Boomers Hit New Self-Absorption Milestone: Age 65

By DAN BARRY NY TIMES
In keeping with a generation’s fascination with itself, the time has come to note the passing of another milestone: On New Year’s Day, the oldest members of the Baby Boom Generation will turn 65, the age once linked to retirement, early bird specials and gray Velcro shoes that go with everything.

Though other generations, from the Greatest to the Millennial, may mutter that it’s time to get over yourselves, this birthday actually matters. According to the Pew Research Center, for the next 19 years, about 10,000 people “will cross that threshold” every day — and many of them, whether through exercise or Botox, have no intention of ceding to others what they consider rightfully theirs: youth.

This means that the 79 million baby boomers, about 26 percent of this country’s population, will be redefining what it means to be older, and placing greater demands on the social safety net. They are living longer, working longer and, researchers say, nursing some disappointment about how their lives have turned out. The self-aware, or self-absorbed, feel less self-fulfilled, and thus are racked with self-pity.

So, then, to those who once never trusted anyone over 30: Raise that bowl of high-fiber granola, antioxidant-rich blueberries and skim milk and give yourself a Happy Birthday toast.

“The stork’s 1946 diaper derby left a controversy today that rocked the cradles from coast to coast,” The Associated Press reported 65 years ago. “The maternal question of the moment was: Who was the first baby born in the new year?”

The wire service named several contenders, from a newborn girl named Darleen in Los Angeles to a baby boy named James in St. Louis — to the infant identified only as “the son of Mr. and Mrs. Aloysius Nachreiner, of Buffalo.” Readers of that news item could not help wondering:

What is to come of this son of Buffalo? Who will he be?

The Nachreiner boy, along with these other bundles of innocence, were the very first of what has come to be known, rather graphically, as the “pig in the python.” After the travails and absences of the Depression and World War II flattened the birthrate, the promise and prosperity of the postwar years created a sharp rise in births that lasted from 1946 until 1964, when the popularity of birth control pills helped stem the tide.

Ascribing personality traits to a bloc of 79 million people is a fool’s endeavor. For one thing, people born in 1964 wouldn’t know the once-ubiquitous television hero Sky King if he landed his trusty Songbird on their front lawns, just as people born in 1946 wouldn’t quite know what to make of one of Sky King’s successors, the big-headed H. R. Pufnstuf.

For another, the never-ending celebration of the hippie contingent of boomers tends to overshadow the Young Americans for Freedom contingent. After all, while some boomers were trying to “levitate” the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War, other boomers were fighting in that war.

Steven M. Gillon, the author of “Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever and How It Changed America” (Simon & Shuster, 2004), warns against generalizing about baby boomers, especially when it concerns politics. Still, he says, the boomer generation, of which he is a member, clearly changed our world. Here’s a simple generalization — that is, explanation — of how:

Previous generations were raised to speak only when spoken to, and to endure in self-denying silence. But baby boomers were raised on the more nurturing, child-as-individual teachings of Dr. Benjamin Spock, and then placed under the spell of television, whose advertisers marketed their wares directly to children. Parents were cut out of the sale — except, of course, for the actual purchase of that coonskin cap or Barbie doll.

“It created a sense of entitlement that had not existed before,” Mr. Gillon said. “We became more concerned with our own emotional well-being, whereas to older generations that was considered soft and fluffy.”

The boomers may not have created rock ’n’ roll, but they certainly capitalized on its potential to revolt against parents. And they may not have led the civil rights movement, but they embraced it — at least, many of them did — and applied its principles to fighting for the rights of women and gay men and lesbians. They came to expect, even demand, freedom of choice; options in life.

“But the pig has moved through the python, and is moving to the final stage,” Mr. Gillon said. “And we won’t describe what that stage is.”

Here is an attempt: retirement, old age, then a release to a place where the celestial Muzak plays a never-ending loop of the Doobie Brothers.

About 13 percent of the population today is 65 or older; by 2030, when the last of the baby boomers are 65, that rate will have grown to 18 percent. In addition to testing the sustainability of entitlement programs like Social Security, this wholesale redefinition of old age may also include a pervading sense that life has been what might technically be called a “bummer.”

A study by two sociologists, Julie Phillips of Rutgers University and Ellen Idler of Emory University, indicates that the suicide rate for middle-aged people, notably baby boomers without college degrees, rose from 1999 to 2005. And Paul Taylor, the executive vice president of the Pew Center, summed up a recent survey of his generation this way:

“We’re pretty glum.”

This gloominess appears to be linked to the struggling economy, the demands of middle age and a general sense of lofty goals not met by the generation that once sang of teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony, and then buying it a Coke.

No one person can represent all 79 million members of a generation. But perhaps one person can remind us of the small epiphanies and private pains that define all generations.

Remember the son of Mr. and Mrs. Aloysius Nachreiner, the first baby born in Buffalo in 1946, thus making him one of the country’s first baby boomers? Well, his parents named him Aloysius, too — though he was often called Butch.

His father was a bagger at a feed mill; his mother raised their three children in the first floor of a rented duplex. When he was 5 years old, he was blinded in his left eye during a snowball fight with his friend Billy. He liked watching Roy Rogers and Howdy Doody on the family’s round, black-and-white television, and rooted hard for Mickey Mantle.

Al, or Butch, graduated from a vocational school with plans to become an auto mechanic, but that never happened. He wound up making his career as a setup man and press operator for a folding box company.

He married an older woman named Alice, a widow with seven children who loved Elvis Presley. They had two daughters, but one died of crib death. They bought a house in a Buffalo neighborhood nicknamed Iron Island because it was surrounded by railroad tracks.

He played fast-pitch softball for many years, pitching for who knows how many bars and taverns, but gave it up a few years ago because his knees would hurt for days after a game.

Two years ago, two days after their 40th wedding anniversary, his Alice died, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. She left him with two dozen grandchildren and a half-dozen or so great-grandchildren. “As long as they all don’t come over at once, it’s all right,” he says, laughing.

Mr. Nachreiner still works, making boxes from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., five days a week. In his free time, he roots for the hapless Buffalo Bills, uses his computer — “though I’m not very good at it” — and, when not visiting family, relaxes at home with his Jack Russell terrier, Trixie, where a portrait of Elvis hangs on the wall.

He does not devote much time to pondering the traits of his generation, or his status as an early baby boomer, or even the fact that come New Year’s Day he will turn 65. What he says of it all is what all those baby boomers behind him hope to say one day:

“I made it.”


Jack Begg contributed research.

After Russian Death, Inquiry Doors Open and Shut

By ELLEN BARRY NY TIMES
MOSCOW — It was more than a year ago when six members of an obscure oversight panel filed into Butyrskaya Prison to look into the death of a prisoner.

They were hardly an intimidating bunch: retired women in hats, mostly, scribbling their observations in notebooks, regarded by the prison staff as a minor irritant, like fleas.

In a country whose law enforcement structures wield enormous power, it is easy enough to ignore civilian watchdog groups. But this day was different. When the doctors were led in and told to take a seat, the panel’s leader, a veteran human rights activist named Valery V. Borshchev, felt something unfamiliar in the air.

“They lied to us, of course,” Mr. Borshchev later recalled. “But they were frightened. And the fact that they were frightened gave us hope that something would really change.”

The man who had died was Sergei L. Magnitsky. His death in pretrial detention at the age of 37, officially recorded as resulting from sudden heart failure, sent shudders through Moscow’s elite. They saw him — a post-Soviet young urban professional — as someone uncomfortably like themselves. He had been arrested after accusing police investigators of a huge tax fraud, and he died awaiting trial.

A full account of Mr. Magnitsky’s death, the group knew, could restore some confidence in Russia’s legal system. A whitewash, on the other hand, could erode what faith remained.

Investigating the death meant confronting Russia’s security structures — the police, prosecutors, courts, prisons and prison doctors, all links in a self-protective chain. The findings, however decisive, would have to compete with an official inquiry, which would ultimately determine if anyone would be prosecuted.

Even so, they felt oddly hopeful. President Dmitri A. Medvedev, by all accounts genuinely angry over Mr. Magnitsky’s death, insisted that state prosecutors stop dragging their feet and open a case. Two days later, a top prison administrator admitted “obvious violations on our part” to a Kremlin advisory group.

In a country ruled more by commands than by laws, a command had gone out: This time someone would have to be punished.

So the inspectors walked into Butyrskaya with uncommon confidence.

“We could cover ourselves with this comment and say, ‘The president demanded an investigation,’ ” said Lyubov V. Volkova, deputy head of the panel, known as the Public Oversight Commission. “It was like an umbrella. We could go in and say, show us this, show us that. We are under this umbrella.”

Unlikely Detectives

Ms. Volkova and her colleagues were hardly detectives. Their group was brand new, approved by Mr. Medvedev after more than a decade of lobbying the government. They were empowered to inspect cells and investigate complaints, but their recommendations were not binding. In their berets and reading glasses, they seemed to pose little threat. But once inside Butyrskaya, the commission members were neck deep in a criminal investigation.

They moved from cell to cell, standing in the last spaces Mr. Magnitsky had occupied, seeing the last people he saw. They paged through sheaves of complaints he made: there were more than 400, as many as three a day, sometimes written by hand. The picture of a man began to take shape before them.

“Every day, in prisons, we see beaten, constrained, terrified people, who don’t complain about anything,” said Ms. Volkova, 62, a brash blonde partial to satin pants and animal prints. “Magnitsky complained. And the more he complained, the worse they made it for him. And then he complained again.”

“He is the only one we’ve seen like this,” she said.

There were signs that something had gone badly wrong. A doctor on the prison’s medical staff who had been treating Mr. Magnitsky for abdominal pain appeared more distraught than others interviewed by the group. Three days before his death, she told them, Mr. Magnitsky complained about vomiting and severe pain on his right side.

That was a Friday, and she went home for the weekend. No doctor saw him again until Monday, and then, she said, he had “acute, belting pain, vomiting every three hours.” It looked to her as if he had acute pancreatitis, which left untreated can lead to organ failure. As the commission members hastily took notes, the doctor described her alarm, saying: “It was necessary to push for an examination. I thought he had a chronic disease.”

At this, the commission members’ ears pricked up. Whom did she have to lobby to get Mr. Magnitsky treated?

But the conversation was cut short. At that moment, Mr. Borshchev recalled, a prison official walked up behind the doctor, grasped her by the shoulders, and took her out of the room.

Tracing a Prisoner’s Journey

Mr. Borshchev learned about prisons in the 1970s, when, as a close friend of the Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, he ferried books and sausages to the outskirts of penal colonies to be passed to political prisoners. From his own interrogations for dissident activities, he knew that a prisoner needed a plan to withstand official pressure. He had his own plan: as soon as the investigator raised his voice, he would stop talking and gaze out the window.

Now 76, Mr. Borshchev has fat streaks of white in his beard, and peers over his glasses as if he is presiding over his own personal Supreme Court.

At Butyrskaya, he walked from one cell to another, tracing eight transfers Mr. Magnitsky underwent in the last three months of his life. The cells were increasingly cramped, dark and dirty.

Mr. Magnitsky was allowed only one visit with his wife and mother for the full 11 months he was in custody; they attended court hearings so they could stare at him from across the room. He passed the time by reading Shakespeare’s tragedies. When overcome with anxiety or despair, a cellmate later said, he would turn his face to the wall, as if he wanted it to swallow him up.

Though a prison doctor had diagnosed gallstones and pancreatitis and ordered a follow-up ultrasound, he was suddenly transferred to Butyrskaya, which had minimal medical facilities. There he had an attack, writing of pain “so acute that I was not even able to lie down.” In September, Oleg F. Silchenko, lead investigator in the case, refused Mr. Magnitsky’s appeal to advocate for the ultrasound, saying investigators were under no obligation to intervene. The ultrasound never happened.

To Mr. Borshchev, there was only one way to interpret this: the prisoner was refusing to cooperate. Indeed, Mr. Magnitsky’s job at a Russian-American law firm drew him into a battle between William S. Browder — once the largest foreign investor in the Russian stock market — and the Interior Ministry, which oversees law enforcement. In 2007, Mr. Browder’s company, Hermitage Capital, based on Mr. Magnitsky’s research, accused police investigators of an immense act of corruption, charging that they had seized three of Mr. Browder’s subsidiary companies and used them to receive a $230 million tax refund.

The next year, the Interior Ministry charged Mr. Browder’s companies with evading $17.5 million in taxes. As soon as Mr. Magnitsky was arrested, investigators were pushing him to testify against someone, presumably Mr. Browder, said his defense lawyer, Dmitri V. Kharitonov. But he refused.

The commission’s narrative flowed with some logic until it reached Nov. 16, 2009, the day he died. The nervous doctor sent Mr. Magnitsky to another prison, which had a hospital. There, the oversight panel met a surgeon named Dr. Aleksandra V. Gaus, who said she noted upon his arrival that he had symptoms of acute pancreatitis and prepared to send him for treatment.

At 7 p.m., Dr. Gaus said, he started to act erratically, and she changed her mind, determining that he was suffering from “acute psychosis and persecutory delusions.” She called a team of eight guards to forcibly subdue him, and they handcuffed him to the bed in an isolation cell to wait for a psychiatric emergency team. An hour and a half later, officials said, he collapsed when the psychiatrist was examining him, and was rushed to intensive care for resuscitation. He was declared dead at 9:50 p.m.

Mr. Borshchev was mulling over this account when he got a startling phone call. A few days earlier, he had left his card for the psychiatrist who was present at Mr. Magnitsky’s death. On the phone was the psychiatrist, Dr. Vitaly V. Kornilov, who told a different story: He and his team had been forced to wait at the clinic’s outer gates for a full hour — roughly from 8 until 9 p.m. — before they were allowed inside.

By the time he entered the cell, as Dr. Kornilov would later tell the official investigators, “we were presented with the fact that we could not carry out a psychiatric examination because of the lack of a patient.”

“The head of the corpse was tilted toward his left shoulder, his eyes were open and wide,” he said, according to official documents. “No heartbeat could be felt, no breath or arterial pressure was felt, his skin was pale and cool. Biological death had occurred 15 minutes before.”

The Panel Reports

Six weeks after Mr. Magnitsky’s death, Mr. Borshchev published the commission’s report. He was pleased; though there were still gaps and contradictions, he was sure the commission had uncovered enough to show that someone could be charged, if only for negligence.

“When undesirable information gets into the case file, it starts working by itself,” he said. “It must be disproved or else unraveled.”

But another inquiry — the official one — was taking place out of public view. Around 12 hours after Mr. Magnitsky died, his body was examined by a coroner who reported that Mr. Magnitsky’s death was as sudden and unpredictable as a lightning strike. In her report, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times, she listed the cause of death as heart failure as a result of dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease that sometimes makes headlines when young athletes collapse in the middle of a game. She found no evidence that he was suffering from pancreatitis.

The autopsy would undergo a series of expert analyses — one of which involved dozens of specialists and was headed by the country’s most famous cardiologist. That panel was confident enough to provide what appeared to be an endpoint to the investigation.

“The drawbacks in medical aid given to Magnitsky,” they wrote, “have no connection to his death.”

Still, the experts did not hide their dissatisfaction. After reviewing accounts from medical staff members, they said the testimony was so contradictory that they could not even determine the time or place of Mr. Magnitsky’s death, official documents show. They were given such paltry documentation that they “couldn’t give an objective assessment of medical care” or determine whether a crime occurred.

They noted that none of Mr. Magnitsky’s doctors had showed concern over his heart, and that diagnostic work done three weeks before his death showed no signs of heart disease.

Moreover, no blood samples were taken when Mr. Magnitsky arrived at the hospital — “the lab only works during the day, and it was night,” Dr. Gaus told a forensic expert — and little toxicology screening was done after his death. So it is difficult to know whether his symptoms were caused by septic shock, an overdose of some agent, or some other form of poisoning. And there was little explanation for the fact that he had been left in a cell for more than an hour in a state of acute distress.

By fall, police officials were so confident that they began to go on the attack. At a ceremony to observe Militia Day, the Interior Ministry bestowed public honors on the investigators who helped put Mr. Magnitsky in prison. On the anniversary of his death, the ministry held a news conference to announce an astounding new accusation: He himself was guilty, said a spokeswoman, of applying for a fraudulent $230 million tax refund. That is the crime Hermitage had reported to prosecutors in 2007.

The inquiry Mr. Medvedev had ordered was extended a second time, but now a new signal had gone out: No arrest was imminent.

“There is no basis to believe that his death was connected to the officials carrying out his prosecution,” Aleksandr Bastrykin, director of the Investigative Committee, the Russian agency that was charged with inquiring into his death, said in September.

No Longer Waiting

Mr. Borshchev had long since stopped waiting for a response to his report. He was at home listening to the radio one day when he heard Aleksei V. Anichin, the head of the Interior Ministry unit that handled Mr. Magnitsky’s case, say that his investigators were “the people who suffered the most from Mr. Magnitsky’s death” — because they lost the opportunity to convict him.

“After this statement,” he said, “it became clear that the investigation is not interested in finding the truth.”

Something had changed during the year, and the members of the Public Oversight Commission felt it as keenly as anyone. When the time came to nominate the new members of the panel — whose single high-profile act had been its damning report on Mr. Magnitsky’s death — the candidates were not well known in human rights circles.

Two were from the Association of Professional Security Guards; two were from the Veterans of the Secret Services; another two were from the Association of Retired Police Operatives; two were from the Association of Police Veterans. The balance on the panel is now so tenuous that Mr. Borshchev fears he will be replaced as the body’s president. One of his critics on the panel, Anton V. Tsvetkov of the Officers of Russia Foundation, complained about “nihilists who disavow everything, who criticize everything,” but said his position had nothing to do with the report on Mr. Magnitsky’s death. “I don’t think anyone read that report,” he said.

Two weeks ago, the state’s lead investigator for the first time asked to interview Mr. Borshchev and Ms. Volkova about their research in the case. They sat together for three hours, meticulously reviewing the findings, which are to be attached to the official file. As they left, Mr. Borshchev said, he clung to the hope that Mr. Medvedev might still press to uncover what really happened.

Ms. Volkova said she was exhausted from the effort of hoping. “I have begun to feel sorry for our president, for Medvedev,” she said. “I look at him and say: ‘Poor, poor boy. Are you really going to clean up all this dirt that they are producing? These hundreds of thousands of corrupt people?’ I am sure that he is the most pitiable person.”

“Nothing was stopping him from giving an order, at least, not to give awards to the investigators,” she said. “Nothing stopped him.”

Sum
Forty Tales from the Afterlives
Written by David Eagleman
In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.

You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in
line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events. In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.



Egalitaire

In the afterlife you discover that God understands the complexities of life. She had originally submitted to peer pressure when She structured Her universe like all the other gods had, with a binary categorization of people into good and evil. But it didn’t take long for Her to realize that humans could be good in many ways and simultaneously corrupt and meanspirited in other ways. How was She to arbitrate who goes to Heaven and who to Hell? Might not it be possible, She considered, that a man could be an embezzler and still give to charitable causes? Might not a woman be an adulteress but bring pleasure and security to two men’s lives? Might not a child unwittingly divulge secrets that splinter a family? Dividing the population into two categories—good and bad—seemed like a more reasonable task when She was younger, but with experience these decisions became more difficult. She composed complex formulas to weigh hundreds of factors, and ran computer programs that rolled out long strips of paper with eternal decisions. But Her sensitivities revolted at this automation—and when the computer generated a decision She disagreed with, She took the opportunity to kick out the plug in rage. That afternoon She listened to the grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled their cases earnestly. She covered Her ears and moaned in misery. She knew Her humans were multidimensional, and She could no longer live under the rigid architecture of Her youthful choices.

Not all gods suffer over this; we can consider ourselves lucky that in death we answer to a God with deep sensitivity to the byzantine hearts of Her creations. For months She moped around Her living room in Heaven, head drooped like a bulrush, while the lines piled up. Her advisors advised Her to delegate the decision making, but She loved Her humans too much to leave them to the care of anyone else.

In a moment of desperation the thought crossed Her mind to let everyone wait on line indefinitely, letting them work it out on their own. But then a better idea struck Her generous spirit. She could afford it: She would grant everyone, every last human, a place in Heaven. After all, everyone had something good inside; it was part of the design specifications. Her new plan brought back the bounce to Her gait, returned the color to Her cheeks. She shut down the operations in Hell, fired the Devil, and brought every last human to be by Her side in Heaven. Newcomers or old-timers, nefarious or righteous: under the new system, everyone gets equal time to speak with Her. Most people find Her a little garrulous and oversolicitous, but She cannot be accused of not caring.

The most important aspect of Her new system is that everyone is treated equally. There is no longer fire for some and harp music for others. The afterlife is no longer defined by cots versus waterbeds, raw potatoes versus sushi, hot water versus champagne. Everyone is a brother to all, and for the first time an idea has been realized that never came to fruition on Earth: true equality.

The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don’t want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote.

So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they’re all in Hell.



Circle of Friends

When you die, you feel as though there were some subtle change, but everything looks approximately the same. You get up and brush your teeth. You kiss your spouse and kids and leave for the office. There is less traffic than normal. The rest of your building seems less full, as though it’s a holiday. But everyone in your office is here, and they greet you kindly. You feel strangely popular. Everyone you run into is someone you know. At some point, it dawns on you that this is the afterlife: the world is only made up of people you’ve met before.

It’s a small fraction of the world population—about 0.00002 percent—but it seems like plenty to you.

It turns out that only the people you remember are here. So the woman with whom you shared a glance in the elevator may or may not be included. Your second-grade teacher is here, with most of the class. Your parents, your cousins, and your spectrum of friends through the years. All your old lovers. Your boss, your grandmothers, and the waitress who served your food each day at lunch. Those you dated, those you almost dated, those you longed for. It is a blissful opportunity to spend quality time with your one thousand connections, to renew fading ties, to catch up with those you let slip away.

It is only after several weeks of this that you begin to feel forlorn. You wonder what’s different as you saunter through the vast quiet parks with a friend or two. No strangers grace the empty park benches. No family unknown to you throws bread crumbs for the ducks and makes you smile because of their laughter.

As you step into the street, you note there are no crowds, no buildings teeming with workers, no distant cities bustling, no hospitals running 24/7 with patients dying and staff rushing, no trains howling into the night with sardined passengers on their way home. Very few foreigners. You begin to consider all the things unfamiliar to you. You’ve never known, you realize, how to vulcanize rubber to make a tire. And now those factories stand empty. You’ve never known how to fashion a silicon chip from beach sand, how to launch rockets out of the atmosphere, how to pit olives or lay railroad tracks. And now those industries are shut down.

The missing crowds make you lonely.You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.


Descent of Species

In the afterlife, you are treated to a generous opportunity: you can choose whatever you would like to be in the next life. Would you like to be a member of the opposite sex? Born into royalty? A philosopher with bottomless profundity? A soldier facing triumphant battles?

But perhaps you’ve just returned here from a hard life. Perhaps you were tortured by the enormity of the decisions and responsibilities that surrounded you, and now there’s only one thing you yearn for: simplicity. That’s permissible. So for the next round, you choose to be a horse. You covet the bliss of that simple life: afternoons of grazing in grassy fields, the handsome angles of your skeleton and the prominence of your muscles, the peace of the slow-flicking tail or the steam rifling through your nostrils as you lope across snow-blanketed plains.

You announce your decision. Incantations are muttered, a wand is waved, and your body begins to metamorphose into a horse. Your muscles start to bulge; a mat of strong hair erupts to cover you like a comfortable blanket in winter. The thickening and lengthening of your neck immediately feels normal as it comes about. Your carotid arteries grow in diameter, your fingers blend hoofward, your knees stiffen, your hips strengthen, and meanwhile, as your skull lengthens into its new shape, your brain races in its changes: your cortex retreats as your cerebellum grows, the homunculus melts man to horse, neurons redirect, synapses unplug and replug on their way to equestrian patterns, and your dream of understanding what it is like to be a horse gallops toward you from the distance. Your concern about human affairs begins to slip away, your cynicism about human behavior melts, and even your human way of thinking begins to drift away from you.

Suddenly, for just a moment, you are aware of the problem you overlooked. The more you become a horse, the more you forget the original wish. You forget what it was like to be a human wondering what it was like to be a horse.

This moment of lucidity does not last long. But it serves as the punishment for your sins, a Promethean entrails-pecking moment, crouching half-horse halfman, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives. And that’s not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won’t have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won’t understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpted from Sum by David Eagleman Copyright © 2009 by David Eagleman. Copyright © 1995-2008 Random House, Inc. All rights reserved

Senate Passes Tax Plan by Wide Margin

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN NY TIMES
WASHINGTON — The Senate on Wednesday approved the $858 billion tax plan negotiated by the White House and Republican leaders — the first concrete product of a new era of divided government and acid compromise.

The vote was 81 to 19, as Democrats yielded in their long push to end the Bush-era lowered tax rates for high-income taxpayers, and Republicans agreed to back a huge economic stimulus package, including an extension of jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed and a one-year payroll-tax cut for most workers, with the entire cost added to the federal deficit.

The bill goes next to the House, where Democratic leaders said they expected to bring the bill to the floor on Thursday. They predicted that it would be approved this week, despite lingering opposition among rank-and-file Democrats who are still intent on making changes to a provision that grants a generous tax exemption to wealthy estates. Republicans have said they will not accept any change.

“A tremendous accomplishment,” the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, declared shortly before the vote on Wednesday. “Whether you agree with all the contents of the bill or not, everyone should understand this is one of the major accomplishments of any Congress where two parties, ideologically divided, have agreed on a major issue for the American people.”

The two-year tax measure will touch virtually every American — poor and rich, old and young, married or single, with children or living alone, and even those who die. And, with a reprise of this year’s contentious debate now slated for the height of the 2012 presidential campaign, the bill is likely to be a precursor to a broader effort by President Obama to overhaul the nation’s labyrinthine tax code and begin tackling the long-term deficit.

The tax plan would extend all of the lowered income tax rates enacted under President George W. Bush, as well as the 15 percent rate on capital gains and dividends, which were due to expire at the end of this month. And it would set new estate tax parameters, including an exemption of $5 million per person, or $10 million per couple, and a maximum rate of 35 percent. All these provisions would last for two years.

The estate tax lapsed entirely this year, but was set to return on Jan. 1 with an exemption of $1 million per person and a maximum rate of 55 percent. House Democrats were particularly infuriated by the White House’s agreement on the estate tax, which provides a more generous exemption and lower rate than many of them wanted.

The bill would also keep jobless aid flowing to the long-term unemployed for an additional 13 months, maintaining extended limits, which now range from 60 weeks in states with less than 6 percent joblessness to 99 weeks in states where the unemployment rate is more than 8.5 percent. Benefits normally last for just 26 weeks.

The one-year payroll tax cut would reduce to 4.2 percent the 6.2 percent Social Security tax levied on income up to $106,800. For a family with $50,000 in annual income, the cut would yield tax savings of about $1,000. For a worker paying the maximum tax, it would provide savings of $2,136.

The bill also contains an array of other tax breaks for individuals and businesses, aimed at pumping up the economy. It continues a college tuition credit for some families, an expanded child tax credit and the earned income tax credit. It also includes a two-year adjustment to the Alternative Minimum Tax to prevent as many as 21 million more households from being hit by it, and it contains a provision allowing businesses to write off some kinds of expenses more quickly.

The tax deal was sealed in back-channel talks between Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. It offered a glimpse of a new power dynamic that is likely to characterize the next two years, as Republicans take control of the House and occupy six additional seats in the Senate.

Many Democrats had reacted furiously to the proposal, but ultimately bowed to the political reality that Republicans, by making big gains in the November elections, had also won the upper hand in the tax debate. Some Democrats said they had concluded that the White House had won important concessions that would help middle-income Americans and potentially give a big lift to the still-struggling economy.

Democratic opponents of the plan said it would overly benefit the wealthiest Americans and not do enough for the working-class and the poor, and that the money used to continue reduced tax rates on the highest incomes could be better spent on other steps to stimulate the economy.

The bill met with opposition as well from some Republicans, who said it was too expensive and would add dangerously to the deficit at a time when many public officials are worried about the nation’s rising debt.

Even so, President Obama defended the deal as the best that could realistically be struck, and said it should be enacted despite its shortcomings. “I am absolutely convinced that this tax-cut plan, while not perfect, will help grow our economy and create jobs in the private sector,” Mr. Obama said on Wednesday before a meeting with business leaders.

The Senate’s overwhelming approval of the tax plan was a brief flash of bipartisan cooperation amid the deep partisan acrimony in the waning days of the 111th Congress. The tax plan was supported by 43 Democrats, 37 Republicans and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent. Opposed were 13 Democrats, 5 Republicans and Senator Bernard Sanders, the Vermont independent. Both Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Sanders caucus with the Democrats.

Ahead of the tax vote on Wednesday, Mr. McConnell denounced the effort by Democrats to approve a $1.1 trillion spending bill that would finance the government through the end of the federal fiscal year on Sept. 30, 2011.

Mr. McConnell called on Democrats to approve a stop-gap spending measure that would last only through the early part of next year instead, and to abandon everything else on their agenda and adjourn for the year.

“We should accomplish the most basic function of government — we can at least vote to keep the lights on around here,” he said. “Pass the tax legislation and keep the lights on,” Mr. McConnell said. “Everything else can wait.”

Democrats, however, are refusing to back down on any of their priorities, which include the omnibus spending bill, the New Start arms control treaty with Russia, a bill to repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy barring open service by gay soldiers, and an immigration measure that would create a path to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants brought to the United States as young children.

Mr. Reid said that the Senate would be in session on Sunday in a push to finish work on all of these legislative items, but Republicans were maneuvering aggressively to thwart him. Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, said he would force a complete public reading of both the Start treaty and the more than 1,900-page spending bill, potentially locking up the Senate floor for more than 24 hours.

Usurper in Chief?

By MAUREEN DOWD NY TIMES
FORT MEADE, Md.

He can’t handle the truth.

At least not while he’s facing the brig.

Lt. Col. Terry Lakin of the Army had a motley crew of frustrated Birthers at his court-martial here on Tuesday. The decorated Pentagon doctor from Colorado became the movement’s hero when he went on YouTube in March to brazenly urge President Obama to show “honesty and integrity” by releasing his “original signed birth certificate, if you have one.” He vowed to disobey what he called “illegal orders” to deploy to Afghanistan because he did not regard Obama as a legitimate commander in chief.

Originally, Colonel Lakin and his frenzied supporters had wanted to reveal the Ultimate Truth, what they consider the biggest hoax ever perpetrated — that a foreigner, a “Usurper in Chief,” had seized control of the Oval Office.

But then the military judge, Col. Denise Lind, denied a request for President Obama to testify and for his birth certificate to be entered into evidence.

So now the Birthers consider the court-martial part of the dastardly conspiracy. “This whole trial looks like a sham,” said Orly Taitz, a tall blonde California dentist, lawyer and leader in the Birther movement. “I was raised in the Soviet Union. This was worse than what I’ve seen in the Soviet Union.”

If Lakin ever envisioned his court-martial as the slingshot that could bring down a presidency and prove that the Birthers are heroes rather than loonies, he had given up that dream by the time he entered a guilty plea and backed up a not guilty plea with a technicality.

The balding, gray colonel may not have truly changed his beliefs. But he looked small and shaken as he admitted to disobeying orders from his boss, Gordon Roberts, a Medal of Honor recipient. He murmured “Yes, ma’am” over and over in a low voice as the precise Judge Lind pressed him on whether he understood that “the dictates of conscience do not justify disobeying a lawful order.”

Sobered by the prospect of a dishonorable dismissal, losing his pension and serving hard time, as well as facing a panel of military superiors in dress uniforms, Colonel Lakin said the winter had been “a confusing time, a very emotional time for me.” His shoulders slumped, he offered excuses about how he had gotten conflicting advice from lawyers — his defense was underwritten by Birthers.

“I understand that it was my decision, and I made the wrong choice,” he told the judge.

His civilian lawyer, Neal Puckett, said Lakin is innocent of the charge of “missing a movement.” Simply because he missed U.S. Airways Flight 1123 on April 12, which was supposed to be the start of his journey to Fort Campbell, Ky., to join his unit, the lawyer argued, does not mean he couldn’t have gotten another flight or driven.

This was an attempt to get him off on a technicality because Lakin had stated back then that he had no intention of joining the unit at all.

In the voir dire, Puckett asked some colonels who were prospective panelists if they considered the Birther movement to be racist.

While disappointed there wasn’t a more full-throated trial of Obama’s provenance — unlike Lakin, the president is considered by Birthers to be guilty until he proves himself innocent — the Birthers, who had come from all over the country to the trial, stood by their man.

Literally, in the case of Kate Vandemoer, a 55-year-old blogger and hydrologist from North Dakota, who rose with Lakin when he offered his plea.

“I feel very close to him,” said Vandemoer. “This is a very serious national security matter.”

Some argued that whether Obama was born in Hawaii is not really the point; the point is, he’s not “a natural-born citizen.” “You must be born in the U.S. with two parents who are U.S. citizens,” they explained. Obama, they argued, has “a dual allegiance” that makes Americans “sitting ducks.”

“His father was a British Subject,” said a pamphlet passed out by Vandemoer. “He believes he is a Citizen of the world.”

Eldon Bell, a 76-year-old retired Air Force officer and doctor from Rapid City, S.D., said he “drove three days through a damn blizzard just to get here.” Comparing the president to Hitler, another “usurper,” he said “if he is not legitimate, our soldiers serving under him can be tried and hanged like the Nazis at Nuremberg.”

James Haven, a black preacher from New York, dismissed Obama as “the long-legged Mack Daddy, the president of all pimps.”

With the last three presidents, there has been an attempt to go beyond criticism to delegitimization, to paint them as not just wrong, but charlatans who have no right to the job. With Obama, the craziness is infused with biases about race and religion.

But, in the end, the court-martial offers one big truth: President Obama doesn’t have to show Terry Lakin anything. The colonel should have followed orders.

From kid celebrity to consummate con artist
BY ROBERT SAMUELS
Juan Carlos Guzman-Betancourt The international con artist's tale of deception began 35,000 feet in the air, on a small plane shipping flowers to Miami International Airport.
He was found unconscious on the tarmac under the Arca Airlines plane. It was 80 degrees at 2:30 a.m. on June 4, 1993, but his olive skin was frostbitten and turning blue.

When immigration officials greeted him at Pan American Hospital, he said he was a 13-year-old orphan from Colombia who sneaked into the Arca Airline plane's wheel well. Name?

``Guillermo Rosales.''

That was the first lie.

Now he has matured into one of the world's notorious jewelry thieves, who has escaped prison and dizzied detectives in at least five countries using a slew of stolen identities: A budding doctor studying in Ireland. A Colombian diplomat's son. An English family man. A New York priest. A German prince. A wealthy Bahraini.

The thefts, though, were stunningly similar. In each, he pretended to be a guest at a five-star hotel. Then he'd sweet-talk a member of the staff into getting a room key and the password for a safe. Finally, he'd pocket everything -- credit cards, jewelry, cash, passports. Police estimate his total bounty at close to $1 million.

Juan Carlos Guzman-Betancourt -- as he is now known -- is set to be sentenced in Brattleboro, Vt., on Monday after being arrested and admitting to illegally crossing the U.S.-Canada border about a year ago.

But 17 years ago in Miami, he was just an unusually tall boy who charmed the world with his dubiously simple story of daring. Back then, a wealthy woman in Texas set up a bank account for him and vowed to pay for his college education. Strangers would hug him when they saw him at his favorite restaurant, McDonald's. Florist Bertha Sotoaguilar and her then-husband Jairo Lozano, a city of Miami cop, took him in.

Sotoaguilar, now 55, shakes her head when she thinks of ``Guille.'' She knows his capers are rooted in South Florida, where he first developed a lust for the lavish.

``He loved all the attention he got here, all the gifts that people would give him,'' said Sotoaguilar, who now works as a city of Miami investigator.

``All those things, he learned about while he was here.''

***

She took him shopping at K-Mart for the clothes he didn't have. Then, she cut his tangled, shoulder-length black hair, filled with lice.

Days into the stay, he wrapped his arms around her and rested his head on her shoulder. (At 5-foot-10, he was already taller than she was).

Can I call you Mama? she remembers him asking. Of course.

He color-coordinated her closets and always asked about her jewelry. Sometimes, when he wasn't doing interviews with the media, she'd catch him alone, thumbing through old copies of National Geographic.

A week into his stay, Sotoaguilar's sister got the family free access for a day at the Fontainebleau.

``I feel like a millionaire,'' he said as he toured the fancy hotel.

Guille went off on his own for a while. On the way home, Sotoaguilar noticed a gold chain around his neck. He also had $200 in his pocket. He talked about how nice the suites were.

How'd you get in? Sotoaguilar remembers asking.

``It's easy,'' he said.

Meanwhile, the immigration officials were determining that Guille's story was fiction. There's no way he could have survived the sub-freezing temperatures, aviation experts said. They confirmed the ``orphan's'' mother was still alive. He was 17, not 13. His name: Juan Carlos Guzman-Betancur (not Betancourt, as he's known now).

Because she wasn't the legal guardian, Sotoaguilar wasn't allowed to say goodbye when the boy was deported. She watched him wave through the plane's windows on television -- like the rest of South Florida and Latin American -- and cried, expecting his life would be bumpy.

But she didn't expect he'd spend the next half of his life oscillating between penthouses and prison cells. Along the way, he left a complicated paper trail that could only be untangled through court and police records, as well as interviews with attorneys and detectives in four states and three countries.

****

Detective Kirk Sullivan was working for the Las Vegas police's tourist division on Aug. 14, 2003, when a most unusual crime occurred at the Four Seasons Hotel near the Manadalay Bay Resort and Casino.

The victim was Daniel Gold, a British man staying in Room 37112, which was connected to a separate room for his two kids and their nanny. While Gold was at a 10 a.m. appointment at the massage spa, a 5-foot-10 man with dark hair in a burgundy T-shirt and dark shorts presented himself to the hotel as ``Mr. Gold,'' and said he needed a copy of his incidental charges.

He offered an international ID with Gold's name and signature. About a half hour after receiving the key, he called for help to open the safe.

The security guard who responded told the police that the man said: ``I forgot my passcode and my wife is very upset with me. She is waiting for me downstairs, so can you hurry?''

The nanny, still in the adjoining room, received three phone calls from a man saying Mr. Gold wanted to see the kids downstairs. When she left, she saw the dark-haired man in the hallway.

At 11:40 a.m., the real Mr. Gold walked into the room.

Gone were the $10,500 Rolex watch and the $30,000 clear stone ring. Gone were the pink/white stone earrings and the $15,000 necklace, the Prada shoes, the plane tickets and the passport. Total haul: $280,000.

Months later, two similar incidents happened at the Bellagio.

The cases went nowhere until Jan. 24, 2005, more than a year later, when someone sent the security guard a digital link to a newspaper story.

A suave 29-year-old who looked just like the suspect had been arrested.

The crime? Fooling hotel staff and stealing some $139,000 worth of cash and jewelry from The Mandarin Oriental, The Savoy, The Dorchester and another branch of the Four Seasons.

The place? London.

***

On Dec. 20, 2004, an off-duty police officer was at a London supermarket when he saw an olive-skined man wearing a Valentino jacket and a Frank Mueller watch. He had a pronounced jaw and pouty lips, with a distinctive bluish mole near his eyebrow.

A rich Bahrani man in town to do some holiday shopping had reported the jacket and watch stolen. He was staying at The Dorchester Hotel.

Confronted, the suspect surrendered a Spanish passport. Name? David Iglesias Vieto.

Skeptical cops searched an apartment he shared. In the house, they found a Russian passport with the suspect's photo and the name ``Denis Vladmirovich Kiselev.'' They again asked for his name.

OK, OK, he said.

It's Alejandro Cuencas.

He admitted stealing from the four hotels in London. He told them his inspiration was Frank Abignale, the impersonator played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Catch Me if You Can.

As British detectives pieced the case together, they discovered he had the same eyebrow mole as a man arrested years before for even more hotel burglaries. But that person had a different name: Gonzalo Zapater Vives.

They also got a call from French investigators. They, too, were searching for a man with that blemish, who stole identities and cash from a Four Seasons Hotel in Paris in 2001 -- before the DiCaprio movie came out.

The name of the man they were seeking?

Juan Carlos Guzman-Betancourt.

Sullivan, the Las Vegas detective, asked for the booking photos to be sent from London. He did a photo lineup with five members of the Four Seasons staff. Four picked the suspect out as the thief.

When the Golds' nanny saw a photo, she exclaimed:

``That's him!''

***

But in jail, the suspect refused to answer to Juan. The man the British called Gonzalo Vives was sentenced to 3 ½ years in England, at Her Majesty's Prison at Standford Hill. It's an isolated place on the Isle of Sheppey, where there is only one bridge to get out you out of town.

Investigators still aren't sure how he latched onto all those names. They suspect he picked up discarded receipts, or maybe lingered around lobbies to listen for the names of wealthy-looking patrons. Sullivan wanted to interview the man, but before he got the chance, the the man escaped.

***

Somehow, Vives persuaded a prison guard to let him out so he could go to the dentist.

Two weeks later, police in Dublin, Ireland, arrested a man with a $35,000 Rolex watch in connection with the theft of a stolen passport and credit cards at the Dublin Merrion Hotel. His name was Alejandro Cuencas -- one of Vives' known aliases.

Again, he admitted to the crimes. And he was sent back to prison.

****

At around 3 p.m. on Nov. 23, 2005, the man known as Cuencas received a phone call at Cloverhill Remand Prison. It was from Sullivan, the detective in Las Vegas.

Sullivan showed off his Spanish speaking skills. How many language do you speak? he asked.

The suspect admitted he spoke Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and two types of English.

``I can speak the King's English,'' he said in a posh accent. Then, he slid into a Southern drawl. Sullivan remembers him saying: ``Hell yeah! I can sound like I'm from Texas!''

``He spoke with a mix of anger and self-pity,'' Sullivan remembered. During one exchange, the detective asked why a man of such great intellect chose this lifestyle.

His response: ``If you had been thrown in a jail as a 15-year-old with criminals, what would you learn?''

***

After the wheel-well caper and subsequent deportation, it appeared at first that all Guzman-Betancourt wanted to do was return to Miami. Six months later, he found himself at a home for runaways in New York. But he rode a train south -- disguised as a priest -- only to end up arrested in South Florida. Again he was deported.

In 1998, he tried to get on a flight as Terrence John Marks, an English medical student studying in Dublin. Airport security said he looked nothing like his passport photo. Marks said he was simply trying to get to Miami.

In 1999, he was caught carrying a credit card stolen from a hotel in Tokyo. He paid a fine and identified himself as Cesar Ortigosa Vera.

In January 2000, ``Cesar Ortigosa'' was arrested in New York and charged with using a stolen credit card to book $1,742.38 worth of credit card charges at the Waldorf-Astoria. They found him with another ID for a Douglas Johnson. He said he used that name to get into clubs.

While Guzman-Betancur was locked up at a Metropolitan Detention Center Guaynabo in San Juan, he told people that his deportation was all a big misunderstanding. He was actually Prince Juan Carlot Gutman-Betancur, son of Queen Margaret of Denmark and Duke Oskar Adolf III of Luxembourg.

In his phone conversation, Sullivan did not coax out a confession. Still, Las Vegas' police department issued a warrant on July 16, 2006. They hoped prosecutors would extradite him when he was out of the Irish prison. But they never did.

By Sept. 12, 2007, detectives in Switzerland were now scratching their heads. Someone caught on camera who looked like the con artist had impersonated a guest at the Four Seasons Hotel de Bergues in Geneva.

The Swiss magistrate put out a warrant for him -- although officials there won't discuss any specifics because of the country's privacy laws.

``All I can tell you,'' said one detective close to the case, ``is this is the greatest con artist I've seen in my career.''

High-end hotels around the world remained on the lookout for a suave, charming man.

But when customs officials announced they found him, he looked neither suave nor charming. He was a lost tourist in Derby Lane, Vt., asking for a taxi service at an Irving gas station.

``After all this,'' Sullivan said, ``I can't believe they found him there!''

***

On the evening of Sept. 21, 2009, an off-duty officer overheard the person talking to the cashier about attending a nearby college.

But there was no college nearby. Only Stanstead College in Quebec, which is actually a high school.

The officer asked his name.

Jordi Ejarque-Rodriguez of New York.

But he had no ID, so the officer searched him. He found the name Ejarque-Rodriguez on a Spanish passport, with stamps from Turkey, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. He would eventually plead guilty to charges of illegally entering the country. When investigators pressed for a name, he finally said:

Juan-Carlos Guzman-Betancourt.

****

Over the past year, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Doherty has worked to put together the many adventures of Miami's lost boy. He's asking the judge for a 10-year sentence to be served in the United States.

``His career is truly remarkable,'' Doherty said.

Steve Barth, Guzman-Betancourt's attorney, asked for leniency in a statement to the court. Barth noted that his client's crimes within the United States have largely been petty, and he hadn't been deported in a decade.

``Mr. Guzman is not violent,'' he wrote. ``He does not poison our streets with drugs, and he does not target vulnerable victims.''

Three days before the sentencing, the woman who once called him Guille is flipping through boxes of family photos.

``He wasn't with us for long, but I think he did love and respect me,'' she said. ``And I grew to have a feeling for him. Every time I hear about something like this, my heart sinks.''

She finds a group of photos. One is of their first day, with Guille at the local Colombian radio station. There's one of him talking to reporters for Telemundo and two more of strangers who wanted to be seen with him.

She puts the photos down and shakes her head. She thinks of the college offers and the gifts showered upon him, of the times he laughed while riding a bike and of all the people who offered their support.

``He didn't have to go all through this,'' she sighed.

``He could have had everything.''

Herald researchers Rachael Coleman and Monika Leal, as well as freelancers Katherine Pannella and Henning Engelage contributed to this report.

Destination: LAPTOPISTAN

By DAVID SAX NY Times
JUST after 4 o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, as a dozen people clicked away on their laptops at the Atlas Café in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, half of a tree broke off without warning less than a block away. It crashed into the middle of Havemeyer Street, crushing a parked car, setting off alarms and blocking the street. A deafening chorus of horns rose outside Atlas’s window as traffic halted. An 18-wheeler executed a sketchy 10-point turn in the middle of a crowded intersection before a pair of fire trucks made their way through the traffic jam in a blaze of red. Chain saws roared, sawdust flew and the horns built to a peak. It was New York urban pandemonium at its finest.

Inside the warm confines of Atlas, separated from the chaos by only a thin wall of glass, not a soul stirred. A quiet mention was made of the falling tree, a few heads rose for a second, and then, just as quickly, they ducked back down. They all returned to whatever was on the other side of their glowing, partly eaten apples. On a day when the cafe Internet connection had already been down for four hours, and the toilet had been blocked for even longer, I thought I had seen these worker bees pushed to their limit. But I had underestimated them. Nothing could stir these people. They were not in New York; they were citizens of Laptopistan.

I was an interloper among them, an anthropologist of sorts, sent to untangle their odd society, to understand their mores and unwritten rules. How did the natives interact? How did the government function? What was the economy like in this land of bottomless cups and table hoggers? And what, oh what, were they all writing?

I was, admittedly, a profoundly skeptical observer. Though I had been a freelance writer for the last eight years, I had always worked at home, clad in pajamas and brewing my own fuel rather than paying $3 for someone to make pretty designs in my caffeinated foam. Whenever my wife suggested that I get out of the house, maybe take my laptop to a cafe, I shot back: “Real freelancers don’t work in coffee shops. It’s just unemployed hipsters and their unpublished novels, or screenplays, or Facebook stati.”

My disdain for the coffee shop writing scene only grew this June, when I met a friend at the Red Horse Cafe in Park Slope. I had previously been there only on weekends, when it was filled with couples sharing the Sunday paper and parents wiping brownie residue off their toddlers. That weekday afternoon it was a place transformed. Gone were the newspapers and the strollers. Laptops had colonized every flat surface. No one uttered a word; people just stared into screens, expressionless. It felt like that moment in a horror movie when the innocent couple stumbles into a house filled with hibernating zombies, and they listen, in terror, as the floorboard creaks.

My friend and I ordered our coffee, and began to discuss whatever it was we were there to discuss. Within seconds of opening my mouth, I felt a change in the room. Eyes rose from their screens and landed on us — the zombies were awake, and they weren’t happy. One of them passed our table on the way to the washroom and let loose what can only be described as a snicker. We downed our coffee and beat a quick retreat. “To hell with those laptop-wielding fundamentalists,” I said.

So what was I doing in Laptopistan? I moved from New York to Toronto in September, but had come back to the city for a week and was sleeping on a friend’s couch. I needed a place to work. Someone suggested Atlas. I swallowed my skepticism and got my passport ready.

SET on the corner of Havemeyer and Grand Streets, and flooded with light from two walls of windows, Atlas Café, which opened in 2003, looks like a combination of worn trattoria and late 1990s Seattle coffeehouse. The name reflects its wall-sized map of the world (there are also a mobile of hanging globes, and flourishes of décor inspired by someone’s travel to the Far East). The soundtrack is a mix of old country and folk (Dylan, Willy, Cohen and Cash), classical, bebop and French ballads.

A makeshift milk station sits in the center of the 750-square-foot room. To the left is a long bar of dark stained rustic wood, where people order food and drink (proper espressos for $1.50, excellent panini, salads and deadly little chocolate-filled Italian doughnuts, $3), as well as the windowless, orange washroom. There are three stools at the bar, and beside them a table of reclaimed timber pressed against a cozy window bench. According to two signs, this little corner, perhaps one-sixth of the cafe, is designated a laptop-free zone.

Everything beyond is Laptopistan: two rows of old church pews formed into an elongated L, each fronted by small wooden tables and chairs. Scattered along the pews are tattered blue tubular pillows, for lumbar support. Windows run along the walls, flooding the computer zone with natural light during the day, creating a fishbowl effect for those inside looking out, and for passers-by, who frequently stop and stare at the tableau.

Entering Laptopistan is a task in itself. The floor presents an obstacle course of power cables snaking their way around coffee cups, over chairs, and around table legs, eventually finding a home in one of two power strips that look as though they came from a Soviet coal refinery. Whenever a plug is inserted, the outlet sparks, and certain movements can cause all the plugs on a given strip to simultaneously eject.

A quick glance around shows I have brought my laptop, a month-old MacBook Pro, to its nesting ground. Diversity here means the odd white MacBook or old black PowerBook scattered amid the silver MacBook Pros. Throughout the week I will see only a handful of PCs, each looking sadly out of place, like they have arrived at a black-tie affair in a corduroy blazer.

I worked for a few hours, and quickly learned the principal laws of Laptopistan:

Silence Is Golden. There is no prohibition on talking, of course, but, as one Atlas regular of several years, Joelle Hann, explained, “there’s almost a code that people aren’t going to talk loud.” When people’s phones ring, they run outside as fast as possible to take the call.

“If someone’s on Skype or having a conversation, people make an effort to chill out their conversations with looks,” said Ms. Hann, a yoga teacher and a freelance journalist and textbook editor. “When they don’t stop, you can feel the tension.” Shushing conversations is equally verboten. “No one wants to be the librarian,” Ms. Hann added.

Respect Personal Space. While any open seat is technically available, it is forbidden to set up your computer on a table with a computer already on it; doubling up is allowed only when all tables are taken. At the same time, people bounce from table to table throughout the day, chasing the sun, the shade or their own feng shui.

Mind Your Neighborhood. When you get up to take a call, get coffee or use the washroom, you need only to look at a neighbor, make eye contact, look back at your computer and nod. The deal is sealed without a word: You watch my MacBook and I’ll watch yours.

MOST Laptopistanis — Laptopistanites? Laptopistanians? — at Atlas are in their 20s, 30s or early 40s, split evenly between men and women. The dress is casual, with both sexes wearing T-shirts, sweaters and jeans, though a few women seem dressed for “work” with button-down blouses, blazers, even a dress or two. Most Laptopistanis work alone, though occasionally I spotted a group collaborating at a corner table. Socially, Laptopistan is a conservative society; outward displays of emotion are frowned upon. Most people hide behind their screens.

Aaron Tugendhaft is the exception. He appears at Atlas every morning for a few hours, tie askew, black coffee at his side, some heady-looking book in front of him. Mr. Tugendhaft, who is an adjunct professor of religion at New York University and the editor of a small custom press, is one of the only Atlas regulars I observed sans laptop.

“I’ve made friends with people because I’m the only guy without a computer,” he told me, quietly, one morning. “A book can be a conversation starter.”

Mr. Tugendhaft has been coming to Atlas nearly every day for three and a half years, but there are many Laptopistanis he has never spoken to. (“Some of them are in the room right now,” he confided in a low voice, eyeing a woman in a jean jacket two tables over.) He has dated fellow Laptopistanis, but not anymore, preferring to keep romance out of the workplace. People tend to keep to themselves, he said, until something breaks the routine: an argument between lovers, news of a subway breakdown, or, most often, some sort of interaction around the power strips.

“Power is power,” Mr. Tugendhaft said.

Mallory Roberts, a longhaired freelance astrophysicist, said that he had met two girlfriends (now exes), and his current roommate, via power-strip negotiations. “Three months ago Courtney was looking for a plug and we got to talking,” he said of the roommate, with whom he is now working on a documentary about a giant telescope in Puerto Rico. “It turns out we went to the same university, and she needed a place to stay.

“There’s a recognition here,” he added, “that people come to a cafe to not be alone.”

THE cost of living in Laptopistan, at least for my personal intake of tea, bagels, sandwiches and salad, averaged $12 a day. Other cafes popular with freelancers charge for wireless Internet access and even table time, but the owners of the Atlas, Enrico Lorenzetti and Luca Tesconi, refuse to. Observing the gross daily consumption in Laptopistan, where people seem to nurse a cup of coffee and a cookie for hours, I could not imagine how the two managed to stay in business. But they said the laptops were a stealth economic engine.

While the people behind the screens spent a paltry $6 to $10 per day, their true value is as a draw for more profitable takeout customers, Mr. Lorenzetti said. From the moment the door opens at 7 a.m. until it closes at 9 p.m., the place is buzzing, a productive society, visible from the street through wraparound windows. “People come in to buy food and coffee to go, because they see a full crowd,” he said. “They think ‘Hey, this place must be good if I can’t even get a table.’ ”

My long-held notion that Laptopistan’s citizens were just sitting around e-mailing other writers in other cafes around the world dissipated as I got to know the MacBook Pro owners around me. Sure, there were aspiring screenwriters, novelists and people updating Twitter, but there was also Gauri Nanda, a product designer from Detroit who created Clocky, the alarm clock on wheels that’s featured at the MoMA store and sold worldwide. There was Billy Schultz, a corporate human resources consultant crunching numbers for spreadsheets in PowerPoint and Excel (on a Lenovo PC, no less), and Meredith Sadin, working on her doctorate in American politics at Princeton.

Laptopistan’s is an entrepreneurial economy, driven by solitary thinkers. Aszure Barton, a choreographer from Alberta, was working with colleagues to prepare for her contemporary dance show called BUSK, which will debut Dec. 17 at the Jerome Robbins Theater. Robert Olinger runs a biotech startup that is getting silkworms to make spider silk at commercial scale, designs online education programs for the New York City Department of Education, and directs theater projects with Russian artists. In just a few days I met architects and event planners, database designers, classical musicians, film editors and app developers, every facet of the creative economy working under one roof, not so much together as in tandem.

“Here, people have large ambitions,” Mr. Olinger said. “Some have resources, some don’t. They don’t have career plans mapped out, but they have a career in mind. They’re not looking at a particular ladder to climb, they’re looking at a mountain to conquer.”

WHEN that tree fell that Wednesday afternoon, I was one of the only people who walked over to check it out. I knew I was becoming one of them when a voice in my head said: “O.K., time to get back to work.”

At home, the slightest change in light is enough of an excuse to get up, walk around, clip my nails or head into the kitchen. Though home offices seem like the perfect work environment, their unrestricted silence, uninterrupted solitude and creature comforts breed distraction. In Laptopistan, I focused with intense precision, sitting motionless for hours at a time. At home, when the Internet goes down, I feel professionally castrated, and usually retire to the sofa until the connection is restored. When the wireless network at Atlas seized up two afternoons in a row, I just switched to off-line tasks without breaking stride. No one else seemed fazed, either. If anything, the place got more crowded. Laptopistan provides structure, and freelancers, like children, secretly crave structure. You come to work, for two or four or eight hours, and you take comfort in the knowledge that everyone else is there to work as well. There’s a silent social pressure to it all.

“It almost sounds sick,” said Selena Ross, a fellow Canadian freelance journalist I sat next to one day, “but the fact that people are watching me do my work helps me be what they expect me to be. It’s like working exhibitionism.”

Back home in Toronto, with my ergonomically correct chair, spacious desk and dedicated Internet connection, I pulled up my notes from the journey to Laptopistan and tried to write. Within 10 minutes, I was lost in Facebook and watching old “Soul Train” clips on YouTube.

So I unplugged my laptop, traded my sweat pants for jeans and walked two blocks to the nearest coffee shop. There was some country music playing at a comfortable volume, and the familiar sight of cords along the floor. I took a seat between a guy working on an identical MacBook Pro and a woman drawing in a journal, and I worked like I was back in Atlas: productively, contentedly, fueled by a steady diet of Earl Grey tea, an economically acceptable quantity of cookies, and that social pressure I was craving.

After an hour or so, the guy next to me got up to go to the washroom, turned toward his laptop and looked at me.

With a nod, I completed the transaction. When he walked away, I smiled. It was not a big smile; most likely it was barely visible to anyone looking beyond my screen. Precisely the secret smile that citizens of Laptopistan allow themselves when no one’s looking.

After 30 Years, Times Square Rebirth Is Complete

By CHARLES V. BAGLI NY TIMES
Next month, 11 Times Square, a new, glassy 40-story office tower at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, will formally open with its first tenant. Compared with the metamorphosis that has occurred around it, there is nothing extraordinary about the building except for this: Its completion officially marks the end of the long and tortuous redevelopment of Times Square, an effort that began 30 years ago.

The plan, to radically make over 13 acres, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, primarily fronting 42nd Street, outlived three mayors, four governors, two real estate booms and two recessions. It faced widespread derision in the beginning from jaded New Yorkers who were wise to grand plans. It faces occasional derision today from New Yorkers who speak of the old Times Square with newfound fondness.

It embodied both the hubris of urban master planning and its possibilities, and showed the value of ripping up blueprints and starting over in midstream. And it has been a touchstone experience for a city that is now building, or trying to build, several multibillion-dollar projects, including ground zero, the Atlantic Yards, Willets Point and the Hudson Yards.

“So often, people say New York can’t build large-scale projects anymore,” said Lynne B. Sagalynn, a professor of real estate finance at Columbia University and the author of “Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon.”

But, Professor Sagalynn said, “Times Square is an example of how a city was able to think on a grand scale and carry it out.”

“It can take a decade or two for the complete vision to become a reality,” she continued. “But it happened here.”

Success is evident. Crime is down significantly from the days when pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts and dope pushers prowled Times Square and the Deuce, as that stretch of 42nd Street was known. The number of tourists is up 74 percent since 1993, to an estimated 36.5 million last year, and attendance at Broadway shows has soared to nearly 12 million.

Morgan Stanley, Allianz Global Investors, Viacom and Condé Nast now make their corporate homes there. Retailers are paying rents as high as $1,400 a square foot, second only to those on chic stretches of Fifth and Madison Avenues.

And while many billboards in Times Square were blank in 1979, today the area is a kaleidoscope of moving images depicting financial institutions, automakers and fashion houses, with the best spots on 1 Times Square’s facade commanding as much as $4 million a year in rent.

“The irony is that this place represents in many ways the epitome of free-market capitalism,” said Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance. “But its transformation is due more to government intervention than just about any other development in the country.”

Times Square, of course, has certain unique qualities that none of the city’s current projects enjoy: it sits in the middle of Manhattan, has a rich, century-long history and is recognized internationally as the crossroads of the world. Even at the worst of times, tourists from England to Italy, Algeria to Japan came to New York to have their pictures taken in Times Square.

But the often painful rebirth also took perseverance and a long-term approach, rare characteristics in a city obsessed with making things happen in a New York minute.

The concerted effort began in 1980, when after years of complaints and false starts, Mayor Edward I. Koch and state officials announced the coming rejuvenation of Times Square.

The developer George Klein, who later formed a joint venture with Prudential, was selected to build four sedate skyscrapers at the famous intersection of 42nd Street, Broadway and Seventh Avenue. The state would take over the decrepit theaters, evict the peep shows and X-rated movie houses and restore the former dignity. The subway stations would be refurbished, and a huge merchandise mart would be built on Eighth Avenue, between 40th and 42nd Streets, across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

The plan envisioned the use of eminent domain, and the owners of the theaters and nearby office towers, like the Durst family, resisted.

There also was criticism of the large tax breaks showered upon developers and tenants in the new Times Square; the Municipal Art Society, a private planning and preservation group, once estimated that the redevelopment would entail more than $1 billion in “unnecessary” property tax abatements and other benefits like zoning changes that allowed for taller towers than would otherwise be permitted.

By the time the state had fended off 47 lawsuits brought against the project, a severe recession in 1991 brought the city to its knees. The next year, for the first time, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo failed to mention Times Square in his State of the State address.

Rebecca Robertson, who was then president of the state’s 42nd Street Development Project, worried that the whole plan was unraveling. Prudential, which had already put up $241 million for the land, threatened to pull out if it was forced to build towers at a time when it would be hard to fill them with tenants. It was given more time.

But this gloomy period, Ms. Robertson said, also proved to be an opportunity to overhaul the much-criticized development plan, whose four huge skyscrapers were designed more to bury Times Square’s sordid past than to celebrate its connection to popular culture.

Ms. Robertson, together with the architect Robert A. M. Stern and the graphic designer Tibor Kalman, devised an interim plan that reconnected with the “razzmatazz” of Times Square’s past by emphasizing entertainment, big garish signs, an eclectic mix of tenants and glassier, flashier office towers, with lobbies that seemed to flow onto the sidewalk rather than wall it off.

“To me, the market crash was a wonderful time to rethink the whole thing,” Ms. Robertson said, referring to a stock market crash in 1987. “We couldn’t have gotten our plan through in a hot market. The development pressures would’ve been way too strong. Everyone would’ve been talking about what big tenant can we get, and not about restoring popular culture and entertainment.”

The oft-heard complaint about the Disneyfication of Times Square sometimes loses sight of the fact that it was the Walt Disney Company, perhaps more than any other, that helped start the turnaround.

Disney wanted its own Broadway theater, but feared being a lonely outpost on a hostile block. A fierce negotiator despite its Mickey Mouse image, Disney reached an agreement to take over the New Amsterdam theater in the last days of Mayor David N. Dinkins’s tenure, got a low-interest loan from the state and prodded officials to sign deals with Madame Tussauds wax museum and the AMC Theaters, which moved in down the block. The restored theater has now been home to two wildly successful Disney plays, the Lion King, which later moved a few blocks away to the Minskoff Theater, and now Mary Poppins.

The economy recovered and then some, and the multicolored Westin Hotel, more movie theaters and the B. B. King Blues Club and Grill soon followed on the north side of 42nd Street. Douglas Durst, an early opponent, built 4 Times Square, the Condé Nast building, on land he acquired from Prudential. Then followed the Reuters building, the Ernst & Young tower and a fourth skyscraper as the wrecking ball demolished hot-dog stands and pornography shops.

One Times Square, the building atop which the ball drops every New Year’s Eve, and now the most expensive advertising space in the world, sold for $110 million in 1997, four times what it had fetched just two years earlier after a foreclosure.

The New 42nd Street, the nonprofit group that oversees the redevelopment of seven historic theaters, created the New Victory children’s theater with low prices and an award-winning educational program.

Instead of a merchandise mart on Eighth Avenue, there is the New York Times’s new headquarters. Over objections from landowners, the state condemned a parcel that was home to 55 businesses, including a technical school, a hat store and sex shops, to build The Times’s third headquarters in the neighborhood in a century.

And there is 11 Times Square, on the last parcel to be redeveloped, and a sign of Times Square’s progress but also its challenges ahead. It was built speculatively, without tenants already lined up, and is now seeking to fill its floors amid competition from other buildings, including those going up at ground zero. Proskauer Rose, a major law firm and its first occupant, is scheduled to move in next month.

The adoption of a revised redevelopment plan was a critical moment, said Ms. Tighe, the real estate executive. “They recognized that this wasn’t going to be Rockefeller Center West,” she said. “Each part of the city is unique and demands its own solution.”

One of the last remnants of the old Times Square is Jimmy Glenn, the owner of Jimmy’s Corner, a bar on West 44th Street east of Seventh Avenue. A boxing trainer, Mr. Glenn was the owner of the late Times Square Gym, located one floor above 42nd Street; boxers with names like Ali, Frazier and Tyson used to mount the long stairwell to his ring.

Now, he said, “it’s like a pinball machine out there.”

But Mr. Glenn, now 80, does not miss the drug addicts, pornography shops and criminals. “Everybody loves Times Square now,” he said.

X 37B Spacecraft Returns After 7-Month Trip

JOHN ANTCZAK
LOS ANGELES — The U.S. military's secretive X-37B unmanned spaceplane slipped out of orbit and landed itself in early morning darkness Friday at a California airbase after a successful maiden flight that lasted more than seven months, the Air Force said.

The stubby-winged, robotic craft fired its engine to begin re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and autonomously landed at 1:16 a.m. PST at coastal Vandenberg Air Force Base, 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles

Range safety officers were on hand to track its descent over the Pacific and activate a destruct mechanism if the landing needed to be aborted. There were no immediate reports of any sonic booms being heard.

Vandenberg released infrared camera video of the craft rolling to a stop, recovery crews approaching in vehicles and working around it in protective suits, much the way space shuttles are handled upon landing.

The Air Force had emphasized that the primary purpose of the flight was to test the craft itself but classified its actual activities in orbit, leading to speculation about whether it carried some type of spying system in its small payload bay.

Program manager Lt. Col. Troy Giese said in a statement that all objectives were completed and the landing culminated a successful mission.

The Air Force immediately announced that a second X-37B, which had only been revealed last April, is scheduled to be launched next spring.

The first X-37B, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle, was carried into space atop an Atlas 5 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on April 22, 2010.

The flight followed the project's long and expensive journey from NASA to the Pentagon's research and development arm and then on to the secretive Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on the X-37 program, but the current total hasn't been released.

Built by Boeing Co.'s Phantom Works, the 11,000-pound craft is 9 1/2 feet tall and just over 29 feet long, with a wingspan of less than 15 feet. It has two angled tail fins rather than a single vertical stabilizer.

Solar panels deploy in orbit to charge batteries for electrical power.

Officials made public only a general description of the mission objectives: testing of guidance, navigation, control, thermal protection and autonomous operation in orbit, re-entry and landing.

However, the ultimate purpose of the X-37B has long remained a mystery, though some experts said the spacecraft is intended to speed up development of combat-support systems and weapons systems.

Last spring, Gary Payton, Air Force undersecretary for space programs, rejected characterization of the project as leading to the weaponization of space.

"It's just an updated version of the space shuttle kind of activities in space," he said during a conference call with reporters. "We, the Air Force, have a suite of military missions in space and this new vehicle could potentially help us do those missions better."

Top priorities for the project are to demonstrate an inexpensive and fast turnaround, he said.

Need for extensive servicing such as replacement of many thermal tiles would make it unattractive, he said.

Payton suggested the X-37B would be useful for rapidly putting many small satellites into orbit, with a turnaround time measured at 10-to-15 days or less, operating more like an SR-71 spyplane than a routine space launch vehicle.

Like the first X-37B, the budget for the second spaceplane is classified, he said.

Defense analyst John Pike, a critic of the X-37B's usefulness, said the autonomous orbital and landing system apparently worked, but he remained skeptical of the program.

"They demonstrated that they could keep a secret about whatever else it might have been doing," said Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org. "It remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma."

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AP Science Writer Alicia Chang contributed to this report.