PocketHits

My Day With The New SimCity

View Profile — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 23:48:06 +0100

Last week, I headed over to Maxis headquarters in Emeryville to spend a big chunk of time playing SimCity. I decided that rather than attempt to list all of the features of a game this dense, I'd just keep a journal of my day. So that's what I did.

Who's ready for some hot city-planning action?

Many of the screenshots in this article are actually from the city I made while I was there (née "Kotakuville"), but as I couldn't get all of the images I took, a few are stock screengrabs that EA sent over. Those'll be designated, though the differences are pretty clear. The version of the game I played was near to complete but still had some bugs, and the final version is available for purchase on March 5.

Here we go. Hope I don't talk about food/Adam Sessler/Fire Emblem too much.

8:54 AM I am still in my apartment, and this preview session starts soon. I'm IMing with Jason Schreier about Fire Emblem: Awakening, which we've both been playing. I've been having a hard time not comparing everything to Fire Emblem lately. The Dead Island severed torso thing is happening, which is proving to be a distraction. Also, I have to pay rent on my way to the train station.

8:57 AM I make a joke to Jason about how I'm including our IM conversation in my journal. He says, "hahaha. excellent. meta."

Time Passes…

10:30-ish AM I arrive at Maxis. I'm running a bit late, but thankfully they still haven't gotten started. I head into a boardroom where they've lined up a bunch of computers for us to play. The usual press folks are here.

10:39 AM Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw and SimCity creative director Ocean Quigley come out to introduce the game. They seem genuinely happy to have us here, and proud of what Maxis has put together. I'm sitting at the end of a long table full of reporters, which feels exciting. I'm like the chairman, check it out:

Well-known video game pundit Adam Sessler is sitting to my right. In the interest of Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day, I'll add that I met him for the first time that day, and he seems like a lovely man. He was wearing a snappy hat.

10:41 AM They show us a splashy intro video of the game. The audio is clipping, and it is kind of intense.

FIRE EMBLEM TEST: Is this intro video cooler than Fire Emblem: Awakening? No.

10:43 AM The press materials here say I get to take 10 screenshots. I'm such a screenshot shotgunner, I'm a little bit worried I'll get too excited.

10:44 AM Lead producer Kip Katsarelis gets up to give us tips about how to play. If we want, we'll have 5-6 hours to play SimCity today, which he mentions is a "rushed" experience. I'm not sure I'll be able to play for that many hours at once, but we'll see.

10:45 AM The music that's playing for Katsarelis' demo is quite nice. Chris Tilton did this music for this game. Very soothing.

10:46 AM The PR guy steps in and turns the demo music down. Boo, PR guy!

10:47 AM Just watching Katsarelis use the road-making tool in his demo makes it clear that I'm not going to learn much about this game even if I take all 6 hours. There's a looot here. So many variations, just on the road tool! Arced roads, straight roads, and all these different road types. And my god, so many menus. This is a Stephen Totilo dream-game.

FIRE EMBLEM TEST: Is this demo more interesting than Fire Emblem: Awakening? No, but this is actually pretty cool. I'm looking forward to playing this game.

10:51 AM I had forgotten that they call things you drop on the map "Ploppables." Ew.

Time to Start Playing

10:51 AM Time to start playing. I open up a tutorial called "Getting Started."

10:53 AM Adam Sessler's phone vibrates. He has gotten a text message.

10:55 AM The tutorial involves helping the town connect with the outside world. I tried to connect a road to the highway running down the side of my empty pasture, but I failed, somehow. My road just got... stuck... and there doesn't appear to be a way to get out of the basic road tool or use the bulldozer (?), this being a tutorial. Slight panic sets in. Why does this always happen to me at these events?

10:58 AM I have made peace with the fact that somehow, I failed the tutorial. I built a road out to the highway, and it built "wrong." So, I wound up stuck with a crazy misplaced ramp jutting out, with no way to bulldoze anything. This does not bode well. For me, I mean, not for the game. I wound up out in the menus and was embarrassed about asking a PR person for help, so I thought I'd just dive into a full game. So. Full game! Who needs tutorials anyway?

11:00 AM Wow, I started a new city and two minutes later, it looks like this:

11:01 AM Just kidding. That's a press screenshot. In reality, I have located the bulldozer. Feelin pretty good about that.

11:03 AM I have decided that whatever town I make will be called "Kotakuville," and the roads will form a giant K. Guess what else starts with K? My name. Oh, yeah. I am Ozymandias.

11:05 AM I've begun zoning different areas for industrial, commercial and residential. Everything is tied to the roads this time—you can't just go zone random land that isn't on a road. That makes transportation much more of an artery of the city, and makes it simpler to place your zones in places where you can easily supply them. I believe there are different sounds for each of the three main SimCity zones—for example, for industrial, it makes a metallic sound. I think this is very neat.

11:05 AM Kotakuville will rely on oil power. Let's see how this goes.

11:06 AM It just started raining! In the game, I mean.

11:07 AM My city is broke. Not brokEN, as in, "Damn, your city is BROKE." But like, we have no money. I'm going to try passing a bond measure, because I don't want to raise taxes, because I need to be liked.

11:08 AM My city needed water, so I bulldozed some houses and dropped a water plant where they used to be. Sorry, folks.

11:09 AM Having some fairly extreme graphical slowdown on my computer with the road-building tool. No idea what kind of PC this is, but it seems pretty beefy. Huh. This isn't the final version of the game or anything, so there are liable to still be bugs and the like. This must be one of them.

11:11 AM Placed my city hall up at the top of the "K." Away from the plebes.

11:11 AM Now that I have a city hall, I've been invited to formally name my city. Hello, Kotakuville!

11:16 AM I try to find someone to ask how to take a screenshot. Also, I got a bear claw. It's pretty good! There was almost no coffee left. I can take a screenshot with the "C" key. Because of course, using F12 would be way too… steamy.

11:18 AM Wrapping up the bear claw.

FIRE EMBLEM TEST: Was this bear claw more nourishing than Fire Emblem: Awakening? Not emotionally, but perhaps nutritionally.

Burning Sensations, Server Woes

11:21 AM Uh oh, my city has an abandoned building with no power. I'm… not sure what to do about it. Likely the first of many bad signs.

11:21 AM There's a taqueria in my commercial district called "Burning Sensations." I wonder if the people there read Burning Questions? Anyway that is a terrible name for a Taqueria. Sheesh, residents of Kotakuville.

11:23 AM Our preview session appears to be having server issues, which is making it difficult for some people to play. Hmm. My game is still okay.

11:25 AM My factories all have funny names. "Hair Glue Factory." "Kensherr Magnetrons." "Donut Dough Industries." Kotakuville is a center of industry!

11:30 AM They're showing us another video. While they're doing that, they're also shutting down all of our games to cycle the server, which will theoretically fix the server issues some people are having. Again, huh. This does not bode well for a game where whenever they turn off the servers, every person in the world has to stop playing.

11:33 AM This demo is about all of the different ways you can build an identity for your city. How you can add "personality" and culture to you city. I wonder if you have too much culture, if you can get SimHipsters? I feel like probably not.

11:37 AM We are still not playing the game, because the servers are still down. The launch of this game may well be pretty interesting! And by "interesting" I mean "possibly a disaster." Note that I write this entry at 11:37. THIRTY SEVEN. Coincidence? I THINK NOT

11:40 AM Looks like they've got the servers up now. Yup, servers are back up.

Back up and Running

11:41 AM Splines have been reticulated on Kotakuville. Back to it.

11:42 AM PR seems audibly relieved that we didn't lose Kotakuville. Well. I'm glad, too!

11:45 AM Spent a while messing around with roads. Accidentally bulldozed a bunch of businesses. Sorry, guys. I'm struck by how comparatively small my city is, compared with past SimCity games. I haven't filled my area, but I can see the boundaries. I guess this is as big as a city gets?

11:47 AM I've decided to build up a commercial district to the west of the K. The grid-building is a little different, since the game is more fluid than its predecessors. They give you visible guidelines to build your roads, which is a cool approach. Every time you start to lay road, these dotted lines appear to show you where you could put them to keep them symmetrical. It's flexible and seems to work pretty well.

11:51 AM Oh dear, my city hasn't had sewage this entire time. More like Stinkville 1.0, amiright?

11:51 AM When I try to drop a sewage outflow pipe, it tells me I "must plop on a snap point!" Ew, again! Because sewage!

11:53 AM I still have a 68% approval rating, despite the fact that no one in my city has had working plumbing since they moved here. This must be what Obama feels like!

11:54 AM I paused it to do some zoning, and the rain paused in midair. Neat.

11:55 AM Raised taxes to 10%. Hope this doesn't cause an occupy movement.

Plains, Trains and Power Supplies

11:55 AM The power just blew! In the Maxis buildings, I mean. Not in the game. All of our computers just went down. Hmm, no end of technical problems here, I guess. Then again, string together this many PCs, and you're bound to have some power issues.

12:01 PM It has been suggested that my Macbook is sucking too much power and causing the crash. This seems unlikely, but I may have to plug in somewhere else. I felt this was worth noting. Now I feel like everyone is looking at me.

12:06 PM Took a minute to tweet about this whole Deep Silver severed torso thing, which is happening today, but which most of you will probably have forgotten about by the time the embargo for this preview lifts. But hey, let's remember for a minute. The torso thing! It's probably been replaced in the collective consciousness by some new offense, but man, that was pretty fucking grim!

12:07 PM Kotakuville is still chugging along after the power outage. I lost some of my recent zoning, but that's it. Actually, I may not have even lost that. At least now we know that if you lose power while playing, you own't really lose progress.

12:07 PM Everyone else here has bigger monitors than I do. Maybe their HUGE MONITORS are what's sucking power. Not my laptop. Jeez.

12:07 PM Oh, turns out I didn't lose any progress. Nice.

12:08 PM City Hall has given me an incentive to hit a population goal and incorporate into a small city. It looks like "incentives" are little mini-goals that help you branch out and try to hit new waypoints.

12:09 PM Music update: The music changes when you pause it, and goes through a filter. But as far as I can tell, it doesn't do that cool layering thing with the camera-zoom that it was doing in the last demo.

12:11 PM Power went down again. They made me unplug my laptop.

12:13 PM Still waiting on reboot.

12:15 PM Tara Long from Revision3 is the only one who got a computer that isn't on this circuit, so she's been playing uninterrupted. Taraaaaaaa! *shakes fist*

12:30 PM Power problems resolved. Okay, hopefully the game won't crash anymore.

Time to Take Out The Trash

12:30 PM Now that I've seen it a bunch of times, I can confirm that the SimCity menu is... pretty clean-looking.

12:33 PM Sewage has been taken care of. Whew. Okay, here's what Kotakuville looks like now.

12:38 PM A little while with no updates. I expanded the roads to the southeast, and did a tutorial about the budget panel. A good sign that I just sort of got into it for a while. I can tell it's going to take a few revisions to get this thing right. I bet Kotakuville 4.0 will be pretty good.

12:40 PM Raised taxes again. Sorry everyone. I've taken out two bonds, which was probably a bad call, in retrospect.

12:44 PM I've been notified that "Air pollution just drifted in from outside the city." Hmm. I'm not sure what to do about it, so I move on.

12:49 PM I'm doing pretty well. Getting some tips from another developer, dropped a hospital, and now have $72,000 simoleons in the bank. Not bad.

12:51 PM Fire! We have a fire. Yikes. Though also: Hooray! This is sort of a SimCity milestone. Now to do what all mayors do when there's a fire: quickly build a fire department.

12:52 PM Ocean Quigley just came by to show me the camera-filters. There are a few different color-filters you can use to look at your city. You can watch 'em in the video Chris put together to the side there. They're neat. Quigley says it can be jarring to go back to the other way of doing things. I put on "soft" and then "vintage" and find I do like how it makes my city look. Really, even on my kind of janky monitor, this is a lovely-looking game.

12:55 PM I've somehow wound up wandering into the neighboring area of Norwich Hills, which looks like a second whole city area. (I'll explain this more later.)

1:22 PM Lengthy pause from updates. I did a lot of things recently. I ate some Chipotle! Will you believe me if I tell you that as far as I know, that was the first Chipotle I've ever had in my life? Because it was. Hmm. It wasn't half bad. I see why people go there when it's the only option. I don't know if it's as good as "Burning Sensation," but then, what is?

How The Multi-City Setup Works

Longer Update: My PR helper Charlie showed me a lot about the way the game scales, and some of how the multiplayer works. It's pretty cool. Basically, the game exists on three levels: Cities, Regions, and the worldwide economy. A region can hold a number of cities, and any player online can control any city. Regions have anywhere from three to 16 city-spaces, which are pre-designed. (Later, Katsarelis confirms to me that you can't terraform like in past SimCity games—the city-spaces are all pre-made.) Each region also has a "Great Works Site," which can have something mega, like an Arcology or an international airport or a space center. Each one of those has an impact on every city in the region, bringing in money, or tourists, or other sorts of benefits.

So, like I was noticing, the cities themselves are pretty small—you can't build some huge Dredd-esque Megacity One. That makes the game more complex. I can tell that once I've built a few cities, it'll get a lot easier to plan out how I'm going to do what I'm doing. The basic idea is to have one city be residential/commercial, one city commercial with some industrial, and one city industrial. People will live in the residential city and commute to the industrial or commercial cities to work. Of course, your other cities will influence one another, so you'll start getting pollution runoff from one city, or have your residents go to the industrial city to work. And your friends can take over (or build) your neighboring cities, too. I get it, and I like it. It's very different from past SimCity games, of course.

Kotakuville, meanwhile, is very much in the awkward, possibly terminal adolescence of the "First SimCity City." Heading over to Maxis employees' regions to look at established cities, I'm now aware of just how smart you can be with your layout, and how you can maximize the limited geography to get the most out of a city. Here is a press screenshot that gives you a sense of what I'm talking about:

1:28 PM I've been writing all of this with the SimCity music going in my ears, and I have to say, this is some great music to write to. Good show, Tilton. The tick-tock, pizzicato strings have got me in a rhythm. Might have try working to this music in general.

Multiplayer

1:29 PM Okay where was I? Right, multiplayer. So the way multiplayer works is, you can invite friends to come and set up shop in cities anywhere in your region. (Or in the blank areas where a city could be. See here:

Once they come in and run one of your cities, there's no going back—if they mess up your city, it's messed up for good. The idea will be, then, that you'll be playing on a server next to people, which will be a different sort of experience than the one I've been having so far.

1:33 PM Kip is going to walk us through multiplayer. This is most of the stuff I just talked about. He says that after 4-6 hours, players are going to want to step out and make another city. He's going into how you can share services from city to city around your region, gift money and resources to one another, send firefighters and police, etc.

1:43 PM I pipe up to ask Kip about a 16-City map. He obliges and loads one up for us. It's much, much bigger than what we were working with, but very cool. Quite big! Loading the map is taking quite a while, since the game still isn't quite finished.

1:53 PM Back to Kotakuville. I keep going for the undo button once I accidentally lay a road incorrectly . In this game, there is no undo. There is only Bulldozer.

1:57 PM Kotakuville looks quite nice at night. I... didn't get any screenshots of it. Sorry. You'll have to take my word for it. Oh ok, here's a press screenshot:

1:58 PM This soundtrack is very much a fan of the lydian mode. Points off for over-reliance on Lydian, Tilton! There are other ways to conjure "airy and thoughtful!"

1:59 PM JK that's not really fair, I mean I really like lydian too.

FIRE EMBLEM TEST: Is this the lydian mode better than Fire Emblem: Awakening? Tough call. There is some lydian IN Fire Emblem: Awakening, so they're kind of related, even. Jury is out on this one.

2:01 PM My people are protesting. Too many deaths per day in my city! What a drag. I should probably upgrade my clinics.

2:02 PM I zoomed in on a sick sim walking down the street, puking everywhere. It's not as horrifying as it sounds. He's going to the hospital, which is pretty far away.

2:03 PM I've gotten a few achievements. "Bad News, Creeps" for having my police catch a criminal, and "Sand through my fingers," for spending expenses over $5,000 per month. I also got "Awfulest Mayor Ever!", which is an achievement for having an approval rating below 10%. Whoops. When did I get that award? (He asked, like every awful mayor ever.)

2:05 PM I upgraded my clinic with an add-on for an ambulance.

2:08 PM Well, Kotakuville is starting to look pretty nice.

2:10 PM Again my city burns. And there's nothing I can do. Boo. To illustrate what's going on, albeit in a much grander, more successful city, here is another official press screenshot:

2:12 PM Some of my factories are closing because there "aren't enough places to ship freight." I gotta say, I get the sense playing this game that there is an entirely new feel to the way all the systems interlock. It's cool, though overwhelming at the moment.

2:13 PM Good example of a system that isn't overwhelming: I built a school, but then had to build school bus stops to go to my various neighborhoods. It's pretty cool, how it works—very intuitive. As you place stops, the streets light up green; you have to get all the streets where people live to light up green. Here's an example of a similar thing with a clinic:

2:15 PM Having one of those SimCity moments where I think I'm doing well, but as it turns out, my city is this close to being abandoned. I don't believe that's happening, but you never know.

Ghost Towns

2:16 PM Speaking of that, one cool thing is that you can just "Abandon" a city or region, and other people can "find" it and start playing it. Could well be we'll start to get a raft of cool, weird abandoned cities, and no one will know who made them. I like that idea. It's sort of like Jason Rohrer's awesome "Chain World" Minecraft experiment.

2:17 PM Time to make a second city. Kotakuville can cruise for a while and earn money.

2:19 PM In two minutes, I seem to have burned through my neighboring town's budget building a second city that is entirely roads and a coal power plant. This is going to generate revenue? … Okay.

2:26 PM Since we're meant to be messing around with multiplayer, I'm now connected to everyone else, and have been informed that someone has come to my city to take a look at it. That's something you can do with any public city. It's of course possible to make your city or region private.

2:39 PM I got some coffee! I realized that I hadn't had much coffee today.

FIRE EMBLEM TEST: Is this coffee better than Fire Emblem: Awakening? Right now, yes.

2:43 PM The overhead viewing angle is pretty cool:

2:45 PM Whoops, just dropped a dump into my residential area.

2:46 PM Aaaand, read over that last entry and realized how it reads, decided to keep it in, since it is sort of what I did, actually.

2:50 PM My cops are not keeping up with crime in the city, I've been told. I'm always so bad at the SimCity balancing act at first.

Plumbing

2:53 PM I've fixed my water system. Fun to watch water pump out to houses, and have their angry red water-taps vanish as they become hydrated. People are like crops.

2:58 PM I'm focusing on figuring out how transit works; there are so many different kinds of roads, and you can upgrade and downgrade roads depending on what you need.

3:00 PM Everyone must be escorted to the bathroom. Towel-service jokes are being made. This is s.o.p. for a game studio visit, by the way.

3:05 PM I'm pretty much stepping back from active SimCity at this point, doing the thing where you leave your city to run without you for a bit and build up some money. This is definitely one of the things I like about SimCity; it allows you to take breaks while still making progress.

FIRE EMBLEM TEST: Is taking a break from SimCity better than Fire Emblem: Awakening? No. SUB-TEST: Can you play Fire Emblem: Awakening while allowing your SimCity city to build up money over time? YES YOU CAN

(Am I going to do that now? No, because that would be rude.)

3:08 PM It's a little thing, but when the sun moves in the game, the shadows of the buildings move, too. It's very nice-looking.

3:08 PM Filter update: I have gotten very used to the "Vintage" filter I have on everything.

3:13 PM I'm a bit SimCity'd out. Kip is going to talk to us about multiplayer again, which is all well and good, but I've seen as much as I can see for now. I'm going to talk to him, then go home, I think.

So here we have it; this is where Kotakuville wound up:

Overall Impressions

The SimCity beta will start this weekend, so if you can get in, you can relive my first hour over and over. While I was at Maxis, I spoke with Katsarelis about a bunch of interesting stuff relating to the game and what I played, so I'll have that on Kotaku soon.

My overall sense of SimCity is that it is faithful to the general feel and flow of past SimCity games but dramatically different in several ways. It's a lovely-looking game that is fun to interact with; Maxis has achieved their goal on that front. I enjoyed using it, moment-to-moment. The other key difference is more sweeping, and it stems from the fact that you can't save your game, not in the traditional sense. Specifically, you can't save a copy of your game, then save in a new slot if you want to preserve the version you just saved. There's a sense of forward momentum to everything, and I can see how playing the game could start to feel like writing in the sand.

Everything is a bit ephemeral, which can be freeing, but over the long term, it might make it harder to get too invested in your cities. You can't back up a version of your work in order to preserve a moment in time, or download famous cities that your friends have re-created. It really is different from past SimCity games in that way, especially when you combine that with the new game's always-online ecosystem. This SimCity is happening in the present-tense. I'm not at all ready to say it's a bad thing, because the game I played was vibrant, interesting, and fun. But it certainly is different.

tiny family
no plumbing, but hey, okay
burning sensations

"Inauguration 2013: A Bad Lip Reading: — A Bad Lip Reading of Barack Obama's Inauguration

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 23:43:25 +0100

Smog of War

Jonathan Gourlay — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 23:04:41 +0100

Credit: U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Thomas Dow/International Security Assistance Force.

U.S. Army Specialist Mihkel Gilmete spends his days flying in a UH 60 Black Hawk helicopter in Afghanistan. Two hours of show time, prepping the helicopter. Then six or seven hours in the air, looking down at the brown expanse of the Afghan steppes. Thousands of feet in the sky, he snaps a picture for Facebook through the open side-door of the helicopter. A door-mounted M60 machine gun is in the foreground; the vast yellow-brown plains of Afghanistan are far below. The shadows of high clouds dapple the desert. There is no sign of human activity in the desolate land below except a pair of tire tracks that appear to travel from nowhere to nowhere. He is sitting atop the whole of central Afghanistan, staring at it, as so many have, through the sights of his gun.

Gilmete, a Micronesian, spends hours watching Afghanistan from above. It’s peaceful, mesmerizing, almost like staring at the ocean from his home on the sunset side of a small island in the central Pacific. The Afghans below him would never guess that there is an islander hovering above, one of many U.S. military enlistees from tiny island countries all over the Pacific. In fact, per capita, there are more casualties from Gilmete’s home island of Pohnpei than from any U.S. state. Afghans who wonder what life will be like after the U.S. leaves should look to Micronesia, which the U.S. never really left after the end of the Cold War brought an end to its military significance. Basically: more political independence and more economic dependence. The Federated States of Micronesia is a constitutional democracy whose economy is now run by a five-member board—three Americans, two Micronesians.

Gilmete has been fired upon four times in the past year. A Black Hawk just like the one he rides was shot down near Kandahar in August, all crewmen dead. But most days nothing much happens: The Black Hawk crew transports soldiers where they need to go. Gilmete helps provide a kind of armed valet service in a country with few working roads.

Sometimes there is a distress call and an order. Then they swoop down and extract troops from these little nothing villages or ancient, dry waterways or steep mountains where, periodically, the enemy sees an easy target and attacks. The enemy? It’s better not to think about the enemy because there is no one cohesive enemy, no “Taliban,” to go attack. There are just locals, villagers, who one day are farmers and the next day “insurgents.” This lack of a fixed enemy poses a problem for big armies. There is no way to win such a fight short of just killing everybody, a tactic that some have tried. But wondering about the enemy is above Gilmete’s pay grade. He has just has one role: Move the troops. The rest is just flying and staring at the landscape. All of this time looking at Afghanistan and yet the country remains as abstract to him as it is to the rest of us. “I don’t interact with the locals too much because we fly,” he says. “We do fly low over the locals sometimes and it gives me great sadness to see these people living in such poverty.”

Years ago, I was Gilmete’s poetry teacher on the lush, tropical island of Pohnpei. He was a pain in the ass, spitting red juice from a cheek full of betel nut, defying me to teach him anything, wanting nothing more than to leave the island. He had no patience at all for the Romantics. That’s too bad because one could imagine the face on Shelley’s statue of Ozymandias, his sneer of cold command disappearing in the sand below the Black Hawk. Through the centuries, kings, warlords, traveling English gadabouts, Western-educated technocrats, and iron-fisted Soviets have contemplated the same blank map of Afghanistan from the same top-down perspective. They come to this country, declare some version of, “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!” and soon enough find their works ground into the dust. But Gilmete is just here to do the job he enlisted to do. He’s counting the days before he returns to his base in Hawaii with the rest of the Tropic Lightning Division. Most of the troops will follow him back home, far from the lone and level sands of central Afghanistan.

It is often joked that Americans don’t really know a country exists until we invade it. But even that isn’t always true. Even today, how many (few?) of us can actually find Afghanistan on a map, without computer help? Like most Americans, I knew next to nothing about Afghanistan when we began bombing the country in the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks. Like most Americans, I still know next to nothing about Afghanistan. More than 2,000 U.S. soldiers killed, more than 3,000 civilians dead in just one year of the conflict (2011), and somehow it still doesn’t register. Why is that? There are reporters on the ground; we get updates when something particularly horrific happens; many of us read or watched The Kite Runner; and although the main author may be a shyster, there was Three Cups of Tea. Yet the whole decade-plus of war seemed distant and bloodless to me until I read a college scholarship essay written by an Afghan girl, Sabera, that made me pause to consider her country.

Through the centuries, kings, warlords, traveling English gadabouts, Western-educated technocrats, and iron-fisted Soviets have contemplated the same blank map of Afghanistan from the same top-down perspective.

“I was born in the middle of a civil war,” she wrote, “when people were running from one house to another to seek shelter from heavy rocket and mortar bombardment.” She was born in Kabul, in chaos, in a period when Mujahedin were fleeing the city and the Taliban were destroying it. In her essay, she wondered why they were fighting over pools of blood, piles of debris, the ashes of a city. “What were they trying to gain from each other when they had already destroyed everything the country possessed?” To read this essay—well, the poetry teacher in me must refer you to the Wallace Stevens poem “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself” —Sabera’s essay, like the bird’s cry in the poem, caused “a new knowledge of reality.” I considered that there exist people, girls in particular, in that antique land that Gilmete gazes upon all day, who are targeted for death or beating or maiming because they go to school. There exist families for whom educating their children is so important that they would risk their lives to do it. There is nothing—not bombs, guns, tanks, missiles, God, love, or money—that so upsets the Taliban and other groups of their ilk as much as a girl who can read, write, and speak her mind. These girls, their families, and the country they could create deserve our support.

It’s a good policy to be thoughtful about one’s own righteous indignation, especially when one is feeling that indignation on behalf of other people in cultures one does not understand. As Teju Cole reminds us, there is nothing more frightening to much of the world than an American who wants to help fix things.

During my 11 years of teaching English at the College of Micronesia on Gilmete’s “developing” island of Pohnpei, I watched the once-daily plane disgorge any number of American helpers. I wasn’t one of them. I was there for purely selfish reasons: I just liked the island. The islanders knew what to do with helpers from abroad: take the American money or aid or computers or books or sermons or whatever was on offer and then retire to the village to have a good chuckle and go back to their lives. As soon as the Americans left on the plane, their donated books, lessons, schemes, and plans would be placed in a humid closet and eaten by giant cockroaches. There was a closet in the English department, for instance, that at one point contained the following: several large boxes, each containing one gross of U.N.-donated condoms, stacks of outdated California public school social studies textbooks, portraits of U.S. presidents through Nixon, and about 50 Olympus Pen 35mm half-frame cameras. It’s frustrating, these American do-gooders would complain, how we put all this money and effort into helping the locals and yet they refuse to change. There must be something wrong with them.

When I got a chance to talk to Sabera, I knew exactly what she meant when she asked me to “reverse this idea that it is the Afghans who fail.” Right now there are well-meaning Americans wondering why our billions of dollars and 12 years of intervention have not caused Western democracy to flourish in Afghanistan. I guess the Afghans failed.

I can’t be the only American who has avoided the subject of Afghanistan for fear of feeling powerless, angry, sad, or embarrassed. I ignored Afghanistan the way one might avoid a suspicious lump: I feared knowing. I queued the documentaries but didn’t watch them. I avoided the news reports. I have never been there and am not likely to go there. But the fact is that this is now America’s longest war. We will be spending millions, likely billions, of dollars there in the coming years, even as we celebrate our exit. The country where we have spilled so much blood will coalesce into a functioning political entity or it will fall apart. And this will happen whether we care to know about it or not. The only power you and I have is to hope to understand, just a little, this country where we have been fighting and dying. The map of Afghanistan should be filled in with more detail than what you can get by staring at it from a couch in Connecticut. So I began to read, especially Tamim Ansary’s excellent history Games Without Rules, and I talked at length with Sabera and her classmate, Nilofar.

There is nothing—not bombs, guns, tanks, missiles, God, love, or money—that so upsets the Taliban and other groups of their ilk as much as a girl who can read, write, and speak her mind. These girls, their families, and the country they could create deserve our support.

Here is lesson no. 1: Sabera and Nilofar are Afghan, not Afghani. If you call an Afghan an Afghani, you are calling them by the name of their currency. English speakers avoid calling someone Afghan because we associate the word with a crocheted blanket or breed of fancy hound. Don’t worry; Afghans won’t take offense at being called Afghan.

Sabera attends a small, Baptist college in a small, Baptist town in Kentucky. When her American classmates first meet her, they can’t quite believe that she is Afghan. It’s true that if you passed Sabera on the street you might think she is Mexican or Chinese or Turkish or, perhaps, Amer-Asian? Peruvian? As she passes you, you see a short, dark-haired, energetic teenage girl dressed in blue jeans, a black jacket, and a puffy blue shirt. There is nothing about her that screams out “Afghanistan.” Sabera does not wear a burqa, she only sometimes wears a headscarf, and she is not a terrorist. This is important: One of her American friends knew her for over a month before he finally worked up the nerve to ask her if she was a Taliban. “What a brave guy you are,” she told him, laughing, “for hanging out with a Taliban for so long!”

In America, Sabera says, “they think people in Afghanistan are really just killing each other. Just like in Afghanistan, they think everyone in the U.S. is CIA and everything they do is for a purpose and stuff like that. And they would be surprised that Americans are open-minded.”

When Sabera was an infant, her family fled the Taliban and escaped to Hazara Town, a section of Quetta, Pakistan. Hazara Town is part ethnic ghetto and part refugee camp. It’s a mazy, crowded area of small alleyways and cement homes. Many of these single-story dwellings have bright blue doors that contrast with the dirt-brown streets and walls. About 50 miles distant, beyond a line of snow-capped mountains, is the somewhat arbitrary border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Another 50 miles beyond this border is the city of Kandahar, the “hometown” of the Taliban. The border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is called the Durand Line, after the mustachioed, 19th-century British diplomat who drew it up. It runs about 1,600 miles and neatly bisects the area traditionally inhabited by ethnic Pashtuns. In hindsight this border is, to be kind, a disaster. The Taliban are mainly rural Pashtuns. Any of them who feels one side of the border is a drag need only hop over to the other side.

Hazara Town, as you might expect, contains mostly ethnic Hazaras like Sabera. It has been occupied for more than a hundred years by waves of Hazaras fleeing persecution in Afghanistan—the most recent mass exodus occurred after a horrific genocide perpetrated by the Taliban in the 1990s. This is why Sabera’s family fled. But Hazara Town was by no means a safe zone. Even today, Hazara families are picked-off by drive-by shooters with numbing regularity. They are attacked by suicide bombers—nearly 100 dead in recent attacks. Many of the dead in the most recent attack were young men in a pool hall. This attack so angered the Hazaras that they refused to bury the bodies of the victims until Pakistan afforded them some protection. In short, Hazara Town is not a place you would escape to unless you absolutely had to.

I have avoided calling the Hazara “Shi’a” and their attackers “Sunni” because then the story becomes “sectarian violence” which is one of those terms that keeps the Afghan war at a distance. Let’s face it, “sectarian violence” basically translates into “crazy Muslims killing each other for vague religious reasons.” It’s like saying that Irish school kids were murdered over a disagreement about transubstantiation. The young Hazara men shooting pool probably didn’t care too much about who succeeded Muhammad in 632. They were probably focused on their game. Perhaps someone called, “eight ball, corner pocket,” before the room exploded.

As Ansary describes in Games Without Rules, Afghan refugees like Sabera were tolerated but not exactly welcomed in Pakistan. They were shunted into ghettos like Hazara Town or into refugee camps and left there with no legitimate means of earning a living. Sabera’s father, for instance, sold cheap socks on the street. Instead of buying medicine for himself, he used what little money he had to buy lamp oil so that Sabera could study. Sabera, though she was barely a kindergartner, had to do something to help. As she told me, “I was the oldest one and if I didn’t do anything… my family would starve. So I went to sell plastic [wearing] guys’ clothes. My dad would bring plastic bags from a big store and there was a small bazaar where people would sell.” At this marketplace, Sabera, dressed as a boy, sold her plastic bags to shopkeepers. “If you did this as a girl—you couldn’t, but you know you would be harassed and kids your own age would tease you. It was not seen to be good for the family and stuff. I didn’t know I was a girl, actually. I was just a person selling plastic.”

Sabera’s classmate in Kentucky, Nilofar, has a similar story. Her family also escaped to Pakistan in the late ‘90s. Her family fled, in part, because her father’s business in Kabul was selling Indian and Western DVDs. Movies, along with music, art, television, and photography, were outlawed during the Taliban era. “If the Taliban would find out that you were selling DVDs they would burn them. And they would just beat you, you know?” Nilofar says. Her family went to Pakistan with nothing and no way to survive. “Everyone was going to a country that they didn’t belong to, right?” she says. “And they were looking for jobs. It was really hard for them. They were criticized because people were saying that you have come from a country where war is going on and you might be terrorists or whatever, you know?”

Hazara Town was by no means a safe zone. Even today, Hazara families are picked-off by drive-by shooters with numbing regularity. They are attacked by suicide bombers—nearly 100 dead in recent attacks.

Nilofar is especially adept at speaking like an American teenager, liberally spicing up her English with “like,” “you know,” and “whatever.” This is impressive: She is attending college using her fourth language.

Here is the next lesson: Afghans don’t speak “Afghanish.” Sabera and Nilofar are native Dari speakers. In Pakistan they learned their second language: Urdu. When they returned to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, they had to learn yet another language: Pashto, the language of the majority Pashtuns. Later, they learned their fourth language: English.

Learning English in Afghanistan is a political act. Not everyone is supportive. During Sabera’s high school years in Kabul, young guys would come by her front yard while her father was working in the family garden. “Some of the guys told my dad not to let me be free,” she says. “One of them even told me that if I wear a colored veil, like a red scarf, they told me that if I ever wore that I would be beaten badly. But, you know, I didn’t really care… And that man again came to my dad and told him not to let me go outside. Which I did. I was always getting out of the house in the morning and coming back at night. I was going to the English center… And that man was telling me not to be alone out there or they would harm me or kidnap me. But we never listened to [him].”

Sabera’s family returned to Kabul before the Taliban fell. One effect of the Taliban’s pogroms was that much of the city was empty. Her family moved into two abandoned houses where they raised chickens and grew vegetables to survive. Sabera was in elementary school. One day something happened that most third-graders dream of but never experience. “The teacher told us, ‘You are free. You don’t have to come to school any more.’ And I was really happy, actually, because I wouldn’t have homework,” Sabera says. But permanently dismissing his classes didn’t save the teacher from the Taliban. He was tortured and executed for not teaching according to the Taliban’s version of Islamic law.

“After that, the bomb things happened,” says Sabera. Her first impression of America was created when the U.S. Air Force buzzed her home. Sabera jumped up and down with excitement at the sight of the pretty planes. The family’s chickens ran about excitedly, their squawks muffled by the chop-whirr of helicopters and the whoosh of bombers. Sabera climbed up on the roof of her family’s one-story home. First, a wave of sound knocked her over. Then she saw the airplane that dropped the bomb. All of the windows in the house shattered. In the confusion of the blast, she saw something even more gorgeous than the planes: “I saw this—mushroom I think it is. I think they’re called mushrooms. I didn’t know that was a fire, actually. I thought, ‘Wow, it’s so beautiful and colorful.’ After a while I saw the sky getting dark. Black clouds. And black smoke. And I was impressed. We were always seeing those mushrooms. I knew that people are coming to my country and, I don’t know, killing us or something like that. That was my impression.”

Imagine that your first encounter with a country is their bomb-blast busting your windows and knocking you over. Then, years later, you arrive in the country that dropped the bomb and are standing in the hallway of an American high school, wondering why the boys are feeding the girls like birds do, mouth to mouth. Most of these American kids can’t find your country on a map, much less understand what is going on there. Both Sabera and Nilofar spent one year in American high schools on a (now discontinued) scholarship aimed at bringing youth from Muslim countries to America.

“[American students] think that people in Afghanistan are all wearing burqas and that the Taliban is everywhere,” Nilofar says. “They think that people don’t work. They have to be at home. People are surprised when I say I am from Afghanistan. They say, ‘Oh my God, I thought they looked really different.’ They ask, ‘Did you ever kill people?’ And I’m like ‘Nooooo...’ Yeah, sometimes they ask really funny questions.”

We have spoken for about an hour and I say a polite “I better let you go” to excuse myself. She has more to say, though, and will not let me go. Speaking with her is like speaking with a very insistent, stationary tornado.

Unwelcome in Pakistan, misunderstood in America, and targeted for violence in Afghanistan, Nilofar and Sabera do, ironically, have a strong sense of home. It’s just that this home doesn’t exist yet. Nilofar imagines an Afghanistan where girls can play soccer, tennis, and “whatever fun stuff” just like boys. Sabera wants to build schools to help those who were not as lucky as she was: the 94% of Afghan girls who do not graduate from high school. But to get to this home, they, and their country, will have to confront groups of their fellow Afghans who would sooner kill them than accept what they think of as Western interference.

In July, just before she was to begin college, Nilofar and a group of women took to the streets of Kabul to protest the videotaped execution of a woman accused of adultery. While the women walked from the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to a U.N. compound, they were flanked by journalists as well as curse-spouting Taliban sympathizers. “There were people shouting at us, saying, ‘Look at all these puppets from America, come in here and teach us how to live. Teach us how to treat our wives or how to treat our girls.’“ The marchers went on anyway. Nilofar carried a sign that read, “Where is the protection and justice for Afghan women?” More curses and, even worse, cell phones and cameras pointed at her, taking photographs the men can use to target Nilofar and her family. “They take a picture and say curses on you and say bad stuff about you and it’s horrible, just horrible. There are people who are against you and if they find you, they are just going to kill you. But the only thing that we are saying is that all women have a right to study. All women have a right to live, you know?”

This is the final, hopeful, lesson: Zoom in on that blank map of Afghanistan and you find young men and women who have braved war, dislocation, bombs, threats, and even American high schools because they believe in a country with education, with access to whatever kind of fun, with opportunities to live in the 21st century while respecting the past.

Mihkel Gilmete, as he turns his gunsights away from the vast Afghan countryside and flies back to his island, worries that this future may never come. “Without military presence or some kind of security, there won’t be any education at all,” he says. But young Afghans like Sabera and Nilofar will keep trying to create a new country because, really, what other choice is there?

“There is sometimes an option and there is sometimes not an option,” says Sabera. “I don’t have any other options. The women I see, they suffer. So what would be my point of living if I could not help them? Because of those women who really suffer, because of those women who burn themselves, I am here. I have been given an opportunity and if I cannot use this opportunity, I cannot help them, right? What is the point?”

When Sabera tells me this, I am speaking with her over Skype, and I am worried that I have taken up too much of her time. Midterms are coming and she is holed up in a tiny library study room with a stack of books on her desk and the weight of her country’s future on her shoulders. A year has passed since I read her scholarship essay and sent it along to those at her college who could assist her. We have spoken for about an hour and I say a polite “I better let you go” to excuse myself. She has more to say, though, and will not let me go. Speaking with her is like speaking with a very insistent, stationary tornado. She has a need to communicate, to tell her story, and it comes out in rapid-fire, fluent English. Before signing off she has more lessons for me.

About education: “You can fight for human rights much better with education because you change their minds, you change their attitude. If you fight them or give them money, it will not change their perspective and minds.”

About the Taliban: “The Taliban is a small group. You want to make peace with them? You will make peace with a small group. And still they will have their weapons.”

About Afghan women: “Even though my country is one of the worst in the world for women, still, when we decide something, we do it. Whatever happens. At risk of our lives.”

Finally, she says:

“Help to reverse this idea that it is the Afghans who always fail. If they can see and use technology, then they will gain the power to confront corruption and they will be good allies. Even now there are people who are organizing this. This will get bigger, and, inshallah, we will change the world someday. Change our world, actually.”

The book of coach

Seth Wickersham — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 21:14:10 +0100

This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Feb. 4 Perfect Issue. Subscribe today!

THE MOST INFLUENTIAL football coach of the past 30 years hated his legacy. He hated it from the moment he retired at age 57, in January 1989, days after winning his third Super Bowl as head coach of the 49ers. Bill Walsh had felt fried for years, and during that last season he was in "a claustrophobic panic," as a friend later described it. Or "just eking by," as his son Craig recalls. That 1988 season had been the most wrenching of his career, because the 49ers were not a great team. They were a 10-6 team that happened to win it all, and the grind swallowed Walsh to the point that he was, as his son says, "like a zombie." So he secretly decided to retire during the season, and in the whooping and wet locker room after the Super Bowl, Walsh wept alone, head in his hands. He wasn't happy. He was relieved. It was over.

That image, of course, doesn't square with the Walsh in old footage: elegant and confident, handsome and professorial, walking a damp Candlestick Park sideline in a sweater and khakis, fog-white hair neatly combed, holding a pencil to his lips as he plotted his next move, which always seemed to be two ahead of his opponent. But that's how he was. He always coached through existential torture, with alternating bouts of believing that he was brilliant and that he was incapable of fulfilling his own idea of greatness.

So it was no surprise that Walsh instantly regretted retiring. Believing that he left at least one Super Bowl on the table, Walsh was "melancholy and terrible," according to Craig. That the 1989 49ers were more dominant in the playoffs under new coach George Seifert than they ever were under Walsh made it worse. Walsh hated that Seifert won a championship that year with his team, his West Coast offense, his philosophy; he so hated the ring that the team awarded him that he gave it away. "He didn't want them to win," Craig says. "He couldn't hand over the team he had created to someone else, because he wasn't capable of it."

He tried broadcasting but quit in 1991. "I'm not going to sit for three hours and let some 27-year-old f-- in my ear tell me about the game," he told Brian Billick, former Ravens coach and one of his many protégés. In 1992 Walsh returned to Stanford, where he had coached in the '70s, but left after two losing seasons in three years, his magic gone. "He needed to be Bill Walsh," Billick says. "He needed to be a genius."

So he decided to write a book.

Walsh's tome has team lectures that deal with everything from malcontent agents to not thinking of opponents as personalities.

Pat McDermott has a dream: He wants to coach in the NFL. He is 26 years old, with bulky shoulders, a round face and an eagerness in his blue eyes that shines in the ravenously ambitious. He is in his first job, coaching running backs at the Episcopal Academy in Newtown Square, Pa. Like all coaches, he is drawn to football's impossible challenge, to somehow perfect a series of collisions on each snap into something as coordinated as a symphony. He was drawn to that challenge as a running back, first as a Pennsylvania prep standout and later at West Chester University. After graduating in 2009 with a business degree, he decided to make football his career.

In 2010 McDermott called Andy Reid, the then-Eagles coach now with the Chiefs whose sons he had played high school ball with, and Reid gave him an internship during the following summer's training camp. His tasks were menial -- organizing the coaches' dorm rooms and driving staffers around -- but offensive line coach Howard Mudd and offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg recognized a precociousness in him that once lived in themselves. They invited McDermott to join their early-morning and late-night film sessions. McDermott watched them obsess over the game's never-ending details -- a quarterback's footwork, a guard's hand placement -- and realized that if he wanted to be an elite coach, he needed to learn to think like one.

Last spring he heard about a book written by Bill Walsh that supposedly had a cultlike following among coaches. McDermott searched online and found two books authored by Walsh. One, called The Score Takes Care of Itself, was $13. The other, Finding the Winning Edge, cost a minimum of $100, with special leather-bound, signed editions fetching $1,000. It had been published in 1997 and was no longer in print.

McDermott, earning $2,000 a year at Episcopal Academy and working part time as a personal trainer, bought the cheap one. It was a breezy leadership read, not a hard-core football tome. A few weeks later, McDermott pulled up Finding the Winning Edge and skimmed the reader reviews. "Walsh goes through football from A to Z. Everything, and I mean everything that you would ever want to know about football ... Walsh fleshes out ALL of the details of all of his philosophies on how to run a football organization from management to players ... This book is a NFL Head Coach's blueprint, bible and handbook ..." McDermott purchased it, joining Bill Belichick, Urban Meyer and hundreds more coaches who have it on their shelves. As Billick says, "I don't sit in an office at an NFL facility where I don't see a copy." Last August, interning for the Eagles again, McDermott dived into it, unaware that he had bought a manual for ruining his life.

WALSH BEGAN WRITING alone at his beach house in Monterey, Calif., always at 8 a.m., on yellow legal pads, in pencil, in all caps, his penmanship so clean that it could be its own font. He would tear off sheets and stack them neatly in piles on the floor. This was in 1995, and Walsh didn't know what kind of book he wanted. A leadership guide? A playbook? A coaching manual? A blueprint for front offices? Walsh told Craig he wanted it to be a "real football book," not some light autobiography, waxing poetic about Super Bowls and Montana-to-Rice touchdown passes. He wanted his first book to motivate coaches, not delight fans. The truth was that a career that began in 1956 as a graduate assistant at his alma mater, San Jose State, almost ended many times. He was fired as Cal's offensive coordinator in 1963 because the team didn't win. He resigned as the Raiders' running backs coach in 1966 after one season because the grind overwhelmed him. Owner Al Davis expected coaches to work until he called to allow them to go home for the day. After a few too many nights of Davis not calling, Walsh quit and applied to Stanford business school, ready to leave coaching forever.

What haunted Walsh went deeper than pink slips and long nights. It was his drive to be great at something he couldn't control. His colleagues recall him as the most intelligent coach they'd ever seen, which Walsh not so discreetly agreed with. But he could be sensitive to the point of devastation, crushed by failures large and small. It began in high school, when his coach moved him from quarterback to running back. It continued when he wrote his master's thesis at San Jose State and the 192 pages on the evolution of the passing game in football was panned by professors. The only reason he graduated, according to biographer David Harris, was that his paper included only one footnote; he had done most of the original research himself. And he couldn't get out of his own way during his first head coaching job, at Washington High in the East Bay in the late 1950s. He refused to throw to his best receiver for fear that the team would score too quickly and rob him of the chance to test his new plays.

But Walsh was back within one year. While Walsh's business-school application was being processed, legendary coach Paul Brown, on the recommendation of others, offered Walsh a job coaching tight ends with Cincinnati. Walsh accepted, and three years later, in 1971, he took over the offense, which had been limited by a weak offensive line. Altering the concepts he'd learned in Oakland -- attacking defenses vertically with five receivers -- Walsh devised a system of short, quick passes designed to pick up small chunks of yardage, the West Coast offense in its infancy. Over the next few years, as Walsh turned Ken Anderson into one of the league's most accurate passers, the system worked so well that Walsh began to think he could do something no coach had done: conquer the game itself. His offense became so precise that it couldn't be stopped when executed perfectly, so Walsh became obsessed with always executing perfectly. "It would grind on him," says longtime friend Dick Vermeil. "He was so perceptive and detailed and emotional, and he put so much of himself into a game plan, that he took it personally if it didn't work."

And he took it personally when his brilliance was ignored. He constantly bumped heads with Brown, who was smart enough to keep Walsh around while at the same time -- Walsh believed -- blackballing him from becoming a head coach elsewhere by tainting his name to owners. In 1976 Walsh left Cincinnati to become the Chargers' offensive coordinator. One year later, he got a chance to be a head coach, at Stanford. After the 49ers hired him in 1979, Walsh won a total of eight games in his first two seasons. Ridiculed in the media, he grew so despondent that he considered resigning, convinced he didn't have the answers. Even after Walsh turned an inconsistent Notre Dame quarterback named Joe Montana from a third-round pick into a future Hall of Famer, winning Super Bowls in 1981 and 1984, he felt more angst than validation. "Bill had to prove himself to himself all the time," Vermeil says. "His past success could never overcome a recent failure, and nothing was enough to fill that little hole in his personality."

So he took the technocratic obsession that led to the West Coast offense and adapted it to the entire franchise. As president, GM and coach, Walsh would devise game plans, negotiate with agents, interview secretaries for jobs, instruct marketers, everything. As his offense became the offense around the NFL, opponents marveled at and then copied the so-called 49ers Way. But it was really the Walsh Way, a system flowing from one man's ingenuity and insecurity. By the late '80s, as Walsh's definition of success became so narrow as to be unattainable, the Walsh Way started to cripple the coach. He would sit dazed in his hot tub even after wins, despondent that he had miscalculated a play or two. "I was a tortured person," Walsh later told biographer Harris. "I felt the failure so personally ... eventually I couldn't get out from under it all. You can't live that way long. You can only attack that part of your nervous system so many times."

At his beach house in 1995, surrounded by rising stacks of legal paper, he was training others to attack theirs the same way. Walsh wanted to include everything. In the '80s, he had written job descriptions for everyone in the organization, from the GM to the executive assistant. Those had to be included. So did some of his classic West Coast plays, like 22-Z In, the slant pattern that became the NFL's most unstoppable play. So did his team speeches. He had videotaped most of them over 10 years, using them as a reference and an archive, and hired Craig to transcribe them. Craig spent eight hours a day in front of a VCR, staring at grainy footage, a glimpse of a man whom he seldom saw as a child and struggled to understand as an adult. Walsh had a solution for every situation, from planning pregame meals to always calling basic plays in the tightest situations to give the players confidence. "You realize how complex of a man he was to have all of this going through his brain," Craig says. "How could he have ever relaxed? He didn't."

Craig transcribed the speeches in a month. His dad promised to pay him but never did. Those papers became another pile on Walsh's floor. Craig said, "Dad, you have too many notes."

"No," Walsh said. "You have to understand all these components to get a full understanding."

"Have you read any other sports books?"

"It's not a sports book," Walsh snapped back. "It's a thesis."

At first, McDermott tried to read Finding the Winning Edge cover to cover. But he quickly discovered it's not meant to be absorbed that way. Belichick once referred to it as football "literature," but it's more like a textbook -- 550 pages, 1.8 inches thick, 3.2 pounds, loaded with charts, graphs and bullet points. For example, Walsh includes 57 keys to negotiating contracts ("The negotiator's need for food and sleep can affect his/her ability to function effectively"), 13 pages of sample practices and 108 in-game scenarios.

Its humor fails. "The fundamental goal of passing the ball is to make sure it's caught ... by the intended receiver." Some of the wisdom is painfully obvious. "A quarterback should lead by example." But McDermott understood why Belichick calls it a bible. In a secretive profession, it shows how a legend thinks. It teaches a coach to view the game from 30,000 feet and from the sideline. It provides the tiny details that add up to a philosophy for building a team, winning games and running a franchise. Mostly, it can lure a coach into the illusion that if all the steps are followed, perfection can be attained.

McDermott finished it in a month. Now he revisits it weekly. On this September Wednesday, he's worried that his players will become overconfident. Episcopal Academy is 3-0, outscoring opponents 134-0. Saturday night the Churchmen play Hill School, a rival they should smoke. McDermott is haunted by the specter of a meltdown. So what would Walsh do? McDermott turns to a section titled "An Extended Winning Streak." "Overconfidence can have disastrous consequences if your players feel that they ... have already mastered the basic fundamentals."

McDermott has always been a perfectionist. But since he became a coach, everyone has told him that success requires that instinct to be amplified. Sometimes McDermott pauses to consider the costs of that mentality, but ambition usually overrules. So he flips to Chapter 11, "Preparing to Win." "The core of any type of detailed preparation is the need for maximizing meaningful repetitions ... A 'wasted' rep is a lost opportunity that will be very difficult to make up later."

He jots it down on 3-by-5 cards to use in tomorrow's practice.

WALSH DIDN'T HAVE a ghostwriter, an agent or a publishing contract. So in 1996, he approached Billick at the NFL combine. Walsh was there to give a lecture about hiring minority coaches -- he was an early advocate of coaching diversity, a huge source of pride for him. The two men had known each other since the '70s, when Walsh hired a young Billick to be a 49ers PR staffer; his former pupil was now the Vikings' offensive coordinator. "Brian, I want to put something together, and I need help," Walsh said. "You gotta find someone with a writing background, that knows the game, that understands my structure, that I can work with regularly ..."

"Well, there's a number of guys," Billick said.

"No, no," Walsh interrupted. Right then Billick knew that Walsh wasn't asking but insisting.

"Bill, do you want me to do this with you?"

"Well, I was thinking you'd be good."

"We can do one of two things," Billick said. "We can do a 250-page Bill Walsh's Keys to Success, aim it toward corporate people and make a lot of money. Or we can do a legacy piece. I don't know how financially successful it'll be."

Walsh chose the latter. A week later, Billick opened a new computer file. Thinking for every coach, owner, GM and scout, he asked, "If you could sit with Bill Walsh, what would you want to know?" He wrote up a 150-page outline and four times over the next few months visited Walsh in Monterey, armed with questions and a tape recorder, filling dozens of cassettes, which Billick now calls "my prized possessions."

For some reason, Walsh never gave Billick any of the stacks of paper that he had compiled over the years. He just answered Billick's questions, usually until late afternoon, when the former coach, then 65, would become exhausted and start to repeat himself. Billick, not wanting to embarrass his hero, would say, "I'm tired now." And they'd pick up the next morning. Faxes from Walsh always greeted Billick when he returned home, labeled as "points," because that's how Walsh thought. Point One would be the relationship between the GM and the scouting staff. Point Two would be how marketers should approach selling a first-year coach. Point Three would be how a linebacker should handle a pulling guard. Over months Billick incorporated everything into a 500-page manuscript. He asked a writer friend, Jim Peterson, to take a look. "It was disjointed," Peterson says now. "It didn't have a purpose. It was a mind-dump, not a book." He called Billick and said, "We need to start over."

Working off the note cards at practice, McDermott is not just about good reps. He's about good Walsh reps. He repeatedly orders the scout team to "go hard." When running backs make lazy cuts, he sternly reminds them of their "aiming points." When a tailback catches a pass with one hand, McDermott sighs and yells, "Two hands!"

He is walking a fine line between nitpicking and instructing, knowing that instructive nitpicking is the Walsh Way. And the Walsh Way is the Episcopal Academy Way. At least three of his colleagues, it turns out, also own the book; it sits in head coach Todd Fairlie's office, a resource at the ready to feed what the coaches think will make them happy, on game day, in practice, in life. The rush of coaching a perfect play, McDermott admits, is addictive.

Practices on Thursday and Friday are crisp and clean. Aside from a few errant shotgun snaps, the players flawlessly execute the first 15 scripted offensive plays, another Walsh touch. But because the coaches are coaches, they push harder. Huddling with the running backs after practice, a day before the game, McDermott says, "We have a lot we can do better. A lot."

THEY STARTED OVER. Peterson became Walsh's de facto co-writer and produced a new outline. He reworked Billick's draft, trimming as he went. Walsh loved military references, even from Nazis, all of which Peterson cut. "Having an excessive number of quotes from the bad guys distracted from the point," Peterson says.

But for every quote that was cut, Walsh wanted to add 10 pages. He wanted a chapter on salary cap management, about which he had only rudimentary knowledge. He put Peterson on the phone with an NFL capologist, and Peterson wrote the section as if it came straight from the legend's lips. Then Walsh wanted a chapter about the media, and as Peterson says, "His only contribution was 'The media sucks.'" So Peterson researched media strategies and wrote a chapter about deflecting questions and never allowing reporters to get under your skin -- skills that Walsh neither possessed nor practiced.

All along, Peterson was working on spec. He never signed a contract or even talked money with Walsh. Spending hours mining the coach's psyche was worth it. Though Walsh had decided not to write an autobiography, it ended up being autobiographical anyway. In the third person, he encouraged assistants who worried they'd never become a head coach. "Many people erroneously think they have only one chance to succeed, and if they miss that chance, they are doomed to failure. In fact, most people have several opportunities to succeed." And he warned about the perils of retirement. "Life after football can be an extremely traumatic experience."

In 1996 Peterson sequestered himself to write. He gave Walsh pages to review, and Walsh would blanket them with comments, always in pencil. Then new ideas would occur to him, and he'd fax over additional notes. Walsh hated to waste paper, so he'd send Peterson torn magazine pages with feedback in the margins. As Peterson neared completion, Walsh's perfectionism kicked in. Walsh suddenly wanted the book to be about coaching and business, a niche read and a bestseller, everything to everyone. Then he wanted a chapter on the Catch, Montana to Dwight Clark in the 1981 NFC championship game. Peterson argued that if they included X's and O's, booksellers wouldn't put it in the front of the store but back in sports. Walsh ignored him, adding 82 pages of inside-football appendixes and 55 pages of play diagrams. As Craig says, "He wanted people to know that he had that all in him, that all his success didn't just happen."

Then Walsh wanted people to know that it wasn't all him. He insisted on including inspirational quotes from his coaching buddies, so, as Billick says, "We had to put in every slapd -- he'd ever met." The book swelled so much -- to more than 800 pages -- that Peterson suggested breaking it into volumes. But Walsh wanted one comprehensive guide. Finally, in mid-1997, Peterson cut it to 550 pages and, acting as an agent, sold it to Sports Publishing Inc. Walsh received a $20,000 advance. Walsh never paid Peterson but did put his name on the cover, in small type at the bottom, under a photo of Walsh waving to the Candlestick crowd after his Hall of Fame induction in 1993, appearing neither happy nor satisfied. Still, as Peterson says, "I was honored."

THE BOOK WAS published in December 1997. All 36,000 copies quickly sold. Coaches would approach Billick before games and ask whether he could get them one. Nearly a decade after Walsh retired from the NFL, his influence on football had never been greater. Seven of his former coaching pupils had become head coaches; nearly every team ran at least some West Coast offense concepts. For those who coached under Walsh, Finding the Winning Edge was a study of the genius beyond his playbook. For those who coached against him, it was a window into the mind of their nemesis. For Belichick, it was validation. It was published during the crossroads of his career, while he was working as a Jets assistant. The book reinforced Belichick's own belief in detailed planning, which is why he calls it and Jack Welch and the GE Way the two most influential books of his career.

For most, though, Finding the Winning Edge was a painfully bracing shower. In 1997 David Shaw thought he knew football. His father was an NFL assistant coach, and Shaw had played at Stanford under Walsh and now was an Eagles assistant. But as he read, "I realized I had no idea what I was doing." Armed with a highlighter, Shaw started over again, both with the book and what he thought he knew about the game. He learned that therapy should be considered during a losing streak, because, as Walsh wrote, "Typically, the head coach has no emotional support system." He learned the 29 ways Walsh used to determine whether a player had a drug problem: "No. 6: He began playing the entire game in a lethargic manner." Shaw learned how to evaluate centers: "A large body can be a hindrance in a small area." He learned how a head coach should fire assistants: "You must take painstaking care in detailing and documenting his lack of production."

Now age 40 and Stanford's head coach, Shaw sits in his office and flips through one of his two copies. He stops at the quarterback section and reads aloud. "Good passing involves accuracy, timing and throwing the ball with enough touch so that it's catchable, and having a great sense of anticipation. He must be able to handle situations in a composed, systematic manner. He must be courageous and highly competitive." Shaw shakes his head. "I unknowingly quote this all the time when talking about Andrew Luck."

The book has held up over time. Walsh correctly predicted that hurry-up, one-word offenses would come to dominate football. His light, fast practices became the template for what the NFL's CBA now mandates. Urban Meyer has chapters bookmarked for when he needs a problem solved. James Harris, the football program's chief of staff at Oregon, used the job descriptions to reorganize his department last year. Browns personnel executive Michael Lombardi, a former scout under Walsh, bought it for Arizona State basketball assistant coach Eric Musselman and for Indiana football head coach Kevin Wilson, who read it on a Florida beach last summer and highlighted so much that in certain chapters "there's more yellow than white."

And yet the book's limits are as obvious as its strengths. As veteran NFL coach Al Saunders, a close friend of Walsh's, says, "It can't win for you. You can't adopt Bill's ability to react. You can't get the human element." In other words, as much as the coach wrote the book to make you Bill Walsh, you can't be Bill Walsh, the great coach. Only Bill Walsh, the imperfect perfectionist.

Game day. McDermott wears a headset and sits in the coaches' box, an unpainted shed above the stands, during the action. His copy of Finding the Winning Edge is at home, yet its blessings and curses hover. At halftime Episcopal Academy leads 35-0. But Walsh wouldn't be pleased, and McDermott and Fairlie aren't. "I'm challenging you to improve," Fairlie tells the team. "That was a sloppy half of football. We have to get better."

The final score is 42-7. After the game, the coaches stand at midfield, waiting to address the players. Nobody is happy. McDermott's arms are crossed. Fairlie's hands are on his hips; he's angry that the team was flagged for five personal fouls, angry that his quarterback changed the depth of a route so that the receiver would score a touchdown, not just get a first down. "It's a win," Fairlie says. "But the greed and selfishness? F--ing unbelievable. They're starting to care about their stats."

Fairlie turns to address the players. "You can't be thinking about yourself and not the team." McDermott nods, like he thinks a great coach should. But as he looks at the players' chastised faces, he wonders if maybe, just maybe, the coaches are too tight. After a few minutes of lecturing, Fairlie seems to realize it too. "Hey, guys," he says. "Smile. You won." Nobody does.

Two hours after the game, the coaches sit at a bar, downing beers and wings. Any of the half a dozen other patrons would assume that these coaches are there after a loss. In a way, they are. As one round of drinks becomes two and soon three, the coaches dwell on mistakes but not successes, what each player can improve on but not what he did well, as if they're trying to out-angst each other.

McDermott sits at the end of the bar, more observer than participant. The dark room is lit only by the flat-screen TVs showing college games, filled with shots of coaches throwing headsets and screaming at refs, players and their own assistants. Sometimes at moments like this, McDermott is able to see his profession clearly, and through it, himself. Why try to find the winning edge if winning isn't enough? "That nobody was pleased ... I'm not sure that's a good thing," he says later.

He vows to ease up. But as the team keeps winning, McDermott uses another Walsh technique -- "the one-point underdog attitude" -- to make his players believe that unless they improve on their almost-perfect play, they're beatable. The Churchmen finish the season 10-0, winning the league championship 21-14. Afterward McDermott says, "It would have been more gratifying if it had been a two-score game."

CRAIG WALSH SITS in a conference room of the Silicon Valley real estate firm where he works. He's 53 and barely resembles his father. Craig's hair is still dark. He smiles easily and frequently. On this summer day, Craig opens Finding the Winning Edge to his father's dedication note to his family. "My dad," he says, shaking his head. "Right off the bat, the first thing he says is, 'We shared the disappointments.' This is a guy who won three freaking Super Bowls, coach of the year twice, and is in the Hall of Fame! He was a modern Shakespearean tragedy."

Craig is as conflicted about the book as he is about his old man. He remembers how his dad blew up after holding a first galley. Pages were upside down. Entire chapters were upside down. After the printing mistakes were corrected and it was published properly, Walsh mailed signed copies to his friends and traveled around the country to discuss it with coaches and owners. But Walsh being Walsh, he couldn't bring himself to actually read it. He hated the book the way he hated his legacy -- it wasn't perfect. He regretted using a small publisher and blamed Peterson for it, cutting him off forever. He sued the publisher for rights, a case that was later settled. And he hated how dense, dry and narrowly focused it was. Immediately, Walsh began writing another book, which he wanted to be easy to read, filled with stories about Montana-to-Rice, published by a major New York outfit and, finally, a commercial hit.

But in 2004, he was diagnosed with leukemia, and the project got derailed. Three years later, when his life was measured in days, not months, one of the last things he told Craig was "Finish this book." Craig, along with a co-writer, did just that. The Score Takes Care of Itself was 250 pages and hit shelves in 2009. It's not in every coach's office.

ON A HIGH SHELF that can be accessed only by forklift, in a nondescript warehouse in downtown San Francisco, there are crates filled with an idea and a person and an obsession. After his father died, Craig hired a packing company to pack up his dad's house and move its contents. In this warehouse sits boxed-up memorabilia -- game balls, trophies, photos -- and boxed-up secrets, the yellow legal pads that once grew from Walsh's office floor, the early drafts of Finding the Winning Edge, the scribbled notes and faxes.

Craig thinks of his father when he drives by, because in a very real way his dad lives in that warehouse, everything he was and wanted to be. Sometimes Craig wonders what to do with those notes. He has considered reorganizing and republishing them into something less arduous, a final gift to football.

But in the end, it's too much to unpack.

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Giant squid! To catch a monster, bring patience and plenty of cash

Arikia Millikan — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 20:03:16 +0100

Giant squid – also known also by their scientific name Architeuthis – have been the stuff of both legend and science for hundreds of years. Stories of great tentacled Kraken in Scandinavia and in the scientific writings of Pliny the Elder are some of the earliest indications that such monsters were thought to exist. Giant squid have also left evidence of their existence tangled up in fishing nets and washed ashore all over the world. Despite their massive size (adults can grow up to about 40 feet from tip to tentacle and weigh up to 610 pounds) searching for them has been a needle-in-a-haystack endeavor.

The first video footage of a giant squid in its natural habitat will air this Sunday on the Discovery Channel in Monster Squid: The Giant is Real. The show is the culmination of years of searching, and a successful six-week expedition 550 miles south of Tokyo in June of 2012.

The search

"It’s not that they’ve been evading us,” explains Craig McClain, Assistant Director of Science National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and founder of Deep Sea News. “It's more that our daily activities don't overlap with their daily activities."

Only around five percent of the oceans on Earth have been explored, and everything about the behavior of the elusive giant squid has been inferred from chance sightings at sea and dissecting beached carcases. Unlike its relative the humboldt squid which hunts in schools, the giant squid is thought to be a solitary creature. Also, until about twenty years ago, the best submersibles were made of opaque metals, and no camera could withstand the pressure and cold of the deepest waters.

Discovery and Japanese television company NHK began plotting the ultimate giant squid mission in 2006, but after watching repeated and fruitless attempts by National Geographic and others, there was hesitation about investing resources. But premiere squid scientists Tsunemi Kubodera of Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science, American oceanographer Edie Widder, and Kiwi renegade marine biologist Steve O'Shea convinced producers that they could find the squid. But they still needed the equipment.

Enter Ray Dalio, billionaire manager of the world's largest hedge fund, who just happened to own a fully equipped research vessel. Dalio made his 56-meter motor yacht, the Alucia, available for NHK and Discovery to charter for the expedition, along with three submersible vessels, one of which is "the sexiest, most contemporary deep submersible that money can buy," according to the manufacturers.

"He really just wanted to have an opportunity to go under water, just he and his family," said Bruce Jones, CEO of Triton Subs, who manufactured the craft used to capture the footage. "Then he decided that since he had these assets, he might as well use them for some scientific progress."

The team knew this was likely to be the last opportunity they had to search for the mythic creature, and on June 22nd, 2012, they boarded the Alucia and set off for six weeks afloat in the vast, blue sea.

To catch Architeuthis

Kubodera had captured still pictures of giant squid near the Ogasawara Islands, so the team used that as a starting point, setting sail from Sagami Bay.

Patrick Lahey, President of Triton Subs, joined the team on the Alucia to train the pilots and crew members in operating the submersibles. Three people would be in a submersible on every dive: a scientist, a photographer, and a pilot. During the six weeks they kept an around-the-clock schedule of missions. Each of the 55 jaunts below the surface lasted eight to 10 hours, and they took full advantage of the sub's capabilities, often reaching its max depth of 1000 meters.

“You are down there and you are absolutely lost in time and space,” O’Shea said. Lahey says, “we all have to be a little bit crazy to do this,” because these expeditions are often emotionally and physically draining on crew members.

Even the world's foremost giant squid researchers know virtually nothing about the way the giant squid behaves in its natural habitat, so they were forced to guess at how to lure it in front of a camera. Each of the researchers took a different approach, with success hinging on one main unknown: do giant squid prefer the lights on or off?

Widder, who has a PhD in Neurobiology and specializes in bioluminescence, sunk to the depths in the dark, extending a glass orb with flashing LEDs as bait. Her goal was to mimic the light display of a deep-sea jellyfish called atolla, which release a glowing chemical while being attacked. She'd observed that smaller squid were attracted to this jellyfish, but had never found any evidence that squid eat them. She concluded that squid were using the jellyfish as a “bioluminescent burglar alarm,” eating whatever was eating the jellyfish.

"You've got this small thing lighting up because this medium sized thing is munching on it, and the goal of the small thing is to get away from what's eating it," she explained.

Widder didn't capture any video footage of Architeuthis while in the submersible, but she did capture five different recordings of giant squids by dangling a “Medusa” — her bioluminescent lures and a camera system — from a buoy on the surface.

O'Shea took a drastically different approach. He armed himself with a mixture of chemicals extracted from the mantles, arms and gonads of fully mature male and female giant squids, which he predicted would act as a pheromone to attract adults, and descended into the abyss "lights blazing, singing Neil Diamond, making as much noise as possible, squirting all sorts of chemicals into the water.” Why, if a major hypothesis of his respected colleague was that the giant squids have an aversion to white light? “Because I firmly believe that these squid don't give a damn about light or sound."

When it comes to speculation on the mental prowess of the giant squid, O’Shea is dismissive. “I think it's one of the most stupid animals in the ocean. The only thing going through that 20 gram brain is eating and breeding.”

In his dives, O’Shea had lots of creatures attack the bait, and even the sub — on a 500 meter dive they once felt a thump from below and found themselves shrouded in a massive ink cloud. O’Shea saw more squid than anyone else during his dives with the lights on, but none were of the giant variety.

In the end, the successful approach was Kubodera’s, who descended like a deep-sea ninja, as quietly and invisibly as possible. Like Widder, he made use of the infrared lighting system and turned off everything electronic in the sub, including the temperature control system. He thought giant squids may be especially sensitive to sound vibrations. He sat staring out into the black abyss for eight hours at a time, cameras aimed at a diamond squid as bait.

And finally, on one lucky occasion, Architeuthis approached.

What followed was an inter-species staring competition. The squid explored the bait suspended in front of the sub, “sitting there for the most of 18 minutes looking beautiful,” as O’Shea put it.

O’Shea and Kubodera have held opposing hypotheses about the giant squid’s hunting behavior for as long as they’ve known each other, and were hoping that finally seeing it in motion would settle the bet once and for all.

Kubodera thought the animal would be an aggressive hunter darting around and quickly projecting its tentacles out to pull prey into its mouth. "I always thought that it was a dopey, giant thing that was floating at a 45 degree angle through the water column, dangling the two long tentacles down," O’Shea said.

When they watched the video footage, each declared their own hypothesis confirmed. O'Shea says he shed a single tear when he saw the giant squid on video for the first time. "All I felt was overjoyed. It had now been done. We can now relax. We can now move on.”

Back on land, producers at Discovery are ecstatic for the giant squid’s 15 minutes, and grateful their gamble paid off. "Had we not succeeded I'm not sure anybody would have tried again," said Christina Weber, VP for Production and Development for Specials at Discovery.

To celebrate the discovery, Dalio flew famous biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins out to meet the research team on the yacht, which Dawkins later blogged about. While the scientists no doubt delighted in breaking new ground, their true bounty was the potential for the giant squid to act as an emblem of the deep, as a symbol with the power to convince the average television watcher of the necessity of preserving the earth's oceans.

The question remains as to whether viewers will see the squid as majestic and beautiful, or as a monster like the show’s title asserts. “We are in the entertainment business. We don't always want to preach to the choir,” Weber said, explaining that putting “monster” in the title was a ploy to lure in an audience beyond the scientific types who are already inclined to tune in.

"We're driven to find all this weird and wonderful stuff on film for you guys, but at the same time what's driving us is conservation. We use these charismatic megafauna as our hook to lure you into far more important matters,” O’Shea said. "People are going to see this on television and start giving a damn about the marine environment.”

The giant squid may have been the holy grail, but it wasn’t quite the final frontier. There is evidence of a squid even bigger than the giant squid out there called the colossal squid. Now that the elements for successful deep sea exploration voyages have been established, it’s only a matter of time before someone attempts to capture the colossal squid in Antarctica.

Why did men stop wearing high heels?

William Kremer — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:55:25 +0100

For generations they have signified femininity and glamour - but a pair of high heels was once an essential accessory for men.

Beautiful, provocative, sexy - high heels may be all these things and more, but even their most ardent fans wouldn't claim they were practical.

They're no good for hiking or driving. They get stuck in things. Women in heels are advised to stay off the grass - and also ice, cobbled streets and posh floors.

And high heels don't tend to be very comfortable. It is almost as though they just weren't designed for walking in.

Originally, they weren't.

"The high heel was worn for centuries throughout the near east as a form of riding footwear," says Elizabeth Semmelhack of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

Good horsemanship was essential to the fighting styles of the Persia - the historical name for modern-day Iran.

"When the soldier stood up in his stirrups, the heel helped him to secure his stance so that he could shoot his bow and arrow more effectively," says Semmelhack.

At the end of the 16th Century, Persia's Shah Abbas I had the largest cavalry in the world. He was keen to forge links with rulers in Western Europe to help him defeat his great enemy, the Ottoman Empire.

So in 1599, Abbas sent the first Persian diplomatic mission to Europe - it called on the courts of Russia, Germany and Spain.

A wave of interest in all things Persian passed through Western Europe. Persian style shoes were enthusiastically adopted by aristocrats, who sought to give their appearance a virile, masculine edge that, it suddenly seemed, only heeled shoes could supply.

As the wearing of heels filtered into the lower ranks of society, the aristocracy responded by dramatically increasing the height of their shoes - and the high heel was born.

In the muddy, rutted streets of 17th Century Europe, these new shoes had no utility value whatsoever - but that was the point.

"One of the best ways that status can be conveyed is through impracticality," says Semmelhack, adding that the upper classes have always used impractical, uncomfortable and luxurious clothing to announce their privileged status.

"They aren't in the fields working and they don't have to walk far."

When it comes to history's most notable shoe collectors, the Imelda Marcos of his day was arguably Louis XIV of France. For a great king, he was rather diminutively proportioned at only 5ft 4in (1.63m).

He supplemented his stature by a further 4in (10cm) with heels, often elaborately decorated with depictions of battle scenes.

The heels and soles were always red - the dye was expensive and carried a martial overtone. The fashion soon spread overseas - Charles II of England's coronation portrait of 1661 features him wearing a pair of enormous red, French style heels - although he was over 6ft (1.85m) to begin with.

In the 1670s, Louis XIV issued an edict that only members of his court were allowed to wear red heels. In theory, all anyone in French society had to do to check whether someone was in favour with the king was to glance downwards. In practice, unauthorised, imitation heels were available.

Although Europeans were first attracted to heels because the Persian connection gave them a macho air, a craze in women's fashion for adopting elements of men's dress meant their use soon spread to women and children.

"In the 1630s you had women cutting their hair, adding epaulettes to their outfits," says Semmelhack.

"They would smoke pipes, they would wear hats that were very masculine. And this is why women adopted the heel - it was in an effort to masculinise their outfits."

From that time, Europe's upper classes followed a unisex shoe fashion until the end of the 17th Century, when things began to change again.

"You start seeing a change in the heel at this point," says Helen Persson, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. "Men started to have a squarer, more robust, lower, stacky heel, while women's heels became more slender, more curvaceous."

The toes of women's shoes were often tapered so that when the tips appeared from her skirts, the wearer's feet appeared to be small and dainty.

Fast forward a few more years and the intellectual movement that came to be known as the Enlightenment brought with it a new respect for the rational and useful and an emphasis on education rather than privilege. Men's fashion shifted towards more practical clothing. In England, aristocrats began to wear simplified clothes that were linked to their work managing country estates.

It was the beginning of what has been called the Great Male Renunciation, which would see men abandon the wearing of jewellery, bright colours and ostentatious fabrics in favour of a dark, more sober, and homogeneous look. Men's clothing no longer operated so clearly as a signifier of social class, but while these boundaries were being blurred, the differences between the sexes became more pronounced.

"There begins a discussion about how men, regardless of station, of birth, if educated could become citizens," says Semmelhack.

"Women, in contrast, were seen as emotional, sentimental and uneducatable. Female desirability begins to be constructed in terms of irrational fashion and the high heel - once separated from its original function of horseback riding - becomes a primary example of impractical dress."

High heels were seen as foolish and effeminate. By 1740 men had stopped wearing them altogether.

But it was only 50 years before they disappeared from women's feet too, falling out of favour after the French Revolution.

By the time the heel came back into fashion, in the mid-19th Century, photography was transforming the way that fashions - and the female self-image - were constructed.

Pornographers were amongst the first to embrace the new technology, taking pictures of naked women for dirty postcards, positioning models in poses that resembled classical nudes, but wearing modern-day high heels.

Elizabeth Semmelhack, author of Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated Shoe, believes that this association with pornography led to high heels being seen as an erotic adornment for women.

The 1960s saw a return of low heeled cowboy boots for men and some dandies strutted their stuff in platform shoes in the 1970s.

But the era of men walking around on their toes seems to be behind us. Could we ever return to an era of guys squeezing their big hairy feet into four-inch, shiny, brightly coloured high heels?

"Absolutely," says Semmelhack. There is no reason, she believes, why the high heel cannot continue to be ascribed new meanings - although we may have to wait for true gender equality first.

"If it becomes a signifier of actual power, then men will be as willing to wear it as women."

The Why Factor is broadcast on BBC World Service on Fridays at 18:30 GMT. Listen to the heels episode via iPlayer or The Why Factor download.

Why It's Time to Binge-Watch Parenthood : Hollywood Prospectus Blog

Juliet Litman — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:38:04 +0100

Resize Font: A^- A⁺

NBC's Parenthood ended its fourth season last night. Unfortunately, we're all caught up, but the majority of you are not watching this show (we know this because a healthy network series does not have a January 22 season finale), and that's a mistake. You really should be, and now is the time to marathon through its 68 episodes. Binge-watching Parenthood is a lot more like having a heroin habit than you think it is: You gorge yourself in a daze, lose all sense of will, and completely succumb to a foreign substance. You are ashamed by your consumption but can think of nothing else but getting more. Your emotions become frayed, you try to reach the apex that you felt at first by doing more, but doing more just leads to … doing more. Next thing you know, it's 6:27 a.m., you can’t sleep, you can’t cry, and you can’t stop. Here’s the good part, though: Watching Parenthood won’t turn you into a homeless prostitute. The worst thing that watching Parenthood will do is make you cry so many times that you completely abandon all attempts to maintain any sort of steely, unshakable manliness. Parenthood makes you feel, and goddammit, isn’t that enough reason to binge-watch alone? No? Fine then, we have eight more.
— Jacoby

The Joy of Dax

Jacoby: Remember Ashton Kutcher’s hype-man/partner/bro bro from Punk’d? The dude who made Justin Timberlake cry? Yeah, that guy, Dax Shepard. He disappeared for a bit after Punk’d, confessing, “Mostly my love was Jack Daniel's and cocaine,” then popped up in tabloids for getting super swole, and dating actresses and stuff. Since then, he has gotten sober, gone vegan, stayed swole, and gotten engaged to Kristen Bell. Now he is absolutely bodying the role of Crosby Braverman on Parenthood. Crosby is far and away the most intriguing, entertaining, and dynamic of the Braverman clan. When Juliet, Simmons, and I made the Braverman Power Rankings, we put Crosby at the no. 1 spot and went straight to no. 2 without even discussing it. (By the way, Braverman Power Rankings is something that we do at the office.)

While I realize that Dax Shepard basically is playing a Berkeley version of himself, his ability to showcase his inner loving, concerned parent and husband while remaining the irresponsible, likable, super-fun baby boy of the family is some of the best TV acting I have seen. None of us will ever meet our child at 5 years old, marry a chick who was sleeping with a doctor a couple weeks ago, and go into business with our brother. But somehow Dax Shepard shows you exactly how to handle these super-awkward, potentially nervous-breakdown-inducing events, just in case. Oh yeah, he also slept with Minka Kelly. Did I not mention that Lyla Garrity is on this show? I would make that its own reason for binge-watching but, ya know, that would be a little pervy.

Litman: You forgot lovable. Crosby Braverman is completely lovable. If you don't love Crosby, you have no soul.

Amber Holt, World's Best Hipster

Litman: I guarantee you've seen Mae Whitman in something before. First she was everyone's daughter — George Clooney's (One Fine Day), Sandra Bullock's (Hope Floats), and the President's (Independence Day) — and then she was television's most forgettable girlfriend, Arrested Development's Ann Veal (her?). She may have achieved cult status by way of her AD association, but now she actually deserves it for her role as Amber Holt, the hipstery, existentially lost daughter of Sarah (Lauren Graham). Amber might be one of the least realistic characters on the show: She managed to live in a Berkeley studio on a barista's salary, she applied to only one college (not early decision), and her hairstyle changes every third episode. But none of that matters. Mae Whitman sells Amber as a wise older sister so well that you never question the guidance she gives to her brother and cousins. Even though she didn't go to college and is sort of a mess, you keep watching her, constantly expecting her to break out. Amber is a star. She just hasn't been discovered yet. She's the most compelling singer-songwriter since Jewel whipped out her guitar in the bathroom stall, and with her black plastic glasses, Mae Whitman as Amber Holt gives a good name to hipsters everywhere.

Jacoby: There is good reason that we had Amber second on our power rankings: She's the sister/daughter/bestie that we all wish we had — caring, present, and extremely fashionable. Crosby is one affair away from relinquishing the top spot.

The Cry Moments

Jacoby: This show is going to make you cry. This show is going to make you call/text/hug someone in your life and tell them you love them. Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t fight it. Embrace it. Let the tears flow, let the snot drip, and let your face crumble into rubble like a toppled building. You are powerless over it, so enjoy it. I swear that in the writers' room where they have those corkboards with colored index cards on them, they have a special color for “cry moments” and put two of them in every episode, one at the end of the fourth segment and one at the end of the fifth. The equation works like this:

Major Character Disappointed + Revelation + Long Reaction Shot + 1970s Easy Listening Folk Jam = Cry Moment

There is something about being moved to tears that makes you feel alive, makes you remember what is important, and makes you want to make changes in your life. Yeah, Parenthood will do that for you, no bullshit.

Litman: There is only one true way to judge a Parenthood episode. Yes, you will cry every time, but how many times and at what intensity? The show has spoiled me so much that I'm only satisfied when I tear up once and sob a second time. Preferably in that order.

Relatability

Jacoby: The people who make this television program have written in a plotline, a character, a scene, or a set for everybody. Only child? Joel and Julia only have one, too. Wait, you don’t have any parents at all? Season 3 is for you. Have a brother? Wait until Adam and Crosby open The Luncheonette. Have a sister? Juliet already told you about Amber. Have a mean dad? Check out Adam and Zeek. Have a nice dad? Check out Crosby and Jabbar. Have a dad-at-large? Seth and Drew. The writers have so flawlessly incorporated impressive family, professional, and sexual dynamics that you will undoubtedly relate to at least one relationship, struggling along with the characters. I want to rewatch the whole damn thing right now.

Litman: I can already anticipate the objections coming from people with small families. Remember this: We all have parents, and the show covers many permutations of parent-kid relationships: overbearing parents, absentee parents, single parents, alcoholic parents, teenage parents. There will be something for you.

It's Less Predictable Than You Think

Litman: Since cable has become the domain for television's "prestige" and "cool" shows, network series have remained in a stasis of melodrama and predictability (I think; I mainly watch reality TV and British soaps). Sure, Parenthood can't escape the melodrama, but at least it resolves its story lines in ways you wouldn't expect. Since the show started, very few recurring characters got the promotion to regular status, and the characters usually make choices with consequences that reverberate through it. (WARNING: If you are a spoiler-phobe, look away now.) In this most recent season, Drew and his girlfriend make the type of very realistic decision that is hardly seen on television, especially network television. Before that, Haddie gets mad and frustrated with her younger brother, whose Asperger's syndrome dominates the family's choices. She yells at him and storms off. Who hasn't wanted to do that?

Jacoby: This is important for the binge-watching public. Remember, season-long story lines are not meant to be consumed in a binge. And often when consumed so, they show their flaws. Even in a binge environment, Parenthood will keep you on your toes. But be prepared to see Sarah in like 14 love triangles over a 24-hour period. I never got over that.

Mastering the Details

Litman: Parenthood's investment in believable family dynamics and contoured characters is evident in even the most minor elements of the show. Kristina Braverman's (Monica Potter) mom-hair is my favorite example. She has wavy blond hair that's long enough to be styled, but usually it's just pulled back in a ponytail, with various bobby pins to help keep it out of her face. It's attractive but completely practical. Kristina has three children, two of whom are very demanding, and she even tries to work. Of course she doesn't have shiny, flowy Kate Middleton hair! The supposed doctors of Grey's Anatomy and every other workplace drama should really take note. It's a small touch, but it adds dimension.

The second-most noteworthy aspect of Kristina is the syncopated rhythm of her speech. She rails off a string of words at one volume before landing on the end of her sentence, and, somehow, her TV daughter Haddie speaks exactly the same way. It's as if she's really her daughter and she picked up the mannerism. It's the kind of thing you'd expect to find more frequently on television, but it's actually fairly unique. This level of detail suffuses many of the show's relationships, and often I forget this is not a real family (probably because I wish it were).

Jacoby: Full disclosure: I've never really thought about this. But isn’t that exactly the point? Sure, they do wild shit, like have Jasmine get engaged to Crosby hours after sleeping with someone else, but the little things never bother me. Good point.

The Opening Credits

Jacoby: Every show starts with the entire Braverman clan in the backyard of the grandparents’ house, having dinner to the sound of Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young,” under the glow of well-placed string lights. If there were ever a better advertisement for “love your spouse, have a bunch of kids, and everything will be fine,” I've never seen it. Binge-watch this show and I promise you will tell your significant other that you love them more often and spend an extra five minutes on the phone with your mother. If that doesn't seem like reason enough to get onboard, this show isn’t for you.

Litman: Everything Jacoby said about feelings is true, but more importantly, WHERE HAVE ALL THE OPENING THEME SONGS GONE? When did television shows get too cool for a 30-second intro? Friends was defined by its theme as much as anything else. In my mind, the Cheers theme song is as iconic as the bar itself. Parenthood respects and refines this important television tradition.

Ray Romano Is Waiting for You in Season 4

Litman: I never thought I'd say this, but I truly love Ray Romano. His character on Parenthood is the perfect blend of jerk, curmudgeon, and charmer. I already explained that guest stars rarely get promoted, but I haven't wanted that to happen more than with Ray's character. Watching him with Lauren Graham is so entertaining that it's worth getting all the way through the season just to see him. Seriously. Ray Romano! Who knew? It's worth watching to simply understand this Romano phenomenon.

Jacoby: I have no idea if Ray Romano is actually a dick in real life. However, after watching his run on Parenthood, I can tell you with confidence that he is either a dick in real life or a truly talented actor. I choose to believe the former.

Conservatives Have Their Worst Week Ever

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:14:45 +0100

Have Republicans, and the right wing in general, ever been more disjointed? More confused? More incapable of getting out of their own way?

Watching America's political conservatives try to counter-maneuver opposite Barack Obama's re-inauguration over the course of the last week has been an incredible comedy – like watching the Three Stooges try to perform a liver transplant on roller skates.

Let's review the basic timeline. First, Political Media, a conservative action group, decided to try to make an appeal to win the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere by declaring January 19th – previously known as Martin Luther King Day, to the rest of us – to be "Gun Appreciation Day."

On Daily Beast: No Winners in Angry Gun Control Debate

They solicited hundreds of sponsors and sought to get 50 million people to sign a goofball petition (written in the style of the Declaration of Independence, with a plethora of "Whereas…"-es... Why do gun people insist on trying to use 18^th-century syntax?) against the "tyrannical governments" that were out to take their guns. "Gun Appreciation Day" would also involve gun shows and other local events all over the country, meant as a counter-balance to the candle-toting gun control protests that were springing up over last weekend in anticipation of Obama's inauguration and the rumored plans for new gun legislation.

But even before their excellent idea gets out of the gate, it stalls out, as obnoxious reporters check the list of "Gun Appreciation Day" sponsors and find that the "American Third Position," a group that purports to represent the "unique political interests of White Americans," is one of the event's sponsors.

So now, Political Media has not only decided to hold its Gun Appreciation Event on a holiday meant to celebrate the life of a black leader who was a symbol of nonviolent protest and who was killed by a white man with a gun, it's done so with the financial help of some yahoo white supremacist group. But this doesn't derail the whole thing, as it's of course just an innocent mistake. Political Media kicks "Third Position" out and appropriately issues a statement, saying, "We have removed the group and reiterate this event is not about racial politics, it is about gun politics."

So far, so good, right? Well, then they go and actually hold their "Gun Appreciation Day" rallies all over the country, on Martin Luther King Day. And what happens? Five people get accidentally shot!

You can't make this stuff up. In three separate incidents – one in North Carolina, one in Ohio and one in Indiana – gun-loving real Americans did their darndest to worsen the demographics in the favor of the gun control lobby by blowing themselves away with accidental discharges. They failed, fortunately – all five victims in the three incidents survived – but you literally can't script a worse outcome for a political sideshow meant to highlight Americans' love of the wholesome, safe exercise of gun rights.

In North Carolina, three people – a 50-year-old man, a 54-year-old woman, and a 50-year-old retired sheriff's deputy – were injured when someone pulled a shotgun out of a display case and the 12-gauge accidentally went off, spraying the three people with birdshot.

In Ohio, a gun dealer was "checking out" a semi-automatic handgun he'd brought to a show at the Medina County Fairgrounds when he "accidentally" pulled the trigger, forgetting that, while he'd removed the magazine, he'd left a round in the chamber. According to the local police chief, the bullet "struck the floor, then a longtime friend of the gun dealer. The man was wounded in the arm and leg."

The man was rushed by helicopter to a hospital in Cleveland. I sure hope that dude has private health insurance that he paid for. If it turns out that taxpayers had to foot the bill for a freaking helicopter flight to rescue the friend of some gun-toting conservative who decided to protest the socialist Obama administration by accidentally shooting a pal on Martin Luther King Day, that would be some kind of embarrassing, wouldn't it?

Of course, that would fit right in with the kind of week gun advocates had. In a show at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, one Emory Cozee was loading his .45 while walking back to his car when he accidentally shot himself in the wrist. Once again, the taxpayer had to step in to the man's aid, as state troopers rushed to the scene and transported Cozee to a nearby hospital. No charges were filed, stupidity not yet being against the law in Indiana, or anywhere else.

Beyond those five people getting shot, the other "Gun Appreciation" events went on without incident. Then we had Obama's inauguration, where the president took more than one opportunity to goad the gun lobby in advance of an upcoming heated fight over his proposed gun restrictions, saying among other things, "Being true to our founding documents . . . does not mean we will all define liberty in the same way," and, "We cannot substitute absolutism for principle."

Without even taking a position on Obama or his proposed gun law, let me say this: The president, when he makes his case, does not come across like a drooling maniac, like he's pissed off to the point of reaching back, grabbing a frying pan, and belting you across the forehead if you even think about disagreeing with him. He comes across like what he is – a calm, experienced attorney making a rhetorical argument to adults. That, plus a lot of video of little kids' bodies being hauled out of school rooms in suburban Connecticut, can win you a lot of votes with people on the fence on the gun issue.

Then there's Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA. He came out after Obama's speech and gave one of his own at the Weatherby International Hunting and Conservation Awards in Reno, Nevada. In it, LaPierre weaved back and forth like a maniac, his blond forelock heaving, as he blurted out semi-coherent, quasi-grammatical defenses of "absolutism," saying things like "absolutes do exist, it's [sic] the basis of all civilization," and "without those absolutes, democracy decays into nothing more than two wolves and one lamb voting on who to eat for lunch."

He then proceeded to double down on his organization's lunatic decision to inject Obama's daughters into the national gun debate, saying, "If neither criminals nor the political class, with their bodyguards and security people, are limited by magazine capacity, we shouldn't be limited in our capacity, either."

This was clearly a reference to the controversy about the NRA's recent TV buy, in which they blasted Obama for being an "elitist hypocrite" for allowing his daughters to have Secret Service protection while Joe Sixpack has to send his kids to school without paramilitary security experts. "Protection for their kids, and gun-free zones for ours," was the ad's nutty tagline.

The NRA was rightfully blasted for that crazy-ass commercial, which made no sense on any level and mainly painted the NRA as a bunch of disturbed rage-addicts who are completely out of touch with national sentiment after Sandy Hook. (Yes, the president's kids have Secret Service protection – to protect them from your members, you idiots!)

Overall, people like LaPierre have fallen into every single political trap that's been laid for them in the last month, allowing Democrats to paint them as humorless, frustrated and probably dangerous political radicals whose response to Sandy Hook has been to publicly attack the president's minor children and to propose more guns in schools. Even the surge in NRA membership numbers since Sandy Hook is a net minus for the NRA, politically, because it scares the hell out of normal people and will result in increased pressure on pro-NRA congressional members to distance themselves from people whose response to piles of mowed-down children is to buy more guns.

So to recap: The gun lobby's response to Obama's inauguration was to organize a "Gun Appreciation Day" on Martin Luther King Day that left five of their own gun-loving members accidentally shot. Then they responded to Obama's inaugural speech by doubling down on the "elitist hypocrite" ad that earned them near-universal condemnation previously. So how could things get worse?

Well, you could have a spokesman for Political Media, which organized "Gun Appreciation Day," tell the Hollywood Reporter that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is the perfect argument in support of gun rights. Political Media's Larry Ward said he's considering a "What Would Django Do?" campaign as part of this new rhetorical line they're thinking of trying to sell, particularly to the black community. The idea is, get this, that there wouldn't have been slavery if slaves had had gun rights.

"Django is perfect for what we're trying to do," said Ward, "which is to promote gun rights to minorities."

Hey, dipshit: Before anyone allowed slaves to have guns, they would have had to have other rights, like for instance being considered human beings. Are you people completely stupid? You'd have to have hoovered more coke than even Quentin Tarantino to imagine a world where white slave owners denied black people freedom of movement, denied them education and freedom of speech and dominion over their own bodies, but then for some reason also allowed them to buy guns. Jesus Christ! The whole point of slavery is that slaves didn't have any rights, much less the right to bear arms.

Now, Django Unchained is a movie that uses the N-word 109 times (breaking the all-time record set by Finding Nemo, as Kamau Bell wittily noted) and was so historically jumbled that it featured scenes of both the Ku Klux Klan and sunglasses before either existed. Can you imagine any white guy going into Bedford-Stuyvestant or Compton or any other place where so many young black people have been killed by guns, and trying to connect with them by telling them you're down with Django Unchained? That's how out-to-lunch these NRA dudes are, that they genuinely think this is their entrée into minority communities.

I'm not naïve enough to think that just being publicly stupid is going to result in political problems for American conservatives. That's never been the case before – hell, there are still people out there who think Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. There's enough popular anger out there toward Barack Obama that someone like Wayne LaPierre could probably shoot skeet on Martin Luther King's grave and public support for the NRA still won't drop below 40 percent.

But the behavior of the gun lobby in the last month will, for sure, have an impact on people who are on the fence about gun control. Moreover, there's bigger game in play here. The Republicans post-2012 have been staring down the barrel of an increasingly desperate demographic problem that will require the party to find some way to market itself to blacks, Hispanics, women, gays and other minorities or else be relegated to permanent minority status.

But after Sandy Hook, the Democrats have skillfully painted the Republicans as the party of scary-looking and scary-sounding white maniacs like Tennessee security-company CEO James Yeager, a shaven-headed, soul-patched anger-sick white loony who posted a video promising to go ape if gun laws are enacted. "If this goes one inch further, I'm going to start killing people," Yeager said.

Conservatives could have dealt with this post-Sandy Hook political curveball in a number of ways, from simply shutting up and working quietly behind the scenes to scuttle gun control efforts (that always worked before) to announcing willingness to engage in some extremely mild compromise (like maybe prohibiting schizophrenics from carrying machine guns near kindergartens).

Instead, they decided to piss all over Martin Luther King Day and then shoot themselves by the half-dozen in the process.

Well done, fellas! You're well on your way to solving your demographic problems.

Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution

Verge Staff — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 20:02:56 +0100

By Dieter Bohn and Ellis Hamburger

Something strange and remarkable started happening at Google immediately after Larry Page took full control as CEO in 2011: it started designing good-looking apps.

Great design is not something anybody has traditionally expected from Google. Infamously, the company used to focus on A/B testing tiny, incremental changes like 41 different shades of blue for links instead of trusting its designers to create and execute on an overall vision. The “design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data” led its very first visual designer, Douglas Bowman, to leave in 2009.

More recently, however, it’s been impossible to ignore a series of thoughtfully designed apps — especially on iOS, a platform that doesn’t belong to Google. Google+, YouTube, Gmail, and Maps are consistent and beautiful — in stark contrast both to Google’s previous efforts and even Apple’s own increasingly staid offerings.

We went to Google looking for the person responsible for the new design direction, but the strange answer we got is that such a person doesn’t exist. Instead, thanks to a vision laid out by a small team of Google designers, each product team is finding its way to a consistent and forward-looking design language thanks to a surprising process.

They’re talking to each other.

Project Kennedy lifts off

When Page took office, his first directive was clear. "Larry said ‘hey everyone, we’re going to redesign all of our products,’" recalls Jon Wiley, lead designer on Google Search. Wiley and co had just two months to give Google a fresh coat of paint, and to start thinking holistically about how Google as a whole was perceived. "We had a mandate to make this all look good," Wiley says.

It wasn’t the first time that Google’s designers had tried to unify the design language across multiple products, but it would turn out to be the most successful by far. "Historically at Google there were pockets of designers that said ‘let’s bring all of Google together into one beautiful, amazing design,’ but because of the way Google is set up — for speed — […] it was hard for any one team to push that Google-wide," says Wiley. It’s not that there weren’t designers at Google before, it’s just that they weren’t moving in the same direction and they didn’t have as much authority as they needed.

"When I joined Google five years ago, there was no such thing as a common design language for our platform," says Andrey Doronichev, Senior Product Manager for YouTube Mobile, "we always wanted to create beautiful applications, but our priorities were different." A Google-wide design initiative "required the vision of a CEO," says Wiley, "who could rally the entire company to make it happen." Wiley codenamed Google’s new design direction Kennedy — a reference to Page’s now-famous "moon shot" strategy for thinking up new products.

Google’s senior designers gathered to decide how a few design principles would be applied evenly and tastefully to dozens of products used by over a billion people. There was also some "outside help" from Google Creative Lab, as Wiley described in a 2011 talk entitled "Whoa, Google has Designers!" Google Creative Lab is a collection of top-tier designers in the company’s New York offices, mostly known for creating unique and emotionally compelling marketing projects like a tear-jerking Super Bowl ad or the innovative Arcade Fire music video. Page tapped Creative Lab to work with the rest of Google’s designers on creating the new vision. Unlike Apple, Google is willing to work with outside parties on design, and that played a role in the creation of Kennedy. "What might a cohesive vision for Google look like?", Page asked them.

The vision would turn out to focus on on refinement, white space, cleanliness, elasticity, usefulness, and most of all simplicity. "At Google we want to move fast, so a lot of these various products grew up on their own," says Wiley, and so before Kennedy they didn’t abide by one design standard across the board. "We had a lot of simple and useful products," Wiley says, "so we turned our focus towards making these products more beautiful, but also more consistent as a suite of products."

Creating a design vision is the first step, but the product designers had to distill and implement it. "We sat down, locked ourselves in rooms, and we just refined on this design as quickly as we could," Wiley said in 2011, "[we] created these reference set of designs and then set those onto the world through the 'productionizing' of that with the engineering teams."

At the end of June 2011, just under three months after Page took over as CEO, Google shipped fresh new versions of Google Search, Google Maps, and Gmail, and Calendar. In the next year and a half, Google moved swiftly, launching Google Now, a fresh mobile take on Kennedy ideals, and a host of stunning new iOS apps like Google+, YouTube Capture, Chrome, and Maps that followed much of the original vision, albeit with some variations between the different product teams. What was once Brownian Motion, as Wiley describes it, was now a flowing stream of design ideals with forks along the way, but all heading in the same general direction.

Matias Duarte, senior director, Android user experience, put it this way: "Google is going through a design revolution, for lack of a better word."

Committee by design

Every designer we spoke to at Google repeated variations on the same message: "There’s not one person who’s the grand leader of design at Google," Wiley says. Doronichev repeated the message: "We don’t have a single mastermind designer." Google may not have a Jony Ive, but there is nevertheless a coherent process for laying out a design vision across all these multiple teams and platforms.

Doronichev says that "it’s all about teams iterating together and sharing information, and making sure we end up in a sweet spot where our design language is very similar, fits well into each platform, but at the same time keeps being Google."

This doesn’t just naturally arrive out of regular collaboration around the office. To help make it happen, there’s a small group of a few designers in New York called Google UXA. It’s a relatively secretive group, its web footprint limited to just a few job listings, but the size of its presence at Google almost can’t be overstated. The UXA team, born out of the Kennedy Project, works on "designing and developing a true UI framework that transforms Google’s apps into a beautiful, mature, accessible and consistent platform for its users" and focuses on keeping that vision consistent across all of Google’s products.

UXA works with all of the lead designers for Google’s most important products on a regular basis. But its small size and even smaller public face makes it unique, and in fact may help the core design team work better with the rest of Google, where collaboration between teams is the name of the game. In fact, Google doesn’t publicly mention UXA by name, including in our interviews with their designers. Creative Director Chris Wiggins’ blog post announcing the first Kennedy redesign mentions plans for "a series of design improvements across all our products," but beyond such subtle hints the team stays under the radar.

Essentially, you can think of UXA as taking the structure that was put together for the rapid, three-month Kennedy project and turning it into a Google institution. And like any true Google institution, the way its work turns into actual product is a curious mix of informality and relentless work ethic. Speaking more generally about how design meetings go at Google, Wiley says "We get together, we have lunch, and we talk endlessly."

Darren Delaye, lead designer on Google Maps for Mobile, told us that designers for various iOS apps have a "casual get-together, but on a very regular basis, to talk about feedback we have for each other and things we’ve tried." That’s not to say that these design meetings dictate the final look and feel for apps, but they seem to act more as a guide. "Designers take the design language from cross-product initiatives like Kennedy and weave that together with the user needs for their particular product," Wiley explains.

The goal is to "balance the experience across all Google products with the need to move fast and deliver great solutions for our users," and to that end, each product team acts indepently to ship its app. You’ll see small variations between specific implementations, but since Google has institutionalized this new approach, each app — finally — looks like it belongs in the same family.

Google's future, Now

You can see yet another example of Google’s design process in the development of Google Now on Android. An incredibly ambitious new product, Google Now "started as a twenty percent project," as Android’s director of product management, Hugo Barra told us in October, but it became something much bigger.

"Google Now is a great example in so many ways to talk about design and the rise of design culture and the way that design works at Google," says Duarte. The Google Now team needed to take many different Google features and combine them into an interface that could "feel like it’s a natural extension of Android without losing any of the Googleness." To do it, the Android team followed the same process that the web team did with Kennedy: they collaborated across the entire company.

We worked very closely with Jon Wiley’s search team because they were really building a big part of what Google Now was — the knowledge part. We worked closely with the Android team in London that was working on the speech stuff. And we had an Android team here in Mountain View that was understanding your location. We got together in this giant war room and just churned and mashed and just iterated, trying to create the simplest possible experience.

Duarte stressed the importance of typography in "expressing the knowledge and answers" Google Now serves up. "A lot of use of white space, not a lot of artificial, surface-like divisions. We’re really counting on bold typography, white space, and big images to give emphasis, give character and give hierarchy to the cards that we give you." It was a new look for Google, one that would soon propagate throughout its mobile products.

The central design metaphor that Duarte and the team eventually landed on was one he’d used before in webOS: cards. The cards in Google Now also show up in Google search, when it displays "Knowledge Graph" results on the web. In both cases, cards seem to represent the information Google gives you directly instead of through a list of blue links. Cards are like a digital equivalent to the traditional architectural concept of marrying form and function — so that the way a thing looks is inseparable from what the thing is. "These are objects," Duarte says, "They feel, not necessarily real, but they feel virtual. They’re not trying to be fake things, not … fake leather, fake wood, fake brushed aluminum."

Thinking about the intersection of information and software interfaces as tangible digital objects is admittedly high-concept stuff. The actual experience of using Google Now isn’t quite so heady — the cards often aren’t exactly what you were hoping for and are still a long way off from the "shocking, provocative direction" that Page asked for. The product itself might not live up to its ambitions, but nevertheless it quickly established itself as the most forward-looking mobile design at Google at the time.

Will the design of Google Now eventually make its way into Android? It’s entirely possible. Duarte is on the record saying that Android isn’t where he wants it to be yet, "Personally I feel like I’ve gotten only about a third of the way to where I want to be with regards to consistency, responsiveness, and polish." Duarte says that Holo, the design guidelines for Android, is more than flexible enough to handle the design cues in Google Now. Since Holo sits on "that razor’s edge of not forcing everybody to look the same, feel the same," it simultaneously explains why there’s a little less design consistency in Android and why that could easily change soon. But while we wait to see if the rest of Android will take on the look and feel of Google Now, Google’s iOS apps are already doing it.

Design, distributed

Google Now’s cards, along with the original vision laid out in Kennedy, set the tone for nearly all the redesigns we saw in 2012 — modern frames for content that eschew heavy-handed drop shadows in favor of clean lines, a vibrant array of colors, and highly legible fonts like Helvetica Neue (iOS) and Roboto (Android). Cards are most visible in Google Now, but have inspired interfaces in everything from Knowledge Graph search results to Google+ profiles to Google Maps on iOS.

"How do we take what’s great about Google design and express it in many places?" Wiley asks. The resulting effect is an interface like the new Gmail web interface "which doesn’t show you things you don’t need" and focuses on simplicity. You might notice that the array of buttons like Archive, Report Spam, and Delete now only appear once you’ve selected one or more emails — a design choice that’s logical but also visually unclutters Gmail. You might also notice red "Compose" and blue "Share" buttons in many Google web products, or profile pictures, which appeared in Google+ and now find themselves next to every member of an email chain in Gmail.

Google is supposed to be "born of a digital environment," in contrast to "a trend to create things representative of physical objects," Wiley says. It’s somewhere in between Apple’s skeuomorphism and Microsoft’s sparse "Metro" design. The new Google has depth, but isn’t shiny or blingy, and has subtle design choices, shifting the focus towards content like search results, email, and Google+ posts.

The biggest challenge became designing an interface that works across all platforms — Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS primarily — while still feeling native to each. "Your inbox is a to-do list that others have made for you, and is inherently chaotic," says Gmail lead designer Jason Cornwell. The goal is not "making Gmail look identical across the web, Android, and iOS," Cornwell says, "but taking the elements that make those platforms what they are and marrying them with the overall conceptual direction Gmail is pushing."

Gmail 1.0 for iOS was a haphazard and ugly webview riddled with bugs, but over time was updated regularly to the point when it evolved into Gmail 2.0 — a svelte and (comparatively) speedy application. "We took our time with [Gmail 2.0 for iOS] and really sweated the details," Cornwell says, an attitude shared by the others we interviewed reflected. As a whole, deciding what Google apps should look like on iOS just took some time. "The mobile apps took several iterations to get right and really find our voice," he says. "What you’re seeing is the result of a lot of back and forth between different teams to come up with what feels like a very coherent design statement across our apps." "How do we apply the Google design aesthetic to iOS in a way that feels native?" Cornwell asks. The "spinner" animation indicating that the app is loading new content was directly inspired by Google+’s unique pull-to-refresh animation, he says.

It’s not identical to what Google+ uses, however, and is a good small-scale example of how Google’s collaborative design process works: a designer on the Google+ iOS team comes up with a great idea, and it spreads like wildfire to other designers, and thus to other apps. Google Maps is the most recent iteration of Google’s new design direction on iOS, and it’s unique in that the Maps team had an opportunity to start from scratch. "That was a great gift in a lot of ways," says Darren Delaye, lead designer on Google Maps for mobile. "We could experiment, iterate, and come out with something completely new."

The result, Google Maps for iOS, is an app that includes many components of Kennedy, Google Now, and Google.com, Delaye says. "We’re using Cards, white on white, and soft shadows to separate different elements of the UI. Many would agree that Maps for iOS looks better than Maps for Android, but Delaye says the apps are two sides of the same coin, reflections of Google at different points in time. He defines the success of Maps not in how it looks, however, but in how quickly you’re able to stick your phone back into your pocket. "How many steps are there? How hard do you have to think for every step? How long do you have to wait?" Delaye added an ETA box to Maps for iPhone that appears the moment you ask for directions.

Having launched most recently, Maps is the most complete vessel for Page’s vision: a simple, useful, and aesthetically pleasing design. It embodies a new trend at Google: collaboration across platforms, teams, and applications. As each new app launches, it’s easy to see the design lessons and visual cues that carry through to the next one. "Everyone bases their work off whatever’s the freshest at Google," says Delaye. Wiley explains that the process is actually pretty straightforward, the core cross-disciplinary design team grabs the best stuff when it makes sense: "when products launch new or interesting components that are appropriate for wider adoption, we work to build those into the overall design language." He calls it "a feature of our open culture," and it’s a kind of serial design that so far seems to be working.

Everyone we interviewed repeated the mantra "one simple, beautiful, useful Google" — though the order of those three words sometimes changed. Wiley says, "the different teams are creating apps that hang together as recognizable ‘Googley’ apps simply by talking to each other, not by following strict design rules."

Notable Google design milestones

2011

April 4 - Kennedy project begins

June 28 - Google.com Search

June 28 - Google+ web

June 28 - Google Maps web

June 30 - Gmail web

June 30 - Google Calendar web

October 3 - Google Docs web

November 2 - Gmail iOS 1.0

2012

June 28 - Chrome for iOS, Drive for iOS

September 11 - YouTube iOS app launch

October 30 - Google Search app with Now cards

December 4 - Gmail iOS 2.0

December 12 - Google Maps iOS

December 14 - Google+ iOS with pull-to-refresh

December 17 - YouTube Capture

2013

January 23 - Google Image Search revamp

Restructuring a legacy

Just a few years ago, Google’s apps had little sense of identity. They were all built by Google, but had few threads tying them together aside from a lowercase g. While Larry Page served as Google’s product president for a decade, perhaps he realized that the company needed a design dictator, not to point out that a button needs to be four pixels right, but to finally make design a true priority at the company. Its children had aged together but didn’t look like members of the same family. "We’re slowly starting to build a real design culture throughout Google," Duarte says, "the teams are independent, but there is an increasing amount of communication, camaraderie, and collaboration." Without Page’s complete organizational restructure that focused the company around seven key product divisions, some of Google’s moonshots and vibrant design concepts may never have taken off. Without the decision to create a core team of designers who would work together across product teams to keep the vision consistent, it would have all reverted to an incoherent mess — and this being Google, that eventuality often feels dangerously close.

In stark contrast to Eric Schmidt’s tenure as CEO where data-driven product invention and design was standard operating procedure, Page’s Google is more willing to let humans make design decisions instead of algorithms. "At some point the engineering and product organizations were just focused on solving big data problems," say Doronichev, "but as time went on the organization became more mature, and we started focusing on the little things." And so far, it’s paid off. Google’s had a fantastic run of over a year and a half releasing core web and mobile product redesigns that are competitive with anything on the web, Android, and iOS.

Google’s process is quintessentially Google and happened in a quintessentially Google way. Larry Page mandated that there be a new design focus to get the ball rolling, but instead of micromanaging at every step he let his employees to do the rest — guided by an empowered, core team of designers. They organized themselves in a typically Google structure: cross-discipline, informal, but driven to achieve a goal.

While the Eric Schmidt era was perhaps best known for "don’t be evil," Page’s Google might soon be defined by "don’t be ugly."

Video credits: Shot by Jordan Oplinger and Billy Disney. Edited by Jordan Oplinger and Billy Disney. Additional editing by John Lagomarsino and Ryan Manning.

Tom Odell - I Knew You Were Trouble - BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 19:43:17 +0100

How to Have a Year that Matters

Umair Haque — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:30:28 +0100

Let's cut the crap. Life is short, you have less time than you think, and there are no baby unicorns coming to save you. So rather than doling out craptastic advice to you about Making!! It!! To!! The!! Top!!™, let me humbly ask: do you want to have a year that matters — or do you want to spend another year starring-slash-wallowing in the lowest-common-denominator reality show-slash-whiny soap opera of your own inescapable mediocrity-slash-self-imposed tragedy?

If (congratulations) your unquenched desire to have better than a smoking trainwreck of a so-called life exceeds your frenzied mania for spending another 365 days wallowing in a sea of junk-food wrappers, then — don't worry, I'll be gentle — here are a few tiny questions.

Why are you here? I don't mean to induce a full blown heart palpitation accompanied panic attack filled existential crisis in you (or maybe I do) — so let's keep it simple. This coming year: why are you (really) here? There are plenty of answers to this biggest of questions — but, no: all answers aren't created equal. There are poor ones, which will probably lead to a long, dull, dismal, rainy Sunday of a year. And there are better ones — which just might begin to explosively unfurl a life that feels fully worth living. Allow me to break it down for you.

What do you want? Here are some perfectly valid answers, if tedious mediocrity's the limit of your horizon this year: money, sex, power, fame, keeping up with the Kardashians. Here are some better answers, if a year in a life meaningfully well lived is what you're after. To make a difference. To transform something that sucks. To create that which transforms. To build that which counts. To experience what's true. To do stuff that matters.

How much does it matter? Here are some pretty good answers, if a snoozer of a year in a cavernous landfill of a life is what you're after. To your boss, her boss, his boss, or their boss. To shareholders, to the markets, to "consumers." Here are some better answers, if you want this to be a year that one day that, in a surprisingly short time, you don't just remember, but that you still savor: to society, to humanity, to tomorrow. To the timeless spirit of furious impossibility that characterizes the art of human excellence — not just to the zombie vampire robots that make up the bulk of our beige, big-box, yawn-inducingly banal infomercial-for-dystopia of a so-called economy.

What's it going to take? You don't get to a life well lived using the tired capabilities and skills built to Farmville the cubefarm. You need to "use" not just your whole mind, but to learn to employ your whole being: mind, heart, soul, and body. If nothing less than a life worth living's your goal, you probably need to nurture not just the so-called pseudoscientific skills of a sartorially power-suited spreadsheet jockey — counting beans, pillaging the townsfolk, sweetly stabbing your peers in the back, all the while slickly glad-handing your higher-ups — but the arts of empathy, humility, passion, imagination, rebellion, to name just a few.

Who's on your side? A life meaningfully well lived isn't a Western, and you're not John Wayne (although I bet you, like me, look darn good in a cowboy hat). Rugged individualism is nice in theory, but the truth is: if you're going to make a difference, you're probably not going to make it happen all by your lonesome. So who are your mentors and allies, friends and peers? Who's at your back, manning your sails, crewing your boat? Here's a hint: if you look around and your boat's empty, learn to lead. Challenge, provoke, inspire, connect — and then, harder still, evoke the best in people. For it is the best in us that, in turn, elevates our capacity to love; the truest currency of a life well lived. And so respect is earned — and love given — not just to those who pander, but those who matter.

Where's your true north? If you're going to live a life that matters, you need an ethical compass: a belief system with a true north that points toward values that are in some sense enduringly, meaningfully good. Lance Armstrong's true north seems to have been trophies — not championships; and the result, I'd bet, is a life that now feels arid, empty, wasted. So what's your true north? In what direction do you find the stuff that makes life "good"? Does your true north point to consumption, status, transactions — instead of investment, accomplishments, relationships? If it's the former, I'd bet: a life well lived is going to remain as elusive to you as it's been to Lance.

What breaks your heart? Follow your passion, we're often told. But how do you find your passion? Let me put it another way: what is it that breaks your heart about the world? It's there that you begin to find what moves you. If you want to find your passion, surrender to your heartbreak. Your heartbreak points towards a truer north — and it's the difficult journey towards it that is, in the truest sense, no mere passing idyllic infatuation, but enduring, tempestuous passion.

What's it worth? A life well lived isn't partytime with the airheads at the McClubs in Ibiza. And here's the inconvenient truth: it's going to take more than the tired old refrains of hard work, dedication, commitment, and perseverance. It's going to take very real heartbreak, sorrow, grief, and disappointment. Only you can decide how much is too much. Is it worth it? Aaron Swartz, who packed an astonishing amount into his short 26 years, was relentlessly persecuted by an overweening prosecutor — and tragically took his own life in part for it. Van Gogh, of course, famously died for his art. A life well lived always demands one asks of one's self: is it worth it? Is the heartache worth the breakthrough; is the desolation worth the accomplishment; is the anguish balanced by the jubilation; perhaps, even, are the moments of bitter despair, sometimes, finally, the very instants we treasure most? There's no easy answer, no simplistic rule of thumb. The scales of life always hang before us — and always ask us to weigh the burden of our choices carefully.

Sure, you might read all the above and mutter: "Duuude? Check me Broseph. All I really want is a mega-bonus, a lifetime membership to the VIP room, and the keys to a Maserati." Welcome, then, to bootylicious mediocrity. For mediocrity isn't the poor, hardscrabble immigrant cleaning the bathroom at the 7-11: it's the lucky trust fund kid who could've, just maybe, lived a life worth living — and thinks a life worth living is a loft, a corner office, a sports car, and a designer coffee machine instead. All that stuff's nice — but entirely besides the point. Of life. For the simple, timeless truth is: You'll never find the rapture of accomplishment in mere conquest, the incandescence of happiness in mere possession, or the searing wholeness of meaning in mere desire. You can find them only — only — in the exploration of the fullness of human possibility.

Hence: every moment of every day of this year, and every year that follows, what I want you to map is the uncharted shore of potential: the capacity of life to dream, wonder, imagine, create, build, transform, better, and love; the infusion of the art of living into the heart of every instant of existence.

We've been taught to be obedient rationalists. And the rationalists say: there's no magic in the world. But they miss the point. There's a kind of quiet magic that each and every one of us is condemned to have in us, every moment of our lives: the facility to exalt life beyond the mundane, and into the meaningful; beyond the generic, and into the singular; through the abstract, and into the concrete; past the individual, and towards the universal. And it's when we reject this, the truest and worthiest gift of life, that we have squandered the fundamental significance of being human; that the soil of our lives feels arid, featureless, fallow, a desert that never came to life; because, in truth, it has been. And so this almost magical facility you and I have, potential, is something like an existential obligation that we must live up to: for it's only when we not just accept it, but employ it at its maximum, that we can reconcile ourselves not merely to regret, but with mortality; that we can escape not merely our own lesser selves, but the all-destroying scythe of futility; and come, finally, to find, at the end of the day, not merely time's revenge on life, but life's revenge on time: an abiding grace for both the fragility and the fullness of life.

I don't pretend any of the above is revolutionary, or new, or anything less than obvious. Yet, the lessons of a life well lived rarely are: they're simple, timeless truths.

So let me ask again. Why are you here? Do you want this to be another year that flies by, half-hearted, arid, rootless, barely remembered, dull with dim glimpses of what might have been? Or do you want this to be a year that you savor, for the rest of your surprisingly short time on Planet Earth, as the year you started, finally, irreversibly, uncompromisingly, to explosively unfurl a life that felt fully worth living?

The choice is yours. And it always has been.

The Pizza Lab: Foolproof Pan Pizza

J. Kenji López-Alt — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 02:17:08 +0100

SLIDESHOW: The Pizza Lab: Foolproof Pan Pizza

It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.

I've got a confession to make: I love pan pizza.

I'm not talking deep-dish Chicago-style with its crisp crust and rivers of cheese and sauce, I'm talking thick-crusted, fried-on-the-bottom, puffy, cheesy, focaccia-esque pan pizza of the kind that you might remember Pizza Hut having when you were a kid, though in reality, most likely that pizza never really existed—as they say, pizzas past always look better through pepperoni-tinted glasses.

It would arrive at the table in a jet black, well-worn pan, its edges browned and crisped where the cheese has melted into the gap between the crust and the pan. You'd lift up a slice and long threads of mozzarella pull out, stretching all the way across the table, a signpost saying "hey everyone, it's this kid's birthday!" You'd reach out your fingers—almost involuntarily—grasping at those cheese strings, plucking at them like guitar strings, wrapping them around your fingers so you can suck them off before diving into the slice itself.

That perfect pan pizza had an open, airy, chewy crumb in the center that slowly transformed into a crisp, golden-brown, fried crust at the very bottom and a soft, thin, doughy layer at the top right at the crust-sauce interface. It was thick and robust enough to support a heavy load of toppings, though even a plain cheese or pepperoni slice would do.

It's been years since I've gone to an actual Pizza Hut (they don't even exist in New York aside from those crappy "Pizza Hut Express" joints with the pre-fab, lukewarm individual pizzas), but I've spent a good deal of time working on my own pan pizza recipe to the point that it finally lives up to that perfect image of my childhood pan pizza that still lives on in my mind.

If only pizza that good were also easy to make. Well here's the good news: It is. This is the easiest pizza you will ever make. Seriously. All it takes is a few basic kitchen essentials, some simple ingredients, and a bit of patience.

The way I see it, there are three basic difficulties most folks have with pizza:

Problem 1: Kneading. How long is enough? What motion do I use? And is it really worth the doggone effort?
Problem 2: Stretching. Once I've got that disk of dough, how do I get it into the shape of an actual pizza, ready to be topped?
Problem 3: Transferring. Ok, let's say I've got my dough made and perfectly stretched onto my pizza peel. How do I get it onto that stone in the oven without disturbing the toppings or having it turn into a misshapen blob?

This recipe avoids all three of those common pitfalls, making it pretty much foolproof. To be perfectly honest, every single one of these steps has been done before, and none of it is rocket science. All I'm doing is combining them all into a single recipe.

You can jump straight into a full step-by-step slideshow of the process or find the exact measurements and instructions in the recipe here, or read on for a few more details on what to expect and how we got there.

No Kneading

By now, everybody and their baker's heard about no knead dough. It's a technique that was developed by Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery and popularized by Mark Bittman of the New York Times. The basic premise is simple: mix together your dough ingredients in a bowl just until they're combined, cover it, and let time take care of the rest. That's it.

So how does it work? Well the goal of kneading in a traditional dough is to create gluten, a web-like network of interconnected proteins that forms when flour is mixed together with water. All wheat flour contains some amount of protein (usually around 10 to 15%, depending on the variety of wheat). In their normal state, these proteins resemble tiny crumpled up little balls of wire. With kneading, your goal is to first work these proteins until they untangle a bit, then to rub them against each other until they link up, forming a solid chain-link fence.

It's this gluten matrix that allows your dough to be stretched without breaking, and what allows it to hold nice big air bubbles inside. Ever have a dense under-risen pizza crust? It's because whoever made it didn't properly form their gluten in the process.

Now you can see how how this can take a lot of work. Kneading, aligning, folding, linking. That's why most pizza dough recipes takes a good ten to twenty minutes of elbow grease or time in a stand mixer.

But there's another way.

See, flour naturally contains enzymes that will break down large proteins into smaller ones. Imagine them as teeny-tiny wire cutter that cut those jumbled up balls of wire into shorter pieces. The shorter the pieces are, they easier it is to untangle them, and the easier it is to then align them and link them up into a good, strong network. No-knead dough recipes take advantage of this fact.

Over the course of an overnight sit at room temperature, those enzymes get to work breaking down proteins. Meanwhile, yeast starts to consume sugars in the flour, releasing carbon dioxide gas int he process. These bubbles of gas will cause the dough to start stretching, and in the process, will jostle and align the enzyme-primed proteins, thereby creating gluten.

Simply allowing the dough to sit overnight will create a gluten network at least as strong (if not stronger!) than a dough that had been kneaded in a mixer or by hand, all with pretty much zero effort. Indeed, the flavor produced by letting yeast do its thing over the course of this night will also be superior to that of any same-day dough. Win win!

Other than time, the only real key to a successful no-knead dough is high hydration. Specifically, the water content should be at least 60% of the weight of the flour you use. Luckily, high hydration also leads to superior hole structure upon baking. I go for about 65%.

Problem 1: Avoided

No Stretching

One of the happy side effects of having a loose, moist dough is that it practically stretches itself. Form the dough into a ball and let it sit around at room temperature and you'll see it spreading slowly outwards until it it nearly disk-shaped. The only thing holding it back? Friction. It sticks to the countertop or board.

What do you use to eliminate friction? Grease. Coating the dough ball in grease and placing it on a smooth surface (such as, say, the inside of a skillet or round cake pan) allows it to stretch completely under its own power.

All that's needed is a few gently pokes with your fingertips to do the final shaping and to eliminate any ultra-large air bubbles.

You may wonder why we'd want to get rid of those bubbles, when an open, airy structure is what we're after. Well, it's because this dough is almost too good. It's so loose and easy to stretch that large bubbles will form giant domes, shedding their cheese and sauce, eventually collapsing into large barren craters when you pull the pies out of the oven, like this:

Some simple fingertip docking eliminates that problem while sill keeping your dough plenty light and airy.

Problem 2: Avoided

No Transferring

Do I need to spell it out here? If your pizza is constructed in a pan, there's no need to use a peel or a stone. Just throw the pan straight into the oven.

As the pizza bakes, the olive oil it was stretched out in will allow the bottom and sides to fry, getting them extra-crisp.

The one issue you might run into is this:

Air bubbles that form under the crust as it rises will pull away from the pan bottom, preventing them from browning and crisping properly. To avoid that, I make sure to give the dough a quick lift around the edges before topping it, just to release any air bubbles that may be trapped.

You end up with a nice, even golden brown like this:

The Details

Really, that's the sum of the process. Most other details are incidental. You can use whatever sauce you'd like, whether it's simply pureed canned tomatoes with a bit of salt and olive oil, or a cooked pizza sauce. You can use grated mozzarella, or go for a more eclectic choice like cheddar or jack.

Here are a few tips.

Cook Hot

I max out my oven (550°F) when I bake pizza. Why? Hotter cooking leads to a few differences in the end product. For one thing, it produces more micro-bubbles on the exterior, giving your pie more crunch and character. These microbubbles form because air and water vapor inside the dough expands rapidly under high heat, filling up and stretching out gluten-walled bubbles before they harden and crisp. The hotter the oven, the faster these bubbles will expand.

You can easily see the difference in the texture of a crust cooked at 400°F:

Versus one cooked at 500°F:

Cook it even hotter and the differences become more clear.

High temperature cooking also leads to superior interior structure for the same reason: bubbles inflate rapidly, giving a pizza cooked at a high temperature a more open, airy crumb.

Again, here's a pie cooked at 400°F:

And the identical dough cooked at 550°F:

The difference is striking.

Top Away!

Normally I'm a minimalist when it comes to pizza. I like my New York or Neapolitan-style pies with either no toppings, or at most one or two carefully selected items. With a thick, robust pan pizza, on the other hand, I'll add as many toppings as it'll hold, which is a whole lot. Multiple cheese (a good melting cheese as the base and a hard grating cheese to add at the end is my go-to), some pickled items, fresh vegetables, cured meats, whatever.

This pizza can handle whatever you throw at it.

Be Generous With The Sauce

Again, it's counterintuitive—normally I'd advise a thin, thin layer of sauce—but for a thick pie like this, you need a nice thick layer of sauce.

I go with around 3/4 of a cup per 10-inch pie.

Cheese to the Edges

With a New York pie, the cornicione, or pizza bones are essential to the slice. For many folks, they're the best part.

With a pan pizza, on the other hand, I've got no such need or desire for those edge crusts. I'd much rather have my pie fully topped from edge to edge, allowing some of that cheese to drip into the cracks between the crust and the pan, browning into those wonderful crisp, charred bits.

Add Some Post-Bake Flair

Some toppings are best added before baking. But a few are better added once the pie emerges from the oven.

Topping that list? Hard cheeses. I like to add grated Parmigiano-Reggiano by the fistful to the top of the pie after it emerges from the oven. I love the contrast you get between the browned, bubbly bits of mozzarella and the sharp, fresh bite of the un-cooked parmesan.

Other than that, there's really not much more to say. Like I said, the recipe is stupid-easy. Mix together ingredients, then let'em sit for a while. Top them, and bake them. It's as easy as that.

Next time someone asks you "I want to make pizza at home. Know any good recipes for beginners?" (and if your life is anything like mine, you hear that question at least a couple times per week), you'll know where to send them.

Get The Recipe!

For a full step-by-step slideshow, head right this way! »

Or get the recipe for Foolproof Pan Pizza here! »

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Samsung's road to global domination

Michal Lev-Ram — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 23:48:04 +0100

South Korea's Samsung is trampling rivals and gunning for Apple. Can its hot streak last?

FORTUNE -- To understand how Samsung -- yes, Samsung -- became America's No. 1 mobile phonemaker and thorn in Apple's side, it's helpful to rewind to last fall. On a mid-September morning, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook stepped onto a stage in San Francisco to unveil the iPhone 5. Several hundred miles away, in a Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Los Angeles, a group of marketing executives from Samsung Electronics followed real-time reactions to Cook's remarks. They huddled around tables mounted with laptops and TV screens, carefully tracking each new feature and monitoring the gush of online comments on the new device via blogs and social media sites. As the data flowed in, writers from the company's advertising agency, who were also camped out in the restaurant turned war room, scrambled to craft a response.

Two hours later, when Cook stepped off the stage, the Samsung group was already drafting a series of print, digital, and TV ads. The following week -- as the iPhone 5 went on sale -- the company aired a TV ad mocking Apple "fanboys" queuing up for the new phone. ("The headphone jack is going to be on the bottom!") The 90-second commercial went on to become the most popular tech ad of 2012, garnering more than 70 million views online. More important, in the weeks following the launch of Apple's iPhone 5, Samsung sold a record-breaking number of its own signature smartphone, the Galaxy S III. "We knew this was going to be a big moment in time, when consumers are really paying attention," says Todd Pendleton, chief marketing officer of Samsung's U.S.-based mobile division. "We wanted to take that opportunity and all that energy and make it Samsung's moment."

MORE: 29 stunning Apple surprises nobody saw coming

No doubt about it, Samsung is having a moment. In recent years the South Korean company has taken the mobile world -- the U.S. included -- by storm. Last year it overtook longtime leader Nokia to become the No. 1 player in cellphones, with 29% market share worldwide. In smartphones, those high-end devices with advanced computing power, Samsung is also No. 1 globally and in a dead heat with Apple in the U.S.: Most analysts show Apple with a slight edge in smartphone sales, while one outfit, ABI Research, says Samsung's share of smartphone shipments topped 33%, compared with Apple's 30%. (To be sure, Apple sells one device, the iPhone, while Samsung offers 25 unique smartphones in the U.S.) "Samsung is on fire," says John Legere, CEO of mobile operator T-Mobile USA.

Chalk up Samsung's success to a combination of marketing swagger, innovation, operational prowess, and a marketplace hungry for an alternative to the iPhone. Although Samsung wasn't the first to develop a phone that runs on Google's Android operating system, it quickly moved ahead of the pack by introducing one with a strikingly thin, bright, and large screen, and by rapidly rolling out cutting-edge features like the ability to "beam" photos by pressing together the backs of two phones. Thanks to tight control over an extensive supply chain (Samsung makes everything from screens to memory chips), it's been able to move quickly to meet the rising demand for its mobile devices, churning out more than 215 million smartphones globally last year. And phone companies are so eager to stock Samsung devices that they've abandoned their practice of demanding exclusive deals on new phones; last summer Verizon Wireless (VZ), T-Mobile, Sprint (S), and AT&T (T) agreed to launch the Galaxy S III phone simultaneously -- a major coup for Samsung.

Of course, not everyone loves the new Samsung. Apple has sued the company for patent infringement, and the phonemakers will probably be embroiled in litigation for years to come. And while Samsung has done a phenomenal job of building itself into a cool brand in a short time, it doesn't wield much control over the wireless ecosystem -- the mobile operating system, application store, and other software services that have helped make smartphones so popular. Indeed, some of the same forces that contributed to Samsung's growth -- the Android platform and app catalogue, consumers' desire for the next shiny new toy -- also leave the handset maker vulnerable to a raft of Android-based rivals, all gunning for the new No. 1. And don't expect Apple to rely solely on the courts to fend off Samsung. Says T-Mobile's Legere of the South Korean juggernaut: "I think they got the other guy's attention."

Samsung Electronics, No. 20 on last year's Fortune Global 500 ranking, with $149 billion in revenue, has humble beginnings. Samsung, which means "three stars" in Korean, started out as a small supplier of dried fish and noodles in the city of Daegu back in 1938. Eventually the company's ambitious founder, Byung-Chull Lee, moved the company headquarters to the country's capital, Seoul, and expanded into new businesses.

In the late 1960s Samsung officially entered the electronics business. In the early years the company was known for cheap televisions and air conditioners. That all changed in 1995, when its chairman (and the elder Lee's son), Kun-Hee Lee, paid a momentous visit to the company's plant in Gumi, a factory town in south-central Korea. Legend has it that the younger Lee had sent out the company's newest mobile phones as New Year's presents and was horrified when word came back that they didn't work. Later, at Gumi, he made a giant heap of the factory's entire inventory and had it set on fire.

After the incineration at Gumi, spending on R&D increased, and Samsung started churning out top-notch products, like the world's first MP3 phone, the highest-megapixel camera phones, and other high-end devices that could run on South Korea's superfast cellular networks. But much of the world, especially the U.S., didn't associate the Samsung brand with mobile, in part because the company let the telcos take the lead in marketing the devices.

By 2010, some three years after the launch of the iPhone, Samsung decided that its low-key approach wasn't working, especially in the U.S. Dale Sohn, president of Samsung's U.S. mobile operations, assembled his local leadership team to figure out a way for Samsung to control its own destiny, instead of relying on partners to tell its story to consumers. Sohn says he is in constant communication with his bosses in Seoul but also has a degree of independence to do what's best in his home market. As a result, he adds, it wasn't hard getting headquarters onboard with his plan, which later became known internally as the "paradigm shift."

In June 2011, Sohn hired Pendleton, the former global brand communications director at Nike (NKE). By then Samsung had already launched its second-generation Galaxy smartphone, the S II. The 4 1/3-inch device came with built-in near-field communication capabilities and a cool function that mutes incoming calls when the phone is placed face-down. "We had a product that was better that was already in the market, but nobody knew about it," says Pendleton.

Pendleton moved fast (the longtime Nike exec has a collection of some 600 pairs of sneakers). In just a year and a half he put together an entire marketing team from scratch. Ketrina Dunagan, his new VP of retail and channel marketing, opened Galaxy Studios -- facilities where consumers can test Samsung phones instead of going to Best Buy (BBY) or a phone-company store. Another exec, Brian Wallace, was brought in to handle digital marketing efforts. Wallace, in turn, brought in a data-analytics company called Networked Insights to help Samsung tap into and utilize the conversations across social media, a key part of its strategy to connect better with consumers. (In December Wallace said he would leave Samsung for a marketing gig at Google's Motorola unit; Networked Insights is still working with Samsung.)

Just a few months into the job, Pendleton also enlisted 72andSunny, an ad agency owned by Toronto-based MDC Partners. "At that point the main guys were Apple, and everyone else was fighting for the No. 2 spot," says John Boiler, 72andSunny's co-founder and CEO.

Boiler had worked with Pendleton on several Nike campaigns. It was his team that came up with the now-famous fanboys campaign, a series of ads that poke fun at diehard Apple fans. Over the past year 72andSunny has worked with Samsung on ads for four different products, including the Galaxy S III. In the most popular of the anti-Apple commercials -- the one that aired during the iPhone 5 launch, it turns out that one of the hipsters waiting in line for an Apple phone is actually holding a spot for his parents. Ouch.

All that buzz doesn't come cheap. Samsung spent $349 million on marketing in the U.S. in the first three quarters of 2012, compared with $191 million a year earlier, according to Kantar Media, a research firm. But CMO Pendleton is quick to point out that without a great product, all those dollars wouldn't have much effect. Samsung spent $8.7 billion on R&D efforts in 2011. One in four of the company's 220,000 employees works in research and development. Much of the phone technology is developed and produced by groups in Asia, then tweaked and packaged locally. Researchers are currently experimenting with innovations like bendable screens and new memory technologies -- all of which are expected to be incorporated in future versions of its smartphones.

MORE: Smartphones are China's next great economic indicator

Indeed, part of Samsung's secret sauce is that it controls and manufactures many of the building blocks of its phones. It has capacity to ramp up production of those parts quickly, which also makes Samsung a favorite among other phonemakers. One of its largest components customers? Apple. "All of their competitors must use third parties to accomplish the same tasks," says Len Jelinek, a semiconductor analyst at research firm IHS iSuppli. "One could estimate that there would be at least a quarter's advantage due to internal control of all operations."

Samsung's relationship with Google (GOOG), maker of the Android operating system, has also evolved. Samsung launched its first Android smartphone, the Galaxy S, in 2010, well after HTC came out with the first so-called Google phone. Once Samsung embraced Android, though, it became the platform's No. 1 performer: Today it makes 45% of all Android-based phones. Samsung also collaborates with Google on chip technology, says Andy Rubin, senior vice president of mobile at Google. "We worked together on several Nexus products, and the partnership has also prepared the platform to take advantage of the advances in embedded processors," Rubin writes in an e-mail.

Samsung's reliance on Android unquestionably accelerated its growth in handset sales by offering it a "turnkey" mobile ecosystem. But Android could also turn out to be its Achilles' heel. While it builds some services on top of the operating system and tries to give its Galaxy phones their own look and feel, Samsung ultimately does not own Android. In fact, the operating system is freely available to all other phonemakers, including up-and-coming Chinese manufacturers that are developing cheaper phones. Then there's the fact that Android's parent, Google, now owns Motorola Mobility. It remains to be seen if Samsung will enjoy the same friendly partnership with Android if Google decides it wants Motorola to grab market share.

MORE: Everything about Blackberry's iPhone fighter

Samsung claims that being "open" gives it the flexibility to shift gears if a particular operating system falls out of favor. The company has already announced a Windows Phone 8 device, the Ativ Odyssey, which will launch in the U.S. in the coming weeks. It also said it will make a phone that runs on Tizen -- an open-source operating system backed by Intel (INTC) -- later this year.

"We don't own the ecosystem because we've chosen up to this point not to innovate in that direction," says Justin Denison, VP of strategy and market intelligence at Samsung. "Where we choose to innovate is creating the best package possible for the consumer."

Still, Samsung is working hard to build up its own content and services on top of Android, like its Music Hub offering, which allows users to purchase and download songs or store them in the cloud for streaming. To help beef up its software know-how, the company is expanding its footprint in Silicon Valley. In December, Samsung announced it would soon open a new startup incubator in Palo Alto. The company is also building out a 1.1-million-square-foot R&D center in San Jose.

Samsung's executives won't say if they intend to develop their own operating system. Industry observers say that without full control over all the pieces -- hardware and software -- Samsung could be missing out on a huge opportunity: getting all its consumer-electronics products to work together seamlessly. With a proprietary operating system, Samsung could enable its TVs to talk to Samsung-made phones and even washing machines. Applications and content could easily be shared among the different devices, making Samsung's entire line of consumer electronics much, much stickier with consumers.

But gadget makers and Internet companies have been talking up such convergence since the 1990s, and many analysts aren't holding their breath. "I don't yet see that they're moving into the next phase," says Asymco analyst and Apple commentator Horace Dediu.

For now the Samsung U.S. team remains focused on developing and marketing the next hot device. While Sohn, the U.S. mobile president, and marketing chief Pendleton are pleased with the positive reviews and cool factor the Galaxy devices are enjoying in the marketplace, they recognize that success can be fleeting in consumer electronics. If Samsung doesn't keep innovating and creating experiences that customers love, it may find itself on the outs -- and maybe even the subject of a cheeky ad campaign. "Thanks for holding our spot at the Samsung store"? Ouch.

This story is from the February 4, 2013 issue of Fortune.

A battle for the best 'Chappelle's Show' sketch ever

Rembert Browne — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 22:35:04 +0100

I'm not sure if it's the best show, or the funniest show, or the smartest show, or even the bravest show, but I do know that Chappelle's Show is hands down, without a close second, the most important show of my life. Since its debut on January 22, 2003, it became one of the few television shows that I watched every week, in real time, the night it aired. There are two reasons for this: (1) It was revolutionary, and (2) it was unacceptable to show up to high school the next day without knowing all the material from the previous night's episode. Social suicide, the kids still call it. And since the show went off the air in 2006, my weekly intake has only slightly decreased.

There's nothing I'd call myself an "expert" in, but for all intents and purposes, I have a PhD in "Ashy Larry" from the accredited institution of higher learning known as David Khari Webber Chappelle. For that reason, I feel confident in my abilities to carry this out in the most professionally passionate way possible.

The 11 Rules

The 64 entries are sketches, not full episodes.
What's subjective? Inclusion in the field of 64. Feel free to complain.
What's objective? Seedings, which are based on views on comedycentral.com. No complaints allowed.
If a long sketch ("Rick James," "The Mad Real World," etc.) is split into multiple clips on comedycentral.com, the views were summed.
Recurring segments ("Negrodamus," "Ask a Black Guy," "Lil Jon") are treated as separate entries.
Sketches that had multiple parts airing at different points of the same episode ("Piss on You," "Reparations 2003," "Pixies," etc.) are treated as one sketch, and the views of their separate parts were summed.
End-of-episode musical performances, while extremely important, are not included in this contest. But watch this. Never forget.
There is a noticeable bias, by way of views, toward newer clips (Season 3), which is unfortunate because that's Chappelle's worst. But know that that doesn't really matter, because seedings are almost irrelevant.
A win = what I feel is the best sketch. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you are disgusted by hyperbole, now would be a good time to leave.
If you are not well versed in Chappelle, stop now. This isn't amateur hour. Consider this bracketology's FINAL BOSS.

The Five That Just Missed the Cut

Redman Potty Fresh
Great Moments in Hookup History: Smashley Evans
Dude's Night Out
Def Comedy Poetry
Marijuana PSA Commercial

That's it. ENJOY YOURSELF.

[+] Enlarge

Round of 64

Silky Johnson Region

Prince (1) vs. Ask a Black Dude: Size Matters/They'll Take Your Show (16)

While pretty much anything going up against "Game, Blouses" will lose (this "Ask a Black Dude" segment included), this isn't as much of a blowout as one would think. This "Ask a Black Dude" sketch, from Season 1, essentially has Paul Mooney (out of his Negrodamus garb) eerily (and hilariously) prophetic about the way Chappelle's Show ultimately ended ("I get to talkin' some mess on your show, they'll take your show"). This seemed to be rattling around in Dave's head when he turned down $50 million instead of pushing out a full third season. So yeah, an important sketch but there were no grapes, pancakes, or Micki Free, so it loses. ONWARD, REVOLUTION.

Jedi Sex Scandal (8) vs. Don't Pitch Me (9)

Had I not gone through and recently watched every episode, I would have forgotten about the "Jedi Sex Scandal" sketch. As a rule of thumb in this bracket (there are a few, where I simply can't deny my biases), if Chuck Taylor is around, it gets a leg up, mainly because he looks just like David Gregory. Anyway, there are few things funnier than watching Yoda say, "Over, this interview is." Until the next scene when Yoda says, "Ooh, about it tell me," vocally transforming into a flamboyant black man. Just fantastic. Against Yoda is "Don't Pitch Me," the sketch in which we all learned to always tell Arsenio how good the cheese is, or ELSE. Both sketches have their weak moments as they push along, so at the end it comes down to the classic matchup of Yoda vs. Arsenio. What a beautiful world we live in where that can happen. Anyway, Arsenio wins, easily, if for no other reason than those twists he was wearing in 2004.

Kneehigh Park (5) vs. Dave's Educated Guess Line (12)

"Kneehigh Park" is equal parts disgusting and genius. It's disgusting because the entire sketch is about puppets (and Q-Tip) teaching children about venereal diseases. It's genius because it allowed Charlie Murphy to do the voice of Stinky — the puppet that lived in a "fucking trash can" (sound familiar?) — curse at children, and sing one of the most beautiful songs ever, titled "That's Why I Say Fuck It" (I'm listening to it right now). Against "Kneehigh Park" is one of the most beautifully racist sketches he's ever done. It's classic Dave, because he toes the line of prejudice by making fun of everyone. Oh, and that outfit. I've been looking for a two-piece purple dashiki set since the day this aired. I love the hotline, and in my ideal world it actually exists, but it's narrowly edged out by Kneehigh Park. Narrowly. Had Snoop not voiced the puppet known as "Dangle," it might have gone the other way. Oh, and had that little girl not called Dave Chappelle "Chris Rock." That too.

Piss on You (4) vs. Mitsubishi Commercial (13)

This is one of the more lopsided matchups of the entire tournament. While the Mitsubishi commercial is pretty awesome (and shockingly dated; WHERE YOU AT, DIRTY VEGAS?), the reason it's important is because it's the first sketch ever. Not a bad way to start the most culturally important show of the decade. Unfortunately, it's up against "Piss on You," which, excuse my French, "drip, drip, drips" all over the competition. It's just too good.

Fear Factor (6) vs. The Wrap-It-Up Box (11)

The "Fear Factor" episode gave us a top-10 Chappelle's Show quote:

"I'm-a tell you something about me, Joe Rogan, that you might not know. I smoke rocks." —Tyrone Biggums

I love the Wrap-It-Up Box, especially when the girl is going on and on and Dave just replies with "Word," but Tyrone Biggums is an institution and this might be his magnum opus. Oh, Tyrone also says, "My feet are strong" while walking across the hot coals, which is a quote I utter on a daily basis. Oh yeah, Tyreeta is also in this sketch. Yeah, this competition is over.

Wayne Brady (3) vs. Give Up the Show (14)

This is a fitting matchup, because "Give Up the Show," is the setup for the Wayne Brady sketch. I almost lumped these together, but they really need to be treated like two separate entities. Again, like the "Ask a Black Dude" sketch, Dave predicted what probably ended up happening, with him giving up the show, people thinking he'd lost it, and then being cast out by the likes of Big Boi and Nick Cannon. But again, no matter how prophetic this was, it can't overtake one of the funniest sketches. Ever. Get comfortable, Wayne, you aren't going anywhere.

Keeping It Real: Vernon Franklin (7) vs. Popcopy (10)

I have to admit, I liked every "When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong" sketch, but I didn't love them. Funny, just not my favorite. Anyway, the one that always stood apart was the one with Dave as Vernon Franklin, the precocious young man who loses his cool in the boardroom and goes on one of the more real tirades I've ever seen. I can't lie, there's not really much that tops a rant that goes from "five on the black-hand side" to "soft-shoe and juggle watermelon" to "allow me to reintroduce myself, my name is Hov" to "thuglife" to a series of DMX barks to "WU-TANG." Sorry, Popcopy. I love you, but you never had a chance.

WU-TANG.

Tupac Is Still Alive (2) vs. Love Contract (15)

You have to give Chappelle credit for taking one of the most tired jokes ever, Tupac still being alive, and turning it into a hilarious segment. One of the highlights of Season 3 might be when "Tupac" goes through the long-winded story of explaining that by "George W." he meant "George W. Smith … from city council … he ran in '93 … out in Oakland … you probably didn't hear about him." It's just too good. That moment alone is one of the reasons I went from almost excluding Season 3 from the bracket to having everything be fair game. Going against the sketch that gave us "It might be DOO-DOO" is "The Love Contract." Earlier I mentioned one of my biases being sketches that feature Chuck Taylor. Bias no. 2: sketches involving Rashida Jones. Why lie: Her chariot awaits whenever she decides to call me back. Anyway, Rashida with disheveled hair + the line "the love contract, because you'd hate to catch a beef for something you know you didn't do" + the fact that I always forget the second part of this sketch involves the even funnier "Confidentiality Agreement" + "KOBE" makes this a near-perfect, short-but-sweet sketch. Yes, Tupac is funny, but it comes up short. 15-2 upset, baby. RASHIDA ON TO THE NEXT ROUND.

Buck Nasty Region

Mad Real World (1) vs. Mooney on Movies (16)

So yes. "Mad Real World" wins. Obviously. But before I move on, I have to talk about one of my favorite moments from the series, which takes place in "Mooney on Movies." When they go into the second film, Barbershop, one of the ladies gives a nice description of the film. As she's talking, Mooney is shaking his head, about to erupt. And when she finishes, Mooney simply says, "You know it's just a front; they really sell drugs at barbershops." And that's it. Just unreal. But yeah, Tron, Tyree, and Katie easily on to the next round.

Trading Spouses (8) vs. Black Gallagher (9)

This is a weird matchup, because when I think about Black Gallagher, I immediately think about the outtakes on the Season 2 DVD, which couldn't be funnier. The actual sketch is hilarious, too, but just not as funny as the footage left behind. Coupling that with the fact that every single thing in "Trading Spouses" is executed perfectly makes "Black Gallagher"'s road to the Round of 32 an uphill battle. From Todd cooking parsnips to Leonard saying "Who the fuck is Renee Zell-wedge-er" to Leonard dropping his new son off in the hood and saying "G-g-g-good-bye" to Leonard explaining how white people wash themselves, all while a cigarette delicately dangles from his mouth, this couldn't be any better. A surprisingly easy win for T-Mart and the gang.

Lil Jon vs. Lil Jon (5) vs. Slow Motion (12)

Sorry, "Slow Motion" sketch, but the last 30 seconds of the phone call between Lil Jon and Lil Jon might trump everything.

(Bold = Lil Jon, Italics = Chappelle as Lil Jon.)

"That was Oprah, she's having our baby. Yeaaaahhhhh. I can't hear you, my cell phone's breaking up. I can't hear you, it sounds like your phone is breaking up. What? What? What? What? What? What? OK, Yeah, Yeaaah, Yeah, Yeaaah, What? What? OK, OK, Yeah. Affirmative, huh? Roger? Yeah. What? Melting down. Ahhhh. BYE, NIGGA."

So yeah, that's how you move on.

Racial Draft (4) vs. Tyrone Biggums: Red Balls (13)

There was a lot of pressure going into Season 2 of Chappelle's Show. But the first episode did not disappoint, due in large part to the "Racial Draft." Dave as Tiger, Mos Def in that red suit, Condoleezza given away by blacks, and the creepy Wu-Tang part at the end only begin to scratch the surface of how good this sketch is. On the other side is "Red Balls." I've never really stopped thinking about the part when Tyrone steals the lady's radio, runs away, then comes back and says, "FYI, people still do steal radios, how do you think I got this suit," goes into a Harlem shake, and then screams "RED BALLS GOT ME, AHHHH!" It's a fantastic sketch, but it can't really compete with the then–Secretary of State being given away by her race. So rude. So good.

Tyrone Biggums: Drug Awareness Class (6) vs. And1 Sports (11)

I originally thought that this was a no-brainer in favor of Tyrone and the completely inappropriate drug talk he gave to an elementary school class. I always remembered the "And1 Sports" bit being funny, but not that funny. Then I watched it again and realized how wrong I was. The names of the different guys, Ronny "Fielder's Choice" Banks, Kenny "Baseline" Sims, and Reggie "Gutterballs" Bryant make me smile, and having insane crowd reactions for baseball, tennis, and bowling is just too funny. Oh, and one other thing: Let the record show that the idea of playing defense in bowling is priceless. Few things top that. So I'm going to call this a huge upset, with the often-overlooked Season 1 sketch knocking out heavyweight Tyrone Biggums. Don't worry, though, Biggums Stans, he has plenty of classics left.

The Niggar Family (3) vs. Ribs (14)

Dave Chappelle should be given an American Sociological Association Lifetime Achievement Award for inventing "The Niggar Family." That's all I have to say about that for now. Sorry, "Ribs," but Timmy Niggar does NOT play around.

Dave Gets Oprah Pregnant (7) vs. Negrodamus: Wayne Brady (10)

The way Dave reacted when he found out he got Oprah pregnant is one of the rudest and most accurate stories he ever told on the show. Getting Oprah pregnant would 100 percent bring out the worst in any good-natured human. I promise. Anyway, the sketch is awesome, especially the fact that The Jeffersons theme song is playing in the background. Oh, and the fact that he sings karaoke with a crew of Asian people with fighter pilot goggles on. Going against this sketch is one of the Negrodamus sketches. Not only does this sketch have one of the dumbest, funniest jokes I've ever heard ("Arnold Schwarzenegger will divorce his wife and marry Shirley Temple Black and she will be Mrs. Shirley Temple Black Nigga"), but it immediately goes into the joke that sets up perhaps the best Chappelle's Show sketch ever ("White people love Wayne Brady because he makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X"). While it pains me to see Oprah's pregnancy not make it to the next round, there's no way to knock out this Negrodamus sketch this early.

The Playa Hater's Ball (2) vs. Great NY Boobs (15)

Before a single person even appears on the screen for "The Playa Hater's Ball," its opening credits give it a bye into at least the Sweet 16. The text:

"HBO, the greatest network of our time, has brought you compelling documentaries about pimps, ho's, players, johns, tricks, marks, mark-ass tricks, trick-ass marks, skeezers, skanks, skig-scags, and scallywhops … "

It's so good, I've almost forgotten what "Great NY Boobs" was even about. HATE HATE HATE.

Pitbull Region

Rick James (1) vs. Lil Jon Interview (16)

The Theresa Roddy interview is one of the better Lil Jon sketches, especially the highly emotional monologue about black youth, but no. Just no.

Calvin Got a Job/WacArnold's (8) vs. Life Like a Video Game (9)

"Ew, nigga, you smell like French fries" and "It's a thin line between fries and shakes" are two of my favorite Chappelle lines, both from the WacArnold's sketch. Like so many Chappelle sketches, this one is very much a social commentary, but in addition to that, there's no denying how hysterical this segment is. This is especially true once Calvin makes it back to his house and starts verbally threatening the mother of his child that if she keeps acting up, she will not get the rib sandwich that's coming out the following Tuesday. Going against "WacArnold's" is the sketch "Life Like a Video Game," in which Chappelle makes fun of Grand Theft Auto. It's not a very complicated sketch, but it is very well done, from the different camera angles to the way Dave walks to the way he switches around his guns until he's satisfied with his killing machine. The impersonations are spot-on almost to the point of being cute. Sadly, cute always loses to generational poverty and urban blight, so "WacArnold's" advances.

Wu-Tang Financial (5) vs. I Know Black People (12)

This is unfortunate. If put in different sections of the bracket, both of these sketches could easily be Sweet 16–bound. Unfortunately, one has to go and it's really not that hard of a decision. I love everything about "Wu-Tang Financial." I'm still waiting for the day when I walk into Bank of America and the first employee that sees me grabs my hand and says, "You need to diversify yo bonds, nigga." I don't care who they are or what they look like, I will embrace them and start crying tears of joy. Anyway, as much as I love Wu-Tang Financial, there's no way it can touch "I Know Black People." The responses to "What is a loosie?" alone would probably send it to the next round. Or if not just that, "loosie" + Chappelle playing air-bass while singing the Good Times theme. Either way, "I Know Black People" marches forward. Sorry, The GZA. Sorry, The RZA.

The Time Haters (4) vs. History's Greatest Wars (13)

These two great segments, one about the Playa Haters going back in time and the other about the turf war between the 19th Street Gangsters and the River Terrace Crew, are pretty equal in number of laughs. The great thing about both is that each has a standout passage, and determining which is better seems like the only appropriate way to determine which advances. In "The Time Haters," Silky Johnson explains the word "Honky" to those living in the 1800s by saying:

"'Honky' is a racial epithet used for white people. It was made popular by a man named George Jefferson in the 1970s. You see, he and his wife, Weezy, owned a dry-cleaning business, so they moved on up to the east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky. They finally got a piece of the pie. Convoluted story, I'll admit, but the point is this … that in the future, all black people will be FREE."

And then he goes on to hilariously, repeatedly shoot a slavemaster. In the "History's Greatest Wars" segment, General Cornrow Wallace (played by Mos Def) sends a note from jail that says:

On top of that being illiteracy at its most comical, it's additionally great because what Mos Def reads and what the letter actually says don't match up (listen and read at the same time; it's awesome). Anyway, a tough battle, but "History's Greatest Wars" is beefing its way to the next round. Ppprrrrr.

Tyrone Intervention (6) vs. Real Movies: Deep Impact (11)

The Tyrone Biggums intervention sketch is important, because it gave us two outstanding crack references, the "Five o'Clock Free Crack Giveaway" and "Come to Tyrone's $450,000 Crack Party." Classic crack references. On the other end is the Deep Impact spoof, with Chappelle as a presidential Morgan Freeman, telling the world all the secrets he knows, since Earth is about to end by way of a meteor. The only thing better than exposing AIDS cures, cloning, magic bullets, magic, and Bibble is the wig and faux-facial hair Chappelle decided to don to impersonate Morgan Freeman. This matchup is a tough one, but Dave as Morgan Freeman as pre-Obama has to move on. I'm not upset about that one bit.

Black Bush (3) vs. Three Daves (14)

I love watching "Three Daves," because I plan on releasing a similar video when I turn 30. I've already written the script for 18-year old Rembert and, for better or for worse, it's not that different from 18-year-old Dave. My script for 24 will be finished soon after finishing this bracket. As for 30, I really hope that I, too, am screaming at my kid because he's more interested in Diggy Simmons than in his father. As much as I have applied this sketch to my real life, it's going up against one of the better sketches to watch in present day, seeing that we have one of those black president things now. If the outtakes to "Black Bush" were in this bracket, it would win in a landslide, but the aired sketch, unlike "Black Gallagher," is still extremely above average. "Black Bush" advances and, not to look ahead, but we've got a second-round black-on-black president bloodbath on our hands. CAN'T WAIT.

Jury Selection (7) vs. Mandela Boot Camp (10)

"Mandela Boot Camp" is phenomenal, not only because even Dave knows it's a horrible impression of Nelson Mandela, but also because the premise of Nelson Mandela having a boot camp that takes in rough kids from the Sally Jesse Raphael show is second only to defense in bowling in terms of absurdly genius concepts. Before the seedings worked themselves out, I really wanted this sketch to make its way into the second or third round, just because it's so silly. Unfortunately, it ran into the sketch with the single greatest description of Michael Jackson's "alleged" penis in the history of Michael Jackson "alleged" penis descriptions: "There's a head, a shaft, some balls, hair — maybe press-permed hair — with glitter sprinkled on it." "Jury Selection" advances on the strength of that quote alone, which is saying something, given that there's still R. Kelly, O.J., and Robert Blake to be discussed.

Cribs (2) vs. Nat King Cole (15)

Even though I've mentioned my bias against Season 3, there's no denying the mastery that is the Chappelle "Cribs" sketch. Whether it is The Real World, Making the Band, or Cribs, Dave truly knew how to take a reality show and accurately mock every ridiculous aspect of it. Between the initial quote of "Come on in, you broke motherfuckers," his reversible white panda/bald eagle fur, and a chicken bone chandelier, he nails it. So good. Too good, actually, with regard to its competition, the "Nat King Cole" sketch. Yes, watching Dave as an inappropriate Nat King Cole is always fun, but it's just no match for watching Dave open his freezer, pull out a Tyrannosaurus Rex egg, and say, "Y'all wanna eat some dinosaur, nigga? Let's try it out."

NEIL PATRICK HARRIS dreams BOLLYWOOD - Neil's Puppet Dreams - SEASON FINALE

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:14:09 +0100

SIRI RISING: The Inside Story Of Siri's Origins -- And Why She Could Overshadow The iPhone

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:14:00 +0100

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The world got its first inkling of the quick wit that would make Apple’s Siri an icon during a packed press conference held before an auditorium of tech elite.

"Who are you?" an Apple executive asked the assistant.

“I am a humble personal assistant,” Siri answered to appreciative laughter.

More like humbled personal assistant. That press conference was actually Siri's second coming-out party. When the virtual assistant first launched in early 2010, it was a standalone iPhone app called Siri created by a 24-person startup with the same name, a company Apple would later acquire.

Back then, Siri boasted an even more irreverent tone -- and a more robust set of skills. Like fiction writers dreaming up a character, Dag Kittlaus, Siri's co-founder and chief executive, and Harry Saddler, a design expert, had carefully crafted the assistant's attitude and backstory. It was to be "otherworldly," "vaguely aware of popular culture" and armed with a "dry wit," Kittlaus says.

Ask it about gyms, and Siri sent back a mocking, “Yeah, your grip feels weak.” Ask, “What happened to HAL?” -- the brainy (and murderous) talking computer that starred in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 thriller "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- and it delivered a sullen, “I don’t want to talk about it." In those days, Siri still had “fuck” in its lexicon.

That was before Apple washed Siri’s mouth out with soap and curbed many of its talents, even as it endowed the assistant with new gifts. The Siri that Apple introduced in October 2011, 16 months after acquiring the technology for a reported $150 to $250 million, had expanded its linguistic range from one to multiple languages. It was scaled to serve millions of people and programmed to operate internationally. It had acquired a voice with which to speak its answers, where before it had offered only written responses. And it was deeply integrated into the iPhone, so that it could tap into about a dozen of Apple's own tools to handle simple tasks like scheduling a meeting, replying to emails or checking the weather.

As impressive as those talents were, most failed to realize that Apple's version of Siri lacked many of the features once built into the program. This, after all, was no ordinary iPhone app, but the progeny of the largest artificial intelligence project in U.S. history: a Defense Department-funded undertaking that sought to build a virtual assistant that could reason and learn.

At its original debut, in 2010, Siri had been able to connect with 42 different web services -- from Yelp and StubHub to Rotten Tomatoes and Wolfram Alpha -- then return a single answer that integrated the best details culled from those diverse sources. It had been able to buy tickets, reserve a table and summon a taxi, all without a user having to open another app, register for a separate service or place a call. It was already on the verge of “intuiting” a user's pet peeves and preferences to the point that it would have been able to seamlessly match its suggestions to his or her personality.

At a 2010 tech conference, Siri co-founder Tom Gruber demonstrated the app's reach: Telling the assistant, “I’d like a romantic place for Italian food near my office,” yielded an answer that seamlessly combined facts from Citysearch, Gayot, Yelp, Yahoo! Local, AllMenus.com, Google Maps, BooRah and OpenTable.

As conceived by its creators, Siri was supposed to be a "do engine," something that would allow people to hold conversations with the Internet. While a search engine used stilted keywords to create lists of links, a do engine could carry a conversation, then decide and act. Had one too many drinks? The ability to coordinate a Google search for a ride home might elude you, but a do engine could translate a muttered, "I'm drunk take me home," into a command to send a car service to your location. The startup's goal was not to build a better search engine, but to pioneer an entirely new paradigm for accessing the Internet, one that would let artificially intelligent agents summon the answers people needed, rather than pull relevant resources for humans to consult on their own. If the search engine defined the second generation of the web, Siri's co-founders were confident the do engine would define the third.

The do engine was designed to be a participant in the life at hand -- one that could anticipate what you wanted before you wanted it, and make it yours before you could ask. Siri's creators planned, though never implemented, a way for Siri to assist waylaid travelers: The assistant could preempt the frustration caused by a delayed plane by suggesting alternate flights, trains departing shortly, or car rental companies with vehicles available.

This Siri -- the Siri of the past -- offers a glimpse at what the Siri of the future may provide, and a blueprint for how a growing wave of artificially intelligent assistants will slot into our lives. The goal is a human-enhancing and potentially indispensable assistant that could supplement the limitations of our minds and free us from mundane and tedious tasks.

Siri's backers know Apple's version of the assistant has not yet lived up to its potential. “The Siri team saw the future, defined the future and built the first working version of the future,” says Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, one of the two first venture capital firms to invest in Siri. “So it’s disappointing to those of us that were part of the original team to see how slowly that’s progressed out of the acquired company into the marketplace."

But as a new wave of virtual assistants compete to take on our to-do lists, Apple is under growing pressure to use the technology it already has and turn Siri into the multitasking, proactive helper it once was. Siri's history suggests a fantastical future of virtual assistants is coming; where we now see Siri as a footnote to the iPhone's legacy, some day soon the iPhone may be remembered as a footnote to Siri.

“A kinder, gentler HAL is on way its way to the mainstream for sure,” says Kittlaus. “Siri is just a poster child, but it goes way, way beyond that."

REPORTING FOR DUTY AT 'NERD CITY'

Thirty-five years after HAL’s big screen debut, turning the stuff of science fiction into fact fell to perhaps the only organization with a more outlandish imagination than a Lucas or Spielberg: the Defense Department.

In 2003, the agency's investment arm, DARPA, tapped the non-profit research institute SRI International to lead a five-year, 500-person effort to build a virtual assistant, one the government hoped might yield software to help military commanders with both information overload and office chores. Although it wasn't the project's mission, this helper, the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes, or CALO, would ultimately provide the inspiration and model for Siri.

The Defense Department's financial backing, $150 million in all, united hundreds of top-tier artificial intelligence experts for an ambitious and uncertain endeavor that most corporate R&D labs could only dream of tackling: teaching computers to learn in the wild. The army of engineers at "nerd city" -- one SRI researcher's nickname for the lab -- were tasked with creating a PC-based helper smart enough to learn by observing a user's behavior, and all the people, projects and topics relevant to her work. The undertaking was “by any measure, the largest AI program in history,” says David Israel, one of the lead researchers on CALO.

The CALO project was part of the PAL (Personal Assistant that Learns) program, funded by the Defense Department's investment arm, DARPA.

At least to some people, it seemed as if the serious-minded federal government was taking a flier on the stuff of 9-year-old boys’ sci-fi fantasies.

“CALO was put together at a time when many people said AI was a waste of time,” explains Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and associate professor at Stanford University. “It had failed multiple times, skepticism was high and a lot of people thought it was a dumb idea.”

Despite its naysayers, CALO proved a scientific triumph. The project reunited, for the first time in decades, independent disciplines of artificial intelligence that had been deemed too complex to cooperate.

It also demonstrated that a machine could learn in real time through its lived experience, as a human being does. Previously, artificial intelligence software had been coached "in vitro," meaning a machine-learning algorithm would be applied to a fixed set of data, then judged on how it handled that information. Every part of CALO instead had to learn "in vivo," training itself as it performed tasks using an uncontrolled diet of information.

The SRI lab had a history of bringing the future to the present. Founded in 1946 by Stanford University trustees seeking research for "the good of society," SRI formally split from the university in 1970 and has operated independently ever since. The institute leads research projects funded by government agencies and corporations, then spins out its most promising technologies into standalone startups. The inkjet printer, LCD screen and Disneyland are all among the institute’s brainchildren.

The Menlo Park lab also gained renown for counting, among its researchers, Silicon Valley legend Doug Engelbart, who in the 1960s pioneered the computer mouse and foresaw many of the basic computing tools we now take for granted.

Adam Cheyer, an engineer at the institute, was already drawing comparisons to Engelbart, well before he launched what would eventually become Siri. The dark-haired, soft-spoken engineer -- a one-time Rubik’s Cube champion who could solve the puzzle in just 26 seconds -- shared not only Engelbart’s ingenuity, but also his “people first” approach to technology.

Engelbart maintained that machines should be used to augment human intellect and capabilities. The objective was “not trying to replace humans in any respect, but trying to have devices, hardware and software that make humans more effective at what they already do,” explains Israel, who remembers Cheyer and Engelbart having lengthy discussions in the research institute’s cafeteria.

Where other people saw chores on a to-do list, Cheyer saw learning opportunities for virtual assistants. During an earlier stint at SRI in the 1990s, Cheyer, then straight out of a master's program in computer science, built a small army of prototype assistants. Cheyer’s kitchen helper, for example, could track the contents of his fridge and place grocery orders online when milk ran low.

At SRI, Cheyer worked on assembling all the pieces produced by the CALO project’s 27 teams into a single assistant, which was required to take an annual exam testing what it had learned over the course of the year. The “research-grade” virtual assistant Cheyer helped build -- also called CALO -- was still too rough around the edges to be installed in white-collar workers' office PCs. But CALO was capable of performing an impressive variety of tasks that once seemed exclusive to human assistants.

Say your colleague canceled shortly before a meeting. CALO, knowledgeable about each person’s role on a project, could discern whether to cancel the meeting, and if needed, reschedule, issue new invitations and pin down a conference room. If the meeting went ahead as planned, CALO could assemble (and rank) all the documents and emails you’d need to be up to speed on the topic at hand. The assistant would listen in on the meeting, and, afterward, deliver a typed transcript of who said what and outline any specific tasks laid out during the conversation. CALO was also able to help put together presentations, organize files into folders, sort incoming messages and automate expense reports, among a host of other tasks.

Cheyer split his time between training CALO and assisting SRI's Vanguard program, a parallel effort launched in 2003 to help companies such as Deustche Telekom and Motorola probe the future of a promising new gadget called the smartphone. The Vanguard program developed its own prototype assistant, more limited than CALO, but more feasible.

The prototype dazzled a general manager at Motorola by the name of Dag Kittlaus.

A native mid-Westerner once likened to a “baby-faced Nordic Brad Pitt,” Kittlaus supplemented his office routine with a daredevil's diet of activities -- chasing tornadoes, jumping from planes and earning a black belt in Hapkido. He was a sci-fi buff partial to authors like Arthur C. Clarke (who helped pen the screenplay for "2001: A Space Odyssey") and would later set out to write his own novel set in the distant future.

When Kittlaus failed to persuade Motorola to adopt Vanguard’s technology, he quit the company in 2007 for a position as entrepreneur-in-residence at SRI. Soon after, he found himself on a plane to California for a retreat with Cheyer and several SRI colleagues. Their mission for the weekend: figure out how to harness the best ideas from CALO and Vanguard to seed a startup.

It was at the Cypress Inn at Half Moon Bay, a quiet, coastal town just south of San Francisco, that the vision for Siri was born. This mobile virtual assistant -- like CALO, and in tune with Engelbart’s thesis -- would be put to work relieving humanity of low-grade mental busywork.

The working nickname for this assistant was HAL. The proposed tagline: “HAL’s back -- but this time he’s good.”

From left to right: Mark Drummond (then SRI's executive director of ventures and licensing), Norman Winarsky (vice president of SRI Ventures and a member of Siri's board), Dag Kittlaus, Didier Guzzoni (then Cheyer's Ph.D. student) and Adam Cheyer. Also present, but not pictured, was Bill Mark, vice president of SRI's information computing sciences division and a principal investigator for CALO.

THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

Virtual assistants had long proved a kind of siren song to an entire crew of Silicon Valley dreamers that wound up shipwrecked in pursuit of a more human, intelligent and helpful HAL.

Over a decade earlier, in 1994, Wildfire Communications debuted a new telephone-based assistant, “Wildfire,” that could handle messages, place calls and retrieve voicemail in response to a prompt. Wildfire earned good reviews, but saw little pickup, despite the fact that “she” charmed users with sassy responses. A few years later, Microsoft Office’s assistant Clippy, an over-eager bouncing paperclip volunteering tips and shortcuts, launched to the chagrin of office workers everywhere. Eventually, Clippy made TIME’s list of 50 worst inventions. In 1998, General Magic’s Portico promised to connect the Internet and cell phones with a voice-controlled aide that could read emails and take messages, among other tasks. Within four years, the company shut down the assistant and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Yet if ever there were a right place and a right time for virtual assistants, the fall of 2007 appeared to be it. Faster wireless speeds, better speech recognition, the rise of cloud computing, the debut of Apple’s iPhone and a flood of new web services made virtual helpers seem attainable at last.

The SRI crew could see that the iPhone, which had launched just before their excursion to Half Moon Bay, would yield a population of networked, always-on-the-go consumers who would increasingly rely on tiny touch-screens to tell them what to do. An assistant, in the form of a voice-controlled iPhone app, seemed the ideal way to help mobile users complete all kinds of tasks, without having to poke at small screens with fat fingers or wait for web pages to load.

The aspiring entrepreneurs also had the advantage of being able to tap CALO's technology. Under a law passed by Congress in 1980, nonprofits, like SRI, were given the right to keep the profits flowing from software developed via government-funded research. The law would allow a startup to license key software from the CALO project in exchange for giving SRI a stake in the company.

Though Cheyer had doubts CALO research could be used to create a profitable business and was reluctant to leave his post at the lab, Kittlaus prevailed on his "innovation soulmate." The result was a new company named Siri, with Kittlaus, as CEO, taking on co-founders Gruber, as chief technology officer, and Cheyer, as vice-president of engineering.

Siri's founding trio required prospective hires to read MIT professor Michael Dertouzos's The Unfinished Revolution, a treatise arguing for “human-centric computing” and devices that “truly serve us, instead of the other way around.” If an applicant didn’t agree with Dertouzos’ thesis, he or she wasn’t a match for Siri.

Once hired, new Siri employees were handed an empty frame and instructed to keep a photo on their desks of the person whose vision most inspired their work. Cheyer framed a picture of another tech visionary who preached the "people first" mentality: Doug Engelbart.

Siri's co-founders. From left to right: Cheyer, Kittlaus and Gruber.

Siri secured $8.5 million from investors in early 2008 and its progress over the following months was "absolutely breathtaking," says Morgenthaler, the early Siri investor. Shawn Carolan, a partner at Menlo Ventures and another Siri backer, recalls, "Every board meeting was a breakthrough."

The founders enlisted their Siri prototype in a rigorous artificial-intelligence boot camp of their own design, one meant to train the assistant to understand, interpret and answer queries. When asked a question, Siri, which processed information in a remote data center, would send the audio of the speaker’s question to a server, where speech recognition software would "transcribe" the spoken words.

Siri then had to figure out the words' meaning -- what computer scientists call natural language processing. People have dozens of ways of asking the same thing, and while humans can deduce that the phrases, "I’m in the mood for a croissant,” “Is there a bakery nearby?” and “Some French pastries would be nice,” all arrive at the same point, it takes a highly sophisticated algorithm to reach that same conclusion.

The more traditional, error-prone approach to natural language processing interpreted meaning by identifying the parts of speech in a sentence. But Siri abandoned that method in favor of a breakthrough approach devised by Cheyer and his colleagues. Instead of modeling linguistic concepts, their system could model real-world objects. Told, "I want to see a thriller," Siri would immediately identify "thriller" as a film genre -- and summon up movies -- rather than analyze how the subject connected to an object and a verb.

Siri was able to map the contents of a question onto a domain of potential actions, then pick the action that seemed most probable, based on its understanding of the relationships between real-world concepts. (For example, Siri knew a given restaurant should have a rating, an address, a type of cuisine and a price range associated with it.) Siri could also apply details about the time of day and a user’s preferences and location to inform its response, or to ask for more information.

Picture Siri as a concierge in a noisy lobby. A request for the “closest coffee shop” might sound like “closest call Felicia” over the din. But knowing that “closest” is more likely to characterize a place than a person, and that a guest is more likely ask a concierge for dining tips, a human hotelier would infer the asker was probably hankering for a cappuccino. Same with Siri, which was tuned to listen for the kinds of phrases an employer might use with a personal assistant and could get the gist of a question without understanding every word. To avoid miscommunication, Siri also allowed users to type, rather than speak, their questions into its interface.

To pull a list of cafés, Siri would tap into data it had organized from over 40 web services that operated like remote, diffuse lobes of its brain. While previous virtual assistants functioned through deep training in a single specialty, Siri had been built as a cross-industry savant with expertise in anything from books to bagels; it just needed access to the application programming interfaces, or APIs, many web companies offer to third parties.

Early on, the Siri developers saw virtually no limit to the routine transactions the assistant could automate. They envisioned Siri’s architecture allowing for any web service with an API -- potentially hundreds of thousands of them -- to add its database to the do engine.

But Siri’s creators also knew their virtual assistant would only succeed if it was both smart and a smartass, both artificially intelligent and artificially amusing.

Kittlaus and Saddler brainstormed snappy comebacks for all the offbeat questions people were likely to ask the assistant. The co-founders also dreamed of offering users a choice of different personality “packs” that could be installed to make Siri's answers sweeter or sassier. And because Siri could recognize nuances in users’ speech mannerisms, its creators hoped one day they might even build a Siri that could mimic people’s personalities. “Yo, yo what kind of flicks are playing, dude?” might get Siri to answer, “Hey man, check out the new Eastwood flick. Word,” according to Kittlaus.

The standalone Siri app, when it first launched in 2010.

In February 2010, three weeks after Siri debuted as an independently developed iPhone app, Kittlaus received a call from a mystery number -- one he nearly missed thanks to a glitchy, unresponsive iPhone screen.

It was Steve Jobs and he wanted to meet. The next day.

Siri’s co-founders spent three hours with Jobs at his Palo Alto home discussing the future of do engines and how people could converse with machines (Jobs loved Siri's snark). Apple quickly followed up with an interest in acquiring the young company.

“The way that Steve described it, speech recognition -- and how to use it to create a speech interface for something like the iPhone -- was an area of interest to him and Scott Forstall [then head of Apple's mobile software] for some time,” recalls Kittlaus. “The story that I’m told is that he thought we’d cracked that paradigm with our simple, conversational interface.”

Verizon thought so, too. In the fall of 2009, several months before Apple approached Siri, Verizon had signed a deal with the startup to make Siri a default app on all Android phones set to launch in the new year. When Apple swooped in to buy Siri, it insisted on making the assistant exclusive to Apple devices, and nixed the Verizon deal. In the process, it narrowly avoided seeing Siri become a selling point for smartphones powered by its biggest rival, Google. (Somewhere in the vaults of the wireless giant, there are unreleased commercials touting Siri as an Android add-on.)

Its first and only app had barely been available for two full months. And now Siri -- and its future -- belonged to Apple.

"It was a storybook ending -- or beginning, you can call it," Kittlaus says.

"AN ARTIFICIALLY-INTELLIGENT ORPHAN"

With Siri and its entire 24-person team installed at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, the tech giant at once got down to tinkering with its new acquisition.

Even as Apple amped up some features, it removed many of Siri's powers by disconnecting the assistant from most of the outside services that had powered its digital brain. The restaurant reservation function, one of the key features of the original Siri app in 2010, would be denied to iPhone users until 2012.

Industry insiders say Apple's size has hindered its ability to forge deals with the dozens of services that once synced with Siri. Whereas partnering with a startup in its embryonic stages was a simpler affair, brokering a deal with the world's most influential tech company, a high-stakes undertaking by any measure, required many lawyers, meetings and spreadsheets of cost-benefit analyses. Though Apple has the technology to pair Siri with a multitude of sites and services -- and could use it soon -- it may not yet have persuaded those potential partners to embrace a bigger Siri.

Apple also seems keen to ensure Siri will be decent for many users, rather than genius for a few. Progress has been slowed by Apple's need to localize the assistant in the nearly 100 countries that offer the iPhone. Sending Siri abroad requires training the assistant in dozens of different languages, a time-intensive affair given the technical challenges of teaching the algorithm to understand human speech.

People familiar with the early version of Siri gripe that Apple, usually so meticulous about its products' look and feel, has hidden Siri's capabilities with a design that over-promises on what Siri can deliver. To avoid disappointing its users, the original Siri app tried to teach people what they could ask by showing a screen of sample questions each time they queried the assistant. Siri’s current layout largely leaves the assistant’s abilities to the user’s imagination, even though it excels at only a very specific subset of tasks. Apple’s slogan for Siri -- “Your wish is its command” -- creates even more frustration by suggesting people should let their dreams run wild and expect Siri, the genie in the iPhone, will fulfill any desire.

Apple also must wrestle with the fact that Siri isn’t always a great listener, especially in the places it’s likely to be used most. Speech recognition software is still iffy in noisy settings, and especially has trouble decoding the low-quality audio that Bluetooth headsets send to Siri -- so good luck chatting with Siri while you're driving a car. That problem is likely temporary, however, as better data and more sophisticated models help machines become ever-more in tune with human speech.

Already, Apple's assistant does seem to be getting sharper: Investment bank Piper Jaffray raised Siri’s grade from a “D” to a “C” after a test of its skills last December found Siri could understand 91 percent of queries and correctly answer 77 percent of them.

But corporate politics have been unkind to Siri, and the endeavor's prospects may be jeopardized by its loss of many powerful advocates within Apple. Though Saffo, the Stanford professor and futurist, cautions deciphering Apple's inner workings is like "trying to understand North Korea," he ventures that Siri has become "an artificially-intelligent orphan" within the company.

Only one of Siri’s three co-founders, Tom Gruber, remains at the company. Kittlaus left three weeks after Apple re-launched Siri in 2011, and Cheyer quit a year later. Apple's Forstall, who introduced Siri at its first keynote and oversaw the company's iOS software, was fired last year. Steve Jobs died the day after Siri debuted. And Luc Julia, who replaced Kittlaus as head of Siri, lasted just 10 months at Apple before leaving in 2012.

A HIGHER STATE OF BEING

Siri offered the first mass-market assistant capable of understanding humans' natural speech patterns and assembling information from disparate parts of the Internet into a single, correct response. That model, one Siri pioneered, has been embraced by a growing wave of artificial intelligence engineers and entrepreneurs keen to pioneer their own version of HAL.

The virtual assistants now coming to market are trying to provide many of the same capabilities offered in the early version of Siri, and CALO before it. Even Apple has been slowly reinstating some of the capabilities Siri once offered, such as movie reviews and restaurant bookings.

Having seen Siri's success, Silicon Valley startups are now mining the CALO project to build a race of assistants tailored to work in specialized fields. Desti is an artificially intelligent assistant specializing in travel; Lola is a “Siri for banking;” and Kuato is leveraging CALO research to build a learning assistant.

More than half a dozen Siri-like services launched in 2012 alone. Samsung debuted S-Voice, a voice-controlled assistant. Nuance, a provider of speech recognition software, released a "Siri for apps" called Nina. Startups Evi and Maluuba each released virtual assistant apps. IBM is working on adapting its supercomputer Watson into a turbo-charged Siri that can help physicians, farmers, Wall Street traders and high-schoolers. And Google has followed Siri with its own conversational assistant, Google Now.

“The idea is not to ask one question and get an answer, but to have the assistant proceed with me in a conversation and go and do things for me,” says Scott Huffman, an engineering director who oversees Google's mobile search efforts. It's a vision that sounds remarkably like the one Siri’s founders first embraced.

Futurists and researchers predict such voice-controlled software, like Siri and Google Now, will take us from understanding how to use technology to technology that understands us.

“We’re moving more and more towards an interface like the interface we have with each other,” says Saffo. “Our whole trend is toward ever more intimate interactions with machines [...] and with each phase, machines are doing something ever more central to our lives.”

These ever more central tasks include everything from taking care of life's little hassles to actually shaping what we do. Siri's founders had planned to make the assistant a source of personalized advice and wisdom by implanting Siri with CALO's cutting-edge learning skills. Siri would have taken it upon itself to summon information that hadn’t specifically been requested.

Google’s assistant is going a step further, volunteering information before it’s even been asked. Google Now masters its users’ routines so it can proactively fetch game updates for sports fans or advise users to leave early for a meeting due to traffic. (As Google chairman Eric Schmidt bluntly told the Wall Street Journal in 2010, “[People] want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”)

A few years from now, as you walk through the mall, your virtual assistant will tell you where to shop for shoes by factoring in your wardrobe, time frame and cash flow. When you step into a store, you consult the options the assistant has lined up for you. The calfskin loafers are a must, it whispers, at the same time cautioning that the purchase would put you over your monthly budget. If you do splurge, it suggests you request a cash advance, and the assistant offers to contact your bank. While you're paying, the assistant, knowing that you’ve been going to a lot of museums lately, offers updates on current exhibits. Or, thanks to emotion-recognition technology that infers your mood from your facial expressions, it senses you're feeling down and cracks some jokes. At the office, another assistant might take over. Before your date, yet another could counsel you on your love life.

Where does that leave humans?

Siri investor Shawn Carolan, like many others, imagines we’ll be more productive. “Take everything you do in a day and just condense it down from 15 minutes down to 30 seconds. You can just express your intent, and it gets done,” explains Carolan. “You just became a 30 times more powerful human.”

With its own reach and Siri's software, Apple could still fulfill the do engine dream. If it took advantage of Siri's early architecture that used web services' APIs to feed the assistant's ever-expandable brain, Siri would have the potential to automate a multitude of tasks.

Morgenthaler argues that with this technology, Siri could do for “thousands of activities what Amazon has done for shopping." Under Apple, Siri could one day book flights, order flowers and offer fashion advice, becoming what former CALO program director James Arnold calls an “iTunes for everything else in the world.” Siri, the startup, took a commission anytime someone made a purchase via the app. Were Apple ever to do the same, it could tap into an entirely new source of cash.

Arnold also sees virtual assistants as intellectual equalizers. A superb memory might cease to be an advantage as intelligent assistants are tasked with remembering names, dates and other details. Everyone will have the ability to see unusual but important connections between legal cases or patients' symptoms, thanks to assistants that can identify relevant precedents or files.

“The future of virtual personal assistants is to make it so we don’t have to think so much and work so hard to do things that are possible,” says Kittlaus. “It’s less about survival and more about exploring the world.”

Yet for all the efficiencies these do engines may provide, they may also carry a significant risk. Evan Selinger, a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, argues that less friction in our lives may "render us more vulnerable to being automatic," and eliminate crucial opportunities for moral deliberation. "The digital servant becomes the digital overlord, and we don’t even recognize it."

They might also make us an easy target for an algorithm that knows more about our bad habits and indulgences than we do, and isn't above exploiting them. The stream of suggestions from virtual assistants, especially if advertisers have a say, could make us more susceptible to overeating and over-spending. A spouse knows not to encourage you to stop by the steakhouse given your heart condition. But would Siri? Or Google Now if Google got a big ad buy from the steakhouse? Would Siri nag you into becoming your best self or would it coddle and humor you into a state of blissful complacency?

By freeing us of the irritants and drudgeries of life that keep us from pursuing our more serious interests, the promise of virtual assistants offers a release into an inconceivably higher state of being. As the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed, “Progress is measured by what you no longer have to think about.”

But progress toward what? That may be one of the few questions our assistants won’t be able to answer.

This story appears in Issue 33 of our weekly iPad magazine, Huffington, in the iTunes App store, available Friday, Jan. 25.

PEOPLE ARE AWESOME 2013

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 20:56:49 +0100

The Force

Jill Lepore — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 23:48:09 +0100

Sixty-two legislators sit on the House Armed Services Committee, the largest committee in Congress. Since January, 2011, when Republicans took control of the House, the committee has been chaired by Howard P. McKeon, who goes by Buck. He has never served in the military, but this month he begins his third decade representing California’s Twenty-fifth Congressional District, the home of a naval weapons station, an Army fort, an Air Force base, and, for the Marines, a place to train for mountain warfare. McKeon believes that it’s his job to protect the Pentagon from budget cuts. On New Year’s Day, after a thirteenth-hour deal was sealed with spit in the Senate, McKeon issued a press statement lamenting that the compromise had failed to “shield a wartime military from further reductions.”

The debate about taxes is over, which is one of the few good things that can be said for it. The debate about spending, which has already proved narrow and grubby, is pending.

The United States spends more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined. Between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled, reaching more than seven hundred billion dollars a year—more, in adjusted dollars, than at any time since the Allies were fighting the Axis. The 2011 Budget Control Act, which raised the debt ceiling and created both the fiscal cliff and a Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, which was supposed to find a way to steer clear of it, required four hundred and eighty-seven billion dollars in cuts to military spending, spread over the next ten years. The cliff-fall mandates an additional defense-budget reduction of fifty-five billion dollars annually. None of these cuts have gone into effect. McKeon has been maneuvering to hold the line.

In the fall of 2011, McKeon convened a series of hearings on “The Future of National Defense and the United States Military Ten Years After 9/11.” The first hearing was held on September 8th, the same day as, and down the hall from, the first meeting of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, which is known as the Supercommittee. It was no one’s finest hour. By the time McKeon gavelled his meeting to order, just after ten in the morning, only seventeen members of the House Armed Services Committee (five Democrats and twelve Republicans) had shown up to hear the three former heads of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been called to testify. Congressional attendance lies, ordinarily, somewhere between spotty and lousy. In committees, roll is generally called only if there’s a vote, and, despite pressure for reform, attendance isn’t even recorded except on “gavel sheets,” compiled by staffers, which are said to be unreliable. In short, it’s easy for lawmakers to skip meetings in which there’s little to be decided. In any case, the point of the Armed Services Committee hearings wasn’t really to debate the future of the American military; it was to give the Department of Defense the chance to argue against the automatic, across-the-board cuts that were scheduled to go into effect this month if the Supercommittee failed to reach a compromise.

“Our nation finds itself at a strategic juncture,” McKeon began. “Osama bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda is on its back. The Taliban has lost its strategic momentum in Afghanistan, and Iraq is an emerging democracy.” Yet, “faced with serious economic challenges, we are slipping back into the September 10th mentality that a solid defense can be dictated by budget choices, not strategic ones.”

He then welcomed prepared remarks from two former chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one former vice-chair. No one denied the size of the deficit. At issue was whether military spending should be on the table or off. General Peter Pace, of the Marine Corps, insisted that it was inappropriate to look at defense “from a dollar-and-cents perspective.” Better to count risks and threats: Iran, North Korea, and, looking ahead, China. Admiral Edmund P. Giambastiani, Jr., compared the prospective cuts to “performing brain surgery with a chainsaw.” General Richard B. Myers, of the Air Force, declared that “the world is a more dangerous and uncertain place today than it has been for decades.”

None of this was contested by anyone, including the ranking Democrat, Adam Smith, a lawyer from Bellevue, Washington, who has served on the House Armed Services Committee since 1997 and who agreed that “defense is in an incredibly vulnerable position” because budget cuts, which could lead to force reductions and base closings, would “change the equation of power projection.” Around the world, “power projection” is, in fact, a central mission of American forces. Smith expressed alarm at the prospect of its diminishment. He asked a question, which was purely rhetorical: “What if, all of a sudden, we don’t have troops in Europe, we don’t have troops in Asia, we are just, frankly, like pretty much every other country in the world?”

The long history of military spending in the United States begins with the establishment of the War Department, in 1789. At first, the Secretary of War, a Cabinet member who, from the start, was a civilian, was called the Secretary at War, a holdover from the Revolution but also a prepositional manifestation of an ideological commitment: the department was chiefly to be called upon only if the nation was at war. Early Americans considered a standing army—a permanent army kept even in times of peace—to be a form of tyranny. “What a deformed monster is a standing army in a free nation,” Josiah Quincy, of Boston, wrote in 1774. Instead, they favored militias. About the first thing Henry Knox did when he became George Washington’s War Secretary was to draft a plan for establishing a uniform militia.

Beginning in 1822, congressional oversight was handled by two standing committees: one for the Army, the other for the Navy. A committee on the militia, established in 1815, was abolished in 1911—the militia itself having been essentially abandoned. Six years later, the United States entered the First World War, and the staggering devastation of that war raised both new and old fears about the business of arming men. In 1934, the publication of “Merchants of Death,” a best-seller and a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, contributed to the formation, that year, of the Senate Munitions Committee, headed by Gerald P. Nye, a North Dakota Republican. Not coincidentally, that was also the year Congress passed the National Firearms Act, which, among other things, strictly regulated the private ownership of machine guns. (Keeping military weapons out of the hands of civilians seemed to the Supreme Court, when it upheld the Firearms Act, in 1939, entirely consistent with the Second Amendment, which provides for the arming of militias.) For two years, Nye led the most rigorous inquiry into the arms industry that any branch of the federal government has ever conducted. He convened ninety-three hearings. He thought the ability to manufacture weapons should be restricted to the government. “The removal of the element of profit from war would materially remove the danger of more war,” he said. That never came to pass, partly because Nye was unable to distinguish his opposition to arms profiteering from his advocacy of isolationism, a position that had become indefensible.

Not until the Second World War did the United States establish what would become a standing army. And even that didn’t happen without dissent. In May of 1941, Robert Taft, a Republican senator from Ohio, warned that America’s entry into the Second World War would mean, ultimately, that the United States “will have to maintain a police force perpetually in Germany and throughout Europe.” Taft, like Nye, was an ardent isolationist. “Frankly, the American people don’t want to rule the world, and we are not equipped to do it. Such imperialism is wholly foreign to our ideals of democracy and freedom,” he said. “It is not our manifest destiny or our national destiny.” In 1944, when Nye ran for reëlection, he was defeated. Taft three times failed to win the Republican Presidential nomination. The Second World War demonstrated the folly of their vantage on foreign policy. It also made it more difficult to speak out against arms manufacturers and proponents of boundless military spending.

A peace dividend expected after the Allied victory in 1945 never came. Instead, the fight against Communism arrived, as well as a new bureaucratic regime. In 1946, the standing committees on military and naval affairs combined to become the Armed Services Committee. Under amendments to the National Security Act of 1947, which created the position of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the War Department, now housed for the first time in a building of its own, became the Department of Defense.

Meanwhile, during Senate hearings concerning the future of the national defense, military contractors such as Lockheed Martin—which was an object of Nye’s investigation in the nineteen-thirties, and built more than ten thousand aircraft during the Second World War—argued not only for military expansion but also for federal subsidies. In 1947, Lockheed Martin’s chief executive told a Senate committee that the nation needed funding for military production that was “adequate, continuous, and permanent.”

In the nineteen-fifties, at the height of both the Korean War and McCarthyism, the United States’ foreign policy had become the containment of Communism the world over, and military spending made up close to three-quarters of the federal budget. “Defense,” no less than “national security,” is a product and an artifact of the Cold War. So, in large part, is the budget for it.

On September 8, 2011, when Buck McKeon convened the first of his House Armed Services Committee hearings on the future of the military, no one much disputed the idea that the manifest destiny of the United States is to patrol the world. Truth be told, no one asked any particularly searching questions at all. The only real flareup occurred when McKeon had to suspend the session briefly owing to the noise of protesters in the hall. “This demonstration that is going on outside is not to do with us,” the chairman explained. (It was a spillover from the Supercommittee.)

Still, John Garamendi, a Democrat from California, who during the Vietnam War served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia, read aloud from “Chance for Peace,” Eisenhower’s first major address as President, delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953. Eisenhower had sought the Republican Presidential nomination in order to defeat Taft and the isolationist wing of the G.O.P., but, six years into the Cold War, he was as worried as Nye had been about what an arms race would cost. In the speech, Eisenhower reckoned the price of arms:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This is a world in arms. This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . . This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Eisenhower, a five-star general who during the Second World War had served as the Supreme Allied Commander, was the son of pacifist Mennonites who considered war a sin, as James Ledbetter reports in “Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex” (Yale). Ledbetter writes that “when, as a child, Dwight began to show a voracious appetite for military history, his mother was disturbed and tried to keep the family’s history books locked in a closet.” Better known, if less stark, than “Chance for Peace” is the farewell address that Eisenhower delivered when he left office, in 1961, after years of failing to end the U.S.-Soviet arms race. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower warned then. “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

If any arms manufacturer today holds what Eisenhower called “unwarranted influence,” it is Lockheed Martin. The firm’s contracts with the Pentagon amount to some thirty billion dollars annually, as William D. Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, reports in his book “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex” (Nation). Today, Lockheed Martin spends fifteen million dollars a year on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions. The company was the single largest contributor to Buck McKeon’s last campaign. (Lockheed Martin has a major R. & D. center in McKeon’s congressional district.) This patronage hardly distinguishes McKeon from his colleagues on Capitol Hill. Lockheed Martin contributed to the campaigns of nine of the twelve members of the Supercommittee, fifty-one of the sixty-two members of the House Armed Services Committee, twenty-four of the twenty-five members of that committee’s Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces—in all, to three hundred and eighty-six of the four hundred and thirty-five members of the 112th Congress.

The merchants-of-death argument explains only so much, as the political scientist Daniel Wirls observes in “Irrational Security: The Politics of Defense from Reagan to Obama” (Johns Hopkins): “The military-industrial complex, such as it is, does not produce the propensity or predisposition for war or even hawkish policies short of conflict, as much as war or hawkish policies (driven primarily by political decisions) produce an opening for the military-industrial coalition to take advantage of the biases built into the system that favor, over the long run, hawkish policies.” Ledbetter is less concerned with Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex than with private contractors, abuses of civil liberties, and foreign arms sales (the U.S. sells more guns than any other country), which, he believes, together “constitute an overreaching military-industrial complex at least equal to the one Eisenhower warned against” and create “problems that cannot simply be resolved with more rational budgets.” Neither can these problems be solved without thinking about guns sold, owned, and carried within the United States. At home and abroad, in uniform and out, in war and in peace, Americans are armed to the teeth.

“Every gun that is made,” Eisenhower said, “signifies, in the final sense, a theft.” During that first hearing, when Garamendi finished quoting Eisenhower, he invited General Myers to comment. Myers said, “I wonder what President Eisenhower would have done in New York City on 9/12/2001.”

In 2001, military spending, as a function of the over-all American economy, was, at six per cent, the lowest it had been since the Second World War. Then, for a decade, it rose. In much the same way that the peace dividend expected with the Allied victory never came because of the Cold War (during most of which military spending made up roughly half the federal budget), a peace dividend expected after the end of the Warsaw Pact, in 1991, came but didn’t last. Instead, after 9/11 the United States declared a “global war on terror,” a fight against fear itself. The Iraq War, 2003-11, went on longer than the American Revolution. The war in Afghanistan, begun in 2001, isn’t over yet, making it the second-longest war in American history. (Only Vietnam lasted longer.) Troops may be withdrawn in 2014; the fighting will rage on. During George W. Bush’s second term, the National Defense Strategy of the United States became “ending tyranny in our world.” But a war to end tyranny has no end; it’s not even a war.

The United States, separated from much of the world by two oceans and bordered by allies, is, by dint of geography, among the best-protected countries on earth. Nevertheless, six decades after V-J Day nearly three hundred thousand American troops are stationed overseas, including fifty-five thousand in Germany, thirty-five thousand in Japan, and ten thousand in Italy. Much of the money that the federal government spends on “defense” involves neither securing the nation’s borders nor protecting its citizens. Instead, the U.S. military enforces American foreign policy.

“We have hundreds of military bases all over the world,” Melvin A. Goodman observes in “National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism” (City Lights). “Few other countries have any.” Goodman, a former Army cryptographer and a longtime C.I.A. analyst who taught at the National War College for eighteen years, is one of a growing number of critics of U.S. military spending, policy, and culture who are veterans of earlier wars. Younger veterans are critical, too. A 2011 Pew survey of veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq found that half thought the war in Afghanistan wasn’t worth fighting, and nearly sixty per cent thought the Iraq War wasn’t.

The most persuasive of these soldier-critics is Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate who fought in Vietnam in 1970 and 1971; served as a career Army officer, rising to the rank of colonel; and is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. A Catholic and a conservative, Bacevich is viscerally pained by Americans’ “infatuation with military power.” Everything, in Bacevich’s account, comes back to Vietnam, the way it does for a great many of that war’s veterans, including Chuck Hagel, the President’s nominee for Secretary of Defense.

Lately, Bacevich argues, Americans “have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.” Even as military spending has soared, war has become more distant: less known than imagined, less remembered than forgotten. War has become a fantasy: sleek, glossy, high-tech (more “Top Gun” than “Apocalypse Now”), and bloodless. Americans have less experience of war, and know less about the military, than at any point in the past century. Since 9/11, at any given time about one-half of one per cent of Americans have been on active duty. Only a tiny minority of members of Congress have known combat, or have family members who have. “God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do,” Eisenhower once said. From Reagan to Obama, but especially during the Administrations of the past three Presidents, none of whom ever saw active duty, civilian thinking about foreign policy has been subordinated to military thinking. The State Department has deferred to the Department of Defense. And the Commander-in-Chief has deferred to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The United States, a nation founded on opposition to a standing army, is now a nation engaged in a standing war. Bacevich locates the origins of America’s permanent war more than a decade before 9/11. “During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totalled a scant six,” he reports. “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events.” Bacevich places much of the blame for this state of affairs on intellectuals, especially neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz and Donald Rumsfeld, but also liberals, who, he points out, have eagerly supported the use of the military and of military force “not as an obstacle to social change but as a venue in which to promote it.” The resort to force is not a partisan position; it is a product of political failure.

And a failure, as well, of political culture. CNN loudmouths, neocon opinion-page columnists, retired generals who run for office, Hollywood action-film directors, Jerry Falwell, Wesley Clark, Tom Clancy, Bill Clinton—Bacevich has long since lost patience with all these people. He deplores their ego-driven mythmaking, their love of glory, their indifference to brutality.

War, by its nature, is barbarous, grievous, and untamable. There never has been a “smart war.” Still, some wars are worse than others. “Surely, the surprises, disappointments, painful losses, and woeful, even shameful failures of the Iraq War make clear the need to rethink the fundamentals of U.S. military policy,” Bacevich suggested in his 2005 book “The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War.” That scrutiny has not yet been given, not least because, as Bacevich has observed, “The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy.” Don’t ask, don’t tell. But, especially, don’t ask.

In 2007, Bacevich’s only son, Andrew Bacevich, Jr., a twenty-seven-year-old first lieutenant in the U.S. Army’s Third Battalion, died of wounds sustained during combat in Iraq. Bacevich didn’t testify at Buck McKeon’s hearings on the military’s future in 2011, but he did testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, when its chairman, John Kerry, convened a hearing about the war in Afghanistan. This winter, the President nominated Kerry as Secretary of State.

During the hearing on Afghanistan, Kerry looked exhausted. “Colonel Bacevich,” he said, “you get to be the wrap-up.”

Bacevich read a statement. Kerry listened intently, covering his mouth with his hand.

The war in Afghanistan, Bacevich said, reminded him of Vietnam and of how, in 1971, Kerry testified before this committee on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “Yet there’s one notable difference between today and the day, thirty-eight years ago, when the chairman of this committee testified against the then seemingly endless Vietnam War,” Bacevich said. “When the young John Kerry spoke, many of his contemporaries had angrily turned against their generation’s war. Today, most of the contemporaries of those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have simply tuned out.”

Kerry picked up his pen.

Bacevich read on: “Recall that in his testimony before this committee, speaking on behalf of other antiwar veterans, the young John Kerry remarked that ‘we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam, and about the mystical war against Communism.’ ”

Kerry looked down at his notes.

“The mystical war against Communism,” Bacevich said, “finds its counterpart in the mystical war on terrorism.” Mystification, he said, leads us to exaggerate threats and ignore costs. “It prevents us from seeing things as they are.”

People in the room began to applaud.

Kerry wiped his brow. “Please, folks,” he begged. “We will have no demonstrations of any kind.”

On October 13, 2011, at the fifth of Buck McKeon’s hearings on the future of the military, the House Armed Services Committee heard testimony from Leon Panetta, the Secretary of Defense, and General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Committee attendance was bad, but better than before. (Eleven Democrats and twenty-two Republicans were in the room when the hearing began.)

“There are some in government who want to use the military to pay for the rest, to protect the sacred cow that is entitlement spending,” McKeon said, in his opening remarks, referring to Social Security and Medicare. “Not only should that be a non-starter from a national-security and economic perspective, but it should also be a non-starter from a moral perspective.” Cuts should be made, he said, not to “the protector of our prosperity” but to “the driver of the debt.”

“The driver of our debt is our military-complex machine!” someone shouted from the gallery.

The Capitol Hill Police stepped in and arrested several protesters, including Leah Bolger, the vice-president of Veterans for Peace.

“The war machine is killing this country!” she cried, as she was carried away.

The hearing resumed. McKeon introduced Panetta. But the moment Panetta began to speak a protester interrupted. He identified himself as an Iraq War veteran. “You are murdering people!” he shouted. “I saw what we did to people. I saw.” He was escorted out of the room.

The hearing lasted two more hours. Much time was spent defending defense spending. “I don’t believe that the D.O.D. should have to pay one penny more in discretionary budget cuts,” McKeon said. Much time was devoted to inventorying threats to national security, which, Panetta said, are only increasing in both danger and number. (His list included Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and North Africa.)

Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, attempted to draw an analogy between the Capitol Hill Police’s ability to arrest protesters in a hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building and the deployment of U.S. forces in every corner of the globe. “From time to time, there are disturbances throughout the world, and these disturbances may interrupt some of our various interests around the world, and it is necessary for us to have some kind of force to maintain order,” he said. “It is like competition, like capitalism.”

Protesters are by no means uncommon at congressional hearings, but this particular protest had rattled people. “I know we started the day with protesters in the room, and sometimes they seem disruptive or their tactics are some we might argue with,” Chellie Pingree, a Democrat from Maine, said. “But, frankly, we are facing a time when there are protesters in almost every city where we reside or represent.”

This time—emboldened, maybe, by the protesters—a few committee members offered comments that were more pointed. Niki Tsongas, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told Dempsey, “I would hope you also take into account that not every risk can be dealt with through a military response.” And the questions were tougher. Walter B. Jones, a Democrat from North Carolina, asked Panetta, “Why are we still in Afghanistan?”

Panetta circled around an answer. “One thing we do not want,” he said, “is Afghanistan becoming a safe haven again for Al Qaeda.”

“Mr. Secretary,” Jones pressed, “we got bin Laden, and Al Qaeda has dispersed all around the world. Let’s bring them home.”

But by far the most adamant statement came from Dempsey. “I didn’t become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to oversee the decline of the Armed Forces of the United States, and an end state that would have this nation and its military not be a global power,” he said. “That is not who we are as a nation.”

Either the United States rules the world or Americans are no longer Americans? Happily, that’s not the choice the 113th Congress faces. The decision at hand concerns limits, not some kind of national, existential apocalypse. Force requires bounds. Between militarism and pacifism lie diplomacy, accountability, and restraint. Dempsey’s won’t be the last word. ♦

Vi Hart's Guide to Comments

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:31:01 +0100

Bones of Contention

Paige Williams — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:14:12 +0100

Natural history goes to auction five or six times a year in America, and one Sunday last May a big sale took place in Chelsea, at the onetime home of the Dia Center for the Arts. The bidding, organized by a company called Heritage Auctions, began with two amethyst geodes that, when paired, resembled the ears of an alert rabbit. Then came meteorites, petrified wood, and elephant tusks; centipedes, scorpions, and spiders preserved in amber; rare quartzes, crystals, and fossils. The fossils ranged from small Eocene swimmers imprinted on rock to the remains of late-Cretaceous dinosaurs. That day, the articulated toe and claw of a Moroccan dinosaur sold for sixty-three hundred dollars. A tyrannosaur tooth—ten and a half inches from root to spike—went for nearly forty thousand.

Along one wall, behind ropes, loomed the skeleton of a Tarbosaurus bataar. T. bataar, as it is known, was a Tyrannosaurus rex cousin that lived some seventy million years ago, in what is now the Gobi Desert of southern Mongolia. Eight feet tall and twenty-four feet long, the specimen had been mounted in a predatory running position, with its arms out and its jaws open, as if determined to eat Lot No. 49220—a cast Komodo dragon, crouching ten yards away, on blue velvet.

After a German sea-lily fossil sold to a live bidder, for forty thousand dollars, Greg Rohan, Heritage’s president, who had been standing near the lectern, handed the auctioneer a note. The auctioneer announced, “The sale of this next lot will be contingent upon a satisfactory resolution of a court proceeding.” He was talking about the dinosaur, which he called the auction’s “signature item.” Largely intact dinosaur skeletons are not easily found, and this specimen had been advertised as seventy-five per cent complete. “It can fit in all rooms ten feet high,” the auctioneer added. “So it’s also a great decorative piece.”

As the bidding opened, at eight hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, Robert Painter, an attorney from Houston, stood up, a BlackBerry in his hand. Painter is six feet three and forty-two, with dark hair, rimless eyeglasses, and a deep voice. “I hate to interrupt this,” he told the room. “But I have the judge on the phone.” The previous day, Carlos Cortez—a state district judge in Dallas, where Heritage has its headquarters—had signed a temporary restraining order forbidding the company to auction the T. bataar, on the ground that the dinosaur was believed to have been stolen from Mongolia. The judge, defied, was not pleased.

The auction had come to the attention of the Mongolian government the preceding Friday, after Bolortsetseg Minjin, a Mongolian paleontologist who lives in New York, saw a television report about the auction and suspected that the dinosaur had been taken from her country. Bolor, as she is called, discovered that the online auction catalogue listed the item’s provenance as “Central Asia”—a vague term often considered code for Mongolia and China, both of which forbid the commercial export of fossils found within their borders. Other catalogue items, such as the tyrannosaur tooth, openly referred to the Nemegt Formation, a fossil-rich expanse of sandstone and mudstone in the Mongolian Gobi.

Bolor e-mailed Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, an aide to President Tsakhia Elbegdorj. Mongolian dinosaur fossils had appeared on the black market for years, but there had been few, if any, organized efforts to stop their sale. Even though the Mongolians had only two days to intervene in the auction, they decided to try. Bolor enlisted two of the world’s top experts in Mongolian dinosaurs—Mark Norell, the head of the American Museum of Natural History’s paleontology division, and Phil Currie, of the University of Alberta—who wrote open letters of protest. Norell argued, “These specimens are the patrimony of the Mongolian people and should be in a museum in Mongolia.” The letters were distributed to reporters. Online, paleontologists, geologists, students, and Mongolians signed a petition against the auction, adding comments: “Fossils belong in museums where EVERYONE can see and learn from them, not in some rich, fat douchebag’s mansion or in some Wall Street office”; “Mongolian fossils are spectacular . . . selling them as mantelpieces is akin to using the Mona Lisa as a placemat.”

Bolor wrote to Heritage: Where had the T. bataar come from? Did it possess provenance papers? Heritage’s attorney replied, “Although we appreciate your concerns . . . it is our conclusion that no impropriety exists.” He added, “Mongolia won its independence in 1921 and this specimen is quite a bit older than that.”

The Mongolian government lawyered up, retaining Painter, the Houston attorney. He had experience representing Western mining interests in Mongolia, whose vast, untapped reserves of copper, gold, and coal are at the center of an international scramble. Like most lawyers, he had never handled a case involving a dinosaur, but he drafted the restraining order, got Judge Cortez to sign it, and boarded a plane for New York.

As Painter interrupted the auction, his BlackBerry aloft, the auctioneer eyed him but never broke patter. He called for a bid of nine hundred thousand dollars.

Rohan, Heritage’s president, met Painter in the aisle, and for five seconds they squared off in a quiet little dance, four arms waving. A security guard stepped in. Painter repeated that he had Judge Cortez on the phone. “O.K.—well, you need to walk,” the guard said, escorting Painter to the rear of the auction floor. Outside, on the sidewalk, a small, pro-Mongolia protest had formed, with banners reading “National Heritage Is Not for Sale” and “Return Our Stolen Treasure.”

An attorney for Heritage approached Painter, who handed him his BlackBerry. While the attorney was having an awkward discussion with Judge Cortez, the dinosaur sold to an anonymous phone bidder, for nearly a million dollars.

Heritage brokered the T. bataar on behalf of a thirty-seven-year-old bone hunter named Eric Prokopi, who lives in Florida, a great state for fossils. For roughly the first half of the past fifty million years, the region lay beneath a warm, shallow sea. As land repeatedly surfaced and receded, the remains of marine creatures got mixed up with those of terrestrials, forming one big Ice Age graveyard: sea cows, prehistoric sharks, spike-tailed armadillos the size of refrigerators.

Shark teeth attract kids to fossil hunting because they’re so easy to find. Sharks shed thousands of teeth per year, and have been doing so for eons. The teeth, exposed by erosion and tides, can be as big as a human hand. The largest look like the arrowheads of giants, and can sell for thousands of dollars.

Prokopi, who grew up outside Tampa, is the son of a music teacher and a homemaker. He found his first shark tooth as a small boy, in the late seventies, at nearby Venice Beach. By age ten, he had a diving license. His mother, a competitive swimmer, accompanied him on river expeditions. As he explored underwater, holding a rope, she rode in a canoe, tugging the line if she saw an alligator.

Through fossil clubs and field trips to quarries, Prokopi got to know older hunters who spent their lives beachcombing or standing chest deep in muck, searching for bone. Paleontology books explained what he’d found and taught him what to look for next. When he was in high school, fossils began to take over the family’s house, and around 1990 he started selling them, making eight hundred dollars at his first trade show, in Lakeland. At such events, he bartered with other hunters, who often brought entire trailers filled with specimens. Some fossils were still sheathed in “field jackets”—the lumpy white plaster encasements that excavators apply at dig sites, for safe transport, making the artifacts look like misshapen mummies.

Although some countries had fossil-trade restrictions, or were enacting them, certain dealers proceeded as though there were no rules; they justified their trade, in part, with the idea that exposed fossils, if not collected, disintegrate. Prokopi quickly learned that, when he found something good, someone would buy it. If the business sometimes resembled a black market, it was a small one: nobody seriously imagined getting rich digging up prehistoric bones.

Then, the day before Prokopi turned sixteen, a magnificent T. rex was found weathering out of a cliff near Faith, South Dakota. An amber hunter named Sue Hendrickson, working with the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, a company that collects and prepares fossils, had wandered off to explore a bluff as her crew changed a flat tire, and came back with a handful of dinosaur. The team named the T. rex Sue.

A legal fight followed, centering on the Sioux rancher who, for five thousand dollars, had sold Black Hills the right to dig out the dinosaur but whose land, part of an Indian reservation, was being held in federal trust. As the case unfolded in the courts, the movie “Jurassic Park” came out, rebooting dinosaurs in the popular imagination. The rancher eventually won the right to sell Tyrannosaurus Sue. On October 4, 1997, Sotheby’s, in New York, auctioned the fossil; Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History bought it, with sponsorship from Disney and McDonald’s, for an unprecedented $8.4 million.

Hendrickson had found her T. rex the way hunters have always found fossils: by walking around and looking down. In America, the most spectacular dinosaur discoveries have been made in the West, in a swath of exposures from the Canadian border to New Mexico. During the infamous nineteenth-century “bone wars,” between the East Coast paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and O. C. Marsh, scientists encountered dinosaur skeletons “exposed like corpses on a deserted battlefield,” Michael Novacek writes in “Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs.”

Today in the United States, only approved researchers may collect vertebrates on public land, but a hunter who finds a fossil on his property, or on private land where he has permission to dig, can sell it, exhibit it, export it—whatever. After the sale of Tyrannosaurus Sue, a modern gold rush began, and it has not let up. In the summers, the Western snows have barely receded before prospectors arrive, often with private clients who pay to hunt with guides.

Ranchers who had once allowed scientists to explore their land for free began leasing it to the highest bidder. Paleontologists lost out to amateurs with more money, and they lost specimens to vandals and thieves, some of whom went after fossils with sledgehammers. Federal agents have tracked stolen American dinosaurs as far away as Japan. The paleontologist Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, says, “The day Sue got auctioned is the day fossils became money.”

Prokopi continued selling fossils through high school and college. He won an academic scholarship to the University of Florida, in Gainesville, where he joined the swim team and earned a degree in engineering, a subject that interested him only insofar as it illuminated the mechanics of, say, how to level a structural foundation or gut-renovate a house. After graduation, he stayed in Gainesville and started his life as a full-time fossil hunter, calling himself a “commercial paleontologist.” He named his company Florida Fossils.

At twenty-eight, he married a SeaWorld dolphin trainer named Amanda Graham—a native Virginian he met through their shared love of diving. For extra income, they “flipped” houses near the college campus. Amanda started an interior-decorating business that sometimes showcased natural-history objects, featuring Eric’s finds and other fossils that they had imported or come across at the two big U.S. trade shows, in Tucson and Denver. They also began using eBay, which allowed merchandise to be moved faster, and, if the participants so chose, with greater anonymity.

If you were mapping the geographic evolution of Prokopi’s inventory, you’d pin Florida to start, then move on to Alabama, Texas, China, Japan, Peru, Morocco, Argentina, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere. He sold sloth claws, elephant jaws, wolf molars, dinosaur ribs—a wide range of anatomical fragments that went, mostly, for between ten and fifty dollars. Increasingly, Florida Fossils got into triple digits, especially when Prokopi started selling dinosaur parts. In the fall of 2011, he sold two Mongolian oviraptor nests for more than three hundred and fifty dollars each, a tyrannosaurus ileum for five hundred and sixty-one dollars, a tyrannosaurus tooth for three hundred and twenty-five dollars, and a tyrannosaurus tail vertebra for four hundred and ten dollars. He built up a 99.7-per-cent-positive rating with eBay customers, who praised his wares as “unusual” and “exquisite.”

By 2010, the Prokopis had a toddler son, Grey, and an infant daughter, Rivers, to support. It was no longer enough to peddle a bone here, a bone there, even as Prokopi supplemented his income by “prepping out” fossils—cleaning and restoring them—and selling the results to small museums and nature centers. His best shot at big money was dinosaurs. The top sites in the American West were largely tied up in federal boundaries and, on the private side, in existing contracts that usually required sizable cuts to ranchers. Only one place on Earth holds big, beautiful T. rex-like dinosaurs in relatively soft sand, in a vast, remote landscape that all but insures privacy.

Mongolia, which is more than twice the size of Texas, borders Russia to the north and China everywhere else. Thirty per cent of Mongolia’s three million people live in or around the capital, Ulaanbaatar, and, despite flashes of new-economy wealth (Hummers, a Louis Vuitton shop), much of the nation subsists in poverty.

The Gobi Desert cuts across southern Mongolia and extends into northern China. The primary locus of dinosaur hunting is the Nemegt Formation. Phil Currie, the Canadian paleontologist, says, “Right now, the Nemegt represents one of the top two dinosaur sites in the world, in terms of diversity of specimens.”

T. bataar, a carnivorous, bipedal dinosaur, lived around seventy million years ago; Russian and Mongolian scientists discovered it in 1946, during an expedition to the Nemegt. The species closely resembles T. rex, which lived at the same time but has been found only in North America. Both had long tails to counterbalance large skulls, and, proportionally, they had the smallest forelimbs of any apex predator. T. bataar was slightly smaller than T. rex, which is like drawing a distinction between a city bus and a school bus: the largest known T. bataar stood ten feet high, was up to forty feet long, and had nearly six dozen huge, spiky teeth, with jaws of crushing torque. T. bataar fed on other dinosaurs—big ones.

We know this because of the fossil record, which exists thanks to all types of hunters but is vetted by scientists, many of whom loathe the sale of fossils but don’t necessarily want to discourage the popular fascination with them, either. “Great ones have yet to be found, so we want people looking for them,” Johnson, the Smithsonian director, says. “But we want a path for the really important ones to loop into science. Right now, that path doesn’t exist. Plenty of collectors say, ‘You’re more than welcome to come to my house and study my fossils.’ But it’s an empty promise. Even if they let you look at something, if they sell it, it might as well not exist.”

Unlike the U.S., most other nations with rich dinosaur deposits—including Argentina, Canada, and China—consider fossils part of their national heritage and oppose or restrict their entry into the private market. Mongolia outlawed the trade in 1924, but bone runners have always operated from the Gobi, because they have found outsiders willing to buy fossils. “The Gobi’s getting hammered,” Mark Norell told me in July, just before leaving for Mongolia. He helped reopen the Gobi to Westerners after Communist rule ended, in the early nineteen-nineties, and since then has dug there at least twenty-two times. “My sites in Mongolia have been clobbered by these slimeballs,” he said of poachers, adding, “People follow you. There’s nomads living out there. You’ll see guys on motorcycles, and guys a kilometre away, looking at you through binoculars.”

Currie, who has worked in Mongolia since 1996, recognizes poached sites by their trash: cigarette wrappers, vodka bottles, junked cars, Super Glue bottles, graffiti. Poachers often mark their sites by carving the date on rocks, and they frequently leave Mongolian money tucked beneath stones—alms to the gods.

Many poachers take teeth and claws first, because they’re the easiest to transport. Other thieves hack their way up the vertebral column in pursuit of the skull, the most prized body part. A fossil that has been separated from its geological context—such as location and stratigraphic position, which poachers do not document—becomes far less significant to science.

Once a smuggler gets fossils out of the country, the shipment need only make it past customs. Smugglers don’t always succeed. A few years ago in Chicago, agents X-rayed an express-mail shipment of “shoes,” with a declared value of fifty dollars, that turned out to be the skulls of Chinese dinosaurs. In Los Angeles, agents seized the fossil of a Chinese oviraptor nest after it sold, via the English auction house Bonhams & Butterfields, for more than four hundred thousand dollars. (The buyer cancelled his bid.) The nest had been advertised as featuring visible, preserved embryos, but it actually was a composite: the seller had bought the eggs separately, then implanted them in a slab of imported red sandstone. In late 2011, the U.S. repatriated the eggs.

The T. bataar skull entered the country, amid other fossils, via U.P.S., on March 27, 2010. By then, Prokopi had established a business arrangement with Chris Moore, a hunter on the famed Jurassic Coast of England and a well-known dealer at the Tucson and Denver shows. Moore had shipped these component fossils to Prokopi in three crates weighing nearly three thousand pounds. The customs forms listed the shipment’s country of origin as Great Britain, its over-all value as fifteen thousand dollars, and, on an invoice, its contents as “2 large rough (unprepared) fossil reptile heads, 6 boxes of broken fossil bones, 3 rough (unprepared) fossil reptiles, 1 fossil lizard, 3 rough (unprepared) fossil reptiles,” and “1 fossil reptile skull.” Customs sent it on through.

Prokopi spent the next year and a half cleaning the T. bataar fossils, gluing them together, fabricating bones out of resin to replace missing pieces (an accepted practice, even in museums), and building a custom-welded frame. For years, the Prokopis had prepped fossils on their kitchen floor and in their garage, but in May, 2011, they built a five-thousand-square-foot workshop in their back yard, and they assembled the T. bataar there. In early 2012, they laid the bones in formation on the workshop floor and shot a photograph from overhead: a large dinosaur curled in a loose fetal position, with Eric kneeling beside it, hands on hips, smiling up at the camera. The photograph was posted on the Facebook page of Amanda’s home-design business, Everything Earth (“Where nature is art”); prospective buyers were urged to e-mail for more information.

In February, Prokopi took the T. bataar to the Tucson show and displayed the legs and skull, along with the photograph of the full skeleton on the workshop floor. When the dinosaur failed to sell, he turned to auction houses that handled natural-history specimens. He had relationships with I. M. Chait, Heritage, Sotheby’s, and Bonhams. At least one house rejected the T. bataar, but Heritage took it. To make the spring-auction deadline, Prokopi stayed up for ninety hours straight to finish the prep work and the mounting. The specimen was shipped to Texas, to be photographed for the Heritage catalogue, and then to New York.

Other Prokopi projects, meanwhile, were acquired for other auctions. A saurolophus, a duck-billed dinosaur that, like T. bataar, has been found only in Mongolia, went to I. M. Chait, in Beverly Hills, with a listed provenance of Central Asia. The catalogue copy noted, “To this day, barely more than 10 skulls are known, and this is one of only a handful of complete skeletons ever found or mounted.” The estimated gavel price was between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand dollars. The saurolophus didn’t sell. Two weeks later, the T. bataar sold to the anonymous phone bidder.

The Mongolians began preparing for a courtroom battle. Commercial hunters, meanwhile, couldn’t believe that anyone had so openly tried to sell a major Mongolian dinosaur. At the Denver fossil show, in September, I stopped by the booth of Mike Triebold, a veteran Colorado hunter who has been working with the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists to find a way for academics and legitimate commercial hunters to collaborate. “I’ve got about thirty employees and millions of dollars invested in my business,” he said. “The last thing I’m gonna do is bring in an illegal fossil.”

Bob Detrich, another hunter, was at Triebold’s booth, and he said, “My first question when I saw it in the catalogue was ‘How is this even possible?’ ”

Triebold noted that Mongolian dinosaur bones had been on the market for years, but added, “It’s been up to and including skulls. There’s never been a big, whole T. rex-y skeleton. This is a big, sexy dinosaur. It’s so over the top that somebody finally said, ‘All right, wait a minute. You guys gotta stop this.’ ”

The price of the T. bataar, with Heritage’s premium, came to $1,052,500. The transaction was put on hold until the provenance could be worked out. Dismantled and crated, the fossil was trucked to the Cadogan Tate Fine Art storage facility, in Sunnyside, Queens. President Elbegdorj, meanwhile, formally asked the United States to investigate. The Americans—mindful, perhaps, of staying in the good graces of a country poised to become a mining giant—granted Mongolia’s request.

Although Heritage continued to defend the sale, it coöperated with the investigation by allowing a team of paleontologists to assess the dinosaur. On the morning of June 5th, three scientists met at the warehouse in Queens: Bolor Minjin, Phil Currie, and Khishigjav Tsogtbaatar, of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, in Ulaanbaatar. The scientists found more than two hundred bones in open crates or laid out neatly on tables, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

It was something of a miracle that the dinosaur existed at all. Nature heavily skews the odds against an animal becoming a fossil—most simply decompose. But this T. bataar had somehow been buried quickly in sediment, which then turned into rock. Fossils absorb ground minerals specific to their location, giving them a geochemical signature. Mongolian dinosaurs are slightly radioactive, owing to the presence of uranium in the Gobi; the bones, which have a distinctive off-white color, resemble those of the freshly dead.

Dozens of T. bataar skeletons have been exhumed, but there’s still much to learn about the species and how it lived. Why, for instance, was T. bataar so tremendously overrepresented in the Gobi? “It makes no sense,” Currie says. “You can’t have an ecosystem where there are more carnivores than herbivores.” And there are anatomical mysteries: just what evolutionary purpose did those tiny arms serve?

Paleontologists usually handle fossils bare-handed, but at the warehouse the scientists were given purple synthetic gloves to wear as they worked. Currie and the others spent the day examining the T. bataar, piece by piece, comparing the bones’ size, color, and condition with what they knew about the species from other fossils. They determined that seventy-five per cent of the dinosaur was composed of original bone, as advertised. The creature was two-thirds grown. The ivory coloration matched that of other Nemegt fossils. The scientists concurred: the dinosaur was Mongolian.

Two weeks later, in downtown Manhattan, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York sued for custody of the specimen, on behalf of the nation of Mongolia. Procedure required that an arrest warrant be issued against the dinosaur itself, so the action became known as United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton.

On June 22nd, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent a cargo truck to the warehouse in Queens and confiscated the dinosaur. As Bolor Minjin, Robert Painter, and the rest of the Mongolia contingent watched, elated, from behind a chain-link fence, Homeland Security Investigations agents loaded four large crates onto the truck. They then took the bones to an undisclosed location.

Prokopi hired a pair of attorneys who have represented dealers of contested antiquities: Michael McCullough, in New York, and Peter Tompa, in Washington. Prokopi had sixty days to decide whether to surrender the dinosaur or make a legal claim for it. If the deal went through, he stood to make about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, after the other parties took their share, and he was clearly reluctant to give this up. Indeed, Prokopi had entertained the idea of brokering a quiet deal with the Mongolians. Four days after the auction, in an e-mail conversation with a Heritage employee, he wrote, “Although I am sure that everything with this specimen is legal as far back as I can tell, I do know just about all of the people involved in the business of central asian fossils, and could offer ideas and help to make permanent changes that would nearly eliminate the black market and benefit all sides. If the mongolian president is indeed only interested in getting to the bottom of the sources, and wants to look good for his people, I think I can help him do that if he is willing to cooperate and compromise. If he only wants to take the skeleton and try to put an end to the black market, he will have a fight and will only drive the black market deeper underground.”

Publicly, Prokopi said nothing about how he had acquired the dinosaur, or how it had wound up in England before coming to the U.S. He insisted that he was not a thief. “I’m just a guy . . . trying to support my family—not some international bone smuggler,” he said, in his sole statement to the media. “If I believed it wasn’t legal for me to have or sell this dinosaur, why would I have offered it in such a public format? The lost sale of this dinosaur has irreparably devastated my family financially, it has cost several people their jobs, taken an emotional toll on my wife and two young children and damaged my reputation as a commercial paleontologist. . . . What will we tell our kids? How will we keep going? I’m headed toward total financial ruin.”

In Gainesville, the Prokopis live in a historic, plantation-style house called Serenola. Built in 1935, it is white clapboard, with black shutters and four Corinthian columns. The Prokopis got the house for free six years ago, as a derelict property; it was in such bad repair, and so full of filth and feces, that when Amanda first toured it she had to step outside to vomit. But the Prokopis saw money in it. They loaded the house onto flatbeds and moved it a mile down the road to nine acres that they owned, and then restored it themselves, foundation to roof, adding a Viking stove and a fifty-thousand-gallon saltwater pool. They wound up with a showplace and decided to keep it.

We met there one Wednesday in August. The property faced a four-lane highway, but Serenola was tucked behind a brick wall and a modest electric gate. The surrounding marsh, shrieking cicadas, and Spanish moss—hanging like frayed gray scarves, not a breeze to stir it—made the property feel almost secluded. Clouds that had blackened a far quadrant of the sky pulsed with lightning.

The Prokopis answered the door together. Amanda, a shiny-haired blonde, wore black from head to toe, her wrists roped in silver bracelets. Eric, who is tall, dark-haired, and deeply tanned, with a swimmer’s shoulders, was dressed casually—polo shirt, camouflage cargo shorts, and flip-flops. He said little, which, Amanda explained, was typical. Once, during a dive trip to Mexico, someone asked Eric what he did for a living. When he said, “I sell fossils,” the person answered, “You sell faucets?” and proceeded to talk about faucets. Prokopi let it go. “I have to pull things out of him sometimes,” Amanda told me.

Their two children, both towheads, came downstairs. Their son, who is five, led everyone to the family room, opened the deep drawers of a reproduction Colonial bureau, and showed off his toys—dinosaurs, jumbled together, snout upon tail, in a plastic mass grave. “Guess what this one is,” he said several times, blurting out the species. How do you know all the names? I asked. “Because I’m a scientist,” he said.

We sat at the dining-room table, which the Prokopis had made from the slats of champagne barrels. The house was filled with vintage objects: repurposed corbels and bricks, bone-white corals alongside mercury glass. Amanda adheres to a decorating principle of “big mirrors, lots of lamps, and something sparkly” in every room. “Global Chic Meets Plantation Elegance,” the Gainesville Sun put it, in a 2010 article about Serenola. (Eric “likes to do laps” in the Olympic-size pool, the paper reported, “when he’s not diving Florida’s rivers or setting off on business trips to Bali or Mongolia.”)

About three weeks before my visit, Prokopi had made an official claim for the T. bataar. To win the case, he would have to prove legal ownership. Although people in paleontology circles had been speculating about how the fossil had been taken out of Mongolia—I had been hearing that some fossils crossed the border hidden inside shipments of coal—Prokopi declined, on the advice of his attorneys, to discuss specifics. He told me that he had gone into the fossil business because he was drawn to “the treasure-hunting mentality” and to “the thrill.” He added, “I used to keep everything. Now I don’t keep anything. I enjoy having it for a time and then move on.”

So far, no evidence had emerged proving that Prokopi had spent time in Mongolia digging for the T. bataar or other dinosaurs, although his eBay account featured more than a hundred items from the country, and he had sold higher-end Gobi pieces at auction. His connection to Mongolia had “started with Tucson,” he said, referring to the trade fair, which takes place every February. “And that’s probably as far as I can go with that right now.”

Amanda genially jumped in: “People come around at the shows and want to trade for stuff, just like baseball cards. So your inventory evolves that way.”

“There’s always a lot of unprepared stuff available,” Eric said. “I was getting better at mounting specimens and doing big projects, and that’s where a lot of the money is. When you buy it, it’s not necessarily worth that much. It’s the work that you put into it that creates the value.”

“It’s like the paint in the ‘Mona Lisa,’ ” Amanda said. “It’s really the same thing.” She then compared fossil preparation to renovating houses. The T. bataar looked “awesome now, but it took years. And it took being up all night and being broke all the time to get to this point.”

A major fossil is “a good investment,” Eric said. “You can get a good return in the end, and it’s interesting and fun.” But when “you’re struggling to make the sale, and then it doesn’t happen when you’re expecting it, it’s difficult.”

“It’s like rebuilding a house and watching it burn down,” Amanda said.

“Renovating a house and putting tons of money into it, and the government coming and seizing it before you can sell it,” Eric said.

They offered a tour of the property. In the back yard, where the T. bataar had been assembled, the workshop bays stood open. Huge industrial fans rearranged the soupy air. An employee, a University of Florida archeology student, was using a pneumatic tool to clean a chunk of Wyoming stegosaurus. There were boxes full of bone fragments and dim old bottles fished from rivers, and a flat-bottomed military boat that, Eric said, “doesn’t get used much anymore.”

Inside the house was a tall antique case that, according to Amanda, once displayed wedding gowns at Sears. It now held an ankylosaurid skull and other fossils. “Mostly casts,” Eric said. Brilliant corals were arranged in glass-fronted cabinets, in the manner of an apothecary shop. “This is all inventory,” Amanda said. “These are from all around the world.” On an end table was a tortoiseshell with an elaborate pattern. “This is what?” Amanda asked Eric. “A radiated tortoise?” The radiated tortoise is most commonly found in Madagascar, I subsequently discovered, and is an endangered species. (Prokopi later told me that he’d bought his from someone who works at an American zoo, but he declined to elaborate.)

“The stuff in our house evolves all the time,” Eric said.

Upstairs, in one of the children’s rooms, was the framed auction photo of a tyrannosaurus skull, dated March, 2007. The skull closely resembled that of T. bataar, but Amanda didn’t want to talk about it, except to say that their son was conceived on the weekend of that auction. “We were celebrating,” she said. (I. M. Chait sold a T. bataar skull that month, to a private collector, for nearly three hundred thousand dollars.)

A while later, after a walk in a nearby nature preserve, we were back at the champagne-barrel table. Eric asked a surprising question: “One thing I was wondering is if any of these paleontologists you’ve talked to have given their argument of why paleontology is important.” Fossils are “just basically rocks,” he said. “It’s not like antiquities, where it’s somebody’s heritage and culture and all that.”

Amanda changed the subject to a television program she had liked, on the Discovery Channel, about whether mermaids exist. But Eric persisted. “Where do you draw the line?” he said. “I don’t think it can ever be black and white. You can’t legislate every single species or fossil.” He had been twisting a scrap of paper and shoving it through the slats of the table. Amanda took it away from him.

Heritage Auctions was founded in Dallas, in 1976, by a pair of rare-coin dealers. With satellite offices in Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Manhattan, and Europe, Heritage bills itself as the world’s largest collectibles auctioneer, and over the decades it has branched into comics, movie posters, jewelry, books, fine art, and wine, among other things. Last year, the company sold more than eight hundred million dollars’ worth of items.

Heritage got online early, in 1996. Rohan, its president, told me, “We thought, Oh, the Internet: interesting. We don’t think anybody will ever do any real business on it, but maybe we should spend a couple million dollars and build a whammy-jammy Web site and load it full of content for coin collectors.” That venture led to online auctions, which coincided with the explosive popularity of eBay. Rohan said that eBay “did for auctions what Fidelity did for stocks—took it down to the Everyman.”

Rohan was telling me this in late July, in a parlor of a Southampton bed-and-breakfast where he was vacationing with his wife. He had bumped into Matt Rubinger, who heads Heritage’s luxury-accessories division, and brought him along to our meeting. Rohan is fifty-one, lean, and six feet one; in khakis, a navy Izod, blue leather loafers, and a canvas belt embroidered with sailboats, he appeared ready to tack. Rubinger, twenty-four, had a Gatsby look: a summer suit with a white, open-collared shirt. I asked him what his clients collect. Rohan answered for him: “Two-hundred-thousand-dollar handbags.” Rubinger added that vintage Hermès bags were the most popular items. “It’s a new, new market,” he said.

Natural history accounts for “very little” of Heritage’s sales, Rohan told me. Still, the T. bataar deal would have yielded a six-figure commission. Heritage was now “out of it,” in any case. “It really is an issue between the consigner and Mongolia,” Rohan said. “We’ve extricated ourselves.”

It had been that easy. Black-market fossils have regularly been sold through some of the world’s finest auction houses, but auctioneers, including eBay, have not been held accountable for their role. When I asked Rohan why Heritage had accepted the T. bataar, he said, “Because the person who consigned it had a good reputation over decades, and because he warrantied, in writing, that he had clear title. It was his to do with as he saw fit.” Did he have any regrets? “It’s annoying that I had to spend a lot of money on legal fees, dealing with the issue,” he said. A few minutes later, he thought of one more thing: Mongolia’s interference had scared away buyers. Without the controversy, he said, the dinosaur “would’ve brought a much, much higher price.”

The head of Heritage’s natural-history division was David Herskowitz, a well-known broker in the mineral and fossil world. In 2011, I called Herskowitz about a Dallas auction that featured a “fighting pair” of Jurassic dinosaurs from Wyoming. When I asked him how natural-history objects had entered the American fine-arts auction market, Herskowitz credited himself. “It all started by chance,” he said. “I was importing and exporting gemstones, going down to South America and buying emeralds, when the Soviet Union fell apart and we had a free market. I heard there were good gemstones to be had in Russia, so I went there and bought topaz and emeralds and amber.” An appraiser in New York helped him grade the stones, one of which encased a prehistoric fly. “I said, ‘How could a fly get inside a gemstone?’ I didn’t realize amber was actually fossilized tree resin. The appraiser said, ‘Some people actually collect this.’ ” A jeweller sold the amber on Herskowitz’s behalf, for three hundred and twenty-five dollars. “And I thought, O.K., wow, I’m gonna load up the truck.” He returned to Russia and paid a hundred and seventy-five dollars for a load of amber pieces with insects embedded in them. Bonhams later sold the amber, he said, for more than seven thousand dollars. “Fossils are perfect for auction because auctions are there for treasures and things you don’t see in a store every day,” he told me. “If you’re a fossil collector, where are you gonna buy your fossils? If you find a T. rex, where are you gonna sell it?”

Museums feed the market, up to a point. Established institutions discriminate among sources when acquiring fossils, but newer ones sometimes don’t. Natural-history museums that are popping up in China, Japan, and the Middle East have been accused of being willing to buy from anyone. They want dinosaurs and mammals, Herskowitz told me, while individual collectors prefer smaller pieces. “Not many people have a house big enough for a dinosaur,” he explained. “The most popular stuff is the stuff you can put on your shelf, like meteorites, trilobites, dinosaur eggs, and dinosaur bones. Like a nice vertebra—you can put it on your shelf and say, ‘Look, that’s a T. rex vertebra.’ ”

The man who was prepared to pay more than a million dollars for the T. bataar is Coleman Burke, a Manhattan real-estate developer and lawyer in his seventies. His friends call him Coley. He is tall and trim, with wispy white hair, and on the day we met (reluctantly, on his part—his bid, after all, had been anonymous) he had on khakis, Topsiders, a checked shirt, and a brown leather belt studded with silver fish. It was late August, and he had recently returned from the midsummer encampment of the Bohemian Club, in California; he was now getting ready to go fly-fishing in Idaho—a trip that he and friends have taken annually for the past forty-five years. Burke mentioned his service on various environmental boards and his role as a trustee of the natural-history museum at Yale, his alma mater, but he kept returning to the topics of geology and rivers. “I’ve been going down rivers all my life,” he said.

In 1995, he and a five-member crew rafted down the Santa Cruz River, in Patagonia, inspired by a journey that Charles Darwin had tried to make in 1834. Had Darwin not turned back, he might have reached Argentina’s spectacular bone beds, a sight that captivated Burke. During the Santa Cruz trip, and others to Patagonia and the American West, Burke’s interest in dinosaur fossils intensified. He began hunting fossils and funding expeditions, to the extent that his friends kidded him about it. Six years ago, at a party for his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary (theme: “Joy and Mischief”), a tuxedoed pianist jokingly serenaded him about dinosaurs, with lyrics set to the tune of “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” Burke told me, “People say, ‘How’s the archeology going?,’ and I say, ‘Oh, that’s not my bag.’ If it’s not a hundred million years old, I don’t do it. I call it the ultimate antiquing.”

Burke’s company, Waterfront New York, occupies a city block at Twelfth Avenue and West Twenty-eighth Street. An operator-run elevator cage delivered me to the seventh floor, and then Burke and I climbed a tight spiral staircase to a window-walled office reminiscent of a crow’s nest, with views of the Hudson and New Jersey, where Burke grew up. On the observation deck was a tarp-covered signal light, which Burke, an ex-Navy lieutenant, likes to flash at passing ships. His walls held framed photos of Western badlands, vintage maps of South America, and an Explorers Club membership certificate. A Giganotosaurus carolinii skull—a cast, he quickly pointed out—occupied half the eastern wall, dwarfing an upright piano that he often plays.

“I’m a complete amateur,” he kept saying, but his fossil hobby has not been fruitless. A decade ago in Argentina, a Burke crew found a new dinosaur species that is now considered one of the southernmost carnivores on record. The creature was named Orkoraptor burkei, in his honor. A few years later, the Explorers Club honored him and a Drexel University geologist for finding, also in Argentina, the largest dinosaur femur ever discovered.

Burke, for all his hunting, has never owned a major fossil. “I’ve got a couple of bones lying around, but nothing big,” he told me. In May, he saw a newspaper item about the upcoming T. bataar auction. He went to the preview, and the moment he saw the dinosaur he wanted to buy it. Maybe the T. bataar could be displayed on the ground floor of his company’s headquarters; later, perhaps, it could be in a museum. He did not notice where the specimen was from, he told me. “Could’ve been the jungles of Sarawak,” he said. “I wasn’t focussed on that at all. It was a well-prepared specimen. They said it was seventy-five to eighty per cent complete.” He added, “I can assure you, I’d have called in some experts long before I parted with one thin dime, to go down there and check each bone, and make sure I could get to seventy-five or eighty per cent.”

On the day of the auction, Burke bid by phone from his house in Westchester County; to his surprise, he won. “It was a lark,” he said. He has since withdrawn his bid.

United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton went to court in early September, in lower Manhattan, with U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel presiding. Castel has adjudicated cases involving accused mobsters (John Gotti, Jr.) and cases involving rappers (Kanye West) but never one with a party from the late Cretaceous. “I stand to be educated,” he said. “I’m not going to claim that I have dinosaur arrests presented to me with any frequency.”

Prokopi was not present. The purpose of the hearing was to set deadlines for determining whether the case would go to trial, and it went on for about an hour. Castel wanted to know who Prokopi was. A commercial paleontologist, one of Prokopi’s attorneys answered, adding, “He collects fossils and he builds dinosaurs out of them.”

“How did he acquire it?” the judge said, meaning the T. bataar.

“He purchased it,” the attorney said.

“Where did he purchase it?”

Multiple sources.

“What sources?”

“From dealers who sell dinosaur parts.”

“Where are they located?”

“Some of them are in Japan, I believe,” the attorney said. “I don’t know where all of them are.”

Prokopi’s team had claimed that the T. bataar had come into the country in three separate shipments. Now they were saying four—and that the specimen had been assembled from the bones of a number of dinosaurs.

“You’re telling me that what was being auctioned did not come from one once-upon-a-time living creature?” the judge said at one point.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” the attorney said. The dinosaur was soon being referred to as a “Frankenstein model.”

The prosecutors, who had said that they were “loath to take” Prokopi’s word on anything at this point, informed the judge that a team of paleontologists had examined the bones and concluded that they had derived mostly from one creature. But this didn’t matter much, anyway, since all the bones in question were certainly T. bataar and, therefore, certainly Mongolian.

Isn’t it possible, the judge had asked, that T. bataar lived elsewhere on Earth? Aren’t scientific discoveries made all the time?

One of the assistant U.S. attorneys, Martin Bell, assured Castel that the scientific evidence all but confirmed that the bones were Mongolian.

At one point, the judge asked, “Any idea how large this dinosaur is, when fully assembled?”

About twenty-four feet long and eight feet high, Bell answered.

“So it would fit nicely in my courtroom,” the judge said.

A few weeks later, at the annual fossil show in Denver, everybody was talking about the T. bataar case. Dealers were hoping that the drama wouldn’t lead to new legislation making all U.S. fossils off-limits to commercial hunters. Paleontologists, meanwhile, hoped for stronger, clearer regulations or formalized collaboration between scientists and dealers. Johnson, the Smithsonian director, was attending the fair, and over breakfast he told me, “The commercial guys range from people who couldn’t give a shit about what they’re selling and the people who really would’ve been scientists if they’d had a good education.”

We went over to the Merchandise Mart, the show’s main venue. Johnson has always kept amicable relationships with both the academic and the commercial side of the fossil world, and he wanted to stop by the booths of friends. Though shady deals have been known to go down in back rooms or parking lots, I wanted to see if anyone was openly selling dinosaur fossils from countries that forbid their export.

On one dealer’s table lay three raptors from China. Bones and beaks and claws were folded in red and brown sandstone, as in a bas-relief. One was priced at twelve thousand dollars, the two others at twenty-five thousand apiece. The dealer said that he had collected them ten years ago, when it was legal. (“Classic answer,” Johnson said.) At another booth, we saw fossilized pinecones from Argentina. (“Those have always been illegal.”) At another: sabre-toothed-cat skulls. (“Chinese.”) The legal and the illicit were all jumbled together. Johnson compared the situation to finding marijuana nestled among parsley and cilantro at the grocery store. “That’s the caveat-emptor part that I don’t like,” he said. “What’s colliding here is the potential for kids to get excited about science and the weird spectre of some of this stuff being tainted.”

I stopped at a booth selling Chinese and Mongolian fossils and casts, and asked the dealer how he got them. “As long as you go through the proper channels, you’re fine,” he said. “Grease the right politicians’ palms and stuff comes out. You gotta pay off the right guys.”

Overhearing this, a woman browsing at his table said, “I know all about that—I’m from New Jersey.”

As I browsed at the booth of a man selling fossils that had been quarried in Germany, I overheard him say that someone “who works about fourteen hours a day might, once in his lifetime, find something.” Some quarry owners, he went on, “don’t pay well. If a worker finds something, he can get ten times more on the black market.”

Chris Moore, who had shipped Prokopi the T. bataar fossils, was listed in the show’s directory as a vender. But Moore didn’t show up. He was digging fossil fish in Scotland, an associate of his told me, and had “hit big.”

The Prokopis are not fond of New York—“We don’t get it,” Amanda says—but on the day that the paleontological team inspected the T. bataar Eric flew there to unpack and repack the bones, rather than entrust the job to others. He and some of the Mongolians happened to be staying at the same La Quinta Inn, in Queens. The Mongolians didn’t know what Prokopi looked like, but, when one of them overheard a man in the hotel lobby talking on his cell phone about a dinosaur, he quietly took a photograph. It showed Prokopi, in jeans and boots, sitting on a sofa and holding a paper cup.

Over the summer, the photograph was passed around in Mongolia as investigators there looked into whether Prokopi had ever visited the country. A Mongolian paleontologist gave a sworn police statement saying that, in June, 2009, Prokopi had paid him fifty dollars a day to help him dig dinosaurs for a week or so in the Gobi. They travelled into the desert in a Land Cruiser, with a guide, following a map that Prokopi had of known dinosaur sites. A search of customs and hotel registries indicated that Prokopi had also visited Mongolia in 2008 and 2011. On at least one of the trips, a Mongolian source told me, he shared a hotel room in Ulaanbaatar with Chris Moore. (Moore, through his New York attorney, declined to comment for this article.)

Investigators focussed on the Gobi guide, who, according to the Mongolian paleontologist’s statement, owned an “antique museum, a private museum,” and had bragged that he had hung out with Prokopi in the States. Investigators searched the guide’s home and confiscated a computer, on which they found a 2008 letter to a fossil buyer in Japan. The letter, which was incomplete, began, “Dear Butts.” It continued, in part, “I told people that I would buy a head of Tarbosaur”—a T. bataar—“and I offered high price for any size. . . . Following my offer many expeditions went to countryside.” The letter included a price list: forty thousand dollars for the head of a velociraptor, forty thousand for the head of a T. bataar, five thousand for the claws of a T. bataar. The letter informed “Butts” that he owed thirty-seven thousand six hundred dollars and would need to pay fifty per cent up front before receiving any more shipments. “People are getting more and more cautions [sic] here,” the letter continued. “In Mongolia the price [of] everything is rising.” The letter-writer added, “We have been in business cooperation for many years. You know that I don’t do temporary business. I do see the future when dealing with people.”

If the letter’s author was indeed the Gobi guide, there is no more future to speak of. He died in 2011—of illness, a source in the fossil trade told me.

There is a fossil dealer living in Japan named Hollis Butts. He would communicate with me only by e-mail, and he denied any connection with the T. bataar bones, though he said that he had done other work with Prokopi. Butts identified the Gobi guide as a fossil supplier with whom he had done business, but he said that their relationship had “finished well before 2007.” When asked about the 2008 letter to “Butts,” he said, “I suspect it was a letter to someone else, with ‘Mr. Butts’ written on top.”

By fall, federal authorities in New York had fattened their case. They had discovered that, on one fossil shipment, Prokopi had changed the country of origin from Mongolia to Japan. Scientists from a host of nations had issued statements saying that the T. bataar could have come only from Mongolia. An inspection of customs records revealed that the specimen was not Prokopi’s first contested dinosaur. In May, 2010, the Department of Homeland Security had stopped a shipment described first as a “sample of craft rock,” and then as a “fossil replica,” which turned out to be a Chinese microraptor. When the government seized the fossils, Prokopi had complained, in a letter, that he had “$1,000 invested in this item” and claimed that the mixup could likely be attributed to the shipper’s poor English.

Federal agents in the T. bataar investigation obtained access to Prokopi’s AOL account, and found numerous e-mail exchanges with business associates that centered on the buying, selling, and prepping of “Tarbos” and “Mongol fossils.” The agents also confiscated the saurolophus—the duck-billed dinosaur that had failed to sell at the Chait auction in early May. Prokopi’s civil attorneys advised him to get a criminal lawyer.

Meanwhile, in Mongolia, several suspects were detained, including one of the Gobi guide’s relatives. Interpol was now involved. The Mongolian public had taken a strong interest in the T. bataar. When Robert Painter, the Houston attorney, travelled to Ulaanbaatar to meet with President Elbegdorj, a TV station interviewed him for half an hour—the segment aired live, without commercial breaks.

Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, one of the Mongolians who had helped launch the campaign to save the fossil, told me over Skype that government officials in Ulaanbaatar were thinking of the T. bataar case “as a way to clean out our house.” She noted, “T. bataar is actually fighting for our democracy. We’re going to use it to fight corruption. T. bataar will change lots of things in Mongolia if it comes back.”

And if it doesn’t?

“Even if it doesn’t, we will hunt down the pipeline.”

Over the summer, she had been elected to Parliament and named minister of culture. Dinosaur tourism, as yet only a concept in Mongolia, now fell within her jurisdiction.

“People said, ‘Why do you need to study dinosaurs?’ ” she told me. “I said, ‘There’s so much mining going on in the Mongolian Gobi, and there are so many dinosaurs. You need proper policies.’ I needed to know how to protect them and make museums for them.”

Mongolians have never been widely exposed to paleontology, despite the rich bone beds. The country’s only natural-history museum, in Ulaanbaatar, is an unattractive, poorly kept, Soviet-era tomb. Bolor Minjin can imagine the T. bataar inaugurating a new scientific era. She told me, “I hope the return of the T. bataar skeleton will generate enthusiasm among Mongolians, and that they will urge the government to build new museums and train the next generation of paleontologists.”

Early on the morning of October 17th, a Wednesday, about two dozen federal agents and sheriff’s deputies arrived at Serenola, got Prokopi out of bed, and arrested him on three counts involving smuggling. Amanda and the children were kept upstairs as he was handcuffed and led away. Then she drove the kids to school.

The agents spent the day searching the house and the workshop. They packed fossils, electronics, business papers, and other items into cardboard boxes stamped “EVIDENCE.” Late in the morning, a U.P.S. truck happened to arrive, and for Prokopi the timing could not have been worse. The four-hundred-pound delivery was from I. M. Chait, and contained the bones of another dinosaur: a Mongolian oviraptor.

Eric and Amanda put up Serenola as collateral to free him on bond, and by late afternoon he was home. He had surrendered his passport. On Sunday night, he flew to New York and checked into the Fairfield Inn & Suites, in Times Square. The next morning, he dressed in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a red tie, and went downtown, to Duane Street, to meet with his criminal lawyer, Georges Lederman. At two o’clock, they entered a fifth-floor magistrate’s courtroom, Prokopi carrying a soft-sided briefcase and looking distressed.

When his case was called, he took a seat next to Lederman at the defense’s table, in a high-backed leather chair. His crow’s-feet crinkled whenever he murmured a response to one of Lederman’s whispered questions. Martin Bell, the lead prosecutor in the criminal case, asked the judge to raise the bond to six hundred thousand dollars. The judge looked at the pretrial-services forms and noted that Prokopi had fifteen hundred dollars in his checking account and seven hundred in cash. A background search had turned up two traffic citations. Prokopi had been married for a decade and had a stable residence and two young children. “Is there really a risk that he’ll leave the country?” the judge asked.

Bell said that Prokopi was sitting on about “half a million dollars’ worth of dinosaur fossils” and had powerful connections overseas. The judge asked if there was some sort of underground market in dinosaurs that he wasn’t aware of. “I thought they were sold at auction,” he said. Bell told him that the international black market in fossils has been able to “hide in plain sight,” and that trafficking “far exceeds” the current efforts of law enforcement.

They went back and forth for nearly an hour. The judge ordered that Amanda also surrender her passport. He ordered Prokopi not to travel beyond northern Florida once he got home, and he raised the bond to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Two months later, on December 27th, Prokopi returned to New York and pleaded guilty to customs-related crimes that carried a maximum seventeen-year sentence and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The plea agreement required that he abandon all claims on the T. bataar and the duck-billed dinosaur, and on four more Mongolian and Chinese dinosaurs to which federal prosecutors could now connect him: two oviraptors and two more T. bataars, one of them believed to be somewhere in Great Britain.

“Tell me what you did,” the judge said to Prokopi.

Prokopi responded that he had instructed an associate in China to undervalue one shipment, and had imported fossils with “vague” and “misleading” labels.

“So you mislabelled it to make sure it would be imported?” the judge said.

“Right,” Prokopi said.

Nothing more was revealed about how his dinosaur business worked: about who had dug the original T. bataar, or when, or how it had been removed from Mongolia. The judge set the sentencing hearing for April, and court was adjourned.

“My client is radioactive when it comes to being able to earn a living in his business,” Lederman had told the court at Prokopi’s arraignment. In fact, a dealer, once tarnished, is not necessarily finished. Convicted hunters have been known to return directly to the field. In Prokopi’s case, Mongolia will be out of the question. But the Florida waters and quarries are still full of Ice Age bones. At the start of 2013, eBay alone had more than forty thousand fossils, rocks, and minerals for sale.

Heritage Auctions, for its part, has reorganized its natural-history department. Greg Rohan, the company president, told me that it plans to continue selling fossils, but added, “We’re going to want to see a lot more proof of origin.” On August 28th, Heritage notified David Herskowitz that his contract would not be renewed. He hopes to open a new natural-history department at another auction house.

In December, the Prokopis put Serenola on the market for eight hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. They had been offering various other items on eBay—their first sales since June—including a slab of Florida cypress salvaged from the Suwannee River, and Amanda’s 2002 Lexus S.U.V., which sold for ninety-one hundred dollars.

By January, when I visited them again, the Prokopis had decided to sell as many belongings as they could—from pool furniture to prints on the walls—and move in temporarily with Amanda’s mother, in Virginia. Instead of the Lexus, Amanda told me, they now had two “smaller, dumpier” cars. They had no savings. “It was all in the dinosaurs,” she said.

In Virginia, Amanda hopes to continue working as an interior decorator. Eric plans to revive his fossil business, by doing prep work and making casts. He recently canvassed some ranch land in Wyoming, looking for prime fossil-hunting spots, and hopes to open a dinosaur quarry nearby. “It’s competitive,” he said. “It takes a while to get in on something.”

“And it’s a lot of time away,” Amanda said. “Every time he goes out West, it’s months of time that he’s not with his kids.”

“Yeah, the Mongolian stuff basically just arrived here and didn’t require me to be gone a lot,” Eric said.

Amanda said, “What kills me is that we watch these clips from the news and people are laughing about it. People think it’s funny. It’s not. It’s our life. It’s pretty much over.” She began crying, for the second or third time.

“It’s not over,” Eric told her. “But we’re gonna start over.”

It’s over “as we know it,” Amanda said. “And for what? For bones? No one’s been murdered. We restored a dinosaur. You know?”

Eric had photocopied two texts for me to take home. In one, he had highlighted a passage about the relative commonness of T. bataar, which, he believed, underscored his point that his specimens were scientifically unimportant. The other was a German magazine article about a Hamburg dealer of Mongolian fossils. Prokopi suggested that the article offered proof that the Mongolians have sanctioned some commercial exports. I pressed him: had this happened with the T. bataar? Prokopi said only that he had heard of exportation permits being granted in the past, and initially believed that such permits would be issued for the T. bataar. When the dinosaur reached Great Britain, he discovered that there were no permits, and imported the fossils anyway. I asked for copies of the past permits, and for the names of those who provided them. He declined, saying, “There’s details about my dealings and associations in Mongolia that I’d like to talk about, but I don’t think I can.”

Painter, President Elbegdorj’s attorney, said, “Prokopi’s story evolves every time there’s a new hurdle. If Prokopi believes he was duped, the Mongolian government would love to know about that. All we want is a name, and the government will aggressively investigate.”

Prokopi, meanwhile, is getting ready for the Tucson show, in February, by restoring a giraffe skeleton and “low-end bulk stuff.” Lederman has asked federal authorities to release the Prokopis’ seized possessions. Among them is a cast that Prokopi made of the T. bataar. He hopes to sell it in Tucson, for at least thirty thousand dollars.

The real T. bataar will go home in the spring. The Mongolian government recently decided to turn an old Lenin museum into a new dinosaur museum. A national Mongol Bataar Day has been suggested for May 18th, to commemorate the date when President Elbegdorj acted on news of the Heritage auction. The Prokopis had given the T. bataar the distinctly American nickname Ty. The dinosaur will now be known as Mongol Baatar—“Mongolian hero.” ♦