From The Times
The Link: the first paper for lonely hearts dating ads
In 1915, a publication was founded for personal ads.

These days, friendship, sex or even love is seemingly only a click away. With the internet, it’s never been easier or more convenient to meet those who share your interests, however bizarre or mundane, and even to find the man or woman of your dreams. From Facebook and MySpace to Match.com and Dating Direct, we, at least in the industrialised West, and increasingly elsewhere, are all advertisers now.
At one time, all ads were in the form of short, pithy paragraphs of text, the first of which – a statement of ecclesiastical rules governing the Easter festival – was printed in 1477 by William Caxton. However, ads like these only began to be used to find husbands and wives in the 1690s, around 50 years after the invention of the modern newspaper – the first reference is in the agony column of a periodical called The Athenian Mercury in 1692. By the early 18th century, however, matrimonial advertising was booming.
At first glance, the early advertisements do not seem so different from those that became common in the 20th century. Men looked for wives, women for husbands, and some even looked for unspecified “arrangements”. Such was the popularity of these columns that one young lady in 1777 could even complain that “the mode of advertising is become too general” – although that did not prevent her from placing her own ad, seeking “a man of fashion, honour, and sentiment, blended with good nature, and a noble spirit, such a one she would chuse for her guardian and protector”.
As they have done ever since, these advertisements catered for those slightly at odds with traditional forms of courtship and morality, sometimes women just beyond the customary age of marriage or those distanced from the usual connections of family.
Yet although there were thousands of devotees, the anonymity involved – not to mention the necessity of giving chapter and verse on income and prospects in each ad – lent a mercenary air to the whole enterprise and ensured that it was not quite the done thing in polite society.
At the end of the 19th century, however, the matrimonial ad gained a new prominence and respectability. With much of Britain’s population living in cities by the 1890s, social commentators were becoming concerned that traditional courtship was increasingly outdated. Modern workers, they feared, were spending all their time at the office or in distant suburban lodgings and were finding it hard to meet suitable partners, with the result that some were resorting to the social life of the street and all its illicit temptations. Some respectable journalists, philanthropists and thinkers therefore began to argue that the small ad might be a solution to the difficulties of marriage and the anonymity of modern life.
By the First World War, things had progressed a step further. One journalist, Alfred Barrett, realised that small ads need not serve only those who wanted to marry but also those who were simply looking for companionship. In 1915 he founded The Link, which sought to make this sort of “companionship” advertising stylish and lighthearted rather than earnest, solemn and intellectual. Inevitably, his lonely hearts ads attracted criticism from those worried they were a threat to conventional morality and in a landmark case Barrett’s paper was suppressed in 1921 for “corrupting public morals”.
Looking for a manly Hercules
Alfred Barrett naturally argued that his paper, whose masthead proclaimed it to be “helpful, clean, and straight”, was nothing but honest and safe. But R.A. Bennett, editor of the muck-raking newspaper Truth, and his moralising ilk clearly thought otherwise. He studiously went through The Link’s ten pages with a green pencil and marked what he thought were the most dangerous advertisements, underlining the key words and phrases for the benefit of the police.
The section devoted to women was, he wrote, “frank enough”, as it seemed to promise adventure with all sorts of “sporty” or “jolly” girls, such as the one from “Bohemian Girl, 24”, who was “interested in most things”, and wanted a “man pal”. Ads such as this, Bennett said, looked foolish, but were probably harmless, unlike a number of those placed by men that seemed to be of rather dubious morality and legality. There was, for example, one from “Iolaus?24”, who described himself as “intensely musical” and of a “peculiar temperament”. He had, he said, been “looking for many years for [a] tall, manly Hercules”. Another came from an “Oxonian?26”, also seeking a man pal, who was “brilliant, courteous, humorous, [a] poet, future novelist, in love with beauty despite cosmic insignificance, [and] masculine”.
These coded words, Bennett argued, “speak for themselves as plainly as such an advertisement could”. As he hardly needed to point out, these advertisers were breaking the law, since not only was sex between men illegal at this time, but so too were any attempts to arrange it. Indeed Bennett had felt prompted to send the paper to the police after hearing about a youth who had made, he said, “various acquaintances of which his mother strongly disapproves”.
The court case
In spite of these objections, The Link might have continued and even prospered if it hadn’t been for an unfortunate coincidence. Shortly after the police received Bennett’s highlighted copy of The Link in September 1920, a self-styled bohemian named Walter Birks was arrested in Carlisle on a charge of fraud, and was found to be carrying love letters from one William Ernest Smyth, a 22-year-old clerk living in Belfast. When a police officer visited Smyth’s rooms, he discovered evidence of a passionate and lengthy correspondence between the two men, and hundreds of letters from other people. It soon emerged that the correspondence between Smyth and Birks, as well as their subsequent love affair, had been initially arranged via the pages of The Link.
Some of Smyth’s letters were from another clerk – an ex-serviceman named Geoffrey Smith, from Enfield, near London. All three advertisers were arrested and charged with conspiring to commit “gross indecency”. As for Barrett, he was charged with aiding and abetting his advertisers, conspiring to enable the commission of such unnatural acts, and also with the offence of “corrupting public morals by introducing men to women for fornication”.
If that was not enough to persuade a jury of what was going on behind the pages of The Link, evidence could be produced of a Major Lombard (“artistic, musical and literary”), who had asked for introductions to 12 men, and had also sent in a photo of himself dressed as a woman. The connection between The Link and homosexuality seemed clear enough. But was it, as the prosecution argued, also an “advertisement pimp” which encouraged heterosexual “fornication” and the prostitution of women?
The evidence for that was much thinner. Most of the advertisements placed by women were, on the face of it, tame to say the least. To modern eyes, it would seem that few could have had any objections to the “Gentlewoman (London, S. W), young widow, very good standing?[who] would like to meet cultured man, 30–40”. Still less could moral panic be inspired by the “Catholic lady (Abroad)”, who “would appreciate letters from gentlemen anywhere in England or Rhine Army”.
However, the prosecution argued that amid the sea of notices placed by innocuous widows, there were definitely ads that were pernicious, some of which even seemed to have been placed by married women. One ad introduced at the trial was placed by a “Young Grass Widow”, who frankly admitted that she wished “to meet [a] straightforward man” in what seemed to be an adulterous quest.
Some of the more obvious heterosexual advertisements were placed by men, such as the “Lothario, London West, 30”, who wanted “cuddlesome girls”, and who was “fond river, dancing, pleasure”. But other ads were apparently connected to much more serious matters than straightforward seduction, and the prosecution used them to insinuate that women had been put in harm’s way and the public’s morals corrupted by the promiscuous mixing of the sexes. One ad from 1921 placed by a “Widow, (London W), greatly interested in discipline”, and who wanted to “hear from others, both sexes”, was linked to a woman named Alice Vezey with two convictions for brothel keeping dating back to 1912.
Epidemic of loneliness
In court, Barrett admitted that he had been careless with some of the ads, but hadn’t realised their “true character” at the time. The fact was, though, that the very nature of Barrett’s business itself put him in an awkward position. Matrimonial advertising, The Link’s close relation, had never had a good reputation. Ever since its earliest days, it had been seen as the last resort of the old, sad and ugly, who were, it was assumed, all vulnerable to the depredations of dishonest marriage brokers.
To some observers, Barrett was even worse than his predecessors because his major innovation was to make The Link strictly non-matrimonial. Accordingly, The Link masthead proudly announced it to be “Social – Not Matrimonial”. It was emphatically not a vehicle for husband-hunting, but was instead “A Monthly Social Medium for Lonely People”. According to its editor, the purpose of the paper was not necessarily to facilitate marriage, but “to provide a medium by which lonely people can escape from their loneliness, and those in want of friends can be brought in communication with other friendless beings”. That, then, was the essence of his defence: The Link was a wholly respectable enterprise founded as a solution to the epidemic of loneliness which had engulfed modern society.
In his own account, Barrett had founded The Link because he had heard of a friend who was returning to Britain after 20 years spent on an Australian ranch. This man’s difficulty in meeting members of the opposite sex prompted Barrett to help him out, and led to the thought that “there must be? thousands of such in London alone, to say nothing of the feminine portion of humanity”. The Link was therefore not an opportunistic response to the lax wartime moral climate, but was instead fulfilling a long-felt want throughout society.
As his barristers pointed out, apart
from the disciplinarian Alice Vezey and the innuendoes of the press, the police had failed to provide any evidence of The Link’s alleged connection to white slavery. Barrett himself was presented by his defence team as the very essence of a respectable editor and novelist. This was, ostensibly at least, what he was. He seemed an unlikely whiteslaver.
By the time of the trial he was 51 years old and had had a long career as a comic novelist and editor of magazines as respectable as The Christian World, Family Circle, the comic journal Scraps, and the women’s paper Mary Bull, which he had left to set up The Link. On the surface, he lived a blameless suburban life in Balham, from where he took the train every day to his office in Fleet Street. In dedicating a book to his wife, “whose comfortable and encouraging appreciation has made me alive to the unsuspected advantages of having a critic on the hearth”, he conjured up the very image of companionable domesticity, but when the police raided his house in the spring of 1921, they discovered an interesting cache.
Under Barrett’s bed lay not only about 100 indecent photographs, but also a collection of French pornography relating to “abominable practices”, a ponderous Victorian euphemism for homosexual acts. Mr Justice Darling had no doubt that Barrett had more than a professional interest in his paper, and conjured up a lurid vision of the depraved corrupter of public morals poring over his private collection, lost in homosexual reverie.
In spite of all the evidence testifying to the popularity of the lonely hearts ad, the laws punishing male homosexuality were emphatically against them. On June 8, 1921, Barrett was found guilty of corrupting public morals, and of aiding and abetting his advertisers in a conspiracy to procure acts of gross indecency. The other men were found guilty of conspiring to commit the acts of gross indecency. There could be no greater attack on the morals of the country, Mr Justice Darling told Barrett, than to “establish a paper as you did for the purpose of allowing men and women to commit immorality”.
Regretting bitterly that he could not dispatch the defendants to penal servitude, Darling settled for the scarcely less onerous maximum sentence: two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. Barrett, who had done so much to make the lonely hearts ad a feature of modern life, was lost to history. His hour in the limelight was over, but the personal ad (and its modern cousin, the internet profile) would go on to become one of the defining features of modern social life and contemporary romance.
Breaking the code: the language of classifieds
All personals have their own codes, and those in The Link were no different. The first clear indicator of sexual preference was to establish that you wanted to “meet chum own sex”, as ‘Bachelor, 39?affectionate disposition, fond of things in general”, put it in 1921. Further, if you described yourself as “affectionate”, “amiable”, “sincere” or even “beautiful without vanity”, you would certainly catch the eye. You could even, like “Otherwise Normal”, say that you were seeking “young friends who do not chase girls”. Some of the code words employed were practically clichés. As the police had learnt, “artistic”, “musical”, and “unconventional” all acted as glaring indications of homosexual interest. If the penny still hadn’t dropped, a list of authors, playwrights and composers who belonged to a sort of queer artistic canon could be cited in the ads to act as clear statements of intent. Writers such as the Edwardian socialist Edward Carpenter, who had written a number of books about what he called “the intermediate sex”, the American poet of manly comradeship Walt Whitman, and above all Oscar Wilde were consistently mentioned in The Link’s pages in order to remove any doubt as to one’s interests.
Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column by H.G. Cocks, published by Random House Books on February 5, is available from BooksFirst priced £13.49 (rrp £14.99), free p&p, on 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstnyone,

Republicans Choose First Black Party Chairman
By ADAM NAGOURNEY (NY TIMES)

WASHINGTON — The Republican National Committee chose Michael Steele, an African-American, as party chairman on Friday, putting a new face on a beleaguered party as it seeks the right posture to take on President Obama and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress.
The election of Mr. Steele, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland, means that both major political parties are being led by African-Americans. Mr. Steele is the first black chairman of his party, and his selection was particularly striking for Republicans, who have been criticized over the years as stirring racial animosities in an effort to build political coalitions, particularly in the South.
If history is any guide, Mr. Steele will be anything but a behind-the-scenes functionary, given that, with Republicans out of the White House and in the minority in Congress, the party has no dominant national figure.
Instead, he is likely to be, at least until the presidential race starts in two years, at the leading edge of his party as it makes its case against Mr. Obama.
Indeed, many Republicans said they were drawn to Mr. Steele because of his feisty public presence and television skills, and Mr. Steele made clear, from the moment he accepted the position after six rounds of voting that took up most of an afternoon, that he would move aggressively to take on the Democrats.
“It’s time for something completely different, and we’re going to bring it to them,” Mr. Steele said. “We’re going to bring this party to every corner, to every boardroom, to every neighborhood, to every community. And we’re going to say to friend and foe alike: ‘We want you to be a part of us. We want you to be with us, and for those of you who are going to obstruct, get ready to be knocked over.’ ”
Offering a hint of the tone he would take as his party’s spokesman, Mr. Steele said the Republican Party had been unfairly caricatured by Democrats “and the media” as racist and insensitive to the needs of ordinary Americans.
“We have an image problem,” he said. “I think how we begin to correct that image problem is defining ourselves to the people of this country.”
“We’ve been misidentified as a party that doesn’t care, a party that is insensitive, a party that is unconcerned about minorities,” he said, adding, “Nothing can be further from the truth.”
In deliberations that stretched over nearly five hours and six ballots, Republicans suggested that they saw selecting an African-American chairman as helpful in redefining the party’s image.
In a final ballot fraught with racial and political symbolism, Mr. Steele faced as his only remaining opponent Katon Dawson, the chairman of the South Carolina party, who had been criticized for belonging to a whites-only country club, a membership he resigned before this election began.
The party’s decision to step outside Washington also signaled the extent to which Republicans were looking to break with the recently departed president, George W. Bush. The incumbent chairman, Mike Duncan, who had been put into office by Mr. Bush, dropped out after the third ballot, acknowledging that he could not overcome party members’ concerns that it would be a mistake to put before the American public someone with such close ties to an unpopular administration.
Mr. Steele, 50, a lawyer, was notably reticent in offering criticism of Mr. Bush on Friday, even though he had been a sharp critic of the former president when running for the Senate from Maryland in 2006.
At the time, he appeared at a lunch with reporters where he agreed to be identified only as a Republican Senate candidate and proceeded to lambaste Mr. Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq and said the response to Hurricane Katrina was a “monumental failure.”
“It’s an impediment; it’s a hurdle I have to overcome,” he said of trying to be a Republican candidate in the political climate of that period in a Democratic-leaning state like Maryland. “I’ve got an R here, a scarlet letter.”
His remarks were recounted, according to the ground rules, in a humorous column in The Washington Post by Dana Milbank; within 24 hours, Mr. Steele acknowledged that he was the source of the remarks. He lost the election, 54 percent to 44 percent.
“The bottom line is the American people had lost faith in our leadership,” he said Friday in discussing what he had meant, adding: “That was then. This is now. This is a new moment for our party. We can take that scarlet badge off.”
Mr. Steele was one of two African-Americans among five candidates seeking the chairmanship. The other one, Ken Blackwell of Ohio, dropped out and endorsed Mr. Steele midway through the balloting. Mr. Steele made no mention of the historic nature of the moment in his acceptance speech, although he did in talking to reporters after the vote.
“I think this is a remarkable moment — some say it’s historic,” he said. “It’s just one more step, one more bold step, that the party of Lincoln has taken since its founding.”
And Mr. Steele suggested that he was looking forward to engaging Mr. Obama in the months ahead.
“I would say to the new president, ‘Congratulations, it’s going to be an honor to spar with him,’ ” he said.
He grinned and quoted the country singer Toby Keith as he added, “And I would follow that up with, ‘How do you like me now?’ ”

Masturbation can be good for the over-50s
Removal of toxins built up over a lifetime reduces the risk of prostate cancer
By Jeremy Laurance (London Independent)
Masturbation may be good for you – or bad, depending on your age. The solitary sexual activity that is widely practised but little discussed, is linked with an increased risk of prostate cancer when practised frequently by young men in their twenties and thirties, doctors say.
But by the time men reach their fifties, it may protect against the disease because it helps remove toxins that have built up over a lifetime.
Prostate cancer is known to be driven by the male hormone testosterone, and men with high levels of testosterone tend to have a higher sex drive and a higher risk of the cancer.
But most research has examined older men because prostate cancer is unusual under 50. Researchers at the University of Nottingham studied the link between sexual activity in younger men and the disease to see if it affected their long-term risk. More than 400 men with prostate cancer diagnosed before the age of 60 were questioned about their sexual habits over the preceding decades and the results compared with 400 controls.
The findings showed that those who had been most sexually active in their twenties – having sexual intercourse or masturbating more than 20 times a month – were more likely to have the cancer. Frequent masturbation, but not sexual intercourse, in the twenties and thirties was significantly linked with the later development of prostate cancer.
In their 50s men who were most sexually active (more than 10 times a month for sexual intercourse and masturbation combined) enjoyed a small protective effect. The effect was greater when masturbation was assessed on its own.
Polyxeni Dimitripolou, who led the study published in the British Journal of Urology International, said: "It seems as if keeping up a certain level of sexual activity through the decades is better than having a high level early [in the 20s and 30s] and then nothing."
"One theory is that during the early years the prostate gland is more susceptible to hormonal changes and is still developing. As men age and accumulate toxins from the diet or through their lungs , sexual activity may help release them. Studies have found toxins in the semen and the fluid produced in the prostate. As you age it is more important to flush them out."
However, she admitted that there was no good explanation of why masturbation should have a greater impact on prostate cancer, either by increasing or reducing the risk, than sexual intercourse.
"For our sample there was no association with intercourse – all the effect was coming from masturbation. But it may have to do with our group of men. With a different group there could be different findings."
She added: "What makes our study stand out from previous research is that we focused on a younger age group than normal and included both intercourse and masturbation at various stages in people's lives."
"A possible explanation for the protective effect that men in their fifties appear to receive from overall sexual activity, and particularly masturbation, is that the release of accumulated toxins during sexual activity reduces the risk of developing cancer in the prostate area. This theory has, however, not been firmly established and further research is necessary."
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politics SLATE
The Storyteller
Obama's best speeches have always revolved around stories. Which one will he tell on Tuesday?By John Dickerson

Posted Saturday, Jan. 17, 2009, at 4:40 PM ET
Barack Obama has a lot of ground to cover in his inaugural address. He has to create optimism, kick off a new era, give the country a vision of happier days, act humbly, thank God, thank his family, live up to his own sky-high rhetorical expectations, and not get frostbite.
He will undoubtedly hit these marks. What I'm wondering is whether he's found a story for the moment. Some of Obama's most memorable campaign speeches were powerful because of the news—after his Iowa victory and after his defeat in New Hampshire—but the ones that were most successful on their own always ended with a story.
Obama didn't just tell inspirational anecdotes. He told stories about a transaction—the moment inspiration jumps from one person to another. It was this transaction, repeated thousands of times, that turned the Obama candidacy into a movement. That it also happened to be an effective way to ask for people's votes was surely part of the plan. But Obama was also selling an idea that could sound corny or quaint: the notion that many small actions could make a large difference.
The sense of unity and collective action is the spirit he will try to rekindle Tuesday on the Mall. His inauguration speech will be framed with the idea of a "new era of responsibility," a theme he touched on at the end of the campaign and again in his recent speech about his economic recovery package. The idea is that everyone, from politicians to CEOs to those of us trying to get a bank loan, has to take greater responsibility to get us out of the fix we're in.
Sounds good. But how do you build this kind of thing, particularly in an age where trust in government is low and people are cynical and distrustful of their fellow humans for all the reasons Obama himself has outlined? To get us all on board with this idea, Obama has to wire us together. To build collective responsibility, there has to be social cohesion. If we're not all in this together, if my neighbor or editor isn't going to do his part, why will I bother to fulfill my responsibilities? I might also be doubtful about whether simply acting responsibly can change anything. And I might also reject the premise: Those Wall Street bankers did more than I did to get us into this mess. So why shouldn't they have to do more to get us out?
Obama undoubtedly knows this, which is why the entire inaugural cavalcade has been designed to help create unity. As Obama says in his message about the inauguration: "It's not about me. It's about us." His office has created Organizing for America to help people organize in their communities, and encouraged people to host inaugural celebrations in their hometowns and join together in a national day of service.
Some of that might actually work. But none of it will be able to match the power of a well-delivered speech, which much of America (and the world) will stop to watch. In his address, Obama could simply describe the dilemma and call for a collective effort to solve it. "The change we've worked so hard for will not happen unless ordinary Americans get involved," he said in his message announcing Organizing for America. Or he could return to familiar phrases about our ability to "recognize ourselves in each other." But he has the skills to be more rhetorically powerful. This is where the stories come in.
During his campaign, Obama also had to convince people that individual action and connection could make a difference in a community (and, not incidentally, a campaign). Two examples from last year stand out. (If you want to experience them instead of having them synopsized—and you should—the first can be watched or read and the second can be watched here.)
The first is the story of Ashley Baia, a young white woman volunteering in his South Carolina office. Baia's personal story so affected a black man nearly three times her age that he became a volunteer in the Obama campaign. The story was so effective that Obama reprised the tale at the end of his speech on race in America. The second story is the one Obama told regularly throughout his campaign about being rallied by the spirit of an elderly woman on the city council in Greenwood, S.C.— the "fired up and ready to go" story he told perhaps never so well as on the last night of his campaign.
The goal of these stories was not just to make people feel good, though they did. It was to make the case for engagement. At the end of each campaign story of inspiration, he made the same claim—that a voice could change a room and a room could change a city and a city could change a state and a state could change a nation.
To convince Americans to make a collective sacrifice, Obama first has to convince them that they face a collective danger. It's clear from Obama's recent statements that he believes the economy can be improved for the long term only if people genuinely embrace a new feeling of shared responsibility. "There are going to be very difficult choices," he told the Washington Post, choices requiring "sacrifice and responsibility and duty."
Will Obama find his story? One might have landed in his lap in the heroic actions of Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III, the pilot who safely landed that US Airways jet in New York's Hudson River on Thursday. There are rumors he might make an inauguration appearance. What better tale for the times than one of calm, collective action at a moment of crisis?
Then again, storytelling can feel forced, and it's certainly not crucial for an inaugural address, which is a clear departure from the campaign rhetoric. Kennedy's famous address did not include any anecdotes, yet for inspirational punch, it ranks alongside the one Martin Luther King Jr. gave at the other end of the Mall two and a half years later.
Of course, there is another approach available to Obama. Maybe he doesn't need a new story because just by standing there, he will be the story. In many ways, despite what he's said about Tuesday, the story will not be about us—it will be about him.John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

It’s written all over your face
To potential mates, your mug may reveal more than you think
By Elizabeth Quill
Eye candy might more appropriately be called brain candy. Seeing a pretty face is like eating a piece of oh-so-sweet chocolate — for the brain, if not for the stomach. In fact, attractive faces activate the same reward circuitry in the brain as food, drugs and money. For humans, there is something captivating and unforgettable about the arrangement of two balls, a point and a horizontal slit on the front of the head.
The power of faces isn’t lost on psychologists. “Faces are interesting because they impart so much information — expression, attention — and these interact with facial beauty,” says Anthony Little of the University of Stirling in Scotland.
So it’s no surprise that making faces attractive is big business. Each year, Americans spend more than $13 billion on cosmetic surgery and tens of billions on cosmetics and beauty aids.
But while facial improvements leave those who subscribe to them with a healthy glow and the illusion of youth — subtracting a few years can bump you up a few notches on the hot-or-not barometer — studies of attractiveness have tended to leave the scientists who undertake them with puzzled looks, gray hairs and wrinkles.
Recently, though, researchers seeking to unmask the essence of facial attractiveness have been using computer technology to isolate the characteristics long rumored to underlie beauty. New methods reveal that averageness, or a lack of distinctness, makes someone more appealing, while facial symmetry doesn’t automatically make a knockout, as most people believe. Features that make a man look manly or a woman feminine can trump both averageness and symmetry, but only sometimes. And studies of faces in motion support the idea that femininity and masculinity are important to attractiveness.
Researchers have also started focusing on why faces are attractive, not just what makes them so. Attractiveness may signal good genes and a good mate. A new study links averageness to diversity in the major histocompatibility complex — a cluster of genes that plays a major role in the immune system. And brain-imaging studies are poised to capture how the brain responds to potential cues to genetic fitness.
Seeking (to define) beauty
Believing beauty to be in the eye of the beholder isn’t exactly wrong, but research suggests that there are some universal standards to attractiveness that everyone seems to apply.
“When you look at what people find attractive, it is consistent across cultures,” says evolutionary psychologist Hanne Lie of the University of Western Australia in Perth. “We have some innate or hardwired beauty detector.”

Symmetry has been popularized as a feature that is key to attractiveness. Though subtle, a face looks off if one side doesn't mirror the other. Though the symmetrical face would still be rated more attractive, some studies suggest symmetry is not as crucial as has been assumed.
Most attractiveness research has focused on three aspects of a pretty visage — averageness, symmetry and sexual dimorphism.
Early research into these three characteristics relied on photographs and a ruler, so it was difficult to separate the characteristics from each other. Nowadays computer technology has revealed a deeper understanding of beauty.
“The huge benefit of computer graphics,” Little says, “is in manipulating one thing and one thing only.” For example, he says, it is possible to take any face shape and make it perfectly symmetrical. It is possible to mark points to determine average positions, such as the height of the ears, length of the nose and distances between the eyes. It’s even possible to morph faces to accentuate masculine or feminine features. Isolating such characteristics has revealed new complexities to how averageness, symmetry and sexual dimorphism help define beauty.
Averageness, one researcher quipped, could account for as much as 85 percent of good looks. Here, average does not mean dull or boring, but rather nondescript, lacking distinct or dramatic features. In the late 1870s, Sir Francis Galton combined photos of men convicted of serious crimes to develop an image of the prototypical criminal’s face. He found the composite image — with its smoothed out features and absence of irregularities — surprisingly attractive. More than a century later, in the early 1990s, psychologist Judith Langlois, now at the University of Texas at Austin, and her colleagues confirmed that blended faces are more attractive than the originals. (Averaged faces are also preferred by infants; babies stare at composites longer.)
Symmetry as a feature of attractiveness dates back to Plato’s day. He believed the “golden proportion” was the key to a good-looking face. The width of the ideal face would be two-thirds its length and the nose no longer than the distance between the eyes. Modern research suggests that symmetry judgments depend on how well one half of the face reflects the other, Little says. Asymmetry makes a face look a bit off; the two sides don’t quite match. “Essentially, it’s wonkiness,” he says.
And anyone who has gawked at a supermodel with big eyes and high cheekbones or the prominent jaw of a soap opera hunk knows that these beauties bring something else to the mirror. Sexually dimorphic characteristics — meaning those that make someone very masculine or very feminine — can take a face from beautiful to, well, sexy.
Fully understanding facial beauty requires studying how these three facial characteristics relate and interact. Averageness is attractive, says Lisa DeBruine, an experimental psychologist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. But, she says, when it comes to some key features, such as big eyes and small chins in women, being distinctly nonaverage (being very feminine) can be better. Distinctness is, by default, thought of as bad because, she says, “there are more ways to be nonaverage and ugly than there are ways to be nonaverage and beautiful.”
In a series of studies, researchers including Little and Steven Gangestad of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque also found that symmetrical faces have attractive features independent of their symmetry. Symmetry was attractive in male faces, for instance, but women shown only half of an attractive male face still found the face attractive, Little and colleagues reported in 2001 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
A further study, published by Little on May 7 in PLoS ONE, suggests that symmetry goes up and down with sexually dimorphic features in Europeans, African hunter-gatherers and in nonhuman primates. Symmetrical males had more masculine features and symmetrical females had more feminine features. Gangestad has shown that symmetry and masculinity vary together in men — as one increases, the other does too, suggesting the two characteristics point to some unknown underlying quality. So, perhaps, symmetry is important not on its own, but as a proxy for other characteristics — identified or not yet identified, researchers suggest.

Averaging shows that a composite face -- one that is made by mathematically blending individual faces -- is more attractive than the faces that are combined to make it (minus the hair, of course). Above, the six smaller faces have been blended to create the middle image. Scientists say this technique evens out features, hides any irregularities and smooths out skin tone.Other missing elements in evaluating beauty have begun to emerge with the use of new technology. Video techniques have allowed for dynamic rather than static interpretations of beauty.
“Real faces move,” says Edward Morrison of the University of Bristol in England. “If you show someone a moving face, they can recognize it quicker. There is more information.”
And it turns out that how faces move may contribute to how good they look. In a 2007 paper in Evolution and Human Behavior, Morrison reported that more of the movements known to be indicators of femininity — blinking, nodding and head tilting — made women’s faces more attractive to male and female volunteers.
“Movement can convey important meanings,” Morrison says. “If that person likes you or doesn’t. If that person is being aggressive. If the person is being flirtatious. The face can start to convey these kinds of things.”
The findings echo results from studies of static faces, supporting the conclusion that sexual dimorphism is important in evaluating women’s faces, and less important in evaluating men’s faces, which tend to move less.
Little says that while scientists are slowly finding all the pieces, fitting them together remains a challenge. “As far as the actual relative weight of these things,” he says, “I don’t know whether we have a good handle on what is most important.”
Designed to impress
If the first goal is to find out what is attractive, the next is to understand why. More than triggering mere identity, facial features can reveal the sex, age and race of their owners. Movement can indicate mood and interest. And clues to personality may also be present, or at least people may think they are. (Studies have shown that voters believe baby faces suggest incompetence while jutting chins and angular noses are clues to capability in candidates. Another study suggests that people think baby faces make more honest CEOs.)
But faces are far subtler vessels still. If a male peacock can show a female his fitness by growing colorful feathers, maybe humans can, more subtly, reveal their fitness with the features on their faces. And people may subconsciously pick up on the cues that identify a good mate.

Accentuating femininity

Men tend to find women who look more feminine -- bigger eyes and lips, smaller chins, higher cheekbones -- more attractive. Technologies that allow the adjustment of these features, shown here by a face that's been feminized (far left) and masculinized (on the right), have helped reveal their import. When ovulating, women find men with more masculine features -- exaggerated brow ridges, thin lips and strong chin.
Under this assumption, masculine features may signal a strong and protective partner, while feminine features communicate youth and fertility. Asymmetries would signal underlying developmental instability. An individual’s genetic profile would also contribute to averageness.
Lie and her colleagues Gill Rhodes and Leigh Simmons, both also of the University of Western Australia, connected averageness, genetic profile and attractiveness in a recent study. In male faces, attractiveness signaled diversity within the major histocompatibility complex, the team reports in the October 2008 Evolution.
This cluster of 128 genes and surrounding genetic material plays an important role in the immune system. The genes encode molecules on the cell surface that recognize self from nonself and detect pathogens and parasites. In rhesus macaques, diversity in the MHC has been linked to reproductive success. And female fat-tailed dwarf lemurs have been shown to prefer males with greater MHC diversity.
Lie looked at genetic diversity in 80 men and 80 women whose faces were rated on a 10-point attractiveness scale by volunteers. The researchers found that those rated most attractive showed greater diversity in the MHC. Taking the study a step further, Lie and her colleagues linked averageness to diversity in the MHC for the first time. More diversity means a better mate, the thinking goes. Presumably, more variation in the MHC will help a person fight off diseases and infection, and a potential mate would pass on this fitness advantage to future offspring.
A number of other studies have attempted to link the features that make a face attractive to perceived, and in a few cases, actual health. A 2000 study by Rhodes and Leslie Zebrowitz of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., showed that volunteers rated people with more symmetrical and more average faces as appearing healthier. Faces of 17-year-olds that were rated as distinct were associated with poor past health records. And a study in 2004 linked apparent health of facial skin to attractiveness. Some studies have hinted that attractiveness is related to longevity, body mass index and even semen quality.
Most intriguing to Little and others are studies revealing that when women are at the most fertile time in their monthly cycle — when male quality might be most important to them reproductively — they are more interested in men with masculine and symmetrical faces.
“Women prefer all sorts of things when they are ovulating,” Gangestad says. “More masculine faces, more masculine voices, more muscular bodies. Taller men. More dominant men. Certain scents.”
At other times, researchers suspect, women might be interested in other traits — like a man’s nurturing ability or willingness to hang around and raise children.
“There are trade-offs,” Gangestad says. For example, “more masculine men may be less reliable partners.”
Presumably women are more tuned in to indicators of quality when they are able to conceive, so researchers say studying those women might provide the best clues to what makes a man attractive and why. Studying the women at other times may explain the factors beyond attractiveness that contribute to choosing a life partner — why, for example, women don’t always just go for the more manly man.
“Facial features don’t tell us everything,” Gangestad says, “but we know they tell us something.”
DeBruine says studies reveal that individuals’ preferences for faces are not arbitrary, but vary in specific, systematic ways. New research shows that men’s preferences also change depending on their hormone levels. Working with DeBruine, Little and other colleagues, Lisa Welling of Aberdeen found that when men have higher levels of salivary testosterone, they prefer more feminine faces. If high testosterone is a signal of better quality, men with such levels may know that they can better compete in the good-female-getting game. Men with lower levels may look for lower quality (less feminine) women. “Maybe I think Brad Pitt is the most attractive mate possible, but I am not going to win him,” DeBruine says. “It is not a good strategy for me to set my sights on him.” The study, which appeared online last August in Hormones and Behavior, and others suggest that attractiveness preferences may depend on a person’s own perceived attractiveness.
So your personal preferences aren’t entirely personal. Studies out of Aberdeen suggest that, in addition to your hormonal profile and how attractive you think you are, how much someone looks like you and how much attention they pay you can influence just how attracted you are, in quite predictable ways.
Beauty in binary
But here’s the catch. Caring about specific features is one thing, articulating those preferences is another. Even people who consistently rate symmetrical faces as attractive, for example, have trouble identifying symmetrical faces. People just know an attractive face when they see it.
So does at least one computer. Eytan Ruppin of Tel Aviv University in Israel and colleagues have trained a computer to recognize what humans would rate as an attractive female face. The machine, described in January 2008 in Vision Research, automatically extracted measurements of facial features from raw images rated by study participants for attractiveness. It considered thousands of features and then condensed them. Then it went to work on a fresh set of faces. The computer predicted attractiveness in these new faces in line with human preferences.
Even more intriguing, the computer replicated at least one human bias. Symmetry studies often involve taking the right side of a face and mirror imaging it to create a full face or taking the left side and doing the same. Humans show a surprising bias; in two-thirds of cases, they prefer left-left images (from the point of view of the onlooker). Somehow, this bias must have been embedded in the original rankings the computer received because it also preferred these faces. But no one is sure why or how.
Though replicating human ratings is a fun exercise in artificial intelligence, Ruppin says a computer can’t help scientists understand what people find attractive. “It says what is in the mind of the computer, not the mind of a human.”
Some researchers are, in fact, turning to the human mind to explore attractiveness. The brain has special machinery for recognizing faces. One front-on glance and a human shape among masses of others becomes a long-lost friend, a beloved family member or an irritating coworker.
Face recognition may be “the most fine-tuned system we have,” says Alice O’Toole of the University of Texas at Dallas. “However we code them neurally, we are able to keep track of what makes individual faces unique. When I look at you, I would code what makes you different from every other face I have ever seen.”
Some work suggests that attractiveness is processed as a variation from the mean (which could hint at why averageness matters). In a 2007 study published in Neuropsychologia, participants underwent fMRI while viewing faces of varying degrees of attractiveness. The study suggested that people’s brains have strong responses in the right amygdala — part of the brain that has been linked to both positive and negative emotions — to pretty faces and ugly faces, and less response to middle-of-the-road faces. (So ugly faces are also intense like chocolate, not because they create longing, perhaps, but fear.)
Joel Winston of University College London, an author of the study, says early brain-scanning research took a linear approach to attractiveness, finding that some brain regions responded more to attractive faces and others to unattractive faces. But the recent study included faces that fell between the extremes and found that some brain responses are elicited by unattractive and attractive faces but not less distinct faces.
In this respect, Gangestad says, you could think of characteristics like averageness in terms of preference and avoidance. “It may well be that in our ancestral past certain kinds of mutations caused malformations of all sorts of bodily features, including the face, and that is part of what you are picking up on,” he says.
Winston says the imaging studies don’t look at nitty-gritty brain activity, but still hold promise. “There is some evidence in basic visual science research that with an fMRI scanner we can actually decode what the subject is looking at better than the subject can,” he says. “Certainly the brain knows more about the world than you do in the sense of your conscious self.”
Steve Platek of the University of Liverpool in England agrees that indicators of potential fitness ought to activate sensors in the brain. “The average person you pass on the street is probably not ‘hot or not,’” he says. “But if they are hot or not, they should activate some kind of socially behavioral response [the reward circuitry] that says go after that person at all costs or avoid them at all costs because mating could be really horrific for your [offspring’s] genes.”
Such a drive might underlie the utility of attractiveness. And elucidating how the brain responds to large, obvious differences in attractiveness could help researchers understand how the brain responds to differences that are subconscious and difficult to articulate. Platek says he does have results, as yet unpublished, that look at the brain’s response to good-gene indicators.
While computers have enabled the isolation of facial features for study, Lie says the next step will be in reassembling attractiveness — joining studies on facial features with predicted fitness and brain scans. “I have a feeling when we perceive attractiveness in the real world, it is a holistic process,” she says. “It becomes more than the sum of its parts.”
The next time a face catches your eye, you may not be able to articulate what turns your head or makes your heart jump, but you will certainly know what you feel. Call it instinct, call it evolution, call it what you want. It may take researchers many more years to understand why you find a super-fine face to be so sweet. But that shouldn’t stop you from looking.

The PC World Challenge: 72 Hours of Windows 7!

We challenged one blogger to make the switch: a full conversion from Windows Vista to Windows 7 for three days. From gaming, to business, to screwing around on the Internet: Did our intrepid upstart make it through until the bitter end? And what's up with that buffalo?
David Murphy PC World
Switch from Windows Vista to Windows 7 completely. No going back to work with compatible programs. No jumping ship if a driver keeps out away from your Warhammer Online character. No tears. Windows 7 is your new home for 72 hours, starting from your initial download of the software.
Microsoft doesn't know how to manage digital downloads. Nor does Microsoft doesn't know how to title its own applications--this isn't Windows 7, not by any means. It's Windows Vista SP2.
Having completed my 72 hours in Windows 7 land, I'm going to adopt the same mindset and cap the writing of this post at one hour's length. Having seen no less than 40 different articles about Windows 7 over the past three days (if not three months), I'm not about to bore you with a list of the 89 most important features Windows 7 brings to the table. What I am going to chat about is what the actual process of jumping to Windows 7 is like. What happens? How do the new features of Windows 7 affect the general usage patterns of an operating system? What's the speed like? Why would I buy this to replace Vista?
I'll start with a cursory note that this article was actually suppose to run Monday morning--the whole concept of "72 hours in Windows 7 Land" being a fun little weekend activity that I would write up and post for all the people who gave up on downloading the beta on its horrible Friday release. About that. Seeing as Microsoft has no idea what "busy servers" entail, and apparently refuses to release its beta clients across a peer-to-peer distribution method a la Blizzard game patches, I waited. And waited. And waited, until I finally acquired a copy of Windows 7 well into Saturday afternoon. Leading the charge into the digital future, that's Microsoft.
Ahem.
I fired up Windows 7 on a drive I had pre-partitioned in preparation for the event. On one half sat a fresh installation of Windows Vista featuring all the latest updates and drivers I could get my hands on. On the other would sit Windows 7, as I wanted to compare the two's initial performance before installing a ton of my typical junk on either. I fired up my Windows 7 ISO and let 'er rip.
Installing Windows 7 (x64) brought a tear to my eye, for I do love nostalgia and this installation routine is virtually a carbon-copy of Windows Vista's. Save for the addition of a new setup screen for establishing a Homegroup--Windows 7's answer to network file-sharing--there's nothing dramatic about the installation in the slightest. Compared to Windows XP, both Vista and 7's installation procedure (side note: I hope this never becomes the nickname for the operating system) are a godsend. But I'd love to see a more streamlined installation: Perhaps a way to set all the options you need to set up-front, so you can just sit back and let the 24:01-minute process do it's thing. I love making customized slipstream OS installation discs for this very fact. Convenience, Microsoft. Convenience!
Both installation processes forced two resets on my computer. And for those keeping score at home, the Vista installation took all of three minutes, twenty-six seconds less time than the Windows 7 installation. That's not a lot minute-wise, but it's still 16 percent more time than its predecessor. I'm also running a pretty souped-up PC--a stock-clocked Intel QX9650 running at 3.0GHz, four gigabytes of RAM, a speedy Western Digital terabyte hard drive, and an ATI Radeon HD 4850 video card. I can only imagine how long Windows 7 might take for a machine of less prowess.
As mentioned, my first act upon installing Windows 7 was to fire up some benchmarks to get a direct, bare-bones impression of OS performance between Vista and Windows 7. I ran PCMark Vantage on an untouched Windows 7 installation and an untouched Vista SP1 installation (both fully updated with all relevant drivers installed). Go figure, Windows 7 is the faster operating system--10 percent faster than Windows Vista, with a PCMark Vantage score of 6557 to 5919 respectively.
A nice touch of Windows 7 is that it installed with more drivers configured than its predecessor. My Windows Vista installation came with five unknown devices attached, requiring me to find and install drivers for the video card and Ethernet drivers for the motherboard in particular. Windows 7 set itself to the highest resolution my monitor supports using what appeared to be Microsoft-friendly ATI drivers. My Internet connection "worked" immediately, allowing me to fetch whatever I needed without having to first find the CD that came with my motherboard. Nice.
(Ethernet woes aside, I like how Windows 7 now gives you a "files processed per second" time instead of a "Megabytes of speed" value.)
Further inspection of the Ethernet drivers revealed that these were less than stable for my system. I had horrific problems trying to make multiple connections to either the Internet or my network devices. The operating system froze up every time I tried to grab more than one batch of files from my NAS, download files from the NAS and Steam at once, or generally do anything but surf the Web. Frustrated, I went back to the my motherboard's CD drivers and that seemed to fix the problem just fine. This now-stable OS was ready to get used!
One of the core problems with Windows 7, which Microsoft will invariably not fix, stems from its utter similarity to Windows Vista. Sure, the taskbar is a little different, Windows Explorer has a newer feel to it, and the desktop looks like it requires a GPU of its own for all the fun little transparent gimmicks and what-have-you. But at its core, this is Windows Vista. Windows Vista (remix), perhaps, but still Windows Vista. I found it difficult to figure out the actual changes to the OS save for the obvious differences in appearance. Sure, browsing through the help file pointed out some, but it was also extremely unexciting to do. The final release of Windows 7 needs some kind of snappy, orchestrated pop-up that tells you when a feature you're accessing has new elements "nearby." For example, you pull up Windows Explorer for the first time. A one-time popup tells you something like, "Hey, did you know that Libraries are totally awesome? Here's how they work." Or you're surfing the control panel and hovering over the various icons when poof!, up pops a tiny, 15-second animation to let you know about the wonders of PC Safeguard.
(Poof! Libraries are a useful way to organize the contents of your computer without having to worry about maintaining a traditional folder architecture)
Would this get annoying, Clippy-style? For the power user, yes. But if there was a way to establish that you were either a new Windows 7 user or a transfer Vista user upon installing the OS for the first time, surely Windows could then give you a bit more of a walk-through than what this beta delivers: A bright blue background of a fish and a pat on the bum for good luck.
I rip all the applications and games I own to their own mountable .ISO files. I hate scratched discs, but more than that, I hate having to look for that one, mission-critical disc (like, say, Gigabyte motherboard drivers) that's somewhere about the stack of junk in my room. Not only can I install the actual programs faster this way, but I can sleep easy knowing that I'll always be able to access my Planescape: Torment CDs no matter where the physical media might be (Ohio, last I checked). Windows 7 did not like this plan. Specifically, it did not like the various applications I use to mount CDs, like Daemon Tools.
Basically, any application that uses a SPTD layer to access virtual optical devices utterly fails in this Windows 7 beta. I hope this is fixed by either Microsoft or the various application developers for the final launch, as it took me forever to find a suitable replacement for disc mounting. Which brings up an interesting point of its own: What happens when Windows 7 launches? Will developers have to support XP, Vista, and Windows 7 versions of their applications?
(I found no difficulties whatsoever in using a common barrage of applications and games on Windows 7, including Microsoft Office, Steam games, Adobe CS4, Hamachi, UltraVNC, Revo Uninstaller, et cetera)
I venture so, at least for the Windows 7 part of the equation. While I'm still coming to terms with the new icon-based toolbar, it's obvious that some legacy Vista programs just don't cross over very well. Take Steam, for example. When I'm running Valve's games platform, a little icon appears in the taskbar to let me know the program's running. Normally, I'd right-click on this icon to access the context menu for pulling up your friends window, games window, community window, et cetera. Only, that's not how it works. The actual icon for this is now hidden somewhere in the right-hand part of the taskbar near the clock, buried in an arrowed context menu. In a perfect world, one icon would handle all. But here I have two. And I don't like clutter.
Similarly, I look forward to the day when I can make use of the new context-menu-bearing icons in the start menu. For Microsoft apps like Paint and Word, there' sa little arrow icon to the right of the icon and name combination you'd normally use to launch the program in the start menu. This gives you added context for the action you want to undertake, be it opening said program's recent items to new documents, et cetera. I long for the day I can launch my Steam games directly out of one of these menus.
I'm not a betting man--at least, not one to make (too) stupid of bets. This is exactly why I would not have placed money on Apple's iTunes working with Windows 7. But I never expected the installer mechanism to outright die. I began installing iTunes somewhere toward the top of this article. As of this sentence's writing, it's still hung at three-fourths completion. If Apple can release a version of iTunes that's fully-functional, installs perfectly, and doesn't muck up CD burning for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 installations... well, I might just buy a hat and eat it.
I'm running out of time on my self-imposed limit, so I'll make this quick. There are indeed some unique elements of Windows 7 that make it appear rather dashing when compared to Windows Vista. Gone is the hideous network lag that makes me wait 30 seconds every time I try to connect to my NAS. Windows 7 pulls it up as if it was just another folder: A++, I say to that. I'm a geek for good looks in an operating system, and I really dig the fun new features of Windows 7 in that regard. I love the slide-show background option, even though some of its choices for scenery are downright laughable:
(Yep.)
Seriously. A buffalo? Anyway, I also enjoy the fact that you can now drag maximized windows around to your leisure. They're no longer locked to all four corners of your screen, and re-maximizing them is as easy as dragging them to the very top of your monitor. I'm not sure why you'd ever use it, but you can now invert the picture to your display completely upside-down. I can now hang my 30-inch display from the ceiling with joyful confidence, I suppose.
Everyone's talking about it, so here's my five seconds. UAC is back. You can turn it to different levels of annoyance with a slider, and that's that. Windows Firewall has received a substantial upgrade in its capabilities, so much so that I actually considered--for the briefest of moments--fiddling around with its extensive new inbound and outbound limits before promptly switching it off. But still, I considered. This will be a fantastic upgrade for those of you who don't surf the Internet via hardware firewalls.
I don't have friends who use my desktop, but the new ability to completely wipe out a user's changes via PC Safeguard is a must-have for anyone who wants their computer to remain crap-free when significant others, younger siblings, or drunk friends are around.
Other than that, there are plenty more articles that go over the extensive, feature-by-feature differences found in Windows 7. Those are just a few of the major ones I noticed offhand and felt the need to comment on. Remember, I'm flying blind into Windows 7 (no press previews, no articles read, nothing. Just a plain ol' user), and didn't really have a way to find a ton of new features throughout the course of my normal weekend's worth of work.
I phrase that last paragraph as I do, because it relates to my ultimate point. As it stands, Windows 7 is not a new operating system. It's SP2. Rightly, it's what Vista should have been, but I'm willing to compromise on this just existing as a significant, service-pack-worthy upgrade to the core Vista OS. A mainstay of the new experiences you will actually encounter are cosmetic in design or function: the new desktop functions are pretty, Windows gadgets are an exploded version of the Vista sidebar, Homegroup is just a rebranded way to set up network sharing, the Taskbar uses icons instead of icons and words, et cetera.
Truly novel innovations: an extensive Firewall system, a brand-new Backup and Restore tool that would actually keep me from buying an off-the-shelf solution, PC Safeguard... these are all neat applications. At its core, I really like the direction Microsoft has gone with Windows 7. There's no question in my mind about that.
But as a paying customer, I have to ask myself: when this OS hits the market, is there enough packed in there to warrant its $125 price (or thereabouts)? From XP to Vista, I definitely pulled the trigger and didn't look back. I don't believe that, at this stage in the game, the pretty functionality and intriguing applications are worth the eventual cost. I can mimic a lot of Windows 7's new functionality with common freeware applications. And while the graphics are pretty, I'm not about to shell out a ton of cash just so I can shift around my desktop windows and giggle.
(To be fair, the new graphical elements like full Window transparency just by hovering your mouse over "Show Desktop" make up some awesome features.)
Had Microsoft the gall, it would release Windows 7 as a free upgrade for Windows Vista users. It's not going to, nor can I see the software giant doing anything but slapping a standard pricing model on this "brand-new" OS. It'll be curious to see what this does to Vista support, given the inherent similarity between the two platforms. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft officially killed Vista development and made Windows 7 its default, go-to operating system. Sounds crazy? Eh. So is the hype around this operating system.
As for me? I think I'll go back to Vista for now...
© 2009 PC World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved

Midtown High-Rise, Flight Plans Included
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
HOW about a little aerial bombing practice in Midtown? That’s what Edward W. Browning wanted to do from his 1913 World’s Tower Building at 110 West 40th Street, where he planned a runway on the roof for airplanes.
That idea never took off, but his white terra-cotta tower is gleaming after a renovation last summer.
Born in 1874, Edward West Browning wanted to be a builder from childhood, when he made designs for fantasy houses. He began investing in real estate in the late 1890s, and in 1908 put up a narrow but otherwise unexceptional loft building at 11 West 17th Street, 27 feet wide.
Five years later, he erected the 25-story World’s Tower Building, at 110 West 40th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. For its outsize name, this project was narrow at 50 feet wide, but Browning had taken care to protect the light on all sides by controlling the flanking parcels.
This permitted his architects, Buchman & Fox, to address a matter plaguing the skyline since the first tall buildings went up in the 1880s: the typical high-rise rose in decorous civility from its street frontage, but the side exposures were usually just rude blank walls. The architects gave the World’s Tower Building no secondary facades — all were equally developed.
Buchman & Fox worked in the new mode of a Gothic-style skin in glazed terra cotta, made by the Federal Terra Cotta Company. This newly developed material offered great promise: lightweight compared with stone, easy to produce and covered with a soot-resistant glaze.
In 1913, Real Estate Magazine reported that Browning’s idea for the project was “location plus light equals leases,” and that his control of adjacent properties gave it daylight all four sides. The windows were “set in golden frames,” apparently a light polished bronze.
Three years later, as war raged in Europe, The New York Times reported that Browning, an “enthusiast for preparedness,” planned to use airplanes, stationed on the roof of the 40th Street building, to drop “dummy bombs” over Midtown to demonstrate the threat of aerial bombardment.
Browning did not address the technical aspects of such flights, like how to get aircraft on and off a roof crowded with mechanical equipment and parapet walls. No provisions for aircraft landing are shown in the original drawings. And he did not elaborate on what kind of demonstration bombs he proposed to drop on Midtown.
Browning also said he would begin commuting to work by airplane from his rooftop apartment at 35 West 81st Street to the World’s Tower Building, yet another idea that did not come to fruition. In 1919 Midtown did get bombing practice, of a sort: lightning fractured the cornice of the World’s Tower Building, raining debris onto the street.
Browning seems to have liked the narrow midblock formula: in 1915 he built three nearly identical apartment houses, also designed by Buchman & Fox: 42 West 72nd Street, 118 West 72nd Street and 126 West 73rd Street. Each rose 13 stories on a 25-foot-wide lot, with Gothic-style facades in white terra cotta and windows all around — although with these later buildings he did not get control of adjacent lots.
Soon Browning gave up property development for another hobby: girls. With his first wife, Adele, he had advertised to adopt children — girls only, apparently — offering their parents the knowledge that their children would be brought up in luxurious circumstances.
After adopting two girls, the Brownings divorced. Even so, the entrepreneur continued his search, settling in 1925 on Mary Louise Spas, who claimed to be 16, but was found to be 21, after which the adoption was annulled.
His next selection was 15-year-old Frances Heenan, known in the tabloids as “Peaches.” They married, with her mother’s consent, but separated within a year. He brought suit and she made sensational charges that some newspapers blushingly declined to print; he was found blameless. Edward Browning died in 1934, barely known for real estate but world famous as “Daddy.”
The World’s Tower Building was renovated last summer, in this case with an opaque cream-colored sealant to hide the cracks and defects common to century-old terra cotta. Preservationists have long been cautious about masonry sealants of any kind, especially opaque ones, out of concern that they may trap moisture, conceal decay and hide the actual material.
But there are new generations of sealants that are considered benign, and what is noteworthy about the work on the World’s Tower Building is how new the facade now looks. Even from a few feet away, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune — often writ large on fragile terra cotta — seem to have melted away.
The cracks, chips and dings one would expect to see are invisible, and the effect on Daddy Browning’s chef-d’oeuvre is unexpectedly pleasing.

The Good, the Bad, and Joe Lieberman
The Obama tide lifted some clear winners, including polling savant Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, gun-shop owners, Black Eyed Peas front man will.i.am, MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow, and, of course, Oprah. As for the losers, Joe Lieberman tops the list.
by James Wolcott (Vanity Fair)
Here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the liberal capital of frizzy hair and encyclopedic grudges trailing back to the Spanish Civil War, many of my fellow comrades are still walking around with Obama buttons stuck to their fulsome bosoms. The election is over, victory was achieved, and yet they can’t bring themselves to take off their buttons. They may never take them off. Obama buttons and yes we can actionwear may become classic staples of Manhattan street fashion, like Ramones and CBGB T-shirts. That so many steel-wool cynics have developed a sentimental attachment to Obama buttons is testimony that everybody loves to identify with a winner, especially when they’ve been stigmatized as losers for so long, pelted with peanuts by Rush Limbaugh and every other caroler on the right. Noble failure is fine, until you make a habit of it, then you become a pathetic figure of fun. George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore’s loss in 2000, John Kerry’s loss in 2004, the eviction of Dan Rather from CBS, the financial hemorrhaging at The New York Times—each has been draped like an albatross around liberalism’s neck, the musty aroma becoming the signature scent of Nation subscribers, PBS viewers, and Wally Shawn fans. But then Obama won—won big and wide—and the cling of failure dissolved like the vines in The Sleeping Beauty, liberating the sun. Even the Clinton victories didn’t carry such exultation. It was almost scary, seeing so many New Yorkers smiling in the post-election afterglow, using facial muscles long buried under habitual scowling. That’s what winning does—it promotes cellular rejuvenation. Losing, however, results in a leakage of life force, shrinkage under the spotlight. That’s why the Republicans keep trying to tap into the legend of Ronald Reagan, hoping to extract one last vital drop of sap.
It doesn’t take a quantum mechanic to figure out who the conspicuous winners were in the election. Where the Hillary Clinton brain trust tried to roll each other down the bowling alley (with Clinton’s hapless chief strategist, Mark Penn, serving as the designated patsy), Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, and chief strategist, David Axelrod, conceived and executed the Obama electoral strategy with a supersonic hum and a minimum of bared ego. The first to grasp the portent of what was taking shape was the prophet of the Obama paradigm shift, the journalist/activist/online editor/blogger Al Giordano, who, as a student of the teachings and tactics of community organizer Saul Alinsky (whose Rules for Radicals is the guerrilla guide for domestic insurgents), divined the advantage that Obama’s small-donor base gave him against old-school juggernauts. In a prescient article for The Boston Phoenix in September 2007, a full year before the Democratic convention, Giordano saw a distant dot heading down the railroad tracks and perceived that the Hillary Is Inevitable story line was Old Hollywood, about to be overthrown by an emerging social grid. He foresaw “a different narrative than has ever occurred before—especially because most of Obama’s record-breaking campaign war chest comes from small donors.… Obama is raising campaign money faster than even the Clinton machine is. So the real surprise of the 2008 Democratic nomination contest is that, for the first time since Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, the upstart rival will be able to outspend the anointed Democratic front-runner.” Outspend and outmaneuver. “It is Obama’s history as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago—and the application of that experience to organizing his campaign—that is making the 2008 cycle distinct from previous ones. Where [Howard] Dean failed to convert his donor-activist base into effective organization, Obama is apparently writing the book on how to do it.” And although Dean’s 2004 campaign may have prematurely ruptured, Dean’s tenure as chairman of the Democratic National Committee was a triumph, the party’s nationwide victories a vindication of his 50-state strategy. He was able to bury “the Dean Scream,” for which he is hoarsely remembered, under a high note.

No shiny arrow shot swifter and loftier from obscurity to quotable authority than Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight.com site became the expert sensation of the election season. (Five hundred thirty-eight is the sum of electoral-college votes up for contention.) Crunching poll numbers until they sang with clarity, Silver, a managing partner and sabermetrician at Baseball Prospectus and a former Daily Kos diarist, made many of the old pros look as if they were stuck in the previous century, milking cows. Not only did his disciplined models and microfine data mining command respect, his prognostications hit the Zen mark on Election Day. “This uncanny accuracy is the equivalent of dropping a penny from the top of a 50 story building and landing it in a shot glass,” John Cole wrote at Balloon Juice. “This is sick accurate.” Silver also became an instant cable-news savant, his geek-genius glasses and owlish mien worthy of a Starfleet sub-adjutant whose quadratic equations coolly foil an attack from a Romulan vessel while the senior officers are frantically poking at their touch screens. Combine blog cred and TV-niche stardom, and a fat book contract is the next-best thing to inevitable, and, sure enough, Silver scored a two-book contract said to be “in the neighborhood of $700,000,” which is a pretty nice neighborhood, especially these days when people are stockpiling spam. Able to move into an even nicer neighborhood is comedian Sarah Silverman, whose “Great Schlep” viral video campaign to noodge Jews to migrate to Florida to persuade their cranky grandparents to vote for Obama helped catapult her into a multi-million-dollar book deal. Some of Obama’s victory dust rubbed off on her, too. Contrast this with the sorry plight of Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, a book destined for the remainder bin of infamy as a case study in authorial hubris (Steele still won’t acknowledge he blew it) and the cost of becoming Super Glued to a losing argument.
The Sabrina story of the season was Rachel Maddow’s captivating rise from minor-league hottie to prom-queen media darling. After regular guest appearances on Race for the White House with David Gregory and Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Maddow—a host on the liberal Air America talk-radio network, whose collegial humor and buoyant crusading defied the stereotype of the ranting lefty driven bonkers by Bush-Cheney—was awarded her own prime-time show on MSNBC, a time slot that had been a cemetery plot, claiming the souls of Deborah Norville, Dan Abrams, and others whose names are writ in mist. The ratings rocketed far beyond expectations. Maddow’s sparky enthusiasm at being the new kid on the block stood in marked contrast with the granitic monotone of Fox News hosts such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, who tried to gin up scary-Obama controversy with their customary one-two of jabbing fingers and gritted dentures, relying on a right-wing playbook from the Clinton-bashing era that’s as stale as one of Roger Ailes’s old stogies.
Oprah Winfrey, whose world you and I inhabit, added yet another crown jewel to her empress tiara with her early benediction of Obama. Opinion was divided at first as to the wisdom of her infallible decision. The marriage of those two magic circles, those twin halos, would constitute a new power ring, many proclaimed; others wrinkled their beaks. To question Oprah’s wisdom is to doubt the cosmos, to accuse the Wheel of Life of having a loose axle, yet a few agnostic members of the Beltway punditry ventured skepticism, despite the obvious risk to their immortal souls. One of the most prominent shuffleboard players on the political-analyst scene, the hacktacular Mark Halperin, began the debunking with a Time-magazine piece confidently titled “Why Oprah Won’t Help Obama.” He conceded that Obama and Oprah together would be a photo-op orgasmatron. “So yes, expect loud, rousing rallies in all three early voting states when Oprah Winfrey comes to town with her friend Barack Obama in early December [2007], with gobs of media attention, raucous crowds, emotion and great pictures. But don’t expect those events to do anything productive to allow Obama to get over the biggest hurdle standing between him and the White House. American voters are not looking for a celebrity or talk show sidekick to lead them.” Undecided voters, Halperin speculated, might be turned off by such hullabaloo. “In that respect, Winfrey’s events might even be—dare it be said—counterproductive.”
John McCain, slouching loser, fallen maverick, and his fellow failures: from left, Karl Rove, architectural disaster; Sarah Palin, Margaret Thatcher with moose antlers; Mark Penn, Hillary’s minister of misfortune; Christopher Shays, Republican snail darter; and Joe Lieberman, the defective defector. Photo illustration by Chris Mueller.
Halperin, dare it be said, made a doody, as did Lisa Schiffren, a former speechwriter for Vice President Dan Quayle, who argued at National Review Online that basking in Oprah’s reflected glory only served to make Obama look Mickey Mouse. “Just watching Obama standing next to this very successful, very sophisticated older middle-aged woman who has been around the block a couple of times, highlights his youth and inexperience. What does he know about life?” Not as much as a former speechwriter for Dan Quayle, that’s for dang sure! Other observers had a healthier respect for Oprah’s powers of levitation, such as David Bositis, senior policy analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who told The Washington Post’s “The Trail,” “If she can get Tolstoy back on the bestseller list in an era of shortened attention spans, then there’s not much she can’t do.” But it would take a pair of economists from the University of Maryland to quantify “the Oprah effect” at the polls, to verify and certify that what she was able to do for that old fusspot Tolstoy was politically transferable. In a paper titled “The Role of Celebrity Endorsements in Politics: Oprah, Obama, and the 2008 Democratic Primary,” Craig Garthwaite and Timothy J. Moore reached the heart- pounding conclusion: “The results of this study suggest that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary had statistically and politically significant effects on Obama’s political outcomes.” Sounds a little vague, care to specify? “In total, we estimate that Winfrey’s endorsement was responsible for 1,015,559 votes for Obama.” Oprah earned every close-up she received as one of the rejoicers at Obama’s victory address in Grant Park, and every invitation to the Lincoln Bedroom the Obamas care to extend.
Another winner was will.i.am, the musician and front man for Black Eyed Peas, whose song “Yes We Can” was alchemized into an anthemic, iconic YouTube classic by director Jesse Dylan, evocatively weaving passages from Obama’s speech with testimonial cameos from Scarlett Johansson, Herbie Hancock, John Legend, Amber Valletta, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (not wearing his pilot’s uniform from Airplane!, alas). “Yes We Can” inspired a couple of hilarious spoofs, one of them titled “john.he.is,” where John McCain’s offhand hawkish comments about bombing Iran and staying in Iraq for 1,000 years induce panic attacks in the sensitive songbirds taking part (one of them breathing into a paper bag). And what did the McCain camp lob back in musical response? Every four years Republicans pretend to love country music down to its dyed roots to show how much they have in common with “real Americans,” and this year country repaid the favor with a rusty-assed ditty by Hank Williams Jr., giving doggerel a bad name with his rousing theme song “McCain-Palin Tradition,” whose lyrics probably took the better part of an afternoon to Scrabble: “John N Sarah tell ya just what they think / And they’re not gonna blink / And they’re gonna fix this country / Cause they’re just like you N ole Hank.” Fixing the country would have been easier than fixing ole Hank’s rhyme schemes, but the electorate intervened, sparing Republicans both awesome tasks.
“I could sell a hundred ARs an hour, if I had them.”
That was the word from the man behind the counter at my local gun shop yesterday afternoon when I stopped in. As if to put an exclamation point on his claim, two men added their names to an ever-growing waiting list to purchase AR-15 carbines within minutes of my entering the store. —Confederate Yankee blog, November 20, 2008.
No group of winners enjoyed a more perverse windfall than gun-shop owners, whose showrooms were besieged by militiamen, survivalists, deerstalkers, rifle-range groupies, fans of the cult film Red Dawn, and other Second Amendment bitter-enders loading up on guns, scopes, and ammo as if ready to refight the Battle of the Alamo in the Home Depot parking lot. Based on my diagnostic survey of gun blogs, numerous strains of psychic contagion prompted this biped stampede. Some hunter-gatherers feared that, were Obama to win, black people would go crazy in rampant celebration, burning city blocks to express their joy. Others feared that, were Obama to lose, black people would go wilding with outrage, igniting a nationwide Rodney King rampage. Either way, they wanted to be ready. Even after the election, when America’s urban citadels stood unsmoking and intact, gun showrooms saw a rise in boot traffic as the heavily armed became even more heavily armed, stocking up on high-caliber staples before an anticipated crackdown by the Obama administration on home arsenals. “Bernie Conatser has never seen business this good,” began a CNN story of November 11, 2008. “ ‘I have been in business for 12 years, and I was here for Y2K, September 11, Katrina,’ Conatser said, as a steady stream of customers browsed what remained of his stock. ‘And all of those were big events, and we did notice a spike in business, but nothing on the order of what we are seeing right now.’ ” America being the unhappy hunting ground of multiple homicides, a volatile combination of stockpiled weapons, political resentment, psychological rage, and economic distress could generate many a tragic headline going forward as some of that surplus ammo gets used up.
Such a grim note for this inaugural season. Let’s jolly it up a bit to find succor and inspiration in the unfatal misfortune of others, those divinely ordained flops intended to teach humility to the unteachable. Poetic justice doesn’t get more perfectly crafted than the spectacle of Fox News political analyst Karl Rove—Bush’s “brain,” the intellectual architect of the permanent Republican majority, the reigning dean of the Lee Atwater school of cutthroat division, the hissable villain who busted hip-hop moves with NBC’s David Gregory—watching his dream castle wash out to sea as Pennsylvania and Ohio went for Obama, and with it his hope of spending the rest of history gloating with both baby cheeks. An unrepentant Communist watching the Berlin Wall crumble must have felt something akin to Rove’s emotions as repudiation rolled across the scoreboard. Moreover, the McCain team was riddled with Rovians, McCain’s defeat thereby denying Rove the paternal pride of seeing his protégés—the Devil’s disciples—carry on his works and secure his legacy. When Rove was a power source inside the White House, rivals and foes alike could magnify his dark intentions, imagining the evil directives winging from his brow. But upon leaving the service of President Bush in 2007 (rat, ship, flee), Rove was divested of his wizard mystique, deprived of his base; he hopped on the merry-go-round of Beltway punditry, quickly establishing himself as the thinking man’s Dick Morris, which is something of a comedown after being Satan. Instead of picking up the phone and making people’s lives hell, he’s now peddling standard op-ed mush with an extra dab of gall. Without any apparent sense of self-irony he took to his Wall Street Journal pulpit to intone, “Now Obama Has to Govern.” Given Rove’s profound involvement with the Bush White House, which wrecked the country’s image abroad and plunged the nation into an economic abyss (Great Depression II: Jurassic Edition), he’s the last person to be lecturing anybody about governance. It’s like putting Sarah Palin in charge of sentence construction.
But at least Rove didn’t personally embarrass himself during the election and post-election contest, which is more than can be said for Michael Barone, a once stolid and reliable fixture (co-author of the authoritative Almanac of American Politics and senior writer at U.S. News and World Report) who has slanted so far right in recent years that the straw has come out of his head. A week after the election, in a speech in Chicago, he gave voice to quite a faux pas. “A roomful of academics erupted in angry boos Tuesday morning,” wrote Mike Allen and Andy Barr at Politico in one of the year’s cheeriest ledes, “after political analyst Michael Barone said journalists trashed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee, because ‘she did not abort her Down syndrome baby.’ ” Beneath the jovial masks of his fellow journalists lurked a ghoulish zealotry, Barone claimed. “They wanted her to kill that child.… I’m talking about my media colleagues with whom I’ve worked for 35 years.” The boos and angry walkouts provoked by Barone’s aspersions were the first clues that his speech wasn’t going over very well. In an apologetic e-mail explaining how his big mouth had strayed into foul territory, Barone wrote that he “was attempting to be humorous and … went over the line.” Abortion humor in a roomful of academics—gee, what could possibly go wrong? Barone’s self-inflicted injury was clinching evidence of how Ann Coulter’s callow brand of group slander—liberal-trashing one-liners delivered with a hiccup—has rancidly seeped into the Republican mainstream. It’s a very dated style now, as tired and ineffectual as the stomach growls to which CNN’s William Bennett gives voice to render his headmasterish disapproval of whatever it was Paul Begala just said.
Conspicuous as a two-time loser in 2008 was Hugh Hewitt, a blogger, radio host, and Promethean twit possessed of an infallible gift for getting it pompously, egregiously wrong. First he became the supreme laser swordsman for Republican hopeful and hair lord Mitt Romney, advocating his candidacy with a book-length mash note titled A Mormon in the White House?, then fawning over every move Romney made on the campaign trail, reaching a crescendo with a post-pubescent swoon over Romney’s speech addressing concerns about his Mormon religion. Hewitt’s Townhall column began, “Mitt Romney’s ‘Faith in America’ speech was simply magnificent, and anyone who denies it is not to be trusted as an analyst. On every level it was a masterpiece.” Once Romney left the primary stage, taking his multi-level masterpiece with him, Hewitt pressed his fingers to his mystic temples and projected another vision on the side of the barn. On October 3, a month before the election, H.H. pronounced, as if it were a mortal lock, “Why McCain Will Close and Win.” His reasoning was somewhat windy—“We do not desire to become Europe.… Large portions of Obama’s most dedicated supporters do”—but his certitude was as solid as Gary Busey’s sobriety on Celebrity Rehab. “America is a great and good nation, and it will not turn itself over to a party in the grip of its hardest left cadres, its most corrupt machine and its least experienced nominee ever.” Oh, yeah? Guess again, buddy boy! Up against the wall! Free Huey!

Its habitat destroyed, picked off one by one, the Republican Moderate is going the way of the auk and the dodo, fading into extinction. It may have taken its last hard hit in 2008. Chris Shays’s loss in the election deprived the Republicans of their remaining House seat in New England. To those who pine for a cooperative spirit of partisanship, who bathe in the healing bubbles of Washington sages David Broder and David Gergen, the demise of the Republican Moderate is an occasion for elegy. But to bugle-blowing conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh, the appropriate send-off to Chris Shays and his ilk is good-bye and “good riddance.” The Republican Moderate, a political animal that goes by the disparaging acronym of rino (Republican in name only), is a useless excrescence, sapping the vital essence of conservatism. Moderation is emasculation in the minds of militant conservatives, and pruning the party of wishy-washies will produce a lean, mean fighting machine for 2008 dream girl Sarah Palin, whose flash stardom was a boon to Tina Fey and a Viagra boost to conservative gawkers, whose pants ballooned like Jiffy Pop bags whenever she appeared on TV in glorious array. (Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, may never live down rhapsodizing about Palin’s vice-presidential-debate performance as if he had just been honored with a lap dance. “I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, ‘Hey, I think she just winked at me.’ ” Down, tiger.)
So let the purge commence of crybabies such as Chris Shays and Christie Todd Whitman and backstabbers such as—well, the conservative Web site RedState is putting together a list. Furious over the leaks about Palin coming from fellow Republicans, RedState announced a campaign called “Operation Leper” to compile the names of these traitorous finks hiding behind anonymous leaks to the hated mainstream media. RedState urged its readers to sign a petition pledging “to publicly expose and actively oppose all of John McCain’s staffers smearing Sarah Palin and … oppose any candidate who hires these people for a 2012 race. These smear artists must become political lepers for the good of the country and the Republican Party.” This stirring call is reminiscent of the Captain Video Ranger pledge Norton swore in The Honeymooners, minus the space helmet. It’s unlikely that any Republican of moderate inclination will wish to wade into the shark waters of suspicion and recrimination that will roil while the party is out of power, ensuring that the future rank and file will become largely the refuge of white people animated by fear, spite, and a hunger for simple answers. But, hey, at least they’re animated! That’s why they gravitate to Sarah Palin—they’re drawn to her frontier spunk, that coonskin cap of hair she has. She makes the past come alive, which appeals to those feeling left behind, for whom the past is a beautiful Sunday idyll that liberals went and ruined. She’s America’s first and probably last prelapsarian drama queen, a brassy object of fascination whose unsheathing of presidential ambitions and personal entitlement will be breathtaking to behold in the years ahead, akin to watching Godzilla eat breakfast. Well, it beats listening to Joe Lieberman ooze. Aligning himself with the wrong team, having the effrontery to show up grinning on the stage at the Republican convention, Lieberman was the loser’s loser of the 2008 election—in the immortal words of Groucho Marx, Go, and never darken our towels again!
James Wolcott is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.