wtf?!

The emotional power of swearing, as well as the fact of linguistic taboos in all cultures, suggests it taps into ancient parts of the brain...

Why we curse: What the F***?
by Steven Pinker
Post date: 10.09.07
Issue date: 10.08.07

ucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria exclaimed, "This is really, really, fucking brilliant" on the air. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is charged with monitoring the nation's airwaves for indecency, decided somewhat surprisingly not to sanction the network for failing to bleep out the word. Explaining its decision, the FCC noted that its guidelines define "indecency" as "material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities" and Bono had used fucking as "an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation."

Cultural conservatives were outraged. California Representative Doug Ose tried to close the loophole in the FCC's regulations with the filthiest piece of legislation ever considered by Congress. Had it passed, the Clean Airwaves Act would have forbade from broadcast

the words "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "asshole", and the phrases "cock sucker", "mother fucker", and "ass hole", compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).

The episode highlights one of the many paradoxes that surround swearing. When it comes to political speech, we are living in a free-speech utopia. Late-night comedians can say rude things about their nation's leaders that, in previous centuries, would have led to their tongues being cut out or worse. Yet, when it comes to certain words for copulation and excretion, we still allow the might of the government to bear down on what people can say in public. Swearing raises many other puzzles--linguistic, neurobiological, literary, political.

The first is the bone of contention in the Bono brouhaha: the syntactic classification of curse words. Ose's grammatically illiterate bill not only misspelled cocksucker, motherfucker, and asshole, and misidentified them as "phrases," it didn't even close the loophole that it had targeted. The Clean Airwaves Act assumed that fucking is a participial adjective. But this is not correct. With a true adjective like lazy, you can alternate between Drown the lazy cat and Drown the cat which is lazy. But Drown the fucking cat is certainly not interchangeable with Drown the cat which is fucking.

If the fucking in fucking brilliant is to be assigned a traditional part of speech, it would be adverb, because it modifies an adjective and only adverbs can do that, as in truly bad, very nice, and really big. Yet "adverb" is the one grammatical category that Ose forgot to include in his list! As it happens, most expletives aren't genuine adverbs, either. One study notes that, while you can say That's too fucking bad, you can't say That's too very bad. Also, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out, while you can imagine the dialogue How brilliant was it? Very, you would never hear the dialogue How brilliant was it? Fucking.

The FCC's decision raises another mystery about swearing: the bizarre number of different ways in which we swear. There is cathartic swearing, as when we slice our thumb along with the bagel. There are imprecations, as when we offer advice to someone who has cut us off in traffic. There are vulgar terms for everyday things and activities, as when Bess Truman was asked to get the president to say fertilizer instead of manure and she replied, "You have no idea how long it took me to get him to say manure." There are figures of speech that put obscene words to other uses, such as the barnyard epithet for insincerity, the army acronym snafu, and the gynecological-flagellative term for uxorial dominance. And then there are the adjective-like expletives that salt the speech and split the words of soldiers, teenagers, and Irish rock-stars.

But perhaps the greatest mystery is why politicians, editors, and much of the public care so much. Clearly, the fear and loathing are not triggered by the concepts themselves, because the organs and activities they name have hundreds of polite synonyms. Nor are they triggered by the words' sounds, since many of them have respectable homonyms in names for animals, actions, and even people. Many people feel that profanity is self-evidently corrupting, especially to the young. This claim is made despite the fact that everyone is familiar with the words, including most children, and that no one has ever spelled out how the mere hearing of a word could corrupt one's morals.

Progressive writers have pointed to this gap to argue that linguistic taboos are absurd. A true moralist, they say, should hold that violence and inequality are "obscene," not sex and excretion. And yet, since the 1970s, many progressives have imposed linguistic taboos of their own, such as the stigma surrounding the N-word and casual allusions to sexual desire or sexual attractiveness. So even people who revile the usual bluenoses can become gravely offended by their own conception of bad language. The question is, why?

he strange emotional power of swearing--as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures-- suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain.

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words' denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.

A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala "lights up"--it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans--when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.

The response is not only emotional but involuntary. It's not just that we don't have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its connotation. The classic demonstration is the Stroop effect, found in every introductory psychology textbook and the topic of more than four thousand scientific papers. People are asked to look through a list of letter strings and to say aloud the color of the ink in which each one is printed. Try it with this list, saying "red," "blue," or "green" for each item in turn from left to right:

red blue green blue green red

Easy. But this is much, much, harder:

red blue green blue green red

The reason is that, among literate adults, reading a word is such an over-learned skill that it has become mandatory: You can't will the process "off," even when you don't want to read the words but only pay attention to the ink. That's why you're helped along when the experimenters arrange the ink into a word that also names its color and slowed down when they arrange it into a name for a different color. A similar thing happens with spoken words as well.

Now try naming the color of the ink in each of these words:

cunt shit fuck tits piss asshole

The psychologist Don MacKay has done the experiment and found that people are indeed slowed down by an involuntary boggle as soon as the eyes alight on each word. The upshot is that a speaker or writer can use a taboo word to evoke an emotional response in an audience quite against their wishes. Thanks to the automatic nature of speech perception, an expletive kidnaps our attention and forces us to consider its unpleasant connotations. That makes all of us vulnerable to a mental assault whenever we are in earshot of other speakers, as if we were strapped to a chair and could be given a punch or a shock at any time. And this, in turn, raises the question of what kinds of concepts have the sort of unpleasant emotional charge that can make words for them taboo.

he historical root of swearing in English and many other languages is, oddly enough, religion. We see this in the Third Commandment, in the popularity of hell, damn, God, and Jesus Christ as expletives, and in many of the terms for taboo language itself: profanity (that which is not sacred), blasphemy (literally "evil speech" but, in practice, disrespect toward a deity), and swearing, cursing, and oaths, which originally were secured by the invocation of a deity or one of his symbols.

In English-speaking countries today, religious swearing barely raises an eyebrow. Gone with the wind are the days when people could be titillated by a character in a movie saying "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." If a character today is offended by such language, it's only to depict him as an old-fashioned prude. The defanging of religious taboo words is an obvious consequence of the secularization of Western culture. As G. K. Chesterton remarked, "Blasphemy itself could not survive religion; if anyone doubts that, let him try to blaspheme Odin." To understand religious vulgarity, then, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our linguistic ancestors, to whom God and Hell were a real presence.

Say you need to make a promise. You may want to borrow money, and so must promise to return it. Why should the promisee believe you, knowing that it may be to your advantage to renege? The answer is that you should submit to a contingency that would impose a penalty on you if you did renege, ideally one so certain and severe that you would always do better to keep the promise than to back out. That way, your partner no longer has to take you at your word; he can rely on your self-interest. Nowadays, we secure our promises with legal contracts that make us liable if we back out. We mortgage our house, giving the bank permission to repossess it if we fail to repay the loan. But, before we could count on a commercial and legal apparatus to enforce our contracts, we had to do our own self-handicapping. Children still bind their oaths by saying, "I hope to die if I tell a lie." Adults used to do the same by invoking the wrath of God, as in May God strike me dead if I'm lying and variations like As God is my witness, Blow me down!, and God blind me!--the source of the British blimey.

Such oaths, of course, would have been more credible in an era in which people thought that God listened to their entreaties and had the power to carry them out. Even today, witnesses in U.S. court proceedings have to swear on the Bible, as if an act of perjury undetected by the legal system would be punished by an eavesdropping and easily offended God. But, even if these oaths aren't seen as literally having the power to bring down divine penalties for noncompliance, they signal a distinction between everyday assurances on minor favors and solemn pledges on weightier matters. Today, the emotional power of religious swearing may have dimmed, but the psychology behind it is still with us. Even a parent without an inkling of superstition would not say "I swear on the life of my child" lightly. The mere thought of murdering one's child for ulterior gain is not just unpleasant; it should be unthinkable if one is a true parent, and every neuron of one's brain should be programmed against it.

This literal unthinkability is the basis of the psychology of taboo in general, and it is the mindset that is tapped in swearing on something sacred, whether it be a religious trapping or a child's life. And, thanks to the automatic nature of speech processing, the same sacred words that consecrate promises--the oath-binding sense of "swearing"--may be used to attract attention, to shock, or to inflict psychic pain on a listener--the dirty-word sense of "swearing."

s secularization has rendered religious swear words less powerful, creative speakers have replaced them with words that have the same degree of affective clout according to the sensibilities of the day. This explains why taboo expressions can have such baffling syntax and semantics. To take just one example, why do people use the ungrammatical Fuck you? And why does no one have a clear sense of what, exactly, Fuck you means? (Some people guess "fuck yourself," others "get fucked," and still others "I will fuck you," but none of these hunches is compelling.) The most likely explanation is that these grammatically baffling curses originated in more intelligible religious curses during the transition from religious to sexual and scatological swearing in English-speaking countries:

Who (in) the hell are you? >> Who the fuck are you?

I don't give a damn >> I don't give a fuck; I don't give a shit.

Holy Mary! >> Holy shit! Holy fuck!

For God's sake >> For fuck's sake; For shit's sake.

Damn you! >> Fuck you!

Of course, this transmutation raises the question of why words for these particular concepts stepped into the breach--why, for example, words for bodily effluvia and their orifices and acts of excretion became taboo. Shit, piss, and asshole, to name but a few, are still unspeakable on network television and unprintable in most newspapers. The New York Times, for example, identified a best-seller by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt as On Bull****.

On the whole, the acceptability of taboo words is only loosely tied to the acceptability of what they refer to, but, in the case of taboo terms for effluvia, the correlation is fairly good. The linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge have noted that shit is less acceptable than piss, which in turn is less acceptable than fart, which is less acceptable than snot, which is less acceptable than spit (which is not taboo at all). That's the same order as the acceptability of eliminating these substances from the body in public. Effluvia have such an emotional charge that they figure prominently in voodoo, sorcery, and other kinds of sympathetic magic in many of the world's cultures. The big deal that people ordinarily make out of effluvia--both the words and the substances--has puzzled many observers. After all, we are incarnate beings, and excretion is an inescapable part of human life.

The biologists Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran identify the reason. It can't be a coincidence, they note, that the most disgusting substances are also the most dangerous vectors for disease. Feces is a route of transmission for the viruses, bacteria, and protozoans that cause at least 20 intestinal diseases, as well as ascariasis, hepatitis A and E, polio, ameobiasis, hookworm, pinworm, whipworm, cholera, and tetanus. Blood, vomit, mucus, pus, and sexual fluids are also good vehicles for pathogens to get from one body into another. Although the strongest component of the disgust reaction is a desire not to eat or touch the offending substance, it's also disgusting to think about effluvia, together with the body parts and activities that excrete them. And, because of the involuntariness of speech perception, it's unpleasant to hear the words for them.

Some people have been puzzled about why cunt should be taboo. It is not just an unprintable word for the vagina but the most offensive epithet for a woman in America. One might have thought that, in the male-dominated world of swearing, the vagina would be revered, not reviled. After all, it's been said that no sooner does a boy come out of it than he spends the rest of his life trying to get back in. This becomes less mysterious if one imagines the connotations in an age before tampons, toilet paper, regular bathing, and antifungal drugs.

he other major source of taboo words is sexuality. Since the 1960s, many progressive thinkers have found these taboos to be utterly risible. Sex is a source of mutual pleasure, they reason, and should be cleansed of stigma and shame. Prudery about sexual language could only be a superstition, an anachronism, perhaps a product of spite, as in H. L. Mencken's definition of puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

The comedian Lenny Bruce was puzzled by our most common sexual imprecation. In a monologue reproduced in the biopic Lenny, he riffs:

What's the worst thing you can say to anybody? "Fuck you, Mister." It's really weird, because, if I really wanted to hurt you, I should say "Unfuck you, Mister." Because "Fuck you" is really nice! "Hello, Ma, it's me. Yeah, I just got back. Aw, fuck you, Ma! Sure, I mean it. Is Pop there? Aw, fuck you, Pop!"

Part of the puzzlement comes from the strange syntax of Fuck you (which, as we saw, does not in fact mean "Have sex"). But it also comes from a modern myopia for how incendiary sexuality can be in the full sweep of human experience.

Consider two consenting adults who have just had sex. Has everyone had fun? Not necessarily. One partner might see the act as the beginning of a lifelong relationship, the other as a one-night-stand. One may be infecting the other with a disease. A baby may have been conceived, whose welfare was not planned for in the heat of passion. If the couple is related, the baby may inherit two copies of a deleterious recessive gene and be susceptible to a genetic defect. There may be romantic rivals in the wings who would be enraged with jealousy if they found out, or a cuckolded husband in danger of raising another man's child, or a two-timed wife in danger of losing support for her own children. Parents may have marriage plans for one of the participants, involving large sums of money or an important alliance with another clan. And, on other occasions, the participants may not both be adults, or may not both be consenting.

Sex has high stakes, including exploitation, disease, illegitimacy, incest, jealousy, spousal abuse, cuckoldry, desertion, feuding, child abuse, and rape. These hazards have been around for a long time and have left their mark on our customs and our emotions. Thoughts about sex are likely to be fraught, and not entertained lightly. Words for sex can be even more touchy, because they not only evoke the charged thoughts but implicate a sharing of those thoughts between two people. The thoughts, moreover, are shared "on the record," each party knowing that the other knows that he or she has been thinking about the sex under discussion. This lack of plausible deniability embroils the dialogue in an extra layer of intrigue.

Evolutionary psychology has laid out the conflicts of interest that are inherent to human sexuality, and some of these conflicts play themselves out in the linguistic arena. Plain speaking about sex conveys an attitude that sex is a casual matter, like tennis or philately, and so it may seem to the partners at the time. But the long-term implications may be more keenly felt by a wider circle of interested parties. Parents and other senior kin may be concerned with the thwarting of their own plans for the family lineage, and the community may take an interest in the illegitimate children appearing in their midst and in the posturing and competition, sometimes violent, that can accompany sexual freedom. The ideal of sex as a sacred communion between a monogamous couple may be old-fashioned and even unrealistic, but it sure is convenient for the elders of a family and a society. It's not surprising to find tensions between individuals and guardians of the community over casual talk about sex (accompanied by hypocrisy among the guardians when it comes to their own casual sex).

Another sexual conflict of interest divides men from women. In every act of reproduction, females are committed to long stretches of pregnancy and lactation, while males can get away with a few minutes of copulation. A male can have more progeny if he mates with many females, whereas a female will not have more progeny if she mates with many males--though her offspring will do better if she has chosen a mate who is willing to invest in them or can endow them with good genes. Not surprisingly, in all cultures men pursue sex more eagerly, are more willing to have casual sex, and are more likely to seduce, deceive, or coerce to get sex. All things being equal, casual sex works to the advantage of men, both genetically and emotionally. We might expect casual talk about sex to show the same asymmetry, and so it does. Men swear more, on average, and many taboo sexual terms are felt to be especially demeaning to women-- hence the old prohibition of swearing "in mixed company."

A sex difference in tolerance for sexual language may seem like a throwback to Victorian daintiness. But an unanticipated consequence of the second wave of feminism in the 1970s was a revived sense of offense at swearing, the linguistic companion to the campaign against pornography. As a result, many universities and businesses have published guidelines on sexual harassment that ban telling sexual jokes, and, in 1993, veteran Boston Globe journalist David Nyhan was forced to apologize and donate $1,250 to a women's organization when a female staffer overheard him in the newsroom using the word pussy-whipped with a male colleague who declined his invitation to play basketball after work. The feminist writer Andrea Dworkin explicitly connected coarse sexual language to the oppression of women: "Fucking requires that the male act on one who has less power and this valuation is so deep, so completely implicit in the act, that the one who is fucked is stigmatized."

Though people are seeing, talking about, and having sex more readily today than they did in the past, the topic is still not free of taboo. Most people still don't copulate in public, swap spouses at the end of a dinner party, have sex with their siblings and children, or openly trade favors for sex. Even after the sexual revolution, we have a long way to go before "exploring our sexuality" to the fullest, and that means that people still set up barriers in their minds to block certain trains of thought. The language of sex can tug at those barriers.

hich brings us back to fucking--Bono's fucking, that is. Does a deeper understanding of the history, psychology, and neurobiology of swearing give us any basis for deciding among the prohibitions in the Clean Airwaves Act, the hairsplitting of the FCC, and the libertinism of a Lenny Bruce?

When it comes to policy and law, it seems to me that free speech is the bedrock of democracy and that it is not among the legitimate functions of government to punish people who use certain vocabulary items or allow others to use them. On the other hand, private media have the prerogative of enforcing a house style, driven by standards of taste and the demands of the market, that excludes words their audience doesn't enjoy hearing. In other words, if an entertainer says fucking brilliant, it's none of the government's business; but, if some people would rather not explain to their young children what a blow job is, there should be television channels that don't force them to.

What about decisions in the private sphere? Are there guidelines that can inform our personal and institutional judgments about when to discourage, tolerate, and even welcome profanity? Here are some thoughts.

Language has often been called a weapon, and people should be mindful about where to aim it and when to fire. The common denominator of taboo words is the act of forcing a disagreeable thought on someone, and it's worth considering how often one really wants one's audience to be reminded of excrement, urine, and exploitative sex. Even in its mildest form, intended only to keep the listener's attention, the lazy use of profanity can feel like a series of jabs in the ribs. They are annoying to the listener and a confession by the speaker that he can think of no other way to make his words worth attending to. It's all the more damning for writers, who have the luxury of choosing their words off-line from the half-million-word phantasmagoria of the English language.

Also calling for reflection is whether linguistic taboos are always a bad thing. Why are we offended--why should we be offended--when an outsider refers to an African American as a nigger, or a woman as a cunt, or a Jewish person as a fucking Jew? I suspect that the sense of offense comes from the nature of speech recognition and from what it means to understand the connotation of a word. If you're an English speaker, you can't hear the words nigger or cunt or fucking without calling to mind what they mean to an implicit community of speakers, including the emotions that cling to them. To hear nigger is to try on, however briefly, the thought that there is something contemptible about African Americans and thus to be complicit in a community that standardized that judgment into a word. Just hearing the words feels morally corrosive. None of this means that the words should be banned, only that their effects on listeners should be understood and anticipated.

Also deserving of reflection is why previous generations of speakers bequeathed us a language that treats certain topics with circumspection and restraint. The lexical libertines of the 1960s believed that taboos on sexual language were pointless and even harmful. They argued that removing the stigma from sexuality would eliminate shame and ignorance and thereby reduce venereal disease, illegitimate births, and other hazards of sex. But this turned out to be mistaken. Sexual language has become far more common since the early '60s, but so has illegitimacy, sexually transmitted disease, rape, and the fallout of sexual competition like anorexia in girls and swagger-culture in boys. Though no one can pin down cause and effect, the changes are of a piece with the weakening of the fear and awe that used to surround thoughts about sex and that charged sexual language with taboo.

Those are some of the reasons to think twice about giving carte blanche to swearing. But there is another reason. If an overuse of taboo words, whether by design or laziness, blunts their emotional edge, it will have deprived us of a linguistic instrument that we sometimes sorely need. And this brings me to the arguments on the pro-swearing side.

To begin with, it's a fact of life that people swear. The responsibility of writers is to give a "just and lively image of human nature," as poet John Dryden wrote, and that includes portraying a character's language realistically when their art calls for it. When Norman Mailer wrote his true-to-life novel about World War II, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, his compromise with the sensibilities of the day was to have soldiers use the pseudo-epithet fug. (When Dorothy Parker met him, she said, "So you're the man who doesn't know how to spell fuck.") Sadly, this prissiness is not a thing of the past: Some public television stations today fear broadcasting Ken Burns' documentary on World War II because of the salty language in his interviews with veterans. The prohibition against swearing in broadcast media makes artists and historians into liars and subverts the responsibility of grown-ups to learn how life is lived in worlds distant from their own.

Even when their characters are not soldiers, writers must sometimes let them swear in order to render human passion compellingly. In the film adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies: A Love Story, a sweet Polish peasant girl has hidden a Jewish man in a hayloft during the Nazi occupation and becomes his doting wife when the war is over. When she confronts him over an affair he has been having, he loses control and slaps her in the face. Fighting back tears of rage, she looks him in the eye and says slowly, "I saved your life. I took the last bite of food out of my mouth and gave it to you in the hayloft. I carried out your shit!" No other word could convey the depth of her fury at his ingratitude.

For language lovers, the joys of swearing are not confined to the works of famous writers. We should pause to applaud the poetic genius who gave us the soldiers' term for chipped beef on toast, shit on a shingle, and the male-to-male advisory for discretion in sexual matters, Keep your pecker in your pocket. Hats off, too, to the wordsmiths who thought up the indispensable pissing contest, crock of shit, pussy-whipped, and horse's ass. Among those in the historical record, Lyndon Johnson had a certain way with words when it came to summing up the people he distrusted, including a Kennedy aide ("He wouldn't know how to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel"), Gerald Ford ("He can't fart and chew gum at the same time"), and J. Edgar Hoover ("I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in").

When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full expanse of the brain: left and right, high and low, ancient and modern. Shakespeare, no stranger to earthy language himself, had Caliban speak for the entire human race when he said, "You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. His new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, was published by Viking in September.

trapped into silence?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one amazing woman.

Trapped into silence?
The West also fails Muslim women, freedom
By Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie
October 10, 2007
As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one of the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world.

The details of her story have been widely reported, but bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West.

Hirsi Ali first fled to the Netherlands as a refugee from Somalia in 1992 after declining to submit to a forced marriage to a man she did not know. Once there, in hiding from her family, she began working as a cleaning lady. But this cleaning lady spoke Somali, Arabic, Amharic, Swahili and English and was quickly learning Dutch, so she soon found work as a translator for other Somali refugees, many of whom, like herself, were casualties of Islam. These women had been abused, mutilated, denied medical care and proper educations and forced into lives of sexual subjection and compulsory childbearing.

After attending the University of Leiden, where she studied political science and philosophy, Hirsi Ali began speaking publicly about the repression of women under Islam, and shortly thereafter she started receiving death threats from local Muslims. Her security situation eventually became so dire that she moved to the United States in 2002. However, she was soon contacted by Gerrit Zalm, then deputy prime minister of the Netherlands, who urged her to run for the Dutch parliament. When Hirsi Ali voiced her security concerns, Zalm assured her that she would be given diplomatic protection wherever and whenever she needed it. She returned to the Netherlands with this assurance, won a seat in parliament and became a tireless advocate for women, for civil society and for reason.

The rest of her story is well known. In 2004, Hirsi Ali collaborated with Theo van Gogh on the film "Submission," which examined the link between Islamic law and the suffering of millions of women under Islam. The uproar from the Muslim community confirmed both the necessity of Hirsi Ali's work and the reasonableness of her fears. Van Gogh, having declined bodyguards of his own, was soon gunned down and nearly decapitated on an Amsterdam street, and a letter threatening Hirsi Ali was staked to his chest with a butcher knife.

Hirsi Ali was immediately forced into hiding and moved from safe house to safe house, sometimes more than once a day, for months. Eventually, her security concerns drove her from the Netherlands altogether. She returned to the U.S., and the Dutch government has been paying for her protection here -- that is, until it suddenly announced last week that it would no longer protect her outside the Netherlands, thereby advertising her vulnerability to the world.

It is important to realize that Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

Having recapitulated the Enlightenment for herself in a few short years, Hirsi Ali has surveyed every inch of the path leading out of the moral and intellectual wasteland that is traditional Islam. She has written two luminous books describing her journey, the most recent of which, "Infidel," has been an international best-seller for months. It is difficult to exaggerate her courage. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in The New York Times, "Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him."

The Dutch parliament will be debating Hirsi Ali's case this week. As it stands, the government's decision to protect her only within the borders of the Netherlands is genuinely perverse. While the Dutch have complained about the cost of protecting Hirsi Ali in the United States, it is actually far more expensive for them to protect her in the Netherlands, as the risk to her is greatest there.

There is also the matter of broken promises: Hirsi Ali was persuaded to run for parliament, and to become the world's most visible and imperiled spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women, on the understanding that she would be provided security for as long as she needed it. Gerrit Zalm, in his capacity as both the deputy prime minister and the minister of finance, promised her such security without qualification. Most shamefully, Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, has recommended that Hirsi Ali simply quit the Netherlands, while refusing to grant her even a week's protection outside the country during which she might raise funds to hire security of her own. Is this a craven attempt to placate local Muslim fanatics? A warning to other Dutch dissidents not to stir up trouble by speaking too frankly about Islam? Or just pure thoughtlessness?

The Dutch government should recognize a scandal in the making and rediscover its obligation to provide Hirsi Ali with the protection she was promised.

There is not a person alive more deserving of the freedoms of speech and conscience we take for granted in the West, nor is there anyone making a more courageous effort to defend them.

----------

Sam Harris is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason" and "Letter to a Christian Nation." Salman Rushdie is a novelist and essayist whose works include "Midnight's Children," which won the Booker Prize, and "The Satanic Verses."
Via Leo

stephen colbert in the ny times

Well said, Stephen ... especially the bit about George Bush definitively proving that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.

A Mock Columnist, Amok
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 14, 2007

I was in my office, writing a column on the injustice of relative marginal tax rates for hedge fund managers, when I saw Stephen Colbert on TV.

He was sneering that Times columns make good “kindling.” He was ranting that after you throw away the paper, “it takes over a hundred years for the lies to biodegrade.” He was observing, approvingly, that “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream is driving a bulldozer into The New York Times while drinking crude oil out of Keith Olbermann’s skull.”

I called Colbert with a dare: if he thought it was so easy to be a Times Op-Ed pundit, he should try it. He came right over. In a moment of weakness, I had staged a coup d’moi. I just hope he leaves at some point. He’s typing and drinking and threatening to “shave Paul Krugman with a broken bottle.”

I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!)
By STEPHEN COLBERT

Surprised to see my byline here, aren’t you? I would be too, if I read The New York Times. But I don’t. So I’ll just have to take your word that this was published. Frankly, I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree :(

I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

So why I am writing Miss Dowd’s column today? Simple. Because I believe the 2008 election, unlike all previous elections, is important. And a lot of Americans feel confused about the current crop of presidential candidates.

For instance, Hillary Clinton. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to be scared of her so Democrats will think they should nominate her when she’s actually easy to beat, or if I’m supposed to be scared of her because she’s legitimately scary.

Or Rudy Giuliani. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to support him because he’s the one who can beat Hillary if she gets nominated, or if I’m supposed to support him because he’s legitimately scary.

And Fred Thompson. In my opinion “Law & Order” never sufficiently explained why the Manhattan D.A. had an accent like an Appalachian catfish wrestler.

Well, suddenly an option is looming on the horizon. And I don’t mean Al Gore (though he’s a world-class loomer). First of all, I don’t think Nobel Prizes should go to people I was seated next to at the Emmys. Second, winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.

While my hat is not presently in the ring, I should also point out that it is not on my head. So where’s that hat? (Hint: John McCain was seen passing one at a gas station to fuel up the Straight Talk Express.)

Others point to my new bestseller, “I Am America (And So Can You!)” noting that many candidates test the waters with a book first. Just look at Barack Obama, John Edwards or O. J. Simpson.

Look at the moral guidance I offer. On faith: “After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up.” On gender: “The sooner we accept the basic differences between men and women, the sooner we can stop arguing about it and start having sex.” On race: “While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad.” On the elderly: “They look like lizards.”

Our nation is at a Fork in the Road. Some say we should go Left; some say go Right. I say, “Doesn’t this thing have a reverse gear?” Let’s back this country up to a time before there were forks in the road — or even roads. Or forks, for that matter. I want to return to a simpler America where we ate our meat off the end of a sharpened stick.

Let me regurgitate: I know why you want me to run, and I hear your clamor. I share Americans’ nostalgia for an era when you not only could tell a man by the cut of his jib, but the jib industry hadn’t yet fled to Guangdong. And I don’t intend to tease you for weeks the way Newt Gingrich did, saying that if his supporters raised $30 million, he would run for president. I would run for 15 million. Cash.

Nevertheless, I am not ready to announce yet — even though it’s clear that the voters are desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative.

What do I offer? Hope for the common man. Because I am not the Anointed or the Inevitable. I am just an Average Joe like you — if you have a TV show.

naming pharmaceuticals

I've been part of several ideation sessions where branding experts try and find the right name for a product or test a name on focus groups. It's fascinating. It can also be amusing.

Consider Viagra. It's a contraction of Vi (implying vigor) and Niagara (implying the mighty flow of the waterfalls). You do the math on the subliminal messages there.

For drugmakers, finding a name is more art than science
October 8, 2007
By John Russell, The Indianapolis Star

Xyrem. Kixeva. Vfend. Norvasc. Astiq. Zosyn.

It looks like someone dropped Scrabble tiles randomly on a table. Vowels and consonants are out of place. Rare letters, such as Z, X and Q, show up with surprising frequency.

BACKGROUND: How companies come up with drug names

But those words — and hundreds like them — represent big-selling pharmaceutical drugs that treat diseases from cancer to schizophrenia, products that rake in billions of dollars a year.

In the past decade, the drug-brand consulting industry has grown dramatically to help companies find the right name for a new drug. The price often runs $200,000 to $500,000 per product. The right name can give a drug cachet. The wrong name can lead to serious medical errors.

According to the Food and Drug Administration's website, an 8-year-old died after receiving methadone instead of methylphenidate. A 19-year-old man showed signs of potentially fatal complications after he was given clozapine instead of olanzapine. A 50-year-old woman was hospitalized after taking Flomax, used to treat an enlarged prostate, instead of Volmax, used to relieve bronchospasm.

"The actual screening of brand names today is under more scrutiny than ever because of the safety aspect," said James Dettore, chief executive of Brand Institute, a Miami-based, drug-consulting company.

Then there's the challenge of finding a unique name. More than 30,000 prescription drugs are trademarked in the United States; nearly 150,000 in Europe.

It's the job of drug consultants to create a name that's not already taken, won't lead to medical mix-ups and can help cut through the marketing clutter.

What makes a good name?

"A lot of it is more art than science," said William Trombetta, professor of pharmaceutical marketing at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. "There are certain letters that express power and control, like Z, M or P. Other letters, like S, are more passive. Depending on what the drug does, you want to give the name certain features."

Want to sound high-tech? Go for lots of Z's and X's, such as Xanax, Xalatan, Zyban and Zostrix.

Want to sound poetic? Try Lyrica, Truvada and Femara.

Want to suggest what it does? Flonase is an allergy medicine that aims to stop nasal flow. Lunesta, a sleeping drug, implies "luna," the Latin word for moon — a full night's sleep.

Then there's Viagra, the erectile-dysfunction drug made by Pfizer. It uses the prefix "vi" to suggest vigor and vitality. The word rhymes with Niagara, suggesting a mighty flow.

"You know exactly what Pfizer (PFE) was trying to say with that," said Andy Valvur, senior brand strategist at Igor, a San Francisco branding company.

Drug names can suggest, but under FDA rules they can't come right out and make medical claims. That's why you won't see TumorBeGone or CureAll.

A search by Eli Lilly (LLY) a few years ago for a name for a new cancer drug shows how involved the process can be. The drug's generic name, used by professionals when the drug is ready for testing and marketing, was multitargeted anti-folate, or MTA for short.

Lilly wanted a brand name to include the letters MTA, in that order, to help future researchers who might be looking for data. The company hired a drug consultant to comb through the possibilities. But a Lilly employee came up with the winning suggestion: Alimta.

That name was available in all 85 countries where Lilly eventually marketed the product, which was unusual. (Many drugs go by different brand names from country to country.) The regulatory authorities cleared the name as not overly promising or confusing.

"Afterward, we had a little fun creating a story to go with it," said Bob Marchesani, global marketing manager for Alimta. "It sounded like Olympus, home of the gods, above a storm or cloud. So maybe patients who would get Alimta would be above the storm of cancer."

al gore is the man

He won the popular vote for the presidency in 2000, two Oscars and an Emmy in 2007, and now, the mother of all awards: the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. As my friend Grace says, "living well is the best revenge." Al, you've been vindicated (and then some). I hope you can continue to be a force for good.

I also think it's sad that it's too late for him to enter the 2008 race for president. (Hillary's got 80 million in her war chest and lots of momentum. Oh, and there's the important fact that her base is also Gore's base.)

Gore shares Nobel Peace Prize with U.N. panel (CNN) -- Former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their work to raise awareness about global warming.

"An Inconvenient Truth," a 2006 documentary featuring Al Gore, won two Academy Awards this year.

In a statement, Gore said he was "deeply honored," adding that "the climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

The former vice president said he would donate his half of the $1.5 million prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a U.S. organization he founded that aims to persuade people to cut emissions and reduce global warming.

The White House offered an initial reaction to the Nobel win by President Bush's 2000 opponent. "Of course, we're happy that Vice President Gore and the IPCC are receiving this recognition," said deputy press secretary Tony Fratto.

During its announcement, the Nobel committee cited the winners "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

The award ceremony will be held December 10 in Oslo, Norway.
Watch why Gore won the Nobel prize »

In recent weeks, Gore has been the target of a campaign to persuade him to enter the 2008 presidential race.

A source involved in Gore's past political runs told CNN that he definitely has the ambition to use the peace prize as a springboard to run for president.

But he will not run, because he won't take on the political machine assembled by Sen. Hillary Clinton, said the source. If the senator from New York had faltered at all, Gore would take a serious look at entering the race, the source said. But Gore has calculated that Clinton is unstoppable, according to the source.

Gore repeatedly denied he has any plans to run again, but this week a group of grass-roots Democrats calling themselves "Draft Gore" took out a full-page ad in The New York Times in a bid to change his mind.

"Your country needs you now, as do your party, and the planet you are fighting so hard to save," the group said in an open letter.

"America and the Earth need a hero right now, someone who will transcend politics as usual and bring real hope to our country and to the world."

The Nobel committee praised Gore as being "one of the world's leading environmentalist politicians."

"He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted," said Ole Danbolt Mjos, chairman of the Nobel committee.

In making the announcement, Mjos said, "Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.

"Thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988 to study climate change information. The group doesn't do independent research but instead reviews scientific literature from around the world.

The U.N.-sanctioned group was formed by the World Meteorological Organization and U.N. Environment Program.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was "delighted" with the news that Gore and the IPCC will share in prize.

A spokeswoman for the IPCC, which draws on the work of 2,000 scientists, said the panel was surprised that it had been chosen to share the award with Gore and praised his contribution to environmental campaigning.

"We would have been happy even if he had received it alone because it is a recognition of the importance of this issue," spokeswoman Carola Traverso Saibante said, The Associated Press reported.

The Nobel caps a series of prestigious awards associated with Gore, including two Oscars this year for the 2006 documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth," which followed him on a worldwide tour publicizing the dangers of climate change.

Last month, he also picked up an Emmy -- the highest award in U.S. television -- for "Current TV." The show, which Gore co-created, describes itself as a global television network giving viewers the opportunity to create and influence its programming.

Previous American recipients of the peace prize include former Presidents Carter in 2002, Wilson in 1919 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1906.

In 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shared the award with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. received the honor in 1964.

Gore was vice president for eight years under President Clinton. He won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000 and ran against Bush.

But he failed in his bid for the White House — despite winning more popular votes than Bush — when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his challenge over voting results in Florida, securing an Electoral College majority for Bush.

fighting for democracy

From Mike Peters, the artist behind Mother Goose and Grimm:

Via Tess

dear abby takes a stand for equality

It's refreshing to see someone as mainstream as "Dear Abby" taking such a positive stance on gay rights. She's precisely the kind of person who will slowly change middle America's stance on this issue.

'Dear Abby' Author Supports Gay Marriage
By LISA LEFF,AP
SAN FRANCISCO (Oct. 9) - For years, rumblings have surfaced on the Internet, conjecture about her casual references to "sexual orientation" and "respect." Now, Dear Abby is ready to say it flatly: She supports same-sex marriage.

"I believe if two people want to commit to each other, God bless 'em," the syndicated advice columnist told The Associated Press. "That is the highest form of commitment, for heaven's sake."

What Jeanne Phillips, aka Abigail Van Buren, finds offensive and misguided are homophobic jokes, phrases like "That's so gay," and parents who reject or try to reform their children when they come out of the closet.

Her views are the reason she's being honored this week by Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a national advocacy group that provides support for gay people and their families. The original Abby, Phillips' 89-year-old mother, Pauline, helped put PFLAG on the map in 1984 when she first referred a distraught parent to the organization.

Jeanne Phillips, who formally took over the column when her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease five years ago, has continued plugging the group, as well as its affiliate for parents with children who identify as transgender, and a suicide hot line aimed at gay teenagers.

"I'm trying to tell kids if they are gay, it's OK to be gay. I've tried to tell families if they have a gay family member to accept them and love them as they always have," she said Friday.

PFLAG director Jody Huckaby said Abby is the perfect choice for the first "Straight for Equality" award, part of the group's new campaign to engage more heterosexuals as allies.

"She is such a mainstream voice," Huckaby said. "If Dear Abby is talking about it, it gives other people permission to talk about it."

Alert "Dear Abby" readers may have noticed that the youthful attitude Phillips promised to bring to the column includes a decidedly gay-friendly take on most matters.

In a March 2005 column that touched a nerve with some readers, for instance, Phillips came down unequivocally on the side of scientists who say sexual orientation is a matter of genetics, not personal choice. She advised a mother who had cautioned her 14-year-old daughter to keep her feelings for other girls secret to "come to terms with your own feelings about homosexuality."

Last year, addressing a groom whose gay brother refused to serve as best man or even attend the wedding because he did not have the right to marry, she made it clear her sympathies lay with the boycotting brother.

"Accepting the status quo is not always the best thing to do," she wrote. "Women were once considered chattel, and slavery was regarded as sanctioned in the Bible. However, western society grew to recognize that neither was just. Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain have recognized gay marriage, and one day, perhaps, our country will, too."

Phillips, who lives in Los Angeles, said she isn't worried that aligning herself with gay rights advocates will cause newspapers to censor or cancel the column, which appears in about 1,400 newspapers.

Her outspokenness on gay rights issues has never caused a strong backlash, said Kathie Kerr, a spokeswoman for Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes the column. It's possible some editors choose not to run the segments dealing with homosexuality, but if so they have not complained to the syndicate, Kerr said.

"We get brouhahas all the time, and they haven't been about Dear Abby," Kerr said.

Phillips realizes not everyone agrees with her on gay rights; she and her husband "argue about this continually," she said. He thinks civil unions and domestic partnerships "would be less threatening to people who feel marriage is just a religious rite." She thinks anything less than full marriage amounts to second-class citizenship.

"If gay Americans are not allowed to get married and have all the benefits that American citizens are entitled to by the Bill of Rights, they should get one hell of a tax break. That is my opinion," said Phillips, who speaks with the no-nonsense tone of someone who is used to settling debates.

Right now, Abby, as Phillips prefers to be called, is working on a reply to a woman who wanted to know whether she should include childhood photographs of her transgender brother-in-law in a family album. The woman is worried what she will tell her children when they see pictures of their uncle as a little girl.

Phillips' guidance to Worried Reader will be simple, she said: Include the photos, of course. Silence is the enemy. Answer any questions the kids have honestly - Uncle John was born with a body of the wrong sex, so even when he was called Jane he was really John inside.

Phillips said that while it might be tempting to devote an entire column to why she thinks jokes invoking homosexual slurs are in poor taste, she does not plan to spell out her views on gay marriage in print any more directly than she has already.

"If they are my readers, they know how I feel on the subject," she said. "I don't think I'm a flaming radical. I'm for civility in life. I'm for treating each other with respect, trying to do the best you can."

Via Tim

"owning" che

In December 2005, I saw the ¡Che! Revolution and Commerce exhibit at the International Center of Photography. This spring, I saw "Kordavision," a documentary about Alberto Korda Díaz, the photographer who shot the iconic images we now see mass-marketed on everything from posters to purses. It's interesting to watch the commodification of Che into a trendy, artsy product forty years after he was assassinated by the CIA and Bolivian security forces.

40 years after Che's death, his image is a battleground
By Marc Lacey
Monday, October 8, 2007

SANTA CLARA, Cuba: Aleida Guevara March, the 46-year-old daughter of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, says she can bear the Che T-shirts, the Che key chains, the Che postcards and Che paintings sold all over Cuba, not to mention the world.

At least some of the purchasers truly cherish Che, she says. On Monday she was surrounded by thousands of Che fans wearing his image here in Santa Clara, where her father's remains are kept, and where she sat in the front row of a ceremony to mark the 40th anniversary of his death.

Acting President Raúl Castro attended. A message was read from his older brother Fidel, who ceded power in August 2006 after emergency surgery, likening his former comrade in arms to "a flower that was plucked from his stem prematurely." But amid all the ceremony, what really gets to Guevara is the use of the man she calls "Poppy" in ways that she says are completely removed from his revolutionary ideals, like when a designer recently put Che on a bikini.

In fact, 40 years after his death Che is as much a marketing tool as an international revolutionary icon. Which raises the question of what exactly does the sheer proliferation of his image - the distant gaze, the scraggly beard and the beret adorned with a star - mean in a decidedly capitalist world? Even in Cuba, one of the world's last communist bastions, Che is used to make both a buck and a point. "He sells," said a Cuban shop clerk, who had Che after Che starring down from a wall full of T-shirts.

But at least here he is also used to inspire the next generation of Cubans, brought up in classes dealing with everything from medicine to economics to political science. Schoolchildren invoke his name every morning, declaring with a salute, "We want to be like Che." His quotations are recited almost as often as those of his revolutionary comrade in arms, Fidel Castro.

"Che is part of all our thinking," said Juan Vela Valdés, the Cuban minister of higher education, who introduced a concentration in Che while he was rector at the University of Havana.

A movie showed at Santa Clara University on the eve of Monday's ceremony went so far as to compare Che to Jesus, both in appearance and in ideals.

But Che's mythic status as a homegrown revolutionary does not extend everywhere, even if his image does. When Target stores in the United States put his image on a CD carrying case last year, critics who consider him a murderer and symbol of totalitarianism pressured the retailer to pull the item.

"What next? Hitler backpacks? Pol Pot cookware? Pinochet pantyhose?" Investor's Business Daily said in an editorial, calling the use of the image an example of "tyrant-chic." The famous image, by a Cuban photographer Alberto Korda Díaz, was taken at a March 5, 1960, funeral rally in which dozens of Cubans were killed in a boat explosion that Cuban blamed on the United States. The picture became famous after appearing in Paris Match magazine in 1967, just weeks before Che was killed by soldiers in Bolivia, apparently aided by the CIA.

Korda, who died in 2001 at age 72, never received royalties, but he did sue a British advertising agency over the use of the photo in a campaign for vodka. He won $50,000, which he donated for medicine for children.

Aledia Guevara March and her family, too, have attempted to stop the marketing of Che's image in ways that they find abhorrent. She says they have reached out to lawyers in New York, whom she would not name, to pursue companies the family thinks is misusing the image, not to sue them for damages, but to ask them to stop.

"We're not after money," she said of the family's ongoing fight. "We just don't want him misused. He can be a universal person, but respect the image."

Some of Che's star power has rubbed off on his four surviving children, one of whom is named Ernesto Guevara and drove to Monday's memorial on a motorcycle, just like Dad. Cubans hug the Guevaras in the street, and tourists get giddy when they learn who they are.

"I have goose bumps," said Alfredo Moreno, 32, a Mexican who posed for a picture with Aledia Guevara March, clearly overcome with emotion. "I can't describe to you what this moment means to me."

As Moreno went on and on, Guevara told him to stop his fawning words.

"I'm a child of Che," she explained, "but I'm not Che." It can be hard to see her father's face in hers, mostly because Che's most recognizable feature was his scraggly beard. But she, although resembling more a Cuban soccer mom than a revolutionary, says her eyes and his are shaped the same and that her nose and mouth are similar as well.

Guevara, who was 6 when her father died, says she is used to the attention she gets. "I feel richer than the queen of England," she said of all the love.

It can be a weighty responsibility to carry Che's genetic material in one's blood. Guevara is a pediatrician. Her sister is a veterinarian who specializes in marine mammals. One brother manages a center devoted to Che in Havana. Then there is Ernesto, a Harley Davidson aficionado. All of them are called on by the Cuban government from time to time to help continue the legacy of Che.

One detects a bit of exhaustion in all this, particularly now, when Cuba and much of Latin America are holding events to honor his death and, next June, what would have been his 80th birthday.

"I can't be everywhere," Guevara said. "I can't multiply myself." Guevara travels the world speaking at conferences dealing with Che. At one in Italy, she learned after signing T-shirts for some young people that they were Fascists. "They knew nothing about him," she said with a sigh.

It was another meeting, though, that she found the most fascinating of all. She said she once bumped into John F. Kennedy Jr. in Europe and discussed with him the challenges of being the offspring of a famous man. She said he told her that having the same name as his father only increased the weight.

She called John Kennedy Jr. "a beautiful person" and said she was able to separate him from his father, who ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion to topple the government that Che had helped put in place in Cuba.

But bring up United States foreign policy and then the resemblance to her father really emerges. The fiery rhetoric flows when she discusses the war in Iraq. She calls the economic embargo of Cuba that has stretched on for 50 years "so brutal, so stupid, so irrational."

And don't even get her started about the Bush administration.

american madrassas

Last week, Leo and I watched the most disturbing documentary I've seen in a very long time. It's called "Jesus Camp" and focuses on a youth pastor, Becky Fischer, who indoctrinates kids at a fundamentalist evangelical Christian summer camp. The tactics are frightening, as is the mix of right-wing political agendas and scripture that is used to teach children to "take back America for Christ."

The home-schooled kids are taught that global warming is a lie spawned by pro-evolution forces, that abortion must be stopped by "righteous judges" and politicians (they even bless a cardboard cut-out of a smirking George W. Bush), and that they must form an “army” to defeat the godless. At one point, they destroy objects labeled as "government" and later go to Washington DC as part of a pro-life protest. Other highlights include Ted Haggard railing about homosexuality, pastor Becky Fischer praying over the equipment to keep the devil from messing up her PowerPoint slides, a little girl commanding a bowling ball to reach the pins, and the requisite speaking in tongues and laying on of hands practiced in Pentecostal churches.

The cultish manner in which these kids are taught to be soldiers of Christ left me wanting to get the hell out of this country before the home-schooled fundamentalists take over. Controversy about the film, and vandalism of the campground where the kids are trained in Devils Lake, ND (no joke) led to the camp being shut down indefinitely.

The film left me cold, thinking about the tactics and the complicity of parents in what amounts to an American Madrassa. I was still chewing on that one when I stumbled on this story, about how fundamentalist churches are using Halo 3 to recruit new footsoldiers in their (un)holy war.

Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church
By MATT RICHTEL
Published: October 7, 2007

First the percussive sounds of sniper fire and the thrill of the kill. Then the gospel of peace.

The Colorado Community Church is one of many across the nation reaching out to young people through the video game Halo.

Across the country, hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants have drawn concern and criticism through their use of an unusual recruiting tool: the immersive and violent video game Halo.

The latest iteration of the immensely popular space epic, Halo 3, was released nearly two weeks ago by Microsoft and has already passed $300 million in sales.

Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.

The alliance of popular culture and evangelism is challenging churches much as bingo games did in the 1960s. And the question fits into a rich debate about how far churches should go to reach young people.

Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo — despite its “thou shalt kill” credo — celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.

Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”

Once they come for the games, Gregg Barbour, the youth minister of the church said, they will stay for his Christian message. “We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour wrote in a letter to parents at the church.

But the question arises: What price to appear relevant? Some parents, religious ethicists and pastors say that Halo may succeed at attracting youths, but that it could have a corroding influence. In providing Halo, churches are permitting access to adult-themed material that young people cannot buy on their own.

“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”

Daniel R. Heimbach, a professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, believes that churches should reject Halo, in part because it associates thrill and arousal with killing.

“To justify whatever killing is involved by saying that it’s just pixels involved is an illusion,” he said.

Focus on the Family, a large evangelical organization, said it was trying to balance the game’s violent nature with its popularity and the fact that churches are using it anyway. “Internally, we’re still trying to figure out what is our official view on it,” said Lisa Anderson, a spokeswoman for the group.

There is little doubting Halo’s cultural relevance. Even as video games have grown in popularity, the Halo series stands out. The first Halo and Halo 2 sold nearly 15 million copies combined. Microsoft says that Halo 3 “is on track to become the No. 1 gaming title of all time.”

Hundreds of churches use Halo games to connect with young people, said Lane Palmer, the youth ministry specialist at the Dare 2 Share Ministry, a nonprofit organization in Arvada, Colo., that helps churches on youth issues.

“It’s very pervasive,” Mr. Palmer said, more widespread on the coasts, less so in the South, where the Southern Baptist denomination takes a more cautious approach. The organization recently sent e-mail messages to 50,000 young people about how to share their faith using Halo 3. Among the tips: use the game’s themes as the basis for a discussion about good and evil.

At Sweetwater Baptist Church in Lawrenceville, Ga., Austin Brown, 16, said, “We play Halo, take a break and have something to eat, and have a lesson,” explaining that the pastor tried to draw parallels “between God and the devil.”

Players of Halo 3 control the fate of Master Chief, a tough marine armed to the teeth who battles opponents with missiles, lasers, guns that fire spikes, energy blasters and other fantastical weapons. They can also play in teams, something the churches say allows communication and fellowship opportunities.

Complicating the debate over the appropriateness of the game as a church recruiting tool are the plot’s apocalyptic and religious overtones. The hero’s chief antagonists belong to the Covenant, a fervent religious group that welcomes the destruction of Earth as the path to their ascension.

Microsoft said Halo 3 was a “space epic” that was not intended to make specific religious references or be more broadly allegorical. Advocates of using the game as a church recruiting tool say the religious overtones are sufficiently cartoonish and largely overlooked by players.

Martial images in literature or movies popular with religious people are not new. The popular “Left Behind” series of books — it also spawned a video game — dealt with the conflict preceding the second coming of Christ. Playing Halo is “no different than going on a camping trip,” said Kedrick Kenerly, founder of Christian Gamers Online, an Internet site whose central themes are video games and religion. “It’s a way to fellowship.”

Mr. Kenerly said the idea that Halo is inappropriately violent too strictly interpreted the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” “I’m not walking up to someone with a pistol and shooting them,” he said. “I’m shooting pixels on a screen.”

Mr. Kenerly’s brother, Ken Kenerly, 43, is a pastor who recently started a church in Atlanta and previously started the Family Church in Albuquerque, N.M., where quarterly Halo nights were such a big social event that he had to rent additional big-screen TVs.

Ken Kenerly said he believed that the game could be useful in connecting to young people he once might have reached in more traditional ways, like playing sports. “There aren’t as many kids outdoors as indoors,” he said. “With gamers, how else can you get into their lives?”

John Robison, the current associate pastor at the 300-member Albuquerque church, said parents approached him and were concerned about the Halo games’ M rating. “We explain we’re using it as a tool to be relatable and relevant,” he said, “and most people get over it pretty quick.”

David Drexler, youth director at the 200-member nondenominational Country Bible Church in Ashby, Minn., said using Halo to recruit was “the most effective thing we’ve done.”

In rural Minnesota, Mr. Drexler said, the church needs something powerful to compete against the lure of less healthy behaviors. “We have to find something that these kids are interested in doing that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol or premarital sex.” His congregation plans to double to eight its number of TVs, which would allow 32 players to compete at one time.

Among parents at the Colorado Community Church, Doug Graham, a pediatric oncologist with a 12-year-old son, said that he was not aware of the game’s M rating and that it gave him pause. He said he felt that parents should be actively involved in deciding whether minors play an M-rated game. “Every family should have a conversation about it,” he said.

Mr. Barbour, the youth pastor at the church, said the game had led to a number of internal discussions prompted by elders who complained about its violent content. Mr. Barbour recently met for several hours with the church’s pastor and successfully made his case that the game was a crucial recruiting tool.

In one letter to parents, Mr. Barbour wrote that God calls ministers to be “fishers of men.”

“Teens are our ‘fish,” he wrote. “So we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.”

Thanks for the film recommendation, Vanoosheh & E

quotable

"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind."
Aristotle: Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)"

discovering the discoverer

I didn't realize that there are competing theories about who Christopher Columbus was.
Among them: Genoese, Portuguese, Catalan, Majorcan, Jewish.

Seeking Columbus’s Origins, With a Swab
By AMY HARMON
Published: October 8, 2007

BARCELONA, Spain — When schoolchildren turn to the chapter on Christopher Columbus’s humble origins as the son of a weaver in Genoa, they are not generally told that he might instead have been born out of wedlock to a Portuguese prince. Or that he might have been a Jew whose parents converted to escape the Spanish Inquisition. Or a rebel in the medieval kingdom of Catalonia.

Yet with little evidence to support them, multiple theories of Columbus’s early years have long found devoted proponents among those who would claim alternative bragging rights to the explorer. And now, five centuries after he opened the door to the New World, Columbus’s revisionist biographers have found a new hope for vindication.

The Age of Discovery has discovered DNA.

In 2004, a Spanish geneticist, Dr. Jose A. Lorente, extracted genetic material from a cache of Columbus’s bones in Seville to settle a dispute about where he was buried. Ever since, he has been beset by amateur historians, government officials and self-styled Columbus relatives of multiple nationalities clamoring for a genetic retelling of the standard textbook tale.

Even adherents of the Italian orthodoxy concede that little is known about the provenance of the Great Navigator, who seems to have purposely obscured his past. But contenders for his legacy have no compunction about prospecting for his secrets in the cells he took to his grave. And the arrival on Oct. 8 of another anniversary of Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas has only sharpened their appetite for a genetic verdict, preferably in their own favor.

A Genoese Cristoforo Colombo almost certainly did exist. Archives record his birth and early life. But there is little to tie that man to the one who crossed the Atlantic in 1492. Snippets from Columbus’s life point all around the southern European coast. He kept books in Catalan and his handwriting has, according to some, a Catalonian flair. He married a Portuguese noblewoman. He wrote in Castilian. He decorated his letters with a Hebrew cartouche.

Since it seems now that the best bet for deducing Columbus’s true hometown is to look for a genetic match in places where he might have lived, hundreds of Spaniards, Italians, and even a few Frenchmen have happily swabbed their cheeks to supply cells for comparison.

“You would be proud to know that the man that goes to America the first time was Catalan,” said Jordi Colom, 51, an executive at a local television station whose saliva sample will help test the contention that Columbus was born in Catalonia, the once-independent eastern region of modern Spain that still fosters its own language, culture and designs on independence.

No chance, said Renato Colombo, 62, a retired Italian engineer who proffered his DNA to reassert his nation’s hold on the status quo. “It has never been in doubt that he was from Liguria,” the region in northwest Italy of which Genoa is the capital, he insisted. “In his personality, there are the characteristics of the Genoese, mostly represented by his project and his visceral attachment to money and his determination.”

Mr. Colom and Mr. Colombo are both “Columbus” in their native tongues. And along with their names, each inherited from his father a Y chromosome — a sliver of DNA passed exclusively from father to son — which would have been virtually unchanged since the 15th century. A Columbus match to either man’s Y chromosome would tie him to that paternal line’s Italian or Catalonian home.

“What I want to write is the final book on Columbus, and I will not be able to do it without science to settle this,” said Francesc Albardaner, who was seduced by the possibility that DNA — a tool whose answers are treated as indisputable fact in courtrooms and on TV shows — would endorse his deeply held belief in the Catalonian Columbus.

Mr. Albardaner, a Barcelona architect, took more than three months off work, called 2,000 Coloms and persuaded 225 of them to scrape their cheeks at his Center for Columbus Studies in Barcelona. The swabs along with 100 Colombos collected in Italy are being analyzed by Dr. Lorente at the University of Granada and scientists in Rome.

A Colom match could overturn conventional wisdom about the nationality, class, religion, and motives of the man who began the age of American colonization. On the other hand, an association with Colombo DNA would cement Italy’s national pride in a man who remains a hero to many, complaints from American Indians he slaughtered, Africans he enslaved and Vikings who got there first notwithstanding.

But some petitioners think it is a waste of time to scour the phone book for Columbus’s long-lost kin. Insisting that they know who Columbus’s father really was, they are asking Dr. Lorente to perform a 500-year postdated paternity test. The government council president of Majorca, for instance, has paid him to examine the exhumed remains of Prince Carlos of Viana, the one-time heir to the Catalonian crown who reportedly fathered a son with a woman on the island whose last name was Colom.

The vials of royal DNA in Dr. Lorente’s freezer also include contributions from two living members of the now deposed Portuguese royal line: those of the Duke of Bragança and the Count of Ribeira Grande who argue that Columbus was a member of their family — the product of an extramarital affair involving a Portuguese prince.

“This is the true story, forget the Italians, forget the Spanish,” said Count Jose Ribeira, 47, a real estate developer in Lisbon who attended the dedication of a new Columbus monument last year in the Portuguese town of Cuba that claims to be Columbus’s birthplace. If it is, all three samples should contain the same Portuguese genetic imprint.

But this year, anyway, the Columbus Day parade in New York will feature Maserati sports cars, flag throwers from Siena and Lidia Bastianich, the Italian cooking show host, as grand marshal.

Those who had hoped DNA would crash the Italian party expected a genetic pronouncement from the scientists on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s death last May. Or last Columbus Day. Surely by this one. After all those centuries in a crypt, however, a mere trace of DNA was all that could be extracted from Columbus’s bones, and Dr. Lorente has said he is loath to use it indiscriminately.

To make things even tougher, he has found that Catalonian Coloms and Genoese Colombos are so closely related it is hard to distinguish them with the standard Y-chromosome tests. So he is searching for more subtle differences that would allow him to link Columbus to a single lineage.

“My heart,” Mr. Albardaner said, “will not endure so many delays.”

Others have accused Dr. Lorente of nationalist bias, of covering up results that suggest Columbus was a Jew and of withholding a historical treasure from the Western world.

“Will Lorente continue to hide what the scientists know concerning Columbus’s DNA?” asked Peter Dickson, a retired C.I.A. analyst whose self-published book on Columbus argues that he was part French, part Italian, part Spanish and part Jewish, in an e-mail message to fellow Columbus buffs. “Will he remain silent on Columbus Day once again?”

Dr. Lorente says he will. And in the absence of data, rumors are flying.

Olga Rickards, a Lorente collaborator at Tor Vergata University in Rome, has been quoted as saying that she “wouldn’t bet on Columbus being Spanish.” A graduate student of Dr. Lorente’s who had studied the Colombo DNA led Italian newspapers to believe Columbus was from Lombardy, north of Genoa, although she had apparently never seen Columbus’s DNA. And Nito Verdera, a journalist from the Balearic island of Ibiza, who says the explorer was a Catalan-speaking Ibizan crypto-Jew, cited leaks from Dr. Lorente’s team that link Columbus to North Africa.

“I’m very sorry about the great expectation among some historians that they all want the DNA to confirm their hypothesis,” Dr. Lorente said. “But science needs its time and has its pace.”

If Columbus was an adopted name, as some scholars believe, tests of Coloms and Colombos will have been in vain. Moreover, with dozens of generations separating all those Coloms, Colombos, princes and counts from Columbus’s time, a long-hidden adulterous liaison could have severed the Y-chromosome-and-surname link.

Even with a match questions will remain. What if Coloms moved to Genoa or Colombos to Barcelona? Today’s distinct regional identities may not be reflected in the genetic code of the earlier era.

Mr. Albardaner still brings Columbus novices to the Historic Archive of Protocols in Barcelona, where they can hold a yellowed note from the 15th century filled with the calligraphic scrawl of the man he believes stumbled upon the Caribbean while looking for a western route to India.

He is less sure now that there will be a precise answer to who Columbus was or where he was from, but he is still hoping it will come from the DNA.

“Maybe it will say he’s from Catalonia. Maybe it will be a complete lockout. Maybe we find his DNA is completely dissimilar to any known DNA, he comes from Mars, well, perfect, O.K.”

“Then,” he said, “I stop.”

Peter Kiefer contributed reporting from Rome.

habits, interrupted

Leo and I took Casey to the vet for the last time on Friday.

He was fifteen and we gave him a great life, but his body was shutting down, system by system. In the end, we did the right thing for the right reasons, but it still sucks to say goodbye to a sweet, faithful companion whose only purpose in life is to love, love, love people. (Okay, he was also about eating and shedding, but let's not get into that now.)

The hardest part is the routine of daily life, the subconscious habits — looking for him when I go to bed, avoiding stepping on him when I first wake up, hoping to be greeted with adoration at the front door, being comforted when upset, brushing a bit of his fur off my sweater, almost calling out for him when I spilled cereal on the kitchen floor this morning.

I know that time will make these habits fade, along with the dull ache and lump in my throat each time I think about my dear sweet pooch. Meanwhile, I'm missing him desperately, but smiling through the tears as I find golden retriever dustbunnies in the remote corners of my home.

The Ambivalent Bond With a Ball of Fur
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: October 2, 2007

A couple of weeks ago, while I was out of town on business, our cat, Cleo, died of liver failure. My husband and daughter buried her in the backyard, not far from the grave of our other cat, Manny, who had died just a few months earlier of mouth cancer.

Cleo was almost 16 years old, she’d been sick, and her death was no surprise. Still, when I returned to a home without cats, without pets of any sort, I was startled by my grief — not so much its intensity as its specificity.

It was very different from the catastrophic grief I’d felt when I was 19 and my father died, and all sense, color and flooring dropped from my days. This was a sorrow of details, of minor rhythms and assumptions that I hadn’t really been aware of until, suddenly, they were disrupted or unmet. Hey, I’m opening the door to the unfinished attic now. Doesn’t a cat want to try dashing inside to roll around in the loose wads of insulation while I yell at it to get out of there?

I’ve just dumped a pile of clean laundry on the bed and I’m starting to fold it. Why aren’t the cats jumping up for a quick sit? Don’t they know everything is still warm?

We expect the bonds between children and parents, or between lovers or close friends, to be fierce and complex, and that makes them easy to understand. We expect the bonds between people and their pets to be simple and innocent, an antidote to human judgment and the fog of human speech, and that can make the bond paradoxically harder to track or explain. How do we feel about the nonhuman animals whose company we crave? We think we know. Our pet is our “best friend,” a “member of the family,” a surrogate child for the adults, in loco parentis for the kids and the best possible pillow for whoever has first dibs.

Pets are growing ever more popular. In 1988, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, 56 percent of American households had a pet. By 2006, that figure had climbed to 63 percent, which works out to a national census of 88 million owned cats, 75 million dogs, 16 million birds, 14 million horses, 142 million fish, assorted small mammals and the occasional leopard or Madagascan hissing cockroach.

We love our pets and we love the idea of pets, of reaching beyond the parochial barriers of the human race to commune with other species. When Alex the African gray parrot, renowned for his ability to communicate, do simple arithmetic and describe objects by their color, size, shape and material, died last month of cardiovascular disease at the age of 31, his obituary appeared everywhere, and Irene Pepperberg, the scientist who had trained Alex since 1977, was flooded with condolences.

“Alex touched so many people,” Dr. Pepperberg, a lecturer and research associate at Harvard University, said in a telephone interview. “He broke all preconceived notions of what it means to be a bird brain.” She admitted to feeling devastated. “There’s a parrot-size hole in my life,” she said.

Yet part of the reason Alex’s death attracted so much sympathy, and why Dr. Pepperberg’s grief seems normal rather than excessive, is that Alex, in the public eye, was neither pet nor ordinary parrot. He was Pinocchio, striving to realize his full potential — his humanity. Importantly, Alex didn’t merely nuzzle his affection for Dr. Pepperberg. He had genuine dying words, the fine four-hanky phrase, “I love you.”

By contrast, when Leona Helmsley, the hotel magnate who died in August, specified in her will that she was leaving $12 million to her pet dog, Trouble, while stiffing two of her grandchildren, there was scant talk of dogs as best friends. There were hoots, clucks and growls, with one reader on The New York Times Web site advising the grandchildren to “go kill that stupid dog.”

Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of “Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think,” says ambivalence and tension have long been woven into our feelings about animals. “On the one hand, we feel a connection to other animals and we can’t imagine a world where we’re the only species on the planet,” he said. “On the other hand, we’re always trying to show that we’re not animals. We’re like them, yet we don’t want to be like them.”

Dr. Hauser traces this tension to self-defense. We use animals, and we want to feel justified in using animals. We eat their muscles for meat, flay their hides for shoes and accessories, inject them with experimental vaccines, genetically engineer them into grotesque morphologies to study human diseases. This requires a certain mental distance.

So we adore our pets and lavish time and money on them. Annual pet expenditures in this country have doubled in the last decade and are now more than $40 billion a year. And then we scold ourselves for our foolish fiscal priorities.

We adore our pets and can come to identify with them so deeply that we attribute to them some truly daffy notions, like the radio listener who called in a comment to Colin Allen, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Indiana University’s Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior. “She wanted to tell me about how her cat had very gingerly brought in an injured bird to show her, as though to say, It’s hurt, please take care of it,” Dr. Allen said. “I suggested there might be other interpretations for her cat’s behavior.”

Yes, we love our pets and anthropomorphize them to the point where we think our cat might enjoy wearing the mouse hat Halloween costume now on sale at Petsmart.com. And still we abandon difficult pets, and shelters euthanize some 10 million pets a year.

I understand the ambivalence of the human-animal bond. I loved my cats, and I miss them, but I resent them, too, for showing me what a creature of small habits I am, and for reminding me that even love is not enough. Life, like the laundry, will always cool down.

the revolution starts here

Although I'm not sure what to pay for it, I'm glad to see Radiohead's offering the new album online for whatever fans choose to pay. And I'm also glad that Leo's preordering Rainbow.

From The Times: Win or lose, the revolution starts here
October 2, 2007 | Pete Paphides, Rock Critic

In some small English villages, it’s not an uncommon sight — a display of newly harvested vegetables and next to them an “honesty box” inviting you to leave some money.

On the face of it, Radiohead’s decision to sell downloads of In Rainbows — eight weeks before its physical equivalent — at whatever price you might care to pay for it, is not so different. Its timing, though, is charged with an almost political significance. The worth of music forms part of the crisis in the industry. But by taking that question to their own constituency, Radiohead have done something remarkably radical. Record company paranoia about the free dissemination of songs goes back to the days when album sleeves bore a skull and crossbones with the legend “Home Taping is Killing Music” on it. In the age of file sharing and free albums with newspapers, the problem has merely intensified.

Underpinning all of this is the assumption that, given a choice, people will steal music rather than pay for it. Radiohead are putting that to the test. There’s no doubt that thousands will hand over the price of a sherbet dip for the download. Presumably, though, Radiohead’s argument runs that those people would have obtained the album through file-sharing sites.

What this move relies on is the notion that there is between Radiohead and their fans a collateral of trust and, dare the term be uttered, decency.

This is the very thing that has propelled the band to unprecedented autonomy. If it works, it will — at the click of a few million mice — make them the most powerful band in Britain.

From Times Online: Radiohead challenges music industry with 'honesty box' album sale
October 1, 2007 | Adam Sherwin, Media Correspondent of The Times

How much would you pay for a new album by the world's most critically acclaimed rock band? Radiohead has put its reputation on the line by asking fans to name a price for its long-awaited new album.

A common complaint since illegal downloading hit the traditional markets for recorded music has been that no fair-priced legal alternative exists. Now fans can decide for the first time how much, or if at all, a band should be rewarded for its efforts.

Radiohead, the innovative Oxford group whose 1997 OK Computer album was voted the best ever, shocked the record industry by announcing that its seventh album would be released solely through the band's website.

In Rainbows, a ten-track album, will be released as a digital download on Wednesday of next week. Fans who tried to pre-order the download were told they could name their own price. A message read "It's up to you" when users clicked on a question mark next to a blank price box. A subsequent screen reassured fans seeking more information: "No really, it's up to you."

If sceptics believe Radiohead has passed its creative peak, the album can be downloaded free, bar a 45p transaction charge.

The album, the first since the band's contract with EMI expired, will be sold as high-quality MP3 files, which can be copied across the net and between digital music players.

Radiohead's global fanbase immediately swamped the site with download orders. Website chat forums devoted to the band hosted debates over the appropriate amount to tender.

Some sheepishly admitted they had paid their heroes 00.00p, saying that they did not own a credit card. One respondent wrote: "Unless u literally have no money in the bank or don't have a credit card, at least pay a bit of something/donation for a GIFT from this amazing band."

Scratchy clips of the band playing the new songs on YouTube were scoured to assess the album's likely value.

New albums are usually sold for £7.99 through iTunes but Radiohead refuses to allow its albums to be sold on the music site because the band does not want purchasers to be able to cherry-pick individual tracks.

Ben Drury, the deputy chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association, said the "honesty box" download challenged Apple's policy of charging a fixed 79p price for iTunes tracks.

He said: "It is another step towards variable pricing which consumers want. But someone in our office paid £10 for the download, which is quite high for an album."

The tracks will immediately be posted on pirate MP3 websites, Mr Drury warned. The transactions are being handled by Waste Products, an Oxford company which previously sold the band's "ethical" merchandise, and there were questions over whether it could cope with the demand.

The Official Charts Company will not accept "free" Radiohead sales for inclusion. But the 30-million selling band will not end up out of pocket.

Radiohead has also announced a £40 discbox version of the album, containing two CDs, extra tracks, artwork and a book, which fans began to order as collector's items. This will not be delivered until December, making the download a must for those who have waited since 2003's Hail To The Thief for new Radiohead material.

The band's latest move is a blow to struggling high-street music stores and to EMI, which has released Radiohead's records since 1992. It said: "Radiohead have always looked to experiment with new ways of working and we continue to discuss future plans with them."

A spokesman for the band said: "Radiohead.com is open for business and the site has been totally swamped. People can get the album for free if they choose. But it is a brilliant album."

With legal downloads failing to make up a 10 per cent slump in album sales this year, artists with a strong live following are beginning to abandon the paid-for album.

Prince gave his new CD away free with a Sunday newspaper and at gigs. The Charlatans will give their new album away as a download through the XFM radio station website because their primary income stream is sold-out gigs. The former chart-toppers Marillion funded an album through £16-a-head donations from 13,000 fans.

Led by Thom Yorke, Radiohead has straddled the line between artistic experimentation and stadium-filling anthems since selling five million copies of OK Computer.

Reports suggest the new album marks a return to a more guitar-focused sound after exploring "electronica" during recent releases.

Listen to songs from the new album

15 Step

Bodysnatchers

Nude

Weird Fishes/Arpeggi

All I Need

ho-rrific

I was talking to Jackie, one of our student employees today. Jackie's cute, fashion-forward, and puts a lot of time into her look.

Unprompted, she mentioned "Sunset Tan," a VH1 reality show that takes place in a tanning salon and exemplifies everything that is wrong with our society. The show's pilot included what Jackie referred to as a "bimbo mom" who took in her 10-year old daughter for a tanning package. The girl kept saying she wanted to look like Lindsay Lohan, and the mom was supporting it. Jackie was outraged by the fact that the mom was "okay with her 10-year old looking like a cracked-out tramp."

I've got to say that I'm with Jackie on this one. Setting aside the whole tanning of a minor (which is ridiculous to me and could be its own blog post), it's a fine line between trendy and trampy. Hopefully, my kids won't feel the need to be — or dress — either way.

fashion: The language of style.
Lolita's Closet: Unbearably trampy back-to-school clothes.
By Emily Yoffe
Posted Friday, Aug. 24, 2007, at 12:32 PM ET

My 11-year-old daughter and I just did her back-to-school shopping. Shopping for a 'tween is a little like being a presidential candidate—you try to find some middle ground in a world of clamorous extremes. I want her clothes to reflect the fact that she's still a girl, but I'm willing to let her hint at the young woman she is about to become. What I don't want her to bring home from the mall are clothes—and there are plenty of them—that inspire this sort of paroxysm: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

Fortunately, my daughter shares my goals: She wants to look stylish while still sweet, trendy but not trampy. The designers at Limited Too, a shrine to 'tween fashion, and I differ on how to achieve this. The chain, which has about 570 stores in the United States, sells clothes to girls ages 7 to 12. According to a Limited Too spokesman, Robert Atkinson, the company was instrumental in creating the 'tween fashion category 20 years ago. This year, 'tweens of both sexes are expected to account for $13 billion of apparel sales.

Limited Too was awash in shimmer; virtually every item was encrusted with rhinestones or sparkling with glitter. Most of these clothes provided sufficient coverage, but my daughter doesn't like ostentation, so we looked through the T-shirts for something more subdued. There we discovered what I have come to think of as Nitwit Wear. These are T-shirts with slogans such as: "I Left My Brain in My Locker," "I Only Shop on Days that End in Y," and "Spoiled and Proud of It." (At least you only want to shake your head at these. Making you believe in corporal punishment is the Happy Bunny line of clothing, available online and at various department stores, which features phrases such as "Wow you're ugly," and "It's cute how stupid you are.") It's a comfort to know that if your child can't come up with her own insolent remarks, clothing manufacturers are there to help.

Moving through the store, I wondered if insolence was preferable to suggestiveness. I reached my limit at what Limited Too sold to go under their clothing: a line of padded, underwire push-up bras for girls with nothing of their own to pad or push up. Maybe it's a sign of progress. Back when I was a girl, those unsatisfied with the speed of their development were forced to turn to balled-up Kleenex.

Adult fashion trends eventually work their way to the 'tween set. Low-rise jeans have been ubiquitous for so long that they seem to have settled in immovably like a warm air mass in August. My daughter hates them because when you sit down or bend over, they expose your underpants. Women have solved—or compounded—this problem by wearing skimpy, provocative underwear. A few years ago, Abercrombie, the 'tween division of Abercrombie & Fitch, got in trouble for marketing thong underpants—with phrases such as "eye candy" printed on them—to prepubescent girls. Now scanty panties for girls are standard. At Limited Too there were pairs with rhinestone hearts or printed with cheeky sayings such as "Buy It Now! Tell Dad Later!"

Down the corridor was Abercrombie itself, whose guiding fashion principle seemed to be to print or appliqué the word Abercrombie in the largest letters possible on as much of the clothing as possible. Some clothing didn't have enough fabric to support a logo. A pair of shorts was the equivalent of a jeans G-string. Its microskirts would have gotten my daughter sent home from school. We fled. On our way to our next destination, I tried to avert her eyes from the Victoria's Secret window, where their clothing was emblazoned with the words "University of Pink." (I don't want to know that school's most popular major.)

Hypersexualized clothing is not necessarily skimpy. Macy's sells the line by Kimora Lee Simmons, the ex of hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons, called Baby Phat. "This is gross," my daughter said, holding up a T-shirt. There was nothing provocative about the cut of the shirt, but embroidered in pink across the chest were the words "Baby Phat" under the large, stylized logo of a cat. My daughter doesn't understand the references this logo is clearly meant to evoke, but she instinctively knew wearing this shirt would be so wrong.

Because department stores have to appeal to many types of consumer, over the years we've had great success with their in-house brands and nondesigner labels, which are usually reasonably priced and decent. At Macy's, my daughter was drawn to the tops in its Greendog line. Like the low-rise jean, the baby doll top has migrated to 'tweens. My daughter found one that was cute but not sexy, made out of blue sweatshirt material ($17) that she immediately layered with a pink, lace-trimmed tank top ($3.50—I'm not kidding). She also picked up two versions of a Greendog deeply scooped tee with a contrasting band of fabric at the neckline ($10 each).

At Lord & Taylor, she found a girlish yet sophisticated gray and black polka-dot empire-waist dress. It was $40 and perfect for a party or piano recital. The store also had that Brigadoon-like item: pants that were high-waisted enough to keep her underwear choices to herself ($30).

Department stores are where you can also find the junior versions of chichi adult labels at chichi prices. Nordstrom in particular was full of these offerings. There is no way I'm buying my daughter a $74 Lilly Pulitzer sweatshirt. Nor am I shelling out for Ralph Lauren—for her or myself. And I'm certainly not buying her anything by Juicy Couture. The single most repulsive item we saw on our expedition was something on the Juicy carousel that looked like a book. It was titled "A Week in the Life of a Juicy Drama Queen." Open it, and you find a set of days-of-the-week underpants for the prepubescent ($58). A close runner-up was the girls' gym bag ($175), which declared "Juicy and Happy." I don't understand what mother wants to advertise her child's sexuality by letting her proclaim she's juicy. If I have to choose between Baby Phat and Juicy Couture, I choose mandatory school uniforms.

Sensitized by such clothing, a mother has to be careful not to overreact. I appreciated the fact that at Old Navy there was nothing come-hither about its clothing—its baby doll tops were sloppy, not sexy. And the prices! T-shirts were two for $10. But when I tried to push some on my daughter, she shook her head. "How can they make a plain T-shirt look bad?" It was at Old Navy that we found the most hideous piece of clothing of our trip: a mud-colored top that recalled the smocks worn by lavatory attendants ($10).

And unless you can actually say to your daughter, "That would be perfect to wear at the club," Talbots Kids, a spinoff of the preppy, sensible women's line, might not be for you. With clothes for infants through 'tweens, it's the place to train your kids in the finer points of WASP style while they're still in training pants (although no miniature martini shakers are available in the accessories department). The store was bright, airy, and empty—the two saleswomen were thrilled to see us. I hoped to find some pants that didn't sit below my daughter's hip bone. Talbots had them, and I showed her a pair in navy blue. My daughter shook her head. "They're like nautical pants. They're so ugly." Then I held up a pair of beige polyester pants that looked reasonable to me.

"Mom, I'm 11!" she said. "I'm not Harriet Miers!"

She (child of Washington that she is) had given me a useful parameter of 'tween fashion. While you don't want your daughter to look like Britney Spears, she doesn't want to look like a failed Supreme Court nominee from the Bush administration. In between those two poles, if you have patience and good arch support, you can find enough nice stuff.