TIME Magazine - 23rd March 2009

March 23, 2009 Vol. 173 No. 11

10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now ARTHUR HOCHSTEIN

COVER

10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now What's Next The global economy is being remade before our eyes. Here's what's on the horizon •

Jobs Are the New Assets

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Recycling the Suburbs

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The New Calvinism

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Reinstating The Interstate

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Amortality

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Africa: Open for Business

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The Rent-a-Country

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Biobanks

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Survival Stores

1. Jobs Are The New Assets By BARBARA KIVIAT

Photo-illustration by Julie Teninbaum for Time; Lambert / Hulton Archive / Getty

Remember when jobs weren't worth your small talk? Think back a year or two. Picture yourself at a cocktail party or maybe picking up the kids from soccer. How did the conversation go? You talked about your house. A new deck! You talked about your portfolio. Gotta go small cap. Did you mention how much pleasure you derived from bringing home a steady paycheck? Probably not. "Land was valuable, and capital was valuable, and labor — who cared?" says David Ellison, a Boston-based money manager. "The attitude was, As long as I buy a few homes and invest in a hedge fund, I'm done. I can sit in my chair and watch football games." We now know how that ended up. Your portfolio is down 50%, your mortgage is worth more than your house, and your savings account is barely visible. The job, meanwhile, is making a roaring comeback. Not in a statistical sense, of course. We are in a recession, after all: at 8.1%, unemployment hasn't been this high since 1983. But in terms of the American psyche — and a household's balance sheet — we're rediscovering the job as the most valuable asset a person can have. For years, we felt quite the opposite, and understandably so. From 1999 to 2006, the value of real estate owned by individuals more than doubled as the homeownership rate hit a record high. The money the typical family had in the stock market soared

from just 28% of financial assets in 1989 to a full 53% in 2007 as the percentage of families in the market jumped from 32% to 51%. Houses and stocks — those were the things we paid attention to, the things that gave us the confidence to be good American consumers (hello, home-equity- lines of credit). At the same time, the percentage of income we saved dropped and dropped and dropped -until, thanks to the power of credit cards and other debt, it went negative in 2005. That was neatly explained away by the "wealth effect": we spent money we didn't have because we felt — and technically were — richer because of our assets. All the while, we blissfully ignored a little concept economists like to call human capital. The cognition you've got up there in your head — your education and training — it's worth something. We can extract value not just from our homes and our portfolios but from ourselves as well. The mechanism for extracting that value? A job. "The income you earn from working is like the stream of interest income you might get from owning a bond," says Johns Hopkins University economist Christopher Carroll. "Think of it as a dividend on your human wealth." Human capital is worth quite a lot. Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist, figures that in a modern industrialized economy, 75% to 80% of a person's economic output comes from human capital (as opposed to, say, land or machinery). Of course, during the bubble years (first stocks, then housing), the noneconomists among us didn't exactly think about it that way. "People became mesmerized by how rich they were," says Becker, "and didn't realize the crucial asset they had in their earning power." The tide is now turning. To see how, let's check back in with the savings rate. After it went negative in late 2005, it meandered back into minimally positive territory. Then, last year, it started bounding upward. By the fourth quarter, we were saving 3.2% of what we brought in. In January we hit 5%. No longer are we disrespecting our paychecks, treating employment income as an also-ran source of wealth. "People are realizing their job is their real source of financial stability," says Ellison, "that they

have to live within the means of their job, not within the means of their assets. We're relearning how to create wealth." As we do this, we'll start looking at our jobs differently. If that thing you do at the office every day is suddenly your sole financial lifeline, you'll approach it more cautiously. When you've got only one chip left, you're much less willing to put it on the table. In this new era, a predictable salary is more appealing than the chance of scoring big with bonuses and stock options. And having a government job — one of the last bastions of security — looks even better. One day soon you might find yourself perusing a list of the fastest-growing, best-paying professions, trying to picture yourself as an actuary. And instead of spending thousands of dollars to build a new deck, you're more likely to use that money to take a class. Careers expert Dick Bolles sees another shift coming. If as a society, we turn our attention back to work — if we dote on our jobs as much as we did on our homes and portfolios in an earlier era — then we'll have to start asking deeper questions about why we do what we do. In December, Bolles noticed that a book he wrote in 1970 was back on the best-seller list. What Color Is Your Parachute? is about jobhunting and career-changing, but it's also about figuring out who you are as a person and what you want out of life. "Why are people rushing out to buy a book that talks about more meaningful work?" asks Bolles. "They're realizing they have to rethink work if they've got no Plan B. It reframes the whole issue of, What type of work am I willing to do?" That almost sounds like a happy ending: the flagging economy has finally set us straight on how valuable our work is. Too bad it has also made work that much harder to come by. So often we don't know the true value of what we have until it's gone.

2. Recycling the Suburbs By BRYAN WALSH

As big retail centers die out, suburbs have begun remaking them into libraries, schools and town centers. Brian Ulrich

The American suburb as we know it is dying. The implosion began with the housing bust, which started in and has hit hardest the once vibrant neighborhoods outside the urban core. Shopping malls and big-box retail stores, the commercial anchors of the suburbs, are going dark — an estimated 148,000 stores closed last year, the most since 2001. But the shift is deeper than the economic downturn. Thanks to changing demographics, including a steady decline in the percentage of households with kids and a growing preference for urban amenities among Americans young and old, the suburban dream of the big house with the big lawn is vanishing. The Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech predicts that by 2025 there will be a surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (on one-sixth of an acre [675 sq m] or more) in the U.S. Environmentalists will celebrate the demise of sprawling suburbs, which left the nation addicted to cars. But all the steel, concrete and asphalt that went into making the suburbs can't simply be tossed out in favor of something new, even if it's perfectly green. That would be worse. "As much as possible, we need to redirect development to existing communities and infrastructure," says Kaid Benfield, director

of the smart-growth program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Otherwise, we're just eating up more land and natural resources." The suburbs need to be remade, and just such a transformation is under way in regions that were known for some of the worst sprawl in the U.S. Communities as diverse as Lakewood, Colo., and Long Beach, Calif., have repurposed boarded-up malls as mixed-use developments with retail stores, offices and apartments. In autodependent suburbs that were built without a traditional center, shopping malls offer the chance to create downtowns without destroying existing infrastructure, by recycling what's known as underperforming asphalt. "All of these projects are developer-driven, because the market wants them," says Ellen Dunham-Jones, a coauthor of the new book Retrofitting Suburbia. Not every suburb will make it. The fringes of a suburb like Riverside in Southern California, where housing prices have fallen more than 20% since the bust began, could be too diffuse to thrive in a future where density is no longer taboo. It'll be the older inner suburbs like Tysons Corner, Va., that will have the mass transit, public space and economic gravity to thrive postrecession. Though creative cities will grow more attractive for empty-nest -retirees and young graduates alike, we won't all be moving to New York. Many Americans will still prefer the space of the suburbs — including the parking spaces. "People want to balance the privacy of the suburbs with more public and social areas," says Dunham-Jones. But the result will be a U.S. that is more sustainable — environmentally and economically.

3. The New Calvinism By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Illustration by Lorenzo Petrantoni for TIME; Calvin: Popperfoto / Getty

If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard "The Old Rugged Cross," a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-mybuddy intimacy of "Shine, Jesus, Shine." And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are...well, hark the David Crowder Band: "I am full of earth/ You are heaven's worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity." Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin's 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism's latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination's logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time's dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision. Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation's other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don't have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by "glorifying" him. In the 1700s, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards

invested Calvinism with a rapturous near mysticism. Yet it was soon overtaken in the U.S. by movements like Methodism that were more impressed with human will. Calvinist-descended liberal bodies like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) discovered other emphases, while Evangelicalism's loss of appetite for rigid doctrine — and the triumph of that friendly, fuzzy Jesus — seemed to relegate hard-core Reformed preaching (Reformed operates as a loose synonym for Calvinist) to a few crotchety Southern churches. No more. Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don't operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, "everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world" — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom's hottest links. Like the Calvinists, more moderate Evangelicals are exploring cures for the movement's doctrinal drift, but can't offer the same blanket assurance. "A lot of young people grew up in a culture of brokenness, divorce, drugs or sexual temptation," says Collin Hansen, author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's

Journey with the New Calvinists. "They have plenty of friends: what they need is a God." Mohler says, "The moment someone begins to define God's [being or actions] biblically, that person is drawn to conclusions that are traditionally classified as Calvinist." Of course, that presumption of inevitability has drawn accusations of arrogance and divisiveness since Calvin's time. Indeed, some of today's enthusiasts imply that non-Calvinists may actually not be Christians. Skirmishes among the Southern Baptists (who have a competing non-Calvinist camp) and online "flame wars" bode badly. Calvin's 500th birthday will be this July. It will be interesting to see whether Calvin's latest legacy will be classic Protestant backbiting or whether, during these hard

times, more Christians searching for security will submit their wills to the austerely demanding God of their country's infancy.

4. Reinstating the Interstate By RICHARD LACAYO

A light rail system runs along the interstate in Portland, Oregon. Miles Hochstein / Portland Ground

Maybe the most unlikely thing that Barack Obama has accomplished in the past few months is that he's made infra-structure sexy. O.K., not sexy, but at least a hot topic. Rebuilding scuffed and threadbare roads and bridges all around the U.S. is an Obama priority. The recent stimulus package contained $8 billion to develop new intercity high-speed rail lines. But the biggest single chunk of infra-structure in the U.S. is the interstate highway system, more than 47,000 miles (76,000 km) of multilane roadways connecting every major American city. And people who spend time envisioning improved systems for energy and transit have ideas for the interstates that go far beyond fresh asphalt and new guard-rails. They've been talking up ways in which the big roads could become the backbone of a larger network of railways and broadband cables and even a new, more efficient electrical power grid. The construction of the interstate highway system, which Congress authorized in 1956, was one of the great can-do enterprises of the post-World War II era, the largest public-works project in history. But now the interstates look like a vast monument to the law of unintended consequences. They turned out to be the great

enabler of America's car culture and the fossil-fuel consumption that goes with it. And by making it possible to live far from where you work, they were the key element in the phenomenon of suburban sprawl. So can the big roads be remade into something better than 47,000 miles of temptation? This is where the new thinking about a highway/light-rail/power-grid nexus comes in. The first great advantage of the interstates is that they represent an established right of way. The government owns the road-beds and adjacent land, so rail and power lines can be laid down without the need to purchase more land. "Right of way is a precious resource," says Representative Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat who has become a point person in Congress on infrastructure issues. "It's been developed over centuries at great cost. It's strategically located and immediately available." And it's already being put to use in some places. In the new expansion of the Portland Light Rail system in Oregon, the trains run alongside the road. And in Portland some stretches of that road are also being equipped with solar panels to power the roadside lights. But maybe the most audacious idea comes from the Al Gore-affiliated Repower America, a clean-energy advocacy group. Highways could be one of the routes for the new, more efficient electrical power grid that Repower advocates. And that grid would be available for battery-powered and hybrid vehicles to draw from and even sell surplus power back to. Envision a system in which you drive to a light-rail station along the interstate, plug into a smart grid at the parking lot and ride the train to work while your car recharges. But making these ideas work will require an unusual degree of coordination among states, regions and regulatory bodies. "There's one group of people looking at highways," says Shelley Poticha, president of Reconnecting America, a mass-transit advocacy group. "There's another looking at passenger rail and a different group looking at freight." She thinks the solution is a bipartisan federal commission "like the commission that oversaw military-base closings, so that we can have a strategy for the highways." It was, after all, one great federal effort that built the interstates. Maybe it can be another one that rebuilds them.

5. Amortality By CATHERINE MAYER

Illustration by Lou Beach for TIME; Madonna headshot, body third from right: Frank Micelotta / Getty

When Simon Cowell let slip last month that he planned to have his corpse cryonically preserved, wags suggested that the snarky American Idol judge may have already tested the deep-freezing procedure on his face. In 2007, Cowell, now 49, told an interviewer that he used Botox. "I like to take care of myself," he said. Cowell is in show biz, where artifice routinely imitates life. But here's a fact startling enough to raise eyebrows among Botox enthusiasts: his fellow Brits, famously unconcerned with personal grooming, have tripled the caseload of the country's cosmetic surgeons since 2003. The transfiguration of the snaggletoothed island race is part of a phenomenon taking hold around the developed world: amortality. You may not have heard of amortality before — mainly because I've just coined the term. It's about more than just the ripple effect of baby boomers' resisting the onset of age. Amortality is a stranger, stronger alchemy, created by the intersection of that trend with a massive increase in life expectancy and a deep decline in the influence of organized religion — all viewed through the blue haze of Viagra. Amortals live among us. In their teens and 20s, they may seem preternaturally experienced. In later life, they often look young and dress younger. They have kids early or late — sometimes very late — or not at all. Their emotional lives are as

chaotic as their financial planning. The defining characteristic of amortality is to live in the same way, at the same pitch, doing and consuming much the same things, from late teens right up until death. Cowell is one of their poster boys; so too is France's Nicolas Sarkozy, as mercurial as a hormonal teenager. Madonna is relentlessly amortal. It's easier to diagnose the condition in the middle-aged, but there are baby amortals — think Mark Zuckerberg, the world's youngest self-made billionaire, who looks set to comport himself like a student geek to the end of his days. The eldest amortals, born long before the first boomer wave, are still making mischief around the world. Amortals don't just dread extinction. They deny it. Ray Kurzweil encourages them to do so. Fantastic Voyage, which the futurist and cryonics enthusiast co-wrote with Terry Grossman, recommends a regimen to forestall aging so that adherents live long enough to take advantage of forthcoming "radical life-extending and lifeenhancing technologies." Cambridge University gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is toiling away at just such research in his laboratory. "We are in serious striking distance of stopping aging," says De Grey, founder and chairman of the Methuselah Foundation, which awards the Mprize to each successive research team that breaks the record for the life span of a mouse. It is "bleeding obvious," he adds, that it is possible to extend the human life span indefinitely. "Most people take the view that aging is this natural thing that is going on independently of disease. That's nonsense. The fact is that age-related diseases are age-related diseases because they're the later stages of aging." For all the optimism about how science may prolong life, mice and humans keep turning up their toes. No matter how much the government bullies and cajoles, amortals rarely make adequate provision for their final years. Yet even as faltering amortals strain the public purse, so their determination to wring every drop out of life brings benefits to the private sector. They prop up the tottering music industry, are lifelong consumers of gadgets and gizmos, keep gyms busy and colorists in demand. From their youth, when they behave as badly as adults, to their dotage, when they behave as badly as youngsters, amortals hate to be pigeonholed by age.

They're a highly sexed bunch. Viagra and its cousins help give elderly amortals a pleasurable alternative to aqua aerobics while blotting out those pesky intimations of mortality. At the Coco de Mer erotica shop in Los Angeles, which offers instruction in subjects like "Being a Mistress in the Bedroom," patrons recently included two women in their 80s. "They were both like, 'Help — we want to have fun,'" says the store's owner, Justine Roddick. Notions of age-appropriate behavior will soon be relegated as firmly to the past as dentures and black-and-white television. "The important thing is not how many years have passed since you were born," says Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, "but where you are in your life, how you think about yourself and what you are able and willing to do." If that doesn't sound like a manifesto for revolution, it's only because amortality has already revolutionized our attitudes toward age.

6. Africa, Business Destination By ALEX PERRY

New Chinese owners got this Congolese wood-processing plant working again. Paolo Woods for TIME

Togo is like much of West Africa — small, poor and an occasional producer of sensational soccer players — but for the bank. Lomé, Togo's capital, is home to Ecobank, a 21-year-old pan-African retail and corporate bank that, according to CEO Arnold Ekpe, employs 11,000 people in 620 branches in 26 countries, with a balance sheet of $8 billion. Unlike a lot of other banks, Ecobank is expanding. It has opened 200 branches since 2006 and aims to set up in three more countries by June. What's more, it actually makes money: annual profits were up 47%, to $191 million, in 2007 and up 32%, to $104 million, for the third quarter of 2008 alone, the latest period for which figures are available. Even more extraordinary, it is managing to raise money in the "crunched" capital markets — $700 million since August. Granted, the world's banks are in a historic crisis. That does not make any less arresting the thought that some of the best-performing bankers on the planet right now come from a place called Togo. "Warren Buffett is based in Nebraska," says Ekpe. "It's not where you are. It's what you do."

Up to a point. In Africa's case, the perception has long been that where you are renders all but irrelevant what you do. Africa is hopeless, a place of war and famine seemingly populated almost entirely by tyrants and children with flies in their eyes. According to this view, if Africa generates any kind of growth, it is in suffering — and in the overseas aid sent to address that, now a $40-billion-a-year industry. Naturally, with a new appeal every year and a new disaster every other, some people have begun to wonder if all that money is doing any good. They argue that aid creates dependence, fuels corruption, undermines democracy and stifles development. They have written books with titles like The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't

Working (by an ex-spokesman for the World Bank in Africa) and Dead Aid (by a Zambia-born former Goldman Sachs investment banker). And that debate is important, no doubt. But it is drowning out a more significant development. Ecobank's success is not an isolated blip, and aid is no longer Africa's main source of foreign income. Africa is becoming a business destination. In 2006, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, foreign investment in Africa reached $48 billion, overtaking foreign aid for the first time. That gap has only widened, reflecting a quadrupling of foreign investment since 2000. As the senior adviser in Africa for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), David Nellor, noted in a report last September, sub-Saharan Africa today resembles Asia in the 1980s. "The private sector is the key driver," wrote Nellor, "and financial markets are opening up." War is down. Democracy is up. Inflation and interest rates are in single digits. Terms of trade have improved. Crucially, said Nellor, "growth is taking off." The IMF puts Africa's average annual growth for 2004 to '08 at more than 6% — better than any developed economy — and predicts the continent will buck the global recessionary trend to grow nearly 3.3% this year. Yes, Africa is still a continent of commodities — with its forests, oil fields and mines — and demand for commodities has plummeted. Yes, Africa still has its Darfurs, Somalias, Congos and Zimbabwes. But commodity prices are higher than they were in the 1990s. Most Africans are not middle class, but most also no longer live in extreme poverty. The World Bank says the percentage of Africans living on $1.25 a

day or less dropped from 59% to 51% from 1996 to 2005 and has decreased further since. In an article for the online journal allAfrica in February, Oxford University economist Paul Collier and Witney Schneidman, who advised President Obama on Africa during his campaign, noted that Africa now offers the world's highest rate of return on investment. "Africa, usually the poorest performing region in the world economy, is now likely to be among the best-performing," they wrote. "Moreover, the region has been largely immune from the current banking crisis...The continent's financial institutions did not venture into derivatives or sub-prime mortgages." Shanta Devarajan, the World Bank's chief economist for Africa, says the current downturn might be unfair to the continent, since it is "not remotely Africa's fault," but it should not alter the underlying trend: "There has definitely been a transition in the last few years. The continent now has huge potential." Or as Stephen Hayes, president and CEO of the Corporate Council on Africa, puts it, "Africa offers more opportunity than any place in the world." Perhaps the most compelling evidence that Africa is now a business destination is China's new love for it. While the old superpowers still agonize over Africa's poverty, the new one is captivated by its riches. Trade between Africa and China has grown an average of 30% in the past decade, topping $106 billion last year. Chinese engineers are at work across the continent, mining copper in Zambia and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo and tapping oil in Angola. Nor is this merely exploitative. China bought its access by agreeing to create a new infrastructure for Africa, building roads, railways, hospitals and schools across the continent. The current crisis is not expected to affect China's march in Africa: on the contrary, with the West's plans in Africa on hold at best, Beijing views it as an opportunity to extend China's lead. "We will continue to have a vigorous aid program here, and Chinese companies will continue to invest as much as possible," Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said in South Africa in January. "It is a win-win solution." Dambisa Moyo, who wrote Dead Aid, says those who need convincing about Africa should ask themselves if they are convinced about China, "because if you back China, you're backing Africa." Ecobank CEO Ekpe says part of the explanation for

China's zeal for Africa is a new way of looking at Africans. "[The Chinese] are not setting out to do good," he says. "They are setting out to do business. It's actually much less demeaning." And that gets to what, for Africans, is the emotional heart of the matter — and why joining the business world means so much. Though it rarely occurs to Westerners who've been instructed that Africa needs their help, charity is humiliating. Not emergency charity, of course: when disaster strikes, emergency aid is always welcome, whether in New Orleans or Papua New Guinea. But long-term charity, living life as a beggar, is degrading. Andrew Rugasira, 40, runs Good African Coffee, a Ugandan company he set up in 2004 to supply British supermarkets under the motto "Trade, not aid." He is emblematic of a new generation of African antiaid, antistate entrepreneurs. For Rugasira, aid not only "undermines the creativity to lift yourself out of poverty" but also "undermines the integrity and dignity of the people. It says, These are people who cannot figure out how to develop." Aid even manages to silence those it is meant to help. "African governments become accountable to Western donors," says Rugasira, "and Africa finds itself represented not by Africans but by Bono and Bob Geldof. I mean, how would America react if Amy Winehouse dropped in to advise them on the credit crisis?" And if that's a striking inversion, consider another one. Look back at the African growth figures once more. Compare them with this year's forecasts for the developed world. Who's the basket case now?

7. The Rent-A-Country By KRISTA MAHR

Albert Moldvay / National Geographic / Getty

Take a moment to consider breakfast, the most important meal of the day. Maybe you grabbed a banana or ate a bowl of granola. Whatever it was, chances are that some — if not all — of your morning meal came from a country you don't live in. Food isolationism is dead. It collapsed in a messy, public heap last year when oil hit $100-plus per bbl. and the world's crush on biofuels pushed food prices to unprecedented highs. Thirty-six nations needed food aid. Twenty-five imposed export bans or restrictions to keep staple crops like rice and wheat at home. As prices shot up 50%, food riots erupted in Haiti, killing at least five, and eventually brought down the government. And then something else happened. A few diplomats and business leaders quietly boarded their jets and got to work. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and South Korea — well-off states without enough good land or water to feed their people — started to look outside their borders. "It's economically not viable to grow food in the desert," says David Hallam, deputy director of trade and markets for the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization. "They said, 'If we can't grow our own food, we'll grow it somewhere else.'"

Their words did not fall on deaf ears. In April, diplomatic relations between Cambodia and Qatar were officially established. In May, the Presidents of South Korea and Sudan discussed food cooperation at the launch of the Korea-Arab Society in Seoul. The Saudi Binladin Group penned nonbinding agreements with Indonesia to plant rice on some 1.5 million acres (607,000 hectares) of island paradise, and millions more have reportedly been earmarked, from Pakistan and Kazakhstan to Burma and the Philippines. Alwi Shihab, a special economic adviser on the Middle East to the President of Indonesia, sees this new investment as a boon to the nation's agricultural sector. "We have large, sizable, fertile -land and good water," says Shihab. Growing crops for strangers, of course, is nothing new. The long, grim march of colonialism was driven by Europe's penchant for sugar, tea, tobacco and other crops that don't flourish in northern climes. But as climate change and growing populations put ever more pressure on the earth, state-backed searches for land and food contracts as part of a national food-security strategy strike many as fundamentally new. "We're talking about a whole different logic," says Renée Vellvé, a researcher for Grain, an organization that has been compiling media reports of these deals. Vellvé's group sees a downside. When farmers in food-insecure countries like Laos and Cambodia are scrambling to feed their children, does it make sense to lease out vast tracts to grow rice for foreign governments? "These are not fallow fields," says Paul Risley, a World Food Program spokesman based in Thailand. "These are villages where families have farmed for centuries." And for investors, moving into regions where so many depend so fiercely on the land can translate into risk. "You see a backlash," says Rajesh Behal, a principal investment officer for International Finance Corp., which has just put $75 million into an emerging-market agribusiness fund. "People say, 'Who are these people, and how long will they be there?'" In July, South Korea's Daewoo Logistics signed contracts to lease more than 2.2 million acres (900,000 hectares) in Madagascar — more than a third of the island nation's arable land — to grow corn and oil palms. A violent political dispute erupted in the capital soon after, complicating the deal. "Farming is a

pretty dirty business," says Behal. "You have to know the nuances and withstand the volatility." But in countries where governments can't afford — or don't prioritize — significant domestic agricultural investment, foreign money has the power to deliver better roads, irrigation, technology and training. "One thousand times we say yes on private and public agricultural investment, but done in a certain way," says Jean-Philippe Audinet, acting director of the policy division at the U.N.'s International Fund for Agricultural Development. "It's very important not to look negatively at this trend. We have to try to look at the win-win." After all, is there a choice? Some of these deals are probably doomed to fall under the ax of the global credit crunch, if they haven't already. But for land-poor countries, the underlying problem of relying heavily on imports will remain. Encouraging a new generation of deals to come out of the diplomatic closet may be the best chance we have to make sure that people on both ends of the bargain end up with food on their plate. —With reporting by Jennifer Veale in Seoul

8. Biobanks By ALICE PARK

Inside Huntsman Cancer Institute's vaults: Pancreatic tumors on ice. Lance W. Clayton for TIME

Now that major banks in the U.S. are getting by on a government bailout, the idea of creating yet another repository to safeguard your most valuable assets might seem downright ludicrous. And even irresponsible. But that's exactly what some federal officials are hoping to do. Relax — it's not your money they're after. It's your blood. Folks at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) are heading up an effort to establish the U.S.'s first national biobank — a safe house for tissue samples, tumor cells, DNA and, yes, even blood — that would be used for research into new treatments for diseases. Think of it as an organic bank account. You put your biomaterial in and earn medical interest in the form of knowledge and therapies that grow out of that deposit — no monetary reward, just the potential that you might benefit from the accumulated data at some later date. (Sorry, no shiny new toaster to inspire you to open up such an account either — just an appeal to the greater medical good.) Britain, Canada, Norway and Sweden have already begun building up their national biobanks. And the residents of Iceland, though the country is bankrupt, still have their biological assets tucked safely away; more than 60% of adults in the island nation have donated DNA

to deCODE Genetics, the company that runs the bank. The U.S. effort currently lies in the NCI's Office of Biorepositories and Biospecimen Research (OBBR). By fall, the group hopes to have mapped out a plan for a national biobank; the recent stimulus showered on the government by the Obama Administration might even accelerate that timetable. Why the NCI? Cancer, it turns out, is a smart place to start with a biobank. Already, dozens of genes have been linked to cancers — BRCA 1 and 2, which are behind 5% to 10% of breast cancers — and gene proteins like prostate-specific antigen, which signals a potentially abnormally growing prostate gland. Many cancer hospitals have been collecting and storing tissue samples for decades. Imagine the power of those thousands of samples writ 100,000 or even millions of times larger, over not just cancer but any disease, ranging from brain disorders like Alzheimer's to metabolic conditions like diabetes. With enough tissue samples from both affected and unaffected people, researchers can pick out gene profiles that haunt the DNA of those who get sick, then start to screen and treat these individuals and others like them more aggressively. "Biobanks will transform the way we see disease developing," says Dr. Carolyn Compton, director of the OBBR. It will certainly change what you leave behind each time you visit the doctor. The key to a powerful national biobank is high-quality specimens from as wide a swath of the country's population as possible. And both doctors and patients are beginning to warm to the idea of collecting DNA and tissue samples as a part of routine examinations. The challenge, of course, is to maintain the privacy of account holders and ensure that access is limited to medical personnel and those who have the individual's consent. Coding each specimen and setting up layers of password-protected data sets might be one way to accomplish this. Sounds easy, but will it work? That all depends on how comfortable people can get with sharing their DNA. "Having all of your DNA out there where organizations or governmental institutions have access to it makes people nervous," says Dr. Randall

Burt of Huntsman Cancer Institute in Utah. The medical incentives are certainly great — scientists- are convinced that only by mining the riches of the human genome will we uncover the next generation of treatments for disease. And maybe those toasters couldn't hurt either.

9. Survival Stores By SEAN GREGORY

A survival store's solar panels would keep the consumer green. Graj + Gustavsen

Stores stink. Yes, they're not selling anything. Open up the business pages any day of the week and you'll see news of shops liquidating, workers getting laid off, retailers bleeding cash. But you can't blame just the economy for consumerism's woes. Think about it: When was the last time you walked into a store and saw, or just felt, something fresh? Most retailers have attacked the recession by discounting their products to pennies on the dollar. But the whole system is in disarray, and 70% off isn't the sole solution. What we need is a bigger fix. It's not about just dropping prices to match consumers' diminished buying power. Shoppers aren't going to buy the same things they used to, and they're not going to buy them in the same way they used to either. What we need is a whole new kind of store. What should the shop of the future look like? Simon Graj, CEO of Graj + -Gustavsen and a respected retail consultant, is pushing a concept he smartly brands the "survival store." Graj envisions a place where you can get the goods you need — low-cost food, clothing built to last a few winters, a bike to substitute for the new car you can't afford — while offering experiences that help you cope during these

difficult times. Why couldn't you float from the food department to the living-andleisure department, where you could meditate with a local Yogi? Or to the education department, where experts could offer sensible financial advice? "Helping people go fearlessly into the future — and have fun doing it — is the idea," Graj says. Some retailers are already catching on. French-based retailer Carrefour, for example, has built "hypermarkets" where consumers can buy food and have their computers fixed. These days, a survival-store brand could be cool. It's suddenly hip to save money. Dollar stores are thriving — there's no shame in trading down. Retailers should be straight with their customers, who are in no mood to decipher some muddled marketing pitch. This is a survival store, plain and simple. Come in and look around: all these other people are in the same boat. Have at it. That simple message might just inspire a very sad shopper. Once the economy rebounds, the survival store will be a relic, right? But hold on. We've lost too much wealth to return to the old days. Even if the economy roars back, could we really be dumb enough to revert to our old habits of conspicuous consumption? From here on out, the market for sensibility will be stable. Survival will always be in season.

10. Ecological Intelligence By BRYAN WALSH

When it comes to going green, intention can be easier than action. Case in point: you decide to buy a T shirt made from 100% organic cotton, because everyone knows that organic is better for Earth. And in some ways it is; in conventional cottonfarming, pesticides strip the soil of life. But that green label doesn't tell the whole story — like the fact that even organic cotton requires more than 2,640 gal. (10,000 L) of water to grow enough fiber for one T shirt. Or the possibility that the T shirt may have been dyed using harsh industrial chemicals, which can pollute local groundwater. If you knew all that, would you still consider the T shirt green? Would you still buy it? It's a question that most of us are ill equipped to answer, even as the debate over what is and isn't green becomes all-important in a hot and crowded world. That's because as the global economy has grown, our ability to make complex products with complex supply chains has outpaced our ability to comprehend the consequences — for ourselves and the planet. We evolved to respond to threats that were clear and present. That's why, when we eat spoiled food, we get nauseated and when we see a bright light, we shut our eyes. But nothing in evolution has prepared us to understand the cumulative impact that imperceptible amounts of industrial chemicals may have on our children's health or the slow-moving, long-term danger of climate change. Scanning the supermarket aisles, we lack the data to

understand the full impact of what we choose — and probably couldn't make sense of the information even if we had it. But what if we could seamlessly calculate the full lifetime effect of our actions on the earth and on our bodies? Not just carbon footprints but social and biological footprints as well? What if we could think ecologically? That's what psychologist Daniel Goleman describes in his forthcoming book, Ecological Intelligence. Using a young science called industrial ecology, businesses and green activists alike are beginning to compile the environmental and biological impact of our every decision — and delivering that information to consumers in a user-friendly way. That's thinking ecologically — understanding the global environmental consequences of our local choices. "We can know the causes of what we're doing, and we can know the impact of what we're doing," says Goleman, who wrote the 1995 best seller

Emotional Intelligence. "It's going to have a radical impact on the way we do business." Over the past couple of decades, industrial ecologists have been using a method called life-cycle assessment (LCA) to break down that web of connection. The concept of the carbon footprint comes from LCA, but a deep analysis looks at far more. The manufacture and sale of a simple glass bottle requires input from dozens of suppliers; for high-tech items, it can include many times more. The good news is that industrial ecologists can now crunch those data, and smart companies like Coca-Cola are using the information to clean up their corporate ecology. Working with the World Wildlife Fund, Coke analyzed its globe-spanning supply chain—the company uses 5% of the world's total sugar crop—to see where it could minimize its impact; today Coke is on target to improve its water efficiency 20% by 2012. Below the megacorporate level, start-ups like the website Good Guide are sifting through rivers of data for ordinary consumers, providing easy-to-understand ratings you can use to instantly gauge the full environmental and health impact of that T shirt. Even better, they'll get the information to you when you need it: Good Guide

has an iPhone app that can deliver verdicts on tens of thousands of products. Good Guide and services like it "let us align our dollars with our values easily," says Goleman. But ecological intelligence is ultimately about more than what we buy. It's also about our ability to accept that we live in an infinitely connected world with finite resources. Goleman highlights the Tibetan community of Sher, where for millenniums, villagers have survived harsh conditions by carefully conserving every resource available to them. The Tibetans think ecologically because they have no other choice. Neither do we. "We once had the luxury to ignore our impacts," says Goleman. "Not anymore."

TO OUR READERS

Navigating the New World By Richard Stengel, Managing Editor

Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

I don't have to tell you that this is the worst economy since the Depression. Or that this is a difficult and uncertain time in America and around the globe. I'm not telling you anything you don't know when I say that our world is changing before our eyes-and that a new world is being created. That's your daily reality--and ours. What I am telling you is that our mission at TIME is to help you navigate this new world--to explain what is changing and why and what you can do about it. Our task going forward is to use great reporting, great writing, great photography and great video online to be your guide to this new and changing world. In many ways, TIME functions best in a crisis, and we're determined to help you understand the economic crisis we're all living through. It affects us too, but our job is to explain how it's affecting you. We have been doing this for the past 10 months,

beginning with our cover stories "Surviving the Lean Economy" and "Job #1: The Economy" during the presidential campaign. And we've been doing it ever since, not with opinion and conjecture but with reporting on the ground and a concern for how all this is affecting real people's lives. We did that last week with "So You Think You're Insured?" and the week before that with our special economic package "Holding On for Dear Life." And we've been defining this economic crisis since our signature cover story "How Wall Street Sold Out America" the week Lehman Brothers went under. We captured the mood of the nation with our "The New Hard Times" cover in October, not to mention channeling a sense of the public anger in our much discussed "25 People to Blame" package last month. This week our second annual 10 Ideas issue concentrates on new ways that people and thinkers are reckoning with this new economy. Senior writer Lev Grossman edited the package, starting from the premise that the ideas, as he said, "are meant to explain the world as it is, not as it used to be." In the face of economic contraction, we're rethinking things we used to take for granted. The opening piece, by Barbara Kiviat, acknowledges that in these difficult times, plain old jobs, not stocks or real estate, are our most valuable assets. Sean Gregory writes about a new minimalist model for the shopping experience, and Bryan Walsh looks at how the suburbs are reimagining themselves now that the economy can no longer support the massive shopping centers that used to define them. Krista Mahr in Hong Kong reports on how the crunch is fueling a new kind of international trade: countries with money but little arable land are renting huge tracts from countries rich in soil but poor in cash. Alex Perry zeroes in on the unexpected star of the global economy: Africa. Amid all the anxiety out there, if there's a theme to the special Ideas issue this year, it's renewal. This is not false hope or irrational optimism but the power of ideas and innovation to transform the world and us. A decrepit transport system becomes the nerves of a new, greener network. A 16th century sect inspires a new generation of believers. The power of ideas is to make old, broken things work in fresh new ways. In fact, transformation is at the heart of what is going on in America and around the

world, and we're tracking it and explaining it for you every week in TIME and every day on TIME.com Richard Stengel, MANAGING EDITOR

NATION

Keeping Homeless Kids in School By Kathleen Kingsbury / Minneapolis Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

After moving to a shelter across town last fall, Ty'jhanae Walker, 7, still attends the Minneapolis school that is lending her a violin. Her bus ride takes an hour each way. Brian Lesteberg for TIme

Right now, nearly 1 in 10 children attending public school in Minneapolis is homeless. Read that sentence again. As Wall Street tries to right itself, the global economic crisis is punishing many of the youngest Americans. Preliminary nationwide figures indicate that there were nearly 16% more homeless students in the 2007-08 academic year than in the previous year. And the number of homeless students continues to climb as more parents face foreclosure or the unemployment line. Of some 1,700 school districts surveyed this

fall in a separate study, 69% said they had already counted at least half as many homeless students during the first few months of this academic year as they did in all of the last one. By Thanksgiving, 330 districts — including Las Vegas; Albuquerque, N.M.; and San Bernardino, Calif. — had equaled or surpassed the previous year's total. At these rates, 2008-09 could top the 2005-06 academic year, when Hurricane Katrina wrecked the Gulf Coast and 1 in 50 American children experienced homelessness, according to another report released this month. Over the past two decades, Minneapolis' 33,000-student district has seen a steady increase in the number of homeless kids, as the Twin Cities area has hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs and the supply of affordable housing has dwindled. The recession has worsened the problem: between July and December, Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) tallied nearly 20% more homeless students than during the same period the year before. Perhaps out of necessity, the district has become a national model for how to identify what it refers to as "highly mobile students" and ensure that their education is not interrupted. Case in point: Since September, when second-grader Ty'jhanae Walker moved with her family to a shelter across town from her school, the 7-year-old has ridden a bus an hour each way so she can keep going to Ramsey International Fine Arts Center. Her mother Denise Powe wants her to stick with the K-8 school — which currently has at least 24 other students classified as highly mobile — because she doesn't want Ty'jhanae to fall behind. "Different schools learn at different paces, so I'm really pushing for her to stay in Ramsey," Powe says. "Moving Ty'jhanae is going to be my very last resort. Her education is my life." Since 1987, federal law has required districts to help homeless children stay enrolled at one school continuously, as any move could set these kids back several months academically. Under the law, a district must provide free transportation — whether by taxi, city bus or school bus — even if the child is staying in a shelter outside its boundaries. Every year, MPS spends more than $1.5 million transporting homeless students. On a recent morning, seven buses arrived at Ty'jhanae's shelter to deliver 21 kids to eight different schools.

Teachers and school social workers at MPS are trained to recognize signs that a child may be between homes: hoarding food, wearing the same clothes every day, regularly falling asleep in class. Sometimes it's just a matter of asking the right questions. When a second-grader at Longfellow Elementary School couldn't stay awake during reading time, his teacher gently asked him why. "He told her that the rats and roaches were keeping him up," says one of the school's social workers, Cheryl Flugaur-Levitt. "We discovered he'd been sleeping on a relative's floor, and he was scared to death about things crawling on him at night." So she went to work on getting him at least a mattress to sleep on until his family could find a more permanent home. MPS gives each homeless child a new backpack full of school supplies paid for by private donations and federal dollars. And these aren't cheapo knapsacks. "We don't want backpacks that look like they came from a shelter," says Elizabeth Hinz, district liaison for homeless and highly mobile students. In the winter, her staff members hand out coats, mittens and hats. Year-round, they find free medical clinics to treat earaches and provide dental services. School social workers take kids to get glasses and vaccinations. Many high schools offer laundry or shower facilities for teenagers — who are often left to fend for themselves when a family becomes homeless — as well as a secure locker for their belongings. "We've seen students put their whole lives in those lockers," says Elena Shaw, MPS's high school support liaison. The district provides funding to make sure kids don't get left out of sports, field trips, school dances or special projects like the science fair. And when two homeless students at Cityview Performing Arts Magnet won a regional science fair, teacher Pamela Holland-Mills did their laundry so they would have clean clothes for the celebratory dinner. Nationwide, the federal stimulus package allocated $70 million to help homeless students, more than doubling the $65 million slated for this year. But those dollars will be meted out across the country's 15,000 school districts. And as the recession wears on, shelters are getting maxed out: the one where Powe and her two kids are staying has room for 32 people but received 50 calls from people seeking shelter in

October 2006, 100 in October 2007 and about 300 last October. School districts know they'll have to fight one another to get enough resources for their homeless students. "It's our gravest concern that we'll lose more federal dollars," says MPS superintendent Bill Green. "Because staying in school is these kids' only shot at a better life." Powe has been looking for a job for more than a year since the beauty shop at which she worked cut all full-time positions. She appreciates the stability her daughter's school provides as well as the instrument the school is lending Ty'jhanae for the year. "She just loves playing her violin," Powe says. "Every time we go to a different church, she plays it for the volunteers." Marie Bell, one of two social workers at Ty'jhanae's school, says music serves as a balance for homeless kids. "Students are more resilient if they are able to develop musical skills," she says. The school encourages students to write daily journal entries that can help officials identify children who are between homes. "There may be some homeless kids here we don't know about," Bell admits. "Just letting them unscrew their valve and let some steam out helps."

Obama's Reform Agenda: Is He Trying to Do Too Much? By David Von Drehle and Michael Scherer Friday, Mar. 13, 2009

President Barack Obama Brooks Kraft / Corbis for TIME

On the best of days, Washington and Wall Street are as antsy as a boy who plants an acorn and then starts talking about climbing the tree. And these are not the best of days. Under the stress of a global financial disaster and juiced up on the amphetamine of 24-hour cable chatter, America's axis of money and influence is jittery and nervous and primed for panic. This is relevant background for digesting the news that Barack Obama's honeymoon in the corridors of power has come to an abrupt end — even as opinion polls show that the public remains by his side. To most grownups, seven weeks is an eyeblink (in baseball it's called spring training), but along the Acela line it is much ... too ...

long to wait for Obama to fix the economy. And so the doomsday chorus began: He's trying to do too much. He's doing too little. His bank bailout is too complicated. His health-care plan is hollow. The great orator can't communicate his priorities. His priorities are clear — but screwed up. The problem for Obama, and perhaps for us all, is that some of the hand-wringing came neither from flibbertigibbets nor from opportunists. Some came from Warren Buffett, whose patient ability to take the long view has made him the wealthiest investor in America. Buffett was — and is — an Obama supporter, but he took to the airwaves on March 9 to try to seize the young President's attention away from health care and education and energy and refocus it back onto the economy. Warning that Obama's agenda has become too sprawling and provocative, Buffett admonished, "Job 1 is to win the war, the economic war. Job 2 is to win the economic war — and Job 3." He added, "You can't expect people to unite behind you if you're trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throat." The oracle's verdict was quickly endorsed by Jack Welch and Andrew Grove, retired CEOs of General Electric and Intel, respectively. And from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke came this measured nudge: "Until we stabilize the financial system, a sustainable economic recovery will remain out of reach." Another unexcitable voice, from the laconic flatlands of North Dakota — Senator Kent Conrad — warned on March 10 that Obama's $3.6 trillion budget is already in trouble on Capitol Hill. Democrats may be in power, but they aren't all in agreement with Obama's do-it-all-now approach to solving the nation's most persistent problems. "Anybody who thinks it will be easy to get the votes on the budget in the conditions that we face is smoking something," Conrad declared. Obama fired back the same day. "I know there are some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time," he said, invoking Lincoln's launch of the transcontinental railroad in the midst of the Civil War. "We don't have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term." The political strategy of the Administration can be summed up in a motto: "Never waste a good crisis," as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it. That phrase

has been the rallying cry of the Obama team for months. But it increasingly appears that the Administration was unprepared for both the severity of the recession and the political resistance to trying to do so much at once. And so the Obama team is coming to grips with another motto for the ages: Sometimes a crisis is an opportunity — but sometimes it's just a crisis. The Confidence Game As director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag is a card-carrying numbers guy. But lately Orszag has been reading up on that aspect of the economy ungoverned by numbers: the realm of groundswell and mojo — our "animal spirits," in the vivid words of economist John Maynard Keynes. Spirits such as trust, belief and confidence. When surging, these spirits can turn a slump into a boom and a boom into a bubble, but once they shatter, it's a devilish job trying to resurrect them. That's because other animal spirits rise up to take their place: doubt, fear, even panic. The arrival of a new President tossed some tinder onto the cold coals of economic confidence; now Orszag and others inside the Administration are trying to feed the fire. And in spite of Obama's insistence that his team must walk and chew gum at the same time — make that "run and chew gum," his advisers recently amended — it is starting to register that nothing would stoke the flames better than a credible strategy for cleaning up the banks. As a senior Administration official puts it, "The money is less important than restoring a sense of confidence." So although the President defends his broad agenda, he understands how much is riding on the gradual rollout of version 2.0 of his bank plan — not necessarily bigger than the $787 billion package that left the markets cold, but sharper and more plausible. The trouble with the initial draft unveiled unartfully last month by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, says Moody's Economy.com chief economist Mark Zandi, was that it was "too clever by half," creating elaborate incentives for private investors when the simple solution would be to have Uncle Sam immediately wade in, grab control, wring out the bad debt and punish the malefactors. The more complex

approach attempted to avoid the stigma and huge up-front costs of "nationalizing" banks. But "the Administration hasn't sold its policy efforts well enough," Zandi says. There are good reasons for the Administration to focus on the banks. The first is clarity. In recent days, the President has highlighted his long-term plans for education, energy independence and health care — all of which, he argues, are essential to the long-range vitality of the U.S. economy. But to borrow from Keynes again, in the long term, we'll be dead, and in the short term, the LIBOR rate — that esoteric measure of financial vigor — has been creeping in the wrong direction again. "The public really needs to know what he thinks is important," says a senior Democrat. "There's no prioritization." The second point is that a lasered-in President is an antidote to the flightiness and indiscipline endemic to both Washington and Wall Street. Fixing one problem at a time may strike Obama as mere gum-chewing. But in modern-day Washington, one is a very high number. The reason so many people were left slack-jawed by the Obama budget was not that they disagreed with his premise that health-care costs are out of control or that energy independence is desirable or that better schools are important to the future of the economy. It was the real-world knowledge that financial calamity has not magically transformed our slow-moving, reform-resistant, cantankerous government into a peaceful, streamlined, problem-tackling machine. Every one of Obama's reforms will mean bigger political fights, consume more intellectual bandwidth and require more bravery from politicians than Washington has witnessed anytime in the past 15 years. Which once again argues for knuckling down on the banking issue, because that's a matter of unquestioned urgency. Political opportunists will no doubt jockey to claim credit or place blame, but ultimately everyone is looking to the Administration for leadership in this area, and only ideologues will grumble if Obama manages to find a way through it. The President and his team were elected to fix the economy, a senior Republican acknowledges, but the electorate is less clear, he argues, on the rest of the Obama agenda.

Yet another reason to focus — perhaps the hardest for the Obama team to accept — is that this is a rookie White House still finding its legs. That's not criticism. It's just a fact. Obama defended his vast agenda by citing John F. Kennedy, who didn't have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and a mission to the moon. But history shows that seven weeks after being sworn in, Kennedy was bumbling his way toward the Bay of Pigs. It takes time to get good at the presidency. And Team Obama isn't there yet. Even for a great communicator, confidence requires an investment in credibility — and Obama has been a little risky with his portfolio. He said no lobbyists would be working in his White House — except the ones he really, really needed — and that no pork would fatten his budgets once he got past the $410 billion omnibus spending bill with its 8,570 earmarks. By promising higher standards for hiring, tighter controls on spending and greater transparency in execution, Obama set himself up to let people down. Consider Orszag's March 10 trip to Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Finance Committee. Senators are intrigued by Obama's proposed 10-year, $634 billion "down payment" on health-care reform, but Orszag pointedly avoided going into detail. "You will not be receiving definitive answers from me on exactly what the Administration does or does not favor on the benefits-and-coverage side of health reform," he told the panel. This may be a good way to get a bill through Congress; whether it is a good way to instill broader confidence in the President's priorities is another question. How Long Will Americans Wait? Americans under stress are more receptive to the robust government that Democrats offer. So Obama believes conditions are ripe for his party's answers to problems that are far beyond the present storm. Inside the Administration, Obama's audacious budget sketch is seen as an intricate web of reinforcing reforms, an exquisite piece of re-engineering in which stimulus creates jobs, jobs generate revenues, revenues fund an efficient health-care system, which in turn tames the deficit. What critics consider a massive intervention to impose a price on carbon emissions is, to the White House, the engine for the growth of a robust new green economy. Meanwhile, students will begin graduating from improved schools and moving seamlessly into this prosperous future. Shortcomings may lie in the details, but the economy won't

really be fixed until the entire web is assembled. "I see this document differently," Obama told Congress as he introduced the budget. "I see it as a vision for America — as a blueprint for our future." This is the reason behind the Obama team's madcap multitasking. As press secretary Robert Gibbs put it the other day, the whole American house is on fire, not just the particular room where the flames happen to be roaring. "Are you going to call the fire department and ask them to put all of it out?" Gibbs asked. "Or are you going to say, 'You know what? We love the living room. Start over there. And if you can, get quickly to the kitchen, and next to the den.' We could do that. And maybe by the time they get to the kitchen or the den, the whole house is in ashes." But moderate Democrats in Congress may douse some of Obama's grander ambitions. As infuriating as that is to progressives eager to seize on this "good crisis," it's a natural by-product of giving the vote to Americans who live in coalburning, oil-drilling, far-driving and heavy-manufacturing regions. One such place is Indiana, whose Democratic Senator, Evan Bayh, will be tough to sell every line of the Obama budget to. "I've spent some time with the President, and my strong impression of him is, at the end of the day, he's a pragmatist," Bayh says. Translation: Obama will take what he can get. The thing nostalgic Democrats forget about Social Security is that it did not come in the first year of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency or even in the second. The major initiatives of the New Deal passed only after F.D.R. had convinced Americans that he had his priorities straight. His immediate attention to issues like the run on banks and sky-high unemployment gave him a congressional landslide in 1934 that ratified his 1932 victory. That's when he grew strong enough to pass his broader agenda. The best way not to "waste a good crisis" is to put the stress on "crisis." Once Obama does that, the antsy gang on Wall Street and in Washington will have to pay attention. — With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Michael Duffy and Jay Newton-Small

ESSAY: Tuned In

CNBC Under Fire: Sticking Up for the Big Guy? By James Poniewozik Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Jim Cramer Gary Gershoff / WireImage / Getty

On the March 9 edition of CNBC's Squawk Box, Becky Quick was interviewing Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett when the Oracle of Omaha expressed support for the Obama Administration's mortgage bailout. "Becky," co-host Joe Kernen broke in, "tell Warren you're mad that you've done all the right things and all these other people are going to get bailed out." Buffett replied, "There's nothing wrong with being mad, Joe. It's just that there are times when you're mad about something that you've got to overcome the emotion."

That is why Buffett is not in the cable-news business. For as the economy nosedives, CNBC — the TV darling of the turn-of-the-century stock boom — is proudly letting the emotion overcome it. In February, reporter Rick Santelli launched into an on-air rant against helping "losers" with their mortgages, a viral-video hit that made Santelli the poor man's Rush Limbaugh — or is that the rich man's? Kudlow Report host Larry Kudlow opined that President Obama "is waging war against capital." Stock picker and professional gasket blower Jim Cramer trained his bulging eyes on Washington, accusing Obama of "the greatest wealth destruction I've ever seen by a President." To watch CNBC today is to enter an alternative universe, where élites are populists, Wall Street is Main Street and bank executives are the oppressed. It's not surprising that a voice of opposition to the new Administration would emerge. But who would have thought it would be on a channel not owned by Rupert Murdoch? In a way, CNBC has no choice but to become political, since the economy itself has. And CNBC faces the same dilemma as the rest of the media: If psychology drives the economy, when does reporting bad news become creating bad news? How do you walk the line between desperate cheerleading and reckless ranting? CNBC's answer has been to dive off both sides of the line at once. On the silverlining-hunt side, its straight-news interviewers now spend uncomfortable days (even when not talking about parent company GE's woes) pleading with gloom-saying guests to declare a bottom to the market or find stock picks. "Do you have just one?" Steve Liesman asked an investment adviser, almost plaintively. On the ranting side, it has increasingly pinned the state of the economy on the twomonth-old Administration, with Cramer offering recommendations to "Obama-proof your portfolio," a phrase that now comes up regularly on CNBC's air. (In response,

The Daily Show aired a clip reel of the network's bad calls during the bubble, suggesting viewers might prefer to CNBC-proof their portfolios.)

CNBC's reaction is colored by its stressed-out day trader's focus on the short term. When ordinary people think about the economy, they think about jobs, college, retirement. Sure, the stock market affects them in the long run — but so do job security and the threat of getting wiped out by health-care bills. When CNBC considers the economy, it means Wall Street's numbers that day, that hour, that minute. CNBC may pay lip service to the long term, but it has the time horizon of a fruit fly. This means that CNBC looks at everything, particularly politics, in terms of how it will affect "the Market." The commentators on CNBC murmur about the Market as if it were the Island on Lost: a mystic force that must be placated, lest it become angry and punish us. "The Market doesn't like ..." "What the Market wants to see is ..." And, oooh, is the Market cranky at Obama! The Market doesn't like raising taxes on the wealthy (even if Buffett does). The Market doesn't like government health-care reform or cap-and-trade environmental policy or big budgets or limiting bonuses at bailed-out banks. And don't get the Market started on bank nationalization. That ticks the Market off! It is as if — between MSNBC and CNBC — NBC News were trying to own the liberal

and conservative voices of cable news. But CNBC's is a much different strain of conservatism from Sarah Palin's or Bill O'Reilly's: it is urban, club room and Mammon-oriented rather than small town, VFW hall and God-oriented. It's an ideology not exclusively beholden to party (Cramer voted for Obama), but it's an ideology nonetheless. It's also an ideology that you'd think, given the track record of trusted financial institutions, people would be a little wary of crowing in public nowadays. But ratings are up. As the rest of the country stews over the mismanagement of insurers and banks, there's still a small, demographically appealing niche for talking heads fulminating against the "demonization" of business and being in favor of laissez-faire government.

Hey, somebody's gotta stick up for the little guy. Even, or especially, when he's the big guy.

Viewpoint

The Trouble with Obama's New Deal By Newt Gingrich Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Newt Gingrich Brendan Smialowski / Getty

President Barack Obama faces a daunting political reality: the world he envisioned in the spring and summer of 2008, when he was formulating his political strategy and building his political alliances, has been replaced by a world in economic danger. His $3.5 trillion budget might make sense if these were normal times, with a newly elected, very liberal Administration wanting to focus on reshaping America and redistributing wealth. However, these are not normal times. We are in the midst of the worst economic challenge in 80 years. Japan's gross domestic product dropped 13% in the fourth quarter. The Russians are so short of cash, they are signing a lopsided 20-year deal for oil sales to China in exchange for a $25 billion loan. Iceland is bankrupt. The World Bank predicted on March 8 that in 2009 the global economy will shrink for the first time since the 1940s.

Here in America, the unemployment numbers keep growing. Such icons of U.S. economic power as Citigroup, General Motors and General Electric are in trouble. The big-spending strategy employed by George W. Bush and now Obama has so far failed to turn around the economic decline. Congressional leaders are talking about the need for a second stimulus package. No one should underestimate the danger posed by these policy failures. Gigantic economic dislocations have gigantic noneconomic consequences. The Great Depression led to the rise of Nazi Germany and a militaristic Japan, the spread of communism and World War II. In this environment, the only two relevant objectives are creating jobs and restoring financial institutions to functional stability. Yet the Obama budget has the potential to do exactly the opposite. If the country's No. 1 priority is to create jobs, then a hidden $1,300-per-family energy-tax increase in the guise of a cap-and-trade system is absolutely destructive. Herbert Hoover raised taxes in 1932, and it further crippled the economy. The waron-wealth rhetoric (Obama talks about punishing companies that send jobs overseas; Vice President Joe Biden said he wanted to throw CEOs "in the brig"; Senator Claire McCaskill referred to CEOs as "idiots") and policies of this Administration and the Democratic Congress are making it difficult to stabilize the stock market and much harder to get successful people to invest in American jobs. If we want to keep money in the U.S., then sending it overseas for oil and gas is counterproductive. Yet the Obama budget includes a 13% excise tax on offshore oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the domestic oil and gas industry at a time when we should be encouraging it to return resources home to America. The various tax increases in the Obama budget combine to form as great a threat to economic growth as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff — in effect a huge tax increase on consumers — did in the 1930s. Obama needs to slow down, recognize how much the world has changed and work across party lines to develop a totally new budget to meet this new reality.

The outlines of such a budget can be found at AmericanSolutions.com. Our 12 American Solutions for Jobs and Prosperity include creating a temporary new tax credit to offset 50% of the payroll tax (helping both workers and small businesses), cutting the business tax rate to 12.5% to match Ireland's, and reducing the 25% marginal income tax rate to 15%, effectively establishing a flat tax rate of 15% for almost 9 out of 10 American workers. These steps would put more money into the hands of American businesses and consumers faster than any stimulus plan that has to disburse money through a centralized bureaucracy. Our 12 solutions also include a strategy for energy abundance that would lower energy costs by exploring for more domestic oil and natural gas, as well as investing in sources of affordable energy for the future, including clean coal, renewable fuels, wind and nuclear. We also call for the abolition of capital-gains taxes, which would immediately add value to the personal portfolios of every American and bring relief to anyone saving to retire, buy a home or go to college. This is the type of vivid progrowth, pro-savings and pro-investment strategy that's needed to create jobs and restore stability to the financial markets. If President Obama used these 12 solutions as the basis for his 2010 budget, it would enjoy bipartisan support and set America on the path to recovery.

Former House Speaker Gingrich is chairman of American Solutions for Winning the Future

This Journalist Is Brought to You by ... By Joel Stein Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Illustration by John Ueland for TIME

The panic comes in the morning. As I sit at my desk and drink a tall glass of Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice, I start to worry about my career. I may be the best journalist in the world, but if there are no journals left to be journalisting for, I'll have to use my communication skills in some other way, like asking my parents for money. That's why I've decided to save print journalism. My first idea was to get every reporter to switch beats and cover only cats doing funny things. Then I had some more Pom Wonderful, allowed the antioxidants to flush out my free radicals and came up with the perfect solution: product placement. Just like how on the show 24 Jack Bauer drives some brand of car that's not paying me and on American Idol the judges drink some kind of soda that's not paying me,

last summer the anchors at the Fox News affiliates in New York City, Chicago, Las Vegas and Seattle put cups of iced coffee from a fast-food place that's not paying me on their desks. This upset lots of people because they thought it compromised the objectivity of their local anchors. This marked the first time anyone has thought about the credibility of Las Vegas anchorpeople. To get journalists to embrace my radical solution, I decided to be the first columnist to solicit product placement. This would also allow me to show my bosses just how valuable I am — in cold, hard cash. If I'm pulling in high-end cars and watchmakers and Joe Klein has nothing but socialist beard trimmers, I think we know who's going to survive the next round of layoffs. Unfortunately, the athletic-shoe company I called first took a very long time getting back to me. Like past now. Same with the adult-beverage conglomerate and the hotel chain. I started to get worried when the cable station, broadcast network and sports league turned me down. There is nothing scarier than wanting to sell out and discovering that no one wants to buy in. I was starting to worry about the value of my not-so-hard work when I contacted my college friend Matt Tupper, who has an extraordinarily healthy heart, prostate and ability to sustain an erection and is also president of Pom Wonderful. We met at an expensive restaurant and discussed, over delicious Pomtinis, what kind of deal we could cut. I reminded him that children are often assigned this column as classroom reading and that many assistants of high-level executives spend their downtime at work searching for my old articles. I asked him how much it would have been worth to have Mark Twain write The Celebrated Pom Wonderful of Pom Wonderful County. Those Pomtinis are strong. I was prepared to have Tupper reject me. Instead, he offered $25,000. I was hoping for about a quarter of that, and I was expecting it less in cash and more in posters and caps. A $25,000 check would more than cover the entire cost of this column, even including the dinner I claimed I had with him both in the paragraph above and on my expense report. I quickly accepted the check on TIME's behalf, promising that

I'd subtly work his 100% American-made, antioxidant superpower juice into my column in a way no one would ever notice. Then we called his marketing department to find out exactly how it approached product placement. Though it will supply free juice to lots of TV shows, movies and red-carpet events, the company is willing to pay to be in situations only if they highlight its core brand messages of health and luxury. "We wouldn't pay a lot of money if it's just sitting in front of Simon Cowell," said senior vice president of marketing Diane Kuyoomjian. I was feeling pretty healthy and luxurious until she told me, as an example, that the company turned down a scene in a movie in which the Pom Wonderful bottle would have been used as a bong. When I asked if people at the company expected to read what I wrote before it was printed, I was relieved to find out that they are just given a general idea of what a scene is about and don't get to see a final cut. Product placement was going to do less damage to my work than my editors do. It was all going very smoothly until my editor's editor's editor decided we had a policy against the mingling of advertising and editorial content and we would have to give the Pom Wonderful money to charity. Oddly, I thought that was what I was doing this whole time. Instead, all my efforts did was teach me exactly why the proud, antediluvian print-journalism companies are in financial trouble. Not only is Time Inc. turning down $25,000, but it's employing three editors for this column.

WORLD

Postcard from Hughson By Kate Pickert Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Beekeeper Orin Johnson checks on hives in an orchard. Two hives can pollinate one acre. Anne Hamersky for Time

The white boxes parked in California's almond orchards this time of year are easy to spot. Stacked in sets of four or six, they squat between dead-straight rows of trees awash in blossoms. (A walk through an almond orchard in early March is not unlike a stroll past a department-store perfume counter.) From afar, the boxes look as if they might provide a weary farmer a place to sit or store his tools. But get close enough under the right conditions--dry, above 55°, no more than a light breeze--and you can hear and see one of the most vital relationships in modern American agriculture: the droning dance of honey bees feasting on almond pollen.

Almonds are a huge business in California's Central Valley; the state's 660,000 nutproducing acres are responsible for some 90% of the world's crop. Every almond we eat is the result of multiple acts of pollination; without a massive number of bees to flit among the blossoms, growers say, almond trees would produce scarcely a tenth as many nuts. That's why, every February, more than a million beehives--with a total of some 20 billion bees--are shipped in on flatbed trucks from all over the country. It's a sweet, symbiotic relationship: the annual pilgrimage keeps California's $2.2 billion almond industry ticking and is a huge moneymaker for more than half the country's commercial beekeepers. But this year, some worry that relationship is starting to sour. Driven by surging global demand, California's almond growers have doubled acreage since 1981, forcing them to lean heavily on imported bees from as far away as Vermont. Drive along the unlined roads around Hughson, and it's easy to find 10 different almond farmers renting hives from 10 different states. Orin Johnson, whose family has been keeping bees around Hughson since the 1950s, remembers when beekeepers earned less than $10 per hive in pollination fees to supplement their main business: honey. "Almonds were nothing," says Johnson, examining some of his 700 hives, his snow white hair peeking out from beneath a green trucker hat. Today about 60% of Johnson's business is pollination. (The honey made from almond blossoms is too bitter to eat and is not harvested.) The industrial pollination may be starting to take its toll on the bees. Many keepers are feeding their colonies corn syrup, sugar and pollen substitute to artificially bulk up hives ahead of the almond season, while killing off parasitic mites with pesticides. Plus, parking the hives smack in the middle of this land of almonds "is comparable to us going to McDonald's every day for a month," says Johnson. "In the past, you'd have a blend of sources, and [the bees] seemed so much healthier." Johnson and many bee researchers believe this monocultural diet may have contributed to the recent epidemic of colony-collapse disorder (CCD)--a mysterious phenomenon that can kill up to 90% of a hive's insects, and whose root cause is still unknown. CCD has helped cause a nationwide bee shortage; rental prices spiked to as much as $160 per hive last year.

Consequently, California's almond growers are getting stung. Dave Phippen, a partner in his family's farm in nearby Manteca, just paid $150 per hive to a Texas supplier. "If we didn't put any bees out here, I think we'd have a crop failure," he says, "and I'm not about to learn." Three years of record yields have depressed almond prices to half their peak; many growers will be lucky to break even this year. Meanwhile, a drought led Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a state of emergency on Feb. 27. Some almond farmers didn't even rent bees this year, figuring they wouldn't have enough water to irrigate their trees all summer. Ironically, it's been rainy around Hughson, cutting hours for active pollination short. This area's almond crop may suffer. Regardless, growers have few choices. "I'm in it for the long haul," says Jim Hudelson, a fifth-generation Hughson almond farmer. "When you become a tree farmer, you have to commit to it."

The Lessons From Japan By Michael Elliott Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Japan can play a key part in getting growth going again. But that will require expanding its domestic economy rather than relying on exports. Keith Bedford

Correction Appended: March 12, 2009 Wandering the streets of Tokyo's Roppongi district on a wet night, you know where film director Ridley Scott got the inspiration for his dystopian Los Angeles in Blade Runner. Multicolored neon; disembodied voices from video screens; a freeway over your head; the smells and sounds of bars and noodle shops; fake fur everywhere. Then, the next morning, you look out a window and see another Japan: a hedge in which each leaf seems to have been clipped by hand; a couple of rocks placed, in some Zen way, just so. In many years of visiting Japan, I've learned not to be surprised by the juxtaposition of modernity and tradition, by an embrace of high-technology that coexists with a

reverence for an older nation of cherry blossoms, hot springs and snow on maple trees. In an enigmatic way, this duality has not torn Japanese society apart but given it a remarkable stability. The question facing Japan now, however — and the issue that should dominate elections to the lower house of the Diet, which could come as early as May and in which the ruling Liberal Democratic Party looks vulnerable — is whether stability is enough. The nation faces enormous challenges: a rapidly aging population, the rise of China as a regional superpower and the breakdown of the economic system responsible for Japan's postwar economic success, as international trade collapses and with it Japan's markets for its goods. Japan's ability to meet these challenges is of more than local interest. The nation is the world's second largest economy and the U.S.'s key ally in Asia. And given Japan's recent economic history, the way in which it copes with the current crisis could provide some insights into how the rest of the world can get through it as well. In the late 1980s, after banking laws were relaxed, Japan went on a credit binge that made the modern U.S. look prudent. The stock market took off into the stratosphere, and property prices got so out of control that it was said the land on which the Imperial Palace sat in the center of Tokyo was worth more than the whole of California. Then the bubble burst, banks found that their balance sheets were full of bad loans, and Japan entered a lost decade of stagnant economic growth. Nearly 20 years after its peak in December 1989, when the Nikkei index nearly hit 39,000, the stock market has never come close to recovering. The Nikkei recently touched its lowest point since 1982. So what lessons can the U.S. learn from Japan? Here are three: 1. Act Early, Act Often After the bubble burst, Japan's powerful bureaucrats, who had earned a reputation for brilliance in the 1980s, dithered for years. In the face of slumping demand and price deflation, they cut interest rates too slowly, delayed a fiscal stimulus and failed

to restructure so-called zombie banks, whose bad loans made them dead in all but name. You can criticize the details of the U.S. response to the collapse of credit markets, but in comparison to Tokyo, Washington has acted at warp speed. As Japan watcher Richard Katz points out in the latest Foreign Affairs, it took the Bank of Japan nine years to bring the interest rate that banks pay on overnight money to 0%; the U.S. Fed managed that in 16 months following the beginning of the credit crisis in the summer of 2007. Japan — in desperate denial about the plight of proud companies — long delayed using public money to recapitalize banks. The U.S. starting doing so within a year of the crisis's start. 2. Stick with the Program Early action, however, is just the beginning. Japanese policymakers have learned the hard way that it takes years to leach toxic assets out of a financial system and restore confidence so that consumers shop rather than stash their money in safedeposit boxes. While domestic demand remains sluggish, government spending has to take up the slack and keep at it. In Japan, a recovery was aborted in the late 1990s when, at the first sight of green shoots, the government raised taxes. President Barack Obama is committed to reducing this year's federal budget deficit of $1.3 trillion by half in four years. That's a laudable goal — as long as private-sector demand has picked up by then. In Japan, there's a clear recognition of the economic link between feeling safe and feeling confident. In a March 7 interview with TIME in Tokyo, Ichiro Ozawa, the leader of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan and the front runner to be Japan's next Prime Minister (if he can avoid the fallout from a scandal over political fundraising), said "giving a sense of security to the population" was key to economic recovery. Ozawa argues that only if families feel that their basic needs have been taken care of — needs like health care and provision for retirement — will they go out and spend money on new cars and clothes. There's a lesson for the U.S. there too. Health-care reform in the States isn't just an egalitarian goal; it's also a way of providing confidence so that families feel able to go out and enjoy themselves again.

3. We're All in This Together After a decade in the tank, Japan's economy started to recover around 2003, buoyed by spectacular growth in China and the U.S. This year's slump is correlated with the collapse of external demand; in January, Japan's exports were down an astonishing 46% compared with the previous year's. The U.S. economy is not nearly as dependent on trade as Japan's. Nonetheless, the contraction of world trade is hitting the U.S. too. This is a global recession — the World Bank has forecast that the global economy will shrink this year for the first time since 1945 — and it needs global solutions. When world leaders meet in London in April, they will be trying to coordinate a tide that lifts all boats. Japan can play a key part in getting growth going again. But that will require it to change, to expand its domestic economy rather than rely, as it has long done, on its exports. That's where Japan's duality comes in. It is a nation that does not always find it easy to change, to embrace the future. In Tokyo's Ota Memorial Museum of Art this month, there is an exquisite exhibition of ukiyo-e woodblock prints displaying Japan during the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century, when Western habits — European music and military uniforms, crinolines — were beginning to replace the old ways. In one print, a woman in traditional kimono and lacquered hair watches wistfully as a young girl, hair flying behind her, joyfully rides a bicycle. Will today's Japan now pedal off to meet the future with confidence? At least in part, the prospects for a global economic recovery depend on it.

The original version of this story misidentified Japan's Liberal Democratic party as just the Democratic party.

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Paul Rudd: Everybody's Buddy By Joel Stein Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Paul Rudd Michael Muller / Contour / Getty

Paul Rudd doesn't seem like a leading man until you remember that some men star in movies with other men. Bob Hope didn't beat up criminals or woo ladies, and likewise, Rudd, who at 5 ft. 10 somehow projects 5 ft. 6, has found the perfect expression of his charming, nonthreatening slyness in the buddy comedy. After playing a lot of leading men's friends (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) and nice guys embraced by leading women after they've come to their senses (Friends,

Clueless), Rudd has graduated to playing the lead. He did it in last year's Role Models with Seann William Scott, and he's doing it again in I Love You, Man with Jason

Segel, out March 20, in which he plays a guy who has been so focused on his girlfriends that he has no male friends. So his fiancée sends him out in search of a best man, which Rudd approaches with the earnestness of a man oddly comfortable being on the gayest journey ever. But I wasn't buying the premise: that a straight adult male can successfully troll for straight adult male friends. Men are genetically programmed to shed friends once they get married, not add them. "If my dad had social engagements, it was my mom who arranged them," Rudd says. "But I never had a problem making friends." So, sitting in a booth at the Half King bar in New York City, two beers down, we decide to see if we can pull it off. For the first half-hour, all the guys we like walk right by, piling into the back of the bar for a reading by debut novelist Stephen Lovely. I wonder if maybe we should have gone to a sports bar, but Rudd seems to know what he's after. "If we went to ESPN Zone — that's not our kind of guy," he says. "We want someone nerdy. Bookish. Probably wears Chuck Taylors. Can make jokes about the fact that he's listening to the new Fleet Foxes CD. Maybe a little fey. I love straight guys that seem gay. I'm a little like that." He is. But for a soft guy, his comedy can be pretty dude. He's both the kind of guy who indulges his 4-year-old son's habit of dressing up in three-piece suits and one whose friends view a TIME magazine article as an opportunity to tell embarrassing stories about him. "He always liked to get naked. Anybody that lived in his fraternity house would tell you. And yes, he is a frat boy, no matter how much he would go screaming from that now," says sportscaster Joe Buck, who, along with Mad Men star Jon Hamm, has known Rudd since their college days. Buck says the assslapping, gun-shooting dance Rudd did with Beyoncé when he hosted Saturday Night

Live in November was his typical way of leaving a room in college. He built on those skills when he moved to L.A. after graduation, deejaying high-end Bel Air bar mitzvahs. "He was known as the guy who did the dork dance," Buck says. Even then, with his mullet and Duran Duran jacket, people thought he was cool. "He's adorable. There's no two ways about it," says Hamm. For an adorable guy, though, Rudd has

depth. "He has a bit of a postmodern Jimmy Stewart quality. He's an everyman who has a dark side that peeks out from the edges," says Donald De Line, a producer of I

Love You, Man. Eventually a guy walks into the bar who looks about right. "Glasses — that's a plus," Rudd says. "And some sort of a knapsack." But suddenly Rudd's training from the film deserts him. "What do we do?" he asks. "Make eyes at the guy? Hold a gaze a little long? How do we initiate it?" After a while, Rudd gets up and asks the bookish guy if he wants to sit with us. Two minutes later, Sammy Politziner, 31, an investment banker, and Rudd are talking about the University of Michigan football team, quoting Steve Martin movies and comparing outfits by looking at each other's tags. (Sammy is wearing Banana Republic; Rudd, J. Crew). We all, I believe, have the comforting and horrifying epiphany that all men are, at least in the short term, interchangeable. Then Politziner says, "We're three married dudes. I wonder if there's a thrill of the chase missing from our hormones that we're searching for." To which Rudd replies, "I think so." This exchange does not sound as gay as it does poignant and questioning. If you need help imagining this scenario, try drinking four pints of Guinness. Politziner, who knew the plot of I Love You, Man two months before its release, quickly endears himself to me by asking Rudd far better questions than I was asking. When Rudd mentions playing Lisa Kudrow's boyfriend on Friends, Politziner asks, "Was she a good kisser?" Rudd deflects with "Well, I knew her husband," and then explains that TV kissing rarely involves tongue. Politziner also finds out the best adlibbers Rudd has worked with (Will Ferrell, Steve Carell and Jane Lynch), his favorite books (Pete Hamill on New York history), where he lives (he rents an apartment in the West Village and recently bought a weekend house in upstate New York) and what he's been working on (Rudd and some friends wrote a sitcom about actorcaterers called Party Down that airs on Starz starting March 20). I am considering bringing Politziner to all my interviews, because having him there allows me to drink and text the friends I still have after getting married.

And as good as Rudd is at being interviewed, he's not bad at interviewing either. Politziner, it turns out, once worked as a waiter at Café du Monde in New Orleans, watches The Bachelor and has a Lisa Kudrow thing. These are the confessions that build male friendships. There may, or may not, be a puppy on my iPhone home screen. After about an hour, our new friend has to leave for dinner. As we walk out into the cold with the satisfaction of men whose mission is complete, Rudd seems just as smiley as when we walked in. I get the feeling that even if Politziner had been a

Clueless-hating jerk, Rudd would have been just as smiley. He's that rare, edgy, adorable leading man you could drop into any bar. Or any movie. I think he could even handle being in one with a woman.

Whole Lotta Love By Josh Tyrangiel Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Amadou plays rock-influenced guitar; Mariam's vocals add sweetness. Carsten Windhorst / Retna

If the term world music gives you hives--and its condescension to musicians (lumping all non-Westerners into a single undifferentiated category) and consumers (writing off anyone who doesn't listen to it as implicitly narrow-minded) is really quite impressive--then grab an EpiPen before reading any further. For we are about to discuss Amadou and Mariam, the world-music stars who are not just a married, middle-aged couple from Mali but a blind, married, middle-aged couple from Mali. By description, they're worthier than the Grameen Bank. The blind thing is certainly played for effect--just not the effect you might anticipate. Almost since their first meeting, in 1976 as students at Bamako's Institute for Young Blind People, Amadou and Mariam have billed themselves as the Blind Couple of Mali, and if the lack of an exclamation point reads as restraint, factor in that they often

perform in diamond-studded sunglasses. Faced with a world that tends to view blindness and African-ness in tragic terms, Amadou Bagayoko (he plays a killer guitar) and Mariam Doumbia (she sings like an adoring aunt) go out of their way to assert that things are pretty great with them, thanks. To understand just how great, listen to the pair's fifth album, Welcome to Mali, out March 24. Following up on their 2005 breakthrough, Dimanche à Bamako, which was produced by France-raised Spaniard Manu Chao and topped critics' lists worldwide, Amadou and Mariam recruited another international rock star, Brit Damon Albarn, for a cameo. What Albarn brings is an opener, "Sabali," so light and giddy that no translation is required to get that Mariam is whisper-singing about love. The swirling keyboards and gradually rising dance beat are pure '80s pop, sweeter than cheap champagne--but with soul; it's like a Cyndi Lauper tune sung by Vera Hall. From there, Welcome to Mali becomes a more standard Amadou and Mariam affair, which is to say it's a joyous, hook-filled guitar album with impressive range. Amadou grew up as the biggest Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple fan in Bamako, and while he knows how to mimic the sounds of a kora and slip into high-stepping township jive, he's most at home using African styles to flavor rock melodies. "Ce N'Est Pas Bon" is stomping garage rock, while "Bozos" could be a particularly happy Neil Young song. Everything has a familiar pop structure, but there's just enough African instrumentation to provide a thrilling sense of dislocation. Amadou and Mariam's lyrics tend toward uncontroversial declarations like "Hypocrisy in politics, it's not good/ We don't want any." (It's possible the lyric sheet was simplified in the translation from Bambara and French; it's also possible they're just casual lyricists.) The exception, linguistically, is "I Follow You," sung by Amadou to his wife in tender, halting English: "Under the sun, baby, I follow you/ Under the ground, baby, I follow you." As Amadou told a British music magazine, "We would like English-speaking people to understand us. It's not a large vocabulary, but our heart is in it."

NBC's 'Kings': The New Old Testament By James Poniewozik Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Like Saul in the biblical story, Silas (McShane), left, sees David (Egan) as both hero and rival.

Is it better for a TV show to be consistent or surprising? Is it worse for it to be ridiculous or boring? NBC's unorthodox new drama Kings (Sundays, 8 p.m. E.T.) comes down solidly on the latter side of those questions. Some viewers will say it's fascinating. Others will say it's pretentious hoo-ha. Allow me to split the difference:

Kings is fascinating pretentious hoo-ha. The premise of Kings is unlike that of anything else on TV: a reimagining of the biblical story of David, set in the modern world. Or an alternative version of it, where democracy never developed, where a King holds court in a skyscraper, where God speaks to man with signs and portents while man uses cell phones and the Internet.

The nation of Gilboa, led by King Silas Benjamin (Ian McShane) — based on the Bible's Saul — has been at war for generations, most recently with neighboring Gath. His son Jack (Sebastian Stan) is taken hostage at the front but is rescued by David Shepherd (Chris Egan), who destroys a supposedly invincible Gath tank — a "Goliath," natch — by slinging a grenade duct-taped to a wrench. David is called to court in the gleaming new capital, Shiloh, where the cunning Silas parades him as a hero and eyes him as a potential rival. There's no getting around it: Kings is a bizarre, disorienting hybrid of a show. For starters, there's the language, half-contemporary, half-archaic: "We sign our names, we shake hands, and future ghosts know us for our contributions, not our wars," says Silas at a treaty negotiation. Kings is lucky to have McShane, who, as a philosophical criminal in Deadwood, effortlessly breathed out David Milch's mix of obscenity, frontier talk and Shakespeare. Here, leonine, menacing and thoughtful, he makes Kings' quasi-biblical declamations seem natural — as well as the idea that a First World Western country would be run by a tyrant in pinstripes, selected as King by God, who made a crown of butterflies alight on his head as a sign of divine mandate. (Gilboa's emblem is a butterfly, a symbol made unexpectedly ominous by its resemblance to an upside-down NBC peacock.)

Kings' setting — a cleaned-up version of Manhattan — is stunning. You're lulled by familiarity, then rattled by reminders — say, a scribe following on Silas' heels, scribbling hagiography on a tablet computer — that this is a very different place. But some of creator Michael Green's inventions are puzzling or simplistic. Gilboa and Gath have modern armies, so why are they facing off across trenches as if it were World War I? (Apparently so that David can have dramatic moments walking across enemy lines.) Gilboa is an advanced capitalist state, so how can Silas be manipulated by his brother-in-law (Dylan Baker), who runs a single corporation so powerful it can bankroll the entire government? It's easy to overlook these faults — and Kings' taste for melodramatic cheese, slathered with an overheated operatic score — when McShane is onstage. But Egan's David is an upstanding stiff, and when Egan gets a McShanian monologue at the end

of the two-hour pilot, he sounds ridiculous. The subplots involving Jack and Gilboa's gilded nightlife play like a bad marriage of The Tudors and Gossip Girl. Yet I'd rather watch Kings than a number of other less daring, more consistent dramas. Why? Because it surprises me and takes chances (like basing a drama on religion without being snarky or saccharine). Because it has ambitions that broadcasters have all but ceded to cable, and sometimes it even meets them. Because it creates a world rather than borrowing one. And because I'm willing to be patient with a show that has learned sling-wielding David's timeless lesson: Sometimes it pays to aim big.

BUSINESS

While the Giants Reel, Many Small Banks Are Thriving By Barbara Kiviat / Eustis Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Bob Croslin for TIME

Last fall, soon after Congress decided it would spend $700 billion to shore up the nation's flailing financial system, about 100 shareholders of Reunion Bank of Florida gathered for a party. Over crab fondue and London broil, they toasted the start of their spanking new bank. It had been decades since a locally grown bank had opened in Tavares, an old citrus hub about an hour by car from Orlando. "We had folks drive from 45 miles away," recalls Reunion co-founder and CEO Mike Sleaford. "Everyone was so excited." Partying bank investors? That doesn't seem quite right. Since September, the bad news about banks has been nonstop — and not just at the top of the food chain.

Although teetering giants like Citigroup and Bank of America grab the headlines, at the end of last year 252 institutions were on the problem list of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), up from 171 three months earlier. Seventeen banks have failed so far in 2009; expect hundreds more over the next few years. Yet amid all that carnage, there's celebration too. The industry as a whole may be reeling from bad loans and investments, but start-ups like Reunion don't have to wrestle with those problems. Entrepreneurs like Sleaford, even in hard-hit Florida, are setting up shop with completely clean balance sheets. They've got millions of dollars in fresh capital to write loans — and to pursue borrowers cast aside by banks focused on mopping up the mess from the years of excess. "New banks see people having a tough time getting loans, plus their funding costs are cheap since rates are low and they pay next to nothing for deposits," says Richard Sylla, an economist at New York University's Stern School of Business. "There's a profit opportunity there." Odd as it may sound, it's a great time to start a bank. Bankers get that. Since last summer, at least 30 groups have filed to start new banks, according to SNL Financial. From Richmond, Va., to Tulsa, Okla., to Pacific Palisades, Calif., community bankers are hitting the pavement, raising funds a few hundred thousand dollars at a time from stock-market-wary investors. It's not an easy sell, and regulators, spooked by the wave of failures, are making it tougher than ever to win approval. For entrepreneurs who can run that gauntlet, though, the stars are aligned for small independent banks in a way they probably never will be again. Last March, when Kenneth LaRoe set out to start a bank in Eustis — the next town over from Tavares — the speed bumps were already starting to pop up. Building a bank was old hat to LaRoe. The one he founded in 1999, he sold to a larger company in 2006, quadrupling investors' money. This time around, he lined up $24 million in commitments in three months. Then came IndyMac. On July 11, the FDIC moved to take over the nation's seventh largest savings and loan, a casualty of aggressive home lending and one of the biggest bank failures in U.S. history. Images of depositors lining up to pull their money out of the bank flooded the media.

LaRoe started getting calls immediately. People who had pledged to invest half a million dollars were dialing back to $200,000. Those who had been offering $200,000 were opting out altogether. Throughout the fall, the hits kept coming. Washington Mutual collapsed. Wachovia was sold off. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson went before Congress begging for money, looking as if he'd seen a ghost. "It got to the point where I didn't want to pick up the paper or turn on the TV," says LaRoe. "The mantra I kept singing was 'This is perfect, guys. This is perfect. The banks won't even loan banks money.' " Eventually, LaRoe won out. First Green Bank opened its doors on Feb. 17 — and business has been booming. On a recent weekday morning, loan officers and account reps zipped between desks and offices, sidestepping exercise equipment (the bank is operating out of a defunct fitness center until it completes its new ecofriendly headquarters). When First Green was applying for a charter, it figured to make $39 million of loans in its first year. The bank already has nearly $60 million worth in the pipeline. That's partly because First Green is picking up qualified borrowers that other lenders are shedding. Banks that have placed too many bets on real estate and construction loans are stumbling and cutting back lending. "Banks are looking to lessen the risk on their balance sheets," says Gerard Cassidy, managing director and banks analyst at RBC Capital Markets. "Even a good customer may be encouraged to leave." Consider Perth Blake, a family physician who has rented a building in Eustis for a decade. Three years ago, he took the first step toward his dream of constructing a building for his practice and borrowed money to buy a parcel of land. Last October, having paid off more than half his land loan, he went back to his bank and said he was ready to start building. His bank declined to lend him more. So Blake figured out how to shave some $130,000 off the construction cost and applied again. Still no dice. Three banks later, he got the same result. Then LaRoe came along. "It befuddles me," says LaRoe. "We looked at it, and it underwrote fine."

It's not just business owners who benefit. Last fall, Ivan Lefkowitz, a tax attorney in Orlando, says he got a letter from Morgan Stanley telling him his $150,000 homeequity line of credit was being frozen. He was current on his account and owned his home free and clear — though the value had dropped from $800,000 to about $625,000. Now he has a line of credit with New Traditions National Bank, another start-up. "Were it not for the financial crisis, we wouldn't have grown to the size we are," says CEO David Dotherow, who after 6½ months finds himself at the helm of a bank with $148 million in assets — a size he didn't expect to hit for at least a year and a half. For banks moving down the chute now, though, winning clearance is decidedly tougher. LaRoe's First Green was the last bank to be approved by the FDIC, and getting that blessing was "without a doubt the biggest challenge of my career," says LaRoe. He drew up a spreadsheet of potential customers and how much each would probably deposit or borrow, hiding their identities. The FDIC sent the list back, wanting to know names. "Keep in mind, these are start-up businesses," says Mark Schmidt, the FDIC's regional director in charge of the Southeast. "We ask a lot of questions about how they're going to carry out their business plan when the economic headwinds are against them." You don't have to leave Central Florida to understand why regulators are so cautious. An hour's drive north of Eustis, up in horse country, sit a handful of CenterState Bank branches. Until Jan. 30, the signs outside said Ocala National. That was the day FDIC agents swooped in and took over. For years, Ocala had ridden the real estate boom for all it was worth, indiscriminately lending money to home buyers (often speculators) and to builders putting up more houses. The bust took the bank down, and the FDIC is spending some $100 million to clean it up. "The system is imploding," says RBC's Cassidy. "Regulators are in batten-down-the-hatches mode. Opening up new banks is the last thing on their mind." If the same fraction of banks fail this time around as did during the last downturn — the S&L crisis of the late 1980s and early '90s — we will eventually see a thousandplus banks close, Cassidy figures. Since mid-January, the FDIC has been shutting

down a couple a week. Yet at the same time, the system could use the extra capital. Since October, the government has plowed hundreds of billions of dollars into banks to bolster their balance sheets. Last year the average start-up bank brought more than $18 million of fresh capital into the system, according to SNL Financial. That juxtaposition makes things particularly frustrating for Geoffrey Longstaff. After months of getting nowhere, he and his colleagues at Mercantile Commercial Capital in Altamonte Springs, a suburb of Orlando, decided to give up on the idea of starting a bank. "We were willing to put $37 million in capital into a new banking organization with no past-due loans," says Longstaff. "If we want to foment new lending, wouldn't it be nice to have those investor dollars instead of taxpayer dollars?" The answer is yes. That's not to say the FDIC should simply bless every application. But this is how the downslope of the business cycle is supposed to work — weak companies get wiped out, and fresh ones rush in. Dropping millions of dollars here and there is hardly going to cure the banking system's sickness. But it might make it a little easier for a few more doctors to set up shop.

The Great Bond Bailout By Justin Fox

Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Richard Drew / AP

You're ticked off about the bank bailouts. Furious. You think somebody — other than you and your fellow taxpayers — needs to pay. Let's try to work out who that somebody ought to be. The banks' shareholders don't make a promising target. The stock prices of Citigroup and Bank of America, to name two especially dramatic examples, are down more than 90% from their 2007 peaks. There are arguments, relating to incentives for executives and future shareholders, for wiping out current shareholders at the most troubled banks. But that won't pay for anything — the shareholders simply don't have much more value to cough up. Same goes for those who work in the business. Many have lost their job and life savings, and most have seen their salary cut. Yes, there have been egregious bonuses and golden parachutes — and we ought to claw

them back — but that won't pay for a trillion-dollar (or more) bailout. Which leaves ... the folks who loaned the banks money. The banks' creditors have been the clearest beneficiaries of the bailouts — leaving them with the most wherewithal to contribute. Who are these creditors? The biggest group, with outstanding loans of about $9 trillion, is depositors like you and me. When you deposit money, you're lending it to the bank. Those deposits were explicitly insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) up to $100,000 before the crisis, and the banks paid for that insurance (though not in full, given that FDIC coverage has been raised to $250,000 and seems effectively without limit at bigger banks) and passed the cost on in the form of lower interest rates than on, say, an uninsured money-market account. That, plus the fear that panicked depositors could start a devastating run on the banking system, explains why we're going to continue to be protected. But banks also borrow on wholesale markets, mainly by issuing bonds. About $2.6 trillion of bank funding in the U.S., 20% of the total, comes from such debt securities, according to the FDIC. At the most troubled of the big banks, Citigroup, the figure is 27%. (Citi's domestic depositors account for just 16% — its main deposit base is overseas.) These bank bonds are mostly in the hands of large, sophisticated institutional investors — pension funds, insurance companies, mutual funds. It may be too much to ask small depositors to monitor the risks at the banks where they put their money and pay for getting it wrong. But these bond buyers are pros. If there is to be any market discipline of risk-taking by banks, bond investors ought to be the ones who enforce it by withholding their cash from the bad apples — and paying the price for misjudgments. Plus, a few concessions from creditors could ease the burden on taxpayers dramatically. If Citi's $486 billion in wholesale debt were converted into common shares — admittedly a pretty extreme solution — the company's balance-sheet woes would evaporate. Which is why these arguments have been gaining in popularity. "I think it's very important that the creditors in this crisis take a hit," said New York University finance professor Matthew Richardson at an NYU conference in March. "We need to try to transfer some of the risk from taxpayers to the financial system."

Sounds awfully logical. So why haven't we stuck it to these guys? Because we're afraid they'll panic. "Unfortunately, we've built a system where if you hammer those guys hard, you're going to have a global credit collapse," said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and whose blog, Baseline Scenario, has become essential reading for crisis buffs. The Federal Reserve and Treasury left creditors at Lehman Brothers adrift in September, and the repercussions were so dire that regulators resolved not to let such a thing happen again. The FDIC can wind down banks in a more orderly fashion than occurred at Lehman. But FDIC chairwoman Sheila Bair and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke have both said they don't have the authority to wind down global financial conglomerates like Citi. The upshot: "If you want to have no more Lehmans, then inevitably you wind up guaranteeing the banks' debts," said John Hempton, a money manager and former Australian treasury official whose Bronte Capital blog has become another crisis must-read. That is, an orderly reorganization of the financial system in which creditors make sacrifices would be great. But it's not really an option. So we keep bailing them out.

HEALTH & MEDICINE

A Flu Strain Goes Kerflooey By Alice Park Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

The H1 strain that spread from Camp Funston Kansas, killed more than 21 million.

First, the good news: As flu seasons go, this one isn't bad--at least as far as the overall numbers are concerned. This season, 11,000 cases of influenza have been confirmed in the U.S., on a par with the caseload at this time for the past few years. The vaccine, designed to protect against the three flu strains that researchers predicted would cause the most illness this season, seems to be a pretty good match for what ended up being the most common strain. And there's enough vaccine to go around. Now the not-so-good news: you can never be complacent about a virus as fond of mutating as influenza is. We're always just a few random genetic shifts away from a possible pandemic. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(CDC) last year documented for the first time that one of the many viral components that make up a common flu strain, known as H1--which also happens to be a descendant of the same virus that fueled the pandemic of 1918--was resistant to the popular antiviral drug oseltamivir, a.k.a. Tamiflu. In the flu season--October to May-of 2007-08, 12% of circulating H1 subtypes were resistant to the drug; this season, 98% of them are. Interestingly, the mutation does not appear to be driven by overuse of the drug. In fact, rates of oseltamivir resistance are higher in nations like Norway where there is little use of the drug, and lowest in countries like Japan where the antiviral is prescribed heavily. That means that other medications, like zanamivir, a.k.a. Relenza, or prescribing oseltamivir in combination with other drugs is still an option. But the spread of a resistant strain raises the specter of a pandemic--brought on by a flu virus that is highly contagious and invulnerable to nearly all our medical efforts. That's why flu experts around the world are keeping their microscopes poised to detect just such mutations. Under the leadership of the World Health Organization (WHO), four flu labs--in London, Tokyo and Melbourne and at CDC headquarters in Atlanta--are picking apart flu viruses sent to them throughout the season from doctors treating infected patients. "This is certainly far and away better than the system that existed before, where we weren't doing real-time surveillance to see what was changing, such as resistance," says Nancy Cox, director of the WHO-CDC Collaborating Center for Influenza in Atlanta. What can we nonexperts do? Get a flu vaccine every year. No shot is 100% effective, but getting vaccinated gives you a good chance of lessening your symptoms--and thus your infectiousness--should you get slammed with the oseltamivir-resistant strain. There's also hope that a promising antibody--which researchers discovered in February--that binds to a nonmutating part of the virus could one day provide lifetime protection in a single shot against practically all versions of the flu. No more annual flu vaccine and no more worries about the next pandemic. Until then, we just have to hope that the virus doesn't evolve too far ahead of our ability to keep up.

SOCIETY

Hard Times Send 'Economoms' Back to the Job Market By Bonnie Rochman Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

With a baby and a toddler, Young seeks work to offset her spouse's shrinking income Gina LeVay for Time

When you're eight months pregnant, it's hard to find a good interview suit. But a burgeoning belly didn't stop Nicole Young, 33, from hitting the job circuit this fall. Her husband, who works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, has seen his income shrink along with the Dow. And the consulting projects she has been doing from their home on Long Island in New York are not bringing in enough money to make up the difference. So Young, who left her full-time marketing job in 2005 when she was pregnant with their first child, buffed up her résumé and started conducting

phone interviews to try to line up a job that would begin after her second child was born in December. She contacted five recruiters, hoping to find something in corporate communications or general management. Could she start right away? Not exactly. No job offers ensued. Now, with a 3-month-old and a 3-year-old, Young is reviving her job hunt: full time, part time, any time will do. With the employment outlook turning bleaker by the day, she and many other white collar moms who opted out of the workforce to focus on their kids are scrambling to get back in. Meet the economommies. Of course, for much of the U.S., working is not optional. But with men making up 82% of the recession's job losses, women are flocking to mom-centric job and career-consulting sites, where they learn how to translate their maternal skills (negotiation, time management) into corporate argot. Mom Corps, a staffing company that pairs women with white collar jobs that have flexible hours, in February surveyed its 500 most recent registrants: 63% said the economy was driving their decision to look for work. Five percent said they joined because their spouse was laid off. At Mom Corps, businesses pay to list job openings and gain access to tens of thousands of women who have registered for free; the agency, like rival service 10 til 2, also does actual matchmaking for companies. It's definitely a buyer's market. In early March, Mom Corps had 34,000 job hunters and 54 jobs; 10 til 2 reported a similarly scary ratio. How quickly employees are synched with employers — Mom Corps says most of its openings are filled within two weeks — hinges on factors like location and skill set. Think Excel is just a verb? Next in line, please. Since Mom Corps opened shop in 2005, it has matched nearly 1,000 women with manager-level positions at small firms as well as Fortune 500 ones. Though the number of listings fell in recent months, founder Allison O'Kelly says, things are picking up as hiring freezes make project-based, benefits-free workers the only kind companies can afford.

"This is not a good time for many businesses, but this is a good time for our business," says iRelaunch co-founder Carol Fishman Cohen. Her firm, along with sites like YourOnRamp and 2Hats Network, offers crash courses in networking as well as tips on how to finesse gaps in résumés (don't organize chronologically) and what to wear to an interview (shoulder pads are for linebackers). One tidbit from Harvard Business School, which held a weeklong course this month geared to help women re-enter the workforce: steer clear of the term part time. Use

flexible hours instead. "Part time has a connotation of not full commitment," says Timothy Butler, who chairs the Harvard program, which cost attendees $5,000 apiece. Cheaper options include iRelaunch's $125 one-day return-to-work sessions around the country and its new $19.99 webinars. The first topic: What the heck is LinkedIn, and how can it be used as a job-search tool? Until recently, business networking sites like LinkedIn were a mystery to Lisa Estabrook, 50, who left her advertising job at a bank in Philadelphia when her first child was born 16 years ago. Now she finds herself haunting YourOnRamp, which her husband — who was laid off from a reinsurance firm six weeks ago — heard about from a career counselor at a local church. She rattles off all the networking sites she's trying to get a handle on, including Facebook and Tweeter. Um, make that Twitter. "To my kids," she says, "it's funny to see Mom trying to get with it." In March, Maria Retter, 48, started a part-time job she found through Mom Corps as an office manager in northern Virginia. With a self-employed husband and with their youngest child about to join two others in college, Retter decided she needed steadier work than the Web-designing she had been doing from home. And she is firmly convinced that motherhood has made her a better employee: "If you can handle temper tantrums, then when you have to deal with obnoxious people in an office setting, you say to yourself, 'You remind me of my 2-year-old.' "

How to Improve Your Hoops Game By Kobe Bryant Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Kobe Bryant Andrew D. Bernstein / NBAE / Getty

In tough times, the NBA's defending MVP offers tips on how to let off steam: "You have to practice like you play. The moves you see me do in the game are the exact same moves I do in the gym, over and over again. When your shot comes to the point that you're not thinking about it, you know you're doing well--when it's on autopilot. Guys have a tendency to start thinking about the next shot. You can't do that. Just trust the process and let that thing fly. "Sometimes basketball has to do with the emotional space you can put yourself in. When I scored 61 points against the New York Knicks last month, I wasn't in the

mood to talk to anybody. I wasn't going to say hello to my man Jay-Z. I was in my mode. "Oh, yeah--and never, ever forget to stretch." Kobe One on One See the Lakers star give a basketball tutorial at With reporting by As Told to Sean Gregory

Is KenKen the Next Sudoku? By M.J. Stephey Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Will Shortz is to puzzles what Oprah is to books — an endorsement by the New York

Times crossword editor is as good as gold. He helped popularize Sudoku in the U.S. and has sold more than 5 million volumes of the number-sequencing game. Now he's moved on to another numerical brainteaser, KenKen, which boasts something Sudoku does not: actual math. The game was invented by a teacher in Tokyo to help kids learn arithmetic; kenken means "cleverness squared" in Japanese. "I'm a pretty busy guy, and I don't solve many puzzle books anymore, certainly not from start to finish," Shortz says of his becoming addicted to KenKen a year and a half ago. "I just loved it." He persuaded his newspaper to start publishing the game last month and just held KenKen's first U.S. competition at the annual American Crossword Puzzle tournament, in New York City, which drew more than 900 people from around the world — including KenKen's creator, Tetsuya Miyamoto.

So far, the reception has been good, though not Sudoku-mania good. (Then again, Sudoku wasn't an instant hit either; an Indiana architect devised the game in the 1970s, but it languished for decades under the unfortunate name Number Place.) Only five years old, KenKen already appears in the Times of London and Le Figaro in Paris, and it's coming soon to an iPhone near you. If nothing else, the name KenKen has been well received. It even inspired NYU professor Amanda Yesnowitz to pen a parody of Cole Porter's "Can-Can," which she debuted at the tournament: "If a lad called Jennings, Ken, can ... If John Glenn, in his den, now and then can ... Can Obama? Yes, he KenKen!" Afterward, the president of Nextoy, which owns the puzzle's rights outside Japan, approached her about posting the song on his company's website, but she was too distracted by a nearby conversation, gasping, "Did Will just say my name?"

SPECIAL SECTION

Selling Out to Growth By KATHLEEN KINGSBURY

Merging with TriHealix helped Balaguer, center, maintain his firm's social mission. LAUREN FULLER FOR TIME

About one-third of Americans who qualify for public assistance haven't signed up. That amounts to millions of people needlessly going without food stamps, lowincome housing or health insurance. This predicament is what RealBenefits, a Boston-based software start-up, was created to solve. The five-person firm's Web database circumvents complicated government paperwork with easy-to-use screening and enrollment tools. So far RealBenefits has connected nearly 100,000 families to more than $371 million in government aid since 2000. Yet amid this success, RealBenefits, which began life as a nonprofit, faced the same dilemma that many social enterprises do: how to scale up without selling out. "No software firm is going to attract donors easily, even a nonprofit," says Sharon Oster, dean of the Yale School of Management and an expert on social entrepreneurship. "And to grow, you need access to equity capital." So in 2006, RealBenefits went commercial. Still tucked under the umbrella of founder Community Catalyst, the sales staff began slowly refocusing its energy on paying

customers like hospital chains, governments and school districts rather than the community organizations and nonprofits that had previously peppered its client list. A subscription-based service, RealBenefits charges a fee that ranges from $10,000 for, say, a homeless-services group to six figures on the high end. "Our model was to find large health-care providers who'd be willing to pay because they were actually increasing reimbursements and minimizing uncompensated care by using our technology," says CEO Enrique Balaguer. At both ends, low-income families win. Whereas an uninsured patient going to the emergency room once faced a bill for thousands of dollars, now, using RealBenefits, hospital staff can screen him to see if he is eligible to file a claim with Medicaid. One Massachusetts hospital, Baystate Medical Center, reported a 50% increase in the number of Medicaid reimbursements it received in 2006 by using RealBenefits. Nonetheless, RealBenefits was still struggling to expand because of the difficulty of accessing capital. So the firm set out to find a buyer willing to continue its social mission. It eventually settled on TriHealix, a Connecticut-based health-care IT company. The June 2008 deal was worth $3 million to $4 million, Balaguer says. For RealBenefits, the transaction allowed it to tap into a larger sales and marketing force. The firm now aims to expand into at least 15 states over the next two to three years. "Our three core goals — to maximize benefits to families, effect policy change and to create additional capacity — remain in place," Balaguer says. "And being profitable is a major component of that." It's a target that will most likely pay dividends to the whole community.

Global Business > South Korea

The Tiger Trap By Michael Schuman Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Hong Kong's Kwai Chung container-shipping industry faces a huge slowdown. MARK LEONG / REDUX

The developing world has had no shortage of dictators who made lofty promises to uplift the poor and build a powerful nation. Few ever delivered. But then there was South Korea's Park Chung Hee. A general who took control of the country in a 1961 coup, he ruled, often with an iron fist, for 18 years. Yet he was deeply moved by South Korea's destitution. In the early 1960s, the country's per capita income was just over $100, and the economy depended on American aid. Park, a virulent nationalist, vowed to do something about it. "I had to break, once and for all, the vicious cycle of poverty and economic stagnation," he later wrote. The solution Park divined was to hitch South Korea's future to an expanding global economy. The country used its cheap labor force to manufacture necessities like shoes and clothing to sell to consumers in the developed world, particularly those in the U.S. The strategy proved wonderfully efficient. It attracted investment capital, generated factory jobs for impoverished farmers, established infrastructure to supercharge commercial development and otherwise produced wealth that South Korea could never have generated by itself. Eager to raise living standards in their own countries, Asian policymakers and business people latched on to that formula.

The economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore did so with such success that they became known as the Asian tigers. Their growth model produced miracles--and, as Park said in a 1965 speech, exports were "the economic lifeline." Today the tigers are being tripped up by this same lifeline. As consumer and industrial demand dries up in recession-racked Western countries, East Asia's exportled nations are proving to be highly vulnerable to a synchronized global slowdown. Among the tigers, overseas trade is shrinking with frightening speed: Taiwan's exports in January plunged 44% from the same month a year earlier, while Singapore's fell 35% and South Korea's 33%. Overall economic growth is following suit. In the fourth quarter of 2008, Taiwan's GDP contracted 8.4% from the same period a year earlier, making it the worst quarter on record. South Korea's GDP shrank 3.4%, Singapore's fell 4.2%, and Hong Kong's dipped 2.5%. Eric Fishwick, head of economic research at the brokerage CLSA in Hong Kong, predicts the dismal numbers will persist. He expects GDP in Taiwan and Singapore to contract at double-digit rates this year. "We've never seen an external shock in Asia like this," says Fishwick. Asia has suffered recessions before, of course. But this downturn is different. Unlike in 1997-98 and 2001-02, Asia's favorite customer--the American consumer--is drastically cutting back. Consumer spending in the U.S. dropped at a rate of 4.3% in the fourth quarter of 2008, the steepest quarterly decline since 1980. Because roughly 25% of Asia's exports ultimately end up in the U.S., the region's manufacturing powerhouses are helpless to counteract this crash. Trade among Asian countries is also plummeting, since much of this intraregional commerce is indirectly dependent on the West. A high percentage of Taiwan's trade with China, for example, is made up of electronic components shipped to Chinese factories for assembly into finished products that eventually appear on U.S. store shelves. As a result, Taiwan's China trade is contracting twice as fast as the island's U.S. exports. In some ways, Asia's growth model came to resemble a vast Ponzi scheme--one precariously perched on expectations that debt-soaked Americans would buy more

TVs, computers and cars forever. Those expectations have been dashed, leaving the tigers with excess manufacturing capacity and a burgeoning army of unemployed workers. At Taiwan's Hsinchu Science and Industrial Park, home to many of the island's flagship tech firms, most workers are taking unpaid leave at least one day a week. Ryan Wu, chief operating officer of the job-search website 1111 Job Bank, says conditions at Hsinchu have never been so dire. "There's extreme panic right now," Wu says. Manufacturers can't count on a swift rebound once a recovery is in progress. Americans are starting to save more, and they may not return to their free-spending ways for years. "There is good reason to believe the capitulation of the American consumer has only just begun," said economist Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. Ajay Chhibber, director of the Asia bureau at the United Nations Development Program in New York City, says the tigers can't expect to weather this recession by temporarily increasing government spending to boost growth until Western export markets recover. "The model where you stimulate and [then] go back to the old days is gone," he says. Asian leaders and policymakers for years have recognized the need to reduce their dependence on exports. Now that need has become urgent. Export-led Asian countries must diversify their economies by promoting domestic consumption, expanding service sectors and strengthening and extending trade links beyond the U.S. and Europe. Some moves are already under way. Shortly after South Korean President Lee Myung Bak took office last year, he launched a program to improve the service sector by increasing financial aid to targeted businesses and reducing red tape. Singapore is making strides in attracting biotechnology and private-banking businesses to the city-state. Yet if the tigers really want to thrive, the answer might lie in rejecting a legacy of Park Chung Hee: the idea that government alone can successfully engineer high economic performance. Jim Walker, an economist at the research firm Asianomics in Hong Kong, argues that Asia's politicians still intervene too much in their economies instead of allowing market forces to work. "What governments need to do is start

trusting their own people rather than hoping the West is going to get it right all of the time," Walker says. For the tigers to keep roaring, they may need to find their future, for the first time, at home. With reporting by With Reporting by Neel Chowdhury/Singapore, Natalie Tso/Taipei, Jennifer Veale/Seoul

Global Business > Australia

Wombat Love By Todd Woody / Epping Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Wildlife officials sport corporate and critter logos. WARREN CLARKE / WPN FOR TIME

It's a steamy antipodean evening, and I'm lost in the Australian bush, wandering around a remote patch of Queensland that is the last redoubt of one of the world's rarest large mammals: the northern hairy-nosed wombat. Only 115 of the burrowing, nocturnal marsupials survive in this 7,800-acre (3,160 hectare) preserve at Epping Forest National Park, and I've ventured out in the hope of spotting one. As my footsteps send wallabies bounding through the scrub, something shuffles through the grass a few yards ahead. I aim my flashlight, and I'm startled to find myself confronting a small, bearlike wombat. I've just become one of only a few hundred people who have ever been face to face with the northern hairy-nose, because none are in captivity. So how do you snatch from extinction's grasp a critter so reclusive it's an afterthought for government funding when compared with A-list animals like the panda? Answer: Do what sports teams have done with their stadiums. Brand the wombat with a corporate logo. In a world first, Xstrata, a $28 billion Swiss global mining company, has agreed to fund an endangered species' recovery. In exchange for spending millions on the

marsupial, Xstrata's name will appear on everything wombat: from websites to educational DVDs to shirts worn by wildlife workers. Xstrata execs will also star in documentaries about the northern hairy-nose and speak at media events. Call it the ultimate in green corporate branding. The Xstrata money is paying for the creation of a second wombat colony some 435 miles (700 km) to the south, and later this year wildlife officials plan to relocate some wombats to seed a new population as an insurance policy against a catastrophic fire or other calamity at Epping. To keep the wombat from going the way of the dodo, environmental officials gathered at Epping in late 2007 to brainstorm a radical shift in strategy: they would abandon business as usual by embracing Big Business. The wombat program had operated on a shoestring budget for years, and millions were needed to establish the second colony. "To do this properly, we need the big bucks," said Queensland wildlife-conservation chief Rebecca Williams, sitting at a table outside the ramshackle trailer that serves as the camp's kitchen and makeshift lab. "So think differently." Also at the table was Wes Mannion, head of Australia Zoo, the for-profit founded by the late Steve Irwin, the "Crocodile Hunter." The zoo had inked a deal with the government to help save the wombat, mainly through research support. "It's all about the marketing and money, mate," chimed in Mannion, an Irwin look-alike in his Aussie safari outfit. That view won over Alan Horsup, a conservation officer who spent the past two decades in an often lonely quest to pull the northern hairy-nose back from the edge of extinction. "I didn't like it at first," he said of corporate sponsorship. "But bloody hell, why can't we have the BHP wombat?" That would be BHP Billiton, mate, an Xstrata rival. In fact, Geoff Clare, an executive director of Queensland's Environmental Protection Agency, had mining in mind because the industry had raked in record profits thanks to Australia's commodity boom. Some green sheen wouldn't hurt the industry one bit. So in February 2008, Queensland's top environmental officials walked into the Australian headquarters of Xstrata and made the pitch. For Xstrata Coal CEO Peter

Freyberg, investing an initial $3 million in the wombat was a no-brainer. "There's obviously benefit in terms of the way people perceive Xstrata," says Freyberg. Xstrata is not just writing a check. Freyberg says the company will play a hands-on role in the relocation project. "The wombat is massively endangered," he says. "Without our intervention, this animal would be at serious risk." In November, Freyberg made the trek to Epping, where he had his own close encounter with a northern hairy-nose late one night. Branding endangered species rankles some greens, but Michael Bean, chief of the Environmental Defense Fund's wildlife program, sees it as a positive trend as the list of imperiled animals grows and other funding falls. "Potentially, it can do a lot of good," he says, "as long as there are no strings attached." Australia's Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry, spent a month with the hairy-noses as an Epping caretaker. "It's absolutely terrific what Xstrata has done," says Henry, an ardent conservationist. "There's opportunities for other corporates to get involved with other species." Memo to Tasmanian devil: Are you getting this?

PEOPLE

10 Questions for Ryan Howard By Ryan Howard Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Ryan Howard Gene J. Puskar / AP

What do you think would be a more fulfilling feeling: winning your first World Series or winning a second one? John McStravick, LOS ANGELES I would have to say winning the first one. It's your first World Series championship. You can't win two without winning the first one. How do you feel about the comparisons of you to Pittsburgh Pirates first baseman Willie Stargell? George Travlos HAVERTOWN, PA. It's funny, because my college coach used to always make that same comparison. He used to call me Willie McCovey, Willie Stargell. So it was definitely funny when I got

into professional baseball. It's an honor to be mentioned in a category with a guy like that. Do you feel that the controversy surrounding the use of performanceenhancing drugs by baseball superstars like Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez diminishes the credibility of all players? Matthew Thacker BOWLING GREEN, OHIO I don't think it diminishes the credibility of all players. I think it definitely puts a cloud over everything. For the guys that haven't done anything and don't need to use anything, it's tough because we have to answer those questions and there is that cloud that does hang over us. I've always been that guy who never used steroids, never believed in it. It just felt like that's not me going out there and playing the game. Given the economic downturn, do you feel that baseball salaries are unreasonable? Alan Lantz, BELLA VISTA, ARK. I don't really think so. I think it's just like anybody else who would go out there and get what they feel that they've earned. If teams are going to pay it, then why not? Who were your heroes and role models as you were growing up in St. Louis, Mo.? Leon Chen, HERNDON, VA. My baseball heroes were Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Bonds and Tony Gwynn. I loved the way they carried themselves. They carried themselves with a swagger, but they weren't cocky. And just the way that they went out and they played the game was absolutely awesome. And my role models were definitely my family: my parents, my older brother and sister and my twin brother. Besides the Phillies' home field, Citizens Bank Park, in which park do you enjoy playing the most? John Wargo, MANAYUNK, PA. I would have to say St. Louis, just because it's going home. It's always good to go home and play in front of your family and friends.

Do you wish you were a St. Louis Cardinal? Dennis Cross, DIXON, ILL. You know what? I think that everybody wants to play for their hometown team. If that were to happen someday, then that would be great. But right now I'm happy where I am. I'm happy to be a Philadelphia Phillie. Do you prefer hoagies or cheesesteaks? What's your favorite place? Marv Wigder, WHEATON, ILL. I would have to say cheesesteaks. And I'd probably say Pat's. Which pitcher do you dread facing the most? Yusef Isis, MELBOURNE, FLA. Man, I've struggled against Darren Oliver and Oliver Perez. I think anybody with the name Oliver right now. They're both great pitchers. Oliver Perez is tough on lefties because he'll switch up his angles; he changes up speeds very well, throws a slider and a big curveball. And Darren Oliver's got a nice little cutter that kind of keeps you off balance a little bit. What advice would you give to all the parents who coach Little League baseball? Chris Hilvert, BARTLETT, ILL. You've gotta remember that your kid is still little. You want to keep it fun and keep it interesting for your kids. Don't put too much pressure on them to try to perform, because they're not going to be in the big leagues tomorrow. You want them to try and have as much fun as they possibly can and enjoy the game for as long as they can.

LETTERS

Inbox By DEPARTMENT Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Profiles in Foreclosure "House of Cards" paints a sad picture of two people who allegedly followed all the rules yet are still in jeopardy of losing their homes, but I'm short on sympathy [March 9]. My grandfather had a rule, and it was to never spend capital gains on disposables. In other words, don't cash out of real estate to buy junk you don't need. Paula Stevens refinanced three times so she could spend freely on "clothes and gear for her girls"? Are you kidding me? Sorry, but while there certainly are legitimate cases of distressed homeowners, many refinance-based dollars got spent on things people really didn't need and couldn't afford. There may not be a law against that, but they still broke the rules. Will Pattison, DALLAS TIME's article on foreclosure was heartbreaking. How is it that some people pay more to pamper their dogs than other people pay for their mortgage? Also, how does one pay $800 a month for health insurance yet still owe $15,000 in medical bills? I think this story uncovers another part of the financial industry that has contributed to the economic meltdown. Thank God we finally have a President who gets it. Bonnie Huggins, CENTENNIAL, COLO. My wife and I, both professionals with college degrees, are raising five children in a 2,400-sq.-ft. home. Most people we know live with less. Perhaps if Stevens had shot for the American dream instead of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, she'd be in better shape today. Nick Kasoff, FERGUSON, MO. Welcome to the SEC Circus I was incensed after reading your article on the lack of accountability and oversight at the Securities and Exchange Commission [March 9]. Thousands of hardworking people lost their jobs and homes as a result of the incredible nonfeasance,

misfeasance and probably malfeasance of Christopher Cox and friends. Those responsible, from government to local banks and mortgage brokers, need to pay for this bailout. If we don't get legal justice, we need to take it to the streets. I did not serve 20 years in the military for this. James C. Byrk, PLATTSMOUTH, NEB. Help for Homeowners I can't figure out how far into his cheek Joel Stein had his tongue while writing "I Bought a Bad House" [March 9]. My house is paid off, but for my own benefit, I support a bailout for my neighbors. If my neighbor's house is foreclosed on, the value of my house drops and I suffer. I can pay additional taxes and help, or I can agree with CNBC's Rick Santelli and say, "Screw them, they made a mistake." I'd rather help my neighbor. Bob Connelly, MILFORD, DEL. A homeowners' help plan, fairly implemented across the country, would save millions of Americans their home investments and allow them to spend money again. This would in turn actually stimulate our economy and not just add another event to the spa calendars of the idiots who got us into this mess. Oh, and we'll pay back our loans too--which is something the AIGs of the world will never do. Steve Goodwin, DISCOVERY BAY, CALIF. Who You Calling Nuts? Overall, your article about nut allergies was balanced and informative [March 9]. But enough already with the "nuts" puns and references to how hysterical some parents are! That assessment depends on which side of the diagnosis you are on. As the parent of a child with food allergies, I have found that raising such a child is a constant balancing act. How can I keep him safe with three square meals a day while allowing him to thrive in his social and school life? My son is well adjusted--and not "surprisingly" so. I do my best but cannot help but worry. What the statistics you cite don't show is the number of close calls: "mild" reactions subdued by Benadryl; anaphylaxis controlled by an injection of epinephrine and an emergency-room visit; an overnight hospital stay to monitor for a biphasic or delayed anaphylactic reaction. What is the frequency of these less severe, yet significant, incidents? Because I

always wear a seat belt, would you say I'm too anxious about driving? I will continue to be diligent about keeping my child safe--no matter how I am labeled. Eileen Hoekstra, ANN ARBOR, MICH. Alice Park writes, "in some instances, peanut-free zones seem downright silly. Upon request, Delta and Northwest ... will set up a peanut-free buffer zone spanning three rows in front of and behind an allergic passenger." Since when is dying from anaphylactic shock at 30,000 ft. silly? Kate Kelly, INDIANAPOLIS Park's article is right on the mark. Now 20, I received a peanut-allergy diagnosis 18 years ago, and guess what--I'm still alive. And, yep, I've eaten peanuts before (by accident, of course). When I realize something is wrong, I know what to do. I've never had Chinese food, because a lot of it is made with peanut oil. The smell of peanut butter annoys me, so I ask my roommate to close the jar when she's done putting it on her sandwich. When someone finds out I'm allergic, they start freaking out, making sure I'm O.K. if they eat a granola bar. All these overreactive parents are giving a bad name to those of us who know how to handle our situation. Katie Bakalarski, STEVENS POINT, WIS. Yes, only a small number of kids die each year from food allergies. But only a small number of children have food allergies, so the relative risk is much higher than that of a lightning strike. Besides, what exactly does it mean to say "only" 15 to 20 people die per year? Does that make those deaths O.K.? Why should my allergic son be less important--and less protected in school--than a diabetic child? Elizabeth Kite, LIBERTYVILLE, ILL. I'm 16, and I've been allergic to peanuts, eggs and other allergens all my life. I was appalled by the mocking tone of your article. Let me give you some insight into the life of a kid with life-threatening food allergies. When I was in elementary school, the school was very attentive to my needs; during lunch I sat at a peanut-free table with my friends, and I felt safe. In high school, guidelines about food in the classroom are not enforced. Insensitivity to my allergies has turned me into an introvert who sits by herself at lunch and doesn't touch the table for fear of a fatal allergic reaction. As a

high school junior, I'm not reviewing colleges based on programs alone; I'm looking at colleges that will take my allergies seriously. Don't treat those of us with allergies as if we're making all this up. Our lives are bad enough without your making us feel worse about ourselves. Teresa Olah, PRINCETON, N.J. I Wouldn't Moondance with Him Re 10 Questions with Van Morrison [March 9]: It's disenchanting to have spent a chunk of your life admiring and being moved by someone's creative work and then discover that the person who created the work isn't nearly so likable. Asked "Are there any musicians or groups today that excite you?" Morrison responds, "No. Absolutely not. It's all been done, you know?" In that and other responses to TIME's questions, Morrison comes off like a bitter old man--not the soulful troubadour I imagined him to be. Holley Aufdemorte, MURRELLS INLET, S.C. Credit Where It's Due in Basra I am currently serving in the U.S. Marine Corps and noticed some inaccuracies in your "Rebuilding Basra" article [March 9]. You state that in March 2008 the "Iraqi army--trained by the Brits ... launched an operation to disperse the militias [in Basra]." From August 2007 to August 2008, I served on a military transition team working with the 1st Iraqi Army Division. In March 2008, our team was ordered to Basra to help restore order and peace in the southern city. It was the U.S. Marine transition team, along with the Iraqi army, that cleared Basra, block by block, in order to restore peace and government to the hostile city. This mission is near and dear to my heart as well as those of other members of my team, because we lost a fellow Marine in Basra during the fighting. Please give notice and respect to the U.S. military for taking the lead in this fight. Harry Boyd, LEXINGTON, S.C. U2? Me Too! I have been a fan of U2 since the start [March 9]. I'm from Ireland, am the same age as Bono, have every one of their recordings on vinyl and CD, and have seen the band live, in Dublin and elsewhere many times. I wanted to thank Josh Tyrangiel for

his incisive, honest and, above all, brave review of their new album, No Line on the Horizon. I've listened to an advance copy about 30 times, and it's a poor, disjointed, unmusical record with a few listenable songs. The only good ones sound like Brian Eno tunes with guest appearances by U2. The other publications to which I subscribe have written reviews that left me wondering if the critics were listening to a different record. (To Rolling Stone, the album is a "5-star masterpiece"; to ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, an "A--"; and to the New York Times, "head-spinning.") Thank you, TIME, for your objectivity. Joe Martyn, BOSTON I'm surprised that you rate boy as one of U2's four worst albums. It is an excellent album that many younger fans will probably continue to overlook based on articles like this one. If U2 released Boy today, critics would probably be fawning over the rebirth of a pop/rock giant rather than analyzing the band's ongoing decline. Jeff DeVito, BOUND BROOK, N.J.

NOTEBOOK

The Moment By NANCY GIBBS

Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel calls Bernie Madoff evil, and who better to judge? Both Wiesel and his foundation were wiped out, along with thousands of other investors in Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Families were ruined; victims have killed themselves; charities have had to shut down. So, what punishment could fit such crimes, and what are the odds that anyone will come away feeling that justice was done? We have met thieves before, but few so epically wicked. There is something about Madoff's ability to look people in the eye as he stole from them, to accept accolades from the charities he was destroying, to absorb the praise of people who trusted him over decades of deception. He started out as a lifeguard, then let people drown. Madoff arrived at court in a dark suit and bulletproof vest, and proceeded to deny his victims even the catharsis of a trial with his plan to plead guilty to 11 felony counts. That surrender enraged some who feared this was one more scam, to protect his family and conceal his true villainy. He still faces 150 years in prison. "I hope his time in jail will be hell on earth," said victim Joan Sinkin, 75, of Boynton Beach, Fla. Maybe there needs to be a camera in his cell, so that victims can watch him pace and prowl and go slowly mad with boredom. And he should be able to see them too: At a Portfolio magazine breakfast, Wiesel suggested there be a screen on which would appear in relentless accusation the faces of his victims, "one after the other after the other, always saying, 'Look, look what you have done' ... He should not be able to avoid those faces, for years to come." But with this climax comes a warning. Justice may be done, but revenge seldom satisfies. Closure often leaves a cold and bitter draft under the door. "Nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance," Churchill argued. Let Madoff

be fairly and fiercely punished, and then let's turn away and deny him the satisfaction of causing any more pain.

The World By Harriet Barovick Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

1 | Belfast Violence Reawakened Twelve years after the last killing of a British soldier in Northern Ireland, two deadly shootings in as many days threatened to reignite the violence that once plagued the region. On March 7, two British soldiers were killed in an ambush while accepting a pizza delivery at an army base near Belfast, an attack for which the dissident splinter group the Real IRA claimed responsibility. Just two days later, a policeman was murdered while sitting in his unmarked patrol car. A separate faction, Continuity IRA, said it had orchestrated the killing; two suspects have been arrested. Some speculate that local tensions over an increase in British troops may have prompted the shootings. Catholic and Protestant leaders in the region's power-sharing government called the attacks the work of terrorists. 2 | Brazil Abortion for 9-Year-Old Tests Church A Catholic Archbishop has sparked a bitter debate by excommunicating the mother and doctors of a 9-year-old girl who received an abortion. Brazilians, including President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, assailed the church for hewing to doctrine despite extreme mitigating circumstances--the child, who was carrying twins, had allegedly been raped by her stepfather. While generally illegal in heavily Catholic Brazil, abortion is permitted in rape cases. Critics said the church--whose actions were backed by the Vatican--risked alienating congregants. 3 | Baghdad An Echo of Iraq's Dark Days A pair of deadly suicide attacks in the Iraqi capital have stoked fears that Sunni extremists may be preparing more violence in anticipation of the U.S. troop pullout later this year. On March 10, 33 people were killed in a blast following a reconciliation meeting in the town of Abu Ghraib on the outskirts of Baghdad. Two days earlier, at least 28 died in a similar attack outside Baghdad's police academy. Iraqi Civilian Deaths 30,000 deaths 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 SOURCE: IRAQ BODY COUNT PROJECT 4 | Washington A Reversal on Stem Cells In his latest move to undo the policies of his predecessor, President Barack Obama, on March 9, lifted a Bush Administration ban on using federal funds for human embryonic-stem-cell research, which scientists believe could help treat illnesses like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Pro-life advocates criticized Obama's move, saying it could lead to the destruction of human embryos in the name of research. 5 | Washington Supremes Rule on Race In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court narrowed the scope of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965 in part to increase the number of black officeholders. The Justices ruled that the act requires states to create new voting districts only when the new district will have a minority population greater than 50%. Dissenting Justices argued that even districts without such a majority are worth creating, because they encourage the election of minority candidates with the help of concentrated minority populations and so-called crossover white voters. Later this year, the court will rule on whether states with a history of racial discrimination must get federal approval before changing their voting procedures. 6 | Germany DEADLY SCHOOL SHOOTING A 17-year-old gunman clad in black combat fatigues opened fire at his former school (above) near Stuttgart, slaying nine students and at least six other people before taking his own life. The tragedy struck a day after a man rampaged through southern Alabama, killing at least 11--including himself--in what authorities called the worst mass shooting in that state's history. 7 | Pakistan Opposition Under Fire In the latest sign of political unrest in this nucleararmed state, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari's government cracked down on opposition parties on the eve of a major demonstration, arresting hundreds and enforcing a ban on protests in two provinces. The ban was intended to suppress a planned "long march" on Pakistan's Parliament to demand that Zardari reinstate the judges dismissed by former President Pervez Musharraf in 2007.

8 | England Shakespeare's New Look Fans of the bald, dour Bard might have to prepare for a studly new William Shakespeare. British scholar Stanley Wells has unveiled what he claims is the only known portrait of the writer made during his lifetime. The Cobbe portrait--named for the Irish family that unknowingly possessed it--purportedly shows a fresh-faced Shakespeare in his mid-40s. This 1623 engraving has long been the accepted depiction of Shakespeare The earringed Chandos portrait, some say, is of a different person entirely The Bard 3.0: more sharply dressed, wealthier--and with a lot more hair 9 | China Trouble on The High Seas An encounter between a U.S. Navy intelligence ship and five Chinese military and fishing vessels in the South China Sea touched off a diplomatic firestorm between Beijing and Washington, with U.S. officials accusing China of harassment and Chinese officials accusing the U.S. of violating its territorial waters. The Pentagon alleges that one Chinese boat came within 25 feet (about 7.5 m) of the U.S.N.S. Impeccable, forcing its crew to turn a fire hose on the approaching ship. The flotilla also tried to foul the lines of Impeccable's trailing sonar array (the area is thought to be heavily used by Chinese submarines). The encounter came a week after a Pentagon statement noted "increasingly aggressive conduct by Chinese vessels." Said a U.S. official: "The debate is still on in China whether, as its military power increases, it will be used for good or for pushing people around." 10 | Washington The Incredible Shrinking Global Economy The world's gross domestic product will contract for the first time since World War II, according to a new World Bank report, but the outlook is even more dire for developing countries hit hard by plummeting trade and tightening credit. Poorer nations face a shortfall of $270 billion to $700 billion, which threatens progress toward developmental goals like reducing mortality rates. Out of 116 developing countries ... 94 countries have experienced an economic slowdown

43 of those 94 countries have high levels of poverty RECESSION WATCH The economic downturn and record-high gas prices have been a boon to public transit. Americans took 10.7 billion trips last year on the nation's trains, buses and subways--the highest level of ridership in 52 years, according to the American Public Transportation Association. But while the rate stayed high even as gas prices dropped, rising unemployment could mean fewer commuters in 2009. By Alex Altman, Harriet Barovick, Gilbert Cruz, Alyssa Fetini, Dan Fletcher, Kate Pickert, Frances Romero, M.J. Stephey

Verbatim By DEPARTMENT Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

'My experience in Iraq is that despite having been shot seven times, it is very great.' MOSES MATSIKO, one of an estimated 10,000 Ugandans working in private security in Iraq 'Mr. Medvedev is not a vodka personality. Mr. Putin is.' STANISLAV KAUFMAN, Russian businessman, explaining why Putinka vodka, named for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, is outselling a brand named for President Dmitri Medvedev 'We are terrorists to the bone.' KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, along with four other accused 9/11 plotters, defending their actions in a six-page war-crimes court filing 'I am prepared to take my fair share of the Green Revolution on my shoulders. I am less keen on having it in my face.' PETER MANDELSON, Britain's Business Secretary, after an assailant threw green custard on him to protest the construction of a third runway at London's Heathrow Airport 'Even today, Tibetans in Tibet live in constant fear.' THE DALAI LAMA, marking the 50th anniversary of the failed Tibetan uprising 'April 13-1861 Washington thank God we have a government Jonth Dillon.' JONATHAN DILLON, watchmaker, in a newly discovered message engraved in a pocket watch repaired for Abraham Lincoln on the day after the Civil War began 'It's like the Battle of Stalingrad. Any sensible person would want both of them to lose.' ANDREW FERGUSON, editor at the Weekly Standard, on the series of debates between liberal comedian Bill Maher and conservative author Ann Coulter Back & Forth: Media

'If only I'd listened to CNBC, I'd have $1 million today--provided I had started with $100 million.' JON STEWART, Daily Show host, lampooning the business network through a video montage of bad stock-market predictions made by CNBC analysts 'Almost every stock is down! Any stock you recommended is bad. You know, Warren Buffett, I could run tapes from him--he would look like a complete fool.' JIM CRAMER, host of CNBC's Mad Money, defending the network and saying the CNBC clips were taken out of context Internet 'Craigslist is the single largest source of prostitution in the nation.' THOMAS DART, sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, after filing a lawsuit to ban the classified-ad website's Erotic Services section 'Frankly, Sheriff Dart's actions mystify me.' Craigslist CEO JIM BUCKMASTER, saying the volume of ads for erotic services had dropped 90% to 95% in Chicago and four other U.S. cities since tougher measures were put in place last year Politics 'The tactics of the Israel lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency.' CHARLES FREEMAN, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, after withdrawing from consideration as chairman of the National Intelligence Council because of "distortions" by pro-Israel lobbyists 'If it had simply been a dispute about Middle East policy, he would have survived.' Representative MARK KIRK (R., Ill.), saying Freeman's job as head of the Saudifunded Middle East Policy Council tarnished his objectivity For daily sound bites, visit time.com/quotes Sources: Christian Science Monitor; Wall Street Journal; AP; BBC; Reuters; New York Times (2)

A Brief History Of: The Post-Presidency By Alex Altman Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Dollar sign: Getty

For George W. Bush, the bucks start here. On March 17, before about 1,500 Calgary business leaders, Bush will give his first post--White House address and set the going rate for an audience with a former leader of the free world: a reported $150,000 per speech. That may seem like a lot for a man who left Washington with a record-low 22% approval rating. But it's far from exorbitant on the world's most lucrative lecture circuit--one of the perks that prompted John Updike to dismiss the presidency as "a way station en route to the blessed condition of being an ex-President." It wasn't always so blessed. Out of office, Thomas Jefferson found himself buried under crippling debts; James Monroe died destitute; and Ulysses S. Grant, scammed by a Wall Street grifter and battling cancer, hawked his memoirs to Mark Twain to

keep his family afloat. Not until 1958 did the Former Presidents Act award ex--Chief Executives a pension and staff. But beginning with Gerald Ford, former Presidents have each earned hefty fees for speeches, memoirs or corporate advice--despite criticism that cashing in on their service sullies the office. In 1989, Ronald Reagan raked in a whopping $2 million (plus $5 million for his entourage and expenses) for a pair of 20-minute talks in Japan. Bill Clinton has amassed tens of millions on the podium--a fact that briefly imperiled his wife's nomination to be Secretary of State. Senior staffers like Henry Kissinger and presidential also-rans Al Gore and Rudy Giuliani have also parlayed political power into riches. Bob Dole, in lesser demand after getting trounced by Clinton in 1996, became a TV pitchman for everything from debit cards to erectiledysfunction pills. Further evidence, perhaps, that it's good to be the boss.

The Skimmer By Alex Altman Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy By the Team at the Boston Globe Edited by Peter S. Canellos Simon & Schuster; 464 pages Had the last chapter in Ted Kennedy's story been written a generation ago, it would have been a cautionary tale: the scandal-scarred prodigal son who, consigned to carrying the torch of America's foremost political dynasty, extinguished it in the waters of Chappaquiddick Island. But Kennedy found redemption in a stellar second act. As the authors write, "the chubby kid in short pants who was eclipsed for so many years by his brothers" became the clan's patriarch and a champion of causes ranging from civil rights to health care--a legislative record they rank among the finest of the past century. The Globe's scribes don't whitewash Kennedy's shortcomings, devoting considerable space to his booze-fueled carousing and the car accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne. With Kennedy battling brain cancer, the book-whose title was borrowed from a Churchill biography and bestowed on Ted by John McCain--is a timely if not revelatory portrait of a flawed figure who "never expected

to become the custodian of his family's sorrows" but found a way to transcend the role.

Pop Chart By DEPARTMENT Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

SHOCKING JOHN MCCAIN'S pork-filled Twitter feed DREW BARRYMORE reportedly approached to helm third Twilight movie: "Because I'm a director now." Everybody's strange obsession with MICHELLE OBAMA'S arms EMINEM recession special: two albums in 2009 EDGAR ALLAN POE letter surfaces in which he apologizes to publishers for drinking too much KEN BURNS loses 22-year GM sponsorship, imperiling hours 34 and 36 of Zydeco docu White House SWING SET: not that impressive PREDICTABLE D.M.C. to host American Idol--like, grandma-friendly rap reality show JIMMY KIMMEL and SARAH SILVERMAN break up for second time CNN cancels D.L. HUGHLEY show after realizing that no one watches the news on Saturday night South Park finally gets around to mocking the JONAS BROTHERS SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE musical in the works. Quick, Broadway--only six movies left!

SULLY shops book proposal, hopes to save publishing industry from crashing into the Hudson In her first step down the path of Britney, HAYDEN PANETTIERE lashes out at photographers Jilted BACHELOR FIANCEE joins Dancing with the Stars Police confiscate more than $1 million in drugs at PHISH reunion shows SHOCKINGLY PREDICTABLE

Milestones By DEPARTMENT Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

DIED Less than a month after Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was sworn in as Prime Minister, his wife Susan Tsvangirai, 50, was killed in a car accident when a drowsy truck driver crashed into their motorcade. Despite initial suspicion of foul play, investigators--and her husband, who was injured in the crash--say it was indeed an accident. • The sport's first female agent, Colleen Howe, 76, was "Mrs. Hockey" to husband and NHL great Gordie Howe's "Mr. Hockey." She not only worked as his chief negotiator but also did business for their professional-hockey-playing sons Mark and Marty. • Though withholding in his affections, silent-film legend Charlie Chaplin did help his son Sydney Chaplin, 82, land his first movie gig. The younger Chaplin was then able to move on to such roles as his breakout performance in the 1956 Broadway show Bells Are Ringing, for which he earned a Tony Award. • Former head of communications for the Lutheran Church, Robert E.A. Lee, 87, produced A Time for Burning, a landmark 1966 Oscar-nominated documentary about race relations and the U.S. civil rights movement. • A first-round NFL pick in 1940, George McAfee, 90, played offense and defense for the Chicago Bears; the team won three championship titles in eight seasons. SENTENCED Dubbed the "Swiss gigolo" by the media, Helg Sgarbi, 44, was sentenced to six years in prison on March 9 for extorting $9 million from married German BMW heiress Susanne Klatten, 46, with whom he was having an affair.

Hank Locklin By Frances Romero Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

"It almost mashed me flatter than a fritter," Hank Locklin once told the Birmingham News about being hit by a school bus at age 9. The incident gave the Grand Ole Opry staple, who died on March 8 at 91, a second chance early in life. He used it wisely. During his recuperation, he learned to play guitar, combining that newfound skill with a singing ability honed in church. By the time Locklin was a teenager, he was a traveling musician, taking odd jobs along the way to help supplement his income. In the late 1940s, he ended up in Houston, where he hosted a radio show and sometimes spun his own records. They were infused with the new Nashville Sound, which eliminated steel guitars and fiddles in favor of string sections and backup vocals to create a smoother, more refined melody. One day he played the song that would become his first hit (and one of his biggest), "Send Me the Pillow You Dream On." The station received 200 pillows from listeners. Locklin later recorded the song for a small label, and it became a crossover hit in the U.S. and Britain. In 1955, he got his biggest break yet, a contract with RCA that led to 65 albums over a five-decade career. He lived longer than expected. None of those years were wasted ones.

Jim Bellows By Tom Wolfe Thursday, Mar. 12, 2009

Barely 40 when he edited the New York Herald Tribune, he had the posture of an 80year-old. His body was skin and bones, nourished solely by cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes, as far as I could tell. Everybody said he didn't actually speak. He mumbled. In fact, that odd sound was the audible tone of the megavolt current generated by his passionate fascination with the human comedy. Just 20 minutes before deadline one evening, I made it back to the city room with, if I do say so, a hot story about the notorious numbers racketeer Newsboy Moriarty. In the first sentence, I took readers down into the lint at the bottom of Moriarty's lootlined trouser pockets. Bellows must have loved that lint as much as I did, because as I was finishing the second sheet of copy, he materialized and said in his electric whisper, "Keep it coming. Everything you've got. I don't care how long it is. I want it all." In my 53 years as a writer, that remains the greatest compliment I have ever received. Bellows loved hot stories written in acrobatic prose. Only under Bellows could the Trib's Sunday supplement, New York, have turned into a showcase for the radical experiment now called the New Journalism. Bellows' Trib became the hottest newspaper in America. The only thing Bellows liked better than high style and muscular editorial content was a fight. He would poke any eye to start one. In 1965 I wrote a story for New York having some sport with William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker. The moment our issue came off the press, Bellows sent a copy to Shawn. The detonator was a little inscription on the calling card that accompanied it: "With my compliments, James G. Bellows." Oh, and all those cigarettes? Bellows died March 6 at 86, without ever having experienced so much as a dry cough.