Mysteries That Howl and Hunt

By CAROL KAESUK YOON NY TIMES
With a chorus of howls and yips wild enough to fill a vast night sky, the coyote has ignited the imagination of one culture after another. In many American Indian mythologies, it is celebrated as the Trickster, a figure by turns godlike, idiotic and astoundingly sexually perverse. In the Navajo tradition the coyote is revered as God’s dog. When European colonists encountered the species, they were of two minds, heralding it as an icon of the expansive West and vilifying it as the ultimate varmint, the bloodthirsty bane of sheep and cattle ranchers.
Mark Twain was so struck when he first saw that “long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it” that he called it “a living, breathing allegory of Want.” And Twain’s description itself was so vivid, it inspired the animator Chuck Jones to create that perennial failure known to cartoon-loving children everywhere, Wile E. Coyote of Road Runner-hating fame.
Yet as familiar as the coyote seems, these animals remain remarkably poorly understood. They have remained elusive despite fantastic ecological success that has been described as “a story of unparalleled range expansion,” as they have moved over the last century from the constrictions of their prairie haunts to colonize every habitat from wild to urban, from coast to coast. And they have retained their mystery even as interest has intensified with increasing coyote-human interactions — including incidents of coyotes dragging off small dogs and cats, and even (extremely rarely) attacks on people, from Los Angeles to the northern suburbs of New York City, where four children were attacked in separate incidents this summer.
Coyotes have managed to elude much serious scrutiny by being exquisitely wary, so much so that even dedicated coyote scientists can struggle to find ways to lay eyes on them, not to mention hands.
Dr. Laura Prugh, a wildlife ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said trying to survey a population of coyotes in Alaska was “like working with a ghost species.” To even have a chance of catching a coyote, she said, traps must be boiled to wash away human scent, handled with gloves and then hidden extremely carefully with all traces of human footprints brushed away. Even then, the trap is likely to catch only the youngest and most inexperienced of animals.
Coyotes have remained so much in possession of their own secrets that it was not until this year that the real identity of the coyotes living in the eastern part of the country was revealed. Two separate teams of researchers studying the genes of coyotes in the Northeast reported evidence that these animals that have for decades upon decades been thought of as coyotes are in fact coyote-wolf hybrids.
The team headed by Roland W. Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum, studied coyotes from New Jersey to Maine. Jonathan Way, wildlife biologist with the Eastern Coyote Research consulting firm, and colleagues examined coyotes around Cape Cod and Boston. Both teams found that the animals carry wolf and coyote DNA. The paper by Dr. Kays and his colleagues was published in Biology Letters; the paper by Dr. Way and his colleagues was published in Northeastern Naturalist.
Based on the wolf DNA found in the Eastern coyotes, Dr. Kays and colleagues hypothesize in their paper that Western coyotes dispersing eastward north of the Great Lakes across Canada during the last century mated with wolves along the way, bringing that wolf DNA along with them to the Northeast.
The findings may explain why coyotes in the East are generally larger than their Western counterparts — that is, more wolflike in size — and why they are so much more varied in coat color, as might be expected from a creature with a more diverse genome. It may also explain why Eastern coyotes appear to be more adept as deer hunters than their Western forebears, which tend toward smaller prey, like voles and rabbits.
What the finding does not settle is how to define exactly what these animals are, or for that matter, what to call them. Dr. Way favors the term “coywolf” to denote the animals’ hybrid heritage. He said because these animals are part wolf — species that enjoy protected status — they deserve some benefits not available to coyotes, which are typically freely hunted.
Dr. Kays, however, says that he is not a fan of the name, in part because the animals are “mostly coyote and a little bit of wolf,” but also because the Eastern coyote may be less a finished product deserving of a name and more an evolutionary work in progress.
There are even hints that the traveling coyotes may have been up to more than just dawdling with a wolf or two. Dr. Kays’s team also found one coyote carrying something similar to domestic dog DNA, suggesting that the question of what exactly an Eastern coyote is may become even more complicated as scientists learn more.
One major complication is that all the species in the genus Canis, to which the coyote belongs, can successfully interbreed. In other words, coyotes (or Canis latrans, meaning “barking dog”) and domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and every kind of wolf, from the red wolf to the Eastern wolf to the gray wolf (Canis lupus), can mate and produce perfectly healthy pups. No wonder, then, that interactions among these species have led to a genetic mess that researchers sometimes refer to as “Canis soupus.”
That coyotes will consider a wide variety of species as mates may be a reflection of their adaptability, also evident in their catholic tastes in food. Stephen DeStefano, a wildlife biologist with the United States Geological Survey’s Massachusetts Cooperative Research Unit and author of “Coyote at the Kitchen Door” (Harvard University Press, 2010), explains that coyotes will feast on things as diverse as beetles, bird eggs, garbage, pocket gophers, raspberries, pigs, wild plums, porcupines, apples, flying squirrels and watermelons.
But while such broad tastes have mostly made villains of coyotes as they happily expand their diet to take in the family pet when they can get it, they have also, at least once, made them the hero. Dr. Stanley D. Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist at Ohio State University who has studied coyotes in the Chicago area for the past decade, found that coyotes have a taste for Canada goose eggs. Rather than just dining at a single nest, the coyotes will plunder multiple nests in a night, gathering what eggs they can’t eat and burying them for later. The result has put a significant dent in what had been fast increasing numbers of geese, considerably noisier and messier urban creatures than the coyote.
Flexibility is also a hallmark of coyotes’ hunting. Not only do coyotes hunt singly and in packs, they have even been observed hunting cooperatively with other species. In Wyoming, scientists have seen coyotes hunting with badgers, large burrowing creatures that enjoy a nice bit of ground squirrel. As badgers dig toward squirrels in their tunnels, coyotes wait above for the squirrels to pop up for a quick escape, or perhaps to be chased back down to be eaten by a badger. Teams may work together often for an hour or more, the coyote mock-chasing or otherwise playfully inviting the lethargic badger to activity when it pauses, and to good purpose. Coyotes hunting with badgers had to work less and ate more than solitary coyotes in the same area. These teams were so effective that researchers reported often seeing the same pairs working together again and again.
Despite such charming intelligence, the coyote has found itself almost universally despised, feared and hunted. Ranchers hate coyotes for killing millions of dollars in livestock each year. These thefts have been answered with many millions of tax dollars spent over the years on programs to kill coyotes through the deployment of cyanide, strychnine, baited sheep collars and guns of many kinds. It is a war that has been as unrelenting and intense as, some researchers say, it is useless.
“Killing coyotes is kind of like mowing the lawn,” said Dr. Prugh. “It stimulates vigorous new growth.”

Even in their new habitat of the great metropolises, with nary a sheep in sight, the coyote finds itself, at best, a nervously tolerated visitor. In recent years, urbanites have been simultaneously charmed and disturbed by coyotes strolling in Central Park, trotting into a Quiznos restaurant in downtown Chicago and taking a dash around a federal courthouse in Detroit. Such news is, more often than not, soon followed by the news that the coyote has been rounded up and removed. It doesn’t seem to matter that coyotes are relatively harmless, as researchers point out, as any person or pet is much more likely to be injured or even killed by a domestic dog.
Neither does it seem to matter that the removal of a single showy coyote is unlikely to leave a city clear of these animals, or even give any sense of just how many coyotes a given city harbors. Dr. Gehrt said that when he began his research he would have guessed there were some 50 to 100 coyotes in the Chicago metropolitan area. After a decade of radio tracking and genetic analyses, he knows better. Dr. Gehrt said he conservatively estimates the number of these rarely seen creatures at more than 2,000.
The coyote is out there, and it is here to stay. For most people (as long as they are not very unlucky and they and their neighbors refrain from feeding coyotes — the No. 1 reason coyotes end up hurting someone), the coyote offers a bit of wildness to anyone willing to listen to the gift it has shared for millenniums — its unforgettable voice.
The moniker “barking dog” just doesn’t cut it. The coyote has a bountiful lexicon that includes growls, huffs, woofs, whines, yelps, howls, “wow-oo-wow” sounds and more. Each serves its purpose in the coyote business of giving greetings or disseminating alarms.
But perhaps the sound that listeners know best, the one that makes us stop what we’re doing and look up into the night sky, is that mad cacophony of mournful howls and maniacal yips. That, scientists say, is the coyote’s territorial declaration, an effort to make a few coyotes sound like 10 or 100, to insist on their unassailable presence.
Dr. DeStefano writes in his book of the legends that coyotes are talking to us, that they can tell us things like where to find water, whether danger is approaching and whether today is the day that death will come, that the coyote has learned Comanche, Apache and many other languages, but not English.
But even we English speakers know what the coyote is telling us when we hear those calls, shrill and fierce as they bounce along canyons of rock or concrete or just down the cul-de-sac. The coyote is saying to everyone, fellow barking dogs or otherwise, “We are here.”

Iran Fights Malware Attacking Computers

By DAVID E. SANGER NY Times
WASHINGTON — The Iranian government agency that runs the country’s nuclear facilities, including those the West suspects are part of a weapons program, has reported that its engineers are trying to protect their facilities from a sophisticated computer worm that has infected industrial plants across Iran.
The agency, the Atomic Energy Organization, did not specify whether the worm had already infected any of its nuclear facilities, including Natanz, the underground enrichment site that for several years has been a main target of American and Israeli covert programs.
But the announcement raised suspicions, and new questions, about the origins and target of the worm, Stuxnet, which computer experts say is a far cry from common computer malware that has affected the Internet for years. A worm is a self-replicating malware computer program. A virus is malware that infects its target by attaching itself to programs or documents.
Stuxnet, which was first publicly identified several months ago, is aimed solely at industrial equipment made by Siemens that controls oil pipelines, electric utilities, nuclear facilities and other large industrial sites. While it is not clear that Iran was the main target — the infection has also been reported in Indonesia, Pakistan, India and elsewhere — a disproportionate number of computers inside Iran appear to have been struck, according to reports by computer security monitors.
Given the sophistication of the worm and its aim at specific industrial systems, many experts believe it is most probably the work of a state, rather than independent hackers. The worm is able to attack computers that are disconnected from the Internet, usually to protect them; in those cases an infected USB drive is plugged into a computer. The worm can then spread itself within a computer network, and possibly to other networks.
The semiofficial Mehr news agency in Iran on Saturday quoted Reza Taghipour, a top official of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, as saying that “the effect and damage of this spy worm in government systems is not serious” and that it had been “more or less” halted.
But another Iranian official, Mahmud Liai of the Ministry of Industry and Mines, was quoted as saying that 30,000 computers had been affected, and that the worm was “part of the electronic warfare against Iran.”
ISNA, another Iranian news agency, had reported Friday that officials from Iran’s atomic energy agency had been meeting in recent days to discuss how to remove the Stuxnet worm, which exploits some previously unknown weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows software. Microsoft has said in recent days that it is fixing those vulnerabilities.
It is extraordinarily difficult to trace the source of any sophisticated computer worm, and nearly impossible to determine for certain its target.
But the Iranians have reason to suspect they are high on the target list: in the past, they have found evidence of sabotage of imported equipment, notably power supplies to run the centrifuges that are used to enrich uranium at Natanz. The New York Times reported in 2009 that President George W. Bush had authorized new efforts, including some that were experimental, to undermine electrical systems, computer systems and other networks that serve Iran’s nuclear program, according to current and former American officials.
The program is among the most secret in the United States government, and it has been accelerated since President Obama took office, according to some American officials. Iran’s enrichment program has run into considerable technical difficulties in the past year, but it is not clear whether that is because of the effects of sanctions against the country, poor design for its centrifuges, which it obtained from Pakistan, or sabotage.
“It is easy to look at what we know about Stuxnet and jump to the conclusion that it is of American origin and Iran is the target, but there is no proof of that,” said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and one of the country’s leading experts on cyberwar intelligence. “We may not know the real answer for some time.”
Based on what he knows of Stuxnet, Mr. Lewis said, the United States is “one of four or five places that could have done it — the Israelis, the British and the Americans are the prime suspects, then the French and Germans, and you can’t rule out the Russians and the Chinese.”
President Obama has talked extensively about developing better cyberdefenses for the United States, to protect banks, power plants, telecommunications systems and other critical infrastructure. He has said almost nothing about the other side of the cybereffort, billions of dollars spent on offensive capability, much of it based inside the National Security Agency.
The fact that the worm is aimed at Siemens equipment is telling: the company’s control systems are used around the world, but have been spotted in many Iranian facilities, say officials and experts who have toured them. Those include the new Bushehr nuclear power plant, built with Russian help.
But Bushehr is considered by nuclear weapons experts to be virtually no help to Iran in its suspected weapons program; there is more concern about the low-enriched uranium produced at Natanz, which could, with a year or more of additional processing, be converted to bomb fuel.


John Markoff contributed reporting from San Francisco, and William Yong from Tehran.

Thieves Cart Off St. Louis Bricks

By MALCOLM GAY NY TIMES
ST. LOUIS — By the time Raymond Feemster awoke to the pounding of firefighters at his door, flames were already licking his shotgun-style home. The vacant house next door, which neighbors said was frequented by squatters, had burst into flames and was now threatening to engulf houses on each side.
Mr. Feemster, who gets around on an electric scooter, had to be carried out of the burning building, but today he considers himself lucky that the damage was contained to just two rooms.
“My neighbor’s house was completely destroyed,” said Mr. Feemster, 58. “I guess it was one of the crackheads in that vacant house.”
Perhaps. But the blaze, one of 391 fires at vacant buildings in the city over the past two years, may have had a more sinister cause. Law enforcement officials, politicians and historic preservationists here have concluded that brick thieves are often to blame, deliberately torching buildings to quicken their harvest of St. Louis brick, prized by developers throughout the South for its distinctive character.
“The firemen come and hose them down and shoot all that mortar off with the high-pressure hose,” said Alderman Samuel Moore, whose predominantly black Fourth Ward has been hit particularly hard by brick thieves. When a thief goes to pick up the bricks after a fire, “They’re just laying there nice and clean.”
It is a crime that has increased with the recession. Where thieves in many cities harvest copper, aluminum and other materials from vacant buildings, brick rustling has emerged more recently as a sort of scrapper’s endgame, exploited once the rest of a building’s architectural elements have been exhausted. “Cleveland is suffering from this,” said Royce Yeater, Midwest director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “I’ve also heard of it happening in Detroit.”
After the fire that devastated much of St. Louis in 1849, city leaders passed an ordinance requiring all new buildings to be made of noncombustible material. That law, along with the rich clays of eastern Missouri, led to a flourishing brick industry here. Historians say that at the industry’s height, around 1900, the city had more than 100 manufacturing plants, and St. Louis became known for the quality, craftsmanship and abundance of its brick.
“They love it in New Orleans and the South — wherever they’re rebuilding, they want it because it’s beautiful brick,” said Barbara Buck, who owns Century Used Brick. “It really gives the building a dimension, a fingerprint.”
Mr. Moore, who is drafting a bill that would increase the penalties for brick theft, said that while many thieves still used cables and picks to collapse a wall, arson had become the tool of choice. Thieves even set fire to wood-frame homes to create a diversion. Firefighters often knock down walls, making it easier for thieves to harvest the bricks.
“The whole block is gone — they stole the whole block,” Mr. Moore marveled as he drove his white Dodge Magnum through his ward’s motley collection of dilapidated homes and vacant lots. “They’re stealing entire buildings, buildings that belong to the city. Where else in the world do you steal an entire city building?”
There are more than 8,000 vacant buildings in St. Louis, and more than 11,000 vacant lots.
The maximum penalty for brick theft here is a $500 fine or 90 days in jail or both. The city police said there were 34 brick-related thefts in the last year.
“You see these guys with mortar dust all over them, and they’re stacking on a pallet, and they’ll say, ‘I’m just a day laborer working for that guy over there — whoa, where did he go?’ ” said Maribeth McMahon, a lawyer with the city counselor’s office. “So this poor stiff, who’s just trying to earn an hourly wage, gets a summons.”
Ms. Buck, who said thieves often arrived at her brickyard with “bricks in the trunk of a Lexus,” said she followed city ordinance and required brick vendors to produce a demolition permit to sell their bricks. A pallet of 500 goes for roughly $100, she said, but other less scrupulous buyers do not require permits.
Ms. Buck estimates that as many as eight tractor-trailer loads of stolen bricks leave the city each week for Florida, Louisiana or Texas, because “St. Louis brick is in such high demand.”
The toll on the city’s struggling north side has been particularly heavy. During a hard-luck tour of his ward last week, Mr. Moore pointed out several piles of rubble where houses once stood.
Mature trees grew from the foundations of some, while others were missing entire walls, laying bare unsupported second floors, dangling electrical outlets and the remnants of those who once lived there — their wallpaper, posters, toilets, clothing and curtains.
Rounding one fallen-down building, Mr. Moore encountered a lone thief as he piled bricks into the back of an S.U.V. Pushing the rear seats forward, the man had nearly filled his vehicle when Mr. Moore approached on foot.
“Put them all back, and I won’t lock you up,” Mr. Moore yelled as the man, dressed in a filthy T-shirt and ragged pajama bottoms, stopped in his tracks.
Apologizing, the man, who declined to give his name, said that he had been “messing with bricks” for only a week, and that he had never been asked for identification when selling his harvest.
“I don’t even know the man,” he said. “You just pull up there and sell him your bricks.”
As the man drove off, Mr. Moore turned to head back to his office.
“He been doing bricks longer than a week,” Mr. Moore groused. “Those bricks will be gone tomorrow.”

Mr. Showmanship’s Show Is Closing

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
LAS VEGAS — Bill Holt was gawking. At the room filled with ornate antique pianos, among them a Baldwin grand glistening with a coat of rhinestones that was Liberace’s favorite. At a 1962 Phantom V Landau Rolls-Royce, covered in mirrors, that looked like a disco ball on wheels. At Liberace’s collection of candelabras, rings, capes and boots.
At, in short, the paraphernalia of a onetime star of the Strip who appears to have become a symbol of an era that is not only past, but forgotten, too.
The Liberace Museum, once a tourist attraction on a par with the Hoover Dam — 450,000 people came every year to the strip-mall museum with a red neon piano on the roof — is closing its doors next month. The collection is being put into storage.
“I’ve lived here for 40 years and this is the first time I’ve come,” said Mr. Holt, 71, a retired civil engineer, soft piano music tinkling above him. “I heard this place was closing, so I headed over.”
Tanya Combs, the museum director and one of 30 employees about to be out of a job, glanced dolefully at Mr. Holt. “That is the problem,” she said. “You should have come more often.”
Yet it is hard to blame Mr. Holt or any of the other hundreds of people who suddenly showed up over the past few days at the news of the Oct. 17 closing, filling a parking lot that had grown barren in recent years. “They used to come in droves,” said Jack Rappaport, the president of the Liberace Foundation and Museum.
There can be no disputing that Wladziu Valentino Liberace once helped define this town that loves its glitz. He was Mr. Showmanship, if he did say so himself, and people, or at least older people, remember catching a Liberace show at the Riviera Hotel (a picture of the Riviera marquee shows Liberace with top billing over a singer named Barbra Streisand).
With his costume changes, arch piano playing and desire to shock — yes, he played Radio City Music Hall in red, white and blue hot pants and knee-high boots, which you can see in all its garish glory if you hurry — Liberace was Lady Gaga before Stefani Germanotta was even born.
There are millions of Americans who watched him on television in the 1950s, who swooned at his campy outfits and jewelry and blinding-white smile. “I want to look at Liberace!” Alice yelled at Ralph Kramden in a “Honeymooners” episode in which she pleaded with her cheap husband to buy her a television set.
And Liberace’s fans followed with stunned sorrow when he died of AIDS in 1987, one more turning point in the nation’s perception of that disease and homosexuality.
Yet unlike Frank Sinatra’s or Elvis’s, Liberace’s legacy has steadily faded as his audience has aged. A taxi driver taking a visitor to the museum got lost.
His appeal failed to cross generational lines, despite the effort of museum officials to, as one put it, rebrand him.
“We really started pushing the idea of bling, and Liberace was the first person who was really doing bling,” said Jeffrey P. Koep, the chairman of the Liberace Foundation and dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. “He had the big rings. He had the look that you see the kids doing now that’s very popular.”
Attendance last year was down to 50,000 from 450,000 just 12 years ago, and even that number was inflated by two-for-one discounts, and free admission on Sunday for Las Vegas residents.
The museum’s founding endowment has shrunk from $10 million five years ago to $1 million, a result of money-losing investments and a decision to take out an expensive mortgage to finance a renovation of the building that in hindsight, Mr. Koep said, does not seem like a wise decision.
The museum anchored both ends of a strip mall Liberace bought to display the trappings of his life. But many of the stores that once rented space from the foundation, including a wedding chapel and a music school, are gone. The mall, typically for Las Vegas these days, is a collection of empty storefronts.
The Liberace Museum has also fallen victim to changing tastes of tourists. When it was opened by Liberace — two blocks away from one of the 39 places he called home, Ms. Combs said, but three miles from the heart of Las Vegas — the Strip was all about gambling. Today, the museum has to compete with a boulevard of top-name performers and exported shows from Broadway. The museum began running a shuttle to the Strip, but that did not do much good.
There are some rays of hope for those interested in preserving a Liberace legacy. The director Steven Soderbergh said he was intending to go ahead with a biopic on Liberace that had been in doubt, probably starting production this summer.
Mr. Koep said that part of the collection would be displayed in some form of traveling exhibition. And he said the founders would look to sell the property, a prospect he described as tough in this market, to raise money to buy another space, ideally closer to the Strip.
“We are not selling the collection,” Mr. Koep said. “Part of the reason we are closing down is so we can keep the collection.”
Still, there is sadness in the dusky exhibition rooms that will soon be closed to the public. “I can’t imagine his name ever stopping,” said Pauline Lachane, a onetime president of the Liberace Fan Club, and today the museum librarian. “He’s going to go on forever. He put the excitement in this town.”
Billy Vassiliadis, the head of the advertising agency that represents the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said the loss of the museum “was a shame, especially for us older folks.” But, he said, Las Vegas, like Liberace, has always been about reinventing itself.
“We have to keep refreshing Las Vegas,” he said. “Thousands of people turn 21 every day. Who knows, maybe we’ll have a Lady Gaga museum in 10 years.”

Taking the floods to the drought

Times of London
The large-scale South-North Water Diversion Project plans to slake the thirst of dry areas such as Anhui province Jane Macartney Last updated September 18 2010 12:01AM
Not content with building the world’s greatest wall, its longest canal and oldest hydraulic engineering system, China is now engaged on the world’s most ambitious replumbing scheme.
This month about 67,000 people were resettled to make way for the South-North Water Diversion Project that will divert supplies hundreds of miles from the Yangtze River to the drought-stricken residents of Beijing.
Those displaced so far are the vanguard of about 345,000 people who must leave homes that will be submerged during the project. Yao Ziliang spent his first 74 years in an earthen-floored house and made a living by growing wheat and maize in Guangou village. He and 894 fellow residents moved three weeks ago into a new version of Guangou, which has kept its original name. They now live in concrete homes that have running water and indoor bathrooms.

Mr Yao is full of praise for the scheme, which will divert water 1,277km (793 miles) along canals across China. “We have given up our homes for the South-North project. We are sad to move but it is for the good of the country,” he said. He dismissed the concerns of some environmentalists who fear that the water supply for the aqueduct may run out. “I believe the water will reach Beijing. The [Communist] party would not lie to us,” he said.
The diversion scheme is among the most ambitious that China, which is already famed for megaprojects such as the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze, has ever undertaken.
It involves three sections. The Eastern Route runs along the route of the 14th-century Grand Canal from the southern city of Hangzhou to Beijing and its port city of Tianjin. The Middle Route runs along a canal that is being built from the Danjiangkou reservoir, which is the largest man-made body of water in Asia, and the Western Route will come from the Tibetan plateau.

The project was first mooted by Chairman Mao with a throwaway comment during an inspection of the Yellow River in 1952. He said: “There’s a lot of water in the south but not much in the north. If we could borrow some then things would be all right.”
In 2002 the leadership of the Communist Party gave its formal seal of approval and the budget was set at 149 billion yuan. Since then costs have increased and, while estimates vary, some experts say that it will require as much as 420 billion yuan (£42 billion) or twice the cost of the Three Gorges Dam.
Progress has not been smooth, at least on the Eastern Route. Work to repair the Grand Canal started in December 2002 with the intention of creating a 1,156km waterway to carry drinking water to Beijing and nearby cities. The structural work has been completed but there was trouble with the water. It was so polluted by the industries that line the banks that it was too dirty even to be treated.

Officials in Tianjin have reportedly refused the water, saying they would rather slake the thirst of their people with costly desalination plants that would be less risky. The water is due to be ready by 2013.
Wang Shushan is the official in charge of the waterway in the central Henan province where the Middle Route runs for 731km, or 57 per cent of the total route. He told The Times in a rare public acknowledgement that some of the water was not potable: “You can’t say that the Eastern Route isn’t good, but it has a lot of pollution. The purpose is to use the water for agriculture and industry.”
He was proud about the success of the Middle Route, adding: “This is a clean-water corridor.”
Polluting industries in the area are being closed and a green belt 100m (330ft) wide will be created along the length of the canal. Fears that the water supply from the Danjiangkou reservoir could dry up are overdone, he said.

The height of the dam is also being raised from 157m to 173m to increase its capacity. That is why Mr Yao and the village’s other farmers and residents had to move. Their homes will be below the new water level once the reservoir is filled.
Mr Wang described the venture as a must-do project because of the needs of arid northern China, as well as of his province. The Government has already taken into account the possibility that the reservoir’s waters may fail to supply the planned 9.5 billion cubic metres needed to flow north.
“We can’t find ourselves looking at an empty reservoir. We can’t waste this project. That is why we have a second phase: to build a channel from the Yangtze River to the Danjiangkou reservoir.”

That costly addition to the original plans — estimated at about eight billion yuan — was decided on in 2008 and work has already begun. Because the route is uphill, costly electricity from the Three Gorges Dam will pump the water to Danjiangkou. The Middle Route’s sole water source will be the reservoir. From there the water will be sent north using only the power of gravity to deliver it to Beijing. The water will fall 98.7m over its journey and at one point will be carried by two tunnels — 7.2km long and 8.5m wide — under the Yellow River.

Guo Shuqiang, of the 16th Bureau of the China Railway Construction Group, has been working at the tunnels for 20 months and is delighted with the engineering triumph. Drilling will be finished this month. “We must build this for the people of Beijing, for the leaders and for foreign guests. No doubt it will be a success,” Mr Guo, 25, said.
Officials no longer make much mention of the complicated Western route that envisages bringing water from rivers on the Tibetan plateau that are swollen with glacier melt. Mr Wang said that the most technically complicated section of all may have to wait beyond its projected completion date of 2050.
“It has been stopped because of the huge investment and the difficulty. But we will do this one day,” he said.
He expects that the Middle Route, costing 80 million yuan a kilometre — mainly because of the canal’s reinforced concrete bed — will start to flow in 2014.
Mr Wang said: “The South-North project is as significant as the Grand Canal or the Great Wall. On this hinges the long-term survival of China, the survival of future generations.”

From: Joshua Wolf Shenk SLATE
Subject: Inside the Lennon/McCartney Connection, Part 2
"The tension between the two of them made for the bond." —George Martin
To the public, Lennon and McCartney famously declared themselves a fused pair. As soon as they began to write together, they decided to share credit regardless of individual contribution. At the top of their music sheets, they would write, "Another Lennon/McCartney original." They collapsed the space between them—not even an "and" would divide their names, just a slash.
But the joint credit also served as balm on the cuts of a constant, intense—though often joyful—competition. "Imagine two people pulling on a rope," said George Martin, "smiling at each other and pulling all the time with all their might. The tension between the two of them made for the bond."
Martin's image is perfect. John and Paul constantly pulled away from each other—and moved closer at the same time. Their competition actually enhanced their individual differences, even as it brought them into a relationship that was itself a third entity, the space where two circles overlap.

Even in their early years, when, as John said, they wrote "nose to nose" and "eyeball to eyeball" Lennon/McCartney songs clearly bore the stamp of their primary creators—John usually dwelling on betrayal and loneliness ("Tell me why you cried/ And why you lied to me") and Paul on devotion and connection ("There's really nothing else I'd rather do/ 'Cause I'm happy just to dance with you").
At the same time, the songs clearly evolved through a shared vision—at first, for engaging, infectious, emotionally direct pop, later for more ambitious, far-reaching ideas and sounds. Their harmonies make the chemistry and connection palpable, along with an implicit communication that extended to the whole band— "just being able to sort of blink," Lennon said, "or make a certain noise and I know they'll all know where we are going."

The nature of John and Paul's intimacy evolved over the years. In the early days, the partners were hardly ever apart. In Hamburg, the Beatles famously played for hours at a time (adding up, as Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, to the famous 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice" that Anders Ericsson has determined leads to true mastery.) Paul and John essentially lived together on the road; even on days off, they got together to write.

After August 1966, when they stopped touring, their lives were more separate. John lived in a mansion in the suburbs of London with his wife and son. Paul lived in London, first with his girlfriend Jane Asher's family, and then in a townhouse not far from the EMI studios on Abbey Road.
In part because each man grew as an artist, in part because they marinated in wild, innovative scenes, in part because they turned so much of their ferocious energy into a meticulous, relentless and inventive use of studio technology, the songs, beginning with the album Revolver, began to take on new color and oddity and elegance. Lennon wrote the lyrics for "Tomorrow Never Knows" after reading The Psychedelic Experience and following its instructions on an LSD trip: "Turn off your mind relax and float downstream." When it came time to record the song, he told George Martin that he wanted the sound of a hundred chanting Tibetan monks. He also suggested that he be suspended from a rope, get a good push and sing while spinning around the mike.
McCartney, meanwhile, edged into an almost operatic narrative style with "Eleanor Rigby," and his infectious pop developed new layers as with "Got To Get You Into My Life."

According to the conventional wisdom, their drift apart had begun. But the increased distance sometimes functioned like the space between boxers in a ring—giving more room for a powerful shot. "He'd write 'Strawberry fields,' I'd go away and write 'Penny Lane,' " McCartney said. "If I'd write 'I'm Down,' he'd go away and write something similar to that. To compete with each other. But it was very friendly competition because we were both going to share in the rewards anyway."
Friendly, but with a sharp edge. "I would bring in a song and you could sort of see John stiffen a bit," Paul said. "Next day he'd bring in a song and I'd sort of stiffen. And it was like, 'Oh, you're going to do that, are you? Right. You wait till I come up with something tomorrow.' "
The favorite back-and-forth—who was the real genius in the pair?—looks to set one on a pedestal. But when we look closely at the back and forth, that debate's most cherished assumptions come into question—for example, that John charged ahead with the musical avant-garde while Paul nurtured traditional elements of melody and symmetry. It's true that John tended to stick his finger in the audience's eye while Paul usually preferred to coo to them. John's "Revolution 9" may be the oddest, most dissonant thing ever laid down on a big pop album and Paul's "Let It Be" and "Hey Jude" set a standard for sweetness and formal perfection.

But in some ways, it was Paul who forged the frontier and John who raced to catch and exceed him. From 1966 to '68, John lived a weird, sleepy, deeply interior life. He spent days on end dropping acid and watching television. Paul, meanwhile, threw himself into the London art world and its "happenings"—performances that blurred the boundary between artist and audience. In 1965, their music publisher Dick James gave them each a Brenell Mark 5 tape recorder. While John used his to record rough demos, Paul, immersed in the experimental work of composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, jiggered the machine to disable the erase head and make tape loops of layered sounds. He brought these to the Beatles sessions to create the sound for "Tomorrow Never Knows," the famous "John" song.
"I lived a very urbane life in London," McCartney remembered. "John used to come in from Weighbridge … and I'd tell him what I'd been doing: 'Last night I saw a Bertolucci film and I went down the Open Space, they're doing a new play there.' "
Paul said John would reply: "God man, I really envy you."
In 1966, a far-out artist named Yoko Ono moved to London from New York City. Paul not only met her first; he had helped create the India Gallery where she and Lennon met. Though it took several years to ripen, Lennon eventually threw himself into the relationship—he literally asked people to consider them JohnandYoko. (Yoko made for the third person, following Pete Shotton and Paul McCartney, with whom he collapsed his name.)

Joined with her, John left no doubt who would be master of the avant garde. Where Paul had merely attended happenings, John and Yoko staged them. Where Paul used his tape loops to extend the pop form and kept his wildest, most experimental recordings in the can, John insisted that "Revolution 9" go on a Beatles record.

The point here isn't to identify whether John or Paul was the "real" edge, but to underscore how keenly they watched each other. Indeed, Paul's dive into the London art scene may itself have been a reaction to his image as the "cute" Beatle, compared with John, the "smart" one.
This constant give and take took a decisive shift in August 1967, when the band's manager Brian Epstein died. For some time, Epstein had been more figurehead than real leader—and it is telling that, by the mid-1960s at least, he deferred to Paul far more than to the others. But in a tenuous democracy led in strange fashion by two principals, he gave cover, the way even a weak parent will for squabbling boys.
Paul had asserted control before Epstein's death, when he conceived of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and dominated the sessions. With Brian gone, Paul's role as a de facto manager became far more obvious—and far more threatening to John's own sense of control. "Paul had a tendency to come along and say well he's written these ten songs, let's record now," John said, claiming that he and George became "side men for Paul." But this bitter language came later. And for a long while, he acquiesced. He was too checked out to do much of anything else.
The traditional story is that John withdrew from the band even further when he took up with Yoko. She is cast as usurper—provoking rifts that led to the band's demise. But on closer look, we have to ask whether John actually used her to assert his dominance—to claim his rightful, incontestable leadership. To the others, John's insistence that Yoko be treated as an equal seemed preposterous. But for John—however aware of his audaciousness—it all still fit: It was his band. He could bring in new members the same way he'd brought in Pete Shotton, the way he replaced Bill Smith with Len Garry—the way he brought in Paul. As strange as it might sound, even John's dramatic break with the band can be seen as a power move—a backhanded form of engagement. In September 1969, as Paul urged that the Beatles get back to their roots and play live shows, John shot back, in the account given by biographer Bob Spitz, "I think you're daft. I wasn't going to tell you, but I'm breaking the group up."
The language is key. John's leaving the band would mean its dissolution. He later made the claim explicit: "I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that."

But the break was hardly simple. It's not even clear that Lennon wanted a final break. For all his bluster in the band meeting, he never made his decision public—which is to say, he never made it real. To the contrary, just months after he told Paul he wanted a "divorce," he talked publicly about the band recording again and even touring. "It'll probably be a rebirth, you know, for all of us," he said. Perhaps John needed to believe he could end the band in order to stick with it.
At first, Paul showed signs that he would step back and let John get what he needed. He saw the choice, he said later, to accept Yoko or to lose John, and he chose the former: "When you find yourself in times of trouble … let it be."

But now, at a moment of great turmoil, two new factors came into play. For years, George Harrison had been the "quiet Beatle" at the side. Literally, as John and Paul faced the crowd side-to-side in performance, he stood far off facing them. But as he grew into his own—writing songs like "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun"—he bristled at Paul's bossiness and grew positively indignant at taking instructions from John's wife. At one point, according to George Martin, he and Lennon even came to blows. His energy made the tenuous balance between John and Paul much less stable.
Meanwhile, the Beatles, as a business, were in such a freefall that John predicted they could go completely broke. Someone needed to take control at Apple Corps, a wildly ambitious holding company that had turned to chaos. Paul wanted his new bride Linda's father and brother, Lee and John Eastman, to run Apple. But in another impetuous power move, John summarily signed with Allen Klein, a brash manager with a reputation for bullying record companies for higher royalties. (Klein was also a questionable character; he basically stole ownership of the Rolling Stones' catalog and later went to jail for tax fraud.)
George and Ringo followed John and signed with Klein. Paul held out. But for all his defiance, his vulnerability came strongly into play, as well. He had never yielded his essential devotion to John—and the rejections devastated him. "John's in love with Yoko," he said. "He's no longer in love with us."

As Paul wrote in "Let It Be," the light always shined on him, even on cloudy nights. But now, as a storm raged, he fell into a profound depression. He stayed in bed and drank through the day. "Boy, you're going to carry that weight a long time"—this grew out of his despair, he said. But he also wrote, in what seems a plea to his partner, "You and I have memories, longer than the road that stretches up ahead."

In the spring of 1970, with tensions among the four Beatles still at a fever pitch, Paul released a solo album and included a short Q&A that he authored with his publicist. It included this exchange.
Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?
PAUL: No.
Q: Is this album a rest away from the Beatles or the start of a solo career?
PAUL: Time will tell. Being a solo means it's "the start of a solo career …" and not being done with the Beatles means it's just a rest. So it's both really.

Like John, Paul hardly said the band had broken up for good. "It's just a rest," he said.
But newspapers seized on the first public acknowledgment of the band's rumored troubles. "McCartney Breaks Off With Beatles," ran the New York Times headline on April 11, 1970. This loss of face—the public acknowledgment of a coup—was more than John could stand. "I was cursing," he said, "because I hadn't done it. I wanted to do it, I should have done it. Ah, damn, shit, what a fool I was."
The time had long passed where he could just take a washboard and break it over a mate's head. The fight between these two partners now had the whole world in thrall. They would never work together again. But the history of their partnership was just beginning to be written. Hardly a straightforward account, it would be another winding road on their path together.

To be continued.

Understanding a Mad, Mad Primary Season
Ed Kilgore THE NEW REPUBLIC

Christine O’Donnell is not someone you’d expect to be a Republican nominee for a competitive U.S. Senate contest, particularly in the staid state of Delaware, and particularly as the choice of primary voters over Congressman Mike Castle, who up until yesterday had won twelve consecutive statewide races.

O’Donnell is a recent newcomer to Delaware and, since arriving, has managed to get into trouble with her student loans, her taxes, her mortgage, and her job. She also unsuccessfully sued a conservative organization for gender discrimination. In general, she’s the kind of person whom you’d expect Tea Party activists to excoriate for irresponsibility, not promote as a candidate for high office. But yesterday she beat Castle handily, becoming yet another exhibit of the extraordinary extent to which ideology has trumped every other factor in the 2010 Republican primary season.

Where does this leave us? Yesterday’s eight contests all but ended 2010’s primaries, and we're now able to step back and assess their overall political impact. The immediately obvious effect of this year's contests has been to move the GOP far, far to the right—not only via successful primary challenges that overthrew incumbents, but also because the remaining independent-minded Republicans, fearing for their careers, rushed headlong into Tea Party orthodoxy. Meanwhile, few Democratic incumbents lost, and few contested primaries followed any sort of ideological script.

The body count of establishment candidates who lost to right-wing challenges is pretty impressive, particularly in a year full of rich opportunities to win over independents and Democrats by running candidates who are attractively centrist.

The fallen include two incumbent senators: Robert Bennett of Utah (who didn’t even qualify to participate in the primary) and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Another purge victim was Florida Governor Charlie Crist, the GOP star who was driven to become an independent. There was Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who lost a gubernatorial primary; Florida gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum; Colorado Senate candidate Jane Norton and Colorado gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis; Delaware Senate candidate Mike Castle; Nevada Senate candidate Sue Lowden; Kentucky Senate candidate Trey Grayson; and California Senate candidate Tom Campbell. House incumbents like Bob Inglis of South Carolina lost for the sin of voting with the Bush administration in favor of TARP. Of course, many of these races involved extenuating circumstances, as in the South Carolina gubernatorial primary, where the candidate positioned furthest to the right—Nikki Haley—won in no small part because of a backlash against aggressive attacks on her character and ethnicity. But the sheer number of upsets from the right is stunning, especially as compared to the number of upsets pulled off by moderate Republicans, which amounted to one: Rick Snyder’s money-driven victory over a divided conservative field in the Michigan gubernatorial primary.

The roll of candidates who surrendered to the right-wing is in some ways even more impressive. Illinois Senate candidate Mark Kirk won against weak conservative opposition after repudiating his vote for climate-change legislation. Arizona Senator John McCain abandoned what was left of his own moderate voting record in the process of subduing J.D. Hayworth. California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman beat conservative challenger Steve Poizner by running an unbelievable number of ads attacking him as an abortion-rights supporter and tax-and-spend champ, and "just another liberal Sacramento politician," even as she talked tough on immigration. Whitman went so far that she's spent every moment since the primary trying to regain her centrist bona fides, and still hasn't recovered. Indeed, it’s difficult to identify any competitive Republican primary, even in areas where moderates have traditionally done well, in which every viable candidate did not aggressively brand him- or herself a "true conservative."

The role of the Tea Party movement in this rightward shift was significant, but it was not ubiquitous. And if, like me, you think the Tea Partiers are simply a mobilized bloc of conservative Republican voters, focusing on their role as if it were some sort of independent force is a chimera. What we have actually witnessed this year is the final victory in a Fifty Year War waged by the conservative movement for control of the Republican Party. The timing of this rightward lurch is remarkable, given that the usual practice of parties which have recently lost multiple elections is to “move to the center.” And, barring some miracle, an electoral triumph for this newly hard-right Republican Party will almost certainly render the transformation semi-permanent, confirming, as it will, the longstanding belief held by “movement conservatives” that excessive moderation—usually defined as any moderation—hurts Republicans politically.

The contrast with Democratic primaries is vivid. There were only two major left-leaning primary challenges to statewide incumbents, in Arkansas and Colorado, and they both failed. Neither of these challengers was a fire-breathing progressive. Left-wing challenges to House incumbents in California, Florida, Georgia, and Oklahoma also failed; only in Florida was the contest close. In most of the country, Democrats united early behind their strongest general election candidate, and even where there were competitive statewide primaries—as in the Pennsylvania and Ohio Senate races and the Alabama, Minnesota, and Vermont gubernatorial races—ideological differences were relatively subdued. The closest thing to a “purge” was probably in Alabama, where Artur Davis chose to thumb his nose at his own electoral base, and faced the consequences. If there was a “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party,” it was more like a schoolyard tussle than a cage match.

You might think that this landscape is good for Democrats, leaving them better positioned for a general election in which non-ideologues will be crucial. And yet … there’s still the “enthusiasm gap,” evident in the extraordinary strength of Republican primary voting this year. As voter participation guru Curtis Gans pointed out earlier this month, based on the primaries that had been held as of August 28:

Republican turnout in their statewide primaries exceeded Democratic turnout in theirs by more than 4 million votes. The average percentage of eligible citizens who voted in Democratic primaries was the lowest ever. The average percentage of citizens who voted in the GOP statewide primaries was the highest since 1970.
You can attribute some of this GOP primary advantage to an abundance of competitive races, and some of it to the great ideological sorting-out that has eliminated the ancient Democratic advantage in self-identification among voters who don’t necessarily vote for “their” party in general elections.

But all in all, the events of this primary season confirm the picture of an exceptionally excited Republican Party that is moving to the ideological right as fast as is practicable.

The GOP may ultimately pay a price for going on this ideological bender. In 2010, there are races that Republicans could lose which less rabidly conservative candidates might have won—such as the Senate races in Nevada, Kentucky, and Delaware, plus the gubernatorial race in Florida. Many conservatives don’t seem to care. Influential RedState blogger Erik Erikson, even as he criticized Christine O’Donnell’s campaign in Delaware, summed up this attitude:

I’d rather see the Democrat get elected than see Mike Castle get elected. Seriously, I know many of you disagree with me, but if the majority depends on Mike Castle, to hell with the majority.
In the long run, though, the real test of this year’s conservative triumph will occur immediately after November 2. Whether it’s a matter of Republicans in Congress being forced to write a budget or of Republican presidential candidates having to come up with a positive message and agenda, they will not long enjoy the luxury of moving to the right without consequences. If they take control of the House and begin investigations and maybe impeachment proceedings against the president, their craziness will be apparent. And in 2012, they will face a very different electorate than the old-white-voter–skewed midterm crowd of 2010.

If that evokes memories of the decisive U-turn in Republican fortunes which took place between 1994 and 1996, it’s no coincidence. After this primary season, the GOP appears poised to send to Washington a cadre of one-night political wonders who make the “Republican Revolutionaries” of 1994 look like pikers, if not RINOs.

creative pairs
Two of Us Inside the Lennon/McCartney connection, part 1.
By Joshua Wolf Shenk SLATE

"I thought, 'If I take him on, what will happen?' "—John Lennon
How did John Lennon and Paul McCartney make magic together? On the surface, it seems simple—they covered for each other's deficits and created outlets for each other's strengths. Paul's melodic sunshine smoothed out John's bluesy growls, while John's soulful depth gave ballast to Paul and kept him from floating away.
These points are true so far as they go. John and Paul did balance and complement each other magnificently, and we can pile example on example. When they were writing "I Saw Her Standing There," Paul offered this opening verse:
"She was just seventeen
Never been a beauty queen."
"You're joking about that line," John shot back, "aren't you?" He offered this revision:
"She was just seventeen
You know what I mean"
There it is: Innocence meets sin—an inviting, simple image takes a lusty, poetic leap.
Lennon and McCartney did, to use the precious phrase, complete each other. "Paul's presence did serve to keep John from drifting too far into obscurity and self-indulgence," said Pete Shotton, a Liverpool boy who stayed in the Beatles' circle, "just as John's influence held in check the more facile and sentimental aspects of Paul's songwriting."
But images of completion and balance miss an essential energy between Lennon and McCartney—the potential energy of creative partnerships that they, as much as any pair in history, exemplify and illustrate. We tend to think of them in terms of arithmetic: Two people added together yield magnificence. This is the idea of partnership as chocolate and peanut butter—tasty, obvious, easy.
But Lennon and McCartney were more like an oyster and a grain of sand. Their power together didn't derive simply from individual ingredients but from a dynamic of constant mutual influence. Indeed, even "influence" understates the case, as it suggests two distinct actors operating on each other. Lennon and McCartney did affect each other, change each other, goad, inspire, madden, and wound each other. But they also each contributed to something that went beyond either individual, a charged, mutual space of creation—those pearls your ear probably recognizes and leans toward as much as to your parents' voices.

On a warm, humid July day in 1957, 15-year-old Paul McCartney came around to see a local band called the Quarry Men play in the fields behind St. Peter's Church in the suburbs of Liverpool, England.

John Lennon, who was 20 months older, fronted the six-piece band. He had his glasses off as usual—he was vain like that, though his vision was lousy. His hair was piled up and greased back in the style of post-Elvis "Teddy Boys." He played banjo chords on his guitar, ignoring the two bottom strings. For much of the set—part rock and part "skiffle" (a flavor of 1950s folk)—he passed over chord changes he didn't know and made up lyrics as he went along. When he did the Del-Vikings doo-wop "Come Go With Me," he threw in an image from the blues: "Come and go with me … down to the penitentiary." McCartney thought it was ingenious.
Afterward, in the church social hall, Paul picked up a guitar himself, flipped it over to play left-handed and showed off the songs he knew—Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins, Little Richard.* He had the lyrics down (including the complete lines to Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock," a song others had a hard time even deciphering) and knocked off the chords perfectly (including a quick and delicate shift from a G to an F chord that made jaws drop). Then he went over to the piano and pounded out some Jerry Lee Lewis. The boy had polish and heat. He wore a white jacket with silver threads—he looked like Elvis, John thought. "Right off, I could see John checking this kid out," said Shotton (who played the washboards for the Quarry Men). Another friend said that John and Paul "circled each other like cats."

Clearly, these two boys had chemistry—that ineffable quality of attraction that feels like a primal, physical force and that often descends like a lightning strike. As with the passion of love, or the nature of creativity itself, science has struggled to account for chemistry. Humans may, or may not, have pheromones that affect connection (though smell does demonstrably play a role in sexual attraction). Mirror neurons may, or may not, play a role in empathy and rapport. In their new book, Click, Ori and Rom Brafman offer many powerful stories of what chemistry looks like, but when it comes to analyzing it, their first adjective is "magical." Hardly the stuff of white coats and laboratories.
Of course, we celebrate, even venerate, these "chemical" connections—and for good reason. They give us a big kick. MRIs show the brain region responsible for dopamine absorption lights up in couples that say they are in love, comparable to the influence of narcotics. By contrast, social disconnection provokes activity in the region responsible for physical pain.
But intense connection also brings a peculiar discomfort. People "madly" in love show symptoms directly comparable to mania, depression, anorexia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Serotonin levels actually fall in passionate love (which, not incidentally, has a short lifespan, as opposed to the mellower, longer lasting "companionate love").
The behavior in passion also carries profound psychological risk. Arthur and Elaine Aron's experiments on what they call self-expansion show that people literally lose a sense of distinction between themselves and a close other. And as the psychologist Sandra Murray has shown, love wouldn't work at all without "cognitive restructuring," or helpful illusions that dispel the inherent fear of rejection and pain.

John Lennon saw the two sides of his attraction to Paul McCartney quickly and clearly. "I dug him," he said, and he wanted him in the band.
But he had his concerns. "I half thought to myself, 'He's as good as me,'" he told the journalist Hunter Davies in 1967. "I'd been kingpin up to then. Now, I thought, 'If I take him on, what will happen?' " (In one sense, Lennon obviously meant: "If I invite him to join the group." But the double meaning of "take him on" is worth noticing.) In a 1970 interview with Jann Wenner, Lennon described his dilemma even more plainly: "I had a group. I was the singer and the leader; then I met Paul, and I had to make a decision: Was it better to have a guy who was better than the guy I had in? To make the group stronger, or to let me be stronger?"
With hindsight, it's clear that it wasn't an either/or. Bringing Paul aboard made the group much stronger and it made John much stronger. It gave him part ownership of a priceless enterprise. That math adds up to infinite value.
But we're missing the point if we look at Lennon's thinking as a mistake. Actually, he put his finger right on the core emotional dynamic. What Paul represented to John—for good and for ill, for excitement and for fear—was a loss of control. All through his relationship with McCartney, the power between them would be fluid—a charged, creative exchange that fueled them and frustrated them, leading to creative peaks and valleys of recrimination and estrangement.
And it can all be traced to their first encounter. "The decision was made to make the group stronger," Lennon told Wenner. Had he decided to keep the power all to himself, he probably would have forsaken his power entirely.
In a 1995 interview, Mick Jagger was asked how he and Keith Richards lasted so long as songwriting partners, when Lennon and McCartney split. His answer was simple: A team needs a leader. (He didn't go so far as to explicitly identify himself as that leader, but he made it perfectly clear.)
By contrast, John and Paul, Jagger said, "seemed to be very competitive over leadership of the band. … If there are 10 things, they both wanted to be in charge of nine of them. You're not gonna make a relationship like that work, are you?"
His point sounds like an M.B.A. case study—fitting, maybe, from a rock and roller who studied at the London School of Economics.
But successful creative pairs suggest that power roles are often murky. The domineering and dynamic Gertrude Stein seemed to run over her mousy, housekeeping partner Alice B. Toklas. Stein literally appropriated her partner's identity—wrote in her name—to create a self-serving portrait of herself. But close observers often saw Toklas take Stein by the lapel, directing her as deftly and surely as an actor onstage. In many ways, Stein's creative life began when Toklas recognized her—when, in Stein's words, Toklas said "yes" to her work.
Sometimes, apparently rigid power roles actually facilitate something more open. Quayle Hodek and Kris Lotlikar, co-founders of a leading renewable energy firm, decided at the start that one of them would be CEO and have the final say. This, Hodek told me, allows them to operate without fear of paralyzing conflict. The irony, he says, is that his ostensible deputy calls many more shots day-to-day.
Even Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at times operated more fluidly than Jagger claimed. The masterpiece Exile on Main Street was recorded in Richards' house in the south of France, and on the terms he preferred (a loose arrangement, edging into chaos, built on jams and endless takes). Many consider this album the team's masterpiece.
But no pair illustrates the fluidity of power—and the power of fluidity—better than John and Paul. At its worst, theirs was an alienating, enervating struggle. But at its best, the dynamic was playful and organic. Jagger is probably right that it led to their split. But who said you measure the strength of a collaboration by its longevity?
The tension between Lennon and McCartney was rooted in their distinct styles and personalities. As a boy, the precocious and creative John Lennon always needed, he said, "a little gang of guys who would play various roles in my life, supportive and, you know, subservient." "I wanted everybody to do what I told them to do," he said, "to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss." He needed both to connect and to dominate. "Though I have yet to encounter a personality as strong and individual as John's," said his friend Pete Shotton, "he always had to have a partner." (John so entwined himself with Pete that he called them "Shennon and Lotton.")
When John put a band together, he brought his mates in—often simply because they were his mates—but left no doubt about his status. Shotton, for example, didn't have a particular talent for music and didn't like it much. When he told Lennon he needed out of the band, John broke Pete's washboard over his head. It's not likely we could find a clearer display of power with primates on the savannah.
For some time after Paul joined, John stayed out front. Among the band's many early names were "Johnny and the Moondogs" and "Long John and the Silver Beetles." When "The Beatles" went to Hamburg, Germany, the contract named John as the payee. In the late 1950s, Paul pitched a journalist on the band; he began his description of the boys with John, "who leads the group … " But the letter itself—a piece of Paul's relentless promotion—speaks to his own power style. He was more social, more affable, more outwardly and consistently energetic. Where John oscillated between intense shyness and raw aggression (he beat his girlfriend, for example), Paul had a knack for working people that was savvy as it was sweet.
From the start, Paul looked up to John—"posing and strutting with his hair slicked back," remembered Cynthia Lennon, "to prove that he was cool." But he also took the microphone and worked the crowd. In Hamburg, "most people among the fans looked upon [Paul] as the leader," said Astrid Kirchherr, a German student who befriended the band. "John of course was the leader," Astrid continued. "He was far and away the strongest."
What's interesting, though, isn't the question of who ran the show, but the subtlety of strength itself, the many ways power can be exercised between partners.

Consider the moment Paul's brother Michael cited as an illustration of his "innate sense of diplomacy." It was in Paris in 1963. The Beatles' producer George Martin had arranged for them to record "She Loves You" in German. When the band missed their studio appointment, Martin came around to their suite at the George V hotel. They played slapstick and dived under the tables to avoid him.

"Are you coming to do it or not?" Martin said.

"No," Lennon said. George and Ringo echoed him. Paul said nothing, and they went back to eating.

"Then a bit later," Michael said, "Paul suddenly turned to John and said, 'Heh, you know that so and so line, what if we did it this way? John listened to what Paul said, thought a bit, and said, 'Yeah, that's it.' And they headed to the studio."
How would we chart the lines of authority for this decision? You could say Lennon made the call to refuse the recording session, then reversed himself—the band following him both times. But it was actually Paul who shaped the course the band took. His move to avoid a direct confrontation—to let John stay nominally in control—only underscores his operational strength.
Just as shorter people are more aware of height, Paul seems to have noticed the power dynamic more acutely. In a 1967 conversation about the band's Hamburg days, Lennon said that Paul had just recently told him about fights they had over who led the band. "I can't remember them," Lennon said. "It had stopped mattering by then. I wasn't so determined to be the leader at all costs." This is crucial. He had decided he didn't need to be the leader at all costs—itself a leadership claim. As the band rocketed to success, Lennon would increasingly acquiesce to Paul's ideas, much as a king in tumultuous times will defer to his counsel. But he never gave up the idea that he could, when he wanted, return straight to his throne.

The 6 Smartest Ideas From Stephen Hawking's New Book
by Joshua Robinson
The Daily Beast 12 Sept 2010
The world's most famous physicist’s latest book, The Grand Design, has been causing a storm with its views of God, but just what is the book all about? Joshua Robinson gives you the book in a nutshell.
This isn’t your typical popular science book. It doesn’t explain how black holes work. It doesn’t discuss the conditions for time travel. And there isn’t a single Star Trek reference. The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, is far more ambitious than that. They propose a framework for discovering the answer to life, the universe, and, well, everything else. And, they promise, the answer is not just 42.
Stephen Hawking gives a lecture at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 20 June 2010. (Warren Toda, EPA / Landov) The book’s conclusions are so sweeping and address such fundamental questions of existence that it often borders on philosophy. But Hawking and Mlodinow, who have more than half a century of experience between them and several bestsellers between them, see no problem with dabbling beyond the realm of traditional physics. “Philosophy is dead,” they assert. “Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”
It’s a bold claim. Appearing as it does on page 5, it can also be an intimidating one if you’ve just picked up the book. So here is The Daily Beast’s executive summary of six of the book’s biggest ideas. It won’t be enough for you to stroll into your nearest graduate-level cosmology class and ace the midterm. But it should help you navigate a conversation at a cocktail party.
What We See is Real. Unless It’s Not.
Physicists have all sorts of tools for describing the universe around us. Some are neat and elegant, like Einstein’s theories of relativity (which come in special and general flavors). Others are more ugly and unwieldy, like the Standard Model. And all of them purport to explain reality when in fact we have no idea what is objectively real.
The way the problem is often summed up in popular culture is, “What if we were just the playthings of some all-powerful being?” or “Could we all be the stars of an alien reality show?” The answer is: Maybe. But physicists have come to terms with this problem. Hawking and Mlodinow’s conclusion is, “There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality.” All we can use is model-dependent realism. We come up with mathematical models to explain observations with a set of narrowly defined rules. And that’s the best we can ever do.
“It is not necessary,” Hawking and Mlodinow write, “to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
A Brief History of Quantum Physics…
Hawking and Mlodinow don’t deliver anything new on this front, but there are a few baffling elements of quantum physics worth knowing. Quantum theory explains the interactions of the universe’s fundamental particles. And when things get that minute, mind-boggling things happen. One crucial tenet is that light behaves simultaneously as a particle and as a wave—which is always a neat fact to toss out there.
But perhaps more relevant to this discussion is the importance of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that we cannot accurately know both the position and velocity of a particle. From there, some very smart people, like Richard Feynman, deduced what is known as the sum over histories. (Brace yourself for this one, it defies all intuition.) It means that when a particle travels from point A to point B, it doesn’t simply take the path of a straight line. It takes—every possible path simultaneously. Only once it is measured does it appear to have taken the straight-line path. The wider implication of this is that the universe has no definite past. This is a vital point in any multiple universe, or multiverse, model.
Amazingly enough, it has widely stood up to experimental testing.
… And Why It Doesn’t Always Work With Classical Physics
What 20th-century quantum physicists found is that in the world of the infinitesimally small, classical Newtonian physics breaks down and quantum theory takes over. A troubling discovery. Even Einstein could not wrap his head around the possibility that so much of the universe’s fundamental interactions were left to chance, famously stating that “God does not play dice.” In wider philosophical terms, the claim that objects do not have single definite histories flies in the face of scientific determinism—the idea that a single set of laws should be able to explain past events and predict future physical behavior to a great degree of accuracy.
That conflict shaped the direction of physics for much of the 20th century and into the 21st. The science’s Holy Grail became a grand unified theory of everything, which brings together all four fundamental forces (gravity, the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force).
Dial M for M-Theory
The most compelling model we have to unify the various conflicting, and often inelegant, frameworks for understanding the universe is known as M-Theory. It isn’t quite the single, beautifully economical theory that Einstein spent his latter days vainly searching for. It is more like “a whole family of different theories, each of which is a good description of observations only in some range of physical situations.” In that way, it incorporates both classical physics and quantum theory to explain the most general range of phenomena yet.
Most importantly, it explains that at the moment of creation (whatever form it took), a huge number of universes were created simultaneously and spontaneously, all arising from physical law. The number of universes could be on the order of 10500—that’s 1 with 500 zeroes after it. And all of them have many possible histories. Only a few, however, present the rare combination of factors required for intelligent life to exist. As Hawking and Mlodinow describe it, M-Theory is “a model of a universe that creates itself.” In fact, they argue, it is “the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe.”
It all makes missing the bus this morning seem pretty insignificant.
Anthropic Principle 101
With so much randomness in the universe, it seems like a miracle that we could be at all. Unimaginable numbers of conditions over billions of years had to develop just so for humans to be here, asking the universe’s biggest questions.
This observation has led to one of the most divisive points in modern physics: the anthropic principle. The strong anthropic principle suggests, according to Hawking and Mlodinow, “that the fact that we exist imposes constraints not just on our environment but on the possible form and content of the laws of nature themselves.” In other words, our very existence is proof that the laws of nature must behave in an extremely narrowly tailored way, which must allow for the development of intelligent life. It almost seems like an argument in favor of a creator. But while Hawking and Mlodinow argue in favor of the anthropic principle, they leave out any implication of an almighty designer.
So Where Does That Leave God?
Bad news for pretty much every organized religion. The door that so many physicists from Newton, to Kepler, and even Hawking himself (in A Brief History of Time) had left open for the big guy upstairs is shut, according to The Grand Design. Hawking and Mlodinow even rule out the necessity for God as a grand watchmaker, an all-powerful being who created the universe and then left it to tick away on its own, which had been the preferred interpretation of many classical physicists and philosophers. As they explain, the complex consequences of gravity mean that there is enough negative energy in the universe to cancel out the positive energy that comes with the spontaneous formation of new matter without disrupting the overall equilibrium. The technical physics behind this are only within the grasp of a handful of people in the world, but there is a powerful upshot to their conclusions. “It is not necessary,” Hawking and Mlodinow write, “to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

It Adds Up: This Was New York’s Hottest Summer

By PATRICK McGEEHAN NY TIMES
With one final, fitting blast of 96-degree heat on Tuesday, the summer of 2010 went down in the National Weather Service’s record books as the hottest ever in New York City.
Hotter than the previous high of 77.3 degrees set in 1966, when more than 1,100 deaths were attributed to heat that repeatedly exceeded 100 degrees. Hotter than 2006, when a heat wave set off a blackout in northern Queens that left more than 100,000 residents without power for days.
But in this record-breaking season — defined by the Weather Service as June through August — there was no cataclysm, no singular event that was likely to define a three-month period when the temperature averaged 77.8 degrees. Instead, the summer of 2010 might be more properly measured in more subtle ways.
For Sal Medina, a newsstand operator from the Bronx, it could be measured by the number of frozen water bottles that he slipped into his pants this week to stay cool (three).
For John Natuzzi, it could be all the ice cubes used during the first day of the United States Open tennis tournament on Monday (80,000 pounds).
For lifeguards, it could be the number of total visitors to the city’s beaches (17.2 million).
For executives at Consolidated Edison, it would surely be the number of 90-degree days the utility struggled through without any widespread disruptions of its power network (34).
Tally it all up and the sum of the last three months is a rarely interrupted stretch of hot days that forced New Yorkers to keep cool in ways both traditional and creative.
Mr. Medina, 56, who lives in Pelham Bay, could barely stand to be inside his metal-jacketed newsstand at Clinton and Delancey Streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. To cool off, he devised a system using frozen pint-sized bottles of Poland Spring water.
He would tuck three inside the waistband of his pants. A fourth he would sling in a plastic bag whose handles he would knot just under his chin, holding the icy cylinder against the back of his neck.
Even with that gear, Mr. Medina said he had quit early a few days this summer, heading home at 3 p.m. on the hottest days, instead of the usual 6. The heat, he said, “affects your whole nervous system, makes you grouchy; it makes you so you can’t stand your customers.”
At Natuzzi Brothers Ice Company in Queens, the phones ring nonstop once the temperature hits 90, Mr. Natuzzi said. This summer, he said, his company has been supplying dry ice to ice-cream stores to keep their products frozen, a request he said he rarely got last summer.
The shortage of orders during the cool early months of last summer led to significant losses, Mr. Natuzzi said, but this summer has been a different story. The company, whose warehouse holds 40 tons of ice, sold out its supply during the heat wave that started on the July 4 weekend. It has been running its delivery trucks up to 15 hours a day since then.
“It’s been quite a ride this summer,” Mr. Natuzzi said.
Exhausted as he is, it is not quite over. His company supplies ice to the food-service operations at the United States Open, which runs for two weeks. On the first day, the Open used about 20,000 pounds more than usual, he said. “I’ll look back and say that this is one summer I’ll never forget,” Mr. Natuzzi said.
At Con Edison, the summer of 2010 will be memorable for what did and did not happen. In the past three months, the utility’s customers drew more power off its grid than during any previous three-month period, according to data compiled by the company. But through successive heat waves, the electric distribution system held up, with only occasional localized disruptions.
“For two days we suffered,” said Theo Trilivas, 65, a retired plumber who lost power in his home in Astoria, Queens, in July. “No power. No cooking. No A.C. No lights. Nothing. We had to throw out everything in the freezer.”
The growing demand for power from residential customers has been one of the bigger surprises to Con Ed officials this summer. Of the company’s 36 distribution networks, 14 — all in residential areas — exceeded the forecast for peak demand, said John F. Miksad, a senior vice president who oversees the company’s electric operations. Reflecting the weak state of the economy, power usage by commercial customers declined this summer, he said.
The increased use of air-conditioning has been one constant of life in the metropolitan region. According to Con Ed’s estimates, 6.6 million air-conditioners are in use in its service area, and that number is rising by at least 170,000 a year.
Sam Sharma and his wife tried placing buckets of ice cubes on window sills and in front of fans in their apartment on the second floor of a house in Woodside, Queens. But eventually they broke down and did what so many other New Yorkers have done: they bought an air-conditioner.
“We have it in the living room and only run it when it is extreme heat, and then only for a few hours,” said Mr. Sharma, an immigrant from Nepal who works as a parking lot attendant. “Maybe we used it 10 days this whole summer. It’s expensive.”
In search of relief, some people actually sought out the city. On Monday, Sharon Fredman, 38, a Web consultant from Tenafly, N.J., had run out of suburban options to entertain her daughter, Margot, 8, and keep her cool at the same time. So she drove in for the day to let Margot splash around in a sprinkler in Tompkins Square Park. “When it’s 90 degrees,” Ms. Fredman said, “it’s equally hot everywhere.”
When New Yorkers sought to escape the heat indoors, they flocked to the beaches, particularly Coney Island. According to the city’s parks department, total attendance at Coney Island’s beach slightly exceeded 12.8 million people, more than triple the total from 2009.
“There were tremendous increases at all the beaches,” said Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner. “The beaches were our natural air-conditioners.”
Many of those beachgoers were repeat visitors, like Stephen Fybish, who said he went to Coney Island or neighboring Brighton Beach to swim in the ocean 11 times this summer. He said that he found the sand to be crowded some days but that he always had ample room to swim.
A weather historian who has kept detailed records on temperatures in the city for many years, Mr. Fybish was already looking ahead to September and calculating what sort of weather it would take to extend the hottest-ever distinction. By his reckoning, the average temperature for the month has to be higher than 71 degrees for New York to have its hottest June-through-September period on record.


C. J. Hughes and Rebecca White contributed reporting.