Flight delays and Air Travel

 

 

The Financial Page

The Unfriendly Skies

by James Surowiecki September 3, 2007

In the summer of 1999, after a series of highly publicized customer-service debacles, the nation’s major airlines collectively promised Congress that they would revamp their operations, offering a "service commitment" that they dubbed "Customers First." Eight years later, airline passengers are waiting in vain for any sign of that promise’s being kept. They’re also waiting in vain, period. This summer, nearly a third of all flights have been arriving late, more flights have been cancelled, many planes are overbooked, and, in June, reports of baggage problems were up twenty-five per cent from last year. A service commitment like this should probably be called "Customers Last."

The airlines’ explanation for the sheer misery of flying is that the important problems—bad weather and an antiquated air-traffic-control system, resulting in overcrowded runways—are out of their hands. But those unavoidable difficulties have been exacerbated by the airlines’ strategic choices, most notably their decision to cut the number of workers they employ and the number of big planes they fly. Over the past six years, airlines have laid off more than a hundred thousand workers, around a sixth of their workforce, and six major carriers have shrunk their fleets—planes are expensive not only to acquire but to maintain—by twenty per cent. From an economic point of view, this was sensible. Making money in the airline business has always been tough—Warren Buffett has said that if captialists had been present at the Wright brothers’ first flight they would have been well advised to shoot the plane down—but the years following 9/11, in which the industry lost more than thirty billion dollars and several airlines filed for bankruptcy, were especially brutal. So airlines moved aggressively to cut the fat out of their business, trying to insure that each of their planes flew as many flights, while carrying as many passengers, as possible. The strategy was so successful that, even as business has recovered, the airlines have chosen to stay slim. As a result, planes today are more crowded than before—last year, the airlines filled seventy-nine per cent of their seats, compared with sixty-five per cent in the mid-nineties—and forecasts suggest that the industry as a whole may clear four billion dollars in profits this year.

The lean-and-mean approach may have saved the airlines, but for passengers it’s made an already bad situation worse. If something goes wrong with a plane, servicing it will likely take longer than it used to, and there’s less chance that another jet will be available to get passengers where they need to go. And since the planes the airlines do own are flying more flights, the ripple effects of delays have been magnified: a third of all flight delays are due simply to the fact that the plane was late arriving from its previous flight, and often the effects of a mid-morning flight’s late arrival can still be felt that evening. According to the Department of Transportation, more than a quarter of all delays in June were due to "air carrier" problems.

Oddly, none of this seems to have hurt the airlines—more people than ever are flying, and ticket prices remain relatively stable. In part, this is because, for many trips, there’s no meaningful alternative to flying, which limits the power that fliers have as customers. They can make certain choices—they consistently go for the cheapest flights, making it hard for an airline to raise prices—but anyone who vows never to fly with a particular airline again will likely have an equally bad experience on a rival carrier soon afterward. Like consumers of regional utilities or like drivers who tolerate bad traffic day after day, fliers have accommodated themselves to misery. It’s little wonder, then, that the air-travel market rarely punishes an individual airline for failing to get people to their destination on time: consumers assume, with good reason, that the options are interchangeably awful.

The airlines could improve the current system by investing more money in planes and staff, reducing the number of segments each plane flies in a given day, and increasing the number of direct flights. So you might expect that free-market competition would have thrown up at least one major airline promising reliable on-time arrivals in exchange for higher ticket prices—like a toll road in the air. The trouble is that although things like bad weather and air-traffic-control problems are easy excuses for the airlines’ failures, they’re also real problems, and any airline dedicated to keeping its on-time arrivals high could easily find its efforts, in the short run, stymied by storms or by high volume. And the punishment for an airline that explicitly promised excellent performance and failed would probably be much harsher than if it had promised nothing at all. (When JetBlue experienced huge delays this winter because of bad planning, it was savaged in the press, precisely because it had always insisted that it was different from other airlines.) Furthermore, in the short run more competition could actually make things worse for customers: it would mean more flights, a greater burden for the air-traffic-control system, and possibly more delays.

In other words, we’re stuck with the current system, because it isn’t really in any airline’s interest to try to change it. As long as no airline makes a dedicated effort to distinguish itself from the pack, all the airlines can stay lean, even at the expense of quality. In that sense, the most honest thing about the airlines may be their advertising, which tends to emphasize the flying experience—lulling us with talk of leg room and fully reclining seats. You may end up waiting on the runway for a couple of hours, the message seems to be, but at least you’ll do it in a comfortable chair. ?

ILLUSTRATION: CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Copyright New Yorker Magazine 2007 

The French President’s Un-Chirac foreign policy.

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Sarko Steps Up
The French President’s Un-Chirac foreign policy.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Nicolas Sarkozy made headlines this week by telling his diplomatic corps that "an Iran with nuclear weapons is for me unacceptable." But the French President did more in his speech than name the gravest current threat to global security, itself a feat of clear thinking. He also signaled that France means to be something more on the international scene than an anti-American nuisance player.

That’s worth applauding at a time when the conventional wisdom says the next U.S. President will have to burnish America’s supposedly tarnished reputation by making various policy amends. In Germany, under the conservative leadership of Angela Merkel, foreign policy views have been moving closer to the Bush Administration’s, not further away, while new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made clear he will not depart significantly from the pro-American course set by Tony Blair.

But it is Mr. Sarkozy who, true to his reputation, has been the boldest in stepping up to his global responsibilities. On Afghanistan, he told the assembled diplomats, "the duty of the Atlantic Alliance as well as that of France," is to "increase efforts." He then announced he would be sending additional trainers to assist the Afghan Army. On Israel, he said he "would never budge" on its security. He warned about Russia, which "imposes its return on the world scene by playing its assets with a certain brutality," and he cautioned against China, which pursues "its insatiable search for raw materials as a strategy of control, particularly in Africa."

It’s hard to imagine Jacques Chirac, Mr. Sarkozy’s predecessor, speaking this way. (Mr. Sarkozy has also reportedly described French diplomats as "cowards" and proposed "[getting] rid of the Quai d’Orsay." Imagine the media uproar if President Bush mused about doing the same to Foggy Bottom?) No less a departure from past practices at the Élysée Palace is his stance on Iran. In January, Mr. Chirac had mused that an Iranian bomb would "not be very dangerous." Mr. Sarkozy, by contrast, has previously insisted on the need to "leave all options open" when dealing with Iran’s nuclear programs.

In his speech this week to the diplomats, Mr. Sarkozy warned of the need for tough diplomacy, including "growing sanctions," to avoid the "catastrophic alternative: the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran." That doesn’t sound far from Senator John McCain’s useful formulation that "There’s only one thing worse than the United States exercising the military option; that is a nuclear-armed Iran." The important point is that Mr. Sarkozy has put on record that he won’t let Iran develop a bomb under cover of feckless Western diplomacy.

One test of his resolve will be how much France assists the Bush Administration as it seeks to round up votes in the U.N. Security Council for a third round of sanctions on Iran next month. The Administration has had a hard time moving the diplomacy beyond symbolism in part because of the economic ties that other permanent members of the Council, including France, have with the Islamic Republic. The French say they’ve already pulled out some of their investments in the country, and in recent months France, Germany and other European countries have in fact cut back their export credits to Iran.

Mr. Sarkozy could now demonstrate real seriousness by forcing French energy giant Total from its $2 billion investment in the huge South Pars natural gas project. A corruption probe into the decade-old project could give him the leverage to do so, as could rising pressure in the U.S. Congress to start enforcing sanctions against companies that do business with rogue regimes.

Whatever Mr. Sarkozy does, however, he has plainly set a new tone for French foreign policy. That’s not to say we agree with him on every point: He reiterated France’s opposition to the war in Iraq and called for a "horizon" for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Yet even that puts him well to the right of every U.S. Democratic Presidential candidate. And he warned against the "risks of an antagonistic multipolar world," the very world Mr. Chirac seemed to strive for by opposing the U.S. at every turn.

In a speech last year in New York, Mr. Sarkozy noted that "I’ve always favored modest effectiveness over sterile grandiloquence. And I don’t want to see an arrogant France with a diminished presence." With his remarks Monday, Mr. Sarkozy has given the best evidence to date that his presidency will attempt to enhance French influence not by opposing the U.S. but by working with it.

 

Copyright Wall Street Journal 2007. 

Global warming is more alarmist than alarming. Another Opinion

 

GLOBAL VIEW

A Denier’s Confession
Global warming is more alarmist than alarming.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Tuesday, August 28, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

The recent discovery by a retired businessman and climate kibitzer named Stephen McIntyre that 1934–and not 1998 or 2006–was the hottest year on record in the U.S. could not have been better timed. August is the month when temperatures are high and the news cycle is slow, leading, inevitably, to profound meditations on global warming. Newsweek performed its journalistic duty two weeks ago with an exposé on what it calls the global warming "denial machine." I hereby perform mine with a denier’s confession

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that Mr. McIntyre’s discovery amounts to what a New York Times reporter calls a "statistically meaningless" rearrangement of data.

But just how "meaningless" would this have seemed had it yielded the opposite result? Had Mr. McIntyre found that a collation error understated recent temperatures by 0.15 degrees Celsius (instead of overstating it by that amount, as he discovered), would the news coverage have differed in tone and approach? When it was reported in January that 2006 was one of the hottest years on record, NASA’s James Hansen used the occasion to warn grimly that "2007 is likely to be warmer than 2006." Yet now he says, in connection to the data revision, that "in general I think we want to avoid going into more and more detail about ranking of individual years."

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that the world has been and will be getting warmer thanks in some part to an increase in man-made atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. I acknowledge this in the same way I’m confident that the equatorial radius of Saturn is about 60,000 kilometers: not because I’ve measured it myself, but out of a deep reserve of faith in the methods of the scientific community, above all its reputation for transparency and open-mindedness.

But that faith is tested when leading climate scientists won’t share the data they use to estimate temperatures past and present and thus construct all-important trend lines. This was true of climatologist Michael Mann, who refused to disclose the algorithm behind his massively influential "hockey stick" graph, which purported to demonstrate a sharp uptick in global temperatures over the past century. (The accuracy of the graph was seriously discredited by Mr. McIntyre and his colleague Ross McKitrick.) This was true also of Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who reportedly turned down one request for information with the remark, "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

I confess: I understand that global warming may have negative consequences. Heat waves, droughts and coastal flooding may become more intense. Temperature-sensitive parasites such as malaria could become more widespread. Lakes may be depleted by evaporation. Animal life will suffer.

But as Bjorn Lomborg points out in his sharp, persuasive and aptly titled book "Cool It," a warming climate has advantages, too, and not just trivial ones. Though global warming will cause more heat deaths, it will also mean many fewer cold deaths. Drought may increase in some areas, but warming also means both more rain and longer growing seasons. Temperature changes will harm some wildlife in some places. But many species will benefit from a bit more warmth. Does anyone know for certain that the net human and environmental losses from global warming will exceed overall gains?

I confess: Denial never solves anything. But neither does sensational and deceptive journalism.

Newsweek illustrates this point by its choice of cover art–a picture of the sun, where the surface temperature hovers around 6,000 degrees Celsius. Given that the consensus scientific estimate for average temperature increases over the next century is a comparatively modest 2.6 degrees, this would seem a rather Murdochian way of convincing readers about the gravity of the climate threat. On the inside pages is a photograph of a polar bear stranded on melting ice. But the caption that the bears are "at risk" belies clear evidence that the bear population has risen five-fold since the 1960s. Another series of photographs, of a huge Antarctic ice shelf that quickly disintegrated in 2002, suggests the imminence of doom. But why not also mention that temperatures at the South Pole have been going down for 50 years?

I confess: It’s easy to be indifferent to far-off and diffuse threats. It’s hard to work toward solutions the benefits of which will not be felt in our lifetime.

Then again, if Americans are not fully persuaded of the dangers of global warming, as Newsweek laments, don’t chalk it up to the pernicious influence of the so-called deniers and their enablers at ExxonMobil and Fox News. Today, global warming is variously suggested as the root cause of terrorism, the conflict in Darfur and the rising incidence of suicides in Italy. Yet the 20th century offers excellent reasons to be suspicious of monocausal explanations for the world’s ills, monomaniacs intent on saving us from ourselves, and the long train of experts predicting death by overpopulation, resource depletion, global cooling, nuclear winter and prions. Also, hypocrites. When we are called on to bike to work, permanently abjure air travel, "eat locally" and so on, we expect to be led by example, not by a new nomenklatura.

I confess: Though it may surprise those who use the term "denier" so as to put me on a moral plane with Holocaust deniers, I have children for whom I would not wish an environmental apocalypse.

Yet neither do I wish the civilizational bounties built up over two centuries by an industrial, inventive, adaptive, globalized and energy-hungry society to be squandered chasing comparatively small environmental benefits at gigantic economic costs. One needn’t deny global warming as a problem to deny it as the only or greatest problem. The great virtue of Mr. Lomborg’s book is its insistence on trying to measure the good done per dollar spent. Do we save a few lives, at huge cost, as a byproduct of curbing global warming? Or do we save many, for less, by acting on problems directly?

Some might argue it is immoral to think this way. Maybe they are the ones living in denial.

Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays. 

 

Weights and Measures

 

URLS and The Web

COLUMN ONE

Dot-com names get dottier

From Abazab to Xoopit, start-ups try to be clever and unique to stand out from the hundreds of new firms online. Still, many are just gibberish.

By Michelle Quinn
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 29, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco

Even if you could say Abazab or Eefoof without snickering, would you want to do business with them?

Would you feel OK owning Wakoopa shares in your 401(k)? Telling potential in-laws you met on Frengo? Relying on Ooma to call Grandma?

Silicon Valley is in the midst of a great corporate baby boom. Venture capitalists have pumped $2.5 billion into 400 young Internet companies since the beginning of 2006, compared with $1.3 billion into 236 companies during the previous two years, according to research firm Dow Jones VentureOne.

These entrepreneurial brain children have short life expectancies, destined to fight for revenue with the likes of Google, Yahoo and EBay. But still they are being born — and they need names.

Naming a company is far more difficult than naming a child. The name needs to sound snappy, separate its young company from the pack and provide a unique Web address.

Having two Ethans and three Madisons in a kindergarten class can create confusion, even embarrassment, but giving your start-up a name that’s already taken guarantees a legal fight you can’t win.

The result? New Internet companies are being baptized daily with handles that sound like a cross between toddler-speak, scat singing and what the aliens will greet us with when they land.

You won’t find a name among the horde that conjures up traditional companies such as Dress Barn, Best Buy and Burger King. Most Internet company names make little sense, and they roll around the mouth like a marble.

"Old-school ideas about sounding trustworthy or sounding big are not as important as they used to be," said Burt Alper, co-founder of Catchword Branding in Oakland, which has helped companies pick such names as Vudu (makes a device for watching videos) and Promptu (creates voice-recognition products). "Now, it’s about sounding different and standing out from the crowd."

Like naming a new baby, the process involves late-night brainstorming, some expert help and a dose of frank feedback from friends.

And like the grandparents-to-be, a company’s financial backers can kill a loved name with a raised eyebrow. Picking the wrong name can kill a multimillion-dollar investment.

Entrepreneurs today pick names they think will help their companies stand out, as do parents of little Zander and Arlo, Eliza and Matilda.

"Naming a company is like naming a celebrity," said serial entrepreneur Jared Kopf, who has helped christen companies including Adroll.com, his online advertising firm, and Slide, a Web photo service. "Made-up words don’t come with psychological baggage."

One approach is whimsy: picking a name that seems inspired by Dr. Seuss. If the late author were to tell a story about Internet start-ups, he could pit Qumana and Qoosa (blog editing and Web browsing) against Tagtooga and Tendango (both social networking). Peace would be brokered by Ooma (Internet phone calling). BooRah (restaurant reviews) would hiss, then cheer. Lala (music sharing) would sing.

Call it the Google effect. Thanks to the successful Internet search company with the goofy name, entrepreneurs feel no shame telling people they work for ItzBig (career networking) or asking venture capitalists to invest millions of dollars in Picaboo (a website for ordering custom photo books). Who needs the gravitas of an International Business Machines or a General Electric?

Many names come with little context. Firms such as Xobni, Meebo and Squidoo give no hint of what they might do (e-mail management, instant messaging and online recommendations, respectively). Entrepreneurs say having to explain their mission provides a marketing opportunity.

But naming experts say the current crop of Internet companies is in danger of overwhelming customers. Not many will bother to commit it to memory that Imeem is a social network for sharing music and videos or that Imbee is a social network for kids.

"Now, it’s almost like fashion styles, all these vowels and unpronounceable made-up names," said Steve Manning, managing director of Igor, a naming company in San Francisco. "You cannot possibly remember one from another."

Some corporate namers seek a feeling of familiarity by evoking the Internet’s biggest success stories.

Elad Hemar, co-founder and chief executive of Yoomba, an e-mail service, said the name was chosen because it echoes the double O in Google and suggests that the service is about "you." It joins other double-O entries such as Oodle, Renkoo, Kaboodle and Wakoopa, to name only a few.

Naming your company after a mainstay such as Google provides "linguistic comfort," said Anthony Shore, global director of naming and writing at Landor Associates. But "when everyone apes a name, everyone loses."

Twitter, which lets users broadcast short bloglike pronouncements via text message, instant message or e-mail, sought inspiration in nature.

"Every time I listen to birds, I get a sense of that short burst of information," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said.

With his second company, Ariel Maislos didn’t want to repeat the problem he faced with his first, Passave Technologies. It was the Hebrew word for "broadband," which is what the chips the company made were designed to improve. But people complained they couldn’t spell or say the name, pronounced Pa-SAH-vay.

So his new company, described so far as producing "a breakthrough technology that makes your phone conversations interesting," is as simple as a kid’s lunchbox snack. It’s called the Pudding.

"Everyone likes pudding," Maislos said.

Google too may have sounded silly in its early days, but the name developed a pedigree through good products, Twitter’s Stone said. "If these things are around long enough, the name grows up," he said.

Internet entrepreneurs say the desperation to be unique is compounded by the need to simply own an Internet site.

Like Manhattan real estate, almost every conceivable, recognizable domain name has been scooped up in the hope that they’ll be resold for big money. In two extreme examples, the rights to creditcheck.com recently sold for $3 million, and porn.com went for $9.5 million.

Internet companies have come up with tricks to capture Internet addresses, such as rejiggering the spelling of regular words: Drop a letter to make Flickr or insert odd punctuation, like Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us.

And if the name doesn’t catch on? This generation of Internet companies so embraces change — "Internet time" is to regular time like dog years are to human years — that it is not averse to changing identity if the name or business model don’t work out. Riya became Like. Eefoof has been reborn as VuMe.

Name remorse is not uncommon. A few months ago, Bijan Marashi began to wonder if he had erred in giving his San Francisco start-up a name that loosely rhymed with "stupid."

Xoopit (pronounced ZOO-pit) was a riff on the word "soup," but it proved tricky to pronounce and for some, baffling to spell.

Then there was the typical parental fear: Would rival start-ups — the bullies of the Internet playground — call it "stupid" or make off-color jokes about a zoo pit?

Could Xoopit, which has yet to launch its service but promises to rethink how we organize e-mail, grow into a serious company with such a name?

Concerns were so great that a venture capitalist who considered investing in Marashi’s business said he wouldn’t do so unless the name was changed.

Marashi suggested Phr332 (pronounced like Freak), but that was quickly shot down. So was Flume.

So Marashi conducted market research. He approached 10 strangers in various San Francisco neighborhoods and asked them to read the name "Xoopit" aloud. Most could. He reported his findings to the start-up’s eight employees and sought the advice of friends and family.

Marketing experts assured him that X was the new Z.

In July, Xoopit decided to stay Xoopit. The company plans to embrace it in a marketing slogan that, using Xoopit as a verb, suggests its users will become smarter: "Don’t be stupid. Xoopit."

"Once you pick a name, you have to stand by it," Marashi said. "The baby is born and you have to sign the birth certificate."

michelle.quinn@latimes.com 
 

Ten Things to Do Before This Article Is Finished

 

August 26, 2007

By ALEX WILLIAMS

1) Write a catchy opener.

"Zen has no goals," according to a traditional koan. "It is always on its way."

If so, Rachael Hubbard, a preschool teacher in Salem, Ore., will not be accompanying it. Ms. Hubbard has many goals — 78, to be exact. And it is only by dutifully ticking them off, she said, that she has found her path toward enlightenment.

Two years ago Ms. Hubbard compiled what is known as a life list, a contract with herself enumerating dozens of goals she hoped to accomplish before she died (build a house for Habitat for Humanity, read "Pride and Prejudice," etc.) and posted it online.

"I just felt like I was slowly getting older and was looking around saying, ‘Well, I haven’t really done a whole lot with my life yet,’ " she recalled.

But once she began the journey prescribed by her list, it quickly became an addiction.

"Earn a master’s degree" (No. 5): check.

"See a dinosaur fossil" (No. 27): check.

As for her latest challenges, "become quadri-lingual" or "swim with dolphins," well, she is only 24.

"Hey, I am actually accomplishing things with my life," she said, "even if it’s little by little."

2) Distill the point of this article in a "nut graph."

Once the province of bird-watchers, mountain climbers and sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the life list has become widely popular with the harried masses, equal parts motivational self-help and escapist fantasy.

3) Demonstrate the popularity of life lists.

Evidence of the lists’ surging popularity is all around. The travel writer Patricia Schultz currently has two "1,000 Places to See Before You Die" books lodged on The New York Times paperback advice best-seller list, two in an avalanche of recent life-list books, like "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" and "101 Things to Do Before You Turn 40."

In December, Warner Brothers will release Rob Reiner‘s "Bucket List," starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as cancer patients who set out on a series of life-list adventures, including a Harley ride on the Great Wall of China.

Multiple life-list oriented social-networking Web sites have cropped up, inviting strangers to share their lists and offer mutual encouragement. Even Madison Avenue has chimed in. Visa is currently running a print campaign built around a checklist called "Things to Do While You’re Alive" (and credit-worthy, presumably).

4) Offer an explanation of the phenomenon.

And no wonder life lists are so ubiquitous. They are, proponents say, the perfect way for anxious time-crunched professionals to embark on spiritual quests in a productivity-obsessed age. The lists are results-oriented, quantifiable and relentlessly upbeat. If Aristotle were alive, he might envy the efficiency of a master list in which the messy search for meaning in life is boiled down to a simple grocery list: "get a tattoo," "learn to surf."

5) Consult the experts.

"People are dying to make this list, and most haven’t been given a chance since grade school," said Josh Petersen, a founder of the Robot Co-op, a Seattle company that runs the Web site 43Things.com, which since 2004 has enrolled 1.2 million members who post customized life lists, find others with similar goals and encourage one another to check them off. Sky diving ranks 24th in popularity; losing weight, unsurprisingly, is first. "Pull a prank involving 100 lawn gnomes" is a goal shared by 65 members.

"In school you’re asked, ‘What do want to be when grow up?’ " Mr. Petersen said. "Then people stop asking the question."

Caroline Adams Miller, a life coach and motivational-book author in Bethesda, Md., asks that her clients create their own list of 100 things to accomplish. "What it does is give you a road map for your life," she said. "To check items off your list gives you a sense of self-efficacy, or mastery."

Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University, agrees that people are happiest when making progress toward clear-cut goals, but said that those who set unreasonable goals (or overly ambitious timelines to meet them) set themselves up for stress. "Evolution vested us with a carrot — happiness — and a stick — anxiety," he explained. "We feel happy when we make progress toward our goals, anxious when we don’t."

6) Include the celebrity angle.

There was a time when life lists seemed mostly favored by overachievers who viewed their years on earth as heroic narratives. As recounted in "Chicken Soup for the Soul," the motivational speaker and self-described adventurer John Goddard wrote a list of 127 life goals when he was 15 — pilot the world’s fastest aircraft, milk a poisonous snake — and now, at age 88, says he has checked off 110 of them. (He has yet to visit the moon.)

The college football coach Lou Holtz jotted down a life list of 107 items that included telling jokes on the "Tonight" show and winning a national championship. By 1988 he had done both.

Last year Ellen DeGeneres asked celebrity guests to share their lists on her talk show. Orlando Bloom vowed to learn to play the bongos. Beyoncé Knowles promised to take ballet lessons.

7) Return to the experiences of everyday people.

Non-celebrities tend to use their lists to overcome more-fundamental hurdles. Stacey Morris, 40, a sales manager at a housewares company in Ventnor, N.J., created a 100-item list after consulting with Ms. Miller, the life coach, because she said she felt unmotivated and "needed more focus." Several of her items seemed vague ("develop a more positive attitude," for example), but the goals have forced her to take specific steps toward self-improvement, she said.

To make good on her vow to "develop persistence," she trained herself to pause at work every 15 minutes to record the activities she had just finished. The point, she said, is to eliminate distractions like inessential phone calls. She says she has doubled her daily productive hours.

"Having a life list," she said, "changed my life."

When she turned 40, Jill Smolinski, a single mother and freelance writer in Los Angeles, drew up a life list that unearthed ambitions she hadn’t known she had. "The first thing I wrote was ‘live in a beach house,’ " said Ms. Smolinski, now 46. "That’s weird. I didn’t even know that was important to me."

"Within a week, I was going for walk and noticed a beach house for rent," she said, adding, "and I’m standing in it right now."

The list also yielded a novel. Her book "The Next Thing on My List," about a woman who vows to live out a dead friend’s life list, was published in April by Shaye Areheart Books.

8) Explore grand theories about the lists’ popularity.

Ms. Schultz, the travel author, who has sold 2.5 million copies of her first book and has seen it spun off into games, desk calendars and a Travel Channel show, surmised that there were demographic factors behind the sudden interest in this alluring, if gimmicky, pursuit.

"Seventy-nine million of us baby boomers are at a point in our life that this is the moment to stop and take stock," she said. Ms. Schultz, 54, added that she had visited 80 percent of her 1,000 must-see places. "If ever there was an awareness that this is no dress rehearsal, this is it."

Those in midlife, wrestling with issues of personal worth, seem to be the target for many of the life-list books, like "Fifty Places to Play Golf Before You Die," by Chris Santella (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2005).

But Justin Zackham, 36, who wrote the screenplay for "The Bucket List" and was one of its executive producers, argues that the life-list impulse is actually strongest among members of Generation X, like himself: those who have grown up watching boomers stress out over high-paying conventional jobs and have vowed to chart their own course.

"We grew up as a generation questioning all that," said Mr. Zackham, whose own life list includes sky diving (check) and "get a bunch of movies made" (check). "People do more lists now because they are actually thinking outside the typical progression of what life is supposed to be like."

9) Postulate that life lists show a universal longing for adventure, fulfillment and grace.

The concept of the life list is as old — and American — as the self-improvement regimen that the young Jay Gatsby scribbled inside his tattered copy of "Hopalong Cassidy," in which he vowed to "practice elocution, poise and how to attain it."

Decades later the life lists of average Americans do not seem unlike those of people who strived to be extraordinary, and became so. For a companion book to "The Bucket List," Mr. Zackham collected life lists from dozens of celebrities and high achievers. Jerry Rice, the football great, said he wished to visit Rome. Mr. Freeman, the actor, said he hoped to attain the perfect golf swing.

"These people pretty much want the same thing you do," Mr. Zackham said. "So how extraordinary are they — or how un-extraordinary are you?"

10) Find a humorous "kicker."

Then again, some Americans lead lives too extraordinary to augment with a life list.

For his book, Mr. Zackham visited Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion and asked him what he still hoped to experience.

"Nothing," was Mr. Hefner’s answer to him. "He said, ‘I honestly can’t think of anything I don’t already have.’ "

 

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company