets and ride them down to the bitter end.
The network model explains why Ted Koppel is favored over younger talent to serve as interlocutor on “This Week” and why, when networks make what they see as a risky move — hey, let’s put a woman in the anchor chair — it will be someone like Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer, both of whom have been on television for decades.
Twitter nation was livid, of course. “Nice work NBC. Take out the only late night host my age range and younger will even consider watching,” said @MatthewJBrown, Tweeting the sentiments of many.
No one thought the network television business would age gracefully, but NBC has turned two of its biggest stars into the equivalent of Jon and Kate: two wounded parties biding their time until the divorce comes through. By Friday night, Mr. O’Brien had a day to gain some perspective and ticked off a list of rumors, including a last one that sounded just about right:
“NBC is going to throw me and Jay into a pit with sharpened sticks. The one who crawls out alive gets to leave NBC.”
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com http://twitter.com/carr2n

Kepler telescope discovers five new planets, all bigger than Earth
By Joel Achenbach Washington Post Staff Writer
In their search for a planet that looks like Earth -- comfortably bathed in sunshine in a pleasant solar system where life would be easy come easy go -- astronomers keep turning up the strangest things.
They've found a planet with the density of Styrofoam.
They've found two planets with surfaces hotter than molten lava.
They've found two inexplicable planet-sized objects that for some reason are hotter than the stars they orbit. Scientists have never seen anything like this before.
"Does anyone know what they are?" asked Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer David Latham, standing onstage in a ballroom of astronomers Monday at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park.
About 3,300 astronomers and students are in Washington for the annual winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society, where sessions range from why stars explode to how astronomers can find a job. The gathering's first day was dominated by news from Kepler, a new space telescope NASA launched in March on a mission to find Earth-like planets.
The very early results are tantalizing. Astronomers said they found five new planets, all much bigger than Earth. An additional 100 or so signals are being analyzed that might indicate planets. The new telescope has also revealed that the sun is not anomalously calm by galactic standards, which boosts the odds that other solar systems would be habitable.
William J. Borucki, Kepler's lead scientist, spent decades lobbying NASA to fund the mission. For much of Monday, he played his cards close to the vest, revealing only the five planets that popped up in the first six weeks of observations. Eight more months of data are still being analyzed, with the candidate planets being scrutinized by ground-based telescopes.
"There's a lot of real interesting stuff. That's all we can say now," said Simon "Pete" Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center. If an Earth-like planet were found, he noted, the president and Congress would be brought into the loop prior to a public announcement.
Latham, part of the Kepler team, teased, "You ain't seen nothin' yet."
A race is going on between American and European scientists to find the first "Earth" -- a planet that is about its size and simultaneously in the "habitable zone" of a star. In the habitable zone, a planet would be in the Goldilocks position, neither too hot nor too cold, and just right for water to be liquid at the surface.
Many scientists interested in the idea of extraterrestrial life have been excited by the discovery of hundreds of "exoplanets" beyond Earth's solar system. There is also evidence that complex molecules of the type necessary for life are abundant in the universe. But what's also clear is that the universe has a lot of ways to construct solar systems. When it comes to planets, eccentricity may be the norm.
"The universe is more bizarre than our imaginations can conceive," said NASA astrophysics chief Jon Morse.
Said Latham: "If the universe is tuned for life as we know it, why did it bother to make all these weird planets?" His conclusion: "Nature is prolific. Nature will try anything it can."
Although about 400 planets have been found since the first was discovered in 1995 by a Swiss-led astronomical team, none has been terribly promising at first glance as a potential abode for life. Most are "hot Jupiters," jumbo objects in tight orbits around the star, so close that their gravity jerks the star to and fro and causes a wobble in the starlight as seen from telescopes on Earth.
But Kepler uses a different technique, one that measures the slight dimming of starlight as a planet passes in front of the star. This method allows astronomers not only to detect the planet but also estimate its size and density. The telescope, which is in an Earth-trailing orbit around the sun, was designed to look at about 150,000 stars in the galaxy in a patch of sky just above the galactic plane and near the constellation Cygnus.
The search requires serendipity as well as precision. Most planets, particularly the small, rocky bodies such as Earth that orbit fairly far from the star, won't be properly aligned to transit the face of the star as seen from Kepler's vantage point. But scientists can estimate the probability of seeing a planet of a particular size in a particular type of orbit. Any discoveries can then be extrapolated statistically; a few "Earths" found by Kepler would mean that many more exist.
"Right now, we're still taking the inventory of the universe. That inventory is largely complete with regard to stars. It is in its infancy with regard to planets," said Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History.
Kepler does more than find planets: The telescope is revealing secrets of stars more generally. One finding is that the sun is not anomalously serene in the galactic scheme of things. Some theorists had argued that life in other solar systems might be rare because most stars might be a lot crankier and less stable than the sun. Kepler's data suggest otherwise.
"We know that sun-like twins abound," said Natalie Batalha, a Kepler team member and astronomer at San Jose State University.
Astronomer Catherine Pilachowski of Indiana University said that the relative calm of most stars in the galaxy is good news for earthlings: "I'm going to sleep better tonight knowing that -- that we're in a good, safe place."

dispatches SLATE
Where Russia Meets China
"China is the destiny of Siberia."

By Joshua Kucera
IRKUTSK, Russia—When you're the leader of a fringe political group, a cafe called "I'm Waiting for a UFO" may not be the best place to take a visiting journalist. But it's possible that alien abduction is more likely than what Mikheil Kulekhov is working for: Siberian independence.
Kulekhov was the head of the Siberian Liberation Army until officers from the FSB (the successor to the KGB) contacted him. "They asked me: 'Why are you calling yourselves an army? Are you going to take up arms?' " Assured that wasn't the case, the officers asked Kulekhov to change the organization's name. He did, and it is now the National Alternative of Siberia. (The two names share the same acronym in Russian, OAS, he points out.)
That Russian security let these would-be secessionists off with nothing more than a gentle scolding is probably a reflection of the group's modest size: Kulekhov counts about 30 members in the OAS. So, Siberia is not Chechnya.
Siberian independence is unlikely. But this region's long-term political and economic future is uncertain. Much of the oil and natural gas that has fueled Russia's booming economy over the last decade is found in eastern Siberia, and the area is also rich in timber, minerals, and other natural resources. But it doesn't have very many people. This was the last part of Russia to be settled, and the Russian history of much of eastern Siberia stretches back barely 100 years.
Contrary to Siberia's reputation, most of the cities I visited were pleasant—Irkutsk, in particular, has gracious architecture and a bookish college-town feel. Siberians boast that they tend to be smarter and better-looking than their compatriots, because so much of Russia's elite was shipped out here when Siberia was used as a penal colony. But life here has always been difficult; it's remote and, in the winter, bitterly cold. The Soviets encouraged Russians to settle here, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, people started heading west: The population of Russia east of Irkutsk decreased from 8 million to 6 million between 1998 and 2002 (the date of the last census). What would this mass exodus mean for Russia? Perhaps Russia's greatest claim to being a great power is its immense size, and a shrinking population in its farthest reaches could call its claim on Siberia—and by extension its authority on the world stage—into question. I was traveling through this region, heading east from Irkutsk, to see how Russia is holding on to its Far East.
Kulekhov bases his argument for independence on three pillars: the geographic, economic, and cultural uniqueness of Siberia. Irkutsk, he notes, is farther from Moscow than New York is from London, and Russian involvement in Siberia is analogous to the British colonization of the New World. "We're so far away, it's easy to see that we're a different country," he said. Economically, he argues, Siberia has more trade with Asia than it does with the European part of Russia, and too much of the income from this region's vast natural resources ends up in Moscow.
What's more, Siberians have unique "national characteristics. We are very skeptical, don't trust anyone, we're difficult to negotiate with, and we do things the way we want them to be done. We're individualists." While ethnic Russians everywhere are Orthodox Christian, in Siberia they have a syncretic bent, incorporating some elements of the Buddhist and shamanistic traditions of the indigenous peoples of Siberia. (The green-and-white OAS logo nods to that ecumenism, incorporating a cross as well as a circular form that refers to Buddhist chakras.)
The OAS is claiming its place in the long history of Siberian political independence movements, from 19th-century intellectuals who first posited the existence of a Siberian identity distinct from Russianness to a short-lived anti-Bolshevik Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia in the chaotic days after the Russian Civil War. Every year, OAS members make a pilgrimage to the grave of one of the early heroes of Siberian independence, and during my visit, the group's newspaper ran a front-page feature on the police force of the post-civil war autonomous government.
Kulekhov claims solidarity with other secessionist movements, which, he says, are everywhere in Russia. But at least for now, Russia is heading in the opposite direction. Regional governors used to be elected by local voters, but in 2004, then-President Vladimir Putin changed the law and decided to appoint the governors directly, greatly increasing the Kremlin's authority over Russia's far-flung regions. This would become a running theme throughout my trip: how distant Moscow rules Siberia imperiously, with little regard for the wishes of the people here. The word colony came up again and again in conversation.
Mikhail Rozhansky, a political analyst in Irkutsk, said there is no hope for Siberian independence. But its appeal is obvious. "It's understandable why people here have this dream—they don't want to feel like they're on the edge of the world," he said.
"Everything is centralized; everything is a colony of Moscow. Even regions close to Moscow still feel like they're living on the edge of Russia," Rozhansky said. Although that centralization creates resentment, it also makes it hard for strong regionalism to develop: "Ties between Irkutsk and Moscow are closer than the ties between Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk," another Siberian city.
A key component of the Siberian character is rootlessness, Rozhansky added. The first Russian settlers came here not because it was a pleasant place to live but because they were chasing the valuable natural resources of the time: furs. And that hasn't changed, even if today the goal is work in the timber or petroleum industries.
"Even if people came four centuries ago, they feel like life here is temporary," he said. "People have always come here because of the natural resources, not because they wanted to. And there's no tradition of compromise—people will just leave, find a new place to live."
From: Joshua Kucera

Subject: Don't Call Them Twin Cities
BLAGOVESHCHENSK, Russia—Across the Amur River, which forms the border between Russia and China, the city of Heihe gleams. The brand-new Yuan Dun shopping center juts into the water, its name written in Cyrillic letters large enough to be seen the half-mile across the river. At night, the Vegas-like lights of Heihe's downtown reflect in the river, and a spotlight makes circles in the sky, like a car dealership trying to draw customers.
Among Russians in Blagoveshchensk, a two-day train ride east of Irkutsk, the sight of Heihe across the water is a source of both admiration and defensiveness. During my time here I was told over and over that although Heihe looks impressive from a distance, up close the city can be dirty and chaotic. Others mentioned that that the central government in Beijing lavishes extra attention on Heihe—other cities of its size don't have those bright lights—because it's on the border. Russians have seen this sort of thing before: "It's a Potemkin village," said Mikhail Kukharenko, the Russian head of the Chinese-government-run Confucius Institute in Blagoveshchensk.
At the same time, Russians love Heihe. Several ferries a day carry over tourists and shoppers looking for cheap Chinese electronics and clothes, and so many people made their livelihood in the "suitcase trade"—buying cheap things in China to sell for a profit in Russia—that Blagoveshchensk's downtown has a monument to the traders, complete with an inscription that reads, "For the hard work and optimism of the entrepreneurs of the Amur," referring to the region that includes Blagoveshchensk.
For most of the last century, this border was closed. In 1969, the Soviet Union and China even fought a battle over a disputed island farther downstream. Hundreds of soldiers died.
But it reopened in 1989, and the fact that ordinary Russians and Chinese could cross the border freely added a new wrinkle to the already complex relationship between the two powers. In particular, Russians were forced to confront an uncomfortable demographic fact: This part of their country was strategically important, badly underpopulated, and right next to a China bursting at the seams.
The Russian Far East, the eastern edge of Siberia that borders China and the Pacific Ocean, has only 6 million people, and that number is dropping fast. Just across the border, though, the three provinces of northeastern China have about 110 million people. Meanwhile, the Russian Far East has substantial reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal, which China needs to run its supercharged economy.
All that has led many Russians to fear that China will eventually exert control over the region. "[I]f we do not step up the level of activity of our work [in the Russian Far East], then in the final analysis we can lose everything," Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said last year. Kukharenko of the Confucius Institute spelled it out for me: "It's a law of physics, a vacuum has to be filled," he said. "If there are no Russian people here, there will be Chinese people."
That's why Russia has serious misgivings about its neighbors to the south, as a trip along the border makes plain. While Beijing has moved aggressively to court Russian visitors and business, Russia's central government has largely neglected the areas that act as the gateway to China. The few new buildings in Blagoveshchensk—some shopping centers and a high-rise hotel—were built by a Chinese company.
While Blagoveshchensk is relatively prosperous, at least by the standards of Russian cities of its size, Heihe has positively boomed. It was just a village in 1989, and now it has 200,000 people, about the same as Blagoveshchensk. And in contrast to Heihe's glitzy, welcoming facade, Blagoveshchensk's barely lighted waterfront promenade features a Soviet-era World War II memorial that consists of a gunship with its barrels aimed across the river, toward China.
In one telling episode, in 2007, in an apparent attempt to play up its Russian connection and appeal to tourists, Heihe placed garbage cans that were designed to look like Russian matryoshka dolls around the city. Some excessively sensitive Russians saw this as an insult—Russian culture was trash. The mini-scandal made national TV news in Russia, and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs protested. So Heihe's government painted the trash cans over. (I later saw panda-shaped trash cans in another Chinese city, which suggests that the matryoshkas were, in fact, a friendly gesture.) In Blagoveshchensk, meanwhile, a new government-run cultural center was originally named Albazin, after the fort built by early Russian settlers to defend the territory from China, until local historians petitioned the government to change it, saying the name was unnecessarily provocative.
In several small ways, the Russian government has made it difficult for Russians and Chinese to interact. Heihe has street signs in Russian, but there is almost no Chinese to be seen in Blagoveshchensk. While Russians can cross into Heihe visa-free for a short visit, Chinese can't do the same to Blagoveshchensk. The local government gave the license to operate ferries that cross the river to a politically connected local monopoly, which charges more than $40 for the 10-minute ride. (Chinese visiting Russia use a different company, which charges much less.) China has offered to pay for a bridge between the two cities, but the Russian side has dragged its feet for years, said Yevgeny Kuzmin, a local journalist. "It's always the Chinese side that takes the initiative," he said.
The Russian government recently made the suitcase trade much more difficult by reducing the amount of clothes, electronics, and other consumer goods that Russians can bring back into the country duty-free and the frequency with which they can take such trips. One city official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, said that while Heihe's government is promoting the idea of Heihe and Blagoveshchensk as "twin cities," Blagoveshchensk's government is balking. "Heihe is always pushing this relationship more," she said. "They get a lot of money from the central government, so they have lots of proposals and ideas for programs, but we don't have the money for that."
The central government has given Blagoveshchensk funds for one thing, though: a new waterfront. Moscow has committed about $200 million for a five-year program to create a completely new waterfront facade for the city, a spokeswoman for the city told me. The plan will entail dumping sand into the river to add nearly 100 acres of prime riverfront real estate and then building brand-new high-rises along the new shore.
I asked if the new plan called for lights as impressive as Heihe's. "We'll do our best," she said with a smile. But the World War II memorial, with the gun pointed at China? It's staying.
Click here to view a slide show about where Russia meets China.
From: Joshua Kucera

Why Are Siberian Russians Drawn to China?

BLAGOVESHCHENSK, Russia—I originally came to the Russian Far East with the idea that the Russian-Chinese border was roughly analogous to the U.S.-Mexican border: poor, darker-skinned people sneaking north across a river for better job opportunities, freaking out the white people.
Poor Chinese do cross over, and they do work for less than Russians. And some of the overheated immigration rhetoric you hear in the United States exists in Russia, too, about the "zheltaya ugroza," or "yellow peril." That paranoia is much more prevalent in Moscow than in the Russian Far East, however. Here, everyone seems to have their favorite example of how other Russians exaggerate the Chinese presence. There are reports in the Moscow press that half the population of Blagoveshchensk is Chinese or that there are dozens of Chinese villages in Russia that don't appear on any map. "I've heard that the streets in Blagoveshchensk are named after Chinese generals or that there are Chinese people on the city council here," Mikhail Kukharenko, the head of the Chinese-government-run Confucius Institute, told me.
In part because the government has placed tight restriction on Chinese visitors to Russia, there is little visible Chinese presence in Blagoveshchensk—and there's more here than anywhere else in Russia. There are a couple of so-called "Chinese markets," where Chinese vendors sell cheap clothes and electronics, but you can find these all over Russia and the former Eastern bloc. There are also a good number of Chinese restaurants catering to Russian tastes: It was here that I had stir-fried potatoes for the first time.
But you see very few Chinese people on the streets, other than a few tourists snapping photos of the statue of Lenin or of the reconstructed arch originally built for Czarevich Nicholas' visit through the Far East in 1891.
What is remarkable here, though, is the enthusiasm that Russian people—in contrast to the Russian government—display about China. While some poor Chinese citizens come to Russia for work, educated, middle-class Russians are increasingly going in the other direction. Among the group of young, English-speaking Russians I fell in with in Blagoveshchensk, nearly all of them worked in some capacity with China. Many of them had lived there. One, Sergey, was home from his job in Shanghai, and he raved about how much friendlier, more open, and optimistic Chinese people were compared with Russians.
One feature of the Russian-Chinese relationship seemed especially telling: Cross-border marriages are overwhelmingly between Chinese men and Russian women. Much of this has to do with demographics—Russia has a surplus of women, while China has too many men. But as one Russian woman told me, "Chinese men are kinder and more attentive to their wives. And they usually have more money."
In the international relations department of Amur State University in Blagoveshchensk, the number of students studying Chinese increases every year, and more Russian students now learn Chinese as their first foreign language than English. The department is closing its European studies track and shutting down German and French. Soon, it will offer only Chinese and English.
"China is the destiny of Siberia, our present and future depends in every respect on what happens in China," Victor Dyatlov, a professor at Irkutsk State University and a top authority on Russian-Chinese relations, told me. "The only direction we can move in is integration and cooperation between Russia and China. But we don't know what form that integration will take."
But this local integration with China doesn't mean much to the larger picture, Dyatlov said. "The future of Siberia and its people is defined not by the people here but in Moscow," he said. "What people in Siberia think isn't that important. Siberia is the national treasure, and the people here are just meant to help the government exploit these resources."
Indeed, many people complain that Moscow treats the Russian Far East like a cash cow to be exploited for export income to China and cares little about how people here live. In February 2009, Russia and China signed a 20-year, $25 billion oil deal, and by the end of that term China could be getting one-quarter of its imported oil from Russia and Central Asia. Most of that oil will come from eastern Siberia, through a pipeline whose original route veered dangerously close to famously pristine Lake Baikal, prompting protests from Siberians. Russia also recently started selling electricity to China from the Bureya Dam, on a tributary of the Amur, at a price cheaper than Russians pay for electricity in Blagoveshchensk. "We don't like it," said Svetlana Kosikhina, the dean of the international relations department at Amur State. "Electricity is expensive here, and if we sell it to China, it's going to be even more expensive."
Even locals admit to a significant amount of skepticism about China's intentions toward the Russian Far East. Kukhalenko—as director of the Confucius Institute here, he's an employee of the Chinese government—said he assumes that "a lot" of the Chinese students in Blagoveshchensk are spies, "especially the ones who are older and who speak good Russian already." There are also rumors of a secret museum in Heihe—shown only to Chinese tourists—that displays maps showing Chinese control over the Russian Far East.
"We're not afraid, but we're wary. We just don't understand what they're going to do. It's a system that could rise up at any moment and attack us," Kosikhina said. "We have a saying here: 'Pessimists study Chinese.' "
Click here to view a slide show about where Russia meets China.Joshua Kucera is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

The Sunday London Times
Top scientists share their future predictions
From virtual brains and Matrix-like thought connections to disease-making bacteria, what the next decade could bring
Bryan Appleyard
Nothing much is going to happen in the next 10 years. Of course, that’s not counting the diesel-excreting bacteria, the sequencing of your entire genome for $1,000, massive banks of frozen human eggs, space tourism, the identification of dark matter, widespread sterilisation of young adults, telepathy, supercomputer models of our brains, the discovery of life’s origins, maybe the disappearance of Bangladesh and certainly the loss of 247m acres of tropical forest.
As I said, just another decade really.
These days, “just another decade” always means 10 years of future shock. Science, technology and the contemporary mania for change combine to stun the imagination. It is the way we live now, in a condition of permanent technological revolution.
In 2000 — remember? — the internet all but died when the dotcom stock market bubble burst. You could stand on top of the World Trade Center. And mobile phones were just, er, phones. Today, you still get up and eat breakfast, but, outside, it’s a different world.
Next? Well, as Woody Allen said, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans for the future. But, taking a punt, I reckon the brain is the one to watch. Science has been zeroing in on the 2lb 14oz of grey and white custard-like stuff between your ears for some time now. It’s not been easy. In spite of the evidence of The X Factor, the human brain is very complex custard indeed. But some people are getting very excited.
“By 2020, genetics and brain simulation will be giving us personalised prescriptions for marriage, lifestyle and healthcare.” This is Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain project in Switzerland, an attempt to reverse engineer the brain by building one from the ground up inside a supercomputer.
“We won’t need a psychologist to tell us why we feel unhappy. All we’ll need to do is log into a simulation of our own brain, navigate around in this virtual copy and find out the origins of our quirks ... Computers will look at a virtual copy of our brains and work out exactly what we need to stop our headaches, quiet the voices talking in our heads and climb out of the valley of depression to a world of colour and beauty.”
Gosh. But isn’t there still that pesky problem of other people and their brains? It’s their quirks that tend to get in the way of my happiness. No problem, we can climb inside each other’s brains.
“The big thing for me is being able to link two brains together for communication.” This is Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics scientist at Reading University. “This could have great implications for teaching. Sometimes, no matter how you explain something, it takes forever for the penny to drop.
It would also help to avoid misunderstandings.”
But, eek, what would it be like?
“Well, just like The Matrix with a plug in the back of the head into the brain, or yes, like a Bluetooth earpiece. It would have to be bidirectional, though, so thoughts could travel from you to someone else and back,” says Warwick, who has already implanted a microchip in his own arm so that he can open doors without needing to use a doorknob.
James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, thinks gene sequencing will be the key to unlock the custard and even stir it. “Disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, unipolar depression, obsessive-compulsive disease, attention deficit disorder and autism will finally have their genetic guts open for all to see.”
Some of the most impenetrable and harrowing mental illnesses known to man will, Watson believes, be understandable and maybe even curable.
“The exact location and biological function of the DNA variants causing many depressive disease and related disorders cannot be revealed too soon,” he says.
Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at Warwick and Oxford, agrees that brain diseases are the really big nasties. “Some leave sufferers horribly aware as they lose the ability to walk, to talk, to swallow. Others corrupt and destroy the mind, leaving an empty body. Some, such as CJD, are very rare, others frighteningly common. About 700,000 people in the UK have dementia.”
We are seeing more of these diseases because death rates from cancer and heart disease are falling so people are living long enough to develop them. Hope for cures is coming from stem-cell research, genetic and molecular analysis.
“There will be a breakthrough. My hunch is that research on motor neurone disease will provide crucial clues and by 2020 we will know why cells die in some, perhaps many, of these diseases. It could be another decade before we see the impact on health, but by 2020, we must be on the way to this ultimate goal of modern medical science,” says Blakemore.
Meanwhile, sex — you knew it was coming — will be even more recreational than it is now. The pill will continue to be the primary contraceptive device, says its inventor, Carl Djerassi, but sterilisation will be catching up.
“At present, people tend to have children and then are sterilised later on in life. In the future, sterilisation will happen earlier on in a person’s life, with gametes, male and female, extracted and stored in a reproductive bank account... Already we know that male sperm can be frozen for decades, but it is far more difficult to freeze women’s eggs. The problem is not yet solved — this is where research should be directed.”
Baroness Deech, a lawyer and bioethicist, agrees about the freezing thing. Women, she says, will have children later. “Late child-bearing will be assisted by advances in reproductive technology, enabling young women to freeze their eggs in their twenties and postpone child-bearing until it is convenient.”
The other breakthrough that Deech would like to see is “a return to stable two-parent families”. “It should be as acceptable to criticise a man who leaves his family as it is to criticise a smoker,” she says. “We have a great deal of law to protect children from potential abusers, but at the moment we say and do nothing when the greatest harm occurs to children, namely the break-up of their families. In 10 years’ time Britain will no longer be at the bottom of international tables of children’s happiness; marriage rates will rise and divorce fall.”
All very nice but, remember, humans may not be around long enough to enjoy all this. The environment is definitely going to get worse.
“I would love to be able to predict that all tropical deforestation would be halted by 2020,” says George McGavin at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, “but as humans can’t agree on the colour of shite, it is unlikely. My prediction is that the world will lose at least another 100m hectares [247m acres] of tropical forest.”
James Lovelock, our greatest and gloomiest deep green, doesn’t think humans can do much about global warming. It’s just the planet saying that we’ve outstayed our welcome. Nobody knows exactly how bad it will be and how quickly it will happen. But the possibilities are clear.
“As everyone is aware, one of the most threatened of places in the world is Bangladesh, which is in danger of flooding as the sea level rises — and the sea level really is rising. And once Bangladesh floods, there is almost nowhere else for people there to go but India, and it’s difficult to see how things like that could take place peacefully. And it’s things like that, I think, which will be drivers for trouble up ahead.”
Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum and professor of climate science at University College London, says we cannot cut emissions fast enough, so we need to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, perhaps using artificial trees that eat it.
“If it can be achieved, it will allow us to exploit the substantial reserves of oil, gas and coal to sustain society through the inevitably long and hard transition to a low-carbon world, without causing dangerous climate change. If ever there were a technical project that humanity should invest in, this is it.”
Craig Venter, the genetic maverick who first sequenced the human genome, may have one solution. He’s working on making bacteria that excrete diesel, leaving the Saudis wondering what to do with all that oil. “The debate on fuels and energy is blown out of proportion. We are very close to solving the energy needs in a way that will make our children enjoy cheaper and more efficient energy than what we see today,” he says.
We may all be in the same warming, flooded gutter but some of us are looking at the stars. Lord Rees, the astronomer royal and president of the Royal Society, is excited by the fact that we have discovered that most stars seem to have planets, and planets mean life. Possibly.
“Efforts to detect a signal from ‘ET’ are being pursued,” he says. “A new telescope in California, privately funded by the ex-Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, will allow much more sensitive searches than hitherto. I’m enthusiastic about these searches. It would fascinate all of us to detect a signal from space that’s clearly artificial.” Then he adds: “But I’m not holding my breath.”
Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin tycoon, is even more enthusiastic about activity in space in 2020. “Space tourism will have taken off,” he says, Nasa will have a “clear plan to get to Mars with a manned mission” and there will be a space station built on the moon.
“Oh, and before I forget, in 2020 I will be an astronaut along with thousands of others,” he adds.
It’s just another decade of future shock. So it goes. Of course, the real shock will be what actually happens, which is never the same as what people say will happen. But, anyway, the shocking Noughties are over, happy new ... good grief, we haven’t even predicted a name for it!
bryanappleyard.com

NY TIMES
The Body Electric
By WILLIAM SALETAN
THE DEPARTMENT OF MAD SCIENTISTS
How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, From the Internet to Artificial Limbs
By Michael Belfiore
295 pp. Smithsonian Books/Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99
Two years ago, in his book “Rocketeers,” Michael Belfiore celebrated the pioneers of the budding private space industry. Now he has returned to explore a frontier closer to home. The heroes of his new book, “The Department of Mad Scientists,” work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa, a secretive arm of the United States government. And the revolution they’re leading is a merger of humans with machines.
The revolution is happening before our eyes, but we don’t recognize it, because it’s incremental. It starts with driving. Cruise control transfers regulation of your car’s speed to a computer. In some models, you can upgrade to adaptive cruise control, which monitors the surrounding traffic by radar and adjusts your speed accordingly. If you drift out of your lane, an option called lane keeping assistance gently steers you back. For extra safety, you can get extended brake assistance, which monitors traffic ahead of you, alerts you to collision threats and applies as much braking pressure as necessary.
With each delegation of power, we become more comfortable with computers driving our cars. Soon we’ll want more. An insurance analyst tells Belfiore that aging baby boomers will lead the way, enlisting robotic drivers to help them get around. For younger drivers, the problem is multi­tasking. Why put down your cellphone when you can let go of the wheel instead? Reading, texting, talking and eating in the car aren’t distractions. Driving is the distraction. Let the car do it.
That’s where Darpa comes in. Belfiore traces the agency’s origins and exploits from the 1957 Sputnik launching (which shocked the United States government into technological action) to the 1969 birth of the original Internet, known as Arpanet, to Total Information Awareness, the controversial 2002 project that was supposed to scan telecommunications data for signs of terrorism. His tone is reverential and at times breathless, but he captures the agency’s essential virtues: boldness, creativity, agility, practicality and speed.
The Army needs vehicles that can move cargo without exposing human operators to bombs or enemy fire. To encourage development of such vehicles, Darpa sponsored a 2007 contest in which cars designed by 35 teams navigated a simulated urban war zone. The cars used systems like those already in consumer vehicles: GPS, lane guidance, calibrated braking. But instead of routing their information and advice through human drivers, the cars simply acted on it.
Belfiore recounts several low-impact crashes caused by the limited ability of current software to understand complex traffic situations. But with each successive contest since Darpa’s first robot-car race, the Grand Challenge, in 2004, performance has improved. In some respects, the robot cars already surpass us. Their reaction speed is better. They can see at night, thanks to laser range-­finders. They have no blind spots. And when networked, they can read one another’s intentions.
So maybe we’ll let robots drive our cars. But would you let a robot cut you open? That’s Darpa’s next project. In minimally invasive surgery, doctors insert very thin instruments through keyhole-size incisions. This minimizes pain, blood loss, infection risk and recovery time, but it’s hard. Surgeons have to manipulate their instruments indirectly and watch them on a video monitor. They might as well use a machine. It could execute their commands, give better video feedback and hold the instruments more steadily.
More than 850 hospitals already use such operating machines. Surgeons sit across the room from patients, connected to their instruments by game-style controls and three-dimensional video binoculars. When the machines meet resistance, the surgeons feel it. The goal is to engage the doctors’ senses as fully as if the mechanical eyes and hands were theirs. In fact, they are theirs. The surgeons’ minds map, orchestrate and experience the machine like an infant taking possession of its own body.
But if sensory feedback can extend a surgeon’s body across a room, why stop there? A new version of the machine adds Ethernet, freeing the doctor to inhabit a mechanical body anywhere with a good cable or wireless connection. By digitizing surgical commands, we’ve already created transitional moments in which maneuvers have been described but not executed. Why not extend this transition, playing out the surgery in virtual reality and then editing out any errors? That’s the next step: surgery with a word processor, so to speak, instead of a typewriter.
Unfortunately, the military doesn’t have these luxuries. Soldiers get wounded in faraway places without broadband or doctors, and they need help fast. That’s why Darpa wants mobile machines that can do surgery without human guidance. Such robots are in the works, according to Bel­fiore. Their initial repertory will be limited, but that’s O.K. They just have to keep the wounded alive for the hour it takes to reach a hospital. And with every life they save, they’ll begin to earn our trust.
So maybe you’ll let a robot fix your body. But would you let one join your body? In fact, the coupling is well under way. As troops come home from Iraq and Afghanistan with limbs blown off, they get computerized arms that read the body’s electrical signals. They’re cyborgs.
The next step is mutual adaptation. Amputees have always had to learn how to operate their new limbs. Now the limbs are returning the favor. Their software studies each user’s electrical signals, gradually becoming more accurate at interpreting commands. And though the user’s brain remains in charge, his body has become negotiable. Amputees are getting surgeries to make their motor signals more readable by myoelectric arms. The human is being reconfigured for the machine.
The eventual payoff isn’t just parity with unreconstructed humans. It’s superiority. Some mechanical arms now exceed the reach of human arms. Last year, a disabled sprinter was forbidden to run in Olympic-level track meets on his carbon-fiber legs because they were deemed too fast. And computerized limbs can be networked. Belfiore recalls a recent conversation with an Iraq war amputee about whether his new hand could manipulate a mouse. “Why do I need a mouse?” he asked. “Why can’t I plug my arm right into a USB port?”
For that matter, who needs a USB port? Limb designers have devised injectable sensors that can transmit motor commands to artificial arms through wireless signals. Once you can operate an arm wirelessly, you don’t need it attached to your body. You can control it from anywhere.
But your arm can also be hacked. And that raises an unsettling question: If humans marry machines, who will control the marriage? In its 2007 car contest, Darpa took elaborate measures to stop robots from going rogue. Each vehicle was outfitted with multiple shutdown devices and trailed by a human driver with a kill switch. The penalty for the slightest disobedience was immediate disqualification. But at least one team, according to Belfiore, liked to run simulations with its car’s “software aggression level cranked up into what they jokingly called Rambo mode.”
Imagine your arm in Rambo mode. Something like that has already been reported: Michael Weisskopf, a journalist who lost his right hand in Iraq, was making a turn in rush-hour traffic sometime later when, as Belfiore describes it, Weiss­kopf’s new hand “clenched the wheel of his car in a death grip and refused to let go.” It was just a misunderstanding. But electronic limbs are being programmed to make more and more decisions. After all, it isn’t just your body anymore. It’s theirs, too.
William Saletan writes the Human Nature column for Slate and is the author of “Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.”

From The London Times
Why the music cassette has never died
Central to the lingering affection that people still have for tapes is the fact that you can compile them yourself
Pete Paphides
Richard Goldsmith, of the upscale hi-fi geeksters’ paradise Audio Gold, dismisses the notion of a a dying format. “I’m not sure there’s any such thing,” he says. Cast your eye around his North London shop, and you can see why he might say such a thing. Walking past turntables and transistors that look like exhibits from a design museum, he shows me a cassette player priced at a bracing £450. It’s made by Nakamichi, who prided themselves on divining hitherto unimagined clarity from the humble C90. The best thing about it, though, is the way it changes tape sides. Through the Perspex window, you can see a mechanism, tantamount to a small robot hand, physically turn the tape around to start playing it. Goldsmith says he would be surprised if the machine is still here by the end of the week. They are, apparently, popular with middle-aged reggae fans.
Tempting as it is to herald the return of the cassette, it appears that the format introduced by Philips as a dictation aid in 1963 never quite went away. This week Island Records announced that sales of the 4,000 cassettes they decided to produce of Words for You had exceeded all expectations. HMV and the leading supermarkets have long since stopped selling tapes, but the album, on which celebrities such Joanna Lumley and Martin Shaw read poetry while classical music trills prettily along in the background, still managed to sell out on Amazon. By contrast, only 746 of the 200,000 copies of Words for You sold have been downloads. Thousands more cassettes are being manufactured in time for Christmas. “What’s exciting,” says an Island spokesman, Ian Brown, “is that we don’t know how big the market is because no one realised there was a demand.”
You can’t help feeling that this has been a howling great oversight. Having worked out that old people are one of the few age groups that will pay for music, Decca threw its weight behind We’ll Meet Again: The Very Best of Vera Lynn and saw their efforts repaid with a No 1 record. How many more might they have sold if they had also put it out on tape? It’s tempting to smile indulgently at your silver-haired elders as they persist with their old Val Doonican cassettes. It may just be, however, that older people are privy to specialised knowledge that comes only with the passing of the decades. There are some environments in which the tape wins over all other formats.
As the iconically hip, left-of-leftfield guitarist of Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore may be an unlikely bedfellow for the sort of septuagenarians who think Mpegs are what you hang your Mcoats on. But even during the CD’s early supremacy, Moore’s devotion to the cassette never wavered. Four years ago he published Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, a love letter to what he calls “the most personal of all formats”. Occasionally he produces limited-edition cassette runs of releases on his Ecstatic Peace label. “The cassette offers one of the great listening experiences,” he says. “That friction of the tape against the head is unbeatable. Then you’ve got the aesthetic difference. You find a mixtape that someone has made for you, and there is no mistaking the amount of care and affection that has gone into it.”
By any criteria, Moore’s obsession is extreme. He has thousands of meticulously filed CDs released on cottage-industry imprints with such names as Chocolate Monk and Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers — labels that equate the cassettes’ affordability and apparent obsolescence with their underground credentials. He is not alone. In Camden Market, the must-have accessory of 2009 was the bag designed to look like a cassette.
It’s all very well, but does this sort of loyalty have its basis in anything other than nostalgia? Not if a furious essay that appeared two weeks ago on the American music site Popmatters is anything to go by. Despite left-field releases by the likes of Dirty Projectors and Crystal Castles that sold out their cassette runs, Calum Marsh, author of Reconsidering the Revival of Cassette Tape Culture, insists that “at best, the cassette revival is merely a vacuous fad of no genuine value . . . at worst, a confused, cultural misstep more dangerous than most would care to admit”.
Might it not be that tapes offer something that subsequent technologies have failed to provide? Moore maintains that the CD is a vulnerable format that is designed to be re-bought. Anyone who has tried to keep CDs in a car — you might as well attack them with a cheese knife — must surely concur. On CDs the information is exposed. On cassettes it is protected by a plastic shell. The price of cassettes at my local charity shop — a can’t-give-them-away 20p a throw — suggests that, in the neophilia of the 21st century, these are considerations we may have simply forgotten about.
Since I started relieving Oxfam of their surplus, I have filled my car with albums by the Supremes, Van Morrison, James Brown and Talk Talk. Surprisingly, the cassette era even extends to relatively recent gems such as Radiohead’s Kid A. Better still, the foetal bass and padded cell production of that album’s highlights — Everything in its Right Place, Morning Bell — is perfectly suited to the warm, cocooned ambience of magnetic tape.
Of course, central to the lingering affection that people have for tapes is the fact that you could compile them yourself. “Home taping is killing music,” warned the skull and crossbones on the back of several major label releases in the early 1980s. I still have the first cassette of songs I ever recorded from the radio. Thirty years after I removed it from its case, my red ferric BASF C90 features excerpts from that Sunday night staple Star Choice, in which a celebrity of the day got to be DJ for a couple of hours. Separated only by inter-song banter from the Birmingham City star striker Trevor Francis are such hits as Chicago’s If You Leave Me and ELO’s Living Thing.
Victoria Hesketh, of Little Boots fame, is 16 years younger than me, but even she remembers sourcing her music by a similar means. “Oh, absolutely. You would sit by the tape recorder with your finger poised on the pause button because you’d want to catch it before the DJ started talking.” Take away the technologies of the era and such behaviour was no different from that of ten-year-olds illegally downloading the latest N-Dubz and Chipmunk hits to their computers. So why did it somehow not feel as wrong?
Moore thinks that the moral differential lies in the aesthetic merits of the two formats: “File sharing is utterly unsexy,” he says. “It takes no time at all to knock up a playlist from your iTunes folder and give it to someone.”
He surely has a point, and one that’s reflected in the monetary decline in the value of music. Everything to do with consuming music has become easier. In the past when you compiled a tape for someone, the time spent making it was central to its perceived value. You would also have a fairly good idea that each track followed on smoothly from the last one because the compilation would have been made in real time.
Moore compares DIY compilations to scrimshaws — pieces of whalebone on which voyaging sailors would make ornate carvings. “Sometimes I go to yard sales to buy cassettes compiled by people who are complete strangers to me. You see something that has ‘Marty’s Mix’ scrawled on it in ballpoint pen. You take it home and you don’t know if it’s going to be US post-punk hardcore or Kenny Rogers. Whatever it is, though, I know I’m getting a slice of someone’s life. Cassettes are the only format that can give you that.”

A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic

By MANOHLA DARGIS NY TIMES
With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.
The story behind the story, including a production budget estimated to top $230 million, and Mr. Cameron’s future-shock ambitions for the medium have already begun to settle into myth (a process partly driven by the publicity, certainly). Every filmmaker is something of a visionary, just by virtue of the medium. But Mr. Cameron, who directed the megamelodrama “Titanic” and, more notably, several of the most influential science-fiction films of the past few decades (“The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), is a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW.
The scale of his new movie, which brings you into a meticulous and brilliantly colored alien world for a fast 2 hours 46 minutes, factors into that wow. Its scope is evident in an early scene on a spaceship (the year is 2154), where the passengers, including a paraplegic ex-Marine, Jake (Sam Worthington, a gruffly sensitive heartthrob), are being roused from a yearslong sleep before landing on a distant inhabited moon, Pandora. Jake is woken by an attendant floating in zero gravity, one of many such aides. As Jake himself glides through the bright cavernous space, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore, as someone soon quips (a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Cameron’s favorite film). You also know you’re not in the gloom of “The Matrix.”
Though it’s easy to pigeonhole Mr. Cameron as a gear head who’s more interested in cool tools (which here include 3-D), he is, with “Avatar,” also making a credible attempt to create a paradigm shift in science-fiction cinema. Since it was first released in 1999, “The Matrix,” which owes a large debt to Mr. Cameron’s own science-fiction films as well as the literary subgenre of cyberpunk, has hung heavily over both SF and action filmmaking. Most films that crib from “The Matrix” tend to borrow only its slo-mo death waltzes and leather fetishism, keeping its nihilism while ditching the intellectual inquiries. Although “Avatar” delivers a late kick to the gut that might be seen as nihilistic (and how!), it is strangely utopian.
It doesn’t take Jake long to feel the good vibes. Like Neo, the savior-hero of the “Matrix” series played by Keanu Reeves, Jake is himself an avatar because he’s both a special being and an embodiment of an idea, namely that of the hero’s journey. What initially makes Jake unusual is that he has been tapped to inhabit a part-alien, part-human body that he controls, like a puppeteer, from its head to its prehensile tail. Like the rest of the human visitors who’ve made camp on Pandora, he has signed on with a corporation that’s intent on extracting a valuable if mysterious substance from the moon called unobtainium, a great whatsit that is an emblem of humanity’s greed and folly. With his avatar, Jake will look just like one of the natives, the Na’vi, a new identity that gives the movie its plot turns and politics.
The first part of Jake’s voyage — for this is, above all, a boy’s rocking adventure, if one populated by the usual tough Cameron chicks — takes him from a wheelchair into a 10-foot, blue-skinned Na’vi body. At once familiar and pleasingly exotic, the humanoid Na’vi come with supermodel dimensions (slender hips, a miniature-apple rear); long articulated digits, the better to grip with; and the slanted eyes and twitchy ears of a cat. (The gently curved stripes that line their blue skin, the color of twilight, bring to mind the markings on mackerel tabby cats.) For Jake his avatar, which he hooks into through sensors while lying in a remote pod in a semiconscious state, is at first a giddy novelty and then a means to liberation.
Plugging into the avatar gives Jake an instant high, allowing him to run, leap and sift dirt through his toes, and freeing him from the constraints of his body. Although physically emancipated, he remains bound, contractually and existentially, to the base camp, where he works for the corporation’s top scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, amused and amusing), even while taking orders from its head of security, Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a military man turned warrior for hire. A cartoon of masculinity, Quaritch strides around barking orders like some intransigent representation of American military might (or a bossy movie director). It’s a favorite Cameron type, and Mr. Lang, who until this year had long been grievously underemployed, tears into the role like a starved man gorging on steak.
Mr. Cameron lays out the fundamentals of the narrative efficiently, grabbing you at once with one eye-popping detail after another and on occasion almost losing you with some of the comically broad dialogue. He’s a masterly storyteller if a rather less nimble prose writer. (He has sole script credit: this is personal filmmaking on an industrial scale.) Some of the clunkier lines (“Yeah, who’s bad,” Jake taunts a rhinolike creature he encounters) seem to have been written to placate those members of the Michael Bay demographic who might find themselves squirming at the story’s touchier, feelier elements, its ardent environmentalism and sincere love story, all of which kick in once Jake meets Neytiri, a female Na’vi (Zoë Saldana, seen only in slinky Na’vi form).
Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in “Avatar” back in the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn’t exist until recently. New digital technologies gave him the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an actor’s physical movements into a computer-generated image (CGI). Until now, by far the most plausible character created in this manner has been slithery Gollum from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” cycle. The exotic creatures in “Avatar,” which include an astonishment of undulating, flying, twitching and galloping organisms, don’t just crawl through the underbrush; they thunder and shriek, yip and hiss, pointy teeth gleaming.
The most important of these are the Na’vi, and while their movements can bring to mind old-fashioned stop-motion animation, their faces are a triumph of tech innovation, with tremors and twitches that make them immediately appealing and empathetic. By the time Neytiri ushers Jake into her world of wonders — a lush dreamscape filled with kaleidoscopic and bioluminescent flora and fauna, with pink jellyfishlike creatures that hang in the air and pleated orange flowers that snap shut like parasols — you are deep in the Na’vi-land. It’s a world that looks as if it had been created by someone who’s watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau television or, like Mr. Cameron, done a lot of diving. It’s also familiar because, like John Smith in “The New World,” Terrence Malick’s retelling of the Pocahontas story, Jake has discovered Eden.
An Eden in three dimensions, that is. In keeping with his maximalist tendencies, Mr. Cameron has shot “Avatar” in 3-D (because many theaters are not equipped to show 3-D, the movie will also be shown in the usual 2), an experiment that serves his material beautifully. This isn’t the 3-D of the 1950s or even contemporary films, those flicks that try to give you a virtual poke in the eye with flying spears. Rather Mr. Cameron uses 3-D to amplify the immersive experience of spectacle cinema. Instead of bringing you into the movie with the customary tricks, with a widescreen or even Imax image filled with sweeping landscapes and big action, he uses 3-D seemingly to close the space between the audience and the screen. He brings the movie to you.
After a few minutes the novelty of people and objects hovering above the row in front of you wears off, and you tend not to notice the 3-D, which speaks to the subtlety of its use and potential future applications. Mr. Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but he’s an old-fashioned filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise as Jake eventually does. On the face of it there might seem something absurd about a movie that asks you to thrill to a natural world made almost entirely out of zeroes and ones (and that feeds you an anticorporate line in a corporately financed entertainment). But one of the pleasures of the movies is that they transport us, as Neytiri does with Jake, into imaginary realms, into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz.
If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it’s because “Avatar” is as much about our Earth as the universe that Mr. Cameron has invented. But the movie’s truer meaning is in the audacity of its filmmaking.
Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life (instead of iPhone size), if only because we were children. Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What’s often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn’t changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder.
AVATAR
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Written and directed by James Cameron;

'Road Out of Hell' a chilling true-crime tale
By Mae Anderson Associated Press
The Road Out of Hell: Sanford Clark and the True Story of the Wineville MurdersBy Anthony Flacco, with Jerry Clark.Union Square Press. 304 pp. $24.95.
This is a darkly disturbing true account of a 13-year-old boy, Sanford Clark, sent to live with his uncle on an isolated chicken farm in California in 1926.
Clark is quickly subjected to all manner of abuse by his uncle, Gordon Stewart Northcott, a psychopath and sadist who lures young boys to the farm to sexually assault, torture and kill them, to Clark's slowly dawning horror.
Northcott forces Clark to help with his grisly deeds, rendering the boy so guilty and terrified that even when he escapes once, he's afraid of how he might be received and slinks back to the farm.
Flacco depicts Clark's life with the aid of court transcripts, newspaper articles and interviews with Clark's son, yet he chooses to tell the story mostly from Clark's perspective.
There are many scenes between the uncle and Clark only, so it's impossible to know how much is verbatim from accounts and how much is influenced by Flacco, a screenwriter and author of historical novels and true-crime books. Still, the effect is visceral and haunting, simply by suggesting the exchanges that might have occurred between Northcott and Clark.
One of the boys reported missing and killed by Northcott, Walter Collins, became part of a notorious case involving the LAPD (depicted in the movie The Changeling), when police tried to send a boy who was not Walter home with his mother.
However, that case is barely mentioned in the book because Flacco keeps the narrative tightly focused on Clark and what happened on the farm. That approach sacrifices some background and perspective but creates an intensely unsettling, almost claustrophobic atmosphere. Clark's guilt and shame at what he is forced to do and bear is palpable, and when he finally manages to escape from Northcott after two years, with the help of his sister Jessie, he not surprisingly has difficulty getting past what he has gone through.
Flacco, with the help of Clark's son Jerry, paints a vivid portrait in the latter part of the book of a man who went on to marry, raise two sons and serve in World War II.
It is ostensibly a tale of redemption, but the book also makes it clear how disturbed Clark was for the rest of his life. It was a time when counseling and therapy weren't common, so Clark simply bore the pain, rarely discussing his past and suffering from flashbacks and periods of deep depression for the rest of his life.
The Road Out of Hell is a chilling look at a chapter in America's criminal annals.

NYPD tracks gun in deadly Times Square shooting
By COLLEEN LONG (AP)
NEW YORK — Authorities on Friday said a machine pistol used by a street hustler shot dead in a Times Square gunfight was purchased at a Virginia gun shop whose business card was found in the aspiring rapper's pocket, and they were looking for the woman who bought the gun.
Raymond Martinez, who wrote songs about staring down cops in Times Square and hawked CDs to tourists, was carrying a pocketful of business cards from Virginia gun dealers and a stolen Mac-10 pistol when he was killed by a plainclothes officer near the Marriott Marquis hotel. The handgun, which held 30 rounds, jammed after Martinez got off three shots.
Jordan Kelsey-Stewart, 25, bought the weapon from Dale's Guns in Powhatan, Va., chief NYPD police spokesman Paul Browne said. Officials with Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are trying to find her and are investigating whether she had any connection with Martinez; a telephone listing for her could not immediately be found on Friday.
Police said Kelsey-Stewart reported the gun stolen from her car Oct. 28 in Richmond, Va. It was unclear how Martinez obtained it, and there was some evidence he owned it for only a brief period of time — weeks at most and perhaps just days.
Investigators also were trying to determine whether Martinez had other weapons. They said they found a .22-caliber handgun during a police search of Martinez's home on Friday.
"We're actively investigating whether he was involved in purchasing firearms," Browne said.
Dale Blankenship, who owns Dale's Guns, said he provided the information about who bought the gun to the ATF earlier Friday. He said Kelsey-Stewart was from the Richmond area, had all the proper identification and passed a background check when she purchased the weapon.
Blankenship said she bought the gun by herself. He didn't know what happened to the gun after he sold it.
"I have no idea," he told The Associated Press. "I really don't know what happened. I don't know how the gun was stolen."
Martinez, 25, went by the rap name "Ready" and regularly sold CDs for his group, Square Free, in Times Square. He was part of a freelance collection of hawkers who sell self-produced wares on the street.
Police said Martinez ran a scam in which he would autograph a CD or put a passerby's name on it, and then demand payment of $10. He had been arrested June 19 at 1515 Broadway, the exact same location where Thursday's confrontation started, for not having a tax stamp, which allows hawkers to sell their self-produced wares.
Vendors selling their own work are protected by the First Amendment and fall outside the stricter regulation of vendors selling retail goods.
The sheer number of vendors in Times Square and their aggressiveness lead to frequent confrontations with authorities trying to catch counterfeiters and protect tourists from scams.
Martinez and his brother are well known to regular Times Square denizens and videos of them rapping and getting hassled by police are posted on YouTube. In one shaky video, Martinez shouts, "They ain't taking me nowhere!" and "I'm ready to lay some down!" as officers, their hands in their pockets, escort him from the area. His lyrics talk of hawking CDs and staring down cops.
Sgt. Christopher Newsom usually works in uniform on a task force that tracks aggressive peddling. He was in plainclothes when he stopped Martinez on Thursday and asked him for his tax stamp, setting off the chase and shootout.
Josiah Deandrea, who was distributing fliers Friday to a comedy act a block from the shooting scene, said he had seen Martinez in the area in the past.
"Nobody had any idea he had a gun," Deandrea said.
Daniel O'Phalen, 24, who passes out fliers in Times Square for the musical "White Christmas," said Martinez was part of a regular crew of CD salesmen. Sometimes, he said, the group would order him off a corner, saying he was on their territory.
"They're pushy. They're not nice guys," he said.
Still, it's rare that police encounters with peddlers escalate to gunfire.
"These are usually quality-of-life violations, and they typically do not escalate, they don't involve violators being armed," Browne said.
If Martinez had recently gone looking for a gun, it wouldn't have been unusual for him to look out of state.
Because buying a firearm is so difficult in New York, people barred from owning pistols here often travel south to shop at gun shows where there are no required background checks for people buying secondhand weapons. Martinez didn't have a license to own a firearm.
There is also a steady supply of guns purchased at southern gun shops and smuggled north.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been a fierce critic of gun stores with a record of selling weapons that later wound up in the hands of criminals, suing several of them in recent years for reckless conduct and driving several out of business.
There are "too many guns on the streets," the mayor said Friday. "This is one of the great public health threats. And our police officers are clearly in danger."
The machine pistol like the type used Thursday are rare in the city: only 26 have been recovered so far this year, compared with 5,427 other guns. In 2008, there were 46 recovered, and 5,959 other guns.
Associated Press writers Cristian Salazar, David B. Caruso, Adam Goldman, Ula Ilnytzky and Sara Kugler in New York and Dena Potter in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The Sunday London Times
Colton Harris-Moore, the barefoot boy bandit, outfoxes sheriffs
In the forests and remote islands around Seattle, police are setting traps for a barefoot teenage outlaw who has eluded them for nearly two years.
Police say 18-year-old Colton Harris-Moore, whose escapades are turning him into a folk legend, is a one-man crime wave, responsible for 50 burglaries as well as stealing light aircraft, which he taught himself to fly from video games, and several speedboats.
He lives in the woods, shuns shoes and catches his own food. His only technological aid is a pair of thermal-imaging goggles to hunt at night and his weakness is pizzas, which he asks to be delivered at the edge of the woods.
For some Harris-Moore is a modern Butch Cassidy: a surprisingly agile 6ft 5in cat burglar who thanks his victims by leaving them notes and cheeky photographs of himself, which have sold for £300 on eBay.
Thousands subscribe to his Facebook page and his image appears on T-shirts with the logo “Fly, Colton, Fly!”. Local rock groups have penned songs about him.
Hollywood producers have lodged lucrative film deals with his family and offered to pay for lawyers if he gives himself up.
Raised in a caravan on Camano Island, an isolated community in the Puget Sound, Harris-Moore started living wild at the age of seven. He would break into holiday homes, steal blankets and food and vanish into the woods for days.
In April 2008, after being sent to a juvenile detention centre, he complained that the beds were too short for his lanky frame and went on the run.
Police believe he fled to Canada and then, a few weeks ago, came back across the border to Idaho where he stole a Cessna 182 and flew to Seattle. He crash-landed in a forest clearing and walked away with cuts and bruises.
Since then he has been accused of stealing other planes for hops around the islands in the Puget Sound, including another Cessna belonging to a disc jockey who vented his frustration on radio, saying: “He still doesn’t know how to land a plane in one piece.”
He evaded a police pursuit by crashing a Mercedes-Benz into a roadside gas storage tank, using the explosion as a diversion to escape back into the woods where, he says, he feels like a Native American.
This was followed by the largest manhunt in recent memory. Three dozen sheriffs, aided by specialist armed units and an FBI helicopter, fanned out across Camano Island but failed to capture him. “We saw him, we think, but it’s like he disappeared in front of our eyes,” said one sheriff.
His luck may be about to run out. During a recent sweep a rifle shot was fired at police, raising his status to “armed and dangerous”. His mother, Pamela Kohler, now fears that even if he did not fire the shot he will be held responsible.
Kohler said she was proud her son had stolen the aircraft because he had never had a flying lesson in his life. “I was going to send him to flight school, but I guess I don’t have to,” she said. “I’d tell him the next time he took a plane: wear a parachute and practise your landing.
“If he shot that gun, it was really stupid. I don’t expect him to come out of the woods alive.”

From The London Times
How Dubai's burst bubble has left behind the last days of Rome
Hugh Tomlinson and James McLean in Dubai
The engine of the black Corvette revved to a gasket-popping roar. Its driver leant out of his window. He was dressed in traditional Arab robes but wore a rubber wizard’s mask. He held an aerosol aloft and directed a jet of party foam into the air. Four-wheel drives plastered in pictures of Dubai’s Royal Family roared their engines back in approval. The cacophony was deafening.
On the opposite carriageway smoke billowed from the spinning back wheels of a new Land Cruiser as the driver pressed the brakes and floored the accelerator. This was the favourite way for many of the fervently patriotic and car crazy Emiratis to mark National Day in Dubai this week, the 38th anniversary of the founding of the United Arab Emirates, and one of the biggest celebrations of the year.
A mile away at the new Marina Yacht Club, Western expats were also working their way into a party mood. Deferential Filipino staff served a foamy lobster broth as an amuse bouche between courses. Beer and cocktails loosened tongues and a knot of dancers formed in front of the band. Tens of millions of pounds worth of powerboats bobbed at their moorings beneath the revelry on the terrace. Behind the boats a dozen skyscrapers framed the view, a few of the lights in their thousands of flats were on. “It’s so beautiful here,” said a pretty young Anglo-Indian woman clutching a large glass of chilled white wine and taking in the scene.
Welcome to the modern equivalent of the last days of Rome. The failure of Dubai World, one of the Emirate’s flagship companies, to honour a debt due last month has rocked this city state to its foundations. By any conventional logic Dubai is now a busted flush.
Superficially there has been no change to life here in the days since the failure to pay up triggered financial carnage but nowhere does superficial as convincingly as Dubai.
The Emirate has been struggling for many months, and if you scratch the surface the pain in this new and gaudy metropolis is palpable. Ross, who asked not to be identified, is one of countless expatriates who have been caught out by the collapse in Dubai’s once-booming property market.
Like many he bought a flat off-plan in what was a red-hot property market. Today he is trapped, his passport confiscated until he repays bank loans he used to invest in a property that may never exist. If his work dries up before he can clear his debts he will go to jail.
We met at a coffee shop in Dubai’s vast Mall of the Emirates. Around us were some of Britain’s most familiar high street names — Next, Debenhams, Virgin, Costa Coffee and Harvey Nichols. For now trade is still brisk. “I’m struggling to know what to do really,” he said.
Borrowing from family to supplement his savings, Ross, in his early thirties, moved with his family to Dubai from South London in late 2006, put down a £60,000 deposit and arranged a £30,000 loan to help to cover the initial instalments on a £350,000 two-bedroom apartment in the Dubai Sports City development.
“The plan was to let the place out to cover the loan and mortgage but it was scheduled for completion by the end of 2008 and they haven’t finished the ground floor yet,” he said. Without the apartment to boost the family’s income, the high cost of living forced them back to Britain. The debts became overwhelming in a city where non-payment is a criminal offence. Ross returned for some contract work but he was held on arrival at the airport by the police.
The Sports City developer, Middle East Development, told him that work on his property will restart before the end of the year but will take at least 18 months to complete without any further delays. Even if it were to meet this schedule it will be three years late.
Ross’s options are stark. He must keep working to pay off the bank, borrow from his family, leave Dubai illegally and lose the apartment or go to jail. “The worst-case scenario is that I have to lean on friends or family to get the money together. It’s that or jail — it’s a no-brainer really.” For now he is looking no further than Christmas, trying to decide whether to fly his wife and three children out to Dubai for the holiday.
He is far from alone. The handful of cars dumped by expatriates at the airport each week bear testament to that, and talk of a speculative property market gone sour.
The scale of overbuilding in Dubai, paid for by a phenomenal debt binge facilitated by British and international banks, is hard to conceive until you see it. The world’s tallest building, the 2,600ft Burj Tower, is due to open next month. Its spectral presence looms over the city, its pointed top a needle to the bubble.
On the road tunnel into Palm Jumeirah, the famous tree-shaped property development reclaimed from the sea, is a mural. It depicts Palm Jumeirah itself, the bigger Palm Jebel Ali and the gargantuan Palm Deira, as well as the other massive sea reclamation development The World. All are the responsibility of Dubai World’s real estate arm, Nakheel. Only one, Palm Jumeirah, on which houses were given to British footballers to help to lure ordinary investors, is all but complete.
A year ago Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, began a fireworks display here so vast that it could be seen from space. This week one resident said that she had just knocked the annual rent on her Palm villa down by two thirds to a little more than £1,000 a month.
The other Palm projects and The World, despite the computer-generated images in the tourist brochures and websites showing green trees and completed houses, are a collection of imported rock and dredged sand on which building work has stopped.
Even more fanciful plans — for a massive seawater canal to be dug around the city to enable waterside properties in the desert hinterland, and another vast offshore island complex called The Universe, are no longer mentioned.
Work on dozens of new skyscrapers continues but building has slowed to a crawl on others. More than 40 per cent of newly built offices are already untenanted, and the available space is expected to double by 2011.
Thousands of the migrant labourers who were bussed in from their desert camps to build Dubai have left as the construction boom faltered. The investment bank UBS thinks that the population of Dubai is shrinking.
The borrowed money has not just gone on property. A state-of-the-art metro train system, operated by Serco, opened amid much fanfare in September at a cost of $7.6 billion. At 9.30am on a Thursday the station at Dubai airport’s cavernous Terminal 3 is empty. The train into the city, capable of carrying more than 640 people, has 21 on board.
Western expats who have been here for a decade or more are still well ahead on their investments even if, as some forecasts predict, house prices dip by 70 per cent from their peaks.