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Week 26, 2005
THE BEST SELLERS (recent popular articles):
1) The Economist: Relax! It's the law [Pourquoi il est parfois préférable sur un plan de rentabilité économique que l'Etat impose les vacances.]
2) The Economist: Financing German companies [Proposition de créer une 'usine à crédit' en Allemagne pour faciliter les prêts aux PME.]

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THE REGULARS: Summary
3) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic: Major League Soccer [Le foot aux Etats Unis.]
4) Car Talk/The Puzzler: Blind man in metro [Un casse-tête. Un aveugle au métro.]
5) Slate/Dear Prudence: Horrible mother-in-law and cheap boyfriend [Conseils sur la vie sentimentale et la vie tout court. Cette semaine, une lettre d'une femme dont la belle-mère essaie de détruire son mariage, et une autre d'une femme qui regrette d'avoir dit à son petit ami qu'elle n'aimait pas recevoir de cadeaux.]
6) CNN/Global Office: UK workers turn backs on the tie [Les employés britanniques rejettent le port de la cravate.]

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1) The Economist: Relax! It's the law [Pourquoi il est parfois préférable sur un plan de rentabilité économique que l'Etat impose les vacances.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3987228
Economics focus: Relax! It's the law
May 19th 2005

Would Americans like to work as little as Europeans? What's stopping them?

MOST people greet the weekend with gratitude. But some economists view it with puzzlement. Why, they wonder, does the bulk of the population rest on the same two days each week? Why does everyone's week end at “the” weekend? From an economic point of view, it would surely be more efficient to stagger days of rest throughout the week. That way, expensive pieces of equipment would not lie idle for two days in seven, and infrastructure would be less congested the other five.

One person impressed by this logic was Josef Stalin, who rationalised the Soviet calendar in 1929. Workers were given every fifth day off, but their shifts were staggered, so that factories could run without interruption. The staggered week appealed rather less to the people who worked it, however. According to Witold Rybcynski's 1991 book about leisure, “Waiting for the Weekend”, Stalin's four days on, one day off, was unpopular, even though it was less onerous than the six-day week that preceded it. Families and friends rarely had the same day off; administrative staff rarely worked at the same time. After less than three years, the staggered working week was abandoned.

Echoes of Stalin's discovery can be found in a recent paper* by Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, both of Harvard, and Bruce Sacerdote, of Dartmouth College. The authors begin from the premise that Stalin unwittingly proved: people complement each other at work, and perhaps at play too. Couples want to go on holiday together; parents want time off when schools are out. As a result, the economists say, people do not make solipsistic decisions about how much labour to offer in the marketplace. Their choice depends on everyone else's. Knocking off early carries less of a stigma if others do the same. Jobless youth find unemployment more tolerable if their friends are also out of work. Conversely, an ambitious underling will want to put in at least as many hours as his boss, whatever time she clocks off.

Messrs Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote think this principle might help to explain why Europeans work so much less than Americans. The gap is quite striking. According to the Luxembourg Income Study, the typical American worker puts in 1,820 hours over the course of a year. Meanwhile, according to the OECD, his German and French counterparts clock up a mere 1,480 and 1,467 hours respectively. They put in five or six fewer weeks per year, and three fewer hours per working week.

Edward Prescott, a winner of the Nobel prize for economics, blames these transatlantic differences on tax. Europeans would like to work more, but are deterred by the high percentage of their extra earnings the state would confiscate. Olivier Blanchard, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, puts it down to transatlantic differences in taste. Europeans, he says, put a higher implicit price on their leisure. “There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Europeans enjoy their leisure more than their American counterparts,” he writes.

But why? Some speculate that Americans, being the cultural heirs of the industrious Puritan settlers, are still gripped by a Protestant work ethic. However, as recently as 1970, Europeans worked more each year than Americans. Why should their work ethic have lapsed since then?

Rather than blaming culture or taxes, Messrs Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote instead credit trade unions. The strength of organised labour peaked in Europe in the 1970s, about the time that work hours started falling. After the first oil shock of 1973, the authors write, Germany's unions marched to the slogan “work less, work all”, and the same mantra, in different languages, was recited across the continent. In France, the unions eventually won an agreement in 1981 to cut the working week to 39 hours. The government then took up their battle, culminating in the national 35-hour week implemented in 2000. Indeed, their cause has gone continent-wide. The European Union's working-time directive, first issued in 1993 and subject to fierce debate again this month in the European Parliament, insists that workers toil no more than 48 hours each week on average (see article).

Let's all go home

There is an obvious liberal objection to any regulation of work hours: workers should be free to sell as much or as little of their labour as they wish, and employers free to buy as much as is profitable. Union demands and working-time directives are unnecessary encumbrances, stopping workers and employers striking deals to their mutual advantage.

But Messrs Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote float an alternative possibility. Such regulations might solve a co-ordination problem, they suggest. If Europeans complement each other at work and rest, they may prefer to work shorter hours and fewer weeks provided others do the same. If so, the authors write, “national policies that enforce higher levels of relaxation can, at least in theory, increase welfare.” Perhaps Americans would also like to work less, if their family, friends, or bosses worked less also. But in a competitive economy there is no way to co-ordinate their decisions. The individual American can act with others, but not too far ahead of them.

By recent evidence, however, Europe's unions got ahead of themselves. By demanding shorter working weeks with no loss of pay, they raised the cost of labour and undermined employment. In the past year or so, the French government has backed away from the 35-hour week, and German unions, most prominently at Siemens and DaimlerChrysler, have agreed to work longer for no more pay. The unions that once marched to the slogan “work less, work all”, have now conceded the need to work more, if they are to work at all.

Financing German companies: The loan factory
Apr 14th 2005 | FRANKFURT

How financial mass-production could help Germany's artisans

HANS REICH, head of Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW),Germany's national development bank, has a recurring dream: an inexhaustible well from which the country's small and medium-size enterprises, collectively known as the Mittelstand, can draw loans at reasonable rates of interest. The savings banks used to be that magic source, but new capital rules and the loss of their state guarantee from July 15th this year have made them pickier about credit risk.

German banks have plenty to lend, but processing costs and wariness of smaller credits mean that they are all chasing bigger borrowers, with sales of €50m ($65m) or more. For a loan of around €300,000, a bank's processing cost is far more than the risk premium it can earn, says Mr Reich.

His solution is a Kreditfabrik (loan factory), for processing standardised loans cheaply on behalf of many banks. The banks would deal with customers, as now; the factory would do the back-office work.

The idea is not new. The Länder, or states, and co-operative banks would claim to have the basis for their own loan factories already; the savings banks also have a project, Modell K, that they say has already cut processing costs. However, the division of German banking into private-sector, public and co-operative banks hinders industry-wide collaboration. Meanwhile, rising numbers of small firms complain that they “hardly have access any more to credit and reasonable development capital”, said Mr Reich this week.

A survey of Mittelstand companies, by Creditreform, a commercial-debt advisory group, shows that a slight upward trend in expectations last year has been thoroughly squashed: forecasts of turnover, employment and profits have fallen. Even so, these companies still intend to invest, if they can only get credit.

Mr Reich hopes that a change in KfW's refinancing programme will help. Since April 1st banks that refinance Mittelstand loans through the development bank have been allowed to charge borrowers a risk-based rather than a flat interest rate. That may encourage more lending.

However, progress on the Kreditfabrik is slow. Even if it does come to fruition, it will not solve another acute problem facing the Mittelstand: lack of equity capital. In the 1960s, shareholders' equity accounted for 30% of German companies' balance sheets; now the ratio is only 17%. And 37% of the Mittelstand companies surveyed by Creditreform this year had less than 10% capital; last year's figure was 31.4%.

Venture capital and mezzanine finance—essentially, debt with equity-like features—are still rare in Germany. That is changing slowly. Last month Deutsche Bank, the country's biggest bank, and IKB Deutsche Industriebank, a specialist industrial lender, touted “equiNotes”, a mezzanine instrument for Mittelstand companies. These would be standardised enough to trade as securities. In July the Munich stock exchange will open a new segment, called M:access, for Mittelstand companies.

Neither innovation, though, will be much use to run-of-the-mill companies. M:access demands minimum capital of €2m, a website and an annual analysts' meeting. EquiNotes are aimed at companies with sales of at least €50m and an investment-grade rating. Most of the Mittelstand will have wait to for Mr Reich's loan factory to open for business.

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3) Le texte plus abordable de la semaine/Scholastic: Major League Soccer [Le foot aux Etats Unis.]
http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/soccer2005/soccerstories/index.asp?article=majorleague

Major League Soccer
By Michael Lewis

Major League Soccer (MLS) is the top professional league in the United States. If you're in the league, you've made it.

Formed in 1996, MLS celebrates its 10th year in 2005 with two new expansion teams: CD Chivas USA, which will play in Carson, California, and Real Salt Lake, which will call Salt Lake City, Utah, its home.

The league has 12 teams: defending champion D.C. United, Columbus Crew, MetroStars (New York and New Jersey area), New England Revolution, Chicago Fire, and Kansas City Wizards in the Eastern Conference; and Los Angeles Galaxy, San Jose Earthquakes, Colorado Rapids, F.C. Dallas (formerly known as the Dallas Burn), Chivas, and Real Salt Lake in the Western Conference.

The teams play a 32-game season, which kicks off this year on Saturday, April 2. Every season includes an all-star game, playoffs, and a championship game—the MLS Cup—which will be held outside Dallas in Frisco, Texas, on November 13.

United defeated Kansas City, 3-1, in last year's MLS Cup, behind Alecko Eskandarian's two goals. United's best-known player is 15-year-old Freddy Adu. Adu, who many hope will become the U.S.'s first soccer superstar, earns $500,000 a season, the most of any player in the league.

MLS is considered to be a great stepping stone for American players to move to Europe. Forwards Landon Donovan (Bayer Leverkusen, Germany) and Brian McBride (Fulham, England) are among those who decided to go for greater fame and fortune.

Among the top American MLS players to watch are Dallas forward Eddie Johnson and San Jose's Brian Ching, who tied for a league-best 12 goals; the MetroStars' 18-year-old Eddie Gaven, the youngest player to be named to the MLS Best XI, the league's season-ending all-star team; and New England forward Pat Noonan, who shared the overall scoring crown (30 points) with league MVP Amado Guevara of the MetroStars.

Women's Soccer

The best-known women's league is called the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA), which has 34 teams coast to coast.

The WUSA was considered the leading women's league in the world, but it suspended operations after a three-year run after its 2003 season. Several people are trying to get that league back off the ground in perhaps 2006 or 2007.

The Minors

For athletes not in the top rung of American soccer, there's always the United Soccer Leagues (USL): the minor leagues of soccer.

The USL has a network of teams organized into two divisions. The A-League has a dozen teams: the defending champion Montreal Impact, Atlanta Silverbacks, Charleston Battery, Minnesota Thunder, Portland Timbers, Puerto Rico Islanders, Richmond Kickers, Rochester Raging Rhinos, Seattle Sounders, Toronto Lynx, Vancouver Whitecaps, and Virginia Beach Mariners.

The division is the Pro Soccer League, which includes nine teams: the Charlotte Eagles, Cincinnati Kings, Harrisburg City Islanders, Long Island Rough Riders, New Hampshire Phantoms, Northern Virginia Royals, Pittsburgh Riverhounds, Western Mass Pioneers, and Wilmington Hammerheads.

A national amateur league, known as the Premier Development League, has 53 teams in cities such as Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Sioux Falls, Iowa. These players don't play for money, but for the fun of it. Many are college athletes looking for quality games over the summer.

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5) Slate/Dear Prudence: Horrible mother-in-law and cheap boyfriend [Conseils sur la vie sentimentale et la vie tout court. Cette semaine, une lettre d'une femme dont la belle-mère essaie de détruire son mariage, et une autre d'une femme qui regrette d'avoir dit à son petit ami qu'elle n'aimait pas recevoir de cadeaux.] http://slate.msn.com/id/2121305/

Dear Prudence,
I have a wonderful husband, but the World's Worst Mother-in-Law. She is mentally ill, manipulative, and abused my husband in countless ways when he was growing up. My husband spent all of his life prior to our marriage taking care of his mom. Now that we're married and have moved away, she is still at it from a distance. She sends photos and letters from ex-girlfriends, had a family friend send a wedding invitation to us as "Mr. XXX and guest." She has told him twice she has cancer, only to admit she made it up after several weeks of torment. I hate this woman for what she has done to him and what she continues to do. I refuse to have any contact with her. I've expressed my anger about this to my husband, but he continues his relationship with her. While he doesn't react to her sabotage attempts, I feel that he is disrespecting me and our marriage by continuing his relationship with such a toxic woman. What can I do?

—Fuming and Frustrated

Dear Fume,
Get thee to a marriage counselor, and take him with you. With luck, a neutral third party can open your husband's eyes to the fact that his mother's behavior doesn't even come close to acceptable. It is often difficult for a grown child of such a parent to break away, but with some edification and therapy he might be able to do it. It would be drastic to put your marriage on the line, but the frustration and exasperation may leave you no other choice. Good luck.

—Prudie, supportively

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Dear Prudence,
My boyfriend and I have been dating for a while now, and although we are very happy together, I find myself in a predicament. When we first started dating, he bragged to me about the lavish gifts he would buy for his previous girlfriends and about the expensive flower arrangements he would send. I told him that I'm not the kind of girl who needs or really wants to be showered with gifts. I would much rather have my partner by my side than a new bracelet on my wrist. But now I feel like kicking myself for making those statements. Even though I am only 23, I have never had a man give me flowers. I have always dreamt that when it would happen it would be from someone special. I feel that this guy is that someone. It's been three months, however, and in that time Valentine's Day has passed, and still no flowers. I feel he has taken my statement too literally to mean no gifts, period. Now I find myself looking wistfully into flower shops, hoping that he will realize how badly I want just that one gift. So my question to you is: How do I politely/subtly let him know that I want him to buy me flowers without rudely coming out and saying so?

—He Doesn't Bring Me Flowers

Dear He,
Prudie has made this mistake, herself—though never with flowers ... or jewelry. There are times when one just feels that declining is the polite thing to do—in effect saying, "Oh, no, don't bother." Sometimes we say certain things to show that we are gracious, well-grounded, or maintenance-free. With time, Prudie has learned to let nature take its course, if you receive her drift. As for retracting your statement of oh-no-you-mustn't, when the time seems right (perhaps walking by a flower shop?) you might say that you wish to amend a previous assertion. Tell him that now that you're an established couple, you would happily accept whatever would pleases him to give you, and you actually love flowers. Prudie hopes this does the trick.

—Prudie, florally

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6) CNN/Global Office: UK workers turn backs on the tie [Les employés britanniques rejettent le port de la cravate.]
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/06/22/britain.dress/index.html
UK workers turn backs on the tie

Wednesday, June 22, 2005 Posted: 1134 GMT (1934 HKT)

LONDON, England -- British workers who long ago consigned the bowler hat to the sartorial dustbin are now set to discard the humble necktie.

Evidence of the change in attitudes was revealed Wednesday as a leading trade union backed a suggestion by a top civil servant that ties could be abandoned in the workplace.

Andrew Turnbull, head of the civil service in Britain's government, said staff should be able to carry out their duties without wearing a tie, as long as they looked authoritative and professional.

This could be particularly relevant in hot weather, Turnbull said.

"Obviously it would not be suitable for people to turn up in blue jeans and trainers because it could undermine their authority, but as long as they looked smart they needn't wear a tie", he said.

The FDA, a union for senior public servants, said Wednesday it was right to relax the rules.

"Oscar Wilde once said that a well-tied tie is the first serious step in life", said FDA general secretary Jonathan Baume.

"Times have changed, thank goodness, and it's only right that civil servants should be allowed to leave their wool jackets and ties at home."

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7) USA Today: Off-duty behavior can affect job [Encore un article sur l'ingérance des entreprises dans la vie privée des salariés.]
ttp://www.usatoday.com/money/jobcenter/2005-06-12-off-duty-usat_x.htm

Off-duty behavior can affect job

By Stephanie Armour and Julie Appleby, USA TODAYMon Jun 13, 6:56 AM ET

Some companies are cracking down on employees' off-duty behavior, raising questions about how far employers should go in policing what workers do on their own time.

Employees are being disciplined or fired for such behaviors as drinking on their own time, using competitors' products and displaying political bumper stickers. No one tracks the number of such cases, but some workers rights' groups are concerned that the practice is on the upswing.

"The shock is that there's no legal protection," says Lewis Maltby, of The National Workrights Institute, a non-profit based in Princeton, N.J., that focuses on employee rights. "You can get fired just for having a bumper sticker the boss doesn't like."

For example:

• At the Atlantic City, Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, bartenders and waitresses can be fired if they gain more than 7% of their body weight. They are first given a 90-day unpaid suspension to lose the weight. Officials say it is a recent clarification to the company's appearance policy.

About 200 cocktail servers and bartenders, known as "Borgata Babes," are covered by the policy, and have to submit to weigh-ins. Weight gain for valid medical reasons, such as pregnancy, are exempt, but the waitresses have 90 days to comply with the target weight upon return.

"We believe the policy in place is not only legal and non-discriminatory, it is also fair," spokesman Michael Facenda said in a statement.

• Lynne Gobbell was fired from her job packing insulation by her Moulton, Ala.-based employer for displaying a John Kerry bumper sticker on her car, according to the Associated Press and numerous media reports. Gobbell could not be reached for comment.

• Ross Hopkins, who worked for a Budweiser distributor, sued after he says he was fired for drinking a Coors at a Greeley, Colo., bar after work.

But Jeff Bedingfield, attorney for American Eagle Distributing, says Hopkins was fired in 2003 for making disparaging comments about the company while at the bar wearing a company uniform. The case is expected to go to trial.

While about half the states have laws preventing employers from firing workers who smoke off duty, questions remain about other legal, off-duty activities. Some states have passed broader protections, says Kary Moss, executive director of the ACLU in Michigan.

"It's a growing trend," Moss says. "But whether or not they will go further to protect workers is an open question."

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8) The Economist: Profiting from obscurity [Le dernier concept qui fait fureur, la 'queue longue', à savoir l'idée qu'on peut désormais vivre en vendant peu d'un grand nombre d'articles plutôt que d'essayer de vendre beaucoup de quelques articles.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3936129Economics focus

Profiting from obscurity
May 5th 2005

What the “long tail” means for the economics of e-commerce

DISRUPTIVE technologies, learning curves, tipping points—every so often a trendy new term enters the business lexicon and becomes a staple of business plans, conference speeches and PowerPoint presentations. The latest example, generating buzz among entrepreneurs, technologists and bloggers, is the idea of the “long tail”. The term is not new, having long been used in statistics to refer to a feature of “power-law” distributions, such as the frequency with which different words are used in English: there are a few common words that are used a great deal, and a long tail of increasingly obscure words that are used less often. But the idea is now in vogue because of its particular relevance to the economics of e-commerce. Its popularity in this context is due to an article* published last year by Chris Anderson, formerly a correspondent for The Economist, who is the editor-in-chief of Wired, a technology magazine. The article struck a chord: Mr Anderson is expanding it into a book, and talk of long tails is becoming a venture-capital cliché. “Business plans now have to have an obligatory long-tail passage,” he says. So when people invoke the long tail, what do they mean?

The short answer is a shift from mass markets to niche markets, as electronic commerce aggregates and makes profitable what were previously unprofitable transactions. Consider book sales, which obey a power-law distribution: there is a small number of very popular books, which sell millions of copies, and then a long tail of less popular books. A real-world shop can only stock so many titles on its shelves, so it generally holds those most likely to sell, at the head of the curve: even the largest bookstore carries only around 130,000 titles. But an online store, with no limits on its shelf space, can offer a far wider range and open up new markets further down the long tail. In the case of Amazon, for example, around a third of its sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Similarly, Rhapsody, a streaming-music service, streams more tracks outside than inside its top 10,000 tunes. Mr Anderson's point is that the collective demand for obscure items is very large, is growing, and can be aggregated over the internet, so that selling obscure books, music CDs or movies could prove to be just as lucrative as selling hits.

This has a number of intriguing implications. For one thing, opening up those previously uneconomic niche markets should increase overall demand: as people are better able to explore niches, they are more likely to find things they like, and may well consume more of them. This will then shift some demand, at least, away from hits. Indeed, the long tail reveals the hit-driven nature of the entertainment industry to be, in part, a vestige of scarcity. With limited space on store shelves, media providers are traditionally very discriminating about what they release, and use intensive marketing to generate a handful of hits. The shift towards electronic sales and distribution, however—music can already be purchased and downloaded instantly, and movies will be next—means that content providers can afford to be less discriminating. “The long tail says rather than trying to guess what the market wants, put it all out there and you'll find demand you hadn't anticipated,” says Mr Anderson.

But how can people find content they want when it is buried far down the tail? Already, a number of mechanisms have emerged, based around user recommendations. Perhaps the best known is “collaborative filtering”, in which purchase histories are analysed to work out what else is likely to interest the buyer of a particular product (“Customers who bought this item also bought...”, as Amazon puts it). This approach allows users to navigate from hits that they know they like to more obscure titles further down the tail. “You need not just variety, but information about variety,” says Mr Anderson. “A long tail without good filters is just noise.” Many people find even the amount of choice on supermarket shelves overwhelming—in large part because there is so little information on which to base a rational choice. But a mere 27 flavours of jam is nothing compared with millions of music tracks or thousands of movies, so providing filters to help people find what they want is vital.

From mass market to niche nation

Perhaps the most profound implication of the long tail, however, is its impact on popular culture. As choice expands and people can more easily find niche content that particularly interests them, hits will be less important: so what will people talk about when gathered around the water cooler? In fact, says Mr Anderson, the idea of a shared popular culture is a relatively recent phenomenon: before radio and television, he notes, countries did not operate in “cultural lockstep”. And the notion of shared culture is already in decline, thanks to the rise of cable television and other forms of market fragmentation. The long tail will merely accelerate the effect. There will still be blockbuster movies, albums and books, but there will be fewer of them. The companies that will prosper, says Mr Anderson, will be “those that switch out of lowest-common-denominator mode and figure out how to address niches.”

Many successful online businesses, such as Amazon, Rhapsody or the iTunes Music Store, already exploit the effects of the long tail. So too do other internet companies, such as Google (which makes money not just by selling adverts to big firms, but also by placing obscure adverts alongside obscure web pages) and eBay (which aggregates low levels of demand for obscure products to make a huge business). Hence the venture capitalists' enthusiasm for long-tailish business plans—and, now that the term is deemed to be cool, its use and misuse in other spheres. The misuse, says Mr Anderson, is painful. But it is arguably a sign of success: the “long tail” has passed into common parlance.

Wednesday, June 22, 2005 Posted: 2348 GMT (0748 HKT)

(CNN) -- Luxury store Hermes on Wednesday apologized to Oprah Winfrey for turning her away last week, saying that its Paris store was closed to set up for a public relations event when the talk show host stopped by.

"Hermes regrets not having been able to accommodate Ms. Winfrey and her team and to provide her with the service and care that Hermes strives to provide to each and every one of its customers worldwide," the store said in a statement. Hermes apologizes for any offense taken due to such circumstances."

The store said the incident occurred on June 14 around 6:45 p.m., about 15 minutes after the store closed. It said Winfrey and her team arrived at a time when "a private PR event was being set up inside."

Harpo Productions spokeswoman Michelle McIntyre said Winfrey "will discuss her 'crash moment' when her show returns from hiatus in September."

"Crash" is a film dealing with race relations. The phrase "crash moment" refers to situations where a party feels discriminated against on the basis of skin color.

The New York Daily News cited sources close to Winfrey as saying the talk show host was first rebuffed by a clerk and then a store manager. The Daily News reported Winfrey had gone to the store to buy a watch for singer Tina Turner, her dining partner that night. McIntyre confirmed that account for CNN.

The New York Post, in its Monday Page Six gossip column, reported she was turned away because the store had been "having a problem with North Africans lately." In comments to CNN, an Hermes spokeswoman categorically denied that allegation. "There was never any discussion of North Africans," she said. "The story is not true."

The spokeswoman said Winfrey came to the store 15 minutes after closing and a security guard informed her the store was closed and gave her a card, telling her she could come back the next day. Surveillance videotape of the encounter supports the store's account, according to the spokeswoman. She said the CEO of Hermes has called Winfrey's people to explain "the situation" and invited her to come back to shop in the store.

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10) NPR/Present at the Creation: Batman [Alors que 'Batman Begins' sort, un retour audio sur l'origine de l'homme chauve-souris. AUDIO]

Voici une série de reportages radio sur Batman:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4704766

Voici la page sur l'origine de Batman:
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/patc/batman/index.html

Batman

June 17, 2002 -- Pity not poor Batman, the most un-super of superheroes. Sure, he can't fly. He's not an alien. He has no radioactive spider venom running through his veins. But somewhere under that dark cape lies the heart of a hero. And between those pointy ears, the swift, capable mind of a vigilante out for justice.

Batman has many familiar forms, and not just because his alter-ego, millionaire Bruce Wayne, is as stylish and glamorous as his darker half is mysterious and brooding.

As part of Present at the Creation, NPR looks at the history of this conflicted superhero, whose origins stretch as far back as 1939, in the mind of an 18-year-old comic book artist. Jon Kalish reports for Morning Edition on the many faces behind the mask.

When Batman made his debut in issue #27 of Detective Comics, swinging from a rope with a crook clutched under his arm, the occasion was momentous not because of the superpowers being demonstrated, but for the character of the hero.

As imagined by Bob Kane, the comics wonder boy who dreamed him up, Batman had violent crime in his blood. As a young boy, he had witnessed the murder of his parents. And unlike other conventionally good-vs-evil superheroes with more spectacular or otherworldly talents, Kane's hero was always just a step away from criminal behavior himself.

Frank Miller, who took on the challenge of recreating Batman in his 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, says that this ambiguity is a big part of the appeal. "He's got this gorgeous streak of malice running through him that makes him a really exciting character," Miller says. "He's not a role model. He's not here to tell us how to behave. He's a scary fantasy."

The fantasy began under the influence of some pretty disparate sources. In a 1990 interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross, Kane revealed the origins of the idea. Kane, who died at the age of 83 in 1998, said that the bat wings came from a sketch out of a book of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, who had grafted them onto a sled to form a flying apparatus. The notation, Kane remembers, read: "Your bird shall have no other model but that of a bat."

If Leonardo helped to shape the costume, the other major influence gave Batman his dual identity. It was The Mark of Zorro, with Douglas Fairbanks Sr.

"During the day he was a bored count in Southern California in the 1880s," Kane says, explaining the influence on his own creation, "and at night he became a crusader fighting against the injustices of the dictatorship of that time."

Like the masked swashbuckler before him, Batman also became a television hero, swinging onto screens in the 1960s. But in this version, most of the darkness was drained out of the scenario, as Batman and Robin, the boy wonder, battled a preening cadre of super-villains bent on taking over the world. Batman still didn't have any superpowers, but the show featured his array of gadgets, from his ever-present utility belt to the Batarang and the rocket-fueled Batmobile.

The TV show (still featured nightly on cable), along with the 1966 movie, may have been all bright colors, tight costumes and choreographed fights with the words "POW!" and "BAM!" exploding onto the screen every time the heroes landed a punch, but it couldn't repress Batman's essential darkness forever.

Miller's The Dark Knight Returns sent Batman back to the streets, emphasizing the aspects of vigilantism around which his air of mystery revolved. The rebirth was such a success that it became the basis for the 1989 blockbuster movie, directed by Tim Burton.

Since that time, there have been three other live-action Batman films, ranging in tone from dark and scary to campy and full of one-liners, with another yet in the works. Batman has also come to television screens in animated series, and of course, still appears regularly in comic books.

Miller says that this staying power assures Batman's place as a heroic icon. "There will be characters that capture the public imagination for even a generation and then fade," he says. "Whereas other ones just keep getting reborn. We can't shake Robin Hood. The same with Superman. The same with Batman."

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11) The Economist: La ville en rose [De récents livres sur Paris.]
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3886829

Paris

La ville en rose
Apr 21st 2005

Paris Tales: Stories
By Translated by Helen Constantine
Oxford University Press; 246 pages; $16.95 and £9.99

Paris: The Biography of a City
By Colin Jones
Viking; 566 pages; $29.95.
Penguin/Allen Lane; £25

THE sharp click of stiletto on pavement, the sweet, burnt warmth of the Métro: no capital evokes sensations in quite the same way as Paris. The city has been described so much, noted Baron de Pollnitz in 1732—and one has heard it talked about so often—that "most people know what the city looks like without ever having seen it". Each of these two volumes (one history, the other fiction) draws on elements of that mythologised Paris, while also trying to reach beyond it.

Helen Constantine has translated a collection of short stories, some of whose authors will be familiar to a non-French-speaker (Emile Zola, Colette), others less so (Frédéric Beigbeder, Maryse Condé). The result is a sort of literary guided tour of Paris: an accumulation of impressions, glances, thrills, disappointments, mapped out against the city. Romance and nostalgia naturally feature, even when Paris is but a backdrop. As Ms Constantine points out, the names of Paris stations alone evoke history or intrigue—the Gare Saint-Lazare and Réaumur-Sébastopol—in a way that London King's Cross, say, does not.

But the stories garner hostility, violence and loss in Paris too. In "A Parisian Adventure", Guy de Maupassant's provincial heroine seeks sexual adventure in the city. Her attempt to taste the sinful pleasures on the distant horizon ends in repulsion and regret, as she wakes with a "little fat man lying beside her, his distended belly making the sheet swell like a gas balloon". Georges Perec's carefully paced story, "The Runaway", painfully pieces together an adult's recollection of fleeing home as a child. As the young boy darts hesitantly about the city, waiting for someone to speak to him, see him—and fetch him back—Paris itself comes to embody loneliness, uncertainty, fear and cold.

Memory also stalks Colin Jones's work. A British historian who set out to write a biography, as opposed to a history, of Paris, Mr Jones draws inspiration from Georges Perec's 1975 micro-chronicle of a day in a Paris square, "Tentative d'Epuisement d'un Lieu Parisien", and Pierre Nora's critical study, "Les Lieux de Mémoire". The result is a wide-ranging work that moves from Roman rule to that of President Jacques Chirac, told not only as political narrative, but through the city's evolution in terms of ideas, arts and geography too.

There is still plenty for the traditionalist, from the account of the development of Paris under the Capetians to the radical urban planning of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann or the grands projets of Georges Pompidou and François Mitterrand. There are also separate boxes on such eclectic subjects as Saint Geneviève, Josephine Baker, the Café Procope and the vespasiennes (public urinals). These, Mr Jones explains in as much detail as one might ever want, were named after the Roman Emperor Vespasian, and numbered 4,000 by 1914. Installed during the second empire, along with lamp posts, benches, kiosks and water fountains, they formed part of the embourgeoisement of the Paris street. Architectural styles ranged from Gothic through classical to the baroque. By the mid-1950s, thanks to domestic sanitary improvements, the number of vespasiennes had dwindled to some 300. Scarcely one survives today.

Some questions are left tantalisingly unanswered. Why, for instance, from the 1970s onwards, did Paris come to lose its primary position as a world intellectual and artistic centre? With such ambition, though, omission is inevitable. A scholar, Mr Jones also manages to find an accessible voice that strays only occasionally into impenetrable academese, such as the Métro being "replete with a matrix of often arcane meanings" which "defy even the most assiduous of users". Ignore such nonsense, and enjoy instead a highly readable and illuminating canter through the history of a much-loved city.

Anna, Ikea's help desk assistant, is perky and pretty, with a rusty-brown shag haircut and deep blue eyes that she flashes coyly as she answers questions. Anna is also fake. She is Ikea's animated online employee. Want to talk to Anna? Go to www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/customer_service/splash.html, type a question, and she's more than happy to answer.

Sort of.

After my Ikea ordeal, I turned to Anna for advice.

Me: Hi, Anna. Will Ikea assemble bookcases?

Anna: Here, you can see the Ikea 2005 calendar.

Me: But I need help with my bookcases. I'm frustrated.

Anna: At most times, Ikea catalogs are available at Ikea stores, free of charge. To get more information on ordering a catalog, please see the Web page that's opening now.

Me: But assembling my bookcase is making me insane. My wife wants a divorce.

Anna: Please have a look at the bookcases.

Me: My wife is leaving me.

Anna: The most important people in the world deserve furnishings made just for them. You'll find plenty of colorful, playful products for kids' rooms. And of course, lots and lots for the whole family.

Me: We don't have kids. Did I mention my wife wants a divorce?

Anna: I'm sorry, but that's not a subject that I can discuss. My job is just to talk about Ikea.

Me: Fair enough. Do you think Americans should get as many holidays as Swedish people?

Anna: Lots of people like to travel, but that's not why I'm here. My job is to talk about Ikea.

Me: My wife left me. What are you doing tonight?

Anna: I don't know the answer to that question yet, I'm sorry. Please contact your local Ikea store for help.

Me: Thanks. You are very pretty.

Anna: You are perfectly entitled to hold any opinion you want of me. Furthermore, your comments improve my knowledge base. Thank you.