The agony and the ecstasy
Is waxing down under really worth it? As more and more men opt for bizarre downstairs topiary, our writer finds himself seduced
Nirpal Dhaliwal London Sunday Times

I have always been a pubic snob. Nothing delights me more than a fragrant, lovingly tended lady garden that invites one to linger for hours. Equally, I never hide my disappointment when presented not with a seductive purring kitten, but something wild and ugly that, frankly, I’d rather fend off with a stick.
Having now had my own bits’n’pieces waxed and bejewelled, however, I shall never again tolerate an unkempt hedge. That said, I also have a deeper respect for women in general, appreciating the pressure they’re under to be beautiful and the excruciating steps they take to achieve it.
I like to keep myself fairly tidy down there, passing my beard trimmer through whenever it gets out of hand. But with the recent revelation in the Manchester United official club magazine that a member of the team had burnt his baby-maker in a depilating accident (the finger was being pointed at Cristiano Ronaldo), I realised I wasn’t keeping to the latest standards of grooming. While gay men have always led the way in male vanity, straight ones are increasingly catching up. Emulating the six-packs, smooth chests and sexual technique of their online porn heroes, they now also want the bald look downstairs. Hirsuteness is no longer a sign of masculinity, but a mark of monogamy, proof you are out of the high-octane sexual loop that keeps young people working hard to be desirable.
“Lots of men shave their testicles,” Suzanne Barker, of the Glamour spa at GL-14 health club, in Manchester, told me. (All sorts of football royalty go there, so she really ought to know.) “But it’s better to wax. It lasts longer and feels much more comfortable.” I related to this, having once shaved myself out of boredom in adolescence, only to be tormented for weeks with a rough and itchy crotch.
So I agreed to head undergo a Bollywood waxing, a treatment the pioneers at the spa have brought to Britain, hoping to tap into men’s growing obsession with personal styling of all varieties. “It’s called that because of how Indian women prepare and decorate themselves for their wedding night,” Barker explains, showing me a range of studded diamanté ornamentations.
For, while a Brazilian would leave my manhood topped with an elegant furry triangle, the Bollywood denudes it completely and adorns it with a sparkly design that looks like something you might see in the window of a sari shop. I opted for a pretty multicoloured butterfly. Well, why not?
My first ever waxing was, at times, a horror, incomparable to anything I’ve experienced in life. Each time Barker tore the hair from me, I gasped in shock. One small tuft proved particularly stubborn. Tears in my eyes, I pulled my willy as hard as possible, stretching the skin to make it easier for the hair to come away. When it did, in a yank that shook my very soul, the pain reached a level I hadn’t imagined possible. After that, anything was possible. Having my bum strip-waxed was almost pleasurable, like a series of saucy, stinging spanks.
Afterwards, Suzanne and I agreed the hairless little trooper looked rather cute with a diamanté butterfly glittering above him, appearing longer, thicker and more sensuous, too. The beauty of waxing is that the moment it ends, the pain is forgotten and you’re left excitedly enjoying your new creation — much like childbirth, I imagine.
Being completely smooth feels deliciously fresh, clean and sexy. It gives me the constant mischievous smirk of someone with a naughty little secret. Women intuit that I’m hiding something and ask me what I’ve been up to. When I did tell one friend, she simply had to see it, and then couldn’t keep herself from touching. Loving how it looked and felt, she resolved to persuade her boyfriend to have the same.
Knowing the first waxing is by far the most painful, I’m tempted to keep it up. And given how sensual my skin now is, I may even wax my whole body, imagining the exquisite sensation of making love with a soft, hairless body. Waxing has inspired a new level of eroticism I’m keen to explore.

From London Times
Suicide attempt prompts panic at Foxconn
Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent The spiralling suicide crisis at Foxconn appeared to be worsening last night after another employee of the electronics plant tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists.
The suicide attempt was made just hours after the death of a 23-year-old employee.
Psychologists and experts in suicide have begun to talk openly of a “mass hysteria” among the 350,000 mostly migrant workers at the vast factory in Shenzhen, southern China, which makes digital equipment such as iPods, mobile phones and laptop PCs for big-name clients.
The death today brought the toll among the company’s staff to 11 since January. The Times has learnt that Sony has begun “re-evaluating” the working environment at Foxconn.
With panic starting to show among Foxconn’s management, the company is understood to have asked employees to sign a pledge that they would seek medical help if they were ever overcome by suicidal thoughts.
The fatalities come amid mounting condemnation of working conditions at the Taiwanese-owned plant and the decision of several of the company’s biggest clients — Apple, Dell and Hewlett Packard — to investigate how their products are being manufactured.
The latest victim, like the nine other young employees who have committed suicide at the plant since January, leapt from the seventh floor of his dormitory.
The company has made hastily contrived efforts to improve conditions for its workers, the majority of whom stand in the same position for 12-hour shifts and receive the equivalent of about £90 each month in salary. Those measures include the use of “soothing” music on the factory floor, the recruitment of hundreds of dance instructors and the establishment of a suicide hotline.
Terry Gou, the chairman of Foxconn, is fighting hard to persuade the world that he is “certainly not running a sweatshop”. Hours before the latest death he had been touring the factory assuring staff that he was doing everything possible to avert more suicides.
He told reporters that he was unable to sleep and lived in fear that the next call to his phone would bring news of yet another death.
The plant’s astonishing productivity levels have attracted global clients such as Samsung, IBM and Sony, but labour activists have long alleged that the famous efficiency comes at too high a cost.
The attention given to Foxconn suicides relates less to the actual numbers and more to the apparent pace at which they have risen and that the victims have taken their lives in the same “copycat” way. If the suicide rate at the Foxconn factory matched the Chinese national average, the size of the workforce there would imply around 45 deaths per year.
The steep rate of increase in Foxconn suicides over recent weeks, though, has challenged the business model on which China’s manufacturing industry has grown. The company’s plant in Shenzhen is a city-sized complex set up to feed the global appetite for cheap technology.
Speculation that big brands might take their business away from Foxconn to protect their image are unrealistic, said one Tokyo-based electronics analyst. He said that consumers were no longer prepared to pay the sort of money it would cost to build computers, digital cameras and iPods without the productivity of companies such as Foxconn.
The company has previously claimed that the latest deaths were a symptom of deeper social problems in China, such as the widening gap between rich and poor. Ma Ai, the head of the Institute of Legal Psychology, China University of Political Science and Law, believes instead that the reasons are far more complex. The depression caused by factory life is in large part born of disappointment — the workers are young people who left the poverty of the provinces in the belief that a factory job would offer them a “city life” and enough money to enjoy a little of China’s economic growth. The reality they find is infinitely more grim.
At one level, said Professor Ma, Foxconn is in the grip of a form of “group hysteria” that has found its outlet in suicide. “People’s feelings are contagious, and can spread between each other quickly,” he said.
He added that a “hellish” mood was developing at the factory, where workers had lost faith in their employer and any sense of security. What you have now, said Prof Ma, “is a group of susceptible persons are living in nervous and depressing atmosphere”.

A Long, Lean Backlash to the Mini

By RUTH LA FERLA NY TIMES
JEAN RHYS knew a thing or two about style and, in particular, about the hauteur conveyed by the sweep of a hem. In her novel “Wide Sargasso Sea,” a Goth-tinged prequel to “Jane Eyre,” Christophine, a servant, lets the tail of her skirt fan out behind her — a gesture of breeding, the reader is told. Hitching up one’s hem, on the other hand, sends quite a different message. When your man is abusive, Christophine advises her young Creole mistress, just “pick up your skirt and walk out.”
Today those gestures seem quaint — more likely to be witnessed on Turner Classic Movies than on the F train or in fashion’s front row. As for the style — long, lean and willowy — it is fast gaining traction on Manhattan streets as a new generation of early adopters discovers the attractions of a trailing hem.
“There is definitely a movement to a very lengthy look, especially among the young,” said Nevena Borissova, a partner in Curve, a progressive retailer with stores in New York, Los Angeles and Miami. Ms. Borissova favors radically stretched-out skirts and dresses that “drag on the floor, with raw edges, and worn with combat boots,” she said. And as she pointed out, these myriad calf- or ankle-grazing iterations of the milelong skirt bear no relation to “Big Love” or, for that matter, the Summer of Love.
There is nothing remotely prim or saccharine about the latest interpretations of this look, with their distinctly urban overtones. Current versions, even the most languid, are likely to be toughened up with a military parka or a biker jacket and thick-soled shoes. A muted, and at times ascetic, successor to the sweet-as-a-bonbon, Hamptons-worthy maxi-dresses that first alighted on downtown streets a couple of summers ago, the new maxis are more Morticia than Ophelia. They are “darker and more sophisticated” than last summer’s flounced beach dresses, said Morgan Yakus, a partner in No.6, a haven for style-setters in downtown Manhattan.
More tellingly, perhaps, they represent a seductive — make that subversive — alternative to the jeans, leggings and showily girly micro-minis that pop up like ragweed with the first mild breeze. They are “fashion’s backlash to the short skirt,” Ms. Yakus suggested.
Sharon Graubard, a senior executive with Stylesight, a trend forecasting firm in New York, predicted that while the maxi trend is “forward” — that is, positioned well outside the mainstream — it would be adopted by “the same cutting-edge girls who first embraced the micro-mini” and would pick up steam as fall approaches. Cool-weather variations from houses as diverse as Louis Vuitton, Haider Ackermann, Ann Demeulemeester and Missoni, and even the calf-length renditions Marc Jacobs unveiled in New York last winter, are “really going to change women’s eyes,” Ms. Graubard said.
SPAWNED, though rather tepidly received, in the 1970s, the latest maxis have been filtered through the hair-shirt sensibility of the early ’90s, when excessive consumption gave way to an attitude of piety exemplified by a kind of monastic look — “fashion’s little penance,” as Amy Spindler termed it in The New York Times in 1993.
Today the fluid but rigorously plain maxis reflect a subtly shifting cultural climate born in the wake of the Dow’s collapse. Maxi-dressing “speaks to a movement,” said Colleen Sherin, the women’s fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue, adding that the subdued and often monochromatic skirts and dresses appeal “to women who want something less ostentatious and care more about quality than flash.” Committed to opulent but understated interpretations of the style, Saks recently showcased long, blanket-like cashmere skirts by Michael Kors in its windows.
An elongated silhouette also represents a turning away from the frivolity and calculated provocation of a thigh-high skirt “toward a more austere sensibility,” said Holli Rogers, the buying director for Net-A-Porter, which highlights and sells long tanks from Helmut Lang (a side-split jersey maxi, $330), Stella McCartney (a long silk shirtdress, $1,115) and L’Agence (a cross-back jersey maxi, $200) on its Web site. “People are accepting a more muted, covered-up feeling and moving on,” she said.
Siena Scarritt, a sales assistant at No. 6, wears long bias-cut skirts most days of the week. “They make me feel tall and elegant,” she said, “and I like their feeling of movement.”
Sandra Bohbot of Bisou Bisou, the family-owned fashion chain where she works, said she enjoys the way her longish Chloé skirt plays around her calves. Ms. Bohbot, who has sworn off micro-minis — for the moment, at least — has found herself wearing longer skirts almost exclusively, because, she said, “I began to feel that wearing short is unclassy.”
Street-sweeping skirts have been embraced by a handful of vanguard merchants offering elongated tank dresses, tubular skirts, taper-slim halter dresses and one-shoulder columns. Less common but perhaps appealing to women still on the fence about the full-on maxi are versions like one by Yohji Yamamoto for Y-3, hiked to the knee in front and pooling in a train at the rear. Mr. Yamamoto, it should be noted, is one of the Japanese provocateurs who introduced more voluminous versions of the look more than two decades ago.
Fast-fashion outposts like Topshop and Forever 21 sell their own variations of the newly slender maxi. Zara, too, has budget-friendly interpretations, including a black floor-length pleated tank dress and an earth-tone hip-slung skirt. While Zara does not disclose sales figures, a spokeswoman said that maxi-skirts and dresses have proved so successful that it plans to reissue some styles and add others throughout the fall.
No. 6, an early proponent of the look, sold out its long dresses within days after they arrived in late April, Ms. Yakus said. She plans to restock with ’90s-era monastic pieces from Donna Karan and Ghost, the British label known for its flowing, unembellished shapes.
Popular as they are with the nose-ring and chunky-boot set, maxi-skirts have only lately surfaced in the influential fashion glossies. In its April issue, Vogue showed lean, ankle-length skirts for day from the likes of Marni and Ann Demeulemeester, suggesting, however, in a cautious codicil, that “they work best on taller women.”
Will the street-length skirt endure? Even its most ardent proponents will tell you, that depends. “People are waiting to see trendsetters like Kate Moss wearing it,” Ms. Borissova of Curve suggested. “Then they’ll take a chance.”
She maintained, nonetheless, that by fall, a long, lean silhouette could be driving sales. “Five years from now,” she insisted in a whoosh of enthusiasm, “we’ll all be wearing maxis.”
And fending off the advances of unsavory-looking strangers with an insolent hitch of the hem.

Vanishing Treasure: The Rent-Regulated Apartment

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
Rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments carry mythic significance to New Yorkers starved for space. These are the high-ceiling homes featured in Woody Allen movies, the places secured by celebrities like Carly Simon, Cyndi Lauper and Ed Koch.
They are the reason that Monica on “Friends” was able to afford her apartment on a chef’s salary.
Of course, Monica is a fictional character, but awe-inspiring, teeth-clenching deals still do exist. An informal survey of some major landlords and real estate agencies turned up an Upper East Side woman paying $156.20 for two conjoined studios, a Lower East Side man paying $60 a month for a walk-up, and octogenarians and nonagenarians sprinkled through Little Italy paying $58 to $102 a month.
Most of these tenants with time-warped rents declined to be interviewed, because of the hate mail they believed they would receive. But one such tenant did agree to go on the record, and he wants his fellow New Yorkers to know that he has not been able to keep his cheap apartment without a long fight.
He is John Burke, a 65-year-old paying $288 a month for a studio at 218 East 84th Street. As the last rent-stabilized dweller in a five-story walk-up, Mr. Burke is living in a construction site where the latest landlord is renovating all the other studios and charging $1,850 to $1,975 a month. Mr. Burke says he has spent $13,500 to repair his dilapidated apartment and $11,000 on legal fees taking his landlords to court over the conditions.
He is waiting for his current landlord to find him a temporary apartment, make repairs and let him return home. But there are no guarantees when or if that might happen.
As Mr. Burke carefully walked through the sweltering apartment, stacked to the ceiling with furniture he was waiting to move, he inhaled the unsettling scent of mold, ignored the head-splitting sawing and hammering from floors above him, and poked his dark-wood cane at rotting floorboards his landlord had not repaired.
“It’s been hell,” Mr. Burke said while walking among glass shards that construction had left strewn about the backyard. “Now you see, it’s no bargain.”
As with many other things that money and gentrification have scrubbed from the city, the number of these apartments is shrinking. The roster of rent-controlled apartments, the ones with the most restrictions on rent, has shrunk to 40,000, according to the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal. When these units are emptied, they often become rent stabilized, and after a certain point the apartments can be liberated to the free market. According to the most recent figures available, the number of rent-stabilized units fell to 848,000 in 2008 from 900,000 in 2003. And outside of prime neighborhoods, the restricted rents are not such a great bargain, in many cases barely cheaper than what the apartments could fetch on the open market.
The deteriorating low-priced apartments still exist partly because landlords have little financial incentive to make renovations or apply for rent increases. Stabilized rents increase by order of the local Rent Guidelines Board, typically around 3 percent a year, while controlled rents can go up only if the landlord files an application for an increase with the state, a laborious process. And the state will not allow a rent increase if an apartment has major housing code violations.
Sherwin Belkin, a Manhattan lawyer who represents owners and developers, said landlords often say it is not worth the time to apply for increases that could translate into just a few dollars more a month.
While it is less true today, rent-regulated apartments have provided some New Yorkers with very comfortable lives. Mr. Burke, who grew up in Ireland on a farm outside Galway, moved to New York in 1964 to be close to his brother upstate and his 100 relatives in Massachusetts. He worked in restaurants and bars and collected decades of tales of celebrity sightings and romances. He moved into his current apartment in 1977, when the rent was $65, and filled his closets with handsome clothes.
As new owners bought his building and pressed tenants to leave, Mr. Burke held his ground. He was careful to pay his rent by check or money order, not cash, to have a paper trail. But an accident in the Catskills in 1995 left Mr. Burke unable to work and with little spare money. He currently lives on an $1,100 monthly disability check. He finds solace reading historical romance novels about lords and earls by authors like Julia London.
Mr. Burke has reached a stalemate with his latest landlord, the Shalom family, which bought the building last year for $3.3 million. He is working with State Senator Liz Krueger, the nonprofit Eviction Intervention Services and the tenant rights group Shalom Tenants Alliance, which is fighting the landlord over its management of more than 100 buildings. Calls and e-mail messages to the Shalom family at their firm Sky Management, to the past landlord and to brokers renting out apartments were not returned.
Catie Marshall, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, said the agency was “aware of the conditions of his apartment” and wanted it “to be brought up to all of the standards of the housing code.” The building currently has 190 violations, including 76 in that specific unit. For example, the department has asked the landlord to repair the broken kitchen sink and bathroom floor tiles. The Department of Buildings is also monitoring the building and has issued 18 notices of environmental control board violations.
Still, Mr. Burke’s eyes twinkled when he was asked whether there was any benefit to the battle for his bargain apartment.
“I have been fighting for other tenants and myself,” he said. “We can leave a road map showing people how to win.”

A Classic Turns 50, and Parties Are Planned

By JULIE BOSMAN
In Santa Cruz, Calif., volunteers will re-enact every word and movement in the famous courtroom scene. In Monroeville, Ala., residents dressed in 1930s garb will read aloud from memorable passages. In Rhinebeck, N.Y., Oblong Books will host a party with Mocktails and a performance by the indie band the Boo Radleys.
All summer “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be relived through at least 50 events around the country, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of a book that became a cultural touchstone and an enduring staple of high-school reading programs.
Its publisher, HarperCollins, is trying to tap into what appears to be a near-endless reserve of affection for the book by helping to organize parties, movie screenings, readings and scholarly discussions. The publisher has recruited Tom Brokaw and other authors to take part by reading from the novel — which tells the story of the small-town lawyer Atticus Finch, who defends a black man accused of rape, and his family — in their hometowns.
Of course, there is also the hope that the events, which are scheduled to run through Sept. 22, will drum up more sales of the book. HarperCollins plans to issue four new editions of the novel next month, each with a different cover and all to be placed on special “Mockingbird”-themed floor displays in bookstores.
Perhaps the largest concentration of celebrations for the book are in Monroeville, which calls itself the “literary capital of Alabama” after its most famous resident, the “Mockingbird” author Harper Lee. The city is planning four days of events, including silent auctions, a walking tour of downtown, a marathon reading of the book in the county courthouse and a birthday party on the courthouse lawn.
The festivities are not expected to attract an appearance by the mysterious Ms. Lee, who is 84 and still living quietly in Alabama after never publishing another book. “Harper Lee has always been a very private person,” said Tina Andreadis, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins. “The legacy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ speaks for itself.”
Few novels have achieved both the mass popularity and the literary cachet of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The book was originally published in 1960 by J. B. Lippincott and Company (now part of HarperCollins), won a Pulitzer Prize and has not been out of print since. It has sold nearly one million copies a year and in the past five years has been the second-best-selling backlist title in the country, beaten out only by the novel “The Kite Runner.”
Interest in the book intensified after the 2005 film “Capote,” in which Catherine Keener played Ms. Lee, and grew even stronger the next year, when Sandra Bullock played her in “Infamous.”
Sales of the book are especially robust in the South, including Kentucky, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Florida, and in the Midwest, particularly Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
Mr. Brokaw, who will read from the novel in a bookstore in Bozeman, Mont., on July 11, said he vividly recalls reading it as a 20-year-old college sophomore in South Dakota in 1960.
“I just remember being utterly absorbed by it, and inspired by Atticus, and very taken by Scout,” Mr. Brokaw said. “Those are very powerful characters. And I don’t remember another book about the South that treated race in quite that fashion.”
Mary McDonagh Murphy, a writer and documentary director whose book, “Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of 50 Years of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’,” will be published in June, called “Mockingbird” “our national novel.”
“I can’t name another book that is this popular, that tells such a good story, has such indelible characters and makes a social statement without being preachy,” Ms. Murphy said. “It is plain in the very best sense of the word.”
Less plain is Ms. Lee’s response to the unceasing popularity of her one and only book. Executives at HarperCollins said they began planning the summer-long celebration of “To Kill a Mockingbird” on the assumption that Ms. Lee would not take part. “She’s almost never given interviews,” said Kathy Schneider, a senior vice president and associate publisher at HarperCollins. “That’s why we didn’t expect her to participate in a big way.”
Ms. Murphy, who has interviewed Ms. Lee’s sister Alice Lee, said that Harper Lee was unhappy that in interviews decades ago, reporters did not quote her precisely. And she also had a philosophical issue — “that writers should not be familiar and recognizable,” Ms. Murphy said. “That was for entertainers.”
Wally Lamb, a novelist who will be part of a panel discussion about the book in Wilton, Conn., in September, said he believes Ms. Lee’s quiet stance evokes Boo Radley, a character to whom Ms. Lee has compared herself.
“One of the things that I find really cool about her is what I consider her caginess,” Mr. Lamb said. “And I think maybe the mystery surrounding her, and that sort of silence that she decided to maintain with the media, that becomes part of the legend of the book.”

From The Sunday Times
Found: genes that let you live to 100
Jonathan Leake,

Environment Editor SCIENTISTS have discovered the “Methuselah” genes whose lucky carriers have a much improved chance of living to 100 even if they indulge in an unhealthy lifestyle.
The genes appear to protect people against the effects of smoking and bad diet and can also delay the onset of age-related illnesses such as cancer and heart disease by up to three decades.
No single gene is a guaranteed fountain of youth. Instead, the secret of longevity probably lies in having the right “suite” of genes, according to new studies of centenarians and their families. Such combinations are extremely rare — only one person in 10,000 reaches the age of 100.
The genes found so far each appear to give a little extra protection against the diseases of old age. Centenarians appear to have a high chance of having several such genes embedded in their DNA.
“Long-lived people do not have fewer disease genes or ageing genes,” said Eline Slagboom of Leiden University, who is leading a study into 3,500 Dutch nonagenarians. “Instead they have other genes that stop those disease genes from being switched on. Longevity is strongly genetic and inherited.”
Slagboom and her colleagues recently published studies showing how the physiology of people in long-lived families differs from normal people. Other studies, showing the genetic causes of those differences, are due for publication soon.
“People who live to a great age metabolise fats and glucose differently, their skin ages more slowly and they have lower prevalence of heart disease, diabetes and hypertension,” she said.
“These factors are all under strong genetic control, so we see the same features in the children of very old people.”
The so-called Methuselah genes — named after the biblical patriarch who lived to 969 — are thought to include ADIPOQ, which is found in about 10% of young people but in nearly 30% of people living past 100. The CETP gene and the ApoC3 gene are found in 10% of young people, but in about 20% of centenarians.
The studies show that tiny mutations in the make-up of particular genes can sharply increase a person’s lifespan. Nonetheless, environmental factors such as the decline in infectious diseases are an important factor in the steady rise in the number of centenarians. The human genome contains about 28,000 genes, but they are controlled by a tiny number of so-called regulator genes.
Dr David Gems, a longevity researcher at University College London, believes that treatments to slow ageing will become widespread.
“If we know which genes control longevity then we can find out what proteins they make and then target them with drugs. That makes it possible to slow down ageing. We need to reclassify it as a disease rather than as a benign, natural process,” he said.
“Much of the pain and suffering in the world are caused by ageing. If we can find a way to reduce that, then we are morally obliged to take it.”
An anti-ageing drug which might be taken by millions of people, perhaps from middle age onwards, could be the ultimate blockbuster for the pharmaceutical industry.
Michelle Mitchell of Age UK said: “Ageing is a natural part of life. The key is to ensure that we do not simply extend life but extend the years of healthy life so that people can enjoy, not endure, their later years.”

The Naked Men of Chatroulette
by Shannon Donnelly DAILY BEAST

The latest social-networking phenomenon is filled with men showing off their genitalia. Shannon Donnelly talks to flashers about what they're getting out of it—and whether Chatroulette is turning otherwise normal men into exhibitionists.
Chatroulette has given rise to an impressive array of hilarious and poignant viral sensations, from improvised concerts by Ben Folds, to a foul-mouthed 8-year-old, to Jon Stewart’s antics. Which is pretty remarkable considering the website seems to be largely comprised of naked men.
Chatroulette, which launched only a few months ago, has already become a phenomenon, thanks in part to its ludicrously simple layout. Webcam users are connected to complete strangers, and if they’re bored with whomever they’re talking to, they can click “Next” and be connected to another randomly selected stranger. The site has none of the frills of other social-networking sites—no profiles, no private messages, no friends—just an endless stream of strangers. And, as the site has seemingly become overrun by flashers, an endless stream of genitalia—mostly of the male variety.-“Chatroulette is technology’s answer to an exhibitionist’s prayers,” says one psychiatrist.
This disconnect between Chatroulette’s flashers and the vast majority of users who want nothing to do with them prompts the question: Why? Who are all these naked men, and what, exactly, they getting out of this game of naked cat and mouse?
For many of them, say experts, it’s a similar thrill to what real-life flashers on the street get—but even better because it’s risk-free. “Chatroulette is technology's answer to an exhibitionist's prayers,” says Carole Lieberman, psychiatrist and author of Bad Boys: Why We Love Them, How to Live with Them and When to Leave Them. “It allows would-be trenchcoat-wearing subway flashers to get the same titillation without the danger of getting caught.”
Why exposing one’s self to strangers online would be titillating, however, is something most people can’t imagine. According to Lieberman, there are many things that might excite an exhibitionist. Some men, she says, “have fears of inadequacy and are trying to prove that they are 'big' men by getting 'big' reactions from others.” The Daily Beast spoke briefly to one Chatroulette flasher for whom that appears to be the case. When asked why he was showing us his genitalia, he typed out: “i want people 2 see me an i want 2 see ppl.”
This particular man, a 23-year-old construction worker from Oregon named Joe, also confirmed that he is not a flasher anywhere other than on Chatroulette, which seems to imply that Chatroulette is turning normal, everyday men into guys who expose themselves to strangers—or, at least, it’s bringing out that until-now repressed desire in them.
“They can be very bright and successful and you’d never know that they have this addiction,” says Dr. Nancy Irwin. She says these Chatroulette flashers aren’t the seedy characters we usually imagine, and that most flashings are just the result of social awkwardness combining with sexual compulsion. “They’re CEOs, they’re celebrities, and they have this issue. Sexual compulsion crosses all ethnic, gender, and socio-economic barriers. Most of them have extreme difficulty relating to women in a normal way.”
Because of this, they may have more confidence in their physicalities than their personalities. “They’re very proud of their equipment, so they sort of lead with their ace, shall we say,” Irwin says.
Still other men aren’t interested in eliciting a reaction from the flashee at all. They’re “simply lonely and horny and are pretending they have a 'sexual partner' in the viewers who inadvertently click on to their webcam,” says Lieberman.
But it’s not just psychological—Lieberman says there’s a cultural aspect to online flashing as well. “There is a kind of exhibitionist mentality that is invading our culture, from Chatroulette to reality TV,” she says. “Though not all of the participants are physically naked, they are ‘exposing’ themselves to grab attention and their 15 minutes of fame.”
Whether they’re looking for attention or a genuine connection, there’s one thing the flashers of Chatroulette are definitely not looking for—conversation. In fact, over the course of three days—days punctuated with bored-looking young men and women, a few friendly folks eager to connect, an octogenarian man wearing cat ears, several copulating couples, women baring their cleavage, and, yes, many, many penises—only Joe from Oregon was willing to stop what he was doing long enough to tap out his one-handed answer to a reporter’s questions.
This, of course, is the crux of exposing oneself on Chatroulette. Online, a flasher can control what is and isn’t seen, pointing the camera at his torso so that his face is obscured, and retaining the option to click “Next” if he doesn’t like who he’s paired with. This new brand of no-risk flashing makes the kind of exposure indulged in by guys like Ben, a 45-year-old flasher who works with computers, seem almost antiquated. Ben frequents a messageboard dedicated to exhibitionism, and agreed to shed some light on his own motivations for public flashing.
From the time he was 13, Ben has enjoyed exposing himself to women, getting off not on the risk of being caught but by the surprise of the women he encounters. He describes his jury-rigged outfit, which consists of a raincoat, and the cut-off legs of pants tied with garters around his thighs to give the illusion that he is wearing pants underneath. A T-shirt cut off at midriff completes the illusion.
“If there was an alley or side street, I would stand in it waiting for women to come down the street. When they came close I would drop my coat and do my thing.” For Ben, this isn’t a conduit to sex, nor even an attempt to attract a flasher-loving mate—his fit body and lucrative career, he says, do that on their own. Flashing, for Ben and for many others, is just about the thrill of provoking a reaction. And now, Chatroulette is mass-manufacturing that thrill, taking away the threat of getting caught and the costly costume requirements, leaving any would-be flasher with no excuse not to indulge his urges from the comfort of his living room couch.
But what of the clothed Chatroulette users who log on looking for a genuine connection and find that, within a few clicks, they’re staring down the business end of a… well, you know. Will the constant stream of nudity eventually inure Chatroulette users to the sight of masturbating men? “Viewers who keep clicking on Chatroulette—and being exposed to countless male organs in various stages of arousal—will become somewhat desensitized to flashers,” says Lieberman. “However, in real life, it will still be more intimidating because there is always the real-life danger of the exhibitionist pursuing you.”
All Things Digital recently caught up with Andrey Ternovskiy, Chatroulette’s 17-year-old computer-whiz creator, while he was standing in line to buy an iPad. He said he was working on “changes to the ‘reporting people’ function designed to cut down on the male genitalia.”
If Ternovskiy does indeed manage to clean up Chatroulette, he’ll either transform an already intriguing site into a full-fledged social-networking hub with the potential to explode like Facebook and Twitter—or decimate his userbase. Either way, Irwin sees an upside to the current, phallus-ridden version. “This actually could be a very positive thing for society,” she says. “If these people have a ‘healthy’ channel like this, an appropriate place to share this fetish, that means they won’t have to do it in real life, it will stop them invading our boundaries.”
And when they do invade your boundaries on Chatroulette, you can always click “Next."
Shannon Donnelly is a video editor at The Daily Beast. Previously, she interned at Gawker and Overlook Press, edited the 2007 edition of Inside New York, and graduated from Columbia University. You can read more of her writing here.
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Seven Children Killed in School Attack in China

By EDWARD WONG and MARK McDONALD NY TIMES
BEIJING — Six kindergarteners and a teacher were stabbed to death and at least 20 other people were injured on Wednesday in an attack at a school in northern China, according to the state news agency Xinhua.
The attack, which occurred about 8 a.m. at a kindergarten in Shaanxi Province, was one of the deadliest in a bizarre series of attacks on Chinese schoolchildren by apparent lunatics wielding knives and hand tools.
The latest attacks are presumably copycat crimes, and they have ignited fear and outrage among parents. Some parents have spoken of their reluctance to send their children off to school. The anxiety is heightened by the fact that most parents in China have only one child because of the government’s strict birth control policy.
Some schools have increased security in the aftermath of the attacks; it was not immediately clear whether the Shaanxi school had done so.
The injured were taken to a hospital in the city of Hanzhong, Xinhua reported. A nurse answering the phone at the hospital said most of the victims had critical wounds to their heads.
“We are very busy saving people’s lives,” she said before hanging up.
Unlike in the United States, school shootings are rare in China because it is difficult to buy guns of any kind here. Sharp objects and tools are the weapons of choice.
Although official Chinese news organizations have been quick to release initial reports on the string of attacks, the government has been carefully censoring subsequent stories, perhaps to prevent other copycat murders, or perhaps to diminish any suggestion of dysfunction within Chinese society. In presenting China as a “harmonious society” — the signature propaganda phrase of President Hu Jintao — the government often deletes dissonant reports from the Internet and other media platforms.
Some scholars have speculated that the attacks point to the absence of adequate pressure-release valves in a society that is going through significant economic upheaval, where the gap between the wealthy and the destitute is rapidly widening, and where corruption by local officials heightens frustrations among ordinary citizens.
Mental illness, too, is rarely acknowledged here, and thus treatment is in short supply.
The first of the recent wave of attacks took place on March 23, when Zheng Minsheng, 42, stabbed eight primary school students to death in Fujian Province, on China’s eastern coast. After a speedy trial, Mr. Zheng was executed on April 28, the same day that 16 children and their teacher were attacked at a primary school in the southern province of Guangdong.
The following day, in the city of Taixing, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, 29 kindergarten pupils and three adults were injured by an attacker with a knife Protesting parents took to the streets chanting, “We want the truth! We want our babies back!”
The day after that, Xinhua reported, five kindergarteners and a teacher were injured by a man in Shandong Province, also in eastern China. The man beat the five children with a hammer, then doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire with two other children in his arms. The attacker died.
Edward Wong reported from Beijing, and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong. Zhang Jing contributed research from Beijing.

White flight? Suburbs lose young whites to cities

By HOPE YEN
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — White flight? In a reversal, America's suburbs are now more likely to be home to minorities, the poor and a rapidly growing older population as many younger, educated whites move to cities for jobs and shorter commutes.
An analysis of 2000-2008 census data by the Brookings Institution highlights the demographic "tipping points" seen in the past decade and the looming problems in the 100 largest metropolitan areas, which represent two-thirds of the U.S. population.
The findings could offer an important road map as political parties, including the tea party movement, seek to win support in suburban battlegrounds in the fall elections and beyond. In 2008, Barack Obama carried a substantial share of the suburbs, partly with the help of minorities and immigrants.
The analysis being released Sunday provides the freshest detail on the nation's growing race and age divide, which is now feeding tensions in Arizona over its new immigration law.
Ten states, led by Arizona, surpass the nation in a "cultural generation gap" in which the senior populations are disproportionately white and children are mostly minority.
This gap is pronounced in suburbs of fast-growing areas in the Southwest, including those in Florida, California, Nevada, and Texas.
"A new metro map is emerging in the U.S. that challenges conventional thinking about where we live and work," said Alan Berube, research director with the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, a nonpartisan think-tank based in Washington. "The old concepts of suburbia, Sun Belt and Rust Belt are outdated and at odds with effective governance."
Suburbs still tilt white. But, for the first time, a majority of all racial and ethnic groups in large metro areas live outside the city. Suburban Asians and Hispanics already had topped 50 percent in 2000, and blacks joined them by 2008, rising from 43 percent in those eight years.
The suburbs now have the largest poor population in the country. They are home to the vast majority of baby boomers age 55 to 64, a fast-growing group that will strain social services after the first wave of boomers turns 65 next year.
Analysts attribute the racial shift to suburbs in many cases to substantial shares of minorities leaving cities, such as blacks from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Whites, too, are driving the trend by returning or staying put in larger cities.
Washington, D.C., and Atlanta posted the largest increases in white share since 2000, each up 5 percentage points to 44 percent and 36 percent, respectively. Other white gains were seen in New York, San Francisco, Boston and cities in another seven of the nation's 100 largest metro areas.
"A new image of urban America is in the making," said William H. Frey, a demographer at Brookings who co-wrote the report. "What used to be white flight to the suburbs is turning into 'bright flight' to cities that have become magnets for aspiring young adults who see access to knowledge-based jobs, public transportation and a new city ambiance as an attraction."
"This will not be the future for all cities, but this pattern in front runners like Atlanta, Portland, Ore., Raleigh, N.C., and Austin, Texas, shows that the old urban stereotypes no longer apply," he said.
The findings are part of Brookings' broad demographic portrait of America since 2000, when the country experienced the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a historic boom in housing prices and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Calling 2010 the "decade of reckoning," the report urges policymakers to shed outdated notions of America's cities and suburbs and work quickly to address the coming problems caused by the dramatic shifts in population.
Among its recommendations: affordable housing and social services for older people in the suburbs; better transit systems to link cities and suburbs; and a new federal Office of New Americans to serve the education and citizenship needs of the rapidly growing immigrant community.
Other findings:
—About 83 percent of the U.S. population growth since 2000 was minority, part of a trend that will see minorities become the majority by midcentury. Across all large metro areas, the majority of the child population is now nonwhite.
—The suburban poor grew by 25 percent between 1999 and 2008 — five times the growth rate of the poor in cities. City residents are more likely to live in "deep" poverty, while a higher share of suburban residents have incomes just below the poverty line.
—For the first time in several decades, the population is growing at a faster rate than households, due to delays in marriage, divorce and births as well as longer life spans. People living alone and nonmarried couple families are among the fastest-growing in suburbs.
___

Long Island City Comes Into Its Own

By JEFF VANDAM NY TIMES
IT’S got sushi bars. A teahouse. An upscale grocery store. A cocktail lounge where the word “mixologist” could reasonably be uttered. Multiple options for doggy day care. It’s one stop from Manhattan, the views are fabulous, and, joy to the world, there are no alternate-side parking rules.
With all that and more, has Long Island City, 30 years after it was first labeled “hot,” finally become a self-sustaining neighborhood?
The evidence that this semi-industrial section of Queens is approaching some kind of critical mass is growing. More than a dozen new and converted condominium developments have opened in recent years, and several are sold out. And while thousands of housing units have appeared, a huge number of others — 5,000 or more — are due to be delivered by both public and private enterprises in the coming years.
Prices are rising, too, having mostly recovered from a dip during the Lehman Brothers slump. Though values for condos have not approached the levels of those in sister neighborhoods across the river in Manhattan, it’s not uncommon to pay more than $700 a square foot in Long Island City. Rentals in new buildings aren’t cheap, either; monthly lease rates in some ascend to heights of $3,000 and beyond (but come with unfettered vistas of Midtown, of course).
Perhaps more important for the new residents paying those prices, the list of local amenities is far longer than it was five years ago. Psychic changes are afoot, too.
Consider the great McDonald’s scare of 2010, wherein the blog liQcity.com posted an item about the Golden Arches’ landing a spot on Vernon Boulevard, the main drag. The response was swift and, tellingly, of the type you might expect in a place like Park Slope or Northside Williamsburg.
“Be prepared for fat lazy people discarding their burger wrappers on the street as they leave the restaurant,” one commenter wrote.
“Please let this be a joke,” said another, repeating the thought three times for emphasis.
It was indeed a joke — the blogger, Nancy Verma, quickly informed her readers that they were all April fools. But back in 1980, when New York magazine labeled Long Island City the city’s “next hot neighborhood,” it would have been impossible to conceive of coordinated neighborhood scorn for fast food. Heavy industry was the rule then, with residents mostly living in town houses and small apartment buildings.
Longtimers like the Cerbone family, which runs the well-known Italian restaurant Manducatis on Jackson Avenue, now share the neighborhood with the still-growing crop of condos. It’s difficult to turn a corner without seeing a new building like the Solarium on 48th Avenue or the Murano on Borden Avenue.
The Citylights co-op tower, which sat alone on the waterfront for years, now has a cadre of sleek, glassy neighbors. At the base of one of those buildings, you can buy $13.79 teriyaki swordfish kabobs and truffled Gouda for $25.99 a pound at Foodcellar & Company, a Whole Foods-like grocer that opened in August 2008. (It was followed by a Duane Reade next door, with $23 shampoos and Belgian ales on display.)
“Five years ago when we moved here, all around us it was just, like, warehouses and fields,” said Yulia Oleinik, who lives in the Arris Lofts building with her husband, Logi Bragason, and works for Unicef across the river. “Now there is all this variety of buildings and the infrastructure is coming big time. I just feel that the neighborhood is very much alive, and growing.”
Ms. Oleinik has tapped into the active artistic community that predates the condos, often taking in plays at underground theaters and shows at small art galleries. She and Mr. Bragason sample cuisine at the annual Taste of Long Island City event and loll by the waterfront in Gantry Plaza State Park, which continues to expand northward along the East River.
Yet like others in L.I.C., Ms. Oleinik is worried about the events of the past two years. Around the time of the Lehman Brothers crash, businesses along Vernon Boulevard started to close, prompting residents to wonder whether they were living in a bubble that was about to burst.
“We go through major amenity cycles,” said Ms. Verma, who has lived in the area several years. “The fall is always an upswing for retail, but in the winter there’s always a little decline. The year before last, I feel like 10 businesses went under.”
Today, an empty retail space at the foot of a new residential building is a common sight, as are “coming soon” signs, like the one on the waterfront advertising a library that remains a vacant lot for lack of financing. Other basic services are missing, as well.
“The most mandatory thing we need here on the boulevard more than anything is a butcher, and a hardware store,” said Gianna Cerbone-Teoli, who grew up in the neighborhood and owns the restaurant Manducatis Rustica on Vernon. “And a good bread man, a bakery,” she added.
Still, as some lights go out, others go on. A space on Jackson Avenue at 11th Street is to become Natural Frontier Market, a health food store. Over on Center Boulevard, the brothers who run the Michelin-anointed restaurant Shi are planning a Mexican place called Skinny’s Cantina across the street.
“It’s not a neighborhood to move to if you like the status quo,” said Jake Atwood, a charter resident of the Citylights building who runs the Web site QueensWest.com. “It is constantly evolving, in fits and starts. There are times when it looks like buildings are being built every five minutes.”
The price of entry has come up some, but not quite back to the highs of the pre-Lehman era. Eric Benaim, the president of the real estate firm Modern Spaces and a partner in the new comfort-food restaurant El Ay Si, said that prices began to rise around March 2009, when they had a starting point of around $500 per square foot. Today they have moved into the $600s and $700s.
What is more, the concessions and incentives that buildings were offering to new buyers in late 2008 and early 2009 have been scaled back.
“Before, they were really throwing everything at you,” Mr. Benaim said. “Now it’s not as many as last year. People are out there now. We do have a lot of real buyers, and it’s busy.”
In terms of actual prices, listings with Nest Seekers International for the Vere condominium, farther from the waterfront on Jackson, range from $389,000, for a junior one-bedroom, to $1.199 million for a two-bedroom penthouse with two terraces. Units at the Powerhouse, a converted factory on Fifth Street, range from $475,000, for a studio, to $1.325 million for a two-bedroom two-bath corner apartment.
The finishes there, as in other buildings, tend toward the luxurious.
“It was like, ‘Oh, was there a fire sale on Bosch washers and dryers?’ ” said Todd Smith, who was impressed by the amenities at the buildings he surveyed with his partner, Ethan Jones. They settled on the Powerhouse and moved there from Riverdale in the Bronx earlier this spring.
Some of the newer buildings have sold out completely, like 5th Street Lofts, a Toll Brothers development that sold the last of 118 units in winter 2009. Prices started in the upper $300,000 range for a studio; a unit with 1,600 square feet of space went for around $1.5 million, according to Scott Avram, a senior project manager at the company. Sales started in February 2007. And at the Arris Lofts, where sales have been completed, Hanifa Scully of Corcoran Realty closed a deal for a three-bedroom in March for $1,275,000.
“I’ve never been so busy,” said Ms. Scully, who also lives at the Arris and said she had seen some prices pass $800 a square foot. “Since last September, I’ve seen a tremendous change. It’s very hot.”
There are plenty of new rentals, too, with prices to match. At 47-05 Center Boulevard, built and marketed by the Rockrose Development Corporation, one-bedroom units start at $2,600 per month; a studio with 490 square feet of space across the street at 47-20 Center, marketed by TF Cornerstone, rents for $1,925.
Brian Hennessey, who moved into the 5th Street Lofts in 2008 with his wife, Verena Arnabal, and their new daughter, Maya, made the jump to Long Island City from Murray Hill and hasn’t looked back. The couple shop at the Queens Costco when Foodcellar gets too pricey, and on weekends they hang out with a laptop at the teahouse, Communitea, on Vernon Boulevard.
“They just have the right recipe for success here,” he said. “It’s very easy to get to Manhattan. It’s at the right price point. It’s got all the luxury amenities that people want in the yuppie crowd, and it’s got a good community feel to it.”
Still, Mr. Hennessey is clear-eyed about what the neighborhood needs. Parking is a problem: when friends come to dinner, he has to help them find spots. The service interruptions on the No. 7 train are annoying. He wonders if facilities for dogs will ever come to be, as they aren’t allowed in most of Gantry Plaza State Park and there are few other places to take them.
Those issues may intensify in the coming years. The city’s Economic Development Corporation plans to develop up to 5,000 waterfront units at Hunters Point South, 60 percent of them as middle-income housing; construction should begin next year, said Gayle Baron, the president of the Long Island City Business Development Corporation. And Rockrose, which has already built several waterfront towers, has the rights and plans to build several more.
“I can only imagine that we’re going to wish these days would never end,” Mr. Hennessey said. “When the people come, I can imagine this becoming a very busy part of town.”
Standing over a cappuccino at her restaurant’s counter, Ms. Cerbone-Teoli is circumspect. Some of her regulars are old-timers, but some are new arrivals, and business is good.
As the neighborhood continues to find its way, she hopes that some kind of centralized planning will prevent overdevelopment and disorganized growth. But leaving all that aside, she’s tired of hearing that her home is becoming a happening place to be.
“People think it was just discovered,” she said reprovingly. “But Long Island City was always a great community. It didn’t just now become great.”

Signs of Neanderthals Mating With Humans

NY TIMES

By NICHOLAS WADE
Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.
The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA that still exist in their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.
Scientists say they have recovered 60 percent of the genome so far and hope to complete it. By comparing that genome with those of various present day humans, the team concluded that about 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals. But the Neanderthal DNA does not seem to have played a great role in human evolution, they said.
Experts believe that the Neanderthal genome sequence will be of extraordinary importance in understanding human evolutionary history since the two species split some 600,000 years ago.
So far, the team has identified only about 100 genes — surprisingly few — that have contributed to the evolution of modern humans since the split. The nature of the genes in humans that differ from those of Neanderthals is of particular interest because they bear on what it means to be human, or at least not Neanderthal. Some of the genes seem to be involved in cognitive function and others in bone structure.
“Seven years ago, I really thought that it would remain impossible in my lifetime to sequence the whole Neanderthal genome,” Dr. Paabo said at a news conference. But the Leipzig team’s second conclusion, that there was probably interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans before Europeans and Asians split, is being met with reserve by some archaeologists.
A degree of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals in Europe would not be greatly surprising given that the species overlapped there from 44,000 years ago when modern humans first entered Europe to 30,000 years ago when the last Neanderthals fell extinct. Archaeologists have been debating for years whether the fossil record shows evidence of individuals with mixed features.
But the new analysis, which is based solely on genetics and statistical calculations, is more difficult to match with the archaeological record. The Leipzig scientists assert that the interbreeding did not occur in Europe but in the Middle East and at a much earlier period, some 100,000 to 60,000 years ago, before the modern human populations of Europe and East Asia split. There is much less archaeological evidence for an overlap between modern humans and Neanderthals at this time and place.
Dr. Paabo has pioneered the extraction and analysis of ancient DNA from fossil bones, overcoming daunting obstacles over the last 13 years in his pursuit of the Neanderthal genome. Perhaps the most serious is that most Neanderthal bones are extensively contaminated with modern human DNA, which is highly similar to Neanderthal DNA. The DNA he has analyzed comes from three small bones from the Vindija cave in Croatia.
“This is a fabulous achievement,” said Ian Tattersall, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, referring to the draft Neanderthal genome that Dr. Paabo’s team describes in Thursday’s issue of Science.
But he and other archaeologists questioned some of the interpretations put forward by Dr. Paabo and his chief colleagues, Richard E. Green of the Leipzig institute, and David Reich of Harvard Medical School. Geneticists have been making increasingly valuable contributions to human prehistory, but their work depends heavily on complex mathematical statistics that make their arguments hard to follow. And the statistical insights, however informative, do not have the solidity of an archaeological fact.
“This is probably not the authors’ last word, and they are obviously groping to explain what they have found,” Dr. Tattersall said.
Richard Klein, a paleontologist at Stanford, said the authors’ theory of an early interbreeding episode did not seem to have taken full account of the archaeological background. “They are basically saying, ‘Here are our data, you have to accept it.’ But the little part I can judge seems to me to be problematic, so I have to worry about the rest,” he said.
In an earlier report on the Neanderthal genome, the reported DNA sequences were found by other geneticists to be extensively contaminated with human DNA. Dr. Paabo’s group has taken extra precautions but it remains to be seen how successful they have been, Dr. Klein said, especially as another group at the Leipzig institute, presumably using the same methods, has obtained results that Dr. Paabo said he could not confirm.
Dr. Paabo said that episode of human-Neanderthal breeding implied by Dr. Reich’s statistics most plausibly occurred “in the Middle East where the first modern humans appear before 100,000 years ago and there were Neanderthals until 60,000 years ago.” According to Dr. Klein, people in Africa expanded their range and reached just Israel during a warm period some 120,000 years ago. They retreated during a cold period some 80,000 years ago and were replaced by Neanderthals. It is not clear whether or not they overlapped with Neanderthals, he said.
These humans, in any case, were not fully modern and they did not expand from Africa, an episode that occurred some 30,000 years later. If there was any interbreeding, the flow of genes should have been both ways, Dr. Klein said, but Dr. Paabo’s group sees evidence for gene flow only from Neanderthals to modern humans.
The Leipzig group’s interbreeding theory would undercut the present belief that all human populations today draw from the same gene pool that existed a mere 50,000 years ago. “What we falsify here is the strong out-of-Africa hypothesis that everyone comes from the same population,” Dr. Paabo said.
In his and Dr. Reich’s view, Neanderthals interbred only with non-Africans, the people who left Africa, which would mean that non-Africans drew from a second gene pool not available to Africans.