How to Eat Now

How to Eat Now

The Truth About Home Cooking by Mark Bittman

PLUS The sm

arter grocery list

A guide to taking back your kit

chen

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TIME (ISSN 0040-781X) is published weekly, except for two issues combined for one week in January, May, July, August, September and December, by Time Inc. Principal Office: Time & Life Building, Rockefeller Center, New York, NY 10020-1393.Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40110178. Return undeliverable Canada addresses to: Postal Stn A, P.O. Box 4322, Toronto, Ont., M5W 3G9. GST #888381621RT0001 © 2014 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. TIME and the Red Border Design are protected through trademark registration in the United States and in the foreign countries where TIME magazine circulates. U.S. subscriptions: $49 for one year. Subscribers: If the Postal Service alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Postmaster: Send address changes to P.O. Box 62120, Tampa, FL 33662-2120. CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUBSCRIPTIONS—For 24/7 service, please use our website: time.com/customerservice. You can also call 1-800-843-TIME or write to TIME, P.O. Box 62120, Tampa, FL 33662-2120. Mailing list: We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable firms. If you would prefer that we not include your name, please call, or write us at P.O. Box 62120, Tampa, FL 33662-2120, or send us an email at [email protected]. Printed in the U.S. ◆◆◆◆◆◆◆

on the cover:

Photo-illustration by Andrew B. Myers for Time

4 � Conversation

BRIEFING

7 � Verbatim

8 � LightBoxSyrian Kurds search for a safe place

10 � World Air strikes against ISIS continue; the Olympics nobody wants; flooding in the south of France

12 � SpotlightFacts about the terrorist group called Khorasan

13 � NationHigh school football tragedies; ballot-law battles; Ferguson remains restive

18 � Wellness How men can fight aging with exercise

21 � MilestonesFarewell to stage star Marian Seldes

COMMENTARY

26 � The Curious CapitalistRana Foroohar on lending startups

28 � In the ArenaJoe Klein on the cynicism of the American voter

THE CULTURE

58 � MoviesRobert Duvall and Robert Downey Jr. face off in The Judge

61 � ReviewsBill Murray buoys the sappy St. Vincent; an earnest new album from Canadian indie band Stars

62 � Television Jane the Virgin’s Gina Rodriguez is a leading lady for the mainstream

64 � BooksThe ecstasy of mixed martial arts in Thrown; Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators

68 � Pop Chart Quick Talk with The Walking Dead ’s Andrew Lincoln; Twin Peaks returns

70 � The Awesome Column Joel Stein proclaims his feminism

72 � 10 Questions Actor Jennifer Garner

vol. 184, no. 15 | 2014

A pro-democracy protester in Hong Kong in the hands of an anti-demonstration crowd. Photograph by James Nachtwey for Time

FEATURES

30 Panic Goes ViralTo combat diseases like Ebola and

enterovirus D68, we must conquer our fears by Jeffrey Kluger

36 The Paperless ClassroomPutting a computer in every student’s hands will change life for parents and

teachers by Michael Scherer

40 Voices of Hong KongA new generation of pro-democracy

protesters speaks up Text by Emily Rauhala; photographs by James Nachtwey

48 The New Fast FoodA best-selling food writer preaches his

practical approach to quick and healthy home cooking by Mark Bittman

Robert Downey Jr., page 58

vw.com

It’s hosted battle royales that have raged for years.The Volkswagen Passat is built to withstand the endless rounds of

unsportsmanlike conduct it will face over the years. Because a

Passat isn’t just a family car, it’s a Volkswagen. So you can be

confi dent that your Passat won’t just know how this battle started,

but will be there when it fi nally ends. Volkswagen has more vehicles

on the road with over 100,000 miles than any other brand.*

That’s the Power of German Engineering.

*2012 Passat shown. Your experience will vary and depends on many factors, including driving habits and vehicle maintenance/repairs. Global calculation of total vehicles with over 100,000 miles per brand based on Wolfram Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com) average-mileage-per-year data and IHS Automotive: Polk global registrations of 2001 models and older in 49 countries, as of November 2013. ©2014 Volkswagen of America, Inc.


BEHIND THE STORY On Oct. 1, TIME and Real Simple hosted the first Women & Success conference in New York City. A highlight: TIME editor Nancy Gibbs’ interview with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, above left, in which they discussed everything from her struggle to break into politics to why the Senator can’t stand the phrase having it all. “I think it’s insulting,” Gillibrand told Gibbs. “What are you having? A party? Another slice of pie?” For more on the event, visit time.com/womenandsuccess.

NOW ON TIME.COM An interactive heat map provided exclusively to Time by Twitter illustrates the way the Ebola discussion shifted from Sept. 16 to Oct. 6. Among the findings: On the night of Oct. 1, a day after news broke of the first U.S. diagnosis, users worldwide sent tweets mentioning Ebola at a rate of 6,000 per minute, compared with 100 per minute on Sept. 19. See more at time.com/ebolamap.

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What You Said About ...

ONTIME.COM

On Oct. 13, we’ll reveal our roundup of the year’s most

influential teens—spanning music, politics,

business and more. Here, a preview of

the list; see more at time.com/

influentialteens.

MO’NE DAVIS, 13Little League wunderkind

JOSHUA WONG, 17

Hong Kong activist

LORDE, 17Multiplatinum singer

BETHANY MOTA, 18

Budding YouTube mogul

EBOLA Our Oct. 13 cover package on the spread of the virus sparked an anxiety-filled debate. Silas Mariano of Oceanside, Calif., advocatedclosing off travel between WestAfrica and the U.S. “We are not chasing Ebola in the U.S.,” he wrote.

“The President and CDC have welcomed it with open borders and airports.” Others disagreed. “We need to bring more people in from West Africa so we can cure them, which in turn will snuff this virus out,” wrote Time .com reader aztecian. “It is NOT easily transmitted.”

LEON PANETTA ON IRAQ In an exclusive article adapted from his book Worthy Fights, the former De-fense Secretary expressed frustration that President Obama did not follow the advice he gave in 2011 to maintain a presence in Iraq to prevent groups like ISIS from taking root. The piece prompted strong opinions—Jonathan Allen of Bloomberg News called it a “pretty stunning condemnation”—and some GOP gloating. On Twitter, Senator John Mc-Cain wrote, “Sec Panetta totally refutes falsehoodPres Obama has told for yrs on residual force in#Iraq. Now we face consequence.” But many read-ers defended the President. “Trying to dump the ap-pearance of ISIS on our President is totally unfair,” said Dorothy Neumann of Arlington, Va. Added John Moore of Hendersonville, N.C.: “The major im-pediment to stability in Iraq was not the withdrawal of U.S. troops but the continuation in office of Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki.”

CORNEL WEST In 10 Questions, the academic criti-cized the President for committing “war crimes” with drones and indicated that he didn’t vote in the 2012 election. An indignant Scott Smith of West Hollywood, Calif., responded, “The difference be-tween terrorists, who target innocent civilians, and

our military is that we try to avoidsuch deaths.” Janice Belsky of Encino, Calif., wrote, “West didn’t vote for anybody in 2012? What

sort of message does that send to the black community?”

Although Ebola dominates the conversation in Liberia, the

majority of Ebola tweets are sent from the U.S.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

A Milestones item on the birth of Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky (Oct. 13) incorrectly described Charlotte, N.C. It is the state’s largest city.

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REVOLUTIONARY COMFORTNew Business Class seat: discover the comfort of a fully

lie-flat seat bed with direct aisle access and exceptional service.

AIRFRANCE.US

Gradually phased into service on select Boeing 777 long-haul aircraft since June 2014.

Briefing$4,000

Price of the new Reinast luxury toothbrush,

which is being marketed to individuals “with an

incredibly high net worth”

‘American values are why this

country’s support

for Israelhas been

unwavering.’JOSH EARNEST, White

House spokesman, touting U.S. military

aid to Israel after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said U.S. opposition to settlements is “against

American values”

Miles (1,662 km) that Iranian exile Reza Baluchi tried to travel

in a $45,000 “hydropod”; he lasted less than a week at sea

before being rescued

JENNIFER

LAWRENCE, actor, to Vanity Fair,

speaking for the first time about the nude

photos of her and other celebrities that

were taken from hacked accounts and

leaked in August

MEG WHITMAN,

Hewlett-Packard CEO, giving career advice to high school girls at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, after HP announced a

split into two separate companies

‘WHAT MATTERS MOST IS

YOUR FAMILY.’

TED OLSON, conservative lawyer and gay-marriage supporter,

defending the Supreme Court’s Oct. 6 decision to let stand lower-court rulings allowing same-sex

marriage in five states but to avoid deciding the issue nationally,

as advocates wanted

1,033

‘Sometimes they act

by inaction.’

RoyalsKansas City swept the Angels to reach

baseball’s ALCS for the first time

since 1985

AthleticsOakland also lost

to the Royals—and has lost every

winner-take-all game under GM

Billy Beane ‘The training is just PowerPoint.’

DR. MOHAMMED BAH, director of a government hospital in Sierra Leone, describing the lack of resources for the nursing staff amid West Africa’s Ebola outbreak

‘It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime.’

219.97 sec.

Average amount of time a customer waits in a drive-

through line in 2014, 40 sec. more than in 2013

GOOD WEEK

BAD WEEK

THE WEEKTHE U.S. EBOLA

PATIENT DIED

Sources: Wall Street Journal; New York Times; ABC; Vanity Fair; AP; Gizmodo; ESPN; QSR Magazine

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time October 20, 2014

LightBoxBriefing

FOR PICTURES OF THE WEEK, GO TO lightbox.time.com

Photograph by Bulent Kilic—AFP/Getty Images

An Uncertain PathSyrian Kurds wait in Suruc, Turkey, after

crossing the border on Oct. 2 in the wake of nearby mortar strikes. Militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria are

threatening the Turkey-Syria border.

Briefing

World

KENYA

‘I chose not to put the sovereignty of more than 40 million Kenyans on trial.’ UHURU KENYATTA, President of Kenya, announcing in a televised address to Parliament on Oct. 6 that he would temporarily step down to attend a hearing at the International Criminal Court in the Hague; Kenyatta, who reiterated his innocence, faces charges of crimes against humanity for inciting mass violence in the wake of Kenya’s 2007 elections

Briefing

World

DATA

WHICH COUNTRIES

ARE BEST FOR THE ELDERLY?

Rights group HelpAge

International analyzed factors such as pension

income and life expectancy to determine

quality of life in 96 countries. A sampling of the

rankings:

A Border-Town Battle Shows How ISIS Is Evading the U.S.

A U.S.-led game of whack-a-mole has been under way across much of Syria and Iraq since the end of September—and so far the moles are winning. The most prominent evidence was visible all too clearly from nearby Turkey: the town of Ko-bani, just inside Syria, appeared to be falling to the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) despite a stepped-up U.S. air campaign. Local Kurds equipped with small arms fought up to 9,000 jihadists outfitted with tanks and rockets. By Oct. 6,

Men watch smoke rise from Kobani after the U.S.-led coalition bombed ISIS targets in the city

ISIS’s black flags flew above an east-ern neighborhood. Kurdish officials warned that ISIS militants would kill thousands if they prevailed.

The fight for Kobani will test a U.S. strategy that at President Obama’s insistence has been limited to air strikes, depending on uncer-tain local allies on the ground to do the actual fighting. U.S. officials are angry that Turkey, a NATO ally, has refused to do more to avert a slaughter, largely because of its own bloody history with the Kurds. A delegation from Washington is heading to Ankara to urge Turkey to fully join the battle against ISIS.

The second piece of the U.S. strat-egy involves training as many as

5,000 moderate Syrian rebels per year to fight ISIS on the ground. But that’s a long-term gambit with no guarantee of success, in part because many of the rebels are more interested in fighting their three-year-old civil war against Syrian strongman Bashar Assad than in combatting ISIS.

ISIS has frustrated air strikes by abandoning key outposts—which would be easier to hit—and break-ing into smaller units. The terror-ists are also moving into civilian areas they know the coalition won’t bomb—especially without intel-ligence from on-the-ground scouts. Obama has refused to dispatch such spotters as part of his ban on U.S. ground troops in the conflict.

ISIS’s success helps explain why, on Oct. 5, the U.S. began deploying AH-64 Apache helicopters against the militants. The low-and-slow gunship is better than a jet bomber for attacking moving targets. But helicopters are more vulnerable to ground fire than jets. ISIS recently shot down a pair of Iraqi choppers, killing all four pilots aboard. For a President who wants to defeat ISIS without ground forces, the options are dwindling.

1Norway

8U.S.

48China

96Afghanistan

76Venezuela

10 By Noah Rayman and Mark Thompson

Trending In

THE EXPLAINER

Why Nobody Wants to Host the 2022 Winter Olympics

Wrong TurnFRANCE A wrecked car sits among the trees outside the city of Montpellier in southern France on Oct. 7. Record-setting downpours caused heavy flooding and forced thousands of people to leave their homes, though no fatalities were reported. The top-tier professional soccer team in Montpellier canceled its 40th-anniversary party and may have to relocate home games after its stadium was partly submerged. Photograph by Guillaume Horcajuelo—EPA

FRANCE

Huge costs

Last year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi set Russia back $51 billion, exceptional even by Olympic standards. Vancouver, for example, spent $6.8 billion in 2010.

Briefing

DIPLOMACYNorth and South Korea agreed to

hold another round of peace talks by

early November after Hwang Pyong So,

below, North Korea’s presumptive No. 2 (behind leader Kim Jong Un), made an unexpected visit to

South Korea.

POLITICSPro-business

candidate Aécio Neves, who finished a surprise second in Brazil’s presidential elections, is aiming to unseat incumbent Dilma Rousseff in the

runoff on Oct. 26.

PRANKSYoda, Chewbacca and seven Darth

Vaders are among names

submitted to run in Ukraine’s Oct. 26

parliamentary election. They’re with the Internet Party, a group known for its theatrics and

evangelization of technology.

Briefing

$1.3The size of the financial lifeline Walt Disney Co. is providing Euro

Disney, which runs Disneyland Paris. The resort has struggled to stay afloat amid Europe’s economic

troubles

Limited payoff

London poured $14 billion into its 2012 Summer Olympics, but it remains unclear how much it wound up benefiting the city economically in the long run—if at all.

Popular backlash

Some cities are wary of citizen reactions after protests shook Brazil last year in part over the government’s lavish spending to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Shady partner

The International Olympic Committee, which works with the host to put on the Games, has been plagued by allegations of corruption and a lack of transparency.

BILLION

Oslo withdrew its bid on Oct. 1, making it the fourth city in recent months—after Stockholm; Lviv, Ukraine; and Krakow, Poland—to have second thoughts about hosting the Games. Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, are the only remaining contenders.

SYRIA , FRANCE (D ISNEY ), PRANKS, POL IT ICS: GET T Y IMAGES;

KENYA: AP; D IPLOMACY: EPA

Briefing

Spotlight

publicly identified for the

first time in late September when the U.S. launched air strikes against its positions in Syria, the Khorasan group was “working on an effort to attack the U.S. or our allies, and look-ing to do it very, very soon,” ac-cording to FBI Director James Comey. As more information emerges, we learn that it may not be so new after all.

Why you never heard of them beforeThe group is tiny, perhaps a couple dozen people, and until President Obama targeted it with cruise missiles on Sept. 23, it had managed to stay under the radar. Kho-rasan did not tweet. It had no YouTube channel. In the constellation of armed groups operating in Syria, it was the dark star. Even today, its ac-tual name remains unknown, if it has one. Khorasan is the label U.S. intelligence of-ficials say they agreed on, the ancient name for a region that includes parts of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Iran and that some say the Prophet Muhammad predicted would produce a triumphant army under black flags.

Who they areIn two words: al-Qaeda. The leader reported killed in the strikes, Mohsin al-Fadhli, was a senior al-Qaeda operative who the U.S. says was one of

the few to know about the 9/11 attacks in advance. He was likely dispatched to Syria by al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in early 2013 to negotiate an alliance between al-Nusra Front, which is for-mally aligned with al-Qaeda, and ISIS, which began as al-Qaeda in Iraq. Instead, the groups ended up at odds, with some al-Qaeda delegates join-ing ISIS and al-Nusra shelter-ing the rest.

Why they are in SyriaIt’s safer there, for one thing. Predator drones have made Pakistan’s frontier a killing ground, while Syria was a place Obama had been long reluctant to bomb. Syria is also crowded with hun-dreds of young jihadis from Western countries who might be recruited for the terror attacks that remain al-Qaeda’s

Who Is Khorasan?Simple: al-QaedaBY KARL VICK

priority. “The ability to plot in relative safety is a long-term danger to us,” says former U.S. counterterrorism official Daniel Benjamin. “I can’t un-derscore enough how critical the safe-haven issue is.”

How dangerous are they?Very, say experts. Syria offers al-Qaeda not only the opera-tional freedom it enjoyed in Afghanistan before 9/11 but also far easier access to the West, by way of Turkey, a transit-and-logistics route for militant Islamists even before Ankara turned a blind eye to foreign fighters entering Syr-ia. U.S. officials say explosives experts from al-Qaeda’s busy Yemen affiliate were working with Khorasan, attempting to create a bomb that could be slipped through airport se-curity. Al-Fadhli had a record of financing terror projects

through wealthy donors in the Gulf. “Especially for something small, one or two or three of those, you’re good to go,” says Matthew Levitt, a former U.S. Treasury official.

What might be nextIf the group was not undone by the Sept. 23 strike, such a chance is unlikely to come again soon. The Americans had both tactical surprise—catching the mili-tants in villas near the Turk-ish border—and apparently excellent intelligence, perhaps gleaned from former captives, says an individual involved in hostage negotiations. Further strikes may also risk driving ISIS and al-Nusra together. But with both the CIA and al-Qaeda drawing down their forces on the Pakistan border, Syria looks more and more like their new battleground.

Al-Nusra Front supporters protest U.S. strikes on fellow al-Qaeda group Khorasan


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Nation

The “five-second rule” that

Ferguson, Mo., police enforced to keep protesters

from remaining in place on

downtown streets was ruled

unconstitutional by a federal judge

on Oct. 6. The ruling, which comes amid

lingering protests, was a modest

victory for demonstrators, whose nightly

gatherings in the mostly African-

American St. Louis suburb

called attention to the rash of police shootings in black

communities. Tensions continue

as a grand jury weighs whether to

indict police officer Darren Wilson, who is

white, on murder or manslaughter charges for the

fatal Aug. 9 shooting of

Michael Brown. A decision is

expected by early November.

—ALEX ALTMAN

PROTESTS

LITTLE PEACE IN SIGHT FOR FERGUSON

In Nobody’s Playbook

BY SEAN GREGORY

National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at the University of North Carolina. In a collision sport, the adolescent brain is at particular risk. The electrical wiring is not yet fully insulated, leaving it more vulnerable to injury. “The 16-year-old brain is still develop-ing,” says Robert Stern, professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Boston University School of Medicine. “It’s a vulnerable brain, in many cases being struck by big, adult-sized bodies.” High school players also have weaker neck muscles than college and pro players. “It’s the bobblehead effect,” says Jamsid Ghajar, professor of neurosur-gery at Stanford University School of Medicine and president of the Brain Trauma Foundation. “The whiplashing neck motion causes the jos-tling of the brain that leads to concussions and worse.” Concussion rates in the high school game are 78% higher than in college, according to the Institute of Medicine.

Would you let your son play? That question just gets tougher.

dozens of teenagers from suffolk county,

New York, donned football jerseys during the first weekend in October. If only they were headed to a game.

Instead they attended a wake for one of their own. Tom Cutinella, a junior offensive lineman and linebacker for Shoreham– Wading River High School, died on Oct. 1, hours after colliding with another player during a game. An official cause of death was not released, but police reported that Cutinella—who was adored by his small, tight-knit community—had suffered a head injury.

Cutinella, 16, became the third high school football player to die within a week. On Sept. 28, Demario Harris of Troy, Ala., died two days after making a tackle; on Facebook, Harris’ father said his son had suffered a brain hemorrhage. In North Carolina, Isaiah Langston, a linebacker for Rolesville High School, died after collapsing dur-ing pregame warm-ups on Sept. 26. Both were 17.

Eight high school football players died while playing the game in 2013, according to the

Taking a knee Players from rival Mount Sinai High in Suffolk County, New York, pay their respects to Cutinella

time October 20, 2014 13

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HEALTH CARE Walmart will drop health insurance for 30,000 part-time employees, the company announced on Oct. 7, joining the policy of other major retailers. Walmart said it had not budgeted for the number of part-timers seeking to enroll in company coverage to fulfill their obligation to obtain insurance as required by the Affordable Care Act. The Arkansas-based company is the nation’s largest private employer, with a U.S. workforce of 1.3 million.

WORKPLACE

66%The percentage of female restaurant employees who say they have been sexually harassed by managers, according to Restaurant Opportunities Center United, an advocacy group.

MARRIAGE The U.S. Supreme Court gave sweeping de facto approval to same-sex mar-riage on Oct. 6 by declining to review three appellate decisions undoing state bans on the unions. The calculated inaction had the immediate effect of lifting bans in 11 states and encouraging chal-lenges in 20 others.

HOLIDAYS The Seattle city council voted on Oct. 6 to observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day, joining Minneapolis and Berkeley, Calif., in amending a tradition deemed Eurocentric.

LONGEVITY

78.8The number of years a baby born in the U.S. in 2012 can expect to live, according to the CDC, a new record.

The RundownThe Contest Behind the Election

BY MAYA RHODAN/BOONE, N.C.

the nov. 4 midterm elections are the

first nationwide ballot since the U.S. Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, which freed some state legislatures to write voting laws without the supervision of the Justice Department. The ruling revived a debate cen-tral to the civil rights era, when Southern states frequently placed blatant obstacles in the way of African-American voters.

And now? Democrats argue that the changes many states have made in recent years amount to a more subtle effort to sup-press turnout among minorities and young

people. Republicans point out that voting remains easier than almost ever before and say strict voter-ID rules safeguard the integ-rity of elections.

Both sides may turn out to be right: the new laws could inadvertently boost turnout. North Carolina’s Republican legislature passed the nation’s most sweeping restric-tions, prompting a court challenge and talk of a voter backlash. “The mistake the extremists in the state legislature made,” says the Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, “is that their actions have energized people.”

SOURCES: BRENNAN CENTER; FRONTL INE; NCSL

VOTER-ID REQUIREMENTS

Thirty-two states require voters to present some form of identification

before casting a ballot, and at least six of the voter-ID laws set to be in place this election

can be considered strict photo laws. The U.S. Justice Department

sued over one such law in place in Texas, saying

it violates the federal Voting Rights Act.

VOTER- REGISTRATION

LAWS

Several states have passed changes to voter-registration drives, but new voter-registration laws in North Carolina and Kansas have been singled out by critics

as unduly strict. North Carolina is involved in a

battle over a 2013 voting law that among other

things ended same-day voter registration during the early-voting period.

EARLY-VOTING AND ABSENTEE RESTRICTIONS

Voters in six states face changes to early and absentee voting

this election—including Ohio, where the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to weigh in on

reductions to the early-voting schedule. Despite the cuts, voters in Ohio began casting ballots

on Oct. 7—a full month before the general

election.

FELON VOTING RIGHTS

Some states have moved to restore voting rights to those who have served time, while others

have made it more difficult for convicted

felons to vote. In Florida and Iowa, felons’ voting rights can be restored

after they’ve completed their sentence, parole or probation—but in Florida they must wait an extra

five to seven years.

Changes at the Ballot Box

TEXASA court will soon decide the fate of

the Lone Star State’s voter-ID law

OHIOA time frame

known as “golden week” was cut from the state’s

early-voting period

WISCONSIN Some 300,000

people don’t have the ID

required under state law to

vote, advocates warn

ARKANSASThe state supreme court heard oral

arguments on the merits of the state’s

voter-ID law on Oct. 2

NORTH CAROLINA

The Tar Heel State’s voting law has

tightened the most

Briefing | Nation

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andrew ng is holding still

as a co-worker carefully an-gles an iPhone camera in front of him. The app onscreen shows the silhouette of a head, and Ng’s face fills the space in-side. The two must be aligned for the program to read his features, decipher them and retrieve a headshot of his near-est celebrity look-alike from the web. More often than not, the app fetches a dead ringer.

This is more than a parlor trick for Ph.Ds. Ng, 38, is work-ing in one of the most contest-ed and potentially lucrative frontiers in tech: so-called machine learning, or teaching computers to teach them-selves. The app Ng is toying with is just one small dem-onstration of its potential. As everyone from automakers to health care providers grapples with the vast amounts of data generated—by themselves, by us—many engineers have come to believe, like Ng, that the only reasonable way to avoid drowning in the deluge is to build machines that can train themselves to parse it.

“I’ve always thought you can make computers more in-telligent, free us up from a lot of the more routine work, and then we can spend our time on more worthy pursuits,” says Ng. Artificial intelligence is also, he argues, the key to dominating the next wave of Internet businesses.

A race to build computers that learn is already under

way. Google and Facebook have gone on a hiring binge, and talented grad students as well as top professors have grown accustomed to six- and seven-figure salary offers from big tech firms. In May, Ng who

Baidu is Google on growth hormones. The company has a virtual lock on its home coun-try’s 618 million Internet users—more than double the number in the U.S. The major-ity of those users run searches

Brain Builder Creating the world’s smartest

BY DAN KEDMEY

until earlier this year was a Stanford University professor, took over the research efforts of another web giant: Baidu.

If Americans know the name at all, it is likely as the “Google of China.” In fact,

InnovationBriefing | Business

Business 1

Brainiac Ng has advanced degrees from Carnegie

Mellon, MIT and Berkeley

Photographs by Ian Allen for TIME

Briefing | Business

through Baidu’s servers, which house one of the fastest-growing data sets in the world. (The firm’s version of Wikipe-dia, for example, has nearly double the number of articles as the English-language ver-sion.) If Baidu’s growth contin-ues, it might soon possess one of the most valuable informa-tion reservoirs in history. “We dominate search,” says CEO Robin Li. But he argues that in order to tap it for all it’s worth, the company first needs the right mind.

ng, who grew up in singa-

pore before arriving in the U.S. for graduate study, earned the engineer equivalent of rock-star status in 2012 when he cre-ated a program dubbed Google Brain. Using 16,000 computer processors loaned to him by the search giant, Ng and a team of researchers created a neural network, or artificial brain, that could watch You-Tube videos and teach itself distinctions onscreen—the difference between a human’s face and a cat’s, for instance.

It may sound odd, but Ng’s work was a major break-through. Neural networks are computer programs that try to understand the world in much the way people do, in layers from abstract to concrete. Feed an image through one set of the program’s “neurons” and it may recognize blobs of color. In the next layer it may sort out shapes, and so on, until it reach-es complex concepts like a cat’s maw. Ng’s innovation was to pack networks with enough processing power to get drasti-cally smarter over time.

Since Google Brain, similar programs have been used to improve more prosaic technol-ogy. Google Search and Apple’s Siri, for example, take spoken commands with fewer mis-

understandings as a result of Ng’s research. “Anything half related to machine learning, if I wanted it done, I would want to hire him to do it,” says Geof-frey Gordon, a computer scien-tist at Carnegie Mellon.

Now Ng is overseeing Bai-du’s international R&D efforts from a brand-new, $300 mil-lion research center in Sunny-vale, Calif. Inside, office chairs still have promotional tags dangling beneath them ad-vertising “adjustable lumbar support” to workers who have yet to arrive. Ng’s plan is to fill them with some 200 employ-ees, many poached from Face-book, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google. Out of this half-vacant office, Baidu has already prom-

ised breakthroughs that will “transform the world.”

But Ng’s new office has no visible signs of a big artificial brain under construction. There are no refrigerator-size computers, no bundled cords snaking across the floor. There’s not even an employee in a white lab coat. Just beige carpets, white walls and generic office plants. Squint and you could almost mistake Baidu’s cutting-edge lab for an office of tax accountants.

The really cool equipment is in Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning, on the fringes of Beijing, where the company is building one of the world’s most sophisticated neural networks. It will be kitted out with 100 billion connections, or 100 times as many synapses as Google Brain. Ng and his team of researchers can com-mand its stacks of servers from just about anywhere in the world. From here, Ng will at-tempt to feed Baidu’s ocean of data across layers of neurons to make image recognition sharp-er, make voice dictation more perceptive and, the company hopes, make searching the web about much more than typing text into a blank box.

baidu isn’t the first for-

eign company to pin its hopes on absorbing some of Silicon Valley’s talent. Over the years, many opened Bay Area outposts with similar expectations—often with mixed results. Samsung, the massive Korean com-petitor to Apple, is currently building a 1.1 million-sq.-ft. (102,000 sq m) research facil-ity in downtown San Jose. What makes Baidu’s foray unique is that it has no plans to launch products and ser-vices in the U.S. The company wants minds, not customers.

Still, recruitment in the U.S. could be difficult. Baidu will have to compete fiercely for a pool of talent that is surprisingly shallow. Among the vanguard of top thinkers in this emerging field, most have already been recruited, according to Michael Littman, a computer-science professor at Brown University.

There are also skeptics about what neural networks can really achieve. “There’s more to human intelligence than just finding patterns,” says Ray Kurzweil, Google’s engineering director and a well-known futurist. Ng himself admits that he has at times been skeptical, steering students away from the idea. “It’s easy to hype them up,” he says. Yet the potential of Baidu’s brain has refired his imagination. Ng is hesitant to predict what one of the world’s largest neural networks might accomplish when it hums to life. But one thing is clear: he’s no longer steering talented young programmers away from the idea. ■

‘THERE’S MORE TO HUMAN INTELLIGENCE THAN JUST FINDING PATTERNS.’ —RAY KURZWEIL, GOOGLE

Room with a view Ng in Baidu’s $300 million California research center

Business 2 time October 20, 2014

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like pitchforks and placards

before them, smartphones should be a powerful protest tool. But when cell towers get overloaded with traffic or governments decide to restrict Internet access, they’re as good as useless. Both have hap-pened in the weeks since Sept. 27, when protests broke out in Hong Kong over Beijing’s decision to vet candidates for upcoming elec-tions. And yet phones have played an integral part of the continuing demonstrations.

The reason? FireChat, a smart-phone app that allows users to communicate even when they can’t get online or send texts. FireChat directly connects users to other nearby users who are within 250 ft. (76 m) via Bluetooth or local wi-fi. More people in range can then join the chat, extending the network. Protesters have been using the app to coordinate and support one another—all without an Internet connection.

In the two days after protests broke out, some 200,000 people in Hong Kong downloaded the app, says Micha Benoliel, CEO of

TechBriefing | Small Business

Business 4

Fire Starter

BY ALEX FITZPATRICK

Open Garden, the company that makes FireChat. It skyrocketed to the top of the region’s app-store charts for both Apple iPhones and Google Android devices. Open Garden, a San Francisco–based startup, was founded in 2011 and has raised about $2 million since. The company, which also offers apps that make it easier to find open wi-fi networks, didn’t create FireChat specifically for protesters. The app is also used at crowded public events such as music festi-vals and football games.

But FireChat’s popularity among protesters isn’t a complete surprise. The app was used by Taiwanese protesters in March, making it the latest in a long line of technology that has helped fuel political dissent. Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution was dubbed the Twitter Revolution thanks to protesters’ organizing via the microblogging site. And 2011’s Oc-cupy Wall Street movement had a hashtag even before it was a real-world street protest.

Still, FireChat isn’t perfect. The chat rooms are open, making them easy to join—and monitor. The company is currently working on a version with more privacy measures. “If this application can help in this way, it’s very aligned with the mission of the company,” Benoliel says. “We are very sup-portive of what’s happening here in Hong Kong.” ■

250 ft.

Users can enter public chat rooms

to exchange messages—but

authorities could be snooping there

The more people who connect to the local networks of

FireChat users, the bigger that network gets geographically

Users download

FireChat on their phones

If mobile Internet isn’t

working, FireChat connects users via

local wi-fi or Bluetooth

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Briefing | New Energy

it’s easy to get gloomy about climate

change when melting sea ice has forced 35,000 walruses onto a skinny patch of Alaskan shoreline. When the first 13 years of this century were among the 14 hot-test years on record—and this year could end up topping them all. When scientists who have spent years issuing apocalyptic warnings about epic droughts and rising seas and irreversible tipping points keep concluding that the situation is far worse than they expected.

It’s also easy to get gloomy about our ability to reverse these terrifying trends. World leaders keep holding climate sum-mits where they jibber-jabber about the plight of the planet and get nothing done. In the U.S., the Republican Party opposes climate action, as do many fossil-fuel-state Democrats. Oil spills, superstorms and other ads for the dangers of carbon have not inspired us to rethink our daily energy use; meanwhile, billions of people in de-veloping nations yearn to match our daily energy use. And the dream of a silver-bullet substitute for fossil fuels has not come true. The nuclear renaissance has sputtered. The biofuels revolution hasn’t happened. “Clean coal” is still a mirage.

It’s a bummer. The world is pumping more and more carbon into an atmosphere that can’t handle too much more of it. Fracking and other technologies are un-locking more petroleum than ever before. How will we break the cycle?

Actually, we’re already breaking it. We’re starting to decarbonize. The only question is whether we’ll do it fast enough to avoid planetary catastrophe—which, granted, is an important question. I’m not arguing for a don’t-worry-be-happy attitude. We should worry! But we’re not doomed. The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, and the carbon age will end when alternatives are more attrac-tive than carbon. The happy news is that we’ve reached the beginning of that end.

How can we tell? The quick answer is that the good stuff has gotten much cheaper. Emissions-free wind and so-lar are increasingly cost-competitive with coal and now make up the major-ity of the U.S.’s new power-generating capacity. LED lighting has reached a tipping point, and other energy-saving technologies—programmable thermo-stats, superefficient windows—are going mainstream. Battery prices are plunging, which is why electric-vehicle sales are doubling every year, while traditional vehicles guzzle less gasoline. And govern-ment policies—President Obama’s new carbon rules, carbon taxes in Sweden and British Columbia, cap-and-trade regimes in California and the E.U.—are making dirty energy more expensive, accelerating the transition to cleaner alternatives.

Natural gas has also gotten cheaper, which is not purely positive for the cli-mate, since it’s a fossil fuel, but is mostly positive, since it emits much less carbon than coal. There are legitimate questions about methane and other fracking issues, but cheap gas is a big reason U.S. emissions have fallen 10% since 2005. In the past four years, one-third of U.S. coal plants have been scheduled to close, and August set a new record for retirements. Globally, solar power has quadrupled since 2010. The cheaper solar gets, the more it is de-ployed, which further drives down prices, which further accelerates deployment.

Official energy forecasts suggest that we’ll still have a predominantly fossil-fueled economy for decades to come. But official energy forecasts assume that past performance dictates future results. The world doesn’t always work that way. We’ve managed to solve intractable prob-lems like filthy rivers and smoggy air and acid rain. There’s just as plausible a case for optimism about the carbon problem, in part because we’re screwed if we don’t solve it. The human race does a lot of stu-pid things, but we’ve got a powerful incen-tive to save the only planet that has pizza and Yosemite and our children. The arc of the logical universe is long and, hopefully, bends toward common sense. ■

WE’RE STARTING TO DECARBONIZE. THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHETHER WE’LL DO IT FAST ENOUGH TO AVOID CATASTROPHE

FOR MORE ON NEW ENERGY GO TO

time.com/newenergy

Do Worry. But Be Happy.We just might avoid a climate catastropheBY MICHAEL GRUNWALD

Lost habitat Herds of walruses retreat to land after the sea ice they depended on turned to slush

Business 6

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Briefing

women have been told for decades to take care of their bones as they age, but men have

new reason to follow suit. A study from the International Osteoporosis Foundation reveals that a third of all hip fractures occur in men—who are twice as likely as women to die afterward. Muscle mass, which helps strengthen and support bones, dwindles naturally as the body ages. The upside is that muscles can come back, says John P. Porcari, a professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse. Porcari, who has studied fitness extensively, recommends these six simple moves.

Age-Proof Your MusclesNew research pinpoints the ideal moves to protect the male body as it ages BY MANDY OAKLANDER

Wellness

SHOULDERSFifty to 60 percent of men will get shoulder injuries in their life-time, Porcari says. Prevent injuries by building strength. His group’s recent study found that the dumb-bell shoulder press was the No. 1 move for working the front part of the shoulders.

CHESTLeft alone, pectoral muscles will sink with age, but you can chisel them back with the humble push-up. “You’ll get a better physique and better muscle mass,” Porcari says. Start with wall push-ups, then move to knees, then to fully extended push-ups.

CORE AND ABSA 2013 ACE-sponsored study found that kettlebell classes led to 70% more core strength than training without them. If you prefer to forgo equipment, an April study found that the traditional crunch activated more muscle than any ab device tested.

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Seldes, who died Oct. 6 at age 86, was a Tony Award winner

MilestonesBriefing


DIED

Marian SeldesStar of stage and screenBy Angela Lansbury

Marian Seldes was mad for the color mauve. When you visited her apart-ment, the flowers were always mauve. People knew it; they wouldn’t think of sending her anything else. It seemed to give her confidence and security.

I first worked with Marian in a 2007 Terrence McNally play called Deuce, in which we played former tennis partners reunited at the U.S. Open. Whatever eccentricities she had for color preference, she was an extraordinary tour de force onstage.

She lived and breathed the theater. Elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1995, she had several great successes, among them Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. Not only was she a revered actress; she was also a teach-er at Juilliard, adored by her young students.

I remember on the first night of Deuce, I gave her a mauve necklace that was amethyst. She loved it. And she wore it, and wore it, and wore it.Lansbury is a Golden Globe– and Tony Award–winning actress

DIEDJerrie Mock, 88, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe as a solo pilot. She accomplished the feat in 1964, 27 years after Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean.

STRUCKA deal to sell the iconic Waldorf Astoriahotel in New York City, to a Chinese insurance company for $1.95 billion. It would be the most expensive purchase of a hotel in the U.S.

DIEDFormer Haitian dic-tator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier,63, in Port-au-Prince. He ruled in the brutal style of his father “Papa Doc” and lived 25 years in exile in France.

SUEDThe U.S. government,by Twitter, over the right to disclose information about authorities’ requests for user data. Tech companies are currently restricted in how they can share that information.

DIEDU.S. airmen, after Typhoon Phanfone hit Kadena Air Base in Japan, washing three of them to sea. Two bodies have been recovered and a third remains missing. One of the deceased was identified as Senior Master Sergeant James Swartz.

DOUBLEDThe number of deaths by heroin overdose in 28 states, from 1,779 deaths in 2010 to 3,635 in 2012.

WON

Nobel Prize Discoverers of “brain’s GPS”How do our brains know whether we’re in an office or lounging on a beach?

We have the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to thank for identifying the brain cells that function as our inner GPS system. John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser received the award on Oct. 6 for discovering that the brain works like a satellite, pinpointing the cells that beam signals for triangulating our location. In 1971, O’Keefe identified “place” cells in the hippocampus of rats that were active when the animals moved to specific locations. Those nerves oriented the brain in space—the cage, for example, or in humans’ cases, our homes.

The Mosers, a husband-and-wife team, found another group of nerve cells that pool such place information into coordinates that map precise locations—the left corner of the cage or the sofa in the living room. It takes these cells working together to allow us to know where we are.

Another three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, a more energy-efficient lighting source. And three others won the Chemistry prize for improving microscopes to see finer detail than before. —ALICE PARK

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you know credit is tight when

the former chair of the Federal Re-serve can’t get a mortgage. Ben Ber-nanke, who isn’t exactly hard up (he reportedly makes at least $200,000 a

speech), recently lamented that he wasn’t able to re-finance his home because of tight credit conditions. This is an inglorious reminder that the housing re-covery is being driven not by first-time home buyers or people who want to trade up but by wealthy peo-ple who don’t need a loan. Since most middle-class Americans still hold most of their wealth as equity in their homes, we won’t achieve a sustainable re-covery until we fix the housing market.

Banks would say the difficult credit conditions reflect the higher costs of complying with new regulations like Dodd-Frank. There’s some truth to that but not enough to justify turning down nearly any borrower who can’t put down 30% cash on a house. A more accurate explanation is that home-mortgage lending isn’t nearly as profitable as securities trading, which is where big banks still make much of their money these days. And so, hidden in the sluggish housing recovery is another revolution: American banks continue to morph into investment houses in ways that could ulti-mately put our financial system at risk.

R ather than bemoan this, i am encouraged

by some of the innovative companies trying take advantage of these shifts. A whole new

category of nontraditional lenders is springing up to take traditional banking’s place. Nonbank fi-nancial firms, a category that includes everything from companies like Detroit-based Quicken Loans to peer-to-peer lenders like the Lending Club, are growing exponentially. (Peer-to-peer lending is the relatively new practice of lending money to unre-lated individuals without going through a tradi-tional intermediary like a bank.) This category of nonbank banks is taking up a lot of the slack left by traditional banks in the aftermath of the financial crisis. During the first half of this year, almost a quarter of mortgages made by the top 30 lenders came from nonbank firms, the highest level since the financial crisis began.

Many of these lenders use unconventional met-rics to judge how creditworthy borrowers really are. They’re focusing not just on borrowers’ sal-ary and tax returns, which are the basis of most

traditional mortgage-lending calculations, but also on their field of work, what kind of degree pro-gram they are in or what their potential income trajectory might be.

Such metrics enable these lenders to take on risks that traditional banks now shun. “There’s a misperception out there that millennials don’t want to buy a home,” explains Mike Cagney, CEO of Social Finance, a company that has already done over $1 billion in crowdsourced student-loan refinancing and is now pushing into the online mortgage market. “But the reality is that they don’t have the credit to do it.” Cagney says many of his initial mortgage borrowers mirror the profile of the customers to whom he gives reduced-rate student loans—upwardly mobile young profes-sionals, many with degrees from top schools, who have bright futures in high-income professions but little cash in the bank. Particularly on the coasts, where real estate prices are high, it is nearly im-possible for a young person to buy a home with a traditional credit profile.

O f course, it’s not only upwardly mobile

future members of the 1% who deserve a break on credit. Research shows that many

low-income borrowers with steady jobs are much better credit risks than they look like on paper. One University of North Carolina study found that even poor buyers could be better-than-average credit risks if judged on metrics other than how much cash they have on hand. That’s not to say we should have runaway borrowing as we did in the run-up to 2008, but credit standards are still very tight relative to historical averages.

Nontraditional lending has already shown there is an alternative to the not-very-public-minded banking system we have in place now. That raises the question, Why should big banks whose prima-ry business model is no longer consumer lending be government-insured in the first place? (Many would argue that the bailout guarantee implicit in such insurance was the reason the too-big-to-fail institutions were able to leverage up and cause the subprime crisis in the first place.) Perhaps the safest thing would be for banking as a whole to go back to a model in which institutions simply keep a lot more cash on hand, or have unlimited liability as a hedge against risk taking? Who knows? That might make mortgage lending look good again. ■

CAN’TGET A

BREAK

Banking by Another NameTraditional lenders aren’t doing their job.

Ex–Fed chiefBen Bernanke on the tight

credit market

‘I recently tried to refinance

my mortgage, and I was

unsuccessful in doing so.’


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Rana ForooharCOMMENTARY / THE CURIOUS CAPITALIST

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“how do you feel about the fed-

eral government buying tons of am-munition for the post office in order to raise the price of ammo for gun owners?” was the first question I got

at a town meeting in Shreveport, La. Kevin and Lois Martello, a dentist and speech therapist, respec-tively, had put together a group of 15 friends and neighbors to talk politics, and it was pretty intense from the start. I asked Lee Foshee, who had raised the post-office question, where he’d heard that. He told me he had several sources. One of them may have been the right-wing Breitbart website, I later learned, which has been tracking ammo sales to federal agencies. Breitbart didn’t mention the price-raising strategy, but Bill Kostelka, a certified public accountant, confirmed that he’d had to stand in line to buy .22-caliber rounds recently. (For the record: the U.S. Postal Inspection Service is armed and needs ammo from time to time.)

I t’s hard to know what to believe,” said lois

Martello, the host, who seemed as nonplussed by the post-office-ammo conspiracy as I was. She

and her husband were a bit more moderate than some of their friends. “Especially in the election season,” she continued, “when all the ads are on the air. But even on the news, it’s hard to tell what’s real.” I was tempted to defend my profession, but we seemed to be in a full-fledged American Mo-ment, and I didn’t want to kill the buzz. Anyway, Kevin Martello, Lois’ husband, tried to take the conversation “in a different direction,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty concerned that the top 1% of the population controls 40% of the wealth in this country.”

There were a couple of head nods but not much commentary. There was more concern about gov-ernment waste than about unseen wealth. Indeed, another chorus of consternation ensued, this time about food stamps. Waylon Bates, the principal of the local middle school, said he’d seen people “buying T-bone steaks and giant bottles of orange soda” with government scrip. Others said they’d seen the very same thing. And Foshee said he’d seen long lines at a combination liquor store and check-cashing place—a fine establishment, no doubt—on the day the Social Security disability checks came out each month.

I have heard the T-bone steak and orange-soda

riff a number of times on road trips in recent years. It is always T-bone steaks. Sometimes it’s dog food too. Is it true? Maybe so; there are food-stamp abuses, no doubt. Or maybe it happened once, someone saw it, and the story spread, sprayed into the atmosphere by talk radio. It is now an urban (and rural) legend. The food-stamp stories mix with more purposeful fantasies spread by inter-est groups, like the National Rifle Association’s constant spew that the government wants to “take away” your guns rather than merely regu-late their use. And then there are the immigrant stories: Kostelka heard about a carload of Mexi-cans stopped by the local police without driver’s licenses or proof of residency. “And they were given a fine and set free,” he said. True, no doubt, but incomplete: fewer would-be immigrants have been crossing the border in recent years, and the Obama Administration has been sending record numbers back home.

D emocrats are swimming against the pre-

vailing cynicism as they attempt to retain the Senate this year. Across the South, their

candidates are placing a heavy bet on women’s is-sues, especially equal pay, and education. In some places, like North Carolina, where a traditional emphasis on education spending has been violated by the Republican state legislature, they have a chance to win. In Louisiana, where Senator Mary Landrieu is facing a virtual candidate named Bill Cassidy—local reporters claim they can’t find the guy, and I couldn’t either—the incumbent is facing a real hurdle. The hurdle is Barack Obama, about whom the crazy rumors are—still!—thick, and the ads are constant: each of the incumbent Democratic Senators running in the Southern states I visited has voted with the President more than 90% of the time. That is one thing every voter who enters the polls will know next month.

There is also an undercurrent of fear—about ISIS and Ebola—that does not help the Democrats. Most of the people I talked with don’t think this federal government is competent to handle anything. And there is an undercurrent of exhaustion, especially among Democrats who have talked themselves silly trying to dispel the rumor fog that has engulfed po-litical discourse. These are stories that stick in the mind and rot the body politic. They are a dominant political currency, and not just in the South. ■

UPHILL FOR SOUTHERN

SENATE DEMS

6 Percentage points by which two-term

Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu trails

her Republican opponent Bill

Cassidy, according to a recent CBS poll

4 Percentage points

by which incumbent Arkansas Senator

Mark Pryor, a Democrat, trails his Republican opponent Tom

Cotton, according to a recent CBS poll

A Troubled American Moment As conspiracy theories abound, voters are uncertain about what to believe


TO READ JOE’S BLOG POSTS, GO TO time.com/swampland

Joe KleinCOMMENTARY / IN THE ARENA

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Bearing witness Neighbors watch as a biohazard team cleans the apartment where the Dallas Ebola victim stayed

FEARFACTORTwo viruses have created an epidemic of anxiety

about deadly infections in America. Here’s how managing fear can give us an edge over disease

By Jeffrey Kluger

MEDICINE

32

MEDICINE | PUBLIC HEALTH

Secure, told Bloomberg News that its sales had spiked “several hundred percent.”

Social media, no surprise, have fed the blaze. Searches on Google related to the virus—including “Ebola que es” and “Ebola outbreak”—are up 1,000% this year. On Oct. 1, the day after Duncan’s ill-ness was announced, online chatter men-tioning Ebola peaked at 6,200 tweets per minute, compared with 100 tweets per minute before the announcement. Few of those posts are sharing the reassuring—and accurate—news that Ebola is hard to catch, is not an airborne virus and can be transmitted only by direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected and symp-tomatic person.

Instead, they are 140-character rumors and horror stories. Public-health officials have thus had to scramble to refute claims that Ebola had broken out in Iowa (it hadn’t) and in New Jersey, after a passen-ger on a Newark-bound plane vomited—a symptom of Ebola, yes, but in this case sim-ply a sign of an upset stomach.

misinfor m at ion spr e a ds t hrough

societies in much the same way diseases do, and it’s not just for irony’s sake that re-searchers use the word infected to describe the rumormongers who are exacerbating the problem. “We have millions and mil-lions of people on these social networks,” says Ceren Budak, who studies online communications at Microsoft Research. “Most of them in certain cases are not going to have reliable information, but they’re still going to keep talking.”

In the center of the storm, the residents of the Vickery Meadow neighborhood in Dallas—a community of Liberians and other immigrants—are suffering in their own way. Rocks were thrown at the apartment complex where Duncan had stayed—and where his family members were quarantined before being moved to a townhouse nearby. Medical clinics, food pantries and after-school tutoring centers have gone begging for the volunteers who usually make up the staff, as outsiders shun the community—giving the people living there a second cause for worry.

“They’re not just scared about getting Ebola,” says Matt Karwowski, a contact

shows itself in a lot of ways—none of them terribly pretty. It’s when reason gets shouted down and shown from the room, when we quit being governed by what we know and instead by what we fear. It’s what America has been experiencing since Sept. 30, when news broke that the first Ebola case had been diagnosed in the U.S. The country’s nerves were already jangled by the continuing spread of entero-virus D68 (EV-D68), a flulike disease that has infected 664 people—most of them children—in 45 states so far and the Dis-trict of Columbia. It has killed one 4-year-old New Jersey boy.

That disease is arguably the bigger threat on U.S. soil, but it’s Ebola that knocked us silly. Contagion has a way of doing that. The enemy is not just among us; it’s potentially invisibly within us—the most primal violation of all. Until re-cently, Ebola had a comforting, faraway otherness about it. But with confirma-tion of a diagnosis and, later, death in the U.S.—and let’s be clear, it’s the only such case so far—Ebola has gone from being a thing of there to a thing of here.

“One case has transformed the way we think about Ebola,” says Jane Risen, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “It switched it from being impossible to possible.”

It doesn’t help that the victim, Thomas Eric Duncan, who died on Oct. 8, grew ill in Dallas after arriving from Liberia to visit his family, mainlining the disease straight to the heart of America. It doesn’t help ei-ther that Ebola is so sublimely awful. A dis-ease that causes the very viscera to break down and bleed out is not the kind of thing that encourages rational thought. And so, accordingly, we have reacted irrationally, with ripples in many directions.

Airline stocks have tumbled on fears that international travel is a deadly risk. Attendance at Dallas schools fell 10% af-ter parents began keeping kids home. Em-ployees at a day-care center half a continent away on New York’s Staten Island have be-gun wearing latex gloves because many of the students are members of a Liberian community. Sales of hand sanitizers, sur-gical masks and other biohazard gear are soaring, according to online retailers. One of them, the reassuringly named Life-

In Texas After working to decontaminate the apartment where the Dallas Ebola

patient stayed, hazmat crew members disinfect each other

Panic

Thomas Eric Duncan died of Ebola eight days after doctors

diagnosed him


None of this, the epidemiologists know, will do much to address the ostensible goal, which is to control the disease, stop its spread to the rest of the world and get help to the people who are stricken al-ready. But none of it comes from the part of the human mind that is equipped to do such cool, focused, deliberate work any-way. It comes instead from the part where fear and suspicion and irrationality live. Putting the disease back in its box requires doing the same to our worst impulses first.

there is no good time for a disease

like Ebola to strike, but in the U.S., the moment seems especially bad. Diseases largely eradicated here—measles, mumps, whooping cough—are suddenly reappear-ing, viral brush fires that could be easily eliminated if all parents vaccinated their kids. The SARS outbreak of 2003 and the swine-flu scare of 2009 have sensitized us to the threat of emerging pandemics. Then came the enterovirus, and then Ebola—literally a murderers’ row of bugs.

“For years we’ve been prepped for this kind of anxiety by public-health officials and the media,” says Philip Alcabes, a professor of public health at Adelphi Uni-versity and the author of Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics From the

Black Plague to Avian Flu. “We hear about pandemics, so in some cases people can’t be blamed for thinking that Ebola is that thing.”

In the more toxic provinces of the Inter-net, racial and cultural animus emerges—a common theme in times of epidemics. It showed itself during the Black Death in the 14th century, which Europeans blamed on astronomical or climate events. But since it’s hard to get angry at the stars or the skies, they blamed the Jews too and set about attacking their villages.

It happened again in the 1800s, when cholera hit New York City and Philip Hone, a former mayor, blamed Irish and German immigrants—“filthy, intemperate, unused to the comforts of life and regardless of its proprieties”—for such outbreaks. It hap-pened in 2009, when the swine-flu out-break led to the familiar seal-the-border refrain, the ineffective cure that is so often recommended for whatever ails us.

Kurt Gray, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, attributes the problem to what he calls “dyadic comple-tion,” a term that sounds overwrought and overthought when people are panicking over a fatal disease but one that explains a lot. “We think of evil involving a dyad—a villain and a victim,” he says. “So when we have a victim, we’re looking for an evil entity to blame for the suffering.”

It’s this kind of thing that led evangeli-cal pastor Pat Robertson to lay blame for the 2010 Haitian earthquake on a “pact to the devil” that the Haitians had struck and led former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin to argue that Hurricane Katrina was in part divine retribution for U.S. intervention in Iraq. It’s also, Gray says, what explains why, after a swarm of locusts destroyed a year’s crops in France in the Middle Ages, officials put the locusts on trial—because what else was there to do?

“This happens all the time across a host of kinds of suffering,” he says. “A vi-rus doesn’t have a mind that would allow it to choose to do harm, so when it comes to Ebola, we blame the outsider instead.”

putting a brake on those base behav-

iors can be achieved, but it takes effort. Social psychologists see value in not even trying to make people think more rational-ly about risk without first acknowledging their fear—especially in the case of Ebola. “It’s not crazy to worry,” Alcabes says. “It’s a scary infection. So many people die.”

Barbara Reynolds, director of the

tracer for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “They’re scared about how they’re perceived by the community, what it’s going to be like to re-enter the community when it’s all over.”

As so often happens, some elected leaders are making matters worse, see-ing a crack of political daylight and rush-ing to take advantage of it. “Could we have a worldwide pandemic?” Kentucky Senator Rand Paul wondered aloud in an interview with Breitbart News. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and Texas Senator Ted Cruz—who, like Paul, are potential members of the GOP’s 2016 presidential field—raised the prospect of limits on travel to and from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, the three nations hardest hit by Ebola. It’s a move Paul endorses too and one that CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden says is exactly the wrong thing to do, since it would make it harder for medical teams and supplies to get to and from the region.

President Obama, likely sensing vul-nerability on the issue, ordered stepped-up Ebola screening at airports in both the U.S. and West Africa. That will include taking the temperature of all passengers arriving from the African disease zone—a move that might calm nerves but would reveal nothing about any infected people in the symptom-free incubation phase. With Spain now reporting its first case of Ebola, in a nurse who had been caring for a patient with the disease, points of embar-kation in Western Europe could come in for more scrutiny too.

In New Jersey Triplets Eli, Sydney and Ava

Waller on their fourth birthday; Eli was the first person to die

from EV-D68

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MEDICINE | PUBLIC HEALTH

CDC’s public-affairs division, put together a public-messaging protocol during the avian-flu outbreak that stresses an I-feel-your-pain approach. “I had to throw out all the paternalism that comes when we are trying to make sure people don’t panic,” she says. “The message isn’t going to get through if you don’t first say, ‘We get it.’”

Sometimes fear is not only understand-able; it’s also actually useful. Frieden doesn’t mind if members of his Ebola team remain a little spooked by the disease. “We want them to be scared,” he said during a news conference. “We want them to chan-nel that fear into being incredibly meticu-lous about infection control.”

Pushing back in the information wars can help too. Obama’s team has constant-ly reassured the public that the govern-ment “will stop the disease in its tracks,” a phrase that has enjoyed its own viral spread throughout the White House. The CDC is taking the fight to Twitter. One tweet that included an illustration of how the disease can and cannot be spread was retweeted more than 4,200 times, and the agency gained almost 5,000 new followers on the day after Duncan’s diagnosis.

Sometimes simple compassion can help too. In Dallas County, Judge Clay Jenkins has been assigned the job of over-seeing the government’s response to the Duncan case. He conspicuously wore no biohazard gear when he entered the apart-ment in which Duncan and his family had been living. He also drove the fam-ily, which is being monitored twice daily in quarantine for signs of infection, to its new quarters himself and appeared imme-diately afterward before the press.

“I’m wearing the same shirt I was when I was in the car for 45 minutes with that family,” he said. “If there was any risk, I wouldn’t expose myself or my family.”

Somewhere in Jenkins’ brain the same panic circuits that all humans have surely went off, at least briefly. Yet he overcame them with reason and with a knowledge of how Ebola behaves. And he soldiered on.

It’s not entirely our fault if we fail to do the same. Millions of years of behavioral wiring tell us to be afraid. But it’s entirely to our credit if we rise above our fears. An epidemic, approached in the right way, can sometimes be an opportunity to cure more than just a disease. —with

reporting by denver nicks/dall as,

alex altman/washington and victor

luckerson, alice park and alexandra

sifferlin/new york city ■

Mary Mallon, immune to the typhoid bacillus, carries the illness and directly infects 51 people during her lifetime. Known as Typhoid Mary, she is quarantined from 1907 to 1910 and from 1915 until her death in 1938.

The Spanish flubreaks out in the U.S. Cities like New York, which closed schools and isolated the sick, had lower death rates than those that didn’t impose such measures.

Federal authorities incarcerate more than 30,000 suspected prostitutesnear U.S. military bases during World War I in an effort to curb the spread of venereal disease. Most women are held for 10 weeks.

1907 19181918

HOW THE TWO DISEASES DIFFER

On Oct. 1, Texas health officials issued orders of quarantine to four people who’d had contact with Thomas Eric Duncan after he was diagnosed with Ebola. When Duncan died the morning of Oct. 8., those four remained quarantined. For many Americans, this raised the question of who has the legal authority to monitor their movement and human contact, restricting the liberty of presumably innocent people.

Under Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to take measures to prevent the spread of communicable diseases between states and from outside the country. The CDC is responsible for carrying out these functions.

Isolation and quarantine can also be imposed by states under their police-power functions, but in the event that states’ powers aren’t sufficient to stem the spread of a disease, the federal government can step in.

Isolating the ill—or the potentially ill—under hospital authority is another way to contain bugs, as health officials did in an Indiana hospital in September when they placed a girl with enterovirus, possibly the strain known as EV-D68, in isolation. Here’s a look at how that works.

A TALE OF TWO VIRUSESEbola and enterovirus D68 have Americans on edge. Here’s how the government is trying to contain themBy Emily Barone and Tessa Berenson

TRANSMISSION

Throughout U.S. history, to contain the spread of viruses, health officials have turned to isolation,which separates contagious patients from the healthy, and quarantine,which restricts still healthy people who may have been exposed to a communicable disease.

Ebola

The illness spreads when an infected person coughs,

sneezes or touches a surface that is then touched by

others. Enteroviruses can live on surfaces for days.

The illness spreads through direct contact with body

fluids such as vomit, saliva, and blood via broken skin or

the eyes, nose or mouth. Ebola virus can live on

surfaces for days

THE HISTORY OF CONTAINMENT

CASES CONFIRMED IN

THE U.S.

Enterovirus D68

Enterovirus D68

Ebola

664 1SOURCES: AP; CDC; INDYSTAR;

ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA; NEW

YORK T IMES; NASA; WHO; N IH

A woman arrives in the U.S. from Stockholm, where there was a smallpox outbreak, and fails to produce vaccination documenta-tion. She is quarantined for 14 days out of concern that she is a possible carrier.

Apollo 11 astronauts are quarantined for three weeks in a trailer upon their return to Earth to determine whether any medical problems stemmed from exposure to lunar material.

During the global SARS outbreak, patients in the U.S. are isolated while symptoms persist and for 10 days thereafter.

A 31-year-old Atlanta attorney is diagnosed with a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis. He flies to Europe, caus-ing an international health scare, and is isolated on his return to the U.S. It is later determined that he was misdiagnosed and that his tuber-culosis is treatable.

Public-health officials impose quarantines on homes and towns where poliocases are found. Children and adults diagnosed with the disease are placed in isolation wards at hospitals accepting polio patients.

Four people who were believed to be in close contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient who was diagnosed and died on American soil, are in quarantine until the 21-day incubation period passes.

1963 1969 2003 20071940s 2014

U.S. quarantine stations are located at 20 ports and land borders where international travelers arrive. A dozen of these stations were added from 2004 to 2007 because of concerns about bioterrorism after 9/11 and the 2003 SARS outbreak.

THE U.S. STATIONS

In the 1800s, a black-and-yellow flag was flown to indicate quarantine aboard ships. Today, a solid yellow flag indicates that a ship is free of disease and is safe to enter a port.

THE EBOLA PROTOCOL

TREATMENT AVAILABLE DRUGS

VULNERABLE POPULATIONS

Ebola Ebola Ebola

1AIRPORT

SCREENINGPassengers

leaving Liberia must have their

temperature taken and answer a health

questionnaire. Duncan allegedly

lied on his.

2DIAGNOSIS AND

ISOLATIONOnce a patient is

diagnosed with Ebola, he or she is put in

isolation in a hospital and kept away from visitors and other

patients.

3CONTACT TRACING

After the patient is isolated, health officials locate all people who came into contact with the patient and

monitor them for 21 days.

4QUARANTINE

Some contacts may be given quarantine orders, which can

be enforced by police. Breaking a federal quarantine

can result in fines or imprisonment, and in most states breaking an order is a criminal

misdemeanor.

521 DAYS AND AFTER

Contact tracers spend three weeks

conducting daily checkups on the

patient’s contacts. If someone develops

symptoms, the whole process begins again.

Children and teens. Asthmatics may

have a higher risk.

Family and others in close contact with patients.

Fluids, rest and over-the-counter medication to lower fever.

Intravenous fluids and steps

to maintain oxygen and

blood pressure.

No vaccine or specific drug treatment.

No vaccine or FDA-approved

drug treatment. Experimental drugs such as

ZMapp have been tried on some

patients.

EnterovirusD68

Enterovirus D68

Enterovirus D68

SYMPTOMS

Ebola

Fever, runny nose, body aches and coughing. Severe

cases include wheezing.

Fever, headaches, muscle pains,

diarrhea, vomiting,

abdominal pain and bleeding.

u.s. quarantine

stations

Enterovirus D68

FROM LEF T: AP; GET T Y IMAGES (4); AP

Photographs by Mark Mahaney for TIME

No erasers needed The national shift to computers in the classroom is happening fast, with paper, textbooks and pencils replaced by tablets, headphones and keyboards

EDUCATION

THE PAPERLESS CLASSROOM IS COMINGA national push to get a computer into each student’s hands will upend the way American children are taught BY MICHAEL SCHERER/CALISTOGA, CALIF.

37

back-to -school night this year in

Mr. G’s sixth-grade classroom felt a bit like an inquisition. Teacher Matthew Gudenius, a boyish, 36-year-old computer whiz who runs his class like a preteen tech startup, had prepared 26 PowerPoint slides filled with facts and footnotes to deflect the concerns of parents. But time was short, the worries were many, and it didn’t take long for the venting to begin.

“I like a paper book. I don’t like an e-book,” one father told him, as about 30 adults squeezed into a room for 22 stu-dents. Another dad said he could no lon-ger help his son with homework because all the assignments were online. “I’m now kind of taken out of the routine,” he complained. Rushing to finish, Gudenius passed a slide about the debate over teach-ing cursive, mumbling, “We don’t care about handwriting.” In a flash, a mother objected: “Yeah, we do.”

At issue was far more than penman-ship. The future of K-12 education is ar-

riving fast, and it looks a lot like Mr. G’s classroom in the northern foothills of California’s wine country. Last year, Presi-dent Obama announced a federal effort to get a laptop, tablet or smartphone into the hands of every student in every school in the U.S. and to pipe in enough bandwidth to get all 49.8 million American kids on-line simultaneously by 2017. Bulky text-books will be replaced by flat screens. Worksheets will be stored in the cloud, not clunky Trapper Keepers. The Dewey decimal system will give way to Google. “This one is a big, big deal,” says Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

It’s a deal Gudenius has been work-ing to realize for years. He doesn’t just teach with a computer on every student’s desk; he also tries to do it without any paper at all, saving, by his own estimate, 46,800 sheets a year, or about four trees. The paperless learning environment, while not the goal of most fledgling pro-grams, represents the ultimate result of

38

EDUCATION | CONNECTED LIFE

Indeed, emerging research suggests that there may be reason for concern. Op-tometrists warn that a steep increase in blue-light exposure from screens could lead to eye problems later in life. Early stud-ies have also shown an increase in physi-cal ailments—sore backs, dry eyes, painful necks—among kids who are asked to work most of the day on computers while using desks designed for pencil and paper. “A lot of money is going into the technology without looking at where you put the tech-nology,” says Karen Jacob, an occupational therapist and board-certified ergonomist who teaches at Boston University. “It’s more demanding physically on a child than just having a piece of paper on a desk.”

It will take years before the science is conclusive, and in the meantime, educa-tors may have been beguiled by the prom-ise. The next generation of middle-school curriculum software, for example, can correct students as they make mistakes as well as suggest improvements to gram-mar and paragraph structure in real time. Work can be automatically tailored to the abilities of each student. Word processing has also been shown to improve the quality of student writing over longhand, even in the early grades. “From first grade to 12th grade, we have the same effects,” says Steve Graham, a professor of education at the University of Arizona, of these types of pro-grams. “It’s basically a 20-percentile jump.”

Cool new gadgets tend also to help mo-tivate easily distracted students, at least initially. “The problem we have in K-12 is we are not engaging the kids because we are not using the things they use outside the classroom inside the classroom,” says Lenny Schad, who is overseeing the pur-chase of 65,000 devices for Houston-area high school students. The best teachers, meanwhile, are able to integrate the com-puters into an active lesson, rather than plugging them in for six hours a day.

Back at Calistoga, Gudenius works the crowd on back-to-school night, mixing in funny YouTube videos with examples of work his students have completed. He explains that state tests will all be admin-istered online anyway and that no college will accept handwritten papers, so typing must be learned. Toward the end, one of his critics, Tony McBeardsley, a parent who voiced his support for paper books, offers an olive branch. “I love your enthusiasm,” he says. The parental concerns may not be resolved, but the revolt seems quelled for now. And the transformation goes on. ■

technology transforming the classroom.Gudenius started teaching as a

computer-lab instructor, seeing students for just a few hours each month. That much time is still the norm for most kids. American schools have about 3.6 students for every classroom computing device, according to Education Market Research, and only 1 in 5 school buildings has the wiring to get all students online at once. But Gudenius always saw computers as a tool, not a subject. “We don’t have a paper-and-pencil lab,” he says. “When you are learning to be a mechanic, you don’t go to a wrench lab.”

Ask his students if they prefer the digi-tal to the tree-based technology and every one will say yes. It is not unusual for kids to groan when the bell rings because they don’t want to leave their work, which is often done in ways that were impossible just a few years ago. Instead of telling his students to show their work when they do an algebra equation, Gudenius asks them to create and narrate a video about the process, which can then be shown in class. History lessons are enlivened by brief videos that run on individual tablets. And spelling, grammar and vo-cabulary exercises have the feel of a game, with each student working at his own speed, until Gudenius—who tracks the kids’ progress on a smartphone—gives commands like “Spin it” to let the kids know to flip the screens of their devices around so that he can see their work and begin the next lesson.

Overcoming the Glitcheslike just about everything else in

education, computers in the classroom work only when used correctly. The costly missteps of earlier digital-learning initia-tives are famous in certain school corri-dors. A $500 million plan to buy an iPad for every student in the Los Angeles Uni-fied School District imploded this year af-ter questions were raised by members of the school board about both the technol-ogy plan and the bidding process. Other districts have found themselves with de-vices that don’t work, teachers who don’t know what to do with them and outdated school infrastructure that makes it hard to get online.

“We do see a lot of districts that say, If we just buy a lot of technology, something will happen,” says Mark Edwards, super-intendent of the Mooresville, N.C., Graded School District, which has seen large gains

‘From first grade to 12th grade, we have the same effects. It’s basically a 20-percentile jump.’ —steve graham, professor of

education at the university of

arizona

in student retention and test scores after implementing a computer-based learning model. “Something will happen. But not really what they want to happen.”

While kids may take to new technol-ogy naturally, the learning curve for par-ents and other educators can be steep. And even in communities where the rollout has gone relatively well, there’s still plen-ty of friction. In Calistoga, Calif., where Gudenius teaches, the first classroom computers were iPads for kindergartners, which led to an initial rebellion from some teachers and even a member of the school board. The Association of Pediatrics has been warning parents for years to limit screen time for their children, but now the screens were filling up the school day. Skeptical parents and teachers wondered how a 5-year-old tracing his letters with a finger on a tablet would deliver a better outcome, without negative side effects, than using a marker with a piece of paper.

Show, save and share Students in Mr. G’s sixth grade do math with inkless pens

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D O B U S I N E S S W I T H A D I V E R S E P O RT F O L I O

O F E N T E R P R I S E - G R A D E D E V I C E S .L E A R N M O R E AT W W W. S A M S U N G . C O M / U S / S A F E

© 2014 Samsung Telecommunications America, LLC. Samsung, Galaxy S, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Tab, SAFE and Knox are all trademarks of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. Appearance of devices may vary. Device screen images simulated. SAFE™ (Samsung for Enterprise) is a mark for a Samsung device tested for security with enterprise use in mind. For information about Samsung’s SAFE™ program and the security solutions tested with a SAFE™ device, please refer to www.samsung.com/us/safe.

T H E N E X T B I G T H I N G

F O R B U S I N E S S I S H E R E

A NEW GENERATION

SPEAKS

WORLD

Color of dissent On a wall just outside Hong Kong government

offices, protesters leave words of support for one another

and demands for political action

HONG KONG’S PROTESTS MAY BE WANING, BUT THE BATTLE FOR

DEMOCRACY WILL CONTINUE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMES NACHTWEY FOR TIME

42

hey have been pepper-sprayed and

tear-gassed by police, pushed and punched by their opponents, drenched

by torrential rain. Still, they stay. Since Sept. 22, in a historic act of civil disobedience, pro-democracy demonstrators—the overwhelming majority of them students—have occupied key financial and retail districts in one of the world’s great cities: Hong Kong. When their camps were attacked by thugs who the protesters say were backed by the state, more than 100,000 people rallied for peace. When the authorities set an Oct. 6 deadline for them to clear out, they held fast. Says 17-year-old Jennifer Wong, who is in high school: “I choose to stand up.”

The protesters are standing up for a say in government, starting with the election of Hong Kong’s chief executive (CE). Until now, the CE has been chosen by a 1,200-member electoral college made up largely of Hong Kong’s politi-cal and business elite. In 2017 the public will be allowed to vote for the CE, but the leadership in

China, which has sovereignty over Hong Kong, has imposed conditions. Candidates must be vetted for “patriotism,” and only two or three can run. Officials say the new system represents progress; critics say it’s rigged to stifle dissent.

Young people are particularly concerned. Hong Kong is a rich city, but its wealth is con-centrated in ever fewer hands. Big Business, particularly the city’s real estate sector, has inordinate influence over government policy. High property prices prevent many people from owning homes. Wages are stagnant. “We don’t see good prospects for our future,” says Katie Lo, 21, a university student.

That future would be brighter with democ-racy, Hong Kong’s youth believe, because it—at least in theory—would make the government more responsive to public needs. “People say to me, ‘If you want to change the world, go to university, then work as a government admin-istrator or a businessman,’” says Joshua Wong, a protest leader who turns 18 this month.

T

“No, to affect the world, you go to the streets.”Many citizens are tired of the disruptions to

their lives and want to reclaim those streets—a growing sentiment that officials may exploit to pressure the students in coming talks. Protesters are getting weary too. On the night of Oct. 7, only about 2,000 were at the main rally point, com-pared with the tens of thousands before. Still, Hong Kong has undergone a political awaken-ing. Says Emily Lau, 62, a legislator and the head of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party: “Once people have been shown their power, they know how to use it again.” —by emily rauhala/hong kong.

with reporting by elizabeth barber, hannah

beech and nash jenkins/hong kong ■

Weathering opposition The crowds have dwindled, but thousands of people remain, camping on streets, above left, and facing down angry counterprotesters, left. A key source of inspiration: teen activist Joshua Wong, above in white shirt, a co-founder of the student group Scholarism, which helped kick-start the protests

43

WORLD | HONG KONG

HOWTO

EATNOW

HEALTH

BEST-SELL ING FOOD WRITER

MARK BIT TMAN WANTS

YOU TO STAY IN AND E AT AT

HOME BECAUSE I T ’S GOOD

FOR YOU, I T ’S GOOD FOR

YOUR FAMILY—AND I T ’S FAR

E ASIER THAN YOU THINK

MARK BITTMANpioneered a practical approach to food in his New York Timescolumn, The Minimalist. He is the author of dozens of popular cookbooks, including How to

Cook Everything Fast

J

50

HEALTH | FOOD

ust two generations ago, pre-

paring meals was as much a part of life as eating. Now we’ve given up what is perhaps our best excuse to get together and spend time with the people we love—mealtime—and someone else stands at the stove. We’re either watching cooks on TV like we would a spectator sport or grabbing grub, bagged,

and eating it alone and on the go.The fetishizing of food is everywhere. There are

cutthroat competitions and celebrity chefs with TV shows, and both social and mainstream media are stuffed with an endless blur of blogs, demos and crowdsourced reviews. So why in Julia’s name do so many Americans still eat tons of hyperprocessed food, the stuff that is correctly called junk and should really carry warning labels?

It’s not because fresh ingredients are hard to come by. Supermarkets offer more variety than ever, and there are over four times as many farm-ers’ markets in the U.S. as there were 20 years ago. Nor is it for lack of available information. There are plenty of recipes, how-to videos and cooking classes available to anyone who has a computer, smart-phone or television. If anything, the information is overwhelming.

And yet we aren’t cooking. If you eat three squares a day and behave like most Americans (and increasingly, the world is doing just that), you prob-ably get at least a third of your daily calories outside the home. Nearly two-thirds of us grab fast food once a week, and we get almost 25% of our daily calories from snacks. So we’re eating out or taking in, and we don’t sit down—or we do, but we hurry.

Shouldn’t preparing—and consuming—food be a source of comfort, pride, health, well-being, relaxation, sociability? Something that connects us to other humans? Why would we want to out-source this basic task, especially when outsourc-ing it is so harmful?

For all the hand-wringing about how to fight the obesity epidemic and diet-related maladies like Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, there is a fairly simple solution: Do it yourself. Sure, there are chal-lenges to cooking; there are challenges to fixing income inequality too. Our goal should be to make things better, not to accept such a dismal status quo.

When I talk about cooking, something I’ve been doing for the better part of five decades, I’m not talking about creating elaborate dinner parties or three-day science projects. I’m taking about simple, easy, everyday meals. My mission is to encourage novices and the time- and cash-strapped to feed themselves. Which means we need modest, real-istic expectations, and we need to teach people to cook food that’s good enough to share with family,

friends and, if you must, your Instagram account.Because not cooking is a big mistake—and it’s

one that’s costing us money, good times, control, serenity and, yes, vastly better health.

The Consequence of Convenienceperhaps a return to real cooking needn’t be

far off. A recent Harris poll revealed that 79% of Americans say they enjoy cooking and 30% “love it”; 14% profess to not enjoy kitchen work and just 7% won’t go near the stove at all. But this doesn’t neces-sarily translate to real cooking, and the demographic breakdown from this survey shouldn’t surprise any-one: 52% of those 65 or older cook at home five or more times per week; only a third of millennials do.

I’m almost 65, which makes me part of the so-called convenience generation. Back in the 1950s most of us grew up in households where Mom cooked virtually every night. Depending on where you lived, the quality of the ingredients varied,


but the intention to put a home-cooked meal on the table was pretty much universal. Most people couldn’t afford to do otherwise.

Although frozen dinners were invented in the ’40s, their popularity didn’t boom until televisions became popular a decade or so later. Since then, packaged, pre-prepared meals have been what’s for dinner. The microwave and fast-food chains were the biggest catalysts, but the hegemony of the big food companies—which want to sell anything except the raw ingredients that go into cooking—made the home cook an endangered species.

Still, I find it strange that only a third of young

people report preparing meals at home regularly. Isn’t this the same crowd that rails against pro-cessed junk and champions artisanal and craft cooking? Aren’t they the ones clogging the web with food porn? And isn’t this generation the most likely to say they’re concerned about their health and the well-being of the planet?

If these are truly the values of many millenni-als, then their behavior doesn’t match their beliefs. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 16% of men and 13% of women ages 20 to 39 eat pizza every single day. The top source of calories for the rest of us is baked goods, followed by chicken, sugar-sweetened beverages, alcohol and, yes, pizza. Welcome to the Standard American Diet, which is often referred to as SAD, because it is.

There have been halfhearted but well-publicized efforts by some food companies to reduce calories in the sweetest, most hyperprocessed of these foods, but the SAD is still the polar opposite of the

SPICES AND HERB S

Salt and black pepper

Curry powder

Smoked paprika

Ground cumin

Dried thyme

Dried oregano

Dried rosemary

Chili powder

Dried dill

Fresh herbs

Dried sage

Garlic powder

Ground ginger

Dried chilis

Cayenne

OIL S AND CONDIMENTS

Extra-virgin olive oil

Vegetable oil

Sherry or wine vinegar

Balsamic vinegar

Mustard

Soy sauce

Mayonnaise

Hot sauces

Ketchup

Fish sauce

Rice vinegar

Dark sesame oil

Barbecue sauce

THE PERFECT PANTRY

Having a well-stocked pantry

makes spontaneous cooking doable.

Start with the items that appeal to you

most (Bittman’s are in bold) and build

from there.

A MEAL ANYONE CAN MAKEThese simple, healthy dishes don’t require hard-won

skills, fancy equipment or exotic ingredients—it’s just everyday food, cooked at home

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STAPLESPasta or other

noodles

Rice

Whole grains

Canned beans

Dried beans

Oil-packed tuna

Canned tomatoes

Coconut milk

Tomato paste

Peanut butter

Nuts or seeds

Stock

Honey or maple syrup

Anchovies or sardines

HEALTH | FOOD

healthy, mostly plant-based diet that just about ev-ery expert I know says we should be eating. We consume less than half of the fiber and fruit recom-mended by the USDA, and we eat just 59% of the recommended amount of vegetables. Considering that the government’s standards are not nearly am-bitious enough, the picture is clear: by not cooking at home, we’re not eating the right things, and the dire consequences are hard to overstate.

Annual health care expenses related to obesity and its consequences total $150 billion in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Pre-vention, and over $1 trillion worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. To help quantify both the hidden and the explicit costs of a poor diet, I recently tried to estimate this impact in terms of a most iconic food, the burger, which generates about $70 billion in gross sales annually in the U.S. alone. I concluded that the profit from burgers is more than offset by the damage they cause in obesity and its related diseases and environmental harm.

Cooking real food is the best defense—not to mention that any meal you’re likely to eat at home contains about 200 fewer calories than one you would eat in a restaurant. Of course, anyone who cooks could have told you that.

Something’s Gone Awrythere’s something peculiar about our obses-

sion with the business of cuisine. There are 24/7 TV shows on food, countless food magazines and more Instagram accounts of impossibly beautiful and exotic dishes than one could count or, frankly, stomach. And it’s evident from the haughty, well-

inked celebrity chefs who smile down at us from billboards that the place of food in our day-to-day lives is no match for the place it holds in our culture.

Making food a performance, as entertaining as that can be from our seats in the grandstand, has had a damaging effect on our relationship to cook-ing. In a land of million-dollar kitchens, Himalayan pink salt, dragonfruit, truffle butter and Wagyu skirt steak, most of us feel like outsiders—and as a result, we cook less than we ever have.

Whether it’s because we’re scared or lazy or time-pressed, or simply that we think the food we cook won’t taste as good as the junk we buy, we have allowed others to feed us, rather than taking charge of feeding ourselves. For the sake of our health, our well-being, our palates and the environment, that has to change—and you don’t have to be Giada De Laurentiis to get on board.

A lot has changed since I started cooking in my late teens. Growing up in New York City a mile from the U.N. headquarters, I was spoiled with easy access to cheap international street food. There were dressed-up hot dogs and spicy Korean bowls and hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurants. I got used to those big flavors, so when I went off to college in Massachusetts, where the food at the time was terrible (and unaffordable), it was learn to cook or starve.

So to those Americans, and there are a lot of us, for whom money is a concern, my advice is simple: Buy what you can afford, and cook it yourself. Rice, beans, bacon, salad, bread—few things are cheaper than that. The common prescription is to primarily shop the perimeter of the grocery store, since that’s

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LONG-STORING VEGE TABLES AND FRUIT

Onions

Ginger root

Potatoes

Garlic

Sweet potatoes

Carrots

Cabbage

Frozen fruit

Celery root

Squashes

Shallots

Lemons and limes

Oranges

Apples

Frozen vegetables

where fresh produce, meat and seafood, and dairy are. But you’ve still got to dive into the aisles, and not just for toilet paper. Besides beans, whole grains and pasta, there are staples like oil and spices and inter-national ingredients like rice noodles, coconut milk and soy sauce that can bring life to affordable basics.

And to save money and still eat well you don’t need local, organic ingredients; all you need is real food. I’m not saying local food isn’t better; it is. But there is plenty of decent food in the more than 37,000 grocery stores in the U.S. The average grocer carries about 44,000 items.

The other sections you should get to know are the freezer aisle and the canned-goods shelves. Frozen produce is still produce; canned tomatoes are still tomatoes. Just make sure you’re getting real food without tons of added salt or sugar. Ask yourself, Would Grandma consider this food? Does it look like something that might occur in nature? It’s pretty much common sense: you want to buy food, not unidentifiable foodlike objects.

You don’t have to hit the grocery store daily, nor do you need an abundance of skill. But since fewer than half of Americans say they cook at an inter-mediate level and only 20% describe their cooking skills as advanced, the crisis is also one of confi-dence. And the only remedy for that is practice.

So, What’s for Dinner?there’s no mystique to cooking the evening

meal. You just have to do a little thinking ahead and redefine what qualifies as dinner. It can be simple: a soup, even one based on frozen vegetables; a piece of meat and a loaf of hearty bread; a chicken that roasts while you make a salad; pasta with vegeta-bles; tacos. Eggs and pancakes seem like treats after sundown, especially for kids. And, I mean, what’s pizza? An open-faced cheese-and-tomato sandwich. Do this with a couple of extra vegetables on top and cooking will start to feel more accessible—and ap-petizing, if you like pizza.

To get comfortable in the kitchen, pare down your ambitions, ease up on your expectations and start with something manageable that you will actually enjoy eating. Like any skill, cooking gets easier as you do it more; every time you cook, you advance your lev-el of expertise. Someday you won’t even need recipes.

I get that spontaneity is intimidating; so are many recipes. My advice is that you not pay attention to the number of steps and ingredients, because they can be deceiving. Instead, to get an accurate idea of the work involved, see how items need to be prepared. Beware of the hidden steps that appear after the in-gredients, like “2 lb. butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into 1-in. cubes”—that’s 10 minutes’ work right there. (In How to Cook Everything Fast, I incor-porated all the slicing and dicing into the directions, but that’s not how most recipes are written.)

Are any do-ahead tips mentioned? If so, try to use them. And remember that the estimated time is of-ten not accurate. Some recipes have you scrambling for 20 minutes, while others that take two hours

SO SIMPLE, SO SPEEDYFrom left: The skillet pear crisp makes for an

easy cleanup, the vegetable soup borrows from the freezer aisle, and sautéed greens take minutes


54

may include unattended cooking times that free you to do other things as the foods do theirs.

Time, I realize, is the biggest obstacle to cook-ing for most people. I get some flak for my position, but I stick by it: You must adjust your priorities to find time to cook. Look at your activities and then do some juggling. Move a TV to the kitchen and watch your favorite shows while you’re standing at the sink. Get up 20 minutes earlier so you can get dinner into a slow cooker or pack last night’s leftovers for today’s lunch. Keep the death grip on your devices if you must; they’re smartest when called upon to help you find recipes and learn new techniques. No one is asking you to give up activities you like, but if you’re watching food shows on TV, try cooking instead (or at the very least, do both at the same time).

The best part is, you don’t have to go it alone. Cooking with other people—spouses and kids if

you have them, friends and extended family if you don’t—can be an immensely satisfying and relax-ing social activity, with the added benefit of having something delicious to eat when you’re done.

If you haven’t ever tried this, give it a whirl; many people find it life-changing. Back in my college days, I was lucky enough to have a roommate who was a prep cook at a restaurant. That’s how I learned to cook basics like hamburgers and scrambled eggs. That’s also when I learned that bringing someone else into the kitchen allows you to share a valuable skill—while helping you put aside any feelings of not-good-enough that your kitchen may elicit.

So forget the blogs and the celebrities and the TV shows and just cook. Preparing my own meals changed my life, setting me on a career-long course to make it easy for others to do the same. I suspect if you try it, it will become your mission too. ■

WHOLE ROAST CHICKEN

MAKES 4 OR MORE SERVINGSTIME: ABOUT AN HOUR, LARGELY UNAT TENDED

1 3-to-4-lb. whole chicken4 tbsp. olive oilSalt and pepper4 whole heads garlic (optional)2 lemons, halved (optional)

1. Heat oven to 450°F. Put a heavy roasting pan with a wire rack (optional) on a low rack in the oven. Trim any excess fat from chicken, rub with 2 tbsp. of olive oil, and sprinkle inside and out with salt and pepper. Slice garlic crosswise to trim off tips and reveal cloves.

2. When oven is hot, put chicken, breast side up, in the middle of the heated pan. Tuck garlic and lemons around the outside and drizzle with remaining oil. Roast, undis-turbed, for 40 to 50 min.; the chicken is done when a quick-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the thigh registers 155°F to 165°F or when its juices run clear and there are no traces of pink in the meat.

3. Transfer chicken to a platter and let it rest for at least 5 min. If you’re eating the chicken right away, quarter it or cut it into parts and serve with the garlic, lemon and some of the pan juices. To store in the fridge, let the chicken

cool, then cut it into parts. Store it with the garlic and lemon in a freezer bag or tightly sealed container for up to a week.

VEGETABLE SOUP

MAKES 4 SERVINGSTIME: 20 TO 40 MIN., DEPENDING ON THE DESIRED TEXTURE

1⁄4 cup olive oil plus more for drizzling1 large onion, choppedSalt and pepper2 garlic cloves, minced8 cups any chopped frozen vegetables6 cups chicken or vegetable stock

1. Put olive oil in a large pot over medium-high heat. Add onion, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cook, stirring occasion-ally, until it softens a bit, 2 to 3 min. Add garlic, stirring occasionally, until fragrant, 2 to 3 min.

2. Meanwhile, organize packages of vegetables on your counter from firmest (longest-cooking, like squash or beans) to most tender (like spinach and other greens). Start adding the vegetables,

firmest first, stirring oc-casionally until they thaw and begin to get tender. (Timing will vary by veg-etable; test frequently.)

3. Continue adding and stirring, adjusting the heat to prevent burning, until the vegetables in the pot begin to brown in places. Add the stock, raise the heat to high, and cook, stirring once or twice, until the soup comes to a boil. Reduce the heat to a steady bubble and cook until the vegetables are as tender as you like. Taste and adjust the seasoning, then pour the soup into 4 bowls, drizzle with more olive oil and serve.

SKILLET PEAR CRISP

MAKES 4 TO 6 SERVINGSTIME: 15 TO 20 MIN.

6 tbsp. (3⁄4 stick) butter1⁄2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans1 tsp. grated lemon zest1⁄2 cup rolled oats1⁄4 cup shredded un-sweetened coconut1⁄3 cup packed brown sugar1⁄2 tsp. cinnamonSalt

2 lb. pears, unpeeled but trimmed, cored and chopped

1. Put 5 tbsp. butter in large skillet over low heat. When butter is melted, add nuts, lemon zest, oats, coconut, packed brown sugar, cinnamon and a pinch of salt; toss to coat. Cook, stirring frequently, until topping is golden and crisp, 6 to 8 min. Remove from the pan; no need to wipe it out. (The topping can be made ahead and stored in an airtight con-tainer up to a day or so in advance.)

2. Put 1 tbsp. butter in the skillet over medium heat. When it’s melted, add fruit and cook, stirring occasionally until pears are soft but not mushy, 5 to 6 min. Scatter the topping over the warm fruit and serve. (This recipe can be made with any fruit you like, including berries, apples and mangoes. Adjust cooking time based on firmness of the fruit.)

These recipes are adapted from How to

Cook Everything Fast (Houghton Mifflin

Harcourt)

LONG-STORING DAIRY AND

ME ATEggs

Bacon or ham

Milk or cream

Butter

Yogurt

Parmesan cheese

Other hard cheeses

Ricotta cheese

Goat cheese

Sour cream

HEALTH | FOOD

B I T T M A N ’ S G O -T O

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MOVIES

Race Relations In the satirical comedy Dear

White People (out Oct. 17)—a hit at the Sundance Film Festival—beloved big man on campus Troy

(Brandon P. Bell, above) butts heads with ex-girlfriend Sam

(Tessa Thompson), a DJ who hosts a controversial radio show.

TELEVISION

Wedding Bells After dating for six years,

Annie (Happy Endings’ Casey Wilson) and Jake (Party Down’s Ken Marino) make a tumultu-

ous journey to the altar in NBC’sMarry Me (premiering Oct. 14), which is loosely based on creator David Caspe’s marriage to Wilson.

MOVIES

Egomaniac The biggest jerk in your life has nothing on Philip (Jason

Schwartzman), a novelist whose ego ruins his relationship with

girlfriend Ashley (Elisabeth Moss) in Listen Up Philip, hitting

select theaters Oct. 17.

The CulturePAGE 62

By Nolan Feeney

THE WEEKABOUT A BOY IS

REMADE FOR NBC

Duvall and Downey previously acted to-gether in 1998’s The

Gingerbread Man

The Culture

“how did i come to asking for a selfie in

a swag hat?” Robert Downey Jr. asks, fidgeting with a fishing hat while looking over Venice’s Abbot Kinney Boulevard from the third-floor balcony of his gorgeous, three-story California production office. His chef is cooking a three-course meal for him and Robert Duvall, his co-star in The Judge, in which they play an estranged father and son, before they go out to screen the new movie for British Academy of Film and Television Arts voters. When Duvall walks in, there’s hugging, some chatting—about steak restaurants, football or horses, since that’s all Duvall likes to talk about—and then Downey’s request: “I want to ask you if we can take a pic-ture with The Judge hats.” The two put on the pro-motional fishing hats while a Downey employee takes a cell-phone shot for social media.

Duvall, 83, didn’t want to be in the film at first, turning it down largely because of a scene in which Downey, 49, cleans him up after an accident on the toilet. “It was so negative. I said, ‘I don’t know if I want to do that, sh-tting all over yourself,’” Duvall says.

“Let me qualify that,” Downey says. “Some-times you’re considering something, and you say, ‘Is this really worth it?’”

“And I’m tired of dying in movies,” Duvall adds. “I’m f-cking dying all the time. Every time you turn around, some guy is getting old and gets cancer. I don’t want to do that sh-t. But this is well written and accompanied by cer-tain talents, so you say, ‘I have to look at this.’”

Whereas Downey is unerringly charming—instantly ferreting out commonalities and revealing minor intimacies while energetically giving an office tour in sweats and a T-shirt from his martial-arts school—Duvall, in stiff

jeans and a blue blazer with gold buttons, is unerringly honest. Which is the basis for the conflict in The Judge, the first movie produced by Team Downey, the company formed by the actor and his wife Susan. Downey plays a slick, churlish Chicago lawyer who defends creeps (“Everyone wants Atticus Finch until there’s a dead hooker in a hot tub”) and returns to his small hometown, where he defends his strict, estranged father, the local judge, in a murder trial. It’s a simple dynamic, which director Da-vid Dobkin pitched to the two actors as a west-ern with “a sheriff dad and his gunslinger son.” It comes from Dobkin’s own story—a boomer classic retold by Gen X—of having to pause his messy midlife to take care of a sick parent he had issues with.

The movie also has Vera Farmiga, Billy Bob Thornton, Vincent D’Onofrio and Dax Shepard, but they don’t get much screen time. “The first audiences thought the movie was really slow and wanted to get to Downey and Duvall,” Dobkin explains. “So we went the other way in the editing studio. Almost everything with Downey and Duvall is in the movie. There’s one scene that we cut out. And it’s amazing.”

After Downey’s chef brings out crab cakes made from Duvall’s mom’s recipe (which was from Reader’s Digest), Downey goes over the long list of Duvall roles he loves and how this one is different, an internalized Great Santini—the 1979 film that brought Duvall his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role, before he won for 1983’s Tender Mercies. When I ask Duvall when he first noticed Downey, the world’s highest-paid ac-tor, he pauses, taking a sip from his root beer. Downey, again, intervenes to help his co-star.

Daddy Day CareThe Judge turns Duvall and Downey into a father-son act By Joel Stein/Los Angeles

Photograph by Jeff Vespa

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“I think in Toronto,” he jokes, referring to the Toronto International Film Festi-val, where the film premiered. “I think in the screening.” Eventually, Duvall says it was Sherlock Holmes, which came out five years ago. “Sometimes I go to the movies. Sometimes I don’t,” Duvall explains. “They asked what my favorite performance of his is, and I said Chaplin,and I haven’t seen it yet.” A little later, talking about how universal father-and-son stories are, Downey has to pause to tell Duvall what Less Than Zero was.

As Downey pulls out bottle after bottle of vitamins and amino acids to take with his meal, Duvall says he doesn’t take nearly as many pills. “He’s a very healthy guy. Tremendously healthy guy,” Duvall says of Downey.

“You didn’t know me when, did you?” Downey replies, an arch reference to his well-documented issues with addiction.

“I told you on that other movie, I saw you sitting in the corner. You looked very lonely and alone,” says Duvall of working together on Robert Altman’s 1998 film, The Gingerbread Man, though they never spoke on the set.

“Why didn’t you come over and give me some condolences?” Downey asks.

“I was in and out. We were all in and out,” Duvall says. “One day I was rehears-ing in [Altman’s] house and there was no food, so by mistake I ate their kid’s lunch. Why didn’t he give me something to eat?”

“If you eat my kid’s lunch, it would be an honor. It would give him a story,” says Downey. Replies Duvall: “I never even saw the movie.”

Not Trying to Be Seendowney kept the set of the judgeloose, taking moments between shoot-ing heavy scenes to get the other actors to compete at improv, to see who could do the best zombies after they had all seen World War Z. But Duvall keeps a set even

looser. He was the one asking everyone to go out for dinner, when he wasn’t bring-ing in Texas-marshal buddies to visit the set (he wrote and directed Wild Horses, an upcoming movie about marshals, with James Franco and Josh Hartnett) or taking off to meet Tom Brady. “The most surpris-ing thing was how open he was to all the improvisations and how willing he was to play before the cameras started going,” says D’Onofrio, who plays Duvall’s other son. “I held him too high and didn’t real-ize he would do that kind of thing.”

“The mystique that people hold around someone like Duvall, he’ll break that down as soon as you meet him,” Downey says. “He’s not interested in utilizing that. I wonder why that is?” Duvall deflects it by talking about Marlon Brando, eventu-ally saying that in The Godfather, he would have liked to see him tip over a table to show his violence.

But over fish, creamed spinach and steak with truffled mushrooms, Duvall says he likes acting now more than in the 1970s. Downey adds, “If you talk to iconic figures of their generation and you talk about actors these days, they’ve got plenty to say about how it used to be and what these kids don’t know.” Duvall nods. “I’m the opposite,” he says. “They’re better now. I worked with a director who said, ‘When I say action, tense up, goddamn it.’” He’s harking back to the

way Henry Hathaway directed him in True Grit—the 1969 version starring John Wayne. “There’s less of that now. The good directors want to see what you can do. If you did Moneyball 40 years ago, it would have been inundated with carica-ture performances.”

Neither Downey nor Duvall writes down notes about his characters, and di-rector Dobkin doesn’t rehearse material, wanting to capture the first interactions onscreen. And Duvall would always prefer to hold back. Downey remembers, “Bobby would say, ‘Wait, wait, wait—let’s not get to the arguing here. Remember, that crescendos in the kitchen.’” Duvall’s approach, says Downey, was “Let’s not repeat a feeling.” He moves his arms in a figure eight. “I see Bobby do this a lot with his hands,” he says. “Nothing is be-ing jammed down your throat.”

When Dobkin looked at the dailies, he was surprised by how subtle Duvall was. “We’d look at his closeups and be like, ‘How is he doing that?’” the director says. “There’s so much going on inside of him and so little outside. His choices are so simple. He’s just existing in the space. He’s transcended acting.” To Dobkin’s re-lief, Downey kept it nearly as simple. “An actor like Downey goes from being a big movie star to a [smaller-scale] dramatic movie, and a lot of them chew the scen-ery up to prove something. And he never does that. He’s not trying to be seen, ever.”

After the chef serves slices of gluten-free, dairy-free banana cream pie (it keeps Downey feeling light), Downey drinks a mugful of espresso (it keeps him awake). Duvall asks if he can keep the swag fish-ing cap from the photo. “I need a hat,” he says. Downey responds, “Trust me, we’ve got plenty,” and leads Duvall downstairs to an office to load him up with promo-tional hats, shirts and paperweights. It doesn’t really feel all that different from a scene in The Judge. ■

‘I’m tired of dying in movies ... Every time you turn around, some guy is getting old and gets cancer.’—robert duvall

Paternity test In The Judge, Duvall plays an irascible jurist charged with murder; Downey is the egotistical son who becomes his defense attorney

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Reviews

at the toronto film festival world premiere

of St. Vincent, Bill Murray was asked how he landed the title role of a grumpy old man. He looked at writer-director Theodore Melfi and said, “Because you couldn’t get Jack Nicholson.” The character of Vincent, a seedy Brooklyn misanthrope, might seem an odd candidate for a schoolboy’s “Saints Among Us” project, the premise of Melfi’s movie, but he does fit the template Nicholson established in As Good as It Gets and The Bucket List—a crab apple that ultimately turns Delicious. And Murray at 64, 13 years Nichol-son’s junior, has the gravelly gravitas to bring some ornery life to a reductive fable of redemption.

After Bad Santa, Bad Teacher and Bad Grandpa comes Bad Saint. Vincent wanders Sheepshead Bay like Marley’s ghost, from the local bar to Belmont racetrack to the arms of the pregnant Russian hooker Daka (Naomi Watts). He’s deeply in hock every-where, so he could use the $12 an hour a new neigh-bor (Melissa McCarthy) with a double-shift hospital job will pay him to mind Oliver, her 12-year-old son. Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher) has his own problems: an absent father, his own personal bully (Dario Barossa) at school and now this horrible geezer as a babysitter.

If you think Vincent will become Oliver’s nemesis or predator rather than his mentor and savior, you are imagining a more complex movie than Melfi, a

MOVIES

Bad Saint. Bill Murray gets a heart transplant in the hokey St. VincentBy Richard Corliss

MUSIC

Lost and FoundThe five Canadi-ans who make up the veteran indie pop band Stars are unabashed romantics and unrepentant hams. No One Is Lost,their seventh studio album, revolves around a single idealistic theme: everyone struggles, but no one’s immune to the redemptive power of a great song. Highlights of the album—recorded at Mount Zoomer, a Montreal studio above a defunct gay disco that’s hosted prominent Canadian bands like Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade—have the pulse of a dance floor, like the epic opener “From the Night” and the anthemic title track. Because the band lives on the edge between endearing-ly earnest and pain-fully cheesy, there are some inevitable duds. A line like “I call it poetry/ it’s called a pop hook,” from the dreary “You Keep Coming Up,” is an impos-sible sell, but that’s always been half the fun with Stars: they’re a high-risk, high-reward propo-sition, and worth it.—JAMIESON COX

TV-commercial director making his first feature, has in mind. Yes, Vincent takes Oliver to the bar and the track; he spumes his bad moods all over this very decent kid. But he gives the boy life lessons, like how to fight off the brutes at school. Vincent also has a secret charity, which shows he has a heart, and it won’t stop aching.

The overqualified actors often give quirky life to a script that denudes their characters of nuance. Mc-Carthy goes nicely pianissi-mo for a change, and fretful rather than shrewish. Lie-berher offers charmingly understated counterpoint to the star curmudgeon. Watts chips in with a few chipper chippie scenes.

And Murray reminds us that he’s a precious movie resource. Tooling around in a wood-paneled ’83 LeBaron convertible, he inhabits the role like an ingenious squatter in an abandoned tenement, picking through the detritus of plot and finding nourishment for Vincent’s pain and way-ward grace.

And yet nothing can make a discerning viewer feel worse than a feel-good movie like this one. Melfi ends scenes with visual punch lines that play like rim shots, forces salvation on everyone (including Oliver’s bully) and truckles shamelessly for emotional uplift. This barrage is enough to turn any saint in the audience into the old, grouchy Vincent, before he got canonized.

WHERE’S BILL BEEN?

A movie star for 30 years, Mur-ray has played the lead in only three films since 2004: Broken Flowers, Hyde

Park on Hudson and St. Vincent

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The Culture


in a crowded beverly hills, calif.,

hotel ballroom in July, a member of the Television Critics Association asked Gina Rodriguez, star of the new CW comedy Jane the Virgin, a seemingly simple ques-tion. Why had she turned down a chance to test for the Lifetime series Devious Maids to pursue a role like this one, about a young woman who’s artificially insemi-nated as the result of a hospital mix-up?

“Every role that I’ve chosen has been [one] that I think [is] going to push for-ward the idea of my culture, of women, of beauty,” Rodriguez, 30, said in a speech that quickly made the rounds online. “I wasn’t going to let my introduction to the world be one of a story that I think has been told many times.”

When Jane the Virgin premieres on Oct. 13, Rodriguez makes that introduc-tion playing not a maid but the kind of character she never saw on TV as a kid. Unlike Modern Family and Brooklyn Nine-Nine (which feature multiple Latino ac-tors in supporting roles) or Orange Is the New Black (whose Latina characters are all in prison), Jane the Virgin puts an ordinary Latina front and center without making a big deal about it—even though it is a big deal for Rodriguez. “To read a story about a young girl where her ethnicity wasn’t at the forefront, where her dual identity was so integrated in life that it didn’t feel like a separate conversation, was such a breath of fresh air,” the actress tells Time.

Loosely based on the 2002 Venezuelan telenovela Juana la Virgen, the show fol-lows a religious 23-year-old whose life is turned upside down when a frazzled doc-tor confuses her with a fertility patient. Jane’s Catholic grandmother is horrified; her mother, who got pregnant with Jane as a teenager, is more understanding; Jane’s boyfriend, who learns of the mis-hap midproposal, is dumbfounded; and the accidental donor, who happens to be Jane’s former crush, a cancer survivor and the owner of the hotel where she works, is blindsided. And that’s just the first episode. Rodriguez’s down-to-earth

Happy Accident. Gina Rodriguez maybe the biggest miracle in Jane the VirginBy Nolan Feeney

warmth and contagious enthusiasm helped make her an instant favorite when it came time to cast the role. “You expect it to be a really long search, and to see someone come in, literally the third person [to audition], it was amazing,” says executive producer Jennie Snyder Urman. “She’s 100% genuine and 100% fun. Sometimes I feel like I’m hanging out with one of my college friends.”

Rodriguez, the daughter of Puerto Rican parents, was born and raised in Chicago as the only artist in her family. (Her older sisters are an investment bank-er and a doctor.) Inspired by screen icon Rita Moreno, a vocal critic of the limited roles available to Latina actresses, Rodri-guez decided early on that she wouldn’t take roles that cast Latinas in a stereo-typical light. That sometimes meant the graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts turned down jobs when she needed them most. “I have fought so hard to not take roles,” Rodri-

guez says. “I had to fight [myself] like, ‘Gina, you can’t pay rent. Are you really going to say no?’”

She didn’t have much to choose from. Hispanic people made up 17% of the U.S. population in 2013, and they’re major en-tertainment consumers: they purchased 25% of all movie tickets that year, accord-ing to the Motion Picture Association of America. But according to a study from Co-lumbia University, there wasn’t a single lead role for Latino actors in the top net-work TV shows or films of 2013. That’s in contrast to the 1950s, when the Latino pop-ulation was smaller but commanded more prominent roles. (There have been occa-sional exceptions, like America Ferrera in Ugly Betty, which ran from 2006 to 2010 on ABC, and stand-up comedian Cristela Alonzo’s new sitcom, Cristela, also on ABC.)

Jane the Virgin doesn’t shy away from its Latino heritage. It features an interna-tional cast (Jane’s father, for example, is played by Mexican actor Jaime Camil) and frequently pays tribute to the stylis-tic tropes and ridiculous story lines of telenovelas. But it’s not a “Latino show” either. Rodriguez expects the story of a multigenerational family responding to life’s curveballs to resonate widely.

“What’s beautiful about Jane the Virginis it is giving you a glimpse into a life that happens to be Latina and also Amer-ican without hitting you over the head with it,” she says. When Jane’s grand-mother speaks to her in Spanish, Jane an-swers in English; at home, Jane calls her abuela but says grandma to her friends. This kind of code switching isn’t a major plot point or conflict, just a fact of life. The same goes for the cast, which in-cludes a couple of gay and lesbian charac-ters, and for Jane’s shape—you won’t hear a peep about how she’s both beauti-ful and not a size 2. On Jane the Virgin, di-versity is paramount but rarely discussed by name. For Rodriguez, simply sharing her point of view is what matters.

“The show is bigger than myself, and it’s going to be big for the Latino commu-nity,” Rodriguez says. “[It’s like] finally seeing themselves on the billboard of Fast & Furious, of Superman, of Spider-Man, to see themselves in the same arena that they see everyone else in. They’re invited to the same party—and we belong here.” ■

Television

Tuned In James Poniewozik On Jane the VirginThe accidental-insemination story line in the CW’s Jane the Virgin isn’t a biblical Immaculate Conception. Yet it’s still a kind of miracle when a new actress appears and it’s as if someone upgraded your TV set. Adept with both physical comedy and soulful emotion, Gina Rodriguez has an instant everywoman charm and eyes that transmit feeling with fiber-optic clarity. Like a good telenovela, Jane careens through absurd plot twists, but it’s instantly grounded with Rodriguez. Jane may or may not live up to the promise of its conception, but either way, it looks like a star has been born.

Photograph by Ramona Rosales for TIME

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The Culture

in the first chapter of

Kerry Howley’s Thrown,which is probably the most bizarre and fascinat-ing book I’ve read this year, a graduate student in philosophy wanders out of a conference in Des

Moines, Iowa, on phenomenology—the philosophical study of consciousness—and into a mixed-martial-arts event that happens to be taking place in the same convention center. She stays, though she’s not sure why, and during the last fight of the night she has an extraordinary experience. A kind of rapturous clarity comes over her: “It was as if someone had oil-slicked my synapses, such that thoughts could whip and whistle their way across my mind without the friction I’d come to experience as thought itself.”

Somehow, witness-ing the sweaty, brutal-ly physical humanity of the fighters frees her from the limitations of her own state of person-hood. It’s a breakthrough in applied phenomenology. “This exhibition,” she thinks later, “what-ever it may be, has ushered ecstatic ex-perience back into the world.” The grad student, whose name is Kit, will spend the rest of the book chasing that high.

Something like this, although not exactly this, probably actually happened. Thrown is billed as nonfiction, but its author is neither a grad student in phi-losophy nor named Kit—Kit is Howley’s

Fighting Words. One writer’s journey through the world of mixed martial artsBy Lev Grossman

Books

fictional alter ego, which she has adopted for reasons I don’t fully understand. But the fighters are real, and so is Kit/Howley’s obsession with them. She spends months following two in particular: Sean Huff-man, a lumbering, gnarly-eared journey-man, then 32, and Erik “New Breed” Koch, then 21, a pale, whippet-like prodigy. She attaches herself to their entourages and watches them train, eat, get drunk, get high, drive around, talk smack, play video games and, of course, fight.

Having read Thrown—and squinted at actual footage of both men fighting, in miniature, on YouTube—I still have no real idea why cage fighting induces a state of ecstasy in Kit. But I know that it does, because of the way she writes about it:

Sean moves like a fat man on hot coals, never still for a moment but each step fractions of an inch off the ground. Cobb jabs. Sean’s back is to me and he vibrates hard twice in time with the

glorious unfurling of Cobb’s arms. They dance in my direction; Sean

has gone red in the soft skin under both eyes. When Cobb leans into one leg and shoots the other across Sean’s white calf I hear the knock of bone against bone and

feel the crowd hear it behind my back, the small parts of 3,000 ears

vibrating in tune.

The precision of Howley’s prose reminds me of Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace: she’s so involved with the fight, it’s as if she were

trying to eat it with words. Howley writes like someone who’s been flayed,

all nerve endings exposed, no barriers between her and the world around her. She writes like somebody in ecstasy.

Thrown also narrates the long troughs between the fights, which are decided-ly unecstatic. Outside the octagon the fighters are like sleepwalkers, trudging through dead-end jobs, only intermit-tently solvent, bouncing from spare couch to cheap motel to crappy apart-ment. They’re utterly uninterested in

real life. The book’s title is a wry joke—there ain’t no thrones in Thrown—but it’s

Kerry Howley writes like someone who’s been flayed, all nerve endings exposed—she writes like somebody in ecstasy

TO READ AN EXCLUSIVE

EXCERPT FROM KERRY HOWLEY’S

BOOK, GO TO time.com/thrown

Ring leader Erik Koch, one of the book’s subjects, has fought since he was a tween

http://time.com/thrown


O Pioneers! Walter Isaacson’s new book celebrates original minds of the computer age By Eliza Gray

also an allusion to a Heideggerian concept that Kit glosses as the “poignant sense of having been hurled into the world without preparation or consent.” Only in the octagon can the fighters wake up and briefly float free of their existential pre-dicament. To them we’re the sleepwalk-ers. “It’s interesting to me,” one fighter says, “that so many people are out of touch with what it means to be alive.”

Thrown is also a very funny book, and some of the comedy comes from the extreme disparity between Kit’s hyper-active verbal intelligence and the utter intellectual inertness of her subjects. The fighters are, almost without excep-tion, profoundly boring: the first time Kit meets Erik he spends an hour show-ing her pictures on his phone of meals he’s eaten (“a roast beef sandwich, big as a baby, glistening with grease”). She transcribes their inane conversations the way Boswell transcribed Johnson: “Have you tried blueberry muffin tops?” “No.” “You haven’t lived.”

But Kit never condescends to her sub-jects. She seems to get that her extreme academic preciousness is in its own way as absurd as the fighters’ total lack of it, and that although their genius is purely physical, it’s still genius. “To watch Erik move,” she writes, “was to watch Carte-sian dualism disproved.” And Kit’s not always easy company herself. She’s a world-class observer but also an insuffer-able grad student. (I say this as a recover-ing insufferable grad student myself.) She’s pretentious and self-involved, and sometimes she seems interested in the fighters only for the next hit of transcen-dence she can get off them.

But even Kit’s occasional unpleasant-ness is oddly refreshing. Most writers these days work overtime to be likable, but she’s too honest for that (if that’s something you can say about a fictional construct). And if she doesn’t always care about the fighters as people, she always makes the reader care. My inter-est in professional fighting is nil, but I hung on the outcome of every fight like a rabid fan. When Sean tries to explain to Kit why he fights, he can only say, “I like to feel things.” Me too. Martial arts doesn’t do it for me, but great writing like Thrown does. ■

the biographer of singular geniuses such as albert ein-

stein and Steve Jobs takes on a slew of them inThe Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.As it turns out, inventions we cannot imagine living without—the computer and the Internet—were not the work of a few rogue whizzes in garages whose names are now famous (though they helped). Across a century and a half of innovation, lesser-known masters laid the digital foundation. Here are just a few:

THE WOMEN OF ENIACResetting switches and moving cables on the University of Pennsylvania’s massive 1940s computer was a routine task, maybe too much so for the male engineers: women handled programming.

GRACE HOPPERWhile working on Harvard’s 10,000-lb. (4,535 kg) Mark I in the 1940s, Hopper developed the compiler, a concept that would allow programs to be made for multiple machines. Her team also coined the term bug after they found a moth in the wire relays.

RAY TOMLINSONIn 1971 the MIT engineer devised a way for people to message one another using the @ symbol to designate a digital address. That seemingly inconsequential hack, as Tomlinson thought of it, became email.

JUSTIN HALLIn 1994, as a freshman at Swarthmore, Hall kept a “web log”of irreverent personal musings. That type of digital exhibitionism, published in reverse chronological order, was the prototypical blog.

DOUGLAS ENGELBARTAmong Engelbart’s many inventions was an ergo-nomically carved piece of mahogany that a user could roll across a desk-top to move a cursor on a screen. And what does a chassis with a tail of cord look like? A mouse.

ADA LOVELACEUsing her skills as a mathematician, Lord Byron’s daughter wrote the first algorithm meant for computer analysis in 1843 and thus became the first published programmer.

TO READ ISAACSON ON

MICROPAYMENTS, GO TO time.com/

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YOU WILL TRAVEL IN A LAND OF MARVELS.

—JULES VERNE

BRILLIANTLY CRISP DISPLAY • REMARKABLY THIN DESIGN

EFFORTLESS PAGE TURNING • LIGHT THAT ADJUSTS WITH YOU

INTRODUCING

The Culture

QUICK TALK

Andrew LincolnOn Oct. 12, the 41-year-old actor returns as Rick Grimes, the leading man in AMC’s The Walking Dead. The show, in which bands of frazzled survivors try to navigate a zombie-infested apocalypse, has grown progressively darker and more popular over the past few years. —matt vella

When you showed up to the premiere event without a beard, people freaked about what it could mean for this season’s plot. How does it feel to have facial hair that can launch a thousand blog posts? Plotwise, it could mean an extended flashback, I found a razor or I’m dead. But I had no idea the sort of shock waves that being clean-shaven would make. Is it difficult working on a show that has such passionate fans? The first time I saw my face tattooed on

somebody’s body, that was pretty over-whelming. Which is harder to get used to shooting: zombie-on-human brutality or

human-on-human brutality? The thing I’m more interested in, certainly

this season, is the human factor. We are moving into a much more terrifying and psychologically scary landscape, because the peo-ple that inhabit this world now are either very dangerous, very pragmatic or very organized. Or all three. Has any of this desensitized you to onscreen violence? No. I read a script for a movie recently, and I couldn’t finish it. I was terrified. I had to phone my agent and say, “It’s really great. I think it’s going to be a hit. But I can’t do it because it’s too scary.” I’m still as soft as when I walked into the job.

THE DIGITS

3,097 Number of pieces in the world’s largest collection of Harry Potter memorabilia, owned by Menahem Asher Silva Vargas of Mexico City

Pop Chart

REAL TALK

Nope, that’s not a photograph—it’s an oil painting by American artist Richard Estes, who was a major figure in the photo-realism movement that got started in the late 1960s. Bus With Reflection of the Flatiron Building (1966–67) is one of many Estes works on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s retrospective “Richard Estes’ Realism” through Feb. 8, 2015.

Mars willrevive CrispyM&M’s in theU.S.—after a full decade—in 2015.

JP Gibson, a 5-year-old diagnosed with acute lympho-blastic leukemia in 2012, got to sign a one-daycontract toplay for theUtah Jazz.

Asking for names is reportedlyverboten at the Starbucks located at CIA headquarters.

Creators David Lynch and Mark Frost will helm a newTwin Peaksseries on Show-time in 2016.

LOVE IT

By Eric Dodds, Nolan Feeney, Samantha Grossman and Laura Stampler

LIFTOFF This house bubbling up over the earth’s surface might resemble a massive diorama—or a monstrous Photoshop creation—but it’s actually a sculpture, Firing for Effect, and not even 4 ft. (1.2 m) in diameter. All its details were hand-painted by Thomas Doyle, one of 45 artists featured in the book Big Art/Small Art, which highlights works that play with scale in unusual ways.

VERBATIM

‘I don’t want to be labeled “gay.”’

RAVEN-SYMONÉ, actress and former star of The Cosby Show and That’s So Raven,explaining to Oprah Winfrey that she doesn’t want to be defined by the fact that she’s

dating a woman. She added, “I want to be labeled ‘a human who loves humans.’”

The Culture

A Japanese company debuted a “tranquility chair” with giant, human-looking arms to hug sitters.

Jimmy Kimmel is McAfee’s “most danger-ous” celebrityof 2014, mean-ing that search-ing for his name can often lead to virus-laden websites.

Jeopardy!’s recent “WhatWomen Want”category was designed to prompt answers like “What is a vacuum cleaner?”

North West has dolls madeto resemble herparents Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.

FOR TIME’S COMPLETE TV, FILM AND MUSIC

COVERAGE, VISIT time.com/

entertainment

LEAVE ITTWEET BEAT

Which Celebs Should Duet

Next?We asked our Twitter followers who would

make worthy—or just funny—successors to

album collaborators like Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett or Pink and

folk artist Dallas Green.

MARIAH CAREY AND ARIANA GRANDE

“So we can have music evidence of what

happens when the new Supreme is chosen.”

—@alex_abads

GRAHAM NASH AND QUESTLOVE

“Because why the hell not?”—@fabflabulous

MACKLEMORE AND IGGY AZALEA

“Because they’re the king and queen of rap.”—@hunterschwartz

KANYE WEST AND TAYLOR SWIFT

“Would cause a stir.”—@badlydrawndobs

M&M’S: MARS; BUS WITH REFLECTION OF THE FLATIRON BUILDING, 1966–67: RICHARD ESTES—MARLBOROUGH GALLERY, © RICHARD ESTES; FIRING FOR

EFFECT (DETAIL), 2010: THOMAS DOYLE; DOLLS: CELINE’S DOLLS; DUETS: GETTY IMAGES (8); LINCOLN: AMANDA EDWARD—GETTY IMAGES; TWIN PEAKS: ABC

http://time.com/entertainment

http://time.com/entertainment


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On Becoming a Better FeministI work to publicize HeForShe, though not as hard as I work to publicize my working for HeForShe

Donahue, she was equally flummoxed. “I’m from Zimbabwe,” she explained.

Looking for more concrete advice, I called my mom. She had small concerns about some references in my columns but was more worried about my 5-year-old son Laszlo. He had recently told her that her husband and I were “smart” but that she and my lovely wife Cassandra were “pretty.” She thought this might stem from the fact that I’m always telling Cas-sandra that she’s pretty instead of smart.

The problem, I explained, is that I get a ton of credit with Cassandra when I call her pretty. My mom said the sexist priori-ties society had instilled in Cassandra were no excuse to further propagate them. So I immediately walked over to Cassandra and said, “You were really smart today.”

“About what?” she asked. This does not happen when I tell her she looks pretty.

“The decisions you made,” I said.“What decisions?” she asked.

i am an ardent feminist,

which surprises many peo-ple because I spend so much time objectifying women. But I’ve been a feminist ever

since I was a little kid, when my mom, who was the vice president of our local League of Women Voters chapter, got me addicted to the Free to Be . . . You and Mealbum, which taught me that it’s all right to cry, why boys can have dolls and how to pick up and put down a record needle to skip “Atalanta.”

Now I give all my Kiva microloans to female entrepreneurs, and I once watched most of a WNBA game. I believe not only that it’s my responsibility to fight for equality but also that it’s impor-tant I should do it in a public fashion so that I can distract people from my objecti-fication issues. I want women to say, “For a second, I thought Joel was staring at my chest, but then I realized he was staring at my heart, which is equal to his heart.”

So I offered my services to Elizabeth Nyamayaro, a senior adviser at U.N. Women and the project manager for its HeForShe campaign, which asks men to fight for women’s causes. She suggested I go to heforshe.org and click on a but-ton proclaiming my commitment to feminism and then post a selfie holding a sign that reads #heforshe , as did Harry Styles, Russell Crowe and Chris Colfer.

I told her I was ready for a bigger role, one that possibly required interacting with another human being, especially since I needed to make amends for put-ting too much emphasis on women’s attractiveness in my column. “This is inspiring,” she said. “I think your story is so powerful that we can find something much more prominent for you.” I told her that going to high schools and telling kids not to use the word boobs too much in their humor columns wasn’t the kind of thing that was going to make me my gen-eration’s Alan Alda. “Who is Alan Alda?” she asked. When I compared him to Phil

“About what sink to buy and where to put the washing machine,” I offered. Then Cassandra said two words that many women have said to many men.

My mom, who was still on the phone and heard all this, suggested that I bring the fight straight to Laszlo. “Take every opportunity to have him understand what feminism means and why it’s very, very important that women have equal pay,” she suggested.

That seemed like it might do more harm than good, putting ideas in his head that weren’t there, but as a soldier for HeForShe, I couldn’t run from a chal-lenge. “You know boys and girls are as smart as each other, right?” I asked Laszlo.

“No they’re not,” he said. “Boys are smarter.”

I explained that they were the same. “Either one is smarter or the other is smarter,” he said. “I’m sure they are.”

Then I told him that women make 78¢ for every dollar a man makes for the same job. He thought that wasn’t fair, though to be honest, he really only understands numbers up to 30. When I asked him what we should do about it, he said, “We should say, ‘Pay that girl some more money!’ If they don’t listen, we’ll get a different per-son in our family to try. You and me will try to convince them, then Mommy.” I’m not entirely sure this was working.

I’ll keep working on my son. Mean-while, I asked Nyamayaro if I could do something easier, like take on the trolls who harassed Emma Watson after her HeForShe speech at the U.N., threatening to leak nonexistent naked photos. “I’m not going to recommend that you should take on the bad guys. Our whole thing is diplomacy,” she said. When I mentioned the U.N. soldiers who fought in Korea, Somalia and Bosnia, and how I might call HeForShe supporter Kiefer Sutherland for some backup, she told me to stay at home. “I hope that you become a great force for HeForShe. Why don’t you start with stopping porn? That sounds really great.” It’s not easy being a male feminist. ■

THE AWESOME COLUMN

JoelStein

http://heforshe.org

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10 Questions

Actor Jennifer Garner talks about what she does on the Internet, sex ed and beating Ben Affleck at the box office


Of the many preposterous dis-

guises she wore on the TV show Alias,

Garner says this was her least favorite

Your new movie Men, Women & Children is about the effects the Internet has on relation-ships. What’s the biggest one you’ve noticed? People having a conversation, but holding phones in their hands and looking down and typing as they do it. I’m guilty of it, so I have no judgment.

Have you figured out your Internet policies as a family?I have nothing figured out yet, but I know that I like rules. I’ll probably watch how strict the other moms are and try to be one notch more strict. But then again, my husband [Ben Affleck] is much more con-nected than I am, and he may feel differently. It’s definitely a team sport, parenting.

Easy access to pornography is another issue in this movie. Do you have a position on it? I’m sure that pornography is fine for consenting adults. Maybe it’s dehumanizing, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a place among adults who are aware of what they’re doing. The problem is when kids happen upon it by ac-cident and that becomes their reference for sex.

Have you given any thought to how you’ll teach your kids [who are 8, 5 and 2] about sex? I’ve given it a lot of thought, especially for my daughters. I’ve gone to hear specialists talk. I’ve read books. It doesn’t mean that I have anything more figured out than anyone

else. I want them to see sex as something joyful, as a gift, as a celebration of love and of their bodies. And it makes me feel really cool and hippieish to think of it that way.

Did you ever get “the talk” as a kid? I have the best parents in the world, but no. We’ve still never addressed it. I’m waiting for the talk, Mom, Dad!

Have you ever used the Inter-net to not be Jennifer Garner?I’ve taken classes online, and one of them was this class that Nick Kristof taught when Half the Sky was coming out. And I was very involved in the class discussions and in the comments, but not as myself. I really enjoyed that.

You donated to the guber-natorial campaign of Wendy Davis in Texas. How inter-ested are you in politics?My interest is becoming more specific—less about the party, more about if you are a candidate who sup-ports early childhood edu-cation. This is connected to my work with Save the Children, which is entering the political realm a little bit. We’ve been raising money, and we’re going to use it to

try to influence a couple of campaigns. There is no NRA for kids, no AARP for kids.

You often play disciplined, almost uptight people. Are you like that in real life? I am disciplined when I need to be. I’m disciplined about motherhood. I still work out at 5:30 a.m. almost every day. But I’m also a total flake. I’m in charge of a kindergarten cof-fee next week, and I forgot to write down what everyone was supposed to bring.

Ben’s new film Gone Girlcame out the same day yours did. Is there a contest on which will make more money?

I am not anticipating Men, Women & Children taking

Gone Girl. But it would feel great someday to

spank him at the box office.

Your dogs are called Martha Stewart and Gandhi.

How did you arrive at those names? Gandhi is my husband’s dog. I named my dog Mar-tha Stewart because at the time—Martha’s 11—that cooking show was my reli-gion. I would time my audi-tions around it. [Eventually] I got on the show. And I’ve made that Thanksgiving turkey every Thanksgiving since, thank you very much. —belinda luscombe

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