MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2010 Copyright © 2010 The New York Times

Supplemento al numero

odierno de la Repubblica

Sped. abb. postale art. 1

legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates

BACK IN 2007, WHEN the govern-

ment here announced its plan for

“the world’s first zero-carbon city”

on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, many West-

erners dismissed it as a gimmick — a fad-

dish follow-up to neighboring

Dubai’s 828-meter-high tower

in the desert and archipelago

of man-made islands in the

shape of palm trees.

The city, called Masdar, would be a per-

fect square, about a kilometer and a half on

each side, raised on a 7-meter-high base to

capture desert breezes. Beneath its laby-

rinth of pedestrian streets, a fleet of driver-

less electric cars would navigate silently

through dimly lit tunnels. The project

conjured both a walled medieval fortress

and an upgraded version of Tomorrowland

at Disney World.

Well, those early assessments turned out

to be wrong. By late September, as people

began moving into the first section of the

project to be completed — a 1.4-hectare

zone surrounding a sustainability-oriented

research institute — it was clear that

Masdar is something more daring and more

noxious.

The place blends high-tech design and

ancient construction practices into an

intriguing model for a sustainable com-

munity, but it also reflects the gated-com-

munity mentality that has been spreading

like a cancer around the globe. Its utopian

purity, and its isolation from the life of the

real city next door, are grounded in the

belief that the only way to create a truly

harmonious community is to cut it off from

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Prompted by

fears of digital-era plotters, gov-

ernments around the world are

taking steps to implement new

security regulations for the Inter-

net.

In the United States, officials

want all services that enable com-

munications — including encrypt-

ed e-mail transmitters like Black-

Berry, social networking Web sites

like Facebook and software that

allows “peer to peer” messaging

like Skype — to be technically ca-

pable of complying if served with a

wiretap order. The mandate would

include being able to intercept and

unscramble encrypted messages.

The proposed legislation raises

fresh questions about how to bal-

ance security needs with pro-

tecting privacy and fostering in-

novation. And because security

services around the world face the

same problem, the American bill

could set an example that is copied

globally.

In India, government authorities

are well beyond the proposal stage.

Officials are already demanding

that network operators give them

the ability to monitor and decrypt

digital messages, whenever the

Home Ministry deems the eaves-

dropping to be vital to national

security.

The most inflammatory part of

the effort has been India’s threat

to block encrypted BlackBerry

services, widely used by corpo-

rations, unless phone companies

provide access to the data in a

readable format. But Indian offi-

cials have also said they will seek

WhenSecurityTrumpsPrivacy

DUNCAN CHARD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Carbon-free Masdar rises squarely from the Abu Dhabi desert to catch cooling breezes. The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology.

NICOLAI

OUROUSSOFF

ESSAY

Con tin ued on Page 1V

Seeking a Desert UtopiaIn Arabian sands, a

green vision is lofty but

socially questionable.

INTELLIGENCE: America feels the ground shift, Page II.

Con tin ued on Page 1V

Fourteen years ago, a little-known

American author of two novels that

slipped into obscurity too quickly

for his liking published an essay

that did not suffer the same fate. In

it, he lamented

that his time was

so indifferent

to literature

that Time, the

magazine, would

never put a

serious American

novelist on its

cover.

But it wasn’t just literary

fiction that seemed bound for the

cultural scrap heap. A decade

later newspapers and magazines

throughout America began dropping

coverage of books altogether,

allotting the vacated space to gaming

and other trendy technology.

Books, it seemed, were no longer

news. Then, of course, the recession

hit, many of those book-spurning

publications went out of business

as well, and it seemed for a while

that the printed word was itself

threatened with extinction.

Today, newspapers and magazines

remain mired in the bleak outskirts

of obsolescence. But books have a

happier story to tell. Books suddenly

are generating more buzz than they

have in a long while.

First, there is the author of

that pessimistic essay, Jonathan

Franzen. You may have heard of him

by now: he appeared on the cover of

Time in August.

And the release of his latest

novel was so well orchestrated

you might have mistaken it for a

new Apple gizmo or video game.

But the hype failed to diminish its

cultural stature. In The Times,

it was proclaimed an American

masterpiece, and reviews elsewhere

were just about as ecstatic. A literary

novel became the season’s cultural

event.

But it was a season that already

had seen Chelsea Handler, the

immodest host of an American

cable TV show with a very modest

audience, use the astounding

success of a scurrilous new book to

shoot to a new prominence, earning

her a profile in The Times and the

host’s spot at the MTV awards.

And it was with a book that Tony

Blair, the former British prime

minister, thrust himself back into

the international limelight. As The

Times reported, his book stirred up

virulent protests but also sold “as

if he were the most popular person

alive.”

Even on the technology front, the

talk of the season was mostly about

books — electronic books, thanks

to the Kindle and, even more, to the

iPad. As The Times reported, iPad

users especially liked the fact that its

touch screen let them turn pages as if

it were a real book.

But an even more ironic triumph

for the book lies in this: a former chief

technology officer for Microsoft, a

physicist and chef who researched

high-tech cooking, chose to release

his findings not on a Web site or as an

e-book, but as type printed on dead

trees. A forest of dead trees: Nathan

Myhrvold’s “Modernist Cuisine”

will run to 2,500 pages over six

volumes and sell for $625. According

to The Times, gastronomes “greeted

with a collective sigh” recent news

of another delay in the book’s

publication. A chef predicted it will be

“the cookbook to end all cookbooks.”

And perhaps that is what it will

take to truly kill off books: not a

flashy alternative medium, but a

book so good it will make all others

redundant. Mr. Franzen, never short

of ambition, may already be hard at

work on the project.

CARLOS CUNHA

A Lot of Life Left in Gutenberg’s Legacy

For comments, write tonytweekly@nytimes.com.

IIIWORLD TRENDS

Cracking down on

abortion in Mexico. VIIEDUCATION

A Cairo school where

learning is not rote. VISCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Egyptian desert

yields an ancient site.

LENS

Repubblica NewYork

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O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA R Y

II MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2010

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Francesco Malgaroli

Missed Goals on Delivering AidTen years ago, leaders of rich and

poor countries pledged to build a bet-

ter world by 2015. Among their vital

goals: halving extreme poverty and

hunger from 1990 levels, reducing by

two-thirds the child-mortality rate

and slashing maternal mortality by

three-quarters and achieving univer-

sal primary education.

As they gathered at the United Na-

tions the week of September 18, world

leaders had to admit that their prog-

ress “falls far short of what is needed”

to meet those targets by the deadline.

The global recession set many coun-

tries back. But rich nations — includ-

ing the United States — have not con-

tributed the money needed to make

this a reality.

The best way we can see of turning

this around is for wealthy nations to

make a generous and concrete pledge

of aid for the next five years — and

then deliver. The 0.7 percent of gross

domestic product endorsed by world

leaders in 2002 is a good place to start.

Unfortunately, the United States and

many others, including Italy, Germa-

ny and Japan, fall far short of that.

It was disappointing that President

Obama made no hard commitment

to increase development aid when he

addressed the United Nations confer-

ence on September 22. The legalistic

claims by some of his aides that the

United States never really signed on

to hard aid targets sends precisely the

wrong message. If Washington isn’t

willing to fully ante up, there is little

hope others will.

Still there was a lot in Mr. Obama’s

speech that made good sense to us.

He made a compelling case for why

foreign aid is an essential component

of an effective national security strat-

egy. And he outlined a promising new

policy to bring coherence to the often

incoherent American foreign aid and

development system.

He said the United States would still

be a major donor but would put new

emphasis on using all of its tools — in-

cluding trade and export credits — to

help poor countries get to the point

where they don’t need assistance. He

also, rightly, promised to hold recipient

countries accountable for improving

governance and combating corruption

and to be “more selective and focus our

efforts where we have the best part-

ners and where we can have the great-

est impact.” That, too, is essential.

The meager progress on the so-

called Millennium Development Goals

underscores why more effective aid is

so important but also why more money

is needed.

The best news is that the share of

people living on less than $1.25 a day

seems on track to meet the goal of

halving the extreme poverty rate. But

most of those gains have occurred in

China and other East Asian countries.

Poverty rates in sub-Saharan Africa

remain way too high. The world is far

behind on many other goals.

Between 1990 and 2008, the mortal-

ity rate of children under 5 in devel-

oping countries declined only from

10 percent to 7.2 percent — far from

the target of a two-thirds reduction

by 2015. Maternal mortality declined

only from 480 deaths per 100,000 live

births in 1990 to 450 deaths in 2005. The

2015 goal is closer to 120. Enrollment in

primary education reached 89 percent

in 2008, up from 80 percent in 1991.

Nobody can know how much money

is needed to meet these and other ur-

gent development goals. But, in 2002,

rich donor countries agreed that con-

tributions of 0.7 percent of their gross

domestic product was politically fea-

sible. Today, only Denmark, Sweden,

Norway, Luxembourg and the Neth-

erlands have met the goal. In 2009, the

United States channeled 0.2 percent of

its G.D.P. to aid. On average, develop-

ment assistance amounted to only 0.31

percent of G.D.P. of developed nations

last year.

On September 22, world leaders

again urged developed countries to

meet this aid target by 2015. Talk is

cheap. They have to deliver.

Anger is sweeping America. True,

this white-hot rage is a minority phe-

nomenon, not something that charac-

terizes most American citizens. But

the angry minority is angry indeed,

consisting of people who feel that

things to which they are entitled are

being taken away. And they’re out for

revenge.

No, I’m not talking about the Tea

Partiers. I’m talking about the rich.

These are terrible times for many

people in the United States. Pov-

erty, especially acute poverty, has

soared in the economic slump; mil-

lions of people have lost their homes.

Young people can’t find jobs; laid-off

50-somethings fear that they’ll never

work again.

Yet if you want to find real political

rage — the kind of rage that makes

people compare President Obama

to Hitler, or accuse him of treason —

you won’t find it among these suffer-

ing Americans. You’ll find it instead

among the very privileged, people

who don’t have to worry about losing

their jobs, their homes, or their health

insurance, but who are outraged, out-

raged, at the thought of paying mod-

estly higher taxes.

The rage of the rich has been build-

ing ever since Mr. Obama took office.

At first, however, it was largely con-

fined to Wall Street. Thus when New

York magazine published an article

titled “The Wail Of the 1%,” it was

talking about financial power bro-

kers whose firms had been bailed out

with taxpayer funds, but were furious

at suggestions that the price of these

bailouts should include temporary

limits on bonuses. When the billion-

aire Stephen Schwarzman compared

an Obama proposal to the Nazi inva-

sion of Poland, the proposal in ques-

tion would have closed a tax loophole

that specifically benefits fund manag-

ers like him.

Now, however, as decision time

looms for the fate of the Bush tax cuts

— will top tax rates go back to Clinton-

era levels? — the rage of the rich has

broadened, and also in some ways

changed its character.

For one thing, craziness has gone

mainstream. It’s one thing when a bil-

lionaire rants at a dinner event. It’s

another when Forbes magazine runs a

cover story alleging that the president

of the United States is deliberately try-

ing to bring America down as part of

his Kenyan, “anticolonialist” agenda,

that “the U.S. is being ruled according

to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the

1950s.” When it comes to defending the

interests of the rich, it seems, the nor-

mal rules of civilized (and rational)

discourse no longer apply.

At the same time, self-pity among

the privileged has become acceptable,

even fashionable.

Tax-cut advocates used to pretend

that they were mainly concerned

about helping typical American fami-

lies. Even tax breaks for the rich were

justified in terms of trickle-down eco-

nomics, the claim that lower taxes

at the top would make the economy

stronger for everyone.

These days, however, tax-cutters

are hardly even trying to make the

trickle-down case. Yes, Republicans

are pushing the line that raising taxes

at the top would hurt small business-

es, but their hearts don’t really seem

in it. Instead, it has become common

to hear vehement denials that people

making $400,000 or $500,000 a year

are rich. I mean, look at the expenses

of people in that income class — the

property taxes they have to pay on

their expensive houses, the cost of

sending their kids to elite private

schools, and so on. Why, they can

barely make ends meet.

And among the undeniably rich, a

belligerent sense of entitlement has

taken hold: it’s their money, and they

have the right to keep it. “Taxes are

what we pay for civilized society,” said

Oliver Wendell Holmes — but that was

a long time ago.

The spectacle of high-income Amer-

icans, the world’s luckiest people, wal-

lowing in self-pity and self-righteous-

ness would be funny, except for one

thing: they may well get their way.

Never mind the $700 billion price tag

for extending the high-end tax breaks:

virtually all Republicans and some

Democrats are rushing to the aid of

the oppressed affluent.

You see, the rich are different from

you and me: they have more influence.

It’s partly a matter of campaign contri-

butions, but it’s also a matter of social

pressure, since politicians spend a lot

of time hanging out with the wealthy.

So when the rich face the prospect of

paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their

income in taxes, politicians feel their

pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s

clear, than they feel the pain of fami-

lies who are losing their jobs, their

houses, and their hopes.

And when the tax fight is over, one

way or another, you can be sure that

the people currently defending the

incomes of the elite will go back to de-

manding cuts in Social Security and

aid to the unemployed. America must

make hard choices, they’ll say; we all

have to be willing to make sacrifices.

But when they say “we,” they mean

“you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

E D I T O R I A L S O F T H E T I M E S

PAUL KRUGMAN

The Angry Rich

LONDON

One of the characteristics of the

uncertain global economic recov-

ery is that it has been accentuating

inequality within nations even as it

is cutting inequality between them.

Wall Street has done better than the

American middle class. At the same

time, the United States as a whole has

seen emergent powers race ahead as

it struggles.

Neither of these developments

bodes well for America but it could

navigate the troubles better if it

showed greater receptiveness to a

changed world.

Take Latin America. The econo-

mies grouped under the BRIC acro-

nym — Brazil, Russian, India and

China — have all used the crisis to

demonstrate their new resilience as

well as their reduced dependency on

the American economy. But Brazil

has been a standout. Its 11 percent

growth rate in the year to March

2010 may not be sustainable but is a

reminder of the Lula miracle.

Perhaps any power that has en-

joyed a spell of near hegemony and

finds itself at war will, ostrich-like,

refuse to accept the emergence of

another behemoth in its hemisphere.

Still, the United States would do well

to look south for political as well as

economic inspiration. It has failed to

do so.

One small example: at a recent

meeting of the Washington-based

Inter-American Development Bank,

Brazil and other South American na-

tions sent ministers to attend. China,

with a close eye on the mineral wealth

of Latin America, sent the president

of its Central Bank. All the United

States could muster was an assistant

secretary.

“To tell you the truth we’re not that

unhappy about U.S. distraction,” one

senior South American banker told

me. “We’re looking instead to China

and Asia whose interest in the region

is huge. There’s still a U.S. tendency

to say, ‘This is what you should do.’

Today nobody listens.”

The fact that United States free-

trade deals with Colombia and Pana-

ma still stand unratified sends a clear

message of American indifference.

On the political front, I thought the

contemptuous American dismissal

of a Brazilian-Turkish deal with Iran

to get low-enriched uranium out the

country and so provide a breathing

space for dialogue was another mis-

take. The accord was not perfect but

nor was it different in its essence from

one the United States proposed earli-

er, though the Americans complained

that Iran had doubled the amount of

uranium it enriched and altered the

terms of the original deal.

Here was a historic opportunity

for America to say it sees the power

shifts in the world and appreciates

the efforts and emergent sense of

responsibility of the developing pow-

ers. Instead Big Brother’s curt mes-

sage was: don’t think for a second you

can tackle the big issues. And here we

are, locked into another sterile cycle

of sanctions on Iran.

I said the “Lula miracle.” President

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who steps

down at the end of December after

eight extraordinary years, has dem-

onstrated precisely the popular touch

that President Barack Obama has

been unable to communicate. Lula is

right to declare that “Brazil, Russia,

India and China have a fundamental

role in creating a new international

order.”

America and Obama would do

much better to foster that process

and so shape it than to be blind to it or

dismissive. This will involve a funda-

mental reorientation of United States

foreign policy.

The Lula-Obama contrast is puz-

zling in some ways. Both are outsid-

ers. Both break the mold. Both were

seen as change agents. So why has

Lula proved so much more effec-

tive?

There was some luck of course: the

Brazilian leader rode the commodi-

ties boom of the past decade. But per-

haps it’s above all because a popular

touch has to be rooted in experience.

Lula, one of eight children, from the

impoverished far north of Brazil, a

former steelworker who left school

very early, has struggled every step

of the way. Obama incarnated hope

in a divided America, but in the end

he is a man framed by elite schools

and institutions as much as by his ex-

perience as an African-American or

community worker. Finding the right

tone for a nation trying to dig out from

difficulty has eluded him.

The verdict is in. Brazil, long the

most divided of societies, has gone

some way toward easing inequality

as the United States has moved in the

opposite direction. It has also closed

the gap on developed-world econo-

mies and could well be the world’s

fifth largest economy by 2025.

Send comments tointelligence@nytimes.com

INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN

New Power

In a World

Of Change

JAMIL BITTAR/REUTERS

America could learn from Brazil, which, under President Luiz Inácio

Lula da Silva, center, has seen 11 percent economic growth this year.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2010 III

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Matteo Marzotto Chairman, Vionnet S.p.A.

Michele ScannaviniPresident, Coty Prestige

Stanislas de QuercizePresident & CEO, Van Cleef & Arpels

Paul SmithDesigner

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BAGHDAD — More than six months

ago, millions of Iraqis cast aside fears

about bombs and bullets to vote. But

the people they elected have yet to

agree on a leader and start work.

“I’m representing the Iraqi people,

but it doesn’t feel like it,” said Kadhim

Jwad, a Sadrist elected to represent

Babil Province in the country’s south.

“I’m at the boiling point. I’m tired and

annoyed all the time. There’s lots of

pressure on me. This is more than I

can take.”

Some of the idled elected officials

have sought out less chaotic places

with better weather and less blood-

shed, staying in nice hotels or private

homes with chlorinated swimming

pools in Jordan, Syria, Iran or Dubai.

A few have sat home and stewed.

The energy and optimism with which

these would-be reformers rode into

Baghdad after the March 7 election

have all but vanished.

Ayad Samarrai, the speaker of

Iraq’s last functioning Parliament —

a body whose trademark lassitude led

the public to vote good members out of

office in March (though Mr. Samarrai

was re-elected) — said feelings of mel-

ancholy were not uncommon among

his colleagues.

“Not having a session has created

a state of psychological emptiness”

among those elected, he said. “They

feel useless. They were ready to par-

ticipate. They were ambitious, ready

to make change. And of course, that

motivation has now been stopped en-

tirely.”

A salve for their ennui, however, has

been their compensation: salaries of

about $11,050 a month each, which in-

clude a housing allowance; a fleet of

three brand-new armored sport util-

ity vehicles and a 30-member secu-

rity detail for their use; freshly issued

diplomatic passports, which allow for

worry-free international travel; and

government payments into pension

plans that will yield 80 percent of their

salaries.

In the meantime, one in four Iraqis

are estimated to live below the pover-

ty line. Leila Hassan, a newly elected

member, said, “I get embarrassed

when people ask me ‘What’s going

on?’ and when I go out, I feel shy be-

cause I’m worried people will blame

me.”

Ms. Hassan, from the Kurdish Alli-

ance party, said she had tried to stay

engaged, but now often gives in to

boredom.

“In my spare time, well, I’m not mar-

ried and my mother takes care of me,”

the 30-year-old said. “She cooks and

cleans the house, so I have nothing to

do. I have spent a lot of time reading

books.”

Ms. Hassan said she had also taken

courses on democracy with other

women elected to Parliament, which

has taken them to the United States

and Lebanon.

“We have agreed to serve as a lobby

on women’s issues inside Parliament,”

she said. “We expected that we would

meet each other during a session, so

it’s funny it happened outside Iraq.”

Mahmoud Othman, also a member

of the Kurdish Alliance, said he had

been showing up at Parliament in spite

of himself.

“I keep coming to the building, but

I am all alone,” he said. “I find no one.

Sometimes, there are journalists so I

do an interview with them, and some-

times I see friends here, but nothing

very useful.”

He said he had spent all but one

month of the break in Baghdad, a city

he says compares poorly to Erbil, the

capital of the semi-autonomous Kurd-

ish region.

“Baghdad? What’s there in Bagh-

dad?” he said. “There’s nothing to do

in Baghdad. I’m sitting at home most of

the time with my wife, chatting, bond-

ing. This has been a great opportunity

for me to spend more time with her.”

Fatah al-Ashikh, a member of the

Iraqiya political slate, who represents

Baghdad, said the hiatus had given

him the chance to work on his doctor-

ate in media studies.

“I am using this useless time to do

something that will help me in the fu-

ture,” he said.

He has also broken in his new official

passport.

“During Ramadan, I went to Syria

and spent most of the month there,” he

said. “I was running from the heat of

Iraq and all the electrical blackouts.”

Mr. Ashikh also organized a rally

protesting a Florida pastor’s threat

in September to burn copies of the Ko-

ran, and said he had visited the sites of

recent bombings around the country .

Unadim Kana, an independent from

Nineveh Province, said he would hap-

pily give up the travel to get to work.

“We have lost seven months of pos-

sibility,” he said.

By ELISABETH MALKIN

GUANAJUATO, Mexico — Here in the state of

Guanajuato, where Roman Catholic conserva-

tives have controlled government for more than

15 years, it is standard procedure to investigate

suspected cases of abortion. Often this involves

the prosecutor’s office interrogating women

while they are still in the hospital.

But Guanajuato is no anomaly, women’s rights

advocates and some health officials say, since

a broad move to enforce antiabortion laws has

gained momentum in other parts of Mexico.

One reason is a backlash against Mexico

City’s decision three years ago to permit legal

abortion to any woman in the first 12 weeks of

pregnancy. After the Supreme Court upheld

that law in 2008, 17 states passed constitutional

amendments declaring that life begins at con-

ception, even though abortion was already ille-

gal everywhere but Mexico City, except in cases

of rape or to save a mother’s life.

“It is a political response,” said Pedro Sala-

zar, a legal scholar at the Institute of Legal Re-

search of the National Autonomous University

of Mexico. “This is a well-coordinated initiative.

It’s not a spontaneous decision.”

Lawyers contend that rather than tighten-

ing existing antiabortion legislation, the state

amendments are aimed at preventing future

state governments from possibly legalizing

abortion.

The enforcement of the antiabortion law here

in Guanajuato has created what critics call a cli-

mate in which any pregnancy that does not end

with a healthy baby raises suspicions.

The fear of being investigated means that

even some women who want to be pregnant

but have complications or lose the baby “have

to think twice about going to a hospital,” said

Nadine Goodman, who runs a school for mid-

wives in the Guanajuato town of San Miguel de

Allende.

Dr. Luis Alberto Villanueva, adjunct director

of maternal health for Mexico’s Health Minis-

try, said he was concerned that antiabortion en-

forcement could scare many women around the

country away from seeking health care.

“The intentional search for ‘proof’ in women

with bleeding in the first half of pregnancy di-

verts health workers from their task,” he said,

“and drives women away from medical facili-

ties.” He added that poor women were particu-

larly vulnerable.

State prosecutors here in Guanajuato have

opened 166 investigations for abortion in 10

years, according to women’s health advocates.

Most of them do not reach a judge, but nine

women have been convicted for having abor-

tions.

They were sentenced to jail, but paid a bond to

finish their sentences on parole.

In the gulf state of Veracruz, the state wom-

en’s institute found this year that eight women

serving sentences for homicide — killing their

babies after they had been born alive — had

either had abortions, which has a much lighter

penalty, or had miscarriages or stillbirths. They

have since been released, according to the insti-

tute’s departing director.

Eight women in Guanajuato have also been

jailed on homicide charges in recent years, stir-

ring a debate over whether the authorities have

used the crime as a way to pursue tougher sen-

tences against women who had had abortions, or

perhaps simply lost a baby during pregnancy.

When the cases were publicized this summer

after one woman was released on appeal, the

national news media descended on Guanajuato

and the women gave jailhouse interviews. Some

contended that they had been forced to sign

confessions after they gave birth to babies who

were stillborn or premature.

“The women went into labor alone,’’ said

Javier Cruz Angulo, a lawyer who runs the legal

clinic at CIDE, a Mexico City university, which

won the first appeal. “There were no health ser-

vices.’’

The cases created such a furor that the State

Congress changed the women’s sentences and

applied them retroactively. In September, the

women, who had been serving terms of 25 to 30

years, were freed but not absolved.

By ADAM NOSSITER

COTONOU, Benin — This is not

about secretive mutterings in the

dead of night or freakish eccentrics,

explained Dah Aligbonon Akpochi-

hala, an eminent voodoo priest who

has taken to the airwaves to preach

the messages of faith, fidelity and

obedience integral to his religion. It

is about bringing a younger genera-

tion on board.

“Voodoo is sabotaged, demon-

ized, as if there was nothing good in

it,” Mr. Aligbonon said.

Mr. Aligbonon maintains his

modest cinder-block temple on a

busy street in this bustling capital.

The temple offers spiritual con-

sultation and ceremonies to Mami

Wata (a water divinity) — along

with photocopying, binding ser-

vices and CDs in the Fon language

of Mr. Aligbonon’s television and

radio broadcasts.

Benin claims to have given birth

to the voodoo religion. And under-

neath the Christian and Muslim

surface, the old-time faith for voo-

doo persists for many here, experts

say.

Nocturnal visits to féticheurs,

or priests, after having attended,

say, Catholic Mass or prayers at

the mosque are hardly uncommon,

says Félix Iroko of the Université

d’Abomey-Calavi, a historian.

“The double practice persists,

even among university people,”

says Mr. Iroko.

An unjustified stigma still comes

with voodoo practice, Mr. Alig-

bonon said. “Voodoo is not the devil,

and still less Satan,” he writes em-

phatically in one of the pamphlets

for sale in his storefront, a detailed

guide to the religion’s principal di-

vinities. Voodoo is “based on natu-

ral law” and existed before Buddha,

Christ and Muhammad, he says.

Fragments of the philosophy —

“If you respect nature, nature will

protect you,” but “if I do evil against

someone, that diminishes my force”

— are dispensed in Mr. Aligbonon’s

broadcasts. The aim, in his telling,

is to bring voodoo and associated

teachings out of the closet and up

to date.

“When Aligbonon comes on the

radio, nobody sleeps,” he said.

“The people are hungry for my

broadcasts. Whenever I come on, I

get hundreds of phone calls after-

wards. People have said to me that I

am an awakener of consciences.”

Mr. Iroko said that the soft-spo-

ken Mr. Aligbonon has a larger fol-

lowing than other voodoo priests.

He can express himself easily in

French, Mr. Iroko said, helping him

move between two worlds — that

of traditional practitioners and of

academics.

Mr. Aligbonon also belongs to

the upper reaches of Beninois aris-

tocracy. He is a direct descendant

of the 13th-century princess Alig-

bonon, who in legend is said to have

mated with a panther to found a his-

toric clan at the origin of one of the

great African kingdoms, Danhomè.

It later became the French colony of

Dahomey, as the country was called

until its name was changed to Benin

by the military dictatorship in 1975.

“In Benin, there is not a king who

is above me,” said Mr. Aligbonon

quietly. “Even priests from Italy

come to see me.”

ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Yolanda Martínez was charged with

homicide under Guanajuato’s strict

antiabortion laws.

COTONOU JOURNAL

Voodoo Priest

Seeks Out

A New Flock

Iraq Officials’ Long Vacation Continues

Reformist zeal wanes as a Baghdad deadlockpersists.

Mexican States Enforce Strict Abortion

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2010

greater access to encrypted data sent

over Gmail, Skype and other virtual

private networks.

The government has also clamped

down on the importation of foreign

telecommunications equipment, say-

ing it wants to ensure that it does not

contain malicious software or secret

trap doors that could be used by for-

eign spies.

During the Mumbai attacks, said

Gopal Krishna Pillai, the secretary of

India’s Home Ministry, officials could

not gain access to some of the com-

munications between the terrorists

and their handlers. Other countries,

including the United Arab Emirates

and Indonesia, are trying to impose

measures similar to India’s.

Critics say India’s actions could

make foreigners think twice about

doing business there.

“If there is any risk to that data,

those companies will look elsewhere,”

said Peter Sutherland, a former Ca-

nadian ambassador to India who now

consults for North American compa-

nies doing business there.

James X. Dempsey, vice presi-

dent of the Center for Democracy

and Technology, an Internet policy

group, said the American proposal

had “huge implications” and chal-

lenged “fundamental elements of the

Internet revolution” — including its

decentralized design.

“They basically want to turn back

the clock ” on the Web, he said.

But officials contend that impos-

ing such a mandate is reasonable and

necessary to prevent the erosion of

their investigative powers.

“We’re talking about lawfully au-

thorized intercepts,” said Valerie E.

Caproni, general counsel for the Fed-

eral Bureau of Investigation. “We’re

not talking expanding authority.”

In India, critics say that the govern-

ment’s security efforts, which they

describe as clumsy, may do little to

protect the country, even as they in-

trude on the privacy of companies and

citizens alike.

“This will shift users to less vis-

ible and known platforms,” said Ajay

Shah, a Mumbai-based economist.

“Terrorists will make merry doing

crypto anyway. A zillion tools for this

are freely available.”

American officials want a law that

will apply broadly, including firms that

operate from servers abroad, like Re-

search in Motion, the Canadian maker

of the BlackBerry. In recent months,

R.I.M. has come into conflict with the

governments of India and Dubai over

their inability to conduct surveillance

of messages sent via its encrypted ser-

vice.

Countries such as Dubai have

sought leverage by threatening to

block BlackBerry data from their net-

works. Several privacy and technol-

ogy advocates argued that requiring

interception capabilities would create

holes that would inevitably be exploit-

ed by hackers.

Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia Uni-

versity computer science professor,

noted that in 2005 in Greece. hackers

took advantage of a legally mandated

wiretap function to spy on top officials’

phones .

“It’s a disaster waiting to happen,”

he said. “If they start building in all

these back doors, they will be ex-

ploited.”

WhenSecurityTrumpsPrivacy

Con tin ued from Page I

the world at large.

The city’s designer, Foster &

Partners, a firm known for feats of

technological wizardry, has worked

in an alluring social vision, in which

local tradition and the drive toward

modernization are no longer in con-

flict.

Norman Foster, the principal part-

ner, said he began with a meticulous

study of old Arab settlements, in-

cluding the ancient citadel of Aleppo

in Syria and the mud-brick apart-

ment towers of Shibam in Yemen,

which date from the 16th century.

“The point,” he said, “was to go back

and understand the fundamentals,”

how these communities had been

made livable in a region where the

air can feel as hot as 65 degrees Cel-

sius.

Among the findings his office

made was that settlements were

often built on high ground, not only

for defensive reasons but also to take

advantage of the stronger winds.

Some also used tall, hollow “wind

towers” to funnel air down to street

level. And the narrowness of the

streets — which were almost always

at an angle to the sun’s east-west

trajectory, to maximize shade — ac-

celerated airflow through the city.

Mr. Foster’s team estimated that

by combining such approaches, they

could make Masdar feel as much as

nearly 50 percent cooler. In so do-

ing, they could more than halve the

amount of electricity needed to run

the city. Of the power that is used, 90

percent is expected to be solar, and

the rest generated by incinerating

waste (which produces far less car-

bon than piling it up in dumps).

Masdar is 30 kilometers from

downtown Abu Dhabi. You follow

a narrow road past an oil refinery

and through desolate patches of

desert before reaching the blank

concrete wall of Masdar and find the

city looming overhead. From there

a road tunnels through the base to

a garage just underneath the city’s

edge.

Stepping out of this space into

one of the “Personal Rapid Transit”

stations brings to mind the sets de-

signed by Harry Lange for “2001: A

Space Odyssey.” You are in a large,

dark hall facing a row of white, pod-

shaped cars lined up in rectangular

glass bays. Daylight spills down a

rough concrete wall behind them,

hinting at the life above.

The first 13 futuristic electric cars

of a proposed fleet of hundreds were

being tested the day I visited, but as

soon as the system is up, within a few

weeks, a user will be able to step into

a car and choose a destination on an

LCD screen. The car will then silent-

ly pull into traffic, seeming to drive

itself through a network of routes

below the city’s raised ground level.

There are no cables or rails.

It’s only as people arrive at their

destination that they will become

aware of the degree to which ev-

erything has been engineered for

high-function, low-consumption

performance. The station’s elevators

have been tucked discreetly out of

sight to encourage use of a concrete

staircase that corkscrews to the

surface. And on reaching the streets

— which were pretty breezy the day I

visited — the only way to get around

is on foot.

The buildings that have gone up

so far come in two styles. Labora-

tories devoted to developing new

forms of sustainable energy and

affiliated with the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology are housed

in big concrete structures that are

clad in pillowlike panels of ethylene-

tetrafluoroethylene, a super-strong

translucent plastic that has become

fashionable in contemporary ar-

chitecture circles for its sleek look

and durability. Inside, big open floor

slabs are designed for maximum

flexibility.

The residential buildings, which

for now will mostly house profes-

sors, students and their families,

use a more traditional architectural

vocabulary. An undulating facade

of concrete latticework is based on

the mashrabiya screens common in

the region. The latticework blocks

direct sunlight and screens interiors

from view, while the curves make

for angled views to the outside, so

that apartment dwellers never look

directly into the windows of facing

buildings. Like many Middle East-

ern university campuses, the neigh-

borhood is segregated by sex, with

women and families living at one end

and single men at the other. Each end

has a small public plaza, which acts

as its social heart.

Mr. Foster’s most radical move

was the way he dealt with one of

the most vexing urban design chal-

lenges of the past century: what to

do with the car. Not only did he close

Masdar entirely to combustion-

engine vehicles, he buried their re-

placement — his network of electric

cars — underneath the city. Tradi-

tional cars are stopped at the edges.

Still, one wonders, despite the

technical brilliance and the sensitiv-

ity to local norms, how Masdar can

ever attain the richness and texture

of a real city. Eventually, a light-rail

system will connect it to Abu Dhabi,

and street life will undoubtedly get

livelier as the daytime population

grows to a projected 90,000. Mr.

Foster said the city was intended to

house a cross-section of society, from

students to service workers. “It is not

about social exclusion,” he added.

And yet Masdar seems like the

fulfillment of that idea. Ever since

the notion that thoughtful planning

could improve the lot of humankind

died out, sometime in the 1970s,

both the megarich and the educated

middle classes have increasingly

found solace by walling themselves

off inside a variety of mini-utopias.

This has involved not only the pro-

liferation of suburban gated commu-

nities, but also the transformation

of city centers in places like Paris

and New York into playgrounds for

tourists and the rich. Masdar is the

culmination of this trend: a self-

sufficient society, lifted on a pedestal

and outside the reach of most of the

world’s citizens.

Con tin ued from Page I

Green Utopia Rises From Arabian Sands

A futuristic city usesancient methods ofcooling heated air.

Vikas Bajaj contributed reporting from New Delhi, and Ian Austen con-tributed reporting from Ottawa.

Repubblica NewYork

B U S I N E S S T R AV E L

MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2010 V

By TANYA MOHN

Airports in Germany have come up

with an unusual approach to moni-

toring air quality. The Düsseldorf In-

ternational Airport and seven other

airports are using bees as “biodetec-

tives,” their honey regularly tested for

toxins.

“Air quality at and around the air-

port is excellent,” said Peter Nengelk-

en, the airport’s community liaison.

The first batch of this year’s harvest-

ed honey from some 200,000 bees was

tested in early June, he said, and indi-

cated toxins far below official limits.

Beekeepers from the local neighbor-

hood club keep the bees. The honey,

“Düsseldorf Natural,” is given away

as gifts.

Could bees be modern-day sentinels

like the canaries once used in coal

mines?

Assessing environmental health

using bees as “terrestrial bioindica-

tors” is a fairly new undertaking, said

Jamie Ellis, assistant professor of en-

tomology at the Honey Bee Research

and Extension Laboratory, Univer-

sity of Florida in Gainesville. “We all

believe it can be done, but translating

the results into real-world solutions or

answers may be a little premature.”

Not surprisingly, Nancy Young, vice

president of environmental affairs

at the Air Transport Association

of America, an airline trade group,

defended the air quality at airports.

“Airports are not significant

contributors” to local air pollution,

she said, adding that aviation

emissions represent “less than 1

percent of the nation’s inventory and

typically only a few percentage points

in any given metropolitan area with a

major airport.” She said the United

States had improved the air quality

at its airports through more stringent

standards .

Internationally, there have been

similar improvements, said Steven

Lott, a spokesman for the International

Air Transport Association. Since the

1960s, carbon monoxide, unburned

hydrocarbons, smoke and nitrogen-

oxide emissions have been substantially

reduced, he said.

Still, some are not persuaded that

air quality at airports has improved.

“It’s way worse than people think,”

said Debi Wagner, of Citizens Aviation

Watch USA.

Some emissions are not adequately

sampled and measured, Ms. Wagner

said, and others are not monitored at

all.

Recent studies also raise questions

about the quality of air at small

general aviation airports. Most large

airports are farther from residential

communities, .

“There were issues for ultrafine

particles and lead,” said Philip Fine, an

atmospheric measurements manager

in Southern California.

Research suggests ultrafine particles

could pose a serious risk because they

pass through cell walls easily. The

particles come primarily from jet

aircraft.

Emanuel Fleuti, head of environment

services for Zurich Airport, said there

were concerns in Europe as well.

Meanwhile, he said, he is confident

about the biomonitoring work the

German airports are doing with bees.

“If you look at the honey, it’s

perfectly fine,” Mr. Fleuti said.

LONG BEACH, California — Long

rumored and joked about, the so-called

stand-up airplane seat was unveiled

at the Aircraft Interiors Expo Ameri-

cas trade show in mid-September. The

SkyRider was the most

talked about event of the

show.

“Like riding a horse,”

said Dominique Menoud,

the director general of Av-

iointeriors, the Italian air-

craft seat manufacturer,

after I had slid into the company’s new

contraption. “It is very comfortable, no?”

“No,” I replied, though Mr. Menoud

seemed to take that as an assent.

It was definitely not comfortable,

although the seat is being promoted as

resembling a horse saddle. I have ridden

many a horse, and the SkyRider is noth-

ing like being in the saddle. Sitting in one

was more like being wedged, legs braced,

on a stationary bicycle.

The seat is being marketed mostly

for shorter haul flights of two hours or

so. But Mr. Menoud said that the seats

could also be used on flights up to four

hours.

Aviointeriors said the seat allowed

for a new basic class of seating with a

“much reduced seat pitch.” Most coach

seats have about 75 or 82 centimeters

of pitch, the industry definition of the

distance between one point in a seat

and the same point in the seat ahead. A

few discount airlines have seats with 71

centimeters of pitch, but the SkyRider is

intended to have 58 or less.

Before a seat like the SkyRider would

actually turn up on airplanes, there

remain various hurdles — chief among

them safety concerns about emergency

evacuations from planes with passen-

gers crammed into such tight spaces.

But experts in cabin interior engineer-

ing from the major aircraft manufactur-

ers, Boeing and Airbus, discussed the

stand-up seat at the show and, while

both were skeptical, neither dismissed

the idea.

Have any airlines signed up? “No,

but we are in discussions right now, and

there is a lot of interest from carriers

around the world,” Mr. Menoud said. He

would not identify which airlines his com-

pany has been talking to, but said two are

in the United States.

Before the trade show, Ryanair, the

European discount carrier, had said it

hoped to win regulatory approval to put

rows of stand-up seats, with the cheap-

est fares, in rear sections of its planes.

Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief execu-

tive, recently said on British television

said the airline was thinking of taking

out some existing seats to install “the

equivalent of 10 rows of standing area.”

In the United States, the somewhat

brash discount carrier Spirit Airlines

would seem another likely suspect,

but Spirit declined to comment when I

asked.

What is the SkyRider like? Well, it’s a

tight fit. You sidle in and perch on a little

pitched seat. The “passenger’s body,”

as Aviointeriors describes it, assumes

“a comfortable, dynamic, upright and

healthy position.” My impression was

like being strapped into an amusement

park thrill ride.

Even in a semistanding position, belted

in against a tall seat back, you have scant

room to maneuver. And because the

seats are high, you would have a tough

job in a crash vaulting over the SkyRider

in front.

Aviointeriors says the SkyRider has

undergone extensive testing and will

meet all regulatory safety standards.

The seat is being promoted as an option

for airlines that might want to more

profitably use space in any given air-

plane. A Boeing 737, for example, could

be configured with 16 business-class

seats, 66 standard coach seats and 98

SkyRiders, Aviointeriors says.

“The concept is to allow for an extra

class of seating” with very low fares, Mr.

Menoud said. Of course, there are things

some of us won’t do, even for a cheap

fare. But the market potential is there.

“Clearly, there are a lot of potential

barriers even before they could get to

the point of installing this type of seat,

but there’s something to be said about

carriers being able to put more custom-

ers into smaller spaces and being able

to offer rock-bottom prices,” said Bryan

Saltzburg, the general manager of

TripAdvisor flight search. “There is a

segment of the market that this seat will

cater to.”

By JULIE WEED

How can families spend time

together that normally would

be consumed by work, and even

turn the experience into an ad-

venture and save money dur-

ing these recessionary times?

They can combine a business

trip with a family vacation.

According to a 2008 study by

Egencia, the corporate travel

arm of Expedia, 59 percent of

business travelers have had

friends or family join them on

a trip.

Andy Palmer, a co-founder

of Vertica Systems and global

head of software engineering

at the Novartis Institutes for

BioMedical Research in Cam-

bridge, Massachusetts, com-

bines business travel with fami-

ly time whenever he can. He has

taken his wife to Sweden and

his daughter to Disney World.

One year Mr. Palmer took his

son out of school for 10 days to

accompany him on a business

trip to Idaho and Utah. They fit

in some time for fly-fishing.

“I hate traveling away from

my family,” said Mr. Palmer,

who lives in New Castle, New

Hampshire. “So having any of

them with me is a million per-

cent better.”

Last spring Mr. Palmer’s

wife, Amy, and their four chil-

dren accompanied him to the

Novartis headquarters in Ba-

sel, Switzerland. His family “ate

and toured” while he worked

during the day, and they all re-

grouped to dine together in the

evening.

The children appreciated

seeing where their father had to

go so frequently, Mrs. Palmer

said.

“He wasn’t calling from a

black hole after that — they

could imagine the setting where

he was,” she said.

Lois Howes, who works at

Superior Travel, in Freeport,

New York, recently helped trav-

elers going to Istanbul, Seattle

and Savannah, Georgia, extend

their work trips for some sight-

seeing.

“I had a couple of married

teachers from New York going

to a convention in Seattle this

summer and I booked them on

an Alaska cruise,” she said. “If

their work hadn’t paid for their

airfare to get out west, they

couldn’t have afforded it.”

When Mary Sorensen of Seat-

tle discovered that her husband,

Stan, would be taking a busi-

ness trip to Paris during spring

break, she rented an apartment

there for 10 days.

“We took the opportunity to

transport our life to France,”

she said. “Every day we fixed

Dad breakfast in the morning

and sent him to work.”

After breakfast, Ms. Sorens-

en and her sons, 11 and 9, would

explore. Along with visits to the

Louvre and Notre Dame, they

went to a bakery every day to

practice their French. “The

boys had a wonderful taste of

what it was like to live in anoth-

er city,” she said.

Experienced business travel-

ers advise checking with a man-

ager before bringing family on

a trip. Companies are generally

fine with the idea as long as em-

ployees don’t put family costs

on their expense accounts and

meet their professional require-

ments.

Mixing business and person-

al travel requires extra plan-

ning. When Mr. Palmer took

his daughter Morgan on a trip

to Disney World in Florida, he

made sure his aunt, who lived

in Orlando, could care for her

while he worked.

A few years later, his daugh-

ter accompanied Mr. Palmer

on business trips to three states

so she could visit colleges. Mr.

Palmer scheduled meetings

around campus tour times.

As travelers who combine

business with vacations try to

fulfill different objectives, there

can be tension. Expectations

should be set before departure,

including each day’s business

obligations, and when there will

be time for recreation.

Some business travelers have

their families join them at the

end of a trip and extend their

time a few more days.

Even when parents aren’t

away on business, the line be-

tween work and family often

blurs, Mrs. Palmer said, point-

ing out how some people work

on the computer at home instead

of playing with their children.

“This helps us claim some of

that time back,” she said.

ANDREAS WIESE/

DÜSSELDORF INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

Düsseldorf airport’s bees are

regularly tested for toxins.

MARK RALSTON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

The new SkyRider airplane seat is being promoted as a cheap option for

two-hour flights, but safety concerns remain about the ability to quickly

evacuate a crammed plane in tight quarters.

JOE

SHARKEY

ESSAY

In a seat touted as a saddle, who’s being taken for a ride?

Time for fly-fishing between meetings; saving money too.

Biodetectives miss some forms ofpollution, critics say.

Low Fare,Leg RoomOptional

A Working VacationWith Family Emphasis

German Airports Get Good Air Grades From Bees, Plus Fine Honey

Repubblica NewYork

S C I E N C E & T E C H N O L O GY

VI MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2010

By JUSTIN GILLIS

This year’s extreme heat is putting

coral reefs under such severe stress

that scientists fear widespread die-

offs, endangering not only the richest

ecosystems in the ocean but also fish-

eries that feed millions of people.

From Thailand to Texas, corals are

reacting to the heat stress by bleach-

ing, or shedding their color and go-

ing into survival mode. Many have

already died, and more are expected

to do so in coming months. Comput-

er forecasts suggest that corals in

the Caribbean may undergo drastic

bleaching in the next few weeks.

What is unfolding this year is only

the second known global bleaching of

coral reefs. Scientists are holding out

hope that this year will not be as bad,

over all, as 1998, the hottest year on

record, when an estimated 16 percent

of the world’s shallow-water reefs

died.

Scientists say the trouble with the

reefs is linked to climate change. For

years they have warned that corals,

highly sensitive to heat, would serve

as an early indicator of the ecological

distress on the planet caused by the

buildup of greenhouse gases.

“I am significantly depressed

by the whole situation,” said Clive

Wilkinson, director of the Global

Coral Reef Monitoring Network in

Australia .

Coral reefs are made up of millions

of tiny animals, called polyps. The

polyps supply algae with nutrients

and a place to live. The algae in turn

capture sunlight and carbon dioxide

to make sugars that feed the coral

polyps.

The algae give reefs their brilliant

colors; many reef fish sport fantasti-

cal colors and patterns themselves.

According to the National Oceanic

and Atmospheric Administration, the

first eight months of 2010 matched

1998 as the hottest January to August

period on record. Coral reefs occupy

a tiny fraction of the ocean, but they

harbor perhaps a quarter of all ma-

rine species. They are the foundation

not only of important fishing indus-

tries but also of tourist economies

worth billions.

In small island nations and on some

coasts of Indonesia and the Philip-

pines, people rely heavily on reef fish

for food. When corals die, the fish are

not immediately doomed, but if the

coral does not recover, the reef can

eventually collapse, scientists say,

leaving the fishery far less produc-

tive.

Research shows that is already

happening in parts of the Caribbean.

Scientists tracking the fate of cor-

als say they have already seen wide-

spread bleaching in Southeast Asia

and the western Pacific, especially

corals in Thailand, parts of Indonesia

and some smaller island nations.

“It is a lot easier for oceans to heat

up above the corals’ thresholds for

bleaching when climate change is

warming the baseline temperatures,”

said C. Mark Eakin, who runs Coral

Reef Watch for the National Oceanic

and Atmospheric Administration.

Coral bleaching occurs when high

heat and bright sunshine cause the

metabolism of the algae to speed out

of control, and they start creating

toxins. The polyps essentially recoil.

“The algae are spat out,” Dr. Wilkin-

son said.

If temperatures drop, the corals’

few remaining algae can reproduce

and help the polyps recover.

Even on dead reefs, new coral pol-

yps will often take hold. The worst

case is that a reef dies and never re-

covers.

Temperatures have cooled in the

western Pacific, and the immediate

crisis has passed there. In Thailand,

“there are some signs of recovery

in places,” said James True, a biolo-

gist at Prince of Songkla University.

“The concern we have now is that the

bleaching is so widespread that po-

tential source reefs upstream have

been affected,” Dr. True said.

Climate varies considerably from

place to place. Tropical storms and

hurricanes moving through the Atlan-

tic have cooled the water in the north-

ern Caribbean and may have saved

some corals. Farther south, though,

temperatures are still remarkably

high, putting many reefs at risk.

Water temperatures off Australia

are also above normal, and some sci-

entists are worried about the single

most impressive reef on earth. “If

we get a poor monsoon season,” Dr.

Wilkinson said, “I think we’re in for

a serious bleaching on the Great Bar-

rier Reef.”

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Over the last two decades, John

Coleman Darnell and his wife, Debo-

rah, hiked and drove caravan tracks

west of the Nile from the monuments

of Thebes, at present-day Luxor.

These and other desolate roads, beat-

en hard by millennial human and

donkey traffic, only seemed to lead to

nowhere.

In the practice of what they call

desert-road archaeology, the Dar-

nells found ruins where soldiers, mer-

chants and other travelers camped in

the time of the pharaohs. On a lime-

stone cliff at a crossroads, they came

upon a tableau of scenes and symbols,

some of the earliest documentation of

Egyptian history.

The explorations of the Theban

Desert Road Survey, a Yale Univer-

sity project co-directed by the Dar-

nells, called attention to the previ-

ously underappreciated significance

of caravan routes and oasis settle-

ments in Egyptian antiquity.

And in late August, the Egyptian

government announced what may be

the survey’s most spectacular find —

the extensive remains of a settlement

— apparently an administrative,

economic and military center — that

flourished more than 3,500 years ago

in the western desert 177 kilometers

west of Luxor and 483 kilometers

south of Cairo. No such urban cen-

ter so early in history had ever been

found in the desert.

Dr. John Darnell, a professor of

Egyptology at Yale, said that the dis-

covery could rewrite the history of a

little-known period in Egypt’s past

and the role played by desert oases in

the civilization’s revival. The 88-hect-

are site is at Kharga Oasis, a string of

well-watered areas in a 97-kilome-

ter-long, north-south depression in

the limestone plateau that spreads

across the desert. The oasis is at the

terminus of the ancient Girga Road

from Thebes.

A decade ago, the Darnells spotted

hints of an outpost from the time of

Persian rule in the sixth century B.C.

in the vicinity of a temple. “A temple

wouldn’t be where it was if this area

hadn’t been of some strategic impor-

tance,” Ms. Darnell, also trained in

Egyptology, said.

Then she began picking up pieces of

pottery predating the temple. Some

ceramics were imports from the Nile

Valley or as far away as Nubia, south

of Egypt, but many were local prod-

ucts.

Evidence of “really large-scale ce-

ramic production,” Ms. Darnell not-

ed, “is something you wouldn’t find

unless there was a settlement here

with a permanent population, not just

seasonal and temporary.”

In 2005, the Darnells and their

team collected the evidence that they

were on to an important discovery:

remains of mud-brick walls, grind-

stones, baking ovens and heaps of fire

ash and broken bread molds.

Describing the bakery artifacts

that has been collected, as well as

signs of a military garrison, Dr. Dar-

nell said the settlement was “bak-

ing enough bread to feed an army,

literally.” This inspired the name for

the site, Umm Mawagir. The Ara-

bic phrase means “mother of bread

molds.” The team also found traces

of what was probably an administra-

tive building, grain silos, storerooms

and artisan workshops. The inhab-

itants, probably a few thousand

people, presumably grew their own

grain, and the variety of pottery at-

tested to trade relations over a wide

region.

The ruins at a desert crossroads are

another wonder of the ancient world.

“People always marvel at the great

monuments of the Nile Valley and the

incredible architectural feats they

see there,” Dr. Darnell said in the Yale

alumni magazine. “But I think they

should realize how much more work

went into developing Kharga Oasis in

one of the harshest, driest deserts on

Earth.”

Crows Put Tools to Good UseNew Caledonian crows, found in

the South Pacific, are among nature’s

most robust nonhuman tool users.

They are well known for using twigs

to dislodge beetle larvae from tree

trunks.

And there’s a good reason. By forag-

ing for just a few larvae, a crow can sat-

isfy its daily nutritional needs, which

explains the evolutionary advantage

of learning how to use tools, research-

ers report in the journal Science.

Using an infrared video camera,

the researchers studied the crow’s

method of capturing larvae. The crow

uses twigs to poke at a beetle larva un-

til the larva becomes so agitated that it

grabs onto the stick with its mandibles,

at which point the crow yanks out the

twig, having successfully captured its

prey.

“We found that these grubs are very

nutritious, they have very high fat

content and they contribute dispro-

portionately to the diet of these birds,”

said Christian Rutz, a zoologist at Ox-

ford University.

Since crows that are good tool users

have better access to highly nutritious

food, it is beneficial to learn how to use

tools, Dr. Rutz said.

But what remains unknown is why

tool use has evolved in only certain

animal lineages and not others, and

why tool use is generally uncommon

among animals. Next, the research-

ers may study whether the offspring

of particularly skilled tool-using

crows reap benefits, such as a longer

lifespan, improved health or better

reproductive success.

SINDYA N. BHANOO

Plants Grow by ChernobylIn April 1986, a nuclear reactor at

the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine

exploded and sent radioactive par-

ticles flying through the air, infiltrat-

ing the surrounding soil. Despite the

colossal disaster, some plants in the

area seem to be flourishing in the con-

taminated soil.

This ability to adapt has to do with

slight alterations in the plants’ pro-

tein levels, researchers report in the

journal Environmental Science and

Technology.

“If you visit the area, you’d never

think anything bad had happened

there,” said Martin Hajduch, a study

author and a plant geneticist at the

Slovak Academy of Sciences in Slo-

vakia. “Somehow plants were able to

adapt to the radioactivity; we wanted

to understand what kind of molecule

changes were going on.”

He and his colleagues grew flax-

seeds in contaminated soil in the

Chernobyl region and compared them

with flax grown in nonradioactive

soil. They found that there were very

few differences between the plants

— aside from a 5 percent difference in

protein levels. These alterations may

be a defensive mechanism, enabling

the plants to protect themselves from

radiation, the researchers believe.

But the first-generation plants may

not be safe enough for consumption.

“Now I don’t think anybody wants

to eat this,” he said. “But one day, it

may be cultivated and used for agri-

cultural purposes.”

The scientists plan to publish re-

sults from second- and third-genera-

tion plants as well.

SINDYA N. BHANOO

DR. SIMON WALKER

A New Caledonian crow uses a

twig to agitate and capture larvae.

TAKUMA FUJII/UNIVERSITY OF THE RYUKYUS

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Excavations west of Luxor, Egypt, revealed a ruin with grain silos, artisan workshops and ovens.

F I N D I N G S

Reef die-offs could endanger a link in the food chain.

Signs of life on anoasis amid a harsh environment.

A Warning For PlanetIn DeathOf Corals

Desert Roads Lead to Egypt Ruins

Coral reefs are experiencing near

record bleaching; scientists say it

is linked to global warming.

Repubblica NewYork

E D U C AT I O N

MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2010 VII

By SAM DILLON

LAWTON, Oklahoma — In an

effort to teach the world its lan-

guage and culture, China has sent

about 325 guest teachers to work

for up to three years in American

schools. A parallel effort has sent

about 2,000 American school ad-

ministrators to visit China at Bei-

jing’s expense.

“My life in high school was tor-

ture, just studying, nothing else,”

said Zheng Yue, 27, who is teach-

ing Chinese in Lawton. Like all the

other instructors, she has volun-

teered for the assignment.

“Here students lead more in-

teresting lives. They party, they

drink, they date,” she added.

Several other Chinese teachers

said they had some difficulties

adjusting to American schools

after working in a country where

students leap to attention when a

teacher enters the room.

A Chinese teacher in Wiscon-

sin, Hongmei Zhao, said a few

students sometimes disrupted

classes by speaking English so

rapidly that she could not under-

stand them.

“Then the whole class laughs,”

Ms. Zhao said, though she added

that none of her students had been

disagreeable.

Still, Ms. Zheng said she believed

that teachers got little respect in

America.

“Teachers don’t earn much, and

this country worships making

money,” she said. “In China, teach-

ers don’t earn a lot either, but it’s a

very honorable career.”

She said she spent time clearing

up misconceptions about China.

“I want students to know that

Chinese people are not crazy,”

she said. One student, referring

to China’s one-child-per-family

population planning policy, asked

whether the authorities would kill

one of the babies if a Chinese cou-

ple were to have twins.

Some students were astonished

to learn that Chinese people used

cellphones . Others thought Hong

Kong was the capital.

Barry Beauchamp, the Law-

ton superintendent, said he was

thrilled with the instructors. “Part

of them coming here is us indoctri-

nating them about our great coun-

try and our freedoms,” he said.

Ms. Zheng’s situation is fairly

typical of other guest teachers:

China pays about $13,000 a year

toward her salary, and the school

district provides her with housing

and a $500 monthly stipend. Law-

ton lends its guest teachers a car.

At MacArthur High School in

Lawton, Ms. Zheng teaches three

hourlong Chinese classes a day.

She has described to her classes

the schools in the city of Pingding-

shan, where students study six

days a week from 8 a.m. through

a mandatory evening study hall

ending at 10 p.m.

One day, Ms. Zheng recalled

how earlier this spring a student

brought her newborn to school.

“People were happy for her,” Ms.

Zheng said. “But I found it shock-

ing, because we think girls should

focus on their studies.”

After a student asserted that

France was not in Europe, she said,

“American students don’t know a

lot about the outside world.” She is

hoping to educate them in different

ways.

“They won’t remember a lot of

words,” she said, “but I want them

to remember the beauty of the lan-

guage and the culture.”

As Tuition Soars Globally, Schools Face a Need for Frugality

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

CAIRO — Who am I? What does it

mean to be human?

These are the kinds of questions

posed to undergraduate students en-

tering the American University in

Cairo during what the president, David

D. Arnold, called a first year of “disori-

entation.” The students — 85 percent

of them Egyptians — are taught to

learn in ways quite at odds with the

traditional method of teaching in this

country .

“It’s different here because there

is room for people to express them-

selves,” said Manar Mohsen, a junior

majoring in political science and jour-

nalism. “It is not that simple outside,

where it is more about conformity.”

In Egypt, education is based on the

concept of rote learning, and creativity

in the classroom is often discouraged.

Students at Cairo University say they

memorize and recite, never analyze

and hypothesize.

So the idea of a liberal arts education

aimed at developing critical thinking

skills is often new to the students. “For

a lot of the kids here, the idea that you

are supposed to have your own ideas

is a novelty,” said Lisa Anderson, the

university provost who is on leave from

Columbia University. in New York.

American University is a private, elite

school, expensive and generally out of

reach for all but the wealthiest families

and a handful of scholarship students.

Tuition and fees for Egyptian students

run about $19,600 a year, a large sum in

a country where about half the popula-

tion lives on about $2 a day.

“We are all rich and spoiled,” said

one student, upset that more of her

classmates were not more politically

aware. But in some respects, the elite

label is a strength. American Univer-

sity plays a central role as an intellec-

tual incubator for young people who

will become leaders in government

and the economy.

“If we teach the elite to be good citi-

zens, that’s not a bad thing,” Ms. Ander-

son said.

The university was founded in 1919 by

a group of Presbyterian missionaries.

The university was located originally in

Tahrir Square, in the center of Cairo, a

hyper-urban landscape with the mosaic

of Egyptian life on every corner. That

was part of the university’s appeal.

But over the years it has grown, and

now serves 5,000 undergraduates on an

architecturally inspiring, if geographi-

cally isolated, $400 million, 105-hectare

campus in a suburb called New Cairo.

But as the school has grown, so has a

conflict within the university itself: can

it change its mission while retaining its

liberal arts core?

“We are moving more and more into

professional schools, like business, en-

gineering, sciences,” said Nabil Fahmy,

a former longtime ambassador to the

United States who is the founding dean

of a new school of global affairs and

public policy.

There are other pressures, too, com-

ing from a society that holds engineers

in such high esteem that the profession

is also a courtesy title, like doctor.

“The humanities in general, and phi-

losophy specifically, are seen as either

frivolous or, at the very least, not fi-

nancially prudent, by many of the very

people who seek what makes A.U.C.

unique,” said Nathaniel Bowditch,

an assistant professor of philosophy.

Dr. Bowditch argued that “learning

how to think rather than what to think

prepares a person for all professions,”

and that without that “the academy

becomes nothing more than a trade

school.”

For now, the university leadership

says it remains committed to its core

mission. “We want our students to be

imaginative in their fields,” Ms. Ander-

son said.

By CONRAD DE AENLLE

College tuition and other fees have

risen for years in many countries, and

the economic and financial crisis al-

most ensures that the trend will persist

or worsen.

Students and their families will have

to get used to bearing a greater share of

the burden, the experts say.

But universities may be forced to

operate more efficiently and frugally,

they say, as those who pay the bills

become smarter, more cost-conscious

shoppers.

Margaret Spellings, senior adviser

at the Boston Consulting Group, a

global management consulting firm,

and secretary of education under

President George W. Bush, blames

government’s failure to demand

more value for the money spent, and

an elitism that she says is entrenched

in academia.

“Affordability is an issue worldwide,”

said Ms. Spellings, “but an interest in

reform is going up for the first time

ever.”

Soaring demand for university plac-

es is also driving up costs, as is a desire

by governments to accommodate the

demand.

“Part of the problem in much of the

world is exploding enrollments,” said

D. Bruce Johnstone, emeritus profes-

sor of education at the State University

of New York in Buffalo. He said condi-

tions were especially acute in develop-

ing nations.

And he cited a Western penchant for

academic egalitarianism.

“An expectation of an entitlement to

participation in a research university

is part of the problem,” Mr. Johnstone

said. He noted that all secondary school

graduates in France and Germany who

pass a national examination are guar-

anteed university admission.

Tuition rose 106 percent between 1997

and 2007 at American public universi-

ties and 76 percent at private universi-

ties, to $7,171 and $30,260, respectively,

according to the National Center for

Education Statistics.

It is lower everywhere else, although

it can be quite high relative to incomes,

especially in the developing world. The

23 million students attending Chinese

universities pay about $3,000 a year,

Mr. Johnstone said; the government

has warned that fees will go up.

Tuition in India varies, he said, but it

works out to about $600 a year for aver-

age universities and much more for the

elite technology institutes.

Chinese and Indian schools have no

shortage of applicants, but in Japan,

enrollments are shrinking.

The average tuition there is about

$4,500.

Tuitions are assessed at much lower

rates in Continental Europe, Mr. John-

stone noted.

“European countries introduce tu-

ition fees amid enormous political con-

troversy,” he remarked. Eventually

conditions deteriorate and the authori-

ties are forced to increase fees, he said,

“and then everyone really screams.”

Official Europe has begun to accept

the idea of tuition, with an important

caveat. Dennis Abbott, the European

Commission spokesman on education,

pointed to “a distinct trend to increased

cost sharing” between students and

state sources, although he stressed that

fees “should be supported by grants

and/or loans.”

Higher tuition is not the only sug-

gestion for closing the funding gap. A

2006 report by the Center for European

Reform, a London-based, centrist re-

search organization, encouraged Eu-

ropean universities to become more

competitive and more entrepreneurial

and, although it did not say so explicitly,

more American.

The authors also recommended pay-

ing faculty on the basis of merit; lobby-

ing aggressively with state and private

funding sources, like alumni; and woo-

ing corporate benefactors.

One way to improve affordability

and productivity, Mr. Abbott said, is to

make sure first that students at univer-

sities want and need to be there.

“Too many young people are em-

barking upon university careers but

dropping out before completing their

courses,” he said. “This represents a

missed opportunity, both in terms of

the human potential of the individual

student and in terms of the best value

for money. Better advice and guidance,

combined with improved support, in-

cluding financial support, should be

made available.”

Ms. Spellings said she expected an

increase in “a la carte, hybrid, technolo-

gy-based education,” in which students

take courses in person, online and at

times of their own choosing. “Consum-

ers are demanding it,” she said.

“Things are starting to change,

as prices have gotten so ridiculous,”

Ms. Spellings continued. “People are

starting to ask the right questions that

would have been heretical five years

ago. Universities have enjoyed their

ivory tower status of being above it

all, but they’re beginning to change

and it’s happening worldwide.”

Universities are urged to be more entrepreneurial.

In Cairo, a Campus Where Unlearning Is First

Visiting Chinese Teachers Experience American Ways

SHAWN BALDWIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The American University in Cairo teaches students to think for themselves. The school’s library.

MATT NAGER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Beijing has sent 325 volunteers, like Zheng Yue, to the United

States to teach Chinese language and culture.

An intellectualincubator for Egypt’s leaders.

Repubblica NewYork

A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2010

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

The phenomenally gifted if wildly

unconventional pianist Glenn Gould

was a tangle of personal tics and

complexes. Sometimes he seemed a

provocateur bent on riling the public

with extreme interpretations and odd

behavior. Other times he came across

as a fragile, fearful man, at ease only

when making music.

“Genius Within: The Inner Life of

Glenn Gould,” the fascinating new

documentary by the Canadian film-

makers Peter Raymont and Michèle

Hozer, has won praise for providing

insights into Mr. Gould’s eccentric

character. It shows the sad progres-

sion of a brilliant, garrulous musician

with a fiercely original artistic vision

as he becomes increasingly obsessive

and isolated. Yet it also provides valu-

able insights into the inner workings

of Mr. Gould’s distinctive technique

and unorthodox interpretive ap-

proach.

An only child, he studied piano with

his mother until, at 11, he began les-

sons with the Chilean-born pianist

Alberto Guerrero at the Toronto Con-

servatory. Mr. Guerrero was an advo-

cate of a technical discipline known as

finger tapping. He taught his students

to hold one hand in a relaxed position

on the keyboard, lightly touching the

keys. With the other hand, the student

would tap a fingertip enough to de-

press the desired key. The mechanical

action of the key springing up would

lift the finger back into place. The idea

was to teach the fingers to play with a

minimum of effort and no excess lift.

Mr. Gould sat low to the ground when

he played, his preferred chair just 33

centimeters high. In this crouched

posture, with his hands reaching up

to the keyboard, his fingers do every-

thing. Yet you cannot play the piano

with just your fingers. Your arms,

shoulders and back — even your feet

must get into act as well.

That Mr. Gould’s astonishing play-

ing lacked this bodily dimension comes

through in the film, in a segment about

his performance of Brahms’s D minor

Concerto with Leonard Bernstein and

the New York Philharmonic in 1962.

“You are about to hear a rather,

shall we say, unorthodox perfor-

mance of the Brahms D minor Con-

certo,” Mr. Bernstein began, with

“frequent departures from Brahms’s

dynamic indications.”

But he emphasized that there “are

moments in Mr. Gould’s performance

that emerge with astonishing fresh-

ness and conviction.”

The tempos in this performance

are fairly broad. Yet in retrospect Mr.

Bernstein must have been bothered by

Mr. Gould’s other “departures” more

than by the slow tempos. Brahms of-

ten wrote for the piano as if it were an

orchestra. Here Mr. Gould tried to rid

the piano part of orchestral thickness

and purge the music of blatant expres-

sive contrasts.

The film quotes Mr. Gould from a

radio interview the next year saying

he found Mr. Bernstein’s speech that

night full of good spirit and thought the

whole controversy was amusing.

That Mr. Gould, who died in 1982,

was beloved by a circle of intimates

comes through touchingly in the film.

After Mr. Gould stopped giving pub-

lic concerts at age 31 and confined

his work to the recording studio, he

spent countless hours with Lorne

Tulk, an audio engineer, who carried

out his painstaking editing demands,

sometimes neglecting his children, he

says.

One day Mr. Gould told Mr. Tulk

that they should be brothers, that they

should actually go to some office in To-

ronto and make it legal. Mr. Tulk, as he

recalls in the film, gently answered, “I

would love to be your brother, Glenn,”

but “I have four brothers and a sister”

who might want some say in the mat-

ter.

Mr. Gould thought this answer was

very sweet, Mr. Tulk says. The subject

never came up again.

By GUY TREBAY

The treasure hunters left the late-

summer light on a recent Sunday to

descend into the gloom of the Vault

at One Hanson Place in Brooklyn.

There, in subterranean chambers,

they searched through the folding

tables and bins set out by 30 or so vi-

nyl record dealers.

“I buy house and Detroit techno,

mainly,” said Matt Arace, a D.J.

from Hartford, Connecticut, who

was hunting down labels like Kom-

pakt or Minus.

Jeffrey Joe, who teaches high

school in Harlem, was “not looking

for anything in particular,” simply

putting himself in the way of seren-

dipity.

The numbers of vinyl fanatics are

hard to measure, but what’s certain

is that they are growing, along with

vinyl record sales. In 2008, 1.88 mil-

lion vinyl albums were purchased,

more than in any year since Nielsen

SoundScan began tracking sales 20

years ago.

That figure may be small com-

pared with the volume of digital

downloads during the same period.

Yet the people at SoundScan were

not alone in noting that a generation

raised on MP3 players has lately fall-

en in love with long-playing records,

as well as the outdated technology

that was the primary means of play-

ing music at home for the better part

of a century.

Mass retailers have taken note

and now sell vinyl records and re-

cord players. The men’s-wear de-

signer John Varvatos, a collector

whose personal stash runs to 15,000

records, was onto vinyl early; his

store stocks some of the choicest old

records in town.

“Vinyl is the biggest it’s been in 20

years,” Mr. Varvatos said recently.

The Brooklyn vinyl fair on a Sun-

day in late September was not the

largest one around, but it had a dis-

tinct flavor of New York. Among the

vendors was a senior editor at The

Huffington Post Web site; two guys

from Other Music, a record store; a

teacher with a sideline selling psych-

rock records; and Bill Yawien, a

55-year-old who recently moved

from a house to a condo.

“It was time to whittle it down

a little,” Mr. Yawien remarked to

some browsers perusing his trove

of records by Cream, Jimi Hendrix

and the Jefferson Airplane and the

Mothers of Invention.

It is safe to assume that buyers

were also, in some subtle fashion,

seeking cultural connections, the

kind you can get only from someone

like Sal Siggia.

“Someone once called me a cul-

ture maven,” Mr. Siggia said. “But

I never thought much about what

I was collecting. I just knew it was

worth saving somehow.”

Almost everything he sold that

day, including T-shirts from the

nightclub Area and a complete col-

lection of Smiths records, had been

acquired not for resale but for per-

sonal pleasure. “Everything people

bought was my stuff from the ’80s,”

Mr. Siggia said.

Was it tough, Mr. Siggia was

asked, to relinquish his treasure,

these autobiographical relics?

“No,” he said flatly. “Once I decide

to let go, I let go. If I dropped dead

tomorrow, all this stuff would be out

on Avenue A the next day.”

NEW YORK — You enter “Nueva

York (1613-1945)” feeling fairly sure of

your geographic bearings, but after

viewing an unusual accumulation of

artifacts, you leave less certain, curi-

ous, challenged.

Instead of seeing the

city and its past along

an East-West axis and

its conflicts and cul-

ture through interac-

tions with European-

born colonizers and

immigrants, we have our attention

rotated 90 degrees by the exhibition

at El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan.

We look along the North-South axis,

toward Latin America.

That is also the axis along which

immigration and cultural influence

accumulated in recent decades, lead-

ing to a growing Hispanic presence in

the city and in American life.

The Dutch, we learn, were inter-

ested in New Amsterdam not only

because of furs, pelts and lumber:

they also were countering their en-

emies the Spanish, whose empire in

the Western Hemisphere was vast.

We even see examples of the Spanish

treasure that inspired such rivalry.

Silver mines in present-day Bolivia

produced ingots like one on display

here. By the mid-1500s, the Spanish

had even cornered the market in

Mexican cochineal insects, which

were ground into paints and dyes,

creating the sumptuous scarlets and

reds of Renaissance Europe.

The British also had rivalries in

mind when they transformed New

Amsterdam into New York: Span-

ish power was the defining nemesis,

even in the way the British shared the

Dutch distaste for Spanish Roman

Catholic culture. A group of Jews from

Brazil was reluctantly permitted to

settle in New Amsterdam, but Catholic

churches were barred.

The American Revolution marked

a turning point. In opposition to

Britain, the colonies attracted Span-

ish support; in return, Spain was

rehabilitated. In 1786 New York’s

first Catholic church — St. Peter’s on

Barclay Street in Lower Manhattan

— was built.

But revolutionary ideals also in-

spired challenges to Spanish power.

In 1784 the Venezuelan Francisco de

Miranda arrived to seek assistance

“for the liberty and independence of

the entire Spanish-American Conti-

nent.” His enterprise faltered, leav-

ing it to others, like the Argentine

José de San Martín and the Venezu-

elan Simón Bolívar, to lead wars of

independence.

We learn of one New York celebra-

tion of South American independence

at the City Hotel on March 23, 1825.

But commerce must have been a

large factor in such support. Brook-

lyn became the world’s center for the

refining of South American sugar

cane.

In 19th century New York, new

immigrant communities formed.

They were small — in the early 1860s,

about 1,300 Spaniards and Latin

Americans lived in New York — but

they grew. Intellectuals and politi-

cians joined the merchants.

The 19th century’s Latin American

revolutions even seemed to begin in

New York, with many people fleeing

oppression in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

A red, white and blue flag hung here

is a reproduction of the one raised

by The Sun newspaper in 1850: it

was destined to become the flag of

an independent Cuba, though it was

meant as a call for its conquest.

New York became a locus for Cu-

ban debates for half a century. José

Martí, a supporter of Cuban indepen-

dence, came in 1880 and worked as a

journalist, while establishing New

York’s Spanish-American Literary

Society and writing poetry.

The exhibition cites a number of

such cultural encounters while also

showing their converse: the paint-

ings of Frederic Edwin Church (like

“Cayambe,” shown here) led to a lo-

cal fascination with the South Ameri-

can landscape.

By the time we reach the show’s

end, we see that even if there hadn’t

been a demographic transformation,

there is no way to understand the his-

tory of the city or the history of South

America without the North-South

axis. What is left unclear is just how

that axis changed in the latter part of

the 20th century under the pressures

of immigration.

Although the exhibition technically

ends in 1945, a film made for the show

by Ric Burns is meant to fill the gap,

and overturns the usual immigrant

narrative, blaming today’s influx of

immigrants on what American poli-

cies have done to their native coun-

tries. The film is being shown inside an

art installation called “From Here to

There,” created by Antonio Martorell:

a mock airplane resembling those that

ferried Puerto Ricans to New York in

the 1940s and ’50s.

The film’s assertions are par-

ticularly jarring because of what we

have already learned. There is no

claim made in this exhibition that

the history of the North-South axis

was untroubled or that anybody

was unilaterally benevolent, but it

is still a history of political inspira-

tion, mercantile energy and cultural

interaction.

DON HUNSTEIN/SONY

Glenn Gould’s technique involved an unusual posture.

KIRSTEN LUCE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Though still dwarfed by digital

downloads, demand for records

is rising.

CHESTER HIGGINS JR./THE NEW YORK TIMES

EDWARD

ROTHSTEIN

REVIEW

Virtuosity matched with a fragile eccentricity.

Looking South, Not East,

Into New York’s Past

RevealingThe MagicOf a Pianist

Hunting for Vinyl Treasure, And Cultural Connections

‘‘Nueva York

(1613-1945)’’

documents the

city’s historic links

to Spain and Latin

America. ‘‘From

Here to There,’’

an installation

made to resemble

the airplanes that

brought many

Puerto Ricans to

New York. Below,

Cuba is the subject

of this lithograph

printed in 1898.

Repubblica NewYork