The darkness at ground zero just got a little darker. If there are people still clinging to the expectation that the Freedom Tower will become a monument to the highest American ideals, the current design should finally shake them out of that delusion. Somber, oppressive and clumsily conceived, the project suggests a monument to a society that has turned its back on any notion of cultural openness. It is exactly the kind of nightmare that government officials repeatedly asserted would never happen here: an impregnable tower braced against the outside world.

The temptation is to dismiss it as a joke. And it is hard not to pity Mr. Childs, who was forced to redesign the tower on the fly to meet the rigid deadline of Gov. George E. Pataki. Unfortunately, the tower is too loaded with meaning to dismiss. For better or worse, it will be seen by the world as a chilling expression of how we are reshaping our identity in a post-Sept. 11 context.

The most radical design change is the creation of the base, which will house the building's lobby and some mechanical systems. Designed to withstand a major bomb blast, the base will be virtually windowless. In an effort to animate its exterior, the architects say they intend to decorate it in a grid of shimmering metal panels. A few narrow slots will be cut into the concrete to allow slivers of natural light into the lobby.

The effort fails on almost every level. As an urban object, the tower's static form and square base finally brush aside the last remnants of Mr. Libeskind's master plan, whose only real strength was the potential tension it created among the site's structures. In the tower's earlier incarnation, for example, its eastern wall formed part of a pedestrian alley that became a significant entry to the memorial site, leading directly between the proposed International Freedom Center and the memorial's north pool. The alley, flanked on its other side by a performing arts center to be designed by Frank Gehry, was fraught with tension; it is now a formless park littered with trees.

The interior, by comparison, holds a bit more promise for the hopelessly optimistic. Visitors will enter from north and south lobbies, where they will have to slip around an interior partition set just beyond the revolving doors - yet another concession to security concerns. If the configuration of windows could somehow be improved, one could imagine, with some effort, a sealed cathedral-like room with heavenly light spilling down.

But if this is a potentially fascinating work of architecture, it is, sadly, fascinating in the way that Albert Speer's architectural nightmares were fascinating: as expressions of the values of a particular time and era. The Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a world shaped by fear.

At a recent meeting at his Wall Street office, Mr. Childs tried to deflect this criticism by enveloping the building in historical references. The height of the tower minus its spire (1,368 feet) matches the height of the taller of the former World Trade Center towers and is meant to re-establish a visual relationship to the nearby World Financial Center, which was exactly half that height. The fortresslike appearance of the base was partly inspired by the Strozzi Palace in Florence, the relationship between the base and the soaring tower by Brancusi's "Bird in Space" sculpture.

But the tower has none of the lightness of Brancusi's polished bronze form, let alone its sculptural beauty. And the Strozzi Palace's rough stone facade is beautiful because it is a mask: once inside, you are confronted with a courtyard flooded with light and air, one of the Renaissance's great architectural treasures. What the tower evokes, by comparison, are ancient obelisks, blown up to a preposterous scale and clad in heavy sheaths of reinforced glass - an ideal symbol for an empire enthralled with its own power.

This obsession with symbolism extends all the way up to the tower's spire. Mr. Childs has long been itching to reposition the original spire, which, as Mr. Libeskind envisioned it, had to be set at the edge of the tower to echo the outstretched arm of the Statue of Liberty. In the new version, the spire rises out of the center of a tension ring mounted atop the building, an abstract interpretation of Liberty's torch and a concept that, like Mr. Libeskind's, has more to do with pandering to public sentiment than with any big architectural idea.

All of this could be more easily forgiven if it were simply due to bad design. But ground zero is not really being shaped by architects; it is being shaped by politicians. Soon after the new security requirements were announced, it became clear that the entire building would have to be redesigned. That could have been seen as a last chance to repair what had become a confused master plan, one that had little connection, except in the minds of Mr. Libeskind and Governor Pataki, to the original. Instead, the quality of the master plan has been sacrificed to the governor's insistence on preserving hollow symbolic gestures.

Absurdly, if the Freedom Tower were reduced by a dozen or so stories and renamed, it would probably no longer be considered such a prime target. Fortifying it, in a sense, is an act of deflection. It announces to terrorists: Don't attack here - we're ready for you. Go next door.

[original article]

One would often return home empty-handed, no closer to solving the mystery of the missing cousins, where all the money went or why no-one ever talked about Uncle Bill.

Now, with a wealth of genealogical information available online and an explosion in the number of people eager to research their roots, family history can be a completely different experience.

You can access birth, marriage and death indexes and census details instantaneously and quickly link up with people who have other useful resources at their disposal or specialist knowledge.

Random number

And with these developments a new breed of genealogist has emerged - ready to root at will and for whom the process of recreating people's lives and times is an end in itself.

Members of the 16,000-strong Rootschat forum now take part in a monthly challenge, in which an individual with whom none of them has any known connection is randomly selected from the 1881 census.

The job is to find out as much as possible about the mystery person within the next four weeks. It's pot luck - the person could have died a week later - but there's always something interesting to discover about them.

"I suppose it's almost like getting a bit of a hit," explains Sarah Mackay, who with partner Trystan Davies set up Rootschat, which attracts up to 140 new members every day.

"People doing their own family may get stuck for years, but it's very addictive and when you can't get any further yourself, you're still quite desperate for the same hit.

"Which is when they start casting further afield into someone else's family group.

Killed in war

"It's almost like it becomes your own family. What I can't get over is the amount of detail people will go into."

Randomly chosen Abraham Bland, of Sale, Cheshire, started off as simply a name in the 1881 census, but a month later he was the subject of hundreds of postings, some including photographs.

The son of a landscape gardener and strict Sabbatarian - who wouldn't allow meals to be cooked on Sundays - the 5ft 7in-tall blue-eyed blond (chest measurement 34in), known as Len, emigrated to Canada in 1904, set up his own six-acre homestead and kept cattle.

He joined the armed forces in 1916 and went with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces to England, where he was based at Sandling Camp in Kent, and then to France, where he was killed in the battle of Vimy Ridge on 22 August 1917. He left no wife or children.

Censuswhacking

There is a serious side to the project, and the hope is that the randomly chosen person will fit into another researcher's family tree - something which has actually happened on each occasion so far.

Researcher Paul Etherington, who initiated the challenges, sees the site as a "truly altruistic experience".

"My own experience was that I was given advice and guidance by total strangers, and it only made me determined to want to offer the same to others.

"There's a definite pleasure to be had in helping others to find their way through to their ancestors. It must be the same kick that teachers get when a pupil suddenly gets a point they're trying to put across."

Paul also came up with the idea of censuswhacking - searching for a first name, surname or occupation that appears only once in a given census (as transcribed) - which has proved a big hit on the site.

Where else would the lives of Ginnie Pig, Spud Murphey and Alfred Goold - 1901 occupation "living on condensed milk" - be recorded for posterity?

CENSUSWHACKS

• Fatty Atkinson, 1881
• Peter Pan, 1891
• Banana Pointer, 1891
• Crusoe Robinson, 1871
• Clara Slime, 1901
• Nasty Clough, 1861
• Ester Bunney, 1871
• Sherwood Forest, 1901

[original article]

Ever since Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 1943 children's novel, The Little Prince, science-fiction writers have dreamed of tiny planets -- planettes, if you will -- wrapped in tiny atmospheres and clothed in plants and cottages, animals and people. Few writers have concerned themselves, though, with the formidable technical details. The first and largest problem is also the most obvious: gravity. Large bodies like the Earth have got a lot of it, while small bodies like asteroids and moons have only a little. On a mile-wide sphere of rock, there's only the faintest tug of attraction; the air and houses and people would simply drift away into outer space. But science offers us an interesting trick here, because a celestial body's surface gravity depends not only on its mass but also on its radius. To put it very simply: a small, dense object puts you closer to the center than a large, fluffy object of equal mass. Hence, gravity's pull is greater.

The other problem is more serious, because it results in suffocation. "Escape velocity" is the speed an object has to be moving to break free of a gravity well and sail off into interplanetary space. Here on Earth's surface, this speed is a comfortable 11.9 kilometers per second -- enough to keep us all firmly in place, and to make it really expensive to send probes and spaceships off to other planets. On a smaller body like the moon, escape velocity is only 2.4 km/sec, which is why the moon has no atmosphere. See, air molecules are never motionless; even in a closed room, they bounce around at high speed, colliding with the walls and with each other. At room temperature and sea-level pressure, the average velocity of an oxygen molecule is around 450 meters per second. Unfortunately, the maximum velocity can be much higher -- several kilometers per second -- which is fast enough to escape the moon's gravity, slowly bleeding the atmosphere away.

On our VW-sized planette the situation is even worse, because escape velocity is only 6 meters per second -- running speed -- which means neither you nor the air will be hanging around for long. Of course, the problems of tidal stress and escape velocity can both be reduced by making the planette larger; with a diameter of 500 meters it'd have a tidal gradient only 20 percent as steep, and would be capable of hanging onto air molecules moving 40 m/sec. This is a definite improvement, although still not enough to make the place livable. A denser atmosphere weighed down by heavy molecules would also help, but you'd still need some technology for cooling off the upper atmosphere, slowing down those gas molecules, and unfortunately if the power ever failed, so would the air. Make no mistake: While planettes of this kind are physically possible, they won't persist forever without stewardship. In this sense, they're more like space stations than planets.

But here we can combine the best of both worlds (or both types of worlds) by taking a large, airless body like the moon and compressing it. Reducing the moon's diameter by 60 percent (from 3,476 to 1,414 kilometers), we bring its outside closer to its center, increasing its surface gravity from 0.165 to 1.000 g -- a perfect match for Earth. Better still, this increases the escape velocity from 2.4 to 3.72 km/sec, which is more than enough to hold onto an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Tidal gradients would be negligible, and best of all, this "Earthlike" planette would be three times easier to escape from than the Earth itself. That is, a rocketship would need only one-third as much velocity -- or one-ninth as much energy! -- to get away. Such huge savings, combined with the safety and convenience of a real atmosphere, would make the squozen moon a perfect spaceport -- indeed, the main hub for all interplanetary traffic. Pretty cool, eh?
A matter of gravity

The dimensions of this remodeled satellite give it a surface area of 6.28 million square kilometers -- about 17 percent of its original area, or 1.7 percent of Earth's. This is roughly the size of China or India, so it's no great stretch to imagine hundreds of millions of people living there in perfect comfort and happiness. Because angular momentum is always conserved, reducing the diameter of the moon also shrinks its rotation period by a factor of 6. As a result, the moon's current solar day of 29.53 Earth days (708.72 hours) would be shortened to a more palatable 4.92 days (118.12 hours). For convenience, we might adjust that to exactly 5 Earth days, or 120 hours, and if we want to spend the extra energy, we could even strap nuclear rockets around the equator to spin it faster. A 24-hour day, anyone?

Of course, having the right gravity and rotation period does not, by itself, make a habitable world. After all, Venus has almost exactly the same gravity as Earth, while Mars has almost exactly the same spin, and neither one is exactly homey. They don't have any free oxygen in their atmospheres, and both have too much carbon dioxide. Venus has too much sulfur, too, making it highly acidic as well as hot. In some ways the moon is actually a bit more friendly, being very similar to Earth in all but four basic elements. Here's a quick comparison of soil chemistry:

Since we can extract oxygen right out of SiO2 in the rocks, the only real problems are a lack of carbon and hydrogen in the lunar soil and an overabundance of toxic nickel. The figures on nitrogen are misleading, since Earth's atmosphere contains a huge reservoir of this element, whereas the moon does not. A dense nitrogen atmosphere is certainly necessary to support Earthly life, so one would need to be imported. This could require a really large number of tanker ships, but if technology weren't a limiting factor, I'd personally vote for quantum teleportation, to pull down nitrogen and methane from Titan (Saturn's largest moon). The same technology could extract water from Europa (one of Jupiter's frozen children), to flood the landscape with small oceans that would stabilize the climate, create wildlife habitats, and provide a limitless reservoir of drinking water for the squozen moon's residents.
Sprucing up a satellite

Of course, after all this crushing and dumping and mixing, the air and water will be filled with all sorts of strange contaminants, and we'll have no easy way of cleaning or renewing them unless we install a working ecology. This process is called "terraforming," and has been a mainstay of science fiction ever since Olaf Stapledon's novel First and Last Men in 1930 (though the term itself was coined in 1949 by Jack Williamson). If you're reading this column, I can only assume you know the basics: first you import microbes, then engineered lichens and plants, then animals and, finally, humans. So many descriptions of this process were written over the span of the 20th century that I have very little to add here, except to say that the shock troops -- the first microbes into a hostile environment -- had better be rugged little critters.

Many biologists speculate that the ultimate temperature limit for single-celled "life as we know it" (i.e., life that's compatible with ours) may be as high as 160 degrees Centigrade, while the lower limit (as observed in Antarctica) seems to be around -12 degrees Centigrade. Many bacteria, and their primitive cousins the archaea, can survive long exposure to vacuum, which is certainly helpful in any terraforming operation. The same organisms can often survive at pressures as high as 300 atmospheres (i.e., 300 times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere), and "barophilic" or pressure-loving bacteria can thrive at up to 500 atmospheres. Nothing we know of can live without water, and because salt allows water to conduct electricity, life needs that as well. It can get by, though, with very dilute solutions like pond water, whereas extremely salty solutions will dehydrate most living things. The upper limit for salt tolerance seems to be around 33 percent solution, which is quite a lot if you consider that Earth's oceans -- which can kill land and freshwater life -- are only at 3 percent. Similarly, most organisms can't stand large variations in acidity, because acids and bases are both highly corrosive. Most life exists in a range of pH from around 5 to 8 (mildly acidic to mildly basic). However, there are bacteria capable of surviving in pH less than 1 -- acidic enough to dissolve metal! -- and as high as 11.5, which is equivalent to a weak solution of lye and can literally convert most cell membranes into soap.

Engineering a single organism to survive all these extremes is likely impossible, but we'd want to come as close as we could. We'd also want something that could produce oxygen, not only by photosynthesis but also through other chemical reactions, fueled by the very pollutants we want to remove from the crushed moon's air and water. And to cope with a rapidly changing environment, they should also be capable of surviving long periods of drought and starvation. And yet, we need our superorganisms to be either very friendly to human life, or else very, very easy to kill when they've outlived their usefulness. Otherwise, we might find we've gone to all this trouble to prepare a world not for ourselves, but for them.

We all love the large, pale moon that hangs in our nighttime sky. A half-sized blue and green one will definitely take some getting used to, especially when its dark side starts lighting up with cities. Still, the prospect of a new world -- large enough to house the entire United States, accessible enough to serve as the airline hub for an entire solar system, and yet safe enough to survive a technological collapse -- may be too good to pass up. Besides, who wants to live in the same old house for all eternity? Sooner or later, you've got to remodel.
Sources used for writing are:

McCarthy, Wil: To Crush the Moon (Appendix C: Technical Notes), Bantam Books, June 2005

Wikipedia: ("Terraforming"): http://www.wikipedia.org

McCarthy, Wil: Hacking Matter, Basic Books, 2004

Postgate, John: The Outer Reaches of Life, Cambridge University Press, 1994

Roger Bate, Donald D. Mueller and Jerry E. White: Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, Dover Publications, Inc., 1971

The Encyclopedia Britannica, 2004 Edition ("Moon")

Gillett, Stephen L.: World-Building, Writer's Digest Books, 1996

Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, nanotechnologist, science-fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short writings have graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Wired, Nature and other major publications, and his book-length works include the New York Times notable Bloom, Amazon "Best of Y2K" The Collapsium and, debuting this month, To Crush the Moon. His acclaimed nonfiction book, Hacking Matter, is now available in paperback.

[original article]

Chicago

WE are at that time of year when millions of American college and high school students will stride across the stage, take diploma in hand and set out to the wider world, most of them utterly unable to write a clear and coherent English sentence. How is this possible? The answer is simple and even obvious: Students can't write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are.

On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the semester each group will be expected to have created its own language, complete with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the text and strategies for teaching your language to fellow students. The language you create cannot be English or a slightly coded version of English, but it must be capable of indicating the distinctions - between tense, number, manner, mood, agency and the like - that English enables us to make.

You can imagine the reaction of students who think that "syntax" is something cigarette smokers pay, guess that "lexicon" is the name of a rebel tribe inhabiting a galaxy far away, and haven't the slightest idea of what words like "tense," "manner" and "mood" mean. They think I'm crazy. Yet 14 weeks later - and this happens every time - each group has produced a language of incredible sophistication and precision.

How is this near miracle accomplished? The short answer is that over the semester the students come to understand a single proposition: A sentence is a structure of logical relationships. In its bare form, this proposition is hardly edifying, which is why I immediately supplement it with a simple exercise. "Here," I say, "are five words randomly chosen; turn them into a sentence." (The first time I did this the words were coffee, should, book, garbage and quickly.) In no time at all I am presented with 20 sentences, all perfectly coherent and all quite different. Then comes the hard part. "What is it," I ask, "that you did? What did it take to turn a random list of words into a sentence?" A lot of fumbling and stumbling and false starts follow, but finally someone says, "I put the words into a relationship with one another."

Once the notion of relationship is on the table, the next question almost asks itself: what exactly are the relationships? And working with the sentences they have created the students quickly realize two things: first, that the possible relationships form a limited set; and second, that it all comes down to an interaction of some kind between actors, the actions they perform and the objects of those actions.

The next step (and this one takes weeks) is to explore the devices by which English indicates and distinguishes between the various components of these interactions. If in every sentence someone is doing something to someone or something else, how does English allow you to tell who is the doer and whom (or what) is the doee; and how do you know whether there is one doer or many; and what tells you that the doer is doing what he or she does in this way and at this time rather than another?

Notice that these are not questions about how a particular sentence works, but questions about how any sentence works, and the answers will point to something very general and abstract. They will point, in fact, to the forms that, while they are themselves without content, are necessary to the conveying of any content whatsoever, at least in English.

Once the students tumble to this point, they are more than halfway to understanding the semester-long task: they can now construct a language whose forms do the same work English does, but do it differently.

In English, for example, most plurals are formed by adding an "s" to nouns. Is that the only way to indicate the difference between singular and plural? Obviously not. But the language you create, I tell them, must have some regular and abstract way of conveying that distinction; and so it is with all the other distinctions - between time, manner, spatial relationships, relationships of hierarchy and subordination, relationships of equivalence and difference - languages permit you to signal.

In the languages my students devise, the requisite distinctions are signaled by any number of formal devices - word order, word endings, prefixes, suffixes, numbers, brackets, fonts, colors, you name it. Exactly how they do it is not the point; the point is that they know what it is they are trying to do; the moment they know that, they have succeeded, even if much of the detailed work remains to be done.

AT this stage last semester, the representative of one group asked me, "Is it all right if we use the same root form for adjectives and adverbs, but distinguish between them by their order in the sentence?" I could barely disguise my elation. If they could formulate a question like that one, they had already learned the lesson I was trying to teach them.

In the course of learning that lesson, the students will naturally and effortlessly conform to the restriction I announce on the first day: "We don't do content in this class. By that I mean we are not interested in ideas - yours, mine or anyone else's. We don't have an anthology of readings. We don't discuss current events. We don't exchange views on hot-button issues. We don't tell each other what we think about anything - except about how prepositions or participles or relative pronouns function." The reason we don't do any of these things is that once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or that piece of content, usually some recycled set of pros and cons about abortion, assisted suicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the death penalty, free speech and so forth. At that moment, the task of understanding and mastering linguistic forms will have been replaced by the dubious pleasure of reproducing the well-worn and terminally dull arguments one hears or sees on every radio and TV talk show.

Students who take so-called courses in writing where such topics are the staples of discussion may believe, as their instructors surely do, that they are learning how to marshal arguments in ways that will improve their compositional skills. In fact, they will be learning nothing they couldn't have learned better by sitting around in a dorm room or a coffee shop. They will certainly not be learning anything about how language works; and without a knowledge of how language works they will be unable either to spot the formal breakdown of someone else's language or to prevent the formal breakdown of their own.

In my classes, the temptation of content is felt only fleetingly; for as soon as students bend to the task of understanding the structure of language - a task with a content deeper than any they have been asked to forgo - they become completely absorbed in it and spontaneously enact the discipline I have imposed. And when there is the occasional and inevitable lapse, and some student voices his or her "opinion" about something, I don't have to do anything; for immediately some other student will turn and say, "No, that's content." When that happens, I experience pure pedagogical bliss.

Stanley Fish is dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

[original article]

DURHAM -- After a period of failing health, Joseph E. Michael, Jr., died May 26, 2005 at Exeter Hospital. He was a resident of Durham for more than 50 years.

He married in 1949 and began practicing law in Rochester. He was later appointed District Court Judge of Durham, and most recently had been Of Counsel in the law firm of Swanson and Hand in Newmarket, N.H. A member of the New Hampshire Bar Association, Judge Michael was licensed to practice in Federal Court. He also served as a Director of the First National Bank of Rochester and as a Director and General Counsel for the Profile Bank FSB.

He taught undergraduate and graduate law courses at the University of New Hampshire for more than four decades. Among other duties, he served as Durham Town Moderator for many years, helping to guide the town when the proposed Onassis Oil Refinery threatened New Hampshire's seacoast. A founding member of St. George's Episcopal Church in Durham, and an active church member for more than 50 years, he was a Trustee of the Diocease of New Hampshire and a delegate to many state and national conventions. Additionally, he was a Trustee of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States' Pension Fund for many years.

He is survived by his wife, Shirley Whiting Michael; his daughter, Christine Nevada Michael; his son, Joseph E. Michael III; his daughter-in-law, Susan Lavallee; his son-in-law, Martin White; and five grandchildren-Aditep, Carmen, Isabel, and Jonathan White, and Cameron Michael; his brother, George Michael; and many beloved nieces, nephews, in-laws, and cousins.

His life was enriched by his love of the outdoors. He delighted in his hours on the water: at his cottage on Crystal Lake; during his annual fishing trip to Moosehead Lake in Maine; while boating on Little Bay; and when sailing the Eastern Atlantic Coast. He was a ticket holder and an avid enthusiast of all sports at the University of New Hampshire, and he spent many summers coaching Little League baseball in Durham. He enjoyed travel in the United States and in Europe, but his most treasured moments were spent with his family and close friends.

A private service will be held for family members. A public memorial service will be held in July; details will be forthcoming.

In lieu of flowers, a contribution can be made to the Joseph Michael Memorial Fund of the Gilmanton Land Trust. The address is P.O. Box 561, Gilmanton, New Hampshire, 03237, and contributions should be marked "Attention Nanci Mitchell."

[original article]

SMITHFIELD, N.C. - The airplanes of Aero Contractors Ltd. take off from Johnston County Airport here, then disappear over the scrub pines and fields of tobacco and sweet potatoes. Nothing about the sleepy Southern setting hints of foreign intrigue. Nothing gives away the fact that Aero's pilots are the discreet bus drivers of the battle against terrorism, routinely sent on secret missions to Baghdad, Cairo, Tashkent and Kabul.

When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job. If agency experts need to fly overseas in a hurry after the capture of a prized prisoner, a plane will depart Johnston County and stop at Dulles Airport outside Washington to pick up the C.I.A. team on the way.

Aero Contractors' planes dropped C.I.A. paramilitary officers into Afghanistan in 2001; carried an American team to Karachi, Pakistan, right after the United States Consulate there was bombed in 2002; and flew from Libya to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the day before an American-held prisoner said he was questioned by Libyan intelligence agents last year, according to flight data and other records.

While posing as a private charter outfit - "aircraft rental with pilot" is the listing in Dun and Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A. officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency's Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees.

Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on paper, the C.I.A. has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001 as it has pursued and questioned terrorism suspects around the world.

An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.

The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper Aviation.

The civilian planes can go places American military craft would not be welcome. They sometimes allow the agency to circumvent reporting requirements most countries impose on flights operated by other governments. But the cover can fail, as when two Austrian fighter jets were scrambled on Jan. 21, 2003, to intercept a C.I.A. Hercules transport plane, equipped with military communications, on its way from Germany to Azerbaijan.

"When the C.I.A. is given a task, it's usually because national policy makers don't want 'U.S. government' written all over it," said Jim Glerum, a retired C.I.A. officer who spent 18 years with the agency's Air America but says he has no knowledge of current operations. "If you're flying an executive jet into somewhere where there are plenty of executive jets, you can look like any other company."

Some of the C.I.A. planes have been used for carrying out renditions, the legal term for the agency's practice of seizing terrorism suspects in one foreign country and delivering them to be detained in another, including countries that routinely engage in torture. The resulting controversy has breached the secrecy of the agency's flights in the last two years, as plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements.

Inquiries From Abroad

The authorities in Italy and Sweden have opened investigations into the C.I.A.'s alleged role in the seizure of suspects in those countries who were then flown to Egypt for interrogation. According to Dr. Georg Nolte, a law professor at the University of Munich, under international law, nations are obligated to investigate any substantiated human rights violations committed on their territory or using their airspace.

Dr. Nolte examined the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who American officials have confirmed was pulled from a bus on the Serbia-Macedonia border on Dec. 31, 2003, and held for three weeks. Then he was drugged and beaten, by his account, before being flown to Afghanistan.

The episode illustrates the circumstantial nature of the evidence on C.I.A. flights, which often coincide with the arrest and transporting of Al Qaeda suspects. No public record states how Mr. Masri was taken to Afghanistan. But flight data shows a Boeing Business Jet operated by Aero Contractors and owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, one of the C.I.A.-linked shell companies, flew from Skopje, Macedonia, to Baghdad and on to Kabul on Jan. 24, 2004, the day after Mr. Masri's passport was marked with a Macedonian exit stamp.

Mr. Masri was later released by order of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, after his arrest was shown to be a case of mistaken identity.

A C.I.A. spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. Representatives of Aero Contractors, Tepper Aviation and Pegasus Technologies, which operate the agency planes, said they could not discuss their clients' identities. "We've been doing business with the government for a long time, and one of the reasons is, we don't talk about it," said Robert W. Blowers, Aero's assistant manager.

A Varied Fleet

But records filed with the Federal Aviation Administration provide a detailed, if incomplete, portrait of the agency's aviation wing.

The fleet includes a World War II-era DC-3 and a sleek Gulfstream V executive jet, as well as workhorse Hercules transport planes and Spanish-built aircraft that can drop into tight airstrips. The flagship is the Boeing Business Jet, based on the 737 model, which Aero flies from Kinston, N.C., because the runway at Johnston County is too short for it.

Most of the shell companies that are the planes' nominal owners hold permits to land at American military bases worldwide, a clue to their global mission. Flight records show that at least 11 of the aircraft have landed at Camp Peary, the Virginia base where the C.I.A. operates its training facility, known as "the Farm." Several planes have also made regular trips to Guantánamo.

But the facility that turns up most often in records of the 26 planes is little Johnston County Airport, which mainly serves private pilots and a few local corporations. At one end of the 5,500-foot runway are the modest airport offices, a flight school and fuel tanks. At the other end are the hangars and offices of Aero Contractors, down a tree-lined driveway named for Charlie Day, an airplane mechanic who earned a reputation as an engine magician working on secret operations in Laos during the Vietnam War.

"To tell you the truth, I don't know what they do," said Ray Blackmon, the airport manager, noting that Aero has its own mechanics and fuel tanks, keeping nosey outsiders away. But he called the Aero workers "good neighbors," always ready to lend a tool.

Son of Air America

Aero appears to be the direct descendant of Air America, a C.I.A.-operated air "proprietary," as agency-controlled companies are called.

Just three years after the big Asian air company was closed in 1976, one of its chief pilots, Jim Rhyne, was asked to open a new air company, according to a former Aero Contractors employee whose account is supported by corporate records.

"Jim is one of the great untold stories of heroic work for the U.S. government," said Bill Leary, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Georgia who has written about the C.I.A.'s air operations. Mr. Rhyne had a prosthetic leg - he had lost one leg to enemy antiaircraft fire in Laos - that was blamed for his death in a 2001 crash while testing a friend's new plane at Johnston County Airport.

Mr. Rhyne had chosen the rural airfield in part because it was handy to Fort Bragg and many Special Forces veterans, and in part because it had no tower from which Aero's operations could be spied on, a former pilot said.

"Sometimes a plane would go in the hangar with one tail number and come out in the middle of the night with another," said the former pilot. He asked not to be identified because when he was hired, after responding to a newspaper advertisement seeking pilots for the C.I.A., he signed a secrecy agreement.

While flying for Aero in the 1980's and 1990's, the pilot said, he ferried King Hussein, Jordan's late ruler, around the United States; kept American-backed rebels like Jonas Savimbi of Angola supplied with guns and food; hopped across the jungles of Colombia to fight the drug trade; and retrieved shoulder-fired Stinger missiles and other weapons from former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

Ferrying Terrorism Suspects

Aero's planes were sent to Fort Bragg to pick up Special Forces operatives for practice runs in the Uwharrie National Forest in North Carolina, dropping supplies or attempting emergency "exfiltrations" of agents, often at night, the former pilot said. He described flying with $50,000 in cash strapped to his legs to buy fuel and working under pseudonyms that changed from job to job.

He does not recall anyone using the word "rendition." "We used to call them 'snatches,' " he said, recalling half a dozen cases. Sometimes the goal was to take a suspect from one country to another. At other times, the C.I.A. team rescued allies, including five men believed to have been marked by Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, for assassination.

Since 2001, the battle against terrorism has refocused and expanded the C.I.A.'s air operations. Aero's staff grew to 79 from 48 from 2001 to 2004, according to Dun and Bradstreet.

Despite the difficulty of determining the purpose of any single flight or who was aboard, the pattern of flights that coincide with known events is striking.

When Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq the evening of Dec. 13, 2003, a Gulfstream V executive jet was already en route from Dulles Airport in Washington. It was joined in Baghdad the next day by the Boeing Business Jet, also flying from Washington.

Flights on this route were highly unusual, aviation records show. These were the first C.I.A. planes to file flight plans from Washington to Baghdad since the beginning of the war.

Flight logs show a C.I.A. plane left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture of several Al Qaeda leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest. They included Abu Zubaida, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on March 28, 2002; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped plan 9/11 from Hamburg, Germany, on Sept. 10, 2002; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashri, the Qaeda operational chief in the Persian Gulf region, on Nov. 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, on March 1, 2003.

A jet also arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003, after the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the capture of Mr. Ayiri's deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani.

Flight records sometimes lend support to otherwise unsubstantiated reports. Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born prisoner in the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said through his lawyer that four Libyan intelligence service officers appeared in September in an interrogation cell.

Aviation records cannot corroborate his claim that the men questioned him and threatened his life. But they do show that a Gulfstream V registered to one of the C.I.A. shell companies flew from Tripoli, Libya, to Guantánamo on Sept. 8, the day before Mr. Deghayes reported first meeting the Libyan agents. The plane stopped in Jamaica and at Dulles before returning to the Johnston County Airport, flight records show.

The same Gulfstream has been linked - through witness accounts, government inquiries and news reports - to prisoner renditions from Sweden, Pakistan, Indonesia and Gambia.

Most recently, flight records show the Boeing Business Jet traveling from Sudan to Baltimore-Washington International Airport on April 17, and returning to Sudan on April 22. The trip coincides with a visit of the Sudanese intelligence chief to Washington that was reported April 30 by The Los Angeles Times.

Mysterious Companies

As the C.I.A. tries to veil such air operations, aviation regulations pose a major obstacle. Planes must have visible tail numbers, and their ownership can be easily checked by entering the number into the Federal Aviation Administration's online registry.

So, rather than purchase aircraft outright, the C.I.A. uses shell companies whose names appear unremarkable in casual checks of F.A.A. registrations.

On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that those companies appear to have no premises, only post office boxes or addresses in care of lawyers' offices. Their officers and directors, listed in state corporate databases, seem to have been invented. A search of public records for ordinary identifying information about the officers - addresses, phone numbers, house purchases, and so on - comes up with only post office boxes in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

But whoever created the companies used some of the same post office box addresses and the same apparently fictitious officers for two or more of the companies. One of those seeming ghost executives, Philip P. Quincannon, for instance, is listed as an officer of Premier Executive Transport Services and Crowell Aviation Technologies, both listed to the same Massachusetts address, as well as Stevens Express Leasing in Tennessee.

No one by that name can be found in any public record other than post office boxes in Washington and Dunn Loring, Va. Those listings for Mr. Quincannon, in commercial databases, include an anomaly: His Social Security number was issued in Washington between 1993 and 1995, but his birth year is listed as 1949.

Mr. Glerum, the C.I.A. and Air America veteran, said the use of one such name on more than one company was "bad tradecraft: you shouldn't allow an element of one entity to lead to others."

He said one method used in setting up past C.I.A. proprietaries was to ask real people to volunteer to serve as officers or directors. "It was very, very easy to find patriotic Americans who were willing to help," he said.

Such an approach may have been used with Aero Contractors. William J. Rogers, 84, of Maine, said he was asked to serve on the Aero board in the 1980's because he was a former Navy pilot and past national commander of the American Legion. He knew the company did government work, but not much more, he said. "We used to meet once or twice a year," he said.

Aero's president, according to corporate records, is Norman Richardson, a North Carolina businessman who once ran a truck stop restaurant called Stormin' Norman's. Asked about his role with Aero, Mr. Richardson said only: "Most of the work we do is for the government. It's on the basis that we can't say anything about it."

Secrecy Is Difficult

Aero's much-larger ancestor, Air America, was closed down in 1976 just as the United States Senate's Church Committee issued a mixed report on the value of the C.I.A.'s use of proprietary companies. The committee questioned whether the nation would ever again be involved in covert wars. One comment appears prescient.

When one C.I.A. official told the committee that a new air proprietary should be created only if "we have a chance at keeping it secret that it is C.I.A.," Lawrence R. Houston, then agency's general counsel, objected.

In the aviation industry, said Mr. Houston, who died in 1995, "everybody knows what everybody is doing, and something new coming along is immediately the focus of a thousand eyes and prying questions."

He concluded: "I don't think you can do a real cover operation."

Tired of Being Isolated and Ignored, Continent Isn't Bloody Moving

"Good Lord, that was a booze up," said a bleary-eyed Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, speaking from his residence at Kirribilli House, approximately 600 nautical miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

According to Australians and residents of several countries destroyed or lewdly insulted during the continent's nearly 7,000-mile saltwater stagger, the binge began just after noon yesterday at a pub in Brisbane, where several patrons were discussing Australia Day and the nation's general lack of respect from abroad.

"It started off same as always; coupla fossils saying how our Banjo Patterson was a better poet than Walt Whitman, how Con the Fruiterer is funnier than Seinfeld, only they're Aussies so no one knows about 'em," recalled witness Kevin Porter. "Then this bloke Martin pipes up and says Australia's main problem is that it's stuck in Australia, and everybody says 'Too right!'"

"Well, it made sense at the time," Porter added.

By 2 a.m., powered by national pride and alcohol, the 3-million-square-mile land mass was barging eastward through the Coral Sea and crossing into the central Pacific, leaving a trail of beer cans and Chinese take-away in its wake.

When dawn broke over the Northern Hemisphere, the continent suddenly found itself, not only upside down, but smack in the middle of the Atlantic, and according to most of its 19 million inhabitants, that's the way it's going to stay.

"We sent troops to Afghanistan. You never hear about it. We have huge government scandals. You never hear about it. It's all 'America did this,' and 'Europe says that,'" exclaimed Perth resident Paul Watson. "Well, we're right in the thick of things now, so let's just see if you can you ignore us."

Officials on both sides of the Atlantic conceded that would be difficult. "They broke Florida," said U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. "And most of Latin America is missing."

Meanwhile, victims of what's already been dubbed the "Australian Crawl" are still shaking off the event.

"Australia bumped into us at about midnight local time," said Hawaii governor Ben Cayetano. "They were very friendly ? they always seem friendly ? but they refused to go around unless we answered their questions. But the questions were impossible. 'Who is Ian Thorpe? Do you have any Tim Tams? What day is Australia Day?'"

"Fortunately, somebody here had an Unimportant World Dates calendar and we aced the last one," Cayetano added.

Panama, however, was not so lucky.

"Australia came through here screaming curses at us to let them through," said Ernesto Carnal, who guards the locks at the entrance to the Panama Canal. "We said they would not fit, so they demanded to speak with a manager. When I go to find Mr. Caballos, they sneak the whole continent through."

When Caballos shouted to the fleeing country that it had not paid, Australia "accidentally" backed up and took out every nation in the region, as well as the northern third of Venezuela. They then made up a cheery song about it.

By late morning today, however, not everyone in Australia was quite so blithe. "We've still got part of Jamaica stuck to Queensland," said Australian army commander Lt. Gen. Peter Cosgrove. "I think we might have declared war on it. I don't bloody remember. Maybe it's time to go home."

Cosgrove, however, is not in the majority, and at press time, U.S., African, and European leaders were still desperately trying to negotiate for Australia's withdrawal. But the independent-minded Aussies were not making it easy. In a two-hour meeting at midday, Australian representatives listed their demands: immediate inclusion in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a permanent CNN presence in all 6 Australian states, a worldwide ban on hiring Paul Hogan, a primetime U.S. television contract for Australian Rules Football, and a 4,500-mile-long bridge between Sydney and Los Angeles.

U.S. negotiators immediately walked out, calling the Australian Rules Football request "absurd."

Copyright 2002, SatireWire.

[original article]

ORONO, Maine -- Delivering the commencement speech at his alma mater, best-selling author Stephen King counseled University of Maine graduates Saturday to be voracious readers, donate a tenth of their earnings to worthy causes and carve out their careers in Maine.

After he was introduced Robert Kennedy, the university president, King joked that if he screwed up on the first speech, he would be the one introducing Kennedy in the afternoon ceremony.

King said he remembered speaking to the same class in the fall of 2001 when they were "freshpeople." He had told them he would be back when it was time for them to graduate.

"I never thought you would make good on your word -- I guess Kid Rock and Donald Rumsfeld were busy," he said.

When the time came for King to impart advice, he rattled off a "top 10" list, urging students to hug and kiss whoever helped them get to this point, to read as much as they could and to give away a dime for every dollar they make.

"If you don't, the government is just going to take it for you," said King, who is known for his own generosity to the university. "You go out broke.... You're not an owner in this life, you're just a steward."

The last four points of his list were the same: Stay in Maine.

Despite his celebrity, King has chosen to live in his native state for most of his life and makes his home in nearby Bangor.

"This can be home if you want it to be," he said. "If you leave, you will miss it, so you might as well skip the going away part."

The university awarded honorary doctorates to journalist Douglas Kneeland, a Lincoln native and university graduate whose career included work at the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, and Andrew Shepard, president and CEO of the Maine Winter Sports Center.

King and his wife Tabitha received honorary doctorates when he addressed Maine graduates in 1987.

This year's commencement was the university's largest, with 1,923 graduates, including 33 at the doctoral level.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[original article]

By JONATHAN SILVERSTEIN

Now, videogamers, hackers and others who just enjoy a good challenge, are coming out of the woodwork -- or hiding in it -- and adopting lock picking as their new hobby of choice.

Though some fear the hobby amounts to nothing more than burglary training, lock pickers claim they're not out to hurt anyone and may even help the public by exposing flaws in commonly used locks and other physical security devices.

'It's the Challenge'

For pickers like Andrew Howard, "lock-sports" are all about an intellectual challenge that is put on par with games like chess and compared to the '80s puzzle phenomenon Rubik's Cube.

"For me, it's about improving yourself," said Howard. "It's the challenge of being able to increase the physical dexterity in your fingers and being able to mentally imagine what's happening inside the lock."

Howard, a 24-year-old Brisbane, Australia, resident, says that like many of his lock-picking peers, his interest in picking was sparked by a job he did in network security.

"I'm a database programmer for the education department and I dabbled in Internet security for a while last year," he said.

Howard says it was a "natural progression" for his interests in computer security to expand to physical security.

"I thought it would be cool to pick a lock," he said cavalierly. "So I did and I've been into it ever since."

For people like Howard, security is like a puzzle. The idea is to make the puzzle so difficult that no man or machine can solve it.

A lock works very much the same way: the better the lock, the more complicated the puzzle, the harder it is to open without a key.

'Security Through Obscurity'

On the other side of the globe, in Alberta, Canada, another picker who goes by the alias Varjeal, enjoys picking for similar reasons, but he says that for him it's not just fun, it's revolution.

"I kind of undertook my own personal little way of changing things," he said. I want to "encourage people to come up with new ideas in regards to physical and lock security, because in the past it just hasn't been done. We're relying on technology that's basically a couple of hundred years old."

A locksmith for the last six years and a moderator for lockpicking Web site lockpicking101.com, Varjeal asked that his real name not be used, partly because he doesn't know how law enforcement and the public will feel about his hobby, but also because he fears retribution from the locksmithing community. Varjeal believes the locksmith industry's philosophy of "security through obscurity" is working to the detriment of the public by limiting access to information on flaws and defects to those only in the business.

Through the popularization of lock-sports, Varjeal believes a new flow of ideas, improvements and excitement will push the industry to make positive changes in physical security.

It's something he says he already sees happening.

"There are a lot of puzzle-minded people that are now looking at locksmithing and the whole physical security industry as a viable career," he said.

Finding Flaws

Marc Webber Tobias, one of the pre-eminent and more outspoken experts on locks, safes and security, agrees.

"I think that the more people from diverse fields that are looking at locks and security the better," he said.

But at Associated Locksmiths of America or ALOA, an organization that represents locksmiths across the United States, they concede that people outside the industry may have something to contribute, but stop short of endorsing lock picking as a hobby.

"We're not for pointing out physical security flaws to the general public," said David Lowell, ALOA's associate executive director. "Just like I'm sure the Atomic Energy Commission would not endorse the Web sites that tell you how to build a nuclear bomb. It's the same thing."

Lowell says that ALOA isn't against identifying flaws in physical security, but they are opposed to revealing that information to the general public.

"No one would ever have a problem with someone just sitting in their basement or even a group gathering in a living room or at a meeting or something and just kind of discussing ways to pick locks," Lowell said. "But then disseminating that into the New York Times or something like that goes beyond the scope of responsibility."

'They Don't Get It'

But Tobias and many pickers argue that making flaws public is exactly what the industry and the public needs.

"They don't get it," he said.

"The fact is, so what if a hacker can crack a lock," Tobias asked. "It just means the lock's got a problem. So what? My response is 'go fix it!' "

Though the word "hacker" may conjure up images of surreptitious computer geeks hovering over their keyboards to sinister ends, the term has actually broadened in meaning over the years.

Now a "hacker" is anyone who likes to fiddle, alter, play or tinker with software or hardware to make it do something it's not supposed to -- like opening a lock without a key.

"The locksmiths associate anybody in these sports/locksmithing clubs as hackers. They think they're all criminals and miscreants," he said. "It's housewives, it's doctors, it's lawyers, it's architects, it's newsmen, it's kids, it's hackers, it doesn't matter."

Evidence of this can be found at the annual Dutch Open lock picking competition or any one of a number of computer hacking conventions held around the world that include lock picking contests.
A Common Misconception

Because lock picking takes skill, ability, practice and patience, pickers like Varjeal say you're more likely to suffer a break-in at the hands of a bumbling robber armed with a crowbar than a set of lock picks.

"There's a misconception that teaching people a skill like this is going to mean that more people are going to use it for an illegal purpose than a legal one," he said. "Truth be known there are a lot faster and easier ways to bypass a lock rather than picking."

Douglas Chick, author of "Steel Bolt Hacking: The Computer Man's Guide to Lock Picking" says he's constantly asked the same question about his book, "doesn't it bother you that you are teaching people to steal?"

"Thieves use hammers and crowbars to smash and grab," Chick said in an e-mail interview. "Lock-sport practitioners are as likely to use their skill to steal, as a locksmith would be."

Chick's claim is supported by David Estrada, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department, who says that if you define lock picking as using an intricate device to simulate the action of a key -- as lock sports enthusiasts do -- it's not something you'll see too often in Boston.

"I've been working with the department for 10 years," said Estrada, "and I've never heard of an 'intricate device' being used for a burglary -- unless you consider a screwdriver an intricate device."

Even so, Chick admits lock-sports are not exactly mainstream -- yet.

"There is no question to the fact that lock picking is a strange and curious skill for someone to want to learn, especially in an already security anxious world," he said. "It is difficult to defend such a sport or brag about book sales on a subject that might very well be in the same light as picking pockets, but it is an underground sport that is growing larger everyday."

[original article]
Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures

Bill Gates is on a mission to build a Google killer. What got him so riled? The darling of search is moving into software?and that's Microsoft's turf.

FORTUNE
Monday, April 18, 2005
By Fred Vogelstein

He sure got that right. Today Google isn't just a hugely successful search engine; it has morphed into a software company and is emerging as a major threat to Microsoft's dominance. You can use Google software with any Internet browser to search the web and your desktop for just about anything; send and store up to two gigabytes of e-mail via Gmail (Hotmail, Microsoft's rival free e-mail service, offers 250 megabytes, a fraction of that); manage, edit, and send digital photographs using Google's Picasa software, easily the best PC photo software out there; and, through Google's Blogger, create, post online, and print formatted documents--all without applications from Microsoft.

While Google was launching those products--all of them free--Microsoft has been trying in vain to catch up in search. It has spent about $150 million on its search project, code-named Underdog. But Google and lately Yahoo keep leaping ahead with innovations like local-area search complete with maps and satellite photos, ways to search inside a video file, and search designed for cellphones.

Simply put, Google has become a new kind of foe, and that's what has Gates so riled. It has combined software innovation with a brand-new Internet business model--and it wounds Gates' pride that he didn't get there first. Since Google doesn't sell its search products (it makes its money from the ads that accompany its search results), Microsoft can't muscle it out of the marketplace the way it did rivals like Netscape. But what really bothers Gates is that Google is gaining the ability to attack the very core of Microsoft's franchise--control over what users do first when they turn on their computers.

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt all say that any talk about supplanting Microsoft is ludicrous. But the idea that Google will one day marginalize Microsoft's operating system and bypass Windows applications is already starting to become reality. The most paranoid people at Microsoft even think "Google Office" is inevitable. Google is taking over operating system features too, like desktop search. There are fewer uses for the start button in Windows now that Google's desktop search can locate any program, document, photo, music file, or e-mail on a computer.

All of which helps explain why inside Microsoft, the battle with Google has become far more than a fight over search: It's a certifiable grudge match for king of the hill in high tech. "Google is interesting not just because of web search, but because they're going to try to take that and use it to get into other parts of software," says Gates as he leans forward in his chair, his body coiled as if he could spring to his feet at any second. "If all there was was search, you really shouldn't care so much about it. It's because they are a software company," he says. "In that sense," he adds later, "they are more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with."

Though CEO Steve Ballmer has been boss for five years, Gates, who is chairman and chief software architect, is leading the charge against Google. Forced to watch Google's stock soar the way Microsoft's used to, and Brin and Page enjoy their roles as tech's new rock stars, Gates brings to the fight a ferocity that nobody has seen since the Netscape war a decade ago. Their popularity gets under his skin. "There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," he says sarcastically, suggesting that Google is nothing more than the latest fad, adding, "At least they know to wear black."

Just how big is Microsoft's Google problem? First, a reality check: Microsoft, with nearly $40 billion in revenues, is ten times the size of Google. It's sitting on $34 billion in cash, generating $1 billion in new cash a month, and, thanks to its core Windows, Office, and server products, growing at 15% a year, with operating margins above 30%. Most companies would love to have such numbers.

But Microsoft isn't exactly in fighting trim. Its ambitious new operating system, code-named Longhorn, is more than a year late, even after having been scaled back. Linux, the free operating system that Gates once scoffed at, is fighting Microsoft for share in both the server and desktop markets, forcing the company to do the unthinkable: offer customer discounts. Last year it had to spend $1 billion to rewrite thousands of lines of code to make its programs less susceptible to viruses. Its Xbox gaming console is winning raves from players but has yet to make serious money. Meanwhile, Apple has stolen the show in online music with its hugely popular iPod and iTunes Music Store. Plus, the recently released Firefox browser, which can be downloaded free, has forced Gates to reconstitute an Internet Explorer development team. Indeed, four years have passed since Microsoft released a piece of software that generated the kind of buzz Google seems to generate every month.

Dozens of current and former Microsofties say that Google's success is causing a corporate identity crisis. Gates basically created the notion that success in software is a function of the IQ of your team, and for years Microsoft has prided itself on having the smartest employees on the planet. Now many of those overachievers feel as though they've gotten their first B. Google, not Microsoft, is the hot place to work for young engineers. Every month it seems as if Google hires away one of Microsoft's top developers. Before Google's IPO last fall, Microsoft executives dismissed this brain drain as a function of greed. But when the exodus continued after the IPO--especially when Marc Lucovsky, one of the chief architects of Windows, bolted for Google--it was clear that Microsoft had a bigger problem on its hands. As of March, roughly 100 Microsofties had left for its search nemesis.

Google has even had the nerve to set up an office five miles down the road from Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., headquarters. Its opening last November was supposed to be an invitation-only affair, but word spread and by 7 p.m. the place was swarming with dozens of uninvited Microsofties--casually, and sometimes not so casually, looking for work. The Google migration has gotten so bad, says a former Microsoft employee, that when he told his bosses and colleagues he was leaving earlier this year, "the first question out of their mouths was 'You're not going to Google, are you?' " (He was not.)

Perhaps worst of all, Google is building programs that people at Microsoft prefer to their own. Microsofties have always been voracious samplers of competitors' products; many used the Netscape browser for years until Microsoft's Internet Explorer was good enough. But today, stop almost anyone on campus and ask which e-mail or photo or blogging program he uses, and the answer will invariably be Google's. No wonder Bill Gates is mad.

To understand why micro- soft is having so much trouble catching Google, it helps to hear the story of Chris Payne. He had been watching Google closely for months by the time he got Gates' ear in February 2003. A newly minted vice president charged with overseeing a grab bag of web products for MSN, Microsoft's web portal, Payne stepped to a podium in the conference room in building 36 at the Redmond campus. Peering at his audience--Gates, Ballmer, and about two dozen other Microsoft brass--he launched into the most important pitch of his career. He asked them to approve a massive push into the search business--a Google killer.

Payne, 37, was nervous but pumped. Although Ballmer was present, everyone knew no big technology project got a green light without Gates' say-so--and the chairman never said yes until he had subjected the idea to a withering barrage of questions. Zapping through PowerPoint slides, Payne spoke for two hours, showing in painstaking detail how MSN was making a monumental mistake outsourcing its search function to third parties. In those days Inktomi, a small firm that had agreed to sell itself to Yahoo in December 2002, provided MSN's search results. Overture, a brainchild of Idealab's Bill Gross, supplied the ads to go alongside them. In hindsight, outsourcing search looks dumb, but back then, search was widely viewed as a money loser. Payne explained how Google was developing a great search engine, and how its minimalist design and consistently relevant results--better than those delivered by MSN's cluttered site--were attracting legions of Internet users. Worse, Google had unlocked the secret of online advertising; its automated system noted a user's search request and then delivered discrete matching ads alongside the results. That enabled the Internet upstart to generate gobs of cash. The impact on MSN was obvious. "I'm seeing revenue in the category go up, and I'm seeing our market share go down," Payne said later.

Payne told Gates & Co. that he would need more than $100 million and 18 months to build his search engine; that he wanted the authority to pull the cream of Microsoft's brainiacs into the effort. And Gates? He asked almost no questions, interrupting mostly to suggest people in Microsoft who might help. "It was reasonably obvious to me that we were going to have to depend on ourselves, not our partners, for search," says Gates now. So when Payne finished, Gates signed off on one of the largest commitments for a new business in Microsoft history: Project Underdog was born. Payne could hardly contain himself. "I was very, like, God!" he says, pumping his fist. "I had done all this work, and then I'm like, 'He said yes!' Honestly, it was awesome."

It was the last easy win for Payne. Last November he released Microsoft's search engine, followed in December by a desktop-search tool (two months behind Google) and in March by a search-related advertising business. Microsoft supported the launches with a $150 million ad campaign and scores of other promotions. But the effort has generated little buzz so far, and Microsoft's global market share, at about 13% of search requests, remains puny.

Yet Payne seems impervious. A gregarious Kentuckian with a devilish Jim Carrey smile, he talks in wide-eyed bursts. He seems to be in motion even when he's at rest. Since taking charge of the search effort, he has become well known within the company not just for energy and charisma but also for toughness. Gates may have given him a pass during that initial presentation, but Payne has been at the receiving end of plenty of vicious tongue-lashings since then, during his monthly meetings with Gates and in the weekly e-mails he receives from his boss.

Payne joined Microsoft right out of Dartmouth in 1990, eventually ending up as a marketer and strategic planner for the company's database-software business. His first break came in 1995 when he was transferred to the then-fledgling MSN division. He was one of the original three employees on MSN Investor, playing a critical part in making it one of the best financial websites. But he didn't stick around to reap the rewards. He jumped to Amazon in 1999, only to discover that working there was more about retailing and merchandising than he had thought it would be--he missed building and selling software. By early 2002 he was back at MSN, running its home page and search, among other things. Over the course of that year, he saw Google's threat and began formulating the plan for Underdog.

The project's beginnings were auspicious. With Gates' backing, Payne recruited top talent throughout the organization, like Ken Moss, whom he brought in as chief engineer. Moss had been instrumental in the early 1990s in creating Excel, Microsoft's spreadsheet program. The fledgling search unit quickly grew to roughly 500 engineers and marketers. Nevertheless, it successfully cultivated a startup--even renegade--mentality. Payne's managers bragged to underlings that they had the clout to poach anyone inside Microsoft. And the focus was on winning--in the halls near Payne's office, the walls were covered with performance reports on the group's servers, comments from customers on how Microsoft could improve, and media clippings about Google.

For six months the team even bought its own servers. Gaining clearance to run and monitor the project on the corporate server farm would have been too time-consuming, Payne's team felt--not to mention the strain an ambitious search offering would put on the systems. (Google is widely estimated to run 250,000 servers to support its search.) The technology they eventually unveiled used a heavily modified version of the Windows server operating system. All its other components were of their own design, run with a lot of software they had written themselves.

Confidence ran high. A senior Microsoft executive said the top brass thought the fight against Google "was going to be Netscape all over again." Microsoft has a long, dramatic history of being a fast follower, rarely first in a market but ultimately providing the most accessible and practical solution, then outmarketing competitors. The company hasn't always played by the rules, but when it has gone after a market, it has done so quickly and aggressively. Current and former executives of companies like Apple, WordPerfect, Lotus, Novell, and of course Netscape can attest to that.

Like Google, Netscape threatened to sideline Microsoft's operating system, in its case with the web browser that founder Marc Andreessen unveiled in 1994. The reason was that the browser, which cost each user $39.95, would enable applications like word processors and spreadsheets to reside on centralized Internet servers rather than on the hard drives of users' desktops. That in turn would lessen their need for Windows or Office, sapping Microsoft's business. But Gates rallied Microsoft to develop its own browser, which it then bundled free with Windows. Netscape's market share collapsed, and the upstart was forced to sell to AOL (like FORTUNE's publisher, a unit of Time Warner) three years later.

Trying to build a Google killer, however, has turned out to be truly humbling for Microsoft. The effort has taken longer, cost more money, and exposed more big-company problems at Microsoft than anyone imagined. As Payne predicted, targeted online advertising has indeed become a gold mine. Still in its infancy, it's one of the hottest sectors in high tech, a $5-billion-a-year market growing at some 40% annually. Yet no matter what Payne and his crew do, Google and Yahoo seem to do better. "I remember when [Payne's team] showed off their first prototype in early 2004--people laughed because it was so much like Google," says a former Microsoft executive. "We had copied them. That's not how you lead."

A headache for Payne is that Microsoft isn't as nimble as smaller, younger rivals like Google and Yahoo. For example, at Google, engineers are responsible for the software that they write--period. They don't hand it off to a "system operations" team to deal with bugs. When something goes awry, the team that wrote the software and knows it best is responsible for fixing it.

The bureaucracy and even Gates himself have gotten in Payne's way. Underdog has been slowed by turf battles within MSN and among the company's six other business units. Microsoft executives' compensation is based on the success of their own organizations, which means, says a former exec, that every interaction Payne's team has with, say, the Windows business unit comes with strings attached. Payne and his team have tried to speed development by buying their way into the search game, but something has always thwarted that approach. In spring 2003, Payne pitched Gates on buying Overture, a move that would have given Microsoft search engine technology out of AltaVista as well as an advertising business that was generating huge profits. But Gates shot the plan down, convinced that Microsoft could do a better job for less money on its own. Instead, Yahoo bought Overture, a move that, together with its earlier purchase of Inktomi, enabled it to catapult itself successfully into the search game in a year.

In fall 2003, Microsoft briefly considered buying Google, only to realize that even if Brin, Page, and their board could have been persuaded to sell--which seemed unlikely--Microsoft would have been left to explain to the world why it was now running a search engine built entirely on Linux instead of Windows. Even when it did buy a company--Lookout--in June 2004 (Lookout had mastered fast Outlook e-mail search), it didn't move quickly enough to expand the software to search the whole desktop.

The price for being slow-footed became abundantly clear last fall: Google beat Microsoft to market with desktop-search software by two months. The news ripped through Microsoft with titanic force. Everyone from Gates on down scrambled into meetings to assess how good Google's product was. Not especially, they decided. Even so, it dealt a blow to their pride. "Here Microsoft was spending $600 million a year in R&D for MSN, $1 billion a year for Office, and $1 billion a year for Windows, and Google gets desktop search out before us? It was a real wake-up call," says an exec. "It was the first time many people in the corporation understood that Google was more than just a search engine. People said, 'If they can do desktop search, what prevents them from doing a version of Excel, PowerPoint, or Word, or buying Star Office [from Sun Microsystems]?' "

What does Google make of Microsoft's growing animosity and paranoia? Although neither the co-founders nor CEO Schmidt would comment for this story, Schmidt told an audience of Internet pioneers at UCLA last fall, "One of the criticisms that the media makes is to compare Google to previous-generation companies. Google is trying to solve the next problem, not the last problem." Privately, Google's executives understand exactly the impact they are having on Gates and his team. They project a carefree image in part because it makes business sense. One blunder by Netscape was that it let Andreessen tell the world how he intended to put Microsoft out of business. Count on Google not to repeat that mistake.

Remember, many of the most influential people at Google are hardened Microsoft warriors. Schmidt battled Gates as CTO of Sun Microsystems and CEO of Novell in the 1990s. Omid Kordestani, Google's head of ad sales, was a top executive at Netscape. Three of Google's directors, Ram Shriram, John Doerr, and Michael Moritz, have been on the front lines of Silicon Valley's war with Microsoft over the years. "Microsoft can literally spend a billion dollars on this if they choose. We take them very seriously," says a Google executive. One reason Google has been rolling out so many new or improved products is that Schmidt understands that innovation is the only sure edge Google has. The moment Google allows itself to slow, Microsoft could overwhelm it.

For anyone who has been watching Gates over the years, the idea that an upstart like Google could so flummox him and his fierce company takes getting used to. But Google is a rival unlike any he has faced in a long time. In previous battles, Microsoft always had a powerful trump card: It controlled the Windows operating system. That meant that when consumers bought a PC, Microsoft had a powerful say in what products and services they saw first. It had pricing power and distribution power over competitors. Because of that, its applications didn't have to be superior to those of the competition--just roughly equal. Windows wasn't better than the Macintosh; Word didn't improve on WordPerfect, or Excel on Lotus. Even Explorer was only as good as Netscape. Microsoft's genius was integrating them seamlessly to make them easier for customers to default to, and then using its marketing, distribution, and pricing clout. It won by attacking competitors' business models, not their technology.

Microsoft's array of weapons has so far proved next to useless against Google. For one thing, any attempt to bundle search with its products will probably be scrutinized by antitrust regulators. Meanwhile, you no longer need a PC to use Google--it works fine from a Treo, a BlackBerry, a cellphone, a television, an Apple, or a Linux computer--any device with some kind of keyboard and Internet access. Nor can Microsoft undercut the price of Google software as it did with Netscape: Google is already free. There's no quick and easy way to lure away Google's online advertisers either. They pay based on the price of a keyword in a search and on how many times users click on the ad, but Google doesn't control that--it's set by auction. Says a former Microsoft executive: "Microsoft can play its old game to compete with Linux and Apple. It has to play Google's game to compete with Google."

Gates and Payne don't agree at all. To them, beating Google is the same as beating any of Microsoft's previous challengers. It's still about writing software that is easier to use, and the easiest-to-use software is always the kind that's integrated with what people already have--like Windows or MSN. Gates says that when Microsoft is done integrating search into future versions of Windows and Office, the world will look back at the way we are now "Googling" for stuff on the Internet and laugh. "The idea that you type in these words [in the search box] that aren't sentences and you don't get any answers--you just get back all these things you have to click on--that is so antiquated," he says, later adding, "We need to take search way beyond how people think of it today and just have it be naturally available, based on the task they want to do." For example, if you wanted to look up a factoid while you were writing a document, you might search for it without ever leaving Word.

Perhaps Gates is right--again. After all, Google may be hugely profitable and a Wall Street darling, but it is also a young company, largely controlled by its founders and dealing with the unavoidable pains of torrid growth. Oddsmakers would say the likelihood of its stumbling is high, and no one is better at outlasting the competition than Gates. Certainly the search game is still in its infancy. Only a fraction of the content available online is actually searchable. For instance, even subscribers can't search current and archived issues of the Wall Street Journal0 or most other publications with a search engine; you have to go to the publication's site. This suggests that the search engine that can get the world to list premium content on its platform will have a leg up on the competition. Microsoft has plenty of money to buy the rights to such content; it also owns powerful digital-rights-management software, which helps copyright holders control who uses their products and how often. Those should be advantages in negotiations with companies worried about losing control of copyrighted text, music, and video on the Net.

Another advantage for Gates & Co. is that search engines are still technologically primitive. They can't understand context, for example; if you type "chip," they can't tell whether you are looking for a snack food or high-tech equipment. As a result all three big search engines are scrambling to find ways to make search more personalized. The thinking is that the more a search engine knows about who is searching, the more accurate the results will be. Each company has the foundations of such a product in its desktop-search software, which can tell what you have on your hard drive. Perhaps Microsoft, because it understands Windows better than any other company, will be able to offer faster, more accurate searches.

All the same, Microsoft is taking longer to catch Google than anyone could have imagined--and it will take longer still. Unless it can deliver search that is plainly better, most users won't bother to switch, says Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy. He adds, "Google is a huge brand. From where I sit, it's their game to lose." The competition could well test Gates' patience as never before. In spring 2003 he told one of his executives, "These Google guys, they want to be billionaires and rock stars and go to conferences and all that. Let's see if they still want to run the business in two or three years." Well, two years have passed, and so far, they sure do.

[original article]
Feedback fvogelstein@fortunemail.com

The extra sunshine, which helps combat depression, may also provide the people the energy they need to act on their suicidal feelings, they believe.

There is one suicide every 84 minutes in UK and Ireland.

May peak

Around 6,300 people take their lives each year, the Priory Group said.

Professor Chris Thompson, the group's director of healthcare services, said research showed there was a direct link between the amount of sunshine and the national suicide rate.

In Scandinavia and Canada, studies have shown that those who commit suicide have low levels of a "happy" brain chemical called serotonin.

Others have shown that serotonin levels often rise with the amount of sunlight a person is exposed to.

Professor Thompson said: "It is a harsh irony that the partial remission which most depression sufferers experience in the spring often provides the boost of energy required for executing a suicide plan.

"People coming out of depression have a higher suicide rate than those who are severely depressed and this is exacerbated by the season.

Seasonal

"Spring is a time for new beginnings and new life, yet the juxtaposition between a literally blooming world and the barren inner life of the clinically depressed is often too much for them to bear," he said.

A spokeswoman from the Samaritans said there definitely was a rise in suicide rates in spring/summer.

She said a number of factors might be involved, such as changes in body clock and social interactions.

Figures show there has been a 50% rise in attempted suicides since 1990. Most suicides are among men.

Amelia Mustapha from the Depression Alliance said: "Depression is a debilitating, life-threatening disease which affects one in five people at some stage in their lives.

"Unfortunately, depression is still under-diagnosed, which means that hundreds of thousands of people in the UK are trapped in the throes of this potentially-fatal illness.

"We urge anyone who feels suicidal, or who believes that they are seriously depressed, to visit their GP for help.

"The good news is that depression can be successfully treated and many affected by the condition go on to lead happy and fulfilling lives."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/health/4528883.stm

Published: 2005/05/09 10:01:31 GMT

© BBC MMV

[original article]

By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Senior Writer
31 March 2005

Life can be funny, and not just for humans.

"Indeed, neural circuits for laughter exist in very ancient regions of the brain, and ancestral forms of play and laughter existed in other animals eons before we humans came along with our 'ha-ha-has' and verbal repartee," says Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Bowling Green State University.

When chimps play and chase each other, they pant in a manner that is strikingly like human laughter, Panksepp writes in the April 1 issue of the journal Science. Dogs have a similar response.

Rats chirp while they play, again in a way that resembles our giggles. Panksepp found in a previous study that when rats are playfully tickled, they chirp and bond socially with their human tickler. And they seem to like it, seeking to be tickled more. Apparently joyful rats also preferred to hang out with other chirpers.

Laughter in humans starts young, another clue that it's a deep-seated brain function.

"Young children, whose semantic sense of humor is marginal, laugh and shriek abundantly in the midst of their other rough-and-tumble activities," Panksepp notes.

Importantly, various recent studies on the topic suggest that laughter in animals typically involves similar play chasing. Could be that verbal jokes tickle ancient, playful circuits in our brains.

More study is needed to figure out whether animals are really laughing. The results could explain why humans like to joke around. And Panksepp speculates it might even lead to the development of treatments for laughter's dark side: depression.

Meanwhile, there's the question of what's so darn funny in the animal world.

"Although no one has investigated the possibility of rat humor, if it exists, it is likely to be heavily laced with slapstick," Panksepp figures. "Even if adult rodents have no well-developed cognitive sense of humor, young rats have a marvelous sense of fun."

Science has traditionally deemed animals incapable of joy and woe.

Panksepp's response: "Although some still regard laughter as a uniquely human trait, honed in the Pleistocene, the joke?s on them."

[original article]

BY JOANNE KAUFMAN
Tuesday, March 29, 2005 12:01 a.m.

Harriet Klausner read four books yesterday. Frankly, this was no big whoop for Ms. Klausner. The only days she doesn't read four books are the days she reads five. Her peregrinations through the printed word are charted in the critiques she posts on Amazon.com--she's been voted its No. 1 reviewer--and other online book sites.

Still, in terms of productivity (8,649 reviews as of mid-March) and the ability to turn out what the site calls helpful information, Ms. Klausner is in a league of her own.

More than 53,000 Amazon visitors have given a thumbs up to commentary like "the fast-paced story line contains intriguing heroes battling with one another as much as with their common foes." That was Ms. Klausner on the thriller "No Man's Dog" by Jon A. Jackson. "Exhilarating British police procedural" was her word on "Flesh Wounds" by John Lawton. "Daniel's Veil" by R.H. Stavis, meanwhile, was deemed "a fascinating and enthralling paranormal tale."

It would be overstating things to suggest that Ms. Klausner, 53, has never met a book she didn't like. It would be more on the money to say she's of the "if you don't have anything nice to write, don't write anything at all" school of literary criticism. "If a book doesn't hold my interest by page 50 I'll stop reading, which is one of the reasons I give a lot of good ratings," says Ms. Klausner, whose voice suggests she's taken more than a few nips of helium. "And why review a book to give it a low rating or to tear it apart? Nothing in that."

But rest assured she can cut the motor on her enthusiasm when necessary. "I give Ralph McInerny, the author of the 'Father Dowling' mysteries, a low rating and tell why I can't stand the books," says Ms. Klausner, who's contributed reviews to Amazon since 2000. "It's basically the same story over and over."

She has the same "been there, read that" problem with Cassie Edwards, a scribe of Native American romances. "It's either a half-breed Indian male or a full-breed Indian male and a white virgin," sighs Ms. Klausner, running down the essential plot of titles like "Savage Joy," "Savage Devotion," "Savage innocence," "Savage Hope," "Savage Courage" and "Savage Torment." "She gets kidnapped, returns to white society, then comes back to Native American society to be with her lover, who ends up as her husband.

"Her books individually are good," adds Ms. Klausner. "If she wrote five of them they would be great, but if you write 75 or 80, which she's written . . . enough is enough.

"I have one basic criterion: A book should entertain me and take me away from the rest of the world."

A recent day's entertainment comprised "The Hidden Quest," a fantasy by New Zealand-born author Alma Alexander; a novel Ms. Klausner describes as "a Christian legal thriller" by Randy Alexander ("I forget the title, but the book was very good"); "Hitler's Peace," a thriller by Phillip Kerr about Germany trying to negotiate a peace in 1943, and a mystery by Nevada Barr. "I can't remember that title either. Just look it up on Amazon." Aha: "Hard Truth."

As may be clear by now, Ms. Klausner's taste runs to fantasy, chick-lit romance--particularly the paranormal and supernatural variety--horror and science fiction. Pet authors include Laurell K. Hamilton, Jan Burke, Nora Roberts, Jayne Ann Krentz and particularly Patricia Cornwell. "I need a lot of variety. There's never enough for me to read," says Ms. Klausner, who has zero truck with poetry, westerns ("You put on a cowboy hat, place the story in the wild west and you have a police procedural") or nonfiction ("unless it's a subject I'm really into. Otherwise it's too time-consuming.")

While Amazon declined to comment specifically on Ms. Klausner to avoid the appearance of showcasing one particular reviewer, others in publishing were less demure. "I'm sure there are people who go online and think, 'I wonder what Harriet has to say about this book,' " notes Knopf publicity director Nicholas Latimer. He sends Ms. Klausner every fiction title his house publishes "because I'd like her to weigh in. There are authors she covers that don't get covered by a lot of major review outlets because of space limitations. Harriet's their champion."

It's not that Ms. Klausner is immune to the charms--and plot turns--of marquee names like Ms. Roberts and Ms. Cornwell, but "you'll see that I often review lesser-known names. Some of those authors are just as good as John Grisham," she says. "It's just that they don't have a publicity machine behind them. That's the whole purpose of my doing this on Amazon. It's a way of bringing writers to the attention of audiences who wouldn't otherwise buy their books. That's the whole purpose of my doing this on Amazon," continues Ms. Klausner, whose sole remuneration is the thanks of newly enlightened readers (they sometimes send appreciative e-mails) and grateful authors (they sometimes send promotional bookmarks).

More tangible compensation comes from Ms. Klausner's book reviews for periodicals like Affaire de Coeur and I Love a Mystery, the online 'zine Baryon, and from her work as an advance reader for the Doubleday Book Club. "It's like magic when you find that gem of a great new author," says Ms. Klausner, who claims she saw gold in a then-unknown Tess Gerritsen, now a perennial on bestseller lists. "People say I have influence over book sales, but I don't see it. If I thought about it, I would get nervous."

The elder of two children, Ms. Klausner grew up in the Bronx. Her father worked for the publisher McGraw-Hill, a bonanza posting for a young bookworm. "I got a lot of free books. I was very lucky," says Ms. Klausner, who worked her way through series like Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames with dispatch.

A master's degree in library science seemed like nothing short of manifest destiny. Subsequent gigs in bookstores catering to fans of horror and science fiction, and stewardship of various library newsletters, were good prep work for Amazon, a connection Ms. Klausner made simply because "it seemed like a good idea. I need to review."

On more than one occasion, she says, publishers have approached her to push the envelope--to write a novel of her own. "I think it's sweet as can be that they ask. It's just not something I could do."

Daily, books come by the cartload to Ms. Klausner's Atlanta home, putting her at odds with the mailman, the UPS delivery guy and her husband, Stan, a business analyst for the Army. "He says we have to get rid of some," says Ms. Klausner, who stacks the overflow on the kitchen table and in a shed out back--and makes covert online purchases of new favorites like legal-thriller author Christine McGuire. "But don't tell my husband."

Friends encourage her to get a hobby, to develop some new interests. One pal recently gave her a combination VCR-DVD player with the directive to "go to a new venue." "It was a great present," says Ms. Klausner. "It's still in the box."

Ms. Kaufman covers arts and entertainment for The Wall Street Journal.

Copyright © 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[original article]

The greatest stories ever told

JK Rowling and Jacqueline Wilson top the bestseller lists. Businessmen and teenagers alike devour Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. But that's just the tip of the iceberg, says Dina Rabinovitch - there is so much talent out there that this is a truly extraordinary era in children's literature

Morpurgo is our children's laureate, and to mark the publication of his recent book The Sleeping Sword, the publishers threw a party that involved renting out the Scilly Island of Bryher. People arrived in helicopters, and the Duchy of Cornwall had to be placated. The original party budget was tripled and then some. But Egmont didn't even blink. That's because it, like other publishers of children's literature, has realised something of literary historical import, something that goes waybeyond the fact that grown-ups read Harry Potter on the tube. We are right in the thick of a golden age of children's literature.

What does it mean to call a specific period of literary endeavour "golden", without it being mere hype? What it doesn't necessarily mean is a golden age as accountants might understand the term (except in rare instances; Walker Books is popping champagne corks this week as it publishes 250,000 copies of Anthony Horowitz's latest Alex Rider story, Arkangel). Publishers mutter gloomily that while there are a huge number of children's books out there, there hasn't actually been a rise in the number of authors selling books. The market share for children's literature is stuck at 15%. What is happening is that a few (a very few) children's authors are selling loads; the names you know already - JK Rowling, Jacqueline Wilson, Philip Pullman.

Why, then, will publishers countenance huge spending on book launches when adult authors are lucky to get away with not paying for their own white wine in some fusty club? Why are celebrities falling over themselves to become children's authors - Madonna is already on her fourth title, while Paul McCartney's first tale of Wirral the Squirrel is being published this coming autumn. Why are even celebrated authors such as Jeanette Winterson (The King of Capri) or Elmore Leonard (A Coyote's in the House) also keen to get in on the act? Why is Horowitz, winner of the Bafta people's award for his adult detective TV series Foyle's War, best known for his teenage boy hero Rider?

Every once in a while - not at regular intervals, not even every century - one literary form comes to dominate. When that happens, all the other practising artists are pulled towards the dominant form. In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, drama became primary; in the 19th century, it was the novel. So strong were the writers in these fields that all other writing took on some of the qualities of the dominant genre; practitioners in other fields turned to playwriting, poets experimented with the novel. So in a decade in which Salman Rushdie has produced a children's book, the question is whether children's fiction is exercising that gravitational pull right now.

The answer has echoes in that previous time. What made Elizabethan England a golden age of literature? It was because there wasn't just Shakespeare - who raised standards higher than they'd been before - but the plethora of other brilliant playwrights (Marlowe, Middleton, and later Webster and Ford); authors who in any other age would be hogging the limelight all to themselves.

That is the situation in today's world of children's literature. Not just Rowling but several other names are at the top of their game: in no particular order, Lauren Child, Geraldine McCaughrean, Jerry Spinelli, Ann Brashares, Michael Morpurgo, Mark Haddon, Philip Ridley, Neil Gaiman, Joel Stewart, Eva Ibbotson, Michael Rosen. The talent out there is dazzling.

So how is it that these names aren't on the tip of every literary adult tongue? Where is the Granta photograph of the top 20 children's authors? Surely, in this instant information world, we pride ourselves on knowing what's happening? The books pages in the national press are sticking to their occasional round-ups of children's books; non-specialist TV and radio aren't interested either. "We are up against this kind of resistance," says Justin Somper, children's books publicist, "producers saying, 'It's a children's author, that won't be of interest to my audience.' I always know I have to compete with the latest Ian McEwan, which will definitely merit an interview."

It is a mark of these fertile times that the arts reviewing is lagging behind the news. I remember a Saturday lunch at our house some years back - 2000, I think - just us and one of England's top books editors with his wife. She, talking to my 11-year-old, mentioned that she had a review copy of the latest Harry Potter. Electric excitement around the table. The only person who looked bemused, and said, "Who? What?" was the editor. And this wasn't the first Harry Potter novel, it was the third. In children's books, it's been word of mouth that has spread the gospel. The arts media - so quick to name trends in adult literature - haven't spotted what is happening at knee height.

The major turning point in children's literature was the publication of Alice in Wonderland in November 1865. The crux was that Carroll made the child central to the story, rather than the adult. A rule was broken, a new law established, and a first golden age of children's literature was inaugurated, ending, critics generally agree, in the late 1920s with AA Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh.

Barry Cunningham, the founder/publisher of The Chicken House and the man who famously signed JK Rowling to Bloomsbury, knows exactly when he first realised that this was a new creative boom. "This is the real thing," he says. "I worked for Puffin in the 70s, which was also considered to be a time full of talent, but there is a much broader span of achievement now. The barriers have all exploded, so there is harsh, realistic fiction being written for children, and fantasy - like Cornelia Funke's - that transcends international borders."

And the first inkling Cunningham had of what's going on? "I had the shock of my life when I saw young executives with Harry [Potter] propped on their laptops. I know exactly when it was. I was in an airport lounge in the States, walking through to the plane, and instead of reading thrillers, guys were reading Harry."

One of the markers of the first golden age was that a book written for adults, The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley, turned into a children's classic. This time around it's the opposite; books that are written for children but appropriated by adults. The classic example is Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which was being handed from adult to adult in children's publishing before most children had even seen it.

Cunningham says the statistics may show that market share of children's books has not increased, but he himself never looks at statistics. "My experience," he says, "is that we're selling to a much wider age group - an enormously expanded world reading children's fiction".

There is a catch though, for all those would-be children's authors. "Children's books," says Cunningham, "are being invaded by pseudo-children's books - books being produced with an eye to this burgeoning market." Writing children's fiction has to be done by those who've retained their childhood. "Otherwise," says Cunningham, "you're writing 'about' childhood."

Until the day we see the name Aaron "West Wing" Sorkin on the cover of a children's title, we cannot claim supremacy for children's fiction over that other monstrous reservoir of talent this early 21st century, American TV drama. But don't be surprised when it happens.

What's the story? Classics for every age

Age 0-5

Lauren Child 's picture books (I Will Not Ever, Never Eat a Tomato, What planet are you from, Clarice Bean, to name just two) are a mix of drawing and collage, with a style as vibrant as childhood. She is that rare talent: the words she writes are as good as the pictures she draws. Child is a perfectionist, and it shows: "I can't just hand my illustrations over [to publishers] and say, 'Whatever you do is fine.'" Her characters Charlie and Lola (from I Will Not Ever, Never Eat a Tomato) are about to debut on television.

Neil Gaiman (words) and Dave McKean (pictures) form the most distinctive partnership working in picture books (The Wolves in the Walls, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish). Scary stories, though no more so than your average fairy tale. Gaiman lives in America, McKean in Kent, and their collaboration is phone-based.

Joel Stewart cut his teeth illustrating others' stories; his version of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky brought new meaning to old words. Now he is writing and illustrating his own works, and Me and My Mammoth proves that his talent for telling is every bit as insightful as his line and ink drawings.

Age 7-12

Eva Ibbotson 's novel, Journey to the River Sea, is a childhood classic - one of those books that children mention as seminal to their childhood reading. Eighty years old this year, she is still writing, her work now coming from a different, darker source than the lightweight tales of witchcraft with which she made her name.

From the first sentence of a Michael Morpurgo book, you know you are in the hands of a natural storyteller. His latest, written during a period when he has been a very active children's laureate, is The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips.

Geraldine McCaughrean has just been chosen to write the sequel to Peter Pan. The only children's author to win the Whitbread Children's award three times, she remains surprisingly anonymous. Children happily stick with her books even though she takes a certain pleasure in using unfamiliar words. "I don't give any quarter on vocabulary," she says. "I reckon children are so close to acquiring their entire language, it won't stretch them enormously to work out what a few more mean."

Philip Ridley is, unusually, read as much by boys as by girls.