MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009 Copyright © 2009 The New York Times

Supplemento al numeroodierno de la Repubblica

Sped. abb. postale art. 1legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

LENS

The doldrums of the Great Reces-sion has given way to the do-over era. Sitting still and waiting it out may mean getting left behind. In-stead, businesses are thinking of

ways to repack-age, renameand revise their products andstrategies to make the cus-tomer feel goodabout spending again.

“There’s asaying: ‘When times are good, advertise. When times are tough,advertise more,’ ” Dan Beem, presi-dent at Cold Stone Creamery, an ice-cream chain based in Arizona, toldThe Times’s Stuart Elliott.

The recession has become themother of reinvention. And whatbetter time than now to revampwith some plastic surgery? Maybe

those sagging jowls are as much ofa weight as a lackluster retirementaccount. But a face-lift is no longerjust a face-lift. It’s now branded asthe Lifestyle Lift or the QuickLift,wrote The Times’s Catherine SaintLouis. Patients pick an advertisedoperation, and are then referred bya national organization to a doctorwho will perform the procedure,wrote Ms. Saint Louis.

“What’s new is this is plastic sur-gery being marketed to the publicas a widget,” or product, Dr. Brian Regan, a plastic surgeon in San Diego, told Ms. Saint Louis. “People are buying, so buyer beware.”

The retail industry is also get-ting a face-lift. High-end stores likeNeiman Marcus and Saks will offermore midpriced merchandise, wroteThe Times’s Stephanie Rosenbloom.J.C. Penney is installing self-servicecomputers to help customersbrowse. And Macy’s stores will bestocking merchandise that custom-ers request and getting rid of itemsthey complain about.

“I think in this economy we’re seeing a lot more of an open dia-logue with the retailers than we hadin the past,” Adele Arkin, who runs an exercise-and-socialize group inNew York that gathers in shopping malls, told Ms. Rosenbloom.

Companies now want to showthat they are on the same level asthe customer and are approach-able, which means names and logos are changing.

“Logos have become less official-looking and more conversational,”Patti Williams a professor of mar-keting at the University of Pennsyl-vania’s Wharton School, told The Times’s Bill Marsh. “They’re not yelling. They’re inviting. They’remore neighborly.”

Bold, block capital letters are replaced by lower case to soften thevoice of corporate authority. Sprigs, bursts and friendly flourishes of logos like Kraft Foods and Amazon.com create logos that smile, Mr. Marsh wrote. And happier colors abound: electric blue, yellow, red,

purple, orange and green.All these efforts are trying to

get the consumer to feel better about buying more stuff. And there is plenty of new stuff: food, cars, drugs and soap.

But many marketers are bringing out new products under the ban-ner of brands that consumers are already familiar with, wrote Mr. Elliott. After all, companies don’t want to rebrand themselves out of existence. Häagen-Dazs Five,an ice cream made of five natural ingredients (basically the same asthe ingredients in its regular ice cream), sells under its brand of su-perpremium desserts. The productmight be new, or rather, new-ish, yet it’s already familiar.

Aliza Freud, chief executive at She-Speaks, which helped the Häa-gen-Dazs Five campaign, told Mr. Elliott: “This is a very good time for brands to get out there in new and different ways.”

Even if it’s about selling the same old product.

ON JULY 20, 1969, at 9:56:20 p.m. at

NASA headquarters in Houston,

Texas, Neil A. Armstrong stepped

from the ladder of Apollo 11’s lunar mod-

ule to the surface of the

Moon. His first words:

“That’s one small step for

man, one giant leap for

mankind.” He presumably

meant “one small step for

a man,” but the “a” was

lost in the static, or perhaps he simply for-

got it in his understandable excitement.

Mr. Armstrong tested the footing and

determined that he could move about eas-

ily in his bulky white spacesuit and heavy

backpack while under the influence of

lunar gravity, which makes everything

weigh one-sixth of what it weighs on

Earth. After 19 minutes, he was joined

outside by another astronaut, Edwin E.

Aldrin Jr. The two immediately set up a

TV camera away from the spacecraft to

give people back home a broader view of

the lunar landscape and their operations.

Years later, the third crew member,

Michael Collins, who remained in lunar

orbit in Apollo 11’s command module while

Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin walked on

the moon, would recall the world tour the

astronauts took after the mission. He was

warmed by their reception, not so much by

the adulation as the expressions of shared

accomplishment. People they met felt they

had participated in the landing, too.

In the 2007 documentary film “In the

Shadow of the Moon,” Mr. Collins said:

“People, instead of saying, ‘Well, you

Americans did it,’ everywhere they said:

‘We did it!’ We, humankind, we, the hu-

man race, we, people did it!”

It occurred to me, as I covered the land-

ing for The Times at Mission Control in

Houston, that if Christopher Columbus

or Captain James Cook were alive, they

might be less astonished by two men land-

ing on the Moon than by the millions of

people, worldwide, watching every step of

the walk as it happened. Exploring is old,

but instantaneous telecommunications is

new and marvelous.

In just 1.3 seconds, the time it takes for

radio waves to travel the 383,000 kilome-

ters from Moon to Earth, each step by

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NASA, EXCEPT TOP RIGHT

Astronauts from the United States’ Apollo 11 mission took a walk on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquillity in 1969 and set up a television camera so millions around the world could watch.

JOHN NOBLE

WILFORD

ESSAY

From Bailouts to Burnishing

III

VIII

VI

WORLD TRENDS

American recruits

join jihad groups.

ARTS & STYLES

Toyo Ito’s quest to

find balance.

MONEY & BUSINESS

Oil’s volatile swings

hobble industry.

Our Moon

For comments, write tonytweekly@nytimes.com.

Con tin ued on Page IV

40 Years Ago, the World Watched Humans Set Foot on Lunar Soil

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

II MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009

Tangled Trade Talks

The World Strategy for IranWhen George Washington was a young man, he copied

out a list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior inCompany and Conversation.” Some of the rules in his list dealt with the niceties of going to a dinner party or meet-ing somebody on the street.

“Lean not upon anyone,” was one of the rules. “Read no letter, books or papers in company,” was another. “If any one come to speak to you while you are sitting, stand up,”was a third.

But, as the biographer Richard Brookhiser has noted,these rules were not just etiquette tips. They were de-signed to improve inner morals by shaping the outward man. Washington took them very seriously. He workedhard to follow them. Throughout his life, he remainedacutely conscious of his own rectitude.

In so doing, he turned himself into a new kind of hero. As the historian Gordon Wood has written, “Washington became a great man and was acclaimed as a classical he-ro because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men.”

Washington absorbed, and later came to personify whatyou might call the dignity code. The code was based on thesame premise as the nation’s Constitution — that human beings are flawed creatures who live in constant peril of falling into disasters caused by their own passions. Artifi-cial systems have to balance and restrain their desires.

The dignity code commanded its followers to be disin-terested — to put national interests above personal inter-ests. It commanded its followers to be reticent — to never degrade intimate emotions by parading them in public.It also commanded its followers to be dispassionate — to distrust rashness and political enthusiasm.

Remnants of the dignity code lasted for decades. Formost of American history, politicians did not publicly cam-paign for president. It was thought that the act of publicly promoting oneself was ruinously corrupting. For most of American history, memoirists passed over the intimaciesof private life. Even in the 19th century, people were ap-palled that journalists might pollute a wedding by cover-ing it in the press.

Today, Americans still lavishly admire people who

are naturally dignified, whether they are in sports (JoeDiMaggio and Tom Landry), entertainment (LaurenBacall and Tom Hanks) or politics (Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King Jr.).

But the dignity code itself has been completely obliter-ated.

We can all list the causes of its demise. First, there iscapitalism. We are all encouraged to become managers of our own brand, to self-promot e and broadcast our own talents. Second, there is the cult of naturalism. We are all encouraged to to liberate our own feelings. Third, there is charismatic evangelism with its penchant for publicconfession. Fourth, there is radical egalitarianism and its hostility to aristocratic manners.

The old dignity code has not survived modern life. Every week there are new scandals featuring people

who simply do not know how to act. For the first few weeksof summer, three stories have dominated public conversa-tion, and each one exemplifies a branch of indignity.

First, there was the press conference of Mark Sanford,the Republican governor of South Carolina. Here was a guy utterly lacking in any sense of reticence, who wasgiven to rambling self-exposure even in his moment ofdisgrace. Then there was the death of Michael Jacksonand the discussion of his life. Here was a guy who was ap-parently untouched by any pressure to live according to the rules and restraints of adulthood. Then there was Sar-ah Palin’s press conference. Here was a woman who as-pires to a high public role but is unfamiliar with the traitsof equipoise and constancy, the sources of authority and trust. In each of these events, one sees people who simply have no social norms to guide them as they try to navigatethe currents of their own passions.

Americans still admire dignity. But the word has be-come unmoored from any larger ethical system.

But it’s not right to end on a note of cultural pessimism because there is the fact of President Obama. Whatever policy differences people may have with him, we can all agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and traitsassociated with dignity. The cultural effects of his presi-dency are not yet clear, but they may surpass his policyimpact. He may revitalize the concept of dignity for anew generation and embody a new set of rules for self-mastery.

There are few things that could domore damage to the already batteredglobal economy than an old-fashioned trade war. So we have been increas-ingly worried by the protectionistrhetoric and policies being espousedby politicians across the globe.

Against this bleak backdrop, it isespecially good news that the world’sleading developed and developing na-tions have committed to complete astalled global trade agreement (theso-called Doha Round) by next year.For that to happen, leaders — espe-cially in the United States, Europe,India, China and Brazil — are going to have to muster real sense and politicalcourage.

The World Trade Organization fore-casts that exports from developedcountries will fall 14 percent this year, while exports from developing nationswill contract 7 percent. The collapse isparticularly damaging for poor coun-tries that are heavily dependent onexports. But it is also intensifying thedownturn in many rich countries. Re-viving trade is essential for recovery.

The talks, begun in Doha, Qatar,in 2001, had long been in limbo. Theybroke down last year after big devel-oping countries — China and India, inparticular — rejected demands fromthe wealthy nations that they lowertariffs on imports of goods and openservice sectors to more competition.

But there are signs that the collapse in trade have awoken many leaders to the advantages of strong internation-al rules to keep trade channels open.This is particularly true of China,which has suddenly found its exports on the receiving end of tariff increases and antidumping suits.

There is no guarantee that a dealcan be pulled off. President Obamawill have to provide lots of leadershipto convince developing countries tomake serious offers on market access,

and to convince reluctant members of the United States Congress that theywill have to make concessions, too.

Big developing countries havebeen reluctant to reduce tariff ceil-ings, allowing themselves the optionto increase their tariffs at any mo-ment. They have been unwilling toopen service sectors, like accountingor electricity generation, to foreigncompetition. They insist on being ableto increase their barriers to protectfarmers against sharp increases infood imports from cheaper producersabroad. They must be willing to makeconcessions on these points.

The rich West will also have to givemore. The United States and Europemust slash agricultural subsidiesmore aggressively and refrain fromadding more. The United States willhave to reduce its own agriculturalbarriers and might have to offer more visas to professionals from countries like India.

The Doha Round was originally con-ceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks as a way to encourage developmentin the poorest countries by providing them access to export markets in the rich world. This is still its goal.

The Group of 8 industrialized na-tions took an important step on Thurs-day by pledging to invest $20 billionover three years to bolster agriculturalproduction in some of the world’s poor-est countries. We were made nervousby reports on Friday that suggestedsome contributors might already berethinking their generosity.

So far, Mr. Obama has been reluctant to spend any political capital at home on trade. But it is important for thepresident to follow through. The talks opened in Doha were supposed to helpthe world’s poorest countries. Theyhave now acquired an even broaderpurpose: reviving global cooperationand the global economy.

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

The world’s wealthy nations havegiven Iran until late September toagree to restraints on its nuclear pro-gram. If there is no progress, PresidentNicolas Sarkozy of France declared at this week’s Group of 8 summit, “wewill have to take decisions” on impos-ing tougher sanctions.

We hope Mr. Sarkozy and the other G-8 leaders mean it. For seven years,the world powers have pursued a feck-less strategy that failed to halt Iran’sefforts to master nuclear fuel produc-tion. More deadlines, without any realfollow-through, will send a dangerous message to nuclear wannabes who al-ready see Iran and North Korea defy-ing repeated demands from the United

DAVID BROOKS

In Search of Dignity

People always ask: What can I do to make a differ-ence?

So many people in poor countries desperately need as-sistance. So many people in rich countries would like to help but fear their donations would line the pocket of a cor-rupt official or be lost in an aid bureaucracy. The result is ashort circuit, leaving both sides unfulfilled.

That’s where Scott Harrison comes in.Five years ago, Mr. Harrison was a nightclub promoter

in Manhattan who spent his nights surrounded by friends in a blur of alcohol, cocaine and marijuana. He lived in a luxurious apartment and drove a BMW — but then on a vacation in South America he underwent a spiritual crisis.

“I realized I was the most selfish, sycophantic and mis-erable human being,” he recalled. “I was the worst person I knew.”

Mr. Harrison, now 33, found an aid organization thatwould accept him as a volunteer photographer — if he paid$500 a month to cover expenses. And so he did. The orga-nization was Mercy Ships, a Christian aid group that per-forms surgeries in poor countries with volunteer doctors.

“The first person I photographed was a 14-year-old boy named Alfred, choking on a four-pound benign tumor inhis mouth, filling up his whole mouth,” Mr. Harrison re-called. “He was suffocating on his own face. I just wentinto the corner and sobbed.”

A few weeks later, Mr. Harrison took Alfred — withthe tumor now removed — back to his village in the West African country of Benin. “I saw everybody celebrating, because a few doctors had given up their vacation time,” he said.

Mercy Ships transformed Mr. Harrison as much as itdid Alfred. Mr. Harrison returned to New York two years later with a plan: he would form a charity to provide clean water to save lives in poor countries.

Armed with nothing but a natural gift for promotion,Mr. Harrison started his group, called charity: water — and it has been stunningly successful. In three years, he says, his group has raised $10 million from 50,000 individ-ual donors, providing clean water to nearly one millionpeople in Africa and Asia.

The organization now has 11 full-time employees, al-most twice as many unpaid interns, and more than halfa million followers on Twitter (the United Nations has3,000). New York City buses were plastered with free ban-

ners promoting his message, and Saks Fifth Avenue gaveup its store windows to spread Mr. Harrison’s gospel.American schools are signing up to raise money.

“Scott is an important marketing machine, lifting oneof the most critical issues of our time in a way that is sexyand incredibly compelling — that’s his gift,” said Jacque-line Novogratz, head of the Acumen Fund, which invests in poor countries to overcome poverty.

Mr. Harrison doesn’t actually do the tough aid work. Hepartners with humanitarian organizations and pays themto dig wells. In effect, he’s a fund-raiser and marketer — often the most difficult piece of the aid puzzle.

So what’s his secret? Mr. Harrison’s success seems to depend on three precepts:

First, ensure that every penny from new donors will go to projects in the field. He accomplishes this by cajoling his 500 most committed donors to cover all administra-tive costs.

Second, show donors the specific impact of their contri-butions. Mr. Harrison grants naming rights to wells. Heposts photos and G.P.S. coordinates so donors can look uptheir wells on Google Earth. And in September, Mr. Har-rison is going to roll out a new Web site that will matcheven the smallest donation to a particular project that can be tracked online.

Third, leap into new media and social networks. Thisspring, charity: water raised $250,000 through a “Twes-tival” — a series of meetings among followers on Twitter.Last year, it raised $965,000 by asking people with Sep-tember birthdays to forgo presents and instead solicitcash to build wells in Ethiopia. The campaign went viral on the Web, partly because Mr. Harrison invests in clever, often sassy videos.

One popular video shows well-heeled Manhattanitesstepping out of their luxury buildings and lining up to filljerrycans with dirty water from a lake in Central Park.We watch a mother offer the murky water to her children — and the upbeat message is: you can help ensure thatother people don’t have do that, either.

Mr. Harrison’s underlying idea is that giving shouldbe an infectious pleasure at the capacity to bring aboutchange.

“Guilt has never been part of it,” he said. “It’s excite-ment instead, presenting people with an opportunity — ‘you have an amazing chance to build a well!’ ”

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Clean, Sexy Water

The Intelligence column will return next week.

Nations Security Council.We don’t know if there is any mix

of incentives or sanctions that wouldwork. Certainly President George W.Bush, for all his tough talk and bully-ing ways, never tried to find it.

We also know that if any strategyhas a serious chance of success, it mustbe fully embraced not only by the Eu-ropeans but also by Russia and China.So it was disheartening to hear Rus-sian officials boasting about watering down the G-8 statement on Iran.

Dealing with Tehran is even harderafter last month’s bogus presidentialelection sparked weeks of protest and repression. President Obama and the other G-8 leaders were right to deplorethe violence. But Mr. Obama is alsoright to stay open to engagement, evenif it’s a long shot.

Iran’s political tug of war is far from over. There are signs that Mr. Obama’soffer of direct talks may have helpeddeepen fissures inside the politicalestablishment. The bad news is thatAmerican hard-liners are still encour-aging Israeli hard-liners to fantasizeabout a military strike.

President Obama told CNN thatWashington has not given Israel a“green light” to attack. He needs tomake sure the Israelis believe him. A strike would only feed Iran’s nuclear appetite and drive its program evenfurther underground.

The United States must make clearto Iran the advantages of coming infrom the cold. It must work to craft atough package of sanctions that could make Iran’s clerical and military eliterethink their destructive plans. Tenweeks is not a lot of time. And Iran’sprogram is moving ahead.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009 III

Gulf of Aden

Indian

Ocean

1991 A civil war leads to the collapse of Somalia’s last functioning government.

2006 An Islamist group controls Somalia for six months until Ethiopian forces, backed by the U.S., invade. The event prompts a political awakening among young Somalis around the world.

2007 The first wave of Minneapolis residents travel to Somalia and join the Shabaab militia.

2009 Ethiopians withdraw, and the civil war intensifies.

THE NEW YORK TIMESSource: UNHCR Somalia

Note: Numbers collected from April to June. Regional boundaries in Somalia are disputed.

20,000

150,000

1,000

S O M A L I A

ETHIOPIA

42,800

SOMALILAND PUNTLAND

KENYA

297,400

DJIBOUTI

YEMEN

142,000

Bossaso

The civil warin Somalia has displaced nearly two million people, most in the last three years.

Shirwa

Ahmed’s

suicide attack

Mogadishu,

Burhan

Hassan was

killed here

The Shabaab, a

radical Muslim

militia, controls

almost the entire

south and

central portions

of Somalia.

Major events

REFUGEES

By ANDREA ELLIOTT

MINNEAPOLIS — For a group of students whooften met at the Carlson School of Managementon the University of Minnesota campus, the motto“Nowhere but here” seemed especially fitting.

They had fled Somalia as small boys, escap-ing a catastrophic civil war. They came of age asrefugees in Minneapolis, becoming naturalizedUnited States citizens and embracing basketballand school dances, hip-hop and shopping malls.By the time they reached college, their dreamsseemed within grasp: one planned to become a doctor; another, an entrepreneur.

But last year, in a study room at Carlson, the men turned their energies to a different enter-prise.

“Why are we sitting around in America, doingnothing for our people?” one of the men, Moham-oud Hassan, a skinny, 23-year-old engineering major, pressed his friends.

In November, Mr. Hassan and two other stu-dents dropped out of college and left for Somalia. Word soon spread that they had joined the Sha-baab, a militant Islamist group aligned with AlQaeda that is fighting to overthrow the fragileSomali government.

The students are among more than 20 young Americans who are the focus of what may be the most significant domestic terrorism investiga-tion since 9/11. One of the men, Shirwa Ahmed,blew himself up in Somalia in October, becomingthe first known American suicide bomber. OnJuly 13, authorities in Minneapolis unsealed anindictment that charges Salah Osman Ahmedand Abdifatah Yusuf Isse with providing mate-rial support for terrorism. And two other Soma-li-American men suspected of fighting with the Shabaab were shot dead July 10 in a battle in theSomali capital.

An examination by The New York Times re-veals how a far-flung jihadist movement found a foothold in America’s heartland. Most of the menare former Somali refugees who left the TwinCities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in two waves,starting in late 2007. While religious devotion mayhave predisposed them to sympathize with theIslamist cause, it took a major geopolitical event — the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006 — to spur them to join what they saw as a legitimate resistance movement, said friends of the men.

Generation of Refugees

In the first wave of Somalis who left were men whose uprooted lives resembled those of immi-grants in Europe who have joined the jihad. Theyfaced barriers of race and class, religion and lan-guage. Mr. Ahmed, the 26-year-old suicide bomb-er, struggled at community colleges before drop-ping out. His friend Zakaria Maruf, 30, fell in witha violent street gang and later stocked shelves at a Wal-Mart.

If failure had shadowed this first group of men,the young Minnesotans who followed them to So-malia were succeeding in America. Mr. Hassan, the engineering student, was a rising star in his college community. Another of the men was a pre-medical student who had once set his sights on aninternship at the prestigious Mayo Clinic.

A ‘Crisis of Belonging’

At Roosevelt High School, Shirwa Ahmed was a quick study. He memorized hip-hop lyrics. He

practiced on neighborhood basketball courts.He took note of the clothing and vernacular of hisAfrican-American classmates, emulating whathe could.

Much as he tried, he failed to fit in.You’re not black, his peers taunted. Go back to

Africa.Somali and African-American students clashed

frequently at the school. “How can they be mad atme for looking like them?” Mr. Ahmed’s friend Ni-cole Hartford recalled him saying. “We’re from the same place.”

Even as Mr. Ahmed met rejection at school,he faced disapproval from relatives, who com-plained he was mixing with “ghetto people,” Ms.Hartford recalled. It was a classic conundrum foryoung Somalis: how to be one thing at school and another at home.

News developments from Somalia, followed ob-sessively by the adults, held little interest among teenagers. Yet young men like Mr. Ahmed re-mained tethered to Somalia by the remittances they were pressed to send. After school every day,he joined a stream of teenagers headed for the airport, where he pushed passengers in wheel-chairs. He sent half of his income to Somalia, to “relatives we don’t even know,” his friend NimcoAhmed said.

After graduating from high school in 2000, Mr. Ahmed seemed to flounder, taking community college classes while working odd jobs, friends said. But he had done better than many peers,who turned to crime and gangs.

At the root of the problem was a “crisis of be-longing,” said Mohamud Galony, a science tutor who was friends with Mr. Ahmed and is the uncle of another boy who left. Young Somalis had been raised to honor their families’ tribes, yet felt dis-connected from them. “They want to belong, but who do they belong to?” Galony, 23, said.

The first wave of men to leave for Somalia were in their 20s and 30s and had been fixtures at the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, the larg-est Somali mosque in Minneapolis. “All this talk ofthe movement must stop,” the imam, Sheikh Ab-dirahman Sheikh Omar Ahmed, recalled tellinga crowd at the mosque. “Focus on your life here. Ifyou become a doctor or an engineer, you can helpyour country. Over there you will be a dead body on the street.”

In the audience were several young men who also would soon disappear.

An Inquiry Intensifies

“Never did I imagine that I would step into thishere, in the Midwest,” said Ralph S. Boelter, asquare-jawed Wisconsin native who took overthe Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Minneapo-lis office in early 2007.

While federal investigators had tracked themovements of American recruits to the Shabaabsince at least early 2008, the F.B.I.’s case accel-erated after Shirwa Ahmed’s suicide attack that fall.

Investigators in Minneapolis approached So-malis on the street, in their homes, at the Abuba-kar mosque and on the University of Minnesota campus. Community leaders say that more than50 people were subpoenaed to appear before afederal grand jury in Minneapolis and another jury was convened in San Diego. In April, F.B.I.agents raided three Somali money-wiring busi-nesses in Minneapolis. By then, the investigation had expanded to smaller Somali communitiesaround the country.

Young Somali Immigrants in America Answer a Call to Jihad

Ramla Bile contributed reporting from Minne-apolis and Margot Williams from New York.

MUSTAFA ABDI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

NICOLE BENGIVENO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

There are indications that three Twin Citiesmen have returned, possibly after defecting fromthe Shabaab. A friend of the men still in Somalia said they had no thought of attacking America.“Why would I do that?” the friend recalled theformer pre-medical student, Adbisalan Ali, say-ing on the phone last spring. “My mom could bewalking down the street.”

The central question driving the F.B.I. inves-tigation is whether American citizens have pro-vided material support to the Shabaab, either inthe form of personnel or money.

Meanwhile, some Somali parents in the TwinCities have taken to hiding their sons’ passports.

The tension in the community has turned in-ward at times, with some blaming the Minneapo-lis mosque for “brainwashing” the young menand possibly raising money for Islamist groups in Somalia.

The mosque’s leaders denied this, in turn ac-cusing families of shirking responsibility fortheir children. “That’s their obligation, to knowwhere their kids are going,” said Farhan Hurre,the mosque’s executive director.

For many older Somalis in Minnesota, the deep-est mystery is why so many young refugees wouldrisk their lives and futures to return to a country that their parents struggled so hard to leave.

Some Somali-Americans abandonedtheir inner-cityneighborhood inMinneapolis, above, to fight in Somalia. Shabaab fighters participate in a drill nearMogadishu.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009

A Flight to the Moon Changed Our View of the EarthONLINE: AN HISTORIC JOURNEY

Full coverage, including interactivefeatures, photos and video:nytimes.com/space

From Page I

Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrinwas seen, and their voices heard,throughout the world they had for the time being left behind. In contrast to exploration’s previous landfalls, the whole world shared in this moment.

During their 2-hour, 21-minuteMoon walk, the astronauts planted an American flag, deployed threescientific instruments for collectingdata in the months after their departure, and picked up samples of rock and soil.

Mr. Aldrin, at one point, described the bounding kangaroo hops of theirmovements in the low lunar gravity.“Sometimes it takes about two or three paces to make sure that yourfeet are underneath you,” he said. “And about two or three, maybe four, easy paces can bring you to a fairly smooth stop.”

The astronauts paused for a tele-phone call from the White House.“Because of what you have done,”President Richard M. Nixon told them,“the heavens have become a part ofman’s world.”

The year before the first landing, anearlier mission in the lunar program had set out to circumnavigate the Moon for the first time. The flight of Apollo 8 came at the end of one of the most tumultuous years in Americanhistory. The country in 1968 was di-vided and demoralized.

Opposition to the Vietnam War had forced President Lyndon B. Johnsonto withdraw from a run for another term. The Reverend Dr. Martin Lu-ther King Jr. fell dead in Memphis,Tennessee, from an assassin’s bullet,a tragedy that incited a riot of arson and looting in scores of cities. Themourning and fury had hardly sub-sided when Robert F. Kennedy was cut down by another assassin’s bullet, in Los Angeles.

No one in power, as I recall, seri-ously advocated canceling or defer-ring the Apollo mission. Yet amid ashooting war abroad and bitter unrest at home, going to the Moon slipped lower in the public’s order of priori-ties. It dismayed me to think that inthis climate, the first human voyages to the Moon might wind up as irrel-evancies. Selfishly, I wanted the story to be as big and inspiring of awe asI had counted on when I took the as-signment. I wanted the same country that had decided to go to the Moon to be relieved and enthralled when atlast we succeeded.

Earthrise, 1968

Apollo 8 proved to be an inspirationat this crucial time. The astronauts— Frank Borman, James A. Lovell Jr. and William A. Anders — flew to the Moon and circled it 10 times in orbitswithin 100 kilometers of the lifelesssurface. Their television camera recorded the gray plains and widecraters, one scene after another of ev-erlasting desolation.

On the fourth orbit, as Apolloemerged from behind the Moon, Mr. Borman, the commander, exclaimed:“Oh, my God! Look at that pictureover there! Here’s the Earth comingup. Wow, that is pretty!” The astro-nauts gasped at the sight of Earth, a blue and white orb sparkling in the blackness of space, in contrast to thedead lunar surface in the foreground.

The sight moved the poet Archibald MacLeish to write in The Times: “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see our-selves as riders on the Earth together,brothers on that bright loveliness inthe eternal cold — brothers who knownow they are truly brothers.”

NASA later released the picturesthe astronauts had taken of “Earth-rise.” These were even more inspiringand humbling, the mission’s prizedkeepsake. Time magazine closed outthe troubled year with the Earthrisephotograph on its cover, accompanied by a one-word caption, “Dawn.”

In a 2008 book, “Earthrise: How

Man First Saw the Earth,” RobertPoole contends that the picture wasthe spiritual nascence of the environ-mental movement, writing that “it ispossible to see that Earthrise markedthe tipping point, the moment whenthe sense of the space age flipped from what it meant for space to what itmeans for Earth.”

Another Apollo 8 surprise was instore. Late on Christmas Eve 1968, onone of the final orbits, Mr. Anders an-nounced, “The crew of Apollo 8 have amessage that we would like to send toyou.” While a camera focused on theMoon outside the spacecraft window,Mr. Anders read the opening wordsof the creation story from the Book ofGenesis.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth,” he began.“And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Mr. Lovell then tookover with the verse beginning: “AndGod called the light day, and the dark-ness he called night.” Mr. Bormanclosed the reading: “And God calledthe dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas;and God saw that it was good.”

The Genesis Flight

At the conclusion, a hushed audi-ence throughout the lands of Earthheard Mr. Borman sign off from the Moon: “And from the crew of Apollo8 we close with good night, good luck,a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.” Today, Apollo 8 is still spoken of as theGenesis flight.

The inclusiveness of these experi-ences was remarkable, given the space race’s origins in an atmosphere of fear and belligerence. It all started with the Sputnik alarm in 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first spacecraft, giving rise to invigorated United States efforts in science and technology. It was followed by Presi-dent John F. Kennedy’s challenge to

the nation in 1961 to put astronauts onthe Moon by the end of the decade.

Looking back, three of the nine Apollo lunar missions stand out from the others as especially emotionalexperiences.

Apollo 11 made history. Kennedy’sbold commitment was fulfilled, and those alive then have never forgotten where they were and their feelings when humans first walked on the Moon. Apollo 13 was an epic suspenseunfolding in real time to a global audi-ence. Three astronauts went forth,met disaster, faced death and barely limped back to the safety of home.And Apollo 8, as the first flight of humans beyond Earth’s low orbital confines, restored momentum andmagnitude to the adventure of reach-ing for the Moon.

Mr. Collins, who was the capsule communicator in Mission Control for Apollo 8, said that the essence of that flight was about leaving, and that Apollo 11’s was about arriving. “As you look back 100 years from now,which is more important, the ideathat people left their home planet orthe idea that people arrived at theirnearby satellite?” he asked himself.“I’m not sure, but I think probably you would say Apollo 8 was of more sig-nificance than Apollo 11, even thoughtoday we regard Apollo 11 as being theshowpiece and zenith of the Apollo program, rightly so.”

The Launching

In memory, after all this time,Apollo 11 resists relegation to the pasttense. In the wee hours of July 16, 1969, the summer air of the Florida coast iswarm and still as we drive toward alight in the distance. Its preternatu-ral glow suffuses the sky ahead but,strangely, leaves the land where weare in natural darkness.

After the first checkpoint, where guards at Kennedy Space Center inspect our badges and car pass, the source of the light comes into view.

The sight is magnetic, drawing us on. Strong xenon beams converge on Pad 39A, highlighting the mighty Saturn 5rocket as it is being fueled.

A few more kilometers, another checkpoint, and Doug Dederer, a free-lancer for The Times, and I approach the Vehicle Assembly Building, a mammoth presence rising above the flat terrain of sand, palmetto and la-goons stretching to the Atlantic.

Along an embankment stretches a line of trailers for the larger news or-ganizations and imposing studios for the three major television networks. At The Times’s trailer, Doug and I un-load the car. We switch on the air-con-ditioner and fill the refrigerator withsandwiches and cans of soda. We hook up small TV sets and a telephone, and spread the spacecraft manuals andpress kits on a desk. I stretch out on the floor to catch some sleep.

In the early light of dawn, the three Apollo 11 astronauts take the drivefrom their quarters to the launching pad. Everything is on schedule for aliftoff at 9:32 a.m.

Precisely on schedule, Jack King, the “voice of Apollo,” intones the final countdown. 5-4-3. Ignition. Orangeflame and dark smoke erupt from huge nozzles at the base of the Saturn5. The rocket hesitates, held down byheavy steel arms. 2-1, King continues.“We have liftoff.”

Once at full thrust, and unbound,the 3,463-metric-ton spaceshipstrains to overcome gravity, and for a heart-stopping second or two appearsto be losing the fight. Then, ever soslowly, it rises and clears the tower.

Only now do the staccato thunder-claps from the engines reach the press site, confirming once again that sound travels more slowly than light. Theblasts beat on your chest and shakethe ground you stand on. The experi-ence is visceral, the Saturn movingearth and smacking us with good-byes. The spacefarers are off over the ocean, fire and vapor trailing behind,on their way to the Moon.

Apollo’s Legacy

Apollo 11 effectively ended the space race. The Russians conceded as much by their subsequent space endeavors.Handicapped by failures in testingtheir own heavy-lift rocket, they never attempted a human flight to the Moon and turned instead to long-duration flights in low orbit.

American astronauts made sixmore journeys to the Moon, all suc-cesses, excepting Apollo 13. But publicinterest was flagging. A battle had been won, people seemed to feel, sobring the boys home.

By the end of 1972, the last of the 12men to walk on the Moon packed upand returned home. The uncertainfuture for human spaceflight mutedthe celebrations at the space centerin Houston. At the conclusion of thatflight, Apollo 17, I solicited historians’assessment of the significance of theseearly years in space. Arthur M. Schle-singer Jr. predicted that in 500 years,the 20th century would probably beremembered mainly for humanity’sventures beyond its native planet. Atthe close of the century, he had notchanged his mind.

How brief the space race was, the 12years from Sputnik to the first Moon walk, but thrilling, mind-boggling,even magnificent at times. No one has been back to the Moon since 1972.

Yet spaceflight is now embeddedin our culture, so much so that it isusually taken for granted — a far cryfrom the old days when the world heldits breath for the United States’ earlyMercury missions of Alan B. ShepardJr. and John Glenn, and watched,transfixed, the pictures from the moonin July 1969. That was then; no astro-

nauts today are household names. Yetspace traffic is thick and integral to theinfrastructure of modern life.

Seldom does it cross our minds that our voices and text messages are car-ried across continents and oceans viasatellites. Our weather and the effectsof global warming are tracked from space. Our news, including reports of astronaut missions now relegated to back pages, is disseminated through space. We view the spectacular im-ages from the planet Saturn and thefar cosmos with less thought to howthey were obtained than of the beautyand abiding mystery they call to our attention.

The United States has now em-barked on a program to return astro-nauts to the Moon by 2020 to establisha more permanent research presencethere and prepare for eventual human flight to Mars. But in the absence of the cold war motivation, the effortlacks the money and the political man-date that favored Apollo. Another en-terprise on the scale of Apollo is, in the foreseeable future, unimaginable.

Someday, however, a party of space travelers may make the pilgrimageto Apollo 11’s landing site on the Seaof Tranquillity, a broad basin that is a smudge on the right face of the Moon, as seen from Earth on clearnights. The encampment, known as Tranquillity Base, should be just as Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrinleft it. Change comes slowly on the arid, airless Moon, and barring anintervening shower of meteorites, theAmerican flag and the forlorn base of the lunar module should look likenew. And the astronauts’ boot printsshould still appear fresh in the graypowdery regolith.

An Age of Heroes

For a brief time, when spaceflightwas fresh and exciting, we embracedastronauts as heroes who took risks toreach grand goals. We believed thenmore readily in heroes, people who re-flect what it is that we feel is admirablein humanity, who inspire us at least tostrive to live up to some ideal image.

Only four years before Sputnik,Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgaywere hailed as heroes for making thelast “giant leap for mankind” of thepre-space-age generations. Theirascent to the top of Mount Everest, ashigh as anyone can aspire and still berooted on terra firma, culminated anera of crossing oceans, penetratingcontinental interiors and reaching theends of the earth. They crested a di-vide in exploration between the moreindividual exploits of yore and thegreater team efforts mobilized to chal-lenge newer frontiers of achievement.

On this side of the divide, potentialheroes get lost in the crowd of col-laborators and overshadowed bytheir enabling technology. Even theamazing technology itself, so swiftly domesticated for the workplace and home, soon seems too ordinary to beremarkable. Our laptops have a great-er capacity than any of the computersin the Apollo Project.

Neil Armstrong has earned the last word. “I think we’ll always be inspace,” he said in a 2001 interview forthe American space agency’s oral-history program. “But it will take uslonger to do the new things than theadvocates would like, and in some cases it will take external factors orforces which we can’t control and can’t anticipate that will cause thingsto happen or not happen.”

Mr. Armstrong then struck a note that resonates with his contempo-raries, and that includes me. He and his Apollo 11 crew were born in thesame year, 1930, three years before I was; we were the right age at the right time and places to participate in a sin-gular adventure in history, whatever its legacy as seen through the eyes oflater generations.

“We were really very privileged,”he said, “to live in that thin slice of history where we changed how man looks at himself and what he might become and where he might go.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NASA

EXPLORERS Neil A.Armstrong, top, was the first to step ontothe Moon, followed19 minutes later byEdwin E. Aldrin Jr.,center. Apollo 11’slunar module, known as the Eagle, carried the two astronautsto the surface fromlunar orbit.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009 V

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Mass transit in developing countries generates far fewer greenhouse-gas emissions per passenger than private vehicles do.

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Sources: International Energy Agency; “Transportation in

Developing Countries”, Pew Center on Global Climate Change THE NEW YORK TIMES

Clean Buses Versus Traditional Vehicles

By JOHN TAGLIABUE

OVERTURINGEN, Sweden — Itwas a lousy blueberry season in2007, said Siv Wiik, 70, one of a pair of Swedish grandmothers now creditedwith discovering what experts say may be one of the richest gold depos-its in Europe. “That year it was too cold in the spring, so there were few berries,” she said.

Berry picking is a serious business to Mrs. Wiik, who was born in thisvillage of 171, and her friend, Harriet Svensson, 69. For 40 years the two, widows with children and grandchil-dren, have explored every patch of field and forest clearing in the region, hunting for mushrooms and wildberries — blueberries, raspberries,blackberries, cloudberries.

But the women are also amateur geologists. They never leave home for a stroll in forests or fields without their geologists’ hammers, with their12-centimeter handles, and their magnifying eyepieces, dangling from ribbons around their necks.

So in that terrible August when theblueberry crop failed, they decided to poke around for minerals. They went to a place called Sorkullen, far downan unpaved logging road, where trees had recently been felled, upending the earth and exposing rock to the air.Using their hammers, they clearedsoil from around the stones, dig-ging for about six hours, deeper and deeper, until they found a rock with a dull glimmer.

The women phoned Arne Sund-berg, of the Geological Survey of

Sweden in Uppsala, who came thefollowing day. “When he looked, he thought something was wrong withhis eyepiece,” said Mrs. Svensson,laughing. Analysis showed that thestone contained more than 23 grams of gold per ton; most active mines inSweden yield less than 5 grams.

The women entered a sample inan annual geological competitionrun by Mr. Sundberg. “You must find something that’s new and unusual,that looks promising for the future,”Mr. Sundberg said by telephone. “It could be a new mine, not just gold, but something new. It was the first time the ladies entered.”

Needless to say, they won.They proceeded to obtain the rights

for a large area around the find, then entered into negotiations, alone and without lawyers, with about 20 min-ing companies from Sweden and abroad, finally choosing Hansa Re-sources, of Vancouver, Canada.

This month, Hansa began boringat the site to obtain samples to sendto Vancouver for analysis. “Whetherit’s gold or not, even with a high-gradeore, you cannot see it with the nakedeye,” said Anders Hogrelius, projectmanager for the drilling. “This was asurprise, and I think it’s positive, sinceit shows that it’s worthwhile to go out-side the traditional mining areas.”

The windfall for the women has un-til now been modest. Hansa paid the women about $125,000 for the mining rights, and if a second round of boring is authorized this fall, the companywill pay an additional $225,000. But the women have also been given a 20percent stake in any future mining activities, which could yield a bonan-za for many years to come.

“By then I’ll be out in the church-yard,” Mrs. Wiik said with a laugh.

MUNICH — The collapse of Com-munism in the East two decades ago did not provide much of an opening for the Catholic Church to influ-ence economic policy, but perhaps

the near-collapse of Western capitalism will. Two Germanauthors — one named Marx, the other his patron in Rome — are certainly hoping so.

The first is Reinhard Marx, arch-bishop of Munich and Freising, who has written a best seller in Germany that he titled “Das Kapital” (and inwhich he addresses that other Marx— Karl — as “dear namesake”). The second is Pope Benedict XVI, whorecently published his first papal encyclical on economic and socialmatters. It has a more gentle title,“Charity in Truth,” but is based on the same essential line of thinking. Indeed, Archbishop Marx had a hand in advising the pope on it.

The message in both is that globalcapitalism has lost its moral com-pass and that Roman Catholic teach-ings can help set Western economics

right by encouraging them to focus more on justice for the weakand closely regulating the market.

Archbishop Marxand other Catholics yearn for reform, not class warfare. In that, they are fol-lowing a long and fundamental line of church teaching. What is different now is that some of them see this eco-nomic crisis as a moment when thechurch’s economic thinking just may attract serious attention.

“There is no way back into an oldworld,” Archbishop Marx said in arecent interview, before the encycli-cal was issued. “We have to affirmthis world, but critically.”

Catholic voices have long hadinfluence on the debate in the West about social justice, but never asmuch as the church would havewished. Pope John Paul II was animportant voice in bringing downCommunism. But he had to watch in the 1990s as Eastern Europe em-braced its polar opposite — a rather pure form of secular capitalism,

instead of any Catholic-influenced middle way.

“John Paul II was often very clear what he was against: He was against unbridled capitalism and the kind of socialism of the Soviet sphere,” saidJohn Allen, the National CatholicReporter Vatican watcher. “What he was for was less clear.”

Now Archbishop Marx, 55, is try-ing to develop a new approach. Inhis book, he offers a vision of a world governed by cooperation among na-tions, with a welfare state as the core of a market economy that reflectsthe love-thy-neighbor imperatives of Catholic social thought.

On the first point, Archbishop Marx is in good, cosmopolitan com-pany; many officials, from New Yorkto London to Beijing, are calling these days for a world in greater reg-

ulatory harmony. Hesounds considerablymore German when exhorting the world to

create, or recast, the welfare state.People need the welfare state before they “can give themselves over tothe very strenuous and sometimes very risky games of the market economy,” Archbishop Marx said.

Of course, the archbishop says he realizes that a European’sideal of welfare states and border-straddling institutions might not have universal appeal. At the end of his book, he quotes Jean-ClaudeJuncker, the prime minister of Lux-embourg, who has said, “I approve of the notion that Europe sees itself,unpretentiously, as a model for the world, but the consequence of that is that we would have to constantlychange that model because we arenot the world.”

Neither, he might have added, isthe Roman Catholic church.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Like most thoroughfares in booming cities of thedeveloping world, Bogotá’s Seventh Avenue resembles a noisy, exhaust-coated parking lot — a tangle of carsand minibuses that have long provid-ed transportation for the masses.

But a few blocks away, sleek red ve-hicles full of commuters speed downthe four center lanes of Avenida de las Américas. The long, segmented,low-emission buses are part of a novelpublic transportation system calledbus rapid transit, or B.R.T. It is more like an above-ground subway than a collection of bus routes, with seven in-tersecting lines, enclosed stations thatare entered through turnstiles withthe swipe of a fare card and coaches that feel like trams inside.

Versions of these systems are beingplanned or built in dozens of develop-ing cities around the world — MexicoCity, Cape Town, Jakarta, Indonesia,and Ahmedabad, India, to name a few— providing public transportationthat improves traffic flow and reducessmog at a fraction of the cost of build-ing a subway.

But the rapid transitsystems have anotherbenefit: they may holda key to combating cli-mate change. Emissionsfrom cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles in the booming cities of Asia,Africa and Latin Amer-ica account for a rapidly growing component ofheat-trapping gaseslinked to global warming.While emissions fromindustry are decreasing, those related to trans-portation are expected torise more than 50 percentby 2030 in industrializedand poorer nations. And 80 percent of that growthwill be in the developing world, according to datapresented in May at an in-ternational conference inBellagio, Italy, sponsored by the Asian DevelopmentBank and the Clean Air Institute.

Bus rapid transit systems like Bogo-tá’s, called TransMilenio, might holdan answer. Now used for an average of1.6 million trips each day, TransMilen-io has allowed the city to remove 7,000small private buses from its roads,reducing the use of bus fuel — and as-sociated emissions — by more than 59percent since it opened its first line in

2001, according to city officials.In recognition of this feat, Trans-

Milenio last year became the onlylarge transportation project approvedby the United Nations to generate andsell carbon credits. Developed coun-tries that exceed their emissions lim-its under the Kyoto Protocol can buy credits from TransMilenio to balancetheir emissions budgets, bringing Bo-

gotá an estimated $100million to $300 million sofar, analysts say.

“Bogotá was huge and messy and poor, so peoplesaid, ‘If Bogotá can do it, why can’t we?’ ’’ said En-rique Peñalosa, an econo-mist and a former mayor of the city who took Trans-Milenio from a concept toits initial opening in 2001and is now advising othercities. In 2008, Mexico City opened a second success-ful bus rapid transit line that has already reducedcarbon dioxide emissionsthere, according to LeeSchipper, a transporta-tion expert at StanfordUniversity in California,

and the city has applied to sell carboncredits as well.

But bus rapid transit systems are not the answer for every city. In the United States, where cost is less con-straining, some cities, like Los Ange-les, have built B.R.T.’s, but they tend to lack many of the components ofcomprehensive systems like Trans-Milenio, and they serve as an addition

to existing rail networks.In some sprawling cities in India,

where a tradition of scooter use may make bus rapid transit more difficultto create, researchers are working todevelop a new model of tuk-tuk, or mo-torized cab, that is cheap and will runon alternative fuels or with a highly efficient engine. “There are three mil-lion auto rickshaws in India alone, andthe smoke is astonishing, so this couldhave a huge impact,’’ said Stef vanDongen, director of Enviu, an environ-mental network group in Rotterdam,the Netherlands, that is sponsoringthe research.

TransMilenio moves more passen-gers per kilometer every hour thanalmost any of the world’s subways.Most poorer cities that have built sub-ways, like Manila and Lagos, Nigeria,can afford to build only a few limitedlines. And bus rapid transit systems can be built more quickly, according to Walter Hook, executive director ofthe Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, in New York.

“Almost all rapidly developing cit-ies understand that they need a metroor something like it, and you can get a B.R.T. by 2010 or a metro by 2060,’’ he said.

Bogotá’s Buses Offer a Lesson in Green Transport

POOL PHOTO BY L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO-VATICAN, VIA GETTY IMAGES

SCOTT DALTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A bus rapid transit system in Bogotá, Colombia, improvestraffic flow, saves money and reduces carbon emissions.

CARTER

DOUGHERTY

ESSAY

OVERTURINGEN JOURNAL

A EurekaMoment

In Sweden

Catholicism as AntidoteTo Turbo-Capitalism

A bad season for blueberries turns into a good year for gold.

Pope BenedictXVI, signing his encyclical oneconomic matters,which called for “greater socialresponsibility” onthe part of business.

Repubblica NewYork

M O N E Y & B U S I N E S S

VI MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009

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Source: International Monetary Fund; Bloomberg

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By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

In a different economy, BillyMitchell and Nicole Drucker of San Francisco might have spent $10,000on an engagement ring. But Ms.Drucker is out of work and they needto save for a house. So in April, Mr.Mitchell got down on one knee and proposed with a $4,000 diamond ringhe had bought on the Internet.

“We had to decide, where do wewant the money?” he said. “On her finger?”

In this economy, many consum-ers would rather keep their moneyin their wallets than on their fingers,necks or ears. As people re-examine their budgets, jewelry is one of theeasiest places to cut back.

“The half-carat is the new three-carat,” explained Hayley Corwick,who writes for Madison Avenue Spy,a blog about designer sales.

The new frugality is putting apainful squeeze on the jewelry in-dustry. It has forced diamond mines to curtail production, led to deep dis-counting at jewelry chains, spurred hundreds of store closings and re-sulted in job cuts at boutiques anddepartment stores.

Because jewelry is expensive in-ventory that moves slowly even inbetter economic times, many stores are laden with debt — even thoughwholesale global prices of polisheddiamonds were down 15.4 percent inJune compared with a year earlier.

Experts say that when the shake-out is over, far fewer jewelers will beleft. About 20 percent more Ameri-can jewelers will go out of business this year than did last year, accord-ing to Kenneth Gassman, president

of the Jewelry Industry ResearchInstitute .

The jewelry chains that have filed for bankruptcy in the last year or soinclude Fortunoff, Whitehall Jewel-ers, Friedman’s, Christian Bernard and Ultra Stores.

Still in business but posting lossesare big jewelry chains, both high endand low — from Harry Winston and Bulgari to Zales and Claire’s Stores.

And while the venerable Tiffany& Company is still making money,sales have dropped 34 percent at its stores in the United States that havebeen open at least a year.

Major mass-market retailers in-cluding Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, BJ’sWholesale Club and Costco havecited jewelry as one of their worst-performing categories this year.Ofthe consumers still buying jewelry,many are trading down to less ex-pensive items. Blue Nile, the online jeweler, said some people were opt-ing for engagement rings made ofsemiprecious stones .

For the retailers the good news,relatively speaking, is that thechains say the rate of decelerationhas slowed in the last three months. No one is declaring a recovery, oreven that the market has reached a bottom. But Tiffany, which has been selling its signature six-pronged di-amond solitaire engagement ringssince 1886, is confident the sparklewill return.

“We’re going through a businesscycle,” Mark L. Aaron, vice presi-dent for investor relations at Tiffany said. “There will eventually again bea rising tide of affluence around the world.”

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

FONTAINEBLEAU, France —French workers normally take offmuch of the summer, but this monththere is something of a revolution go-ing on here at this former royal cha-teau southeast of Paris. The throngsof tourists will be jostling alongsidestonemasons, restoration experts and other artisans paid by the French gov-ernment’s $37 billion economic stimu-lus program.

Their job? Maintain in pristine con-dition the 800-year-old palace of morethan 1,500 rooms where Napoleon bid adieu before being exiled to Elba and where Marie Antoinette enjoyed agilded boudoir.

Besides Fontainebleau, about 50French chateaus are to receive a face-lift, including the palace of Versailles. Also receiving funds are some 75 ca-thedrals, including Notre Dame inParis. A museum devoted to Laliqueglass is being created in Strasbourg,while Marseilles is to be the home of anew 10 million euro center for Mediter-ranean culture.

All told, Paris has set aside 100 mil-lion euros for what the French like to call their cultural patrimony. It is aFrench twist on how to overcome the global downturn, spending borrowedmoney avidly to beautify the nationeven as it also races ahead of the Unit-ed States in more classic Keynesian

ways: fixing potholes, upgrading rail-roads and pursuing other projects.

“America is six months behind; ithas wasted a lot of time,” said Patrick Devedjian, the minister in chargeof the French stimulus. By the timeWashington gets around to doling out most of its money, he sniffed, “the cri-sis could be over.”

The confidence evident in the words of Mr. Devedjian, a close adviser toPresident Nicolas Sarkozy, echoes abroader pride among French business and political leaders that their govern-ment has done a better job dodging the worst of the economic turmoil than its European neighbors.

Yet France remains highly vulner-able to rising unemployment. The Or-ganization for Economic Cooperation and Development, expects the Frenchjobless rate, currently 8.9 percent and lower than the 9.5 percent rate in the United States, to hit 11.2 percent by the end of 2010.

Under French regulations, unem-ployed workers are guaranteed up to 67 percent of their former salary and can collect as much as 70,000 eurosannually in benefits for two years.“We’re insulated from the shocks, but the next generation will pay for it,”warned Hervé Boulhol, head of theFrance desk at the O.E.C.D.

For now, though, the deluge seemsfar off into the future at Fontaineb-leau, much as it did to Louis XIV, theSun King, who spent each fall herefor his annual hunt. The well-tendedgardens and canals shimmer, whileartisans repair the courtyards andkitchen buildings where royal feastswere once prepared.

“This was the heart of the castlebecause court life revolved aroundmeals,” said Jacques Dubois, a spokes-man for the Château de Fontainebleau.“And this money allows us to finishconstruction that’s been going on foryears.”

By JAD MOUAWAD

The extreme volatility that hasgripped oil markets for the last 18months has shown no signs of slowing down, with oil prices rising sharplysince the beginning of the year despite an exceptionally weak economy.

The instability of oil and gas prices is puzzling government officials and policy analysts, who fear it couldjeopardize a global recovery. It is alsohobbling businesses and consumers,who are already facing the effects of a stinging recession, as they try in vainto guess where prices will be a yearfrom now, or even next month.

A wild run on the oil markets hasoccurred in the last 12 months. Lastsummer, prices surged to a recordhigh above $145 a barrel. As the globaleconomy faltered, oil tumbled to $33 abarrel in December. But oil rose 55 per-cent since the beginning of the year, to$70 a barrel, before falling less than $60early this week.

“To call this extreme volatilitymight be an understatement,” saidLaura Wright, the chief financial of-ficer at Southwest Airlines, a compa-ny that has sought to insure itself bybuying long-term oil contracts. “Over the past 15 to 18 months, this has been unprecedented. I don’t think it can beeasily rationalized.”

Volatility in the oil markets in thelast year has reached levels not re-corded since the energy shocks of the late 1970s and early 1980s, according toCostanza Jacazio, an energy analystat Barclays Capital in New York.

These gyrations have rippled acrossthe economy. The automakers Gen-eral Motors and Chrysler have beenforced into bankruptcy as customers shun their gas-guzzling automobiles.Airlines are on pace for another yearof deep losses because of rising jetfuel costs. And households, alreadycrimped by falling home prices,mounting job losses and credit pres-sures, are once more forced to monitor their discretionary spending .

The recent rise in oil prices is re-

prising the debate from last year over the role of investors in the commod-ity markets. Federal regulators in the United States announced July 7 thatthey were considering new restric-tions on “speculative” traders in mar-kets for energy products.

Government officials around theworld have become concerned about a possible replay of last year’s surge.Energy officials from the EuropeanUnion and OPEC, meeting in Viennalast month, said that “the speculationissue had not been resolved yet andthat the 2008 bubble could be repeat-ed” without more oversight.

Many factors that pushed oil prices up last year have returned. Supplyfears are creeping back into the mar-ket, with a new round of violence in Ni-geria’s oil-rich Niger Delta crimpingproduction. And there are increasing fears that the political instability inIran could spill over onto the oil mar-ket, potentially hampering exports.

The OPEC cartel has also been re-markably successful in reining inproduction in recent months to keepprices from falling. Even as prices re-covered, members of the Organizationof the Petroleum Exporting Countries have been unwilling to increase pro-

duction.Top officials said that OPEC’s goal

was to achieve $75 a barrel oil by theend of the year, a target that has been endorsed by Saudi Arabia, the group’s leading member.

“Neither the organization, nor itskey members, has any real interestin halting the rise in oil prices,” said a report by the Center for Global EnergyStudies, a consulting group in Londonfounded by a former Saudi oil minister.

For the global airline industry, thelatest price surge is certain to translateinto more losses this year, accordingto the industry’s trade group, I.A.T.A.

“Airlines have not yet felt the full im-pact of this oil price rise,” according to I.A.T.A.’s latest report. Likewise, au-tomobile showrooms emptied out asgasoline prices rose, forcing General Motors and Chrysler to cut productionas they wade through bankruptcy.

For Jeroen van der Veer, who re-tired as chief executive officer of RoyalDutch Shell, prices are increasinglydictated by long-term assessments of suply and demand, rather than currentmarket fundamentals. He advised tak-ing a long-term view of the market.

“Oil has never been very stable,” Mr.van der Veer said.

Wild Swings in the Price of Oil Jeopardizes Economic Recovery

ED ALCOCK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Restoration work on the Grand Commun, next to the Palace ofVersailles, is part of France’s $37 billion plan to help the economy.

France FightsDownturnWith CulturalRestorations

For Jewelers, RecessionHas Dulled the Sparkle

Alice Pfeiffer contributed reporting from Paris.

Repubblica NewYork

Location of

glass boxes

103rd floor

The glass observation boxes extend

1.3 meters out of the building.

The new 103rd-floor observation booth at the Sears Tower,in Chicago, takes advantage of new technology to use glass as a load-bearing element.

Don’t Look Down

Supporting

steel frame

Glass floor

Glass walls

support the

weight of the

floor and the

viewers,

and transfer

the load to

the steel

frame.

Glass box shown in

retracted position below

Gasket deflated

The floor, sides and ceiling of the observation boxes are made of three sheets of half-inch tempered glass bonded together with polymer film.

Glass elements are joined together with stainless steel fasteners. Some joints have a silicone layer to allow for thermal expansion.

A gliding mechanism driven by an electric motor allows the four glass boxes to be pulled inside the tower for cleaning and maintenance.

MECHANISM

An inflatable gasket seals the glass box in place. Deflating the seal allows the box to be moved in and out. Heating cables prevent ice buildup and keep the seal from freezing to the glass.

WALL

INFLATABLEGASKET

HEATINGCABLES

BUILDINGFACADE

SEAL

TEMPEREDGLASSSHEET

Laminated glass

POLYMER FILM

Sources: Skidmore, Owings

& Merrill; MTH Industries

GLASS FLOOR

GLASS WALL

FASTENER

STRUCTURAL GLASS FASTENER

EXTENDED POSITION

GLASS BOX RAILS AND BEARINGS MOTOR

RETRACTEDPOSITION

MAINTENANCEPOSITION

Side view

MIKA GRÖNDAHL/THE NEW YORK TIMES

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

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009 VII

The visions seem to intrude from the brain’s depths at the worst pos-sible times — during a job interview, a meeting with the boss, an apprehen-sive first date, an important dinner

party. What if I started a food fight with these hors d’oeuvres?Mocked the host’sstammer? Yelled out a racial slur?

“That single thought is enough,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in“The Imp of the Perverse,” an essayon unwanted impulses. “The impulseincreases to a wish, the wish to a de-sire, the desire to an uncontrollablelonging.”

He added, “There is no passion innature so demoniacally impatient, asthat of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge.”

Or meditates on the question: AmI sick?

In a few cases, the answer may beyes. But a vast majority of peoplerarely, if ever, act on such urges, and their susceptibility to rude fantasies in fact reflects the workings of a nor-mally sensitive, social brain, argues apaper published recently in the jour-nal Science.

“There are all kinds of pitfalls insocial life, everywhere we look; notjust errors but worst possible errors

come to mind, and they come to mindeasily,” said the paper’s author, DanielM. Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard.“And having the worst thing come tomind, in some circumstances, mightincrease the likelihood that it will hap-pen.”

The exploration of perverse urges has a rich history, running through the stories of Poe and the Marquis de Sade to Freud’s repressed desires and Darwin’s observation that manyactions are performed “in direct op-position to our conscious will.” In the past decade, social psychologists have documented how common suchcontrary urges are — and when theyare most likely to alter people’s be-havior.

At a fundamental level, function-ing socially means mastering one’s impulses. The adult brain expends at least as much energy on inhibition as

on action, some studies suggest, and mental health relies on abiding strat-egies to ignore or suppress deeply disturbing thoughts — of one’s own inevitable death, for example. Thesestrategies are general, subconscious or semiconscious psychological pro-grams that usually run on automatic pilot.

Perverse impulses seem to arise when people focus intensely on avoid-ing specific errors or taboos. Thetheory is straightforward: to avoid saying that a colleague is a raging hypocrite, the brain must first imag-ine just that; the very presence of that catastrophic insult, in turn, increasesthe odds that the brain will unleash it.

“We know that what’s accessiblein our minds can exert an influenceon judgment and behavior simplybecause it’s there, it’s floating on thesurface of consciousness,” said Jamie

Arndt, a psychologist at the Universityof Missouri.

The empirical evidence of this in-fluence has been piling up in recentyears, as Dr. Wegner documents inthe new paper. The risk that peoplewill slip depends in part on the level of stress they are undergoing, Dr. Wegner argues. Concentrating in-tensely on not staring at a prominent mole on a new acquaintance’s face, while also texting and trying to followa conversation, heightens the risk of saying: “We went to the mole — I mean, mall. Mall!”

“A certain relief can come from just getting it over with, having that worst thing happen, so you don’t have to worry about monitoring in anymore,” Dr. Wegner said.

All of which might be hard to ex-plain, of course, if you’ve just insultedthe dinner party.

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

CHICAGO — To truly appreciate how glasscan be used structurally, make your way to 233 South Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago. More precisely, make your way 412 meters above SouthWacker, to the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower.

Once there, take a few steps over to the west wall, where the facade has been cut away. Then take one more step, over the edge.

You’ll find yourself on a floor of glass, suspend-ed over the sidewalk just over a kilometer below.If you can’t bear looking straight down past yourfeet, shift your gaze out or up — the walls areglass, too, as is the ceiling. You’ve stepped intoa transparent box, one of four that jut 1.3 meters from the tower, hanging from cantilevered steel beams above your head. The glass walls are con-nected to the beams, and to the glass floor, withbolts. But what’s really saving you from oblivionis the glass itself.

The boxes, which opened recently as part of anextensive renovation of the tower’s observation deck, are among the most recent, and more out-landish, projects that use glass as load-bearing elements.

But all glass structures have at least a bit of dar-ing about them, as if they are giving a defiant an-swer to the question: You can’t do that with glass,can you?

You can. Engineers, architects and fabrica-tors, aided by materials scientists and software designers, are building soaring facades, archingcanopies and delicate cubes, footbridgesand staircases, almost entirely of glass.They’re laminating glass with polymers to make beams and other componentsstronger and safer — each of the Sears Tower sheets is a five-layer sandwich — and analyzing every square centimeter of a design to make sure the stressesare within precise limits. And they are experimenting with new materials and methods that could someday lead toglass structures that are unmarked bymetal or other materials.

“Ultimately what we’re all strivingfor is an all-glass structure,” said James O’Callaghan of Eckersley O’CallaghanStructural Design, who has designedwhat are perhaps the world’s best-knownglass projects, the staircases that are a prominent feature of every Apple Store.

Through it all, they’ve realized onething. “Glass is just another material,”said John Kooymans of the engineering firm Halcrow Yolles, which designed the Sears Tower boxes.

It’s a material that has been around formillennia. Although glass can be made in count-less ways to have any number of specific uses — toconduct light as fibers, say, or serve as a backing for electronic circuitry, as in a laptop screen —structural projects almost exclusively use soda-lime glass, made, as it has always been, largely from sodium carbonate, limestone and silica.

“For years, the basic composition of soda-limeglass has not changed much,” said Harrie J. Ste-vens, director of the Center for Glass Research atAlfred University in western New York State. It’s

the same glass, more or less, that is used for thewindows in your home and the jar of jam in yourrefrigerator.

Pristine glass is very strong. But like a new car that plummets in value the moment it is driven offthe lot, glass starts to lose its strength the instantit’s made. Tiny cracks begin to form through con-tact with other surfaces, or even with water vaporand carbon dioxide.

Even one gas molecule can break a silicon-oxygen bond in glass, generating a defect, said

Carlo G. Pantano, a professor of materials scienceat Pennsylvania State University. While glass isvery strong in compression, tensile stresses willmake these tiny fissures start to grow, bond bybond. “That’s what makes glass break,” Dr. Pan-tano said. “And if it doesn’t break, it weakens it.”

Unlike steel or other materials, glass does not deform or otherwise give advance warning of fail-ure. If breakage occurs, maintaining the integrityof the structure is paramount so that people on orbelow it are safe.

Already, some engineers are starting to useadhesives to join glass directly to glass. LucioBlandini, an engineer with Werner Sobek Engi-neering and Design in Stuttgart, Germany, usedadhesives to create a thin glass dome, 8 meters across, for his doctoral thesis in a clearing in Stut-tgart. “I think adhesives are the most promising connection device,” Dr. Blandini said. “It allows glass to keep its aesthetic qualities.” His firm isusing adhesives in parts of structures being built at the University of Chicago and in Dubai.

Making Glass Bear Its Share Of the Load

BENEDICT

CAREY

ESSAY

Inappropriate urgesarise when we try toavoid taboos.

When Mischief Takes Over the Brain

Repubblica NewYork

By PATRICK HEALY

BEIRUT — Along the Beirut Riverjust outside of the city center is an in-dustrial neighborhood of small ware-houses and factories, car dealerships and crumbling, squat buildings thatbear the scars of bullets from Leba-non’s wars. It is a place, in other words,where a cultural space that would bethe envy of New York has come to life.

The Beirut Art Center, a 1,500-square-meter space occupying two floors of aformer factory, opened on January 15,and it has quickly emerged as a populardestination for Beirutis, tourists and art critics across Lebanon.

Through July 14 it housed a provoca-tive exhibition of work by 20 Lebaneseartists titled “The Road to Peace:Paintings in Times of War, 1975-1991,”a collection of pieces that portray thetrauma of the Lebanese civil war. Mostof the work had not been shown publiclybefore, the exhibition organizers say,and reflected the art center’s ambitionsto become a major cultural player in amodern, peaceful Lebanon.

Planning for the art center beganin 2005. Lamia Joreige, a visual art-ist, and Sandra Dagher, previouslythe director of the gallery Espace SD in downtown Beirut, said that theythought that the city lacked the mu-seums and cultural spaces worthy ofa metropolis of its size and history.Specifically, they said in an e-mailinterview, they saw a need for a con-temporary art center that could mountsolo and group shows of Lebanese art-ists to complement the government-supported museums in Beirut.

The war between the Hezbollahparamilitary forces and Israel dur-ing the summer of 2006 slowed theirsearch, but eventually they agreedon the factory space in the Jisr el-Wati neighborhood, where construction of residential projects and a municipalschool are also bringing new life to thestreets.

“Although Beirut Art Center has not been open for a long time, it has veryquickly become a cultural landmark inthe city,” Ms. Dagher said.

The title of the recent exhibitioncame from a series of print drawings by Aref Rayess that depict Lebanese survivors of war. In one drawing afamily takes shelter with a gunmanbehind a brick wall as chaos ensuesnearby; in another, shadowy faceswith pained expressions are etchedinto city buildings.

The specter of death suffused theexhibition. Theo Mansour’s “MassGrave” blends red, crimson and other bloodlike colors in acrylic forms ofcorpses and writhing bodies, manywith their mouths agape as if scream-ing.

In the work “The April the LiliesDied” by Mohammad Rawas, etch-ings and stencil drawings depictingdestruction during 1983 include thebombed-out barracks where, in Oc-tober of that year, 241 Americans who were part of a multinational peace-keeping force were killed.

“When I came back to Beirut in 1981,I deliberately ignored and avoidedworking on the theme of war until1983, when the war had its severe tollon me through the death of a very closefriend,” Mr. Rawas said in a statement posted near the work. “The war made me aware of the futility of art whoseraison d’être was considered to simplyplease the eye.”

The most surprising piece was in a small, windowless room off the maingallery space. Three adult-size cas-kets were arranged on the floor; theywere filled with small lighted candles that dripped wax and with stacks ofbooks about art and creation; on thetop of one pile was a book whose cover simply read, “Imagination” — a visualcue that stayed in the mind of visitorsto the art center as they poured back onto the streets of a newly vital Beirutneighborhood.

TOKYO — After nearly fourdecades of work, Toyo Ito has earneda cult following among architectsaround the world, although he is littleknown outside his home country,

Japan. Throughhis strange andethereal buildings,he has created abody of work almostunmatched in itsdiverse originality.

Over the past decade, as manyof his contemporaries have piled up one commission after another,Mr. Ito has largely remained on the sidelines. He is rarely mentioned inconversations about semicelebrities like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid or Jacques Herzog.

Mr. Ito’s status may finally beabout to change. A stadium with a pythonlike form that he designedfor the World Games was recently unveiled to a global audience inKaohsiung, Taiwan.

Even more ambitious are his plans for the Taichung opera house, which is scheduled to go into construction sometime next year.A work of striking inventiveness,it has already been touted as a masterpiece. Its porous exterior, which resembles a gigantic sponge, is as wildly imaginative in its wayas Frank Gehry’s Guggenheimmuseum in Bilbao, Spain. Its designwas a large reason Mr. Ito was

recently awarded his first Americancommission, the Berkeley Art Museum in California.

But even if Mr. Ito begins to land the big, lucrative commissions that he so obviously deserves, he may never be completely accepted by a broad popular audience. He does not have the intimidating, larger-than-life persona of a Koolhaas. Nor is he a flamboyant presence like Ms. Hadid,who is often compared to an opera diva because of her striking looks and imperial air.

Mr. Ito, by comparison, can beunassuming. A small, compact man with a round face framed by

rectangular glasses and darkhair, he is easygoing and rarely flustered. And he has the rare ability to consider his projectswith a critical eye.

His career can be read as a lifelong quest to find the precise balance between seemingly opposing values — individualand community, machine and nature, utopian fantasies and hard realities.

His ability to find such balances consistently has madehim one of our great urban poets.

The Tama Art UniversityLibrary, west of Tokyo, is set at theedge of a dreary hillside campus. Itwas conceived as an irregular grid of delicate concrete arches. Inside, the arches are arranged at odd angles toone another. The floor of an informalexhibition space follows the slope of the surrounding landscape so that from inside, the relationship of the two seems fluid.

The result is a kind of antimonument. The image we holdof a heavy, traditional arch becomes something fragile and ethereal. The design’s aim is to liberate us fromthe oppressive weight of history and,in the process, open up imaginative

possibilities.Since the library’s completion his

ambitions have led to a startling range of new designs, like his recently opened Za-Koenji PublicTheater in Tokyo. The theater’s uneven tentlike form seems to be aresult of the forces colliding around it, like speeding trains and arcane zoning requirements.

The design for the 44,000-seat Kaohsiung stadium, by contrast, seems to be as much about the anxieties of a mass event as about a shared emotional experience. Itseeks to maximize our awareness of the outside world while still creating a sense of enclosure. By embracing ambiguity, his work forces us to lookat the world through a wider lens.

“I sometimes feel that we arelosing an intuitive sense of our ownbodies,” Mr. Ito lamented. “Childrendon’t run around outside as much asthey did. They sit in front of computergames. Some architects have beentrying to find a language for this newgeneration, with very minimalistspaces. I am looking for somethingmore primitive, a kind of abstractionthat still has a sense of the body.”

“The in between,” he added, “is more interesting to me.”

TOMIO OHASHI; LEFT, MARC BIBO

Irregular concrete arches define the Tama Art University Library,above, designed by Toyo Ito. Mr. Ito’s recent projects include a stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, left.

NICOLAI

OUROUSSOFF

ESSAY

Buildings That Suggest the World Beyond

Face of War PervadesArt Center

It was ridiculous when someconservative religious leaders complained of a hidden homosexualagenda lurking behind the jellyfish and floating plankton of “SpongeBob

SquarePants.”Ridiculous, but

not totally absurd. Adults have beentrying to detectsome sort of subtextto that cheerful,

almost inexplicably popular cartoon series on the children’s televisionnetwork Nickelodeon since it first bubbled to the surface a decade ago.

There have been books,dissertations and seminars dedicated to the study of the fun-loving yellow kitchen spongewho lives in a pineapple under the sea. There was a theatrical-release movie version. President Obama said during the campaignthat SpongeBob was his favorite television character. David Bowie and Johnny Depp are among the many stars who boast or blog about

having been guest stars.To fete the show’s 10th

anniversary, Nickelodeon recentlyran a 50-episode weekend marathon that included 10 new episodes of “SpongeBob,” while its sister network, VH1, planned to show a documentary, “Square Roots: TheStory of ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ ” that interviews its creator, Stephen Hillenburg, an illustrator andmarine biologist, and others.

The series celebrates its firstdecade as popular as ever and withouthaving disclosed any higher meaningto Bikini Bottom, the name of theunderwater city where it takes place.

Part of the show’s mystique isprecisely that it has so little edge orsubversiveness. The writers takeon all sorts of American quirksand conventions while placing them underwater, but gently and benignly. “SpongeBob” remains distinctive, if only for its retro look: Mr. Hillenburg and his colleagues draw their animation by hand, witheach episode requiring more than

20,000 drawings.Mostly it’s the sensibility that is

a throwback to a less sardonic era.“SpongeBob” became a huge hit in the early ’00s when some of the most popular cartoons, like “SouthPark,” had a cynical, perverse edgethat appealed to both teenagers and adults.

SpongeBob is an optimist, a naïfand a child, and the unifying joke isthat he is impervious to danger ordislike. SpongeBob loves his friends and doesn’t realize that some, notably his neighbor Squidward and

even Mr. Krabs, his miserly boss at the Krusty Krab food shack, do notexactly reciprocate.

At times, the writers seem to pokefun at some of the sick humor soprevalent on “South Park” and other more sophisticated animated series.

In one episode SpongeBob inadvertently drives a school-crossing guard to abandon her post and flee; a line of tiny schoolchildren cross the street by themselves and right into oncoming traffic. Theyaren’t crushed and smeared across the sidewalk, as some “South Park”viewers have come to expect.Instead the approaching vehicles turn out to be a slow-moving, colorfulparade, to the delight of SpongeBob and the children.

It’s been 10 years now, and“SpongeBob” still seems refreshing and innocent compared with somuch other precocious children’sprogramming.

Edward Gorey, the master illustrator of the macabre, once said that there is no such thing as “happynonsense.” “SpongeBob” could bethe exception.

NICKELODEON

ALESSANDRA

STANLEY

ESSAY

Fun-Loving SpongeKeeps It Clean

‘‘SpongeBob SquarePants’’ remains both innocentand hugely popular.

A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, JULY 20, 2009

Repubblica NewYork