Cameras

Monday, February 28, 2005

NIKON COOLPIX 8800
UP CLOSE – The Coolpix offers sharp closeups 1.2 inches from the subject and a 10X optical zoom. It lacks a zoom ring, however, and performance suffers in dim light

KONICA MINOLTA DIMAGE A200
STEADY – The Dimage, the only eight-megapixel camera under $600, has an antishake feature that helps with slow-shutter and zoom shots, and it records 15-minute movies.

OLYMPUS EVOLT E300
SPEEDY – The Evolt is a true single-lens-reflex camera; while you get no preview screen, audio or movies, the consolation is fast focusing, fast startup and minimal shutter lag.

CANON POWERSHOT PRO 1
EXTRAS – The PowerShot has a big L.C.D. screen (two inches diagonally) and includes a 64-megabyte memory card. But the on-off switch is minuscule.

 
February 24, 2005STATE OF THE ART The Big Picture: Megapixel Race at Milestone 8By DAVID POGUE

N life’s final exam, the section intended to gauge your maturity and wisdom will probably look like this. "Mark each statement true or false: More money always makes you happier. A larger strawberry always tastes better. More megahertz always means a faster computer."

Too easy? All right, then, answer this: Why are so many people convinced that more megapixels means a better digital camera?

Within three years, camera companies rolled out four-megapixel cameras, then five, then six and seven. Now, if you can believe it, eight-megapixel consumer cameras are available for under $600.

Let’s get one thing straight: the number of megapixels is a measure of how many dots make up a digital photo, not its quality. An eight-megapixel photo can look just as bad as a three-megapixel one – just much, much bigger.

The problem with this digicam arms race is that more megapixels mean bigger files. You need a much bigger memory card, you’ll pay more for the camera (for its faster processing circuitry) and you’ll have to wait a lot longer for those giant files to download to your computer. Once there, they also take longer to transfer, open and edit.

All right. Now that you’ve been given the Lecture, it’s only fair to acknowledge that more megapixels do come in handy in three situations. First, an eight-megapixel photo has enough resolution for giant prints – 20-inch-by-30-inch posters, for example. Second, more megapixels give you the freedom to crop out a huge amount of a photo to isolate the really good stuff, while still leaving enough pixels to make reasonably sized prints.

Third – let’s be honest here – it’s fun to blow people away by telling them you have an eight-megapixel camera.

Five big-name camera companies make eight-megapixel models under $800: Nikon, Olympus, Konica Minolta, Canon and Sony. (Sony declined to provide a camera for evaluation in this roundup, saying that its entry has reached the end of its life cycle. Memorial services have not yet been scheduled.)

Fortunately, these companies didn’t just slap eight-megapixel sensors into so-so cameras. Each company also incorporated excellent lenses, fast circuitry and other hallmarks of high-end cameras. In other words, these cameras give you eight good megapixels.

All of these cameras are heavyish, black and fairly bulky; if you want one of those slim, silver credit-card cams, forget it. Each offers full manual controls, a pop-up flash and a detached, easy-to-lose lens cap. Each can capture photos in either the JPEG format or what advanced shutterbugs call RAW format – huge, 13-megabyte files that when transferred to a program like Photoshop or iMovie can be miraculously "reshot" with different exposure, white balance and other settings, right on the computer.

Three models in this review – the Nikon, the Minolta and the Canon – fall halfway between traditional consumer cameras and more professional models. They offer powerful 7X to 10X zoom lenses that can bring you much closer to the soccer field or the school play than the usual 3X zoom. All three feature liquid-crystal-display screens that flip out from the camera body and rotate, making overhead, ground-level and self-portrait shots much easier. (As a bonus, the screen is protected when it is snapped shut against the camera back.)

Note, too, that when you peer into the eyepiece viewfinder of those three cameras, you don’t actually see out the lens. Instead, you see another tiny L.C.D. screen (an EVF, or electronic viewfinder) – an approach loved and loathed by various shutterbug factions.

You can expect exceptional photos from all four cameras, far superior to what you get from a $300 consumer camera. (You can see some samples at http://www.nytimes.com/ slideshow/2005/02/23/ technology/circuits/ 20050224_STAT_SLIDESHOW_index.html Here’s what else you can expect.

KONICA MINOLTA DIMAGE A200 At $587, this is the least expensive eight-megapixeler. (These prices come from shopping.com, which identifies the lowest price from a highly rated store.) It’s also among the smallest and lightest, yet the rubberized, hand-turnable zoom ring makes it feel precise and professional.

This model gets brownie points for its exceptionally clear menu system, its comfortable body design and an antishake feature that does wonders for slow-shutter and fully zoomed-in shots. (The Nikon has a similar feature.)

And if you want to take movies with your camera, this is the one to get. It can capture TV-size, TV-smooth movies up to 15 minutes long. Better yet, the autofocus and that awesome zoom ring operate while you’re recording, which is unusual for a digital still camera.

Subtract a few points, though, for the flash, which doesn’t pop up by itself (you have to haul it up manually), the lack of a printed manual and the limited number of canned presets like Portrait, Sports, Night and Sunset. (In fact, that’s the whole list.) And the A200’s viewfinders turn grainy and slow to focus indoors at night, in large part because the camera lacks an autofocus assist lamp (which helps a camera focus in dim light).

CANON POWERSHOT PRO 1 Canon’s octamegapixel camera is also compact – except for the L.C.D. screen, that is; it’s two inches diagonally, a lot nicer than the 1.8-inch screens of its rivals. The PowerShot’s price is nice, too (about $635), the illuminated top-mounted L.C.D. status screen is helpful and the photos are absolutely terrific. To its further credit, Canon is the only company that includes a memory card (a 64-megger).

With due respect, though, the most fitting adjective for this camera is annoying. The nano-dial that turns the camera on and off requires thumbs the size of Barbie’s. And when you half-press to focus, the image on the screen freezes momentarily – and frustratingly. (The Nikon also exhibits this quirk.)

Worst of all, though, is the electronic zoom ring: the zooming lags behind your turning, which can drive you crazy.

The PowerShot Pro has plenty of great features and, in good light, takes excellent pictures. But certain aspects of it can get on your nerves.

NIKON COOLPIX 8800 What a list of great features! Crystal-clear close-ups 1.2 inches from the subject; truly helpful image stabilization; a wireless remote control for self-portraits and shakeless shutter presses; 15 preprogrammed scene modes; 30 frames-per-second movie recording, with zoom (30-second length limit); and a best-in-class 10X optical zoom, which makes this model what a Nikon spokesman calls "the über-soccer camera." (Nikon also offers the Coolpix 8400, which lacks the 10X zoom and the vibration damper and costs about $80 less.)

Unfortunately, the list of disappointments is equally stunning. For starters, this Coolpix (about $725) is the only eight-megapixel camera without a zoom ring. To zoom in and out (and noisily at that), you have to hold down the + and – buttons, which feels so three-megapixel.

Second, the manual-focus system cries out for a rethink. The operation requires both hands, the screen doesn’t magnify the image to help you out and the on-screen scale doesn’t display actual distances.

Finally, this camera falls to its knees in dim light. Its autofocus often flails helplessly indoors, zooming futilely in and out; if the subject is more than five feet away, the autofocus assist lamp just twiddles its thumbs. If birthday parties and Thanksgiving dinners are among the scenes you hope to immortalize, you’ll find Coolpix distinctly uncool.

OLYMPUS EVOLT E300 This is one big, weird-looking camera. Because light is mirrored off to the side, the usual hump over the lens (where a prism usually sits) is missing, so the Evolt looks as if it has been scalped.

The Evolt isn’t in the same category as the cameras described above. It’s a digital single-lens-reflex camera, which means that you can’t preview the picture on the screen; you have to compose your photo by peering through the glass eyepiece (although that’s a wonderful, bright, professional-feeling experience). You don’t get movies or sound, a tilt-and-swivel screen, a powerful zoom or a remote control. A digital S.L.R. is a pure, unadulterated still-photo machine, with fast focusing, fast startup time, a catalog of available lenses, days-long battery life and practically no shutter lag (the delay after you press the shutter button).

No wonder, then, that the Evolt easily outshoots its three more compact, more consumer-oriented rivals, even though its price is in the same ballpark ($723 after a $100 rebate that’s good through March 31).

The colors pop, autofocus can’t miss and the flash pops up so high, your subjects’ likelihood of having red eye is next to nil. There’s even an ultrasonic vibrator inside that shakes dust off the sensor each time you turn the camera on.

Now, there are better digital S.L.R.’s. The widely adored Nikon D70, for example, has zero startup time and takes sharper photos than the Evolt. But it will cost you at least $900, with lens, and that’s after a $200 rebate. (Just a few days ago, Canon unveiled a new superfast, sub-$1,000, eight-megapixel digital S.L.R. of its own, called the EOS 350D.)

THE BOTTOM LINE If you’re like most people whose photographic ambitions involve birthdays, weddings, soccer games, holidays and children, here’s the cold, hard truth: eight megapixels is three or four megapixels too many.

But if you foresee having to print out posters or heavily cropped 8-by-10’s, then the Olympus Evolt E300 is clearly the sharpest shooter of the bunch. Of course, buying it involves giving up some delicious features, like digital movies and the ability to compose your photos on the screen.

If you’re not prepared to make those sacrifices, then consider the Konica Minolta Dimage A200. It offers great photos, superb movie capture and a minimum of annoyances, all in a relatively small, inexpensive package.

Either way, these cameras ought to tide you over at least until the 24-megapixel models come out.

E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com

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Frank Rich Oscars

Monday, February 28, 2005

February 27, 2005

FRANK RICH

Hollywood Bets on Chris Rock’s ‘Indecency’

Correction Appended

THE total box office for all five best-picture nominees on Sunday’s Oscars is so small that their collective niche in the national cultural marketplace falls somewhere between square dancing and non-Grisham fiction. But if this year’s Oscars are worthless as a barometer of the broad state of American pop culture, there’s much to learn from the hype spun by ABC and the motion picture academy to seduce Americans to watch even if they can’t distinguish Clive Owen from Catalina Sandino Moreno. The selling of the Oscar show is the latest indicator of the most telling disconnect in our politics: in the post-Janet Jackson era, "indecency" is gaining in popularity in direct proportion to Washington’s campaign to shut indecency down.

Hollywood can read the numbers. Once the feds vowed to smite future "wardrobe malfunctions," the customers started bolting the annual TV franchises where those malfunctions and their verbal counterparts are apt to occur. An award show sanitized of vulgarity and encased in the prophylactic of tape delay is an oxymoron. And so the Golden Globes lost 40 percent of its audience in January on NBC, the Grammys lost 28 percent of its audience this month on CBS. The viewers turned up instead at the competing "Desperate Housewives" on ABC, where S-and-M is the latest item on the carnal menu. Though this year’s Super Bowl didn’t have to go up against that runaway hit, its born-again family-friendliness also took a ratings toll; the audience in the all-important 18-to-49 demographic fell to an all-time low. The viewers perked up only for a GoDaddy.com commercial parodying a Washington "Broadcast Censorship Hearing": TiVo reported that the spot’s utterly unrevealing "wardrobe malfunction" gag was the most replayed moment from any of the game’s ads, much as the Jackson-Timberlake pas de deux that inspired it was the TiVo sensation of the year before.

This is why the people bringing you the Oscars have done everything possible to imply that Sunday’s show will be so indecent that even the winner of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award may let loose with a Dick Cheney expletive. Rather than chase away MTV and its fans from the festivities as the National Football League did after the Jackson fracas, the academy hired as its host Chris Rock, a three-time MTV Music Video Awards M.C. Mr. Rock, as brilliant at P.R. as he is at comedy, ran around giving cheeky interviews making the outrageous charge that the Oscars might have a gay following. Matt Drudge took the bait and assailed the comedian for indecency. Mr. Rock was soiling "the classiest night in Hollywood," he said on Fox News, by taking "a lewd route … to the gutter."

The motion picture academy’s marketers couldn’t have said it better themselves. They know a lewd route is the yellow brick road to Nielsen nirvana. Gilbert Cates, the Oscars producer, had already been putting out the message that he opposed the show’s tape delay as "dangerous to society." The academy’s executive director, Bruce Davis, elaborated to Lola Ogunnaike of The New York Times: "I like to hear that people are nervous, because that means you’re more likely to watch." Last Sunday Mr. Rock was billed by Ed Bradley on "60 Minutes" as a "nontraditional host" who is "not afraid to offend" and whose "comedy is still as profane and uncut as ever." Two hours later came the pièce de résistance: Mr. Rock in an Oscar-show promo spot on "Desperate Housewives" fondling the Oscar statuette (in all its gold nudity) and declaring, "You won’t believe the halftime show!"

It’s all a hoax, of course. ABC has merely shortened last year’s seven-second tape delay to five seconds, and viewers already annoyed that the Oscar telecast is pre-empting "Desperate Housewives" may have further reason to complain when they learn that any profane comedy or liberated cleavage will be seen only by the swells at the Kodak Theater. Next year may be another story. In a little noted report in Variety earlier this month, the academy got ABC to forgo a contract stipulation requiring a tape delay in future Oscar shows. Further ratings tumbles ensure that the war against tape delays will be taken up in earnest by media giants eager to preserve their profit centers. Already the networks are mulling a court challenge to the constitutionality of the decades-old Federal Communications Commission decency standards. The rules are so loosey-goosy it’s hard to imagine how the networks could lose.

The signs are everywhere that the indecency campaign is failing anyway in the months since "moral values" supposedly became the unofficial law of the land. To see how much so, forget about the liberal Hollywood of Oscar night and examine instead the porn peddlers of the right.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, always a leader in these hypocrisy sweepstakes, made pious hay out of yanking the second scheduled broadcast of the GoDaddy.com commercial after its initial Super Bowl appearance. But Fox Sports promptly plastered the "GoDaddy girl" alongside Playboy bunnies and other pinups on its "Funhouse Fox of the Week" Web site, where every adolescent teenager could ogle it to his libido’s content. No less a bellwether is the decision of Adelphia, a cable giant known for its refusal to traffic in erotica, to change its image radically now that its moralistic founder and former C.E.O., John Rigas, has been convicted of looting the company. Shortly after President Bush’s inauguration Adelphia acknowledged that it is offering XXX, the most hard-core porn, to some subscribers – a cable first, outdoing even the XX porn on Mr. Murdoch’s DirecTV in explicitness. "The more X’s, the more popular," an Adelphia spokeswoman told The Los Angeles Times.

As Jake Tapper reported on ABC News, Adelphia is a big Republican contributor. Its beneficiaries include Rick Santorum, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania who has likened homosexuality to "man on dog" sex, a specialty item that his campaign donor might yet present some day. Sift through the Center for Responsive Politics’ campaign contribution site, and you will also find that Fred Upton, the Republican point man in the Congressional indecency crusade, is one of the many in his party (President Bush among them) raking in contributions from Comcast or its executives. Comcast subscribers are awash in porn. In Mr. Upton’s own Kalamazoo district, its pay-per-view networks have offered such hard-core fare as "Young, Fresh & Ripe" and "As Young As They Come No. 8" even as the congressman put the finishing touches on the penalty-enhanced Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005.

Cheering Mr. Upton on is the Parents Television Council, the e-mail factory that Mediaweek magazine credits with as much as 99.9 percent of all indecency complaints to the F.C.C. in 2004. It is also quite a little fount of salacious entertainment in its own right. On its Web site, the organization’s tireless "entertainment analysts" compile a list of every naughty word used on television and invite visitors to "Watch the Worst TV Clip of the Week." An archive of past clips – helpfully labeled individually by sin ("gratuitous teen sex," "necrophilia") – is there for your pleasure, with no requirement for the credit card number or membership fee that porn Internet sites use as a roadblock for children.

That politicians and public scolds like these have succeeded in the temporary laundering of live TV shows, and even "Saving Private Ryan," is a symptom of the political moment. It won’t last long. The power of the free market, for better or worse, will prevail, and the market tells us that it is still the American way to lament indecency even while gobbling it up. This is the year that Sports Illustrated for the first time published the number for its subscribers to phone if they wanted to skip the swimsuit issue – and almost no one called. Sandra Dee really is dead, and no fire-and-brimstone speeches by James Dobson are going to bring her back.

But that does not mean that the indecency campaign is benign. Even if it barely slows the entertainment industry juggernaut, it inflicts collateral damage elsewhere – whether casting a chill over broadcast news or crippling public broadcasting by inducing it to censor even the language of American troops in a "Frontline" documentary about Iraq. The Parents Television Council may purport to complain about "The Simpsons," which last Sunday presented an episode both sympathetic to same-sex marriage and skeptical of a Bible-thumping minister. ("If you love the Bible so much," Homer asks him, "why don’t you marry it?") But that’s a game; this organization knows full well it can’t lay a finger on Fox or its well-connected proprietor, Mr. Murdoch. The same anti-indecency forces, however, can and did set the stage for the new secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, to go gunning for a far milder evocation of same-sex parents in the children’s show "Postcards From Buster" on PBS.

Fresh from sending a cartoon rabbit to the slaughterhouse, Ms. Spellings will figure out ways to discriminate against real-life lesbian moms in other departmental policies that have nothing to do with entertainment. And she’s not the only administration official empowered by the decency crusaders to apply censorship to public policy well removed from the TV screen. No sooner were PBS’s lesbians sent to the indecency gulag than The Washington Post reported that the Department of Health and Human Services had instructed the presenters of a federally funded conference on suicide prevention this month to remove the words "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual" and "transgender" from the name of a talk heretofore titled "Suicide Prevention Among Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender Individuals," thereby rendering it invisible and useless.

At least President Bush is now on tape saying he won’t "kick gays." He leaves that to surrogates. It’s gay people and teenagers being denied potentially life-saving sex education who ultimately are the real victims of the larger agenda of the decency crusaders, which is not to clean up show business, a doomed mission, but to realize the more attainable goal of enlisting the government to marginalize and punish those who don’t adhere to their "moral values." For its part, show business will have no problem fending for itself. My favorite moment in the whole faux Oscar controversy came on a "Today" show segment weighing the Drudge Report blast of Chris Rock. "Still ahead this morning on ‘Today,’ " said Katie Couric without missing a beat as that report ended, "former teacher Mary Kay Letourneau is planning to marry the student who fathered two of her children." America just can’t stop itself from staying tuned.

Correction: February 27, 2005, Sunday:

The continuation of a front-page column on Page 17 of Arts & Leisure today about the Oscars and indecency in popular culture includes an outdated reference to sexually explicit films offered on some Adelphia Communications cable systems. After the section had gone to press, Adelphia announced that it would stop carrying films classified XXX.

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Chris Rock, The Oscars

Monday, February 28, 2005

‘Sit your asses down!’ With those four words, comedian Chris Rock brought a new tone to the Oscars (news – web sites) that network executives and sponsors of the Academy Awards (news – web sites) hope will lure back a bigger, younger TV audience to Hollywood’s biggest night. In this photo, Rock performs during the 77th annual Academy Awards in Hollywood, February 27, 2005. (Gary Hershorn/Reuters

Edgy Chris Rock Brings New Tone to Oscars

Sun Feb 27,11:17 PM ET

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – "Sit your asses down!"

With those four words, comedian Chris Rock brought a new tone to the Oscars (news – web sites) that network executives and sponsors of the Academy Awards (news – web sites) hope will lure back a bigger, younger TV audience to Hollywood’s biggest night.

Giving the Oscar producers what they paid for, the first-time host introduced an edgy, provocative mood to the show, with a monologue that was politically charged and racially aware while seeming, at times, to veer close to profane.

Rock, who drew controversy weeks before taking the Oscar stage by suggesting that he and most other African Americans had little reason to watch the awards, opened Sunday’s show by acknowledging the record number of black performers vying for acting honors this year.

"We have, like, four black nominees. It’s kinda like the Def Oscar Jam tonight," he enthused, in a reference to the HBO comedy series "Def Comedy Jam," a springboard for many black performers.

While flirting with network censors in his choice of words as he urged the star-studded studio audience to take their seats, the opening minutes of the broadcast bore no signs that ABC was forced to bleep put any of his remarks.

The sharp-tongued comic drew some of his biggest laughs with jabs aimed at President Bush (news – web sites), the involuntary star of Michael Moore’s scathing documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Rock noted that Moore’s film, though shut out of the Oscar competition, was breaking box office records at the time Bush was running for re-election.

"Can you imagine applying for a job, and while you’re applying for that job there’s a movie in every theater in the country that shows how much you suck in that job?" Rock said. "It would be hard to get hired, wouldn’t it?"

Citing "another movie nobody wanted to make this year," Rock turned to Mel Gibson (news)’s blood-soaked homage to the final hours in the life of Jesus, "The Passion of the Christ."

"I saw ‘Passion of the Christ. Not that funny, really," he joked. "Nobody wanted to make ‘Passion of the Christ,’ man. Come on. They made six ‘Police Academies’ and can’t make one ‘Passion of the Christ."’

Turning again to race for laughs, Rock complained that Hollywood makes movies "for white people to enjoy — real movies, with plots, with actors, not rappers, with real names, like, ‘Catch Me If You Can,’ like ‘Saving Private Ryan.’

"Black movies don’t have real names," Rock continued. "They get names like ‘Barbershop.’ That’s not a name. That’s just a location. ‘Barbershop,’ ‘Cookout,’ ‘Carwash,’ … you know ‘Laundromat’s’ coming soon, and after that, ‘Check-Cashing Place."’

Rock closed his monologue by sending "love out to our troops fighting all over the world."

Off-camera friction with ABC over what performers could say during the broadcast bubbled to the surface when Robin Williams took the stage to present the award for best animated feature, and ripped a piece of tape from his mouth.

The gesture was an reference to the network’s reported refusal to allow Williams to perform a song lampooning a conservative group that had criticized cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants for appearing in a video the group branded "pro-homosexual."

But Williams got in his licks anyway.

"SquarePants is not gay," he said. "Tight pants, maybe. SpongeBob Hot Pants, you go girl. What about Donald Duck? Little sailor top, no pants. Hello?" … "Bugs Bunny? In more dresses than J. Edgar Hoover at Mardi Gras. Hello?"

 

 

Michael Jackson

Teen accuser told investigators he knew more about "birds and bees" than Michael Jackson

FEBRUARY 27–The Los Angeles boy who has accused Michael Jackson of molestation told investigators that the singer was a naif when it came to "the birds and the bees," claiming that his alleged abuser "didn’t know much. I knew more than he did."

The surprising appraisal from the boy, now 15, came during a January 19, 2004 interview with Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department officials, The Smoking Gun has learned.

At the interview’s conclusion, a detective asked the child about conversations he had with Jackson about girls and any related guidance offered by the performer. The boy, who was 13 at the time of the alleged molestation, replied that Jackson would "always, like, try to give me" advice about "the birds and the bees."

However, the boy told investigators, "He didn’t know much. I knew more than he did."

The Q&A session, which was audiotaped, came about two months prior to the child’s initial appearance before the grand jury that later voted to indict Jackson on ten felony counts. During his testimony, the boy occasionally appeared flippant while discussing the alleged sexual assaults and Jackson’s provision of wine and assorted booze to him and his two siblings.

When District Attorney Tom Sneddon asked if he had ceased drinking alcohol after leaving Neverland Ranch for the last time, the boy responded, "That period of my life, I went to AA. That period of my life is over." To "make sure the record is clear," Sneddon asked the boy whether he was kidding about attending Alcoholics Anonymous. "I’m just joking," replied the accuser.

At another point during his testimony, the boy was asked to describe the alleged molestation incidents in Jackson’s bedroom, which he did in graphic detail. The boy, who has been enrolled for years in a Navy sea cadets program, was then asked by Sneddon if anyone else had been present during the assaults. "No," the child answered, adding, "Not unless a Navy SEAL dropped down."

At the close of his first day of testimony, the boy received Sneddon’s standard witness admonition that a judicial gag order barred him from talking to the media about his confidential testimony. "Oh man," the child replied, "I was going to have a press conference."

The grand jury transcript, which TSG exclusively obtained earlier this month, also reveals that sheriff’s detectives interviewed a young friend of Jackson’s during the November 2003 raid of his California estate.

The performer befriended the teenager, Omer Bhatti, in 1996 during a Tunisian stop on the singer’s HIStory tour (the child, then a 12-year-old Jackson imitator, was apparently spotted in front of Jackson’s hotel).

Investigator Jeffrey Ellis testified that when he "broached the subject of pornography," Bhatti became nervous and "seemed to have trouble forming a sentence. It was almost like a stutter." Ellis added that when he asked Bhatti a series of questions about the consumption of wine and alcohol and references to "Jesus Juice," he saw "that same type of uneasiness in him that I noticed when I started talking to him about pornography."

While prosecutors apparently sensed Bhatti had a story to tell, the Jackson crony appears only on the defense’s list of prospective witnesses.

Iraq

Suicide Blast in Iraq Kills at Least 115

37 minutes ago

By ALI AL-FATLAWI, Associated Press Writer

HILLAH, Iraq – A suicide car bomber blasted a crowd of police and national guard recruits Monday as they gathered for physicals outside a medical clinic south of Baghdad, killing at least 115 people and wounding 132 — the single deadliest attack in the two-year insurgency.

 

Torn limbs and other body parts littered the street outside the clinic in Hillah, a predominantly Shiite area about 60 miles south of Baghdad.

Monday’s blast outside the clinic was so powerful it nearly vaporized the suicide bomber’s car, leaving only its engine partially intact. The injured were piled into pickup trucks and ambulances and taken to nearby hospitals.

The deadliest previous single attack occurred Aug. 29, 2003, when a car bomb exploded outside a mosque in Najaf, killing more than 85 people, including Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim. Although officials never gave a final death toll, there were suspicions it may have been higher.

On March 2, 2004, at least 181 people were killed and 573 were wounded in multiple bombings at Shiite Muslim shrines in Baghdad and Karbala, although those were from a combination of suicide bombers, mortars and planted explosives.

Outside the concrete and brick building in Hillah, people gingerly walked around small lakes of blood pooling on the street. Scorch marks infused with blood covered the clinic’s walls and dozens of people helped pile body parts, including arms, feet and limbs, into blankets. Piles of shoes and tattered clothes were thrown into a corner.

Angry crowds gathered outside the hospital chanting "Allah akbar!" — Arabic for "God is great!" — and demanded to know the fate of their relatives.

"I was lined up near the medical center, waiting for my turn for the medical exam in order to apply for work in the police," Abdullah Salih, 22, said. "Suddenly I heard a very big explosion. I was thrown several meters away and I had burns in my legs and hands, then I was taken to the hospital."

Babil province police headquarters said "several people" were arrested in connection with the blast, the biggest confirmed death toll in a single attack since the fall of Saddam Hussein (news – web sites). Insurgents have repeatedly targeted recruits for Iraq (news – web sites)’s security forces, and the attack comes at a time when Iraqi politicians are trying to form a new government following landmark Jan. 30 elections.

Iraq’s interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that Iraq still needed international forces on the ground while the effort was under way to rebuild Iraqi security forces.

"But we will continue to need and to seek assistance for some time to come," he wrote.

Maj. Gen. Osman Ali, an Iraqi National Guard commander in Hillah, put the toll at 115 dead and 132 wounded. A health official in Babil province said the death toll could rise.

Dia Mohammed, the director of Hillah General Hospital, said most of the victims were recruits waiting to take physicals as part of the application process to join the Iraqi police and national guard.

"I was lucky because I was the last person in line when the explosion took place. Suddenly there was panic, and many frightened people stepped on me. I lost consciousness and the next thing I was aware of was being in the hospital," said recruit Muhsin Hadi, 29. One of his legs was broken in the blast.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news – web sites) condemned the attack and pledged to help the Iraqi government track down those responsible.

"All civilized people should feel nothing but revulsion for the terrorists who can kill innocent Iraqis who only want to help build a new democracy and a better society," he said.

A second car bomb exploded Monday at a police checkpoint in Musayyib, about 20 miles north of Hillah, killing at least one policeman and wounding several others, police said on condition of anonymity.

In Baghdad, the U.S. military said it was investigating the death of a U.S. soldier who was shot while manning a traffic checkpoint in the capital a day earlier. Nearly 1,500 U.S. troops have died since the war began in March 2003.

Iraqi troops blocked main avenues leading to and from Firdous Square, the roundabout in central Baghdad where Iraqis toppled a statue of Saddam on April 9, 2003. Occasional shots and bursts of automatic weapons fire could be heard during the sweep of the Battaween area, know locally as the Sudanese district.

Several people believed to be Sudanese were seen being arrested by police. Some of Baghdad’s past suicide bombers have in the past been identified as Sudanese.

In al-Mashahda, 25 miles north of Baghdad, police found three unidentified corpses with their hands tied together with plastic cuffs, police commissioner Abbas Abdul Ridha said.

The Hillah suicide bombing came one day after Iraqi officials announced that Syria had captured and handed over Saddam Hussein’s half brother, a most-wanted leader in the Sunni-based insurgency, in the latest in a series of arrests of important insurgent figures that the Iraqi government hopes will deal a crushing blow to violent opposition forces.

The arrest of Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan also ended months of Syrian denials it was harboring fugitives from the ousted Saddam regime. Iraq authorities said Damascus acted in a gesture of goodwill.

Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, who shared a mother with Saddam, was arrested along with 29 other fugitive members of the former dictator’s Baath Party in Hasakah in northeastern Syria, 30 miles from the Iraqi border, officials said Sunday on condition of anonymity. The U.S. military in Iraq had no comment.

In an interview published Monday in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Syrian President Bashar Assad denied U.S. accusations his regime lets militants slip across the Iraqi border. He said Washington blames Damascus in order to cover for its strategic mistakes in Iraq.

"Washington accuses us of failing to cooperate, of nurturing the guerrilla," he said. "But in reality they are asking us to remedy to their mistakes: the dissolution of the state, of military forces."

Syria is under intense pressure from the United States, the United Nations (news – web sites), France and Israel to drop its support for radical groups in the Middle East, to stop harboring Iraqi fugitives and to remove its troops from Lebanon.

A week ago, authorities grabbed a key associate and the driver of Jordanian-born terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and believed to be the inspiration of the ongoing bombings, beheadings and attacks on Iraqi and American forces. Iraqi officials said they expect to take al-Zarqawi soon.

 

Christo and The Gates

The Gates" near the Seventh Avenue entrance on Central Park South. Sunday was the 16th and final day for the project of 7,500 gates on 23 miles of Central Park paths.

February 28, 2005 A Last Look at ‘The Gates’

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

ontrary to some reports, Jeanne-Claude’s hair is actually a few shades darker than the Sunkist orange – er, saffron – of the million square feet of fabric hanging from "The Gates" in Central Park. It’s more the color of carrot cake.

Still, she is unmistakable in a crowd. On a Sunday morning stroll through the art project in the park that she and her husband, Christo, designed, she could barely walk a few feet without attracting a horde of jacket-swaddled tourists.

"Why are you taking pictures of me?" Jeanne-Claude barked. "Turn around; look at the gates! I see only coats! I want to see gates!"

Art is long, and life is short, and city contracts are even shorter. The dismantling of the 7,500 gates was to start first thing today, and, Jeanne-Claude said, in keeping with her and Christo’s agreement with the city, it all has to be gone by March 15. That schedule is fine with her. February was the only month the project would work, she said, when the trees are leafless and row upon row of color can be seen in every direction.

The dismantling will be easier than the installation because there will not be any need to be careful. The 5,290 tons of steel will be melted down and recycled – "The aluminum is going to become cans of soda," Jeanne-Claude says – and the fabric will be shredded and turned into carpet padding. Then all that will be left of "The Gates" will be the memories, and the T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, watches and baseball caps.

There will also be the coffee table book, as there is for most of their projects. Christo spent yesterday morning with Wolfgang Volz, the photographer, gathering pictures for the book.

Jeanne-Claude laughed, imitating her husband’s orders to Mr. Volz: " ‘I want that tree and that tree, but not that one,’ " she said.

It was a bright sunny morning, but cold, and the park was crowded, considering the weather. There were the usual joggers, cyclists and Chinese wedding ceremonies, but also, of course, the New Yorkers and tourists coming for a first or last look.

Everywhere she walked, Jeanne-Claude was followed by a constant stream of thank yous and butchered mercis. She smiled back, but would not sign autographs and stopped for photographs only grudgingly. In a whisper, she explained that the gratitude was misplaced. The whole project, all $21 million of it, was of, by and for themselves, Jeanne-Claude and Christo. If the public happened to like it, well, that was a bonus. Any artist would tell you the same, she said.

So there is no weeping on her part for the end of "The Gates." It was a project that took the couple 26 years, sure, but as of Feb. 12, the day the gates were unfurled, the creativity was over. Then their days were filled with maintenance problems, sanitation issues, tours through the park with out-of-town visitors. Every day was packed, from 5 a.m., when they woke up, to that glass of Scotch before bed 20 hours later.

Now it is on to the next project: a plan to suspend several miles of fabric panels across the Arkansas River in Colorado. She began explaining, but broke off after a couple of sentences.

"Look at that over there," she said, pointing to a place where the fabric had turned peach in the glow of the afternoon sunshine, "and look over there," she said, pointing to a panel veined with the shadows of a tree. "They are two completely different colors." Out came her camera.

After a brief stroll on the edge of the Sheep Meadow, Jeanne-Claude returned to the car, a Mercedes Maybach on loan for a few weeks from DaimlerChrysler. She said she originally laughed at the idea of the Maybach – "We don’t even own a bicycle" – but she clearly cannot get enough of the car.

Out of a side-door compartment, she fished a saffron-colored Band-Aid tin, and from the tin snatched a cigarette. An assistant came to the window with a report: Someone had cut hearts out of the fabric in four gates. It’s always something; a few minutes earlier she pointed out a brand new gate, a replacement for the one that was hit by a taxicab. Was there much vandalism?

"Vandalism?" she repeated. "Cutting out hearts? It annoys us, but I can’t call that vandalism."

Suddenly the door opened, and Christo tumbled into the back seat. Before the door closed, he was debating whether they had time to eat lunch, since it was the last day Mr. Volz could take pictures and had much more to do.

"We always eat in 12 minutes," Jeanne-Claude said.

"To the boathouse, quick, quick," Christo said to the driver.

During the ride to the boathouse, Christo and Jeanne-Claude constantly talked over each other, pointing in a hundred different directions: look at the colors over there, look how the shadows of the branches fall here, look how the wind plays with the fabric.

Like his wife, Christo said he was not bothered by the closing of "The Gates." That’s what creating is all about, he said. You want to move on to the next thing.

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Maureen Dowd

Monday, February 28, 2005

February 27, 2005

OP-ED COLUMNIST

W.’s Stiletto Democracy

By MAUREEN DOWD

ASHINGTON

It was remarkable to see President Bush lecture Vladimir Putin on the importance of checks and balances in a democratic society.

Remarkably brazen, given that the only checks Mr. Bush seems to believe in are those written to the "journalists" Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Karen Ryan, the fake TV anchor, to help promote his policies. The administration has given a whole new meaning to checkbook journalism, paying a stupendous $97 million to an outside P.R. firm to buy columnists and produce propaganda, including faux video news releases.

The only balance W. likes is the slavering, Pravda-like "Fair and Balanced" coverage Fox News provides. Mr. Bush pledges to spread democracy while his officials strive to create a Potemkin press village at home. This White House seems to prefer softball questions from a self-advertised male escort with a fake name to hardball questions from journalists with real names; it prefers tossing journalists who protect their sources into the gulag to giving up the officials who broke the law by leaking the name of their own C.I.A. agent.

W., who once looked into Mr. Putin’s soul and liked what he saw, did not demand the end of tyranny, as he did in his second Inaugural Address. His upper lip sweating a bit, he did not rise to the level of his hero Ronald Reagan’s "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Instead, he said that "the common ground is a lot more than those areas where we disagree." The Russians were happy to stress the common ground as well.

An irritated Mr. Putin compared the Russian system to the American Electoral College, perhaps reminding the man preaching to him about democracy that he had come in second in 2000 according to the popular vote, the standard most democracies use.

Certainly the autocratic former K.G.B. agent needs to be upbraided by someone – Tony Blair, maybe? – for eviscerating the meager steps toward democracy that Russia had made before Mr. Putin came to power. But Mr. Bush is on shaky ground if he wants to hold up his administration as a paragon of safeguarding liberty – considering it has trampled civil liberties in the name of the war on terror and outsourced the torture of prisoners to bastions of democracy like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. (The secretary of state canceled a trip to Egypt this week after Egypt’s arrest of a leading opposition politician.)

"I live in a transparent country," Mr. Bush protested to a Russian reporter who implicitly criticized the Patriot Act by noting that the private lives of American citizens "are now being monitored by the state."

Dick Cheney’s secret meetings with energy lobbyists were certainly a model of transparency. As was the buildup to the Iraq war, when the Bush hawks did their best to cloak the real reasons they wanted to go to war and trumpet the trumped-up reasons.

The Bush administration wields maximum secrecy with minimal opposition. The White House press is timid. The poor, limp Democrats don’t have enough power to convene Congressional hearings on any Republican outrages and are reduced to writing whining letters of protest that are tossed in the Oval Office trash.

When nearly $9 billion allotted for Iraqi reconstruction during Paul Bremer’s tenure went up in smoke, Democratic lawmakers vainly pleaded with Republicans to open a Congressional investigation.

Even the near absence of checks and balances is not enough for W. Not content with controlling the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and a good chunk of the Fourth Estate, he goes to even more ludicrous lengths to avoid being challenged.

The White House wants its Republican allies in the Senate to stamp out the filibuster, one of the few weapons the handcuffed Democrats have left. They want to invoke the so-called nuclear option and get rid of the 150-year-old tradition in order to ram through more right-wing judges.

Mr. Bush and Condi Rice strut in their speeches – the secretary of state also strutted in Wiesbaden in her foxy "Matrix"-dominatrix black leather stiletto boots – but they shy away from taking questions from the public unless they get to vet the questions and audiences in advance.

Administration officials went so far as to cancel a town hall meeting during Mr. Bush’s visit to Germany last week after deciding an unscripted setting would be too risky, opting for a round-table talk in Mainz with preselected Germans and Americans.

The president loves democracy – as long as democracy means he’s always right.

E-mail:

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NY. Times Acquisition

The Times Company Acquires About.com for $410 Million

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

he New York Times Company announced yesterday that it would acquire About Inc. and its Web site, About.com, from Primedia Inc. for $410 million.

Times Company officials said the acquisition would add a fast-growing, highly profitable Web site to the company’s portfolio and would increase the company’s revenue from the expanding online advertising business.

"This deal provides a very attractive return on our investment going forward, and I feel very comfortable standing up in front of shareholders and telling them that," said Leonard P. Forman, chief financial officer of the Times Company.

By adding About’s 22 million monthly users to the Times Company’s 13 million monthly users – from The New York Times, The Boston Globe and more than 40 other Web sites – the company said it would have the 12th-largest presence on the Internet.

"This scale is important as content companies compete for market share in readership and advertising," said Martin A. Nisenholtz, named by the Times Company yesterday as senior vice president for digital operations.

About.com uses a network of about 500 experts to write online about hundreds of specialty topics, from personal finance to quilting to fly-fishing. Primedia wanted About.com as a way to provide a link with its many print publications, Web sites, newsletters and video programs.

Kelly P. Conlin, Primedia’s president and chief executive, said that selling About.com would help Primedia reduce its debt and strengthen its own balance sheet.

The Times Company’s acquisition of About.com comes after it was among the losers in a bidding war in the fall for CBS MarketWatch, the financial news Web site. The site was acquired by Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for $519 million.

Times Company officials said About.com would help diversify its online advertising base by adding "cost per click" advertising, in which advertisers pay only when a reader clicks on an ad.

Cost-per-click ads are the fastest-growing segment of online advertising. The Times Company said it also expected to market its products to About.com users. "The appeal of About is that it gets the NYT Company into the fastest-growing component of the advertising market place, and therefore it makes strategic sense," said Peter Appert, a media analyst for Goldman Sachs.

"The challenge is that About is very small versus the total scale of the NYT business," he said, adding that About’s revenues last year were $40 million, a fraction of the Times Company’s revenues. "It represents barely over 1 percent of NYT revenue, so while it’s strategically appealing and it’s a step in the right direction, it’s financially too small to really change the growth story at the NYT," Mr. Appert added.

Times Company officials said the demographics of About’s users were somewhat different from those of users of The Times’s Web site. The median age of About’s users is 37, which is five or six years younger than that of nytimes.com users. About 65 percent of About users are women, while The Times’s site attracts more men than women. The average income of About users is $61,000 a year, while that of The Times’s online readers is $80,000 a year. And there is little overlap between current About users and The Times’s users.

"It adds a huge new base to our mix," Mr. Nisenholtz said.

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Harvard President Summers

var SA_Message="zSACategory=61734"; human nature
The Girls of Summers
What Harvard’s president and his critics got wrong.
By William Saletan
Posted Friday, Feb. 18, 2005, at 7:04 AM PT

For more than a month, critics have accused Harvard President Larry Summers of using genetics to explain away sexism in society and academia. They’ve demanded that he release transcripts of the remarks in question, delivered at an academic conference on Jan. 14. On Thursday, facing calls for his resignation, Summers released the transcript. It shows his critics misconstrued or misrepresented him on numerous points. It also shows what he got wrong and why.

Let’s start with his caveats, which eyewitness accounts omitted.

1. He reaffirmed the need to address discrimination. The transcript shows him affirming Harvard’s commitment to "the crucial objective of diversity" and urging his audience to address factors that cause women to drop out of academic career paths. Women are among the groups "significantly underrepresented" in an advanced field, he said, and their absence "contributes to a shortage of role models for others."

2. He questioned the rationality of work expectations that discriminate against women. Earlier accounts suggested that when Summers cited very long work hours as a standard women were less likely to accept, he was justifying that standard and its discriminatory result. The transcript shows him making the opposite point: "Is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men?" He worried about employers’ defiance of "legitimate family desires" and suggested that they offer "different compensation packages that will attract the people who would otherwise have enormous difficulty with child care," as well as "extending tenure clocks" and considering other "family benefits."

3. When he said discrimination was the least of three factors in women’s underrepresentation, he was talking about discrimination in academic hiring, not discrimination earlier in life. The transcript shows him describing the third factor as "different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search"—i.e., the search for a new faculty hire. Earlier accounts suggested he blew off discrimination as a factor on the grounds that there weren’t enough qualified women to hire in the first place. But the transcript shows him drawing a different conclusion from the inadequate pool of female candidates: He and his audience should be "thinking about this as a national problem rather than an individual institutional problem."

4. When he spoke of differences between male and female test scores, he was confining his analysis to a tiny subset. "If one is talking about physicists at a top 25 research university," he argued, the population in question was "in the one-in-5,000, one-in-10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool." Summers explicitly said he wasn’t talking about a difference in average scores.

5. He rejected socialization as the sole factor—not as one factor—in test score differences. Summers said there was "reasonably strong evidence" of differences "that are not easy to attribute to socialization." Afterward, when a critic suggested that the evidence supported an alternative explanation based on socialization, Summers replied, "I don’t presume to have proved any view that I expressed here. But if you think there is proof for an alternative theory, I’d want you to be hesitant about that."

6. His story about his daughters was grossly misrepresented. Numerous reports of Summers’ remarks noted damningly that he had mentioned his daughters as evidence of innate gender differences. And indeed he did cite "my experience with my two-and-a-half-year-old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, ‘Look, Daddy Truck is carrying the baby truck.’" But not one report mentioned that this was a minor anecdote appended to a more serious case study: the Israeli kibbutz movement, which, according to Summers, "started with an absolute commitment … that everybody was going to do the same jobs: Sometimes the women were going to fix the tractors, and the men were going to work in the nurseries." Despite this sex-neutral commitment, he said, individual choices "in a hundred different kibbutzes … all moved in the same direction"—toward traditional gender roles. Summers’ point wasn’t that nature accounted for everything, but that attempts to erase it as a factor had failed. The kibbutzim were the evidence; his daughters were an afterthought.

In short, Summers got a bum rap. So, was his analysis of biological and cultural factors sound? The transcript answers that question, too. The answer is no. Summers grossly overreached the evidence, and he made a couple of glaring logical blunders.

Summers proposed "that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination." In other words, biology outweighs environment. No evidence he presented justifies this hypothesis. So how did he reach it?

First, he rashly extrapolated from the limits of socialization in one area to the limits of socialization in another. "Most of what we’ve learned from empirical psychology in the last 15 years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization," he said. "We’ve been astounded by the results of separated twins studies. The confident assertions that autism was a reflection of parental characteristics … have now been proven to be wrong." For this reason, he was "hesitant about assigning too much weight" to the idea that girls and boys are socialized differently.

In the Q&A, a questioner pointed out that the environmental differences affecting identical twins (which are always of the same sex) are nothing like the environmental differences affecting boys and girls. Summers replied,

The field of behavioral genetics had a revolution in the last 15 years, and the principal thrust of that revolution was the discovery that a large number of things that people thought were due to socialization weren’t, and were in fact due to more intrinsic human nature. And that set of discoveries, it seemed to me, ought to influence the way one thought about other areas where there was a perception of the importance of socialization. I wasn’t at all trying to connect those studies to the particular experiences of women and minorities who were thinking about academic careers.

Any Harvard student who gave this answer on an exam would be flunked. If you aren’t claiming that a highly abstract resemblance to another subject has any bearing on this one—and you present no evidence to justify the cross-application—you have no business bringing it up.

Second, Summers confused two different causal conflicts. In the course of arguing that socialization was a less persuasive explanation for differential outcomes than biology was, he observed, "When there were no girls majoring in chemistry, when there were no girls majoring in biology, it was much easier to blame parental socialization. Then, as we are increasingly finding today, the problem is what’s happening when people are 20, or when people are 25, in terms of their patterns with which they drop out." In other words, even after we’ve substantially canceled out differences in socialization by getting women to major successfully in sciences, they still drop out of the academic race. Well, yes. But that doesn’t show that the alternative factor is biology. It just shows that there’s an alternative factor—and Summers had already mentioned two other alternative factors that would more plausibly affect 25-year-old women: bias against women and bias against people who bear and raise children. The limits of egalitarian socialization in controlling a woman’s career prove nothing about the limits of sexist socialization in shaping a girl.

At one point, Summers acknowledged, "It’s pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive" of academic success. "And that’s absolutely right," said Summers. "But I don’t think that resolves the issue at all. Because if … there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well."

What? This is pure abstract inference at an absurd level. It’s also incoherent. You can’t presume that men and women differ in the second respect while inferring this presumption from a likeness to their difference in the first. Either you presume similarities, or you presume differences.

Why did Summers make these mistakes? The transcript suggests two conflicting reasons. One is that he’s stubborn and argumentative. He repeatedly deflected cultural explanations by saying things like, "No doubt there is some truth in that," "This kind of taste does go on," and "Yeah, look, anything could be social"—and then minimizing these explanations. The consistent tone of his remarks was "Yeah, but …" There are two possible explanations for that tone in this context. One is that he’s a sexist. The other is that once he offers a hypothesis, he’d rather defend and extend it than listen objectively to the alternatives. He’s got an open mind but not an open heart.

I suspect this, rather than sexism, is the root of Summers’ errors, because a sexist wouldn’t have said what he said while displaying a second intellectual flaw evident in the transcript. Again and again, Summers warned his listeners to be skeptical of what they’d prefer to believe. We all want to believe socialization explains differences in male and female outcomes, he observed. Therefore, he reasoned, we should distrust that hypothesis and look for evidence to the contrary. He was so busy being skeptical of the popular explanation that he forgot to be skeptical of the unpopular one. He overstated the case for innate sex differences not because he wanted to believe it, but because he didn’t.

If you think this explanation is too kind to Summers, ask yourself why he told the story about his daughters. An old-fashioned sexist wouldn’t have told that story, because he wouldn’t have been surprised at his daughter’s maternal behavior—never mind that he wouldn’t have given her a truck in the first place. Summers brought up the incident not because it would rock the academic world—it didn’t—but because it rocked him. As he put it, the incident "tells me something." He wasn’t speaking as the president of Harvard or even as a scholar. He was speaking as a modern dad who thought he could overcome nature and discovered he couldn’t.

When we talk about gender or any other controversial topic, we "have to be willing to ask the question in ways that could face any possible answer that came out," Summers implored his audience. What brave and wise counsel. Now he just needs to follow it.

William Saletan is Slate‘s chief political correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2113742/

Documentary Films

By Bob Tourtellotte

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Forget fictional movies "The Aviator," "Million Dollar Baby" and "Sideways," for many Oscar watchers 2004’s best films are the documentaries.

Box office hits "Super Size Me," an attack on U.S. fast food restaurants, and "Tupac: Resurrection," which tells of murdered rapper Tupac Shakur using his own words, are nominated alongside more traditional fare like "The Story of the Weeping Camel," which looks at the lives of Mongolian nomads.

They face "Born Into Brothels," which has already changed the lives of its subjects — children of prostitutes in India — as well as "Twist of Faith," which hopes to influence the way people view victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests.

"Each of these films is very different from the other, and that is what is so refreshing about the group," said Susan Froemke, whose "LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton" was nominated for 2001’s best documentary Oscar.

Since Michael Moore’s anti-Bush "Fahrenheit 9/11" took in $120 million at U.S. and Canadian box offices this summer, 2004 has been seen as the year in which documentaries break the old rule that people won’t attend non-fiction films in theaters.

Moore pulled "Fahrenheit" from Oscar consideration for documentaries to aim at best film but failed to be nominated.

But the Oscar nominees do not lack box office clout. With $11.5 million in ticket sales, "Super Size" is the No. 3 non-fiction film of all-time. "Tupac" is No. 6 at $7.7 million, according to box office tracker Exhibitor Relations.

NEW VOICES, NEW ERA

"It’s a new era of documentaries. These are not the same old subjects," said Maryann DeLeo, whose "Chernobyl Heart" won the Oscar for short subject documentary in 2003.

Several factors are causing change. Notably, low-cost digital cameras and tape are giving more people access to movie equipment. Corporate and charitable funds are less necessary, and the result is a digital democratization of the medium.

Generally, documentaries had been journalistic endeavors with filmmakers telling stories from multiple viewpoints. They did not put themselves in the story, but that is changing.

"Super Size" director Morgan Spurlock wanted to shed light on obesity, so he picked up an inexpensive digital camera, ate only food from McDonald’s for 30 days, and chronicled the weight gain and organ damage he suffered.

"I’m a believer that documentaries are becoming one of the last bastions of free speech," he said. "It’s an arena where no one is going to tell you what you can or cannot say."

Similarly in "Born into Brothels," first-time directors Zana Briski and Ross Kaufman set out to tell of the plight of kids growing up in the red-light district of Calcutta. During their work, they gave the kids cameras and what emerges is a portrait of the children’s lives through their own pictures.

In "Twist of Faith," Toledo, Ohio-resident Tony Comes and his family tell much of Comes’ story of sex abuse by a Catholic priest utilizing home-made video. "Faith," directed by Kirby Dick, challenges audiences to question norms in society.

Director Lauren Lazin takes a more traditional approach to documentary making in "Tupac: Resurrection," but she fascinates audiences using old TV interviews of Tupac talking about himself so that, in effect, he is the murdered man commenting on his own past life.

"The good news is it just shows how open-minded audiences are," Lazin said about the success of these new documentaries. "Audiences are saying, ‘Challenge us, do something new."’