Why a Battle with Bat and Ball Is Exactly What India and Pakistan Need

Serious sport, wrote George Orwell, amounts to "war minus the shooting." India and Pakistan have certainly done plenty of shooting in the three wars they've fought since being separated in birth by the departing British Empire in 1947. But on Wednesday, they'll channel their rivalry into another ritual bequeathed by the British when they face off in an eagerly awaited semifinal of cricket's Word Cup. Both countries' leaders will be among the tens of thousands squeezed into the stadium in the Indian city of Mohali, recognizing the sporting showdown as a rare opportunity to ease the geopolitical one.

"This is the mother of all matches," says Mushahid Hussain, a prominent Pakistani opposition politician. It is difficult to exaggerate the excitement built up on both sides of the border, with anticipation of the match having dominated the news cycle for days now on a subcontinent obsessed with the sport. Hundreds of millions of viewers are expected to watch the match on television, with absenteeism at work likely to reach record highs. Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, who will be at the match, has announced that government offices will close two hours before the opening ball is bowled. (See pictures of cricket legends' last chance to win the World Cup.)

Cricket is a rare source of cohesion in an increasingly fractured Pakistani society in which passion for the game is as widespread and embedded in the national identity as the embrace of Islam is. But whereas religion has proved to be a violent source of division in recent years, cricket unites Pakistanis across the dangerous fissures of ethnicity, sect and social class. But the violent fanaticism that cloaks itself in religion impinged on the sanctity of cricket when, in March 2009, the visiting Sri Lankan team was attacked by terrorists. No foreign team has toured there since. Were it not for the terror threat, Pakistan would be co-hosting the World Cup. Some say it is better that Pakistan was spared the embarrassment of hosting matches at Lahore's Gaddafi Stadium, named in honor of the Libyan dictator for his support of Pakistan's clandestine nuclear-weapons pursuit.

Terrorism has also sabotaged efforts to repair relations between India and Pakistan. After the November 2008 Mumbai massacre, New Delhi severed diplomatic links with Islamabad. The attackers were from Pakistan and were members of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a terrorist outfit that Pakistan had backed as a proxy in the anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir — and had banned only under pressure from the Bush Administration. (Read "India, Pakistan and Cricket Diplomacy.")

The Mumbai attacks brought the nuclear-armed neighbors perilously close to war; now, partly thanks to cricket, the peace process is slowly resuming. On Monday and Tuesday, the interior secretaries of the two countries met for scheduled talks. In a breakthrough, Islamabad agreed to allow Indian investigators probing the Mumbai massacre to visit Pakistan. On Wednesday, the two Prime Ministers will also meet — at the match.

Once the two countries had beaten their quarterfinal opponents to set up the Mohali showdown, India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh didn't hesitate to invite Gilani to the game. "One can call it symbolism," says politician Hussain, "but in the checkered history of India-Pakistan relations, even symbolism becomes substance." (Watch a video of India's passion for cricket.)

Cricket diplomacy has proved useful in easing tensions before. In 1987, Pakistan's General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq unilaterally decided to watch the teams play in Jaipur, India, a move that is said to have defused fears of a cross-border attack. And in 2004 and 2005, leaders from both countries traveled to watch cricket on both sides of the border as hostilities in Kashmir subsided and a back-channel dialogue got under way.

One side will have to lose Wednesday's match, but the politicians won't let that cloud a diplomatic opening. "Both leaders have shown wisdom in not letting this opportunity pass," says Sherry Rehman, a Pakistani lawmaker heavily involved in track-two diplomacy and also a cricket fan on her way to Mohali. "We must not expect major summitry here, as this is not a structured dialogue, but it can become a window for new beginnings, for turning a new corner. God knows both countries could use one." (Read about the 2011 World Cup matches to watch.)

Pakistan's security establishment remains obsessed with the idea that the country faces an existential threat from India, seeing Indian support for the Karzai government in Afghanistan as part of a scheme to encircle Pakistan. India complains that Pakistan has done little to crack down effectively on LeT, which despite being banned still holds public rallies to incite jihad against India. So there are limits to what cricket diplomacy can achieve. Gilani, after all, is forced to defer to Pakistan's powerful military in matters of national strategy, while India's Singh appears to be in a minority in his own Cabinet.

For many on both sides, part of what makes the political divide so frustrating is also what makes the cricket rivalry so enjoyable: "India and Pakistan are so close in many ways and so far in others," says H.M. Naqvi, a Pakistani novelist who recently won the award for best South Asian fiction at the Jaipur Literature Festival. "The rivalry is a function of our peculiar relationship. We all watch Bollywood, eat dhal, listen to qawwali [music] and enjoy cricket. And yet, despite all these commonalities, we've often been at daggers drawn." (See pictures of a new version of cricket.)

The ritual combat of cricket, however, offers a more attractive — and bloodless — avenue of conflict. Even the most enthusiastic peaceniks fail to suppress their nationalism when it comes to the sport. "The competition on the pitch helps let off steam," adds Naqvi. "All our aspirations and anxieties are played out on the field. The rivalry also makes for a great goddamn match!" The two teams are among the best in the world, with a history of nail-bitingly close finishes. On this occasion, however, India is the favorite — a stronger team on paper with a powerful home-ground advantage. (Read "India's Cricket World Cup Ticket Woes.")

But Pakistan needs the victory more. The national cricket team has become a metaphor for the national malaise, plagued by instability and a match-fixing scandal that has taken down some of its top players. And while India has keenly burnished a global image as a rising economic power, Pakistan's headlines are dominated by terrorism, assassinations, floods and deepening economic gloom. A cricket win would certainly lift morale. (Comment on this story.)

Although Wednesday's game is only a semifinal, few Pakistanis care whether they ultimately win the World Cup. Fans merely dread a humiliation at the hands of the archrival next door. "Lose to any team you want," Pakistanis often say, "but never lose to India."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2062133,00.html#ixzz1I5I4B6Jp

Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

As I write this, tomorrow is Tuesday, which is a cardio day. I'll spend five minutes warming up on the VersaClimber, a towering machine that requires you to move your arms and legs simultaneously. Then I'll do 30 minutes on a stair mill. On Wednesday a personal trainer will work me like a farm animal for an hour, sometimes to the point that I am dizzy — an abuse for which I pay as much as I spend on groceries in a week. Thursday is "body wedge" class, which involves another exercise contraption, this one a large foam wedge from which I will push myself up in various hateful ways for an hour. Friday will bring a 5.5-mile run, the extra half-mile my grueling expiation of any gastronomical indulgences during the week.

I have exercised like this — obsessively, a bit grimly — for years, but recently I began to wonder: Why am I doing this? Except for a two-year period at the end of an unhappy relationship — a period when I self-medicated with lots of Italian desserts — I have never been overweight. One of the most widely accepted, commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you exercise, you will lose weight. But I exercise all the time, and since I ended that relationship and cut most of those desserts, my weight has returned to the same 163 lb. it has been most of my adult life. I still have gut fat that hangs over my belt when I sit. Why isn't all the exercise wiping it out? (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008: From A to Z.")

It's a question many of us could ask. More than 45 million Americans now belong to a health club, up from 23 million in 1993. We spend some $19 billion a year on gym memberships. Of course, some people join and never go. Still, as one major study — the Minnesota Heart Survey — found, more of us at least say we exercise regularly. The survey ran from 1980, when only 47% of respondents said they engaged in regular exercise, to 2000, when the figure had grown to 57%.

And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same period: a third of Americans are obese, and another third count as overweight by the Federal Government's definition. Yes, it's entirely possible that those of us who regularly go to the gym would weigh even more if we exercised less. But like many other people, I get hungry after I exercise, so I often eat more on the days I work out than on the days I don't. Could exercise actually be keeping me from losing weight? (Watch TIME's video "How to Lose Hundreds of Pounds.")

The conventional wisdom that exercise is essential for shedding pounds is actually fairly new. As recently as the 1960s, doctors routinely advised against rigorous exercise, particularly for older adults who could injure themselves. Today doctors encourage even their oldest patients to exercise, which is sound advice for many reasons: People who regularly exercise are at significantly lower risk for all manner of diseases — those of the heart in particular. They less often develop cancer, diabetes and many other illnesses. But the past few years of obesity research show that the role of exercise in weight loss has been wildly overstated. (Read "Losing Weight: Can Exercise Trump Genes?")

"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

The Compensation Problem
Earlier this year, the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE — PLoS is the nonprofit Public Library of Science — published a remarkable study supervised by a colleague of Ravussin's, Dr. Timothy Church, who holds the rather grand title of chair in health wisdom at LSU. Church's team randomly assigned into four groups 464 overweight women who didn't regularly exercise. Women in three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer for 72 min., 136 min., and 194 min. per week, respectively, for six months. Women in the fourth cluster, the control group, were told to maintain their usual physical-activity routines. All the women were asked not to change their dietary habits and to fill out monthly medical-symptom questionnaires.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857-1,00.html#ixzz1I5DbTQ9V

The findings were surprising. On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised — sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months — did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did. (The control-group women may have lost weight because they were filling out those regular health forms, which may have prompted them to consume fewer doughnuts.) Some of the women in each of the four groups actually gained weight, some more than 10 lb. each.
What's going on here? Church calls it compensation, but you and I might know it as the lip-licking anticipation of perfectly salted, golden-brown French fries after a hard trip to the gym. Whether because exercise made them hungry or because they wanted to reward themselves (or both), most of the women who exercised ate more than they did before they started the experiment. Or they compensated in another way, by moving around a lot less than usual after they got home. (Read "Run For Your Lives.")
The findings are important because the government and various medical organizations routinely prescribe more and more exercise for those who want to lose weight. In 2007 the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association issued new guidelines stating that "to lose weight ... 60 to 90 minutes of physical activity may be necessary." That's 60 to 90 minutes on most days of the week, a level that not only is unrealistic for those of us trying to keep or find a job but also could easily produce, on the basis of Church's data, ravenous compensatory eating.
It's true that after six months of working out, most of the exercisers in Church's study were able to trim their waistlines slightly — by about an inch. Even so, they lost no more overall body fat than the control group did. Why not?
Church, who is 41 and has lived in Baton Rouge for nearly three years, has a theory. "I see this anecdotally amongst, like, my wife's friends," he says. "They're like, 'Ah, I'm running an hour a day, and I'm not losing any weight.'" He asks them, "What are you doing after you run?" It turns out one group of friends was stopping at Starbucks for muffins afterward. Says Church: "I don't think most people would appreciate that, wow, you only burned 200 or 300 calories, which you're going to neutralize with just half that muffin." (Read "Too Fat? Read Your E-mail.")
You might think half a muffin over an entire day wouldn't matter much, particularly if you exercise regularly. After all, doesn't exercise turn fat to muscle, and doesn't muscle process excess calories more efficiently than fat does?
Yes, although the muscle-fat relationship is often misunderstood. According to calculations published in the journal Obesity Research by a Columbia University team in 2001, a pound of muscle burns approximately six calories a day in a resting body, compared with the two calories that a pound of fat burns. Which means that after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 lb. of fat to muscle — a major achievement — you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight. Good luck with that.
Fundamentally, humans are not a species that evolved to dispose of many extra calories beyond what we need to live. Rats, among other species, have a far greater capacity to cope with excess calories than we do because they have more of a dark-colored tissue called brown fat. Brown fat helps produce a protein that switches off little cellular units called mitochondria, which are the cells' power plants: they help turn nutrients into energy. When they're switched off, animals don't get an energy boost. Instead, the animals literally get warmer. And as their temperature rises, calories burn effortlessly. (See TIME's health and medicine covers.)
Because rodents have a lot of brown fat, it's very difficult to make them obese, even when you force-feed them in labs. But humans — we're pathetic. We have so little brown fat that researchers didn't even report its existence in adults until earlier this year. That's one reason humans can gain weight with just an extra half-muffin a day: we almost instantly store most of the calories we don't need in our regular ("white") fat cells.
All this helps explain why our herculean exercise over the past 30 years — all the personal trainers, StairMasters and VersaClimbers; all the Pilates classes and yoga retreats and fat camps — hasn't made us thinner. After we exercise, we often crave sugary calories like those in muffins or in "sports" drinks like Gatorade. A standard 20-oz. bottle of Gatorade contains 130 calories. If you're hot and thirsty after a 20-minute run in summer heat, it's easy to guzzle that bottle in 20 seconds, in which case the caloric expenditure and the caloric intake are probably a wash. From a weight-loss perspective, you would have been better off sitting on the sofa knitting. 
Self-Control Is like a Muscle
Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower — that we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the journal Psychological Bulletin published a paper by psychologists Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister in which they observed that self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it. If you force yourself to jog for an hour, your self-regulatory capacity is proportionately enfeebled. Rather than lunching on a salad, you'll be more likely to opt for pizza.
Some of us can will ourselves to overcome our basic psychology, but most of us won't be very successful. "The most powerful determinant of your dietary intake is your energy expenditure," says Steven Gortmaker, who heads Harvard's Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity. "If you're more physically active, you're going to get hungry and eat more." Gortmaker, who has studied childhood obesity, is even suspicious of the playgrounds at fast-food restaurants. "Why would they build those?" he asks. "I know it sounds kind of like conspiracy theory, but you have to think, if a kid plays five minutes and burns 50 calories, he might then go inside and consume 500 calories or even 1,000." (Read "Why Kids' Exercise Matters Less Than We Think.")
Last year the International Journal of Obesity published a paper by Gortmaker and Kendrin Sonneville of Children's Hospital Boston noting that "there is a widespread assumption that increasing activity will result in a net reduction in any energy gap" — energy gap being the term scientists use for the difference between the number of calories you use and the number you consume. But Gortmaker and Sonneville found in their 18-month study of 538 students that when kids start to exercise, they end up eating more — not just a little more, but an average of 100 calories more than they had just burned.
If evolution didn't program us to lose weight through exercise, what did it program us to do? Doesn't exercise do anything?
Sure. It does plenty. In addition to enhancing heart health and helping prevent disease, exercise improves your mental health and cognitive ability. A study published in June in the journal Neurology found that older people who exercise at least once a week are 30% more likely to maintain cognitive function than those who exercise less. Another study, released by the University of Alberta a few weeks ago, found that people with chronic back pain who exercise four days a week have 36% less disability than those who exercise only two or three days a week.
But there's some confusion about whether it is exercise — sweaty, exhausting, hunger-producing bursts of activity done exclusively to benefit our health — that leads to all these benefits or something far simpler: regularly moving during our waking hours. We all need to move more — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says our leisure-time physical activity (including things like golfing, gardening and walking) has decreased since the late 1980s, right around the time the gym boom really exploded. But do we need to stress our bodies at the gym?
Look at kids. In May a team of researchers at Peninsula Medical School in the U.K. traveled to Amsterdam to present some surprising findings to the European Congress on Obesity. The Peninsula scientists had studied 206 kids, ages 7 to 11, at three schools in and around Plymouth, a city of 250,000 on the southern coast of England. Kids at the first school, an expensive private academy, got an average of 9.2 hours per week of scheduled, usually rigorous physical education. Kids at the two other schools — one in a village near Plymouth and the other an urban school — got just 2.4 hours and 1.7 hours of PE per week, respectively.
To understand just how much physical activity the kids were getting, the Peninsula team had them wear ActiGraphs, light but sophisticated devices that measure not only the amount of physical movement the body engages in but also its intensity. During four one-week periods over consecutive school terms, the kids wore the ActiGraphs nearly every waking moment.
And no matter how much PE they got during school hours, when you look at the whole day, the kids from the three schools moved the same amount, at about the same intensity. The kids at the fancy private school underwent significantly more physical activity before 3 p.m., but overall they didn't move more. "Once they get home, if they are very active in school, they are probably staying still a bit more because they've already expended so much energy," says Alissa Frémeaux, a biostatistician who helped conduct the study. "The others are more likely to grab a bike and run around after school."
Another British study, this one from the University of Exeter, found that kids who regularly move in short bursts — running to catch a ball, racing up and down stairs to collect toys — are just as healthy as kids who participate in sports that require vigorous, sustained exercise.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857-3,00.html#ixzz1I5DqV8Gb

Could pushing people to exercise more actually be contributing to our obesity problem? In some respects, yes. Because exercise depletes not just the body's muscles but the brain's self-control "muscle" as well, many of us will feel greater entitlement to eat a bag of chips during that lazy time after we get back from the gym. This explains why exercise could make you heavier — or at least why even my wretched four hours of exercise a week aren't eliminating all my fat. It's likely that I am more sedentary during my nonexercise hours than I would be if I didn't exercise with such Puritan fury. If I exercised less, I might feel like walking more instead of hopping into a cab; I might have enough energy to shop for food, cook and then clean instead of ordering a satisfyingly greasy burrito.
Closing the Energy Gap
The problem ultimately is about not exercise itself but the way we've come to define it. Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity — the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. "You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles," says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. "The muscles will ache, and you may not want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements don't have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day."
For his part, Berthoud rises at 5 a.m. to walk around his neighborhood several times. He also takes the stairs when possible. "Even if people can get out of their offices, out from in front of their computers, they go someplace like the mall and then take the elevator," he says. "This is the real problem, not that we don't go to the gym enough." (Read "Is There a Laziness Gene?")
I was skeptical when Berthoud said this. Don't you need to raise your heart rate and sweat in order to strengthen your cardiovascular system? Don't you need to push your muscles to the max in order to build them?
Actually, it's not clear that vigorous exercise like running carries more benefits than a moderately strenuous activity like walking while carrying groceries. You regularly hear about the benefits of exercise in news stories, but if you read the academic papers on which these stories are based, you frequently see that the research subjects who were studied didn't clobber themselves on the elliptical machine. A routine example: in June the Association for Psychological Science issued a news release saying that "physical exercise ... may indeed preserve or enhance various aspects of cognitive functioning." But in fact, those who had better cognitive function merely walked more and climbed more stairs. They didn't even walk faster; walking speed wasn't correlated with cognitive ability.
There's also growing evidence that when it comes to preventing certain diseases, losing weight may be more important than improving cardiovascular health. In June, Northwestern University researchers released the results of the longest observational study ever to investigate the relationship between aerobic fitness and the development of diabetes. The results? Being aerobically fit was far less important than having a normal body mass index in preventing the disease. And as we have seen, exercise often does little to help heavy people reach a normal weight. (Read "Physical Fitness — How Not to Get Sick.")
So why does the belief persist that exercise leads to weight loss, given all the scientific evidence to the contrary? Interestingly, until the 1970s, few obesity researchers promoted exercise as critical for weight reduction. As recently as 1992, when a stout Bill Clinton became famous for his jogging and McDonald's habits, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published an article that began, "Recently, the interest in the potential of adding exercise to the treatment of obesity has increased." The article went on to note that incorporating exercise training into obesity treatment had led to "inconsistent" results. "The increased energy expenditure obtained by training may be compensated by a decrease in non-training physical activities," the authors wrote.
Then how did the exercise-to-lose-weight mantra become so ingrained? Public-health officials have been reluctant to downplay exercise because those who are more physically active are, overall, healthier. Plus, it's hard even for experts to renounce the notion that exercise is essential for weight loss. For years, psychologist Kelly Brownell ran a lab at Yale that treated obese patients with the standard, drilled-into-your-head combination of more exercise and less food. "What we found was that the treatment of obesity was very frustrating," he says. Only about 5% of participants could keep the weight off, and although those 5% were more likely to exercise than those who got fat again, Brownell says if he were running the program today, "I would probably reorient toward food and away from exercise." In 2005, Brownell co-founded Yale's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, which focuses on food marketing and public policy — not on encouraging more exercise.
Some research has found that the obese already "exercise" more than most of the rest of us. In May, Dr. Arn Eliasson of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center reported the results of a small study that found that overweight people actually expend significantly more calories every day than people of normal weight — 3,064 vs. 2,080. He isn't the first researcher to reach this conclusion. As science writer Gary Taubes noted in his 2007 book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, "The obese tend to expend more energy than lean people of comparable height, sex, and bone structure, which means their metabolism is typically burning off more calories rather than less."
In short, it's what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight. You should exercise to improve your health, but be warned: fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain. I love how exercise makes me feel, but tomorrow I might skip the VersaClimber — and skip the blueberry bar that is my usual postexercise reward.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857-4,00.html#ixzz1I5Dxyihu

Hoping for Arab Mandelas

With Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria now all embroiled in rebellions, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that the authoritarian lid that has smothered freedom in the Arab world for centuries may be coming off all 350 million Arab peoples at once. Personally, I think that is exactly what is going to happen over time. Warm up the bus for all the Arab autocrats — and for you, too, Ahmadinejad. As one who has long believed in the democracy potential for this part of the world, color me both really hopeful and really worried about the prospects. 

I am hopeful because the Arab peoples are struggling for more representative and honest government, which is what they will need to overcome their huge deficits in education, freedom and women’s empowerment that have been holding them back. But getting from here to there requires crossing a minefield of tribal, sectarian and governance issues.

The best way to understand the potential and pitfalls of this transition is to think about Iraq. I know that the Iraq war and the democracy-building effort that followed have been so bitterly divisive in America that no one wants to talk about Iraq. Well, today we’re going to talk about Iraq because that experience offers some hugely important lessons for how to manage the transition to democratic governance of a multisectarian Arab state when the iron lid is removed.

Democracy requires 3 things: citizens — that is, people who see themselves as part of an undifferentiated national community where anyone can be ruler or ruled. It requires self-determination — that is, voting. And it requires what Michael Mandelbaum, author of “Democracy’s Good Name,” calls “liberty.”

“While voting determines who governs,” he explained, “liberty determines what governments can and cannot do. Liberty encompasses all the rules and limits that govern politics, justice, economics and religion.”

And building liberty is really hard. It will be hard enough in Middle East states with big, homogenous majorities, like Egypt, Tunisia and Iran, where there is already a powerful sense of citizenship and where national unity is more or less assumed. It will be doubly hard in all the other states, which are divided by tribal, ethnic and sectarian identities and where the threat of civil war is ever present.

Not one was more divided in that way than Iraq. What did we learn there? First, we learned that when you removed the authoritarian lid the tensions between Iraqi Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis erupted as each faction tested the other’s power in a low-grade civil war. But we also learned that alongside that war many Iraqis expressed an equally powerful yearning to live together as citizens. For all of the murderous efforts by Al Qaeda to trigger a full-scale civil war in Iraq, it never happened. And in Iraq’s last election, the candidate who won the most seats, a Shiite, Ayad Allawi, ran on a multisectarian platform with Sunnis. Lesson: While these tribal identities are deeply embedded and can blow up at anytime, there are also powerful countertrends in today’s more urbanized, connected, Facebooked Middle East.

“There is a problem of citizenship in the Arab world,” said Michael Young, the Lebanese author of “The Ghosts of Martyr’s Square,” “but that is partly because these regimes never allowed their people to be citizens. But despite that, you can see how much the demonstrators in Syria have been trying to stay nonviolent and speak about freedom for the whole nation.”

Lesson two: What was crucial in keeping the low-grade civil war in Iraq from exploding, what was crucial in their writing of their own Constitution for how to live together, and what was crucial in helping Iraqis manage multiple fair elections was that they had a credible neutral arbiter throughout this transition: the U.S.

America played that role at a staggering cost, and not always perfectly, but played it we did. In Egypt, the Egyptian Army is playing that arbiter role. Somebody has to play it in all these countries in revolt, so they can successfully lay the foundations of both democracy and liberty. Who will play that role in Libya? In Syria? In Yemen?

The final thing Iraq teaches us is that while external arbiters may be necessary, they are not sufficient. We’re leaving Iraq at the end of the year. Only Iraqis can sustain their democracy after we depart. The same will be true for all the other Arab peoples hoping to make this transition to self-rule. They need to grow their own arbiters — their own Arab Nelson Mandelas. That is, Shiite, Sunni and tribal leaders who stand up and say to each other what Mandela’s character said about South African whites in the movie “Invictus”: “We have to surprise them with restraint and generosity.”

This is what the new leaders of these Arab rebellions will have to do — surprise themselves and each other with a sustained will for unity, mutual respect and democracy. The more Arab Mandelas who emerge, the more they will be able to manage their own transitions, without army generals or outsiders. Will they emerge? Let’s watch and hope. We have no other choice. The lids are coming off.

Alien Life, Coming Slowly Into View

I REMEMBER the first time the concept of another world entered my mind. It was during a walk with my father in our garden in Sri Lanka. He pointed to the Moon and told me that people had walked on it. I was astonished: Suddenly that bright light became a place that one could visit.

Schoolchildren may feel a similar sense of wonder when they see pictures of a Martian landscape or Saturn’s rings. And soon their views of alien worlds may not be confined to the planets in our own solar system.

After millenniums of musings and a century of failed attempts, astronomers first detected an exoplanet, a planet orbiting a normal star other than the Sun, in 1995. Now they are finding hundreds of such worlds each year. Last month, NASA announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite. Six of the planets that Kepler found circle one star, and the orbits of five of them would fit within that of Mercury, the closest planet to our Sun.

By timing the passages of these five planets across their sun’s visage — which provides confirmation of their planetary nature — we can witness their graceful dance with one another, choreographed by gravity. These discoveries remind us that nature is often richer and more wondrous than our imagination. The diversity of alien worlds has surprised us and challenged our preconceptions many times over.

It is quite a change from merely 20 years ago, when we knew for sure of just one planetary system: ours. The pace of discovery, supported by new instruments and missions and innovative strategies by planet seekers, has been astounding.

What’s more, from measurements of their masses and sizes, we can infer what some of these worlds are made of: gases, ice or rocks. Astronomers have been able to take the temperature of planets around other stars, first with telescopes in space but more recently with ground-based instruments, as my collaborators and I have done.

Two and a half years ago, we even managed to capture the first direct pictures of alien worlds. There is something about a photo of an alien planet — even if it only appears as a faint dot next to a bright, overexposed star — that makes it “real.” Given that stars shine like floodlights next to the planetary embers huddled around them, success required painstaking efforts and clever innovations. One essential tool is adaptive optics technology, which, in effect, takes the twinkle out of the stars, thus providing sharper images from telescopes on the ground than would otherwise be possible.

At the crux of this grand pursuit is one basic question: Is our warm, wet, rocky world, teeming with life, the exception or the norm? It is an important question for every one of us, not just for scientists. It seems absurd, if not arrogant, to think that ours is the only life-bearing world in the galaxy, given hundreds of billions of other suns, the apparent ubiquity of planets, and the cosmic abundance of life’s ingredients. It may be that life is fairly common, but that “intelligent” life is rare.

Of course, the vast majority of the extra-solar worlds discovered to date are quite unlike our own: many are gas giants, and some are boiling hot while others endure everlasting chills. Just a handful are close in size to our planet, and only a few of those may be rocky like the Earth, rather than gaseous like Jupiter or icy like Neptune.

But within the next few years, astronomers expect to find dozens of alien earths that are roughly the size of our planet. Some of them will likely be in the so-called habitable zone, where the temperatures are just right for liquid water. The discovery of “Earth twins,” with conditions similar to what we find here, will inevitably bring questions about alien life to the forefront.

Detecting signs of life elsewhere will not be easy, but it may well occur in my lifetime, if not during the next decade. Given the daunting distances between the stars, the real-life version will almost certainly be a lot less sensational than the movies depicting alien invasions or crash-landing spaceships.

The evidence may be circumstantial at first — say, spectral bar codes of interesting molecules like oxygen, ozone, methane and water — and leave room for alternative interpretations. It may take years of additional data-gathering, and perhaps the construction of new telescopes, to satisfy our doubts. Besides, we won’t know whether such “biosignatures” are an indication of slime or civilization. Most people will likely move on to other, more immediate concerns of life here on Earth while scientists get down to work.

If, on the other hand, an alien radio signal were to be detected, that would constitute a more clear-cut and exciting moment. Even if the contents of the message remained elusive for decades, we would know that there was someone “intelligent” at the other end. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence with radio telescopes has come of age recently, 50 years after the first feeble attempt. The construction of the Allen Telescope Array on an arid plateau in northern California greatly expands the number of star systems from which astronomers could detect signals.

However it arrives, the first definitive evidence of life elsewhere will mark a turning point in our intellectual history, perhaps only rivaled by Copernicus’s heliocentric theory or Darwin’s theory of evolution. If life can spring up on two planets independently, why not on a thousand or even a billion others? The ramifications of finding out for sure that ours isn’t the only inhabited world are likely to be felt, over time, in many areas of human thought and endeavor — from biology and philosophy to religion and art.

Some people worry that discovering life elsewhere, especially if it turns out to be in possession of incredible technology, will make us feel small and insignificant. They seem concerned that it will constitute a horrific blow to our collective ego.

I happen to be an optimist. It may take decades after the initial indications of alien life for scientists to gather enough evidence to be certain or to decipher a signal of artificial origin. The full ramifications of the discovery may not be felt for generations, giving us plenty of time to get used to the presence of our galactic neighbors. Besides, knowing that we are not alone just might be the kick in the pants we need to grow up as a species.

Ray Jayawardhana, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto, is the author of “Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System.”

Why Brits Live Longer than Americans (It's Complicated)

Two key pieces of research were released on either side of the Atlantic this week, shedding new light on what we can do to live longer — and why experts will be squabbling over the secrets of longevity long after most of us have turned up our toes.

Heathland has already carried an interview with psychologist Howard Friedman about The Longevity Project, the newly published book Friedman co-authored with Leslie Martin examining data from a study of children born in California in the 1920s. The purpose of the research was to identify factors that led to comparatively early deaths for some people while their counterparts survived into robust old age. And an analysis by David Leon, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in the forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology and available here in advance, compares trends in life expectancy in Europe, the U.S. and Japan to try to discern the reasons for wide divergences among countries and continents and between the sexes.

I approached the studies with trepidation, as the author of a book that examines dramatic changes in our expectations and experiences of age and aging. Amortality (it's a word I coined to describe the increasing trend to live agelessly, doing and consuming the same things from teens into old age) won't be published until May, but is even now being printed. Our understanding of the science of aging is in flux. What if the new findings challenged my thesis? It's the kind of scenario to shorten a writer's life.

Happily for me, both analyses seem to reinforce the research that underpins my investigation and our conclusions overlap. The Longevity Project, for example, finds that devil-may-care characters, far from being granted a longevity bonus by their dispositions as traditional wisdom assumes, die younger than the types the authors interpret to be more sober-sided and conscientious — but whom I might recognize as amortally driven. There is a correlation between happiness and longevity, but the components of happiness are not — say it softly — unlimited leisure, positivity and the absence of stress. In fact, the opposite may be true.

That accords with two observations about amortals. They — we — may be careless about health. We assume that medical interventions can deliver us from the consequences of our actions and see no reason to change our habits and behaviors as the years slide by unremarked upon until something jolts us out of our amortal rhythms. But a positive by-product of age blindness is the amortal appetite for work, which remains undiminished and may even sharpen as we seek ways to keep intimations of mortality at bay. And continuing to work — even continuing to endure stress at work — would appear to enhance our prospects for a long life, as Friedman and Martin discovered.

The benefits of labor are, of course, shared only by those with the conscientiousness, as they term it — not to mention the dumb luck of being born into environments that encourage achievement — to secure high-status work. People in low-status jobs are much less likely to bank health benefits from working and may even be better off doing nothing.

This is just one of the ways in which socioeconomics determine how we live and for how long, and Leon's study lays bare inequities in health outcomes that at first glance might be attributed to the gap between wealthier and poorer populations. But as he makes clear, the statistics raise as many questions as they answer. Britons now live two years longer on average than their American counterparts although the U.S. has a higher per capita GDP and greater spending on health care (and it's hard to see fish'n'chips as a health food). Indeed, Leon says there is no indication that the obesity epidemic engulfing both countries has depressed life expectancies. He adds the caveat that we have yet to observe "a generation of people who have been obese from childhood through to adulthood."

What both studies and my own research confirms is that multiple factors interact in determining how we age. Only some of these are susceptible to influence at government or a personal level; that makes it even more important to pinpoint what those factors are.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/03/18/why-brits-live-longer-than-americans-its-complicated/#ixzz1HHcv3kdo

How Obama turned on a dime toward war

Posted By Josh Rogin Friday, March 18, 2011 - 12:26 PM  

At the start of this week, the consensus around Washington was that military action against Libya was not in the cards. However, in the last several days, the White House completely altered its stance and successfully pushed for the authorization for military intervention against Libyan leader Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi. What changed?

The key decision was made by President Barack Obama himself at a Tuesday evening senior-level meeting at the White House, which was described by two administration officials as "extremely contentious." Inside that meeting, officials presented arguments both for and against attacking Libya. Obama ultimately sided with the interventionists. His overall thinking was described to a group of experts who had been called to the White House to discuss the crisis in Libya only days earlier.

"This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values," a senior administration official said at the meeting, telling the experts this sentence came from Obama himself. The president was referring to the broader change going on in the Middle East and the need to rebalance U.S. foreign policy toward a greater focus on democracy and human rights.

But Obama's stance in Libya differs significantly from his strategy regarding the other Arab revolutions. In Egypt and Tunisia, Obama chose to rebalance the American stance gradually backing away from support for President Hosni Mubarak and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and allowing the popular movements to run their course. In Yemen and Bahrain, where the uprisings have turned violent, Obama has not even uttered a word in support of armed intervention - instead pressing those regimes to embrace reform on their own. But in deciding to attack Libya, Obama has charted an entirely new strategy, relying on U.S. hard power and the use of force to influence the outcome of Arab events.

"In the case of Libya, they just threw out their playbook," said Steve Clemons, the foreign policy chief at the New America Foundation. "The fact that Obama pivoted on a dime shows that the White House is flying without a strategy and that we have a reactive presidency right now and not a strategic one."

Inside the administration, senior officials were lined up on both sides. Pushing for military intervention was a group of NSC staffers including Samantha Power, NSC senior director for multilateral engagement; Gayle Smith, NSC senior director for global development; and Mike McFaul, NSC senior director for Russia. . 

On the other side of the ledger were some Obama administration officials who were reportedly wary of the second- and third-degree effects of committing to a lengthy military mission in Libya. These officials included National Security Advisor Tom Donilon and Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was also opposed to attacking Libya and had said as much in several public statements.

Not all of these officials were in Tuesday night's meeting.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called into the meeting over the phone, a State Department official confirmed. She was traveling in the region to get a first-hand look at how the new U.S. Middle East strategy is being received across the Arab world. Denied a visit with Egyptian youth leaders on the same day she strolled through Tahir Square, Clinton may have been concerned that the United States was losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab youth at the heart of the revolution.

When Clinton met with the G8 foreign ministers on Monday, she didn't lay out whether the United States had a favored response to the unfolding crisis in Libya, leaving her European counterparts completely puzzled. She met Libyan opposition leader Mahmoud Jibril in Paris but declined to respond positively to his request for assistance. This all gave the impression that Clinton was resisting intervention. In fact, she supported intervention, State Department official said, but had to wait until the Tuesday night meeting so that she didn't get out ahead of U.S. policy.

At the end of the Tuesday night meeting, Obama gave U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice instructions to go the U.N. Security Council and push for a resolution that would give the international community authority to use force. Her instructions were to get a resolution that would give the international community broad authority to achieve Qaddafi's removal, including the use of force beyond the imposition of a no-fly zone.

Speaking before the U.N. Security Council following Thursday's 10-0 vote, Rice made the humanitarian argument that force was needed in Libya to prevent civilian suffering.

"Colonel Qaddafi and those who still stand by him continue to grossly and systematically abuse the most fundamental human rights of Libya's people," Rice said. "On March 12, the League of Arab States called on the Security Council to establish a no-fly zone and take other measures to protect civilians. Today's resolution is a powerful response to that call-and to the urgent needs on the ground."

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon also said on Thursday that the justification for the use of force was based on humanitarian grounds, and referred to the principle known as Responsibility to Protect (R2P), "a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community's failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."

"Resolution 1973 affirms, clearly and unequivocally, the international community's determination to fulfill its responsibility to protect civilians from violence perpetrated upon them by their own government," he said.

Inside the NSC, Power, Smith, and McFaul have been trying to figure out how the administration could implement R2P and what doing so would require of the White House going forward. Donilon and McDonough are charged with keeping America's core national interests more in mind. Obama ultimately sided with Clinton and those pushing R2P -- over the objections of Donilon and Gates.

Congress was not broadly consulted on the decision to intervene in Libya, except in a Thursday afternoon classified briefing where administration officials explained the diplomatic and military plan. Rice was already deep in negotiations in New York.

Obama's Tuesday night decision to push for armed intervention was not only a defining moment in his ever-evolving foreign policy, but also may have marked the end of the alliance between Clinton and Gates -- an alliance that has successfully influenced administration foreign policy decisions dating back to the 2009 Afghanistan strategy review.

"Gates is clearly not on board with what's going on and now the Defense Department may have an entirely another war on its hands that he's not into," said Clemons. "Clinton won the bureaucratic battle to use DOD resources to achieve what's essentially the State Department's objective... and Obama let it happen."

UPDATE: A previous version of this story stated that Vice President Joseph Biden pushed for the imposition of a no fly zone in Libya. Friday afternoon, a senior White House official told The Cable that, in fact, Biden shared the same concerns of Gates, Donilon and McDonough and that those concerns have been addressed by the policy announced by the president. 

How the G-20 Can Prevent a Food Crisis

During the French presidency of the G-20, one of our top priorities is to tackle alarming price hikes in the commodity markets. Here's how we can get the job done.

BY BRUNO LE MAIRE | MARCH 14, 2011

As France assumes the presidency of the G-20 this year, trouble is brewing in the commodities markets. During our country's leadership over the next nine months, we are determined to head off crisis before it strikes the world's poor, as high food and oil prices did just three years ago. 

In 2008, the explosion in the price of commodities prompted hunger riots in several African countries. Preoccupied by the financial crisis, we didn't do anything to prevent such a situation from happening again. Two years of plentiful harvests in 2008 and 2009 were enough to conceal the problem. Today, however, the situation has once again become a cause for concern. Poor harvests last summer and an increase in climate variation have led to a significant increase in agricultural prices. Wheat, for example, increased from 140 euros per ton in July to more than 280 euros in February. The prices of barley and corn doubled. The Food Price Index established by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has reached its highest level since its creation in 1990. The same causes produce the same effects; we should expect a new food crisis to erupt if we don't take extremely swift action, especially because the number of countries that depend on the import of agricultural commodities has been continuously increasing since 1990.

The impact of the increase in commodity prices is already being felt: 44 million additional people have been pushed below the poverty threshold over the last few months. In Bangladesh, the average household expenditure on food has increased 60 percent since 2008. In certain vulnerable places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, sub-Saharan Africa, and Haiti, there is a real danger that food riots will take place. Quite simply, we've been warned; we know what to expect. No one would forgive us if there were food riots again given that the warning bells started to ring, one by one, several months ago. That would be an economic mistake and a moral offense. We must take urgent action given the risk of global food shortages.

France has assumed this responsibility by including agricultural price volatility on the agenda of its G-20 presidency. We realized that agriculture was a strategic issue. We realized that we couldn't feed the world by allowing the continuance of a system in which price variations can reach 50 to 60 percent in a few months. Whether the trend is upward or downward, the increasing volatility of commodity prices is intolerable for producers everywhere in the world because they don't have any visibility regarding their investments. When the trend is upward, volatility is intolerable for the consumers who have to pay more for their food. The importing countries that have the means to pay more for their commodities can take the hit; the others have to deal with shortages and famine. In every instance, it's the poorest countries that are hardest hit: In developing economies, many people are both producers and consumers and thus suffer the effects of upward trends as well as downward trends in prices.

What causes this volatility?

First, the gap between supply and demand. Global agricultural production is now only increasing 1.5 percent per year, whereas it increased 3 percent per year between 1960 and 1990. Climate change has a direct impact on agricultural yields. As a result of the drought in Eastern Europe and the floods in Australia, global harvests have decreased, leading to panic on the markets. At the same time, global food demand is increasing. There will be 9 billion people in the world in 2050. To feed the world in that year, agricultural production will need to increase 70 percent. In view of the volatility of prices, can we demand that states and farmers make the necessary investments to achieve that?

Secondly, this physical reality is aggravated by increasing financial speculation with respect to agricultural commodities. Today, markets trade paper worth 15 times global cereal production. Eighty-five percent of those market positions are held by purely financial stakeholders whose activities have no real link to agriculture. This speculation is unacceptable. Everyone understands that agricultural prices can vary according to the basic principles and phenomena of climate. Yet it is incomprehensible that financial actors can speculate on global hunger in order to double prices in just a few months. 

Given this twofold food and economic challenge, what are France's proposals?

First, we propose that the G-20 prioritize a reinvestment in global agriculture, a move that will have an exponential effect in fighting poverty in developing countries. In this regard, official development assistance in agriculture plays a key role. Yet over the last two decades, the percentage of aid devoted to agriculture fell from 15 percent to less than 5 percent. We must reverse this trend and uphold commitments made by the international community at the 2009 L'Aquila summit: to promote the development of agricultural autonomy in the least advanced countries and share our research and technological advances in agriculture with them.

Our second proposal is to expand market regulation. Let's be clear: Regulating the market in this area does not mean fighting the market. Regulating the market means improving the way it operates so that wealth is more fairly shared. It doesn't mean returning to a managed economy; it means restoring order when the market becomes erratic.

Specifically, we recommend working on four areas:

First, we will push for improved market transparency. We must be more aware of production, consumption and agricultural stocks. Let's not forgot that opacity and the lack of information are what create fertile ground for speculation.

Second, we need to improve international coordination. We must be able to respond more effectively to market crises. Responding effectively means responding together, not everyone in their own corner. This is the best way to face emergencies and avoiding market overreactions.

Next, we propose regulating the commodity derivatives market using the model of the Dodd-Franck Act adopted in the United States. Instruments exist, such as setting position limits, recording and standardizing contacts, and punishing market abuses. Why not put them in place for all global agricultural markets? 

Finally, our fellow G-20 countries should commit to providing support for the most vulnerable countries with respect to commodity price volatility. Together with the U.N. World Food Program, we want to establish pre-positioned emergency stocks in the areas that need them most. We also want to define risk coverage instruments for the most vulnerable countries. And finally, we propose doing away with export restrictions when they apply to emergency food aid for poor countries.

The solutions we propose are both ambitious and achievable. They are ambitious because they provide answers that are on a par with the challenges, and they are realistic because they provide the international action with concrete means to swiftly remedy the situation.

The forum for all these proposals to resolve the issue of volatility in agricultural prices will be the G-20 summit held in November. Meanwhile, the G-20's development working group will also work on implementing the development plan agreed upon in Seoul last year. For my part, I will bring together all the G-20 agricultural ministers for the very first time on June 22 and 23. France wanted to deal with this topic during its G-20 presidency because agriculture has once again become a strategic issue for the entire planet.

Yet though the G-20 will provide political momentum at the highest level, it cannot take the place of the work and expertise of other existing international organizations when it comes to food issues. That's why the G-20 will work closely with the main actors in this area: the United Nations, the FAO, the World Bank, the OECD, and the World Food Program.

President Nicolas Sarkozy also wants us to work with all countries on building an international consensus. Efforts must therefore extend beyond the G-20 and into other actors in the international community.

We had an economic responsibility to master the financial markets in 2008. We have a moral responsibility to ensure global food security in 2011. We drew lessons from the financial crisis to avoid a global collapse of the financial system. In this same spirit of responsibility, we must act today to save ourselves from urgently having to manage a food crisis with uncontrollable geopolitical consequences. We know what the problems are, and solutions are available. We can't say we didn't know.

10 Ideas That Will Change the World

Sweet Bird of Youth! The Case For Optimism

Youth. Antisocial, mobile-tapping, Lady Gaga-obsessed layabouts who get off the couch only to riot. What's to like? Rather a lot. In the Middle East and North Africa, youths played a major role in bringing down some long-standing dictatorships. And that may be only the start. A burgeoning young population might help speed global economic growth and be a sign of positive developments in the quality of life worldwide.
Around the world, countries are in various stages of progress through what economists call the demographic transition. That's the move from high rates of fertility and mortality — women having lots of children, many of whom die young — to low birthrates and longer life expectancies. The rich countries of Europe and North America, along with Japan, are all the way through this transition, with many of them seeing shrinking populations as a result. Africa is still in the middle of the change; Latin America and Asia are further ahead.
In all regions of the world, mortality rates have fallen before fertility rates have. To put it crudely, fewer people die before fewer people are born. That's why we've seen such dramatic global population growth over the past 50 years, from 3 billion to nearly 7 billion. At the start of the demographic transition, women still have lots of children, but many more of those children survive into adulthood and old age. Only after a while do birthrates decline. And between those two moments not only do populations increase, but the average age of people also drops. You get a youth bulge.
Take the developing countries of the Middle East and North Africa as an example. In 1960, on average, women in the region gave birth seven times, and about one-quarter of children died before their fifth birthday. By 1980 child mortality had almost halved, but fertility rates remained stubbornly high. Child mortality dropped further by 2000, and at last fertility began to follow — dropping to three births per woman. Meanwhile, the proportion of working-age people increased from about half in 1980 to nearly two-thirds today.
Traditionally economists and political scientists viewed a youth bulge as a problem. As part of a rising number of mouths to feed and hands to employ, an army of youths would put pressure on wages and food supplies, potentially dragging developing-world societies further into poverty. And youths could all too quickly become a literal army — provoking unrest and civil war. But in many countries, recent evidence tells a different story.
Work by David Bloom at Harvard and other economists suggests that the youth bulge can speed economic development. When a greater percentage of the total population is of working age, then, other things being equal, you would expect income per person to be higher. As women cease spending their most productive years having babies, they can enter the workforce. That's good. It is working-age people (not children or retirees) who save the most, creating more funds for investment and growth. Bloom and his colleagues suggest that as much as a third of East Asia's "miracle" growth rates over the past few decades might be attributed to the youth bulge.
But there's nothing inevitable about a youth bulge producing a growth dividend. Benefits have to be earned. Without the right policies spurring education and job opportunities, they won't materialize. The Middle East got education right: college and university enrollment in Egypt has doubled since 1990, for example, and Cairo University alone has about 200,000 students. But a sclerotic private sector and hidebound institutions have failed to create sufficient jobs for graduates. Unemployment among 15-to-24-year-olds in the Middle East and North Africa is above 25%. And despite the fact that in many countries in the region there are more young women than young men in college, few women are active in the workforce, especially after marriage.
In the Middle East, then, young people had nowhere to go but the street. Luckily, once there, they confounded skeptics by favoring ringtones over riots. Young, educated and tech-savvy, they helped foment peaceful revolutions. Think of Tahrir Square as Egypt's Woodstock — only cleaner and with a purpose.
Political scientist Chris Blattman of Yale suggests that it isn't just in the Middle East that the link between youth and political violence might be weaker than many once thought. Around the world, he notes, "the people who riot or rebel are poor, unemployed young men... The problem is that the people who don't riot are also poor, unemployed young men. Most of the population is poor and unemployed and young. It's not clear that the poorer and less employed are more violent." It is clear, though, that if the youth demonstrations lead to more responsive governments that focus on creating jobs, the region may at last start seeing a demographic dividend.
That's just the start. Behind the youth bulge is more good news. Falling fertility and mortality rates are great outcomes in their own right. They mean that the probability that a woman in the Middle East or North Africa will go through the pain of watching one of her children die before its fifth birthday has fallen from 85% in 1960 to just about 10% today. That's still too high, but no parent could call it anything other than wonderful progress.
Moreover, falling fertility, along with reduced risk from childbirth, means that maternal mortality has dropped worldwide. The number of mothers who died in childbirth fell from 526,000 in 1980 to 343,000 in 2008. Reductions in fertility and child and maternal mortality are all connected to a greater power among the world's women to make decisions about how many children they want and how to raise them. A sign: girls' school-enrollment rates have been climbing rapidly worldwide. Even in parts of the Middle East, they now match or surpass boys' rates of enrollment. Declining birthrates also reflect family-planning programs' rolling out access to modern contraceptive techniques, which have reduced birthrates by as much as 1.5 births per woman.
Falling mortality at a time of rising populations worldwide suggests even more good news: the global breakdown of the so-called Malthusian trap, which predicts that rising population will lead to increased poverty, famine and even war as limited resources are spread among ever more people. Instead, famines have become increasingly rare. Wealth has been spreading so much that global poverty has been more than halved since 1990. And the recent past has seen a considerable downtick in violence: there were 24 wars going on in the world in 1984, but by 2008 that number had dropped to five.
The spread of global democracy, better health, more education, less violence — it all adds up to a much better world. And that suggests the biggest new idea of all: it's time to abandon our usual pessimism about the state of the planet and the course of history. We've got many challenges to overcome, but it might be a good idea to adopt a bit of youthful optimism when it comes to confronting them. After all, we appear to be making pretty good progress.
Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author of Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2059521_2059564_2059561,00.html #ixzz1H7UOx6Yv

Why Afghanistan Is Far from Hopeless

In winter, a noxious fog sometimes descends on Kabul that is so acrid, you can actually taste it. It's a toxic brew of fumes from traffic jams and thousands of charcoal fires, and it's a testament to the fact that in the decade since the fall of the Taliban, Kabul's population has gone up sixfold, from 500,000 to about 3 million.
This gets to the paradox of Afghanistan today: despite the enormous level of government corruption and the Taliban's resurgence in parts of the country, there is another story here — of Afghan recovery and progress. But this story is not well understood by many Americans, 6 out of 10 of whom now oppose the war in Afghanistan.
Consider that under Taliban rule there were only a million children in school. Now there are 6 million, many of them girls. During the Taliban era, the phone system barely existed; now 1 in 3 Afghans owns a cell phone. Basic health care has gone from being a luxury to being available to most of the population, and annual economic growth is over 20%.
These kinds of advances explain why 6 in 10 Afghans in a poll last fall said their country is going in the right direction. The positive feelings Afghans have about the trajectory of their country seem counterintuitive given Afghanistan's deep poverty and feckless government, but they become more explicable when you recall what life under the Taliban was like. The Taliban incarcerated half the population in their homes, massacred thousands of Shi'ites, hosted pretty much every Islamist terrorist and insurgent group in the world and were pariahs on the international stage. Simultaneously, they presided over the collapse of what remained of the economy. And before the Taliban, there was civil war and rule by warlords; before that, a communist dictatorship; and before that, brutal Soviet occupation.
No wonder that 6 in 10 Afghans today have a favorable opinion of the U.S. military presence in their country. They understand that the U.S. is a guarantor of a future that is somewhat better than the Afghan past. They are not, of course, expecting Afghanistan to be turned into a central Asian nirvana, but they are hoping for more security and prosperity, and there is reason to believe they are right to do so. The war in Afghanistan still claims far fewer victims than the war in Iraq, a conflict widely believed to be all but over. Last year about 4,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by warring factions, while in Afghanistan, which has a larger population than Iraq, some 2,800 civilians died in the conflict. That makes the death rate of the Afghan war 9 per 100,000. (The murder rate in Washington is 22 per 100,000.)
The Taliban are getting squeezed where it hurts. The southern province of Helmand is the linchpin of Afghanistan's opium trade and a region where the Taliban once roamed freely. Now it might as well be Marine-istan, so effectively does the U.S. control most of it. A recent BBC poll found the proportion of Helmand residents who say their security is "good" has jumped from 14% to 67% since 2009. And in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, the religious warriors have been pushed out of key districts. The International Council on Security & Development, a think tank that has done field work in Afghanistan for years and is generally critical of Western policy, released a report last month that concluded that the U.S. troop surge in Helmand and Kandahar had improved security significantly.
This makes the prospect of "reconciliation" with elements of the Taliban more plausible. Insurgents do not make peace deals when they think they are winning, but they might if they begin to think they are losing. Richard Barrett, the U.N. official responsible for monitoring the Taliban, says, "I have heard of 12 different initiatives designed to engage the Taliban in talks." And such initiatives are pursued with a large national consensus that this is the right way forward; more than three-quarters of Afghans favor negotiations with the Taliban.
President Obama has also shifted the calculations of the Taliban by announcing that American combat forces will stay in Afghanistan until the end of 2014, a sea change in U.S. policy that has surprised the Taliban and even dovish members of Obama's Cabinet. When Obama announced the surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan in December 2009, he said they would start withdrawing in 18 months. Vice President Joe Biden subsequently opined, "In July 2011, you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it."
Extending the deadline is enormously important. The fact that there will be large numbers of American forces in Afghanistan for the next four years has major implications for all the players in the country. Taliban detainees have told their U.S. interrogators that the prospect of fighting for another four long years is sapping their morale. And more years on the clock will allow the buildup of a much larger and more effective Afghan National Army — one that is more capable of resisting the Taliban — while giving Afghan politicians sufficient time to organize to defeat the Karzai mafia, which now dominates the country.
There is also some real hope that Afghanistan's economy can be based on more than just international aid and opium production. In January, an obscure Pentagon office, the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, released a report about Afghanistan's mineral wealth. The 49-page study details the size and location of an estimated $900 billion worth of mineral deposits across Afghanistan, the fruits of "remote sensing technology" of satellites, buttressed by the work of geologists on the ground taking samples.
The Pentagon report concluded that Afghanistan could become a "world leader" in lithium, which is used in making batteries and other industrial processes, and it found a massive copper deposit just south of Kabul and next door to another giant copper seam for which the Chinese have already paid $3 billion for the right to mine. The report also identified substantial gold deposits; three months ago the Afghan government approved a deal brokered by JPMorgan in which Western investors will invest an estimated $50 million in a gold mine in northern Afghanistan.
With such potential wealth below the surface, Afghanistan can "become either South Korea or Somalia," an official in the Afghan Foreign Ministry explained to me. Afghans already lived through their own version of Somalia during the civil war of the early 1990s and the subsequent rule of the Taliban, who restored order at the price of imposing a brutal theocracy. They don't want more of that; fewer than 10% of Afghans in a number of polls hold a favorable view of the Taliban. There's nothing like living under Taliban rule to convince one that the group's promises of Islamist utopia here on earth don't pan out. Instead, Afghans want what everyone else wants: a slightly more prosperous and secure future. Slowly, very slowly, that goal is being met.
Bergen, a frequent visitor to Afghanistan since 1993, is the author of The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda and the director of the national-security studies program at the New America Foundation

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Relax: You Don't Need to Worry About Meeting E.T.

The recipe for life ought to be pretty simple: start with water, add some hydrocarbons and simmer for a million millennia or so. Nothing but chemistry plus energy plus time. It worked on Earth; it might have worked on Mars, till the planet dried up. For all we know, it's working right now in the deep oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa. Humans and aliens haven't connected yet, but with 1022 stars out there (that's 1 with 22 zeros), it's just a matter of time — right? Wrong. If exobiologists have learned anything, it's that you and your kids and their kids' kids will probably never hear the slightest peep from an alien. If E.T. the movie star is your idea of what extraterrestrial life might be like, you will be disappointed. If your thoughts run more to War of the Worlds, you can breathe easy.
How can we be so sure? Start with the numbers. Most stars are too far from Earth for us to hear from the theoretical inhabitants of any of the theoretical planets orbiting them. A signal from a star 1,000 light-years away would, by definition, take 1,000 years to get here — and that's just next door, in an observable universe with a radius of some 14 billion light-years. "If the nearest hundred or thousand stars don't have life, we probably won't ever, ever, ever know about it anywhere else," says astronomer Don Brownlee of the University of Washington, in Seattle.
Whether or not we ever hear from aliens, cooking up life may be a whole lot more complex than just mix, heat and serve. Even asteroids are known to have once contained water ice, and radio active isotopes — which have since decayed — provided them with warmth. But they're hardly crawling with living things. What's needed, says Brownlee, is a more varied world, like Earth, that has a lot of different environments. That leads to chemical disequilibrium, which in turn leads to electrons' being traded back and forth. That's what builds complex molecules and, later, organisms. "It's not a matter of random assembly," he says. "You could put all of the elements of life in a jar and wait a trillion years, and it'll still just be there."
Physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies of Arizona State University is even less persuaded of the odds of otherworldly life. The author of The Eerie Silence, which argues — well, you can guess — Davies questions some of the most fundamental premises of our search for extraterrestrial life, including our hunt for earthlike worlds. "There's certainly a lot of real estate out there, but habitable is not the same as inhabited," he says. "I have no idea what turns nonlife into life. I get irritated by people who say life can emerge in earthlike conditions."
Our scientific methods are also hopelessly poor, because almost all our theories of life are drawn from the only place we know it exists, which is right here. When your sample group is so vanishingly small — when n=1, as the statisticians say — you've got a long way to go before you reach statistical significance.
But the biggest mistake exobiologists make may be believing that the only place to look for alien life is on alien worlds. The best place to find it could be on Earth. If life indeed developed with relative ease, Davies argues, it could have emerged numerous times in numerous different forms right beside carbon-based organisms like us. We don't see it because we don't know what we're looking for.
We've already discovered life in extreme environments on our own planet — notably in deep volcanic vents where water is heated to 120°C (250°F), temperatures that ought to be unsurvivable. Those organisms don't count as aliens because on the temperature spectrum, they're living in a zone adjacent to our own. "They don't stand out, because there's no discontinuity," Davies says. On the other hand, if we found no life at all in the 125°C-to-175°C (260°F to 350°F) range and then a critter popped up at 195°C (385°F), we might be onto something.
Of course, even such aliens would hardly be the kind we either crave or fear — those who could regale us with tales of what things look like on the other side of the cosmos on the one hand, or conquer us with their superior intellects on the other. Too bad — or maybe very good — you're never going to see them.

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Fix the Deficit? We Can Do That

It's rare that those of us concerned about the nation's fiscal course come bearing good news. The federal debt, after all, is as high as it has ever been in the post-1945 period and is growing uncontrollably. Under our best projections, the debt will grow from nearly 65% of gross domestic product today to over 90% by the end of the decade — a level that experts have warned could have dangerous economic consequences.
Yet while our fiscal challenges are large and growing, they are not insurmountable. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, on which I served as associate director, has shown a way forward. Its recommendations offer proof that broad bipartisan support for deficit reduction — based on the principle of shared sacrifice — is possible. Yes, the population is aging, which means Social Security and Medicare costs will rise. And yes, health care costs continue to grow faster than the economy, putting upward pressure on federal health spending. But we can address these challenges. Our problems are not fundamentally economic; they are political.
The politics of pain makes deficit reduction a difficult task, of course. More worried about the next election than about the next generation, politicians prefer to avoid or defer decisions that increase people's taxes or cut their benefits and services.
Making things worse, pledges of what not to do — raise taxes, meddle with Social Security, cut defense spending — are pervasive in Washington. The more pieces of the budget that policymakers take off the table, the harder it is to bring debt under control.
And yet the fiscal commission overcame these odds. The plan would cut $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending — both defense and nondefense — while protecting, and in some cases increasing, spending on education, infrastructure and high-value R&D. It would cut $600 billion in mandatory spending, especially by reducing health care costs and reforming federal pensions, while protecting programs for the poor and disadvantaged. It would reform the tax code in a way that reduces or eliminates various tax breaks in order to drastically cut tax rates while helping generate nearly $1 trillion in new revenue. And it would make the Social Security system solvent for the next 75 years and beyond through a combination of progressive changes to the benefit formula, a gradual increase in the retirement age and an increase in the amount of income subject to the payroll tax, among other measures.
In total, the fiscal commission's recommendations would reduce the deficit by $3.9 trillion through 2020, bring annual deficits to manageable levels of 1% to 2% of GDP (compared with 10% this year) and put the debt on a downward path after 2013.
The recommendations prove that we can enact policies to bring the debt under control and do so without cutting spending or increasing taxes in a way that hurts low-income individuals or stifles investment and growth. Far more important, the commission showed that such a plan can garner support from across the political spectrum. The plan received the support of 11 out of 18 commissioners, a bipartisan super majority that comprised five Democrats, five Republicans and one independent. The fiscal commission demonstrated emphatically that the parties can work together, in the spirit of principled compromise, to get our fiscal house in order.
Unfortunately, the President's budget this year failed to include most of the commission's recommendations, and House Republicans have thus far focused too narrowly on cuts in domestic discretionary spending. But neither party has ruled out the adoption of the recommendations. As tough votes on this year's budget and a debt-ceiling increase come up, a comprehensive deficit-reduction plan may be the only way to avoid stalemate.
On our commission, we actually found that the "go big" approach helped garner more votes, not fewer. Republicans were willing to cut defense spending, but only if nondefense spending (including entitlements) was also cut. Democrats were willing to accept substantial spending cuts, but only if accompanied by significant new revenues.
If President Obama and the leadership of both chambers of Congress — and both parties — are willing to enter into serious negotiations to solve our fiscal problems, there is no doubt that they can reach agreement. Everyone will have to give up something. After all, the solutions are painful. But in the process, everyone can get something in return: a better future.
Goldwein is policy director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget

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Your Next Job: Made in India or China

There is a chance, and maybe even a good one, that you'll walk into work one Monday morning and find out your job is being moved to China or India. Millions have already seen that happen, from shop-floor machinists to IT specialists, in places as disparate as Italy, the U.S. and South Korea. China is a manufacturing machine, charging into the global market for everything from cars to solar panels. India's highly trained engineers are outdueling Stanford grads for jobs in R&D, software development and other sectors that are supposed to be the West's economic salvation. The harsh realities of the globalization of labor have left much of the world's workforce feeling despondent. Everyone in places like London and Los Angeles is competing with smart applicants from Bangalore or Shanghai who are willing to work long hours for a pittance. When there are 2.5 billion people in those two Asian giants combined, how can anyone's job be safe?
Yet there's another way of looking at the great shift of economic power to the East, one that is much less scary and perhaps even inspiring. Those 2.5 billion people are getting richer by the day. This presents an unprecedented opportunity for the workers of the world.
Thirty years ago, the average person in China or India could afford almost nothing beyond basic food and other simple necessities of life. That poverty was a problem for all of us. With so little spending power in the developing world, the global economy was dependent on a handful of wealthy nations, especially the U.S. Today, however, China and India have become a new source of growth for the global economy. Hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians can now splurge on Sony LCD TVs, Australian steaks and Apple iPhones. Last year, Indians and Chinese bought 19.9 million new passenger vehicles, 70% more than Americans did, according to J.D. Power. This new bonanza for consumer goods increases demand for copper, cotton and other natural resources; the machinery to manufacture those goods; the ships and trucks to transport them; and the people to design and sell them. The result is higher sales and bigger profits for companies such as Boeing and Rio Tinto, as well as more jobs.
We've already seen the benefits. If not for the continued rapid growth in emerging economies like China and India, the world might easily have descended into a real depression in 2008. China lifted all of East Asia out of the recession by buying capital equipment and consumer goods from Japan, South Korea and the rest of the region. U.S. exports of goods to China reached $92 billion in 2010, a 32% jump. The influence of China and India will only spread and strengthen as the two countries get wealthier and purchase more from the rest of the world. In Western Australia, the local chamber of minerals and energy believes the industry will create 40,000 jobs over the next three to five years in that state alone, in part because of expanding exports to China.
The newly rich of China and India are also bringing their money right to your doorstep. Their citizens are becoming active tourists, filling hotel rooms and dining out in Times Square and Tokyo's Ginza. According to the U.N. World Tourism Organization, the number of Chinese traveling outside the country rose to 47.7 million in 2009, 54% more than in 2005, and they spent more than French, Japanese or Canadian travelers. Chinese and Indian companies are expanding overseas in a quest for global presence and markets, creating jobs everywhere. Mumbai-based IT giant Tata Consultancy Services — a firm built on outsourcing from the U.S. and Europe — employs more than 13,000 non-Indians, nine times as many as in 2005. Chinese firms invested $56.5 billion abroad in 2009, up from only $12.3 billion in 2005, and they tend to hire locally as they invest, to absorb talent and know-how. Not one of the 450 people who work in the U.S. for Chinese appliance maker Haier is from China.
The advance of China and India demands an overhaul in the way we think about jobs. You might just find, for example, that your biggest customers are in Chengdu, not Chicago, or that your boss sits in New Delhi, not New York City. Your paycheck could come in renminbi or rupees instead of in euros or dollars. Sure, in this new economic order, your job may be lost to Chinese or Indian workers. But don't worry. They'll give it right back.

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Think of Your Airport As a City — but Nicer

Home is not a matter of where you sleep but of where you stand. I made this curious pronouncement seven years ago at a conference next to the Dallas Fort Worth airport (DFW), and to my surprise, the diplomats, Air Force officers, teachers and executives gathered in the room seemed largely to agree. They felt closer to fellow nomads in Singapore or Toronto, they said, than to their geographic neighbors. But when we flew away after three days of discussing global families in our hotel, I realized something even more displacing: none of us, in 72 hours, had set foot outside the airport complex, a small universe of five terminals, a 36-hole golf course and 400,000 jobs within a 5-mile (8 km) radius. No surprise. The community that has formed around the terminals — the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, as it's known — is home now to 6 million people and is the fastest-growing city in the U.S.
The days when we built our airports around cities now seem distant; in the new, mobile century, we build our cities around airports. For most businesses, it's more important to be close to Bangalore or Shanghai than to be near the next suburb over. And as we complete "the annihilation of space by time" that Marx predicted, and as connectedness becomes more urgent than rootedness, airports are not just becoming cities. Cities are becoming like airports — places to leave from more than to live in.
I'd always sensed this, but it came home to me with almost shocking immediacy when I was reading the dazzling new book Aerotropolis. One of its authors, John F. Kasarda, is a business professor in North Carolina who flies from Amsterdam to Seoul preaching the gospel of building homes and businesses near airports. Co-author Greg Lindsay is a journalist who knows how to make Kasarda's research racy while raising questions about the cost of living in midair.
As Kasarda sees it, the writing's already on the screen. The third largest computer company on the planet, Lenovo, doesn't even have a corporate headquarters; its executives just orbit the globe. Two in every five IBM employees have no office. And Ram Charan, "the most influential consultant alive," in Fortune's words, had no home until he bought one (in Dallas, of course) at 67. Previously he lived entirely in hotels and on planes, sending his laundry to an office in Dallas, from which strangers sent him fresh clothes at a future destination.
Much of this is as alarming as hearing George Clooney's character in Up in the Air say, "The slower we move, the faster we die." What does a world in constant flight say about family ties and continuity? Doesn't the aerotropolitan way of life put business before humanity and convenience before community?
Aerotropolis points out that we can still address the oldest needs but in new and liberating ways: A grandmother flies to DFW every Tuesday from her home in Houston to babysit for her daughter, who is completing her medical residency. Polish surgeons commute every week to work in Nottingham, England, as fast as Brits travel on weekends to Estonia for stag parties. Yet several years ago, I spent two weeks living in and around Los Angeles' LAX to see what the global city of the future might look like. I've never been so exhausted. People were shouting, sobbing, sitting alone and confused at baggage carousels. Airport workers kept telling me how travel is etymologically related to travail. The whole experience felt as unsettling as being in a city of cranes like Beijing or Dubai.
But maybe I was drawing the wrong conclusions. Norman Foster's Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International is larger than all five of Heathrow's terminals combined, and when you walk through the mile-long (1.6 km) dragon-headed structure, it's hard to dispute that it's infinitely more appealing than the overcrowded cities and villages all around. It was the largest airport terminal in the world until Terminal 3 in Dubai eclipsed it. Emirates Airlines not long ago boasted profits greater than those of all U.S. carriers combined. LAX, which I'd taken to be the future, is, in fact, like New York City's JFK, hopelessly lost in the past. Even as LAX is busy upgrading shuttle buses to take visitors downtown, Beijing and Dubai — like Dallas — are building whole cities in the air that allow them to take off, again and again. It's only those of us stuck on the ground, perhaps, who can't see the larger picture.
Iyer is the author of The Global Soul, about airports and movement

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How Stem Cells Are Changing the Way We Think About Disease

Treating disease is about fixing broken parts — about replacing cells that no longer work as they should, repairing tissues that falter and boosting systems that fail. But curing disease is a different matter. To cure disease, you have to do all of that and more. You have to remove the pathological cause of the problem and to ensure that it doesn't return. This requires teasing out where rogue cells went wrong and finding a way to nurture healthier ones to replace them.
That's where the promise of stem cells lies. As the mother cells of every tissue in the body, they are the biological ore from which the body emerges. All cells can trace their provenance to a stem cell, to the embryo and the first days after fertilization when such cells form. It's now possible to grow stem cells in a lab, not just from embryonic tissue but also by turning back the clock on an already developed cell like one from the skin, bypassing the embryo altogether with four important fountain-of-youth genes that rework the skin cell's DNA machinery and make it stemlike again.
These biological wonders are transforming the way we treat disease as well as how we think about unhealthy states and even the way we approach aging. Now that it's possible to generate an unlimited supply of stem cells from our own tissues, scientists say it's only a matter of time before they figure out how to turn those cells into nerves, heart cells, liver cells or any other living tissue we may need if we get sick or injured. Disease, therefore, no longer needs to be a black box of medical mystery. To expose what makes nerve cells in patients with Lou Gehrig's disease lose their ability to control muscle, for example, some researchers have already grown motor neurons from stem cells made from patients' skin and watched how they develop, at first normally, then veering off into pathology. Such a disease-in-a-dish strategy led to the discovery that it's not the motor neurons that are at fault but that other cells assigned the task of supporting these nerves turn toxic and break down the connections to muscle. With that insight, drugmakers have begun screening compounds to see if they can find an agent to block that lethal effect.
Even when we already know what causes a disease, stem cells can help us improve on existing therapies. Stem cells may make it possible for Type 1 diabetics, for example, to eliminate their repeated blood checks and insulin injections by someday allowing them to generate their own insulin-making pancreatic cells. If stem cells can replenish the dying brain neurons that affect memory and cognition, Alzheimer's patients might also benefit.
But why stop there? If these cells can replace ailing cells, why not aging ones? Can stem cells, as a source of replenished, renewable and healthy cells, keep us young forever? "In the absence of disease, why would we die?" asks Douglas Melton, a stem-cell researcher at Harvard University. "With stem cells, can we get control of the aging process?"
There's tantalizing evidence that this might be possible, at least when it comes to blood and the immune system. Thomas Rando, a researcher at Stanford University, thinks stem-cell treatments may enhance healing in older patients who have difficulty recovering from surgery or a fracture. But he's also thinking about deeper issues involving the power of regenerative medicine. "There are very basic questions I hope we can make headway on using stem cells — in terms of understanding cellular aging, how that's related to tissue aging and the aging of an organism," he says. Which leads to the interesting possibility that with stem cells, we may no longer define age as how old we think we are but as how old our cells tell us we are.

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Today's Smart Choice: Don't Own. Share

Someday we'll look back on the 20th century and wonder why we owned so much stuff. Not that it wasn't great at first. After thousands of years during which most human beings lived hand to mouth, in the 20th century the industrial economies of the West and eventually much of the rest of the world began churning out consumer goods — refrigerators, cars, TVs, telephones, computers. George W. Bush won re-election as President in 2004 in part by proclaiming an "ownership society": "The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America."
Even as Bush was announcing its birth though, the ownership society was rotting from the inside out. Its demise began with Napster. The digitalization of music and the ability to share it made owning CDs superfluous. Then Napsterization spread to nearly all other media, and by 2008 the financial architecture that had been built to support all that ownership — the subprime mortgages and the credit-default swaps — had collapsed on top of us. Ownership hadn't made the U.S. vital; it had just about ruined the country.
Maybe we're all learning though. You're not likely to be buying big-ticket items if you're out of work, and even if you have a job and a house, good luck taking out a second mortgage to help you scratch that consumerist itch. That's especially true for the young, who've borne the brunt of the recession, with a jobless rate in the U.S. of about 20%.
And it's the young who are leading the way toward a different form of consumption, a collaborative consumption: renting, lending and even sharing goods instead of buying them. You can see it in the rise of big businesses like Netflix, whose more than 20 million subscribers pay a fee to essentially share DVDs, or Zipcar, which gives more than 500,000 members the chance to share cars part-time.
Those companies, however, while successful, are essentially Internet-era upgrades of old car- and video-rental businesses. The true innovative spirit of collaborative consumption can be found in start-ups like Brooklyn-based SnapGoods, which helps people rent goods via the Internet. Or Airbnb, which allows people to rent their homes to travelers. There's a green element here, of course: sharing and renting more stuff means producing and wasting less stuff, which is good for the planet and even better for one's self-image. And renting a power drill via SnapGoods for the one day you need it is a lot cheaper than buying it. It's a perfect fit for an urban lifestyle in which you have lots of neighbors and little storage.
But the real benefit of collaborative consumption turns out to be social. In an era when families are scattered and we may not know the people down the street, sharing things — even with strangers we've just met online — allows us to make meaningful connections. Peer-to-peer sharing "involves the re-emergence of community," says Rachel Botsman, co-author of What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. "This works because people can trust each other."
We yearn to trust and be trusted — one researcher has found that people get a spike of the pleasant neurotransmitter oxytocin when they're entrusted with another's goods. That's the beauty of a sharing society — and perhaps the reason it might prove more lasting than one built on ownership.

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How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Tweet The Ways

Compared with a sonnet on perfumed parchment, a 140-character declaration of love doesn't seem very romantic. But you may get one soon. In a recent survey by Shape and Men's Fitness magazines, more than 65% of respondents said they had been asked out via text message. And when was the last time you sent someone a love letter? Or, frankly, any letter at all?
But don't despair. In the age of texting, old-fashioned romance may seem as antiquated as Old English. Yet technology can smooth the course of true love, whether it helps find it, nurture it or, if need be, end it.
Looking for your Romeo? The boom in Internet dating means there are more fish in the sea than ever before. Heading online is no longer seen as a last resort. Half the respondents in a survey by advertising giant Euro RSCG Worldwide said they knew someone who had met a partner online. With Internet dating, "you kind of go to a 'bar' and look at all potential mates very easily and scroll through them," says Patrick Markey, director of the Interpersonal Relationship Laboratory at Villanova University. For those too busy for the singles scene, online dating is a welcome shortcut, especially when profiles and photos let you be choosy about your choices.
Before you even go on your first date, you can Google and Facebook your potential love to your heart's content to make sure she's not hiding any skeletons. "What people know about each other gets revealed more quickly now," says Robert Rosenwein, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University. "It may warn you off from some people so you don't have to spend time figuring out whether or not a person's right for you."
So once a potential Juliet is found, what's the way to a modern woman's heart? Try her cell phone. If they're correctly organized, text messages are like stacks of love letters tied with ribbon — only now they're searchable. Paul Walker, 25, used texts to create the perfect anniversary gift for his girlfriend, Elizabeth. He created a calendar that tracked the chronology of their relationship, using only their text messages. As he was making the calendar, Walker, who lives in Brooklyn, converted his chats with her into a text document — 1,200 pages long. Though the mass of messages was intimidating, the finished calendar showed the arc of their relationship. "It ended up creating a rather emotional thing," says Walker. And an overjoyed girlfriend.
Technology helps not just the enamored though. In a study, Jen Eden and Alice Veksler discovered that those attempting to thwart an unwanted love have new tools at their disposal. "We found that people use avoidance tactics to maintain a status quo" in a relationship, says Eden, a visiting assistant professor at Miami University in Ohio. "And computer-mediated technology is great for that because you can think about what you want to say." If a romance goes sour, your iPhone can take all the effort out of writing a Dear John letter. In the magazine survey, 43% of women and 27% of men said they had been dumped via text message.
Especially in the case of breakups, it's tough to draw the line between efficient and impersonal communication. The key seems to lie in balancing your online and off-line relationship. "Some people think it's 'add water, instant relationship' because we have access to each other's Facebook profiles," says Art Ramirez, an assistant professor of human communication at Arizona State University. Technology just cuts out the small talk, letting you know if your partner is the right one for you.
And who needs Shakespearean declarations of love anyway? If Juliet had Googled Romeo, she would have found out he was a Montague and avoided all that fuss.

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Using Business Savvy to Help Good Causes

Brian Mullaney is raising $25 million to send out 200 million pieces of junk mail. This qualifies as good news because all the letters he sends will be asking for money. Still not seeing an upside? Mullaney, who has a way with an envelope, believes he can fix at least five of the world's problems with his direct-marketing campaigns: clubfeet, burns, holes in the heart, cataracts and hydrocephalus.
His plan would sound like the scheme of a hopeless idealist if it weren't for Mullaney's track record. He's one of the founders of Smile Train, an organization that funds cleft-palate operations in countries where people are too poor to pay for them. Smile Train, set up in 1999, raised $91 million in 2009 with a fundraising staff of four and had $101 million in assets, according to its tax records. The charity claims that, because of its work, 600,000 people no longer have cleft palates.
Mullaney is a believer in scale, which is partly why he loves direct mail. From the more than 100 million letters a year Smile Train has sent out, he and his team have reams of data about what appeals generate the most money. He knows which of the 49 faces he tested on the envelopes — presurgery, postsurgery, children, grownups — elicited the best response. (American-looking kids, presurgery.) He knows whether promising to never send another request for money is more effective than enclosing address labels. (It is.) Smile Train's team analyzed the mail so thoroughly, they can not only predict the most generous ZIP codes, but they can also foretell that Alysons will give more than Suzies.
Now Mullaney, who has parted ways with Smile Train, wants to take those data-analyzing techniques and apply them to a new set of problems — which, like cleft palates, can be solved with surgery performed by local medical clinics at non-Western prices.
His new foundation, Surgery for the Poor, hopes to be the invisible marketing and fundraising arm for a family of what he calls "charity brands." It will function like a wholesaler, a big donormaking factory gathering money cheaply for different causes, each under its own name. If the trends at Smile Train hold, spending $36 million on direct marketing the first year and $60 million a year thereafter will yield a surplus by the second year, and by the fifth, $146 million annually to spend on operations.
Why doesn't everybody do what Mullaney's doing? Similar techniques are used by credit-card companies. But, says Mullaney, whose background is in advertising, most foundations reject direct mail because it's expensive, annoying, and déclassé. Less than 0.5% of people respond to the initial letters. (But about 60% of those who do will give again sometime in the next two years.) Nonprofits are also wary of spending donors' money on getting more donors. "The whole charity industry is very dysfunctional when it comes to this stuff, because they're antibusiness and antimarketing," says Mullaney.
Raising lots of cash just for direct mail is not uncontroversial. Several fundraising experts said they'd never heard of a campaign so big. But Mullaney is meeting with billionaires to get the first $25 million and claims he's 80% of the way there. And he's unapologetic about spending that much to raise more — or about the junk mail. "Do-gooders run 9 out of 10 charities. They don't understand why they have to market," he says. "It's time for marketers to step up."

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