The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22, 1999

The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22, 1999 

Killers Among Us 

By LARRY DOYLE 

QUESTIONS FOR 

James Dale, Gay Boy Scout 

ON LANGUAGE 

Plainspeak 

By PATRICIA T. O'CONNER 

SALIENT FACTS 

It Isn't Easy Being Green 

By GREG DICUM 

THE NEW ECONOMY 

Unreal Estate 

By JOHN COOK 

THE ETHICIST 

The Slacker Temp 

By RANDY COHEN 

WHAT THEY WERE THINKING 

Barry 

Bransfield, 

Brigham and 

Women's 

Hospital, 

Boston 

THE MILLENNIUM ISSUES 

"'We were about to go out, and I'm looking in this mirror — me, 

with my gut hanging over my bathing suit — and it was, like: Who 

would want to look at this?'" 

The Bully in the Mirror 

By STEPHEN S. HALL 

Tormented by an unattainable ideal, 

boys are learning what girls have 

long known: it isn’t easy living in a 

"Baywatch" world. 

The Outsiders 

By ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC 

How the picked-on cope — or 

don’t. 

http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/ (1 of 2) [8/22/1999 9:11:16 PM] 

Can B. Smith Be Martha? 

By JULIA REED 

An icon of the black professional class is hoping to cross over — by 

mounting a three-fronted attack on Martha Stewart’s living. 

Television’s Final Frontier 

By PETER DE JONGE 

The willfully isolated Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has finally let 

TV inside its borders. Can its ancient Buddhist traditions survive the 

tube?


Into the Unknown 

Mapping worlds known and 

unknown, redefining adventure. 

Women: The Shadow Story of 

the Millennium 

Faith, fertility, politics, imagery, sex, 

irritation and hope. 

The Best of the Last 

1,000 Years 

Best Stories, Best Inventions, Best 

Ideas. 

STYLE 

Urban Renewal 

By PILAR VILADAS 

Photographs by WILLIAM ABRANOWICZ 

A stylish Manhattan apartment blurs the line 

between traditional and modern. 

Plus: Footnotes 

FOOD 

Slaw and Order 

By MOLLY O'NEILL 

For shreddability, cabbage is still the prime 

suspect. 

Letters 

Puzzles 

LIVES 

Eviction Day 

Photographs by 

ED KASHI 

On the Cover: Alexander Bregstein (left) and Tyler Snitko tell tales of 

overcoming adolescent woe. Photograph by Justine Parsons for The New York 

Times. 

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INTERNATIONAL 

2 Lives, Again Entwined, Mirror the Fate of Berlin 

The two lives of Wally Muller and Waltraut Neumann mirror the 

fate of Berlin in a story of loss, division and elusive reconciliation. 

WEEK IN REVIEW 

Death Row's Living Alumni 

For each seven inmates executed since 1976, one awaiting execution 

has been exonerated. 

BUSINESS 

A Push From the Top Shatters a Glass Ceiling 

A middle-aged white guy who never thought much about women in 

the workplace until he became a single parent has helped create 

Hewlett-Packard's reputation as a bastion of egalitarianism. 

MAGAZINE 

The Troubled Life of Boys 

Tormented by an unattainable ideal, boys are learning what girls 

have long known: it isn't easy living in a "Baywatch" world. 

OP-ED COLUMNIST: MAUREEN DOWD 

Just Say Maybe 

I get no kick from writing about cocaine. But the press is not out of 

bounds here. Whatever W. did in the past, he has made his own 

white mischief in the present. 

BOOKS 

'Diana': All You Could Ever Want to Know 

"Diana: In Search of Herself," by Sally Bedell Smith, offers 

everything there is, plus a psychological diagnosis: borderline 

personality disorder. 

TECHNOLOGY 

When the Glitter of Stock Options Turns to Dust 

When Brian Knapp arrived at Barnes & Noble's new media division, 

he thought the risks were amply justified by the rewards. Since then 

he's learned an unspoken truth about stock options: they don't always 

pay. 

TRAVEL 

The Glory of the Northwest 

Artifacts from an Indian tribe's rich history fill a museum on Cape 

Flattery. South of Seattle, Mount Rainier looms, inspiring fear and 

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BREAKING 

NEWS FROM 

A.P. 

Sunken Barge 

Crew Found 

Off Russia 9:56 

p.m. EDT 

Sen. Aspirant 

Chafee Admits 

Drug Use 9:55 

p.m. EDT 

Paramilitary 

Units Blamed 

for Deaths 9:55 

p.m. EDT 

Fastest 100 

Meter Sprints 

9:51 p.m. EDT 

Force Wins at 

NHRA 

Nationals 9:50 

p.m. EDT 

Japanese 

Stocks Up in 

Early Trading 

9:25 p.m. EDT 

Mexico's 

Seaside 

Residents 

Remain 9:22 

p.m. EDT 

Surinamese 

Police Official 

Sought 9:21 

p.m. EDT 

MORE A.P. NEWS . . .

The New York Times on the Web 

respect. 

SUNDAY STYLES 

Vows Column Archive 

Victor Ebisan Ekperigin first saw Sarah Frances Redd a year ago, 

when he sat across from her on a Q subway train rattling through 

midtown Manhattan. Also, the latest fashions in On the Street. 

LEARNING 

On This Day 

On August 22, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt became the first 

U.S. chief executive to ride in an automobile, in Hartford, Conn. See 

this front page and read the full Times article. 

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• Killers Among Us 

• Camping Lessons 

• It Isn't Easy Being Green 

• Unreal Estate 

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW 


• The Slacker Temp 

• Plainspeak 

• What They Were Thinking 

What kind of person would open fire on innocent kids? An 

animal — just like any of us. By LARRY DOYLE 

friend of mine was murdered 

last month. We had been much 

closer in college and had fallen 

in and out of contact as people do; 

even though we had lived within 20 

minutes of each other for the past 

three years, we had had dinner once. I 

came to work one morning and a 

co-worker told me that a friend of hers 

was trying to reach me about a friend 

of mine. I called. Janet was dead. She Photograph by Lars Klove/Nonstock 

had been causing trouble for some 

drug dealers across the street, and the night before last, people had broken into her 

home and executed her. She was four months pregnant. 

I couldn't sleep. Not crying, not mourning in any usual sense, I lay in bed, twisted, 

caught in the twilight, before dreams but beyond waking. I stood in front of my 

friend's home. I crossed the street and entered the drug dealers' house, which nicely 

conformed to the lairs I had seen in movies and on "N.Y.P.D. Blue." And I began 

shooting. I shot the one on the couch in the stomach, moved into the bedroom and 

shot two on a dirty mattress, one in the chest and one in the back. In a corner was 

another one, weeping and begging. I shot him in the head. I had this -- for want of 

a better word -- fantasy for several nights running, each time shooting more people 

with more and more and more anger. If one can be half-asleep and enraged, I was. 

Larry Doyle is a television and 

magazine writer who lives in Los 

Angeles. 

I never did anything, because I'm more or less 

sane, because it wasn't a very good plan, because I 

didn't have a gun. All I had was the impulse to kill. 

Two weeks ago, a 37-old man walked into a Jewish community center a few miles 

from my home and starting shooting. Two weeks before that, a 44-year-old man 

bludgeoned his wife and two small children, then walked into an Atlanta brokerage 

firm and started shooting. Nearly a month before that, a 21-year-old Illinois man 

got in his car and started shooting. Before that, two teen-age boys walked into their 

school and started shooting. Because he hated Jews; because he had lost money; 

because he hated Jews and Asians and blacks; because they were picked on by the 

jocks. We take solace from the horror or insanity or cold triviality of their motives; 

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ENTERTAINMENT 

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it makes them monsters and maniacs and demons, not quite human. 

But how was their rage so different from mine? Obviously, that I did not actually 

shoot anyone. Though had I shot up a house full of drug dealers, the media 

response would have been quite different. And a good many people who have been 

successively sickened during this plague year would be considerably less 

devastated, perhaps relieved and maybe even a little thrilled. The rage is the same, 

only we share the hate. 

Calling for the execution of a 

murderer. Or in really bad traffic. It's 

the same impulse, whether horrific or 

honorable, and we've all had it, at 

some time and to some extent. Men 

seem to have it more often than 

women; they certainly walk into 

places and start shooting more 

frequently. We've heard the theories: 

men are rewarded for their aggression; 

men are more avid consumers of the 

pop death cult; men are reared to 

believe the world will bow before 

them and are frustrated to learn it's 

actually the reverse; men are denied 

outlets for their pain. . . . Most of 

these explanations, myriad as the talk 

shows and magazines that pander 

them about, all suggest that men kill 

because of something society does to 

them. But in nature, animals who don't 

watch TV or work in go-nowhere jobs 

kill all the time: for survival, for 

ON THE BRINK: A POLL 

According to the Gen Y2K Report, a recent 

survey of 2,000 young men and women: 

Of those ages 16 to 19, 41 percent say there are 

people they want to get even with. 

43 percent say they sometimes are pushed too far 

and feel they will explode. 

58 percent of this explosive group agree they 

would use a gun "if I had to." 

53 percent of this group watch TV movies, 

compared with 34 percent of those who do not 

feel they will explode. 

The study's authors, Liz Nickles and Laurie 

Ashcraft, report that controlling parents may be 

to blame for kids' volatility. "Most people assume 

that teens who exhibit . . . violent tendencies are 

the result of hands-off parenting," Nickles says. 

"In the population we studied, the opposite is the 

case." Says Ashcraft, "Overscheduled, pressured 

children are an emotional powder keg." 

territory, for power. Men who kill do so for the same simple objectives, however 

demented or hateful their reasoning may be. It may be as simple as that: men are 

animals, perhaps a little more so than women. 

So, "animals kill, guns don't kill," to paraphrase the National Rifle Association's 

boilerplate regurgitation? Well, that's true, in its own disingenuously dense way. 

Obviously, hatemongers with guns are much more efficient killers than 

hatemongers with knives and baseball bats. But I think there is something to guns 

beyond their convenience. In their very design, they are an eerily perfect extension 

of rage. The handgun in particular: you make a fist and point the metal finger at the 

thing you hate. Impulse to twitch, and a hard, hot bolus of fury hurtles out of you at 

hundreds of miles per hour. Point and click. Point and click. From urge to 

execution in a flash. 

There have been many times in my life when I'm now happy I did not have a gun. I 

was a dour teen-ager, I'm told, and if I had had a handgun, I might have not shot up 

my school but perhaps a couple of particular individuals, including myself. There 

were plenty of other kids in my school who could have made the cover of Time 

and Newsweek, with enough ammo. 

Even as a hormonally stable adult, I didn't need something as gut-wrenching as the 

murder of a friend to unleash the impulse. Being jostled along the crowded, 

steaming streets of New York, there were days when, if I could have simply 

pointed my finger. . . . 

Table of Contents 

August 22, 1999 

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Camping Lessons 






QUESTIONS FOR JAMES DALE 





The man who successfully sued the Boy Scouts of America for 

discriminating against homosexuals talks about getting on with 

his life and the importance of staying earnest. By DAVID RAKOFF 

: When you were a kid, did 

friends ever give you what on 

"Leave It to Beaver" they might 

call "the business" for being a Scout? 

Like jive for it? Yeah. It loses 

coolness the older you get. And it's 

one thing to be in the Scout uniform in 

the confines of the Scout camp or a 

meeting. But then to sort of go out 

walking down the street beforehand, 

shopping, that was a little . . . actually, 

the second troop I was in, the 

Scoutmaster just thought, "What's the 

point of these uniforms?" I was happy 

to not have to put on the uniform, 

which was a cotton-poly blend. 

That's why I got my "Je Parle 

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White Oleander 

by Janet Fitch 

The Testament 

by John Grisham 

Business @ the Speed of 

Thought 

by Bill Gates 

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff 

by Richard Carlson, Ph.D.


Francais" badge and got out of there. 

Wasn't there also a "Troubador" 

badge? 

You know, I learned my appreciation 

for show tunes and cabaret no place 

other than the Boy Scouts of America. 

There were more skits in drag and 

campfire songs than in any gay bar 

that I've ever been in. But it takes a 

while to perfect those skills. Actually, 

I became more and more valuable in 

the program as I got older. Most kids 

drop out at 13, 14 -- cars, girls, you 

know, whatever the average 

heterosexual boy is interested in. But I 

was being recruited by troops to be the 

older Scout, a role model. I was 

always picked on a lot in school, but 

the Boy Scouts was a community that 

accepted me, welcomed me, gave me 

positive reinforcement. 

Photograph by Ashkan Sahihi 

Now you live in New York, world capital of jaded, world-weary anomie. Have you 

ever had to be in the closet about being a Scout? Have you ever walked into a 

party and thought: "People can be very intolerant. I'd better not act scouty." 

I remember running into my first jaded New Yorker at my first 

job. He would constantly make fun of me because I couldn't 

quote Bette Davis or Elizabeth Taylor films. I went and rented 

each and every one of those gosh-darn films -- well, I don't want 

to swear. Even the fact that I can joke about this is proving your 

point. 

And did you memorize the films? How's your Elizabeth Taylor? 

"I am not a whore, Mama!" "Butterfield 8." 

Related Article 

New Jersey Court Overturns 

Ouster of Gay Boy Scout 

(Aug. 5) 

You quoted the movie like a true Boy Scout; the actual line is, "I was the slut of all time!" I think 

you have an internal V-chip. But tell me, how much of your life has your legal crusade taken 

over? Does it play a role in your relationships? 

I wouldn't necessarily say that it caused the demise of my last major relationship, but it didn't 

help. I see this case as an important community thing. I tremendously believe in the value of 

community. And I don't think that my boyfriend viewed it in the same light. He viewed the 

victory as "Good for you!" instead of "Good for us." 

What about your family? Your brother is a former Scout, right? And he's gay? 

http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990822mag-gay-scout.html (2 of 3) [8/22/1999 9:58:19 PM] 

Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution 

by Robert C. Atkins, M.D. 

Under the Tuscan Sun 

by Frances Mayes 

All Too Human 

by George Stephanopoulos


There's always been this weird dichotomy between us. I came out when I was 19; he came out 

when he was 28. And I think my coming out so publicly and suing the Boy Scouts didn't 

necessarily help him. He was kind of mocking when he was in the closet -- I don't understand 

why you're doing this." But now, after all this time, he's more intolerant than I am -- I can't 

believe people won't come out of the closet." I think that in time he'll probably be a little more 

tempered and maybe more empathetic. 

If you have a son of your own, will you encourage him to go into the Scouts? 

Assuming that the discriminatory policy's not there, I would definitely like the kid to be in the 

Scouts. But I would want to know who the people were that were influencing him -- his 

Scoutmaster, the other Scouts. A kid can be highly impressionable, and I wouldn't want some 

narrow-minded person leading my son's troop. For all the hysteria around gays in the Boy 

Scouts, I think any parent who trusts just anybody with their child is crazy. You have to know 

who they are and what it's about. It's not like dropping the kid off with Grandma. 









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Plainspeak 






ON LANGUAGE BY PATRICIA T. O'CONNER 

Taking the gobble out of gobbledygook. 




here do you go if you need help "re-engineering communications 

processes" or "contextualizing expertise"? What if you want "improved 

system efficiencies" and other "value-added communications 

components"? Why, you go to a plain-language consultant, of course. 

You'll have no trouble finding one. In recent years, the plain-language movement 

has spawned a small industry of consulting firms, both large and small, for 

showing people in business and government how to use clear, simple English. But 

be warned. Some of the "proactive" folks who want to "modify your long-term 

business-development strategy to include plain language" haven't quite mastered it 

themselves, if the writing on their Web sites is any indication. 

To be fair, simple language isn't so simple to use. "Simple English is no one's 

mother tongue," Jacques Barzun said. "It has to be worked for." And the defenders 

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Thought 

by Bill Gates 



Plainspeak 

of clarity, including plenty of plainspoken consultants, are making some progress, 

however fitful, in the war against jargon, bureaucratese, technobabble, pomposity 

and gobbledygook. 

It is an old fight, going back at least as far as Aristotle, but one fought with 

particular fervor lately. The results are mixed, but an optimist may be forgiven for 

thinking that things are looking up -- if not navigating an upward trajectory. 

Patricia T. O'Conner is the author 

of a grammar guide, "Woe Is I," 

and a new book about writing, 

"Words Fail Me." William Safire 

is on vacation. 

In the private sector, some hard-nosed business 

types have concluded that intelligibility is good for 

the balance sheet. Ford, for instance, recently 

demystified its auto-leasing contract. Among other 

things, lessee has become you, and there's nary a 

shall in sight. Linguists at General Motors have 

developed what they call a controlled language for use in service manuals. The 

idea, according to Kurt S. Godden, G.M.'s translation manager, is to eliminate the 

ambiguities of English. And the aerospace industry has invented another controlled 

language to standardize the vocabulary of airplane maintenance. 

On the medical front, we have the plain-language version of the venerable Merck 

Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, the forbiddingly technical reference book 

physicians have been thumbing for 100 years. Take hangnail, for example. "Acute 

or chronic inflammation of the periungual tissues" became "an infection around the 

edge of a fingernail or toenail." 

"This wasn't a simple matter," says Dr. Robert Berkow, who has been editor in 

chief of the Merck Manual for 25 years. It took five years to produce a twin 

version of the Merck for lay readers, with virtually the same information but in 

everyday language. "Most of that first year was spent practicing writing in plain 

English," he says. 

As for the Government, it has always provided the kind of warm, moist 

environment, undisturbed by fresh air, that's ideal for the incubation of verbal 

monstrosities. But Washington's antigibberish brigade got a break in early 1997 

when it enlisted Vice President Gore in the effort. The result was a Presidential 

memo last summer directing Federal agencies to write in ordinary English -everyday 

words, short sentences and the active voice. It was a tall order for 

bureaucrats used to expressing themselves in language that only another bureaucrat 

could understand. 

Similar campaigns fizzled out in the 1960's, 70's and 80's, but this one may be 

different. "It could really work," says Bryan A. Garner, a plain-language consultant 

and the editor of Oxford's new Dictionary of Modern American Usage. "It's 

making more official writing accessible." But don't expect overnight results. "It's a 

never-ending battle, and you can only change things incrementally." 

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All Too Human 


Plainspeak 

So it may be a while before every agency's preliminary planning strategy becomes 

a plan. Even the Clinton Administration's clarity guru, Annetta L. Cheek, has a 

fussy-sounding title: plain-language coordinator. (She prefers to say, "I'm the one 

who's supposed to make the Government write better.") She has no illusions about 

the difficulties of getting an entrenched bureaucracy to change its ways, but she 

says it will happen. 

"The customers are going to demand it," she says. "It's the right of the American 

people to get clear communication from their Government, and they should insist 

on it. There's absolutely no reason for this bloated language." 

You don't have to be a psycholinguist to understand the allure of officialese. It can 

make a lousy idea look good or an unpalatable one easier to swallow. It lets an 

insecure writer sound impressive or helps a writer with nothing to say hide the fact 

that the emperor has no clothes. But sheer habit may be the biggest factor of all. 

Old customs die hard, especially in government. 

Carol Florman, deputy director of the office of public affairs at the Justice 

Department, finds some of the writing in her agency simply "frightening." Why? 

"Not only are we a bureaucracy, but we're a bureaucracy populated by lawyers," 

she says. "They just don't write in English." 

But William Lutz, a Rutgers University English professor who writes about plain 

language, says his vote for worst writing goes to the Internal Revenue Service. 

"Lawyers are a piece of cake," he says. "You haven't lived until you've gone one 

on one with an accountant." 

Some agencies, though, have distinguished themselves in the battle against 

incomprehensibility. Every month, the Administration gives its No Gobbledygook 

Award to the employees who produce the most readable document. The star of the 

effort has been the Securities and Exchange Commission, for getting companies to 

cut the jargon out of financial-disclosure statements. 

But plain English is nothing if not humble. An Agriculture Department worker 

won the award for rewriting consumer tips on safely cooking a stuffed turkey. Her 

summation was clarity itself: "Measure the temperature of both the turkey and 

stuffing! Don't just trust a pop-up indicator!" 



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Plainspeak 







http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990822mag-onlanguage.html (4 of 4) [8/22/1999 9:14:49 PM]







SALIENT FACTS 





With new genetically modified crops, agribusiness is positioning 

itself as nature's very best friend. Where does that leave 

environmentalists? By GREG DICUM 

WHAT'S NEW DOWN ON THE FARM? 

Ever since high-tech agribusiness 

started tinkering with the DNA of 

crops, genetically modified foods have 

been a battleground for 

environmentalists (who have called 

them "frankenfoods"). Americans can 

buy genetically modified corn, 

potatoes and papayas, though in 

Europe, groups like Greenpeace have 

blocked the importation of some 

altered produce. But with the latest 

innovations, producers are betting 

Wheat: Corbis. Strawberry: Michelle 

Garrett/Corbis. Fish: Douglas Peebles/Corbis. 

they can beat the greens at their own game, casting their test-tube advances as the 

environment's last, best hope. 

TO MAKE PRETTIER PRODUCE? 

Like all genetic modifications, these crops are created by either fiddling with a 

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Thought 

by Bill Gates 




plant's own genetic material or splicing genes from one into the cells of another. 

But these latest modifications aren't just designed to benefit consumers and 

retailers. According to the claims being made by companies like Monsanto and 

Novartis, they are actually kinder to the earth than the earth's own products. 

AND WHAT WONDERS HAS THIS YIELDED? 

A widely used application is Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a bacterial insecticide. 

Scientists plug it into the genes of corn, potatoes and cotton, after which the plants 

produce it themselves. By altering the genetic composition of aspens, scientists 

have also developed wood that can be made into paper with fewer harsh chemicals. 

And Monsanto has developed plants that are resistant to pesticide, allowing 

farmers to spray it and harm only weeds -- so long as they use the pesticide in 

question, which happens to be Monsanto's flagship product. "We obviously see 

that this is a technology that presents the opportunity to use less pesticides, to farm 

in a more sustainable way," says a Monsanto official. 

SO WHAT HAS GOT THE GREENS SEEING RED? 

For starters, they fear that any kind of genetic manipulation could disrupt the 

fragile ecosystem in horrible ways. So far in nature, no engineered genes have 

migrated from cultivated crops to wild plants, but even Vincent Chiang, a 

professor at Michigan Tech University who developed a genetically modified tree, 

allows that "it's possible." Second, many scientists are concerned that such 

widespread use of Bt will cause insects to develop an immunity. Finally, 

environmentalists are alarmed that a multinational company like Monsanto has the 

temerity to suggest it is saving the earth. That's their job. 

SOUNDS RATHER CONFUSING? 

When environmentalists condemn research that at least claims to reduce pollution 

and conserve energy, it can get awfully hard to tell who's on what team. Last 

month, Gerber baby food -- which is owned by Novartis, a leader in high-tech 

agriculture -- announced that it would stop using genetically modified ingredients. 

And recently, Robert Shapiro, the C.E.O. of Monsanto (which brought us Agent 

Orange), gave an impassioned pro-ecology speech: "If the only model for 

development is the recapitulation of the Industrial Revolution, with all its horrific 

waste and pollution, there simply is no way that development can occur without 

doing permanent, irreversible damage to the systems on which life depends." In 

thanks, environmentalists threw a tofu cream pie in his face. 



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All Too Human 









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Unreal Estate 






THE NEW ECONOMY 

Unreal Estate 




Internet stocks may no longer be soaring, but the market for 

Web addresses is getting tighter all the time. By JOHN COOK 

arlier this month, the Internet 

domain name www.drugs.com -just 

the name, nothing else -- was 

sold to an anonymous buyer for 

$823,456 (which works out to about 

$103,000 per letter). It was not the 

highest sum ever paid for a domain 

name (many addresses, including 

wallstreet.com and bingo.com, have 

fetched $1 million or more), but it is 

evidence of how the supposedly 

limitless World Wide Web is running 

short on real estate. 

According to Network Solutions, a 

company that registers domain names, 

all you need to secure a home on the 

Web is $70 and an unclaimed name 

with no more than 22 characters. But 

SITE SELECTION 

John Cook goes looking for a Web address, but finds 

the most obvious permutations of his own name have 

already been snapped up. 

Cook.com 

"It's not for sale," says its owner, Scott Day, a 

former watermelon farmer in Oklahoma who has 

plans to start a cooking Web site. Not for any 

sum? "I don't think it would be affordable to you. 

It wouldn't be affordable for any individual." 

Cook.net 

"If it were just a cash deal, I'd have to hold out 

for $25,000," says David Cook, a Florida investor 

who once owned the phone number 

1-800-PHONECALL, which he sold for $25,000. 

Cook.org 

"I'd probably sell it for upward of $10,000," says 

Steve Anderson, the C.F.O. of a Silicon Valley 

company. "I think the dot-org domain names are 

worth a lot less. A dot-com domain name is 

worth 10 times a dot-org, potentially. It's all in 

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Thought 

by Bill Gates 



Unreal Estate 

that's not as easy as it sounds: 

although a Network Solutions 

representative says quality domain 

names are "limited only by the 

imagination," most experts agree that 

all the good names have been taken -by 

enterprising visionaries hoping to 

turn a $70 investment into a retirement 

fund. 

What makes a good name? For 

starters, dot-com is the essential 

suffix. Dot-net and dot-org just can't 

compare. Jeffrey Tinsley, the C.E.O. 

of Great Domains, the company that 

brokered the sale of drugs.com, 

explains: "Drugs.org or drugs.net are 

worth something to someone, but 

dot-com is the Internet's Rodeo 

Drive." (Of course, any speculator 

knows that today's slum can be 

tomorrow's hot neighborhood; Great 

Domains' parent company holds the 

rights to wallstreet.org.) 

what the buyer's willing to pay for it." 

John.com 

Network Solutions has the address registered to a 

John Little of Cupertino, Calif., but efforts to 

contact him were unsuccessful. 

eCook.com 

"We're building a prototype of a very cool 

cooking site, targeted more toward pop-culture," 

says Firas Bushnaq, who heads a firm known as 

Ecompany and maintains that the name is not for 

sale. But if it were? "Anywhere from $100,000 to 

$200,000." 

Cookweb.com 

"It was something that I tried to do, and just 

didn't have time with school," says Timothy 

Cook, a 16-year-old from West Melbourne, Fla. 

"I couldn't see charging more than the price it 

cost me, which is $100. I'd have to talk to my 

dad." 

Jcook.com 

"I registered the domain name for a friend of 

mine a few years ago," says Rodney Joffe of 

Phoenix. "He has yet to use it, but keeps making 

noises. He has rejected offers because he really 

wants it for himself, but my guess is that he'd 

probably settle for a couple hundred dollars." 

Domain names emerged as an object 

of intense speculation around 1996, the year Great Domains was founded. The 

people who got in the game early often just stumbled across the idea. A typical 

case might be Scott Day, an Oklahoma watermelon farmer who in 1997 registered 

watermelon.com -- and in the process sensed a business opportunity. He quickly 

snapped up several food-related names (including cook.com, desserts.com and 

barbecue.com), envisioning a Web-based culinary empire. "Over 500 people a day 

type in 'cook.com' looking for recipes," says Day, who gave up growing 

watermelons. 

Many entrepreneurs control large blocks of sites. Rick Schwartz, a Web developer 

in Boca Raton, Fla., who was introduced to the domain game as an operator of 

adult-entertainment sites, has more than 3,000 titles, including fishingtackle.com 

(which cost him just the $70 registration fee), sneaky.com ($3,000), men.com 

($15,000), abuseexcuse.com ($70, after hearing the term used on CNN in reference 

to Hillary Clinton) and d-i-v-o-r-c-e.com (for $70, not in honor of the Tammy 

Wynette classic but because it would read well on a billboard). Though he's not in 

the habit of selling domain names -- he intends to develop businesses around all his 

sites -- Schwartz did accept $100,000 for the rights to eScore.com (from Kaplan 

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All Too Human 


Unreal Estate 

Education Services, the college-board prep company). "I bought my mother a 

condominium on the beach," he explains. 

Other high-stakes addresses acquired in the domain name rush include art.com 

(sold for more than $450,000) and rock.com ($1 million). Addresses with an 'e' or 

an 'i' before them -- like etoys.com -- are also considered hot; those preceded by a 

number (4drugs.com) are getting there, too. Even misspelled versions of famous 

addresses -- like amazom.com and yahpp.com -- can turn a profit, since they 

guarantee a certain amount of traffic based solely on typos. No niche market is too 

obscure to attract speculators. "I've seen someone trying to sell ostrichmeat.com 

for $5,000," says Ellen Rony, co-author of the "The Domain Name Handbook." 

Internet experts believe that sooner or later the naming system will have to change 

to accommodate the Web's growth. Until it does, however, promoters are hungry 

for any address that will attract traffic, even if it's from people who land there 

accidentally. "I know of a young boy who wanted to check on a Nintendo game 

called Zelda," Rony says. "So he typed in zelda.com, and guess what? It's a porn 

site. And he got into trouble for that from his school. How could he know? It's a 

messy business." 









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THE ETHICIST BY RANDY COHEN 





I have been placed in charge of a data-entry temp whose work is 

very shoddy. I don't want to complain about him — who should 

be expected to do a good job of mindless work for low pay? But 

I worry that his performance is sabotaging me and my 

colleagues. What should I do? 

— Jon Lackman, New York 

s you rightly suggest, running to the boss 

should be a last resort. The person to talk to 

first is the temp: make sure he knows what 

is expected of him and what the consequences 

will be if he doesn't deliver. 

But few people eagerly work well in bad jobs. 

Indeed, if anyone's acting unethically here, it's 

your boss; it is ignoble to force people into 

soul-deadening, pointless, poorly paid jobs. And it is force -- people must work to 

live, and surely no one would freely choose to waste his days in such 

circumstances. 

Organizing work into tedious, repetitive tasks, while profitable for the few, makes 

life miserable for the many; some political economists have called it a crime 

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Thought 

by Bill Gates 




against humanity. The humane solution is to distribute the most tedious tasks 

evenly rather than dumping them on one person. But the current arrangement 

brings cars, camcorders and the Backstreet Boys to the millions -- myself included 

-- and we seem to like that. 

Short of a radical transformation of the labor economy (which doesn't seem too 

likely), the situation at your office will continue to be exhausting for everyone 

involved: your co-workers, your boss and even the temp himself. And as the 

supervisor, you have the responsibility to see that the work gets done, so you must 

act. Can you persuade the temp to improve his performance? Great. Can you get 

him more money or rearrange his most mind-numbing tasks? Even better. But if 

you can't do either, and you continue to feel, as you say, that his job is so wretched 

that reporting him would be wrong, you can continue to work there, but you can't 

ethically continue as his supervisor. You can be a soldier but not an officer. 

We received an invitation to a surprise party for our friend Ted, given by his wife. 

It said: "It is a clown party! Ted is afraid of clowns!! Feel free to dress as a clown. 

The idea is to scare him! Adults only! We do not want children to see how terrified 

Ted will be by the clowns!" Not going is a no-brainer. Should we tell him? — 

M.M., Madison, N.J. 

By all means, tell him about the party. And about a divorce lawyer. 

Do you have ethical queries that you need answered? Send them to 

ethicist@nytimes.com or The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 229 West 

43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. 

Illustration by Christoph Neimann 



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All Too Human 









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What They Were Thinking 









WHAT THEY WERE THINKING 

Barry Bransfield, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston 

Photograph by ROY DI TOSTI 

"I am being treated for cancer of the brain, and I went in every day at 9 o'clock for 

my 15 minutes of radiation therapy. It was like a job, the job of curing myself. No 

one is in the room, so you get into a meditative state. I don't think of the cancer. I 

was just thinking about things like Muddy Waters, because I was listening to him. 

Blues is the celebration of sadness. I think of my family and my wife the whole 

time. But I think of other things to keep going. I am just turning 50, and this is not 

what I had planned. Your mind races over all kinds of things, from science to 

friends. And you just hope God is thinking of you." 



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Go to Article 

http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990822mag-cover.html (1 of 3) [8/22/1999 9:16:24 PM] 






Thought 

by Bill Gates 











http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990822mag-cover.html (2 of 3) [8/22/1999 9:16:24 PM] 





All Too Human 



http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990822mag-cover.html (3 of 3) [8/22/1999 9:16:24 PM]


THE TROUBLED LIFE OF BOYS 


Tormented by an unattainable ideal, boys are learning what 

girls have long known: it isn't easy living in a 'Baywatch' 

world. By STEPHEN S. HALL Photographs by JUSTINE PARSONS 

Looking good! Alexander works out in the gym five times a week to be all he can be . . . 

and less (about 40 pounds less) than he once was. 

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Thought 

by Bill Gates 




n an insufferably muggy afternoon in July, with the thermometer pushing 

90 degrees and ozone alerts filling the airwaves, Alexander Bregstein was 

in a foul mood. He was furious, in fact, for reasons that would become 

clear only later. Working on just three hours of sleep, and having spent the last 

eight hours minding a bunch of preschool kids in his summer job as a camp 

counselor, Alexander was itching to kick back and relax. So there he was, lying 

on his back in the weight room of his gym, head down on an incline bench, 

earphones pitching three-figure decibels of the rock band Finger Eleven into his 

ears as he gripped an 85-pound weight in each hand and then, after a brief pause 

to gather himself, muscled them into the air with focused bursts of energy. Each 

lift was accompanied by a sharp exhalation, like the quick, short stroke of a 

piston. 

Stephen S. Hall is a contributing 

writer for The New York Times 

Magazine. 

The first thing you need to know about 

Alexander is that he is 16 years old, bright, 

articulate and funny in that self-deprecating and 

almost wise teen-age way. However, about a 

year ago, Alexander made a conscious decision that those weren't the qualities he 

wanted people to recognize in him, at least not at first. He wanted people to see 

him first, and what they see these days are thick neck muscles, shoulders so 

massive that he can't scratch his back, a powerful bulge in his arms and a chest 

that has been deliberately chiseled for the two-button look -- what Alexander 

now calls "my most endearing feature." He walks with a kind of cocky 

gravity-testing bounce in his step that derives in part from his muscular build but 

also from the confidence of knowing he looks good in his tank top and baggy 

shorts. 

As his spotter, Aaron Anavim, looked on, Alexander lifted the 85-pound weights 

three more times, arms quivering, face reddening with effort. Each dumbbell, I 

realized as I watched, weighed more than I did when I entered high school. 

Another half-dozen teen-agers milled around the weight room, casting glances at 

themselves and one another in the mirror. They talked of looking "cut," with 

sharp definition to their muscles, and of developing "six-packs," crisp divisions 

of the abdominals, but of all the muscles that get a workout in rooms like these, 

the most important may be the ones that move the eyes in restless sweeping arcs 

of comparison and appraisal. "Once you're in this game to manipulate your 

body," Alexander said, "you want to be the best," likening the friendly 

competition in the room to a form of "whipping out the ruler." While we talked 

between sets of Alexander's 90-minute routine, his eyes wandered to the mirror 

again and again, searching for flaws, looking for areas of improvement. "The 

more you lift," he admitted, "the more you look in the mirror." 

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All Too Human 



In this weight room, in a gym in a northern New Jersey suburb, the gym rats 

have a nickname for Alexander: Mirror Boy. That's a vast improvement over the 

nicknames he endured at school not long ago. "I know it sounds kind of odd to 

have favorite insults," he told me with a wry smile, munching on a protein bar 

before moving on to his next set of lifts, "but Chunk Style always was kind of 

funny." And kind of appropriate. Until recently, Alexander carried nearly 210 

pounds on a 5-foot-6 frame, and when I asked if he was teased about his weight, 

he practically dropped a dumbbell on my feet. "Oh! Oh, man, was I teased? Are 

you kidding?" he said in his rapid, agreeable patter. "When I was fat, people 

must have gone home and thought of nothing else except coming in with new 

material the next day. They must have had study groups just to make fun of 

people who were overweight." He even got an earful at home. "My parents -- 

God bless them, but they would make comments all the time. My father would 

say, 'If you eat all that, you'll be as big as a house.' And I'm, like: 'Dad, it's a little 

late for that. What am I now? A mobile home?"' 

The day of reckoning came in April 1998, during a spring-break vacation in 

Boca Raton, Fla. As his family was about to leave its hotel room to go to the 

beach, Alexander, then 15, stood in front of a mirror and just stared at the 

spectacle of his shirtless torso. "I remember the exact, like, moment in my mind," 

he said. "Everything about that room is burned into my head, every little thing. I 

can tell you where every lamp was, where my father was standing, my mother 

was sitting. We were about to go out, and I'm looking in this mirror -- me, with 

my gut hanging over my bathing suit -- and it was, like: Who would want to look 

at this? It's part of me, and I'm disgusted! That moment, I realized that nobody 

was giving me a chance to find out who I was because of the way I looked." 

And so Alexander decided to do something about it, something drastic. 

here is a kind of timeless, archetypal trajectory to a teen-ager's battle with 

body image, but in most accounts the teen-ager is female and the issue is 

anorexia or bulimia. As any psychologist knows, however, and as any 

sufficiently evolved adult male could tell you, boys have body-image problems, 

too. Traditionally, they have felt pressure to look not thin, but rather strong and 

virile, which increasingly seems to mean looking bulked up and muscular, and 

that is why I was interested in talking to Alexander. 

Although more than 30 years in age separates us, hearing him give voice to his 

insecurities, to imagined physical flaws, reminded me all over again of my own 

tortured passage through adolescence, my own dissatisfaction with a body that 

seemed punitively untouched by any growth spurt and my own reluctant 

accommodation with certain inalienable facts of nature. Like me, Alexander had 

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been teased and harassed about 

being short in stature. Like me, he 

had struggled to overcome his 

physical shortcomings as a member 

of the high-school wrestling team. 

Unlike me, he also battled a severe 

weight problem, but at a similar 

moment in life, we had both looked 

in the mirror and hadn't liked what 

we'd seen. 

Still, a lot has changed since I was 

15. Consider the current batch of 

cold messages from the culture at 

large. The new anabolic Tarzan. 

The mirror on the wall tells James, Mickey and 

Adel whether they "fit" in — or not. 

"Chicks dig the long ball." Littleton. (Buried beneath a ton of prose about gun 

control was the report that Eric Harris apparently felt dissatisfied with his height, 

repeatedly complaining that he was smaller than his brother.) 

Aggressive advertising campaigns showing half-naked men in which the 

Obsession could just as easily be about your own very toned body as about 

someone else's. Even a lawsuit at the higher echelons of American business 

peeled away the pretense of adult civility to show that the classic junior-high 

body-image put-down -- Michael Eisner dissing Jeffrey Katzenberg as a "little 

midget" -- is alive and well in the boardroom, as it has been in the locker room 

for decades. You would never know that for the past quarter-century, feminist 

thought and conversation has created room for alternatives to traditional 

masculinity, in which toughness is equated with self-worth and physical stature 

is equated with moral stature. 

No one can quite cite any data, any scientific studies proving that things are 

different, but a number of psychologists with whom I spoke returned to the same 

point again and again: the cultural messages about an ideal male body, if not 

new, have grown more insistent, more aggressive, more widespread and more 

explicit in recent years. 

Since roughly 90 percent of teen-agers who are treated for eating disorders are 

female, boys still have a way to go. Young girls have suffered greatly from 

insecurity about appearance and body image, and the scientific literature on 

anorexia and related body-image disorders depicts a widespread and serious 

health problem in adolescent females. But to hear some psychologists tell it, 

boys may be catching up in terms of insecurity and even psychological 

pathology. An avalanche of recent books on men and boys underlines the 

precarious nature of contemporary boyhood in America. A number of studies in 



the past decade -- of men, not boys -- have suggested that "body-image 

disturbances," as researchers sometimes call them, may be more prevalent in 

men than previously believed and almost always begin in the teen-age years. 

Katharine Phillips, a psychiatrist at the Brown University School of Medicine, 

has specialized in "body dysmorphic disorder," a psychiatric illness in which 

patients become obsessively preoccupied with perceived flaws in their 

appearance -- receding hairlines, facial imperfections, small penises, inadequate 

musculature. In a study on "30 cases of imagined ugliness," Phillips and 

colleagues described a surprisingly common condition in males whose 

symptoms include excessive checking of mirrors and attempts to camouflage 

imagined deformities, most often of the hair, nose and skin. The average age of 

onset, Phillips says, is 15. 

Two years ago, Harrison G. Pope Jr., of Harvard Medical School, and his 

colleagues published a modest paper called "Muscle Dysmorphia: An 

Underrecognized Form of Body Dysmorphic Disorder" in a relatively obscure 

journal called Psychosomatics. The study described a group of men and women 

who had become "pathologically preoccupied" by their body image and were 

convinced that they looked small and puny, even though they were bulging with 

muscles. The paper got a lot of attention, and it led to an even more widely 

publicized study earlier this year from the same lab reporting how male 

action-figure toys like G.I. Joe and the "Star Wars" characters have bulked up 

over the years. 

Of all 

body-image 

issues, size is 

the most 

important, 

because it leads 

to a kind of 

involuntary 

self-definition. 

The kids were 

called Mouse. 

String Bean. 

Little J. 

Leprechaun. 

Recent figures on cosmetic surgery indirectly 

confirm the anecdotal sense that men are going to 

greater extremes to improve their appearances. 

Women still account for about 90 percent of all 

procedures, but the number of men undergoing 

cosmetic surgery rose about 34 percent between 

1996 and 1998, with liposuction being the most 

sought service. "Basically, men in general are 

getting the same medicine that women have had to 

put up with for years, which was trying to match an 

unattainable ideal in terms of body image," says 

Pope, who has focused his studies on college-age 

men just past adolescence. "Boys are much more 

prone at this point to worry about being beefed up, 

about having muscles," says Mary Pipher, a 

psychologist and the author of "Reviving Ophelia," 

a book about adolescent girls. "As we've 

commodified boys' bodies to sell products, with 

advertisements that show boys as bodies without 



Shortie. Half 

Pint. Spaghetti. 

accessible is your appearance." 

heads, we've had this whole business about focusing 

on the body." And, she adds, families move so often 

that teen-agers "don't really know each other very 

well, so the only piece of information that's really 

There is one trenchant piece of research that justifies the sudden new focus on 

male development. Inspired by the AIDS epidemic, Government-sponsored 

researchers began an enormous survey of sexual attitudes in teen-age boys called 

the 1988 National Survey of Adolescent Males. Joseph H. Pleck, a psychologist 

at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and one of the principal 

investigators of the study, reported in 1993 a factor called "masculinity 

ideology," which indicates the degree to which boys subscribe to the more 

traditional standards of male comportment: the need for respect from peers and 

spouses, a reliance on physical toughness, a reluctance to talk about problems, 

even a reluctance to do housework. "The more traditional the attitude about 

masculinity in adolescent males," Pleck found, "the higher their risk for risky 

sexual behavior, substance use, educational problems and problems with the 

law." 

"This one variable is a really powerful predictor of behavior," says Dan Kindlon, 

a researcher at the School of Public Health at Harvard and co-author, with 

Michael Thompson, of "Raising Cain." "When you look at the kinds of kids who 

are in trouble in terms of -- you name it -- drugs and alcohol, suicide, 

attention-deficit disorder and learning disabilities, the prevalence statistics are so 

skewed toward boys that it's enough to knock you over. And when they looked at 

kids over time, the kids who had the highest risk were the highest in terms of this 

masculinity ideology." Since this ideology is so pervasive in boys, Kindlon says, 

it creates a kind of social pecking order based on physical size and the 

appearance of toughness. 

The confusions that arise in young males as they try to reconcile the traditional 

masculine values of their fathers, for example, with a postfeminist culture that 

celebrates sensitivity and openness have created a "national crisis of boyhood," 

according to some psychologists -- as well as a boomlet of academic interest in 

boys and a burst of popular literature on the subject. In addition to "Raising 

Cain," there is William S. Pollack's "Real Boys," Michael Gurian's "Wonder of 

Boys" and James Garbarino's "Lost Boys," as well as a spate of books and 

magazines about male fitness. Many of these books were inspired by the 

groundbreaking research in the 1970's and 80's by Carol Gilligan, of Harvard's 

Graduate School of Education, who charted the psychological and moral 

development of adolescent girls. Now Gilligan and Judy Chu, her research 

associate, are listening to boys' voices too. And one of the most eagerly awaited 



books this fall is "Stiffed," an account of the "masculinity crisis," by Susan 

Faludi, author of "Backlash." 

Some academics claim to have seen the crisis coming for years. After the recent 

outbreaks of school violence in Littleton, Jonesboro and Springfield, Pollack 

said, "It's boys who are doing this, because of this code about what they can say 

and can't say, how they feel about their body self, how they feel about their 

self-image, how they feel about themselves in school." There's "no coincidence," 

he added, that boys are unleashing this violence in school. 

You don't have to buy the alarmism implicit in Pollack's point to appreciate that 

body-image concerns form part of a larger, more complex and in some ways 

changeless ethos of male adolescence that would be trite and obvious if it weren't 

so true: boys, like girls, are keenly aware of, and insecure about, their physical 

appearance. Boys, unlike some girls, do not talk about it with their parents, other 

adults or even among themselves, at least in part for fear of being perceived as 

"sensitive," a code word for "weak." Indeed, they tease each other, on a scale 

from casually nasty to obsessively cruel, about any perceived flaws, many of 

which involve some physical difference -- size, shape, complexion, coordination 

-- and since adolescent teasing begs for an audience, much of this physical 

ridicule occurs in school. If you don't change the "culture of cruelty," as Kindlon 

and Thompson put it in their book, you'll never defuse the self-consciousness 

and concerns about body image in boys. 

"When you go to ask men questions about psychological issues," Kindlon says, 

"you've got two things going against you. One is emotional literacy. They're not 

even in touch with their emotions, and they're doing things for reasons of which 

they're not even aware. You're not getting the real story because they don't even 

know the whole story. And even if they did, a lot of them would underrepresent 

what the problem was, because you're not supposed to ask for help. If you can't 

ask for directions when you're lost in a foreign city, how are you going to ask for 

help about something that's really personal? Especially if you're an eighth 

grader." 

etting boys to talk about their bodies is not an easy thing to do, as I learned 

when I met with several groups of teen-agers. On one occasion, six 

middle-school boys and I sat around a table on a warm afternoon very 

close to the end of the school year at a Manhattan public school in Chelsea. I 

asked them to describe the feelings they have when they look at themselves 

alone in the mirror, and for its sheer confused candor, it was tough to top the 

remark of Mickey, a 13-year-old who begins the ninth grade in a public school 

early next month. 

"I don't know," he said at first. "I can't even tell what stage of puberty I'm in. 



'I don't know,' 

said one 

13-year-old. 'I 

can't even tell 

what stage of 

puberty I'm in. 

Some parts, I'm 

sure about, but 

other parts, I'm 

not so sure.' 

Some parts, I'm sure about, but" -- he added with an 

impish smile -- "other parts, I'm not so sure." 

We went around the table. Dwayne, mentioning that 

he appeared younger than his 13 years, looked 

forward to the effect this would have later in life. 

Bernie, lean and a little more satisfied than the 

others, said he didn't want muscles and would never 

use steroids. James saw a chubby 13-year-old in his 

mirror. ("I just want to be skinnier," he said 

plaintively.) Adel, who shot up six inches and 

gained 24 pounds in the last 14 months, monitored 

acne outbreaks with the avidity of a D.E.A. agent. 

Willie, a powerfully built 15-year-old with 

impressive biceps, derived no solace from his solid 

athletic build. "When I look in the mirror, I wish my 

ears were bigger and my feet were smaller. I wear size 11 1/2 shoes. My behind 

is big, too. But," he added, "girls like it." In retrospect, the most interesting thing 

about the conversation was how the older, bigger boys dominated the discussion 

while the younger, smaller boys deferred: size cued the communication. 

Take any half-dozen boys and you'll probably get close to hitting the same cross 

section: the fat one, the skinny one, the one who's self-conscious about being tall 

and the one who's self-conscious about being short, the jock and the kid who 

plays in the band. No one here looked like Mark Wahlberg. They slouched in the 

body language of feigned boredom, although that may just have been another 

way of expressing wary curiosity, as if body image is something they think about 

all the time and talk about almost never. 

Mickey, the eighth grader, captured the problem well. "When you're at this 

stage," he observed, "it's all about fitting in to something, cliques and stuff. And 

when you're not at the same stage of life as other kids, it's harder to fit in." He 

was using "fit," of course, in its metaphorical sense, but it was exceptionally apt: 

the essence of the word is physical, of shapes and interactions and congruence. 

For boys in the midst of the exotic and uncontrollable incongruence of puberty, 

growing up in an internal world flooded with hormones and an external world 

flooded with idealized male images, the fit may be tighter than ever before. 

In seventh and eighth grades, Alexander Bregstein didn't fit in at all. "I was 

picked on in every single class," he recalled, "every single day, walking the 

hallways. It was beyond belief. They would do things like hide your bag, turn 

your bag inside out, tie your shoelaces together. Some of the stuff I just can't 

repeat, it was so awful." They called him Fat Boy. They thought he was lazy, 

that something was wrong with him. He knew it wasn't true, but he also realized 



that his physical appearance made him a social outcast and a target -- neither of 

which is a good thing to be in early adolescence. 

hen you visit the office of Harrison (Skip) Pope, in a grim institutional 

building on the rolling grounds of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., 

the first thing you notice are the calipers hanging on the wall -- partly as 

objets d'art, but partly as a reminder that what we subjectively consider attractive 

can sometimes yield to objective measurement. Pope, after all, was one of the 

scientists who devised what might be called the Buff Equation, or: FFMI = W x 

(1-BF/100) x h-2 + 6.1 x (1.8-H). 

The formula is ostensibly used to calculate a person's Fat-free Mass Index; it has 

sniffed out presumed steroid use by Mr. America winners, professional 

bodybuilders and men whose unhealthy preoccupation with looking muscular 

has induced them to use drugs. 

Pope is a wiry, compact psychiatrist who can squat 400 pounds in his spare time. 

("You can reach me pretty much all day except from 11 A.M. to 2 P.M.," he told 

me, "when I'm at the gym.") I had gone to see him and his colleague Roberto 

Olivardia not only because they were the lead authors on the G.I. Joe study, but 

also because their studies of body-image disorders in slightly older 

postadolescent men may be the best indicator yet of where male body-image 

issues are headed. 

Shortly after I arrived, Olivardia emptied a shopping bag full of male action dolls 

onto a coffee table in the office. The loot lay in a heap, a plastic orgy of 

superhero beefcake -- three versions of G.I. Joe (Hasbro's original 1964 version 

plus two others) and one G.I. Joe Extreme, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in 

their 1978 and mid-90's versions, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Batman, 

Superman, Iron Man and Wolverine. The inspiration for the whole study came 

from . . . an adolescent girl. Pope's 13-year-old daughter, Courtney, was surfing 

the Web one night, working on a school project on how Barbie's body had 

radically changed over the years, and Pope thought to himself, There's got to be 

the male equivalent of that. 

Once Pope and Olivardia gathered new and "vintage" action figures, they 

measured their waist, chest and biceps dimensions and projected them onto a 

5-foot-10 male. Where the original G.I. Joe projected to a man of average height 

with a 32-inch waist, 44-inch chest and 12-inch biceps, the more recent figures 

have not only bulked up, but also show much more definition. Batman has the 

equivalent of a 30-inch waist, 57-inch chest and 27-inch biceps. "If he was your 

height," Pope told me, holding up Wolverine, "he would have 32-inch biceps." 

Larger, that is, than any bodybuilder in history. 



Now let it be said that measuring the 

styrene hamstrings of G.I. Joe does 

not represent 20th-century science 

at its most glorious. But Pope says 

it's a way to get at what he calls 

"evolving American cultural ideals 

of male body image." Those ideals, 

he maintains, create "cultural 

expectations" that may contribute to 

body-image disorders in men. 

"People misinterpreted our findings 

to assume that playing with toys, in 

and of itself, caused kids to develop One way to get a "foot in the door": carry a 

six-pack, courtesy of the McBurney Y. 

into neurotic people as they grew up 

who abused anabolic steroids," Pope said. "Of course that was not our 

conclusion. We simply chose the toys because they were symptomatic of what 

we think is a much more general trend in our society." 

Since the early 1990's, evidence has emerged suggesting that a small number of 

adult males suffer from extreme body-image disorders. In 1993, in a study of 

steroid use among male weight lifters, Pope discovered that 10 percent of the 

subjects "perceived themselves as physically small and weak, even though they 

were in fact large and muscular." Researchers termed this syndrome "reverse 

anorexia nervosa" and started looking for more cases. Two years ago, the Pope 

group renamed this disorder "muscle dysmorphia," the more specialized 

condition that involves an obsessive preoccupation with muscularity. Men who 

were clearly well developed and, by anyone's standards, exceedingly muscular, 

repeatedly expressed the feeling that they were too small, too skinny and too 

weak, to the point that their obsessive quest to build up their bodies began to 

interfere with work and relationships -- in short, their entire lives. 

"It's very hard to document trends like this in quantitative terms," Pope said, 

"because people who are insecure about their body appearance are unlikely to 

come out of the woodwork to confess that they're insecure about their body 

appearance. And so it is an epidemic which by definition is covert. But it clearly 

has become a much more widespread concern among men in the United States." 

lexander said he felt that insecurity at a visceral level. He was not only 

overweight, but also undersize. "I've been called short umpteen times," he 

said during a pause in his routine, and the only time I saw a hint of visible 

anger in his face was when he talked about being discriminated against because 

of being short. 



"Kids are so self-conscious," Kindlon says. "One of the reasons that this 

body-image stuff is so powerful is because there's such an increase in 

self-consciousness as you move into puberty. I don't know anybody who has a 

good neurological explanation for it, but clearly there's real egocentricity, 

especially in early adolescence. Everything revolves around you. You walk into 

a room and you think everybody is looking at you. These kids are petrified 

because they always feel like they're onstage. Clothes at least are something that 

you can change. Fat kids and short kids are the ones who get it the most." 

Another factor tends to complicate the sense of feeling like an outsider. Girls 

usually reach puberty earlier than boys, and the starting line is starkly marked by 

menstruation. Boys, by contrast, beginning around the age of 11, suddenly find 

themselves awash in hormones, but without any navigational landmarks. The 

amount of testosterone in the bloodstream rises roughly 100-fold in boys during 

puberty. (It also rises in girls, though not nearly so much.) And yet biology is not 

behavioral destiny, according to the research of Richard Tremblay, director of 

the Research Unit on Children's Psychosocial Maladjustment at the University of 

Montreal. In a long-term study that has followed boys from kindergarten through 

high school, Tremblay's group has shown that the most aggressive boys at age 13 

actually had lower than average levels of testosterone, although the most socially 

dominant boys had the highest levels of the hormone. 

"The real damage gets done in middle school," Pollack says, "when boys and 

girls are most out of sync with each other in their development." He tells of a 

group of mothers, including feminists, who yanked their sons out of public 

school and put them in single-sex schools because they were getting harassed by 

girls. "They weren't physically harassing them. But they were calling them on 

the phone, wanting to talk to them. They were wanting to be romantic, and some 

of them wanting to be sexual. In an assertive way, not in an aggressive way. And 

these were little shrimp boys, as I call them, who wanted to play Nintendo and 

basketball and weren't ready for this level of development. They were two years 

behind. When this goes on for two or three years at the middle school and then 

you're throwing them into the environment of high school, then you've got this 

revved-up negative experience from middle school that gets over-aggressified in 

high school. And it just gets worse." 

I can vouch for that. In 1965, just shy of 14, I was not only the shortest kid in my 

freshman gym class, but also the new kid in school, my family having just 

moved to a suburb west of Chicago. It had rained heavily the day before, and 

there were huge puddles on the fields around which we were ordered to take the 

obligatory lap at the end of calisthenics. As I was running along, two larger boys 

-- football players, it turned out -- came up behind me, knocked me down and 

then, each taking a leg as if grabbing a wishbone, dragged my 4-foot-9, 

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82-pound frame along the ground and through several pond-size puddles. It is 

part of the dynamic of stoic boyhood, of suffering the routine bullying and 

hazing in resentful silence, that my parents will learn of this incident for the first 

time when they read this article. 

As I spoke with adolescent boys and psychologists, it became clear that of all 

body-image issues, size is the most important, in part because it leads to a kind 

of involuntary self-definition. One morning I met with a group of boys attending 

a summer session at the Chelsea Center of the McBurney Y.M.C.A. in 

Manhattan. I asked them if they had nicknames, and almost every name referred 

to a physical quality. Mouse. String Bean. Little J. Leprechaun. Shortie. Half 

Pint. Spaghetti. 

These insults, even the benign ones, seem to have the half-life of nuclear waste 

for kids. Adel, now a hulking and self-confident 6-foot-2 10th grader at the 

public school in Chelsea, recalled specific insults about his size and clumsiness 

dating back to the 4th grade. Another boy, who will attend Friends Seminary, in 

Manhattan, this fall, told me he has always been teased about being tall; he 

recalled with painful precision what was said, when and by whom -- eight years 

earlier. Rob, who will begin boarding school in the fall, was the shortest in his 

class, and he could barely contain a fidgety, amusingly self-aware impatience. 

"Can I talk about feeling insecure about being short?" he piped up at one point. 

"I'm insecure about being short, because all the bigger kids think, correctly, that 

they can beat me up." 

Harmless teasing? Psychologists have begun to suggest that the stress of all this 

taunting and hazing may have significant biological effects on boys during 

puberty. Kindlon, for example, cites the research of Bruce McEwen, a 

Rockefeller University neuroscientist who has shown in animal studies that 

prolonged and chronic stress leads to biochemical and structural changes in the 

brain that compromise the development of cognitive functions like memory. And 

Katharine Phillips, the Brown University psychiatrist who specializes in body 

dysmorphic disorder, says that some adolescent boys may have a biological 

susceptibility to teasing, which in extreme cases can lead to psychiatric illness. 

Men who suffer from B.D.D. may believe they are so ugly or unattractive that 

they refuse to leave their homes -- they become, in effect, body-image 

agoraphobics, and they almost always date the onset of this insecurity to 

adolescence. 

Leaving such extreme pathology aside, the point remains that a boy's body image 

is shaped, if not determined, by the cruelest, most unforgiving and meanest 

group of judges imaginable: other boys. And even if you outgrow, physically and 

emotionally, the body image that oppressed you as an adolescent, it stays with 

you in adult life as a kind of subdermal emotional skin that can never be shed, 



only incorporated into the larger person you try to become. I think that's what 

Garry Trudeau, the formerly small cartoonist, had in mind when he described life 

as a tall adult as that of a "recovering short person." 

t was during his sophomore year, getting "the daylights pounded out of him" 

in wrestling and gaining even more weight, that Alexander began what he 

calls, with justification, his "drastic transformation." He started by losing 30 

pounds in one month. For a time, he consumed only 900 calories a day, and 

ultimately got down to 152 pounds. He began to lift weights seriously, every day 

for three months straight. He started to read magazines like Flex and Men's 

Fitness. He briefly dabbled with muscle-building supplements like creatine. He 

got buff, and then beyond buff. 

By the time his sophomore year in high school began, Alexander had packaged 

his old self in a phenomenally new body, and it has had the desired effect. "My 

quality of social life changed dramatically when I changed my image," he said. 

He still maintained friendships with the guys in the computer lab, still 

programmed, still played Quake with dozens of others. But he worked out at the 

gym at least five times a week. He shifted his diet to heavy protein. He pushed 

himself to lift ever-heavier weights. Until an injury curtailed his season, he 

brought new strength to his wrestling. Still, he wasn't satisfied. When I asked 

him if he ever felt tempted to try steroids during his effort to remake his physical 

image, he denied using them, and I believe him. But he wasn't coy about the 

temptation. "When someone offers you a shortcut," he replied, "and it's a 

shortcut you want so bad, you're willing to ignore what it might be doing to your 

insides. I wanted to look better. Who cares if it's going to clog up my kidneys? 

Who cares if it'll destroy my liver? There was so much peer pressure that I didn't 

care." 

Alexander was especially pleased by the good shape he was in -- although he 

didn't care for aerobics, his resting heart rate was low, he ran a mile under six 

minutes and seemed to have boundless energy. But fitness was only part of what 

he was after. As he put it: "No one's looking for a natural look, of being thin and 

in shape. It's more of looking toward a level beyond that." He added that "guys 

who work out, especially guys who have six-packs and are really cut up, are the 

ones girls go after." 

To be honest, I was a little dubious about this until I spoke with an admittedly 

unscientific sampling of teen-age girls. It turned out that they not only agreed 

with the sentiment, but also spoke the same lingo. "If you're going swimming or 

something like that, girls like the stomach best," said Elizabeth, a 14-year old. 

"Girls like it if they have a six-pack, or if they're really ripped, as they say. That's 

the most important thing. And arms too." 



"But not too much," added her friend Kate, also 14. "You don't like it if the 

muscles are too huge." 

"It changes your perspective on them if they have a flabby stomach," Elizabeth 

continued. "And the chest is important too." 

There is nothing inherently dangerous about weight lifting. "It's great exercise," 

says Dr. Linn Goldberg, professor of medicine at Oregon Health Sciences 

University and an authority on muscle-enhancing substances in high-school 

athletes, who lifts weights with his 18-year-old son. "Here's the problem, though. 

Our studies show that supplements are gateway substances to steroid use, and 

kids who use them are at greater risk for using anabolic steroids." Goldberg 

noted that 50 percent of males participate in athletics at some point between the 

9th and 12th grades, and a recent study of more than 3,000 boys in Oregon and 

Washington by Goldberg and his colleagues showed that 78 percent of 

high-school athletes use supplements, which include creatine, ginseng, ma-huang 

and androstenedione, the supplement made famous by Mark McGwire, who 

recently renounced its use. 

Many of the kids with whom I spoke were well aware of the health risks 

associated with the use of anabolic steroids, especially the fact that the testicles 

shrink with prolonged use. (Steroids also increase the risk of cardiovascular 

diseases and some forms of cancer.) Despite a great deal more scientific 

uncertainty about the risks -- and benefits -- of the supplements, however, 

Charles Yesalis, an expert on steroid abuse at Penn State University, estimated 

that "creatine use is epidemic at the junior-high-school level, and ubiquitous at 

the high-school level." 

n my conversations with boys, it began to dawn on me that male adolescents 

pass through two distinct stages. During the early phase, when 

self-consciousness is at its peak, boys tend to look inward, think asexually and 

act like, well, boys. As they get older, their field of view enlarges, and they start 

to pay more sophisticated attention to cultural images and their own sexuality. 

And they become very interested in whatever their objects of romantic attraction 

are interested in. So if you ask 13-year-old boys what catches their eyes, they'll 

say "The Simpsons" and "Revenge of the Nerds" and ads for Mountain Dew. If 

you ask 16-year-olds the same question, they tend to mention "Dawson's Creek" 

and "American Pie" and fashion advertising. 

"When you hear girls gawking at Abercrombie & Fitch about how hot the guy is 

on the bag -- that makes an impression," Alexander told me one night on the 

phone. The "guy on the bag" turned out to be an exceptionally cut youth not 

wearing a shirt. "If I look this way," Alexander said, "I've got my foot in the 

door." This very heterosexual impulse, however, was elicited by a school of 



advertising whose genealogy follows a risque and decidedly homoerotic lineage. 

In the slow male striptease known as men's fashion advertising, there have been 

plenty of landmark cultural images in recent years. Calvin Klein, which until 

recently developed all of its advertising in-house, has been pushing the boundary 

of taste navel-ward and beyond ever since 1980, when a 15-year-old Brooke 

Shields teasingly announced that nothing came between her and her Calvins. 

There was Bruce Weber's photo of the model Jeff Aquilon splayed on a boulder 

for Calvin Klein in 1982 and Mark Wahlberg (then known as Marky Mark) 

prancing in Calvin Klein underwear in 1992. But the ad that made sociologically 

explicit what had been implicit all along is what detractors have called Calvin 

Klein's "basement porn" campaign of 1995. 

These television spots -- they were, almost incidentally, for jeans -- featured a 

deliberately cheesy, amateurishly lighted basementlike setting with cheap wall 

paneling. They began with an adult male voice posing questions to youthful and 

shirtless boys. The models were, of course, beautiful, but only in retrospect do 

you realize how toned and buff their bodies were -- and how the ads made sure 

you noticed. In one commercial, the off-camera voice says: "You have a lovely 

body. Do you like your body?" In another, a boy who has both the looks and 

indifferent demeanor of a young James Dean sits on a ladder, wearing jeans and 

a white T-shirt. 

"You got a real nice look," an adult male voice says off-camera. "How old are 

you?" 

"Twenty-one," the boy says. 

"What's your name?" 

"August." 

"Why don't you stand up?" 

When the boy complies, the man continues, "Are you strong?" 

"I like to think so." 

"You think you could rip that shirt off of you?" The boy pulls down on the 

T-shirt with both hands and suddenly rips it off his body, revealing an extremely 

lean and well-developed chest. "It's a nice body!" the man exclaims. "Do you 

work out?" 

"Uh-huh." The boy nods again. 

"Yeah, I can tell." 



I don't think of myself as culturally squeamish, but the ad struck me as so creepy 

that when I screened it at home recently, I became concerned that my 

15-month-old son, toddling around the room, might be paying attention. "The 

style, the look, the leering tone, even the 'chicken hawk' voice-over -- Klein 

mimicked, closely, the style and tone of cheap basement gay pornography," says 

Bob Garfield, a columnist at Advertising Age and a longtime critic of what he 

calls Klein's "shockvertising" approach. If it is true, Garfield adds, that these 

commercials influence how boys think about their bodies, it reflects in part "the 

opening up of gay culture, where male objectification has almost nearly the 

effect that the objectification of females has had for time immemorial for 

women." 

This point is not lost on researchers. "The feminist complaint all along has been 

that women get treated as objects, that they internalize this and that it damages 

their self-esteem," says Kelly D. Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating 

and Weight Disorders. "And more and more, guys are falling into that same 

thing. They're getting judged not by who they are, but how they look." 

There is no way to plug popular culture into an equation and see what effect it 

has on mass psychology, of course, but there is widespread sentiment that these 

provocative images of buff males have really upped the ante for boys. Writing of 

both men and women in her new book, "The Male Body," Susan Bordo notes 

that "in an era characterized by some as 'postfeminist,' beauty seems to count 

more than it ever did before, and the standards for achieving it have become 

more stringent, more rigorous, than ever." Some of the research on body-image 

disorders in males indirectly makes the connection to cultural images. 

Olivardia, who conducted extensive interviews with men suffering from body 

dysmorphic disorder, says the patients bring up Hollywood movie stars all the 

time. "Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme. And Calvin 

Klein -- that name has been brought up quite a lot of times." If you pick up an 

issue of Gentleman's Quarterly or Men's Health or Teen People (or even this 

magazine), you'll see the trickle-down effect: a boy removes a tank top for Guess 

jeans. Firemen drop trou for Jockey shorts. Even the recent ads for "Smart Start" 

cereals by Kellogg's feature a naked torso. Consider: a six-pack in a cereal ad! 

Indeed, the bare, hairless, ripped chest has become so ubiquitous as a cultural 

icon that it occurred to me that contemporary advertising may have completely 

reinvented -- or at least relocated -- the physiological epicenter of male 

insecurity. Once, the defining moment of terror in a boy's life came in the locker 

room at shower time -- the place, as a boy at the Chelsea school put it, "where 

there's nowhere to hide." There's still plenty of angst about penis size; many boys 

simply don't take showers after gym class these days, but I heard genuine fear in 

the voices of older boys when they spoke about the impending horror of going to 



camp or the beach and having to appear in public without a shirt. 

fter Alexander finished his workout that hot July day, we stopped to get 

something to drink at the gym's cafe. "I feel pretty good right now," 

Alexander admitted, "and I was furious when I went in there." It turned out 

that the night before, he had a conversation with a girl that took a decidedly 

unsatisfying turn at the end. 

At a time when the collective amount of American body fat is enough to stretch 

the jaws of Skip Pope's calipers from coast to coast, when so many adults amble 

about like fatted calves and so many children are little more than couch potatoes 

in training, it's hard to find fault with disciplined, drug-free efforts by teen-age 

boys to add a bit of muscle; weight lifting is not a sport with shortcuts, and it has 

become an essential adjunct to contemporary athletic performance. But there is a 

psychological side to all this heavy lifting that may be as unhealthy and 

undermining on the inside as it seems fit on the outside. And it resides not in that 

telltale mirror, but in how we see ourselves. 

"I look in the mirror and I don't see what other people see," Alexander told me. 

"I look in the mirror, and I see my flaws. People go, 'Oh, you're narcissistic.' I 

go, 'No, I was looking at how uneven my pecs are,' although I know that in 

reality, they're, like, a nanometer off. And I have three friends who do exactly 

the same thing. They look and they go, 'Look how uneven I am, man!' And I go: 

'What are you talking about! They look pretty even to me.' It's not narcissism -it's 

lack of self-esteem." 

I'm not so worried about kids like Alexander -- he clearly has demonstrated both 

the discipline to remake his appearance and the psychological distance not to 

take it, or himself, too seriously. But there will be many other boys out there who 

cannot hope to match the impossibly raised bar of idealized male body image 

without resorting to the physically corrosive effects of steroids or the 

psychologically corrosive effects of self-doubt. Either way, the majority of boys 

will be diminished by chasing after the golden few. 

Moreover, this male preoccupation with appearance seems to herald a dubious, 

regressive form of equality -- now boys can become as psychologically and 

physically debilitated by body-image concerns as girls have been for decades. 

After all, this vast expenditure of teen-age male energy, both psychic and kinetic, 

is based on the premise that members of the opposite sex are attracted to a retro, 

rough-hewn, muscular look, and it's a premise that psychologists who study boys 

have noticed, too. "While girls and women say one thing, some of them continue 

to do another," Pollack says. "Some of them are still intrigued by the old male 

images, and are attracted to them." 



Because he's a perceptive kid, Alexander recognizes how feckless, how 

disturbing, how crazy this all is. "I tell you, it's definitely distressing," he said, 

"the fact that as much as girls get this anorexic thing and they're going through 

these image things with dolls and stuff, guys are definitely doing the same." 

True, he admitted, his social life has never been better. "But in a way it depresses 

me," he said, before heading off to a party, "that I had to do this for people to get 

to know me." 











THE TROUBLED LIFE OF BOYS 


How the picked-on cope or don't. By ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC 

Photographs by JUSTINE PARSONS 

Tyler Snitko in his bedroom. Weight lifting and a few growth spurts made him a protector 

for bullied classmates. 

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Thought 

by Bill Gates 




he fight takes place in the bright light of adult view -- on a weekday 

afternoon, on a tree-lined residential street, within sight of the police station 

and a block from the middle school. The smaller boy, about 12, waits until 

there is a safe distance between himself and the other boy, about 13. Then he 

sends a curse. It lands. He waits. No response. He follows with a homophobic 

slur. His opponent -- a chubby boy nicknamed Sex Machine -- finally turns 

around. 

A freckled friend of Sex Machine's loops around him on his bicycle, lazily doing 

doughnuts. He prods Sex Machine chirpily: "You gonna take that? He's a punk!" 

Halfheartedly, Sex Machine blusters back a retort. More friends appear and 

cajole him, challenging him to at least pretend that he has nerve. 

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is writing a 

book about inner-city girls, due out 

next year. 

"C'mon, Sex Machine!" one shouts, then 

whispers to another, alarmed: "Look at him. He 

keeps backing up!" 

Whatever started the fight is irrelevant. The friends clamber up a nearby wire 

fence to get a good view, hyper spiders clinging to the mesh. 

Sex Machine is frightened. Despite his oversize T-shirt, you can see the rise and 

fall of his heaving chest. A man's voice chimes in and shouts encouragement to 

the smaller boy from the driveway. 

"That's his father!" a boy says. "Can you believe it? He's telling him to fight!" 

"That's not right," says a girl. 

Borrowing from the man's confidence, the smaller boy rushes forward and 

swings. Sex Machine stumbles backward as he tries to duck. A woman leans out 

from the second-floor window of a ranch house and says, "Come in, come in," 

without sounding as though she means it, a weary Juliet. 

Sex Machine looks desperate, flailing his arms frantically, trying to flag down a 

car. Luckily, one stops. Apparently, it's his mother. All the tension and fear that 

his body has been holding bursts into punctuated sobs. He storms around the car 

to the passenger side. His freckled friend, who had been cheering within inches 

of the action, cycles over and dismounts to say goodbye. With all the fury raging 

inside him, Sex Machine bellows, "You didn't help me!" then shoves him to the 

ground. 

ntrim, New Hampshire, where the fight took place, is a long way away 

from Littleton, Colo., as well as from Conyers, Ga., where a 15-year-old 

boy shot six classmates at his high school in May. It is one of nine towns 

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All Too Human 



whose regional high school, ConVal, sits in Peterborough, N.H., the setting that 

inspired Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." But what it shares with those other 

places, and with countless others across the country, is a brutally enforced 

teen-age social structure. 

Below the 

popular kids, in a 

shifting order of 

relative 

unimportance, 

are the druggies, 

trendies, 

preppies, 

skateboarders, 

nerds and 

techies, wiggers, 

rednecks and 

Goths, better 

known as freaks. 

Real losers are 

invisible. 

Boys at the bottom of the pyramid use different 

strategies to cope -- turning inward and outward, 

sometimes in highly destructive ways. (There has 

been a fivefold jump in the homicide and suicide 

rates of boys in the last 40 years, a rise some experts 

attribute to increasing male depression and anger as 

well as access to guns, among other factors.) Most 

boys live through it, suffer, survive. But the journey 

may be especially deadly now because, as the 

avalanche of new "male identity" literature 

demonstrates, the old prescriptions for behavior no 

longer hold, and the new ones are ambivalent. 

Today's young males may be feminism's children, 

but no one is comfortable with openhearted or 

vulnerable boys. 

ConVal is in some ways progressive. There are 

about 900 students and an administration that 

consciously works to minimize the ultramacho 

sports culture that dominates many schools. Says 

Bob Marshall, the head of the social studies 

department, who founded the football program in 

1992: "We had to create a football culture. People 

didn't know when to cheer. We didn't even have a school song." 

Even so, the traditional hierarchies operate: the popular kids tend to be wealthier 

and the boys among them tend to be jocks. The Gap Girls-Tommy Girls-Polo 

Girls compose the pool of desirable girlfriends, many of whom are athletes as 

well. Below the popular kids, in a shifting order of relative unimportance, are the 

druggies (stoners, deadheads, burnouts, hippies or neo-hippies), trendies or 

Valley Girls, preppies, skateboarders and skateboarder chicks, nerds and techies, 

wiggers, rednecks and Goths, better known as freaks. There are troublemakers, 

losers and floaters -- kids who move from group to group. Real losers are 

invisible. 

Bullying, here as elsewhere, is rampant. Even in small-town, supposedly safe 

environments like Peterborough, a 1994 study found, the vast majority of kids 

from middle school up are bullied by their peers. The shaming is sex-based, but 

the taunting is more intense for boys -- an average high-school student, 

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according to another study, hears 25 antigay slurs a day. 

To be an outcast boy is to be a "nonboy," to be feminine, to be weak. Bullies 

function as a kind of peer police enforcing the social code, and ConVal's freaks 

are accustomed to the daily onslaught. The revenge-of-the-nerds refrain -- which 

assures unpopular boys that if they only hold on through high school, the roster 

of winners will change -- does not question the hierarchy that puts the outcasts at 

risk. So boys survive by their stamina, sometimes by their fists, but mainly, if 

they're lucky, with the help of the family they've created among their friends. 

good day for Andrew, 14, occurs when R., a boy who torments him, is 

absent from school, like when he was suspended for ripping the hearing aid 

out of another classmate's ear. R., 15, weighs more than 200 pounds. 

Andrew, a small boy with straight, dirty-blond hair and glasses, takes care to 

note R.'s better days -- say, when Andrew helps him with an assignment, when 

he's in a good mood or distracted by harassing someone else. 

The trouble started long before the appearance of R. "First people harassed me 

because I was really smart," Andrew says, presenting the sequence as 

self-evident. "I read all the time. I read through math class." Back then, in middle 

school, he had the company of Tom Clancy and a best friend he could talk to 

about anything. He says things are better now; during school, he hangs out with 

the freaks. Yet the routine days he describes sound far from improvement -being 

body-slammed and shoved into chalkboards and dropped into trash cans 

headfirst. At a school dance, in the presence of chaperones and policemen, R. 

lifted Andrew and ripped a pocket off his pants. "One day I'll be a 'faggot,' the 

next day I'll be a 'retard,"' Andrew says. One girl who used to be his friend now 

sees him approaching and shouts, "Oh, get out of here, nobody wants you!" 

Andrew joined the cross-country team but the misery trailed him on the practice 

runs. He won't rejoin next year although he loves the sport. Recently he and 

some other boys were suspended for suspected use of drugs. According to 

Andrew, he used to earn straight A's; now he receives mostly C's and D's. He 

does not draw connections between the abuse and the changes in his life. 

He also does not expect help from the adults around him. He suspects they have 

their reasons -- some don't care, while others worry only about physical attack. 

When I point out that he's being physically attacked, he imagines that the 

teachers think it's horsing around, although he does wonder why the teachers can 

see the same kid pushing other kids every day and don't just tell the kid to stop. 

"Maybe have a talk with him or do something," he says. "One little push isn't 

that much, but when it's every day, it's something." He only wishes that someone 

had helped in middle school, before the contagion grew. "When it first starts to 

happen, there's definitely something you can do," he says. "But you can't turn a 



whole school." 

Neither does Andrew tell his parents. He believes they think he is popular. "If I 

try to explain it to my parents," he says, "they'll say: 'Oh, but you have plenty of 

friends.' Oh, I don't think so. They don't really get it." His outcast friends, 

however, do. 

One of them is Randy Tuck, a 

5-foot-4-inch sophomore with a 

thick head of hair and cheeks bright 

red with acne. He rescued Andrew 

from a "swirly" (two boys had him 

ankle up, and headed for the toilet 

bowl). 

Randy moved from Alaska to New 

Hampshire almost three years ago. 

To his frustration, his classmates 

called him Eskimo Boy. Art is his 

solace, along with the occasional 

cigarette. He loves to draw. He used 

to sketch Ninja Turtles and now, 

with the help of an art teacher, he's 

studying anatomy. He associates Randy Tuck (pictured at home) sought refuge 

among the freaks, who, he says, are "friendly, but 

with the freaks during school mainly 

not welcoming." 

because they let him. He says, 

"They are friendly, but not welcoming." 

Classmates debate with Randy about his atheism, but he refuses to believe a God 

could arrange a life as unlucky as his. Andrew blames himself. Randy says, 

"Andrew's vulnerable and small and weak and R. takes advantage of that." 

Randy utilizes "verbal bashing" as a defense, although he admits that its powers 

don't prevent physical attack. R. surprised him one day in the hallway. He passed 

Randy, then turned around and punched him in the spine. But Randy also notes 

that R. can be funny. "When he's not in a bad mood, he can be very 

entertaining." 

Andrew says that the ostracizing "does build up inside. Sometimes you might get 

really mad at something that doesn't matter a lot, kinda like the last straw." He 

could understand the Columbine killers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, if their 

misery had shown no signs of ending, but Andrew remains an optimist. After all, 

there are some people who have no friends. "Things are not going up really fast, 

but they are getting better," he says. "I might have a week where they get worse, 



but overall they are getting better, definitely." 

he quips ricochet around the bedroom like friendly-fire darts. Myles 

Forrest, 16, a sophomore with baby fat and sweet eyes, is one of George 

Farley's closer friends. George, also 16, is a floater. He has set up camp 

with ConVal's freaks for now. George sees weakness everywhere -- in women 

who look for milk cartons with the latest expiration date at the store where he 

works; in the unemployed drunk who receives an allowance from his working 

wife; in white girls who think they are cool because they date guys who are 

black. Softness arouses his contempt. He is no more gentle with himself. The 

volleying with Myles, who wears his Y2K T-shirt -- "01-01-00" -- relieves 

George of the clearly burdensome obligation of having so much edge. 

"The end of Myles's life," George starts. 

"The end of life as we know it," Myles says. The phone rings. George lifts the 

receiver. "Myles Forrest, loser," he announces, and so the afternoon begins. 

Myles and George provide sustenance between insults. Myles fiddles with his 

computer -- one of two -- as George peers out over the street. "What's up with 

the dress?" George asks, spotting an exchange student from ConVal. 

"What? He's Hindu," says Myles. 

"I said, What's up with the dress?" 

"It's like a cult thing," Myles says, somewhat sharply. 

"That's a dress," George says, losing steam. 

"It's like a cult thing. It's like a kilt." 

"You know I'm messing with you, don't go getting all politically correct with 

me." (Later on, Myles will explain the theory of equal-opportunity hatred: "You 

ever notice that you can't hate a particular group, but if you generally hate 

everybody nobody seems to mind?") The sarcasm slows when the Quake 

competition begins. 

It strikes me as I watch them in front of the famously violent video game that it 

is one way for the boys to enjoy closeness without it being threatening. The 

violence of the game, the state-of-siege mentality, the technical expertise 

required, supplant the macho expectations and give the boys a rest from the 

relentless one-upmanship. Rather than insult each other, they can attack the 

game. Soon enough, they are allies in the search for snacks, rushing down the 

stairs. They amble past the locked gun case behind the door leading through the 

playroom, to the kitchen. George sticks his head in the fridge. 



"How about some of these worms?" he asks, holding a baggie of bait. "Fishing is 

like alcoholism. It's an excuse to drink. Or maybe they're trying to level the 

playing field. How hard can it be to outsmart a fish?" 

"Catching it is kinda fun --" Myles tries. 

"Now ice fishing -- alcoholism in the extreme," George continues. "Cold, boring, 

worry about falling through the ice. Hey, my girlfriend dumped me. She dumped 

my slacker [expletive]." 

"I thought you were gonna give her the --" Myles tries. 

"Yeah, but she surprised me." 

"Irony of ironies. So, technically, you're the loser." 

"Shut up," George says, sounding sad. 

Toffer survived 

the solitary years 

by not showing 

emotion. 'I didn't 

like myself 

because I didn't 

have anything,' 

he says flatly. 

'No athletics, no 

grades. The only 

thing that kept 

me going was 

that I hated them 

more than I 

hated myself.' 

"To the winner goes all the spoils of war," Myles 

appeals. 

"Shut up," George says, relocating to the sun room. 

He lifts Fido, Myles's lizard. 

"Watch out, George," Myles says protectively. 

George presses Fido into the aquarium to make the 

wood chips fly. 

"That's cruel, stop it," Myles says, retrieving his 

lizard, as George moves on to his lectern, the 

Stairmaster. 

"That cat is wishing for a tail," George says, 

observing Myles's tailless cat. 

"To the victor goes the spoils of war," Myles sighs, 

mock ruefully. 

"Stop defending your tailless cat," says George. 

"Anyways, so Colleen broke up with me." 

"You already told me that," Myles says. He glances 

at his buddy. "I thought that's what you wanted." 

"I did," George says, sounding far from sure. Now that he has been rendered 

single, what will come of the flirtation he lost his girlfriend for? 

The new girl, a computer skateboarder chick, likes to spar. George says, "We're 

both the same person, but it's hard when you have two sarcastic people making 



fun of each other, and then they get worse and worse until --" 

"Until there's no place you can go," Myles says knowingly. 

"Shut up, you slack [expletive]," George says, knowing, too. 

een-agers find heroes among their friends. Tyler Snitko, 17, pulls other 

outcasts in, functioning as a kind of human insulation for the freaks. To 

each taunt he quips, "Thank you." He booms, "These are my people," 

opening his arms, his fingernails polished black, to embrace his fellow freaks at 

lunch time in what has been labeled Mutant Hall. In the presence of someone 

like Tyler, more vulnerable teen-agers are less likely to be picked on, and they 

intuitively know this. 

Tyler's hero is his grandfather. Not only did the old man give him advice that he 

often quotes ("Sometimes there are going to be rat bastards in life, and you have 

to deal with them"), but he also backed up the talk with action: he gave Tyler his 

first set of weights. 

Tyler kept his strategy secret, taking long, midnight runs because he did not want 

to jeopardize his affiliation with the freaks, who were supposed to be "all skinny 

and pale." He soon discovered that his best friend, Toffer, 17, studied jujitsu to 

control the anger building in himself. 

Toffer knew what it was like to be excluded. His isolation began in elementary 

school, and only in high school, through his friendship with Tyler and with his 

girlfriend, Anne Baker, did the fog begin to lift. Through the worst of the 

ostracization, the boys had each other. Says Tyler: "Other people turned me 

away, like I'd bring the whole house down. He stood by me." 

Toffer, whose name is Christopher 

Eppig, is a senior who looks very 

much like Jesus. He survived the 

solitary years by not showing 

emotion. He shows very little 

emotion now. "I think it was the fact 

that I couldn't completely control 

myself that scared me," he says 

flatly. "I didn't like myself because I 

didn't have anything. No athletics, 

no grades. The only thing that kept 

me going was that I hated them 

more than I hated myself. 

Toffer (Christopher Eppig) in the blacksmith 



"Before, all I knew was what people 

were telling me about myself, and it 

wasn't a positive image, and I wasn't 

shed in his backyard. He manages his anger 

largely through jujitsu. 

interested in who I was," he continues. "Jujitsu gave me something else that I 

was, that was better and more believable." 

The friendship with Tyler created elbow room. They joined the wrestling team. 

They formed a band named Gawd. It helps that Tyler's parents encourage his use 

of their renovated colonial as a social center, and that his dad quit his job as an 

executive to stay home full time. His parents call the arrangement a luxury, a 

decision they made around the time when Tyler's mother was promoted to 

assistant principal of a middle school. Then Tyler had the great good fortune of 

several growing spurts, which, at last measure, topped six feet to match the 

hard-earned bulk. 

His upbeat personality may defuse hostility, but his physical presence is a moat. 

A friend who has known Tyler since childhood, who will only give his on-line 

name, Bladerunner, says: "He is just really nice and he sticks up for people." 

Bladerunner, 17, has had his own troubles. A boy he'd met in the hospital after a 

suicide attempt wanted to beat him up, and for months, the tranquil New 

Hampshire town became a minefield for him. Bladerunner stopped visiting the 

park and dreaded school. The restaurant where he washes dishes was the only 

place he anticipated with some pleasure because his boss treats him "like a 

person." Otherwise, he met Tyler at the Incubator, a room where students go 

when they have a free period. They would get passes to the weight-lifting room. 

Bladerunner didn't stick with the weights, but it mattered that Tyler encouraged 

him. Recently, Tyler invited Bladerunner to be a vocalist for Gawd. "I realized I 

was walking around people on eggshells, because I'm always afraid of what's 

going to happen to me, or what people are going to think," Bladerunner says. "I 

am going to try to take what I am afraid of and look it in the face, as much as it 

might physically hurt." 

Even as it helps in the day-to-day of high school, bodily renovation perpetuates 

the hierarchy. Bulking up -- or being near someone who does -- just means the 

pyramid starts lower down. Tyler sees similarities between R. and himself: "He 

gets respected because he throws his weight around. I get respected because I 

don't have to." He also recognizes how the pressure to prove his masculinity 

drove him to objectify girls. "I treated my girlfriends really bad," he says. "I 

admit it. I was like, Oh, there's a pair of boobs, I'll go stand next to it. I think I'll 

go talk to it." 

Of course, trivializing girls is a most likely result of a pecking order in which 



girls represent "femininity," the perceived threat to conventional masculinity, the 

mix of which leaves boys so confused these days. The fear of feminizing boys is 

embedded in the hierarchy of the social cliques: winner-loser, popular-outcast, 

boy-girl. "This fear of sissifying boys," says Olga Silverstein, author of "The 

Courage to Raise Good Men," "I think it's going to be the last prejudice to go." 

he danger signs are everywhere, but only if you want to see. Banning 

trench coats, installing metal detectors and security guards -- the quick-fix 

solutions to the problem of seemingly rampant boy violence -- "becomes a 

weird kind of McCarthyism," says Russell Novotny, a 1999 ConVal graduate. 

"The only way to get kids not to hurt each other is to get kids not to want to hurt 

each other," a process he compares to a road. "It's the whole little-step thing. 

You take a little step and suddenly you are in the woods. How did I get here? We 

are so far into the woods. For every mile you walk, you have to walk a mile 

back. You can't look too far ahead or you trip over what's in front of you." Or 

you look at what's in front of you, a boy like J., and you don't really see him. 

J., who doesn't want his name to be used, ranks as a loser. He finds temporary 

refuge with the burnouts, but his precarious welcome depends upon their mood 

and whether or not he has weed. His greatest flaw seems to be his willingness to 

try anything to fit in. 

"That kid does whatever you tell him to do," says Josh Guide, a classmate. Past 

instructions are rumored to include wading knee-high in a running brook, with 

his sneakers and socks on, fetching sticks. He doesn't fight back when people 

shake him down for money. He claims to get high when a classmate sells him 

oregano with chives. He falls off his bicycle when the other boys are done using 

it and ignores the bleeding, which, during a game of basketball, stains another 

boy's new Tommy Hilfiger shirt. 

"Now I have AIDS," the boy says, disgusted. J.'s distress is so apparent that the 

boy says, "I'm kidding," but his hostility is clear. This particular afternoon, J., 

who has ragged black hair and a crumpling smile, opens his mouth as if to speak, 

but doesn't. He saves his mouth for his teachers. 

The week after the shootings in Littleton, Colo., ConVal High School held an 

assembly about school safety. J. recounts what happened in his class next period. 

"I said, 'I wish those kids would come over here and blow away the teachers,"' 

especially an assistant principal, with whom J. had a long history. J. says, "I am 

always in trouble, every day, for my attitude." 

According to J., the classroom teacher said, "I'm kind of concerned about you." 

"Nothing to be concerned about," J. replied. "Everyone hates him anyway." 



"Do you want to go to the office?" she asked. 

"Hell, no," he said. Then she sent him there. 

Ordinarily, J. would have been sent home for cursing. He knew the drill. This 

time, however, he waited for the Peterborough police, who, he says, searched his 

knapsack and escorted him to the station, where he was charged in juvenile court 

with disorderly conduct. (ConVal officials cannot comment on J.'s case because 

he is a juvenile and because it is pending.) 

That night, the police appeared at the homes of members of J.'s family with a 

search warrant and collected handguns and sporting rifles. The next day, news 

cameras greeted ConVal students in the parking lot. The print media continued 

the story, and J. became known as a copycat in a wider world. "It's retarded," he 

says. "I shouldn't have got in trouble. If it was some good kid that did it, they 

wouldn't have gotten in trouble." Many students feel that the administration 

overreacted, less because of Columbine than for the fact that even if he had 

meant what he said, he was an unlikely candidate to carry out that particular kind 

of plan. Says one parent, sighing, summing up a typical adult response, "That's 

just J. being J. again." 

Being J., according to J., is as inevitable as his difficulty in school, which he 

compares to his unhappiness in his family life. He says: "I try not to spend much 

time at home. It's like I'm a failure. My sister is a straight-A student and 

everything." He doesn't get along with his stepfather. Right now, his relationship 

with his mother isn't good. "Whenever I get in trouble, she yells at me for 10 

minutes, then she stops," J. says. "They yell nonstop, then they forget what they 

are yelling for. They don't even punish me. It's like a habit with them." 

J. spends his days watching television. In the afternoons, he goes to the nearby 

basketball court. His mother tracks him down. (She declined to comment for this 

story.) J. says, "Then she yells at me all the way home, then I fall asleep and get 

up and do it all over again." 

More upsetting to J. than his threat to an assistant principal -- and more 

memorable to many ConVal students -- was an event for which he was 

suspended earlier. He stepped into a bathroom to smoke a joint. It wasn't getting 

high, or even getting high during school, that was so problematic to the other 

students, but that he had selected a bathroom without ventilation that led directly 

into the hall where a teacher stood. J. heard the teacher but still kept smoking. "I 

just finished cuz I knew I was gonna get caught," he says. 

"How stupid can you get?" George asks. "He just proved to everyone that he's 

the [expletive] everyone thinks he is." 

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Andrew ventures, "Not to be mean to J., but that's plain old stupid." 

Even Tyler, who tried to defend what was left of J.'s eroding reputation, admits: 

"That was the stupidest thing I ever heard of. I don't even know why I tried to 

protect that kid." 

Drugs -- at least temporarily -- blur the social lines. Boys and girls from different 

groups get high together; says George: "Polar opposites -- they are bound 

together by drugs." James Key-Wallace, a 1999 graduate, attributes the social 

leveling to limited distribution: "The drugs come from the same half-dozen 

sources. You're going to come in contact on grounds that demand respect." Says 

Hayden Draper, who also just graduated: "Popular kids do drugs. Unpopular kids 

do drugs. Everyone has their own place to get high." J., however, was all alone. 

Since Columbine, the Safe School Committee at ConVal has undergone a 

renaissance. The Peterborough police have stationed an officer at the entrance. 

But many of the students believe that a shooting spree like that of Klebold and 

Harris's could happen anywhere. Says Toffer: "It certainly didn't happen because 

of the lack of a safe-school committee. Their problem was, they weren't 

accepted, and they weren't going to be accepted, and that's the way that our 

society is. There are always people that are going to be cast out and people that 

are cast in." 

Colleen, George's ex, a slim girl with short straight hair and an easy smile, grew 

up down the street from J. He's generally annoying, she says. He used to sing 

Christmas carols on the bus in June, but he is not cruel. Everyone, she says, has 

their days. What J. hates is people talking down to him, so she takes care not to 

do that. She feels the same way when people talk down to her because she is a 

girl. "There are times I can talk to him about things, without it being weird and 

without him being a pervert," she says. It's all relative. When you are close to the 

bottom, there's not much room left to fit. She recalls J. at his happiest during a 

class he described to her, in the high school's on-site preschool, how content he 

felt playing among the little kids. 












The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, June 6, 1999 

The story of the last 1,000 years can be told as a series 

of great adventures: Marco Polo to China, Columbus to 

the New World, Lewis and Clark to the Pacific, Darwin 

to the Galapagos. Adventure is as old as Homer, but 

plunging into the unknown in quest of knowledge is the 

special legacy of this millennium -- one that began with 

Leif Ericsson and ends with a robot on Mars. Where 

must the explorer go now to find terra incognita? 

The Times 

Capsule 

Submit your 

ideas for our 

1000-year 

project. 

Audio Special: 

The Art of 

Adventure 

Writing 

Listen to authors 

and actors read 

adventure 

literature. 

Crossword Puzzle 

With two sets of 

clues. 

Forum 

Join a discussion on 

adventure. 

In The Same Boat 

A journey in which the author confronts a difficult 

truth about himself -- and the limits of thinking in 

black and white. By Richard Ford 

Black Like Huck 

Revisiting Twain in the age of Oprah. By Stanley 

Crouch 

LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Novelist Pat Conroy 

Responds 

Why We Go 

Even a modest adventure can reinvent the world 

-- and our place in it. By Andrea Barrett 

1492: The Prequel 

Decades before Columbus, Zheng He sailed from 

China with 300 ships and 28,000 men. His fleet 

got as far as Africa and could have easily reached 

America, but the Chinese turned back. What 

happened? By Nicholas D. Kristof 

AUDIO SPECIAL: Interview With Nicholas Kristof 

http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m3/index.html (1 of 3) [8/22/1999 9:21:00 PM] 

On Language 

Adventurer 

By William Safire 

They Lived to Tell 

the Tale 

By Annie Proulx 

SLIDE SHOW: An 

Adventurer's Scrapbook 

Crazy for 

Adventure 

By Brad Wetzler 

The Wanderjahrs 

By Lesley Downer


Letters 

From the June 27 

issue of the 


THE MILLENNIUM 

ISSUES 

Women: The 

Shadow Story of 

the Millennium 

Faith, fertility, 

politics, imagery, 

sex, irritation and 

hope. 

The Best of the 

Last 1,000 Years 

Best Stories, Best 

Inventions, Best 

Ideas. The first of 

the six special 

Magazine issues. 

Magazine Cover 

What They Carried 

Forget Gore-Tex and polar fleece. For most of this 

millennium, all an explorer needed was a 

compass, a buckskin jacket and a plate of lichen. 

By David E. Brown 

On the Road With God's Fool 

How St. Francis lost everything and found his 

way. By Gretel Ehrlich 

SLIDE SHOW: St. Francis of Assisi 

Points of No Return 

Mapping the millennium: The globe is dotted with 

posthumous reminders that adventure is risky 

business. By Stephen Mihm 

Under the Tongue of the Ocean 

A novelist sent to the bottom of the sea finds 

illumination in the darkest of places. 

By Robert Stone 

VIDEO: Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution 

SLIDE SHOW: On the Dive 

Only on the Web 

Hubble's Human Brain 

A novelist sent to explore the cosmos meets the 

people behind the telescope. By Bruce Duffy 

VIDEO: Animations From the Hubble Telescope 

Overheard at the Explorer's Club 

A cartoon by Stan Mack. 

Not Because It's There 

It took admiring climbers like Petrarch and 

Cèzanne to put mountains on the map. 

By Michael Kimmelman 

SLIDE SHOW: Cézanne's Ste.-Victoire 

Journey to the Center of My 

Mind 

Brain scans can locate the home of memory and 

the land of language. They may eventually help to 

map consciousness. By Stephen Hall 

AUDIO SPECIAL: An Interview With Stephen Hall 

One if by Land, Two if by Sea, 


contemplation.com 

By Pico Iyer 

Style 

Have Duvet, Will 

Travel 

Whether her 

destination is 

Marrakech or Mars, 

the woman of the 

future is a creature 

of comfort. 

Photographs by 

Warwick Saint 

Food 

Going to Extremes 

Toungue torturers 

and palate 

educators. By Molly 

O'Neill 

Endpaper 

Bad Trips 

A log of explorers 

who should have 

stayed in bed that 

day. By John Tierney 

Adventure Quotes


Three if by Rollerblade. ... 

It's not enough for modern-day athletes to run, 

sail, kayak, orienteer, climb, swim and paddle 

their way in adventure competitions. Now they 

have to relate to the natives too. Text by Edward 

Zuckerman 

A Nigerian Discovers America 

Back home, Murphy Popoola couldn't get even a 

small loan. In Houston, his hopes are already 

rising, perhaps even for Popoola Special Breeds. 

By Roger Cohen 

Found in the Woods 

You can still visit a patch of the 

forest primeval, in the Bronx. 

Just don't take a cell phone, and 

watch out for skunks. 

By Charles Siebert 

AUDIO SPECIAL: One Minute in 

the Forest 

MULTIMEDIA SLIDE SHOW: Fernando Pessoa's 

Poem #47 





Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company 

http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m3/index.html (3 of 3) [8/22/1999 9:21:00 PM]

The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, April 18, 1999 

Best of the First 

Millennium 

By Felipe 

Fernández-Armesto 

Best Time to Be 

Alive 

Moderated by 

Russell Baker 

Best Speech 

By William Safire 

Games 

Crossword 

Puzzle 

With two sets of 

clues 

Faces of the 

Millennium 

A Photo Gallery 

and quiz 

Forum 

The Best of the 

Millennium 

Join the discussion 

Introduction 

Why the Best? 

By Frank Rich 

Video 

Eyes Wide 

Open 

By Richard 

Powers 

Every Dictator's 

Nightmare 

By Wole Soyinka 

When Tristram 

Met Isolde 

By Joyce Carol 

Oates 

Best Magic 

Trick 

By Teller 

Video 

Best Feat of 

Engineering 

By David 

Macaulay 

Best Nuisance 

By Penelope 

Fitzgerald 

Best Innovation 

in Painting 

By Michael 

Kimmelman 

Slide Show 

Best Vision 

The Times Capsule 

Submit your ideas for The Times 

Magazine's 1000-year project. 

Narrate or Die 

By A.S. Byatt 

Audio 

The Book That 

Killed Colonialism 

By Pramoedya 

Ananta Toer 

Morality Bites 

By Elmore Leonard 

Best Love Song 

By Lorrie Moore 

Audio 

Best Pope 

By A.N. Wilson 

Best Sex Scandal 

By Josephine Hart 

Best Trial 

By Scott Turow 

Best View of the 

World 

By Charles Johnson 


Everything in 

Its Place 

By Oliver Sacks 

How the Bean 

Saved 

Civilization 

By Umberto Eco 

Invention Is 

the Mother of 

Necessity 

By Jared 

Diamond 

Best Piano 

Composition 

By Charles Rosen 

Audio 

Best Ergonomic 

Design 

By David 

Gelernter 

Slide Show 

Best Tool 

By Witold 

Rybczynski 

Best Stage 

Comedy 

By David Lodge 

Best Mistake


Best Herb 

By Molly O'Neill 

Best Question 

By Dennis Overbye 

Magazine Cover 

Letters 

From the May 9 

issue of the 


Image Credits 

By James Gleick 

Slide Show 

Best Species 

By Edward O. 

Wilson 

Best Building 

By Herbert 

Muschamp 

Best Shot 

By Charles 

McGrath 

Best 

Punctuation 

By Alberto 

Manguel 

Best Utopia 

By Margaret 

Atwood 

Best Port 

By Jan Morris 

Slide Show 

Best Leader 

By Gail Collins 

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By David Fromkin 

Best Treaty 

By Fareed 

Zakaria 

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By Wendy 

Wasserstein 

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By Bernhard 

Schlink 

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By Peter J. 

Gomes 

Audio 

Map 

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By Alan Brinkley 

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By Stephen Mihm 

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By Ron Chernow 

Best Town Square 

By Vincent Scully 

Best Naval Battle 

By Patrick O'Brian 

Best Fable 

By Marina Warner 

Best Musical 

Instrument 

By Leon Botstein 

Audio 

Best Poem 

By Helen Vendler 

Best Come-From- 

Behind Victory 

By Keith Olbermann 


By John Lukacs 

Best Medical 

Insight 

By Jerome 

Groopman 

Best of Breed 

By Caroline 

Knapp 

Best Meal 

By Ruth Reichl 

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By John Julius 

Norwich 

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By W.S. Merwin 

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By R.W. Apple Jr. 

Best Game 

By Paul Auster 

Best Fashion 

By Alison Lurie







http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m1/index.html (3 of 3) [8/22/1999 9:23:21 PM]

Letters 

Letters 

There were no undecideds in the Rudy Giuliani mail. New 

Yorkers were either all for the Mayor's possible Senate bid or 

all against it, with the ayes edging out the nays. On the 

sex-selection front, reactions remained strong. Writers were 

less critical of the medical procedure than of what many 

regarded as parents' selfish motives. 

THE MAYOR'S MAKEOVER 

James Traub (Aug. 1) mixes an odd 

cocktail in trying to define Rudy Giuliani's 

strengths as weaknesses. Perhaps more 

remarkable, however, is the theme that the 

Mayor may have too strong a personality 

and set of beliefs for the Senate. It is 

frightening to read that our nation may no 

longer seek charismatic and virtuous 

leaders. 

Giuliani has already given much -- not just 

to New York City but also to the country, 

in the policies and strategies that have 

become the accepted paradigms for urban Photograph by Jake Chessum 

renewal and recovery. That he is willing to 

accept the mantle of broader office is another sign of his strength, and one we 

should rush to embrace. 

MICHAEL OFFIT 

New York 

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Thought 

by Bill Gates 



Letters 

If, in James Traub's deft phrase, the "Mayor does seem to lack some of the 

typical furniture of the human personality," surely the furniture most 

exasperatingly absent is anything upholstered with recognizable human empathy. 

This isn't merely to criticize his style; there's something far more troubling in his 

lawyerly reactions than in his often blunt choice of words -- some essential grasp 

of human nature seems to be missing. 

GUY KETTELHACK 


It is ironic that an article about Rudy Giuliani, whose very claim to fame was his 

crackdown on organized crime, should include Mafia terms like "consigliere" 

and "caporegime" in describing members of his staff. 

ROBERT J. DYM 

Brooklyn 

The Mayor does not need a makeover! He is what he is: an honest, intelligent 

public servant. Like him or not, he has made New York City a place that people 

want to come back to. 

ROSE M. FACELLE 

White Plains 

Traub's article contained a secondhand quote from Rudolph Giuliani calling me a 

liar. The supposed quote, from an unidentified confidant of the Mayor's, had 

Giuliani talking about plans we made for a parade celebrating the Police 

Department's 150th anniversary. The article quoted Giuliani, secondhand, as 

saying, "That's the last time he'll ever lie to me," a rather broad accusation. 

I take strong objection to this characterization. I never lied to the Mayor about 

this event or any other. Despite their public denials at the time, the Mayor and 

his counsel, Dennison Young, were given a full briefing on the plans for the 

parade in my conference room at Police Headquarters. After that meeting, there 

was continued contact with the Mayor's aides about the project. 

WILLIAM J. BRATTON 


WHO'S AFRAID OF CHINA? 

In his highly informative article (Aug. 1), Patrick E. Tyler described how he 

broke out of house arrest in an obscure Chinese town, how he ran along a 

highway until a motorist picked him up, dropping him off eight hours later at 

http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990822mag-letters.html (2 of 5) [8/22/1999 9:25:13 PM] 





All Too Human 


Letters 

another remote spot, and how he caught the last flight to Beijing to cover the 

death of Deng Xiaoping. 

Is that the way things are in that notorious police state? A Western journalist can 

skip out of police custody and freely find his way back to the nation's capital, 

thousands of miles away? Some police state! 

JOSEPH D. POLICANO 

East Hampton, N.Y. 

Tyler's point that 1.3 billion Chinese want only to develop their economy would 

be more reassuring if ordinary Chinese citizens were able to shape their country's 

foreign and defense policies. The Chinese Government's recent record 

demonstrates its intent to increase its power in order to challenge America's 

influence in Asia. 

The correct response to China's rise as a superpower is neither the fear that Tyler 

discounts nor the complaisant optimism he advocates. Instead, the United States 

should meet the challenge by defending its values and by strengthening its 

alliances in Asia. 

FRANK LECHNER 

Atlanta 

THE TRUMAN SHOW 

James Truman says he doesn't get good press, and he's right (Alex Kuczynski, 

Aug. 1). He has come twice to the New School to talk to students in my 

journalism classes. The last time he had just got off a plane and was jet lagged. 

We offered to reschedule, but he did not want to disappoint the students. In his 

first lecture, he talked about query letters, how to try to specialize in a subject 

and how to work with editors. He was kind, attentive and spoke clearly on the 

business of freelance writing. On the second occasion, his office phoned and 

asked whether your reporter might attend. She was there for several hours 

listening to Truman giving advice and encouragement. Yet not a minute was 

mentioned in your article. 

ELISABETTA DI CAGNO 


ROBOKITTY 

Nicholas D. Kristof's article (Aug. 1) scared the bejesus out of me. It paints 

http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990822mag-letters.html (3 of 5) [8/22/1999 9:25:13 PM]

Letters 

Hugo de Garis as a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. What made this article more 

nightmarish than Mary Shelley's story was the potential for these machines to 

surpass humans and the possibility that they may eventually turn on us. 

LEONARD KAPLAN 

Brookline, Mass. 

GETTING THE GIRL 

Lisa Belkin's article (July 25) on medical advances in sex preselection was astute 

and gripping. I was less concerned by ethical issues than by the women 

interviewed, who were in such a collective froth to conceive babies with the right 

chromosomes. (Interestingly, the husbands were indifferent on the matter.) "It 

was like I was robbed of my little girlyhood," said one woman. 

NELL BERAM 

Cambridge, Mass. 

Wishing for a girl is one thing, but being obsessed is another. Yet I do 

sympathize. When I was pregnant with my second child (and I knew it would be 

my last), I learned during the ultrasound that I was going to have another boy. 

Disappointed, I went home, allowed myself a few tears and then gave thanks that 

by all accounts my child was healthy. Not all parents receive such good news. 

BARBARA REITZ 

Hampton, N.J. 

Letters should be addressed to Letters to the Editor, Magazine, The New York 

Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. The E-mail address is 

magazine@nytimes.com. All letters should include the writer's name, address 

and daytime telephone number. We are unable to acknowledge or return 

unpublished letters. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. 




Letters 








Page One Plus 

Sunday, August 22, 1999 

ON THE FRONT PAGE 

States Criticized on Lax Lead Tests for 

Poor Youths 

By ROBERT PEAR 

Federal investigators say most states are flouting a 1989 

law requiring that young children on Medicaid be tested 

for lead poisoning. As a result, they say, hundreds of 

thousands of children exposed to dangerously high 

levels of lead are neither tested nor treated. 

2 Lives, Again Entwined, Mirror the 

Fate of Berlin 

By ROGER COHEN 

This is a normal German story -- one of loss, division 

and elusive reconciliation -- a tale of two women tossed 

this way and that by the traumas of their city and their 

country. 

Sidelined for Days, Turkey's Army Joins 

Rescue 

By STEPHEN KINZER 

With victims complaining bitterly about a lack of 

government authority to help them recover from 

Tuesday's shattering earthquake, the Turkish army 

entered the rescue and cleanup effort Saturday after 

spending days on the sidelines. 

FRONT PAGE IMAGE 

TODAY'S PHOTOS 

Today's Sections 

INTERNATIONAL 

NATIONAL 

N.Y. Region 

Politics 

Obituaries 

BUSINESS 

TECHNOLOGY 

SCIENCE 

SPORTS 

EDITORIAL 

OP-ED 

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Sunday Sections 

ARTS & LEISURE 

AUTOMOBILES 

BOOK REVIEW 

TRAVEL 

REAL ESTATE 

WEEK IN REVIEW 

A Push From the Top Shatters a Glass 

Ceiling 

By REED ABELSON 

A middle-aged white guy who never thought much about women in the 

workplace until he became a single parent has helped create Hewlett-Packard's 

reputation as a bastion of egalitarianism. 

http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/front/ (1 of 3) [8/22/1999 9:27:11 PM]

Page One Plus 

For Jews from Around the World, Brooklyn Is the Place 

to Shop 

By KIT R. ROANE 

Driven by the density of its Jewish population and an entrepreneurial spirit 

among its business community, Borough Park, Brooklyn, has become what the 

Lower East Side used to be: the place for Orthodox Jews to shop. 

ALSO IN TODAY'S TIMES 

Cold Feet in Russia Doom Stepashin's Marriage of 

Convenience 

By MICHAEL R. GORDON 

If ever there was an example of how hard it is for Russia's liberal politicians to 

work together it was the implosion Saturday of Sergei Stepashin's new centrist 

electoral bloc. 

Russian Money-Laundering Investigation Finds Familiar 

Swiss Banker in the Middle 

By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN WITH RAYMOND BONNER 

At the intersection of illicit Russian money and the Bank of New York is Bruce 

Rappaport, a Swiss banker who has had brushes with governmental 

investigators in the past and who has long had an important connection to the 

bank. 

At Johnson Wax, a Family Hands Down Its Heirloom 

By DAVID BARBOZA 

Samuel Curtis Johnson, the owner of S.C. Johnson & Co., plans to carve the $5 

billion enterprise into three unequal parts, giving each interested child a 

separate company to run. 

Corrections 

QUOTATION OF THE DAY 

You can't babysit him all his life. He comes up with all different 

excuses, and I say, `All right, that's your decision, that's your choice, but 

10 years down the line I don't want to hear you going, when you've got 

that dreary job doing nothing, `That could have been me, that could have 

been me.' 

MICHAEL O'FARRELL, whose stepson, George Carrion, played 

professional baseball, then quit. 


Page One Plus 






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LIBERTIES / By MAUREEN DOWD 


Related Articles 

● Op-Ed Column Archive 

Forum 

● Join a Discussion on Maureen Dowd's Columns 

get no kick from writing about cocaine. 

But the press is not out of bounds here. Whatever W. did in the past, he has 

made his own white mischief in the present. 

The problem lies in George Bush's packaging of his myth. W. understands that 

the arc of a Presidential campaign follows the arc of a heroic adventure. The 

candidate must slay the dragon or the giant. 

As Joseph Campbell wrote: "A hero ventures forth from the world of common 

day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered 

and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious 

adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." 

John F. Kennedy, Bob Dole, President Bush and John McCain offered traditional 

conquests. They fought real enemies in war. 

But boomers like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush who avoided Vietnam 

needed to create domestic dragons and internal giants to kill. Mr. Clinton 

dramatized his teen-age confrontation with his alcoholic, abusive stepfather. 

Yuppie candidates play up painful odysseys of self-discovery. They slay the 

Gorgon of addiction and the Hydra of self-indulgence. They present themselves 

as redeemed, reborn (or born again) with the Arthurian virtues -- temperance, 

loyalty, courage. 

W.'s myth (potent because it offers the classic plot line of succeeding his father 

as ruler) has been much written about of late: He was, as his cousin John Ellis 

said, "on the road to nowhere at age 40." In 1985, he had a serious talk with Billy 

Graham at Kennebunkport. He quit drinking, drifting, smoking and chewing 

tobacco and became a disciplined, Bible-reading leader who "accepted Christ." 

W. is perfectly content when the press hews to this story line: hothead and 

goof-off metamorphoses into Presidential timber. 

He'll talk about overcoming alcohol. He'll talk with pride about his faithfulness 

to his wife because it offers a positive contrast with Bill Clinton. Other 

"mistakes" are declared off limits. 

But as in "Fantasia," once the demons are unleashed it's hard to contain them. 

When you pick and choose which dragons you've slain, you shouldn't be 

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surprised when the press won't be spoon fed from a menu of sins you choose. 

They'll also be interested in the ones you want to hide. 

And in hiding, W. began to sound too much like the man he scorns, the President 

-- parsing, tap-dancing, obscuring, trying to have it both ways, dribbling out and 

selectively revealing the facts. 

The Texas Governor's tough talk on crime also left him open. He signed a 

punitive law in Texas that allowed judges to put people convicted of possessing 

less than one gram of cocaine in jail. He is also the new standard bearer of a 

party that has worked hard to demonize drug users as weak and immoral sinners, 

best treated from a jail cell. 

His reaction to the kerfuffle shows that he is still green in many ways. He 

clumsily reversed his stance of not going beyond acknowledging youthful 

"mistakes," boxing himself in by defining time periods when he did not do 

illegal drugs. The coyness was unbearable. First it was seven years, then it was 

15 years, then it was 25 years. He grew ever more ill at ease and peeved. 

By the time he got to Fairlawn, Ohio, on Friday he was still deep in 

Clintonspeak. "I think parents, particularly baby-boomer parents, ought to say to 

children, 'Do not use drugs,' " Mr. Bush said. "I think we owe the children that 

responsibility to share our wisdom. I worry about a society that sends a different 

message. One of the interesting questions facing baby boomers is, 'Have we 

grown up?' " 

He was pressed by The Times's Adam Clymer: "And if a child asks a 

baby-boomer parent, 'Well, did you?' " 

He replied: "I think the baby-boomer parent ought to say, 'I've learned from 

mistakes I may or may not have made. 

And I'd like to share some wisdom with you.' " 

Mistakes he may or may not have made? There's not a teen-ager in America who 

would swallow that. It's not moral instruction. It's not even wisdom. It's evasion. 

Voters might accept a boomer candidate who admitted he dabbled in drugs. They 

might welcome a candidate who said firmly and consistently "none of your 

business." But they'll never accept a Bush who sounds like a Clinton. 







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States Criticized on Lax Lead Tests for Poor Youths 

August 21, 1999 

States Criticized on Lax Lead Tests for 

Poor Youths 

By ROBERT PEAR 

ASHINGTON -- Federal investigators say most states are flouting a 

1989 law requiring that young children on Medicaid be tested for lead 

poisoning. As a result, they say, hundreds of thousands of children 

exposed to dangerously high levels of lead are neither tested nor treated. 

The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, found that 

"few Medicaid children are screened for blood-lead levels," even though the 

problem of lead poisoning is concentrated among low-income children on 

Medicaid. Medicaid recipients are three times as likely as other children to have 

high amounts of lead in the blood. 

Separately, a Federal advisory panel said this week that "current lead screening 

rates among children covered by Medicaid are very poor, despite Federal 

requirements." 

Cost is not the main reason for the failure to test children, health officials say. 

The laboratory test usually costs less than $10. 

Officials cite more complex reasons for the low rates of testing. Many doctors do 

not see lead exposure as a problem for their patients and therefore do not believe 

tests are necessary, or they are unaware of the Federal requirements. In addition, 

many poor children do not go to the doctor until they are sick, and most children 

with high levels of lead in the blood display no obvious symptoms at first. 

Under Federal law, states are responsible for the screening of children on 

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Thought 

by Bill Gates 




Medicaid. They can provide such services directly, or they can arrange for the 

services to be provided by doctors, clinics and health maintenance organizations. 

President Clinton has repeatedly emphasized that all Government policies should 

be evaluated for their effects on children. But the General Accounting Office 

found that most of the children served by Medicaid and other Federal health 

programs were not tested for lead, as Federal law and regulations dictate they 

should be. 

"Federal lead-screening policies are often not followed" by state officials, and 

the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, which supervises Medicaid, 

does not review state compliance with these policies, the auditors said. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 890,000 children age 1 

through 5 have so much lead in their blood that it could harm their health or their 

ability to learn. 

About 535,000 of these children are enrolled in Medicaid, but fewer than 20 

percent of Medicaid recipients in that age group -- 1.2 million of the 6.3 million 

recipients -- are ever tested, the accounting office found. 

"This is a dismal record," said Senator Robert G. Torricelli, Democrat of New 

Jersey, who recently introduced a bill to increase lead testing of children. 

The state auditor of California, Kurt R. Sjoberg, reached a similar conclusion in 

a new report on the experience of that state, which has far more Medicaid 

recipients than any other state. 

"Thousands of lead-poisoned children have been allowed to suffer needlessly" 

because California has not complied with the Federal requirement to test them 

for lead poisoning, Sjoberg said. 

Dr. Susan K. Cummins, chief of the state's lead poisoning prevention program, 

said perhaps 20 percent of the children on Medicaid in California had been tested 

for lead. "And that's probably an optimistic estimate," she said. 

Federal rules say children on Medicaid must be tested for lead poisoning at the 

age of 12 months and again at 24 months. Medicaid recipients ages 3 to 6 must 

also be tested if they had not previously been screened. 

Children on Medicaid have a higher risk of lead poisoning because they often 

live in older housing with peeling lead-based paint and with dust contaminated 

by such paint. 

More than 80 percent of houses built before 1978 have lead-based paint. 

Screening rates vary greatly from state to state. In Washington state, Federal 

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All Too Human 



auditors found that fewer than 1 percent of the children on Medicaid had been 

tested for lead poisoning. Elsewhere, they said, rates range from 3 percent in 

Montana to 10 percent in Colorado, 40 percent in New Jersey and 46 percent in 

Alabama. Many states, including Connecticut, said they did not have statewide 

data on testing rates or the prevalence of lead poisoning. 

New York has a state law that requires day-care centers and nursery schools to 

ask parents for evidence of screening. The New York City Health Department 

reported that more than 40 percent of children ages 1 to 5 had been tested. 

Statewide data for New York were not immediately available. 

Despite the Federal requirements, Thomas W. Bedell, the Medicaid director in 

Washington state, said: "We don't believe we have much of a problem with lead 

exposure here. So we don't think it's cost-effective to impose 100 percent 

screening. There are better ways to spend our money." 

Dr. Maxine D. Hayes, the acting health officer for Washington state, added, "We 

don't think it's right for the Federal Government to dictate what states should do" 

in testing children. 

Under Federal rules, Medicaid will pay for testing and treating a child, but will 

not pay for testing of substances like water and paint that are sent to a laboratory 

for analysis. 

"Medicaid reimbursement is available only for the provision of medical 

services," said Sally K. Richardson, director of the Federal Medicaid program. 

"Water and paint are environmental elements. If a child has already been 

diagnosed as lead-poisoned, the testing of these elements serves no direct 

medical purpose." 

But public health experts say this policy often cripples efforts to identify the 

cause of a child's lead poisoning. 

The advisory panel that voiced concern about the low rates of screening also said 

this week that Medicaid should pay for laboratory tests of dust, water and other 

substances in the homes of children poisoned by lead. 

"Such testing is good public health policy, and it's definitely the standard of care 

for treating lead-poisoned kids," said Dr. Cummins, the chairwoman of the 

panel, the Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention. 

Heather M. Mauro, a resident of Atco, N.J., said she felt fortunate that her 

children had been tested for lead because the tests detected high levels of lead in 

all four youngsters. 

Their home, a large Victorian, was built in the late 1800's or early 1900's. 

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Lead poisoning can cause learning disabilities, behavior problems and 

neurological damage in children, and Mrs. Mauro said she believed that her 

children had suffered such problems because of exposure to lead. 

State officials across the country are encouraging families on Medicaid to join 

health maintenance organizations. But Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health 

law and policy at George Washington University, said that in their contracts with 

H.M.O.'s, states rarely specified the full range of services that should be 

provided to children with lead poisoning. 

In New Jersey, Edward J. Rogan, a spokesman for the Department of Human 

Services, said "we are not happy" with the fact that only 40 percent of children 

on Medicaid have been tested for lead poisoning. "We want to strengthen our 

contracts with H.M.O.'s to make sure they achieve a greater level of screening," 

he said. 

Connecticut officials said they did not have statewide data on lead testing of 

Medicaid recipients. In Hartford, where doctors and hospitals have made special 

efforts to eliminate lead poisoning, a recent study of 877 preschoolers found that 

93 percent had been tested. But Judith Solomon, executive director of the 

Children's Health Council, a child advocacy group, said, "We don't assume the 

results would be the same in other parts of the state." 







http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/082299lead-poison.html (4 of 4) [8/22/1999 10:22:43 PM]

Brief Fare Deals Doing an Encore 

August 19, 1999 

PRACTICAL TRAVELER / By BETSY WADE 


ome air fares for fall and winter, and a few Mediterranean cruise prices, are 

making Europe seem nearly irresistible. The low air fares were presented 

as short term earlier in the summer, but industry officials said that an 

oversupply of flights to Europe had developed with the delivery of new planes, 

and the airlines began gradually backing away from higher prices to try to fill the 

seats. 

Competition is bringing a bonanza for travelers. Northwest was first with the 

fare cuts, but others have followed. As seats fill, of course, the good buys will 

fade away. But not many have so far. 

Likewise, the cruise specials were sometimes described as an effort to recover 

from the period of the Kosovo bombardment, when many Adriatic itineraries 

were changed. But various circumstances, including itinerary changes caused by 

the late delivery of new vessels, have created the cruise bargains. 

One example of an excellent price is Swissair's Newark-Basel round-trip 

economy fare of $330, plus taxes, a promotion to introduce its new A-330 

Airbuses on the daily service, which has been operating for a year or so. This 

fare will be sold at least until Friday, with travel possible until Dec. 15. The new 

planes have 224 seats, with 166 in economy class; the route to Basel, a 

pharmaceutical center, is heavily used by business travelers. Swissair: (800) 

221-4750. 

Here is a small selection of some other good buys running into the fall. These are 

available from travel agents, the airlines or on the Web. The prices do not 

include departure taxes or Customs fees. 

Discounts on Flights 

American Airlines had a fistful of choices. Many of these fares for midweek 

travel were originally due to expire 10 days ago, but continue to be available 

until Aug. 31 -- and that deadline is not immutable, either. Those looking for 

even lower rates can buy them now for travel in November and December, but 

blackouts apply to the holidays. These are all seven-day advance-purchase fares. 

Tim Smith, a spokesman for American, said that the seats available for these 

prices were limited, but that many flights in the winter showed wide availability. 

Weekend flights, which are $50 more round trip, fill up faster than midweek 

ones. 

On American, a New York-to-Frankfurt economy ticket is $588 for midweek 

travel, $638 otherwise. For travel from November to mid-March, with a holiday 

blackout, fares are $330 and $380. 

http://www.nytimes.com/library/travel/practical/pt990822.html (1 of 3) [8/22/1999 10:30:34 PM] 

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Boston-London (Heathrow) economy round-trip fares for travel on American 

into October are $448 to $498, depending on the day of the week. For later 

travel, holidays excluded, Bostonians who want to swap their dark city for a dark 

city on the Thames can do it for $318 to $368. Nonstop flights from Dallas-Fort 

Worth, American's headquarters, to London go into Gatwick: these fares are 

$588 and $638 until October, $428 and $478 after that. 

New York to Paris until October is $458 and $508; for November, these are 

$368 and $418. 

Continental has a new route from Cleveland to London (Gatwick). Until Aug. 

31, round-trip tickets for midweek travel between Sept. 5 and Oct. 30 cost $588. 

For travel from Oct. 31 to March 31, with a blackout from Dec. 17 to Jan. 2, 

midweek round trips drop to $428. Also on Continental, midweek travel between 

Newark and Paris in September and October is $458. For November, it is $368. 

British Airways put some promotional fares on the market Aug. 10, with the 

last purchase date Aug. 31. All of the line's 22 United States cities were 

involved. Jill Donaldson, vice president for leisure marketing, said that the best 

buys involved New York departures. To London (Heathrow), the midweek fares 

begin at $448; to Paris, $458; to Rome, $588. 

Midweek fares from Los Angeles or San Francisco to London begin at $638. 

From Chicago, the midweek fare is $558. Dallas-Fort Worth to London is $588, 

and Atlanta-London, $608. Travel on these fares is possible between Sept. 5 and 

Oct. 30. 

It is likely that any other airline flying the routes mentioned above is offering 

similar prices. Ask. 

An airline new to the United States, AirEurope, is offering flights between 

Kennedy Airport in New York and Venice, with a continuation to Pisa. To 

announce itself, it is offering $425 round-trip fares for travel until the end of 

September. The price is available until Aug. 30. The line was having some 

ticketing difficulties at first and apparently could not process credit card sales at 

Kennedy, only cash. There is a long wait on the line's number: (888) 999-9090. 

Savings at Sea 

n the Mediterranean cruise front, Holland America made schedule changes 

because delivery of its new vessel, the Volendam, was delayed. As a 

result, a 12-night cruise on the Rotterdam from Venice to Istanbul on Sept. 

22 is being deeply discounted. Stewart T. Chiron of the Cruise Line, a big 

agency in North Miami Beach, is offering this cruise for $2,399 a person, 

including port charges and air fare from New York and other United States and 

Canadian cities, based on double occupancy in an inside cabin. The least 

expensive outside cabin is $2,899. The ship visits Romania and Greece before 

reaching Turkey. These prices were $1,500 higher when they were first posted. 

Another value Mr. Chiron cited in the European cruises was a 12-night trip 

aboard the Norwegian Dream of Norwegian Cruise Line that leaves Istanbul Oct. 

23 and ends in Civitavecchia, the port for Rome, on Nov. 4. This cruise is also 

sold with air fare from the East Coast to Istanbul and home from Rome. Prices 

per person, based on two people in an inside cabin, start at $2,652. These prices 

were formerly $2,600 higher. In addition to Turkey and Italy, this cruise stops in 

Israel, Egypt and Greece. Mr. Chiron said the Norwegian Dream was shifted 

from the Black Sea to this Holy Land itinerary because the line found two 

similar cruises were selling well. The Cruise Line: (800) 244-7447. 

There are pluses and minuses to prices that include air fare. The flight may take a 

roundabout route. But if the flight was booked by the cruise line and is delayed, 

the line usually takes responsibility. On the other hand, if a cruise starts or ends 

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in Venice, and the traveler wants to stay over, arranging the air trip separately 

can be an advantage. Travel agents can quote prices with and without the air 

fare. A 12-night Royal Caribbean Mediterranean cruise in Mr. Chiron's roster 

was $2,649 with air fare; $1,599 without. 

Web Strategies 

hen competition drives down air fares, do Internet shoppers learn it 

quickly, or do they have to fill in the boxes for departure date and return 

date to get a picture? Suzi LeVine, a product manager for Microsoft 

Expedia, said clients did not have to fill in all the blanks. 

Her company's home page at www.expedia.com posted a "big sale" notice on 

Aug. 3, with samples also on the front page. The page gave all the caveats, 

which at that point included an Aug. 13 closing date for the sale. A fare tracker, 

a service users can sign up for, will look for the best fare, she said. 







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The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22, 1999

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