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4) Car Talk/The Puzzler: The princess and Igor [Un casse-tête. Comment le bossu va-t-il finir par sauver sa vie et épouser la belle princesse ?]
http://www.cartalk.com

A beautiful young princess had a dilemma. She was in love with Igor, the blacksmith's son and a hunchback, and she wanted to marry him. Sshe knew that her father, the king, would not approve. Furthermore, if the king knew of their love, he would surely have the young man executed. They devised a plan. They will run away to be married. Sadly, their plan fails, and they are stopped at the castle gates by the guards who spotted Igor's hump, of course.

They are brought before the king. Now the king was indeed furious but decided to offer Igor a sporting chance, as they say. He said he would write the word "princess" on one piece of paper and the word "death" on another, and the young lad could decide his own fate by selecting one of the slips of paper from a jar. So the two slips are crumbled up, thrown in a jar.

So the young man has his fate in his own hands. He has to draw a stupid paper from the jar. However, he knows the king is sneaky and has written "death" on both slips of paper. Despite this. Igor manages to win the princess's hand. How?

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7) The Economist: Euro visions [Qu'ont en commun l'Union européenne et le concours Eurovision de la chanson ?]
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3960886
Charlemagne: Euro visions
May 12th 2005

Where the Eurovision song contest goes, Europe tends to follow

WHICH cultural achievement best captures the spirit of Europe: the “Mona Lisa”, the “Moonlight sonata”, “Hamlet”—or “Diggi-Loo, Diggi-Ley”? No contest. In modern Europe it has to be the Swedish ditty that won the Eurovision song contest in 1984, whose cheery inanity captures the spirit of the annual pan-European event. Every year millions of Europeans tune in to Eurovision. This year's contest will be held in Kiev, Ukraine's capital, on May 21st. For those seeking evidence that Europe is more than a geographical expression, Eurovision is a rare example of a cultural event that engages the interests of people across the continent. T.R. Reid, a former London correspondent for the Washington Post, argues that the contest “is playing an historic role. Eurovision has become a celebration of Europeanness that strengthens the growing sense among 500m people that they all belong to a single place on the world map.”

So what does the contest tell us about Europeanness? First, that Europeans, for all their sophisticated self-image, cannot resist costumes that involve sequins, lamé and plunging necklines. Second, that nursery babble is the preferred pan-European language: the 1984 Swedish entry was in the fine tradition of an earlier British winner, “Boom-Bang-a-Bang”, and a Dutch one, “Ding Dinge Dong”. But nonsense is now giving way to English, which dismays those who want Europe to remain a bastion of linguistic diversity. Georgios Karatzaferis, a Greek member of the European Parliament, has asked the European Commission to take action against the “bastardisation” of the contest, and the triumph of “bad music and American words”, by forcing contestants to sing in their national languages. This was the rule between 1977 and 1999; since then, all contestants have been free to choose any language. This year's favourite is Helena Paparizou, a Greek compatriot of Mr Karatzaferis, who will be singing “My number one” in English.

Americans may appreciate the fact that Eurovision is often in their language, but find other features baffling, if not repulsive. Cultural conservatives would be struck by evidence of European moral degeneracy. In 1998 Eurovision was won by Dana International, an Israeli transsexual; in 2003, the most talked-about act featured a couple of Russian teenage girls whose performance involved fondling each other suggestively to a techno-beat. Janet Jackson's errant nipple seems tame by comparison.

But the biggest single lesson of Eurovision is that Europe's centre of gravity is moving east. The contest is being held in Ukraine this year because a Ukrainian won in 2004. Over the previous three years, the winners were Turkey, Latvia and Estonia.

The parallels with the European Union are obvious. The Eurovision song contest was the brainchild of Marcel Baison, a French music producer, who was an admirer of Jean Monnet. It got going in 1956 with a mere seven contestants; the Monnet-inspired European Economic Community was formed a year later with six countries. In both cases, membership was initially restricted to western Europe. Over time Eurovision and the European Union have both grown in popularity and membership. The EU now has 25 members; this year Eurovision has 39 contestants. Eurovision has expanded faster because it is easier to compose a mindless ditty and don a lamé costume than to pass the 80,000 pages of law needed to join the EU. But the new Eurovision entrants hope—and many old Europeans fear—that where Eurovision goes, the EU will one day follow.

New entrants to Eurovision, rather like new entrants to the EU, also embrace the contest with a naive enthusiasm. By contrast, as the song contest and the EU have both grown in size, the older members have become increasingly jaded. When Estonia won the song contest in 2001, the country's politicians, who were enmeshed in negotiating the finishing touches to their EU entry terms, seized upon the victory's symbolic significance. As the Estonian prime minister expressed it at the time, “we are no longer knocking at Europe's door. We are walking through it singing.” The Ukrainians, who are eager to follow Estonia into the EU, are sure to use their staging of Eurovision next weekend to underline their membership of a wider European family. In honour of the occasion, they have even dropped all visa requirements for EU nationals.

The Eurovision sceptics

While the new participants enthuse, older members of the family are getting distinctly cynical about the whole Eurovision thing. British television commentary is doused in irony and often draws attention to the way in which neighbours tend to vote for one another: the Greeks and Cypriots can always be relied upon to give each other high scores, and there is plenty of Baltic and Nordic solidarity. This goes to confirm the ingrained British prejudice that the odds in Europe will always be unfairly stacked against them. Indeed in Britain, the whole event is now regarded as a high-camp joke. A British contestant who scores the fabled nul points is likely to get far more attention than one who achieves respectable mediocrity.

Other western European countries also take Eurovision less seriously. The Irish, serial winners in the 1990s, now feign indifference. Denis Staunton of the Irish Times wrote in 2002 that trying to win the contest “seemed to jar with our new, nonchalant, national self-image.” The Italians, who gave Eurovision one of its few memorable songs in 1958 (later released as “Volare”), no longer bother to enter. As for the French, who won three of the first seven Eurovisions, they have not had a winner since 1977. The French referendum on the EU constitution takes place eight days after this year's contest. At a time when France agonises over its declining influence in the new, enlarged EU, it might be politic to let it win the new, enlarged Eurovision. And certainly to avoid a winner like “Waterloo”, Eurovision's all-time favourite, with which ABBA took the prize for Sweden in 1974.

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8) The Economist: Tony le magnifique [Une passion passagère des Français envers Tony Blair.]
http://www.economist.com/World/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3966420
France and Britain: Tony le Magnifique
May 12th 2005 | PARIS

How the French learnt briefly to admire the British prime minister

THE standard French critique of Tony Blair has it that he is George Bush's poodle and an ultra-libéral who runs a Dickensian country where the economy may boom but state schools crumble and hospitals stink. Strange, then, to witness an outpouring of admiration for Mr Blair during the recent British election. “Tony le Magnifique” ran a headline in L'Express. A leftish weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur, devoted eight pages to “Why the English are better than us”. “The British ‘miracle’ should be a model for us”, chimed in Le Figaro, a daily. Even President Jacques Chirac, who recently dismissed the British economic model as “unacceptable”, cooed, in a letter to Mr Blair, about “the closeness that has grown between us over the years”.

Why the sudden change? Mr Blair is younger and more dynamic than France's president, who celebrated ten years in the Elysée last week, and 40 years in elected office in March. Even British-style Euroscepticism is newly popular in France, ahead of its referendum on the EU constitution on May 29th. But the biggest explanation is low British unemployment of 4.8%, less than half the French rate of 10.2%. French commentators used to dismiss low British unemployment as a statistical manipulation, or a product of an ill-paid McJobs culture. But now some wonder if it reflects genuine policy choices. There is admiring talk about efficient British job-centres. Nor is it only low unemployment that draws envy. The French feel the pinch in their pockets, while British average earnings are steadily growing.

The British seem also to have made peace with the forces of globalisation and de-industrialisation that continue to haunt the French. Thus, while France's political leaders tear their hair out trying to rescue ailing industries, British voters can coolly re-elect a government that allowed the only carmaker still in British ownership to close, and in the middle of an election campaign to boot. “If you lose your job,” says an apparently startled Le Nouvel Observateur, “the economy guarantees you another.”

Will the seduction last? Unlikely: the French envy the outcome of British labour-market policy more than its flexible nature. Most are reluctant to surrender the job protection that hinders job creation. When Mr Blair takes over the EU presidency in July, he will embody more than ever the ultra-libéral economic model that has provoked so much recent French hostility to Brussels. In short, it is a matter of time before Tony le Magnifique resumes his traditional role as Tony le Manichéen.

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THEIR tale of a love nearly unrequited is the stuff of Nora Ephron movies. And it took four years before Alyssa Banthin and Brian Murphy could see what had been obvious to those around them. What they thought was "in like" was really "in love."

As graduate architecture students at the University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Banthin and Mr. Murphy worked side by side 18 hours a day, dining together, talking shop and becoming best friends, soul mates and gentle critics of each other's work.

To be sure there were outside forces working to keep their relationship platonic. First, Ms. Banthin was engaged to her high school sweetheart, an insurance consultant, who flew in and out of Philadelphia. Second, Mr. Murphy had a girlfriend.

As he recalled of the day they met at Penn, in 1998, "It wasn't any sort of fairy tale romantic moment, that she walked by and I forgot my name." Mr. Murphy, 32 and an architectural designer at Tsao & McKown Architects in Manhattan, added, "What bound us together was a shared perspective of why we were there."

Ms. Banthin, an architectural designer at Edelman Sultan Knox Wood/Architects in Manhattan who is also 32, said they shared a love of the architects Antonio Gaudí and Victor Horta. "We like their very organic forms," she said. "It's not sterile."

As undergraduates, he played guitar and liked jazz, choral and world music at the University of Pittsburgh, and she pursued modern dance at Middlebury College. So when they had to design a dance studio at Penn, they bonded more, talking about bodies and voices sailing through space. Still, Ms. Banthin said, "I didn't have a secret crush on him," adding, "He was very nice, but his work intrigued me more because he draws beautifully." She also admired his dedication to his girlfriend. "I had a boyfriend who just wasn't physically present," she said. Mr. Murphy, for his part, loved Ms. Banthin's sense of play.

Then in June 1999 she married her fiancé. In the fall of 2000 she, Mr. Murphy and some classmates went to study for a semester at the Architectural Association in London, sharing a house, along with her husband, who she said continued to travel.

Mr. Murphy, who had broken up with his girlfriend, was dating. But when Ms. Banthin's husband or Mr. Murphy's latest girlfriend was not around, they walked about London as friends, hand-not-in-hand.

"Sparks did not fly," Mr. Murphy insisted.

Friends disagreed. "She talked about him 80 percent of the time," said Rachel Esch, a Middlebury friend of Ms. Banthin's.

In 2001, Mr. Murphy was living in Manhattan. So were Ms. Banthin and her husband. She wanted a career and children, but could not figure out how with a husband who she said spent half his time out of town. By June 2002 she was divorced.

Even as Mr. Murphy helped her cope with her loneliness by having dinner with her, he was not in a romantic mode. He could not find a full-time architecture job. In July he told her he might join the Peace Corps. "Oh no, you can't leave," Ms. Banthin recalled saying. "What will I do?"

That was the moment. "If we spend all of our time together, there must be a reason," she said. "So, should we spend more time together?"

That was the night of their first kiss, and on April 23, 2004, they decided to marry.

They were wed exactly one year later by the Rev. John Davies, a United Church of Christ minister and an uncle of the bride, at the Nicholas Roerich Museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the walls are hung with densely saturated depictions of Russian churches and of India by Roerich, a Russian painter and disciple of yoga. Friends read passages from the Bhagavad-Gita, Emerson and Shakespeare, which also appeared on the couple's seven-page wedding invitation, designed by her and drawn by him.

Before the ceremony, Abraham Silver, a Penn classmate, said: "I thought they had a secret crush on each other. Absolutely. It's easier for someone on the outside to see how comfortable they are with each other." He added, "When I said to a friend that Brian and Alyssa are engaged, she said, 'Finally.' "

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The missing madeleine

Marcel Proust's madeleine is the cliché cookie—a highbrow reference that's penetrated pop culture. (Take the Sopranos episode in which Tony's Proustian madeleine is a slice of cappicola.) The great French author put madeleines on the map, and probably in our mouths, too. We surely have him to thank for those little packages at every Starbucks checkout.

But Proust left out one important detail: the recipe. And no one ever asked him for it.

Many cookbooks claim that you can reproduce Marcel Proust's magical madeleine in your own kitchen. But do any of the recipes yield the genuine article? I decided to reverse-engineer Proust's madeleine, using hints the author gives in Remembrance of Things Past, in an effort to find out.

In the renowned passage, the fleeting taste of this cake/cookie calls to life the world of the narrator's childhood in Belle Epoque France. For the attentive reader, the clues to The Recipe for The Madeleine are in the text:

She (Marcel's mother) sent for one of those squat plump little cakes called "petites madeleines," which look as though they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell … I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses …

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane …. and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and garden alike, from my cup of tea.

What can we glean from this passage? Proust's madeleine was quite dry. It demanded not just a quick dunk, but immersion to "soften" it (according to the new translation by Lydia Davis, said to be the most accurate). And, you'll note, Marcel never bites the cookie. The memory surge is triggered by crumbs.

The Crumb Factor is the key to this culinary mystery. A close analysis of the text yields the following sequence: Marcel 1) breaks off and drops the morsel into the tea. 2) The madeleine piece then wholly or partially disintegrates during its immersion. 3) Marcel then fishes about with his spoon, yielding a spoonful of tea mixed with crumbs.

The question, then: What recipe would deliver this dry, extraordinary crumb-producer?

Modern food science gives clear guidelines. To make a cake less moist, you put in less moisture and less fat. That means less butter and fewer eggs. And less sugar, too. Sugar is "hygroscopic"—meaning it helps baked goods retain moisture—so you want to keep it to a minimum. Also high on the list of no-nos: resting the batter. Resting allows the flour to absorb the batter's liquid and results in a moister product.

Running through this list of Proustian baking "tips"—which reads more like a catalogue of baking "don'ts"—the great man's signature dish was beginning to sound less than appealing: a pathetic, parched product, not a buttery treat.

My criteria knocked many supposedly "authentic" recipes out of contention. In The Way To Cook, Julia Child touts hers as "presumably the true Madeleine from Commercy, the one Marcel Proust dipped in his tea." But she turns out to be an incorrigible batter rester. Not only that, she beats the flour into the egg and sugar mixture, a sure way to develop the flour's gluten and produce a denser, uncrumby madeleine.

Dining With Proust, a cookbook that re-creates dozens of dishes from Remembrance, is co-authored by Anne Borrel, founder of the Proust Museum in Illiers-Combray. But the book's recipe calls for resting the batter a full hour-and-a-half and, worst of all, includes honey, notorious for its hygroscopic properties.

I found two recipes that looked promising. In the Food Lover's Guide to Paris, French food expert Patricia Wells champions dry madeleines. "The best, freshest madeleine has a dry, almost dusty taste when eaten on its own," she tells us. Being soaked in tea is what brings it to life. The relatively low butter, sugar, and egg content in Wells' recipe gave me hope.

In The Making of a Cook, Madeleine Kamman traces her recipe's lineage back to the 18th century and maybe even to "Madeleine Paumier … the young girl who … presented the first known madeleines to King Louis XV of France." She is adamant that the flour be folded into the batter, not beaten, to avoid the dreaded gluten development. Neither a batter beater, nor a batter rester, she was my strongest candidate.

I pulled out my mother's old early-Julia Child-era imported madeleine molds and set to work.

My first batch of the Kamman madeleines came out of the oven smelling great but looking terrible. I picked up one of the misshapen blobs. Not much resemblance to Proust's "little scallop shell pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious fold." But was it a crumb-producer?

I broke off a piece, dropped it into a glass of tea, and waited a minute. I prodded the cookie with my spoon. Looking very closely I saw only two small bits at the bottom of the glass. I stirred again, and a couple more appeared. The crumb production was underwhelming.

A madeleine morsel, it turns out, is a hardy little customer. Protected by a lightly browned layer, it does not disintegrate. Close examination revealed that it doesn't truly "soften," but absorbs liquid like a sponge, retaining its structural integrity. The locus of crumb production is confined to the narrow, exposed lens-shaped surface at the break-off line.

Would another recipe yield more Proustian results? Patricia Wells' fared no better. (Except, perhaps, in terms of taste. Her madeleines, supposedly "dry, dusty" tea-soaker-uppers, were delicious on their own. Half the batch disappeared while the tea was brewing.) Wells' madeleines produced no more crumbs than Kamman's. Julia Child's, as I expected, were equally crumb-free.

Things were looking bad for M. Proust. The sickly author, who hardly left his cork-lined bedroom in Paris for a dozen years, from 1910 until his death in 1922, supposedly channeled an entire world in all its precise sensations, setting it down on paper for us to re-experience. But my mind was afflicted with a blasphemous thought: Could Proust's madeleine ever have existed? Could it be he … made it all up?

I had one theory in reserve. Maybe Proust's Madeleine was stale. Unthinkable? Not necessarily. Proust was not finicky about his sensory stimuli—the fictional Marcel is even propelled into a reverie at one point by the dank smell of a lavatory.

I left my remaining madeleines outside, uncovered, defying instructions to keep them "stored in a tightly closed tin." After three days I brewed a glass of tea. I broke off a piece of madeleine and plopped it in. The result: about the same as before. I stirred, took a spoonful. A few brown bits swam in the spoon. I tasted. And here came the shocker: I could not taste the crumbs. Madeleine crumbs, once detached from the mother morsel, are quite delicate. They almost dissolve. It turns out they are insensible to the tongue.

I called my wife into the kitchen (her initial comment: "Does Proust explain who cleaned up?") for an objective opinion. She has a fine palate, but couldn't taste the crumbs either.

Confounded, I decided to confer with leading Proust authorities. I discovered a major obstacle: the eminent professor William Carter, author of Marcel Proust: A Life, who had supervised a re-creation of the famous scene for a PBS documentary. The professor was skeptical. He was turned off by my notion that Marcel had "dissolved pieces of madeleine floating around in his teacup," calling it "not likely." And, to my surprise, he asserted that Marcel does dunk and bite the madeleine—which would mean there's no crumb production mystery to be explained. The professor insisted that the crumbs are simply created in the narrator's mouth after he bites off a morsel and shmooshes it around.

I objected that no biting, or shmooshing, is mentioned in the text. The professor insisted it is "implied." But, in my view, Proust was simply too obsessed with detail to let something as significant as biting, let alone shmooshing, go unnoted if that's what he had in mind.

Much to my relief, I found firm support from MacArthur "genius" grant-winner Lydia Davis, the translator of the widely praised new edition of Proust's Swann's Way, in which the famed passage appears. She finds no "implied" biting in the text, and calls mere dunking "out of the question." She concurs that the crumby madeleine material is already in the spoon as it approaches Marcel's mouth. The tie-breaker was Stanford professor Joshua Landy, a Proust scholar who declares himself firmly in my "crumbs in the spoon" camp.

I'd given Proust a more-than-fair shot. His failure to account for extraordinary crumb production was manifest. Case closed, then: Proust's madeleine did not, does not, and never could have existed. To put it bluntly: Proust didn't know from madeleines.

This may be less than surprising. As it turns out, Proust's original model may have been a piece of soggy toast. In an early version of the scene, the narrator is offered a piece of "dry toast" which he dips in his tea. The "bit of sopped toast" triggers the familiar surge of memory.

This fact is not advertised to tourists making the pilgrimage to Illiers-Combray, where madeleines are sold by the bushel, and one patisserie does good business claiming Proust's family as patrons.

But Proust must have understood the madeleine's power. Otherwise he would have just left us the soggy toast. A well-made madeleine (and, please, rest the batter) is that rare thing: perfection itself. The shape, so pleasing to the eye, the double surface texture (ridged on one side, smooth on the other)—and, yes, the buttery, lemony taste. Make a batch. Take a bite. An "exquisite pleasure" will invade your senses. And you will have your own madeleine memories.

DETROIT (AP) -- Would you like fries with that? Either way, the Detroit city treasury would like a bite. Faced with a $300 million budget hole, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is hoping people in this already heavily taxed city won't mind forking over a few extra cents for their Big Macs and Whoppers.

Kilpatrick wants to ask Detroit voters to approve a 2 percent fast-food tax -- on top of the 6 percent state sales tax on restaurant meals. The mayor says consumers will barely notice the extra cents at the cash register, but critics say the tax would unfairly burden the poor and hamper economic development.

''Just tell him we're going to go to Bloomfield Hills to McDonald's if he puts a tax on it,'' said 18-year-old Ebony Ellis, referring to an affluent Detroit suburb, as she and four friends ate at a Golden Arches in Detroit. The high school classmates eat at McDonald's every day after school because their schedule doesn't leave them time for lunch.

Other cities and states have special taxes on prepared food, and some have tried ''snack taxes.'' In New York, Assemblyman Felix Ortiz has proposed a 1 percent tax on junk food, video games and TV commercials to fund anti-obesity programs. But if approved, the Detroit tax would be the country's first to target fast-food outlets, the National Restaurant Association said. The tax would apply to anything sold at a fast-food restaurant -- even salads.

Opponents have been quick to call it a ''fat tax'' in this city dubbed the nation's fattest in 2004 by Men's Health magazine. Detroit fell to No. 3 for 2005.

City officials say the proposal, part of the draft budget Kilpatrick presented to the City Council last month, is more about Detroit's financial health than anything else. Although the tax would not come close to fixing Detroit's financial problems -- officials predict it would bring in $17 million in the next fiscal year -- every dollar counts in a city already bracing for mass layoffs and service cuts.

Enacting the tax would likely require a change in state law, potentially a tough sell in the Republican-controlled Legislature. The tax also would require the approval of Detroit voters.

Young people and senior citizens are big consumers of fast food and would bear an unfair share of the tax's burden, some critics contend. ''It's really going to fall upon poor people harder,'' said Robert Wassmer, a professor of public policy and economics at California State University, Sacramento.

The restaurant industry says the idea is also unfair to businesses. ''We think it's extremely counterproductive to say to those people who have provided jobs, who have provided growth, 'We're going to levy on you a special tax that we don't levy on anyone else,''' said Andy Deloney of the Michigan Restaurant Association.

But Kilpatrick insists an additional 2 percent -- a nickel on a $2.50 Big Mac -- would have little effect on the pocketbooks of the average resident or the competitiveness of Detroit eateries.

And the fact is, there aren't many options. ''With Detroit, you're kind of grasping at straws because the tax base is so tapped into,'' Wassmer said. The city currently has five major revenue streams: state revenue sharing, an income tax, property taxes, a tax on its three casinos and a utility tax.

Michigan law limits Detroit's ability to raise income and property taxes, and high taxes are already cited as a major reason people and businesses have fled the city, further depleting the tax base.

In a study by the District of Columbia comparing Washington and the biggest cities in each state, Detroit in 2003 had the 10th-highest tax burden for a family of four with an income of $75,000. State and local taxes combined totaled 11 percent, according to the study.

An overall meals tax not limited to fast food is out, Deputy Mayor Anthony Adams said. The mayor likes to boast that 22 new restaurants have opened downtown in the last three years. A tax on all restaurants might hamper this fledgling development, while the city's fast-food market is ''pretty mature,'' Adams said.

And just how is ''fast food'' defined? Besides the obvious chains like Wendy's and White Castle, officials have mentioned takeout pizza places and Detroit's ubiquitous chili dog restaurants known as Coney Islands. It's uncertain, however, where Starbucks or the corner deli would fall. The administration says it is still working on a definition.

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12) Slate/Moneybox: How dumb rich people end up in debt [Même les riches peuvent être assez débiles pour avoir recours au crédit à la consommation.]
http://slate.msn.com/id/2118391/

The Neiman Marcus Paradox: How dumb rich people end up in debt.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005, at 2:46 PM PT

One of the best scenes in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities was when Sherman McCoy enumerated his expenses—the private school, the birthday party, the summer house, the jewelry, the taxes—and fretted that he was having difficulty making it on $1 million a year. And that was in the mid-1980s!

The rich are different than you and me. They shop at better stores, and they don't fly commercially. But in one way, they are very much the same: A fair number of them spend more than they make.

At the high end of American society, as at the low end, debt is apparently becoming the fuel of choice for the engine of consumption. Yes, most rich people easily pay for all their baubles. In last Friday's Wall Street Journal Robert Frank noted, "The richest 1 percent controlled 33 percent of the nation's total wealth in 2001, yet they held only 6 percent of its debt." But they still owe plenty. Frank cited research by Federal Reserve economist Arthur Kennickell noting that in 2001, the U.S. households with more than $5.9 million in net worth—the top 1 percent—owed $346 billion—most of it tied up in house mortgages. What's more, "borrowing among the richest Americans has grown in the past few years as interest rates have remained historically low."

Traditionally, debt has been associated with poverty. But in the modern age it has been re-imagined as leverage—a powerful force that lets you lift more than you otherwise could. And a big chunk of today's rich-folk indebtedness is surely related more to leverage than to an inability to pay current bills. Many rich people probably think (and rightly so, from experience) that they can get a higher return on cash than the interest they pay. Borrowing at 6 percent to pay for that ski house in Aspen is a no-brainer if you can earn 15 percent with your hedge-fund manager or by opening a new store.

But not all the rich folks' debt is strategic. Many high-end home-buyers, for example, are engaging in the same type of desperate maneuvers as hard-pressed middle-income purchasers. With prices rising, many first-time buyers in hot markets have turned away from fixed-rate mortgages to interest-only and so-called negative amortization loans (lower interest, no principal, and not even all the interest). James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, noted with alarm an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal for interest-only loans with a negative-amortization option available for up to $5 million. Who is using these? "The rich who happen not to have money," he concludes.

And the rich are also capable of amassing idiotic debt. Frank cited a survey by Spectrem Group that found 14 percent of people with more than $5 million in assets have credit-card balances. That's mystifying, since credit-card cash is perhaps the most expensive form of money legally available.

For decades, Neiman Marcus has occupied an admirable niche as the destination of choice for extreme consumers. The department store chain was recently the subject of a fevered auction, and one of the most desired parts of the business, as the New York Times reported in April, was its private-label credit-card business. Neiman Marcus accepts only American Express and Neiman Marcus credit cards. The in-house card unit, which counts some 562,000 active users, has about $550 million in receivables—meaning about one-sixth of the company's 2004 sales was bought on layaway. In Connecticut, the interest rate on a Neiman Marcus card is a whopping 15 percent. Now, it could be that many of these borrowers are New American Luxury-types, middle-income fashion victims who buy groceries at A&P but splurge on shoes at Neiman Marcus. But a lot of these card-holders could simply be rich people who are either living beyond their means or have atrocious money-management skills.

We know from recent experience that the very rich can be just as reckless about aligning monthly cash flow with obligations as the poor. And we know that income volatility, one of the factors that push lower-income workers into debt, can affect those in the upper tax brackets. Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from the company he ran to buy ranches and a boatyard—and had difficulty paying it all back. When Enron's stock plunged, ex-CEO Kenneth Lay was forced to hold an asset fire sale to meet loan obligations. These may be extreme examples. But I'm guessing there are plenty of rich folks who need a sit-down with Suze Orman, or a copy of Jean Chatzky's Pay It Down.

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13) New York Post: Size doesn't matter [Les New-yorkais doivent se satisfaire de petits logements. Personnellement, moi qui vis dans 31 mètres carrés, je ne trouve pas un studio de 45 mètres carrés particulièrement rikiki.... 10 square feet = 0,9 mètres carrés]
http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/46240.htm

SIZE...DOESN'T MATTER

By MAUREEN CALLAHAN

HE lives without books, magazines or CDs. She sleeps on a used $20 mattress and can fit all of her clothes into a single suitcase. He has carved storage space into almost every piece of furniture he owns.

On the following pages, you'll meet four New Yorkers who've mastered the art of living in excruciatingly tiny apartments - all made beautiful, and livable, with a few space-saving tricks.

These homes were all finalists in the first "Smallest, Coolest Apartment" contest hosted by apartmenttherapy.com, a design site for and about New Yorkers. (About 2,500 city dwellers voted in the competition, which ended Friday.)

"Your space just needs to reflect your personality," says Metropolitan Home's Linda O'Keeffe, who evaluated the finalists for The Post. "All of these people had cookie-cutter apartments, but they didn't deal with them in a cookie-cutter way."

That's high praise, given that a studio apartment smaller than 500 square feet cost an average $308,000 last year - an amount that elsewhere in the country would buy "a 2,500-square-foot ranch on a quarter of an acre," says Jonathan Miller, a top Manhattan real estate appraiser.

But those who live happily in coffin-sized dwellings say that even if you rent (which all of our finalists do), money spent on making a small space feel bigger is a smart investment.

"I need to have a great place to live in," says finalist Robert Nassar, who spent about $18,000 renovating his 300-square-foot space - even though friends warned him that since he didn't own, he'd never see the return on his investment.

"But my return," says Nassar, "was my piece of mind."

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Size: 185 square feet
Hillary (last name withheld), 25
Freelance graphic designer
Harlem

Biggest challenge: "My budget."

Solution:

Think of limited space and funds "as an exercise in living simply," says Hillary, who pays less than $800 a month to rent this studio. She got rid of all her CD cases ("they took up too much room"), tucked the discs into the CD jackets and tacked them on the wall to create a piece of functional art.

What she spent: Mattress, $20 (used); chair, $20, both found on craigslist. She spent $20 on a new rice cooker and another $40 on a new mattress cover for a total of $100.

Favorite resources: Craigslist and freecycle.com - "everything on it is free!"

Golden rule: Again, it all comes down to lack of clutter. "Most of my stuff is in my dad's garage, but I'll probably sell it now. It makes me feel good that I don't need a lot of stuff."

O'Keeffe says: "The notion of turning everyday objects into art" - like Hillary did with her CD collection - "is a brilliant solution." That said, "she could have hanging storage under her loft bed."

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Apt: 300 square feet
Robert Nassar, 44
Interior and product designer
West Village

Biggest challenge: "A really intrusive neighbor who tried to get me evicted" during renovations on the apartment he rents for less than $1,500 a month.

Solution: "I'd leave boxes of chocolate outside his door when I knew there would be banging." It didn't work, but ultimately, the cranky neighbor "was powerless. My landlord's used to people complaining all the time."

What he spent: Architectural expenses, $5,000. (Nassar hired contractors to seal up one doorway and create another and expand the kitchen from 3 feet to 8 feet.) The rug's from ABC Warehouse; bookcases and entire kitchen from IKEA.

Favorite resources: Canal Street; IKEA.

Golden rule: No - surprise! - clutter. "It's the most crucial thing in a small space - you take off your shoes and the place is a mess. Keep everything out of sight. My vacuum is under my bed; my broom is in the large cabinet next to my bookshelf; my couch has storage built in behind it, underneath it - even under the cushions."

Best advice: Never try to rip off one look entirely. "Look in magazines to get ideas, but don't emulate them exactly."

O'Keeffe says: "He has a simple color palette, good storage and the strongest sense of architecture."

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Size: 450 square feet
Brandon Specketer, 24
Architect

Upper West Side

Biggest challenge: Limited funds and a roommate.

Solution: Specketer (who pays more in rent, since he sleeps in the loft) told his roommate he was going to redesign the space on his own, with no input allowed. "My roommate was like, 'You're the architect; do what you want.' He loves it. Our friends love it - everyone always comes over here for pre-party drinks."

What he spent: Paint and supplies, $30; wardrobe, $125 from IKEA; three black tables (to form makeshift coffee table), $15 each from Target; metal desk from VFW in Kansas City, $100. Two end tables found on the street, $0.

Favorite resources: Craigslist and eBay: "In New York, the market is so overpicked that people jack up the prices. But on eBay you can find vintage Eames chairs in the Midwest for much cheaper."

Golden rule: No clutter - especially when you share a tiny space like this with a roommate, as Brandon does. "If you bring one thing in, throw one thing out. Burn your CDs and sell them. With magazines, rip out the pages you want, put them in a binder and throw them out. Clothes - donate what you're not wearing."

Best advice: Even if you know nothing about design, don't be intimidated: "It's like being insecure about how you look. Don't try to fit an image to impress people. If you wear what you want, you'll look good. The same philosophy extends to apartments."

O'Keeffe says: "I loved the marrying of function and design. He has a very good sense of proportion, and I liked the reduced color palette."

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Size: 485 square feet
Patrick Hamilton, 41
Creative director
Near Lincoln Center

Biggest challenge: Clutter. "I lived in this apartment with an uncomfortable level of clutter 'till I figured out what to do with it." Hamilton suggests other pack rats do the same - wait until you know exactly what kind of storage you need. (Otherwise, containers will just replace your clutter, rather than conceal it.)

Solution: Toss old magazines, CDs, etc., and make the most of what you have: "I put drawers, bins and double-backed hanging rods in the closet - that gave me two-thirds more space."

Key pieces everyone should have: "A console that doesn't scream 'living room' or 'bedroom.' Good lighting, even if it's a colored light bulb. A table that can work for dining and as a desk."

Favorite resources: Crate & Barrel, Design Within Reach and IKEA: "If I were building a kitchen from scratch, I'd go there."

Golden rule: Mix it up. "People fall into the trap of getting everything from one place."

Budgeting tip: "Know what you need the most, buy what you love the most" and sacrifice accordingly. "I don't go to restaurants that much, and I don't travel much, either. I'd rather put my money into my apartment."

O'Keeffe says: "He has a very sophisticated sense of color, but he still needs to remove some stuff and watch the open storage."

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14) International Herald Tribune: To French workers, minutes add up [Le lundi de Pentecôte "travaillé".]
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/29/news/france.php
To French workers, minutes add up
By Thomas Fuller International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2005

PARIS One minute and 52 seconds is the time it might take an employee to remove his coat and begin booting up his computer, or maybe to dart off for a trip to the water cooler. In France this year, it is the additional time that staff at the national railroad company were asked to work each day as their contribution to a "solidarity fund" for the handicapped and elderly. The rail workers' response: not unless we get paid for it.

"One minute and 52 seconds doesn't seem like much but it still adds up to 7 or 8 hours a year that would not be paid," said Grégory Roux, secretary of the railroad workers division of the CGT, one of France's largest unions.

The rail workers are not alone. Many are protesting the government's decision to turn a national holiday into a working day, worsening the atmosphere here at a time when President Jacques Chirac is desperately seeking a way to turn around public opinion before the French referendum on the European Union constitution.

The dispute over the solidarity fund is perhaps the best illustration today of the sour mood gripping the country. There is mistrust between bosses and workers, disenchantment with the government and overwhelming hostility toward reform. No one wants to budge from his position, and everyone, it seems, is complaining.

Plans for the solidarity fund arose after the brutal heat wave of 2003, when the government decided to sacrifice the Pentecost Monday holiday for the greater good. The holiday, which this year falls on May 16, has effectively been converted into an unpaid working day, with salaries - even from private companies - turned over to the government and channeled into a special fund.

But the plan has backfired. When management at the railroad company, SNCF, offered to maintain the holiday but spread out the extra working time over the year - the infamous 1 minute and 52 seconds - the unions demanded compensation. Employees of the Paris Métro, which is separate from the rail company, along with postal workers and teachers have vowed to strike because they have to work on Pentecost. A Christian trade union says it will march through the streets of the French capital on Sunday [May 1], Labor Day in much of the world, under the banner, "Don't mess with my holiday." And the strictly secular Socialist opposition has ironically said it will make Pentecost a holiday again if it comes to power.

Pentecost is celebrated 50 days after Easter and commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles.

Springtime is very often a restive season for industrial relations in France, but this May promises to be especially conflictual, union leaders say. Threats of strikes and marches are multiplying. "There is an increased mobilization in the whole country," said Roux of the CGT. "We are proposing possible actions for the weeks and months to come."

The subtext to the controversy over the Pentecost holiday is the falling popularity of the conservative government and the bruising campaign leading up to the May 29 referendum on the EU constitution. Debates about the constitution have splintered the left, divided the right and emboldened militant unions, creating a general impression of political disarray.

A recent newscast on a national radio station, France Info, offered a taste of things to come. The broadcast began with reports about doctors striking, wine producers protesting and angry high school students ransacking a government office, and ended with an announcement that the station could not provide any sports news because the journalists themselves were on strike.

French newspapers have been running daily reports on who will be working on Pentecost Monday and who will be striking, protesting or simply taking the day off. "The French don't want to work," said a recent headline in Le Parisien, a daily newspaper. The article was specifically about Pentecost but to some readers it had a double meaning: In a country that already has generous vacations and a 35-hour workweek, one of the world's shortest, workers were balking at giving up one day off.

France has 9 national holidays, relatively few compared with other industrialized countries - 10 in the United States, 14 in Japan and 11 in Germany, 13 in Spain and Britain. But this spring some workers feel cheated in France because some holidays, like May 1 and May 8, are falling on weekends.

Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who met with his ministers Thursday for an emergency consultation on the Pentecost crisis, stuck to his guns. "I ask that everyone follow the law - this is republican practice," he said in televised comments Thursday. "The law must be applied."

The law, which was passed by Parliament last year, came as a reaction to the 15,000 mostly elderly people who died in Paris during the heat wave of 2003. The government estimates that it will reap €2 billion, or $2.6 billion, from the day of solidarity and says the money will help modernize government rest homes and will generally improve services for the elderly.

The extra day of work equals about 0.3 percent of an employee's annual salary, and the law gives companies the option to allow employees to take Pentecost off but then contribute an equivalent share of their annual salaries. The management of the railroad company decided to maintain the Pentecost holiday and increase working time by an average of 1 minute and 52 seconds per day, thus the genesis of that dispute.

But unions and leftist parties say they are suspicious of the government's motives. "This is no more and no less an attempt by the government to lengthen working time, barely camouflaged by false claims about helping the elderly and handicapped," said Thursday's issue of l'Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party.

In an article in Le Figaro on Monday, the minister of health, family and solidarity, Philippe Douste-Blazy, said working on Pentecost was a way to remind France of its aging society and the rising costs associated with that. "I can understand that people don't accept an extra day of work with a merry heart," he said. "But pretending to ignore the problem that we are facing seems to me, and I say this directly, intolerable."