Table of Contents: October 11, 2010

IN THIS ISSUE EDITION: U.S. Vol. 176 No. 15

COVER
Locked And Loaded (Cover) On the Web and in militia groups, antigovernment extremism is on the rebound. A special investigation Inside an American Militia Photographer Ty Cacek joins the Ohio Defense Force during a grueling weekend training exercise

ESSAY
A Blast from the Past (Commentary / In the Arena) Fearless Jerry Brown campaigns for governor of California, but can he save his state? Friends in Need Mark Zuckerberg joins the ranks of America's great philanthropists. How far will his gift go?

NATION
Recovering Memory: Can a New Device Help Amnesia Patients? (The Well / Technology) Can a new device help amnesia patients outsource memory? What $120 Million Buys (The Well / Nation) Meg Whitman has spent more running for California governor than Al Gore spent running for President, but is it the money or the message that matters?

WORLD
The Laughing Bishop (The Well / Profile) Apartheid's scourge evolved into the world's moral compass. As he hangs up his cassock, Desmond Tutu reflects on a life spent defending the oppressed

SOCIETY Have Wiki, Will Travel (Life / Techland) A free site lets more than 40,000 globetrotters play tour guide Supersize Me: Why Our Burgers Are Getting Bigger (Life / Food) An American classic grows up and out. What's fueling the explosion of oversize novelty burgers? Fighting School Violence by Pinpointing Its Victims (Life / Education) Chicago schools set out to pinpoint (and protect) likely victims of violence

TO OUR READERS
Twisted Patriotism

The ranks of America's antigovernment militias have swelled since Obama took office. TIME investigates their secret world

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Young Blood (Profile) Chloe Grace Moretz brings innocence to some very grownup roles Reeler than Real (Movies) A new breed of "documentaries" blurs the boundary between verifiable fact and movie truth New Exhibit Gives Object Lesson in China's Power (Exhibitions) Treasures from an Emperor's garden cast glittering light on China at the peak of its power Treasures from the Forbidden City Photos: A new exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. provides a glimpse into the life of a discriminating 18th-century Chinese emperor Ben Folds and Nick Hornby (Q&A) Short List TIME'S PICKS FOR THE WEEK

BUSINESS
How Blockbuster Failed at Failing (Business) Yes, the movie-rental firm was doomed. But the ending could have been a lot better

SCIENCE
Kosmo The Dino (Paleontology) Meet the Kosmoceratops, the latest and strangest fossil from America's own backyard

PEOPLE
10 Questions for Danielle Steel (10 Questions) The prolific, best-selling novelist has a new book, Legacy, on sale now. Danielle Steel will now take your questions

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

Fertility and Cancer: Surviving and Having Kids Too (Wellness / Oncofertility) A new field of fertility medicine helps cancer survivors have babies after treatment

LETTERS
Inbox (Inbox)

BRIEFING
The Skimmer Book Review: Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson The Moment 9|28|10: Pyongyang The World 10 ESSENTIAL STORIES Mark Halperin's Take: A Failure to Demonize (Washington: The Politics Page) Why Murkowski Can Win: Follow The Money (Washington: The Politics Page) Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine Verbatim Brief History: Wiretapping Eddie Fisher (Milestones) Gloria Stuart (Milestones) Arthur Penn (Milestones)

COVER

The Secret World of Extreme Militias

By BARTON GELLMAN Thursday, Sep. 30, 2010

ODF militiamen Frank Delollis, right, signals for a patrol party to turn around while searching the Old Roseville Prison property in Roseville, Ohio for enemy combatants during the Ohio Defense Force's annual FTX on Aug. 21, 2010. Ty Cacek for TIME Camouflaged and silent, the assault team inched toward a walled stone compound for more than five hours, belly-crawling the last 200 yards. The target was an old state prison in eastern Ohio, and every handpicked member of Red Team 2 knew what was at stake: The year is 2014, and a new breed of neo-Islamic terrorism is rampant in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio... The current White House Administration is pro-Muslim and has ordered a stand-down against Islamic groups. The mission: Destroy the terrorist command post or die trying. The fighters must go in "sterile"without name tags or other identifying insigniaas a deniable covert force. "Anyone who is caught or captured cannot expect extraction," the briefing officer said. At nightfall the raiders launched their attack. Short, sharp bursts from their M-16s cut down the perimeter guards. Once past the rear gate, the raiders fanned out and emptied clip after clip in a barrage of diversionary fire. As defenders rushed to repel the small team, the main assault force struck from the opposite flank. Red Team 1 burst through a chain-link fence, enveloping the defense in lethal cross fire. The shooting was over in minutes. Thick grenade smoke bloomed over the command post. The defenders were routed, headquarters ablaze. This August weekend of grueling mock combat, which left some of the men prostrate and bloody-booted, capped a yearlong training regimen of the Ohio Defense Force, a private militia that claims 300 active members statewide. The fighters shot blanks, the better to learn to maneuver in squads, but they buy live ammunition in bulk. Their trainingno game, they stressexpends thousands of rounds a year from a bring-your-own armory of deer rifles, assault weapons and, when the owner turns up, a belt-fed M-60 machine gun. The militia trains for ambushes, sniper missions, close-quarters battle and other infantry staples.

What distinguishes groups like this one from a shooting club or re-enactment society is the prospect of actual bloodshed, which many Ohio Defense Force members see as real. Their unit seal depicts a man with a musket and tricorn hat, over the motto "Today's Minutemen." The symbol invites a question, Who are today's redcoats? On that point, the group takes no official position, but many of those interviewed over two days of recent training in and around the abandoned Roseville State Prison near Zanesville voiced grim suspicions about President Obama and the federal government in general. "I don't know who the redcoats are," says Brian Vandersall, 37, who designed the exercise and tried to tamp down talk of politics among the men. "It could be U.N. troops. It could be federal troops. It could be Blackwater, which was used in Katrina. It could be Mexican troops who are crossing the border." Or it could be, as it was for this year's exercise, an Islamic army marauding unchecked because a hypothetical pro-Muslim President has ordered U.S. forces to leave them alone. But as the drill played out, the designated opponents bore little resemblance to terrorists. The scenario described them as a platoon-size unit, in uniform, with "military-grade hardware, communications, encryption capability and vehicle support." The militia was training for combat against the spitting image of a tactical force from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), FBI or National Guard. "Whoever they are," Vandersall says, "we have to be ready." As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side. Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs. A six-month TIME investigation reveals that recruiting, planning, training and explicit calls for a shooting war are on the rise, as are criminal investigations by the FBI and state authorities. Readier for bloodshed than at any time since at least the confrontations in the 1990s in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, the radical right has raised the threat level against the President and other government targets. With violence already up on a modest scale, FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and state agencies point to two main dangers of a mass-casualty attack: that a group of armed radicals will strike out in perceived self-defense, or that a lone wolf, trained and indoctrinated for war, will grow tired of waiting. Even the most outspoken militia commanders worry about the latter scenario. Kevin Terrell, a self-described colonel who founded a group of "freedom fighters" in Kentucky and predicts war with "the jackbooted thugs" of Washington within a year, says he has to fend off hotheads who call him a "keyboard commando." Some are ejected from his group, he says, and others are willing to wait a little longer. "You have to have the right fuel-air mixture, the piston has to be in the right position, the spark has to be perfectly timed," he says. "The day will comesooner than later." Twisted Patriots Within a complex web of ideologies, most of today's armed radicals are linked by self-described Patriot beliefs, which emphasize resistance to tyranny by force of arms and reject the idea that elections can fix what ails the country. Among the most common convictions is that the Second Amendmentthe right to keep and bear armsis the Constitution's cornerstone, because only a well-armed populace can enforce its rights. Any form of gun regulation, therefore, is a sure sign of intent to crush other freedoms. The federal government is often said in militia circles to have made wholesale seizures of power, at times by subterfuge. A leading grievance holds that the 16th Amendment, which authorizes the federal income tax, was ratified through fraud.

In a reversal of casting, the armed antigovernment movement describes itself as heir to the founders. As they see it, the union that the founders created is now a foreign tyrant. "It's like waking up behind enemy lines," says Terrell. He says he smelled a setup when the FBI arrested nine members of Michigan's Hutaree militia in March and charged them with plotting to kill police. (Their trial is set to begin in February.) Terrell and other leaders put their forces on alert, anticipating a roundup. "There was a lot of citizens out there in the bushes, locked and loaded," he says. "It's only due to miracles I do not understand that civil war did not break out right there." Some groups, though not many overtly, embrace the white-supremacist legacy of the Posse Comitatus, which invented the modern militia movement in the 1970s. Some are fueled by a violent stream of millennial Christianity. Some believe Washington is a secondary foe, the agent of a dystopian new world order. A small but growing number of these extremist groups, according to the FBI, ATF and state investigators, are subjects of active criminal investigations. They include militias and other promoters of armed confrontation with government, among them "common-law jurors," who try to make their own arrests and convene their own trials, and "sovereign citizens," who respond with lethal force to routine encounters with the law. In April, for example, Navy veteran Walter Fitzpatrick, acting on behalf of a group called American Grand Jury, barged into a Tennessee courthouse and tried to arrest the real grand-jury foreman on the grounds that he refused to indict Obama for treason. In May, Georgia militia member Darren Huff was arrested by Tennessee state troopers after telling them that he and other armed men intended to "take over the Monroe County courthouse," free Fitzpatrick and "conduct arrests" of other officials, according to Huff's indictment and his own account in an interview posted online. Investigators are keeping a wary eye on a related trend, which has yet to progress beyond words, in which law officers and military service members vow to refuse or resist orders they deem unconstitutional. About a dozen county sheriffs and several candidates for sheriff in the midterm elections have threatened to arrest federal agents in their jurisdictions. Group distinctions are seldom clear because of overlapping memberships and alliances. The Ohio exercise, for example, included a delegation from the 17th Special Operations Group led by Colonel Dick Wolf, a former Army drill sergeant who previously took a unit to join Arizona militia leader Chris Simcox in armed patrols along the Mexican border. Wolf travels around the country to train other groups in such skills as knife fighting and convoy operations. He does not ask about their philosophies. "That's their business," he says. The Obama Factor None of these movements are entirely new, but most were in sharp decline by the late 1990s. Their resurgence now is widely seen among government and academic experts as a reaction to the tectonic shifts in American politics that allowed a black man with a foreign-sounding name and a Muslim-born father to reach the White House. Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus. Even Patriots who had no truck with white supremacy found that they could amplify their antigovernment message by "constructing Obama as an alien, not of this country, insufficiently American," according to Michael Waltman, an authority on hate speech at the University of

North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Perennial features of extreme-right scare loreincluding imagined schemes to declare martial law, abolish private ownership of guns and force dissidents into FEMA concentration campsbecame more potent with Obama as the Commander in Chief. Threats against Obama's life brought him Secret Service protection in May 2007, by far the earliest on record for a presidential candidate. At least four alleged assassination plots between June and Decemberby militiamen in Pennsylvania, white supremacists in Denver, skinheads in Tennessee, and an active-duty Marine lance corporal at North Carolina's Camp Lejeuneled to arrests and criminal charges before Obama was even sworn in. "We call it somewhat of a perfect storm," says a high-ranking FBI official who declined to speak on the record because of the political sensitivities of the subject. With an economy in free fall and rising anger about illegal immigration, Obama became "a rallying point" for dormant extremists after the 2008 election who "weren't willing to act before but now are susceptible to being recruited and radicalized." Theirs is not Tea Party anger, which aims at electoral change, even if it often speaks of war. In the world of armed extremists, war is not always a metaphor. Some of them speak with contempt about big talkers who "meet, eat and retreat." History suggests that even the most ferocious, by and large, will never get around to walking the walk. Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center observes that "there are huge numbers of people who say, 'We're going to have to go to war to defend the Constitution or defend the white race,' but 'That will be next week, boys.'" And yet there are exceptions, and law-enforcement officials say domestic terrorists are equally the products of their movements. Those most inclined toward violence sometimes call themselves three percenters, a small vanguard that dares to match deeds to words. Brian Banning, who led local and interagency intelligence units that tracked radical-right-wing violence in Sacramento County, Calif., says, "The person who's interested in violent revolution may be attracted to a racist group or to a militia or to the Tea Party because he's antigovernment and so are they, but he's looking on the fringe of the crowd for the people who want to take action." The Supremacist One such man was James Von Brunn. On June 10, 2009, he pulled up to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, raised a .22-caliber rifle and shot security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns in the chest. Part of Von Brunn's story is now well known, but police, FBI and Secret Service investigators held back a startling epilogue. Von Brunn was an avowed white supremacist with a history of violence that reached back decades. He had spent six years in prison after an attempt to take hostages at the Federal Reserve in 1981. After finding only disappointment in organized groups, Von Brunn retreated to his website and railed against passive comrades. "The American Right-wing with few exceptions... does NOTHING BUT TALK," he wrote. At 88 and hospitalized with a gunshot wound he suffered at the museum, Von Brunn did not loom large in the public eye as a figure of menace. He was profiled as a shrunken old man, broke and friendless, who ended another man's life in an empty act of despair. He died seven months later in prison before he could be tried.

What authorities did not disclose was how close the country had come to a seismic political event. Von Brunn, authoritative sources say, had another target in mind: White House senior adviser David Axelrod, a man at the center of Obama's circle. The President was too hard to reach, in Von Brunn's view, but that was of no consequence. "Obama was created by Jews," he wrote. "Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do." The episode sent a jolt through the FBI and DHS. Von Brunn had demonstrated motive, means and intent to kill one of the President's closest aides. The Secret Service assigned Axelrod a protection detail and took other, undisclosed steps to broaden its coverage. The DHS put out bulletins to state and local law-enforcement agencies on the tactics, warning signs and other lessons of the case. FBI agents need to understand, a senior supervisor says, that "it isn't just the threat from Islamic extremists but also from homegrown or domestic terrorists" with antigovernment agendasas the bureau had already seen in a small town in Maine. The Dirty Bomber The first thing Jeff Trafton noticed at 346 High Street was a "big swastika flag in the living room." Upstairs, where a man lay dead in his bedroom, there were photographs of the victim posed in a black Gestapo trench coat. Any murder was unusual in Belfast, Maine, a town of 7,000 where Trafton is chief of police. This one kept getting stranger. Who did it was not a mystery. Amber Cummings, then 31, shot her husband James, 29, to death, dropped the Colt .45 revolver and walked to a neighbor's to dial 911. Evidence of her torment at the dead man's hands during years of domestic abuse would later persuade a judge to spare her a prison sentence. On the day of the shooting, Dec. 9, 2008, the story she told and an initial search of the house brought an FBI forensic team running. James Cummings appeared to have accumulated explosive ingredients and radioactive samples. He had filled out an application to join the National Socialist Movement and declared an ambition to kill the President-elect. It was hard to tell how seriously to take that threat. On Jan. 19, 2009, WikiLeaks made public the FBI search inventory, which was distributed to security planners for Obama's Inauguration. State police assured reporters, in response, that the Cummings home lab had posed no threat to public safety. A much more sobering picture emerged from the dead man's handwritten notes and printed records, some of which were recently made available to Time. Fresh interviews with principals in the case, together with the documents, depict a viciously angry and resourceful man who had procured most of the supplies for a crude radiological dispersal device and made some progress in sketching a workable design. In this he was far ahead of Jose Padilla, the accused al-Qaeda dirty-bomb plotter, and more advanced in his efforts than any previously known domestic threat involving a dirty bomb. Cummings spent many months winning the confidence of online suppliers, using a variety of cover stories, PayPal accounts and shipping addresses. He had a $2 million real estate inheritance and spent it freely on his plot.

"He was very clever," says Amber Cummings, who until now had not spoken publicly about her late husband's preparations. "There's a small amount of radioactive material he can legally buy for research purposes. He'd call those companies, and he had various stories. He'd claim he was working as a professor." On Nov. 4, 2008Election DayCummings placed his last two orders for uranium, at a total cost of $626.40, from United Nuclear Scientific Equipment & Supplies. The Michigan-based company, which declined to answer questions, offers uranium for sale online in "medium, high, super high and ultra high radiation" blends. In an ironic twist on customer service, United Nuclear wrote with regret to inform Cummings that one of the samples he ordered that day "was already purchased by Homeland Security for training purposes." By way of apology, the company sent a larger quantity, in two chunks. A vendor in Colorado sold Cummings radioactive beryllium. Cummings produced a third radiation source at home. From standard references and technical manuals, Cummings learned how to extract thorium from commercially available tungsten electrodes by soaking them in a peroxide bath. According to the Centers for Disease Control, all three metalsuranium, thorium and berylliumare highly toxic when ingested and cause cancer if inhaled as fine airborne particles. Cummings had none of them in large quantity, and none had the high output of gamma rays that would make for the most dangerous kind of dirty bomb, but he was looking for more-lethal ingredients. A shopping list, under the heading "best for dirty bombs," named three: cobalt-60, cesium-137 and strontium-90. Cummings made his best progress on high explosives. He bought large quantities of 3% hydrogen peroxide, which is commonly sold in pharmacies, then concentrated it on his kitchen stove to 35%. With acids on hand, Cummings had a recipe and all the required ingredients for TATP, a hellishly energetic explosive favored by Middle Eastern suicide bombers. In 2001, when shoe bomber Richard Reid came close to downing American Airlines Flight 63, he had several ounces of TATP in his hiking boots. Cummings had the ingredients to make many times that much, as well as aluminum powder, thermite, thermite igniter and other materials used to detonate the explosive and amplify its effects. Crude designs Cummings sketched on lined paper suggest that he had a lot to learn about efficient dispersal of radioactive particles. Even so, he was aware of the gaps in his knowledge. "His intentions were to construct a dirty bomb and take it to Washington to kill President Obama," Amber Cummings says. "He was planning to hide it in the undercarriage of our motor home." She says her husband had practiced crossing checkpoints with dangerous materials aboard, taking her and their daughter along for an image of innocence. Maine state police detective Michael McFadden, who participated in the investigation throughout, says he came to believe that James Cummings posed "a legitimate threat" of a major terrorist attack. "When you're cooking thorium and uranium under your kitchen sink, when you have a couple million dollars sitting in the bank and you're hell-bent on doing something, I think at that point you become someone we want to sit up and pay attention to," he says. "If she didn't do what she did, maybe we would know Mr. Cummings a lot better than we do right now."

Who Would They Fight? The abandoned state prison in Roseville, with its broken cinder-block walls and crumbling stairwells, made a suitably apocalyptic set for the Ohio militia's August exercise. In the officers' ready room, where back issues of Shotgun News and Soldier of Fortune lay on folding tables, an ancient graffito reading "KKK" had been painted over by one of Kenneth Goldsmith's men. "The Klan in this area, they don't like me at all," Goldsmith says. "They came to me a few years ago to join forces... I told the guy, 'You think you are from a superior race, is that it?' He said yes. I said, 'You don't look so superior to me.'" Members of militias around the country say, like Goldsmith, that they resent comparison with white supremacists like Cummings and Von Brunn. They complain of being tarred as members of hate groups by watchdogs at the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. "I can't tell you how much I enjoy being lumped in with sociopathic organizations like neo-Nazis, anti-abortion extremists and Holocaust-denial groups," says Darren Wilburn, a private detective in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., who trains with a hard-core militia he preferred not to name. He cites his motto, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of anyone who threatens it," as evidence that he is not looking for trouble as long as trouble keeps clear of him. The same two pointsa defensive posture and ill will toward no onewere repeated with sincerity by many of Goldsmith's men. There were layers of meaning beneath those words, which peeled back as the weekend progressed. The Ohio Defense Force charter declares two missions, which may sound the same to outside ears but mean very different things. One is to help state and local law enforcement upon request. The other is to "assist in the protection of local citizens in emergencies." An example of the first mission, the most recent one Goldsmith could think of, came after flooding struck Columbiana County six years ago. Chief Deputy Sheriff Allen Haueter says the militia helped direct traffic, leaving sheriff's officers free to respond to emergencies. But Haueter did not authorize them"Oh, no, no," he saysto carry guns. They could as easily have done the job garbed as candy stripers. Why, then, the paramilitary training that takes up nearly all the militia's time? That question bothers Sheriff Matt Lutz of Muskingum County, where the militia is headquartered. "There is no correlation with them saying they're there to help us in any way and them running around with assault rifles in the woods," he says. "That's what scares people. That just tells me they're preparing for the worst." As indeed they are. The militia's second mission, protecting local citizens, requires no invitation from the likes of the sheriff. An officer named Ken, who asked that his last name and hometown go unmentioned, says, "You can be a civilized human being and defend yourself without being a bad guy." Against what? "Most likely it will start when the government tries to take our guns," he says. Craig Wright, 50, a consulting engineer from Mansfield, was one of the face-painted raiders who ambushed the Blue Team's rear-perimeter guards. He learned something important, he says, when he went drinking with fellow members of force Red. "Some of these people are, quite honestly, quite scary," he said. "They might not be well educated, they might not listen to Beethoven, but they can take care of themselves." And that is what Wright is looking for.

"We're not planning to overthrow the government," he said. "We're planning for what could happen." He proceeded to list, among other scenarios, a pandemic; economic collapse; hunger-driven big-city refugees; a biological, chemical or nuclear terrorist attack; an electromagnetic pulse from the sun that wrecks earthly machinery; invasion by Mexican drug cartels; and an eruption of ash from Yellowstone that "wipes out the breadbasket of the United States." Any one of those would likely give Washington the excuse to declare martial law. If so, Wright and his brothers in arms would fight back. "Hopefully," he said, "if they rule the cities, we'll rule the countryside." This is a frame of mind that law-enforcement and counterterrorism officials have seen before, and it worries them. "There are a number of militias out there that we call almost defensive in nature, right?" a senior national-security official says. "So they train. They're pulling in arms or pulling in weapons. They're pulling in food. They're preparing bunkers... They're preparing for confrontation, but they will call it defensive." The official paused as if to play out a scene in his mind's eye. A well-equipped paramilitary force with "a perception of being confronted would strike out and strike out pretty hard," he says. "For a small or even a medium-size law-enforcement agencyanybody, reallythere would be some serious, serious issues." War on the Feds On the sidelines of the disparate antigovernment movement, its philosophers are edging their followers closer to violence. Bob Schulz, a leading exponent of the view that the IRS and much of the government it funds are operating illegally, has reached the brink of calling for war. The moment is significant because he is an influential voice among militia groups. After more than a decade of conventional legal battles, Schulz and a network of allies organized by the We the People Foundation began filing hundreds of petitions for redress of grievances. Schulz had come to believe that the First Amendment's petition clause required governors, legislatures and federal agencies to provide specific and satisfactory answers to accusations of wrongdoing. He filled government dockets with thousands of questionsone petition, for instance, asked the IRS to "admit or deny" 116 allegations of fraud in the 1913 debate that ratified the 16th Amendment. When his petitions went ignored and the Supreme Court declined to hear his case in 2007, he wrote a formal brief accusing the court of "committing treason to the Constitution." The IRS, meanwhile, revoked his foundation's tax-exempt status, alleging that he used it to promote an illegal "tax termination plan" and bringing tax-evasion charges against some of the people who followed Schulz's advice. Last year Schulz convened hundreds of delegates to a second Continental Congress in St. Charles, Ill., drafting Articles of Freedom with "instructions" that state and federal governments halt unlawful operations. Refusal to comply would be "an act of WAR," the delegates wrote, and "the People and their Militias have the Right and Duty to repel it." Several militia leaders are among the authors. Then, in November and March, Schulz staged vigils at the White House in which he and some of his followers dressed in the mask of the menacing "V" from the film V for Vendetta. (In the movie's final scene, the oppressive seat of government erupts in spectacular flames to the swelling strains of the 1812

Overture.) "If the First Amendment doesn't work," Schulz says, "the Second Amendment would." He asks, "What does a free man do" when all other avenues are closed? "I am struggling with my conscience." Regardless of what conscience tells them, what chance do would-be armed rebels possibly have of prevailing against the armed might of the U.S.? One answer comes from former Alabama militia leader Mike Vanderboegh, who wrote an essay that is among the most widely republished on antigovernment extremist sites today. In "What Good Is a Handgun Against an Army?" Vanderboegh says the tactical question is easy: Kill the enemy one soldier at a time. A patriot needs only a "cheap little pistol and the guts to use it," he writes, to shoot a soldier in the head and take his rifle; with a friend, such a man will soon have "a truck full of arms and ammunition." Vanderboegh is hardly a man of action himself, living these days on government disability checks. Even so, when he wrote a blog post in March urging followers to protest the health care bill by breaking windows at Democratic Party offices, they did so across the country. Another answer comes from Richard Mack, who is holding constitutional seminars for county sheriffs from coast to coast, urging them to resist what he describes as federal tyranny by force. In his presentations, he shows movie clips to illustrate his point, like a scene from The Patriot in which Mel Gibson says, with fire in his eyes, "You will obey my command, or I will have you shot." Citing a long list of antecedents, beginning in 11th century England, Mack asserts that each of the nation's county sheriffs is the supreme constitutional authority in his or her jurisdiction. A sheriff has the power to arrest and, if necessary, use lethal force against federal officers who come uninvited, and he may "call out the militia to support his efforts to keep the peace in the county." In his term as sheriff of Graham County, Ariz., Mack became famous for fighting and winning a legal battle against a provision of the Brady Bill that required him to enforce federal gun-control laws. He now says he wishes he had stayed out of court and simply drawn a line in the sand with the ATF. "I pray for the day when the first county sheriff has the guts to arrest the real enemy," he says. Among the enemy, he numbers "America's gestapo," the IRS. Steve Kendley, a Lake County, Mont., deputy sheriff who is running for the top office there on Mack's platform, says he expects federal agents to back off when threatened with arrest, but he is prepared for "a violent conflict" if "they are doing something I believe is unconstitutional." The nearest antecedent to Mack's argument, and the only one known to scholars interviewed for this story, is the Blue Book of the Posse Comitatus, by white-supremacist militia leader Henry Lamont Beach, whose organization disintegrated after leading members were convicted of felonies or killed in 1983 during shoot-outs in Arkansas and North Dakota with federal marshals and uncooperative sheriffs. Beach used nearly identical language, saying the county is "the highest authority of government in our Republic" and the sheriff "the only legal law-enforcement office." After Time e-mailed Mack extracts of Beach's book, he replied that it "sounds exactly like Jefferson." Beware the Lone Wolf Federal law-enforcement agencies want no part of a conversation about angry antigovernment extremists and refused in virtually every case to speak on the record. A few injudicious passages from

career analysts at the DHS in an April 2009 report titled "Rightwing Extremism" which could be misread to suggest danger from ordinary antigovernment opinions or military veterans in generalbrought a ferocious backlash. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano distanced herself from the report and forbade further public discussion of the subject. Shortly afterward, the National Security Council staff canceled plans for a working-group meeting on the surge of violent threats against members of Congress. Yet the months that followed brought fresh support for the study's central finding, that rising "rightwing radicalization and recruitment" raised the risk that lone wolves would emerge from within the groups to commit "violent acts targeting government facilities, law-enforcement officers, banks and infrastructure sectors." Within 90 days came the Von Brunn shooting; a triple murder of police officers in Pittsburgh by white supremacist Richard Andrew Poplawski; and a double murder of sheriff's deputies in Florida by a National Guardsman, Joshua Cartwright, who attributed his rage to Obama's election. The specter of the lone-wolf terrorist is what most worries law-enforcement officials, who return again and again to the searing example of Timothy McVeigh. Before destroying the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, McVeigh cycled through several white-supremacist groups and militias. In the end he decided to act alone, abetted by his friend Terry Nichols. A top FBI counterterrorism official says the bureau's "biggest concern" is "the individual who has done the training, has the capability but is disenchanted with the group's actionor in many cases, inactionand decides he's going to act alone." A high-ranking DHS official added that "it's almost impossible to find that needle in a haystack," even if the FBI has an informant in the group. James Cavanaugh, who recently retired from a senior post at the ATF and took part in some of the bloodiest confrontations with the radical right in the 1990s, says the creation of monsters in their midst is the greatest danger posed by organized groups. The ceaseless talk of federal aggressionand regular training to repel it"becomes a hysteria where you constantly, constantly practice and nothing happens," he says. "Now most of them wouldn't go out offensively, O.K.? But generally why they're dangerous is that some people can't stand that rhetoric and just wait for it to happen. And they go off the rails, la McVeigh."

Inside an American Militia

Camouflaged and Silent The Ohio Defense Force is a private militia claiming 300 active members. On the weekend of August 21, they engaged in a training skirmish with other units in Roseville, Ohio.

Muster The militia trains for ambushes, sniper missions, close-quarter battle and other types of military engagements. On the weekend when photographer Ty Cacek took these photos, the ODF's mission was

to destroy "a terrorist command post." An abandoned prison stood in for the object of their attack.

Portraits Militiaman Frank Delollis, left, and 1st Sgt. Tom Gheen are both ODF members.

Preparation Each member brings his or her own weapons. During the drill, they shoot blanks.

Camo The ODF stresses that they are not engaged in a re-enactment or game; they are drilling for scenarios that they feel could be real one day.

At Attention The drill scenario for the August exercise went as follows: "The year is 2014, and a new breed of neo-Islamic terrorism is rampant in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio...The current White House Administration is pro-Muslim and has ordered a stand-down against Islamic groups." The goal is to

destroy the enemy command post, or die trying.

Motorized The fighters must go in "sterile" without name tags or identifying insignia as a deniable covert force. "Anyone who is caught or captured cannot expect extraction," the briefing officer said.

Dismount The ODF members exit the transport.

Recon A patrol party searches the property.

Coordinates ODF Officers and senior members examine a property map and discuss their plan.

His and Hers This woman is the wife of one of the male ODF members.

Portraits Private E2 Doug, left, chose not to give his last name; Militiaman C.J. McIntosh, right, poses inside the prison target.

Sentry Lt. Jeremy Fister rests while guarding a second-story window from enemy contact.

Checkpoint Two militia members take a smoke break while guarding the rear of the prison.

Flag Many members of the ODF say that they are not a hate group. Their charter asserts that their mission is: to help state and local law enforcement agencies on request during a flood six years ago they helped direct traffic, giving local sheriff's officers the freedom to respond to more pressing tasks and "to assist in the protection of local citizens in emergencies."

ESSAY
IN THE ARENA

The Brown-Whitman Debate: Blast from the Past

By JOE KLEIN Thursday, Sep. 30, 2010

California attorney general and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown waves as he leaves the stage following a debate with Republican gubernatorial candidate and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman at UC Davis' Mondavi Center on September 28, 2010 in Davis, California. With just five weeks left before the election, California gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman, Republican, and Jerry Brown, Democrat, faced off in their first debate as polls show the two candidates are nearly tied. Jose Luis Villegas-Pool / Getty Images At the beginning of her campaign for governor of California, Meg Whitman said that a book I'd written, Politics Lost, would be her guide. The book was a plea for greater spontaneity in politics, a screed against the often deadening, risk-averse impact of political consultants on the process. Whitman then proceeded to hire the very best Republican consultant out there, Mike Murphy, and spend no less than $120 million of her own money she is a former CEO of eBay on the campaign, mostly on TV ads. Murphy had her perfectly prepped for her first gubernatorial debate, on Sept. 28. Whitman spun her talking points sleekly, personably, though not exactly spontaneously. In any other debate, this might have worked but Whitman was facing a grand master of calculated weirdness and militant informality. At the end of my cross-country road trip, there stood Jerry Brown, just as he had at the beginning of my career, a jolly blast from the past. His 1976 presidential campaign was the first I covered, and it was hilarious. His campaign buttons were minimalist no words, just a color: brown. His slogan was "Protect the earth, serve the people, and explore the universe." He was the newly elected governor of California and famously frugal, far more so than his predecessor Ronald Reagan. He refused to live in the opulent governor's mansion Reagan had built; he lived instead in a rented room, a secular reprise of the Jesuit seminary he had once attended. In a way, he was the Tea Party of his time but a strange brew, with a touch of Zen and outlandish political ambitions. He ran for President thrice: in 1976, 1980 and 1992.

And now, at the age of 72, he is running for governor again and his presidential addiction is an issue. He was asked what would stop him from running for President again. "Age," he replied. "Hell, if I was younger, you know I'd be running." He promised to be more assiduous this time around. "I now have a wife," he said. "I come home at night. I don't try to close down the bars in Sacramento like I used to do when I was governor of California. I'm going to spend more time in Sacramento and get it done." Of course, this was not quite true. He was never the sort to close down the bars. He tried to seem the swinging hipster dating the singer Linda Ronstadt and all but he was more likely to be found in his cell late at night, reading the French mystic priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In fact, Brown's cleverness as governor deflated more than a few of Whitman's talking points. She accused him of being too close to the public-employees' unions. He reminded her that he had vetoed public pay raises twice. She promised "a spine of steel" and reform of the state's bloated pension plan. He reminded her that he'd offered pension reform very similar to hers a generation ago. And then, in a reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger, he added, "We've tried this business of the inexperienced private-sector person coming in with a spine of steel, and they get flummoxed by the shark-infested waters of Sacramento." It was a bracing debate. Both candidates seemed smart and sane. There were none of the wild claims or scare tactics so prevalent in the rest of the country. But California is a basket case: 12% unemployment, a $19 billion state-budget deficit, a gridlocked government entangled in special interests (on both sides) and stymied by too many conflicting ballot referendums and initiatives. "We have a history of boom and bust," says Dan Schnur, chair of the state's Fair Political Practices Commission. "We spend ourselves crazy, then the economy tanks and we've got a budgetary mess on our hands. In the past, there's always been another boom to bail us out. There was aerospace, then high tech, then construction. Now people are wondering, Who's going to save us next? Is it possible that no one will?" And that is the great American fear right now. It has been the underlying theme of almost every interview I've conducted during this monthlong road trip. Republicans are more confident in their answers less government, lower taxes. Those are perennial positions with great appeal. But most people I've talked with are convinced that this is an unprecedented crisis, a slow slide from dominance and prosperity, that demands a new and dramatic approach. Neither Brown nor Whitman offered any striking solutions, but they're not alone; I haven't met a single candidate along the way who has broken through the miasma with something that sounds fresh and plausible. The best, like Brown, convey a restless energy, a love of the game and fearlessness in the face of a monumental challenge. But this year, for this crisis, that clearly isn't enough.

Friends in Need
By NANCY GIBBS Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

Illustration by Gerard Dubois for TIME Especially in this autumn of austerity, it's great to watch swashbuckling rebels fling gold into the air. Grinning on Oprah as he revealed a surprise gift$100 million to turn around the benighted schools of Newark, N.J.Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seemed surprised at what fun it was. The skeptics had already weighed in on his possible motives. New York magazine called his gift "the p.r. move of the month," designed to deflect attention from the movie premiering the same day that portrays Zuckerberg as an awkward, unscrupulous hacker who stole the idea for Facebook from his Harvard schoolmates. Others saw an act of atonement for his landing as the second youngest billionaire on the Forbes 400. Or, as one blogger proposed, a plot to "cement the Facebook brand with the young people who made Zuckerberg a billionaire." As though the motives even matter. America's first billionaire, Standard Oil titan John D. Rockefeller, was described as "a monster; merciless in his greed; pitiless in his cold inhuman passions"and that was by his brother. But the robber barons were complex, competitive men who emerged from the Industrial Revolution with way more money than the church offering plate could hold. So they industrialized charity, tackling immense problems--hunger, disease, the root causes of povertyin ways that saved enough lives to salvage their legacies. Their most important legacy may have been their example: the expectation that, in America, wealth performs a marriage of duty and opportunity. Now that the Information Revolution has accelerated wealth creation along with everything else, there's a new generationbrash, creative and crazy richready to spend more on the next challenge than on themselves. This would seem especially true of Zuckerberg, who has made about $559,361 every hour of every day for the past year but whose material needs don't appear to extend much past gray T-shirts and sneakers. This is not the old money of the great foundations or the new money of the Wall Street raiders who yearned to see their names in gold letters on concert halls. This is fast money, which tends to flow outside and around established institutions to find smart solutions to the least glamorous problems. Bill Gates is going to save the world from malaria and diarrhea. And now Zuckerberg is going to fix education in Newark.

Safe to say, it will be harder than inventing Facebook. Newark's schools are so bad that 15 years ago the state took them over. More than half the third-graders can't read or write at grade level, and barely half graduate. Money is not the problem; Newark already spends $22,000 a year per student, more than twice the national average. The problem is legal, political and cultural, which is why Zuckerberg didn't even pretend to have a plan. He just decided that New Jersey's smart, combative Republican governor, Chris Christie, and Newark's charismatic Democratic mayor, Cory Booker, were worth underwriting in an unprecedented way. "Instead of building out a large foundation," he said, "I wanted to invest in people that I believe in." And that's where the more depressing reaction comes in: not from those who are cynical about Zuckerberg's motives but from those who are threatened by them. The film that really applies here is not The Social Network but Waiting for "Superman," the blistering documentary about failing schools. Booker says that under their contracts, principals work 29 hours a week. The Wall Street Journal reported that in June, a young history teacher rated as "distinguished" was forced out of one school under the "last hired, first fired" protocol, while the five who remained included one rated as failing to "establish a culture of learning." And no sooner had Zuckerberg's gift been announced than the first threats of lawsuits arrived, from veterans of the education wars who say that policy should not be made on Oprah and that the rules make no provision for superheroes, even if they come in sneakers. No one wants billionaires writing curriculums to suit their tastes or using their wealth to circumvent voters. But Newark is now a test for all involved. Zuckerberg has invited reformers to build something great. Opponents are standing by with sledgehammers. Parents, teachers and politicians will have to choose whose side they're on; in three years, when Christie's and Booker's terms are up, voters will decide if they like what they see. That's as it should be, since problems this big won't be solved without all parties' putting down their weapons and picking up their tools. It's hard to imagine, but $100 million is just the first of them.

NATION

Recovering Memory: Can a New Device Help Amnesia Patients?

By EBEN HARRELL Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

Image from the Sensecam. Claire Robertson was in the changing room at her local swimming pool when she glanced up to see a woman looking at her. The woman had a nice face warm, searching blue eyes; a hesitant smile but seemed unsure of what to say. This often happens to Claire, a 49-year-old former nurse who six years ago suffered brain damage due to a rare viral infection called herpes encephalitis. Now an amnesiac who is unable to recognize faces, Claire lives in a world in which even her lifelong friends appear as strangers. Her husband Ed wears a distinct shark-tooth necklace at all times to help her identify him. Memory is so foundational to friendship that even those aware of Claire's brain injury often wait a second or two upon seeing her before reintroducing themselves, hoping their presence might spark a flicker of recognition which of course it never does. Claire assumed that was the case with the woman across from her in the changing room. But the woman continued to hover, not saying a word. Claire looked up again; this time the woman looked at her with an anxious expression. Claire decided to introduce herself. And that's when she understood: she was walking toward a mirror. The anxious, unsure face that was staring at her was her own. There is no cure for Claire's memory loss. The brain remains far too complex an organ for modern medicine to master, let alone reanimate after parts of it die off. Primitive memory aids diaries, photo albums, reminder alerts on electronic devices remain the most effective tools for helping amnesiacs like Claire cope with their condition. But the technology available to neuropsychologists is evolving fast, and Claire is among the first brain-injury patients to benefit from something as simple as a camera albeit a very special one. The portions of Claire's brain most damaged by the virus are known as the hippocampi, two deep, seahorse-shaped structures where new memories are formed and others are retrieved. Destruction of the hippocampi causes memory loss but only of a particular kind. Claire, like most such amnesiacs, retains a functioning procedural memory. She remembers, for instance, how to drive a car, and she could

learn to play the piano if she wanted, although she would have little or no memory of receiving lessons. Likewise, Claire's so-called semantic memory remains largely intact; her brain has preserved previously learned facts (Paris is the capital of France; her husband's name is Ed), and she can retain a limited amount of new information. But she can rarely remember the sensations of an experience the sights, sounds and feel, what psychologists call her episodic memory. This is where the new memory-enhancing camera can help. Called the Sensecam, it hangs around a patient's neck and automatically takes photos with a wide-angle lens every 30 seconds and when it senses movement or a change in lighting. The patient can download the pictures later and review them in sequence. But why should a two-dimensional image of, say, a museum Claire visited jog her memory when actually returning to the same museum a week later draws a blank? On a warm, autumn morning in the kitchen of Claire's chaotic but vibrant home in Peterborough, England, she and one of her neuropsychologists, Catherine Loveday of Westminster University, explain that the Sensecam helps in two ways. First, it provides a record rather like a jetliner's black box of Claire's life that she can revisit as often as she pleases. As she scans the images, her memory can't store most of the pictures in any lasting way, but her ability to retain facts (her semantic memory) at least allows her to know she has experienced something. Claire will often review images of days spent with friends before seeing them, allowing her to bond with them over common experiences. "It gives me a sense of belonging," Claire says. "So many people know so many things about my life, and I haven't any idea whatsoever. But I have these pictures now." Of more interest to neuropsychologists is the fact that reviewing Sensecam images seems to stimulate what little remains of Claire's episodic memory. Emma Berry, a neuropsychologist at Microsoft, the company that developed the camera, hypothesizes that Sensecam's impromptu wide-angle photographs, which capture everything in Claire's field of vision, provide much stronger memory cues than staged, traditionally proportioned pictures. Even in healthy brains, episodic memory often responds to bizarre, seemingly extraneous stimuli. Episodic memory is, in the words of American writer and physician Austin O'Malley, "a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food." Without recognition, Claire often passes over frames that include her close friends, but a tiny detail from a seemingly meaningless frame a sign on a wall, perhaps, or the fact that a waiter was left-handed triggers her memory of that moment. Functional-MRI scans of Claire's brain show that the areas associated with memory light up with far greater activity when she tries to remember experiences previously reviewed on Sensecam than when she attempts to recall events recorded in her diary or by traditional photographs. Microsoft has licensed British company Vicon to sell Sensecam as a medical device, but there may be a bigger market than just amnesiacs. Berry believes that since Alzheimer's disease targets the hippocampi and nearby structures first, these cameras may provide a prophylactic for people at risk of the disease by keeping their hippocampi healthy longer, though she says more research is needed.

Not all experts share Berry's enthusiasm. The University of Cambridge's Barbara Wilson, a leading amnesia expert who has co-authored a study using a Sensecam, says that for brain-injury patients, the mantra must always be "rehabilitation is not synonymous with recovery." The device "can help people cope," she says, "but there's no evidence it can restore episodic memory." Dr. Gregory O' Shanick, national medical director for the Brain Injury Association of America, worries that if Microsoft "markets it as a panacea, we are going to disappoint patients or, worse, make them feel as if there is something deficient in them." For her part, Claire prizes her Sensecam and says she would feel bereft without it. When I met with her, she searched through dozens of Sensecam photos from a recent day out in London, her eyes scanning longingly for the familiar. Images that a healthy-brained individual would recognize immediately like a direct shot of a close friend passed by unnoted. But then suddenly Claire had one of what Martin Conway, a neuropsychologist at Leeds University who works with her, calls her "Proustian moments." Marcel Proust described memory as a "rope let down from heaven to draw one up from the abyss of unbeing." When Claire glanced at an otherwise unremarkable picture of her close friend Carole drinking at a pub in St. Pancras train station, whatever electrical impulse or neurotransmission that ties an individual to Claire coursed through her brain, and she sat up straight and started talking quickly about how, yes, she was texting her husband from the pub at the time! Texting him to say that she was sitting near the champagne bar at the station and that she remembered he took her there once for a surprise date and how happy it made her and that, yes, Ed! She remembers! As Claire's gaze lingered on the screen, her eyes moistened, and it was clear that memory's great gift the cerebral shooting stars that illuminate the past out of darkness had allowed her, for a few moments at least, to suddenly know herself.

What Does Meg Whitman's $120 Million Really Buy?

By MICHAEL CROWLEY Thursday, Sep. 30, 2010

Republican Nominee Meg Whitman greets potential voters after speaking at Function Drinks, a small start up company in Culver City on September 14, 2010. Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS Meg Whitman says she's running for governor of California to bring a sense of fiscal responsibility to Sacramento. But Whitman's own campaign isn't exactly what you'd call frugal. The former eBay CEO turned Republican politico has already pumped about $120 million of her estimated $1.3 billion personal fortune into the race. Stop to think about that number: $120 million is enough to buy a half-dozen F-16 fighter jets and about 25 Ferrarisand still grab Christie Brinkley's recently listed $16 million five-bedroom home in the Hamptons. Even in the context of ever ballooning political spending, it's huge money. Throw in the $25 million in donations, and Whitman has spent more than Al Gore's entire 2000 presidential campaign did. She has shattered the previous spending record for a statewide California candidate ($78 million by former Democratic governor Gray Davis in 2002, money raised from thousands of donors). In mid-September, hers became the single most expensive nonpresidential campaign ever, surpassing the $109 million New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg plowed into his 2009 re-election. With the election still a month away, some estimate Whitman could spend another $30 million or more. Yet despite complaints that Whitman is simply buying the election, she hasn't purchased much of anything yet. She finds herself in a toss-upat bestwith her opponent, attorney general Jerry Brown, whose campaign has spent all of $4 million, or about 3% of Whitman's total. (Brown has raised an additional $30 million.) A recent Field poll placed the two in a tie at 41%. But a new TIME-CNN poll shows Brown with a handy 52-43 lead among likely voters. That would be a pretty meager payoff for Whitman's massive outlay, even in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 10 percentage points and Brown is practically a household name, thanks to his four decades in state politics. Whitman, by contrast, began her race as a complete political unknown. That's why "she has saturated the airwaves," in the words of Henry Brady, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. But assuming Whitman's money has bought her a fighting chance, it remains to be seen whether she can close the dealor whether she will join the long list of failed millionaire (and some billionaire) candidates whose money couldn't buy them political love. Making Money Talk Whitman's advisers say her money isn't nearly as important as her message: that California needs to slash state jobs to close its $19.1 billion deficit, lower taxes to spark the local economy and reform the state's education system. Whitman casts herself as an independent above partisan politics. (She is a moderate whose conservative primary rival attacked her as "liberal Meg Whitman.") Brown, Whitman says, is a relic from another era--a Big Government liberal in hock to the state's public-employee unions. Message is important, but a checkbook sure helpsespecially in a state as large and expensive as California. And thus far, Whitman has spent smarter than some other profligate tycoons who notoriously carpet bombed the television airwaves with no clear strategy. As befits a tech CEO, Whitman has spent her money with a savvy that impresses strategists of both parties.

A prime example is her effort to reach out to California's Latino population, estimated at 15% to 20% of the electorate. Faced with long-standing Latino suspicion of California Republicans, Whitman began advertising on Latino television and radio stations months ago. More recently, she has taken the unprecedented step of buying billboards and bus-stop advertisements in Latino communities. ("NO a la Proposicin 187 y NO a la Ley de Arizona," one declaresproclaiming Whitman's opposition to Arizona's tough new immigration-enforcement law and to a similar 1994 California ballot measure that was struck down by the courts.) "Republican candidates are never able to communicate to Latino voters because of how expensive it is" to craft a second campaign message in a different language, says Whitman campaign adviser Rob Stutzman. "So Latino voters for the first time are seeing a candidate spend significant resources to talk to them in Spanish-language media." The targeting gets even more specific than ethnicity. The Whitman campaign uses "microtargeting" software that helps tailor mailings and phone calls to voters on the basis of not just traditional factors like party registration but also polling and purchasable consumer data like magazine subscriptions and car ownership. "If you're a voter in California, it's possible you have received 16 or 17 mailings by this time, all of them highly specific to you, with your name on them, talking about issues they know you care aboutnot just a generic 'Vote for Meg Whitman.' That's never been done before in California," says Garry South, a Democratic political consultant who ran two winning races for Gray Davis. Also groundbreaking is a series of interactive television ads Whitman has been airing across the state. During the traditional pitch, a pop-up message appears on viewers' screens urging them to press a button on their remote control if they want a free Whitman bumper sticker. The cable provider passes along the addresses of viewers who play alongwhich not only gets them a bumper sticker but also adds valuable new entries into the Whitman campaign's voter-turnout database. Of course, there's still plenty of old-fashioned spendinglike the $10 million she had showered by June on consultants, including $90,000 per month to the firm of her top strategist, Mike Murphy. Whitman advisers note that Brown has been backed by a few million dollars in union advertising, with more likely to come. But even with the spending of outside groups factored in, Brown's side could be outspent by more than 5 to 1. Indeed, Whitman's spending on polling, information technology and office-related matters alonealmost $6 million as of Juneexceeds Brown's total budget so far. But Is Anyone Listening? The question is whetherand at what pointWhitman's largesse might boomerang on her and turn off voters who are struggling to get by in a wheezing economy. One person who thinks that's already happening is Chuck Idelson, spokesman for the 86,000-member California Nurses Association, which has been among Whitman's harshest criticsthanks in part to her pledge to fire 40,000 state employees. Idelson calls Whitman's campaign spending a "corruption of our political process" and says it explains why recent polls show an uptick in negative opinions of her (although the same is true of Brown). To drive home the point, the nurses' union hounds Whitman with Queen Meg, a gown-and-crown-clad actress who parades around regally outside the candidate's political events. On Labor Day, Queen Meg hit parades across the state, passing out pink slips with white-gloved hands. Does it somehow contaminate the democratic process when a billionaire candidate swamps an opponent with campaign spending? Whitman, like wealthy candidates before her, says it's just the opposite: that

she is free from the influence of campaign donors and the kinds of interest groups backing Brown. "Meg will not be beholden to anyone," says Stutzman. "Brown will be beholden to status-quo public labor unions." And despite the grousing about rich people buying elections, it's not that easy. Just ask past presidential hopefuls like Ross Perot ($65.4 million in 1992) and Steve Forbes ($76.1 million in 2000). Or the conservative New York businessman Tom Golisano, who dropped $74 million on a governor's race in 2002and won 14% of the vote. In fact, the National Institute on Money in State Politics found that from 2000 to 2009, only 11% of some 6,000 state-level candidates who contributed at least half of their campaign's spending from their own pockets ended up winning. So far this year, however, big spenders have had some success. Yes, Florida Democratic Senate candidate Jeff Greene, a billionaire known for partying on his yacht with Mike Tyson, reportedly spent more than $23 million of his fortune on an August primary defeat. But also in Florida, businessman Rick Scott won a Republican gubernatorial primary after spending $50 million of his cash. And in Connecticut, pro-wrestling executive Linda McMahon spent $22 million successfully clobbering her opponent in the fight for a GOP Senate nomination. But more ominously for Whitman, California has several notable entries on the list of self-funders who went nowhere: Democrat Al Checchi spent $40 million and landed 13% of the primary vote in his 1998 bid for governor, while Republican Michael Huffington spent $28 million on his 1994 Senate campaign, only to lose. The lesson is that "you can't spend your way into becoming a good candidate," says David Donnelly, a campaign-finance reformer with the Public Campaign Action Fund. But many a good candidate doesn't have the money to be heard. One solution: limiting how much money a candidate can give to her own campaign. The Supreme Court has already called that a violation of free speech, however, meaning it would require a constitutional amendment (not very likely) to change it. Other options include a system of public financing for cash-poor candidatesor, as many conservatives propose, an end to all campaign-finance limits. That way a candidate could accept huge donations from wealthy supporters to match Whitman's personal largesse. Congress has shown little appetite recently for major campaign-finance reform, but a Whitman victory could revive the debate. First, it remains to be seen whether this political newcomer and her avalanche of money can win one of the biggest jobs in American politics. "We've never seen anything like this," says South, "so it's very hard to make predictions." If Whitman does prevail, who knows how the next record will be set? But there's long been talk that Mayor Bloomberg may someday mount a self-financed run for President--an adventure that could easily cost more than $500 million. Even Meg Whitman might call that a lot of money.

WORLD

The Laughing Bishop

By ALEX PERRY Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

Desmond Tutu Pieter Hugo for TIME On Sept. 25, 1977, 16 years before apartheid's end, Desmond Tutu stood before a crowd of 15,000 at the funeral of murdered black-consciousness leader Steve Biko in King William's Town, South Africa, and declared that white rule was finished. "The powers of injustice, of oppression, of exploitation, have done their worst, and they have lost," thundered the then 45-year-old bishop of St. Mary and St. James, Lesotho. "They have lost because they are immoral and wrong, and our God ... is a God of justice and liberation and goodness. Our cause ... must triumph because it is moral and just and right." Few could have known then that the unrest sweeping South Africa would be the beginning of the end of apartheid. But Tutu did. "That's the chief lesson I have learned," he told Time recently. "The texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail." Oct. 7 will mark two final achievements for a man who went on to become Archbishop Emeritus, a Nobel peace laureate and, as leader to a hundred commissions, charities and causes, a kind of conscience to the world. On that day, he will turn 79, and at the request of Leah, his wife of 55 years, he will retire. That will be a relief for oppressors from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. But for millions of others, a world without Tutu will be a bit darker, a little more dull. His official legacy will be the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, which he founded with Leah in 1998 to foster tolerance and understanding in war, but he will not have an active role in its operations. His unofficial legacy will be his life and the story of how this tiny pastor with a huge laugh from South Africa became our global guardian. Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born in the black township of Klerksdorp in northern South Africa in 1931. Mpilo means "life" in Tutu's native Xhosa and was the defiant name chosen by his grandmother for a sickly boy who later contracted polio. After he overcame the disease, apartheid tried to hobble him. Tutu's biographer John Allen describes in Rabble-Rouser for Peace how throughout Tutu's early life, South Africa's racist rulers destroyed "community after community, institution after institution" in which he lived or studied. Tutu's teaching career ended when he refused to submit to a new racist curriculum. Klerksdorp was bulldozed in the 1950s for being too close to a white area.

From his doting mother, Tutu learned empathy. But from the injustice around him, he took righteous fury. "He hates confrontation," says Allen. "But when he sees people suffering ... there is this extraordinarily articulate, scathing anger, a fierce determination to speak out." The rock musician and campaigner Bono says, "The Arch" as he is universally known "ties tight faith, justice and passionate earthiness. He takes on the most sophisticated structural wrongs and breaks them down with a pure focus." Tutu evolved a philosophy of rebellion that fuses Christianity with African sensibility. "God is not evenhanded," he summarizes it today. "God is biased, horribly in favor of the weak. The minute an injustice is perpetrated, God is going to be on the side of the one who is being clobbered." In the South African context, that put Christianity at odds with apartheid. Tutu also drew on the African concept of ubuntu, which describes a world without division, in which the worth of the whole is determined by its parts. Ubuntu requires a pastoral approach and forgiveness even for your torturers. It also makes nonsense of separation between colors or religion and politics. Tutu was not the only church leader who opposed apartheid. What marked him out was an unearthly confidence. That self-assurance gives him the independence to confront injustice wherever he finds it, whether under apartheid or among South Africa's later rulers; in Burma, Gaza, Sudan or Tibet; or among conservatives in his own church opposed to women and gays. It also gives him his easy humor; he is ready to laugh at himself or his God. At some of the most charged moments of the struggle against apartheid, Tutu would break the tension by imploring, "God, we know you want change, but why do you not make it slightly more obvious?" (Wit is something he shares with Leah. Asked what Tutu's retirement means, she replies: "A great deal to me!") It is confidence, too, that gives Tutu his talent as a showman: the ability to read an individual or a crowd, open himself completely to them and come alongside them. As the author John Carlin once wrote, "There's no one who rattles our nonbelief as he does." At an opening concert for South Africa's soccer World Cup in June, he stole the show from a host of international stars simply by appearing onstage in a Bafana Bafana jersey, scarf and woolly bobble hat and smiling and dancing. During apartheid, Tutu would capture crowds of a different kind, time and again walking into standoffs between protesters and armed police and persuading both to walk away. Tutu's secret, then, is no secret at all. It is faith. Good and laughter and justice will prevail. "In the end," says Tutu, "the perpetrators of injustice or oppression, the ones who strut the stage of the world often seemingly unbeatable there is no doubt at all that they will bite the dust." The thought still delights him. "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" he roars. "Wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful!"

SOCIETY

Wikitravel: Have Web, Will Travel

By DAN FLETCHER Friday, Sep. 17, 2010

ILLUSTRATION BY SERGE BLOCH FOR TIME I'm a neophyte when it comes to international travel, but something of a nerd on the Web. That's why, on a recent two-week trip with a friend through Europe, I had two resources at the ready: a traditional guidebook spanning the entire continent and a BlackBerry stocked with links to Wikitravel.org. Wikitravel borrows more than a prefix from the giant online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It takes its anyone-can-edit philosophy, too, and applies it to the travel world. Whereas guidebooks are the product of a handful of writers and editors, the English version of Wikitravel alone is compiled by more than 40,000 contributors, each pitching in anything from full city guides to a line about their favorite local caf. In the seven years since it was founded, Wikitravel has accumulated enough entries (some 24,000 and counting in the English version) to be considered almost comprehensive: the city guide to Paris, France, may tip the scales at nearly 20,000 words, but Paris, Texas, has its own small guide too. Globetrotting duo Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins created the site in 2003, after a guidebook they were using on a trip through Southeast Asia led them on a lengthy hike through the forest to a hotel that no longer existed. "The typical editorial cycle on these guidebooks is three to five years," Jenkins says. "The worst part was not that we made this mistake, but that hundreds of others would too." Though the two seeded their travel-centric wiki with its first entries, taken from notes scribbled during their trips, it wasn't long before word of the project spread and the contributions started coming in. "There's this huge desire for travelers to share information from their trips," Jenkins says. "We gave them a format to do that in." Whereas Wikipedia is criticized for letting anyone edit its articles who's to say I know anything about astrophysics? that uncensored access is a strength in the travel world. A guide written by committee has something for everyone tips from business travelers dining in a city's swankiest spots to pointers from backpackers on the best street meal. And when local experts chime in, it makes for entertaining and sometimes tongue-in-cheek advice. Taking a vacation to Mongolia? Avoid eating marmots, as they can carry the bubonic plague. Planning a

trip to Mogadishu? At busy intersections, just fire a machine gun in the air to clear pedestrians out of the way. Jenkins and Prodromou still contribute to Wikitravel, but it's no longer theirs. The pair sold the site in 2006 to Internet Brands, a conglomerate of some of the Web's larger online communities. But thanks to the unique attributes of the wiki format the site contains a license that lets anyone use, modify or even sell the online guides the two were able to start up Wikitravel Press, which produces dead-tree copies of some of the site's meatier entries. Having already published guidebooks for seven cities (three more will follow shortly) Wikitravel Press is partially a nod to practicality not every country nor every traveler has always-on Internet access. But traditional publishing could learn something from the Wikitravel model too: new editions are issued every few months, the better to incorporate the latest contributions from the site (once they're looked over by a professional editor). The market for ink-on-paper travel guides won't dry up anytime soon. But whether it's online or in print, Wikitravel has a speed and convenience the books' publishers can only envy. On my trip through Europe, a budget spaghetti place ($6.50 plates!) in Bruges, Belgium, recommended by our guidebook was shut down for the summer. Not only did Wikitravel help me locate an alternative, it also let me leave a note for other tourists to warn them their spaghetti night might have to wait for the fall. "We have a very understandable goal and premise: the traveler comes first," Jenkins says. "We're not interested in how the world should be; we're interested in how things are on the ground now for a traveler." And whether that ground is well-trodden or rarely covered, there's no better guide than those who have gone before you. This article originally appeared in the September 27, 2010 issue of Time Europe magazine.

Supersize Me: Why Our Burgers Are Getting Bigger

By CLAIRE SUDDATH Saturday, Oct. 16, 2010

I just ate a pizza made out of hamburgers. By that I mean that I tried Burger King's new Pizza Burger, a 2,530-calorie monstrosity that includes four hamburger patties, pepperoni, mozzarella and something called Tuscan sauce on an enormous sesame-seed bun. The $13 megaburger is 9.5 in. (24 cm) in diameter the size of a small pizza and is the caloric equivalent of nearly four Whoppers. I made it through two slices before I called it quits.

The Pizza Burger may be the largest burger produced by a fast-food chain, but the foot-long (30 cm) cheeseburgers at Hardee's and Carl's Jr. aren't far behind. For a while, West Coast chain Red Robin stuffed burgers with mozzarella sticks. East Coast chain Friendly's sometimes wedges a patty between two grilled-cheese sandwiches. Oversize concept burgers are everywhere. "This is what everyone in the industry is doing now," says Brad Haley, vice president of marketing for CKE Restaurants, the parent company of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's. "We still offer low-fat, low-carb alternatives, but those never sell as well as big hamburgers do."

Burger King's new $13 Pizza Burger Danny Kim for TIME America's century-long love affair with the hamburger has survived health trends, the processed-food backlash, even the recession. But the past decade has seen a shift in consumption patterns from the traditional patty-and-bun combination to what marketing executives call premium and specialty burgers that focus on high-quality beef and previously uncommon accoutrements. That helps explain why restaurants are touting gourmet toppings, creating novelty proportions and making buns out of everything from soft pretzels to glazed doughnuts. Given that nearly 27% of U.S. adults are not just overweight but obese, the idea of a pizza-size sandwich might be cause for hand wringing and finger wagging, but very few Burger King customers will actually have access to it. Right now, the supersize item is available only at the BK Whopper Bar in New York City. "These extreme foods are oftentimes just a stunt, something to get the consumer to think about their restaurant," says Brian Wansink, director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab and author of Mindless Eating. "Take the KFC Double Down, for example. If no one had ordered it, would it have still been a good idea? Absolutely. It made them seem edgy." On the consumption side, media stunts can get a restaurant only so far. Freakishly large burgers provide amusement, maybe earn the eater some bragging rights, but in the end they offer nothing more than a hint of pizza sauce or a slight doughnut aftertaste. The foot-longs don't even have that. After all, food can't taste longer.

Fighting School Violence by Pinpointing Its Victims

By Annie Murphy Paul / Chicago Sunday, Oct. 17, 2010

Jimmy Fishbein for TIME Ron Huberman is a fast-talking former beat cop with an M.B.A. and a passion for number crunching. For just under two years, he has run the Chicago public-school system, a job whose duties include trying not only to raise test scores and graduation rates but also to keep students from getting killed. During the past school year, 245 Chicago public-school students were shot, and 27 of them died. Huberman thinks the toll would have been even higher had it not been for a controversial school-safety program he announced last fall and is continuing this year. Instead of focusing solely on the perpetrators of violence, the district is also identifying potential victims figuring out which students are the most likely to be gunned down and taking steps to keep them safe. The initiative, one of the first of its kind in the U.S., is the natural extension of a burgeoning field of study called victimization research. Its premise: most crime victims are not chosen at random, and some people are much more likely than others to become targets, on the basis of factors such as where they live, how they spend their time and even which personality traits they possess. Huberman, 38, approached Chicago's seemingly intractable youth-violence problem by gathering detailed information about the more than 500 public-school students who had been shot in the city over the previous two years. The typical student shooting victim was failing academically, absent 40% of the school year (compared with the average student's 16%) and five times more likely to be off track to graduate than other students. These victims90% of whom were malealso had a history of school disciplinary problems, racking up eight times as many incidents of serious misconduct, like drug use or gang activity, as classmates who were not shot. Huberman and his team used the data to create a predictive model that identified a tenth of Chicago's roughly 100,000 public high school students as at increased risk of victimization and about 250 individuals at the very highest risk. "If you're not in that group of about 10,000 kids, your likelihood of being shot is incredibly low," Huberman says. If you're in the ultra-high-risk group of 250, he says, "your chances of being shot in the next two years are 1 in 5."

After identifying the ultra-high-risk students, Huberman set about trying to change how they spend their time. "How many alcoholic drinks someone consumes each day, how many nights a week someone spends outside the homethese things are highly predictive of victimization," says Robert Sampson, chair of the sociology department at Harvard University. Another major predictor is proximity to crime hot spots, places where assaults and other illegal activity tend to cluster. If you live in or near a hot spot, you're more likely to be victimized. This was the case for Derrion Albert, a 16-year-old who was beaten to death with railroad ties on his way home from school last fall. His route home passed through a South Side neighborhood notorious for gang violence. Though many of the ultra-high-risk students live in high-crime neighborhoods, Huberman has taken steps to mitigate their risk: he has assigned each of them a full-time mentoran adult from the student's community who gets paid to act as a counselor, cheerleader and role model and to be available to the student around the clock. Huberman's $60 million safety program, which is financed by federal stimulus grants, also subsidizes part-time jobs for at-risk students. The jobs and mentors are intended to offer guidance and instill good habits and also to help run out the clock. "Every hour a kid is working at his job or talking to his mentor is an hour he's not hanging out on the street corner, vulnerable to getting shot," says Josh Gray, 33, deputy director of the Chicago schools' antiviolence initiative. "We track their activities very carefully." The strategy seems to have worked for at least one participant. "Sunshine," as he was nicknamed by a program staffer, is a slight young man who seems engulfed by his baggy jeans and black leather coat. Identified last fall as a senior with an ultra-high risk of being shot, he ended up bonding with his mentor, spending as much as 30 hours a week with him, sharing meals, playing basketball, going online to learn about colleges and applying for financial aid. In June he became the first person in his family to graduate from high school. The program has made Sunshine feel safer. "Before, I was a fish out of water," he says. "I couldn't breathe. Now I have water around me, and I can breathe again." The Odds of Victimization Some of the links social scientists are making between how people behave and how likely they are to be victimized are in line with our everyday assumptions about crime: we know we're more likely to be mugged if we stay out late partying than if we have an early dinner and go to bed. But some of the researchers' theories go further, tying the odds of victimization to certain personality traits. Christopher Schreck, an associate professor of criminal justice at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is at the vanguard of these studies. In a 2006 paper published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, he and his two co-authors analyzed data that tracked 3,500 young people starting when they were in the sixth and seventh grades. To measure the participants' level of self-control, they were asked to rate how strongly they agreed with a series of statements, such as "I act on the spur of the moment," "I do what brings me pleasure now" and "I am more concerned with the short run." The youths were also asked how many times they had experienced physical assault, robbery or theft. Even after controlling for contact with delinquent peers, Schreck found that youths' level of self-control effectively predicted how often they were victimizedat the time of the first survey as well as a follow-up

a year later. Low self-control, he concluded, predicts vulnerability to crime "potentially many years into the future." Scientists are also searching for characteristics associated with another form of youth aggression: bullying. A 2008 study of nearly 2,000 children, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that the "trajectory of victimization" begins as early as age 2. The aggression of young children who are unable to peacefully negotiate solutions to social problems can lead to those kids' being bullied. This helps explain why a number of antibullying initiatives are taking a victim-focused approach, teaching bullied kids how to handle social situations and manage their emotions more effectively. Such efforts have shown promise in reducing victimization, but a concern still lingers: Is it a good idea to label vulnerable young people, who are just developing their identities, as victims? The answer is that the stigma is worth it if the intervention saves lives. But some youth-violence experts are skeptical. "My models can tell me where and when people are most likely to be victimized, but they can't tell me with certainty that it will be Joe and not John who will be the victim," says Harvard's Sampson. "Showering resources on a small number of individuals in the belief that they're the ones who will be victimized is unlikely to pay off." One problem with the Chicago program is that "time does not stand still," Sampson says. "Older kids are aging out of the gangs. Younger kids are coming up. New alliances and enmities are being formed. By the time you draw up a list [of potential victims], it's going to be outdated." Huberman disagrees. His victim-prediction model pinpointed more than 40% of the Chicago high school students who ended up getting shot during the past academic year. And he thinks providing mentoring and jobs for high-risk kids kept at least some of them from meeting the same fate. As for the danger of labeling, it's relative. "None of our kids were remotely surprised to learn that they're potential victims," says Jonathan Moy, 32, a program manager for the Chicago schools' safety initiative. "They already know they're vulnerable. They're just glad someone else noticed."

TO OUR READERS

Letter from the Editor: Twisted Patriotism

By RICHARD STENGEL Thursday, Sep. 30, 2010

TIME Editor at Large Bart Gellman interviews members of the Ohio Defense force in Roseville, Ohio on Aug. 21, 2010. Ty Cacek for TIME True patriotism is not owned by any party or person. Nor is there a one-size-fits-all definition that would please all those who consider themselves patriots. We each define the idea and act on it in our own way. But there are some definitions that cross the line, that pervert patriotism and take it to a place that is hateful and dangerous. Barry Goldwater famously declared in his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican Convention that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Fine. But some forms of extremism in defense of a misguided sense of liberty can be poisonous. And such noxious extremism can come from left or right or anywhere. In this week's powerful and disturbing cover story, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative correspondent Barton Gellman explores the world of extreme antigovernment alienation, from the training protocols of America's militias all the way to the deranged plans of a neo-Nazi who sought to plant a dirty bomb in Washington. In recent years, rhetoric on the left and the right of the political spectrum has grown more incendiary, but both sides still aim to achieve their ends with ballots, not bullets. The story portrays those who believe that government is more than just the problem; they believe it is the enemy. The most extreme militants do not believe in change through peaceful means and think it is only a matter of time before they will have to take up arms against the federal government. Barton spent the past six months working on this, his first TIME cover story, and traveled to California, Ohio, North Carolina, New York and Washington. "I grew up target shooting and have family in the Army," he notes, "so the guns didn't scare me. What scared me is the way some antigovernment groups are training to use them and the matter-of-factness of some of their members when they speak of bloodshed." The striking photograph on the cover and those inside were taken by a young photographer named Ty Cacek, who accompanied Barton to an Ohio Defense Force training site in Zanesville, Ohio. Ty is just 19, but his vision has a maturity that belies his age. The entire project was overseen by national editor and Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy.

TIME has a long history of innovation in visual media which continues to this day. In 1937 we won an Oscar for our March of Time newsreels. On Sept. 27, 2010, we won an Emmy in the new digital documentary category, for three online videos called the Iconic Photo series. The series was produced and edited by Craig Duff, TIME.com's director of multimedia, who accepted the award alongside photographer Anthony Suau, whose image of a young man hammering at the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the subject of one of the videos. "The idea," Duff says, "is to bring famous images to life in a new medium, with the same attention to reporting and storytelling that we have always been known for."

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Young Blood
By MARY POLS Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

Chlo Grace Moretz has 30,000 followers on Twitter, but she is not allowed to wear high heels, not even to the premieres of her movies. In her latest, Let Me In, the 13-year-old gives a transfixing, delicately intuitive performance as Abby, an ancient vampire trapped in the inconvenient shell of a child's body. She has seen some "really beautiful" snippets of Let the Right One In, the 2008 Swedish film that inspired director Matt Reeves' American remake, but not the whole R-rated film. Her parents, McCoy (Mac) and Teri Moretz, are strict about such things. Chlo does hope that in a few years they will soften their stance on the issue of pierced ears, but she is philosophical about making do with clip-ons. "I'm a girl," Chlo says. "I'm not 16. I'm not 20. I'm definitely 13. I get told that all the time." She shrugs, but it is not the shrug of an annoyed teen. She is unfailingly polite. It is the c'est la vie shrug of a professional, sitting in the Los Angeles office of her publicist.

Chloe Grace Moretz brings innocence to some very grownup roles. Sally Peterson for TIME Parental restrictions are something Chlo talks about a lot, both in interviews and on the video blogs she occasionally makes with one of her four brothers, Trevor, a 24-year-old look-alike who serves as her acting coach and works in movies as Trevor Duke. But it's difficult to decide whether these are the simple laments of an almost adolescent or a pre-emptive strike against those who consider her career to date an offense against innocence itself. There she was in the remake of The Amityville Horror at 6, conveying Salingeresque wisdom beyond her years in Diary of a Wimpy Kid and (500) Days of Summer and playing a foulmouthed killing machine named Hit-Girl in last spring's ultraviolent Kick-Ass. Let Me In is emotionally the darkest of them all yet another horror movie for a young actress whose filmography is already half horror, even if the movie looks and feels a lot less like Amityville than it does Carrie, Brian De Palma's unforgettable rendering of adolescent cruelty. Whatever the case, reminders of her age are needed. Children who are capable of the performances Chlo gives are flummoxing. We express amazement, and then we worry about the unnaturalness of it all. In Let Me In, for the first time, Chlo tackles a role that bears some resemblance to her own peculiar place in the world. Abby is worldly, with 250 years of experience, but even as a demon, she has the

vulnerability of a child and faces society's restrictions; 12-year-olds can't just run around killing people. Instead, her "father" (Richard Jenkins) hunts and disposes of bodies for her. There are hints of pedophilia, although the references are more oblique than in the original. It's a tragic story, as close as our vampire-crazed society has come to a realistic depiction of what a vampire's life might be like. At its heart is the love story between Abby and a bullied boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee, who endured The Road last year) who is also friendless and 12 but won't be an adolescent for long.

Chloe plays a Howl-toting middle schooler in Diary of a Wimpy Kid Everett Neither will Chlo, of course, but therein lies the problem. She is not just maturity in a cute package, like the young Jodie Foster or Tatum O'Neal. She is a gorgeous girl, with the kind of oversize cupid's bow of a mouth (inherited from her mother) that even when she's spitting the worst obscenities known to man, as she did, to audiences' horror, in Kick-Ass suggests a future sensuality that the world can't help being attracted to. She's like a more skilled version of Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby. Just looking at her incites guilt.

Chloe starring in a vampire thriller, Let Me in. Saeed Adyani / Overture Films When the "Where were the parents?" outrage over Kick-Ass hit last spring, Chlo's parents were, in fact, right there being supportive of what seemed to them like a good opportunity. To the media, Teri Moretz pointed out the hypocrisy of being more upset by her daughter's swearing onscreen than by her gleefully killing people. Chlo, the family said, was capable of differentiating between fact and fiction. Kick-Ass has undeniably been great for her career. She just signed up for an adaptation of the cult comic

Emily the Strange, and she's been shooting Martin Scorsese's Hugo Cabret in London and Paris. She's been gone for months, so it's no wonder that her father took a day off from his Beverly Hills plastic-surgery practice (he relocated from Atlanta in 2005, just as Chlo's career got serious) to spend time with his daughter during her press interviews. Clean-cut and still speaking with the soft North Carolina twang of his youth, he gives an impression of sunny stability. Mac is aware that his daughter has been favorably compared to Foster and Natalie Portman ("We just file that away," he says placidly), attributes Chlo's extraordinary talent to a gift from God and gracefully sidesteps controversy. When Lindsay Lohan's name is introduced with regard to the pitfalls of child stardom, he says only, "Bless her heart," with a sincerity that makes you feel dirty for bringing it up. Asked whether he has seen any impact on his daughter from all these dark parts nightmares, for instance? he evades with endearing stories about tiny Chlo memorizing lines even before she could read.

Chloe as Mindy Macready in Kick-Ass Dan Smith / Lionsgate Chlo is more willing to answer the question directly. "I've never been scared or affected by anything I ever do," she says. "I never even go into a funk when I do a crying scene, you know? Because it's fun to me." She likens herself to an athlete or a dancer and says that, while "God definitely gave me something," she works hard to refine her talent. She created a diary for Abby, trying to imagine what goes on in her mind, and by the time of her audition (a tape of which was leaked on YouTube) she already had an uncanny grasp on the character. Chlo gives constant credit to her brother Trevor for this. "The way I like to put it is, it's like a painting," she says. "I draw the outline, and he fills it in and makes it perfect." She does not read her own press, considering it neither fun nor helpful. (She is sweet and savvy enough to say kind things about being interviewed: "Press is cool. I like it, to a point.") But innocent though she may be, she's not oblivious to the downsides of living an adorable existence in public. In one of last year's rambling, chatty vlogs, Trevor and Chlo call for questions from fans. "Nothing too personal," Trevor says. "'Cause if you're creepy, I'm going to edit it and delete it, and you won't get heard." He indicates his little sister. "Because she's 12, O.K.?" Chlo opens her eyes wide and puts on a winning expression of mock horror. Maybe it's those four big brothers, but the girl with the scary talent seems to feel as safe as houses.

Reeler than Real

By RICHARD CORLISS Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

Joaquin Phoenix Magnolia Pictures "Do you want to be the subject of this documentary or not?" the filmmaker Ariel Schulman asks his photographer brother Nev (rhymes with Steve). "No," says Nev, "I do not." But of course he does, or there would be no Catfish, the tale of Nev's Internet friendship with 8-year-old Abby, a budding artist, and with her Michigan mother Angela and teenage half sister Megan. As warning shadows creep over the naive Nev's Facebook tryst and he ventures toward an encounter with the sirens of the Upper Peninsula, a question forms in the viewer's mind: Is this a documentary or not? Is Catfish real? Or just "real"? Reality is "one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes," Vladimir Nabokov wrote in the afterword to Lolita (itself the supposed document of an adult male's inappropriate relationship with an underage girl). That dictum surely applies to the reality TV of the Survivor and Jerry Springer varieties. But taking a page from these shows, the nonfiction film has gotten a reality makeover. You used to be able to trust that the scenes in a documentary really happened. But in Catfish and in another hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Exit Through the Gift Shop, which since its April release has earned $3.3 million (in the nano-world of indie films, that's Avatar money), as well as in the Joaquin Phoenix docutravesty I'm Still Here you have to wonder if you're being taken. That's part of the weirdness, the appeal and the sales pitch of the new fakeumentary. Crockumentary. Prankumentary. Or, after Nabokov, "documentary." Gift Shop presents itself as the record of one Thierry Guetta, a Frenchman who videotapes L.A. graffiti artists in action. He manages to contact Banksy, the famed, mysterious English art prankster, and becomes his chronicler. The film, which purports to have been assembled by Banksy from Guetta's tapes, has much to say about the appropriation and exploitation of an artist's work. But who really made it, and how? That's Banksy's secret. The perplexities about Catfish begin with Nev, a swarthy cutie (if the movie were remade in Hollywood, he'd be played by Jake Gyllenhaal) who during the filming has no liaison worth mentioning. Catfish

suggests a reprise of the e-mail-romance comedy You've Got Mail, then flirts briefly with Texas Chainsaw Massacre elements and finally goes for a Wizard of Oz type twist. Maybe it's real, maybe not. But even discounting that meta-matter, Catfish keeps you glued to its fable of the lure and peril of virtual intimacy and invested in the poignant psychology of one of its female characters. If the movie were to come out of its own closet, she might be the first person in a "documentary" to earn an Oscar nod for Best Actress. Phoenix has been an Oscar finalist twice, for his roles as the Roman villain in Gladiator and Johnny Cash in Walk the Line. In the new warts-and-all (in fact, all-warts) portrait by his brother-in-law Casey Affleck, the actor impersonates "Joaquin Phoenix," a Method movie star who puts on so much weight he looks like a morose Zach Galifianakis, ingests mountains of cocaine, abuses his staff and makes two humiliating visits: one to hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, in a bid to jump-start his rap career, the other as an incoherent guest on David Letterman's talk show. On Sept. 22, Phoenix returned to Letterman, clean-shaven and straight-talking, to fess up to the ruse. That might have pricked the air out of I'm Still Here's balloon if it weren't such an illuminating, dead-on parody of Hollywood ego run amok. Even though it's fake, it's still squirmingly real. Strictly speaking, nothing onscreen is real. Shot selection, filming and editing demand dozens of artistic decisions, all of which conspire to fictionalize content. The documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty recognized the genre's dramatic needs as far back as 1922, when, while filming Nanook of the North, he directed his Inuit star to re-enact events he had told Flaherty about. But these three "documentaries" also have antecedents in classic faux docs. I'm Still Here borrows Sacha Baron Cohen's mix of fake character and real confrontation and pushes it up one bold notch. Catfish hints at The Blair Witch Project, with a different sort of strange force awaiting Nev. And Exit Through the Gift Shop is spiritual kin to the 1973 F for Fake, in which Orson Welles took a BBC doc of art forger Elmyr de Hory, recut it and added footage starring himself a fuller-figured, on-camera Banksy. Welles knew that a viewer asks only one thing of any movie, real, fake or somewhere in between: keep me watching.

New Exhibit Gives Object Lesson in China's Power

By RICHARD LACAYO Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

You can say this for the Qianlong Emperor, who ruled China for 60 years in the 18th century: he was good with catchy names. At the Qianlong Garden, a personal retreat he designed and had built in the Forbidden City in Beijing, there's a Gate of Spreading Auspiciousness, a Hall of Fulfilling Original Wishes and a Building for Enjoying Lush Scenery. The Studio for Self-Restraint doesn't sound like much fun. But the Building of Extending Delightwho wouldn't want to get a look inside that one?

Now you can. In the mid-1920s, the garden was closed up and effectively abandoned. But a restoration project begun nine years ago by Beijing's Palace Museum and the World Monuments Fund is currently bringing the place back to life. While renovations continue, a selection of the precious contents of the garden and its pavilions has headed to the U.S. as part of "The Emperor's Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City," an exhibition currently at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. Nancy Berliner, the museum's curator of Chinese art, organized the show and is an adviser to the restoration project, which is expected to be completed in 2019. The Qianlong Emperor had a cadre of phenomenally skilled craftsmen at his command, the kind who could produce painted lacquer panels with an almost phosphorescent glow, superb carved furnishings and wall paintings of great charm. There are 90 of these treasures in the show, which remains at the Peabody Essex until Jan. 9, then travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Milwaukee Art Museum. That makes this the largest exhibition the Palace Museum has ever sent abroad, and when the garden reopens to the public, it's unlikely these objects will ever travel again. Meanwhile, they add up to a fascinating glimpse of one man's rich personal paradise, assembled when his empire was at the height of its power, wealth and ironclad self-regardand on the threshold of a disastrous decline.

Courtesy of the Palace Museum, Beijing The exquisite contents of the Qianlong Garden were meant to be the accessories of a serene old age. A two-acre (0.8 hectare) compound of courtyards, greenery and more than a dozen pavilions, the garden is attached to the Palace of Tranquility and Longevity, a retreat built by the Emperor for his retirement. This explains why the garden also contains a Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Servicethe Emperor wanted it known that he'd been a busy man. Born with the Manchu name Hungli, he was the fourth emperor of the Qing (pronounced ching) dynasty, which was established by the Manchus after they swept down from the north in 1644. When he rose to the throne in 1736, the Qianlong Emperor was 25 years old. Over time he would prove to be a warrior king: his defeat of a Mongol uprising on the empire's western border led to the acquisition of territories that increased the empire's size by a third. But he would also be a philosopher king, one who wrote poetry and commissioned an anthology of 2,000 years' worth of Chinese texts, which eventually filled 36,000 volumes. Whether this made up for his habit of executing writers who offended himand sometimes their entire families as wellis hard to say. In the 18th century the Chinese still considered their empire the center of the universe. They had a point. In 1750, China's population was about 179 million, 30 million more than all of Europe. At the peak of his reign, the Qianlong Emperor presided over a realm of almost 4.6 million sq. mi. (12 million sq km),

making it the largest empire in the world. When a British mission arrived at the Imperial Court in 1793 to press for increased trade, the aged Emperor sent George III the reply that he had no need of British manufactures"we possess all things"but that Britain was welcome like other nations to pay tribute to him as a vassal state. All the same, the Emperor was curious about Western abilities and inventions. In the gardens northwest of the Forbidden City that are known to Westerners as the Old Summer Palace, he ordered the construction of a number of European-style stone buildings with Baroque touches. And his court artists included French and Italian Jesuits who brought Western methods of representation and the magic of perspective drawing to the wall paintings in the Qianlong Garden. One of those paintings, in which two elegant women preside over a roomful of boisterous children, is a masterful exercise in illusionistic technique. It's a scene with sources in traditional baizi tu paintings"picture of 100 sons"which represented the wish for many male offspring to continue the family line. But the Qianlong painting's relatively deep recessional space is a sign that the Chinese artist who made itscholars are uncertain who that washad been schooled in perspective by the Europeans at court. To enhance the illusion, our view into the room is framed by border panels that bear miniature paintings, all of them done separately by noted court artists in their characteristic styles and signed. Likewise the other small paintings visible within the room. On the right, a woman gazes at her reflection in a lacquered panel, absorbed in an illusion while she inhabits a world of illusion herself. To ensure that he would not occupy the imperial throne longer than his grandfather, China's longest-serving ruler, the Qianlong Emperor stepped down in 1795 in favor of his son. But even after his abdication, he remained the effective ruler of China until his death four years later at the age of 88. To the end, he could imagine that China would remain forever among the most powerful nations on earth. But in truth, his empire was declining, falling behind the West in technology and military power. Soon European nations, resentful of the obstacles China put up to foreign entry into its markets, would start pressing their case at gunpoint. By 1860, China had suffered two humiliating defeats in the Opium Wars, culminating in British and French troops looting and burning the Old Summer Palace. Yet the Qianlong Garden survived the turmoils of Chinese history intact, perhaps because it was relatively small and tucked away. In 1911 the forces of Sun Yat-sen established the Chinese Republic, and the last Qing Emperor, the hapless Puyi, was forced to abdicate. He lingered for years in the Forbidden City. But after he was abruptly ejected in 1924, the garden was closed up. Even in the 1950s, when the exterior courtyards were opened briefly to the public, the interiors remained shut. For decades the pavilions quietly sagged, the wall paintings peeled, and the plantings ran wild. It became a Chinese version of Grey Gardens, with the difference that nobody lived there but ghosts. Those conditions began to change when the Palace Museum and the World Monuments Fund, which assists historical-conservation projects, launched their effort to restore the garden to its former glory. The Qianlong Emperor, who loved beautiful things, especially his own, would have been pleased.

Treasures from the Forbidden City

Portrait of the Qianlong Emperor A new exhibit, "The Emperor's Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City" showcases works commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor, the fourth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, which was established by the Manchus after they invaded China from the north in 1644. His reign, from 1735 to 1795, is the second longest in Chinese history. He commissioned many portraits of himself, including pictures showing him in full armor on horseback, hosting victory banquets and even as a Buddhist deity.

Overhead View of the Emperor's Private Theater The Qinlong Garden consists of courtyards, greenery and more than a dozen pavilions of various sizes. In one of them, the Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service, was this room, the Emperor's private theater, with a small stage and a covered seating area.

View into the Emperor's Theater A circular portal one similar to the "moongates" that are a common outdoor feature of Chinese gardens opens on to a ground level view of the Emperor's theater. The Emperor loved illusions and filled the pavilions of the Qianlong Garden with them. One of them is visible at rear a two-story wall painting of a garden as seen through a trompe l'oeil painted portal that mimics the real one that we look through in the foreground. Through the circular entry a white crane, symbol of longevity, peers into the room. The "bamboo" lattice work in the foreground is itself an illusion real bamboo would crack in the cold winters of Beijing, so the Emperor's craftsmen used carved wood, which they stained to create the appearance of bamboo.

Interior Scene In the Supreme Chamber of Cultivating Harmony is this wall painting of a richly dressed palace woman and her attendant surrounded by boisterous children. The relatively deep illusionistic space of the room they occupy indicates the influence of European artists at the Emperor's court who trained their Chinese counterparts in the Western techniques of spatial perspective. The small inset paintings on the panels that border the room on three sides, as well as the paintings visible within the room, are all the work of notable Chinese artists, each working in his characteristic style, who produced and signed each one separately.

Jade Inlay Portrait of a Luohan The Building of Luminous Clouds contains a monumental wood screen with 16 panels depicting luohan semi-legendary disciples of the Buddha who achieved enlightenment. The portraits, made of white jade inlaid into jet black lacquer, are based upon a famous set, much admired by the Emperor, that was the work of Guanxiu, a Tang dynasty painter, poet and monk who lived from 832 to 912 A.D.

Detail of Luohan Portrait Guanxiu depicted the luohan as grotesques, giving them cartoonish features that he claimed had come

to him in a dream. Their appearance may also be intended to bear out the Buddhist belief that external appearance is no indicator of internal virtue.

Gilt Flower Remarkably, on the reverse side of the louhan panels the side turned to the wall are magnificent pictures of plants and flowers rendered in gold and silver paint on lacquer. They were rediscovered recently by conservators when they took down the luohan portrait panels for cleaning.

Detail of a Flower Panel The Qianlong Emperor employed a cadre of phenomenally skilled craftsmen.

Throne This piece is one of four carved wooden thrones in the Belvedere of Viewing Achievements. Each of the four occupied a separate and distinctly decorated throne room located on one of the four sides of a central core, each facing outward towards one of the four points of the compass. This one is inlaid with bamboo, jade and semi-precious stones.

Throne With Foot Stool Another of the thrones, this one, of sandalwood and cedar, has a carved back panel depicting deer in a mountainous landscape.

Cabinet A wood cabinet with lacquer and gold painted decoration is one of 90 items on display in the show.

Court Fan Fans of painted wood and brass mounted on long poles, which stand upright when not in use, were displayed in the Supreme Chamber of Cultivating Harmony. After its run at the Peabody, the show will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Ben Folds and Nick Hornby

By CLAIRE SUDDATH Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

The former front man of Ben Folds Five has teamed up with the author of High Fidelity to create Lonely Avenue, an album of touching, piano-driven pop that sounds almost like a collection of short stories. How does the songwriting process work when one of you [Hornby] can't play music? Folds: Nick just wrote what was in his head. He turned his thoughts into lyrics and e-mailed them to me. Hornby: We tried it once with Ben sending me an existing melody and me writing words to fit, but the other way was much better. "Belinda" is about a musician forced to sing an old love song written for someone he no longer loves. Has that happened to you?

Folds: No, I don't feel that way about the songs I'm singing. Once I write a song, it becomes like a cover. I don't relate to it anymore. I feel like I'm singing "Wooly Bully" or something. Why did you write a song about Bristol Palin's ex, Levi Johnston? Hornby: Levi seemed like a good metaphor for all the mistakes that we make when we're kids and the price that we pay for them. Folds: It's like the expiration date on milk. You vaguely know when it will go bad, but for him it was like, Oh, time's up. What's it like to compose a love song for your wife when you can't play music? Hornby: I hoped Ben might provide a kind of insouciant, upbeat melody. But he went for the big ballad 'cause he knew it was a love song. So then I got found out.

The Short List of Things to Do

WEEK OF OCTOBER 1

White Knuckles
Online

OK Go's brand of disposable guitar pop isn't for everyone, but its videos are small miracles of performance art. This one features a choreographed dance routine starring 12 highly trained rescue dogs, shot in one continuous take. (Not impressed? Ask a pet owner.) Lassie would be so proud.

Record Collection
Now in Stores

British DJ Mark Ronson (here with his band the Business Intl.) is a collaborating fool, inviting everyone from Boy George to Ghostface Killah to join in on his third album. Part hip-hop, part new wave, it'll make even the most timid wallflower get up and dance.

A Privilege to Die
Now in Stores

Part political party, part aid group and part terrorist outfit, Hizballah is the biggest wild card in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Journalist Thanassis Cambanis gets inside its members' mind-set and makes a strong case for why they're the biggest threat to the Jewish state.

The Little Foxes

Now on Stage

Lillian Hellman's 1939 drama about a rapacious Southern family at the turn of the previous century loses its period sets and costumes but gains a stark, existential urgency in avant-garde director Ivo van Hove's quirky, emotionally wrenching new off-Broadway staging.

Granta: Pakistan
Now in Stores

For its fall issue, the London-based literary magazine gathers writing and art from Pakistan and its diaspora, on topics ranging from Karachi pop stars to the Times Square bomber. It's a vibrant collection with an even more vibrant cover painted by a Pakistani truck artist.

BUSINESS

How Blockbuster Failed at Failing

By Stephen Gandel / Dallas Sunday, Oct. 17, 2010

Blockbuster may have to close two-thirds of its 3,500 stores Brian Ulrich In retrospect, it seems obvious that the practice of driving to a store to rent a movie to watch at home was preordained to extinction. The surprise, and the business tragedy, is this: the company that delivers movies to 15 million doorsteps these days isn't Blockbuster the retail chain that once dominated the industry but an upstart, Netflix, that used little more than a website and knowledge of the postal service to topple a far more powerful and wealthy rival. It had been clear for years that Blockbuster's model was unsustainable. Heck, Netflix was operating for six years before Blockbuster launched its own movie-by-mail service. So Blockbuster had more than enough time to adapt. Instead, its bosses hinted they could copy Netflix and crush the upstart. When that didn't work, they could have smartly managed the demise, handing whatever money the firm made over to shareholders. Blockbuster didn't do that either. It's one of those companies that failed at failing. Since 1999, Blockbuster has paid out in dividends just 12% of the cash its operations generated. Worse, a succession of managers squandered cash on schemes to keep the outmoded retail business alive. That just delayed the end. On Sept. 23, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy, a few weeks shy of its 25th birthday. For now, Blockbuster's more than 3,500 stores will remain open. It has worked out a deal with lenders to wipe out most of its $1 billion debt. In return, those lenders will be Blockbuster's new owners. Analysts estimate the company will have to close as many as two-thirds of its outlets, though CEO Jim Keyes says no determination has made. The same can be said for Keyes. Blockbuster has reportedly hired executive search firm Korn/Ferry to help the company find a new chief executive. While Blockbuster says Keyes may remain in the company's top job, he is also playing an active role in evaluating any successors. Blockbuster's bankruptcy is more bad news for the struggling economic recovery. The Dallas-based organization has 25,500 workers, of which 7,500 are full time. More than half could find themselves out of work. The bankruptcy will also create more vacant spaces in strip malls, adding to the woes of the lagging commercial real estate industry.

Bankruptcy could finally give Blockbuster the chance to provide movies to customers not only through stores but also via vending machines it currently has 6,630 DVD dispensers by mail and through a streaming service for Internet-connected DVD players and wireless TVs. "It's about being the most convenient for the customer," says Keyes. "Our business model, with multichannel distribution, is well positioned for the future." So Blockbuster may survive. But the market has changed so much that the former giant is unlikely to thrive. Its rival Redbox already has 24,000 video kiosks, more than three times the amount Blockbuster has, at supermarkets and other stores, dispensing DVDs at $1 per rental. Blockbuster has matched that price at its vending machines but gets three to five times that for a new release at its stores. In streaming video, Netflix has a huge lead on Blockbuster, yet Netflix is facing stiff competition from the likes of Apple, Amazon and Walmart. "Blockbuster doesn't have a clear run at the finish line," says Steve Harnsberger, who follows the market for the technology consulting firm FreeStyle. "Even if they transition to digital, it's not going to be what they used to make at the stores." A Breakthrough Goes Broke Blockbuster, ironically enough, was the product of a tech advance. Entrepreneur David Cook founded the outfit in 1985. A computer programmer, Cook noticed that typical movie-rental-store owners had no idea what they had in stock. Customers would pick an empty title case off a shelf and wait while a clerk hunted in the back room to see if there were any copies left. Cook programmed computers to keep track of inventory and give him a daily report of what customers were renting. While every video store had the newest releases, Cook's computers also allowed him to determine which older, classic titles people wanted and which ones to ditch. That allowed Blockbuster to optimize its movie selection. Today it's Retailing 101, but back then it was a revelation. Combine Cook's computers with brightly lit stores that had a family-friendly, no-porn policy and Blockbuster was a retail hit. Over dinner not long ago at a restaurant in Dallas, Cook, 59, who left Blockbuster in 1987 and has since started two technology companies, says the current situation is a shame. "It didn't have to be this way," he says. "They let technology eat them up." Just as Cook's larger, better-stocked stores had done in the '80s, Netflix made it easier to find the films you wanted, especially if you weren't looking for just new releases. Cook sold a controlling stake in Blockbuster to H. Wayne Huizenga for $18 million, and the new owner turned it into something worthy of its name. When Huizenga took over, Blockbuster had just 19 stores; he increased the number by some 500 a year. He would go on to own AutoNation and sports teams, including the NFL Miami Dolphins, as well as help bring the Marlins to Florida. These days, Huizenga, 72, seems more interested in the Ab Circle, a piece of exercise equipment in his Fort Lauderdale office, than in film rentals. But before Blockbuster went under, he shared some of its secrets. "We had a saying at Blockbuster," said Huizenga. "If you don't come in on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday. We worked hard." Blockbuster's share price soared during its rapid expansion. By '94, there were nearly 3,000 locations generating close to half a billion in annual cash flow. One of the keys was something Huizenga and his team called "managed dissatisfaction." On weekend nights, the most popular movies disappeared fast. But Blockbuster had more movie titles than many of its

rivals. So most customers would leave with something, if not their first choice, and would have an enjoyable evening anyway. The tactic kept customers happy and boosted profit. Studios charged less for the nonhits, and older titles were often paid for already. In those days, nearly 70% of Blockbuster's sales came from less-popular fare. Huizenga said he knew technology was going to hurt the brick-and-mortar business at some point. He hired a team to research new ways to deliver movies. "We discussed it a lot and thought about buying a cable company," he said. "But there were so many ways it could go, and none of us wanted to get into an area where we had no expertise." Having failed to conquer the tech risk, Huizenga devised a brilliant tactical retreat: he made Blockbuster somebody else's problem. He sold it in '94 to Viacom for nearly $8 billion. Without Huizenga, Blockbuster faltered. Viacom tried to turn the stores into outlets for its Paramount and MTV merchandise, selling T-shirts, toys and books. Sales fell. Within two years, Blockbuster lost half its value. Jim Antioco, a former Taco Bell boss who took over as CEO in '97, refocused on movies. Profits rose again, for a time. Then Huizenga's fears were realized: Netflix launched the year after Antioco took over, and within a few years the company started to eat into Blockbuster's sales. Rather than charge $5 per movie like Blockbuster, Netflix uses a subscription model. For $16.99 a month, Netflix customers can rent three movies at a time, choosing from its 100,000 films via the website. There are no late fees, which always turned off even Blockbuster's most loyal customers. Keep the movies as long as you like. Send one back, and Netflix sends you another. At first Antioco didn't seem to take the Web or the Netflix threat seriously. Blockbuster introduced a flat monthly-rental fee, but unlike Netflix, it continued to charge late fees. It wasn't until 2004 that Blockbuster launched a competing by-mail service. By then, Netflix had nearly 3 million customers. In a bid to slow the competition, Antioco finally eliminated late fees. Subscriptions increased, but not enough to compensate for the $300 million the company had been getting from tardy renters. Blockbuster's frustrated board, led by activist investor Carl Icahn, sent Antioco packing in '07. Keyes took over. Blockbuster got some things right. It must have, because these days it's Netflix that's taking a page from Huizenga's playbook. About 70% of Netflix's sales come from less-popular titles. And that's more profitable. That's because Netflix has to pay the studios significantly higher fees for new releases rather than, say, foreign flicks or art-house movies. That and the fact that Netflix doesn't have stores has made it much more profitable than Blockbuster. Last year, Netflix earned $116 million. Blockbuster lost $518 million. Still, Netflix will have to watch out; its own business model is quickly becoming outdated. Increasingly, consumers are streaming movies over the Internet, cutting out the middleman. And Netflix has a growing number of well-financed competitors, including Redbox. Amazon already sells movies. You can stream movies from Apple, through its AppleTV device, and at Microsoft's Zune, through its game console xBox. Scarier still, Walmart recently bought the video-streaming website Vudu. Google's YouTube, movie studios and cable companies are also measuring the market.

Blockbuster is now in the streaming game, and Keyes thinks he can compete there. For new movies, Blockbuster has negotiated a 28-day exclusive period with four of the biggest studios. Keyes says the new-movie advantage matters when customers can quickly switch from Netflix to Blockbuster with one click from their couch. They'll pay a premium. Blockbuster charges $3.99 a rental though for $8.99 a month Netflix lets you watch all the movies you want. What's more, Netflix has 20,000 films available through its "Watch Instantly" streaming service. Blockbuster's service carries mostly recent releases. Netflix, for its part, seems to be adapting to oncoming technology, recently launching a streaming-only subscription service in Canada dumping its original business model. What's clear is that whether Netflix, Blockbuster or someone else dominates this new world of rentals, a huge market is resetting. There are few aneurysms in American business. Few companies drop dead. Instead, most endure a long slide into the grave. Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, who has studied technological change and its effect on large companies, says many of the decisions that led Blockbuster to bankruptcy might have appeared rational at the time. "But when faced with a threat by disruptive competitors like Netflix, the circumstances were different," says Christensen. "Decisions that in other circumstances would have made sense, instead drove the company into the ground." Into the ground Blockbuster went. In 2002 it had 8,000 stores and a market value of $3 billion. Today, movie-by-mail Netflix is worth nearly three times that much. And Blockbuster is broke.

SCIENCE

The Newest (and Horniest) Dinosaur: the Kosmoceratops

By JEFFREY KLUGER Friday, Sep. 24, 2010

An artist's reconstruction of the Kosmoceratops Lukas Panzarin / Utah Museum of Natural History / AP The movie trailer writes itself: Long ago, on the lost continent of Laramidia, lived the mysterious Kosmoceratops, a three-ton, 15-horned beast that roamed and ruled the swamps it called home. O.K., you might want to lose the lost-continent bit, and 15 horns kind of jumps the shark, but tweak it a little and you could have a winner. The thing is, however, you can't tweak any of this. According to a delightful new paper published Sept. 22 in the online science journal PloS One, the Kosmoceratops indeed lived a good 76 million years ago, according to the scientists' reckoning. And Laramidia better known today as the Western United States, with bits of Canada and Mexico was a real place, separated from the eastern half of the North American continent by a great inland sea. The PLoS paper reveals intriguing new things about both the animal and its ancient home. The division of North America into two land masses prevailed for about 27 million years during the late Cretaceous Period, 95 million to 68 million years ago. As sea levels rose worldwide, the central region of the continent flooded, producing a long but shallow body of water called the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway. Contemporary scientists have dubbed the area to the east Appalachia and to the west Laramidia, after Laramie, Wy., which is part of the old minicontinent. Though small just 20% of the area of modern North America Laramidia became what the authors of the paper call "a crucible of evolution," likely because of its lush vegetation and swampy coasts. Most of the animals that lived there were large-bodied from one to two tons (about 1,000 to 2,000 kg) and included the duck-billed hadrosaur, the armored ankylosaur and the dome-headed pachycephalosaur.

The Kosmoceratops was unknown to science until 2007, when Scott Richardson, a volunteer bone hunter who was part of a University of Utah expedition in the southern part of the state stumbled across a pair of skulls unlike any ever seen before. They were similar to that of the Triceratops except that they had a horn over each eye, one over the nose, one protruding from either cheekbone and no fewer than 10 forming a frill resembling bangs across the top of the head. "[It's] one of the most amazing animals ever known," Scott Sampson, a University of Utah paleontologist and the lead author of the PloS paper, told the Christian Science Monitor, "with a huge skull decorated with an assortment of bony bells and whistles." The full name of the animal is Kosmoceratops richardsoni: kosmos meaning "ornate" in Latin, and richardsoni a tip of the hat to Richardson an extraordinary honor for a mere volunteer. As with most such discoveries, it can take years of study after a fossil is found before a paper can be released granting it a name and declaring it a species; these two events at last happened this week. The almost comical array of horns on the Kosmoceratops' skull is, the investigators believe, a good example of a sort of natural selection on steroids. The protrusions would have been largely useless in battling predators and might even have hindered the animal's mobility much like the tail feathers on a peacock or the extravagant antlers on some species of ungulates. Rather, as with those physical features, the Kosmoceratops' horns would probably have been used principally to intimidate other males of the species and attract females. The Kosmoceratops was not the only dinosaur included in the new paper; also described was the Utahceratops. With a less remarkable array of just three horns, the animal is notable mostly for its size: 6,600 to 8,800 lb. (3,000 to 4,000 kg) and 18 to 22 ft. (6 to 7 m), compared with the 5,500-lb. (2,500 kg), 15-ft. (5 m) Kosmosaurus. The fact that one paper included two new animals is an indicator of the explosion of paleontological discoveries in southern Utah ever since a 1.9 millionacre tract known as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) was set aside for protection in 1996. Prior to the expeditions that have taken place at the GSENM, paleontologists were long puzzled by the seeming division between the types of animals that once lived in north and south Laramidia. On a land mass so comparatively small and narrow, there should have been a wide commingling of creatures, yet while large-bodied animals were abundant everywhere, at the species level there was not a lot of crossover between north and south. The mystery was particularly hard to crack because of a lack of good data: the majority of Laramidian fossils came from Alberta, with a relatively sparse bone record in the south. But a decade's worth of collecting has yielded the fossils of large and small herbivores and carnivores, as well as the remains of plants, fish, amphibians and insects. The GSENM is, the researchers write, one of the most "fossiliferous" zones in Laramidia, and this has helped them develop new theories to explain the north-south species schism. Among the possible explanations for the animals' segregation are a now vanished mountain range that blocked migration, an east-to-west river that presented a similar obstacle, and seasonal flooding that washed out low-lying habitats and discouraged repopulation. The lack of much geological evidence of such features so far at least rules those theories out for now. The remaining likely causes are subtle

temperature, precipitation and other climatic differences between the north and south to which the local animals adapted. This idea is supported by samples of ancient pollen that are distinct to the regions. "Dinosaurs appear to have been sensitive to latitudinal zonation in environments," the scientists wrote in their study science-paper-speak for "Some liked it hotter; some liked it cooler; some liked it wetter; some liked it dryer." The Kosmoceratops may be the most whimsical new dino to come along in a while, but it surely will not be the last. Indeed, 200 million years of dinosaur history will probably never yield all its secrets. With Utah's Grand Staircase open to science and off-limits to development, however, more of the discoveries that do get made are likely to be conveniently close to home.

PEOPLE

10 Questions for Danielle Steel

Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

Danielle Steel Brigitte Lacombe Of the books you've written, which are you most attached to? John Frederick, ROCHESTER HILLS, MICH. I probably feel most attached to the one about my son, which is His Bright Light, but that's nonfiction. Fictionwise, I always feel most attached to the one I just finished, so that would be Legacy. It's about a Dakota Sioux Indian woman. She's a very courageous soul. My son is bipolar like your son Nick was. His Bright Light is my favorite book of yours. Would you ever be a spokesperson for mental illness? Debra Lathrop, READING, PA. I am, in a way, because I wrote a book about having a child who was bipolar to show what we experienced, what he experienced, to give people hope. But I wouldn't be interested in touring the country and making speeches. My life was really taken up in great part by his illness for many years. When he died, I remember thinking, I don't want this to become my life now as a crusade. Are any of your novels based on your life? Stella Cardozo, MONTREAL Sometimes, in an altered form. There's no question that in 113 books, something has snuck in. But there's not a whole lot that's lifted straight out of my life. My mother asked me the same question once, and I said I'd have been dead years ago if all that had happened to me. As the mother of nine children, how do you balance writing and family?

Pam Lawson, MCPHERSON, KANS. I wrote at night when they were asleep or in the day when they were at school or both. I didn't sleep a lot. Does it annoy you that you've not won a prize for literature? Sally Budd, CRAWLEY, ENGLAND What means more to me is that the books mean so much to the readers. And I never think about winning prizes--just about what I write and reaching out to people. How do you avoid confusing the story lines of your novels? Joann Mackewich, WEST HAVEN, CONN. I only work on one at a time. I'll start from the beginning to the end. Then I put it aside. I can't do two chapters in one and then another chapter in another one. I do 22-hour stints for several weeks until it's done. I don't go shopping. I don't take messages. I don't go out. I stay with the book. Have you ever had writer's block? If so, how did you overcome it? Sloan Piva, PORTSMOUTH, R.I. I had writer's block once. My son died, my marriage ended, and I stopped writing for about 14 months. And I was afraid that was it forever. Then I was in a car with a friend in London, and a double-decker bus was heading at us at full speed, and the driver was not pulling out of the intersection. I screamed, and the driver pushed his foot on the gas. The bus scraped the back bumper, and we discovered that our driver was drunk. It shook me up so badly that I got a great idea for a book, went back to my hotel and started writing again. Are you religious? Anna Maraj, STANGER, SOUTH AFRICA Yes, definitely. It comes through in my writing. Every now and then, religious titles sneak in--Answered Prayers, Amazing Grace--but that stuff is very personal. You can get through hard times without religion. It's helped me, but it's not for everybody. What's your response to the opinion that novels like yours are mercenary, lack deep ideas and can't long survive? Nick Twinamatsiko, KAMPALA, UGANDA Five hundred ninety million readers would say something different. And I think popular literature does survive. Charles Dickens is a wonderful example. Shakespeare is far more important than anything I'll

ever write, but when I go to bed at night and I want to read something, I don't read Shakespeare. I read authors like me, and I guess other people do too. You've written more than 100 books. Do you know how many more you'd like to write? Marisa Caplan, SAN FRANCISCO Probably another hundred.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

WELLNESS

Fertility and Cancer: Surviving and Having Kids Too

By BONNIE ROCHMAN Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

Tamara Shopsin and Jason Fulford for TIME Holly Trandel was married on Oct. 1. Like any other bride, she juggled an endless to-do list before gliding down the aisle of St. Alphonsus Church in Chicago, the train of her fluted ivory silk gown sweeping between the oak pews. Unlike other newlyweds, however, Trandel, 29, already has her future as a mother mapped out five potential babies on ice at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where she works as a community health educator. Trandel was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009, two months after getting engaged. But in many ways she considers herself lucky. Her cancer was caught early. It also happened to be discovered at the hospital that serves as the hub of the nationwide Oncofertility Consortium, a network of some 60 cancer centers where doctors take a larger-than-usual view of the aftereffects of cancernamely, the impact of treatment on a patient's fertility. What it means to survive cancer today is very different from what it meant 20 or even 10 years ago. Back then, doctors and patients approached cancer like a monster to be slain; surviving was the only goal. But as treatments have improved, cancer patients have begun demanding more than just survival. They want a return to life as usual. They want to be normal people, leading normal lives. They want to have babies. Yet, as if having cancer weren't bad enough, curing itdepending on the recommended therapiescan reduce patients' future chance of having children or erase it entirely. It is a possibility faced by at least 10% of the 1.4 million Americans under age 40 who find out each year that they have cancer, caught off-guard in their prime childbearing years. Many of these 140,000 patients, including 12,500 children, are not informed about ways to safeguard their fertility. A study published in December in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that only 47% of oncologists routinely refer their patients to fertility specialists.

Why? Some doctors worry that fertility preservation techniques will delay treatment. Others don't know exactly what their patients' options are; most oncology offices are neither set up to offer fertility counseling nor affiliated with reproductive oncologists who can. And in most cancer centers, it's not clear whose responsibility it is to handle questions of fertilitythe oncologist's? The surgeon's? "It falls through the cracks," says Gwen Quinn, a specialist in reproductive health and cancer at the University of South Florida. "If patients say they don't care about that right now, they just want to get rid of the cancer, they need to be told that in five years they may feel differently. They should at least be informed." Meet Your Fertility Navigator Teresa Woodruff had heard too many stories of cancer survivors intent on starting a family only to discover that their bodies could not cooperate. Three years ago she coined the term oncofertility to refer to the burgeoning discipline at the intersection of oncology and reproductive medicine and launched the Oncofertility Consortium. With a $21.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the consortium is studying why cancer drugs threaten fertility, trailblazing techniques to preserve fertility in cancer patients and training doctors to include fertility preservation as a standard part of cancer care. At Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where Woodruff's consortium is based and where Trandel was treated, the staff now includes one of just a handful of "fertility navigators" nationwidepeople whose mission is to assess patients who ultimately want children and immediately direct them to an expert on reproduction and cancer. Within just two days of her diagnosis, Trandel and her then fianc, Rich Manprisio, found themselves in a fertility specialist's office being told that Trandel would likely face early menopause because of her chemotherapy and that if they wanted to be parents, they had better freeze some embryos. "I was kind of, like, I can't believe we are sitting here listening to this stuff," recalls Trandel. Trandel underwent surgery to remove the cancer in June 2009; the next month, she began hormone shots. Doctors retrieved eight eggs; five of them were fertilized and frozen. Trandel's mother calls them her "grandsicles." After Trandel completes two years of tamoxifen, she will try to get pregnant. The thought of building a future family, she says, "has helped me through the tough times." That so many oncologists fail to press patients to preserve their fertility rankles Dr. Sandra Carson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. "It sounds rather controlling, but patients have just received this devastating diagnosis, and it's all too much to process. You have to be almost parental in encouraging them to do this," she says. How Best to Prepare The solution for men is usually as simple as freezing sperm, but the reproductive cycle in women is far more complex. Depending on how quickly doctors need to forge ahead with cancer treatment, a woman can choose to harvest and freeze either eggs or embryos, assuming she has access to spermand time. The procedure takes up to two weeks. But a cutting-edge technique called ovarian tissue cryopreservationin which an ovary or a piece of one is laparoscopically removed and frozen before cancer therapy, then transplanted once a woman decides she wants to get pregnantcan shrink that time to 15 minutes. Doctors have been studying the procedure for at least a decade, but it has only recently begun yielding results. To date, more than a dozen live births have been reported from

transplanted frozen ovarian tissue, including the first in the U.S. to a cancer patient6-lb., 13-oz. (3 kg) Grant Patrick Tucker, born May 27. His mother, Amy Tucker, 32, of Columbia, Ill., had one of her ovaries removed in 1998 at age 20 when the technique was still experimental. That it happened at all was pure chance; Tucker's nurse had recently attended a lecture about the new procedure and mentioned it to her. In 2009, a year after getting married, Tucker, a Hodgkin's lymphoma survivor, had the ovary replaced, and within eight months, she was pregnant. "Every day I look at Grant and I'm like, You are truly a miracle," she says. "I am so grateful I was in the right place at the right time." Dr. Sherman Silber, who treated Tucker, counts more than 60 specimens of frozen ovarian tissue "under lock and key" in his lab at St. Luke's Hospital in St. Louis. The procedure requires only small samples of ovary, since its payload of follicles is located in the outer millimeter of tissue, which is transplanted back in strips. Each week, Silber says he consults with another regretful cancer survivor who never froze her ovarian tissue because her oncologist had discouraged it or, worse, failed to even tell her about the possibility. "We should have 1,000 frozen," says Silber, who heads St. Luke's Infertility Center. For many women with "liquid" cancers like Hodgkin's lymphoma or leukemia, however, ovarian transplants may not be ideal because the blood-borne nature of the disease means that cancer cells could have infiltrated the ovary. But such patients' options are expanding. In September, Brown's Carson announced that she had helped develop an artificial ovary that could one day be used to nurture immature eggs harvested from cancer patients to full maturity. And in Woodruff's lab at Northwestern, consortium scientists are working on other methods of maturing ovarian follicles outside the body, coaxing them in petri dishes into full-fledged fertilization-ready eggs. Developing eggs outside the body circumvents the need to reintroduce potentially cancerous ovarian tissue. "If we could get this right, it could change the way cancer diagnosis affects young women," says Woodruff. The Costs and Questions The evolving science aside, cancer patients face other roadblocks to fertility, like insuranceor, rather, the lack of it. Hardly any insurance plans cover cancer-related fertility preservation (freezing eggs or embryos costs $8,000 to $15,000), even though they pay for procedures like hair-loss treatment after chemo and postsurgery breast reconstruction. In the March issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, a senior research fellow at the Oncofertility Consortium, argued that infertility should be treated no differently from any other postcancer health issue. "Cancer patients are not infertile in the traditional way," says Campo-Engelstein, who is helping draft new federal regulations for pretreatment coverage. "If they want to preserve their fertility, they need to do that before their cancer treatment." Then there are ethical minefields some patients must pick their way through. Consider cases of childhood cancer, for example. Should young girls have their ovaries harvested? "There could be an 8-year-old girl who doesn't even have a concept of what it means to reproduce and be a mother," says Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law at Northwestern University who specializes in reproductive rights and bioethics. Amid the philosophical debate, life and science march on. In April at Brown University, ovarian tissue was removed from an 18-month-old girl with cancer; she is believed to be the youngest child to undergo fertility preservation.

Even within the Oncofertility Consortium, experts have debated whether the ability to have biological children should be regarded as so critical. (Research shows that many cancer patients prefer conception to adoption.) At least two reasons it matters: studies suggest that adoption agencies tend to reject cancer survivors, and perhaps more important, the mere idea of having a baby can prop up a woman reeling from a diagnosis. "The overriding devastation we hear from women is that they won't be able to be parents," says Corey Whelan, program director at the American Fertility Association, a patient-advocacy organization. That is why Teresa Woodruff in late September traded her white lab coat for a brown linen suit and addressed the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues, which indirectly funds the consortium's work. She thanked the caucus for its support and pledged that the consortium's scientists, bioengineers, doctors, ethicists and academics would not rest until they solved the problem of having cancer and having babies. Because science owes it to people like Holly Trandel, preparing for her Mediterranean honeymoon cruise, to address not only that they survive but also how they live.

LETTERS

Inbox
Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

Surprise Party One has to wonder: Where were the Tea Partyers when Bush and Cheney lied to get us into the Iraq war ["It's Tea Time," Sept. 27]? Where were they when Guantnamo Bay and Abu Ghraib tarnished our reputation worldwide? And where were they when Republicans' trickle-down economic policy in the first eight years of this century ground our economy into the dirt? Now all of a sudden, after Obama has been trying to clean up the mess in less than two years in office, they are "fed up," want to "restore honor" and want their voices heard? Wen Chen, MIDDLETON, WIS. When I saw your cover line, I was apprehensive, since the national media have been so far off base on real Tea Party people. You helped me overcome my doubt. Not once did I see the word racist or extremist in your story. You even got the players right, using art size to denote importance. You played it straight down the middle, and we need more political reporting like yours. Ron Hill, BEACON, N.Y. I suggest the Tea Party candidates, to prove their sincerity, publicly vow not to accept any big-government perks, like a transportation allowance or insurance, if they win, and to serve only one term lest they themselves become part of the problem. David Kelly, TUCSON, ARIZ. I was shocked by the photograph of the rally in Flagstaff, Ariz., showing young children holding Tea Party signs. If there is anything this country needs less, it is school-age children growing up blindly indoctrinated in their parents' political opinions, whatever those opinions may be. What this country does need are citizens who can process ideas, think critically and help arrive at solutions. David Cohen, WYCKOFF, N.J. We're Here, We're Peers, Get Used to It If the Catholic Church has no authority to confer ordination on women because Jesus had no female Apostles, then no Native Americans, Eskimos or South Americans should be ordained either ["Robes for Women," Sept. 27]. The Catholic Church condemned Galileo as a heretic in 1633 for his correct theory that the earth revolves around the sun--and did not formally clear him of heresy charges until 1992. How many more years will it take to see the lack of logic in its position against ordaining women? Jim Brennan, ROCKY POINT, N.Y.

There is only one Catholic Church. There are tens of thousands of Protestant churches. These good women and their followers have more in common with those churches than with the mother church that Christ created with his Apostles more than 2,000 years ago in that upper room. Jim Baxter, BEAUMONT, TEXAS Kudos to Jane Via and Nancy Corran as they carry out their revolutionary priesthood at Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Community in San Diego. Remember that the religious authorities burned Joan of Arc at the stake, then ultimately canonized her as a saint. Daniel J. Dinan, SAN DIEGO As Victor Hugo said, "One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas." All the guys in robes in the world cannot stop an idea whose time has come. Nikki Wright, NASHVILLE Images from Africa Now I know why Cdric Gerbehaye has all those awards ["Birth Pains," Sept. 27]. His Sudan photographs are simply gorgeous. Nancy Nesbit, TAOS, N.M. More on Israel The sample of highly defensive letters you received railing against Karl Vick's probe into Israeli attitudes toward peace talks should be seen as Exhibit A in support of Vick's premise [Inbox, Sept. 27]. The 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon, a Jew who lived in Tel Aviv for many years, said much the same thing in reports last year--that the two-state solution is all but dead given the political power of the settlers and the fact that many Israelis, faced with such an intractable problem, live in denial about the conflict. M. Bruce Grosjean, SAN FRANCISCO

Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts or samples before recycling

BRIEFING

The Skimmer
By DAN FLETCHER Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

Danny Kim for TIME Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History Of Innovation By Steven Johnson Riverhead; 336 pages A good idea is often fleeting--slipping away into the ether as quickly as it emerged. So a book that seeks to explain where ideas come from? Good luck with that. Fortunately, Johnson isn't lacking in ambition. A favorite among the tech set, he breezily tracks the development of some of the world's best ideas, from Darwin's theory of evolution to Google News. While ideas may present themselves as sudden bursts of insight, the truth is much messier. "We like to think of our ideas as a $40,000 incubator, shipped direct from the factory," Johnson writes. "In reality they've been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage." GPS navigation started with two U.S. scientists snooping on the Soviets' Sputnik. The best ideas don't occur in a vacuum; they take time to grow, standing on the shoulders of occasionally unlikely people, platforms and experiences. Will reading Johnson's book give you the idea for the next big thing? Not by itself. But if you believe his thesis, it might just prove to be the first spark. READ [X] SKIM TOSS

The Moment
By MICHAEL ELLIOTT Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

Because its regime is one of the most loathsome in the world, there is a temptation to see every political development in North Korea as a precursor to the sort of instability that might one day lead to real change. So it has been with the announcement that Kim Jong Un, thought to be 27, a son of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, had been promoted to general--a sign that he is likely to inherit his father's, and grandfather's, mantle. But the younger Kim is untested, the army has its own agenda, and China would like its ally to at least make some moves toward economic reform. So might the ice be about to crack? Don't bet on it. Loathsome regimes are not necessarily short-lived. The Stalinist hereditary monarchy in Pyongyang has lasted 62 years so far. (The Soviet Union managed 73.) It would be nice if the North's nuclear-armed government really were unstable, less because the world could then breathe easier, more because North Koreans could then breathe freer. But Kim Jong Un's ascension does not make so devoutly wished a consummation any more likely than it ever was.

The World
By Harriet Barovick; Ishaan Tharoor; Alexandra Silver; Claire Suddath; Frances Romero; Kayla Webley;
Josh Sanburn Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

1 | Pakistan
U.S., NATO Increase Air Strikes A series of NATO air strikes in Pakistan's mountainous northwestern region killed more than 50 suspected militants, officials said on Sept. 27. The rare manned helicopter attacks came as the CIA ramped up its unmanned drone missions against insurgent strongholds in Pakistan's tribal areas. More than 20 such assaults were carried out in September alone--the most ever in a single month--as part of the agency's covert war in the region. Military officials say the drone attacks are essential when targeting the militants' hideouts along the rugged Afghan border with Pakistan, but civilians on both sides of the border have been killed as a result, prompting protests. The recent strikes came as NATO and Afghan forces launched a ground offensive against Taliban positions in southern Afghanistan. U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan 2004-07 9 2008 34 2009 53

2010 (AS OF SEPT. 27) 76 SOURCE: NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION 2 | Paris Terrorism Fears Lead to High Alert France raised its terrorism alert following bomb threats at the Eiffel Tower and two congested train stations, suggesting that there may be an intensifying standoff between France and North African jihadist group al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The alarm came as President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that five French nationals who had been kidnapped in Niger by AQIM on Sept. 16 were reportedly spotted alive in Mali. French officials indicated they would be willing to negotiate with the group for the release of the captives. 3 | Israel Peace Talks' Future Uncertain Despite appeals from the international community, Israel allowed its 10-month moratorium on West Bank settlement construction to end Sept. 26, leaving the future of peace talks in doubt--as splits among Israeli officials over the current path of negotiations became clear. While Israeli leaders agreed to meet their Palestinian counterparts in October, more hard-line Israelis have cooled on talks, calling for a renewed focus on Iran and only small gestures toward peace with the Palestinians. 4 | U.K. Sibling Rivalry in Party Election During his debut address as Britain's newly elected Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband pledged to overhaul the party that saw itself ousted from power in May. But he also praised his older brother, the better-known--and more centrist--David Miliband, a former Foreign Secretary, whom Ed narrowly defeated for the post. The sibling rivalry triggered a media frenzy, but the two downplayed any question of personal or political differences. In his speech, Ed (left) warned against the war in Afghanistan's becoming "a war without end." 5 | Russia Mayor Dismissed President Dmitri Medvedev sacked Moscow's longtime mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, Sept. 28. Luzhkov, who was mayor for 18 years, oversaw Moscow's transformation into a glitzy 21st century city but is regarded as a politician cast in the old Soviet mold. His firing could be a sign of Medvedev's asserting his authority over Russia's elite. 6 | Washington

A U.S.-War-Crimes Case A hearing for one of five U.S. Army soldiers charged with murder for allegedly killing three Afghan civilians began Sept. 27 at a base in Washington State. If court-martialed and convicted, Specialist Jeremy Morlock (above) could face the death sentence. The five soldiers are said to have kept some body parts of Afghans as souvenirs. 7 | Venezuela Opposition Gains Strength Though President Hugo Chvez's United Socialist Party (PSUV) won the most seats in Venezuela's Sept. 26 legislative elections, the outcome was widely seen as a victory for the opposition. With the nation facing rampant crime and high inflation, PSUV lost its two-thirds majority, meaning Chvez will no longer rule unchecked. The opposition--which boycotted the 2005 elections--won about half the popular vote, suggesting Chvez may face a challenge when he runs for re-election in 2012. 8 | Nigeria Children Abducted The Sept. 27 kidnapping of 15 schoolchildren from prominent Nigerian families signaled a new level of lawlessness in a delta region often referred to as the country's kidnapping capital because of the frequency of abductions of foreign oil workers. A ransom of $130,000 was demanded. The country has seen a sharp increase in abductions of wealthy Nigerians and their relatives as security for oil workers has been improved. 9 | New York City Soft Gun Laws Linked to Crime A nationwide coalition of 596 mayors, led by New York City's Michael Bloomberg, issued a report using previously unavailable federal data that links gun-control laws with interstate gun trafficking. According to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, in 2009 states with lax gun laws exported guns involved in crimes at significantly higher rates than states with strict regulations. Ten states supplied 49% of the 43,000 guns traced to U.S. crime scenes. Guns recovered in out-of-state crimes* NATIONAL AVERAGE 14.1 STATES WITH HIGHEST RATES (Miss., W.Va., Ky., Alaska, Ala., S.C., Va., Ind., Nev., Ga.)

33.4 STATES WITH LOWEST RATES (Mich., Ill., R.I., Minn., Calif., Mass., N.J., N.Y., Hawaii, D.C.) 4.6 *PER 100,000 INHABITANTS; SOURCE: BUREAU OF ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, FIREARMS AND EXPLOSIVES 10 | Spain PROTESTS IN EUROPE Sept. 29 saw Spain's first general strike in eight years, as workers decried spending cuts and changes in labor laws. Meanwhile, Europeans elsewhere demonstrated against austerity measures intended to aid debt-ridden economies. In Brussels, tens of thousands of people marched toward European Union buildings to express dissatisfaction with the way the continent's technocrats have dealt with the financial crisis. * | What They're Ending in Germany: War is over! World War I, that is. On Oct. 3, Germany will pay the very last installment of the $33 billion debt levied by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles for starting WW I. The fines crippled the German economy at the time, leading to resentment that fueled the Nazis' rise to power. Adolf Hitler refused to pay reparations during his rule. Most of the money will be distributed among private individuals and pension funds.

ONE NATION

GOP Candidates Withstand Dems' Efforts to Demonize

By MARK HALPERIN Monday, Sep. 27, 2010

From left: Tom Williams / Roll Call / Getty Images; David Kohl / AP; Matt Sullivan / Reuters Republicans remain poised to have a heckuva Election Day. But their curious choices in a few important contests could have undermined the GOP's overarching antiBig Government message. Some standouts in the group of Republican nominees: a former Lehman Brothers executive; the guy who was in charge of budgets and trade agreements for George W. Bush; another financial honcho who has long

been one of the nation's leading proponents of privatizing Social Security; two corporate CEOs with checkered records; and a onetime health care CEO with an even more checkered record. In 2010, politician might be a dirty word, but you wouldn't expect fat cats, Wall Streeters, free traders, Bushies and Big Business profiteers to fare much better than Democratic pols when proffered to an angry electorate. But, to the surprise of some analysts, and to the great disappointment of the White House and its allies, the Republican candidates with those career badges are not only in the hunt to win some of the choicest midterm contests, but in many cases have opened up significant polling leads, despite buckets of money spent by Democrats over many months to stop them.

From left: Pat Toomey, Rob Portman and John Kasich In Ohio, the exLehman Brothers executive (and former long-term Republican Congressman) John Kasich has opened up a comfortable lead over the incumbent Democratic governor Ted Strickland. Also in the Buckeye State, Rob Portman, who headed both the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in the last Bush Administration, is considered by even most Democratic strategists to be a lock to win an open Senate seat and beat the state's lieutenant governor Lee Fisher. Ohio voters have been told over and over again, on radio and television, flyers and blast e-mails, about how rich Kasich got in the era of Wall Street plunder, and how Portman contributed to George W. Bush's record of deficits and the blight of American jobs shipped overseas. But those messages have bounced off like popgun caps rather than pierced like silver bullets. Ditto for the Senate race in Pennsylvania, where Pat Toomey, the Republican nominee, is now heavily favored to win the seat currently held by newly minted Democrat Arlen Specter over the party's nominee, Congressman Joe Sestak. Toomey made a fortune as a Wall Street derivatives trader and peddled personal savings accounts as a cure for Social Security's troubled balance sheet as the head of the conservative group the Club for Growth. Sestak and his allies have pounded away at those themes for months only to watch the Democratic Congressman fall further and further behind in the polls. In three other megaraces, former business leaders are in a position to win, despite efforts to disqualify them in the present based on their pasts. The former eBay CEO Meg Whitman remains in a virtual tie against Jerry Brown to replace Arnold Schwarzenegger as the governor of California. Carly Fiorina, who

left the top job at Hewlett-Packard under a corporate cloud, has got a decent chance to unseat incumbent Golden State Senator Barbara Boxer. And in Florida, controversial former health care executive Rick Scott, who ran Columbia/HCA when the hospital company was enmeshed in a fraud and kickback scandal, has jumped ahead of Alex Sink, the Democrats' nominee for the open governor's slot. All three Republicans made oodles of money in their private-sector jobs, and in the case of Whitman and Scott, have spent many millions of their own to propel their candidacies. Again, Democrats have relentlessly pointed out these potential biographical blots and have scored no knockout punches for their efforts. In some of these cases, to be sure, the Democratic candidates are career politicians in an anti-career-politician environment. But Sestak was an admiral in the Navy and Sink was a banker, and both entered elective office relatively recently. No matter. In 2010, having a D after your name is a scarlet letter that apparently carries a more negative wallop than the heavy professional baggage lugged by Kasich, Portman, Toomey, Whitman, Fiorina and Scott. Not all those Republicans will necessarily win in November but it wouldn't be safe to wager against any of them at this point. Democrats bet that they could make voters forget about the short, unpopular tale of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid trinity by talking about the long, dense histories of their Republican opponents. So far, that bet has not paid off.

Why Murkowski Can Win: Follow the Money

By JAY NEWTON-SMALL Thursday, Sep. 30, 2010

Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) attends a Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Subcommittee hearing on Minerals Management Service reorganization June 23, 2010 in Washington, DC. Astrid Riecken / Getty Images

No Senate candidate has won a write-in bid since South Carolina's Strom Thurmond in 1954, but don't count Alaska's Lisa Murkowski out just yet. She hails from a state known for voting with its wallet, and that wallet has been thin of late. For every dollar Alaskans pay in federal taxes, they get back $1.82 from Washington, making it the most heavily subsidized state in the union. Enter Joe Miller, the Tea Party darling and small-government advocate who beat Murkowski in the GOP primary. Miller believes that Social Security, Medicare and unemployment benefits are unconstitutional. He wants to abolish the Department of Education and opposes earmarks, unlike Murkowski. "The continued government growth, the continued fiscal insanity, is going to result in this country, I think, falling from its leadership role in the international scene," Miller told TIME. Miller's candidacy has provoked panic in the state and local employees' unions, including the firefighter, police and teachers' associations, and all of Alaska's native tribes. "I think Alaskans understand the importance of [Murkowski's] presence in Washington," says Barb Angaiak, president of Alaska's National Education Association chapter. A new TIMECNNOpinion Research poll found Murkowski pulling in 36% of likely voters, compared with 38% for Miller a statistical tie. Her aides say online donations and volunteer numbers are up as well. She will need all that and more to make sure voters know how to spell M-U-R-K-O-W-S-K-I by Nov. 2.

Lab Report: Health, Science and Medicine

By ALICE PARK Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

MRI scan of brain. SPL / Getty Images

MEDICAL RESEARCH When Clinical Trials Uncover New Problems When you volunteer to participate in a medical-research study, you expect the unexpected; you even sign a consent form acknowledging that you do. But a new report finds that many participants get more than they bargain for when they sign up for these trials. In a sample of more than 1,400 participants involved in research using imaging techniques such as X-ray, CT scan and MRI, scientists found that 40% of the study volunteers learned of potential health problems that were unrelated to the original purpose of the study. That figure may sound alarming, but only 6% of the surprise findings required additional clinical care, with 1% benefiting the volunteer--early cancer diagnoses, for example. The results, say the scientists, should remind investigators to be better prepared for unanticipated consequences. Even as imaging technology that detects the smallest lesions continues to improve, most researchers and volunteers are still working with consent forms that neither adequately address these possibilities nor describe how they should be handled when they occur. HEART DISEASE Increase Statin Use, Lower Health Care Costs? Heart disease is the leading killer of Americans, and yet it is preventable, say experts. Which is why researchers decided to find out whether helping more healthy people avoid the disease--by prescribing cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins more widely--could save not only lives but health care dollars as well. Current national guidelines suggest that only those at high risk of developing heart disease--defined as having a greater than 20% chance of experiencing a heart event in the next 10 years--should take a statin. But the new study has found that if the threshold for statin eligibility were lowered to include people with even 15% risk, overall costs for treating problems such as heart attack and chest pain would drop. The authors stress, however, that the calculation represents a delicate balance between the health benefits and potential risks of the therapy. While statins are relatively safe, like any other drug they have side effects, like muscle weakness, which can become severe. If giving statins to more people without symptoms of heart disease causes an increase in serious side effects, it could result in higher health care costs in the long run. Finding that balance is now up to a group of experts who are currently revising national heart-risk guidelines. FROM THE LABS Is It That Time of The Month?

Women's monthly periods can lead to moodiness, owing to fluctuations in estrogen, and now a rat study suggests that the hormone changes may leave the brain a bit fuzzier too. Rats with lower estrogen levels took longer to learn a new task than those with higher levels. Previous studies had found that ovulating women had trouble concentrating, but the animal work is the first to measure the hormone's effect on cognitive function. Skin-Cancer Gene Melanoma comes in many forms, and predicting who is at risk of developing the most aggressive and fastest-spreading skin cancers would help more patients take advantage of treatments earlier. Scientists have homed in on a gene linked to a cell's ability to control proliferation, and in samples of the most aggressive melanoma tumors, the gene was missing. HAZARDOUS HOGS Cruising on a motorcycle may make riders feel alive, but a new study finds that black bikers are nearly 60% more likely to die in a crash than white riders, even if they are wearing helmets. The reason may have to do with the faster and heavier machines black riders prefer, which suggests that safety efforts should focus on more than simple protection against head injuries.

Verbatim
Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

'I don't want my son Mirwais to be a foreigner. I want Mirwais to be Afghan.' HAMID KARZAI, Afghan President, tearing up as he denounced an attack by militants that killed a deputy provincial governor and five other people on Sept. 28; Karzai spoke of his fear that the violence in his country will cause young people to leave 'I feel like David against Goliath, but I've got five rocks, and I haven't thrown one yet.' EDDIE LONG, pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga., saying he will fight allegations that he coerced young male church members into having sex with him 'We have to wage peace.' IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF, who is behind the contested plan to build an Islamic cultural center near New York City's Ground Zero, saying the project is meant to curb extremism by creating a platform for moderate Muslims

'People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up.' PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, admonishing apathetic Democratic voters who plan to sit out midterm elections and warning that doing so would derail the party's agenda for years 'China has come with warnings before, but they have no influence on the committee's work.' GEIR LUNDESTAD, director of the Nobel Institute, on China's attempt to dissuade it from awarding the Peace Prize to jailed Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo 'Sesame Street will not be brought to you by the number 34 or the letter D.' RUSSELL BRAND, fianc of singer Katy Perry, whose segment on the show with the character Elmo will not be broadcast because of complaints over her cleavage-baring outfit 'Israeli government policies are not supported by all Jews.' RICHARD KUPER, a member of the group Jews for Justice for Palestinians, which dispatched a supply boat to the blockaded Gaza Strip; the vessel was intercepted by Israeli forces without incident TALKING HEADS Stephen Colbert The Comedy Central satirist, speaking before Congress about the lack of immigration reform: "America's farms are presently far too dependent on immigrant labor to pick our fruits and vegetables ... This is America. I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, then sliced by a Guatemalan and served by a Venezuelan in a spa where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian." --9/24/10 Jonathan Holslag Writing in the Financial Times about the recent clash between China and Japan over disputed waters: "China flexes its muscle at a moment when other powers feel less confident about their future and are under pressure to stand strong. In such a climate, distrust could turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy, because it weakens the position of moderate leaders, stirs mutual fear of aggression and, above all, strengthens the belief that shifts in the balance of power inevitably lead to greater global rivalry." --9/27/10 Roger Cohen

Brief History: Wiretapping

By William Lee Adams Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

Police investigate the DNC headquarters at Watergate Hotel following the June 1972 burglary. Ken Feil Washington Post / Getty Images Every day, Hundreds of millions of people chat, exchange messages and send images via social-networking sites like Facebook and mobile devices like the BlackBerry. Unfortunately for security officials, those users include criminals and suspected terrorists. So it wasn't altogether surprising when, on Sept. 27, it emerged that the Obama Administration plans to submit a bill to Congress next year that could force communications firms--including giants like Facebook and Skype--to ensure that they have the technical know-how to intercept and unscramble messages if asked to do so by officials. Wiretapping first became a tool of U.S. law enforcement in the 1890s, but the Supreme Court didn't establish its constitutionality until 1928, at the height of Prohibition. Roy Olmstead, a Seattle bootlegger, had been convicted on evidence gathered through a wiretap in his home. He argued that authorities had violated his rights--but the court upheld his conviction, saying eavesdropping was not a physical invasion of privacy. In 1963, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized the FBI to break into the home and office of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The agency planted bugs, assuming they would unearth King's rumored links to communists, but removed them in 1966. Richard Nixon approved the illegal wiretapping of four reporters and 13 government officials in 1969 in a bid to unmask those leaking information to the press. And in 1972 a grand jury indicted two Nixon aides for the burglary and illegal wiretapping of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. FBI officials have said that Obama's proposal won't expand their authority: any intercepts would need legal approval. Privacy advocates may shriek, but as criminals turn to new technologies, those in law enforcement may have greater license to tap into our now wireless lives.

APPRECIATION

Eddie Fisher: The Songs, the Sins, the Scandal

By RICHARD CORLISS Friday, Sep. 24, 2010

American singer Eddie Fisher smiles and stands with his arm around his wife, American actress Debbie Reynolds, right, while looking at British-born actress Elizabeth Taylor in Las Vegas, Nev. in this 1958 photo. The next year Fisher left Reynolds and married Taylor. Hulton Archive / Getty Images Eddie Fisher was the golden boychik of mainstream pop, the dimpled troubadour from Philadelphia. Pretty and poised, he had the packaging and the product: a clear, confident tenor that could turn powerful or intimate at will. In the 1950-54 prerock period the most tepid five years in the history of 20th century music he had 19 songs reach the Top 10, including four ("Wish You Were Here," "I'm Walking Behind You," "Oh! My Pa-Pa," "I Need You Now") that went to No. 1. When he was drafted into the Army during the Korean War, President Harry Truman proclaimed him "my favorite PFC." He transferred his vinyl popularity to a TV variety show and then to movies. Fisher's covenant with Hollywood mythology was sealed with his 1955 marriage to Debbie Reynolds, Hollywood's princess of pert. It marked the perfect merger of adorable and adorabler. Show-business legend-making is dreams plus lies. Sometimes the truth slithers out from under the parade float, sometimes not more frequently now than in that sedate stretch between World War II and Vietnam. Fisher was an agent of one of those shocks to propriety in 1959, when he divorced Reynolds to marry Elizabeth Taylor. Liz could wed early and often (this was her fourth marriage, at 27); the public saw her as a creature of exotic allure and mercurial passions. But Eddie, promoted as the boy next door, was declared a war criminal of domesticity for deserting Debbie's dollhouse. Fisher was the victim of another, larger jolt in 1962, when Taylor left him for her Cleopatra co-star Richard Burton. Biter bit, America thought; serves him right. The one-two punch of infidelity and cuckoldry left an instant, perpetual brand on Fisher's rsum. From platinum recording artist to Johnny Carson punch line, he dwelled in oldies purgatory for nearly 50 years, dying Sept. 22 in Berkeley, Calif., of complications from a hip fracture. He was 82.

"By the time I was 33 years old," he proclaimed in his 1999 autobiography Been There, Done That (penned with celebrity ghostwriter David Fisher), "I'd been married to America's sweetheart and America's femme fatale, and both marriages had ended in scandal; I'd been one of the most popular singers in America and had given up my career for love; I had fathered two children and adopted two children and rarely saw any of them; I was addicted to methamphetamines, and I couldn't sleep at night without a huge dose of Librium. And from all this I had learned one very important lesson: There were no rules for me. I could get away with anything so long as that sound came out of my throat." By the 1980s, the drugs were choking the sound; Fisher was often unable to perform. "It was either quit cocaine or quit performing," he says in the book. New paragraph. "So much for my career." As a kid, Edwin Jack Fisher didn't have much to sing about. He described his father Joseph, a Jewish immigrant from Russia (where the family name was either Tisch or Fisch) as "a nasty, abusive man, a tyrant." Joseph's side of the family thought that his wife, the long-suffering Kate, was beneath them. ("The only time I ever heard the Fishers say anything kind about my mother was in the limousine on the way to her funeral.") The boy's ticket out of this unhappy family was his voice; by his teens it had gotten him regular jobs on three Philadelphia radio shows. Eddie Cantor heard him sing at Grossinger's in the Catskills and put Fisher on his national radio show, and the 21-year-old secured a recording contract with RCA Victor. His skein of hits began with "Any Time," which became his signature song, and abated around the time RCA signed Elvis Presley, another young heartthrob with the voice of rebellion, sexuality and the future. Fisher co-starred in two movies: with Reynolds in the 1956 Bundle of Joy, and with Taylor in Butterfield 8 in 1960. His presence, so genial on TV, looked skulking on the big screen, and that wrote finis to his film career. He admitted he was no great shakes as a dramatic performer except for a few times on the concert stage. His father, now proud of his famous boy, would sit in the front row, gazing up as Eddie sang the Euro-plaint "Oh! My Pa-Pa" ("To me he was so wonderful ..."), and Eddie would look down, seemingly misting up at the sight of the man who had made his family miserable. Now that, Fisher said, was acting. In his memoir, Fisher was incapable of acting the gentleman to his first wife. "I've often been asked what I learned from that marriage," he writes. "That's simple: Don't marry Debbie Reynolds." They had two children, Carrie (the writer and actress) and Todd (who in the 1990s managed Debbie's Las Vegas showplace). He would soon have little time for them. While consoling Taylor over the plane-crash death of her husband, producer Mike Todd, Fisher fell hard for the reigning movie queen. "Sexually she was every man's dream," he recalled. "She had the face of an angel and the morals of a truck driver." Decades after Taylor left him, he says, he still carried the torch with the blue flame. His third marriage, to actress Connie Stevens "the nicest ex-wife I've ever had" spawned two daughters, Tricia Leigh and Joely, and ended in the usual rancor. "I wish you good luck, good health and wealth and happiness in your own time on your own terms," Stevens wrote him in a farewell note. "I do not wish you love as you wouldn't know what to do with it." Love replaced lust in the Fisher hierarchy; then cocaine and methamphetamines took over. He got hooked in 1953, backstage at the Paramount Theater in Times Square, by the notorious Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson, who, Fisher claimed, also treated President John F. Kennedy. ("Jack Kennedy and I shared drugs and women.") Fisher's memoir details affairs with Ann-Margret, Edie Adams, Carol Lynley,

Stefanie Powers and many others, some of whom have denied the liaisons. He asserted that Taylor was also addicted to pills and booze and that he once borrowed a gun with the intention of shooting Burton. As the stories get wilder, in a book that may be more acute in its writing than in its veracity, the reader may think Fisher is channeling the other Richard Burton, the 19th century translator of the fanciful Mideast tales in One Thousand and One Nights. But we don't doubt that Fisher lived, as he insisted, "the thousand nights of pleasure and the thousand nights of drug-addicted hell." In 1990 he checked into the Betty Ford Clinic; apparently he was clean for his last 20 years. Fisher did not divorce his final wife, Betty Lin; she died nine years before he did. A gift of song, an early success, a gash of notoriety; a host of fractured hearts, only one of them his. Sometimes show-business truth can be more instructive than Tinseltown fable. Can we say that Eddie Fisher lived an exemplarily misspent life?

Gloria Stuart
By ALEXANDRA SILVER Monday, Oct. 11, 2010

In a way, Gloria Stuart's early lack of fulfillment was her ultimate good fortune: one of the reasons director James Cameron cast the actress in Titanic was that audiences weren't likely to recognize her. Although she appeared in more than 40 films in the 1930s, Stuart's face easily passed for that of an aged Kate Winslet, who played young Rose in the 1997 blockbuster about the sinking of the "unsinkable" ship. The role of Old Rose earned Stuart an Oscar nod--making her, at 87, the oldest actor ever nominated for an Academy Award. She found the character rewarding in its own right. "If I had been given plum roles like this back in the old days," she told the Chicago Tribune, "I would have stayed in Hollywood." When Stuart died Sept. 26 at 100, it was nearly 80 years since she'd debuted on the silver screen. She'd worked with Eddie Cantor, James Cagney and Dick Powell; played Shirley Temple's older cousin; acted with Boris Karloff in The Old Dark House and Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. But her career wasn't satisfying. As she described it, the all-controlling studios reduced the blond beauty to a "girl detective" or "society girl." Her life offscreen was less predictable. A founding member of the Screen Actors Guild, she also helped create the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Away from movies for some 30 years, she became a successful painter. She returned to acting in the '70s and had a role in 1982's My Favorite Year. But it was only after Titanic that Stuart wrote her memoir, I Just Kept Hoping.

Arthur Penn: The Miracle Worker of Bonnie and Clyde

By RICHARD CORLISS Thursday, Sep. 30, 2010

Director Arthur Penn on the set of his 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde Everett Collection The film's publicity tag line told the truth: "They're young. They're in love. They kill people." Bonnie and Clyde was the movie that changed movies, for a while. A true-crime love story told with a modernist flair, this 1967 hit certified Warren Beatty as a prince among actor-producers and made a star of Faye Dunaway. Its epochally violent climax announced that Hollywood was ready to become a full-time munitions factory. The movie defined the careers of that generation's film critics: the New York Times' Bosley Crowther excoriated it, and abruptly retired four months later; Newsweek's Joe Morgenstern panned the film one week, recanted and raved the next; a young Roger Ebert, and Pauline Kael, in one of her first New Yorker reviews, loved it. Its script, a first-time effort by Esquire staffers David Newman and Robert Benton, brought a European art-house sensibility to the very American themes of (in Kael terms) kiss-kiss and bang-bang. And it turned Arthur Penn into the director du jour. Penn specialized in rebel movies that were in sync with their bold times and often a little ahead of the mass audience. His 1965 Mickey One was a Kafka-Camus tale of a stand-up comic (Beatty) in a perpetual state of existential flight. Alice's Restaurant, the 1969 film version of Arlo Guthrie's 19-minute talking-blues FM-radio hit, was an elegy for two generations: the hippie young and the restless middle-age marrieds. The following year, in Little Big Man, he directed a comic dirge itemizing the white man's extermination of native Americans. But Penn didn't dress the part of a wild auteur; he kept his hair short and his manner calm. In 1956 he married the actress Peggy Mauer; 54 years later she was with him

at their Manhattan home when he died Sept. 28, the day after his 88th birthday, of congestive heart failure. Born in Philadelphia, Arthur performed in Army theater troupes in World War II, then enrolled at the experimental Black Mountain College, studied at two universities in Italy and trained at the Actors Studio. In 1953, Fred Coe, the decade's most influential producer of dramatic anthology shows, promoted the young man to director on The Gulf Playhouse. Penn was thus a charter member of the Golden Age of TV drama, along with such future filmmakers as Sydney Pollack, John Frankenheimer, Norman Jewison and Robert Altman. In the next few years Penn would direct original plays by Paddy Chayefsky (A Gift from Cotton Mather, The Strong Woman, Catch My Boy on Sunday), Horton Foote (The Tears of My Sister, John Turner Davis) and Rod Serling (The Dark Side of the Earth). One TV play Gore Vidal's The Death of Billy the Kid, starring Paul Newman and originally directed by Robert Mulligan became Penn's first feature film. Another TV play soldered the director's career in three media. William Gibson's The Miracle Worker was a portrait of the young Helen Keller the blind and deaf girl who rose to be an important author, suffragist and socialist and her half-blind teacher, Annie Sullivan. Dramatists have stumbled and truckled so many times attempting true-life inspirational films and TV movies; Gibson eschewed sentiment to focus on two strong wills locked in battle. Penn, always a master at unleashing his actors' ferocious physicality, staged one dining-room fight, in which Annie tries to impose some rudimentary table manners on the wild child, as a 10-min. siege of ultimate fighting and impeccable choreography. (At the end an exhausted Annie tells Helen's mother, "The room's a wreck, but her napkin is folded.") On TV the roles were played by Patty McCormack and Teresa Wright; in the Broadway and film versions that followed, by Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft. Bancroft and Penn and Gibson and designer George Jenkins all won Tony awards. Duke and Bancroft both received Oscars for the film, and Penn the first of three Academy nominations. (The other two were for Bonnie and Clyde and Alice's Restaurant; he never won.) In the early '60s Penn was considered a prominent theater director who dabbled in movies. In addition to The Miracle Worker, he staged Gibson's Two for the Seasaw, Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic, the Broadway debut of the comedy sketch duo Mike Nichols and Elaine May, the musical Golden Boy and, in 1966, Frederic Knott's thriller Wait Until Dark another blind girl in peril. Jenkins later recalled standing in the lobby with Penn during that play's tryout and hearing, inside, the audience's collective scream when the villain (Robert Duvall) leaped out of the shadows to attack the heroine (Lee Remick). The director and the designer hadn't realized this frisson would have such a visceral, audible impact. A year later, Penn would give moviegoers a more seismic shock with Bonnie and Clyde. When showered with acclaim, Penn would not take the safe road but the rough one. The Miracle Worker confirmed his success, but instead of going Hollywood he went indie. Mickey One, from a script by Alan Surgal, was the story of a rebel without applause: a flailing stand-up comic (Beatty) who flees Detroit for Chicago when his life is threatened. "Hiding from you-don't-know-who, for a crime you're not even sure you committed?" asks the sympathetic Alexandra Stewart. "And the only thing I know," Beatty says, "I'm guilty." Guilty of what? "Of not bein' innocent." A performer for whom the spotlight has the blinding intensity of a third-degree interrogation or the awful radiance of a demon deity, Mickey does one last stand-up routine under the gun. "Is there any word?" he calls out to the person perhaps his soon-to-be killer manning that spotlight. Silence. "So this is the word." The end.

In this hipster crime movie, Penn shows he has appropriated, if not quite assimilated, the tropes of mid-period Orson Welles (shots in distorting mirrors or through ornamental grates, garish carnival creatures) and of the French New Wave (jump cuts, non-naturalistic sound, a braying jazz score by Eddie Sauter and Stan Getz). His cinematographer, between gigs for Louis Malle (The Fire Within) and Robert Bresson (Mouchette), was Ghislain Cloquet, who wove a web of fatality with a mixture of punishing closeups and infinitesimal long shots. Mickey One might have been an immensely influential film, if anybody had seen it. Well, Beatty had. The actor was ready to produce a movie; and after Penn suffered through a big Hollywood production, The Chase (which was recut by its producer, Sam Spiegel), Beatty offered him Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde writers Benton, an art director, and Newman, a staff writer, had helped create the Dubious Achievement Awards feature that made Esquire the hot magazine of the '60s. They also loved movies, foreign ones mostly, and wrote a Barrow Gang script in the style of New Wave crime movies by Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless) and Francois Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player). Both French directors were offered the project but said no; then Beatty bought it. At Penn's encouragement, Benton and Newman streamlined the plot and emphasized the film's connection to the American movies that Barrow and Parker might have seen. The rags-to-riches stories of the early talkies era primarily involved gangsters (Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, Scarface) and performers (Applause, 42nd Street, the Gold Diggers series). Bonnie and Clyde fit both categories. Their models are the fast talkers and snappy dressers whose appealing arrogance defined young people on the move, whether to Broadway or the morgue. The Barrow gang's bank-robbing m.o. is pure showbiz: some professional choreography (Buck Barrow, played by Gene Hackman in another career-making turn, clears a teller's window in three graceful steps, catching Clyde's satchel in one hand), a touch of Hollywood humanism (they steal only from the haves), and a catchy tag line ("We're the Barrow gang!"). They work harder on building a seductive movie image than on acquiring a fat bankroll. They are their own scriptwriters, directors and publicists; and they seem to be auditioning to play themselves in the movie version if only they'd live long enough. A period bio-pic made by New York sharpies, Bonnie and Clyde had the same amused, obsessed, lightly derisive view of old, hick, rural Texas that Nichols' The Graduate the other game-changing film of 1967 took toward the new, plasticized Los Angeles. The movie also paraded its daring by establishing Clyde as a sexual naf whose gun is his most imposing phallic symbol. (Bonnie strokes it; that was a big deal back then.) When he and Bonnie finally make love successfully, she says, "You did just perfect," and he observes, with a grin that betrays his surprise, "I did, didn't I?" Shortly thereafter, they're dead, in the bullet barrage that won the film instant notoriety and lasting clat. It consumes 30 seconds and 27 shots, in an artful montage by editor Dede Allen. From then on, no action film was complete without a mammoth display or artillery and the slow-motion deaths of gangsters or Western varmints, perforated with blood squibs. After Bonnie and Clyde became a hit, Penn again disdained the sure thing of Hollywood prestige projects for the new and the weird. Working with Venable Herndon (another first-time scripter) on adapting Guthrie's narrative ballad into a movie, Penn cast nonactor Arlo in the lead role. Penn was noted for pulling great performances out of novice actors; he proved that when he coached John F. Kennedy in his first 1960 TV debate against Richard Nixon. (Viewers awarded JFK the win; voters gave him the

Presidency.) But the charming Guthrie looked stranded as Penn put him in strange places and through some strange paces. The movie has scenes of Arlo in hospital visits with his father, the folk poet Woody Guthrie, who's been virtually paralyzed with Huntingdon's Chorea played by actor Joseph Boley, as Arlo's real dad had died the year before filming. Ranging from dope scenes to underage sex kittens to Vietnam draft-board politics (it could be Hair with different songs), and often wandering off into the portrait of a marriage in crisis, the Alice's Restaurant film misses the loose-limbed but finely crafted larkishness of Arlo's song. But it shows that, with the freedom to make the film he wanted, Penn would try anything. Somebody else could fret over whether the audience got it. Little Big Man was closer to the kind of film Hollywood expected Penn to make: a Western epic from a lauded novel (by Thomas Berger) with a newly anointed star (The Graduate's Dustin Hoffman). A picaresque epic told by 121-year-old Jack Crabb, the last survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn, this fitfully enthralling movie tilts, like Bonnie and Clyde, between winking comedy and a tragic body count. Penn's signal achievement here was in his choice for the role of Jack's Indian mentor, Old Lodge Skins. Unable to sign Laurence Olivier or Paul Scofield, and after Richard Boone left the movie, Penn cast the 70-year-old Chief Dan George, leader of the Tsleil-Waututh nation of British Columbia. Imagine: a Native American playing an Indian. Or, as George calls his people, human beings. At the end of the film, Old Lodge Skins prepares to die with a prayer to the spirits to take him away. But nothing happens. As he explains to Jack, "Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't." For Penn, the magic would stop working. He'd go four, five years between movies, and the ones he made weren't quite worth the wait. Night Moves reunited him with Hackman for a Ross Macdonald-style detective story that purred with Penn's specialty, sexual tension, but otherwise couldn't escape the ordinary. The 1981 Four Friends came alive in a spasm of violence at a dinner table (shades of The Miracle Worker) and the elegant tangle of lovers on a summer beach, with a third figure watching anxiously; but the acting of Penn's young cast let him down. Dead of Winter, a 1988 thriller, showed that the director of Broadway's Wait Until Dark still knew how to craft unease into dread. It was a smooth suspense ride that went nowhere new. So Penn had one great film decade which is one decade more than most directors. Not a writer, he relied on other people's originality, to which he would bring his own artistry. His films display an ethnographer's fascination with outsiders: people whose skin is the wrong color, whose sight is too weak or hair too long, who fight to achieve celebrity or just to keep on living or who surrender to the siren call of mortality. Over a 50-year career, Penn always invested his projects with a passionate intelligence. And when American movies needed a little revolutionizing, he was there to make it happen. What Beatty's Clyde Barrow said of himself might apply to Arthur Penn in the '60s: "I ain't good. I'm the best!"